HS 301 - FBF – “How Hybrid Seeds Ruined America” with John Lipscomb

Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or wor scenario. You'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome John Lipscomb to the show. He is the founder and the president of El Dorado Heirloom Seeds. And we're going to be talking today about gardening, urban gardening hopefully specifically, and what you can do to be self sufficient and live off the grid and be self reliant in terms of your food supply. John, welcome. How are you?

Oh, I'm fine. And it's just horrific to be on your show, Jason.

Well, it's great to have you. It seems like the powers that be, the corporatocracy, Monsanto, etcetera, Are trying to control the food supply. The government with this new recent, I believe it's called the Food Safety act, is just interfering in our lives more and more and we've got this whole situation with Monsanto and these hybrid seeds. Now what are heirloom seeds and what is the difference? John?

Oh, great question Jason. I tell you, a lot of people, I would say about 90% of Americans are unfamiliar with heirlooms. But heirloom seeds are the vegetable seeds that were used prior to the Industrial revolution and the turn of the last century. And during that time, the early 1900s, what we had in this country was a need to produce more food because our country was growing and everybody was moving to the city for the good paying jobs. At that time they went to corporate farming rather than a mom and pop farming. And what they saw is that they needed to produce a more uniform vegetable and something that could be harvested without bruising and go down those conveyor belts and all that mechanized equipment. So what they did is they created hybrids and a hybrid is basically the merch of other vegetables together. So initially they were taking heirlooms and taking the best, what they accounted was the best of each type. So if they were working on a tomato, an heirloom tomato, they wanted a more round, uniform look, a particular size and a skin toughness and they kind of forgot what the mom and pop farms were doing which was focusing on quality of food and taste. The health aspect. Over the last hundred years, we now have all this sterile food. The other downside with these hybrids is that you cannot take the seed from the current crop and replant it and get more of the same.

That is really amazing and scary that they can stop nature first of all like that, but then patent nature.

Yeah, it's very disturbing. And a lot of farmers, as people look into it, there's a lot of documentaries online about farmers that have lost their farms just because some seed blew across the road onto their field and they accidentally grew patented seeds. It's a real mess. And people are starting to wake up and become concerned about the quality of their food. So that drives them into two areas. One, to be organic gardeners and farmers. The other aspect is to go back to the old original seeds, the same seeds that our ancestors grew in their garden and their farms. And that's an heirloom. Anything that is original and has a history that dates back to about a century or more, that is what we consider heirloom.

And how do you get the. I mean, are all of the seeds out there virtually nowadays, these hybrid seeds that are patented and controlled and won't regrow, are they still. Obviously, people can buy these hybrid heirloom seeds through you, but if you go to buy them at Lowe's or Home Depot, what are you getting?

Yeah, that's the real problem. Ever since about the 40s and 50s, heirlooms were phased out of the marketplace. So everything you see in even farm and ranch centers, to Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot, all those seeds are basically hybrid seeds. And that's what gardeners have been using for about 100 years. But there's a new resurgence, and we're right at the beginning of it, and that's people wanting to grow their own food. And they're thinking, you know, I want to go back and I want to grow what my ancestors had, and I want healthy food, and I want to be able to save the seed and then plant it again next year instead of having to go out and buy new seed year after year, which you have to do when you're talking about hybrids.

So it's been that long. I didn't realize this has been going on that long for decades now. Huh. So how do you get ahold of these heirloom seeds to resell them? I mean, where do you get them?

Wow. It accounts for about half of my day. Throughout the year, Jason and I hunt down large Gardeners and smaller farms that are certified into growing heirloom vegetables. And they are doing this for restaurants typically. And I make a deal with them to ask them to put some of that back and sell the seeds to us. And so we're buying directly from the small farmer, typically. And they usually are in the Midwest. Some are in California, but Iowa, Indiana, Pennsylvania, all over. I even found one here in Kansas, which is quite a surprise, because where we're located in the state of Kansas, there just isn't much interest in heirlooms. They are so conditioned in some states to just grow hybrids and then, of course, get into the genetically modified seeds and. Wow, that's a nightmare.

Yeah, this is pretty scary stuff when the powers that really try to control the food supply like this. So heirloom seeds really got phased out then in the 40s and 50s, you're saying, right?

Yes, it began at the turn of the century, 1905, 1910, right. When they were bringing in the big harvesting mechanized units to phase out the labor. The corporate farm moved in when the small farmers and his family moved to the city to get the industrial juice. And they left behind this land while investors put together their funding and they bought all this acreage and it became a corporate farm. But because they were driven by profit and not maybe serving the health of their customers, they were focused solely on eliminating cost. And as most business people know, right off labor, manual labor, is your biggest cost. So by going to machinery, they were able to eliminate that labor.

And so the original thing behind the hybrid seed movement then was not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it was to make the fruits and vegetables more shippable, more assembly line able, for lack of a better phrase, so that they would be tougher, so that they would last longer. And, I mean, that was good because people had more access to produce, right?

Absolutely. And it also kept the cost down. But there was one other aspect to this, and that was the corporate farms were selling to corporate retailers. The mom and pop grocery stores started to phase out between 1910 and 1950, and in came Dylan's and Safeway and so on. So those grocery store sellers in the vegetable department noticed their accountants actually were the ones to notice that when they had heirloom vegetables all those years in the mom and pop stores, that the oddest shaped, sometimes the smallest or sometimes the largest vegetable was left behind, and there was waste. And so by teaming up with these corporate farms and saying, hey, can you give us tomatoes and melons and carrots that are all identically the same size the same color. And they did. They did. By manipulating the genetics in that seed. That's where hybrids were all about. They were able to eliminate at the grocery store all that waste, Jason. And that was a good thing. Everybody's making money on this. And even consumers are saving money early.

On because they could sell for lower prices.

Absolutely. But now we have. Let me put this out there to folks. We have been struggling in this country with obesity. We all that have had wives, that have had children, we notice that our wives will have a craving for a particular thing when they're pregnant. That is because the body is telling them they need something, some minerals, something in that food. Well, I believe, Jason, that what's going on with obesity in this nation is that our bodies are screaming for healthy food. They're not getting it through the hybrid and GMO foods. And that's why we're eating more and more and more.

Well, I think that's very possible. The food is just kind of empty, in other words, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

We had a guest on Talking before about GMO food and what you mean there is. GMO is genetically modified organisms. So genetically modified foods. Tell us your take on the GMO problem.

Wow. You know, it started about 11 years ago when they crossed a tomato with a fish. So you took an animal and a vegetable and at the molecular structure, you united them. It was a shocking revelation in science. And I remember being on the news and everybody thought, oh, that's just terrible. But they didn't notice that they've been eating it ever since. Now, again, that was driven by the P and L on a financial statement on the corporate farm side, because you have late frost and it would kill the tomato plants off. They said, well.

There'S some fish out there that have a natural antifreeze in their DNA. Let's take that from that animal and put it in with a vegetable so that it could survive 30°, 28° nights late in or early in the spring. So they did, and we've been eating it ever since. And now they've taken firefly for whatever reason I cannot figure out and put it with corn. Maybe they want the harvester to be able to see the corn late at night. I don't know. But sometimes I think these scientists are just doing things because they can. They're not asking the question whether they should or not.

Yeah, good point. I mean, we really don't know the effects of the GMO situation, do we? I mean, that's really just a lingering question, isn't It.

Yeah, sure it is.

I want to say, besides, obesity is cancer.

Yes. Yeah. There are some people that have done some research and seem to be able to point that direction. But I'd rather just play it safe rather than sorry and eat healthy food.

So talk about what someone needs to know about gardening and what they can do to really be self sufficient. Of course, buy heirloom seeds. What else is involved though? There's a lot more to it than that.

Oh, sure, but it is a lot easier than what people think. We got to remember that the industrial revolution separated Americans from the farm we had. Over 60% of us were in the agriculture Department. And then when we got to the 70s, we had 15 and today we're three. Now along with that has been a great drop in vegetable gardening. As a matter of fact, during the depression, 80% of Americans were able to grow a garden. Today, currently we have 2%. 2 to 3% of Americans grow a vegetable garden. So there's a detach from our own food. And I would say if we had an economic collapse today, we would be in a really mess because most people don't have a clue how to grow a garden. But it's easier than you think. You've got to get out there in your own backyard. It doesn't need to be a large area. There's some efficient ways of growing a garden. Raised bed is probably the most popular. It's what we've used for 21 years and it is to get that soil built up in height above the rest of the ground so that the roots can go down rather than out. And all the farmers in this country for over a century have been doing row farming and gardening and the roots have to spread out so they take a lot more area. The other thing is to investigate organic gardening. Stay away from the herbicides and the fertilizers. We don't need it. And once you add it to your garden, you'll have to use more and more every year. And that's part of the plan too, with some of these companies that make the herbicides of herbicides. They're getting you to buy more every year. What a, what a scheme that is. We really urge our gardeners that we serve to take these heirlooms and do organic gardening with them because then you really control the quality of the food. There's been a lot of comparison between organic vegetables and non organic using chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and there's a dramatic difference in the nutrition here at El Dorado Heirloom Seeds. One thing that we do, Jason, is we have introduced, we're the first company to do this, introduced trace minerals to the backyard garden. These are the essential minerals that plants need and you need from the food that you harvest from the plant. It's great for human health. We have 67 varieties of vegetables, but we have 67, so happened, 67 trace minerals in this prehistoric dirt that we have harvested for us down in Nevada. I think it's all about you feed the soil and the soil feed that vegetable plant and it will give you great healthy food.

What else should people know? Anything. On the technical side, you include some DVDs with your packages and you mentioned raised bed farming. How high should the bed be raised? You mentioned before when we were off the air, you talked about worms. What are some of the more detailed parts of this?

Yes, that's a great point. We saw that they're such a detached, with American culture, with their gardening, we thought we really got to take them back to the basics. We have a DVD that will teach them how to do lasagna gardening, which is a real innovative approach and raised bed gardening. And you really want to get that that soil built up to about nine inches above ground. Of course, you want to rototill the dirt underneath so that you have about 18 inches of good fertile dirt. We urge everybody to purchase the trace mineral soil from us in bags. You just sprinkle that out there and as you water it or it rains, it's going to go down into the soil rather quickly. And yeah, we teach them how to raise worms, but we really, with organic gardening, you can introduce worms into that raised bed and a handful of them will just do wonders to a raised bed garden.

And what will they do for it? I mean, what do the worms do for it? Remember, you're talking to some people who are city slickers here.

Because the next thing I'm going to ask you about is how to do this on a patio. How do you do it in compact spaces? But first of all, answer the worm question, if you would.

Sure. The worms, I tell you what, the first thing they do is they rototill on a micro level, just rototill. But as they consume the soil and compost and the matter that is in your raised bed garden, they are manufacturing it in their body so that when it comes out, it's actually called black gold. But some people do harvest this dirt and then sell it, and it sells for a lot of money, but they're introducing microbes into it through their system. But I like to think of them as just miniature rototillers down in the earth. And by making the soil deep and arable, the roots are able to shoot down through there easily without fighting, without having to fight through that clay and any of that area. That's real important to have worms in there. And you can only have worms in your garden if it's organic. If you're spraying herbicides and all that, you're going to have a problem. In our kit also we have a solution called vegetable thrive. It's also 100% organic and all it is is a solution of microbes. You just spray this on your garden, it will last you all season. These are microbes that go down in there and they'll de. Decompose all the matter. They're a smaller machine than the worm. But it's very important to have microbes in your garden because they stimulate the root system of the vegetable plant to triple in size. Now, if you have the trace mineral that we sell in that soil also think of this. You've tripled the root system and it's able to pick up all this nutrients, all these minerals, and bring it up to the vegetable. What you get in effect is a giant plant. You get a healthy vegetable and it's just nothing better than that than growing your own food.

How does someone do this on a small space type of issue? Urban gardening. What do people need to know about really making this compact and just ultra efficient?

Well, no matter where you are, you can grow your own food. You might not be able to grow a year's worth, but you can grow some. I promise your listeners that once they get started on this, they're going to never stop because it's just the funnest thing in the world. And to sit down and eat your own lettuce, it's a whole new experience. But whether you're doing a raised bed that might be 4ft by 8ft long, or many of those, like my wife and I, we have about 40 of those. So we do a rather large raised bed garden, or you're doing a container garden on your patio or perhaps a flat roof in a city, you can take a terracotta pot or any kind of container, get up there on the patio or the roof in the urban cities, and as long as you have some good healthy soil and some good healthy seeds, you're going to be just fine. You'll be surprised at how much you can grow, but just In a small 1 foot to 18 inch terracotta pot, you could grow a rather large tomato plant that can provide you 30, 40, 50 tomatoes over the season.

Speaking of which, what about that? What do you think about that upside down tomato planting system you see on the infomercials? Are those things just gimmickry or are they good?

You know, Jason, I've never. I saw that for the first time just recently, and I laughed out loud. But I tell you what, I'm open to it. I'm not going to attack it until I've tried it and it doesn't work. So it just might work really well. It did look amazing in the TV commercial.

Okay. Anything else about compact urban gardening styles?

Well, it's just real important when you're doing container gardening to really be aware of the water. You need that soil. You need to have water moist there. And when it comes to container gardening, I really like to set 5 gallon bucket of water out there and let it set 24 hours before I use it. Because you're in the city, most water is fluoridated and not a big fan of fluoridation and either will your plants be. So it's good to allow not only the water to aerate and get the chlorine out and all that before you use it, but just to have water on hand because a container garden will evaporate the moisture inside a lot quicker than a typical garden.

Good stuff. Well, what else would you like people to know in closing, John?

Well, Jason, it's just that, you know, whether they buying heirloom seeds from us or somebody else, I really urge them to do it. We need to take in this country. We need to take back control. Now, we can try to do that politically, but it just seems to not work.

Whether we work.

Yeah, no, we go third party and. And that doesn't work. We, you know, we got it. What can we control? Well, we might not be able to control the politics from a thousand miles away, but we can control our own lives and what happens in our house, what we eat and what we can grow right out our backyard. You don't have to be out of the city. You can live right in the city. You can grow an amazing amount of food in a 12 by 12 area. And why we're not doing it, I don't know. But there is a huge turn towards this, Jason, and we're really excited. We started off four years ago and just a tiny little business. I was putting seeds.

In envelopes on our dining room table and now we have 15 employees full time. And we're just thrilled with the business we're going to do right around $5 million in heirloom seed business this year. So it's an exciting time. So Americans are waking up and they are taking back control of their food. And nothing could be more important because we are what we eat. And if we're eating junk, then we're junk.

That's fantastic. That's very good advice. So what is sort of the basic product or kit that people buy from you and then give out your website?

Of course they can go to Eldorado heirloomseeds.com and they will see a photograph, we just changed our website today and they'll see a photograph there of our 67 varieties of heirloom seeds. Now these have been proven to grow in most every zone in the United States. We sell worldwide and they grow in Africa, the Asia area. We've sold to Russia all over. But Canada and England area is our biggest market outside the United States. But they do grow everywhere. They've been proven to do that. 67 varieties. You might not like everything that comes in. If you're not a radish person, well, you don't have to grow radishes, but there's plenty to choose from. And then we have a DVD showing you different ideas about gardening. We also have a book on CD that will teach the gardener how to save the seed every year so that they never have to buy from us again. Because the real motive for this company is to get America back to growing their own food and being self sufficient. We don't want to be a Monsanto where we're forcing you to come back every year to buy your seeds. We have a little sample of the thrive trace mineral there and a garden planter to show you when you need to plant your radishes or your onions and your tomatoes. We have a ph soil test kit so that it's real important to have a good PH balance with your soil before you plant. If you're too acidic, your seeds won't grow. If you're too alkaline, they'll be a little sickly. So you need good healthy soil. And, and the PH strip will help you identify that soil. And goodness, Jason, that's just about it. But we're here to help. If people have questions, our phone numbers are on the website. We can't grow the garden for them, but we've got everything there that they could possibly need. It's an exciting time for us. By the way, let me mention on that homepage, if you just scroll down a few inches, you'll see our brand new commercial which is done by Michelle Beschen of PBS and hgtv. She's a big fan of ours and she came on board with the company and did a commercial for us and we're real excited about that. But she explains the kid in full. Probably does it a little better than I do.

Excellent. Well, good stuff. Well, John, thanks so much for joining us today and everybody listening. Take back control of your food supply and don't be dependent on the powers that be, the corporatocracy, the government, because you're not going to get a good deal from them. You got to be in control. You got to be self reliant. John, we appreciate you joining us today. Thank you.

Thank you. Jason.

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