Restoring Degraded Land for Economies, Communities, Farmers, and Health with John D. Liu

Hey nerds, Farmer Jesse here. Welcome to Growers Daily, your daily dose of ecological farming insight. It is Wednesday, August 20th, 2025, and today, uh, is another fun special episode for you all as I got a chance to sit down with John D Liu, uh, legendary ecologist and filmmaker. And, uh, we just chat about some of the large-scale ecological restoration work he has seen and been involved with, what some of the effects on the communities and economies have been, the role of ag in all of this, and some ways in which we can all get involved in ecological restoration. I could have happily, uh, had this conversation for days and days. Uh, John has seen and done so much, it's impossible to cover even a small sliver of it in a short talk. But, uh, I hope you enjoy what we were able to cover, and I hope to stay in communication with John because he is just a wealth of insight and, uh, inspiration. So let's do it. John D Liu, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much.

It's super great to have you. I'm very excited about this conversation. Maybe if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, like where you are and what you do, a little bit of that stuff.

Well, I'm in Beijing, China. I'm in my studio here. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. But back when I was 28 years old, I I came to China and I had the opportunity to help open the CBS News Bureau, and I worked there as a producer and cameraman for a decade. That was a period where China was rising from poverty and isolation, and there was also very big geopolitical events in the region and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And working for CBS, and we had the Evening News and 60 Minutes, and you know, at all of the shows. So I went all over the world and I kind of became slightly addicted to that life, but it was exhausting too. So later I was watching as China was developing from a poor ancient civilization into a modern superpower. And that was kind of interesting, but I noticed a tremendous amount of pollution, and I was quite worried about that level of pollution. And so that started me on another area where I started bringing films to China on ecological issues about pollution and health implications of that. And I ended up bringing 1,000 films to China and It really helped. You could see instantly the population was changing their minds about public health and about pollution, and they realized that was really very important for them.

When you say you brought 1,000 films, are you— what kind of films were you bringing?

Well, there were a lot of British films, documentaries on air pollution, on water pollution, on toxins, and, you know, there's climate change, erosion. I mean, basically all these things. And then urban development, the idea that we're building all this hardened infrastructure and we think that that's what we depend on for life, but in fact we need air, water, and, and food and fertile soils and biodiversity, but we're, we're focused somehow on these hardened infrastructures. So that led me to— a lot of people started to notice this, and I had left CBS and I built another studio for Italian television, and I built another one for German television. I also built, built some studios for just education. Educational purposes, for the Environment Agency and so on. And in doing that, I could see how important it was. Media, media was changing people's minds. And then the World Bank asked me to go out to the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River, which is the cradle of Chinese civilization, and there was a huge desertified landscape about the size of France. It's called the Loess Plateau. It's really where the early dynasties were based. And in this place, it was just desperately poor. And the rest of China, the coastal regions and the industrial areas and the cities were sort of really improving. They were gentrifying, I guess you would, you know, you could look at it that way. And basically this place was stuck and it was basically ruined. And when I went there, I couldn't really understand it because the idea that the most populous ethnic group came from a place that looked like the moon, you know, just didn't compute to me. Later on, I had many opportunities to go to the Middle East and I realized, well, actually all the early civilizations, they destroyed their soils, they destroyed the hydrological cycle, and then they turned the areas into deserts. What I saw though, this was the World Bank and the Chinese government deciding that they were going to restore this cradle of civilization, and I thought, "Is that even possible?" And when I saw that and I compared that to the geopolitics and the sort of egos, I mean, really, these guys are more or less legends in their own minds, really. They're, you know, it's like nobody remembers Brezhnev, you know, who cares? I mean, it's nothing, finally. And, um, so, you know, I realized that there was more in the sort of evolutionary succession and the interaction between plants and animals and humans and all life emerging on the planet, and that that was connected to eternity. You know, that's really something else. It's cosmic in nature, you know. And as I realized, I was alone standing on a mountaintop instead of crowded with a bunch of people who thought everything is determined by how much money you have or how much power you have or motorcades of people with armed guards and stuff. So I was like, "Oh, actually this is actually more real." And it flooded into my being, like, "Oh." This is what I'm supposed to do. And it's, of course, it's nice to be trained as a professional observer and be able to have some skills to be able to communicate this. But, but this is what is more important.

So you started filming this area, right? And that's kind of like where it started for you.

Well, I, I had already been taking these environmental films on different pollution issues and social issues. And then the BBC was asking me, would you film some stories? So I started filming Chinese environmental issues. So about poverty and raising people out of poverty. I think the first film I did with the World Bank was scaling up poverty reduction in China because it, brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It's never been done before. In a decade, you know, in a decade you can raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. That's extraordinary. So I started to get interested in those kinds of things. But then when the World Bank asked me to go out to this place in the Lis Plateau, and I sort of had a little inkling when I was doing the poverty film about this. But then the next year I said, well, we could go and do an entire film on that because it's so important. And when we were doing the baseline study to see what it looked like when it was in its early stages, and then we started to learn and document the methods that they were using to bring back vegetation, to bring back the hydrology, and to restore restore the lower hydrological cycle. So it's things that I think I had never really thought that you could work at that scale. And I mean, it's ridiculous to, you know, think as an individual that you could, and actually you can't really as an individual. It has to be humans as a species working together to make this happen. But if we got collective, consciousness and a collective intention to do this, this is the highest potential that we have. And so all this infighting and, and, and, uh, that doesn't make any sense. We really should be focused on what is going to make the quality of life survivable and sustainable for our children and generations to come.

And prosperous and happier, healthier, all of those things. In fact, I think you mentioned it earlier, I always talk about there's a tie-in between environmentalism and health that I think gets skipped over, that people are just, they go straight to what you eat or medicines that you're putting in your body and they completely skip the whole environmental aspect. But one thing you mentioned that this place that you were kind of witnessing, that they're doing this large-scale ecological restoration on was roughly the size of France. What scale did they do this restoration on? Was it that whole area, or was it like a chunk? How much has been sort of restored?

Well, you have to realize that the Chinese are sort of hyper-ambitious in some way. So if you imagine what they've been able to do, they were having 10 and 11 and 12% growth rates in their economy continuously for decades. So that's kind of ridiculous, you know, how do you do that? And then what happened was the pilot project was 35,000 square kilometers. So that's the size of Belgium. So their pilot project is the size of Belgium. And then when they when they were seeing that it worked, they just said, okay, that's enough. We have enough information. This is the law now. So, you know, the things that you— the things that were being done to cause the degradation were just banned. So you couldn't cut trees, you couldn't cut naturally grown, you know, ancient trees. That was just like, no, you know, you can't do it. You have to plant trees. So they had almost no forestry cover, and now they have pretty good forestry cover and more coming. So when you start to understand that it's the percentages and total amounts of biomass, of living plant material that is respirating, and then you have— that's analogous to necromass, to the decaying organic material. When each generation of life dies and gives up its body. And that accumulates on the top of the lithosphere. So we have the geologic materials, the subsoils and the sediments and the rock areas, the igneous and sedimentary layers. And then on top are the bodies of all life since the beginning of time, decaying and And that's the habitat for bacterial and fungal and insect and, you know, all the— and mammals, even small mammals. And so all of this is happening under our feet, sort of, and we're kind of not necessarily— now a lot of people know that it requires these bacterial and fungal communities to make the mineral nutrients bioavailable to the plants. But back 30 years ago when I started to do this research, pretty much this— nobody knew that, you know, this was not, this was not known. But when we started seeing it, we were like, oh well, this is very important, you know. And, and, and so we've documented that period And when this knowledge came, and we've seen what it does. So not only— a lot of people said, well, how can we do restoration? How can we do that? Because we really need food. We need productivity. So we just really want to beat this ground and, you know, get out as much, mine it for as much as we can. And actually, when you do the analysis, you find that if you think that degraded landscapes are more productive than functional ones, then really you, you have no clue what you're talking about, because functional ecosystems are always more productive than degraded ones. And our shifting away from massive diversity when, through evolutionary succession, where all the plant life and animal life as well, co-created a biologic system that held the moisture close to the Earth, moderated the temperature, altered the wind speed, wind direction, and vortex activity, and, and basically altered the physics So that's how nature manufactured or created, constantly filtered and continuously renews the oxygenated atmosphere, the freshwater system, the fertile soils, and the climate and the weather. So, okay, if we understand that now and we're at that level of understanding, well then that must be the central intention of human civilization because that is the basis of life and the basis of health. And because of that, it's the basis of wealth as well.

So, and to that point, actually, uh, I, you know, in the next segment I want to talk a little bit about that wealth element because I think that's, uh, a critical part of this, especially if you're trying to sell it to somebody who's never cared, to be like, what are the benefits of caring about this? And also, I just want to add this because I, I was reading about it this morning that Kentucky's having one of the hottest summers we've ever had, but it isn't hotter than 1936, which was in the middle of the Dust Bowl. And a lot of people, or a lot of research suggest, or some research suggests that that is partially just because you had this giant barren landscape to the west of us that was essentially just not cooling the air before it got to us, to put it very simply. So these large-scale ecological effects, in other words, are products of misuse, not just in our area of the land, but all over the world.

Exactly. And so we, each of us and our communities, we have to work hyper-locally. But on the other hand, this has to happen simultaneously everywhere on the Earth at this now. Like, if we look at the scientific— so I've been able to have many visiting fellowships to different universities and research institutes now over the last 30 years, and the data is clear. The impacts are increasing very rapidly, much more rapidly than people were talking about the middle of the century or the end of the century. That's off. We're in it now. We're in the soup. This is— this— it's happening. So it isn't— there's no time for dawdling. And so the best way we can react is actually both from a food security perspective, even from a, like, psychological perspective to restore the ecological system because you feel better if the cool winds and the, you know, it's better for you. And the Japanese are calling it forest bathing. You know, you're supposed to, they'll give you a doctor's prescription, you know, here's your prescription, go take a walk in the woods, you know, and that actually works way better than like take a bunch of pills, you know. So, so, you know, we need to realize that. And then when you understand the value aspect of it, then you realize, well, that's more valuable than buying and selling plastic junk that comes all across the world in, in container ships. And when we know that, we actually need to make our economy reflect our understanding.

All right. On that point, I want to make sure to get a break in here real quick. And then in the next segment, we're going to talk a little bit about that wealth side, what the economic effects and the social effects are of these ecological restoration projects. Be right back. Today's episode is brought to you by Farmhand. We know it's peak season, you're busy, but the messages you send now are what drive renewals later. That's why Farmhand is offering free instant access to their Farmerbuilt newsletter builder. No demos, no setup fees, just drop your logo, upload your list, and start sending farm-branded emails that boost sales, engage members, and save you hours each week. Get free access today at farmhand.partners/notill. That's farmhand.partners/notill. All right, back to the show. Let's continue in a little bit on this conversation about sort of the, you know, social and economic benefits of these ecological projects. Because I think, you know, people see it as expensive or maybe even unnecessary, but like I've seen a lot of your work and a lot of the projects that you've reported on or covered, and I've seen how you've talked about people returning to the land, production on those agricultural lands improving. Can you talk just kind of a little bit to that idea?

Sure. We've created a thing which is called the Ecosystem Restoration Communities. You can find out about that. And that actually started, I was dreaming and I actually didn't have too much faith in my dreams, I kept waking up in the morning and people were going in my dreams, skipping off to go camping and to plant trees and help restore the earth. And I just thought, oh wow, you know, that really sounds— I've been working on this for decades now, at that point over 20 years, and I thought nobody's really listening to me. I don't really believe it. And then I, but I wrote this essay called Earth Restoration Peace Camps. And what happened was when it was published in Permaculture Magazine, actually tens of thousands of people started saying, that's what we want. So when, when that happened, it was sort of like, okay, you know, actually they do want it. And then we have to figure out how to do it. It's really not a question of whether they want it or not. It's how do you do it? And so we started the first camp in Spain and Andrew Millison has a beautiful piece he did on that recently.

I just watched that the other day actually. We'll make sure to link that in the show notes.

Yeah, it's amazing. Fascinating project because it's brought thousands and tens of thousands of people into this place they called In Spanish, territorios abandonados. So it's like a place that's been abandoned by all the people. It looked like a Fellini movie. You'd have an old woman in black with a veil going to the church and nobody else, tumbleweed flowing through the village and ruins everywhere, just like ruins. And if you study it, it's interesting too that They had all these oak trees before, and they cut them, many of them, to build the Spanish Armada. And then the Spanish Armada was sunk, you know, really fast. It didn't last long. You know, they blew it up. And so it was really kind of a thing that had turned into a desert. It was again looking very similar to the situation in China. And there's some really good scientists we met. Professor Myan Myan, sadly he passed away just a few months ago. But his work has been really important to understand about critical mass for condensation and precipitation. So what we also found is that in these kinds of places, people come together and they're all curious and they all want to know. And so this becomes like a living laboratory where people can do collaborative inquiry for collective intelligence. So it, it basically means we can all study together and we all end up with the knowledge. So it's not like selfishly trying to gather the knowledge. It's like everybody has— this has to become the common knowledge. And when that happens, then you're gathering these people together. And now we're at the point where there are Almost 100 of these ecosystem restoration communities have been formed over the last 8 years. We're in the 9th year now since they started, and they're continuing to grow and they're getting better. So there's more— we're learning more about, like, you can collectively buy land in a community land trust. And you can have shared tools and machines and you can even do the kind of home building that the Amish do where everybody comes and you build a house really fast. Everybody helps and you get better and better at doing those kinds of things. You can have restaurants, you can have music camps, you can have pubs and whatever you need you can have for the community if you get all this right. And we're even going into some— when we look at some of the harder ecological restoration issues, then we really, we need some skills to do that. So one of them that we're looking at is living water gardens. And this, this is something that Dr. John Todd started doing a long time ago, '60s and '70s in the United States. He was at Woods Hole. Massachusetts and the New Alchemy Institute. And when he started doing this, it became a thing, and it was— a lot of people started making them. He called them— the first ones were called living machines, and then he had the eco machine. And we're, we're, we're, we're just in the process of moving one to Britain called an eco oasis. It's a geodesic dome, and it, and it It encourages just rapid growth of bacteria and all these early precursors of soils, and it just bursts into life.

Just to kind of drill down a little bit on what you're talking about, you know, when you said it, it reminded me maybe of like the chinampas or something like that where you're growing food on water. Is that what you're talking about? Or like, how does—

Well, you can, but we have a, pollution episode which took place in Britain now. And so in this case, and what we've also been seeing, China has taken it on. And so I can share a lot of information with you about what this is like. But essentially, they started to realize that all these places which were filthy and they were horrible, eutrophicated, so that nutrient enrichment, because they're losing a lot of their nutrients from their animal farms or from their misapplication of chemical fertilizers, and it goes into the water, and then the water has algae blooms all the time, and you're seeing this now everywhere. And so if we can have community-based community-based enterprises that can address this kind of work, then basically it's much faster than corporations or, or the governments. And it's directly in the, in the benefit of the individuals and the communities that are affected by this. And it's a job, and it's a job that's not working in a cubicle or selling fast food or doing some stupid thing that's not needed. This is really where we need to put our energies because this means the future is going to be better. And when we reach that point where we understand that the value of this is higher than anything else, then it's going to be well paid. And there's, there's plenty of work to do now because the whole planet is so massively degraded that we're seeing that the science says we're exceeding planetary boundaries. It says we're changing the climate. We are facing all these consequences. It's biblical to have floods and, and wildfires and mudslides and droughts and so on. So let's stop that and let's focus on what really needs to be done and do that, because the more people who understand it and do it, then not only will they have meaningful work, And they should, they must be compensated for that. It's more important than anything else. And at the same time, they'll have more food because functional systems are always more productive than degraded ones. And instead of thinking about abiotic systems as much, they'll be focused on biotic systems, the systems that co— co-evolved to balance the Earth's life support systems, to regulate the hydrology, the atmosphere, the wind speeds, and the climate.

That's great. We're gonna take one last quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about the role of agriculture in all of this. Be right back. Farmer Claire Coleman here from the Winter Growers Podcast. Did you know that I also founded Real Farmer Care, a nonprofit that supports farmer wellbeing? From my own experiences farming, I knew firsthand that this type of support was missing from ag, so I decided to do something about it. As of today, there are over 500 farmer recipients of a $100 self-care award with more applying daily. If you'd like to help, each $100 donated supports one new farmer. Visit realfarmercare.com to donate and learn more. Again, that's realfarmercare.com. All right, so you mentioned like the water gardens and that sort of stuff. Can you talk a little bit about the role of agriculture in restoration? Because I think it does get a bad rep sometimes when it's used the wrong way in how much agriculture can degrade land. But there's also the side of it that, you know, can be really productive for improving ecology and benefiting the soil to, you know, improving water and all of those things. Can you talk a little bit about the role of agriculture in restoration?

Sure. I think that humans are mammals and we're hungry. The interesting thing is that we started to develop in unnatural ways, and so a lot of people look at agriculture, and they think it's, it's all been pretty good. But in my research, I've gone to all of the ancient cradles of civilization, and what you see when you go there is a place where it's very difficult to live and there's very little food production. And so, you know, you have to question how did this happen? And I usually tell the story, you know, agriculture was created not by a scientist. It was created by someone who saw the seed pods hanging off of one plant and he said, oh, look at those. And he found he could eat them and that he could dry them and maybe later he could crush them and and then he could make grain, you know, he could bake them, cook them. And he didn't know what the other plants were for. He didn't want them. And so he started killing the other plants, and then he would express those seeds. And then he did two things at the same time. He exposed the soil by plowing, essentially, and he could get better and better. And then in create industrial processes to do that. And then he created monocultures. So both plowing and monocultures are very hard to justify if you look at it from an ecological perspective. You think they're more productive because you have vast areas and you can use the kind of industrial methods to hoover up all of the grain. But if that land is destroyed fundamentally and the hydrological cycle, it stops raining and there's long-term drought or there's tornadoes and, you know, all the other stuff which basically this causes. And then the soil is not there, it's not fertile anymore. There's no mechanism to make the mineral nutrients in the rocks bioavailable to the plants. And then we think, well, let's put on just chemicals. Well, that doesn't actually have— if you're thinking the simple types of things, I mean, we're saying that NPK, nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, are the, the, you know, sort of primary nutrients. Well, they're not. It's what about carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, you know? That's wrong. And they're secondary nutrients. And what about the micronutrients, which are regulating our glandular development or our brain development when we're, you know, young, or even when we're old? You know, I mean, let's, let's be honest, you know, we're, we're exchanging ourselves all the time and we need to have all of these different complex life systems functioning. And that's not coming from, you know, chemicals. It's coming from the sort of natural systems that have co-evolved over billions of years. And we're not going to magically, in, in a few tens of thousands of years, change that. And I don't think we should. I think we We really want to live in a, in a natural way. And so if we understand that agriculture is connected, or food production is connected to polycultures and to ecological function, then agriculture has an enormous potential to be more productive and also to most definitely be functional. So as soon as we get to the point where we value the function higher than the production, then suddenly everything changes. That, that in— from logic, that must be the central intention of human civilization. Ecological function must be the central intention because focusing on the production of commodities that causes the— to weaken the ecological function, that degrades the amount of wealth you have, that degrades your health, that degrades life. And so essentially we're at this moment in history where we can understand that. I had this fellowship to the Rothamsted Research Institute. It's a very old 1850s in Britain. And it was funny because I didn't know very much about their history, but they gave me a fellowship and I was appreciative and I went there and it's a beautiful place and they have a lot of— they're kind of focused on— I mean, they were definitely involved in creating artificial fertilizers and even now genetic modification, but in the In the past, what they did do that's continuing is they started studying carbon in the 1850s, and those experiments continue to this day, and they are the basis of this understanding that we're really altering the atmosphere. And so that's pretty important. And then the director, he said, you must go to Africa. And I went to Africa, and it, it also made a big impact on some of the African countries to share this information. But interestingly, I gave a lecture when I got this fellowship, and they had all these famous academic people there. And I gave this lecture, and a famous guy came up, and afterwards he said, "You seem to know what you're talking about." And I said, "Oh, thank you, I guess." And then he said, 'If you can understand it, anyone can understand it.' And I was like, 'Well, that's kind of sneaky, underhanded, terrible thing to say, but okay, yes, everybody can understand it.' We can get there to understand this. This is a breakthrough. This is a breakthrough moment for human civilization. The more people who understand this, the more we understand what is true value.

Yeah, I mean, I think we all inherently understand that we need food to survive and that we want— and agriculture is where we get that food. What I think it gets missed a lot when you're talking about, like you referenced, like polycultures and that sort of thing, is the potential of growing food in a way that restores the land, that improves it, that restores our hydrological cycles, that filters our water, that filters our air. All of these things, I think that often gets overlooked because there's a lot of pushback on this idea that farms like that can be just as productive. I mean, does that resonate? Do you feel like—

Well, absolutely it resonates. I think it's not just that they're more productive, they're more valuable because when you just put the value on the products and the commodities, you're missing the point. The ecological function is more important. And functional ecosystems are more productive. Both ways you win when you are doing regenerative agriculture. And when you're not, you're imagining that buying and selling things and this money, and I mean, you have to get to the point where you understand that money's an idea. Money is a concept. Where does it come from? You know, I mean, the Chinese have a museum here about money. It goes back a long way. And all of the money that's ever been, I mean, all of it changes. It collapses at some point because it's an idea. And what we need to do is see there is real value. There's true value. We are breathing air, we're drinking water, we depend on fertile soils, and we depend on symbiotic relationships with all other life forms. And when we understand that, then we're not, we're not there yet. We're not, um, we're not expressing that level of understanding in our societies, in our economies now. So our economies are not true to what we know to be true. And if we align our behavior with what we know is true, then actually we can restore all degraded lands on the Earth. We can have full employment for every human being. We can realize that actually every human being has a birthright. You cannot take away their right to life or their human rights. They are born with them. They don't belong to you or anybody else. They belong to all living things. And it's not just human beings, it's all living things. It's the rivers and the trees and, you know, the insects and the birds and the animals. Everything in life has a right to life because it was born and it is connected to all life since the beginning of time. It can't be any other way. So once we understand that, then, I mean, and that's very close to an understanding of paradise, of, you know, like God made the world. How can we talk about altering it? We could do better than that. You know, I don't think so. This is the only planet we know of that has an oxygenated atmosphere and a freshwater system and fertile soils and amazing biodiversity. And all these egotistical people wandering around like saying what they want, you know, that doesn't matter. We're going to have to, you know, if you were in certain societies, you know, they would be considered crazy. And, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't want to actually just look at them too much. You'd like, oh, have some tea, you know. Take it easy. You know, we have to take this guy off crisis control, you might say, you know.

John, this has been such an amazing conversation. I could keep it going all day long, but I'm gonna respect your time and I have to go harvest some basil. But thank you so much. We will make sure to link your projects in the show notes and hopefully keep in touch.

Well, let's do it. Let's become very good friends. I think that sounds—

That sounds delightful to me.

I would say that Relationships that matter last a lifetime.

Absolutely. All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. We will put as many links as we possibly can in the show notes to the various related projects, uh, that we discussed. Huge shouts to John for his time. Don't forget, No-Till Growers is now officially a nonprofit 501, so donations are tax deductible and greatly appreciated. Please make sure to like and subscribe and/or follow wherever you're getting this podcast. That's an easy way to help us out. Enormous thank you to all of our show sponsors. And if you'd ever like to sponsor this show, you can reach out to farmermichelle@notillgrowers.com. Huge shouts to Willy Breeding for the theme music and Mike Hilbert for the production help and editing. Also shouts to Epidemic Sound for the background music that you can hear. Pick up a hat or a copy of my book, The Living Soil Handbook, at notillgrowers.com to support our work. Big, big thank you to everyone over at patreon.com/notillgrowers. /no-tillgrowers where at a certain level, or if you just bump up from one level to another, or you sign up in the month of August, you get a shout on the show. So big shoutouts today to all of our pollinators. This is a good list. We have Tyler Lloyd, Andrea Fronti, Tobias Dierdorf, Tasman, Tasman, Cedric Reed, Bill Price, William Wiley-Madrow, Wish I Started 20 Years Ago, Dwight Howard, Honey Works, Lynn Tompkins, Steve Hurlbut, Rebecca S., Mark Revanelle, Lee Shelley, Brian McCarthy, Larry Shepherd, Marsh and Cindy, DP, Kat Branigan, Little Row Farms, Hank Zeka, Ashley Sharp, Jill Crosby, Madison, just Madison, Scott Roser, Norskgaard Farm, Laura Britton, Alberto Diaz, Peter Broad, Jason Ruel, Earth Care Farmer Jane Myrner, Derek Page, Meredith Light of Granite Springs Farm, Grown Up Farm, Bob and Ann Patton of Hexhamshire Organics, Jared Kirsch of Rivendell Farms, Fiona and Donnie of Firefly Farm, and Jen Lawrence. I think I've said and Jen Lawrence like, I don't know, 200 times at this point. So, and Fiona and Donnie and all of— I mean, a lot of these people. So thank you to all of our pollinators. All right, so as you will remember for our story this week, the young couple finally got to see the property that was going to be given to them. And although the land was stunning, the living quarters were indeed quarters. They were nice, they had solar panels and all that stuff, but They were like 4 small houses all connected by this like central pavilion. On each edge of the 4 properties, uh, there was like their own little house, their own little living quarters. Then, uh, another couple, as they were standing there, had just come walked out of one of the houses, as you will remember. And anyway, um, the new couple looks just as confused as our couple. So our young couple decides to introduce themselves and quickly finds out that this new couple are in the exact same position. Got the the same, uh, letter from the same lawyer, the estate, all that stuff. And they were offered similarly land, but unlike our couple, they actually had been farming on farms for years. And after a few minutes, another truck pulls up, and out of that truck pops a strong young man beaming with enthusiasm. He says, "I take it y'all got a letter too, huh?" Then, uh, another young woman pulls up and smiles and asks, "Uh, am I in the right place? Are any of them?" That is for tomorrow on the Do What Now Farm. Oh, I kind of like that. I don't know if that would really translate if you read it. You'd be like, do what now farm? It almost sounds like do what now farm? I don't know. I tried. Thanks for watching, indoor listening. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.