https://www.listennotes.com/e/bba6d37f3c054ab0838c80e9ce6a8fce

I'm going to start with some really brief introductions for our community and then we can jump right in. Well, welcome everyone. Joining us Today here is Dr. Zach Bush, triple board certified doctor physician whose work bridges internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care, with a focus on the microbiome and the deep interconnection between human and planetary health. He's also the founder of both for profit and nonprofit initiatives including Farmers Footprint, all centered on the reconnection, rewilding and regeneration. We're also joined today by John Kemp, pioneering voice in regenerative agriculture and founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture. He also serves as a board member for Farmers Footprint. And John has dedicated his life to helping growers restore soil health and plant vitality through studying plant immunity, nutrition and microbiome dynamics. I think it's really interesting how we get to have these conversations with both of these incredible thought leaders in this space who have been on their journeys from agriculture and health health and focused on not just preventing harm, but supporting vitality and strengthening the intelligence of nature to restore our systems. So to open us up and set the tone and intention for the conversation today, I wanted to ask you both, for our conversation today on our food systems should hear Heal the Earth with food being the direct connector between humans and our environment. For both of you, when you hear the phrase our food systems should heal the Earth, what does that evoke for you?

You know, increasingly it has pointed back to relationships. For me, I think when I started out, I came from a very scientific framework of what that meant. And so I was after nutrient density and I was after, you know, the understanding of chemical herbicides and their impact on human biology and the impact on ecologies as we wipe out the metabolic. So came from a very scientific framework. And what I've discovered over the last 10 years of being in this space is that everything is about human relationships. And it's ultimately our failed relationship between Earth and humans that is driving the damage and extractive nature of our industries, including food industries. But then much broader than that, our clean clothing industry and how that drives agriculture and plastics, our fuel industries and how that drives agriculture to these monoculture, you know, Megatron energy systems and all of this. And so there's increasing understanding that it's this breakdown of relationship at the bottom of the soil, ultimately that is there. And so for me, when we say food systems, I think I'm starting to see that as a web of interconnected relationships of humans. And nature is going to do her food production all the time, everywhere, regardless of what we're doing. And she may be feeding birds and, you know, elephants rather than humans, if we're refusing to receive from her, but she's feeding. And so just the sense that the nature is abundant always the design of the universe within the intelligence of what we might call God is so profoundly abundant that the fact that we find ourselves in organizing ecosystems and economies around the concept of scarcity is a deep, deep wound in our relationship. So food systems need to start to be seen as a web of relationships. Back to Mother Earth, I guess.

And Zach, why? It's just the very phrase of a food system. And how should our food systems heal the Earth? The very framing of that question creates a distinction between us and them. There is no us and them. There is only us. And so healing the Earth is not disassociated from healing us. Healing, healing the relationships between soil and soil, microbes and plants and livestock and people is no different and cannot be separated from healing the relationships between people. And so it's that, that place that we come from within, when we come from a place within of deep care and stewardship and nurturing, then that means we show up differently into, in our interactions with, with other people. And, you know, if you want to use a scriptural or a biblical perspective, you could ask the question, can you be your brother's keeper while the observation providing him with food that is toxic? Or can you be your brother's keeper by farming in such a way that produces an environment that has toxins in it? And so at its, I think, at its most foundational perspectives, when we think about our food systems healing the Earth, it's about, it's not about healing something that's external to us. It's about healing the wounds that are internal to us. And when we really. Internal to us, internal to our loved ones, our communities, the people that we care about, to the broader, larger community, those are all things that we can align around, that we can be unified around. And you cannot heal those things without healing food and healing farming and healing the entire ecosystem. They are all integrated. There is no us and them.

Beautifully said. Thank you. Thank you for, for setting the ground for that conversation in that way. It's a beautiful segue to our next question. And I'm, I'm going to be prompting questions. And if you want to focus more on a specific one or take it a different direction, please feel free to, to do that. I have so much trust in the two of you here to, to what you were both touching on in different ways. How do you see the health of our soil mirrored to the health of our bodies. And what are some of the patterns that you see emerging in that, in that relationship?

I'll tackle that, I guess, initially from the health standpoint. But I think that, you know, the thing I love about John, working with John all the time, is that he, like you had mentioned at the beginning, you got a doctor and a farmer who met at the very center point of everything. And I think we both went on winding journeys of trying to go to the very top, right to the front cutting edge of our industries in the paradigm that was being taught at the time. And we went through that at a very similar time. So 1990s, early 2000s, John and I were really trying to be the front runners. And for me, the chemotherapy development, chemical poisoning of humans in the name of health, John in the name of chemical herbicides in the name of producing food. And so we really pushed the paradigm, trusting that our education was sound and that this made sense. And so we both went through the reversal process right about the same time, 2006, 2007. We were both starting to emerge from this. And so I feel like we were both put on these divine paths that we're going to collide each other at an ACRES conference some 10 years ago or something like that. And that agricultural conference, when I first saw John, it was like a goosebump moment of, like, I could feel it coming more than I could know what was coming. I could feel something happening in me when I saw him coming down the hallway. And I was like, this is going to change my world, but could potentially change the whole world if farmers and doctors start to speak the same language and start to understand the same path. So then to put my perspective so John can come at it from the other is, you know, what I was seeing in the clinic was the phenomenon of the reversal of life. Life is the concentration of light energy that allows then, for the complex systems of communication and energetics of biology to form. The brightest thing that physics does is the sun. The brightest thing that the universe does is life. It's thousands of times brighter per cubic centimeter than nuclear energy. And so what a human is really is a pinnacle expression of the concentration of light energy. And many of us will, in our spiritual practices, find a light body within ourselves and tap into that light body in our meditations, in our prayer lives, or in other, you know, spiritual practices. I've hit that with sitting in churches with black Baptist choirs. And, like, there's just these moments where you feel the light body within yourself. And these are our spiritual experiences. And the fact is, our biology is not separate from that spiritual experience. Your biology is a light being. By definition of life, what happened in the 1970s is we started, well, really 1950s, you know, we started large scale antibiotic behavior. And so in the clinic, antibiotics were a phenomenon. But then we scaled that to animal production. And we're using 10 times more antibiotics per year in cattle and poultry and the rest than in humans. And then we 100x that when we started using antibiotics on soil systems that would end up as food residues and in our water. And so that journey prepared me to be the generation of doctors that would oversee the advent of the chronic disease epidemic that nobody could have imagined the 1980s. And so five years after the advent of this massive antibiotic systems of the late 70s, we see the advent of obesity, diabetes, allergy, autoimmune disease, neurologic collapse, mood disorders and mental health disorders. Following that, cancer, following that infant, and then following that, the gender dissolution that is so rampagy of the world today. And so we see from, you know, frogs and farm fields all the way to humans, we have so diminished the life force within beings that we can no longer reproduce, we can no longer gender in the womb. And so this phenomenon that is is currently being blamed on some sort of social movement is a biologic reality. And as an endocrinologist, I've been at almost this gobsmacking, front row seat to the collapse of the endocrine function. The second half of my specialty is metabolism. Endocrinology and metabolism. Metabolism was my whole entire study of mitochondria, which are small bacteria that live inside of our cells. So not surprisingly, when you start to add antibiotics to an environment, the mitochondria diminish at the same rate that the number of microbes in your gut diminish. And so we were literally losing the powerhouse, we're losing the lights to humanity over my career. And that found me into a desperate situation of chasing cancer at the end of my research. And I had been put in a mindset where it was a reasonable thing to believe that we had such this demon invader of cancer that the only pathway was to poison the person to see if we could kill the cancer. Cancer. And it took a complete loss of my underpinnings in that worldview for me to start to allow ultimately my patients to reverse that paradigm, for me to ask the bigger question of why is the cancer there? And we're not allowed to ask that typically in western medicine. And so we Go after this. And then by the time it looks like crisis is everywhere, then it's a rational thing to say, well, we have to go to war against disease, rather than ask how would we nourish ourselves into health? And so that reversal for me started 2007, 2008, when my patients started asking me questions I couldn't answer, like, what does this chemotherapy have to do with how I got cancer? That was the question that kind of blew up my world. And that was the first patient in my clinical trial. And so it turns out that not a single cancer in human history has been caused by a lack of chemotherapy. So that was a big problem for my mindset. So that's how I ended up on this slippery slope into soil systems and food systems and ultimately to. To meet John and. And for us to watch farmer's footprint come to life.

Zach, I didn't realize that we had such. Such parallel pathways and almost on a parallel timeline. That's. That's. It was pointing it out. That's an intriguing story. Yeah. What does healthy soil mean? And how is healthy soil mirrored in human health? You know, Zach, you stated it already so eloquently, but historic mainstream agriculture, for the last half a dozen decades or more, has viewed soil essentially as being a substrate and being equally. You can replace soil with sand or peat moss or some entirely lifeless media. In some cases, they would intentionally. We would intentionally deliberately sterilize it to have a lifeless media. That is the, if you will, the chemotherapy, the antibiotic version of agriculture. And what we are coming to learn about soil, fundamentally healthy soil is alive. And the degree of health that a soil has corresponds to its degree of aliveness, to the amount of the quantity of life that it has in it and the quality of life that. That life experiences. And so, as I'm of course, very interested from an agriculture and from a farming perspective of collecting the data and trying to understand how can we provide economic incentives to growers to shift and to embrace a living soil and so on, the pathway to achieving that outcome, we are measuring things like the phytonutrient profile of plants and the microbiome of plan. And it becomes very obvious that the one that. When you start really studying soil biology and what is happening with soil, what's happening with plants, you know, in. In our bodies. And Zach, you can correct me, you know this better than I, but we have, what, something like 10 times more microbial cells in our bodies than we do human cells? Well, the same thing is true of a plant. When you start looking at a plant closely and looking at its associated microbiome, all of a sudden it becomes very difficult to tell where the microbiome ends and where the plant begins, because they're so inextricably intertwined, they are really one. And so healthy soil is soil that is filled with life. Healthy plants are plants that are filled with life. And when you think about that exactly as you described, Zach, it really calls into question our mainstream agricultural approaches of the last 70 years of trying to destroy forms of life that we perceive as causing us harm.

Yeah. And just to kind of cycle back on that, because it's so profound how these things web together here. But, you know, the amount that's actually human in your body is. Is probably less than 1% when you start to really calculate the mass of it, because you've got somewhere around 70 trillion human cells that's then fed by somewhere around 1 1/2 quadrillion bacteria. But what's never been actually well counted, because it's such a challenge from a genomic standpoint, is how many fungi species are there. And when you get into the fungi, you're probably in half a million species. So you have 40,000 species of bacteria, half a million species of fungi, tens of thousands of species of protozoa, parasites, and all of this is a healthy soil system. We've demonized portions of those. We've demonized bacteria for a long time. Then we demonize yeast and mold and fungi and basically viruses. Everything that's ever happened in nature, humans have managed to say, this is killing us. This stuff is dangerous. We gotta kill that. Some reason we are so divorced from nature, and it's this kind of fundamental abandonment disorder in our subconscious that makes us believe that everything in nature must be against us and this plays out in our society. How is it possible that we're all against each other? We're all freaking humans. And yet you currently have Europe pushing in ground troops into Poland and like, mounting what looks like an aggressive move towards a ground war with Russia. It's just like what. Like this is. How is this happening to an intelligent species? That we are marching our children once again into a massive war that has absolutely no expectation of changing the dynamics of human biology or our human psyche, our human consciousness, and can only undermine the wellness of the children and their children that will now be radicalized against each other once again. And the same. So the same thing as it plays out in soil is playing out at the. At the global social movement order. And I really love your description there, John, that you can't distinguish between the microbiome and soil and the plant. And this continuum is spectacular. The fungal. Fungal systems of the. The mycelial network somehow collaborate with plant roots to produce something that doesn't even have its own genome. We don't even know how to categorize it, but it's called the mycorrhizae. And those mycorrhizae are this, like, collaborative way to build a dynamic relationship of gifting economy between mycelium and a plant root. Mycelium is ultimately a single celled organism. All fungi are. The plant root is a multicellular organism. And so to get multicellular organisms to exist on the planet, it didn't just take the innovation of mitochondria, which is what allowed for the energy upgrade to allow for. It took a imagination of how would a single cell talk to a multicellular creature. And the result was this beautiful spider web through nature. And it turns out the same damn thing is happening in your gut. Your gut is creating this interaction, this relationship between the rootlets of a human, which the root system are these long projections into the gut soil and the soil of the gut. The microbiome is building these biofilms that potassium can travel across and communication networks can occur through and all of this. And so there's this exquisite collaboration between single celled and multicellular organisms. So to be a soil system is no different than being the plant within it. Being the plant is no different than being the soil of the gut in which we'll compost that. The gut microbiome is no different than the human, which will grow out of it. And ultimately the human growing out of that, you know, quadrillions of organisms is powered by 10 times even more the microbes inside the cells. And so we like to think of mitochondria as part of the human cell or some sort human.

And.

It has to rely on this internal environment that is the mitochondria. And so this I'm trying to just, you know, kind of fill in further this beauty of everything is a continuum of light energy. And the more complex and more concentrated light energy gets, the more life will thrive on a planet.

So, Zach, if I could just build on what you've been describing there is one of the things that really was such a beautiful wake up moment for me was changing my perspective on how plants and thriving ecosystems collaborate instead of compete. So one of the foundational dogmas, if you will, of contemporary agriculture has been that plants are competing with each other, necessarily. They're competing with each other for water. They're competing for light, they're competing for nutrients. There is. And that this paradigm of survival of the fittest is the strongest to survive. And in an environment that is resource rich, that has abundant nutrients and water, and that is devoid of biology, then in that type of environment, it is true that plants compete with each other. And we should recognize that that is an artificial environment. But when you have an environment with a healthy microbiome where you have these mycorrhizal fungi, hypha networks, and you have bacteria and protozoa, nematodes and viruses and everything collaborating, or should say communicating, when you have this, this entire community engaged in quorum sensing, what changes is instead of competing with each other, they begin collaborating with each other. All of a sudden, plants that previously might have competed now begin supporting each other. They will supply water to each other. They will. They will sacrifice a degree of their own success for the benefit of their neighbor. So there is this beautiful collaboration that happens in biologically healthy ecosystems that many farmers have never gotten to see because they've never gotten to see exceptionally healthy soils that have a vibrant microbiome. And so there's this completely different world that most of us haven't observed because we haven't been paying attention, we haven't been looking. But that in reality, there is a completely different way of thinking about plant interactions and plant microbiome interactions where in a vibrantly healthy ecosystem, they will collaborate with each other instead of compete. And can you imagine the level of health and the level of immunity and the level of productivity that happens when everyone supports each other? It's incredible. It's much more than we could ever hope to achieve from a warfare mentality of competing with each other.

Absolutely. John. I think Zach was kicked out, so hopefully he'll, he'll join back in in a few minutes. But just to reflect on what I'm. What I'm hearing from you and Zach too, it seems like we are so focused on chasing the symptoms that are of what goes wrong. And I'm just getting this visual of an iceberg and the terrain, as Dr. Nasha Winter calls calls it, too. Like what you were saying, there's no us versus them. And we are. We're made up of whole ecosystems and worlds that want to collaborate, to thrive alongside us. So to take a step back and see ourselves as part of this whole, both internally in our soil, in our system, and in the communities that we are part of, it's all, it. It's all systems of collaboration. And how can, how can we, like, be in Service to that collaboration that is, that is wanting to happen for life to thrive.

You know, just before Zach dropped off, he spoke a bit about the existing warfare and possible possibility of further war that we have globally right now. And, you know, it's intriguing how. Glad to have you back, Zach. It's intriguing how mainstream agriculture for the last seven or eight decades has really been based on an adopted paradigm, an adopted mentality of a warfare approach to agriculture. You know, when you think about. When you think about farming from its foundational level, I'll speak for just a moment. In the North American context, farming is hard work. It's long hours, challenging conditions, not particularly good pay. There are many things that you could do that would provide for a much easier life than farming. And yet many people aspire to be farmers, and many people have a dream of farming. Why? It's not about the money that they can make. It's not about the economic reward. It's because they have a desire to have a connection to life and to living systems. There is something about experiencing the joy of a newborn animal or watching seeds germinate from the soil, or listening to birds sing as they are surrounding us in the environment. And it is those types of things, that connection to life and living processes, that attracts many people to agriculture. And it's particularly interesting that here in the North American setting, our agricultural community generally profess to be Christians. They profess to believe in a worldview that embraces the idea of stewardship and nurturing. And yet, precisely in that environment, we have adopted a model of agriculture that is based on a paradigm of warfare. Identify a specific pest, identify a specific pathogen, and figure out how you can destroy it. And if the first weapon of choice is not successful, you get a bigger bomb, get a stronger pesticide, get a bigger hammer. And so it is this. This creates a. A deep internal dissonance within many farmers where deep in their hearts and deep in their spirit, they know that the vision that they aspire to, what originally attracted them to agriculture in the first place, does not align with their daily practice. But they don't know any different. They've never heard any different. They feel stuck and trapped. And this is why we now have, with all of the work that has happened over the last decade from many pioneers in the space, such as Zach and others, who've really popularized the damage and the destruction that is occurring from endocrine disrupting pesticides as well as the damage that we are doing to our soils generally. There is now an openness of discussion that did not exist even five years ago, even three years ago. So we have a window of opportunity in the dialogue and the conversation. And I think it's important for us to, it's not helpful for us to demonize the farmers and the people who are involved in this form of agriculture because they feel as stuck and as trapped as many other people. In many cases, they have an authentic desire to farm for the best outcomes of their ecosystems that they're responsible for stewarding. And they are of the persuasion that with their existing knowledge set, they don't have an alternate pathway other than the tools that they are already using.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's something that, that we see a lot here at Farmers Footprint. And how, what, what are the support systems that we need to create as a society when we are asking farmers to transition to regenerative practices? What is the, what is the systemic changes that we need to shift so that there's a market ready for them when, when they transition? How can we support them throughout that transition? And just to prompt a follow up question, I want to ask you both, what are some of the inner or cultural shifts that you think are needed to support that transition towards more regenerative food systems?

That's a multidimensional question or a question with multidimensional answers. What are your thoughts? Zach.

Got me there. In some ways, the crisis is actually a system of unintentional consequences to things that sounded like a good idea in the 1960s and 70s. And so the chronic problem with government and bureaucracy in general is that it's very difficult to change directions once you've started a direction. And it's because you have lawmakers that are signing up for 2 year, 4 year, 6 year stints in local to federal government systems. And it's very difficult to maintain a long term view of what's going on and where you've come from. So when you don't know where you've come from and you don't know where you're going, the now turns into just a series of maintenance of what existed before. And that's what's happened with the support systems that we put into farming as kind of a rationale for getting us out of a deep crisis, which was the dust bowl of the 1920s and 30s and the deep dysfunction of soil systems that was driving widespread hunger. And today it's very hard for us to imagine that there was people starving all over America just less than 100 years ago. And there were soup lines that were the last semblance. And my grandfather was working for the Roosevelt White House. And he was Eleanor's right hand man in the, in the New Deal. And so, you know, in generosity to the history of it. Like it'd be easy to think that there's just bad guys trying to make money, but that's just not what happened. It was, we were in deep crisis and we were deep soil crisis. And along came the innovation of small molecule chemicals coming out of fossil oil. And with the end of World War II, there was suddenly a need to find new home for that oil because suddenly the tanks and planes weren't rolling. And so the slowdown of the war machine turned into this new opportunity, market opportunity. And that saw the opportunity in this deficit that we had in nutrients and soil. And so we suddenly bunny hopped tens of thousands of years of soil management practices and knowledge for this new technology of soil inputs. But they were expensive. And so farmers were supported by government through subsidies. And it was really the subsidy programs that now have farmers stuck. And not only does it have farmers stuck, it has consumers stuck. And not only does it have consumers stuck, it has a healthcare system in crisis. And so the unintended consequences kept rolling over the last 50 years of farm subsidies that said, hey, let's just give farmers extra money, Even if they're losing money with every crop they harvest. We can buoy that up by giving them subsidies that we're gaining off of the oil industry or off of other industries. And those subsidies set us up for a situation where it would be cheaper to buy Doritos, which is a highly processed, high chemical input, high demand thing, than it is to buy a potato. And so that you walk into a grocery store and I think one of your first questions would be like, how is this the reality? How is the produce section the most expensive part of a food system? That doesn't make any sense. Because the amount of energy that it takes to turn corn and soybeans and everything else into the myriad of chemicals that create the artificial flavorings and the natural flavorings and everything else that are put on everything, not to mention the artificial constitution of the carbohydrates. We went from fructose and apples and corn to high fructose corn syrup that can't even be handled as a carbohydrate in human biology. It has to be used as a triglyceride and it causes inflammation, blood vessels and everything else. So it doesn't actually even turn into a fuel once it's chemically converted to high fruits, corn syrup. So we take fuel and turn it into non Fuel and then sell it for cheaper than the actual fuel. And so it's the most bizarre situation economically. And it was set in motion by these subsidies. And unfortunately, the farmers have been super screwed by it because the banks decided, well, if we're going to loan money to farmers for their inputs in the spring, we better have some insurance. And so the government better insure these crops because there might be another drought like we had in the 1920s, and we don't want to be on the hook of the for that. So the USDA comes along and says, you know what? We'll create an insurance program, which is not an insurance program. It's another form of subsidy in the form of basically a handout to farmers to plant predictable crops that require a predictable amount of inputs. And so now to get your loan from the bank to get your inputs, you have to have USDA crop insurance. But if you go and say, I've got this plan, I'm going to go regenerate organic, I'm going to go zero inputs, I'm going to get five species of animals traipsing around 32 species that cover crops, and I'm going to do this phenomenal thing. I'm going to create freaking Garden of Eden in five years. Suddenly the banks are like, I'm sorry, we don't have a Garden of Eden plan. We have a chemical input plan. And if you don't have USDA crop insurance, we can't actually loan you the money. So you just don't fit our model. I'm sorry. And so you have farmers that cannot access the capital and they're stuck. And so when you ask what is the support, in some ways, we ought to tear down the support systems while coming along to share the risk with farmers for real. Farmers can't be put on the hook for this entire thing. We have created a planet that is so dynamic right now, the risk of every piece of energy is so disrupted in this transition phase that we're in. It's been popularized as global warming or climate crisis. I think it's actually just a natural rebirth cycle of Earth in a lot of ways. But we have added to the intensity by us breaking the relationship between soil, water, human plant life, et cetera. And so that's been my thought process as it's developed over the years, is we got to remove all of the old things. We need to go to a fair market environment for farmers. They need to be able to compete for bank dollars regardless of their methodology. And I don't want to penalize people for chemical farming either. I want people to say, hey, I'm going to borrow it for those inputs. And then I want the farmers who are doing regen organic to have equal access to the capital. And so we should be. If we're going to do crop insurance, it needs to be uniform. It needs to be across the board, regardless of your management practices, regardless of what type of input you decide. And then we'll let the bottom line decide. Because I know that the farmers that are going to go regen organic and get John Kemp and his agronomists on their land are going to 3x to 5x their bottom line over the next 5, 10 years. And so I would want my money there if I'm a banker. But the banks don't know that yet because they haven't seen the widespread success. So I would like the market to determine who's doing the right thing by the soil. To do that, we would have to remove the supports.

Yeah, the regenerative farmers win hands down in a free market environment and not by small margins. There are significant advantages to, I think the hand of the market, if you want to call it, will incentivize regenerative agriculture over time. But the present props to the existing system and the barriers, the policy barriers to the new system certainly are slowing that down and making it a lot more difficult. But Zach, I'd like to just add a dimension to what you were talking to and to the original question that you asked us, which is what are the, what are inner or cultural shifts that you think are necessary? Here's my perspective. Being embedded in the farming community very closely, I actually think three years ago there was greater consumer demand than there was farmer supply. Today that has reversed itself. There are more farmers who actually want to go down. They have a desire to go down a regenerative pathway and many of them are in spite of having no market support. But in fact, there is not enough consumer demand to meet the higher quality product that they are producing. And it's not even necessarily about being paid a premium or a very small premium. It's just the fact that nobody cares that they're doing a better job and growing a better quality product where not nearly enough people care. There's not enough consumer demand for originally grown product that's nearly on the scale at which it is being produced.

Yeah, I mean, just listening, listening to you both, I want to reflect some of what I'm hearing for people joining us here. And I see some, some people trickling in still how our food system is not our current industrial food system is not more efficient, is not working. And we're not, by advocating for regenerative agriculture, we're not proposing something that will be. I'm sorry, I'm just trying to connect the dots of all the, all the information I'm receiving.

There's no yield drag from regenerative agriculture. I think that's a very important aspect.

And a lot of the work that we do at Farmers Footprint is based on the premise that awareness precedes change. So a lot of, A lot of the consumers or the farmers that are policymakers too involved, involved in these, in these decisions each day aren't even aware of the consequences of our food system, of what is the difference and what is the difference between an organic product and a regenerative product and an industrial product, how we're putting that pressure on. To your point, John, the farmers that are wanting to do better, that are wanting to regenerate the soil, and the current system is set to put more pressure on those individuals and the consumers. So we're just designing from the wrong premise and what we're. What we're. Yeah. How our food system is built to deliver calories, empty calories and processed foods to everybody. And I want to prompt you both with the next question on how would moving from extraction to nourishment and reciprocity look like in. Within our current system?

Well, that's a good question. When we go back to what I was describing earlier about what biological ecosystems actually look like and how in. In living systems, in soil and plant biomes, there is. There is this beautiful collaboration that happens where plants are no longer competing with each other, but they're really collaborating and they're supporting with each other. You know, it's such a beautiful model for us in a human community to support each other and to collaborate more effectively. And right now, Zach said some words a few moments ago that were very important, and that was that we are once more, or we have the possibility of once more expecting our farmers to do more, asking them to do more, when it's really, if we want to. I mean, the reality is from a, from a macroeconomic perspective, it is. It's remarkable. I think I might even use the word pathetic. It's pathetic that our farmers are consuming their equity and they can barely survive and make a living farming, and then we're asking them yet to do even more. And so there is. There is this need for a fair trade component. What we need is we don't need regenerative verified farms. We don't need more farms that are growing food in a regenerative manner. Actually, we do need that, but that's not where the emphasis needs to be. I think the emphasis needs to be that we need regenerative supply webs. We need regenerative supply chains that have this fair trade component where the, with a fair trade component, they are compensating the farmers fairly and reasonably and well for producing a high quality product. If that happens and we have this fair trade component from a food perspective, CPG perspective and so forth, then all of a sudden that solves for the entire supply chain, that solves the foundation. Because right now, instead of a collaborative relationship, we have this extractive relationship with both input suppliers who are supplying inputs to farms and also off take people who are buying from farmers and their margins are fixed, their margins are constant. They're going to make money whether the market goes up or down. But that's not true for the farmer. The farmer is treated like a commodity producer. And as long as we treat our farmers that way, then we should expect them to produce the lowest quality product as cheaply as possible, because that's precisely what we are incentivizing. You achieve what you incentivize, and if you're incentivizing cheap food production with no consideration for quality, that's precisely what you will achieve.

So, so you're.

And I would say, sorry, go ahead, go ahead, Zach. Then if you extend that out to the human health side, you can see the fallacy of economy, which is we currently report something called gross domestic product gdp. The irony of that is that you would think that it would take productivity to drive product. And so I would like to move into government and force all economies worldwide to start reporting gross domestic productivity rather than product. It's a very subtle shift in the language, but the metric would radically change. It would mean that we can no longer count any health care spending as productive because every time you spend a dollar on healthcare, you're undermining the productivity of the people that are being served there. So you can't start measuring our safety.

Does that mean you can also no longer measure Superfund sites and you can only measure forest once they're destroyed?

Exactly. And so when you take the healthcare out and then you say, well, we're also going to measure the productivity of your soil and the food that's produced in it. And now you got a different metric altogether. And so no longer is it bushels of low quality dead corn that's going to be turned into poor quality chicken Feed for chickens that are dying that will end up as your chicken salad that is full of so much stress that you will go into a panic attack and think that there's impending doom in your life two hours after eating your chicken. That's currently what the health care and food system is delivering to us. And so when you start to reevaluate global economies with global productivity rather than product, we will start to measure the correct things. And that is exciting because it's such a simple shift that we could all do together. Every country could suddenly be responsible for the wellness and productivity of their land and the peoples that would grow out of that. And so that's one of those subtle shifts where I think that when you ask, what are the social, cultural changes, we have to start measuring something that's relevant to our survival as a species. And the amount of cash in people's bank accounts is a completely irrelevant thing. And I have a lot of evidence for that. It might seem obvious, but I've got a lot of evidence for it because I was in a hospice doctor for four years and I was admitting 80 patients a week to die. And I did that for four years and never heard a single one of those thousands of deaths tell me what their bank account balance was. Not a single one of them ever mentioned how much money they made in their paycheck. Not a single one of them actually even mentioned their job description to me. Not a single one of them told me what their industries were, by and large. They told me what their favorite meal was. The memory of a grandchild sitting on their lap. The moment they fell in love for the first moment. They went on this epic journey in Europe and they got to taste a croissant in the streets of Paris for the first time. They are having this flashed back memory of the beauty of their own life. And the bank account never enters the equation. And so ultimately, we are measuring metrics that have absolutely no relevance to you on your deathbed or economies in their productivity for humans. And so then when we start to think about change, we have to start to really realize that we are all living our lives every single day by metrics that are killing our planet. And for that, we keep rewarding, like John was saying, we're rewarding farmers for doing the wrong thing. We're rewarding VCs for doing the wrong thing. We're rewarding, you know, whatever you want to think of any industry, Just fill in the blank. Cell phone companies, whatever. We're rewarding people for doing the wrong thing over and over. Again being played ultimately by our own active hallucination that we call humans space and reality. It is a hallucination of reality that's now compounding in its severity because we now have open AI. OpenAI chat GPT is a entire system of intelligence. It shouldn't be called artificial because it's just damn intelligent. It is an intelligent system based. And you can go ask Sam Altman, like, go talk to these guys. How did you build it? We built it on natural language systems and nls. A natural language system is the last thing you would ever want to build intelligence on, because it's built on the written word. Written words are abstractions that mean absolutely nothing until a society agrees that the word GDP is important to it or the word sparrow is important to nature and it defines a bird with that shape and all that. So it's an abstraction of nature. And so when you have a species that's hallucinating for hundreds of years and we build a massive body of written language that describes all of our beliefs, all of our paradigm, everything we've ever created, and then you base intelligent system on that abstraction. Every time you chat chat, GPT something, you are, you are looking at the hallucination of the collective human intelligence. And so we are compounding the hallucinatory belief system. A species that has forgotten how good it feels to take off its shoes and walk in grass and walk in wildflowers and smell morning dew on real soil. That is an intoxicating smell. We would solve mental health problems overnight if people felt what it felt like. When birds sing in the morning to open the respiratory pores in the trees that they're nesting in, which has got evidence recently, the bird song in the morning is opening the respiratory function of trees. Nature is so freaking beautiful. And when did we lose the belief that human song and human art wasn't the highest form of contribution that we would ever do? When did we lose sight of the beauty that we would create? And when are we going to start measuring gross domestic beauty and what are we really producing? Because when I drive through streets today, our houses are ugly, our cars are ugly, our built systems are pathetic, highway systems, demolished ecosystems so that we can get to the airport faster is just so ugly. Which is a demonstration that we are outside of nature in our current design of human society and systems. Because nature has never created something ugly. You know, fires are freaking beautiful, tornadoes are beautiful. Her most destructive forces are some of the most beautiful things you ever lay eyes on. And then that seedling popping out of soil like it Just insane. And then you look through a microscope and you find out that it's sacred geometry all the way to the atomic level. And then you get a telescope and you look out in the cosmos is sacred geometry. As far as you can see out into the cosmos, we are a pixel in a state of flow, of beauty that flows from source to its manifested beauty every single day in more and more spectacular ways. And it will take such a small shift in human consciousness to become part of that again. Because if you look at the buildings we built 400 years ago, you will be dumbfounded by the craftsmanship, the intelligence, the mathematics, the intelligence that was there in the late 1800s. Remember, we were agronomy society. We were all farmers in the 1800s. Every household was a farm. There was nobody not farming as farmers. If you go go probably chatgpt this. You want to solve your hallucination, go look up 1880s 8th grade education because there's been this phrase. Maybe it's out of the, out of the phraseology, but the phrase an 8th grade education was kind of used derogatorily. Well, that guy's just got an eighth grade education. He's a farmer. If you look up the 8th grade test in the 1880s, I guarantee you we don't have a college student today that could pass that test. It is the most extraordinary intelligence that was in our agronomy mindset because our children were on the farms from birth onwards. And like John was saying, they watched those animals birth, they watch the seedlings coming out of there. They laid down in the grass at night and they looked up at the stars and blew their mind over the state of the cosmos. Those children reached this incredible intelligence because they were integrated into the beauty of Earth Farms, were a beautiful extension of nature's biodiversity. 1940s, this is in most of your lifetime's memory, if not yours, your mother's or your father's memory, your grandfather's memory. 1940s, we were growing 45% of our food system in our backyard. Victory gardens throughout, not just the United States, but all over the world. 45%. Today, we are growing 0.01% in our backyard gardens. We have fundamentally divorced ourselves from nature, and therefore we have failed to realize that we can be part of the beauty. We can actually create beauty. And the only thing that has really done no harm to this earth, I believe, is our art. And so I see great promise when we stop designing AI systems based on natural language that is hallucination. We need a planetary AI system, which I'm So excited. Adina is building. Adina is the founder of a Earth, and she's building a planetary AI system that does not use written language, but uses the data sets of nature itself. And nature is speaking to us as to what is reality, what is truth, what is valuable to humans, and how should we think? We should think as part of the trees. We should remember we are part of the soil itself. Our intelligence is a continuum between soil and tree and cosmos. Intelligence does not belong to humanity. Intelligence is imbued and gifted to humanity through the ecosystem that speaks through us. We are the most complex ecosystem on Earth. There's more bacteria, fungi, protozoa in every centimeter of a human colon than any other colon in animal life, any other spot in the world. You are more complex than jungles, coral reefs, you name your beautiful moment. You are more complex. And for that biodiversity speaking through you, you are endowed and gifted the capacity for intelligence. And for that, you have an opportunity to participate in the glory of the universe. And that. That's what I wish kids were talking. So, John, you are actually part of a community that remembers this. So the Mennonite community has really survived. And there's been some recent data in. In some of your sister communities there over in Pennsylvania and the like, recognizing that there's a fraction of, and sometimes not even measurable rates of childhood cancers, childhood diseases that are rampant in the cities that are just a few miles away, and they're just not existing in your communities, in the Mennonite and other communities around you guys. So tell us a little bit about. You know, I'm sorry about that, Marlo. I get really passionate and kind of go off my own rails sometimes. So that was one of those moments. But I'm back on. I'm okay. Survived, everyone. You're beautiful, John. Just give us a little bit of insight on that and then Alana will turn it back over to you. Thanks for patient with me.

My goodness, Zach, there's so many things that you said that I would like to reflect on. I have one of those 8th grade educations, and certainly I wouldn't suggest that it was to 1880 standard. I'm not sure exactly what that looks like, but it was to a standard that did not begin to compare with the public school education of my era. I graduated. I forget what it was early 2000s, and it was my graduation test, was very different from the mainstream even at that particular moment. So anyway, you. You asked me about the. The disease levels in the Amish and men communities that are in Pennsylvania, you know, it's certainly true that they are, in many cases they're hardly measurable, they're. And rather than addressing that question directly, I'll give you an example of COVID of my community's response to Covid. And the thing about really being in community with other people is that you are one or at most two degrees of separation away from everyone. You know, everything that's in our community is, I'm not sure the exact size. I would speculate somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3,000 to 3,500 families. And so in the case of COVID we knew there's all this drama about all these people that are dying from COVID There's all the news and everything else which we were insulated from to a degree, but we certainly got some exposure to some of the hysteria. But the benefit of everyone knowing everyone else is that we were able to keep track of all the deaths very closely. And over the course of an 18 month period, we were able to do the tabulations. Over the course of an 18 month period, there were 83 deaths in the community, four of which were designated as Covid, all of which had significant. Each of those four had significant comorbidities, extreme obesity and diabetes in several cases. The benefit of having a local community, of being that close, is that the fear and the hysteria of the macro community cannot overwhelm you and cannot overpower you because you are part of, of a closely connected support network. And I think that is the piece, when we consider the example and the biomimicry of the microbiome of being there to support each other and being in community. Most shouldn't say most. There are large segments of our modern day culture that have lost that, that don't really participate deeply in community in the sense of supporting each other at the cost of personal sacrifice if necessary. And that is, I think, the foundation, if we want to, if we want to heal ourselves. Coming back to where we started this conversation, we want to heal the earth and heal ourselves. A foundational aspect of that is being in community with other people and being part of a community is not about what you can receive, but about what you can contribute and then contributing fully, whatever your talents and skills may be.

As, as I want to.

Just.

Please, no, I just, I just wanted to, to share a brief reflection as I listen to both of you speak here. And we're asking farmers to do more, we're asking doctors to heal us and, and we underestimate our power and our, and our impact to be of service, to contribute to the, to the systems and communities that we are a part of.

Yeah, yeah, we've and I, we've spoken a bit about the things that we didn't know historically. What is different today is that there is such an abundance of available information. No one can say, no one can claim responsibility for remaining ignorant today. Ignorance in today's world is a choice. And therefore there is this old saying that ignorance is bliss. Well, if ignorance is bliss, then knowledge is responsibility and knowledge or the lack of thereof is a choice. Today all of us are responsible. We are responsible for our own health. We're responsible for the health of our families and our communities and all its different aspects. And to the degree that we accept that responsibility for our own health will determine the degree of the success that we have in healing ourselves and in healing our planet.

Beautiful. Yeah. And you know, on the optimism side, I'm joking, I had dinner with a group, you know, impressive regions being built down here and it's largely being run by, you know, 20 and 30 something year olds who have never farmed before. And there's no farming in their recent history that they're stemming from. But they are suddenly getting this uncontrollable call to go farm somewhere and they are finding land around the world to go farm. And I was been spending a lot of time in the Middle east and North Africa and Southern Africa and really diving into what is the planet trying to do right now. And the answer is the planet is moving into her regenerative cycle. Every 20,000 years this Earth regenerates herself and we go from a desertification cycle into a regreening. And that begins with this incredible rebirthing of the grasslands in the North Africa and Middle east region that then regreens one third of the planet every 20,000 years. 15,000 years, depends on the cycle. But you're in this very predictable cycle. And the Saharan desert we think of as this permanent structure on the earth. When we look at today's globe, it wasn't their 700,000 years ago it was a grassland and it was growing the largest food system that's ever existed called the Roman Empire. And so Rome, having extracted and destroyed all the European soils, moved all of the food systems for entire European continent to North Africa, which is now desert sands. But at that time it had these verdant deep soil systems that had been grown out of the grasslands between the dunes. And they grew massive wheat fields that extended all the way across the border of North Africa. The entire Mediterranean southern border was the food system of Europe. And that was fed from a lake that sat in the middle of the Sahara Desert called Lake Chad that was bigger than any other fresh water source in the world that's currently understand. And in the last four months, the lakes have started filling up again in North Africa. Mother Earth is doing her reclamation of her deserts and she does it for the purpose of regeneration, which is to say biodiversification. Every time she does this Earth diversity, what Earth's up to, the question is, can we align human systems fast enough to take our knee off the neck of Africa and the Middle East? Right now, chemical agriculture in those zones is keeping the recovery of the deserts out of the framework. All of our fencing that we put up in the name of conservation is blocking the movement of our, our macro animal systems in Africa and other continents. Those fences basically are the macro version of an antibiotic. As soon as you put up a fence, you decrease the biodiversity of land. The soil starts to degrade. If the animals cannot move across the land that were supposed to be there on this green earth, the soil will suffer. We've proved this out with keystone species. You put beavers back in rivers in Arizona. Suddenly the deserts start regreening. You put wolves in Yellowstone national park and somehow rivers start flowing again. You put bison back on the plains of Texas, rivers come back, soil systems come back. You put white lions back in northern portions of South Africa and the microbiome recovers and rivers start to flow again. This is the phenomenon of nature. It is a nature and life itself is a complex network of interconnected relationships that are a gifting economy for the, for the rising of all boats. Everything is lifted. Everything is an ascension pathway in nature. Humans somehow divorced ourselves from that understanding, flipped the paradigm, upset eye down and said we're going to have to take everything now because nature's against us. We might not have anything next year. And so it's out of that fear of a future that's not supported by nature. And spend a bunch of time with the Oshawar tribe down in the Amazon. The best, most wonderful thing is you walk into their houses that are huge and beautiful. Vaulted ceilings 30ft high, made out of incredible natural sources. The whole houses breathe, they're open air, closed air, the whole thing and spectacular. And then you go sit down with them for a meal and you're looking around, there's not a single basket to store food in. There's no refrigerator, there's no storage of anything. And you're like, wait a second, you don't store anything. Like how, what happens if like what happens tomorrow? What do you mean what happens tomorrow? We walk back out in the jungle, well that's been feeding us for 40,000 years and we get food again. Like they're just like dumbfounded by the question. Like you do what, you store things in freezers for a year. That must taste terrible. They can't understand, like what you're doing, what, like, how come you aren't just getting food? Like, you know, they can't fathom what we've turned ourselves into in our fear that nature won't provide tomorrow. And there's some deep biblical lessons that happened to a previous, you know, time in our history where we were going hungry and we were taught that you cannot store your food anymore. You're going to have to just be provided for on a daily basis and if you try to store it, will rot in the jars. That was the manna. And the stories of the deserts in the Middle east and North Africa at the time of, you know, pre, pre Judeo Christian times. But there was this history there of the peoples that had also forgotten that they were provided for daily and they had to be retrained. I think we're getting to the collapse of systems that will retrain us into community structures that will remember that we have to walk out every day and ask Mother Earth, what would you have for your children today? What would you gift us today? Because I think you do care. And this is a mother that knows how to nurture her children. And when mothers in the most abject communities that we've been working in in Africa find out that they can plant 10 perennial food producing trees that will produce food every year for the next seven or ten generations, their minds are blown. And these mothers suddenly realizing that they weren't expected by nature to be single mothers coming out of abusive relationships, trying to raise four children on less than US$400 a year. They were mothers that were children of the mother. And when they find out that Mother Earth is there to take care of their children more effectively than they can in their poverty, the concept of poverty goes away. And suddenly within months, they're growing seedlings to share with their neighbors. And they're like, you can't believe this story. Like, look at these things growing in my yard. They're going to start feeding us every single year, forever. We're going to start planting food everywhere. And so I'm watching food sovereignty return to some of the most broken human systems in the world and the speed at which we regain human dignity. And then immediately after dignity comes creativity and from the creativity comes new economy. We need to begin that again in the west and in these wealthy cultures that are living in this hallucination economy, hallucination realities of natural language, belief systems and start to really feel instead of talk, we got to stop talking so much and we need to start to feel what it feels like to be alive. And then our intuition will kick back in and our creativity will follow quickly.

Amen. Amen. Zach, thank you so much for, for leading us in. Such an inspiring note just to, to wrap us up, John, Zach, thank you both so much for, for joining us today in this, in this conversation and, and everyone else who tuned in it. It is Earth Day today and, and this is how we, how we bring awareness to Earth Day at Farmers Footprint through hosting some of these conversations. We're working on, on reconnecting our agricultural and health systems. A lot of the ways that we do that is just getting farmers and doctors to start speaking to each other, talking to each other. And again, for all of us who are not farmers or doctors, but are eaters, we can't give up our power and expect and expect doctors and farmers to solve it for us. As John said, it takes a food web. It takes a community. And we need to realign with nature and harmony to be in service to that. So if you feel inspired after these conversations, please, and you're in a position where you can donate, please go ahead and do that. We will be hosting other conversations throughout the day. The next one is at 5pm Pacific. And thank you, thank you both so much. We're looking forward to continuing this conversation.

Thank you so much, John. Thanks so much to the community. I just want to encourage each of you on the funding. I just want to give some reflection of how much of a joy it's been seen the last seven years. So we raised $5 million to get this global project started from donors all over the world with an average gift size of $33. 5 million has changed the entire global matrix of this whole discussion. And we're ready to compound our efficacy now with aligning with family offices and the rest in this recent last year to really accelerate our impact. But I want to really emphasize to each of you that that $33 a month, just as a game changer for these programs that are running this. So it takes so little money ultimately to seed nature. And I love that because that's how nature works. You put a little seed in the ground and a freaking tree grows out of it. And I feel like that's what's happened with the many seeds that you guys have put in to the ground with us in these $33 contributions. So if you can do $33 a month, make that commitment to Lana and team, it just supercharges our team to see that that Runway broaden and the fuel put in the tank for these incredible stories to fly further and with more efficacy. So thank you all for your continued support over the years. It's been so moving and we know we wouldn't be where we are today in our sense of hope without every one of you being part of that community and the interconnected intelligence that's running through all of us. So thank you so much. Lana. You've been such an inspired leader these last couple years and so amazed by you and your entire team. What a dedicated group of humans. And you guys are just have made it through so much adversity in these last couple years and you have done it with such aplomb and grace and just deepest gratitude. Thank you farmers whooper team. Thank you Project Biome. Thank you all of you for making it real.

Thank you Zach. Thank you Zach. And thank you everyone who might be inspired to donate today or is already a support supporter of our work. Go check out the garden club. In our Mighty Networks community. We have a really in depth course with resources on how to grow food in your backyard. We're also working on a glyphosate pesticide awareness campaign that is going global this year. And you can, you can check out all of our other programs on our website. We have some really, really exciting efforts launching this year. So stay tuned and thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Bye Zach. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Lana. Thank you all.