Regenerative Farming w/ Neil Smith #25

Hello everybody, I'm David Goldsmith and welcome to another edition of Redefining Tomorrow. It's here where we discuss topics that may redefine your future. They may redefine how we live on this planet or any other type of redefining you might consider. A quote I've lived with personally for most of my life is you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. Today we're going to be redefining tomorrow. The topic we're going to explore today is unlearn the science to rebuild the Agra ecosystem, which is far off of what I think we've ever gone in this direction. Today we have a fantastic individual with us. We have Neil Smith. How are you, Neil?

I'm doing very well, David.

Well, Neil has been involved across the ecosystem agriculture from carbon sequestration, ecology, soil science, permaculture systems design, regenerative agriculture and renewable energies. Along with tying this all to a future that is Web3 and crypto solutions, which is an interesting spin in today's times. He's been a regenerative farmer, a distiller, worked with industry worldwide. I will also share that he's been a part of the Project Moon Hut team for quite some time.

Thank you.

Fabulous to have him on the call with us. So one thing before we start is this, and I've had to add this, which was not part of our beginning recordings was I had to share with individuals that I have no clue what Neil is going to talk about. None. What Neil and I have done is we agree, we got together, we agreed on a title and sometimes a title can take an hour to three hours to generate. We go back and forth but we don't go into any details. Then Neil goes on his own and comes up with what he believes would be the best thing to teach about this one topic. And then we work through the topic. So just like you are listening to this today for the first time, it is the first time I'm hearing anything about the content that Neil is going to be delivering. So that said, Neil, do you have an outline for us?

Certainly do, David, and it's great to be here to share that with you. The very first outline, the very first thing I'd like to talk about is the history. I think the, it's important to go dive into that. And so that title is that bullet point, the History of Eco Agro.

Eco Agro. Okay, number two.

Organic Farming. Good intentions, but still a little vanilla.

Eco Farming. Good intentions, but still a little bit vanilla.

Little.

Now you make me hungry. Okay, number Three, two.

Aussies slap. A name on ancient wisdom. Slot.

A name on ancient wisdom. Next.

Regenerative. What it means to eco aggro.

To eco agro.

Number five, nature's choice. Cheat codes.

Cheat c h e a t codes.

You got it? Yeah.

Okay. Number six.

Controlled environment. Agriculture. Next stop, gluttony. Eat with the seasons.

With the seasons. Next.

The honest support we need.

Is there another?

The last one, which is. Don't put more on, more on.

Don't put more on, more on.

You got.

So basically saying I need to lose some weight. I mean, through this whole thing.

Health plays an important factor in everything we're talking about.

So, yeah, I feel I'm okay, but maybe a little bit can come off. So my. We're gonna start with number one, the history of.

Ecoagro.

Ecoagro. And I'm hoping, and I normally don't say this, but I'm hoping you're going over where that word comes from, because I have never heard that word before. You.

Yeah, it's absolutely. I am.

Okay, so help me understand this.

So ecoagro, really, in conversations with most people, we talk a lot about restoring nature in the world that I live in. Stemming from agriculture, branching into land stewardship, tying in food along the way. There's a word that often comes up. It's called ecology. Architect. Ecology tend to be the mechanisms to help fix the ecological systems that are out there. And then we talk a lot about the agriculture systems. Now there is a term called agroecology which tries to blend that together. I tend to find that as a little bit hard to swallow for a lot of people. They still divide up the two. And really we should be taking the perspective from ecology first before we start talking about the agriculture systems. Agro capital A. Agriculture or agro is all inclusive. So not just how we grow things out of the ground, but the whole supply chain. And so I've coined and utilized and maybe others have used this term, but I spin that the other way around. So eco agro is ecological agriculture, capital A, agriculture, the whole component of agriculture. But we start from the ecological standpoint and how we can improve this. And so the history of eco agro really takes us all the way back to the early farming days. And I like to start there because I like to paint a picture of what things used to look like when farming. You could say when ecology was simple. This is when the Incas were terracing fields. They didn't have erosion to deal with. They didn't have water issues. They. They actually managed water Very effectively in terms of moving around the different terraces that they were building. These folks could have built the best Instagram worth worthy rice paddies ever, if you think about it. But what they did was teach us that, you know, thinking about ecology, working with the systems that are there, is far better than trying to work against it.

Can I ask, why did you start with Incas instead of ancient Chinese series or ancient African series? Why Incas is your first place?

I tend to find people think of the Inca period as opposed to the Mesoamerican period. Ancient. When we're sitting in North America and I, I am sitting in Canada, as I am talking to you today, David, I am Canadian. We often think of that period as a period that spun a lot of innovative ideas. And you know, they lived in a time that was so far away from where we are today and yet they had systems that we continue to refer to. And the Inca pyramids, no different than maybe the pyramids in Egypt, but very America's focused, maybe a little bit biased. And so that's why I ventured there.

It's. And I had to look it up because I didn't know this. The Incas were 1200-1500 A.D. so there was a lot more going on before that.

There was.

Why. I mean, did the Incas learn it from somebody else? Do we know that? Are there other places around the world that had also advanced systems?

Absolutely. I mean, I think you could probably point to any historical period of time. Learnings of how to raise, grow food and nourish ourselves happened in every part of the world, and it was taught and handed down. I just grabbed a historical period of time that I thought was far enough away that highlighted two major key components that are going on today, which is water issues and erosion, soil erosion, and how this ancient civilization was able to master that. So did they learn it from somebody? Absolutely. But I haven't gone that far back in my, in my preparedness in terms of discussing the historical.

No, it was just one of those questions that came to mind because I'm thinking Incas and in my head and there's a lot of bad things just floating around all the time. I, I'm asking my. It's interesting because you chose an in and I, I don't know if this right way to say it, an isolated group where it was disconnected from the Asian, African, European land masses. This is Inca is where it's South America. South America. I was wondering if it was also Central America.

So I think they, they got up there a little bit but pr, by and large, actually, I talk about the Mesoamericans, which is sort of that Central American historical period and culture. And they actually came up with planting three different crop species together. So corn, beans, and squash. Today we call that champion cropping or intercropping. That was something actually, that was done historically in Mesoamerica. It was a term sort of referred to as three sisters planting system.

So they would do them simultaneously or rotational like.

No, not rotational. Yeah, they plant them all together. Huh?

Okay.

Yeah. Of course, they didn't grow all at the same time. They've got different growing aspects. But what was happening below the soil, unbeknownst to them, or maybe known to them, was a ability to have a thriving ecosystem in the soil that produced very healthy crops as they rose. So corns, beans, and squash. Now, corn looked. Corn back in the day looked very different than it does today. It had different colors, it had different sizes. It was about the nutritional factors more than the. The aspects of what we drive out of it today.

Okay, so we're going to take it from Incas forward.

From Incas forward. So Incas moving into the Mesoamerica period and then actually jumping the pond over to Africa. When we think about the silver pasture or the tree crop systems that integrated livestock. So in Africa, the African continent, we think about it, a lot of it today being barren desert land and very inhospitable. Back in the day, it had an abundance of trees. There was far more integration with natural livestock and the tree systems to integrate crops and soil and water functionality. And the reason I've sort of picked three historical components is that there are learnings from each of these that are becoming new again today. The whole learning, the whole conversation today is about unlearning the science and rebuilding the eco agrosystem. Well, the ecological learnings from the past are once again new. It's like any fashion trend, you know, we've seen come around. You know, what was once old is new again. The same is true in what we're doing in our ecosystems and our agriculture systems. What was once old is now new again. So figuring out how to manage water perfectly, like the Incas did in terraced rice paddies, that avoids erosion is something that we're now coming out as brilliant new ideas and functionality of how we can better our ecological systems, our ecosystems. So champion croppings. Yeah.

Might you argue then that because individuals thought they were better than the system could figure it out better that they morph these systems into something we have today? And by Saying we have to go back. What we're saying on a high level is we kind of screwed it up. We had better things back then, so we're going back to them.

Absolutely. It's a perfect way of looking at it. We screw things up. I think there's a bigger play here, which is we have a dependence. We've created a society that depends on science and science being the under key, the underpinning of comfort for a lot of us. And I think we need to uncouple ourselves from the dependency on science. I'm not knocking science certainly has added its values, but when we think about the ecological and agriculture systems in particular, that that dependency is clouding or preventing us, slowing us down from actually looking at and smelling the soils and looking at the observational changes that we, we know how to do. We've been taught how to do from our historical counterparts in these different eras. We just need to look at a different lens and not depend on science to give us the indicators.

I would redefine science then. What we're doing is we're saying that we over science it because the science before, when you did an observation, when you smelled it, when you, whatever they did back then was science enough. And maybe the additive agricultural chemistries that we add, maybe the rotations that we thought would get us a higher yield have ended up in the long term degrading our soil, degrading the quality of the product that's delivered, creating unhealthy or not as healthy varietals. Did I kind of say that right?

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Science isn't your magical fairy godmother. In short, you know, we need to have more observational nuance as we move forward. And that will be an underpinning theme that I carry forward in some of these points that I talk about is getting back to the land and being more observational.

So I guess because I'm trying to follow this, because I think it's going to go all the way through. What you're going to be carrying bringing forward is the science aspect of it is first we had Africa, silver pasture with the trees being a lot more trees than there are today. The understanding of layer tier systems. I don't know if you plan on talking about how do we get so far away?

It's a very good question. I think a lot of it stemmed from the world wars coming out of those, a society that was very broken and a dependence on central systems, centralized systems that were trying to feed the world and what they took from the World War as devastating as this world war was, was an ability to do things at scale. And so we, you know, we look at farmers in America in particular. You know, if you couldn't go to war, you could feed the troops and so till the land plow the land grow en masse. And there was a whole campaign around that. And what we got was a dependency on science. Science that helped us build tanks and the military arsenal and the spies, equipment and etc. And so forth. All the very devastating things, bombs came out of that. And also the science that took us over to helping grow food en masse to feed the troops first. And then after the war, the reintegration of troops in society and the dependence on science continued to move forward. Now science had a part to play in an ability to learn a lot of aspects of what we, we have taken today in, in the agricultural world in terms of the science of the soil and the uptake of nutrients and plants and you know, the difference between non nutritious and nutritious plants, fungi, bacterial components, genes, you know, that goes into livestock as well, gene editing, epigenetics. But there's just too much dependence on that and it's clouded us. And so we have created a society that is very dependent in our scientific systems. So much so that, and I won't go down this rabbit hole, but I'll just scratch the surface of it David, that you're actually seeing doctors in the medical field today pulling away from the traditional medical and saying don't necessarily trust the medical system because a sick person is more profitable to the medical system and a healthy person isn't. So you need to have self awareness and self managed priorities. I would say the same is true in our eco agriculture systems. So from an ecological standpoint, from an agriculture standpoint, we need more of that observational, self managed ability to rectify, regenerate and then move to a sustainable, sustainable systems.

It's, I'm seeing an inflection point and I'm, I see the military in the world wars. So now what you're saying is this is a very, very relatively new historical shift. And I'm also, I got, because you can't see me, I've actually got my hands in front of me. So I've got the, the, the right, the left side of the, the right side of the chart is this world wars and then the left side, the pre. Didn't we have a lot of famines? Didn't we have a lot of individuals who didn't have the food that they needed?

Didn't Absolutely we did. And that happened for a lot of different reasons. If we go into history, invasions and other nations invading nations and as cultures sort of clamor to be dominant forces, Romans, etc. And so forth, you know, there's reasonings and atrocities that happen with that and also hygiene, you know, just learning about some of the hygienic components. You know, I think, you know, people that without naming any one group, there's certainly people out there that don't like to eat pork because it was once considered a very dirty meat that carried a lot of diseases. So there, you know, there's been many learnings from that. And certainly I think as we went into the wars and after the wars, running back up to sort of a more modern time frame, we wanted to grow better, create less famine. But we've to to steal a page out of somebody's book called the Tipping Point. Malcolm Gladwell I think we've reached a tipping point and we've gone the other direction in our food supply chain, which stems right back to our ecological and agriculture systems being broken.

I'm going to use that graphic. So if I was to take the Post World War we had one level of type of agriculture pre World War, we had this other type of agriculture. Are we now saying, I'm trying to create a graph in my head, does it. Is it stepping stones? Are there phases? Because it sounded like the way you started with Agrico Agra and Incas is that you went back to 1200 and 1500. Somewhere in that timeline. Was there anything in between? I mean, did they have these tiers, they had these structures that they working on that were very positive. Was there another step? Or did we go there and then hit world wars and say, screw it, we're going to jump to sciences?

I think sciences became exceptionally important during the World wars and as we hit some milestones in science for the military efforts that then took us into what we call civilian life today and you know, the world as we know it, regardless of the.

So that was the big inflection point.

The world that was the big one.

Even before that it was, it was more regenerative, it was more harmonious with nature. And if you were to look at a chart, you'd kind of say, yes, there was some changes. But the big World War II also brought industrialization. It also brought machinery that was on a scale that we had not seen before pre, that we didn't have the same type of tools.

Absolutely. I think, look, I mean agriculture is 196,000 years old. Based on, I believe, the last thing I read in terms of our historical documentation, moving from hunter gatherer, from the Homo sapien sort of time periods all the way forward to today, where we had those inflection points, the Industrial Revolution, our world wars is kind of where I pick up and use as a key identifier of where some major changes happened that, you know, took us to where we are today. All of that led to changes in our climate, which is having an ecological effect, greater population density, which is certainly being. Since the world wars to today. We've seen an enormous increase in our population demand or carrying capacity on the world over hunting, overfishing. You know, these were things that weren't prevalent, possibly because of population size, possibly because of lack of that interconnectivity between nations and transportation that has also increased significantly since the world wars. And then probably the biggest one, which is science that has created technology and technology has been, you know, created domestication of a lot of things that were more natural back in the day.

Definition then was. I'm again trying to get my mind around it. When you think of ag, when you use the term agro.

Yes.

You're inclusive of all farming activities, whether it be livestock. Okay. Because you use the word agriculture in point four. And it was interesting because I had associated eco agro with agriculture. But you're saying it's eco agro, which is a more inclusive everything from things that you go and pull from the forest. Does it include agro from farming or fishing and livestock and all. I mean that too, Absolutely. Okay.

One might even say, I've heard a gentleman say that mining is a form of agriculture. Yeah.

That's what I.

We won't go down that rabbit hole, David.

Yes, I know the person who said that.

Good, good.

You're funny. Yeah, I just typed that because we're looking to potentially put together a series on the mining side where forestry is a form of mining, water fishing is a form of mining, and so is all of the others. So this is serious. So, yes, you're inclusive. So now that changes my entire perspective of eco agro. It is our entire. And I'm gonna. Maybe this is a bad way to say it, but it's a. It's our entire food possibilities for society, no matter where it comes from.

Yes, that's a great way of putting it, Food possible. Yeah.

Yeah. Because I. The definition, just my take on it is ecoagra sounds very much agriculture. And to an average human, and I'm below average, but to an average human, they're probably going to think agriculture and you've shortened it. And that's where I was. That's why I was asking all these questions because I'm trying to get my mind around what eco agro means. And it's. I think I shared this with you, Marie. Baja was on our other podcast series and he wanted to talk about space debris and that was his big topic. And I listened for 25 minutes as we're creating the title. And I said it bores me. I have no interest in this and not to be. It wasn't mean the way I said it, but I said let's go someplace else. And I thought about what about what we called it, space environmentalism. And I said that's inclusive of everything that could be involved in that ecosystem. And he loved that word. He's using it today. So I kind of feel like the eco aggro has to be really well defined because I went from just farm from crops and now we're talking anything within the food supply chain. If that's a way to kind of say it.

Yeah, I think that's a great way. And, and I, I agree with you. I think it's very hard to put definition to some of these terms that are so interconnected. And even my take on it, you know, when I put together eco aggro play on some of the things that are out there. But yes, more inclusivity to a larger. And that's why I emphasize capital A. You know, I take that from not to get into religious. But they often talk about Catholics as lowercase c Catholic or capital case c Catholic. I, I do the same in agriculture or agro capital A lower gay to sort of help define a larger picture scope versus a very narrow focused indicator.

Yeah, I think the challenge with someone like Moriba or this is you're so close to it. You've been so involved in it that when you talk to individuals who are probably trying to understand this, they say, yeah, I understand it. It's obvious to them. For me it was okay. The history of agri grow didn't make, you know, you started with land stewardship and restoring nature and architect ecology. But all of them in my head, just so you know, I was only thinking about farming. That's all I was thinking about. I never went to livestock fishing, the natural reserve people pick foods out of forests. I didn't think about water and fishing and that whole ecosystem. I did not go there. I don't know if that helps a little bit, but now it helps me because to Understand easier. Eco agro now is huge, which is phenomenal. It's exactly what I like to learn about. So this is, this is perfect. So anything else in the history side? Because I've got to believe there's some other key things in history that you'd like to add.

Well, I, I think again I'm sort of rolling up to sort of this post war syndrome that we, where I pick up. I guess that's a great way to, to start. And certainly there's many hours of conversation that you know, can happen prior to that. But post war, you know, the things that are within our control to sort of fix and regenerate because of what's happened post war are. I'm good. Those are the areas I'm going to speak to. So you know, after that historical knowledge came what we call a little bit of a green revolution in the 20th century. And things got a bit weird there. David. You know, I think there was a need and a sort of desire that hey, science is helping us grow yield and we can grow, you know, 100 times more potatoes and corn and we can feed our population forever as long as we keep dumping more, what we call forever chemistry into today. But it was chemistry onto the ground to boost yield. And sure it made the crops grow faster, but it also nuked the soil and that had a rippling effect as you go out into the ecological surroundings. So not only were we pushing our ecological surroundings into the ground to create more barren land for farming, we are also devastating it by adding these chemistries into the soil that had ripples effect that we didn't see for many decades in our water systems through leaching in our treed areas, on the embankments of our farmland and even in our urban centers that as everything flows through the soil started to have adverse effects all the way up to today. And so that let's dump chemistry everywhere so we can feed forever. Our world has actually gone the opposite direction. We're seeing a decrease in yield. And so we're having to, you know, find new chemistries and do things that are maybe more synthetic or non natural to meet the same demand that we once got from our first bump. I equate it a little bit to feeding our environment drugs as a human would. Right. And that first time somebody takes a drug and they, they feel this huge rush, recreational or otherwise, and then they can never quite get that same feeling. And so they take more and more of it and they chase and there's some very bad effects that come out of that. We won't go down there, but that that's what's happened in our environment today.

Did people, I mean, I've got to believe there were individuals out there. I guess they just weren't heard that said said, wait a moment, this doesn't make any sense.

You know, where it turned, I think it was called the Dust bowl in the 1930s. I think that's where a lot of sort of the Dust bowl in America, let's be very specific. I am being pretty bioregional focused right now though. Certainly this happened in other regions globally. But for the sake of, you know, educating you, David, I think there's a lot of take away from what's happened in the Americas as indicators of what's working and not working for some of the the other bioregions. So the Dust bowl that happened in the 1930s, this was happening. Our topsoil was being blown away by wind because we didn't have enough structure in the soil to hold it in place during winds and rain events and climatic events. And so it was like plowing just for the sake of plowing until there's no tomorrow. And then when drought hits or when storms hit, all of that topsoil, which is really where we grow food or where life is sustained in terms of trees and grasses and rangeland. And that was all blown away. That ended up in the water systems, which created still does to this day, creates large issues in our natural water systems and then into our ocean systems. Those blue zones that you've heard about, you know, they, they get affected quite severely because of all this erosion of soil, the Dust Bowl. And so that inflection, that second inflection point in the 1930s is when people sort of went ah, that that's not good, that Dust bowl scenario is not good. How do we change that? And you started to see more conversation happen around that. But again, it was a turning of the head to science to help fix that versus looking at more natural ways. Now there were certainly some really good people out there that were advocating for more natural ways, but the need to feed the world superseded that and and still to a degree does right today as we speak.

I often share with individuals when talk about and I don't know if you're going to bring it up, there's United States to give a general is about 30, 35 years of topsoil left and China has maybe 20, 25 years of topsoil left. I don't know those are exact numbers. But individuals have challenges with that. So I always say to them, have you Ever driven by a farm and you've seen that the farmhouse is about a meter or 3ft higher, 2ft higher than the house. The ground that they harvest on and they say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I say, well, what's happening is the nutrients and the materials are being extracted out of the ground. They disappear when you pull the roots out, when you pull the system out and it's sucking it up. So it's actually declining. You're seeing it right in front of you. But it's not a rapid decline. It's over decades of time of tilling, moving, harvesting and then redoing that over and over again. And so that, that whole topsoil issue is huge because it's not an unlimited level in our, in the earth's, in the earth's forming. We don't have 40 meters of this. We have a limited supply because it has to be grown. If you want to say leaves decaying, animals decaying and the average individual, including myself, I mean, I had to learn it one day, didn't understand that. And it's obvious that it's a challenge that we are going to have to face in the near term.

You're 100% right and it's great that you say that, you know, that soil can be growing. And when I talk to people about what's happening, you know, we often start in this sort of dour, you know, position, you know, the things are working well, but there is hope and there is capability of moving there. And to that point we'll get in that towards the end, you can regenerate or grow soil. We can get back to making the ecosystem ecological and agriculture capital, a function more effectively and work with nature in a way it was intended to. But we need to know, you know, in terms of things that aren't going well, we need to sort of hear about the pieces that, that need to be fixed or need to be changed altogether. And one of those would be the commoditizing the farmers. So we moved away from, you know, farmers being a strong advocate to feeding the troops and then feeding the world and farming and, you know, go farm, go plow, go farm. Subsidizing that to commoditizing farmers. And the actual profession of farming deteriorated in a lot of people's mind. It was a sort of a blue collar, lower class profession to have. And I'd really love to change that opinion because I think that's still out there today that, you know, farmers are undervalued and a lot of that is because they're treated as a part of the machine. And farmers are being asked to sign contracts for every aspect of what they do. I mean, even stepping foot on soil, most farms today in North America or large scale industrial agriculture systems don't own the seeds that they're planting. You know, they can't modify that. If they buy seeds from a seed vendor, they have to use a seed recipe in terms of the chemistry to grow what they're, what they're doing. They don't own the machinery, they don't own the commodity trade of that seed to the market space. They just become part of the cogwheel. And we have to change that narrative greatly.

I had heard that the seeds that are being, this is a very tangential. But the seeds that often are replacing the seeds that a farmer had are not seeds that can reproduce in the same way. So the minute they switch to this type of new seed, they've kind of cut their, their knees off the below the knees cap because they now have to buy the seed every year and all the supplies from the organization that they're allied with. Is that kind of correct?

You got it, you got it? Yeah. I mean seed seed genetics, seed modification, whether you call it GMO or otherwise, like a lot of things, is dependent on science to give us the indicators that, you know, this is the right direction to go to continue to hit the yields, to meet the contractual terms that's been laid out by the food supply chain by and large. And you know, and there's all sorts of devastating effects that that's been had around that.

It's. I've drawn two dull arrows and I've got one arrow that goes towards the, this new farmer, which you're saying is not a new farmer in the same sense, because you're using the word farmer, it becomes more challenging. And you and I have had discussions at least to some degree on some of the other work we're doing within the foundation that we're talking autonomous robotic mining, autonomous robotic forestry, autonomous robotic agriculture. Potentially. The ecosystem that is surrounding agriculture is not going to be the group of individuals who reshape the ecosystem because they're so entrenched in their own belief structure that you almost need, which isn't paid to think. I think you had seen the chart. You need a, you need something that comes in from left field or from far out where someone says it's no longer farming, it's not farming, it's different. And therefore a farmer might be a technologist or a farmer might be, I don't know, giving it a Grant more grandiose name. As long as it doesn't have that same physical bruteness that's necessary. And that's part of the challenge when I think when we speak farming is there's a lot of physical work that has to be done. As a farmer, I don't know if that will change. Even when you have a Class 9 harvester that basically the person standing inside, sitting inside is watching movies the entire time, it can go through the night. But I don't know how. You got large equipment, you've got heavy equipment, you've got machinery that's got to move. I think that probably will take some time to have that evolution you're expect or looking to transform to. I don't know if I said that.

Well, I know you said it perfectly. I believe we're on a precipice of purely on the equipment side and how we farm a massive paradigm shift that's going to happen. And this is where technology to a degree, if you want to say there's a science behind the technology, but technology advancements have allowed us to come through the tipping point that's detrimental into the other side to say, you know, we can do more with less. We can do things at smaller scale and still have industrial farming, you know, to meet our global demand. But we have to think about things differently. And so to your point, autonomous, autonomous vehicles, Instead of having one massive combiner, one massive tractor, we could have 12 that aren't human controlled, that follow a path, plan on the field and you know, work continuously. But then at that aspect we could have more people involved in farming because the price of, you know, equipment is going to come down and the ability to share multi unit equipments is going to be much more feasible. And the transportation of equipment, I don't know, last time you saw a combine or tractor roll down the street, but it, you know, pretty much takes three lanes nowadays with a five load signed, they're massive and on the soil, that's compaction on the soil and, and that kills life in our soil. And so.

Never thought about that.

We devastate our soils in just about everything we do, whether we're mining, forestry, foraging. Every time we're compacting soils, we're creating some sort of devastation in terms of, you know, the life that's living there in the top 2 to 3 inches. And so soils though undervalued is the beginning of agriculture and what sustains everything for us. But that isn't a science problem to fix. That is an observational thing. I need people to get out there, I need them to understand what soil smells like and the different soil structures that are out there and how it changes with the different crops that you grow without any chemistry and what's happening below it and the different worm structures that help hold water in place so, so it doesn't run off with all the topsoil and the microfungal rhizae that is down there. You know, these are things that we need to start focusing on. Those are all natural systems and we can help them get there without any science, purely by observation and discussion.

So you made a jump which I didn't. No, no. Well, the jump you're thinking might be different. So I'd like to hear your jump. But my jump was when you were talking about science Iadvertently again, not so smart. I am tying science also to the tech. But what you've done is separate it which is a smart way to do it. You're saying that there's the science side of it that has gone awry. But if we the technological side of those advancements still have that can add added value with a different approach that's more Inca regenerative side. So it's almost as if you've taken, you know, when you get a. I'm going to use a Chinese meal that has rice underneath it, you get it and then you mix everything together. You're kind of jumbling them. So it's not that the science is bad, but pieces of the science don't work. It's not the technology is bad, it's the pieces that don't work. And it's not that the full system of and I'll call it the Inca the old regenerative is workable today, but pieces of it will work. So if we can harness inside of that triangle a new set of paradigms that brings regenerative, that brings certain sciences and yet is altered by a even you shared equipment environments where you can leverage the tech at a much cheaper cost less work. Swarm technologies, sonar, infrared, whatever it may take to be able to figure out the whether a food or crop is at its yield, its highest yield or even spot treatments, sickness, health of a plant, not even an animal. I would say the same thing. You can then create a new formula out the backside. But it could also go horribly wrong.

Yeah, I so did.

I said a lot. I know, sorry.

I both agree and disagree. I mean I to a degree this jumbling of terms I think is very great of you to, to understand that. And I think, I think by and Large we get caught up in some of that as well. I get caught up in some of that is using these terms, broad stroke. And we do need to be more definitive on everything we're doing. So qualification quantification, science. And the science I'm talking about specifically the things that I believe we should be pulling away from are more on the input or chemistry side science, so chemical science and non engineered science, so non technological. I think there are pieces of the technology science that I have some issues with. But by and large, I think technology, as you've mentioned, I do wobble out as difference than science, chemical science. And so I appreciate you noting that. The last part that you ended on and something I want to address, the old way of doing things we know can be worked today and will have positive outcomes, not negative outcomes. If it has negative outcomes, it's because we've interfered with the natural cycle. So the paradigms that we're trying to create, we're pushing to create as opposed to allowing to thrive. And so living systems remember their innate ecological intelligence, far superior than you and I. I mean, you've noted, you know, several times, and I put myself in that category, I'm on the low man on the totem pole in some areas. And, and I like that because I want to learn, I want to continuously grow living systems, actually remember innately their ecological intelligence. And they can transform the fragmentation that's happened in our ecological systems to create vitality and abundance. And so we just need to give, we need to work alongside that living system, call that nature in a way where we're observing what is going on and don't push it to an outcome that we want to see because we're continuously amazed by what the living system can do and outcomes that happen when we leave it to do what it does naturally.

Okay, so maybe I misspoke and I agree with you. Mine was that humans have a tendency to make or over emphasize another piece of the puzzle. So let's say, and we don't completely understand, we don't understand how a baby turns on in a woman's stomach. We don't understand how a lot of things our brain really works, how we can take disconnected ideas and put them together. That would be an AGI. We can't do that today. My computer last night didn't tell me, hey, David, you made a big mistake back here. And I actually asked it, I said, why didn't you make that? I mean, we worked for an hour and a half and you never said anything. I asked him and said, My mistake. Well, it didn't care. There's no outcome to it. But when we play with believing we understand regenerative systems, we might put in the wrong technology, think we're doing it, doing a great thing. When we play with science, we might think because humans fall in love with their own ideas, we might think we're doing a great job. So my point was, when you kind of mix them together, we're hoping that the balance comes out. I don't think that humans are often great at that balance. So while this nature runs by itself, when you put a human in, something goes sideways.

Absolutely. We try to engineer resilient futures at a planetary scale and it goes sideways. You know. Okay, you've put that very clearly and I guess this is a good point. Bridge point, David, to my second, my second bullet point that I gave you. It's the introduction of movements that seemingly were. This, this balance idea that is going to get us more. It's going to get us more in line with nature's intelligence. And so that very first movement that really sort of took fire was this organic movement. And both in the ecological side and in the agro side, this organic movement, which I refer to today as the OG of the eco gain, you know, because organic, I think has got some connotations, but it, it really was a rebellion against what was happening from the dust bowl.

From co gain. G A I N gain.

Yes. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

You know, you had, you had Albert Howard, Sir Albert Howard, saying let's compost everything. So everything that was a byproduct of our food or had some sort of organic material to it. Compost. It basically was the original compost bin influencer, you could call it, if you want to Correct. Equate it to terminology today. That was, that was all part of that organic ideology. Another one. So Rodale Institute. JI Rodale, you know, no chemicals, please. This was the start of no chemistry in, in what we're doing in our ecological environments, agro included. And so this started this trend that everything had to be organic. And organic though it mirrors some conventional lanes, it was minus the synthetics from their points or the chemistries. And just for knowledge base, David, as I'm talking to you, another term that probably needs defining and sort of relative knowledge is synthetics and chemistry. And I think there's some key differences there. But by and large, I think where synthetics really came from and this again was something advancements that came out of the war was the Harbor Bosch process. Are you familiar with that? What does it say it again, the Harbor Bosch process.

No, I don't know.

So this was an innovation, Actually, some people call it. It was an innovation that saved more lives than anything else during our, our last century on Earth. And it allowed large scale synthetic ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen to be created. And so it revolutionized agriculture, something we've been talking about with synthetic fertilizers. So it's a whole process of feeding N2 and H2 gases into a reactor is the term I'm looking for. Going through a heat exchanger, going through some cooling and condensing periods, getting to a refrigerated unit, NH3 compounds that come out at the other end. And so we call these basis of synthetic fertilizers. It was fueled by our understanding of science and you know, the chemistries that went into that and it is being credited, as I mentioned, to food production. So growing more yield faster, lots of it, and sustaining billions of people worldwide. To your point that you made earlier, after the wars, it helped starve away or prevent starvation and malnutrition. But we've tipped it too far the other side. So Harbor Bosch process. Something that if you look up, I actually cringe a little bit about it. But you have to think, what did we learn? Well, we learned putting too much emphasis on a process that created fast bang or flash in the pan movement. In terms of the amount of food that we grew really fast, the amount of stimulation we gave our soils is going to have some sort of reaction. And that reaction is being recognized today.

I would also. I don't know, I'm looking at the word. I've got two words, I've got three. You put chemistry and synthetic, and I put organic and synthetic. Those were my polar opposites. Organic and synthetic. More than chemistry and synthetic aesthetic. On the. I've often heard that even on the organic qualified as organic. It's not organic in the way that we might have assumed it had been 200 years ago. So even organic has its challenges.

Absolutely.

Does it because they use synthetic or is it because. How is organic still having the challenges?

Yeah, so I mentioned organic. Let's call it organic farming in particular, mirrored conventional or what I call industrial farming, just without the inputs, the chemistry, they still till the land, you know, that's part of the process. So turning over the soil. What happens when you turn over soil and there's wind? Well, your soil flies away. Well, what happens when your neighbor who isn't practicing organic, tills his land and the wind takes his soil and drops it onto your.

No, you have cross Contamination, cross contamination.

And this is one of the, probably the hardest issues. Now, what happens below the soil put chemistry on and it leaches. Let's say your fields are contiguous, so they're right beside each other. Well, you're going to get leaching of whatever they put on their field over to your field. The same with the water systems that run, you know, aquifers run deep underground. And if we're affecting the aquifer, the water systems that go from your Neighbor's field maybe 10 miles away and it flows all the way down to your organic field, whether you're growing food or trees or anything else there, it's going to affect it. So organic, though, on premise, you know, good intentions, but still a little vanilla. It didn't get away from some of those conventional movements. So tilling the soil, the leeching, the surrounding premises, you know, your borderlines, contiguous fields, it focused solely on place and time. And what you're doing, I'm not putting anything on. So by, you know, by indicator, whatever I grow is organic, which isn't really a true statement.

Yeah. Now, and we have so many challenges that we can't see what has happened from years ago that still exists. The contaminated water that's in a. In a water aquifer or wherever underneath the ground could be contaminated for hundreds of years. And you're in Canada, the Lake Ontario, what they used to do is they used to take, I think it was nuclear. They took some type of very, very, very terrible output of a process. And they waited to winter. They would bring these drums made of wood and metal straps and bring them and bring it to the center of the lake. And it was hard. And then when it melted, all of this toxic chemical is at the bottom of Lake Ontario.

That was radioluminescent dials. That's what is contaminating.

Right. I couldn't remember it, so I was trying. And then these are being held together by metal bands that if they snap, which they haven't at this point, but there is so much toxicity down there that in generations to come, they could be facing an ecological disaster, which would be the water tables that supply the food around the region, which would also be transferred up river, which, I mean, there's just so many different implications for it. It's almost as if you're saying organic farming, because chemicals last forever in some cases. Correct. Relative to human timelines, is never going to be organic the way we probably assume it is in our own heads.

Correct. And I think the other side of that is organic had a blind side when it started putting out certifications. Now, this might be for another topic, David, but when we get into certification bodies, when it comes to our food supply chain, there's a lot to be said there about corruption and mislabeling and misinformation. But I don't really want to open that can of worms right now, today.

Okay.

I think the point I want to make here about that is that certification blind spot has ended up in that exact category that when you see certified organic on any food products in your grocer, that a lot of people now just say, well, that that farm or that innovative food food manufacturer simply paid their admission fee to the organic certification body to get that label to print onto the. To the bank. And herein lies, you know, a transparency and confidence issue between what's happening at our agro borders and our consumer knowledge base. And something I'll get to in coming bullet points here that I want to talk about.

So before you jump to that, we. I lived in Asia for 10 years. The food tended to be crispier, tastier. Everything that you would, you know, you just. I remember Eliza was one of the close people that I was friends with in Hong Kong. And when we would sit down, the first thing she would say is, okay, what are the vegetables? She wouldn't start with a dish that you might think that might be European or American, always vegetables. And she ordered amazing vegetables and they were cooked incredibly well. And when you go to Europe, the 1200, some odd chemicals that can't be used on food that the North America and I don't know how far Canada goes in line with the United States chemical addiction. Going back to your original reference, we're pretty aligned. Okay, so are we. Are we more talking? And I know that those places are now changing. They're having similar physiological challenges. They are having challenges with food supply in a way that is probably a lagging to the United States. How does this look, this whole organic, this whole movement, whatever we're talking about, how does it relate to. To Russia? How does it relate to Brazil? How does it relate to Japan?

When we talk about organic, It's. It's very similar in all the bioregions. As we move on to some of the other methodologies I want to discuss, that does start to change a little bit. But organic is a movement that happened early on. As I say, it, you know, had good intentions and a little bit vanilla, but it did circumnavigate the world as a practice, as a methodology, or as a movement is a better way to Phrase it. That can be seen and recognized around the rule. But the same issues arise.

Yeah, my head is flying. Because we're no longer talking about agriculture, we are talking about manufacturing, we're talking about extraction, we're talking about how homes are being built, we're talking about landfills, we're talking about the, the energy sources that we use that go into the air, that land in the soil because every drop of water has some toxicity in it on the planet today. So we're, we're really. And you know me well enough with Project Moon Hut. We're, we're more or less looking at a unbelievably, exponentially, logarithmically, whatever factorials you want to use. Complex system that needs a kick in the butt.

You got it.

Geez. My head just went. I just, I just traveled around the world and went, oh my, this is crazy now. Because even the definition of organic cannot be organic because every drop of rain has something in it. And if you go to where the nickel is being extracted in Indonesia, the places that people live around, I mean, it's toxic. If you go down to Bahamas, and I think I've shared this with you. If you go to Bahamas and you order fish, you'll see on the menu, you'll see salmon. Salmon is not indigenous to Bahamas. That's because the toxicity in the water around the Bahamas, farming fish is high enough that it's more difficult for them to survive off of it. So they fly in fish.

Yeah.

Geez. You just, you just kind of.

Oh, I took the wind out of your sails there. And I.

You did. Because I, I have my hands behind my back right now around my chair. I don't even have my pen on the paper. I have seven pages of notes so far. And I'm sitting here saying, oh my freaking God, how do you make this with all the things that we're working on, which you know about in the foundation. How. And that's why I'm. I guess I'm appreciating you as an individual with us. And I appreciate, Grow United, who you've brought with us. I, I appreciate these things because the, the complexity is so dynamically different than, I think, the way it's very difficult for the human mind to get their mind around it because of the interconnectedness of everything.

Yeah. And I think this is exactly why we default to waiting for the scientists to tell us what the next move is. The interconnectivity, interconnectedness of the things that aren't going well. And on a global Scale, not even bioregionally. But to that I say recognize the large global problem, but focus bioregionally on what you can affect and how you can make differences. And we can do that. There are things. And I'll get to. As our conversation rolls here and these movements, I don't knock the movements and where they started, they just. They fell short. Right. And we got to recognize how to move on. And I think people too quickly, like any good movement, believe it is the silver bullet and feel like that this is the only way forward. And so we've got the staunch organic folk out there that I think are actually anchor in the sand that's slowing the boat down. And we're not recognizing we need to pull that anchor up because there is a few paths that are going to allow us to move far quicker.

So you're saying that the organic movement is actually a challenge to the whole movement? Because it is. I'm going to use. It's defined improperly and by. By de facto. It now gives. Puts people in a perspective that they shouldn't have because it's not where it needs to be. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Yes.

I got it, unfortunately. Okay.

So then let's move on to point 3. Two Aussies slap a name on ancient wisdom. There's another movement that arose from these two Aussies. These two Aussies were called Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. They coined the term permaculture. Permaculture has been toted as the way forward. That is not the organic movement, but a more holistic approach. And this approach follows a series of guidelines that look at things just beyond the purview of organic. So when we start thinking about permaculture, you look at the topographic lay of your land so that you can maybe do what the Incas did in terrace in a more effective way to reduce erosion. You do look at water flow systems. Where's the water on my land? Where is it coming from? You know, where, where do I need to shore it up and how do I access it? You look at diverse planting systems, you look at your fence lines, you look at infrastructure. So there's a lot more. What I have been talking about, sort of that observational assessment on the top end of it. And spoiler alert, indigenous people had already been doing this in Australia for thousands of years. So again, what was once old is new again. Exactly what's happened here. And so the term permaculture is really just a rebranding of indigenous genius. And it is akin to what we call biomimicry today in more sort of scientific terms. Those that are very scientific. But it was the aboriginal Australians that were using fires to regenerate grasslands. They would actually light the grassland on fire. They didn't recognize the biochar or they just recognized that when they had fires that the grasses grow back healthier abilities. The Amazonian tries used what was called terra preta and you know, super rich black soils that last centuries. I mean think whereabout the Amazon was, right, the amount of peat and water and rich soils that undisturbed even to this day to a degree, you know, terra preta is what they look for and that's what they were growing, plant, sand and that, that's where they built their communities around these rich soil zones. You talked about islands Pacific and islanders, they built agroforestry systems so agriculture and forestry systems that work together to feed the entire island because they recognize the benefit of trees as it related to the production of the food. So wind breaks, shelter breaks from, you know, islands obviously get a lot or I shouldn't say obviously islands, whether you know or not, get a lot of different climatic systems that roll through them. So wind, hurricanes, etc. Well, forests can help protect not only the island and the inhabitants, but the food that they're growing in the soils that's there. Trees have a neat way to integrate. And so permaculture, I'd say I give a lot of credit to being more indigenously aware of the observational techniques that we needed. But they have never translated over to what we call industrial agriculture today or production agriculture. I think industrial might have a bad term chronologically, so production, so producing for the masses. Permaculture sort of got stuck in a way to trying to be very indigenous in thinking about its way forward. And one thing to note is indigenous tribes and you can kind of look at historically what's happened. They moved around a lot. You take our, our North American first nations or Indians in Canada we refer often to them as first nations and America it's Indians, those tribes Iroquois and Mohawk and the Cree people, they moved around a lot and they carried these permaculture methodologies or practices with them. But they never stayed in one place for a long period of time. And so when they left those systems rewilded. And that is one of the issues that I find with permaculture is that again we've got these die hard permaculturalists say this is the way forward and the only way forward. Forgetting that it came from indigenous genius Ingenuity, but it was meant for a period of time and for, you know, a finite period of time. And then you moved on. You let that system be wild. We don't let that happen today.

No. Because we have settled down with homes.

Correct.

And we need supplies.

So again. Right. You know, what learnings can we take from organic, from permaculture? And where do we go with these systems that, these methodologies, these practices that are going to enable us to move forward in a more effective way? We know that we, we have to do a few different things. And I'm going to actually ask you a question, David here, if I can be so bold.

Sure. I've asked you a ton those things.

That I've pointed out as problematic in our eco. So the ecological side and the agro side, what, what are those problems that are consistent through everything I've said so far? Or if there was one thing that stood out to you, what was an issue that we need to continue to focus on through all of it?

I'm not going to give the answer that you want, but good. When I. What stands out, out to me is probably from the Incas forward, if I was to use that timeline, it is the lack of perception of the way in which environments, ecosystems survive, thrive and, and evolve. And so without that basic understanding, everything you build on top of it, which is presumptive to meet the needs of a growing society or a stagnant stationary society, you end up with harm that could be reversed if in fact enough individuals were open to a. Not a reductionistic or a, a switch back in time, but a better observational understanding of what really is happening.

It's really what you're saying.

Do I get like a, a C plus or a B minus or.

Yeah, gold star. Gold star. I got a gold star.

Wow.

Yeah. Not akin to Goldsmith, but just.

Well, I wasn't gonna say it, I was thinking it, but going to go tell my mom.

Yeah, there you go. You're basically saying what most people talk about, which is how do we build on what we have? And I, through everything that I have talked about thus far, I continue to come back to one intersection that is weaved through all of it, which is a understanding of soil. It starts and stops with soil. Whether you're going down in the soil for mining purposes, David, for some of the other things you're working on, whether you're talking about it from an equal agro standpoint, which is where I'm talking about it today, improvements for all the systems that we have discussed this is where we need to focus our attention. And there's a term that's sprung up. Some people say it's gone too far in a green or whitewashing of this term, but it's called regenerative. In my opinion. This term is very well defined, though a lot of people would say it's got some holes in its definition, but it is very well defined in the fact that it focuses on integration of the original organic green revolution thinking.

So we've just switched to number four.

We have. I brought you all the way that I've brought you that far.

Yeah, I just. We didn't. I just want to make sure that I'm on the right place. Yes.

Yeah. And thank you. Thank you for keeping me on track on that. So it's. It incorporates the organic. It builds upon what the indigenous groups were doing and what Bill and David termed as permaculture. And it throws in, you know, some of these elements. Some of them refer to that as a scale of permanence. There's a model that you can look at if you wanted to, but these observational techniques mirrored with the doing from an organic standpoint. And it takes it a step further to say we really need to get to understand what is happening in our soils. And from that we can understand that we can regrow soils. We've come that far today that by looking at some very basic components of imbalance in our soils, we can actually start to see the soil we build. And then that has a domino effect through everything else we've just talked to, whether that be the nutrient cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle that is going to help take in all those elements that we said went globally with organic, that, you know, aren't organic, and start to regenerate. Regenerate the soils through our forest, through our food, through our water systems. And it is something that isn't just hearsay. It isn't just pie in the sky thinking. It's something that's being done at scale today. And I think today, more than any other time in history, we have use cases at a precedent point that we're actually seeing this movement spread faster and farther than I ever thought it would at this stage in our history. Um, and. And that is really what I'm excited about. So it's healing the land like a pro, like the Einstein of farming, you know, thinking E equals MC squared. Regeneration is that kind of powerful mic drop apple falling from the tree moment. Soil health. And I refer to it as functional soil health because soil health is good if it's healthy, but it needs to function in the ecosystem that it lives in. So if it's under a tree canopy or if it's in the Amazon or if it's in Australia, it's going to have different functionality and we need to really understand those key components. There's an aspect that I. Yep, go ahead.

Throughout history, humans have said that, and I'm going to use your. Drop the mic that they've thought they've dropped the mic many times and in hindsight, maybe the mic was just broken, maybe they walked out and there was no, you know. No, no. APPLAUSE. We've got 8 billion people soon to be in the next 40 years, 10 billion people. When you drop the mic and we're talking Project moon, that's a 40 year plan. When you extend from today to 2063, what do you see?

We're going to see a more harmonious environment in which we live, more interconnected with nature, food and humans. That's what I see.

So you're believing that humanity will change enough on a global scale that they will understand and accept the evolutionary changes being proposed through eco, agro or other types of applications?

Correct.

Yeah. I often, and I think you've probably heard me say this, when people say, well, I live in a democracy, I say to them, okay, wait, wait, wait, let's, let's try this. Let's take your home. You have two children, your wife and yourself. You have. Everybody in the house has one vote for everything. And they say, no, of course not. My kids are only 9 and 11. So, okay, so it's monarchy, patriarchy, dictatorship, whatever, whatever you want to call it. I said, okay, so let's go to work. At work, you have a democracy, right? Everybody, one vote. One right. And they say, well, no, I mean, I can't operate. I was, okay, let's go to your community. You put an age of 18 and under can vote, but in theory everybody should have one vote. And they say, well, David, that wouldn't work. And I said, okay, so let's get this straight. You don't have a democracy anywhere you live, however you use the term democracy ubiquitously. Having worked in over 50 countries around the world and seeing the vast differences in the way in which cultures look at one another, the way they live, the way they thrive. You've made a very broad statement that you believe that. I mean, nature could be, food could be. You also believe that humans in that timeline will have a. Let's use your tipping point where enough humans will say, got it. I'm gonna change. No more Yodels. No more, no more. I mean we got an obesity issue worldwide that's epidemic, that's growing. So that's. I, I'm. Can you give me some examples, I guess of the transformation that you're seeing that are as powerful enough to get my. So I can see.

Yeah, it has a lot to do with our aging population on a global scale. Yeah, it has a lot to do with our young population with eco fears that is rising. There's even a shift to break away from the amount of technology that we are utilizing on a day, daily basis, the amount of time we spend behind computers and all these things that were supposed to make us more productive and effective to a younger generation that is more connected to each other through storytelling, through communally breaking bread and eating together, through what our human nature was set up to do, which is co. Mingle with each other and the introduction of more time in nature, better understanding. I think there's a big disconnect.

With.

What happens in nature, farming included into that whole nature piece and what's happening in our urban centers. And our urban centers outweigh population to non urban centers, you know, where humans are living. And we, we're seeing this shift happen. There's also a bigger demand. I love where Europe is in terms of their introduction to emphasizing more health focused activities on our daily basis. Real food, so good, nutritious food, how we prepare that food and our connectivity to that food. So where does it come from and why is it good and why we're eating in season. You know, I wouldn't say we're seeing this in third world or less more impoverished countries. I think it naturally happens in more impoverished countries that they have a better connectivity to their foods because it doesn't travel as far and because they by and large have to grow a lot of it themselves. But that to me are green lights as to why we're moving in the right direction, David. And that humans can get there. I think our biggest problem to face is helping get the urban centers globally to start integrating more. Nature based activities, landscapes, awareness of what, what's going on beyond the urban center. And, and then we'll start to see bigger paradigms just happen. All these other things are great.

We're talking 72 to 79% of the world's population still lives under €9, €9, US$10 a day. You still have countries such as India where there's 600 million people living in poverty. We have an inflection where poverty is going up for the first time in centuries. Because of all the challenge, many of the challenges that we're seeing globally, we have one of the. We have a large slave trade that exists worldwide. The. When I my kids are 30 and 32, I believe those are the ages I had to close my eyes to.30 and 32. And I do talk with individuals in their 20s, part of Project Moonhead. I do see them, talk to them regularly. I. I'm not sure I hear as much of what you're saying, and I'd like to believe it, but can you, I mean, can you give me an example that's much more concrete, that says yes? For example, in Germany or in Spain or in Argentina or in South Korea, there's data that supports this.

There is data. I don't have it off the top of my head, but I'm going to give you an example in.

Okay.

In North America. So there's a little company in Oregon or West coast of America, let's call it Oregon or Washington State, I forget which. And what they're doing is correlating data to sort of nature, to the correlation of health. And that's the data that they're synthesizing. And they actually have an app that helps you understand how much time you spend in nature versus how much time you spend in your home or at work. And it incentivizes you through gamification. But the correlation that they have and that that company is called Nature Quant Q U A N T that a lot of their data is data I look at in terms of. And they do work in Europe. They're starting to work with the European European Commission, I believe, and they've got some other global initiatives. It's introducing viable information that is, that's underpinning what I've indicated. And it takes it a step further because it correlates it to health data. You know, so, you know, areas that have, you know, percentage of trees versus areas that don't are going to see a rise in systemic health issues versus, you know, areas that don't have or do have more trees, where there's more people engaging with nature, getting out, walking, you know, have a lower, lower health issues in those, in those areas. And so this data is out there. I don't have it readily available.

I'm looking at their site right now.

Yeah, that's what comes to mind when you ask about that. And that is indisputable information that you can find from other places about what's happening in our environments and how that is affecting our, our Human aptitude to think differently. But I think probably one thing that I'm observing, and this is coming from my wife's daughter who's in fourth year, third year university right now, there's just this change in perception about utilization of technology. And I think that one indicator for me is a strong indicator that they're wanting to connect with humans more without being connected through technology. They're wanting to go out and break bread. And you know, interacting with food is very important. Breaking that whole notion of breaking bread together with others, creating bonds, creating relationships and an understanding of what good food tastes like versus just feeding the body with whatever's on the shelf. That's a very simple indicator to you, David, but one that I'm not sure.

If it's a. I don't know if it's a. I don't know how they're measuring it because I just did a stupid search. I said, how many gamers are in the world today? Give me a chart. And gaming, gaming has increased since 2020, 21, 22, 23. And it's going up every year between 4 to 6%. So there are now 3.22 billion gamers in the world. Now how they define it, I don't know. I don't know how clean that data is that the. My, my thought is while we could say that there is a correlation between them, it could be just that more people are getting on apps and recording it more than you're getting more engagement. And I'm going to give a simple example. When I grew up, you've probably seen the videos on YouTube or Instagram where the woman, the person's drinking out of the ho, out of those guys wearing a hat, kind of like very, very todayish. And he says, I don't get it. You drink out of a hose. And the mom says, okay, let me lay it out to you. We weren't allowed in the house. Our parents just said get out. They didn't watch if we broke our leg, they, if we were riding a bike, if we were doing stupid things, we were thirsty, we could go in the house. We just went over and took a drink from the hose. And that's a short version of it. I look out on my street and I've got a community that has young kids. We've got kids that are probably 5 years old to 11. To my right, to the left is there are kids in three houses that are young. I mean, I'm going to say in that same age group. I don't think any of them is over 14 years old and they are barely out compared to my mom when we came home from school, go out and play. And the only time you came back is when you heard mom yelling David. And that's when I came home. We don't have that today. And actually when the kids are out, the parents are out too with them for safety, you know, being, being abducted, all of these other pieces, that's in a country, I'm in a very rural place. There's only 4, 200 people in my home. If you saw it on the map, you'd say, oh, why do you live there? I don't, I, I, I don't see it as much as it's, you're making it sound as if there's that migration and the Instagram generation, tick tock generation wanting to be an influencer, all of that on a global scale. I, I, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying I don't see it. So I'm having trouble digesting that. We've got this movement happening, very fair.

And I think that's maybe a, a rabbit hole. We don't need to go down.

Okay, I think I'm good with that.

If we bring it back to the fact, you know, I'm talking about the eco aggro, that that's certainly a, a divergent piece to the conversation. No, but as long as it's, as.

Long as it's working, the food supply, where it comes from, no matter will be better for those individuals. As long as it's working. Whether the health and the activity and the lifestyle is changing, it doesn't have to correlate with the, with the eco ag change. They don't have to be synonymous nor parallel because one of them is saying the foods you eat are going to be better the, whether it be livestock, fish, whatever, and the other one is saying how does society live? They don't have to be parallel to what you're talking about.

Okay, so I'm going to maybe change, build upon that can be mutually exclusive. The environmental impacts of food and agriculture.

Okay.

26% of the greenhouse gases recorded analyzed, which is about 14 billion tons, comes from food production in our world. There's about 40,000 billion tons or 38 billion, I think 38. And change and round it up comes from non food related production, so manufacturing and other scales, land use. And I'm, I'm trying to, I'm trying to paint a picture here. So go with me because I'll come back just so I'm listening. So land use. 50 of the world's habitable land is used for agriculture. The other, the other percentage is, you know, forests and shrubs and urban areas.

And forests or mountains or whatever.

Yes, mountain regions, yeah. Euthrocation. 78% of global ocean and freshwater population. Agriculture purposes. Global eurtification. Other sources about 20, 22% manimal. This is a very interesting one. So I often get into debates, you know, do we have enough cattle in the world? I'm not sure if you've ever gone down that conversation road. So 94% of global mammal biomass, excluding humans, by the way, is livestock, which leaves wild animals about 6%, if you can think on those terms. I often say we don't have enough cattle in our world to actually regenerate soils. But I refer to that as a little bit tongue in cheek, more to the kin of the bison, the black tide or when the bisons used to roam North American plains, north to south. If we, if we got to that stage in North America, we don't have enough cattle. I think by and large there's, there's a great volume of cattle, livestock. We just don't manage it very well and we can manage it much more effectively, whereby this wouldn't be such an issue. And so when people read that stat, that correlation to, you know, methane issues, greenhouse gases coming from cattle, why that's such a big problem, why we don't need to eat more meat, we need to get rid of cattle. I think from a different perspective that we need more livestock so we can help regenerate the soils and the cattle that we do have, we're just not managing effectively and we're actually taking up more land use for that 50% land use for agriculture. A lot of that is for roaming livestock. The rest of it's for cropping systems. And so the last one that I talk about is aviation birds, what I'm looking for, not aviation birds, bird biodiversity. And this is a great indicator of pollination of system nature, natural systems coming back to life. The more diversity of birds you see, the more a natural biosphere is improving. But right now, 71% of global bird biomass is. Can you guess it?

Pigeons, chickens, chicken. Oh yeah, of course, yeah, I was trying because you said aviation av and I was taking a flying. So I tried to go up.

Yeah, no, I misled you there. Not.

No, that's okay. But you're right because they are considered a bird. So yeah, it was my error in judgment. But yes, the chickens are huge part. I just looked it up because you mentioned it Canada's forest fires release 645 metric tons in 2023 of CO2. And if you take some of the largest fires in Australia and other places around the world, that's as much as an industrialized nation. So I think we even have our gases kind of screwed up.

We do, we do, but we can. The soils do incredible things to help us grow, help us regenerate our ecosystems through sequestration. And I'm big on sequestration of carbon and, you know, the cycles. And really, when I talk about some of these, like carbon in particular, I talk about it from a cycle standpoint because you both respire carbon and sequester carbon. Right. We need a certain amount held in the ground for a period of time. But there is a respiration that happens within our soils and our plants that is releasing. It releases other things, too. But those cycles are what we need to fix. And we can. But it starts with the soils, and those soils help us fix those very fundamental environmental cycles. Carbon, water, nitrogen, and the list goes on. Yeah, go ahead, David. I hear a question coming.

Yeah, you. You've said it a few times. You use the word fix. To me, fixing is one thing. The other one is letting nature drive its course. So if you let land sit, you'll have trees dumping leaves, you'll have rotting, you'll have animal feces, you'll have decaying biomass. That, to me, is a natural fix. When I hear the word fix, I'm going all the way back to the words you were using early on, technology and science. So when you use the word fix, are you talking fix? The universe makes it fix. And I'm meaning nature by itself are using fixed by in. If we do things the right way, we can simulate or put into place where this type of reconditioning would happen by itself. Do you get what I'm asking?

I mean, yeah, that's a great question, and thanks very much for peeling the onion on that one. When I use the term fix, I'm actually meaning regenerate. And so it's working with nature. So. So being more observationally aware of your natural surroundings, understanding what's going on with the soil, helping it so it can start to regenerate on a natural basis. And so, you know, we've come this far that we're going to need to work with nature. We can't completely extract ourselves for numerous reasons that I don't have to get into. And so what I would love to do is think about unlearning the science, which is the Typical path, which is, you know, earth moving chemistry to a degree, you know, controlling the environment. We need to be more observationally aware and work with our surroundings in a more effective way. Where we can still grow food, but the soils are healthy, they're functional. That we're creating more biodiversity in our environments, which is going to help improve numerous other things. Water systems, carbon cycle systems, you name it. Then and only then we can start to interject technology.

You've used word help a few times. When you say helping it, what does that mean? Helping it? Because now it's human intervention. What are we doing? If I have bad soil or degraded soil or a limited amount of topsoil, tell me what this thing is.

We can start to introduce some of the, what we're coined as the regenerative principles. And those regenerative principles, by and large, I think there's five or six, depending on who you talk to. But adding in some sort of COVID crop to keep the soils covered, that is going to have roots that are going to create different macro and micro interactions within the root structures and the soil structures. They're going to create a microorganism community in the soil that is going to start to help repair some of those natural cycles that happen. So what would that, like the garden cycle or the nitrogen cycle?

Let's say I have a farmland. When you say reintroduce cover crop with roots. Stupid me. I thought all crops had roots.

They do cover crops for soils that are left exposed. So very good definition. You're covering the soils that were otherwise left covered or uncovered, which caused a lot of erosion.

And so do we leave, do we leave land? Do farmers leave a lot of land exposed or do they.

Farmers leave it. Mining leaves it, Construction leaves it. If you drive around in a lot of rural areas or suburban areas, you're going to see a lot of brown dirt, dirt that's exposed and left.

But again, I'm a stupid thing. I thought when a farmer has brown dirt, they're waiting for the next season to plant their new crop.

Yeah. So they've, they've done what's probably called the tilling practice. So they've plowed in, they've turned over, they've prepared the soil for seeding for the next season.

Right.

Being the typical practice, you might inject it with anhydric chemistry, you might put chemistry into it to, you know, try to put some nutrients back in the soil that are going to sit there over winter. It's going to winter. But you're absolutely right that, that was the old way of doing things.

So.

So the new way of doing things is not leaving it.

So when you harvest, when you're done harvesting, what you're saying is you now put over another crop, not a crop, or you put over a cover of something that you're not going to use as part of the crop, but it stays there for the winter. And I'm going to use a simple one, a grass. Put a grass over it so it holds it for the winter. And when they come in the summer, what they do is they till that up again or whenever they're ready to plant, they till it up again. So now you've got some biomass that's also going to break down in the soil while your new crop is growing. Is that what we're saying?

Almost, almost. Remove the tilling part and you're right on track. So another major change in the way we're thinking about it is minimizing soil disturbance. So minimum till or zero till would be the practices that are the direction we need to head. So you're covering the soil and you're minimizing the tillage, the turning or the disturbing of the soil.

Right. Tilling to me is the blades that go and they turn the, they rotate the ground so that it's got something covered. Okay, so what you're now saying is at the end of the season, you've harvested your crop, you're going to put down a cover crop. Let's just use grass for the sake of argument. You put down this grass and when you go to plant the next season, you punch a hole and drop a seed instead of tilling it. Yeah, okay, I didn't. I might sound obvious to you, but. So now the practice is not to turn it over, but instead you're going to have mechanisms that seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, seed. Even though there's grass on the ground, that's okay. Because that grass is holding the soil together. It's also decaying, it's also giving nutrients. It's allowing life, bacteria, all different types of creatures to do ants to live their life. And now the plant itself will have a higher nutritional val. Higher, higher. You're pulling more nutrients from the ground because it's there.

You got what we're saying. And then it. And integrate livestock on that small ruminants, large.

Okay.

And you start to enhance all of those things that you just mentioned in terms of nutrient. You can think about the dun that comes out the rear end of those animals that getting, you know, natural fertilizer. There's actually so if the grasses were there and they're, let's say they're knee height grasses and you're going to go in and put a crop down, you may not want it to be knee height. You want to see where you're going to sow in your seeds. Well, if you ran cattle through that, they would raise it down to a height where you could actually see where you're sowing in your seed. While they're adding, I mean, they're adding cattle.

Yes, all sorts of things to it.

Yeah. And when you get into livestock grazing management systems, you'll learn about the saliva and a cow's mouth and how that saliva is affecting the regrowth of grass. You graze it to a certain level and move them on. Adaptive multi paddock grazing is a term. So enough livestock head or enough animal ahead. Sorry, enough feed for, let's say 80 head of, of cows. But you've only got, you've only got. Sorry, you put 100 in there. So enough food, I apologize, I should have a sip of water quickly. But you have enough food for 80 head and you put 100 in, you force a little bit of competition, which is actually going to force a little more saliva because they're salaciously, they want to eat the nutritious grasses. They poop a lot more. And then you rotate them and you rotate them quickly. And so they're moving four or five, maybe six times a day, depending on the size of your.

And the downstream, the downstream advantages are you aren't running diesel vehicles, you aren't. So now you don't have emissions, you've got a richer soil that comes out of it. You've got a product that is instead of at times nutrient deficient, you're now putting more nutrients into the mouths of individuals who are buying it. I'm assuming the food will also be more heartier. So therefore it will prevent the need for insecticides, pesticides. So therefore there's downstream water tables don't get that. Nor does the individual get it in their food. Yada, yada. Did I do okay?

You did very well. You did very well. You're obviously combining what I'm swathing as.

A person trying to figure it out. Yeah, that whole, that whole piece was missing and I wasn't getting it. I wasn't getting how this model worked on a regular. Because in my head, you know, I, I live near farming and I grew up in a, in the Catskill Mountain range and was farming all over the place and my father had 5,000 chickens and horses. And I didn't see it. He was younger. So I'm, I'm using old paradigms to understand new paradigms. And it's. I had to make a break.

No, and, and you're. And that's terrific. And that's the break that I want people to come to trying to uncomplicate something that I'm very invested in. And as you've mentioned, when you're in it, sometimes you don't recognize how you need to verbalize it differently. But I think by and large here you're picking up what I'm putting down. And I think that's wonderful.

The piece.

And I just really quickly.

Sure.

The piece that connects back to the humans and this sort of movement that I was talking about, I think is the awareness or education about that whole process and where their food comes from. So as much as they're saying we recognize what good food tastes like and how it nourishes our bodies, the connection back to where it was grown or where it was raised or how it was farmed is going to be a major stepping stone to push that paradigm forward even further. And I think that is something that we can introduce technology for to help create some of that. And maybe to your point, even the gaming systems, you know, can start to produce a gamification around that.

Well, we, in, in the directive, there's paradigm shifting thinking. If you, if you kind of tied the pieces together, you're on this program because Project Moonhot is about paradigm shifting thinking. The one thing I've tried to inform or warn individuals when they have high aspirational goals of change is that you don't need to have a whole society to understand it. You just need enough. More or less doesn't work, but more often might not work either. So. So in essence, I don't really need to know how this is being run and I don't need to love nature because my job might be I really enjoy roofing or I really enjoy working on games or something else. As long as enough of the individuals worldwide. Enough is a relative term, understand that concept. It'll shift it. But it doesn't mean. How do I say this? My wife looks at something that's written and everything jumps off the page that spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes. We have people on our team who are very chemistry oriented. So they'll talk to me and they'll say, well, when you have a hydrogen, get into nitrogen and then it bonds with this, it bonds. They see that in the air. I don't see. And I've taken organic chemistry, physics, calculus. I. I don't see the molecules in the air. I have to write them down and see it. And I really love chat and I really love Grammarly and I love all these solutions because I can look at something and not see it. And my wife one day sat me down because I wanted to spend more time learning about this. And she said, there are plenty of people who could do what I can do. Not as many people who could do what you do the way you do it. You could spend your time on it, but it's better to have me. And she was absolutely right because I was spending a lot of time trying to figure something out. I don't see. So I think in the case of paradigm shifting the world in terms of this, it's having someone go by and say, huh, I didn't know that. And that's enough. They don't have to be in touch with nature because that might not be their being. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it absolutely makes sense. On the other side of that, I think the more we educate, the more it moves beyond. And that's the storytelling component that I sort of mentioned. Moves beyond to. I didn't know that too. I'd like to understand more about that, whether it's my innate purpose or driven. And I think there's going to be a percentage of individuals that go beyond. I didn't know that too. I want to know more. And that will continue to fuel everything that we're talking about.

And, and I hope that's the case. I have just come to understand. I have. I. This weekend I had one of our. We had some water coming down in our basement and I was trying to figure out where it's coming from. I've got every tool in the world, probably like you do. And I said, where is that coming from? And I had to open up a piece of drywall because I could not find it.

It.

And then I said, it's not coming from these pipes that everybody was telling me that's where they come from. It was coming from upstairs going down a wall. So I went up. It was. One of the bathrooms was spraying water out the back and I had to do the sink work behind it. My kids don't use the tools. I can't force them to use the tools or understand what I did. But my hope is in their future, if they need some, they see water, they're going to call a plumber. It's. It's. They're not predisposed to wanting to know about it. And it's not easy to get them to be predisposed to it. We all have our own. We have our own likes and dislikes, and this program is one of those ways to get that message out. So I'm hoping this does it to some people like you're trying to do. But I'd be careful because my wife and I are different. You and I are different. We all look at the world differently and hopefully get enough.

And that's why we're on here. I mean, I am. I'm going to say this very bluntly, David. I. I'm putting a lot into these bullet points that I gave you in sort of high level and trying to break some of that down. And I think this conversations sort of brought up some of the. The more minutia components of each one of the. I mean, everyone.

I love it.

Could have a podcast by itself.

So I love it. I mean, what you. Where we've gone has given me different insights into you and the types of things that you've spoken about. The challenge is not everybody's going to love it and that's just the way humans are. So. So we went back to humans. Movement of the process comes from connecting to the farm race. I love this whole section because now I understand if I drive by a farm, why it's got grass on it or something, which I would not have assumed otherwise unless I heard this from you.

Yeah. And you can see that in vineyards, in orchards as well. Down the rows, in between the vines, you can actually have different crops or grasses and you can actually run cattle or sheep or small livestock in there to graze it. And it's not left as exposed earth, which you would have typically found not too long ago.

So. Yeah, I've never thought about do vineyards today. Every time I've been to a visitor, there's stuff on the ground. There are grasses on the ground, but not to the degree. Are you seeing a shift where they're just saying leave it?

Yes, grow it higher, leave it. You want some of the natural bugs that are in the grasses to interact with the vines. And the. It depends a little bit the, the food resource that, you know, could be grown in there and call it companion growing. So depending on the grape or the, the stone fruit that's been growing on my own farm, I have. We have grapes and then we have apples and I've got them in two different rows and in between that I actually planted half bascap berries. And they grow very well. They're contributing to the growth of the apples and the grapes become a nice little windbreak in there and they're producing some pretty neat berries. I didn't put them there for the berry production or even the harvest. I put them there as an alternative to grasses as a cover crop, but also to create some nutrient in the soil. So symbiotic. And on the other side I have seabockthorn. Seabockthorn is a nitrogen fixing plant and it actually is helping create some below the soil ecological niches for that microbiology to thrive. And so that is helping the apples and it's helping the grapes. And we can see that in vineyards and you can see that in other orchard setups or plantations that have this what we call row crop setup. And in between it, we can do things that are different than they used to be to create biomass on the top, stop erosion, hold water capacity and then continue to create more functional soil health pool and soil.

So if we're talking about these big huge farms, and I know, I think I'm going to use a relative term because I've been to the them, but like Minnesota, I haven't seen the same type of farms. I've got to believe they're in China and in other places around the world, but I've seen them in Minnesota where you can go miles, kilometers and it's just fields. Is it? This is. I know the math would work, meaning if you allowed the grass to grow, if you allowed the, the, the cattle or the grazing. Yeah, but these are large. Would they. Do they have the cattle to be able to do 50 miles of straight land all over 20 miles, kilometers. That's a lot. Is, is that possible with livestock?

Yeah, I mean it goes to my point to say that it's probably not enough livestock to regenerate the soils we have based on.

Oh, okay.

Manage the land. But I think the point that really you're going to drive home here is, and this is my next sort of bullet point, nature's cheat code trees. And so there's a lot we can do with agroforestry as it relates to the eco aggro setup or regenerative setups. There's a term coined by a gentleman named Ernst. I'm gonna pronounce his last name Ron, but gosh, G O with the umlaut, the two dots, T S C H. He coined the term syntropic forestry, which is term which relates to planting trees in a way that mimics a forest cycle. And that forest cycle is going to help with some of that soil biology. Right. Based on what's going on below the soil. So you don't necessarily have to run as much lifestyle through these open fields, but you're going to introduce more trees. That's also going to help with some of the sunburn that happens on crops that are out there. It's going to help with some of the windbreak, it's going to help with capturing snow to keep water retained in northern climates. And so trees are your nature's cheat code for us to help restore some of these plowed fields that we now have monocrops on, or just miles and miles and miles of.

So I'm gonna ask a stupid, stupid question then.

You got it.

How do you put a tree in the center of these lands or trees with an s. How do you, how do you. Does our farming equipment today operate in that environment and can it be productive as compared to what a traditional farmer might think?

So my, my cheeky answer is absolutely, David. Yeah, I know. Yeah. My, my long answer is not without change. And this is going to spur all the change. So if you stick a tree in the middle of a big field, of course it's going to change the way your combine or planter or, or high clearance sprayer on these big production and agriculture cropping systems work. But really what I'm doing is forcing us to think about do we need bigger and bigger or do we need smaller and more diverse breakup land a little bit. And so instead of having, you know, a thousand acres of corn, could you have, you know, know for many sections that are all growing diverse crops, one of them could be corn. But, you know, you've got smaller plots and then we can use smaller equipment. It's going to have less compaction and in the center you're going to have this tree community that is. Or around the edges. One of the things I love about going to England and looking at the farms around there or Scotland is the same way you have these things called row hedges sort of bordered all these fields. It looks very picturesque. It's, it's. But the benefit of that, the ones that aren't built out of rocks, the actual row hedges, they're actually providing a break and nutrients into the soil for whatever that mini paddock or that mini field was growing. And so there's a lot of synergistic alignment to the hedges that we're growing there. And so we can do that with trees in the same way in our big fields. We just have to plan it out a little bit differently. And so some of the work I do, which you would know is helping plan out our, our farmlands in a different way that is going to be more regenerative, moving us to a more sustainable system set up and in the end. But regenerative systems, I always think about sustainable as the end result of what we're trying to get to. Right now we're in this process of regenerating and repairing is a term that you use. But introducing trees is going to certainly help us for those situations that you were talking about. Now trees have another benefit. There's been some research that's come out as of late, kind of goes to some of that research I just mentioned on that website, correlating landscape and health and you know, our connection with, with nature and the, the research shows that. And I just trying to, off the top of my head, I believe it's the three. No, sorry, it's the 33 and 300. So 30% of your neighborhood in an urban center.

Let's.

I like to use that or semi urban, you know, rural communities maybe like where you are, David, should have trees. That's about three trees from every home in between. And that's going to significantly reduce the mental health issues to a tune of about. I believe the research shows about 40% reduction in mental health. Just because we have introduction of trees. Don't quote me on that. I do have to double check that and double click on that. But significant impact. But it's the 33 and 300 and at 300 is 300 meters from the nearest park. So your house should be 300 meters from a park system. You should have three trees between every home. And there should be about 33, 30% tree canopy cover within the neighborhood that you're living.

I've got, I've got. I was just trying to do a rapid count. I got like 26 trees on my property.

There you go.

Yeah. I mean our neighborhood again, if you saw it from Google Maps, if you took a left, a right and a left, it's green, green, green, green, green. I mean just farms and trees. I'm on the outskirts of the outskirts. So yeah, we've got a lot of trees and tall trees that are 15 meters high, 20 meters high, some of them.

So it's wonderful. And by the way, I mean those aren't. The numbers were deliberately chosen to strengthen the rule. Simplicity. Right. For stickiness.

So if it's four, three is a great number. It's just, it's, it's the starting point. There was in India I was with. I forgot who it was. Danish or Shaboo from who was or Nandan. We're talking about India and changing the way people lived. And one of the things they said is if I clean around my house then you will clean around your house. And it's a challenge in India in terms of cleanliness. And they had an initiative to make this happen. Very challenging. But when you have a simple number as three depending on the size I have a half an inch acre depending on the size three trees is a doable exercise.

Exactly. It creates that adoption level. So that really was 0.5 which is nature's secret code which is enacting syntropic forestry trees.

I'm thinking of the equipment. How far have you gotten on the equipment, equipment modification and adaptation?

Well, I tell you what, this whole component that I've toted already which is what was a voltage new again. There is so much small scale equipment out there on what called beeline dealerships or small scale dealerships that can be utilized today that we can repurpose. We could bring out of hibernation or that is broken brand new that's out there. Just small scale equipment that would allow us to continue doing what we're doing just in a different way. By the integration of some of the things I mentioned, we don't need to go.

But there it does go back to that initial presentation or representation that you had shared. You now become a farmer again, which is any piece of equipment has to be repaired. You have to have the tools, you have to be out there. It's not the desire of many young individuals to spend that time. So we're we. I believe while there's small equipment, you, you would have to be operating differently if in fact autonomous robotic equipment, not to put people out of a job, but I believe that a lot of this functionality if we're going to feed the masses with the aging population in certain parts of the world. Africa is growing. Central America will be growing. United States, United States still will be growing. There are parts of Asia which will grow. India is one of them. But you would still need for the rest of the world to be fed, I would believe an autonomous robotic equipment technology to. Because we won't have the individuals going into these fields.

You're absolutely right. And in fact I think that's happening to date. And you may be sort of are skirting on the borderline of do we need to talk about renewable energies and the electrification or the different ways in which we power this equipment. But by and large the equipment is changing. I'm even seeing it today. There's a lot more young agriculturalists out there that are. They've got auto steer, they've got GPS in the tractor, their tractors are running unmanned and they're on the side of the field doing the things that I think they should be doing, which is observational awareness. Starting to listen, smell, hear, watch what's going on in the environment instead of sitting in the tractor. So we've got the capabilities if, to go small today without doing a whole lot and without a whole lot of added costs and then the addition of, I'm just going to call it renewables. It's not necessarily solar or electrification, but just renewable ways to create power. We're going to have a whole new, very shortly, a whole new way we can operate on the farm and fast track some of the things I've talked about from soil level.

When you say a whole new way.

Autonomous, autonomous tractors swarm.

Well, I meant the powering, the powering you said.

Just, just batteries. Hydrogen is the thing. I was maybe alluding to that it doesn't always have to be so whether it's hydrogen engines or it's hydrogen power engines or it's electric batteries to power the, the vehicle, Ford or things that I've maybe not even aware of. They're going to come down in terms of our ability to move equipment and vehicles. But those two for sure are, you know, certainly within reach and happening today on the electric side.

But we have to be very careful. And you haven't seen this yet. I'm putting together for one of our decks some information to get an individual to understand what it really takes to build, create whatever we're trying to pull out of the ground or, or generate. And I, I show this in one deck, which is that for an iPhone you have to mine 50 tons of material in like 30 different mines to create an iPhone. But I have this on a typical Tesla battery. It says, and it's a little long, but I'll try to do it short. This is a typical Y battery which makes up the space under the car. It's 12 tons of rock to pull lithium, 55 tons of cobalt minerals which have to be extracted, which includes copper nickel processing. Three tons of nickel ore have to be pulled, 12 tons of copper ore. You need to move 250 tons of soil to get the lithium nickel, manganese and cobalt. And to make a Battery, you need 441 pounds of aluminum, steel and plastic and 112 pounds of graphite. So one caterpillar consumes a 994A consumes 264 gallons of diesel in 12 hours. This means that, you know, it's often done by children in countries. And that's for the. One of the smaller models. It takes seven years of an electric car to reach net zero CO2 and battery life is 10 years. So while we're doing what. And the reason I brought it up is while you just gave batteries and hydrogen in the smaller regenerative, there's another whole dimension. And I'm not saying we have to answer it here, but there's another dimension that downstream or off stream that has to also going back to that when I said, wow, there's a lot. And it's not an isolation, that interconnectedness of every decision we make. So shifting the batteries electric, hydrogen also requires another challenge that we have to overcome.

Come. You're absolutely right. And that's why I was delicate to sort of dive into those rabbit holes because.

Well, that's why you love. That's why you like working with us. That's why you like being a part of the team. Because we look at holistically, right.

And. And that word. And I've heard you utilize it lots and certainly it's a word that enters my vocabulary quite a bit. It's the interconnectedness of everything.

Of everything, yes.

And for me, I. I continue to drive back to the soils because I think that's an area that I can have the strongest impact. And to your point, you know, for those that look at fields and go, okay, great, didn't know that. Move on. You know, let's continue on with roofing or whatever other vocation is, it's driving their fulfillment. For me, it's where I can make that impact. And it's through the soils. Knowing that we have such strong opportunities. My belief and that there's practices and mechanisms out there through use cases that are demonstrating this is going to be beneficial.

I love it. I'm asking questions because I want to learn and I hope you appreciate that. That's what I. You've known me long enough. But I'm fascinated because I'm seeing in my eyes a different covering over the world. And again, we're a globe, we're worldwide, so we don't look at anything in isolation. And I'm saying I'm asking myself questions. Okay, how does that fit into the new materials we're working on? How does that fit into the platform we're building? How does that move into the tech transfer? What does that mean in our immersive ARV or digital twin or how does that fall into the autonomous robotic equipment that we're working on and yada yada, I mean, down the line. And I'm asking myself, how does this play? So I appreciate what you're sharing because I'm trying to embed it as we're talking.

That's wonderful. That's wonderful. So moving on from there.

Yep.

What's the next bullet point that I have?

So it is controlled environment agriculture. That's Calcutta.

Excellent, excellent. Yes, cea. And I chuckled to myself because the beginning of our conversation is unlearning the science. Right. What I'm not saying is science is bad. And I think we've highlighted that as we've had this discussion. You know, there's certainly a need to. And there's different sciences out there that we need to understand. We just have to unlearn the science, particularly on the inputs into the soils that are coming, created some of those negative effects. But one of those areas where human ingenuity and a combination of functional science has created this controlled environment agriculture. I believe there's a place for controlled environment agriculture within our agriculture systems as a whole, our food supply chain. I think there's many different mechanisms within CEA because you can have aquaculture, you can have greenhouses, you know, that are self powered, even, you know, solar, solar powered greenhouses. You can have very mechanical, fully autonomous controlled environment systems that everything is robotic from the seed into the soil or the soil into the container. The seed feed into the container, the container into the, to the rooms. And in fact, these trays have microclimates between every tray that sits in this room. It can get very technologically advanced and we can monitor every piece of detail in there, change the lighting environments and the nutrients that go into growing the food. But I do believe there's a good hybrid with community controlled environment agriculture to help with what I call this on demand society, that we have created a society driven by the need to be have everything at our fingertips on a regular basis. Coming from that what I call web one era of information at our fingertips. We've now taken that into, into. We need everything at our fingertips and readily available, you know, drop shipped to my door within, you know, 24 to 48 hours. And our food included, the number of food box companies that are out there direct to your door, the ability to access food on a regular basis. Do you know what the number one vegetable is that's purchased in a grocery store?

Number one vegetable?

I guess it's not vegetable. The number one fruit.

So now you're confusing Me, because I'm not good at this. I can. There's only. There's three that come to mind and maybe I'm wrong on them. It's an apple, it's an orange or banana.

Yeah. So it's definitely one of those three.

Okay.

It's maybe towards the end of those three that you mentioned the banana. Yes. It's the number one fruit that's purchased in a grocery. It's actually the number one item in a grocery store that's purchased.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay. I was just pulling it out of thin air.

No, you're right on the money. You're right on the money. And the interesting thing, and I always, I walk into my Canadian grocers and I'm going, well, we don't grow bananas here year round. In fact, we don't grow a lot of bananas period. Certainly not year round. And they're always yellow and they're always available. Doesn't matter seven days a week, doesn't matter what grocery store. And so controlled environment agriculture is helping, but there is an issue with the transport of these vegetables that are shelf stable. You know, there's a lot of things that we put on fruits and veggies, but fruits in particular to ensure that they have longevity. Where I think this can go, and we're really going with this without sort of bashing the supply chain. And some of those other issues that we can get into is that controlled environment agriculture will allow us to have some of these fruits and veggies in particular that are being able to being produced year round available to us. Even though my belief is that we should eat more seasonally in our local, local bioregions. There are some things, avocados, bananas, and there might be some other fruits, oranges that we can grow and provide for the benefit. There are some potentially hazardous byproducts from these CEA facilities, but there's some very innovative technologies out there that are using those byproducts. Creating biochar, creating low grade heat to help power technology systems like bitcoin miners. Taking the byproduct of water and cleaning it and using that as irrigation back in these controlled environments. Recycling of the panels on these greenhouses, Integration of building integrated solar into the panels. I mean, so the innovations are happening. But those controlled environment agriculture systems, I think are very much need to come in line with agriculture as a whole or our eco agriculture ecosystems that we are building. So and so I, I felt like it needed to be a bullet point.

Yeah, you brought up avocados and all. I've Heard are bad things about how much irrigation they need to be able to be grown and that they're actually terrible for the environment.

Yes, they are. Okay, well, they take a lot of water and they certainly take a lot of nutrients. We add. So they deplete the soil. It's kind of like potatoes take up a lot of nutrients in the soil. Right. That's why they're so devastating. We mound up hills, grow potatoes, and they deplete the soil, soil of a lot of the nutrients that are there. They need plenty of light. I believe it's six to eight hours of light a day. So that's why they're typically more prevalent being grown in the southern climates than northern climates. So, I mean, they certainly are a very, I would say, extractive crop to grow outdoor and indoor, but they can be grown indoors and they. They can. You know, we're going to get different varieties than you do in the outdoor. You might have more dwarf varieties, which are probably by and large the better direction to go for an indoor avocado growing. But we can provide the nutrient density or the nutritious value of an avocado in a greenhouse the same way you would do in an outdoor arable farm.

A. So when. And I didn't realize this. Potatoes draw a lot out of the ground. Is that why people eat potatoes?

Rephrase that question and quite understand.

You said that they draw. Avocados take a lot of certain resources. But you said potatoes take a lot of the nutrients out of the soil.

Yes.

So are they. Are they very healthy? Because it goes into the potato.

Potatoes are very hearty.

They're hearty, but I didn't know. I never thought of them as healthy.

Yeah, I mean, there's. There's 400 plus varieties of potatoes. I believe what we get are one or two major varieties. Yellow, russet is what you see a lot of potatoes. Potatoes be made out of. And they're all going to take up the different. The different varieties are going to take up different nutrients, but they're extractive to the nutrients in the soil. So the correlation to. Does it make them healthier? No, not necessarily. But they use. They're very big consumers of the nutrients in the soil. And so what we do as humans is we infuse the soil with, you know, heavy amounts of manufactured nutrients, whether through synthetic chemistries, fertilizers, to help the soil create the environment for potato to grow.

Okay, so. So it's not a correlation, extractive versus value.

No.

Okay. Because I think of avocados is very healthy. As compared to a potato.

The avocado certainly has those healthy, what they call healthy fatty acids and nutritious values that are different from the potato for sure.

Okay, so that's good also. What?

Good question. That's actually going to send me on a rabbit hole to see evening. So thank you for that. The health benefits potato versus avocado. Because I don't think I've ever done that correlation, hence my hesitation to pause. But I mean you can. They always say with every crop, right?

Right. They say eat the skin because the skin has the value in it, but a potato itself doesn't have a lot of value. And I'm thinking you throw away the avocado skin and you eat the avocado and you're saying it's highly, it takes a lot of nutrients out of the ground. So in theory, I'm saying is the avocado actually a better nutritional product even though it takes a lot of water because the other one is soil degradation. So you're not winning.

So I, I would say you're right. I mean these crops are, they're harsh on our growing conditions. Right. And yet we, we're very fond of them. As our discussions go and as we get more familiar with food, maybe there's better crops that we could grow that aren't potato or avocado related. I know avocados have less carbohydrates. They also have more E and K in them, which is probably why there's a contribution to vitamin E and K to be healthier than potatoes.

Just an interesting question. I was doing the math in my head and I'm saying, so when I eat an avocado I shouldn't feel as bad because when I eat a potato I should feel worse.

Unless your body needs carbohydrates. So this goes into body engineering and body hacking and making sure your body's healthy.

I got a wife, she just takes care of all that, whatever sits in front of me. She'll say, you need some of this. Yeah, you know, I won't go to the bad places I can go, but she's making sure I'm taken care of.

Very good. Okay, so forestry controlled environment. We certainly need that. It will help us in some of our bioregions on year round growth though there's a correlation to, you know, be more attuned to what's growing in the seasonality. The eco agro toolbox, We've mentioned some of this. We actually jumped to some of this. But small scale electric equipment is in that toolbox using Things that are powered by the largest reactor in the world, sun, that is creating electricity for us, that doesn't necessarily have to go to the grid, but can power batteries and allow us to do many operations within our land environment, whether we're stewarding the land or farming the land. You know, that small scale equipment reduces the amount of fossil fuel that we're going to burn. And there's an offset to that because we still have to build the equipment. And that by and large is going to be built into manufacturing, but it is going to help us with our environments as we regenerate them. Our natural garments, remote imaging and sensory. I think we need to work a lot more with regenerative or ecological designers or nature based designers. There's sort of a whole series of terms that sort of mean the same thing, but those that are utilizing the satellites overhead to give us geospatial imagery, giving us better indicators, vegetative indicators, indicators or changes in climatic information over historical period so that we can design our systems with call it the rhythm of that bioregion or that certain area that we are functioning in. You know, the satellites I often talk about, their geospatial is kind of like having your own meteorological weather person that has given you a lot of information on your land at a very, very Mac or micro level and that you can have a lot of data driven decisions that can come out of it. You can even, you know, as some say, look at the mood of your corn or your soybean or your, you know, those quantity crops that we see far too many of out in the fields. Some of the satellite imagery can actually indicate the changes of that or as farmers are akin to saying they can identify the moods. I bundle all this up into ag tech. So drones come in here, small scale equipment, electrification equipment, remote imaging, spectrometry or geospatial imaging. All of this comes into egg tech. And I think egg tech is something that every agro, eco, eco agro specialist should have in their toolbox and understanding how to use it effectively, you know, preventing us from moving into an apocalyptic dystopian future. Okay.

You jumped really far there.

I did, I did, yeah. I was maybe stretching a bit there.

So we went from, we went from a hopeful conversation of making the ground, the soil better for us to dystopian apocalyptic scenarios. It's almost like the, the. What is that clock that we're like a few seconds from disaster. You just, you just fell right into that.

Yeah, I did, I did.

I hope you felt it because I.

Was like, wow, I said it and I smiled and I was like, I'm glad the camera's not on right now because I'm giving the most awkward face as I'm saying that.

I just sat here saying what just happened.

Well, as part of the humor that you said that I apparently come out. Maybe that was my akin to being as humid, bringing humor into the conversation as possible. And that was supposed to be humorous.

I remember. Remind me to check humor at the door with you.

Yeah. But I do say, David, I jostle quite often between talking about these. These issues that are so, you know, large and, you know, I do want to sort of fuel the energy in people to say we could get to that state if we don't think about it and don't have these conversations. And yet on the other side, there is hope and we've got the mechanisms to get us there. And so self admittance. I do jostle probably too far between those extremes than necessary.

The name of the podcast is Redefining Tomorrow. So we're gonna stick on the side that we have possibilities.

Perfect. Perfect. I love it.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we're so. Should be part of our toolbox.

And we do need to figure out ways that we're aligning with that, and that leads us into. This whole. I. I'm actually going to jump to bullet points because I think I gave them to you in the wrong order. I've written them down incorrectly. But when we think about the honest support we need, which is a. I think I had it 10 or nine. Is eight.

Okay, yeah, stop, stop. Gluttony, eat with the seasons. A seven.

Okay, so I did give it to you in the right order. I think I actually wrote it down wrong on my list. And when I said it to you, I put it in the right order. So I'm glad I checked. But that, that leads us into the honest support we need. And I think this is where this emerging technology of what people call Web3 is really going to help us better understand the ed Tech piece and how it can benefit us with all the regeneration that is needed. And so I look at web3. First of all, let me back up. I talked about Web1 being the information era a little while ago. Information at our fingertips changes the way we had conversations around the world, stopped the storytelling from our ancestors. It created a need to double check, you know, what people were saying and find out things in our time of idle hands giving us different mechanisms of education that we'd never seen before. We moved quickly into this Web2World. And I call the Web2World the Commerce Era. And the commerce era is everyone is trying to monetize all that information in different platform and different mechanisms. From taxis, we now call them Uber, we don't say taxi very often. To every social media platform has a mechanism to make money off of it. To even monetizing people's blog posts, just somebody thinking about to even this podcast, people try to monetize you listening to a podcast. It's all built on this Web2 platform we call the World Wide Web. And it's a commerce era. Make money started with a dot com boom. Make money in this World Wide Web. We've gotten to a point though, that as much as it's wonderful that people can find new ways of organization, earning a living and we can monetize things differently, there's this recognition and it's ever more present in, in the farmers purvey that data is really driving everything we're doing. A lot of what we're talking about, David, today is a better understanding of data. Data can be observational. Data can be, you know, it doesn't have to be digitalized, but we need to better utilize data. The big recognition point is that typically that data doesn't stay with the person that cultivated it, to use an agriculture term. It is cultivated and then handed off to somebody that then owns it through contractual means and leverages it to their benefit, often not recognizing the person that cultivated it. And so I tie this right back to ecosystems, in particular farmers who are putting in the hard work, whether through the use of swarm technology on farm and observational awareness of their natural ecosystem, or through the utilization of current ag tech platforms. John Deere tractors, Case tractors, New Holland tractors, all having some sort of platform that you subscribe to, and you enter all your data and it tells you, you know, variable rate input for seeds and your other inputs. All that data on all these platforms are pieces of software that you're subscribing to. You're entering the data, and that data isn't owned by the farmer anymore. It's owned by those platforms, by and large. And I find that a bit of a problem. I find that a problem when I enter my information on the Uber platform, I enter my picture so they can recognize who I am when they show up and that I am the person that ordered that Uber. I enter my address, where I live, my phone number. I don't own the fine print is I don't own that data anymore. Those are all data sets. They can go monetize that and they can Use it to their benefit. And so there's been this emerging technology and people working on this in this area called Web3, whereby we have sovereignty over the data we use on these platforms. And we can create different conversations with those platforms on how they get to utilize our data. So their business model may be great, but they don't get to utilize our data. We own our data, we get to give it or license it to them or, or open source it to them, or just create different mechanisms, but we own the data at the end of the day. And when we tie this back to our food systems and in particular our farmers, the farmers can find new mechanisms to monetize their data. They can change the conversations with all the ag tech companies, they're coming to their farm and engaging with farmers in ways that we haven't seen before. And it can also create different conversations with the consumer. That consumer can have more confidence of where that data is coming from or more relationship with that data, knowing that the farmer owns it and he's sort of licensing it out. But there's a piece in here called the blockchain, of which Web3 can be built upon. And that blockchain is creating a lot more immutability, which means the data can't be altered for somebody's benefit. It means the good, the bad, the ugly goes onto that blockchain. And that mechanism of transparency is in a large amount of cases with the way we're utilizing blockchain currently, creating more consumer confidence, particularly when it's attached to the food supply chain. So tracing your data or tracing your food, knowing where your food came from, was that avocado growing in Mexico, Salinas county in California, or greenhouse in Toronto, Canada? How was it growing? What went into growing it? How far did it travel? All that information can be put into a QR code that then a consumer can scan. And if they know it's in a blockchain format, and it was followed a certain process of a chain command in terms of how the data enters that blockchain. Once it's there, they can have confidence in what they're reading, that the avocado is what it says it is, that it doesn't have any pesticides or ethylene to make it look greener on the outside, etcetera and so forth. And so Web three, I think is going to enable us to change the way we interact with how we're improving our ecosystems and by a large blockchain and changing the conversations with food supply and big agriculture. And so that's the Honest support we need that is built upon some of that technology that I was talking about.

I think you've probably heard me say this at least once. I often will say, when people say, well, being transparent, and I'll say, no, no one is transparent. No one is ever transparent. We are selectively transparent. We will always be selectively transparent. That would be the equivalent of walking into a room and saying to a person, you smell, you're ugly. I don't like the way you walk, your legs are screwy, I don't like your accent. I mean, if we were completely honest all the time and transparent with everybody, we'd get nothing done. There's a secondary level of that. Sometimes being transparent early on doesn't mean that that's the direction that you're going in. So for example, if you were working with me, I sometimes go very negative to go positive. I'm building and then I say, okay, wait, and I go down to a place that you probably don't want to go. But what I'm doing is I'm asking a set of different questions. It doesn't mean that's what I want to act on. But in order for me to understand the modality, the model, the structure, the design, the framework, whatever I'm just working on, I'm asking a new set of questions. I don't want those answers out there because that's not my solution, that's my draft. Those are where I find new answers. The challenge that I have with this transparency is where, within that transparency does it become transparent? Because a farmer might say, I'm going to buy that, I'm going to do it this way, and then change their mind after the first time they try it. But now it says that this person bought that equipment or worked with that company, or was engaged in this, that or the other. And it will generate just as many challenges as the old framework. Because we can never be and live in society transparent. We are always and will always be selectively transparent. I.

I hear what you're saying because.

I hear this argument all the time. And I've got people who are saying everything in Project Moon should be transparent. I'm like, do you want to sit here and see, like, I mean, where does transparency start and end?

Well, I think, I mean, again, like a lot of these bullet points that I'm talking about, maybe high level here and we can sort of stick to an understanding that there is an on ramp between the real world data, real world asset data that's being collected in an ecosystem, call it a Farm and getting onto chain, onto the blockchain, that is, that's the term that's used and that is called, you know, the chain of command or the authorization of that data. Is it what it claims to be? You know, can somebody validate that? To a degree. And there's certainly, there's certainly those people and organizations and groups out there that are doing that work and that's very important work. I think when the data gets into the blockchain and by the way, it can be updated. And so let's say a farmer says I put down X amount of worm poop vermiculture onto the ground, which is a nature based solution, but then change the, you know, pounds per acre that he put down, he can change that. There's a trackable ledger in the blockchain that will show the change. Right. So it doesn't get altered, it doesn't get superseded or overwritten. That, that changes. The piece that you're really talking about is, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, is that on ramp piece, the authorization or validation of the data. Because I think once it's in the blockchain based on the way the blockchains are built and correct me if I'm wrong in the. Desire behind and the reason for building this web3 community and ecosystem was that things are meant to change and update. But then there's a historical ledger that will show you that whether it's on the decentralized finance side, whether it's on the data side, the real world asset data or anything otherwise. I often talk about the data going on chain needs to be the good, bad, ugly and all. There's a, there's another piece there and I'll get there in a second, which is open sourcing data so that we can analyze and see similarities, differences, benefits and some of those.

What if someone bought, what if someone bought something and did something to the fruit, the vegetable, the cow, whatever and doesn't record.

Yes, well, and this is, this is where I'm coming back to. It's this on ramp and I think this is where the conversation is that you're actually talking about, which is.

And.

I, and I, I agree with you that between the farmer doing, we'll just use that as a use case. Between the farmer doing the things that he says he's doing, recording it and then validating that that is what the farmer said he did and getting it on chain. There is lots of opportunity to be selective. Transparency. Absolutely. I totally understand that. But I do think there is a separation. I Do think blockchain is blockchain. That it, that it. Once it's there, it's transparent. But the question is, has it been, you know, what, what is that rigor before in terms of that chain of command and how honest are people in terms of.

I think once you, you know, it's. Once you see something not done in, I'm not going to call it ethical, you see it not done the way you thought it should be done, you then will have a lack of confidence in the rest of the system. It's general human nature. So the reason, I mean I would, I don't think I'd ever check where my bananas came from. Maybe somebody else would like to do that. I don't think I really care. You know, I want to know that the food is a certain type of. I'm hoping that it is, but I don't know if my lifetime, if I have that time to go and check my food supply chain to know if that's the right one. And I'm hoping somebody else will check it. But I also do know that the moment you get and they're going to be three different companies around the world or two different companies who are able to get around leaves, lacks or leaves a lack of confidence through the whole ecosystem. You don't need thousands to have it happen. You just need a few major players. And I would love, I'm, I'm very interested in the regenerative side and what's been happening. I, I would love to see a technology that confirms that the food that we're getting is of higher quality, whatever that means, and also helps. I just don't know if we're being realistic that the expectation of the product will get to the point where we will have that high level confidence. I think it'll be less than we think. That's just the kind of forecast only because of how humans act. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing and I'm saying this is a good ad. Great. We have this for certain places and if we know more, we could have more confidence. But we're the level that we're being promised, promised seems to be higher than what I think is what we're going to find.

And that's fair enough. That's certainly your perspective to own. I would disagree with that. But I think the thing that we could probably agree on here, and it's not necessarily about finding a quorum in agreeance, it's ownership of data. So if I own data, regardless if it's ethically put together or not, and I have control of that data. I like that. I like, I like the thought that I will own my data, my picture, my address, my phone number. I get to choose where it goes. Nobody gets to use my data without my knowledge. And I can have different conversations whether I use my real address or I use your address and say it's my name, name and my, my location, you know. Yes, there's some inherent problems of authorization, of how, how responsible we are and saying the data is what it is. But at the end of the day, whatever that data is, I own. If I'm putting it there, I own it well, and I like that.

And so that would be. Imagine if you were doing. And I appreciate that there's also challenges to that, owning that data. You get. Share your wallet with somebody, somebody else, they can see what's in your wallet. They can. You moved money out of the, you move currency out of the wallet. So they could check where that, where that went. So now someone is at a dinner party and they say, you know, he owns the data, but it's on the blockchain. He doesn't have what he says. You know, I mean, I know he's promoting or she's promoting or they're building and they're, they're moving and this is that. Yeah, but no, no, that's not what it is.

It could.

There are so many ways to play this.

You still have to give permission for that data to be shared. I can just.

No, no, but you can share it verbally. You could share it verbally. You can post it on a post. It's not, you're not supposed to, but there will be challenges with it. So I like the idea of being able to know what's happening on a farm or an agra, an eco agra. I just, I, I'm, I'm, I'm tempt, I'm tempering my expectations.

Fair enough, fair enough. But I, in, in this whole opportunity for us to rebuild the eco agrosystem from the soil up the, you know, thinking about science, in particular chemical science, I believe in terms of inputs related to the synthetics, primarily introduction of technologies. I believe the Web3 Gateway is a direction that is going to create far different conversations.

Yeah, absolutely.

I believe they're going to be.

And it's a starting point.

Yeah.

For certain types of dialogue. Absolutely.

And, and from my perspective, if we can make the farmer the hero of the story again and not promote some of the super conglomerate centralized food supply chains, not to name anyone, we're going to have more connectivity with our land. Because if our, if we have more connectivity with our farmer, it's going to create a mechanism for us to better understand those ecosystems, systems of where those farmers are. A farmer in South Africa versus Brazil versus upstate New York versus, you know, prairies of, of Canada. You know, the ability to be more connected to where those farmers are coming from and the land that they're, they're stewarding, because I believe we should all be stewarding, I think is also going to be an Enabler through this Web3 highway.

Yeah. And if we're talking about Web3 giving an alternative to the existing Web2, the alternative to Web1. Absolutely. I think there's a definitely generative step in the right direction for certain applications that allow that to happen. Yeah, I don't disagree with it. I'm still in the Agra side saying there's gotta be ways that people will get around this because they always have. But what if you could at least have Instead of a 62% certainty or 23% certainty, you're now up a 68 or a 29. Even that level of confidence to say, well, this one's really trying. They bought this product. It sounds more real. We just hope that you don't hear later on that. And I've got to believe we will. News comes out, XYZ company didn't do that. And they, even though they, they professed to do it, they didn't. And so we'll have to deal with that when it comes.

Yeah, I think there's a piece there too, just in terms of, call it the actual transaction. I'll take the carbon market as an example. I think there's a lot of people in the carbon market trying to work on the things that you're talking about, the current authorization of data, data, call them project developers or standard methodology companies. They're creating the rules to work by and the project developers are implementing those rules on how we collect data and those two sort of authorize the data. When it comes to the monetizing of carbon credit, I believe there's not enough going back to the farmer that there's a lot left in what I call a messy middle. And because there's a lot of people there that spend a lot of time and energy and building registries and measuring equipment, mrv, doing trade brokering, you name it, and not enough going back to the farmer and I think, or the land steward that is doing something positive with that, with the carbon that's going to create the carbon credit. I think the ability for the farmer to change the conversation with a smart contract to say, no, in this case, I'm going to focus on sequestration. I sequestered X tons of carbon. Here's the work that went into it. Regardless of that other aspect, I want to create a smart contract. And if there is a buyer that says, yeah, okay, I'll believe you with the data, there's more. Back to the farmer's point pocket. They own that data and that data won't get resold and aggregated and, you know, monetized in ways where the farmer isn't benefiting. So there's going to be more there for them. And that's just one use case where we're changing the conversation through the utilization of a smart contract on, on the blockchain. And I think it's much more powerful. We're just sort of scratching the surface of it. But it has absolute mechanisms, I think, that are going to enable those, those conversations and those narratives to change between the land steward, in this case, a large part of that is farmers and our food supply chain. And the benefit is going to be recognized by the consumer.

And I wouldn't disagree that it'll give options that are on the table.

Yeah, okay, great. Well, I know we've been talking for a few hours here. The last piece I believe that I sort of mentioned was just don't put more on, more on.

So is it with the gluttony of eat with seasons that we kind of touched on is that you just are looking for individuals to be more in sync with nature?

That's correct. Eating with the seasons, the gluttony is as much as CEA allows us to have seasonal growing year round and enable that on demand. I'm hoping that as we move to better awareness of our natural systems, that we also start to learn about the seasonal benefits that happen, particularly within the crops that grow within different seasons. So you take winter in Canada, for instance, and you know, we're going to be eating back in the day we were eating what we had harvested and, you know, canned or stored or frozen through the winter seasons. Of course we can't grow tomatoes and so we would have canned tomatoes. But there are a lot of benefits of eating the soups that we've canned and the, you know, things that we have harvested and, and stored away. And then as we get into spring, we start eating the produ, the things that grow during the springtime, in the summer. And this is true in every ecosystem around the world, that there's different things that grow within the different seasonalities. And the better we understand that it's going to have a direct correlation as well with how our bottle body and health function within those natural circadian rhythms, as it were. And so stop the gluttony, which stop the on demand. I want 100 bananas today at my doorstep every other day. And working more within the seasonality, which is also going to have a change on the amount of yield that, you know, the amount that we have to grow in anyone. And so that changes conversations as well. So reducing the food miles, helping our health with understanding the benefits of the seasonality and what's growing there. But I don't discount that there is some benefits for CEA and that's why.

It would be beneficial. But I think it would be interesting if you took maybe 10 grocery stores of different chains, different parts of the world and you put a little bit of data on the sign that they're buying from within season does X out of season, does Y. I wonder how many people would not buy the banana, would not buy the product that's out of season.

That would be a great. Agree. Let me test a little.

Yeah, but you understand that's a simple way to see is that you'd use the exact same type of messaging that fits their culture obviously and just see if people pay attention to it. Is, is it important? What does that mean? And you know, you might, you might have to do a lot of education, which a giant retailer might not do. But if you put a QR code, if you want to learn more, click here. Then someone's going to put a QR code and they're going to steal your data with a sticker over it. But let's assume that it was used properly. Maybe something on there. You're in the business. It would be an interesting study.

I wholeheartedly agree with that, David. Absolutely.

Okay. So yes, I believe if we could do that. I just don't. I can't even tell you when things are in season or out. My wife can tell you more, but I can't.

Yeah, the big ones usually come with fruit. Right. You see a lot more fruits that, you know, peaches in the summer, you know, necessarily. Okay. But we're, we're in the northern climate, so that's. I'm assuming I have similar.

But let's take a grocery store. It's not just the fresh fruits but the, the product along the all. The entire grocery store has food that came from a farm, all of it. Therefore it should be next to the dole pineapples not picking on dole. I'm just, I've had pineapples from them or it might be next to another food and. Well, will they buy that? Will they buy that ketchup? If that ketchup was grown out of season, would they care? And what if you have a mixed food? Again, I'm not just in the fresh produce section. What if it's a mixed food that requires vegetables, chicken, you know, all sorts of spices? Maybe that has 14 different seasonal growing challenges or conditions. I wonder how that would. This. This was bought. You know, I don't even know how to label that because we are talking the entire grocery store. Correct, correct.

And so when I think about mixing like a manufactured. You're taking a bunch of raw products and you creating something out of that. I think about that more on the food manufacturing side when I think about the seasonal. And this is just for the point of highlighting an indication and thinking more about the raw product itself before it's processed. So non processed and processed. And I don't mean processing in a negative way, but you know, creating a canned soup that has four to your indication, 14 different spices and, you know, different lentils in it and rice. Because we can harvest our food and we can freeze it and we can put good nutritious food into a preserved standpoint so we can consume it at a later date. That's what canning was all about back in the day. And cold sellers and. And by the way, if you ever grow any carrots, keep carrots in sand in a dry, cool area and you'll have carrots throughout the winter season, sort of long past the growing season for consumption. And they'll stay moist and they won't get, you know, brittle and they'll still have a lot of flesh flavor. So we can do that.

Yeah, I'm just tossing it out because it might be interesting to. Maybe, maybe there's a canning rating system that says if it's within season, it gets a one. If it's. If the majority of products are out of season, it's a two. If it's something, it's a three. And maybe there's a rating system so people could make a decision that this product is more damaged than the next. Yeah, I don't know.

And I, and I think, I think there's people working on that, the food score system, you know, that ties to the traceability component, like where is the food coming from? You know, how do we rate food? How do we get that nutrient density score in there? You know, is it nutritious or is it just there?

Right.

And I think these are all very, very good questions and things that people are actually working on. Okay, right now.

So we got the last one. Don't put more on moron.

That's right. I take this right back to this soil. So whether you're. The eco agro renaissance era, and I'm going to use it for word renaissance, opposed to revolution or anything else, because I think we're, we're in an age of Renaissance age, another Renaissance age. And this is focused primarily around improving our environmental impacts. But the eco agro renaissance isn't about singing Kubaya, you know, to the mango tree. It's not rainbows and butterflies. I'm not trying to paint it as, you know, something that has an easy bite. It is hard work. I equate it to, it's a term I use often. It's organized persistence. It's relentless effort and a vision that stays the course. But there's something that we continue to need to do and it is reducing the amount that we put on our soils. It doesn't matter if it's equipment, if it's inputs, if it's human factor we need to reduce. And by and large I'm talking about inputs of all degree, the amount we put on. And so the human nature is, and this is really the science that I was talking about earlier. Plantations, forests, backyard gardens, communal gardens, huge industrial agriculture production agriculture. When things aren't going well, we have a tendency to put more on, more fertilizer, more water, more. In fact, my wife and I were just talking and laughing because we had started to over water one of our plants that was in our house. I've grown up in agriculture. I like plants, you know, but I was watering it and I didn't realize that she was watering it. And all of a sudden it started to have indications that it was suffering, it was getting root rot. And we were putting more on thinking that's, oh, I was seeing that it was turning a little bit brown, I need some more water. Not thinking about what the root cause was. Did I pull up the pot and see what was below it. Now the same thing that we do in the soil, you know what's worth, oh, there's too much water. I just went to putting more on. I fell into the same trap that I talk about all the time. Don't put more on, more on. I think we, we do that in a lot of different areas. But specifically thing that I believe is going to help us, well, hardly believe it's Going to help us fix our, our ecosystems and really create eco agro renaissance champions is reducing the amount we put on. So we need to focus heavily on the data we collect from observational awareness of our ecosystems. Restoring that soil health. Create functional soil health. Not just soil health, functional soil. It's functioning effectively integrating of that agroforestry. And this is where I'm sort of tying the pieces together here. Stopping the point I didn't mention when I, when I was talking about the gluttony and eating seasonally is not chasing the yield. And I think by and large we do that. And yield relates to commodity trading in the, you know, contractual setups that we, we have for our trade agreements and meeting demand on a global level for some of the things that we've deemed to be very important. Oil seeds. For all the oil seed pieces that we see out there that go into our food systems by and large and other manufacturing market spaces. We need to look at not chasing the yield so not chasing the bushel. Diversifying the number of crops crops and what we're growing. Integration of agtech to help power some of the abilities for us to be more observational in our ecosystem. Leveraging things like Web3 to our benefit. But we can't be adding more of any of those in any large factor. Not one super proceed to the other. So I, I take that as far as don't put more on, don't add more web3 because we're gonna think that's gonna fix the issues that we're having on the conversation. Same with trees. Same with, you know, adding more diversity. You know, there is a tipping point where we get so small scale and so diverse that we're not even feeding our local community with the right things that we need. Right. So we really need to take that to heart. But I, I start and stop primarily with the soils. Don't put more on more on and I fall into that trap too. So I'm not trying to blame anyone by, by any means. You know, we've gotten here. We just need to stop and check ourselves. So it's not just tech, it's life jargon in any way.

No, it's life. I mean I, I've been using CRM since I don't know, trees were born. And the CRM systems are fantastic. I use an old one, I've got 30,224 names in it and individuals have all these fancy systems as they've purchased and they don't put in name, address, email, all the main piece of Components that you need. So I see these things and they're the old garbage in, garbage out. But there's no garbage in there, they didn't even put it in. And I say, look, a CRM system is as good as you use it. You have to put in and we force field everything, name, address. But every time I set up a person, every time I communicate, I have to take those three to five minutes and set them up. I felt like, sorry, Web three, which is a value add, was that, oh my God, now we've got another thing. As long as it can be an easy. You kind of answered it here. It was almost like, oh no, now the farmer has to understand web3. And as long as it could be done in a non obtrusive way, I think that the first part of the program is fantastic. And then the second part, this just the web3 thing, it's still reverberating in my head partially because I'm going to an event tomorrow this unauthorized or what do you call it, Uncorrelated environment Miami. And we've got people on our team where you and I with Will are talking about the blockchain, crypto, all of that space. So I'm, I'm asking questions such as how much is enough to move us to the next evolution or the next change. So yeah, I know you're not blaming anybody. We're trying to address creating new, new futures. Well, we covered a lot, my friend.

We did cover a lot. We did. And I, you know, I, I'm just going to double click really quickly on that blaming. I always like to make sure that there's an indication that we're not demonizing because I, you know, have a lot of respect for the things that got us to work where we are, as much as they've also had some negative impacts. And if I am going to demonize anyone, I certainly want them to be sitting across from me and having a conversation to defend themselves. So hence why I say that. But it is, you're right, human nature. And maybe that's a little bit of my Canadian character coming out as well.

You're a person looking to create change and we all, I mean, having this conversation, that's the good thing about me not knowing anything, walking into this conversation is that I'm bringing real questions. I may not be right. I might be going, remember I sometimes I go negative to go positive. I'm trying to figure out and what we covered in this through over three hours. There's a lot and I, if I was to make all these changes I can't think of, like, where do you start? How do you make it happen? You. You're asking. So I might be going negative, but that doesn't mean that there's not an answer around the corner. That's what I'm looking for. And that's why those questions sometimes are poignant.

Yeah.

So. Well, this was fantastic. This. Yeah, we covered a lot.

We've.

I've done over 400 interviews, never won on the agrispace in this regard. So this was fabulous. Appreciate it. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to thank anybody who's listening to the entire time that thank you for taking the time during your day to listen. And I do hope that you've learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Now, Neil, what's the one best way.

To get a hold of you Best way would be. Helloohima IO K O H I M A I O Kohima. Hello, Kohima.

Perfect. And for as I always say, you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. And we're working on redefining tomorrow. So I'd love to connect to you also. Davidavidgoldsmith.com See me at Instagram Mr. DavidGoldsmith Goldsmith on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, projectmoonhut.org There's so many different ways to reach out to us. Appreciate you taking the time and therefore we'll end. I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.