OUR MAGIC SEEDS 🌱 Zach Bush MD: Discover the real agriculture revolution | Wellness Force #Podcast

Your passion is so infectious. The first time I had you on the show, I felt it the same way. And there's so many people out there that are just learning about Monsanto. They're just learning about soil health. They're literally just beginning, what do they do? Like, what's the first step? For someone watching this, Maybe this is the first podcast they've ever seen about organic foods or the truth about organic or soil. What's that beginning step for them? What do they take?

It's so cool that the world just did this. So, you know, for all the fear and all of the masks and all the crazy, wild stuff that we've done as a. As a population over the last few months, we also ran out and bought every last seed in this country for the first time. So we bought all these companies out, and thousands and thousands of families went out and planted gardens for the first time, including you. And so this, this first time gardening generation is moving us back towards the 1940s. So in 1945, at the end of World War II, we were growing 40% of our food in our backyard. Victory Gardens. Not just in the U.S. but London, the whole Allied powers around the world were growing their food in their backyard. And the whole message that got us to grow those and call them Victory Gardens is our independence is actually going to come from our resilience. If we have food security, we're going to win the war. Because this is a war of attrition. If we can eat still in five years and the Germans can't, we will win this war. So it became a war of attrition through resources. And the secret was not through better technology and better railroads, and it was through decentralization and backyard gardens. We could reclaim that in two years. I really think that, you know, if we decide in the United States that we're going to grow 40% in our backyards, it would take the first year to just get the. The practice in. But by year two, you can grow an insane amount of zucchini and cucumbers and tomatoes in your backyard, not to mention the mints and the radishes and the carrots and everything else. And so it doesn't take long to realize that seeds have all the magic. And it doesn't take long as a physician, to find out that the baby has all the magic. The less we meddle in the garden, the more beauty will often come out of it. And so don't be overly concerned about how your garden looks, maybe ever, but certainly not in those first five years, because it should look like chaos. I don't want you to have like the manicured tomato plant growing there and a zucchini plant growing over there and then nice laid mulch. I want kind of craziness going on. I want weeds and I want all this stuff growing up in between. You have to weed and you have to keep it clear around there. But you've got biodiversity exploding on that soil. And next year is going to look different. Not because you did anything right, but because you didn't try to control the system. So have some freedom and just plant a bunch of stuff out back and have no expectation of what that's going to look like. And if it produces some food in the first couple years, fantastic. But if it's just creating anything but lawn next year, you're winning the game for the planet. And so I would say start simple with low expectations on yourself. Don't ever call yourself a failure because nature knows how to do this. You don't and never will. Farmers are always the first to say, the more you try to fight Mother Nature, the more you're going to lose. The best farmers are always the ones that are making space for nature to do their work. Do her work and so do that in your backyard. Let her start to tell you, why does it look so manicure? Why does your backyard look like every other suburban neighborhood for thousands of miles? Well, let's do something radical. Let's start planting where there is lawn. Let's start creating, you know, multi species cover crops or low lying succulents or whatever your environment is calling for to create that biodiversity in the soil. So start small. And if you don't even have any plot of land or a pot out back on the porch or whatever it is, start in your window. A single mint plant is very hard to kill. And so if you want to start with mint, just put that in the window. A little bit of sunlight, they can handle some shade. So a little bit of dappled light in the window. One mint plant. And then I want you to bite a leaf off of that mint plant. Don't pick it and then go put it on your salad. I want you to literally bite the leaf off the planet every day and experience everything there. You may have an aversion to it the first time you try this because it's not going to taste like the mint that you're used to having picked on your restaurant plate. It's got so much going on because you've never been connected with your tongue to a root system before. So before you bite it off the plant, let it sit on your tongue for a moment, and you're going to be connect to a biophotonic event between soil, sun and that plant right there. And you're going to realize a vitality in your body in that moment. I believe that mint plant could teach you how to garden better than anybody else could on the planet. That mint plant is going to take you through an experience of, oh, my gosh, it's just this connection of soil, sun, some water. You're going to realize that it's just this cycle of soil, water and air that's producing this extraordinary electrical event on your tongue. And then you're taking that biophotonic energy and turning it into a healing power within you. That's the whole story of organic gardening. And one mint plant in the window. So that's how simple we can begin. And let's take this journey as us and see what we create out in the world.

What's most exciting for you when you look at the future of this real revolution? Because we had the revolution in the 60s, which was really about monocrops. It wasn't actually a revolution. It was where things were just subsidized and it kind of broke the system. It really broke Mother Earth starting in the 60s. So now where does she heal? And what does that look like from a financial perspective? And what companies do you see that are in partnership with Farmers Footprint that are really doing a great job?

You know, I think corporate has been hesitant to attract us at the beginning because I think they've been wary of who are we, what are we doing, all of that. But we're very much in the vein of bridge building. Like, we've never told a farmer they're doing the wrong thing ever. I've never told a farmer that they need to stop spraying glyphosate today. Farming is complex and they need an education around that. They need a transition phase. They need, you know, and so you have to embrace the journey as much as you want the goal. And so Farmers Footprint is trying to be patient with that and identify where we want to go. Is a bridge builder. And so as a bridge builder, we're building to corporate. And the first people that are rushing into this space, not support, surprisingly, are kind of the impact investment people that are seeing. Oh, my gosh, we can feel this afoot. As, you know, anybody who saw the tech boom Starting in the 1990s, it was a good place to invest. What everybody's feeling right now about soil and regenerative agriculture. But nobody knows where to invest yet. Nobody's, the definitions are poor and everything else. And so we're seeing people rush to us with a sense of like, okay, if these people are starting to build the interstitium, the connective tissue between this, we know that a $1.7 trillion US agricultural society is going to pivot in the next 20 years out of just, if nothing else, just sheer demand from the consumer. We need to be a part of that. And if we could get on the early side of that, we're going to make a lot of money. So, you know, these are, you know, very forward thinking peoples. A lot of, you know, family funds, family foundations, philanthropic kind of minded, but also want to be part of the new future. And I think excitingly, the pandemic has put a really fine point on this and has excited, accelerated our mission radically. And so we see tons of philanthropic dollars being reorganized towards realizing that all of the hard hit neighborhoods that really suffered under the presence of this COVID virus, we can say that show very clearly that there was poor nutrient density within that food system and poor access to real air and water systems. So soil, air and water. And so we can use the pandemic to show the world immediately where are hotspots of dysfunction. And, and if we start rebuilding there and start to build, build a decentralized system that can serve all of that simultaneously. Instead of just trying to like fix it here and then scale that one model, let's let it grow up through teachers teaching teachers, farmers teaching farmers, school systems, teaching school systems, communities teaching communities, and let that matrix start really rebuilding itself into that future that, that can.

Come for all the parents watching what lights you up about these children that you've raised and what are they going to do when it comes to their responsibility? How have you inspired them? And how can we inspire all the parents to leave their kids with the knowledge that they can make the world better than we left it? They can actually do way better than we can.

Yeah, I would actually say that's the most exciting thing is both my children are pretty profoundly unimpressed by what I'm doing. They're just like, really? That's it? Like that's what you got?

Oh, come on.

You know, because it's just like they're looking at the world being like, the problems are so, so much deeper than you can see, dad. Because they can see that the problems are about in human respect. My daughter recently taught me a lot about this. She's living in New York and has watched this whole thing go down with the civil unrest there around George Floyd's death and all of this. She's taught me so much about what her generation is seeing. And her generation doesn't see a thousand problems. It really sees one problem is we're not respecting human beings. And we're going to start to be the generation that just respects everybody for where they are, who they are, what they think they are. We don't care. We're going to accept them there and then we don't even worry about the rest. Because if we start there, we're going to get somewhere much different than where all you got to, because you started at a lack of respect and a lack of seeing each other and a lack of that. And so that's my excitement about our children's generation is the sense that they've started with a completely different paradigm, a completely different chessboard, and they don't see a linear career course ahead of them. They see a three dimensional space where they can impact the world at will. They can do anything, anywhere, all the time. And I think we see that just seeping up through that generation.