This is a transcript excerpt of a YouTube interview (Sept 15, 2020) where Zach Bush MD explains how corporate consolidation in agriculture and pharmaceuticals has driven dependence on synthetic chemicals, eroded soil and human microbiomes, and accelerated disease and planetary decline. He links soil "biophotonic" energy and microbial biodiversity to plant resilience, human mitochondrial function, and healing capacity; argues that topsoil death and failed carbon cycling—not solely atmospheric CO2—drive seasonal greenhouse gas dynamics; and advocates regenerative organic agriculture (Farmer's Footprint narrative) as a solution. He also critiques modern food systems (e.g., school/prison "grade D" meat, high-fructose products) and cultural failures to value children's health.
We're talking about this convergence of soil and human health and the microbiome and what's actually going on with our world. Four companies, four companies own 60% of the seeds share with us. You know, what is farmers footprint? Also how is farmer's footprint actually taking that to a solution and giving more people soil independence and seed independence?
Yeah, we've created, you know, in the agricultural system very much what we've created everywhere else in the world, which is a consolidation of wealth, a consolidation of control of companies and ultimately the formation of just a few mass of monopolies. And so the, you have Amazon, you've got Google, and those are kind of ever present as kind of the monopolies that dictate our daily experience. But behind the scenes of very few companies you're talking about, six to ten companies like you mentioned are really creating the whole paradigm of western medicine and western agriculture. And those are the same companies. And so the same chemical companies kind of step up and create this incredible co dependence of declining human biology on small molecule chemicals that, that are synthetic, non naturally occurring compounds. And not surprisingly, as we develop that co dependence on non natural stuff, we become more sick. And that's why every drug commercial you've ever seen is followed at the end with a very fast list of the 32 conditions this thing might cause, including death. And so the reason why all those side effects and ultimately increase in mortality are so common for all the pharmaceutical drugs is because they're taking us further away from our natural state. They're disrupting millions and millions of different pathways within our body to try to band aid up one particular condition. But it turns out that cancer never attacks a healthy human body. A virus never attacks a human body. Illness, disorder and disease is the manifestation of a weakening immune system, health, vitality, ultimately the biophotonics of the body. If you can't put biophotonic energy in the form of food into your body and can't be transformed into electrical energy by the relationship between the bacteria area and the mitochondria inside your cells, your batteries go low. And so as the charge comes out of your physiology, your repair rate declines. And as you repair slower, the rate of injury exceeds that, you age faster and you develop disorder and disease. If you can put tons of biophotonic energy into that system and the bacteria explode in biodiversity, out of demand for all these micronutrients that are being consumed and they turn that into electrical energy, your batteries go on and all of the energy state is flowing. Now you have, you know, Healing potential that shoots up. And even with the same injury rate, you're now healing, not, not declining. And so that's the whole game we play in our clinics, and it's the whole game we're now playing with farmers around the country. If, if you're inundated with weeds and pests, it's because your, your rate of repair within that plant system has dissolved. The biophotonic energy within your soils has, has been depleted. And if we regenerate that biophotonic energy within the soils, now we're talking about a relationship between sun and soil and a plant between them. If we charge that whole system with resilience and energy, we're going to get to this point of extraordinary explosive delivery of health and vitality. And that's of course, what happens when you go into regenerative organic. You can see this soil becomes so vibrant that the plants that grow in it are so resistant to any problems. And the weeds that have been terrorizing your for two generations are gone within a single season because you create a biodiverse, biophotonic energy within that soil system. And so when we talk about organic versus regen organic, what we're really talking about, what is the vitality of life between sun and soil? And how can you integrate carbon at all of those levels, carbon cycling in particular, to speed up the vitality of life within that system? If you do that, not only do you solve for human health crisis, you solve for planetary health crisis. The rapid climate collapse that we're currently in doesn't have anything to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. It has to do with the failure of the respiratory cycle of the planet. Our soils are dying and therefore CO2 is accumulating. We've been thinking that it's a greenhouse gas phenomenon, when in fact those greenhouse gases clear. Every year, every summer, our greenhouse gases disappear from the atmosphere. We pull CO2 and methane down to baseline levels, and then it explodes again in the wintertime. But as long as we've got vibrant soils in the Northern hemisphere, we've got, you know, we don't have a greenhouse phenomenon happening the same way that we do in the winter months. And so it's through the death of the topsoil that we're losing the ability to continue that cycle of biophotonic energy, carbon cycling between the soil, the sun and the plant, between. And so that's where we're at now is realizing that, wow, not only did we allow six companies to dominate and all the sad, tragic stuff of poisoning of our water systems and soil systems. And we see children dying prematurely from cancers they should have never had. And it's horrible. Like this is the darkest chapter of humanity in so many chapters. But you look at World War II, you look at World War I, you look at so many crises that have happened on this planet before. This is our history. We are a cataclysmic event. And we keep doing these cataclysmic things over and over again. These cataclysmic events tend to be in these narcissistic moments when we think that we're there to dominate an ecosystem or we're there to dominate another people group. And we're there to create a new empire and extract more wealth for a few. Every time we do that, we collapse systems that are invisible to us. And so in our monopoly building of the chemical industry at large, we've created modern medicine and modern agriculture, but unknowingly, we eroded the foundation for life below it. The whole secret sauce of farmer's footprint is going to be to tell the narrative of healing at every level. And we cannot extract the human health story from the planetary story anymore. It's so intermixed. You literally cannot create human health. If we don't solve for these agricultural systemic issues in the same way we can't solve the agricultural problems unless we come to understand the value of human life and start to reallocate valuation of food, for example, correctly. If children's health is important, then why does school food look like school food? If children are important, then why does their school look like it does? Why does it look like a jail so much of the time? Why do we sequester them away from nature eight hours a day instead of putting them in nature eight hours a day? And so I really believe it's a failure to understand the value of life that's leading to the human behaviors that are driving the agricultural decisions we're making. If children are really valuable souls in exquisitely miraculous bodies, why would anybody give them a Coke? Anybody? Why would anybody hand them a high fructose corn syrup laden anything? Why would anybody put them into an environment where they can't connect to the fresh air? Why would anybody sequester them away and mold ancient old H vac systems and then traffic them diseased meat that's dying at the time of harvest? You know, we have this grade D meat and I actually saw this when I was in college. I was running early one morning around the CU campus in Boulder and this truck pulled up at like 4:30 in the morning. Just barely dawn and backs up to the, to the, the cafeteria on the main cafeteria on campus. And on the side of this truck I couldn't even believe they had the gall to ride. It is grade D meet for schools and prisons only. Wow. And I had, I wasn't even headed for a health career at that point, but I just, it struck me so much of like, wait, what is that doing?
Shouldn't that be in school?
Like, wait, why schools and prisons? Like, why wait? That doesn't make any sense at all. Like, that just sentence shouldn't exist. And yet today we pump the worst grade, you know, food systems, whether, you know, depleted vegetables, depleted, you know, everything into those trays of food that we're, we're feeding our children. And so we are failing to see the value of human life. And so we behave like we do. And so, of course, all of our mistakes are coming out of the failure of that golden rule. If we really loved ourselves, then we would treat our neighbors much differently. But sadly, whether farmer physician patient, or commodities crop owner, it doesn't matter, or chemical company CEO, we're not loving ourselves. And so in the end, farmersfootprint Us is a story about us. It's a story about if we don't start looking in each other's eyes and acknowledging the miracle of life within each of us, then we're gonna keep making the mistakes. There's no scientist that's gonna prove our way out of this. It is a fault of valuation. And that valuation is not of a crop. It's not of a soil. It's of the human standing on that soil. We have been a blight on this planet. We behave as a cancer on this planet because of our lack of care for ourself and those around us, ultimately of our children themselves. And so farmer's footprint, while it began with a story in soil, is the most human experience I've had. And I feel like I don't see my own humanity until I see it through the context of all of those stories that come out every week on another farm family that's doing the right thing.
