Humans: Earth's greatest CARETAKERS? Regenerative gardening and worry-free-eating with William DeMille

Wondering what is actually in , on, or missing from your food? How can we get what we need for health when healthy food seems expensive, soils are depleted, and so much food (especially in the US) is sprayed with chemicals we know are bad for us, or animals are raised in unhealthy environments and pumped with chemicals themselves? YOU ARE FAR FROM ALONE in asking these questions, and William Demille is on the show today to share insights related to all of it. 

He is a master regenerative gardener and the creator of the Georgic Schoolroom and the Georgic Revolution, which offers courses and boot camps for regenerative gardening and agriculture no matter what environment you are trying to grow food in. He is the author of “Worry Free Eating”, a book chock-full of information for restoring the soil, growing, and harvesting food, whether you are growing in a pot on the porch or hundreds of acres of land. 

In this fascinating episode we cover: 

*what changes the taste and nutritional content of our food

*why tilling up the land may be one of the WORST things you can do for your garden, and how it creates MORE weeds and ultimately MORE compacted soil

*what the microbes in the soil need and how we can feed them with the least hassle.

*how some very common traditional gardening and agriculture methods may be CREATING our biggest problems in the garden

*a different take on humans and the ecosystem, and why William thinks we are magnificent at RESTORING ecosystems, not just destroying them. Also, shout out to Beavers…and what makes them amazing.

*can humans help it rain more in our areas and help the soil hold the water? Let’s talk about bringing in the RAINFALL and limiting flood risk!

*using types of bread as a visual aide for how our soil can hold more water on its own (limiting waste and cost of water!)

*what happens downstream if a soil DOESN’T retain water or nutrients

*bringing back grasslands that have turned into deserts, and what made them turn into deserts in the first place

*How do cattle and sheep really impact the land? Should we remove them if a land is struggling or put them back on? 

*When raising livestock on your land how can you move them to help both the animals and the land thrive?

*A snapshot of schools of thought in regenerative agriculture and permaculture, who does what best and how William combined their views into a georgic view of the whole

*How when we care for the land it cares for us back, not just in food, but in community and character. 

This is the first of 2 episodes with William, the next will cover usable measures for soil rehabilitation before and during spring planting. Tune in then as well!

You can access all of William’s links, courses, patreon, socials, and you tube resources here:
https://linkfly.to/williamdemille
Worry Free Eating book link:  https://a.co/d/funSlTZ

Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome to the What Really Makes a Difference podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Becca Whittaker. I've been a doctor of natural health care for over 20 years and a professional speaker on health and vitality, but everything I thought I knew about health was tested when my own health hit a landslide and I became a very sick patient. I've learned that showing up for our own health and vitality is a step by step journey that we take for the rest of our lives. And this podcast is about sharing some of the things that really make a difference on that journey with you. So grab your explorer's hat while we get ready to check out today's topic. My incredible guest network and I will be sharing some practical tools, current science and ancient wisdom that we all need, no matter what stage we are at in our health and vitality. I've already got my hat on and my hand out, so let's dive in and we can all start walking each other home.​Oh, I am so excited to share this conversation with William DeMille, with you today. The reason I'm excited to have William DeMille on the show is because I think a lot about food. And I know some of you do too. I think about what's in my food, what's been sprayed on my food, what is missing from my food, about the soil that I'm hearing more and more about being depleted and how our food doesn't have the nutrients that it used to. But what are we supposed to do? to do about that. I also know about agriculture, about the horrible conditions that, that our livestock is sometimes raised in and how the antibiotics they're pumped with and their general unhappy chemicals can also be affecting our meat, which affects our brain chemistry and our gut chemistry and everything. buT what are we supposed to actually do about the problem? We are not big pharma. We are not big ag. We are not big food industries. We're regular people. What I love about talking to William DeMille is it puts the power back in our hands. For so much of what we can do on the scale that we are able to do. Whether you have hundreds of acres of farmland and are farming or doing livestock agriculture for a living, he has principles and methods that help, that help the land, that help the soil, and that help the nutrients get back into your food. So you know what you're eating and it's full of more of the content that we need to help our bodies be healthy, which helps our minds be healthy, which helps us in productivity and joy and relationships and the whole gamut as I found his work and started to apply his work this last I have been floored at the value that it has given my personal life as well as how much food we were able to produce and in a fun way that was way less annoying and way less terrible hard work than it ever had been before. So if you're interested in food, if you're interested in regenerative gardening, if you're just wondering what all of the buzzword is about, William DeMille is one of the most efficient places that I can tell you to start. So with no further ado, and for a fantastic conversation, continue to listen, and I give you William DeMille.

Track 1: 3:33

Hello. I am so grateful to be having a conversation with William Demil today, and so grateful that I can finally share it with people that I love or anyone else that's interested in food and soil and nutrition and how the, how those all relate together. So I'll, I'll let William start in just a moment, but I wanna explain to you why I am excited to share William Dim Mill's work. So, I grew up in the middle of a family with seven children, and I was, we gardened every year. It was in a big garden, but I hated it. I felt like my dad just had children for slaves, for gardening. hated it, didn't realize what we had until I went to college. And I remember when I bought my first tomato from Walmart and I took a bite, which I had paid for this thing with my hard-earned money, and I thought. This is not even a tomato. This is like eating a cardboard mildly tomato flavored, weird, squishy thing. I could not believe the difference. And I started to understand why my dad wanted a garden, but, and so, and so, I tried, you know, to have smaller gardens as we were moving to different places. we Had a little patio garden. When we were in grad school. Everything died. We didn't remember to water it enough. We had tried square foot gardening when we had kids and what it always ended up being was me weeding most of the time. And then as soon as I got tired of weeding was when the stuff actually started to grow. And then I got busy and didn't go out intended and squash bugs, ate all the rest. We moved to another house. Chickens ate all the rest. I was Pretty much about done with gardening. So this last year I was not planning on doing a garden. I was gonna give myself the mental and physical rest and just gratefully celebrate my friends at the farmer's market that could grow vegetables. And then I heard William Demil on a podcast and he was talking about soil, how it relates to nutrition and how some of our current gardening practices are actually tearing apart the soil. That sometimes the traditions of farming or gardening or agriculture are different than what the science is supporting. Now, because I am a science nerd, I literally just stopped what I was doing, sat down on a rock and listened very carefully to what he was saying on the podcast. That, and I started to apply. I decided to give it one more try and. I was hooked. The things he talked about really actually helped. I've never had a garden that has grown so well. We just tore the flower terraces out and replaced it all with this jungle variety garden of food and color and vibrancy. And what I found was, what he said was true. As I learned how to nourish the earth, the earth ended up nourishing me back. The time in the garden was fun. I wanted to be out there, and the food tasted better. It truthfully was one of the things that began to bring me back to my own health and to a better mental, physical state as well. So I'm, I just cannot share his information enough. We went to a bootcamp. Which was incredible. And so if you're near a rock pull up a seat and really pay attention to what we have to hear from William DeMel. So thank you for joining me today, William

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 7:14

You are welcome. Thanks for having me on. This is exciting. I.

Track 1: 7:18

Yay. So let's start by talking about, you say in your book, which I'm gonna hold up for those who watch on video later, but it's called Worry-Free Eating. And I am really, really loving it. I'm planning on just working my way through it while we're in our winter cold months, so that I'm even more prepared for next year. But what is it about gardening that makes worry-free eating? And what is the deal with our. Food. Why would we even need to worry about growing our own food or what's in it?

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 7:52

Yeah. You know, that's a great question. It is a fun title. I've just noticed over the years when you go to a grocery store, You'll stand there in the produce aisle, and if you stand there for maybe 15 minutes, if it's busy, you will see several people go through, they pick up an apple and they look at it and they turn it around and they have suspicion on their face and they wrinkle their nose and they squint their eyes and then they put it back and they walk by. And if you ever ask one of those people what they're thinking, first of all they think you're a weirdo. But if you can have a a a discussion with them, they will say, well, I just don't know. I'm afraid it's been sprayed. And people are worried about the food. And it's true the apple has been sprayed. If it's on the grocery store shelf, the question is, what was it sprayed with? I mean, even organic food gets sprayed, you know that's just the world we live in. So it's so true that people are worried about their, our food supply, but I named the book that because we don't have to. Completely participate in all of that worry. If we understand food where it comes from, the way Mother Nature creates food and what food really is and our interaction with the food, then we can have an experience where we're not worried about the food supply. Now most people don't grow their own food, but most people can grow some of their food and people don't really realize that or think that that's real. A lot of people have a garden. They may struggle with it, they may like it, but it doesn't really impact the food supply. But what I try to teach people is that no matter how much land you have or how little you have, you can significantly increase your food supply. I mean, people can grow a lot just in a few pots on the dead. They just don't know it. So, and there's ways to make the food more nutritious and the way. To make the food the most nutritious is to mimic Mother Nature and doing what Mother Nature does. I've had quite a few frustrations over the years with education in gardening and farming because we are educating people to grow large yields of food. That's what we learned in the agricultural sciences is here's what you do to get the most bushels per acre, the most pounds per acre. And you know, I, that's kind of a good idea a long time ago, but what that has evolved to now is low quality food and low quality nutrition. So as we're eating food, we have to eat more food to get the same amount of nutrition outta it because the nutrition in it is less dense. So that's, you know, and some of these points can be argued. And it's hard to quantify a lot of these things, but there is some really great research that's showing that this is actually true, which is really exciting and great. But I think it comes down to our taste. I think we, over time, we have you know, changed over the, the centuries, the Melania, that our taste buds will tell us whether or not we are eating nutrition or not. So if we're eating from the grocery store and it doesn't taste good if you're feeding kids vegetables, they don't like them. There's a couple of things that play here, but one of them is the fact that our body is not recognizing nutrition, our nervous system, our brain, all the components of our body. We just simply are not recognizing the nutrition and so we don't want it. I also think that there's probably allergies at play there and there's probably addictions at play there. So there's other things going on. For the most part, if food tastes really good and you know, and you are just excited when you're eating something like an apple, it tastes really good. And we've all had apples that don't taste good. Well, I think most of the time the things that taste really good to us is'cause it's higher in nutrition. It's something that our body needs and CRAs.

Track 1: 12:03

I also think, I think the tasting good. There's a difference between a sugary taste good, like a high fructose corn syrup. To me, that feels almost like a frenzy. Like I have to have more. Right? But it feels empty, but like I have to have it But when you are eating something that Is really wholesome, that's full of nutrition and has the natural sugar in it, and plenty of water. It, it feels good while it tastes good. I went to a bootcamp at Williams farm. The place where he lives is on a really amazing cattle ranch in northern Nevada. But we ate food that had been grown there and for every mill stuff that, for every mill food that was prepared using healthy practices and straight out of the ground, out of good soil with good minerals. And my body, I swear, was just resonating. I felt so good. And the more that I ate it and the more that I relaxed, it's like the more my digestive system could handle even, even better quality and more of it, it, it was healing to eat instead of. worrisome to eat. How else to explain that?

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 13:21

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, I, I love what you said in the beginning of that was that our body feels the nutrition, you know, it's not just the taste. There's more to it than that. And when, when you're exposed to really great food, that certainly happens. The question that people have for me, which I love to answer, is how do we do that? How do we get food that's this good? During my bootcamp, Selena usually does all the cooking and people are, oh, are so excited. How, how did you cook this? I've had this recipe before, but how did you do it?'cause she shrugs her sh shoulders and smiles and says, well, it was pretty easy. We just put it together. But and I think it goes back to the quality of the food. When you get homegrown food, you know, 90% or more of your entire ingredient list is coming from the source. Instead of going through packaging and processing and factories and storage and all of the things that our modern food system does when we simply get it from the source. And we picked it today, or maybe yesterday. It's, it doesn't get any fresher than that. And our bodies tend to recognize that. So, you know, everybody just raves about the food when they come here at bootcamp, they're like, man, that is so good. Have you ever, are you gonna publish a book cookbook? They don't ask me that, but they ask Selena and it's like, yeah, I'm working on one. You know, I love food Network. I, I don't watch TV very much, but when I do, it's often Food Network. I just love to see what the chefs have to say. And they always say the recipe depends on the quality of your ingredients. You have to have good ingredients to make good food. And so that's, that's pretty exciting. You know, I, I have young people here for classes they often will just get a cabbage and I, I do weird things just to have fun with young people, but I'll pick a big cabbage and, you know, it's a big old, giant thing, bigger than my head. And I'll just take a bite out of it like an apple. Just, just to goof around young people like that. If, if we're laughing during class, then it makes life better. And, and then they're inspired. So they bite the cabbage and they're always amazed, you know, it's been picked for eight seconds. We just cut it out of the field. I pick it up, I bite it, they're laughing about it'cause it's a weird thing to do. And then I have them taste it and, and they're amazed. They're like, Hey, this is really good. I didn't know cabbages tasted like this. And I hear the one thing I hear from visitors, from students, from everybody who comes here is this statement, if I knew vegetables tasted like this, I'd even eat'em all the time. And it's true because vegetables do taste good, but we have to grow them in such a way that they're filled with nutrition.

Track 1: 16:14

Yeah. I feel like just saying hazah, because I think sometimes the vegetables that our kids don't wanna eat, I mean, if we buy them, they're out of season, they're sprayed with a stuff, bunch of stuff. We shove it in the microwave, we, I mean, it's not good but it can be kinda hard to know what to cook if that kind of food that does resonate and is freshly picked is not available. So how can you, how can, how can we help our food be nutritious like that if we don't, if garden, if farming is not gonna be our full-time job?

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 16:50

Okay, so I think everybody should have a garden. That's just my bias and it's probably not true. I'm sure that there's students going to medical school and or law school and other things, and during that time of life, you probably need to be focusing on those studies and not worrying about a garden. But for most of people's lives, they should be doing some type of farming, you know, even if it's just some herbs in a pot, but the way that you make the food the most nutritious this whole endeavor growing food is you've got to mimic nature. And so there are some certain keys to mimicking nature and is, it's different. It's very different than what we have learned in the gardening world. In the gardening world, we fight against nature and then we have plants that don't taste as good and they are lower in nutrition. And we know that because of modern science. So we can, we can send off leaf analysis and they come back and tell us what minerals are missing and so forth. So when we mimic nature, what we need to do is we need to grow the food the same way the plants grow. When you walk into a forest or out into any lush, beautiful. place, you know, if you want to be there for a, you know, like a beautiful camping experience where there's lots of plants and lots of water around, that's how our gardens should look. So when we garden, the first thing people think of is, oh, I need to go tell up my garden. Well, that's the first thing I tell people to stop doing because mother nature doesn't till there's, there's, no tillage out there when we're

Track 1: 18:38

you told me that Yeah. When you told me that I could just picture my dad with like the tiller behind him and how hard it was and everything, I'm like, what? We could skip that step and it would work. I mean, I live in a, the high desert and I know how hard the dirt can get and how full of clay the dirt can get. So I know me and all the people I ever gardened with thought that was the only way you can get water into your soil. And you have some different things to say about that. Can you share why we don't till and, and what other way we can soften up

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 19:09

Yeah. So the, the thing that makes plants grow are the beneficial microbes in the soil. And when we till the soil, it kills the beneficial microbes. One tillage pass can kill 50% of your beneficial fungus. we need the fungus to help the plants grow. But that is not what we hear in most of the gardening books. It's not what we hear in the agronomy classes at college. It's not what we're hearing from most of the master gardener classes at the universities. And because we're still thinking the way we've done things in the past, we haven't come up to the the new modern science, but we've gotta get the microbes in the soil so that they are functioning so that they are driving the mineral cycle, they're keeping the water cycle working, they are keeping all of the ecological processes working properly. And that's what I mean when I say mimic nature. We have to have all the processes working so that the plants can grow without people doing very much. So after, you know, three to five years, you can get your soil to a spot where you don't have to do much. The main thing you'll be doing is planting some species you want. And then harvesting. And you'll, you'll need to manage weeds a little bit, but not a lot.

Track 1: 20:27

And that's three to five years

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 20:28

guess all I.

Track 1: 20:29

in William lives in the high desert in Nevada. And it's not a place where like it is in, I don't know. Oregon where plants naturally grow lush and beautifully. And I live in the high desert in southern Utah. And the same like when I look out at a field, it's full of weeds and packed dirt. That's hard So I was interested when you said that, but also wondering if that just only applied in easy farming communities that you really wouldn't have to put big amounts of nutrients on it and that you wouldn't have to put fertilizer on it and that things could just grow naturally. But you really mean three to five years even in, even in the really hard climates. And I know you do things to help the soil repair and regenerate itself. So can you talk about how you can make it so, so can you talk about how we help the microbes in our soil to grow more than just not killing them by tilling? How do you make it so they can. be propagating and growing and making it soft enough that we can dig in it.

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 21:41

Yeah. Perfect. So the microbes are like any other animal. They want some basic things. They want food, they want water, and they want a house to live in. So what we do is we feed them, and there's two sources of food for them. One is a living plant growing in the soil will it'll do photosynthesis and then it will put sugar down into the ground and it will exudate those and out the soil. And they, and the plants do that on purpose. They like to do that. A healthy plant does that, and the reason they do it is to feed the beneficial microbes. So that's the first source of food for, for the beneficials. The second source of food is dead decaying plant material or even an animal material. But mostly we're dealing with plants and gardens. And so animal manure on the ground, that's dead, decaying plant material leaves that fall off your trees in the, in autumn time, those leaves come down, they decompose. That's the dead plant material. So those are your two sources for the microbe food. And then water is comes from rain, snow, and any irrigation that you may do. And so you would never really want your ground to dry out. So how do you keep these microbes healthy and happy? Keep the ground covered with what we call a detri. Sphe, which is the dead plant material on top and always keep growing plants in the soil. A lot of people say, well, I can only grow plants for like 80 days. I live in the high mountains. In fact, that's what our growing season averages out to be. It's 80 days between our last frost and our first frost. So most of the year is cold. But you gotta think about that. Is it really your growing season or is that just the growing season for a tomato and a pepper? Because your growing season could be the entire year if you have living plants that are perennials. They live, you know, way beyond the frost like grass. It will green up months before your last frost and it won't go dormant until it's covered with heavy snow. So it could be, you know, it could be late December in some places. I mean, I'm looking out the window here right now. We have snow on the ground, but the grass is still green

Track 1: 23:59

oh, okay. It's fun. First of all to think about the plant taking in sunlight and then pumping out nutrients to the, to the microbes. Like here you go, I think it's fun to think of one mistake. I know I did. I looked around and I didn't really know why I should put wood chips on top of the soil. I just knew the people I knew that had the best gardens did that. So we went and we, we got the, it turned out to be pretty expensive. We went and got the bags of like the wood bark sort of chips from our local farm store. And we didn't just put them on top'cause we thought they needed to be in the soil to soften it up and break it down. So we tilted in the soil and what it turns out is those would, this was before I met you, those Wood bark. Things were sprayed with chemicals and so we tilled and put poison in the soil and it made it so it was like a rotten sort of consistency. And they did break down in the soil, but they did not seem to help it much So tell me why you put stuff just on the top of the soil to help the soil break down, and what is different about that than trying to shove nutrients into the soil? How does it come from the top down?

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 25:16

Yeah. Here again, it's a principle of mimicking nature. If you put all that detri stratosphere on top, then the microbes in the soil know what to do with it because they've been dealing with dead plants, falling on the soil surface for who knows how long, millions of years. But if we till it into the soil thinking that we're helping it, the microbes don't know what to do with it when it's been tilled in because they haven't had that condition. They haven't adapted to that over the millennia. So I just put it on top because that's what we find in nature. A lot of times if you till it in, it further compacts the soil. And so the kind of decomposition you get would be anaerobic, which is, would be bad for your plants. You want everything to stay aerobic, which means lots of oxygen. You don't want that. Lack of oxygen because oxygen is the number one most important nutrient in our soils. And the microbes are the creatures, the, the mechanism that makes the soil soft and beautiful. So we will take a rotor tiller out there. We till up the ground and it's soft and beautiful as soon as we get done, but it actually makes the soil more compacted over time. They have giant machines when they build highways that are these big, huge tillers and they'll we'll till up the subsoil. Where they've been doing construction to compact the soil hard enough to make a, a highway. And so if engineers know that that's how to make a really compacted highway to drive, you know, whatever, to build a freeway on, why are we doing the same thing in our gardens to try to un compact it? It makes no sense. So it's not compacted for a while, and you may get, you know, three or four or five months, but just think about it. How many times have you tilled your garden, you know, for three or four or five years? And it gets to the point where every spring, your garden is just like a rock. It's just like a, like concrete, you know? And so you have to till, and that's what I hear all the time, is people say, well, if I don't till it, it's just like planting in a, in, in concrete. Well, that's because you've been tilling every year. And so it gets more and more compacted because you're killing more and more of the beneficial microbes. Over time. Anyway, that's that's the detriment of, of tillage.

Track 1: 27:44

And you also said, and I saw to be true, that when you till, as the soil is trying to repair itself, it actually grows more weeds as a way to heal itself. So the more weeds are the, what you call early succession plants, and it's what nature will do to help the bacteria to come back after you've killed them all. But the early succession plants are things we think of as weeds. So we're doing a lot of the really hard stuff to ourself. We're tilling, which ultimately is gonna make it harder soil next year. And also it's meaning that we are gonna have to fight a lot more weeds because nature is trying to pop up those

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 28:25

Yeah, for sure.

Track 1: 28:26

you said I wouldn't have to

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 28:27

you know, it's we do create most of our own problems.

Track 1: 28:31

So you said I would need to weed less and it almost sounded too good to be true for me, but when I did what you taught me to do, I really spent so much less time weeding truthfully, almost not at all. And when I was weeding, I wasn't pulling anything out of hard compacted soil either. I was just chopping the tops off so they wouldn't go to seed. And on we went, it was so much faster. And just so much more pleasant So it's interesting that we do these things to ourself thinking that we're helping it be softer soil, when really it's making it harder and full of wheat.

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 29:07

Yeah, it's true. You know, we really do create our own biggest problems. We have, we till and then we have to keep tilling, and then we burn up all the organic matter in the soil that starves the beneficial microbes. yOu know, I've been saying throughout this today that it kills the beneficials. It actually kills the fungus really well, and it kills a lot of the other microbes. It will kill your predator microbes, your protozoa, and your nematodes, which are very beneficial. We need those, but it increases a lot of the bacteria and so you get way too much bacteria in the soil and then you are creating more, there's a lot more nitrogen in the form of nitrate, and that's what wakes up the weeded seeds. But if you have high levels of nitrate in the soil, then the weeded seeds will germinate. Where if you have a balance of nitrate and ammonium, then the weeded seeds don't germinate. They just stay dormant, which is pretty neat. And that's that's one something that we've just learned in in recent science in recent decades. So, you know, the more we till, the more weeds we have, we compact the soil. You know, years ago, Thomas Jefferson said, we can clear a forest and we can grow crops for 15 years, and then we can't grow crops anymore and we don't know why. just have to go, you know, till or clear more forest and start over again. Well, the reason why we understand it easily now, that's about how long it takes to kill off your soil food web, which is what Dr. Laningham calls it, to the point where the soil's not functioning anymore. And then you have to start over. With plants that we call weeds, they will come in and they will restore the biomass of dead plant material to the soil surface, and that brings in the beneficial microbes again. And it takes another, you know, it could take up to a decade or. It centuries. If Mother Nature does it, when managed by humans, it takes three to five years to create. So it's pretty exciting that we can do that.

Track 1: 31:22

Yeah, I am. In your bootcamp, you talked about humans as powerful caretakers of the earth, and that really struck me because I'm used to thinking of humans as destroyers of the earth. The big companies that are buying all the land, killing the soil, making it so we don't have nutrition and humans just destroy, destroy, destroy you. Were right. There is no other animal that can care. Take it like we can once we learn and we choose to do so. Can you explain a little bit more about that?

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 31:54

yeah, for sure. There's, there's two animals that are absolutely magnificent at restoring the ecosystems. Humans are the first one, and beavers are the second one. So beavers will build dams in any water wave that's going and they restore the water cycle. So when you remove beavers, a large number of beavers from a continent, you tend to start having droughts in the decades that come. And we've seen that in, you know, just when you look at history when you have people who are ecologically illiterate and they simply don't know how to deal with the ecology and what the ecology is telling them when they walk out into nature. They don't, they don't, they can't read the ecology. Then we make mistakes ecologically that tend to degrade land so that land won't produce plants anymore. So there is a lot of degraded land. There is a lot of desertification. I. There are a lot of the problems that happen because people haven't known in the past what to do. But I'm so excited and so positive about this because we live in an age now where we do understand ecology. I mean, if a person can become ecologically literate within a month, if you know what to study and you have a good mentor who can point you in the right direction, you can get on a path in a month to become really ecologically literate so that you know what is happening, and then you probably need three to five years, just like the soil you a person needs about three to five years to practice it, to, to become really good at it. That's why I teach my classes is to get people on this path because we can take a piece of ground that most people would look at and say, oh yeah, well, that ground won't produce anything. That land's not worth much from, from an agricultural point of view, a land, land that's worth a lot is a land that can produce a lot of crops well. And so desert land, people look at it and think, oh, well that won't grow anything. There's no water. That's the first thing they say. Well then let's fix the water cycle. And, and the argument is, well, you can't fix the water cycle. I mean, it just rain. It's an act of God. If it's not raining, then we're doomed, and that's where we're wrong because humans can do a lot to increase the amount of water that we hold in the soil. We can even create situations where we get more frequent rains. So we've got the big water cycle that comes from the ocean, and then we have the small water cycle, which are things like thunderstorms. So if, if you ever, ever look at the weather channel early in the morning, the forecast is. There's not really a chance of rain today, and then three o'clock in the afternoon, there's thunderstorms popping up. Well, so where did that rain come from? Well, it came from your local area, maybe the mountains around you. The, the grasslands around you, the, the swamps where wherever you are, water is evaporating from wherever, and it goes up into the air, and then you're getting precipitation. So if we can manage our land to hold more water, which we can, then those local rains can happen more frequently as the sun is evaporating water out of the ground. So, and you know, it, it can get pretty technical in the science of how that works, but we've seen that happening. This is not just a good idea. I mean, the case studies are there. We, we, we know people who are doing this. wE're up, according to Dr. Allen Williams, we're up to 38 million acres this last summer. Of people who are keeping their ground covered. This is big farmland all across North America. And instead of doing all of the tillage of bare ground, which creates a high pressure because the the sun hits that bare ground, the hot air rises creates a high pressure. If a cloud comes along, the high pressure pushes it further. But if you have the ground covered with living plants or dead plants, which is what farmers are doing now, instead of tilling it in, they're leaving dead plants on top of the ground. Now the sun hits that and, but it's not as hot because the sun doesn't reflect off of dead plants or living plants, the same the way that it does off of a tilled soil. So now you've created a low pressure up in the sky and a cloud comes along and we have a much greater chance for rainfall. Alejandro Carrillo is doing this and the Chihuahua Desert in Mexico. He's part of that a, that 38 million acres. He's got 20,000 acres. And it's awesome when you have these big landowners, meaning large acres, because if you can control a pretty big area, then that will significantly impact your local region with rainfall. And you know, but boy, you go talk to somebody and say, oh, we can make it rain. They roll their eyes and they think you have lost it because pretty much all of humanity believes that things like rain and wind and acts of nature are simply an act of God, an act of nature. And humans have no control over it. But the more we are dealing with the ecology, making the right decisions, the more we are seeing that we certainly can have a positive impact on it. And we look at people who are doing things to create bare ground. And we see less rain, we see hotter temperatures, we see it going the opposite direction. And so it points to you know, just, it's it's becoming quantifiable. It's pointing to the fact that the way we manage the ecology absolutely has an impact on our, our land. You know, our livelihoods. It, it all really comes down to, to finances for a lot of people.'cause if you have a piece of land and you're, you are relying on your paycheck from what you're producing from that piece of land, then you want to manage it so that you get as much as possible. And the way we get anything from land, as far as agriculture goes, is growing plants. Even if you're a livestock person, you are a plant farmer first. You're a grass farmer first. You are a microbe farmer. Before that. So it all starts with the microbes, and the microbes will grow the plants, and then the plants will support the animals.

Track 1: 38:47

Yes. Oh so much in that, that is a message of hope along with just super cool science. So, so much of some of what I think of climate change, like weird hot temperatures and, and no rain and the threat of famine coming, so much of that can be created by humans is being created by humans with current practices and then so much can also be helped that science makes sense. That doesn't seem like voodoo for me. Sun reflecting off of bare earth. I also really something you said about, sorry, let me try that again. I also really like how you talk about the water can come down more easily in areas where the plants, where the, it can come down more easily in the areas where the soil is covered. but how the water can stay in that soil. So you did, at the bootcamp that I attended, you did a visual aid that has just really stuck with me. You had an amount of water and you had a piece of bread. Was it two different kinds of bread? Can you, can you explain the analysis you did? It was showing soil compaction, but because I live in a place where there's a lot of desert and compacted soil, we got a huge rainstorm a couple of years ago that just decimated a small town next to me because the soil was so hard it couldn't absorb any of the water. So I really was woke, have woken up and paid attention. And this year when I was doing your practices and my soil was softer, we had thunderstorms come through and a whole bunch of rain gushed down in the same way that it did a couple of years before. But we had an entirely different landscape for it to stay on. And we had zero problems with flooding. Where before it was rushing into my basement and causing chaos and we couldn't really hold any of it. What it meant for me now was I was worried to see what was happening. I had to swish some wood chips back in place, but I just didn't have to turn on my sprinklers for a few days after that'cause the water held. That's only, that's only after one year. I'd only been doing it for one season, really covering it different. So can you tell me, tell me how covering the earth helps that.

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 41:06

Yeah. So I mean, you, you cover the earth and that creates the home for the microbes. And so they can go to work and the microbes create what we call is the gros sphere and the sphe. And so the aggregate TheraSphere or aggregates, they are these little balls. They're pulled together like you know, think of a jar filled with marbles. Okay. And so the space between those would be the aerospace between all the marbles. Well, that's gonna be the por sphere. And so that's where the water goes. It's like a sponge. So we're creating a soil sponge the thing I did in bootcamp with the, the pieces of bread to, to show this. So I have one plate with a piece of bread on it, and then I have another plate with flour on it that you make bread out of. And then I have a plate with a tortilla, and they're all the same thing. They're all flour and water, except the bread is filled with microbes because we put yeast in bread and then the bread rises, and then as we bake it, it creates this por ophere and the aerosphere, and it holds it in place. So you can take you know, four or five teaspoons of water and put them on the bread. And the bread soaks it up and it holds it. And then if you tip your plate, you don't really get any water coming off until you, it becomes completely saturated. You keep pouring water on there, and finally it's pouring off. But what happens is the water comes off clean. And so that's exactly what we want. We want that water to come clean out. And that is an example of what happens in our soils. If our microbes are healthy the soil, then, and we get enough rain, it will become saturated. But as the water runs off of our land into waterways, it's clear clean water. We're not polluting the rivers, killing the fish. We're wa dirt is not going away. Taking our precious top soil and polluting our deltas in the rivers. So there's all these benefits. tHe other plate in this experiment that we show is the, the flour. Now, when you pour the teaspoons on the flour it com, it runs off immediately and it's cloudy and dirty. So that is showing us an example of a tilled soil where you don't have that grottos sphere and por sphe holding things together. And so a lot of your flour will erode away causing the problems downstream.

Track 1: 43:42

another person that I listened to is Dr. Zach Bush, md. He does farmer's, farmer's footprint where he's also teaching farmers not to till and to do some of these very same principles, but they were out, I'm trying to think if it was in Mississippi or something, and there had been so much runoff of the chemicals used for farming and for big ag, like big food production, ag that The, all of the chemicals had concentrate concentrated, and the silt coming from the topsoil that was just like dead dry coughing, dirt, that these people were getting all kinds of cancers. Their children were getting way more problems with like attention and autoimmune and everything because they had to touch the stuff that had run down the river from everything above it. I just haven't gotten rid of that visual in my mind of what runs off when, when it's unhealthy stuff on the soil and the soil doesn't have anything to anchor to as rains come.

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 44:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a big problem. yoU know, flooding is such a huge deal nowadays. You know, that flood there where, where you are, you mentioned a few years ago that was it was devastating. I. And, you know, that's what we show on that plate with the tortilla is you put the water on it and it doesn't soak into the tortilla. 99% of the water just runs completely off. And that's what's happening to our super compacted soils. All the way up that canyon into the mountains where the water is all running down and it can't soak in. And it is because of the mismanagement of the land. Now, I, I hate to blame people because the people who are managing the land, they're good people. I'm not blaming anybody specifically. I'm not out to get anybody. It's just that we live in a world that is still ecologically illiterate. We simply don't know how to fix that. So let's say we have a million acres in a, in a watershed area on the side of a mountain. How do you fix that whole thing, you know, so that we don't have a flooding? Well, it's the same thing. we we encourage plants to grow. And we let them grow. And Alan Savory with holistic management, has taught us how to do that. And you know, he's been very successful and there's ranchers all over who've been very successful. This is how Alejandro did it is following holistic management. So this can happen in our gardens. This can happen on farms, growing crops. This can happen in orchards with fruit. It can happen in range land with where we're running cattle. We just have to manage the land properly.

Track 1: 46:32

I remember you saying that Utah or this high desert area used to be a thriving grassland, and you were talking about pictures of some of the Indians that we have from some of the first photographers we had out in that area. Can you tell me. What you have found through your research to, and the research of others to be one of the biggest things that will turn a place into a desert or a grassland. What's one of the ways we, what are some of the ways we manage that differently? I.

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 47:07

Y Yeah. So we know it's a grassland because of how the soil looks. If you take a backhoe and you dig deep down into the ground or you find a gully that's been eroded out and you can see the horizons of the, the soil that's how we know it used to be a grassland in many, many areas. So the thing that created the deserted conditions we have now. Is we removed a lot of the grazers in the early days of the European settlement and then we brought in a lot of cattle. Now I'm a hundred percent for cattle. Cattle are fantastic, but they can cause some overgrazing issues if we don't understand how to manage them properly. In fact, we have 2000 cattle right here out, out the door right now. They're my ecological tool to bring back the deserts and so this winter we have'em, they're going home the day before Christmas. so We brought them in for a period of time to do a job. They're gonna be go on semi-truck and leave. It'll take us three days to get that many loaded on trucks and shipped out of here. But cattle are the greatest tool that we have found to take a degraded piece of ground, and you have it grow grass. But if you just put cows out there and they're wandering aimlessly for the growing season, they will be hard on the ground and they will over graze. They will kill out certain species. But if you manage them in such a way that you concentrate the manure and the urine in one place, and then you move them the next day and, and then they never come back to that one place for about a year to three years, depending on what's happening. And so you have to know what you're doing to make this work. If you get a lot of good rainfall, if there's a lot of good seed in the ground, then maybe one year, it may take three years if we're in more of a drought situation. But what we're finding is that about 60% of the cow pies that are left out there will grow grass if cows don't walk over them and break them up. We, we need them to be, to stay intact. So that the seeds can sprout and grow out of them. Generally with normal rainfall levels, we are seeing the grass growing within a year and it's, and it's coming back, but we have to manage it. So we have our, our big fields here divided up into 160 acre pieces. And those 2000 steers are on that for about one day Now, how long do you keep'em on? How how many cattle do you put into an area? It depends how much food there is for'em. So years ago when there was no nothing out there, they couldn't have been there that long because it wasn't enough food to feed them. So what would we do? Well then you need to bring in more cattle on a smaller piece of ground. Now this sounds counterintuitive. And this is what we did in the early days. And I mentioned this in my book about the re the Livestock Reduction Act, when they removed the livestock from the Navajo Indian Reservation, which is a pretty dark spot in American history'cause we did the wrong thing. But the, the Navajo had had the sheep there for 400 years. They got the sheep from the Spanish, the explorers that came in. And any, any culture that has something working for 400 years, they're managing it correctly, especially in these arid fragile lands. So anyway, the sheep already moved and then it deserted quicker than ever. And there's many, many examples of this happening worldwide because scientists.

Track 1: 50:55

the sheep were removed. Right. Because we, the scientists that were working on this area for the government told them, no, it's turning to desert. The problem is the sheep. We need to take the sheep away. This is what happened in Africa, right. With the, it was deserting. So they think it's the elephants. So they say, we need to kill all the elephants, and surely that will help it. And, and, and in neither case, did it help. Right,

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 51:20

Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. See, the, the, the logical thing that the scientists thought was, well, the species are the grass species and, and the Forbes, the legumes, all these plants that are out there, they're getting fewer and fewer and further and further between, there's more bear ground. So we're losing the number of species and the density. We're lo losing both. And so it's turning into a desert. What's the problem? Well, there's too many animals eating it, that's not the problem. That's the first conclusion we come to, but that's not good science. And now what we know is that when We remove the grazers and it doesn't matter what they are, they, they can be any animal that grazes. But when we remove those grazers, then the grant land recovers the next year really good. So you have all this growth and then everybody says, oh, see, it's the grazer's fault. But then two years down the road, it still looks pretty good. But seven, eight years down the road, a lot of those species have killed themselves out because the light could not penetrate through the dead standing material. And so how do you remove it? A lot of the Indians all across North America, they would burn the, the grasslands. And so fire is a tool that you can use to do that. The problem with fire in our climate today of we're being worried about pollution. bUrning grasslands releases a lot of the, the greenhouse gases. If people are worried about the greenhouse gases, then fire is not a good solution. So what's the other solution? Well, it's eating that off and trampling it down with grazers. And when you do that, the manure and the urine, the hoof action and the saliva, the, the grazing, those contributors of a grazer will make the grass grow more. And we can have a whole class on those, those impacts that an animal has. But that takes too long for for this conversation. But when you have all of those impacts, it makes the grass grow. So where you are growing the, a desert, trying to, to make it more lush so that you have some food for the people who live there. You, you need to encourage as much grass as possible. And, and the best way to do that is with livestock. And if you have a multitude of livestock, it's best mixing, you know, mixing up cattle, sheep, goats deer, elk, you know, all the different animals is fantastic. If you only have one species, it doesn't do as well.

Track 1: 54:05

So on a big landmass like that, where there was initially a problem, like something is deserting and scientists think it's the grazers. The grazers, like the something else was actually wrong and the grazers were just kind of holding it together. But the thing that was wrong is that actually the micro balance in the soil, the porousness of the soil, things like that, like what is actually wrong that they were pointing at the grazers for,

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 54:31

Y you know, I don't know. And I don't think that data was ever captured back then. Nobody was, nobody was out there doing a good scientific study to actually figure that out. You know, I don't, I I wish we knew. We don't know. And, and that's kind of a tragedy. Here's what we do know. If you have a population of people who depend on the land for their food and for their culture and their livelihood, which is pretty much everybody, everywhere on Earth, but when you have people depending on that land, you need to make that land productive. And, and we know how to do that. And we didn't know this 50 years ago. This is new science. We, we know that we, if if you can't grow enough grass to sustain a hundred cattle, then you need 200 cattle. No, that sounds nuts. Well, you don't even have enough for a hundred. Let's cut it down to 50. You cut it down to 50, and in five to 10 years, you won't be able to have 25. The way you grow more grass is with more livestock managed correctly. So you wouldn't take you know, 50 cows on 300 acres and then double that number of cattle on the same acres and do it the same way. You would need to, instead of 50 cows, let's get 300 cows and put them on 10 acres and move them twice a day, and then they never come back to that area for a year to three years and allow Mother nature to sprout those seeds and, and get them growing. And if nothing's happening, then let's say that the Cal pies have been there for a year in an arid place and, and there's no grass coming out. Then maybe you need to flash graze your herd through there, which means they never stop walking and you move them through very slowly, slow enough that their heads are down eating what there is and their hoof action going through there will stimulate seeds to grow. And that's what happens.

Track 1: 56:51

So if people wanna learn more, say you have a piece of property and you want to turn it into a vibrant piece of property, or you know, for permaculture or for joy or if you are depending on farming for part of your income or you're doing agriculture, then they can contact you, which we'll have show notes that will list all of yours. There's other people that I know you mentioned that they can learn like Alan Savory. Is he the biggest one you would look at for land management with cattle or goats or,

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 57:23

yeah. Alan Savory the Savory Institute is fantastic. Yeah, the, there's, there's a bunch of people. yoU know what, let me just tell you quickly what I've done in my, in my class with the, and then, and then this will lead into the people to study, but I, in one classroom, I bring in holistic man management, which is all savory. I bring in permaculture, which is Bill Moison, and then Jeff Lawton made it he evangelized it and made it really popular. So study Jeff Lawton and he's fantastic. And then you've got biodynamics, which is the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. And then you've got Silva Pasture, which goes back 10,000 years if you look at the archeology in, in England. So you have all these different groups and ways of doing things. Well, I bring it all into the Georgia School room where we can see the benefit of all of these. And it's, it's interesting'cause you go to a permaculture conference or a biodynamic conference or any of them. And they all kind of are a little bit negative about the other groups. And I would really like to see people get over that because we're all on the same team and we all really have great things to offer. Look at biodynamics. What do they have to offer? They have the best soil that there is, the highest soil test. The outliers on the soil test that we're off the charts of the best soil in the world is the biodynamic farms. And then you look at permaculture. What do they have to offer? Well, they offer the very best in the design. You have a piece of land, oh, well what do I do with this piece of land? The permaculture people are the ones who will maximize the ecological processes on your piece of land. So it would produce a maximum amount of whatever your goal is. You know, normally it's a food production system. And then you look at Silva Pasture. Well, what does it do? Well, it's, it maximizes the amount of food you get per square foot of land. So, not only are you growing your garden on the ground, but you've got your bushes and you have your overstory of trees, and, and how do you use those trees? Of course, permaculture talks about that all the time. But Silva Pasture maximizes the use of those trees in such a way that nobody else even compares. So there's all these different groups, and those are just a few, there's several more that we talk about in our class, but it, it's, it's so important, you know, if, if you really wanna understand how to make the most nutritious food from the like big agriculture, like if you're dealing with hundreds of acres, you'd be studying people like John Kemp and Nicole Masters and Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta. If you're looking at permaculture, you're gonna take a good look at the, the teachings of Bill Mosson and Jeff Watton. And there's many others. Oregon State has a fantastic program, and there's, they have a lot of videos for free online that you can, can look at biodynamics, you know, look their stuff up. You got Lloyd Nelson they have a, a meeting you can go to once a year. They have their, their biodynamic workshops. So there's all kinds of places you can go to learn these things. But I, I've been looking for decades for the book that tells the things that I wanted to see and I could never find it. You had to read a library to get it. So that's why I wrote my book Worry-Free Eating is because it brings it all together into one place, one classroom, and my focus was ecological literacy because all these groups I've mentioned today, they are ecologically literate. And, you know, so well, why do you need all of them? Well, for the reasons I just said, because you don't wanna have a really great design, but you're, you're struggling to get your soils where they need to be because it could take 10 years, it could take 50 years if you just let Mother Nature do it.'cause you could plant the right things, but if you don't know how to jumpstart it, you're gonna be waiting. So that's why you bring in biodynamics because now with permaculture and biodynamics working together, you can have the best soils in three years. I mean, you, you saw what you did just by covering the soil in, in like a year. You were, you, you had heavy rains and you're already infiltrating lots, we say three to five years.'cause nobody believes this. When we say, oh, you can have massive impacts in a year. And a lot of times we're working with big agriculture who have extremely degraded soil because they've been tilling for seven to years and they've been dumping on chemical fertilizers for that long. And sometimes it can take three to five years, maybe even eight years in a really bad situation, especially in low rainfall years, to get that soil to where it needs to be. So erring on the side of, you know, I mean, we don't want to be liars, so we say three to five years, but within one to two years you can do an amazing amount.

Track 1: 1:02:26

I remem. So I went to a bootcamp out in Nevada, like we said, but during part of that, you bring out the microscope and we look at a soil sample from people that attend, can bring a soil sample. And you talked about someone that had Wasn't in my class, but the class you did just before where they brought a soil sample from a farmer across the road from them that had been tilling and spraying fertilizers for, I can't remember how many years, but a generational farm and said that soil was basically dead. Like not much living in it of any sort, which is why they then have to fertilize and then have to do soap. So things that a, a slice of land that has been managed using traditional schools of thought with fertilizers and tilling and everything may take longer to rehab, but my big flower beds had just had nothing happening to them except for, I mean, I was growing weeds and feeling guilty about not getting out to do the weeds, but not getting out to do the weeds. So we would just cut them down and leave the grass there, which made me feel guilty at first, but now I know. Oh, I was actually slowly helping, just at least not poisoning it. And that's probably why mine rehabilitated. I'd like to talk about what options people have for more. So we talked a lot about agriculture or growing things on big swaths of land, but what I like about what you teach is there are the principles, and they are similar principles for whether you are on a 2000 acre cattle ranch or whether you have flower beds. So I really, I think it's so worth learning from William who is pulling these different schools of thoughts together and then choosing what works for you well in your life. So you have YouTube q and as that you do, you have a Patreon, we'll have links for all of these things. You also have boot camps that you do for fall gardening or for spring gardening. I had never fall gardened in my life, but we did indeed plant a seed mixture and at least got some living things in the soil to help them through the winter. You'll be happy to know, but you also have something that, gosh, I wish I would just love to attend if, if I was a younger person without so many responsibilities for four months. So can you tell me about your Georgic school room, what you do with mentoring?'cause wow. If you know any, any people in the teenager or twenties age that, that this might be a fit for William is who I would, who I would send them to. So tell me what you do.

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:05:11

I started a class called the Georgic School Room. Georgic is an ancient word. It comes from the Roman poet, Virgil Geo meaning earth or meaning work. So to work to the earth or to farm. And there's this georgic tradition of writing about farming and poetry. And then there's the other side of it, which is the work aspect. And most of the old time farmers who have been generational farmers would be Georgia Classic people. That's kind of the way they've lived their life. And but the word itself is pretty much obsolete. We don't really hear about it or in our vocabulary today, but I call it Georgia School Room for historical romantic reasons, because I like that stuff. The class is four months long. People can come here. They live here on site. They get up every day, they work with me in the gardens. Each student is assigned a garden plot that is 15 feet wide and 50 feet long, and we plan the garden together, and then I mentor them on how to grow the soil, grow the microbes, grow the most nutritious, flavorful food. And then towards the end of the program, the students are responsible for feeding themselves from their garden for the last month of the program. And this is the,

Track 1: 1:06:32

pause you there. I I, I mean, truthfully, that means they are only eating the food that they have grown. And on your kettle ranch, you, you are, you and a friend is how it started really. Right? He, during COVID when there was food supply chains issues, and you're out there and he, well, he and his large family and his cattle ranch people that worked at the cattle ranch, they're all out there. And the food supply chain could make it very difficult for them to get what they needed. So he knew he needed a way to grow food for the, to support his family and the ranchers on the ranch. So didn't he bring you out to build a w Pini and help him kind of solve it and then hired you and you now help grow that? The food for the workers, for the family, for your family. It has grown on site and eaten and, taken care of so that it can last through some of the months where you're not growing as much now you're still growing in the winters. Right. Different kinds of foods, but you know, not as much.

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:07:40

Yeah. Yeah.

Track 1: 1:07:42

mostly supportive there. So you're, so you, when you come out there, you're on site, on a place where they are growing the food. That is literally what they will survive on. So you gotta get it right.

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:07:52

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we do gross. We, We, grow a lot of food here for our students. We do go to Costco and buy a bunch of groceries, you know, for, we're, we're not growing enough food to feed everybody, everything. But that last month that's what you live on. And last year the students, they, they were funny because they were getting ready for this during the growing season, and they're harvesting things and putting stuff in the freezer. They're drying stuff and they're scared. They're like, we're gonna starve to death. And obviously I'm not gonna let anybody go hungry or starve to death. But, but I highly encouraged them. I said, you need to really take this seriously and eat from your garden. The very first week of class here, they write down a menu of what they want to eat the last month. Then that's how they plant their garden. And so what they plant is in the garden comes from the menu. And then, and then we work on growing the garden together. And we had hailstorms that were wiping people's plants out the, the first month we had excessive rain that we normally don't get in this climate. So things were different. And every time that we hail storms, it did damage, it did significant damage to little plants that had been put out. And I told the, I just looked at them. Every time that the hail would come, we would look out at the hailstorm and I would say, welcome to the Georgia tradition, that's what the literary tradition is about, is about how hard a farmer works and how he has to fight mother nature. And that's a lot of the, the, the ancient literature about it. So it was pretty funny.

Track 1: 1:09:35

You're also learning composting, worm, composting, adapting, how to make a small scale, how to make big scale, how it's just such a well-versed education in, in real life, real food, real soil. Do you turn a patch of land that was not producing into a vibrant, beautiful, producing, producing piece of land in, in action in person. So

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:10:02

Yeah, yeah, for sure. We, we do tailor this to the context of what the, the students' needs are. We have the students identify something in society that they don't like, a need, a societal need. So what is something that speaks to you that you don't like? Have you ever known somebody who was hungry? How are you gonna feed them? I mean, just identify any problem in society. What can you do with your gifts and talents to make it better? So there's a whole self-development part of this because we can learn all the skills in the world. About any, any subject. But if we are not a person who can follow through and make something happen, we're, we're gonna struggle in life. So there's a lot of that self improvement that we, that we really focus on in this class. And there's no better way to self-improve yours, your, your life than to be in a garden and have to take care of a bunch of living things that can't ask you. They can't tell you what's wrong. A a, a child that's old enough to talk, they can at least tell you what's wrong. You know, if they're crying, you know, a five-year-old, that's crying, you can say, what's wrong? My belly hurts. Well, well that narrowed it down to a lot of things. But when you're sitting in the garden and your carrots aren't growing, you, you can ask the carrot what is wrong, but it's not gonna speak English to you. And so you, so it really helps us to become ecologically literate. So we have to start surveying the entire situation. Is there a bug? Is there a disease? Is there a lack of nutrients? What is going on? We can pull soil samples. We look under the microscope. Are the predators in there that are driving the, the nitrogen cycle? Or are they, is this system actually working? And so we can do all of this stuff? It, it's, it's pretty remarkable. It's, it's very fun to see the, the students struggle and thrive.

Track 1: 1:11:58

I went to a class by Dr. Shannon. Help me remember his name, Dr. Shannon

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:12:04

ShAnnon Brooks.

Track 1: 1:12:05

Dr. Shannon Brooks. The, that leads Monticello College and he. Was saying how strange it is that we have specialists for so many things in our towns and our cities. Specialists for teeth specialists, for eyes, specialists, for all kinds of things, but not for the soil. Like not someone to teach us what is happening if our parents aren't growing. And there's almost, there's very little more basic need than us knowing what is happening with our soil if we need to be growing food. You may not have to grow your food now, you may not have time now, but let me tell you, that's, that can be really important in some situations. And what I think about your mentorship program or the boot camps, or your book or whatever, is like sending networks out of people into their cities and towns that now can speak this language a little bit better. And I see as we speak that language better and get information out in. Formats that are easy to understand and apply. We can have some more literate people and maybe even some specialists that people know to go to if the tomatoes aren't growing or this is always getting blight or bugs or whatever.'cause they are typically helped by knowing what's going on in the soil. So we need to come to the end of part one just for time. William has agreed to do two parts with me, which I'm so grateful for. This was more laying the groundwork for why this is important in talking about some of the things happening in agriculture and gardening and farming and in the current lay of the land, I guess you could say. But part two is going to go into more how we use this information into what we do with our gardens. So I am really interested next time in having William walk us through what we do to prepare our garden and to grow a more successful garden. With spending less. So I would urge you, please do not lay out your plot of gardening and go to your local nursery and buy all the things you normally buy until you listen to our next episode. But until then, since this will be releasing in the winter, William, can you answer with our last bit of time we have, what are some things you can be doing in the winter to help your mindset or to help your soil so that when it's time to start growing, we could be a little bit more prepared?

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:14:38

Okay. So I think the first thing to do is start studying some of the people that I mentioned today. You could get my book and read my book. You could study some of the other names. Physical.

Track 1: 1:14:51

Free Eating, right?

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:14:53

Yeah. Worry for eating. Yeah. And it's available on Amazon, so it's easy to order. A physical thing you can do is start rounding up lots of organic matter. If people are still raking leaves, you know, that's kind more of a fall activity than winter. But if you can find old rotten bales of hay straw, barnyard, manure, any kind of organic material start collecting that so that you can use that in your garden. That is the number one thing that's missing from all the gardens that I see is there's not enough organic matter. So you need to have grass clippings, wood chips leaves. all of that kind of stuff is fantastic. So, and that's a good thing to do in the winter. So collect that and, and read, read, listen to podcasts, and I have all kinds of things. You could go to my YouTube channel if you, if you're an audio visual learner get on my YouTube and start watching videos. If you want more, if you want the UpToDate stuff that's coming out right now, then you join my Patreon. The, the videos on YouTube are, are a year old. I mean, they're still valuable. They're still relevant because all we ever talk about are principles. But the new releases are on Patreon. Read my book Thursday nights every Thursday night at seven o'clock Pacific time. I am on a free q and a and you can get the link from my website revolution. And anyway, I'm here to help. I just want people to have the most nutritious food in the world. We've talked mostly about gardening and land regeneration today, but the reason is to have nutritious food because when we regenerate the land and we have a beautiful soil, that's when we create the most flavorful, nutritious foods.

Track 1: 1:16:43

Thank you William. I got, I gotta tell you, it reminded me when you were saying gather up the leaves if they're still still there. So we have had snow on and off the ground now, but we still have some of the leaves that we haven't gathered up from our neighbor's trees that always drop often. I just feel guilty and like sad that I don't get the time to go rake up the leaves and put it out, and I should make my yard look better by taking care of all these leaves. But after attending your bootcamp, I knew those leaves are wonderful mulch for my garden. So my husband came home one day to find me just smiling ear to ear and kind of giggling to myself with a whole arm full of leaves. I had just gone to get my gardening gloves on and I had an extra 20 minutes, so I went out and was just scooping up Armfuls. And he's like, what are you doing? Why are you so happy about it? And I said, well, what William said is it's sometimes crazy that we as humans rake up the leaves, which is natural mulch, and we'll create natural fertilizer as the microbes eat it, and then we put it in plastic, take it to the trash, and then we buy fertilizer and put it on our gardens when we are just throwing away a better fertilizer. And I'm like, I am. I don't have to shove these in a bag. This is my precious fertilizer. I'm laying it on my garden and telling it. Good luck. Hi microbes. I love you, I'm saving

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:18:13

right.

Track 1: 1:18:14

It's making my yard look better. It is just a win-win win, which is how it feels with every principle that I follow that you teach. So. I wanna thank you for making me smile even when I'm dealing with soggy leaves in my yard, and we will see you next time on a recording of episode two. So thanks for joining us today, and thank you so much, William, for the wisdom that you're sharing

squadcaster-fggc_2_12-11-2023_102021: 1:18:37

Hey, thank you. It.

Track 1: 1:18:40

Until next time.

1:18:48

Isn't that a cool conversation? I think some of the takeaways for me would be when William talks about some of the traditional gardening and agriculture, habits that we have or traditions that we have may be creating some of our worst problems like compacted soil or weeds, and I love that he has easier answers for that. I'm so excited to share more of those usable, functional answers in episode two, which will come out in about a month. I loved what he had to say about humans being a force for restoring the ecosystems. Like I said in the conversation, I'm used to thinking of humans being destroyers of the land, but he's right. We can also be caretakers of the land more efficiently than any other species here. So it's neat to be learning how to really do that, how to speak the language of the ecosystems, how to speak the language of our environment and our areas, and to help Mother Nature speed up the process and help her repair instead of consistently destroying. So neat. I loved what he talked about rainfall, about how we can actually help through these practices, bring more rain into our area and help the soil hold on to that rain. How cool is that? Super cool. And especially since I'm in the high mountain desert seems even. More fantastic to me. We are always praying for rain, but sometimes it comes in big swaths and we think maybe we've prayed too much jokes aside, we really would love to hold on to more of our water in our soils and hold the nutrients in our soil. So I'm so grateful for what he shared and it's fascinating to think about areas that are deserts now. That were grasslands and about some things that we have done that have made them desertify more quickly, but what we can also do to bring back the grasslands, bring back the healthier soil and, work to make it healthy again. So thank you so much for joining me on this episode. I hope you'll check out his links, which are in the show notes and his book. And I'm really excited for the interesting conversations that all of what William DeMille shares can spark. There's just so much to learn there and be empowered by. I'm also looking forward to having you join me next time. I am in conversation with Abigail Levi, who is one of the founders and creators of Abigail's Oven, a fantastic sourdough company. The twist on that is she started that when she was 10 years old. In her parents kitchen, and it grew and morphed and is an amazing company today. We talk about what she learned along the way regarding wheat, gluten, business, entrepreneurship, family, and it's a fascinating conversation about what she learned in life as she went. So join us next time on What Really Makes a Difference. We'll see you then.