Episode 22: Elementals: Nitrogen & Understanding Fertilizers

Current World events have the topic of petroleum on everyone's minds. While not widely understood well over half of all agriculture is only made possible because of the Haber-Bosch process of converting atmospheric nitrogen into urea, anhydrous ammonia and nitrate fertilizers. The disruption of natural gas supplies in the Persian Gulf stands to impact the global food supply sooner than later. Here in Episode 22, farmer Don Tipping provides a basic overview of the role of Nitrogen in the environment as it applies to plant growth and maintaining fertility of agricultural lands. The existential threat to our food systems compels us to develop and strengthen local food production, distribution and storage to ensure resilient Agrarian communities. Be the solution!

Here is the audio version on Spotify

More at:
 www.thetippingpoints.net

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Show notes:
The Party's Over, by Richard Heinberg
https://richardheinberg.com/bookshelf/partys-over

World Fertilizer Use: 
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertilizer-total-use

Check out more at:

www.dontipping.com

Courses & Farm Tours: https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/pages/workshops-and-tours

Seeds & Tools - https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/

Growing Tips https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/blogs/news/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello, and welcome to episode 22 of the Agrarian Renaissance podcast, where I try and share a roadmap of a successful way forward of how do we retool civilization and get us back to some of our agrarian roots and navigate the peak oil cliff we seem to be hurtling off of the collapse of industrial civilization and how do we create regional islands of coherence? So I'm talking to you today from the Cascadia Bioregion down in the Klamathiscu Mountains, and where I'm near Williams, Oregon, on March 27th, 2026. My name's Don Tipping, and I've been an organic farmer and seed grower and agrarian enthusiast optimist for well over 30 years now. So I've been trying to uh build up these talks, these podcast episodes, as a bit of a foundation so that we have a shared understanding, a lexicon, a of the jargon of what is an agrarian civilization. And even though everyone alive, except for the handful of hunter-gatherer uh peoples still functioning their traditional in their traditional lifeways, lives in an agrarian civilization. We eat food that has largely been farmed and uh or ranched. Um there is a small percentage, I would venture guess it's less than five percent, that is still foraged or hunted, whether that's mushrooms, or in particular, I think the biggest component of the hunter-gathered food is fishing, commercial fishing. But all you gotta do is look at uh uh the statistics to realize that we're um we're overfishing the oceans, and that's not a viable um method of securing protein except on a very small scale. And commercial aquaculture seems to be a bit of a nightmare if you dive deep down that. And if you haven't, I encourage you to check out the documentary documentary C Spiracy. I'll put a link in the show notes about that. So um what I wanted to talk about today, because we're in spring and everything's growing like crazy here in the northern hemisphere, as all the trees and perennial plants come out of dormancy and grow leaves and flowers and the grass and all the forage is growing abundantly. A bunch of that's water weight, but it's nitrogen, is the big driver of the what plants use to grow leaves. And nitrogen is the seventh element on the periodic chart. In case you forgot, I had to double check. It sits on the chart in between carbon and oxygen, and once again, the periodic chart is organized by um atom the atomic number. So the atomic number for nitrogen is seven, and that means it has seven electrons for every proton. And if you look in our whole uh galaxy, nitrogen is the seventh most common element. It's a non-metal, uh mostly occurs as a gas here on Earth. It makes up about 78% of our atmosphere, and the rest of the air we breathe being oxygen, a little bit of carbon dioxide, um, hydrogen, a little bit of helium, and a little bit of other trace gases, but a bunch of nitrogen in the air, every breath you take. Um, and the breaths that the plants take through their stomata, too. So it occurs in all living organisms because nitrogen is at the core of both DNA and RNA and all amino acids, and you need amino acids to build proteins. So if you think, you know, a lot of folks just have a very cursory understanding of proteins and nitrogen, like, oh, I need to eat more protein in my diet or something. Well, proteins are what plants use to move things around. RNA writes proteins as a communication network for the building blocks of life. But I'll spare you a little molecular biology lesson, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least touch on that point. So in the human body, yours and mine, nitrogen makes up about 3% of our total body mass. So that means for me, I've probably got about four pounds, four or five pounds of pure nitrogen in me. And we use, you know, when we look out in nature, um, nitrogen comes from three primary sources. It before, you know, non-industrial sources, those being nitrogen-fixing plants, things like legumes, peas, and beans, but also trees like acacias and and the like, uh, black locusts, honey locusts. Those are trees that actually fix nitrogen from the air through their stomata and their leaves, which are like pores that open and close, and they work in a relationship and a symbiotic conjunction with a bacteria, actually, a whole family of bacteria called rhizobacters. And these colonize the plant roots and make these nodules. And you can dig up a pea plant or a bean plant or clover or things, any nitrogen-fixing plant, and you can literally see these nodules on there. So it benefits the plant, these bacteria, in terms of making more nitrogen available to the plant, but then also when the plant dies or is cut back or grazed in the example of like alfalfa or clover, it sheds those nodules, and then that nitrogen becomes available to other neighboring plants, which is cool. Um, there are other nitrogen-fixing plants that are not legumes. I'll just mention a few noteworthy ones because they are worthwhile knowing about. Here in my bioregion, um, we're in this kind of overlap of the California ecology and the Cascadia ecology. We have these chaparral regions where we have Cyanothus. And there are many species of Cyanothus here and all throughout the California floristic province. And soon they'll be flowering and they give this pungent, musky aroma. They're in the Ramnaceae plant family, and they fix nitrogen too, even though they're not a legume. And then there are also in the rose family, the rosaceae, we have a plant commonly known as mountain mahogany, but the Latin name is Circocarpus betuloides. We also have another one here. And that's in the rose family, but they fix nitrogen too. And in on our farm, we use another rose uh family member called Aronia, Aronia melnocarpa, which is actually native to the upper Midwest, and it goes by the common name of chokeberry, and that's in the rose family, and it fixes nitrogen too. Um, and also alders in our area, which is a native deciduous tree. We have a few species: red alder, white alder, sitka alder, depending on the elevation of where you're at. And those fix nitrogen in conjunction with a fungus called Francia. I've never dug one up to look for it, but I trust that it's there. And you can notice that in the fall, when all the leaves of the other deciduous trees are changing color and beautiful hues of salmon or red or yellow, the alders drop their leaves green. So one of my mentors, Tom Ward, Tommy Hazel, actually suggested creating little weirs in if you have a stream to gather those leaves and you could compost them because they're rich in nitrogen. So if you couldn't get fertilizer anywhere else, that might be a good thing to use in your garden. Um, and then so the second way that nitrogen becomes available for plants to grow, just it or it cycles through the environment, is animal manures. And we're talking everything from insects, slugs, all the way up to whales and elephants. And if you add up all the mass of animals on the planet, that's a lot of manure. And it's not pure nitrogen, there's other elements in there and a lot of moisture. Uh in general, manure, depending on the species, can be anywhere from like 2% up to you know 15, 20% in the case of birds. Uh, there's a great book I'll put in the show notes. I don't know if it's still in uh print, but it's uh designing and maintaining your edible landscape naturally and also the integral urban home. That's the one that has a chart comparing the uh various constituents and different types of manures and their suitability for use in gardening. Um, so they even include humanure and like dog and cat manure, but I would not recommend those because of pathogens and they're just gross. So the third way that nitrogen uh cycles through the environment is lightning. So most of the nitrogen is just bound up in uh molecules in the air and it doesn't fall freely when it rains. But when we have lightning, that's a big energy source and it fractures those molecular bonds, and that rain that follows a thunderstorm uh brings a trace amount of nitrogen. And if you spend any time down in the desert southwest and have appreciated the artwork of the indigenous peoples there, you'll see they have the thunder gods and goddesses are uh featured prominently because those peoples in their ancient agriculture didn't really use animals as livestock, so they didn't have manure for fertilizer, but the rains brought fertility with them. And if you think of the amount of lightning on the planet, that's a big cycling of nitrogen. We don't get many thunderstorms here in our region, uh, but some areas of the planet definitely do. And uh, you know, in the Midwest or folks that grew up on the east coast of the United States, you definitely see that. I've seen in the Serengeti Plain, you know, big thunderstorms roll through, and I'm sure that does a lot to stimulate the growth of the savannah and the grasslands there. So what's uh fascinating, and that why I'm bringing up why nitrogen is so important, is because with the current events globally happening with the war in Iran and other squirmishes, uh we're seeing some supply chain shocks as far as petroleum. So human beings since the uh you know World War I basically have doubled the amount of nitrogen applied to the earth through the Harbor Bosch process. And so that is using natural gas. So if you think of an old-style like Texas oil well, um, they would flame off the natural gas because otherwise it would build up to dangerous explosive levels because they didn't have a way to contain it or do anything with it. Nowadays, natural gas is all over the place. If you uh use propane or gas heat or you heat your water with uh natural gas or propane, you're using natural gas, and fracking is in the news a lot, and that is trying to obtain natural gas. And if you're following along on uh you know the news in the last four weeks, you'll notice that there's major natural gas deposits in the Middle East. And so I need to back up about 120 years now, and go back to the human population in the year 1900 was about 1.6 billion people. Now we're up over 8 billion people. How did that happen? Is it just we got better at living? No, it's because of petroleum. And the author Richard Heinberg, who wrote a few great books, but there was one that introduced me to this concept of energy return on energy invested, he pointed out that as we, you know, it was really World War II, that era, that human population really began to spike. And it was because we got better at harnessing petroleum for all kinds of things fertilizer, uh, transport, agriculture, uh like tractors and that kind of thing, uh, but also plastics and synthetics and medicines. Pretty much nitrogen is used in all pharmaceuticals of some sort. Um, and you know, they're using nitrogen derived through uh natural gas, the burning of natural gas in some shape or another. So Richard Heinberg said we had a speciation moment somewhere in there where we speciated into two distinct branches. We had Homo sapiens, subspecies sapiens, and then Homo sapiens subspecies petroleum man, because it's estimated that anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of the human population only exists because of our extensive use of petroleum. Um, and me too. Here I am talking to you on a computer with plastic headset. Uh the thread that made my clothing was probably polyester, not cotton, even though I'm wearing all cotton. And petroleum, it's everywhere. It touches so many elements of our life. And for thousands of years, agriculture existed through using nitrogen fixing plants, the aforementioned lightning, which was just a freebie, uh bringing nitrogen with thunderstorms, and mainly animal manures. So, because you needed domesticated animals uh to pull your plow or pull your wagon to bring your things to market. And people don't do that so much anymore. Um, we'll get into that a little bit more later. So, what changed? So in 1908, this is probably the most significant invention in human history. I would argue if it was up to me, it it's far and away the most important one, more than the wheel, fire, antibiotics, any of that stuff. Reading, um, is the Harbor Bosch process. So that was a period where Fritz Haber discovered that you could free the uh nitrogen in the in the air using uh energy source, a big energy source, and at that time natural gas was just seen as uh a waste product of petroleum and make it available as ammonia, that gaseous smell, the stinky smell if you've ever been around uh, you know, animal urine and manure in a barn or something. That's ammonia, which is NH3. Uh we won't do too much chemistry, but it's it's it's useful to at least remind ourselves of these things. Uh so Fritz Haber initiated the process later. Uh Carl Bosch uh elaborated on the process and in in uh 1913. And so the Harbor-Bosch process, as we call it today, is what's used to create anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, uh, taking the N2 out of the air and turning it into NH3. So uh later there was another uh chemist, uh Otswald, and after which the Otswald process is named, and he used similar techniques to create nitric acid, which is HNO3, hydrogen, nitrogen, and three oxygen atoms. Um so today, like in terms of fertilizer use on the planet, there's three main things. And if you've ever bought a bag of fertilizer or you know, some liquid fertilizer, whether it's organic or not, even like fish emulsion has these numbers on it, you'll see three numbers. And that represents the nitrogen, is the first number, phosphorus is the second, and the potassium is the third. And there was another scientist, we got to go a little bit farther back in history, named Justus von Liebig, and he was a chemist in Germany, and a lot of the more uh forward-thinking uh chemists were in the Austria-Germany area at that time. Uh, and he in 1840 was doing uh research about organic chemistry. And so he took plants, dried them, then burned them, then analyzed the what would the mineral content of the ash, and he discovered that the the he developed an analogy to picture this. It's called Liebig's barrel. And if you think of an old barrel, it's got staves or planks uh that are you know thin pieces of wood that are stacked together with metal bands to make a barrel. And so he used this analogy to describe the various elements, uh minerals that were in the soil, uh, which there gave life to the plant. So the three most uh prominent ones were nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. And that was the first understanding by science of you know, what if we could increase the the uh prevalence of these, the availability, could we uh accelerate plant growth? And that you know, scientific inquiry kind of cruised along until the Harbor Bosch process, and then World War I came along, and that led to a major mobilization of material science, but also mining and transport of various things around the planet to support the war on everything. And so at that point, we were obtaining, we're talking, I'm looking on my notes here for the year, salt petra in 1910 was used for making sodium nitrate, and that was mostly mined uh in caves where bats lived, like fossilized bat poop or seabird guano, where seabirds had just created huge deposits of guano poop. And this was you know chemically refined into both gunpowder and fertilizer, but also bomb making and ammunition and all of that. So you can imagine a World War I when we shifted from you know uh simple rifles to machine guns and planes that could drop bombs on people and all of that. It was a uh we we needed more and more of this nitrogen uh in order to facilitate that. And then after the war, uh we had developed all this industrial capacity, so we turned the war on humans into the war on the earth, and bomb making became fertilizer production, and then tanks became tractors, and then uh you know the chemical engineering for uh poison nerve gas like mustard gas became the insecticide industry. And if you look at Dow and DuPont and Bayer and all of these old corporations, they were at the forefront of making insecticides, fungicides, pesticides with um petroleum, basically. So uh if we look now, currently on the planet, we apply 195 million tons of fertilizer. And that's so that's uh a lot of times fertilizers are blended as NPK, like I mentioned earlier. So 59% of that total is nitrogen. That equals 110 million tons, these are 2023 numbers, the most recent ones I could get, of fertilizer to the planet. And then from our world in data, I'll put the link uh below so you can follow up on this and geek out if you want. I'm not making this up. Uh it's estimated that over 50% of the global population, which is about 4 billion people, it relies on chemical fertilizer for their food. And the remaining people are still peasant, small-scale family farmers around the world, uh, I would say predominantly in the developing world, they're still using uh horse-drawn plows, oxen, donkeys, mules, that kind of, and doing things by hand. So, you know, going back to that, just thinking about now that uh, you know, the industrialized nations are using a lot of fertilizer, it's estimated in the uh like in North America here, most of South America, and Western Europe, we use about 50 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare. That equals 43 pounds per acre in imperial measurements. In China and India as they're trying to uh industrialize their agriculture uh to feed increasingly uh skyrocketing numbers of people, they're applying up to 100 kilograms per hectare, about twice. Here in the U.S., we've learned through algal blooms and nitrate and nitrite pollution in the Gulf of Mexico that uh, you know, as it all washes down the Mississippi River basin where a lot of agriculture happens, that over fertilizing it just runs off. There's only so much the plants can use. So we on an XY graph, we probably reached a higher level of fertilizer, and then because you have to pay for this stuff and it's a lot of work to apply it, we've realized that less is actually better. There's a point of diminishing returns. And China actually, if you look at a chart of the XY graph of their fertilizer use, it's going down because they're learning their you just don't get more bang for your buck. And anybody who's gardened and over fertilized with like chicken manure or something, you can see the plants get yellow and die. Um a a great uh little personal science experiment you can do, citizen science. Uh I tend to do this. I've got a little patch of poison oak that tries to grow up an oak tree behind my house. Our urine has a lot of uh nitrogen in it, it has ammonia, you know, which I said earlier, NH3. And you can smell it, uh especially, you know, the first pee of the day. You can go pee on a plant repeatedly, uh, and you you can kill it by just nitr over nitrogen uh fertilizing it. And an interesting fact, too, because think we eat a lot of food over the course of a year, we eat a lot of food. Uh, there's a certain amount of that that's protein, let's say 10%. Uh and that protein is the building blocks of those molecules that we call proteins, is there's nitrogen in all of those, because back to the amino acids. We're going full circle here. Um, the urine that one human being makes in a year, if you could somehow store it, if you were to just like put it in buckets, a bunch of it would go gaseous. That's what that ammonia smell is. It's it's uh the nitrogen uh escaping into the atmosphere, uh volatilizing. And uh that's enough nitrogen, pure nitrogen to keep one acre fertile. So I remember some permaculture uh teacher I had years ago suggested like if you have an ample source of sawdust, let's say you have a wood shop or you do some sawmilling or you know somebody that does, you can put that in a bucket because that's just almost pure carbon. Um, so you need a good carbon to nitrogen ratio. Remember back to compost science. You need enough nitrogen to like burn the carbon to get it to compost. Um so just peeing in a bucket of sawdust is a way, and then you could layer that in your compost because urine is sterile. Don't be afraid of urine. Other people's urine, fine, but your own, it's fine. It came out, your your body made that. So pee on a compost pile, pee on a tree, just not too much, or pee in a bucket with sawdust, and you can capture that nitrogen, which may become more important as we move into potential Great Depression victory garden tactics that I think are going to be really important because what I'm about to share. So uh 45 uh urea is what a lot of chemical fertilizer is called, uh, which is also called anhydrous ammonia, and the chemical signature for that of the you the you little classic chemists out there is CO parentheses NH2 parentheses two. So you can see that there's nitrogen and hard hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen in the urea molecules. It's a little confusing when you hear urea, it tends to make you think urine, but it's not. This is a uh a chemical product made mostly from natural gas. And so that has 45% pure nitrogen in it. Um so when the Ukraine war uh started in I think it was 2022, maybe 21, um Ukraine has rich natural gas deposits. And uh I read some stuff that the Biden family had extensive uh financial interest in those natural gas deposits, as did other uh corrupt uh losers that we call leaders. Um fertilizer prices tripled when that war started because uh supply chains were threatened or bombed or whatever, and because there's a war going on, so fertilizer went from$500 a ton for anhydrous ammonia to$1,500. And then for a brief moment it spiked up to$1,600. So currently, in the last three weeks, fertilizer prices, according to uh sources, I could I'll put the sources in the show notes, went from$700 an acre, because they never went back down because the Ukraine nightmare is still going on over there, uh, because humans don't know how to get along and collaborate and cooperate, except sometimes. Uh and that's kind of the topic of this podcast is that we should cooperate and collaborate and develop uh you know resilient, regenerative nodes, islands of coherence where you are, because the global thing is a shit show. And d everybody's talking about oil in the news right now. I'm not a political uh scientist or analyst because most people don't know of any farmers, they're not a farmer. They're not maybe not even a gardener growing any of their foods. So their only concern is the price of gasoline or home heating oil in the winter, or you know, your natural gas bill, um, or how expensive propane is if you're low-tech. Um, but really we should be way more concerned about fertilizer and the role that natural gas plays in the production of anhydrosammonia and uh nitrate and urea fertilizer. Because as it gets more expensive, farmers, if they're watching the price of diesel and fertilizer skyrocket, they they might do the math. Here we are at spring planting time. The head of the Farm Bureau just reached out to the current clown show administration and said, yo, there's a lot of farmers that aren't even gonna plant because they're gonna lose money. And I wouldn't do that either if I relied on that system. And you could see that your input costs are higher than whatever money you you could make. Probably what's gonna happen is they're gonna turn on the money printing machine and further destroy the value of our currency and give band-aid handouts to Midwestern industrial chemical farmers who most of that stuff, you know, like 65% of the corn and soy produced in the Midwest is for uh biofuels and like ethanol production, which is a super wasteful way to convert um, you know, ancient sunlight, which is all petroleum is ancient sunlight. It's not made from dinosaurs, it was like really small plants like azola and other algae that sank to the bottom of the ocean or different marine sediments and over time went back into being carbon, because that's what what it was as things break down. Anyhow, it's a really dumb way to convert ancient sunlight into energy now, ethanol, like growing corn to turn it into alcohol to burn in a car or engine. It's just it's very inefficient when you consider all the transport costs. Um and the uh a huge amount of that corn and soy too, and the alfalfa and wheat that's grown in the Midwest, it goes to feedlots to be fed to genetically engineered, you know, nightmare feedlot kind of food, which I would argue isn't even food. So um that whole system is in for a big challenge. Here in the United States, we do have our own natural gas supply because of all the fracking that we do and all the pollution we're creating from that. So we do have some domestic supply of um natural gas, but uh big areas of the world like Western Europe, a lot of uh Asia, Japan, Philippines, they they don't have any. So one-third of the global fertilizer that's produced goes to the Strait of Hormuz. And I know I I've read that Iran is starting to broker like a$2 million per boat fee to lit some through. Um, but it it represents a big supply shock. So everybody's talking about oil, but really we should be talking about natural gas because they also just bombed they, them, the whole crazy nightmare war uh hawk community that thinks we can settle disputes through fighting. Isn't that like didn't people get that memo when you were like six years old that you can't resolve things through fighting? It doesn't work anymore. I think it's all just a smokescreen for the military industrial complex and taking money out of one pocket, uh, like here, defense spending and putting it in the pocket of the defense contractors and then giving more money to groups like Halburton to rebuild the infrastructure that they bombed and create this nightmare. It's I think it's demonic, really, deep down system. So, but I just I want to lay this out as a farmer because most people don't know farmers, they don't understand this, and I'm a super small-scale farmer, but I try and stay abreast of what conventional agriculture is doing because they are my colleagues in some way. We're all tending the earth, tending the soil, trying to coax the growth of plants and animals forward to feed our communities and uh clothe ourselves and nourish uh our civilization, our our agrarian communities. Um I just joined the board of a nonprofit here in Oregon called Friends of Family Farmers. And uh I there's some good news here as we talk about, you know, at the ideas of how can we nourish and incentivize resilient regenerative community. Is um there was a bill, I can't remember the number that passed late last year, uh, that enables you here in Oregon, it's just for Oregon, that you can use your domestic well. I don't know if you're on city water, probably not if you're on city water, but if you have a domestic well, you can irrigate up to a half acre garden, a mini farm, um to grow and sell produce or flowers or herbs or whatever. So before you could still grow that much, but you couldn't sell it, you'd be in violation of some laws. So that was really great because I think we need to see many more uh mini farms, microfarms. And because those, then your supply chains are are local and you be delivering by bicycle or foot or donkey cart or any of that kind of stuff. So we need more of those slow, small, slow solutions rather than the big giant ones. Uh so right now the big giant solution for um fertilizing most of the agriculture is using natural gas. And so I read that like a huge natural gas plant was bombed in Iran and one of the largest in the world in Qatar was uh bombed as well. So that is gonna be a supply shock. It's gonna be interesting. You know, there's right now I think probably the government here is gonna put a band-aid on this gaping wound of the dysfunctional agribusiness model uh by printing money and just giving subsidies and handouts because most of that system doesn't even work uh ecologically or economically without subsidies, um or like insane loans through the farm bill. If you look at our national food policy uh as seen through the lens of the farm bill, it's subsidies to big agribusiness and food stamps. And I know in our area, 50% of the sales at our farmers' markets is food stamps, which is shocking. Here in Oregon, I think the state total is one-fifth of the food, whether it's at grocery stores or markets, is bought using food stamps. That's not a very good system. What if we took all that money and we created community farms and we reskilled people to run little micro farms? I I had a former student who became a friend out in Denver, and he's a uh, I think army vet. And he worked uh to develop a program called Veterans to Farmers and training um people to with new skills. And they had they got some seed money to start it, but they had greenhouses growing like chili peppers and then turn that into a hot sauce business. I'd so much rather see this kind of money rather than handouts and welfare because people, I don't think people really want to be on welfare. I I can only imagine what that does for your dignity. Uh I would rather see grants for, you know, take that money. It's like billions of dollars. I think like on the on the whole, it's like 180 billion dollars in the farm bill goes to Snap and WIC and all those kind of programs. Um and develop, like get farmers, get older farmers who are retiring who know all kinds of stuff to train people or master gardeners or whoever has the skills to train people and you know build greenhouses, plant food forests, develop soil fertility, composting systems to grow food locally. And if you look at a really inspiring example around this, and this is a good way to kind of close this dark cloud with a silver lining, because I think we're in for some challenging times. And if you've got any extra money, I'd put it into uh non-perishable food uh and fuel uh if you've got the storage or create a better pantry system or food storage system, because that is only going to uh pay off. Because not only is food going to become more expensive, uh the purchasing power of your dollar is intrinsically gonna go down because they're gonna continue to devalue our currency. Uh, it's just that's the trend, not to be a bearer of bad news. But there's a great documentary I saw once called The Power of Community, and it was looking at Cuba that was relying on imports of fertilizer from Russia when they were still uh under the arc of the USSR. And so really quickly they had to, much like a heroin addict, go cold turkey on from chemical fertilizer and figure out how to grow food locally using old school techniques like animals and manure and uh cover cropping, and just more efficient. There's a lot of waste when you do industrial agriculture, um, and just look at like crop loans and crop insurance for some statistics about that. Um, besides food waste of people just because Americans overeat, putting in the garbage. It's estimated, I think, one-third of the volume at a landfill is food that people didn't eat. Um, get some chickens, people, or have neighborhood pigs. Anyhow, this power of the community looked at in a very short amount of time, they mobilized and they ramped up and they said, we're gonna distribute all food through state-owned uh food distribution things. So we're all gonna have to tighten our belt to get through this together, but we're gonna tighten our belt as a community. So doctors are gonna get the same amount of calories as a janitor, and that is brilliant. And not that I am an advocate of communism, but I think if we were to go through a similar level of rationing, I think here in the U.S. the rich would eat and the poor would starve. And that's just a sad thing about democracies, is there always seems to be a back door for the elites and the wealthy. They can always get out of jail free. But anyhow, in Cuba, they all I think it was 1,500 calories a day. So there's like no dairy products, very little meat, because they needed all those animals to be making manure or pole plows and stuff. Um and then I think very shortly, uh in a short period of time, over 90% of the vegetables consumed in the city of Havana were produced within the city limits. So anybody that wanted to grow food could have a plot of land. Um, and they also I think kicked out or nationalized any large tracts of land, 160 acres or over. Uh, so a lot of those are probably like leftover absentee landowners from like dole banana republic kind of stuff. Uh yeah, again, the kind of things you can do with top-down dictatorships of just like, you know, it's my way or the highway. But in that instance, it was a beautiful example. Another good, hopeful example is when the fall of the Soviet Union happened, there had already been in place the Dasha movement, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but of community gardens, of small-scale gardens. And a lot of people had gardens, and this probably wasn't just in what we now know as Russia, but many of the former Soviet bloc countries. So a lot of the uh fruits and vegetables were just grown by the people that were there. So they weren't relying on extensive supply chains, like here in the Rogue Valley where I live, the Rogue River Valley of Southern Oregon, 97% of the food, according to the latest uh Rogue Valley Food System Network analysis is imported. So even though we have all these farms and ranches, when you drive through our valleys, you can see a lot of agriculture, a lot of it's export. You know, so if a winery's there, or if uh let's say a rancher's raising hay uh or beef, uh some of that beef is exported or sold at auction and stuff. So it's not feeding people locally. And also part of that is because where people obtain their food, which is mostly like Walmart, Costco, big box stores that aren't sourcing from local farmers. So it's really important that you support your local farmers. Like, really isn't a big enough word. I'll I'll say crucial, vital, mandatory. If you eat, you need to know a farmer, support a farmer. And there's a great saying like, you know, once in your life you might need an attorney, you know, once a year you might need an accountant, every now and then you need a doctor, uh, but every day you need a farmer. But most people don't even know any farmers. Like, and I know for a lot of my social group, I'm probably the only farmer they know. So go to farmers markets. Don't I don't ever want to hear anyone ever tell my, I don't want the sound going to my ears of like, oh, it's more expensive. I want to say, you know, screw you, sorry. Good luck with your job that just uses a laptop. Do you know how many things I need to do my job as a farmer? It's like, it's crazy the amount of tools and land and buildings. It's so extensive. But to basically live at like an almost peasant level of existence, which most farmers do. Most farms in the U.S. have negative income. And the only way it works is debt, and uh one of the family works off the farm with a job that has like healthcare and stuff. So we're about to have a major shockwave hit our whole food supply system, and the smart people, the compassionate people are developing the lifeboats and the community resilient regenerative systems now before it's too late. And I've heard a few uh economists say, we're gonna skip right over the recession part and go right from whatever economy we have now, which I think has been in a recession for longer than they're willing to admit, to a depression. It's gonna be drastic and radical. And I don't think there's any easy way out of this, but it's fine. Like I think tending the land and having a garden is probably the best thing you can do for your mental health, your physical health, and your spiritual well-being that you can do. So go do it. I want to encourage folks to do it. Drop uh notes in the comments. And if you haven't already done this, please like, share all those things, uh, trumpet your uh appreciation for these efforts because I'm not making any money doing this. I'm mainly doing it because I don't want to be the only person that all these hungry people are like, oh, I should have done this, that they're coming and knocking on my door. I wanted to be like myself back in 2008. I didn't even know there was a financial crisis because we were so subsistence-level farming that I'm only like catching up on the history of it later because we live mostly off-grid. So I want that to be your experience is that this shockwave doesn't hit you and those that you love quite so hard because you were preparing. And uh to quote a friend uh a saying they heard in the military is you don't rise to the occasion, you fall back to your level of training. So again, get your pantries in order, all that stuff. So I'll put all the books and stuff uh that I mentioned in the show notes. You can do more homework, and there'll be an audio version only of this available on Spotify and other podcast streaming things. And please share this with your friends. Um I'm I'm enjoying doing it. I think I'm building a good uh library of audio content for really what is a university of understanding ecology as it applies to agriculture. And that's really the goal. And if you have suggestions for future shows, feel free to do that. I'm gonna begin interviewing uh other farmer friends or people that are hunter gatherer types uh because farming is more than just food, it's also the clothing we wear and um industrial uh applications for things like linen. Uh so all the best to you and enjoy the springtime. Get out there and grow something good. Peace.