Why Soil is the Key to Future Health, Following Your Gut Podcast #22

Roland Pankewich welcomes back Jeff Thurston, exploring the theme “From Soil to Soul.” They delve into the critical link between soil health and human wellbeing, emphasizing how depleted soils impact food nutrition. Thurston reflects on environmental stewardship, the importance of returning to nature, and fostering sustainable practices like home gardening and supporting local farmers. They discuss the power of collective small steps, the concept of convenience over stewardship, and making individual choices that contribute to broader ecological health. This conversation is a profound call to action for better soil care and personal health.

About the Guest(s):

Jeff Thurston is a respected authority in the field of probiotics and regenerative agriculture.  He boasts a rich career dedicated to understanding and educating about soil health, microbial interactions, and their profound impact on human health. Jeff is a prominent advocate for sustainable agricultural practices and is preparing for an upcoming speaking tour to share his insights on “Soil to Soul.”

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body." 

Transcript

0:00:02 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the following your gut podcast, where clinical wisdom meets health science. Today, we got one of the bosses back on. I’m super excited to be back here with Mr. Jeff Thurston, the man himself, the godfather of probiotics. He’s doing a fist pump, but you guys can’t see right now, but I promise you, it was good. And last time Jeff was on, he talked a little bit about company history. We really didn’t get to hear what moves him in life in terms of his own knowledge, interests, and expertise.

0:00:34 Roland Pankewich: And he’s getting ready for his speaking tour. The circuit is coming up in terms of all the health shows. And he’s come up with this new concept, the title that I heard from Soil to Soul, and besides being a very provocative title, it sounds super interesting because it kind of spans the physical world into something a little bit more, dare I say, spiritual, sort of. I want to welcome you back, Jeff, and I need to dig into soil to soul with you. But first and foremost, how you doing?

0:01:03 Jeff Thurston: I’m doing fabulously well, thank you. Winter is waning. Spring is around the corner, and nothing can be better than another spring.

0:01:14 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, well, you know, we’re doing this in February of 2026, and psychologically, when you cross that threshold of mid Feb, you know, you’re close. Maybe you guys up north a little further away than some others, but it’s. At least you can look forward to seeing green grass again and going outside without, you know, getting frostbite in T minus 10 minutes.

0:01:34 Jeff Thurston: Right. Or putting on 15 jackets and five layers.

0:01:37 Roland Pankewich: Yes, but you are very safe. Should you fall in that scenario. But that’s, I guess, a tangential conversation topic.

0:01:44 Jeff Thurston: Yes.

0:01:44 Roland Pankewich: So, Jeff, from soil to Soul. I want to know what the inspiration for this is, because I think it’s something that everyone in our community really needs to hear.

0:01:55 Jeff Thurston: Well, it starts from the. The question that. Imagine you’re standing in front of your great, great, great, great, great grandchild, and they ask you, why did you poison the soil? Because it was supposed to feed me. And if we don’t start thinking longer term and understanding how important it is, what’s underneath our feet, you know, our health is tied to it directly. And so if you. If you’ve got to go from what’s in the soil, you know, that’s got to be right to human health, it’s got to be right before you can, you know, go somewhere else and, and, you know, and. And have that message carry on. So to me, that’s what it’s all about. I grew up in the 60s.

0:02:49 Jeff Thurston: That was when I was in high school. And it was a book called the Silent Spring. Rachel Carson wrote it was all about the dangers of ddt. Birds disappeared, you know, especially the raptors. And, and I’m looking around today. Cornell just said that we’re down 500 million songbirds, but who’s counting? You know, it’s. If that’s not the canary in the coal mine, I have no idea what is.

0:03:13 Roland Pankewich: Very interesting. So let’s pretend that this may be a message that people are hearing for the first time. I think I would like to dig into the problems that you’ve been researching into the soil and what’s actually happening there.

0:03:28 Jeff Thurston: Well, it’s not just the soil. It’s, it’s, it’s almost every biological system. Liebig had this term. He called it the Law of the minimum. We are not regulated, nor is the soil regulated by the total resources as much as it is limited by the scarcest resource. So if we, if the soil has, you know, scarce resources, how is your food going to have any? And if your food doesn’t have any, how are you going to get it?

0:04:01 Jeff Thurston: I mean, you can’t, you don’t breathe it in, you know, so it’s, it’s, to me, it’s so important. And, and the microbial world, which is really, you know, the, the, the point that, that I grew up with and I, I still follow through with a probiotic company, you know, it’s the microbes. You know, 250 million years ago, plants moved onto the land for the first time. And what did they bring with them? Mycorrhiza fungi.

0:04:30 Jeff Thurston: It’s been a relationship since forever, you know, so if you go out into an acre of undisturbed grassland soil, in that acre, there’s three tons, three tons of bacteria, actinomycetes and fungi, and there’s other things, earthworms and moles and things insects, but there’s three tons of those. And in fact, in a very well aerated acre of soil, there could be as many as 10 tons of mycorrhiza fungi. And these are the, these are the organisms that take the minerals in the food or in the soil and bring them up into the plants.

0:05:14 Jeff Thurston: Now, there are probably 64 minerals in. Some are very major, some are very minor, but 64 that, that humans need. Only about 15 of them can go directly from the soil into a plant. All of the others need microbial activity. And of those 14 that are really soluble, most of those are enhanced by having some microbial activity. We’re growing food now. Right. But it have nutrition in it. It’s got volume, it’s got mass, but it has no nutrition.

0:05:50 Jeff Thurston: So why are we, I look at. Why are we chronically sick? Why are our kids so sick? They don’t have the minerals that they need to. To make things work. Yeah.

0:06:02 Roland Pankewich: They’re running a deficit, so to speak, biochemically. And, you know, in saying what you said there, growing up in the 60s, do you remember food tasting a lot differently? 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago?

0:06:14 Jeff Thurston: That’s a hard thing to remember because I can’t remember sometimes what popcorn tastes like. You know, it’s like you don’t have it, you know. But I can tell you this. If you go back into the 1950s, a hundred grams of spinach used to have about 150 micrograms of iron. Today, that same amount of spinach probably has less than 30 micrograms grams. And I’m choosing iron because iron is a really particular mineral that has such an impact on human health.

0:06:53 Jeff Thurston: Right. You need, you know, the. The bacteria in the soil, they do. They. They make citro fours, and those citro fours can take ferric iron, which is insoluble, and make it ferrous iron, which then can be taken up by the plant. So now the plant will get some iron. An animal, whether it’s a human or a root, you know, a deer or a cow or something like that, eats the plant and then they get the iron. The most bioavailable iron comes from another animal who’s already processed it. But, you know, not to exclude vegetarians and vegans from the conversation, you know, they’re still going to produce and process iron. If their microbiome, if their digestive tract is right, then they will be able to utilize that iron.

0:07:42 Jeff Thurston: But iron. Let me ask a question. How long can you go without food?

0:07:49 Roland Pankewich: Probably a week to a couple weeks, depending upon your energy store status.

0:07:55 Jeff Thurston: Right. How long can you go without water?

0:07:57 Roland Pankewich: What is it, a couple days max? Maybe.

0:08:01 Jeff Thurston: How long can you go without air?

0:08:04 Roland Pankewich: As long as you can hold your breath.

0:08:06 Jeff Thurston: Right. So. Well, I mean, it’s like minutes, you know, with the exception, you know, it’s minutes. So what is the priority? What’s the hierarchy of things that are most important?

0:08:17 Roland Pankewich: I would say oxygen is the most important nutrient on the planet.

0:08:20 Jeff Thurston: Right. And what does oxygen do?

0:08:24 Roland Pankewich: Do you want the technical term?

0:08:27 Jeff Thurston: Oxidizes things and makes them kind of rust?

0:08:30 Roland Pankewich: It can. It can, yeah.

0:08:32 Jeff Thurston: In.

0:08:32 Roland Pankewich: In certain contexts, yep.

0:08:34 Jeff Thurston: Right. But Mother Nature has given us, you know, various ways of converting that oxidized material into unoxidized or reduced, like superoxide dismutase. People take antioxidants all the time, right? That’s what happens every time you breathe. Mother Nature’s created this system. The most important part of that system is catalase. Those catalysts will convert to hydrogen peroxide that’s produced in that process and convert it back to hydrogen or so water and oxygen.

0:09:10 Jeff Thurston: What do you need to have that? You need catalase. What does catalase need?

0:09:15 Roland Pankewich: Iron and sulfur and all kinds of

0:09:18 Jeff Thurston: other minerals, you know, so, so it’s just one little teeny tiny part of a. Right. But the whole system is, if you don’t have the iron from the soil, how do you have it working in your mitochondria to give you energy?

0:09:31 Roland Pankewich: Back to that scarcity resource concept.

0:09:34 Jeff Thurston: Right, exactly. But iron is a blessing and a curse, right? Too much you have a problem. Too little you have a problem. It’s got to be maintained perfectly by the system and mostly because it’s tied to a protein. And if it’s tied to a protein, most adults, seniors my age don’t get enough protein, you know, so that all of a sudden energy becomes an issue and a lot of other things. So it, there, there’s processes that go from beginning to end.

0:10:08 Jeff Thurston: But let’s go back into the soil. The roots of a plant can go down in the ground 12ft, right? And when sunlight hits a plant, you have photosynthesis. Half of the energy of that photosynthesis goes back into the ground to feed the microbes. So, you know, everything, everything is tied to everything else. And when you break the chain anywhere, you’ve got to restore that. And most of the time in, in a lot of medicine today, they look at a, a broken part. You have a certain symptoms and they give you something to take care of the symptoms, but they’re really not covering the problem. And that problem can often be quality of the food you’re eating.

0:10:54 Jeff Thurston: I can tell you this. If you’re, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re not well and you’re eating nothing but fast food and sodas, probably never going to get better,

0:11:09 Roland Pankewich: Fair to say.

0:11:10 Jeff Thurston: So I kind of look at, I kind of look at things like people say, well, organic food or good food is so much more expensive. Well, I’m going to say if you put your health care management budget and your food budget together, you spend more on food, you’re likely to spend less on medical care. If you spend less on food, you’re probably going to spend more on medical care. It’s the same budget.

0:11:36 Roland Pankewich: Front end or back end conversation, Right, Exactly.

0:11:41 Jeff Thurston: So that’s the genesis.

0:11:43 Roland Pankewich: It’s interesting. You said that I wanted to bring something your way in terms of getting your opinion on it. Right. So you say that to people and it’s a piece of information and that doesn’t, it doesn’t hit until it actually becomes real in their reality.

0:11:59 Jeff Thurston: Right.

0:12:00 Roland Pankewich: You tell someone who’s healthy, oh, you got to take care of yourself because it may go away until they feel that it’s not something that really resonates. Right. Same thing with what you say about the environment, the quality of the soil. These are things that people cannot deny, but it doesn’t cause them pain yet. So there’s no, there’s no solution on the horizon. And the average person want to take action to find remedy.

0:12:26 Roland Pankewich: You’ve been on this planet quite a while longer than most of us. What do you think it’s going to take for the mentality of humanity and, and the global awareness of not being, not having to react only when a problem comes, but having the insight or the foresight to be proactive. What do you think it’s going to take for us to change that relationship with things?

0:12:50 Jeff Thurston: I don’t know, to be honest with you. Because convenience outweighs stewardship.

0:12:58 Roland Pankewich: Can you explain that a little bit more? I think that’s a really powerful statement.

0:13:01 Jeff Thurston: Well, it’s, that is, that goes back to that initial question I asked. You’re standing in front of your great, great, great, great grandchild and they say, why did you poison the soil that’s supposed to feed me? We’re not thinking about our grandchildren. We’re not thinking about our great great grandchildren. We’re thinking about the food that we have right now and what we’re eating. Oh, and if we get sick, we’ll go to the doctor and they’ll take care of us. We don’t have, we don’t have that sense of stewardship. You go back to the Iroquois nation long ago, and they had a concept of the seven generations principle.

0:13:36 Jeff Thurston: Right? That every leader, and I don’t care if it’s the leader of the family, the leader of the community, the leader of the church, political leader. I don’t care what kind of a leader it is, that when they make decisions, they should look at what the impact might be on seven generations to follow. And if you start thinking that way, stewardship is there automatically. It’s not convenience, it’s not quarterly profits. It’s it’s what are we leaving behind?

0:14:09 Roland Pankewich: And when you say stewardship, you’re talking about enacting personal responsibility to make a difference. Like your actions overseeing something to actually make a difference.

0:14:20 Jeff Thurston: Yeah, I mean, if, if it typically happens, you know, corporations are driven by profit, right? So if you have a supermarket and the supermarket all of a sudden is, is their, their business is going down because everybody’s going to the, the farmer’s market to buy good food. What’s the supermarket going to do? It’s going to buy good food, right. And then they’re going to sell it at a little bit better, better price than, than the other guy.

0:14:49 Jeff Thurston: Where are they going to get the good food? They’re going to have to go to people who are using regenerative agriculture as opposed to conventional. I mean, you take an acre of grass and you turn it over, you till it, you kill it. You’ve cut off all those bacteria and everything else that are down below that top 6 inches of soil, that 8, 10ft of bacteria and mycorrhiz fungi, you just chopped it off.

0:15:12 Jeff Thurston: You know, so if you, we need to figure out better ways to grow the food that we’re growing, everybody needs to spend a little bit more to do that and that will force things. You know, the supply and demand is going to take care of a lot of different things like that, but it’s going to take people having the, the drive to make that happen. Something’s going to have to make that happen. You know, it’s just convenience is too important these days.

0:15:39 Roland Pankewich: Well, it’s funny as you say that, you know, I’m envisioning everyone getting a multitude of Amazon deliveries all the time. But there’s the thing that is encouraging on my end is I’m seeing more of a support of farmers market culture happening in different places. You know, you’re getting people who come together, they create co ops or, you know, they’re, they’re creating these groups that are being enacted to support farmers markets so they get the awareness out to the communities about these farmers markets. There’s one that I go to as often as I can and it’s wonderful just to go through the farmer’s market. And my favorite part is, and this is where I think people have a little bit of a block that this might be good to hear.

0:16:21 Roland Pankewich: When I bring my baskets up on the counter, there is a lot of food in those baskets. But every time they calculate my total, it’s 50% under what I’m expecting because I’ve been conditioned by the convenience of the grocery store. You know, I think there is something that the grocery store is not the discount anymore. The grocery store, you’re paying for all these logistics, you’re paying for all these middlemen, all these brokers, these brands.

0:16:44 Roland Pankewich: So when I go there, sometimes I6 items, it’s like 118 bucks, go, what the heck did I buy? But I come home with three bags of stuff from the farmer’s market, sometimes it’s like 90, 100 bucks. And I don’t want to project anything on anyone from a financial perspective, you know, but if the opportunity to allocate is there, it is the number one best investment you can make in yourself. And I think you can probably say it’s a little way of throwing a token back to the planet. Because most farmers markets are supporting small farms.

0:17:18 Roland Pankewich: Most small farms are probably adhering to, honoring nature and the processes by which they grow food.

0:17:25 Jeff Thurston: Yeah, exactly. Now just look at a supermarket, for instance. My grandmother could never have gotten a tomato in a grocery store. Any time of year from November until August up here in the north, right? The tomatoes just don’t grow. It takes, it’s a 90 day crop from the time you grow it, you know, and so, and you can’t start up here until Memorial Day, so you’re already at the end of the summer before you can get a real tomato.

0:17:55 Jeff Thurston: So what do you get? You get a tomato that’s grown in Chile, it’s green, put on a plane, shipped up here and you know, a lot of gas, it’ll turn red. And you buy it, but it was picked green, it doesn’t have all the nutrients in it yet. The food isn’t ripe, you know, and, and that’s what you’re buying now. If you, if you, you know, if you, if you go down to the, the farmer’s market and you buy enough tomatoes and you can them yourself, guess what? You’ve got tomatoes that were grown that have all the right sugars in them, all the right minerals are in there, all the right. The lycopene, all those things are in there, right? And then you got a good tomato and you can, can and it’ll last a little while, but then you’re gonna have to wait a while before you get tomatoes again.

0:18:39 Roland Pankewich: That’s the way it was supposed to be. You know, that whole idea of convenience versus the reality of honoring the food that nature intended for you to eat. You know, there is this concept of seasonal eating and, and I’ve often debated what buying organic so. And so or buying in season. So, and so, food wise. And I always arrive at the fact that if you follow the patterns of nature, you’re probably going to align your physiology with the nutrition the body needs to optimize how the body needs to perform given a season.

0:19:14 Roland Pankewich: You know, winter and summer are two different states of metabolism. So I, I like that you’re putting that forwards and I think it’s important for anyone get to know when things are meant to grow. That rhymes. That was inevitable. That was just by accident. But that was kind of cool because that’s, I’d imagine what you’re trying to portray as a message. You’re going to get the nutrition that you need from that food if it was meant to ripen on the vine or mature in the ground.

0:19:39 Jeff Thurston: Yeah. And, but there’s, there’s, you know, I mean, to get really far out there, there’s an epigenetic component to all of this too. You know, where you grew up, the, you know, what you ate was around you has an impact on your genetics. Right. And so if all of a sudden you start eating food from somewhere else that has totally different, very different components to it.

0:20:07 Roland Pankewich: Right.

0:20:07 Jeff Thurston: It just doesn’t really match all that well. Skinner, you know, the epigenetics is. And this is something that drives home that seven generations thing too. Skinner did some studies years ago where we. Things like nicotine and BPA and then clozalin and subjected pregnant rats to that chemical. Right. Never again were those rats exposed to it. The male offspring of the first generation had extraordinarily low sperm counts.

0:20:43 Jeff Thurston: For four generations later, that sperm count was still low, even though the pregnant rats were not exposed again. The grandchildren were not exposed again. It lasted a long time. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of reasons to eat local, there’s a lot of reasons to eat seasonal, there’s a lot of reasons to eat organic. But not one of them is convenience.

0:21:08 Roland Pankewich: No, it’s actually quite inconvenient for probably most scenarios. But you have to make that choice, I’d imagine, is what you’re saying.

0:21:15 Jeff Thurston: Right.

0:21:15 Roland Pankewich: It’s a choice of your own health.

0:21:17 Jeff Thurston: Everything’s a choice.

0:21:19 Roland Pankewich: Exactly. Oh, wow. That’s a lot to think about because it’s such a simple concept. But you can see how the map evolves out from the simple idea, quality of the soil, how it affects the soul of the individual. What do you think are some strategies, based upon the research that you’ve done, that can be done to help the quality of the topsoil on this planet? Right now.

0:21:46 Jeff Thurston: Well, that’s, you know, if you can grow your own food and compost your, you know, the waste products you have, and. And put that into the soil and. And don’t spend a lot of time turning it over. Grow companion plants, because a lot of plants, you know, we’re monoculturing. We. We just. We just take 50 acres and just plant a tomato plant in there. The same tomato plant, right. You know, if you were to plant basil in there and marigolds in there with it, right, Those things are going to have some impact. Garlic, there’s another. You can plant a lot of things together.

0:22:17 Jeff Thurston: There’s a lot of things you don’t want to plant together. There’s books written on companion planting, you know, so you can grow your own food. And it doesn’t take a lot of space to grow your own food. Just takes a little plot of ground and then. And then. Then you can go into your community and start doing community gardens and you can start growing some food. You eat a little bit of good food. I’ll tell you what, when you walk out into your garden, you take a little cherry tomato off the vine. It’s red, and you eat it.

0:22:43 Roland Pankewich: Oh, it’s amazing.

0:22:43 Jeff Thurston: You haven’t tasted anything like that before. If you’re. If you’re, you know, under 50.

0:22:50 Roland Pankewich: You know, I remember as a kid on the side of my house, we had this raspberry bush. It was right next to the air conditioner, right. So maybe not the most wonderful place. But the raspberries, we would just get big bowls full of them. Super red. Not any of them were mold. I put a container of raspberries today. Half of them were disgusting. I threw them out because they get moldy. They’re. They’re picked for a long time in the container. They sit on the shelf. But when you get it right from nature, it’s a different experience.

0:23:22 Roland Pankewich: The food tastes like the food should taste. Which is why I asked if you could remember the experience of produce when you’re in your teen years or as a kid, because I would imagine it’s a very, very different experience than what it is you eat now.

0:23:36 Jeff Thurston: No, I still walk in the woods a lot. Whenever I see raspberries, I stop pick them. Whenever I see blueberries, I stop and pick them. You know, I stop and pick those things and eat them. I have my own garden. I grow them. I raise honeybees. I try to do the things, you know, But I’m fortunate. I have some. I have enough land here that I can. I can do those things. Right. People dwelling in the city have a little more difficult time doing that. But just a pot, a clay pot with good soil in it and make sure there’s some compost in there. Plant a tomato, you know, and when they’re ready to eat, eat them, you know.

0:24:12 Jeff Thurston: You know what I like. You know, one of the things I like to do is I like to put kelp. I get organic kelp. And I just take that and I put that in the soil right in the fall, and so it sits all winter and it just, you know, it just works its way down into the soil and feeds everything, puts a lot of minerals down there in a pretty good ratio. And, and, and that’s about the only fertilizer I do. I do use and do electriculture, you know, because that electron transfer thing is the single most important thing to me of most biological activity.

0:24:50 Roland Pankewich: Is that like putting copper rods in the ground and connecting. Yes. The wires. I’ve seen it. I don’t quite understand how to do it, but I know it’s supposed to really help the robust nature of the plants in terms of their growth.

0:25:03 Jeff Thurston: I haven’t had to use a fertilizer, pesticide, or weed killer in my garden in four years.

0:25:09 Roland Pankewich: Wow. I think I remember when you actually talked about first setting that up. I was with you at one point. That’s amazing. Four years later, you see seeing this outcome and, you know, this is that. That’s a good point. In terms of perspective, it comes back to what I said about people don’t take action until they typically feel the pain. You will see a return on investment once you’ve committed to the process or the path in retrospect. But you have to be mindful to look for it, to understand if it was something that actually held true, I. E.

0:25:43 Roland Pankewich: If you start gardening and you. You want to improve the quality of the food you’re eating, what’s actually coming? Are you feeling better when you start eating seasonally or locally? Is the supporting of your local farmers market going to be something that actually grows and helps the community, gives people opportunities? So I think that’s a wonderful piece of perspective because everything’s hindsight in 2020.

0:26:06 Jeff Thurston: Oh, yeah. But the soil is important for a lot of reasons. You know, just on an aside, I think human health has gone downhill since we started wearing rubber on the bottom of our shoes.

0:26:20 Roland Pankewich: Absolutely. I agree with that statement.

0:26:23 Jeff Thurston: You know, we’ve lost touch with the ground. But if you’re gardening, your hands are in the soil, you’re grounded, you’re discharging electrons and you’re grounding yourself and you’re letting your body start to heal in a natural, normal way. Things are done. So the whole thing is all about, I don’t know, I don’t want to just say back to nature because that there are a lot of things that we do that are superior, you know, I mean, thousand years ago, you know, they didn’t have toilets and we had a lot of diseases. You know, we’ve, we’ve improved things, right?

0:27:00 Jeff Thurston: We certainly haven’t improved the quality of the water we drink, you know, that’s piped in with chlorine in there or sometimes fluorine, you know, and, and the food we eat’s got pesticides on it, you know, and the air is certainly not the cleanest that it was. So we, you know, medicine can’t forever manage systems that are broken. You know, if the system around you is broken, you’re constantly getting contaminants into your system.

0:27:34 Jeff Thurston: There’s no amount of modern medicine that’s going to fix that. You’ve got to fix the problem of lowering the load of toxic junk that’s happening to us. And you got to take your, you got to make the choice. You’ve got to do what you think is the right thing to do.

0:27:56 Roland Pankewich: And it’s interesting, you started off this whole conversation with a notion of your grandchild asking, why did you poison the planet for me? You know, you being a grandfather now, I’d imagine this message is even more important because you’ve seen the third generation in your family and the world that’s kind of left for them if we don’t do something.

0:28:16 Jeff Thurston: Exactly. But we have a choice. The answer to that question is, I am going to stop doing this, I’m going to stop doing that. I’m going to start looking more towards stewardship than profitability and convenience. That’s a choice. It’s not as easy. It’s not easy, but nobody said it would be easy. The easy solution though is to watch your great, great, great grandchild just wither away and be sick and struggle.

0:28:50 Jeff Thurston: Your choice.

0:28:55 Roland Pankewich: So why don’t we end this on trying to draw positives in terms of some suggested actions. Three things that you would love for people to take away from this as not a down and out kind of scenario. Because that can be very doom and gloom esque where you’re saying, look, this is a choice, but if you do nothing, it’s going to be screwed. What can the average person do? 3 things with their actions, with their Money with their intentions, starting today, to potentially help, even if it’s in a tiny, small way, the next generation and the next generation clean up the mess that’s currently here.

0:29:34 Jeff Thurston: You know, every. Every mile that you run begins with the first step. First step, just grow a plant, right, and eat it. You know, even if you, you know, if you. If you eat some tomatoes that you grew yourself, you’re going to get the nutrition from that tomato, right? And it’s going to start. It’s there, right? It’s not going to change. It’s there, right? Next year, maybe you grow two, maybe another pot the next year.

0:30:05 Jeff Thurston: You know, it’s not a big thing. It’s not hard to go down to a garden center, and it’s not hard to find heirloom seeds from somebody who’s grown them. These. These cultivars we get today, you can’t recede from them, you know, and if they’re genetically modified, that’s another story. But, you know, try not to use pesticides. Try to do the things that are going to make life better for people in the future, one step at a time. If everybody takes one step, that’s. That’s a billion steps, you know, and. And it doesn’t take much to make. To make some change if you go just a little bit at a time. But it’s not all doom and gloom, you know, there’s.

0:30:49 Jeff Thurston: But you. You do need to be healthy. You do need to take a little bit of time to understand that it’s all a system. And if the system is broken, you can repair it. It’s going to take a lifetime. It might take three lifetimes to fix the problems that we’ve created. Heck, the, you know, DDT was dumped on the ground, you know, in the 70s. It’s still around. You know, it’s going to take a long time for that one to go away, you know, so just stop.

0:31:21 Jeff Thurston: Stop doing things that are going to cause harm. Start doing things that are going to start pushing us towards more stewardship of the land. And, you know, those are. Those are just choices that people make. All right.

0:31:38 Roland Pankewich: Thank you for that, Jeff, because it is right. It starts with small things, you know, buying something in a glass jar instead of a plastic container, redoing the reusable bag thing at a grocery store rather than getting plastic bags as you check out, or asking for paper. It doesn’t seem like it’s all that big. But as you said, you know, one step taken by 2 million people is 2 million individual but cumulative steps. So I want you. Sorry. I want to thank you rather for sharing all this wisdom with us, sharing these insights, giving us a little bit of a sneak peek into your world and obviously what’s become more close to your heart these days because it’s something that you’re about to share on the speaking tour. And I’m excited for everyone who’s going to get to hear what it is you have to say because I know it’s going to resonate.

0:32:24 Jeff Thurston: Well, I’m looking forward to it, too, because that’s one of my steps.

0:32:28 Roland Pankewich: It is. And you know, for every person who attends, theoretically, you’ve taken a multitude of steps on the everyone else’s behalf. Or at least encourage them to take their own first steps.

0:32:38 Jeff Thurston: Encourage them to take theirs. That’s right.

0:32:40 Roland Pankewich: Thank you for that, my friend. Well, it’s always a joy having you on. It was a second go around, but it by no means will be the last. So when the new topic du jour comes to you, the new thing, the new download, please do come back and talk about what it is that you’re passionate about again.

0:32:57 Jeff Thurston: We’ll do that. Thank you, Roland. Appreciate all. You do, too.

0:33:01 Roland Pankewich: Appreciate that. All right, everyone, Hope you enjoyed today’s episode. We’ll see you next time. Take care.