Fixing Our Dirt

Well I got some bad news for you there. Some of us are not great at cultivating soil, which is what we are talking about today is how to avoid getting a lot of void, Like, how can we help help against our soil just blowing away? Um? Yeah, that is that is that is our discussion. I I wrapped up like a week of research on California's specific climate

and drought and what all the farmers are doing. Um, and a lot of their soil is blowing away and so far their solution to that is just spray more water on it, which the problem is there's not tons of water. Um. So let's talk about dirt. Let's talk about soil. I will hand it over to the residents. Soy boy, the soil expert here, because I don't know what I'm talking about with dirt. My puns are getting famous, I know I have. That was that was just that I was just ripping, ripping off of a title of

one of his episodes. So that's not original. Blame him for the pond. Sorry, I do that a lot. So in terms of building soil, there's it's really a basic idea of how to do it, and it generally comes down to understanding what a soil needs and how to let the soil build through rest. And generally speaking, when we plant our annual crops, what happens is you put your tomato plants in the ground, whatever it might be.

You've got a great harvest, you let them die, clear them out, and then the next year, maybe you throw some more compost on it, or maybe you're like, I just don't want time, I won't do it, and you'll grow and you might have a pretty decent crop again, and then usually by like the third year, you start to notice that your plants just aren't doing as well, Like all the nutrients and the minerals have started to get taken out of the soil, so you can either

continuously add new material to it which comes from somewhere. Doesn't seem very sustainable. Yeah, it's absolutely not sustainable. And the alternative is to think about how can I build up that soil without doing that, And there's a couple

of different ways we can do that. The soil can get built from things like cover crops, so we can add cover crops generally things like nitrogen fixing plants, clovers, hairy vetch, and a number of others that we can used to help fix nitrogen into the soil, or we

can add other things to add biomass. So certain grasses and things like that can be planted and they'll mind deep into the soil to pull up nutrients when they die off, or you can cut them down they start breaking down, they return those nutrients back, but they're on the top soil now, So that's another way we can

do it. Alternatively, if we're talking about a little bit more land, you can take advantage of using animals so chickens, rabbits, cheap cows, whatever it might be, reintroduce nutrients back into the soil through things like rotational grazing, and there's a you know that that's a whole other subject of you know, how different methods are better or worse for fixing nitrogen and all the other nutrients back into the soil. And um, we can talk about it. I don't know if you

want to spend an hour talking about it. I assume that that definitely depends on the scale of your operation. I would assume absolutely. And you can do that on a smaller scale, not necessarily cows, but like chickens. Chickens can be run through chicken tractors, which can be as small as you know, three ft by six ft. And we were making yeah, we were making some fertilizer a few months ago and basically we raked up well I did. I I watched as people did this because I was lazy.

I watched people just rake up tons of sheep shit um, because there we have there's a little sheep set up. Um. And they were just raking up all the ship and putting into a pile of dirt. And now it's been like a it's been like a month or two, and we should have some okay fertilizer by now, which we can you know, use however we see fit. But chickens, chickens, chickens as well not not everyone probably has sheep or

access to sheep um, but chickens are surprisingly easy to get. Yeah, and depending on the city or in h you can live in pretty dense places and still legally have chickens. You might have to get comfortable with the idea of slaughtering a rooster, but other than that, you know, there's it's funny because what you'll see is like in the early spring, everyone gets chickens and then by like July u on on Craigslist or Facebook or Instagram, everyone's like,

free rooster to good home because they can't slaughter themselves. Yeah, I've had I've had to watch a few roosters get the get the old old acts. There was there was this one rooster that would always wake up as we were all going to bed. We would have like we have like a movie night um, and we're like going to bed at four am, and that's when the rooster starts. We're like no, we're trying to sleep, and we're like

we need to kill that rooster. It's only time one bad day to be like I cannot listen to that sound again at least at least it went to some good use. Yeah. Anyway back to dirt. Yeah, let's see where were were talking talking about reintroducing stuff via you know, chemical means I mean, or or just using animals and stuff, or or rotating plants. Yeah. So there's a bunch of different ways you can do it, and obviously it's all

defined by what your site needs. You know, the way we're talking at this point has been mostly about like, you already have a garden and that soil needs to be amended to improve it. But if you're working with, say a site that has almost no top soil. So for example, a friend of mine out in California lives near a highway and they had scraped all the top soil around the highway to build up the highway. So now there's no top soil, it's just garbage. So how

do you build that soil up? And there's a bunch of different ways we can do that, whether it's through taking advantage of free resources like um mulch. Like if you see a tree getting cut down and they chip it all up, those guys have to pay to get rid of it most of the time, or they get paid just enough to cover their gas. So if you see it down the street and say, hey, you want to drop it off in my house, they'll happily do it. Yeah.

We we just found out there is this business in Portland that you can email them to do a chip drop where they take all of their mulchion wood chips and drop them off in your driveway and it's completely free you you you you don't need to pay for it. You can just schedule them to drop it off anywhere. And a short aside, we also found out that they don't require address verification, so you can do this as a prank. Um. You can find out where the mayor lives.

Um or where I don't know a particularly bad person lives. Let's say he wears armor and he brutalizes people and threatens them with guns while having a badge. You can find out if you know where it lives, you can just deliver tons of wood chips right right on this driveway. Um. And and they have a rule on their website is once a delivery has been initiated, it's like once the truck leaves you know, their office, it cannot be stopped. There's no way, there's no way preventing it, And they

don't contact the house beforehand, no way preventing it. Just a random, random wood chip drop anywhere in any driveway. It's a magical system. But you can also just use this for you know, getting wood chips to help grow things. Yeah, and we'll just such an underrated medium. It's like really good for like water retention and helping soil not dry out too fast. It's it's not just like aesthetically nice looking and accessible. It's also like really good for the plants.

So I'll add two caveats to that, And the first is that it's really important to know what species you're dealing with that are the woodchips, because certain species have chemicals on them that will reduce growth or stop it completely. So like black walnuts are really well known on the East Coast as having what's called juglone, And there's a bunch of different species that again are probably unique to where you live that you should just be aware of.

And the second one is that mulch and wood chips are fantastic for your garden. However, the one drawback is that for the wood chips to break down, they actually utilize a lot of the nitrogen in the soil. So that's just so you may have a bit of a nitrogen problem or some kind of nitrogen fixing, So it would be more important to think about cover crops and either adding fresh compost or whatever it might be help offset some of that nitrogen absorption. So so it's not

it's a great resource. It's just not perfect. You just have to be aware of the limitations. I would like to touch on why we're in a bit of a pickle, like what what what what have we done agriculturally to kind of make our soil so unfragile? Like what what did we do wrong? Um on? Like even on like a larger scale, and how how might someone like me who just has a small set up, you know, not make the same mistakes in my own personal garden. Sure, so the beginning of the food system becoming what it

is today really started with oil. Access to things like petrochemicals allowed us to start rethinking about how we grew food and forgetting about traditional methods pummarily things like using the newer I mean you think about it, You eat, all the nutrients go out the sewer and then they

never go back into the soil. And we're constantly taking from the same soils year after year, and the only way we continue to produce is because we're dumping chemicals and forcing the soil, which is just a medium at this point, just dirt. It's not soil, and we're just making it grow food because we're adding the chemicals the

plants need. But we've destroyed things like the bacterial community, the fungag community, all these different things that are so crucial for our food systems to be resilient in terms of how can we move forward. Building that soil is super important and understanding these cycles of where our food comes from. The biggest challenge really is that we're trying

to create ethical food systems under an inethical economic model. Sure, so, like you'll see, like perma culture is like a really big thing today and for a lot of good reasons

because it challenges that methodology. However, because of things like capitalism, we can't really have an honest conversation about the fact that a lot of people will tell you can make money doing perma culture, and you some people do, but it's not it's not really what people think, Like there's no way to ethically grow food and not have the problems of yeah, you're you're facing or competing with somebody that doesn't have any ethical guidelines or framework that you

have to compete with. And I mean there's plenty of things we can say that there are problems with perman culture, and if you want, we can talk about that further. But this is the primary reason why we can't really fundamentally rethink our food system until things either fall apart or capitalism no longer exists, or there are major subsidies

for these alternatives, whatever it might be. Yeah, let's see, Like is even something like would you even say, just like someone buying pre made fertilizers should be avoided in that case, Like would you would you rather you know, someone trying to make it ourselves? And like what's cheaper you know, like is just buying fertilizer or cheaper than

I would to actually make it yourself. There's another kind of problem with these types of things that it turns out, you know, the way to make things better might cost some people more money, you know than people who don't really have as many resources, you know, just like a regular person who's trying to do this, you know, they don't have as much money, and would would just buying pre made chemicals be you know, easier and cheaper than doing work to kind of build it up more like

ute unquote naturally, I mean obviously, I think under capitalism, anything that's efficient in terms of time and um, taking advantage of things like scalability, which you know, mining nutrients is always going to be more efficient when you're doing it on a massive global scale, Like you really can't compete dollar for dollar. And that's at least with what

I do with the poor pros almanac. We don't really focus on that and instead say this is how things should be, and how do we do that and when do we need to start doing that if we know that what exists today isn't sustainable and that ultimately this is gonna fall apart in some capacity. Yeah, you talked more about like trees specifically, and I would love to love to hear more about that, you know, outside of just you know, making your own like edible garden, doing

doing other kind of ecology related related work. Sure, so trees have you know, so many benefits outside of the fact that they can produce food. Um, we could look at things like how they can manage a landscape and reduce temperature extremes the way they can maintain soil quality because of UM reducing things like runoff from major storms, which are happening more and more frequently. Further, like I said, they do produce food, and they sometimes they produce food

for us, sometimes they produce food for our livestock. Um. Additionally, there's a process called silvil pasture, which is essentially when you think of a farm, you think of a cow walking around in a field. Instead that cows walking around and a managed forest and the forest floor gets enough sunlight to grow grass, so you're getting the benefits of the grass as well as the trees. And you can either be using those trees for lumber or for food crops or whatever it might be, and you're getting the

best of both worlds. And in a lot of ways, the civil pasture system more accurately represents the way the landscape had been managed, especially here in the northeast and generally the East coast by indigenous people. Um. You know, they weren't using cows, they were doing prescribed burns and things like that. But those environments are actually better for things like a deer, which like like to exist on like the margins of forests where they're getting the best

of both worlds. So that was how they managed a wild Essentially they're wild grazing the native species. Yeah. We just I'm just trying to think there's like we we don't really have anything like that on a on a large scale anymore. We've we've just jumped right into like the the field and pasture thing. Yeah, I mean, you think about it, it it makes sense that we haven't because of the fact that to do that requires individuality. In terms of how we manage a landscape. You can't run

a machine through you sbo pasture. You can't just make like a template and apply to every situation. Everything is much more unique based on their individual environment and ecosystem. Yeah, and then it becomes less efficient to manage in terms of how we manage things as a successional thing where we have you go through the field and you seat it with a giant machine, because you can do it faster that way, you can add whatever amendments you need

more quickly. When it's just a flat piece of land with nothing in the way, so on and so on. It's just it doesn't It goes right in the face of how we think of efficiency despite the fact through it's diversity, it's more resilient to what's coming in terms of climate change, especially the logs run. Yeah. Um, in the last episode we talked a bit about grilling gardening. Can this like intersect with with this idea of like growing in the forest? Um? Is there? You know? I

assume there's like a decent cross over there. Absolutely. So generally speaking, a lot of people that are into silvil pasture are also thinking about things like tree crops. And one of the things that I really focus on is thinking about foods that we don't traditionally think of as foods, or at least not as like staple crops. So like while people might be familiar with kind of the odd fruits like per simmons, you might know what a persimmon is. You might have one or two, or maybe make per

simmon bread. That's not usually a large part of anyone's diet, no, And that's like, that's the challenge that we really have is while people like to incorporate these types of things in permaculture into you know, how they think about their relationship with the environment, Like nobody's giving up their toast in the morning and that's you know, a third of your diet or whatever it might be, and that's where we need to fundamentally shift how we think about food.

So you're saying that we need to change in order to address these large systemic issues that have caused many problems. We need to change the way we extract resources from the earth and maybe reevaluate how much we do. So yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's no small feet, is

what I'm saying. I know, I'm just saying, like, you know, that's the this specific thing around like food and diet is the same route problem we have with climate change on a larger scale of like just doing you know, progress for progress's sake without realizing that this is not a sustainable way to do things. And infinite growing and like infinite expansion, maybe it is a bad idea and

maybe it has some consequence. Who has some costs? Who would have thought that infinite growth on a finite planet wasn't sustainable? Oops? Yeah, The point that I'm really trying to drive home is that we really need to rethink what food looks like and it has to be in a meaningful way that it can't just be those odds and ends. And that the thing I think people forget is that food is a huge component of our culture

and our identity. Absolutely think about food and identity. The reason why our identity is surrounded around food is because food is the byproduct of the environment that we live in. And it's you know, for it's been a couple of generations. And we went from the reason why Italians eat x y z s because that's what grows there. Two I eat this because my family does, but I don't know why. And that's the way those things relate to one another is have been completely lost, and we need to figure

out how to do that again. Can you point to any examples of these things you're talking about of like you know, of systems existing now or in the past that of kind of shown these methods of viewing food and viewing you know, growing and soil cultivation, so like any indigenous practice. And like we say indigenous, and we usually mean like North America or South America or Australia.

But even if you look across Europe, you know, before capitalism kind of got its clause into the rest of Europe or all of Europe, like there were plenty of indigenous practices and in some places they continue and the way that people lived um reflected the needs of their ecology and how people could relate to that ecology. The reason why Nordic countries have high amounts of meat in their diet is because of what grows there and what how they can utilize what grows there to feed themselves

through animals and things like that. Hmm, yeah, I mean that is that is generally what we we hear is you know, look at the various indigenous methods of growing um and how they how they fed people in their media area, and thinking like, how can we take those similar ideas and scale it up? Because I mean, they

weren't growing food for seven billion people. But I know, like we grow way too much food for what for many people, maybe not too much food, just we distribute it in a very unefficient way because we don't do it for what we need. We do it for profits, and like we we we throw away so much food that we grow as you know, globally UM. But I you know, when I think of these more like older methods of growing food, it's it's harder for me to picture that, you know, feeding an entire city, right, And

I don't know what the solution is here. This isn't really the thing I focus on a lot. But is there a way to kind of scale up these like smaller scale things that you know, people can do in their own yards on any kind of mass level or is that just kind of rely back on the same thing. We've need to like re reevaluate how much we consume and how we consume it. So I think there's a

little bit of both. I think we do need to reevaluate what we're consuming and the volume that we're consuming, as well as um, you know, the the waste specifically in terms of those two things that we tend to lose a lot of food that otherwise is useful um. But also there is a lot of opportunity and wild places like maybe New York City because of the development around the city, might not there might not be any way possible to grow food like within the metropolitan or

even the region. We know that, like, and this is something I probably should have checked before the staff, But it's something like there's four acres of arable land for every person on Earth, and four acres is like that's plenty, that's plenty, That's absolutely plenty. UM. But like, one of the things that's really important is to start thinking about how we can decentralize these systems in order to have those clusters of places where those things are more um

capable of growing and handling the production that's necessary. And so maybe rethink about what what urbanization really should be and what it should look like. And you know, in the future, while things might seem like, well, you can't ask people to leave New York City as climate change worsens in our food systems start to fall apart, that might be a much easier conversation to have, while today

that seems kind of radical. Yeah, and at the very least, maybe we should maybe we shouldn't make any more New York cities absolutely. Um, is there any like resources online that you can point to that talks more about these types of topics, or like books or like anything in this general was growing on the growing side of things and then like the more like ecology side of things.

So Tom Wessels has this really great book called The Myth of Progress, which talks about complex system science and essentially what that is is decentralization and um, the benefits of having diversity within a community and in fact that any any power that's you know, centered in one specific place ends up having imbalances and has less resiliency, and that plays until it's focused around ecology. But I think it's really helpful, especially if you're an anarchist. I think

you can through the lens. Yeah. Yeah, so that that's definitely one place to look in terms of like growing food. I don't know if there's really any books that really address it from this perspective of climate change and decentralization, but there's plenty of work online about silver pasture and you know, food force, any of these types of things.

YouTube has like a vast array of resources, and of course if you're interested in this kind of stuff, you can come check us out on our podcast or proslamanac we Uh, the entire show is pretty much around this subject matter, So you want to learn more about it and check it out. Yeah, absolutely definitely. UM if this specific topic, you have a wonderful catalog of stuff discussing this. UM and I just want to thank you they and thank you so much for coming on this show to

kind of talk about these topics. You know, me and Robert and you know Chris, we more of like a background and like history and that kind of thing. We are we are not super avid to plant people like we're trying to start growing more stuff to our ourselves personally. But I'm definitely not educated to talk on this, and I'm very very happy that you were able to when you're generous with your time and knowledge. So thank you,

thank you so much. Yeah, definitely check out their show on you know, wherever you get your podcasts, and you can follow the show Twitter, on Instagram at cool zone Media and happen here pod um any any any final final notes? Grow some food? Yeah, grow some food. Grow some food. That is one if I've I've asked that question a lot and that answer has come up many times. Just growth growth food. Okay, you go grow here. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening