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David bloom is on with us, and David, what's a defined regenatory agriculture as opposed to sustainability?
That's a good way to do it. Ian. So basically, we all heard the stainability. And when I was teaching a permaculture course, which is an ecological design course at the Blackwood Indian Reservation some years ago, the medicine elder was in the room and he stood up with me and he he asked the students in that class, I've been hearing about this sustainability, then, can someone explain to
me what that is? And this one perky woman sits up, stands up, and she says, well, it's so that in seven generations people will have the same level of resources as we have today. We just won't use everything up. And Wilbert he thought about that for a second and he said, well that all sounds pretty good, but when are you going to fix all that stuff you wreck you white people? Now. Regenerative agriculture unlike sustainability, which basically
says let's not make things any worse. That's what sustainability is. But regenerative says no, with everything we do, we have to repair and improve the environment. Because we're smart monkeys, we can do that at the same time we conduct business. So let's look at marijuana for a second. In biology, so follow me on this little magical mystery tour. You mentioned olives earlier. Now, if you look at an olive tree, you're going to wonder, how does he get that incredible flavor?
You know, the tree must be really clever to make that stuff. The flavor and the odor of all oil and olives, not one bit of it is made by the tree. Where the stuff comes from. For that is bacteria and fungi in the soil, a helping soil. And you know when bacteria and fungi eat something, you know, they're little, tiny, one cell things. They also have to proove out things. And the stuff that they release into the soil is what the roots suck up as fertilizer.
And those things become the flavor and odor of olive oil. Now that's because you have a thriving biology. You know, not chemicals, not minerals, but living microorganisms that are eating up dead plant matter, et cetera and recycling it into new substances which the tree that absorbs and makes these wonderful olives. So that whole idea of biology being a cooperation between what lives in the soil and the tree above it is something that's been missing from agriculture for
about one hundred years. So I've heard ag professors say, well, the soil, that's just a convenient place for the plant to put its roots, so that we can add all the chemical fertilizer and the plant will suck it up. But that chemical fertilizer actually sterilizes and kills all the biology in the soil, And so did the pesticides that we use for killing insects. When he gets into the
it kills all that biology. So now we're totally dependent on the fertilizers that agriculture has to supply because we no longer have a thriving biology to do it. And that's not bad. It's like, as we all know, selling addictive drugs is like a good business, and chemical fertilizer and chemical pesticizer are really addictive. You can't go back easily.
Yeah, so is the pimento inside of an olive when it's having a bad like g I day, No, No, I'm just kidding. So that's interesting because this is you know, as I mentioned, olives were one of the first cash crops out of Phoenix, which is which is why we have Pall Mallive, which is why and there was headquartered there for the longest time.
But I never knew that.
Yeah, yeah, actually, and the Pall Mall of building was shaped like a bar soap vaguely but definitely you could see that distinct, you know, curve that they had that they had pioneered. Anyway, So but on Tuesday of I guess it was this week recreational marijuana used became legal
in Minnesota right to Minnesota's twenty one and older. And this this it's although it has slowed down a bit, it continues to be recreational marijuana continues to be growing in popularity and states for both the tax purposes and also because it's just it takes a tremendous amount of resources to track down and incarcerate people for weeds.
So we've gotten over caring about that as a moral issue for the most part, and it's all about tax dollars. But let me explain how regenerative agriculture and marijuana and
tax dollars are all related. So I live in Santa Cruz County, California, and we have a lot of cannabis business, Therapya, Santa crush, you do, legalized not just marijuana, but coyote, byahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms, and those same liberalizations are also happening in Oakland, California, the whole state of Colorado, and we're looking at Washington and Oregon being next. So now why is this going on because of the tax dollars?
So you know here we are, your county is Santa Cruz and thinking, okay, how are we going to tax these pot guys? They've been illegal for like one hundred years. Can we just ask them how much money they made and charge them taxes based on how much money? Nah, they're not going to tell us the truth. What about Hey, how about how much tons of marijuana did you make? And we can tax them based on that. Nah, they'll lie to us about that too. So they said, ah,
I know what we're going to do. Let's tax them by the square feet in the greenhouse. We'll tax them by the square foot. They can't cheat on that. Well, the part rowers came to me and said, how do we cheat on that?
I love having you on That's awesome.
Look, see you should come to my farm and see. And so my farm I grow all kinds of organic vegetables and other stuff, and I have an alcohol plant there as well. You know I wrote that book Alcohol can be a guess.
Yeah, cells, rappers.
And people how to make their own fuel. But fuel is only part of picture. When you take like in my case, old peaches or you know, food processing waste that I ferment it in a tank and then I filled the alcohol off. Well, that fermentation process. The yeast that eat the pulp, the fruit pulp make alcohol, but they also breathe out carbon dioxide just like you are, and you're breathe out carbon dioxide into the room. Sure well, plants are the opposite of people. They need to breathe
in carbon dioxide. So if you have making all this extra carbon dioxide from fermentation, well you conduct that right into the greenhouse. And if you have more carbon dioxide than average rather than what's normally in the air, you can triple your yield per square foot because you're taking the byproduct of making the alcohol and use it it to feed the plants. The carbon dioxa they need, and now you're getting three times of product for square foot,
but you're only getting taxed on the square foot. So you know, you can be very clever with regenerative design to work within human systems like the money system.
So it's not just in that way. Then it beyond sustainable. It also becomes regenerative if it's if it's putting oxygen back into our environment, which we had sucked out of for one reason or another. And an oxygen is something which we had become we again we sort of are plant based. Oxygen is something we had taken very much for granted in our deforestation of places like the Amazon.
Well yeah, not only that, but you know you're looking at places like Africa where people. You can do this with any group of people. Say, okay, we have ten people, just general party. Okay, you have stand to the left. You hadn't stand to the right. Okay, all you guys on the right. You represent the part of the world that cooks your dinner over a wood fire indoors. That's half the world. So you know, we're really all over the amount of CO two made by burning oil or
natural gas or all that stuff. But Number three is the burning of wood for cooking, and it's an invisible thing to us. Now, alcohol can be used very inexpensively to cook people's food, and there's a lot of organizations pushing that right now, and it can be made locally with a distillery. And that alcohol only gives off when you burn it carbon dioxide water, the same thing you and I are breathing out. And so basically the plants
absorb the carbon dioxide out of the air. That's what a plant does, photosynthesis, right, We've all heard that word. What it means is combining carbon dioxide from the air, water and with sunlight to stick it together, and we get a carbohydrate carbon dioxide water. So food is largely made from carbon dioxide, which is a good thing. So what I'm saying is when you look at systems like this, you can figure out how to solve problems and make
more money and more food and better health. That's what regenerative agriculture, regenerative design is all about.
So the.
Best thing that I mean, one of the best things we can do then for our economy, it would be to track these things in the making the massive industrial vats that make alcohol or these growing number of farms that are making weed. Which one is better for the environment.
Well, heck, put the weed farm next to the alcohol plant.
That's what I was thinking.
Yeah, but you know.
All these Midwest alcohol plants, they typically have a couple of hundred acres around them because you know, you're putting up a big plant. Nobody wants to really live next to a big plant.
Yeah, and it smells. It's corn mash and it's other stuff and it really reeks.
Oh yeah, but oh my god, the corn mash is the best.
First, I'm not saying it's not, but yeah, I was down, lived down windows of a place like that, and oh, that does a smell you never get.
Yeah, it's it's Yeah, sour mash is that. But it's so valuable you just don't let it go to waste. Now. Sure, you know, if you take the carbohydrate out of corn, which is about seventy five percent of the corn starts right, corn starch is a carbohydrate, all that's left over at the end is protein and fat and some fiber. So it's a much better animal feed for cows because, as it turns out, cows cannot just starch. Cows came from
like Northern Africa, Southern they eat grass. They actually can get food value out of something we couldn't by eating grass. But if you give them starch, oh, they get horrible gas, they have huge gut problems, and they get completely thrown off. So when we make alcohol in the United States, we're making the best quality animal feed is the byproduct after
we've removed all that starch in making alcohol. So our cattle in the United States, their health has rocketed upwards over the last twenty thirty years as we've been increasing more alcohol production, and a huge portion of our corn is first made into alcohol and then all the valuable goodies left over become the animal feed.
Okay, very interesting. What are the downsides? You know, the hamp I know is a great fibrous material, there's a natural way of making rope and all these other But what are the downsides to the growth of pot These giant farms that are selling that are growing and then packaging weed.
I think they fall prey to the same kind of thinking that the rest of big agriculture does, so they end up not doing things the ecological way, not you know, the ones that are just you know, looking to maximize, maximize, production and not caring so much about the quality of the final product and what that does to the environment. I mean, you know, I got to tell you if I'm as liberal as farmer as you can get, but what I want your average everyday platform next to my farm.
I don't think be the best neighbor because you know, we don't see yet the development of a market of organic, high quality marijuana, you know, which you know would follow the same route that high quality food is followed over the last forty years. And I'm really I do a lot of consulting for popforms that are wanting to pursue that goal because there's a hunger, a need to provide this healthier, higher quality product, like just like there is
an organic food. And when you do that, the bug problems, for instance, go away, so now you don't need pesticides.
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