David Leon – Farmer’s Footprint Introduction

We’ve covered the issue of regenerative agriculture and its importance, not just in terms of carbon sequestration, in terms of regeneration, the giveaway is in the name rather than sustainability.

Sustainability of a degraded situation is one thing, but regeneration is another. And it turns out the term regenerative agriculture has so many benefits in terms of making healthy soils to grow healthy food and healthy animals on. And today we are going to be exploring a new and collaborative effort coming from a group called Farmers Footprint.

I love this, the concept behind this organization. And today we’re going to be talking to its CEO, David Leon. Look, I’m not going to give anything away. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with David Leon.

Podcast Transcript

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:06] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Now, we’ve covered the issue of regenerative agriculture and its importance, not just in terms of carbon sequestration, in terms of regeneration, the giveaway is in the name rather than sustainability.

Sustainability of a degraded situation is one thing, but regeneration is another. And it turns out the term regenerative agriculture has so many benefits in terms of making healthy soils to grow healthy food and healthy animals on. And today we are going to be exploring a new and collaborative effort coming from a group called Farmers Footprint.

I love this, the concept behind this organization. And today we’re going to be talking to its CEO, David Leon. Look, I’m not going to give anything away. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with David Leon. Welcome to the show, David.

David Leon [00:01:14] Thanks for having me, Ron. Appreciate it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:01:17] David. Regenerative agriculture is a favorite topic of this podcast. And Farmers Footprint is something that I’ve been looking at and reading about. And it’s just such a fascinating and empowering group. I wondered if you might share with our listener a little bit about Farmers Footprint and how it came to be.

About Farmers Footprint

David Leon [00:01:38] Sure, yeah. Thank you. Well, Farmers Footprint, where we’re a non-profit based in the United States. We launched back in  February of 2019. So we’re a young organization and I co-founded that organization with very dear friend of mine named Dr. Zach Bush. And we really started this organization with a film, with a story.

And in this story, you know, was a farm family. And in the US, that was on the vanguard of what we now understand to be a regenerative transition and the way that they operate and steward their land. And, you know, it was it is a human and poetic story more than anything else, because our you know, our number one goal with telling this story was to create relationship and connection. And that’s what, you know, I would come to understand to be really at the foundation of what regenerative agriculture is, which really is a relationship, a collaboration with one’s land, with one’s community, and with one’s family. And this film didn’t start in that way.

It started actually, Zach wanted to tell a story about glyphosate travel through the Mississippi River system, the largest river system in the United States. And he wanted to take measurements up and down. And they traveled from the north to the south where he was interested. And that was really in what we call Cancer Alley, which was this collection of chronic cancer cases happening in the southeast of the United States at the outlet of that river system into the Gulf of Mexico, into the Gulf of Mexico.

And, you know, the intent of that story changed a little bit when we actually started meeting the farm families that were living and working alongside that river system. And, you know, it changed the we changed the focus into we really want to show the struggles and transformations that were happening in U.S. agriculture because farmers more than anyone are starting to understand that there was something incredibly wrong and it wasn’t necessarily, you know, all the science that was telling that story in the most efficient way.

It was a story about relationship and one’s understanding of health outcomes that that that they were seeing within their own families and in their own communities. And that was the first take-off point that something was very wrong here. And so what Farmers Footprint then intended to do was following the model of a doctor stepping across sector lines into food production and agriculture, starting to ask very specific questions about how food production was affecting health outcomes in the patients that the Zach was treating.

That was really what brought this story to life for so many people. It was it shifted from a soil science story to a human health story and a relationship story of the intrinsic connection between the microbiome in the soil and the microbiome of of of the human body. And so that, you know, in retrospect, as we shared that film online, even without really the strategic intention to launch a non-profit around it, we realized quickly that we had an important role to play and a platform to utilize in order to strengthen the tenants of that story. And it was because human health came into the picture all of a sudden.

This is why you have to care about your food and the way that it is produced and the way that we are. We are operating our land because it is having very real consequences, not just for the ecology of that land, but for human health in general. And that’s where we saw things really start to take off.

So Farmers Footprint, you know, coming out of that, we didn’t really know all that was happening at the time as we were going through it, where we’re watching this story get written. So I’m sharing retros retroactively here, how we came to that. But what we realized was our was a big part of our theory of change was the power of story that we had perhaps one of the most important stories of this generation.

Unfolding on farms and within food systems in rural communities around the country, and as we would come to see around the globe and that we needed to tell a cohesive narrative about those emergent themes that were coming out so that we can expand really the good that has been established on the ground.

There’s a lot of organizations and farmers, indigenous folks who have been practicing what we now broadly call regenerative agriculture and promoting its principles. But there just has not been a platform to raise those up through the noise. And so, you know, that’s what we want to use as our platform to do is amplify those groups, be a source of connectivity between folks who are looking for the resources and connectivity with one another. Because so much of, again, region AG is this relationship with community. And there is no we understood, you know, later on as well, there is no silver bullet for just saying if we put this in place, that this will solve, you know, the deficits or barriers across all these different regions.

Regenerative agriculture is it’s highly distributed and it’s highly regionalized. And so how can we get farmers, food companies, producers, processors, educators? How do we get them talking within a regional context? And that’s a very different sort of strategy than, you know, typically capitalism likes to impose, which is go vertical, go big, and go really scalable. This is a very complex problem because it is so distributed. And so we thought that you know, the best way to address something complex is make it simple. And that’s what you do in a story, is you relate something. You relate something that may be very, very complex into a very simple and relatable way. And that’s really what we do.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:08:51] Yeah, well, it’s just there’s so much there that you’ve said that is so powerful and so profound. I mean, that whole thing about relationship and connection, not just between individuals and communities, but between us. And so on the ground, we grow. Our food is so, so powerful. And of course, the power of story, which has been going on for tens of thousands of years, even before we could write.

So we instinctively react well to the storytelling. And the farmer’s story is such an interesting one, isn’t it? Because farmers are producing food, we need to be healthy. But farmers themselves aren’t always the healthiest of people because of the very nature of the work they do and the stresses they are under an. I mean, that’s part of the paradox here or the dilemma really, isn’t it? The farmers own health in this process is not as good as it could or should be.

David Leon [00:09:55] Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, it’s the unfortunate truth that, you know, at least in the United States, there’s food deserts in the midst of communities that are almost nothing but farms. And, you know, how is that possible? And it is just it’s you know, that’s a complex question in itself. But the crux of it is that we’ve created these huge, complex supply chains that sort of roll up and consolidate and make best use of this asset here and this asset there. And it ends up what would get what ends up happening is you leave out the rights and needs of the communities themselves.

And so if you’re if your county is growing just acres and acres and acres of soybeans, that that’s not actually food for a whole lot of folks. And in fact, your whole county might be only growing things that are going into to animal feed. And that’s the unfortunate truth. And that’s where farmers have had to sort of shift to those realities because of the market pressures at play. And what got left out at the end was, was the health and resiliency and diversity of their own communities, their diets, and how that was affecting their health.

So it’s a huge problem in it. And, you know, that was another one of the light bulbs that I think has come on for a lot of farmers was, you know, there wasn’t a lot of doctors going to a farmer and saying the way that you are growing, your food is directly affecting the health outcomes of my patients. And that’s a powerful, powerful thing for a farmer to hear that reframed their work and in ways that they had never thought about before.

In many cases, and so that’s that really is is demonstrative of the power of story. That is actually a reframing that is making a metaphor of something that you do and seeing it in a brand new light so that it has a profound twist in the way that you understand what you do. So, yeah. We’ve seen that over and over again, not just with farmers, but all the way up the supply chain and certainly with consumers as well. There’s all regenerative agriculture sort of forces us to unthink some of the pillars that we associate with how our society is constructed. And, you know, we were starting to rethink what those actually are and what they look like.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:12:39] It’s interesting because part of what we look at in our podcast is also how we think about things is a crucial aspect of our health. And there’s this concept called the PERMA model, which is PERMA, which is being positive, engaging relationships, having meaning, and being acknowledged. You know, that’s the PERMA of Perma. And when we look at farming and the purpose of growing food, if it is just to a balance sheet issue of survival for the individual, then that kind of is very restrictive. And if you are trying to dominate nature in that endeavor rather than enable it.

That is also kind of restrictive. It’s interesting, isn’t it, the resistance? I mean, I’ve been very interested as a health practitioner about regenerative agriculture and its ability to provide nutrient-dense foods. But one of the funniest or the most difficult thing I’ve found is when you have a regenerative farmer on the one side of the road and the traditional farmer on the other side of the road and the route and the farms look so different. And the attitude of the farmer and the dependency on the chemical industry, the finance industry, that this literally I’ve been in farms where it’s side by side.

It couldn’t be more contrasting when you think about what is the restriction there for the farmer on the other side of the road to accepting what’s going on in the regenerative farm. And it’s such an interesting situation there, isn’t it? I mean, what you’ll be. What is? Yeah. What do you make of that?

David Leon [00:14:23] Well, you know, it’s the way I came to this work, not as a farmer. I’m gonna talk about. And so I, I usually need to sort of caveat all my conversations with farmers. I lead off with that, and we can get into why that ended up being sort of more of a blessing than anything else. But, you know, one piece of it is that I underestimated the extent to which a farmer’s identity is wrapped up in the way that they are operating their land. And that was that that was an entirely foreign concept to me. And that’s sort of what explains these things, is there’s a whole host of different sort of metrics and components that a farmer is considering when they make a sort of change like that.

And certainly, you know, we think of it, you know, sometimes in terms of just being economic. And oftentimes it certainly is. But you have to remember, too, that a lot of cases, these farms, these are these that this is land that their family has been on for generations. And, you know, there’s a lot of there’s a pride there. Certainly, there’s an anxiety there about what is to come and what is what are the changes that I’m making and how is that can affect the legacy of my family and its relationship to the land that I’m on.

So it’s a really, really it’s one of the most complex pieces of this whole equation. And we spend a lot of time, you know, as storytellers, certainly. But even more widely in the regen space with other non-profits and folks who work in this space thinking about what is driving those behavior changes. And unfortunately, you know, what we’ve seen for the most part is that you know, farmers need to be almost at the they need to be facing existential collapse in their business and their access to their land for them to make the dramatic changes that may be necessary to bring it back. And so a big part of our work is like, what are the.

What are the ways that we can intervene before they are there on the very last, very last thread of solvency and you know that those are still open questions? There’s certainly been there certainly been approaches that have worked. And other times, it’s it just surprises you in ways that you can’t imagine.

I’ll give you one quick example. Actually, one of them that’s interesting is like a farmer told me, you know, well, the way that’s really convincing to me is, is did my neighbor end up buying that brand new truck out the back? And it’s like that was one of those things. It’s not like they’re they’re trading profit margin or anything. But it was there was there’s subtle markers like that of going, OK, like, he must be doing something right. He was able to get a new truck this year. And so it’s tapping into those those those subtle hints that, you know, there are markers and things that farmers are looking for that may not be immediately apparent.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:39] But you’re right because, in some of many of the stories that I’ve heard, it’s often been some crisis, some trauma that has driven the change. And hey on an individual level. We hear that all the time when people get diagnoses of cancer say, you know, people sometimes have reflected on it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I mean, you know, I know we would all rather not, but that’s an interesting way of framing the trauma. And it’s interesting the resistance to change because sometimes it’s that switch that. Am I going to explore change? That is the first step. And for so many people, particularly that have been connected with the land over generation after generation, change implies a rejection of the past. And that is what is so difficult in the process. And I think it’s a way of reframing that concept to say, no, it’s not a rejection of the past.

In fact, it’s a building from the past for the future. And that attitudinal change, it almost keeps permission to think, okay, this is the way it has been done. And now moving forward, how do I move forward in that? But it’s your journey, David. I’m also in. I mean, I want to talk more because there’s so much there you said about Farmers Footprint that I wanted to dive into. But your background, your own personal journey. I know you’re not a farmer and I know you’ve come to this relatively recently. And your background is is very different from that. And yet here you are, CEO of a not-for-profit organization called Farmer’s Footprint. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

David Leon’s Journey

David Leon [00:19:21] Yeah, I’m you know, in a lot of ways, I think my journey is emblematic of what I’d like to see or what I envision for much of our audience to go on. And that is where you have come from? Where does the world need to go? And what are the unique gifts that you can bestow, given your background experience and who you are? And that’s really that’s what Regenerative AG is, or that’s what regeneration, in general, is really calling for, is, is the diversity of voices, backgrounds, experiences to participate in the healing of the planet and our species. And so for me, you know, just to say, I don’t have any illustrious pedigrees, or I mean, I’ve been an entrepreneur. I like to solve and work on interesting problems. You know, I’ve had a CPG brand.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:20:19] Go on CPG?

David Leon [00:20:19] Oh sorry, consumer packaged goods I have. Yeah. I mean, I, I had it was a soap company actually that I ended up buying, buying off of Craigslist and we brought that into to Wal-Mart nationally. And I had a technology company based around providing payments and schedules for yoga teachers to sort of be their own studio. I say it’s, you know, where I’ve come from. In many ways, I thought it had nothing to do with what I do now. And what I realized is, you know; first, you have to be ignited by a problem. And I had the benefit. Zach was my neighbor. He was I was good friends with his wife, Jen. And we had met through the yoga scene where we were living there in San Diego. And this guy comes along, and he’s an interesting fellow.

We have dinners and a glass of wine and talk about the world in the way of things. And, you know, at a time when I was about to make a transition in my career to exit out of a couple of my ventures, and it was ready to see what was next. And he called me up and said, hey, you know, I’d like you to check out this story that we’ve been envisioning. And I think there might be something pretty big here and, you know, tell me what to think. And I saw I’d seen an early cut of the film and I called him the next day. And I said I feel very strongly about this. This feels like something really, really big. And I don’t know what I can give, but I’d like to give something. What I do know how to do is start and run early-stage ventures.

I’m comfortable with that sort of uncertainty, and I’m comfortable rolling up my sleeves and just getting in and doing it. And so that was my next. That was the next step on my journey was, hey, you’re going to run a non-profit now let’s see what this is about. And, you know, what I then understood is the gifts are not just to extend to farmers. And obviously, I had I was coming to them with a very open beginner’s mind and asking a lot of stupid questions and maybe hearing things in a way that, you know, someone who’s been working in this space for many decades, they can’t hear it that way anymore. And I realized that as I’d like to take that journey that I was on and model that for as many people as possible because that means we get a lot more stupid questions and we get a lot more beginners. And that is only a good thing. And so for me, especially, you know, not just with the mission at hand with Farmers Footprint was the non-profit structure, in general, is really in need of rethinking the paradigm for how a non-profit operates in the world. And so a big part of my work as well has been what the new ways that nonprofits can interact with for-profit companies are?

There’s some special you know; there’s some special superpower’s that each entity has. And it’s not driven by profit. It’s driven by mission. And that can be leveraged in significant ways. So I’d like to see I’ve looked around the room at my peers here as I was on this very steep learning curve coming up through regen AG. And I had some significant mentors; obviously, that brought me in and made sure I was listening to the right people and reading the right books.

And I said, look, all these groups are doing amazing work. No one knows their story. They deprioritize and under-invest in their own marketing and. And increase its own market share. And you have the resulting, you know, sense of scarcity that really, you know, is a cornerstone of nonprofits, unfortunately, and it shouldn’t be. These are the most. These are some of the most passionate, smart, driven folks I’ve ever worked with. And so a big part of my mind, you know, my next push into this, knowing the Farmer’s Footprint is not the singular org that is going to go and solve this problem was to go how do we raise every everyone who’s doing this work up? And part of that is a very Start-Up problem. We need to create better business models with a non-profit.

We need to understand that you have to be solvent. You have to be attracting interest in the work that you’re doing. You have to be able to tell a story about yourself. So just as we’re telling stories about farmers and amplifying the work that they are doing, we also tell stories about the organizations that are supporting them and giving them the microphone, so to speak, so that, so that they can drive in the support and resources that they need to continue and expand that work. So that’s as much a part of what we do at Farmers Footprint as anything else.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:25:37] Yeah. And then it’s interesting bringing you mentioned the word diversity because it is that diverse group of skills and perspectives and also from a novel, you know, from a novice’s perspective in this area, asking those basic questions is actually a very cathartic experience for the person who is answering them as well as the person who is listening to them.

I think, you know, the person who’s asking, answering your question, your basic farming question is being asked to go back to that fundamental level. And perhaps even question it. It’s interesting. And you are bringing this other skill into I’m actually rather passionate about this idea that not for profits have a vital role to play in bringing together both profits and not for profit organizations, because what a novel idea. Not making a profit and still doing some good, you know, but in a coordinated way. I love that about Farmers Footprint. You’re sort of exploring in different regions. How are you bringing those organizations together? How has that been going? I love that idea. How has that been going?

Bringing the organizations together

David Leon [00:26:52] Yeah. It’s, you know, relationship building and network building. Some days it feels like, you know, some days it feels like everything happens within a week. And then sometimes you have weeks go by where you feel like nothing’s happening. So it comes in fits and starts sometimes. But I think what’s really well, what I’m really excited about in that in that network building side is how much we all have to learn from one another. And so if we can create those points of connection, what we end up seeing is everyone’s work gets accelerated. It’s sort of like each neural connection, a new connection that gets made, it lights up a whole other, you know, an ecosystem of of of players within that space. And there’s just so much, you know, in Australia. Case in point.

We had a lot of interest coming in from Australia. And in some ways, Australia is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of the willingness to take on and actually how far down the path many farmers already are in this work. And, you know, I’ve had the opportunity to have some amazing conversations about what is working there and especially take the behavioral question first off. And you go, you know, it doesn’t. Sure.

There are cultural differences here and there. But the core drivers of human behavior change. I would posit to say that they’re actually not all that different between different countries around the world. And so it’s just interesting when you have conversations with other folks working in spaces in different parts of the world, how they’ve gone about an addressed, some of those behavior change questions. And I think there’s there’s just so much opportunity for shared learning, for peer-to-peer mentorship across country lines that are going to be entirely relevant for the speed at which we’re able to make these transitions come to come to bear fruit. And so I think it’s just incredibly important.

I don’t I really don’t turn down any phone call with anyone because as outside as, you know, I use this example a lot because it’s been a really fun one. I fielded a call from an interior designer who’s based in L.A. who does sort of, you know, big projects for celebrities and stuff. And he was just very lit up by detoxifying our neighborhoods for the sorts of pesticides that municipalities were using. And as we get into as I’m asking him how he came into this journey, you know, we get into this riff about how do we start to tell stories about regenerative agriculture and bring it into physical space.

So I’m making multi-media and Instagram posts and written word. And I have this whole tangent with this person who writes stories within physical space. And that may be where I spend five percent of my time today. It may be where 80 percent of our impact comes from, you know, three years from now. And that’s why it’s just it’s so exciting. Every conversation is a new opening for a different sort of expertise to come and contribute and participate in this movement.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:30:31] I know I’ve connected with some of the people that have been connecting with you in Australia, and you’ve also obviously in the US is, you know, the movement is growing. Where else have you been able to connect with? It is in Europe. Have you found a strong regenerative movement in Europe or the UK?

David Leon [00:30:54] Certainly, yes. Spoken to folks in the U.K. Canada is a massive one. There’s a lot of great work happening up there. There’s you know, it’s interesting to me this might be a bit anecdotal, but I’ve also seen sort of different regions tend to bring different sorts of priorities into the work. And so part of it obviously is agricultural, but it’s so highly variable because of different climates and crops and soil type.

You know, the conversations I’ve tend to have in Europe have been around investors who really want to support these transitions and are really interested in ways to do that without, you know, getting involved in greenwashing or sort of even traditional funding vehicles that might cut corners when they need to.

And then, you know, I’m sitting I’m talking to you today from Hawaii, which obviously is a state in the US, but has such a strong indigenous identity that that sits alongside the state. And I got to got off a call with another partner in New Zealand, similarly. And those are such valuable knowledge exports as well because these are we talk a lot about internally that the power of indigenous wisdom in powering, you know, the regenerative movement. And that’s because this is those were the inventors of it.

Its native communities are the ones who had been most harmoniously, you know, working with the land in nature. And they have a really they have a critical role to play in the way that this story gets told, in the way that it’s implemented. We have so much learning and listening to do there.

So it’s just it’s going to be interesting to start sharing those stories, cross-culturally and across different countries. And I think what it’s ultimately going to do is make us realize how relevant all of those differences really are as, you know, as different as it may seem from a cultural perspective. There is so much relevant information to learn and pull and utilize that it’s fascinating for the way that we’re approaching this, particularly in storytelling.

David Leon [00:33:27] Well, the story of the film is a great one. And I know it’s available on your website there, which will obviously have links to and the connection bringing these groups together. I mean, that would be great to in some way, particularly now as we’re learning that Zoom is such a great way to connect with people no matter where they are, when, you know, within reason we’re bringing these groups together is going to be a huge part of the issue is not literally it’s getting them talking.

David Leon [00:34:03] Yes. Yeah, it’s so fascinating, actually. You know, for the apparent slowdown that the pandemic has caused, it’s really accelerated connection in a lot of ways because we’re actually communicating so much more efficient. Right now. You know, it sort of dawned on us as a team, we had a couple of months back right at the start, you know, when everyone started working from home, we did a panel discussion with a few big regenerative thinkers. And Zach was on there, and a big consumer company in the US had their CEO on there. And we assembled this group on Zoom in and, you know, 6000 registrants came in to witness that. And we got off that call, which I took from my living room floor.

I was sitting on the floor with my computer on the table, and we got off, and we just said we just had a whole regenerative conference for about an hour and a half. No planes, no hotel ballrooms, no crappy airport food. And it was a couple of hundred bucks extra on our Zoom account. And so, you know, it really is starting to make it made it makes you think about, wow, we were wasting a lot of time going to and fro face to face. And, yeah, for the sliver of time that’s going to be really important to get that real face time in. But in so many ways, it has accelerated our ability to do our work. People are leaning in as we are now face to face to a screen. I can see your house in a little slice of your life, and you can see a little of mine. And that is a connection. There is a connection there for sure. And so, yeah.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:53] The thing I also liked about the message coming out of the Farmers Footprint, too, is and we’ve heard it so many times, but think I act locally and think globally. And, you know, this idea of taking the best of local knowledge and local practice and sharing that globally, but actually doing it locally is an essential part of this message, isn’t it? And I guess this whole story about connecting with people via Zoom is all good and well. But we’ve also come to realize how precious that face-to-face contact is and that’s available in our local communities. So I’m kind of I love what you got.

I love what you’re doing David. I love the whole story of the farmer’s footprint. So, listen, we’re going to have links to the website and the film, which I would highly recommend to any anybody interested in their health, the health of the individual and the planet because they’re all connected and certainly getting this message out to farming communities and how to connect city communities with that as well is just terrific. I really think what you’re doing is fabulous. I look forward to hopefully working more closely with you and helping collaborate that movement in Australia.

David Leon [00:37:16] I’m very grateful for your support and for sharing your platform today with me. The film is free. We’ve got pieces starting up in Australia. So we’re hoping that there’s going to be a more direct way for all of your listeners to get involved. And I would just say to you know, my call to action is to call out. Call out to me.

I will have a conversation with every one of you. It’s I want to hear how you came to care about this movement and work and ultimately understand, you know, what you can give and how you can participate with is the knowledge and expertise that you have. It’s so important, and it is so needed.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:38:00] David, thank you so much for joining us today.

David Leon [00:38:03] Thank you, Ron. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Conclusion

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:38:08] So there it is, Farmers Footprint. Well, you know, the idea of bringing groups together. The idea of building relationships and connections and harnessing the local communities, the local strengths within those areas is in those regions, and bringing them together in conversation and sharing knowledge is something that I found so empowering. The film is great. It’s not it’s only 20 minutes or so long, but it tells a really important story. And I think David’s point about the power of story is one that we as a species are always attracted to. And there are just so many great stories now.

You know, I’ve spoken over the last couple of years to some tremendous people in the regenerative agriculture space. Of course, Allan Savory, who talks about the importance of a holistic context underpinning every decision that is made, whether it’s made as a government, as a corporation, as a family, as an individual, to have an overarching, holistic view of how decisions will impact on the individual community and planetary health and have that is the holistic context of every decision that’s made and then go on and sort out the details. Allan Savory, a legend.

Go back and listen to that podcast. It’s even more relevant today than it was then. It was relevant then to and of course, talking to some wonderful people in the ag space. Terry McCosker, Charlie Massy, Graham Rees, Charlie Arnott. So just to name a few. And we connected with that IPE group, the international panel of experts in Europe. So there are so many great episodes in this, and this adds another pillar to that.

That resource, which is a very passion, a big passion. This podcast and I think it’s something that we should all need to be connected with. If you think the food you eat is important and obviously it is, then how it is grown is also a very important part of that. And how not just sustainable, but how regenerative.

I love the way Charlie Massy talked about the fact that sustainable isn’t necessarily good enough. If we have a degraded environment sustaining that is not necessarily what we want, what we want to be doing this regenerating. And, you know, when you think about the fact that soil takes 500 years, I think it is to grow one inch of soil out there in nature. And yet within a regenerative agricultural environment, you can grow one inch or 2.5 centimeters of soil in three to five years.

Now, I’ve found that fact is incredible. And the fact that soil degradation is such a huge and growing and constant problem. So, so, so much here. And it was when I heard about Farmers Footprint; it was so great to connect with.

Now, also, don’t forget the Unstress with Dr Ron Ehrlich app. We’ve upgraded that as we have our new website and we’ve got some great courses coming online in the next few weeks and months. So stay tuned for all of that. So. And, of course, don’t forget, leave a review on iTunes and help push the ratings up. I hope this finds you well during these very challenging times. Until next time this is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Be well.

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.