Show Notes

• Urban Agriculture Month November 2024
• Water Ups – Improving food security, urban greening, and water management
• RELEVANT PAST EPISODE: David Holmgren – RetroSuburbia: The Downshifters Guide to a Resilient Future
• RELEVANT PAST EPISODE: Helena Norberg-Hodge: Local is Our Future

Timestamps

[00:00] Introduction

[02:57] Welcome and Urban Agriculture Month

[04:16] What is Urban Agriculture?

[06:29] Schools and Urban Agriculture

[07:46] Sam’s Journey to Urban Agriculture

[12:20] Pocket City Farms: A Blueprint for Urban Farming.

[16:35] The Difference Between Allotments and Market Gardens

[20:39] The Importance of Connection

[22:32] Biodiversity and Resilience in Urban Spaces

[25:55] Permaculture 101

[31:12] Addressing Climate Change Through Urban Agriculture

[37:08] Making the Most of Urban Spaces

[41:03] Innovative Water Solutions: Wicking Systems

[48:11] Edible Education Environments in Schools

[52:18] Closing Thoughts

[52:30] Conclusion

• Dr. Ron Ehrlich reflects on the conversation and its key takeaways.
• Encouragement to explore Urban Agriculture Month and local initiatives.

Sam Betteridge: Urban Agriculture Month

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:00] Feeling stressed. Overwhelmed. It’s time to Unstress your life and focus on controlling what you can control. I’m Dr. Dr Ron Ehrlich, host of the Unstress Health podcast, inviting you to join the Unstress health community and discover a holistic approach that helps you more effectively face the daily challenges of our modern world and effectively recover each and every day. Unstress Health is here to provide you with advice and support that is independent of industry and influence, an influence that that’s easy to miss but difficult to ignore. Our focus is on building mental fitness. Your mind can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Mental fitness is the key. Our three phased approach Target Mindset. Boost your positive intelligence quotient and move from self-sabotage to self-mastery. Secondly, the challenges We redefine what stress means in our modern world. And thirdly, Recovery master the five pillars of Health. As a member of the Unstress health community. You’ll turn obstacles into opportunities with expert led courses, curated podcasts, personalised health assessments, supportive community, and much, much more. Join Unstress Health today and together let’s not just survive but thrive. Click on the link below or visit Unstress Health.com. Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Well, today we celebrate, and it should be really a celebration. Urban Agriculture Month in Australia. This is the month of November. And this week we will be kicking off this episode today with Sam Betteridge. Now, Sam is his background is in education. He’s a qualified primary school teacher, but he has been education officer at Pocket City Farm. His passion is urban agriculture and education and bringing the two together. And he is extremely passionate and insightful on this topic. It’s a great conversation. It’s an inspiring conversation, and it’s one that I think we all need to be engaged with. This whole idea of connection is so fundamental to our existence as human beings, not just connection with with each other, not just connection with the earth on which we live, but also connection with the food that we eat. And through those three connections, we benefit so much as an individual and as a society and as a planet. Look, I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Sam Betteridge. Welcome back, Sam.

Sam Betteridge [00:02:57] Hello, Ron. How are you?

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:02:58] I’m very well, Sam. It’s been you know, we talk about this subject quite often as we get together, but it is Urban Agriculture Month. And so these two episodes coming out this week, your one and the one that I also had the pleasure of talking to Judy, Dr Judy Friedlander from Planting Seeds in the B&B Highway. I don’t want to spoil it for people, but that’s coming out this week as well. But tell us about Urban Agriculture Month. What’s it all about? What does it hope to achieve?

Sam Betteridge [00:03:32] Yeah, that’s a great question, Ron. I think very simply, Urban Agriculture Month is obviously a month out of the year that we have chosen as a community and the community in particular is actually Sustained Talk, a fantastic organisation and they’ve been doing this for quite some years now, but essentially they have said that November is to be Urban Agriculture Month and obviously urban agriculture is fairly straightforward. It is agriculture, which is the practice of growing food in the urban environment, and it’s just a good month to be aware of our impact in cities, in the urban environment and how that all connects to things we do three times a day for some people.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:04:16] Yeah, yeah. And there’s so much potential there, isn’t there? I mean, as we walk around the our, our own environment, our own urban environment and we see people mowing lawns and parks with lots of grass and stuff, you know, there are what what would be if you had to write your ideal scenario of how urban agriculture could be? What what do you how is it first of all, what what do you know much about what is happening out there? I mean.

Sam Betteridge [00:04:46] Yeah, I mean, obviously I’m sort of I kind of exist in this world. I’m very interested in agriculture, particularly regenerative agriculture. And and in terms of what I see in them at the moment in the urban environment. There’s lots of things going on. And as you touched on before, when there’s lots of things going on, that means there’s great potential. And, you know, I see the urban environment as a real integration of things that have occurred across all landscapes, whether they’re rural or semi-rural. But, you know, practices that we see in agriculture come from far and wide and they coalesce in the cities and in the urban environments. And some of them are on one end of the scale that may not be too focussed on food, but are just, you know, concerned with the aesthetics of the landscape all the way up to the other end of the scale, where you have people who are actively growing food in, you know, relatively speaking, small spaces, being very creative with the outputs of other things. For example, you may have someone down the road from you who likes to mow their lawn and they have a beautiful grass lawn that they look after. And then three doors down you might have someone who sees that potential or an opportunity and they actually take the grass clippings from that person and bring them into their garden and use it as mulch or some sort of additive to regenerate their agriculture in their small space. So I’m very excited by the urban environment, particularly because I live here, but mostly because of the potential that you outlined just before.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:06:29] Your background is in education. You’re your primary qualified primary school teacher. Schools are a place where a lot of this kind of thing is starting to happen.

Sam Betteridge [00:06:40] I believe so. I believe so. I mean, call me biased. I do work in education still, as you know. I still use my degree where I’ve linked to to get my passion for agriculture and growing food and my education degree come together. So I do see a lot of schools. And I do have a sense, particularly over the last probably not six, seven, eight years, that schools are very much interested in teaching the future generation how to look after country land, however you want to refer to it, but also educate them on how food is grown and how in looking after the natural environment or the urban environment that that school exists in, you can support communities through food, which is something that I said before happens three times a day for most people.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:07:33] I would be interested, Sam, if you could share with us your own journey, because it’s you’ve. You’ve kind of been in education for a long time in one way or another. But tell us tell us about what’s brought you to this point. Yeah. This focus.

Sam Betteridge [00:07:46] Look, you know, I’m I’m not quite 40 years old yet. I’m 37, which if you if you do some calculations, you’ll you’ll know that that puts me and I’m pretty deep into the YouTube generation, if you will. I have spent a lot of time just voraciously consuming information on all things related to agriculture from all different contexts. And as a as a teacher who taught in schools, I always had a desire to, you know, use that knowledge that I was consuming and taking in and learning about in my classroom practice, whether it was in a natural classroom or an outdoor classroom, which was preferably preferable for me. But my journey, you know, started basically just being curious, basically wanting to understand more about where food was grown and how I could produce beautiful food, but also how I could teach people how to do that and also at the same time in parallel, regenerate the land or, you know, the backyards that people lived in or the school grounds that some of these gardens existed in. So in terms of my journey, that’s kind of where everything started. And I went, you know, like a lot of people did through Covid on a journey where I had to change roles. I had to change jobs. And, you know, over time, I picked up different skills, particularly with construction, and continued to learn about agriculture. And I started to meld those two together where I was originally melding my education degree and my love for gardening and agriculture together, I began melding construction skills into landscaping and things like that. And I was really, really lucky to spend some time in some really cool, innovative organisations that have a lot to do with urban greening and basically trying to turn cities into luscious agricultural sites, whether it was through plants that were edible or just ascetics or plants that actually filtered air and water. There’s all sorts of different projects that some of these companies that I worked with were interested in. And so I learned even more about design and proper land use and land management in the urban context in particular. And I also was lucky enough to spend a couple of years on an urban farm. In fact, I would say that the urban farm that I worked on as the education manager is the premier urban farm in the southern hemisphere, and that is, of course, pocket city farms. So, you know, to continue along this journey of education and agriculture and construction and agriculture, I found myself at Pocket City Farms as the education manager, where I could bring all of those things together with the use of my degree to help develop and write curriculum that made sense for the context of the farm, and also used all my construction skills to actually build infrastructure on the site that pointed the direction of the farm and the direction of the education program towards regenerative agriculture. And a lot of that was done through conscious design. And today I find myself not in that role, but I’m still an education manager and I still write curriculum. And I work for a company that is very interested in water sensitive urban design and also urban agriculture and various products that they have created to support people in the urban environment to grow nutritious food whilst regenerating the planet or their parcel of land for their piece of country. And I continue to learn. I continue to grow figuratively and also literally in the garden. And I’m just really excited about what we can do with the potential that urban environments provide us on a platter. You know, all it takes is. A simple walk down the street and to take time to observe and interact with communities around us and just physical lands around some of those parks that you talked about and understand that within those areas, potential exists for us to regenerate, grow food and therefore have a really positive impact on society at large in many different ways.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:12:20] I mean, you mentioned Pocket City farming and it’s incredible to think that that is right in the middle of Sydney. And as you have observed, the premier urban farm in the Southern Hemisphere. Tell us a little bit more about about how that came about. Where did they put it? How what is it growing? What did you build? You know, like what What’s possible? Because that’s kind of a blueprint, isn’t it?

Sam Betteridge [00:12:45] It really is a blueprint in some sense. And it really speaks to exactly, you know, what our conversation is about today. How do you how do you regenerate an urban environment or how do you set up an urban environment to be supportive of agriculture? So a little bit of context about pocket city farms. It used to be an old bowlo club, so obviously two big bowlos are very hard compacted soil. And at the time that the bulk.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:13:17] Sam Sam for our overseas listeners ‘bowlo’ was an extra Australian expression for lawn bowls.

Sam Betteridge [00:13:25] Yes. Only thank you on that translation. Lawn bowls being the sport that requires very hard and compact and very short grown grass so that you can roll probably ceramic spheres along them with a bit of a wobble. It’s an interesting sport, and I’ll leave that up to the listener to do research. But as you can imagine, to get that type of environment that is usable for someone who’s practising lawn bowls, there’s a lot of chemicals, there’s a lot of sand, there’s a lot of compaction, which are the exact opposite of what you want to do for an urban environment that is being set up to grow food. So, you know, touching back on the blueprint and the retrofit that we talked about just a moment ago, Pocket City Farms is able and is still doing so, demonstrating how you would turn dilapidated, really anti antithetical spaces into something that is lush and beautiful and produces food, regenerates the land, increases community interaction and educates on a very vast. I think in the last, you know, in the two years I was there, I think I did some, you know, back of the napkin calculations the other day. I think I taught roughly 350 to 400 different workshops across that two year span. And you can figure out how many kids that was and how many students and how many schools I was able to interact with and and sort of give my spin on why I think this is important. And and also, you know, speak to a broader community about the necessity to make sure that the food you’re eating is not just good for you, but it’s also good for the place that it’s growing. So, you know, a very inspiring place to have worked. It does provide the blueprint for what can be done in an urban environment from scratch or having to completely start again from old sporting venues that no longer serve us in those those ways anymore. And the site itself is just it’s a bit of a drain because you stand on these market gardens and you think, I wouldn’t expect to see this here. You know, you would think you’d have to drive three hours, four hours in other direction to get to like a rural or a rural town to be able to experience these. So it’s very magical. It has it has a great hook as soon as you walk in. It’s just a beautiful place to be. And it’s it’s actually renewed the community there. You know, what was once a place that was falling asleep, if you will, is now revived. And and this new generation, including older generations and younger generations, get to come together in a space that actually promotes and celebrates this methodology of regenerative urban agriculture.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:16:21] Because in England, I think they do a lot of allotment. You know, allotments are very poor, have been very popular over the. Over long, long. Yes. Over history.

Sam Betteridge [00:16:31] Still very they still very much are very, very important as well.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:16:35] And this is kind of taking that concept and as you say, turning. I mean, a bowling green, it’s not concrete, but it’s pretty close to concrete in my chair. And it was an incredibly lush, also servicing a cafe that was there as well.

Sam Betteridge [00:16:51] As cafe restaurant. It was true. Farm to table in the middle of the city. I’ll just touch on something you mentioned there, Ronnie. There is actually a bit of a difference between allotments and the market garden. That Pocket City farms was. And this is an interesting little thing I spent about a month ago. 3 or 4 weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend the Australian Association for Environmental Educators in in Albany, and that was at the Charles Sturt University there in Albany, which, by the way, if anyone ever gets a chance to go to Albany, please go and see that site because, you know, whilst Pocket City Farms is set up as this wonderful demonstration of sustainable regenerative agriculture using permaculture design principles. Charles Sturt University is on another level in the in the sense that it services, you know, entire apartment buildings and giant filtration water lands and also is as pocket City Farms was an education institution where people get to go and experientially learn through their environment. But back to the allotment piece. Charles Sturt University also hosts the the I think it’s the state. It could even be the country. I’ll have to check that. But the countries or states largest allotment gardens and it is amazing and what it is it’s obviously a small amount of acreage that sits between actually the Tate in Albany and the university. So you have this intersection with all these houses around it that has evolved and manifested itself into this giant patchwork of gardens. And I mean, there’s probably there’s hundreds, hundreds of small allotments that individual members of the community come and maintain and regenerate and experiment and experience and educate and do all those wonderful things. And the difference there between Pocket City Farms, which is actually set up quite a very well oiled organisation with rows and there’s, you know, spreadsheets to make sure that things are moving through a succession at a rate that makes sense and that they’re going to support the economy. The allotment style or methodology is very much like. It’s up to you as the person who is stewarding that small parcel of land. And that in its own right is another model of urban regenerative agriculture that have you, as you just pointed out, is very important in some parcels of the land parcels of the earth, I should say, particularly in the United Kingdom. We have small amount of allotment culture here in Australia, but I would suggest that it’s probably more focussed to actual backyards instead of. And that’s probably due to our population density and how spread out our lands are. Whereas in the UK you’ve got these like small parcels of land that are obviously free because a lot of the urban sprawl that’s occurred in the cities pushes people into these smaller parcels and that’s where allotments come up. So it’s actually a very interesting and rich historical culture to follow. And and as people start to really read into what is urban agriculture, how has it sort of evolved, what are the different avenues that it has taken on throughout, you know, decades and probably hundreds and thousands of years? In fact, we know it’s hundreds of thousands of years. It it really brings you back to the importance of food and understanding that, we have to look after this place, because if we don’t, it’s not going to look after us.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:20:39] It’s also interesting, and this is why I think this I love this idea of urban agriculture and celebrating it regularly, because connection is such an important concept for us as humans and not just connection which with each other, which brings people together in a common task or growth or focus, but connection with the land and the food that we ate. I mean, that’s it’s just so fundamental, isn’t it?

Sam Betteridge [00:21:11] Well, it’s so fundamental, in fact. And you know this very well that, you know, a large percentage of the gut biota that exist within the human being is actually mimicked in the soil biota. And you have to stop for a second. Go. Hang on a second. So what I’m saying there is that the microbial community community that exists in your gut is mimicked almost to a T in the microbial community in your garden. And obviously that happens because the food you eat comes from that garden. So that connection. I mean, that’s the most insane connection I can think of. I mean.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:21:56] Yeah. Well, I mean, this is we’ve championed, as you know, regenerative agriculture throughout the life of this program. And it’s interesting for you to draw that analogy between the soil microbiome, the gut microbiome. I’ll I’ll add to that. The oral microbiome. Yeah. The more diverse it is, the healthier you are, the healthier your mouth is, the healthier your gut is, the healthier the soil is, the healthier the planet is. Diversity is key, and it’s reflected right throughout nature.

Sam Betteridge [00:22:32] And as you’ve said a couple of times before and, you know, and listening to all the fantastic interviews and podcasts you’ve got on this on this show with regenerative agriculture, it’s actually the diversity that bolsters a resilience in any system. Whether that system is microscopic or macroscopic diversity is a tool to be recognised because it’s something that already exists in nature. And and once you’ve recognised that that diversity can be useful in many things relating to oral health, gut health, actual garden health, then you realise that there’s not a lot you can do wrong in the garden as long as you keep planting, as long as you keep adding things. And in fact what that usually means is you have to move away from monocultures, you know, to bring it back to that sort of agricultural context. One thing we’ve realised, unfortunately the hard way is that if you’re just planting big rows of single species and you’re not sort of protecting the soil and adding some friends into the garden, I use friends quite literally there because plants do communicate via rhizomes and microbial economies below the soil that you end up destroying that system. So biodiversity is a tool for us to reflect upon in all areas of our life. And one of the ways that we know that that is definitely a path we should be taking is I like to tell people about, you know, when you when you buy a let’s say you go to the shop grocery store and you buy a big piece of fruit, let’s say a pawpaw here in Australia, some people call them papaya pawpaw, and you open that papaya up and inside there are hundreds of seeds, like I’m talking hundreds. And you have to think to yourself, why would this plant this one particular fruit that came from this plant provide so many seeds? Well, what you realise is that nature provides in abundance. You know, that’s not like a philosophical perspective. That’s a literal perspective. Every time you open up a fruit, there are hundreds of seeds. There’s not just 2 or 3. And what that tells me and anyone who’s sort of tuning in to the natural environment is like, we need to plant more. Right, because this is encouraging me to plant more. And obviously you can plant more of one thing. But what we really need to say, things like we need to be planting lots of different things so that they can support each other and build a community that is resilient.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:25:19] I know another area that you’re very interested in and have studied a lot of, and this is relevant to what you just said, is permaculture. And it’s an expression some people may have heard. I know we’ve done a program with David Hollegran and and we talked about it in a previous episode. And actually, I might even rerelease that this month. That could be a good thing to do. But my point my question to you is, can you just give us a little bit of Permaculture 101 because you’re talking about not planting mono crops. Tell us a bit about permaculture.

Sam Betteridge [00:25:55] Well, yeah, I think, you know, just in the way I’ve been talking about things and the way I’m laying out explanations of things, it’s clear that. That I’ve. I’ve kind of angled my approach to gardening through a design perspective. Right. So. So permaculture for me and for anyone interested is essentially a design framework. It’s a way of thinking about how you would produce agriculture’s or cultures that are permanent permaculture. But the title says it all. Regenerative agriculture is, in a sense, the agricultural approach that permaculture design puts forth, because for anything to be permanent, you need to be regenerating. You need to go beyond just sustaining what you have. You need to be constantly feeding a system. Right. So systems thinking and design, that’s permaculture. How do I design systems that are self-sustaining? But also and this is taking another angle, as in tropic approach is another philosophy that has actually come out of Brazil and is now spreading across the world, thankfully. So when you add more and more and more, you get a centripetal right and that’s entropy is what enables a system to be process driven. Okay, So back to permaculture for a second. What we want to think about is designing our agricultural systems so that they can become permanent. And in doing so, we need to be focussed on the regeneration of that environment so that environment has the ability to feed itself. And that’s where central becomes in you constantly. It’s an upward spiral of accumulation and increasing photosynthesis and increasing the amount of biomass that that system will create so that that system is designed to feed itself. And obviously interactions via human interaction or animal interaction are a part of nature as well. So that doesn’t mean we design ourself out of the system. No, no, no. It’s actually the opposite. You want to design yourself into a system to help it become permanent and to help manage it and make it super productive. So when I think about permaculture, I think about the way that I design a system. And then a subcategory of that design process is a regenerative type of agriculture. And then as I kind of weaved in there, there’s a sin tropic mindset as well. How do we actually supercharge that? Because we do have the ability to do this super fast, relatively speaking. It’s not something that we just we can step back from and just let it happen. We can actually turn it turn on the, you know, turn the dial up if we wanted to. And we can. We do. Yeah.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:29:11] Hi, Dr Ron here it. I want to invite you to join our Unstress Health community. Now, like this podcast, it’s independent of industry and focuses on taking a holistic approach to human health and to the health of the planet. The two are inseparable. There are so many resources available with membership, including regular live Q&A on specific topics with special guests, including many with our amazing Unstress Health Advisory Panel that we’ve done hundreds of podcasts over listening to with some amazing experts on a wide range of topics. Many are world leaders, but with membership we have our Unstress Blab podcast series where we take the best of several guests and carefully curated specific topics for episodes which are jam packed full of valuable insights. So join the Unstress health community. If you’re watching this on our YouTube channel. Click on the link below or just visit Unstress health.com to see what’s on offer and join now. I look forward to connecting with you. Well, you know, we’re we’re kind of preoccupied as a society with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and getting to net zero. And how can we drag this carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? You know, let’s you know, I mean, I think I remember in first year high school learning in biology this thing called photosynthesis, which says carbon dioxide plus water, of which there’s plenty in the air, gives us carbohydrate and and oxygen. Wow. You know, so, you know, doing it really quickly, we we did a program with Zach Bush who, you know, it’s different how you think about things. Do you see the carbon dioxide as a problem or as an opportunity? And it is very much.

Sam Betteridge [00:31:12] Things from three doors down.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:31:14] Yeah. That’s right. It’s like, you know, it’s a great opportunity to pull that carbon down and use our first year biology knowledge. Yes. Rocket science, not rocket science. And that’s not rocket and growth style stuff. But I think it’s worth reminding our listeners who might be listening to this idea of permanently growing things and regenerating the soil, that that’s actually not the way most of our food is grown.

Sam Betteridge [00:31:39] No, unfortunately, it’s not. And maybe what it’s worth, you know, sort of laying out here is how how you would do it and how that works. Right. So as you learned in first grade, carbon dioxide is actually a fuel for plants. The way that you increase the capacity for a garden to take on more carbon dioxide so that your garden has more fuel is you create biomass, soil and buy in. And biological material is actually a housing for what actually stores and looks after the carbon and that carbon that is sequestered in to a biological mass, whether that’s soil or lots and lots of pruning from trees that are actually breaking down as they do in environment to become a soil structure. It’s the economy that exists in those structures. So all of the microbes and all of the trophic levels of the wood wide web or the soil food web, all of those microscopic creatures that look like insane little aliens, they’re very cool for anyone interested. Grab yourself a microscope and some soil and you’ll see some very cool things. But it’s in those carbon life forms that are the creatures that carbon is stored because they eat and they feast on all of the things that are breaking down that the photosynthesis has pumped full of photons and the water has drunk in to that mass of biological bits and pieces. And it’s the economy, the microbes and the name and toads and the arthropods and the Beatles and the worms and all of the things that are the carbon bank. It’s the life in the soil that should be focussed on because life begets life. The more life you have, the more life we have available for us in terms of soil to grow more nutritious food. And you can do that in the urban environment. It doesn’t have to be on some planes and giant acreage. It can happen in a square planter. It can happen in a very small space.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:33:47] Here in healthy. I mean, I remember we had Charlie Massey in our on our program as well and other others in that regenerative space saying something, two things they said which blew my mind away. And that was that in a healthy teaspoon, teaspoon of soil, there are a billion microbes in a healthy soil. And in a healthy soil there is in one cubic metre of healthy soil there is 27,000km of mycorrhizal fungi hyphae. You know, the that and that’s extraordinary. But but if we are using herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, fertilisers, that just ain’t happening.

Sam Betteridge [00:34:33] It’s not going to happen. It’s I mean, it’s it has the, the suffix  ‘cide’. C I’d a at the end of each of those herbicide pesticide fungicide for a reason decide is it’s a death suffix. So it’s it’s just a logic right. If if you read that word properly you’ll understand that that’s killing things. And yes, for a long time we feel like you need to kill things to look after the things you don’t want to kidney, but it doesn’t work out in the end, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not it’s not something that is worth pursuing because you just you putting yourself on the back foot and also putting your own health on the back foot, not only the environmental health, but your own health. One thing I’d love to add there is, you know, the sheer number of microbes in a teaspoon and hyphae lengths in terms of like thousands of kilometres is if you think about a seed. And I’ve really gotten into seeds in recent times and I think a lot of people should actually consider growing from a seed as opposed to a transplant. That’s a whole other conversation. But a seed itself has on average about 9000 different species, just at a species level of microbes cover encasing that seed, which is that species level the variation in the diversity of species. And some seeds will then obviously have a lot more than that, like actual numbers of those beneficial bacterias and all sorts of things on there as well. And you know, if that’s not something to marvel over, I’m not sure what is. But, you know, that seed then goes into the ground and has everything it needs to develop an ecosystem that could potentially cover a planet. If it was allowed to. So, you know, there’s great awe. And we’re reminded when we hear numbers like this and and some of the latest science that is being that is being produced and also listening to ancient civilisations in the tales they tell this great or in the natural environment. And I would urge anyone who has a small piece of soil to just put a seed in it and see what happens. And you know, obviously when things grow, so does your perspective. And if we have a perspective, something that Charlie Massey obviously talks about a lot, you know, that the paddock between your ears, you know, if we can change that perspective to be about the awe of life, you know, the wonder of what is possible, that the great potential that just a simple garden has, then I think we’re going to come around pretty quickly.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:08] We will see you back. Coming back to the urban environment, because people live in have access to varying amounts of it from just. Yes. Balcony, if they’re lucky to a whole garden. Small garden. If they’re luckier to a big garden. If they’re really lucky. What are what are how should we be looking at these spaces? What can we do with some of these varying sized spaces?

Sam Betteridge [00:37:35] Yeah. Well, I think the first thing I would say is you need to sit back and you need to observe and you need to spend a considerable amount of time examining what is sort of what pathway is your system travelling through or what pathways are travelling through your system, whether that’s wind or noise or sun or animal pressure. There’s all sorts of things that interact with a space that you don’t often consider until you sit down and really watch. And it’s then upon that data set that you collect through observation that you can then make meaningful design. Right. So whether that is a small pot. And where that’s orientated on a sunny balcony windowsill or it’s a large plot that has full sun with zero tree cover, there are going to be different ways that that space should or could be designed depending on those income streams, you know what I mean? And I talk about it financially because it is a it is an economy. You learn that that sunlight, if placed in correlation with that plot, becomes a financial gain again, for the photosynthesis that needs to occur with that plot. And likewise, you might have income streams coming in that you don’t want, so you might even be putting trees in particular corners of your yard just to gain some privacy where you can yield a privacy screen. And there’s obviously various ways that a space, whether it’s mined or massive, can be designed. But the most important thing is you can’t do that properly, that designed properly unless you’ve collected some data on how your parcel interacts with the wider context around it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:39:28] I remember the last time we spoke something that you said that really was an AH-HA moment for me and that was the use of vertical space because, you know, we kind of look at our square, a square metre or whatever we’ve got, but a lot of us have got fences.

Sam Betteridge [00:39:47] Yeah, fences are my favourite because they do exactly what you’re touching on and that’s extending the amount of space, but just vertically. So obviously plants grow vertically, vines can be trained vertically. We have reached a point in our technological advancements on this planet where we have things that can hang off vertical spaces. And for anyone who has a small space and they might let’s say you’ve got a small backyard like I do, very small, actually, it’s about five metres by about four, maybe three metres of actual growing space. The rest I’ve got put into service for some animals that I have some chickens. But you know, if you look at a box, the net of a box, obviously you’re growing here horizontally. But once you start to think about that vertical space and all the sunlight that’s shining onto it, you can use that as an area to spread vining plants or train especially fruit trees, or just allow things to drop down. And over from the top, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of extra space in small spaces that people, you know, have the opportunity to work with.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:41:03] I know another aspect that’s challenging, particularly in Australia, is is water. And you know, I don’t necessarily want this to be a commercial for what you’re working on now, but I am struck by the relevance of it because not only is water a very sparse commodity, but people often forget to water the plants. Yeah. And you know, you leave it on watered for a few days, maybe a week or two, and you’re done. You have to start all over again. So tell us a little bit about your latest, you know, adventure into this space of urban agriculture.

Sam Betteridge [00:41:43] Yeah. Look, look, I’m really proud to to let people know that I actually work for a fantastic company, at least in my perspective. I work for a company that has developed a technology that really embodies some of the permaculture principles that we talked about before. And that company is, of course, water ops. And what water ops is, is essentially they’ve created wicking cell. And for anyone who hasn’t or isn’t familiar with what wicking is, it’s another natural process that we have learnt about through observation of the natural environment. And long story short, Water US has developed a technology that takes advantage of capillary rise, which is something that your listener can learn about. That capillary rise is essentially the leverage of the adhesive and cohesive nature of water. So water will stick to things, but it also sticks to itself and that enables water to climb like a ladder. And the wicking cell, which is a product of water ups, just helps to bring water from a reservoir, which is essentially a water tank up from below soil and into the soil, right? So imagine inserting a water tank into your garden bed or garden pot, or if you’re in a nursery, you can use them as nursery trays and water. There’s so many different applications and you can water that once and maybe come back next month and it needs to be watered again. And you might say, well, hang on a second. Why is that? Why is that interval of watering or irrigation so wide? And what it is, it’s because, again, we’ve taken advantage of nature here and what we understand about nature. When you water from the top, you lose water to gravity. Obviously gravity is a thing. You water on top and the water will come in to the root same, but also that it will keep passing through the roots, even if there’s more than enough or if you water from the top. We are obviously subject to one of those really powerful income strains. Being the sun and evapotranspiration can often suck the water away from the plant, which you need at the plant. You know, the plant needed the water. So water comes with its wicking cell technology and the cell sits inside a water tank. A reservoir allows water to be sucked up via capillary rise into the soil and in particular the exact space in the soil that that water needs to be in. That’s around the rhizome, around the root. And what you have and what we’ve discovered, what water has discovered is that, you know, from the bottom of a reservoir, water will travel up about 40cm and just hold there because of the adhesive and cohesive nature of the water molecule. So it’s really, really a fantastic company that I’m very proud to say I work for because what water ops is kind of doing, it’s revelo revolutionising the way that we irrigate our agricultural spaces. And if you can save up to 80% of the water that you would use if you were applying it topographically, you know, not losing about 60% of that to evapotranspiration and 80% of that being lost to the gravity down below, below the rise. And then that’s a game changer because, you know, in terms of how that sits within this space that I love, that I exist in to urban regenerative agriculture, well, that’s integrating some of the the two most important things into an urban growing context. That’s water sensitive urban design, right? We’re sensitive about the water. It’s very important. Let’s not waste it. Let’s use it appropriately and efficiently. And it also allows me to design systems that are sensitive of the water. So not just the amount of water in terms of sensitivity, but how the water is looked after. You know, we can use plants in these water sensitive urban designs to actually filter and clean water. You know, there’s ways that we can use technology in the urban environment to create waters or water scapes that are very sensitive and make sense for us as humans who are consuming that water will make sense for animals and the biodiversity of insects and all sorts of things that natural environments need. They need them to function correctly, to function well so that we can all support the biome that we live on this planet we call Earth.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:46:36] Yeah, I love it because, you know, with the best of intentions, I think we’ve all planted things and then gone away on holidays and come back and found we’re going to start all over again. Yeah. And, and as you say, when we water, when we pull out the garden hose and start watering our plants, at least what you said, 60% of it’s lost to evaporation. Yeah, but I love the idea of using because that’s what happens, isn’t it? You water a plant, the water goes down to its roots and then it gets sucked up transpiration and moves through the plant and then comes out through the leaves. So you’re kind of using that wicking of nature and reproducing it. It’s a lovely idea.

Sam Betteridge [00:47:20] And it’s a natural process. And yeah, the technology just supports this psychology that we observe in nature.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:27] Yeah. Now edible education environments. So you know, and just let’s touch on that for a moment because schools and I mean a lot of kids I think get the idea that food actually is grown in the supermarket and on plastic trays that are covered in cellophane, you know, in in clingfilm. Yeah. But the school seems like a net a perfect place. Edible education environments. I mean, I think you’ve touched on it with pockets of the farm and how, how do, how do we take this into into schools and spoiler alert here and next episode this week, planting seeds. It talks a lot more about this. But let’s let’s talk a little about that.

Sam Betteridge [00:48:11] What to begin this like a big shout out to planting seeds of which every lander is is responsible for. We’re actually in partnership with planting seeds with they’re a fantastic organisation in supporting schools and in particular supporting edible education environment. So yes, Pocket City Farms is an example of an environment that is producing edible food, that is also providing education on how to do. And I think, you know, my latest mission, if you will, is to create more of these edible education environments. And that’s across all scales. You know, that’s in schools, university level, like we talked about at Charles Sturt. What do you see in the backyard or just on your windowsill? Right. And I think the idea for me is it’s one that just to me makes sense. You know, we need to be teaching people education about the environment and what better way to do so through the food you eat. So it’s it’s a very simple logic. The most exciting part for me being from the context of an urban environment is that not everyone has access to big pieces of land. Schools are often places that, you know, often in the urban environment, the only places left that actually have parcels of land where students can move freely on fields obviously can go to park, but that’s public lands is a bit different. And what I see is that water ups, The company I work for has this amazing ability to support schools, which, by the way, are very, very busy places. They are often very chaotic. And it’s quite understandable that if you are a teacher in a school who set up a garden, that they might forget to water it amongst the million other things that you have to do. So, you know, this technology that we have at water maps can serve schools to produce agricultural edible environments that also educate about the sensitivity of water and how we can truly be sustainable with the fantastic molecule that is H2O, but also allow for those busy lifestyles to occur because the time span between watering is a lot less. And because you can be sure that the water is in the exact right spot, it’s going to be. You also have incredible increases in growth rates. And water apps has done a lot of the experiments and has the science written down and ready to present to people if they’re ever unsure. But we can increase the growth rate of plants. In fact, schools and education environments that are often seen as places where you need to have laboratories or places where students can experiment and truly learn through experience. Experiential learning. We can provide laboratories that are fail proof whilst feeding the communal community whilst showing how we can regenerate agricultural environments and just be regenerative. You know, generally speaking, So there’s, you know, there’s this kind of. 3 or 4 pathways that come in here that schools, I think, actually have the ability to provide for not just the school, but the community that they’re connected to as well. And that’s kind of in a nutshell how I feel we should be developing urban agriculture. So obviously there’s rooftops and there’s verticals and there’s basements and there’s all sorts of spaces in the urban environment where regenerative agriculture systems can be developed and designed. But to me, it makes sense that you do that within an education institution, and that’s what schools are. And obviously, children will eat the food they grow. And that touches on your point before. Not only will they be eating healthy food, but they will truly learn that that food does not come in cling wrap. From a from a, you know, a big grocery store.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:52:18] Sam, That’s a great note for us to finish on, a very inspiring one. And I want to thank you so much for joining us today, sharing your knowledge, wisdom, passion and inspiration with our audience. Thank you so.

Sam Betteridge [00:52:30] Much. Thank you very much, Ron. It was it was a pleasure.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:52:33] Well, there were so many things we covered there and so many opportunities for us as individuals, irrespective of what way we live, even if it’s just a pot. But if it’s if you’ve got a small veranda or if you’ve got a window ledge, if you’ve got a fence, if you’ve got a tiny backyard or a big backyard, or if you want to get together with neighbours and approach council about using medium strips or or unused strips of greenery around your neighbourhood, the opportunity to connect with others and to connect with the earth and to grow something worthwhile, i.e. vegetation, food, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, contributing to net zero. If that is something that you really want to do, whatever. I think this is such a great opportunity and to take it into schools. Now, later on this week, we will also be talking to a doctor, Judy Friedlander, about planting seeds and the B and B highway. And this is all about pollination and the importance of pollination. Now, sin tropics, entropy was a term that I must say I wasn’t familiar with. So I’ll just share with you. In short, since Trippy is parliamentary the complimentary opposite of entropy, I’m not sure that helps. While entropy governs the thermodynamic transformations to release energy at the expense of complexity, meaning that I think things become moved towards breaking down Central P governs life, which accumulates and organises energy. And in the context of sin, tropic farming can be seen as a specific methodology within the broader framework of permaculture. Permaculture itself encompasses a wider variety of techniques and principles and has a more holistic approach towards sustainable living and land use. Look, this urban agriculture movement is something we could all and should all get involved with in in large or small ways. One of the things that we often hear, of course, is, well, if you didn’t go through this industrial agriculture, through the use of chemicals, fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, we just wouldn’t be able to feed the world. And having learned a lesson in the pandemic that I knew I should’ve known before. And that is there is a narrative that is conveyed to us through the mass media. I hesitate to call them news outlets anymore. They are essentially a mass media organisations. Places like The Guardian, the Herald, the ABC, the BBC, CNN, you name it. They’re all part of the mass media. And when they convey a message, which may well be we need this kind of industrial agriculture, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to feed the world. I have to approach that with a degree of scepticism because healthy scepticism because well, putting aside that a third of all food produced is wasted, which is a shocking indictment to our food system and the way we use it, but also the fact that we have so much space available to us in the urban environment. And this dovetails into programs we’ve done with one of my heroes and mentors, Helena Norberg Hodge, about local futures and also Damon Gamow in his regenerator episode, which I refer you back to, and that is about local futures. Local is the key. The movement towards globalisation has polarised and fractured societies and I’m really getting to know your neighbour rather than having a thousand friends on Facebook is far better for everybody’s health, including the health of the planet. So a lot here. It’s a big month. It’s an important month and it’s a it’s a month that we should carry into all 12 months of the Urban Agriculture month. We will have links to sustain.org. And also I would suggest water’s water apps, which is a is an organisation and I’ve seen things growing in these containers and it removes that that tension about have I water, do I need to water or am I wasting water. All those sort of things. I mean, I think it’s a really exciting initiative. And together with planting seeds, you know, we really should be supporting and getting involved in this movement. It only costs 18. Dollars to set up a whole organisation within a school. $800. 10,000 schools in Australia. You do the maths on that. I’m sure it comes in well and truly under $1 billion. And considering we spend $360 billion, our Australian government has spent $360 billion on 5 or 8 submarines that we probably never get. But we have no problem spending that kind of money. Perhaps we should be spending money that is good for us as individuals, good for us as a society and good for the planet. What a novel idea. Hope this find you will. Until next time, this is Dr. Ron Erlich. 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