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May 30, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
57:41
Allan Campbell and Mike Adams explore ways to GROW YOUR OWN abundant food forest...
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Welcome to today's interview on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, and today we are joined by a first-time guest, Alan Campbell.
He works with Food Forest Abundance.
Well, he's one of the principals there with Jim Gale.
And Alan Campbell has a new Brighteon University course coming out called Spring Permaculture Summit that's coming up.
We'll tell you about that.
We're going to start off by just welcoming him to our show and talking about the benefits of permaculture and growing your own food.
So welcome, Alan.
It's great to have you on today.
Thanks so much, Mike.
I'm really excited to be on and to have a chat about this subject, which is huge and really dear to my heart.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Thanks.
Well, we love this subject as well.
And, you know, we're all about advocating people growing their own food and becoming more food self-reliant.
Tell us about your background, how you got into permaculture, and then helping to shape foodforestabundance.com.
Yeah, great.
So I am originally, I studied as a mechanical engineer in Texas.
I'm originally from Uruguay and South America.
While I was in university, it was a time of discovery, really, for myself.
And I learned about this methodology, this design methodology called permaculture.
And, you know, a lot of the things that they were talking about made a lot of sense.
And it also made a lot of sense to the struggles and the challenges that I was seeing coming in the world.
So, for example, you know, there was talk about, you know, A place is being deserted or a lot of drought or a lot of water or people not being able to eat.
And I was seeing that permaculture was combining all these things into solutions, like having a water catchment system where you can then filter your water and drink it and irrigate your garden and grow your own food and capture your own energy.
So this design methodology made just a lot of sense, and it just stayed with me, and I slowly started practicing it.
I created a compost system in my local neighborhood, so I was getting to know my neighbors and creating amazing soil out of it.
With that soil, I started my first garden in Austin, Texas.
I was basically riding my bike around the neighborhood, picking up all this All these leftovers from people's kitchens.
From there, I went to work in a community garden, another place to create community and build up different types of skills.
And in 2020, when all the craziness happened, I decided to basically just dedicate my life to permaculture because I knew that permaculture had all the solutions that Basically, the world needed.
And I started with education, with youth education, because my son was a small kid.
And we were out in nature all the time foraging for food.
And then I translated that into my kids' school and now both of my kids' schools.
And soon after, I found Food Forest Abundance.
And Food Forest Abundance, you know, had like, in a way, like, Simplified the permaculture message because sometimes permaculture gets a little bit confusing for people because it's just a big umbrella for so many things.
Yes, yes.
I wanted to ask you about that, but go ahead.
Yeah, and basically Jim, you know, was like spearheading this movement of like simplifying the message of like Hey, we can transform something that is not really an asset for us, it's a liability, which is the lawn, into an edible and ecologically rich landscape through a food forest.
So we can put in plants that in the long run are going to create the ecology of the place much healthier, and they're going to give us food for years and years to come.
Yes, absolutely.
So there's a lot of people that resonated with that message.
So Food Forest Abundance, that's where Food Forest Abundance was launched.
And we've designed basically all over the world in almost every state in the US. And we collaborate with a large team of designers and a team of installers that actually put the Food Forest on the ground.
So that's a little bit the journey.
So this is fascinating, Alan.
I have so much to ask you about.
I love the fact that your background is as a mechanical engineer.
So you understand the math behind the physics of how our world works, which is really important for permaculture.
Just to clarify, are you the founder of Food Forest Abundance or the co-founder?
How do you describe yourself?
No, I came in as a designer a couple of months after Jim founded Food Forest Abundance.
I went into the education space pretty quick because I was already doing education before Food Forest Abundance.
Got it.
Just to be clear, So, like my co-host, Todd Pitner, he hired your company, Food Forest Abundance, with Jim Gale, who's been a guest with us many times.
He hired your company to build a food forest in his backyard in this neighborhood in Florida.
And I've got to tell you, by the way, that brings him so much joy, more than anything imaginable.
He sends me videos all the time from that food forest.
All the time.
I think one of his latest quotes was, a food forest gives you the gifts of the miracles of nature.
Because you're out there looking at it all the time, seeing it evolve.
It's not a static thing.
It's a living, sentient thing that actually responds to you, too.
You become it, and you become part of this ecosystem.
So that's another thing.
Another reason to grow your own food.
The food is almost like the hook that makes you want to be out there and see if you're producing the food that you're going to bring to your family, but then you start seeing It's not just about the food.
It's about all the ecological services or all the ecology that I'm creating in this place.
I'm creating habitats for beings that I didn't even realize existed.
I have so much to talk to you about on that point.
Even on my own ranch, just by allowing it to grow And not poisoning it, not using any pesticides or herbicides for the decade plus that I've lived there.
The amount of habitat that has grown up And the food that has emerged spontaneously without any effort on my part.
I mean, this should be called the spontaneous food for us.
It's like I have dewberries.
I have wild onions.
I have live oak acorns.
I've got so many natural food sources and flourishing then with rabbits and armadillos and then, of course, also falcons, the predators that go along with the ecosystem.
But now I have places for rabbits to run and hide.
So now there's rabbits everywhere, and then the other animals thrive as well.
So it's just this whole ecosystem.
It's amazing.
But you mentioned something earlier about how permaculture can sometimes seem intimidating to people.
And I agree with that point.
I've seen various attempts to cover permaculture that get too technical.
Yeah.
And when people ask me, like, what is permaculture?
I say, you know, it's so simple.
Instead of letting the water run off, yeah, you build a little bowl.
You know, you have an excavator or a bulldozer, you make a little bowl, and you're done.
And then trees are just going to grow there on their own.
You don't even have to plant them.
The trees are just going to start popping up because now you're catching water.
Like, that's where it starts, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I have several sayings from some of our designers.
For example, one of our designers, Doug Crouch, he says, every forest is a food forest.
So if you see it, one of the main functions of a forest is feeding all its beings inside of it.
So every forest is a food forest, so we can learn from that.
And then another of our designers, Matt Monger, he says, the easiest and simplest way to apply permaculture on a degraded land is putting a bird perch.
Because a bird is going to come, perch on this little object that you created, and it's going to poop seeds.
And then these seeds are going to sprout.
So it's basically like Being able to combine all these functions.
That's what permaculture is.
And another person here in Costa Rica told me, like, oh, permaculture is making use of all your resources.
And I was like, yeah, exactly.
Making smart use of all your resources.
So it's like combining all your elements in your system into, like, a smart and sound way of interrelationships.
So, yeah, like you were saying, like, Make sure you can capture all the water you have.
Of course, sometimes if you have too many, you need to find a way for it to safely leave.
If you have organic waste, turn it into compost, so then you can feed your plants.
If you have too many plants, use all that organic matter that you're chopping to feed your soil, etc., etc., etc., right?
Just see what systems are in your ecosystem, And see how you can contain them and make use of them in a cyclical manner as much as you can before the energy leaves the site.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And let me add to that.
But first, real quick, at brightu.com, folks, you can register to watch for free the Spring Permaculture Summit.
It begins June 18th.
Or June 8th, I'm sorry.
June 8th through June 17th.
And you can register for it now.
It's free to watch.
And it teaches you the principles of permaculture here from Alan Campbell and Food Forest Abundance.
And you can also optionally purchase the entire program and download it.
You can even purchase it now ahead of time at brighteonuniversity.com if you wish.
Or you can just watch it for free.
One episode runs each day, free to register, free to view.
If you do purchase it, it helps support Alan Campbell's efforts and his organization as well as some of the revenue supports this platform.
But one of the things that I learned, Alan, you know, I lived in Ecuador for a couple of years before I moved to Texas.
And when I lived in Ecuador, I learned so much about growing food.
And at that time, we had...
Planted and we're growing something like 80 different fruit trees in the Valley of Longevity area, which is like springtime year-round.
So it was the easiest place in the world to grow everything.
Papayas, mangoes, cherimoya.
You know, you're from Uruguay, so you know the climate can be very, depending on your altitude there, the climate can be very amenable to growing food.
Well, when I first came to Texas and I looked around, I thought, my God, there's no food here.
Everything's just dry.
There's nothing here.
And then over time I learned, wait a minute, everything is food or medicine.
Everything.
Like right now, I'm transplanting loblolly pine trees because the pine trees...
You know, you harvest the pine needles, you make pine needle tea, high in vitamin C, high in shikimic acid, which is the molecule used in the Tamiflu anti-pandemic medicine that stops viral replication.
I'm like, my gosh, I'm looking at a medicine chest of abundance.
What are your comments on that?
Yeah, for sure.
You know, nature has, like, all the food and all the medicine we need.
So sometimes it's about, like, learning about your environment rather than trying to plant food.
It's like going into a food forest, going on a foraging walk, learning about your local mushrooms, depending on where you are.
And that's what got me into permaculture, because I was seeing food growing everywhere and then learning about it, too.
And then I wanted to replicate that in my space.
So yeah, I think it's really about learning.
But yeah, there is also a reality that you see a lot of man-made, deserted areas.
I don't know.
I also worked in the oil industry in platforms that were drilling for natural oil and gas fields.
And basically, to be able to put in these platforms and containers, You need to basically evacuate all nature.
There's a possibility there where you can go back and replant.
We are regenerators.
Humans are regenerators.
We can go back and regenerate.
And the same with monocrop agriculture.
And the same with Even a city, right?
Here I'm living in San Jose, Costa Rica, and this is the Central Valley, and most of the places where cities were built on central valleys or on valleys of mountain ranges, these are the most fertile grounds where people used to harvest all their food.
Now they're almost food deserts because people prefer to, you know, to have like ornamentals because that's what was like instilled in their brain that that was the way to go.
But yeah, but these are, you know, if we can recover these places, these are the most fertile soils.
Of course, now they're filled up with debris from, you know, construction and deconstruction and all this stuff.
But yeah.
We are regenerators.
We have it in our DNA to be connected to nature and to recreate.
There's even studies right now showing that the Amazon rainforest is actually a man-made food forest using these techniques.
So permaculture, at the end of the day, is using the techniques of the ancestors that were really connected to the land, right?
There's not really nothing new, right?
It's us just reconnecting back to the land.
What you're talking about speaks to the, well, this is an existential issue for humanity.
I believe that we either return to sustainable permaculture type of philosophies or our civilization will die.
And let's talk about Mexico City, because I'm sure you've been covering this.
Mexico City is just about out of water.
I mean, they're cutting off water to high-end luxury neighborhoods right now.
And for all you watching, what's the value of your home or your business in a neighborhood that has no water?
It's zero, okay?
It's zero.
So you want to obliterate all real estate?
Just use up all the water supply.
So talk to us about that.
Mexico City facing, I think it's going to be the first major city in the world, over 10 million people.
I don't know the exact population.
The first super large city to run out of water.
Why is that happening?
What does that mean?
There could be millions of reasons.
I can, you know, make some assumptions.
It's happening here in San Jose, Costa Rica as well.
You know, we have a program, the water cuts.
So basically, like from noon until 3 p.m., you don't have water.
And, you know, and so, yeah, it's happening all over the world.
So...
Of course, there's a...
And this is like the bowl of Costa Rica, right?
This is where all the water infiltrates into.
This is where we should have the most water, you know?
Yeah.
And in Mexico City, it's kind of like the same thing.
Mexico City used to be a lake.
And basically, some of the most fertile agriculture happened over there in these systems called chinampas, where the indigenous people, like, mounded, basically, like, excavated the lake and put these mounds of soil and then had canals around it.
And, like, this soil was connected to, you know, to this super fertile water with fish manure and all this stuff.
Oh, yeah.
They were producing, like...
A lot of nutrition out of that.
And of course, as the city developed and more real estate and et cetera, then the lake actually got covered up and used up as well.
So reasons for water running out, well, in the permaculture literature, let's say, one of the cycles that has been most tampered is actually the water cycle.
You know, there's a lot of talk about global warming because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Actually, there's much more water vapor in the atmosphere than greenhouse gases.
So the water is not in the ground, it's in the air.
And now, of course, the cycles are kind of like...
Kind of like more aggressive in a way, like longer periods of no water and then shorter periods of more water.
So we just need to reestablish that.
And the way of reestablishing those cycles is keeping water on the ground and also not polluting the water, too, because if you have a river that is polluted, it cannot support like any trees or any life in it.
So it's going to erode much quicker.
The water is going to rush to the ocean much quicker.
So if we're able to hold the water, so any water that falls on a land, on a roof, is meant to stay on the land and slowly move towards the ocean, right?
It's not meant to rush into the ocean.
And that's what we're doing right now.
We have so many impermeable surfaces, no way of catching it.
We actually want to get it out of the city as quick as possible.
I'll just go with it.
Yeah, go for it.
Again, just a reminder to the audience, brightyou.com, this is where your permaculture summit will be airing beginning June 8th.
Register there to watch the whole series free of charge.
But what you're talking about there reminds me about how fragile the current monoculture systems are.
So it's a very fragile system.
The plants, when it's the same crop, they cut down all the trees, they make this nice flat field, and then they spray all kinds of chemicals on it and synthetic fertilizers and so on to grow so-called food, which is mineral deficient anyway.
But it's fragile.
It can be wiped out easily with disease or even a short-term drought or one rain, too much rain, just wiped out.
Whereas what you're talking about, permaculture has this built-in resiliency.
It's got redundancy because it has diversity of all kinds of different species.
And I don't know about you, but the way I like to plant, well, I'm pretty sure this is the same way you like to plant.
I don't plant in rows, you know.
It's just like wherever it seems the best place for that tree or this plant or that, and I let nature tell me where things are supposed to go, right?
And you know, like this plant wants to be on a little bit of a hill because it needs better drainage.
This plant wants to soak up more water, so you're going to put it in the bottom of this little bowl.
That's the way to plant.
Exactly.
Yeah, and then you have more resilience against drought and floods and everything.
Exactly.
You're working with nature rather than against it.
So yeah, 100%.
It's about reading your landscape and putting in the things that make sense there.
Of course, that's what we're trying to do with permaculture and specifically with a food forest, right?
We're trying to balance our dietary needs with the needs of the plants that we're putting in and what the ecosystem wants to be.
So we're kind of like We're interfacing all these layers of information to come up with a design and a decision-making process to then be able to do our planting.
But a lot of it comes from intuition as well.
So the more you fall in tune with your land, like you were saying, Mike, like you understand, okay, this is like a wet spot.
So I'm not going to put something, you know, I'm not going to put a cactus in here.
The cactus is going to go up in the hill, you know, where it's going to be dry.
So, yeah.
Yeah, and what's really interesting is I think the longer you live with a piece of land, the more, because I walk in nature every day.
It's just part of my religion, I suppose.
I walk with my animals in nature.
I have goats.
I take my goats with me on the walk, and they walk with me.
And the more you walk around, the more you observe, and over time you begin to learn the personalities of all the different plants and what they like or don't like.
And what always really struck me was where they crop up.
It's like, if you create the environment, the plants will appear.
Like, again, effortless permaculture.
You don't have to plant anything.
Like, if I want Nopal cactus...
All I have to do is create the environment for Nepal cactus and then boom, they will appear there on their own just over time.
But if you were to compress it in a time lapse, it's like magic.
They just appeared.
Or if I want a spot for like a bur oak tree or a live oak tree or if I want to grow dewberries.
I know I need a certain kind of environment.
It needs to be on the north side of something so it's more shaded.
It needs to have moisture.
And then, boom, dewberries just explode the next year, you know, and I'm picking berries.
And I don't call it gardening.
It's not gardening.
I'm not out there doing anything other than just mostly leaving it alone and then harvesting the food.
Exactly.
Gardening is almost like the excuse for you to go out there and connect with nature.
And then after that, yeah, it's not gardening anymore.
It's you being part of this ecosystem and then just reading it and exploring it.
You should be a designer with us, Mike.
I would love it.
I would love to be a designer with you.
Tell us about your design services.
I already mentioned my co-host, Todd Pitner.
He used your company.
So thrilled.
But you work with people all over the world, don't you?
Yeah, we work with permaculturists all over the world.
The process is that you can book a consultation with us for free on the website on foodforestabundance.com and you talk with one of our designers.
That's kind of like a free place where you can ask questions or you can ask about the process or you can talk about the price.
Yeah, if you go to the button on the top right, you can sign up for the free consultation.
Yeah, free consultation.
Okay, I see.
Yeah, and then that takes you to one of us.
And you have 30 minutes with us.
We can answer questions.
If you have any specifics, if you want to know about our design process, we go over that.
But basically, from there, you can decide several routes.
You can decide...
If you're ready to kind of like transform your land into like an ecological paradise and a food producing paradise, we can take you to the design journey, which is basically a series of three consultations where we understand all your needs, we understand all the energies that influence your land, the type of soil that you have there.
So kind of like what Mike was saying, you know, like we understand the landscape, we understand your needs, we combine these together And we're experts with plants in every region because of the diverse array of designers that we have.
So we put this plan of a perennial food forest.
We also include your annual vegetables because those are the fastest producing plants.
So you can have food pretty quick.
And again, that's kind of like the excuse for you to be going out there.
And...
And then you have your roadmap through a blueprint.
It includes a map with all the layout of your plants.
It includes a narrative which explains all the logic of why we put the plants in each location and the combinations of plants.
And it also comes with a plant list.
So you can take that and then run with it yourself and do it yourself, or then you can hire one of our install teams that we have install teams throughout the U.S. mainly.
I'm here in Costa Rica, so if you're in Costa Rica, you can hire my services.
But...
So that's one route.
And then there's another route, which is you're not ready to do the big transformation and you want to do it yourself and you just want to be handheld for a couple of months or half a year or a couple of seasons, let's say, or maybe at the beginning of each season.
We have consultations that are $200 an hour, but if you group them more than three that you can do at different times, they go at $150 an hour.
And this is also a nice way of us following your journey and giving you advice throughout the process.
So, it's not like a one-time thing and then you're like, okay, what do I do from here?
Of course, you can always hire us to do consultations moving forward if you have a design, but you can hire us with consultations all the way from day one.
Yeah, that's a little bit of our process in food forest abundance.
All right, that's really fantastic to hear.
And again, people are thrilled with what you've done.
You've transformed landscapes into really edible backyards and edible food forests.
And there's so many factors to consider today, but food inflation is just worsening.
It's getting so bad.
I was reading a story last night that said that Taking the family to McDonald's is now considered a luxury.
And I'm thinking, there are so many things wrong with this story.
Like, number one, families can't afford McDonald's except on special occasions.
And then if it's special, why would you take them to a junk food place like McDonald's?
Why would you go to, like, a place where you can pick your own fruit?
Like, go to an orchard.
Pick your own fruit.
You know?
That would be more of a family type of thing.
But...
Food inflation is bad, and it's only getting worse.
And also the quality of the food is very bad.
Wouldn't you say that one of the main advantages of growing your own food is that now you know where it came from because you can see it.
You know it hasn't been sprayed with who knows whatever toxic chemicals.
You know it hasn't been picked too early.
You know what's the worst thing in the world?
It's a store-bought peach that's still hard.
I mean, come on.
I'm not going to eat hard peaches.
I'm not going to pay for them.
Exactly.
You know, I want a fresh, soft peach right off the tree.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, exactly.
No, I know the quality, the taste, the nutrient contents of something that you grow yourself is always going to be, you know, you cannot even count it.
I was also reading an article that Like, apples back in the 70s or the 60s, you know, had like 40 milligrams of magnesium, and now they have like less than four, you know?
Oh my.
Yeah, like, you know, the depletion, like...
And, you know, it's like, yeah, you know, obviously we can, you know...
It's easy to point fingers.
We can say, okay, a farmer has a fault, but they're embedded in a system that is creating these situations.
All the way from education, from standardization of human beings, all the way to standardization of foods, of soils, of everything.
We're losing the ecological diversity, which is the resilience of the earth.
Growing your own food, right now there's all these autoimmune diseases, people are allergic to breads and gluten and all this stuff, but is it the grain?
Is it actually the pesticides?
That doesn't happen when you're growing it yourself.
There's also energetical information as well.
If you eat something that is grown in your land and then you get the flu or something that is a local bacteria or virus or whatever, your body is going to be much more able to respond to that because it has the information from nature to be able to respond to that.
If you're in Texas, but you're eating bananas from Costa Rica, and there's a bacteria or something, a disease in Texas, your body's like, what do I do with this banana to combat this disease that I have?
So there's also information that you get from your local ecosystem by eating your local ecosystem as well.
Yeah, that's incredibly, very much the case.
I mean, we've done stories about eating local honey, for example.
Yeah.
It helps your body.
It teaches your body what the local pollen is like, and so then people have fewer problems with allergies.
That's right.
You're sort of inoculating your body against any of the proteins that are floating around.
It's like, hey, I'm not even going to call it a vaccine because I don't even agree with that philosophy.
It's just food as medicine.
It's like the effect of the vaccine, but letting your immune system do the real work, right?
You're getting a shot of a potential, if you're getting a big quantity harmful thing, But you're ingesting it through your mouth.
You're getting a small dose.
Your ecology is getting used to this.
It's incorporating it.
You know, it's not like something that you're getting a vaccine and then your immune system didn't even understand that it went through you because your immune system normally gets it through your nose or through your mouth or even through your skin or through your ears, not directly into your bloodstream or into your muscle tissue.
That's so foreign.
Absolutely.
I want to ask you...
It is, yeah.
It's like a natural vaccine.
And there's so much of that, even when you eat foods that you pulled out of the ground that have the soil microbes in them.
Exactly.
Yeah, and you want that thriving microbial ecosystem and it creates resilience in your immune system as well.
That's right.
I want to ask you possibly a controversial question about permaculture.
And I've noticed if you have any kind of Real property, let's say five acres or more, and you want to do these kinds of projects yourself.
You want to plant trees, you want to dig holes, you want to move earth around.
It's incredibly useful to have a piece of machinery called an excavator or a mini excavator or mini-ex.
Let me show my screen just to show you.
I think the Kubota brand has been really reliable, but this is what they look like.
So you have little mini excavators like this.
Even a small one.
You see how small this is?
The guy's just writing it here.
But even something like this can save you all kinds of hours of time.
So you're converting diesel fuel into labor.
Often in a one-time situation, you need to reshape this piece, and then it's done for 100 years.
Do you think it is acceptable?
Because I've heard some permaculture people say, oh, no, you can't burn fossil fuels.
You can't use combustion engines to get anything done.
It's all going to be done with shovels and mules or something.
I don't know.
What's your take on this?
Well, permaculture is also about what you have available.
If you have a community of people that can come and all shovel together and create this, then great.
Or if you have a mule, then that's great as well.
I think machinery plays a huge role in the today and age reshaping of the land.
I think they're incredible assets.
However, if you're going to use a machine that has a lot of power in shaping the land, I would say make sure that you're designing and checking that the design makes sense before you do the work.
Because they are going to create a big impact.
And if it's done wrong...
For example, if you create a huge pond and you don't have a good...
Maybe it's not put in the right place and you don't have a good spillway for the pond.
You might cause big trouble there because you're holding a lot of water and suddenly all that water starts rushing out.
And you were only able to do that because you had an excavator.
So it needs to be done right.
In permaculture, normally when you're unsure, it's better to do simple and slow solutions.
That's one of the principles that we use.
Because then you can test out the system.
And you can still do that with an excavator, right?
You can do like a small pilot of what you were thinking you were going to do and see how that works.
And you can scale up over time.
So you start simple until you have the knowledge and the wisdom of what your local land needs and only then bring in the effort multipliers.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I personally don't, you know, I don't, using petroleum fuels, like, of course, like, you know, they cause emissions and stuff like that.
But I also worked in the environmental consulting industry.
And there's much more, like, you know, loss of carbon or any other emitters into the atmosphere from, like, deforestation than there is from fossil fuels.
And, you know, there's also industries that are much more heavy in fossil fuels.
I think, like, a small excavator, you know, to reshape your lands, to be able to then plant, you know, thousands of, like, thriving trees.
Like, there is a concept, Eric Olson, who is also a big permaculturist, like, uses the concept of embodied energy, right?
So, the machine has an embodied energy, the petroleum has an embodied energy, and then, like, what are you going to result out of it, right?
So, yeah, if you use, like, you know, an excavator, stuff like that, and you just do a driveway, then It's kind of like negative, negative, negative body energy.
But if you use an excavator and then you create this pristine food forest full of life, then okay, you exchange something that is like Taking away energy, but you're adding a lot of energy to the ecology.
I'm right there with you.
Exactly that.
If you're using it responsibly, and some of these excavators can burn less than half a gallon an hour.
It's incredible the amount of work that's in a gallon of diesel fuel, by the way.
But if you're using it to plant trees, to reshape, to capture water, to do these things, then it's a net benefit in the long run.
And I find, like, if I'm moving around, let's say, banana plants or something, they're very water-rich.
They're heavy.
And they're very heavy.
If you get the bulb and some stalk with it, it's a couple hundred pounds.
There's no way I'm doing that with my bare hands.
It's just not going to work.
No way.
I need a machine.
Exactly.
I do have donkeys on my property, but they don't do any work.
They're privileged donkeys.
All they do is beg for carrots, mostly.
They get manure.
Yeah, but they absolutely are not interested in doing any work.
They're like welfare donkeys, basically.
Okay, so just a reminder then to our audience, the course is called the Spring Permaculture Summit, even though it's a little bit kind of late spring here in the Northern Hemisphere.
But these are timeless principles.
You can use them year-round.
It begins streaming June 8th.
You can register for free.
Watch all the episodes for free.
Or optionally, you can purchase the full download, the digital downloads.
You can watch it then at any time you want.
You can put it on a thumb drive.
Feel free to share it with a friend or a neighbor as well if you purchase the course.
And you'll be helping to support these organizations here.
And we're advocates of permaculture.
Now, let's talk about...
We do see a lot of crazy weather happening these days.
And some say it's getting worse.
Some say it's the same.
We're just noticing more.
I don't know.
It seems crazier to me.
We're getting crazier windstorms and whatever hail sometimes.
Doesn't this mean that our food supply is going to be a lot less reliable from the traditional producers?
Yeah, I believe so.
In the designs that we do, we actually put plants that can be in both sides of, let's say, the hardiness zone, or the weather patterns, or where it might go in that area.
So, if you have a weather pattern that is here, We plant plants that can also be sustained in this weather, and also plants that can be sustained in this weather.
Because it's happening that it's not going in one direction only.
For example, here in Costa Rica, one year it rains a lot, and then the next year it doesn't rain that much.
In some places more north, it could be one year they have a really cold winter, and one year the winter is almost not even there.
We're trying to create resilience by putting plants on each side of the spectrum.
If one year you had deep frost and those plants couldn't sustain it, we have more plants that were cold hardy that are able to sustain that.
In one year you don't have a frost and you have plants that need a frost.
Now we planted some stuff that is more temperate that you can produce too.
There is I believe there is a shift in the way that agriculture is being done as well.
Of course, it started with organic agriculture, but that's almost the same as monocrops, still a lot of soil depletion and not really enhancing the ecology of the place.
But now there's starting to be waves of agroforestry systems, which they're still planting in rows for production efficiency and management efficiency, but the systems are much more complex.
And because of the complexity of the systems, the system itself is more resilient.
The system creates wind buffers, the system creates temperature buffers, so plants are not getting shocked with these extremes.
Alright, that's really important, but let me ask you kind of a follow-up question on that.
And it has to do with people who are currently looking to move to a different place, and so they're looking at pieces of land, or they're looking at a home with some land, whatever.
A lot of people are moving out of places like California, obviously.
I mean, who wants to live in a collapsing West Coast society at this point?
And people are looking for more rural areas.
Can your company help people also consult about just looking at the land that they're about to buy?
What's the permaculture potential here?
And let me just add this.
I know a lot of people who moved to Austin.
Now, Austin, in West Austin...
Now, you lived in Austin, you said.
In West Austin, the soils are horrible.
It's like a little thin layer of leaves and then it's rock.
It's like limestone.
There's nothing.
But then east of Austin, roughly speaking, east of the 130 tollway or whatever, now you have soil.
You've got five feet of black dirt.
I mean, the contrast is huge.
I've seen people move to Austin and buy a house in West Austin because that's where it's kind of more popular.
And then they're like, how come I can't grow any food?
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, it's also understanding the ecology too, right?
It's a more like desert landscape, so you could be growing more like desert plants there in a natural way.
But there's always ways of creating more fertility on your soil by us being regenerators, right?
So planting things, like for example, the mesquite.
The mesquite grows in West Austin quite a bit.
It's almost like a weed.
And it's hard to work with because it has thorns.
But it's...
It's a very good food.
You can turn the mesquite beans into flour.
So you can have a source of food there which is really rich in protein.
And then you can be planting a lot of mesquite and then you can be chopping and dropping that mesquite into the ground.
And maybe you do like a pit, like you said.
You create a pit and you start putting all this organic debris in it.
And suddenly you create an island of fertility.
So now you can plant something that is like Something that can withstand a little bit of a different climate, not just the deserted climate.
So you can start creating this succession in your plant.
But yeah, you need to manage it.
You need to be on it because, yeah, you need to build soil.
It's the same as in Florida, right?
In Florida, you have sandy soils.
At Jim's place in Gold's Landing, it's all sand.
The way to fix that is to put a lot of mulch, a lot of wood chips from cuttings of trees because The wood chips have a lot of calcium and then they can bind to other minerals and slowly you start creating soil.
Yes.
So similar concepts.
There is efforts right now with these principles, they're regenerating the Sahel, the intersection between the tropic Africa and the Sahara.
There's also a big permaculturist in the world called Jeff Lawton who has a big regeneration of the Of the desert in Jordan.
And he's using a lot of pioneer plants, nitrogen-fixing plants that he's chopping and dropping to create a lot of biomass.
Wow, that makes sense.
And then you can plant.
In Phoenix, Arizona, people are growing tropical stuff because they're dumping truckloads of wood chips, so they're planting in the wood chips, and of course with a little bit of irrigation.
In Tucson, Arizona, there's Brad Lancaster who basically changed all the All the laws of the town because he was like, hey, there is enough water that falls on this town.
It's just like we're not capturing any of it.
So he's creating these basins off the curve of the road.
So the road is a river and then he has a cutoff where the water infiltrates in a basin and now he has this enormous ecology growing and they're actually solving water problems in these deserted areas.
Yeah.
That's challenging, because in Tucson, it only normally rains hard like once a year.
Yeah, he did the calculations, right?
And he's like, even though it only rains once, if you calculate all the water usage of the town, we actually get that amount of water when it falls.
You just have to capture it.
Yeah, it falls so intensely that people just want to get it out, because it's like, you know, if we capture it, you know, or if it stays, it's going to cause disaster.
But if you design for it, Now you're creating the ecology that you need.
Absolutely.
Let's also talk about combining animals with your permaculture.
Let me just say, for example, we have chickens in addition to goats.
I think it's really important to have backyard chickens because, of course, you get the fresh eggs, but then you also have a place to put your food scraps.
So if you've got fruit that's gone bad or whatever, the chickens are happy to gobble it up.
And then also goats.
I love the fact that goats make nice, just really awesome pelletized fertilizer.
They're just like little pellet fertilizer factories walking around, just pooping and walking, and that's what goats do.
But if you need to handle animal manure, you want goat manure, trust me.
It's like the best to deal with.
It's already, it's like pre-packaged by Mother Nature, you know what I mean?
Yeah, it's great.
But isn't it important to incorporate, if you can, where you live, you know, how do animals incorporate into a permaculture plan?
Yeah, I see animals, you know, playing, you know, so many functions in a system.
Well, first of all, like, you know, you start, like, you know, getting to know them as well, right?
So you start getting to connect with these animals.
So there's kind of like this friendship, spiritual connection.
But, you know, like, their biggest function, I see, is their, yeah, they're kind of like compost machines, right?
And we are, too.
We are, too.
You know, we're eating stuff, and we're creating compost.
We're not, in a lot of places, we're not...
We're comfortable with maybe using our own manure, but animal manure, let's say, has less pathogens, so it's easier to use.
But yeah, all of their gut systems is a compost-making machine, so basically having animals is going to accelerate your...
Your regeneration process.
You're going to have much healthier soils if you can incorporate the animal manure into your system much quicker than if you don't.
You can chop and drop a plant and that's great.
It's going to decompose.
The soil itself has its own microbiome, so it's going to create this digestive system.
But if you pass it through an animal, it's going to be from one day to the next.
You eat it, you chop it up, you get all your microbiome digesting it, and then you're getting it out, and now all the nutrients are available for the plants immediately again.
So I would say incorporating animals, if you can, is huge.
Normally, the incorporation of the animals, it's just the next level of commitment to the place, right?
Because you need to have a system to be able to manage them, right?
Like, what are they going to eat?
What are they going to drink?
Chickens, you have to have water for them all the time.
They can survive without food for a little bit.
But you have to have some kind of protection from predators in the night.
You just have to be a little bit more committed and have systems in place to be able to manage them.
A food forest by itself, you don't have to manage that much, but animals is the next level of commitment to place, which is great.
That's a great thing to do as well.
Committing to place is what's going to make the place be regenerated quicker too.
Now, fish and ponds.
Now, you mentioned earlier some of the ancient civilizations really knew how to grow food.
When I lived in South America, one of the things I did is I toured some of the ancient Inca civilization structures, and they had fish ponds.
And they would capture, you know, fish, and then basically this was aquaponics back, you know, I don't know what year it was.
Centuries ago.
Aquaponics.
So they would have fish in the pond, and then they would have rafts of plants that would have what we call the suspended non-circulating hydroponic system.
The roots go down into the pond water, so the fish are creating the nutrients.
The roots are getting the nutrients, and there's specialization of the roots.
Some roots that are in the air become the air exchange roots, and then some that are in the water become the nutrient water roots.
And so they had a system, and it didn't require any technology, really, just understanding.
The system worked, you know?
Exactly.
I'm looking at them like, why aren't we doing this now?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's, in my mind, simpler than aquaponics, because aquaponics, you require a lot of, like, technology that, you know, you might, like, You know, you're relying on, like, you know, temperature of the water and you're relying, like, on oxygenation of the water and making sure your pipes do not get stuck and all that stuff.
So, in a way, it's like simplifying aquaponics and doing it more with nature.
Of course, like, if you're living in a place that is really cold and you want to have fish and, you know, you want to have access to it all the time and you have the technology and the expertise, go for it.
But aquaponics, I would say, is like a very invested, high-tech, I completely agree.
I mean, I looked into it very deeply, and both hydroponics and aquaponics, if you lose power, you lose all the fish in minutes, and then you're done.
In hydroponics, you can lose the whole crop if the water doesn't circulate for a few hours.
But I was using the...
I've been growing for years in these bins using what's called the Kratky method, you know, the suspended net pots, which is really based on, I think, the Inca technology, which was also adopted in Taiwan by the aboriginal Taiwanese.
But it's a very simple system, requires no pumps.
So it's great for third world scenarios or off-grid scenarios because there's no pumps.
So there's nothing to fail, you know?
Okay, yeah.
And I'm into resilient systems that can't just, like, I don't want to wake up one morning, oh, the power failed, I lost the whole crop.
No, no thank you.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's what permaculture is as well, right?
Trying to create resiliency, also so it doesn't depend on the human input that much.
Right.
Or circuit boards.
Right.
Exactly.
You know, I don't want these complex circuit boards that are really close to the water tank also that, you know, are subject to a power surge or a lightning strike.
And it's like, oh, come on.
We've got to be able to make this work.
So that's what permaculture is all about.
All right.
So, Alan, let me mention your website.
Foodforestabundance.com is where people can contact you and Jim Gale and get their services, the food forest design services, nailed down.
And then the Spring Permaculture Summit is at brightu.com, coming up beginning June 8th.
Is there anything else you'd like to say and leave us with as we wrap up this interview?
Yeah, we would like to also give your audience, Mike, a discount for the upcoming weeks until the end of the spring.
So until June 21st of 20% with a coupon code of MIKE20 for anybody that wants to buy a design or a consultation.
So yeah, feel free to go to the website.
That's awesome.
Can I ask you to also add a coupon code RANGER? Ranger, yeah, we can do that.
Just Ranger, because my audience knows that's usually like the standard coupon code.
Yeah, we can change it to that.
Or we can now do both.
Yeah, do both.
Okay, so Mike20 or Ranger...
Perfect.
Or sometimes we like to do funny coupon codes like, Mike collects goat poop, saves you 20%, you know?
Something like that.
We come up with, you know, we like to have fun, too.
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's about that, too.
I'm doing the food forest at my son's school right now, and we're building community.
It's such a pleasure to be out in nature and see these systems evolve.
As Todd says, the growing food is a huge part of it and a huge part of the benefit for us.
The benefits that you get in the long run, well, you're going to have an asset to leave to your next generation as well, right?
If you plant something now, you feel like, oh, I'm not going to be here in 10 years, or I'm just going to reap very little fruit out of this tree.
That tree is going to be there for generations to come.
So many people are going to benefit from that.
And it's part of the story, too, right?
Back in the day, there used to be stories of like, yeah, the grandpa used to sit under this tree and brew his tea or smoke his pipe or so many stories connected to nature like that.
We create these emotional relationships with these beings as well.
There's so many benefits that come from growing your food forest.
Yeah, we encourage you to do it yourself or if you need help, to reach out to us.
I would also say to all those watching, if you're a prepper, you're into preparedness at all, you probably have a food supply stored.
That's going to run out.
I mean, it's good for a while.
No matter how big your food supply, eventually it's gone.
You have to transition into growing more of your own food.
And the best time to start growing food, especially with nut trees and fruit trees and berries and so on, is to start now.
So that a couple years down the road or whenever there's disruptions in the food supply, you've got at least semi-mature trees that are really producing.
You know, one other thing, Alan, I want to mention this to you.
I was talking with a man who sells peaches at one of the local farmer's markets over the weekend.
And he said that somebody stole 200 peaches off his peach tree.
Okay.
I'm like, people are looting peach trees now.
That's how bad food inflation is.
Exactly.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
It's almost like you also need to strategically put your peach trees and other trees where you can protect them from looters.
Put your cactus around, put your mosquito around your peach trees.
Yeah, right.
If you can make it through the thorns, you can have the peaches.
Exactly.
Well, there's a guy in Minnesota who created these rust barriers.
To prevent the deer to get into its food forest.
And yeah, they're successful.
So yeah, there's ways to work around that too.
Oh, that's great.
All right.
Well, thank you, Alan.
It's been a pleasure to speak with you today.
We really appreciate what you're teaching people and what you do.
And thanks for making the world a more abundant place.
Awesome.
Thanks, Mike.
Thanks for having me.
It's been great.
All right.
Thank you, too, Alan.
Have a great rest of your day.
And thank all of you for watching.
Again, the Summit is available free of charge.
You're going to learn a lot there.
Just go to brightu.com, sign up.
It begins streaming June 8th.
You're going to love it.
You're going to learn life-changing information that will help keep you well-fed and nourished for potentially generations to come.
And thank you for supporting us, and thank you for supporting foodforestabundance.com.
And they can change your life.
If you've got a piece of land, you want to turn it into a food forest, they're the folks who can help you get that done.
And thank all of you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
God bless you all.
Take care.
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