S5 ● E63 Talking Shop With Curtis Stone

so I'm here with catalyst and we've had an amazing workshop and this is the second part of a video the first part of the video is up here maybe it's up here I don't know how great cards work but you can see some questions from curtis's viewers that he wanted to impose to us and we're just discussing a few things about the farm here but I actually got a few questions from our subscribers that I ask people for questions that they could put Curtis while he's here and so as a few of those here someone was asking here silver maples he's asking and like in the past you've talked about buying a bigger farm and doing the real thing which is what you were interested in originally when you started being here and farming and what are you thinking about that now like do you it's funny well it's I mean it's a complicated answer I mean I would say come in here I mean there's parts of the lifestyle that are really attractive to me I love living in the country I love the community in the country like even just talking to some people who are your neighbors you know in the course I mean I love country people because they have skills they're really resilient they're really resourceful and I like that aspect of the lifestyle of the country but the challenge for me is that I'm involved in so many other enterprises outside of specific farming I run a company in California with Diego footer I'm a regular content creator I write every week I do all these other things and I have a young baby that I go in a way I'm kind of happy I didn't do it you know if I didn't have those other things happening and this all comes down to context if I didn't have those other things happening I think I would be wanting to do this but at the same time I've already I've put in seven years I mean I've been this is my ninth year of doing this I put in seven years where I had huge days and I look at your day to day and you know no offense but I'm just kind of like I don't know if I want to do that I don't know if I don't know if I can handle that right now because I have too many other things on the go that I it just it just wouldn't be practical in my context at this moment could it happen again later in my life probably yeah most likely I think eventually I do want to be in this kind of situation that's the context change over time and there's I've been talking to Curtis about it's like my context is also changing we have a young baby and the desire to spend more time with family and time out and I kind of took on a couple of full-time roles here one is educating and mentoring people and one is one in the farm and actually I've really zooming down to wanting to just farm and have less people around and and so context changed and that's the way it is and all we need to do is keep responding and managing to them that's it it's it's cool I mean I think like once you get into that line of thinking and you know we hit you and I have had some different conversations about permaculture and what it means and all that but I think one of the greatest things that I've taken from permaculture because I got into it quite a long time ago was observational thinking no and that's actually helped me not only in my farming but really it's helped me in my other business enterprises because I've learned to take live feedback feedback loops observe and interact and then change things as I go so what I started with and where I thought I would be is totally different than where I am now and so I think as long as like I've been open to these things and I'm open to have my mind changed because it has been changed many times and that's kind of helped me continually redefine my context I've got a question here from Aruba and we obviously me producing farm and I think everyone that follows our channels well aware of that even if they're not people indeed meet themselves but it's a big part of what we do here and obviously we're exposing people to the entire process of raising slaughtering animals and I've talked a lot about the unsustainability of of a vegan approach to farming now I'm not I have no bones with whatever people want to eat but from a farming perspective is really important to understand that animal inputs are vital for driving fertility loops and the question for Maroubra was to yet so he occurred this touch on that as a vegetable producer and I think probably a lot of people the vegan vegetarian are following your channel and maybe not even aware that how much animal input there is in in vegetable production yeah well it's interesting this is actually come up at the workshop a lot because we kind of talked about commercial farming versus being an agrarian mmm-hmm and those two things are very different you know people like John Jevons in the biointensive movement have done this for a long time they can produce vegetables on a vegan diet with vegan inputs and that's all fine and dandy but it is agrarian ISM in the sense that you can't scale the production and a lot of Labor and inputs go into producing your fertility this is the advantage of animals that the the gut of an animal is an instant way of creating compost and it's just the reality of it I was a vegetarian for 16 years I was even a raw vegan for I was raw vegan for one year I was a vegan for a couple other years out of that whole 16 years and two years into me being in farming I was still vegetarian I learned really quickly that a vegan diet just wasn't practical in organic agriculture and it was just it was one of these things where I sort of experienced a cognitive dissonance where it was just like well this goes against everything that I've thought was correct for many years but it's just the reality and I think you know if you want to talk about the sustainability of meat because obviously when meat is criticized it's the vegans are always criticizing industrial agriculture yeah I mean they're a good tune and and we do - exactly because it isn't sustainable and it rightfully so it should be criticized but when you really when it really comes down to it animals are required in agriculture just as in the natural world animals eat each other and kill each other and nature I would argue that in nature it's a lot nastier for some of the way animals are killed then they are here on this farm it's quite fast and these animals on this operation have an incredible life up until the last seconds that they're killed that one that day is don't sell it and says it's really important to understand that there are no vegetarian ecosystems and it's really fine whatever people want to eat but I think it's an irresponsible way to farm myself it's you know animal inputs drive fertility in all ecosystems and they integrate so well together and that's what we need more in our farming systems is integration via ok taste is asking so both of you have market gardens with wide wide range of products and looking at the decline of resources in the world what would be the hardest resource to self supply in the future to keep a small micro or small vegetable garden running thinking about things like water seed grain compost etc well I think you and I probably agree on this one it's probably phosphorus as far as an input that's brought in but that also is very dependent on where you are I've done market gardens I helped people set up market gardens all over North America some in Australia New Zealand and in some places phosphorus isn't an issue in the soil it's overly abundant but in some places it's not so I would say as an input that is needed in agriculture phosphorus is one and as far as I know we're at sort of a peak you know what is what it's possible to produce in the world is phosphorus so it's probably that because you can produce nitrogen you know if we just talk about NPK compost can always be done locally that's right so we can produce nitrogen relatively easily and I think seed is one but I just was thinking about Curtis made a video recently looking at a seed saver who's running a commercial you know profitable commercial saving seed and I think you should check that video yeah maybe it's what it card up to it or something and yeah because you know seed saving like seed is a global distribution market so if you buy seed from a local Swedish company they're buying from johnny's in America who are buying from possibly Syngenta or you know yes nobody knows it's a massive global distribution network but actually what we need is people running market gardens a bit like this specifically for seeds and they're local I would always buy a local person seat because it will be adapted really well to this specific circumstance as long as they can do it at a price that's reasonable sometimes like in Danvers blah is the video this is turn a Seoul farm in Quebec it's an incredible large-scale organic farm and I would urge people to check it out because sometimes we talk about scalability and market gardening and I honestly think is my opinion now and this has changed over the years just in my experience in my travels is that if we're gonna scale market gardening it does get to a point where the 30-inch bed system just doesn't make much sense because let's be honest 30 inch bed market gardens are not going to feed the world because if you want them to feed the world you're expecting more people to get into agriculture than are now and people in agriculture has been declining ever since the Industrial Revolution exponentially because technology allows farmers to do more with less yeah and so unless we expect that that trend is all of a sudden gonna change and there's also suddenly gonna be a revolution of billions literally of billions of farmers getting into market gardening I highly I think that's unlikely I would love to think that that would be the case my idealistic mind would say yeah wouldn't that be lovely but it's not so I think it's worth looking out operations like turn a soul and say here's an organic farm that builds soil they're using active cover cropping and some tillage to build soil on scale and so I'm not saying that has to be done through tillage but I think there's a lot to look at these types of farms and see how do you do this on scale because 30 inch bed where it's really human powered is a great system I would say up until six maybe ten acres once you get beyond that and you're talking about tens of thousands of customers every day it's a different operation and I think we need to look at larger scale systems and and learn from them and I think that's probably what's realistic if we want to scale this because we can't expect billions of people to get into Market Garden and I just think it's an unrealistic expectation it's an interesting thing I think Curtis will say the same but because we'll we're just engaged in this field every day limes that it kind of forget that not everyone is thinking about this stuff and actually hardly anyone's thinking about this stuff you guys all are following these channels but most people on this planet aren't and so the global trend is this decline of people in Ag and Farms are getting bigger and more industrial and robotic etc and there is a big rise contrary to that there's a big rise in people getting into particularly market gardening yeah it's such a small scale that it's insignificant it is in the global food supply and that's I mean it sounds depressing to talk about because I mean we have certainly seen I don't know if this has been your experience but it's been mine I'm sure it has been your experience but I have noticed a lot of people getting into this and so in our little microcosm of our ecosystem that we live in it seems like this is this huge phenomenon but if you look at the hard numbers of global food production and you talk about regenerative AG and market gardening we're not even a sliver of a percentage of global output and I know the UN published this this it was I don't know if it was the UN but it turned out to be not quite true there was this study that went around and said you know small farmers are producing the lion's share of the global food programs it wasn't true it was they exaggerated a couple things but it's like you know and it was times it's funny and it's ironic I was having a laugh with your wife when we didn't have some stuff on the farm and she was like thank God for the global food system that we were able to get some of this stuff brought in to use at our event here we need to feed 45 people a day it's so it's like we should criticize industrial in agriculture we should criticize conventional large-scale but at the same time should be humble enough to none we should be humble enough to learn from it and also be grateful that it is there in that we have been able to do things that human beings are never able to do as a result of it so again doesn't justify the things that are wrong about it but it's it's important to put it into context yeah it's complex questions but I think yeah that the seed one is an important one for me because it's that's going to be a limiting factor for people as time goes on but there's a big need in demand for good seeds there's and and skilled as a skill like it's I don't think each market gardener should be say see do you want to be turning your beds over making a viable living but that viable living can be made by someone exclusively growing seed but that's it's another skill level and you need to know it it's a it's a very other skill level it also requires a certain amount of land that you can do it the thing that's interesting about seed saving operations is that they always have a market garden so but it's not necessarily it doesn't really work the other round if you're if you're gonna be a market gardener to have a seed saving operation doesn't really make sense unless it's really your context but Dan brizz was operation is there are seed savers and they have this fairly big Market Garden I know a couple other people on the west coast of Canada that save seed and seed saving is their thing but then they have a small Market Garden as cash flow and so it's well actually one thing I wanted to touch on because we mentioned compost and seeds is I think compost is actually an enterprise that is really overlooked and it's it's not as sexy as bringing up animals and having a market garden but I think that's a serious need that's not being met in this space because you and I both bring in compost we had a point in getting good compost here yeah and and I talked to people around Europe here this is a major issue I see it from my youtube subscribers all the time they say Curtis I know you use a lot of compost sometimes we use 20 yards a cubic yards a year on our tiny 46 50 foot bed farm and people go I can't get good compost you can actually make money and compost the guy that I was buying compost from for years died last year unfortunately but he was making money at this and it's actually not that complicated of an operation it's it doesn't require a ton of infrastructure you need something you definitely need a tractor and you need a way to turn that compost but you can scale into it you can start simple and then you can upgrade to implements I think this is an enterprise that a lot of people should be looking at yeah we need people getting powered up and operate in all parts of the system so there's many ways into you know in the field of regenerative a girl whatever you want to call it but Carl hammer in America Vermont compost that's a really great operation very great opera make soup a good compost that's passionate about the art and science of compost whereas most compost you can find it's more of a simple compost turning a waste into another resource but the passion and the part that makes it so useful for a market garden is missing it's just a substrate with nutrients balance but missing life or whatever so I agree I think that's a really good enterprise that people could be standing up as well yeah cool I think that's gonna be enough for now we're going for breakfast yeah it's our last day today Curtis is leading the day and then people who are dooming back off to where they live to carry on with their projects and farms and digest all the information they've been exposed to but thanks so much for coming yeah I've enjoyed this days these guys are awesome and we've had a really nice smooth easy time really it's been surprisingly easy to drownd yeah in a drug and it was funny cuz it rained yeah the day after we got here it's like we brought the rain so it helped a lot yeah thanks so much and I've really enjoyed the time and I look forward to collaborating future absolutely awesome cool thanks so much for watching folks see in the next video [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 14,875

Rating: 4.9523101 out of 5

Keywords: ridgedale, ridgedalepermaculture, curtisstone, marketgardening, urbanfarming

Id: lR4gPUAP2Mc

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 25 2018