We have destroyed or severely disrupted many of the perennial ecosystems that were here in favor of annual crops. Crops that require the use of herbicide and mulch year after year until, eventually, the soil is depleted and we move on. So, how can we use the design principles of permaculture to restore the ecology of the planet, provide ourselves with all the food, fuels and fibers we need, and make money while we’re at it? And at scale no less!
Agroforestry farmer and permaculturist Mark Shepard is the CEO of Forest Agriculture Enterprises, Founder of Restoration Agriculture Development, and award-winning author of Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Mark joins Ross and Christophe to share his understanding of permaculture, explaining how he applies its principles in a way that allows for scale and designs practical systems around the individual farmer’s machinery.
Mark introduces us to his idea of STUN agriculture (Strategic Total Utter Neglect), describing how nature solves every problem farmers have—at no cost and with very little effort. Listen in for insight on where science falls short in supporting the transition to restoration agriculture and learn how we can leverage permaculture to build economies around ecologically-designed systems.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers by Mark Shepard
Water for Any Farm by Mark Shepard
Forest Agriculture Enterprises
Restoration and Agriculture Development
Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith
The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming by Masanobu Fukuoka
Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit by Andrew Moore
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club? Get special access to nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori.com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am Nori’s creative editor. I am joined by my co-host Christophe Jospe.
Hey, Christophe.
Christophe Jospe: Hello, hello.
Ross Kenyon: Hello. We have a guest for whom we read a book. We did our homework. We’re ready to talk about this book. So Christophe, I will pass it to you to introduce the book and our guest.
Christophe Jospe: All right. Well, our guest today is Mark Shepherd, who is an agroforestry farmer, a permaculturalist, also a musician, we just found out, and also an author of Restoration Agriculture. It’s a real pleasure to have Mark on the podcast, not only because I actually really enjoyed your book, Mark, but you’re one of those folks who thinks about things slightly differently And probably, you know, stirs the pot. I don’t know, is that the right metaphor, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so.
Christophe Jospe: You’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, so you’d know we’d probably think about this topic. But you’re also coming at the whole topic from a really interesting way. So maybe, Mark, if you could start us off with the show to give a bit of your background and what it was that drove you to want to write this book in the first place.
Mark Shepard: Oh, my goodness. See that? Well, hi. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate that. How I got to the point where I actually wrote a book about it was kind of a long and roundabout thing. I grew up in the early 1970s during the oil embargo, the whole hippie back to the land movement, the river down at the bottom of the hill when we would leave the house in the car. The big game as kids would be to guess what color the river was. Red, green, orange, yellow. It was the Nashua River in north central Massachusetts.
And one day while we were waiting in a gas line because gasoline was rationed, The car ran out of gas. I was 10 years old. My mom was in the driver’s seat, obviously, with my baby brother in the car seat in the front. They actually allowed that back in those days. And he’s screaming and hollering and throwing Cheerios all over the place and car won’t work. So my mom makes me and my next to younger brother get out and push the car. And when you have the opportunity to push a car in a half a mile worth of a gas line, you have a lot of time to think about How critically dependent on fossil fuels and all of the other trappings of so-called civilization that we had become.
And that was one of the, you know, seriously strong founding moments for me. It’s like, we got to really make change and not just talk about it, not just vote about it, not carry a placard on the street corner, but make real change both personally and, you know, and collectively. So that was one of the founding influences. I was, of course, pressured to get a good education, go to a good school, get a good job. I did all that. I hated it. So I quit my job after going to engineering school and went back to college to study ecology.
And that was really my passion. I just wanted to hang out outside and study how nature actually works. Now, how nature actually works and how you’re told that nature actually works are sometimes two different things. And that might be where you get that thing that I stir the pot or rabble rouse or whatever words you used on me. And so from a very early age, early 20s, actually, I decided that I was going to take personal action in my life. To help to restore the ecology of planet Earth while providing myself with food, fuels, medicines, fibers, and to generate enough revenue to pay my bills and help others to learn how to do it.
And it’s been one heck of a rollercoaster ride since then.
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. Thanks, Mark.
Mark Shepard: You bet.
Christophe Jospe: So the subtitle in the book actually is Real World Permaculture for Farmers. Which begs the question, what is permaculture?
Mark Shepard: Well, permaculture is a contraction, two words, permanent and agriculture. That was the original meaning assembled by the founder of the whole permaculture movement, Bill Mollison, an Australian, and David Holmgren, his first big sidekick. It’s morphed through the years, but my training was from way back when, and it sure seems to me that permanent agriculture is a really good goal for us as a human species. Most of our food, our human calories, come from a handful, five, as a matter of fact, or the majority of all of our carbohydrates, proteins, and oils come from five different plants that are all annual plants, which means that you plant them in the ground, they grow for three to four or five months, and then they die, and you harvest a copious amount of starch or protein, whatever the case may be.
That’s a very nomadic and it’s a very temporary form of agriculture because in order to grow an annual plant, you have to destroy a perennial ecosystem first. You have to plow up a prairie, you have to clear cut a forest or, you know, slash and burn or whatever the case may be. You have to kill the perennial vegetation and destroy a three-dimensional ecosystem that can persist and regenerate itself through time, propagate itself, expand its range, and it can survive with no fossil fuel inputs, no additional soil amendments. It can do it all by itself within the existing disturbance framework, and by disturbance I mean anything that can suddenly change The short-term health of that particular ecosystem, most commonly wind, you know, big huge windstorm comes by and flattens, you know, acres and acres of forest.
The forest comes back. In August, big huge windstorm came through Iowa, flattened somewhere around 3 million acres of corn and soybeans. The corn and soybeans didn’t come back. So what you do is you replace a resilient perennial ecosystem with this annual ecosystem that has the benefit of producing just a prodigious amount of total calories lacking in nutrition. And so the whole annual agriculture where you have to continue to plow or continue to use herbicide or continue to use mulch year after year after year after year is temporary. It’s a nomadic style of agriculture where you can put your seeds in your pocket and after you’ve depleted the soil of your current operation, whether it’s a homestead or a multi-thousand acre farm, the soil has blown away in the wind, oxidized in the sun, washed away in the rain, and pretty soon it’s not fertile anymore.
So you try buying some chemicals from a bag and that helps for a while, then you poison your soil. Pick up your seeds and leave. Go somewhere else. Buy some cheap land somewhere else. That’s a temporary agriculture. So permaculture was intended to be how to design plants. Perennial human habitats that supply us with all of our needs. And that’s the definition that I go with and I operate with. Well, most of my contemporaries took the whole permaculture idea. And since they lived in the suburbs, it turned into a landscaping technique where you do all kinds of food grown in your landscape.
And it was really beautiful and wonderful and all that kind of stuff. But so far... Nobody anywhere has shown me one example, one example anywhere. If you can show me one example, that’s proof of concept and I’ll believe you. Nobody has shown me one example where anyone in a suburban lot has provided all of their food from a landscape size plot. I’d like to see one.
Unknown speaker: Cool.
Mark Shepard: I haven’t yet. Our food, personally, I weigh 250 pounds. It takes a lot of feed to keep a beast this big going. I need at least a good solid pound of high-quality carbohydrates, proteins, and oils, and a good amount of fiber in there every single day for a whole entire year. That’s 500, 600 pounds of food just to keep me alive. And sometimes we might need it to have a larger piece of land to supply those calories and proteins to us. And that’s part of where farms come in, is as a broad acres of wheat, you know, millions and millions of acres of wheat and corn and rice and potatoes, etc.
That’s where the bulk of our calories come from. They’re grown on a broad acreage and then brought to the people because quite frankly, 80% of the human race lives in cities of 250,000 people or more. And if you’re living in a city, you have even less space. So you can’t grow your own food. So my perspective, permaculture meant permanent agriculture. Let’s grow our food and let’s grow enough food that we can actually feed ourselves, feed our friends and neighbors, have a surplus that we’ve designed into the system that we now sell as revenue for our operation.
And those type of operations are called farms. So for me, permaculture meant taking a 110 acre cornfield, And converting it into 110 acre perennial polyculture, Oak Savannah Mimic, that has been producing food now for 26 years under my management. And 98, 99% of all products sold are perennial, which means they come back year after year after year. You have an ice storm, breaks everything, stuff sprouts back up and it grows again next year. The windstorm, fire. Go ahead, send a California fire through here. It burns everything to the ground. It all sprouts back.
You know, these systems are designed to tolerate the system conditions in the place where they are. That’s my take on permaculture.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Mark, when we think about permaculture, we think about it primarily as being a rather high-density, small acreage kind of operation. But your work seemingly is about bridging this gap to larger-scale farms and making these techniques applicable to large acreage. Is that an accurate understanding of your work?
Mark Shepard: To a certain extent, yeah. And one of the things that I do want to point out One of the basic permaculture principles is to take small and slow, careful steps so as to not massively screw things up. And from my perspective, it appears to me that the permaculture movement has taken that to mean that permaculture has to be small. Well, what I mean by a small little step, let’s take the corn belt of USA that grows corn and soybeans. Much of it used to be Oak Savannah that has a specific plant community associated with it.
Oak, Chestnut, and Beech are an overstory tree. Cherries are an overstory tree. Apples are a midstory tree. Plum and hazelnut are shrubs, currants and gooseberries are shade tolerance growing underneath it, is raspberries and blackberries as a cane fruit, grapes climbing all over the whole mess, a whole host of grasses and forbs and flowers with the insects that go with them, fungi that decompose everything from the leaves to the bark to fungi associated with the roots to decomposing the grassy mat And then, of course, animals. If you can imagine the Serengeti in your mind, you see animals everywhere.
The savannas were just seizing with animals, and they were the land managers. In part, they were the ones that were responsible for maintaining the ecosystem throughout time. Now, if you listen to all the different plants that I just mentioned, from chestnuts to grapes to apples to hazelnuts to raspberries and so on, and the animals, all of those things are edible. All of those things we can sell into large markets, commodity markets, even if we want. So the permaculture principle of making a small change so as to not make a big mistake, I would like to say let’s make one small change in the Corn Belt.
The one small change is let’s now convert those corn and bean fields into perennial polycultures that mimic what was there and what has been there for the past 93 million years is the Oak Savannah with that plant community type there. That’s one small change, and as you can see, it’s a huge anchorage. So that’s my perspective on the permaculture design principle that says take small, careful steps. And if we go ahead and go through the transition through time to convert from a cornfield to a perennial polyculture, we’re going to be doing that.
We have to go slow because an oak tree can only grow so fast. We’re not going to plant everything to oaks because there’s a monocrop of oaks and we miss the benefits of having all these different other plants in there. So it’s going to take time to get there. And in the meantime, we can still grow corn and we can still grow beans on those hundreds of millions of acres. And so when done well, we should be able to do this with no net loss of food to the human food supply.
Ross Kenyon: How do you incorporate machinery that allows for scale into these overlapping polyculture environments? It seems driving a combine over huge amounts of acreage is simple and easy to understand. How do you do it when you have multiple crops all nested within each other?
Mark Shepard: But that’s where the design comes in. And that was probably one of the first things that, as far as rabble rousing is concerned, really annoyed the permaculturists. Because, of course, you can’t design based on machinery. It’s got to all be done by naked hippies barefoot with hand tools. It’s like, no, no, no. I’m designing these systems around the machinery and how it operates. So I’ve just come back from a three-week jaunt process. Visiting various different farms, laying out different operations. And you go right to the equipment. Somebody’s made hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of investments in tractors and seed drills and harvesters and all that kind of stuff.
And you have to design rows of trees, alleys of crop based on turning radiuses of their equipment, height of the equipment, etc. System that some permaculturists would like. It’s a lot more, I was going to say orderly, but it’s orderly only to the mind that sees a cornfield as orderly. You know, they’re rows. There’ll be rows of trees, an alley of crop, another row of trees or shrubs, you know, etc. And so it’s alternating rows of perennial woody plant and a alley of crop, which makes it an agroforestry practice called alley cropping.
Ross Kenyon: So you try to split the difference a little bit there in your designing around machines and not naked hippies. First of all, Mark, why would you want to do that? Isn’t it better to have these naked hippies harvesting? Isn’t that just more fun? Or do you think that way just isn’t going to appeal to most farmers? Why even design for machines in the first place?
Mark Shepard: Why I’m designing for machines in the first place is kind of twofold. And the first thing I would want to do is say, all right, anybody who would say that we don’t Have to design around machinery. Stop eating unless what you eat came from a system that did not involve machinery. And if you eat a single thing that was harvested with a machine, then you’ve violated this game, okay? So currently right now, the human species is fed by machines. These huge machines plant the crop, they maintain the crop, manage it, they harvest the crop, they do weed control on the crop, they then transport the crop, they store the crop, you go to the store, you buy it from a machine or refrigerator, you put it in your machine or a public machine, and you take it to your house and you put it in another machine to store it, and then you put it in another machine to cook it.
So if we don’t design our agricultural systems around machines, We got a problem. Now, there is new stuff coming out, which is pretty cool. There’s a lot more folks that are doing agriculture with robotic machines. And so they can be a lot smaller than like the 55,000 foot wide combines that we classically see roaring across the wheat fields. If you think about a tractor, this is really bizarre. If you think about a tractor, that’s nothing but a mechanical horse. You hook the horse to a piece of equipment, you pull it around.
Our whole entire agriculture is designed around a mechanical horse. Well, if we’ve got these little drones going all over the place, you know, robotic drones, well, now we might have these small little machines. So obviously the design would change based on your equipment use. If your equipment is a wheelbarrow, then I will design a system around you and your wheelbarrow. If your equipment is a, you know, an ATV, we’ll design around that. If it’s an ox cart, we design around that. If it’s the 45 foot wide combine, we design around that.
It’s case by case, depending on who the farmer is, what they’re growing, what their markets are, etc. And one of the reasons why not to make it a totally random, you know, just whatever a beautiful bliss spot is the fact that, you know, farmers actually try to earn a little money by doing this. This is an economic livelihood. And you have to make it practical to You know, to plant, maintain, harvest, etc.
Christophe Jospe: So, I really appreciate you talking about sort of permaculture principles. Because, of course, permaculture is not prescribing a way of, you know, producing food, but rather, you know, showing performance. Showing a path forward and you talk about start small and build from slow solutions. In describing alley cropping, it’s very much the principle of use and value diversity because you have a broad array of different crops working together. I think I’m pleasantly surprised that you are pro-large machinery to think about this question of scale. Oftentimes, when I’m out there talking to farmers who maybe are thinking about transitioning to a form of restoration agriculture, I’m afraid to use the word permaculture.
Actually, it can be a dirty word in farming, perhaps because it evokes thoughts of naked hippies who don’t know anything about farming and are ruining the yield. But what’s your view? Is permaculture a dirty word in farming? And if so, why?
Mark Shepard: The way that I learned about permaculture, my diploma up on the wall has a signature on it that says Bill Mollison. The way I learned permaculture and then immediately went out and practiced it, because to me, it wasn’t an armchair sport. This is something that you learn about, and then you go in and you go do it. To me, it’s permanent agriculture. And J. Russell Smith, who wrote the book Tree Crops back in 1926, First place I ever saw the words permanent and agriculture put together. I’m more of a J.
Russell Smith permaculturist than I am a mud oven, 16 brick rocket stove permaculturist. And I actually have noticed that within the farming community, the word permaculture has almost closed more doors than it opens. It is a design approach that I think is quite brilliant. And the reason why I put Real world permaculture for farmers as the, you know, the subtitle on my book is like, we’re not joking around here. We’re doing real world permaculture, large scale permaculture for farmers, people who actually grow our food. We’re not doing, you know, suburban little, you know, butterfly gardens with the mud oven and a bunch of herb spirals.
That is a radical difference.
Christophe Jospe: Got it. Which, by the way, no one here is against mud ovens or butterfly gardens.
Mark Shepard: I think they’re great. But to say that, and I had a client in Vermont. They get like 45 to 70 inches of rain a year, straight up and down. In order to have any kind of crop growing out there, people took the stones out of the fields for hundreds of years. So they had this farm with all these stone walls. And they were grazing cows. They took a permaculture course. Well, the first thing that they did, they spent like three days in this course learning how to make a cob oven.
So they go back to Vermont and they find out, gee whiz, we don’t have any clay. So they had to drive 100 miles or so and get clay from an arts college, powdered clay, reconstitute it, and make this mud oven using clay that they had to buy and import from who knows where, probably China. Well, like first three or four or five rains come by and dissolve the mud oven and kind of wash it away. All across the USA in the moisture regions, there are mud ovens galore built by people who think that this is a grand solution.
Well, you know what? They have roofs on them. Why do they put roofs on them? Because the rain is going to dissolve the mud. Now, if you’re in Arizona, New Mexico, You know, a mud oven is a really great idea. Well, maybe in Vermont, the real great idea should have been stone and not mud. So whatever fixation people got with this really quick, feel-good solution, they failed to make a context-specific solution. Your solution in Washington State is going to be different than one in Florida, which is going to be different than one in Virginia versus Texas, etc.
, They have to be site specific and not blanket applied. And if you’re going to build this mud oven or a 16 brick rocket stove, where are you going to get the food to cook? You know, you’re going to get it from the six nasturtium plants and have like nasturtium salad sandwiches. And once you eat those, they’re gone. You’re going to starve. Even permaculturists buy food that was grown on farms, large scale farms that was cared for with machines. We got stuck on this machine thing, didn’t we?
Christophe Jospe: I love that example because it points to a real issue where people with perhaps the best intentions come across a solution that just seems so great, but they’re kind of missing the point and not taking a real look at what is already around me and what’s kind of the minimal amount of work that I might need to do. It brings to mind another book I’ve read. I don’t know if he calls himself a permaculturalist or not. One Straw Revolution, the Fukuoka. He, like you, I think, is farming in a similar way in your book, Restoration Agriculture.
You define a term called stun agriculture, right? Sheer, total, utter neglect. And it’s this idea of sort of creating the conditions such that you can have this permanent agriculture and the conditions so that it will thrive by doing the least amount of work. Could you talk about what is stun agriculture? I’m so curious because I read your book and I’m wondering why isn’t everyone thinking in this way?
Mark Shepard: Well, just go to the word stun and I’m going to modify that a little bit. The S, really through time I’ve come to realize it’s strategic. Strategic, total, utter neglect. You have to know when you can neglect things and when you can’t neglect things. But the example I like to use over and over again is no matter where you live, look at the ditch on the side of the road. There is something growing there. Oftentimes there are some edible things growing there. Nobody spent three years putting down cover crops, tilling the soil, mulching it, doing all kinds of whatever amendments to make it beautiful and perfect.
Nobody bothered to plant it. Nobody bothered to weed it. Nobody bothered to do pest or disease control. And there it is. It’s growing something and there’s food there. Nature grows as effortlessly as the stuff in the ditch on the side of the road. So wherever you are around the world, there are natural plant communities. It’s a whole family of plants and animals and insects that are associated with that live together. And anywhere you go around the world, you find oak trees. Somewhere in there, you’ll find some, you know, prunuses, which are cherries and plums.
You’ll find malus or critagus, which are like your apples and hawthorns. You’ll find raspberries. You’ll find hazelnuts. Everywhere around the world. They’ve been growing together as a community for zillions of years. So they’ve been doing that for zillions of years without any human intervention whatsoever. So if we set up a system that’s adapted to our area with plant communities that belong together and belong there, They’ll basically take care of themselves. And then our maintenance drops down to close to zero. Well, when our carrying costs drop down to almost zero, we don’t need top yields in order to have a positive cash flow because we spent so little keeping this going.
We just go out and we harvest the perfect stuff. Well, what about pests and what about diseases? Well, we don’t pick the pest riddled stuff. We don’t pick the disease stuff. We only pick and ship the perfect stuff. Well, then the stuff that may have pests or diseases, we go ahead and we throw that to the ground. And then when we’re finished picking an area, we turn the pigs loose and they clean everything up. And if you have apples that have all kinds of insect larvae on the inside, Pigs eat that and it turns into bacon.
So nature has figured out every problem that farmers and gardeners have. Nature has figured out how to solve that problem at no cost with very little effort.
Christophe Jospe: What do you think is standing in the way from more farmers adopting stun?
Mark Shepard: Well, a lot of it is that people don’t believe it because all the universities are telling you that you have to do this. All of the different trade groups that you go to, whatever the crops are that you’re growing, they’re telling that you have to do this and that and the other thing. Back in the old days, when they used to have conferences, you’d go to an ag conference based on whatever crops you grow, and all these experts, they’re being paid by the input companies, are telling you what you have to do in order to get top yields and cash flow.
What they’re telling you to do isn’t necessarily what’s going to work. It’s what they’re being paid to tell you what to do. And people get this warped idea of what agriculture is and what we have to do. And let’s take apples again. Most familiar with that because I was just talking recently with some growers about it. I was at an apple orchard about four days ago and dealing with their issues. 100% of all of the problems that you have in an apple orchard, Are because you hold the intellectual concept of orchard.
Now, apples grow. They are part of the oak plant community type. There are places where apples actually dominate the landscape, but places where apples are inserted into the rest of the landscape. But if all of a sudden you go in, you take these apple trees, and you put them all by themselves, and eradicate any ground cover underneath it, and you put them there, they grow. All these different insects are going to say, hey, look, there’s food over there. That’s what we eat. So they show up. Well, we have this concept of orchard of these nice, neat, orderly rows, no pests, no diseases.
This pest shows up. Now we have a problem. Now we have to fight against the problem. Well, we wouldn’t have had a problem if we were looking at reality. Now, reality in my situation here, this oak savanna, this mix of species, guess what? Insects are part of reality, so there’s no problem. Here they are. Well, when you have a diverse ecosystem, not 100% apples, you got 100% apples, the only things that thrive are the pests of apples, and their populations boom because there’s nothing but food all around. Well, if you have apples and chestnuts and hazelnuts and grapes and grass and this and that, the other thing, you’ve got like 15, 20 things going on.
All of a sudden, it’s not as easy for the pests to propagate. They actually have to work for a living. Then you start to have other things show up, amphibians, insect-eating birds, bats, and so on, that show up because you’ve created this beautiful environment for them. Now it becomes a hostile environment for pests. And your costs go down because now I’m not spraying to kill all these pests. Maybe I will put out a couple of bluebird houses because I want bluebirds out there. One of the things that I thought was fascinating, it was...
Not too long ago, I was at a conference. It was actually, I guess, quite a while ago. It was like two years ago in Wisconsin. And there was a new economic analysis that had been done. And they said that basically you have to have, I think it was 2,000 trees, 2,000 trees. And you had to have at least five bushel of fruit per semi-dwarf tree per Five bushels of grade A number one fruit in order to break even. It’s like, wait a minute, you know, 1,000 trees times, you know, five bushels is 5,000 bushels, 10,000 bushels of fruit just to break even?
And that pays for all the different sprays that you have to do, all the different equipment, specialized equipment that you have to have. Then you start to have a positive cash flow. It’s 2,000 trees times five. That was like 10,000 bushels you had to have in order to break even. Well, if I have my apple orchard, I’ll put that in quotes, it’s a jungle mix of plants all over the place to the untrained eye. Everything’s in discrete rows. So I’ll have a row of apples through the system. And if I did zero pest control, zero disease control, And then I did have a harvest cost that everybody shares the same harvest cost, unless just for kicks and giggles, say a buck a bushel.
I don’t have the expenses that the other orchards, in quotes, do. Much of my insect control, we already talked about it, is by having animals in the system as cleanup the previous season to clean up any diseased leaves or fruit that has pests inside of it. So my insect populations are already low. Well, then when the pests emerge in the spring, I’ve got frogs, I’ve got bats, I’ve got toads, insect-eating birds, and so on. I have a big pest control crew working for me, so my expenses really approach zero. Do I really need five bushels per tree?
What if I only get one bushel of perfect fruit per tree because I have greater pest losses than you do? I don’t care because my expense was a $1 picking cost and I get a bushel of fruit that’s a $39 profit on that bushel of fruit. Whereas you had to get five bushel of fruit at your $40 just to break even. That’s ridiculous. And one of the ridiculous things is with amphibians, there’s seven different kinds of frogs out here that I’ve counted. I haven’t seen any salamanders yet. If you spray...
Any kind of pest control product, whether it’s an organic product or a chemical product, to kill apple pests, you’re actually making your pest control amphibians sick and they’re dying. Because amphibians take in about half of their oxygen through their skin. And if you spray any kind of insect control spray on it, your amphibians are now puking their guts out on the side of the road. You’re harming the system. You’re harming the pest control by trying to do pest control. It seems like madness to me.
Ross Kenyon: I love this idea that the problem is the idea of an orchard with sort of high modernist principles of straight lines and clean orderliness. When did this idea implant itself and is that changing now?
Mark Shepard: I don’t know when that really took hold, but, you know, part of how the whole stun approach occurred is, you know, when I moved here, I was married at the time, had two little kids, and so trying to build a house and be the happy hippie farmer and take care of everything all at once, plant all these trees. And you got to take care of, of course, you know, everybody tells us you have to have perfect weed control around those trees. And, you know, two foot weed free around the base of the tree, no grass at all, full sunshine.
Well, I could only take care of so many trees with the amount of labor that I had available, which was me, myself, and I working all day while building a house, taking care of a young family and all that kind of stuff. So all these other trees that I had planted got neglected. The ones that I neglected, they didn’t have as high a survival rate. Fewer, you know, more of them died than the ones I took care of. They didn’t grow as fast, but they were just impossibly rugged. And I think it’s because they had to really duke it out to get any kinds of nutrients and moisture at first.
And so I said, well, wait a minute. If I’m not really, I’m not doing anything to those and you’re doing just fine. Well, that’s really affordable. I can do nothing a lot more. In a classic example, I actually got kicked off listserv back in the day when email question and answer listservs were bigger than they are nowadays. Somebody had asked, I just got, you know, 500 apple trees. How do I make a nursery bed to store those apple trees? And I just asked the question, well, why would you put those in a nursery bed and not plant them out where they go?
And I got, you know, yelled at for not answering the question. And then finally, after a thousand different, you know, tidbits of advice, they put it in a particular kind of nursery bed. Then all of a sudden they said, oh my gosh, the weeds are going crazy in my nursery bed. How do I take care of the weeds? I said, well, one, why would you have put it in a nursery bed in the first place instead of where they eventually are going to go and they belong anyways? And then two, who cares if there’s some weeds in your nursery bed?
And I got yelled at again. Well, so then they figured out after 75,000 different kinds of advice, how to get rid of the weeds. Well, now that they got rid of the weeds, these plants, the little apple trees were visible to the deer. So the deer came by, they had to figure out how to solve the deer problem. They put up like a 55 foot high nuclear powered electric deer fence. Well, then still the plants had no competition for water or nutrients, so they grew real fast, so they got aphids on the new growing tips, so they had to figure out how to spray to control the aphids, all of those problems.
We’re caused by the fact that instead of planting these trees out in their final place where they’re going to duke it out with the grass, they would have grown slower. They would have been hidden by the weeds. The deer never would have found them. They would have been a lot more drought resistant because they really had to dive to get the moisture. The roots would really run. So all of those problems were caused by the fact that they thought that they had to put them in nursery bed first. Instead of just plant them out in the grass.
And the planting out in the grass, that one drives me nuts is, oh, you got to get rid of the grass underneath your trees because trees can’t compete with all the grass. It’s like, look around the world. There is grass growing underneath trees on every continent in the world, except for Antarctica that I know of. Grass and trees belong together. So how do we come to believe these really silly things that may have an element of truth? Yeah, with less competition for nutrients and moisture, your tree will grow faster. True.
You can verify that. But is that really what you want? And is it preventing you from doing something good because you’re trying to do something right by somebody’s crazy warped definition of right? You guys trying to push my buttons. That’s what it is.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, we’re just warming you up, Mark. You know, it’s I can’t help but thinking as you’re describing this, you know, something that came up. Actually, Ross and I did an intro to permaculture course. What was it? Almost two years now where, you know, it came up in the problem is the solution. And it’s interesting because you talk about like whose definition of right are we? Even going after. And you took a jab at the academics and science, which this is where I now really want you to put your ranting on a podcast hat on.
Because indeed, like there is a quote unquote, right way to do things in the eyes of science, which is maybe very much funded by certain companies that want to maintain their market share. But you’re also, you went back to school to get, you got a degree in ecology.
Mark Shepard: Money is given to these universities as a tax write-off for the company that’s going to benefit from selling you a product later on. They benefit from the tax deduction by having the research done on their product, and then they benefit from additional product sales because now there’s a PhD out there talking about their product. And yes, I did go to school for ecology, correct.
Christophe Jospe: Well, you’re sort of answering my question without me even asking it, but I’m also curious, you know, where has science fallen short in supporting the transition to restoration agriculture?
Mark Shepard: Well, for one, let’s go right back to the permaculturists, is that they’ve fallen short because they’re not funding research that’s important to permaculture. You know, they’ll hear something like, oh, toxic sludge is good for you. Whoa, who funded that research? That’s the point. Our whole entire research science community government is all set up based on pay to play, whether you like it or not. And you can make a donation to a nonprofit organization. You can give X dollars to X university, say, hey, I want a grad student to study this.
And if there is a grad student looking for some money to study that, they will study what you want them to study because you put up the money to them as a donor advised funds. So permaculturists have fallen short because they haven’t set up successful businesses, there’s another issue, that as a matter of course, A percentage of their proceeds immediately go to nonprofit research and development of things. I know of a number of young researchers right now that happen to get, you know, just the right grant at the right time to do some really amazing research.
They did the research. The funds are not there. There’s no money available for them to continue doing that research. There’s only money available for them to study this product or this relationship between that spray and this pest population. And so where it’s fallen short is that those of us who want to have other things researched have not properly funded that research.
Ross Kenyon: I was just reading something similar about this in Andrew Moore’s Papa in Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit.
Unknown speaker: Sure.
Ross Kenyon: He’s saying someone needs to pay a couple million dollars to do research on the health benefits. And because every fruit has antioxidants and anticarcinogenic properties, once that’s discovered, which it obviously has, then that will take off and pop has we put into lots of things just like pomegranates are.
Mark Shepard: And what’s amazing about pawpaws is if you look at their foliage, it has a really strong, almost solvent or turpentine kind of aroma to it. And there are almost zero insects that eat those leaves. So there’s something going on in those leaves. What is going on in those leaves? We don’t know because nobody’s paying that couple million dollars to do the research on this amazing plant. That has been hiding out on the edges of our farms and our woods in the East, Central and Southeast for hundreds of years. And we have not been able to eradicate it.
That’s sustainable agriculture.
Ross Kenyon: So if anyone out there is listening and they got a couple of million dollars and you want to fund some research, make some pawpaw research happen. I imagine there’s other things related to permaculture. Do you have any examples like that too?
Mark Shepard: We’ve got plenty of hazelnut, chestnut, pine nut research to do. So come this way. I’m just not trying to pop our people off. It’s just that I’m a Northern climates guy.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s an interesting angle for philanthropy. And I wonder how much of that actually does happen. Mark, do you know, or Christophe, have you heard of much happening with regard to that with philanthropy?
Mark Shepard: There’s more happening every day because people are waking up. And I think that the whole plague hitting us in 2020 here has really awakened a lot of interest in that.
Christophe Jospe: So I know of a lot more I’ve asked this question on several podcasts, Ross. It may make you cringe.
Ross Kenyon: Is it a magic wand kind of question?
Christophe Jospe: You guessed it. We’re putting a magic wand in your hand, Mark. And let’s just assume that your intent is for restoration agriculture to occur across all productive ag lands. What have you made true by waving your magic wand?
Mark Shepard: Well, first of all, the dead zones, there’s not just a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. There’s dead zones in every single offshore, every estuary, river outlet in the industrialized world. By putting in riparian buffer strips of productive plants, I’ll just use hazelnut as an example, in the Mississippi watershed, which is huge. It’s extensive. It goes from parts of Pennsylvania, I believe, all the way out to the front range of the Colorado Rockies. With the hazelnut as a riparian buffer strip, let’s say 100 feet out from every single stream, that’s hundreds of millions of acres worth of hazelnut.
It’s a perennial plant. You have enough oil that would come off of that probably to power the U. S. Navy. It’s taken zillions of tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere, not just in improved soil quality because it’s now perennial and not getting tilled, but because of all of the carbon being stored in the woody biomass of the plant. The shells of the hazelnut burn as hot as anthracite coal. Every seven to ten years or so, you just coppice the plants. You chip them right to the ground and use that as a biomass fuel.
So we’ve perennialized. This is just one little step. Let’s perennialize all of the riparian buffers on all of the Mississippi waterway. That would make a radical change, just a seriously radical change. You’d spawn an entire new industry, an entire new food industry, oil industry. I was pressing hazelnut oil and wondered what it would be like if I just pressed them with the shell on and everything. So I did. Obviously, I didn’t get as much oil because some of it got absorbed into the crushed shell. And then it had a much darker color, smelled a little bit of chocolate, which was really interesting.
And the pressed cake that came out of it was gritty and you wouldn’t want to just use that in cakes or cookies as a hazelnut meal, which you can do with just pressed nuts. Then I set, turned the oil press off and I didn’t clean out the nozzle that night because I figured I’ll get back to it in the morning. That, the hazelnut Meal, shell, oil, run through that nozzle at a high pressure, which will elevate its temperature just up to 170 for pasteurizing any pathogens out of it. That was enough to make the most amazing ceramic that I’ve ever seen.
And I couldn’t get it out of the nozzle. I actually had to throw the nozzle away. It was so hard. So what kind of other incredible elements? Products and materials can we come up with if we have an entire new feedstock feeding our industrial system? And just think about this. The soybean and corn are more of an industrial ingredient than they are food. That’s what they’re used for a lot, is to be turned into something else. One of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced is a honey locust bean. It’s a bean, as hard as it can be.
It’s in a big, huge, flat pod with sugar around the pod. So get the pod off, use the sugar, and then the bean, if you soak it, The skin, like you know how on a dry bean, it’s got that skin attached to the bean. We soak it overnight and then that skin will become like a quarter inch thick, like a really slimy, soft, mucilaginous kind of mess. Well, then you let it dry again and it would shrink back down and be hard as a rock and you can’t break it with a hammer.
So what on earth kind of material is that? You add water and it turns to jelly and you let it dry and it turns into a military helmet. We’ll be creating an incredible new suite of industries based on ecologically designed systems. And that’s part of my whole overall program is to let’s design these individual properties that have a mix of crops that are adapted to a region. With breeding done to accommodate climate change. And then let’s use those feedstocks to create a economy that’s actually based on the ecology. Upstate New York, I’m working a lot with some folks in upstate New York right now.
The Chobani Yogurt Company got started in New York. Whole bunch of estate grants that got it going. So they made this fabulous yogurt, made great market penetration, was all over the USA. Well, then California decided to steal that industry away from New York. So they gave them a real smoking deal for, I don’t know, taxes or real estate. I have no idea what kind of a deal they cut them. So Chobani yogurt picked up and moved to California where they can get, you know, more milk and better tax break on all the business things.
Well, meanwhile, that crashes a whole huge sector of the New York industry. Agriculture economy, because that was a temporary type of agriculture. It was a nomadic type of agriculture based on a cow. Well, if you put trees in the ground, and if a pine nut tree lives to be 300 to 500 years old, you can’t just pick up that factory and move it to California whenever you want to. That is a place-based economy that’s based on the ecology of an area. And so I would like to take the magic wand and create ecological economies.
All around the world. And it’ll clean up the dead zone. It’ll take carbon out of the atmosphere. On and on and on and on.
Ross Kenyon: Christophe, I got to hand it to you. That was one of the more successful times that question has been answered. So kudos, Mark.
Mark Shepard: Well, because first of all, I was going to say, well, wait a minute, I’ll take that magic wand and make another magic wand.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, everyone knows Ask the Genie for Three More Wishes.
Mark Shepard: That’s right.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Mark, we should start wrapping it up here. Obviously, if someone is interested in what you’re thinking about and what you’re writing about, Restoration Agriculture, Real World Permaculture for Farmers, the link is in the show notes if you’d like to buy it and read it. You have another book out too, I saw, that we haven’t read yet, but I’m sure we will.
Mark Shepard: Water for Any Farm, also published by Acres USA. Wherever you live around the world, the rainfall that comes out of the sky, don’t let it run off. You know, steer it around your property. Take it from a wetter area. Move it to a drier area. Just some basic land shaping techniques to more evenly hydrate the property. There’s actually a third one that’s not quite out yet. It’s the technical manual that goes with that. And the fourth one is being worked on right now. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Are you able to give us a hint on what the fourth one’s about?
Mark Shepard: That’s actually nature makes soil. Think about this for a second. Take a rock out in the middle of Lake Superior. Over time, that rock is going to be colonized by lichens and mosses and ferns and grasses. And if you were to grab a tuft of grass off the middle of that rock, what’s clinging to the roots of the grass? Soil. Where did that soil come from? And plant communities of planet Earth with their other life associates from large animals that we can see to invisible animals, fungi, etc. create the soil.
They create a richer, more fertile soil. So if we are farming in such a way that the soil is becoming less fertile, we’re doing it wrong. Nature knows how to make soil. And so that’s basically what it is, is describing how nature makes soil and how we can imitate that in our own operations.
Ross Kenyon: Can’t wait to read it. And we’d love to have you back on to talk about it when we get our hands on a text like this. Right. Well, thank you, Mark. Thanks for being here with us.
Mark Shepard: This was not what I expected.
Unknown speaker: What did you expect?
Mark Shepard: I figured you guys were going to go all carbon on me. And, you know, that’s fine.
Ross Kenyon: We’re a mix of that too. Well, in the last minute or so, is there anything you want to say about carbon?
Mark Shepard: Sure. Carbon is one tiny piece of the pie. And if you want to actually have site saturation of carbon, if you look around the world, you look at all the literature, a site saturated with carbon actually has what’s been traditionally called the climax ecosystem on it. And if we have agricultural fields, you really aren’t going to be able to push that above 3% to 6% organic matter. So most of the agriculture, we can make big gains by quickly amping up the soil carbon. But once you hit that 3% to 6%, that’s kind of in a steady state.
That’s a decent place to be. Once you have more carbon than that, you start to get into the peat and the muck, which actually has too much carbon to get good yields. You actually need more minerals to increase your yields on that. But both of those are still short-sighted because you want the maximum amount of carbon retained on a site. You go to the Climax ecosystem, and in California, it might be redwoods with sugar pine. You guys ever seen a pine cone from sugar pine? It’s the largest pine cone on planet Earth and they’re pine nuts.
So why not have 200 foot tall pine nut forests all up and down California with grass growing underneath and animals grazing it. And then when the fire goes to burn through it, it doesn’t bother those. It just kind of burns through and it’s not a problem. There’s not enough fuel built up. So let’s design a agricultural ecosystem based on maximum site carbon, which in that case in California is redwood sugar pine. We can do it all along the way. We can cash flow all along the way while still producing food, fuels, medicines, and fibers for human beings.
Ross Kenyon: Are you satisfied with that, Christophe? Is this a good place to leave it?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I mean, I’m kind of getting drunk with all the optimism coming out of Mark. But it also makes me think, like, why aren’t we doing this right now? And then I get depressed when I think about the realities of the system we’ve set up for ourselves.
Mark Shepard: Because when you said optimism, it blew my mind. It’s like you don’t believe how depressing it is. Because to see all the opportunity that’s all around us and how we’re just missing the boat left and right and left and right, it’s just depressing.
Christophe Jospe: Till then, I guess we’ll have to do more podcasts and write more books. Hallmark.
Mark Shepard: There you go. We’ll talk to you next week then, right?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds good. Well, links to all of Mark’s books, writings, if you’d like to keep up with him, links to his website, all of that is in the show notes. If Christophe and I could ask you for a brief favor too, if you’re listening to this on your iPhone, if you could open up the podcast app under Apple Podcasts, please write us a review. That helps a lot. Give us a great rating. We would certainly appreciate it. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher.
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