Regenerative Ag Stories on the Grazing Grass Podcast

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0:00:01 - Cal
Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, Episode 131.

0:00:06 - Daniel
If you drive behind the tractor for two miles, do you know how much time you're going to lose on your morning commute?

0:00:11 - Cal
You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, sharing information and stories of grass-based livestock production utilizing regenerative practices. I'm your host, cal Hartage. You're growing more than grass. You're growing a healthier ecosystem to help your cattle thrive in their environment. You're growing your livelihood by increasing your carrying capacity and reducing your operating costs. You're growing stronger communities and a legacy to last generations. Growing stronger communities and a legacy to last generations. The grazing management decisions you make today impact everything from the soil beneath your feet to the community all around you. That's why the Noble Research Institute created their Essentials of Regenerative Grazing course to teach ranchers like you easy to follow techniques to quickly assess your forage, production and infrastructure capacity in order to begin grazing more efficiently. Together, they can help you grow not only a healthier operation, but a legacy that lasts. Learn more on their website at nobleorg slash grazing. It's n-o-b-l-e dot org forward slash grazing.

On today's show we have Daniel Firth Griffith. It is an excellent show I think you'll enjoy. Now Daniel comes to Regenitive Agriculture and he says he's beyond regenerative. In fact, we had him on the podcast back on episode 17, I believe, and we talked about his journey at that time and his book that had just been published, wild Like Flowers. He's came back on to share what he's done since then and he's got a new book called Stag Time. As I mentioned in this podcast, daniel makes me question some things Because he's doing things different. You know, for me it seems like non-selective grazing or ultra-high-density grazing is becoming more popular. In fact, I was talking to a neighbor a few miles away that's practicing it here locally and it looks interesting to me. However, when you talk to Daniel and you read Stag Time, he's going the other direction, with less pressure. Based upon Fred Provenza's book, nourishment Daniel talks about that really started him and he talks about his journey to allowing his cows to find the minerals they need in the weeds and grasses growing there. His book talks about his mineral program and how he's worked away from minerals. His book's very interesting, but it's not a book that's going to give you a recipe. Go out and do one, two and three and you'll be successful. He does pose a lot of questions for you and I think it's a very interesting book. I enjoyed it. He's playing on a trilogy, except today, in the episode he mentions it may turn into a series. I'm looking forward to the next book. I enjoy it and I encourage you to read it, and today we have a great conversation with Daniel, so stick around for that and listen with open mind, open ears.

Before we get to Daniel, 10 seconds about my podcast. No, that's not what I do. First, 10 seconds about my farm. And actually I have two things about the farm. One ended up. My daughter knew someone who had some Border Collie puppies and I've talked about on the show before how I've thought about getting a Border Collie. I worry about the time commitment, I worry about the price. It sounds like I worry too much, but my daughter found one from Working Parents and I have a Border Collie puppy now, daisy. I will try and get a photo of her next couple days and post it on my farm's Instagram so you can see it over there. Introduce everyone to the newest farm member. She'll be in training for quite a while but maybe she'll turn into a productive member for a number of years.

Secondly, on the farm, I ordered a laser engraver. I really love the idea of engraving tags. Years ago when we dairied, we used those Ritchie engravable tags and a dermal to engrave them. Our writing never was very good. We changed the Z tags and the markers, but those tags fade. So I purchased a laser printer and I've been playing with Ritchie ear tags, getting them engraved. In fact, if you are looking for some tags you'd like engraved or looking to purchase them, shoot me a message.

Let's talk Now. It's time for 10 seconds about the podcast, and last week we had a technical hiccup. In fact, I went to bed on Tuesday thinking everything was set up for the next episode to come out and we were busy Wednesday, thursday. So Friday, when I logged on to check some things, it showed me my audio file wasn't there and I argued with it. I disagreed it was there, but for whatever reason it didn't work out. So podcast episode last week was a couple days late. I apologize for that.

We strive really hard to make sure every Wednesday you have an episode and we put it out. If Wednesday happens and you are unable to access our episode, shoot me a message, dm me on Facebook, instagram, shoot me an email Because you should have one Now I say that and next week I don't have a guest for next week. So if you know of a grass farmer that'd be interested in jumping on here real quick and doing an episode quickly, shoot me an email because I've let my backlog of episodes dwindle down over summer, so I've got to build it back. Enough of all this, I've talked way too long. Today, let's talk to Daniel. Daniel, we're excited to welcome you back to the Grazing Grass Podcast.

0:06:50 - Daniel
Hey, Cal, it's a blessing to be here with you again. 2021 feels like a lifetime ago, but I don't know it was a blink of an eye to some large degree. I'm just blessed to be back, Thank you.

0:07:02 - Cal
I completely agree. It's so near, yet so far. Like you mentioned, you were on episode 17 of the podcast. So for listeners who have not listened that long, go back and catch that episode. And in that episode we talk about your wild land. We talk about your book at the time, Wild Like Flowers Wildland. We talk about your book at the time, Wild Like Flowers. What I'd like to do today, let's just catch our listeners up to what's gone on your farm since that time.

0:07:34 - Daniel
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to Thanks Kyle. I appreciate it and it's always a fun thing. I have my own podcast and I always tell people. The only reason I have it is just because I love serious conversations with people and oftentimes if I were to reach out to you and I would say, cow man, I really would love to catch up. Like a podcast, to some degree is a very focused time that we get to share and a very little small talk, which I enjoy. Life without small talk it's I get it. I get why some people do like it. I'm very bad at it and so I think that's why I stray away from it. So, anyways, the point is thanks for having me on. I'm really blessed and honored to be with you again. Yeah, so since 2021,.

We were conversing back then, in February I believe, about a book that I had just published, called Wild Like Flowers. It was a book I wrote immediately following the birth of our last daughter, or our most recent daughter. Her name is Sequoia, and I was obsessed with the idea of language and obsessed with the idea of how language penetrated into this regenerative world of ours and how new that thought was to many people. It was a new thought to me, and so I wrote the book in a matter of three weeks. It was a very unbelievably intense episode of our life. I wrote the book in three weeks, published it and it's still a wonderful book. It truly is. It's very topical.

To some degree, it's a book of stories, a book of stories that emanate from my wife and I's life with our children, our growing family, what we call the Timshel Wildland Project, or what I just called a wildland, a 400 acre. At the time we called it a emergent conservation landscape. Today we call it a concentric rewilding landscape for reasons that I think we can get into later, maybe in this conversation. And it was really well received. I couldn't believe how well received it was At the time. We sent the manuscript to a certain slew of publishers again back in 2021, you know and a lot of them had interest. Working through agents and such is not a fun thing. I've never enjoyed that part of the publishing process, but a lot of the publishers were really excited about the book. They compared it to say like this generation has its new Wendell Berry, or something which petrified me.

I remember peeing my pants a little bit when I read that, because the problem was Wendell Berry's daughter Mary is her name, if I have my memory correct she reached out to me and she said hey, I saw what people have been saying about this book and so I'm going to read it for myself and compare you to my dad in my own way. And if I didn't pee my pants the first time, I peed my pants the second time.

And yeah, and that we talked all about that, and the idea of that book was really about the regeneration of relationship, that, as we start to turn to language, as we create a shared vernacular or grammar around the thing that we were all experiencing at the time. Obviously, we were one year into the COVID era, if you will, and yes, and so many people had turned back to local foods because they had no other alternative. If you put yourself back into February of 2021, to some degree, that was the height of, like, the local food movement, where all local consumers turned back if they had the ability to, of course to farmers that were growing food in their region. And what became unbelievably clear, instantly clear, was that we're not ready for this. Regenerative farming, local farming was not ready for this. We had about and I say we, the global, we let alone the mid-Atlantic, let alone the Virginia, let alone the Nelson County where I live we we had about three to four weeks worth of food and then we ran out, everybody ran out, and it was a wake up call, I think, because we had all been saying local food, regenerative farming, regenerative small scale farming can save the world and all of this.

But those relationships, the relationships that necessitate or are necessitated by this worldview, this regenerative paradigm of land management, were not yet constructed. It was farmers working in isolated groups and the consumers. And soon as they started to realize that they depended upon it, it started to fail because the relationship wasn't there. So, anyways, I wrote the book about regeneration being relationship, and then years passed, many years passed it feels like a lifetime has passed since then and we started to realize that the way that our own landscape here, these 400 acres that we call our home, the Wildland Project, it, really was manifesting itself in a whole new way that I wasn't seeing anywhere else. We were asking different questions, we weren't doing a lot, we were questioning a lot and observing a lot and seeing a lot and really responding to the feedback loops that were constantly in front of us. And so, at the request of a dear friend of mine who I could be wrong, but I think she might have even been on this, thaisa Porto, has she been around this podcast? Yes, she has. I thought so.

0:12:22 - Cal
I thought so she's been on here.

0:12:23 - Daniel
She was with us at the time. I thought it was this podcast. Yeah, she was with us at the time when she recorded that and not long after she recorded with you, her and I were talking. She lived here at the Wildland for a while and she was like Daniel, you really have to put some actual thoughts to what's happening here, because it's different. It's not like anything else that's out there, and not because it is good, because it's unique. It's just unique, and we have to start talking about this and letting it enter this new vernacular that you built or started to build or formalize in Wild Lake Flowers back in 2021. And so we started writing, and so that's really what we're here is this birth of a new concept which we have effectively, over the last maybe seven or eight years, graduated towards calling concentric rewilding, and we don't use the term regenerative agriculture anymore.

I don't disbelieve that regenerative agriculture works, because I do. I've seen it. It absolutely builds soil, it absolutely increases biodiversity, etc. But to some degree, it's still constructed out of the same ethos and worldview that so many other conventional alternatives are built out of. It's still pushing in a direction. It's still trying to save the world and not be the world. All these things that maybe you find interesting, that we can talk about later.

But the ways in which this has evolved here, locally for us is about maybe eight years ago. My wife and I started to notice that so many of the things that we were doing as regenerative farmers because we had been farming regenerative grass, fed grass, finished grass, born beef or rotationally grazed or holistically managed beef or whatever you want to call it for about 15 or 16 years at this point we started to realize we were spending so much time telling our animals how to be and we were spending almost no time asking them how they wanted to be. And people at this point often either laugh or they're completely on board. And so I don't know where you are and I don't know where our listeners are, but the way we describe it is. You know we all have fields. If you're a regenerative farmer or farmer or whatever you are, there's a field, there's a lawn, there's grass outside of your house, your farm, whatever it is in your farm, and we're so focused on building biodiversity, for instance, or maybe it's soil health or carbon in the soil to sequester it or store it or cycle it, or we're focused on nematodes, pooping out, plant available calcium in the rhizosphere so the plants will grow like. We're focused on the particulars.

But like, when was the last time you actually went out to a field, knelt down and asked what do you want to be like? When is the last time you acknowledged and attended to the animacy of the life all around us? Right, the relations, our cousins all around us, whether or not they're four-legged cows, two-legged chickens, right, or red-tailed hawks, or vegetative cousins or slithering cousins like snakes and lizards and worms and crawling like beetles and moles and voles and mice. And when was the last time, during this modern understanding, that the climate is truly in trouble, that humanity is truly in trouble, that we're losing more soil than we're creating, we're deforesting more closed, canopy, old growth hardwood forests than are emerging or let to grow? Right, we're in a period of collapse. That is the modern story. For many angles, that's the modern story.

And during this moment, when was the last time we paused and this is the question that we've been asking for almost a decade now and looked at the cow and said we have so long told you how to be. If we were able to and that's really the conversational part but if we were able to, how might you tell us how to be? And so it's a release of control to some degree. It's the paradigm between doing and being, but it's also just a humility paradigm. It's a worldview that we call concentric rewilding.

Concentric is a mix of two words between this idea of kinship that we have, kinship with all of our relations around us, an indigenous perspective, not mine, but a gift given to me and the second aspect is concentricity, or concentric.

That life lives in the circles right, that you and I live in the same circle. And in this circle is air right Circle, is air right, the needed medium of our life. But also, as we take that air, we turn it into carbon dioxide. The trees breathe in and breathe back out. So this is life in a circle Death and chaos, and rebirth, and growth and life and maturation, all the way through death again. And so it's kin-centric, kinship and concentricity inside of this idea of rewilding. That is letting go to some degree, not participating, not kicking humans out, not trying to heal the rivers instead of providing good local food for your community, not doing any of those things, but rather becoming everything. So I'll stop rambling. You can direct the conversation as you see fit, but that's really what we've been working on over the last eight to ten years, and especially the last four since we last discussed wild lake flowers.

0:17:33 - Cal
So what comes to mind? And I read Stag Time and I really enjoyed it and we'll talk a little bit more about that. But it's hard to have even any conversation without bringing that in, because you mentioned there about asking the land, asking your animals what do they want, and in stag time you go ahead and talk about that process of your cows, your goats and releasing some control there, which, I'll be completely honest, as well as most every other regenerative farmer, in so many ways, my cows are out there in a small paddock with electric fence around it and if I go out there later today and they're not there, I'm not gonna be very happy. But so talk about your journey, because in 2001 you were still guiding your cows through your land, right, if I remember correctly. That's correct, and using polywire. Yes, are you still using polywire? What's been that dynamic change there? Yeah, that's a wonderful question.

0:19:00 - Daniel
And so much of the work being done, I think, in the modern green agricultural movements, are an attempt, a good attempt, an honest attempt, an ethical and moral attempt to be very clear to create farms that are managed in nature's image, to the best of our modern abilities. I believe that's what's going on and I have great respect for that, what we are focused on. So, for instance, the paradigm of let's call it rotational grazing, for now Rotational grazing is easy for me to speak about because nobody owns it. Of let's call it rotational grazing, for now. Rotational grazing is easy for me to speak about because nobody owns it. Adaptive multi-paddock grazing is obviously owned by Understanding Ag and Gabe Brown and Williams and everybody else. And then you have like holistic plan grazing, which is obviously under the Savory Protocol of Alan Savory, and so let's just get out of these naming conventions, because I'm not picking on anybody, but we have to have a name for it so we can talk about it.

So let's just call it rotational grazing. Rotational grazing is built off of two types of competition. The first type is what I would call and I mentioned this in the book in section four I believe in in stag time is what we call a intraspecial competition. So intraspecial competition is that in a mob grazing environment there's competition between me and you. Let's say, I am a cow and you, cow, are also a cow. We're out in the field and because forage is limited, there's a competition over forage. I understand that if I don't eat it, you will, and if you eat it I don't and I starve. And so we get that uniform grazing, that uniform distribution of manure and urine, the peeing and the pooing and everything else, those things, that total grazing, regenerative grazing, good regenerative farmer that we like to see. We like to see those grazing lines right when the polywire was, and they couldn't go.

0:20:33 - Cal
We like this stuff, that's intraspecial competition.

0:20:37 - Daniel
The second aspect. I told you there was two. The second aspect is interspecial competition. So, whereas intraspecial is within a species, interspecial is between two species, and this is what many has called the predator-prey connection, that predators push prey animals naturally in nature into tight herds that are always mobbing, mowing and moving Right. If anybody probably has listened to any regenerative podcasts, read books, gone to the conferences, we understand this terminology, we know it well. So regenerative grazing is built on two paradigms competition in the species and between the species.

What we questioned back, maybe five or six years ago, officially after a conversation with my dear friend Dr Fred Provenza, who we've worked for a long time with, is. We started a question with Fred and a couple others what if cows, herbivores, goats, sheep, deer, pronghorn, elk, moose, bison, etc. What if cows in particular, though, but all of those other species in some sort of extended understanding, but cows, since we have them here in the moment and in the field, what if cows could rotate themselves over the landscape without competition? Because the work of the last 20-30 years, regardless if it's the work of Dr Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist who wrote the wonderful book Finding the Mother Tree, who proved that forests don't compete over resources, but they share resources. So our understanding of forest ecology is transferred from being a competitive system to a collaborative system. Okay, with this idea of the indigenous worldview and place-based traditional ecological knowledge, that is, thank God, coming into the floor once again, thanks to decolonization and re-indigenization and everything else that's happening today. It needs to continue happening at a faster pace. I think we also get this paradigm that all of life, or this worldview rather, that all of life is not operating in some zero-sum capitalistic competitive game, but rather is collaborating towards a particular end. We have evolutionary biologists and ecologists that are writing books about evolution is not an evolution due to scarcity or survival of the fittest, but rather an evolution of beauty, right, and so we have all of these different perspectives and worldviews that are built upon transitioning the narrative from competition to collaboration, from scarcity to beauty. But in regenerative grazing we're locked in the competitive mindset that the only way a cow can be a good cow is if there's competition all around it Competition between cows and the grasses, and competition between the cows and the wolves, the cows and the mountain lions, the cows and the bears, whatever they are, and life itself. And so we started to question through again mentorship and friendship with Dr Fred Provenza and so many others how do cows operate in natural systems? Is it really through the predator-prey connection? And we started to talk with indigenous thinkers and wisdom holders. We started to read in 2013.

I lived in the France southern Dordogne river valley.

I wanted to be an archaeologist and I studied ancient paleolithic cave art in Lascaux and Grand Rock and Las Cabrioles and all these other caves and when we studied ancient herbivores and ancient herbivore migrations and the last glacial maximum and in the anti-thermal period of when the ice was receding and that large herbivores were transitioning over to the smaller herbivores that we know today, like the bison and the aurochs and things like this, we look at it there.

In 2017, I wrote a book on the early American West the ecological realities of the early American West that's been praised in the academic circles and all of these things put together. You don't see herds of herbivores mobbing, mowing and moving due to competition. The same thing that Suzanne Simmer found in the forest, the same thing that the indigenous friends and humans all around us have been saying for generations and generations that life operates collaboratively, never competitively is coming into fruition. It's coming into the fore of our knowledge with grazing animals as well, and so we started to question if it's not competition that's driving herbivores to mob, mow and move, or to graze regeneratively, or however you want to say that. Well, what is? And so, about eight years ago, my wife and you read Stag Time. You know it, my wife's the main character of the story. All I do is look like a fool, a blabbering fool, and it's just always her sitting there with the punchline in all the ways and, to be honest, all husbands out there can relate.

0:25:07 - Cal
Yes, so just go ahead. Yes.

0:25:08 - Daniel
No, it's totally true, and so I give her full credit. I truly do. But she started to ask. She said what if herds of herbivores grazed the landscape in what we would today call a regenerative fashion because of, like a matriarchal lineage, the family, okay, and and and? So you would question if that's the case, why don't we see that today in domesticated herbivores?

Well, this is very simple as soon as an animal is born, right, it's raised with its mom and then it's weaned, and if it's a boy, it's castrated. So immediately our endocrine and hormonal systems are immediately terminated, right. And then we separate them and we run a steer herd and an open cow herd and a finishing bull like a steer herd. Then we have a heifer herd. We have all these different herds. We're constantly breaking apart the family, and then we blame the cow for not grazing in a regenerative fashion. Right, wondered if we were to not break apart the family and we were to create an extended matriarchal lineage in the herd that lives and occupies in the land that we call the wildland project here, these 400 acres, over large periods of time, nearly a decade now, what happened, right? So we stepped back right and we started to undergo this transition. So in the beginning we had a herd of a bunch of combobulated herbivores that have no matriarchal or genetic or family relationship with each other, so they were behind polywire. But as the herd matured and we started to have grandmothers in the herd who had, you know, daughters in the herd, that were having daughters, and soon we had those generations we started to release the reins a little bit and we started to notice that they were still doing what we would have had them doing behind polywire, but without the polywire. And then the landscape started to develop and we started to see there's a whole section dedicated in stag time to this understanding of what's called phenotypic plasticity. So to dive into the science just a little bit, you have your genetics, that's your DNA, that's the ATGC, that's your genome, if you will. Epigenetics are the way that genome is expressed given external climatic factors. That's epigenetics, phenotype, or your phenotypic passivity, plasticity or lag it goes by many different names. But your phenotype, if we just focus on that first word, would be the way that your epigenetics manifest themselves as observable characteristics or realities in your final form. Okay, so the way you look, cal, versus the way I look, that is your phenotype, observable characteristics.

Well, the interesting thing is herbivores, governed by a matriarchy, not a farmer with a strand of polywire. They have the ability to adapt their phenotype to their surroundings because they're never told what to eat. There's never competition on what they have to eat. You'll start to notice that predators start to live with the herd. We have pictures of coyotes, we have black bears, we have a picture of a mountain lion just chilling with the cow, as if it was like the African savanna. Oh yes, the mountain lion's a little more distant than the other ones, but you start to see this wonderful complex nuance, this concentricity and kinship arising, what we call kin-centric. This kin-centric idea is rising to the fore through what we call adaptive landscape genomics, which is the matriarchy plus the phenotypic plasticity, so a phenotype that's adapted and thriving within a particular landscape. That's the adaptive landscape genomic. That these animals move themselves by themselves, they're able to medicate on the forage. That they need not eat the forage, that if they don't, you will and they will starve. There's a lot of. It's so interesting.

I've keynoted basically every freaking conference in this regenerative world of ours. We've been a savior hub for five or six years and we're gravitating away from all of these things just coming into ourself a little bit, but like I've run the gamut, I've run the show, I've keynoted the conferences, like I've been around and it's not false in the slightest to say that regenerative farmers or just farmers in general, but regenerative farmers if we can talk about them for the moment, because that's what you and I have been or are we all want the best for our animals. It's clear. We want the best for our land. That's why we're doing it. We want to believe that our animals are able to self-select the diets that they need. I mean, fred Provenza's book Nourishment is one of Chelsea Green, his publisher's, best-selling books of all time. Oh wow, everybody loves this book Nourishment In the entirety of the book.

Nourishment, fred's book, is that animals can select what they need. That's the premise. But if you're continually putting them behind polywire and they're continually eating only that which that if they don't eat they will starve, they're not self-selecting what they need. Right Period. And when you start to get into self-selecting, you have to realize that we're talking medicinal, not nourishing. Right, this isn't a protein on your plate. This is medicine. Your plate, this is medicine when your tea or medicine in a tincture, right?

These are dosages of phytochemicals, secondary compounds, primary secondary compounds, whatever they are macronutrients, micronutrients, and so they don't need calcium. They need two bites of a plantain plant, or maybe magnesium, because plantain, let's say narrow leaf plantain or common plantain, or even black leaf plantain or black stem plantain these are all plants forbs, if you will that grow here in the mid-Atlantic east coast, united States, turtle Island that are high in magnesium, and so they don't need magnesium. They need two bites of the plantain leaf, right? And if they're constantly forcing food into their mouth because if they don't eat that you will, and then I will starve, we're not medicating. We're just ingesting magnesium, hoping that it's the right amount, or really just hoping that it's any amount so I don't starve to death.

And so there's a lot of different ways to look at it. But we truly want to see nature, we want natural farming, we want it to be in a way that we can still harvest, and we want our animals to self-medicate what they need. But to some degree, all of these things necessitate a release of control, not a stepping into more control. And another way to look at this is I said this two years ago on a podcast and it seemed to land, and so I repeat it sometimes, occasionally.

But so many of us see biodiversity as this linear pathway between bare soil and a closed canopy forest and maybe we like a particular aspect of the biodiversity in that chain, so like, maybe it's a native grassland with beautiful wildflowers and so maybe trees coming in for some silvopasture benefits. That's biodiversity to us and we see that biodiversity as a number. Right, I have 70 species in a field. But what we totally miss is that the cows themselves, the epigenetic and phenotypic realities and plasticity of those cows, that's an aspect of the biodiversity. You and I are aspects of this biodiversity, and so if we believe that we can control biodiversity, what we're saying is that we can become separate from that biodiversity and if we become separate from that biodiversity, so we can control it and manage it down here outside of us. We have concluded that we are not an aspect of that biodiversity, we're not an aspect of Earth.

But if Stag Tine says anything, it says that Earth is Earth and we are its Earthlings, or or her earthlings, if you're willing to go that far, which obviously I am. And as an earthling, we have to realize that we are a part of the narrative, a member of this symphony, and as a member, it's very hard to control the other members. The only way I can control you if I is if I'm not you and I'm above you. Right, this is the master and the slave relationship. It's no wonder that, you know, our modern narratives are still infused with this terminology, right, and so I'll stop rambling there. But it's really a question of what is actually natural farming. That's the first question, and the second question is what if the cows, through actually allowing them to be bovines, were to tell us the answer to that question? Not a scientist, not a regenerative agricultural conference, god forbid. Not a keynote at one of those conferences from Daniel Firth Griffith, but like the cow, like what if we actually acknowledge the animacy and wisdom and life force of the cow? What would happen?

0:33:26 - Cal
Daniel, I think those are all great questions. I was talking to Eli Mack a while back and I told him whenever I talk to you, I leave the conversation with more questions than answers, which is a good thing.

0:33:38 - Daniel
I love Eli, by the way, yeah.

0:33:41 - Cal
Eli is wonderful, yes, as you talk about releasing that control of your cows, just to get it down to your practice do you move your cows or do you confine your cows to any part of your wild land, or do they have access to the whole wild land at all times?

0:34:02 - Daniel
Yeah, brilliant question. So in the book it's really important to. I mentioned earlier that this is so rooted in this understanding of acknowledgement. Right, in order to have a conversation with you, I have to acknowledge you for who you are, right, and if I see you as an inanimateimate object, we're not going to be able to conversate. I have to recognize and acknowledge your animacy to do so, and and part of this acknowledgement is also to acknowledge that which we are not able to currently. I don't want to say acknowledge, but we're not able to currently change.

Okay, property boundaries and individual land ownership is one of these structures that unfortunately, we can't change today. I don't believe we can. Maybe our great-grandchildren can find a way to become much. I dream for this to occur, but it is not happening or inhabiting our day. So, animals they need to be able to migrate period, and because of property boundaries they can't.

And so there still is some false structures in our quote-unquote concentric rewilding system here at the wildland project that we can't get away from. One day I hope we can, but that's one of the things we have to understand. We have to acknowledge the place in which we can't yet attend communal land ownership or just communal lands, no ownership at all. And so what we do here at the wildland is the cows have, oh, maybe 75 to 120 acres at their disposal at any time. So there's about three or four blocks here in the 400 acres that we call the wildland, and during that period what you'll see in watering sources and creeks and ponds and wetlands, all of these things are very important because if their watering source, let's say on 120 acre pasture, is in one area, you're not going to see them grazing quote unquote. Naturally, they're just going to be hanging out at the water source on the one end.

And so we've, over the last decade, we've built a network of many ponds and spread out the waters and tap some springs and there's watering sources everywhere, and so that's been critical, but it's so, it's unbelievable. You turn them out to this. So once every couple of months, we move the animals right to the next paddock. The paddock is 100 acres, let's say, and when they get there they immediately fan out just a little bit and you see these family units starting like right now. If you were to come over to the wild and we go out to where the cows are, they're on block three, I think it's about 105 acres. It's a clear cut that we actually burned into prescribed burn on this spring.

0:36:28 - Cal
I wish I'd show you a picture.

0:36:30 - Daniel
I'll send you a picture after this and if you want to send it to people, they can do it. It's ridiculously cool looking just to see life returning, after it was clear, cut and then grazed for seven years and then burned and now grazed again. It's truly emergent landscape, a landscape that is speaking and speaking very loudly. But what you'll see is they form into these little family units, like just this morning there was a cow named Lena. Her mother is Lynette, one of the matriarchs in the herd, and Lena we call Auntie because maybe we have 10 calves on the ground. Right now in the herd there's about 100 cows and we always are ebbing. Our main income source is selling starter herds, so we'll take an entire family unit of our herd and sell that off to us as a starter herd to a new farmer or whatever, lena.

So maybe we have 10 calves that have been born in the last month or two here, and Lena we call auntie because it is so interesting. They have a hundred and let's say 10. Whatever it is acres and it's undulating. You can't see it, just it undulates up and down by three, four hundred feet. It's an unbelievably mountainous topography and you'll see the moms of these calves. They'll spread out and they'll drift off maybe a hundred yards in a group, not a tight group, not a competitive group, but in a group, not a tight group, not a competitive group, but in a group. These are sisters.

Many of the cows in our herd are sisters from this original matriarch. The matriarchy in the herd is first and foremost, but what you'll see is all of the calves hang out in a group with Lena, their auntie, who has never had a calf. This morning she actually had a calf. She was nursing the calf while watching about 10 other calves around her, and so they form these really cool family units that we would recognize as human family units. And then what you see when you see this enough, we start to realize, I should say, is that these are not human family units, they're just life's family units. And you realize that when I say our relations or our cousins, it's not a turn of phrase, it's not some philosophical way to describe something that we want to believe in or we feel like it's utopic to believe in, but it's actually there. These family units govern the operation of the herd and and then you'll be driving a four-wheeler or we have horses, we ride on the horse or whatever it is, and and you'll see this little pocket of cows over here and then over here and over here, and they're all in a sight line of each other. They're all in one herd but they're broken out into individual family units Families, right. And then when they move, like in the evening, go up to one of the ridge lines, they'll all be there, the entire herd laying down chewing cud in a good observational deck, if you will, on these ridge lines. And in the morning you'll find them down in the valleys, again, spread out, but still in the family units. That can all see each other. And over the years we've documented every day we'll go out and we'll place a flag where we saw the morning herd and the evening herd, maybe an afternoon herd, the concentrations, the heavy headers over there, so we know where they've been grazing, because the idea here you're listening to this and you're like, oh my God, he's just overgrazing the hell out of his landscape and we were worried about these things too.

Overgrazing, to be very clear we have to understand this ecologically to really understand the way concentric rewilding and these adaptive landscape genomics inhabit that concentric landscape. Overgrazing is a very easy thing to understand, a very hard thing to manage. Overgrazing occurs when an animal takes a bite of a plant. That plant starts to recover. So ecologically, from a biological perspective or ecological perspective, when a plant begins to recover or regrow, it doesn't have the photosynthetic solar panels its leaves, if you will in order to feed that regrowth, and so it grows from what we call crown energy or root reserves. Different people call it different things. I'm going to call it crown energy for now. And so, as the plant is recovering or regrowing from that crown energy, it's growing from a finite savings account. And so if an animal were to come in and defoliate the plant halfway through its growing, while still recovering or regrowing from that savings account, that crown energy gets depleted. Right, and this repeated again, it depletes the crown energy. So when you're driving around a rural landscape, or you purchase a new farm and the grass is really short, or you're driving around grass that's really short. It's not short because the cows just grazed it. It's short because it has no crown energy to recover or to regrow. And so cows in an open setting we know this, we've been taught this all of the books and all of the conferences and a lot of the podcasts they talk about cows in an open grazing situation are going to overgraze plants because they're going to find their favorites, they're going to devour their favorites, they're going to wait for their favorites to recover and then they're going to devour their favorites again.

And my response to this is when? Stag time is that only humans are destroying the world. Right now, right when we look at a tree tree, we don't say that damn fool is destroying the world. We look at a deer to some large degree, we're still not saying these things. When we look at the elk or the mountain lion or the black bear or or the dung beetles and everything, it's like we don't believe that any other thing or perhaps we would say life, any other life is destroying the world, but domesticated animals. Why we didn't create these animals, we trained these animals. Humans destroy the world not just through chemical pollution and erosion and bad decisions and everything else, civilization as a whole and maybe industrial capitalism and greed and all these other things. We also are destroying the world by creating little humanoids.

The way that a cow grazes the landscape is the way that the human grazes the landscape around us as well, an animal that is actually self-medicating. It has a palate to place feedback loop that's an entire section in the book, developing and understanding how, this way, that the ability perspective, from a longevity perspective, from a family perspective, no animal ever perceived living in a truly natural environment is going to destroy its environment on purpose, because it understands, unlike you and I, they don't live in air conditioning, they don't have savings accounts, they don't have mortgages or health insurance or technology or microphones or podcasts or schedules or time, they don't have clocks. All they do every day is live, and that life is dependent upon food to some large degree water, relationship, happiness, feelings, energies, communication, all these other things too. But food is vitally important. So why would an animal that's entirely dependent upon finding its food locally destroy its local food? That makes no sense. That's what humans do. Humans are very good in the modern sense of doing this, and so it doesn't surprise me that little humanoids call them domesticated cows. Highly domesticated cows are destroying the world. So it's not cows that are the problem, it's not even humans' management of cows that are the problem. It's the humanoids that we've turned cows into that are the problem. Two that are the problem. And so allowing these animals to develop this pallet, to place, connection, this adaptive landscape, genomic, that is, through the matriarchy, through developing this understanding of what do I need and where can I find that, how much of it do I need and how much of it do I understand I'm getting when I find it In an open, free, autonomous and wild situation, what you don't see is animals returning back to the place where we put the flag, where they grazed and re-grazing it.

They don't come back. We've left them in areas a hundred, maybe a hundred, 120 head of cattle. We've left an a hundred acre field for four, four and a half months, whatever it's been, and we have flags all over it, whatever it is, bandanas and trees or whatever. However, we're marking these areas and they're not ever coming back there. We set up wildlife cams like are they coming back when we're not seeing it? No, they graze it and they understand that until that recovers, why would they want to regraze it? It doesn't have the nutrients they need until it's recovered. But also they understand thinking for future, dreaming for the future, that if they were to harvest this plant too much, it would kill it. Right, robin wall?

Commercial talks about the honorable harvest asking permission before you harvest. Animals are very good at this humans, the mammal that we are, but the mammal that we're running away from, we're not so good at this. And so, to some large degree, the phenotypic plasticity, the ability for these animals, these cows, cows, goats and sheep we've done this with as well. They all live here. I talk about cows because they're easy and it's just easy to focus on one species.

But their ability to select what they need is also, if it is honorable, meaning not just in our intentions while we still put them in polywire, but it's's actual they're able to truly understand over the long period of time, through generations, what they need, where that is, in the landscape, how much of it do they need? They're not going to overgraze that, because they need it in the truest sense. You know, and it's not just philosophical. I can give you 10 years worth of science and data and fred provenza supporting it and Stefan van Villet at the Utah State or University of Utah, whatever that is.

It's truly interesting that this releasing of control and, by the way, I'm rambling now and I'm going to stop after this and you can the conversation but when I wrote Wild Like Flowers back in 2021, the response, like I said, was overwhelming. We had the original publishers thought it was gonna be a great book and they were gonna to sell 1 000 copies and we sold like 20 000 copies the first year or whatever. Like it just totally went off the charts in terms of like a regenerative book on short stories. This wasn't some j uh. What's jk rowling's novel?

0:45:32 - Cal
or something you know. I'm trying to say like it in its category.

0:45:34 - Daniel
It did very well, but it was just philosophy, it was just these marvelous stories. What Staghtine is trying to get to is saying the stories are marvelous, they are entirely philosophical. There's plenty of philosophy and archaeology and archaeobotany and stories and novels and mythology and the Celtic tradition, like there's tons of other things in the book. But it's working, and when I say it's working, let me be very clear about this. It's working, and when I say it's working, let me be very clear about this. So much of our understanding of green agriculture's success or failure comes down to science, comes down to science and what I often tell people. I'm notorious around this fine world of ours as the guy who doesn't believe soil health matters, and I set myself up for that. I created a video that went viral a couple years ago that soil health doesn't matter and what I was trying to say is that everything else matters equally. And it's true. But looking at soil health, it's very important to realize we are so petrified of releasing control over the animals to allow our animals to be what they naturally are, because we might not build soil health, we might not see biodiversity increasing. The scientists might tell, might tell us that it's not working, that we're not sequestering carbon, we're not producing nutrient-rich soil, producing nutrient-dense beef for our local consumer, like we're petrified of failing scientifically. But what we have to realize is now listen, I bring up this, up this guy's name. I'm dear friends with him, he knows I say this, I can call him right now, and it's like I just want to say I honor this person. Before I say this, because it might seem like I don't, but like Gabe Brown Soil, he has been intensively regenerative farming, planting way more hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cover crops than I've ever seen in my life every single year over year. Thousands of dollars worth of cover crops than I've ever seen in my life every single year over year. No-till drilling and grazing and doing all of these foliar sprays and fertilization techniques and worm castings like intensive regenerative farming. Yes, now, I don't know his current soil organic matter percentage, but the last time I checked, like the most we have ever really seen is about 8 to 12 percent, and what we have to understand is about 8 to 12 percent. And what we have to understand is that 8 to 12 percent that percentage is the most important characteristic. As I said, we used to be a hub of the savory institute and we have traveled all over the country doing soil tests and then consulting and land designs and I probably have taken the half a million soil tests in my life. On projects and things, we've managed,000 acre projects to 13 acre projects and everything in between. I'm a little bit facetious on the half a million but it's probably not far from it.

But what very few people often consider is that the soil test is giving you an organic matter percentage which has to then ask you of what percentage of what? Right, like if I told you like I got a hundred percent of my test and you're like, well, how many questions were there? Well, there was one question, okay, so you got one question right. Now if I told you there was 100 questions, well, that's a little bit more impressive. So the of what matters as much as the percentage matters.

But most soil tests are completed about six to eight inches in depth. Some people go 30 centimeters but we have to realize is even Gabe Brown's soil I don't know the depth he's working at, so let's just use the top and then add some to it. So let's say 10 inches, let's just go way too deep 10 inches, so that's 8 to 12 percent of his soil at 10 inches deep is organic. But when we think about the pre-industrial, pre-colonization and pre-indigenous genocide-colonization and pre-really indigenous genocide of the 1400s of the western hemisphere or turtle island, we're talking about two feet of soil organic matter, so that our legacy is 24 inches of soil organic matter. Now, whether or not it was 100 or 90 percent of this matter, to me the point is that 24 inches of basic 100 soil organic matter is our legacy and we're patting ourselves on the back for being 10 of the top eight inches this is laughable.

I was a math major in college but I can't do math this quick. But like we are percentages of percentages back to where we need to be and as regenerative this is after 20, 30, 40 years of intensive, no-till drilling, cover croppingpping, roller crimping graze Like we are so far from being back to where it was just a handful of years ago and I'm not saying that to discourage anybody. Like Gabe knows me, I know, gabe. Keep going, gabe. And if you're listening to this and you're like, well, our soil, we brought it from 3% to 7%, like hallelujah, thank God, blessings, blessings to you.

I'm not putting you down, what I'm saying is, that is to say, soil health. That is one aspect of an infinitely complex, infinitely massive whole that is earth. And if we are earthlings, if we are members of earth, that we don't have relationship with earth but we like, we are the relationship, like we don't harmonize, we are earthlings. If we are members of earth, that we don't have relationship with earth but we like, we are the relationship, like, we don't harmonize, we are the harmony. If that's true, then by caring for soil health to the point that we're afraid of letting the animals be animals, and if we're going to care for it. That far down, we're going to be missing something.

Okay, and what we have to start to consider is the soil matters as much as the freedom and the autonomous ability for the animals to adapt to their local environment, to live in their families, to not be weaned, castrated and separated and sold off like modern slaves, if I can go that far. That also has to matter, the whole matters. I've taught holistic management for six. Has to matter, the whole matters. I've taught holistic management for six, seven years now and still we're not getting it. The whole matters. And if the whole matters, we have to understand that soil health is one aspect of a greater whole and that whole is so massive that soil health is incomparable to everything else. It's teeny, tiny. Now it matters, it truly matters. But the herd's autonomy matters and the herd's community within the herd matters, and deleting all of the competition in favor of collaboration and community and in communion between these animals in the pasture, that also matters daniel, like I said a while ago you you caused me to have more questions than answers as I think about our animals and what we're doing.

0:51:45 - Cal
You mentioned there about soil health. It can't be the only target or we're focusing too much on that. If we relate that to animal breeding and we do single trait selection, we can make progress on that single trait selection, but anytime we focus on something singularly, other things are getting hurt.

0:52:07 - Daniel
Especially if those other things are infinitely complex meaning that you don't even know what they are, and you will never even understand the consciousness of a cow, let alone its decision-making process. So how are you supposed to manage that?

0:52:22 - Cal
Yes, yeah, let alone a decision making process. So how are you supposed to manage that? Yes, so it raises some questions there, I think. An excellent discussion, but it is time we move a little bit further along the conversation. And for people that's interested in this and this is going to be a subject of our overgrazing section you've got a book out there and our overgrazing section is about that book Stag Time and just tell us we've mentioned it throughout the conversation thus far, but tell us a little bit more about the basis and what your goal is. I know you have a couple more books planned in the series.

0:52:58 - Daniel
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. For the moment, stag Time is book one in what we call the Wildland Chronicles. Book two and book three are currently being written. We've also started playing with the book four only because I had interest in writing it and I might even write it before book two, but neither here nor there. My mind is often like this. But Stag Time, it's truly a transition. It's a story, a tale of transition from 15 years of regenerative farming as we started arriving to the questions, acknowledging the questions of this concentric rewilding opportunity.

Now let me be very clear. I do not use this term rewilding lightly. I do not like rewilding. I am not a fan of rewilding. I I do not like rewilding. I am not a fan of rewilding. I don't subscribe to Rewilding Magazine in the UK. I don't have any friends in the UK that are wilders or whatever you want to call them. I don't subscribe to the idea of erecting 10-foot-tall game fences around private landscapes, kicking off all of the humans, deporting all of the invasive species, buying the native species species and hauling them in. I often joke that rewilding projects are like moving companies. Right, they come in, they move the humans out, the invasives out. They buy the natives and they bring them in Like. So, for instance, there's this book in rewilding that's huge right now that it's all about beavers, and I kid you not that the author of the book, who is the lead director of this rewilding project. They bought a river, they bought beavers. They moved the beavers in a livestock trailer to the river.

0:54:28 - Cal
They put a fence around it and they call it a success.

0:54:31 - Daniel
It's a moving company, right, and the idea is just like I was talking about families and I often use this as a metaphor but if I were to get 100 humans in a room, you would be a community, but you're not a family.

Right 100 random humans rewilding to some large degree green agriculture, regenerative agriculture, whatever you want to call it to some degree, is that right? Let's just go take 100 random bovines, put them in a herd and call them a herd that. If I use humans in the word family, it doesn't make sense to you, but if I say cows and herds, it does, and that's the problem. We don't see ourselves as nature. When you start to update that language, that linguistic connection, that animacy, that grammar of animacy that Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about, all of a sudden you have a lot more questions, like you do, and so I'm really happy that you're moving this conversation through it as you are, because what Stack Time doesn't do is give answers, and a lot of people were upset about this.

We actually had to self-publish the book for two reasons, the first of which is none of the publishers who wanted, who were interested in the book, wanted it to contain stories. They didn't want the stories in there which, by the way, are my favorite part. So screw those people. We self-published the second side. They wanted it to come down to prescriptions, like tell people what is. I'm willing to enlighten you to the questions to ask, but if you listen to this conversation and you have thoughts on what to do, but no questions. I did it wrong. I believe I did it wrong and if you read this book and you have actual answers to questions that you came to the book with, but you have no new questions and you're not humbled and you think that humans are ready to rise up and save the day, I failed again. And so what? Stag Time is the first book in this trilogy, or maybe that's a series in this four books. I don't know. We'll know soon.

0:56:22 - Cal
Yeah, you'll have to change that.

0:56:23 - Daniel
I know.

0:56:24 - Cal
Trilogy. If you had that fourth book I know, oh, there you go, there you go it's.

0:56:27 - Daniel
It's just detailing the questions we were asking, providing the story where those questions actually inhabit, so that you can come into this questioning with us right in the story and then provide some science that helps us understand the nature of the question, not the answer. That's really foundationally clear. I'm not here to give you the answer. Science has no answers to give. Science is a question asking modality. It is nothing else. If it does anything, it establishes a law that then quickly becomes a hypothesis again. That's the point. Like albert einstein, I'll never forget this. It changed my life.

He was asked in 1945 or 1946, he said. The reporter said listen, the hydrogen bomb or the atomic bomb that landed in Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of World War II, to some degree that was a product. The science that allowed that bomb to exist was a product of your work, of your general quantum theories and relative theories and things. What do you think? And he said, if I were to go back all on it again, I would ditch all of my work so that the hydrogen bomb was never created. The answer isn't the important part, it's the question science to some large degree. In that situation I'm not saying I'm for or against the hydrogen bomb. There's a whole other conversation that's a little larger than concentric rewilding right the point is science is often confused as an answer giving median, it's not right.

It's a question asking modality, and so science and story, they are convivial in this way and made convivial as such. There's a lot of questions that aren't answered but raised in stag time. Cliffhawk, the next book, book two or maybe book three we'll see what happens soon um, to some large degree, is going to be a very similar story. Science and story are convivial within the text, but you start to see some of the outcomes and they're not answers. That's very important. They're not answers but they're outcomes, right. So, for instance, one of the things that we start to discuss in in cliffhawk that I'll provide as a sneak peek for your listeners is this idea of calling right Predators still surround herds of prey. I don't negate this. I negate the idea that predators are pushing prey animals naturally in nature into mobbing and moving units. That doesn't make any sense. For instance, just to provide a little bit of founding to this, the lakota. They laughed at me. I was talking to a dear friend of mine, a sun dancer of the lakota, and I said what do you guys think like? What's your mythology, what's your history, what's your world view, your wisdom, your place-based knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, etc. What does it tell us? And, and he said, before the europeans brought the horse back to turtle island or the American continent, we used to hunt the bison by killing a wolf, donning the wolf's clothing, and then we would crawl on all fours into a bison herd with the wolf's skin clad, its clothing all over us, and we would be able to crawl so close to a bison that we could spear its underbelly with the tip of our spear. But at the conferences we're told that regenerative farmers are the wolves. Right, that we push animals naturally, right. But the Lakota, the indigenous, the actual holders of Earth's wisdom, are telling us the opposite that the only way that they can actually hunt the bison, historically over the last 100,000 years or so, is by dressing up as wolves, because they're more fearful of humans than predators. Wolves, right, yes, gray wolves, and. And so there's an interesting reality there.

But herd calling it's something that's very interesting that we've witnessed here. What is this relationship between herds and predators? I'm not going to spill the beans because it's still unwritten and I don't want to take the time to truly understand it before I come out with it, but there is a relationship there and it's a calling relationship c-u-l-i-n-g. It's a calling relationship and it seems to be purposeful, directed and autonomously democratic that the herd is actually deciding who is consumed by predators and who is not. And for the last maybe six or seven years we've worked with a plethora of local scientists from all around the nation here in the United States. To more, I don't want to say prove, because that's not what it is, but to truly demonstrate that this is a decision-making process. That's happening.

It's not predation from a competitive perspective, right, so that's cliffhawk that's number two, and then the last one is still unwritten and we can talk about that in a couple years sounds good to me.

1:00:53 - Cal
I'm already looking forward to cliffhawk. I really enjoyed stag time and what it provided. Uh, dan, it's time for us to go ahead and wrap up today's wonderful episode with our famous four questions, sponsored by Ken Cove Farm Fence.

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1:02:25 - Daniel
But we don't let anybody off the hook.

1:02:27 - Cal
We're going to see if you're, We'll go through them again. So our first question what is your favorite grazing grass-related book or resource?

1:02:37 - Daniel
Oh, that's good. I've mentioned it multiple times here, but Fred Provenza's Nourishment was a pivotal read for me when I first came out Pivotal.

1:02:47 - Cal
Oh yes.

1:02:48 - Daniel
Absolutely pivotal. It was the moment in which I truly started to play with Fred too, because we met about at that same time and, to be clear, fred wrote the foreword to Stag Time. I've brought up Fred multiple times. Fred wrote the foreword to Stag Time to stag time. I've brought up fred multiple times. Fred wrote the forward to stag time, and so our relationship emerged and matured through this the period between him writing nourishment and me writing stag time. But it was his work in that book that truly started to educate and open my eyes to questioning if animals are truly adapting to landscape through their palates. What are we doing as regenerative farmers by restricting that pallet to place connection? Oh yes, so that's probably my favorite book in the space.

1:03:28 - Cal
Excellent resource there. Yeah, Our second question what is your favorite tool for the farm?

1:03:37 - Daniel
Oh the horse I hate to call a tool a horse. I don't believe in that language. Oh the horse I hate to call a tool a horse?

I don't believe in that language. Oh yes, but recently, you know, as you release control, you do a lot less moving of things, buckets, minerals, whatever right, when an animal can get all the magnesium it needs from a plantain plant or its phosphorus from a pigweed or spiny amaranth plant, you just don't bring minerals anymore. And so we purchased, we sold some of our machinery and we purchased a couple mountain bikes. We rode those for a really long time. We still do so.

Every morning when we do chores it's just on mountain bikes, because to some degree I'm just going out there to say hello, I'm not really doing anything else, I don't bring them anything. And then recently, in the last year, we started, uh, breeding and nurturing our human dacquine relationship with seven, seven mares and we'll slowly be even eradicating the metal mountain bikes. Oh, my process. So I hate to call a tool, a horse a tool, but to some degree they're my locomotion. We do horse logging. My wife and I we build hand log cabins through horses and other things, and so to some degree I have to yeah, yeah, well, very good.

1:04:51 - Cal
Thirdly, what would you tell someone just getting started? I would tell them.

1:04:56 - Daniel
Number one I do not believe that we can save the world. So if that is your view in getting into this climate healing or saving regenerative movement question that, if you're uncomfortable with that, question why you're uncomfortable, why do you believe, as a human, that we can save the world? Or, if we could save the world, why do you want to? When you look around you in industrialism and capitalistic greed and colonialization and all of these things, is that what you're trying to save? Ask yourself those deeper questions. But really, number two, I tell this to everybody Next year we're doing a shared festival here at the Wildlands with my friend, shaleta Zaney. She's a Maori healer and practitioner of verbalism in new zealand and we're doing what we're going to call the tree festival, where you're going to come and you're just going to talk to trees. That's. That's what we're going to do and we're going to facilitate that. It's wonderful, it's so exciting to us.

But just ask yourself how are you acknowledging, with the right intentions, your relations when you walk into the forest? Are you acknowledging, with the right intentions, your relations when you walk into the forest? Are you laughing when you see an herbivore or a cow? It could be a browsing deer. Do you say hello? And when you say hello, do you say hello as a subservient being or do you say hello as somebody that's your equal? And if you can't answer any of these questions, you need to be asking yourself why. Why is your life so constructed in the modern way, full of industrialism and reductionism and linearization and colonization? And maybe that's the point. Maybe your mind is so colonized that you can't stop and I'm getting really deep here and I don't mean to be, but the point is ask yourself why you can't acknowledge your surroundings excellent advice, that's.

1:06:55 - Cal
I'll be honest, daniel, that's a little different than the usual advice we get given here, but I think it's excellent slow down.

1:07:01 - Daniel
If I had to pick a different one, I would say slow down. Oh yeah, there you go because in the even in the book I I write this, but it's just like you know how it is, like you'll be walking in a public space and you'll see somebody that's an acquaintance or just a nice human being that acknowledges your presence and they'll be like hello.

And you'll be like hello and you're like I hope you're staying busy and I always say back hope I'm not slow down, you're going yeah, you know, exactly by the way, I learned and I'm sorry I'm just going to keep extending this I learned the other day if you follow behind a tractor going 14 miles an hour, which is about as fast as a tractor can go on mountainous roads here in the mid-atlantic appalachian mountains if you drive behind the tractor for two miles, do you know how much time you're going to lose on your morning commute?

1:07:47 - Cal
actually I think it's funny. I'm interested what the answer is. But I think that's a funny question because I think because sometimes I drive too fast, sometimes I don't, and sometimes, when I'm not driving so fast, I'm always like why are you passing me? You're not gaining that much time.

1:08:05 - Daniel
Yeah, you're not six minutes so fast. You lost six minutes in your day, oh yeah, and and you really probably saved somebody's life. The number of tractor deaths on the road it's unbelievable. It's some person's dad or mom is in there, or son or daughter, and it's just like slow down. So if throw all of the philosophical stuff I threw at you about acknowledgement although I do believe that is the true answer to your question but if that's not working for you, just slow down and you'll get to the philosophical component.

1:08:35 - Cal
If you slow down, I guarantee part, yeah and lastly, daniel, where can others find out more about you?

1:08:41 - Daniel
absolutely. Yeah, I mentioned earlier that we have our own podcast and we like conversating and that's why I like to do this. I just love talking to people and podcasts, I think, are a marvelous medium to do that. But the one thing that I dislike about podcasts is it's so often just me and you, cal, but nobody else is around us, and I dislike that. Like for instance.

I'm doing a live podcast down in Texas, down in Austin, texas, next month we're through a day's course. We're doing a day's course in the field and then everybody gets to participate in a live podcast because it's like I'm just dying for that. More people, we need more people. And so what I always tell people is like, regardless of your interest in the subject, like, come, find us. My website, danielfirthgriffithcom, which I'm sure you can put in the show notes, is a fine place to start.

Wildtimshulcom is the Wildlands website and it has access to all of it the book, et cetera. Stag Time is purchasable anywhere you get your books, you, etc. Stag time is purchasable anywhere you get your books. You can buy it directly from us and I always like to say it's just so much more personal. But if you buy it directly from us on wildtimshelcom, you'll pay less than if you went to amazon. You'll get free shipping and we make about three times more. And I'll write a cordial handwritten letter in the book to you because I like you and now we have a relationship, and so if you go to either one of those websites, you'll find us.

The majority of our work right now online is being populated in our sub stack which is just danielfirthgriffithsubstackcom, and if you went to my website or Tim Schultz or the Wildlands website, you'll get to sub stack regardless, because it just keeps sending people that way. That is the majority of where we're discussing. And then our podcast, which has a weekly episode, is called Unshod Unshod with DeFerth Griffith, I think is the title, but you can get that on our Substack or my website or Tim Scholl's website. So basically, any one of those is fine. Oh, very good.

1:10:48 - Cal
Come be friends, though. It's the most important part to me. Let's be friends. Don't just listen to my voice or even disagree with me, like let's talk about it. Oh yeah yeah, discussions are always good, absolutely Well, daniel, we appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today.

1:10:54 - Daniel
Absolutely, cal. I really meant it when I said it was a blessing and an honor. It's been really fun for me, wonderful.

1:11:01 - Cal
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