Urban Farming as a Path to Sustainability with Greg Peterson

Parker Condit:
0:00

Hey everyone, welcome to Exploring Health Macro to Micro. I'm your host, parker Condit. In this show, I interview health and wellness experts around topics like sleep, exercise, nutrition, mental health, stress management and much more. So by the end of each episode, you'll have concrete, tangible advice that you can start implementing today to start living a healthier life, either for yourself or for your loved ones. And that's the micro side of the show.

Parker Condit:
0:23

The macro side of the show is discussing larger systemic issues that contribute to health outcomes. An example of that is the fact that most major cities only have a three-day supply of food at any given time, which is an incredibly vulnerable position to be in societally. So, for a variety of reasons, a shift towards regenerative farming, urban farming and individuals growing their own food is a solution that provides resilience with much better long-term sustainability. This, along with soil quality, are two topics that I've become much more interested in over the past few months. We all know that eating nutritious food is very important, but with dwindling soil quality, our food is becoming less and less nutritious, not to mention the environmental impact of factory farming.

Parker Condit:
1:05

So here to discuss all of that today with me is Greg Peterson, and when it comes to anything around urban farming. Greg is kind of a legend in the space, so I'm very thankful to have him on. In 2003, he founded UrbanFarmcom, which is an online portal for urban farming education, and in 2015, he created the UrbanFarm podcast. His vision with the podcast is to help spread awareness and education about growing your own food. In this episode we go over how fragile our current food environment is, why soil quality is such a driving factor for nutritional quality in our food. How you can start your own urban farm even if you have limited space.

Parker Condit:
1:40

Like a porch, like me and what harvesting rainwater is and how you can use that for your garden and what my surprise use that. The UrbanFarm that Greg started all those years ago was only on a third of an acre, so not a huge plot of land, and it was here in Phoenix, which is where I live, and also an area that I would have thought would be very challenging to kind of grow anything. But, as you'll see throughout this conversation, it's very possible as long as you work in alignment with the environment. So, without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Greg Peterson. Greg, really excited to have you on here. We're going to be talking a lot about urban farming, sustainability, and I think the easiest place to start is just getting a brief introduction into what exactly urban farming is, and then we'll get into some of the wider implications around the food system, climate change and things like that. But if you could just start us off with how you define urban farming, I think they'd be a great start for us.

Greg Peterson:
2:39

So I'm going to step back and tell you that I have spent my life. I'm 61 years old. I've spent my life in the food scene, in the local food scene and figuring out local food systems, and I discovered early on in my life that we have a food system problem and I have addressed it by building out systems so people can farm in the city, because I believe that the place that we solve our food insecurity problems is in the city. So urban farming is where it's at for me, and it can be as small as some pots on your front porch to acres in an urban area. Bob McClellan out in West Phoenix has many acres that he farms.

Parker Condit:
3:42

So can you define food insecurity, so people have context around what exactly that means.

Greg Peterson:
3:48

Well, when I spoke that I almost paused myself. But food insecurity is people not having enough food to supply their daily needs, and there is a significant amount of people in this country that are food insecure. They're not getting three meals a day, and so that's one piece of it. And, interestingly, about 20 years ago I was watching the Today Show and they had this segment on where the family three generations were living in this small house in some southern town and they didn't have enough food. And I looked at that segment and they had all this dirt around their house. It's like, man, you need to be growing your own food. You could grow enough food in that the amount of property that you have to feed your family. So there's that piece. That's food insecurity part. And then there's our food system challenges, which we saw really clearly when COVID hit especially. You know things missing out of the grocery store, like I know obviously it's not food, but toilet paper. You know it's a food. Those are food system issues there. Cb.

Parker Condit:
5:13

Yeah, I think what you're alluding to is how vulnerable our system is and that kind of got exposed in 2020. Can you explain? Let me see we don't have. Is there enough food in the country for everyone? That's not the problem, is it?

Greg Peterson:
5:30

AC. That's a really good question and it really depends on how you define food. Is there enough nourishment? From the perspective of good food for people, probably not. Is there enough manufactured food? Maybe, but people still aren't getting it, and when I say manufactured is when they take corn and they make corn chips or all of the boxed things that you find at the grocery store.

Parker Condit:
6:00

Cb, yeah, so I've always, when thinking about this problem, it's like you can't just always think about food quality. It's like when people are struggling to not even know where their next meal's coming from, you need to first think about quantity, Like can you just get them food? And then, once there's a consistent level of food available, then we can start trying to optimize for quality. Ac, yeah, CB, and, as I've understood it, there is enough food in this country. It's just a lot of it. I forget the actual terms. I don't know the supply chain terms, but once it's in our homes, that's where most of it gets wasted. Ac.

Greg Peterson:
6:37

Yeah, there is a lot of food waste and I suspect that people that are food insecure have less food waste. You know, they're probably more conscious about what they eat and what they throw away. Ac yeah, I'm sure?

Parker Condit:
6:55

So let's go back to the idea of urban farming. We're going to kind of keep weaving in and out of a handful of these topics. You lived in Phoenix for a long time.

Greg Peterson:
7:05

AC. That's the five years AC.

Parker Condit:
7:07

Right. So I live in Scottsdale, so I kind of wanted to base this conversation around what a lot of people probably think of as like a very tough climate for farming, where it's very hot and it's very dry here. But you've shown it's possible. So can you just walk through an example of like what you had at your property and then we can kind of I want to end up digging into examples very selfishly of what I can do in a condo with two patios, one sun-facing one, not Just so people have like concrete examples of like what we're talking about here, ac.

Greg Peterson:
7:41

Yeah, so the property that I lived on for 32 years was a third of an acre, approximately 80 feet wide by 160 feet deep, and I built over that 32-year period a what I called a old growth food forest and basically what that means is that there's always food to eat there. In fact, I've been gone coming up on two years now and I visited it, visited the property last month, and they're still maintaining it, and the old growth food forest part means that there's always just food to eat. You walk out into your front and backyard and there were citrus to eat or lettuce growing wild in the yard, so there were dozens of things that would just come back year after year after year AC.

Parker Condit:
8:35

So how did you start that? Was there already fruit trees there when you started? Or how did you start facilitating this old growth food forest?

Greg Peterson:
8:45

AC there was. So the property that I owned when I was in Phoenix was on an old citrus orchard from the 1920s. So when I arrived there there were about a half a dozen citrus trees and that was it. And I bought it because it had flood irrigation and that basically means that the water just shows up and 26 times a year you get six inches of water in your yard and I purposely bought it for that and having that kind of water supply that helped a lot. And then what I did over time is I just planted fruit trees. I love planting fruit trees that because you plant at once and you get food for decades. There were two citrus trees at the urban farm that had been producing fruit for 100 years when I left AC.

Greg Peterson:
9:44

That's amazing what kind of fruit, was it?

Parker Condit:
9:49

AC it was.

Greg Peterson:
9:51

Arizona sweet oranges, so on any given year I was getting peaches, apricots, plums, jujubes, citrus about a dozen different kinds of citrus apples. There was nine months a year. There was food to eat out of the property and what I've noticed is so. I now live in Asheville, north Carolina, so we have a winter and as we're recording this, it's middle of December and there's not much growing outside. In fact, it was 18 degrees out this morning and this is kind of reminiscent for me of a growing season like we had in Phoenix, but it's opposite. So the growing season that I have here is March through November.

Greg Peterson:
10:42

The growing season that we have in Phoenix is October through end of June. So we're still taking two to three months off. It's just a different time of year and it's actually going back to your question. It's actually quite easy to grow things in Arizona if you just pay attention to the seasons and when you're growing. In fact, bob McClendon I mentioned him earlier about 15 years ago he just came out and said I just don't grow in July, august and September. It's just not worth it CB.

Parker Condit:
11:15

That makes sense. So I don't necessarily have a green thumb. I've been able to, over the past few years, keep some houseplants alive, which I'm very proud of. So how much harder is it growing something fruit? I just got a fig tree, a little fig tree, ac and a pot CB.

Greg Peterson:
11:32

Yep, ac yeah. So how much harder is it growing these things in the desert? Ac yeah, CB. Well, I'm just now experiencing growing things in not the desert and it seems a lot harder for me here than it did in Phoenix. Ac, interesting.

Parker Condit:
11:52

It seems very counterintuitive. This just seems like it would be a hard place to grow or keep anything alive. Cb.

Greg Peterson:
11:58

Well and, interestingly for me, I actually started my first garden in Phoenix in 1975. And I moved here. So I'd been growing for about 45 or 46 years. I'd been growing gardens in Phoenix and I moved here and I was talking with Zach Brooks from Arizona Worm Farm he's in West Phoenix and he said he reminded me because my garden the first year I arrived here was bad. It wasn't anything. I would have expected to be bad, wise because hell, I've been growing for over 40 years, I've had over 40 seasons of gardens in my life, and he reminded me. He said, greg, don't forget, your first garden is your worst garden. So I'm having to relearn how to grow things here because of the different climate.

Greg Peterson:
12:53

But you know I had 40 plus gardens and garden seasons in Phoenix and so it's just, it's simple, and the big thing is is paying attention to the seasons. You know, make sure we have our planting calendar that we give away for free at plantingcalendarorg, and it's a planting calendar specifically for the low desert and you cannot count on big box stores and nurseries to sell you a plant that is in the correct season. So planting a broccoli in March, forget it. Planting a watermelon in September, forget it. They're just not going to work. So once you get those pieces figured out, it makes it a whole lot easier.

Parker Condit:
13:39

That can imagine All right. So there is a fair amount of research that's going to have to go into this first. I can't just start buying plants and hoping they produce food in the way that I'd want them to.

Greg Peterson:
13:50

Well, we do have our growing food the basics course online and it takes you through seven lessons on how to do that. It takes you through watering and garden placement and you know all that stuff, so that resource is available.

Parker Condit:
14:03

I'll definitely go through that and I will definitely link to that in the show notes for this as well. All right, so if you could get more people involved in urban farming, what sort of problems do you think you start to solve at the local food economy level?

Greg Peterson:
14:22

What problems do we solve? Yeah Well, so at any given moment there was a let me sidestep here a little bit About 15, 18 years ago, there was some research done out of the UK that determined that any urban area on the planet has about a three-day supply of food.

Parker Condit:
14:49

I've heard that before and I'm like that's scary. That can't be true, but it probably is.

Greg Peterson:
14:53

It is because we have an absolutely beautiful food delivery system in this country. It delivers enough food to get people fed mostly, but it only has about a three-day supply. It's basically it's a just-in-time system, so it has just what we have in the grocery stores. So if there's a trucker strike, if there's a storm, if there's COVID, it disrupts that and that's the big issue that we have to deal with and that's the piece that urban farming growing in our fronts and backyards that solves it.

Parker Condit:
15:42

Yeah, so it sounds like it just creates a little bit more resiliency in the system.

Greg Peterson:
15:47

A little bit or a lot. Cuba for many years grew a lot of their own food right in the city when the whole thing happened in the late 60s, and they just started growing food right in the cities. So you asked me a question a little while ago. I want to kind of tease it apart a little bit more. What is an urban farmer? And my description of an urban farmer is you grow food, you share it, that's it Okay. So you grow food for your family and you're sharing it with your family. You can call yourself an urban farmer, and then the third piece of that is name your farm.

Parker Condit:
16:28

Okay, so pretty easy, or maybe not easy, but simple, three-step process, exactly.

Greg Peterson:
16:34

And the reason you want to name your farm. I named my farm 20-plus years at 25 years ago, called it the Urban Farm, and it's known. In Phoenix. The Urban Farm is a known place and I encouraged people that went on tours to the Urban Farm to name their farms as well, Because what it does I was at a tour one day and I was like how many people have named their farms? And I get five or 10 people that say and it's like Jack's Beanstalk, it's like two fat cats' apartment gardens. What it's doing is it's bringing some levity to it and notoriety.

Greg Peterson:
17:12

Oh, you're a farmer, You're growing food and it can be really super simple and the next step is grow food in your front and backyard. And this is a great small business for stay-at-home moms or dads, high school students, where you're growing food in your front and backyard and then taking it to a farmer's market. Or one of the things that I did this year is we grew way, way, way too many tomatoes. We were harvesting five to 10 pounds of tomatoes every other day out of my new orchard that I planted this year and I just put a sign down on the street and I said free, organic tomatoes. And the people on the street loved me for it.

Greg Peterson:
17:58

I can imagine, yeah, and the other piece of it is that I've said this for years the only place that lack lives is between our ears, Because when you look at the sheer abundance that comes from fruit trees or tomato plants or cucumbers or the, you know it makes so much abundance and we just need to be revisiting that in our front and backyard. When I was in Croatian in 2014, I went there on a food systems project with Arizona State University and every single front yard had food growing in it. I did, I did, Everybody was growing food in it, and that was like all right, well, there's something to learn here. That's like a big wow.

Parker Condit:
18:53

Yeah, you mentioned abundance and since I first got in touch with you about coming on the show, I've been looking up more about the urban farm and I saw that you did have many orange trees on there and recently I started squeezing my own orange juice here.

Greg Peterson:
19:08

Oh nice.

Parker Condit:
19:09

Yeah, but now that I saw like I think it was your orange trees that you were referencing, that you've had for or that have been growing fruit for 100 years, yeah, so a single tree just needs water and sunlight, right?

Parker Condit:
19:22

So just knowing that in my head now I'm like I hate buying oranges, like it feels, and it's like the amount of energy that probably went into wherever they were grown maybe Florida to get them here seems insane. And when you start breaking it down for, like, that's just oranges, like how much energy goes into how far all of our food has to travel along that very incredible supply chain that you were mentioning, that sort of stocks our food or our food system for only three days at a time.

Greg Peterson:
19:51

There's a name for this. It's called food miles. Yeah, okay, do you have any idea? So food miles is the amount of miles that food travels from where it was grown to where it was consumed. Okay, any idea what the average food miles in the United States is?

Parker Condit:
20:09

It's probably a disgustingly high number 1500.

Greg Peterson:
20:13

Yep, it's in half the country, 1500 miles, yeah. And so there is that piece. But there's also another piece that's really important that people need to know about, and that's the oranges that you're eating from the grocery store. The peaches that you're eating from the grocery store aren't as nutritious as the ones that you're picking off of your own trees. Here's why because what happens is they have to pick those fruit early and the moment they pick that fruit it starts degrading nutritionally. But the other side of the coin is that when they pick that fruit, they're picking it early, so it's not as nutritionally dense or sweet as it could be.

Greg Peterson:
21:01

So three or four years ago I handed my friend Tony a bag of cara cara navels from my front yard. They got picked off of the tree when they were ripe and she took them home and called me back 15 minutes later and she said oh my gosh, greg, what are these? They're incredible. I said they're cara cara navels and she said but they don't taste like anything in the store. I bet they don't. That's why they got picked at their peak of ripeness and she took them home and was eating them 15 minutes later. And that's also a nutritional issue as well, they're not as nutrient dense, so we're not getting the level of nutrition that we deserve out of our food either. So by growing your own food, harvesting it when it's ripe, the amount of nutrition that you're getting is better. Plus, if you're growing it the way I like to grow things, it's organic, so you're not getting any of those eucchie chemicals.

Parker Condit:
22:06

Yeah, so just for anyone listening who doesn't necessarily know my background because I don't know by the time it's there is how much I would have shared but I grew up in New Jersey in like the farmland portion of New Jersey, so we always had fresh corn, big corn season, a lot of tomatoes and for years that you just grow up around it. Also, my parents owned a catering company, so I was just exposed to a lot of food and a lot of fresh food and that's just kind of what you grow up knowing and not necessarily appreciating. And then I sort of swung in the other direction. Once I got out of my own I was like I've done enough healthy eating and now I'm like and also not necessarily caring about where my food came from, not shopping at farmer's markets, not necessarily caring about sustainability, and now I'm sort of swinging back in the other direction. So anyone who's listening is like I don't even know where to begin.

Parker Condit:
22:54

I'm very much on a journey of trying to just make better decisions around where my food's coming from and making better decisions around what's going to affect the planet. And I'm definitely nowhere near being good Like. I still drive an SUV, I still make a lot of bad decisions, but I am trying to make take the steps that are moving in the right direction. So I do want people who are listening, who are not necessarily very proactive about this, to know that, like you can make small steps and you can take small steps, you don't need to necessarily start an urban farm. One of the things that I've done now, which I'm feeling much better about when you reference food miles, is that probably 50% of my food that we're consuming is coming from a farmer's market. Oh, good for you, because there's, like great farmer's markets here throughout most of the years.

Parker Condit:
23:41

So you know, like I love knowing that my eggs are coming from a farm 30 miles north of here, right, and same thing with the chicken and where the where my lettuce is coming from. So it's great reducing those food miles and then also hoping that these local farmers it's the food quality, like you're saying, or the nutritional value is slightly higher as well. Yeah, so I want to start doing more things here, but I live in a condo. Do you know what, like what would be something that's reasonable? For? We have a porch in the front, a porch in the back. The porch in the front right here, great sunlight, but fully exposed to sun throughout the day. Porch in the back, a little bit more protected.

Greg Peterson:
24:31

When you're standing on your porch in the front and looking out, what direction are you looking? It's north and south. North and south, all right, so north is going to be pretty much. Forget about it. South would be a great place to grow. Have you ever heard of something called a tower garden?

Parker Condit:
24:49

Yeah, Now that I've been like I was prepping for this interview and looking at more things like this, Facebook is just feeding me with tons of tons of ads for that.

Greg Peterson:
25:00

I've been growing food in the ground since 1975. I was 15 years old and in 2010, I discovered someone on my friends on Facebook sent me a link of a video of this thing called the tower garden, and a tower garden is a hydroponic. It's essentially a hydroponic growing system that is six feet tall and when it's completely filled up with food, you know, it holds 25 or 30 plants. When it's completely filled up with food growing, it looks like a Christmas tree and there's a 20 gallon basin in the bottom and the water, once an hour for 10 minutes, pumps up and hydrates the roots. And I bought one. I pretty much bought one site unseen because I was so excited about it and we use. We haven't broken it out here yet because we're still getting our feet grounded here but from 2010, when I bought it, to 2022, when we left, we used it every season and it's great for growing greens. You know we grew a lot of our salad greens on it, so you know it costs a little bit of money to get in, but the nice thing is is once you've paid for it, it's paid for itself and you know it just keeps going, and so that's one way to do it. Another way is to small pots.

Greg Peterson:
26:38

I lived at the urban farm for 32 years and back in 2012, for a myriad of reasons, I decided I was going to move out. For a year I rented it to a friend of mine and I ended up in a little condo out in Peoria for about 10 months and I put together some raised beds. It was just the back patio was eight by 10, 80 square feet and I ran my tower garden in there and I ran a couple of raised beds and, you know, grew a fair amount of our food. Now, obviously not. You know, when I say a fair amount, I mean like 10 to 30%, because a bulk of our food isn't fresh vegetables. You know we got to have grains and that kind of stuff and so, but we were growing a lot of things there. On this, you know this 80 square foot back patio that faced south, yeah, Okay, so yeah.

Greg Peterson:
27:40

Look at that the big thing is is to make sure you're planting the right thing for the right season.

Parker Condit:
27:45

Yeah, I'm definitely going to use that reference that you have on their website. But, yeah, no. So I'm really glad you mentioned the tower garden, because I've been seeing that and we're, like you, never really know, especially for the amount of investment like it's fairly expensive, but to have somebody who's actually used one to know that it's worthwhile, like that's a big help Big time. Okay, yeah, well, I appreciate that. I mean this call alone might be worth it, just for to get that piece of information.

Parker Condit:
28:13

So one of the other thing that is interesting to me and I think requires more conversation is because this show is largely based around health and healthcare. One of the big things is social determinants of health, and these are things that, like people can't really influence themselves. A big one of them is like food deserts, where I was talking before about the access problem with food. So it's like, yeah, you can say that organic, freshly grown food is better for people's health, but it's like where, if they don't even have access to it, that's not going to be a viable option, Right? So Do you see a movement in the future where this type of farming or this type of food sourcing is going to help alleviate some of those social determinants of health, if people choose it.

Greg Peterson:
29:09

I have this theory that I developed a couple decades ago. I call it my 99.13. 99% of the time people change because they get hit by a metaphorical Mack truck and 1% of the time they change because they choose to change. Now, covid was that Mack truck. We sold more fruit trees that year and, as COVID was hitting, we decided as a team to do a free class on the Internet every weekday and we did that for like 60 days. Just on gardening. We were teaching people how to garden and make bread and whatever it took. We were doing that. We had over 26,000 people to our email list. Wow, that's remarkable. Yeah, and it was that Mack truck moment.

Greg Peterson:
30:14

And so we need to wake up and choose and I hope it's a lot more than 1% of the time we were choosing to actually grow our own food. But we have some significant food system issues coming down the pike that either going to Mack truck us or we're going to work our way through it by growing our own food. So my message with the Urban Farm podcast is hey, it's easy to grow your own food. You can grow it in pots on your front porch or you can buy four acres in North Carolina and grow your own food. So I don't know if I answered your question.

Parker Condit:
31:00

I kind of went on a tangent there, but yeah you did and I appreciate sharing your theory and I think that theory is correct as well. You can always kind of fudge the numbers a few points in one direction or the other, but the point remains the same. You mentioned there's a few issues coming down the pike from a food system standpoint. Can you share what some of those are?

Greg Peterson:
31:23

Well, the infrastructure that gets our food to where it's at is getting old the roadways, the trucks, the systems that are in place and that's a smaller issue. The bigger issue is the health of the food that we're eating. The majority of the processed foods aren't good for us. They're impacting our health. The food's just not good for us. I've seen a lot more posts on Facebook about foods containing GMOs and that kind of stuff, which we really don't know what that's about and what that's going to do for our health long term. There's the incidence of celiac disease skyrocketed in the early 2000s and that's when Roundup Ready corn came on the market, and between the Roundup and the BT that they bio add to the corn, it's affecting our health. So a lot of the and I'll call them manufactured foods a lot of the manufactured foods, just aren't good for our health, and so we have all kinds of health issues.

Greg Peterson:
32:58

And another theory I have my mom passed away when she was 85.

Greg Peterson:
33:05

There was a couple of years ago and she spent 85 years living here and probably spent 20% of her life in a really polluted world.

Greg Peterson:
33:15

I've spent half of my life in a really polluted world and I'm starting to see the effects of that pollution on my health already, Because at the age of 62, I'm starting to experience some of the same kinds of things that my mom was experiencing at 85, 25 years earlier. And then there's our kids, our grandkids, you know. Anybody in their 20s and 30s has spent their entire life in a really polluted world and the health issues that we're seeing with them are dramatic. My friend of mine's, son, ended up with celiac disease in 2002, 2003. And you know it took quite a bit to figure out what was happening and how to get it fixed. And it doesn't necessarily just have to do with the wheat itself, because they're finding that the ancient grains people eating the ancient grains are less impacted by the gluten in the wheat than people that are eating processed food. So I think a big part of the issue is the processed food piece.

Parker Condit:
34:33

Yeah, I think that can't be understated. I was just listening to something with a Gabor Maté. If you know any of his work. He speaks a lot about the idea where a lot of people are talking about disease states or mental health conditions and they're saying these are abnormal conditions. But he sort of looks at the environment that we're living in and he posits that this is actually a very normal physiologic response to the environment that we're currently living in. He goes largely against the disease state medical model but I think he's largely correct. Obviously it's a very nuanced, large conversation but it makes sense and I'm largely on board with that line of thinking I would be curious to go on to. I want to hear more about why you ended up going to Nashville. Did you want to get out of the pollution of a major city and just get more land?

Greg Peterson:
35:34

That was a piece of it. The pollution was a piece of it. About 20, 25 years ago I had conversations, started having conversations with my friends that when my parents passed away I wanted to go someplace quiet. So I lived in Phoenix for 55 years and Phoenix is a metropolitan area of about 4.7 million people. It's loud, it's polluted, and so I was really interested in finding a quiet place to go, not just audibly quiet, but energetically quiet. So that was a big piece of it. And another big piece of it was that I wanted to go someplace that I could actually grow a significant amount of my own food and the food growing scene here is a bit mind blowing. And I'll specifically say the food growing scene, the food scene, restaurants. This place is amazing for that.

Greg Peterson:
36:44

But there is an actual nonprofit called ASAP. It stands for Appalachian Something and they started up 22 years ago when the tobacco industry was kind of closing, downsizing let me say downsizing. So ASAP started to support local farmers to transition to other food farms, to take their farms into food growing, and I went to their shortly after I arrived here. I went to their 20th anniversary party and there were hundreds of people there representing hundreds of farms, small farms that people are just growing their own food. In fact, when I was here vetting the house that we ultimately bought in December of 21, I saw two different sets of billboards that kind of blew me away. One of them said get your local. On a billboard it said get your local compost from us, and I saw multiple billboards for that and for me that was a clue. And the other billboard that I saw was download such and such app. It's a local farm app. They have a local farm app for the Asheville area and it's like wow.

Parker Condit:
38:12

You must love being in that kind of community. I do, I do.

Greg Peterson:
38:15

However, I went from being a you know the urban farm and the work that I did in Phoenix was pretty well known. I went from being a really big fish and a really big pond to a really small fish and do a medium sized pond. So I'm having to relearn a lot. The other thing is is that there's this thing in growing food called disease pressure. It's the pressure of bugs, of fungus, of you know, just things that negatively impact your plants, and what I've come to find is that the disease pressure in Phoenix is non-existent to the disease pressure here, just because it's you know, we get seven inches of rain in Phoenix. We get three to five inches of rain a month here. So it's just again. It's a new learning curve.

Greg Peterson:
39:08

So I'm, you know, ultimately I wanted to go someplace quiet where I could grow a lot of my own food and start a farm, and that's what we're doing here. We got four acres and we've got our barn that's getting finished up this weekend and we put our first greenhouse in about six, eight weeks ago, oh well. And this summer I planted 160 fruit tree and berry bushes. Wow, that was a project, yeah.

Parker Condit:
39:38

It sounds like it that was a project. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. So you're on a third of an acre here in Phoenix. You have four acres now, so a lot of fruit trees and bushes. You've got a greenhouse. What are you growing in the greenhouse, or what's?

Greg Peterson:
39:51

going to be grown there. It'll be for plant starts in January and February. Right now I'm storing my four citrus trees in there, okay, because I brought citrus trees with me because I love citrus and it gets too cold for them, and so it's a place to hold stuff over the winter. It's just a teeny one. We got it from Costco. It's a seven and a half by eight feet. Okay, so it's just a teeny one.

Parker Condit:
40:18

It was like putting tinker toys together when we assembled it, sure, and yeah, do you want to expand at some point in the future, or are you just going to kind of grow out that space and see what you can make of it?

Greg Peterson:
40:34

Yeah, we're just going to grow out this space and so on my podcast, it's the Urban Farm Podcast I interviewed a year ago. I interviewed a young lady named Samara Price and she's got an elderberry product business. So she buys elderberries and processes them into drinks and savs and that kind of stuff. And I said so where do you get your elderberries at? And she said oh, I get them here and there, but most of them come out of Europe. That was my response. And my next thing I said was well, I can grow elderberries for you. I didn't have a clue how to grow elderberries at that moment, but I said I can grow elderberries for you.

Greg Peterson:
41:17

So this was December and January and February I did some research. I bought a hundred elderberry branches. They didn't have any roots, they didn't have any leaves, they didn't have any stem, they were just eight inch long sticks and I was told to stick them in the ground. Well, I'm going to do a little better than that. I'd put them in four by four, by nine pots, and of those hundred sticks, 98 of them turned into plants and by June, when I was planting them, they were two feet tall and by August, through the summer, they were three and a half feet tall. So I am in the elderberry growing business and I currently have about a hundred elderberry plants in the ground, and if I decide to expand the elderberry business I have another three acres that I can plant on.

Parker Condit:
42:11

So that was part of the summer planting. Yeah, exactly, I can imagine.

Greg Peterson:
42:17

So you know I'm an entrepreneur. I've had over 30 businesses in my life. Some of them lasted a sneeze, other others of them. You know I have two of them that were well. The fruit tree program is 24 years old and I had a software company that I ran for 20 years, and that's just what I am. You know, I'll be running my own business until I take my last breath, so who knows where that'll lead? But right now I'm going into the elderberry business.

Parker Condit:
42:47

That's great. It offers you a lot of flexibility and freedom. Yep, a lot of work, but you get the flip side of it, which is, I'm sure, very rewarding. Yeah, I'm really happy you have had this conversation, just because, like when I, when you said I got a bunch of elderberry sticks, like I would look at that and be like these are going to work. But to get a 98% success rate and now they're two feet tall, I'm like, okay, I just need to have a bit more confidence that growing things is going to work. I would just stick and be like I would think nothing of it and you saw that as an opportunity to grow. What's going to become 100 elderberry bushes?

Greg Peterson:
43:26

Yeah.

Parker Condit:
43:27

Okay.

Greg Peterson:
43:27

Yeah. So I really encourage you and everybody you're going to kill plants, I promise you I have killed more plants than you have. Yeah, that's true. I've killed more plants than because I've been growing for over, you know, almost 50 years now I've been. You know I've killed more plants than anybody listening out there, I guess. And when that happens, that's a learning lesson, it's not a stop.

Parker Condit:
43:52

Yep, yeah, it's a great point.

Greg Peterson:
43:54

Oh okay, I won't do that again, yeah.

Parker Condit:
43:57

That's a great point, and we'll hopefully help shift my mindset around these things Well plus plants are so resilient they are.

Greg Peterson:
44:09

Plants are incredibly resilient and productive. I had a guy that came to the urban farm maybe four or five years ago and I had four ounces of carrot seeds. Four ounces of carrot seeds is 100,000 seeds. Oh okay, lots of seeds, yeah. And I asked him if he knew how to plant carrots. He said oh yeah, he said I got it covered, and you know what that means is you put in two rows with maybe you know 300 seeds. He planted the entire bag of carrots in my front yard and when I so, we harvested carrots, but then we also harvested carrot seeds and I ended up with a five gallon bucket of carrot seeds after I processed them.

Parker Condit:
44:56

Five gallon bucket, and you know that's like wow, yeah, a few million seeds, that's how productive nature is. Yeah, despite our best effort sometimes Right, exactly, can you talk about harvesting rainwater and what gray water harvesting is? I'd love to learn more about this. I know that harvesting rainwater in some states is illegal. We can probably get into that, but just starting off, with what exactly it is, how you do it, how you store it, things like that.

Greg Peterson:
45:27

Yeah, so, for starters, it's actually legal to harvest rainwater in every state.

Greg Peterson:
45:35

I had a young lady on my podcast sometime this year and she had done the research on that and there are different levels of legality of harvesting rainwater, so you have to check with your state, but it is legal to harvest rainwater in every state. Harvesting rainwater is really paying attention to where the water is on your property when the rain falls and directing it Whether you're directing it into tanks or into your landscape, and I am a big, big proponent of directing that water in your landscape and then planting the landscape around where you plant the water. So when I get the question in Arizona, I got the question well, we only get seven inches of rain a year. Is it worth harvesting the rainwater? Well, yeah, because you only get seven inches of rain. There's that huge resource there that is invaluable in the desert. Of course, you want to direct it in your landscape. In fact, back in 2014, I had one rain event. I think it was September 14th 2014. I had one rain event where we got 29,000 gallons of water that fell on my third of an acre.

Parker Condit:
46:55

It sounds like an inconceivable number.

Greg Peterson:
46:57

It does. That's like two Olympic-sized pools kind of things fall all at once. The city of Phoenix was flooding and people were having problems with it, but my property acted like a great big sponge and just sponged it up. And the big thing you want to do is, in rainwater harvesting is you want to direct the water where you want it in your landscape, and especially in the desert. You direct it where you want it and then you add lots and lots and lots of woody mulch, because the woody mulch acts like a sponge and it sponges up and holds that water. And then graywater harvesting. You have to check with each individual state.

Greg Peterson:
47:41

In the state of Arizona it is legal to harvest graywater. Graywater is any water that goes down any drain of your house except your kitchen sink and your toilets, and it is perfectly legal to redirect that graywater out into your landscape. It's a little bit more complicated than what I just made it sound, because you need to figure out how to get the water from inside the house to outside the house, and you can do that with plumbing or you can do what I did and I moved a shower outdoor. So I had an outdoor shower at the Urban Farm and an outdoor kitchen sink, so we rinsed our vegetables in it and basically had a nice sink on the back patio. So that's possible.

Parker Condit:
48:27

Yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah, I appreciate explaining those distinctions and it's good to know that there's some level of legality in every state. I think I looked up California and that's where it seemed a little bit iffy.

Greg Peterson:
48:41

Colorado is the most stringent state of the mall for rainwater harvesting, for graywater harvesting. I don't know where the other states are out on that. Okay, all right.

Parker Condit:
48:53

Well, everyone listening, do your own research on that one. Can you describe where you think the trajectory of our food systems are going to be maybe a decade or two from now? Just getting an understanding of the level of urgency required, maybe.

Greg Peterson:
49:09

Well, I think that with where we're at right now, we'll get some people growing food and other people not, and I think that if the Mack truck arrives, then we'll get a lot more people growing food. My hope is that we can get our neighborhoods growing food. In the case of a major shutdown, if I'm the only one growing food on my street, then I become a target. People are going to come and say hi and want to buy food from me or want to take food from me. But if I can get my neighbors and friends, just like when I was in Croatia if we can get everyone growing food in their yards, then we're in a lot better shape.

Parker Condit:
50:07

Do you have hope for regenerative farming? It seems maybe it's just because I'm becoming more interested in it and I'm looking up more of these things online, so I'm getting more of a positive feedback loop of what's being shown to me on social media and through search engines. It seems like I'm seeing more about regenerative farming and that seems like a hopeful avenue, but I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on that from a sustainability standpoint.

Greg Peterson:
50:34

It's the only place we can go. The corporate food system is tenuous at best at this moment just because of everything going on it and it's using up the soil.

Parker Condit:
50:54

I did want to talk about soil.

Greg Peterson:
50:56

Yeah, and we'll talk about healthy soil hectare in a minute. But regenerative farming is really about building healthy soil. That's the key line of it is building healthy soil, because healthy soil has lots of organic matter in it and lots of life in it and that makes the food more nutrient dense. It makes our plants grow better. If I can pontificate a little bit here, there's five components to healthy soil. Yeah, sorry about it. Yeah, and in order. When we have healthy soil, the plants are going to grow better. The food's going to be healthier. For us, the five components are airspace, water, dirt and in the desert what we have primarily is dirt. Dirt is broken down, rock, and if all you have is dirt in your backyard, it's highly compacted, the water can't get in and it's lacking organic matter. So what makes healthy soil is water, airspace, dirt, organic matter and everything that's alive in the soil, the microorganisms and the bugs and that kind of stuff. And so when they talk about good, healthy soil to grow food in, you've got a good balance of those five components. The easy thing is, and the cool thing is, is that to fix dirt or unhealthy soil you just add lots of organic matter. You can add it as compost. You can add it as woody mulch. That eventually breaks down into really healthy soil.

Greg Peterson:
52:46

And I put together a series of videos and stuff called Healthy Soil Hacked and you can find that at healthysoilhackedcom. It's a free series. It goes deeper into the five components of healthy soil. I got a video on that. I did a process in permaculture. Permaculture I like to call the art and science of working with nature and in permaculture they do something called sheet mulching. There's actually a book on the market called Lasagna Gardening. That kind of gives you an idea of what it is. You're laying down a layer of browns and then you put a little bit of manure on top of that and then more browns and you can make this 24 or 36 inches thick and over the course of six months it'll break down to two or three inches of healthy soil. It's a quick way to get really healthy soil growing. And then also the healthysoilhackedcom also includes a video of me putting in a garden for less than a hundred bucks a raised bed garden in the desert. So great.

Parker Condit:
53:55

We're definitely going to link to that in the show notes as well. I'm also going to check that out. I wanted to know about soil because I know monocropping is largely it's just extracting. So much and it's just like it's such a large swaths of land that are just becoming. The soil is just not good anymore, and that's coming through in our food system as well.

Parker Condit:
54:19

So, whatever's being grown there is just not as nutritious because the soil is not as good. Do you know anything about the carbon capture related to healthy soil versus what monocropped soil is? I heard something on a podcast years ago and it was like the difference a lot of climate change maybe not a lot, but a significant portion of climate change, or at least the carbon issue, can be solved if we just start regenerating our soil.

Greg Peterson:
54:46

Yes, yeah, so I'm very happy to have a little tax on this. I know that Maria Rodale from the Rodale Institute wrote a book on it a few years ago and I know she's on a book tour right now so maybe you can get her on your podcast. I will look her up. Yeah, maria Rodale. Organic Manifesto that was the book and she actually did the numbers to address how much carbon gets captured when you're growing healthy soil. So I know it's significant. I just don't know the numbers on it.

Parker Condit:
55:22

Yeah, I remember it being when I heard it, and this was before I really was paying attention to climate change or anything like that it seemed like oh, this seems like a very viable solution, but that was five or six years ago. I just haven't looked into it since, but I know, generally speaking, healthy soil is a good thing for our planet. Oh, big time it's a good time. Are there going to be enough regenerative farms? Can we get away, as a country, regenerative farming? Can we produce enough food that way?

Greg Peterson:
55:58

I say yes Again. I don't have the facts on it. It's amazing the amount. So remember I called the Urban Farm an old growth food forest earlier in the call. It's amazing to me the amount of abundance that can grow just wild in this space.

Greg Peterson:
56:17

In many cases the landscape that I had at the Urban Farm in Phoenix was a foraging space. It was all stuff that I'd planted over the prior 20 or 30 years but I would just go forage in the yard. So if we stop this obsession with lawns and I have a rule in my world that I don't plant things that don't make food if you're going to have a landscape you might as well plant landscape plants that make food for you. That's what I did in Phoenix, even if you want to go with a desert landscape. In Phoenix there is a textbook size book on edibles of the Sonoran Southwest. There's cactuses in. You know we in Phoenix every year we since about 2006, we do a Mesquite bean pod milling where we do education to teach people about harvesting Mesquite beans and then they can bring their beans that they've harvested and get them milled from us and it's a highly nutritious, dense flour that comes from them. That's, that's sweet. My partner, heidi uses Mesquite flour instead of sweeteners in some of her. Yeah, it's that sweet Interesting. I did see that.

Parker Condit:
57:54

I saw that video of yours on.

Greg Peterson:
57:55

I think it was on.

Parker Condit:
57:55

YouTube. So for for people listening, I'm very new to like trying to live more sustainably and I'm admittedly not doing as well as I want to, but I'm trying to be kind with myself and just say we're making steps in the right direction. Yeah, there you go. So that's what, that's all you can do, right, cause, like everyone's busy, it's so hard to add new habits to your life, and I understand that. I totally get it. I just I try a bunch of things and then six months later I'm like, well, these eight didn't stick, but at least I'm still doing these two, so we're trying to be happy about that.

Parker Condit:
58:29

So for people who aren't necessarily ready to make drastic changes and maybe start urban farming, do you have any tips or can you just run through things that you do to try to make a positive impact from a sustainability or from a climate change standpoint, Not necessarily as advice, but just throwing ideas out there that people can possibly latch on to be like, oh, I could maybe try doing that. Anything like that would I think it'd be very helpful.

Greg Peterson:
58:52

Yeah. So number one find your local farmers market. Go hang out at your local farmers market. It's fun to hang out at it. Buy things from the local farmers market. Buy things that are grown locally. That you know. That's the easiest thing to do. Just figure out who your farmer is and then the next step is you know, get a pot. You can put a pot on a front porch and you know, grow some lettuce. How do you use to my partner, how do you use to grow lettuce in a pot on the front porch of the urban farm? You know, and just, and the cool thing about lettuce and spinach and those kinds of things it grows in a method called cut and come again. And so you know, as the lettuce plant is growing up, you're harvesting this, the leaves on the outside, and it keeps growing up and you harvest more leaves, and so it's an ongoing harvest. So you know, just jumping in with a pot or two on your front or back porch is super simple as well.

Parker Condit:
1:00:00

One of the things I started doing was just trying to be more conscious of the amount of waste or food waste I was producing in a given week. Like it's so embarrassing to say, especially like you know, I'd be fine saying this in like a conversation to one person, but you put this out there to the internet, where for so many years I would just take stuff to the dumpster or the trash can and truly, I thought that, as far as my consciousness went, I'm like that's where it ended, right.

Parker Condit:
1:00:26

I'm like it's just out of my hand, out of sight. I'm like that's just where it ends. And it's so silly to think that at 34, I was like, oh, this really goes somewhere afterwards, right, Like I knew that intellectually, but it didn't like not in a conscious way, where I'm like I should do something about it. So that's one of the things I have to pay attention to. I'm like, oh, all of this has to go somewhere.

Parker Condit:
1:00:50

And I try very hard now still not perfect, but of any food that we buy, really try to use it. Get creative with meals, eat things that don't necessarily make sense together, but if it's if I think I could end up throwing it out try to eat it.

Greg Peterson:
1:01:06

And so there is no way you know that's something I learned from Brad Lancaster 20 plus years ago there's no way you know when you throw something away it didn't, yeah. And another thing on the food waste. So one of the things that I do is we're prepping meals here. If there's ends of carrots and celery and onions and just leftover parts that you would normally throw away, first of all I compost them. But secondly, what I do is I'll take the stuff that's still good and I'll stick it in the gallon jar and stick it in the freezer. And when I get enough of that stuff then I pull it all out of the freezer and I stick it in the pot and boil it and get my own vegetable broth. You know, because you're going to, if you make soup you use vegetable broth in the soup and you know you can buy it in boxes at the store. You can make your own. So there's creative things that you can do with that food waste. And so from the regenerative perspective, let's just cover that real quick. Regenerative is a circular.

Parker Condit:
1:02:19

Yep, right, yeah, it's probably great. If anyone listening doesn't know it is, can you quickly describe what like a regenerative farm looks like?

Greg Peterson:
1:02:26

Yeah, so great. So I had at the Urban Farm a regenerative composting system set up and I was actually harvesting 10 buckets of food waste pre-consumer food waste so they'd make their salads and there would be leftover stuff and it would go in buckets and I was harvesting 10, five gallon buckets a week from this restaurant. First of all, I got a lot of food grade buckets and secondly, I got all this food waste and that food waste came up the driveway of my house along with the food waste, any food waste that was left over in the kitchen at the Urban Farm, and it went multiple places in my yard. So, first of all, the chickens loved the food waste. In fact, if you have a backyard, you should have chickens, have three or four hens. They give you eggs, they are great diggers, they give you a fertilizer for your garden and they eat your food waste. And yeah, and if you're really bold and want to jump in this, and I've done this before I raised meat birds and butchered my own chickens about 15 years ago at the Urban Farm just to see what's that process like. So now I am comfortable processing my own chickens. So the food waste comes up the driveway, it goes to the chickens for food.

Greg Peterson:
1:03:54

I was doing worm composting as well at the Urban Farm and that's the kind of composting I do here, and worm compost is the best. They call it gardeners gold worm castings. It's some of the best stuff you can get for your garden, and then anything that I had left over went into the compost bins. So back to regenerative part. I have this food waste coming in, either from our kitchen or leftover stuff in the yard or the stuff from the restaurant, and I'm turning it into chicken eggs and chicken poop, worm poop, which is great fertilizer for the garden, or compost, and that was all going into our garden beds to make healthier soil to grow healthier food. That we were then harvesting and had some pieces left over on it which then went back into the system. So that's the circular part of regenerative and that is my regenerative composting system. Regenerative farming is a bit more complicated and there's lots written on it, but in big part it's just about working with natural systems to grow food.

Parker Condit:
1:05:15

Yeah, like the way I've understood it, maybe as a very simple framework for anyone who'd still don't know, just to think about it is like if you have grown some sort of crop on a certain plot of land, that crops can extract a certain amount of nutrients out of the soil. You can maybe do a certain number of seasons, but then you're going to want to rotate. So if you have livestock, or chickens or pigs, I think are very good at like tearing up the dirt, chickens are good at scratching and they'll eat a lot of the bugs in there and then you want to get their waste product to again, as you said, organic matter, like putting that organic matter back into the soil. So then you're using and you're basically just rotating plots of land for. So that's sort of the circuitous process that you were describing.

Greg Peterson:
1:06:02

Joel Salatin has written, done a lot with regenerative farming and written a lot of books about regenerative farming and, yeah, it's the way to go. Yeah.

Parker Condit:
1:06:15

I first got into that by buying. I wanted to start buying better sources of meat a few years ago.

Parker Condit:
1:06:20

So I just started looking into regenerative farms that had cattle, so that's how I got into it. So, for people who want to be more proactive, what are there any things that you can suggest, because you've clearly been involved with this for a long time, not only at the individual level, but you've clearly started businesses out of this community involvement. What else can people do if they want to be more proactive than just starting to take small steps, kind of like I'm doing, to be a little bit more sustainable and help the planet? If you want to get a little more aggressive and you have the time, what can other people do?

Greg Peterson:
1:06:56

Yeah Well, we already talked about farmers market. And then there's growing your own. Figure out how to take a gardening class. There's the master gardener program in most cities. There's our course called growing food the basics, which it'll teach you everything you need to know in order to grow your own food and get real clear where your food's coming from. That's a big piece of it. I've said for years that the most important thing we can be doing right now is understanding where our food comes from and how to grow our own.

Parker Condit:
1:07:33

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. One of the things that I think I convinced myself of for a long time when thinking about climate change and things like that is like there's going to be some unbelievable technological breakthrough that'll just figure this out. Some sort of technology will just figure out carbon capture and we'll just solve it that way. Do you have any hope that that is going to be the case, or is it going to be like it's going to be just people making better decisions for the planet?

Greg Peterson:
1:08:07

I don't think technology is the capital T solution. I think it's part of the solution. It's going to require a lot of all the way across the scale from technology to just growing food in your front and back yard.

Parker Condit:
1:08:28

That makes sense. For a long time I think I was resistant to anything around sustainability or climate change because I was like I'm one person, how much of a difference can I really make? I knew the information on the biggest carbon producers and it's some astronomically high number of the carbon emissions are produced by the 75 biggest companies in the world or corporations in the world. Why am I going to bother when I'm clearly not making it dent?

Parker Condit:
1:08:56

I've come around to understanding that the decisions you make from a consumer standpoint are largely going to be reflective of your mentality. That's largely. Again, it seems like not enough, but I do think getting more people to be conscious with their purchasing power about what they're doing, whether money is going will make a difference. Do you have any other advice around that, around how to shift your mindset? Because it does seem like there's apathy when it comes to this because it's such a massive problem and you're like how much can one person really do? So anything you can speak to that'll help with people's mindset around feeling like you can't actually make a difference.

Greg Peterson:
1:09:46

For me it goes back to my 99. One theory we have to choose to change. I was at a coffee house maybe three or four years ago. It was early on a morning and I'm always chirpy happy. It was like 7.30 and there was this woman in front of me and she turned around and looked at me and she said why are you so happy? I said, well, I have a choice every morning when I get up, to be happy or not, and I choose happy. And you know what she said to me Get over it. And so a big piece of it is choose. You have a choice. The power of your thinking is huge. Choose. Choose to be happy, Choose to grow your own food, Choose to.

Greg Peterson:
1:10:48

You know so with my fruit tree program in Phoenix, I still do education every year. We've been doing it for 24 years, and then people can get fruit trees from us out of our program. And what started happening with my team about six or seven years ago was I would say something and it would happen, and so my team started calling me out on it. It's like, oh my gosh, Greg, you said this the other day and look, this happened. I don't have any examples off the top of my head right now, but just little things. It's like you know, we need to get rid of all of these pomegranates. So let's set an intention to get rid of the pomegranates and boom, they're gone and your brain has an amazing ability to create in the world, and those come from your thoughts. So what are your thoughts?

Parker Condit:
1:11:53

Yeah, no, it's a great point. It's one of those things where for a long time I kind of worshipped at the altar of like science and logic and mathematics and stuff like that. But I'm coming around to the idea I'm like there's a lot of stuff that happens in the world that I can't necessarily explain or quantify or there's not a double blind RCT proving it. But, yeah, a lot of your thoughts and intentions the word manifestation comes up a lot but a lot of those things where if you just put these thoughts and ideas and energy towards a certain outcome, it certainly helps that outcome become reality. So I think there is something that you can certainly influence reality with your intentions and your thoughts and your energy.

Greg Peterson:
1:12:38

And here's another piece of this what do you stand for? In 1991 I did a lot of work around an organization called Landmark Education and they have something called their advanced course, and in their advanced course they have you create a vision for your life. What are you up to in the world Now? This was 32 years ago that I created my vision for my life and it sounds like this I'm the person on the planet responsible for transforming our global food system. You saw how easy that came. It's who I am in the world Now. Am I going to transform our global food system on my own?

Greg Peterson:
1:13:26

No, but that's the intention which I live by. It's what gets me up in the morning. It's what has me plant 100 elderberries just out of nowhere to become an elderberry farmer. It's what had me start growing in my front and back yard when I went back to Arizona State University as an undergraduate, when I was 40. And so from the time I was 40 to the time I was 43, I was farming my front and back yard and once a week I would go out and harvest what was growing there and I would go to the farmer's market and I would sell it.

Greg Peterson:
1:14:04

So it goes back to your mind has power. Where are you doing with your thoughts and what is your intent? And if your intent is, that's what you're going to get. And if your intent is, oh my gosh, I sent an intention in 1991 to meet my perfect partner and it took me from 1991 to 2013, when I met her on Valentine's Day, by the way, not on purpose and we've been together now for coming up on 11 years and it's amazing, but it came from. I'll take responsibility for that. It came from my intention, from my setting the intention that this is the way it's going to be, and magic happens when you're positive and happy. In fact, when you come and interact with us at our fruit tree program, people often tell me it's like Christmas.

Parker Condit:
1:15:00

I bet it is, I bet it's one of those things that I think probably resonates with so many people at a very intrinsic level and it's just one of those things that's not readily available. I think there's something very natural within us that our hands should be in soil, we should be sort of there's something around working the land that is just kind of within us. Do you enjoy the manual labor, the manual?

Greg Peterson:
1:15:26

side of things I do, I bet. Oh, I do, because I sit in front of with my podcast and the videos that I do. I sit in front of my computer way too much. So getting out and planting trees, digging holes, building a greenhouse, it's fun.

Parker Condit:
1:15:40

Yeah, it's got to be a really nice balance for you. Yeah, one last thing. I had one other question I was like are you optimistic about the future? I think you just answered that with the whole mindset thing. Yeah, I think it will depend on everyone's individual mindset.

Greg Peterson:
1:15:56

I'm optimistic in many ways and the ecological systems of this planet are significantly stressed and that has me concerned and I still carry this stuff like this. I put out my hand and say you know what? You can grow your own food. Look at this, Check this out. And then I don't throw it at people. I kind of you know it's like come and check this out, this is fun, you can grow your own food. Yeah, People have to want it.

Parker Condit:
1:16:33

Yeah, do you have a closing message? You can leave everyone with.

Greg Peterson:
1:16:40

Learn about permaculture and implement it in your life and have fun. If you're not having fun, why bother? If you're in a job that you hate, why bother? Go out and create happy and fun in your life and it will change your world. And it will change the world I love it.

Parker Condit:
1:17:04

I really appreciate this conversation. I have lots of notes for things that we're going to link to in the show notes. We're going to link to your podcast. We'll link to your website. All the resources mentioned throughout the show will link as well.

Greg Peterson:
1:17:15

Nice.

Parker Condit:
1:17:16

Greg, thanks so much for coming on. This is a real pleasure having to chat with you.

Greg Peterson:
1:17:20

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Parker Condit:
1:17:22

Hey everyone. That's all for today's show. I want to thank you so much for stopping by and watching, especially if you've made it all the way to this point. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are going to be released, feel free to subscribe and make sure you hit the bell button as well. To learn more about today's guests, feel free to look in the description. You can also visit the podcast website, which is exploringhealthpodcastcom. That website will also be linked in the description. As always, likes, shares, comments are a huge help to me and to this channel and to the show. So any of that you can do I would really appreciate. Again, thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time.