Greg Peterson on Climate Restoration, Urban Farming, and Lymes Disease
On today's episode, Greg Peterson delights and challenges us with his no BS, passion for permaculture and climate restoration. Join us to go as far as we can in an hour to confront: how can we heal the earth?
Referenced in the Show
Greg’s Bio
Greg is a longtime permaculture advocate, flunked out of university in 1981 because he was bored, then went back 20 years later to earn a bachelor’s degree followed directly by a Masters in Urban and Environmental Planning in 2006. He is a lifelong continual learner.
Greg started his first business at the age of 15 cleaning and servicing fishponds in Phoenix. From 1979 to 1984 he also owned 11 gift wrap centers in Phoenix malls. Then in 1984 he discovered the Macintosh computer and that sent him on a 20 year journey in technology that included the first laser typesetting business and Apple Authorized Training center in Phoenix plus he ran a software App company for 20 years. Since 1999 he transitioned to urban farming education.
Greg is the creator of the Urban Farm Fruit Tree Education program in Phoenix Arizona which he began in 1999 when he discovered you could go into most nurseries and they would sell you a fruit tree that would never make fruit. Since then the program hosts thousands of people yearly in free online and in person classes where they get to preorder fruit trees for planting in the low desert. Each year the program delivers thousands of fruit trees into the local Phoenix market.
Greg is also the host of the UrbanFarmPodcast.com that in just 5.5 years has released over 600 episodes amassing over 2.5 million listens to date. On his days off he hangs out in his garden with Heidi his sweetheart, Kismet their pooch creating new projects and catching some rays.
Full Transcript
Sarah Marshall, ND: Welcome to Heal. On today's episode, Greg Peterson delights and challenges us with his no BS, passion for permaculture and climate restoration. Join us to go as far as we can in an hour to confront: how can we heal the earth? I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.
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Sarah Marshall, ND: If you're game, I think we should dive right in. Cause I kind of love where this conversation's already started.
Greg Peterson: I'm here for you.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Exactly. And yeah, so my sister has this land and it's been her dream for 20 years to create something. Wellness retreat is not the right word at all. It's not really about that, but it's about sustainable architecture, sustainable living, growing in producing your own food. Probably never a hundred percent, but like something we made, I can talk about it right now. When I was 22, I went down to Costa Rica and lived in a permaculture education center, Rancho Mastatal, they still are in operation, they work with a couple partners. One is the Yestermorrow school of Vermont, which is a sustainable architecture design education center. And then they also work in partnership with the university of Washington and they do research in the forest and they bought 80 heck acres of Virgin rainforest.
And I went down there as a volunteer and did not know they'd only been there for nine months when I showed up in 2002. So it was like this brand new idea, two people who Rob Robin and Timo had met in Uruguay and the peace Corps. And then they moved back to Seattle and she was a sominai and he was a pizza delivery guy, literally saved every penny and then bought the land in Costa Rica.
And they've built all kinds of cool things. They've got tree houses and composting toilets, and, you know, but there was an original Tico house that was not off the grid and they started there and then they'd been getting more and more off the grid as they go. And one of the things I loved and I got from them right away was, originally, they thought they were going to go do it, you know, go in alone. And they were like, wait a minute community. And so they've actually been working inside the group of local farmers, which is about, I don't know. Now there's probably more at the time there's about 150 substituents farmers in that region and they Did all their educational programs, like with the Yestermorrow school, all of the locals could just come be a part of it for free and learn.
And then they would always have the school program be something for the community. So they built a community center, they built, built a soccer pavilion and then the Americans and the Westerners that would come pay for the course, they'd come down and do the course in Costa Rica and get to be in this beautiful untouched, Virgin rainforest and the side of a volcano.
So that's where I got my roots in farming permaculture, sustainable architecture. And before I knew I was going to be a naturopathic physician, I thought I was gonna do sustainable architecture. That's what I thought I was gonna do. And here we are, now I'm a doctor. And but yeah, my sister's place is going to be a, something.
Don't quite know yet what I've talked about, starting with building a yurt platform, but then I just was poking around it. Tiny homes and container homes.
Greg Peterson: Oh my gosh, on Netflix, there are five episodes of a container home TV show. Yeah, I get chills every time I share this with somebody because you think container it's a box, right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: … it can be so much more.
Greg Peterson: Yeah, these are, some of them are palaces. You wouldn't, you know, with the exception of a few places inside where you can still see the container as an architectural, you know, piece. Heidi and I went nuts. It's like, Oh hell, we can do one of those.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. So maybe we should introduce you since we've gotten this far.
Greg Peterson: I've already started…
Sarah Marshall, ND: I know this is perfect. Yeah. So welcome to Heal! Listeners, thanks for joining us into our private conversation, but this is just so great. I've got Greg Peterson here, who is the. How.. what's your title? Owner, operator, inventor, owner?
Greg Peterson: owner, operator, and vendor. All good.
Sarah Marshall, ND: urbanfarm.org. And you've been based out of Phoenix, Arizona, and you guys have been doing this for a long time. So tell me a bit about the origins. How did you become you?
Greg Peterson: Oh my Lord. I think it happened in a previous life, honestly. I came in with a knowing in, when I was nine years old, I got fish tanks because I was interested in raising fish.
And what that turned into was a fish pond business when I was 15. So that was in 1974 where I was cleaning, servicing and building people's fish ponds. But what I was really interested in was aquaculture. Raising food, raising fish for people to eat. This was again, mid seventies. Somebody said to me recently, Greg, how did you come upon this?
And I said, well, maybe it was Jacques Cousteau. And you know, the world, according to him, I don't know. Around that same time, I wrote a paper on how we were over fishing the oceans at the age of 15. I have no idea.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. I was 16. I worked out that I could finagle my way out of high school by the end of my junior year.
And what I had to do was take two English courses and two history/ social studies courses at the same time for junior and senior year. And they all had term papers and projects. So I managed to get my teachers all on board for me to do an independent study on the economic and environmental sustainability of our public lands.
And I studied economics of the foresting and the use of lumber off of our federal forest lands. And then I did a whole thing on the public national parks. And then I even ended up because I had a creative writing project. I had worked into this. I had to do Multimedia presentation of prose writing with photography from a canoe trip in the provincial Algonquin provincial park in Canada with my dad.
I had this whole, but I ended up happening as I spent six months of my last year in high school producing this body of work. Wow. And then I went on to go to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and thought I was going to be a forestry major. That didn't turn out for very long. I spent about three months in that program and went, eh, this is not for me. And then I failed and went home to New Hampshire and became a chemistry major
Greg Peterson: because Forestry back then is all about logging.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, I would have been working for the logging companies and I was like, Oh no. Or I would be eating top ramen for the rest of my life working for the forest service. So I kind of had, and the forest service still basically is working for the logging companies at that point. So yeah. Yup. Yeah. So there you were influenced by Jacques Cousteau
Greg Peterson: Well, when w w you know, there's been a few people lately that I've talked to that have deep roots in their… in their knowingness, in their… what they're supposed to be doing in the world. And it's cool to connect with you. Yeah, because I too, because here's the thing for me, this, this food adventure that I'm on has been my entire life.
I knew before probably I was born that I was supposed to be doing this and sometimes it's a gift most of the time it's a gift. Sometimes it's a curse because I can't get away from it. In fact, in 1984. So I did my fish pond stuff. Then along with the fish pond, I was actually building aquaculture systems for people in the seventies, so that they'd raise their own.
They could raise their own fish. And I gave everything up in 1970, 1984, when I bought a Macintosh computer and it's like, Oh, I can make money with this. So I, I had multiple tech companies from 84’ to 04’, but I never got away from the notion of, and you've mentioned this word multiple times and I do not like this word sustainable. You've talked about sustainable. That's the only thing, only word we had until I discovered permaculture in 1991. Yeah. I somehow to this day, I do not know a flyer for the local permaculture design course showed up in my mailbox in 1991. And it was like, Oh my God, that this is like, this is the way I think. Permaculture I like to call the art and science of working with nature. How do we work in the flow of nature rather than against nature, my mentor and good friend. Toby Hemingway who wrote Gaia's garden when he was alive used to say, nature always laughs last. I've noticed my entire life, I've known that nature will always win no matter how much technology we throw at it, how much we think we can do it better. Our downfall, I wrote this in 1996, our downfall as a species is that we're arrogant enough to think we can control mother nature and stupid enough to think it's our job. So that's what I've lived with...
Sarah Marshall, ND: I know. There's this is going to be the longest podcast episode I've ever. Cause I'm like, I want to talk to you for eight hours at least. So I do want to create the distinction between sustainable and permaculture. Cause I think it's, I realize, I just say that reflexively. I'm not thinking I'm not really, because I actually do know the world of permaculture and what I was just going to take in here for this is this episodes of… it's a new topic. We haven't gone here yet on the Heal podcast about food systems, farming, the role of industrial’s side of health. We've stayed mostly in the health. We've gotten into emotion, spirituality, and physical health side of things, which is partially one of the reasons I wanted to start here with you, cause I can't think of anybody better to start this conversation with you, Greg. But permaculture is to farming and food production, what naturopathic medicine is to medicine. They're identical philosophies that you literally can take the word out about food and put in medicine and it's like the same thing.
And when you start reading about the people that really put this down on paper, they were all hanging out together. That Rudolph Steiner who worked in both sides of it. And then you go on from there with anthroposophical medicine and then the whole. Farming industry side of that came up. And then by the way, also the Montessori school system, and there's just these roots and connections between all of it.
And so very similarly, you know, that, and then I wrote a paper in med school. So we were in this, I can't remember the class. And it was, the idea was we were supposed to take a patient's case and write it up inside of the philosophy of naturopathic medicine. And I decided that the patient was going to be the earth.
And I wrote up a medical case, paper of global warming and the fever and the infections and like the inner structure and the systems. They almost failed me on the paper because it was totally not the point at all. That's my inner rebellious nature where I'm like, ah, I'm going to do this. I thought it was brilliant, but it wasn't really actually it,
Greg Peterson: you need to publish that.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I'm going to go and dig it out. I will definitely dig it out,
Greg Peterson: That sounds brilliant. Of course you pissed them off.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I know that's what we do though. Those of us that aren't willing to fight for these things. So then 2004, you're like, all right, I've been doing the tech thing. Was it a aha moment? What happened?
Greg Peterson: No. So I never got away from gardening. In fact, the house where I live, I've been here 31 years. The house where I live is called the urban farm. It's in North central Phoenix. It's a third of an acre that's 80 feet wide by 160 feet deep. I bought it in 1989. So I, you know, and what helped me buy it was my technology stuff, but I bought it because I could garden here.
And so the urban farm is, is a third of an acre. There's about 70 fruit trees on the property. The landscape is all edible or supports edibles. We have chickens and solar panels, rainwater and greywater harvesting. Basically, it is an organic showcase home for 30 years. So I never got inside of technology.
I always had this hobby called, permaculture edible landscaping. So that's, I never got away from it. And technology for me was the, it was fun because Macintosh computers were fun. And, you know, I dove deep into making a living because I've been self-employed my entire life since I was 15. And so I dove into making a really nice, I didn't get rich from it, but a nice part-time living doing technology. Then I could spend my time here at the urban farm. In 1999, I actually decided to go back to college and get a degree. So I got my bachelor's and master's in 04’ and 06’. And again, it's the curse and the gift and it w sometimes I think sometimes with the technology, I tried to run away from the gift, because let me tell you, I know enough about science and caring capacity to know where our civilization is going. And it's disheartening. It is deafening. It is acutely painful. When I stand in, what I know about a simple thing called caring capacity and the systems on the planet and how they are failing.
And so I, you know, sometimes I get to a point of so much anguish that I have to walk away.
Sarah Marshall, ND: That was one of the reasons why I actually had a hard time staying in environmental science, to be honest. So environmental, my passion for environmental, everything. And, and really my upgrade in language now I can say is living in harmony with the earth and myself, you know, it is, it's not like we didn't do it, but for me, what I get about sustainability is whatever idea that ever was the bottom line is that ship has sailed. We're sustainability is not an option anymore. That's that's literally not an option. It's climate reversal and sequestration. It's a complete, like we are now the cancer patient who is sitting on the brink of a terminal illness with a few years to live and we're staring at chemotherapy going, is the technology there? Will that work, will that not work? Like, you know, and, and you can share more about what you see. And I am not an expert on the subject. This is my own, just passion and view is like, I do think it's going to be a combination of technology and grassroots returning to the laws of nature.
It's not going to be solely returning to the laws of nature. I mean, they will always be the foundation. Otherwise we're going to screw ourselves yet again. So like you can't, like you said, nature always wins. But, but no sustainability isn't isn't it? That ship has sailed.
Greg Peterson: Let's talk about that. I haven't liked the word sustainability for a couple of decades.
Now. Remember our incandescent light bulbs? High energy use, high heat, a little bit of light. And then they came out with a compact fluorescent light bulb, not great, but it used 90%, less electricity. The compact fluorescent light bulb is the middle ground. Sustainability is the middle ground.
Sustainability is the conversation that has people wake up, but sustainability never fixes anything. It's simply sustains the mess that we've created. Sustainability. Doesn't do shit. Except, hopefully wake us up.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I'm going to probably get in trouble for saying this, but sustainability sounds akin to most pharmaceutical interventions for chronic illness.
Because you can take a proton pump inhibitor to decrease your stomach acid when you have GERD, but you've now just shut off a major functioning of your digestive system that doesn't allow you to break your proteins down. It doesn't allow you to make neuro-transmitters. You now become mineral deficient.
And many of my clients that come to me in a bed on proton pump inhibitors for, you know, 20 years thinning hair, losing hair, anxiety, depression, and alcoholism is a strong cause. Cause they try and self-medicate through other means, right? And they're just massively nutrient deficient. It sets them up from osteoporosis and we could keep going. That's the sustainable solution.
Greg Peterson: That’s exactly what I'm talking about. So when I discovered permaculture, they in 1991, they introduced me to a term called regenerative. Every single human system on the planet. And I have been looking since 1991 and I challenge people out there to show me a system on the planet that is human created, that is regenerative. There are none. There are none. They are all degenerative. Every, and I, and I'm going to repeat this, every single human system that we have put in place is degenerative. That means over time, it breaks down. That is a linear system.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Even if it’s a long length of time, it still breaks down. And we, one thing we know now is we don't have, we don't have time.
Greg Peterson: There's always with a degenerative system, there is always an end. It always ends.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yep.
Greg Peterson:Let that sink in. So permaculture. I learned about regenerative. Now, when you look at natural systems, natural systems are regenerative. They recreate themselves over and over and over again. And I have a question for you. If they're not regenerating themselves, what happens?
Sarah Marshall, ND: even if they die, something else takes its place and starts filling right in behind them.
Greg Peterson: That's going to happen with us human beings. What happens is, is if the, if a natural system degenerates and goes, it goes away.
So really the whole conversation here is our human condition is terminal. You're right, we have cancer. And we're looking at chemotherapy, which most of the time kills people. I'm not an expert on that, but that's my sense of it. So when people talk about sustainability, I always try and have this piece of the conversation with them to, so that they can start thinking about regenerative systems modeling what we do.
And I didn't make this up. This came directly out of permaculture and really permaculture is natural systems. So in permaculture, what we do is we look at natural systems and then we mimic the natural systems. So our job really, as human beings is to figure out how to mimic natural systems. And I'm a big believer that technology is it's not the where it's at.
You know I was talking to a buddy of mine on text the other day. He was looking for trees for his property and he made the comment, he said, Greg, if we plant a trillion trees on the planet that, and work on making healthy soil, that pretty much fixes it. And I said, yeah. And if you look at you know, I've been studying this for years and if you look at there's a recent movie called, “Kiss the Ground”...
Sarah Marshall, ND: I was just, I'm literally, you pulled it out of my head. I was like, wow, yep.
Greg Peterson: “Kiss the ground”. I have had multiple people reach out to me after watching that movie. And they said, Oh my God, Greg, that's what you've been talking about for decades. And it's like, yes, heal the soil, plant trees.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So funny. Cause like, I mean, I know this and, and you know, the parallels of my passions. I, I did transfer to, actually had a little hop, skip, and a jump through my college career. I went to the university of New Hampshire for three semesters, started my chemistry program. And then I discovered Natural Powder out West because I was a skier born and raised. And so I came out to Utah to visit an old ski racing buddy. And then I moved here. I was like, ha. So I did my last two years of college at the University of Utah. And when I got here, Things about my program had were different than they were in New Hampshire.
And so I needed these upper division credits, but they didn't have to be in my actual field of study. So I started exploring the catalog. What else would I want to do? And interestingly enough, I found in the biology department an organic farming course only taught in the summer that was an upper division credit.
And it was taught by one of my most influential dearest professors, Fred Montague, who is a diehard permaculture, aquaponic farmer per professor here, was at the University of Utah. I don't know if he actually is still here. And started there and then I got into, he taught an environmental literature course that was actually reading like Wendell Berry and Desert Solitaire and like all the greats of the seventies and the eighties.
And, and it was like, all I could do, like again, I couldn't get away from it. Here I am a professional chemistry major, but every elective I could fill in the gaps. Right. And that I didn't have any idea about medicine at that point, I did not have my sights. Actually, my primary career goal during college was to be a whitewater rafting guide.
So that was what I was headed for. And I did that for five years. Yeah. And, you know, I taught skiing and the winters and I was raft guide in the summer. And it only took me a little while though, to realize I'd be sitting on the back of the raft. And all I could do was talk about homeopathy and diet and nutrition.
And I started to have this whole thing coming together about my passion for the environment, but then recognizing the source of the environmental issues was a human being problem. And then I started to get into why are human beings, the way that human beings are? And there's lots of different genres we can answer that question but the one that started to interest me was about the mind body connection. And then that led me into natural medicine. And yet everything you're saying about permaculture and soil, what we say in natural medicine is you can palliate the symptoms, even with natural medicine, you can use green tea extract and probiotics and diets, and you're just sustaining.
It's all in the sustainable level. People will feel better. Their symptoms will get better, but how, you know, you're palliating versus caring is as soon as you stop the treatment, everything comes back.
Greg Peterson: Oh,
Sarah Marshall, ND: what's curative is treating the soil. And what we say is treating the terrain. And somebody who's a tendency towards chronic disease has weak terrain and somebody who can drink mercury and then walk out with no mercury toxicity has strong terrain and it's comes from actually anthroposophical medicine Steiner who was also a farmer.
So, you know, it all goes back into that same space and it's literally macrocosm microcosm as above so below, you know, you can just see the same parallels that run through, which of course is no accident, why I'm still really passionate about permaculture. Although the irony is I personally hate gardening, but I love cooking and I love putting up food. So somebody else will do the garden bit. I will do the food bit, all day long. No problem. I just need a teammate. Yeah,
Greg Peterson: we need you.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Awesome. Cause somebody's got to do something with all the food production.
Greg Peterson: Exactly. Well, and, and you know, the gut biome, I'm sure you know, this, the gut biome and soil biome is very similar. It's very similar. In fact, when we harvest stuff out of the yard, I don't take, I don't wash it, clean it, take the skin off.
Sarah Marshall, ND: No, and it's actually supposed to be that our soil biome is part of our familial biome. And if you think about tribal living, you would have been raised in the same dirt as your grandparents and your great grandparents.
Most people didn't travel further than five miles away from their own home. And that whole ecosystem was important and integral. And again, now we know about gut neurology. Like there's a new field that's come out of neuro gastroenterology and it's literally the scientific study. And then I was just in a conference last weekend that was talking about the other side of this, fungal infections, mold infections, organophosphates, pesticides, herbicides, the drinking water all that in, in the impact of our body's health. The relationship to Parkinson's disease, to Alzheimer's disease, to autism, it's like huge. And at one level you can say those are mold Candida infection issues but then when you recognize why the mold and the Candida we're able to set up shop, it's the increase of pesticides and herbicides in our diets and our drinking water and the lack of a strong soil biome.
We move around the planet. We may not even be with our family who were raised by which you're supposed to swap your bugs, like kissing swaps, bugs, and cuddling with your family members, swaps bugs, breathing the same air swaps bugs. Like that's actually how it's supposed to be. Yeah. You know, it's why I think my theory, I don't know if this is true, that married couples that are together for a really long time start looking like each other. Cause there might go by them start merging, but that's just my theory.
Greg Peterson: Oh, that's a nice thought
Sarah Marshall, ND: soil biome is incredibly important in permaculture.
Greg Peterson: Kiss the ground. That's where we started on this ground. The movie. Yeah. 30 minutes ago, right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Totally, at least thoughts ago.
Greg Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. Go watch the movie, kiss the ground.
That really explains it. And Maria Rodale wrote a book on soil. And I can't remember what the name of it is. But about 10 years ago, she wrote a book on fixing the soil biome. If we fix the soil, if we use organic methods to grow food and went all organic planet wide, in theory, it should fix the problem. Too much carbon planting and trillion trees pulls carbon out of the atmosphere. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So here's the, maybe a hundred dollars, a trillion dollar question. What, as an individual, myself sitting here 40 years old at my desk, in my suburban home, who, every time I put another piece of plastic in the garbage, literally cringe, cause I've seen the garbage patch of the Pacific ocean, because I sailed from Hawaii to Los Angeles and literally our boat ran into a plastic picnic table, we hit a telephone pole, which was terrifying, you know, some 1500 miles out at sea. And I didn't even see the breadth and depth of it. It was just, just sailing across the ocean what I saw. You know, and mostly what you see is a very small percentage cause most of the plastic floats about four to six feet underneath the surface, if it hasn't already been micronized and it's in tiny little bits. Yeah. A whole nother side of my passion is sailing and environmental...
Greg Peterson: Yeah. So there's a book out there called a “World Without Us”. About 15 years ago. I can't remember who the author is. We could look it up.There's a whole chapter on micronized plastic, how it is impacting our planet. So what can we do? Oh Lordy! So We can do the best that we can do. Definitely eat organic, support organic, buy organic, grow your own.
You know, if you're growing your own, you're not. So we, we eat a lot of salads here and we grow a lot of salads, but during the time of year, when we don't have salads, we buy lettuce from the store and it comes in a plastic container. And, you know, we cringe..
Sarah Marshall, ND: Every time. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I, I get in a big conflict about now. I still eat organic. Almost exclusively because I just know too much about it. I also recognize that I am in the economic position to do that. Although I will say I started eating organic long before I officially could afford it. I just committed to it and I shifted my budget towards it. Right. But I know that that is a conversation that is not accessible to a lot of people.
Greg Peterson: There was this twelve-year-old that gave a Ted talk maybe 15 years ago. It was an amazing Ted talk. Go look, I can't remember his name, but I'll look it up...
Sarah Marshall, ND: Kendra, the producer. She'll knock that one out.
Greg Peterson: Alright, cool. Basically what he said was you can pay now by buying organic food, or you can pay later, at the doctor, in the hospital. You know, I've, I have been eating well, I've been eating organic for 20, 20 plus years, but I recently, interestingly had, and it had to do with COVID and being locked down.
I had some interesting things happen with my health. So part of the reason that I'm here is I have Lyme disease. And that's a whole interesting long story in itself, but I've had it for 20 plus years. I have this, if anybody ever sees me and I'm, you know, speaking or something, that's the Lyme disease
Sarah Marshall, ND: and his hand is shaking cause we have audio
Greg Peterson: my right hand shakes all the time. See my left hand isn't? That's the Lyme disease and I have tinnitus and that's the Lyme disease. And 20 years ago I was diagnosed with what they called an essential tremor two different times. And they said, here's a drug, we don't know what it is.
And it's like, Oh gee, thanks medical system. Well, it turns out it was Lyme. And so I have been working with a Lyme practitioner here in Phoenix for five years. And when we got locked down in March of 2000- last year, 2020, we got locked down and We started eating exclusively at home because you know, we're not going to go out, but both my partner, Heidi and I have Lyme and we weren't going to go out cause we didn't want to put ourselves at more risk.
So we entirely ate at home. We ate out of the yard and organic from the grocery store. It costs a little bit more, but, and so back to the Lyme practitioner, I'm seeing her regularly and in October of 2020, she did a blood draw and we did, you know, we did about every year and a half we do a blood test. And the blood test came back and when I met with her, she said, Oh my God, Greg, I have never seen blood work out of you that looks this great. And the only thing I can correlate it back to is, eating home, eating organic...
Sarah Marshall, ND: Like a hundred percent, not even restaurant food, not any, yeah, totally.
Greg Peterson: Not even restaurant food. And you know, so that, that has made an interesting difference in my life.
Now I did get COVID on January 4th of this year, I got, gotten diagnosed with COVID. I had symptoms for about four hours. A week later I tested negative and what I say and my sense from the research that I've done, you know, listening to Zach Bush and the reading that I've done and, and the other doctors that are out there looking at this, we don't have a COVID problem. We have a gut biology problem. And I truly believe that COVID, isn't a big thing. What's a big thing is we're poisoned. You know, we have spent the last 30 year being poisoned by our food and it's sad. And it's the, the only thing in my life for the past two years that I can look back and say, you know what, the reason I got over COVID so quickly and my blood works so great is because I eat organic at home all the time.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit here, which is what about, what do you know about the part where industrialized organic food still is blah blah? Like I've heard about, you know, the irrigation water ditches around farms are still treated with glyphosate and Roundup, and that gets into the water table.
And so, you know, you're going to have some exposure now, I'm, I'm still a proponent of eating organic, but I kinda know it's sort of like sometimes they get pushed back around like the electric car conversation. They're like, well, that's not going to solve the problem. And it's like, no, but it's going in the right direction.
It's putting money in the right direction. It's putting research in the right direction. So that's. That's my answer to the organic food thing. Then I dated a guy from the Netherlands and he was like, organic that's so like level B, like we call it biological, which in their world is the next level up. Cause you can actually purchase permaculture food at the grocery store. Which you can't do here. So organic is their mid-level and then they have a higher level above that, which is permaculture. And I was like, okay. That's a thing. So, you know, when I was in the Netherlands, it was amazing. What do you think about all that?
Greg Peterson: So we live in a very polluted world. I happen to believe that every corner of this world is polluted with something. Yeah, plastics, chemicals. You name it. We, you know...
Sarah Marshall, ND: if you get on the EMF train, it's everywhere…
Greg Peterson: if you get on the EMF train and then now we have 5g and you know, it's everywhere, you're not going to get away from it. Do the best you can. So I actually have this conversation with a friend of mine who is a organic certification. She does organic certification. So you can get your farm organically certified. And I said to her, I said, Laura, talk to me about the food coming out of these places that are organic.
And I actually was asking her about Mexico. And she said, yes, Greg, with the certifications that are in place there, I'm adding this word ‘mostly’ organic. And so between those two pieces, we can only do the best that we can do. And our best right now in the United States is buy organic or grow your own.
But there's a bigger conversation here to be had because there's the health piece of this. And I've been saying this for 15 years, we have a three-day supply of food in any grocery store in any city. And I say, we have a three hour supply and you know, 10 years ago people were seeking their head at me and saying, who's this coop.
Now I get phone calls from people that say, Oh, you were right. Cause look what happened last March. The grocery stores emptied. I was in grocery stores in March and April when the shelves of the grocery stores we're empty. So I believe, and my whole intention is to teach people how to grow their own food. The most important thing we can be doing right now is figuring out where our food comes from and how to grow our own food.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yep. And there is a security component to that massively and that's, that's where you and my sister would get along big time. Cause she's got more of that. I'm just an eternal optimist that believes in the good of people and it totally bites me in the ass sometimes, but mostly works out. But I like to have some people around me that are a little more suspicious and she is. And it just keeps it, it's like,I'm not committed to an us versus them conversation. It's just when panic and trauma and, and circumstances, shift circumstances, shift, and, you know, This is going to be an uneducated statement.
This is just my sense of things. But when I just even like, like I've been watching more Netflix lately than I ever have in my life for various reasons, recent diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, my schedule has changed a lot. And and then in lockdown. And I was actually watching a show that's about the old West and there's lots of these, like, The house in the middle of nowhere with no one around for, you know, dozens of miles at least.
And just that. There was something innate about actually being able to sustain your own life in one spot mostly and go somewhere once a week or once a month. And that was it. You know, when I was a river guide, we would actually float down past old homesteads, particularly on the green river in Utah. And orchards are really big deal in, in Utah.
And they worked that out by using the river water for the irrigation. And there were all these, and you can still go pick apricots and peaches that are just wild ish. Now that have been there for a hundred years, when you float down the green river and you'd go see these and they'd just be like,... And as soon as winter hit, they just sat still for five months and like, That degree of thinking we could sustain and take care of ourselves. And then I was even reading a book kind of unrelated to all of this called the Boys in the Boat about the Olympic rowers of the 1936 Olympics. And the thing that struck me in the book was this guy who was a main character, he grew up in a house that his dad built. And then when he needed to, he just went out and built his house for him and his wife. And I'm like, who could do that anymore? Who could just like, Oh yeah, I've got a job and I'm going to go mill my own timber and then I'm going to put it up and I'm going to make my own clapboard house, like bam, no problem.
You know, and this was like fairly standard, all things considered for the 1930s. That wasn't that long ago. When we think about the skillset and the information and the knowledge base that's lost for all of the information age that we're in now. So I, I really get that of like growing your own. And I happened to be raised by some pretty hippie parents.
My parents actually originally met on a commune in Tennessee. I'm part of my, even further into this conversation is it's in my genes. You know, my mom was a part of a collective group of people who said, we're going to do it. We're going to work and live and eat collectively. We're going to share everything.
She said it was the craziest thing though. They took it to like the nth degree where you didn't even really necessarily own your own clothes. And so laundry would just happen in your favorite pair of jeans would disappear onto somebody else. So like, she's like we, we took it a little far, you know… They did everything by unanimous decision. So they would have they 40 adults living together and they would have these like Epic, long conversations, quote, unquote argument debates on Friday nights, there were these big meetings and like, my mom lived there for two years. And she was guess what? Head of the kitchen. So she processed, you know, they had a seven acre family garden. That was all inner, you know, props, all inner planted and diversified. And then they also did sorghum and wheat and a couple of other cash crops to make money for the, for the whole farm. They debated whether they're going to have electricity or not, they did end up choosing to do it.
And so, you know, I had that family conversation growing up and then I've always dwelled in this like, what does that mean for me? And to be completely honest, like I've been pretty travel oriented. And so like have never really put roots down to set myself up and then like, like putting myself on the line.
I have this thought I'm in this house right now has a huge amount of space in the backyard. This would be an incredible place to turn and it's, and I know what it costs me every summer to do the damn watering the lawn and blah blah... I've only been in it for three years and I have this debate, like if I don't think this is my forever home and I might even move in the next couple of years. What do I do? Do I do it? Do we not do it? Plant fruit trees? Yeah. Cause everybody loves that no matter what.
Greg Peterson: Right. And you, here's the thing about fruit trees. And I have a whole program in Phoenix on where I educate people about fruit trees and then they can buy fruit trees for us, from us, for, for the low desert.
But the thing about a fruit tree is you plant it once and you get fruit for decades. I have an orange tree in my backyard here at the urban farm that was planted in the 1920s. That's still makes oranges, it's a delightful oranges. So plant, plant fruit trees.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And then you also, I was just, I was stalking you on your web stuff.
I just saw the seed, the great American seed up. Is that still happening?
Greg Peterson: Well, or we've we passed the, okay, so COVID, COVID presented a myriad of interesting dilemmas for us. One of them was our great American seed up. And so the, what, the, basically in a nutshell, what the great American seed up is, it's a bizarre where you can go and scoop bulk seeds.
I was going, gonna say dirt cheap, but seed cheap. And our seed scoops for say, Basil normally you go to the grocery store or go to the hardware store and you get it back as a Basil you open it up and there's 20 seeds in there. And it's four bucks. Our seed The scoop is five grams. That's like a hundred times what's in a scoop of Basil and at the hardware store. So basically what we did about six years ago in order to act reactivate the local seed economy, because without seeds, you don't have local without local seeds. You don't have local food, right? So we have to figure out where our seeds are coming from and we have to teach people how to save their own dang seeds.
Sarah Marshall, ND: we can’t save all seeds, right? You can't save all seeds, like not all is, are they still doing that or is this an, a myth where like, if you buy certain seeds from the grocery store, from the hardware store, those plants won't regenerate seeds you can save or is that not true?
Greg Peterson: So there is some truth to that. So there's three different kinds of seeds. There's genetically modified, which for the most part as home gardeners, we don't have to worry about because you know, the, the people that make genetically modified seeds want to sell, don't want to sell a $3 packet of seed, they want to sell a million dollars worth of seed.
So genetically, there's, there's some things that we need to be concerned about about that, but when buying seeds not so much. Then there's hybrid seeds, hybrid seeds are where you take watermelon A, watermelon B you cross pollinate them. You get a quality watermelon that seedless and, Oh my gosh. Amazing.
Right? So that's what they called hybrids. And hybrid seeds, while you can save seeds from them, if you can get the seeds, when you plant them, the hybridization starts to break apart. And you'll still get a watermelon of some sort of some sort. Open pollinated seeds or heirloom seeds basically come true to form.
So if you plant an heirloom carrots and let it go to seed, you get heirloom carrot seeds.. They're pretty much an exact duplicate of your past ones, of what you've planted. So that's why in the great American seed up in the bizarre, we only carry open pollinated seeds. So the dilemma that we had last year was all right, we can't put, because last year in 2019, we had eight over 800 people, scooping seeds in a 10,000 square foot room. It was amazingly Epic. You can't, it's like Christmas. When people come and scoop seeds, it's like Christmas. So you get. Well, you know, at any one time we had two or 300 people in the room. It's like 300 people high on Christmas.
It's amazing. What we did is what we, what we did is we put together something called seed up in a box, where you can go to the great American seed up.org and buy a, buy your own seed up. You can buy enough, basically this, you buy the seeds, the packaging, and the labels to make your own seed packets. Or to get together with friends and make your own seed packets. And again, remember their jumbo sized seed packets. So we've actually had more success with that than just doing it locally here in Phoenix.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And so that is that like a particular timeframe or is it an on going thiong now?
Greg Peterson: the seat up in the box is ongoing. Go to great American seed up.org and buy, see there's videos there, and you can buy a bundle. We had people buying them for the holidays. They would buy a bundle for the holidays. And then when the seeds arrived, they split them up. And I wish I had a packet here to show you, but you get a Ziploc bag, you get enough seeds for whatever our scoop size is, which is always jumbo.
And then you get a business card that we print that has all of the information about the seed and how to propagate it and everything like that, that all gets stuffed in this little Ziploc bag. And so we had people making up holiday gifts.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I’m so doing that, I have so many friends like, and that's, that's one thing that I have managed is since I'm, I actually, for a long time said that, you know, my mom had green thumbs. My grandmother had green thumbs. My sister was older than me, she has green thumbs. And when they got to me, like the genetics ran out and my mom has all kinds of house plants. And when I was a kid, You know, they weren't at the commune anymore, but they did put in a 400 square foot family garden in my backyard.
There's pictures of baby Sarah in a laundry basket, surrounded by tomatoes that my mom's harvesting. And, you know, the first five years of my life in 80, 90% of everything I ate, came out of my parents' backyard or, and then supplement it a little with the local co-op. So that was stellar. And then, you know, dance and ski team and soccer and kid stuff and things. And with the two kids that started to shift and my parents are growing more flowers than food. So it, it changed at one point, but You know, my sister has always had a lot of passion in this area. And then I've now accumulated people around me who do a lot of really awesome urban gardening and stuff.
And so I support them and I will come over and bring labor. And so I got lots of people in my life that that would be awesome for. So that’s great.
Greg Peterson: When you asked me earlier again, what people could do, really, what there is to do is click into your local food system, go to a farmer's market, find your own farmer.
You know, at the farmers markets, there are farmers. Get to know them. They'll tell you what their propagate, how they propagate it. They want, I'm sure they want it, you know, they'll want to share. So plug into your local food system as much as you can.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And there's a resource that I'm pretty sure is still quite active called local harvest.org, where you can go online and find what's happening in your local area.
And another way that I participate in it's my favorite way to do this is I get a farm shares in a CSA (community supported agriculture). And there's a program here in salt Lake city where you can actually go pick up at a local parking lot or they will do drop-offs for a little bit more. And so I actually have drop-off and I found them through local harvest.org.
Greg Peterson: Perfect. Make sure when you're plugging into a CSA that it's locally grown. Here's the thing about locally grown food and it's locally grown food is picked at when it's ripe. I don't know if you've talked about this on the show before, but there's something called food miles, food miles, the average food miles for stuff grown in the United States is 1200 to 1500 miles
Sarah Marshall, ND: I said that I won't eat anything that's more traveled than me and that's not good enough. But, you know, trying to get my local footprint down to a 500 mile radius, it still takes consciousness.
Greg Peterson: Exactly. So you know, figuring what I said earlier, figuring out where our food comes from and grow your own. So there is… have you talked about lectins on the show yet?
Sarah Marshall, ND: We we've kept it actually not… So science-y mostly... I'm I'm at year two where preview of coming attractions are going to get a little bit heavier into the, there's been a lot of foundation of philosophy up till now, but and predominantly people sharing their stories of healing and just what they've gone through, which has been really Epic. So I know you can go nuts on this stuff. So lectins,
Greg Peterson: lectins my permit protocols, one of my permaculture mentors calls them anti-nutrients and the way they basically they're… you know, and I don't know the science behind it, but they, they negatively impact our health, lectins do. And so that much, I know from that perspective, here's what I know from the food perspective.
There are foods that are higher in lectins, like tomatoes and potatoes and peppers. And as a fruit or vegetable ripens on the plant, the lectins reduce.So what happens is, is food that's harvested in Peru or in Mexico or somewhere, you know, a thousand miles away from you. They have to harvest it before it is fully ripe.
That means it's loaded with lectins. And the process by which ripening happens on the trees reduces the lectins plus then that same food that's harvested many thousands of miles away automatically when it is harvested starts losing nutrient density.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And it doesn't even have the nutrient density necessarily because some of the most potent nutrients are the polyphenols, which are color agents.
It's what gives the color to the food. So why we say red wine and green tea. It's it's the color. And this is a chemical property is where the polyphenols areas that are very antioxidant rich. Well, that doesn't happen without if the color never develops. You never get that. And so there's actually a whole nother level of nutrients and those antioxidants were always there to protect the fruit or the vegetable itself from bugs, from outside invaders, from fungal infections.
So a lot of the other problems that we also have in our food system with food, carrying mold and food carrying fungus's, which then like grapes are notorious for having Fungal problems. So they're one of the most heavily sprayed fruits to combat the fungal problem. And then you're taking in huge amounts of antifungals that are horrible for our digestive system and start to throw off the microbiome and you end up in this loop.
So there's like, Many layers to why to eat local and the economic reason of, you know, a dollar in your local economy circulates seven times. And you're not taking it out of the community. You're keeping it in and what that can do exactly among other things.
Greg Peterson: So, you know, a big, big piece of the solution is eat local, know your farmer, figure out who's growing your food for you, grow your own.
If you have kids set up a garden with them, because here's what I know without a shadow of a doubt, kids don't like vegetables, mostly. If they grow them, they'll eat them and love them. It is, I've seen it over and over and over again in 40 years of time.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So I'm glad you brought that up and I I'm clear, I would like to have a three-hour podcast with you, but I'm going to restrain myself and not do that.
So we're gonna start to wrap this up, but. Something, I've learned a lot as a naturopath because I actually have a lot of adults who don't like vegetables either. It's very common. And especially my generation 40 somethings, we were really a lot of the beginning of the latchkey kids where both parents worked, we were in school programs until five, six, seven o'clock at night, you know, or whatever.
And there wasn't a lot of home cooked meals. It was the, you know, there just wasn't, we weren't exposed to it. And so I have people come to me and they're like, Sarah, I hate to admit this, but like, I don't know what to do with these things that I don't really like them. So a couple of things on the health side as well, and this helps with kids a very common reason why we have aversion to meat and we have an aversion to certain vegetables is mineral deficiencies.
It's the minerals in our body that allow us to taste food. And what makes vegetables interesting is the minerals in them. And so you can't taste the D..., this is going to sound ridiculous. and people are gonna laugh at me, the dynamic flavors of broccoli without zinc. And then there's this loop where zinc deficiency is exacerbated by there's not enough zinc in our food to begin with because of the deficiencies in the soil. And when we have any sort of a high inflammation diet, it suppresses our body's natural digestive ability to produce hydrochloric acid. You have to have hydrochloric acid to absorb zinc. So you end up in this loop.
So one of the first things I do with clients is I I'm like, look, I do want you to eat six cups of vegetables a day. And they look at me like I'm an alien. And I say, but here's what we're going to do. We're going to add either apple cider vinegar, or like some sort of a hydrochloric acid supplement to support their tummy with meals.
And then we're going to add a zinc supplement and, and there's different things out there about always supplement zinc with copper. Depends that, take it to your local nutritionist or someone in your community about the best way to go about that. But generally speaking, we are massively zinc deficient in this country and it's a big issue with COVID too.
Greg Peterson: Yeah, exactly. So when, when I, I got COVID. Heidi and Heidi is my partner. Sherry's the person we work with about the lyme, immediately put us on zinc.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And I've actually had most of my clients on zinc this whole year prophylactically. And what's been really interesting is I've had them on zinc and magnesium and a couple other things, which actually in a previous episode, went through what my top five supplements are. So you guys can go back and find that in season three, episode 13 but they were there for the immune system, but then what's been interesting is I've had so many people on them, all these other things have been getting better, which I like knew, but I like never, most of the time, I'm always trying to not like, I want you to eat your vitamins and minerals through food, not supplements, but the problem is the soil. And so much is missing in that whole thing.
Greg Peterson: When I was back at college when I was back in college in the… you know, like 2003-4, I was looking at I was looking at research that was showing that our soils, there were, there were studies that showed that our soils were depleted of minerals after world war II. And all this. Here's the other thing about organic versus conventional? Unconventional, they throw NPK at it, Nitrogen, potassium, whatever the third...
Sarah Marshall, ND: Phosphorus
Thank you. That's the lyme brain sometimes happens to me. That is not the micronutrients. I, in fact, we've got a summit coming up here in in March where we talk about soil. Soil is the, when I talked about it earlier, that is what we have to fix. And our food is tastier and better for us if there's lots of micronutrients in the soil. And what helps our plants extract the micronutrients from the soil is the microbiome of the soil column, which includes fungus and includes bacterias, it includes all of these things that when you put any kind of chemical on them, it suppresses or kills those and therefore our food isn't as good for us.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And we're certainly not like re you know, we know after antibiotics to take probiotics, we are not dousing the soil with probiotics every time there's an application of a chemical on it. That is not a farming practice, but yeah. Oh, my gosh, Greg, this has been awesome. And I'm, my brain is still spinning and there. So, so we're definitely going to have to do this again.
Greg Peterson: I’ve got a list…
Sarah Marshall, ND: yeah, there's more for sure. And thanks for opening the door on this conversation. It's a big passion of mine. One more resource I'm going to sneak in just to bring this component in for the protein eaters out there.
There's a website called eat wild.com and it's the local harvest version of getting locally sourced meats and fish. And like I've had mentioned this before. I have farmer friends in Idaho that have free range, grass fed beef, and I just buy a side of beef from them. I'm still working on the one I bought a year and a half ago.
And then I also work with a fishing cooperative in Bristol Bay, Alaska. That's a group of fishermen that got together and they said, we're going to cut out the middlemen so that we can raise our families and line catch salmon and steelhead and sustainably restore the fishery in Bristol Bay and they've done it.
They got together and they said, nobody else is going to rescue us and we're going to be out of a job. So they just flipped the switch. And so they have theirs and that's a buying club that's specific to certain cities, but there are other buying clubs that you can get involved in that are sort of that same kind of nature, even sort of what you've created around the the great American seed Roundup. Seed up.
Greg Peterson: Yeah. Let me just throw this in, I do have a podcast as well. Well, urban farm podcast, we have over 600 episodes and it's, it's telling people's stories, just like we did today. We kind of told my story. I just touch base in with people and ask them for their story. Yeah. And so there's a lot of great stories there. Urbanfarmpodcast.com.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Thank you, Greg. Thank you for your commitment to this, the inescapable nature of your calling. Yeah. And thanks for sharing it here. We're definitely going to have to have you back for more.
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Sarah Marshall, ND: Inspired by the success of HEAL, we are now a community of over 2000 incredible healers. We will be launching some courses and workshops in 2021. Be the first to know about them by joining our mailing list at SarahMarshallND.com. Thank you to today's guest Greg Peterson for his passion and courage. For a full transcript and all the resources for today's show visit SarahMarshallND.com/podcast. Special thanks to our music composer, Roddy Nikpour and our editor, Kendra Vicken. And as always thank you for being here. We'll see you next time.