If I’m hearing you correctly, for fifteen years, you didn’t know what was the cause of your problem. Some of the operations I work with, they’re measuring things like the bio-digestability of grains. They’re measuring no residue of chemicals. They are measuring increases in Omega-3, trace elements, or vitamins in the food that they’re producing. That’s what I want to see. We start to get down to, what is this food quality? Can we improve the quality that we’re buying? There are a few spectrometers in different types of meters that are being released in 2021 and 2022 that are going to be ones that consumers can hold and measure for themselves what is the quality of this produce, which is exciting. What that did is it then introduced the paraquat, which is a residual herbicide into my spinal fluid. It sat there for fifteen years. I was told that I had fused vertebras C1 and C2. I went and saw every single bodyworker you can imagine. I’ve got a depth of experience in like Bowen, craniosacral, ortho-bionomy, and acupuncture. You name it. I’ve been to see them. When I was 30 years old, so fifteen years later, I met a chemical detox specialist. He used radionics and ran through a series of questions about, is this environmental? Is this a virus? Until finally, he came down to, “It’s paraquat because I had no idea.” Yes. I used a quote there from Stephen Jenkinson who talks about hope. Hope is mortgaging the future. Hope is something that you hold out as some comparison. Something that you’re going to cling to and pray for as opposed to what’s happening is happening now. We need to be focusing on the things that we can do now. Hope is the other side of hopelessness. We go from being feeling overwhelmed to maybe the Knight in shining armor is going to roll up.

Healthy soil. It’s not just what we need for potted plants. It’s what we all need to survive. Nicole Masters, agro-ecologist and author of “For the Love of Soil,” explains on today’s podcast just why our health and the health of the soil are so inextricably intertwined. No, so I had a foggy brain. I had memory problems. I was tired all the time. I had been a competitive long-distance runner and I was good. I had a whole lot of medals and stuff. I went from being athletic to nothing. I did not want to partake in sports. I went off the rails in my own life. I was no longer interested in partaking. Everyone thought, “That’s normal teenage behavior,” but it wasn’t. William Gibson once said that "the future is here - it is just not evenly distributed." "Nicole modestly claims that the information in the book is not new thinking, but her resynthesis of the lessons she has learned and refined in collaboration with regenerative land-managers is new, and it is powerful." Says Abe Collins, cofounder of LandStream and founder of Collins Grazing. "She lucidly shares lessons learned from the deep-topsoil futures she and her farming and ranching partners manage for and achieve." Do you ever give much thought to the Earth? We walk on it, raise animals on it, build our houses on it, and depend on it for sustenance but some of us might not give it a second thought. This is an episode where we talk about why we need to. The soil is in trouble and we need to look at how we can restore its health to regenerate it and cultivate it in a way that is good for the Earth itself and for each of us. This is Episode 256 and our guest is Nicole Masters. Eden, thank you for your testimonial. I loved hearing your story. Each of you is welcome to write a Letter to the Editor that we might include in an upcoming journal. You can also rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts so that we might read a shout-out of yours as well. Thanks so much for reading. Stay well. Y hasta pronto.The first chapter had me hooked. Nicole shared her own story about Paraquot poisoning in her teens and how it affected her health and her journey into ultimately becoming an Agro-ecologist, educator and systems thinker. She not only tells her story but weaves it beautifully into the topic of this book. She speaks of chemicals, genetics, epigenetics and more telling the story of human reliance and exposure to these things. She encourages each and every one of us to listen to our bodies, nature and our intuition to build a rich and insightful life. In so doing she builds the reason for having written the book and her love of nature and soil. I am so glad that you said that just because it has that label doesn’t mean that it’s been produced on a small scale. Like in whole foods. I sometimes see these berries. I’m a big berry girl. I love berries. It says organic, so I think, “That’s great,” but I know their motto crops of berries. It’s done on this huge scale. Tell me, how does that damage the soil? What’s wrong with that if it’s organic? Most people seem to have some malady that is or is not explained. Years of misery and many doctor visits to no avail; then, a practitioner pointed to Paraquat, the first flag in this book. Who would have thought bare feed as a child in a foreign land would be the culprit.

Another problem with this book is it is highly anecdotal, which is fine; in and of themselves, anecdotes aren't bad. To her credit it is very well researched and footnoted with tons of scientific peer reviewed papers that support some of her science. But the anecdotes seem to be mostly with all her customers that she consulted for that she writes about. Virtually none of them have comparative data demonstrating what exactly she did, and how well it worked. Maybe this is because her clients did not want her revealing that info. And that is fine, but she should at least indicate as much. It left me somewhat unimpressed. What would you advocate instead then? If I literally came up to you and said, “Nicole, I’m going to stop eating meat. I’m going to buy all my stuff from Whole Foods.” You were like, “No,” and you explained to me that’s not very helpful. What would you suggest I do instead?

Together with her team of soil coaches, they work alongside producers in the U.S., Canada and across Australasia. Supporting producers who work with millions of acres to take their operations to the next level in nutrient density, profitability and environmental outcomes.

As a lay person and amateur gardener, I thought this was a fantastic introduction to regenerative agriculture. The author shares a wealth of wisdom related to weed growth, plant stress, pest activity, water management and soil health. Her work with the pioneering families and agribusinesses (often ranchers) that are adapting these ideas to their own farms and climates (often in the face of overwhelming odds) is eye opening. My concern is they’re going to greenwash it as they did with organics but how do we keep integrity in that system? Part of that is looking at what is the output because regenerating landscapes are about the output. Are we increasing the quality of the water that’s coming off the landscape? Are we increasing water-holding capacity? Are we increasing microbial diversity and the food quality that’s coming off the property? As for critiques, there are times where the author repeats herself. I personally found this helpful, as it allowed some of the pertinent ideas to sink in. That said, I can imagine it would be irritating for some. Masters questions why the top minerals “es­tablished” for soil health (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) do not include calcium. Accord­ing to her, we’ve been hoodwinked. Calcium plays an essential role in soil health. Our human microbiome probably has 50% of the diversity that it used to have and less specialized organisms that can help you deal with stress. As we start to lose that microbiome in the soil, we no longer have the enzyme-producing organisms, the hormone-producing organisms, or organisms that are creating those vitamins.One way I like to think about soil is the way that we think about the human gut microbiome. You imagine that you only eat one type of food for the rest of your life and what that does to your gut microbiome. It’s the same in the soil. If you’re growing monocultural crops and even if that’s alternating crops, you’re going to grow berries then you grow on the corn, which has a major impact on the diversity of the microbiome as it does with our own human health. If all the consumers turned around tomorrow and said, “That’s it. I’m only buying regenerative foods.” Those big companies scrambled to make sure that was happening. We’re seeing that happen on a pretty big scale now. You see General Mills, Danone, Ben & Jerry’s, and all these kinds of Patagonia. These kinds of companies that provide food and fiber and now, engage with the regenerative story.