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The Grazing Grass Podcast features insights and stories of regenerative farming, specifically emphasizing grass-based livestock management. Our mission is to foster a community where grass farmers can share knowledge and experiences with one another. We delve into their transition to these practices, explore the ins and outs of their operations, and then move into the "Over Grazing" segment, which addresses specific challenges and learning opportunities. The episode rounds off with the "Famous Four" questions, designed to extract valuable wisdom and advice. Join us to gain practical tips and inspiration from the pioneers of regenerative grass farming.
This is the podcast for you if you are trying to answer: What are regenerative farm practices? How to be grassfed? How do I graze other species of livestock? What's are ways to improve pasture and lower costs? What to sell direct to the consumer?
Welcome to grazing grass
podcast, episode 131.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
If you drive behind the tractor for two
miles, do you know how much time you're
going to lose on your morning commute?
You're listening to the grazing grass,
podcast, sharing information and stories
of grass-based livestock production
utilizing regenerative practices.
I'm your host, Cal Hardage.
Cal: You're growing more than grass.
You're growing a healthier
ecosystem to help your cattle
thrive in their environment.
You're growing your livelihood by
increasing your carrying capacity
and reducing your operating costs.
You're growing stronger communities
and a legacy to last generations.
The grazing management
decisions you make today.
impact everything from the soil beneath
your feet to the community all around you.
That's why the Noble Research
Institute created their Essentials
of Regenerative Grazing course to
teach ranchers like you easy to follow
techniques to quickly assess your forage
production and infrastructure capacity.
In order to begin
grazing more efficiently.
Together, they can help you grow
not only a healthier operation,
but a legacy that lasts.
Learn more on their website at noble.
org slash grazing.
It's n o b l e dot org
forward slash grazing.
On today's show we have
Daniel Firth Griffin.
It is an excellent show.
I think you enjoy.
Now Daniel comes to regenerative
agriculture and he says
he's beyond regenerative.
In fact, we had him on the podcast
back on episode 17, I believe.
And we talked about his
journey at that time.
And his books had just been published.
Wild Like Flowers.
He's came back on to share
while he's done since then.
And he's got a new book called Stag Tine.
As I mentioned in this podcast,
Daniel makes me question some things.
Because he's doing things different.
You know, for me, it seems like
non-selective grazing or ultra high
density grazing is becoming more popular.
In fact, I was talking to a neighbor.
A few miles away.
That's practicing it here locally.
And it looks interesting to me.
However, when you talk to Daniel
and you read Stag Time, He's
going the other direction.
With less pressure.
Based Upon Fred Provenza book nourishment.
Daniel talks about that
really started him.
And he talks about his
journey to allowing his cows.
To find the minerals they need in
the weeds and grasses growing there.
His book talks about
his mineral program and.
And how he's worked away from minerals.
His book's very interesting, but it's not.
It's not a book
that's going to give you a
recipe, go out and do one, two and
three, and you'll be successful.
He does.
Um, pose a lot of questions for you.
And I think it's a very interesting book.
I enjoyed it.
He's playing on a trilogy.
Except today in the episode, he
mentions it may turn into a series.
I'm looking forward to the next book.
I enjoy it.
And I encourage you to read it.
And today we have a great
conversation with Daniel.
So stick around for that.
And.
Um, listen with open mind, open ears.
Before we get to Daniel 10
seconds about my podcast.
No, that's not what I do first.
10 seconds about my farm.
And actually I have two
things about the farm.
One, um, Ended up
my daughter knew someone who
had some Border Collie puppies.
And I've talked about
on the show before, how.
I've thought about
getting a Border Collie.
I worry about the time commitment.
I worry about the price.
It sounds like I worry too much.
Um, But my daughter found
one from working parents.
And
I have a border Collie puppy now.
Daisy.
I will try and get a photo
of her next couple of days.
And posted on my farms, Instagram.
So you can see it over there and introduce
everyone to the newest farm member.
Uh, she'll be in training
for quite a while.
And maybe she'll turn into a productive
member for a number of years.
Secondly on the farm, I
ordered a laser engraver.
Uh, I've really loved the
idea of engraving tags.
Years ago when we dairied, we
use those Ritchey engravable tags
and a dermal to engrave them.
Our writing never was very good.
We changed the Z tags and the markers.
But those tags fade.
So I purchased a laser printer.
And I've been playing with Ritchey
ear tags, getting them engraved.
In fact, if you are looking for
some tags, you'd like engraved.
Or looking to purchase them.
Shoot me a message.
Let's talk.
Now it's time for 10
seconds about the podcast.
And last week we had a technical hiccup.
In fact, I went to bed on Tuesday,
thinking everything was set up
for the next episode to come out.
And we were busy Wednesday
Thursday so Friday when I
logged on to check some things.
It showed me.
Um, my audio file wasn't there.
And I, I argued with it.
I disagreed it was there, but for
whatever reason, It didn't work out.
So podcast episode last
week was a couple days late.
I apologize for that.
We strive really hard to make sure
every Wednesday you have an episode.
And we put it out.
If you, if Wednesday happens and you
are unable to access our episode.
Shoot me a message.
DM me on Facebook, Instagram.
Uh, shoot me an email
because you should have one.
Now I say that.
And next week, I don't
have a guest for next week.
So if you know of a grass farmer,
that'd be interested in jumping on here
real quick and doing that so quickly.
Shoot me an email.
Because I've, um, let my my backlog
of episodes dwindled down over summer.
So I've got to build it back up.
Enough of all this I've
talked way too long today.
Uh, let's talk to Daniel.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Daniel,
we're excited to welcome you back
to the Grazing Grass podcast.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Hey, Cal, it's a blessing
to be here with you again.
2021 feels like a lifetime
ago, but I don't know.
It was a blink of an eye
to some large degree.
I'm just blessing, blessed to be back.
Thank you.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139:
I completely agree.
It's so near yet so far.
Like you mentioned, you were on
episode 17 of the podcast, so for
listeners who have not listened that
long, go back and catch that episode.
And in that episode, we talk about
your wild land, we talk about your
book at the time, Wild Like Flowers.
What I'd like to do today, let's
just catch our listeners up to what's
gone on your farm since that time.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'd love to.
Thanks, Cal.
I appreciate it again.
It's always a fun thing.
I have my own podcast and I always tell
people the only reason I have it is just
because I love serious conversations
with people and oftentimes if I were
to reach out to you and I would say,
Cal man, I really would love to catch
up like a podcast to some degree is a
very focused time that we get to share
and a very little small talk, which.
I enjoy life without small talk.
It's,
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
I get it.
I get why some people do like it.
I'm very bad at it.
And so I think that's
why I stray away from it.
So anyways, the point is,
thanks for having me on.
I'm really blessed and
honored to be with you again.
so since 2021, we were conversing
back then in February, I believe,
about a book that I had just
published called Wild Like Flowers.
It was a book I wrote immediately
following the birth of our last
daughter, or, our most recent daughter.
Her name is Sequoia.
I was obsessed with the idea of language.
And obsessed with the idea of
how language penetrated into this
regenerative world of ours and how
new that thought was to many people.
a new thought to me, and so I wrote
the book in a matter of three weeks.
It was a very unbelievably
intense episode of our life.
Wrote the book in three weeks, published
it, and it's still a wonderful book.
It truly is.
It's very topical to some degree.
It's a book of stories.
A book of stories that emanate
from my wife and I's life with
our children, our growing family.
At what we call the Timshel Wildland
Project, or what I just called a wildland,
a 400 acre at the time we called it
a emergent conservation landscape.
Today we call it a concentric
rewilding landscape for reasons
that I think we can get into
later, maybe in this conversation.
And it was really well received.
I couldn't believe how
well received it was.
At the time we sent the manuscript
to a certain slew of publishers.
Again, back in 2021.
And a lot of them had interest,
working through agents and
such is not a fun thing.
I've never enjoyed that part
of the publishing process.
But a lot of the publishers were
really excited about the book.
They compared it to do you say, like,
this generation has its new Wendell
Berry or something, which petrified me.
I remember
my
when I read that.
Because the problem was Wendell
Berry's daughter Mary is her
name, I have my memory correct.
She reached out to me.
She said, Hey, I saw what people have
been saying about this book, and so
I'm going to read it for myself and
compare you to my dad in my own way.
And if I didn't pee my pants the
first time, I peed my pants the
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Right.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
And yeah, and that, we
talked all about that.
And the idea of that book was really
about the regeneration of relationships.
That as we start to turn to language,
as we create a shared vernacular
or grammar around thing that we
were all experiencing at the time.
Obviously, we were one year
into the COVID era, if you
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
And so many people had turned
back to local foods because
they had no other alternative.
If you put yourself back into February
of 2021 to some degree, that was the
height of, like, the local food movement.
Where all local consumers turned
back, if they had the ability to,
of course, to farmers that were
growing food in their region.
And what became unbelievably
clear, instantly clear, was
that we're not ready for this.
Regenerative farming, local
farming, was not ready for this.
We had about, and I say we, the global
we, let alone the mid Atlantic, let
alone the Virginia, let alone the Nelson
County, where I live, we, we had about
three to four weeks worth of food.
And then we ran out.
Everybody ran out.
And it was a wake up call, I think,
because we had all been saying
local food regenerative farming,
regenerative small scale farming
can save the world and all of this.
But those relationships, the
relationships that necessitate or
are necessitated by this worldview,
this regenerative paradigm of land
management were not yet constructed.
It was farmers working in isolated groups.
And the consumers, as soon as they
started to realize that they depended
upon it, it started to fail because
the relationship wasn't there.
So anyways, I wrote the book about
regeneration being relationship, then
years passed, many years passed, it feels
like a lifetime has passed since then.
And and we started to realize that
the way that our own landscape here,
these 400 acres that we call our
home, The Wildland Project, really was
manifesting itself in a whole new way
that I wasn't seeing anywhere else.
We were asking different questions.
We weren't doing a lot, we were
questioning a lot, and observing a
lot, and seeing a lot, and really
responding to the feedback loops
that were constantly in front of us.
And so, the request of a dear
friend of mine, who I be wrong,
but I think she might have even
been on this, Taiesa Porto?
she been around this podcast?
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Yes, she has.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
I thought so.
I
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139:
Yes, she's been on here.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
She was with us at the time.
I thought it was this podcast.
Yeah, she was with us at the time
when she recorded that and not long
after she recorded with you, her and
I were talking, she lived here at
the Wildland for a while, and she
was like, Daniel, you really have to
put some actual thoughts to what's
happening here, because it's different.
It's not like anything else
that's out there and not because
it is good because it's unique.
It's just unique and we have to start
talking about this and letting it enter
this new vernacular that, that you built.
And, or started to build or formalize
in wild like flowers back in 2021.
And so we started writing and so
that's really what we're, here is
this, this birth of a new concept.
Which we have effectively over the last
maybe seven or eight years graduated
towards calling concentric rewilding.
And we don't use the term
regenerative agriculture anymore.
I don't disbelieve that regenerate.
The regenerative agriculture works.
'cause I do, I've seen it.
It absolutely builds soil.
It absolutely increases
biodiversity, et cetera.
But to some degree it's still constructed
out of the same ethos and worldview
that so many other conventional
alternatives are built out of.
It's still pushing in a direction,
is still trying to save the
world and not be the world.
All these things maybe you find
interesting that we can talk about
later, but the ways in which this has
evolved here locally for us is about.
Maybe eight years ago, my wife and I
started to notice that so many of the
things that we were doing as regenerative
farmers, because we had been farming,
regenerative, grass fed, grass finished,
grass born beef, or rotationally
grazed, or holistically managed beef,
or whatever you want to call it, for
about 15 or 16 years at this point.
We started to realize we were spending so
much time telling our animals how to be.
And we were spending almost no time
asking them how they want it to be.
And people at this point either
laugh or they're completely on board.
And so I don't know where you are and
I don't know where our listeners are.
But the way we describe it is,
you know we all have fields.
If you're a regenerative farmer
or a farmer or whatever you are
there's a field, there's a lawn,
there's grass outside of your
house your farm, whatever it is.
your farm.
And we're so focused on building
biodiversity, for instance, or
maybe it's soil health or carbon
to sequester it or store it or cycle it
or we're focused on nematodes pooping
out plant available calcium in the
rhizosphere so the plants will grow
like we're focused on the particulars.
But like when was the last time you
actually went out to a field, knelt down
and asked, what do you want to be like?
When is the last time you
acknowledged and attended to the
animacy of the life all around us?
the relations are cousins all around
us, whether or not they're four legged
cows, two legged chickens, right,
or red tailed hawks, or vegetative
cousins, or slithering cousins like
snakes, and lizards, and worms, and
crawling like beetles, and moles, and
voles, and mice, and When was the last
time during this modern understanding
that the climate is truly in trouble?
That humanity is truly in trouble,
that we're losing more soil than we're
creating, we're deforesting, more closed
canopy, old growth, hardwood forests,
than are emerging or let to grow, right?
We're in a period of collapse.
That is the modern story.
For many angles, that's the modern story.
And during this moment, when
was the last time we paused?
And this is the question that we've
been asking for almost a decade now.
And looked at the cow and said, We
have so long told you how to be.
If we were able to, and that's really
the conversational part, but if we were
able to, how might you tell us how to be?
And so it's a release of
control to some degree.
It's the paradigm between doing and being,
but it's also just a humility paradigm.
It's a worldview that we
call concentric rewilding.
Concentric is a mix of two words
between this idea of kinship that we
have, kinship with all of our relations
around us, of indigenous perspective,
not mine, but a gift given to me.
And the second aspect is
centricity or concentric.
That life lives in the circles, right?
That you and I live in the same circle,
and in this circle is air, right?
The needed medium of our life, but
also, as we take that air, we turn
it into carbon dioxide that trees
breathe in and breathe back out, so
we could, this is life in a circle.
Death.
chaos, and rebirth, and growth,
and life, and maturation, all
the way through death again.
And so it's kin centric.
Kinship and concentricity inside
of this idea of rewilding, that
is, letting go some degree.
Not participating.
Not kicking humans out.
Not, trying to heal the rivers
instead of providing, good
local food for your community.
Not doing any of those things,
but rather becoming everything.
So I'll stop rambling you can direct the
conversation as you see fit, but that's
really what we've been working on over
the last eight to ten years, the last four
since we last discussed, wildlife flowers.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139:
So, what comes to mind?
And, I read Stag Time, and I
really enjoyed it, and we'll talk
a little bit more about that,
but it's hard to have even any
conversation without bringing that in.
Because, you mentioned there,
about asking the land, asking
your animals, what do they want?
And, in Stag Time, you go ahead and talk
about that process of your cows, your
goats, and releasing some control there,
which I'll be completely honest, as
well as most every other regenerative
farmer in so many ways, my cows
are out there in a small paddock
with electric fence around it.
And if I go out there later
today, and they're not there,
I'm not gonna be very happy.
But so talk about your journey because
in 2001 you were still guiding your
cows through your land, if I remember
correctly, and using polywire.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Yes.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Are
you still using polywire?
What's been that dynamic change there?
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Yeah, that's a wonderful question.
So much the work being done, think, in
the modern green agricultural movements.
are an attempt, a good attempt, an
honest attempt, ethical and moral
attempt, to be very clear, to create
farms that are managed in nature's image
to the best of our modern abilities.
I believe
on, and I have great respect for that.
What we are focused on so for
instance the paradigm of, let's
call it rotational grazing for now.
Rotational grazing is easy for me to
speak about because nobody owns it.
Adaptive, multi paddock grazing is
obviously owned by, Understanding
Ag and Gabe Brown and, you know,
Williams and everybody else.
And then you have like holistic plan
grazing, which is obviously under
the Savory Protocol of Allen Savory.
And so like, let's just get out of
these naming conventions because I'm not
picking on anybody, but we have to have a
about it.
So let's just call it rotational grazing.
Rotational grazing is built off
of two types of competition.
The first type is what I would call,
and I mention this in the book, in
section four, I believe, in stag time,
is what we call intraspecial competition.
So intraspecial competition that
in a mob grazing environment, there
is competition between me and you.
Let's say I am a cow and
you, Cal, are also a cow.
We're out in the field, and because
forage is limited, there's a
competition over forage, I understand
that if I don't eat it, you will.
And if you eat it, I don't, and I starve.
And so we get that uniform grazing,
that uniform distribution of of
manure and urine, the peeing and
the pooing and everything else.
Those things that, that total
grazing, regenerative grazing, good
regenerative farmer that we like to see.
We like to see those
right, where the polywire
was and they couldn't
like this stuff.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
The second aspect, I told you
there was two, the second aspect
is interspecial competition.
So whereas intraspecial is
within a species, interspecial
is between two species.
And this is what, many has called the
predator prey connection, that predators
push prey animals naturally in nature
into tight herds that are always
mobbing, mowing, and moving, right?
If anybody probably has listened to any
regenerative podcasts, read books, gone
to the conferences, we know, we understand
this terminology, we know it well.
regenerative grazing is
built on two paradigms.
in the species and between the species.
What we questioned back maybe five
or six years ago, officially, after a
conversation with my dear friend, Dr.
Fred Provenza, who we've worked for
a long time with, is we started to
question with Fred and a couple others,
what if herbivores, goats, sheep, deer,
pronghorn, elk, moose, bison, etc.
What if cows in particular though, but
all of those other species in in, in
some sort of extended understanding,
but cows since we have them here
in the moment in the field, what if
cows could rotate themselves over
the landscape without competition?
Because the work of the last 20 30
years, regardless if it's the work of Dr.
Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist
who wrote the wonderful book,
Finding the Mother Tree, who proved
that forests don't compete over
resources, but they share resources.
So our understanding of forest ecology
has transferred being a competitive
system to a collaborative system.
Okay, with this idea of the indigenous
worldview and place based traditional
ecological knowledge that is Thank God
coming into the fore once again, thanks to
decolonization and re indigenization and
everything else that's happening today.
It needs to continue
happening at a faster pace.
I think we also get this paradigm that all
of life or this worldview rather that all
of life is not operating in some zero sum
capitalistic competitive game, but rather
is collaborating towards a particular end.
We have evolutionary biologists
and ecologists that are writing
books about evolution is not a.
Evolution due to scarcity or
survival of the fittest, but
rather an evolution of beauty.
Right?
And so we have all of these different
perspectives and worldviews that
are built upon transitioning the
narrative from competition to
collaboration, scarcity to beauty.
But in regenerative grazing we're locked
in the competitive mindset that the
only way a cow can be a good cow is
if there's competition all around it.
Competition between cows and the
grasses, and competition between the
cows and the wolves, the cows and the
mountain lions, the cows and the bears,
whatever they are, and life itself.
so we started a question through, again,
mentorship and friendship with Dr.
Fred Provenza and so many others.
Do cows operate in natural systems?
Is it really through the
predator prey connection?
And we started to talk with indigenous
thinkers and wisdom holders.
We started to read in 2013, I lived in the
fra France Southern Doone river Valley.
I wanted to be an archeologist.
And I studied ancient paleolithic ca
art in Lasko and Grand Rock and Less
Cover yells and all these other caves.
And, uh.
And we studied ancient herbivores
and ancient herbivore migrations
and the last glacial maximum and
then in the anti thermal period of
when the ice was receding and that
large herbivores were transitioning
over to the smaller herbivores that
we know today, like the bison and
the, aurochs and things like this.
look at it there in 20, 17, I wrote
a book on the early American West,
the ecological realities of the
early American West that's been
praised in the academic circles.
And all of these things put together you
don't see herds of herbivores mobbing,
mowing, and moving due to competition.
The same thing that Suzanne Simard found
in the forest, the same thing that the
indigenous, friends and humans all around
us have been saying for generations
and generations, that life operates
collaboratively, never competitively,
is this is coming into fruition.
It's coming into the fore of our
knowledge, with grazing animals as well.
And so we started to question if
it's not competition that's driving
herbivores to mob, mow, and move, or
to graze regeneratively, or however
you want to say that, well, what is?
And so about eight years ago, my wife,
and you read Stag Time, you know it, my
wife's the main character of the story.
All I do is look like a fool, a
blabbering fool and it's just always
her sitting there with the punchline in
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: And to
be honest, all husbands out there
can relate, so just go ahead.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
No it's totally true.
It's, I, and so I give her full credit.
truly do.
But she started to ask, she said,
if herds of herbivores graze the
landscape in what we would today
call a regenerative fashion?
because of like a matriarchal lineage.
The family, okay?
And so you would question, if that's
the case, why don't we see that
today in domesticated herbivores?
Well, this is very simple.
soon as an animal is born, right, it's
raised with its mom and then it's weaned.
And if it's a boy, it's castrated.
So immediately our endocrine and hormonal
systems are immediately terminated, right?
And then we separate them, and we run a
steer herd, and an open cow herd, and a
finishing bull, like a steer herd, and
then we have a heifer, we have all these
constantly breaking apart the family.
And then we blame the cow for not
grazing in a regenerative fashion, right?
And so we wondered if we were
to not break apart the family.
And we were to create an extended
matriarchal lineage in the herd that
lives and occupies in the land that
we call the wildland project here,
these 400 acres, over large periods of
time, nearly a decade now would happen?
Right?
So we stepped back, And we started
to undergo this transition.
So in the beginning, we had a herd of
a bunch of combobulated herbivores that
have no family, matriarchal or genetic
or family relationship with each other.
So they were behind polywire.
as the herd matured, and we started
to have grandmothers in the herd, who
had, you know, daughters in the herd
that were having daughters in there
as soon as we had those generations
We started to release the reins a
little bit to notice that they were
still doing What we would have had
them doing behind polywire But without
the polywire and then the landscape
started to develop then we started to
see there's a whole section dedicated
in stag time to This understanding of
what's called phenotypic plasticity.
So dive into the science
just a little bit.
have your genetics That's
your DNA That's the ATGC.
That's your genome, if you will.
Epigenetics are the way that genome is
expressed given external climatic factors.
Okay, those, that's epigenetics.
Phenotype, or your phenotypic passivity,
plasticity, or lag, it goes by many
different names, but your phenotype, if
we just focus on that first word, would
be the way that your epigenetics manifest
themselves as observable characteristics
or realities in your final form.
Okay, so the way you look, cow, versus
the way I look, that is your phenotype.
Observable characteristics.
interesting thing is, herbivores,
governed by a matriarchy, not a
farmer with a strand of polywire,
they have the ability to adapt their
phenotype to their surroundings
because they're never told what to eat.
There's never competition
on what they have to eat.
You'll start to notice that predators
start to live with the herd.
We have pictures of coyotes, we have
black bears, we have a picture of a
mountain lion just chillin the cow.
Like, as if it was like
the African Savannah.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
And don't, the mountain lion's a little
more distant than the other ones but
you start to see this wonderful complex
nuance, this concentricity and kinship
arising, what we call kin centric,
this kin centric idea is rising to
the fore that what, through what we
call adaptive landscape genomics.
which is the matriarchy plus
the phenotypic plasticity.
So a phenotype that's adapted and
thriving within a particular landscape.
That's the adaptive landscape
genomic that these animals
move themselves by themselves.
They're able to medicate on
the forage that they need, not
eat the forage that they need.
they don't, you will,
and they will starve.
There's a lot of it's so interesting.
I've keynoted basically every
fricking conference in this
regenerative world of ours.
We've been a savior hub
for five or six years.
And, we're gravitating away from all of
these things, just coming into ourself a
little bit, but like I've run the gamut.
I've run the show.
I've keynoted the conferences, like
I've been around and it's not false
in the slightest to say Regenerative
farmers, or just farmers in general,
but regenerative farmers if we can
talk about them for the moment because
that's what you and I have been or are.
We all want the best for our animals.
It's
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Right.
Right.
Oh, yes.
Right.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
that our animals are able to self
select the diets that they need.
Provenza's book, Nourishment, is one
of Chelsea Green, his publisher's
best selling books of all time.
Right?
Everybody loves this book, Nourishment.
In the entirety of the book,
Nourishment, Fred's book is that
animals can select what they need.
That's the premise.
But if you're continually putting them
behind polywire, and they're continually
eating only that which that if they
don't eat, they will starve, they're
not self selecting what they need.
period.
And when you start to get into self
selecting, you have to realize that
we're talking medicinal, not nourishing.
Right, this isn't a protein on your
plate, this is medicine, in your tea,
or medicine in a tincture, right?
These are dosages of phytochemicals,
secondary compounds, primary,
secondary compounds, whatever they
are, macronutrients, micronutrients,
and so they don't need calcium, they
need two bites of a plantain plant.
Or maybe magnesium, because plantain,
let's say narrowleaf plantain, or common
plantain, or even blackleaf plantain, or
blackstem plantain, these are all, plants,
forbs, if you will, that grow here in the
mid Atlantic, East Coast, United States,
Turtle Island, that are high in magnesium.
so they don't need magnesium.
They need two bites of
the plantain leaf, right?
And if they're constantly forcing food
into their mouth because if they don't
eat that, you will, and then I will
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139:
Yeah, someone else will.
Yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
not medicating.
We're just ingesting magnesium hoping
that it's the right amount or really
just hoping that it's any amount so I
don't starve to death, And so, there's
a lot of different ways to look at it.
But we, we truly want to see nature.
We want natural farming.
want it to be in a way that we can
still harvest, and we want our animals
to self medicate what they need.
But to some degree, all of these
things necessitate a release of
control, a stepping into more control.
And another way to look at this is, I
said this two years ago on a podcast,
and it seemed to land, and so I repeated.
Sometimes, occasionally.
so many of us see biodiversity as
this linear pathway between bare
soil and a closed canopy forest.
And maybe we like a particular aspect
of the biodiversity in that chain, so
like, maybe it's a native grassland with
beautiful wildflowers, and so maybe trees
coming in for some silvopasture benefits.
That's biodiversity to us.
And we see that biodiversity
as a number, right?
I have 70 species in a
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
But what we totally miss
that the cows themselves.
The epigenetic and phenotypic
realities and plasticity of those cows.
That's an aspect of the biodiversity.
You and I are aspects of this
biodiversity, so if we believe that we
can control biodiversity, what we are
saying is that we can become separate
from that biodiversity and if we become
separate from that to bio biodiversity so
we can control it and manage it down here
outside of us, we have concluded that we
are not an aspect of that biodiversity.
We're not an aspect of earth.
Right?
But if stactine says anything,
it says that earth is earth
and we are its earthlings, her
earthlings, if you're willing to
go that far, which obviously I am.
And as an earthling, we have to
realize that we are a part of the
narrative, a member of this symphony.
as a member, it's very hard
to control the other members.
The only way I can control you is
if I'm not you and I'm above you,
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Right.
Yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
and the slave relationship.
It's no wonder that You know, our
modern narratives are still infused
with this terminology, right?
And so I'll stop rambling there, but
it's an it's it's really a question
of what is actually natural farming?
That's the first question.
the second question is what if
the cows through actually allowing
them to be bovines, were to tell
us the answer to that question.
Not a scientist, not a regenerative
agricultural conference, God forbid, not a
keynote at one of those conferences from,
Daniel Firth Griffith, but like, the cow.
Like, what if we actually
acknowledged the animacy and
wisdom and life force of the cow?
What would happen?
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Daniel, I
think those are all great questions.
I was talking to Eli Mack a while back
and I told him whenever I talk to you, I
leave the conversation with more questions
than answers, which is a good thing.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
by the way.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139:
Yeah, Eli is wonderful.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Yes.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: As you talk
about releasing that control to your
cows, just to get it down to your
practice, do you move your cows or do
you confine your cows to any part of
your wildland or do they have access
to the whole wildland at all times?
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Yeah, brilliant question.
So in the book, it's really important
to, I mentioned earlier that this
is so rooted in this understanding
of acknowledgement, right?
In order to have a conversation
with you, I have to acknowledge
you for who you are, right?
And if I see you as an inanimate object,
we're not going to be able to conversate.
I have to recognize and acknowledge
your animosity to do so.
And part of this acknowledgement
is also to acknowledge that which
we are not able to currently, I
don't want to say acknowledge, but
we're not able to currently change.
Okay, property boundaries and individual
land ownership is one of these structures
that unfortunately we can't change today.
we can.
our great grandchildren can find a
way to become much more communal.
for this to occur, but it is
not or inhabiting our day.
So animals, they need to
be able to migrate, period.
And because of property
boundaries, they can't.
And so there still is some false
structures in our, quote unquote,
concentric rewilding system
here at the Wildland Project
that we can't get away from.
day, I hope we can.
But that's one of the things
that we have to understand.
We have to acknowledge the place
in which we can't yet attend.
communal land ownership, or just
communal lands, no ownership at all.
And so what we do here at the wildland
is the cows have, maybe 75 to 120 acres.
At their disposal at any time.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, okay.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
or 4 blocks here in the 400
acres that we, call the wildland.
And during that period, what you'll
see, in watering sources, and creeks,
and ponds, and wetlands, all of
these things are very important.
Because if their watering source,
let's say an 120 acre pasture, is in
one area, You're not going to see them
grazing, quote unquote, naturally.
They're just gonna be hanging out
at the water source on the one
And so, we've over the last decade, we've
built, a network of many ponds and spread
out the waters and tap some springs and,
there's watering sources everywhere.
And so that's been critical.
But it's so, it's unbelievable.
You turn them out to this, so once
every couple of months we move the
animals right to the next paddock,
the paddock is a hundred acres, let's
say, and when they get there they
immediately fan out just a little bit.
And you see these family units starting,
like right now, if you were to come
over to the wild and we go out to where
the cows are, they're on block three.
I think it's about 105 acres.
It's a clear cut that we actually burned,
did a prescribed burn on this spring.
I wish
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, okay.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
I'll send you a picture after
this, and if you want to it
can do it.
It's ridiculously cool looking just to
see life returning after it was clear cut.
And then grazed for seven years, and
then burned, and now grazed again.
It's a truly emergent landscape,
a landscape that is speaking
and speaking very loudly.
But what you'll see is they form
into these little family units.
just this morning, there
was a cow named Lena.
Her mother is Lynette, one of
the matriarchs in the herd.
And Lena we call Auntie.
Because maybe we have 10 calves on
the ground right now in the herd.
There's about a hundred cows
and we always are ebbing.
Our main income source
is selling starter herds.
So we'll take an entire family
unit of our herd and sell that
off to us as a starter herd, to a
whatever.
Lena, so maybe we have 10 cows,
calves that have been born in
the last month or two here.
And Lena, we call auntie
because it is so interesting.
They have a hundred and.
Let's say 10, whatever it is,
acres, and it's undulating.
You can't see, it's just, it undulates
up and down by three, four hundred feet.
It's an unbelievably
mountainous topography.
And you'll see the moms of these calves,
they'll spread out, and they'll drift
off maybe a hundred yards in a group.
Not a tight group, not a
competitive group, but in a
These are
Many of the cows in our herd are
sisters from this original matriarch.
The matriarchy in the herd
is first and foremost.
what you'll see is all of the calves
hang out in a group with Lina, their
auntie, who has never had a calf.
This morning she actually had a calf.
She was nursing the calf while watching
about 10 other calves around her.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
formed these really cool
family units, that we would
recognize as human family units.
what you see when you see this enough,
we start to realize, I should say, is
that these are not human family units,
they're just life's family units.
And you realize that when I say our
relations, Or our cousins, it's not a turn
of phrase, it's not some philosophical
way to describe something, that we want
to believe in, or we feel like it's utopic
to believe in, but it's actually there.
These family units govern
the operation of the herd.
And and then you'll be driving, a four
wheeler, or we have horses, you'll
be riding the horse, or whatever it
is and you'll see this little pocket
of cows over here, and then over
here, and over here, and they're
all in a sight line of each other.
They're all in one herd, but they're
broken out into individual family
families, right?
And then when they move, like in
the evening, go up to one of the
ridge lines, they'll all be there.
The entire herd laying down, chewing
cud, in a good observational deck, if
you will, on this, on these ridge lines.
in the morning, you'll find them
down in the valleys, again, spread
out, but still in the family units
that can all, see each other.
And over the years we've documented,
every day we'll go out and we'll
place a flag where we saw the morning
herd and the evening herd, maybe an
afternoon herd, the concentrations,
the heavy hitters over there.
So we know
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Because the idea here, you're
listening to this and you're like,
Oh my God, he's just overgrazing,
the hell out of his landscape.
And we were worried
about these things too.
Overgrazing, to be very clear, we have
to understand this ecologically to really
understand the way concentric rewilding
and these adaptive landscape genomics
inhabit that concentric landscape.
Overgrazing is a very easy thing to
understand, a very hard thing to manage.
Overgrazing occurs when an
animal takes a bite of a plant,
that plant starts to recover.
So, ecologically, from a biological
perspective or ecological perspective,
when a plant begins to recover or regrow,
it doesn't have the photosynthetic
panels, it's leaves, if you will,
in order to feed that regrowth.
And so it grows from what we call
crown energy or root reserves.
Different people call it different things.
going to call it crown energy for now.
And so as the plant is recovering or
regrowing from that crown energy, it's
growing from a finite savings account.
so if an animal were to come in
and defoliate the plant, halfway
through it's growing, while still
re, recovering or regrowing from that
savings account, that crown energy
gets depleted, And this repeated
again, it depletes the crown energy.
So when you're driving around a rural
landscape, Or purchase a new farm and the
grass is really short, or you're driving
around and grass that's really short.
It's not short because
the cows just grazed it.
It's short because it has no crown
energy to recover or to regrow.
And so cows in an open setting, we
know this, we've been taught this.
All of the books and all of the
conferences and a lot of the podcasts,
they talk about cows in an open grazing
situation are going to overgraze plants.
Because they're going to find their
favorites, they're going to devour their
favorites, they're going to wait for their
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: right.
Yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
going to devour their favorites again.
And my response to this, as in
stag time is that only humans are
destroying the world right now, right?
When we look at a tree, we don't say
that damn fool is destroying the world.
When we look at, a deer,
to some large degree, we're
still not saying these things.
When we look at the elk, or the
mountain lion, or the black bear,
or the dung beetles, and everything,
it's like, we don't believe that any
other thing, or perhaps we would say
life, any other life is destroying
the world but domesticated animals.
Why?
We didn't create these animals.
We trained these animals.
Humans destroy the world, not just
through chemical pollution and erosion
and bad decisions and everything else.
Civilization as a whole and
maybe industrial capitalism and
greed and all these other things.
We also are destroying the world
by creating little humanoids.
The way that a cow grazes the landscape
is the way that the human grazes
the landscape around us as well.
An animal that is
actually self medicating.
It has a pallet to place feedback loop.
That's an entire section in the book.
Developing and understanding how this
pallet From a stability perspective,
from a longevity perspective, from
a family perspective, no animal
ever perceived living in a truly
natural environment is going to
destroy its environment on purpose.
Because it understands.
Unlike you and I, they don't
live in air conditioning.
don't have savings
don't have mortgages or health
insurance or technology or microphones
or podcasts or schedules or time.
They don't have clocks.
they do every day is live.
and that life is dependent
upon food to some large degree.
Water,
happiness, feelings, energies,
communication, all these other things
too, but food is vitally important.
So why would an animal that's
entirely dependent upon finding its
food locally destroy its local food?
That makes no sense.
That's what humans do.
Humans are very good in the modern
And so it doesn't surprise me
that little humanoids, call them
domesticated cows, highly domesticated
cows, are destroying the world.
So it's not cows that are the problem.
It's not even humans management
of cows that are the problem.
It's the humanoids that we've turned
cows into that are the problem.
And so allowing these animals to develop
this palate to place connection, this
adaptive landscape genomic that is
through the mate hierarchy, through
developing this understanding of what
do I need, and where can I find that?
How much of it do I need and
how much of it do I understand?
I'm getting when I find it.
In an open, free, autonomous, and
wild situation, what you don't see
is animals returning back to the
place where we put the flag, where
they grazed and re grazing it.
They don't come
left them in areas, a hundred,
maybe a hundred, 120 of cattle.
We've left in a hundred acre
field for four, four and a half
months, whatever it's been.
And we have flags all
over it, whatever it is.
Bandannas and trees or whatever,
however we're marking these areas.
And they're not ever coming back there.
We set up wildlife cams, like, are they
coming back when we're not seeing it?
No.
They graze it, and they understand
that until it recovers, why
would they want to re graze it?
It doesn't have the nutrients
they need until it's recovered.
But also, they understand thinking
for future, dreaming for the future.
if they were to harvest this
plant too much, it would kill it.
Right?
Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about
the honorable harvest, asking
permission before you harvest.
Animals are very good at this,
humans, the mammal that we are, but
the mammal that we're running away
from, we're not so good at this.
And so to some large degree the
phenotypic plasticity, the ability for
these animals, these cows, goats and
sheep, we've done this with as well.
They all live here.
I talk about cows because they're easy and
it's just easy to focus on one species.
But their ability to
select what they need.
is also, if it is honorable, meaning not
just in our intentions, while we still
put them in polywire, but it's actual
they're able to truly understand over the
long period of time, through generations,
what they need, where that is in the
landscape, how much of it do they need,
they're not going to overgraze that,
because they need it, in the truest sense.
and it's not just, philosophical.
I can give you 10 years worth of science
and data and, Fred Provenza supporting it
and Stefan van Villet at the Utah State
or University of Utah, whatever that is.
It's truly interesting that this
releasing of control and by the way
I'm rambling now and I'm going to stop
after this and you can the conversation.
But when I wrote Wild Like Flowers
back in 2021, the response,
like I said, was overwhelming.
We had the original publishers thought it
was gonna be a great book and they were
gonna sell 1, 000 copies and we sold like
20, 000 copies the first year or whatever.
Like, it just totally went off
the charts in terms of like, a
regenerative book on short stories.
This wasn't some, J.
What's JK Rowling's novel or
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: right?
Yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
It in its category It did very
well, but it was just philosophy It
was just these marvelous stories.
stag time is trying to
get to is saying no.
The stories are marvelous.
They are entirely philosophical as
you, there's plenty of philosophy
and archeology and archeobotany
and stories and novels and
mythology and the Celtic tradition.
Like there's tons of other things
in the book, but it's working.
And when I say it's working,
let me be very clear about this.
So much of our understanding
of agriculture is or failure
comes down to science.
comes down to science.
And what I often tell people, I'm
notorious around this fine world
of ours, as the guy who doesn't
believe soil health matters.
And I set myself up for that.
I created a video that went viral a couple
years ago that soil health doesn't matter.
And what I was trying to say is that
everything else matters equally.
And it's true.
But looking at soil health, it's
very important to realize we are so
petrified of releasing control over
the animals to allow our animals to
be what they naturally are because
we might not build soil health.
not see biodiversity increasing.
The scientists might tell might
tell us that it's not working,
that we're not sequestering carbon.
We're not producing nutrient rich
soil, producing nutrient dense
beef for our local consumer.
Like, we're petrified of
failing scientifically.
But what we have to realize is, now
listen, I bring up this guy's name.
I'm dear friends with him.
He knows I say this, I, yeah,
I can call him right now.
And it's like, want to say I honor
this person before I say this
because it might seem like I don't.
But like Gabe Brown soil.
He has been intensively regenerative
farming, planting way more hundreds
of thousands of dollars worth of cover
crops than I've ever seen in my life,
every single year over year, no till
drilling, and grazing, and doing all of
these, foliar sprays, and fertilization
techniques, and worm castings, like
intensive regenerative farming.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Now, I don't know his current
soil organic matter percentage.
But the last time I checked,
like, the most we have ever really
seen is about 8 to 12 percent.
And what we have to understand is that
8 to 12 percent, that percentage is
the most important characteristic.
As I said, we used to be a hub of the
Savory Institute, and we, I've traveled
all over the country doing soil tests,
and then, consulting in land designs, and
I probably have taken half a million soil
tests in my life, on projects and things.
We've managed 13, 000 acre projects to 13
acre projects and everything in between.
I'm a little bit facetious on
the half a million, but it's
probably not far from it.
what very few people often consider
is that the soil test is giving
you an organic matter percentage,
which has to then ask you, of what?
Percentage of what?
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Right.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
I told you, like, I got 100 percent
on my test, and you'd be like,
well, how many questions were there?
Well, there was one question.
Oh, okay, so you got one question right.
100 questions, Well, now that's
a little bit more impressive.
So the
matters as much as the percentage matters.
most soil tests are completed
about 6 to 8 inches in depth.
Some people go 30 centimeters.
What we have to realize is even Gabe
Brown's soil, I don't know the depth
he's working at, so let's just use
the top and then add some to it.
So let's say 10 inches.
Let's just go way too deep.
10 inches.
So that's 8 to 12 percent of
his soil at 10 inches deep.
Organic.
But when we think about the pre-industrial
pre colonization and pre really indigenous
genocide of the 14 hundreds of the Western
hemisphere or turtle island, we're talking
about two feet of soil organic matter.
our legacy is 24 inches
of soil organic matter.
Now, whether or not it was a hundred
percent or 90% of this matter, to
me, the point is that 24 inches of
basic, a hundred percent soil organic
matter is our legacy, and we're
patting ourselves on the back for
being 10% of the top eight inches.
This is laughable.
I was a math major in college, but I
can't do math this quick, but like,
we are percentages of percentages
back to where we need to be.
And
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, right, yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
this is after, 20, 30, 40 years of
intensive no till drilling, cover
cropping, roller crimping, graze.
Like, we are so far from being back to
where it was just a handful of years ago.
And I'm not saying that
to discourage anybody.
Like, Gabe knows me, I know Gabe, like,
keep going, Gabe, and if you're listening
to this and you're like, well, our
soil, we've brought it from 3 percent
to 7%, like, hallelujah, thank God,
blessings to you, I'm not putting you
is, that is to say, soil health, that
is one aspect of an infinitely complex,
infinitely massive hole that is Earth.
if we are earthlings, if we are
members of earth, that we don't have
relationship with earth, but we, like,
we are the relationship, like, we
don't harmonize, we are the harmony.
If that's true, then by caring for
soil health to the point that we're
afraid of letting the animals be
animals, and if we're, and if we're
gonna care for it that far down,
we're gonna be missing something.
Okay, and what we have to start to
consider is the soil matters as much
as the freedom and the autonomous
ability for the animals to adapt to
their local environment, to live in
their families, to not be weaned,
castrated and separated and sold off
like modern slaves if I can go that far.
That also has to matter.
The whole matters.
I've taught holistic management
for six, seven years now, and
still we're not getting it.
The whole matters.
And if the whole matters, we have to
understand that soil health is one
aspect of a greater whole and that
whole is so massive that soil health
is incomparable to everything else.
It's teeny tiny.
Now it matters.
It truly matters.
But the herd's autonomy matters.
And the herd's
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Right, yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
matters.
And deleting all of the competition in
favor of collaboration and community
and communion between these animals
and the pasture, that also matters.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Daniel, like
I said a while ago, you cause me to
have more questions than answers.
As I think about our animals and
what we're doing, you mentioned
there about soil health.
It can't be the only target or
we're focusing too much on that.
If we relate that to animal breeding and
we do single trait selection, we can make
progress on that single trait selection.
anytime we focus on something singularly,
we're Other things are getting hurt.
So
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
if those other things
are infinitely complex,
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: oh yeah,
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
you don't even know what they are,
and you will never even understand
the consciousness of a cow,
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: right.
Yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
process.
So how are you supposed to manage that?
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Yes.
Yeah.
So, so it raises some questions there.
I think an excellent discussion,
but it is time we move a little
bit further along the conversation.
And, for people that's interested
in this, and this is going to be a
subject of our overgrazing section.
You've got a book out there,
and our overgrazing section
is about that book, Stag Time.
And just tell us, we've mentioned it
throughout the conversation thus far.
But, tell us a little bit more about
the basis and what your goal is.
I know you have a couple more
books planned in the series.
Oh,
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
For the moment.
Snagged Tine is book one in what
we call the Wildland Chronicles.
two and book three are
currently being written.
We've also started playing with
the book four, only because
I had interest in writing it.
I might even write it before book
two, but neither here nor there, my
mind is often like this but stag time.
It's truly a transition.
It's a story, a tale of transition
from, 15 years of regenerative farming,
we started arriving to the questions,
acknowledging the questions of this
concentric rewilding, opportunity.
Now, let me be very clear.
I do not use this term rewilding lightly.
I do not like rewilding.
I am not a fan of rewilding.
I don't subscribe to
rewilding magazine in the UK.
I don't have any friends in
the UK that are wilders or
whatever you want to call them.
I don't subscribe to the idea.
of erecting 10 foot tall game fences
around private landscapes, kicking
off all of the humans, deporting all
of the invasive species, buying the
native species and hauling them in.
I often joke that rewilding projects
are like moving companies, right?
They come in, they move the humans
out, the invasives out, they buy
the natives and they bring them in.
Like, so for instance, there's this
book in rewilding that's huge right
now that it's all about beavers.
And I kid you not that the author of
the book, who is the lead director of
this rewilding project, they bought
a river, bought beavers, they moved
the beavers in a livestock trailer
to the river, they put a fence around
it, and they call it a success.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
company, right?
And the idea is, just like I was talking
about families, and I often use this
as a metaphor, but if I were to get
a hundred humans in a room, would be
a community, but you're not a family.
A
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Right.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
hundred random humans.
rewilding to some large degree.
Green agriculture, whatever you want to
call it, to some degree is that, Let's
just go take 100 random bovines, put
them in a herd and call them a herd.
If I use humans in the word family,
it doesn't make sense to you.
But if I say cows and herds, it does.
And that's the problem.
We don't see ourselves as nature.
When you start to update that language,
that linguistic connection, that
animacy, that grammar of animacy
that Robin Wall Kemmerer talks about.
All of a sudden you have a lot more
questions, like you do, and so I'm really
happy that you're moving this conversation
through it as you are, because what stag
tying doesn't do is give answers, and
a lot of people were upset about this.
We actually had to self publish the
book for two reasons, the first of
which is none of the publishers who
wanted who were interested in the
book wanted it to contain stories.
They didn't want the
there, which by the way are my favorite
part, so screw those people, we self
second side, they wanted it to come
down to prescriptions, like tell people
This, I'm willing to enlighten you to the
questions to ask, if you listen to this
conversation and you have thoughts on what
to do, but no questions, I did it wrong.
I believe I did it wrong.
And if you read this book and you
have actual answers to questions
that you came to the book with, you
have no new questions And you're not
humbled, and you think that humans
are ready to rise up and save the day.
I failed again.
Right?
And so what Stagtine is, the first book
in this trilogy, or maybe that's a series
and there's four books, I don't know.
We'll know
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Yeah,
you'll have to change that.
It's not a trilogy if you
add that fourth book, so.
Oh, there you go.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
It's just detailing the
questions we were asking.
the story where those
questions actually inhabit.
So that you can come into this
questioning with us, right, in the
story, and then provide some science
that helps us understand the nature
of the question, not the answer.
That's really foundationally key.
I'm not here to give you the answer.
Science has no answers to give.
Science is a question asking modality.
It is nothing else.
If it does anything, it
establishes a law that then
quickly becomes a hypothesis again.
That's the point.
I'll never forget this,
it changed my life.
He was asked in 1945 or 1946, he said,
the reporter said, listen, the hydrogen
bomb or the atomic bomb that landed in
Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of
World War II, to some degree that was
a product, the science that allowed
that bomb to exist was a product of
your work, of every general, quantum
theories and relative theories and things.
What do you think?
And he said, if I were to go back all on
it again, I would ditch all of my work so
that the hydrogen bomb was never created.
The answer isn't the
it's the question.
Science, to some large degree, in
that situation I'm not saying I'm
for or against the hydrogen bomb.
There's a whole other conversation that's
much larger than concentric rewilding.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: right,
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
is, science is often confused
as an answer giving median.
It's not, right?
It's a question asking modality, and so
science and story, they are convivial
in this way, and made convivial as such.
There's a lot of questions that aren't
answered, but raised in stag time.
Cliffhawk, the next book book two,
or maybe book three, we'll see what
happens soon, to some large degree
is going to be a very similar story.
Science and story are convivial within
the text, but you start to see some of
the outcomes, and they're not answers.
very important.
They're not answers, but
they're outcomes, right?
So, for instance, one of the things
that we start to discuss in, in,
in Cliffhawk that I'll, provide as
a sneak peek for your listeners,
this idea of calling, right?
Predators still surround herds of prey.
don't negate this.
I negate the idea that predators are
pushing prey animals naturally in nature
into mobbing, mowing, and moving units.
That doesn't make any sense.
For instance, just to provide a
little bit of founding to this,
the Lakota, they laughed at me.
Talking to a dear friend of
mine, a Lakota, and I said,
what do you guys think?
Like, what's your mythology?
What's your history?
What's your worldview, your
wisdom, your place based knowledge,
traditional ecological knowledge, etc?
does it tell us?
and he said before, the Europeans
brought the horse back to Turtle
Island, or the American continent.
We used to hunt the bison by killing
a wolf, donning the wolf's clothing,
and then we would crawl on all fours
into a bison herd with the wolf's
clad, it's clothing all over us.
And we would be able to crawl so close
to a bison that we could spear its
underbelly with the tip of our spear.
But at the conferences,
we're told that, regenerative
farmers are the wolves, right?
That we
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: right, right.
We push them.
Yeah,
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
the indigenous, the actual holders
of earth's wisdom are telling us
the opposite, that the only way that
they can actually hunt the bison
historically over the last, a hundred
thousand years or so is by dressing
up as wolves, because they're more
fearful of humans than predators.
right?
wolves.
And so there's an
interesting reality there.
But herd calling, it's something
that's very interesting
that we've witnessed here.
What is this relationship
between herds and predators?
I'm not going to spill the beans
because it's still unwritten and I
don't want to take the time to truly
understand it before I, come out with it.
But there is a relationship there.
And it's a calling relationship.
C U L I N G.
It's a calling relationship.
And it seems to be purposeful,
directed, and autonomously
That the herd is actually deciding who
is consumed by predators and who is not.
And for the last maybe six or seven
years, we've worked with a plethora
of local scientists from all around
the nation here in the United States,
to, to more, it's, I don't want to say
proof because that's not what it is,
but to truly demonstrate that this is a
decision making process that's happening.
It's not predation from a
competitive perspective, right?
So that's Cliffhawk,
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: right, yeah.
Well,
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
the last one is still unwritten and we
can talk about that in a couple of years.
Oh,
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139:
sounds good to me.
I'm already looking forward to Cliffhawk.
I really enjoyed Stagtime
and what it provided.
Daniel, it's time for us to
go ahead and wrap up today's
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Wonderful.
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cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: They are
the same four questions we ask of
all of our guests and you've already
answered them in episode 17, but
we don't let anybody off the hook.
We're gonna see if you,
we'll go through them again.
So our first question, what
is your favorite grazing grass
related book or resource?
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
That's good.
Mentioned it multiple times here, but
Fred Provenza's Nourishment was a pivotal
read for me when it first came out.
Pivotal.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
pivotal.
It was the moment in which I truly
started to play with the language.
With Fred too, because we
met about at that same time.
And to be clear, Fred wrote
the foreword to Stag Time.
I've brought up Fred multiple times.
Fred wrote the foreword to Stag Time.
And so our relationship emerged and
matured through this, the period
between him writing Nourishment
and me writing Stag Time.
But it was his work in that book
that truly started to educate
and open my eyes to questioning
if animals are truly adapting to
landscape through their palates.
What are we doing as regenerative
farmers by restricting that
palate to place connection,
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
So that's probably my
favorite book in the space
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Well,
excellent resource there.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Yeah
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Our
second question, what is your
favorite tool for the farm?
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
The horse I hate to call a tool a horse.
I don't believe in the language
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
But recently, you know as you release
control you do a lot less moving of
things buckets minerals, whatever, right?
When an animal can get all the
magnesium it needs from a plantain
plant, it's phosphorus from a
pigweed or, spiny amaranth plant, you
just don't bring minerals anymore.
so, we purchased we sold some of
our machinery and we put, purchased
a couple of mountain bikes.
We rode those for a really long time.
We still do.
So every morning when we do chores,
it's just on mountain bikes.
Cause
degree, I'm just going out there to say,
hello, I'm not really doing anything else.
bring them anything.
And and then recently in the last
year, we started, uh, breeding
and nurturing our human to equine
relationship with seven, seven mares.
And we'll slowly be even, eradicating the
metal mountain bikes from our process.
So I hate to call a tool, a horse, a tool.
But to some degree, they're my locomotion.
We do
logging, my wife and I, we
build a hand hewn Log cabins
through horses and other things.
And so to some degree I have
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, very good.
Thirdly, what would you tell
someone just getting started?
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
I would tell them number one I do not
believe that we can save the world.
if that is your view in getting
into this climate Healing or saving
regenerative movement question that if
you're uncomfortable with that question
why you're uncomfortable Why do you
believe as a human that we can save the
world or if we could save the world?
Why do you want to?
When you look around you and
industrialism and capitalistic greed and
colonialization and all of these things,
is that what you're trying to save?
Ask yourself those deeper questions.
But really, number two, um, I tell this
to everybody we're, next year we're
doing with a shared festival here at the
Wildlands with my friend Shaleta Zaney,
she's a Maori healer and practitioner of
verbalism in New Zealand, and we're doing
what we're gonna call the Tree Festival.
Well, you're gonna come and
you're just gonna talk to trees.
That's what we're gonna do and
we're gonna facilitate that.
It's wonderful.
It's so exciting to us.
But just ask yourself, how are
you acknowledging, with the
right intentions, your relations?
When you walk into the
forest, are you laughing?
When you see an herbivore or a cow, it
could be a browsing deer, you say hello?
And when you say hello, do you
say hello as a subservient being?
Or do you say hello as
somebody that's your equal?
And if you can't answer any
of these questions, you need
to be asking yourself why.
Why is your life so constructed
in the modern way, full of
industrialism and reductionism and
linearization and colonization?
maybe that's the point.
Maybe your mind is so
colonized that you can't stop.
And I'm getting really deep
here, and I don't mean to be.
But the point is, ask yourself why you
can't acknowledge your surroundings.
Ha
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh.
Excellent advice.
That's I'll be honest, Daniel,
that's a little different than the
usual advice we get given here,
but I think it's excellent advice.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
If I had to pick a different
one, I would say, slow down.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139:
Oh yeah, there you go.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Because even in the book, I write this,
but it's just like, you know how it
is, like, you'll be walking into public
space, and you'll see somebody that's
an acquaintance, or just a nice human
being that acknowledges your presence.
And they'll be like, hello!
And you'll be like, hello!
And you're like, hope you're staying busy!
Okay.
And I always say back, hope I'm not
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Right.
Yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
down.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: I, yes, exactly.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
by the way, I learned, and I'm sorry,
I'm just going to keep extending this.
the other day, if you follow behind a
tractor going 14 miles an hour, which
is about as fast as a tractor can
go on mountainous roads here in the
mid Atlantic, Appalachian mountains.
If you drive behind the tractor for two
miles, do you know how much time you're
going to lose on your morning commute?
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139:
Actually, I think it's funny.
I'm interested what the answer is, but
I think that's a funny question because
I think, because sometimes I drive too
fast, sometimes I don't, and sometimes
when I'm not driving so fast, I'm
always like, why are you passing me?
You're not gaining that much time.
You would have to travel so fast.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
You
in your day.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh yeah.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
And and you really probably
save somebody's life.
The number
tractor deaths on the
road, it's unbelievable.
It's some
dad or mom is in there,
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Right.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
or daughter, and it's
just like, slow down.
So if, throw all of the philosophical
stuff I threw at you about
acknowledgement, although I do
believe that is the true answer
to your question, that's not
working for you, just slow down.
And
component.
If you slow down, I guarantee part.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: And
lastly, Daniel, where can
others find out more about you?
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Absolutely.
Yeah, I mentioned earlier that we have
our own podcast and we like conversating
and and that's why I'd like to do this.
I just love talking to people
and podcasts, I think, are a
marvelous medium to do that.
But the one thing that I dislike about
podcasts is it's so often just me and
you, Cal, but nobody else is around us.
And I dislike that.
Like,
a live podcast down in Texas,
down in Austin, Texas, next month.
We threw a day's course, we're
doing a day's course in the field.
And then everybody gets to
participate in a live podcast.
Cause it's like,
dying for that.
More people, we need more people.
so what I always tell people is
like, regardless of your interest
in the subject, like come find us
my website, danielfirthgriffith.
com, which I'm sure you can put in the
show notes as a fine place to start.
Wildtimshull.
com.
is the Wildlands website, and it has
access to all of it, the book, etc.
Stag time purchasable anywhere
you get your books, you can buy
it directly from us, and I always
like to say, it's just, it's free.
So much more personal, but if you buy
it directly from us on wildtimshill.
com You'll pay less than if you went to
Amazon You'll get free shipping and we
make about three times more and I'll write
a cordial handwritten letter in the book
to you Because I like you now we have a
relationship And so if you go to either
one of those websites, you'll find us the
majority of our work right now online is
Being populated in our sub stack which is
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yes.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
substack.
com.
And if you went to my website, or Tim
Scholl's, the Wildlands website, you'll
get to Substack regardless, because
it just keeps sending people that way.
That is the majority of
where we're discussing.
And then our podcast, which has a
weekly episode, is called Unshod.
With D.
Firth Griffith, I think is the title.
But you can get that on our Substack,
or my website, or Tim Scholl's website.
So basically, any one of those is
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, very good.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Come be friends, though.
Like, it's the most important part to me.
Let's be friends.
Don't just listen to my voice
or even disagree with me.
Let's talk about it.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Discussions are always good.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Absolutely.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Well,
Daniel, we appreciate you coming
on and sharing with us today.
d--firth-griffith--me-_1_07-19-2024_130139:
Absolutely, Cal.
I really meant it when I said
it was a blessing and an honor.
It's been really fun for me.
cal_3_07-19-2024_120139: Wonderful.
Thank you.
Cal: I really hope you
enjoyed today's conversation.
I know I did.
Thank you for listening, and if you
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