Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the membership program and the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible, where we are certain, in fact, that if we all work together, and that means all of us human and more than human, we can still lay the foundations for a future that we would all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I am Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller, in this journey into possibility. And by now we know that we need to connect to the more than human world. We know that we need to grow into adulthood and elderhood. We know that we need to move from a trauma culture to an initiation culture. But knowing these things is not the same as living them as a reality. To get to this, we need way makers, people of huge heart and raw courage to walk away from the limited goal based directions of our culture and step into the ways of being where we meet in open hearted, full hearted, strong hearted relationship with the land and all that lives in it and on it and over it. This week's guest, Daniel Firth Griffith, is one of these way makers. With his wife Morgan and their three children, Daniel lives on 400 acres on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains, where he is steadily building relationship with the land.
Manda: He lives amongst cattle, sheep, goats and horses. The latter used for logging on land that was scheduled to be clear cut when Daniel and Morgan first moved there. And since then, with a growing understanding that even the forms of agriculture we term regenerative are still a part of what I would call the trauma culture. Daniel and Morgan have been on a steady journey of transition through to something that feels to me, entirely different. And this is what we need to be, you and me. It's not clear cut. There isn't a hard and fast recipe because every bit of land is different and each of us is different, and the routes to connection are unique, up to a point. Because there are baselines we can learn. We can be human. We can find out what it means for each of us when human is not simply being a wheel in an extractive system. So Daniel is an exemplar of this. He and I had a really long conversation. We stopped at about 90 minutes in and restarted. So you can listen to it in two parts. You can go away and have a break in the middle and come back. Because we go down a lot of rabbit holes.
Manda: We tell stories, or at least Daniel tells big, deep, tear flowing, heart searing stories that made both of us weep. Because stories are how we learn. We are a storied species. Stories are what get into us, into the fibre of our being, and give us the route maps that we too can walk. And stories are how elders have taught for generations upon generations, all the way back up the ancestral lines till we created language and probably before. So this conversation, listening to Daniel, felt like sitting at the feet of an indigenous elder. And the fact that this can happen in 2025, listening to someone of white ancestry who lives on lands stolen by colonialists, and knows it, and has a lot of friends amongst the indigenous people. This is what gives me hope. We cannot undo our past, but we can grow into what the future needs us to be. And Daniel and Morgan and their children and those who visit them are doing exactly this. And now you can be a part of it. So here we go for the first part of this conversation. People of the podcast, please welcome Daniel Firth Griffith and all of the land around him.
Manda: Daniel, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you?
Daniel: Manda, it's a blessing to sit with you. I'm excited to yarn and converse and dialogue. I've been looking forward to this for quite a period of time. I've been a big fan of the Accidental Gods podcast and reached out to you last year or maybe two years ago. And since then we've, or at least I think we've become great friends. I hope you share these thoughts.
Manda: I definitely do.
Daniel: I am in Wingina, County Nelson, Virginia, east coast of Turtle Island. The past, present and future home of the Saponi and Monacan nations. It's a beautiful rolling land of river vales and mountain streams and ancient, tired old Appalachia mountains that are as mystical and mythic as they are, I think, beautiful.
Manda: And tell us a little bit about the farm that you work there, because that's one of the very many exciting things about you, is that you're doing some quite leading edge stuff here. But we'll get to that later. Just tell us about the geography of the farm.
Daniel: Absolutely. So we, my wife and I and our three children, we run or cohabitate, I think we would like to say, a 400 acre wildland. It's to some large degree, and we can converse about these things later, but a fine intermixing. A fine conglomerate between maybe the modern view of regenerative agriculture, in the sense that we're using domesticated livestock to accomplish some end. And sometimes it doesn't feel like that end is material at all. It's actually relational or spiritual, if you will. But there's domesticated livestock involved. And then on the other side, you have this relational conservationism is a term that's been used, rewilding, especially in the UK, has really taken form, even in the more northern states of Europe. And rewilding is a wonderful thing. And I don't mean to, in this conversation, put preference on either the modern regenerative agriculture movement or the modern conservation or rewilding movement, or to take away from either of these. But we found that, I don't want to say right down the lukewarm centre, but right in the very turbulent, chaotic middle ground, is where we've found home. And so we raise, oh boy, sheep and goats, cattle, horses. We breed and train draft horses for horse loggers. Which is a whole other conversation that is exhilarating and also petrifying. It's a whole new thing, to work with animals in the woods, while still trying to exist within any sort of capitalistic framework.
Daniel: So you run into walls and I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing, but the walls are there and they have to be acknowledged. And so that's what we're doing, is acknowledging those walls. And then we have gardens. And this isn't often considered in any sort of farming or agricultural conversation, but we do a lot of foraging. So my work as an ecologist over the past 7 or 8 years has been heavy into the side of foraging and eco literacy and such. And so my family and I, we consume a lot of meat because it's free, because we do it already. And it's there and we are butchers and processors and a lot of our life is training butchery. I mean, we train all sorts of organisations; we train the USDA, we train backyard butchers, we do a lot of field harvesting and animal fibre processing and butchery work. We do a lot of that sort of education, so that that's there in our in our diets. But we also spend a lot of time foraging. I bet half of our diet at this point is wild foraged foods, mushrooms, herbs, I mean all sorts of things; berries and nuts and fruits etc. So we also focus on that as well. I wouldn't say we farm that, but we like to exist, like I said, in that chaotic middle ground between participating in it, but not cultivating it.
Manda: Beautiful. And this opens many doorways. So tell us a little bit about how you came to be on these 400 acres, with the alignment to be in this turbulent middle ground. Because on either side of what we would either call the rewilding or actually there's many sides; there's rewilding and regen ag and industrial ag and maybe permaculture and organic somewhere there. And it's very easy to get caught in tribal spaces where our tribe hates all the other tribes and I have to cling to my talking points because they are my identity. And you have chosen to be in the turbulent middle ground of all of this. How did you, Daniel, get to that?
Daniel: Brilliant question. We can do many podcasts on my story, and I don't want to do that, but I think it's important to mention. And so I'll give you a glimpse of the thing. 15 years ago, I was diagnosed with a number of health concerns that at the time, and still today, I guess. but at the time just staying alive was good enough, you know? They were quite serious. And for about 3 or 4 years, I travelled the world. My mom and I had many serious surgeries and many setbacks from surgeries, and lost ability to walk for a while. And then lived at the Cleveland Clinic up in Northeast Ohio and relearned to walk for a while. And that was all well and fun and good and we made progress and also lost any sort of progress we made. But it was active and we felt good about trying to actively save my life in some sense. And I had never considered agriculture or food up until this point. I was a computer science and mathematics major in college, and then I triple majored in history too, because I liked to read; history was always very interesting to me, and so I liked to read history. And so that's that's what I was doing in college. In 2013, I was very interested in being an archaeologist, which I don't know where this conversation goes as we move forward here over the next hour or whatever it is.
Daniel: But I've not left the field of field of archaeology behind me. But I lived in the Dordogne valley of France and was able to partner with an organisation, an institute. It's a biomedical engineering or something like this, masters or graduate program over there in France. And we were studying ancient Palaeolithic man and art at Lascaux and all these ancient places. Anyway, that was my life. That's where I was focussed. I was highly athletic; national champion in wrestling and Division one football player and everything else. And that was what life looked like. And then the illnesses happened and the surgeries and the lacking the ability to be mobile and walk. And all of that happened next. And long story short, we turned to food as really our last option. I mean, we had more or less tried everything else, and I was in a pretty static state at that period in our life, again, whenever it was, so many years ago. My weight was fluctuating back and forth between 80lbs or so. So like in January, I'll be 200lbs and in March I would be 120lbs, and then I would gain those 80lbs back.
Daniel: But it was a pretty static state. Like, that's actually like the better part of my whole story. You know, when we turned to food we saw a modicum of health return, and then we started to turn to local food because we started to realise that local foods that are fresh and more connected to our eco tone, although I would not have used that terminology or language back then, were even more healing. And then we started to fall in love with the farmers producing that local food. And then we started to work for the local farmers. And then in that environment, in the open air, away from technology and computers and everything that is commercial. I was gonna say commercial capitalism, but everything that is an offspring of commercial capitalism. This techno social utopia of today, or maybe dystopia, depending on maybe your view of the thing. Just getting away from all of that was healing. And we started to fall in love with farming and at the time, my wife and I, we were volunteering, apprenticing really at a pretty large scale regenerative, rotationally grazed cattle farm. Cow calf operation, so they were breeding the cows and raising them out and either consuming them locally, that is to say, processing for meat production or selling them for breeding stock or whatever was going on.
Daniel: And we fell in love with cows and we absolutely fell in love with the thing. Health started to return. And so after a period of years there, we started to look for land. And where we were in Northeast Ohio land pricing is is absolutely ridiculous. I always joke that in high school, if it was sunny you got school cancelled, because it was never sunny. Whereas in a lot of other areas of the world, like when the weather is bad, you get school cancelled. Ohio is a horrible place to live in my opinion. I'm sorry, I can't not just bash Ohio, but it's interesting that people want to live there and land prices are so expensive. And so we started to look outside of our region and we found this place. It was basically at auction. It was set to be clear cut, which decreases land value by an outrageous sum. It was neglected for the last 20 years, there was a lot of problems with it, but we were able to come in at about one third the property price. We had to close in about a week and a half, two weeks, and we did and the rest has been history. So that's what brought us to Wingina and this land.
Manda: Okay. And again, the amazing thing about talking to you, Daniel, is how many doors you open. I would like to go down a particular path, partly because we talked recently on the podcast with Erin Martin of FreshRx in Oklahoma, and they were sourcing food for boxes that would then be prescribed by the GP's for people with chronic diabetes. And they were seeing people going from 13.8 (and 14 is basically you're dead) to 6.9 inside three months, just because they started eating properly. Eating actual food instead of ultra processed food. I'm guessing you were never eating the ultra processed food even when you got sick, but did you ascribe a significant amount of your capacity to heal, because you are now out walking on the land, you can walk. I'm looking at you and you look healthy to me. Do you ascribe that to shifting your diet? And if so, do you know what bits of the diet mattered?
Daniel: Yeah, good question. I think so we do. Yes. There's a lot there. And so I'm deciding on what to focus really. You know, there's a lot of conversation about what you eat matters. And I think that is absolutely clear. Absolutely what you eat matters. What you put in your body, both spiritually, mentally, relationally, but also nutritionally, if you will, from the physical perspective. The matter of all of these other vibrations and substances that you put in your body, all these things matter. And then, I don't know, maybe ten years ago, in the global food movement of like hey maybe we should be eating actual whole foods. You started to see these taglines come up of what your food eats matters; that it's not just the carrot, but what is the soil that is actually associating itself with that carrot that matters. And I think that's also very true. And there's a whole nother rabbit hole you can go down. And that's rabbit hole we have gone down, to some degree maybe the first half of my wife and I's full time professional farming life was down that mainstream, regenerative, holistically managed type pathway that's very popular today, especially in the United States. We used to be a hub, an educational hub and a resource centre of the Savoury Institute, a global organisation teaching regenerative agriculture and holistic management and everything else.
Manda: Can I interject there, just for people who may have come to the podcast recently. Because we did talk to David Montgomery and Anne Buckley, who wrote What Your Food Ate, the book, but that was 18 months ago. So just for people who are coming new, can you just outline, because regenerative AG still feels to many people like cutting edge and yet you've moved beyond it. But let's take a step back and just define the parameters of regen AG, what it does differently to industrial, so that people are up to speed.
Daniel: Yeah. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. So to some large degree the chemical fertiliser based upon fossil fuel industry began really during the World War two era, a little bit before or a little bit after. And at that time, it was the exploration of trying to, and I don't necessarily use this word negatively, although it feels horrible coming out of my mouth; we were trying to push the amount of food upward and onward that one could yield from a particular plot of land. And it's really hard for me to talk about that era, because I think, looking back, it's very easy for us to say what a bad idea. I think looking forward, looking at generations and the I think it's 87 million people died in World War two. It's hard to be in that time and not want to increase the production, the carrying capacity of the land.
Manda: I think there is also, and you may know differently, but particularly towards the end of the war, there were the big companies that had been selling explosives and nerve gas, and they changed them very slightly and they became fertilisers and pesticides, and they created a new market. When I was doing the research for A Treachery of Spies, World War Two S O E in France, I found some books that were basically diaries of that time. And somebody would parachute in from Britain. S O E come in to help fight the fight, and there would be kids in the group that had come to meet them and bring them in and hide them before anybody adverse saw them. And the question the kids were asking was, we've been told that you've got stuff you can spread on the land that smells nice and makes things grow, is it true? You think of all the things that you could have asked someone who's just literally dropped out of the sky to come and help you fight a war, that was the one that mattered to the kids. So it was happening before the end of the war, but I think it really kicked off at the end of the war because there was a narrative to be made that was not necessarily true, that you need this stuff to be able to grow more food. And actually, what it meant was we needed a market to continue to make a lot of money.
Daniel: Yeah. And what you see from that is there's two perspectives. And these two perspectives are still ill defined in the conversations happening around agriculture today. Doesn't matter what space you occupy. I keynoted the USDA's annual conference this past spring up in DC, which is a very strange thing. I mean, it was the strangest moment of my life. And still, even in those conversations, it's still being ill defined. You have the market and you have the farmer, and the farmer doesn't understand the market. And I'm not saying that farmers don't understand market pricing, we do. This is what we live in. We live in the Friday sale sheets.
Manda: Yeah, but the market is a behemoth all on its own. It is the super organism.
Daniel: And we don't we don't see these things. But for the moment to be very simplistic and universal, the farmers, the 'we' in that, what we see is this helps you grow bigger animals. This helps you grow more corn, this helps your family make a little bit more money, etc.. Right? Whereas the market, the people producing these fossil fuel based chemical fertilisers, they're trying to offload resources. They're trying to create a new capitalistic market to exploit the X, Y and Z. Anyway, so it's two different perspectives. And I obviously take the farmers perspective, which is that we spend four years raising a cow and we make less money than the USDA does off of that sale. By particularly large numbers, many multipliers less than the USDA does from the sale of that. And so if you were to tell me, Daniel, you can make $100 extra a cow, and if I didn't have the science and the social media and the Google and everything else, as a farmer I don't know how I would have behaved in the 1920s, 1930s.
Manda: Can we just unpick those numbers a bit? So when you're saying US, do you mean you rearing the way that you rear, which I'm guessing is pasture fed, outside all year round, all of the things that even here, the kind of pasture fed movement is at the leading edge of the regenerative movement. And USDA is we're just going to keep it inside and stuff it full of corn that someone else has grown. And one of the catchphrases that gets bandied around the regenerative movement over here is turnover is vanity, profit is sanity. And you go into the meeting and go, well, I made let's say £100,000 last year and you didn't; actually your turnover was £100,000, but £98,000 of that ended up being paid to the companies that own you. Whereas I made £50,000 last year but I kept it all, except for a tiny bit that I paid maybe for electricity and water.
Daniel: Yeah, there's levels of scale and just like every biosphere, every ecotone has a truly different view of ecology. Plants grow differently, different plants grow, etc. and you can take that for the next hour and a half if you like. I'll just leave you with those two quick thoughts. Just as ecology differs within every ecotone to some degree, even flirting with the understanding that there's no universal laws of biological nature. Like water effects plants differently in different regions. I don't necessarily want to get lost in the biology of the thing.
Manda: I don't know, let's get a bit biologic. Go on, go for it.
Daniel: Okay. So this gets a little bit into the animistic and kinship work that we do, which really separates us and makes us lose some of our friends in the more mainstream, regenerative side. But, to make a long story short, in order for a plant to grow, it needs food. And so a lot of the laypeople and even a lot of farmers, it doesn't matter really, but to a large degree, we see the soil as the food giving organism to these plants. The plants grow in the soil, they get the food from the soil, etc. They photosynthesise, that's pretty cool, right? So when a plant photosynthesises, it takes oxygen and carbon and all these other items out of the atmosphere. And it takes in solar radiation and it creates a glucose molecule to carbon packet through photosynthesis, which we all learned, at some point of our school years to some minor degree. And then it takes that carbon packet and puts it into the soil. That's carbon sequestration, if you've heard that word, that's what's going on. Plants photosynthesise they create carbon, which is glucose, and they put it into the soil. But then they have to trade the glucose molecules with other living animate organisms. Those living animate organisms we have found scientifically, but you could have just asked your indigenous neighbour, they would have told you the same thing.
Daniel: They don't have to trade with that plant. And we're actually finding that just like Patty Krawec, an Anishinaabe woman, So this is indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes region of central North America; she talks about this indigenous worldview of becoming kin. She wrote a book. It's literally titled Becoming Kin, it's a marvellous book. But the same thing has to extend into the relationships of soil based feeding in vegetation and plants. When a plant photosynthesises, it creates a carbon packet, as I've mentioned. It then trades it with soil organisms, so for instance, fungi, mycorrhizal fungi, saprophytic fungi, two different options depending on if it's a forested biome or a grassland biome you're going to get different preferences of different fungi in that area. But the fungi don't have to trade. They literally can just say no, and then the plant starves and dies. So the plant has to become a good kin, and the fungi have to be a good kin to trade with the plant. Well, anyways, all of this happens and the fungi find the bacteria and they create this little team. I always call it team B&F when I teach courses. B&F bacteria and fungi swim around in the aqueous solution that is soil organic matter which is where really the plants roots are. It's called the rhizosphere.
Daniel: It's where so much life is happening. But they're swimming around with the carbon packets, just like you put a backpack on your back. They put the carbon packet basically on their backs. They're swimming around and they're trying to trade with other people. So we all have to be kin. This is marvellous. People call it the soil food web or in the woods Doctor Suzanne Simard has famously called it the wood wide web. Any way you want to see it, it's a connected, kinship based relational network. And then while team B&F, bacteria and fungi are swimming through the soil, predatory nematodes just come out and they just eat them. They eat the entire thing. The fungi and the carbon packet, the bacteria, whatever, and the carbon packet. And they digest it and when they digest it, they poop out. It's what happens, they poop out plant available calcium. Well, as a commercial farmer, really as any farmer, if my landscape after doing soil testing is deficient in calcium, I would go out, because that's what all of the agricultural agencies are going to tell me to do, and I'm going to buy calcium and I'm going to spread calcium on the field. Well, the problem is we then calcify the entire landscape because it's not actually uptaken. That's what we would call it in the field, uptaken by the plants. It just washes off.
Manda: It washes off and gets into the rivers.
Daniel: So this is how you get nitrate poisoning and everything else from excess nitrogen fertilisers and things. It's not actually being uptaken. Well, the problem is, I should say, the reason that it's not actually being uptaken is because that calcium, using my example in extending the analogy or extending the story, that calcium isn't nematode poop.
Manda: It's just bits of rock.
Daniel: It's just a mineralised rock, exactly. Powdered rock. And so in order to have a plant to be a healthy plant, that is to say, in order for it to have the calcium that it needs to grow, I need it to photosynthesise, I need it to live in the aqueous solution. That is to say, the water cycle and the mineral cycle have to have co-created a complex organism called organic soil. It has to live there. And then in there we need bacteria and fungi, all while the sun is still shining. And then we need all of that system to work together and to then be preyed upon, to be consumed by predatory nematodes that then eat all of it, like a lion eats a zebra, and pooping out plant available calcium. But then that plant available calcium needs to be picked up basically by fungi that haven't been eaten and brought back to the original roots. So all of these things have to happen. That's a universal story that I just told about a biological functioning. But let's pretend that the nematodes aren't hungry today. Do the plants have plant available calcium? Well, no they don't. What happens if there's not enough fungi? There's enough fungi for the plants to trade with but there's not enough fungi to pick up the nematode poop to bring it back to the plant. Now we have an imbalance, right? So the amount of kinship and relationship needed for soil health to be healthy, it compounds upon itself, it's highly complex. The language that we're utilising or really deploying to talk about these things is evolving. A lot of the time, you know, agriculture is seen to be very complicated, right? Like like a tractor manual, like a diesel engine is very complicated.
Manda: But linear: complicated not complex.
Daniel: But this system is so entirely complex that, you know, I've been to landscapes that should be healthy, that haven't been. And when you meditate and you do some sort of, which I'm just going to claim at this point as just our animistic type work, you realise the nematodes, they're there, but they're just not wanting to eat the fungi. There's a kinship problem there. And so that's how ecology differs in some sort of universal natural law sense to not seemingly be universal. In the sense that you have you have the sun, you have water, you have organic matter, you have plants, and yet nothing is healthy. There's a relationship there that's going to stand above this idea of biology, this idea about science. And so when you think about commercial farming and you see families that are not entirely making that much money. For instance, in the state of Virginia, the average farmer made $18,000 pre taxes in 2021. And by the way, that was uptick. That was that was an absolute uptick. $18,000. And that's the average.
Manda: That's about what Musk makes in a fraction of a second.
Daniel: Yeah a fraction of a second. A fraction of a second. And these are the people producing your food. Um, yeah. And so I see it from this perspective. You know, when I see farmers spreading commercial fertilisers, what I see them is trying to make a little bit more than 18 grand this year. And then you educate them and you open their eyes and you work with them and you partner with them, and you create relationships with them and supportive communities with them. And all of a sudden now their view changes, their opportunities exist in different ways. And to a large degree, that's a lot of what our work has been. But I see it from that perspective. Now that we've built that ark, I forget the reason we got into the origination of fossil fuel based chemical agriculture.
Manda: I asked you to define the difference between regen ag and industrial AG.
Daniel: Well, there you go.
Manda: So let me give it a go. Basically industrial AG is a lot of inputs on the land based on very linear thinking of: I've measured the soil, I decided it needs more carbon. Or because I can measure nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, in the war era 100 years ago, I was able to measure those so I decided that they were the things that mattered. So then I dump megatons, literally, of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium onto the soil without understanding every thing of the complexity and the wonder and the life that you've just described. Because I'm in the trauma culture, I've cut myself off. And then I don't understand why it all flows into the rivers and we have dead zones the size of Belgium in the place that was until very recently called the Gulf of Mexico.
Daniel: Yeah. Unintended consequences.
Manda: Yeah. And we have food that looks big. We have a tonnage of maize or wheat, and it looks big and glossy and it goes into the mills well, particularly wheat. We've engineered it so that we can grind it into very fine powder that we call flour. And its nutritional value is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what it was 100 years ago before we started this whole process. So what we have is people who have enough calorie intake and are actually nutrient deficient in almost everything else, and then they get type two diabetes. And one of Erin's highest rating was someone who lost 132lbs in three months Just by eating decent food. And Regen Age says, okay, we're not going to put inputs, we're actually going to work with the soil and try and grow food that has good nutrient density. Do you agree with that as my kind of framing?
Daniel: Those are the two mainstream stories exactly.
Manda: And for a lot of people, regen is not mainstream yet. I was just at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, which takes place in Oxford at the same time as the original Oxford Farming Conference. So the Oxford Farming Conference is industrial AG, the real farming conference is the regen people.
Daniel: I love that.
Manda: And actually we were given an entire day before the Real Farming Conference kicked off to do listening to the Land, which is the animist part, the animist Earth collective. And the UN Conscious Food Systems Alliance, (which exists!) got together and we did a whole day of animism. But what I would like is to know how you went from being on a cow and calf dairy, which is quite leading edge of let's actually be humane to our animals, let the cows stay on the cows, and yet we're still going to milk them a bit. And pasture fed and organic and regenerative and trying to heal the land. And yet, as you said, there's a gap. You go and meditate and you understand that we're still using head mind linear thinking and there's a stage yet to go. So I'd really be interested in how did you get to that? How did you get to this place? And then what is this place?
Daniel: I wrote a whole book on that transition, so if it's interesting, we can talk about that later.
Manda: Give us a title and then I will put it in the show notes.
Daniel: Beautiful. It's called Stagtine: Kincentric Rewilding, Science, & A Tale of Letting Go.
Manda: Yes. And it's gorgeous.
Daniel: I appreciate that. And the reason I bring that up, although if this is interesting to somebody, they now have a resource I guess; is just to say this is very complex, it's very large, it's about a 450, 500 page book. And I'm claiming it's only one of three. And I feel like it's it's still completely incomplete. It's a very large subject. Because to some degree, and I'll make this very simple for us to begin with, after being a full time farmer for over a decade now, I would step back and say that the two narratives that we've been pitched...Okay, so we have commercial agriculture, which is to some degree an input heavy and commercial, and I'll say chemically infused methodology, has been, as you so well described, set opposed to regenerative or permaculture or organic or holistic or adaptive. There's all these names that surround sustainable. Whatever. There's all these names, let's just call it regenerative for now. And regenerative agriculture has been to some degree marketed as the opposite, the antithesis to the conventional or commercial approach. I don't think that's actually true, and I realise I get quite in trouble about this. Like when I wrote stag and I had a lot of friends and now I have more friends, but they're not the same people. Like a lot of people left us. We were fired from the Savoury Institute, which had been our partners for the last five years because of some of the things that I said.
Daniel: And I believe them and I'll say them again and again and again, I believe them to be true. And it is interesting, I have more indigenous friends than I ever have. I've less white friends, and that's fine, you know, that's perfectly fine with me. I'm very comfortable there. And anyways, I'm getting a little bit lost in that but I want to substantiate that. This is new, this is my thought and I think it's entirely true but I think about it all the time. And so I'm open, I'm always open to considering these things in more depth. But I think most of the agriculture, if not all of the agriculture that we've seen to date, is a control based mechanism. It's not a perspective or story of control. It's just control. So for instance, and this is a little bit of a universal generalism; it's a little bit too opaque for my likes, but generally it pushes the point across. I make the claim that in 1920 we tried to optimise the amount of corn bushels per acre that we could harvest. Today we're trying to optimise how much carbon that same amount of land could sequester. So we're still pushing for more.
Daniel: We want the soil to be healthier, just like we want there to be more corn per acre. The story, the linear, conventional, very industrialist, very patriarchical story of produce, produce, produce, produce more food, produce better food, produce more healthy food. It is still humanity telling nature what to do. And that's a really big problem to me. It's a really big problem to me and I realise I'm going to lose, you know I hope I don't, I hope all of your listeners stay on, but I usually lose about half the audience at this point when I make the claim that I'm entirely sure that's fine. If soil doesn't become healthy from our modern, scientific and very linear understanding of what healthy soil is, that's fine with me, as long as it's what the soil decided to be. Now I realise in taking out agency over enough time, that living being has a decreased intelligence. That's domestication. What I'm saying is, Frederick Douglass, the emancipated or the runaway and then emancipated slave in the 1960s, brilliantly wrote that in education - I'm sorry, he had to go through two educations - the first of which was from a human to a slave, then the second of which was from a slave back to a human again. And this is the evil of slavery, that we take men, women, humans, we bring them into slavery, and they have to be re-educated back to be human again.
Daniel: We've taken that power, that agency, away from them. And agency so neglected over so much period of time is also very problematic. You can't just take a child that's eaten McDonald's their whole life, turn them into a pasture full of food and say, go wild, forage, you kid, and think that they're going to make the right decisions. That's really what I'm saying there. And well, anyways, the point is, with that nuance aside, because that's a whole other conversation to really be had and explored, what does it mean to give agency back to nature as the patriarchal master who took that agency to begin with, which is a very big subject. That's the 500 pages of of stagtine to some degree, it's the how do we emancipate ourselves and our livestock to just be wild again, which is why we call it kincentric rewilding. I love the term rewilding. Because there's nothing wild in this earth. If we are to define wild as something that has been nurtured and sustained in a matriarchal relationship over the land, without any sort of technological feudalism or oligarchy or mastery or patriarchy impacting it in any sort of deterministic way. Right? So that would be what wild is. I redefine wildness in the book as the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are.
Daniel: And there's many interesting studies. So, for instance, you're going to have to pull me back out of this one in about five minutes, I promise, because I will get lost in these thoughts. But it's so bloody interesting. There was a study done, and this has to do with what in the book I talk about as intergenerational or inter spatial linkages. So we understand in modern science through Rachel Bowers and doctor Uta from Stanford and so many others from the early 2000 on, that trauma is passed through genetics. So if your mother exposes or is exposed to PTSD like trauma in her life, the child is going to inherit that in a different way than if it's the father. And so it's mtDNA, mitochondrial DNA and then DNA, and it's going to look differently in different ways, and there's entire chapters dedicated to that in the book. But the interesting thing, and this is where the book really diverges from a lot of what's being written today, especially in agriculture. But there's inter-species linkages as well. So just as, let's say, feelings, emotions, that spirit that vibrational force of experience that you as a human body interact with, just as that can be passed through generations, that same force can be passed through other species through consumption.
Daniel: Now, it can be passed in other ways too but I'm only interested as a farmer in the consumption of it. And so anyways, there's this huge study that I got to participate in and really learned a lot from. It was in the Dinaric Alps, the Dinaric region of the Alps in Croatia, where a team of international scientists from archeo-Botanists to ecologists and so many more. They studied hunting methodologies in what they consider to be wild animals in these Alps. And the interesting thing about the area of study is that in our region of Croatia, in these upland alpine regions and ecotones, it's almost completely humanless. It's really important. Number two, all three apex predators are still very well and existent in that region. Nowhere in the world today do we have three main levels of apex predators occupying the trophic scale in fullness in any sort of complete way. Yellowstone and the wolves would be the only thing that I could equate it to here in the Western Hemisphere, and even that has some serious problems. So anyways, what they were looking at is an ecosystem intact. It has apex predators, it has predators, it has lower scale predators, the entire trophic chain is still more or less untouched. And what they did was they studied 5000 different hunts and some of them were drive hunts, some of them were select hunts. So a drive hunt would be like a a group of individuals were chasing a deer out of a particular vale and then the deer is running up the mountain top and they get shot. So it's running away from danger. That's a drive hunt. And there's select hunts where there's literally people with bows stalking deer quietly in a very much hunter gatherer or more ancient or indigenous way of hunting. They measured those things. They were hunting roe deer and red deer and wild boar, and I think a couple others. And what they studied, this team of scientists over a couple of years, and again, over about 5000 different kills, 5000 different hunts; was what changes the blood cortisol level of post-mortem meat. So how can we study stress post-mortem? Can we? What does it look like? Right. Because you're not going to stand there as a white garbed scientist with a cortisol measure, like bloodsucker needle, while the deer is running around. Being like, wait, wait, wait, just wait, let me get your blood. You have to do it post-mortem. And so that's what they were doing. And what they found was the only thing that differed, the only substantial finding that they could find was not the gender of the animal. It wasn't the age of the animal, it wasn't the size of the animal.
Daniel: It wasn't whether or not they had big antlers or small antlers or tusks or no tusks. We're looking at both Roe and Red deer and wild boar. It wasn't anything other than drive hunt and select hunt. It could have taken a select hunt Rowe deer ten minutes to die post being shot by the arrow, and we don't see a single spike in cortisol. But if it was drive hunted, that is to say, if it was chased by humans and dogs, not by a mountain lion or grey wolves or something. So if it was chased by something unnatural in its landscape, its cortisol volume was through the roof. Cortisol volume was so high that it was just a tick or two under, like you were talking about diabetes in your previous conversation on the podcast. It's cortisol volume was so high it was flirting with, at a lot of things, but like cardiac arrest, some of it was flirting with ketoacidosis. I mean, it was just insane amounts of stress and adrenal functioning. Or really malfunctioning. And anyways, there's a lot of variables, but it's the difference between select hunt and drive hunt. And the interesting thing is prey species in the Dinaric region or prey species in any region of the world previous to human techno utopia, if you will, that's really just commandeered the entire functioning of Earth.
Daniel: Any prey species will have to fight for its life. That's not new. Humans have to fight for our lives, that's the definition of life, you have to fight for it. People always ask me, Daniel, what you say is too insanely hard to do. How are you supposed to dedicate so much time to, you know, learning what your food you put in your body? And I say, well, you got to become a student of survival. All of us just think surviving today is just something that's given to you.
Manda: As a human right.
Daniel: Yeah, it's a human right to survive. And don't get me wrong, in society we have to work with that. But as humans as mammals, and I'm not talking about the social, I'm talking about the human mammal, we have to strive to survive this. This is what Earth does. And, by the way, striving to survive it's not a gritty sort of thing. It's not a survival of the fittest in some sort of deterministic or ugly sense. I mean, there's plenty of books, there's one sitting right here on the shelf about the evolution of beauty. To some degree, surviving is a beautiful thing, right? In order to survive, you need to become more beautiful or more kind, or more concentric or happier or more social. I'm not reducing survival down to the gritty death of predators and prey, but in this sense, in these studies, that's what I'm doing, looking at that. Because that's where we're able to study post-mortem cortisol and balancing in the blood system. And anyways, select hunts, that is to say, where the animal at the last moment saw the hunter and said, I remember. I remember this. I've seen the mountain lion at the corner of my eye right before he ripped my gullet out. I've seen the hunter before. I've lived this life before. The intergenerational memory that is connecting me to my ancestors eons past remembers this. And even if it takes that animal ten minutes to die, writhing in blood spattering agony, the cortisol in the adrenal system remains intact. And now that's not the only metric to look at, I realise. It's the only metric that this team was looking at. But if that animal has to run away from something alien, that is to say, I don't know what this is. I don't understand this pressure. Why are there humans and dogs chasing me enduringly through these mountains? The cortisol is through the roof, right? And there's a lot of ways to look at this, but in my opinion it's the essence of wildness. It's the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are. Maybe not as we understand them today, but as our intergenerational genomics, our intergenerational memory is also being able to enliven us and awaken us to these ideas.
Daniel: And so when we're working with the land in this new story, I think agriculture, be it conventional or be it regenerative, is still pushing for something that we want. It's still looking through the lens of human civilisation and human society, saying that in order for us to survive, we need healthy soil. But what we never do is look at the soil and ask, what do you want? We never look at the cow and say, what do you want? We never look at the grass and say, what do you want? We want a waving meadow of palatable grasses for our herbivores to eat, so we can raise 100% grass fed and finished nutrient dense, nourishing meat for our neighbours, so that we can make a profit. And that's what the conference is. Those are what the books and what the podcasts are talking about. But we never stand as farmers, as humans, as mammals, as co-creators in this marvellous symphony and ask, what do you actually want to be? It's the moment of stalking. Where the hunter and the husbandman, the hunter is stalking that roe deer in the Croatia; the hunter and the husbandman become one at that point, because the arrow could miss, the deer could shift, they could move, they could still fight their way out. There's still agency and acknowledgement there.
Daniel: But really there can only be agency if there is acknowledgement. So, for instance, the grass can only truly have the agency to do what it can, what it wants, what it must, what it perceives via its own self understanding and self-organisation within the community that surrounds it, if we acknowledge that it can. Because we're not going to release control, right? If we believe that grass is going to grow only scientifically, that is to say, the sun shines, the grass grows. And so we're going to control it to grow in a certain way. But if we believe that the grass actually has agency, autonomy, self-directing decisional power, then our life is going to change. It has to change. There's no way around that. And so in my opinion, we have two stories. It's not conventional versus regenerative to some very large degree. It's conventional and regenerative which is control. It's my view of the world will win, even though I believe that my view of the world is what the world wants, although I never asked. It's a huge problem. And then it's this other side which we call concentric rewilding, but I hate that phrase because it feels like I'm trying to create this thing called concentric rewilding. What it really is, is chaos. But you can't write a book called Stagtine; chaos in the landscape.
Manda: Oh I don't know.
Daniel: Maybe I should have. But it's chaos in the sense of this chaotic middle ground. It's the dawn darkness where it's blacker than the black of night, but the sun's going to come. And you can't really determine when the sun is coming, but the whole day is option. Like everything is open in front of you. Everything already is, but it's also still dark. And what I mean by that is we still have, while very modern and reductionist and destroyed from the climate and everything else, grasslands, water cycles, minerals, we still have nematodes and everything else. We're at the dawn darkness of this new epoch, I think, of human habitation on earth, where the pieces are still there in a healthy enough state. We just have to release control. And now that; that's the conversation. What does it mean to release control? How does that happen? And I think that's your original question. So all I've done now is substantiate that your question is great. So go ahead.
Manda: There is so much in there. I am remembering Robert Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. In the middle of all that, I just wanted to remind people of that, it's really interesting.
Daniel: Yeah, it's a great book.
Manda: I'm also remembering, and I cannot remember the name of who it was, I listened to a podcast by a young man who has integrated with some African tribes, and they practice persistence hunting. Which is we will run for as long as it takes for this animal basically to lie down and die. So if it finds a bit of shade and is able to lie down and recover, then we're screwed. So we basically have to keep this animal moving on, keep it running, basically in a circle within reasonable reach of of where the greater mass of our people are, or else three days later, it's three days of carrying a carcase back and we're all going to be knackered. And it sounds incredibly hard work and actually quite unpleasant on every level. But I would be really interested to know what the cortisol levels of that are. Because you can't do that level of persistence hunting unless also you've tracked the animals, you've worked out which one is the one that may be slightly lame, which one you might be able to. You've made a heart connection I would suggest, because you are in a space where you are intimately connected to the web of life, and that sense of hunter and hunted being intimately bound is there. And my Western mind would so like to know if there's a difference. But let's leave that aside, because what I really want to get to is where we've got to. So I have a framing that comes directly from Francis Weller, that humanity grew as an initiation culture, intimately connected to the web of life. Somewhere around 10 to 12,000 years ago, something happened to create a schism, and the culture that became the Western educated, industrial rich (used to be democratic) weird culture grew from that, separate from the land. And by definition, that method of agriculture, what we have called in our colonial mindset 'the agricultural revolution' is defined by enslavement of the web of life, exactly as you've said. We have to control it, we have to tell it what we need of it, because otherwise we will die. My framing continues that we have to emerge into a new initiation culture, and it will be digitally impacted. We're not going to go back to being forager hunters. There's 8.5 billion of us, that's not a thing. Even if there is a great die off, I still don't think it's very likely.
Manda: But what I feel you have reached is a level where you and your children are living with the land in a way that respects the land and gives it agency, and yet you're still alive. Can you see a way (and if so, how?) for the greater mass of 21st century culture, with everything that's going on at the moment, to step into an initiation culture where we do give control to the whole of the web of life? So what I'm asking is... I want a whole bunch of things. First is, how did you get to this? I'd really like to know, have you always been talking to the land? Or is that something that arose as you came to your own land, or before you came to your own land? Did you talk to this land that you're on now before you ever got here? What does the talking look, feel, and seem like to you? And is it your belief that more people can do this enough to reach a tipping point where most people are doing this?
Daniel: Wonderful. Let's keep track of those three questions, because I want to spend time with each one of them, and I fear that I might lose track after the first one. Because they're all amazing, integral questions. So let's both hold ourselves accountable there. There's no one moment, of course. In the book there's four sections and every section is really undergirded by a serious story. And that story is a particular epoch of our life where something was very outrageously in front of us, a pivotal moment of change, if you will. Where you can put your finger on it, a touch point, and say this was a moment where the Land spoke loudly, that I can then iterate through story and give to somebody like you. The Land is speaking. I mean, just to put this in perspective, being who we are, my wife and I, we process hundreds and hundreds of cattle a year for farmers. We teach people all over the United States, I mean, people have flown into our farm from Germany to take our courses on how to finer process meat and things, so we're very handy in that way. But obviously we also then process our own meat, because why would I pay somebody else to do it? And today, just after this podcast, we were supposed to harvest a cow for ourselves because we were running really low on food and it was her time.
Daniel: And just earlier, maybe 30 minutes before I got on the podcast, we were out with her, and Morgan and I both decided 'no'. We've been leading up to this moment for six months. This has been a very long time coming up, we've understood these things, we understand what our freezer looks like, we understand what we need to be eating through the rest of the winter for our children and nourishment and everything else. And we spent some time with the cow today, and it was a no. I can't tell you why that is. So that's a fine example of it's just Tuesday, okay. It's just a Tuesday. But in the book, I found four stories that speak very loudly that other people can also stand in. You can read a book about evolutionarily how important happiness is, you can read the whole book, and it's a great book, you can learn a lot. And you can read a story where you actually enter that story, and you become awakened to the very startling reality that maybe you're not happy, and this is how you have happiness, and this is how we can build a pathway forward into a better, happier state together. That's a story that has power.
Daniel: And so I provide four stories about our transition. A short little note, while trying to get it published, contract in hand. Basically the contract was on the other side of the email, as long as I said yes to one question. And the question was, are you willing to take out all of the stories in your book? Just the Science and Essays. Let's talk about cortisol and balancing, let's talk about phenotypic plasticity and adaptive landscape genomics, which is all words that we might get into in this conversation, but I don't want any of the stories. And I said, well, you know, damn it, I'm self-publishing then because I'm not going to do that. And so that's what we did, for better or worse. And anyways, the point is that those are the stories.
Daniel: I'll give you one of the stories, just very briefly. Right before our son was born, it was the depth of winter right, about now and a big blizzard, snowstorm. And, like all good regenerative farmers, we were controlling breeding. Now, again, you could be listening to this conversation and saying, Daniel, how dare you say regenerative agriculture and conventional and commercial agriculture are the same thing because they're all based upon control? And I say, listen, go to any regenerative farm and just look where the bull is. And if they take the bull out of the herd so that they can control when the cows get pregnant, it's control. Because if you go into the human community and look at a bunch of women and say, I'm going to tell you when to breed and with who to breed you, hopefully you're kicked out of that very quickly, and I hope other things might happen too. Like, this is not okay, but we do it with animals. We don't do it with humans. And not to go down and diverge from the conversation too much, but I also think that even more could be said about this in the sense that there's two worldviews. To some degree I think we've confused this issue and made more. And maybe that's true in some other sort of generalised sense, or maybe even particular sense in other philosophical mediums. But I really think essentially there's two worldviews. You have the concentric worldview, and then you have the modern worldview, and you can call it techno feudalism, you can call it many things, but there's two worldviews.
Daniel: The first worldview is that we are intelligent, but our intelligence comes from an already intelligent animistic agency based world. That is to say that the kin all around us are intelligent and thereby we are also intelligent because we are the kin all around them. We are one. We live in the circle: kin-centric, that is to say, its kinship and concentricity. We are relational within the great circle of life, kin-centric. That is the first world view. That is the indigenous world view, by the way. And these thoughts were given to me by many of my friends. They are gifts, they are not mine. But I think that's really important to consider. The second worldview is that humanity has intelligence, and we can use this intelligence to do something. Now, I think a lot of the oligarchs of today would say that we can use this intelligence to make more money, or we could do this intelligence to capitalise or colonise. We could do a lot of things. But the regenerative movement says that we have this human intelligence, and by managing cattle in a particular way, we can basically force soil to grow.
Manda: Yeah.
Daniel: But what if your intelligence, that is to say, your ability to take a cow and regenerate the soil is an aspect of an already intelligent system, that doesn't want you to take that cow and improve that soil. Or maybe it doesn't like that cow. Maybe your cow is a bastard arsehole and the soil is like, no, I don't want to grow for this. What if the kinship isn't there? So those are the two worldviews. Regenerative agriculture is a part of the latter worldview; that we can control our way to a better future. And like I always say, if we can control our way to a better future, it won't be better. It'll be a different version of the same thing that we grew out of. This is the pathway of modernity. This is to some degree the pathway of modern, definitely Western civilisation. Let's just do really bad work differently again and again and again, for tens, if not 1000 years.
Daniel: Well, anyways, like all good regenerative farmers, we had taken the bull out of the herd. This is very early in our transition away to what we call concentric rewilding, or just chaos. And it was a February morning. I'll never forget it. And our bull, his name was Paddy or Padraig, we raised an Irish breed and they all have Irish names and my wife and I are both Irish. And anyways, his name was Padraic and we call him Paddy for short and he was losing his mind. He would run through a seven wire high tensile fence charge at 10,000V, and he would run under the road. And we live in a city of about 109 people in the middle of nowhere, but all 109 of us I felt, were very angry and we're trying to get him back on the farm. And for days and days and days he destroyed infrastructure. He almost killed me twice. I almost broke a rib in multiple location. Anyways, a really bad deal, like he was losing his brain. And the only thing we could conclude was that the herd of brood cows not far upwind from him, were all ovulating. They were absolutely ready to be bred and that smell just drove him nuts. And it's very easy to run away with some of these thoughts, but basically, as I write in the book, he was the leader of a herd without a herd. He was separated, he was isolated, he was segregated. And to some degree, this is so that we can control breeding, so that we can control when our cows calf. If you watch any documentary of regenerative agriculture, every single one of them for the last ten years, and I know all of the people in the movies and I know all the producers, but they all say the same thing. Which is that just like the deer fawn in the spring, a cow should calf in the spring. So when do you breed? You take the bull and you put them with the cows nine months before the springtime and so this is good regenerative agriculture. Anyways, really long story short, it's a longer story and there's near death experience, there's a lot of problems with the thing. And in all four stories, by the way, my wife looks at me and says something intelligent and then I listen.
Manda: One day, one day Daniel.
Daniel: She just doesn't like talking on podcasts, so that's why you're talking to me, not her. She also doesn't like to write. But she looked at me and she's like, Daniel, I don't understand why do farmers in the name of natural functioning take out the function of the herd and turn it into a testosterone fuelled gladiator or something like this. Like he was just losing his brain. He wanted his family back. I mean, he has brothers over there, he has sisters over there, his mom was over there.
Manda: Yeah, he's a herd animal and you put him in isolation. It's horrible.
Daniel: Exactly. And so I kid you not, the next morning, after many days of this. But the next morning after that conversation, we walked out and we opened the gate. And it was a huge moment for us. And we literally just opened the gate. And he could have ran down the driveway to the road, he could have ran to the neighbours. I mean, he's just a bull in the open. And we opened the gate and I'll never forget, he looked at me straight in the face and he stood there, like right in the open gateway. He didn't run, he didn't walk, he didn't back. He just stood there and he looked at me. And I'll never forget, I took 1 or 2 steps backwards and I just shifted my shoulders a little bit to the right, as if to say, like, go ahead, you know. And we connected and said some things and he just walked over to the herd of cows and he then waited at the gate. Like he understood that we had transitioned not his life, but our life.
Manda: Your own heart space. Yes!
Daniel: And it sounds simplistic, I realise, as I'm trying not to ball up in tears here, but I will never forget it. In that paddock he ran away continuously through fences, on the road, sheriff departments are involved. And then as soon as we said, what do you want? And we opened the gate and said, we want to be here with you. I can't just let you roam the open prairies, but what else? Like there's still limitations, but what else? And then he just walked to the cows and we've never looked back.
Daniel: I've already drafted the second and third book and there's stories in all of them. There's about 12 to 13 different stories that illustrate our full transition. That is just an aspect of one of the stories that I provide, even simply here. But it's recognising that human control for good reason, is still just control and it's not actually going to lead you anywhere. So, oh my goodness, have we gotten in trouble for doing things like this. Because we don't castrate, I don't cut boys balls off. That's something I do. And as soon as I cut my son's balls off I'll start cutting those balls off. But until I do the first, I'm not going to do the latter.
Manda: Because you'll be in prison, so it won't happen.
Daniel: It's just not going to happen. Just as in the sense that I don't force a cow to breed, just like I don't force a human woman to breed. Anyways, the point is, I don't do a lot of things and people get very angry because I'm ruining breeds and our system is unmanageable and everything else. Well, the interesting thing is we have calves every year. We have hundreds of cows. And the same thing is true for the goats and the sheep. The horses are too new to us to really find this rhythm yet. But they all calf in the spring and they all calf during the same month. And maybe 1 or 2 kind of stray when they want to stray. But generally speaking, all of what we want to achieve is still possible in the chaotic space. We raise an exceptional amount of food with very little input. We produce many calves a year and yet we ask for none of them, right? We don't plan for any of these things to happen.
Manda: Can I ask briefly, how long did it take from letting Paddy go and join the cows, to them synchronising?
Daniel: Three years. It took us three years until it really found a rhythm. And the reason it took three years, it took the sheep and the goats exponentially less amount of time because their gestation is shorter. So for instance, Anytime a cow thought it was time to breed, it then took nine months to learn if it was a correct time. And so it just takes years. But what we have to realise though, is as you start to let go, and this is why I feel like while Stagtine is 500 pages and unbelievably dense, and I have the book sitting next to me and the text is unbelievably small, it should be a much bigger book.
Manda: That would be good actually. But if you do an e-book, people can change the text size.
Daniel: Exactly. And they can buy an e-book online.
Manda: On your website, which I will put in the show notes.
Daniel: What a lot of people try to do. And this is my point about Stagtine being the very tip of the proverbial iceberg, if you will. What a lot of people try to do is they say, okay, cool, so my cows are going to start to breed on their own. But they still keep all of the other control mechanisms around the cows. So for instance, they still castrate, they still separate, they wean, they take young daughters from mothers so that the mothers can get their cycle back and they stop nursing and so they can breed faster. And then they think that while doing that, they can then make a decision about how they breed, while their whole body is going through this systemic shock. I mean, families being torn apart and a forcing of the mammary glands to close up abnormally quickly. It doesn't work. You have to let go and you have to let go in a, this is such a cliche, but it's not a one size fits all. I mean, some cows are going to be so domesticated that you have to go very slowly, and some cows are going to be so much less domesticated and you can move a lot quicker. So for instance, we raised a number of breeds in the herd and they've all kind of co-mingled at this point. And they're just a mutt sort of breed, which we really love.
Manda: You've got a landrace basically, haven't you, that's adapted to your land.
Daniel: Exactly. But one of the breeds in our herd is a is a breed that comes out of the Mexican scrub country. The breed originated in Spain and the conquistadors brought them over in about 1530, 1540. And it didn't work. It wasn't what they expected. Long story short, the coloniser learned some things where they were released. This breed was released, and it wasn't until 1931 that they were recaptured. So for about 400 years they were just feral bovine. I mean, they were elk, they were deer, they were just alive. And they don't need much training to be wild again, I'll say that. If anything, we've had to domesticate them a little bit. Like this is a fence line, you're not allowed to go through it, that kind of thing. There's a road there, I'm so sorry. Humans love the idea of private property; you can't go there. And so there's differing levels, and you have to approach it in a very particular way. It's not just releasing control, right. Like everybody around us, they always talk about this idea of curiosity. And there's, there's so many different pathways we can go down, but I'll pick curiosity as a thing. You know, when a farmer starts to get into the regenerative world, or adaptive plant grazing or sustainable grazing or organic or holistic management or whatever the term that got them going, they start to see that their animals start to sample, what may have been unpalatable weeds or forbs or forages in the past, but they start to sample them a little bit.
Manda: Things that we'd been told were poisonous.
Daniel: Exactly. And they start to sample these things and they say, this is proof that my animals are being rewilded. They're becoming less domestic, and I appreciate the thought. I see the heart of the thing. What we have to be very careful to be conscious of is the difference between curiosity and epigenetics. And when I say epigenetics, what I really mean is a phenotypic plasticity that evolves with the evolving Land; a living phenotype. Curiosity is me being curious about something and trying something new. But with foraging, when we teach foraging classes for humans, when humans come out and we teach them how to forage for their food, we say you have to be grounded in place for a long enough period of time so that when you see this plant, you know it in four different seasons, you know it in all ten of its different growth profiles. You know, when it's a little bit tan, it's going to taste like this and it's going to produce a particular effect in your body when it's a little bit more green. You have to have a relationship with the thing and that takes time. And in herbivores, the best way to facilitate that time transference is through the matriarchy. It's through mtDNA. It's through actually fostering what we would call adaptive landscape genomics through a grandmother like matriarchy, where the entire women of the herd are the leaders of the herd. They're never separated from their offspring, even if, like we have cows in our herd that haven't produced a calf in five years.
Daniel: But they're healthy and they're alive and they're ancient from a cows perspective. And it's not that they are showing the younger generation how to eat, but they are continuously leading the phenotypic plasticity of that herd's epigenetics, of that herd's genetics, of that herd's general birthed phenotype, as the landscape changes. I've been on record saying this; I said it at the USDA conference that I keynoted; I don't know, I think there's a lot of problems in Earth. You know, democracy, I think we can kind of shift gears, maybe if you wanted to talk about that and techno feudalism and stuff, like that's a real problem. But agriculturally, and I realise this is crazy, but I actually am not afraid of climate change and water and desertification and all of these things that we talk about. I am petrified of what what scientists call phenotypic lag. So an organism's ability to survive in its own landscape outside of controlled situations. So cows in a dairy barn is a controlled situation. They don't need to express a phenotypic plasticity. They can to some degree have a phenotypic lag, that is to say a body that doesn't make sense for its landscape because we've just faked the landscape around it for that animal to survive. With veterinary science, unecessary veterinary science, I should say, like unnecessary feed regiments, corn production, etc..
Manda: Up to a point they've had to adapt to being fed cereals that they completely did not evolve to eat.
Daniel: Exactly. And the landscape around that can go in a particular way, but they don't have to follow it because they're not living in that landscape. But if we actually desire life and I mean this from plants, so from herbaceous material all the way to cattle genetics, if we are not nurturing an agency led, an animate led adaptive landscape genomic, that allows the phenotype of these animals; so how their body is able to survive and look and be observed in the landscape. I don't think we have cows. I don't think we have plants. We're all focussed on climate. We're all focussed on carbon. We're all focussed on soil. We're all focussed on water cycles. But last year in the United States, I was reading an article, we lost almost as many cows to heat stress than we did processing. Like less cows were eaten than cows died of heat stress. And by the way, last year was not, in these regions, the hottest year on record. And what I'm saying is the landscape is shifting, but the animals aren't.
Manda: Animals are not adapting fast enough.
Daniel: They're not adapting to that changing landscape. And so, for instance, this year in Virginia, this this past year in Virginia was very difficult. We had a large drought. We're still technically in the drought. It's the worst drought we've had in many hundreds of years. May in Virginia is usually a beautiful time, it's lush, it's wet, it's green. The grass usually grows taller than your truck. Every farmer I knew, regenerative or otherwise, was already on hay, that's how bad the drought was. March and April we get all of our rains. We didn't get a single drop of rain february, March or April of last year. We didn't get rain until October. The landscape was brown. There was more wildfires around us. Four times more acres of Virginia burned this year in our region in the Piedmont, the Appalachian Mountains than ever before. The point is Desertified, right? There was no grass. And I'm not saying this because we're special in any way, Because we also had to go on hay because not all of our herd are where we would like them, but a good portion of our herd, maybe 50% or more literally turned to wood and ate the wood. And not to survive, but because they ate the wood last year and ate the wood the year before.
Manda: So are you talking about browsing off trees, or are you talking about actually eating fallen wood?
Daniel: Not fallen wood, but the green wood. The the tips of the branches that had grown this year that don't have any leaves on them.
Manda: Right, so like deer, they're browsing as deer would browse.
Daniel: Yes, exactly. And they started to eat acorns.
Manda: And you have enough wood to keep however many head of cattle you have going on that? Because deer can ravage a forest, but that means you've got a lot of wood.
Daniel: And the thing to be considered, because I hate it when farmers say well, look at what we're doing, and look how we survived the drought. And everybody else died. Because, again, we barely survived the drought, but the important thing to consider is this, and also, I'll speak in human terms. One of our neighbours is a prepper. He has beans in his basement, as I would say. And he asked me recently how we prep. And I said, well, we forage. Like you're going to have to kill the entire Earth with a nuclear disaster in order for me not to have food. I know what to eat, when to eat. I know where to eat. In Texas I teach sacred eco literacy and foraging courses, and I teach them here, and I teach them in Ohio. I know what to eat. That is to say, I have a relationship with the earth around me, I'm a student of survival. You're going to have to literally destroy Earth to destroy my nutrition. And he says, man, what an important thing to learn. Maybe one day I'm going to learn that. And I said, well, listen, just so you know, when the apocalypse happens is not the time you put beans in your cellar, right? When the apocalypse happens is not the time when you start to actually feel the weight of the moment to then go try to eat wood in a drought.
Daniel: The point is the phenotype of our animals, the phenotype of the Land, the adaptive landscape, genomic, based upon the uncontrolled, chaotic and open communicative relationship between this and that, between the cattle and the Forbes, between the humans and the cattle, etc. it has to be gelling. It has to be understood. It has to be concentric long before there's pressure, because cows that are curious under pressure die. That's period. If the cow is starving and it's under pressure and it sees that poisonous plant and it's a little bit curious, it's going to die. But a cow without that pressure, that's just understanding the flow of the land and the agency and the chaotic middle ground that I was talking about, it now can express that curiosity and transform that curiosity over generations into knowledge, into connection, into actual understanding of survival. That's to some degree what we're looking at here, and there's a lot of different ways to look at it. There's a lot of different ways to focus in on the thing. And to some degree, I think when people hear it, they get overwhelmed. Because our cows aren't really fenced. I mean, they're in fences, because I don't own the world, and the world also isn't communicable.
Manda: But there are fenced 400 acres, and within that 400 acres they have free reign. Is that the case?
Daniel: Yeah, to some degree. I mentioned earlier that the reason we are on this landscape, it was being clearcut and it's not all clear cut. Obviously we were able to come in and stop a lot of it. But like our clear cut land, is 172 acres and it's a totally diverse landscape. I mean, it's just nothing like the other aspects. I mean, obviously it's a natural disaster, written hydraulic fuel and diesel.
Manda: But it's going to grow back. I mean, it must be quite interesting watching it evolve.
Daniel: In farming we call it an animal day an acre. And so how many animals can you fit on an acre for a day and have them fed. So basically what is the carrying capacity of a particular ecotone or pasture, if you will? We get more animal days an acre in the clear cut than in our developed pastures. So it's unbelievably abundant, but it's abundant with different species that really are expressing themselves in ways that are unknown to our region. They're ancient species. They're not dominant in the modern agricultural scene today. Right now the cows are in the clear cut and they have about 100 acres to roam, and there's ponds everywhere, we've constructed wetlands and ponds so that we don't have to move water.
Manda: And have you got beavers?
Daniel: We have beavers and otters. I always joke, Rewilding to some degree, as an international paradigm is our rivers are broken; there's no beavers. So we buy the rivers and import the beavers. That's rewilding. I have no interest in this. I would rather communally live on the land and then let the wetlands develop and then find the beavers. That sounds a lot more fun to me. To some degree what rewilding does is it forsakes the domestic; find whatever semblance of wild animal still exists and then praises that animal. But to a large degree, because I've thought about these things when I was writing the book. I mean, Doctor Fred Provenza, a leader in the scientific community all around nutrient density and everything else, wrote the foreword to the book and kind of helped me write some aspects of the book because I'm not a full scientist like he is. All the way through, He knows a lot of indigenous elders and friends that have gifted me a lot of knowledge, like Wahinkpe Topa and others in the book that I quote from. But I was playing with a lot of these thoughts in the sense that humans are very much a domesticated animal. In the book, I mentioned that humans are to Neanderthals as poodles are to wolves. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but what I'm saying is that if the only hope we have is to export the cattle and bring in the bison, then we'd better export ourselves as well, because we're cattle. And so we have to start inside of us, right? And that's not something we've talked well about in this conversation.
Manda: But I'd like to.
Daniel: But that's the first step. And that's why the story is so bloody important, because it's nature telling us, hey, you need to change. But it's okay. To maybe make it a little bit more clear, the book is dedicated to Lionel, Paddy, Nancy, Nelly and Mara, who invited us to run with them and to become fully remarkable. Lionel, Paddy, nancy, Nelly and Mara are all animals on the land that the stories talk about. And so, to some degree, listening, the heart work, understanding and acknowledging where our agency, where our intelligence actually comes from. These are the philosophical questions that, in my opinion, all of this really should begin with. Like, not soil health, not carbon, not water cycles and everything else, it's rather that why are you special? Because I think you are. To be very clear, I think you're really special. Like I'm looking at you, Manda, I'm talking to the listener like: you are special. But it's not because you're set apart, and it's not because you're created in something else's image to to steward the land and force it into a state of your own understanding of what that state should be. It's special because you're alive.
Daniel: You're here, you're dreaming. You're walking, you're breathing that which the trees expire and you're expiring with the trees inhale. So do that and find joy and peace in doing that. Agriculture is not to blame. Hunter gatherers are not to blame. And it's an interesting part of the book when I get into this and and I don't know what to do with this information, like I told you in 2013, I was really interested in, to some degree, human origins and how the oldest art that we have interacts with that idea. Because a lot of the art in the Dordogne valley of France was created during what's called the retreat, when life was really changing. You want to talk about climate change, like the people who lived through the retreat, they saw some things! They saw a great ice readvance. They saw that same ice retreat in a very small amount of time. They saw the mammoths and the tigers, the long tooth tigers, they saw them leave. They saw much more diminutive animals come. It was a great time of collapse and rebirth, and they turned to art on cave walls. That's always intrigued me.
Manda: But they did it over a long period of time. As I understand it, that art was laid down over 25,000 years. Which is three times the length of our trauma.
Daniel: Yes. The majority of it is a little bit later, but you're exactly right. Again, it's long time human habitation which is the idea of phenotypic plasticity, which is the idea of matriarchal lineages, which is the idea of what survival means.
Manda: And of co-creation with the land. I mean, this may be a projection, but my belief is that every individual understood themselves to be a self-conscious node in the web of life.
Daniel: 100%. Yeah.
Manda: And everybody had their part to play and that's what we've lost. And yet you have found it. It feels to me you're living as a self-conscious node in the web of life. Is that fair?
Daniel: I hope it's fair. I think so.
Manda: People are all going to go and read Stagtine, because I will make them. Listeners, you have to read it. But before we get to them reading it, can you give people an insight into perhaps, not Paddy because you kind of made a decision because Morgan said something and you chose and you looked him in the eye. But how do you connect to the web of life in the place where you live? What does it feel like? And and I hear you go out and it was this cows time and now it's not because she said no. And I'm guessing if there was a tree that needed to come down or there's a bit of forest, if you think perhaps we need some wood, you'd go and ask the trees and the tree would say, this tree. What does it feel like?
Daniel: It's a good question. I think a lot of farmers and I would put myself in this boat for many years. And you could probably say this is probably true for most people, if not all people today. But I can speak as a farmer, and a lot of my work has been around the agricultural industry. And so I'll say very surely most farmers, if not every farmer lost in the agricultural paradigm, understands their work as leading to a harvest, to some degree. And this was a point I was going to make earlier, but I'll make it now, it wasn't right then: I think we blame agriculture in this way. I think we see the rise of agriculture with the rise of Western civilisation, and I think we get confused there. I think there are important moments there and a lot of really important minds have focussed on that point. But in the book I talk about in 2018, a team of international Archeobotanists working in the Jordanian river valley, they discovered a whole new agricultural and ancient community of humans. They believed it was Homo sapiens, it could have been something else, a distant cousin of ours. If you're white, like I know you and I both are, about 3% of our genome is Neanderthal, 2.5 To 3% depending. The point is, Homo sapiens is a strange word. Humans, mammals, us, if you will. They found a civilisation they called it the Holo 2 culture and it dated to 23,000 years ago. So 23,000 years ago, 21,000 B.C., there was a people living in the Jordanian river valley that a team of Archaeobotanists were able to discover. That immediately should put you at the edge of your chair; how can a team of archaeobotanists, not archaeologists, not anthropologists, but archaeobotanists, understand that in 21,000 BC, a large collection of human beings are living in this river valley, modern day Jordan? It's very complex really interesting. Look it up if you're interested in these things. Holo 2 culture, 2018 is the date of publication on many of their journals. 2021 is also when a lot of journals were written as well. But they found what's called proto weeds. And so what is a proto weed? A weed is a forb. Well, forbs are all open pollinated to some degree. I'm sure that you could find 1 or 2, but there's thousands of different species of forbs. So generally speaking, we can universally say that forbs are open pollinated. Grains are also open pollinated. And so this team of archaeobotanists in 2018, in the Jordanian river valley, found open pollinated forbs that had been had been genetically engineered, not by humans but by wheat and barley. In enough volume that it was absolutely agricultural production. So what this is saying is that the Forb's genetics, through open pollination relationship to the grains growing alongside them, were so affected in magnitude that there was acres and acres and acres of grain production in the Jordanian river valley 21,000 BC. But the problem is the rise of agriculture is more distant from that date than we are from the rise of agriculture.
Manda: As far as we know.
Daniel: Right. So go back to the rise and go twice further. And we still see agriculture. And now, talking to a good friend of mine who's a Cherokee man, indigenous to Turtle Island here on the East Coast. And he laughed and he said, we've been agricultural our entire epoch on Earth, and we emerge from the land here. That is our mythology, that is our story.
Manda: But it's always struck me that the whole of Australia, the whole of the Amazon, it's all a managed landscape, but it's managed with the web of life. It's not enslaving the web of life.
Daniel: And that's the question that needs to be asked. How can we have agriculture 21,000 BC? When did human civilisation start to separate itself from Earth? That is the human civilisation that I'm talking about; the degenerative, separatist, patriarchal, kingly dominion over earth. That's what I mean when I say human civilisation. Why was human civilisation so distant from agriculture? That doesn't make any sense. To some very large degree, it seems that indigenous humans were able to do agriculture without also being bastards to the land. It seems like that's possible. So I'm not going to sit here and claim that agriculture is in some deterministic sense the collapse of civilisation; I think we can actually utilise agriculture. The ancient art, the ancient Kincentric art of agriculture and the ancient, definitely indigenous way to heal Earth with Earth as Earth. But it's going to take a whole new world view. And this is what excites me beyond compare; that worldview still lives within us. Not as much me because I have to really pull it out, but in my kin, in the indigenous and in the wisdom holders, in the traditional ecological knowledge that is all around us still. Like we live in a moment of human history where everything is collapsing and those that know how not to collapse are still here. They're still here and they're still yelling. Like a good friend of mine, Taylor Keene, he's a Cherokee and Omaha man here in Turtle Island and wisdom holder, pipe carrier. And he talks about the White Buffalo prophecy. And he says, it's so interesting that seven generations ago, I think it was the Lakota or the Blackfeet, somebody please correct me.
Manda: I think you're right.
Daniel: One of their leaders, they said, I have a vision. In Seven generations The fourth white buffalo calf will be born. And as soon as the fourth white buffalo calf is born, the entire world will turn back to its indigenous nature. That white buffalo calf was born in 2020/21; we are in the seventh generation. The fourth white buffalo calves have been born and Taylor Keene is ready. We as a human consciousness are returning to the idea of concentricity; the circle living in the animate collective of death, life, rebirth, chaos, that. Living in this great circle while still being kin and entirely relational with the land. Not in view of the health of the land, but as the land. Like in one of my books I wrote in 2023 I believe, I wrote that we don't have relationship, we are relationship. And as soon as you actually understand the difference of that, everything has to change. Everything has to change. And that's why the agriculture follows. That's why agriculture still has its potent ability to achieve what I still believe that I, as a mammal am trying to achieve. I hope the grass supports us, I hope that the sun supports it.
Manda: We're so far over time. I'm still very curious. I'm curious about endless things, but the two that leap to the top are how did this go down with the USDA when you were keynote at their conference?
Daniel: It's a good question.
Manda: And the indigenous people do this. I listened to a lovely Two Eyed Seeing podcast recently where they were finally, I think, in Oregon, beginning to invite indigenous elders in, paying them as if they were of the same value as scientific consultants. Taking them into the forest and going, we want to thin this forest, which trees? And the elders would go, that tree, not that tree. That tree. And they would listen, finally. And so they're not getting the wildfires anymore. Woohoo! So there is a little bit of listening happening. It seems to me we are in so many tipping points at the moment and hyper complexity a thing, it's difficult to predict. But how do we help people shift their worldview? Because even within regenerative ag you said you're losing friends. The Savoury Institute kicked you out. And I remember in a previous conversation you saying that they got very upset because you suggested that mob grazing is just another form of control. If we are going to live with the land and be with the land in the way that indigenous peoples are, there are no fences, there is no ownership. The whole premise of capitalism is ownership, commodification of land, labour and capital. This would require a totally different worldview, predicated on wholly different values. And spreading that from within the capital system is a really interesting challenge. But I think that you have thought about this. So question one, how did the USDA take it? Because I take that as a kind of litmus test of whether this is lifting off. And then if you and I were to work on letting this ripple out in a way that works, what would we do?
Daniel: The USDA is a really interesting organisation. They reached out to me and I thought it was like a gag. I thought it was a joke. I am not known as a supporter of the USDA. And so I emailed them back and it was the office of the chief scientist, who was asking. And so I replied to them and literally, I said something along the lines of, hello, good day. I don't know if this is a joke. But I will come and speak if you come to the wildland for a day first. With an open mind, and after a day of being here, I want you to look at me in the face and say yes or no. Because I'll show you the wildland. You're not going to like it. I'm going to say some things that you're going to disagree with, in my understanding of who you are. To their support, they came. We spent a whole day together. We shared a meal. We're good friends to this day, the people who came. I mean, it was a wonderful day. I said some crazy things. For instance, the entirety of the regenerative grazing movement, this is in the book Stagtine that people can dive into more, but the entirety of the regenerative grazing movement is built on the fact that herbivores mob mow and move. And I actually can prove that they don't, in all three ways, while using ancient, modern, and also indigenous ways of being and more. And the point is I can say some pretty outrageous things to people who believe that fence lines and multiple watering points and, you know, rotational grazing or whatever is a very good thing.
Daniel: And even if they don't agree, at least it gets them thinking. And maybe I'm crazy, but the animals seem to love it. My animals like it. So I'm not crazy in my own sense, my own relative little world. And that brings me comfort. Well, anyways, they came. And I fulfilled my promise because I said, you come, I come. So I came with my wife and Morgan and I, we went up to D.C. We were right in front of the Capitol building, I'll never forget it, we were walking into the conference. So when I go speaking I wear my little Irish grandfather shirt and my woollen vest and this is what I looked like. And I was walking in and two military officers, they weren't even police, they were standing out front and they said where are you going? And I said, well, I'm going to the conference. Very uncomfortable, bring me to a city and I just look like a fish out of water in a very true sense. And you put me in front of the military in D.C., and then you really will see me sweat. For no other reason than it's just uncomfortable. And they were like, what conference? And right above us, this is hilarious, right above us is this massive electronic billboard with the title of the conference on it. I don't know what the conference is called, you know, it's not like I asked to be here. I didn't sign up. I didn't buy tickets. I was asked to speak at a conference by the USDA, and that's all I knew. So I take a step back and I tilt my head back just like this. And I read it: The United States Department of Agriculture Sustainability and Ecological Resiliency Conference or something like this. And I look back down at the guard and he looks like he's going to punch me in the face, because it looks like I'm just being an ass. Like I just looked at the conference above his head to answer his question. I finally convinced him, let me go inside, you can even escort me. Bring me to the ticket booth, you'll see that they give me the keynote medallion thing and then you can leave me alone. And so they did. They followed us in and I checked in and they were like, oh, Daniel Firth Griffith, you're here!
Daniel: And it was so interesting. Anyway,the speech was what it was, I had a had a great time, got to dialogue and sit on a panel with some really interesting people that I have great respect for, which I didn't think I would say. I didn't think I would say that. Well, anyways, they took me out to get bagels afterwards at the Capitol building, right after the fact. And we were sitting with the chief scientist at the USDA with my wife in a bagel shop, and then a couple of her assistants. And we're just talking and I'm asking questions like, why is it illegal for me to do this? And they were like, it's not. And I was like, well, no, it's very illegal. The USDA makes this very illegal to do. And I was like, is there any scientific validity for that? And they're like, no, I didn't even know that was illegal. And this is the chief scientist of the USDA. And again, I have great respect and support for these people. Like I really, really observed something new in my life, which is the humanity of the humans that work in a very interesting organisation.
Daniel: And I laughed and I considered to myself; the chief scientist of the USDA does not believe that there's any scientific validity to any of the things that it's illegal for me to do, based upon the science of today. And so what's the problem? Do we have a human problem, or do we have an institutional problem? In terms of this one little instance, it's very clear to me we have an institutional problem. So this morning there was a constitutional amendment held in front of the Virginia House of Representatives, H.J. 452, which was an amendment to the Virginia Constitution that reads: that all citizens of the state of Virginia should have the right to eat what they want from the source that they want, which I fully support. I fully support this. I think you should be able to do this. So, for instance, if my neighbour raises cows and I process that cow, I'm not allowed to eat it and I'm not allowed to process it because I'm not a part of the USDA. I'm not a USDA licensed person in a facility, etc..
Manda: But you should be able to.
Daniel: But seeing the fact that I know my neighbour, seeing the fact that I process it, seeing the fact that I know all of the details. I should be able to make a decision for my own life to do this. I'm not asking to smoke meth, cocaine in public. All I'm saying is the meat raised in your field, I should be able to make the decision if it's healthy or not.
Manda: And raw milk and and anything else. Your eggs.
Daniel: And everything else. Yeah. And if you're at a restaurant or if I'm at a grocery store and I don't know who produced it, who processed it, and there's tons of opaque middle grounds that are ill defined. That's the point of regulation. What I'm talking about is I truly believe that I can make a decision what goes on my family's plate, especially if I can make the an educated understanding of how that was raised, where it was raised, etc., all of these things. So I believe in that. So it was in front of the House of Representatives today, which I wrote this huge piece on, and spoke at this morning. I didn't go there, but it was all on zoom. And so I'm heavily supportive of this. And maybe 15 seconds in to the debate to talk about a constitutional amendment, they all voted to table it. Now, it's been on the docket since January 1st, 2024. I mean, we've been waiting to talk about this for a year, and all of them were like, no later. Again, we see an institutional problem. This is not democracy.
Manda: We so need a new system. Yeah.
Daniel: It doesn't make any sense. Because all of these people are there being like, listen, I think we should be able to decide. And then you have all of the special interests and lobbyists being like, no, I don't want anybody to decide. And they're just like, we'll just table it. Because why would we ever want to make a decision based upon what the populace and the people actually want? When we have the lobbyists, the money and the oligarchy and the techno feudalism.
Manda: Happened in the UK with the Climate and Nature Bill last week, the government just basically kicked it into the long grass. With a procedural motion that they get because they have a majority, because 23% of the population voted for them.
Daniel: It's not a system that makes any sense. It surely is not.
Manda: Our government, bizarre as it may sound, thinks it's doing all it can possibly do for the climate emergency and does not wish anybody to suggest that there might be anything else they could be doing. Nor do they wish any kind of legislation to happen at the time. Which is so manifestly insane that clearly we need a new system. So everybody listening, we are going to close down now, and then we're going to record a bonus with a number of the things that Daniel and I would like to talk about. So Daniel, thank you for part one of this podcast. Anything you want to say to anyone who's not about to listen to the next bit? There might be some. I'm going to put all your books in the show notes. I'll put your website and your podcast in the show notes. Anything else for people listening?
Daniel: It's been a pleasure, Manda. I want to only offer an apology. There is so much here and my mind is in so many places. And in writing book, book two and book three of this chronicle, if you will, I had to stop. Because what I'm realising is there really is so much and I feel like the last hour and a half or whatever, it's been a little bit rambling, but I think what that only does to me is illustrate how possible and the quantity of hope, of touch points, if you will, that all of us truly have. Regardless if it's the phenotypic plasticity, regardless if it's the intergenerational genomics and adaption. No matter if it's just the idea of cows naturally existing in the landscape. I mean, there's a lot of ways to look at this, and I often find myself very overwhelmed with the opportunity. And that brings me great amounts of hope. It's not like we have one solution to solve a very, very large and complex problem. We have a complexity of solutions to solve complexities of issues. And it's totally in our power to do it.
Manda: Well, there we go. We did need to stop at some point. So this is the first break. And the second part will come in a moment. And so that, you know, I have put a link to Daniel's website in the show notes. Please go there. Please have a look at Stagtine and all of the other books. Daniel's writing is astonishing, and like everything else he does, there are layers upon layers upon layers of meaning woven into his words. You will get lost in there and you will come out differently. And if you're in the US or you are going to visit the US, he does run courses and you'll find them there too. So we're about to head into the next part.
Manda: In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music and the production, to Lou Mayor for the videos, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website, and to you for listening. See you on the other side. Thank you. And temporarily, goodbye.