Summary
➡ The speaker believes that farming, especially vegetable farming, is a profitable venture due to the high prices of food. They suggest that farming can be a way to spend more time on your land, improve it, and even make money from it. They also express their lack of faith in society and their desire for freedom and self-reliance, which they find in managing their own land. They warn that living off the grid comes with a lot of responsibility, but also brings satisfaction and a sense of ownership over one’s work.
➡ The text discusses the challenges and hardships of the future, emphasizing the importance of resilience and self-reliance. It suggests that these difficulties could serve as a catalyst for personal growth and societal rejuvenation. The author encourages focusing on personal improvement and self-sufficiency, rather than trying to change the world. The text also highlights the value of nature as a teacher and the importance of instilling these values in children.
➡ The text discusses the personal fulfillment and long-term enjoyment derived from hands-on work, such as farming and homesteading. It emphasizes the importance of doing meaningful work that you can see the results of, as opposed to working in an office where the impact isn’t always visible. The text also highlights the value of understanding where our basic needs, like food and shelter, come from and suggests that this understanding can lead to better mental health. Lastly, it encourages individuals to gain skills and knowledge that can help them become more self-sufficient and less reliant on the system.
➡ The text discusses the transformative power of hard work in challenging environments, using tree planting as an example. It highlights how such experiences can shape one’s personality, build resilience, and foster an entrepreneurial spirit. The text also explores the journey from dependency to sovereignty, emphasizing that it’s a gradual process that requires continuous learning and improvement. It suggests that enduring tough conditions and embracing challenges can lead to a fulfilling life and personal growth.
➡ People often feel defensive about those who choose to live off-grid, often making excuses for why they can’t do it themselves. However, it’s possible to transition to this lifestyle gradually, even if you have obligations like jobs and family. It’s important to compare your progress only to your past self, not to others, to avoid burnout. The concept of an ‘agrarian bunker’ is introduced, which is a self-sustaining system for food and other necessities, but it requires ongoing maintenance and can’t be set up instantly in a crisis.
➡ The speaker discusses the importance of food security and self-sustainability in a potential crisis scenario. They believe that relying solely on stored food is not a long-term solution, and that growing your own food and having a variety of items to trade will be valuable. They also mention the importance of being involved in the work of maintaining a self-sustaining system, rather than relying on others. The speaker encourages a balance between preparing for a crisis and enjoying life, emphasizing the need for a fulfilling and enriched life.
➡ The text discusses the reliance on technology in modern society, particularly in farming. It highlights how many farmers are dependent on technology to run their operations, which can be problematic when issues arise, such as GPS problems due to solar flares. The text also emphasizes the importance of having a deep understanding and connection with nature, as well as the ability to adapt and problem-solve without relying on technology. It warns of the potential dangers of our society’s fragility due to over-reliance on technology and centralization, and the need for individuals to have some level of self-sufficiency, particularly in food production and storage.
➡ The text discusses the importance of being prepared for power outages and other emergencies, using the example of a snowstorm that disrupted an off-grid system while the speaker was away. It emphasizes the need for backup plans, like solar power, and the value of learning from such experiences. The text also advises moving to higher ground with lots of trees and away from highways. Lastly, it promotes a survival gear website offering a discount code.
Transcript
What’s that going to look like when there’s no food in the stores? If I don’t do something about this, I’m going to get caught up in a mess. That was my big wake up calls. Holy. I don’t have any agency over my food at all. There’s only three days of food in the grocery stores across the world. What we’re talking about here, I think people understand if we think about a real SHTF scenario, everything is going to become commodified in some way or another. It’s no longer going to be about just trading precious metals. Seeds are going to have value, food’s going to have value, and it’s going to be able to get you things that you might not have.
I’m not just thinking about two years or five years, I’m thinking 20 years. 30 years of attrition. Curtis Stone, thanks for coming out, buddy. Happy to be here, man. Today we have Curtis Stone, who is an off grid consultant, big time youtuber, half a million subs. You came down to see us, and I’m glad because you are an expert in off grid homesteading, you know, building out off grid retreats. And that’s what I’m in the process of doing. Yeah. So today I’m hoping to pick your brain about how to find the right kind of property. Strategic relocation.
Totally. How to build it out. Yep. To maximize efficiency and all the different aspects of just living off the grid for whatever reason. Yeah. And I guess I’ll start by asking you what got you into this line of work where you’re helping people get ready for SHTF? Yeah, well, you know, it actually. I’ve had the, you know, I’ve been paying attention to the geopolitical situation for a very, very long time, even before I got into farming and doing the things that I do. And so I always wanted to do. I always wanted to live on a big acreage, be off grid, grow my own food.
I always wanted to do that since the time I was twelve years old. But that takes quite a bit of resources to do, as you know, and as you’re discovering. So I got into small scale farming, you know, 15 years ago because that was the thing that I could get into. And so I started an urban farm business, you know, farming in people’s backyards. I was actually inspired by a guy in Saskatoon named Wally Satsowicz. And so I started. That’s a very Saskatchewan name. It is a very Saskatchewan name, yeah. Is it ukrainian maybe or something? But anyways, yeah, got into doing that, loved it, became pretty good at it, and then I really became more motivated on the bigger picture stuff.
And so been on my own project now for three years, building it out. I’ve been consulting for people for ten years, though, and, you know, I kind of just got into it out of a passion for it and really wanting to help people. Found the work very rewarding and, yeah, it’s kind of a. It’s, the time is right for it, I guess. So the kind of stars aligned and your claim to fame with YouTube was building out these urban far. That’s right, yeah. And I think that’s actually a very obtainable place for people to start nowadays when, like you said, the bar for entry is pretty high to get into a rural property and to do all the things that you want to do, depending, of course, on where you go.
And we’ll talk a little bit more about. You don’t necessarily need to drop a couple million on a property. Not at all. There’s different ways you can go about it. But you also started off YouTube. Some of your most popular videos are in urban farming. Yeah, microgreens and urban farming. That’s how people know me. My book, the Urban Farmer, came out in 2016, had a lot of success. It’s still one of the top sellers in urban agriculture or market gardening, as we call it. But, you know, I kind of get bored of stuff. You know, it’d been ten years doing that.
Started the urban farming thing on YouTube ten years ago, and I kind of just kind of hit the pinnacle of where I could go with that. But I always wanted to do off grid. I always wanted to just be on a large acreage, do broad acre land design permaculture, building ponds and things like that. And, yeah, once I had the skill base to get into it, I kind of felt it pulling me there. And because you know, as you pointed out, it’s. It’s hard to get into just going off grid and, you know, being a prepper, there’s.
It’s not only the money, it’s finding the right place, but it’s also having the skill base to manage it all. And so the thing that was cool about getting into urban farming for me in the earlier days was that it was something that was attainable, that I could just ratchet up. Yeah. And so I could kind of get in and build out my skill base, build out my social network and experience, really. And then when it came to doing my own property, I had a lot of the things already there for me. So kind of just, you know, it’s three years on this homestead build, and people say, you know, they’ve been doing theirs for ten years, and I’ve accomplished more in three years than I.
Than most people have in ten. And I think that is a result of the early work I did in honing those skills. Yeah. And I really like your, your initial videos there with the. The urban gardening. Like, just the way you have it laid out. You show it from the aerial perspective and it’s really just well designed. And a lot of times you find some of these homesteads are just thrown together with no real thought put into it. Yes. But you really have worked towards creating highly efficient systems that try to get people to maximize efficiency, not just in terms of what they’re producing, but in terms of how many steps you have to take to get to this part of the acreage.
Exactly. Planning things out. And I think you call it. There’s a term that you call the chore path. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that’s. Yeah, that’s what people know me for in the, in the farming world, because that’s. That’s what I did, is I showed people how to make a really lean business that’s profitable and efficient and effective. And I’ve applied those same principles to the homestead. And it’s been. Yeah, it all kind of works well into it. You know, you can take these same efficiencies of how to run a profitable small scale farming business and bring it into the homestead to make the homestead more efficient.
Because if it isn’t efficient, you end up spending a lot of time doing things that aren’t really enjoyable. And so that’s what’s been fun for me on the homestead, is really thinking about that chore path. And, you know, when you step outside of the house, what are the things that you need to do and what are the steps you have to take to get there and making that efficient. And that’s where, like, you know, the term the chore path in and of itself is, is a really important thing to think about, is what do you got to do every day and how you got to get there.
And you want to think about that before you actually start building stuff on the homestead, if you can, depending on the state of the, the place that you bought is in. But you really want to think about, you know, I gotta collect the eggs, I gotta change the, the, I gotta feed the chickens, I gotta go and open the greenhouses or whatever it is, you really want to think about those things and have the least amount of steps to do it. And I like that you had a commercial enterprise aspect to what you were promoting, because for a lot of people, especially nowadays, with food prices so high, it’s incredibly lucrative to create a food company like where you’re selling, even just locally, to have that component where it’s actually bringing you an income is useful.
And I think that’s even more lucrative today because the prices of food are so high. No question. We’ve reached a point now where farming isn’t just a hobby that people want to do, but it actually makes financial sense even for a person of, you know, six figure income to farm. Absolutely. Because the price of food is just astronomical. Absolutely. And especially in the, call it niche markets of farming. You know, I wouldn’t recommend it being the best time to necessarily get into commodity ag, you know, and, oh, I’m going to go out and do canola and grain, but to grow vegetables.
I mean, look at the price of vegetables. I mean, it’s insane. So not only saving money for what you consume, but it’s actually profitable. And I’ve been saying this for 15 years now, is that there’s never been a better time to get into farming, especially vegetable farming. It’s the lowest barrier to entry. You want to get into commodity or even animal based agriculture. There’s a lot more moving parts, there’s a lot more complexities, regulations especially. But yeah, vegetables are easy. And if people want a homestead and you want to spend time on your land, if you can make even to start some money off the land, you’re going to spend more time on the land, which maybe integrates well with having your kids on the land, homeschooling, things like this, that you can create a sort of holistic lifestyle package where you’re just on your land more.
So if you’re making some money on your land, that’s good, because then you’re on the land more, you’re improving it, you’re putting the time and the resources and capital into making that land better. And if you’re making money off it, you’ve got that incentive. Right? Whereas if you’re just, if you’re going to a nine to five job every day and you’re getting off your land, you’re homesteading on the weekends and evenings, which makes it difficult. So if some, if you, if there’s a way to stack in some kind of commercial enterprise to your homestead, you’re going to get your homestead done a lot quicker and better.
Yeah. If it’s the job, if it’s your primary focus and you can really, you can really maximize its potential. So what, what is it that motivates you to that? I know what motivates me. I mean, I shouldn’t have to say I make videos every day about it. Yeah, but what is your motivation for getting into this lifestyle? What, what concerns you? What, what compels you towards trying to build a self reliant? Like, why not just go and move into the city and enjoy all the amenities and be close to all the stores? Yeah, right. Well, I mean, you know, your audience would know this better than any, but I just don’t have a lot of faith in society when I look at what’s going on.
And I’ve had this viewpoint for as long as I can remember that, you know, the cities are becoming degenerate, a huge, huge amount of dependencies. I mean, especially in the United States, we’ve got, since the creation of the modern welfare state as we know it, we have three generations of people who have been on welfare. And so we have ever increasingly dependent cultural norm and those people don’t have any practical skills. And so what happens if the lights go up? So that’s a big part of motivation, I’d say the other part is just the freedom is I want to be able to go out on my land and do what I want.
I want to do my thing. I want to put the time into the land and the development of that land and know that that’s mine. And it’s sort of an analogy of thinking about chopping firewood is like when you chop firewood and you go out and do that work, you own that work and you own the product of that work. There’s no intermediate intermediary, there’s no tax on it. Like you, you go and put the work in to chop the wood, you bring it into the wood stove, you’re heating the home for your family. I own all of that 100%.
I buck the trees, I take them down. I’ve got 30 acres of timber, and I can basically thin and sustainably manage my forest for a lifetime, make it better, and have firewood forever. And that’s a. When you think about everything is so compartmentalized in today’s society that you go work for dollars that are inflated, taxed, regulated, you know, occupational licensing, you name it, all these things that siphon off all of our work. When you do the work on the homestead, whether it’s planting the garden or chopping the firewood, you own that work. There’s something actually really liberating about that.
It comes with a whole litany of responsibilities, but every time I’m doing that work, I’m just. I own it. And there’s something that’s incredibly satisfying about that. You know, there’s. What you said there with respect to responsibility is a big thing, because when people go off grid, I think there is a romanticized view that I’m going to go and, you know, just live with the land. But it does come with so much responsibility, because now you’re taking on everything that we offloaded to degree in critical infrastructure. You’re building your own infrastructure. You’re your own police, you’re your own medic if accident happens, your own power grid.
So there is definitely an element to that that I think people need to be aware of, that I’m starting to understand just moving. You know, I’m not gonna say how far outside the city, but. Because I don’t want to be triangulated. But, you know, it comes with so much responsibility, because everything is basically in your hands. But there’s also, like you say, a certain part of that that wakes something up within a person that I think in a lot of people, it’s kind of sleeping because we have been so what we’re on the. I call it the big incubator.
Cities are like incubators. They’re farms. It’s a tax farm, basically. And. No, absolutely. I think there’s a direct correlation between freedom and responsibility. So the more freedom you want, the more you have to take on. And that is, as you kind of have noticed, it’s. People don’t really realize that, you know, during the COVID show, we had a lot of people that went out quickly onto the land. Yeah. And they didn’t last. And I see this because, you know, my company does real estate assessments for homestead properties, and we see these properties that you can tell were real turn and burn infrastructure.
Like people just went out, get a pump house, get a little cabin in there, get a, get some, you know, basic ad hoc infrastructure set up. And then they were abandoned. Yes. So a lot of people just don’t have what it takes. They just. Yeah, they didn’t realize what it really took to, and I think it was, I’m not sure it was Joel Salatin who talks about how fear has to be there as a motivator, because you do have to be somewhat leery of the way things are going, but it can’t be the sole motivating factor, otherwise you’ll burn out.
You burn out and you get bitter and angry, and then you don’t enjoy the work. And so I think you’re bang on. There is like, I can’t deny, and I’m not the kind of guy that wants people to be fearful. That’s not part of my narrative at all. I’m very optimistic about a lot of things, but I can’t deny that it was my original motivation to go look at what’s going on. This is not sustainable if I don’t do something about this, I mean, get caught up in the mess. And so that was the motivator. But day in and day out, no, man, I mean, I walk out my home to get on my chore path and go and feed the chickens and open the greenhouses and do all these things, and it’s just absolute joy.
I love every moment of it. And my, and I, and I see it in my kids that just being on the land, you know, we’ve got a good chunk of our property fence, too, and we’re in bear country, cougar country, you name it. Got a good dog, too. A good shepherding dog. But I can let my kids just go and walk out onto the property and literally walk the equivalent of city blocks away. They got the dog with them and they’re in the fenced area, but it’s a huge peace of mind. But also the things that my kids are learning that most children will never even be exposed to, but they get on a daily basis.
I see it in their development, I see it in their general well being and their health. And it’s, it’s worth every moment. You know, I think we should stay on this for a bit because I’ve seen this so much, this post Covid burnout with preparedness, and it’s almost as if people have forgotten how fragile the supply chain is and they’ve forfeited up those aquarium bunkers as you and Joel Salatin. Call them too soon. It’s almost like, don’t get rid of that yet. There’s more coming. There’s more coming. Oh, yeah. And I feel that fear is a great motivator because it is the prime driver of probably, you know, every.
Every massive, monolithic human project has been motivated by, in some way, shape or form, some fear of something. Yeah. But fear when it becomes paralyzing is never good. And when people become full of despair about the future, when I get comments on my channel of, well, I don’t want to survive this anyways, or, you know, people are ruminating about self deletion because of, you know, the future is. And while I do agree that we have tumultuous times ahead, to say the least, that’s part of the. It’s also an exciting challenge that we’re going to have to overcome, whether we make it or not.
I mean, I’m not romanticizing how things are going to be when this thing starts to fall apart because it’s going to be rough and I don’t anticipate it, but at the same time, I think it almost is what we need as a collective people to rejuvenate and just to shake off the weakness that we’ve acquired as a result of being in this, what you call, well, series of welfare generations, if you want to call it that, because that’s created the age old cliche. Good times, great weak men. That’s right. But, you know, we almost need that in order to bring things back to equilibrium.
Yeah, yeah. Because hard times create strong men. And so I totally agree. And, you know, for me, on a really deep level, I think there’s a pretty high level of spirituality to it in the sense that I feel like if you don’t have some kind of major challenge in your life, it’d be a pretty bizarre point. So I look at all this stuff and I go, okay, yeah, I can see all this stuff going south, economically, culturally, resources, agriculture, you name it. It’s a pretty dark course ahead of us. At the same time, I kind of feel like I was.
I chose this life. Like I. My sort of spiritual belief is that we choose our lives and we choose to come in to a certain time to do something. And I just have a great sense of purpose with it all. And so I don’t. The doom and gloom doesn’t bother me at all. And I actually barely pay attention to any of the headlines anymore because I’m just laser focused on creating prosperity. So for me, it’s freedom, liberty, prosperity, the freedom is the choice. In order to have the choice, you have to have the ability to make the choice.
And a lot of don’t. A lot of people don’t because they’re too dependent. But then the liberty is to be able to work towards something better, right? It’s that self determination. And then the prosperity is the benefit of the work. And so if you want those three things, you got to first have the choice and have the mindset to do it, and then to go and be self determined to put in the work. And then that creates the prosperity. And I can already see in with my kids the benefit that they have. Like, my daughter is seven years old.
She can go out into the forest and identify every single plant and mushroom in our little ecological zone because she’s just interested in it. And we found that it’s really kind of a fun thing to just let your kids go and be enticed and inspired to ask questions about things and let them figure it out. And that’s what I love about being on the land, is that it seems like nature is the best teacher. Absolutely. And there’s a certain rite of passage to all of this that historically, humans have been run through that gamut. In almost every civilization, there’s some rite of passage a boy or even a girl has to go through to some extent.
It’s different in every culture. And without that, like you said, there’s a lack of purpose and people don’t. There’s a void. And I think people don’t know where that void is coming from because it’s not something that’s obvious. But when you get out into nature and you have that connection with things, it kind of makes sense where we’re, you know, you feel as though even like, my kids have only been on the acreage for a couple months, and I feel like they’ve learned more in that period of time than they have definitely in the past three years when the school system has been in disarray.
Yep. And now as a result of them not being in school and the whole mask bullshit for two and a half years or whatever, the teachers are striking because, of course, the economy is inflated and, you know, so now that they’re not, they’re still not getting the right education. So, yeah, it’s incredible to see the. Just the rapid development of children when you put them in this environment where they have to have a bit more responsibility, which they’ve never had to have before. Wake something up, which was probably woken up within us because we grew up in eighties, nineties, where there was still, things weren’t all sunshine and rainbows.
We were, I guess, somewhere between Gen X, Gen Y, and so we had a few financial struggles there in the eighties and nineties. I mean, I don’t know about you, but. Yeah, I certainly did. Yep. So we kind of got a little taste of hardship, but we were like the last generation to get that. Yeah. And this generation, and I hate to be like the old guy who’s like these kids nowadays, but, I mean, I’m sure we. They said that about us. They did. But it’s been a. It’s been a constant, you know, from the baby boomers to us, it’s been a constant increase in living standards.
Now, that’s obviously not the situation, right. It’s falling apart. And maybe this is the natural cycle of things. You know, maybe this is what needs to happen. I think, you know, I don’t get hung up on the masses because it is. It’s easy to fall into these traps of, you know, what works for me must work for everybody, and there must be a solution for everybody. I don’t really care about that anymore because look around. You know, I call it the average Walmart shopper. You know, you want to know what your constituency? You want to think you can change society? Go to Walmart.
You know, I was just down in St. Louis, Missouri. You know, go look at the Walmart in St. Louis, Missouri, or Atlanta, Georgia. It’s pretty rough. You know, people are almost killing each other over a plasma tv on a black Friday sale. What’s that gonna look like? There’s no food in the stores. And so I kind of. You know what? There’s always going to be hard times, and perhaps this is our test. And I think a lot of people are going to come out better. Unfortunately, most people won’t. But maybe that has to happen, and maybe that’s their path.
You know? And I kind of look at the grand scheme of things and think about it in a spiritual way, is that maybe that’s your life path, to go and completely conform to the system and then be swallowed up by it. I’m okay with people doing that. But then there’s people like myself and yourself that are going, okay. Well, we need to take responsibility and put a personal stake in the game to improve our lot in life and make sure that our children and people in our community do okay. But we’re ready for that work, and we put the time in and the effort, and that’s our journey.
And everybody’s on their own. Different their own journey. And so I just, I don’t know, I kind of have a sense of peace with it all, to be honest. Yeah. I mean you get into this, I think there’s a certain series of stages that people go through in recognizing that things aren’t right in the world. And some people get hung up on the I need to change the world phase. Yes. And I think what unifies preppers across the political spectrum, whether you’re from the left or from the right, is this relinquishing of control over that and just focusing on what you personally can do and not getting caught up in the mob on either side.
You know, I mean, you know, if the elections, well, the elections aren’t going to go the way that half the country wants in the US this year, regardless of what the outcome is. Yeah. And the temptation is going to be to join in the mob. You know, even if you are a person who is self sufficient and you don’t have to find yourself there, there’s a lot of people are going to put themselves in that position that’s, you know, they’re, they’re at liberty to do that. But I think what unifies the off gridders is that they just don’t want any part of it.
And perhaps maybe they think in that charting that course, they’re better serving their ideology and that they’re, they’re, you know, creating a framework for people to follow as opposed to, it’s more solution focused, it’s uh, less problem focused. And then you don’t find yourself in those precarious situations that many are going to find themselves in when they try to fight this battle with, you know, whatever sort of nebulous entity they believe is running things. Exactly. So, so I, that’s why I’ve, I’ve chosen to, I guess. Was it Timothy Leary who said, yeah, drop out, tune in, turn in and drop out.
Yeah, but I mean, at the end of the day, you’re not going to change people’s minds about stuff. So the best way to change their minds is to do your own thing to the fullest and do it in the most benevolent way possible. Absolutely. And there’s so much personal fulfillment in that work because, you know, it’s one great thing about being on land is that, you know, you know, both you and I were tree planters back in the day. We were talking earlier about just to see the work, you know, you go in and you put a hard day work and you can look at that cut block that you replanted and you go, wow.
You know? Yeah, that’s. That’s quite fulfilling. The same thing with farming and homesteading. You name it, is that you can. You can go on measurable. It’s measurable, but you could. But the other things that aren’t measurable is the doom and gloom. Like, you get onto your Twitter feed and you go through all this stuff and you. Everything’s so screwed. But then you put in a good day on the homestead and you get that garden prepared, you get that greenhouse built or whatever it is. There’s so much fulfillment that comes out of that and so much long term enjoyment that comes from that work.
You know, it’s a long tail effect. You put the work in now, and then you enjoy that for the next 50 years, and then. And perhaps your kids enjoy it for their kids. And so that’s kind of my perspective with it all. And it actually motivates me to just work harder and do more. You know, I do the daily dose of doom and gloom talk about all the bad shit that’s going on in the world, because people treat information as a commodity nowadays. Yeah. And I used to think it was just people that want fear porn entertainment.
And there’s an element to that. People want confirmation that whatever they’re doing for off grid or preparedness is the right path, I guess, to take. It’s the bears wanting validation, essentially. Yeah. But what I found, too, is being out there in a tractor or just out there doing something on the land. I almost don’t want to think. Like, I almost just want to turn it off for a while and just. And, you know, I had this idea that I would get my headphones on, and I would constantly be listening to podcasts, and I haven’t even had the desire to do that.
Like, I’ve just. I’ve just been almost perfectly satisfied just hearing the hum of the engine. Totally. Or, you know, just being out there, not hearing anything at all. Well. And you think, too. Like, I often find that sometimes my biggest sort of philosophical breakthroughs come from me just doing the work. Yeah. And think, I like to listen to music. I like to listen to jazz. I’ll put on jazz albums on my little DeWalt stereo when I’m out doing something. But I totally agree that there’s some level of meditation in the work itself that is very grounding.
And, yeah, it’s a very self sustaining type process, because the more you do, the more you see the benefit, the more you enjoy it, the more you kind of get addicted to that sense of accomplishing things that you see the benefit from and you enjoy right away. You know, you go and build some infrastructure on your farm or your homestead. You get to use that right away. Yeah. You know, it’s more fulfilling than. Oh, of course it’s more fulfilling, but, you know, thinking about things like the stock market or where I’m going to put my money and all this.
When you actually do the work and see the stuff, you’re living it, you’re there. And when you actually create something from almost nothing, like a seed, you start to, you know, you really feel a sense of joy that I don’t think, I think many people are deprived of because a lot of the work we do nowadays is in an office. It’s not always measurable, the effect, and you don’t always get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. I mean, this is probably getting into old marxist thinking in terms of depriving the proletariat of the fruits of their labor.
But there’s definitely something to that in that, you know. Yeah, people have been removed from that. They don’t get to see the rewards and fully realize the rewards. But you do when you take that seed from. From seed to fruition. Yeah. Or that animal, which I yet to get into, but I presume it’d be the same way. Oh, it is. But, but, you know, you’re touching on a pretty big philosophical thing in the sense that what, what we’re talking about here, I think people understand, and because they can understand it in their body, and if they’ve ever done things like that, they get it.
But it’s partly why the system has compartmentalized every industry so much that the average individual is completely disconnected from the things that they need. And I bring this back to having agency over your resources. Like, there’s four things, indisputably that everybody needs. Food, water, energy, shelter. If you don’t have these things, you die. And most people, like probably 99% of people in the world today have zero agency over those things, and so much so that they’re not even connected in one or two steps to that supply chain if they don’t provide it themselves. So to go off grid is to really assume agency over all of those things as best as you can.
But, you know, one step is, you know, thinking about your food. Okay, well, if I can’t grow all my own food right away, well, maybe I can start getting it from supplies, supply chains that are closer to me buying food from local farmers and what have you, but people just don’t have that agency. And the system intentionally, I believe, has been created to create that compartmentalization. Because if you don’t know where your food comes from, why would you care about the way it’s produced? Because you don’t know anything about it. And so it’s no surprise that we live in this completely industrialized, commodified, commercialized food system that doesn’t do good for the environment, doesn’t do good for the farmer, and it doesn’t do good for the people eating it because the food is totally unhealthy.
But if people understood where their food was coming from more, they’d have more skin in the game. And that’s what I love about sort of the off grid, prepper stuff, is that you got skin in the game, in everything. And once you have that skin in the game, not only yourself, but your children and the people around you are going to understand it better, too. So I think it’s really this idea of creating spartans, you know, like the movie like 300 spartan or the movie 300. So instead of going at, oh, I’m gonna fix society and educate everybody about the food system.
It’s starting with yourself and building up this foundation of real understanding and useful knowledge that does have, in time, it will have a good net effect, because you can educate people from the foundation up, whereas it’s one thing to go and watch a food documentary and learn about how screwed up the food system is, but it’s another thing to actually go and work with a farmer and understand the processes from the ground up. That information is going to benefit everybody that knows that individual. So I think it’s a. It’s a quality over quantity argument or position, if you will, that if we focus on people getting skills that will understand things from a foundational level, I think that’s a better strategy long term.
When we think about the doom and gloom and all this stuff is, it’s not about educating the masses. It’s about training 300 spartans. And there’s. What you said about the agency and the lack thereof could potentially be the basis of a psychological theory of mental illness nowadays, because you have so much mental imbalance, which is neurotically based, it’s not genetic. It’s because society is structured in such a way. And I wonder how much of that you could trace back to this lack of agency. 100%, you know, because if you. It’s. I’ve always had this idea, this fantasy, I guess you could say, of how having a therapeutic counseling clinic, which would just drop people into the middle of the forest for a few days and, you know, monitor all their vital signs and, you know, that would be, you know, similar to how people go and take ayahuasca.
Yeah. Only it would be you go and try to survive well, make sure you don’t die. Yeah, but that is your kind of reborn experience. Yeah. And because I think that is definitely lacking in the way that you described it there, with the lack of agency of those four things, the closer people get to approximating their control over those things, I think maybe that’s when they start to really wake up and heal in a lot of ways. 100%. I mean, I’ve seen this working in agriculture for as long as I have, that people change. I mean, you get them.
It could be. It could be throw them into a forest in a survival scenario, it could be throwing them onto a farm and just get them to do the wet work, get them to do the shitty work that is needed, but that nobody wants to do. Get them into situations where they have to kind of tough it out. You know, we both experienced that in the tree planters. You know, you had to get out there every day, rain or shine, bugs or no bugs, and get out there and crank it. Yeah. And that. It shaped me.
I think it shaped you as well. But, you know, those. Those years of suffering in the bush really crafted my. My personality and gave me that. That desire to get through it, because on the other end of it, it’s incredibly rewarding. And that is. That’s a fulfilling thing, man. I mean, it’s. It’s a great way to live, and it really is. I mean, just on the topic of tree planting, you know, if anybody is interested in doing it, I would recommend it. I think it’s a very process that’s poorly understood by a lot of people. Think it’s just a bunch of hippies running around, tree huggers planting trees.
It’s a little bit of everything, really. But it primarily is a very challenging piecework experience, which is capitalism incarnate, because however hard you work, that’s what you get. If you want to f the dog all day on the side of the road. Yep. You’re not going to make much money. Yeah. If you’re a go getter and you want to work harder and endure through whatever the climate throws at you that day, then you will be rewarded for it. Yes. And so it’s a. If all work was like that, maybe we would live in a different society.
I agree. It is. It’s exactly as you said, capitalism incarnate, because what you make is what you take and I think, for myself, it crafted me in a couple different ways. One was it gave me that entrepreneurial spirit. I mean, I was the kind of tree planter that I had everything in spreadsheets. I was looking at my averages right now. I was like, okay, because. Because I was. I was working as a. Trying to be a professional musician at that time. And I was in Montreal. I would come back to BC, I’d work for two and a half months, and I would make more money in those two and a half months than all of my compatriots in my band would make an entire year.
So it afforded me some comforts, is that I could go and work hard and then come back to the city and then just focus on music. But it was that entrepreneurial hustle, but also the fact that I could just withstand uncomfortable conditions for long periods of time, that made me successful at farming as well as business. Because, you know, as well as I do, or any entrepreneur who’s. Who’s started somewhere small and got to something bigger, like you guys have with this space and everything you’re done, is that you got to tough it out, because the journey of an entrepreneur isn’t just this exponential curve up.
It’s all over the place, and you’ve got to get through it. Right. And I almost now fear the highs more than the lows because I know that there’s a low right around the corner, but when you’re in the low, you’re kind of okay. You know, I feel comfortable here. I know I’ve been here before. And this means that things are only potentially looking up and. Yeah, yeah. It’s, you know, on the topic of tree planting itself, there’s something about being thrown into an environment I’m not sure. Did you do any heli blocks? You probably did. I was the heli guy.
I was on all the special missions. So you would get thrown into an environment at the beginning of the day. There’d be wildlife, there’d be bugs, there’d be. And you couldn’t just stand on the side of the road because you get too cold. So you had to work to survive. There was a survival component. And I was telling you, one of my most memorable days was when it was so cold out, so rainy, so muddy, like everything was just mud. And the only way you could keep warm is if you burned the tree box that you had just planted at the end of each bag up.
Most people know the terminology, but. So there’s all these people having fires on the side of the road, and it’s just one of those days that you just don’t forget. It’s a character building day where you just. You realize how deep you have to dig in order to. And I feel sorry for people who don’t have that experience. Like, I look at my kids and I’m like, man, I feel sorry for you guys. Cause, you know, I’m not. I’m not giving you that experience. That’s what people should be. It’s a gift, really, to be put in that.
I agree. My whole saying now is, if it adds to the story, it’s a yes. And so every time something tumultuous happens, I kind of get excited because I go, it’s all upside, right? The only way to go is up. And so you get through it. But all those things add to your life story. Like the best stories we all have are the worst things that happen to us. Yeah, right. And so philosophically, I just look at that as that’s life. And. And how. How boring and meaningless would life be if we were all just sitting in our little pods eating z bugs, you know, just going along to get along.
That sucks. Everything is climate controlled. Everything is perfectly. Yeah, meticulously right where we want it. And that’s why people don’t have those stories, which is why they’re, you know, suffering on a level that they don’t understand. Exactly. I mean, you think about this could steer into another kind of angle thinking about this. But the way I kind of think about the way we live today is there’s sort of a five fold steps to getting free or sovereign in some way or another, is that we all start life as dependence. Right? I mean, you’re born, you’re a baby, you’re vulnerable, you can’t do anything.
And certainly some people are more dependent than others, but we all start at dependency. And even thinking about the way the average individual lives today, they come home, they turn on the lights, they hope, they turn on. You flush the toilet, you hope that it flushes. It’s only the times that it doesn’t work that you really notice. But you go into your fridge, there’s food there. You walk to the grocery store, you live in a city a few blocks down, there’s food there. That’s a complete state of dependency. You can move to a state of less dependency, fairly simple.
I mean, you’ve got a lot of stuff here that can get you there, but you can add resiliency to your system so you can be dependent, less dependent. You can get to a point of security, then you get to a point of resilience and then you get to a point of sovereignty. And I kind of think about the way I develop homesteads for people in that path, because it’s not just a matter of being zero to one. And you probably get this in your comments on, you know, regarding being a prepper or off grid or whatever it is that people think.
It’s always zero to one. It’s like you’re either you’re either it or you’re not. And that’s just not the case. It’s a. It’s a gradual progression. And so you can keep adding pieces in, whether they’re things that you add to your own skillset things, skills that you learn, experiences that you have or pieces that point that come together on the homestead and adding these steps of complexity and redundancy. But getting you to a point with that ultimate goal of I want to have agency over everything that I need to live. You can’t start there. You can’t just watch some YouTube videos and get there.
It’s a long process. Most people that are homesteading are going to tell you that they’ve been on a multi year journey, ten years or more for most guys to get to that point. But it’s fun. And if you can, if you enjoy the work, then you’re going to have so much more sustainability through the long process of it. And really thinking about benchmarks. Where do I get, where am I now? Taking an allocation of your resources and the skills that you have, and then how do I get to the next stage and always just thinking about ways to improve.
I think that’s why a lot of people give up or get upset with preppers. And that’s a huge spectrum in and of itself. As you said, you have urban preppers, you have meso preppers, you have off grid homesteaders, entirely different worlds, really. The tactical guy versus, you know, a farmer. That’s right. But I think a lot of people get very defensive when they see somebody who’s living that life. Because if you’re trying to be the ultimate off grid or right away you’re going to rationalize, you know, reasons why you shouldn’t do that. Yeah. So you’re going to start making up excuses as to why that person is crazy or why they’re just paranoid or, you know, you’re going to be scribing all of these motivations that aren’t true.
But if you do just attack it piecemeal, one step at a time. And I think having a pathway for people that is achievable and really show them that maybe that’s where we failed as a preparedness community in terms of bringing people from, you know, having, you know, basically a person of modest means who lives in the city. You know, it’s not easy to just uproot your life and go and live in the country. Not everybody can do that. You have jobs, you have obligations, you have kids in school, you have medical needs, whatever. So getting people from there to potentially a peri rural, is that what you call it? Peri urban? Peri urban to rural environment that is sustainable.
You’re always going to be in some way, shape or form connected to the grid in some way, especially if you’re using modern tools. But I think that’s where perhaps with your courses, too, people might get a little bit of insight in terms of how they can get there, because there is ways to do it. And it’s not going to be easy. You have to start with very modest expectations, especially if you’re getting into, you know, the commercial gardening space or whatever, you know, your endeavor might be. But yeah, there’s definitely a lot to be said for.
Yeah, well, in the key, there is, and a key thing for people, I could advise them on that journey, is to only compare yourself to who you were yesterday. So don’t watch my videos or your videos and go, oh, I can’t do that. Thus, I’m not going to throw my hat in the ring. Well, start and then compare yourself to where you were before, because we’re all on our own journey. I think people kind of get hung up on the timeline of the collective call it opposed to their own timeline. And I think that’s really important because especially if you do want to go the long haul, if you’re always comparing yourself to others, it will burn you out psychologically.
But if you really take account of who you are, what you have and where you’ve been to where you’re going, it’s, it’s a lot more sustainable on the, the personal journey level of, you know, you’re in it for the long haul. Like we said, you know, a lot of people after the COVID thing, they burnt out and they, society kind of went back to normal, at least for normies, I guess. But if you’re not comparing yourself to where you were, what do you have? Like, it’s, you really got to personalize it all and really internalize that journey into your own story and value your own story, because people watch us and it’s easy to do.
It’s easy to watch people and subscribe to channels and you’ve got a collection of things that you pay attention to to get hung up on that, but, you know, go do the work. Maybe when you’re listening to this podcast, put it on your earphones and go and do the work. You know, get out there and make it happen and really congratulate yourself and be proud of the work you did and just, yeah. Compare yourself to where you were yesterday. That’s the key. That’s very good and practical advice because especially nowadays, and we’re going to talk about how people can get into this lifestyle if that’s something that they so choose.
And you have a lot of different tools that you use to assess what the ideal SHTF properties are. Yep. You have a whole system that you’ve created. You do consulting with people. Yeah. Let’s talk a bit about the concept of an agrarian bunker. Now, Joel Salatin talks about this. Yes. I have a friend, his whole plan, he’s got this off grid retreat and he’s just got shipping containers loaded with shit. Okay. No, nothing built. Yeah, there’s nothing there yet. So he’s anticipating that things are gonna go south. Yeah. High net worth individual. Yeah. Has the money to just dump into a property.
But his whole philosophy is, well, you know, I don’t really want to live like that yet, but if it happens, I’ll have things I need to build a greenhouse, I’ll have a couple tractors. I’ll have all the extra fuel filters and lubricants and fuel stored and all this stuff. So that’s kind of one strategy, I suppose there’s risk in that strategy. I could outline. There’s definitely a lot of risk. Yeah, but it is an option, I guess, is what I’m saying. But the agrarian bunker, it seems to be, at least from what I understand, it’s high net worth individuals who are seeing the way things are going in the world and having met a lot of people in the preparedness industry, you get closer and closer to seeing what the big money is doing.
And they’re prepping, obviously. Right. And lots of them want these turnkey solutions. They want a guy to build them something just in case shit happens. Yeah, but what is your perception of the agrarian bunker and what are you seeing in terms of who you’re consulting with and the industry? Yeah, so I mean, in the agrarian bunker, I guess the idea came from the bunker. Right. Every prepper understands the idea of the bunker. Hunker down, you got all your supplies and you, you know, canned. Canned food you know, bullets, beans and, and boolean or something like that.
Band aids. Yeah. Yeah, sure. You know, the agrarian bunker is. Yeah, well, the agrarian bunker is that idea, but it’s more. It’s more thinking about the long term because how long can you last in a bunker? And it gets lonely. And then the agrarian bunker is, well, you need to have a self sustaining supply of food and the things that you need to live. And so it’s a lot of the ideas that exist in prepping but expanding it and maybe merging that with, say, ideas in permaculture or regenerative agriculture to set up a system where it is self sustaining.
And that. There’s a lot to that. I mean, to your idea about making something that’s turnkey. There’s certainly elements that can be turnkey in that. The challenge is that the climates and the places that we live very significantly, you know, when you’re talking about a temperate climate, say, in North Carolina, United States, to a boreal climate of, you know, northern Alberta, they’re very very different to a tropical climate in, say, Nicaragua, all different. All have different circumstances. The way you build your house is different. The way you grow your food is different. But yeah, the basic idea is that you need to have something going.
The challenge that a lot of the column, the multilevel millionaires that, that I sometimes work with is that you need people. So to go and set up an agrarian bunker and you want to keep your New York high rise, but to have this agrarian bunker that you can just show up to and it’s all there, you need people to, to do it. To build it. To build it, but also to maintain it. Because if you have agricultural systems that are going to be working by the time you get there, they need to be maintained. Right. You can’t just get to the agrarian bunker and then say, okay, now we’re gonna plant the crops.
Now we’re gonna. Now we’re gonna build the food forest at wait for ten years. Exactly. And so this is the risk that, you know, your buddy who’s just got things in shipping containers is gonna run into is that when you start on the project immediately you’re gonna realize that you have things that you didn’t think about. Oh, this isn’t working. Oh, but there’s no Internet. So how do I even figure out how to do this? And so it’s better to have a system that’s set up and, you know, that’s, that’s a tall order. Like the average individual isn’t going to just have this really established plan B set up.
That’s, that’s high net worth individuals. And so if you’re not that, what that looks like is you got to transition your lifestyle to get out on the land somehow. Fortunately, a lot of people can make money online these days. So the possibility to move out to the countryside is actually better than it’s ever been if you’re not going to work in the country. And so you need to get these things going now because to be just a prepper and have it all ready for when an SHTF happens, there’s a lot of variables that aren’t going to be there when you get there.
So what would you say then if they were to fire back and say, well, I could just afford to buy five years worth of freeze dried food? You know, that would probably be, I’m hearing what he’s saying right now and it’d probably be, well, I could just stockpile enough food to get me there. At least that’s the thinking. Yeah. And certainly that’s all part of my strategy. Stored food and things like that. That’s all part of my strategy. But, you know, a year into the SHTF scenario, you’re going to get pretty tired of freeze dried food.
Yeah. And you’re going to want to, you know, have a more balanced diet. And you also might see a value in trading the things because if we think about a real SHTF scenario, everything’s going to become commodified in some way or another in that it’s no longer going to be about just trading precious metals, which might be the only type of currency we have. In that type of scenario, seeds are going to have value, food’s going to have value, and it’s going to be able to get you things that you might not have. And so you’re going to want to have a litany of things that you can exchange with others that aren’t going to do that.
And so that’s where I really start to think about a sort of an agrarian economy that, because if you think about civilization, I mean, civilization doesn’t happen without agriculture. Agriculture is the tie that binds the foundation, the foundation of all civilization, because it’s, civilization is defined by specialization. Right. And that’s, that’s how we get into these complex economies. But at the center of it all is food. And so food security. Food security and just food production in general, if you want to think about the long game. And that’s what I’m not just thinking about two years or five years.
I’m thinking 20 years, 30 years of attrition that you’re going to have all the stored stuff is going to get you through the first phase that might allow you to survive the first wave of panic and pandemonium. But if you want to have a life that’s enjoyable, you know, be able to have a steak or be able to have fresh food from the tree, this is what makes life enjoyable. And so that’s, that’s where I’m at. I don’t want to just be eating canned beans for five years. I want to be eating vegetables from the garden and, and enjoy life.
And so my whole philosophy with prepping is that I don’t want to prepare for a time to just hunker down and get through a phase and just grind through it. I want to enjoy life the whole way through. And so when SHTF’s happening, I want to be picking fruit from the tree. I want to be pulling carrots from the ground. And you want to limit the amount of lifestyle change that will have to occur. Yeah, I want, and I want to enjoy it. Even for preppers there’ll be a big lifestyle shift because you’re going from being on the grid, the lights go out.
Now you’re eating your stored food, whereas a person who’s in the country, they have these, you know, pseudo self sustaining. I say that tongue in cheek because there’s no such thing as true self reliance. I mean it doesn’t exist if you use a nail. You know, that nail had to be mindful from. But yeah, the difference, you’re probably not even going to notice if it happens, if the lights go out, if you have those self sustaining systems in place. So that I guess is the goal. But you talked about people and that being problematic for these agrarian bunkers because they have to be on there.
So what happens then when. Well, shit hits the fan and these people who’ve been working this land maintaining it for you, you know, what happens when, I guess, SHTF happens and all the employees on the yacht decide to have a mutiny. This is the ultimate conundrum that the sort of call it billionaire class face. And in a way I’m kind of comforted by that in the sense that, you know, that the people doing the work are eventually going to prevail. Prevail. And so, you know, as a guy who’s come from modest means and a working class means, I kind of take pride in that.
But I’ll tell you, a lot of the high net worth people I work with are actually working class people that just have done. Well, I don’t really work with aristocratic elite, if you will, nor do I want to. A lot of the people that I work with are oil guys. You know, they’re just, they, they started as rig pigs and then they got into upper level management and then they got into investment and then they started, you know, mobilizing their capital. These guys know how to run heavy equipment. They know how to do things. And so I think, yeah, when it comes to an agrarian bunker, you have to be prepared to get in there and do some of the work.
There is no real scenario for you. Well, maybe there is with robots and AI. We could go down that philosophical rabbit hole. But I think really, if you want an agrarian bunker, you need to be prepared to get in there and do some of the work. And I also think that will also make sure that the camaraderie you have, even if you are a multilevel millionaire who, say, has the budget and the ability to station five to ten people on this homestead and maintain it for a period of time, that it’s there and working, is that if you’re, if you’re the kind of guy that rolls up in the, in the horse drawn carriage that doesn’t want to get your hands dirty, your employees are going to have a pretty big disconnection from you.
But if you’re the kind of guy that’s willing to get in there and do the dirty jobs, that’s how you build. It’s like, it’s like that meme of leadership where you see there’s, there’s the shitty leader is the guy with all the people in front of him whipping them, but the best leader is the guy out front pulling it. Yeah. And so I strive to be that. And I encourage the people that work with me to do that. And most of them are. And so, yeah, I think it’s important, and this also speaks to what we were talking about earlier, is that if you do have some kind of commercial element on your property, that is the incentive that, that if you want to have the place operational for when you come there, then actually instead of setting yourself up with a agrarian bunker, do a little bit of both.
Yeah, have your agrarian bumper bunker, but set up a profitable farming business on it now so that those people have an economic incentive to stay there. And also so you’re not just shelling out cash to pay them, that if this becomes self sustaining as far as its economics, that’s actually kind of a better case scenario. Well, you know, on this topic, there was a writer who interviewed a lot of high net worth individuals like Peter Thiel, his name was Douglas Rushkoff, and the Zuckerbergs. And apparently they have a plan for how they’re going to manage the groups of people they have to work for them.
And so they have, they consult with security experts on, okay, how to maintain order, how to withstand a mutiny and withstand a mutiny in the bunker or wherever it might arise. And there is these strategies that you would employ, these Stasi esque or stalinesque type strategies that you would employ to keep people in line. And I think maybe that’s what they’re sort of banking on. But, yeah, it’s an interesting thing that we see unfolding today, and I think that is motivating anybody with a modicum of common sense that the people who run the show are preparing for the thing to collapse.
So that in itself should be sufficient motivation that the smart money, if you want to call it, is focused on this to some extent, or they’re scooping up these agrarian bunkers and literal bunkers. So maybe I should take an interest in this. And of course, since COVID it’s opened the door to that. But again, goes back to a lot of people are already burnt out and people, there was a resurgence with the war and, you know, people are already. Okay, well, I guess the nukes aren’t coming, even though we’re closer to nuclear war than ever before.
And you get this unfortunate. I guess there’s something about us that is enduring in our motivation that transcends just pure fear based wanting to survive the end. We do want to have good lives. We want to live off grid, in harmony with nature, want to have fulfilling, enriched lives. And that has to be the underlying motivation 100%. Otherwise you’re going to get bored. You get bored and you burn out and then you don’t. You need to be involved with it. You really do. Like, you have to be in the work to do it best. I mean, I have some friends that are, you know, high, high net worth individuals who have done things like this across the world in different places, and they’re just not on the land.
And I’ve built my homestead, I’m almost done and I’m three years in. And some of these guys that I know who have ten times more resources to deploy than I do, it’s not happening because if you’re not in it and you’re not involved and you don’t have a passion for it, it’s challenging. But then, you know, of course the Zuckerbergs and the thiels and guys like this, they’ve got so much capital and resources that they can pretty much accomplish whatever they want. That, like, that type of money will allow you to do that. But most people, and even most of the, the high net worth people I work with, they’re not at that level like the Zuckerbergs and the fields.
That’s a whole other. That’s the billionaire status. I’m not, you know, working in those kinds of circles because those guys can just spend money however they want. But you’re going to have to be involved, and if you’re not, it’s not going to last very long. Now, technology for most people has replaced that. And even farming nowadays is, I mean, with the recent solar flare, there was gps problems with the tractors, so they couldn’t run the tractors. Yeah, it’s like, there is definitely. You’ll find that around here, too. There are people who are willing to get her done.
The proverbial get her done or get her did, as they say. Yeah, but I think the majority of people aren’t like that anymore. Like, especially when you go into the big cities, I mean, Vancouver, total Montreal, you don’t really have to, but there’s definitely something to be said about the having to prepare and living far from the equator and having to, you know, be a bit more calculated in terms of how you ration your supplies and how you plan, you know, and there’s definitely something to that. But I’d say technology is almost equalized thing to a certain extent.
It has. It has. Well, it’s compartmentalized things. I mean, what you said about farming and farmers is with that, with regards to the solar flare and people can’t run the tractors, is. I pointed this out early on, even when I wrote my book. More when it came out in 2016, I was paying attention to the fact that our society’s become so overly technological that some farmers can’t farm without the technology. That’s insane. I mean, most can’t. Like, most big agriculture around here, you don’t have the big combines and the fertilizers and, you know, pesticides and, like, it’s not like what we’re talking about.
Yeah, like horticulture and agriculture, like, worlds apart in terms of big time. Big time. But that’s where I think maybe what’s coming is a reset that’s needed in some ways is because without that knowledge, that old knowledge, and you probably know this in the prepping community, that there’s quite a bit of crossover, say, the survival community, as there is to indigenous knowledge. Like a lot of the First nations people here in Canada can go out. Well, not very few of them now, but the knowledge and the history and the culture is to be able to survive and know what’s edible, know what’s medicinal.
Anywhere the knowledge has been lost. You can say the same with, with old school farmers. And I’ve interviewed hundreds of, if not at this point, thousands of farmers around the world. And the old school guys had it all internalized. You know, we’ve got software to manage your crops and software to manage the machinery, the technology. Predict the weather. Predict the weather. But the old school guys, they just looked outside and said, what am I going to do today? And they had it intuitively. And so I’ve kind of trained myself that way over the years that I don’t even need to plan my gardens anymore.
And I grow, you know, my homestead garden is as complicated and as big as some commercial gardens because I grow a lot of stuff and my wife and I use everything we grow. But I’ve got it so internalized now that I don’t even really have to plan it. I just know. And that’s come from kind of just forcing myself to not become dependent or reliant on systems and technology is just get out there and figure it out. Let nature teach you. Let, let the elements kind of knock you into place to go. Okay, well, what am I going to do now? Because, because every plan, you can have a plan, the best plan, but all it takes is a couple wild cards to completely throw that plan out the window.
Yeah. And you have to go back and go, okay, well, now I got to start again. And so it’s actually good if you learn that early on and test yourself so that when the test comes, comes and you, and you didn’t have, you didn’t have a plan b, because now what are you going to do? Because you need a plan a, a plan B, a plan C. Right. I think these farmers that we see nowadays, it would be interesting to see, like a case study to see how well they actually fare because many of them are so dependent on to run any of their, like, they don’t have their own gardens.
You know, they don’t like these giant wheat fields with tractors that require diesel and maintenance. And it’s all just a commercial enterprise. And so while I think where you’re correct is that there is still that memory from the older generation that they have of the farmers almanac and all those types of things. And they do definitely have a greater appreciation for just nature’s impact on their lives, because they see what effect drought has, or, you know, flooding has, or weather patterns and that sort of thing. They’re closer to the problem, so they’re closer to that. They have more agency.
If we go by your poor agency thing, they’re closer. So they kind of understand what it takes, the inputs into the system. But I think maybe where we’ll be surprised is how inept a lot of those mass agricultural farmers will be and how ill prepared even they are to endure what’s coming. It’s quite, actually terrifying, once you really get into it, how compartmentalized agriculture has been. I mean, this is a thing that I learned from Joel Salatin very long time ago, is that the green revolution in agriculture completely compartmentalized the farm and the farmer. Whereas, as you said, most of these grain fields out here, these guys don’t even have home gardens.
They grow canola or whatever it is down cotton in the south, or corn or whatever the commodified crop is. Without that big monolithic system, they have nothing. And that’s. That’s a scary place to be. And that’s. That’s where a lot of people really need to look at that and say, if you don’t have some level of food production and also, of course, some level of food storage, you. You could be pinched really quickly. And, I mean, there’s only three days of food in the grocery stores across the world. All it takes is a. Is a modest blip in the system to shut it down.
I lived through it in early. It was a. It was early 2008 in Montreal. There was a freezing rainstorm. And this wasn’t the worst one. The worst one was, believe it was in the nineties. I wasn’t there yet, but. But we had it in early 2008. The city was essentially gridlocked for three days. And that was my big wake up call that motivated me to do everything, because up until this point, I was tree planting out out west to make money. And I was just trying to make a go as a. As a composer or arranger in music and playing in bands and stuff like that.
But I woke up one day, my door was frozen to my apartment. I couldn’t get out. It was frozen by a layer of ice. I had to chisel my way out, stick my arm out the window and bang it out so I could get out of the house. And I go to the grocery store, and it’s complete pandemonium. Cars were crashed. People were falling on the sidewalk like a layer of ice on everything. It’s it’s crazy, but I went to the little grocery store on, in the mile end where I lived in Montreal, and I saw very little stuff on the grocery store shelves.
And I. That was my big wake up calls. Holy shit. I don’t have any agency over my food at all. And it was fear, right? It was a fear of motivation to get me going. But it still motivates me today. It’s just our society is so fragile and centralized and compartmentalized that it is so unresilient that it’s quite staggering. I think it was just two nights ago, the first power outage I ever had at the acreage. We don’t have solar yet, and I’ve had power outages in the city and it’s like, okay, you know, power is going to come back on.
And it’s summertime right now, so no big deal. But there’s a certain sense of dread that that occurred to me when that power went out on that acreage. Knowing that had this happened during the winter, it was just like, it was different, you know, it wasn’t like when you have a power outage in the city, when you’re closer to the, you know, the incubator, you know that the government will fix it. There’s something else that happens, which is why I’m happy we’re going to be getting solar, hopefully this year, as a backup plan to that. But that is what is required.
What you’re talking about your experience with the ice storm. Yep. Is required to kind of motivate people to show them. Without that, 90% of people ain’t never going to move on this. No, no. And you’ll experience it when you’re getting off grid because. Yes, redundancies, because you will experience it with off grid. And I had it. I had it this winter, I went down to Mexico for a conference and I left my wife and kids at home. The snow melted and I thought, okay, well, I can go to this conference and the snow won’t be an issue because I do.
We got a kilometer long driveway, and the day I left it snowed six inches. And the whole off grid system down went down without me being there. So I had to coach my wife through going through this sort of redundancy steps we had. And it actually worked out great. It was a good test, but what you pointed out is a good thing. And it’s actually better that it happens now than later. Get to the high ground where there’s lots of trees. If you’re anywhere near any of those highways, forget about it, it’s going to be the first thing to go.
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