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Co-Founder and former CEO of Seeds of Change

Founded Bioneers Conference

Heads Restorative Development Initiative of Collective Heritage Institute

Author, Restoring the Earth, Visioneering, Solutions from the Bioneers, Seeds of Change; the Living Treasure

He produced the film, Hoxsey, How Healing Becomes A Crime

Thank you very much. I’m just getting over a chest flu, and I never would have gone anywhere except to come to ACRES, USA. I have enormous respect and admiration for this community. I first met Charlie in New Mexico in 1985 at the San Juan Garde, which I’ll talk a little bit about tonight where Seeds of Change actually germinated. I consider Charlie one of the true visionaries in this field. I think this community has done so much to keep farmers on the land, and to advance ecological agriculture. So I really want to pay my respects here and express my great admiration for you.

What I would like to do is ramble a little bit tonight. My life is sort of a work in progress, and it’s hard for me to understand it a lot of the time, but perhaps if I touch on it some of my process of how we arrived at some of the work we’re doing now, particularly in terms of economic development in agriculture. Hopefully all of this will make sense by the time our hour is over. I also wanted to point out Holly Lucas who is here with me from Collective Heritage Institute.

We’re very interested to network with the community here around the restorative development initiative which I’ll talk about a little later where we’re linking farmers with progressive markets and really trying to co-create an alternative agricultural economy.

I know you were expecting someone from Seeds of Change tonight. I co-founded the company and ran it for six years, but I left it three years ago because of a difference of vision. So I can’t speak for the company in its current state, and I’m not in contact with these folks, but I’d like to do is tell you how I got involved in some of these projects and then bring it full circle, because it is all reconnecting now over the past 10 or 15 years of my own work.

I grew up in New York City. My father was a teacher, so I spent quite a bit of time—long summers on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket. I was always very connected to the outdoors when I was growing up, so I had a strong connection with nature in that way. I certainly had nothing to do with farming or gardening. Never had any idea about any of that stuff. I was mostly connected with my fishing pole and my baseball bat, basically.

When I was 19 I had some pretty serious health problems. As a result of that, several years later I ended up fleeing New York City and landing in New Mexico. Really to restore my health. Among other things I ended up a small farm north of Santa Fe, about 35 miles north of the city where we had an apple orchard. I was very fortunate to have some local neighbors who became my mentors in organic gardening.

I felt like an idiot because I had gotten that far in my life without even knowing how to grow a garden and I really felt I needed to know how to grow some of my own food and really get out there and work with my body in a different way. I was in the middle of restoring my health when one evening I got a very chilling telephone call from my Mom telling me that my father had cancer. Six months later he was dead. It was a tremendous shock and trauma. I had been very self absorbed in my own travails at that point, and it kind of shook me out of that a little bit.

Two weeks after my father’s death, in the mail unbidden, I got a newsletter that contained testimonials from cancer patients saying essentially that they had cured themselves using nutrition. Although I had become somewhat familiar with alternative medicine for my own situation, this was a very shocking concept to me. I was not only skeptical to the idea, but I was kind of hostile to it. I thought it was preposterous, but with my father freshly buried and my heart broken I decided if there were anything at all to this I really needed to know about it.

So I set about a personal journey of investigation and started to read everything I could get my hands on, talk to anybody who had had a direct experience with alternative cancer treatment. What I found was I sort of fell into a rabbit hole into this world of remarkable remissions of all sorts of people who got well when they weren’t supposed to.

I pursued this quite diligently for a couple of years—about a year and a half, actually, when I came across an article about a very obscure treatment called the Hoxsey Cancer Remedy that completely changed the way I saw the world.

Suddenly, things began to make sense for me because, I really think that like all things, medicine is very political, and I’d like to share with you a little bit of the Hoxsey legend.

Supposedly, this is how the story goes, in 1840 a farmer in southern illinois had a prize stallion who got a malignant tumor on its right hock. It was his favorite horse and he couldn’t bear to shoot animal, so he put it out to pasture to die peacefully.

Three weeks later, he found that the tumor had stabilized. So he started to observe the horse very closely. What he found was that it was eating unusual plants—not part of its normal diet—mostly roots and barks. Within a year the horse was completely well.

So he went out in the barn having just experienced this horse sense and he started to tinker. He put together these different herbal formulas and started adding some other ingredients of popular home remedies of that era and eventually came up with three or four preparations including an internal tonic and an external salve. He became very famous as a veterinarian in Illinois for treating animals with cancer and tumors.

It was a Quaker family and he ended up handing down the formulas through the generations. His grandson was the first one to try it on people, repeatedly with positive results. This was around the turn of the century. Then his son, Harry Hoxsey, was the only one of 13 children who was interested in all this, and who his father said had the healing touch. Harry decided to carry it on.

A death bed legacy, his father gave him these formulas and gave him several stipulations. One of them was that it would carry the Hoxsey name, and the other is that he would treat poor people for free—treat anyone, basically, whether or not they had the money.

He also warned young Harry about the high priests of medicine who would hound him relentlessly, and caution the boy to go to medical school. I am going to condense the story because it’s rather elaborate. There is a video you can get of the film if you’re interested in more of this. It is being turned into a Hollywood film now, which is kind of miraculous.

What happened is Harry decided to go ahead and commercialize the formulas and he started in 1924 in Taylorville, Illinois, south of Chicago with the first clinic. He became very famous very quickly with thousands of patients overrunning the clinic. He is a master promoter, and really quite a showman.

Word spread very quickly to Chicago which was the headquarters of the American Medical Association which was newly powerful at that time. This is really the era of the corporatization of medicine. When Medicine became very big business very quickly.

I spent four years researching the film, and incredibly got it to the AMA archives, which is kind of the King Solomon’s Mines of all this research and the AMA set up something called the Bureau of Investigation at the early part of the century which was essentially their mini-FBI where they tracked so-called quacks, and their list of quacks by the 1940s grew to include 300,000 names if you can imagine that.

Anyway, what happened was Hoxsey demonstrated the treatment, and we actually found photographic evidence of this case. It was a rather grotesque external cancer on this person’s shoulder, and he cured it. You can see visibly that the tumor disappears, and the death certificate of the person, in fact, indicated that he lived on for 30 years after this happened.

Here the stories depart rather radically. Hoxsey claimed he was offered a contract for the rights to his formulas. The AMA denied the incident ever happened. Hoxsey wanted poor people treated for free, and so obviously that didn’t fly with the AMA. That’s when the battle started, and for the next 35 years he fought organized medicine tooth and nail.

He was arrested more times than any other man in medical history, but incredibly, by the 1940s the Hoxsey Clinic in Dallas, Texas, had become the world’s largest privately owned cancer center with 12,000 patients under treatment. Two Federal courts held up the therapeutic value of the treatment and this is despite all the high powered lawyers for the other side that you can imagine.

In court Hoxsey managed to bring his adversary—his medical nemesis from the AMA, Dr. Morris Fishbein, into court where he became the first man ever to defeat the AMA on charges of libel and slander, and to actually win the judgment.

During the trial, Dr. Fishbein, who had battled him for 25 years in the AMA journal where he had, among other things, called him a gule, feasting on the bodies of the dead and the dying—a little purple prose. Dr. Fishbein first of all, admitted that the Hoxsey external cancertreatment does work. It’s never been contested since 1948.

But, he (Fishbein) said he had failed anatomy in medical school. Never completed his internship, and never treated a single patient in his entire career. This is the head of the American Medicine.

Now throughout this period, what Hoxsey was really looking for was a fair scientific investigation. The AMA denied it saying we already know that these plants don’t work. We’re not going to dignify it with a test.

Well, here I was in 1984 looking at this all over again and astonishingly, no one had looked at these plants. So I wondered, of course, what are these herbs? What do we actually know about these?

I ended up in Washington, D.C. at the doorstep of a man named Dr. James Duke whom some of you may know. He is a pharmacognicist. He studies medicinal plants chemistry, and is considered a world expert on medicinal plants. Jim is a very careful and considerate scientist, so what he did was he dialed into NAPRA alert, which is the natural products database worldwide. It has THE information, basically, on medicinal plants.

What we found is that all of these plants, first of all, are old native American plants for cancer with a 3,000 year old imperical history of usage. But then, even more powerfully, what we found is that six of the nine herbs have actually shown anti-cancer activity under controlled laboratory conditions in tests all over the world.

So this was not some new age hocus pocus or some kind of airy fairy nonsense. This was botanical medicine, which is of course, the cornerstone of pharmacy. You know, a quarter of our modern prescriptions today contain a plant constituent, and fully almost half of them are based on natural products and organisms of one sort or another, so there is nothing mysterious about this in that way.

Well, through this rail, I really began to research medicinal plants more intensively and while in Washington I ended meeting Christopher Byrd who wrote, The Secret Life of Plants, which I am sure many of you are familiar with. If I thought what I was doing was controversial, look out. Here’s Chris telling us that plants have consciousness and emotions, and they get upset in the next room if you’re thinking bad thoughts about them.

Anyway, we became pretty friendly, and a few months later when I was back in New Mexico Chris called me up and asked me if I would go and make a film about a friend of his at a very unusual garden on an Indian pueblo near Santa Fe where I live. I figured anything that came from Chris was bound to be interesting. So I got in my car, got our camera crew together and so forth, and drove up the valley.

For those of you who may have seen the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, it’s a very ancient place, and the Rio is a north/south river that’s really the main waterway through the state and the Pueblo Indians have lived there for many, many generations. They date themselves back about 40,000 years. When they talk about agriculture, they’re really talking about agriculture. Their entire society is really based around farming and a very sacred relationship with plants.

All summer long, there are corn dancers. Corn is really a sacrament. It isn’t just a food. It’s really a sacred part of that culture, so you really feel this ancientness as you come up[ the valley.

When I got to the pueblo in San Juan I didn’t know what to expect. What it turned out is I met a young fellow—a long Anglo hippy named Gabriel Howard whom the Pueblo had hired because they had a real problem. That was that since WWII everybody was leaving the land because they couldn’t make a living farming. So the next generation simply was not coming off. They were very very concerned about losing their entire agricultural heritage. So they had hired Gabriel because he had a background of having studied in California with Allen Chadwick. Who has reinvented bio-intensive farming in this century. What Chadwick told his students was, if you really want to learn about farming and gardening, go visit with indigenous people. They’ve been doing this the longest and they’re awfully good at it.

So Gabriel initially started with the Mayan people in Mexico and studied many of their practices. Actually, the Mayans used double digging several thousand years ago. It’s not a 20^th century organic technique. I mean, it is that, but it has a precedent. They do a lot with crystals. They do a lot with astronomical and astrological gardening.

He ended up going further south working with very remote tribes in Equador and bit by piece, as people came to trust him and appreciate his sincerity they gave him, what for them, was the most precious of gifts, which is the gift of seeds. For native people, they really believed that through the seeds speak the voices of the ancestors. IN turn, each time you plant a seed you become an ancestor for the generations to come. So it’s a very sacred transmission that occurs. What Gabriel had done was to collect principally food plants of the Americans from indigenous sources. Then he’d put them in the ground at San Juan Pueblo.

o when I got there, this was really my first experience in bio-diversity in the garden. I’d been a modest gardener for years, but I had never seen anything like this. Literally entire societies of tomatoes—every color, every scent, every shape and size that you can possibly imagine.

The first time I saw quinoa, the sacred grain of the Incan civilization, which each year the emperor of the Incan empire would use a golden staff—a golden spike to plant the first seed to start the whole cycle of the year off. The National Academy of Science has done a great deal of work with quinoa considering it one of the main grains against world hunger. It also is complimentary to wheat, rice, and corn in a lot of its nutritional benefits and is very important in that way. It’s a very delicious nutty grain. I’m sure many of you have eaten it. And it’s quite widely used outside this country and more and more now in this country.

Gabriel also had amaranth. In fact, he had many kinds of amaranth. A brilliant purple plume against the turquoise New Mexico sky. It’s an ornamental as well as being a very nutritional grain and is actually the main grain in places like India where people also eat the leaves. It’s highly nutritious. I forget the exact statistic, but an acre’s worth of seed from amaranth can plant about 10,000 acres. It’s hugely prolific. There’s another very important plant against world hunger.

So for about three weeks I sort of grazed my way through the garden. Bit by bit, researching my way through it and filming it once in a while trying to comprehend the depth of all this.

Toward the end of it we were filling(?) one afternoon and this native American man was standing there and he was holding some red corn seed in his hand, and as he began to speak he began to weep, and I started to pay very close attention to understand what he was saying.

It turned out, Gabriel put the word out through the Pueblo to ask people if they had any old seeds. So every morning on his doorstep he would find a little yellow envelope, or little pot or something with seeds in it. This fellow had found in the adobe wall in his room of his house a little clay pot stuck there, and it contained these red corn seeds, and he had no idea what they were so he went around the Pueblo to find out if anybody knew anything. It turned out that two of the elders were familiar with this. It turned out to be the sacred red corn of San Juan Pueblo and no one had grown it in 40 years.

I realized in that moment, had not this fellow found that corn it probably would have disappeared and become extinct. I realized in that moment how incredibly fragile is this natural world that we live with and we don’t often think about it, but food plants are not natural. They’ve been co-created by human beings over long periods of time—at least 10,000 years, and they only exist because they co-exist with people. When people stop cultivating them they disappear.

So in that moment I realized the profound importance of that relationship and how fragile is this collective heritage of all the genetics that we all carry, and seeds are always the first link in the food web. I began to learn more and more. Most of us have heard of bio-diversity, not so much 10 years ago, but the rate of extinction is now 1,000 times the natural rate. We’re losing 27,000 species a year, which is about 74 a day or 3 an hour.

Scientists do not break out a bottle of champagne and celebrate when they find a new species. They basically put it in a pile and name it along with all the other things that we know nothing more about than their name. What’s really undisclosed is the loss of bio-diversity agriculture, which very few people are familiar with, but to give you a little bit of an idea. Just since the time of our great, great grandparents around the turn of the century of the 100 food plants available to them, 97 of those are gone today. No longer in commercial transaction.

In Europe, about 75% of traditional food plants are on the edge of extinction. The number of varieties out of 30,000 kinds of rice, only about 10 are widely used. Two kinds of peas make up 96% of what is grown. The statistics go on and on, but that gives you an idea of what we’re dealing with.

Several years ago, in his book, Earth In The Balance, Vice President Gore suggested that he thought the genetic erosion—the loss of diversity in agriculture—was the single most important threat to our food supply.

I realized this was tremendously important. I didn’t know exactly at that time what it meant, but I went back to making the film about Hoxsey and I had become kind of friendly with Gabriel. He came to me a couple years later and I thought I was there to make a movie, but as it turned out, I was there to found a seed company. He said he wanted to do something and he didn’t know what. Maybe an organic farm. I suggested, what about a feed company? This seems really important. And originally the idea about Seeds of Change was that the people that care about diversity are gardeners and small farmers.

Gardeners and small farmers are always looking over the fence into their neighbor’s yard and say, what’s that you’ve got there? Where’d you get that? Can I trade you some of this? And that’s really how the world works and how it’s gone for a long time.

So we felt perhaps we could pool together, because I had met this whole underworld of all these various seed heads. They just saw the tremendous loss of diversity and said we’re not going to wait for the bus. They just went out and grabbed everything they could get their hands on and stuck it in their back yard.

We said, what if we pool this gene pool and put together these various collections and form a market partnership with backyard gardeners and bring this out into the world. And that was really the genesis and the origin of the company in that sense.

It ended up working quite well. It dealt with some issues, obviously. That company deals principally with gardeners, not so much with farmers which is another issue I want to talk about.

Around that same time—this seems maybe this would be some kind of a solution working through commerce in a certain way to re-introduce diversity into the food system. I was pretty concerned about other environmental threats, particularly pollution to be with water and toxicity. One by one by one I began to meet other individuals who seemed to me to have very real and vital solutions to major environmental problems and major environmental threats. So around the same time that I co-founded Seeds of Change in 1990 I started a non-profit sort of a sister group, and we started two different programs at that time. One of them is what has become the Bioneer’s Conference.

The idea of a Bioneer is a biological pioneer—people who are really looking into the heart of nature to understand how nature functions and we like to say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. To really imitate natural systems, to learn to live lightly on the earth and learn to live in a much better balance.

So I began to meet these individuals and I was very shocked because none of them knew each other, which is ridiculous, and very seldom did public actually have any idea of what they were doing. We felt maybe what we ought to do is start kind of a gathering which became this conference where these people could get together and share their strategies and their work and cross-pollinate what was going on and begin to get the word out on a wider scale.

What was very very clear is the solutions are present to virtually all our major environmental problems. The problem is that that work is not being supported and it’s not being exposed more widely. There are just a lot of courageous visionary individuals who have simply gone out and done it on their own.

That was really the genesis of Bioneers. I ended up, over the years, producing the conference as well as then recently writing a book which we have here as well and I was kind of fascinated when I began to interview all these people and look at what some of the common themes were.

To give you a little bit of the sense of the context here—we do face a very very real crisis. You’re seeing it a little bit more in the news today with global warming which is now being acknowledged and things of this nature, but if there is one basic fact to understand from ecological point of view all the basic life support systems of the planet are in serious and accelerating decline. From bio-diversity to water to air. You name it. Don’t let anybody kid you. People may argue about a particular species or this particular kind of a toxin, but the big picture it’s all wearing down.

There have actually been five major periods of extinction that we know of in the history of the planet. The planet will survive. We talk about saving the earth and saving the planet. We’re actually talking about saving the humans. We should take a very self-interested point of view about this because it’s ultimately really about us.

I wanted to read you one quote that’s I found really fascinating: “What now remains compared with what then existed, it’s like the skeleton of a sick man. All the fat and soft earth having wasted away and only the bare framework of the land being left.”

These words would be disturbing enough if it were not for the fact they were spoken by the Greek philosopher, Plato, in 350 B.C. who is surveying squandered farm lands. The truth of the situation is that ecological collapse has actually been the history of the demise of several major civilizations on the planet already. We’ve been here before.

The difference right now is that because of our globalization and relentlessly efficient technology we have the ability to create a systems crash on a global scale. Ironically, which very few people realize, at the soft center of this disintegration is farming. Farming is the most destructive human activity against the environment.

Farming has this wonderful idealic, bucolic kind of pastoral image. It’s a disaster. We have done this so poorly. I don’t mean the people in the room here, please. Present company excepted, but it really underscores to me the incredible importance of ecological agriculture and the work that you all here are doing.

We must redirect agriculture if we have any hope of restoring the earth. This is really of the very first importance. Farmers are the single biggest environmental decision makers on the planet. This is really the truth.

One of the things we do at Bioneer is we focus very very strongly on the real green revolution or what we also like to call restorative farming. People throw the word sustainability around a lot. When you think about sustainability, what it really is is the mid-point between destruction and restoration. To the extent that we live in a very depleted world today, it’s not enough just to sustain it. We really have to look towards restoration. It’s a whole other dimension.

We need to start giving back. We’ve been doing much too much taking and we really need to start giving back.

In the book, Restoring The Earth; Visionary Solutions from the Bioneers, I dealt with several people who I feel have come up with very viable restoration strategies. It’s complex. There are many paths to this. But one of the people, I’ll relate strictly to the seed issue. A lady in India named Vonda Nesheeva who is a real living light in India. Quite an extraordinary woman. She is actually a physicist. But she grew up on a farm. Her mother was a farmer in India and she grew up very close to the land in that way.

When she got her Ph. D. in physics and was involved in science in India, suddenly she found that there were very real world problems on the ground that she found very disturbing that her work was really not addressing. One thing that happened there was supposedly a rather bad drought and as a result of that crops were failing, animals were dying, and many people were starving.

When Vonda looked very closely at the data, she was puzzled. One of the worst crashes was in an area where the rainfall was decent. It was a drought, but it wasn’t a severe drought. Well, what she found was, they had switched over to a hybrid sorghum. These plants have been bred to have a very short stalk because it had a huge, oversized seed head—kind of a seed head on steroids. It was to produce an ultra high yield, and what she found when she looked very closely at this was that this hybrid plant had been engineered to produce this very large seed head, and it didn’t have any bio-mass left.

So the whole cycle of decomposition was breaking down. There was what she called a bio-mass scarcity. There was not enough regeneration in the soil from the bio-mass in the plants which, in turn, was breaking down the entire cycle with the animals. In the course of this she met one old wizened farmer, and he said to her, “Daughter, I can make this draught go away. Get me one seed of the old sorghum.” **

She got goose bumps. She knew she had just heard something very very important. So she set about on a whole journey which ended up looking at the so-called green revolution in India which has been a catastrophe. For a very brief time it pumped up the yields and then it started to decline radically at the same time that the soil had been poisoned. Water had been poisoned.

The green revolution is basically a package. These hybrid seeds, first of all they’re mules. They do not reproduce true to form, which makes growers dependant upon the company store to go back year after year to buy seeds that previously had been self regenerating which is the nature of nature. It's very generous and abundant. Seeds recreate and reproduce themselves.

Secondly, these seeds are actually not high yielding, they’re high responsive. They only grow in response to high inputs of petrochemical fertilizers. They only grow within very narrow tolerances. If you don’t use the petrochemical fertilizers those seeds do not do well.

Finally, what it does is makes the farmers very reliant on heavy equipment which is very expensive which very quickly wipes out most farmers, and breeds very large superfarms. (tape turned) Which then became a force beholden to debt which later created a lot of problems in India.

So she began to really investigate this whole situation, and I’ll condense the whole story, but part of what happened in India is that just a few years ago the country was opened up for the first time to trans-national corporations, particularly to large food companies which had previously been forbidden to do business in India.

Cargill, the largest grain trader in the world, went in and started to patent traditional Indian seeds which were felt by the people of India to be the cultural property of that country and literally, by changing just one gene or two genes out of the 23,000 to 100,000 genes in a single plant they claimed ownership. They claimed this was their novel invention. Well, they made a mistake. Things didn’t go so well.

A large group—many thousands of Indian farmers went to the Cargill’s administrative headquarters. Took the filing cabinets containing all these seed patents out into the street and set fire to it.

The next thing they did was about half a million Indian farmers got together and they went to the newly built Cargill seed processing facility—a $2.5 million facility—which they systematically deconstructed. They just tore it down. (applause)

I’m not advocating anything. I’m just reporting.

What this eventually led to is Cargill announced in India that they are no longer going to patent hybrid seeds. What they said is astonishing. It’s the first time that a major corporation has ever acknowledged this. Is that these hybrids actually only have a life of about three years, after which they really don’t do what they’re supposed to anyway. So it amounts to being a flavor of the month club, as opposed to the traditional seed stocks—the wonderful open pollinates which have survived over many many generations. Hundreds often thousands of years, the nature of ecology is changed.

If there is one constant in nature it’s change. What open pollinated seeds do is adapt to change. That’s what they’ve done over many generations. They’ve proved they’re survivorship, their hardiness, their adaptability. These are real keys to survival.

And what you find very quickly is extinctions today in agriculture are actually being driven by patents. That’s what the whole game is about. Just between 1985 and 1990 44% of non-hybrid seeds were dropped from corporate catalogs basically because they’re not patentable. So this is really what it revolves around. So in India now, they are declaring patent free zones. A very interesting idea, and if you understand the depth of the harm and destruction these patents cause in terms of throttling diversity and eliminating these priceless, invaluable feed stocks, this is really what it’s about. They’ve now set up in the country about a dozen community based seed banks among farmers that farmers are freely trading back and forth.

I think this is a very real model and this is spreading through the lesser developed world now. It’s a very very big issue. I believe we’re going to see more and more of it in this country and for farmers it’s a very critical issue. I know it became illegal a few years, for farmers to brown bag anymore—to save your own seeds and to trade it back and forth.

The next phase of this, of course, if genetic engineering. It’s already on line. The idea there is to eliminate farmers altogether. That’s the long term goal is to grow it all in the laboratory. It’s a lot safer from a corporate point of view. You know, why deal with farmers and all these vagaries of nature. Who needs that? We want total control.

There are very serious precedents for this already. In 1970 you may have heard of the Southern Leaf Corn blight. Half the crop from Florida to Texas was lost, and the reason which the National Academy of Sciences documented very carefully was that scientists had inserted a single gene into that crop so that every plant was as alike as an identical twin. They wanted to eliminate having to detassel corn. So they played around with the genes to try to tweak that.

One biologist compared the situation as though a burglar broke into an apartment building and found that every apartment had the same key. That’s what you’re dealing with when you play with the genetics on this scale. So if you have a blight which is inevitable in nature. You know, it’s a game of crops and robbers. It’s always something. If it’s not one thing it’s another. So what you can have is a disaster or catastrophe on a continental scale. This is really what they’re setting us up for.

So this really highlights the importance of looking at these issues on a pragmatic ground level—what we can do about this.

One other person that I profiled in the book is doing interesting work is Fred Curshenman up in North Dakota who I believe is the biggest bio-dynamic grower in the US. He actually inherited a family farm, which went back a couple of generations. His father had unfortunately converted to chemical agriculture, and Fred agreed to take the farm on only if he could go back to organic, which he did. Then he got very interested in bio-dynamics.

Long story short, part of what he found was, part of what he found was that apart from the wonderful ecological benefits of bio-dynamic farming he also fetched a premium price in the market place. He actually chose to use specialty varieties of grain and what I call branded agriculture. The idea of a bio-dynamic certification on it. He now sells that in Europe for premium prices and does extremely well.

He is also encouraging what he calls food webs in his region. This is a really important idea—that we look at what we’re growing locally and regionally, and to put a value on that. Not only are we supporting farmers, but if you really look at the concentration of corporate agribusiness today and the fact that it’s grown in one country, processed in another, packaged in yet another. They go in where environmental regulations are weakest. Labor is cheapest. Farmers are just another input.

A lot of the crash of immune systems today is very likely related to the disconnection of food from place. There is a lot of data coming in about this now. It’s a real serious health issue. So how do we recreate an agriculture that’s bio-regional and regionally based?

Certainly we need a cash economy. Everybody needs cash flow, but at the same time we have to be more based in our communities. Where is the system going to be when agribusiness crashes and burns which is rapidly happening worldwide now. It'’ up to people in this room. You are the future. If we do not do this together, in 10 years, there may not be a food system. It is really that serious.

The other program I started in 1990 just after we started Bioneers is something that grew into what we now call a restorative development initiative. I’ll tell you the story of the genesis of it, then I’d like to share with you what we’re trying to do around some of these problems.

Basically, we had an interesting experience at the Seeds of Change farm where somehow, by some serendipity, the USDA accidentally sent some farmers to us to learn something. We don’t know how they did that—it was obviously a mistake of some sort.

Anyway, Gabriel had this very interesting experimental garden. One of the people that came through this USDA tour was actually the minister of agriculture from Dochar Sandegal(?) from Africa. As he was looking at one of these garden areas he began to cry and we had no idea what was going on. It turned out he had just seen a sorghum that his mother grew in Africa, and he had not seen it since he was a child because it had been replaced by the hybrid sorghum.

He really wanted to know more about this. He wanted to know more about organic gardening and ecological agriculture. He asked us, because he didn’t have any money in Dochar Sandegalis. We could bring him back to study at the farm.

Well, we didn’t have any money either. We were just a fledgling business trying to stay alive. What we ended up doing was starting this non-profit and I went out and raised some money from some very generous people. We started a program that was originally called the native scholar program to bring principally people from indigenous cultures and particularly in the Southwest where we were based, to share some of their traditional knowledge about seed stocks and farming practices, and then to learn kind of post-modern state-of-the-art organic farming, which is what some of our people were involved with.

That went on for several years. Around 1995 or so, really the word from the tribes was, people are leaving the land because we can’t make a living farming. We realized, if we don’t deal with the economics the knowledge loss is just going to continue and all of this is just going to keep being marginalized. We have to deal with the core economics. If we can change that we can stem the loss and really turn things around.

Because of my involvement as an entrepreneur when I started Seeds of Change I ended up meeting a whole group of folks who started what I called mission-driven companies. You would know some of their names like Ben and Jerry’s and the Body Shop and Smith and Hawkin. These companies obviously come and go and they change their priorities, but there are many companies that are really start out because the founder has a vision and a set of values they really believe in and are really committed to. So I ended up trying to pull together some of the companies we know that have good values, and many of them have grown over the years to be quite sizable ventures now.

What we’ve ended up doing is several facets and this is part of what Holley works on and we’d love to network with people here about. A lot of it is about finding progressive markets.

Farmers, of course, don’t like to market as a rule, and of course, it is very costly and time consuming. It’s really a full time job in and of itself, and a very skilled one that demands its own respect. At the same time companies don’t want to deal with the hassle of finding a zillion individual growers. I know one woman who runs a very successful restaurant in Washington, D.C. who is utterly committed to organic farming. She spends hours every day on the phone finding growers, dealing with growers, dealing with growers problems, helping them financially. But this is one woman in a million.

How many business owners are going to do this? It’s just not realistic.

So we felt what we could do is start a database of progressive companies and progressive markets who would buy from family farmers because of their social commitment, and would generally often want organic or ideally want organic farming when that’s possible.

Then we’ve been building a corollary database of growers who are capable of operating at least on a modest commercial scale, if not a larger one, who are family farms and ideally are doing ecological agriculture. We put together, I believe, the first database of native American growers which has never been done before and we now have a pretty good jump on that. We have a pretty good relationship with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in the Southeast which represents about the last 10,000 African American farmers who by the way, are predicted by themselves, to be extinct within the next five to seven years. I think there’s only 300 of them that are under 40 years old. A really frightening statistic, and we’ve been trying to piece together networks around the country to mix and match growers with progressive markets and really create an alternative economy.

One of the projects we’re doing is with the Iroquois in upstate New York who have a traditional white corn, which is a wonderful corn. In fact, it turned out it’s the corn that the Iroquois gave to the Pilgrims. It is the one that actually became what we know as sweet corn in this country. The Iroquois have saved a lot of their seed stocks but the farmers have been leaving the land because they can’t make a living, and they don’t know how to find these markets. So one of the things we did is we hooked John Mohawk and his friends up with a restaurant in New York City called Angelica Kitchen, and another one in Philadelphia called the White Dog Café, both of which are just wonderful, wonderful restaurants that are deeply committed to local farmers.

What they’re doing now is working with professional chefs in commercial markets to develop meals and food products that can be platformed on a national scale, and once we create the customer demand for this, you can work backwards from the market in the sense. Once you’ve created the demand then you’ve created the jobs for the farmers and you’ve created the economics.

So that’s the kind of strategy that we’re looking at. Through networking with a lot of the native farmers we also to our great surprise found that there is actually a lot of finished products being produced by these farmers. So we’re working now to put together a business plan to actually market native Americn food products nationally through catalogs, through restaurants, through a number of different venues.

There are many, many good hearted people in the business community who are quite skilled at what they do who, given the opportunity would love to do this kind of thing. They just don’t know how to reach these people or didn’t know it was out there. A lot of times it’s not so much evil in the world as inertia or just unconsciousness. I find the more we’re able to push this stuff forward there is a lot of receptivity to it, and the public definitely wants this. You know yourself from the growth of organic agriculture the last ten years which has doubled and it’s going to at least double in the next ten years. There’s now in the last ten years 2,000 farmers markets that have spontaneously sprung up around the country. There are CSA’s all over the place.

There’s a lot of people wanting to connect with the food supply and connect much more directly with farmers, and to really support farmers.

So in that regard it’s kind of up to us to come up with creative strategies to make this all work.

The other thing is we’ve been looking quite closely at some of the work of the Federation. They’ve come up with some very viable models for cooperatives. This is just my personal belief, but I believe that divided we fall and united we stand, and that is another issue politically is I believe people need learn to come together better. It’s very hard to make it by yourself when facing the magnitude of the corporate agribusiness world. The more that people can unify into meaningful economic units, the more chance we have to survive, and ultimately hopefully to prosper.

One friend of ours recently started a credit union in the permaculture community and I believe in two months they raised $3 million dollars just from the permaculture community. What these people basically are saying is, we’re going to support each other and we’re going to put our money where our mouth is. Why do we have to go to the bank? Why do we have to be reliant on these corporations? Let’s do it ourselves.

I think we’ve all been bought off by the system on certain levels. We really need to re-examine those relationships and look at ways that we, indeed, can come together. It’s not easy and there’s always problems. It’s going to be a struggle. We shouldn’t have any illusions about that, but I think we also have to be willing to make those mistakes and learn from them and recognize we have the commitment to get through it because it is possible. I really do believe that the coops are one of the key ways to get through these issues, including in relation to marketing.

One of the things that Fred Kurshenman did in North Dakota was that their group of people pulled together many of the bio-dynamic farmers. First they did their do diligence—they did their homework and they went and looked at the organic market to find out what would be a good product to produce. They didn’t just decide “we’re going to plant this and go for it.” They went out and did some market research.

What they ended up deciding among other things was they could do better if they didn’t just grow a raw crop, but actually created a finished product. So what they ended up doing was creating a hard winter durham wheat pasta. They got a bank loan to do their own manufacturing plant, and they have now very successfully sold that into the organic foods market. They did that through a cooperative effort in N. Dakota. They have now gotten funding from the state because it supports the local economy and they’re getting a lot of support through this venture.

I think that’s the kind of direction that is a good indicator of how we can move with all this. A few years ago there was an interesting situation. The Turner Foundation offered a grant for somebody for a prize, basically, to write a novel that contained a positive vision of the future. Well, they were unable to award the grant because nobody had a positive vision of the future.

Well, Black Elk who was the Lakota medicine person about 100 years ago said, without a vision the people will perish. (He got that from Prov. 29:18) I really believe that is what we’re facing now. We really need to create a vision of a positive future.

One of the other people I wrote about in Bioneer is a very interesting fellow who worked for the world bank about 25 years ago and he was sent to Latin America to finance the development projects. At the time he thought he was really helping people. During the time he was there he often ended up in very remote areas. There wasn’t actually much to do there, so he had time to hang out, and he got to know many of the shamans and the medicine people very well. He learned a great deal from them, and he was very respectful of them. He went away, and he went off and did some other things. When he came back about 20 years later, his heart was broken. He flew into places where he had been and the forests were all gone. They’d been cut. There was slash and burn agriculture everywhere. There was mining, there was timbering. He realized that his work with the World Bank had contributed to that, even though he had no idea at the time that he was really doing that. So he got on a small plane and he flew deeper into the rain forest, and he ended up finding some of the medicine people from the tribes that he had known 25 years ago. He sat down with one of these shamans, and he said to him, “I really feel bad about this. What can I do? How can I help? How can I change it?”

What the person said was this is what you have really dreamed. The choked highways, the air pollution, the water pollution. This is all part of the materialist dream, and what you need to do is change the dream. Change to an earth honoring dream. John asked him, how long will that take?

He said, well, it can be done in a generation. In a sense I think that’s really what we’re looking at now is changing the dream. I know the depth of the dream that is in this room. This is a very powerful vision that you all have. I know it gets very lonely out there at times, and you’re out there working so hard with the land and facing all the—just dealing with farming is enough. We have a lot of casinos in New Mexico now and the Indian tribes have taken up the casino. I like to say, if you really like to gamble try farming.

But we do have other things on our side. We had an interesting experience several years ago when I was at Seeds of Change. We used to get a lot of letters from our customers and this one really interesting letter came one day. It was from a lady who was really passionate about corn. She had gone into her garden and planted a hybrid corn and then she got in our catalog and saw all these wonderful heirloom and traditional corns. So she ended up ordering something called Luther Hill Sweet Corn which is a very popular heirloom from the 1950s. Used to be one of the most popular corns in the country.

She planted it in her garden right next to the hybrid corn. It very quickly grew and caught up with the hybrid and had big green leaves and beautiful stalks, and started to make these luscious looking ears of corn, and she just couldn’t wait to eat this stuff. One morning she woke up and discovered, to her horror, that her neighbor’s horse had broken through the fence, gone straight for her corn patch. It had eaten the Luther Hill to the ground and hadn’t touched the hybrid corn, so I think we’re back to horse sense.

What we really have going for us in the long run is the life force, you know? That’s what is really behind us, so that is what I like to think of as the real green revolution. There are just many, many opportunities out there right now if we’re creative. I’ve been very interested coming full circle for myself with the Hoxsey story. It’s now being into sort of a Hollywood film and it’s going to tell the story to a much wider audience on a much different level as kind of a poetic truth of what the struggle is all about.

In the last 12 years the growth of herbal medicine is almost inconceivable. I remember very well when the film came out in 1987, this was a relatively fringe thing. Now, just to give you an example. In Germany the sale of herbal medicines is $3 billion dollars a year. The really interesting thing is that half of that is by doctors’ prescriptions.

What Germany has done is de-criminalize herbal medicine. They have pulled together all the hard science as well as all the folkloric data to a federal commission, and they’ve signed off on all these herbs, basically saying this is valid, this is not valid. This works, this doesn’t work. Whatever the truth of all this stuff is.

The problem now is, where are all these herbs going to come from? One company planted 20 million ginkgo trees a couple of years ago. Ginkgo is now the most popular herb in Germany. It actually cures Alzheimers Disease, according to studies there.

A lot of these plants are being wild crafted, and it’s decimating wild plant populations.** These are very very serious things.

There are opportunities like that out there today for farmers. I think if we can really pull together all these pieces and connect the dots and learn to work together, then I think we have a very bright future.

So, thank you for having me here.

Editor’s Notes:

**One seed of the old sorghum. Save your original seeds. They can save your life or the life of generations yet to come.

**Wild crafting is stripping even the native plant population so save some seeds so that again, you can save yourself or generations yet to come.