If you haven’t heard of Dr. Jonathan Lundgren and Ecdysis, you’re in for a treat. Jon is from the middle of this country and has seen the return of dust storms to our farmland. He was one of the most preeminent scientists in his field, but when he looked around at the farmland he passed as he drove through the Midwest, he saw that none of his achievements were making a difference. He wanted to effect positive change. Like most of you listening who see what is happening to your world, he wanted to make it better. So he did. I don’t want to over-hype him or the work he’s doing, but it may be uni ..read more

My guest for this episode is Nick Hillman. Nick has worked with vineyards on three continents, including all across the US. Nick now lives in Texas where hed does vineyard and farm consultation with his company Regenerative Agriculture Solutions. Nick has been on a journey that led him from conventional, recipe-type viticulture to a transformed regenerative outlook and approach. He tells us about the ideas and experiences that began to make him ask harder questions, the things that didn’t make sense or seem wise. We get technical about Integrated Pest Management or IPM, as well as the pros and ..read more

What if everything you ever heard about foxy wine is a lie? Wine’s F-word is the word "Foxy," and I have been on a journey over the last few years to discover the truth about this word. It has been a surprising and surprisingly impactful journey because it turns out that this word is tied up with almost everything that is currently and perennially relevant to the wine industry because it has to do with deeply held prejudice. And that’s why I believe it’s important to understand what’s going on with this wine term. I don’t know of any journey that is more important than freeing ourselves of pre ..read more

Meet Charlie and Josh of Sylvan Farm and Cidery. They do such an excellent job of introducing themselves and their story, that it would be redundant for me to pre-introduce them here. But I will tempt you to listen on by saying that they talk about harvesting wildish fruit – you know wild is an illusion, right? So maybe feral is more accurate - and making wine cider from it. Or cider wine. They talk about Queer ecology, and living and growing on the feral side of agriculture. They talk about how they’re integrating tree breeding and selection and adaptive un-farming into their orchard pro ..read more

Winegrowers around the globe have made it their goal to grow grapes without sprays. Not only are they succeeding, they are reshaping the way we think about wine. This is a special episode featuring a story about multiple winegrowers who make wine from grapes that they never spray with pesticides or fungicides, neither conventional nor organic. If the thought of attempting this makes you queasy, it may be because of some foundational beliefs you hold about wine that you've never challenged. This story will ask you to challenge them. In fact a wine publication who had bought this story as a pitc ..read more

My guests for this episode are Kelly Allen and Andrew Napier of Artemisia Farm in Virginia. They are hybrid grape growers, and winemakers, aromatized wine makers, makers of wine made with native American fruits besides grapes, writers and publishers, wine faire organizers, farmers who do a regular CSA, foragers, and passionate entrepreneurs. But more than that they are incredibly thoughtful about everything they do, and they are really enjoyable to talk to, which never hurts. Now, one important thing that is worth mentioning. Kelly and Andrew use lots of wild fruits and ingredients, as well as ..read more

This episode is the second part of the conversation I had with Nicolas Haack of Triebwerk agroforestry consulting in Germany. In this part, Nicolas asks me to go into detail about the vitiforestry project I’m planning near the Finger Lakes region of New York. As part of my education and design process for this farm, I took a permaculture design certification course last year through Oregon State University, and used the New York land for my design project. As we learned in last week’s episode, it’s probably more accurate to call this an analysis process, rather than a design process, because t ..read more

“To care for what we know requires care for what we don’t, the world’s lives dark in the soil, dark in the dark.” “Forbearance is the first care we give to what we do not know. We live by lives we don’t intend, lives that exceed our thoughts and needs, outlast our designs, staying by passing through, surviving again and again the risky passages from ice to warmth, dark to light.” - Wendell Berry, A Small Porch I care deeply about the natural world. That’s why I do this podcast. And of course when I use the words “natural world” these aren’t exactly the right words. They’re just the poor abbrev ..read more

Joyce Jones and Charity Potter sound like the street names of Marvel super heroes, but they’re actually the real women I interview for this episode. They’re better than super heroes, though, because they actually live in this messy, complex real world and take part in the real battles that result from living with the courage to speak up and ask questions and call BS when they see BS. This episode is an expose, and it focuses on the experiences and insights and conflicts and unquestioned assumptions and prejudices that Joyce experienced, and continues to experience, as a woman of color taking c ..read more

This episode is an outdoor spirits tasting with Rob Easter in the backyard at Crenshaw Cru… so you will hear some authentic LA audio texture in the back ground. Rob Easter is the man behind Workhorse Rye and Modern Ancient spirits, and he’s trying to instigate a revolution in the grain spirits industry. The vast majority of grain spirits in the US come from a single variety of genetically modified corn, rye, or wheat and are made in a handful massive industrial facilities using the same recipes. Slap a new label on it and market the hell out of it, because they’re all the same other than how m ..read more