Hunting as Husbandry and Why our Regulatory Masters Care To Squash Both with Mike Costello
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Episode Description
Ever wondered how hunting and agriculture intersect? Explore this complex relationship with our guest, Mike Costello, a newly awakened hunter, entrepreneur, habitat restorer, wildlife and conservation advocate.
We share our personal aspirations and the broader implications of living and relational food systems, offering a glimpse into the growing (and declining) interest in hunting and its ties to agriculture, ranching, and ecosystem health.
Curious about the "hunter-husbandman" concept? This episode dives into the historical and contemporary connections between hunters and agriculturalists. We also tackle the critical issues of corporate and government interests in wildlife management, using Colorado's mountain lion population as a case study to illustrate the complex interplay of money, politics, and conservation. Especially, Lobbyists...
Join us as we explore the nuanced approaches required for effective wildlife management, emphasizing the importance of localized solutions, place-based knowledge, and the indigenous worldview. From the resurgence of prescribed fire practices to the challenges of local food production to the inefficacy of wildlife federal policy, this episode covers a wide array of topics critical to understanding and supporting agriculture and wildlife conservation. Whether you're interested in the economics of food systems or the ambitions of major corporations towards regenerative farming, this episode offers a deep, thought-provoking discussion on being in relationship with a resilient and just future.
Transcript
Mike Costello: 0:11
yeah, but uh oh yeah, no record at all. I don't know if you've ever done this, but, uh, once I got to the end of the of the uh of the podcast, I said, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna end the recording now. And I hit end the recording. It says now recording. I'm like no, no, it's like it's, it's, it's like our worst fear.
D Firth Griffith: 0:35
You know it's, it's. Uh, I know somebody who did a podcast with a really large named individual that like flew in for it and um, just forgot to hit record they were having such a good time. I know but maybe that's okay.
Mike Costello: 0:52
You know, maybe that's, maybe that's what was supposed to happen yeah, and then I did have one in person, um, which is rare. And so there's all this equipment, all this very good, very confusing equipment, sound boards and stuff and it wasn't my setup. And, uh, this is with jason matziger, who's he's probably one of the most respected like big game western hunters that produces media in the hunting space, and we had a great conversation in person and, um, I didn't know that you had to like hit the eject the SD card. You had to like push a button before you pull the card out. And I pulled the card out like, oh, got the SD card, I sent it to the guy that was going to do the editing. He's like can't get to it, it's nothing here. I'm like what do you? It turns out apparently I have to like hit the terminate recording before you pull the card out, and so that was sad. That was a really fun conversation too.
Mike Costello: 1:50
So I guess, I've got two that I've fuddled. Yeah, no, I like it Well.
D Firth Griffith: 1:56
I'm sorry, you have to hear more of my voice. No, it's good, it's a it's, it's a privilege to be with you when, when you, uh, I have to be honest, I think I was in a tractor auging some fence post holes and, uh, you know, my phone did a little little dance in the cup holder and I looked down and you know I think it was either your pumas headwaters retreat or hunting at easy podcast or whoever was the first that made contact. Whatever it was, it captured my interest, you know cause I have very few Instagram followers and, uh, so, like every new Instagram follower I get, like I get to look at it, you know cause it's like it's like one a week, you know, one a week.
Mike Costello: 2:36
I have a feeling that I have a feeling there's a trend that's that's going to be upward here, the more you're getting out cause you say you say interesting things Like you say you're putting. You're putting new words to ideas that I think resonate with a lot of people. I hope so. I hope so.
D Firth Griffith: 2:51
I hope I still get to care about every new follower regardless of what happens. But I saw your ears come in and I thought you were interesting and I just reached out. I was, like you know, within about 15 seconds of looking at your profile. I think it was the hunting ain't easy. It was just like yeah, yeah, we got to chat. I don't know what about. I have no idea. Hunting, hopefully, yeah.
Mike Costello: 3:13
Yeah, we'll talk about hunting. Well, so I listened. I listened to a lot of your podcasts with my, my plumas, headwaters, retreat mindset turned on and um, there's a future ranch as a future like. For me it's it's not real. It's not real until it's on Instagram, right, until there's a social media account attached to it, you know modern day.
Mike Costello: 3:37
And so I, uh, I, I also there's a future ranching endeavor that I hope to take on and create, and I also there's a future ranching endeavor that I hope to take on and create. And so I listened through those those, uh, I listened through those lenses Is that a thing? Um, through those filters. But I reached out to you from the hunting easy and I think I think I did, because you have mentioned hunting like of the of the 20 podcasts I've listened to to you on, you know your, your own, this one that we're recording on, and then the others that you've been a guest on over the last couple of years, you've mentioned hunting like like three or four times. Um, as like, oh, okay, there's a, there's, there's a thread here to pull and um, so, yeah, I think, I think we've got a lot, there's a lot that we could talk about. You know the hunting space, yeah, uh, the you know the regenerative um, food ag, ranching, health, healthy food, health, healthy ag, healthy ag, healthy ecosystem space, the corruption of the oligarch, corporatist, government intersection. I mean, what's wild to me is they're all connected. Yeah, like what's resonating for me. So my, I'll just, I'll give you, mike, you probably don't know much more about me than what's on my Instagram.
Mike Costello: 5:11
I'm a relatively new hunter. I'm I'm California and lifelong All my life has been in California. I started hunting like eight years ago, so it was 47 when I did Um, and in Californiaia there's a lot of threats to hunting. You know there's only like one percent of californians hunt and so, um, I've just noticed that there's a lot of. You know the, the anti, I call it. There's an anti-hunting industry. There's also now forming an anti-meat industry, like an anti-meat industry, like an anti-ranching is like, and these I think they're all interconnected.
Mike Costello: 5:48
I think that there are literally forces out there what the words that I'm putting to it are, that there are forces that are either working in parallel or completely in alignment and together to move humans away from ecological processes, and it's it's not to protect ecology, it's to control humans or extract or create power structure and financial structure and wealth structure, because when you separate those two, that's what happens. So, anyways, there's a lot of. I mean, we could, we should talk about just the just. You know the ecology, you know wild lands, hunting, wild farming, stuff like that, but there's also some, some things that I think are really. I think they're really issues that need to be figured out before we're all just like plugged into the matrix and fed some serum and you don't want no chemical goo. Yeah, I know no.
Mike Costello: 6:49
I like mine purple, you can have yours green, yeah, no, I'd rather just. I'd just rather scratch in the dirt and look at the stars.
D Firth Griffith: 7:00
Yeah, yeah.
D Firth Griffith: 7:01
Imagine what if the husbandman became the hunter. What if the field harvest erupted as a ceremonial and kin-centric art? What if becoming a student of your survival emerged as a hope-filled and sacred reawakening of our human form as earthlings? We want to invite you to our August 23rd through 25th beef and goat harvesting class, called the Concentric Table. It is a sacred and ceremonial and hands-on harvesting class where we will together become these earthlings. Together we will work to unbind and untether ourselves from the uncreative sciences of today and learn our humanity to the sacred gift of the field harvest. No corrals, no cages, no fear, using nothing but our hands and simple human scale tools. We will track the herd in over about a hundred acres of the wildland and then harvest a wildland bull and goat buck while they are yet with their herds, letting go of our control and allowing the herd's ceremony to rise and walk with us amongst us unabated. We will cry together, we will light fires and eat. While we work, right there in the field, the herd will be all around us, honoring and learning what we honor From this space. We will then work to break down a already 30-day dry-aged bull, focusing on creating no waste In place of the 60% carcass yield that is common in processing today. We will learn how to utilize 100% of the animal, our cousin, our relation, continuing to honor each ligament, each muscle, each ounce of life that is waiting to be reborn. We will also begin the tanning and hide preserving process, the fleshing, the salting, the scraping, the stretching and more. By this class's end, you will leave with the inner confidence and the physical know-how to harvest cattle and goats at home, kin-centrically, the wildland way.
D Firth Griffith: 9:37
Join us. The information is on our website, wildtimshulcom. Tickets are limited to maintain the intimacy and sacredness of the course, and so head to wildtimshullcom the link is in the show notes and to learn more and see if you want to join us. It's August 23rd through the 25th. We'll see you there. 25th, we'll see you there. Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's. I'm really excited to chat here because so much of my wife and I's recent work is all around this term that we use it's called the hunter husbandman, which is that husbandman need to start learning from hunters and maybe hunters need to reawaken their husbandry side, that relationship side, not that hunting doesn't have relationship, but that husbandry doesn't have more of that natural wild element to it. But we've made them disjoint Like you're saying. They are not disjoint, right. They are in fact very convivial.
D Firth Griffith: 10:39
Like one of the recent books I wrote, stag Time, there's an entire chapter at the very end of the book. It's the largest chapter in the book which gets into this wonderful nuance that hunter-gatherer and agricultural or husbandry-based societies cohabitated for a very long period of time and many indigenous peoples today still occupy that wonderful nuance or wonderfully complex space where, like the Shawnee, were the indigenous peoples where I was raised. You know they were farmers in the summer, hunters in the winter. They lived in singular camps in the summer. They broke into hunting camps in the wintertime, you know. So they broke apart and so there was, you know, consolidated life, individualized, extended family life. There was agriculture, there was hunting and there and there was nuance there and and they both obviously worked in that wonderfully beautiful space, but so many of the world views or paradigms of agriculture and I think I can say so many of the world views or paradigms of the pure hunters out there that they, they don't see across that aisle.
D Firth Griffith: 11:39
You know, it's like today's politics. It's just you're republican or you're democrat and you're nothing else like, you're not even a thinking human being anymore. You're just a Republican and you do what the Republicans think, or the Democrats and you do what the Democrats think. And so I think the conjoining of these two paradigms you know you have the agricultural and the hunting paradigm the conjoining of these two paradigms to me to some degree would make agriculture better but also hunting better. Sure, you know like what I? Okay, anyway, so let's just dive into this, cause that's really. You know how I'm approaching the conversation and where it goes. God, I'm so open. Yeah, but going back to that control, so you have this anti-hunting movement, as you call it. Let's just use it for that. I like that Anti-hunting movement, I call it.
Mike Costello: 12:23
Let's just use it for that. I like that anti-hunting movement. I call it an industry. Why? Why is it an industry? Because as long as there's a crisis to solve it, it becomes monetized. Um, the, the, the, the one that I use let's just take the wolf, because it's such a lightning rod.
Mike Costello: 12:48
I was about to say so present today it's so present and such a charismatic issue and whatnot. Or bears in some cases. So, both with bears and wolves, I've either personally witnessed or heard secondary accounts that are completely, I believe, happened, where the protectionist, the protector or the preservationist that wanted to prevent the harvest or the take of a wolf or black bear I'm not even talking about grizzly bears yet or black bear and black bear in California there's almost as many bears, there are deer in california. It's wild, um. But the preservationist org basically stated you know, we want to save these animals.
Mike Costello: 13:37
Okay, well, what if there's 30 000 bears in california? No, we will never support a hunt. What if there's 50,000 bears in California? No, we will not support it. Or there's 80,000 bears in California? No, we will not support a hunt.
Mike Costello: 13:51
Same thing with wolves and the Northern Rockies ecosystem. Well, what if we're 2X the capacity that we all agreed upon, you know, years ago when we decided to bring wolves back in? Okay, there's two, twice as many? No, we won't support a. We won't support lethal management. What if there's forex? No, we won't. What if there's tenant? No, we won't like they.
Mike Costello: 14:16
They have to have that crisis of of an extreme case to then say you know to create this caricature of the hunter or the rancher that wants to kill all the wolves.
Mike Costello: 14:30
And and if you, if they give that extreme side up and say actually, hunters and ranchers love seeing these critters, they know that they should be on the landscape, but it's a matter of management, it's a matter of there's a middle ground where we want everybody, we want all the species to win, including humans.
Mike Costello: 14:50
Like humans have, the humans have a place in nature too. We should be able to win as well, like all the critters could win if we use our intellect and manage them towards abundance for all the species. The thing is is it's hard to fundraise from people, to get an endorphin kick, you know, from florida, by looking at a, at a cute picture of a wolf cub and sending 30 in, yeah, thinking that they're doing the right thing. And so those extremes are required to create the funding mechanisms and the money streams and the grants and the you know whatever it is to pay for the marketing and the legal teams and whatnot. And so I view it as an industry which requires division and a problem that's never solved, when really we could solve it and get along quite nicely.
D Firth Griffith: 15:45
Yeah, this anti-hunting industry I like industry, I think you're right is in many ways similar to how I view the rewilding as a global phenomenon. It's remove humans, put up game fences, export the invasive species, import the native species and call it a day game fences, export the invasive species, import the native species and call it a day. Right, it's, it's a crisis that we must solve with industrial capitalism, metal fencing and moving companies. Human control, too. Human control.
Mike Costello: 16:13
Exactly Right. Like yeah, that rewilding thing requires it's not, it's never rewilding. Like okay, let's, let's rewild New York state.
Mike Costello: 16:27
First we're going to clear off Manhattan because that was a beautiful ecosystem, Like no. We're going to go up, we're going to North State and screw over some local rural community that's barely getting along right. You know, we're not going to bring the grizzly back to the central valley of California, which used to be a marsh valley of California, which used to be a marsh, and we're not going to give the grizzly bear San Francisco and the Presidio and Alameda, where they were the king. The grizzly bear was the king of the marsh in central California or the Bay Area.
Mike Costello: 16:58
No we're going to put it up in northeastern California and screw over 8,000 ranchers Right.
D Firth Griffith: 17:04
Well, so much of what I understand the rewilding movement, and it doesn't seem entirely dissimilar from what you're describing in this anti-hunting industry either. It's this we want to claim that we're releasing control and outcomes, but really what we're trying to do because we're letting it go wild again. Right, nature's returning. Right, the most important and most successful rewilding book ever been written the subtitle is the return of nature to a British farm. Like that's what we want to believe that we're doing. We're releasing control and releasing this idea of outcome, but really what we're trying to do is control outcomes by removing the unwanted species. Right, to then control it to a more perfect state in a more perfect region that doesn't involve humanity, that doesn't involve feeding the local climate or the biome or the humans that are actually you know I should say not actually, but obviously a part of that, that local system. So it's separation, right, because even when I'm thinking about hunting, you know the story of separation that is so well discussed today. You know as this underlying worldview, this worldview of separation that underpins so much of the degradation or degeneration or dilapidation of our world. Maybe the anti-hunting industry would fit in this dilapidation. So much of that is built upon the story of separation that removes humanity from earth, right, and it says the black bear, the black bear. Humanity is trying to just, you know, raise enough money to pay the black bear. I don't, whatever we could.
D Firth Griffith: 18:26
Okay, let me just stop. Let me just stop. I want to have a real conversation here. Yeah, why? So we're talking about the limitations to human hunting, and limiting that or maybe decreasing it entirely, is due to some of this economic or capitalistic money raising, you know, and other things may be masked, as you know NGOs or nonprofits or something. Why is there money needed? Very simple question why is there money needed for the black bear, for somebody in Florida to spend $30 to help Like? How does this money work? Why are we talking about money when we're talking about hunting?
Mike Costello: 19:01
Oh, we're talking about hunting. We're talking about money flowing to NGOs that will try to steer public policy through lobbying, through political influence and through legal challenges.
D Firth Griffith: 19:19
To do what? So they stand in the House of Representatives for California and they say what they need the money to tell them to stop hunting.
Mike Costello: 19:33
They say that the humans, yeah, they need the money to affect policy. So one thing is in Colorado this year organizations have attempted to stop mountain lion hunting in Colorado for like four times in the last five years. Mountain lion hunting in Colorado for like four, four times in the last five years, and first at the commission level three times, three times at the commission level Colorado has got a great mountain lion population. Colorado back in the 1960s, before the mountain lions were, were defined as a big game animal. They were. They were not a game animal, they were just. They were disregarded, they were not loved. They were kill on site, poison, trap, whatever.
Mike Costello: 20:06
There is a dark history in North America of highly extractive, excessive hunting of all animals, predators included. But in the 60s the mountain lion in Colorado was defined as a big game animal, which means it became managed and through that management the population there has gone from 200 to roughly 5,000. While Colorado also has the greatest number of elk and mule deer, it's just Colorado's got a phenomenal ecosystem and they've also got three times as many humans now than they did 20 years ago. So all of these pressures have happened but mountain lions have thrived and there's abundance of mountain lions. It's very successful While it's been a big game animal. You have to. There's a wants and waste rule where if you harvest, if you kill a mountain lion, you have to take the meat.
Mike Costello: 20:58
But now the current attack is through ballot box biology. So they couldn't get the legislature to do it. They couldn't get the legislature to do it, they couldn't get the commission to do it, and so now they're going to the ballot box to use slogans like it's just a trophy hunt. Well, for the average non-hunter that's in the middle, what's that mean? That means, oh, they don't care, it's frivolous, it's wanton, it's all these things. And so they're using these slogans suggesting that the mountain lions are endangered. They're not. They're thriving.
Mike Costello: 21:28
Um, it's highly managed hunt and and and it's a troveon, it's not. People take the meat home. It's the prize meat, it's the favorite meat in the household, um, it's all these things. And so they're using these slogans. So they need the money to pay for the, the advertising campaign to convince the people that otherwise wouldn't care one way or the other, because they just don't think about it. They've got soccer practice and three jobs and everything else to deal with, and so they need this money. They need money to run a campaign, a public messaging campaign, to convince people that that this is this otherwise very successful regulated managed harvest is is bad, and so they need money to to pit people against each other. They need money to create campaigns that that that that pit people against each other, often without either disregarding success of the animals or or without really, um, considering the whole ecosystem.
D Firth Griffith: 22:34
I think so it, I don't know, maybe, maybe we can dive down this path and if it gets uncomfortable we can leave, cause I I don't study politics and I don't. Yeah, um, but I recently heard a talk given by a representative Massey, a representative out of the fine state of Kentucky and uh, the entire talk was about lobbyists on the house floor. And, uh, he made the comment that he's been in the, the, the uh house representatives, I think, for 12 years and uh, he made the. I think he said almost none or none. So let's just be more conservative and say almost none of the bills. Let's say almost none, if not none, but almost none of the bills ever brought up to the floor of the house of representatives was brought up outside of a lobbyist.
Mike Costello: 23:27
Okay, and so the way our political lobbyists write the bill and bring it forward exactly, or say write the bill.
D Firth Griffith: 23:33
This is what he needs to say, and if you don't, we're going to, you know, unelect you or basically prevent your election in the next cycle, sure, and? And so to take a quick step back. So the american federal political system right, you have the house representatives, which is as close to the people as possible in a Republican political system. There's many representatives per state. I know my local representative right here in Central Virginia. They're local, they're close to the people, et cetera. They're the lower house, if you think back to the monarchies of Britain and English common law that we come from. And then you have the upper house, which is the Senate. I don't know my Senator. I've never met my Senator.
D Firth Griffith: 24:09
The Senator is a very important person, a very rich person. Unfortunately doesn't hold really any of my views, right, like they're a much bigger person. They're supposed to be more of this aristocratic type. They're the upper house. They see the bills that the house pushes, you know to them. After the House votes, it goes to the Senate. Well then, obviously you're out of the legislature, you go to the executive and judicial and everything else.
D Firth Griffith: 24:30
But what Massey was saying is so, in this lower house, which is supposed to be the creator of bills, the initial discusser of bills, right, the passer of bills, at least in the intermediary step between the Senate and then the executive, and I mean intermediary as in between, but really the beginning step.
D Firth Griffith: 24:49
Ideally, in a political system that makes any sense, this system should be entirely devoid of lobbyists. Right, because that's the nature of the lower house to be common. Right, this is the common lower house of representatives. But what you're saying is and it's the same thing that Massey is saying, you know, representative of Massey, it's that the house is pushing forward bills written by rich lobbyists. Rich not in the sense of their own personal wealth, maybe, maybe not, but rich in the sense that they have this money and they push these bill forwards. Laws get created or not created, and then people like you and I suffer, right. And so the separation that we're talking about, it isn't a separation between humanity and mountain lions, like there's not a problem between you know, you, mike, and the mountain lion population in Colorado, but rather the political system is trying to force its way into that, to break that separation, to disallow nuance, to disallow complexity, because you're not saying for the complete and outright harvest of mountain lion unequivocal.
D Firth Griffith: 25:51
And you're not saying that it should be entirely restricted in all situations. You're arguing for right, relationship, nuance, complexity, right and money and obvious are standing in that way. Is what I'm saying true? Is that the framework?
Mike Costello: 26:04
here. No, I think that's fair. I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't want to go deep into the civics issues of the us. I mean in theory. In theory, the, the lobbyists may represent. You know, if everybody throws in five dollars, they can. They then have the resources to go represent a lot of people, um, but they also represent, you know, the five major meat packers in the us, and that's why there's only five.
D Firth Griffith: 26:29
Yeah, because they represent them and where that representation comes from. There's two things always to consider when I hear the word lobbyist, the first of which is I, as a virginian, can donate money to the california lobbyists that have the california house representatives or their own lower house make. So a Virginian is helping make local bills in California. That's a huge problem.
Mike Costello: 26:50
You can have a voice, you can be a constituent, yeah.
Mike Costello: 26:54
And so we're taking that I can be a constituent. I can't vote in Colorado, but I can be a constituent as a potential hunter who may go to Colorado to spend money to buy licenses and tags and invest in the conservation system that hunters fund there and whatnot. I'm definitely a constituent in that regard, and we all are, especially with wildlife when we say that it's held in the public trust. So no, the mountain lions are not in crisis really anywhere in North America. They're doing phenomenally well. But there are movements and wolves are doing well too. Wolves are dispersing throughout. They're expanding their range every year in North America. They're expanding their range, expanding their numbers. They're expanding organically throughout the natural landscape, without any added support, and so, in that regard, I would say that they're not endangered. They're not necessarily common everywhere, but they're not endangered.
Mike Costello: 27:55
But these organizations rely on the picture of a crisis they rely on, like you said, they can't allow nuance and complexity and you know, oh, this year, you know this many harvested last year. They can't allow these ebbs and flows of, you know, natural ecological process. There's highs and lows and there's you know, it's like the tides and by the problem always existing, that organization can live into perpetuity as well. Yeah, yeah, which is frustrating because, like we would love to see I think most, I have to admit there there have been dark days in North America where we over-extracted trees and we over-extracted animals and we over-extracted predators and you know, and these things all happened. There's a phrase I took away from my last job that I really liked. It's like the best thing I got from corporate America in six years was we reserve the right to become smarter. I like that.
Mike Costello: 29:32
Yeah, we need to be able to say, yes, it was bad to exterminate wolves from the lower 48. It was bad to nearly exterminate grizzlies, but we're not doing that right now. That's not today's reality. We're not doing that. And there is a point at which human cultures share the landscape and so when we say, well, back in the day, they were here first, it's like, were they here first? I mean, maybe we all kind of came over together 16 to 20,000 years ago, right, I don't know if they were all here first. I think somehow, you know, I don't think, I don't think, you know, 600 years ago, the folks that lived in the Lake Tahoe region welcomed the black bears into their camp at night. They probably didn't. They probably, you know, know, black bears maintain separation from humans because they had great respect for the power of each other right right.
D Firth Griffith: 30:32
Well, it does two things to me what I'm getting at. Maybe these are two different conversations we can dive down, the first of which is it seems to me as though the policy of the anti-meat industry they're trying to make uniform the idea of mountain lions right, just like the forestry, the anti-meat industry, they're trying to make uniform the idea of mountain lions right, just like the forestry industry.
Mike Costello: 30:48
You said anti-meat, anti-meat. Well, that's what I mean, but it's very similar. Yeah, it's all I'm hearing you say, because you know, because the second part.
D Firth Griffith: 30:57
Ok. So, yeah, I'm playing my cards because that's really what I wanted to talk about in the second part.
Mike Costello: 31:01
So, because that's really what I wanted to talk about in the second part.
D Firth Griffith: 31:03
So the anti-meat, the anti-hunting industry, they're wanting to make uniform this idea of a mountain lion, very similar to the United States Forest Service and the forest industry within the United States wants to make uniform this idea of a forest. You know, a forest is something that produces lumber, pulpwood, energy, chips, paper, whatever it is.
D Firth Griffith: 31:21
But like we, don't know the tree and I don't want to get philosophical or overly mythological here, right, but like we don't know the tree and Suzanne Simard has this marvelous book, um, she she's a forester. Um, by family she's a PhD dendrologist I believe that's what she would call herself by trade. I mean, she's been a PhD and an educator in forest and forest ecology for maybe 40, 50 years, written an amazing book called Finding the Mother Tree. But in the intro there was a big moment in my understanding this when she made it very clear she said her family had been loggers in some valley or mountainous region or maybe a valley akin to the mountainous region in Oregon, for generations. But they had never logged themselves out. It was always take as much as you need, never anymore. But there was a natural limit to it, meaning that today, you know, I'm sure you've seen loggers. You know they have these big fellers that come in. They're the size of a, you know, average American home. They come in, they grab any tree they want. There's no limit, right? If a $10,000 veneer white oak tree is growing at the bottom of a river valley, at the sheer cliff, drop off like we used to leave those because we couldn't pull them out Today, we can just heli them out, we can fel them out, right, there's no limit there.
D Firth Griffith: 32:37
So we've divorced ourselves from the understanding of the local tree, that tree like the personality right of that tree, it seems to me. So point number one is this anti hunting or anti meat industry is trying to make uniform that which can't be made uniform, right? Human beings aren't some uniform, you know, glue or glob, right? Like you are, mike, I am, you know, daniel, and we're different. And until we can recognize that difference in the nuance and the complexity that lives in that difference, we can't do anything. So that's, that's number one. Let's talk about the uniformity.
D Firth Griffith: 33:11
And then, two, the interesting thing to me is and maybe this is just something to laugh at, maybe to cry out a little bit, but there's not much to discuss but talking about the memory, I mean so much of this indigenous, traditional ecological knowledge comes down to memory, as I understand it and as I've been given the understanding of it. So like, a friend of mine is a particular indigenous woman in the African world and she made the claim that in her tribe, historically, over the last 3,000 years, the tribal elders, every new generation, would perform like ecological monitoring, like a biological assay of the local climate, and they would say you know what we screwed up? We hunted too many zebras. You know the last generation? They hunted too many zebras. Okay, so this next generation, they all were given the last name of the local language of the zebra and in their culture they weren't allowed to. If you're named after the zebra, which is this entire generation, you weren't allowed to hunt the zebra, right, and that was their cultural way of 20 year, a 20 year pause, exactly.
D Firth Griffith: 34:16
For you know, and so that's, that's that living memory, working backwards and forwards, that they're talking about.
Mike Costello: 34:21
They don't necessarily, but the reaction you mentioned forests like we over-extracted the forest for 150 years and then somewhere in the last you know for you know, the sixties to the nineties, or sixties until 2020, 2021, we realized that we need to put, we said we need to put out all forest fires. So fire suppression was huge because we need to value the forest. And when you cut down, tree cutting, cutting, so we export our tree cutting to canada um, yeah, so our forest. So then what you know, three generations grow up and we've, in california, what does a forest look like? It looks like this green carpet that is endless, it goes forever. There's not a break in it. There's not a pocket in it. There's not a pocket in it. It's like three species of tree and they're 10 feet from each other.
Mike Costello: 35:10
What happens in 2017 to 2021? In California, we have the most radical, amazing, huge wildfires, Of course. We've seen these throughout the West. Now, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, forest management is kind of a cool idea. Maybe we should go in and do some mastication. Maybe we should go in and do some thinning well, it's just a natural idea like it.
D Firth Griffith: 35:33
I understand we didn't have fossil fuels 500 years ago, absolutely not.
D Firth Griffith: 35:37
Machinery and forestry, mulchers and other things, right, the technology that we have is different, but the role that humanity is playing with the forest in more of a managed way is not entirely dissimilar, or not dissimilar at all right to the standard use of humanity and forest for eternity.
D Firth Griffith: 35:52
You know of our time on earth, right, right, and what I want to do is I mean, I'm saying that not to just, you know, create some sort of agreement here, but rather like what the thoughts that you know that I let me say this more simply it seems like humans living in right relationship to their local biome and maybe that biome might not be local to them always, like maybe you're in Virginia and you go hunting in California with your friends who are Californian, so like I'm not saying local necessarily, as in like central Virginia where I am, or you know California where you are, but it just seems like right relationship and understanding your place, your connection, your oneness, that that again right relationship to that place in the life there seems to have a greater result than government coming down and and and mandating an irrevocable, un-nuanced management pathway which seems to be more like neglect to me, which can't be management.
Mike Costello: 36:53
Yeah, yeah, I agree, I think, especially when well, I guess it's almost inevitable, I was going to say say, especially when that mandate is is separating humans from nature, yeah, I think you take somebody that's been in the city, that hasn't spent much time in nature and you drop them off in the woods for five days without a phone. It's a transformative experience, like there's part of their humanity that has been there all along. Yeah, there's there. There are feelings and thoughts and experiences that happen that have never happened before. They were there, they're they're internal and they're natural and they were there all along. Um, and we just we need, I think we need more of that.
Mike Costello: 37:44
But what I, what I don't like is this, this power play, raising food, meat on the landscape and making those mandates and creating systems that separate humans from ecology. It's happening. It's happening a lot right now and I think it's you. Come back to something you brought up there's Mother Nature, there's Mother Culture. Come back to something you brought up there's mother nature, there's mother culture. Mother culture is fighting to remove us, push us as far away as possible from ecology, and that's being expressed a lot of different ways and many times, mother culture is telling us, telling humans, telling people that are really busy and don't think about this very much, um, because they're just really busy. Uh, they're. They're using like protect nature, support nature, support nature, so step away from it. Right, they're? Yeah, so like, oh, I need to support nature, so I need to. I'll plug in over here and buy this, this thing that came out of a stainless steel fermenter and it's called. You know, it's supposed to look like me. They think they're.
Mike Costello: 39:12
They're being told that they're doing something good for the natural world by removing themselves from it. Yeah, it's literally like here, let me give you this rope. I'll show you how to make a loop out of it. I'll just stand on the chair. You're helping, you're helping, and I don't think that's helping. I don't think it's good, I don't think it's healthy. What's hard is you and I are talking about this. I talk about these things on the podcast. You know the podcast I do with how for wildlife or honey, easy, you're talking about it too. And mostly I'll say you know, agrarian, adjacent like agrarian, interested, you know, group of people, while the forces that be that would have us eat from a stainless steel fermenter or that would have us not go out on the landscape and participate in predator management in the ecosystem. Those forces are talking to the 80% center of populace Right that's why they need the money Voters.
D Firth Griffith: 40:24
You know Right. That's why they need the money Butoters.
Mike Costello: 40:26
That's why they need the money, but they're talking to the people that can make these things with votes. They're talking to the people that can make these decisions often with the least information. Yeah.
D Firth Griffith: 40:37
Yeah, it seems like an inevitable outcome when we offload this idea of relationship to the proverbial Washington. We've been so outcome when we offload this idea of relationship like to the proverbial washington, right, I mean, and we've been so habituated, we've so purchased that narrative that we can offload this idea of relationship, you know, to our masters. Right, that's, that's what it is. They tell us what to do and they tell us what we're allowed to do, and to a some degree, that's, that's what civil society is about, you know, it's what living in community is about. You offload a piece of what you are to the community. There's a portion of that. That's fine, I believe that that's true. But it seems to me like this is not the portion. It seems to me like having a community that makes sense in its life, with a local environment that always seems to make sense sense, I mean that doesn't seem to have any sort of bad bone in its, in its body.
Mike Costello: 41:29
Um, I I'd like to. One of the things I want to hear from you is cause you mentioned hunting a few times. Um, it sounds like you do some wild harvest of domestic animals, but in a wild type setting on your, on your land. I'd love to hear from you Like what are your thoughts on hunting? That's a good question what are?
Mike Costello: 41:48
your thoughts on on humans going out and we don't have to. I could go to the store. You know I went to the farmer's market. You, you inspired me to finally to go to the farmer's market again for the first time in several years. Um, just bought some grass fed beef from a local it's probably one County removed. Heck, yeah, also had some uh, I'm sorry, I'm apologize had some, uh, force of nature.
D Firth Griffith: 42:14
Ah, God bless them god bless them.
Mike Costello: 42:20
I had my first force of nature, regeneratively grown um.
D Firth Griffith: 42:21
You know, whatever what's their, what's their heart, liver yeah, the ancestral land, we just we had that, so bless them yeah, yeah I thought I'd have to throw that in there this episode is brought to you by force of nature what do you?
Mike Costello: 42:37
what do you like? What are your thoughts on hunting?
D Firth Griffith: 42:39
that's a wonderful, wonderful um. You know I was raised hunting. Um, my, my greatest memories growing up was hunting with our, uh, my brother and I. We would hunt with our dad, and then we would hunt with our dad's best friend, who was basically another dad to us. Maybe an uncle would be a fine relation and, um, I mean so much of who I am is like the conversations we would have as, like, a five-year-old freezing to death, like, oh my gosh, my feet would be so cold and he would take you know, I'm not related to this man with in blood, but like, to some degree I was and uh, you know, he would put his, his feet and his, my, my feet in his shirt and he would warm them up.
D Firth Griffith: 43:27
You know, probably, practice, I mean, to me it was this unbelievable connection and this, this love that I share with a man since, you know, you know, all the way to this day, um, to him he was probably just being rational about it, like, please, kid, don't let me ruin this day hunting, cause I have to take you inside regardless. I mean, like, oh my gosh. But I never forget, I'll never forget that he, he always used to tell me, my dad used to tell me this too. He used to say it's called hunting, it's never called getting. Like you know, you know, like that's a huge difference.
D Firth Griffith: 43:57
I've done a whole podcast on that, that that phrase alone, the idea of hunting not getting um, because you know, in the beginning of this I made the comment that husbandry has a lot to learn from hunting and I think hunting can learn a few things from husbandry, but this is one of the things that husbandry can learn from hunting. I think one degree that we can release some aspect of control in the agricultural world and step into a much, much greater or deeper sense of right relationship with the land, with our cousins, with our relations with the animals, et cetera, is to see agriculture as hunting, not getting right when a farmer plants a seed.
D Firth Griffith: 44:30
he plants it to harvest it, but to some degree that's not our role. Every tree that grows is not a house. Some trees need to live, and so letting go-.
Mike Costello: 44:41
They just need to be trees. They just need to be trees In the same sense is so much in agriculture.
D Firth Griffith: 44:47
About 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I was helping manage a particular holistically managed, regenerative, grass-fed and finished farm and their calling C-U-L-L-I-N-G, their calling protocol, was any animal that doesn't breed every year. They just called right, but there were never any questions asked. Like it could have been a 20-year-old matriarch that understood the lay of the land, the energies of the land, the forages of the land, the minerals, the balances, the carbon feeding, the minerals that are feeding, the energy of photosynthesis, like she could have understood all of those things, but if she didn't breed she was out. That's that getting worldview. That is just agriculture, right.
D Firth Griffith: 45:29
But in bovines natural bovines and bison are a clear representation of this they breed every other year. If you give them their druth representation of this they breed every other year. If you give them their druthers, they will absolutely breed every other year. They don't want to be bred every year and so we're forcing nature into a particular worldview that doesn't have any natural foundation and we're calling it natural farming because it's still farming and it is still cattle on grass. So there's a lot of nuance that we're lacking Right is still cattle on grass.
D Firth Griffith: 45:56
So there's a lot of nuance that we're lacking. That's why I keep focusing on what you've been saying To me. This policy, this anti-hunting industry, is just calling for a sincere lack of nuance, which makes me really worried, because the agricultural industry has already pushed and long systematized a world that lacks nuance, and so as you lead into a world that lacks nuance, you have to lead into this fake meat, this industrialized technology, this technopoly, the AI and everything else that surrounds everything that's happening today. You know there's food made in labs instead of food made in nature, as nature, for nature, like that's that lack of nuance, it leads in that direction, and so this is fearful to me. It's that lack of nuance, it leads in that direction, and so this is fearful to me.
D Firth Griffith: 46:39
The interesting thing about hunting that I say that we absolutely support is the feeding of oneself, locally, right. However, you can do that. The issue where we are and I think this is the holdup for us the issue where we are is about half the landscape is corn and soy. None of it is organic, none of it is non and soy. None of it is organic, none of it is non GMO. All of it is till based. There's a lot of.
Mike Costello: 47:02
So those deer are eating all the best, all the best of American ag it's wild food fed with GMO corn and soy and glyphosate.
D Firth Griffith: 47:13
Exactly, and the problem is we fertilize because fertilizer Back to force of nature. Back to force of nature, buddies.
Mike Costello: 47:19
Which is better than your deer? Which is better than your deer?
D Firth Griffith: 47:22
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, we're going to have to put a disclaimer. This episode is not brought by force of nature, no, I'm just joking. Love you guys. And the issue is come 2018, 2019, and then especially in 2020, 2021, when the Russian and Ukrainian war really hit a moment, fertilizer has gone up five or six times in pricing. You could fertilize a field for, you know, 15 to 20 grand now is absolutely costing you 100 grand to fertilize the same field with the same fertilizer. And so all of these monocrop, conventional type, you know agricultural folks all around us, and I mean the general mid-Atlantic region here, right? So from Pennsylvania to South Carolina, as far west as the Mississippi, western Kentucky, and I mean even into Great Plains, obviously. But the point is, in this general mid-Atlantic region, what they've done is they've transitioned over to chicken litter as fertilizer, but also city sludge. Call it city sludge, human manure coming out of cities.
D Firth Griffith: 48:17
It's, it's, you know, untreated, it's just raw sewage um well, I mean it's composted, it's not, really, it's not like right out of the toilet well, no, it goes into the sewage treatment facility, but it's it's. It's so untreated that right you, as human, you have to put signs all around that field. You, as a human, are not allowed to walk on that field because it's so bad. So like regardless if it's raw or really raw. The point is it's so contaminated that you're not allowed to stand there as a human. But also, too, just the amount of drugs that are flushed.
Mike Costello: 48:52
It's actually measurable.
D Firth Griffith: 48:53
I mean we actually have soil, have soil, water and aquifer penetrated drugs in regions that hormones, hormones. I mean it's just, it's it's overrun. And so now the deer, you know, and the chicken litter that they're using is just pure ammonia. It's, you know. You know the five big chicken producers and in the country, purdue and Cargill and Tyson and everything else, and so it's not good. It's filled with antibiotics and dead chickens and disease and all sorts of wonderfulness. A little bit of carbon, thank God, due to the bedding, but it's just really bad fields with really bad crops, with really bad chemicals, with really bad fertilizers. And it's wonderful for deer, I mean. When I say it's wonderful, what I mean is it's where all the food is, because the rest of the landscape is so mismanaged or so cultivated, from a different perspective.
D Firth Griffith: 49:45
So it's either mismanaged in the sense that there's cattle grazing it and it's just a nubbed grassland right the grass is a centimeter tall and there's nothing else, so why would a deer be there? Or it's cultivated in like a yard sense, like we have a neighbor, bless his soul. I think he owns about 100 acres. Doctor, I think he is from Richmond, barely ever visits, but they just mow it.
D Firth Griffith: 50:10
I mean, it's just a marvelous flowing central Virginia, Exactly central Virginia, lush, diverse meadow right on top of the James River Valley, here where we are in the Piedmont ecoregion or biome, and it's just mowed like a golf course. Hundreds of acres, or at least 800 acres, and so the deer also have nothing to eat there, they have no shelter, they have no habitat.
D Firth Griffith: 50:28
So what do they do? They leave these uplands that are either overgrazed or over mowed and they go down to the lowlands where all the corn and the soy are planted and chicken shit and glyphosate and that's what we have for them to eat, and so a huge part of our project I mean, we're writing another book as we speak and this is a significant chapter in it Part of what regenerative agriculture or what we call concentric rewilding a much better version of rewilding hopefully regenerative agriculture is a fine term to use here Part of what we have to start focusing on in our habitat creation and land management, whatever that looks like, is this habitat creation, not just for domestics but for wild animals and deer and coyotes and black bear and everything else alike, because their systems are being eradicated as we speak. Like we have another neighbor, he uh had about 3 000 acres they just deforested, totally clear cut. It's a mountainside, huge mountainside. They just deforested an old growth, hardwood forest, old growth as in, about 200 years old, which is good for our region and uh took them three weeks 2 500 acres. That was clear cut. And the interesting thing is, if you were to walk around the periphery of that, of that landscape, the number of snakes that you would see that like used to live there that now are displaced, you know, or deer or black bear Like. There's so many black bears moving around here now because that 2,500 acres was deforested Right, 500 acres was deforested right.
D Firth Griffith: 51:59
And so as we erode these mountains literally with cultivation be it, you know, modern humanity or can modern humanity and tractors and combines with row crops, however the landscape is cultivated, these, these animals are losing not just food sources or feed sources, but they're losing habitat. As they lose these two items food sources and habitat they start to get pushed right and as they get pushed they end up on the road. I mean it's not unlike like if I'm heading out to do some chores in the early morning here and I take the road to do so, maybe I drive two miles up the road to get to the cows. I mean you'll see two or three dead deer every day on the side of the road.
Mike Costello: 52:30
Yeah Right, oh yeah. Vehicle strikes nationwide take more deer than hunters Hunters. It's amazing how many-.
D Firth Griffith: 52:39
Creating these habitats and then hunting. If you need the meat, I should stop this diatribe, get off the stool a minute and just be a very practical and simple answer of your question. If I ever needed the meat, I would hunt. We have hundreds of head of cattle, goats, sheep historically pigs, chickens.
Mike Costello: 52:58
right, we have plenty of the meat that we need and you have healthy meat because you know exactly what's going into it, which is minimally anything other than what grows on its own world, which is if you, if you become alive, into the idea that you have to participate in the world in order to be alive, and that's reawakened you.
D Firth Griffith: 53:18
You either have to start eating the most wild and regenerative local meat possible or hunting it yourself. Ideally, you hunted yourself. The problem is, we've so destroyed the world that doesn't. It's not much of an option for people who live in regions like the mid-atlantic. Yeah, I think that's how I see it, I think, western states.
Mike Costello: 53:37
From a hunting and meat perspective, I do think that the elk meat in the back country of Montana or Colorado is pretty darn healthy Deer meat, bear meat. Here in California, mountain bears eat bugs, grass, you know, nuts, the occasional bit of carrion or a fawn, but, um, I can see what you're saying about, like that's. That's interesting how you know midwest east, like east of the mississippi, there is so much interplay between the whitetail deer, they spend so much time on farmed land. And then I listen to some podcasts about habitat management, mostly with an eastern land approach, and they'll talk about they'll spray, they'll hack and squirt, um, their food plots and whatnot. And, and it's interesting, some of them have, you know, a principle against no chemicals. Some are like, hey, you know, I'm gonna use whatever tools I can and for my food plot, and so they'll spray it and they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll use, you know, some kind of chemical to, to, to kill, kill trees, that they don't want weed trees, that they don't want things like that, and so there's a various range of approaches on that.
D Firth Griffith: 55:04
I think fire you mentioned this 1960s was a big year for fire in the sense that it was highly removed from our management and, as I understand it, I know a number of prescribed burners and forest fire emergency types. It was that with the rise of industrial technology, the number of engines and possible wildfires that were occurring is obviously increasing in this moment, in the early 1960s. But what's not increasing simultaneous or in parallel with it is emergency response to wildfires. No cell phones. A lot of people didn't even have home phones, etc. Right, so while on farms you would be using this huge diesel engine that was spitting out fire and catching the cornfield on fire, like you couldn't have an emergency response to get there, you know, fast enough. That's how, at least I was just, you know, told as the issue, regardless of why it began, or I should say regardless of why fire was neglected as a tool in the landscape.
D Firth Griffith: 56:05
Fire. I think today is having this wonderful resurgence in in the east, and I can't speak to the west. You know the west and obviously you have. You have some uh, intimacy with some land in the in the west that was burned for good or ill. But I think fire, fire to me is really wonderful, because so much of what humanity tries to do in this anti-hunting industry seems to be doing that this way. Um, I think unequivocally, is that we have a particular end in mind or an outcome, and we control our process to get there right. That's, that's, to some degree, the modern human experience. We have an outcome and we control our process to get there right. That's, to some degree, the modern human experience. We have an outcome and we control our way to get there. We control the plan, we control the implementation. What fire, I think, allows us to do. Prescribed burning is what I mean by fire. Appropriate fire technology used in the landscape, especially a closed canopy forest, especially in the East, cause I can talk about the East.
D Firth Griffith: 56:53
Fire is really wonderful because, while it is set by humans, in particular situations when it's going to do only the damage we want it to do, to, to do in the sense that, like we're going to stop it from going onto the road or the national forest, our neighbor's land, we have the ability to contain it, it in its most precise location. When the fire burns here as opposed to there, it's going to do what it's going to do, and you can't stop it Right. When a fire kills a particular sweet gum or red maple, it might have skipped over the preceding sweet gum or red maple, but it didn't kill that one, it killed this one. And so it's still this autonomous force that allows humanity to occupy the land without having overt or complete domestication, colonization or control over that landscape's final outcome. And so it's-.
Mike Costello: 57:40
Yeah, it's going to create a mosaic. It's going to create a mosaic at the macro level and at the very micro level, like one square. This square foot may have a different soil moisture on that day than the square foot you know five feet away. It's like honoring that beautiful, nuancing complexity that is the Eastern, you know, five feet away.
D Firth Griffith: 57:55
It's like honoring that beautiful, nuancing complexity that is the Eastern, you know, tempered, broadleaf, mixed oak fire forest, where you are going to drift naturally into an ecosystem that is going to be browsing, grazed by deer and other migrating herbivores, much more prolifically than if you just let the forest go into a closed canopy, stagnant, zero carbon cycling system, but it's going to do so autonomously, like you're saying, like with rich nuance yeah, there's, there's more out west here.
Mike Costello: 58:22
There there is definitely a resurgence in prescribed fire uh, organizations, communities, utilization. There's most, uh, most rural counties. You can find some kind of training on how to use prescribed fire proactively, and so I think that's coming back. I think it's coming back as a recognized tool to prevent the million acre. Right, you know, let's do 10,000 acres of prescribed fire a year and nibble at this thing, you know, and have positive outcomes, instead of deferring that for another 40 years and then have another million acre fire. That's truly catastrophic.
D Firth Griffith: 59:11
So to me we're talking about two parallel realities that I believe should be parallel, but they seem to be inversely parallel or like, if we're looking at arrows, they're inversely proportional. To me we have the deregulation of fire not the unregulation but the less of regulation of fire and prescribed burns to solve a very particular need. That is like, strangely, human right, indigenous peoples. They have burned the Eastern climate. I imagine they burned the Western climate prolifically over the last tens or hundreds of thousands of years, like they used fire as a tool, and so we're relearning, that is, reawakening among us, but it's also being deregulated by the government.
D Firth Griffith: 59:46
meaning that you're now allowed to do it within it's enabled. It's enabled, yeah, but simultaneously to that, it seems to me like this anti-hunting industry is doing the opposite. For hunting, right, yeah, but like to some degree, if we can look at it from like an indigenous world view, right, you have hunting and you have fire. This is just human occupation, human habitation as an earthling on earth, like I think that's how that would be said. Why is the one being deregulated and the other being more regulated?
Mike Costello: 1:00:16
uh, I think prescribed fire is being recognized as a tool that should be used and can be used proactively and and successfully. Because we just went, we've gone through, you know, say, five to ten years of of catastrophic, uh, wildfires that that had dramatic, that that did everything that the, the, the prior goals tried to like they. They broke all the. All the other goals were like let's oh, fire smoke. That's bad. We don't release all that carbon in the atmosphere, we don't want to deal with the, the look of it of a destroyed forest, we don't lose all this lumber. It's like, well, yeah, so we, we deferred that for a long time. Then we have these cat, these catastrophic fires of a million, of a million acres per per fire, in some cases like well they're, they're just when you know billions of board feet of lumber, they're just when you know they're just when all the spotted owls that we were trying to save, um, you know they're just went. You look at the particulate matter in the atmosphere. And so we had catastrophic events that told us that we're better off doing small, incremental, natural management approaches as opposed to, you know, deferring that into some catastrophe. I, I think and maybe this is just because I'm an incredibly biased observer looking at what's happening here in California.
Mike Costello: 1:01:46
There are more. Go back to the mountain lion. There are more mountain lions showing up in daylight hours in suburban communities in California. It happens every day. You'll see a video of a mountain lion in somebody's backyard or the pool. You'll see a mountain. There's videos of mountain lions, like cruising the perimeter of an elementary school. That like it's and and it's not. It's not just because we don't see this, just because we all have a ring camera now. It's like, yes, the ring camera on the back porch in a rural property may show you the animal, the critter that was there all along, but we didn't have a ring camera. But seeing that critter at 10 am in a settled suburban area, that's new. Like that's a new thing. And the critter, when that critter sees you and knows direct, knows that there's three humans staring right at it, and it's like it's just giving you the finger, like I don't care, you don't bother me, humans, like that's a new experience. And so I think we're actually I think we're coming to a point where and hopefully we can get to a point where we change our course before catastrophe, before catastrophic events happen in the ecosystem or to humans that actually humans managing, engaging in engaging with these predators like to to, where they develop even just a modicum of fear of humans and they, they go back to a boundary.
Mike Costello: 1:03:23
Um, but it's, it's, it's not, it's complex, it's not just go out and kill three mountain lions. It's like, well, maybe the mountain lions are coming into town because the bears are stealing three-fourths of their kills. Right, and, and that's been done through, you know, peer-reviewed research here in california that that black bears are stealing three-fourths of the mountain lion kills, and so a mountain lion to sustain itself has to kill three times three, you know, three times as many deer, because it's losing 75 of its meat to to other predators and so there, there's a ecosystem thing here where bear numbers are really high, mountain lion numbers are high, or mountain lion, you know, mountain lion prey numbers are down.
Mike Costello: 1:04:08
Mountain lions are struggling, prayer, prayer, sequestering themselves, deer sequestering themselves to more habited, inhabited areas for safety. So who follows them there? And then, when, when the mountain lions follow them there, what they find? They find fluffy the cat and they find a dog and they find a donkey and they find a llama and they find a goat, and they're like oh, this is heaven, like I don't care about these humans anymore because I'm not hunted and I've got all of these. You know I don't have deer, or I don't care about these humans anymore because I'm not hunted and I've got all of these. You know, I don't have deer or I don't have as many deer, but I've got all these other wonderful, delicious critters to prey on, because mountain lions got to eat too.
Mike Costello: 1:04:46
And so I think what's happened is we've returned to forest management. We've returned to the idea maybe a mosaic is better, you know, a biodiverse forest is better than a just a three species green carpet, um. So we're starting to do things there in the forest management side, forest ecosystem, on the wildlife ecosystem side. I think it's going to take or there's going to be a crisis. That happens both when we start realizing that animals, when there's too many of one species in any given area, it's unhealthy, right? I mean CWD, right, deer populations, too many deer in one area, you start getting these bizarre diseases that are tragic. Um, we just had five mountain lions in sonoma county that all died of pneumonia within like a two-week period. Wow, like, how do, how does that happen? Like to me, that only happens when you have so many in a close proximity. Um, yeah, yeah, I don't know I don't know it.
D Firth Griffith: 1:05:54
It seems to me like this like humans today have a wonderful choice on what it means to be human on earth today, but the strangeness of that choice, or the lack of answering to that choice, is also forcing the animals you know, our relations around us, to be like, similarly affected. Like you know, I don't think the mountain lions are walking around being like what does it mean to be a mountain lion? But like they are unequivocally not mountain lions anymore. Some of them you know, like the ones that are just coming into cities and looking at people being like what's up, dude? Like that's not a mountain lion, like it is, it's, it's chemically, it's a sad it's a sad representation of of what, to me, I agree it's not.
Mike Costello: 1:06:32
It's not a wild animal like a wild animal should be skittish, concerned about humans. They should be in the.
D Firth Griffith: 1:06:40
In its natural place, right In its natural place.
Mike Costello: 1:06:43
It's in the dark, it sees you but you don't see it.
D Firth Griffith: 1:06:47
I just don't understand how regulating hunting even more is going to solve this. This is a crisis of understanding who we are. This is a crisis of understanding the relationships that we are lacking Like this is a crisis of land mismanagement, forest mismanagement, wildlife.
Mike Costello: 1:07:09
I think it's a crisis of you talk about how humans we are, the relation. You say we are the relationship. Yeah, and I think it's. There's a lot of people that actually it's like this weird modern guilt, like like that humans don't deserve to be there, like we don't, like we've done so much wrong, we did all these things wrong, so we don't, we don't deserve to be there. It's their landscape, like you hear it all the time with Lake Tahoe and the bears in Lake Tahoe which are everywhere they. They break into houses and they live under your, under your deck in the winter, and it's a lot of people like we don't, it's their space. It's like, no, it's, it's all of our space. And yes, there are more humans there now than there were 500 years ago or even 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect a wild animal to be wild and a human habitation to be for humans.
D Firth Griffith: 1:08:08
Right, yeah, it just seems like regulation of this doesn't seem to make sense. It's like we need to like I don't mean to be overly on the other side, but it's. It's like we need more nature retreats and we'll like forest bathing and human finding and think we have soul work to do. Is the point I'm getting to. Yeah, I don't understand how simply not hunting is going to cure a deeply soulless process. Like we need more souls, right, like you're saying, because you can't sit here and you know and make the claim that we just need to reduce humanity by 50% and if we just had 50% less humans we would be able to like none of these things are available or should be even discussed moral, ethical, et cetera. Right, and so, like I get that this is a really you know like the phrase goes, as coy as it is, but like the rock in the hard place, like I see it, you know it is. It is a problem, I understand that, but until we start to allow the conversations to take a much more nuanced based approach, I just I don't see any sort of hope that can come out about it. Like, even looking at conventional row cropping, like somebody asked me recently well, daniel, all of the conventional row cropping that happens around you, you know. And, by the way, virginia has very little row cropping out here. I mean it's mountainous, it's full of valleys and it's pretty rocky and it's ancient tobacco country that's been farmed out Like it's not good row crop country but it's still around good row crop country but it's still around. And they said well, you know, you're speaking about concentric wilding. You're speaking about, you know, regenerative agriculture. You're speaking about having a right relationship. Like what do you tell them? And it's like, well, we can't have a conversation about row cropping or conventional agriculture without understanding two salient facts.
D Firth Griffith: 1:09:50
First, number one over 50% of the corn produced in the United States doesn't go to feeding humans or animals. So just 50% of it. We need to be talking about fossil fuels and energy, like I just don't even. Yeah, a large part of that 50%, by the way, that's not included, it can bring it up to about 55 to 57%, as I understand the numbers goes into. Oh, now the sugar in processed foods. Um, high fructose corn syrup. Yeah, like, really, about 40 of the corn produced today is for human consumption. Well, the interesting thing is 35 of that corn spoils in the distribution system. So we have 40 and then we have 35 of that 40, right? So we're talking about like less than 20% of the total corn produced in the United States goes to human consumption, and so like let's talk about that, Because I'm not interested in high fructose corn syrup, I'm not interested in corn ethanol for my diesel engines.
D Firth Griffith: 1:10:48
I don't think that we should like. That's a whole other conversation. Let's not grow our engine oil yeah, let's not grow our engine oil. Let's not grow our engine oil. Yeah, let's not grow our engine oil.
Mike Costello: 1:10:55
Let's just be authentic and get it out of the ground and call it what it is and let's have that conversation.
D Firth Griffith: 1:11:01
Right, let that be the conversation. So about 20% of the corn grown today is for us. So, if you want to have the conversation, if I believe that 20% of the corn being produced today should continue to be produced I don't know maybe let's talk about that. No-transcript 80 is devoid of actual conversation, and I think the same thing is true for this conversation with with hunting and everything else. To simply make a blanket claim that 100 of all hunting needs to be regulated in x, y and z and Z way, right Is to look at corn and say let's just overlook that 80% of this is way too nuanced to even converse about in this conversation and let's just add that into the 100%. Let's just not even consider that, right.
D Firth Griffith: 1:12:07
It's like nuanced list conversation to further separate, further colonize humanity in the world as separatist engines where the human can still control the environment, but only if you're rich enough and only if you're a senator. Right, with a lobbyist behind you. Right, it's just this removing humanity from nature. But also it's like the denuancing, the decomplexizing however the word would go of a very, very relationship-based, localized-based solution. Right, because like and again, I'm not a hunter, so speak to this for me, please.
D Firth Griffith: 1:12:37
But like to me, the best case scenario would be to run this like at a city to city to county to county, community to community, person to person manner where you can actually understand like what are the mountain lion in your community? And like how can we co-create with mountain lion to have a greater emergence for the local abundance of wildflowers and bees and pollination and nuts for the bears and the berries for the bears and deer meat for humans and deer meat for the coyotes and the mountain lions and the beer? Like how can we co-create this massive crescendo of beauty and rhythm and wonderful vibrations? Doesn't seem like we can regulate that from the top down in theory.
Mike Costello: 1:13:13
Um, in theory, you know, each state has Department of Natural Resources, a Fish and Game Commission or a Department of Fish and Wildlife, and usually there's a commission and there's usually a department. The commission sets the regulatory policy and that's where, like the social and the ecological, that's where all the inputs go. Like you go to the commission, it's very messy, it's very drawn out Takes. You know their political appointees, but they usually have a six-year term so they overlap governors and so things happen very slowly and very messily. It's a very messy process at the commission level. And then they set the regulatory policies. This is how many deer we're going to harvest this year. Here's the zones, here's the seasons. And they do so usually with social input and from the department and the department is the game wardens, the biologists got it. They execute those policies. Um, that's where, that's where I believe, that's where, like the organization I work with, how for a while, that's where we believe it should happen. It should be a slow, messy process, but it is also highly reversible, like if new information comes up like, oh, in this county we over harvested, like the, like the zebra, like we over harvested deer, or we had a really bad year and we saw a hundred deer on this one ice. They got killed in avalanche. Because this is happening in California We've had extreme winters and we've had like half of a herd taken out by an avalanche as they're crossing and so you're nimble Like you kill too many zebra in that generation. You can throttle back and harvest fewer zebra With the commission, the department structure that's how it's set up.
Mike Costello: 1:15:03
The problem is that the, the, the anti-hunting industry doesn't. They want, they want very binary, polarized decisions. They want no hunting of this critter, of this species. Um, which I understand. If that species is endangered, let's go back to the zebra, right? That zebra for that community was like let's place it into the endangered species act, we're gonna, we're gonna place it in the list for for 20 years, a generation, until it comes back. After 20 years, when it's come back, they say okay, it's back.
Mike Costello: 1:15:30
We're good, we can continue we can look at it again. We can continue to harvest it, and so that's not. So that's not what's happening here. Is there's a goal to even with recovered, healthy populations. There's a goal to control human behavior, to not participate with that animal anymore yeah, regardless of its abundance, regardless of its success, regardless of its secondary, tertiary impacts on other species. And so that's one of the challenges. When you make a decision at the legislative level, you got political influence, financial, other influencing factors go into it. When you make a decision at the ballot box level, where you just have everybody just voting based on whatever they've been told, whether it's a true statement or fabricated statement, those decisions happen quickly and they're almost impossible reverse, right, and so the commission level decisions takes, take a long time, but they're easily reversed and adapted. Legislative ballot box level they happen fast, with less information, and they're almost impossible reverse. So that's that's one of the challenges and that's where focusing on the ballot box.
D Firth Griffith: 1:16:54
You know, focusing on the ballot box. Obviously we live in a democratic republic. We like the idea of voting I think we over like the idea of voting in popular governance, but it just seems like we're focusing on the only species living that has no idea what to actually vote on. Right, like the mountain lion or the over the mountain lion, overpopulated. Well, like, listen, like what if the mountain lion could vote like it would, it would be the right vote. Like, yes, we are overpopulated. Like they, they know right. But like just someone living in, you know, sonoma county, california, who has to go to the ballot box on that random Tuesday where all they saw was the Instagram or the marketing posts of Black Bear. They don't know Right.
D Firth Griffith: 1:17:42
And so the separation breeds further separation. Right, if we can continue to separate people like you from the land, we can then enforce that separation by breeding more separation, by having the people who are already separate force you to be more separate, it's just separation breeding, it's not to be deregulated.
Mike Costello: 1:18:01
I agree with you the further you are away from that ecological system, the more easily you are to influence with a picture and a slogan to push you further away. Exactly right.
D Firth Griffith: 1:18:13
It's not deregulation, but regulation within the right relationship for that regulation to occur. Exactly Right. So it's not deregulation, but like regulation within the right relationship for that regulation to occur.
Mike Costello: 1:18:20
Yeah, so you know one of your. You know the husband, husbandman, husbandry and hunting. Um, I will say, I'll say this the. The word is get now, cause it. You know the.
Mike Costello: 1:18:31
The regenerative movement got to, and I'm a fairly new consumer of the ideas, as a new hunter maybe it's just because I'm new to all this. I'm just like, I'm a sponge. I like to soak up the information and synthesize what I think might be an original thought. Sometimes it has clicked with me that habitat is the number one issue. Predators can be an issue, but really, when it comes down to habitat, the ecosystem, a healthy ecosystem, is the number one thing, and so that's why I have the Plumas Headwaters Retreat property.
Mike Costello: 1:19:08
That's part of the million acre Dixie Fire here in California. It burned in 2021. It's's only 120 acres but it's surrounded almost completely surrounded by national forest, so I can go about five miles any direction. It's all public land, all burned, all crisp. 94 to 95 percent of this property, all woody material was burned. Wow, all the trees, all the conifers are dead Shrubs. Some of the shrubs woody shrubbing material is finally starting to come back three years later at the root, which is amazing that a plant can be burned above ground to a crisp and four, three, four, five years later you start getting new growth from the roots, which is wild. Which brings me back to the mother root or the mother tree idea.
Mike Costello: 1:20:01
What's going on in those roots underground, what's feeding it to make it want to be able to grow, clicked with me as I started to look into like habitat restoration and what can be done with this property to to restore the habitat, restore the ecosystem and do it intentionally in a way. And this is where I think humans like we can stand back and just watch and it might hit its optimal state 200 years from now, like whatever that is going to be. Or we can take the knowledge we have and intentionally do some things like help restore the riparian zone so it's more meadow than creek. Right, you know, we can do things with what we know to help steer restoration, steer regeneration. And this is where how I came across this whole regenerative idea and it was probably a one of the will. It was probably, you know, common ground or um, what was the other movie before that? Uh, kiss the ground, kiss the ground. Yeah, kiss the ground. That and then some will harris's, you know videos and whatnot. And it clicked with me the wait. I can have a thousand acres and take the same number of cattle, potentially, or livestock, and if I get them all close together I could have them, maybe even more than I would have originally. On a set stock basis. I can have them touch each piece of land, each piece of dirt, for just a day or two and move them around, and so the rest of the year say it's three days, thousand acres, they're on each chunk of land for three days. The rest of the year, the 997 acres that they're not on is for wildlife. I'm like I love that idea. That's amazing, like that's to me. That's phenomenal, because I do.
Mike Costello: 1:22:08
I drive through so much of California's like rangeland and I see this golf course, short turf, right, and it makes. It's never made sense to me why there's I'm looking at you know a thousand acres on each side of the road and there's like four cattle out there and they're keeping it this short. I'm like that doesn't make sense, right. How is that possible? It's because the roots are all trimmed to in the process and and so just this whole this regenerative journey that I am on and I'm new to it, so it means that the word, that word, is getting out. I think it's, it's going to, it's, it's clicking with people that you can, and maybe I'm just too optimistic, but you can have the cake and eat it too, type of thing where you can develop a vibrant, biodiverse, you know, really robust ecosystem and have domestic food production at the same time. Right yeah, am I, am, I am I. Am I just too deep into the Kool-Aid, or is that?
D Firth Griffith: 1:23:05
No, no, I mean there's. I think, the most important thing, I think, that we we can do in a moment, any moment, but especially a moment like this is, is to recognize and honor that nuance component Like that. That's the beauty of it. You know, this whole episode could just be called nuance, I realized.
D Firth Griffith: 1:23:19
But like that that is. It's really important the idea that humanity and animals can work together to co-create a landscape that is good for animals and humanity, or just animals in all ways, humans being one such mammal is wonderful, you know. I think it totally works. I think the idea that agriculture can be good for the animals that surround agriculture not necessarily are contained within it, but surround it black bear, coyote, mountain lion, deer, et cetera mule, deer, pronghorn, all of these other species, butterflies is unequivocal. I think it's totally possible. I think it's actually called for, right.
D Firth Griffith: 1:23:56
I think what needs to start being discussed more and more in the agricultural arena is this idea of wildlife monitoring and habitation, or really the monitoring of wildlife habitation in the agricultural environment. Because if the agriculture is truly actually natural, not mimicking nature, right, not in nature's image, but natural, you know, and and and whatever that means, and and. To be very clear, there's to me there's no difference between hunting a deer for food and moving a cow to new grass, right? You're, you're managing it. That right? That's what I'm saying. You're doing it differently. You have maybe more control and less control because of property boundaries and everything else. Obviously, laws treat deer and bovine differently, but at the end of the day, at the intrinsic soul level, there's no difference. And so utilizing one animal in your relationship with that animal, you know, with that animal to impact another animal is just common, logical, you know, sense it, just you're inevitably going to happen. It's just is that relationship a good one or a bad one? So we can utilize the cow to create a bad landscape for a deer. We can utilize the cow to get a good landscape for deer.
D Firth Griffith: 1:25:05
And so the conversation is not really that, if it's possible, but which direction are we going? Are we actually creating a more habitable or less habitable environment? How we do so? That's the nuance, that's the beauty of it, which is why I've been focused so much in this conversation about this happening in the local. I like what you're saying about these commissions and departments and things happening slowly, locally, with great thought and great feedback loops. Like the feedback loop is not discussed enough. The idea that humans act with any sort of supremacy of mind is so incomplete it's generally worthless. We don't Nobody does, I really don't believe like look at a tree, go in a forest, look at a tree. It grows up straight and then it's like shoot the sun's over there, so it grows this way.
D Firth Griffith: 1:25:53
Then it's like tap gone there's a tree over there and so it grows back and they're all twisted right. That shows that the tree made a bad decision. When I say a bad decision.
Mike Costello: 1:26:02
What I?
D Firth Griffith: 1:26:02
mean is that it grew in a particular direction for particular reasons, underwent a feedback loop and realized I need to grow another way. And then it grew another way. Nature, that is to say Earth and all of its inhabitants, undergoes decision, feedback, re-decision, and, as long as that can happen in a local environment, well and uninhibited right. So the zebra example, with Precious Piri, my Zimbabwe friend, all the way to the local department and commission, moving slowly with changeable understandings, multiple, fluid understandings that's what we're talking about here. If we can then view that to the agricultural landscape and allow all of this to all co-create a much more beautiful world, there's hope. There, actually hope. It's not just some massively set stocked project, but it is interesting. Over the last decade that we've managed this property, we've seen the deer families increase, which is wonderful. There's two nesting black bears that we've actually seen that like over about a thousand acres that surround us. I call them nesting black bears, but whatever Black bears that call this place home and they interact and they move and they cycle the nutrients you know with us through death and life and rebirth and everything else that's happening through. You know consuming and predation and such. You know there's coyote like it, just life returns and it's not the life that you can purchase and bring there. And I think that's that has to start to become an aspect of the conversations about climate change and food and food sovereignty, and land use and erosion and chemical pollution all of the modern conversations that we're having it.
D Firth Griffith: 1:27:38
I think you're right in focusing on wild animals, these wild cousins around us, hunting and everything else as an applied use of humanity in earth, as earth, um. But it's also a metric, right. We talk about biodiversity, but like nobody's out there as a farmer in a field, when they're measuring biodiversity of the field, being like man, you know, I found, you know, three different packs of coyotes, you know, are vying for this land. Like that's biodiversity, right, right, but we don't like that biodiversity. I always make a joke, you know, when a chicken eats a bug, it's a good thing, but when a chicken eats a bug, it's a good thing, but when a coyote eats a chicken, it's a farm business problem, right. And so part of the conversation, this nuance, we have to start allowing for it to get to that coyote eating the chicken level. We've so long focused on the chickens eating the bug level and called it pasture-raised, organic chicken, but the coyotes need to have a moment in the system too.
Mike Costello: 1:28:34
And I don't know what that looks like.
D Firth Griffith: 1:28:35
And it needs to look different, I think, in every level, in every location, in every phase of production, for every different local understanding of what a chicken is and how that chicken relates to its environment. And you know, the its food and it becoming food for its local people, humans, et cetera, or coyote I mean there's.
Mike Costello: 1:28:54
I think, if you's, I think, well, if you've got a, if you've got a multi-species, you know, see, if you're monocropping chicken, then the coyote is going to eat the only thing available, which will be the chicken if you. But if you got a multi-species landscape that allows other, you know, from pollinators all the way up to to pheasant and wild Turkey and, you know, chucker and moles and et cetera, then, um, the coyote may have other things to eat other than the chicken.
D Firth Griffith: 1:29:26
Yeah, and that and that's the idea of, I think, resilience. You know we, we talk about resilience but in the same way, like you're getting at, we don't really understand it, we don't really value it. I should say it that way. You know, so much of the resilience today seen in agriculture is like I want to call it like manifest and resilience, controlled resilience, like the land is resilient because we plant cover crops. We're making it more resilient.
D Firth Griffith: 1:29:50
Well, the second, that cover crop seed producers in Oregon and Western or Eastern Washington stopped producing thousands and thousands of acres of monocrop right Tillage radish and white clover and red clover and Dutch white clover right and we stopped the you know technology that can bring it here, or fossil fuels or machinery Like the second. Any one of those components break down. Your agriculture's resilience breaks down because it was dependent on, you know, cover crops. And I'm not saying that cover crops aren't helpful to a system. What I am saying is that the resilience intrinsic to a natural environment is the local community working together in that beautiful sphere of biodiversity, like you're saying. Yeah, right, and as that biodiversity increases, it becomes more resilient. But it has to start developing those relationships. Biodiversity in like segregated, separatist, isolated columns is not resilient right, well, that's just different quadrants of monoculture.
Mike Costello: 1:30:46
Yeah, that's a fine way.
D Firth Griffith: 1:30:47
It's a fine way of seeing it. So we have to let that relationship speak. You know, regardless if it's hunting or husbandry yeah, yeah, no, I agree.
Mike Costello: 1:30:57
So, yeah, with this project.
Mike Costello: 1:30:59
Uh, really, the next project the goal is to create to have a a large enough tract of land like what you've got, maybe a little bit bigger, that allows for elk, allows for rotational grazing you know, very intensive, you know intentional rotational grazing of livestock but allows the 97% of the land that the livestock aren't on to be wild and effectively go. I want to see if I can make a zero input, other than I'll probably buy some initial native seed but, as you've described, there's native seed in the soil that will come out. It will show up on its own given the right conditions. So, yeah, that's one of the paths going down. But you mentioned, like the 50% of corn that's not used for human consumption, and that's where what's wild to me is like we're growing, you know, the prairie, like the prairie has been turned into this, this ethanol plant, that that to produce the corn that's used for ethanol, we're using chemically extracted petroleum based chemicals to spur the, to feed the core corn. Like we're we're using it. It's just like the feedback loop is so wacky.
D Firth Griffith: 1:32:24
Yeah, you know, we're injecting, using millions of tons of of petroleum-based chemicals to enable us to grow corn as a replacement for ethanol, for as a replacement for petroleum-based chemicals and and I think, with the you know because, like I'll be the first one is asinine, yeah, it's, it's asinine and and like listen, you know, like if the corn was good, healthy corn that provided nutrients for its local community in its growth and for the global community in its nourishment, let's talk about it, let's find a better way to do this. The particulars of a production system aren't as efficient as they should be, maybe, but that's the conversation. The conversation is about technology and engineering and purpose and supply chains, right, but the asinine, the completely laughable in a very sad and depressing way, that this conversation has to accommodate for or create really enough in its effect, is that we are create, like you're saying, we are growing the fuel so that we can then grow the fuel, so that we can then grow the fuel right, so that we can then turn it into fuel, to grow the fuel. Like we're just in this never-ending feedback loop that doesn't do anything, right, it's just a loop, right, right, it's just a loop.
D Firth Griffith: 1:33:53
If the end result of that, like I'm saying, was like amazing, nutrient-dense soil and food for humankind, like, okay, let's talk about it, let's see how we get better. But like it's not, it's literally not Like. This is not corn, but it's carrots another C word. But I read recently that it's 14 to 1. You have to eat 14 carrots to equal one carrot in the 1950s. In terms of nutrients, right, and I don't know what corn is, but it's absolutely as bad as carrots or like even meat.
D Firth Griffith: 1:34:24
Do you have to eat two pounds of meat, grass fed and finished beef in order to get the same iron as you would have in 1980? I think, wow, I could check, fact check. That could be 1975, 1980, something like this. And so the point is, until we break this cycle, right, we're just going to have to keep finding ways to make the cycle more potent. Right, we have to get tractors that go further on a tank of diesel, because we need to grow more land for the corn, because it's getting consecutively and continuously less and less and less potent. Right, like, yeah, that's something that we need to be talking about yeah, yeah, do you have time?
Mike Costello: 1:35:05
yeah, please. So, um, you've talked a lot about recently about local. You know, if there's one thing we could do, it's it's it's buy from a local producer, right, somebody you can walk up and talk to and get to know. And then you've also talked about the idea that our major metropolitan areas have three days of food supply Right In them. Right In them and the three days. So, on the local aspect of it, we went to the farmer's market the other day and probably paid a little more than we would have if we'd gone to the local grocery store. So it's wild that you cut out all these middle steps the wholesaler, the broker, the retailer, the warehouse, electric power bill, the retailer's power bill, like the insurance, across the whole spectrum and you pay more. But the thing about that is, is I like the, I do like the idea of investing in that, that person more directly and not all those infrastructure steps and the time. It's also all certified organic and and so you know, I know I'm buying from the, the provider, and I think that's a big part of it. Like that's how we vote with our dollars to to see change.
Mike Costello: 1:36:28
But the three percent thing or the three-day thing, the three-day rule for for metropolitan areas. If it's true that most metropolitan areas in the US have three days worth of food, I would expect that farmers have a lot more power. But the problem that that, what it brought me to, is like okay, the masses of humanity have three days of calories available to them, right, but the, but the, the farmers. If, if a farmer said, ah, I'm not going to sell into the market, I want the prices to go up the middle, the infrastructure between the farmer and the people that need to have foods for three days, we'll say fine, we're sitting on a year's worth of food.
Mike Costello: 1:37:18
Like the, the warehouses, the wholesalers, the brokers, the government and the government, we'll say that's fine, you don't have to sell today because a the next guy, the next person that we finance and just got a new mortgage on their property as debt that we established for them, they have to sell to us. In other words, we'll take their land back. Or they just say fine, we have three years worth of wheat in a silo in the Midwest. We have more than three days worth of calories sequestered away. And so I mean a what a great thing. Like, like the. If you want to control, if you want to control the basses, control the food and establish that, that power structure in the middle to separate the farmer from from the consumer, um, yeah, well there's. I would expect the farmers to have more power in the market, yeah, than they do if the market only has three days worth of supply available to them. Right, but there's, there's a lack of connectivity between the grower, the producer and the market.
D Firth Griffith: 1:38:24
Yeah yeah, there's. There's two things there to consider because, I agree with you, the whole thing is equally as asinine as corn ethanol. Number one the price. You know, the price is so interesting to me. I read this recent paper that $3, every single pound of meat you buy, let's say the ground beef, you go to the local Kroger or Wegmans or you know whatever, whatever grocery store you have. If you buy a pound of beef for $4, $3 of that four, you buy it for $7, $3 of that seven is federal subsidies. But the problem is so when you're really buying that for four.
D Firth Griffith: 1:39:09
Right, you're not, you're not buying that for four.
Mike Costello: 1:39:11
Somebody's paying the other three.
D Firth Griffith: 1:39:13
Exactly, somebody's paying that. Now the problem is the farmer is also paying that because this is federal tax money. I mean, not equally, everybody pays different taxes. Right, I'm not getting into tax policy here, but the point is, in order for you to go to the farmer's market to buy that $8 a pound grass you know, grass fed and finished you know, one pound of beef, let's say or make, let's make math easy and say it's $10, which is probably more accurate today that $10 a pound, the farmer had to pay $3 into the federal subsidies and you, the consumer, had to pay $3 into the federal subsidies. So what you've done in this conventional, horribly, horribly run federal system we have, is that, in order for you to go to the farmer's market to buy a $10 a pound pack of ground beef, you actually have to spend 10 bucks.
D Firth Griffith: 1:39:56
You actually have to spend $10, but you don't get out of the $6 in federal tax subsidies or federal taxes into the federal subsidy system that you guys had to pay in order to be there. You're still paying your federal tax money, right, and so it's like sending your kids to private school or homeschool.
Mike Costello: 1:40:14
It's like you're still paying for the public school down the road. You've just chosen to do it at home, or?
D Firth Griffith: 1:40:20
private school, exactly, and so no, yeah, and so that's that part is yeah, go ahead, please.
Mike Costello: 1:40:26
Well, the other sad part is that it's the rancher who had the cow that gave birth to the calf, that raised the calf on their property, then sent it off. The rancher didn't directly get those subsidies, none of them. More likely, the prop, the propping up, was at the mass-produced food the monocrop food inputs that went to that.
D Firth Griffith: 1:40:50
That's what people have to start understanding Consumers, people who are not in agriculture full-time, like myself. There's not a single local farmer, be it regenerative or sustainable or trying to be something like it, that is ever getting a subsidy, I mean not one. Zero subsidies are available to us $3 trillion a year into federal subsidies and we us Right Three trillion dollars a year Right Into federal subsidies and we get zero dollars. Now there was a three.
Mike Costello: 1:41:14
But if you're buying truckloads of soy and corn based food, yes Now it's different. You are now working Now you're, you're buying something that exists almost entirely, because it's been subsidized Exactly.
D Firth Griffith: 1:41:44
But I you know.
D Firth Griffith: 1:41:45
I hope you're you know when you go to the local farmer's market you're not asking for, like soy, finished beef, you know so like when it comes, so that you can pay somebody else to raise the meat, you're not buying that you could be getting much cheaper at the grocery store Because you can buy the $10 a pound, but you're still paying the $3 a pound for the person at the local grocery store because you paid your federal taxes and $3 trillion of it go to federal subsidies. So the whole thing is really hard. And again, to be very clear and very mathematical, if you buy ground meat at your local farmer's market for $10 a pound, you're spending $13 a pound because you still had to pay the taxes. And if you would have went to Kroger and bought it for $7 a pound, those $3 in taxes you paid would have went to that pound, you see, and so you would have offset. So anyways, you're paying $13 a pound just because of the subsidy system to the local farmer. I mean not 13 to the local farmer, but because of the local farmer. So we have to understand that.
D Firth Griffith: 1:42:42
The other side. You know, when we talk about buying local, what we have to do. You know the other side of the storehouses of wheat and things. Your other point, which is brilliant. Another thing we have to do when we start talking about local food and food sovereignty and localized food systems or food chains, etc. We have to differentiate between the conventional producers and and like the local farmers, right. So, like I know a farmer, he's local, he's farming 2 000 acres. I still call him local, they're, they're. They have no occupancy in the massive two years worth of grain storehouses in wisconsin. Right, those are still being produced at the conventional level. The I farm 100 000 acres 200 000 acres, whatever it is, of crops 5 000, 10000, 10,000, whatever it is.
D Firth Griffith: 1:43:30
It could even be, less than that, but they still sell into that. So the number of things, the one thing that we have to realize is local farmers of any scale. It could be white oak pastures at about 4,000 deeded, 10,000 leased, or the local farm I'm talking about here in central Virginia that's 2,000 acres, or us that's 400 acres. We are only able to produce because we exist outside of the subsidies market. But we still have to pay property mortgages and property taxes and everything else. Like we still have these innate taxes.
D Firth Griffith: 1:43:57
We still have to have property insurance and also liability insurance that costs more than the property taxes do. Like we still are way underneath all of this from. Like legally I have to have all of this. I mean obviously the mortgage and the and the property tax is one thing, but the liability insurance and everything else I have to have licenses to sell locally. Like there's all sorts of hurdles that I have to walk through. But the thing is this like if I went out and bought a cow today, as a farmer, I go out and buy a cow, it's going to take me nine years to pay that cow off by selling its offspring Nine years.
D Firth Griffith: 1:44:29
And that's if not a single one of them dies and she doesn't produce a single girl. If she produces a girl now, 20 years from now, I'm going to have a bigger herd, but it's actually going to take me about 10 to 11 years in order to actually make my money back unless I sell the girl.
D Firth Griffith: 1:44:45
But I only bought one cow and I have 400 acres, so I'm probably keeping the girl. So the point is, one thing we have to consider is there is a nine-year turnaround between investment and return. Generally, we run about a 5% to 10% margin on the product, so a 10-year turnaround on an unbelievably low margin product. What that means is, given weather, given climate changes, given droughts like we're here in central Virginia, we're in one of the worst droughts I've seen in a decade. It's definitely the worst I've seen in a decade, maybe the worst in about a hundred years. We haven't received rain since early March. It's 105 degrees in June, 105 degrees today. I mean it's like literally everything outside of me is just brown and we've been regenerating for a year.
Mike Costello: 1:45:23
Where are your afternoon thundershowers?
D Firth Griffith: 1:45:26
We haven't seen dew since April. Do, oh my gosh. And so we have to deal with not only this unbelievably long turnaround period to profitability 10 years, let's say nine years total. We don't have to only deal with that plus an unbelievably low margin, but we have to deal with the complexities of a natural system of wolves coming in and eating a cow right, or something like this Droughts, monsoons, fires, et cetera.
D Firth Griffith: 1:45:49
Local social tum cow right, or something like this droughts, monsoons, fires, et cetera. Local social tumult right, lack of help, broken fence lines, whatever it is. We have to deal with all of these things. And so what local farmers are doing is raising only what they know that they can sell, because the risk is too simply high. And so, if it takes, it takes about three to four years to raise a cow for meat, you know, in a good way, in a good grass-fed and finished type way. And so, for instance, we are four years behind the production of more food. Okay, and so there's a four-year lag between more customer demand and customer fulfillment, which is kind of a good thing from an economics perspective, right, we have more demand than we have supply, the demand.
Mike Costello: 1:46:32
Yeah, the demand seems to be trending in this direction, stronger than supply right now. I mean the line. The longest line I stood in at the market was for the meat.
D Firth Griffith: 1:46:42
Yeah, which, which is wonderful, but what we saw in COVID in 2020, it's, it's, it's laughable. People started to eat locally. I don't know what they did in California, but out here in the East they started to eat locally. We had maybe a month, two months worth of food and every farmer's market shut down Like the biggest cities. Their farmers were just like we sold out, Like cause we were raising enough to sell the regular people that were interested, Right, and our production is so long, we have to have so much forethought and it takes like a decade, Right, To even really get more. You know worse. And so the people like just just make more, just just make more raise more cows just punch it out of the machine.
Mike Costello: 1:47:20
Right, Exactly, and so where's the? Where are those egg machines?
D Firth Griffith: 1:47:24
Right, and so we live the problem of this, this commercialized market of three day, you know, food supply, is that the farmer is in control, that have connection to that market, that are living within that, that aren't really, like you're saying, understanding their unbelievably pristine place you know, as a as a true source and dependable source for the food that people need to live Like. They're in control. The farmers that live in that right Are the echelon, the top tier of 1% of farmers across the globe, like Applegate, applegate, the, the processed food company. They import 100,000 pounds of ground beef from New Zealand every single month and that's just for processed meat sticks. That's just for meat sticks. By the way, I us meat sticks. That's just for meat sticks, by the way, I don't think I've ever.
D Firth Griffith: 1:48:10
You know, we used to run a community of local farmers here in the in the mid Atlantic region, from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, all the way as West, as Western Kentucky, ohio, west Virginia, tennessee, et cetera, virginia, maryland, delaware and, um, I don't think if there were maybe 57 to 60 farmers, tens and tens of thousands of acres under regenerative management in this community of farmers. I don't think if all of them were to process all of the animals on their property completely all of the breeding stock, all of the deer, all of the bear, all of the butterflies, all of the sheep, all of the chickens, all of the humans. If everything was slaughtered I don't think over that much space we would even find a hundred thousand pounds worth of meat, right? I don't? I don't think so. I mean, you'd be. You'd be astounded.
D Firth Griffith: 1:49:03
Astounded at what local farmers aren't able to produce because they don't have a market. You go to a local farmer around here. They have 200 acres and they have 20 cows because they never had the finances to get more brood stock, but they also don't have the sales to like allow for them to go out and get a two hundred thousand dollar loan to be able to buy the cows, to then be able to sell the cows because the commodity market is so, you know, piss poor. They have to do it, you know, off the skin of their teeth on a farmer's market yeah, yeah, it's, it's.
Mike Costello: 1:49:34
It's interesting how, like the dichotomy between the, the corporate farm, the corporate ranch and the and the hobby I mean because it's effectively's effectively, people that are supporting it through multiple off-farm jobs or whatnot there's just such a huge split there. I do think that there's room I'm maybe just overly optimistic I do think that there's room to have a middle ground where you can can have a profitable midsize farm that's independent of, not necessarily doesn't sell into, but just is not dependent on that that commodity um supply chain. But uh, I just I'll go back Like the I I think there's so much of it that's just it's built out to be. It's like it's a big scam, like the five meat suppliers in the food market from doing it. And they still hold the cards to the market, yeah, to the gate. They hold the keys of the kingdom, yeah like if you're not, if you're not in their supply chain.
Mike Costello: 1:51:16
You can't sell at the prices that they sell at yeah and it's. And so as soon as it, as soon as it pencils out or public policy supports it, they're like yeah, we'll do that now, yeah well, I mean.
D Firth Griffith: 1:51:24
I'll say two things. First, nestle yeah, largest food, food producer and aggregator in the world has already agreed by 2030, their entire supply chain will be from regenerative farms, but they're not going to be buying from what's that mean, though? In mine. Right, absolutely, not, absolutely not. They're buying from regenerative farms that you know they're claiming to be regenerative, that fit within their supply chain, and so absolutely let's call that greenwash you know that's what it is but also from the other side, like purdue, the largest, maybe the second largest chicken producer in the country, maybe the world, definitely the country.
D Firth Griffith: 1:51:58
I think Cargill beats them. I think they're second to Cargill. Tyson, I think, is third. Purdue bought. There's a regenerative pasture poultry organization out of Georgia, I believe they're called Pasture Bird. They develop, you know, pasture bird, you've seen that stuff got the. They've got like the hoop house yeah towable, you know chicken house, yeah, which is brilliant, it seems brilliant. Yeah, you just bought them right so like, and should we be mad about like?
Mike Costello: 1:52:24
that's where I like you know, part of me says like there's a point in time where, if we really believe in the regenerative value we need to not be. We have to define it first, not in this conversation.
D Firth Griffith: 1:52:36
but the question is can an organization like a Purdue exist in a regenerative system? To answer that, we have to define what a regenerative system is, Because if it's simply agriculture without chemicals, yes, If it's agriculture without chemicals, that is less bad for the environment. Let's say less bad for the deer, okay?
D Firth Griffith: 1:53:03
then, yeah, purdue can be regenerative If it's an environment that's less chemically based, less bad for the deer, but also produces nutrient-rich food. See, this is the problem. You actually dive into the science of nutrient density and phytochemical bioavailability and humanity and you realize that there's some actual roadblocks, just like there's no air in outer space and you can't get around that. That's why we have spaceships and space shoots. If we do another conversation, you can't get around these natural roadblocks. So, for instance, stress in cattle and it's just studied in cattle, but it can be most all mammals, humans included. Not that we would study this. But as your stress increases, your cortisol production increases. Right, that's, that's adrenal processing. Well, the interesting thing is as it decreases, I'm sorry, increases around slaughter.
D Firth Griffith: 1:53:55
That increases the ph of the meat. It's called post-insulation uh of glycogen content in in meat and in milk and again, mammals. Well as the ph, the glycogen, glycogen content instills the post-mortemcass. What happens is dark cutting. When dark cutting happens, it decreases certain nutrients. Let's say a bit of carotene, which is like one of the primary reasons you should be eating grass-fed and finished beef, is for the B-carotene. It's a phytochemical. It needed, not a phytochemical, excuse me, a secondary compound that is needed for nutrient acquisition and everything else. Well, it decreases by almost 50%. So you can raise an animal in pasture on the most lush pastures, have it regenerative, grass-fed and finished, etc. But if the transportation around that animal's death is stressful, even in the slightest, we're decreasing the nutrient bioavailability to you, mike, as the consumer, by 50%. And that's just a rough number.
Mike Costello: 1:54:50
It could be even more than that marbling are you suggesting that purdue can't harvest, you know, 500 000 chickens a week without, without imparting stress on?
D Firth Griffith: 1:54:58
them. No, they can harvest 500 000 chickens a week with high stress, but they're only going to be producing 250 000 chickens a week of nutrients, right, you see? And so my point is one we have to consider the actual relationship, the spiritual oneness of the thing in, in the sense, the philosophical side, if you want to call it that, where we're actually asking what is a regenerative system and what does it actually mean to the animals? Right, like is, is that really to be considered? And then, scientifically, right, when you're looking at it, it's very clear that if you increase the scale and production of something, if you systematize it, what we see is the nutrients going down nutrients in the soil, nutrients in the crop, nutrients in terms of bioavailability of that crop inside of the human's body. And so the question is can an organization like nestle or pur or Purdue actually be regenerative? If you look at it from a philosophical and scientific perspective, I don't think it's possible. If you look at it from a perspective of them doing less harm, yes. Can everybody do less harm?
Mike Costello: 1:56:03
Yes, you can't reduce it down to a certain point. Yeah, if the whole thing moves directionally to where there's fewer chemical hell, there's no chemical inputs. Like no chemical inputs. It is natural maybe not in its natural state with a million birds and a pen but if they can move that direction it is good and we should probably say that's better than it was 10 years ago. We we reserve the right to become smarter.
Mike Costello: 1:56:36
Yeah but we have to become smarter but yeah, and so can we do that same thing with cows and we can we do that same thing with with with pig, you know, can we do that.
Mike Costello: 1:56:46
But the asterisk being that if I go out to um, your, you know wild land, and I heart personally sit, stand, you know, sit next to you, lay down in prone position, or, you know, sit behind a blind, and I and I harvest with a double lung arrow. You know a shot with an arrow through the lungs of of a, of a you know 1200 pound three-year-old steer, and it doesn't even know it got hit because you know you kill it. You kill an elk with a with a double lung shot and an arrow. It usually doesn't, it often doesn't even know it's been like killed, like the arrow goes through it and it just stands there and it doesn't know until it just falls over dead. And so if you, ethically, you know, if you quietly harvest an animal we're back to honey you know, then you don't have that dark cutting, you don't have that trauma, you don't have. You know it was a happy deer, it was a happy cow. You go back to that.
Mike Costello: 1:57:46
And you have to define I love the idea of the wild harvest that you're doing, because I think that would be amazing. Yeah, I'd love to.
D Firth Griffith: 1:57:52
You have to start asking what does it mean for a cow to be happy?
D Firth Griffith: 1:57:57
Because like an elk or like a pronghorn or a deer, I don't care what it is black bear, coyote, mountain lion, like these are a little bit easier to us, not in the sense that the information is more easily attainable, but in the sense that it's just like well, they're just over there doing their own thing. We don't have to partake in their world. And so a happy deer, to some degree, is a deer that has a lot of food and is not surrounded by humans. Maybe I don't know, but when it comes to a cow, it's like or a goat, or sheep or pig or whatever it is like. What does it really actually mean for that animal to be happy?
D Firth Griffith: 1:58:26
So much in the modern regenerative movement is just like well, they have to be grazing grass that grows on good soil, right. But that's like saying, with all due respect, like let's take a hundred humans, put them in a room and call them a family. That's not a family, right, like that's what we're doing with animals, right, a lot, of, a lot of herds, especially herding animals, mammals, especially cows perfect example, bison, wonderful example. They live in these adaptive landscape genomics that extend over lineages of genetics, and so what I mean by that is there's matriarchs running the herd, the matriarchs have sub matriarchs. It's all a lineage underneath that. It's a family, right? All I'm saying is a family and that family is adapting to its local environment, as this local environment is adapting to the family, and that's what we call adaptive landscape genomics. There's this phenotypic plasticity, if you will.
D Firth Griffith: 1:59:17
Well, in that phenotypic plasticity, or the adaptive landscape genomic, in the in these families, like you can't just take a hundred bovine, put them in a herd and say, like your family now, like, like regenerate right, adapted, like it can't happen in that you can't control it in that way. Just like I can't take a deer right, put it in my yard and give it access, you know, to the landscape. You know, without letting it leave the little quarter acre plot that my little house sits here in the wildland and call it a deer. Like I've changed the nature of that deer, I've changed his understanding of its landscape, I've changed his understanding of its mobility right, I've changed his understanding of the local family that it ran with. I've even changed his understanding of its life in the sense that inside of this chain link fence there is no such thing as predation. So all the black bears and the codies, the mountain lions, the bobcats, whatever else that might've spooked it humans that drive around in four wheelers.
D Firth Griffith: 2:00:06
Whatever it is, I would have spooked it in times past. Now doesn't spook it. Or maybe it's in a constant state of spook because it's right outside my house and it sees me as a predator. I've changed the nature of that animal and as we change the nature of that animal, you can claim that what I do in my management of that animal is natural. But you can't actually defend that right. Like I can move that deer around my little yard and call it natural deer management. Or I could shoot it from my bathroom window when I'm pooping in the morning. Right, and I can call it hunting.
Mike Costello: 2:00:37
It's not hunting.
D Firth Griffith: 2:00:39
Right. And so the nuance, it still has to be there. The nuance, you know we farm and we farm full time, and so I'm not speaking against hunting and I'm not speaking against agriculture, but rather that the nuance, it gets really hard to scale it too quickly. It's scalable. I mean you can have a herd of a million bison, that's fine. But if I just went and just cherry picked a million bison, threw them together in a herd and said, look at me, look how wonderful this is, you would call that rewilding, not regenerative.
Mike Costello: 2:01:08
That's the problem.
D Firth Griffith: 2:01:12
You see, we can't scale it outside of time. Time is still the force, which is why the local farmers it's going to take a while for them to grow as the market grows. It's why they don't have any market power, because they're always behind the market, like if the consumers locally were like you know what damn it, we're going to start buying locally. The farmers can't support it. They're behind the market Absolutely, entirely 100% of the time, unless they have shit, tons of money that they can sit on, they can go out and spend $200,000 on cattle, put them in freezers and just wait for years for the meat to sell.
Mike Costello: 2:01:43
And they need to remove barriers to entry that are artificially in place because there's five companies with a lot of lobbyists.
D Firth Griffith: 2:01:52
I sat down with the chief scientist of the USDA, by the way, I was asked to keynote the USDA's conference this year, which is hilarious. Well, not keynote one of the keynote.
D Firth Griffith: 2:02:00
And after, that after I spoke they took me to a bagel shop outside of the Capitol building. I'll never forget this. My wife and I sat down with the chief scientist and her team, the assistant chief scientist, et cetera, or assistant to this youth scientist, wonderful people, and I brought some of these concerns to them. You know cause? They asked me you know, as a farmer, what, what, what would you need to be considering? We're an agricultural organization, the agricultural organization of the United States, et cetera. And I told her, I told her things, and she said, well, as a chief scientist, like I don't see why you can't do those things.
D Firth Griffith: 2:02:27
Whatever, it is the hurdles that you're talking about, just from an agricultural, not necessarily financial or physical perspective, just financial, I'm sorry. Agricultural production. Well, I can't produce cows in this way. Well, why not? Well, because you said that it's going to carry disease. And she's like, no, there's no scientific foundation for that. And I was like, well, is there a lobby for that? And she's like, yeah, I know of a lobby for that. And I was like, well, is there a lobby for that? And she's like, yeah, I know of a lobby for that. And it's just really important to consider that the chief scientist of the usda does not see the science as what's driving it, but it's the lobbyist right right, those are the hurdles money is the hurdle, interest is the hurdle, big industry is the hurdle, right, you know yeah, like in california, you can't compost uh, beef cattle processing waste.
Mike Costello: 2:03:14
Wow, dairy cow can just be. They just bury them out back like like dairy. The dairy lobby, the dairy lobby got it figured out.
D Firth Griffith: 2:03:22
But the meat processing lobby.
Mike Costello: 2:03:24
That's the problem dairy lobby got it dialed in. They can just bury, bury them out back. The meat cattle, the beef cattle lobby, like you can't. So if you're a small meat processor, you literally have to, like you have to pay to truck the waste off farm. You can't be. No matter how good your composting facility is, you can't compost it on site. So there's just all these, there's just all these barriers to entry, which, but anyways again, uh, there's so much to unpack, I, I, I think that there's hope. I think for for the, you know, protecting the market for meat, so that we can raise cows, lamb, pigs, etc. In an ecologically favorable manner and not have to drink from, you know, drink, choose the blue or the green stuff from the from the stainless steel fermenter.
Mike Costello: 2:04:16
Um, this, these messages, these issues somehow have to make their way into the very busy 90% of the folks that don't pay attention to it because they're so busy and because they don't have to pay attention to it because it's, it's comfortable, not just like the hunting issue, like we have to figure out how to communicate complicated and nuanced ideas, um, into the, you know, in the, into the, the, the public square. Uh, in a way that's favorable. Yeah, because the, the, the slogan, the headline in the quick picture that is used to counter these things like cows are bad, they poop methane or they fart methane it's like well, bears are always good, you can't kill them yeah, bears are always good.
Mike Costello: 2:05:07
You know, the mountain lion's a keystone species. It's like all these things that are so easy, very charismatic arguments against Nuance, but ultimately they are removing there's a lot of power, a lot of structure, a lot of wealth being developed by removing people from ecology.
D Firth Griffith: 2:05:28
Yeah, Humans, and I think that's a real threat. I mean it's a threat, I think it's a real concern, it's a red flag in the sense that it shows their hand quite quickly, because I know plenty of people that love the mountain lion and I know plenty of people that understand that there's nuance there. But if you come to me and you say, listen, humans need to get out of mountain lions way, you're all you're doing is illustrating the cards you play, which is that you believe the humans are separate from earth. Earth is better without humans and you are steadily allowing that to be the case, right, what I mean is be the case. What I, what I, what I truly mean is you're steadily removing humanity's place from earth and the next step is is often much more intense than the first step, I think.
D Firth Griffith: 2:06:13
I think what consumers need to start under, starting, you know, with hunting it. I don't know, I haven't thought about it. Maybe it's a little bit more difficult to to to really educate, but, like in agriculture, it's very simple. If you're listening to this and you're a consumer, right, kind of like yourself, kind of a person who frequents a farmer's market, your local farmer is four years behind Period, Even if and, by the way, throw this up, you know. Say, daniel, you're wrong with this. Aside, even if you say no, no, no, I'm going to give my local farmer $10,000 right now to go out and start buying animals. The problem is the animals don't exist. There's a whole other side of the conversation.
D Firth Griffith: 2:06:57
You, you today you can't just you know, clap your hands twice and there's cows that can eat grass.
D Firth Griffith: 2:07:03
I mean the number of cows, I mean Greg Judy is one of the more prolific regenerative agricultural thought leaders of the era, for good or bad, I don't need to comment, but the point is he's the most prolific. He's been in this one of the some of the longest and he says he says listen, if you want 100 cheap, go out and buy 200 cheap. If you want 100 cows, go out and buy 250 cows. You're going to kill so many cows because the cows today have epigenetically expressed themselves and adapted to a landscape of no mobility, no autonomous decision-making ability and no digestion of forage. All they're doing is standing in place, getting fed what they get fed, right, and they're choosing between this grain and that grain, or this dead cow and that dead cow that they're going to eat today. So you take them out of that system and you put them in a for lack of a better term a salad bar environment where they get to select what they need from this complex plethora and cacophony of beauty. They die of hunger. They don't know what to do.
Mike Costello: 2:08:00
They don't know how to do it.
D Firth Griffith: 2:08:00
So even if you were to start, infusing regenerative agriculture, or what we would call concentric rewild, with money for light, like it's still going to take us a decade, two decades, to really actually nurture and co-create a local land race of domesticated herbivores that survive in a resilient zero input Like. When I say zero input, I mean no grains, no antibiotics, no vaccinations that are undue, et cetera, in a resilient framework in the local environment to feed the local environment. We are decades away from this.
Mike Costello: 2:08:34
There's not an endless supply of those critters. I know people are developing them, but there's a long line of buyers trying to get to them too.
D Firth Griffith: 2:08:42
Yeah, there's not enough, there's not enough out there, so we have to start. I mean, it has to be pain. You know, I've said it, you know, before everybody else has said it People have to start experiencing pain. The wildfires are the pain. When did forest management change after the wildfires? Until people start to actually get hungry, they're going to start to realize wait a second.
D Firth Griffith: 2:09:02
Food is not a right in the sense that I can just get up and just access it. Food is a right that I have to co-create and defend. I have to start participating in the local food system. I have to start helping local farmers produce local food for myself, even selfishly. Cut out the philosophy, Cut out the economy. Just defend yourself. Help local farmers feed you. We are decades away from being able to do it actually, Like if Cargill shut down. Today, you die, and you don't die because your local farmers aren't willing to help you. You die because your local farmers were sitting here for the past 30 years saying help me, help me, help me, help me, and you never did Right. So how do we allow that help to to to actualize you?
Mike Costello: 2:09:43
know that's different in every case.
D Firth Griffith: 2:09:45
It can't be regulated. It's different in every case, but like talking to your local farmer asking how they need help is a fine first place to start.
Mike Costello: 2:09:52
Sure, that's what I say sure yeah, wow, this has been long your uh, your, your conversations always leave a lot to unpack, or always unpack a lot, and we were just supposed to talk about hunting.
D Firth Griffith: 2:10:07
You know well we talked.
Mike Costello: 2:10:08
We talked about hunting, we talked about hunting. I think there's some things that I actually thought, oh, we should circle back on that, but we can do that another time, We'll do it another time. No, I think the hat I'm wearing hunting is human. That's one of our programs that we're developing Because I think, just like staying close to the ecology, becoming closer to ecology and ecological processes you know, staying close to the ecology, becoming closer to ecology and ecological processes I think one of the most natural expressions of that is to go out and sit in the woods and and try to disappear to where you become part of the landscape and then the critters start to show up and express themselves and, um, I think every human, even if they don't, you know, see themselves as a hunter. I think every human that experiences that. It triggers some things inside of them that go back many, many generations. And just, you know it, we find out that there's, we've all got that, that, uh, we've all got that gene. It's there, it's there.
D Firth Griffith: 2:11:06
This, this reawakening of memory, I think it's, it's petrifying to people who are really seeking to control us. You know, because I believe it's true. You know, I think, I know I have friends that are in government.
D Firth Griffith: 2:11:17
I don't think government is bad. I think the American political system is a fine experiment, obviously has problems. We need to rededicate ourselves to the proposition that people are created equal quite often. But, like generally speaking, it's it's, it's. It's better than it has been in times past, or at least it's getting there. But that said, so much of the policy being created today through lobbyists or special interests, I really do believe it's trying to separate us from memory, from reawakening that memory. Yeah, maybe from a conspiracy, conspiratorial perspective. Maybe it's trying to separate us from memory, from reawakening that memory. Yeah, maybe from a conspiratorial perspective. Maybe it's deliberate, maybe it's not. But the point is we are slowly getting separated. That separation is becoming, you know, even more separation. It's breeding separation and and sooner than later, you know, yeah, we'll drink the goo from the can. Why not? Yeah, you know no I won't.
D Firth Griffith: 2:12:10
No, you won't, you, we won't, I know you won't, I'll eat, you know there's, there's nutrients, yeah, absolutely so, all right, well, hey, um thank you.
Mike Costello: 2:12:23
I mean thank you for, for you know, welcoming um somebody new to the conversation. I mean we, we met what two weeks?
Mike Costello: 2:12:31
ago um you know officially. So I I really appreciate it and I think this is the magic of if there's any magic in modern technology is that two people across the country with similar ideas, or even in different ideas, can, can converse and then share it for other people to tear apart and dissect and and absorb and and then synthesize their own thoughts on it. Um, this is uh, this is uh, you know, this communication is always the basis of, of some revolution and so, like modern communications ridiculously, you know, powerful. So I appreciate you welcoming me to to this conversation and conversation and hopefully we can do it again. I'll let you know, if I ever get that land, that I'm going to do my zero input wild, wild harvest program on. I'd love to see it.
D Firth Griffith: 2:13:18
Mike, it's been amazing. I appreciate you. Yeah, I want to say I want to. I got some notes here. I want to cycle back on. We'll do another episode in the future. Cool For sure, I appreciate it.
Mike Costello: 2:13:29
Right. Thanks, Daniel.
D Firth Griffith: 2:13:32
Well, we made it. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you've enjoyed the content or the conversation and you want to join the content and conversation, I beg you, I plead with you, uh, to allow us to create a two-way conversation and it's not just us speaking at you, but join us online on Substack. It's free, it doesn't cost you anything at all. It's the Wildland Chronicles on Substack. It's a link in the bio. You know what to do? Click it, join it and all of these episodes are posted there, with some further discussion topics and a way for us to discuss and comment and critique and further these thoughts together, which is, I have to be honest with you, the only reason we do this. I have no interest in talking at people, with people. So join us. We'll see you there.
I'd ask about how we might define being a predator. From my experience, there is a fear of survival. And this has been a significant way for marketers to make strong statements.
Thank you both for this conversation.
Excellent episode!