Unveiling the Stories of Seeds

A podcast with Seed Keeper, Kay Baxter

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Episode Description

This episode is with Kay Baxter of The Kōanga Institute, Aotearoa's (New Zealand) largest heritage seed bank & food plant collection. Our conversation emphasizes the vital connection between heritage seeds, community, and individual health. The wonderful Kay Baxter explores how reconnecting with the earth and understanding the history and cultural significance of seeds can lead to an actually holistic nourishment and a renewed sense of purpose in our lives.

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Chapters

0:09 - Seed Keeping

7:11 - The Power of Heritage Seeds

22:23 - Community, Seed Saving, and Local Ecology

37:36 - Rediscovering Indigeneity Through Seed Relationships

44:18 - Connection to Land and Community

55:48 - Reconnecting Through Seed Preservation

1:01:34 - Cultivating Cultural and Local Seeds

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Transcript

D. Firth Griffith: 0:09

How have you been? How are things?

Kay Baxter: 0:11

Good, really good. It's very challenging at the moment trying to do the work that we're doing because it's a whole economic, real major economic downturn in New Zealand. But yeah, great going good. Lots of exciting stuff, things falling apart, things rising like the phoenix out of it, some amazing stuff happening in the world and here. Yeah.

D. Firth Griffith: 0:37

Wow, is Quanga a non-profit.

Kay Baxter: 0:42

Yeah, it's a non-profit and we've been in existence for nearly 45 years and we haven't been a non-profit for that whole time, but we have been for most of it and we're essentially saving the seeds for the whole country. But it's kind of an interesting seed collection because our ancestors all came here from everywhere else, probably almost more so than just about anywhere. Well, no, maybe not. I mean, australia is probably similar, but there's a lot of really important plant material here but.

Kay Baxter: 1:19

I think for me. I was just talking to someone about this this morning and I really connected with the work you were doing because I felt like what I could see in your story is like a reconnection going on, like reconnecting with the natural world or like kind of the way that you've talked about it was almost like you were disconnected and you were learning about reconnection and how to reconnect, to reconnect, and I mean I think that's everybody's journey at this point in time, but for me it's been the same, but for me it's been the. The reconnection has happened because of the seeds, and so the seeds have been my teacher and I was just talking to someone this morning about how in the English language you're probably an exception because you're so good with the English language, but in the English language you can. You can say something and someone. It can mean something to the person who said it and mean something totally different to someone else, because we don't our words have got.

Kay Baxter: 2:25

The words aren't very good, like they just have got. They're hopeless, like they can mean so many different things, and in indigenous languages they have like in Te Reo, māori, they have so many ways of seeing what we have as one word in English. It's like indigenous languages were like that because they came out of the land, whereas it feels now like English is an industrial language and it's so inadequate for talking about what we can learn and what we can feel and all of that. And so, yeah, I guess that's been my journey of coming to listen to the seeds and how they've changed my body and how I've been able to reconnect on a deeper and deeper level, to the point where I'm realizing just how critical the seeds are, because they're the only thing. That's through the seeds that we reconnect to the energies of the universe and the energies of the earth, and without that connection, who are we like?

Kay Baxter: 3:29

we'll die out as this human race because we've disconnected ourselves and we're we're on that, we're on that track. So so it does feels like reconnection is super critical, but it's a thing that happens over so subtly you don't notice it happening. Until you notice something has changed. You don't notice it actually happening. So it's an interesting journey, real amazing journey.

D. Firth Griffith: 3:54

Yeah, like sticking on words and the inadequacy of the English language. I think I've learned that very seriously. I mean, I think in past years, past lives of mine, I would have agreed with you maybe as fervently as I agree with you now. But like it's something deeper. Recently, a lot of the work I just published another book all about. It's a novel, it's a fictional book, but it deals with animacy quite a bit and I find at least a lot of people here in the Western hemisphere, turtle Island, north America, whatever you want to call it.

D. Firth Griffith: 4:26

Um, when you bring up the idea of animacy, like if I were to look at this window, there's a tree maybe one arms reach just a branch growing into this window here. If I would reach out and grab that tree and I said this tree is talking, I think everybody agrees with me. Like the tree, yeah, fine, it's talking, talking, but we all understand the word talking. So entirely different from one another, right, because you know you talk to one group and know the tree is literally talking and you, you talk to another group and they're like no, no, that's like the idea of, like this magical element of our imaginations, you know with creator, what, and it's just like the tree is talking or not talking. Right, we have one word for this. Even in my ancestors old language, there's 34 different words for a meadow, and and yet I can only think of like three or four. And so as our language becomes simplified, I think our minds follow, which is why animacy is so hard yeah, yeah and that's.

Kay Baxter: 5:21

I think all of that has happened as we've become disconnected from the natural world around us.

D. Firth Griffith: 5:27

We were introduced a couple years ago and it seems like we were social media friends long before we were really friends. But I'm glad we got past that. I count you as a friend. Thanks for being on the podcast with me. It's long overdue.

Kay Baxter: 5:42

Kia ora. Daniel, I'm very happy to be here.

D. Firth Griffith: 5:46

Well, Kate, let's start in the very beginning, if you don't mind. So, as I understand your background, you were a preschool teacher. I think you have a degree in geography and you can correct me if I'm wrong.

Kay Baxter: 5:58

It's a long time ago, a few lifetimes ago.

D. Firth Griffith: 6:01

Your journey from where you were to where you are now is quite a transformation. I think a lot of people in this modern era, when we look around us, we see political systems in some shambles. The economics of the world today are definitely something to be concerned about. We see the food system collapsing, we see climate chaos all around us, we see thousand-year storms happening every decade, et cetera, and I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed and it's not something we often do on this podcast, acknowledging that Typically, the philosophy and the conversations and the yarn just kind of spin off and we do our own thing over there. But I think you have the special ability, the unique wisdom, also pertaining to your journey, to speak to this transformation from, let's say, a preschool teacher, grandmother, et cetera, to an internationally renowned seed keeper for basically all nations, all continents on earth, bringing these seeds, keeping these seeds, having these seeds stay living as they are kept, which is something I want to talk to you about as we move forward. Let's start there. Can you just enter us in your journey?

Kay Baxter: 7:08

Yeah.

D. Firth Griffith: 7:08

And then we'll expand and emerge.

Kay Baxter: 7:11

Okay, so I mean, I've always just been a gardener, like from a very young child. I was lucky enough that my parents always lived in places where I could have a garden, where I could have a garden. So I've always gardened and I'm also lucky enough that I'm of the age that I was at university during the Vietnam War and the Springbok tour was really big in New Zealand and there was a really big sort of welling up of people there challenging what was going on in the world and we were like part of that and that was a real gift to have been. It's not like that anymore and so we were, we looked, we we asked lots of questions and we didn't just accept the answers, and so I guess I've always been like that and that's kind of what's driven my life really. So I also had a father who was really outside the square and always getting into trouble with the education department and I thought that was I love that. So anyway, I went to university and even gardened there, and then when I left university and had my children, we were living in a place where up in Northland which is subtropical and the only and I wanted to create a garden that would feed my family, and so I could see that the fruit trees in the garden centers in New Zealand at that point had fruit trees that were coming from other places in the country where it was colder the winters were colder. They just didn't work. They didn't grow well in Northland and I noticed that we had wild fruit trees all around the Kuiper Harbour and wild places where people didn't see them anymore.

Kay Baxter: 9:00

And my first sort of thing I did was I really went on this huge journey on the harbour Kuiper Harbour is the second largest harbour in the southern hemisphere and I went with a fisherman who was a friend, who knew where all the old orchards were that had been planted by our ancestors. When they came from, you know, england and Europe and three Americas and around South Africa, they came a long way over the equator. They brought their sacred things with them, and that included their food plants and their plant material. So here we had these fruit trees that had been living in that climate for 150 years or so and they did well in that area. So I started collecting heritage fruit trees and, my goodness, I learned a lot out of that. I learned a lot of history, which I hated at school and never learned at all. But I started learning about history and what happened and why you couldn't buy them in the garden centers anymore. I mean, that's another whole journey.

Kay Baxter: 9:53

So I started with the fruit trees and then the year of Chernobyl, that Russian nuclear disaster, I went on a bus with a whole lot of old ladies I was like in my early 30s then at that point to a thing which in New Zealand is called the Farmers Field Days, at a place called Mystery Creek. It's where all the farmers go once a year and they have big competitions and they have miles. It's like a big fair. And I walked into a seed tent, totally, completely oblivious to what was going on with seeds in the world. But I knew we had friends in holland who had just had to bulldoze the topsoil off their land because of the nuclear fallout, and it was quite. There was quite a lot of nuclear fallout through europe, but in particular holland apparently. And so I walked into this tent and this man we got. I got talking to the man in there and he said to me um, did I realize that the only seeds that we could buy in New Zealand that were actually growing in New Zealand was pokokawi, long pepper onions and all the rest came from Holland and I like just remember standing there I had four young children at that time and a shiver went up my spine and I just thought, well, I've got to do something about that. I had no idea what I was going to do, so the journey kind of went from there with the seeds and I went home and I talked to my mother-in-law and she said, oh, I've got these lettuce seeds and I've saved them for my whole adult life because the slugs and snails don't eat them and this and that. And I thought, oh, maybe. So I joined the local garden club which was all old ladies in their like 70s, 80s and I thought, actually the first time I walked in to the first garden club meeting, this lady came up to me and she said, oh, you're that lady that saves the fruit trees. You might like these bean seeds. And then I realized where they were, where the old seeds were, with all the old gardeners. So I just went from there and it very quickly things just started coming in. I hardly did anything and all these seeds started coming in and we started collecting them and very quickly our whole orchard's full of heritage fruit trees and the whole veggie garden's full of heritage vegetables.

Kay Baxter: 12:10

And I reached a point one day where I realized that when I picked an apple off this apple tree and I know the whole story we call it whakapapa the Maori word is whakapapa Like whakapapa is everything that's gone before. So when I picked that apple, I knew the whole story, which was passed to me with the apple tree, of how it came to New Zealand, which boat it came out on, who bought it, where it was planted. How it was planted was in a barrel of apple pips this particular apple I'm thinking of and all the apple pips were planted and this man who brought them over selected this best one. And this was it. And another man who had been working in Northland as an entomologist for the Forest Service had also been a hobby historian and plant collector and had been given to him and he'd passed his collection to me. And so what I realized was every time I picked that apple and took a bite, somehow on a cellular level, that whole story went through me and I began to realize that was far out.

Kay Baxter: 13:15

All my fruits are like that now and I know the whakapapa of every tree and all my vegetables are like that and I know the story of every one of those and somehow that's changed me. It's different to eating food from the supermarket. Somehow I felt like parts of me were growing. I didn't even have a name for it was really frustrating in the beginning. I still don't really have names for it, but I know in Maori they do have names for it and I believe most indigenous people probably maybe all of them have names for the things that I was feeling and the things that were growing and changing within me, simply because, well, we are, we are what we eat in the end.

Kay Baxter: 13:57

And so over the I mean I spent 20 years homeschooling kids on a fairly isolated farm and gardening and over that 20 years I came to realize that nutrition is about more than the minerals and the vitamins and what they tell us at school about nutrition. That's hardly the beginning of it. School about nutrition, that's hardly the beginning of it. And during this time I'm learning about, you know there's a whole revolution going on in the world around. You know the whole food system and growing nutrient-dense food, and I studied the work of Dr Kerry, reams and Beto and the people that have kind of Arden Anderson and Graham Sate a lot of people who are working with teaching about growing nutrient-dense food and also epigenetics, like that's all happened in the later part of my whole journey as well, and so I've ended up in a place where, just by nature of the fact really, that I've been eating, I brought my kids up, and now my grandchildren, on this food which has a whakapapa. So I came to feel that what we eat is really really its story is really important and it helps to make us who we are.

Kay Baxter: 15:17

And so now where I've got to with that is that when a seed grows, so long as you've got a heritage seed, because other seeds do not have this full ability and you've got living soil, the plant roots are communicating with the life in the soil and with the vibration of everything that's going on in the soil and that is communicated to our plants. And if our plants are getting their needs met via the soil the first 10% of their needs then they've got a strong electrical current in their bodies which means they can pull in from the universe the other 90% of what they need to reach their full potential. And so the seeds are like catalyzing the energy of the universe, the energy of the earth where we stand and they're bringing that into their bodies. And then, so long as we've got a functional gut which is another big question mark our bodies can unpack that vibration and all those messages and that communication and our body uses that information to grow who we are and our children, if we haven't had our children yet. So essentially there's an energetic connection, constant link and connection between a changing universe, a changing situation in the ground, even maybe just changing from winter to spring or from different minerals in the ground or changing minerals and microbes. There's so many things that are constantly moving. It's like a big dance and the plants we're part of the dance, the plants part of the dance, and all of that incredible potential ends up in us. And then that affects who we are and our thoughts and the way we behave and what we give back.

Kay Baxter: 17:10

And I kind of came to the conclusion in the last few months really, that what's happening in the world now is that there's a direct relationship between the, the violence and the unease, and all the things that are happening in the world is partly a direct result of being disconnected from what we know as well. I don't even hardly know the word for it, but it's connected to life. We've stepped out of that age-old dance of co-evolution or being in relationship. We've kind of stepped out of it and so we haven't got what we need to hold us in the potential we could be, which I believe is peaceful and just feeling at peace and in working with each other. We've lost it because we've disconnected ourselves.

Kay Baxter: 18:07

And the seed is a really critical part of that. It's like a chain and it's broken because the we don't, we're not using those seeds anymore. It's also obviously broken because we've of all the chemicals and poisons and gut health and the situation in the soil and everything is part of it. But the seeds are just the part that I guess that I've connected with and that have been so critical for my journey and which I now understand. And I now understand that our heritage seeds hold that potential. That hybrid seeds and genetically engineered seeds and CMF seeds and all those other seeds that we have now don't hold the same potential to connect us to the earth and the sky and who we are.

D. Firth Griffith: 18:51

What about those hybridizations, the genetic modifications? What does that process do that the heritage seeds preserve? Or maybe a better question is why are the heritage seeds able to do this?

Kay Baxter: 19:06

Yeah, I think because they've come through that. You know many thousands of generations of being in connection with the earth and the sky, like no one ever took it away, and that's how they just co-evolve.

Kay Baxter: 19:19

They communicate, because everything is connected in the natural world. And so when we breed hybrids, what we did I mean I'm not a scientist and I haven't got all the right words, but my understanding is that what we've done is that in hybrid seeds there are well for one, they're bred in laboratories and dead systems and dead soil and so many, many, many generations of that, and the roots change and they lose their ability to connect with the soil. But not only that, they have enzyme blockers. The way that they're changing the genetics is there's enzyme blockers in the roots now which prevent the plants picking up specific minerals and vibration from the soil, as well as the fact that we now have so much roundup glyphosate contamination. As the fact that we now have so much roundup glyphosate contamination that affects the ability, that affects the life and kills life. It's registered as an antibiotic, it's a killer of life and also blocks that connection of the communication.

Kay Baxter: 20:19

So, for many reasons, because of the genetics in the laboratory, because we are selecting things for money, essentially for profits we're losing lots of other qualities. But also because they're being selected in dead soil and there's plenty of science now to show that you know if you grow a plant in dead soil, essentially, and mainline the plant with dead soil. You nitrates to make it grow. The plant loses its ability to connect with the soil, just becomes a dead medium to like to hold the plant up and we mainline it with nitrate fertilizer, whereas originally the soil was what fed the plant. But we've, we've, we've used all the minerals up in the soil by growing and growing and growing and not returning, and so now we just use the soil to hold the plants up. So we've got to kind of take a leap back, or a step back into a regenerative living system where things are connected. And that's quite scary for some people, especially if you're. I think it's a little bit easier for home gardeners perhaps because things are on a smaller scale than the big boys.

D. Firth Griffith: 21:28

Yeah, well, there's this interesting connection, symbiosis of thought and reality, that I've never considered until this moment. So much of our work here at the Wildland, so many of the books that I've written, has to do with animals and animal genetics, animal relationships. Very little of what I've ever done has to do with a seed. You're extending some of these thoughts. It's interesting. Long have animals exactly? It's exactly right long has an animal been seen as just this nutrient cycling engine, kind of like soil holding plants up? Right long have we perceived an animal, even in regenerative systems, regenerative grazing systems, even holistically managed adaptive grazing systems that are trying their best. Animals in a paddock are doing the cycling right, but they could be hybridized animals, for instance. They could be abused animals, they could be depressed animals, they could be diabetic issues.

D. Firth Griffith: 22:23

Like the BFA Biological Food Association, over the last maybe half decade has done a very large nutrient-dense beef study and I always bring this up and I shouldn't say always, but I often bring this up and so maybe people are getting a little bit bored with it, but it's so interesting. They found that marbling in beef, so that which every consumer desires, right, everybody wants marbled beef when customers come out to the farm here and they want to buy a pack of ribeyes or something. They look at the ribeye and they say, well, there's no marbling, or maybe there is marbling or something. They want the marbling. They're looking for the marbling. But what the BFA, through Stefan van Villet, dr Fred Provenza and so many other scientists all over the world, have concluded is that marbling is early stage ketoacidosis in herbivores. Right, and so it's just like well, wait, there's something more here, and what you're saying. It's so interesting to me. I think a lot of people are okay with the thought that you are what you eat. I think they're okay with that.

Kay Baxter: 23:19

Yeah, that's like ever since Fiyako Ano and John Lennon, isn't it?

D. Firth Griffith: 23:23

Exactly exactly, and you're taking that, though a little bit more true. It You're taking that, though a little bit more true. It's like the language you're using is not totally English because you are what you eat, but, yes, no, you actually are what you freezers for thousands of years might not cut it. We have to see these things, these seeds, as living.

Kay Baxter: 23:55

Especially you know what New Zealanders are going to get access to Svalbard Like that's crazy stuff.

D. Firth Griffith: 24:02

So what aspect of these seeds especially, you know, the heritage seeds are I don't want to say are living, because all of the aspect is living, but what aspect of your work in the seed saving necessarily cares for the living aspect of these seeds, like the growing substrate? You mentioned that with hybridization, growing in store soils, regenerative systems. I understand that, kawanga. You guys just don't store seeds around for decades and decades and decades without allowing them to emerge. Can we dive into that a little bit?

Kay Baxter: 24:35

Well, the first thing that I did, really the first thing we consciously decided was that there's no point in having a museum, like the only way we're going to actually, to be honest with you, this came out of. I was gifted a Winston Churchill scholarship to study seed saving in America about 24 years ago, 25 years ago, and we went to seed savers in Iowa and I went down to Santa Fe to Seeds of Change and I had an amazing time talking to some of my well, they became my mentors and I came home from there and I had to write a report. Teasing time talking to some of my mentors. Well, they became my mentors and I came home from there and I had to write a report for Winston Churchill people and it took me three years to write it because we came home so profoundly depressed from America, from Turtle Island. It was the most incredible, unbelievable experience of my life.

Kay Baxter: 25:25

I won't go into it all now but basically we came home with the understanding I mean, that you're never going to save the seeds unless we value the gardeners which hardly exist anymore, and unless we have groups of people villagers who value the gardeners enough that they're willing to eat the food grown from the seeds and support saving the seeds, because they only were ever saved in communities where there was a connection between people and the seeds. And we have no connection anymore and we have no gardeners anymore and in the industrial system. So it's really only like people like us and and home gardeners now that have still got that connection. So so that was the first thing we decided we are going to make them available, we're going to sell them. So that's always been a huge challenge, because they cost more to grow than what you can sell them for. So that was that. That's been an enormous challenge over the years and, um, I don't know how we've survived actually, do you think?

D. Firth Griffith: 26:28

that's necessary. I I'm sorry to interrupt you. It's so interesting the comment you just made to me. Do you think that's necessary, or is that a hurdle that we have to figure out how to overcome? Because I talk to a lot of people and I think about this and so far I've yet to really come to a good answer. So maybe I'm offloading the burden onto you. Really come to a good answer, so maybe I'm offloading the burden onto you. It seems that every single time someone, some community is trying to keep life alive, it doesn't make financial sense.

Kay Baxter: 26:57

I think that's probably true. But I think things are changing and we saw, like 30 years ago. We saw that there would come a point at which the number of seeds in our packets and the price of our packets would I mean it was going to be cheaper for us to grow them than for the industrial world. And I think we are really getting close to that point now because the costs keep going up of all their systems and ours aren't going up. In fact ours are going down because we've actually learnt now how to build soil and the ecology that we sit within in a totally local way, without bringing in any fertiliser from outside. So that's a life journey really, and we've achieved that. But it's critical that it's on a local scale because it's where actually who we are is a reflection of the earth we stand on and the skies we live under. And if we're eating food grown from seeds even if they were good seeds but they've come from far away we're not connecting in to our local. I mean, that's how sensitive this all is. It's a very sensitive like vibrational thing and it's super incredible to be plugged in to your own place.

Kay Baxter: 28:16

I remember we did a workshop here About 2000,. We held the International Permaculture Convergence on our farm in Kaiowaka when we lived up north, and I can remember sitting down in a circle on bales of hay with young people from all around the world and I asked them all what was their bioregion, where did they come from? And only a quarter of them felt like they even had one. So we've become so we've shifted. We don't even know who we are or where we're from anymore. It's probably worse now. So I just think that for the circle to be fully complete and for us to reach our potential as humans and for the ecology and everything around us to reach its full potential, it has to be local. Everything has to be local. So we have to find ways to do it and we've we've committed to like building community and saving the seeds, because they go together. So I don't think we can save the seeds without building community.

D. Firth Griffith: 29:20

again yeah, it talked about that a little bit more. How is community and seed saving interrelated? How are they dependent upon each other?

Kay Baxter: 29:29

Well, one person can't save all the seeds Like you could choose, I don't know. I mean, I have a booklet, even that I've written around how to grow food for your family and save all the seeds so that you could, in theory, in some world, like be an isolated kind of family and grow all your food and save all the seeds, so that you could, in theory, in some world, like be an isolated kind of family and grow all your food and save all your seeds. But I just don't think things work like that. People have to be connected too, like we want to be connected.

D. Firth Griffith: 30:01

It's in us, whether we like it or not.

Kay Baxter: 30:04

We are everything living, the living, the life on earth is all connected and doesn't exist and survive for long without being connected. And I think that model is there from all of our ancestors. All of our ancestors lived in villages or small and hapu In New Zealand it's called hapu we lived in villages and that's a model that's well proven. It's probably the only model that I know of that's well proven to sustain life and build life and grow healthy people. And the seeds are part of that. So I mean in Turtle Island, there's plenty of evidence of that. So I mean in in turtle island, there's there's plenty of evidence of that. I mean all your and all the indigenous people over there lived in groups, villages. So, anyway, I mean that's how seeds have co-evolved, that's how seeds have always been, and people traded between hapu, between family groups, and, and that keeps the seed connected to the place and the people.

Kay Baxter: 31:14

I mean one of the things that I've come to understand through epigenetics and I'm not flash on my ability to talk about epigenetics really, but I do understand that you know the double helix spiral that you kind of see in your mind's eye when, um, you talk about dna. Well, which I do anyway well, like in the in the late, in the late 20th century, um, you know, when the scientists were doing that human genome project and they were trying to like I mean, I can remember seeing in the paper every day, you know some exciting thing, they've discovered this bit of dna and they were trying to, like, discover all the bits. And maybe they discovered all the bits, but then they discovered that didn't help them because they didn't know what controlled all those bits of DNA. And so then they had to create a new science and they called it epigenetics, or what controls the genes, or what's above the genes. But the funny thing was that when they were studying this, they discovered that our DNA only makes up a tiny bit of that double helix spiral, and they called the rest junk DNA because they didn't understand its function in our bodies.

Kay Baxter: 32:20

And it turns out that that is the part of our body that communicates with our environment, including our food. And so the quality of the food we eat, which is largely determined by how connected the seed that started with the quality of the soil and the communication with the universe, so the quality, the things that our DNA junk DNA communicates with. There's only three things that we know of at the moment. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if there was a whole lot more on higher levels, but as minerals, vitamins and fatty acids. Those are the only things that our body is looking for in the food we eat. So high levels of vitamins, minerals and fatty acids. Which means you don't want any highly processed food, you don't want any emulsified food, you don't want any food that's had the fat taken out of it. All the stuff that's happening to our food makes it more difficult for our body for the food to actually communicate to our junk dna, which determines our health. And the other thing about it is that we now know that if your ancestors ate a certain type of food for generations in one place, then you have got neural pathways that recognize that food and it nourishes you more fully and more easily than anyone else's food. So that kind of comes back to connection with place and bioregional, like seed production and food production.

Kay Baxter: 33:56

But it also is a big challenge to us because we're all somewhere else Most of us I mean not everybody indigenous people in New Zealand. There's a lot of Maori people here that are still in their place, but we're not the colonisers aren't and so our challenge is to. I believe probably the biggest challenge we face is to recreate a system that connects us to that place, that is, some kind of regenerative. We need new models and I believe I mean when I started collecting seeds in New Zealand, you know, 40-odd years ago, I saw that we had some quite significant gaps here and that we'd lost some things that we really needed and so I imported. I was very careful where I bought it from and what I bought in, but I bought in a few lines of seed which have become part of our heritage here now, but I think it took two generations.

Kay Baxter: 35:04

Like I don't feel like that seed nourished my body and I'm. I don't think it really became like our heritage seat until it was my grandchildren's. Like there's a difference, you know, like your body doesn't recognise it and it's like neural pathways take time after time after time to like build. Of course, as you get older it's slower and with the young ones it's much faster, but it's not an instant thing and it's a journey now for us of rebuilding communities, whatever that means to different people means different things to everyone, I suppose, but rebuilding communities where we grow our food in our own local bioregions using the seed that's best suited, which may end up being whatever works in that climate and soil. That is also something we feel connected to, because that is important. So we're going to be creating a new culture. That's where culture comes from. That is what culture is, is the bringing together of all those things and the rituals and the processes of how we do. All that stuff is what creates our culture, as well as our physical body.

D. Firth Griffith: 36:15

It is. It's really interesting. You know, we live at a moment where speed seems to be the name of the game. Right, we have to read certain climate goals before X, y and Z, and that's the mythos, that's the story that we're given and it has some truth to it, can't be denied, right, I mean, we are progressing in a particular way and we have to start to challenge that progression, and the sooner the better.

D. Firth Griffith: 36:36

So there is a moment of speed that's required and, at the same time, right, we have to do this remembrance, we have to be creating the memory all around us, but also remembering our memory. So this talk about it as like a two-way dreamwalking, like people like you and I, the colonizers right, I'm from Ireland, majorly, basically genetically from Ireland, a little bit from Poland, and you came from wherever you came from obviously not New Zealand and we have to look back I do believe that that's very necessary and then also look forward, like create these local communities that are building these seed banks for our grandchildren that they can actually co-evolve with the life of the plants and the animals all around them.

Kay Baxter: 37:19

Yeah, so it's such an exciting journey. So the incredible thing there is, what I've come to is that the way to move forward feels like, I mean, although we're the colonizers in this day and age, we also have been colonized so many times that we don't even remember who we are. At the point where I started to realize that this food is changing me, this food with a whakapapa is changing who I feel like I am, I started to realize that I'm starting to tap into my own indigeneity. I'm from my ancestors, I'm English, scottish, irish, and we've been colonised so many times. We don't even have any. We don't have our language anymore, we don't have a connection to the land anymore. We don't even know who we are.

Kay Baxter: 38:05

I mean, that's what makes us. I mean, and actually, in the end, almost everyone on earth is in the same position. We've all been colonizers and we've all been colonized. Maybe there's some exceptions I don't know who they are. So. So I kind of ended up feeling like going back and trying to retrieve my own memories, and my own sense of indigeneity has led me to the fact that, well, we actually all need to become indigenous again and we've got to recreate, and it might look a bit different to what it used to be, but that's our journey and that's the journey that heals everything.

D. Firth Griffith: 38:40

Yeah, it is interesting. Back in 2021, I wrote a book where the basic premise is, this whole regenerative idea is all about relationship and, oh my goodness, some people like the book. And a lot of people would always just reply, or they would send me an email or put a comment on Goodreads or Amazon or wherever they bought the book bookshoporg just saying like yeah, great, so what? Like the health is relationship? Like who cares, like we still need to do all these other things and it's true, right, there's are. There are other things obviously to do, but it's still all founded in this relationship. I still believe that. I believe that probably today more than I ever anymore. And I get the physical pains I do. Right, we had a horrible drought this year, worst drought we've seen in a long time. Grew about two months of grass in a 10-month, maybe a nine-month growing season. I mean it was difficult. More wildfires I mean we had a wildfire that was about maybe 500 acres just literally across the river from us. You could still see the blackened forest out of this window just last week. I mean, it's crazy to think Appalachia is burning and so it is hard, it's true, but I keep getting these reminders. We have to start to ground, whatever that means, right? My Vakapapa using this term is Irish. I'm not in Ireland anymore. My great grandparents left, during the great famine of the 1840s and 50s, eastern Turtle Island now. And so what does that look like?

D. Firth Griffith: 40:16

I think epigenetics, I think quantum science and quantum biology, through seed saving and everything else, is calling for a relationally infused epigenetic emergence in place. How do you see that? You're shaking your head, but talk about it. Talk to me about how you see that whole side, because I want to just make clear for maybe the listener or maybe I'm not making it clear that I understand this for our conversation. But either way, I think when most people hear the idea of seed saving, they think about taking seeds and preserving them. Your work, your focus, your, your almost like your world sense on the matter is you take the seeds and then you allow them to continue living, which is a totally different way of doing this work. You're not preserving them, you're extending them through continual epigenetic emergence and relational continuation and the landscape and et cetera emergence and relational continuation and the landscape and etc.

Kay Baxter: 41:18

Yeah, yeah, um, oh, there's so many things in there. Um, I mean, one of the things is that plants don't stay the same, seeds don't stay the same. Most people think like they want to, so so this line is this seed is called this and it's the same and that's what this is like. But they co-evolve, just like we co-evolve. And so if you shut it up in a seed bank for, like you know, likes of old bud, which is the most craziest story you've ever heard, really it's just so Monsanto can get access to all the plant genetic material. You can't. It's not co-evolving. So it may come out and all, and also our heritage. Seeds contain information of how to change with climate change. Like they're living things. They're not. They're not like something that is this being that looks like this. It's actually a living sea that is transmitting, transmuting all that information from the universe and from the earth so that it can survive. It's like a beehive.

Kay Baxter: 42:12

I always talk about bees because it's easier for people to relate, hear the bee story without turning it back to human health, because that's always a challenge. So in new zealand I don't know what happens over there, but in new zealand we have a beekeeping system where we have langstroth hives, which are hives designed for industrial beekeeping to make the most amount of profit, and every year they requeen the hives. They kill the queens and requeen the hives so that they've got a queen in there that's going to support making of the most amount of profit. Well, and now we've got a lot of sick bees and a lot of really big challenges with bees, and so what we've done is we've taken away the bee's ability to co-evolve with the changing environment that they're living in, which they have the ability to do.

Kay Baxter: 42:58

I mean, they send out their forages and they collect. They even know the bricks or the nutrient density of what they're collecting and they collect the best stuff and the best range and they feed their eggs to adapt them to this changing environment out there and they make the best queen in terms of its relationship to the environment around it and they co-evolve and they can deal with the pressures and they can deal with change, but we've stopped taking away their ability to do that. What a dumb thing to do. But we are doing the same thing with our own food, like when we buy our food in the supermarket. We're taking away. We're actually asking our bodies to co-evolve to what's happening in China, like really, I mean is that really going to be useful In sterile environments.

D. Firth Griffith: 43:44

You know that are cold and unkind and everything else.

Kay Baxter: 43:47

But that's actually the end result of what, and so it must be very confusing for the junk DNA, you know, that useless part of our body that turns out to be the part that communicates with our whole environment.

D. Firth Griffith: 43:58

Right.

Kay Baxter: 43:59

So it's just if you start making I mean, I just think that I mean I guess I was quite lucky in that both myself and my husband were kind of aware of the beginnings of this stuff a long time ago, Because we were the age we are. That was when universities were incredibly amazing places to be, with lots of interesting things going on. We kind of have foreseen a lot of things and we knew that we wanted to create, started out, eco-villages is what we called it. This is the second where we've been involved in quite a few. So we created this village knowing that what we wanted to do was build a place where our homes came from the earth, where, you know, we had sort of intellectual ideas about it, but the reality of doing it changes all of it. Like you sort of, I don't think you can just say you're going to do this. It kind of happens as you take a small step, you make a decision you're going to not maybe you're going to the decision you make could be to use heritage seed that has a story that you can relate to and you learn how to do it, grow it in a way that will build the soil and nourish that plant. So you know how to do it and then that's relatively simple. I mean, it's not that simple perhaps, but it's something everyone can do if you make that decision. But then out of that comes the experience and comes feelings that you didn't have before perhaps, and so that just can, as you reconnect, maybe it might be. I mean, I've seen your, your animal, your or your animal stories and I can see a process of reconnection with connection with the natural world and with the animals and the natural world and you and the animals and da-da-da, and that changes you. It changes who you are, and it's subtle and it's slow and you only really might realize, oh, there's a shift there. It's so subtle but it changes you and it just keeps going on and on and on and you just keep realizing things that are at more subtle levels, more and more subtle levels, and it just builds on itself and so you start making better decisions and you start making more conscious decisions and all the things.

Kay Baxter: 46:23

I don't think we can think it all in our heads. I think a lot of it is connected to other parts of ourselves which in the Maori language. There's a form of Maori gardening in New Zealand called Hua Parakori, and I've been trying to understand what the difference is between what we're doing and what they're doing, because I can see that I feel like everything we're doing and what they're doing because I can see that I feel like everything we're doing fits who are part of Kauri systems, but they've got all these words for which I can't even get my head around In English. I can't even get my head around. It's all these subtle, different levels of things that they are paying attention to which I don't even know exist. So I think that's what comes out of being connected to your own land, to being from like, can come out of your connection with animals. It could come out of a study of any natural science, really any kind of connection, but it's being connected and taking steps to become more connected changes us and changes everything, and it certainly changes the whole ecosystem. Like I didn't consciously set out here to increase the insect numbers by a hundred times, or even the bird population by more than that, but the act of learning how to look after our seeds and grow our food in a way that honours the land has done that, Like it's turned this place into an insect, back into a place where you know when you're driving at night. There's so many bloomin' insects on the car window screen you can't see out which it didn't used to be. And there's way more bird species here now than there used to be, and the numbers are going up every year. Well, we didn't plan that. It just comes out of taking. It's like in permaculture design. You know, you take a step forward, you reconnect some things up, something else happens that you didn't think about and I think it's there's a lot of power in that. They're all simple steps. There's just a lot of power in that, and then you realize how powerful it is because you feel it. I think there's just as much value to honoring the feeling as to trying to follow the head in all of this. I think they're both important, though.

Kay Baxter: 48:49

I rejected science as a teenager. At high school I was in a class of six kids in the sixth form and I could ask the teacher anything anytime. And I went to the seventh form, into a huge classroom in a different school. There were 70 of us and I didn't feel very smart and I sat at the back and didn't listen and said, oh, I don't need science. Science is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. I don't, this is ridiculous. So I rejected science and I spent the next 20 years at home alone, homeschooling kids and gardening developed my sense of intuition really strongly and then I realized actually I can't answer these things, I need science, and the science started coming back in so I can see the value of both. Started coming back in so I can see the value of both.

Kay Baxter: 49:31

But I mean imagine getting to a place where this was an experience I had about 15 years ago where we were living in a Māori community. The only Pākehā in a Māori community and we were. The marae is the place. The whare hui is the place where people meet and talk and have their meetings and practice kapahaka, which is you know what kapahaka is. It's like their music, is like singing with actions and it's very powerful. And so we were part of that the elders writing the words for these songs and the next generation putting the music to it and the next generation, which were quite young, putting the actions to it, and what the words were was the whole story of those people in that environment. It was their experience of their river and what happens at this bend and what fishes are there and da-da-da, and when does this fish run and when does that fish run, and how do you look after this and how do you look after that?

Kay Baxter: 50:38

And so imagine living in a place and being able to do that Like you can only do that when you're connected and your life depends upon that connection. I think that's a really important point. We're nowhere near like. Our lives are actually dependent on understanding our ecosystems. That we live in, which for all indigenous people would have been totally true, that would have been completely essential. The more difficult the climate, the more connected they would have been, or you die. And so I think that's where we have to head, and the seeds are just a critical part of it, really, and by seeds I mean everything, I mean trees and animals, and everything has a seed.

D. Firth Griffith: 51:20

In the modern times, no matter where your allegiances lie, let's say industrial agriculture or regenerative agriculture. Let's pretend that there's actual two poles there Although I don't believe it's polar, but let's pretend for the conversation that it might be you do fall into a I'm going to call it like a monitoring infatuation maybe, where you're maybe obsessed with short-term gains and you confuse them with long-term realities. Like I see a lot in the courses that I teach around animal husbandry. There's a lot of farmers, after six months of employing a particular grazing technique, they're saying look at how all the animals are sampling these new forages. Like this is epigenetics in action, right.

D. Firth Griffith: 52:06

And then the actual scientist in me says, well, it's not, that's curiosity. They don't actually have a deep knowledge that that plant actually cures this and solves this and balances that. That's just curiosity. It's indigenous, yeah, exactly. And the only way to heighten that, to cement that into your genome, the 70 plus, whatever percent, or whatever the data is, of the junk DNA is through generations. It's curiosity over time. And so don't confuse the curiosity with the end result, because that's time in motion, right, and we have to do both, right. You need the curious cow, you need the curious human and then you need that curious cow or curious human in place for long enough, in enough community, those epigenetics to emerge and evolve and continually develop in the world around us, with the world around us, as the world around us, you know. And so there's actions that we have to take today.

D. Firth Griffith: 53:01

But, as I say to my wife all the time, because for a long period of our professional life her and I she's a trained biologist we traveled all around the country here doing ecological monitoring for all of these farms and it was always so interesting. You would see these upward trends in ecological data species count, for instance and then something would happen and they would drop back down for a number of years and then they would rise again. And I always used to joke with my wife that like, hey, you know, a hundred years from now, I think we're going to know the questions we should be asking. We're gonna be far from the answers, but we might know the questions to ask. Yeah, right, and that's not to dissuade us from asking in the beginning, you and I right but it's rather to encourage us that all this is is beginning curiosity to ignite 800, 3 000, 100, 000 years of future epigenetic, continual, communal, you know, co-evolution.

Kay Baxter: 53:53

Yeah, yeah, and I think that in a healthy environment, any healthy environment where things are being connected, the questioning is natural, and it's normal it comes out of, I mean, I think, just having faith that there's good in the universe. You know like there's good. Actually, things want to get better, they want to move forward, and as soon as you take a step in that direction yourself, I mean, what's happened here is that you just feel the whole the energy of nature just comes in behind you to support you. And I'm sure you've seen that too on your place, where you've only suddenly some crazy thing happens and you go oh yes, I'll do this instead, and you do it, and the insect populations go through the roof, or more birds are coming in, or it's. It's almost like oh my god, we've been so stupid, we've been. You know it's, it's crazy, it's all just waiting there for us to like be a bit more thoughtful and or feel a bit more and just take a step, take a risk, risk taking.

D. Firth Griffith: 54:57

I think it is. I think I think you're totally right. There's this health that you can search for and then there's a health that is a tangent of relationship, and I think a lot of us are just searching for health bypassing relationship, whereas if you just search for a relationship, that right relationship, that honorable connection, that kin-centric or kinship-based connection with the world around us, in us the health comes. Like you're saying, the birds come, the insects, come those outcomes come, like you were talking about permaculture.

D. Firth Griffith: 55:27

You do this and this happens and it's amazing and beautiful. I think that's the beautiful thing. The wonderful thing, the truly regenerative thing, yeah, is developing the humility to have that connection, to have that relationship, and watching the health just come. Yeah, that's interesting yeah, the work of?

Kay Baxter: 55:45

do you know who? Weston Price.

D. Firth Griffith: 55:47

Yes, yep. Western price yes, yep.

Kay Baxter: 55:48

So his work kind of shows that. I mean, he worked with indigenous his well, the research project that he did was visiting indigenous people all around the world and all of the people that he studied were eating their original diets. Well, he happened to be there on the cusp of change, but he studied what their original and all of those people were insanely healthy. They didn't know anything about carnivore diets or vegan diets or anything. They ate what grew where they lived and they had learned how to do it. And actually, the amazing thing that blew me out, which showed me how ignorant we are, oh my God, it's embarrassing to say it, really, but the thing that blew me out was that every single one of those groups of indigenous people understood the principles of how to make a healthy person. They all followed the same principles. They all ate different food, but they all followed the same principles.

Kay Baxter: 56:42

And that didn't come out of understanding the science. It came out of being connected to their environment. So all we have to do is the same thing Just eat. We can grow where we are Animals. Grow here, if you want to eat animals or whatever. It's all we have to do. It's pretty simple. It's all just about reconnection.

D. Firth Griffith: 57:02

Yeah, which goes back to the community comment you made at the very beginning. Yeah, it's connection through and through Wonderful. Well, what else, Kay? What else is on your mind? Any other thoughts that you want to discuss?

Kay Baxter: 57:15

Well, I guess that I'm feeling it quite heavily at the moment that there is I don't know there are other, I don't know many other places in the world that are actually doing not only saving the seeds and keeping them alive, but also doing the research around how to do it in a powerfully regenerative way that takes care of the ecology and the soil. And da-da-da big challenges we've got at the moment is we've got this incredible international grain collection which has come I don't even know how it's all come to us over the last 40 years or so, but some amazing things happened and a lot of it came through a guy in america called a guy that runs kooza lorenz charla. I don't know if you've ever connected with him. He's hard. I don't even know if he's. His website's there, but nothing, no one, anything. I don't know if it's still functional.

Kay Baxter: 58:14

So there's some amazing grains that have come in that are really important. Like Heritage Grains actually came out of groups of people living in bioregional communities that suit that kind of agriculture. They're not growing anymore because they don't suit mechanised agriculture and most people, most home gardeners, don't grow their own grains either. So the grain collection is in a really hard place. It costs a lot of money to grow out, to keep these grains alive, and we've had them sitting in freezers for quite a long time now and we have to grow them out again and we really need some support to do that. So it's one of the things.

Kay Baxter: 58:58

So we've got grains that come from Africa. We've got grains from all through Europe, asia, the Americas. I don't think some of the American ones are as endangered, potentially, because there are quite a few people in seed savers in America, more so than a lot of other countries. I always reckon America's got the best and the worst of everything over there. Oh my God, it's such a shock going to America. I didn't know how I was going to live when I first went to America. This is like 25 years ago. Go to a supermarket to get some food and there's nothing in the supermarket you can eat. Yeah, so what do we do? And then I discovered the co-op shops and they're so incredible. So this is just an incredible country. So I just yeah. So if there's anyone who's keen to support our grain grow out which is on the front homepage of our website at the moment that would be really awesome, just to keep the grains alive. I mean I see those grains as going back to where they've come from Some really super endangered grains from Africa, india, some really special ones from India, all through Asia, even Northern Europe, whole oats and all kinds of stuff.

Kay Baxter: 1:00:20

The grains feel and I don't eat a lot of grains because they're hard to grow we kind of become corn people because corn's much easier, the birds don't eat it. So we've become like corn people because corn's much easier, the birds don't, the birds don't eat it. So we've we've become like, you know, cornbread and tortillas and that sort of thing, because the others are so hard to protect from the birds. But people have always grown them, they've always known how to do it and if, if we're going to be reclaiming our local grain production, these are the seeds that people are going to need. So they I feel like they're an internationally important grain collection and there's a little story about that and on the front page of our website there's also an Indigrain Grow Out story. There's a little booklet with the grains, pictures of the grains and the stories of the ones we're growing out this year. So it's a cool little project but we could really do with some some support for that.

Kay Baxter: 1:01:12

So if anyone feels like it and you're able to. That would be amazing, but I think you know, I would just say like it. Just, it's pretty easy to start reconnecting with seeds. Choose something that you can relate to, something that you like kids, love it, man, do it with the kids. The kids just get right into it. It's totally natural for the kids. Um, and choose seeds that grow where you live and choose seeds that you culturally connect with. That will nourish you probably better than anything else anyway, and just make a start and the journey is such a, such a beautiful journey, such a it just makes you feel good.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:01:52

Yeah.

Kay Baxter: 1:01:52

It's a feel-good journey.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:01:54

Yeah, like you were saying, at the very foundation of it, peace and joy and happiness, and it's all innate and native to the world around us and us.

Kay Baxter: 1:02:04

Yeah, yeah.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:02:06

Well, thank you, kay. We'll put these links in the show notes and we'll make sure we can direct people to the website, to the homepage where the Green Grow Out is happening and can be supported. So we'll make sure that happens.

Kay Baxter: 1:02:19

Sure.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:02:20

Thank you, Kay, for being with us. It's seriously a pleasure. I've learned a lot.

Kay Baxter: 1:02:27

Thank you as well, daniel. I'm enjoying your books. They certainly challenge me. I need more words. Yeah, it's great, I appreciate that. We're doing the job we're here to do.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:02:42

Yes, absolutely.

Kay Baxter: 1:02:43

There's a lot of pleasure in that.

D. Firth Griffith: 1:02:44

Yeah, for sure, that's again. Thank you.