Ep.05/19 :: Steven Cornett, Partnering with Nature for Healthy Food and Soil through Regenerative Farming

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Simpler OneEarth Living Podcast

A co-production of Simple Living Works! and The Common Good Podcast (Jubilee OneEarth Economics)

SHOW NOTES

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S.Cornett

By 2030, it’s essential that we change the way food is grown if we are to keep the planet livable. In his early 30s, Steven Cornett understands the urgency and the daunting scale of such change. He makes a living farming 5000 square feet in a couple of large backyards. His company, web site, FaceBook page and You Tube channel are called Nature’s Always Right. Here are his own words from his website:

“Growing food is my passion but I have two higher goals beyond just farming:

#1: I want to help as many people learn to grow food as I can. So they can experience the joy and health benefits of raising their own produce, and if it’s right for them, make a living enjoying this amazing lifestyle.

#2: I believe that radically changing our food system can achieve massive economic and social change that will help breakdown many government monopolized services and replace them with legitimate and efficient private service providers.

If 100,000s of new farmers start small scale regenerative agriculture businesses it will have many effects:

-Increases local economic growth
-Reduces healthcare costs
-Reduces overall environmental and health impacts of conventional farming
-Reduces use of pharmaceutical drugs and many conventional treatments
-Localizes community, scales back and replaces federal government services
-Food security
-Makes government subsidies of agriculture/gmo less frequent
-Reduces transportation of food reducing emissions
-Restores more power and freedom to individuals and their communities

Helping to change our current large scale degenerative food system to a small scale regenerative agriculture system will have a major influence over the future of our world and society. In my opinion, this is the best solution to all of the environmental, health, cultural, and economic crises we currently face. We can use the positive incentives of the market to drive ethical behavior and farm using natural systems that are highly efficient and mutually beneficial to all involved.

You might be surprised to learn that I actually use 0 pesticides on my farm. Birds, ladybugs, hover flies, predatory wasps, spiders, lacewings, etc. are my pest control. I always have dozen of species of plants growing on my farm to promote biodiversity, which brings a high level of balance to the micro ecosystem of my market garden. I even make 75% of my own soils, fertilizers, and amendments. I am aiming to have my property be 95% sustainable by the end of the year including feeding my chickens for free using free inputs. Everything I do will be displayed for all to see on my YouTube.

Nature is already perfect and we can use its systems to an incredible advantage. Or we can meddle with its perfect systems, destroying it arrogantly in the process. These universal patterns and rules of nature apply across all aspects of life. Nature is an endless teacher.”

What Steven says tells you why I’m more committed than ever to developing relationships with the people growing our food. Farmers markets are one of the best ways to do that. Almost every Friday, in the late afternoon, I head for the Farmers Market that’s just two miles away in the nextdoor town of La Mesa. Steven’s farm is within a bicycle ride from where I live. So I loaded my microphone and computer into my backpack and pedaled off to find him. After viewing his farm, we settled into conversation in his garage. Our conversation was rich with insight, inspiration, and knowledge for the health of our planet, which, of course, is a top priority for all of us who want to do everything possible to keep our planet livable beyond 2030.

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OneEarth Jubilee can now help us offset the carbon we put into the atmosphere. Here’s how. First, we calculate our carbon with the calculator online at www.carbonify.com. Then we donate the amount the calculator totals for us. We can donate it to Jubilee Economics Tree Fund because the two Jubilee Circles in Mexico and the one in San Diego all work with trusted groups that plant trees. Not that this is a perfect solution to putting CO2 into the air. Not by any means. When trees die, they, too, put CO2 into the air. But trees live a long time. And every day they live, they sequester carbon from the atmosphere and enrich the soil while putting out oxygen. The April newsletter, Jubileo, is an Earth Day edition and tells you more.

Earlier Episodes

In episode 04/19, banker Pat Trahan speaks about growth economics, the Great Recession of 2008-09, Wall Street, and investing in our neighborhood. His perspective differs from many in the banking world.

After our session, Pat wrote to us with the following short postscript to our conversation. “I think Jubilee is the antidote to the growth-for-the-sake-of-growth model where all the lines in all the graphs move only up and to the right. My reading of the Jubilee passages is that the means of production should be redistributed and democratized on occasion. Our system only redistributes some of the fruit of production. Meanwhile, wealth and power become more and more concentrated.”

Pat has written a series of short, thought-provoking responses to the book Creative Capitalism. 
References: Richard Rohrer–Center for Action and Contemplation // James Howard Kunstler // CNU-Congress for New Urbanism // Chuck Marone–Strong Towns

Ep. 03/19: Chuck Collins of the InEquality Project, Inequality.org from IPS-dc.org (Institute for Policy Studies)

For better clarity, you may want to listen to this episode on headphones or earbuds.

Over the last few decades 15% of U.S. wealth has been transferred from 99% of the populace to 1%. The 2018 tax revisions continue that trend—something many of us will notice as we file 2018 tax returns. In this moment of GREAT INEQUALITY, we’re excited that we get to share the voice and thought of Chuck Collins with our listeners. I (Lee) first became familiar with him through the book, Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change, co-authored by Chuck in 2000. Then I was greatly impacted by a book he wrote with Felice Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity (2005). That book so clearly explains how the economic system can lessen the economic divides in our society and how it can increase them. Subsequently, I established a relationship with Chuck at the Solidarity Economic Forum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2009. When I wrote my first book, Blinded by Progress, Chuck agreed to write the “Foreword.” I’m grateful for that.

As Program Director of InEquality and the Common Good, a part of the Institute for Policy Studies, Chuck edits the “Inequality This Week” eNewsletter. In fact, a good way to appreciate why Chuck can speak with authority to inequality and the racial wealth divide is to scan titles of his writings.

BONUS Podcast! Alternative Radio: Economic InEquality Kills—Stephen Bezruchka

Ep.02/19: “No!” to More Factory Farms—Talking with Adam Mason of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement

We talk with Adam Mason about a strategic campaign in Iowa led by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (ICCI). They want a moratorium on any new and expanded hog farms where thousands of hogs are confined in very small pens. AND, if you love eating a meal with some tasty pulled pork or bacon, or frequently pick up some quick food at fast food chains, you’ll want that campaign to succeed. Be sure to listen to this podcast. This podcast links those food choices to the factory farms which highlight deep ecological and economic problems with the global food supply system, a complex system that starts on farms and finds its way to our plates.

I (Lee) grew up on an Iowa farm and I remember the first time I saw a cattle lot that went on and on as we drove by it. The manure was pooled at one end. We rolled up the car windows to keep out the smell. But after that boyhood experience, it would be years later before I understood how farms were increasingly being run like industrial businesses, and the more that agriculture became agribusiness, the more the farm animals took a hit. Increasingly, beef, dairy, pigs, and chickens were moved off open pastures and free ranges. Instead, they were confined to feedlots and small pens on supersized factory farms, meaning that just as a factory puts together its product piece by piece, step by step, so the animals were fed and treated in a machine-like, computerized process that produces a marketable product in a set number of days.

As you listen to this podcast think about how you participate in this food supply system that is ruining the health of both planet and people. What it does to the animals is acutely unnatural and abusive. AND consider how what you eat gives you leverage to bring positive change.

We may just be on the cusp of a major revolution in how food is grown, both plants and animals, and what people eat. A commission called EAT-Lancet Commission came out this January with the “planetary health diet.” It’s called that because it’s a diet that simultaneously describes for us food that is healthy for the planet to grow and for people to eat. This commission says that a global agricultural revolution is as necessary as the reduction of fossil fuel use in our work to reduce Earth’s fever and engage all causes of climate change. The Commission also said: “Food is the single strongest lever to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth.” This podcast helps us use that lever better.

The factory farms of Iowa destroy environments all the way from the soils and waterways of the state to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of its location between the two great rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi, Iowa is the second greatest polluter of the Gulf. Agricultural chemicals and manure from factory farms run off the land into waterways, end up in one of the two big rivers, and eventually in the Gulf of Mexico where they create an enormous dead zone in the Gulf. No marine life can live in those zones.

For clean air and water, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is teaming up with the Sierra Club, as well as county and city governments. This matters to anyone who eats pork or chicken or cares about the Earth. Adam Mason serves as the State Policy Organizing Director for ICCI.

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Episode 01/19 features Jimmy Marcelin, the playmaker at Safe Harbors, San Diego, where 100 to 300 immigrants arrive daily after crossing the busiest border crossing in the world–Tijuana to San Diego.

They’ve crossed into the U.S. through the Tijuana-San Diego crossing, just 17 miles south of Safe Harbor’s facilities in the Christ United Methodist Ministry Center where Jubilee OneEarth Economics also has an office.

Safe Harbors is the organization which does this amazing work of receiving immigrants who arrive with a host of unmet needs—so many needs everyday that you may well be able to help. Check out their website https://www.safeharbors.net/.

Safe Harbors is part of the multicultural, multilingual ministry center. The immigrants who arrive are sometimes delivered by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), part of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security. ICE is much in the news for the horrors that happen to so many people in the name of enforcement of border security. These horrors are increasingly being stepped into by organizations determined to humanize the treatment of migrants. ICE also processes some people who have papers or seek asylum. Some of these people, ICE delivers to Safe Harbors.

12/1/18–Fair Trade in Schools and Congregations

This episode features Lee’s conversation with Anne Pacheco and Diane Hartley on how they brought the Fair Trade campaigns to their school and congregation.

For most of us the news about free trade agreements, tariffs and trade wars feel quite beyond our control. But in this episode we talk about a different paradigm of trade, and it’s the kind of trade over which we have lots of control. We’re talking about the trade structures known as FAIR TRADE. And just how do we exercise our power regarding trade that is fair? In elementary schools, high schools, colleges and congregations.

11/1/18–The Power of Small, Jubilee Circles to Bring Change in Mexico

Lee’s conversation with Angelica Juarez de Swanson and Lindsey Mercer Robledo from the September gathering of three Jubilee Circles in San Cristobal de las Cases in Chiapas, Mexico.

See Circle Report in Jubileo Newsletter here.

Common Good Feature: Here’s a list of worthwhile alternative non-commercial media. And even more. ->

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The Simpler Living Daily NUDGE

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In addition to this podcast and its show notes, we post a weekly SLW! blog. We hope you’ll read and subscribe. The BLOG is the companion to our monthly podcast. The content is different, though the subject is the same. Click on blog at the top of the show notes of any episode. Blog INDEX

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