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Choose from a great selection of digital coupons and use them up to five times in one transaction. Check our app for details. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. Radical Personal Finance, episode 40. Would you like to start a business with no debt? Live where you work? Work 40 to 50 hours per week only during the spring, summer, and fall?

Take winters off? And make 80 to 100 thousand dollars per year while doing something that benefits the environment, benefits your neighbors, and builds a great number of different forms of capital? That's what today's show is about. Yes, you heard me right. You heard me right. You heard me right.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today, Tuesday, August 12, 2014. Today's show is an interview with Curtis Stone, Urban Farmer Extraordinaire. He's gonna show us a path to freedom, entrepreneurship, all the good things in life. I think you're gonna love this one. If you're not familiar with Curtis, you should be, and after today's show you will be.

We would have mentioned if you listen to show number, let's see, what was that? Show number 37, interview with Trevor Van Heemert of Pedal to Pedal. We mentioned a concept called spin farming, and the person that I had heard of in the past with spin farming was a man named Curtis Stone.

And Curtis Stone is an urban farmer in Canada. And today's show is an in-depth interview with him, and I think you're gonna love it. A couple of just bits of info to pique your interest. In 2012, Curtis's farm, Green City Acres, grew over 50,000 pounds of food on less than an acre of land using 100% natural organic methods and only 80 liters of gasoline.

Curtis started his business with a $7,000 investment, earned $22,000 his first year, and then last year and this year changed the size of his business to the point where he works during the spring, summer, and fall, 40 to 50 hours a week on borrowed land, farming in the city, and makes about $80,000 to $100,000 per year, farming in total about a third of an acre.

I think you're going to enjoy the show. I like this urban farming, as you'll see in the interview. I'm not going to spend much more time introducing the subject. I hope you enjoy this. And if you're interested in this kind of topic, urban farming, listen to this. But even if you're not, listen to this and think about some of the techniques that you may be able to use and apply to your own business.

So with no further ado, here's the interview. So Curtis, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate your being here with me. Happy to be here. So where I'd like to start is would you be willing, I know a little bit about just a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit about the topic that we are going to be chatting about today, but obviously I'm not here to be the one to talk about it.

Would you give us just a brief introduction to to yourself, to a little bit about your background, a little bit about spin farming and how you got wrapped up in this slightly alternative type of agriculture? Yeah, sure. So what I do is run a commercial urban farm, basically. I grow vegetables in the city of Kelowna, BC, Canada, and I do that on land that I don't own.

And it's most often it's land that are front and backyards, like right in the city, right in the downtown core. The farm has been different scales throughout the year, or throughout the five years I've been doing it. So when I started it was just with a couple front and backyards, and then I was really successful at it.

I actually made money at this model of farming right away. I had zero experience in agriculture. I never had a garden as a kid. I never had any formal education in farming or gardening whatsoever. I just basically read some books and watched videos on YouTube and just went for it.

And so the first year I was at about a quarter acre, I turned a $7,000 investment into $22,000 of gross profit that year, and then I doubled that profit every year for four years until the operation... I doubled the size of the operation and the profits of it every year for four years until it got to about four acres of land total on a collection of about 10, or maybe it was 12 different sites.

Some of those sites were up to two acres and some of them were as small as 800 square feet. And so I did that for until four years until I realized that it was so big. I had eight full-time staff working and at that point I realized I kind of had to try all these different scales of it to see where I wanted to be.

And at that point it was too big, it was too top heavy, too many overhead expenses, way too much work versus what I was taking home. And so at that point I decided to scale back down to almost where I was in my first year. And so now I'm operating on one third of an acre.

The farm gross is about $80,000 to $100,000 a year. So that's 15,000 square feet. It can make about $80,000 to $100,000 a year. I have one part-time staff and I pretty much do everything myself. And you're only farming a third of an acre? Yeah, I'm only farming a third of an acre.

So what my secret is for that is basically looking a lot at Pareto's Law, sort of the 80/20 rule. I basically, you know, when I was at four acres with all that staff and all that overhead and we had 80 different products that we grew, I looked at what made money and, you know, it was that real 80/20 rule.

20% of those crops were making 80% of our profits. So I pretty much cut out the 80% of the crops that we were growing. And now I only focus on 15 different crops and I grow mostly for sort of medium to high-end restaurant clientele as well as I do a farmer's market once a week.

But I used to do restaurants, farmer's markets, and we ran a 60-member community-supported agriculture veggie box program. So I cut out the box program and I cut out a lot of the other restaurants. I basically, with my customers, did the same thing. Looked at what was the highest yielding way for me to leverage my efforts and my profits, basically, and I cut all the things out that weren't at that high margin.

So now I sell to about I have about eight different customers, like restaurant customers, that I sell to and then the one farmer's market a week. Wow. I wasn't expecting that. Previously, I knew that in the past you were running a pretty big operation. I didn't expect you to say you'd cut it right down.

That is awesome. What a great application of looking to see where your most profitable market is. Are you having more fun now than you did when you had... Oh my god, yeah. I mean the beauty of it now, I mean this is five years going. I think I'm past that what they call the 10,000 hour benchmark, you know, when you put 10,000 hours in something you'd be kind of a master of it.

And so I've done that and now I work less hours than I've ever worked. I make more money at this than I ever did and I actually have a life. I actually have a social life. So I only work about 40 to 50 hours a week on the farm opposed to 80 hours a week on the farm, which is kind of the norm for most small-scale growers during the growing season.

And I no longer grow in the winter. So I used to run the operation basically January to January and I did that with a lot of a collection of unheated greenhouses also workshop area where I was growing in a controlled environment, microgreens and sprouts and things like that. So now I only run the operation from April till the end of October and I have so I have five months off a year and I do other things.

I do a lot of public speaking. I teach urban agriculture. I'm writing a couple, I'm writing a series of books actually on urban farming. So I expect some of those out in 2015. And yeah, I'm kind of focused a little bit more on the education end of it. And so I've tried to make my farm more manageable so that I can actually focus on creating really high value educational content to inspire people to do the same.

Did any of your previous eight staff members take over? You know, I don't know what you would call them, your accounts or the land that you were farming or did they kind of continue on? Were you able to equip them? They did actually. So with that eight staff in that particular year it was a partnership.

Like I merged my operation with another operation that were not quite as successful as mine, but they had infrastructure, they had some land and they more or less knew what they were doing. So they kind of just kept doing their own thing. Actually kept some of the staff that we had working for us as well.

And yeah, just kept farming and they seemed to be doing all right, too. Good. Is your financial success peculiar? Or is it, I mean, I'm clearly you're applying skill and good business planning to it, but you know the numbers, your $7,000 investment to turn a $22,000 gross profit, is that achievable?

Is that replicable or is that unique to you? No, no, it's not. No, it's not. It's actually, it's very replicable. And so the model that I was using when I started was called spin farming. And in fact, I actually, I still to this day teach the spin farming method.

Though, you know, and in spin farming they say you can do $100,000 per acre using spin methods. And that's the sort of their benchmark figures if you grow these particular crops in this particular way. Using a bed system, sort of pursuing some of the direct consumer markets like that I mentioned, like farmers markets, CSAs and restaurants.

But I've actually added a lot of content to the spin model. And so this is why I'm writing my own book, is that I've developed some methods where my figures can actually double what they do. So in my method, you can do $100,000 per half acre or less. So this is a little bit more of an aggressive marketing strategy, a bit more focus on the restaurant market.

You know, focus, still utilizing all the direct consumer channels that most small-scale growers pursue, like the CSA model and the farmers market model. But I go into a little bit more depth on how to utilize the restaurant and retail and other sort of market streams that exist that are out there.

And as the local food system movement becomes more popular, more of these kind of business models are popping up. So it's kind of like utilizing a bit more of those things. Also, some more, as far as production methods, things that I've developed that weren't really covered in spin farming.

So these are things that I'm working on to put into my books. Why are restaurants superior to individuals? Are they more reliable? Are they willing to pay higher prices? Is it that they can order continually? It's, it's, well, no, it's not necessarily about the price point. It's about, the price point is probably about the same.

Sometimes it's actually a bit less. I mean, when you're doing bulk volume to people, you generally give them, you know, 25-30% off what you would at a farmer's market. The advantage is that they will buy volumes and they will also buy a lot of the same things over and over again.

And so one example of this is a crop like radishes, for example. Radishes are a great crop to grow for a farmer's market in the spring and the fall when there's not a lot of other product available. And, you know, they grow fast and you can move a decent amount of them to the restaurants.

But come summer, they basically become irrelevant, you know, as you have other summer products that come on stream. People at the farmer's market aren't really interested in radishes. However, for restaurants, for restaurant markets, they will buy radishes all year round from you because they want some kind of consistency.

They don't want to have to change their menu every week or every month. And that's kind of the kind of clientele we're dealing with here is sort of the field to fork restaurants that, that the niche market type restaurants that actually want to have a seasonal local menu. And so they like to work with farmers.

However, they still do want some consistency. So things like radishes, you know, I can sell 400 bunches a week year round or all summer long to these restaurants, whereas at a farmer's market, I couldn't do that. And so radishes are a really easy crop to grow and they're fast.

And, you know, by focusing on these restaurant markets, it allows you to really focus your production and go with things that just make money. It isn't about just growing a diversity of crops so that you have a really pretty display at your farmer's market, which that's important too, and that's also part of it, but it's about just cranking out a lot of product that you can move in volumes.

And so this is the best advantage to restaurants is that they will take, you know, a restaurant order might be 50 bunches of radishes, 20 pounds of salad greens, 30 to 40 bunches of Tokyo turnips, 10 pounds of basil. You can move bigger volumes of product and that means that you can turn over areas of land quicker.

And so one of the things about urban farming is when you talk about making money on a small plot of land, so I'm on only 15,000 square feet on five different plots, in order to make money on that land, you have to turn over things multiple times. So everything I do is in a bed.

So spin farming is kind of where square foot gardening meets commercial farming. And so everything is in a standardized bed. And you can't just plant these beds once out in a season and hope to make money. You have to harvest the contents of that crop in a bed, amend the soil, turn it over and replant it again.

And so some of my beds get turned over up to seven times in a season. So when I say I'm on a third of an acre, in a traditional farming sense, I'm actually on say six times that land because I'm turning that land over so many times. And so this is why I generally focus on crops that not only have a high dollar value per square foot, but also have a short date to maturity.

So I only focus on crops that grow and are ready to harvest within about 60 days. And there's some exceptions to that with tomatoes and patty pan squash. And I'm also growing crops that will yield high in a small area. So I don't grow anything like corn, winter squash, cabbages, potatoes, onions, melons.

I don't grow anything like that. I'm focusing on baby root vegetables, salad greens, specialty herbs, and there's all kinds of varieties of things within those categories of crops. Is the way that you're doing it, is it a sustainable system where you're able to keep doing it? Or do you have to rest the land after a certain amount of time?

We can farm our soil continuously. I mean, like I said, I've done this year round for the majority of my years farming and it's all basically biointensive organic methods where high amounts of organic matter go into the soil and the soil gets better and better. And so there are inputs.

The system requires inputs. So I spend not a lot of money, but I do buy considerable amounts of compost every year. I build my own compost and I buy organic fertilizers such as bone meal and feather meal and things like that. And I have to put things into the soil, but yes, it's absolutely sustainable.

And really one of the greatest advantages to urban farming is if you talk about maybe a futuristic scenario where we not a futuristic scenario, maybe it's like a near future scenario where these inputs that I'm required to use are no longer as available to me. Living in a city, I have access to all kinds of waste byproducts that are seen as waste, but are actually resources.

So restaurants, when I deliver to restaurants, I take their scraps of vegetables and buckets and five gallon buckets and I build my own compost that way so I can actually build my own fertility into the soil. I don't do that so much right now because the economics of it are just they don't really add up.

To build your own compost and soil, the labor that goes into it, it just isn't worth the value that you get out of it. But in a scenario where resources become a lot more valued and the price of everything goes up, then that's a situation that we could utilize that system and it would be economical.

But right now it isn't, so I don't bother. I kind of go with the path of least resistance and go with what works at the current time. But knowing that if I did need to go that way, it wouldn't be a hard shift. Right. I mean the economic system is always going to dictate.

I think of the difference between I hate seeing all the garbage that we produce in this country and there's so many useful things probably in there that we don't harvest. But I remember being in Guatemala City one time at the Basurero, the garbage dump right in the middle of the city, and you see hundreds of people who make their entire living.

It's soul-crushing and yet it's also encouraging. And it's soul-crushing because it's a horrible, in my opinion, a horrible lifestyle. There are hundreds of people make their entire living in the dump, on the dump, picking off garbage out of it and repurposing it, whether it's recyclables or whether it's repurposing a piece of plastic into a piece of earrings.

And it's really awful as far as just all kinds of sickness. But yet on the other hand, you look and see the value that garbage can have when you have an economic system where that's kind of out of, I don't want to use the word, out of whack. That's working differently where you have people that need a way to sustain their livelihood and here are resources that can be repurposed.

And I admire the ability to repurpose the resources and I would love it if we just did it when it's easy, in our own front yard, in our own garbage dump, rather than send it on down the road like they do and it gets picked over by someone who's making their living there.

Yeah, exactly. I mean in an ideal world, that's what we would do before it came that way, but that's just not how our society works. I mean, I really believe in prices, that prices of everything dictate our actions. As much as I'd like to think that everybody is going to change their behavior based on the ideas or the concerns about peak oil and limited resources, you know, inflation or environmental destruction, but that's just not the way people think.

People only change their behavior based on the price point. I mean, it's just the reality of it. And so it's just using that understanding to create a sustainable system now on the small scale and being set up for when those changes really do come forward. So how did you get into this?

You said you didn't have any background in agriculture. How did you wind up like discovering this as a business? I was actually, so I was a working musician for all of my 20s, almost my entire, my entire teenage and adult life up until I was about 29, 28. I was living in the city of Montreal and I was just making a real good, making a go at trying to be a professional musician, trying to make a living at it.

And you know, I often tell people you think farming's hard, try being a working musician. You want to work more hours and not get paid and not get the recognition that you want than just be a musician. So I was doing that and I always kind of was like, I kind of came up in punk rock music and I was influenced by thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein and people like this.

And I had a lot of concern about what was going on in the world. And I wanted to do something about it. And the more I was starting to realize that my musical career wasn't going to make me any sort of a living that I could actually raise my standard of living, I started to look elsewhere and I started to look into things that if I wasn't necessarily going to raise my standard of living, at least work towards something that I felt like I was contributing something to society in the right direction.

And so I started to get really interested in sustainable living, living off the grid, natural building, organic farming, what have you, all that kind of stuff. And I just kind of went down a rabbit hole one year, just cruising on YouTube, just like looking at all these different solution-based ideas in the sort of green economy.

And I pretty much at that point realized that being a farmer was one of the best ways that I could truly live by my values because I could really take hold of what I was doing in my life. So at least if I'm controlling the food that I'm eating and taking a stand on that and then making a living at that, then that would be a substantial step towards living by my values.

So when I kind of decided at this point about 2008 that I was going to leave Montreal and move back out west, and so I was originally from BC in Canada, and so I moved back out here and I wasn't sure what I was going to do yet, but I knew I wanted to do something.

So I had planned this bicycle trip down the west coast. And so a friend of mine did this and really inspired me to do the same, and he rode his bike all around the US and just had this incredible experience. And so I had this big trip planned where I was going to ride my bike from Kelowna.

Originally, I was going all the way to New Orleans, but I basically had stops all along the way planned on organic farms, off-grid homesteads, eco-villages, people just living off the land, all kinds of things like this, commercial farming as well. And I just popped into these places on my bike and I would stay anywhere between two to three days to two and a half weeks.

And so I did that and it wasn't so much what I'd learned about farming and living off the grid or living off the land on that trip as it was what I learned about myself, kind of putting myself out there and really wearing my values on my sleeve. You know, when you're traveling by a bicycle, people can kind of clearly identify what your values are to a certain degree.

And so I discovered that everywhere I went, I was just constantly approached by people that were the kind of people that I wanted to talk to. And so it was just this serendipitous experience that everywhere I went, I just had these amazing, met these amazing people and all these amazing acts of generosity.

And I was just building this sort of network of people that shared my values. And by the time I got down to San Diego, I was just so inspired by what I had done and just so jacked up on my own energy and what I created that I was like, oh my god, I have to live this way all the time.

This is the way to do it. And so at that point, I felt like I could do anything in the world. I came back to BC or Kelowna, BC. I did another season of tree planting. That's a job that I did for nine years to kind of support myself.

As a musician, I would go and work for two or three months and I could make, you know, 20 to 40 grand in that time and go back and live as a poor musician in Montreal. I was kind of helping support myself. Yeah, it's a thing that a lot of...

I've never heard of that. Tree planting. It's something that'll... It's a job that a lot of Canadians do to put themselves through college. It's a real Canadian experience. Where are you planting the trees? Really, it's really, really hard work. Just in forested cut blocks, basically. So this is the trees that have been logged and you're...

Yeah. Okay, got it. So you're replanting what had been logged, basically, with little seedlings. And so it's something I did for many years. That's cool. So when I came back to BC, I did that for another year and then I figured at that point, okay, I had this five-year plan at this point.

Like I'm gonna save money, do another five seasons of tree planting, save a bunch of money and then buy a piece of land. Because at this point, I thought that that was the only way you could actually farm, was to buy land and sort of in the rural context or peri-urban context, buy land and be sort of a market gardener as we know it today.

But the land here is so damn expensive. That goal was getting harder and harder to reach. And so I realized then, oh my god, I don't know if I can actually do this. And it was like a serendipitous experience that a friend of mine told me about this spin farming stuff.

And he said, oh, these guys making 100 grand a acre of land and they're farming in the city on lawns, turning lawns into gardens. And so I was immediately intrigued. I bought this book called Spin Farming. And that's pretty much it. I read, I spent a winter reading and researching this book, going online, learning as much as I could and then started the farm.

And then that pretty much is what takes me to where I left off earlier when I told you where I am today. So was this out of a desire? One of the themes that I'm interested in exploring with my show is how people make the transition from employee to entrepreneur.

And so I would think of you as an entrepreneur, but it sounds like, you know, you're an entrepreneur as a musician. So this was less about the desire, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like this was less about the desire to be an entrepreneur and be your own boss and run your own thing and more about your desire to connect with your values of sustainability.

Is that right? Yeah, that's exactly it. And well, actually being an entrepreneur is the best way to do that. Right. And it often leads to some of the most successful entrepreneurs and successful people in my life that I see in my life are the people that say, "These are my values," and then they live by them and they show that to people.

That's got to be one of the most attractive things that draws people to you. Right. And so yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, I guess I always wanted to be an entrepreneur in some way or another, and I guess I always have been. I was kind of, I kind of grew up in an entrepreneurial family.

My dad was, did all kinds of different things, and he took me on the road when I was really young, when he was a traveling salesman, and he started a restaurant when I was about 13, and I worked in his restaurant. And so I'd kind of been around entrepreneurialism a lot in my life, and so it kind of just seemed second nature to me.

And I think a lot of the values that my father taught me growing up, I didn't really think about until I actually started to work for myself. But, you know, just things like understanding the basic economics. If you're spending more money than you're making, then there's a problem with that.

Right. And sort of the frugality of my dad really helped me in business starting out. And it's funny, you think that a lot of people understand that stuff, but they don't. And it's like the number one reason that people fail. So, right. I had a lot of that stuff, and you know, just the basic values, like old school businessman, you know, my dad was like that.

He was like, you know, he said, you know, if you shake somebody's hand, you make a deal, that's a deal, and you do everything you can to make sure that you follow up. And I had a lot of that stuff going in, and it really worked well for me, is just to be the best I could be, operate the most honest, and offer the best value as I can to anybody.

And that stuff has done, has worked magic for me. So I've had success at this for five years now, and I've, yeah, I guess I've made more money at it than I ever really planned on doing. And making money at it wasn't even my intention. My intention was to live by my values, but I've discovered that when you make your values clear to people, and they see you living by those values, the money just comes, and there's no real limit to what you can do with it.

Yeah. It's one of the things I have a tough time sometimes talking with, when conversations turn political, and turn towards, when conversations turn political, and turn against capitalism, I always, I often reach an impasse, because to me, I just see money, money is just simply a method of accounting for an exchange of value.

That's all it is. And so if you don't, I mean, the idea that money is somehow evil, or that somehow we've got to do away with money, or somehow we've got to do away with a capitalist system, it's just a system of accounting among people to say who's bringing the most value.

Oh, I totally agree with you. And I actually, I personally believe that is just a massive propaganda campaign. You know, I could go into all kinds of conspiracy theories. Do it, we like conspiracy theories. Well, it's just, you know, I got sucked into that whole thing too, with like shaming the rich and all that stuff, and I guess once you see things from the other side, your opinions change.

Right. And I don't know, I actually was, really grew up as a total socialist leftist. My mother is a card-carrying NDP member, which is the, in Canada here, the New Democratic Party, which are probably the most leftist party we have here, and a full-on socialist party, and I was kind of brought up with that value, because I spent most of my time growing up with my mother, because my parents are separated, than I did with my dad.

And so my dad had a bit more of the conservative, libertarian, even anarchistic values than my mother, but my mother had more of an influence on my values growing up than my dad did. So, you know, I believe that, yeah, I mean, if we should tax the hell out of the rich, we should tax the hell out of the people that are productive and all that, and I'd, I believed that stuff until I actually started getting into business and going, you know what, I'm just creating value for people.

And so it wasn't so much, you know, I think, I think the money, the system of account we're using can be changed. I mean, we don't have to use the US dollar. Capitalism, to me, the fundamental idea behind it is like what you said, is value for value. So it doesn't matter what that unit of measure is.

All that matters is that it is a unit of measure that you use into account for value. And that is widely accepted. Exactly. And it could be all kinds of things. I mean, I'm really excited about where the cryptocurrency development is moving, and I think there's going to be a lot of future in that system.

And so the what we're using exactly doesn't make a difference at all. It's just that we are using something and I think it's very liberating in a sense to think that we have these new systems of account that are popping up. I mean, I personally believe, I guess I would consider myself a volunteerist or one that believes in more of the anarchist principles of things, is that these things are going to actually give us a real shot at living in that kind of world now, because a lot of these systems that we're creating are allowing us to not depend so much on the services that governments and central banks provide.

And so this is really, I think we're really living in an exciting time. Some of this technology that we're seeing today is allowing us to do incredible things. I think about 3D printing and we can print fabricated steel now. So it's really exciting to think that we're doing these kind of things and all this stuff's available to us.

And it's like this sort of the open source idea that we're seeing, you know, that open source technology sharing these ideas. I mean, we can develop things at an exponential rate now because of this. And we're seeing this in farming too. I mean the internet and this sort of mass communication that we're able to disseminate information so quickly to each other.

We're seeing all kinds of developments in even in my field in agriculture than we've ever seen before. And this kind of technology with 3D printing and whatnot, people are developing all kinds of small machines and doing incredible things. And so I think the future is really bright actually when I think about this kind of stuff.

You're preaching my gospel, you know, it's just the connectivity and the exposure. And frankly, the reason I wanted to start this show is to expose people to some alternative ideas and ways of thinking. Because you know your path, you pull up YouTube and you say, "Whoa, that's possible? That's possible?

Whoa!" And all of a sudden it makes your mind just burst with ideas. Well, listen, if that guy can do that, and if that's possible there, wait, I see here's something that I could do locally and I could apply this in my area. And then all of a sudden you have an entire economy transformed.

And you know, in a sense, I agree with you about cryptocurrencies. And I get so excited when I see how many merchants and how many different people are willing to do business in Bitcoin. Because in a world where somebody can pay you for your vegetables in Bitcoin, especially at the farmer's market, I don't know if you have any restaurants that are doing that, but the world is coming where they can just simply pay you there.

You can go to overstock.com, you can buy the stuff you need there, you can trade with your neighbor for the meat or another producer for the meat that you need. You can trade your rent. I mean you set this up. And in a world of competing currencies, and that's why I hope that there are five cryptocurrency options.

I hope there's a barter network that's based on... I hope there's a hundred of them. Yeah, I hope there's a... Go ahead, you go. Well, I think the really exciting thing for me is seeing how the ethics of nature are starting to come into our way of living in society.

And I think we have to start looking at sort of anti-fragile or resilient systems. And so I think using the natural world is the perfect model for how to design our system and to design our societies. And if you look... So let's just take a forest, for example. Let's just take a natural forest ecosystem.

There are millions, billions, or trillions of microorganisms, mycelium, all kinds of, you know, synergistic life forms that exist within that system. And there is no central authority. There is no government in nature. Government is a monoculture. And so when we talk about why the food system is failing and why we're having all kinds of...

We're finding all kinds of chronic illnesses now after 50 to 100 years of the green revolution. We're seeing all these chronic problems and illnesses that are popping up in people because we've been doing it wrong. In the natural world, there is no monoculture. Monocultures don't exist in nature. And there's a reason for that is because they are fragile.

If one thing goes wrong, the system collapses. Whereas in a natural system, in a forest ecosystem, there are many checks and balances that keep the system resilient. So this is this anti-fragile idea that I like to talk about. And this thing exists within nature everywhere in the universe. And I think where we're moving to right now and where the successful people in the world will be moving to is looking at how to be anti-fragile.

So how to diversify, how to have systems that are resilient. And so those are systems in the economy, in the food system, in production, in manufacturing, all kinds of things. And I think the more small scale we get, the more diversified we get, the more anti-fragile we are. And so looking at nature as a model, we can look at that as a way to design a truly anarchistic capitalist system.

Because we don't need to have a centralized authority. All we need are individuals that are willing to volunteer and choose what's best for them. And so what will succeed will be the thing that serves the most value for the most amount of people, not this is a gun in your face and this is how it's going to be whether you like it or not, which is the traditional model of government that we have.

And so I think all these things, whether it's Bitcoin and these Fab Lab manufacturing, all this kind of stuff is going to diversify us. And I mean, you know, it's going to also turn, I think there's going to be a value shift. I think it's happening now where people are starting to say, okay, this sort of consumerist culture of where we're just human beings in society, we're just consumers.

People are starting to go, let's just be productive because that 3D printing stuff, all the apps and amazing technology that we're creating, people are creating so much value for one another that we can be productive again. And I mean, just for one example, and it's really old school thinking, but as you mentioned, you touched on it a bit there too, is trading.

So trading value for value. The great thing about being a productive person and offering a service that people need, which in my case is farming. And so I think that's where the basis of any new society is going to come from is food production. And then things kind of stem out from there.

But for myself as a farmer, I offer a product that everybody needs. And so this gives me an incredible amount of economic leverage and I can go and trade the products that I have with all kinds of other services that exist. So I can get a carpenter, a welder, any kind of skilled labor to work for me on trade.

And what I love about trade, even though trade is kind of inefficient in the sense that for the people that don't have something that everybody needs, trade doesn't really work. But for the productive people, it works amazing because it allows you to get the highest economic value for your energy.

So if currency or money is just a reflection of your economic energy, when you put that into a dollar, you immediately lose your economic energy. It's like putting it through a really inefficient copper wire to transmit energy from point A to point B. You have all this sort of like runoff of energy.

And so it's the same with dollars. You go into dollars, you immediately lose to inflation, you immediately lose to income tax, you immediately lose to sales tax. Whereas when you go trade value to value in a trade scenario, you get the highest value for your economic energy. And so it's something that I discovered was an amazing way for me to raise my standard of living really quickly without having to work more, put in more hours or make more money.

It's just moving this extra stuff that a farmer always has into some kind of trade scenario. So it's allowed me to eat the highest quality meat and dairy, honey, all the things that I don't grow myself. It allows me to get all that high quality nutritionally dense food for nothing, basically.

So it's allowed me to raise my quality of living. And so I think all this going into being a productive individual is what's going to change our society. And I think we will go back to valuing the productive individuals. I think so. And I think it seems to me, part of the reasons why I'm so interested in your story is because it just seems like a better way to live in this sense.

It feels to me, when I graduated from college, I went to university and I studied business. And when I went into school, I thought my goal was to graduate and be a Fortune 500 CEO because I was obsessed with the ideal of business. And then somewhere in college, I studied abroad in college, and all of a sudden I studied abroad and saw a whole new side of the world that I'd never really thought about.

And that completely threw me for a loop. And I said, what am I doing? And I wound up finishing still with a business degree. But then I went and worked a year in a corporate job. And I just, I only did it a year. And then I went and worked in the cubicle world.

But that opened my eyes to what it was like to work in the cubicle world. And I went from, prior to, so during college, I was actually working in agriculture. And I was running a, on a temporary basis, just for a few months, I was running a tree nursery here in Florida, where we grew basically a lot of ornamental trees, palms and various types of palms and things for sale to landscapers.

And I was running this for a few months and it was, it was hell. I had to be there at five, I had to be there, let's see, what time did we start? So the cruise started at six. I think we basically worked six to four. And you know, the 10 hour day is standard in agriculture.

So I had to be there, you know, before six to get things set up. And then I would wind up there till five and I would just go home, go home, just completely beat and not do anything except sleep all night so I could get up and do it the next day.

And I wasn't making a ton of money. I was making just, I was making enough. But it was just kind of this constant, this constant work. And then, so I had the opportunity to double my income and cut my hours by, you know, 30 percent by moving into the corporate world.

And it wasn't a double income. It was, I don't know, I don't remember. An increase, a significant increase in income and a significant decrease in hours by going into the corporate world. So I went and did it. But the problem was I missed kind of that that sense of beauty of doing something with your hands where you finished it and you looked at it and it was beautiful.

You know, you finished trimming the palm trees and they looked good. You mowed the grass and it looked good and you had that sense of achievement. And then I just went into a world of spreadsheets. So then you look at it and you say, well, let's analyze what's wrong with it.

Well, in the corporate world, you're just, you're one, you're one part of many and that has huge value. But you're just a pawn. You can be taken out and you can be put in. I wound up getting laid off from the corporate job several iterations of the job later.

You can be taken out and someone else can be put in. And you don't have the sense of satisfaction of doing something. You don't have that sense of effort of doing that hard work and being done with it. But you go to agriculture and you say, I'm doomed to no money and a terrible standard of living.

But when I thought back about it, I said, well, A, if I'd actually, let's say that I was in what are the bucolic traditional view we have of a farm. What are the advantages of it? I work from home. I control my own schedule. I'm doing something where I can see.

I'm doing something that matters. My family can be fully integrated. I have breakfast, lunch and dinner with my family. We have seasons where we work really hard and then we have seasons of rest. And so that natural cycle, I think to me, is what I desire of this natural cycle.

Sometimes we work really hard and sometimes we rest. And so you say, but that's not possible. One side of my family is in traditional agriculture out in Colorado and Nebraska in the western states. And I look at the economics of their business and I say, it's crazy. But then I look at the economics of your business and say, wait a second.

You're telling me that with a very small investment and relatively no overhead because there's no debt and I can live right next to my farm and in the surrounding area and I can work on the human scale and I can make a good wage. It sounds like your book should sell like crazy.

Well, I think it will. I mean, this information is going to revolutionize farming. I also, you know, just kind of picking up where you left off there is that the other thing that's going to get people back into farming on the large scale is the price point. Is food prices are going to go up no matter if we like it or not.

There's a few reasons, but the one basic reason is the average age of a farmer. So in Canada, I'm not sure what it is in the US, but I'm pretty sure it's close because worldwide it's around the same. But in Canada here, the average age of a farmer is 59 years old and the amount of people that are leaving agriculture do not even come close to the amount of people that are coming into agriculture.

So, you know, I don't know if you listen to Jim Rogers, the economist Jim Rogers, but he actually talks a lot about this and it's interesting to hear an economic economist talk about this stuff, but it's absolutely true. Is that there is going to be in about 10 years or so a real crunch unless there is a mass move back into agriculture, which I think is possible.

We are going to see food prices spike like crazy and I'm not just talking about prices set to inflation. I'm talking about 100% increases in food prices because if we don't have the people in the field that can actually grow the food because they're just nobody wants to do it, we're not going to have any food at any price.

It doesn't matter what it is because if there's not the farmers that can do the work, then the price will have to go up because it's going to have to draw people back into the system. And so I personally think going forward getting into agriculture now is going to be one of the best investments that people make because food is paramount.

Everybody needs to eat. And so if you look at the numbers of people leaving, they don't even come close to the people getting into it. And so the liberating idea is that, you know, when I tell you that you can make a living and feed a family of four on an income from a third of an acre and a good living too, I mean 100 grand a year, that's upper middle class, right?

Like I'm not just talking about you know working your butt off for 40 grand a year. Yeah, it is and more importantly. 100 grand a year is a pretty upper middle class living and I think going forward we're going to see farmers become the new sort of upper class of society because it's a value shift.

I mean and these things happen throughout history, right? I mean we see over specialization into one thing, then there's a saturation and then there's sort of a mass exodus from that. I think, you know, no offense to you, but I mean in the financial world, that's what we're going to see.

Sure, absolutely. We've seen so much growth and development in the financial world, but I mean some of these guys aren't making any money. Like it's the top dogs that are making a lot of money, but I mean some of these underlings working at Goldman Sachs, you know, maybe they're making 80 grand a year, but they're working 80 hours a week.

Right. Whereas this kind of farming now and also, you know, you touched on the lifestyle a bit too and I think that's so important and it's something that people don't really look at the other capital that exists and there are many forms of capital and one form of capital that I'm really big on.

And so when I call myself a capitalist and I'm very proud to call myself a capitalist, I say that word of pride, but I also tell people that I'm a social capitalist and that I don't just build capital that is dollars and cents. I build social capital. I build community capital.

I build educational capital. I build capital that exists within my community. And but being a farmer has got to be one of the best ways to build social capital. And so what I mean by that is as a farmer when you offer services and products that everybody needs in your community, there's a real needs benefit to that relationship.

And this is one thing that I think in our overly statist society, you know, we talk about neighborhoods where people basically don't even know who lives next to them. We live in these suburban communities where nobody knows each other. There's a reason for that is because there are no needs benefit to that relationship.

And so going back into a society where we have people growing food on the community level, getting to know their neighbors, this is what's going to reconnect us with our neighbors. And so that's where that social capital comes into play. And so the amazing thing about that is just like when you do good business and you do honest business and you do the best you can to offer the most value to the most amount of people, all that stuff comes back to you.

And it doesn't just come back to you in the form of money. It comes back to you in social capital. So building relationships and people doing favors for you. I mean, it's a lot of really old school thinking and a lot of it, you know, for myself came from like Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, but it's, you know, this other forms of capital that we can build that have this intrinsic value, but also have a value rooted in a community and rooted to the people you know.

That's what's so great about being a farmer is you get that really high quality of life where people really respect you and they want to help you because you help them. Two themes. First of all, it's more than a hundred thousand dollars when you compare it to what the cost that you've pulled out.

So let's say that you have a hundred thousand dollar job of salary and let's say that you have a hundred thousand dollar net profit on your farming business. Ignore taxes, ignore any of the savings from barter, ignore any of the, ignore even the own food that you eat from, that you produce from your own hand.

Ignore that. Just from the quality of life and the difference between being a hundred thousand dollar a year attorney, where you have to support a vehicle that's appropriate, you have to support a wardrobe that's appropriate, you have to support the charitable contributions to the golf tournament and the lunches and the drinks with your friends because you're, you know, you can't handle your job and I'm certainly exaggerating.

Not everyone is in that situation. But there are, but the hundred thousand dollar a year farming lifestyle where you walk out your back porch and on your block, on your, on the three city blocks, I mean your situation, you ride a bike to all this stuff, right? Yeah, for the most part I do use a small truck to do my deliveries to like my further customers.

But yeah, for the most part we run it all by bikes and trailers. So you go out your back door and you got a bicycle and you got your three block radius and then you do your work there. I mean there is such a, the hundred thousand dollars net profit is a hundred thousand dollars net profit with very few associated expenses.

And so that's a big number. And the second thing, go ahead and respond. No, you go ahead. Okay. I was going to say the second thing about financial capital and I'm glad you brought it up. I would like to do a show, I've pinned it down, and I've wanted to do a show on all the different forms of capital that I can think of, but it goes directly back to your forest web versus monoculture example from the biological world.

Is that in many ways, look at how devastated many people are when they lose a job. It's terrible because their entire, if your entire system is, if the only capital you have is the financial capital that you can earn by trading your human capital, your life energy for a paycheck, and then that paycheck is interrupted and you're in the habit of purchasing all of your solutions through the financial system.

Well, if the paycheck is interrupted, then your entire plan falls apart. And so many financial planners would say, well, then you should have some backup for that. And some backup might be a savings account, an emergency fund, you might have some investments. But the problem is many times all of those things are predicated upon the financial system.

And what happens in our society is oftentimes by only focusing on one way of thinking about it, by only focusing on the financial system, we can only get financial solutions. But if you can bring back in things like the social capital, things like, I'll give you a very practical example.

I do in part of my work, I've done a good bit of long-term care planning. Basically, what's your plan if you get older and you're not able to care for yourself? Well, throughout all of human history, that has been a fairly okay thing because you had an intense social network, you had a lot of social capital, you had family capital, where your family would provide that for you.

So you didn't need to go and work and earn money and save so that you could pay a nurse to care for you. Same thing with retirement. You didn't always need to just go and say, I've got to save a lump sum of money that's a certain amount so that I can afford to retire.

You had a family structure, you had a friend structure. If you reach the point, if you were a farmer, and I know again, some of these metaphors maybe are a little bit too idealistic, a little bit too bucolic, but if you have this idea, if you have a farmer and you're getting older and you're not able to do it, you would have younger members of your family or the neighboring farmer would come over and would lift the heavy thing or would help with the item that requires a younger body to do it.

It would help with these things. But in today's world, then all of that social capital and family capital has been greatly diminished if not destroyed. And so now you're set to say, how on earth do I sit here and build, how do I save the million dollars that I need to save?

And then how do I buy the long-term care insurance policy that I need to buy so that I can pay for those needs that I have with a financial system? And there's another way of doing it. I still think that the financial planning is incredibly valuable, but how much stronger is a financial plan if we build it like a web, where you can earn an income from a job, but you can supplement that income with a side business and you can supplement that with all of the eco-solutions that we have now, the sustainable, you know, someone's farming your backyard and you have a guy that's farming your backyard.

So there you have a portion of the food. I assume that's how you structure your rents in some way. You have some, instead of every month earning so that you can pay for your electric bill, you've built out the insulation on your house. You've changed your energy usage patterns.

You've installed some form of alternative energy source that you can buy, such as a solar panel, where you can buy it for a one-time thing instead of an ongoing thing. Now your needs for the financial capital are efficiently lowered. And so now we're building a much stronger plan, a web, instead of a single monoculture solution.

Exactly. And you know, this is interesting because the more I talk about these things, a lot of these ideas come to light for me. And hearing you talk about that kind of spelt it out in my mind is that, you know, the idea of the welfare state that's been taking care of us, and the idea that we don't have to work so hard, it's actually done the opposite of what it is intended to do.

Because like you just demonstrated, all that need for that financial capital, because we don't have that social capital, that community capital, that human capital that had been there in previous, you know, in previous generations that would be there to take care of you when you get older, puts more pressure on us for the importance of financial capital.

But in an inflationary world where the value of our dollar is perpetually diminished, it means that we have to work harder and harder and harder to do so. So it's interesting to think that, you know what, to go the other way, focus on the community, focus on the social capital, those are the things that actually enrich our lives.

Right. Those are the things that actually will improve your life in the long run. Because when you really strip it down, when you really strip down to what is important in life, what will actually make your life rich, it's not money, it isn't things, it's human relationships. That's all it is.

And any of the big, even the most successful business people, entrepreneur people will tell you that all you've got are the people you know and the skills you've learned. That's all you've got. So, you know, strip all those things away. That's all that matters. And so building on those things is going to be the thing that's going to make your life better in the long run, even in the short run.

So I think it's a very interesting idea and it's not something that a lot of people talk about. We put so much importance on the financial side. And you know, it's interesting the way you explained that the $100,000 scenario there. It's very true. It's very true because I can't even, it's hard for me to quantify how much capital I've actually built outside of the financial capital.

I mean, it's kind of beyond my imagination when I really think about it. The amount of people that I've connected with and the network of friends and partners that I've built up in this community here, that when I really need something, there's somebody there to help me. Right. And you could, and here's the thing, if you, I don't know, I don't know if, are you single?

Do you have a family? No, I'm single. Okay. So here's, if you, if you, if your economic situation, something happened, you lost all your money, you lost your farm, you lost all your equipment, you had a, whether just natural disaster, tornado destroys, you know, your town falls into the, into the ocean, for some reason, everything is gone.

You could get, you know, you could hitch a ride to another farm of somebody that you know, and in your work of speaking and being an evangelist for the sustainable agriculture movement, you could have a roof over your head, a meal in your stomach, and a way to earn an income to build up your savings again to start your own business.

You could have it by the, by the end of the day. Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is, this is one of the main reasons I got into farming, because I looked at what I had, and I didn't have much. I had a degree in music composition, I had no practical skills, and I didn't even really have a lot of social capital, though I didn't even think in those metrics back then.

But as a farmer, you have that intrinsically, and you can, you always have value to people, and that's, that's something that people overlook today. They don't even, it's not even on their radar. It's like, what is your value? What are the things that you do that people need and people value?

And that's all community is, is needs. Right. If people talk about building sustainable communities, like it's something that the government can do. It will never be something that the government can do. It has to come from the needs of the community, and until you have a reason to need your neighbor, there's no incentive to get to know your neighbor.

Right. And this applies, our systems in many ways, one more example, the social capital, are so twisted, even just in terms of family. And I'll give you an example. When I was talking about retirement, I think about, I think about this sometimes. My father is, how old is he?

I can't remember. He's in his early 70s, and I think about my, my mom is as well, about, about 70. She's, yeah, just, she's 70. I always get your ages mixed up in my head. So, but the thing is, is that I'm the, you know, I'm the youngest of seven children.

And we have such a tight relationship with my parents. They live on their own right now. They live, they live, they're enjoying their condo lifestyle in West Palm Beach here. But we have such a strong relationship that I would never want to see my parents. I hope that they don't live on their own forever.

I hope that they have an opportunity to come in, to come, and I hope that they have an opportunity in the future to live with my family, to live with my siblings, and to be able to enjoy their final decades on earth with their family. And to me, I don't view that as a, as a negative thing, of something that I would have to do.

I view that as something that I want to do. So I look at that and I say, how did my parents build that desire in me? Well, it was built by having a strong relationship. Then I look at my son and I say, well, how am I going to do that?

There is, you can't pay me enough money to take a big prestigious, you know, 60, 70, 80 hour a week job where I'm going to be away from my family. Because it is so much more important for me to invest in the social capital, in the family capital with my children.

That is such a more valuable investment than any stock I could buy, than any business I could invest in. And so the idea is saying, how can I invest my time and invest it into building this family capital? And if you look at it, the financial system in many ways seems to be exactly at odds with it.

And the financial system has brought about a higher standard of living for more people than ever in human history. And yet it has also brought fractioning families. It has brought, you know, depression, you know, it's brought many negative things. So the problem is not the capitalist system. The problem is this misidentification of the various forms of capital and how to work within the system and find a solution.

So, I mean, I would start a spin farm, or I would start a Curtis Stone farm in my backyard, whatever you call it, in my backyard, before I would go and take that salary job. Because then that allows me to simultaneously reap benefits of investing in my health, investing in my business, investing in my community.

And I have a business now, my family can work alongside me. So now I'm investing in my family. And now by stacking the benefits up, just like with good permaculture design or good design techniques, instead of just saying, I'm going to take one benefit, whereas I'm going to go away, I'm going to take a job, and I'm going to earn this, you know, $60,000 of financial capital, rather we say, I'm going to invest in my health because I'm being physically active.

I'm going to invest in my mental health because I can see the work of my hands. I'm going to invest in my family's health because I can have my family relationships. I'm going to invest in my financial health. I'm going to build social capital. I'm going to build this broad network.

It's just a much more holistic planning technique to apply to life. Absolutely. I mean, I think we just solved all the world's problems right there. We got to quit now. But it's, you know, it's that's exactly it. I mean, it's actually really exciting to hear somebody like yourself speak in those terms.

And I think this kind of information needs to be disseminated to people. We need to get out of this whole system. And I think it's by design. I think the fact that we've locked everybody into this idea that all capitalism is creating financial value. I think that is what has driven us to be so divided from one another.

Because if you really embrace the idea of capitalism, like what we've just been talking about for the last 20 minutes, it's absolutely, it's totally liberating because it makes you realize that human beings, in my opinion, human beings by their nature are very productive. We are very resilient. We have survived and evolved over millions of years and have accomplished amazing things.

And to think of a world where we live sort of like the movie Wall-E or Idiocracy, if any of your listeners are familiar with those movies, where people are basically just useless turds. They just like sit in chairs and robots do everything. And this is a sort of dystopian future that I think Hollywood is kind of trying to perpetuate to us for maybe there is a reason for it.

But I don't think that it has to go that way at all. I think when human beings or us in society start to really understand what real capitalism is, we can create enormous amounts of value and turn all these problems around that we have. And I think it all starts with this type of thinking, is like what is real capital?

What kind of capital can you build? Because if we're all locked into just thinking of everything in the metrics of financial capital, then we are so, we will always be dependent on the state to provide all the other things that the other forms of capital didn't provide for us.

And so when you really liberate your mind to say, hey, there's like probably 10 to 20 different forms of capital, and if you diversify within those forms of capital, you can create an amazing amount of abundance in your life. And that's what I've done. I mean, just by doing this, it's all kinds of opportunities that come my way that I never imagined would have done so.

By just farming. And the great thing about being a farmer is that you learn a lot of different skills because you have to fix things all the time. And so I've learned carpentry. I've learned a bit of welding. I've learned how to fix some small machines. I know how to fix my bikes.

You know, all kinds of things that you learn from being a farmer is incredible. And in Japanese, actually, farmer kind of, that word actually means the jack of all trades. It's like somebody that does everything. I didn't know that. That's neat. Yeah. What a cool, what a cool word.

Yeah, I mean, and you have you have all those things as backup plans. Like if farming, let's say that, let's say that your predictions about the price of food are 50,000% wrong and the price of food cuts is cut by 95% and your entire business model devolves, you have now a variety of trades that you can fall back on and you could go in a completely different direction because you've built skills.

Exactly. And this is the thing that I won't go into now, but I've got a whole show planned on skills. And it just seems so simple to me when you think about the fact that the amount of, this is the concept that's lost, going to financial capital. The concept that seems to be lost, that I don't hear expressed very much in our society, is that the amount of money that you earn, let's assume an hourly wage, the amount of money that you earn as an hourly wage is exactly what you are worth in the marketplace.

I'm not talking about your worth as a human being and that. I'm just talking about the market value, exactly what you're worth. A radish is worth X dollars per pound and a tomato is worth a different dollars per pound. So each of us has a certain value that's described by the marketplace.

And the only way to increase what we earn is to increase our skills, which increases our values. But somehow we spend a lot of time, instead of going crazy on saying, "How can I develop my skills and how can I develop my value?" And then the marketplace will ultimately recognize and reward that value.

Many people just don't seem to grasp that. And that's what frustrates me so much when I get into, when people are working in jobs and I get into hourly wage and minimum wage discussions and I say, "Why are you earning minimum wage? That's a good place to start, but go out and get to work and increase your value." Because guess what?

There are people that earn $100,000 for a day's consulting and you could do that too. You just got to develop the value of yourself. Exactly. Two last questions that I have and they're kind of two themes. I don't necessarily need them to go on long or short, but they're two disparate themes.

And I'm going to finish, I'll tell you in advance just so we can guide our conversation there. The last question I wanted to end on was kind of how to get started if someone was interested. But before we do that, I'm interested because you do have exposure to many of the ideas that are coming out of sustainable design and ecological design.

I don't even know what the word to put on it is. Have you ever thought about applying any of the sustainable design ideas to personal finance? And what I mean, and I'm just interested if you have any ideas. I think a lot about this and I think a lot about how to get off of the earn and buy treadmill and get on to the build and own so that I don't have to buy.

So I think of for example, I haven't seen one in person yet, but YouTube videos, I look at the earth ships that they make out in like in New Mexico and I think I don't want to live in, I don't really like the style, but how cool to be able to live in a building that heats itself, cools itself, provides its own water, provides its own electricity, provides that, you know that, how valuable is that on a dollar basis if we could bring that design in.

But I struggled, but so I think there's a lot of exciting technologies and I think that in many ways we should be focusing our financial planning on that, on figuring out how can I provide shelter that is efficient, that doesn't require, that doesn't suck money out of my budget.

How can I provide these things for myself? Do you have any thoughts or have you ever thought about that from a financial planning perspective? Well, yes, actually I have and there's some interesting work being done by a fellow named Mark Shepard and he is a, what does he call his system?

It's... He's the restoration agriculture guy, right? Restoration agriculture, exactly. And so you know his whole idea of buying these, buying tracts of land, so this kind of ties into like real estate financial too in the sense that, you know, buying really marginalized pieces of land and building those up and to be these like total utopias of food forests that are just like a garden of Eden.

And the amount of value we can really think about that stuff and this kind of goes into that the anti-fragile sort of resilient system stuff is that how valuable is that? You know, you've got this food, this natural food system that more or less takes care of itself. You know, you need a lot of inputs to set it up, but once it's set up the system pretty much takes care of itself and it builds on itself just like a natural forest does.

How much value is there in that? I think there's going to be huge financial opportunities in those systems. And so the exciting thing about that idea is that all of a sudden now there's an economic financial incentive to actually heal the damage we've done to the planet in a lot of different ways.

Right. And so I think going forward there's going to be immense opportunities in that. I haven't gone into it myself, but you know with the Earthships too, exactly the same thing. Another idea that I've had is building small-scale district energy off-grid systems. So instead of having a solar power system entirely custom-built for your house, you collaborate with a group of neighbors and you build what's called a district energy system where you have there's one battery bank for 10 houses and maybe we share the solar panels on our house, but we collaborate and create kind of small-scale grids within our system.

So the only thing stopping us from doing that is government, is regulation and however else they try to prevent us from doing these kind of things. But I think there's enormous opportunities in those kind of things. I think what people have to start doing is just putting their necks on the line and just taking the chance and just doing it.

We need to stop asking permission. We need to just start doing stuff. And when people come together and pool their resources and build that social capital in our communities where we know we've got each other's backs, then people won't be so afraid of taking risks. And I think that's where we're at today is because in our overly statist controlled society, it's like we are proletarians living in 1984.

We're so paranoid and afraid of pulling outside of the matrix and actually standing to say these are my values. I'm going to live by my values. I don't give a shit if this is against the law or not. I'm going to take a stand. If people start building that social capital in their communities, people will no longer be afraid to do that.

And I think that's so important going forward because there's all these opportunities that exist, but it's the fear of regulation and the fear of being shut down that prevents us from doing it. The fear of destroying a career and it's fear. And what's interesting is that once you get past it, you look back and say that was it.

But when you're on the side of it still fearing, it seems huge. And so much of that comes into state of mind and this is like total Tony Robbins stuff. But in my opinion, there's two states of mind. There's fear and scarcity mindset and there's joy and abundance mindset.

And so you have a choice every day on what mindset and state you're going to be in. And so I try on a day-to-day basis to choose the mindset of joy and abundance because when you're in that state, that's all that you see and that's all that comes your way.

I don't know what it is. I don't even consider myself a spiritual person. I can't explain how these things happen. But when I'm in a state of mind that's of joy and abundance, all I experience in my life are good things. All these things are drawn to you and it's magnetic.

But when you're in a fear and scarcity mindset, you're worried and you're afraid of losing things. And that mindset exists for rich and poor people. When you're really rich and you have all this stuff, but now you're afraid of losing it because now you have so much to lose.

You get stuck in that mindset and all the experiences you have in your life will be negative. And so that's been a big thing for me is being in that positive joy and abundance state of mindset. And then when you're there, all these good things happen to you. And I can't explain how that happens, but it does.

And I think, you know, we need to empower people and to make them understand that, you know what, as an individual person, you have an incredible amount of power and you have an incredible amount of potential to be productive. It's just getting outside of that fear and scarcity mindset and moving on to something that's more joy and abundance.

Well said. If I wanted to get started, if a listener is maybe just interested in pursuing what you've done and building something similar, where would you suggest people start and kind of how to go about it? And feel free to go as deep as you want or as shallow as you want.

Yeah, I have a YouTube channel right now. It's called theurbanfarmer.co. If you just put that in your ULR, it'll take you to my YouTube channel. I've made a series of videos on what I do. So if people also want more information or interested in taking any of my workshops or want to know about my book when it comes out, they can just go to greencityacres.com and then just like sign up for my mailing list.

You can choose, you know, what you want to sign up for, if it's my speaking events or whatnot. And then, so the book that originally got myself into this was Spin Farming. So they can go to spinfarming.com and check out that book. And that's kind of what I used to get started.

And yeah, I think that's about that will turn people in the right direction. Is this the kind of thing that's possible to do part-time? Yes, it is. In fact, I encourage people to do it part-time to start. It makes the transition a little easier. If you can set yourself up where you've got some kind of job, where you've got sort of secure salary, and you are able to cut back, say 15 to 20 hours a week to focus on the farm, it's absolutely possible to do that.

And I really encourage people to do that where they don't have to necessarily go in, you know, all cards on the table, full risk, and have that transition. Sometimes that works better for others. For myself, actually going all in worked really well for me because once I had some real skin in the game and had a real risk of failure, that made me push really hard.

So, I mean, different strokes for different folks, right? Like some people like to do things a little differently. I'm more of an all-in kind of guy. I always have been. But yeah, the transition can be pretty advantageous to a lot of people. Yeah, it seems to me that the key to a business like yours would be developing the market.

And if you don't have the market, no matter how great you are, you know, sticking seeds in the ground and having them grow up, you don't make any money. And so it would seem to me that I mean, that's why the commodity food system is so attractive to many large farmers, is because you don't have to worry about developing the market.

But it would seem to me that, and I think the market, I don't know about your experiences, but I bet you've probably got more demand than you can handle. I know that here... Go ahead. I do. And just to pick up on what you're saying there, you're absolutely correct.

The marketing is the most important part of farming. The farming is the easy part. The work isn't easy. Nothing is easy. I'm not going to tell anybody that any of this is easy, but if you talk to any successful business person or any successful person in life, nobody's going to tell you it's easy.

It's all hard. But the amount of enrichment and joy that I get out of the work makes it all worth it. But yeah, you're absolutely right in marketing. That is the most important thing. And so when my book comes out, that's my focus. In my book, I'm not going to talk about how to build the best compost, how to build the best soil.

This is about the marketing and how the marketing ties into the production. And so that's what sets the way I farm apart from what how most other farmers do. Most other small-scale market gardeners, they plan their farm. They do a farm plan in the winter that basically dictates every single week what they plant.

My farm is totally improvisational because I operate on a small scale. I grow quick-growing crops and I'm totally based on what the market demands. And so with my book, I'm going to get into how that relates to farmers markets, primarily restaurants, how to change your production on a fly and shift towards market demand.

So my farm is sort of like Tai Chi. It's sort of like bending to the will of what the market demands. Good, good. Because that's the thing. The economics have to be compelling. And although the market, I mean, I tell you, Curtis, I don't live in a foodie place.

Although, well, here's my evidence. I think if we can get, I'd love to see millions of people start doing this. And who knows, I may do it. I've talked with some friends and we've talked about it. I just haven't seen the way to kind of get started with all the other commitments of my time that I have.

But who knows, I may. But I don't know. I have friends from across the economic scale, from across the political scale, from across the age scale. And I don't know anybody who isn't concerned about the quality of their food. And where I live, there are on all sides, let's see, a quarter mile away is a store that's called Greenwise.

It's a Publix, it's our local, it would be like a Safeway, it's a regional brand. And that's their organic store. There's a Whole Foods about less than a mile from me. And then there is a Trader Joe's going in about a mile and a half from me. And there are a couple of more gourmet markets that are within two miles of my house.

And so, I live in a wealthy place, but I just look around and I say, "The market is here for individuals and the market is here for all of these restaurants." And I cannot find any local producers here in my area. Now, I've not looked as hard as I'd like to look, but I've tried to change where I'm buying.

I'm sick and tired of not knowing where my food's coming from. And I've tried to find producers and it's hard to find. So, I think this is a tremendous business opportunity. If you can hammer out and give the instruction on developing the market, there's plenty of great information on developing the product.

And then I'll help people make the financial transition and give some of the financial planning tools to make the transition. And together, we'll make the world a better place. How's that for a rousing try to end on? Yeah, sounds like a great deal. Let's do it. Anything else you want to share before we go?

I think that's good, Josh. We covered a lot of stuff there. Curtis, thanks so much for taking the time to come on. I really appreciate it. Hey, my pleasure. (SWOOSH) I hope you enjoyed that. Curtis, I certainly enjoyed the conversation. It was exactly the kind of conversation that I love to have.

Wide-ranging, thoughtful, challenging one another, but yet agreeing and finding points of common interest. I really enjoyed the interview. I hope you have some things to think about. I find this kind of stuff everywhere. I think a lot about financial planning. And I find inspiration in ways to think about financial planning in so many different areas, as you can see from just thinking about nature and the web that nature lives in, and polycultures instead of monocultures, and how to apply those concepts to financial planning.

So I hope that you have a lot to think about. Again, as I said in the introduction, consider how you can implement some of these ideas in your own business. If you're interested in urban farming, check out some of the links in the show notes. I'm going to put some links to a couple of other interviews that Curtis has done, one on an excellent podcast called Permaculture Voices that is particularly good, and then a couple of other ones as well.

And check out his stuff, check out his information, and see if there's a way that you can... If you're interested in getting involved in this kind of thing, go for it. To me, it seems I'd rather do that than work in a cubicle. In case you haven't figured that out yet.

But if you're not interested in this, skip it. But learn some of the concepts and figure out how to apply them, because there are thousands and thousands of similar ideas and thousands and thousands of ways to implement some of these ideas to your own venture. Think about how he lowered the risk in the beginning.

Think about how you can lower the risk of any startup plan, design a plan to get you from here to there. That's what good financial planning is. It's all about designing a plan that's going to work to get you from here to there. I hope you enjoyed that. That's it for today's show.

A couple of quick updates as far as the rest of the week. Tomorrow I'll be bringing you the final bit of the three tax planning ideas. We did the timing strategies. And then tomorrow's show I'm going to finish out the conversion and the income shifting strategies. So we're going to do some hardcore financial planning.

That hardcore financial planning, I hope you're able to enjoy those shows. Yes, they are hardcore, but you need to understand them in order to figure out how to apply the stuff you always hear about. Things like IRAs, or if you're up in Canada where Curtis is, your RRSP or ERSP or something like that.

Or if you're in Germany or Finland or wherever in the world you are, there's some version of this. And you can apply these tax planning techniques no matter where you are. On Thursday I'm going to bring you an interview with a musician who has been able to make an income on the web.

That'll be good. I hope you enjoy that one. And on Friday, I'm hoping, I don't promise, but I'm hoping to have the show lined up with how to become a millionaire on a minimum wage job at Walmart. And I think you'll enjoy that. I'm going to talk about some of these concepts and show you how financial planning really integrates.

The technical financial planning that you're used to hearing about in finance books and everything, integrates with everything else. And I'm hoping to bring that out in the show that I have planned for Friday. I'm a little nervous about it because I want to do a really good job on it.

But it's challenging. So I've got the idea. We'll just see if I can execute it. I'm pretty excited about it. Leaving Thursday morning. So Thursday and Friday shows we pre-record. Leaving Thursday morning and driving out to Texas for the podcast. Movement conference. Looking forward to that. Talking to some other podcasters.

If you're interested in podcasting, I would encourage you to come. It's going to be in Dallas, Texas. The conference is on Saturday and Sunday. The tickets are reasonably priced. And I think it's an amazing opportunity to connect with other podcasters. I think in essence, in some ways, podcasters are going to save the world.

I'll prove that to you another time. But I have high hopes for the industry of podcasting. So those shows will be pre-recorded. I'll be driving back on Monday and Tuesday. If I can have some shows lined up to be released to you, I will have that. If not, well, you should have enough content here to go back and listen to something else.

Peace out, y'all. Enjoy the rest of your Tuesday. I can't believe I said peace out. The holidays start here at Ralph's, with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use Simple Truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto.

Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese. No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions. Ralph's. Fresh for everyone.