The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Chris Newman of Sylvanaqua Farms to discuss everything and anything around small-scale agriculture and cooperative business models. We jump into what sustainable ag looks like, both for landscapes and also for labor, and we discuss lessons learned around building resilient food systems based on his experiences. If you're in the DC area, go check out Sylvanaqua Farms. If you find his work inspiring, support their mutual aid program to feed people in their community (links at the end of the interview).
Chris Newman:
Sylvanaqua Farms started about 10 years ago, actually almost exactly 10 years ago as a diversified livestock ranch in the model of, say, Polyface Farm. We spent about 2013, 14, 15, 17, we spent about five years trying to do it the traditional small farm, farm to table kind of way and just realized the math doesn't pencil out if you're not born with an inheritance, with a bunch of land, with a market, if you're not using free labor, a couple of minor things, small, fundamentally broken things.
So we kind of came to the realization around 2017, 2018, something like that, that we had to try to do something different. And so, yada, yada, fast forward a few years. We've gotten to the point where we realized that we need to do things more cooperatively. Things need to look more like a business. There's like a pro-business but anti-business thing that runs in the farm-to-tail movement, especially among the Joel Salatin cohort. He calls himself a capitalist, but he very much behaves like the recipient of just the best kind of socialism. But we won't go over that yet.
So we needed to treat things more, be more businesslike, specialize more, scale more, and take more advantage of the programs that are out there to help farms succeed, that a lot of the farm-to-table food sovereignty gets away from the government. So we kind of realized that a lot of making farming and, more broadly, food sovereignty work will require us to go against a lot of the culture built up in this space, and it's a hard thing to do so.
Today, Sylvanaqua Farms is slowly becoming less and less of a farm we started out with. I mean, we did everything. Man, like, I baked bread and sold that stuff in nail salons. I mean, I was a hustle man, like I was doing eggs. I was doing small-scale veg. I was doing broilers. I had pigs, I've had cattle. I've done just about everything but guinea fowl.
But today, we are like our specific farm just runs broiler chickens, egg-laying hens, everything on pasture. In terms of the farm table food sovereignty stuff it's broiler chickens is kind of where we've decided to specialize and going into next year. You know, this year, we've kind of piloted a cooperative with two other farms, one in Palmyra and one outside of Charlottesville, both about two hours away from us. We're there concentrating more on growing, and I'm doing the processing, marketing, and selling. And as we move on and as I get older because I turned 41 this year, I'm not a kid anymore; I'm only going to get older. Pulling broiler tractors gets old.
So we're going to be turning that over to a young man's game and then trying to create a career path where you go from. If you're in your 20s maybe you're pulling broiler tractors. When you're in your 40s and 50s, maybe you're, I don't know, you're teaching other farmers, you're helping run the marketing, you're part of the design of a co-op or whatever.
But we're going to be at the point next year where we're hardly doing any farming at all. We're just processing here in our shop, we're packing, we're doing food safety stuff, we're trying to scale up our ability to process what other farmers grow so we can create this ecosystem where people who want to be farmers, especially these young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed people who want to get into it, and then they wind up getting kind of kicked in the ass by the market, which is brutal they have somewhere where they can not only sell their stuff but also have a pathway to becoming an owner in that, so they don't just become kind of like the standard tournament system poultry operator where it's like, okay, I'm going to sell stuff to Smithfield and boy, I hope they don't just tell me to piss off one day.
So that's where we're at. It's an exciting place. It's worked out so far, with some obvious giant hiccups on the way. I've got more free time and a higher quality of life than I've had at any time in the last decade that I've been doing this. So, I feel like we're really on the right track here.
Andy:
That's awesome. We kind of took opposite paths in this space. When I was younger, I was in a greenhouse, veg starts; production, nonprofits like all that stuff, and then I got burnt out of it. I went back to school for accounting because I was like, what is the thing that pays the most money? After doing this for a number of years, I've always cared about it, been passionate about it, which is kind of part of where this came from, and you kind of went the opposite direction. You went from the tech side and was like I'm tired of this; I don't care what it pays and basically said I'm going to go do a 20-year-old's job and throw my back out and all that fun stuff.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, I didn't get as busted up as a lot of people I know, but yeah, I was. I was in tech. So I did 10 years in tech. Seems like I've got a 10 year lifespan for like anything I do. So I was in tech, started at like Big Evil. I was at Lockheed Martin doing stuff with the security clearance that I still can't discuss. I got tired of that and moved to, well, increasingly smaller, kind of an oxymoron, increasingly small companies. So I wound up at the point where I was at kind of a tech consulting startup. So I was like half engineer, half management consultant, half like IT director.
It's a weird and impossibly stressful job to be in, and it started to literally kill me Like I had symptoms of frigging, maybe stomach cancer, maybe colon cancer, maybe both, who the hell knows. And I was like 29 years old, and I'd always done a lot of agriculture-related stuff in terms of my tribe, so teaching people how agricultural systems work here and, more broadly, how the social, and political systems with Indigenous people held themselves up before contact, before the invasion.
So the agriculture part of that really spoke to me. I got heavily involved in that right when my old career started to come to a head. So I figured what if I could do this for a living? And what sucks is the only person that was really talking at that time which is like, when was that? 2012, 2011, something like that Only person that really had a mic that was talking about stuff like you could be a farmer for a living were people like Joel freaking Saladin.
A lot of the people that we listen to today just weren't around 10 years ago. So, yeah, and I went with my mouth wide open and, you know, wild ride on the Dunning-Cruger curve, and here we are now. But yeah, it was. Yeah, I went from tech into farming, and, frankly, my tech background and my consulting background have actually saved me a bit going into this. After you pull the wool off your eyes and realize that the farm-to-table shtick doesn't really work and you look at it like you would an engineer or a consultant or, like your case, an accountant, you realize how silly a lot of the things that we're told to do are, and you can kind of correct yourself in short order.
Andy:
This is what's always really drawn me to some of the stuff you've done is that you are very focused on the economics of how to farm in a way that is not the conventional ag but also not, as you said, the Joel Saladin method, where it's, like you know, back of the napkin kind of math of well, if you have this many chickens and you spend this much money on feed, then you've got this much of a profit without ever, like you know, accounting for labor or all these other you know significant expenses that go along with that.
Chris Newman:
I'll tell you what, buddy, you are giving Joel way too much freaking credit there. This dude wrote in his book on paper, out loud, brags about I've never created a marketing plan, I've never created sales targets, I've never done P&Ls but like just brags about it and as it takes you a while to realize because he doesn't really talk about it that much in his book. But like it's his inheritance, like when you have a certain amount of money you don't have to care. So, it's not, it's not geared towards people like me and you that got like bills to t have a 550-acre inheritance that we can leverage into whatever we want. We're not Elon, where we can, like, spite buy Twitter for like 44 billion. I like no. Like we got to pay bills. Now, we need cash in order to make cash go out, and we have to make that cash.
What sucked for me was, you know, coming from outside of farming, like it seemed like he's, he's making money. So like, it can't just be magic. You know, there must be enough money coming in from this farm table thing. He must be selling enough chicken, selling up eggs, eggs, blah, blah, blah. And he's like it's hard to be mad at him because he says it out loud. He's like, I don't make it, and so it's like I got to look at myself and say you, idiot, you know better like you were a management consultant for five years, you would have yelled and screamed and jumped up and down if you'd seen this outside of a farming context. But in the farming context, there's all this woo-woo and magic and kind of bullshit around it. And this is where you wind up, with people who ought to know better still freaking, falling into that Super Mario trap, and if you're lucky, like me, you get another life.
Andy:
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to unpack about that. The homestead to farmer transition that exists, you know, it reminds me a lot of like, you know, you go to the gym, and you've got, like your, your fitness trainer, right, well, why is that person a fitness trainer? 99% of the time, it's because they love working out, but there's no way to work out and have a job, so they decide to make working out their job right, and that's what a lot of these homesteaders that go into, like farm to table, do, right, it's like. I love doing this. I love this, I'm passionate about this.
How do I make this the only thing I do? Because there's not enough time in the day to do what I want to do at the scale that I want. Like feeding my family. You know, the stereotypical I want to grow all my own food. Well, you can't do that unless that's your job. And then you try to do it as your job, and it's not profitable, and you don't feed your family that because you're too tired to cook a meal from growing fucking tomatoes all day. You know what I mean?
Chris Newman:
It's got a very similar energy. It kind of nailed the origin story of the Ponzi scheme. I feel like a movie could be made about that, about how somebody who's like, I've got this lovely hobby. How could I only do this hobby? I know. Let me convince everybody how I actually do this for a living, when how I actually do it is tell them the next guy. Yeah, and that's permaculture in a nutshell.
Andy:
So we're going down a rabbit hole, but it does speak to something.
I think that's really important around this idea of farming as a business. What you guys are doing in terms of this concept of cooperative economics, which I think is a really great thing and has a lot of buzz behind it, but there doesn't seem to be a playbook for how to create cooperative farms. And there are cooperatives, and it's kind of like this really messy tax thing, too.
Where cooperatives exist, some states recognize them, but still from a tax perspective, are you an S-corp or a C-corp or a partnership? And from the federal side there is no such thing as a cooperative business in the sense of tax purpose. So it's like this really messy area that I know intimately because I've been very much like all right, how do we do this from a tax side? I'm like, nobody I know does cooperatives because it's not a thing in Massachusetts. If you're in California, it's a whole other animal, but like here, it doesn't really mean anything.
But people love the idea of a cooperative. My point is that it's really complicated. Then, even in practice, it becomes really complicated because, like, how do you start a business and then give up part of your own sweat equity, in a sense, to new people, and kind of what does that process and practice look like? And I know you've been doing this for now a little while. Maybe you could speak a little bit to some of those, those issues, maybe some practical advice and, just, you know, some lived experiences.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, sure, I mean, there's a lot there. I feel like cooperatives are hard in practice, especially the way we talk about cooperative agriculture on the left, like this social enterprise that's not only going to solve the food problem but is going to solve a number of problems around labor, fairness and even getting into the restoration of democracy and things like that, and it tries to be a lot of things all at once, and one of the things that it tries to be and that I tried and fell flat on my face with was basically trying to create something that incorporates everyone all at once in the beginning
Because we're in love with this idea of democracy that everybody has value right now. There's no time element to it. There's no, I don't know. I kind of felt like it's like if you start a co-op, you've got to swing open the doors and you've got to find a way to place people where they are instead of giving yourself time to start really small and build up a kind of momentum and inertia and, frankly, money and resources that it takes to later on be able to bring in people at the right time when they're needed and put them where they're needed when you're starting out.
It's just too hard, and I think one of the big things about this is that it's like you said, people are very excited about the idea of a cooperative and what they can do, and that creates a problem where when you create one, it puts you under a microscope problem where it puts you under a microscope. Everybody's looking at you, and I think it tempts people in leadership positions to do things that are geared more towards good optics, good press, than to do what might be necessary for the organization at the time, which can include letting certain people go, which can include being really strict about who you let in, which can be being focused on profitability and being able to make money and have the resources to do what you need to do, because you just like doing everything poor, like your hands are behind your back, and if you want to create social change and you want not to be dependent on these systems that we define as toxic, then if you don't want to depend on those resources, then you need to have your own and you need to create your own.
Most of us going into this, we're working class, like a lot of us ain't rich, you know, and if we're trying to build this thing from the bottom up, then you have to build it, you have to get the materials to build the thing. So the optics are kind of a big complicating issue. And the other complicating issue that I've seen as a result, when people try to make cooperatives a little too democratic and try to let in maybe too many competing viewpoints and try to have that hurly-burly of democracy when you don't pick the right people, you're going to wind up with people problems instead of technical problems.
So, like you were talking about, there's different forms of incorporation you can do for a co-op. You could do things as a recognized co-op. You could do it as a limited partnership, like a law firm. You could do it as a non-tax, exempt nonprofit. There are a million different ways to organize a nonprofit as a business. There's a million different ways they can be taxed. There are a million different products you can do, ways you can secure land, and all these other things. There are lots and lots of technical things that are fun to solve.
But if you pick the wrong people who aren't necessarily rowing in the same direction, they might have this idea that yes, we want to pursue food sovereignty, but they have different ideas of what food sovereignty means because of various biases or whatever. Some people want to do decolonized food sovereignty and they don't even know what the hell decolonization means. Or some people just want to be able to I don't know have farmers, markets, take over the whole foodscape or whatever. Those can be radically competing visions for what is, on paper, the same goal a community being able to feed itself.
But if they don't agree on what that looks like, you're going to have personal problems, you're going to have chaos around the vision and the more people you get in the room, especially in the early stages, you try to get 10 people, 15 people in a room and try to agree what the hell is food sovereignty and how are we going to pursue it? You're never going to leave that room. You're never even going to start, and by the time you come out ore just going to hate each other, and we're going to have another story about how, as the left eats ’ the left eats itself, nobody can get along. Everybody's full of themselves, too much ego, blah, blah, blah. So that's the lesson I learned the hard way and decided fuck that, never again. I Fuck that, never again.
I'm going to start. I'm going to start an effort with people I know and trust. I know their minds, what they want out of life, and their values. We're going to start very small, but we're going to build something very real. We're going to build it as slowly as necessary for it to be really attractive to other people.
Because, and I think I've heard you allude to this several times like, eventually it comes down to somebody's got to build, start building the pieces of the future that we want. Like we can't just talk it to death. Somebody's got to start building pieces that other people can start to add on and tweak and change. And that's kind of what we're doing here. So, with our co-op with Sylvanaqua and with Blackbird which is the name of the pilot of the three farm co-op that we're making, we've been fortunate enough to have two partners who get it and we're moving in the same direction.
We have a very similar definition of food sovereignty, not only on a definitional level but also what it looks like in terms of where you sell and what you grow. Whose role is what is in the system? Like nobody's freaking out, for example, that I might not be growing a damn thing on our farm next year and I might just be killed. Like, people get that, and so we get to solve the fun technical problems.
Like when we have our retreat next month, we get to talk about, like, what does our incorporation look like? What do our contracts look like? How much do we want to grow? How do we onboard new people? Blah, blah, blah. We're not having fights about I want to include more black people. You don't want to include more black. Like we're not having that fight. We want to include more working-class people. We want to exclude people who have inheritances. Well, rich people are people, too. Like we're not having that we're able to talk about. How do we create enough food so we can start selling food at, like, supermarkets where I live, where most people are poor? We can have real conversations about actually doing food?
So, in terms of practical advice, like you know, people who listen to this podcast, they want to start. They want to start something. They want you not to repeat somebody else's mistakes. I'll say these, I'll run them down, even wrote them down Do not start a cooperative with people you have not worked with before. Don't start a cooperative with people you don't enjoy working with. So don't have that guy that you just could not stand.
Just because you all work together does not mean it's a good match. Figure out what are your real motivators for starting a cooperative. There's this book that I read when I was a consultant called the Five Whys, which is basically, if you've got something you want to do, ask yourself why. And then, when you answer that question, ask yourself why is that true? So like, I want to start a cooperative to pursue food sovereignty. Why is food sovereignty important? Well, food sovereignty is important because people don't have equal access to nutritious food, and there's all these issues around land and climate change and blah blah. Well, why is land and climate change like?
Go down that rabbit hole and make sure the people you're working with, like, have those same deep-rooted answers in terms of why they want to get involved in this and then, with that, you know, keep the democracy for later, like the big stuff. But it's also nice to have opinions from people who are outside of your area of expertise, your way of thinking, but put them on like an unpaid advisory board, like people who you can hit up on the phone and say, hey, I want to run this thing by you, not you got to vote. That's just going to create chaos for you and the other. I mean, the other thing really is to be picky about who you start with, and I think this is the hardest thing. Like, people that I've talked to who've tried to do this kind of thing are kind people, and because they're kind, they want to give everybody a chance.
And this is something I did, like when I got into agriculture. Agriculture was supposed to be uncorporate. So when I was in engineering, when I was, you know when I was doing that thing, like I was looking for like holes in people's stories because, like we're engineering things, you get something wrong, you get somebody killed, you could get somebody, like held up in an airport. Mistakes were very consequential in the line of work that I came from. So when you go into farming, I don't know, it's kind of weird.
We take the mission so seriously, like, oh, we've got to save the world, we've got to save the planet, we've got to grow food for people. But then we're really unserious about who gets to participate, so we tend to let everybody in, and chaos ensues.
And so when you turn that on its head, and you're super picky about who your partners are, and you're looking for reasons to reject people. It can look bad when people are looking at you because you look like an asshole, you look like an elitist, you look like you know this is supposed to be about, you know, bringing everybody in and bringing people together and solving differences and blah, blah, blah.
And it's like that comes later after we have something. Right now, I need to pick the two or three people who frigging get it and are ready to hustle and grind and do what needs to be done so that other people down the road can take it a little bit easier, and that's hard to do when people are watching. The thing I'll say just really, really specific is if you're going to start a cooperative, like an agricultural cooperative, start around whatever you think you'll be best at selling and what has the biggest market. I'll cut it off there.
Andy:
That's all great advice, and given the farm-to-table movement, there's a lot of opportunity to step into these areas. I mean, the thing about the farm-to-table movement that I think is downplayed—I don't want to say downplay; that's not really the right word—but I think it's not so much talked about is that people are so attracted to it because there's something fundamentally missing in the way we eat food.
Right, like there's a piece of it that's missing that people understand, even if they can't fully articulate it. Like it's nice, because you feel good, because you're buying local and blah, blah, blah. But to take your example of why, like start, you start unpacking, why people are drawn to that there's, like this really intimate piece of our identity that's tied to understanding our food where it comes from. And it doesn't mean you need to know your farmer, but rather that we understand food within this bigger landscape of who we are, our identities, our understanding of our place both physically on the landscape and temporally, through, you know the seasons and so on.
The examples I like to use a lot are white girls and pumpkin spice. Like, why do white girls love pumpkin spice? Is this really deep-seeded like humanness of, like it is fall? This is a part of our fall season, right? And it's silly that Chris is laughing. You guys can't see this, I am, but it does speak to, like, this really intimate part of our identity where it's like this is the exception where people get to go ham. This is the fall season. I do all the fall things. Unfortunately, it's just pumpkins, but it does speak to, and it's not even a real pumpkin; it's like synthetic chemicals.
And the reason I'm bringing this up, though, is because, like, you're talking about, like, finding what's best at selling. I think there's a lot of opportunity to kind of pick at that a little bit for new markets. That doesn't mean go and grow the craziest shit you can find but really think about what that movement means to you and why that's attractive to you, and I think you'll find there are a lot of people that might agree with you on why that's attractive to you, and that might help you be able to unpack a little bit of what you might be most drawn to growing or raising and start to really think about those questions of what you're trying to do and what you're trying to accomplish.
I also want to talk about the other side of this. We've kind of touched on like the pragmatic components of it from a farming perspective, but you've brought up the fact that, like, there's this other, like, very economic part that is really important that farmers tend to lack the knowledge of and refuse to engage with in a lot of ways, because it's not, it doesn't fit that like the narrative of like the, the dirty farmer who doesn't know much but how to grow food? Well, or you know, whatever the fuck it is.
You know, and I think there's a lot of ways we can start thinking about. There are tools at our disposal. Just because we're on the left doesn't mean we can't. We can't access those tools, or we shouldn't be accessing those tools, like if we're trying to talk about a level playing field, that means also utilizing all things like that. People don't get into it, and they're afraid of it because it seems really intimidating to apply for a grant. But there are a lot of resources out there and ways that we can leverage our existence, basically, and the fact that the government recognizes that our food system needs to change, and they're trying to figure out ways to inject some money into making that change happen.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, there's, there's a lot there. The first thing I would say, though, is that, like I wouldn't give white women a monopoly on pumpkin spice. Like, I love pumpkin spice. Like six foot four, 200 pounds, black is all get out. I freaking love pumpkin spice. So, yeah, I like to jump on white chicks about it because it's just fun to do that, but let's all be honest, we all love pumpkin spice.
It's fine, it's good, but I mean, what you're talking about speaks a lot to me. I think, you know, I've got some issues with Marx and Engels, but one of the big things that really speaks to me from their writings is this idea of alienation and how people feel alienated.
You know, they focus a lot on alienation from work, but where we are now because I think I've talked about this in another podcast where we've gone from the point to where leftist thinkers have said people are becoming more and more pieces of machinery I feel like, these days, people are becoming more and more the raw materials, like we are the ones being mined like they don't even need us to act like machinery anymore.
Now we're all like debt modules, basically, like people are trying to see what they can get out of us. So, you know, as that gets worse and it is getting worse, with inequality and an economy that's based more and more on rent-seeking, and that kind of thing.
People are looking for that connection to, I guess you might call it the village-like, where they feel like they depend on the people who are around them, where they're of service to the people around them, and they're not just someone who generates an income and pays debt. Because that's how a lot of us feel, Like we're living not just to work, we're living not just for the weekend, but we are just trapped in an endless cycle of make money and pay somebody on the other side of the country who's got more money than they could ever spend if they lived a hundred lifetimes.
People are sick of that, and the farm-to-table movement is, I think, one of the few things that taps into that anxiety, and unfortunately, in a lot of ways, it's tapped into it in a way. That's terrible because it's leveraging it to make more money instead of trying to fix the fundamental problem. So it's assuaging people's guilt. It's like you said about the homesteading Ponzi scheme. It's like I've got this hobby that makes me feel good. How can I do it? All the time, I can convince this sucker that I'm doing something that I'm not, and round and round we go until the bottom falls out. So that really speaks to something and part of that culture getting towards what you said about people either not knowing about the tools available to them to do cooperative agriculture or food sovereignty.
The culture around farm-to-table basically has almost swung the pendulum too far.
We don't want to be pieces of economic machinery; we want to decorporatize things, and so now we get to this point where, okay, anything that's around corporatism, anything that's around business, is potentially toxic and almost certainly toxic. So that includes financial planning, capital budgeting, grant seeking, and venture capital, like all the things you would do to resource any other kind of business We've kind of decided are evil. And that idea, unfortunately, is being given a lot of weight by people who are agricultural influencers, many of whom come into it with an inheritance Like that's their, like that's their trump card.
They don't have to go after capital and money the way that most hustlers have to because they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and they don't tell how important that silver spoon is in their story. They convince everybody that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You can get twenty-five thousand dollars on 20 acres of whatever the hell Polyface says, and they don't talk about how important having an integrated $3 million meat facility is in that equation.
Andy:
Oh, that thing.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, that little thing that's the centerpiece of his ability to make any living at all. But later on, I think we're going to talk a little bit about decolonization, the master's tool, so to speak, to try to liberate themselves or resist what they don't like. Need to look at Native people and what we did Like.
Look, for example, at if you look at military history, which I'm a big nerd about, especially like with the indigenous wars, with the French and Indian war and the Seven Years War, all that stuff that went on up in Iroquois the five nations revolutionized firearms, warfare in a way that is still used by modern special forces. They invented things like the rolling ambush. The reason we don't really line up in columns and just shoot each other in the face anymore is because Native people were like the point of the war is to win.
Andy:
So you're telling me the Patriot lied to me, Mel Gibson lied to me.
Chris Newman:
No, Gibson lied to everybody. We all saw South Park.
So I mean, when you look at, you know the Iroquois- like I try to imagine what would happen now if some of these ideological purists like existed, like within the Seneca, when these guys were trading for firearms, that they'd be able to fight three European powers all at once effectively and say you really ought to be using stone tipped arrows, because man firearms, those are the master's tools. And blah, blah, blah.
And like they would have shot that guy in the face and moved on Like they didn't have time for that because their ability to defend themselves was a very, very serious enterprise and they would grab whatever technology was available. It was not about ideological purity. It was about how do I adapt these tools to my aims and my ways of life in order to be able to survive and thrive. And the ones that did it, the five nations included, survived the onslaught and the collapse the best, whereas nations like mine didn't do it so well.
We got our asses handed to us not only by them but by the Iroquois, when they came down and raided our villages and said dude, we need more people because it's a frigging small box. So there is a historical and decidedly quote-unquote decolonized or indigenized precedent to, or precedent rather, to being willing to use the tools that are at your disposal, even if they come from a source that you're not particularly friendly with.
That's something we need to be willing to do, and when it comes to agriculture, there is so I mean, government agencies are basically begging farmers to take money. People that want to do agriculture, agriculture related stuff. There are so many grant programs. There is so much money almost every farmer that I know like the handful of farmers that I know that created like a genuine zero to like farming their ass off kind of story.
I think about people like Emma Jagoz out of Moon Valley Farm and Frederick. People like her got really good at figuring out how to boost their balance sheets courtesy of the taxpayer and the federal government, which we need to not be afraid to do. Number one and number two, when we talk about cooperatives and when we get into specialization and the fact that not everybody needs to be bent over a row doing the farming, but you need to have people whose job it is to go after money, whether it's sales, whether it's capital, whether it's grants, whatever, if you have people who are dedicated to doing that, life gets a lot easier, for sure.
Andy:
As you said, I think we need to stop trying to exist outside of the system we can't exist within.
I don't think it's really effective. t just allows us to perpetuate the system that we've existed within, where the left is like this laughingstock, where we don't accomplish anything because nobody wants to do anything. That's not pure right, and that's why you've got like these random niche Instagram accounts, myself included, that are like driving, like these narratives that are like not framed in, like a reality, where you know it's like oh, these are all these things we'd love to do, or this is the way the world should be, but it's like well, if you can't engage with the world as it is and try to put yourself out there a little bit, you're not going to change anything. And what's the fucking point? Right? If you're not doing anything, it doesn't matter how many books you read or how good your, your theory is. It just it doesn't matter. Like we're heading towards a cliff as a society and if we don't do anything to slow that down, who cares?
Chris Newman:
The reason I tend to refer to leftism in the third person and not in the first person plural is because that, like too many people that I've met in this space, they're thinkers, and they're not doing anything. They're so afraid of failing, they're really afraid of looking bad, like there's a lot of ego, there's a lot of vanity and I don't know like it. It. It smacks of, uh, one of my least favorite words, which is privilege.
You know, because, because where I grew up like I was like the rich dude in the hood, and I've talked about that like I had, I had super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. I was like, ah, I might as well have done billionaire, despite people getting stabbed in my driveway, but like people who wanted to escape that poverty like you had to hustle, there was nobody like sitting on ass talking about the world that they wanted to exist but doing nothing to like try to get out of it.
You know, people were doing what they had to do to get out, whether it was going to college or selling drugs or anything in between, both. Like there was no sitting around talking about the world that you want to exist and doing absolutely nothing to create it. And one of the problems that we have from a food sovereignty standpoint is that number one, a lot of people are talking about these end states of how things will be. And, number two, not coming up with, like, how do you get from where we are to there? Like step by step, soup to nuts, like what does the roadmap look like? Because they're depending on this collapse, on this collapse. Like that one day the whole system is going to collapse, because you know it's going to be climate, it's going to be politics, it's going to maybe be both, whatever the hell.
But there's this idea that there's going to be this blank slate. Number one, where society almost kind of resets. And number two, that the best ideas are going to win. And on top of that, not only will the best ideas win, but there will be no competition for them.
Like there's no historical precedent, for you know, if there is some sort of social collapse, which has happened from time to time, what usually happens is, like whoever has the biggest swinging dick is the one who, like, defines what society looks like after that. It's not going to be this technocratic like, oh, we're going to look at this system. We're going to look at this system and, whichever ones, we're going to have a reasonable deliberation, like, no, you know, if society collapses, people are going to be hungry, they're going to be terrified, they're going to be pissed off at each other, they're going to just live through some shit, and nobody's going to be thinking reasonably.
So who the hell knows what might come after a collapse? We might think there's going to be some kind of proletariat paradise where, like, everything is cooperatively owned, and we get rid of the aggrandizement of profit and all this other stuff. But if that guy over there is like seven feet tall and is cutting off the heads of anybody that says you can't have more than me, it's not going to happen. I think we have to get over this idea that there's a collapse that's going to give us this level playing field to finally start off of, and the best idea is going to win.
And I get swatted down by like the biggest narcissistic sociopath in the room, but rather, like, how are we going to work within the systems we've got now, too? Almost like to get us to where we want to go, almost without anybody noticing it. Like I don't like the idea of revolution. I've read way too much history to say, yeah, revolution would be great. Because usually, people like you and me get screwed in revolutions Like it's not fun. So, if I can avoid any kind of collapsed revolutionary kind of situation, I will do that, and I don't care what anybody calls me as a result of it. I don't like violence. I don't like upheaval. I am certainly capable of violence, but I'd rather not & eat pumpkin spice.
Andy:
Yeah, you know, a little pumpkin spice stops the revolution.
So there are a couple of things I want to unpack about what you just said, and also, I'm going to do a little callback to one of your Instagram stories, probably from like a year ago. So I'm going to put you on the spot about that a little bit. I'm old, so I fully agree with you. Collapse is not a good thing.
Historically speaking, It will not be a level playing field. Like you think about any other historical collapse and like throw in like nuclear weapons and like nuclear power plants that rely on these massive integrated global systems to like not burn down. I live about 15 miles from one, so like please, on the bright side, I'll go out quickly when it goes down. But you know what I mean. Like that's the silver lining here is I'm not gonna have a very agonizing death.
Our job is to, or the way I think about, like on a bigger picture, I have kids, you have kids, they're about the same age, so I think that causes your brain to think a little bit differently. A little bit differently, I think of it as my job is to start this process of rethinking what food looks like. I don't have any answers, but certain questions need to be asked and, in your case, certain things that need to be tried to be proven whether or not they work and if they don't, at least we know.
One of the stories that you did, about a year ago I think, was about American chestnuts and your anti-chestnut tirade. He's laughing again and I didn't fully disagree with you about it.
However, to the context we're talking about right now, I do think it's really important to think about tree crops and these other perennial crops, even if we can't use them as people that are growing, or think about growing food, building the resources available for future generations to have, whether or not there is a collapse of society, but rather like, all right, if there's a hundred-year-old hickory tree, hopefully, with the technology we have somebody can fucking figure out how to make it effective and efficient to process those calories right, and that can be just as valuable in the future as something as easy not to downplay what you do as growing chickens in pasture when you have, like this, industrial infrastructure set up to provide food and you know electric netting and all these other things.
So I'm curious about, kind of, if you could maybe talk a little bit about, I guess, why you wanted to talk about chestnuts and kind of maybe how that plays into what we're talking about, like this longer-term thought about food systems and understanding your place in, you know, the multi-generational development of sustainable agriculture.
Chris Newman:
I'm trying to remember because I've gone on several like chestnut related basically that it was not.
Andy:
It didn't make sense compared to corn, calorically speaking, energy input speaking, that the permie people are totally out of touch with how food grows, basically, which I don't disagree with again, but I do think maybe, when your goal wasn't to just anger people on the internet, we could talk a little bit add more depth about it.
Chris Newman:
But that is my goal. No, I think my issue with the way like I have no problem with chestnuts as chestnuts Most of any problem I'll have with anything is usually the way people talk about applying it. So, if I remember this correctly, what pisses me off about the way people talk about chestnuts is the idea of replacing corn with it. And when people say that, I don't know if they realize what they're saying. I don't think many people think about why corn is so successful. And I think when people talk about like because there's this big permaculture thing around, you can plant, I think, chestnuts and hazelnuts and some kind of guild that replaces, like, the protein, energy content of corn and soy, and it could, it could effectively like, replace the big two of you know, the big five or six of the American agricultural system.
It's not bullshit from the standpoint that you couldn't supply a farm or a community with the food that they need with chestnuts and hazelnuts. It's the idea that you're going to replace a crop like corn, which you can grow from Canada down to the Andes and everywhere in between, that you're going to replace with this fussy hybridized tree that sometimes produces nuts and sometimes doesn't. If it's in the right place at the right time, it's like, come on, everything I think about tends to be at the system level.
And, yeah, you could have isolated pockets where you know, in a region, maybe chestnut, hazelnut, guild, of what they can actually do, which is a lot, but they cannot. They are not corn because we'd be doing it if they were. They would be planting chestnuts and hazelnuts from Canada down in the Andes, serving the purpose of corn. And I think you know, just given the way I talk, because I have a very polemical from the hip kind of style, it's easy to take that as Chris friggin' hates chestnuts and everything about them.
You heard it here first; this dude goes around and cuts down chestnut trees just because they're there.
Andy:
No, it's not that I mean it's decolonizing like you're doing the opposite of George Washington. Come on.
Chris Newman:
No, you're actually doing the same, so you're using the master's tools exactly, no, I mean whether it's like, whether it's chestnuts or regenerative agriculture because that like that's another one. Like you take something that could be good, like you take chestnuts, or you take, like you take managed grazing, and then you wrap all these insane promises around them. When I hear people saying you can take a chestnut, and then around the chestnut, you wrap this promise that it could, as it could do for Alan Savory and you're done hunting black people and elephants or whatever. And you decide to go up on a TED stage and say that this is the most hopeful thing you will ever see.
We can reverse desertification. We can frigging undo climate change. We can store the whole legacy carbon load in the atmosphere and the soil. Everybody's going to get blowjobs. It's going to be great. You wrap all these promises around this thing and people lose their damn minds. And now you can't have a rational conversation with people around how, hey, let's do both and like, let's take chestnuts where freaking influencer sphere and, frankly, most people aren't like you.
Andy:
You know, my wife says that too.
Chris Newman:
I can see you reading a thousand-page book about chestnuts and loving every minute of it. Most people aren't like that. They're going to listen to what they heard on the internet this one time, and that will be what they believe about chestnuts forever. When these promises get attached to these things, it pisses me off because it makes my job harder. Now, when I need to, for example, convince my customers why corn isn't evil and why I feed it to my livestock and why I'm not apologizing for it, like that's what I'm dealing with people making these wild promises about these, about these other things like chestnut.
But, the chestnut itself is innocent. It is innocent and useful and perfectly practical in certain scenarios, but it's the stuff that gets wrapped around it. It's all the hype and the promises and all this other stuff. But you and I, if you and I sat down and planned an agricultural system for a region, we would probably come to very similar conclusions about how different crops would be used. And what sucks is, it's not you and me sitting in a room.
Be me trying to convince other people who are not subject matter experts in any of this stuff about the way forward and trying to basically unwind their miseducation that they get from this influencer sphere where anybody can say whatever the hell they want it's a lot of money to just say whatever the hell you want, especially if people want to hear it so much money in it, right and just, I'm not getting any of it, but I would you know I'd like to if somebody wants to send some money because you're not blowing enough sunshine up people's asses.
That's your problem. If you were a trillionaire by now, I know you would have told the people what they wanted to hear. Then I could buy all the land and do it.
Andy:
If I could have all my chestnut trees, they would be your origin. They'd be all dead, but you know I'd have them.
So you're bringing up this constant idea of a scale, right, because that's really what, what makes corn, outside of, like, its growing properties, so significant, like people hate it because of its scale and this ubiquitousness in the marketplace, which is weird, because then you also have, like, these people being like hemp, like we need to grow hemp and replace it, and it's like, well, you're talking about a different crop to do the same thing that corn does, but because it's not being done now, it's OK, but if it was, you wouldn't like it. Like, the only reason you like is because of weed, which it's not the same thing. So, I'm not really sure why you're so sold on this crop. That's a whole other story. But you've talked about monocrops, and I really, the first time I saw you talk about monocrops, I was like, what the hell is this guy talking about?
And then I started doing some research and I was like, oh, this is actually really interesting. So, like there's this really interesting historical context for monocrops, especially here in North America, and also the role of monocrops as not being necessarily a bad thing.
Like we tend to shit on this idea of monocrops, like because it's of the ecological devastation that happens, or theoretically happens, from monocrops, which to an extent it does, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. But also we need to, like, we have to come to terms, when we talk about growing food, with, like, what the fucking food pyramid looks like, right, where, like, you have these staple crops that nobody really wants to actually talk about, that are the foundation of all our agriculture, whether or not we're raising corn for livestock.
Like we're still talking about 50, 60% of most of our diets coming from some kind of grain. That means you have to grow a lot of it, and it's hard to grow a lot of it without having a ton of labor go into it, without monocrops. So I don't know if you could talk a little bit about the scale and a little maybe a little bit about monocrops and kind of your thoughts about what that really looks like while being sustainable I could probably do a whole entire podcast just on that part.
Chris Newman:
Trying to figure out where to even begin on this. Like people, I think. When we look at what's wrong with food systems and food webs, people are way too focused on tools and methods. Tools are like the chestnut they're innocent. It's the culture, the values, and so forth that motivate using that tool. That decides whether a hammer builds a house or whether a hammer caves your neighbor's head in. The tool is just sitting there minding its business.
So when we look at what's wrong with monoculture, if you were to walk through, let's say, you got transported back to fricking, I don't know 16th, early 16th century what is now New York, and you were in a village somewhere near where my people used to live, you would leave the village and you would walk outside the palisade and you could walk a mile in any direction and find nothing but cornfields. This is before steel tools. This is before combines. This but cornfields. This is before steel tools. This is before white people. This is before anything resembling any kind of industry as we know it now.
You would have gone to an Algonquin village, especially a big one that was approaching a small city size or even an Iroquois country, and you could walk a mile in a direction, and it would be all food. It would be mostly corn. It would be interplanted with three sisters. We did a slash-and-burn agriculture so you would have the forest right next to it waiting for their turn, things running on, basically a 30 to 40-year rotation, very, very long scale stuff that you cannot get away with in a market economy. So, like the monocultures, was there something very close to a monoculture? If you were to go into a modern farmer's cornfield now, this is another thing.
There's so much goddamn misinformation about how conventional farming works. Like I live in the middle of grain country now, like I'm on the Northern Neck of Virginia, like there are, like this is corn and soy and canola country. You walk into these cornfields. Now you walk into the wheat fields, you will find cover crops. They don't really till it. It's not really a monoculture. Like people are co-planting nitrogen fixers along with their corn. They're putting in catch crops to prevent erosion and to fix certain nutrients.
At the same time, it is not as dumb and unsophisticated as people put out there to make conventional agriculture into this villain. The villain in this story is not the fields and fields of corn or the fields and fields of whatever. The villain in this story is the fact that corn is being grown for a price and not for a person. So corn is going into this black box of a market where it can be turned into God only knows what. Number one or number two, it's tied to some kind of political patronage. Or, number three, it's tied to some pretty strong-arm trade-type stuff. So we've got monoculture, like the bugaboo that people have around.
It's really about land use change. We're leveling the rainforest, we're knocking down perennials, we're plowing up soil, we're screwing things up in order to turn native landscapes or wild landscapes, or whatever you want to call it, into these cornfields, and we can't stand it. And we're not turning them into these things in a vacuum, turning them into these things in a vacuum. We're turning it into them because when you grow corn, it becomes ethanol because there are regulations geared towards the patronage of farmers, one of the most protected political classes in the United States. We're growing corn because we're shipping it off to Africa and Southeast Asia.
We're shipping it all over the damn global south, depressing those agricultural economies and making them dependent on us in ways that go way beyond agriculture, that go into defense, that go into mining, that go into immigration and all this other stuff. Food has been turned into primarily a weapon. That's the problem. It's it's not the fact that it's monocult.
If you were to get rid of the monocultures and keep the same political environment, you will have the same outcomes, except food will get a lot more expensive. You're not necessarily going to arrest land use change. You're not going to do any of the stuff that we would supposedly like the end of monoculture to do. That's not going to happen. You're just going to wind up with the same outcomes. It's just going to be way less efficient. Everybody's going to be way more exhausted and get paid a lot less. That's all that's going to be.
And as long as that is the primary purpose, history demonstrates that you can do monocultures sustainably, better than sustainably. But when you do monocultures within a sustainable cultural and economic and so forth kind of framework, it fundamentally changes the way you operate those monocultures. You don't level forests to create cornfields just because the price of corn is like 319. You know you're not going to level that forest if you don't see mouths that need to be fed. If you like, if your people are comfortable and you don't have anything you need to trade, you would do the almost impossible thing in a capitalistic market economy: sit down and shut up and be happy because you've planted enough.
But as long as we have this growth for growth's sake kind of culture that dominates our economy and this is why it's so important to create economic alternatives, and not just philosophical alternatives to capitalism, but real economic, living alternatives is because as long as that mode of growth for growth's sake, of chasing prices, chasing commodities, chasing markets that are connected, maybe or maybe not, to people who you've never met, will never meet, will never have any real impact on your life, as long as we're doing that, monoculture will be the tool that we use to level this planet.
But if it wasn't monoculture, it would be something else. The problem is the culture, it's the values, it's the market system that we have now. I don't know eco-socialist, left or whatever the hell we want to call it. We need to focus a lot less on ending monoculture or getting rid of corn or like doing these little things. We have to create different economic systems that use the tools that we have now in a much, much, much better way. That creates a lot less upheaval, that creates a lot less systemic risk. But, like, one of the things that kind of raises my hackles a little bit when people talk about it because this is another rant I've gone off on chestnuts that I don't think you might be familiar with because I think I was screaming this to my dad.
Andy:
Yeah, I wasn't there.
Chris Newman:
If you were to replace corn with chestnuts and chestnuts fell short, who's the first one to starve? You know it ain't going to be rich people, the people who bear the brunt of the risk for all these new technical whiz-bang kind of things that we want to do ecologically. If we fuck up, the people who are going to suffer the most are the people at the bottom of the economic ladder. We have to be really careful about wanting this wholesale revolutionary change in ecological systems and try to move the needle as little as possible but in the right direction. Because that upheaval, that risk always falls on people at the bottom.
Andy:
Yeah, when you're talking about these systemic changes versus these symbolic changes, I think a lot about like the eat the rich thing. Right, if we kill Jeff Bezos, like we're gonna somehow solve capitalism. You know, like as if there aren't five people that are gonna be gunning for his seat, and like you're not changing anything with like, even if you did go out and eat the rich, like, it's not going to change the systemic problem that perpetuates rich people existing. You have to challenge it from the other end otherwise you're dealing with just a symptom of the system as it exists. Yeah, and I think going after monocrops can sometimes be that.
I have this other sort of project with Dr Ayesha Khan. We've talked about like monocrops and, like is eating meat the problem? And it's like well, no, there's this whole infrastructure that exists. Even if we stopped eating meat today, ethanol and all these other byproducts of corn would continue to perpetuate the system, regardless of our dietary change. So, you're not really addressing the issue by going vegan. I'm not saying that you shouldn't eat less meat and that there aren't other things to be considerate of, but as a wholesale thing, it's not going to change anything.
So I did want to talk about this idea of scale too, because what you're doing is trying to scale up to compete price-wise with a lot of farmers that are operating at scales of orders of magnitude larger than you. And again, this goes back to this idea of like how do we grow food and be local and do all these things while also providing affordable food, livable wages and like not selling out, so to speak, around like scaling and using these fancy business ideas of capital investment and, like you know, tax dodging and whatever it might be right?
But that doesn't mean like scaling is bad. It's a tool that we should be aware of. How much can we actually scale? What are your thoughts around like, what that actually looks like in terms of like viability for without like losing its sense of place, of where your food is coming from?
Chris Newman:
I guess yeah, I mean, that's the risk that in scaling up that you become the thing you hate, right? Like, we don't want to fall over that watershed where it's like, oh, we just became the next Cargill ADM, and that sucks.
Andy:
With better optics.
Chris Newman:
With much better optics and just best greenwashing money can buy.
The fundamental question, like the thing that I asked myself and this is like one of those weird things you get up, you look in the mirror and you like yell at yourself like you're in a movie. For me it's do you want to feed 640,000 people or not? And that's like the number of people that like roughly live in Washington DC, or something like that. And it's when you look at the problem in terms of the number of people who need to be fed that it becomes really clear that you have to find a way to scale.
Otherwise, this is all just masturbation. This is all just us trying to make ourselves feel working class. People are able to be fed good food coming from regenerated landscapes. Then you have to think about scale. You don't get to not, you don't get to grow your 2,000 chickens on your little farm or whatever, and claim, well, if everybody else was like me, then everything would be fine. Like that's the most narcissistic shit you could possibly. For me, scale is necessary not only from the standpoint of solving the food problem by creating a new type of food web but also from the standpoint of solving the food problem by creating a new type of food web. But when we talk about like a farm business or cooperative, I think it's the only way for them to be economically viable.
And when you look again like I always look back in my own roots into history, into how indigenous people manage landscapes from a position of reciprocity rather than perpetual growth, they did everything at scale. You know my great, great, great, great great grandmothers and grandfathers. Like they, they did everything at scale, my great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers and grandfathers. They did everything at scale. They went big, or they went home because they had mouths to feed, and they had a lot of mouths to feed, and there was no trying to feed everybody at the backyard scale.
Native villages tended to be connected areas of villages related to clan tribes, where everybody cooperated to create enormous amounts of food across the entire commons. Like the entire landscape was treated as a giant farm, whether it was pulling fish and crabs and shellfish out of the water or growing corn or hunting stuff out of the woods or harvesting acorns or freaking chestnuts and all the other stuff that was here. You know that was all done at scale as a team, everybody together. So when we like, fast forward and we have this idea that scale is bad and that we should do like the whole plowman's folly thing of like everybody has two pigs on, however many freaking I don't know whatever that shit show was. We're basically we're trying to feed the world or a city at backyard scale they have not heard of the word redundancy yet I don't know it.
It just doesn't work. There's no historical precedent for scale like for that tiny scale really working. You know, in my mind, there's a scale that is killing the planet, and there's a scale that has been good and has rejuvenated the planet and has allowed people to live in balance on landscapes for very, very long periods of time. But both of them involved bigness and we need to channel the culture that drove the virtuous bigness and get away from the culture that drives the bad.
You know the bad bigness that's all about accumulation and making myself rich and speculating and gambling. And the other one that's people-oriented and reciprocity oriented, not only towards living people but towards everything else in the ecosystem. And I think you have to be careful to not fall into that trap of anything the bad guy is doing is bad. That's just a really dangerous thing to fall down. It ties your hands when it shouldn't.
Andy:
Or, conversely, anything the good guys are doing is good.
I'm going to pick on permaculture, permaculturalists right now people that are like doing cool, like, you know, mutual aid and so on just because they're doing those good things doesn't mean their food systems are inherently good, and that's what we should be mimicking, which I think can also be kind of, in some other ways, really difficult and dangerous to kind of navigate, because it's hard to shit on somebody for who's also doing good things, like, hey, man, you're doing these really cool things, but also that doesn't mean your food production system is like the thing we need to replicate across the globe, which people don't like hearing because they are doing a good thing.
So the other side of this idea of scale is also specialization, which you've touched on a little bit at this point. It is also something I think people again, you see these ebbs and flows of marketplaces, and you're like, all right, well, I have this ebb, you know, I've sold out of the thing you primarily do.
You know, I think about landscaping right around here. You got the landscaping guys. They got like a month or two off, then they go straight into snowplow, right, because it's like well, I got this truck, this capital invested, I need to do something with it. Most of them end up not making any money because of like, how expensive like repair is on your plow truck.
I think that like is a really great metaphor then for like farming. Like it's like, all right, I got all my. You know, we used to do like tomato starts, and I was like, all right, what the hell are we gonna do? Like from like August? And I was like all right, well, we can do mums, which is fine. And then it'd be the like late fall, and it's like all right, what the hell are we gonna do for like four months, five months?
But that is an issue for farmers that are in that spot where it's like, okay, the season's over, what do I do? And they start trying to diversify, or they start thinking about all right, well, I'm doing these things, I've got this space of land that's not being used. Maybe I could grow mushrooms on it. Whatever it is right, and that can be really dangerous in a different way. So I know you've done some diversity in the past. Don't know if you want to speak about that.
Chris Newman:
I mean the big thing that I would tell farmers about diversification. We should think more about diversification across customer bases than product bases and it's speaking to the culture of sustainable agriculture, of farm to table. We, and you know, the whole farm-to-table thing. Like farm to table, which basically says you've got one kind of customer like you should be going from your farm directly to somebody's table. You should be like you should be like somebody's doctor; it should be the super intimate one-on-one kind of relationship and it really buttonholes you into thinking, okay, I got this one kind of customer, so now I need to be able to please that customer, no matter what, and usually that involves growing lots and lots of different kinds of stuff.
You diversify across your product base. So, you know, I started out doing every damn thing. I did bread, I did, I did small-scale veg, I did boilers, I did pigs, I did freaking ducks. At one point like, oh, ducks. But you know, we, we, we do this thing where we, we try to diversify in order to be able to satisfy this very particular type of client and we kill ourselves doing it, because we've kind of tied our hands in terms of thinking about what if I sold door-to-door farmers markets, independent restaurants, what if I tried to get into grocery stores, regional wholesalers and maybe a giant wholesaler like Sodexo?
We tend not to think about diversifying that way because Sodexo is evil, the regional wholesalers are evil, and they're part of the bad system. But there's, in my view, nothing wrong with taking a product that's grown in a quote-unquote regenerative way, in a sustainable way, and getting it to a distributor or some other kind of like middle man. Middle men aren't always terrible. Getting it to someone who will get it to the rest of your community at a price they can actually afford, like that. That's kind of like.
The secret is if we can use scale and specialization to scale up across a larger view of a landscape. So if you've got someone who's specializing in poultry, somebody who's specializing in grains, somebody specializing in this, specializing in that across a landscape, you have a balanced ecosystem, especially if you're working together and not just doing this lazy fare. You do your thing, you do your thing, but we're deciding okay, grains make sense on this farm this year. It makes sense on this another year. Livestock makes sense here, and water work and fishery make that sense here. If you're doing that in a coordinated way, you can treat this place the way indigenous people treat an ecosystem in a market context, and you can grow at a scale that will allow you to.
You're not going to match. You're never, ever, ever going to really match conventional agriculture because they're sending the bill to the planet, basically, and making the point where they go, so like there's no way you're going to make that up, um, which is why I can't stand. What's his name? Gabe brown, or whatever talking about? He could like he could produce regenerative, you know, regenerative poultry and grains and all this stuff at a lower cost point than conventional because I don't use inputs and blah blah. It's like dude, shut up.
You could like get rid of all the inputs you want, but the bill that conventional egg sends to the planet is so damn big you will never beat it by not using chemicals or like antibiotics or whatever the hell anyway. That's all rabbit hole, but you can get close enough and get close enough to their prices for people to give it a second look because you know people. You know, if you're like a buyer at a food line or probably not a Whole Foods, they're weird.
But, like, think about like an Aldi, or you know, one of the like discount type supermarkets, or like a buyer for a buyer for Sodexo, or in my area, like, um, I don't know, standard produce or Akini produce or something like that. If you can get something that has the story that the food that's coming in here is produced at a living wage by people who live in this area, who have a career path that takes them from a 20-year-old to a retired 65-year-old, that's produced in a 20-year-old to a retired 65-year-old, that's produced in a regenerative way, that does not degrade landscapes, that puts money back in its community.
By having these high wages and by bringing money, they can sell that story at a 15%, 20% premium. They can't sell it at a 4%, five, six, 10, x premium. So if we can use scale and and scale and specialization is the only thing you're going to use to get in that range where you're able to compete and make like a big time distributor. Go wait, really. You know, I've got a quote from PFG for eggs for, like you know, two, 99, yours are like three, 20. I think I can make up that difference.
Yeah, because when you know when they sell that end product, you know the, the price goes up by like I don't know, like eight, nine, ten percent or whatever. But it's got these faces attached to it. People who maybe you know, who you've heard of, who you can get your hands on, people will pay that price. Even working-class people will pay that price because it won't kill them. It's like a difference of a few cents or maybe a dollar, and not like eight, nine, $10 every single week.
The only way you get there is specialization. The only way you get there is scale. So when you're talking about specializing number one, just get over the idea that it's a bad thing to do.
It's like I said, you don't have to grow mushrooms and livestock and honey and all this other stuff. Like you can specialize in this one thing and grow enough of it where you could land anyone from Sodexo all the way down to that farm-to-table consumer and everybody in between, and when one of those goes away, you still have the others and I feel like that's a lot more safe and secure than the other way, which is all right. I'm going to do a diversified livestock operation.
I'm going to have pigs, I'm going to have cattle, I'm going to have chickens and if one of them shits the bed, then I'm going to be all right because the other two like that's not usually how that's going to work, like if you have three lines of business and one of them like disappears on, nowhere for them to go, they're taking up all the rooms in your in room, in your freezers. You fed them already; you've got all the infrastructure for them already. Like it's not going to get better because you have chicken and whatever. It's just you're going to go broke slightly less quickly. Yeah, it could actually be worse for you because it could feed this delusion that you're actually making it when you're not. So if you know, for you have people who are risk averse and want to diversify in something fine, but diversifying your customers, not in your product base.
But this issue kind of goes. It goes deeper than just filling in your slow periods, and specialization is the purpose of society. Like we, we get together because you're good at one thing, you're good at another thing. Why don't we combine those things so that we can all live better lives instead of each of us trying to be self-sufficient and kind of do everything ourselves?
And there's, I don't know like a, like a conflict, you know, within the left. Like the left when it comes to and even the right really, really, I mean, the whole spectrum of homesteading and farm-to-table usually revolves around this whole self-sufficiency stick. But on the left, we also have this idea that you know, with agriculture, we want to have like reasonable workloads and we want to have living wages and we want to be able to retire at a decent point in our lives and like we want to have living wages and we want to be able to retire at a decent point in our lives, and like we want to have the nice things. If you want the nice things, you have to specialize. If you're trying to do everything, you're going to kill yourself. If you're going to try to, like, run a whole entire ecosystem on one farm and try to produce every single thing that it can, you are going to kill yourself. You will not make it to 40.
So if you want that 35, 40-hour work week, you must specialize in something. You got to be able to hand stuff off. You have to have really good systems that don't lend themselves to doing 15 or 20 different things on the same landscape. You want a living wage. You want to retire by 65, you want to take off for a month or six weeks for vacation or whatever. You want parental leave.
Do you want any of that stuff? You've got to specialize to the point where you've got so much product and so much cash flow that you can afford to do it without being just stressed out because your cash flow is so tight, because you've got no backup because you've got 20 things you've got to do instead of like one or two. So that's what I'll say about specialization. It is so, so, so necessary if agriculture is going to achieve those stated goals of reasonable to good quality of life without being born rich.
Andy:
Yeah, so you brought up two points that I think are worth talking about. I mean, everything you said was worth talking about, but two things that came to mind as you were talking. The first is this idea of, like, despecialization and, like, you know, if you're trying to talk about numbers working like, the idea of capital investment when you diversify is astounding, especially at the scale that you know, the small farm-to-table movement is talking about. If you're buying equipment to do, I mean, you've done cattle, you've done sheep. Are you using the same fencing for all of them? Probably not. You know what I mean. There are so many pieces that go into it that are just fundamentally mismatched with this idea of diversification. You have bees. Look at the equipment that you need to buy just to produce honey. it is not insignificant.
Those are the things I think gets lost because people are not thinking about their sunk cost at all. They're saying, hey, I've got this equipment, that's only another $2,000, but look how much more money I can make. Instead of saying, hey, I've now spent X amount of money on equipment, but I'm still not making any more money, why am I investing more money to not change anything fundamentally right? I think that's really important to understand. And again going back to this idea of business and how we don't treat the cottage industry of farming or the cottage industry side of farming as a business in many ways.
The second piece that you brought up is this idea that the left and the right also have this really weird relationship with specialization. You know, when I was younger I was really into reading theory and all this stuff. I moved away from it as I got older but I've always been really into like the more economic side of things. So I'd read Adam Smith and so on, and everyone's familiar with the idea of Adam Smith talking about the invisible hand, and that's been kind of co-opted as this idea of the free market, whereas I don't really think that's what he meant.
My reading on it was that he meant the collective unconsciousness of organizing, of community building was what kind of guided that more? You know at the time. You know, you talk about more of a cottage-type industry in a small town, but the idea was that you understood the market needs and your place within the market where you specialized. You know if there are three carpenters, one of you specializes in tables, the other in chairs and whatever else you know. In contrast, we don't have that because we don't have community, and I think a lot of this fundamentally boils down to this idea of we don't. We're so isolated, which we talked about at the beginning of this, that the idea of specializing feels like isolation when it shouldn't be. It should be finding our where we fit as a piece in this bigger puzzle.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the more you specialize, the more you have to depend on other people, and that's where I think the toxicity of our culture kind of kicks us in the ass is that nobody wants to be dependent on anybody because we're in this. Like you said, the invisible hand to me the way I read it when I read Smith was the invisible hand is basically greed is good. As an invisible hand, people acting in their own self-interest will move society towards, like you know, higher planes or whatever the hell, greater comforts, whatever. But the whole idea was that you looking out only for yourself was what makes everything better. It's what's made everything bigger. It's given us air conditioning, but that's about it.
Andy:
It's also we used to not need it, so there's that too exactly it's like.
Chris Newman:
It's it was a thing like capitalism is like firefighters that set fire to the town. It's like we solve our own problems that we created for no reason. You know, it's like the more self-sufficient you get, it's weird, like the more you feed into that idea of being isolated and alienated like I don't need you, screw you. Like it's this whole attitude towards the world of like screw everybody. You know it's the same fear and anxiety that drives people to kind of go the other way and get as rich as possible so I can have a God complex and do whatever I want. I don't have to need anybody, I just buy whatever the hell I want, like money, is it? It's the same kind of thread that drives both of those behaviors.
There's people who are trying to amass this kind of self-sufficiency in terms of homesteading and have their own land and skills and blah, blah, blah, or people just trying to do it with money, trying to do it the fast way. So you know, the more we do that, the more we kind of fall down into that. The thing you mentioned earlier, though, about like the idea that people kind of don't think in the economic sense about the sunk cost issue and like what it means to deploy money one way towards another way. You know the best way to send somebody with this self-sufficiency, like nature, eco kind of mindset run toward the hills is to mention marginal analysis.
Marginal analysis is what every person shouldn't go into business if you don't know what the hell that is. If you have 100,000, what's the best way to spend it to produce the return you want within the context that you want that return. So I have to think about that all the time, like whenever I'm getting ready to buy, say, pork from somebody because I don't raise pigs anymore because I got tired of them being in the damn street, so I buy it from other people. So I buy it from other people.
And if I'm going to spend $5,000 to buy five or six pigs from somebody to resell, I got to think to myself all right, if I sell those pigs after my own labor, co-packing, put it in the freezers, blah, blah, blah, I'm probably going to to make 9% within the context of what I want to do, Because I could gamble it. I can make 100% or 200% or I could lose all of it. I could put it in a stock market and let it sit there for a year and maybe make like 12% 13%, depending on where the market is. I could put it in a cattle and just use it as stock cattle. $5,000 will buy me like five head of cow in way.
Prices are, in two years, like I could double that money, or I could put that money into cold storage, and so I'd be able to specialize more. Like instead of raising 15,000 chickens, I could maybe raise 20,000 chickens, or I could bring on a new partner. So when you've got like that $5,000, there's so many things you could do with it and you have to have a framework that allows you to make intelligent decisions about what to do with that money and have a damn good reason for doing what you're doing, because I could, like you know, the $5,000 that I just spent on pigs I could absolutely spend somewhere else.
You know I could put more freezers back here. I could do some more crap like cold storage is my biggest problem right now but I have to have a decision-making framework that says my relationship with this farmer is more important over the long term, because I'm trying to convince this person to do like x, y and z over the next five years so that five grand is worth it. Um, most people don't have like a flow chart kind of decision making apparatus to do that. They're mostly doing it based on fuck, hey, my customers are going to fail if I don't have everything. Like I said I ain't worried about time, so I will keep talking about this.
I had somebody that approached me recently that had something happen to them. That was the same thing that happened to me recently, which was they had somebody who was in their CSA program who left, like them. They had a meat CSA, kind of like I have, and somebody left because some vegetable producer decided to get into broilers, and so now this person could go, and they could get their veg and their meat at the same place. So they said toodaloo, I love what you're doing, but it's more convenient for me to go over here. She freaked out. She's like, I need to diversify because, you know, if I can't offer everything that people want, then they're going to freaking leave. And this is why diversifying across and we're getting back into the diversification specialization thing.
But this is why specialization and diversifying across customer bases is so necessary because when the same thing happened to me when somebody bounced away from me because they wanted to go to, I forget what it was like ButcherBox or something like that, like somebody that had like all this shit. I'll tell them right now I don't want that customer. I don't want the customer that expects me, with my like you know, three-quarters of a million dollars in revenue, to be like Walmart or ButcherBox, which makes, I forgot how much money they make, but it's an ungodly amount of money because they source from like four countries in all 50 states. A customer that wants you to be that will kill you. So instead, I'm going to produce at a scale where it's like, all right, you're not going to buy my chicken because you can't buy vegetables for me, or because you can't buy lamb or frigging bison or whatever the hell this person wanted. You can't do that and I'm going to lose that customer.
But because I'm producing so much poultry and because, like, let's say, I'm producing so many eggs, I can actually put a bid in front of like Aramark or Sodexo, or I can approach Food Lion and say, hey, can I bring you like 14 cases of eggs a week?
So that person has just snatched that one customer away from me and will never, ever in a million years, be able to compete with me up the customer supply chain because I'm operating at that scale, and that's why I could sleep at night.
When customers want me to act like I'm Amazon or Walmart or whatever, I can just say bye and let some other farmers drive themselves crazy trying to grow 60 or 70 different things on some small landscape with free labor or whatever else the hell they're doing. Anyway, that's like a long road back to the whole specialization scale thing, but it's why it's so important over time to either supply what a Walmart can supply, like that full product catalog, or you're going to spend all this time educating the consumer about why they should be satisfied with the fact that you don't have what they want. Neither of those work.
You should not expect to be Walmart, and you should not become an educator. You're a fucking farmer, and you should be diversifying across your product catalog so that your food can get to everybody, whether you're delivering it to the door of some rich guy in Chevy Chase or whether it's winding up in Walmart for like $4 a dozen. At scale, you can make those numbers work.
Andy:
Yeah, and I think this all really boils down to pragmatism, right, About what you can realistically do, and I think across the whole spectrum of what we've talked about is like pragmatism and even being pragmatic, about being pragmatic.
We don't want to be so pragmatic that what we're doing is meaningless, but things are complicated. The world, the food system, your buyers, and the people you hire are complicated, and trying to do any of this is really difficult but necessary in the sense of like.
We can't, again, go back to how we started this conversation; we can't be buried in theory and this philosophical idea of like. Well, this is how we should be doing things, and that means we need to actually go and do things and be vulnerable and be imperfect and try to build things with imperfect people, and they might not have the same exact vision of the world as we do, but that's okay. We have to navigate the difference between identifying people who are identical to us in our political opinions and so on and like people who are totally off the chart.
You know how we feel about sustainable food, politics, race, and other things that can quickly muddy up conversations. So I want to ask a little bit about your thoughts on building systems and being pragmatic, and how that might influence the way people move forward, how it's influenced your movement forward, and how you're trying to figure out the best way to do any of this.
Chris Newman:
When you're starting, like a lot of people do, which is with relatively little, especially when you're coming into agriculture, it's best to start small and it is best to kind of find your tribe, all and it, and it is best to kind of find your tribe. You know, it is important to be able to reconcile differences with people and, ultimately, at a societalwill coexist level, to figure out how differing opinions and visions of the world are going to coexist together.
But when you're trying to build something, when you have an agenda, when you have something that you're trying to take from your mind and make real in the world, and you're trying to do that with limited resources of money, time, all of that, the people who you're doing it with, they have to be your people, they have to get it, they have to be very much like you, at least in terms of what you're going after, like the specific thing you're going after, like the specific thing you're going after. And your personalities have to be complimentary. You know if, necessarily, if you have somebody who's like in a co-op kind of situation, like I, tend to be extremely extroverted. I like people, I'm energized by people. So I'm kind of naturally good at sales, I'm good at marketing.
I'm good at marketing. I'm good at storytelling, but I'm also like aggressively ADHD. I'm really bad at like detail. I can't keep appointments. I forget things all the time, so that tends to make me kind of a bad farmer, oddly enough, which is why, like when I created this co-op, you know, the people who I'm in the co-op with are, you know, I'd call a couple of the people fairly introverted, which is which is like, really detail oriented and like very like you know, they're very like this nearsighted in a good way, they're better farmers than me because of it, and so kind of with, with our powers combined, our personalities combined and rowing in the same direction, like it creates a very good and positive situation where we can focus on building and not on resolving our personal conflicts.
But when you're trying to build something, at some point it will have to interface with the world around you. Like the world around me right now is like I'm in deep red Virginia, you know, I'm like this weird little isolated island where, like red Virginia, you know, I'm like this weird little isolated Island where, like black people and queers and like all these, this very diverse group of people comes together in this very red area that is very much Trump country and is building this thing, and you know we're we're we're selling to anybody.
We have to decide how are we going to engage with people who aren't us, whether that involves including them in what we're doing, excluding them from what we're doing in certain ways, but including them in other ways. Do people outside of us? Are they just customers? Are they potential employees? Are they potential partners? Can they be advisors? Should we have an educational component to slowly pick at their biases? Maybe we want to do that?
Do we want to view other people as, I don't know, failed attempts at being us? Is that a good thing? Works in progress win converts or do you want to just learn to coexist? Because sometimes, you just have to exist with hostile neighbors, like that's life, that that's something you have to get over and you do diplomacy the best you can, but you're never, always going to be best friends with people and you're certainly never going to get people to drink your kool-aid and like join your thing, like that. I always tell people that the five nations are the five nations, not one.
Even they, like, with all their stuff, are like, all right; you stay your ass on the eastern door, you stay your ass on the western door, we'll keep the fire, and the two of you just try not to hurt anybody. Like that was. That was kind of how the five nations organized themselves and you know they found a way to make it work.
Like, how do you interface with people who have some things in common with you, some people who don't? And you've got to sit down and figure out how that works. But in terms of like practically building something, like do not be afraid to say I need people who get it. You do not need to be in the business of trying to give people chances or trying to do the Kennedy thing and having a council of competitors or whatever the hell. Like you don't have the resources of the executive branch of the United States government. So like, let your cabinet reconcile the differences. Like, for me, I'm the nigga from DC, and I got $8, and I got to spend it real well. So you know, the fewer resources you have, the more you have to get your people decisions dead on, because you get fewer chances to fail. So I don't know.
That's the practical advice when you're going to build something, make sure the people who you are in it with are in it to build it. You've worked with them before. You know their personalities, you know what they're all about, and they're more than just talk because there's a lot of people out there who just run their freaking mouths and they don't. They don't do shit like they. They sell themselves really well, but one of the things that I like to tell people when they ask me about our interviewing process for like for hiring people here is one of the last things I'll ask myself is if, if the person that I just talked to and like research because it's not just your interview like I'm going to dig into your history, I want to find your references, I want to look you up on Like I'm going to dig into your history, I want to find your references.
I want to look you up on social media, Like I'm going to find your ass. I used to work for the NSA. Like I can find out shit about people, but like if this person didn't get to talk and the only thing that could speak for them was what they did and who they affected, we'd just still hire if they didn't get to give you their used car salesman spiel, and usually that tells you what you need to know. So don't be afraid to basically say no to people and be like you're not the one, and you're not the one right now.
Andy:
The internet's created a mess of things for trying to self-identify, for trying to build community, for all these different things. As nice as it is, I'm not sure if it's a net positive or not. To be completely honest, it's probably closer to neutral than anything, which is kind of disappointing given how much it's a part of our lives now.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. It's for every good thing about what all this networking is brought in. I could think of at least one bad thing, so I don't know. But then again, I'm back on Instagram, so like there must be something good about it, like there's something we brought you back, suckered you in.
You had to talk about chestnuts, so you had to come back it was chestnuts and no, it was really like a really narrow. It was my damn chefs, like most of them, were like dude. I want to place orders on Instagram because sitting over the stove, that's when I think about things; I don't want to send you a text. I know the pink dot is you, and I want to tell you that I need 20 chickens in 12 hours. So that's what got me back on Instagram. Then I just couldn't shut up.
Andy:
Now we're getting to the last end of this, and I'm a little bit nervous about it because I have a list of things that I sent over to Chris. Here's the stuff I want to talk about, and he put a couple of bullet points here and there.
This last question I have—he didn't put anything, so I might be getting publicly crucified. I don't know; we're going to find out. So I want to talk about this whole decolonizing thing that exists on and off the internet. Theoretically, land back, rematriation, and indigenizing are all these very loaded buzzwords that are all over the internet about how we fix everything. Then, it kind of falls back on these things without any further depth about them.
You know, people put you, you post this big complicated thing, and their response is like land back, and it's like, well, okay, but what are we actually going to do? Or you know, I'm on unceded blah, blah, blah lands, like all these things make people feel better, but like they're not really any solutions. They don't really address any of the fundamental issues of, like the fact that the United States exists as it does. Indigenous people have been, you know, shoved to the margins of society economically and culturally and like all these really complicated issues that exist. I'm basically going to give you a platform to kind of talk about this a little bit. And, you know, talk shit about the internet if you want, I don't care, go for it.
Chris Newman:
Don't worry about me crucifying you. Everybody who meets me in person says I'm a lot quieter and a lot nicer than I seem on the Internet. No, I didn't write anything in response to your question because, honestly, it was a good question and I didn't know how to answer it.
Like, as an Indigenous person, I look at what decolonization has become in the hive mind of fucking internet, and it's a shit show. Like nobody knows what the hell they're talking about. Ah, God, like, where do you begin with this? You, you know, decolonization has kind of shit the bed. When there are people who I have actually talked to who don't see decolonization being it as rooted specifically in Indigenous people 's cultures. Decolonization is like anti-capitalism; decolonization is anti-scale, and decolonization eradicates private property. Decolonization is such and such thing about, like, gender equality or whatever, and I've heard people say out loud that that, like, basically, what does Indigenous culture have to do with it? And and it's like one of those things where it's like, what do you say to that? I sit here like not, you don't believe what I'm hearing.
It's, it's like we hear the thing in Florida: slavery was good for black people gave them skills we were supposed to have, flying cars and lightsabers, and instead, we're back to talking about why slavery maybe wasn't so great like you're. You're stepping so far back, anyway. I mean, here's the thing.
I feel like decolonization has been co-opted as a term that people deploy to express their frustration with society as it exists today. It's a catch-all for me. When somebody says decolonization, I think about the roots of where decolonization came from. Decolonization started as an assertion of indigenous cultural values in spite of decidedly non-indigenous cultural values that drive it. Earlier, we talked about anxiety, fear, aggrandizement, and growth for growth's sake, calling communism decolonization, which is the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life for so many reasons, but no decolonization.
The idea that these things that we're living with are bad is rooted in a positive assertion of indigenous cultural values and worldview. I don't know how someone who hasn't been taught by Indigenous elders, who doesn't speak an indigenous language, who hasn't been through Haskana or who hasn't been through the process of becoming because you know indigenization, being Indigenous it's not just genetic, it's it's cultural like we don't pop out of the womb with this magical relationship with nature and reciprocity, because I know some awful, awful native people with native blood, um, who don't subscribe to their, to their own cultural inheritance at all.
It's a process that you have to go through, and you spend your life going through it, and it causes you to look at the world in a fundamentally different way. I've talked in my now deleted old Instagram a little bit about decolonization and indigenization because the other thing I don't like about decolonization as a concept is like decolonization. It just means undoing colonization. It doesn't necessarily say what replaces it, which is how people get this idea. It's like well, what do indigenous people have to do with decolonization? People don't know what happens if they undo the colon, like what gets plugged in there into the vacuum. And people who know you know the indigenous people who came up with decolonization know what they want to plug into, that they have positive cultural values and worldview that they walk through the world with all the time and cannot take off. You know that's part of that.
So when I talk to my old Instagram about what the hell decolonization is, it's basically this fundamental commitment to what I call a universal reciprocity that you live your life in a way where you try to keep a balance between everything. So if you're given a new day to be alive, you give thanks for it, you give tobacco for it, you cleanse yourself to speak with creation. If you take something out of the earth, you put something back. If you have a relationship where you take something from someone, you give something back and you never forget. It's a thing that causes you to live your life more slowly.
I've talked in my Instagram before about how the term for white people is showing up. Part of the root of that word is fast-moving. The term for white people showing up part of the root of that word is fast-moving. That's what characterizes the culture that's been created by the white power structure in this country. It's so damn fast. Nobody's thinking about each other, nobody's thinking about their relationships with all the other living and non-living things around them. It's just like I'm busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. Got to get to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. Because there's all this anxiety, anxiety, anxiety.
Whereas native people are characterized by, you know, and even black people to an extent, honestly, like there's a little bit of like default decolonization to the fact that black people ain't never on time. We ain't never on time anywhere. We ain't gonna be in a hurry, like because we're gonna do what we're gonna do and with Indigenous people. Like, the way that we're taught to interact with people is that you take your time to think about your interactions with people and like the state of balance with everything around you, um, and this isn't like some kumbaya kind of thing where you're supposed to like to get along with everybody. You never have conflict. Part of that reciprocity is that dude did me dirty. I'm gonna fuck him later. Like that's part of it, like that is absolutely part of it.
It's having the time to understand that everything you do will have an action and you have to make sure that those things stay in balance. And it's living your whole life with that as what guides you and drives you and how you see the world. That takes a lifetime. It's not. It's not a slogan that you're going to pick up and internalize because somebody memed about it on the internet, and like this, this is how most people learn about decolonization. Like they send you this thing that's on Instagram and like it's usually about some I don't know like something that's not about what I'm talking about. Like it's usually some anti-capitalist kind of thing or like some like private property is bad, landlords are bad, or monoculture is bad, like people are talking about. Decolonization is like abolishing monocultures, which is crazy to me I'm pretty sure.
Andy:
Yeah, I've seen that one yeah it's, it's like whatever.
Chris Newman:
Whatever drives me crazy. The opposite of that is decolonization like that. That's what that's what it is in most people's heads. Some people think, like anarchism is, decolonization is Indigenous. It's fucking not. Like it's, I don't know it's. It's like decolonization is is something that is out of reach of most people. And it's not because we're special, because Indigenous people. We're born indigenous and those of us who are fortunate enough to be connected to our culture, we're born with a different set of goggles that we use to look at the world, and I hope that people can learn from it. There's a lot that people can learn from it and can learn to walk on the earth differently.
But the way it's been co-opted now too, like you said, to signal virtue by putting in your Twitter profile, I'm on unceded Piscataway land. I had to jump on somebody about why even seeing shit like that is a problem. Like you know, the Piscataway land, I had to jump on somebody about why even saying shit like that is a problem. The Piscataway has like 13 different sub-tribes. A lot of them don't get along. They find ways to coexist, but they were blanket called the Piscataway by Charles Calvert, who came over here in the 1600s and was like I ain't calling y'all by 13 different names. You're the Piscataway.
Now You're going to decolonize by calling it the name that the colonizers say because you couldn't be bothered to learn our real names, and that's in your Twitter profile because you're so woke, like, come on, man. So yeah, it's a big co-op. There's this thing to express your virtue and to kind of piss off with your anxiety or whatever and say that you're raging against the machine, and you know fine, but I don't like how it's been disconnected from the people who are carrying the culture and who knows what this un-colonization would be replaced with because nine-tenths of the people talking about it have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
Andy:
Yeah, I've personally strayed away from using the term. Basically, I don't think I've ever used it, ever, to be honest.
Chris Newman:
Everybody's used it once. It's like weed Everybody's done it at least once and it's okay. I mean maybe.
Andy:
But it's just like to your point. I never really got a full grasp on what it meant, because you see it used in so many different ways. The same with land back, I think, is like a really good example. When land back became a term, it had a very specific definition of meeting the agreements that the treaties were set out to meet for Indigenous people. That's all we're asking is that. You know, these are things we agree to. That's what we want, held up, very simple, very easy to get behind.
And now Land Back means like all these different things, and like makes it really difficult to like. You know, are you doing this symbolically or is this something you actually think will happen in the world? And even if it did happen in the world, the other piece of it is like you've basically fucked the entire ecology of the country, and you're just like here it's like if you borrowed someone's car and returned it and the roof is missing, like that. That's basically what you're doing when you say, like land back, we're gonna hand the land back over, like great thanks. Thanks for giving it back. You know I'll fix it, don't worry about it.
Every time I feel like I have a conversation about them, it's just like for me, as a white dude, it's like really difficult to navigate because, like, I'm a white dude and like that's fine, but also like how do you do it? And like be realistic about these, like very abstract, like radical ideas in a way that's like well, I want to actually see things change. So what is what are we actually trying to accomplish? We can have a utopia, right? That's fine, but we also need to pair that with like meaningful steps that are like doing something important.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, yeah. It's like the whole decolonization thing. Land back, I think, has fallen victim to the same thing the chestnut has. And regenerative agriculture, like it started as this one very specific practical thing and then people decide, like that's getting hot, like that's trending, so I'm going to attach my shit to it, and enough time goes by and suddenly it doesn't mean anything because now everybody's just attaching their own agenda to it. It becomes bloated and overweight and you know it's, it's everything.
Now it's it's the freaking, I don't know. It's like the x app of freaking social justice now, like it's supposed to be everything but it actually doesn't do shit. That piss people off. So that's where we're kind of at with it. Like, yeah, land back start is a very, very specific thing about treaty rights in a very specific place. You can basically trace it back to who came up with the term. I don't recall at the moment, but I remember that that's how I came across it. But that's just what happens when you name things. I've got something coming on our Patreon soon about why we should be focused on unnaming things.
Stop trying to be able to talk in shorthand about stuff you talk about decolonization. There's this book that I recommend everybody read. It's called Wisdom Sits in Places and it's where this linguist spends a bunch of time with people and they talk about the importance of expressive language. There are almost no shortcuts to refer to anything in that language, and that's actually true of my language, too, in Lenape. It's really hard to come up with shorthand for things. There's kind of a cultural bent against grouping things Like you know, you call things exactly what they are. It's kind of like the whole thing. Like the Inuit have like God knows how many words for, like different kinds of snow and water, things like that.
The funny thing about decolonization is that if people want to start taking baby steps toward actually doing it, it's to call things what they are in specificity at length, without trying to like wrap things into a term that's easy to like plug into social media, like get used to talking and running your mouth and expressing yourself and talking about things like talk about things like what they actually are.
I think one of the things I like is tying back into how decolonization, work with co-ops, agribusiness, and social entrepreneurship work. One of the things I'm wondering how it's going to go when Blackbird, when my co-op, starts doing like routine meetings, is I want to do the indigenous thing, which is, when you meet with people, you go on at length about the entire course of your relationship. So, like you don't go into a meeting and you say, okay, this is what we're going to talk about, this is the agenda, blah, blah, blah.
You walk in and you say you know, I met you five years ago when you were doing blah, blah, blah, and this is how I felt when you said that, and so we corresponded and then I said this and you told me that this is how you felt and like these meetings can go on because you're talking about like you're, you're remembering who each other are, so that the business of the day doesn't like just completely trump the rest of your relationship. Like you're pissed off, like let's say, like you know, let's say you and me like get into an argument about you know, chestnuts, chestnuts, fucking chestnuts. Like we're like this close to be, like god, screw that guy.
But when you come together, like in council, you talk about hey, the first time I met you was when you said this thing about blah blah blah on on Instagram and that really spoke to something that I was thinking about and it made me feel, you know, it made me feel really good, that I felt heard and I wasn't the only person like speaking into the void. And then, when such and such happened to me, like you were one of the only people that like really had my back and like wouldn't, like you know, jump over the frigging character assassination bridge and blah, blah, blah.
And then you remember, like I don't need to be pissed off at this guy about chestnuts, but you like, but, but you’re kind of not yet. Not yet until you try to plant one in my yard, then I'll shoot you. But, like you know, when you take that time to slow down and consider the whole of your relationship, you kind of remember, like, whatever the issue of the day is now, how big or how small is that compared to your whole relationship, and it causes you to not shoot off so damn fast.
I think that's one of the most practical ways that people want to like use an indigenous framework for dealing with people in, like a social justice or food sovereignty or cooperative, like you know, with all the intimacy that comes with that. I think that's the one piece you should take, intimacy that comes with that. I think that's the one piece you should take, like, if you want to use it practically. But decolonization, you know more broadly, just as this thing where people use it to describe what they don't like and to say that there's this amorphous solution that they can't really describe with any intelligence. Like you gotta stop that shit.
Andy:
But I think that's just a byproduct of the internet and fast, I guess, like fast food culture, almost, of like the way we consume shit on the internet, like quickly, the opposite of what you're talking about. Right, that way, media is created for social media, and the shelf life is nothing. Nothing if you don't produce stuff all the time you, you become irrelevant and, conversely, that content becomes irrelevant. I mean, you think about, like you know, we're talking about land back. I feel like you don't hear about it as much as you used to like.
Even a year ago, like that, that shelf life of land back was very short, when it was the only thing people talked about a year, two years ago, and now it's like nothing. And that speaks to the fact that these complex, long-lived, and multi-generational ideas are being treated like these consumables with no context. And this flattening of history, this flattening of place, this flattening of all of our relationships makes everything more difficult and feeds into that isolationist feeling that social media perpetuates.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. You know, nothing survives longer than a news cycle. Now, that's kind of how that is. I feel like Land Back was the thing to talk about in the mainstream news for maybe a couple of weeks and then, within the niche of people that want to talk about that, it might last like couple of weeks and then, like within the like niche of people that want to talk about that, it might last like six months in it and it's gone. No, it talks about that. The land acknowledgments have gone away, which I'm, you know, I'm happy with.
I hated them, damn things. I got in an argument with my dad about the fact that he kept doing them. But you know, it is what it is and it's it's something that we have to. It is what it is and it's something that we have to actively work against, like you said, by figuring out with something like decolonization. What about indigenous cultures? Can we slow down and actually make this culture into something that resembles something that was here and that was more sustainable, more human centered, and break as much as we can free from this cycle of just endless consumption?
That that, frankly, I mean, it's driven by. It's driven by fear of probation. People are afraid to stop. I have this, I have this conversation with my wife all the time. Like she, she's, she's always wanting to do more. She's, she's feeling like, you know, she might leave something on the table. She has a real hard time just like chilling out. My favorite way to drive her nuts is when I'll go home, and I'll just stare as it drives me insane like I'm not, I'm not doing anything, not on the phone, not reading, not watching TV, just it's like there, and I do it. I do it to drive her crazy.
But it's even harder for me to do. because nobody's immune from then be as indigenous as you want, but you swim in the water you swim in, and right now, those waters are decidedly colonized and capitalized. This is something everybody has to work against. Going towards the whole cooperative thing, it's better when we work against that culture together instead of all by ourselves.
Andy:
So what you're saying is you do radical rest, but you talk shit about radical rest.
Chris Newman:
I contain multitudes.
Andy:
No, seriously, though, like you brought this up, and the first thing I thought of was like my dad, like growing up. He's from Italy and like grew up there and like is very offline, which is great for him. I'm very jealous. When I was a kid, he would like sit in the garage with the garage doors open, and there was like this little strip of land between our neighbors and us that was like these pine trees and like stacks of tires because somebody would just dump tires there. So there's just like fucking tires and rats everywhere and he would just like sit there and look at the tires for like hours.
Like what are you doing? Just relaxing? Okay, I'm gonna go play Nintendo or whatever I was doing, but like, yeah, like this idea of like just disconnecting and like appreciating like existing is like really important and in the world we live in today, that's so hard to do, even if you recognize that it's important, like trying to figure out.
How do I just not go on social media if I'm sitting still and not doing something else? Your default state is, "Oh, I'm in the bathroom; pull out my phone." You know, wherever you are, your default state is, "If I'm not doing something else, I'm gonna look at my phone and do that." That's terrible, but we don't.
Chris Newman:
We don't know how to exist in negative space anymore. Like you, you've always got to be doing something, even like when you're quote-unquote resting. Like if I'm resting I gotta be meditating or doing like mindfulness training, or like reading something, or I got to be doing something. Nobody just like chills on the porch, like you said. You know, either looks at tires in the middle of the road or, like, you know, you talk about like the whole male I'm going to speak to men right now but like you know men and all of our isolation and loneliness, and like how hard it is to make friends as an adult male, you know there's nobody to chill on the porch with. So there's your phone full of lovely memes that you and I put together and share with the world to the problem because it amuses us.
It's something you just have to push back against as best you can. But you know, I don't, I don't judge anybody that can't um, but for me I don't know my, I feel like I talk out of both sides of my mouth sometimes because I I very much talk about, like, the need for people in positions like I am, like I'm in where I'm, I'm in a relatively privileged position and you know, my whole thing is I want to be able to like hold the gates open long enough for other people to be able to kind of rush through and into this new society and economy that we'd like to live in.
So I talk a lot about, like how necessary it is to hustle, to work your ass off, like to to push back against, like, and I think I did explicitly say something about the whole like radical rest movement that the rest is the revolution and no, it's not um, because we're not there yet. Like, you can rest if you, if you're already good. But you know, the whole Toni Morrison thing says is like, if you're free, it is your job to help somebody else get free, and you don't help somebody else.
Get free by chilling in your bathtub with epsom salts and freaking lavender candles going in the background, for fuck's sake. But at the same time, like I don't. Like I don't brag about working 70, 80 hour work weeks. I work real fucking hard from like 5 am until about about 1. And then I'm done, and nobody in the world is going to guilt me into doing more just because, you know, they feel like I should be doing more. I'm going to sit on my ass, I'm going to watch Boardwalk Empire and you can get me up if you fight me. That's about it. So, like you know, both need to be able to coexist and we don't need to start diluting ourselves into I don't know man. Like.
The reason I went off so bad on the whole radical rest thing is because it reminded me a lot of the whole homesteader thing where it's like I have the privilege to make my little isolated island of wonderfulness, and if everybody else was just like me, then the world would be fine like it feels. Like this narcissistic wet dream where you're just like accusing everybody of not being awesome enough to be you and therefore make the world a better place. That's. That's not how the fuck it works. Like. That's selfish. Uh, that's why I kind of flipped out about it.
But there is a balance between it's like work your ass off with boundaries and that's what comes up. Yeah, it's between five and one o'clock, like don't talk to me. Like after one o'clock, like whatever, dude you, you want to smoke weed, you want to, you want to get drunk, you want to fuck around, sit on the porch, talk shit, smoke chicken, cook food, bark the moon. Like do it, live your life, enjoy it. Like enjoy just being in the world. Because, as shitty as things can feel, I wouldn't trade place with like my ancestors that had to live through like the early 1700s. They had it worse; the environment was better, but everything else was worse.
Andy:
Yeah right, the thing about the radical rest that kind of went up my ass was that it wasn't in relation to something else. The way we understand a lot of things, and I don't think people really realize it, is that we understand things in relation to other things. So when we take new terms or new ideas, we put them in context by saying how does this compare to the other things I already know? And that's kind of how you squeeze in those boundaries, right? But when you're talking about radical rest, there's no context other than, like, this vague idea that you work outside of it, right. So, yeah, you work at nine to five, but what is the difference between radical rest and just like existing? And how does that relate to what makes it radical? How does it relate to any other radical activities?
If you want to talk about radical rest, then it needs to be within a bigger context of how it relates to other radical stuff, like what are you doing? That designates it again, its relation to these other activities. That, I think, gets I wouldn't say gets lost. It doesn't even get brought up like it doesn't exist within this context. It's just a thing that somebody on the internet said once and said, yeah, I'm radical, resting because I worked today or whatever. It was right.
Chris Newman:
There's a racial component to it and the radical part of radical rest. It's well-intended and it's one of those things where I got where it's coming from and I don't think it was quite that decontextualized like. Radical rest, if I remember it correctly, was coined by a black woman who framed rest in the context of black people don't get to rest like we are like and and it's not not in terms of just like work and rest, but like even when black people are resting, we never get to like, we never get to put our guard down.
Even when you're out, like at a restaurant, you have to watch your blackness. When you're walking down the street, you got to be like, you have to watch your blackness, like your blackness intersects with the world all the time in a way that can be threatening. So there's that component of it, but there's also, like, the work component, because black people, again, we we're kind of systematic and, for anybody who doesn't know, I'm Indigenous, but I'm also black. My mom was black. So when I speak as indigenous, I speak as we. When I speak as black, I speak as we. So some people are gonna freak out. I thought he was Indian, um, you know.
But like you know, with black folks, like there is a hustle culture, there's a grind culture that's very specific to black people, that that's imbued just in our history of being denied every damn thing, of having to work like a working class black person, having to work like three times as hard to get the same thing as a working class white person, and this is something that has come to be eventually glorified in in hip-hop culture.
Back during my grandfather's generation, like hustle was just like, it's what you did, it wasn't anything you really bragged about, it's just a fact of life. Now you, you've got, you know for like the last I don't know, maybe 25, 30 years, maybe 20 to 25 years to like avoid poverty, to avoid getting your ass kicked by the man, to like get out of places that are over-policed and that are treated like occupied neighborhoods, like militarized neighborhoods. And between the fact that, even when you're not working, even when you're not hustling, you have to constantly have this thread running in your back of like how is my blackness intersecting with where I am right now? It's exhausting. It's really, really exhausting.
So radical rest, the radicalness of it was the fact that black people are expected to hustle, we're expected to suffer like there are all these studies about how people just assume black people, especially black women, can take more pain, that they can as they can just endure more. Even children believe this. Like it's. It's wild, so radical.
Rest was this idea of like, fuck all that, like I'm gonna chill in my black skin, I'm gonna rest in my black skin. That part I was fine with. The part that I was not fine with was that it didn't provide any kind of. It didn't provide any kind of like practical roadmap for somebody who has to hustle to survive, to participate in it. It was just I'm going to rest. You shouldn't feel guilty if you rest.
But there was no “This is how you can join me in the rest.” It was I'm upper middle class. I make enough money to be able to just fuck off into my bathtub. And for somebody that can't fuck off into their bathtub because they got to work their fourth shift, it's just like, oh, like I'd really like to join you, but I can't because I I gotta work as an amazon worker where I might get fired by an algorithm today. Like there was no plan for that person. That's what. That's what pissed me the fuck off. A
I understood the radical well, like for me, as black person, grew up black and dealt with you know all of that. It's basically saying black people are allowed to just be joyfully Black in our own skin. That is a revolutionary act, the idea of Blackness being something other than an expression of. I have overcome. I can endure this, I am resilient, I am powerful. The idea of just saying I am asleep and kissing my ass is revolutionary is radical. But it needed to go farther. It was way too bougie for me, and it just left most of our brothers and sisters behind, and that's why I didn't like the context that I had understood; it was basically memes shared by people who are white and middle class, so that's why I was like what?
This is fucking stupid that's what happens every time. Like somebody takes something. That's why I was like what? This is fucking stupid. That's what happens every time. Like somebody takes something that somebody black created, they water it down and like, even though it's problematic or whatever, they make it just so much more awful and then they decontextualize it and then, like black folks, wind up like paying the price because now, like radical rest comes from a black woman and then it gets transferred to white people, and then another white person only sees the white interface to like that bastardized version of radical rest and it's like radical rest is fucking fundamentally stupid and like you never knew, like the black people that were like behind it, that were responsible for it, and like everybody's worse off now because it got like radical rest became a meme yeah, this ties into everything we've talked about.
Radical rest gets pulled out of its cultural context, neutered of its cultural context, and then just gets turned into garbage to be consumed quickly by whoever likes it. That's true of chestnuts and corn and radical rest. The end.
Andy:
All right, Chris, I know you're working on a book. You've got your patreon, you've obviously got the farm.
Chris Newman:
Yeah, go plug everything you got, okay? Uh, yes, if you are local to DC, Baltimore, Richmond, Charlottesville, or Norfolk, let me feed you. Go to Blackbird Coop.com, I'm so sorry and go ahead and order something. Order some meat, order some eggs, do the thing, support our co-ops, support our network of farmers. That way, if you're farther away, you're more interested in food sovereignty topics and stuff like that. We have a Patreon. We are just me right now, except in the winter when we get more involved in speaking and kind of getting together as farmers to talk about food sovereignty during the downseason. But for right now, it's mostly me writing extemporaneously on patreon, so you can support us there.
Patreon.com/skywoman. SkyWoman is the name of an informal project that we've put together to talk about cooperative agriculture, decolonizing agriculture,and future food webs and food systems. And beyond that we're also doing a book (available now!). I'm doing a book now on cooperative agriculture. I've done another mini book on kind of the history of farming in the United States, again through that indigenous lens of how to re-indigenize people-centered food systems. And the last thing is that no matter where you are in the world, if you want to support my community, especially the people who've been left behind by the farm-to-table movement.
We have a mutual aid program where people at this point, I guess in several countries, including the United States, donate money to a pool that we use to grow food, to give food away to food aid organizations, food pantries, community fridges, aid organizations that are helping people with everything from domestic violence to their immigration status, being kind of iffy and looking at the threat of deportation. So you can also contribute to that at Sylvanaqua.com. Thank you so much.
Andy:
Three-fitty. I forgot about that.
Chris Newman:
We're trying to do the mutual aid thing, where lots and lots and lots of people donate a tiny amount of money, and 350 just happens to be the amount of money where I don't know 3,000 people or so donated. Then, we could get our program funded without anybody really noticing that the money was gone from their wallets. So yeah, three-fitty if you can.
Andy:
Chris, thanks so much. It's been a lot of fun All right, buddy.
Chris Newman:
I appreciate it, man. Thank you so much. This is a lot of fun.
To listen to this interview, tune into episode 173 of the Poor Proles Almanac.
Before the misnomered "Green Revolution" convinced farmers free-market capitalism which, like all other capitalism, had them investing their time and money into creating profit for the people in charge of the "revolution", farm co-ops were ubiquitous. The dairy ones were the best-known, but there were others, some going back to the 19th century when they did it to combat the same kind of capitalists modern farmers are being exploited by. And as much as conservative types break out in hives when they hear the word, that is literally all socialism is: those who produce the product are the ones who benefit from it.
Really great. Thank you.
My favorite take away is that people don’t know where they fit in. Obviously agriculture can be super complicated but it’s also pretty intuitive if it’s working on a scale that’s biologically/socially/neurologically appropriate. There is a level of complexity that we can deal with and is inspiring and generative. The level where can conceptualize and see how it all fits and where we fit mostly for sustenance and then also for the pumpkin spice variety of life things. But too little or great complexity and weird stuff starts happening.
There’s just a level of crazy that comes in when both consumers and farmers go maniac either looking for lowest prices at all cost, highly specific styles of farming for ideological reasons, bizarre nutritional phobias, etc.
I may be wrong but I think the nature of the climate based agricultural slow down will pretty much hinge on who people buy from. If consumers put their money into non-crazy farmers and farmers stay centered in their knowledge and experience, I think it’s be fine. Like it’s about the people not the idea or (within reason) practice