Exploring Forest Farming, Ethnobotany, and New Plant Discoveries with Dr. Eric Burkhart

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr Eric Burkhart from Penn State about forest farming. This is a really fun conversation. We get to jump into some of the more niche areas of ecosystem stewardship. The goal was to talk about ramps and some of the really interesting research he's spearheading, but we end up talking at length on some of his other research, including ginseng, ghost pipe, and even the impacts of invasives on forest health. If you've been waiting for us to dive deep into ecology, this one is for you. Check out Eric's work in the show links and follow him on Instagram, where he posts about many free seminars he offers through Penn State.

Andy:

Eric, thanks so much for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

Hey, it's good to be here. Yeah, where to begin? I guess what people should know is I'm from Western Pennsylvania. I grew up in the Ohio River Valley, if you will, just north of Pittsburgh, blue-collar raised, and a lot of my interests and kind of connectedness to Pennsylvania stems from early childhood, all the way up through, I guess, late teenager, my early 20s.

I moved out west for a while, but that formative period was rooted in the woods of western Pennsylvania. From there I actually went on to Idaho State University in the west and studied ethnobotany, which we'll talk, I'm sure, a little bit more about today. But essentially, what I did is pursue a dual degree in anthropology and botany to study this kind of field that, you know, is this interrelationship between people and plants, and in most of the higher ed system, it’s at best an elective class and not necessarily a major.

So, a lot of what I've been doing, as we'll talk about over the last, let's say, 25 years of my professional career in ethnobotany, has been trying to promote the value and relevance of understanding people and their connectedness with plants in the modern world, and that includes in places like Pennsylvania.

Andy:

Yeah, and you're in a cool spot regarding ecological diversity. I think, as somebody in the Northeast, when I think of Pennsylvania, you think Philadelphia and then you think like Amish country, like farm kind of bland country. But once you get out West, there's some really cool stuff going on and you're digging in deep on it, which is really cool.

So the thing that I think you probably have the most notoriety around is ramps. You've been doing a lot of research on ramps. So, before we even get into your research, what kind of got you into ramps? Was it just a coincidence that you kind of stumbled across it and kept going, or was this something you've always been passionate about?

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

So that's an excellent question and I guess I'll just try and summarize it as briefly as possible. But I have always been interested, I guess since I was younger, in the outdoors and things that are found in the woods, and for some reason, have gravitated towards plants and mushrooms, and I have no idea why. That is because, you know, I grew up hunting and fishing and that sort of stuff, but I never was really mentored by my stepfather or my father around foraging for items. So I guess the pathway to ramps really comes from my original PhD work, which was and still is American ginseng.

So I've been involved, aside from ramps, with American ginseng. So I've been involved, aside from ramps, with American ginseng for about 22, 23 years professionally and, even longer than that personally, uh, growing up in Western Pennsylvania and planting it, harvesting it and things like that, uh. So this whole broad realm of products comes from the woods. That ginseng falls into what we call non-timber forest products, and ramps also fall into that category. So, we get into the world of academia, higher ed, and even extension. So, you know, public outreach, that sort of thing, this whole ball of wax that I operate in with wild mushroom foraging, ramps, and ginseng is referred to as a non-timber forest product world.

Ramps are simply one of those products that I find fascinating because of the connection that people have across Appalachia. When they think of Appalachia, most people think about West Virginia and southwards, but most of Pennsylvania is in what we would call northern Appalachia.

And so ramps, I like to point out to people. You know, we get a lot of kind of, especially on social media. We get a lot of attention paid to the ramp dinners and feeds and social events that happen in West Virginia and Virginia and southwards, and rightly so. But when you actually look at the distribution of ramps and what I call ramp culture, the amount of people and diversity of people that consume ramps, we're squarely within the range of ramps.

That is, ramps are found everywhere in Pennsylvania and there is a consuming public everywhere you go in the state of Pennsylvania. People tend to adore ramps, and so it just became, I guess, an evolution of my ginseng work to focus on ramps as I became involved here at Penn State in research and extension.

Andy:

That's awesome. Everyone who gets into foraging, the first plant that they harvest that they've never eaten before is ramps, at least on the eastern side of the United States, I think it's just like that's the one that people are aware of. It's kind of got like that cult status a little bit when it comes to foraging, where it's like everyone's like, I got to try ramps, or I want to eat ramps, and they are delicious, but it's. There's a complicated relationship there, and one of the things that you've done recently is you were involved with the discovery of a new species of ramp in Pennsylvania. Given your ethnobotany background, was this something that you expected to find or helped to find, or was this just weird?

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

Ethnobotany, as we mentioned, is the study of people's relationship with plants and plants and their relationship with people, so when we do ethnobotanical research, ideally, what we like to do is take a rather interdisciplinary kind of lens. So what that means is, with any of the projects that I involve myself with, we typically are working kind of from the ground up. It's driven by questions that we're hearing from the people. These days, you can see many of these questions posted on Instagram and social media, where people are posing why some are purple and some are green. Those sorts of things.

So we kind of take our lens from what people are asking questions around. This question of a second ramp occurring in the eastern United States, more broadly than in Pennsylvania, has been a question that's been swirling for about 100 years now, frankly, where people have spotted something that looks a lot like a ramp but doesn't quite match up with your typical broadleaf ramp Allium trichocum and so this interdisciplinary approach that I mentioned.

What that means is that in our work with ramps here at Penn State, we've built a team over the last 10 years of many different folks with a lot of different expertise. So, my expertise really is in botany, ethnobotany, and agroforestry, but I work with folks in food science who study natural product development and phytochemistry. What's in these they’re consuming, right? Is it good for you or bad for you? A little of both that sort of stuff, right? I also work with some geneticists and folks who kind of look at the stuff within the plant, right? And so these team members that I work with then have a set of questions that they tend to bring to the equation as well, and one of those questions has been, is this second’ is this second species a real thing? Do we find this narrow leaf ramp, what we call Allium burdickii?

In Pennsylvania, a lot of people have posted for years on social media places like Facebook that they're finding something and casually remark I wonder if this is burdickii or the narrow leaf ramp. And so what has happened is we have naturally, I guess, stumbled upon some of these populations, but we have been looking for them and doing some work to see if we can find them, and so what that means is, back in 2016, we wrote a grant proposal looking for some genetic questions.

Some answers to genetic questions around Allium trichocum, widespread in Pennsylvania. In the process, my colleague Sarah Nilsen, who's at Penn State Beaver, just outside of Pittsburgh, started to connect with a lot of the local botanists and Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and otherwise out there. As we were looking for these trichococum sites we were cognizant that there's this other potential species that's out there that's been reported over the last century that we wanted to keep our eyes and ears open for.

One of the things that quickly emerged from talking with many of the botanists is that they'd been seeing something on some of the sites around the Pittsburgh region that didn't quite match up with what we would traditionally call Allium trichocum or the broadleaf ramp. So they kind of sent us some tips in terms of sites that we might go visit, some natural areas we might go look at. We also connected with a botanist by the name of Harvey Ballard out of Ohio, who has been doing these common garden experiments around allium species that occur in the eastern United States.

And so what a common garden is essentially is it's a collection of what you think might be the same species of plant or closely allied plants. You're planting them in a common set of growing conditions, which helps you sort out the influence of local environmental factors versus genotype. So, you know, all plants tend to kind of have their way of growing, right, when they're grown in a higher elevation versus a lower elevation in garden plants.

That plasticity, yeah, and so one of the ways that you can sort out the noise is by growing plants that seem to be growing in two different locations in the same location and, assuming they survive, do they actually kind of homogenize over time? So they end up looking the same, with the leaves kind of overlapping in characteristics, the flowering times overlapping and so on, and characteristics, the flowering times overlapping, and so on. What Harvey found is that he had a couple of plants in his common garden that definitely had segregated flowering times and looked very different, consistently, from time planting to four or five years later.

And so with his tips and with some of the tips from the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and armed with some scientific literature, again going back about 100 years that you know loosely describes this second species, we started to kind of comb some of the areas around Pittsburgh that we were being tipped off, with Harvey's help, kind of identifying what might be some suspect populations and without you know getting too far down the rabbit hole in that story.

The short answer is that we were able to determine that there is definitely this morphologically distinct species that flowers at a different time, fruits at a different time, it even smells and tastes different than trichocum. From there we have been doing some phytochemistry work, we've been doing some genetics work, and we've been establishing these common gardens in different locations, such as central Pennsylvania and some of our forest farm research plots, and what we've been doing is tracking this thing then for several years now and analyzing it from a number of different interdisciplinary kind of perspectives Again genetics, phytochemistry and fieldwork and trying to figure out is this thing a real distinct species? And again, that is not fully understood.

I guess the listeners should know that even though some people have been calling out the second species for a long time, it still has been questioned as to actually whether it is a second species or whether it should be a variety or subspecies of trichocum. Now, the eyes might roll back in the head if you're anything like me in the sense of thinking, well, if it's so similar that we can't even tell it apart, then are we just splitting hairs here, and I used to think that. So let me just say that there was a time when we first started doing this research when I thought burdickii couldn't be a real species. It just doesn't seem distinct enough, and there was some limited research that suggested that the characters overlap so much that it's perhaps not a distinct species, but I'm here to say that I'm a believer. Now we actually, you know, the first time I saw it, my colleague Sarah Nilsen had found a population in Washington County, southwestern Pennsylvania, and I'm a trained botanist.

I pride myself on knowing just about any plant, especially that you can find on forest lands, which is kind of where I study. As a trained botanist, I pride myself on knowing just about any plant, especially that you can find on forest lands, which is kind of where I study a lot of the flora. And I walked right past the plant over the plant when I first walked into an area because I thought it was this sedge. It looked a lot like a small grass, a very different-looking species, so different that I didn't even recognize it as being a ramp.

And so since then, through careful study, a lot of documentation, including photographic documentation, as I mentioned, the establishment of some of these common gardens and other data like phytochemistry and genetics, we're fairly confident we've got this second species, and now it's just a matter of sorting out where exactly it occurs. And so far, we've found it on 13 different sites in southwestern Pennsylvania and adjacent regions in Ohio and West Virginia, from places like the upper Midwest all the way up through Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

It seems like it may be more common around the Great Lakes and, you know, the kind of middle lakes area, and that maybe we're on the eastern end of it here in Pennsylvania, and so the work continues. It's still very much a limited, you know, count to populations on just a little more than both hands. We are fairly confident now that it's a distinct species, and we continue to build some scientific data that suggests that. Now it's just a matter of trying to figure out how we conserve it and or how we get more people growing it as a forest farm crop.

Andy:

Have you tried tasting it, or have you been too concerned about the population to dip your toes into it?

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

So we are concerned about the population. So the standard refrain from us right now is that for forage, we're all interested in these narrow leaf ramps. Help us find it, but certainly don't consume it. You know, you can nibble on a leaf just to try it or something like that, but there's too little of it. We have a fairly optimistic, I guess, stance that there's going to be a lot more of it found in western Pennsylvania, but we don't know that, and so we need to kind of, in the interim, refrain and restrain from harvesting it, with all but the nibbles on the occasional leaf being the practice while we study not just where the populations are and how much is there and work with private landowners to figure out how much might be occurring on private lands in that part of the state, but also while we do the work.

So, as I mentioned, I've got a PhD student right now who's working on phytochemistry, and he's doing comparisons between trichocum and burdickii, using some pretty hardcore classic and modern chemistry called metabolomics to be able to look at these sulfur compounds and see how these things actually differ. In the anecdotal, I guess, report, we have noticed that when you take the plants, as we've done, we've collected some for this phytochemical analysis. We've also collected some for scientific documentation, and you put those plants in a cooler or in a plant press, and you stick them in a car. This is very scientific, and if you open that car back up later, you're going to notice that the car not just stinks, because trichocum will do that, but it has a very noticeable skunky smell, very different than trichocum.

And so that has led us to some field trials where when we're out in the field, like this spring, when we would see both populations because they can co-occur on the same site, we will nibble and smell some of the leaves of both. We anecdotally noted a difference in the smell and taste very distinctly. I would say, you know, the preliminary kind of judgment is that we found trichocum to be much more pleasing than berdickii, berdickii just a little bit more harsh sulfur notes. But that's very preliminary, and we didn't try the bulb right.

So, we don't know anything about the bulb at this point. So, you know, you can find some YouTube videos of people in the Midwest, Michigan, I believe, and elsewhere that have been nibbling on this thing for a while. Some of the well-known what I consider to be expert foragers, like Samuel Thayer, have been aware of this species and we've been in communication about it. I've not heard them mention any clear differences in their experience with it, but it's something that we need to explore a little more, and I think some of the phytochemistry research we're doing right now is going to help to kind of underline maybe some of the sulfur compound differences that may exist between the species.

Andy:

That's awesome. Yeah, it'd be really interesting to see what the science says on it. Now I'm interested.

You brought up the idea of forest farming. It's a really interesting concept. I know a couple of folks who have kind of dipped their toes into it. Obviously, like we had started this conversation, ramps have kind of become this foraging rock star food that is accessible to the general public, and it's caused some issues or concerns around overharvesting and so on.

That brings up this idea of farming, like forest farming, quite literally recreating the ideal conditions, having the right type of forest, the right species, maples, and so on to help these species thrive and basically make it something that can be consistently harvested. I'm curious, as an ethnobotanist, about your thoughts about taking plants like this and sticking them into these types of systems. Within like a historical, cultural context as well as like, I guess, the bigger implications of like taking wild foods and I wouldn't say domesticating them, but kind of dancing an interesting line of like what that means.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

Well, you're hitting on one of my favorite topics to go full-blown academic on. I'll try to you know, scale it back a little bit, but I became an ethnobotanist, I guess, early on because I was interested in the whole role that people play in, you know, the whole role that people play in, you know, crafting, I guess, future lineages of plants, you know, and a lot of the time we think of it from a conservation knee-jerk reaction, which is to say, to your point, we're concerned about people over-harvesting. In the case of ramps, it is absolutely. That plant has exploded in popularity, and with social media, we've gotten more and more people, I would say, interested in ramps.

Each and every year, the Facebook group that I administer, for example, in Pennsylvania, each and every year we get at least 1,000 new members. So it has definitely become a rock star, as you say, of the foraging world, and that with itself brings some conservation concerns. What I try and balance that with, however, is that people, for as long as people have been around, have interacted with plant populations, and what we kind of have to get back to is more of kind of Indigenous wisdom around plant population management and stewardship. It starts with, you know, not just going out and exploiting wild plant populations, but it starts with learning about the plants, first and foremost, and then making an effort to steward them each and every time you set foot in the woods.

So, in other words, responsible wildcrafting and foraging really come down to what we would call an incipient form of forest farming, thinking about it as if it's a crop that you want to maintain, that you want to see more of in the future, a crop that you want to maintain, that you want to see more of in the future. It's not just about what we subtract from the population or what we remove from the population; it's about what we're doing to preserve the population. So I guess I would phrase it because I have a PhD in forestry, and in forestry, we talk about, you know, a spectrum of forest management or silvicultural practices and philosophies.

Much of what's done in forestry these days is purely exploitative. People go out to mature timberlands, and they remove the best. They leave the rest. As we say, we call that high grading. The industry calls it selective harvesting a lot of the time, Right? But essentially, you're thinking about what's there and removing what's there and not thinking about what. You can identify the plant. You certainly want to harvest it. But it gets down to the fact that in the modern era, with so many people running around Penn's Woods right 12 and a half million, almost 13 million people running around Pennsylvania, it behooves us all to think about how we can increase plant population numbers rather than just take from them right.

And so this idea of forest farming should be thought of as a kind of continuum approach, and that's essentially how I teach. It is that it all starts with an interest in the plant and finding the plant or mushroom population and then educating yourself around how to manage that population so that it's not just transactional in the sense that you're going in and removing things, but you're actually doing things to encourage and sustain and promote that population in a local environment.

And that is, you know. I guess one end of what I would call forest farming is starting to take an interest in whatever it is that you're harvesting from as an intentional crop, how you're going to manage the land, and how that land is conducive to technological inputs and that sort of stuff. But you can scale that up to making raised beds or bringing in supplemental plant material or manipulating the canopy and understory all those sorts of things that one associates with farming per se. That just springs from this natural inclination to tend a patch and take care of it and increase it.

To summarize what I've just said, I often find myself defending my stance around ramp harvesting to my colleagues who are well-intentioned but come at it from more of a conservation biology perspective, which is to say they don't understand the benefit that people can also have with wild plant populations. They're looking more at those plants' conservation concerns and needs. And while I share those concerns, I don't think that regulations, for example, or enforcement, are going to solve those problems of how you sustain populations. I think it's a multi-pronged approach in that educating people so that they hopefully care about the resource and make the right decisions when they're interacting with that resource base is also part of the solution.

Andy:

I'd be really interested to know which of your counterparts that disagree with you have a hunting background, because I think that creates a much different relationship with understanding the ecosystem. And I think for you, as somebody who understands plants very well, you see both sides of it. As a hunter, you can understand the importance of pulling deer out of the woods when there's, you know, overpopulations because you're seeing it, and somebody that knows the plants very well, you can see it exceptionally well, which I guess makes a lot of sense that you have a much more nuanced perspective on how we should be managing these plants. And I know you. We haven't talked about this. I actually don't even have it in my notes, but it's worth it, I think.

Bringing up that you also have done some research on invasive plants in the forest, which is, I think, something that kind of gets missed a little bit because most invasives usually exist on the forest margins. You know, something like Japanese knotweed. Here in the Northeast and in deep forest spaces, there are much fewer invasives, at least ones that get attention. So I don't know, I'm transitioning very quickly, but I do think it's part of, like, a greater threat of the relationship between people and landscapes is the way invasives get into our forests and how we think about managing them and relate with them.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

Right, yeah, there are several things you said there that I'll try and bundle together. The first thing is we were talking about ramps, and ramps are a great example of how people can actually benefit the plants. For example, one of the things that has really kind of bubbled to the surface when you start to pay attention to many ramp populations that are thick and abundant ramp populations is that ramps have a clonal habit, and what that means is that just like a strawberry patch, they can fill in an area very quickly and compete with themselves.

And what that means, and we've noted this in many wild populations where we have research ongoing, is that there's very little opportunity for the seeds that fall off of the plant and typically disperse themselves by gravity to find a good place in the soil where they can germinate and come up through the parent plants, because the plants have all cloned and filled in so thickly that that becomes very difficult for the seeds to do and the seedlings, in particular in the springtime, to grow up through.

And so what that means is, well, that doesn't seem like you know a big deal because, well, there's still ramps there, right? Well, yes, but the climate and the environment continues to change, and one of the things that we do to kind of help plants become resilient to that is to hopefully allow them to reproduce sexually right, to have genetic offspring that hopefully continue to evolve and adapt to the local climatic and local environmental conditions.

So it may be a little bit theoretical, but the reality is that thinning a patch of ramps, much like we would thin a patch of strawberries, can be beneficial to the ramp patch because it allows for those spaces for the plants to seed in, to germinate, to grow from new genetic material instead of just clonal material. And so, you know, these little things that we do can be very helpful. It just depends on our approach and our intention, and our ability to restrain ourselves from over-harvesting, for example, thinning instead of over-digging an area right and over-exploiting an area Along those same lines.

Then, you bring up an excellent point about invasive species and invasive plants. Just take a quick side note. Maybe this is a topic for another conversation, but I'm sure you're aware that there's a whole movement out there amongst people that I agree with a lot of their perspective around invasive species, that we shouldn't take a knee-jerk reaction to a new species being found and label it as somehow being a bad plant and start just spraying herbicides all over the place. The whole topic of invasive species, and invasive plants in particular, is a very deep and rich topic, and it needs a lot of attention in terms of thinking through some of the issues. But in the near term, you know, and setting that aside, the point is that invasive species are radically transforming a place like Pennsylvania. The invasive insects, which are largely unintentionally introduced, are affecting the canopy tree species, for example.

The invasive vegetation, which is largely intentionally introduced through horticultural trade, is radically transforming the understory conditions, and then, overlaid with that, we have climate change, and one could say that's just Mother Nature being Mother Nature. You know we should have a hands-off approach and I would offer much of Pennsylvania is going to be like that, whether you take that approach or not. Right, people are just going to let nature be nature. But what I would also offer is that many areas of forest land are very rich, biodiverse areas that could use our attention and our stewardship as these changes happen.

So it's not inevitable that all of Penn's woods is going to be tree of heaven in the overstory and knotweed in the understory. It's not inevitable, and in fact, what we know is going to happen is that you know, nature abhors a vacuum. So these species that are running rampant over the landscape are Japanese stilt grass, garlic mustard, not a weed. At some point, a disease or a pathogen or an insect is going to decide that this thing is tasty; it's going to recognize the chemistry of the plants, and it's going to start to browse on it. And there are some indications that that is happening anyway, that deer are starting to recognize things like burning bush in some parts of the state and starting to browse on it.

But that takes time. It takes, you know, a big part of what we talk about in invasive species and why they are invasive and aren't, you know, don't disappear as quickly as they grow. Is that things just, you know, the Doug Tallamy kind of mantra things don't recognize them as a food source? The chemistry is foreign, right? Deer just don't. They haven't co-evolved with them, and so they don't necessarily recognize that this thing is every bit as tasty as our native burning bushes, right?

And so it's going to take time for some of the checks and balances to kick in, and in the meantime, it's up to us, the stewards of biodiversity, to help ensure that those pockets that are out there in the landscape of nice, ramp patches or ginseng patches or golden seal patches or whatever it might be, that we keep those pockets resilient to take a toehold in a patch of ramps, that we're getting rid of it as it comes in, not when it becomes a problem and the ramps are, you know, gone at that point.

So, you know, I think both of these issues are actually closely related to the need for conserving and stewarding wild native plant resources and the need to pay attention to the changes that are happening because of non-native exotic species in our wildlands and how those things can kind of bridge us to an awareness around the change that's happening and how we can, you know, play a role in stewarding these things and making them resilient to all of the change that's coming. I mean, the number one, I guess, the thing that I try and share with my students is that you know, we can look at the glass like it's half full.

Climate change is, you know, creating a lot of these crazy weather events that we're seeing this year in Pennsylvania, for example, that are kind of jarring, right. Yes, that's going to be a thing, and we're going to try and do what we can to deal with that. Still, we know that there are larger systemic issues, like the consumption of fossil fuels and so on, that are beyond and above what any individual of us can do, but we all can go out in our own way and contribute to a positive change.

And for many of us who enjoy working in the woods and getting to know these plants and these resources, I like to look at it that that's our contribution to keeping nature resilient right, keeping these ginseng populations and rant populations thriving out there through just going out and removing the garlic mustard right, our own little thing. It's like buying, you know, a plug-in electric vehicle or whatever. It's a small token, but it's what we can do. I strongly believe that, you know, that's going to be a reservoir for the recolonization of many areas at some point in the future, with or without humans, that these areas that we steward now, that become these rich biodiverse pockets for ramps, for example, are going to be the areas that are going to help us recolonize and get this stuff back out there, whether it becomes extirpated or, you know, people just want to start forest farming it.

Andy:

Yeah, no, you brought up a lot of really good points. I think a lot of the invasive stuff really points to the same thing we see we're talking about with ramps and wild foraging. It all comes down to scale, right? People foraging too heavily, like all of us, individually have a huge impact, even if we're all doing it, but individually, if we're not all doing it, it's not as big of a deal.

The invasive thing reminds me a lot of like the conversation from climate change denialists that'll say, like the earth goes up and it goes down in temperature, like, well, how is this different? It's like, well, scale is the difference, right? How quickly it's happening? You know, plants have always migrated, but how quickly is it happening? Bugs have always migrated, but how quickly is it happening? The one thing we can do as people is counteract the negatives that we have done as a species in terms of bringing new plants, new bugs, and so on. What can we do to try to make up for that in some capacity, which means protecting at least some populations, so that, basically, the plants learn how to play nice right, where these things can coexist, and when they can, we might not need to have that much of a role in managing so aggressively, so to speak?

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

And I would just offer that. You know, again, this is a whole other podcast to talk about a lot of these different aspects of invasive species, but you know, I would just offer this that I see a lot of folks who are, I guess, apologists if that's the right way to put it for invasive species. They, I think, wrongly take it that someone like myself that's calling this thing an invasive, that we need to control, that somehow I think it's a bad species or that I hate it or I have some sort of bad feelings against it. And you know I try and encourage the opposite.

I teach an invasive plants class here at Penn State and encourage students to think about it. The plants are just plants, and the overall net positive for me is largely good. They're all fixing carbon and providing oxygen, and that's really important, right? So, like, these plants are plants, and they do have positives, and many of them, if not most of them, were introduced because they have attributes that we can point to and say look, you know, this autumn olive not only does it fix nitrogen, but it's a great pollinator plant. You can eat the fruit.

Yeah, those are all net positives, but we also have to scale that against the fact that, you know, in many areas that are still rich repositories of our native flora, autumn olive is just not welcome because it's going to overtake those areas in many cases if we don't put a check on it right, at least at this point in history. So they don't play nice, as you say, together, and we just have to acknowledge that an autumn olive is just not welcome.

I look out my window right now, and I can see a whole hillside of an old meadow. I recognize that 100 years ago, that hillside was an old ag field, right, and that somebody abandoned it.

I live in Stone Valley and it was called Stone Valley because it's all stones. Somebody abandoned it because it just wasn't productive, and one of the plants that came in because of the introductions of these non-native exotic shrubs in particular that we've made in the last 200 years, that's what came in there, and that's what has a toehold, and I recognize that that might be the right plant for that location for now, right, because that is a disturbed environment that we have influenced and it has been kind of the part of the early successional flora that has popped up there, but that's a very different scenario than what I look at, which is a mile up on the ridge, where it is largely an intact forest and that forest is rich and diverse in the understory and, uh, you know, that is a valuable native plant community that we want to also recognize as being something that's worth saving right.

And so we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Right, we don't have to think that we're an enemy of all plants or of invasive plants and we hate these plants and almost like it's a war mentality that we have to get in our mindset. It doesn't have to be a war. We can appreciate those plants but also recognize that they create problems for us when we want to conserve, for example, ramps or ginseng.

Andy:

There are a couple of other plants that you've been studying. You've brought up ginseng and golden seal, and then the other one that I've seen you post a bit about is ghost pipe, which I think is really interesting. Is it technically considered a plant? It is right.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

It is.

Andy:

Yeah, so for folks that aren't familiar, Ghost Pipe looks like a mushroom, basically. It's like this white thing that comes out with a little cap that flops over. There are tons around me where I'm particular, so it didn't occur to me that it wasn't like super common anywhere else because I felt like I've always seen it everywhere. And this is a really interesting species for a number of reasons, not just because of how it looks but also has a lot of historical context and medicinal value. The science at this point doesn't validate any of it that I'm aware of, and I know you've been researching it. I don't know if you could talk about that.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

Yeah, so ghost pipe or Indian pipe, monotropa uniflora, this is in the Ericaceae, the heath family. It's a relative to the blueberries. Historically, people didn't know what to do with it because it's a rather interesting plant. It's what we call myco-heterotroph Myco meaning mushroom, hetero meaning different and troph meaning energy transfer. So essentially that's a bunch of kind of partial words jumbled together. What that refers to is this rather interesting ecological strategy that this flowering plant has, whereby it doesn't photosynthesize at all. In fact it doesn't have any functional chlorophyll. So it's not green. Instead, it's kind of a pasty white or ghostly white, which is why they call it ghost pipe, or sometimes a pinkish color.

It actually has a root system that connects to the mycelial network, which is the vegetative body of a mushroom that serves as a bridge to a nearby tree host. So, if you follow, we have certain trees that become suitable hosts for a couple of genera of different mushrooms.

There could be more, but right now, we know that it will associate with the genus Russula and the genus Lactarius, the milky caps, and the Russulas and milky caps are fairly widespread, especially across Appalachia. They form an ectomycorrhizal kind of network around the root system of these different tree species. In our region tends to be, through our own observations, tree species in the Fegesi, so the oak family, or in the Arachaceae, the heath family, and sometimes in the conifer family as well, the penises that we see a lot with hemlocks for example, and so it's got, you know, somewhat broad host range, or the mushrooms do, and then the monotropa will actually kind of glue if you will is the best way to describe it its root system to the mycelial network that forms on the root system or is part of the root system for the tree.

And so what happens is the mushrooms are expanding the root system of the trees. That's a typical mycorrhizal role of an ectomycorrhizal mushroom, foraging things like phosphorus, which don't mobilize very readily in the soil, and giving it to the tree, if you will, and the tree, in turn, is giving it complex carbohydrates, carbon molecules and that sort of thing. And so there's a pretty good relationship, a partnership happening there, and what Monotropa is doing, as best as we can tell, and I qualify by saying as best as we can tell, is parasitizing that mushroom and, by default, that tree.

So we don't know that it's giving anything back, but I should say that we just learned in the last 50 years that it's actually attached to this mushroom, and the mushroom is attached to the tree. And so our science continues to evolve as our tools and technology continue to evolve. So, using these radioactive isotopes, for example, starting back in the 60s, using these radioactive isotopes, for example, starting back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they started to figure out the role that many of these mushrooms were playing around the trees and, in turn, how monotropa is actually bridged to these trees through these mushrooms. And so you know, as there are tools for being able to look at these relationships continue to evolve.

We expect that maybe there's a deeper story there, and so what I would say to answer your question is, if that didn't itself, is that this is a rather fascinating species. It's poorly studied, we're just starting to wrap our brains around the ecology of the species, and it's a rather complicated story. And before I tell you a little more about what we're doing with monotropa research-wise, I'll say that that, essentially, is the way that I look at these different non-timber forest products. Going back to the start of our conversation, is that they all have some sort of gateway story when you start to dig into them, and that's what makes them fascinating to me.

So, you know, ramps have this kind of food value throughout Appalachia, and their ecology is unique in terms of where they grow in floodplains or moist areas and how they get. There is a story in and of itself through cloning and seed spreading that sort of stuff. Ginseng is largely spread by humans at this point and also by wood thrushes, so we can talk about this story of ginseng. And the same thing is true with Monotropa. So, monotropa has this rather interesting ecology, which I just described.

But the research also has this very interesting and largely overlooked ethnobotanical background. Across Appalachia the species was first used by Native Americans as an eyewash and had a lot of kind of sacred value to it and folklore associated with it. But for the past, let's say 100 to 150 years, in many of the Eastern United States it has been used as a nervine, as a relaxant, as something that was as a mild pain reliever, inflammatory kind of modifier, if you will. You know, it doesn't necessarily solve pain, but it's described as being something that helps to take it away through a variety of kind of psychological and spiritual kinds of realms.

I know that sounds a little vague, but we are studying it right now and people's kind of perception of what they get from it. And so there are a lot of kind of scientific kind of things that we can put on it and say, yeah, people seem to be using it as an opiate substitute. But that kind of simplifies the role, as it turns out, that people use this plant for and the relationship they have with it. And again, getting back to ethnobotany and the study of these relationships that people have, the one that goes by, it seems to fill these days is people, you know, trying to deal with anxiety, extreme forms of anxiety, and not necessarily wanting to turn to anything that's a strong drug or illicit drug, and that's a very interesting role for a plant to play. Right, it's not necessarily that a lot of people are taking it just for pain and inflammation.

It's for this kind of perceived anxiety and need to kind of relax and sleep better, for example, and so on that note. One of the things that we're studying is how people are using it. Across the eastern United States We've been partnering with formalized herbalist networks like the American Herbalist Guild to send out a survey and study how people are prescribing it and using it across the states. We've also been kind of spreading our wings on social media and asking people who use it on Instagram and Facebook and stuff to kind of participate in the study as an informant, as we say, or as a survey participant. We've been learning a lot about how people use this plant, and it's very fascinating. As I said, we're pairing that, then, with the phytochemistry studies of the plant. That is what's in the plant, and we're doing that because this is virtually an unstudied plant.

When you see people and hear people describing what they know and how they know it in terms of why they're taking the plant and how they're preparing tinctures or smoking it or drying it, the literature that they're using is largely from 100-plus years ago. The methodology of the science, then, we won't say, isn't valid. We'll just say that it needs to be validated, right? So there's a lot more technology available to us in the realm of chemistry, a lot more tools and a lot more know-how, and so we really need to kind of look at what's in this plant.

First of all. People have pointed to the fact that it may have toxic compounds, but that has not been verified. I've seen, as recent as two weeks ago on Facebook, someone pointing to a study in Wisconsin of, I think, an undergraduate student. It wasn't clear that they had kind of said, are there gray anatoxins, some of these toxins that are found that people point to in Monotropa? And it was a great question, but they actually didn't answer the question, and so we actually see a lot of that that people are kind of pointing to the literature, the same old literature, as a source of toxins, and yet it hasn't been validated in the last 100 years, and so suffice it to say we're looking into some of the claims that people have made historically for what they found being present in the plant.

We're looking at some of the international literature. The genus Monotropa has been found in other parts of the world, including China, and in places like China, where it is used as a medicinal plant as well. They've been reporting some compounds, like monoterpene, which is known from a broad array of different tropical and neotropical taxa as well, that are unrelated and have been studied, and that is clearly an anti-inflammatory, and so there may be some validation already out there through some of the compounds that people are reporting elsewhere in the world. But all of this needs to be kind of further studied and put together with some great tools. We're using a tool called metabolomics, which is able to really look at all of the compounds that are in the plant and start isolating them into groups and figuring out.

Okay, yes, we do have some of these glycosides or these alkaloids or, you know, carbohydrates, whatever it might be, and start sorting them out. Then, we can start looking for signatures of some of these molecules, like gray antitoxins and monotropins. So I would say A) the question is really to kind of look at what's in these things and establish, in the modern era, what's in them in a broad sense. B to rule out versus what. A lot of, I guess, people have been suspicious about Penn State's involvement in this realm. People have said you guys are just trying to demonstrate that it's bad for you, right? And no, actually, we approach it objectively. I'm hoping that this is actually a very therapeutic plan, that a lot of people's validations you know are met, but we don't know that there are some again a lot of people's validations you know are met, but we don't know that there are some again.

A lot of people are talking about that there may be toxins here, and some historical literature is present to suggest that. So that's part of it. Another piece of it, though, is really getting back to the ecology of the species to better understand, from an ecological standpoint, how the relationship that this plant has with a fungus and a tree may modify the therapeutic value or the chemistry of what's in those fruiting structures. Right, because what people collect are essentially the ephemeral flowers coming off of the top of the root system. So this is a perennial plant that has a root system that perenniates with the mycelium, but once a year, this time of year produces a flowering stalk, and that's what people generally use. So, we don't know how the chemistry of that medicine may vary in response to what it's attached to.

And so a big part in summation of the work that I do that cuts across a lot of these plants that we've been talking about today also revolves around really trying to do some quality control around how you consume this when it should be harvested, how it should be dried, and so if you look at a lot of our literature which is available on my website faculty page around goldenseal, for example, we've been publishing a lot of research around the alkaloids in goldenseal that point to a specific stage when it should be harvested, even a time of day to maximize the applewood contents, as well as a preferred temperature to dry, and that's all with the idea that if you're just a casual harvester and you're going to dry it on your windowsill, well, that's fine, you can do that.

But if you're a forest farmer selling this as a high-quality medicine to the public and you want some assurances and some quality control, a lot of the research that we do is trying to give the information to the forest farmers and the wild stewards that they need to be able to sustainably harvest this stuff and turn out a product that maximizes quality.

Andy:

You've brought up a lot of really interesting points here and I want to back up a little bit to one of the points that you made that I think is really important that people assume with ghost pipe there are a lot of these negative compounds that could be in it because of a handful of research from 100, 150 years ago, and this is kind of a common thread with a lot of native plants that were never made into a commodity right, where if you go on, like WebMD or wherever, and you type in all these different plants, 90% of the time they'll say that they're either toxic or we don't know enough to say that they're not toxic and like it makes sense to err on the side of caution like 100% agree with that.

However, it does speak to a bigger issue tt have a lot of science on native plants in general, and you see this as a farmer. You see, like you know, I have livestock, and if you go, even with the extension schools, which are pretty good about updating information, a lot of plants that I know my sheep eat a lot of, they'll say those are poisonous to sheep. And you ask anyone who farms and does like forest farming; they'll tell you, no, it isn't.

Maybe if they don't know how to handle it and they just only eat that crop, then yeah, like anything, there's probably a point where it becomes a poison. But in reality, like in practice, within a diverse diet, it's not. And I think people don't know how much research there still is that needs to be done on so many of these native plants and what they could offer us. I mean, we're always talking about you hearing these researchers saying, oh, we need to go to these jungles in India and all this different stuff to find these plants that could cure cancer and so on. And it's like there's still so much to be discovered in our own backyards, quite literally Like there's some ghost pipe about 10 feet from my garage. You know what I mean.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

It's absolutely a great point, and I'll jump off there just to say that I have a colleague, now retired from West Virginia University, WVU, who was one of the core people who studied ginseng biology, Dr. Jim McGraw. And Jim wrote a book you can find out there after retiring on ginseng. There's a chapter in there where he talks about the Appalachian bio treasury and refers to ginseng as just one of a handful of plants right, or more than a handful, one of the hundreds of plants that represent what we call the bio treasury of Appalachia. And what he means by that is we've got all of this biological diversity right here in Appalachia that you know. People just falsely assume that we have studied and we figured out that it's not good for anything. Now let me preface what I'm about to say: jumping off there by saying that not everything has to be good for something, right? So that's another conversation for another day.

But I often hear colleagues who you know are botanists and strict botanists, and they'll get frustrated by, you know, this idea that, like, why does everything have to be good for something? And the answer is not everything has to be good for humans. There doesn't have to be. I'm not a botanist who has to say that I appreciate nature for nature's sake. But there is an argument to be made that when we recognize the full range of values that this thing has to humanity, if only because of its pollinator value or because of its medicinal or edible value or its ecological value, when we understand the human value, people start to listen, they start to pay attention.

Right, and that's one way that we can kind of hook them into paying attention to what's happening around them and to get interested in what's going on on their land and becoming a steward of their land and of these resources. And so studying these things, I think, doesn't answer questions. In most cases, it opens up more and more questions.

And as a scientist, I often interact with herbalists who are adamant about the fact that if I study this alkaloid or that alkaloid, that I'm neglecting the whole plant medicine, all the other stuff that's in there, that might be in there, that we're ignoring. And my answer to them is you're exactly right, and all of the colleagues that I work with, and I won't say this is everybody, but all the folks that I work with in natural products, we all know this. We all know, just like an ecologist, that when we study something in a vacuum, through a reductionist methodology, as we say, we have to put it back into the context of the whole at the end of that.

But reductionism becomes a way for us to start to unravel the complexities of what's going on here, and so we study these molecules. It's not that we're saying that this alkaloid is the most important alkaloid. Instead, it tells us a little bit about the magic of what's going on in this plant, right, and some of the things that might be going on in the plant from a therapeutic standpoint, right, that might be pointing to an application. And so, in the case of ghost pipe, it might be pointing to an application. And so, in the case of ghost pipe, there's a strong reason to think that, because of these compounds that are found, like monotropin, it might actually have these anti-inflammatory properties that herbalists and folk users are talking about.

There's a good reason for us to think that, in the case of ramps, we've just determined and have a paper that's in review right now, absolutely are full of a compound called allicin. Allicin is a sulfur-based compound that's found in garlic and in onions and is known to be extremely beneficial for humans, you know, not necessarily to cure anything, but to keep you healthy, right? So it helps with things like regulating blood pressure, right? So allicin is a very therapeutic compound, and because of its relationship to other alliums, we suspected it's there in ramps. And lo and behold, it's there. And so we can start to look at some of the properties of these plants if we understand what's in them, their relationship to other taxa within the families, and so on.

So, to get to the point that you just made and put an end to this, most people falsely assume that All these things have been studied, that we know that this thing is not good for anything because we'd be studying it, Right, or there'd be a pill made from it, right?

And the answer is that's absolutely not true, and a large part of where we find ourselves in modern capitalist Western society is responsible for the fact that we have just overlooked these plants and continue to overlook them, for the fact that we have just overlooked these plants and continue to overlook them and mushrooms, by the way, and we do that intentionally, and it's through, I would say, nobody's fault, but through the circumstances that we find ourselves in. So, for example, you cannot patent natural compounds like the compound monotropene and allicin, and what that means is there's no real imperative to invest in the research and development around products for these things.

Right, it falls really on kind of natural products industries to kind of develop patented formulations of them to try and make some money at it. So all of the research that's done is either proprietary or it's research that's done on their formulations and not necessarily on the compounds per se or on what's in the plants and mushrooms to publish into the academic realm. It becomes very proprietary, and so we find ourselves in a situation where there's no real economic imperative to do this work.

Other countries are dealing with it by funding it through the government. So, for example, the countries of China and India all invest heavily because they know that large swaths of their population still live in very rural, poverty-stricken environments where these medicines are very important. And so they have, you know, de facto invested in them, our government not so much.

Andy:

As somebody who does a lot of research for this podcast, the amount of stuff that comes out of China on native plants from this continent is just infuriating. That, like the rest of the world, knows more about our ecosystem than we do in many ways, and I can only imagine from your perspective how frustrating that must be to see the money being spent on that research and not that we can't do it here. But you've brought up a lot of really good points about how the scientific method is employed here, how money can drive a lot of this research, and how it's complicated.

Basically, all of this is complicated, but there's a lot of opportunity. Opportunity is really not the right word. Optimism: I guess that there's potential for a lot of really great things that can come out of our forests. We just haven't figured that out yet. Not that that should be the point, but it sure as hell makes people care a lot more.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

Right, exactly so, yeah, so you know. Just to drive that point home again, not everything has to have a value. In other words, I'm trained as a forester but I don't look at all the trees, like you know. Oh, that one's worth $500, and that one's only worth $20, right? As a well-rounded forester, we learn to recognize that that thing produces good acorns, right, and that thing actually produces maple syrup. So we look at the range of values, and a big part of that is hopefully to get people to care, yeah.

Andy:

You brought up a couple of other plants that you've studied: ginseng and goldenseal. I'm curious about kind of what, with the research you're doing right now, kind of what your big, you know, in the next 10 years, you do you expect that one of these plants that you're working with you you seem like a very bright future for something that we'll be hearing about more, whether it's ramps, ramp production or any of these other native crops that have a lot of potential yeah, yeah.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

So right now, you know, um, one of the reasons that we're working with the plants that we are is that we feel like there's a lot of demand. It's only growing and that there's a lot of potential for these things to be wild generations for your own use, for, you know, as community herbalists, for selling on Etsy, whatever it might be. But the reality is that many of these plants continue to be popular. Things like black cohosh, which some of your listeners may know. This is one of the most widely harvested plants from Appalachia. 99% of it is wild harvesting.

The industry's own tracking shows that the volume of black cohosh that moves through the market every year is tenfold. What we see with ginseng and golden seal in most years, right? So many of these plants that we work on—ramps, ginseng, and goldenseal are just kind of the tip of the iceberg—have tremendous therapeutic value or a potential application. They continue to grow in interest from an industrial standpoint.

Now, that might be kind of a red flag for some folks, but what that means is that it provides an opportunity for a new way of growing these plants, we hope, which we call forest farming, right? So in a place like Penn's Woods, where 70% of the land base plus is forested, giving people an alternative to just cutting firewood out of the woodlot or harvesting it once in a lifetime, but giving them an opportunity to be able to stock these things with products that not only diversify with native plants, by the way, and mushrooms these areas that need to be diversified in many cases because of land management or mismanagement but also provide some sort of economic value to the landowner. I mean, that's a win-win in my mindset, right?

And so a big part of this is, if people are going to go in, we talked about invasive plants earlier and have some motivation for managing invasive plants on their forest lands, well, what's going to create that motivation? Sure, there's a small number of people that are just going to do it because they appreciate their forest land not being invaded for whatever values right, hunting, harvesting, whatever it might be, aesthetics, that sort of stuff, or just knowing that it's free of invasives but that's a small fraction of landowners. I mean, we've, you know, there's all kinds of data out there to support that.

You know, and that's what we're battling, frankly, with invasive species in general, is getting forest landowners and wildland owners to care. And, furthermore, how do you resource them? How do you give them enough education and resources to go do something? Well, one of the ways is to get them to start recognizing that, instead of letting this forest land turn into a patch of Japanese stilt grass, you can grow ginseng there, right, or that population of ginseng that's down to 12 plants can be rehabilitated. In 10 years, you could have hundreds of plants in here with just a little bit of intentionality and a little bit of effort on your end, right? And so this all becomes a way I call it a gateway drug that a lot of these non-timber forest products help people to find an inroad into their forest to a lens at which to look at it and to start thinking about all of the different things that are happening there and paying attention. You know, it's Robin Kimmerer stuff, right?

Just paying close attention throughout the seasons to what's going on on your forest lands and that really is forest farming. You know the roots of it. That's like the first thing I tell everybody is to be successful at forest farming; you first go out to your potential forest farm area and get to know the area. What's growing there already? Where is it wet, where is it dry? What does it do in January? What does it do in July? You observe all those sorts of things and start to pay attention. You build a relationship from that relationship.

Then you can start to move forward with engaging with that piece of land. And it's a very you know, I guess I would say traditional, indigenous perspective that I'm promoting here. It's not my own Right. It's this idea of engaging with the land as it is first and foremost, as opposed to trying to radically transform it to something else. And that's largely what we tell people in Forest Farming 101.

I'm writing a chapter right now, which I look forward to maybe talking with you further about at some point in a USDA National Agroforestry Census going to be published next year, it looks like ’ it looks like in 2024. And it's the first manual of its type. It is a manual that's going to have an outline chapter of each of the different practices associated with agroforestry windbreaks, buffers, silvopastures, alley cropping and forest farming windbreaks, buffers, silvopastures, alley cropping, and forest farming. The bulk of the book consists of profiles of different species that people have recommended for these different agroforestry applications. It's got a chapter on indigenous agroforestry in there as well, which touches on a lot of this stuff.

And one of the things that I'm touching on in the forest farming chapter, which I'm the lead author on, is this idea of forest farming as one of the most basic agroforestry practices. That is, time-tested in the eastern United States, of engaging with the eastern deciduous forests as they are and then potentially punching holes in them to grow corn beans and squash and that sort of stuff.

So we are finding ourselves in a place where we know, because of climate change, that trees are good, they fix carbon, that planting trees is always a good thing, afforestation, getting more trees in the landscape the trees that fix the most carbon are those that are growing and adding biomass, right. So this is a way for us to be empowered, right, and that's all as kind of what I've been hitting on throughout our talk today is, you know, we can either be nihilist about all of the challenges that we're facing or we can roll up our sleeves and get busy. And all these things are related to engaging with these plant populations as foragers, practicing agroforestry, where we are thinking about how invasive species are radically changing our local conditions and doing something about it, not because we hate the plants, but instead because there are other things that we would like to see there that promote diversity and nativity. So you know, all these things are interconnected, right?

Andy:

Yeah, I'm really excited to see that book. It'll be really interesting. I think it touches on a deeper interest in the general public of folks that are somehow peripherally related to homesteading, agriculture, whatever you know, permaculture, whatever term you want to use. I think there's a common thread that that's going to address, which I think will be really interesting to see how it manifests. Yeah, this has been really interesting. I'm definitely gonna want to talk to you more at some other time, but I don't want to keep you for much longer. Eric, for folks who want to check out your research, you're on Instagram doing polls. You're always doing a lot of free Zoom classes and stuff, which I try to share as much as I can because it's great information. Where can people find your work?

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

Yeah, thanks for asking. So I'm like, probably a lot of folks that are going to be listening to this in the sense that I'm not a Luddite, but I limit my time on social media platforms. But Instagram is one of those places that I found to be a pretty good crowd, right, and it's very good for kind of sharing information out there. So that's one place or platform that I utilized, and on that, people can find me at PA Botany and Ethnobotany. So Instagram at PA Botany and Ethnobotany, so Instagram @ PABotanyandEthnobotany. And I try and kind of keep people updated on all the different webinars, workshops, publications, et cetera that we're cranking out, as well as just kind of, you know, showing some pictures from the field when we're out there engaging with some of these plants. So, I'd encourage people to look me up there if they're on Instagram. Otherwise you can find me just by Google and Ariburn Card at Penn State you can find all my faculty pages.

I tend to upload as much as I can. With copyright being a thing, I try and put as many publications and extension pub links and stuff up there. So if you're just interested in, and you're especially not on, social media perusing the kind of output that we're engaged in and that we're putting out there. We've got a whole series of publications that are in the works around these non-timber forest products and forest farming that are going to be published for the rest of this year and then into next year. So, I'll be posting information about that on Instagram and my webpage. So those are probably the two major ways: Eric Burkhart, Penn State. You can find my webpages, and then on Instagram, you can find me there as well.

Andy:

Awesome, Eric. This has been really great. Definitely keep me in the loop when you guys get some more information on what's going on with this ghost pipe, because I'm going to want to know more.

Dr. Eric Burkhart:

Absolutely. Yeah, it's been great talking to you today.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode 178 of the Poor Proles Almanac.