Unveiling the Future of Resilient Gardening with Perennial Plants: Insights from Eric Toensmeier on Sustainable Agriculture and Agroforestry

Demystifying Agroforestry and Perennial Crops

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Eric Toensmeier, an award-winning author, whose books include Paradise Lot,  Perennial Vegetables,  The Carbon Farming Solution, Trees with Edible Leaves, and Edible Forest Gardens (with Dave Jacke). He ran a seed company, managed an urban farm, served as an appointed lecturer at Yale University, and was part of the team behind the NY Times bestselling book Drawdown. Eric has also published several peer-reviewed science articles.

Andy:

Eric, thanks so much for coming on. I'll say this is kind of fun because your old books from the early 2000s were really influential on me. Then I got to have you have a commercial on my podcast, so that's like you know. It's like this beautiful, like symbiosis, right? So I want to talk about three books in particular that you released back again a couple of decades ago one on perennial vegetables and then you've got some books on edible forest gardens. So how did you end up being interested in perennials?

Eric Toensmeier:

Oh sure, let's see. Well, I went to intern at this nature center in my town in Philadelphia and was like a very vaguely environmentally interested kind of person and somebody there said, uh, we're going to this conference, you should come and you should go to this talk on permaculture. And I had no idea what that was or anything. And I went and I lit up and I was like that's what I want to do with my life. So I came back and they had permaculture one in the library at the Nature Center and I read that and I thought, wow, that's what I want to do. And I thought, wow, that's what I want to do, but you really can't grow any of those things here. So what does it look like where you can grow pineapple, guavas, carobs, and whatever?

I began a deep dive into the plants, the perennial plants that could be grown in nature-like systems, which is a quest that sort of hasn't ended. I have expanded my scope to kind of the whole world for that, but it's never gotten boring. There are always more plants to learn about and I'm always learning more uses for the plants that I have or that are around me. They never seem to disappoint with their potential, although they do sometimes die or taste bad or become horrible weeds or something. So it's a lifelong learning process. What are the useful perennial plants? How do we combine them in ways that actually work, not like theoretically work, but actually work? I've looked a lot in the tropics for inspiration, because that's where people have done this for thousands of years so successfully and found a lot of useful ideas and inspiration there that have seemed to work up here as well.

Andy:

Yeah, and there is a history here. It's just the United States government has done such a good job of making sure that that knowledge has been as inaccessible as possible, but folks are still trying to keep some of those strings alive or dig them back up, which I find really hopeful and inspiring.

Eric Toensmeier:

Indeed, I'm working on a whole book about that. We could talk about later, if you like, or a couple books actually on that we could talk about later on, if you like yeah, you're scratching that itch for me.

Andy:

That is my space, as you know. So obviously you wrote these books 20 years ago, uh, or at least roughly 20 years ago, and, um, you know, I I think about the way I engaged with, like, food, food systems, food, you know, food sovereignty, and so on 20 years ago, and I'm a significantly different person and I think that should be the goal, that we continuously try to improve ourselves and have a better understanding of nuance and so on. So I'm really interested about how you might think about those books and how you've evolved in your own practice and philosophy that maybe underpinned those books that may have shifted today.

Eric Toensmeier:

Oh sure. Well, let's see. First, we and we actually started writing Edible Forest Gardens in 1997. So it really goes back another, you know, almost a decade before that. Well, in terms of perennial vegetables, in terms of both of them, I think just the context has really changed, like it's no longer a new concept that there are perennial vegetables. That's different, and I think that book helped to be part of making that happen. Like, oh, this is a category that exists, but what's different now on that one is I did a paper, a peer-reviewed paper, a couple of years ago actually 2020 was when it came out where we found 600 cultivated perennial vegetables from around the world.

So while I had thought that they were sort of this like interesting novelty category the first time around, not that they weren't cool, but it was sort of like, hey, here's a new idea. I realized globally, this is the norm, this is a normal thing and something like I don't remember now, but maybe half of all the cultivated vegetables in the world are perennial vegetables, not by number of acres grown in them, but by number of species. So they're much more common than I ever thought, and I also have done a bunch of deep dives on the nutrition of perennial vegetables, particularly how they address the nutrient deficiencies that many people around the world are living with.

Around 2 billion people have these intense the set of tropical they call the traditional malnutrition. And then hundreds of millions more have these industrial diet deficiencies from eating McDonald's and not eating vegetables or whatever you know, from eating McDonald's and not eating vegetables or whatever you know. And these perennial vegetables, many of them are ridiculously high in those nutrients, especially tree vegetables. There's a few that aren't very good, but mostly they're ridiculously high in those nutrients.

So perennial vegetables have come to feel more and more central to humanity's future, to me in that, in that, well, the other big change is the carbon sequestration element that you know, looking at climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation, to some degree with perennials, they have a really big role to play there. And that wasn't on my radar at all in 1997. Anyway, even after, right after the book came out, somebody wrote us and was like, hey, do you think this might sequester carbon? And we were like what's that? We didn't know what that was.

I go through pulses also on the sort of like native plant lens and cool plants from around the world lens and at the time of writing, Perennial Vegetables, I was leaning pretty hard in the grow everything from around the world, and you see the end of that and in Edible Forest Gardens. I think we were really trying to bring some nuance to a conversation that had gone very far into this, you should only grow native plants voice. That was very strong at that time and it was like well, where does your food come from? You know, let's let's talk about taking responsibility for our actual footprint here a little bit.

At the time I even said I was, you know, kind of classic arrogant, permaculturist. I would say when you grow and eat as many edible native plants as I do, then you have the right to challenge me on growing hardy kiwi fruit, for example, which I try not to be quite so stirring the pot. But at the time there was a need to bring that conversation in a little bit of a different direction and that was big.

In Edible Forest Gardens, I think the biggest thing that's changed is Dave in particular was very concerned that we didn't want to assume that things that worked well in the tropics would work here. So he really wanted to root it in North American and European traditions and research and ecosystems and what I've found since then having spent a lot of time in the American tropics, in the Caribbean and in Latin America and in Florida, I think that what people do in those tropical home gardens totally applies here. We have different species, we need to space the trees farther apart to let more light in, but I think there's so much to be learned there. It's a 10,000 year old tradition. Why ignore that? So those would be some of the big, a couple of the big changes I've also now lived with.

I planted my long-term edible forest garden in 2004, like the year before edible forest gardens volume one came out and then lived with it for 17 years. So there's a lot of, like you know, real lived experience in there. You're a little more, on the one hand, skeptical about certain things, another hand, very confident about certain things. That just worked very well. We were, I think, really trying to present it as a hypothesis in that book because not enough people had done it here to really be able to say yes, the revolution is here. And I still wouldn't say the revolution is here. But I would say lots of people are doing this and it's working to some degree and there's room to improve it.

Andy:

Yeah, it's. It's a common story, though, I think, what you're bringing up that somebody writes a book just around the time when they're instituting something, and then they look back in 10 years and they're like, well, the book is static, even though I've evolved. And that's really difficult, I think, especially at a time when we have the internet where information can be so easily changed. But if you have that physical book, it's just out there and you might disagree with xyz in it, but it's still got your name on it and can be quoted by you. What would be that thing you’d like to take back?

Eric Toensmeier:

The dynamic accumulator piece. We just had it wrong. We misread Robert Koric's work on that and I got to talk to him about it later in person at length and I was like, oh, we totally got that wrong. So I've been telling people not to worry about that for a couple of decades now with my classes and stuff but you still see it.

Andy:

I just want to put you on the spot a little bit. Can you clarify a little bit more explicitly?

Eric Toensmeier:

Sure, okay. So a dynamic accumulator in theory is a plant that has the special ability to access certain nutrients out of the soil and if you cut it for mulch or just as it kind of like as the leaves die back every year, it can provide those nutrients to other plants nearby. And there are in fact some known cases where that is true. In some cases, like comfrey has been shown to be really high in a bunch of nutrients, but maybe it's just a really heavy feeder. I don't know. If you cut them up one place and bring it to another, you're bringing those nutrients.

There are also other cases, like the proteoid roots that certain like macadamia relatives in Australia have developed in extremely phosphorus deficient soils. They develop these special kinds of roots that can actually break out, locked up phosphorus from the soil and make it available. But so there's a bunch of like different mechanisms by which this can happen, but I can't say that we know anything yet about how to actually put that to use in a useful way in the garden and the way we or on farms, and the way that we talked about doing it in there, I think just wasn't right. So, yeah, I think just wasn't right.

Andy:

I think that happens,right, and that's fine. I've got 220 episodes. There's definitely things that I'm like, yeah, I probably could have added some nuance to this. I probably could have clarified this. Maybe this wasn't really completely correct because I mean, we're all, we're all human, and I again to go back to the book thing, it does like create this difficulty of being like, yeah, I wrote that and it's wrong, which I think, especially in a space like I'm gonna pick on permaculture a little bit here where your value is your word, right, the reason people take a class with you is because you know what you're talking about.

Coming to terms with being imperfect, I think is really difficult and like it feeds into a lot of like the cultishness I think that does exist. Ben Falk, for example, he added a revision to his book where he commented on some of the classic permaculture stuff that he had done that doesn't work in cooler climates, like where we live, and I think it's really cool to just like kind of own it and just say, hey, listen, like now that I've experienced it, it doesn’t work. It's not a philosophical, not theoretical, it's, you know, there's evidence now and I'm, you know, accepting the evidence for better or worse.

Eric Toensmeier:

The paradise lot book was really about kind of like wanting to share a lot of those mistakes. Dave and I had both done forest gardens before on like rented land or whatever. He did one on his one piece of land and then he got divorced whatever. But it's not this. Even three or four years isn't the same as 17 years alone, a couple of centuries passed down through the family, like we see in other in other parts of the world. So my, my plant mentor, Steve Breyer of Triple Brook Farm, used to say that he open sources all of his successes, but he patents his mistakes and he will sue you if you repeat them, which I think is a good, a very good intellectual property policy.

Andy:

I do like that. That is very cheeky. So before we started recording, to kind of play into this, we were talking about like how we both kind of went through the permaculture thing and kind of came out on the other side a little bit with some respect and also frustration from those experiences. You used this term post-permaculture, and I'm kind of curious about where, how, how you see this kind of movement, I guess, evolve, given I think now, like our platform and other folks there's, there seems to be a bit of pushback, which is good, because everything, whether it's good or bad, should have pushback. If it's, if it's good, it's going to survive the pushback. That's the whole point. So I'm kind of interested how do you see this evolve a little bit? And then I know you're getting more into like the regenerative ag space and if you can kind of speak about some similar challenges you're facing?

Eric Toensmeier:

Well, I will say this Rafter Ferguson, who wrote, I think, really the the best analysis of permaculture, both from an inside and outside perspective, that anybody has ever has ever done, that I've ever seen, he tells this parable. He says imagine you're on the roof of your house and it's flooding. So the floodwaters are rising. You're on your roof, pretty soon, you know you're going to be underwater are rising. Pretty soon, you're you know you're going to be underwater, you're going to drown. And which would be the subtle parallel of our global situation at the moment.

You know, and someone comes by who's selling canoes and you're like, oh my God, this is so great, I really really need a canoe. And they go through all the qualities of the canoe and you're like, yeah, whatever, great, I really I need a canoe. I go through all the qualities of the canoe and you're like, yeah, yeah, whatever, great, I really I need a canoe, I'm gonna die, that's great. And then they say wait one, one more thing before you buy it. This canoe can fly. Do you buy the canoe? Why do they have to say the canoe can fly, it's a perfectly good canoe, it's gonna save your life. Why do you have to say it could fly? Why would you do that? Yeah, no good reason.

And that's a little bit of what we see in the permaculture world and the regenerative agriculture world. I think there's a couple things behind that. I think is, you know, genuine desperation and worry and urgency about the state of the world and we, like, really do need solutions and and and there's a desire for silver bullets, which you know don't come. In fact, in Rafter's article he calls it simple solutions. Populism is part of the permaculture framework and I think also a lot of it is. If you say it's marketing, you know, if you say stuff that sounds good, people will buy your book and go to your course and pay for your consulting and whatever, or buy your food product or whatever. It is message in a little short way. So I, you know I get that too.

I think those are some of the challenges and I think also, at least speaking for permaculture and maybe the organic movement, I and at the time when those were sort of emerging and you're more the historian than me on these things, but the scientific world really didn't want to hear about it and wasn't particularly interested in engaging with the kinds of questions people were asking. So there was sort of a blanket rejection of all science, and that is no longer the case with science at all. Science is very much engaged with these kinds of questions now.

But I think that the kind of people who get plugged into those movements sometimes are people who who don't want to listen to scientists and aren't real interested in evidence-based kind of stuff. And I'll just say for the record that a bunch of people doing permaculture in the world are doing absolutely fantastic, spectacular work that I deeply respect. Folks in Mexico are doing amazing stuff. Some of the folks doing work, even here in the United States, are doing absolutely outstanding work that I like 100% believe in it.

But certainly the movement as a whole has some weaknesses to it and I haven't taught a permaculture design course for something like 20 years now, for a long time I had been involved in the, quite in the heart of the movement. In the same way I've sort of I'm in and out of feeling part of it. At this point I've come back around to feeling, you know, I'm part of it, I'm, I'm from it and I would like to try and bring some other new, new thoughts or whatever. Bring some critique and some offerings. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of good in there, and then there's a lot of people trying to sell stuff that just doesn't work. And to have finally read Mollison's autobiography a couple years ago and learned that he just made a lot of that stuff up.

Andy:

Oh really. That book is so hard to get a hold of.

Eric Toensmeier:

Oh, I've got one. I've got one.

Andy:

It's like $300 right now if you try to buy it online.

Eric Toensmeier:

Oh, I guess I got one when it was good. You know what's interesting, I will say for both Mollison and Rudolf Steiner, for people who and even more for Steiner, I think, for people who did just make it up, they managed to get a lot right, especially for Steiner, who was like channeling it or whatever.

Andy:

Yeah, some people just came up to him like what are your thoughts? And he's just like this is what I think and it was not based in literally anything, any experience, nothing, and so like the fact that any of it worked is amazing.

Eric Toensmeier:

It is amazing and uh, and I will say, biodynamic farms tend to look a lot nicer and better managed than permaculture farms as a general, as a general rule.

Andy:

So now you're working a little bit more on the regenerative side. I think it has captured the industrial market because of its scalability in a different way that permaculture never did, which I think offers some really interesting opportunities to to address shorfalls of permaculture. Well, if we scaled up these ideas we could do it, and we're seeing that in regenerative agriculture a bit. But it's also making very clear, from my outsider perspective, much more clear, those gaps and how they're being exploited. And I'm curious about, kind of your thoughts on it, since you're a little bit more plugged in.

Eric Toensmeier:

Well, I will say I'm now 53 years old and I remember being in my 20s and talking to folks in who are, I guess you know, maybe my age now or something, about sustainable agriculture and they were so mad and felt that the term was completely useless and had lost all value and had been completely co-opted and all that and I didn't understand why they would think that. And now I sort of find myself in the same position about regenerative agriculture.

Every once in a while I want to barf a little bit when I hear people talk about it, just because I feel like it has the definition has expanded so broadly as to lose a certain degree of value. There are again people who practice and call it regenerative agriculture, who do fantastic, amazing, incredible stuff that I 100% respect with no reservations. Lots of them, you start to get this what Murray Bookchin would call a night in which all cows are black, like when you make a definition so broad and murky that you can't find any grounding with it and anymore and that can be a challenge. There's the same kind of like a certain naivete, maybe, about some things, a really desperate hope grounded in very real concerns and fears, and often some unethical marketing, willing to say whatever needs to be said to sell things and a sort of like maybe rigidly rebellious spirit that doesn't care what science says about things. That can be a bad combination.

What I like about regenerative is that it seems to me that, and really different from what I saw in the sustainable and organic worlds, is that it's taking the best of what was in the organic and sustainable world and the best that was in the conventional world and starting to bring those together and create this new kind of hybrid, which I think is really cool, and I'm glad. Those people would not talk to each other 20 or 30 years ago, and I like that this new thing is happening a lot.

In the grazing world in particular, there have been, just like, wild claims about carbon sequestration that can't be backed up. Both on the per acre and the global scale, there's been complete methane denialism, that methane from cows doesn't matter, which is completely wrong and not based in any reality at all. There are lots of people saying we should get rid of all or most of our grain farms and replace them with managed grazing so we can sequester carbon without thinking that that means you in a grazing system, if you take from corn and soybeans and put it into cows, you're only going to get about 10% as much food.

Well, if you do that to all of your grain land, then what happens to the 90% of food that isn't there anymore? That's kind of a big deal at that scale. So you end up with this kind of like easy to sell story that sounds great and inspires people but doesn't want to look at a bigger perspective that if we, if we keep eating as much meat as we do and switch everything to grazing, we have to cut down most of the world's forests in order to have enough room to do that, cause it takes a lot more land than feedlots with grain. Not that I like feedlots, I don't but if we get rid of them, that means we have to have a lot less animals, and people don't want to talk about that and don't want to face that. So those are some thoughts there.

I never thought I would see a world where regenerative would mean using a lot of herbicide and again and again, multiple times a season, for years and years and years does not seem like a good idea at all to me. Does not seem regenerative by definition, I mean by my definition, and the genetic modification thing. I'm not someone who feels like you know, oh, those are frankenfoods, and they're going to and diving into this thing that just further consolidates power and ownership and wealth in the plant germplasm industry, and I think that's hugely problematic.

I think what we need is, you know, millions of citizen plant breeders, valley by valley and region by region, and it's completely the opposite of that. That's more where my concern is there, not that certain applications aren't, you know, very dangerous too. I've heard a lot in that world. That's a little bit of where what I think about those things and, it's just, there's a lot of complexity and nuance when you dive into it and that stuff easily can get, can get lost, and yet we need to be able to communicate as well for sure. You shouldn't have to get a PhD to understand these things, which, I will say.

My biggest regret about edible forest gardens is, I fear that it made people think that they needed to read a thousand pages to do this, but actually it's just gardening, yeah, um, so I made a summary sheet from it which I used in my classes and which I put up published online and stuff of like. Here's the two pages of guidelines for perennial polyculture design. You don't need all that is great and you can gain a lot from it. And the design chapters are, you know, very dense but contain amazing, wonderful stuff. But, like it's gardening. Yeah, there's more thought behind it, but the act of planting it and weeding it and harvesting it is regular old gardening and you shouldn't overwhelm yourself with it. Trying to embody complexity without being complicated is a really tricky thing to do.

Andy:

Yeah, no, I agree. Something as simple I mean the three sisters method, I think like really encapsulates, like it's really simple, even though if you try to describe, like, why it works, it's very complicated. But it's also like, well, if you spend time with plants, you can start to kind of put these things together and understand why it may or may not work. And, of course, like having that lived experience also helps reinforce that. We don't have that ancestral knowledge being passed down, at least today.

Eric Toensmeier:

So in a lot of ways we're we're all just like toddlers from 500 years ago, relearning this stuff, but without anyone to tell us no, that sounds accurate and there are a few bits of that information still around, like Rowan White, who's a very old friend of mine, who is a three sisters advocate, has talked about how she she learned that this if you're using seed in three sisters that has been grown in monocultures, they won't grow well together because you need to select for particular traits.

Like you plant the corn and the beans at the same time, so you want to be selecting for beans that emerge late, so the corn gets a head start, and corn whose ears are out on kind of like a longer branch, so that the twining beans don't totally cover the ears of corn, things like that. So, as she is doing this seed saving in that system, you're sort of like maintaining the identity properly for how those, the ideotype for how those varieties should actually be be functioning and what traits they should be expressing, which is cool. But if you just buy corn and beans and squash, it won't necessarily have been grown in those ways, that may not express those traits that make it ideal for that production system, which is still works, but that's that was fascinating to me when I when I heard that.

Andy:

Yeah, that is really interesting and it sounds like her. So there's a couple things I did want to talk about with you too. You've talked a lot at this point about perennial crop, and one of the areas that I've heard you talk about probably more than anyone else is edible greens from trees. You are the guy that for some reason, I, whenever I like, do any Googling gets brought up at some point, which is cool because I, you know it's one of those things that's very outside of American culture, and especially the American palette, which I think both sides offer unique challenges which you know.

We can talk about all these plants and how great they are all day long, but if there's no culture to support it, it doesn't really matter that much. I mean, to speak to my backyard there's a bunch of oak trees. To somebody that doesn't mean anything, but to a forager it's like well, that's a lot of food, and I think that plays out very remarkably in something like edible greens from leaves or from trees, because most people, even gardeners or people that are into foraging, I would say that's probably the last thing they think of, or kind of like one of those final stages of, like, I'm a forager, I'm not just eating annuals, I'm eating perennial leaves, uh, so I'm kind of curious about how you're seeing this change.

How do we make it change? Even like we've got like you know Alexis the Black Forager, who's like become this huge, like icon in the foraging community and getting people to want to do this stuff. Even with that, you're not seeing any changes. In a grocery store, you've got like forging chefs that are doing really cool stuff, but again, you're not seeing that translate to people that aren't already either in that space or like adjacent to that space. So it's not like the infrastructure is not changing. You know, is it a culture issue? Is it a pricing issue? Is it all of the above? What are your thoughts?

Eric Toensmeier:

Well, right, it depends where you are. In the United States, I think we would think of trees with edible leaves as like something out of Dr. Seuss, like just not a real thing at all. Yet there, you know, certainly there was a tradition of eating tree leaves here before europeans came, and tradition which still persists here and there a little tiny bit, with a few things, that we still eat a lot of sassafras leaf in gumbo and stuff, powdered sassafras leaf, but, like, prospects for eating a lot of red mulberry leaves are pretty poor, given that there's very little red mulberry left in most places and things like that, whereas in other parts of the world it's a daily thing that everybody does, that is completely normal, like in parts of southeast asia and parts of west africa and stuff. I've now been growing and eating these trees without a leaves since I don't know, you know, 2004, 2005 or something, eating them. You know a lot and I appreciate a number of things about them.

I think that the benefits are first of all, a bunch of them are ridiculously nutritious and the things that our diets are most lacking, which is a big deal, but they're like super easy and they, unlike our herbaceous perennial vegetables, our herbaceous perennial vegetables basically give you really good crops in April and May— in Massachusetts anyway. Maybe a few in March. Some of them are going to come back in like October, November, maybe even into December, but they don't do anything for you in the summer.

Most of them, their herbaceous perennial vegetables, are in flower at that point. They're bitter, they're stemmy, they're not good, they're super fibrous. But the trees with edible leaves come on right as those are starting to lose quality and continue all through September or so. So they really fill the gap seasonally really well. So I think for the home gardener that's a huge advantage of being able to. I always say I like to eat every day, so I like to have those vegetables available during those times and they fill that gap really well and they're so easy.

In fact I put the perennial vegetables book out and a couple of years later I was at this conference at ECHO in Florida who did great work around the world and taught me a lot of what I know about tropical perennial vegetables. And I met someone from an organization called Mozalk in Mozambique who do gardening programs with people living with HIV and they said that the tree vegetables were by far the most popular because people didn't have to bend. Because you coppice them, you cut them at like three or four feet high every year, so they didn't have to bend. Once they were established, they didn't have to dig, they didn't have to turn the soil and basically you mostly just harvest and occasionally prune them. So in terms of low maintenance, many of them actually deliver on the promise of permaculture very well, of actually being really easy to grow and care for.

Not all of them do that, but many of them really do. So I think of kind of like there's these different pathways to adoption. They're starting with the backyard gardener for a place like the United States. They're starting with the backyard gardener there. The next step, which I've not been able to get people to, is trying to get like CSA's to add this; they already grow a bunch of stuff people never heard of.

Nobody knows what a celeriac is put a mulberry leaf in there, another weird leaf and you put a recipe in and people you know people can do that. There are some and I'm starting to have some success here some, some like owner chefs who have the ability to be creative and bring in new ideas and stuff, who are starting to get excited about some of these foods.

And because we have this kind of like culture of celebrity chefs right now if people really listen to, paying attention to chefs, I think that's a big opportunity there we can look to. Like in China, the mulberry leaves which are not good enough quality for silkworms are powdered and used in food in like baked goods and noodles and whatever, and like millions and millions of people eat powdered mulberry leaf every day in china and don't think anything is unusual about that at all. So, one of our chefs chef I'm working with here, Kira Kristoff has been ordering in like big bags of powdered mulberry leaf from china to start to experiment with it. Moringa has become a global “superfood” as more of like a nutritional supplement and is being grown on half a million hectares, which is what like 1.5 million acres or something like that, being grown in a big way, to be dried and powdered and people add it to stuff.

Moringa is probably the most widely grown tree with edible leaves in the world, but it's not. You don't sit down and put the leaves in a bowl of soup most of us. So that's another pathway would be like adding to other stuff, adding a dry shelf stable tree leaf powder to other stuff, which I think again, you know whatever is going to make people healthier and stuff, but I'd love to see that in between piece of people there was in immigrant communities.

40:18

Here things are different. I first had Chinese toona, which is this tree that tastes like chicken soup. It's the most unbelievable thing. We also analyzed the nutrition of over 300 species of vegetables from around the world and Chinese toona was the second most nutritious vegetable in the world in that analysis. There was a farm here, Chang Farm for many years that was associated with a Chinese restaurant who grew Chinese tune and shipped it to Chinese markets and restaurants around the country. So there has been some small-scale production of some of these things here, mostly by and for immigrant communities who are bringing those traditions from other parts of the world where they're still alive, where they're still going strong. And it should be said that, in terms of the temperate tree vegetables, temperate climate tree vegetables almost all the best ones are coming out of Japan, China and South Korea, Almost all the best ones, and I'm curious if that's from thousands of years of selective breeding.

My understanding is mostly not. Mostly there are things that were foraged, but as development encroaches more and more on nature and more and more people, so there's less of those trees, because they're being cut down and destroyed and simultaneously people are moving to the cities but still want them, they've begun to bring them into production to meet the demand. So South Korea is like the big place where that's happening. No one in the world is doing more to domesticate their wild edibles, to at least bring them into cultivation than South Korea. They're just way ahead of all of us by so much. But it's not that there weren't trees with edible tree leaves that were being foraged in Europe as well, they just less of them were brought into cultivation. As far as I can tell, only two of them were there.

Andy:

Yeah, I'd be really curious to know, like, how much of our data about what diets looked like during the Mesolithic are wildly off because we're relying on carbon data and certain things hold up better, and leaves are not one of them, leaves and roots do not preserve.

That's interesting in terms of like the, the making the foods more popular. I do think one thing that needs to be done is like a rebrand. So, instead of of calling things a mulberry leaf I think it's got a certain connotation because even if people aren't familiar with mulberries as like a food because it's not typically on a store shelf, they do know mulberries are a fruit. So the idea of eating the leaf of something that already produces a fruit seems like wrong.

In American diets diets we don't typically overlap like a plant providing multiple uses. You know, we all we grow pumpkins. Most people, like a lot of gardeners no one's, not many people are eating the pumpkin leaves, even though you can, the same with like squash, eating like tender leaves from the squash. People don't really do that. We tend to say this plant is for this one thing, so then that's all we use it for.

Like, I think like celery has two products, but they have different names, so you don't think of them as being the same plant. So I feel like that's what we need to do for like mulberry leaves give it a cool name like star leaf or something, I don't know. That's off the cuff, but you know what I'm saying.

Eric Toensmeier:

Yep, that's, that's not a bad idea. I'll talk about edible leaf goji, and everybody just wants to talk about goji fruit, and it's not even the same species that you eat the fruit of. I mean, and you could borrow a name from another language where it's widely grown as food or make something up. I've done a little bit of that kind of rebranding. We started to call the aerial tubers of chinese yam, yam berries, for example. They're not berries, they're aerial tubers or bulbils, but that doesn't roll off the tongue in the same kind of way. Yeah, so there's work to be done there. That's probably not my area of expertise. We probably need some other people, some listeners of your show to come up wth some good names here.

I still don't understand why everybody doesn't garden like I do. I don't understand why every garden isn't full of useful perennial plants, and indeed, you go to some parts of the world and every garden is like that. I'm not always the right person to bridge that gap. I'm a little bit of like a very deep geek who doesn't always understand what's needed to make those gaps. Nor, I think, are trees without a belief, maybe the right next step for a lot of people. A vegetable at all is probably the right next step for most people.

Andy:

Yeah, you brought up the diet thing. It's like this is the real horseshoe theory of like unhealthy diets, um, on both ends of the spectrum, right when there's these massive gaps and deficiencies and I you know it speaks to the infrastructure in the United States and the way we we understand and relate to food, that our diet is the way it is, that you know I'm a very big advocate of this idea that, like, place based food systems are really important, that we need to culturally value it the way we might culturally value like craft beer today.

Like, oh, this brewery is in my town. This is really cool because it's from my town and I will support it for that reason, even though the beer is really not any different than like most other breweries, right, um, with the exception of like, uh, some handfuls, but like, there's really nothing about the beer that articulates the location, right, unless they really integrate some kind of unique ingredient, but that's still pretty rare.

And even and I did think for a while, if the craft beer industry didn't kind of implode over the last few years, that we were going to go towards almost like the estate wine idea where, like to stand out, a brewery would have to like be locally connected to local hops and yada, yada, yada and you get like the terroir kind of like atmosphere of beer. That's the beautiful thing about wine is it still is very place-based and like I don't see why we couldn't do that for the way we engage with food and like embrace the flavor of a place. Right? I'll go out in October in the garden and there's like this row of stuff that's just like wild and I'll just like Scoop up the dried out heads of evening primrose and like munch on the seeds and like that is the flavor of the place.

Eric Toensmeier:

It's not calorically significant but it's just like a connection to the landscape around you, yeah, and I think that's particularly true with the native plants, where, the plants that are from right where you live, like the things that are native to your county, need to be at the base of what we're doing. Whether you know, in particular, some of them have very strong and interesting flavors, like we have a native szechuan pepper, we have a native garlic, we have our own versions of cinnamon and allspice, and on and on and on that just we're not eating those. I had a chef recently, Kira Kristoff was cooking for a chef. We had a quick sour cherry pickle with sweet fern leaves in it, and we had hazelnuts, pralined hazelnuts that were coated in a maple syrup with a reduction of Chinese toona leaf. Like there really is this opportunity.

Andy:

I think like when we think about this food pyramid, we have to think about how does place especially in impending climate change, and like how that is going to fundamentally shift the way we can grow food at scale intersect between scalability and, you know, ecosystem restoration and resilient food systems.

Because, like I'll make this case, you know, I think I think 100 years ago it would be fine, even with climate change, to say, all right, our food systems can be separate from ecology. But I think the state of ecology is so on edge at this point that we don't have that luxury anymore of saying like, yeah, like, as long as we're growing food, we're not dumping too many pesticides in the ground, like the ecosystem will kind of take care of itself. Like the that ship has sailed because we didn't deal with it 100 years ago. And like that means we have to be uniquely good about solving all these issues all at the same time, all with the same systems, which is really a big ask, but I'm not sure if we have an alternative really.

Eric Toensmeier:

That is extremely well said. I will only riff off of that to say one of the things that was interesting that I learned in one of the books I'm currently working on. Talking to a bunch of NRCS soil erosion specialists is that what they're concerned about is that, as the general trend in much of the most of the US, I would say in much of the world is that you may get the same amount of rainfall but it comes in these like very intense storms and then there's long dry spells in between.

Andy:

So I don't know what you're talking about. It's never like that here in New England now, yeah, never ever.

Eric Toensmeier:

So we need farming systems and gardening systems and municipal drainage systems and whatever that can handle that, which have arguably been sufficient for erosion control until now. Like, maybe the emphasis on no-till and cover crops and stuff aren't going to be sufficient anymore and you really need to bring those perennial elements in to perennialize the systems. Even if it's just around the edge or some contour strips of perennial grasses through the middle, it doesn't have to be a 10,000 acre food forest or something, you know what I mean, it's a strip of perennial grass through the field along the contour. Every such and such number of feet, you know every whatever 100 feet or 150 feet or something, those are going to be needed a lot more. Those are being needed a lot more than than ever before, because the intensity is so much greater, and I've been in a number of cases now.

I've been doing projects whether for my own farm or or as far away as the Kenyan Highlands or whatever, trying to figure out species that can hand plant species, perennial plant species that can handle those extremes, like what can handle on my farm really dry sand but also flooding for garden. You know things like that. Those very adaptable species, I think, are going to need to be more part of our palate. And I will say the first place to go in terms of perennializing agriculture to me is changing what we feed to livestock, because we're feeding annual crops to livestock now and I mean, a pig is not that picky, it could be eating something perennial and it doesn't care. So the first place and since a third of all the crops we grow are fed to livestock, if we could shift that to perennial crops, that's a big first step that doesn't require a person to change what they eat at all.

Andy:

I think the only challenge there is the downstream product changes. So you know, when we're feeding corn to livestock, well, it's like, yeah, we're feeding them the inedible part of the corn mostly, and then you've got all these other byproducts, whether it's high fructose corn syrup or oils or you know, whatever it might be. You know, and this is like fundamentally the problem of our food system, right, it's that you've created this hyper, hyper efficient thing, but it's also so precariously perched on this infrastructure of, okay, what happens if we wanted to shift out of corn?

Eric Toensmeier:

Can we even do that, really, because of those downstream products and yet we could make those same products out of other perennial stuff instead.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, it's a monumental task that I think sometimes gets lost.

Eric Toensmeier:

Yes,there's a distinction between, like what changes are ready to make now and what do we want to be able to do in 15 or 20 years. And what can I do on my fun little farm or backyard versus what is a thousand acre farm we're going to do? There's sort of like we want to distinguish between the shovel ready and the like great idea for later. And that's part of our permaculture sometimes doesn't grasp that distinction terribly well. Or regenerative ag sometimes too. We've got a ways to go who want to dive in and go all in on the agroforestry and stuff here in the us and that's awesome and great and we need to totally back and support that. But also there's a lot of farmers where that next step is the riparian buffer, is the windbreak, is the cover crops.

I think we need to be working at those different levels and scalability means means following both of those pathways and the first thing to do is to take the money out of subsidizing the things that are clearly not helping anything. And globally, I think the last paper I read said we're at 700 billion dollars of agricultural subsidies and about two percent were environmentally friendly. So you could level the playing field. You know it's hard to compete in in that world against such heavily subsidized practices.

Andy:

Early on in the podcast, one of the things that I tried to make very clear was that, like the stuff that I'm talking about on here it the idea that you're going to make it profitable is very slim to none and like people need to like just accept that if you're doing this stuff, you have to do it because you want to do it, not because you're like I want to make a career out of you know growing ground, ground nuts or you know whatever. You can maybe have like a nursery and you might do all right with that, but like, in terms of like, you are not going to compete at scale with these products that are valuable for a number of reasons; historical, contextual, ecological and so on. That's important to do, but you're not going to go toe to toe with you know a soybean farm. It's just not going to happen. You're not going to produce caloric content at any scale that matters to challenge that kind of infrastructure.

And even like as as a backyard breeder and somebody who advocates for backyard breeding, like if you look at like the development of like the soybean that's used today. There were probably in today's dollars, billions of dollars spent over like 40 years to get the soybean to where it is today. And the idea that we're going to backyard do that is kind of like laughable. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing backyard breeding, like I I am a huge advocate that the evening primrose is like the plant that we are sleeping on real hard. But also I'm not like oh, if we breed it for the next you know 30 years, we're going to have like a viable crop, like we'll have a crop, but it's not like at that capacity.

Eric Toensmeier:

If you had a $200 million budget, maybe, and soybeans were. I mean, they've been grown in Asia forever and ever and ever, but in terms of in the U S, they were a gleam in somebody's eye a hundred years ago. So there was a process and it didn't all happen at once. We have to have that perspective in mind that there are things that are going to take time.

Like the Land Institute has told me, they could have perennial corn in 30 to 40 years with a good budget. That's awesome. That's great. Meanwhile, we do need to eat now and we have kernza, which I'm growing some here and it's fine and it's you know. It yields okay, and for land that's inappropriate for corn that's too steep or erodible or whatever. That's a you know, that's a good, that's a good place to go. We don't need a crop to replace corn or soybeans to be good or to matter. We want to think about the, the scale and the relevance of things. And if all that happened with trees without a beliefs in this country is a couple of million people grew them in their backyard and ate them, that would be awesome, that would be great. I would be super cool with it.

But given that the global context is that to meet the nutritional needs of humanity we need to triple fruit and vegetable production; we're underproducing fruits and vegetables by two thirds Then maybe some of that new vegetable land that gets added should be in trees with edible leaves. Rather than trying to get people to stop growing as much lettuce as we grow, can we not maybe just add this, and could that be on the border of those farms or on contour, in a perennial strip on those farms to help with, you know, erosion control? Could it be part of a windbreak on those farms? Whatever, you know, it doesn't have to be prime, flat, fertile farmland that needs to be perennialized. Two-thirds of our global farmland is cropland, and is not prime. So those are the places which was, you know, JR Smith's, J Russell Smith's insight is the flatland is fine, but the rest of it is where we need to be really leaning into the trees and stuff.

He also over did some over promising in terms of how ready he thought oaks were and stuff and Mollison really picked that up and ran with it. I've now got a bunch of the best oaks oak varieties in the US grafted up and growing here on the farm and I'm really excited about them, but I don't think they're ready to replace you know, whatever yet it's going to be.

But in my lifetime I can bring in another generation forward. Yeah, or just stepping stones Meanwhile they're a bonus. They're a tree which is doing valuable things as a tree that also makes bonus food for for people and livestock and and that's great. But we don't yet have all the traits we want in one oak tree in the United States, I think.

Andy:

Yeah, we did an oak breeding competition, which I still need to put the results out for. I just haven't gotten around to doing it, but I did get some really amazing burr oaks, one of which was like 1.6 ounces for each acorn. It's by far, by like a very large margin, the biggest acorn I've ever seen. But, the tannins were high, which like is fine, but like you're literally talking about a nut like that, like you know, wow, four inches in circumference, you know, so like it's not insignificant, and it does point to the fact that, like, there's real potential for these plants that offer huge ecological services to also do meaningful work in providing caloric needs for people.

And you know, figuring out what plants are offering us the most opportunity for breeding, I think is definitely worthwhile work for backyard breeders, and we don't have to confuse that with replacing corn. And you brought up another point that I think is really important too, in some of your work is like actually figuring out what the nutritional content of these plants are.

That needs to be done, and also research needs to be done about the safety about them. Not that I don't think they're safe, but rather I think we've created a culture where we assume things are dangerous until we prove they're safe and there's like good validity, given our lack of ecological and historical knowledge and context for these things. But as a hobby farmer, like if you go and check a lot of extension schools, they'll tell you like a lot of plants are dangerous for your animals that aren't, and I think that apply. That same logic applies to the way that we engage with our food system. So, like we just have to do the grunt work of actually like spending the $120 to do a plant analysis of your, you know, evening primrose.

Eric Toensmeier:

I just learned recently that acorn flour has been approved as an official legal food product in the united states. That's a big, that's forward.

Andy:

I think a friend of mine wanted to try selling it and I was like I don't think you can, and they mentioned like we looked into it and said it wasn't FDA approved, so you can only sell it as like a product, for you know other uses.

Eric Toensmeier:

Right, I heard about it from Ken Asmus that had shifted recently. I mean, I've also made bioplastic from acorn flour and it worked great so it could be used for other things. But again you're going to get more starch per acre from corn than you are from um from oaks at this point, but maybe not from chestnuts under certain contexts or if those chestnuts are combined with other things like grazing underneath or with crops that can be compatible with chestnuts. They don't have to stand, they don't have to compete for yields in a monoculture. They have to compete for yields in a combined system.

And in many parts of the world that's already done. In the tropics, perennial staple crops are already. Many of them are already yielding as well or better than the annual staple crops. So that's a done deal there in many ways, not so much here. Yet we don't have staple crops, perennials that will yield as well as annuals.

But like in France, there's been a bunch of research showing that combined winter cereals like grains that you would annual grains, would sow in the fall, the grower the winter and harvest in spring, combined very well with deciduous trees, because they're not really using the light at the same time of year, they're sort of taking shifts using the sunlight. And there they found that those systems have yielded, they have a land equivalent ratio of 1.3 to 1.4, meaning on every acre of the combined trees with grain. If you wanted to do them separately it would take 1.3 to 1.4 acres to get the same yield. So you're getting less grain than you would if it was on its own, but the combined total is greater than the sum of its parts. So that's really the bar we have to aim for.

Again, land that is so erodible that it's going to lose its productive capacity soon anyway has no business being in annual crops. And there's a fair amount, I would say, of that kind of land in production now where it's in urgent need of protection and restoration or regeneration and the trees can play or perennial crops of any kind can play a big role in that. So people are sometimes surprised to see that I grow like tomatoes and carrots and watermelons and stuff. You know annuals are great and I have bread made out of wheat every day.

If we could replace them with perennials and have it be just as good, I would be all for it. But meanwhile, can we perennialize? How much can we make perennial? Even just having three percent of a field be made perennial can make a huge difference in terms of certain ecosystem functions like water quality, erosion, etc. You're not getting, maybe, a whole lot of carbon out of that. You can start to really make a make a difference in, in some critical functions that are not functioning well in a lot of our crop land right now. I think this all kind of tees off kind of where your research is.

Andy:

Now I know you said you're working on a couple books. Could you give us a little rundown on what those are looking like?

Eric Toensmeier:

So last year I put out Trees with Edible Leaves. That was really fun. That was great which is now in four languages and soon to be in five languages. All is free, downloadable PDFs. I'm super happy about that.

I am doing two books with Meghan Giroux of Interlace Agroforestry in Vermont. One is an alley cropping guide for the United States on intercropping trees with annuals, which has like tons of math and like what kind of combinations work and what don't and why and what kind of spacings work and why and what trees are suitable and what annual crops are suitable or not suitable and why. Has budgets. It has like a design set of worksheets that goes all the way through. So I feel like that is gonna fill a need.

She's traveling around to gather case studies from other parts of the world where people have been doing this for longer and doing it, dare I even say better than, not that there aren't great people doing it here, but they've been at it for a lot longer in some parts of the world. And the other one I'm doing with her is on tree fodder. So really, it's mostly on growing trees to feed their leaves to ruminant livestock, although it touches on honey, locust and some other things as well.

Andy:

There's nice timing with Mark Krawczyk's book a couple of years ago.

Eric Toensmeier:

Yeah, yeah. Well, mine is very heavily underlined and one of the things we did for that is we looked at 200 species of woody plants and all the published data on their nutrient value for livestock, their digestibility, their protein and so on, because some are not any good, some are poisonous, some don't taste good to livestock. But to be real, you know, and to meet certain kinds of functions, to be like the emergency backup in case of drought is one thing, but to be like a heavy duty supplement for dairy cows that need like super high quality food is another. You're looking at mulberry leaf and kind of a handful of other species that are really extremely nutritious. So I think that's going to be a great one.

So those are the two agroforestry manuals. They're sort of like how-to manuals or whatever. That'll have farmer interviews and case studies and like math and worksheets and stuff. They're more like very practical. And then I'm doing a book with a couple of, well, it started with a couple of indigenous chefs and I have been working with Dr. Courtney Lewis, who's an indigenous scholar, and some other folks on what was the eastern forest region of the US, like before colonization, in terms of the curation of the ecosystems to make them productive, in terms of the kinds of gardening and farming practices and what were the key food plants. And then how did those practices continue today in indigenous communities? And where are they going next?

Andy:

Are you familiar with Sherry Pocknett? She's a Wampanoag chef who just opened a restaurant in Newport, I believe somewhere over there.

Eric Toensmeier:

I'm sure Neftali knows her. Yeah, he's sort of our chef contact.

Andy:

Yeah, awesome, yea. I'm just going to plug her because I want to see her work in the book.

Eric Toensmeier:

We're going all the way out to like Oklahoma, to the edge of the prairie there. So, it draws on paleoethnobotany and sort of like archaeology. It draws on written histories. It draws on cultural stories. It draws on a lot of interviews with indigenous people today, and I learned a bunch of things that I was really you know, I’m pleased and excited and shocked to learn, like that the native passion fruit, the may pop, was being intercropped with corn at a really big scale in the Southeast.

Andy:

Oh, that's awesome. I've never heard that before.

Eric Toensmeier:

I have not. Either that was like they would bring, bring the fruits out of the fields by the cart load, that's a pretty big deal or that the ground nut, one of our native tuber, crops up till about connecticut from the you know from, like the Florida Everglades, up to about Connecticut. It produces seeds. You've probably covered this in your episode about. It produces seeds up to there which you can also eat as dry beans and stuff, but North of that and it grows way North of that.

None of the plants produce seed or very few of the plants produce seed. They're like triploids sterile triploids, which is a common thing you see in the domestication of root crops that you breed them to not produce seed anymore so they put more energy into tubers. All of the ground nut north of Connecticut, from like way up into Canada, you know, in the Maritime Provinces, all the way way over up into Ontario, is all one cultivar. It's one clone. Really it's all one clone. Those aren't wild plants, plants, those are tubers that were brought by people, by indigenous people, and planted there quite some time ago and permitted to grow and thrive there. The genetic studies show it's all one individual plant that's insane.

But like that's a way of re-looking at the landscape and the book is just full of stuff like that. That makes us go, wow, there was so much more happening here than I understood and that's valuable for me as a non-Indigenous person, but also it's important, I think, for Indigenous folks, because a lot of that has been lost or taken away from people.

Like we've got names in 50 different languages, 50 different indigenous languages for these plants. It's going to be great. It's not like coming out in a couple months or anything, but it's going to be really changing the way that I think about the, the landscape, and I thought I was really tuned into this kind of stuff before, but there just so much more was happening than I understood.

Andy:

It's sort of a labor of love.

Eric Toensmeier:

It's going to be really, really fascinating when it's finally ready. It's been and and indeed touches on a lot of the things you've talked about in the podcast. There's, you know, we talk about black walnut and butternut and oaks and honey, locust and american persimmon and you know, hickories and chinquapins and Ozark chinquapins, american chestnut and all that stuff.

We also talk about annuals and the whole continuum from corn to chestnut is what we're looking at, where we we dive into something like 50 or 60 species of plants that we feel like there's a story to tell, some of which are like not grown at all anymore, barely grown at all anymore, some of which are endangered at this point, others of which have moved on to become, you know, global commodities and everything, everything in between. Some are still foraged and and sold commercially today, and some are just being gardened. So, this whole range of current statuses of those plants and what do we know about their history and how they were involved in fire management and beaver managed landscapes, and on and on and on.

There was so much more beaver impact on the landscape at that point than there is today. It's hard to even fathom how our landscapes were before damming and before the you know, massive reduction in beaver populations.

Andy:

It's another world that that sounds like a book I would really want to read, so I'm excited it's funny you mentioned the groundnuts, because I actually was able to get viable seed this year here in Massachusetts, which is both cool and also a little concerning, because that means the growing conditions are changing significantly that that's happening.

Eric Toensmeier:

There's a stand not too far from me that occasionally produces some seed and there's some not far south of here in Connecticut that occasionally produces some seed. But by and large I really, in my you know 30 years in Massachusetts, I've seen seed on a plant twice.

Andy:

Yeah, I'd never seen seed until like maybe three or four years ago, and then, like last year, I saw it everywhere, which is really concerning, but, also kind of cool, so they're adapting and, I'll be really interested to see some of those plant stories, because, from doing this kind of research or even if you've listened to some of the episodes on, like our deep dives on plants there's so much information out there. You just have to figure out where it is and like catalog it in one spot, because that's what's missing on a lot of this is that it's out there, just no one's done the like dirty work of saying let's collect this in one place, verify it and create this narrative. That's already out there, it just needs to be done.

Eric Toensmeier:

You have to pull it together. Most people don't want to read paleoethnobotanical textbooks. They're missing out, I think they're missing out. So we're very much doing the kind of stuff you do of trying to pull that deep history, pull the other histories together and tell a story of what's happening now and what are, like, the named cultivars of these things that are out there now and where's the breeding work going, or whatever. How do you get your hands on it, how do you grow and propagate it and how might you, you know, care for existing wild stands of it or even, you know, reintroduce it into places, how would you think about going about that? Which are really interesting questions.

I have done a little bit of that, but not a whole lot of that. So all we're really providing is some very rough guidelines, like if something is native where you are, you shouldn't feel too bad about playing the game and you can, and here's some places that it might succeed, and some thoughts on how you might you know how you might do that, or even some potential candidates for assisted migration, things that may, which is a whole other can of worms. But I have seen American persimmon, which is native in southern Connecticut but not here in Massachusetts, and people my neighbor's been growing it for 45 years and it is coming up in the woods near him and stuff. You know cause animals are eating it and pooping it around and stuff, personally, I'm pretty thrilled to see more American persimmon around. I would say that's a real addition to our flora.

American persimmon is a endangered candidate, candidate that desperately needs us in order to survive climate change.

Andy:

I'm definitely going to be picking your brain about some of these plants as we get some episodes, not to to give away too much, but we're going to be queuing up a lot of tree crop stuff this fall and winter, so I'm going to be I'm going to be bugging you a lot.

Eric Toensmeier:

A couple other little writing projects I'vegot going on. I'm working on a piece around leaf protein concentrate, which is like a tofu that you can make from leaves, which is, I think, the most climate friendly protein source that exists. Doesn't taste very good. You mix it with things and it tastes fine. I did this deep dive on oak cultivars a couple years ago and we're talking about doing something like that for honey locust as well. Because there are breeding programs around the world that don't seem to be talking to each other a whole lot. So if we can see what we can harvest and pull together on that, I feel like that's one of our most neglected and underutilized food plants. So, yeah, that's kind of the current slate at the moment.

Andy:

That's all. Just a few revolutionary books and projects, that's all.

Eric Toensmeier:

I can't write any more books until I finish the three that I'm working on.

Andy:

I've got a rule like that too. It's not going great. So for folks that want to keep tabs on you, where can they find you? On social media, or you know what's the best way.

Eric Toensmeier:

Sure, I'm on Instagram and Facebook and I I have this perennialsolutions.org website, which is sort of my main home that has like upcoming events and stuff and the new publications and stuff. I'm on Patreon If people want to support me there, and I post all kinds of fun and interesting things over there, that I'm working on, the tidbits and excerpts from things I'm writing and all of that, and if there's a listener out there who's a great social media expert, I'm looking for somebody to help me step up my game there.

Andy:

Eric, this has been great. I'm super excited for your books. I truly appreciate the work you've done. It has been influential on me and my evolution as a plant person. So I'm super happy to have gotten to have you on and uh, thank for for joining us.

Eric Toensmeier:

Well, great, I love the show and nothing makes me happier than someone actually taking this stuff and running with it and even leaving me in the dust. That is the whole point of it, so that's great yeah.

Andy:

For the next generation.

Eric Toensmeier:

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

To listen to this episode of the Poor Proles Almanac, tune into episode 221.