Episode #298
Will Brinton: Let The Land Express Itslef

Will Brinton makes the case for holistic farming by challenging one of agriculture’s deepest assumptions: that land can be managed like a machine. After decades of working with farmers and studying soil, Will has become increasingly skeptical of universal formulas for fertility, yield, and even “soil health.” He argues that every farm exists within a particular living system, and that good farming begins by paying attention to what that system is already trying to become. Rather than forcing every landscape toward the same ideal, he asks farmers to observe more closely, intervene more carefully, and let the land express itself.

Will Brinton’s interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Will Brinton was interviewed by Dave Chapman in August of 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking again with my friend Will Brinton. Will has such a long history in organic agriculture in America. When I was a very young farmer in Vermont, we started a soil series where we brought a group of farmers together.

Dave Chapman 0:24
We were trying to educate ourselves – we were trying to understand. None of us were trained in academia. None of us had that kind of formal training, and so we were looking to people who could help us do a better job as farmers. One of the speakers we brought in for a full-day workshop was Will.

Dave Chapman 0:41
Will, it’s been a long time since then. You’ve helped me on my farm many times, and you’ve helped many people on their farms many times. We talked yesterday about a lot of stuff, and I have a lot I want to talk to you about today. My first big question is: as we prepare for our conference at Churchtown in September, we’re going to have a debate between Tim Bowles and Michael Grunwald.

Dave Chapman 1:13
Michael is a proponent of what they call land sparing or rewilding. The idea is to concentrate agriculture to make it as productive per square foot as possible, and thus free up land that could be going back to a wild state of nature, and that will sequester more carbon than agriculture. We need to do this for climate change. That’s the argument.

Dave Chapman 1:45
I’ve really thought about it a lot because I thought, “Okay, this is a serious argument, and it seems insane to me.” But why is it insane? What is wrong with this way of thinking about things? We all have thoughts about it. I’d love to hear yours.

Dave Chapman 2:05
I especially want to know, I have come to suspect that, looking at it from a systems analysis perspective, going to intensive chemical agriculture on land puts it into what we would call overshoot, meaning that we’re running down the land. We’re maybe physically losing it, but we’re also destroying the life in the soil, losing the actual natural fertility of how plants work in that complex ecosystem, with many things living in the soil, and that could lead to collapse.

Dave Chapman 2:44
As Allan Savory said, we’ve lost some 20 civilizations to this kind of collapse. As he said, we farmers do a better job than armies. When we destroy a civilization, it stays destroyed. What are your thoughts about this? It’s a huge question, I know.

Will Brinton 3:04
I think the way you described it, it’s a formula for collapse. What they are proposing is a formula for collapse, because if that intensified area goes into any kind of overshoot, it starts collapsing. You’ve pushed away all the rest of nature, and now it is inaccessible. It’s now wilded. What are humans going to do? Start foraging in wild nature, or will we become hunter-gatherers again while the technical system is collapsing? It’s a really dangerous formula.

Will Brinton 3:39
To make that work, those people have to get all their ducks lined up, and they don’t have them all lined up. We see that in these vertical farming models, skyscrapers full of plants. As you fly around this country, there are some major airports that have set up displays of vertical gardening inside the atriums.

Will Brinton 4:04
You look at them, and they look extremely unhealthy. Of course, the question is, are the contractors running them well? But I’ve seen signs of these over-designed systems. Dave, I have to tell you, I don’t trust intellectual thinking anymore to design things.

Will Brinton 4:22
Our thinking is way too mechanical, and I just don’t think we have it in us to imitate nature’s resilience, and its long-lasting stability in a way that would provide that to civilization. That’s just kind of an overview of it.

Dave Chapman 4:43
Another interesting thing is that those systems, all the systems, of course, the vertical farming, but all of that intensive chemical agriculture, are very energy-intensive. As energy becomes more and more precious, which it inevitably will, because it is clearly coming from a limited resource, they’re going to be more and more expensive to run. They’re going to use more and more energy. They’re not going to be in a steady state.

Dave Chapman 5:07
Would you agree with that? As you burn out the organic matter in the soil, you need to put in more chemicals in order to maintain the yields.

Will Brinton 5:20
It just becomes hopeless and futile because you can’t use a chemical to substitute for the complexity of carbon as it organizes itself into organic structures. Think of all the organic structures in soil. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like to use the carbon word because carbon doesn’t exist in soil as sea as carbon. It associates itself with hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and it builds molecular structures, polysaccharides, gums, microbial exudates.

Will Brinton 5:52
Those are all carbon, but it represents the complexity of life there. It’s building a niche for more life to build upon it, and we can’t even predict that. We have to always be careful thinking we can surreptitiously substitute a chemical for a living agent carbon that builds into associative molecules and complexes that make the whole thing work, even when we don’t even think about it.

Dave Chapman 6:22
In a sense, carbon in the soil is always part of a process. It’s part of a community. It’s not like a chunk of carbon here and a chunk of carbon there.

Will Brinton 6:31
Absolutely not. Now we went down a rabbit hole with introducing carbon into farming with biochar, and people know my view on that. We carbonized living matter and took it out of the life cycle. When I first heard the idea, I said, “Who would want to do that?” Because my microbes in the soil expect to be able to eat something I put in it, but if you put charcoal carbon in soil, they can’t touch it.

Will Brinton 6:57
The free energy in charcoal is so negative. No living thing can access it. That’s why it lasts forever in soil. Why would you take it out of the living system to satisfy somebody’s mechanical, economic goal of sequestering carbon? In fact, it’s using nature to make up for the problems that industry has created for us by burning fossil fuels in the first place.

Dave Chapman 7:28
Yes. The first answer to how do we address the problem we’re in is to stop burning so many fossil fuels.

Will Brinton 7:37
We’re going to have to find a way to tone it down significantly. To some extent, I think it will happen naturally. Although we’re not prepared for that, in that we’re reaching a point of population plateauing in the world and starting into a long, long, long decline. The decline day will be unstoppable.

Will Brinton 8:05
All these people projecting population continuing to grow, they’re not reading the charts. They’re not looking at the trends. When we get into a world that… You look at some of the studies, within 100 years, this world will have depopulated, not through disease, war, or famine. It will have depopulated a billion people.

Will Brinton 8:33
The whole of North America could be vacated. It won’t happen here. It’s happening first in China and India, where they’re losing population because the growth of population is not there. Now there are factors such as food availability, land use decline, and so on. But fertility of humans is declining, and people are socially deciding to have less children.

Will Brinton 9:00
Germany is begging people right now to make babies. They’ve plateaued and they’re sinking. They’re bringing in people to expand the workforce because the population is not growing. Now project that worldwide as we go into a population decline measured in the billions of people over the next few hundred years.

Will Brinton 9:23
What does this world look like in the future? I won’t have any neighbors anymore. There’ll be five-mile walks to the store in the future. You don’t believe this, but look at what’s happening. I think we’re misreading the future. A future with significantly less human beings is a very interesting price.

Dave Chapman 9:49
I’m curious. We both watched that amazing show, “Handmaid’s Tale.” That did an amazing job of constructing a dystopian future for our country that does not seem crazy, and one in which, as a result, partly of our declining fertility, as a result of the large number of toxins in our lives, in our manufacturing, and in our food, we simply became significantly less fertile. Do you think that’s crazy talk?

Will Brinton 10:30
It’s not crazy talk. If I could jump back 30 years ago, during which time I studied off and on in Europe, in Switzerland, Germany, and Scandinavia, the Hannover Veterinary School started a series of studies on fertility of animals in relation to how farms are managed.

Dave Chapman 10:55
This is in Germany.

Will Brinton 10:56
In Germany. I remember translating one of the studies they did. Basically, they showed they could reproduce significant fertility aberrations and declines by overintensifying farms on which the forage of the farm was used to feed the animals.

Will Brinton 11:17
The implications of this are enormous. They didn’t blame it on single molecules. They called it extensive versus intensive farming. To find the extensive farms, they had to choose farms that were organic. In this case, they chose many biodynamic farms, which they rated as the most extensive, meaning the least managed. The most where you allow the system to take over.

Will Brinton 11:44
Those farmers in Europe that I experienced doing these methods, they so believed in the farm as an organism. Whatever yield the organism gave was the yield that they accepted. Now, the yields were good, so nobody was complaining. But imagine telling farmers here, accept the yield that your living organism can give you. That’s the right yield. That they called the most extensive way of farming.

Will Brinton 12:11
Then intensive was the other extreme. This concept of a built-up, highly managed, highly chemicalized farm with high yields. They classed these compounds in forages, feeds, and grains as fertility bioactive compounds, and they said it was way too complex at the time to say what was there chemical there what was actually doing it. But the forages did not support healthy fertility cycles.

Dave Chapman 12:44
For the livestock. By extension, the assumption is for the humans.

Will Brinton 12:49
Nobody’s going to do a study like that on us, but the study is being done on us. We are all victims of an enormous experiment, or we are the guinea pigs in the experiment, maybe not yet the victims.

Dave Chapman 13:04
From that perspective, in fact, organic-biodynamic agriculture might be our only option going forward.

Will Brinton 13:13
I think eventually it will be the only option. All other options will fail. Like that famous quote that Winston Churchill said about the Americans. Do you know that?

Dave Chapman 13:24
Tell me.

Will Brinton 13:25
He said, “The Americans always eventually do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.” He was so frustrated with us. “No, we’ll try that later. First, we got to wreck this, and then we’ll wreck this.” They almost lost a war over it.

Will Brinton 13:56
Yeah. Like that wonderful book that we talked about, Ayana’s “What If We Get It Right?” It’s a wonderfully optimistic picture. We finally put our heads together and say, enough fighting. The studies are in. We need to listen to nature more. That’s definitely something we need to do. We need to stop projecting mechanistic theory into nature and start re-observing. But it means changing our science, too. That’s a tough one to look at.

Dave Chapman 14:29
It means changing our minds. It means changing how we look at everything. We all grew up in a system that had these shared values and shared beliefs that are invisible to us. We don’t think that there’s any alternative. When we think about science, we think about reductionist science as being science. It presents answers. But the answers are often… It’s not that it’s wrong; t’s that it’s asking the wrong question. They’re incomplete.

Will Brinton 14:54
Yes. We’re being guided. It’s the subject of a great new book called “The Blind Spot” that people should pick up and read. It’s tough reading, but the idea is that we have engineered blind spots in our perception of the world because what we think we see, we’re understanding while seeing. The understanding is coming from a concept that you pre-formed to organize the information coming to us from outside.

Will Brinton 15:35
Naively, we say, “I see the rhododendron leaves here,” but I’ve already rhododendroned the object with the concept. Otherwise, I wouldn’t recognize. I might not even recognize it as a plant. If I came here from a planet that had no plants, I would not look at that and say, “Those are plants.” I would say, “What is that? I have no idea. It’s a smudge of green.”

Will Brinton 16:03
We’ve lost sight of the fact that… This is why ideology is so dangerous. Ideology is a set of mental constructs that reprogram the brain, and then you see it everywhere in the world around you.

Dave Chapman 16:19
John Fullerton was quoting, and as he said, perhaps misquoting. He wasn’t quite sure that Einstein said this, but he’s quoting Einstein to say that we can’t see something until we have a theory of it. As John extended that, it’s like we say seeing is believing, but believing is seeing.

Will Brinton 16:41
It’s called the Gadamer’s Circle. Cause is effect, effect is cause, and you don’t know where you get off that circle. Life is so pleasant and wonderful because we are floating in this naive balloon of seeing is believing.

Dave Chapman 17:02
There’s nothing per se wrong with that. That is how we survive as animals: we have a conceptual way of seeing things, and we’re able to function in the world. But if we understand that our beliefs are creating problems that might, in fact, be existential for us, then we need to change our beliefs. We need to challenge them and enlarge or adapt.

Will Brinton 17:26
Yes. We’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I remember vividly when Thomas Kuhn wrote his book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” I think it was published in ’68 or ’69 from MIT. I read it in ’72 while I started organic farming.

Will Brinton 17:49
If you’ve ever heard the word paradigm, he was the one that made that word really household language, because he showed that as you shift your thinking, your discoveries change. People say, “Well, wait a second. A discovery is observing factual objects in the world and just recording them.” No.

Will Brinton 18:14
A discovery is a thought construct in your mind organizing the information coming to you – I don’t even like to call it information. Organizing the observation in a way that you then discover something. Then he recounted through history these huge, not gradual evolutions, but we would make leaps with new thought structures, which he called all paradigms, and then we’d start seeing things differently.

Will Brinton 18:48
The history of science is stepwise changing paradigms and then explaining the world differently. We’re stuck right now in a major mechanical linear thinking paradigm, and we don’t know how to get out of it.

Dave Chapman 19:09
I’ve listened to a lot of Dana Meadows in the last few months, author of “Limits to Growth.” She talks about how do you change a system? Because she said we need to change our system. We’re in a system that is dysfunctional, and she said you’ve got to change it – she didn’t use the word paradigm, but that is what she was talking about – you’ve got to change the paradigm.

Dave Chapman 19:37
Otherwise, yes, there are leverage points for change, but really, you’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic down there. You’ve got to go up and figure out how to change the direction of the ship so it doesn’t hit the iceberg.

Will Brinton 19:52
That’s correct. This goes way back to 1640, when a French philosopher, Rene Descartes, made that famous… First, he made the famous statement, “Je pense, donc je suis,” which means “I think, therefore I am.” He was identifying the fact that if we weren’t conscious with concepts, maybe we wouldn’t even exist.

Will Brinton 20:21
It goes back to this thing: Would I recognize the rhododendron here if I had never seen a rhododendron? No, I wouldn’t. But then Descartes said, “The universe is a clockwork mechanism,” and he proposed that. I like to remind people the background of it. He was making a deal with the church. He didn’t want to end up under house arrest like Galileo’s.

Dave Chapman 20:44
His friend Galileo.

Will Brinton 20:46
No, he said, “I’m not into that. I don’t want that.” He made a deal with them. He said, “You get the church. You, you get the souls, all of us. I get the physical world.” He wanted to create science. He said, “The reason I get it, it’s just a mechanism. It’s a clock.” Oh yes, God invented the clock a long time ago, but He doesn’t have to be in it anymore because it’s working.

Will Brinton 21:09
The church sort of went along with that. Now I believe it will become the fatal mistake that we made of bifurcating the world into spirituality, which includes our senses, our sense of beauty, joy, all these subjective things that we’ve now relegated to God, or relegated to a reaction to something in the world that we don’t know what it is. He separated, bifurcated the universe.

Will Brinton 21:46
Einstein came along, and you mentioned him. He said, “It’s not just a clockwork; it’s impenetrable.” People said, “Well, what do you mean by that?” He said, “Well, the clock is working, and we see it. We’ll never be able to penetrate the clock to see how.

Will Brinton 22:05
But we need to form theories, and we’ll keep changing our theories until we come up with a theory that matches the movement of the hands.” Imagine having to invent a theory that would explain an impenetrable clock. In that fell swoop, Einstein sort of locked us out of reality.

Dave Chapman 22:28
John Fullerton, whom we just released his interview, he talks about seeing the universe as a clock from a Newtonian perspective. He said Newton really taught us how to think. That’s the way we think. He was a smart guy, but you’re saying Descartes was working on this…

Will Brinton 22:51
Descartes set the whole stage.

Dave Chapman 22:53
That was the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Will Brinton 22:55
Yeah. Newton hammered out the whole modality of linear mechanistic thinking. His contribution to the world was very accurate, but he sent us down a one-way street, and we are now suffering this linearity. Let’s face it: linearity is great when you’re designing a machine, when you’re designing a set of pistons, when you’re designing a carburetor; this is not a living system. But he, like Descartes before him, and all the early scientists wanted to reduce it all to mechanisms.

Dave Chapman 23:36
Okay, so this really gets to the crux of something that is the essence of “Limits to Growth,” and I know that you want to talk about the ways in which science can fail us. It seems like the gist of it is – and I know this is quite far up in the paradigm here, but it’s important – which is that if we see everything as a machine, and then we figure out it might be a complicated machine, but it can’t be a complex machine.

Dave Chapman 24:12
The difference between complicated and complexity is significant. Complexity always involves something that is part of a much greater context, and everything in that system is always changing and impacting everything else in the system. That’s not how you think about fixing a machine. The guys who are fixing your car are worried about whether it was sunny yesterday or a million other…

Will Brinton 24:38
Or how the sun will affect it during the operation of fixing it, but that’s how nature works and it’s not a machine.

Dave Chapman 24:44
That’s how nature works. We rely upon nature. We are nature. We are part of nature, and just on the simplest level, I don’t know that it’s simple, but the simplest level of how do we feed ourselves? We are now dealing with complexity, because food is produced in these living complex systems, right?

Will Brinton 25:10
Exactly. But the people who will argue against me will say, “Oh, that’s all very well. You can’t just let nature feed you. If I did nothing here, what would we eat?”

Dave Chapman 25:21
Right. That’s okay.

Will Brinton 25:24
We have to design it. Once we design it, there comes the linear paradigm into play.

Dave Chapman 25:30
Allan Savory would say, “Well, you can’t just design it. It has to evolve every day.” That was, I think, one of the things that most frustrated people about Allan’s way of thinking about things is that you can’t just design it; it has to be evolving. That’s based on what’s happening in all these different moving parts, forces, and elements of a system.

Will Brinton 25:57
How do you say that nature is designing itself? The ultimate struggle that Darwin had in coming out with a new theory of evolution was he was really bothered by using the word selection. If I use the word selection, I’m a selector, correct? Only God can select. When he came up with the expression “natural selection,” he knew it was fundamentally self-contradictory.

Will Brinton 26:33
But he coined the expression because he worked with breeders in England who were breeding rabbits, breeding animal stock, and they were the ultimate selectors. He realized what we’re doing in nature is we’re advancing it by selecting. “I don’t like this. We’re going to cull this. We’re going to encourage this,” and helping plants evolve according to human needs.

Will Brinton 26:59
But he was aware of the fact that nature… You cannot say nature is selecting, because that’s a deity. That’s a choice being made. We’re still struggling with the internal contradiction. The answer to it is that nature… The whole is more than the sum of the parts. The whole is acting to organize it. In “The Blind Spot,” this book, they’re struggling with how to make that understandable.

Dave Chapman 27:31
Do you think the guy hypothesis addresses this? In the sense that it is trying to see our planet as a living system that is self-regulating?

Will Brinton 27:45
I think that was Lovelock’s original intention: to make us aware that the whole was not just the parts. It really inspired people. But again, the scientists pull that apart right away. They say, “Yeah, it’s a whole, but we have to count all the parts.” Or it’s like the genetic theory. Most people on the street, if you ask them, they say, “Well, DNA causes everything to happen.”

Will Brinton 28:12
Uh-huh. The cell causes DNA to happen. The cell is the organism in which the DNA is nested and depended on. “Oh no, the DNA made the cell.” No, the cell made the DNA and nests and nourishes it. So how do you get off that contradictory cycle? The path of science now forward is to try to unravel this and keep all the good that we’ve made and throw away the stuff that’s not working.

Dave Chapman 28:43
All right. This was a later question, but let’s jump to it. Reductionist versus holistic science. We know reductionist science in our bones. As you say, we almost can’t even talk about holistic science without making the conversation reductionist. We can’t do it without saying, “Let’s isolate this one part and talk about the part.”

Dave Chapman 29:06
As I understand it, holistic science would be saying, “Let’s look at the system as opposed to an isolated part.” There are some things I believe in nature that we cannot study in a reductionist way because as soon as we try to isolate them, they disappear – they die. What are your thoughts?

Dave Chapman 29:29
I know that you have talked with me about your dissatisfaction with the limitations of that reductionist way of seeing things. You’re a very serious scientist. What does it mean? What’s the alternative? What’s a holistic way of looking at things, and from a scientific perspective?

Will Brinton 29:49
I even question using the word alternative because it implies there’s this, and then there’s another way to do it. What I’m talking about is almost a parallel. It’s a parallel way of doing science. It’s parallel to reductionistic science, but it seeks always to look at the emergent properties of a system. What is an emergent property? An emergent property when you orchestrate living organisms together, something that they alone don’t predict.

Will Brinton 30:21
One of the greatest examples of it that’s really used to not completely contradict Darwin’s linear logic of natural selection is what’s called niche construction in nature. In nature, when you put a group of living organisms together, they start doing things to the system that enable the system to be better habitats for them. Now, how do you explain that?

Will Brinton 30:50
For example, throw earthworms into a system, and they start burrowing. They start making wormholes, surface layer, and deep penetrating layers, which improves the possibility of life for microbes. It improves the situation for plant roots. What is the goal of the earthworm – to be a slave to plants? Of course not. But the whole system is building a niche that improves the possibility of survival. It’s instantly a contradiction of cause and effect. It’s the chicken and the egg again.

Dave Chapman 31:26
Would you say that our natural systems always have a bias for life, for creating life, for engendering life? It seems that there’s something amazing that happens on our planet.

Will Brinton 31:44
Exactly. Thermodynamic laws contradict that because everything goes into entropy. Yet, everywhere around us is negative entropy. Everything is growing, becoming more complicated, more complex, more stable, against all odds – against all cosmic odds. How do you explain that?

Dave Chapman 32:07
That is one law that nobody in physics doubts.

Will Brinton 32:11
No.

Dave Chapman 32:12
There is, as far as a human can understand, an inevitable truth of that. Yet, there is something happening that is not described by that law.

Will Brinton 32:24
Some of the new philosophers of science are saying one of the fatal constructs nowadays is to have separated experience from reality. In other words, I’m sitting here experiencing a situation. I’m looking at a beautiful shrub here, and the reductionistic explanation of this is that my experience is purely subjective. It has no bearing on what that actually is. That the explanation of the plant, its life, is a series of mechanisms that lies outside the experienceable realm.

Will Brinton 33:08
Why did we construct an explanation like that? In the new thinking, they call it the surreptitious substitution. We keep saying no, but that’s not really… The fact that you see it’s green… Ask any scientist: Is the leaf green? They say no. That’s your optic nerve reacting to whatever is there and coloring it green, and you believe it’s green.

Dave Chapman 33:29
Okay. Let me take this back to a lived experience. You have worked on very real questions for your whole career; these are not philosophical. People want to know how to grow plants in the soil, and you have helped them do that. You’ve helped me do that.

Dave Chapman 33:55
Give an example, if you could, about some problem that we face, and what would a reductionist science look like, and how would it address that, and what would a holistic science look like? I’m getting the sense that a holistic science, by definition, is looking at the system – at the whole living ecology. The whole system. Ecology is the science of living systems, I believe. Is that right?

Will Brinton 34:29
That’s correct. I think one way to get at this would be to invoke the expression terroir. Terroir is a word. It’s French. You’ve probably heard it in relationship to wine flavors and wine tasting. Some people think it’s just subjective hubris, but the growers and the people working in the landscape know that they can create a wine that tastes like the landscape. Now, be careful with the word “like” here.

Will Brinton 35:04
But what’s happening in a truly natural system is the emergent properties of it are all consistent with what’s there, and it’s different than what’s over here. Each farm is different. The problem we’re having today is everybody’s theorizing their systems and generalizing this into a single principle.

Will Brinton 35:25
The thing I can’t stand anymore is this talk about soil health. Now, I was part of all that, but you cannot generalize soil health into one thing and give it a number. I visited some vineyards in France once. They’re growing grapes on gravel and stone.

Will Brinton 35:47
Like these white Bordeaux, and the labels have Graves in the name. You should taste the flavor of those vines. It’s unbelievable, and it’s growing on stones. We know the roots are three meters deep, and the plant has created its own niche, and it’s thriving. Wonderful vitality.

Will Brinton 36:10
A farmer would look at it and say, “I can’t grow anything there.” Well, that’s not a reason for you to grind up and bring in soil and change that system. It has created its own wholeness that happens to work very well. I just came back from Switzerland, and we went up and toured farms that are in the mid Alps. That’s like at 1,000 meters high and more, and it’s a vibrant community of growers.

Will Brinton 36:39
They showed me their hay fields. I had never seen such diversity in the hay fields. The beauty of the hayfield. They said, “It’s not a theory that you can taste this in the milk.” We would get the milk from these farms, and I would say I’ve never had anything like this. The landscape is so diverse and beautiful. It’s low yielding, though, but they have plenty of land for their herds. They just don’t overtax the system.

Will Brinton 37:13
We come in with a theory of soil health or a theory of how deep a fertile soil should be, and impose that on the system. We’ve mechanized farming in this way that really bothers me. We have to start watching what nature is trying to do in each situation, then allow that to happen.

Dave Chapman 37:41
Okay. We could go much further there, but I think I’m going to move on because I do have some things I want to talk about with you. These are deep questions, Will.

Will Brinton 37:53
Yeah. The answers to them are not simple answers.

Dave Chapman 37:56
No.

Will Brinton 37:57
But they are intuitive, too. You can have an aha and say, “Okay, I get it.”

Dave Chapman 38:03
Of course, you can convince yourself that the ice cream out of the round container tastes better, and prove it, but you can’t prove it blindfolded. But I’ll bet you can prove that that milk tastes better, that comes from that particular hillside with those particular blends of plants, and give it to somebody who can’t see where it came from, and they go, “Whoa, what’s that milk?”

Dave Chapman 38:28
There’s something real that happens there, and we respond to that. I think they’re different nutritionally. Okay, I wasn’t going to go there yet, but let’s go there. Nutrition. There’s a lot of talk now, and there’s a lot of laboratories that are building up, saying, “We’re testing for nutrition, and we can tell you which carrot is better.”

Dave Chapman 38:55
I have no doubt from my experience tasting carrots that some carrots are better nutritionally because they taste better. They taste really good, and other carrots taste pretty bland to downright terrible. I don’t want to eat them. I don’t want to take a second bite.

Dave Chapman 39:13
My question is: Do you believe that we have a level of sophistication in our nutritional testing at this point, that you can make a clear statement based on these tests, we can demonstrate that this one is better for your health.

Will Brinton 39:31
I have followed this field a long time. One of the first laboratories I worked in in Sweden as part of my master’s program, we were looking holistically at nutritional qualities. Let me give you an example, one that surprises people. We would take crops grown on conventional versus organic versus biodynamic farms, or on whole farms, and we had research plots.

Will Brinton 40:02
The conventionally grown high-nitrogen crops, when you harvested them, they spoiled faster – a lot faster. We developed quantitative tests for that because in order to talk the language of science, you have to measure something, and then you have to reproduce it. You have replicates, and we did all that.

Will Brinton 40:32
We were able to prove, particularly with potatoes, that the more you intensify the landscape, the more it was…. Nitrogen was the crucial culprit in most of the cases. The tubers would start sprouting in the winter, during storage early, and we studied the plant, and the tissue of the plants was already starting to decompose, and that’s an enzymatic thing.

Will Brinton 41:03
People are saying, “Well, where did these enzymes come from? Why are they attacking the plant so early?” They were higher in the plant because the system they came out of had been forced. Now we can’t say nitrogen caused more of the destructive enzymes in the plant tissue, but we saw the association.

Will Brinton 41:24
Now, one of the ways we noticed it is the potatoes turn brown. Have you ever sliced a potato and it starts turning brown? That’s an enzymatic reaction. We developed spectrometers that bounced light off of the potato tissue and measured the color, the wavelengths of it. You could see the conventional ones turning brown faster than the organic and the biodynamic. The difference was huge.

Will Brinton 41:51
Then we expanded this to protein quality. When I was in Switzerland at the early institute called the Research Institute for Biological Husbandry, they were working on greens, lettuce greens, things we eat, and when you harvest them, how quickly do they spoil in the refrigerators, for example.

Will Brinton 42:17
We found it correlated with the amount of nitrate in it. The more nitrate in the lettuce, the faster it spoils. I’m trying to say all this to build a holistic picture that the entire environment of the growing plant was affecting its behavior, which affects its nutrition. Along come people and just say, “We’re going to measure nutrition.” I say you have to look at the whole growing situation, the soil, and all before you answer that question.

Will Brinton 42:48
How are we going to do that? You can’t just measure it in the laboratory. We did quantify it, but we found it was different by every variety. We had an index of coloration for one kind of potato, and when we would change to another, it shifted dramatically. We couldn’t generalize it.

Will Brinton 43:07
You then had to study it within each one. Then we did it with fruit. Apples are a prime example of showing poor quality quickly by what happens to them when you have cut them and expose them. There’s been such a loss of quality to me, and particularly in this country. You cannot buy good-tasting fruit anymore. I just challenge you.

Will Brinton 43:34
Now we love peaches, and our peach trees have just come on now. But before that, I go out and start buying peaches because I want to start eating them, and they’re selling us these rock-hard things. You smell them, no aroma to it. What are the aroma compounds? Why are they so absent in these conventionally grown fruit? It’s so disappointing to me.

Will Brinton 43:59
I’ve heard people say they ate at a salad bar, and the tomatoes tasted like cardboard. What is that? Is that a nutritional tomato if you have no pleasure in it? If the aroma and the flavor are so poor? Now again, it goes back to the whole growing environment.

Dave Chapman 44:20
What’s interesting is you’re also talking about testing not just the nutritional content. I don’t know, there are 100,000 secondary metabolites.

Will Brinton 44:37
You can measure vitamin C, you can measure the oil content, all that…

Dave Chapman 44:41
A bunch of things that don’t even have a name, but they know that they exist. They don’t know what role they serve. They don’t know what the relationships need to be to be optimal, to be even positive. So there’s a lot of things that we don’t understand. I am distressed by the labs that say we have the answer and we will tell you what’s good and what isn’t good.

Will Brinton 45:07
Nutrient density. I hate that word. What do they actually mean by that? Now I can show you chemically grown food that is over-fertilized and that’s loaded with nutrients. It’s overloaded with them. It’s an excessive amount of potassium in the plant tissue, for example. If you eat conventionally grown vegetables, vegetables are high consumers of potassium, but they over-fertilize them to get the good stem growth.

Will Brinton 45:36
If you want a really big stalk of celery, just overload that plant with potassium chlorate. It generates these enormous, thick, crispy stalks, loaded. Potassium is a nutrient, right? And all the associated compounds that go with it. What do we mean by nutrient density?

Dave Chapman 45:58
You’re guessing that that overloaded stalk of celery isn’t actually the best food.

Will Brinton 46:04
Oh no. It’s big. It’s crisp.

Dave Chapman 46:08
It might test very well if you’re testing it for nutritional content. I don’t mean to interrupt, but I wanted to just share our experience. We did testing last year on blueberries. It was part of this whole project, and we tested them for taste, and we tested them for pesticide residues, and we tested them for nutrient density as best we could. We used a couple of labs.

Dave Chapman 46:35
One of the labs we used is like, “Well, I’m quite confident you’re going to be thrilled with these results.” They didn’t know what they were testing. They didn’t know which was which. One was King Grove Farm from Florida, real organic, soil-grown living mulch system. Fantastic, best taste. They won the taste test easily. No pesticides. They did well in the pesticide test.

Dave Chapman 47:00
There was one that lost the taste test. They were certified organic from Mexico. They also lost the pesticide test. They had more pesticide residues than the chemically grown ones in Florida, and prohibited pesticides not only for organic but for conventional. They were complete fraud. They’re the one that won the nutritional testing.

Will Brinton 47:21
It was loaded up with chemical nutrients.

Dave Chapman 47:24
It was also a smaller berry, so it had more skin. The skin is where all of that stuff concentrates.

Will Brinton 47:30
That will certainly concentrate mineral elements and salt elements. That is not necessarily nutritional. We have to be really careful when we start spinning words around nutrient density, and trying to measure it superficially by appearance.

Will Brinton 47:54
It’s an example where holistic thinking fails. We just start trying to describe a holistic property using mechanistic linear thinking. It’s almost a contradiction. There’s a big prize at the end of this development if somebody could come up with it. This is what drives people: if I could come up with some device that would measure this, then we’re off to the races.

Dave Chapman 48:20
They’re talking about certifying it. They’ve got certifications they’re building for major brands to use that certify nutrient-dense. It gives me the willies – the heebie-jeebies.

Will Brinton 48:35
The whole thing, I think, is best laid plans. It’s going to fall apart. As I go from farm to farm and see these different environments, I tell people, “Accept your soil. You don’t have a mollisol. You don’t have the world’s best prairie soil. Let the soil express itself in how it grows plants. You’re not going to get the high yields, but you’ll get good flavor because nature builds its own niche in that situation.”

Will Brinton 49:00
We have to stop generalizing all these ideas. That’s why I will take on the people doing cation balancing of soils. I know it’s attributed to William Albrecht, although he certainly was not the only originator of it. Where did he get that idea? Study mollisols in Missouri. The world’s best soils.

Will Brinton 49:29
He said the animals that live on the pastures on these soils that are well balanced with calcium, magnesium, and potassium, these are great animals. Then he went on to study soils across the country, and he showed they don’t have these great balances, but that doesn’t mean you now go and start manipulating everybody else’s soil to have the ideal generalized ratio of cations that those good soils do. We can’t even afford to do that – to balance all these soils.

Will Brinton 50:03
I started looking at magnesium when I realized this whole theory doesn’t hold up because it invites me to manipulate nature, my soil right here, based on a theory that is not homegrown, meaning nature here did not produce soils like that. I do want to avoid magnesium deficiency because it’s very low in many main soils, but you don’t have to crank it up to the ideal ratio to have the plant completely satisfied.

Will Brinton 50:33
The beauty of that is, the plants in your area will adapt to it and get what they need if you’re not doing something else crazy like using too much potassium. We build these wonderful theories, and then we actuate it like an ideology. At that point, I tell people, you’re not even seeing nature anymore. You’re just imposing this theory – the Einstein model. Where’s the theory to explain this? Keep trying.

Dave Chapman 51:07
Farmers, of course, are trying to survive economically, and so I know one famous farmer who’s working with one famous consultant. As you’ve suggested, it’s almost a hydroponic system in the sense of you need to add this, you need to add that, and he’s been promised that when he gets it right, he will stop having any insect problems on his crop. His crop is in a greenhouse.

Dave Chapman 51:38
The farmer said to me, “You really think that we can do this and not have any white fly? How is it working? I have not asked. I will ask.” I said, “No. I doubt it.” I said, “Maybe it won’t be as bad a problem. I mean, maybe you have imbalances, but there’s more to it than just that.” If you’re creating a greenhouse, then you’re creating a separate ecosystem.

Will Brinton 52:07
It’s a separate ecosystem that starts its own internal evolutionary cycle. It’s starting to build a niche inside the greenhouse. But the danger of that is it can then go into an overshoot. I remember the wonderful years that I was associated with John Todd at the New Alchemy Institute. He designed the ark. The concept of let’s design an ecosystem that would be like the ark to carry life to a newly discovered world. A wonderful concept.

Will Brinton 52:41
The difficulty of it was, and he was a keen observer. He would bring me into the greenhouses, and they had fish tanks in the greenhouses, and he would say, “Look at that.” I say, “What?” He said, “Where did those plants come from? They started to grow in the water.” He said, “This system is self-evolving now,” and they decided to let that happen.

Will Brinton 53:08
Self-evolving systems. Plants would appear, insect life would come and go. The whole system was alive, but it was also constrained by the structure. It was constrained by the climate that it was in. We were very, very concerned about undershoot, overshoot. Undershoot as the system is deficient.

Will Brinton 53:30
Overshoot as the cycles get tighter and tighter. For example, they were building up nitrogen in the system associated with fish and fish waste, because the wastewater was used in the system, too, and the nitrogen eventually was too high in the system. We had to invent ways that nature might have invented in an open system to vent the nitrogen.

Dave Chapman 53:57
Were they feeding the fish entirely from plants grown in the ark?

Will Brinton 54:01
I don’t actually remember that detail.

Dave Chapman 54:03
That’s a big detail.

Will Brinton 54:04
It’s a big detail because whole-farm system studies have shown, particularly in Germany, that just the supplements that you bring in for your cattle are enough to be measurable in three to five-year time frames in the soil as an increase, particularly with phosphorus. Farmers are bringing in dicalcium phosphate, and it’s enough to cause a measurable increase in soil phosphate that’s permanent.

Will Brinton 54:36
That’s an amazing dynamic of a living system. We just have to be tuned to it. All I’m saying, Dave, is you measure here, measure here. I love reductionism to make measurements and quantify it. The problem is how we think about the result.

Will Brinton 54:52
I was in soil testing, as you know, for years, and I got really tired of what a farm expected from the soil test result. How do I fix this now? I say, “No, you’re on a trend here. I’m concerned about the trend.” “No, no, no. Just let’s take care of this year. What nutrients do I add to fix this?”

Dave Chapman 55:16
The challenge for a farmer trying to have this holistic perspective is to see it from a holistic perspective. The things that you’re doing, the ways you’re impacting the system, are having this kind of an outcome, and what might you consider doing a little bit differently?

Will Brinton 55:39
Yes.

Dave Chapman 55:38
Okay. One of the challenges, the things you’re saying, sound absolutely right, and that every piece of land has its appropriate carrying capacity to produce really good food. But if it’s low, and you’re struggling to survive, and you’re on that stony hillside in Maine, it’s either you will address that or you will go out of business. We are all locked into an economic system that’s much bigger than our farm.

Will Brinton 56:11
The Grunwalds of the world are saying, “Aha! Look at that. You’re not going to feed the future populations.” It brings into question why we should even be living in Maine. In fact, if you want to put a measuring stick up to it, oh, let Maine go back to trees.

Will Brinton 56:34
We’d be denuding the landscape of people and moving them somewhere else because whole landscapes aren’t supporting high enough yield, but I’m saying those landscapes create high-quality plants, nutritionally good plants if you allow them to do what they’re trying to express without too much manipulation.

Will Brinton 56:57
The theorists are saying, “Oh no, that doesn’t work the model. That doesn’t fit the model. This land needs to support 1,000 people, not 600.” I’m saying the 600 is fine. Now let’s do this again somewhere else and let the land express itself.

Dave Chapman 57:16
Okay.