Join me today for Episode 903 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
- The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe by Max Paschall
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[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:33 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 3rd day of June. Welcome to June, brothers and sisters, 2024.
And this is episode 903 of Bitcoin, and we are definitely going to do something different today. I've been rereading this particular piece that I'm about to read to you. It has nothing to do at all with Bitcoin unless you look underneath the surface, in which case many of the things that I talk about relate to Bitcoin and a great many other things. This one, I'm going to put the following phrase into your head. While you listen to this. This piece is called The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe. It's by a gentleman named Max Paschel from the Shelterwood Forest Farm blog. Now this was published, like, 4 years ago, October 8, 2020.
But it's very, very good. And I ran across this piece when I was doing some other research and came across what was the word? There there there's a particular word in here. Cultura promiscua. That's right, cultura promiscua. It's a it translates roughly into mixed cultivation. Yes. We are gonna be talking about agriculture today, but we're gonna be talking about some very ancient agriculture. And we're talking about agriculture that was probably started coming up right at the interstitial space that that edge between fully blown humans being hunter gatherers and then moving across into
[00:02:29] Unknown:
full blown
[00:02:31] Unknown:
cultivated agriculture, you know, like the the sort of, like, even though the the agriculture the cultivated agriculture of back in the day, like, you know, 10000 years ago looks nothing like it does today, it did have a lot of the hallmarks that we brought over into modern agriculture, I e, growing a whole field of the same kind of thing. Like all like this field is all corn. This field is all cotton. That this monoculture mindset that we have. But back in the day, this is modern agriculture and, again, when I say modern agriculture, don't automatically think, you know, 8000 years ago, there wasn't a tractor. I know. I get it.
But our modern attitude toward monocultures and mono cropping in our modern agriculture that we have today, that reaches very, very far back. So when I say modern agriculture, I mean the ideas. And in some cases, the techniques. But in more cases, the the pattern of thinking that humans had when it came to developing what we now know as modern agriculture. So with that said, this this mixed cultivation situation looks to me like it was something that probably happened as we were as human beings were transitioning from a purely hunter gatherer type lifestyle into a set more sedentary. And what I mean sedentary in this case, I mean, they don't move around. They they towns started to form.
You know, this is where we got cities. Before agriculture, there was no such thing as cities. There was no real thing as as towns. I mean, if there was, then the whole damn thing moved with the herds and on whatever continent that you were talking about. Okay? So towns and cities and economies and most likely money, which brings us back to Bitcoin, That didn't come around until about 12 to 11000 years ago. The this whole notion of our, quote unquote, modern life, that's where the roots of that whole thing started, was with agriculture moving out of the hunter gatherer mindset and into this mono crop mindset.
This that I'm about to present to you I believe represents the edge walking from one type of world into another type of world and that very thin line between those two worlds is where we're going to exist for the next 30 to 40 minutes. So let's start.
[00:05:21] Unknown:
The Lost Forden Gardens of Europe. In the hills above the Po River in Northern Italy,
[00:05:30] Unknown:
there are a handful of farms that look almost the same today as they would have 3000 years ago. There are rows of short pruned trees with fruit laden grape vines festooned between them. The trees are common natives in the area that produce fruit, firewood, basket making materials, and fodder for farm animals. The grapes are ancient cultivars that have been grown here for millennia. Between these rows of grapes and trees are diverse plots of cereals, hay fields, vegetables and herbs. In a single field, one can find all of the staples needed to live and support the farmstead and more to sell at a high premium.
This is a resilient system, a farm modeled on a forest. Unlike monocultures of grapes or grain, diversity is the strength here. Disease outbreaks and unseasonable weather have limited impact. If one crop has a bad year, there are dozens of others to pick up the slack. These are agricultural ecosystems designed to last millennia and that is exactly what they have done. This style of growing is called Cultura promiscua or mixed cultivation A practice with roots that run as deep as these hills. It is one of a handful of truly indigenous systems of farming remaining throughout Europe, adapted and perfected over a 1000 of years from the earliest hunter gatherers through to the present day.
It has shrugged off extreme climate change events, countless wars and invasions, pestilence and plagues, cultural erasure and colonization. This is the kind of farming system that is needed in the 21st century, a fully integrated three-dimensional farm ecosystem that supports people and animals, provides staples and specialty products, increases local biodiversity, and does not require chemicals or elaborate technology. Whereas modern industrial agriculture is descended from a distinctly imperialist Roman plantation system based on slave labor, systems like cultura promiscua are the direct descendants of the indigenous forest gardens of pre agricultural Europe.
Since the Neolithic Revolution, an assortment of farming systems in Europe that relied heavily on monocultures and a handful of finicky staple crops often ended abruptly and violently. The diverse forest gardens of peasants, however, have quietly shrugged off 10,000 years of turbulent changes. This article is a look at the little known history of these systems and their innovative strategaries
[00:08:25] Unknown:
for survival
[00:08:27] Unknown:
as we search for ways to remake the way we garden, farm, and live in a time of climate change, extreme inequality, and political disarray, looking back at the innovations of Europe's hidden archeological past can provide invaluable lessons on how we might collectively move forward. Our story begins with the last retreat of the glaciers from Europe around 15000 years ago, a period known as the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. That ended with the introduction of farming with the Near East 5000 years later. Mesolithic Europe, populated entirely by hunter gatherer tribes, was an incredibly diverse place in terms of ethnicity, culture, land management, religion, and food Societies across the continent innovated unique ways to thrive in their respective landscapes for millennia After the glaciers retreated, the continent was a cold tundra of lichens, mugwort, dwarf willow, and sea buckthorn populated by prehistoric megafauna and migratory bands of humans returning from their ice age refuge in the mountains.
Around 9,600 BCE, which is before common era, global temperatures rose 7 degrees c in less than a decade, allowing for temperate deciduous forests to return. Populations of Mesolithic humans expanded rapidly across Europe, bringing their most prized plant with them, hazel. Much as peaches once introduced were spread across North America by indigenous people in a matter of decades, the pollen record shows that hazel suddenly becomes ubiquitous across Europe as soon as the climate warmed, Brought to every corner of the continent by hunter gatherers, hazel was the original tree of life for Mesolithic Europeans.
The hazelnuts are about 60% fat and 20% carbohydrates and contain a wide range of proteins, vitamins, and minerals. A few handfuls can cover most of a person's daily energy needs. Its branches, tall and flexible, but slender enough to cut with a flint axe, were used for tools and firewood. Mesolithic thatched huts were often made with hazelwood beams. From cradle to grave, the people of Mesolithic Europe relied on hazel more than any other single plant. Excavations of habitation sites from this period can turn up 100 of 1000 of roasted hazelnut shells. For over 5000 years, this single plant was the life giver to nearly all of Europe's people.
In addition to hazel, Mesolithic people utilized up to 450 different species of edible plants, many of which were common plants of forest edge habitats. Wild vegetables, many of which are considered weeds today, like nettle, knotweed, lesser celandine, dock, lamb's quarters, fruits like slow plum, rowan, Hawthorne, crab apple, pear, cherry, grape, raspberry, and tubers of aquatic plants were all part of the Mesolithic diet. These European native plants were likely utilized by Mesolithic hunter gatherers for the same reason that they are often seen as weeds today. They're extremely resilient.
They're aggressive and adaptive species that can be encouraged to grow with minimal effort. These were not bands of starving cavemen constantly on the precipice of death, but rich and resilient societies that had a much more diverse diet than most present day Europeans. Researchers found that a young girl who died about 57 100 years ago in southern Denmark ate duck and hazelnuts, a far richer and tastier diet than most kindergartners in Western countries today. And for their rich, diverse diet, Mesolithic people worked less than anyone who came after. Hunting and gathering requires just a few hours of work each day far easier than farming much less modern work schedules After helping to create Europe's forests by bringing favored plants like hazel with them, they continued to manage their landscape with hand tools and fire.
Europe was not a pristine wilderness, but a continent of handcrafted nut orchards and semi wild forest gardens carefully managed for 1000 of years. This tracks with common themes around the world. Indigenous people in Australia, North and South America, and elsewhere have used fire and specialized hand tools to achieve unprecedented levels of environmental stewardship and management for millennia. Nor was this anything new. Humans and their Neanderthal and Homo Heidelbergensis ancestors have been shaping Europe's ecology for over 800000 years.
These Mesolithic Forest Gardens were simply the most recent and nuanced manifestation of an ancient ecological relationship. Areas around settlements and campsites were regularly burned to limit the encroachment of the forest and to favor food producing forest edge tree species. These controlled burns established open park like habitats, which could lead to a tenfold increase in the amount of wild game animals present, creating greater opportunities for hunting red deer, wild boar, and yurochs. In some places, people created forest openings to encourage the growth of English ivy, a favorite food of red deer.
These ivy patches essentially served as many wild feedlots in the wintertime, allowing people to hunt deer or possibly even to establish semi domesticated herds much as the indigenous Sami people in northern Scandinavia have today with semi domesticated herds of reindeer coppicing was another important strategy for managing the Mesolithic Forest Garden certain trees and shrubs like hazelnuts can be cut to the ground every few years. Instead of hurting the tree, this effectively rejuvenates it, allowing the plant to live far longer than it would if unmanaged. Hazel in a wild state generally lives around 70 to 80 years, but with regular coppicing it can thrive and produce wood and nuts for centuries. Willow, another plant with many uses and benefits, is managed in this way as well.
Coppicing lent itself perfectly to Mesolithic technology. Without saws or metal tools, it was far easier to harvest small diameter trees and branches than large trunks for cultivating or regenerating patches of wild vegetables or semi domesticated grains Mesolithic Europeans also had a wide range of hand tools at their disposal, including flint axes, wooden and antler hose, mattocks, and digging sticks. The open forest gardens that surrounded Mesolithic campsites and settlements could be managed this way for millennia For 1000 of years, Mesolithic people across Eurasia had lived by their covenant with the web of life, a sacred pact that was defined by reciprocal relationships with their human and nonhuman neighbors.
Unbeknownst to them, however, major events, half a globe away, were about to change this way of life forever. Around 10,800 BCE, the North American ice sheets collapsed, causing glacial meltwaters to cool the North Atlantic and kick starting a global drop in temperatures. Within a few centuries, conditions in Europe and the Near East were almost as cold as the previous ice age. This period, known as the Younger Dryas, lasted for over a 1000 years. In the Near East, hunter gatherer culture saw their entire way of life collapse. Their edenic landscape of fruit and nut trees withered in the cold. The large herds of wild game disappeared.
They had always grown and eaten the seeds of native grasses as a supplemental part of their diet. During the Younger Dryas, however, these grasses and some legumes became the only crops they could reasonably rely on. A 1000 years of planting and harvesting had the effect of fully domesticating these species. When the climate finally warmed again in 9,600 BCE, they had a crop that had never been seen before. Grain, wheat, barley, peas, beans, and flax had gone from wild survival foods to domesticated staples. A period of dramatic climate change had brought about a new class of food that would never and forever change the world. This new age, defined not by hunting and gathering, but by the cultivation of grains, is known as the Neolithic or the new stone age.
The traditional narrative states that the Neolithicization of Europe or the replacement of hunter gatherer groups with grain farming occurred as a wave from 6,500 BCE in Greece to 25 100 BCE in Scandinavia with farming cultures from the Near East bringing grain and livestock leading to the end of the inferior Mesolithic hunter gatherer way of life. A wealth of recent archeological evidence, however, points to a very different story. Every dramatic change or fluctuation in climate from the Neolithic to the present day precipitates major changes in agriculture.
As we've seen, people created productive environments by spreading hazelnuts across Europe when the climate warmed after the Younger Dryas. The little ice age of 17th century led to massive failures in Europe's grain harvest, prompting the widespread adoption of the potato and other new world crops. Similarly, the adoption of cereal farming in Europe did not happen at a continuous pace, but occurred in surges across or associated with several climate fluctuations over the course of 1000 of years grain was a radically new type of food for the Europeans Unlike tree crops that can take years to mature, cereals provide immediate food security in a pinch as they can be grown and harvested within a single season.
With each period of climate induced chaos in Europe's prehistory, cereal farming communities expanded ever deeper into Mesolithic Europe. When conditions improved, these farming communities grew in population far more quickly than the relatively stable hunter gatherer tribes. Mesolithic people were not unaware of grain growing. They had been experimenting with it for millennia before near eastern farming cultures entered the scene. The spread of farming, therefore, was not due to the supposed superiority of grains, but because repeated periods of climate change and the resulting social chaos pushed Mesolithic Europeans to adopt new ways of life to survive.
Indeed, Mesolithic hunter gatherer communities contained continued to live peaceably side by side with Neolithic farming communities for 1000 of years before adopting agriculture. As in many parts of Europe, the cultures of Mesolithic Sweden had depended on hazelnuts for millennia, with some scholars even dubbing this period the nut age. When Neolithic grain farming communities entered southern Sweden around 55100 BCE, the native hazel based cultures continued to practice their traditional ways for another 1600 years.
It was only when a period of dramatic cooling began that hazel populations in the region plummeted, and Mesolithic communities, now without their sacred life giving tree, adopted grain farming by 39100 BCE. This was a story repeated throughout Europe. And while nearly all of Europe eventually came to adopt grain farming, the resilience of these Mesolithic cultures over the course of millennia demonstrates that hazelnuts are perhaps the best option for a perennial crop that can replace grains in a temperate climate. For the first few millennia of farming in Europe, before the advent of traction plowing, families cultivated the land with digging sticks, hoes, mattocks, and foot plows.
This was human scale agriculture, unable to expand past the limits of a person's energy. As a result, Neolithic farming communities generally did not over exploit their environment, but instead, cultivated small plots of land for vast lengths of time with hand tools, crop rotations, and fertilization from livestock manure, compost, and night soil, leaving the land they tended more fertile than when they found it. These ancient farmsteads were the original regenerative farming innovators and in many ways resemble today's small organic farms and homesteads of a few acres.
Monocultures did not yet exist as a concept. Grains were not grown as fields of single varieties, but as diverse mixes of cereals and legumes called maslins. Ancient grains like emmer, einkorn, and barley were grown together with peas and lentils Hemp, flax and poppies were common supplemental crops as well these diverse mixed fields were far more resilient than monocultures. In some parts of Europe, they've existed unchanged for 4000 years. In modern grain farming, a single variety of wheat is planted over 100 of acres. If a season is unfavorable, the farmer will lose the entire crop. Ancient Maslins, however, protected against this. Seasonal weather differences might benefit Einkorn 1 year and barley the next, whether the year was cold or not, wet or not, there would always be a crop to harvest.
Unlike modern varieties, ancient grain lands races were bred to have a long harvest window that protected them against total crop failure in case of a freak weather event. Maslins of crop land races were a simple but effective way for small farmers to hedge their bets against variable seasonality and climate change. Newer research into growing mixes of cereals and legumes has confirmed what neolithic farmers always knew, that these intercrop mixes of grain and legume are superior to monocultures by nearly every metric along with grains and legumes, Neolithic farmers brought domesticated livestock like cattle, pigs, goats, and sheep.
Because these near eastern land races of farm animals were not always well adapted to Europe's climates and conditions, farmers often intentionally crossbred their cows and pigs with native aurex and wild boar in Europe, resulting in offspring that were domesticated but far better adapted to local conditions. Many of the oldest European land races of cattle and pigs today are the direct descendants of these Neolithic hybrids of wild and domesticated animals. The Iberian pig, a Spanish land race that is made into the world famous jaman iberico, is very similar to its Neolithic ancestors, which is a mix of swine and wild boar genetics.
[00:25:06] Unknown:
In Spain, the Iberian pig is a central component of the Dicia system,
[00:25:12] Unknown:
an ancient agroecological masterpiece. The dacias are man made oak savannahs throughout Spain and Portugal, populated with traditional land races of livestock on grassland, with home oak and cork oak dotting the landscape. Jamon Iberico wild game and non meat products like truffles, mushrooms, honey, fighting bulls, and cork are valuable yields in this system as an agroecosystem it has existed in its basic form for at least 4,500 years and in essence is a domesticated form of the fire managed Mesolithic nut tree savannahs replacing aurochs and wild boar with cattle and pigs.
Not only is the Disha a low input silvo pasture system, it has existed for so many millennia that it is now an important ecosystem in its region, allowing it to support an enormous range of biodiversity, including endangered species like the Iberian lynx, imperial eagle, and black vulture. These systems challenge the very definition of farming and show us what agriculture can be when people create it as a fully fledged ecosystem rather than simply a way to mine nutrients from the soil. In other areas, the adaptation of the Mesolithic Forest Garden took the form of fruit, chestnut, silvopastures created as semi natural open forests.
These included diverse nut and fruit assemblages such as chestnut, carob, almond, fig, olive, hazel, cork, oak, and more. That allowed for livestock grazing beneath them. A culture of Chestnut Forest Management in Corsica shows how the use of perennial nut crops as a staple has never left Europe. The practice of coppicing trees did not end in the Mesolithic either. The wild willow thick stream banks became managed willow beds that were planted with cuttings of the best plants. These willow beds were coppiced every year for crafts and tool making. Wicker basketry became such an elevated art form in the British Isles that fine Celtic baskets were imported by Roman aristocrats. The word basket itself, originally is one of the only words of Celtic origin in the deeply colonized English language.
Coppice woods of chestnut, linden, hazel, and other useful species have remained an essential and ancient part of the British landscape providing materials for housing, tools and crafts, charcoal production, mushroom cultivation, and even rich pockets of endangered biodiversity. One of the most recognizable evolutions of Mesolithic Forest Gardens, however, is the hedgerow. The most common forest edge species of fruits and nuts that were cultivated by Mesolithic people the sloeplum, rowan, hawthorn crabapple, wild cherry, brambles, etcetera, also happened to be the most common hedge plants in Northern Europe.
During the Neolithic Revolution, new farming cultures discovered an innovative way to manage and integrate these species by planting them thickly in rows around their farms and cereal fields and periodically rejuvenating them with strategic pruning. The native forest edge ecosystem, in essence, the plant supermarket of Mesolithic people, was compressed into an architectural feature of the new agrarian landscape as a multifunctional barrier that demarcated land, kept livestock in or out of certain areas, and provided food, fodder, firewood tool handles, medicine, and other materials.
Hedgerows were sometimes used as a defense barrier as well the Nervi tribe of northern Gaul modern day France, nearly wiped out Caesar's invading legions in 57 BCE by using their hedgerows to limit Roman maneuvering. In the present day, Europe's hedgerows provide a new benefit in serving as a repository for biodiversity. In highly deforested areas like Ireland, hedgerows are often the largest gene bank of native tree biodiversity that has otherwise been lost. They also serve as crucial corridors for wildlife connecting the few remaining patches of natural space that remain.
The wild fruit orchards of indigenous hunter gatherers exist to this day in the form of these living barriers that crisscross the old fields of Central Europe. The new Creole societies that arose in Europe were fantastically diverse, mixing Mesolithic hunter gatherer cultures and the newer farming communities. Cultures that stray too far from their hunter gatherer roots and rely too heavily on a handful of grain crops like the linear pottery culture of Central Europe were able to expand rapidly but could not maintain a sustainable existence. As soon as the climate began to deteriorate, the linear pottery culture collapsed in on itself with unprecedented violence.
Other hybrid cultures that emerged from this time, however, found ways to marry the best of both worlds. These societies relied on the new cereals for their staples, but supplemented them with a broad range of indigenous foods and growing systems. Some places saw hunter gatherers adopt domesticated livestock but eschew grain. While in other neolithic farmers embraced local land management techniques and native tree crops. These two radically different societies rarely came into conflict, and intermarriage between them was common throughout Europe. Many Mesolithic practices, beliefs, and systems were blended into the new European societies as a result of this peaceful intermingling.
In the Eugenian hills above the Po River, in Northeastern Italy, a neolithic culture combined the cereal crops of the Near East with Mesolithic forest garden management. Farmers perform controlled burns of their landscape radically changing the local ecosystem from a Linden Ur Forest to a chestnut walnut grain savannah. For 5000 years, these farmers regularly set low level fires and cleared out weeds and small trees and sowed cereals, flax, and hemp in the fresh soil. They planted chestnut and walnut trees in these cereal fields along with olives, grapes, and willows, creating a diverse, multi story, agrarian landscape that provided a wide range of products and crops from a single area.
This type of farming is reminiscent of the famous indigenous Milpas of the Americas. To this day, some of the most advanced agricultural systems in the world. The introduction of agriculture in Tuscany also saw the managed forests of the Mesolithic reorganized into a more domesticated form on the farm. Unlike most places in Europe, Tuscany maintained a great deal of its ancestral culture avoiding the worst of the Indo European invasions that wiped out much of the continent's indigenous cultures during the bronze age. As such, the region maintained an unbroken link to its prehistoric past even up through the Etruscan civilization in the Iron Age.
The Etruscans enjoyed a highly diversified diet that consisted of many different annual grains and legumes along with perennials like cultivated grapes, wild cherries, hazelnuts, acorns, olives, pears, and figs. The first wine here was made with native Cornelian cherries before superior grape varieties were introduced throughout trade. The Etruscans developed a diverse forest garden system that has become known in Italian as cultura promiscua or mixed cultivation. Like the extensive forest gardens in the Uganian Hills, these farms were a creolization of local Mesolithic agroecology, tree crops and native perennials together, with Near Eastern Cereal Farming.
It is a system that has survived to the modern day. The practice of trellising grapes into trees is one of the most ancient parts of this system known as Alberata Roman authors wrote extensively about its use Pliny claimed that vines grown on trees produce better wine The tree to which the grapevine is married changes based on local environmental and economic factors in some areas of Italy, the mulberry has been used as the grape trellis in order to provide fruit, livestock fodder, and silkworm rearing. In wet areas, Willow or Poplar was used In the hills, cherries were often the trellis Everything from field maple and chestnut to olive and elm can be utilized in this system.
Cultura promiscua is, at its core, a domesticated facsimile of the prehistoric forest garden whereas their Mesolithic ancestor had gathered wild grains, fruits, nuts, medicine, and wood from the managed forest surrounding their villages, Etruscans and their descendants created a complex polycultural system that maintain these elements in a controlled and linear setting. Domesticated grapes, climbing rows of usually native trees that are pollarded for fodder or materials for basketry and firewood or harvested for fruit and oil, all in closing, small fields of diverse grains, legumes, hay, and vegetables that are rotated to maintain fertility. This system allows for the production of staple crops and specialty products for market, and expands the ability to farm a wider range of soils and conditions.
These domesticated landscapes are fully integrated into the local ecosystem forming networks of connectivity between local woodlands as mosaics of trees, grains, stone features, and waterways they create oases of profound biological, hydrological and geological diversity in the landscape the diversity and strength of this system made it resistant to invasion by the deadly phylloxera that obliterated the weaker grape monocultures of France. Crop introductions through invasions or trade routes are the only major change this system has seen in over 2000 years. Species from Asia and the Americas have seamlessly entered the cultura promiscua and are now staple crops in these systems.
The ancient peasant farmers who fashioned this forest garden system continued to hunt wild game and harvest wild foods just as their descendants in Tuscany do today. The culture and cuisine of Tuscany from truffle hunting to wine making is part of a 30 1000 year old unbroken tradition and relationship with the land. The elegance and near perfection of these tempered forest gardens is shown in how they have thrived for millennia on some of the most contested land in Europe, surviving climate change, war, pestilence, drought, and economic upheaval. Only the proliferation of postwar neoliberal economic policy in the 20th century has managed to drive this peerless system
[00:37:28] Unknown:
to the brink of extinction. Indeed,
[00:37:34] Unknown:
has nearly vanished in its native land for the same reasons that other European agroecological systems have disappeared. Urbanization and rural depopulation in the modern period have virtually eliminated traditional environmental knowledge and the labor base for maintenance and harvest. The intensification of the modern capitalist paradigm has incentivized extractive cash crop mono cultures over self sufficiency or regenerative methods. Post war mechanization, which is built for monocultures and economies of scale, is not suited to the small hand tended agroecosystems that require a high degree of expertise in shaping and working with the natural world.
Medieval, manorial, feudalism, the American plantation system and Jim Crow, and modern industrialized farming are all descendants of the slavery based monocrop agricultural systems that the Roman Empire forced on the land in their effort to subdue and replace Europe's tribal societies. Oppressive systems like these have always flown the banner banner of efficiency and profit without regard for human well-being or ecological destruction. This essential struggle between extractive imperialist systems and indigenous land based lifeways is still ongoing across Europe and its former colonies, particularly the Americas.
The rapid disappearance of the djes, coppice woods willow beds hedgerows and Mediterranean forest gardens are all connected in this fight What's at stake in their survival is not the preservation of some bygone relic, but the protection and expansion of relationships with the land that can feed our communities, preserve biodiversity through climate change, and create productive ecosystems that last for millennia. Despite what we've been told, the indigenous Mesolithic societies of Europe never disappeared. They adapted and survived in new ways.
Their cultures, values, spiritual beliefs, and relationships with the land are encoded in the folk traditions and regional agroecological systems that persist throughout Europe. These are an essential piece of an antidote to the toxic Empire based culture that currently holds sway over our society they are an example of what we might lose if we forget too much, but also of what we can create again. Our present crises of climate change, extreme inequality, imperialism run amok, and endemic violence eerily mirror the downfalls of previous cultures that rely too heavily on a handful of finicky crops and an expansionist ethos.
But this time of chaos could also be an opportunity. A chance to emulate the older cultures that replace them. Those who planted trees in the ruins of empire, who remade the commons on abandoned plantations, and quietly continued to tend their small forest garden as their ancestors had before them. We may have inherited the most destructive systems of extraction and exploitation ever seen, but we also have inherited the seeds for a better way to live. A way that our oldest ancestors knew and cherished. Perhaps it is time that we plant those seeds once again.
And the circle P is open for business. This time, it's gonna be Shee Shee. That's right, Shee Shee. He's gonna sell you some comfrey. If you want to know more about comfrey, you need to go listen to episode 726 of this podcast, the Bitcoin and podcast. And I will tell you everything that you need to know about why you want comfrey in your garden. And guess what? It even includes the history of com comfrey, which also includes Pliny the Elder, who you heard mentioned a couple of times in this piece, the forest or the lost forest gardens of Europe. Okay. So comfrey is something you're gonna want and you can plant it all summer long. It's not one of these plants that's all finicky and you gotta really baby it. No, man. This thing is like a beast.
It you if if you try to get rid of it, you're probably just gonna piss it off. And it doesn't matter if you plant it in July or August, it doesn't matter if you're living in Mexico or, like, up in the, you know, like the Great Lakes region. This stuff grows everywhere and she she's got it for you. You can get one full root cutting or were well, one full root rather for $20 or individual root cuttings for a buck each, I highly recommend getting at least 20 of them. What's the difference between the full root and a cutting? Well, let me tell you. A full root will include or should include no. She she if you're not doing this, you need to let me know because I don't wanna, you know, tell anybody the wrong the wrong thing.
But if the root includes the very top of the plant or what's called the root plate, which is the that that space, that that edge between what is root and what is the leaves of the plant, if it includes that plate on the very top, that thing is going to almost instantly come to life and start leafing out after you plant it. If you do a full root cutting, however, and there's no root plate, it's just the root material, you pop that into a hole. Could be a week. Could be 2. It's taken me as long as 7 weeks sometimes before I see a leaf poke its head up where you know, in a place where I knew I planted a couple of these root cuttings. Alright? So the Bocking 4 and Bocking 14 are both varieties. The Bocking 14 is better fodder for animals.
The balking 4 is a huge biomass plant. Both of them, you want both of them. I sold the rootstock for she she's balking for to him so I personally vouch for that genetic strain. Right? It's done me well. I was able to make 100 I I think I ended up planting, like, I don't know. By the time I moved out of Canyon, I had, like, 300 of these things. It's medicine. It's food for animals. It's I mean, there it does all kinds of neat stuff. But one of the best things about it, great mulch. It's got high in nitrogen, so it's great for your compost piles as long as you've got enough carbon in your compost pile to handle it, because you need you need that. You need carbon. You dried brown leaves along with green stuff. You need both of them in a compost pile.
But this stuff is wonderful. And like I said, if you wanna know more about it and what Pliny the Elder said about it, go to episode 726 of the Bitcoin and podcast. I will have a link directly in the show notes for that. If you need to get a hold of, some, you need to get a hold of Sheeshi. His I will put a link, a direct link to how to get a hold of him on Nostr. He will all that will also be in the show notes, but you can email [email protected]. That is s h I s h I, the numbers 21 and the letter [email protected]. It's gonna be a little slower for him to get back to you, but he will ship you this stuff and you're going to want it. Now, let's get back to this whole forest gardens of Europe business.
This particular piece, I've read this thing a couple of times now. And it's it's fascinating. Again, just so you know, the author's name is Max Paschel, and you can find him at Shelterwood forest farm blog. That's Shelterwood, all one word, forest farm blog. And he's got a couple of pieces over there, that are interesting. Now, as you've probably noticed through it, you probably cringed a couple of times because I said the words climate change, and, oh my god, the evils of capitalism. And, yeah, I mean, you know, I can deal with it. You know, I mean, I I know this guy's way probably way more on the left hand side of of things than I am, but I don't care.
Because all the rest of the stuff that he said is not only is it factually true, it's fascinating. And thank God somebody is capturing this information and bringing it all back to us. We need this information. I live in Eastern Washington and from Eastern Washington all the way all the way from from the eastern edge of Washington State all the way to the Cascade Mountains, which is almost to the West Coast, ain't nothing but grain lentils garbanzo beans as wheat and barley and rye and I mean that's it Just monocrop. Oh, god forbid canola. Yeah. There's all shit ton of canola that's done out here.
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It's just monocrops. There's no trees.
[00:47:19] Unknown:
They're literally, man. I mean, it's like it's it's as far as the eye can see, there's not that many trees. One would think, oh, you live in Washington. It's like a forest. No. It's not. It may be in, like, in the Cascade Mountains and onto the coast. Yeah. It's a huge I mean, there's rain there's temper rainforest. There's a massive one on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. But out here, nuh-uh. Nuh-uh. You gotta go into Idaho before you can hit some forest again. It's just cereal grain. That's it. This this particular way of looking at agriculture as a polyculture where you're growing more than one thing on the same piece of land is something that I believe that sooner or later, we're going to have to get back to if not if not because we say, you know what? It's just a good idea, so we're we're gonna do this.
It could very well be that we don't have a choice. I don't know. I mean, I I don't even have a gut feeling on this. I'm just saying that think of something like grain crops genetics crashing in the face of changing climates because guess what? Climates can and do change. Remember how much climate change we heard about in this piece and that was all, like, 8000 to 15000 to 6000 years ago? Yeah. There was no fossil fuel burning. There was no cars. There was nobody laying asphalt down. There wasn't 8 1,000,000,000 people on the planet. And yet climate change.
Right? Climate change happens. We if if the climate had never changed on earth, none of this would be here. There wouldn't be trees or fish or deer or people or babies or baby cats or kittens or lynxes or bugs or nothing. There would be nothing alive on this planet. Nothing that you can think of as being alive would be on this planet had the climate not changed. We've been through 7 atmospheres on this planet, and it's probably not going to stop. There will probably be an 8th and a 9th and a 10th different kind of atmosphere on this planet. And hopefully, this shit don't happen for 100 of 1000000 of years because I don't want that to change just now. But temperatures change, ice sheets melt, ice sheets come back, things warm up, things cool down. And as you saw entire cultures of Europe got completely decimated, and the only survivors were the guys that were like, well, I guess we're not eating hazelnuts anymore this year, pal.
Let's grow some of this cool grain. So now we start getting a picture of how did we get here? Well, that just painted a very good picture of how we got cereal crops. It was kinda necessary. We were we were gonna eat cereal crops because the earth just basically kinda demanded it, but that doesn't mean that we've got to stay here. That doesn't mean that we can't figure out a way to get out of this this cycle of carbohydrate madness and eat more animal fat, more animal protein, because as you saw animals were are it were and are still heavily integrated into the few remaining systems that we have. Now they talked about the Iberico pork or the I what was it? The Iberico jamon is a famous it's world famous delicacy when it comes to ham. You can only get it from one place, and that's the parts of Spain and a lot of the parts of Portugal that was mentioned in this in this piece. And the way it works is this.
There's a couple of kinds of oak trees. One of them is a cork oak, and that's where cork from your wine bottles come from. It's the bark and they just strip off the bark and guess what? It doesn't kill the tree. There's been trees there for that are a 1000 years old. Oak trees that are a 1000 years old and for a 1000 years, they've had their bark scraped off of them. They're fine. But as they're yielding this cork, guess what else they're yielding? A bunch of acorns. And we can't really eat acorns, not without a lot of manual labor.
But but but pigs pigs, on the other hand, they not only can they process and gain a lot of weight out of eating acorns, to them, it's delicious. And they will clean up the entire they will just run around underneath these oak trees and they will eat and eat and eat and eat after these acorns masked out and all this crap falls to the ground and that's how they get fat. They're not these guys aren't shipping in grain. They don't need it. They've got thousands of acres of oak trees. Some of them are you know, a lot of them are cork, but there's other oak trees too. And all of those will mass and drop nuts. And the pigs love their the acorns.
And they eat and eat and eat. And while those guys are eating and, you know, running around the field and pooping and fertilizing everything again, the old men and women that run these systems, they're back down in town enjoying a coffee. Because, honestly, there's not a whole lot of work to do while the pigs are being fattened, and they can appreciate life. And I'm not saying that they're lazy. I'm just saying that if you do nothing but work, how is that any better? How does that make you a better person than being than not working at all and being completely lazy? If there's not a middle ground there, that's an issue. At least that's what I think.
But if we look if we take a step back and go actually, not just a step back, but we get in a helicopter that can go up 30,000 feet in the air and look straight down at this entire idea of this What we see is a gigantic systems engineering endeavor. It's not a problem to be solved it is a systems engineering endeavor. It is the construction of something that is so symbiotic that it that the definition of symbiosis being 1 +1 equals more than 2 because these these systems, like, kinda compound on each other. No. No. No. No. This is at 1 +1equalslightlymorethan2. This is like 1+1equals
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food and a lot of it forever.
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It doesn't stop producing food. Sure. You might lose, like, a grape a crop of grapes, and you're not gonna have a vintage of wine that year because, you know, temperatures or whatever. But the things that the things that are growing in that same system that don't depend, that their success doesn't depend on, quote, unquote, temperatures, they're fine. And you can sell them at market because you're producing more than one thing. And that is the issue. When we have monocultures, yes, we have a very easily manageable situation on our hands.
It's wheat. We've got a field of not only wheat, but this one variety of wheat. And we have this one machine that that that can fertilize and, you know, this other machine or this that same machine with a different head can be a sprayer and with a different head might, you know, do something else. And then there's the combine that comes through. But, honestly, we've got 2 or 3 pieces of a farm equipment. We've got somebody who pretty much knows how to drive them all, and we've got this one field of wheat. It's a it's an insanely, easily manageable system. But what's what's the what's the, what's the payoff?
Or what what what do we call it in in, in, what was it in in Bitcoin when we had, like, the big blocks? What's you know, if you're gonna have big blocks, what do you have to give up? What's the trade off? If I have a huge field of wheat, what's the trade off? It's easily manageable,
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but one thing goes wrong and that entire crop is lost.
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But if I go to a polyculture system and I do something that's some of the things that are right, like using maple trees to trellis grapevines on. Have you ever seen a grapevine trellis on anything other than a dead stick of wood with some wire stretched between other dead sticks of wood that are shoved in the ground and there's no trees freaking anywhere. I've never seen that. The only time I've ever even heard of this was when I read this for the first time at the end of last week. I've it didn't even dawn on me that you could do this, and it makes sense. The roots of the grape system are in direct contact with the roots of the maple system. I've already told you just how much mycorrhizal fungi will transfer nutrients and water and equalize entire systems using a network between different species of plants.
So it's no wonder that this system would be more resilient because it's not just the roots of the grape system. It's the roots of the maple or the willow or the poplar or any of the other trees that were mentioned because you can use several different kinds. And those acting in symphony with each other, being played by the maestro that is the mycorrhizal fungi that stretches between them, that maximizes their ability to get water in times of drought or maximizes their ability to attain nutrients when they can't themselves, makes the system more and more resilient. However, if the climactic structure just collapses and one of these things just cannot make a product, you've got 12 different products that did make it.
But what's the trade off? It's not easy. The the you trade the profit side and the resilience of profit side for the management this is a much more difficult system to manage or is it? Is it just because we don't want to learn how the system works? We already have examples of it. This is a really good piece. It, I will definitely be linking this piece in the show notes for freaking obvious reasons. I highly recommend that you read it. This isn't as hard as people make it out to be. It's just that John Deere cannot really build a tractor to harvest the whole thing in a week.
It doesn't work that way. If we can realign the way that we think about agriculture in general, we are going to have a much better time as humans. And what I suspect, and this is a gut feeling, what I suspect is what seems like it would be a more difficult managing practice to get into this promiscua or cultura promiscua, it'll probably be more life rewarding. And that you can like, some people would like I'm fascinated by the the the management challenges that this represents. And I think that even through some hardships, because there's resilience on the other side, that I would still be in love with this system if I was having to manage one of these things.
But the amount of shit that we have to relearn that we've forgotten, I think that is a it's a learning curve barrier. And farmers are having it hard enough. They can like, there are so many of them that they're barely able to function from one season to the next. That there is definitely no way that they have time to figure this one out. But we're we're here. We're at a spot where It's clear that that money is broken. It's clear that Bitcoin has come and we can do some things along those lines that's going to fix a whole bunch of stuff. Maybe not everything, but a whole bunch of stuff can be fixed.
And what did he what did he say? Hold on for a second. Let me pause this for a sec. Here we go. This is what I was looking for. Check this sentence out. K? Close your eyes, and let me read it again. Only the proliferation of postwar neoliberal economic policy in the 20th century has managed to drive this peerless system to the brink of extinction. That's the sentence. And that was the one when I read that, that's when I knew I was gonna read this entire thing to you in a completely different style of episode that's never been done on the Bitcoin and podcast. I knew at that sentence that you had to hear this. Why?
Because I know my audience, and I know my audience hears the words proliferation of postwar neoliberal economic policy in the 20th century, and you immediately go, yeah. The money's screwed. So we always talk about that, don't we? The money is is we've just burned it to a crisp. We've just lit it on fire and it's now all ash. And it touches everything. It touches architecture, which is why we have shitty strip malls in the United States. Nobody wants to go to a strip mall. There's not a single person I know that is dying to go to a strip mall, to hang out, to be in the presence of this strip mall. However, there are places in in Europe and there's places in old world America that people want to go to. It's a destination.
But 85% of all the buildings in the United States that have been built in the past 30 years or 50 years have been built with just the shittiest money in the world, which means we've got the shittiest architecture, which means nobody cared about color or place or how you address a building or what your relationship to that building is because we just don't freaking care as long as we get our pets marked.
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Money has destroyed everything that it touches. Architecture, food, art, education,
[01:02:13] Unknown:
agriculture, again, food. But still, I mean, we we have a a situation that food, as far as most of the public, seems to be seems to be looking at food right now as it comes from a grocery store, which again, just think strip mall. There's no destination there. I'm not saying go buy all your food at a farmer's market because that shit can get expensive. But this this is so broke, so broken that our choice is to make a a mathematical calculation in our head as to why we really shouldn't be going to a farmer's market to buy food when it's so damn expensive and everybody's having problems, so we end up defaulting and going to the most known strip mall in the universe, the Walmart, to go get food. And most people that are shopping in that Walmart think their food comes from the Walmart. They don't realize that it had to come from soil at one point or another.
As shitty as the nutrient density is today, most of this stuff is still coming from the soil. And they don't know, so they completely detached food from agriculture. And what we've done for even the people that know that we know that the food in the supermarket comes from farms. We know that. And we look at agriculture and go, yeah. This is screwed too. It is. It's all screwed. It's been screwed for 100 of years. And in fact, if you go back and and read this article again, you'll find out that it got screwed right around 8,000 to 9000 years ago we had just started situational farming and ice sheets melted and everything died and all of a sudden we come back out of that on the other side with grain.
And that's how we're here. The choice was made for us. So are the question that I will end this off with is the following. Shall we remain spineless and just eat our daily gruel as we are expected to, or will we go out and try to find a way to bring this kind of agriculture back where we have several different products thriving on the same piece of land so that one climatic event that wipes out 1 or 2 or 3 of the products does not have a damn thing to say about the other 7. And that in good years, we have all 10. And in bad years, the worst years, maybe we've only got 5, but we're gonna make it. Whereas if we've only got 1
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and something happens, That's it. For that whole year, for that entire year, no work can be salvaged. No food will be had.
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And you'll just have to start over again after a long
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cold dark hungry winter.
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Think about that, and I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:33 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 3rd day of June. Welcome to June, brothers and sisters, 2024.
And this is episode 903 of Bitcoin, and we are definitely going to do something different today. I've been rereading this particular piece that I'm about to read to you. It has nothing to do at all with Bitcoin unless you look underneath the surface, in which case many of the things that I talk about relate to Bitcoin and a great many other things. This one, I'm going to put the following phrase into your head. While you listen to this. This piece is called The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe. It's by a gentleman named Max Paschel from the Shelterwood Forest Farm blog. Now this was published, like, 4 years ago, October 8, 2020.
But it's very, very good. And I ran across this piece when I was doing some other research and came across what was the word? There there there's a particular word in here. Cultura promiscua. That's right, cultura promiscua. It's a it translates roughly into mixed cultivation. Yes. We are gonna be talking about agriculture today, but we're gonna be talking about some very ancient agriculture. And we're talking about agriculture that was probably started coming up right at the interstitial space that that edge between fully blown humans being hunter gatherers and then moving across into
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full blown
[00:02:31] Unknown:
cultivated agriculture, you know, like the the sort of, like, even though the the agriculture the cultivated agriculture of back in the day, like, you know, 10000 years ago looks nothing like it does today, it did have a lot of the hallmarks that we brought over into modern agriculture, I e, growing a whole field of the same kind of thing. Like all like this field is all corn. This field is all cotton. That this monoculture mindset that we have. But back in the day, this is modern agriculture and, again, when I say modern agriculture, don't automatically think, you know, 8000 years ago, there wasn't a tractor. I know. I get it.
But our modern attitude toward monocultures and mono cropping in our modern agriculture that we have today, that reaches very, very far back. So when I say modern agriculture, I mean the ideas. And in some cases, the techniques. But in more cases, the the pattern of thinking that humans had when it came to developing what we now know as modern agriculture. So with that said, this this mixed cultivation situation looks to me like it was something that probably happened as we were as human beings were transitioning from a purely hunter gatherer type lifestyle into a set more sedentary. And what I mean sedentary in this case, I mean, they don't move around. They they towns started to form.
You know, this is where we got cities. Before agriculture, there was no such thing as cities. There was no real thing as as towns. I mean, if there was, then the whole damn thing moved with the herds and on whatever continent that you were talking about. Okay? So towns and cities and economies and most likely money, which brings us back to Bitcoin, That didn't come around until about 12 to 11000 years ago. The this whole notion of our, quote unquote, modern life, that's where the roots of that whole thing started, was with agriculture moving out of the hunter gatherer mindset and into this mono crop mindset.
This that I'm about to present to you I believe represents the edge walking from one type of world into another type of world and that very thin line between those two worlds is where we're going to exist for the next 30 to 40 minutes. So let's start.
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The Lost Forden Gardens of Europe. In the hills above the Po River in Northern Italy,
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there are a handful of farms that look almost the same today as they would have 3000 years ago. There are rows of short pruned trees with fruit laden grape vines festooned between them. The trees are common natives in the area that produce fruit, firewood, basket making materials, and fodder for farm animals. The grapes are ancient cultivars that have been grown here for millennia. Between these rows of grapes and trees are diverse plots of cereals, hay fields, vegetables and herbs. In a single field, one can find all of the staples needed to live and support the farmstead and more to sell at a high premium.
This is a resilient system, a farm modeled on a forest. Unlike monocultures of grapes or grain, diversity is the strength here. Disease outbreaks and unseasonable weather have limited impact. If one crop has a bad year, there are dozens of others to pick up the slack. These are agricultural ecosystems designed to last millennia and that is exactly what they have done. This style of growing is called Cultura promiscua or mixed cultivation A practice with roots that run as deep as these hills. It is one of a handful of truly indigenous systems of farming remaining throughout Europe, adapted and perfected over a 1000 of years from the earliest hunter gatherers through to the present day.
It has shrugged off extreme climate change events, countless wars and invasions, pestilence and plagues, cultural erasure and colonization. This is the kind of farming system that is needed in the 21st century, a fully integrated three-dimensional farm ecosystem that supports people and animals, provides staples and specialty products, increases local biodiversity, and does not require chemicals or elaborate technology. Whereas modern industrial agriculture is descended from a distinctly imperialist Roman plantation system based on slave labor, systems like cultura promiscua are the direct descendants of the indigenous forest gardens of pre agricultural Europe.
Since the Neolithic Revolution, an assortment of farming systems in Europe that relied heavily on monocultures and a handful of finicky staple crops often ended abruptly and violently. The diverse forest gardens of peasants, however, have quietly shrugged off 10,000 years of turbulent changes. This article is a look at the little known history of these systems and their innovative strategaries
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for survival
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as we search for ways to remake the way we garden, farm, and live in a time of climate change, extreme inequality, and political disarray, looking back at the innovations of Europe's hidden archeological past can provide invaluable lessons on how we might collectively move forward. Our story begins with the last retreat of the glaciers from Europe around 15000 years ago, a period known as the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. That ended with the introduction of farming with the Near East 5000 years later. Mesolithic Europe, populated entirely by hunter gatherer tribes, was an incredibly diverse place in terms of ethnicity, culture, land management, religion, and food Societies across the continent innovated unique ways to thrive in their respective landscapes for millennia After the glaciers retreated, the continent was a cold tundra of lichens, mugwort, dwarf willow, and sea buckthorn populated by prehistoric megafauna and migratory bands of humans returning from their ice age refuge in the mountains.
Around 9,600 BCE, which is before common era, global temperatures rose 7 degrees c in less than a decade, allowing for temperate deciduous forests to return. Populations of Mesolithic humans expanded rapidly across Europe, bringing their most prized plant with them, hazel. Much as peaches once introduced were spread across North America by indigenous people in a matter of decades, the pollen record shows that hazel suddenly becomes ubiquitous across Europe as soon as the climate warmed, Brought to every corner of the continent by hunter gatherers, hazel was the original tree of life for Mesolithic Europeans.
The hazelnuts are about 60% fat and 20% carbohydrates and contain a wide range of proteins, vitamins, and minerals. A few handfuls can cover most of a person's daily energy needs. Its branches, tall and flexible, but slender enough to cut with a flint axe, were used for tools and firewood. Mesolithic thatched huts were often made with hazelwood beams. From cradle to grave, the people of Mesolithic Europe relied on hazel more than any other single plant. Excavations of habitation sites from this period can turn up 100 of 1000 of roasted hazelnut shells. For over 5000 years, this single plant was the life giver to nearly all of Europe's people.
In addition to hazel, Mesolithic people utilized up to 450 different species of edible plants, many of which were common plants of forest edge habitats. Wild vegetables, many of which are considered weeds today, like nettle, knotweed, lesser celandine, dock, lamb's quarters, fruits like slow plum, rowan, Hawthorne, crab apple, pear, cherry, grape, raspberry, and tubers of aquatic plants were all part of the Mesolithic diet. These European native plants were likely utilized by Mesolithic hunter gatherers for the same reason that they are often seen as weeds today. They're extremely resilient.
They're aggressive and adaptive species that can be encouraged to grow with minimal effort. These were not bands of starving cavemen constantly on the precipice of death, but rich and resilient societies that had a much more diverse diet than most present day Europeans. Researchers found that a young girl who died about 57 100 years ago in southern Denmark ate duck and hazelnuts, a far richer and tastier diet than most kindergartners in Western countries today. And for their rich, diverse diet, Mesolithic people worked less than anyone who came after. Hunting and gathering requires just a few hours of work each day far easier than farming much less modern work schedules After helping to create Europe's forests by bringing favored plants like hazel with them, they continued to manage their landscape with hand tools and fire.
Europe was not a pristine wilderness, but a continent of handcrafted nut orchards and semi wild forest gardens carefully managed for 1000 of years. This tracks with common themes around the world. Indigenous people in Australia, North and South America, and elsewhere have used fire and specialized hand tools to achieve unprecedented levels of environmental stewardship and management for millennia. Nor was this anything new. Humans and their Neanderthal and Homo Heidelbergensis ancestors have been shaping Europe's ecology for over 800000 years.
These Mesolithic Forest Gardens were simply the most recent and nuanced manifestation of an ancient ecological relationship. Areas around settlements and campsites were regularly burned to limit the encroachment of the forest and to favor food producing forest edge tree species. These controlled burns established open park like habitats, which could lead to a tenfold increase in the amount of wild game animals present, creating greater opportunities for hunting red deer, wild boar, and yurochs. In some places, people created forest openings to encourage the growth of English ivy, a favorite food of red deer.
These ivy patches essentially served as many wild feedlots in the wintertime, allowing people to hunt deer or possibly even to establish semi domesticated herds much as the indigenous Sami people in northern Scandinavia have today with semi domesticated herds of reindeer coppicing was another important strategy for managing the Mesolithic Forest Garden certain trees and shrubs like hazelnuts can be cut to the ground every few years. Instead of hurting the tree, this effectively rejuvenates it, allowing the plant to live far longer than it would if unmanaged. Hazel in a wild state generally lives around 70 to 80 years, but with regular coppicing it can thrive and produce wood and nuts for centuries. Willow, another plant with many uses and benefits, is managed in this way as well.
Coppicing lent itself perfectly to Mesolithic technology. Without saws or metal tools, it was far easier to harvest small diameter trees and branches than large trunks for cultivating or regenerating patches of wild vegetables or semi domesticated grains Mesolithic Europeans also had a wide range of hand tools at their disposal, including flint axes, wooden and antler hose, mattocks, and digging sticks. The open forest gardens that surrounded Mesolithic campsites and settlements could be managed this way for millennia For 1000 of years, Mesolithic people across Eurasia had lived by their covenant with the web of life, a sacred pact that was defined by reciprocal relationships with their human and nonhuman neighbors.
Unbeknownst to them, however, major events, half a globe away, were about to change this way of life forever. Around 10,800 BCE, the North American ice sheets collapsed, causing glacial meltwaters to cool the North Atlantic and kick starting a global drop in temperatures. Within a few centuries, conditions in Europe and the Near East were almost as cold as the previous ice age. This period, known as the Younger Dryas, lasted for over a 1000 years. In the Near East, hunter gatherer culture saw their entire way of life collapse. Their edenic landscape of fruit and nut trees withered in the cold. The large herds of wild game disappeared.
They had always grown and eaten the seeds of native grasses as a supplemental part of their diet. During the Younger Dryas, however, these grasses and some legumes became the only crops they could reasonably rely on. A 1000 years of planting and harvesting had the effect of fully domesticating these species. When the climate finally warmed again in 9,600 BCE, they had a crop that had never been seen before. Grain, wheat, barley, peas, beans, and flax had gone from wild survival foods to domesticated staples. A period of dramatic climate change had brought about a new class of food that would never and forever change the world. This new age, defined not by hunting and gathering, but by the cultivation of grains, is known as the Neolithic or the new stone age.
The traditional narrative states that the Neolithicization of Europe or the replacement of hunter gatherer groups with grain farming occurred as a wave from 6,500 BCE in Greece to 25 100 BCE in Scandinavia with farming cultures from the Near East bringing grain and livestock leading to the end of the inferior Mesolithic hunter gatherer way of life. A wealth of recent archeological evidence, however, points to a very different story. Every dramatic change or fluctuation in climate from the Neolithic to the present day precipitates major changes in agriculture.
As we've seen, people created productive environments by spreading hazelnuts across Europe when the climate warmed after the Younger Dryas. The little ice age of 17th century led to massive failures in Europe's grain harvest, prompting the widespread adoption of the potato and other new world crops. Similarly, the adoption of cereal farming in Europe did not happen at a continuous pace, but occurred in surges across or associated with several climate fluctuations over the course of 1000 of years grain was a radically new type of food for the Europeans Unlike tree crops that can take years to mature, cereals provide immediate food security in a pinch as they can be grown and harvested within a single season.
With each period of climate induced chaos in Europe's prehistory, cereal farming communities expanded ever deeper into Mesolithic Europe. When conditions improved, these farming communities grew in population far more quickly than the relatively stable hunter gatherer tribes. Mesolithic people were not unaware of grain growing. They had been experimenting with it for millennia before near eastern farming cultures entered the scene. The spread of farming, therefore, was not due to the supposed superiority of grains, but because repeated periods of climate change and the resulting social chaos pushed Mesolithic Europeans to adopt new ways of life to survive.
Indeed, Mesolithic hunter gatherer communities contained continued to live peaceably side by side with Neolithic farming communities for 1000 of years before adopting agriculture. As in many parts of Europe, the cultures of Mesolithic Sweden had depended on hazelnuts for millennia, with some scholars even dubbing this period the nut age. When Neolithic grain farming communities entered southern Sweden around 55100 BCE, the native hazel based cultures continued to practice their traditional ways for another 1600 years.
It was only when a period of dramatic cooling began that hazel populations in the region plummeted, and Mesolithic communities, now without their sacred life giving tree, adopted grain farming by 39100 BCE. This was a story repeated throughout Europe. And while nearly all of Europe eventually came to adopt grain farming, the resilience of these Mesolithic cultures over the course of millennia demonstrates that hazelnuts are perhaps the best option for a perennial crop that can replace grains in a temperate climate. For the first few millennia of farming in Europe, before the advent of traction plowing, families cultivated the land with digging sticks, hoes, mattocks, and foot plows.
This was human scale agriculture, unable to expand past the limits of a person's energy. As a result, Neolithic farming communities generally did not over exploit their environment, but instead, cultivated small plots of land for vast lengths of time with hand tools, crop rotations, and fertilization from livestock manure, compost, and night soil, leaving the land they tended more fertile than when they found it. These ancient farmsteads were the original regenerative farming innovators and in many ways resemble today's small organic farms and homesteads of a few acres.
Monocultures did not yet exist as a concept. Grains were not grown as fields of single varieties, but as diverse mixes of cereals and legumes called maslins. Ancient grains like emmer, einkorn, and barley were grown together with peas and lentils Hemp, flax and poppies were common supplemental crops as well these diverse mixed fields were far more resilient than monocultures. In some parts of Europe, they've existed unchanged for 4000 years. In modern grain farming, a single variety of wheat is planted over 100 of acres. If a season is unfavorable, the farmer will lose the entire crop. Ancient Maslins, however, protected against this. Seasonal weather differences might benefit Einkorn 1 year and barley the next, whether the year was cold or not, wet or not, there would always be a crop to harvest.
Unlike modern varieties, ancient grain lands races were bred to have a long harvest window that protected them against total crop failure in case of a freak weather event. Maslins of crop land races were a simple but effective way for small farmers to hedge their bets against variable seasonality and climate change. Newer research into growing mixes of cereals and legumes has confirmed what neolithic farmers always knew, that these intercrop mixes of grain and legume are superior to monocultures by nearly every metric along with grains and legumes, Neolithic farmers brought domesticated livestock like cattle, pigs, goats, and sheep.
Because these near eastern land races of farm animals were not always well adapted to Europe's climates and conditions, farmers often intentionally crossbred their cows and pigs with native aurex and wild boar in Europe, resulting in offspring that were domesticated but far better adapted to local conditions. Many of the oldest European land races of cattle and pigs today are the direct descendants of these Neolithic hybrids of wild and domesticated animals. The Iberian pig, a Spanish land race that is made into the world famous jaman iberico, is very similar to its Neolithic ancestors, which is a mix of swine and wild boar genetics.
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In Spain, the Iberian pig is a central component of the Dicia system,
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an ancient agroecological masterpiece. The dacias are man made oak savannahs throughout Spain and Portugal, populated with traditional land races of livestock on grassland, with home oak and cork oak dotting the landscape. Jamon Iberico wild game and non meat products like truffles, mushrooms, honey, fighting bulls, and cork are valuable yields in this system as an agroecosystem it has existed in its basic form for at least 4,500 years and in essence is a domesticated form of the fire managed Mesolithic nut tree savannahs replacing aurochs and wild boar with cattle and pigs.
Not only is the Disha a low input silvo pasture system, it has existed for so many millennia that it is now an important ecosystem in its region, allowing it to support an enormous range of biodiversity, including endangered species like the Iberian lynx, imperial eagle, and black vulture. These systems challenge the very definition of farming and show us what agriculture can be when people create it as a fully fledged ecosystem rather than simply a way to mine nutrients from the soil. In other areas, the adaptation of the Mesolithic Forest Garden took the form of fruit, chestnut, silvopastures created as semi natural open forests.
These included diverse nut and fruit assemblages such as chestnut, carob, almond, fig, olive, hazel, cork, oak, and more. That allowed for livestock grazing beneath them. A culture of Chestnut Forest Management in Corsica shows how the use of perennial nut crops as a staple has never left Europe. The practice of coppicing trees did not end in the Mesolithic either. The wild willow thick stream banks became managed willow beds that were planted with cuttings of the best plants. These willow beds were coppiced every year for crafts and tool making. Wicker basketry became such an elevated art form in the British Isles that fine Celtic baskets were imported by Roman aristocrats. The word basket itself, originally is one of the only words of Celtic origin in the deeply colonized English language.
Coppice woods of chestnut, linden, hazel, and other useful species have remained an essential and ancient part of the British landscape providing materials for housing, tools and crafts, charcoal production, mushroom cultivation, and even rich pockets of endangered biodiversity. One of the most recognizable evolutions of Mesolithic Forest Gardens, however, is the hedgerow. The most common forest edge species of fruits and nuts that were cultivated by Mesolithic people the sloeplum, rowan, hawthorn crabapple, wild cherry, brambles, etcetera, also happened to be the most common hedge plants in Northern Europe.
During the Neolithic Revolution, new farming cultures discovered an innovative way to manage and integrate these species by planting them thickly in rows around their farms and cereal fields and periodically rejuvenating them with strategic pruning. The native forest edge ecosystem, in essence, the plant supermarket of Mesolithic people, was compressed into an architectural feature of the new agrarian landscape as a multifunctional barrier that demarcated land, kept livestock in or out of certain areas, and provided food, fodder, firewood tool handles, medicine, and other materials.
Hedgerows were sometimes used as a defense barrier as well the Nervi tribe of northern Gaul modern day France, nearly wiped out Caesar's invading legions in 57 BCE by using their hedgerows to limit Roman maneuvering. In the present day, Europe's hedgerows provide a new benefit in serving as a repository for biodiversity. In highly deforested areas like Ireland, hedgerows are often the largest gene bank of native tree biodiversity that has otherwise been lost. They also serve as crucial corridors for wildlife connecting the few remaining patches of natural space that remain.
The wild fruit orchards of indigenous hunter gatherers exist to this day in the form of these living barriers that crisscross the old fields of Central Europe. The new Creole societies that arose in Europe were fantastically diverse, mixing Mesolithic hunter gatherer cultures and the newer farming communities. Cultures that stray too far from their hunter gatherer roots and rely too heavily on a handful of grain crops like the linear pottery culture of Central Europe were able to expand rapidly but could not maintain a sustainable existence. As soon as the climate began to deteriorate, the linear pottery culture collapsed in on itself with unprecedented violence.
Other hybrid cultures that emerged from this time, however, found ways to marry the best of both worlds. These societies relied on the new cereals for their staples, but supplemented them with a broad range of indigenous foods and growing systems. Some places saw hunter gatherers adopt domesticated livestock but eschew grain. While in other neolithic farmers embraced local land management techniques and native tree crops. These two radically different societies rarely came into conflict, and intermarriage between them was common throughout Europe. Many Mesolithic practices, beliefs, and systems were blended into the new European societies as a result of this peaceful intermingling.
In the Eugenian hills above the Po River, in Northeastern Italy, a neolithic culture combined the cereal crops of the Near East with Mesolithic forest garden management. Farmers perform controlled burns of their landscape radically changing the local ecosystem from a Linden Ur Forest to a chestnut walnut grain savannah. For 5000 years, these farmers regularly set low level fires and cleared out weeds and small trees and sowed cereals, flax, and hemp in the fresh soil. They planted chestnut and walnut trees in these cereal fields along with olives, grapes, and willows, creating a diverse, multi story, agrarian landscape that provided a wide range of products and crops from a single area.
This type of farming is reminiscent of the famous indigenous Milpas of the Americas. To this day, some of the most advanced agricultural systems in the world. The introduction of agriculture in Tuscany also saw the managed forests of the Mesolithic reorganized into a more domesticated form on the farm. Unlike most places in Europe, Tuscany maintained a great deal of its ancestral culture avoiding the worst of the Indo European invasions that wiped out much of the continent's indigenous cultures during the bronze age. As such, the region maintained an unbroken link to its prehistoric past even up through the Etruscan civilization in the Iron Age.
The Etruscans enjoyed a highly diversified diet that consisted of many different annual grains and legumes along with perennials like cultivated grapes, wild cherries, hazelnuts, acorns, olives, pears, and figs. The first wine here was made with native Cornelian cherries before superior grape varieties were introduced throughout trade. The Etruscans developed a diverse forest garden system that has become known in Italian as cultura promiscua or mixed cultivation. Like the extensive forest gardens in the Uganian Hills, these farms were a creolization of local Mesolithic agroecology, tree crops and native perennials together, with Near Eastern Cereal Farming.
It is a system that has survived to the modern day. The practice of trellising grapes into trees is one of the most ancient parts of this system known as Alberata Roman authors wrote extensively about its use Pliny claimed that vines grown on trees produce better wine The tree to which the grapevine is married changes based on local environmental and economic factors in some areas of Italy, the mulberry has been used as the grape trellis in order to provide fruit, livestock fodder, and silkworm rearing. In wet areas, Willow or Poplar was used In the hills, cherries were often the trellis Everything from field maple and chestnut to olive and elm can be utilized in this system.
Cultura promiscua is, at its core, a domesticated facsimile of the prehistoric forest garden whereas their Mesolithic ancestor had gathered wild grains, fruits, nuts, medicine, and wood from the managed forest surrounding their villages, Etruscans and their descendants created a complex polycultural system that maintain these elements in a controlled and linear setting. Domesticated grapes, climbing rows of usually native trees that are pollarded for fodder or materials for basketry and firewood or harvested for fruit and oil, all in closing, small fields of diverse grains, legumes, hay, and vegetables that are rotated to maintain fertility. This system allows for the production of staple crops and specialty products for market, and expands the ability to farm a wider range of soils and conditions.
These domesticated landscapes are fully integrated into the local ecosystem forming networks of connectivity between local woodlands as mosaics of trees, grains, stone features, and waterways they create oases of profound biological, hydrological and geological diversity in the landscape the diversity and strength of this system made it resistant to invasion by the deadly phylloxera that obliterated the weaker grape monocultures of France. Crop introductions through invasions or trade routes are the only major change this system has seen in over 2000 years. Species from Asia and the Americas have seamlessly entered the cultura promiscua and are now staple crops in these systems.
The ancient peasant farmers who fashioned this forest garden system continued to hunt wild game and harvest wild foods just as their descendants in Tuscany do today. The culture and cuisine of Tuscany from truffle hunting to wine making is part of a 30 1000 year old unbroken tradition and relationship with the land. The elegance and near perfection of these tempered forest gardens is shown in how they have thrived for millennia on some of the most contested land in Europe, surviving climate change, war, pestilence, drought, and economic upheaval. Only the proliferation of postwar neoliberal economic policy in the 20th century has managed to drive this peerless system
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to the brink of extinction. Indeed,
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has nearly vanished in its native land for the same reasons that other European agroecological systems have disappeared. Urbanization and rural depopulation in the modern period have virtually eliminated traditional environmental knowledge and the labor base for maintenance and harvest. The intensification of the modern capitalist paradigm has incentivized extractive cash crop mono cultures over self sufficiency or regenerative methods. Post war mechanization, which is built for monocultures and economies of scale, is not suited to the small hand tended agroecosystems that require a high degree of expertise in shaping and working with the natural world.
Medieval, manorial, feudalism, the American plantation system and Jim Crow, and modern industrialized farming are all descendants of the slavery based monocrop agricultural systems that the Roman Empire forced on the land in their effort to subdue and replace Europe's tribal societies. Oppressive systems like these have always flown the banner banner of efficiency and profit without regard for human well-being or ecological destruction. This essential struggle between extractive imperialist systems and indigenous land based lifeways is still ongoing across Europe and its former colonies, particularly the Americas.
The rapid disappearance of the djes, coppice woods willow beds hedgerows and Mediterranean forest gardens are all connected in this fight What's at stake in their survival is not the preservation of some bygone relic, but the protection and expansion of relationships with the land that can feed our communities, preserve biodiversity through climate change, and create productive ecosystems that last for millennia. Despite what we've been told, the indigenous Mesolithic societies of Europe never disappeared. They adapted and survived in new ways.
Their cultures, values, spiritual beliefs, and relationships with the land are encoded in the folk traditions and regional agroecological systems that persist throughout Europe. These are an essential piece of an antidote to the toxic Empire based culture that currently holds sway over our society they are an example of what we might lose if we forget too much, but also of what we can create again. Our present crises of climate change, extreme inequality, imperialism run amok, and endemic violence eerily mirror the downfalls of previous cultures that rely too heavily on a handful of finicky crops and an expansionist ethos.
But this time of chaos could also be an opportunity. A chance to emulate the older cultures that replace them. Those who planted trees in the ruins of empire, who remade the commons on abandoned plantations, and quietly continued to tend their small forest garden as their ancestors had before them. We may have inherited the most destructive systems of extraction and exploitation ever seen, but we also have inherited the seeds for a better way to live. A way that our oldest ancestors knew and cherished. Perhaps it is time that we plant those seeds once again.
And the circle P is open for business. This time, it's gonna be Shee Shee. That's right, Shee Shee. He's gonna sell you some comfrey. If you want to know more about comfrey, you need to go listen to episode 726 of this podcast, the Bitcoin and podcast. And I will tell you everything that you need to know about why you want comfrey in your garden. And guess what? It even includes the history of com comfrey, which also includes Pliny the Elder, who you heard mentioned a couple of times in this piece, the forest or the lost forest gardens of Europe. Okay. So comfrey is something you're gonna want and you can plant it all summer long. It's not one of these plants that's all finicky and you gotta really baby it. No, man. This thing is like a beast.
It you if if you try to get rid of it, you're probably just gonna piss it off. And it doesn't matter if you plant it in July or August, it doesn't matter if you're living in Mexico or, like, up in the, you know, like the Great Lakes region. This stuff grows everywhere and she she's got it for you. You can get one full root cutting or were well, one full root rather for $20 or individual root cuttings for a buck each, I highly recommend getting at least 20 of them. What's the difference between the full root and a cutting? Well, let me tell you. A full root will include or should include no. She she if you're not doing this, you need to let me know because I don't wanna, you know, tell anybody the wrong the wrong thing.
But if the root includes the very top of the plant or what's called the root plate, which is the that that space, that that edge between what is root and what is the leaves of the plant, if it includes that plate on the very top, that thing is going to almost instantly come to life and start leafing out after you plant it. If you do a full root cutting, however, and there's no root plate, it's just the root material, you pop that into a hole. Could be a week. Could be 2. It's taken me as long as 7 weeks sometimes before I see a leaf poke its head up where you know, in a place where I knew I planted a couple of these root cuttings. Alright? So the Bocking 4 and Bocking 14 are both varieties. The Bocking 14 is better fodder for animals.
The balking 4 is a huge biomass plant. Both of them, you want both of them. I sold the rootstock for she she's balking for to him so I personally vouch for that genetic strain. Right? It's done me well. I was able to make 100 I I think I ended up planting, like, I don't know. By the time I moved out of Canyon, I had, like, 300 of these things. It's medicine. It's food for animals. It's I mean, there it does all kinds of neat stuff. But one of the best things about it, great mulch. It's got high in nitrogen, so it's great for your compost piles as long as you've got enough carbon in your compost pile to handle it, because you need you need that. You need carbon. You dried brown leaves along with green stuff. You need both of them in a compost pile.
But this stuff is wonderful. And like I said, if you wanna know more about it and what Pliny the Elder said about it, go to episode 726 of the Bitcoin and podcast. I will have a link directly in the show notes for that. If you need to get a hold of, some, you need to get a hold of Sheeshi. His I will put a link, a direct link to how to get a hold of him on Nostr. He will all that will also be in the show notes, but you can email [email protected]. That is s h I s h I, the numbers 21 and the letter [email protected]. It's gonna be a little slower for him to get back to you, but he will ship you this stuff and you're going to want it. Now, let's get back to this whole forest gardens of Europe business.
This particular piece, I've read this thing a couple of times now. And it's it's fascinating. Again, just so you know, the author's name is Max Paschel, and you can find him at Shelterwood forest farm blog. That's Shelterwood, all one word, forest farm blog. And he's got a couple of pieces over there, that are interesting. Now, as you've probably noticed through it, you probably cringed a couple of times because I said the words climate change, and, oh my god, the evils of capitalism. And, yeah, I mean, you know, I can deal with it. You know, I mean, I I know this guy's way probably way more on the left hand side of of things than I am, but I don't care.
Because all the rest of the stuff that he said is not only is it factually true, it's fascinating. And thank God somebody is capturing this information and bringing it all back to us. We need this information. I live in Eastern Washington and from Eastern Washington all the way all the way from from the eastern edge of Washington State all the way to the Cascade Mountains, which is almost to the West Coast, ain't nothing but grain lentils garbanzo beans as wheat and barley and rye and I mean that's it Just monocrop. Oh, god forbid canola. Yeah. There's all shit ton of canola that's done out here.
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It's just monocrops. There's no trees.
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They're literally, man. I mean, it's like it's it's as far as the eye can see, there's not that many trees. One would think, oh, you live in Washington. It's like a forest. No. It's not. It may be in, like, in the Cascade Mountains and onto the coast. Yeah. It's a huge I mean, there's rain there's temper rainforest. There's a massive one on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. But out here, nuh-uh. Nuh-uh. You gotta go into Idaho before you can hit some forest again. It's just cereal grain. That's it. This this particular way of looking at agriculture as a polyculture where you're growing more than one thing on the same piece of land is something that I believe that sooner or later, we're going to have to get back to if not if not because we say, you know what? It's just a good idea, so we're we're gonna do this.
It could very well be that we don't have a choice. I don't know. I mean, I I don't even have a gut feeling on this. I'm just saying that think of something like grain crops genetics crashing in the face of changing climates because guess what? Climates can and do change. Remember how much climate change we heard about in this piece and that was all, like, 8000 to 15000 to 6000 years ago? Yeah. There was no fossil fuel burning. There was no cars. There was nobody laying asphalt down. There wasn't 8 1,000,000,000 people on the planet. And yet climate change.
Right? Climate change happens. We if if the climate had never changed on earth, none of this would be here. There wouldn't be trees or fish or deer or people or babies or baby cats or kittens or lynxes or bugs or nothing. There would be nothing alive on this planet. Nothing that you can think of as being alive would be on this planet had the climate not changed. We've been through 7 atmospheres on this planet, and it's probably not going to stop. There will probably be an 8th and a 9th and a 10th different kind of atmosphere on this planet. And hopefully, this shit don't happen for 100 of 1000000 of years because I don't want that to change just now. But temperatures change, ice sheets melt, ice sheets come back, things warm up, things cool down. And as you saw entire cultures of Europe got completely decimated, and the only survivors were the guys that were like, well, I guess we're not eating hazelnuts anymore this year, pal.
Let's grow some of this cool grain. So now we start getting a picture of how did we get here? Well, that just painted a very good picture of how we got cereal crops. It was kinda necessary. We were we were gonna eat cereal crops because the earth just basically kinda demanded it, but that doesn't mean that we've got to stay here. That doesn't mean that we can't figure out a way to get out of this this cycle of carbohydrate madness and eat more animal fat, more animal protein, because as you saw animals were are it were and are still heavily integrated into the few remaining systems that we have. Now they talked about the Iberico pork or the I what was it? The Iberico jamon is a famous it's world famous delicacy when it comes to ham. You can only get it from one place, and that's the parts of Spain and a lot of the parts of Portugal that was mentioned in this in this piece. And the way it works is this.
There's a couple of kinds of oak trees. One of them is a cork oak, and that's where cork from your wine bottles come from. It's the bark and they just strip off the bark and guess what? It doesn't kill the tree. There's been trees there for that are a 1000 years old. Oak trees that are a 1000 years old and for a 1000 years, they've had their bark scraped off of them. They're fine. But as they're yielding this cork, guess what else they're yielding? A bunch of acorns. And we can't really eat acorns, not without a lot of manual labor.
But but but pigs pigs, on the other hand, they not only can they process and gain a lot of weight out of eating acorns, to them, it's delicious. And they will clean up the entire they will just run around underneath these oak trees and they will eat and eat and eat and eat after these acorns masked out and all this crap falls to the ground and that's how they get fat. They're not these guys aren't shipping in grain. They don't need it. They've got thousands of acres of oak trees. Some of them are you know, a lot of them are cork, but there's other oak trees too. And all of those will mass and drop nuts. And the pigs love their the acorns.
And they eat and eat and eat. And while those guys are eating and, you know, running around the field and pooping and fertilizing everything again, the old men and women that run these systems, they're back down in town enjoying a coffee. Because, honestly, there's not a whole lot of work to do while the pigs are being fattened, and they can appreciate life. And I'm not saying that they're lazy. I'm just saying that if you do nothing but work, how is that any better? How does that make you a better person than being than not working at all and being completely lazy? If there's not a middle ground there, that's an issue. At least that's what I think.
But if we look if we take a step back and go actually, not just a step back, but we get in a helicopter that can go up 30,000 feet in the air and look straight down at this entire idea of this What we see is a gigantic systems engineering endeavor. It's not a problem to be solved it is a systems engineering endeavor. It is the construction of something that is so symbiotic that it that the definition of symbiosis being 1 +1 equals more than 2 because these these systems, like, kinda compound on each other. No. No. No. No. This is at 1 +1equalslightlymorethan2. This is like 1+1equals
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food and a lot of it forever.
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It doesn't stop producing food. Sure. You might lose, like, a grape a crop of grapes, and you're not gonna have a vintage of wine that year because, you know, temperatures or whatever. But the things that the things that are growing in that same system that don't depend, that their success doesn't depend on, quote, unquote, temperatures, they're fine. And you can sell them at market because you're producing more than one thing. And that is the issue. When we have monocultures, yes, we have a very easily manageable situation on our hands.
It's wheat. We've got a field of not only wheat, but this one variety of wheat. And we have this one machine that that that can fertilize and, you know, this other machine or this that same machine with a different head can be a sprayer and with a different head might, you know, do something else. And then there's the combine that comes through. But, honestly, we've got 2 or 3 pieces of a farm equipment. We've got somebody who pretty much knows how to drive them all, and we've got this one field of wheat. It's a it's an insanely, easily manageable system. But what's what's the what's the, what's the payoff?
Or what what what do we call it in in, in, what was it in in Bitcoin when we had, like, the big blocks? What's you know, if you're gonna have big blocks, what do you have to give up? What's the trade off? If I have a huge field of wheat, what's the trade off? It's easily manageable,
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but one thing goes wrong and that entire crop is lost.
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But if I go to a polyculture system and I do something that's some of the things that are right, like using maple trees to trellis grapevines on. Have you ever seen a grapevine trellis on anything other than a dead stick of wood with some wire stretched between other dead sticks of wood that are shoved in the ground and there's no trees freaking anywhere. I've never seen that. The only time I've ever even heard of this was when I read this for the first time at the end of last week. I've it didn't even dawn on me that you could do this, and it makes sense. The roots of the grape system are in direct contact with the roots of the maple system. I've already told you just how much mycorrhizal fungi will transfer nutrients and water and equalize entire systems using a network between different species of plants.
So it's no wonder that this system would be more resilient because it's not just the roots of the grape system. It's the roots of the maple or the willow or the poplar or any of the other trees that were mentioned because you can use several different kinds. And those acting in symphony with each other, being played by the maestro that is the mycorrhizal fungi that stretches between them, that maximizes their ability to get water in times of drought or maximizes their ability to attain nutrients when they can't themselves, makes the system more and more resilient. However, if the climactic structure just collapses and one of these things just cannot make a product, you've got 12 different products that did make it.
But what's the trade off? It's not easy. The the you trade the profit side and the resilience of profit side for the management this is a much more difficult system to manage or is it? Is it just because we don't want to learn how the system works? We already have examples of it. This is a really good piece. It, I will definitely be linking this piece in the show notes for freaking obvious reasons. I highly recommend that you read it. This isn't as hard as people make it out to be. It's just that John Deere cannot really build a tractor to harvest the whole thing in a week.
It doesn't work that way. If we can realign the way that we think about agriculture in general, we are going to have a much better time as humans. And what I suspect, and this is a gut feeling, what I suspect is what seems like it would be a more difficult managing practice to get into this promiscua or cultura promiscua, it'll probably be more life rewarding. And that you can like, some people would like I'm fascinated by the the the management challenges that this represents. And I think that even through some hardships, because there's resilience on the other side, that I would still be in love with this system if I was having to manage one of these things.
But the amount of shit that we have to relearn that we've forgotten, I think that is a it's a learning curve barrier. And farmers are having it hard enough. They can like, there are so many of them that they're barely able to function from one season to the next. That there is definitely no way that they have time to figure this one out. But we're we're here. We're at a spot where It's clear that that money is broken. It's clear that Bitcoin has come and we can do some things along those lines that's going to fix a whole bunch of stuff. Maybe not everything, but a whole bunch of stuff can be fixed.
And what did he what did he say? Hold on for a second. Let me pause this for a sec. Here we go. This is what I was looking for. Check this sentence out. K? Close your eyes, and let me read it again. Only the proliferation of postwar neoliberal economic policy in the 20th century has managed to drive this peerless system to the brink of extinction. That's the sentence. And that was the one when I read that, that's when I knew I was gonna read this entire thing to you in a completely different style of episode that's never been done on the Bitcoin and podcast. I knew at that sentence that you had to hear this. Why?
Because I know my audience, and I know my audience hears the words proliferation of postwar neoliberal economic policy in the 20th century, and you immediately go, yeah. The money's screwed. So we always talk about that, don't we? The money is is we've just burned it to a crisp. We've just lit it on fire and it's now all ash. And it touches everything. It touches architecture, which is why we have shitty strip malls in the United States. Nobody wants to go to a strip mall. There's not a single person I know that is dying to go to a strip mall, to hang out, to be in the presence of this strip mall. However, there are places in in Europe and there's places in old world America that people want to go to. It's a destination.
But 85% of all the buildings in the United States that have been built in the past 30 years or 50 years have been built with just the shittiest money in the world, which means we've got the shittiest architecture, which means nobody cared about color or place or how you address a building or what your relationship to that building is because we just don't freaking care as long as we get our pets marked.
[01:02:06] Unknown:
Money has destroyed everything that it touches. Architecture, food, art, education,
[01:02:13] Unknown:
agriculture, again, food. But still, I mean, we we have a a situation that food, as far as most of the public, seems to be seems to be looking at food right now as it comes from a grocery store, which again, just think strip mall. There's no destination there. I'm not saying go buy all your food at a farmer's market because that shit can get expensive. But this this is so broke, so broken that our choice is to make a a mathematical calculation in our head as to why we really shouldn't be going to a farmer's market to buy food when it's so damn expensive and everybody's having problems, so we end up defaulting and going to the most known strip mall in the universe, the Walmart, to go get food. And most people that are shopping in that Walmart think their food comes from the Walmart. They don't realize that it had to come from soil at one point or another.
As shitty as the nutrient density is today, most of this stuff is still coming from the soil. And they don't know, so they completely detached food from agriculture. And what we've done for even the people that know that we know that the food in the supermarket comes from farms. We know that. And we look at agriculture and go, yeah. This is screwed too. It is. It's all screwed. It's been screwed for 100 of years. And in fact, if you go back and and read this article again, you'll find out that it got screwed right around 8,000 to 9000 years ago we had just started situational farming and ice sheets melted and everything died and all of a sudden we come back out of that on the other side with grain.
And that's how we're here. The choice was made for us. So are the question that I will end this off with is the following. Shall we remain spineless and just eat our daily gruel as we are expected to, or will we go out and try to find a way to bring this kind of agriculture back where we have several different products thriving on the same piece of land so that one climatic event that wipes out 1 or 2 or 3 of the products does not have a damn thing to say about the other 7. And that in good years, we have all 10. And in bad years, the worst years, maybe we've only got 5, but we're gonna make it. Whereas if we've only got 1
[01:04:56] Unknown:
and something happens, That's it. For that whole year, for that entire year, no work can be salvaged. No food will be had.
[01:05:09] Unknown:
And you'll just have to start over again after a long
[01:05:13] Unknown:
cold dark hungry winter.
[01:05:17] Unknown:
Think about that, and I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction to the topic of agriculture and ancient farming practices.
Exploration of the Lost Forest Gardens of Europe and their agricultural practices.
Discussion on the history of farming systems in Europe and their resilience.
Exploration of the Neolithic Revolution and the adoption of grain farming in Europe.
Discussion on the Dicia system in Spain and Portugal and its agroecological significance.
Explanation of the mixed cultivation system known as cultura promiscua in Etruscan civilization.
Promotion of comfrey plant and its benefits for gardening.
Detachment of the public from the source of food
Disconnect between food and agriculture
History of agriculture and farming practices
