Interview with Garrett Richards
In this episode of Agrarian Matters I’m catching up with my friend Garrett Richards. Garrett is a graduating student of the University of Maine’s Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Program. He’s worked on several farms, including helping out at Souder Station Farm. We got together to just openly ramble about farming thoughts on our minds. We covered a bunch of topics in this episode and it was a lot of fun. Looking forward to going deeper on these topics with Garrett in future episodes.
Topics covered:
03:34 Sustainable Agriculture Program from University of Maine
04:39 What is Agrarianism?
07:29 Hunting and Aldo Leopold
10:57 Expansion and Consumerism
15:18 Problems Leaving Industrial Agriculture
16:02 Are we living unsustainably? Shout out to Will Bonsall and The Scatterseed Project And “Through the eyes of a stranger”
19:01 What’s ahead for the future?
25:10 The illusion of safety
25:34 Jim Shockey
28:13 Chemical Farming, Rachel Carson, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
29:00 Red Root Pigweed, Amaranth, Eastern Agricultural Complex
32:25 Man’s hubris and playing God
36:14 To what end?
38:14 Luddites, Nomads, and African and Brazilian Desserts
40:43 Controlling people through food, pre-Mesopotamia
43:52 More energy needed to produce a box of cereal, than the energy we get from the cereal itself
44:35 Corn and Ethanol
46:22 Trump, Thomas Massie, RFK, Joel Salatin, Make America Healthy Again
47:57 Promote More Self Sufficiency and Community Sufficiency
48:20 Grants and Artificial Models, also shout out to MOFGA and the Farmer to Farmer Conference
51:37 Documentary: Poverty Inc
53:48 Seed oils, vegetable oils, and trade
56:08 Back to the land 2.0
59:38 How long is utopia sustainable?
1:01:12 Local Towns outlawing farming
1:03:52 Maine’s Constitutional Right to Farm
1:06:32 Sunday Hunting in Maine
Podcast Link: