26. Returning to Community Supported Agriculture - Philip Merca & Danielle Granier

In today’s episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Philip Merca. Phil has had a dream of being a CSA (community supported agriculture) agent for the past 3 years. Not only is a new wave of farming predicted to appear with the future shift economically, but this also will grow a need for homegrown food! Corporates often outsource for livestock and produce, however- with the debt crisis, there will be room for more CSA’s. CSA’s are populated in more rural areas and the west coast is a hot spot! Email Phil here - philipmerca@gmail.com

The practices that we have in the US, one are not sustainable. And two, I mean, we're seeing the effects of them now. Back in the 80s, the average American spent 4% on medical bills and 16% on food. Now the average American spends 9% on food and 18% on medical bills. We have an average of £10 of bacteria living in our gut, right? £10. That's a lot. When you destroy your gut and then you live a sterile life, you're going to not have a fun one. It's going to be rough, right? If you're not feeding that bacteria, if you're not adding in new and healthy and good bacteria and taking care of that £10 of country called bugs living inside of you that are really helping you, right? And you just kill them all and you're like, okay, I'm just going to go eat Twinkies and Oreos. You're just not going to have a good life for the people who are joining us on the Simply Overcoming podcast today. I am going to be schooled today because today I have Phil Mersa on the podcast. And Phil, it's like America without the A. It's pronounced America. I've got Phil Merca on the podcast and today he's going to educate me about community supported agriculture. Amongst other things. Phil believes that gardening is going to be an important role in the future of America and the future of the people in America. And so I really appreciate having you on the podcast also, to make things even better. We have Danny on the podcast and Danny's been here before. She's been in previous episodes. Danny, thank you so much. You're the one that actually turned me on to Phil. And so you both are here and thank you for being on the podcast. Guys, thank you for having us. Danny pulled this interview off in like 24 hours. So you have had no time to prepare for this interview. I really haven't had any time either. But thank you, Danny, for making this happen because I think this is going to be really important. Can I read your email, Danny? And then maybe Phil can comment on that. I haven't seen this. It's going to be good. This is part of what Danny said. I've learned recently that America will discontinue printing dollar bills on October 18. This will lead to major inflation for our country as our debt crisis is going to change and the economy will know it. I have a friend named Phil who has had a dream of being a CSA community supported agriculture agent for the past three years. He just turned an investment from 30,$000 to $50,000. He'll need about 75,000 to buy land and start his eco farm. I might live on. It is what James says. We want to have a community that shares the farm. This is quite interesting to me. So amongst being somebody who is into agriculture, you also sounds like you're an excellent businessman. He's in sales. He was. I was in sales. I've always been in some way, shape or form a salesperson. When I was a kid, I used to go door to door selling candy. My parents would buy me, like, a variety box from Costco for $14. I sell them for a dollar piece, and there's 30 pieces that make, like $16 on it. It's not that I like sales. I like people. I've always surrounded myself with a lot of people. Up until recently, I've always been involved in different groups. I guess you could call me a salesperson. I think I'm just a people person. That's so awesome. So what do you do, Phil? As of right now, I'm just a concrete truck driver. So I had a pretty sour experience with my last job as a new home sales rep. The company I worked for is really great. It just wasn't really for me. So I just found the quickest way I can get to my dreams. And I looked at what I needed. I set some goals, and I was like, how do I get there without a College degree? How do I get there with very limited experience? What I actually want to do? What's that fast track. And then I was like, concrete truck driver, working 70 hours a week and hating your life. Perfect. You know what? How much sleep are you running on, Phil? None. I also had a kid, so, yeah, none. Well, at the end of the day, it's about the hustle. And no matter what you're doing, do it to the best of your ability. And you know, if you're going to be driving a concrete truck, you're going to be the best damn concrete truck driver that the world has ever seen. Right, Phil? Yeah. So what got you into this passion that you have, like, where did this come from? You didn't go to College for this type of thing, but it sounds like you're a really intelligent guy, and you really love consuming books, which is awesome. I think that's great. Constant learning. We should all be continually learning, right? Yeah. So I'm very add jump from thing to to thing. I also got a mix of bipolar in there, and I've always just picked up new things, right? Nothing can keep my attention for longer than two weeks. And when we moved from Chicago. So I grew up in Chicago. Originally, I lived there for 16 years, and we moved from Chicago to Texas. We live in a really tiny apartment, like a really small apartment. Like, there's four of us. My grandfather, my mom, my dad, and I slept in the kitchen floor. I had a little bed right outside. And I don't know, there's this guy that I just watched that I really like his name was Justin Rhodes. He's a great YouTuber, great family man. I've consumed a lot of his content, but he said something that stuck out to me. He was like, hey, it doesn't matter where you are. Just grow one thing. So I started with, like, three buckets and started growing like, strawberry plants. Had a tomato. Nothing grew. I didn't get anything on it. I went to California for a week. My mom was like, I'll water it. She killed it. But from there, it just kind of grew. I was like, Man, that's really cool that I can plant a seed in the ground and hopefully one day be able to eat what I plant. So after that, we moved from that apartment to a little bit of a bigger house with a backyard. And I was like, you know what? Let's just do it. So I bought Ducks. I bought chickens. I bought Quail. I met this really cute girl who is now my wife, and she was really into gardening. So I was like, hey, I don't know anything. Can you teach me? I knew a lot at this point. I was watching constant content on YouTube, but I was like, I don't know anything. So our first date, I don't know if you call it a day. She just came over and helped me, like, take a little garden bed. Oh, definitely a date. It sounds like a date to me. Yes, but not until recently that I really realized my love for gardening started when I was young, watching my grandma garden, watching her grow food. I didn't spend a lot of time with my grandma before she passed away. There's a really big language barrier that we had where she spoke a little bit of English. There. All my family is from Romania. I'm a first Gen American. I never really appreciated the time that I had with her. But when I look back, all the times that I had, that were really good, we play. What is that sport called where you have a racket and a little birdie? Oh, yeah. Badminton come out and she'd play with me for, like, try to get me away from the TV. Cut, go over, turn the TV on, literally. Just ignore her and she'd get me out of the house. She'd be like, come play with me. And I'd be like, okay, I'm five or ten, nine years old. I'm like, sure. And I just would sit in her garden, and I just remember, kind of like, a piece and just kind of like, a relaxation. And with my add, I don't know if you guys know this, but I think a common symptom of ad is just forgetting things. I've completely forgot about that until it was maybe a year ago where I was like, Man, I miss my grandma. I didn't know why. And I was like, I never really had a great, great relationship with her. But then I remembered I was like, oh, there's a piece that I felt in her backyard where we'd play, like, Bagmitten, how do you pronounce it? Whatever. Badminton, badminton. And we just sit in the garden and she had these giant grapevines that would produce these extremely tart grapes. They were wine grapes. My family is like Orthodox Christian, so they don't drink alcohol. But she's growing wine grapes in her backyard, and they feed them, and they're super tart. I look back at it now, and I'm like, man, that was like a place of peace. And now when I go in my garden, I can go sit there and look at the bugs all day and look at the things, just like flying around and the plants growing. And I realized that we were created. I don't know what you believe, but I believe we were created to be in tune with nature, with the planet that's providing food for us. Just like, as I believe the creator created me. He gave me the opportunity to help. Nourish what he created. And there's a piece about that. There's a relaxation,

really. Just a piece that's, like, the best word I can use to describe that. I like how you frame yourself as an ambassador for the plants and the animals to look out for their best interests. And something you mentioned to me is that the practices that we use does a major doozy or does a major glorification? I guess you could say to the planet like a major love for the planet would be in the practice you use. So, like, sustainable farming versus the way that corporate chicken farms are run, no real light, even exposure in the farms. And they're just sitting in their own field. It's awful. And it leads to disease. And something that you said really impacted me because it is farming. If we come back to this farming, it's almost like a religion or a practice, like in its purest form. What is it? I think it's kind of what you're talking about doing. Do you have any examples of that that you see through farming that you can help take care of the animals and the plants. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So I'm not going to go too deep into confinement farming a really good book on this would be any of Joe skeletons. But, folks, this ain't normal. He just came out a couple of years ago, and he just talks about the practices that we do and how they're just not normal. I mean, leaving a Tyson chicken to breathe its own, like, fecal matter for his whole entire life, not being exposed to any sunlight, no vitamin D, walking around its own filth. That's not normal, right? You look at a bird and what does the bird do? Walks through the grass. Chickens in and of themselves aren't normal. I mean, they're a form of GMO genetically modifying. The original chicken had no breasts, and it's like a bird. Right. But you look at birds and you look at animals like the pigments of a pig. What do they do? They rut. They don't sit on concrete all day and sit in their own filth. Chickens go pack the grass and they eat bugs, grass. They have relatively healthy patterns. A really good explanation of being a good steward, I think, is taking care of the soil biodiversity, right. I feel like most people don't know this. I don't know if these are the exact numbers that don't quote me on this. This is from Gunjury, but we have an average of £10 of bacteria living in our gut, right? £10. That's a lot like when I think about that, like, just like fauna, bacteria, different things living inside of me makes me feel a little weird, but we're pretty much just like stewards of those bacteria. If we start to be bad and not treat them well and put in a lot of sugars and a lot of things they shouldn't consume. I mean, they start to fall apart. They don't live as healthy, which then in turn right. They stopped taking care of us. It's kind of like a symbiotic relationship with the biodiversity of the dirt. Like if you're taking care of the worms, just like the microscopic things that are living inside of it, you can see ten out of ten. Your productions are going to be higher, your plants are going to be higher overall, you're going to be healthier. The use of chemicals isn't normal. You don't see trees dumping NPK ratio, mixing it up in a batch and spraying it on the ground. They drop their leaves. Right. I think this planet survived for so long, doing well with what it had, and I definitely think that there's a possibility to continue doing that right. I definitely believe there's a high possibility of taking care of these jobs. I mean, we can talk about if California should be as big as it is or Sacramento should be as big as it is. But I definitely see the possibility of doing what we did back in the 30s and 40s or we had Victory Gardens up until, like the early 90s and taking care of our neighbors and getting to know each other and providing good food up until what the 70s 40% of produce that was consumed in the US was grown in someone's backyard. Man, that's insane. I did not realize that. Wow. That's only, like 50 years. There's a lot of flip flops that we've had in the past 30, 40, 50, maybe. Let's say, 50 years. What was it? I just heard this today on a podcast from Joe Rogan and Jose Elton. I think Joe Tin said that back in the 80s, the average American spent 4% on medical bills and 16% on food. Now the average American spends 9% on food and 18% on medical bills. So I don't know if that presents kind of like a bigger picture of the way. I view like being a good Stewart, but I think when we take care of the thing that takes care of us in the best possible way and we really just steward this planet. Well, I think in turn, it will take care of us, take care of our biodiversity. Joe Salison is a freak of nature. The dude drinks water straight out of the trough. The cows drink in because he's like, I really just want to take care of this gut bacteria. I want expose it to everything. I'm not that nuts. Not yet, at least, but I don't know if that was a good example. Yeah. Thank you. It fascinates me because we're finally just learning how important gut health is and how we've been destroying our gut health by using different medications. They used to hand out antibiotics like it was candy. You get a little something happens to you, you go to the doctor and they just, oh, let's just throw some antibiotics on it. Now they're realizing that the antibiotics are actually destroying the gut health. And after you do a Regiment of antibiotics, your gut health, it takes up to six months or more for your gut health to get back to where it was, if it will ever get back to where it was. And at some point too, like an antibiotic, you have to think of it as like a nuke to your bacteria, to the things living in your gut, like, it's going to come in and wipe everything out. And if you live in a sterile environment and you're not giving yourself good bacteria, what's going to grow, right? The stuff that's easier to grow, the stuff that feeds off of the sugars and stuff that feeds off of just poor diet, the bad bacteria, you're going to get more sick. But I don't know. I mean, this isn't like scientifically back, but I look at my two kids and my son who wasn't given any antibiotics when he was born, doesn't have any problems. He had Covin when I had Covin. And I don't know if you're allowed to mention that on the podcast. If you don't want to be like, screened, you can take that off. I'll say this. He got sick and it didn't affect him at all. My daughter, who's had antibiotics is consistently, like, sniffling has just like, sinus pressure. She's always just fidgety. I definitely can see a difference. I mean, Lo and behold, she's too much premium. But now that she's almost four months old, I can see a difference in the way my son was and the way my daughter was. And I don't blame that fully on the antibiotics. There's a lot of other things that wouldn't do it. But like when you destroy your gut and then you live a sterile life, you're going to not have a fun one. It's going to be rough, right? If you're not feeding that bacteria, if you're not adding in new and healthy and good bacteria and taking care of that £10 of country called bugs living inside of you that are really helping you, right? And you just kill them all and you're like, okay. I'm just going to go continue to eat Twinkies and Oreos. You're just not going to have a good life. You're not. I fully believe that we were created in a way, and that is the best possible way. Now, our antibiotics horrible and evil. And heinous no, we would not be where we are as a society without antibiotics, right? There's a lot of things that they've, like, taken care of, and they fought. And I don't even think that we would be even close to where we at. I mean, we still be living in caves if it wasn't for, like, modern medicine. I think that we take that as a first opportunity. I scratch my face instantly. Like, what can I do? What kind of medications can I put on it? I think there's a beauty of mixing Western Eastern medications together, really taking care of your body, your overall health via what you eat. This is a big reason I want to get into farming because I want my kids to grow up healthy. When you tell me that they give pigs antibiotics and they give these chickens antibiotics, and then they take that manure and they spread it over fields on what we eat. And then you tell me there's no antibiotics in what we eat that's consistently, just doing small amounts of damage here and there's, like, micro traces. I don't believe that. I don't believe that. I don't believe there's antibiotics or milk because my father in law works for the milk industry, and he's like, yeah, no, he's like, we do so many tests. Like, there's not a single ounce. The practices that we have in the US, one are not sustainable. And two seeing we're the effects of them now, right? You can't walk in any city without seeing a mass, like, obese population. And you can't talk about it either. I just think our society has really stepped away. I was talking to my roommate about this has really stepped away from knowing where everything comes from. Right? Like, we don't sell our own clothes. We don't grow our own food. We pay a water bill. We don't have to dig into a well, we know we understand, like, our understanding of everything is so limited on where everything comes from to a point that it's like, this is going to affect us in the long term. Like, this is going to in some way, shape or form. This is going to do more harm than instant gratification. Baby. It's like we have a remote and we're just like, I want this right now and then I want to buy this, and I want this because I want it and I want it now. Just like what Joe Rogan says. We're kind of living in a time right now. It's crazy. It's like, where are the doctors out there that are talking about the importance of gut health and the importance of exercise and the importance of what you put in your body. It's that quick fix. Go to the doctor, get the drug, go home and all as well. And we're moving away from what we know to be the facts when it comes to the health of a society. It's crazy. We're moving back into the dark Ages. It doesn't seem like we're moving forward. Yeah. It's sad to see five, six, seven year olds who can't run the pacer test or the pacer test has to be removed from the school because of use. It's sad to watch kids not be able to play on the playground and just sit on their phones during recess because they can't move for more than a couple of minutes, not getting tired. That's not the world that I grew up in, but it's the world that kids are growing up in right now. Yeah. When I was a kid, we had leapfrog and we didn't have phones for at least, like, 1314 years into our lives. For the most part, I grew up in the country right next to a mountain at seven years old, my parents just sent me and my brother out the door and we would go out for an entire day hiking around in the mountains. And I look back at that. And I'm so thankful to my parents for allowing us to just get out and live and do these things, even though sending a couple of young little kids into the mountains by themselves for, like, 6 hours at a time might be a little sketchy. And nowadays, I don't know, maybe it's considered child abuse to do such a thing. But, man, we had such a good time, but I'm embarrassed that I really don't know more about this stuff in the situation that I grew up in because we grew up with a big garden and a big greenhouse, and that was such a big part of our lives growing and producing our own food. And so I wish that I had paid more attention to all of that. And I think that that's probably something that the world needs to be educated on and not to change the subject. But I remembered last week, the gentleman that I had on my podcast. Have you ever heard of Wim HOF? I love Wim HOF. Did you have my podcast? No, I didn't have one. Not yet. But we're working on that. No. I had a gentleman on the podcast, and he was in the military for, like, 22 years when he got out of the military. Maybe. I don't know. Six or seven years later, he ended up getting a rare immune disorder, and within a month, he was in a wheelchair. That's how quickly it progressed. And he went to the doctors. They ran all these different tests, and when they finally figured out what he had, they were like, There is nothing we can do about this. All we can do is help you with pain management. And he explains this as his whole entire body just felt like it was on fire, being stung by bees all the time. Major amount of pain that he was dealing with. His body was atrophying. And here's the thing. This guy is an ultra marathon runner. He's very active. He's very fit. And within a month, this guy's in a wheelchair so fast forward, three years. Somebody tells him about Wim HOF, and his son tells him about Wim HOF. And he's like, this is crazy. But maybe if I do cold showers, maybe I'll die quicker.

It kind of feels like he did it more of a way to prove his son wrong. Like, yeah, this Wim HOF thing is full of shit. So he went to do this Wim HOF thing. He started the breathing method. He started the cold water. I kid you not. Within a month, he was out of his wheelchair running around his house. And now he is completely pain free. And if he skips a couple of days of Wim HOF, he can feel some of the things coming back, like tingling fingers and stuff. He hasn't gotten rid of the immune disorder, but the immune disorder and what he's doing, it's fighting. It's holding a day. It's unbelievable. But one of the things that Wim HOF talks about that I'm really passionate about is like, it was not that long ago that we were living in the outdoors. Now we're living in these climate control boxes. We're moving from climate control box to climate control box. And it's so strange. And this has only been in the last, I don't know, 100 years or less that we've done that less than that 50, 60 years. Yeah. I love them. And it's just like we're seeing more and more of that become like, the well known right is known because he's been studied, right? People were like, You're a freak. No one is going to be able to replicate what you do. Like, you staying in water that should kill normal human in six minutes for 2 hours. That's not normal. No one else can do that. And then he's like, what I love about women is Godassi to be like, y'all are idiots. Let me prove you wrong. So he pulled twelve people into the mountains for, like, two months, and they all come out being able to do the same thing as him. More and more stuff like that is becoming the known right. Like, there's more and more CSA farmers and market gardeners coming along, and they're younger, right? The average farmer right now in the US is like, 65 to 65 somewhere around there. That's not what's going to happen when they're not around anymore. Right back in the early 2000s to, like, 80s, you have this thing called, like, what Joe Selson calls a brain drain where the smarter kids went off to College. They left the farm to go off to College, and they essentially got better paying jobs because we look at farmers as peasants. And the dumber one stayed home and took over the farm. Now it's kind of like we're starting to see the opposite where a lot of kids are like, hey, let's farm. It's profitable. We can turn a really good profit. We can live a blue collar life would make a white collar salary. Let's do it. And we're starting to see a little bit of a revival. But it's not enough. It's not nearly enough. There needs to be, like, an ample amount, right? Most major cities need to be taken over by market gardens, by CSAs. You go to most farmers markets in the US, and there's, like, no produce. There's, like, five or six produce stands. We need to start seeing ample amounts. Right. We need to start taking food off of the shelves. Not literally not like putting them in your CSA box. Don't do that. But we need to start having distributors to bring less food. Right. Because what we don't see is the secondary effects of eating healthier. Right? You pay more money for a CSA. If I'm going to go buy meat, I buy ground beef from my sister in law, and it's $8 a pound. That's stupid expensive. But we don't see the secondary effects of, like, what that $8 is doing. That $8 is keeping me from having for lack of a better term diarrhea or food poisoning. Or if it's helping me, that extra $4 per pound is helping me gain weight and be healthier. Right then I'm not really spending more money. I'm saving more money in the long term by not having to end up in the hospital at least once a year. Every couple of years, we're racking up $80,000 in medical bills or 100,000 or millions of dollars in medical bills. I'm saving more money by spending just a little bit here, right? It's not the instant gratification. It's the long term gratification. I love how passionate you are about this, Phil. And my question is like, are you preaching this on the street corner? I mean, this needs to be getting out there seriously. And there's a lot of books that have been written about this, and it just seems like that this information isn't getting out as much as it should. There needs to be more people jumping on board with this. Yeah. I think the hard part right now is because it kind of got on me about not having, like, a YouTube or Instagram. I have a YouTube with a couple of videos on. It nowhere near the content that I want to actually produce because of where I'm at, but I can't produce quality content with the backyard that I have. I get, like, 2 hours Max of sun. You can't grow anything in 2 hours Max of sun. Besides, like, some herbs. But right now, what I'm really just doing is focusing on building up the money, like, the finances to fund the dreams so that I can produce quality content. It's not what I want to do. It'd be nice to just wake up one morning with an extra $500,000 in my bank account, and there's definitely bigger shortcuts that you can take. So I don't want anyone listening to this thing that you need a large amount of money to start farming. Like if you have a backyard that gets sun or if you have neighbors and your desire isn't to grow like that as a business, but just to grow food, then get a couple of chickens, plant a tomato in the ground or plant a tomato in a bucket. Start with a one thing, just one thing and let that grow. But with my goals and my dreams, I need that finance, right? I could very well go to all of my neighbors. There are people who do this growing yourgreens com. He farms like three acres of people's backyards and makes upwards of like a million dollars a year. Gross. Just farming other people's backyards is a full time job, full time gig, and you don't need a lot of space. The book that I just finished, The Market Gardener by some French name. It was so much information taken. He grows on one acre, sells for 21 weeks in Quebec, 21 and a half weeks in Quebec. He does 250 CSAs. He does 120 actual CSAs, and the rest is what he sells the market. But he quantifies that in CSA boxes. It makes $116,000 a year net on a one acre, so you don't need a lot of space. I don't want anyone listening to this podcast to think this is unattainable, right, because it's right at your fingertips. Just grow like Justin Rhodes told me years ago, just grow one thing. So I'm not really focusing on producing a lot of content like this is really cool to do. And I'd love to do this more, but I'm kind of keeping forward vision view where it's like, I would love to do this more, but I know that I can't yet, right? Once I get on that land and once I have an ample amount of time where I'm farming, where I'm selling at markets, I actually can go shake hands and kiss babies. Not actually, I don't think of the thing anymore, but once I have that opportunity actually face to face with people, I think that's where I'm really going to start pushing these ideas forward because they're not my ideas, right? You can go pick up a book by Joe Salton or The Market gardener or Gundry has a great ten great books like The Longevity Paradox is a really good one. So you can pick up this content, but I just can't. I can't do it right now because if I did do it, it would take time away from working at work or spending time with my family. And you have a specific goal and a vision. And that's what you're headed towards and the idea of creating content. You're just not there yet. And I respect that. I really want to turn this conversation to something. And that is how everything that you're talking about, how it could affect our society and talk to me a little bit about what a food desert is and why urban farming could be the answer to this problem. So I don't know exactly the mileage or the time that quantifies the food desert, but it's pretty much not having easy access to natural food, like produce or fresh meat. So Bonton is a really good description of, like, a really bad food desert. Bonton is a small little city in South Dallas, and if you drive through the area, it's just sad. I think, like, 40% of the men that live in the area are convicted felons really hard to get a job because there's not much there. And the kids that grow up there grew up on Cheetos and Gatorade. The only stores that are there in Bonton are liquor stores. So now Bonton Farms is an organization that started in Bonton, where this dude was just like, hey, we're going to start a Bible study in Bonton. They started a Bible study, and they're like, Man, what do these people really need and what they figured out they really need is jobs and food. So he's like, how do I combine that and do both? And they have a really cool story. They're actually someone you could probably get on the podcast. And I think you would really enjoy their story. They just started a farm and started producing food. And there's been life change. And there's been kids growing up seeing where their food actually comes from, people getting restored and not doing drugs anymore. All in all, it's like a really cool organization. Someone was like, hey, I believe in you more than you believe in yourself. And a lot of the people have never heard that. Does that answer your question like, what a food desert is? Yeah, I think it does help. There are a lot of people out there who are growing up on extremely unhealthy foods. Junk foods. They're not getting the brain food that they need because they just don't have access to it. And it's not affordable. It's cheaper to buy the junk food, like produce. It's cheaper to go to a fast food restaurant and get your whole family a meal like a five than it is to go buy a couple of turnips and cucumbers. You know what's interesting to me? I've done a lot of traveling in my life. I've been to 16 different countries. I spent about a year in India, and something that has always surprised me is there are a lot of countries out there where it is completely opposite than it is in the US. Clearly, when you go into a grocery store, fresh produce is cheaper than junk food. Junk food is the expensive food. If you are poor. You have to live a healthy life. You cannot buy the Doritos because there are farmers in America like, there are another country. Yes. Yeah. And they're doing what they can, and they're growing a lot of their food. Like where I'm from in Romania, everyone grows food. Everyone grows food. I think that as like a culture. We've just put ourselves towards the best way to describe. We said we've had this phrase so many times, but it's in gratification. Right. We go on Amazon and we get a thing from halfway around the world in two days or in a day with crime, and it comes into our front door. We open it and we get bored of it in a week. And then we go back and we just do the same thing. We don't prioritize healthy families, healthy lives. We don't prioritize the things that need to be prioritized, which I see a reverse. Right. My generation was kind of like one of the last generations that didn't grow up on cell phones. But I see a lot of this younger generation being like, we don't have intimate relationships, we don't feel loved, we don't feel life and a big part of wanting to move on to land with other people and start like an eco village. There's so many ideas. So before I actually even go deeper into this, I want the listeners to hear this. We don't have a set plan yet, right. There's a lot of things that we want to do, like I want to do a CSA or I want to do a market garden or a little bit of both. But I fully understand in my 24 years, I've seen so many things change so quickly that I understand that I have to pivot and be ready on my feet. Right. So if an eco village doesn't work out, then it's going to move on to the next thing. So then a market garden. If a market garden doesn't work out, then it's going to be a CSA. As a smaller grower, you have to be as agile and as movable as you possibly can, because some things just don't work out. So before I go into that now, the reason I really want to start an eco village, though, is because just like I take care of my stomach, just like I take care of my gut, just take care of my heart, my cardiovascular health. I need to take care of my emotional health. And a big part of that is surrounding myself with quality people.

I think that we've stepped away from surrounding ourselves with quality people and in turn, have surrounded ourselves with horrible content. So that's kind of the dream for the eco village. And then also, it'd be really nice to do things with other people. Farming a CSA market garden is extremely intense when you're not using chemicals and you're doing everything by hand. From what I've grasped from other people, you can't do it by yourself. You need a community. Right. And I think in needing a community, you build up this healthier idea of what the world should look like, when I need someone who I don't fully agree with, or when I need someone who has a completely different train of thought or like a completely different belief system, it kind of puts me in a situation where it's like we have to find middle ground. Right. But if I just surround myself with people who only believe what I believe, who only do things the way I do it, then there's never going to be innovation. There's never going to be growth. There's never going to be Amen, like big life change and world changing things. We need to surround ourselves with people that we don't fully agree with. I love Danielle, right. We get along for the most part, but I know. Let's say she moves on with us and we do this together. There's going to be things that we are going to disagree on and either do what we do in the world now and block each other and remove each other from each other's life and never speak again. Or we can do the healthier thing and being like, okay, so how do we figure this out together, right? Like, you have this idea? I have this idea. How do we make them work in the most beautiful possible way that we can? What's the power and community there's life and community. I think we've seen that more in the past two years than we've ever seen before, right? It's not healthy or normal to stay in a room completely alone for a year. Yeah. Totally not shake hands and not hug people. We've seen, like major depression, major anxiety, start to grow up. That's not normal, right? That's what I love about that. Saying that just elf is like, folks, this ain't normal. This is not what we were made to do. We were made to go stick our hands and compost and run through fields. You know what I mean? And work hard and enjoy what we do, sitting at a desk for five days out of the week for 40 hours and watching Coming Home and watching Netflix. None of that's normal. But, like, you go outside into a place where you plant literally a seed, this tiny little, like, almost. You can't even see it. You can barely hold it into the ground and you watch it flourish right into this giant, beautiful, like Bush, and you pull a tomatoff, but you cut it and you eat it. We were made for that. We were made to experience life in its fullness farming. Isn't everyone's forte, but they go hiking, go experience and go experience it with other people. Go kayaking, go rock climbing, go to a club. I've never been to a club, but go sit with people who are likeminded, but also might disagree with you. Go talk, go have conversations, go drink coffee. There's so many things that we've stepped away from, not just from food. And I think that's where my passion really starts to come out, right? It's not just food. It's like this information that we've been feeding ourselves for so many years. That's just not right. It seems as if we have built a society off of south, and we all see this in our lives. I see this in my life. I don't spend the time with people that I should be spending time with. I do lock myself away. My life consists of work and locking myself away. And it's very unhealthy to do. But it's so easy to do when everybody around you is just thinking about themselves and how they are going to get ahead and how they're going to become the millionaire. Whatever their passion is, their hope is to make them happy. We're all chasing happiness. We've been given the freedom here in the United States to search for happiness, but there was never any guarantee of finding it. Yeah, it's like sifting for gold. Now, this is the thing. Now imagine if I depended on you, right? Like, imagine if me Philip was like, hey, if you don't produce eggs, I'm never going to get eggs. Or if you don't help me sew my clothes, you're the expert sewer. I'm not going to have clothes like they're eventually going to deteriorate. I'm going to be walking around butt naked. I think what we've stepped away from is depending on other people. Right. And instead of depending on other people and building up that community, it's more about like, you're right. How can I get ahead of you instead of how can I grab your hand and pull you with me? What do you need from me? Yeah. You guys can bond over that. Like, you all are super jelled and strong work ethic and providing for your family and forecasting the future financially because you all are both married and just strong work ethic. I feel that. And what was I going to say, just gas you up? No, that's what the kids say. What does that mean? It means to go to someone or give them much a phrase. But do you get what I'm saying? Like, where I'm coming from? That's what I want to start, right? That's where I want to be, because I want to be dependent on someone, and I want someone to be dependent on me. I want to be a symbiotic relationship where I get to wake up every morning and work directly next to someone because there's definitely a value in that. I get that in my marriage, but I've always been one like, we live with roommates. I love people. I love being surrounded by people. I love being closely knitted with people, and it's so much more better when you're not just closely knitted with people, but when you're pushing towards the same goal, I really want to talk to you briefly, and I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but where we are going in our country right now, an example of this would be the toilet paper crisis of 2020. You got to tell me, how crazy was it that people were running to stores and fighting over toilet paper? Phil, when that happens with food, we are going to realize that we are a house of cards, and we are so close. A grocery store holds enough food for maybe three days. If the truck stops, we are so close to disaster. We have no idea. The crazy thing, too, is it's not going to be yelling at fists, like when you start telling families that they can't feed their kids, it's going to be blood. And that's scary, right? We are a house of cards. But I definitely see a future. And I see a hope. And I see life in the Americans right now being like, we are going to try better. You can't tell me that this is sustainable. Two thirds of what we produce is thrown away. Greenhouse gas emissions. If they were ranked by, like, the largest food waste would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter if it was a country right behind China and the US. This isn't normal. This isn't normal. We weren't created to Gorge and then throw away. But let's say you're a climate activist and you really see value in taking CO2 away from our planet. You know what I mean? Like sequestering it into the soil. There's no other better way to do it than growing your own food, right? Because if you think about it, if I'm in, let's say California and I produce almonds in order for you to get almonds in New York or in Florida, I have to load those almonds up, take them to facility, wash them, sterilize them now, because I don't think almonds can be eaten unless they're sterilized. They're not raw anymore. But I've taken this facility. I have to process them. So there's a truck that's picking them up, bringing them to the facility. Co2 emissions, all that energy going into it. You're losing it now. By the time I get that to New York, to Florida, to Shanghai, I think California is one of the largest producers of almonds. How many gallons of gases that one almond used? How many Watts of electricity has it used? Realistically, what we need to see more of is more people growing local food and eating local and staying local. I think that's going to be probably one of the best ways to fight, like, climate change. When you compact Greens, there are two different types of things that when you compost, you have Greens and Browns, right? Browns are really rich in nitrogen in carbon carbon. Okay, he tricked me up a little bit. I was like, what Greens are really rich in nitrogen. If you compact a whole bunch of Greens down, which is what our landfills do, it produces methane gas, it becomes an anaerobic environment and it can't break down. So a lot of landfills are doing now, which is actually not a bad idea. They're sticking these pipes in the ground where they bury our trash, and they're essentially piping that methane gas into tanks where they can capture it and use it. Yeah, that's a great idea, but it's not the best option. I think Sacramento or most of California. I just watched a video yesterday is making it not illegal, but they're making it really difficult to throw away, like, compostable trash. They're like, hey, let's just provide bins for you to throw your compostable items in here, and then we'll just compost it and then throw it back up on the fields. And they said if the whole entire state of California keeps up what they're doing every year, they'll be taking away, like, 1% of carbon that normally would be thrown into the air or methane gas to be thrown into the air, and they're sequestering it and utilizing it. You have so much more, so much less waste. You have so much less carbon being thrown in from having to haul that waste, having to process it by bearing it with these giant machines. What we're doing is not sustainable, but I don't want to leave it at that, because I definitely believe that there's other people in the world that are trying to make change and they're doing it. It's just slow process is slow with all this passion. And just like you said, anger or frustration that you really can't put to words, I think that it's really Noble that you are trying to use what you've learned and also your time, like as someone who's raising two kids and has a wife and wakes up at the crackbut of dawn to go work ridiculous hours all the while wanting to just help the country. Like whether it's something like a desert area, where do we call it a desert, a food desert where you see, like locals have stepped in to try to reach these impoverished people that have no hope giving them work that's mutually symbiotic. Like, if you do this, then it helps me, like taking care of chickens, like cleaning up after their poop. If you don't do that, then it's going to get into your meat and then it's going to be bad. But I love the idea here because there's so many ideas, and I think that being a CSA for people who don't know, like a community agriculture agent, you're going door to door and you're saying to someone, hey, I want to be your produce provider. I want to use the farm and use my community to help you to eat locally, to eat fresh, to have these really good non GMO organic crops, and then they become reliant on you for theirs. And since the economy is shifting as it is, I think it's a really good idea. Not even if you believe in helping the planet, but just even economically, if you just want to go that route. And also, I think that being a CSA allows us to go door to door to colleges to where people are isolated and ask them if they want to buy our produce. Just like, Hello, fresh, but on a local level and tell them about what we're doing. So there are all kinds of ways that we can start to make this an actual reality. And it really just starts. I don't know if you're a praying person, you could pray, like, for Phil and his Ministry. You could say, like, for him to be able to fund this. And, yeah, just perseverance to make it happen, because this is his three year old dream. I was going to ask you earlier. What exactly does this look like visually? And is there somebody that you have taken inspiration from who has already done this? Oh, yeah. So Josh Statin, the Ten mother farms in North Carolina Bonton Farms. There's a lot of people, so pretty much what a CSA garden or farm looks like is you're growing an insane amount of variety. So this is what really starts to build the soil. Right? Different plants have different root levels. And what you really want to do is grow a large variety of different root levels. So, like, let's say tomatoes sinks really deep, right next to a tomato. You can plant a lettuce that has really shallow roots. And what you're doing is you're taking an acre, two acres, three acres. You don't want to grow too big because you can produce a lot, and you're just heavily managing it, growing a lot in one area. And then essentially the day before the day of delivery, you will harvest the food. So it's literally as fresh as it can get. And it's one acre. Let's say you have 40, 5100 foot beds that are 36 inches long. You're just growing multiple varieties of things in each one. So let's say you do carrots, carrots take 60 days to grow, let's say, full size, but a lettuce and a green onion only take 30 days. So let's say you do two rows and 36 inch fed of carrots. Well, you have those two ends that don't have really deep roots or don't have tap roots or big. You can plant green onions or you can plant lettuces, but they'll only take 30 days, 30 days. You come, you pull those and then you plant the other one. So if you plant green onions and you come and plant lettuce, plant lettuce and you come and plant green onions. And then on that 60 day, you harvest it all. So your CSA patrons are really just getting, like, a large variety of produce. They're getting pretty much they go find at the grocery store, but better quality. And a lot of times you can do different things, right. If you're doing heirloom, non GMO organic seeds. There's so many cool, different things that you'll never be able to get in a store. Right? Like one of my favorites that I'm trying to grow this year is called Kudiger carrots. Kudiger carrots. And it essentially tastes like a pear. So it's a juicy carrot. It has all the properties of a carrot, but it tastes sweet. There are other things, like black beauty tomatoes that are completely black. Those are beautiful. We tried them this last year, but because of the lack of sun, we didn't do too well. You're not just getting what you can find at the grocery store. You're getting what you can find at the grocery. Plus more. Hundreds of years ago, the average human would eat 200 to 300 different types of vegetation in a full year. Now, the average American eats maybe 30 different types, and you can count them, right? Think about all the vegetables that you've eaten this year and just the basic ones, like carrots. I've eaten one type of carrot, the only carrot they sell at stores. Maybe if you're fancy, you go to Market Street and you go buy three or four different types of variety. Pack of, like, purple white broccoli. You can count them on both of your hands. And then if you really try to start thinking really deep, you're like, man, take this as a task and count how many vegetables you eat as you're listening to this. How many do you actually put in your body, right? Is it a variety? Are you doing a lot or are you just doing what most Americans do? So you set up this garden and you just, like, intensely manage it. And every week you provide, like, a Hello, fresh. Pretty much you can do just vegetables or some CSAs that do vegetables and eggs. There's some CSAs that do vegetables, eggs and meat. And the highest, like, the most intense is like vegetables, eggs, meat and consumer goods. So, like, cookie batter and Mason jars. So you just have to add, like, eggs and oil to it or tomato sauce, pasta sauce that's, like, the highest form where you're doing all four. And that's usually what you charge the most for. And you're not charging an arm and a leg, right? You're charging about what you go to Market Street or Whole Foods, and you're charging about that price, right? Because this is the other thing that I don't want, like, listeners to hear. There's a stigma that farmers are like, broke peasants. So there's a guy in Quebec who's making $116,000 in 21.5 sellable weeks. There's a farm in Georgia who's netting 200 kwh a year in ten, sellable months when you sell directly to a consumer like, Aaron, if I come to you and I'm like, hey, I have this CSA box for $40. That's a lot of money in the farmer's pocket. But if I go, hey, Cisco, I have all these vegetables. They're going to give me pennies on the dollar when you cut that middleman out and you sell directly to the consumer, they're such a big Avenue for profit. I have a family. I want my family to be taken care of. I love farming, but at the end of the day, if you were to be like, hey, we want you to conventionally farm here's 10,000 acres in a tractor. I'd be like, no, there's no way I'm going to do it. I'll go drive a concrete truck on the day I die because I don't see one value in it, but two also, a lot of these farmers are kind of like going broke at the end of their lives. They're in massive amounts of debt. There's no infrastructure and market gardening. The biggest infrastructure that you're going to have is a walk and cooler to keep food cold, like strawberries and blueberries things that have a short shelf life, Caterpillar tunnels or hoophouses, which are pretty much like bigger greenhouses. So you can do season extensions or you can kind of, like, limit the amount of rainfall you get and kind of have more micro climate, and that's really about it. Some sweat, some hard work and some good protein to keep you going. There's not a lot. And people because of that are now doing this with limited debt and making insane amounts of money. They're living a blue collar life, making a white collar wage. There's such a value in it, right. We just need to start to see Socrates has a really good example in the public of, like, the way society should work. Right? We should have the thinkers at the top and the workers at the bottom, but all need to be valued, right? All need to be valued. What we have now is we have no thinkers at the top, and we have all the hard workers in the bottom and no one's being valued. We're all pushing for goals that are unachievable and dreams that even when achieved, they don't bring us joy. Right? We chase joy and we maybe get a glimpse of happiness. These farmers who are literally feeding us, who are feeding us, who bring us nourishment and keep us alive, need to in some way, shape or form be value. And this movement of taking young people and building CSAs or building market gardening gardens, it's starting to do that. It's starting to give value back to the people who need that value, who deserve that value, who are taking care of our families and building, I mean, constructing the foundation of our nation, right? A healthier nation overall is just going to do better. But when you have a nation that has a 70% enlistment rate in the military, when they need a minimum of 90 to be considered healthy, when you have kids that can't run a mile, when you have adults that are like getting diabetes, not even adults. People, kids getting diabetes and not being able to function. That's not healthy. That's what happens when you take, not Fame. But when you take love away from your local farmers. And there's a value in it financially, there's a value in it emotionally spiritually. There's definitely value that just needs to be seen. And we need more and more younger people my age and younger than me, getting more enticed, getting more excited about this because it's such an exciting thing, not going to College and building up a good foundation and taking care of your family. I don't see a better thing than that, right? I never did well in College. I hate College, but being able to be like, oh, man, I can make a decent living doing what I love. That blows my mind. So the farm that we're looking at is an hour and a half away, right? You don't need to be in an urban setting or close. You just need to be a drivable distance so you can drive those DSAs because you're only coming up for markets. You're only coming up to do deliveries once a week. And let's say you don't have the money and or let's say you live in Dallas and lands too expensive. Grow one thing. Start in your backyard for me. I can't grow anything big, like tomatoes or cucumbers. I did this year, and I grew quite a lot, but nowhere near as much as I could have. If I had more sun, grow herbs, grow parsley, go Mint and just start small. And then once you start expanding past that and you're like, Man, I really think that this can be more. Talk to your neighbors if you don't have the revenue. You're 18 years old, you're 16 years old, you're 14 years old and you're listening to this podcast, and you don't have the money to just start and go and buy ten acres and farm full time. Start where you're at. Go knock on your neighbors doors and be like, hey, is there any space that you have that I can utilize? I don't have money that I can pay you, but I can pay you in produce at the end of the season or at the beginning of the season. Go talk to local farmers in Dallas. There's plenty of local farmers around here that have small amounts of tracks of land that they'd be willing to part with. I've talked to a couple. It's not what I want to do. They've been like, yeah, we have, like, four or five acres. It's hard to farm that you don't have a house on it, but then buy a mobile home. Like, if you're single or if you're just dating somebody, you don't have kids. Go buy an RV, go talk to farmers and see if you can manage their land as long as you can get water and electricity. There's plenty of avenues to do this and start small. Start somewhere, right? I didn't start with ten acres. I started with three buckets. So start somewhere. If you're not into farming and you're like, I like my desk job, it actually brings me joy, which some people love it, right? Like you do a podcast. That's literally super cool. If you love what you do, then do a support local, right? If you're like, man, I'm passionate about this or I like this idea, but I don't really want to do that. Then go find a local farmer, go to a farmers market. If you want to do a little bit, then just grow a small little tomato Bush or tomato vine. Just do something. Do something because life change and world change doesn't start by everyone doing it at once and doing something big. It starts with a few people doing a small thing and then a few more people doing a little bit of a smaller, a little bit of a bigger thing, and then a few more people, like, following in their footsteps. I wouldn't be where I'm at today without someone telling me to start small or without someone looking at me and being like, Dude, just grow one thing, man. Just do one thing, one thing. And if it doesn't work, do it again and figure it out. If it doesn't work, do it again and then do it till it works. You're never going to become an expert at growing until you just start that one bucket. Yeah, and that's the thing becoming an expert. And I'm nowhere near an expert, and I don't think until I die, will I become an expert. Like, there's so much to learn, but you don't learn until you get punched in the face. This is with anything. Forget gardening. If you want to be a track athlete or if you want to play football or ultimate Frisbee and you want to go pro or if you want to be a head level executive, you will not get anywhere until you receive some type of not actual physical bodily injury. But until you receive some type of punishment, right? Until you receive some type of atrophy, right. When you start lifting weights, people lift weights and I don't lift weights. So I'm speaking about something I don't know, but your muscles tear, right? That's how you get stronger muscles is by doing the thing that hurts. Life change doesn't come by waking up one morning and being like, I'm going to run a two minute mile today. That's not possible. But life change comes by waking up at 04:00 a.m. Getting your socks on, getting your shoes on, putting your pants on before your shoes. But then getting outside and running a freaking mile. I need to hear that you really do start waking up when you get decked in the face. It's like a sucker punch again. All right. I'm learning,

man. I'm going to be honest with you, Phil. I think this is probably one of the most educating episodes I've ever had. We're, like, 26 episodes in Phil. Danny, you both have inspired me so much, and I am amped up. I'm going to go do my own personal research on all of this. And you've made me want to look into this a little more. Bill, is there any way that people can get a hold of you if they are interested in being involved in what you're trying to do? I mean, I know you're sort of in the infancy right now, but there might be somebody out there who'd like to talk to you more about it. I don't know if you want people contacting you. The hard part is managing my time. Right now. I'll drop my email and you can probably, like, link in this podcast. I'll hand out my email, and then if you want to contact me, just kind of figure out more of what I want to do if they have any questions, you're just going to have to be ready for me to take a couple of weeks before I actually respond. No, that's completely reasonable. I just think that there might be somebody out there that really is inspired and wants to do something similar to what you're trying to do, but they don't really know where to start, and maybe you can help guide them and maybe even create a partnership with somebody to really make this happen. Yeah. No. I mean, I would love that. And that's a big part of who I am is I like teaching. I like talking. I don't shut up during this podcast. I just love to talk. Yeah, you do. I feel like I should create a new email, so I don't get, like, spam. I'm just kidding. It's going to be Philip. My name P-H-I-L-I. Pmercame R-C-A. At gmail. Com. Feel free to message me anytime. Like, ask me any questions. No questions, stupid. Like if you have any fears or if you just have any what happens if I do this and it doesn't work or like, hey, my tomatoes are yellow. What do I do? You know what I mean? No questions too small. Just be ready to not get a response for a week. I work in insane schedule, so get ready for your email to explode. I don't know about that, but awesome. Thank you so much. And for everybody who has made it to the end of the podcast, thank you for listening to the Simply Overcoming podcast. We're going to drop Phil's email in the description. So if you're interested in this, if you want to talk to Phil about what he's doing, if you're even interested in maybe partnering with Phil in some way, why don't you hit fill up and expect a response in maybe a month? So thanks once again, guys, and we'll talk to you next time.

Bye.