Regenerative Agriculture and Personal Sovereignty
The Great Simplification #76 with Daniel Zetah
This Week…
Today, I am joined by Daniel Zetah, who practices regenerative agriculture on his family farm in Minnesota. Daniel shares his experiences in becoming aware of the global challenges we face and his journey back to his family farm, where he has been instrumental in naturally cultivating the land back to life again. Daniel is now living a simplified life of what he calls energy austerity and ‘personal sovereignty’. While much of The Great Simplification covers the intricacies of the metacrisis we face, Daniel brings the perspective of someone who has actively stepped outside of the system.
Daniel grew up on a farm in Minnesota where he learned to fix all manner of things driven from an insatiable curiosity about how things worked. He studied economics and business at university and lived abroad for 15 years where he bought and sold classic cars, worked as a snake relocator and scatologist, and the chemical spraying auditor for Tasmania. After waking to our planetary predicament, he became a full time environmental activist, then moved to an off grid community in the mountains where he studied permaculture and built straw bale houses. He moved back to America to help steer culture in a more sane direction, where he realized as long as the majority of people are incapable of meeting most of their fundamental human needs, even committed activists are feeding the dragon they’re trying to slay. He and his wife Stephanie moved back to the family farm in Minnesota where they are growing 80% of their calories, rebuilding the local ecology, and educating and empowering people to wrest back control of their sovereignty as human beings.
What are the time, energy, and labor requirements of being in tune with the land in this way? Where do animals - especially cows - fit into this story? Can deep, healthy topsoil be sexy? Is Daniel creating a blueprint for what many more happy, fulfilling lives could look like in a simplified future?
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Interesting how you're changing focus to creative actions, it would hav e been more interesting to interview the Hutterite farmer. I recently read "This Perennial Land: third crops, blue earth and the road to a restorative agriculture." by Lansing Shepard and Paula Westmoreland and wanted to suggest that you talk with those folks. They have done a remarkable accomplishment with an entire watershed. Please check it out a quick read and, they're just southwest of your Minneapolis home.
Yep Nate, this was awesome.
I’d never heard of Daniel before and I’d hoped for a while you’d interview a regen ag farmer but this conversation went way beyond any of my hopes, life begets life, our aversion to death, Ishmael, … so many good topics covered. Thanks Nate!