The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
213. From Tech Innovator to Mystic Farmer, with the fantastic Mr Stone
Andrew Stone has been dubbed the ‘solar mystic farmer’, as a pioneering solar passive designer/builder, former software developer of some of the commonplace apps today working alongside luminaries like Steve Jobs, regenerative farmer with treasured links to Wendell Berry and his family, key presence in the psychedelics resurgence, and a generally fascinating guy.
That was as much illustrated by the fact that when we met to record this episode, he was dressed to the nines as Robert Oppenheimer. You’ll hear why – and you can see him in that splendour on the title slide for this episode. We sat down amidst cottonwood seed falling like sun-drenched snow, magic adobe structures that appear to have spontaneously sprung out of the earth, and regenerating farmland his family has progressively acquired over the last 40 years, right in the heart of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I caught up with Andrew the day after he’d been helping others with adobe building and design, part of a power of work he does with community collectives like the People’s Energy Coop. There was much to talk about – about the past and future of all these technologies and techniques. All of which summed to an extremely entertaining and insightful conversation.
This episode has chapter markers and a transcript, if you’d like to navigate the conversation that way (available on most apps now too).
Recorded 16 June 2024.
Title slide: Andrew Stone (pic: Olivia Cheng).
See more photos on the website, and for more become a member via the Patreon page.
With thanks to Laura & Ben at Grosz Co Lab, for the Americas tour insignia.
Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, from Regenerating Australia.
The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests (thanks to Josie Symons).
Find More:
A bonus episode with 15 fascinating minutes off-record with Andrew here or wherever you listen to podcasts.
For more on the Puebloan peoples Andrew mentions, listen to the 6-part series on the history of the American south-west that Andrew’s wife Katie produced on The Children’s Hour, featured in episode 212.
And to hear James and Joyce Skeet, tune into Spirit Farm, on episo
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I think that one of the things I think about the most - the blessing that I've had - is that I had that vision as a young person to put in my roots and begin building something. I had no idea what its final form was. I didn't want. I mean. That wouldn't have been fun for anyone. You know that's what's so great about improv is you really don't know what you're gonna say next. And it surprises you too.
AJ:My name's Anthony James and this is The RegenNarration, ad-free, freely available and entirely listener supported. So thanks a lot, Laura and Ben of the magnificent Grosz Co Lab - the couple who have gifted all the visual branding of the podcast - for producing the little touch up to the insignia this week reflecting this American chapter. Thanks for so generously being there since the beginning - that's seven years, can you believe? If you're also finding value in all this, please join Laura and Ben of Grosz Co Lab, part of a great community of supporting listeners. An d if you'd like to become a subscribing member, you'll get exclusive access to some behind-the-scenes stuff from me, tips, news, chat, space and other stuff. Just head to the website via the show notes regennarration. com forward slash support - and thanks again.
AJ:You're hearing the ambient sounds of the ranch of previous podcast guest and friend, Nicole Masters, here in the aptly named Paradise Valley, Montana. More from here later. Last week we heard about the global phenomenon that is the Children's Hour radio show and podcast from its renewably powered Adobe studio that executive director Katie's husband built. That husband is Andrew Stone. Dubbed the solar mystic farmer, Andrew is a pioneering solar passive designer/ builder, former software developer of some of the commonplace apps today, working alongside luminaries like Steve Jobs, regenerative farmer with treasured links to Wendell Berry and his family, key presence in the psychedelics resurgence and a generally fascinating guy. That was as much illustrated by the fact that when we met to record this episode, he was dressed to the nines as Robert Oppenheimer. You'll hear why, and you can see him in that splendor on the title slide for this episode. So, after speaking with Katie and Amadeus in the studio, Andrew and I convened outside, amidst the cottonwood seed falling like sun-drenched snow, magic adobe structures that appear to have spontaneously sprung out of the earth, and regenerating farmland they've progressively acquired over the last 40 years, right in the heart of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
AJ:I caught up with Andrew the day after he'd been helping others with Adobe building and design, part of a power of work he does with community collectives like the People's Energy Co-op. There was much to talk about, about the past and future of all these technologies and techniques, all of which summed to an extremely entertaining and insightful conversation. We start with the man he was reprising that day and perhaps even in part redeeming. Andrew, it's great to welcome you to the podcast. Thanks for speaking with me and thanks for having me at your place. AS: Thank you, AJ, for coming. AJ: Now, w hile we're not on film, we're going to have a bit of visual to accompany it, so let's start with how good you look right now.
Andrew:Why, thank you? Today, Comic-Con is in Albuquerque, and I don't know how big that is in Australia, but it's huge in America Really, and my daughter got me into it because it's really something more of her generation, and so I am dressed like Robert J Oppenheimer today, an inflection of all that New Mexico has brought the world, both good and bad.
AJ:There we go, because for those who don't know as I didn't you know, not having seen the film I guess it's in there that this is where it started. I was told about the Trinity site, the very first test of an atomic bomb, los Alamos, a bit to the north here, which we have visited and had to go through government checkpoints because it's still a nuclear facility and it's where it was developed. So this is a very big part of New Mexican history.
Andrew:And to think that the mountain that it's on, the Jemez Mountain, with its gigantic caldera mountain, with its gigantic caldera, or what's left over from the volcanic explosion it's so vast that it was sending basalt as far as Kansas when it exploded. So that was a big bomb and the native people, the Puebloan people, have a sacred site there in frijoles Canyon, and what's interesting is, even to this day it is a pilgrimage site and considered a portal to other worlds. So there's something going on there, with, you know, the atomic bomb being discovered there and a place of worship for tens of thousands of years.
AJ:That's fascinating. We were just at the canyon in between our meeting and being here again at your place Certainly felt a power. What do you extrapolate from that? That there's that spectrum of human activity.
Andrew:I think a lot of times the western mind was so rational, so logical if you can't prove it, it's not real that that leaves out a whole lot of the story. And uh, when you go to bandolelier and get in those caves, if you make a chant or a sound, it reverberates through the whole place. So these places were used for well. Maybe we could call it altered consciousness, but trying to find the deeper mystery.
AJ:And so it's a mystery. It's called a mystery for a reason. Well, I noticed in your recent interview with a local that you sent me, you were referred to as a solar mystic farmer why is that?
Andrew:well, I believe that I got off on this path of wanting to. I think it's an old. People have forever thought of the homestead, the little family farm, the self-reliance. It's part of the mythos of the Western expansion and when I was in South America as a young man, I would see all these indigenous people with their little farm, with their little plot of garden and their trees and their alpacas and llamas and chickens and guinea pigs.
Andrew:What we, disparaging, refer to as subsistence living is actual full dwelling in your life living, and so it's something that seems to have been ripped away in our industrialization and I think there's a process of decolonization going on as we face the challenges of climate change, because we know that we will have to return to the ways of yore, partially because we know we can't continue to burn the fossil fuels that some say are the equivalent of 500 billion people's work the amount of oil. So we've been in this bubble, it's been beautiful, and I think now's the time to prepare for a simpler lifestyle that's that really honors the traditions of of our forebears and all indigenous peoples who have come to learn how to live sustainably.
AJ:You say it's been beautiful and in some ways it has, and we could recount this. I mean, even to be able to do this is a legacy of that, isn't it? But of course, here we started with the atomic bomb, so something's not so beautiful. Let's say, it's really been the gamut and, of course, on net costing a hell of a lot, uh, which is leading us to what you've just suggested there. Let's dwell in that experience you had in south america a little bit, because that was when you were very young, but lead me there. What came before that?
Andrew:I would say what? What's interesting is I I, you know, I come from a good family and I had a good education. Where was all that? And this was in Cincinnati, ohio. It's a beautiful town. It was pretty much colonized by the Germans all three the German Catholics, the German Protestants and the German Jews. And because it's on a river, with the commerce up and down the Ohio River, it was a place of higher education. Even in what my wife refers to as the south, even though it's very close to the Mason-Dixon line, it has a bit of the north it's been referred to as the southernmost northern city and the northernmost southern city.
Andrew:And so a place where you have a really good sense of the struggles of those in the factory and those on the farm. And as a young man, I got to go work on my grandfather's farm in Kentucky. He was a country doctor and would go around and fix people's bones or their horses' broken bones, and they'd trade him a ham or some beans or something. It was sort of a it. Just we're not that far from the barter society. Um, this notion well, I guess it's all bitcoin now, but, um, well, um, we'll come back to that. I kind of see, because you'll find out that I did spend 27 years of my life writing software and kind of realizing that there had to be a way to bring income in to the little family farm. Every farm needs its niche product. Now here we make pickles, hot sauce, and well, pickles are interesting because they require garlic dill. You grow apples to make the apple cider vinegar and, of course, the cucumbers and the effort of doing that is a full year of growing, because garlic is seeded at the beginning of November and you have something beautiful to look at all winter and the dill is the first plant of the spring to get in the ground. And then, right now, my cucumbers have just come up, and I'd have to say, or I'd like to inject, that as a young man growing up in a fairly straightforward family who believed in science and whatnot, I used to not put any faith in the notion of planting by the moon.
Andrew:And yet I noticed that I started doing that, I started paying attention. Well, the moon is either waxing, getting larger, or waning, getting smaller, and so the act of planting, when it's getting larger, does it really draw the plants out faster? Well, last Saturday I planted my cucumbers and four days later they were up. And so that was in conjunction with the moon sign, which is there's a water sign, an air sign, a fire sign and an earth sign, and so the zodiac has 12 spots in it, which means that there's three signs in each of those categories. And so the moon was in Cancer, a very fertile water sign, in the waxing moon. I planted the cukes and up they came. So I follow this what they call wives' tale. And they call it wives' tale. It's very, very demeaning. That is the patriarchy trying to dismiss tens of thousands of years of collected knowledge.
AJ:It's interesting how the language betrays that Like subsistence, you said before, against Native Americans in this case, but world over, and wives' tale against the women.
Andrew:I guess there's a lot of knowledge just sitting there waiting for us to recover.
AJ:Well, I hear from a lot of those people across the board that, in a sense, if you want to be able to approach some of these issues that you found yourselves with patriarchal Western civilization, look for the people you've sidelined. We've got some ideas and have been doing things for a while.
Andrew:And that I'm lucky enough to have been born in 1956, which means I was 13 in 1969, right past the summer of love and so I was very much inspired by this notion of back to the land. And this wasn't a process that just began with the hippies. It was well-seated by youed, by thinkers like Thoreau and others who had come to really doubt that industry, the industrialization of the world, was safe for everything.
AJ:Or even beneficial, like Thoreau, obviously, and many since we talked about Nate Hagen's podcast even when we met Demonstrate that some of the gains you just. It's like the what's the energy factor in agriculture today 10 units in for one unit out. It just doesn't make sense.
Andrew:It has to be heavily subsidized at different levels, and the fact of it not being regenerative that's the. The key is it makes money for somebody. Yeah, and we can't use money, as I was going to say, our gold standard, but that would have been a recursive, so 1969?
AJ:okay, as a 13 year old, okay, and in Cincinnati, still, you're feeling a part of this, absolutely. What was your mechanism? Was it radio?
Andrew:Absolutely. Now FM was very we had been relegated to like classical music, but so it was very niche-y. At the time Few people had FM. But in Cincinnati a friend of my family's dad had an FM radio station for classical music and every Sunday night he would have his show called Jelly Pudding and we would hear the cream, we would hear jimi hendrix. It was the first breakthrough into, uh kind of the mess you know it had to break through this whole the underground of the san francisco psychedelic scene and whatnot, and so it's very intriguing to us Midwesterners for sure.
AJ:And then a few years later is when you go to South America.
Andrew:Yeah, so I had been an avid reader of all things beat Allen Ginsberg, allen Watts, definitely Burroughs, and then of course people like Jack Kerouac on the road, so that to me I guess that was what and people were hitchhiking back then, you know, it was relatively safe, I guess, or we didn't understand the dangers, so the angels protected us, I don't know. Basically finished 10th grade and a friend and I were going to drive down to Lima, peru, which was very naive, because at that time the rail, the road that connects the Pan-American highway through all of Central America hadn't really been built. So it took me I get to Mexico and I get back the word that you can't really get there to South America. So my friend decides he has to go back and it's just me. But I told everybody I was going to Lima, peru.
Andrew:They insisted I'd probably only make it to Lima, ohio, and so I took a plane from Mexico City to Bogota and back then it really wasn't much to fly and I was able to live on a dollar or two a day.
Andrew:This is like unbelievable, but different cultures have different like food in a poor country is available at a low cost. Everything else is very expensive, but at least people have to be able to eat or they will maybe revolt or something. And remember that was the era of Che Guevara. So the words of revolution were on everyone's lips. So the words of revolution were on everyone's lips and I was lucky to be able to travel through Colombia, ecuador, peru and Bolivia, because I was fascinated by how distant from American culture the indigenous ways of the mountain people of the Andes was and their customs, their integrity as people of the land, their humility, their ability to work together and their poverty was evident, but it wasn't what defined them and in many ways I saw something that I hadn't seen in America, that each man for himself notion, or some of the concepts that are clearly false, the rugged individual yeah, you take away these guys' internets and they collapse in a second.
AJ:Well, speaking of which, then that's sort of a segue back to what you flagged earlier. Having worked with steve jobs, like speaking of a almost oh man, can I say idolized, certainly that individual figure with that kind of public persona, right was your experience different.
Andrew:well, I would say yes. Say yes because Steve was my age, so he was born just a few months before me, and the difference was I wasn't a techie my whole life. I was a hippie first and so I had already by the time I got into software, which was I got my first Macintosh in 85. And then I got my. I started programming in 87 using HyperCard, which some of your older listeners might remember, but it was really the precursor to the internet. To the internet and in by having hyperlinks and being able to see data not as a linear stream, but something you can oh, you want to go deeper, you just drill in. So I had an advantage over people that work directly for steve, because, as an independent third-party developer, I maintain my shop here on my little farm here in Albuquerque and would go to San Francisco, you know, several times a year to either show him the software or for our big marketing events, our conventions and whatnot. And so I had the advantage of being involved with it, but at some distance from the thresher, because a lot of people will say well, steve had a temper. Sure, he was absolutely brilliant in that he could find people who are smarter than him and work with them. And if I was to say that many of the folks in software were a bit on the Asperger spectrum, that probably wouldn't surprise you. It takes people who have fixed interests to be able to work that hard, that long on problems.
Andrew:But what he did provide for all of us was he was the master salesman and that's what he used his charisma for. And he was known early on with Apple. To you know, go to New York City and not wear any shoes. He was very much a back to the earth. He like me. We were young hippies so we kind of looked up to the whole thing and weren't jaded by probably the hard drugs and other terrible things that ended up disrupting that first wave of counterculture. So after 10 years of being a hippie in New Mexico doing passive solar adobe construction, all still, you know it's like how are we going to get back to the land? Well, we have to, you know, remember to use the earth for building our buildings and the sun for heating our buildings.
AJ:There was an amazing lineage of that in New Mexico. Is that part of why you came?
Andrew:here. There are so many communes here and there was the Lama Foundation Ram Dass' thing up in north of Taos, so this was a place known for several communes and collectives and the earthships in Taos.
Andrew:To say nothing of the ancient cultures you mentioned before and I think that that was always there the notion that people had figured out how to live on the land here. And they've been doing it and they are doing it still. Our Puebloan friends are living that life and preserving their stories, preserving their seeds and continuing, even in the face of colonization, to continue their traditional ways that have kept them. You know, at first people were saying oh it's, you know, thousands years old. No, 10,000. No, at least 23,000 years. Same thing's happening in Australia.
AJ:I hear that that's true. We're at about 50 or 60 now. Yes, it's amazing.
Andrew:So this is where we need to look for inspiration, and we'd be fools not to integrate what we know of technology. So it is going to be some kind of melange of ancient wisdom and technological taking the best of technology. So our ability to learn. At Khan Academy, you know, no matter where you are, you can get a course in whatever you want to learn. That has to be great for humanity, and so I think Steve carried the vision we really felt with the Mac that we were going to liberate everyone, because if everybody was educated, then people would understand the other, they would have respect for other cultures, it would be the end of war. And this is what hippie idealism is.
Andrew:And you have to feed that wolf pup. You know that story? No, okay, well, it's attributed to the idea oh, some ancient culture. But the elder is there with his two grandsons and he starts to tell the story of how the world has these two wolves. The one wolf is all for himself and greedy and takes too much and doesn't have concern for the community. And the other wolf, it takes care of the community and looks out for everyone and understands, sharing and taking the right amount of things, and they're always in constant battle and the kids look up and they go Grandfather, which wolf is going to win? And he says it depends which one you feed.
Andrew:So I'm interested in, I'm so interested in the days of birthing, the internet and and that feeling of freedom, like we were, this was going to be the thing that was going to bring peace, the Gaia mind. That's it, because the noosphere that Teilhard de Chardin talks about, the notion that we are all linked, and this is really true with the global supply chains we learned during COVID we are all linked and our future is but one, and it's just interesting that it reminds me of rock and roll. Rock and roll was this liberating thing where we could dance any which way we wanted and the rules were off. And then the car companies started selling cars and Budweiser and everything using rock and roll. And so one of the power superpowers of corporate capitalism is the ability to take anything that's on the outside that might threaten it and make it less harmful to it anyway. Yes, by somehow rolling it in, and maybe that's okay. I think a similar process has begun in america, with the widespread use of microdosing.
AJ:Yes, and so well, these things are so linked right the birthing of the internet, the guy of mine was related to that.
Andrew:It's all mycel birthing of the internet and the Gaia mind was related to that. It's all mycelia, it's the mushrooms that originally somehow got to this planet and broke up the soil and you know we are children of the mushroom and grows and hyphes and connects through everything is a beautiful metaphor for what we're building globally, or at least what we hoped we were building.
AJ:Yes.
Andrew:And I think that we're at a little bit of a crossroads now with the disinformation, the power there's a lot of. We're still. There's still those two wolf puffs and we still have to figure out which one we're going to feed.
AJ:Totally so. How are you seeing the, I guess, where all those developments went? And even you know, I have to say, so-called smartphone? In many respects, of course, I mean remarkable, but the way it can disconnect.
Andrew:Right, I think that I tell this little story about Steve. He did not let his kids touch electronic devices. This is folklore now, and you hear about these. You know upper-class schools in Silicon Valley where they do not let the kids play with computers. So it's obvious that we've been socially hacked in terms of, you know, social engineering. These devices are so incredible and liberating, but they're also so addictive. They've figured out how to hijack our neurological circuits, our dopamine and reward response, and you're sitting there doom scrolling I love that word and uh. And then I go stop, go to Kindle and read a book.
AJ:So I'm on the same device, but instead of agitating my mind and my amygdala, I call it whacking your amygdala like a pinata so, as someone who was so embedded for so long and at a time of such aspiration to see it go this way as we sit here today, how do we go about feeding the other pup? I?
Andrew:guess, you know, we have to have people who were so excited about it and were.
Andrew:You know, I was a cheerleader for it in the late 80s and 90s, and then, well, it really became evident to me after, because I developed one of the first Twitter apps called Twiddlator for the iPhone, and so many of the features you see in Twitter and social media today were developed by me and a couple other developers independent developers who had Twitter apps that were not owned by Twitter, but independent software developers, and so we would.
Andrew:It was a time of just so much joy coming up with new ideas, and then the other guys would see them and improve, and we were in a virtual arms race for who could have the coolest twitter app. But, um, so yeah, I had the first quoted retweets. That was an idea that I piloted, and we were the first app that had video in your tweet stream, and so this was all fun. And then I started seeing the more dark side of it that social media really wasn't about bringing us all together. It was being hijacked for taking advantage of your biases and just showing you what you want to see, and that has the effect of subdividing and creating gulfs between people instead of bringing folks together, I think.
AJ:You know we started talking about how you're dressed as Oppenheimer. That's right.
Andrew:In honor of New Mexico, let me get out my pipe. Here we go.
AJ:Wish you had the camera rolling now. And his famous quote of regret what was it? Death I have become, or something like that. I am become death destroyer of worlds. I am become death destroyer of worlds, thanks Am.
Andrew:I am become death destroyer of worlds, thanks, amadeus From the Bhagavad Gita, yeah, yeah, and as you were describing, ah, maybe we have that same feeling, as that's why I've invested In 2015,. I walked away and I decided wait a minute. I'm that hippie dude that came out to New Mexico 50 years ago to get back to the earth. What am I doing? Just you know, embroiling myself with technology. Now, I don't look down on technology, because we have photovoltaic cells, we have the lithium ion batteries, we have EVs, we even have an electric tractor. I'm all about each one of us doing everything we can with our own personal resources to make that transition happen, and that's how it's going to happen, because when one family does it and I show people my $1.25 electric bill every month and I already made that investment, and our economic system is not really set up yet for making these kinds of long-term investments up front.
Andrew:And here in America, though, we have made incredible strides, and most people don't even know about it yet, but the Biden administration passed the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act that was to appease the people in the oil and gas and coal industry, but there are all manners of rebates, grants, outright grants if you don't have much income, and other tax credits that allow people to put the heat pumps on their house, insulate and put new windows where necessary. Necessary and that's something that's so overlooked is energy conservation. Just use less and then buy your solar collectors later, yeah, yeah, but um, now there's. It's just fantastic. This. It's just billions and billions of dollars and it flows to each of the states and each state is responsible for setting up these programs, and Colorado and I think Massachusetts and California, got on it right away and these rebates are already available. New Mexico I'm very pleased that our governor got a crack team in our energy department and they're going to have a one-stop shop website this fall.
Andrew:Where you go, you put in where you live, you put in what the family makes, and it'll show you exactly what you're entitled to and how to sign up for each program. One-stop shop. So, yes, we can do this. This is what I call climate agency. I was very down and sad about the doomers saying you know we were. This was the end, because I couldn't believe that, and so instead I said, well, what can I do about it as a family? And so we've worked hard to really make a zero carbon farm here, and, of course, regenerative agriculture is critical no inputs except what grows on the farm. If you've got weed trees or a coppice, you can grind it up and make incredible inputs for your soil. We have the Johnson's Sioux bioreactor over there. The.
AJ:Johnson's Sioux, just living up the road.
Andrew:Another New Mexico, were you able to interview that couple.
AJ:We've had an engagement, we have an interview.
Andrew:Okay, I'm um it's. I love it when science figures out yes, it's the mushrooms. And then, of course, the biochar has become really interesting and at first very academic, with some um south american archaeologists finding all these piles of biochar in the sustainable cultures down there. And now it's something that there's people at los alamos working on it and showing how we can take. Well, because we have a big problem in new mexico with the drought, this mega drought. We're in a lot of drying of our forests, and so we have to harvest and use those resources. And so the idea of making biochar, both for the forest this is, um to hold more water and, of course, for our agricultural inputs.
Andrew:And, um, I'm not sure when you're going to air your talk with James and Joyce Skeet this week. That's going to be fantastic. I was lucky about five weeks ago to attend one of his brilliant workshops at a small farm in northern New Mexico where he came out, and I got so excited that I spent a couple of weeks trying to find all the parts, because you can build this for about 100 bucks, but you have to find an old 55 gallon barrel, and harder to find is the 30 gallon barrel that's inside. So your, your, your people will learn all about and I recommend they hear that pod to learn about biochar.
AJ:But we don't actually talk much about biochar, would you believe, but of course it links to them, where you can find out more.
Andrew:Yes and um, so much to talk, but the the no, the no-till and low-till farming is something I've engaged in since. Let's just say that covid had mixed blessings. We've lost a lot of people, but we really got our priorities once again. It's like when somebody dies all of a sudden you go. What's the meaning of life? What am I doing with my life? What are my priorities? And as painful as these circumstances are, great good can come out of it, like Katie's icky opera, yes, that's right, musical that has been talked about, and so so I'm curious.
AJ:Yeah, your grandfather, yes, in Kentucky.
Andrew:Yes, was not far from Wendell Berry, that's right, he was good friends with Wendell's father, john Berry, and so these were men who understood things like erosion in the 70s and the 60s and they were part of forming the Burley Growers Tobacco Cooperative.
Andrew:I don't know if I have the right order of the words, it was long and I remember it being written on the but they had a warehouse where little farms could grow a little patch of tobacco and they had rules where no one farmer could grow all the tobacco. The idea was a little bit of income for a lot of people and that idea allowed Kentucky to continue their tradition of small family farms. These are Scotch-Irish-Welsh families very different from the British who came to and no offense at all to our British friends, but they were the more of the plantation owners. They were the ones that had the slaves. I'm talking about hill country in Kentucky that was not suitable for large-scale agriculture and so these are hills and hollers and they're a little more hardscrabble, but the family farm much as you see here that I've kind of recreated a little bit of my Kentucky roots.
Andrew:he loved trees. He would always insist Andrew, I want you to see my arboretum and he had collected trees from all over and just loved trees.
AJ:I'm hearing you, and I'm thinking back to the dry land farmers of antiquity around here as well that had the art down over a long period of time until colonization arrived. It seems, with big adaptations, like some of those ruins were left before the Spanish arrived. So there was adaptation, there was fluidity. Even at that level we were prepared and I say we humans were prepared to leave our cities and towns, if we put that language on it, to adapt to changing circumstances. We've got ourselves a lot more set, but still the principles remain, no Well.
Andrew:I mean, even in our urban and suburban settings, you could be growing the permaculture. The notion of the food forest is becoming a big trend, and so, wherever you are, plant yourself. Wherever you are, grow the basil in a pot, on your balcony, in your apartment building, I mean. I believe that there's room for us to go. We can go back to nature wherever we are in any moment, with every breath, and that's the secret is that we're here. This is the spaceship Earth that we're on, and she has everything we need. We're surrounded right now by cottonwood puffs. It looks like it's snowing.
AJ:It does. There is magic in the air. I'm so glad we sat here for this and I guess we can sort of indulge in our circumstance at the moment to go out with, in a sense. But you've got how big is the property now? So this is five acres.
Andrew:And you've been progressively Just a little bit here. This is something I learned from my grandfather when a neighbor sells, the last thing you want to see is an apartment building. And we are in Albuquerque. We're in the inside of a million-person metropolis where the Rio Grande River flows through, river flows through, and so we're in a little village, a little Spanish village that was one of maybe five that are now incorporated within Albuquerque, but people had pretty much abandoned farming by the late 70s, and so when I got here, land was available, cheap, it was not being irrigated, and so we've had an opportunity to bring back the oasis in this river valley, in this desert, and we are just surrounded by tall elms and cottonwoods and fruit trees All that I planted 42 years ago.
AJ:That's the thing. Was that when you came back from South America?
Andrew:Well, there was no see. There was the. I come back from South America now I'm 17. So I skipped 10th and 11th, 11th and 12th grade. So I have to get the equivalent, the graduation equivalent called a GED, and then that allowed me to matriculate in college. So I went to the university here to study architecture and I started with philosophy as a minor, but everybody was sitting around talking and not doing, but the two together sound good. Oh well, my philosophy was doing. So I started taking industrial arts and that would have been welding, woodworking, machine tools, automotive repair All the things you would need to know if you were on a small farm and wanted to fix everything and build your own.
AJ:And this is part of the feature of I mean, we were recording in the studio with Katie and Amadeus, of course that you built, designed and built and you've done elsewhere, but just sitting here, a little tower, this is all Adobe construction, the Adobe Torreon. Yes, you do some of your profoundest work there.
Andrew:So, you know, small is beautiful and little buildings are better than one giant building. It's also the right scale for what can be built by. You know one or two people as well, and I think that one of the things I think about the most the blessing that I've had is that I had that vision as a young person to put in my roots and begin building something. I had no idea what its final form was. I didn't want. I mean, that wouldn't have been fun for anyone. You know that's what's so great about improv, is you really don't know what you're gonna say next it surprises you to 100%, and it's what animated you with even the technological work.
AJ:I'm reminded of the office of technology assessment that was also instituted in the 70s and 80s. Here, that was literally an official agency to determine how to harness technology in appropriate. Going back to small is beautiful.
Andrew:These were our whole appropriate technology. What is the right balance? You know what are we going to accept and what are we going to say. That's not for me, or even that's not for us.
AJ:Yes.
Andrew:And but I think we have to give everybody the agency to decide. We really, if there's one thing we want to honor, it's sovereignty sovereign, individual sovereignty, tribal sovereignty, a whole nation's sovereignty. But with that is do as you will, yet harm ye none, and that's - can't we get along?
AJ:Wonderful place to end, Andrew, but I actually talk about music before we do end. A piece of music that's been significant in your life. What comes to mind?
Andrew:Let me see. Well, of course it would have to be of the great body of work produced by my friends, the Grateful Dead. Maybe Box of Rain, and the notion that maybe this is a dream we've been dreaming one afternoon. AJ", beautiful.
AJ:Andrew, it's been absolutely brilliant speaking with you. Thanks for having us back and thanks for speaking with me. AS: Thank you, AJ. AJ: That was Andrew Stone outside the Sunspot Solar Studio at his regenerative farm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. See various links in the show notes, including to that conversation Andrew mentioned with James and Joyce Skeet on Navajo Nation. That was episode 210 at Spirit Farm a few weeks ago. Andrew and I continued on for another 15 minutes off record but with the machine on. It was so fascinating. I'll release that as a bonus extra soon. There are a few photos on the website and more, as always, on Patreon for subscribing members, with great thanks to you generous supporting listeners for making this episode possible. If you'd like to join us, just head to the website or the show notes and follow the prompts. Thank you. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden and at the top, Green Shoots by The Nomadics. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.
