S9 Ep45: Urban Food Hacking: Your Yard's Hidden Food Potential with Marjory Wildcraft
“Once you start eating your own food, it expands your taste horizons and you can’t be afraid to experiment. If it doesn’t work out and it’s horrible, just put it in the compost bucket and start over. It’s okay, you’ll be fine.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Episode Description:
“Once you start eating your own food, it expands your taste horizons and you can’t be afraid to experiment. If it doesn’t work out and it’s horrible, just put it in the compost bucket and start over. It’s okay, you’ll be fine.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Food is not just sustenance; it's a fundamental human right that we've outsourced to complex, fragile systems. This disconnection from food sources has transformed us into passive consumers dependent on a market that creates an illusion of abundance, masking a precarious supply chain that can unravel in moments. But we are not powerless. Our backyard is a potential fortress of food security, self-sufficiency, and resilience.
Marjory Wildcraft is a pioneering educator who teaches sustainable food production and home medicine skills. She has developed innovative systems for growing food in diverse environments, helping people reclaim their food independence.
Tune in as Justine and Marjory explore how we can transform our living space into a productive food ecosystem through urban gardening, home medicine, animal protein production, seed diversity, nutrient cycling, and economic resilience strategies.
Connect with Marjory:
Marjory Wildcraft is the founder of The Grow Network, which is a community of people focused on modern self-sufficient living. She has been featured by National Geographic as an expert in off-grid living, she hosted the Mother Earth News Online Homesteading Summit, and she is listed in Who’s Who in America for having inspired hundreds of thousands of backyard gardens. Marjory was the focus of an article that won Reuters’ Food Sustainability Media Award, and she recently authored The Grow System: The Essential Guide to Modern Self-Sufficient Living—From Growing Food to Making Medicine.
She is best known for her DVD series Grow Your Own Groceries, which has over half a million copies in use by homesteaders, foodies, preppers, universities, and missionary organizations around the world.
Beloved for her humorous, non-judgmental, get ’er done style, Marjory raised two teenagers in Central Texas and currently splits her time between Paonia, CO, and Puerto Rico. When she’s not building an online network, being “Mom,” and tending her family’s food supply, Marjory loves playing, running, doing gymnastics, skateboarding, acquiring skills from the Paleolithic era (yes, she is part cavewoman!), and experimenting with anything and everything related to food production and sustainability.
Join the I Can Grow Food webinar to learn the fastest and easiest ways to produce healthy and delicious meat, eggs, and vegetables with Marjory: http://www.backyardfoodproduction.com
Episode Highlights:
00:20 Meet Marjory: A Journey of Food Security
08:00 Practical Tips for Urban Food Production
14:55 Transitioning to Home Medicine
21:11 The Role of Marketing in Sustainability
26:56 Preparing for Future Food Security
30:01 Integrating Ancient Practices with Modern Needs
33:01 The Nutritional Value of Backyard Livestock
38:54 Start Growing Your Food
Tweets:
What if the solution to rising grocery bills and uncertain supply chains was growing right outside your window? Explore transformative strategies for backyard food production with @justine.reichman and @the_grow_network founder, Marjory Wildcraft. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #BackyardFoodProduction #UrbanGardening #FoodIndependence #SelfSufficiency #HomesteadSkills #GrowYourOwnFood #NutrientCycling #EconomicResilience #GardenToTable
Inspirational Quotes:
03:14 “There’s real of studies show that when children eat higher quality food, they score higher on intelligence tests and they have fewer behavioral problems.” —Marjory Wildcraft
07:55 “Many people who just started with a few fresh herbs on a windowsill later on went to do much greater things. So don't underestimate the power.” —Marjory Wildcraft
13:24 “Once you start eating your own food, it expands your taste horizons and you can’t be afraid to experiment. If it doesn’t work out and it’s horrible, just put it in the compost bucket and start over. It’s okay, you’ll be fine.” —Marjory Wildcraft
16:37 “For a business to be successful, you really need multiple products.” —Marjory Wildcraft
25:39 “The more people that are prepared, the easier this transition is going to be.” —Marjory Wildcraft
29:49 “In addition to resiliency, you having at least some of your own food supply at hand and the skills to do it, gives you an appreciation for the farmer who's doing it.” —Marjory Wildcraft
30:13 “Ancient traditions are now colliding with our new traditions, and we're going back and forth to find that new platform that's going to work and be our future.” —Justine Reichman
35:17 “You can have the greatest product in the world, but if you don't know how to market it and sell it, it ain't going anywhere.” —Marjory Wildcraft
37:27 “Set an intention and open up your heart and mind that you'll get an answer.” —Marjory Wildcraft
40:25 “The foundation to everything is backyard food production.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Transcription:
Justine Reichman: So Marjorie, welcome to Essential Ingredients. So happy to have you here. Excited to learn a little bit about your journey. What brought you there? Let's kick it off by just letting our community know who you are, and what you do?
Marjory Wildcraft: Okay. What I do now and who I am now is Marjory Wildcraft. I basically teach people backyard food production and home medicine, so the skills to keep the home together, which used to be very, very common. But that is not at all how I started out.
Justine Reichman: What's interesting to me is you're not alone there, right? People have a journey getting to where they are today, and oftentimes, where they're meant to be and where they love to be. We probably have listeners that are tuning in today that can really resonate with your story, because it's been very varied until you got to this point.
“There’s real of studies show that when children eat higher quality food, they score higher on intelligence tests and they have fewer behavioral problems.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Marjory Wildcraft: Hopefully, it's empowering too, because I was not born in a hippie commune, or on some organic farm or anything like that. Nothing could be further from the truth about that, and my first degree actually is in electrical engineering. My family, we grew up in South Florida. And even in the United States, you're actually doing pretty well. But they didn't have a lot of money, let's just say that. And like a lot of kids that come from that kind of a background, I was very interested in wealth. And when I was in Hong Kong, which is the ultra capitalistic center of the world, I actually got over there with Motorola. I was an expat managing a couple of mobile telephone networks. And the guys that worked for me say, you gotta take this class with this guy named Robert. He's really interesting. He's all about money. And I said, do we know him? And they said, no. We never heard of him before, but he's really good. You have to go. So I went, and then through a lot more classes with Robert, I ended up being inspired to leave engineering. And ultimately, I moved. I chose Austin, Texas as a real estate market. And by the time I was 40, I had made my first million, and things were so successful that Robert asked me if I would be on some infomercials he was making. So I was on national television for four years selling Rich Dad, Poor Dad stuff for Robert Kiyosaki. So none of that involves growing food. Not at all, businesswoman, engineer, but I was volunteering on a project to get locally grown food into an elementary school. This is outside of Austin, Texas. A little town called Red Rock, working with some big movers and shakers in Texas, and we were going to just do it there, and then duplicate it all across the state and get clean organic food in the school system. Super important. Well, that project was an utter and complete failure, and that failure absolutely changed my life. Now, it didn't look like it, like you'd think the school wanted it, the teachers wanted it. There's all kinds of federal grant state money for it. There's reams of studies that show that when children eat higher quality food, they score higher on intelligence tests, and they literally have less behavioral problems. It just makes sense, right? So are you familiar with Steve Ritz?
Justine Reichman: Well, I didn't mean to cut you off, but when you were talking about kids, he does programs in the backs of schools in urban areas, New York City, the Bronx, etcetera, and he helps them learn how to grow food so it supports their ability to do math and science, and all these different things. And as a result, many of these kids are doing really much better going to colleges, and being much more successful. So as you're sitting there saying this, there really is a movement to integrate this in school systems, in urban areas with families, so that people have greater access and can really thrive. That is mentally, physically, all of it.
Marjory Wildcraft: I've seen those greenhouses on the tops of schools in New York City, and I'm like, I want to go visit those. They look so cool. But we were just looking at getting local farmers to provide the vegetables. And the reason that the whole project failed was there weren't enough locally grown organic farmers within the entire county to provide even part of the vegetables for one small rural elementary school. And I just literally that night. I will never forget that night, my body was just violently shaking because first of all, the drive from Austin to Red Rock suddenly made sense. There's no farmers out there. There's some open space. Maybe a few cows, but there's $1 general going in. There's a subdivision, but there's no food growing out in the countryside. There's only four days worth of food in inventory, in the grocery stores. We have a just in time trucking system, and it travels 1500 miles to get to you. And at that time, the population was bigger now, but I was surrounded by 20 million Texans who were seriously armed to the teeth. And I'm like, you know that whole saying about nine days away from anarchy or whatever? I mean, I realized that even though I had a lot of money and wealth, there are scenarios where no amount of money will get you what you really need. And I had two small kids and I just said, that's it. Whatever I've been doing in my life up to now is unimportant. There's lots of people who know how to make money. God does not need another person to be able to make money. But there's hardly anybody anymore who knows how to grow food.
Justine Reichman: I totally agree. And I also think that some people live in larger areas, and it's much easier for them to grow a garden, but there's a lot more challenge in urban areas. And understanding how to do that, and how to create enough abundance of these foods so that people can feed their family, especially as things get more expensive and we don't have good access, you have more control. And so I know we've had many people that have tuned into the podcast wondering, okay, well, that's great. We know that you can do this if you have a garden, but how do we do this in a more urban environment? And so when I saw what you were doing, I thought, wow, here's an opportunity to talk to those people. The people in particular that want to be able to do this, but don't either have the vision because it's not their core competency, which is fair enough.
Marjory Wildcraft: It's not anybody's core competency anymore.
Justine Reichman: If you don't see it and you're not grown up with it, it's much harder to integrate. I'd love to hear from you, if one of our guests were tuning in and they're asking, okay, I want to do this. I live in a high rise or in the middle of New York City, or Miami, Florida, how do I make this work so I can feed my family well?
“Many people who just started with a few fresh herbs on a windowsill later on went to do much greater things. So don't underestimate the power.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Marjory Wildcraft: If you live in an urban area like that, let me riff on that for what you can do right in your own property. And what I would recommend you to start with is a couple of herbs on a window sill. And let me give you the directions for that. So first of all, by the way, when you're cooking, you're doing your spaghetti or whatever, if you add just a little bit of fresh basil, it completely what you know, what's the name of your podcast, right? It completely changes that. It just makes the whole thing just pop and come alive. In fact, when I started doing that, my family thought I had changed. They were like, hey, Mom, you got a new recipe. I'm like, yeah, that's a whole new recipe. I just added a tablespoon of chopped basil, fresh basil. And it's great when you see your kids asking for seconds. That makes you feel good. There's incredible power in just some fresh herbs. And I have had many, many, many people that just started with a few fresh herbs on a window sill that then later on went to do much greater things. So don't underestimate the power. The other thing is learning from those three or four plants that you have there. Everything you learn there is going to be appropriate for when you have maybe a four by four square plot, or a bigger garden, or even if you're managing acres of crops. And don't tell me you're not going to ever be managing acres of crops because we are in a freaking vortex, and you have no idea what you're going to be doing even next year, so it's a possibility.
But everything you learn from those plants, if it's not getting enough sunlight, they get pale, and they just tend to grow straight up, right? If you forget to water them, they start turning yellow, and then the ends start getting crispy brown, and then they die. So these things that you're learning are identical to what you're going to see with their plants, and they're teaching you already. I would really recommend getting started on some of the toughest, most badass plants that are tough to kill. Although you probably will, so don't be worried about it. It is going to be mint and basil, and then chives. Or even scallions, and those also have the biggest impact. I was saying that fresh basil on a dish is just amazing. And the fresh mint, and put it into a beverage. The fresh scallions on top of some soup. It just gives that dish so much vibrancy. So getting started, first of all, do not put this in your spare bedroom. You will never go there. Those plants will die. You'll get to see how they die. Ideally, if you have a kitchen sink with a window that has a little bit of sun, that's going to be perfect because you're by that kitchen sink all the time. Sometimes I think I'm married to my kitchen sink where I do all these dishes. And I live alone anyway. Another thing is get as big a pot as you can fit on that window sill. So the bigger the pot you have, the more soil it's going to be able to hold, and the more forgiving of your erratic water schedule it'll be. So you'll be able to retain more moisture and more minerals, and it'll do better.
Justine Reichman: So for those of us that are not perfect and do forget to water, we have a better chance of keeping them alive.
Marjory Wildcraft: And especially if it has one of those little plates on the bottom to retain extra water, that really helps a lot.
Justine Reichman: I want to ask you about mints. I have mint and it is taking over everywhere. So what do you do in your kitchen, is it a bad idea to mix your mint with your chives and your basil? Does it need its own pots?
Marjory Wildcraft: I would have them all in separate pots. And isn't that great that it's megalomaniacal like, that means you got a lot of mint. You make mint tea, you can have so many mints. You can throw mint, you can give bunches of it away to your neighbors. That is what abundance is all about. You're getting all kinds of micronutrients and stuff from that mint that you're growing. So growing a few herbs is just a fantastic way to start. And I've had a lot of people just start with that. And then a couple years later, they've got chickens, rabbits and goats. I met one woman who was in my community and she started out with that, and she said, I just wanted to grow more. So I went and found a house with a yard because I just wanted to grow more food. So let's talk about some other things that may or may not need a lot of light. Bean sprouts. A lot of people just do that with a simple grow light and boom. Like in five to eight days, you've got sprouts. Not a lot of caloric density, but there's a huge amount of life force and nutrition in those, and they will really help your health. We just got done with a whole series on the Grow Network blog on micro greens and how to grow them in apartments and condominiums because people have been asking us, I think there's like five or six part blog series we just created that'll teach you everything you need to know about growing microgreens in your house.
Justine Reichman: That's really amazing because I think that some of this stuff sounds like it's fairly simple, but is intimidating because we have so many things going on in our lives, and we don't want to forget to do this. And then also, when you're thinking about what you're going to cook, remember to incorporate that. I go to the grocery store and I'm like, wait, what do I have in my garden? I should eat that first. It's like changing the narrative for you to think about this. And I think it takes a little time. Even the other day, I was making dinner and I went into the garden like, okay. In the past, I would think about, what is it that I want to eat? Oh, I want to make this. Oh, it's not local. Oh, it has to come from Mexico. Oh, it's not in season. Oh, my god, how expensive that is. But if you change the narrative and you say, you know what? What I have in my garden, let me investigate what I could make with this. You start to eat local. You start to eat your own food, and you can have more control over the quality of it, and the accessibility of it. You get to grow what you want to eat and what you can offer to your family.
“Once you start eating your own food, it expands your taste horizons and you can’t be afraid to experiment. If it doesn’t work out and it’s horrible, just put it in the compost bucket and start over. It’s okay, you’ll be fine.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Marjory Wildcraft: It really expands your tastes horizons. Don't be afraid to experiment. And if it doesn't work out and it's horrible, just put it in the compost bucket to start over. It's okay. You'll be fine.
Justine Reichman: You first started this, I'm curious. There was a lack of vegetation and farmers in Texas. How did you end up in Puerto Rico now kicking off this Grow Network to create inspiration for others to be able to grow their own fruits and vegetables?
Marjory Wildcraft: I started The Grow Network. So I had the big wake up call, I would say that that was about the 2003 era, and there were a bunch of other things happening. I had a strong intuition, and I started to back it up with research that the real estate market was going to collapse. I basically foresaw what was going to happen in 2008, so I realized that I wanted to get out of that, and it took me a while to unwind it. And then we bought a property out in Central Texas, and I've started full blown homesteading, homeschooling. And as soon as you start growing food, you start to realize that you gotta have community, and it took me a while to really start figuring things out. And then that engineering, I'm like, what is this system gear? What's the simplest way? What's the most effective way? There's a lot to figure out. I started teaching classes locally, and you're on to something when somebody calls you up and says, I've got 20 people. I'll be over Saturday, can you teach us? If you've ever organized events, you know that it is. And everybody kept saying, hey, Marjory, you need to make a video out of this. You need to video this because you need to expand what you've got here. Is really, really good. I wanted people to come to see and experience it. Like, here's why the kitchen garden is right outside my back door so that I can just grab it. If I had a garden that's even 50 feet away, I'm less likely to use it. That's why they're going to kitchen gardens. And I just wanted to have people have that experience and see it. I took a year off and scripted, re-scripted and scripted this video. And then back then, video editing took a lot longer and was way more expensive than it is now. I don't know if you remember DVDs. I made my first DVD called Backyard Food Production and I'd put like, $30,000 of the family savings into this thing. We put up the website, and nothing sold. Because you put up a website, it doesn't mean it's great, although we did have almost half a million illegal downloads on torrent sites and things like that. But if you remember back then in the day how that went.
“For a business to be successful, you really need multiple products.” —Marjory Wildcraft
So anyway, I said, well, I think I have something that's really useful here, and I got to figure this out. I had to come up with a way to recoup the savings that I'd taken from the family's coffer. So I ended up, at that point in time, becoming a digital marketer because I had to figure out how to sell these things, and that's how The Grow Network. And then having one product are a few businesses that can get away with that. But really, for a business to be successful, you really need multiple products. But I was learning a lot more all the time. I got by a copperhead snake, which is a potentially fatal bite, and treated it at home with a lot of natural techniques that I had learned from crazy people living out in the wilderness who lived this kind of a lifestyle to an extreme that none of us are probably going to anytime in this lifetime. I'm like, wow, the techniques that were used thousands of years ago, those Greek and Roman guys are bashing each other with swords and all that stuff, but they got major wounds. Now, a few of them did die from their womb, so the vast majority of them were healed and recovered. And it turns out that those same techniques are still effective today, and you don't need to use antibiotics. I actually never even went to the hospital for a lot of injuries that I have sustained and completely treated at home. So we made a product called treating infections without antibiotics, on how to handle lacerations and broken bones, and snake bites and that kind of thing using natural herbal medicines. That was another product we made.
Justine Reichman: You made this natural product. Where did you get the information to figure out how to make this product and sell it? Because people sell a lot of things. Here's something that I'm listening to you talk about. I can hear you're passionate about it, and I can hear your enthusiasm for it. But I'm wondering how you took it from the idea to create the actual product, and what you did about sharing stories so that people could understand the efficacy of it? What role did that play in it for you?
Marjory Wildcraft: One other thing about how I got the information. I have been deeply, deeply concerned that night in Red Rock. I had a vision of the potential of what could happen, right? And we're talking about mass hunger, and social unrest, and complete disruption, which by the way is still not off the table. And if anything more, it is likely. It's getting more and more likely and probable. Now, the US dollar is almost over. When the banking system collapses, we are going to have that exact situation where you can't go to the grocery store and buy stuff. There's definitely a very practical reason for driving me to learn skills. And so I did all the gardening class and permaculture classes, citizen forest, all the classes you can take, read all the books. And then I started spending time out in the national forest with barefoot crazies who are not losing weight. They're healthy, and they're doing well. And just looking all the beaten path for ways that people can sustain themselves in extremely difficult times. And some of the gatherings that I used to love to go to are called primitive skills gatherings. And this is where people who study and practice, learn and teach the skills that would have been common in the Paleolithic era. I'm homeschooling, so my daughter always comes with me. It was just so fun. We're both learning stuff like how to tan a deer skin with just its brains. All wild plants, and how to create traps and snares, and navigating by the stars, and all the skills of the paleolith era.
And this guy, Doug Simons, came in, and he knew all about treating infections without using herbal medicine to make these treatments. And I'm like, Doug, this is such useful information, and we have to bring it to a wider audience. I guess that I'll be the conduit for that. So I got a videographer to help me, and we created a video called Treating Infections Without Antibiotics, and started putting it up on the website. It does take a lot of people to think, oh, I've got a great product. And actually, the product was as fun as it was to discover that and create it, usually the products only do about 10% of the work, right? Because there's the packaging, the branding and the labeling. There's the sales page, which if anybody wants to see a sales page that I've just written, gosh, I should get you the link for we have a new kit called The Soil Detox Kit, and it's like a 20 page long form sales letter. I hate long form sales letters, but they convert. There's the website and the blog posts. I found that I could never get advertising to work. I'd spend $1,000 on advertising and maybe sell $500 worth of product. You're just not going to stay in business doing that for very long. But one thing that I found really worked for me well was like what we're doing right now. I'd get on podcasts, talk to people and tell them what I had. You want to know how to grow food? Here's a way to do it. Go to backyardfoodproduction.com, I'll show you how to grow food. And I've got a free webinar there. And in that webinar, I show you how to grow half of your own food in your backyard, even if you are older, out of shape, or have no experience. And it's true, I really have dialed in the three easiest ways to grow food in a backyard.
Justine Reichman: When you were coming up with this, and you were hoping to create change, hoping to inspire and support people to grow half their own food in their garden, if you look at the population, what percentage were you hoping to convert? If we just look at your community, let's just say, what percentage were you hoping to convert to be able to do this for themselves? And what percentage have you been able to convert?
Marjory Wildcraft: Well, at this point now in our database, there's more than a million emails. Now, that's because I've been at this for what? 15 years. We only have about 100,000 of them that are active. That's because if you don't engage with me for six months, or we haven't heard from you, if you're not clicking on something, we put you in a campaign that says, hey, are you sure? Goodbye, goodbye. We only keep active and engaged people. And then at this point in time, I've probably talked to people, several million people at this point in time, I've helped in one way or another. Now, when I first got that, made that first DVD on Backyard Food Production, I sold thousands of them. I would follow up with people. And what shocked me was, almost nobody watched it. Almost nobody watched it. They bought it. They thought it was a great idea. They wanted it in their library in case the world came to an end or something like that. So the reality of businesses is that. There's a lot of people in my community now actually like, who is it? I think she's 80 something, and she said, look, I'm almost done here. I'm almost done. I know it. I got some youngsters doing some stuff for me, but I just really want to support you because what you're doing is vitally important for everybody. So she buys my stuff just to support me. Yeah, that's amazing.
Justine Reichman: At the community, do you have a percentage or some statistics that you could share that might realize or highlight the impact you've had by integrating this into your community, and showcasing this in such an accessible way?
Marjory Wildcraft: I don't have any specific numbers like that. We used to have a big forums area, and I would get a lot of feedback. And I would guess the one thing that I'm known for is The Grow half system. How to grow half your own food in your backyard even if you have no experience, you're older and you're out of shape. That headline took quite a while to get to, by the way, so that did not just come out of the air magically. We're playing with a lot of different headlines, and I'll talk about split testing if you want. But as far as I can guess, I think there are several 100,000 people who have implemented that growth system. I've taught little kids to elders, but we don't have any real hard data on that. It's not really something you can track that well.
Justine Reichman: I understand where this came from, it sounds like it came from a place of passion, which is not uncommon for entrepreneurs, and a void that you see that you want to fill. So when you did this and you wanted to kick this off, did you look at this as like another career, and you needed to be able to monetize this?
“The more people that are prepared, the easier this transition is going to be.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Marjory Wildcraft: It's really been more of a purpose and mission driven, because I still see collapse as, actually every day, the probability of it occurring is growing, right? We're in the apocalypse right now. This is for real. The Apocalypse is the lifting of the veil, and it's not anything to be afraid of. We've already gone through tremendous change. We're only ankle deep into what's actually coming, and the more people that are prepared, the easier this transition is going to be. So I've always been driven by trying to help this transition be as easy as possible, so that it's really been purpose and mission driven. And I will tell you that the growing food niche is not a lucrative niche at all. I did really, really well. We had a good couple of runs for a couple of years there, and I can give you some numbers. In 2019, The Grow Network grossed about $ 1.6 million. That was our biggest revenue year. I had a team of eight, and we had been doing over a million for a couple of years. Now, what your gross revenue does not reflect profit. We're making a little bit of profit, but almost anytime, I had new profit. I would roll that into something else that was vitally important, that people were asking, well, home medicine was a huge thing. People were like, I really want to learn the basics of home medicine to take care of my family. And so we developed a whole bunch of products on that. I need to learn about how to build a greenhouse, so we figured that out. We ended up creating an academy because we have like 35 courses now for things people have asked us about how to keep goats, how to keep sheep, different styles of gardening, home medicine, and how to grow cannabis. That's a great gateway.
Justine Reichman: Overall mission with these courses and supporting people with home medicine and home agriculture to feed themselves, what is the overall mission? And what do you hope to achieve?
Marjory Wildcraft: Homegrown food on every table.
Justine Reichman: Homegrown food on every table. And then if we look forward to three, five years, how do you hope this is going to evolve? And what do you see?
Marjory Wildcraft: It used to be like a little tongue in cheek joke, homegrown food on every table. But honestly, we're going to have homegrown food on every table 3, 5, 10 years from now. Probably more like the three to five year time frame, because it takes 10 calories of energy to get one calorie of food on your plate. That is completely unsustainable that will not go on forever, that won't go on for much longer. Now, we're already seeing the collapse of these systems that get you food. So whether I do anything or not, you are ultimately, if you're going to be eating, it will be homegrown food. The existing commercial food supply is imploding right now as we're talking. There's also some other very, very good reasons. And you asked me how many people and what percentage? I think we need to have about a minimum of 70% of people in any food shed doing backyard food production. And the reason is genetics. So the USDA in the 1990s did a study, and they compared seeded catalogs from 1890 with seed catalogs from 1990, and they showed it was tragic. Something like a 94% loss in seed varieties because backyard producers were keeping it alive or keeping the strain going.
We know that this squash is really useful because it stores through the winter better, so we grow that. And almost all of that is gone now. Seed savers have done a good job with it. And then we have the Svalbard in Norway, which is great. Except for that Microsoft, pretty much. Bill Gates owns that, and I doubt we're ever going to have access to it. So somebody's got the genetics, but we really need a lot. Farmers do not have time to experiment, they're working. They're making and growing food. What used to be the bridge between the farmers and the backyard producers are the county fairs. Used to go to the county fair and you get a blue ribbon because you grew the greatest tomato. The farmers would all be there, and they're looking like, hey, that looks like that really tastes good. They talk to you about it, and could I get some seeds from that? That was how there was a transfer. And you can even do this in an apartment or condominium by the way. Even though we have a lot less space, we have a lot more time, and we can do a lot more playing around, and we are absolutely essential to the whole food network. So in addition to resiliency, you have at least some of your own food supply at hand and the skills to do it, which gives you an appreciation for the farmer who's doing it.
“Ancient traditions are now colliding with our new traditions, and we're going back and forth to find that new platform that's going to work and be our future.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: As we're sitting here talking, and we're talking about home medicine and homegrown agriculture, it takes me back, all of a sudden, I feel like we're going back to a long time ago, and ancient traditions are now colliding with our new traditions, and some of the things that we learned, and we're sort of going back and forth to find that new platform that's going to work and be our future.
Marjory Wildcraft: Yeah, I totally agree. And there's some things we let go of, that we really have to pick back up. And part of that is backyard food production. You'd mentioned this, but I'd also like to make a quick correction> Everybody always thinks of me as a garden, and I definitely love gardens. But the most productive food source that you can have is going to be animal products. So for example, a 100 square foot garden, which I recommend two small raised beds. 50 square feet each, so 5 feet by 10 feet long. And in two growing seasons, you can produce 50, 60,000 calories if you're growing some of the more calorically rich foods, like potatoes and things like that. But a small backyard flock of laying hens, like six laying hens, will produce 250 eggs a year. And a medium sized egg is 62 calories. So we're talking about 1500 eggs a year from this small group of six hens in your backyard. That's like 95,000 calories. But more importantly, three egg omelets for breakfast for you for the entire year, plus 30 eggs to give away. So you've got breakfast handled. You build the coupon run or you get somebody to build it, get the feed and water, go to Craigslist or a feed store, buy the laying hens. And in just a couple of weeks, egg production is happening. You can have breakfast handled for a long time, right? So animal products are a lot more calorically efficient and also nutritionally dense.
The other thing about Backyard Food Production is that the most difficult macronutrient to produce is fat. So if you think about it in a garden, there are no fatty vegetables, no eggplant or green beans, none of that has any fat in it. Very Spartan diet. The next most difficult is protein. And you start getting into your beans, legumes and things like that, and you get some protein. The easiest thing to produce is going to be carbohydrates. Your potatoes, your squashes, your carrots and beets. And then there is forage fiber everywhere. There's all kinds of greens everywhere. You don't even need to garden. There's probably something wild all around you that you didn't realize. But animal products are by far the best way to produce protein and fat, which are the most difficult macro nutrients.
Justine Reichman: And I'm thinking about your protein, I'm wondering looking at my garden as I look out my window and I'm like, how's that gonna look?
Marjory Wildcraft: You can have a small coupon run in about the size of a parking spot, even smaller. I also really recommend a small home rabbitry with one buck and three breeding does. And again, you're talking about like 120 square feet, not that much. Another thing that's super important about the rabbits and the chickens, and I have friends who are vegans that still have livestock even though they don't choose to eat them. It's for nutrient cycling. The animals produce the best fertilizers, and you need to think about nutrient cycling. So all your weeds in your garden go to feed the rabbits in addition to some other food, and they create rabbit pellets, and then you're using that to either make warm composting or just applying directly to the garden or composting it. You really need to have this nutrient cycling going on, which is why that three part system at backyardfoodproduction.com. So those of you who have a business, you really have to. I mean, sometimes I hate myself, but you have to promote your business.
Justine Reichman: After being an electrical engineer, going into real estate and kicking this off, when you originally did this, what was it like for you? Because you came from a very different environment to become a business owner and create something that was mission driven and impact driven, how did you make that transition?
“You can have the greatest product in the world, but if you don't know how to market it and sell it, it ain't going anywhere.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Marjory Wildcraft: Think about the sun and the moon, and you think about good, and you think about evil, and you think about engineers, and you think about marketers. I think we could off all the marketers on the planet. We'd be better off along with the lawyers. I hated marketing, right? And I thought I knew a lot about marketing because we've all been marketed to our entire lives. Turns out that I didn't know anything about marketing. And if you're in business, you had better take some marketing classes, workshops, and courses. I mean, I've done so many marketing classes, and that's the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business. So it comes down to marketing. It really does marketing because you can have the greatest product in the world, and if you don't know how to market and sell it, it ain't going anywhere. People always approach me like, because I've got a decent size following, not anything too huge, but they're like, hey, I've got this great product. Could you sell it? I get hit up all the time because marketing and sales is the toughest part. Usually in big corporations, if you see the CEO, they did not come up through manufacturing, they did not come up through accounting, they did not come up through engineering, they came up through marketing, right?
Justine Reichman: As we wrap this up, and I feel like there's been so much, it's been very content heavy, a lot of different things that people can do. If we just wanted to break it down, and you're talking specifically to one of our guests and they said, can you give me the three things I got to do to kick this off, what would that be?
Marjory Wildcraft: Well, first of all, I would say, set your intention. You say, I really want to grow food. And I'll tell you a quick story about this. I know we're running out of time, but I do want to say this. So I always get this question about having an open mind and an open heart, and the universe will, and you can use God or whatever your particular religion is, but I like the universe. We're here. It will help you, it will guide you, but you have to keep an open heart and an open mind. So I've had this question of like, how can I help people to grow more food in apartments and condominiums? And then one day, my teenage son, we found out he had been growing (inaudible) in his closet, which was not cool. So the magic mushrooms, right? So we dealt without his parents. But then I'm thinking, you can grow mushrooms in a closet? So the universe brought me the answer to one of the questions I had. It's like, oh, you can grow mushrooms in an apartment or a condominium. Others are like, they're pretty substantial. It's not just like some leafy greens. So open your heart and open your mind. And you ask a question very sincerely, and the universe will answer you. You just have to be paying attention and realize it's not going to be anything that you've already thought about, because you would already be doing that if you'd have thought about it. So that's my first advice. Set an intention, open up your heart and mind that you'll get it answered.
The other is, of course, to go to backyardfoodproduction.com. As a free webinar, even if you have no experience, you're older, you're out of shape, I'll show you how to grow food. It's mostly targeted toward a backyard, but we also do cover the apartment and condominium series. And the other thing I would say is get started today, because it's happening really, really fast. I mean, there's nothing else more important. You don't need to do Facebook and forget that Netflix thing. Get focused on this right away. Buy some backup food supplies. Start getting your supplies together to get a garden going. Or if you're going to do chickens, hens or whatever, do it right now. For example, here in the United States, the US government has to refinance $9.2 trillion this year. It's the biggest year they've ever had to do it. Most of it, 70% of it has to be done before June. They're having problems in the bond market. Nobody's buying those bonds. We have a currency crisis happening right now. All of our banks are completely bankrupt, they're just keeping them afloat. The Federal Reserve, which is the backstop to the banks is completely bankrupt. And then the US government, which is a backstop to the Federal Reserve, is completely bankrupt. Roy Rogers says, you go bankrupt slowly until it happens all at once. And we're very close to the happening all at once. So I just really want to encourage you, you don't have to pay attention to me, but start growing some food because it will help your life tremendously.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. I know that it's always great for me to talk to folks like yourselves who are creating change, having an impact in the world, and really very mission driven because that's what drives me. And I know that our listeners, the founders and the researchers that are tuning in today and tune into Essential ingredients rely on this kind of information, whether they do it completely or they use it for inspiration to innovate in their own way. It's really inspiring so I really appreciate you sharing that with us. I want to just thank our guests for tuning in. It's a family. It's a community. I feel like these are my friends that tune in each week because they know that we're going to have somebody great like yourself on to share information so we can also make great changes, so thank you to our guests. Thank you to you for tuning in and joining me in this conversation. For those folks that want to learn more, what's the best website to go to?
Marjory Wildcraft: backyardfoodproduction.com.
Justine Reichman: And if anybody wants to connect directly with you, maybe they have a couple questions, or maybe they want to innovate and they want to hear more about your experience, what's the best way to connect with you?
“The foundation to everything is backyard food production.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Marjory Wildcraft: Via email at Marjory, M-A-R-J-O-R-Y, number 3, marjory3@proton.me. And yeah, I'm getting a lot of people reaching out that way. We have a lot of really great projects going on, but the key to it, and the foundation to everything is Backyard Food Production.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Thanks so much.
