GRS Pickard | Jared Pickard

My guest on the podcast is Jared Pickard. Jared and his wife Velisa have one of the only biodynamic farms in the country. Be Here Farm + Nature is a Demeter Certified Biodynamic farm located at 2200′ elevation on the peak of Spring Mountain, Sonoma, CA, just outside the town of Saint Helena. They grow over 300 unique varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers which are utilized in their two product lines: artisanal food products and holistic skincare.

Jared shares how his journey has taken him from Wall Street to farming and occasionally making his own cheese. He discusses how observing his older brother drop 100 lbs with a Chek Practitioner not only got Jared curious but changed the trajectory of his life.

We talk about work, Following your passion, being a beginner, working with your spouse, and how sometimes working “in ” is more important depending on what’s happening in your life than working “out”.

There’s something really unique and special about an East Coast Wall Street guy who talks farming without even plowing the ground.


Listen to the episode here:


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Key Topics:

Jared Pickard – Organic Skin Nutrition

Welcome to the show. My guest is Jared Pickard. He was a Wall Street guy. He and his brother were both there and he was watching his brother systematically lose all this weight. It was close to 100 pounds with a CHEK practitioner, Paul Chek, who’s been on the podcast. It triggered a switch into Jared to go Hawaii. He started doing his own practice which led him fast forward to him and his wife, Velisa, having a farm in Sonoma, the Be Here Farm + Nature, which is truly one of the only biodynamic farms in the country. 0% of the farms in the country are genuinely biodynamic.

We talk about being an apprentice, learning something new, following your passions, what it feels to be healthy, to know the difference, and his practices now. They have a family and they work together. He has a daughter. I respect his approach to life and living, his work ethic, and his hopes for the future for all of us in our food and our farming practices. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

I want to dive right in because I want to get into the skincare, entrepreneurship aspect, and the idea of trying to create businesses because it’s romantic to create this idea of creating a business, especially around things that are sustainable or responsible. Because this is where it’s all moving to, but then there are realities to it as well.

I want to get into all those aspects but I want to start with you. A lot of us are in places that either is not working for us or we know inside that it could be better. Maybe we weren’t raised in an environment to understand how to do it or we don’t have access to people or friends that are in the changes that we want to make.

Your story besides your business is as equally as compelling because you started down one road in life. Through observing your brother, you decided to make a life change. I even find it more fascinating that you’re able to do it with your partner. If you could walk me through where you were, how you’re feeling about that, and what you saw that sparked this idea that maybe you could make these changes, what are the things that you implemented, and then we’ll go from there.

There’s so much there. This was all personal. The idea that there’s a particular ethos woven into our business model is not exactly how it came to be. It was more through the personal side. We underwent personal transformations which then led to a place where we started pursuing things we were passionate about. The idea that we could develop a business that would allow us to do what we were passionate about was a counterculture to the general idea of being a businessman, working long hours, slaving hard, and then kicking back with a beer on the weekend and letting loose. That’s where I was.

I was in New York City and these ideas were coming to me. Ideas, meaning new ideas on movement or mindfulness or food quality and sourcing. Incorporating these things into my life, all of a sudden there was a huge return on investment. I was getting a lot of positive feedback from these new things in my life. They’re making me feel incredible. They were enhancing my life in broad-spectrum ways like eating better, made me digest better, feel better, sleep better, work better, and work out better. It was a positive feedback loop but they were a small section of my day. I was at work all day. I was working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

The running joke is you’re in Topanga, which is a sophisticated hippie Canyon. People think, “You must be from there,” but that’s not the case. You were raised on the East Coast. It feels like you did probably what you thought you’re supposed to and you end up on the floor of the exchange which is high stress, long hours, and probably not tons of conversation about, “How’s your mindfulness practice going?” Or things like that. Do you have a voice inside of you going, “There’s got to be more to life than not feeling great.” Can you even remember what was going inside of you? Were you just full go and not even thinking about it?

Initially, it was the vanity of, “I want to lose weight.” It wasn’t like, “I want to have a holistic lifestyle.” It was definitely like, “I’m looking pretty swollen.” Certainly somewhere in my head, I must have known that drinking a lot of alcohol was not doing me well. I was staying out late on weekends and living in general New York City lifestyle.

What happened to my brother is he started seeing what you would call a holistic life coach, specifically a CHEK practitioner. When my brother, after however many months or even a year, lost over 100 pounds and visually transformed from a morbidly obese person into starting to look like an athletic person, I said, “Let me get involved a little bit,” but I didn’t know what I was getting into.

Was the doctor like, “You better make some changes.”

Probably, but nothing clicked until he had a similar experience. One of his friends had worked with the same CHEK practitioner and underwent the physical transformation. One of his friends was a big party animal type caricature of himself for about a decade of his life. They found a different way of being and my brother witnessed that.

I’ll jump back to me because everybody probably experienced the same thing. We went there looking to lose a few pounds, and then thankfully we were exposed to a holistic approach on how to do that in a sustainable way. Because we had had the same experience as anyone of dieting and failing and all various other reasons why we couldn’t lose weight over time. One of them for me was I was eating a pint of ice cream every night. There are various reasons why, we each had our reasons, but working with someone was extremely helpful.

There are many free online resources, people like you, podcasts, videos, and then minimal subscriptions, all the way up to the idea of hiring a coach to work with you one-on-one, which I was fortunate to have done at that time. All sorts of new ideas were presented at once, some of which I rejected outright and had a hard time understanding, but eventually over time, what happens is something works. You’re getting positive feedback from something. All of a sudden, you’re looking in the mirror and you’re standing taller or the color of your skin is a little different than it used to be, you feel more vital, and you’re sharper at work. You start getting that positive feedback, and then when you start recognizing those positive things, you can compare them to some of the negative feelings that you couldn’t notice.

I was garbage disposal at that time. I was putting anything in. My general state of feeling and being was in retrospect and neutral. Nowadays if I were to go to a college reunion and eat or drink indiscriminately, which I don’t do, I would feel sick probably for a couple of days. I travel with my food and maybe have a hard cider or glass of wine or something. It’s garbage in, garbage out, which is an accounting term. How I recall it is that once I started doing these positive things in my life, all of a sudden, I desperately was attracted to them.

[bctt tweet=”What sounds like the effort is actually fun.”]

For people reading, for someone to call themselves a CHEK practitioner, you’re as close to being a doctor without going to medical school pretty much. It is a rigorous program. Paul Chek makes it difficult to be considered and qualified as a CHEK practitioner. These are informed people. What’s strange about it is sometimes, in certain ways, especially you’re new to this, all of this conversation is almost harder.

I’d love to know some of the things that you said that you initially rejected because you’re like, “Wait a minute…” It’s many layers that they want to talk about because it is our entire organism. That’s the thing, we try to drill it down to food and nutrition, but it’s our sleep, breathing, and how far forward we’re holding our heads. They have many details. You also started with somebody informed which in ways you could be more successful in the long run, but it would be harder to get started.

The one that jumped out at me was one time, I remember him saying something like, “When you want to lose the weight, you will.” I’m like, “You don’t think I want to lose this weight? I’ve been working on losing this weight since it appeared.” He was like, “No. Unconsciously somewhere, you hold some belief that there’s some benefit or protection or there’s some value or you’re not ready to let go of it.” I’m sitting there leaning against the wall in a squat position holding onto something while he’s telling me it.

I’ve worked with Paul directly. I’ve had exposure to other CHEK practitioners and each one’s kind of different. This one was in New York City and is in the basement of this building with no windows, basement-y smell, and he was blasting Rammstein. I’m not sure if you know the German hard rocker. He had a real thing for Rammstein. This was an intense dungeon place.

You thought you’re going to go there to kick your ass, but then all of a sudden, after he kicked your ass and you’re lying there totally depleted, he starts introducing me to these different concepts. Some of them were seeds. They hit me and weeks, months later, all of a sudden, I’d find myself getting a guided meditation for the first time. That was something that I would put on my list of life-changing moments. From that moment on, mindfulness practice was a total constant home base for me.

The thing that I rejected was that kind of concept. I remember thinking, “What do you mean? All I want to do is lose this weight.” Years ago, for the first time ever, my whole-body weight vanished off of it over weeks. I put on several pounds of lean muscle and lost 5% or 6% of body fat over the same period. Nothing changed about my routine too much. Although I will give credit to our friend Joe DiStefano because right at that moment, I went to Runga retreat. It happened to be held right on Spring Mountain where we live. I heard about it and I couldn’t resist. Everything clicked for me all this right moment, but a week before that, finally I understood that original comment about, “When you really want to lose the weight, you will.”

I was in a session with a NET practitioner, Neuro Emotional Technique for those who are unfamiliar. In a real short nutshell, it uses muscle testing and a series of questions and suggestive emotions to uncover beliefs that you hold in your body and unconscious. If you find it and source it back to an original event where you can relive that moment and then clear the energy through some acupressure points, and then come back to the present moment. Real muscle test yourself and identify that your body is no longer “failing or passing” on that emotion or belief.

I had this crick in my neck and I woke up with it. I had otherwise been spot on for weeks, diet, exercise, movement, relaxation, painting, breathwork, family, business, everything was feeling great, and then I wake up with this crick in my neck. I recognize that as a pattern. I recognized, “Every time I’m feeling right on track, I have some sort of thing. My back or my neck feels out of alignment.” It plateaus me enough where I won’t feel like working out that much for a week or two. I’ll feel like lying around a lot resting, working in, and stuff like that. It plateaus me.

I start back on my workout program but everything has been diminished in terms of where I was. I felt like that for years. I was at NET and I said, “There’s an emotional aspect to this neck thing because I woke up like this. Maybe I slept on it funny, but I feel this whole plateau syndrome.” I’m sharing a personal story now. We went into it and the emotion was not trusting my body. Since I know the practice, I originally went to an original event, but then he starts muscle testing. He’s like, “0 to 10. 0 to 5 to 10. H10.” I’m like, “Yup, I’m right there in the room. I know exactly where we are.”

I was waiting before a football game in my girdle, which is the pads underneath your football pants and above your underwear, but pretty much underwear, otherwise naked. I’m one of a handful of fat kids on the team and on the other team with the referees, our fathers, and the coaches of the team weighing us in to see if we’re too heavy or not to play in the game that day. Because at that age, kids grow faster and they don’t want a 6’0″ kid killing 4’0″ kids, but it was generally reserved for overweight kids. Typically, I wasn’t this giant monster-type kid.

The emotional reality of a 10-year-old standing there wondering. I was a starter and one of the captains on the team. I felt like in a position of leadership and now I’ve may or may not be able to play in this game that I’m a leader on the team of. I’m going to let down my team, my coaches, and my dad. I was getting no holistic guidance on how to have a healthy body at this time.

GRS Pickard | Jared Pickard

Jared Pickard – When you’re having fun, you’re capable of learning and being open to new ideas in many more ways.

To me, it was a crapshoot. It’s like, “Is my body going to make the weight this week? Is it going to be okay?” From that moment, going through my mind lying there on the table clearing this, I can remember a whole arc of my life all the way through this major back injury in college. This whole arc of my life not trusting my body and these little injuries derailing my path.

After that NET experience, I went back to my normal routine, which interestingly enough didn’t involve a Runga experience the next week, which reminded me of many things that I’ve been working on for years but never seem to click for me fully. All of a sudden, my body shape changed completely. I lost a lot of body weight. Fifteen pounds on the scale, but I was gaining muscle during that period as well from a subconscious memory release basically.

What type of things clicked during the Runga session?

I was twelve years into a deep, personal journey of trying to arrange my entire life so that it was in line with my values around health and wellness. For me, that means I was eating mostly vegetables grown on our biodynamic farm and animals sourced from pasture-raised and humanely raised regenerative farms, and pretty much nothing else. I wasn’t eating any grains or legumes for many years at this point. I am against processed food of any kind. Definitely, no gluten if there was grain. No sugar or dairy except raw butter for a decade almost. I was eating an extremely clean diet. I was moving, working out, working in, all spectrums of movement. I was practicing meditation. I had deep spiritual practices. I was expressing myself through art. I was professionally engaged.

I felt like I was doing all these things and yet it wasn’t clicking, even though I was doing the things that I felt were required for it. All of a sudden, after this experience, it clicked on its own. I had these things in place. The only thing holding it back was this quivering internal unconscious belief that I wasn’t even aware of. Going back to age 10 in this case.

This might sound woo-woo to some of your readers, but when I was able to clear it, I didn’t change anything else. All of a sudden, the physical body caught up to me instantly to where I felt like I should have already been based on my efforts in reality. In my subconscious, I wasn’t there. That’s why I said it goes back to when that trainer first told me, “When you are ready and want to lose it, you will.” I was like, “He was right. It was something inside my head because I didn’t change my routine at all.”

It’s hard though because many of us have things that happen throughout our lives that can create a pattern or a trigger or something that lives within us that then informs many of the other things we do unless we have the opportunity to do that excavation. Life is busy and stressful and it’s hard to get those moments. To realize, “Can you go back to a time and rework it and come through it,” is fortunate that you were able to do that but you’ve also been doing a ton of work.

The other thing that you said that feels important to put more power into though is when you’re working with a CHEK practitioner, there’s a sense of like, “If I wanted to become stronger, I would do X. If I wanted to become leaner, I would do Y. If I needed to become more flexible, I could do this practice over here.”

A lot of people feel beholden to the state that they’re in and they don’t even know how to begin to unwind the thread and trust that they could understand their body or how to navigate out of it and things like that. I appreciate the amount of effort because what you’re reminding me and anyone reading is that it’s always about paying attention and then being willing to follow through on how you’ve built an entire practice around it.

I’m on the downhill side of this climb. There’s a mountain that you climb, and then all of a sudden, you’re going down the front side of it. What I mean by that is what sounds like the effort is actually fun. These are things I’m now passionate about and I do them for my enjoyment and in general for my well-being. At first, I wanted to have more enjoyment and more well-being. My present-day self even recognizes that the word want implies lack, like, “I lack for nothing, I want for nothing.” I wouldn’t have even have approached it from wanting more of that but I could understand the perspective being like, “I wish my life somewhere different.”

[bctt tweet=”To feel empowered, get yourself and your kids out in nature.”]

My suggestion if I put a share with my friends and family who are seeking advice on this is about making it be something that you genuinely truly enjoy and ideally outdoors. Don’t do it in the traditional way that hasn’t worked for you. Don’t make it about the diet and the workout routine. For my wife and I, one of the first real discoveries was hiking, which to a non-nature person sounds boring or scary but it’s as simple as walking. Everybody knows how to walk.

There are peer-reviewed scientific benefits to going on that walk out in nature. The best conversations, spiritual insights, and everything come on hikes. It’s a syndrome of when people have those good ideas in the shower. It allows you to transition your state of being and you’re moving, breathing, sweating, detoxing, and interacting with beings of nature. You’re in the electromagnetic fields and the general essence of these living beings. The whole thing is a fantastic first step. Go walking outside in nature.

Buying ingredients and cooking them yourselves would be another first step in a way that is fun for you. Taking ownership over these tiny little things that can be fun, making it fun, and then getting positive feedback from them. Once you’ve done it, you can live off of the investment. You’ve already paid the principal and now you’re going to start getting a return on it. You’re going to start having more energy, more desire to do new things. It’s going to be self-perpetuating. Lean into the things that are super fun because when you’re having fun, you’re capable of learning and being open to new ideas in many more ways. More traditionally, you’re like, “I got to go beat up myself.” “I got to go beat up in the gym.” “I got to go kick my butt from the hard weekend.”

The brilliance of the working out, working in concept is that working out, for those who aren’t familiar, are activities where you expend more energy than you generate, and working in are activities where you generate more energy than you expend. If you’re in a state of general depletion, there’s an argument that maybe for 3 to 6 months, you shouldn’t work out at all but you should work in and develop a huge amount of energy reserves. Believe me, try working out on those energy reserves and you’re going to have more gains and benefits. That’s what I did and I’ve done it multiple times in many years. I’ve gone through a 3 to a 6-month period where I exclusively worked in.

For those who struggle with weight gain or loss, I most accelerate my weight loss during periods of no working out, exclusively working in. Examples of that are lying on the floor and meditating, slow walking in nature, Tai Chi, Qigong, truly restorative yoga, a lot of yoga practices are working out, and many more examples. Those things accelerated my weight loss, which has been my issue over my life and that’s why I’m sharing, but counterintuitive.

One of the first times I heard that was from Paul Chek many years ago. My husband is an active person and he’s also emotional. Paul would say, “Your lower chakras are more from your emotion. It goes on you. On Laird, they’re getting taxed all the time. If I’m taking you from there and then I’m bringing you into the weight room, and then we’re going to do legs and hammer you down even more, you’re not considering the taxation that’s on your body just being who you are as a person.” We’re thinking, “That’s interesting.”

This idea of working in and doing the things like, “When is it time to nurture ourselves towards this vitality?” It isn’t about just punishing yourself and slogging it out in a gym towards good health. When you start to tap into that vitality, it’s going to be more important for me to be still, quiet, and nurture myself. “I’ve got the energy this time of the year,” or the season or whatever. “I can go for a little bit more.”

A lot of people don’t go far enough into the questions about these practices to even touch on to those ideas. Sometimes less is more. The warmth of things, the slowness of things, the nurturing of things is equally or sometimes more powerful. I appreciate that point. How long did you stay in New York? Because at some point, for most people, this living would run into a conflict living.

Step one is recognizing, “I’m at work all day long and then I go to the basement of this guy’s gym.” Sometimes at 5:00, I do it before work, either right before or right after. Then I’d go to the butcher shop and go to the market. I’d get some food and then I’d go home. I’d cook for two hours and then I’d write a blog post about it and take photos. I was super passionate about that stuff happening in the last few hours of the day and then I’d get to work.

I’ll share this one. My old boss, I’m sure he doesn’t listen to my podcast, but he would hate to know that I would then spend most of my day looking up recipes because there’s a lot of downtime on the floor of the stock exchange. Certain moments have a lot of fast-paced action, and then it could be hours where you see people watching Rocky or the Godfather at the next company. I would spend that time watching full-length feature films. I would spend that time looking at recipes and researching farming and growing practices. I was becoming enthralled by it.

The first step was I recognized that there was this way that I was enjoying being and yet it was truncated into a few hours in the day, “How could I possibly like these farmers in this book? How can I possibly spend most of the day doing the things that I thought I wanted to be doing?” That was the desire to change. I was able to intellectualize it at the time by saying, “If I do these practices like meditation and movement, I can buffer myself.”

I recognize that yes, the stock exchange and the general lifestyle was a negative environment and stew that I was steeping it, but I was in this little bubble that I had created where my lifestyle and my new practices were protecting me from. Pretty soon I realized that if you’re in a stew, you’re in a stew so I had to get out. We then realized the vision for the project for the first time, which was we knew that it was going to be based on regenerative agriculture. At the time, we probably would have said organic farming. The manner in which we produced the food goes far beyond organic standards. I’m not particularly an advocate for organic as a standard but at the time, we would have said that.

Can you explain that? Because a lot of times, people think there are only 1 or 2 kinds of organic in farming and now you have the regenerative. We’ve been talking a lot about agroforestry where things are cooperating. Laird has been interested in that a lot. As you’re learning, how do you get the vision on, “I see a big difference.” What are the specific differences between organic and regenerative?

GRS Pickard | Jared Pickard

Jared Pickard – The goal of regenerative systems is to support all levels of life. The more life, the better.

Once we decided that we’d be developing a land-based project that this is the foundation, it was known that we would be living there and that it would be integrated much with our personal life. That’s when we took on together an apprenticeship at a resort in Tennessee called Blackberry Farm, which has a farm and a large acreage but it’s a relation to a resort. The son of the founder, the proprietor at the time, was a man named Sam Beall who has since passed away. He was a visionary icon in hospitality and how hospitality can integrate into land stewardship and regenerative agriculture.

For one year, I got to shadow him and work amongst his entire executive team. We both did that and then we both worked in every department between the two of us. She was a concierge, I was a housekeeper. I was a breakfast cook, she was in HR and accounting. I was in engineering, on the farm, and in guest relations, and carrying bags. We did a comprehensive top to bottom year-long apprenticeship there once we had the vision for our hospitality project. I approached him knowing, having researched him, of his own experience as an apprentice. In his own time, he gained knowledge through a series of apprenticeships. I resonated with him on that angle. I’m a big believer in apprenticeships as a means for learning and expanding.

What was natural for you and what was hard in the apprenticeship?

My experience is that when you’re doing something that you’re extremely passionate about, it’s like liquid. I could have transitioned to any of those departments and I felt like I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing. If I could carry that bag and place it down in a way that was orderly and convenient for the person. If I could mention something about the room as I was leaving or improve their stay, I wasn’t approaching it from the typical perspective of a bag handler. I was thinking “I own this resort. How can we do this in a way that maximizes this guest’s experience?”

I learned so much about service there, serving people, and how to try to please people because you’re on a short vacation. It’s not like real life. You have a short amount of time to try to make them as happy as possible. If there are mess-ups and slip-ups, you regret it. It’s not like regular life where crap happens. They’re paying a lot of money to be there and you want everything to go perfect. It’s almost like you’re acting and a fake person, but you’re trying your best to be authentic at the same time. It’s about creating an experience.

I’m thinking about it and I’m curious how are the two of you getting along as a couple? Because you’re busting your ass and you’re tired. You’re doing a lot of the input. There’s learning but it’s a lot out. A lot of people will not put this kind of effort. I understand that you have the vision and I appreciate that. I am curious how do you then come together as a couple and nurture your relationship when you’re both out there taking care of everybody, doing all these new and different things, learning, and giving a lot of output? How did you keep yourselves together?

I don’t think I have an answer to that question. Any challenges and there have been many, seem to push us to a new level of being there for each other. Somebody described it to me that she’s my muse and I understand that because I feel like I could do anything as long as she’s there. I would do anything to make things right for her and I feel that she would do the same for me. It’s just a matter of doing the best we can. It’s so personal. I don’t think that having the business changes for me the difficulty of having a relationship and raising a child.

In particular, in today’s age with an alternative ethos around a variety of things, meaning we have opted out of normal food supply chains and various things that sound extreme almost, but for us, we’re passionate about it. It comes easily and it’s also personal. That’s how we want to be. The fact that we have a business, we get to do it from home. We get to be together as much or as little as we want, but there’s not this classic tension that I remember from my childhood that my dad was working super long hours, would come home tired, and had to commute far distances to make his career work.

The fact that most of the day is spent on a piece of land and out in nature or many times in the office, but still, the fact that home gets to be a centerpiece even of work conversations. All the various ways you could make a living and raise a family probably all have complex challenges that come along with them. We feel partners in the journey. I don’t have an answer outside of the fact that I feel lucky to have a partner in the journey.

It’s beautiful but it is unusual when you can see couples that can individually be heading in the same direction.

Otherwise, the whole house of cards crumbles. There’s more motivation towards working things in a positive direction. We have a daughter, a business, a farm, and a nature. It seems like we’re highly motivated to collaborate towards positive communication and solutions, and thankfully, we tend to.

That is also on some level common sense because you see certain people in certain dynamics and you think none of that behavior is going to end in a good place. It is interesting. I appreciate that you’re able to do that. Especially when you have challenges, it’s shifting gears. Like fire damage, now you have the stress of this and you’re both going through it.

It’s challenging. The odd thing is the amount of silver linings that have been presented with the challenges. Almost in lockstep, it’s weird. I’m not a big believer in labeling things as good or bad in the immediate sense. I’m trying to go with the flow, to be honest, and pivot in the direction of the flow.

Not many people can do it so I appreciate that. Paul connected us and you sent me the most beautiful skin serum that I used. I’m particular like every female on the planet about what I put on my skin. There’s a lot of care that goes into this product. I read all the literature and it was like, “Anyone could probably make this at home.” You said that in your own literature.

I do enjoy teaching people how to make stuff like this. You could grow grapes in your backyard and crush it into wine, but somebody makes a better wine out there probably. You could make it but we’re doing it at a particular quality level that people are reacting to as well. The general gist of how we make it, if time allows, first, it is answered by a question which we didn’t answer, which is, “How are farming styles different?” Because we grow our ingredients. The manner in which we grow them is part of the answer to that question. 1% of our farmland is certified organic. That’s a small percentage but there’s a lot of us farmland. Maybe you’re saying, “But Jared, there are millions of acres of farmland.”

That’s also true but the thing is that, as organic grew in popularity from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and took off in the ’70s, thanks to the hippies, it then got co-opted. By the time it gets codified into USDA certified organic in the early ’90s, it’s now just a list of things to spray or not spray on the farm. It’s lost the ethos that was so popular in the ’70s around the beginning of the sustainability movement, which they would have called appropriate technologies like solar or composting toilets.

This is the beginning of the biological agroforestry movements. There are some universities in California that are focusing on it. It’s the beginning of hippie communes and permaculture communes that are people are living off the land off of these philosophies. It had a deep ethos around soil health, biodiversity, farmworker health, nutrient density, and quality so that the end consumer is getting something worthwhile. It has been a complete downward slope from World War I until the present day in terms of the quality of food that our food system produces.

The food system is 99% and I’m about to argue that it’s more. As that 99% looked towards organic, it’s like, “They got a couple of billion sales this year.” Now they codify it, they make it into the USDA organic, they stripped it down to the bare minimum, they eliminate the broader ethos, and we now have industrial monoculture organic which is arguably maybe 99% of that 1%. It’s at least 80% but it might be as high as 99%. There is almost no mom and pop organic farms. Everyone knows of them but statistically speaking, on the whole, there’s almost zero of them across the country at this point. That’s what you’re imagining when you think of the word organic.

You go to the grocery store and you think, “I want to eat healthily. I want to get the best thing. I’m going to get organic because I’ve heard that’s the best.” If you’re coming from this industrial system, which let’s say 90% some odd percent of it is, then it’s better in certain ways because there were less noxious chemicals used to grow it. Those types of systems don’t produce nutrient-dense foods of high quality because foods of high quality are coming from systems that are not exactly the wild but at least more in line with natural rhythms.

The wild is where you find the most nutrient-dense foods, the superfoods. Those foods are growing on their own in symbiosis with plant communities that they’ve co-evolved with. Interacting with insects and birds in various ways, including bacteria and fungi, the atmosphere of the water, and the sun, this whole symphonic action. There’s no irrigation or manipulation. There are no chemicals and growth hormones. They have to struggle intensely to develop their fruits, leaves, flowers, and stuff. That intense struggle of having to fight off all the insects, turn rocks into essential oils, and all the various things that they do is why they’re beneficial to us because they had to go through that.

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Plants are grown in huge monocultures where the soil is treated as dirt. It’s a lifeless substrate where you pluck cash crops into that are fed IVs of a few macronutrients that are synthetically produced through huge fossil fuel and energy expenditures. When you do that, those plants don’t have to struggle in that same way. They’ve figured out how to make them grow big, fast, strong, and look like food, and yet, that lack of struggle and relationship with the soil, the fungus, the bacteria, and all the other critters that are not there because the chemicals kill them. That’s the ecosystem. The whole ecosystem of the farm is what’s healthy. If you have a healthy system, then anything that grows within, all boats rise with the high tide. Everything growing in that system becomes of similar quality.

In the organic system, there are organic pesticides, organic herbicides, organic fungicides, organic rodenticides, and organic fertilizers. Just because it says organic in the front, the important part is the side at the end. That thing wants to kill something. That methodology of industrial agriculture has now been transposed onto organic agriculture.

Our approach falls into the bucket of specifically biodynamic agriculture which under a larger umbrella, you might call regenerative agriculture or various other names that people are tossing around. The goal of regenerative systems, to use that umbrella term, is to support all levels of life. The more life, the better because the more biodiversity, the more soil nutrients and soil life, the more general resiliency of the system, the more insects and predator insects, reptiles, gophers, moles, voles, birds, and owls. The more of everything. That’s the check-in balance that keeps the system whole. the representative of what you find in nature is that there’s a system working.

Regenerative farms are not the same as nature and yet they’re trying their best to learn from the wisdom of nature, act in accordance with the rhythms of nature, and go with the flow. When you work outside of the flow, then you’re using the chemicals, the straight lines, the machines, and the tractors. You’re overcoming so much. The chemical fertilizers are the same things that they use to make gunpowder, TNT, and dynamite.

First of all, it’s extremely violent and associations are violent. Whatever’s going on in the soil to make things pop out of their seeds and grow into plants, it’s combustive and intense that they have to replace it with dynamite. To me, that means, “Let’s have some tense reverence for the magic and this divine gift. Let’s interfere with that as little as possible.” Those are the kinds of things you find, in our case, in an organic farm.

We don’t purchase any chemicals. Everything I’m about to say is true for a lot about enameled farms, and some of it depends. We don’t buy any chemicals including organic ones. We don’t produce much for fertility and growth as systemic health and immunity. We make a variety of homeopathic medicines that are things that we grow or forage in the wild. They’re generally fermented underground and either added to the compost pile, which then of course gets added to the field, or they’re mixed with rainwater and sprayed on either the soil or onto the crops and the atmosphere around the crops. With the addition of the compost, that is the extent of health protocols for the farm.

In addition to the general sense of biodiversity and all the other things I mentioned, once you have that going, we also then don’t disturb it much. We don’t do what is called tilling and if we do, we do it as little and minimally as possible. We don’t even own a tractor. To give you an example of minimally, we have no tractor in the farm at all. The work is generally done by hand and then we have this walk behind little thing that technically is a tiller. The gist of it is that on typical farms, even organic ones, every single time a crop is turned over, the whole field is tilled with this huge machine that uplifts, turns over, and fluffs in, Vitamixes the soil into this fluffy powder. That certainly destroys a lot of the web of life that has taken hold.

Some of these things like fungi probably regenerate and start growing and come back to life pretty effectively. Even worms can be cut up and regenerated. The approach on our farm is to do that as little as possible. It’s to grow as many things as possible to support biodiversity. To have those things decompose down to the ground, we use forest litter decomposing down to the ground and then leaving the ground covered with those either dead and decomposing things or living growing things, and basically to use the homeopathic medicines as needed.

0.002% of US farmland is certified. The overwhelming majority of that farmland is dedicated to a single crop, which is wine grapes. It’s most popular in wine. There are few farms and we’re starting to learn more and more of them because it’s inspiring to meet other biodynamic farms that are growing a large diversity of things.

There are few places where people are growing this diversity of medicinal and edible plants in this exact way, which the whole goal is if I didn’t describe everything I just described and described why we’re trying to do it, there’s a real purity to that. Organic fertilizer is made from factory-farmed animals, almost exclusively from non-organic origins. That’s the most common fertilizer. Blood meal, bone meal, feathered meal, you can’t get them from Jo’s Pasture Chicken checker in the corner. It doesn’t have enough feathers.

Those come from the industrial factory farming system and they somehow magically get transformed into an organic certified product. That is a clever and resourceful use of a waste stream that exists in this country. The waste stream shouldn’t exist, so we’re solving the wrong problem. Animals shouldn’t be raised in that way and yet they are. It’s resourceful, great, affordable, and certified organic which allows people to use it on organic farms.

On our farm, the compost is made out of grass-fed cow manure. These are cows who are living outside expressing their natural tendencies, living life as they’re supposed to, and somebody is picking up the poop behind them which is digested grass. Vegans and people who care about cruelty-free, etc., might be interested in biodynamics because they are probably not aware that organic is sourcing fertilizer in this way.

There’s probably a lot of arguments why it’s great that they are, but from optimizing your health and well-being, a lot of people make choices about being vegan that relate to animal welfare, to begin with. We don’t support them for that exact. We don’t support factory farming at all, including through the purchase of fertilizers, which might be one of their highest-grossing products for all I know more than meat even.

There’s a lot of organic farms that choose to go beyond the bare minimum and probably source grass-fed cow manure and make their compost. You have all regenerative practices and they’re called organic because it’s a common label. I’m not saying that organic farms are wholesale bad. I’m saying that the industry has used the name to achieve the bare minimum. Some of the organic out there is not particularly impressive in terms of its treatment of the land, the crops themselves, the local wildlife, watersheds, the farmworkers, or the end-user, the eater because you’re getting less quality product.

There’s a study that I’ve been pointing people towards called the Real Food Campaign. They’ve been testing the nutrient density of various crops. I’ve been talking with one of the founders about testing some of our more medicinal plants because they’re testing spinach, carrots, and tomatoes, more standard crops.

They took 600 samples of carrots from across the country and grown in various ways, grocery stores, farmers markets, wherever. They wanted to test the amount of polyphenols present in the carrot, from the lowest-performing carrot to the highest performing carrot. I’d be curious to know your answer, what do you think the percentage variance difference is between the worst-performing carrots? It had X polyphenols and this guy had Y polyphenols, which is how much percent more?

9% more.

That’s one of the lowest guesses I’ve ever gotten. Just a fun fact.

I was thinking maybe showing how close that is.

GRS Pickard | Jared Pickard

Jared Pickard – Foods of high quality come from systems that are not exactly the wild but at least more in line with natural rhythms.

It’s a logical guess because you’re thinking, “How different could these carrots be? How many more polyphenols could they possibly have?”

If you’re growing the carrot and then other carrots, I’ll say 93% difference. If you say to me all the organic carrots and then the rest of everybody else, just a few percentages.

They tested from wherever. There were some biodynamic participants. In various crops, there were hydroponic participants. There’s every kind of farming style you could imagine because there are 600 different farms that they selected from. The answer is 20,000% variance. That’s the difference in the amount of polyphenols present in the worst-performing carrot. You’d have to eat 200 of them to equal the amount of polyphenols in one carrot. Spinach was 35,000% for antioxidants. It was 350 pieces of spinach to equal the antioxidants present in one. Yes, you can make this product with those ingredients but there are potentially tens of thousands of percent more of what you’re seeking out of that product because of the manner in which we grew it.

Do you find when you eat stuff that is nutrient-dense, you don’t need that much of it?

That’s a fact. 350 pieces of lettuce less.

I want people to know that your serum is available for them because I like nice things. Share with people where they can find and get ahold of it.

First of all, we love direct communication and people are more than welcome to reach out to us at BeHereFarm.com. We do have deep relationships with a lot of our clients. We spend a lot of time talking offline about how they can get the most out of things. Every new person who purchases the product gets an invitation to email me at that email, set up a Zoom, have a free video consultation, and even our guided facial relaxation if that’s something they’re interested in. We do a bunch of those and they’re awesome.

Besides emailing me and geeking out on this stuff, it’s first launched on SunPotion.com and they’re one of our favorite brands. They have an incredible product line. We’re the only product that I’m aware of that they’re selling. They typically don’t sell other people’s products. Their founder, Scott, is passionate about our farm and our brand, and we’ve become good friends. He considers it a big vote of their confidence that he’s doing this. We launched there and that was the first time that anyone was ever able to buy it besides in-person from us at pop-ups and stuff like that in the Napa and Sonoma area.

Now, we’ve also launched on CAPBeauty.com which is an amazing online curator of clean beauty and also wholesome food products. I’ve been looking to them for years as an industry leader in terms of offering products of high quality. The word clean gets thrown around. Organic, regenerate, and all these words mean nothing. To find a place like CAP Beauty, if you go to their website and you click on their brands, which we’re now one of them, there are 40 or 50 max brands that are on there and they’re exceptionally well-curated. You can’t go wrong on there. Just similar ethos in terms of toxicity, cleanliness, and purity.

When you look at clean beauty products in general, you notice that most of them aren’t certified organic. If they were, they would still be facing a lot of the problems that we discussed. There are a lot of lab-derived ingredients that can’t be certified organic and that’s one of the main reasons probably. They’re the same type of ingredients you see in healthy food products like Xanthan Gum and stuff like that being the most benign of the list, but there are thousands of chemicals.

Out of the 1,300 that the EU has banned from cosmetics, there are eleven in the United States that have been banned from cosmetics. It’s the Wild West out there. What we’re offering in the serum is a level of purity that would be almost impossible statistically based on what I described to match, and then a level of potency similarly so. What more could you want other than to know that it’s as potent as possible and as absent as toxicity as you could imagine? Those are the two things that we want out of our food and all products generally. We don’t differentiate what we’re putting on our skin from what we’re putting into our mouths. They’re all edible. All the ingredients in this product are things that could have been in your salad.

I’ve been using it for months now. My whole thing is when I eat it, that’s what I say when I go to put things on my skin. That’s where it’s going. When you talk about the ethos around farming, do you think a greater portion of people is going to be able to pull it off? You’re closer to this information than certainly someone like me. Do you feel that there is a better stride going back to doing it the way that it’s supposed to be done? Is it, at times, like, “A few places are going to do it and a few people are going to have access to it.”

The implications are broad that it’s devastating, a nightmare of an outcome, or we did it, we figured it out, we all came together, and we started doing it in a way that makes sense. On the ground, what’s happening around the world is pretty much a nightmare. On a governmental and philanthropic level from the ’60s till now have been piling money into industrial agriculture to the benefit of, at this point, a handful of companies, organizations, and to the detriment of so much natural wealth.

My whole thing is that I understand that part of it but when people hear things like this, they do want to do something besides how they buy. Where can they go? What can they do? If you go to a farmers’ market, let’s talk about that. Some people go to the farmers’ market twice a week. I go to the Tuesday one and I go to the Saturday one. Does that make a difference?

No, it depends on the farmer’s market, too. The interesting thing is that every single farm is different. There’s no rulebook on farming. It all comes down to connecting to some of these farms and finding one that you resonate with, supporting them, joining their CSA, and getting some freezer space in your garage or a corner of your freezer. Also, buying some larger volumes of meat a couple of times a year if you’re a meat-eater. Supporting these local farms and connecting directly is always the answer.

The next best thing is brands that have done that on your behalf. Sun Potions is a good example. They sourced best-in-class ingredients from around the world. They’re offering 40 or 50 different adaptogenic, herbal tonic products. Laird Superfoods, I’m not in the meetings with you guys, but it seems to me it’d be another example. The fact that your cookie or brownie mix is featuring zucchini as opposed to any of the forms of sugar that you could name is an example of finding a brand that’s making good decisions on your behalf and outsourcing that decision making to them.

If you’re walking around the grocery store or the farmers’ market indiscriminately, at this point, that’s on you because I’m providing you with this information so now you’re empowered with the information. Now you have to apply the lens of mindfulness to your decision-making process. Moment by moment on an individual basis of decision making, you’re reviewing the things that are going into your shopping cart and your kitchen, and that you’re cooking for.

It gets even more complicated if you’re eating out all the time which is common too because you got to ask a lot more questions to stay on top of this. It’s about truly developing a relationship with what’s going into your body, how that works for you, and not allowing it to overwhelm you. It’s the same answer for me on the having fun thing. It’s fun for me at this point to go drive two hours to some weird farm to pick up something or to spend half a day churning our butter for some friends coming over, or something like that. These are things that are fun for me. It’s about finding what is fun for you and how to lean into that as it relates to this topic more generally. You got to make it personal.

Your question to me was like, “What’s the future? How are we going to do it? What are people going to do?” The answer is different on the systemic level and the individual level. Systemically, we need billions of dollars of investment into regenerative ag and there needs to be private individuals and governments. Everybody needs to band together and get that number from 0% up to 5%, 10%, 25%. Interestingly, some places are doing better. 10% of all the biodynamic farmland in the world is in Germany. It’s a pretty interesting stat.

What about them growing their thing in the stores? I saw that one company and it can’t possibly be biodynamic though because it doesn’t consider the whole environment, but they will take the plants and put them in the store. Not only do they have the food that’s available but when the patrons go to the market, they get to experience and see the vegetables growing. They take those, they go in, and replenish that. I did think that was interesting because if people were living in cities and they couldn’t go to the farm, they grow.

In the cities, I highly recommend joining a CSA because you can go to the farmers’ markets but maybe you’re not available to speak or whatever. If you join a CSA, you have this box of weird vegetables that you didn’t even choose showing up at your house every week. They immediately engage you because you don’t want to waste it into, “You got to look up a recipe on kohlrabi.” You’ve never even heard of kohlrabi. First, you had to figure out which one on the list kohlrabi even was, and then you had to cook it for your family.

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CSA is one of the slippery slopes that I engaged in that led me to own a farm. The thing about hydroponic systems and indoor systems in general, they’re good for a variety of the reasons that you just described. Maybe they have a place in consumer education and even in feeding the billion people. I can’t solve all the world’s food system problems.

What is starting to become known is that hydroponic systems produce nutrient inferior products, so they’re not as nutrient-dense. In the real food campaign study, generally speaking, hydroponics performs the worst out of all the food systems tested, potentially even worse than chemically grown soil-grown foods. I have to confirm that but if not that, then it’s way definitely near the bottom.

We were talking about superfoods, they’re the most dense. Regenerative holistic systems are working with natural systems, so they’re also nutrient-dense. You got to go all the way down the ladder until you say, “In hydroponics, we figured it out. We got these LED lights, we rip open this packet, we pour in the salt in this powder, and that’s what these foods need to grow.” “Darn those viruses, bacteria, the fungi, and the entire ecosystem. We’ve got it going on right here with this PVC pipe and this sack of powder.” It makes sense to me that it would end up with a nutrient-void product and that’s how I view chemically-grown food in general.

That’s another shift we could make. They call it conventional food or organic or regenerative food. This is extremely nonconventional. This food was developed based on mechanisms of warfare, World War I and II in Vietnam. Weapons of warfare would then immediately get pivoted into the food system. The insecticides that were used in the gas chambers during World War II are the insecticides that are used in chemical agriculture. The DDT from Vietnam was used aggressively around the world in agriculture in people’s homes. They create these needs through war and then immediately pivot those factories into the food system in a way that I can’t even comprehend.

I’m not going to get on the thing about Monsanto because it’s not necessary, but wasn’t that they were doing gunpowder or something, and then it became fertilizer?

The book that’s out that I haven’t fact-checked, Vandana Shiva’s book, chronicles this incredible detail. The whole history of Monsanto Bayer, the pharmaceutical industry’s involvement in agriculture. The future of it, which they’re calling smart ag, which is the integration of technology, GPS, drones, full-on robots, etc. No human beings. We do everything by hand. We don’t own equipment in our lab other than a cold press for pressing this. We don’t artificially heat or pressurize the serum at any time. These flowers are placed into olive oil which is placed into a glass jar, which is placed into a glass hut in the center of our farm. At that point, we do nothing for one complete moon cycle.

The only force of action that’s applied to the serum at any time is the pulsing rhythm of daytime and nighttime. That is what unwinds the plant’s healing properties into the oil. We then cold-press it by hand, blend it, and bottle it. Even if you look at sparkling water, consumer reports are testing sparkling waters through the roof on PFAS is the forever chemicals. The simple process of getting water into a bottle is enough to adulterate even a single ingredient product as simple as water.

When you look at processed foods and cosmetics, it’s not just the ingredients on the list you have to watch out for, it’s the ingredients that don’t get mentioned. Fragrance is a word that contains thousands of carcinogenic things behind it, same with food colorings and all this stuff. You got to either be a scientist and a detective or you start not eating and putting those things on your body that have names that you don’t understand. Especially ones that have catch-all names like fragrance or natural flavor, these are things that are banned in other countries.

Natural flavorings and fragrances, that’s what I love.

Those things are found in the mother’s breast milk and the baby’s umbilical cords. These things are pervasive in all humans at this point and many of them are carcinogenic and known to be so. Sourcing nutrient-dense foods of clean origin are something that I’m passionate about for a variety of reasons. One of them is a necessity, for health and well-being, but I’ve also taken it onto something since it brings so much joy and goodness into my life.

I used to drive fifteen hours to catch a music festival. I would easily spend a weekend going to see an interesting artist and producer within a few hours of my region and spending the night there sourcing up on ingredients coming home and having that in my life. It’s about prioritizing. CSA is a super economical way to get this type of food into your life.

Is there anyone making cheese that they mail that you love?

I’m going to have to circle back on that. I have no relationship to this company nor do I know the founder, but there’s a nut cheese company that has a mail order, an artisanal-looking beautiful nut cheese company.

I used to roll my eyes. I was like, “The vegans and vegetarians and their fake cheese.” There’s been a couple of nut cheeses that I was incredibly surprised by how beautiful and elegant it tasted and satisfying as well because you got that fat so it’s great. Jared, I could go on and on. I do want to ask you one question because you are a dad. What you’re doing appears to be a real natural calling to you and makes a lot of sense. The level of determination to do what you’re doing is real. It’s set that this is the right way to do it so there’s no other way to do it, which I understand when that’s that realization.

You as a father, have this idea of, “What’s going to be for our kids?” Because I think about that. I have three daughters and they’re a lot older than your daughter. What are we leaving and doing for them? When you had your daughter, did it ramp up for you? What was that transition into being a dad for you? Because you’re already doing apprenticeships in farms in Georgia. What was that like for you?

Birthing this project felt like a real birthing of a being and birthing the farm as a part of that in particular. My daughter came in as a natural extension. There’s a lot of things grown on our farm, but the fact that a baby grew made total sense. This is not planned. She came several weeks earlier than her due date, but the week she was born, we planted all 100 fruit trees that exist on our farm. She was coming into being sort as this project was coming into being. She’s our best crop.

You’ve learned many lessons and being in nature and farming and being in those cycles teaches you so much. Is there something that surprises you that you’ve learned about by being a parent?

One time, we woke up and went down to the Santa Monica Pier. We rode some rides, went out for lunch, came home, took a bath, read some stories, and went to bed. It sounds like a genuinely awesome, fun day. She was a total pitch, as sweet as can be. We never had more fun. At bedtime, I was sitting there and I could not believe my level of exhaustion from the day-to-day connection with a little person and giving them yourself like that. The energy pour and the level of tiredness that sometimes arises from what seems normal things that billions of people have done for millennia.

Somehow, I was surprised that the level of energy and focus required to raise her in the way that we want to raise her. She had never been introduced to a screen in her whole life so she had never watched a single thing. That’s hundreds of hours that I would have watched TV as a child. I had burned through my VHS of Spaceballs by age 6. Mel Brooks Spaceballs. I was aggressively ahead of the movie watching, so that’s what comes to me.
You’re in business so you’re on screens to communicate with humans. How are you managing keeping that tucked out with your daughter?

GRS Pickard | Jared Pickard

Jared Pickard – When you start recognizing positive things, you can compare them to some of the negative feelings that you couldn’t notice.

She liked it. She knew that the neighborhood kid plays video games all day and it looks pretty boring and he’s always inside. She’s out on the farm all day. As she was talking and communicating, she got the gist that screens weren’t for little people. She would come into the room and if the TV was on, she’d be like, “Turn it off please.” She was on board with it.

We have what we call her story box, which is not an iPhone and iPad. We have an iPad that has deleted everything except Audible and 1 or 2 other storytelling apps. She’s listened to probably thousands of hours of stories since she was a kid. She’s got a crazy vocabulary and she loves the stories. Just like you can zonk out in front of a TV for hours, she could listen to these stories for hours. She’s never had anything on an airplane other than listening to five hours of stories and playing with a ball of yarn.

Her imaginatory capabilities are like the Waldorf premise. It’s all about them being able to form their inner pictures and outsourcing that to a screen is outer pictures that are then rushing in at you. They’re supposed to be developing their imaginatory capacity which is inner pictures that they can form and perceive their outer world. We found that to be nourishing and good for our family so we took that approach.

After the fires, we had a stress break and we’re like, “It seems like a good time for movies to be introduced.” We as a family went to a drive-in to see Home Alone, Elf, and The Nightmare Before Christmas three weekends in a row. That kickstarted our movie watching. Now we might watch once a week even. They’re in our life now.

I always say my kids are the experiments. They’re a group that the parents didn’t know what was happening and what was coming down the pipe. We’re like, “What are they looking at?” Our kid’s group, they’re the experiment. You guys are forewarned a little more and even saying this suggestion about using the Audible and stuff. Your group is going to get it better and more right on where to implement and put the screens. You will have a better way of using it as a tool. I have a friend and he’s 31. He’s like, “It’s a tool.”

She asks me all the time, like, “But you’re on your phone,” and I say, “I’m on my phone for work. We’re not at home. I have to communicate with people. This is how I do my work.” She gets that, too, at least she claims to.

When she’s 12, she’s going to hand it to you but that’ll be another time.

My goal in framing her life in this way is that we don’t do these things as restrictions. We do them because we enjoy them because they’re good for you. She’s either going to rebel and become the opposite or she’s going to start making her own wise decisions, which I imagine is the path she’s on. She seems to be like a cow out of the pasture and knows exactly what grass to eat for nutrition. She knows exactly where to go. She has been raised in this way. When you present her with options, she doesn’t look at candy as food. She goes right towards the fresh fruit and the things that are nutrient-dense and good for you because that’s what she knows.

She’s probably going to recognize that in people. The vibration of like, “I can move towards that person.” Kids that grow up in nature are connected to that inner whole not only a picture but voice have that in spades.

One thing I would leave people with to feel empowered is to get out in nature, and then get their kids out in nature. If possible, grow a little food even in a pot on your patio like rosemary. That’s how I started, rosemary in a pot in New York City. Touching this process and engaging yourself in the natural flow of life and nature a little bit is enough. That’s the trick. That’s the lock and key for me. It was getting that taste of it, and then it was all positive feedback loop from there. It fed itself beautiful.

I appreciate what you and your family are doing. I love your serum, I’ll be honest. Do you know anything about cauliflower mushrooms before we get off?

What do you mean by that?

There’s something called the cauliflower mushroom and I keep trying to find out more. It’s new and they say it’s pretty good for the skin.

Interesting. No, I’m not familiar. If any of your readers are interested in checking it out, on the Sun Potion website, we’re offering a 10% discount for your readers. We could do code gabby. People are more than welcome if they’re interested. To connect with me, we love connecting. If people want to ask questions about it, no problem.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for being here. If you’d like, rate, subscribe, and leave us a review. All of my music was graciously done by Frank Zummo and Tom Thacker. If you want to see some of the behind-the-scenes action, follow me @GabbyReece. Remember, don’t miss new episodes every Monday.

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About Jared Pickard

GRS Pickard | Jared PickardJared and his family own and operate Be Here Farm + Nature, a 3-acre Demeter Certified Biodynamic farm located on 300 acres atop Spring Mountain on the Sonoma/Napa County line.

The farm produces its own biodynamic preparations on site from scratch, grows over 300 unique varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers, and transforms those crops onsite into a variety of artisanal food products and a holistic skincare line.

The family plans to open the property to overnight guests in 2023.