When I was in college I was studying
architecture, then I realized that there is a lot
of issues in the world and what I was learning in school
wasn't solving anything.
So I went on to look at various things in permaculture
and was exposed to biodynamic farming
and realized that agriculture,
architecture, you know, there is a
few things that human beings need.
We need a roof over our head.
We need warmth. We need water.
We need soil.
So thinking about these things,
I started investigating
what are the solutions ?
We're facing a
lot of challenges here in the future so
how do we navigate this.
Are we going to have a functioning climate? A functioning
political system?
these are the things
that I still think about today and what I
realized was getting your hands and soil
and learning to grow your food, re-localizing economies and building
community, is some of the most important
work that can be done today.
I really do believe that each one of us is this
About half of all the land used in the
United States is used for agriculture.
It also accounts for the consumption of
eighty to ninety percent of water
along with 16 percent of the total energy
production for transportation
manufacturing and processing.
Yet the greatest irrigated crop in the United States
is three times bigger than the
largest food crop.
NASA has estimated that there is sixty three thousand
square miles of grass
in the United States
all while depending on big
agricultural systems which waste up to
40 percent of all the food that is grown.
large-scale monocrop farms are grown with
pesticides and herbicides, some of which
have become illegal over the years due
to discovery of they're link to cancer.
Now despite national debate much of the
food grown is genetically modified
without labeling
According to the National Resource
Defense Council, our current food
manufacturing system wastes an
approximate 218 billion dollars a year
worth of food, while 42 million Americans
face food insecurity
just a third of the
food wasted could provide food security
for everyone.
52% of all vegetables
50% of seafood
38% of grains 22% of meat and
20% of milk is lost due to food waste as
the single largest component of waste in
landfills.
Grass requires a little over
half a gallon per square foot to thrive.
It requires maintenance, weeding and
mowing to meet community standards.
At the same time a garden plot also
requires approximately the same amount
of water per square foot, except once
it's grown you don't have to mow it. You
can eat it.
There are 9 billion gallons of water
used in landscaping, which is more than
laundry and showering combined.
Grass doesn't come with out benefit.
It has cooling effect on the environment. it
cleans the air. It reduces runoff, however
it simply isn't as beneficial as growing
food in your own yard
Right now, in California there is over a
million dollar initiative for desert
scaping and it's creating a desert
climate in California. They're trying to
save water, but instead it's just
creating more runoff.
After seeing the grass lawns outside our window being
sprayed with chemicals in order to dry
out and turn the landscape into a desert
scape, we decided that enough is enough
we left our 2-bedroom apartment, we were
living in at the time, and dedicated our
life to the road and sat our map to some
of the most ecological places and events out there.
We started a quest to find the
most sustainable businesses, ecological
innovations, and farming methods around
the world.
At these events we had the
chance to interview some amazing
innovators in the regenerative world
today and talk to the visitors about
living ecologically.
On our trip we learned a lot about different methods of
farming and got to see some of the
world's most influential ecological
problems and how to solve them by taking
initiative
So growing up my family grew food. My
mother and my grandmother and my
grandfather everybody they grew their
own food so when me and my mom came to
America and saw that everybody was just
going grass and focusing on the grocery
store for everything that they needed at
first it was kind of a culture shock and
I forgot about it. I just got used to the
culture in America, but then
when I had my own kid and I realized how many
pesticides and how it's all being
trucked around. I realized that growing
food locally is probably the best
solution to the problems that we have
it's just for everybody to use the water
that they're currently using to grow
grass and grow food and grow the food
next to that close to them and so we're
going to travel and see how it's being
done back in Poland
Hey everybody!  I'm in Poland. This is where I grew up.
This is my grandmother's garden, my
great-grandmother's garden, and we have
everything growing here. From flowers to
potatoes to peas to cucumbers for
Everything that you could possibly need.
They have been self-sustainable for generations and we're going to show you
around to see how everything grows
So my family they stay in apartments and they
walk to the farms. They take a bus and
they go there every single day and
everybody in the community has this
little farmhouse. It's like a little
vacation house that they grow their food in
So even though they live in
apartments, they have this separate space
that they could just get away to. Their
little garden of eden' of their own and
all this is peas, growing right
alongside flowers, fruit trees, berries,
enough berries to fill up a carton, all
different kinds of vegetables
and the flowers in the garden are meant to keep
the pests aside
and my grandmother does this out of
passion. She just really loves to garden
She grows more food than she can eat and
she does a year after year.
She's retired and this is what keeps her going. She 
just loves doing it. It's beautiful to
look at and this is something that could
be done and everybody's lawn
She does all of this.  She planted all of this stuff.
It's very possible.
I mean, this is so much more beautiful than growing grass.
And I believe that
with our technology, you know,
she walks around with a pan watering everything by hand
but we have automatic irrigation system
and things can be much easier for us
and once it is done it is done.
You know, it is just about maintenance
Pulling some weeds, you know, a little here, a little there
but it's therapeutic, it's very therapeutic
and it's not mowing the lawn
it's actually taking care of your food
like this, when you grow your food like this
you know where it comes from
Here we have a whole field of potatoes
that is going to last her through the whole winter
and after the cucumbers
and everything grows
everything gets pickled for the winter so that it will last
They have a basement
that is underground
that is pretty much a refrigerator
So here at my grandma's farm, she makes
her own wine, which is absolutely delicious.
She makes her own jams.  She pickles her own cucumbers. She has potatoes.
She grows enough potatoes to last through the winter
other than that
my 70 year old grandmother did this
all by herself,
which I think is absolutely incredible
everybody makes so much excuses at how
hard it is to grow food and here my 70
year old grandmother did this whole
plot of land all by herself
So we stayed at my aunts house and she
lives on a farm off the edge of Bialystok,
which is where I was born and this
is the beginning of her farm
It's just small sprouts and as they grow and grown
bigger and bigger.
She's got flowers
growing throughout the place,
pumpkins, zucchini
and she's got a well
and this is how she pickles it.
She puts the pickles with all the ingredients into
the well water and she could store it in
there all winter.
she keeps everything pickled up,
whatever is left over from
the season.
This is when it was so small
and this is how big it got.
This giant beet and it tastes like sugar and it's
not genetically modified.
She's got chicken.
She's got fresh eggs
every single day
They give the chicken scraps, all the
leftovers from the day is the chickens meal.
She's got all different kinds of fruit
bushes, all different flowers,
she's got an entire orchard of trees
strawberries throughout the field
all kinds of apple trees, nut trees
Then after visiting our family in Poland, we
went to go visit our family in Israel to
see how ecological innovations have been
developed there.
the Hava and Adam Ecological Institute is
really amazing. It's in the middle of the
desert and they're growing tons of food.
It's a complete oasis. They are collecting
rainwater. They are reusing their grey
water.  They are growing sustainably
They are growing all kinds of food in a
really really hot climate and they've got
these wonderful cob houses that actually
keep cool the inside of the cob house
feels like air conditioning. So they have
students come from all over the world to
learn about how to grow food and how to
be sustainable
