Meet the Growers with Jenny Pell & Guest Iginia Boccalandro

Iginia Boccalandro
Thank you, I feel honored to be speaking with you, you’ve actually always been a person that’s in a position of mentor. And I’ve been watching closely all the different food forests and the solutions you’ve made for people seeking greater sustainability and a way of living on Earth. And so thank you, I’m honored to be here. And I come from Venezuela. I’m a tropical girl, things move fast. And you know, you have to do the best you can. It’s a very different relationship than with a desert in terms of you know, how you deal with throwing things and whatnot. And it wasn’t, I mean, as a kid, my both of my parents are civil engineers. So I wanted to know everything about construction and mechanics. And engineers are using their intelligence to solve problems. So for me, I am the little girl that always turned the rock over to see what was there. And I’ve been doing that my entire life and when I bumped into permaculture design and read the book that Holmgren and Bill Mollison. Yeah, the whole thing. I read it a cover, and I was sure that I was the boat. This was like in 2000. And knowing the 98 I was sure that I didn’t know anything about permaculture and I was way behind and so I had to take courses and I just went through the best teachers, you know, and grazing and holistic land management. And I remembered that as a kid, my my, my background is my father, my grandfather is a rancher and raise cattle and also had like cotton. And in the summer I would go horseback and we change one, you know the animals through a grazed management system, which I didn’t understand until I met Allan Savory. And I remember as a 10-year-old moving these electrical wires so that then we could we could have the the cattle go from one place to another and then change them every 30 days by the end of the 30 days, the pasture to come back. And my father was an MIT Harvard graduate, he was on the cutting edge all the campus egos in Caracas, thought he was nuts with the electrical and I mean to watch to watch a huge Cebu bull, you know, they’re the ones that have, they have like a bump in the back because it’s good for Aaron in Venezuela, we have dry season and wet season. So you know, it’s it’s kind of you need Hardy animals to watch, you know, 1200 pounds or 2500 pounds stop with the little wire like this, because we would train them how to go through there so that they would understand that it would hurt them. And so my twin sister and I, we’d go and we, we thought we could drop the wire and they would step over all those big animals just waiting. And so we would raise it, then they would walk under it. And that was one of our jobs. And I actually had no idea that I was doing planned grazing from Allan Savory his work with Holistic Management until I studied it with Kurt Garcia in Mexico. But the truth of the matter is, we’ve been here for 100,000 years, we’ve been here for a long time. And in the last 100 we have changed the way we do everything. And so that’s having an impact. Literally we have been here for hundreds of 1000s of years. And what you see is wherever there’s civilization, we create deserts, we cut everything down, we we the soil, the roads, everything disappears. The only difference between you know like when you talk when you read the Old Testament, what’s it say? It saying, you know, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon the cedars of Lebanon. I mean, it’s like we have not seen cedars or hanging things for fun. For hundreds of years, if not 1000 years, so literally where humans are, we create deserts and erosion. And it’s a problem. The only difference between the United States and Egypt is that it took 1000s of years and we literally did it, like 60 years, we created this huge bald spot in the United States.

Jenny Pell
Let’s just take that for a second. So like the famous gigantic cedars of Lebanon, they cut them all down to smelt the order make weapons to you know, in the Crusades, or you know, like, like all of Ireland used to be forested, and they cut that down all to melt the metals to make weapons, looking at the pattern of destruction and deforestation across the globe. You know, it comes from a combination of, you know, resource mismanagement, right, and weaponry, right, there’s, there’s those two, those two things in concert, you know, when the original colonists came over from Europe, over to the new world, there would just be swirling yellow foam on top of the ocean, that was the pollen from the trees from the, from the East Coast trees, and they just came down and wholesale, you know, cut the trees down it completely. They had 100 different words for Creek River, Bob Fenn, Marsh, you know, everybody had wet feet, their feet were all rotting, because everything was so wet in the landscape in the East Coast, and on the Eastern Seaboard. And now of course, that whole pattern has been not just interrupted, it’s just gone.

Iginia Boccalandro
Exactly. And you know, in the entire food web underneath the soil that kept everything going, you know, and I studied with Gaudi who created last Gaviotas in Colombia sustainable village, it’s been there for 5060 years now. Basically, he like grabbed a pickup truck any used half a tank to get as far away from Bogota towards the east towards Venezuela, and then so that he could get a half a kg back. And so he created this sustainable village. And when he speaks, he says, the trees, all the vegetation on our planet, it’s like a skin of the planet, and it’s what keeps us alive. It’s that, that all those biological forces of photosynthesis and all the microbes, and fungi and nematodes that are underneath our feet are what keep us alive, you know, and he says, when you chop down the skin of the earth, you aren’t healing us. And that is why I mean, like in 1990, I thought, you know, we, the air is the most important thing, the carbon, the amount of carbon, the way that, you know, those proportions are so exact. And if we shift them, then something’s going to change. So in 1990, I thought, Oh, I’m late to the party. I need to tell this to everybody. And nobody would even listen, the word sustainability didn’t exist. And I had been studying with Larry San Antonio in Los Angeles, and he said, Look, you help you did a permaculture design for a school for a summer camp. Where are these kids going to go? It’s like in college, there’s nothing like that. And so then my project began as how do we put sustainability in college? Is and we taught 31, and two day workshops in New Mexico and Dallas and 10 different colleges. And lo and behold, now, you know, 1520 years later, the word sustainability is a career path. It is something that people can study. And so I felt well, that’s, you know, a big enough for me, you know, I had my profession, I have only one profession and everything else, you talk about our hobbies that I do, you know, but by one profession is I’m a body worker, I do a technique called roughing. And I was impacting 100 people a year, I thought that’s too small. So I created the economy series. And that was like 3000 people a year and I was happy. And then right in Santa Fe, I’m creating the sustainability workshops. And I and I go to the it’s a farmers market, that’s sort of one of the most successful in the United States. It’s beautiful. It’s got a lot of vendors, they have high quality organic products. And I asked them, you know, what’s your income and they had the average agriculture producer in New Mexico makes $6,000 of revenue a year. And I mean, I’m like, how do you survive? Well, they trade between each other and they eat well, but their kids are not going to go to college, you know, they’re not going to be able to pay for that. So my thought was, what can we do? What kind of crop can we give farmers that will create an extra $100,000 a year because that that was in CSU they did a study and they realized that the average farmer in the United States is 65 or older and they’re single they’ve lost their spouse. They told their kids get out of here, go study something else. You do not want to be a slave of this land the way it is. And so what would it take to bring one of those kids back and give them a legacy plan and it’s the number was $100,000 So I mean, Bill outhouse who he takes up army energy engineer, but he’s a farmer because challenging thing he’s ever done. And he’s a genius and it takes him all this time and effort to grow strawberries. Somebody bet him you can’t grow strawberries in New Mexico because it’s too dry. It’s too high. It’s too desert. It’s too windy, it’s sob. He did 10 years in a row where every other year the the crop would fail. So he figured it out. And he had these strawberries, which were from Europe. Really, really sweet. And the reason why nobody grows a FERS because oh sweet that all the bugs like them. And so you know, you get a Driscoll strawberry that doesn’t taste like anything, the bugs don’t attack it. But these are just outrageous. And I kept thinking he should be able to make a living off of that. So when I took over the farm with my volunteers, we put the price up, he was selling a pipe for five I said it’s applying for eight, and we still couldn’t make ends meet. So I said we need another crop and he had been growing the strawberries this dispensary had just gotten the license and said, can you grow anything else? He goes, Well, you know, I try and he goes, Why don’t you become our master grower and he said, I’m not interested in growing pot for supper stoners. Doesn’t that mean they’re not interested. What I want to work with is CBD because it’s got a healing capacity. And so they were like, well, what’s CBD? And he’s like, Well, it’s like pot, but it doesn’t get you high and it’s good for you. And everybody was like, Oh, that’s so stupid. But anyway, he said, I’m gonna be your master grower if you let me do a case study. So he did the case study with the first variety discovered in the United States with CBD called Harlequin. And it was 6% thc. 6% CBD. So it was a marijuana plant that had CBD in it. And so he did these case studies and it just transformed his life. You know, he said he’d bring it to a veteran who suffered from PTSD and his wife would say he’s loaded his gun. He’s talking about suicide come over here. Oh, and you know, he had to deliver because people couldn’t just go and buy it. This is a while back. And so he would deliver it. The guy had the gun loaded we’d smoke a little bit of the CBD and 20 minutes later, he was out in the front yard playing with his kid he unloaded the gun and everything and you go wow, this is miraculous, you know, people that were really ill at all their dishes and weeds and laundry all backed up. And then, you know, three weeks into it, they were getting back and so he he became really inspired about that and was looking for a variety that was really low in THC. Because if you make if you prohibit something right from hemp was 30 illegal, the word marijuana was invented because they said it came from the south and Mary and Juana you know that’s from and so so they had prohibited it. So the only people that grew with it was to get high and so they use it over 120 cannabinoids, if you make the THC higher and higher and higher displaces all the others. So basically all the genetics are THC dominant, and the other 123 cannabinoids are not even there. Well, he we found one. It was cherry. And we were supposed to stay below the 3% And we had somebody give us that plant. We grew it. And then we had 1000 pounds and it went over. It was point 7%. So I was thinking I was going to help somebody with medicine and then we realized Kingpin, you’re gonna go to jail for the rest of your life. You have 1000 pounds. It’s not like it was 10,000 plans. But so then we were like, What are we going to do? So we decided to blend to mix it with coconut oil. And you know, Charlotte’s Web was right there. We were, like, just getting these innovations. How do you dilute it? So that it’s, it’s that way. And then the second year, we realized the variety we had named Jerry went over. We can’t give this to a farmer, they’ll lose their farm. So we did what we call genomic selection. Do you know what selection is crazy because we had 6000 seeds and we popped the 6000 seeds, half of them were males. So there was only 1000. And then out of those 3000 1500 died because of whatever they didn’t root they got. So we ended up with no production for the second year. But we took those 1500 plants through the whole season and it was beautiful. You could just see all the different varieties even though there were the seeds of the same mom but with unknown fathers and we found one variety that stayed below the point three and had CBD and we call the unicorn and we realized wow that Genetic probabilities to get a high CBD crop is virtually impossible. And what people were doing is the genetics of cherry were stolen. And people just said, Cut early, you know, just don’t take it to full season. But you know, you grow things. If I tell you, you know, pick your tomato, when it’s this big instead of what it’s this big, you’re gonna go, why won’t you know? It’s like, you’ve got to wait until it matures? Well.

Jenny Pell
So I have a question there. So how did you fund your several years of genetic study and genetic selection?

Iginia Boccalandro
That’s a great question. In the beginning, we just we didn’t have a lot of so we organized ourselves as a worker, Co Op, and we said, Okay, you put in your sweat equity, and that’s your investment into the business. So basically Bill gamey and I was three members Bill’s been working for like 12 years, I’ve been working for like nine and Jamie for like, seven, we’ve never really gotten a paycheck, we just get all our expenses paid for. And we have enough material to sell like $3 million worth. Well, now we’re concentrating on the marketing of that, because now we’ve got it down pat. And we’ve never really been paid. So as a worker cooperative, you as a member get part of the profit. But we haven’t really made profit, we just stayed alive. In the first three years, we didn’t have a lot of capital, so we would exchange CBD. So people would come, we’d give them CBD, and they would help us harvest plant transplant. And so it really became a community project where the first two years we gave away more CBD than we sold. But it created such goodwill in our community, because the truth of the matter is we donate 10% of our production to people that can’t afford it. The truth is, though, that whoever asked me for it, I give it to them, because if they need it, then I’m gonna give it to them. And so it created such goodwill that whenever we asked for true believers, which were people who would give us a loan that was not backed up by anything, except the fact that we were going to do this crop. So our first technology was to buy a distilled distiller it was a whiskey still that we retrofitted to be able to extract essential oil is $80,000. So we had a friend, may he rest in peace, Paul, John Long, who knew everybody and was this incredibly generous guy, and I said, we need $75,000. And he’s like, okay, and the next day, he came back with $50,000, and we paid them a 50% return. So they gave us $25,000. And We gave them back 3000, you know, 37 500. And we did that in a year. So all those true believers who gave us those unsecured loans, we said, if we can’t pay you, we have it in CBD, and we’ll give it to you. And they said, Okay, well, the next time we needed anything, they were like, Do you want more money? You know, Would you like more money? I mean, we paid them so well that they were happy to us.

Jenny Pell
So you spent as much time as you needed, isolating the strain that you wanted. Now you focus on these very, very low THC varieties, and you have a CBD market. And your co-op has, you know, you have your membership. And now you’re, of course, it’s legal in Colorado, right and so you have your own dispensaries? Are you selling to the dispensaries or who is your main market at this point?

Iginia Boccalandro
Um, it’s, you know, it’s been mostly friends and family. We didn’t go online until two years ago. So and we don’t really sell to dispensaries, they do their own stuff. Now we’re just slowly going into social media. So we’re getting you know, more and more people. The unfortunate thing about our industry is that the people who got involved were just in it for the money. So they didn’t do things for quality. They didn’t, you know, take care of the customers they overproduced so the the price in the wholesale market dropped. It’s like 95% of all the companies that were around in 2016 17 and 18 are gone. Because we you know, the retail market was slowly growing, and it’s still growing, but people don’t know a lot about it. I mean, most people think, oh, it’s pot you’re trying to get me high. I don’t like that. You know, it’s like there’s a huge stigma to cannabis still, you know,

Jenny Pell
But as the industry matures, and as the medicinal end of it starts to grow a pace. You know, the work that you’re doing is really important. And so do you sell seeds? Do you sell your product online? Where can people find your product? What’s where if I want to buy from your co-op? Where would I go?

Iginia Boccalandro
We have a webpage, it’s called fat pig society.com And you can find all our products you can do I mean, we have several possibilities. Now our unicorn it has has been, it’s, it’s now in cell culture at CSU. And as a university anywhere in the world, you can import those genetics and you would sign an agreement with us on being able to propagate it wherever you are, and giving us a small royalty for each plant. And it’s the first Ayahuasca certified, which is the American Association of seeds variety of cannabis ever registered. It’s the first one it we only go through clones because the seeds have not been stabilized. So essentially, it takes six to seven years to stabilize the seed by back breeding it with itself. Well, that hasn’t happened for anybody in the cannabis. So when somebody is selling you a seed and telling you, it’s this, it’s that it’s they’re lying, it would be like, if you have 100 kids, the only kids that would be identical would be twins or triplets are. But you would have all that genetic variation. And so we have one plant that’s been registered in a Oska. And it’s the only one BD there are, there are ones registered for seed for fiber for dual crops, but not really for CBD. So we sell the clones as well.

Jenny Pell
So if I were a client that wanted to buy the clones, I’d be looking at getting the it’s like a graph. It’s like a cyanwood. It’s like the cannabis version of that you get your clone. And then I would be interested in only having that clone so that I could also move it into a medicinal, low THC, CBD, you know, products.

Iginia Boccalandro
Yeah, no, totally. We, I mean, we believe it works if you’re graded. So if you’re gonna, you know, you’re just gonna grow for the flower to sell it to somebody else, you’re not gonna make enough money. But if you grow, and then you harvest and then you pure and you dry and you extract and you have a finished product, you’re vertically integrated, then one or two acres, you can make $100,000 It’s like we’ve already proven it. In fact, we had to create the fat pink society because we went to 110 farmers in Colorado and said, Hey, we’ve got this CBD, it’s not marijuana, and they all said go away. We don’t want to do anything with you. And so basically, like, where are you from? You’re not from here. And you know, most farmers are that way you go and you say, I’ve got this innovation and they’re like, where are you from here, it doesn’t rain as my throat rains too much, or it’s too dry, you know, they always have a, you’re a new comer nobody wanted to grow anything with us. And so we created the fat pig society as to it’s a, it’s a proof of concept, you know, that we in two acres grow enough product to be able to sell, you know, at the best year, we sold $750,000 worth of product, they cost us $750,000 to do it. So, so we know we learned and COVID saved us really I mean cuz we were spent much money in the extraction and we weren’t making any money but when COVID Hitting shutdown, we looked at all the numbers were like, holy crap, we’re spending the same amount of money. And so time had gone through we’ve been USDA Organic the whole time, which means the land or the your method has to be organic, the way you you dry, it has to be organic, the way you extract it has to be organic, and your kitchen has to be certified organic. So it’s like all these steps, right? We were looking for an extractor there weren’t any extractors and none of them were organic when as soon as COVID hit then we looked again and there were six organic extractors in Colorado and one of them the only one was a farmer and Bill had talked to him early on he goes you know where the bottleneck is going to be is going to be in the in the distillation and the extraction Why don’t you do that and up until then all the all the extractors were telling the farmers you don’t have to pay me just give me 50% of your of your product well 50% of the product is like $200,000 You know it’s like and so they were just stringing farmers along and we didn’t want to play with those guys so this guy it’s called No Go extraction I’ll give a kudos for that you know and a thumbs up to them it’s like a are charging $5 a pound for extraction not you know $50 A pound so it actually the thing that’s the saddest is I’ve watched your state have the same you know, ruthless human beings cell genetics, bad extraction, and they’ve gone from one state to another to another doing the same thing. So yeah, I feel bad for anybody that hasn’t had the battles like we have in Colorado, but you’re gonna end up having the same battles and what you have to know is there is no stabilized seed that guarantees you being below the point three and the extraction with hexane and below obtain which might be really cheap is toxic and poisonous that hemp is a bio remediator because it’s a weed, so it has the ability to suck up impurities from the soil. So if your soil is not organic, then you’re going to be mixing your medicine with a toxin, which the pharmaceutical doesn’t care about that I mean, you know, a pill, we’ll have 2% of an active ingredient and everything else are petroleum products that are fillers and binders. But we in the natural foods world, we in the in the world of real food, and you’re you’re talking reality Climate Reality, like the reality is that when you grow food, or any medicine inside of soil, which is filled with fertility, and microbes, and fungi, and all of that, then that that food is filled with those nutrients. And that’s why we are so particular because we want the medicine to not be messed up, you know.

Jenny Pell
All right. Well, I have a couple more questions about about your unicorn strain. And then I want to switch back over into the carbon economy series and talk a little bit more about the climate change stuff too, because I think as farmers and industries are recognizing the profit potential in the cannabis world, we want to figure out how to also look at carbon sequestration equations. And we also want to look at like one of the things that’s being talked about in Hawaii is, if you’re going to have a cannabis grow, then 60% can be cannabis and 40%. Should be in food. So if you’re if so it’s not enough, because we we really need to localize our food economies in the climate change era. And so where are you necessarily you have your unicorn strain? That’s your big seller. Right? Are you guys seeking other strains are you just going to focus on marketing that we were also talking to another person recently, who’s working in Colombia, and they’re legalizing the change their constitution to legalize cannabis for recreation, for medicine for tourism for everything, and the farmers down there probably could benefit from some consulting from Kenya. But Calandra

Iginia Boccalandro
I was invited to a little while to speak in their cannabis conference and they wanted to know more about CBD. And while I met these women that were Dutch, and they told me that little y had done the same thing that that she had done and that the United States have done which is they legalized the use of it, but the transportation of it and the growing of it and the selling of it, it’s not legal. So you’re you are the consumer can get it. But how do you get it to the consumer without breaking the law? And it’s, it’s crazy. Well, the United States has exactly the same thing. I mean, Colorado did not legalize marijuana, what they did was heavily regulate it and sell it to the highest bidder. Because if it was legal to grow marijuana in Colorado, you could grow it and sell it as a lemonade stand. Well, they’re not allowing you to do that. They put all these regulations, and each state is doing exactly the same thing. So now or California, Colorado, they’re growing more than 100 times what they can consume in the state. So know that it’s exported and done everything without following any of the laws. So it wasn’t legalized, it was heavily regulated and sold to the highest bidders. The first 150 permits of marijuana went to Las Vegas and Russian cartels to Wall Street to the tobacco companies to even petroleum companies. And so you get people like that. And this has been a sacred plant for 1000s of years. I mean, it’s like we we, you know, you see that man in the Alps who was found frozen what he had a little pouch with seeds of cannabis because it’s very useful to us. And so I’m thinking even since we haven’t had it as a regular thing in our it for more than 80 years that maybe some of the health problems that we’re having is because we used to be surrounded by cannabis in terms of food medicine, you know, the textile industry and we haven’t had it and maybe that endocannabinoid system which it’s endocannabinoids inside our bodies, it has receptors for those cannabinoids, if that isn’t working, maybe our health is deteriorating, or we don’t have the same immune system.

Jenny Pell
So why do humans have all of those cannabinoid receptors in their brain and their body if you didn’t co-evolved with the plant? It doesn’t make any sense. Clearly, humans and cannabis have been together for a very long time. That, you know, at this juncture of looking at hemp and cannabis and medicine, again, you know, we’re finding what we’re trying to do through growers magazine is we’re seeking out people who are doing what we call panto. Cannabis is doing cannabis the right way they’re looking for the organic methods you know the people that are doing the big indoor grows that use stunning amounts of chemicals in their can their cannabis grows, it’s just terrible and you know even the outdoor grows the everything has its benefits and its limitations and so while this is this big experimental phase is going on I really applaud you guys for you know, sticking to your principles and doing it as a co op and you know, trying to support the small farmer and in the small farmers they have a hard go of it it’s really challenging to make it as a row crop farmer if anything should be subsidized from the farm bill. It should be the small organic farmer and it’s insane to me that the subsidies continue to go to giant agri chemical business you know the chem ag businesses you know, they’ve got the Farm Bill locked down so here we are at this you know, the still the very early stages of the cannabis industry finding its organic footing and a couple more questions on that and which is where do you what are your plans? Where do you want to take your co-op from here?

Iginia Boccalandro
we we want to teach teach people to do what we did we have six or seven innovations that we figured out through stumbling and then realizing oh, look at this, you know, it was like every time that a door shut in our faces and we took a different direction that helped us you know, so we’d love to teach we have program where you know three or four people come during the season and they learn all the things that we do I’d like to figure out how to do something like what you’re doing you know, it’s like an online video and maybe you know people come for two days is you know part of the end of the workshop or something but I do think that number one we want to teach number two we want to start working with him in the energy so finally you will fill out how Sousa genius was able to convince the people that energy and agriculture pingo together because if you’re using a digester is this we want to do like for example decorticated So in hemp if you’re using fiber right the you have to separate the fiber from the what sticks it together as the lignin and lignin is sticky. That’s why it has a lot of it cannabis is really sticky. So forever the problem has been the lignin and how do you get rid of the lignin. So in 1936, they came out with a deep order feeder, which was mechanical, you know, in the past, they would put it like this in at the end of the season and then leave it there in the winter and then the fungi would eat away at the lignin, then you could pull the fiber but then it had this fungus in it and people didn’t want the fungus in the fibers. So they decided to crush it. And they crushed it. And then they read the make the thread by widening it together. And it’s very, very coarse. It’s like very, very coarse. And so the only way you can get a t-shirt is to mix it with cotton. It doesn’t it’s not very good. The Chinese are way ahead of so what we’re looking at is if you have a long fiber like silk or lemon or you know, then it’s a very, very soft fiber. Well how do you do that? So we got $116,000 grant to study that by from who did you get the grant from the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

Jenny Pell
Okay, so let me do I’m gonna say that again. So the Colorado Department of Agriculture gave you $160,000 grant to study and innovate on the lignin component of the decortication of the stock of the hemp plants

Iginia Boccalandro
That is actually, we wish they would have done that they they didn’t quite go that far. Okay. But what we what we said was if you deep order Kate Right with an inoculant of whatever fungus enzymes inside of a silage bag, then the farmer owns everything. So typically the way that it’s been is the farmer grows it and then there is a big deep border cater plant, if you’re more than 50 miles away the distance and the weight doesn’t make it worth your while and then the farmer shows up and then they go well, we’re gonna give you $500 A ton because of whatever. So, if the farmer has the long fiber, they make $500 a ton not 50 And the way that we want them to do it is so our experiment is planted at different densities cut it at different lengths and then put it in the silage bag with 16 Different inoculants. So we have all we have 16 fields and then the inoculants and then and then we and then at the end we open up the silage bags and which one works better so CSU is all in to create the Inaki went

Jenny Pell
okay so CSU so they are they helping you with the data analysis of all of the dangers of the of this experiment

Iginia Boccalandro
at yes because we have so many departments you know you have the microbiologist that are creating the inoculants and then inside of the silage bag you’re creating methane so we’re gonna grab the methane to power the plant to power the farm and then and then once we find the right inoculant then you’re ready to roll well guess what the two usually you have the byproduct woody Hall and then you have the fiber and then the lignin which everybody tried tried to get rid of. Well Bill if you put lignin first in Google, you will get an entire realm of chemistry that is realized that the lignin in the cannabis plant is almost identical to diesel the diesel like it can become three which is what the guys in in Nazi Germany used for instead of diesel. It’s very, very close. Yes, it’s gonna take some chemical something or other but imagine if the lignin became the highest price thing because you could substitute petroleum and then the fiber and the woody with the wood you could create pellets and have a biomass, then it would make perfect sense for the greediest people in the world to get into sustainable farming.

Jenny Pell
Oh, they’re just gonna they’re just gonna patent it and steal it. You know, one of the thing that reminds me I mean 20 years ago, the Japanese were working on reduced lignin tree and they they wanted it in the pulp industry. Right. So that was that was what they were up to. And I remember at the time being sort of mortified at the genetic engineering of trees to have no lignin because of course they’re gonna cross pollinate with other cheese. That was my concern at the time. But I wonder if there’s also an angle here of like a reduced lignin strain. And then that’s a that lots of work that’s been done on that and other entries,

Iginia Boccalandro
what Bill on it because he loves to read things in the middle of the night, so I’ll put him on it. So I actually thought I came up with an idea. And it turns out the jet the Japanese are doing it, which was, you know, like, if you want to eat an alfalfa sprout, right? You can eat it like that. If you wait until it’s an alfalfa plant, you can eat it like that. So I was like, why don’t we just cut early and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Jenny Pell
I know, we could probably go ramble on a long time about the what’s going on in the cannabis industry. Maybe we can have a few minutes conversation about carbon sequestration and carbon credits. If you’re growing acreages of hemp.

Iginia Boccalandro
Well, actually, you know, the bill that was passed with this administration has billions of dollars for climate studies. And basically what they want is they don’t want anybody to study anything else. They just want people to implement and and do do the projects, which I think that it’s for the for end, the credits are huge. The credits are huge. I mean, it’s the first time that the people who are the greediest on the planet are now let’s do renewable because look at the credits that you can get from it. So it’s really happening we on to another level, the carbon economy series is very, very focused on this right now in Fort Collins, we have a unique grid, our city, we own our own ability to get energy from the sun and reduce our costs. Now, almost every other city in the United States, you know, it’s it’s private, the privatization of energy is you know, you’re at their mercy. So what Bill in the carbonate? Uh huh. Right,

Jenny Pell
Well, and they’re beholden to their shareholders rather than to their public utility that there should be the holding in a different direction.

Iginia Boccalandro
Civilization leading right now is that Fort Collins has been patting themselves on the back were 100% renewable. And Bill out Tao said, why don’t we be 300% renewable and sell our renewable energy to Longmont, Boulder and golden because they want to be renewable. And I mean, it took him six months to even be able to talk to anybody that would say, What a great idea. Well, now they’re getting in forever, Jenny, as you and I know, what they say about renewable energies, oh, well, well, how do you balance out the grid when the sun isn’t shining? Or when there’s no wind or when there’s that it because of the the storage is what’s been really bizarre and hard. Well guess what? Bill demonstrated that there’s more than 6000 vehicles that are electric vehicles, and those electric vehicles can get the charge. So it’s like if you have an electric vehicle, instead of just being a consumer, you become what’s called a prosumer. You’re also creating electricity with panels. So you get the energy at the low peak, at six cents a kilowatt hour and then And the grid needs it, then you sell it for 20 cents. Well, guess what, and then the solar industry in the United States is telling people, we’ll put the solar panels there, we own the solar panels, we reduce your bill, and then we get those credits, and we get that extra and sell it. Well, what we’re saying is that each person becomes a prosumer, we’re also a, GE, and we get it at six cents. And then when the grid needs it, we plug it back in, well guess all the electric cars are now going to have those two way connection, it’s already being used in Europe extensively. And you and I could be making money of our out of with our electric batteries.

Jenny Pell
So the irony of that is our solar wind, right. And Hawaii has a mandate to get to, you know, carbon neutral, and we have a 2050 mandate, and they’re way behind the curve. And so Costco Sunrun, these different companies, they go door to door, and they’re trying to get you to go solar with a really affordable monthly payment that if you have everything on electric, you charge your stuff during the day, not at peak hours. And but their buyback is pittance. Right? So it’s a pittance. And you have to sign a contract that you’re going to do a buyback at that level. So let me see if I understand that. So your battery in your car, once it’s fully charged, you can it’s kind of like having a generator. Is that Is that right? So you can actually plug into your car to power things if you need to.

Iginia Boccalandro
Correct and actually, you’re going to that power is going to go to your neighbor, it’s not going to the company and coming back. And that, you know, it’s it’s through a virtual power plant. And basically what that is, is it’s so in the past, right, or even right now, the reason why they don’t let you dump the energy into the grid is because they see it’s unstable. And it’s, you know, they don’t know, and you’re gonna make it go, well, it’s 100 year old technology that has not been upgraded. It’s ridiculous, it’s stupid, I mean, 70% of the energy gets lost in transmission from the poll plant to the person’s door. And then they’re telling you and I, that if we, you know, use, you know, weather, weather fitting our windows and all of that, that that’s going to help well guess we do have to do that. But 70% is being lost before you even get it. So what we’re talking about is local energy. It’s like each place creates their energy and it’s not lost in transmission and you don’t plant and you don’t have, you know, dirty energy.

Jenny Pell
So you’re talking about a sophisticated hyper decentralized energy grid that uses the solar panel combination of your electric car, to have the energy that you need, particularly during peak hours.

Iginia Boccalandro
Correct. You could do it with anything, it doesn’t matter. It can be a bio Digester. It can be you know, a pellet generator, you know, whatever you have, and, you know, in permaculture, we know that you have the resources and the needs, and when you have resources, that’s what you use. And so it depends, you know, like, we can, I mean, one of the biggest pollutants are is agriculture, because people burn the stuff they can’t use. Well imagine if you put you know, compress it into a log and use it in a in a really clean, you know, combustion to do heat, you know, so it’s really just

Jenny Pell
Composted. I mean, or use it as mulch. I mean, this was like working in Nicaragua. It’s like people would they rake up all of their mulch, all of their leaves and their plastic bags, and they just burned it all. And then they were using chemical fertilizers on their, you know, super dry crops rather than so teaching people how to do mulch was another piece of that. Okay, so let’s go let’s let’s go into the the hemp carbon credits world. So one of the things I worked on some years ago, was looking at transitioning out of sugarcane, like a monoculture chemically intensive sugarcane, where they were ripening the cane with glyphosate. And the sugarcane industry collapsed in Hawaii. And we had this moment where we had this opportunity of looking at how to transition that acreage into a regenerative agriculture. Same thing you were talking about earlier. Our county council didn’t have the vocabulary of regenerative agriculture or permaculture. So the study that we did the malama aina report was a part of the goal of that report was just the language of the people in our county to understand these concepts. We were looking at using the red two in the secondary crop of sugarcane as a fodder crop in rotational grazing. While we were studying a successional strategy of agroforestry, particularly buffering the watersheds. And in that equation, the sugarcane itself sequestering carbon, right? And anything that you’re going to Alli crop down those annual corridors right in between the tree crops, all of that is sequestering carbon and in the tropics and subtropics as two or three that crops of those a year. That’s a stunning amount of carbon sequestration. But it concurrently, if you have the agroforestry coming up, which is your long term, overstory strategy, all those trees are sequestering carbon. And so how do we look at integrating hemp into that rotational grazing system.

Iginia Boccalandro
So it for him you can you can have many many uses right food, if you’re gonna eat the hemp parts, which are high in protein and only Omega acids, then there’s the crop that would be for CBD, which you’re using, it’s actually we don’t even call it a strain anymore, because that’s a misnomer. That’s for bacteria. It’s actually a chemo bar because we’re using the chemistry the chemicals inside of the flower. So that’s another crop and then and then the the crop of hemp for fiber, or for bio gas, it’s that would be broad, acre, permaculture, that, you know, that’s like soy or wheat, it would be in that realm. Okay, so what we are saying is you can have a small specialty crop for the CBD, that if you own all the means of production, then you can make enough money to be able to grow food, because the problem is that growing food is not giving enough money to the people that are growing it so so the CBD is like a bolster crop right? Now, if you want to use the fiber, right, then we need to figure out a way that the farmer can cash in not the decorticated plant, and that’s still a few years you’re doing that research. And if you’re then if you’re going to use it for biofuel, then that is, you know, hundreds of acres. So I would say that for Hawaii, you know, my father, who was very intelligent man, you know, I told them I want to live, I want to, I want to live in Hawaii, and I want to have, you know, two or three people that I work with, and we want to make $200,000 a year. And he was like, huh, and then he said, you know, maybe grapes, you know, maybe not because he had done, he had done lemongrass, the essential oil of lemongrass. And he goes well, maybe grapes, because they’re kind of like Mediterranean, he was like thinking of like the different things. And he, he said, You know, it’s like, it has to be a small niche market. And you guys, I mean, in Hawaii, you have so many tourists, if you were able to sell them a yo yo for $1 All those people going through there, it would make an industry so what you know, what would it be? You know, would it be, you know, something made out of a fiber that’s that hemp could do? Would it be a food? Would it be a medicine, it would have to be a specialty? And I will so there’s

Jenny Pell
So there’s definitely an angle of boutique cannabis products, right? But what we’re talking about here is like, there’s several ways that you can make money off the hemp crop. Can we get carbon sequestration carbon credits money for growing hemp? Yes. Who was giving that out? Like where what how do we do that?

Iginia Boccalandro
I don’t know. I’d have to ask Bill how that’s happening. I mean, it’s basically it’s all trickling down, but the legislators there and the money is there.

Jenny Pell
who meets the rubric for the requirements to actually get the carbon credits. downloaded the rules generally are you have to have 250 acres you have to own the land. Right. And so there’s there’s particular rules, but it seems really smart to me to be able to look at it from the agroforestry succession with the annuals in between that have a high carbon sequestration rating like a Hemp.

Iginia Boccalandro
You know, I think in a way, what we did in the field is we use ground cover that was a perennial, you know that and so I mean, when you’re growing things like that, right? You don’t want them the big plans to create shades and then the other ones don’t thrive. And so we had it was a boy now I’m not gonna remember the name but it came up naturally. And then we realized that it we could mow it and it would stay really Short. And so it would be using perennial cover crops between the hemp is what we used. And it worked great. Right? Used less water. We actually had an event in the 17th of September of two years ago, we had a snowstorm that put down nine. Well, it rained for two days, and then it turned into sleet. And then it turned into snow. And our entire field of 26,000 plants fell over and the roots were up in the air, the plants were down and I actually went to bed for two days didn’t because I was like, I can’t see that devastation. It turned out that hemp is a weed. In terms of evolution, it’s way the hell down there doesn’t need any I mean, you’re working with fruit trees, which are really difficult to do you get them? No, it’s a week. And so we went there and we got the bamboo sticks, and we just pushed it back over because the soil was so wet that the weight of the snow lifted the entire root ball up, and we just pushed it back in and put it up, we lost six plants out of 20,000 it was just like, so it’s a weed, it’s resilient, it’s strong. It’s, you know, you don’t need to have that much care. In fact, a characteristic of a pioneer species in the wheat is that they can grow with really bad soil be naturalized. It doesn’t mean it can do it. So it’s not that hard to grow. It’s just once you grow it, what do you make from it?

Jenny Pell
I mean, it seems like once somebody said to me recently, the cannabis is still kind of in the wild west phase of its, you know, everybody’s up to all kinds of stuff trying to figure out how to do it. And at this juncture where we have the clones that we want, where we have the THC or the CBD content percentages that we want, where the market is, clearly there’s a high demand for stuff. And we can get farmers earning a dignified living wage farming. The combination of all of that also doing carbon Smart Carbon Farming at the same time, in that whole carbon farming series that Darren Doherty did some years ago, I thought that was a brilliant series. And I’d love to be able to weave cannabis into that matrix, you know, as a how do we monetize the cannabis industry and take the money from wherever we can get it? And if the carbon credits part of it is there, that would be a huge boon to the industry.

Iginia Boccalandro
I think deep Pharma. Yeah, no, indeed. You’re bringing up Darren Doherty, which is really interesting, because I asked that was his name, the carbon economy series was his name. And I asked him if I could revive it. And he said, Oh, yeah, I’m changing it. And it was that series in Santa Barbara, where I saw Joel Salatin, and I saw Dr. Elaine income. And I saw Allan Savory. And it was like, all these people that were doing exactly what I felt had to happen for us to stabilize climate, which was to grow more things and have more things doing photosynthesis, so that we could offset the amount of carbon that we’ve created. So I asked Darren, if I could use his name for my nonprofit, and he gave it to me, because I feel that all these movements, you know, they all dovetail into each other and create a more sustainable future. So it’s like, and I always tell people grow anything, grow everything grow whatever you can, you know, it’s like, that’s where we need to go, you know, when Manila gave 10 meters, 10 square meters to every citizen said, You need to plant this and you need to eat from it. I mean, like, up to one or two years, they people were subsidizing their, you know, 60% of their food with what they were growing in their 10 square meters, you know, and I think all of us need to do that on some level. And then, you know, how do we organize and I actually, like the concept of organizing by watersheds, you know, so it’s like, this watershed grows these things, this watershed grows this other thing, and then we exchange between there, you know, and it’s mean.

Jenny Pell
Yeah, and that’s certainly the Hawaiian pattern. You know, that’s the pattern literacy of here for 1000 years. It’s all done by watershed from the top of the mountain, you know, down to the ocean,

Iginia Boccalandro
Really, you know, how they give people the entire segment, you know, as opposed to just being around the rivers and this and that learning how to take care of all of that and including, you know, taking care of those trees way the heck up there. And to help us not erode?

Jenny Pell
Well, and it’s not so much learning it, it’s, it’s more about recognizing that the indigenous knowledge already knew how to do it well, and with generational succession that was abundant. And of course, the first thing that colonists do is come cut all the trees down at the top of the watershed, and then take it from there, they just raped the land all the way down. And so, you know, here we are looking at, basically, climate instability the globe over. And it’s time to let the indigenous people lead, you know like we can, we have a lot to learn, but I think it’s also admitting, and, not just admitting it’s embracing the existing knowledge that there is land management for enduring human systems, there’s not that many of them and like you said earlier, a lot of humans, they come in, they settle, they destroy the land, and then they move on. And, you know, not 8 billion people, you can’t really do that. So how do you have enduring systems in a place that are hyperlocal that are focused on a watershed? And also, how do we monetize that? How do we create an economy around that? So that’s that that’s that whole, you know, carbon economy concept? Right. And we’re looking at the global part of it is that we want to glean the financial resources to support our projects, but really on the other side of that we’re looking at a much more resilient local system overall,

Iginia Boccalandro
Oh, indeed. And it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s almost taking a few steps back to take a look at what’s there and what’s worked in the past, you know, and it’s almost, I always am an athlete. So I like to use the example of like, when you’re going to do a basket, ball layup, you know, you actually back up, and then you take a running start, and then you go pump, and then you do the layup. You mean, you can’t do a layup if you’re right underneath the basket. And so we I think that as a culture, we need to step back and go, Wait a minute, you know, it’s like, yes, the green revolution with high inputs in petroleum and tilling, and, and all these chemicals, which as you know, are a byproduct of war, because the nitrates and phosphates the mountains of it are there after they made munitions. And then, so we have the same companies that are creating war on one side and then selling us fertilizers on the other. And it’s like, this is not the way it was done. 70 years ago, or 100 years ago, this is not the way we got here. And it’s it’s already failed everywhere that we’ve taken it to Africa to South America. I mean, those things have failed. And I mean, I’m from Venezuela, where we’re looking at the United States, like, what are they doing? Oh, this, okay, well, we want to do it because it’s from the USA. So it’s great. So they send you the pesticide, and instead of being able to read that, it’s only one teaspoon, for every five gallons, you got, well, three teaspoons is more, you know, it’s better, because it’s more and it’s better. And actually, what’s happening to us is like all the DDT that we didn’t sell in the United States, they sent it to Central and South America, and we’re getting it in our vegetables, you know, it’s like, it’s like, we’re poisoning ourselves by selling the junk to the country’s around.

Jenny Pell
We need new binoculars that show what’s really gone going on up here. You know, this is this is the part of the paradigm shift for everybody. I’m really fascinated to hear how your small organization has done so much research, really, I mean, II for you, it probably feels like years and years, but it’s really a short amount of time to get to a highly marketable product that is really beneficial to your community. Right. And so you guys are on the cusp of expanding that in your CBD business. You’re also probably getting traction with your farmers who originally were like, forget it. We don’t want to talk to you. They probably now are like, Well, wait a minute, maybe we could make $100,000 So have you started to find farmers who want to work with you at this stage?

Iginia Boccalandro
Yes, actually, we have two very, they told us four years ago you saved our family farm. They had three kids and they wanted to give them raw milk and there was nobody who had raw milk so they were both in corporate America and they decided to do farming and they had a herd and they were selling raw milk and they were going under and what you know one of them went back to corporate America the other one tried him and three years ago they said you saved our family from because the extra income which we have saved are far Now since then, almost every farmer that got started went belly up, because they planted too much. They couldn’t extract it. And they’re they’ve been burned. So now what we want to do, what we usually do is we offer them 5000 clones that it’s 2500 per acre. So two acres, we give them the clones, we teach them how to grow it. And then when they grow it, they give us back the biomass, we make it into oil, and we switch out, we pay them half in cash and half in oil, so they can sell it to. And so now what, what we see is that a farmer will do it if we pay them before. And that’s what we want to do pay them half upfront so that they can have the money to do the planting and irrigation and everything. And then when they give us the biomass, then we pay them again. So we’re working really, really hard to get our name out there and have more sales so that we can support those farmers. And I’m, you know, now we were known in Colorado, so many would grow for us as soon as we have that demand. So we’re looking forward to setting that up here in the next couple of years as we get more cash flow and give them the money, half of the money upfront.

Jenny Pell
Great. Okay, that sounds like a really good model. Thanks so much for taking your time today to tell us about your projects. I’m really, really happy that your your project is successful, that you guys have endured through this thing of the slog of getting to where you are sounds like you’re right on the cusp of some really big stuff with your organization.

Iginia Boccalandro
Well, thank you. I look forward to speaking again. Okay, great.

Jenny Pell
Well, we’ll talk to you soon. This is Jenny Pell, with Meet the Growers podcast. We’ll see you next time.