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The urban farming movement has been growing more and moreover the past decade and proves the importance of changing our understanding of food and where it comes from. Greg Peterson, the founder of Urban Farms and a Lyme warrior, joins us to talk about developing farming hubs in cities and educating people on what mass agriculture is and why we need to steer away from it.
He is an expert in the urban farming movement and this episode is a great resource for at-home farming tips, why we need to stay away from GMOs, and how to get your green thumb.
Mimi MacLean: Yes. I’m excited to talk to you because I actually haven’t had anybody on where we actually talk about gardening and creating our own food. I’ve talked to people who have paleo chefs and written cookbooks, but nobody we’ve talked about gardening and owning the process yourself.
Greg Peterson: But did I see recently that you had Dr. Gundry on?
Mimi MacLean: Yes.
Greg Peterson: Oh, my gosh. I got chills because his work is so important to all of this. All of our immune systems. Yeah, Gundry’s work is amazing.
Mimi MacLean: Dr. Gundry, I think I released his yet, I’m not sure, but Dr. Bock, Kenneth Bock. It’s all about food and your digestion. I’ve been following him for 20 years, so I was a little starstruck when I got on. I was like, “Oh, my God. I can’t believe you’re on. I’ve been reading your books for 20 years.” He’s like, “Really?” And I was like, “Yes. I saw you in New York City 20 years ago.” These pioneers have just been kind of holding the flag when nobody else knew who they were and what was going on. And now it’s becoming more aware, but they’ve been talking about this for 20 years.
Greg Peterson: I’ve had a couple of those on my podcast where I was a little starstruck, so I understand.
Mimi MacLean: Yeah, it was great. I’ve always been researching GMOs because I’ve always had a compromised immune system, and so I’ve kind of taken it on myself. I’m just not a gardener, so I haven’t … I’ve attempted to create my own garden; it just didn’t work. So that’s why I was excited to talk to you today because I’m hoping you could simplify it for us, people who haven’t been introduced to the concept of urban farming.
And what’s also neat about it is that you’ve also had Lyme, so you understand the process, what we’re all going through, and that’s what led you to what you’re doing today. So can we start with just you talking about your Lyme journey a little bit?
Greg Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. So for the first 15, 16 years of my Lyme journey, I hadn’t a clue that it was Lyme. Back in 1999, maybe even 1998, I went to the doctor with this gnarly shake on my right side. They called it an essential tremor. It’s just on my right side. For those of you on video, you can see my handshaking. I’m not doing that. That’s just my handshaking, so it makes it hard to write.
Mimi MacLean: Do you still have that now?
Greg Peterson: Oh, yeah. I have not been able to get rid of that at all. So ’98, ’99, I was diagnosed with something called essential tremor, and at the same time, I had cicadas; I hear cicadas in my ears 24/7. Right now, I hear cicadas.
About three years later, I went and tried again, went to Barrows Neurological Institute, and they looked at me, and they said, “Oh, yeah. That’s just a benign essential tremor. There’s nothing we can do about it. But here’s a drug.” I haven’t been on drugs since the ’70s, so no. And I went on with my life. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve had 30 different businesses in my life. Some of them lasted 20 years. Some of them lasted 30 days.
So for me, it became a new way of being. I have this shake, and oh well. And 2014 rolls around. And my partner, Heidi, gets a bullseye rash. Now we’re in Phoenix, Arizona. She got bit by a tick in Phoenix, Arizona.
Mimi MacLean: Wow.
Greg Peterson: We had no idea what that was; we didn’t have a flipping clue. So this was in the spring of 2014. By August of 2014, she’s in the emergency room, trying to figure out what’s going on with her. She self-diagnoses. She goes back to the emergency room doctor and says, “Test me for Lyme.”
Mimi MacLean: So they didn’t know. The emergency room doctor had never seen it.
Greg Peterson: Oh, God, no. In fact, when she was in the emergency room, they told her she was crazy. You don’t have Lyme. There’s no Lyme in Arizona. They ran a test, and guess what.
Mimi MacLean: She had Lyme.
Greg Peterson: She had Lyme. So at her prompting, they put her on 10 days of antibiotics. By that point, it had advanced, so we’re six months into it at this point. So 10 days of antibiotics later, she comes off of the antibiotics, and three days later, she’s crashing.
Mimi MacLean: Crashes again.
Greg Peterson: And is in the hospital. She was in the hospital for nine days. After her positive Lyme test, she had seven different doctors, including two neurologists, saying she couldn’t possibly have Lyme. Lyme doesn’t exist in Arizona. So we get her better enough to get her out of the hospital and take her out to this place out in Scottsdale that’s supposed to be known for treating Lyme. And they say, “We can treat it. No problem. We’ll put in a … ” What do they call it, a PICC?
Mimi MacLean: Mm-hmm. That’s what I had, yep.
Greg Peterson: Yeah, a permanent. And oh, by the way, the treatment is $70,000.
Mimi MacLean: I know. It’s $2000 a week, at least for me it was, for the antibiotics.
Greg Peterson: I was pissed at them because they kind of said, “Oh, yeah. Come on in. We can help you. No problem. We’ll get it handled.” And we get there, and it’s 70 grand. And she just broke down and cried. And so we went away. She did more research, and we actually find a Lyme nurse practitioner in our neighborhood.
Mimi MacLean: Oh, really?
Greg Peterson: Yeah.
Mimi MacLean: So obviously, there’s enough Lyme that there’s a Lyme nurse practitioner. Or was she only doing Zoom?
Greg Peterson: No, no, no. Remember, this is 2014. This was pretty much pre-Zoom.
Mimi MacLean: Oh, pre-Zoom. Yeah.
Greg Peterson: Yeah. No, at this point, this Lyme practitioner is buried in Lyme cases in 2014 in Phoenix, Arizona. She was getting two or three new ones a week. So I go in with Heidi the first time, and she looks at me, and she says, “Greg, have you been tested for Lyme?” Like, “No. Why would I be tested for Lyme?” Well, first of all, my partner and I are sexually active.
Mimi MacLean: Right, because there’s another theory: Because it’s part of the syphilis family, why wouldn’t it be sexually transmitted?
Greg Peterson: Exactly. So she sends off this test to a place in Washington, the good place for Lyme testing.
Mimi MacLean: IGeneX.
Greg Peterson: IGeneX. Thank you very much. And my Lyme test comes back as positive. And she looks at it, and she says, “Greg, how long have you had Lyme?”
Mimi MacLean: Because your titers are so high, or something like that.
Greg Peterson: Exactly.
Mimi MacLean: Yeah, because they can tell how long you’ve had it based on the levels.
Greg Peterson: Exactly. So at that point, I would’ve had a new case that if it would’ve been because Heidi and I had been sleeping together, it would’ve been a fairly new case. And the titers came back as very old. I don’t understand the test and how that works, but she said, “Greg, you’ve had Lyme for a long time.” And then I started expressing my symptoms. And she said, “Oh, yeah.”
Mimi MacLean: Yeah. You have it.
Greg Peterson: Yeah, exactly. And the other piece of it was, though, back in August, Heidi says, “Greg, I think I have Lyme.” And I said, “Well, tell me. What are the symptoms?” And she was telling me, rattling off these symptoms. I said, “You can’t have Lyme. I have those same symptoms.”
So what we think happened is that I had previously had Lyme, and then she reinfected me with one of the other versions of it, so I was having some of the same symptoms that she was having.
Mimi MacLean: Right, right, right.
Greg Peterson: So that’s kind of how it happened.
Mimi MacLean: At that point, were you already urban farming?
Greg Peterson: Yes.
Mimi MacLean:
So you were already doing this. You were already eating super healthy and into this healthy world. This was not because of Lyme.
Greg Peterson:
No, no, no, no. I wrote a paper in the eighth grade, I was 14, 1974, on how we were overfishing the oceans. In 1981, I was on the board of the Arizona Aquaculture Association. We visited non-sustainable farms here in the state, and it was ludicrous what they were doing. They were harvesting the fish. They were throwing away 70% of the extra stuff. So I looked at that model, and it’s like, “There’s got to be a better way.”
"And while Lyme is genuine, I think a big part of Lyme is our negatively impacted immune systems."
- Greg Peterson
I’ll bring this right back to Lyme. I’m not too fond of the word sustainable. Sustainable simple sustains the mess we’ve created. Regenerative puts in systems, like natural systems, that regenerate themselves over time. And that’s really what we’re trying to do. That’s really what we’re trying to do with our health. So let’s talk COVID just for a minute. I don’t think we really have a COVID problem. I think we have an immune system problem. And while Lyme is genuine, I think a big part of Lyme is our negatively impacted immune systems.
Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. So that’s why some people get bit and can’t get better. Right?
Greg Peterson:
Right.
Mimi MacLean:
And 20% of the people can’t get better because they’re immune-compromised for other reasons. If it’s a toxic overload, or if it’s mold, or if it’s parasites, whatever, it does that. So obviously, you have not gotten completely better because you still have some neurological problems. But are you feeling better otherwise?
Greg Peterson:
Yeah, mostly, I feel better.
Mimi MacLean:
And you did all herbals and supplements?
Greg Peterson:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, homeopathic supplements, that kind of stuff. I still get glutathione shots to help improve my immune system. Recently, I got a COVID vaccine.
Mimi MacLean:
And you felt fine after it.
Greg Peterson:
After the COVID vaccine, I did. We actually did, with this practitioner, an immune system test. They can take blood.
Both Heidi and I got our immune system tested, and then we waited six weeks, and we worked a little bit more on our immune system. I think a big piece of this is immune-compromised issues. I have this theory that my mom, who passed away when she was 85, lived on the planet for about 25 or 30 years, where it was really polluted. She had a pretty good healthy life until she was 85. Me, I’ve been on a planet for over half of my life, and I’m having some of the same health issues that my parents had at 80 and 85.
Mimi MacLean:
Now. And our kids are going to have it in their 20s.
Greg Peterson:
We already see that. My nephew was diagnosed, he was diagnosed with celiac at the age of 12. He was born in 1999.
Mimi MacLean:
I don’t really think we’re having a wheat gluten problem. That’s because if you know all the crazy GMOs in the wheat. It’s we’re having a GMO problem if you ask me personally.
Greg Peterson:
Exactly. Exactly.
Mimi MacLean:
I think if you could find clean wheat, it’s very different than having … It’s the GMOs that we’re allergic to.
Greg Peterson:
Well, and there’s a whole movement. There’s a whole movement on clean wheat. Hayden Flour Mills contracts here in Arizona contracts with all kinds of growers to grow the ancient grains. And Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance has a whole grain trial program. They’re a nonprofit, and they’re actually encouraging people to grow ancient grains, and it’s working. Go figure. Right?
Mimi MacLean:
Right. And then you also look at Europe. You go to Europe; the wine doesn’t have all the tannins in it, or whatever you call it. And then also, the bread, you can eat bread the entire vacation not gain any weight, don’t feel bad. It’s because they don’t have all the preservatives and all the GMOs and everything else.
Greg Peterson:
Well, and GMOs are one thing. But here’s the thing that listeners may not know. Round-Up is sprayed on non-organic grains. And the last thing that farmers are encouraged to do is spray a good dose of Round-Up on their crop when it’s ready to harvest. Did you know this?
Mimi MacLean:
No.
Greg Peterson:
They have to have the wheat dried up before they can harvest it. So what they do is they spray it with Round-Up, which kills it immediately, then they can harvest it immediately. And we’re taking in those toxins when we eat non-organic wheat.
Mimi MacLean:
So, for people who don’t know GMOs, it’s genetically modified organisms. Monsanto, the devil, created it. And so if you could just tell … I mean, I understand, but if you could explain to people why it’s so bad, how they’ve injected.
Greg Peterson:
There are multiple kinds of GMOs. Basically, what they’re doing is they’re taking a gene from a fish, and they’re putting it in tomatoes. They’re moving genes transgenically from one species to another. This is not something that happens in nature, and I don’t know whether this is a good or bad thing. Science hasn’t really proven whether moving genes is a good or bad thing. Do I personally believe it’s a bad thing? I think it’s a bad thing.
I have the biggest problem: these companies are doing this and putting it out in the public domain without testing it. So what happens is they do this genetic alteration, and they put it out there in corn. Guess what? The corn pollen has this genetic in it that now pollutes other corn. It’s said that there is probably no such thing as organic corn on the planet anymore because of that, and that is highly irresponsible.
One of the things that they’ve done, which I believe has helped create the celiac disease, is they’ve taken a naturally occurring bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis. And Bt is sprayed organically to kill caterpillars. It does to the caterpillars because it degrades; listen very carefully; it degrades their digestive system and kills them. They’ve injected it into every single cell of this corn so that when a caterpillar comes along and chews on this corn, they’re chewing on Bt. What makes it not so safe is that it’s now in every single cell of that corn. So if you’re eating that corn, it’s likely that there could be some of that in it.
Mimi MacLean:
I have a question to ask you. When it goes back to the meat if you’re eating organic beef, can they have fed that cow that Bt corn, even though it’s organic beef? Or does that exclude it?
Greg Peterson:
That should. You’ll have to check with the organic standards. But I believe, I don’t know this to be a fact, but I believe that they cannot feed it nonorganic feed. If it’s going to be an organic cow, it has to have an organic feed. I know that’s the case for my chickens.
Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. Right. Okay, so talk to us about your business and what you do, and how you help people, teach them about how to start gardening and farming for themselves.
URBAN FARM IMAGE
Greg Peterson:
I’ve been growing food since 1974, that’s 50 some years ago. I’ve noticed that with my compromised immune system of Lyme and who knows whatever else is there if I eat something like non-organic bread, I know within a couple of hours. One of my favorite things to drink is a Coke. I love Coke, absolutely love Coke. In fact, the ones from Mexico actually have sugar in them.
Mimi MacLean:
Yeah, those are better for you. Right?
Greg Peterson:
Right. Well, they’re somewhat better for you because they just have sugar. I haven’t had a Coke in 10 years because if I drink six or eight ounces of Coke or any soda for that matter, it shows up that fast. I am sensitive enough. I absolutely love wine, so I had two glasses the other night, and I know better. I was miserable within about 18 minutes.
Mimi MacLean:
That fast?
Greg Peterson:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it happens that fast for me. I can drink two ounces of wine and get a little buzz going. And I don’t know that has to do with the wine. I’m just a lightweight when it comes to that. But if I eat or drink something that doesn’t agree with me, I know within 20 to 30 minutes. So what I’ve had to do is get really good about what I put in my body. COVID was a gift because I used to eat out. With COVID, Heidi and I just started cooking at home. And for the past year, I’ve eaten at home three times a day. People ask me about my landscape; I have an edible landscape here at The Urban Farm. And there’s always something to eat.
People ask me: How much of our food do we get out of the yard? Maybe 20%, 30% on a year-over-year basis. There’s always something to eat. I’m constantly harvesting something out of the yard for one of my meals. For lunch today, I had eggs from the organic chickens. And what I’ve found is that if people are paying attention to what they’re eating and how they feel, if you keep a diary, a food diary of what you eat, you’ll notice. You’ll start seeing these subtle shifts in how you feel over time. Is eating food giving you a headache? Is it giving you indigestion? Is it giving you heartburn? In these heartburn commercials, I have to laugh at them because heartburn, in my opinion, is about what you are eating?
Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. And so much fatigue, though, right?
Greg Peterson:
Fatigue, yeah.
Mimi MacLean:
For me, I find, yesterday I was like, “Okay, I’m going to juice.” And I don’t know why I did this, but I had two big glasses of watermelon juice. Oh, my God. I think it was just too much sugar. I had to lay down. I couldn’t even keep my eyes open. It was just too much sugar for my system.
Greg Peterson:
Yeah, exactly. And those are the kinds of things we need to start looking for. I’m a big proponent of organic, and I’ve felt better over the past year, eating exclusively at home and eating exclusively organic.
When we go to the farmer’s market and the grocery stores, we only buy organic. So really, my business is about educating people around food and how to grow their own because I believe the single most important thing that we can be learning right now is where our food comes from and how to grow our own. Do you know what food miles are?
Mimi MacLean:
No.
Greg Peterson:
Food miles are the number of miles that food travels from where it is grown to your plate. The average food miles, what would you guess the average food miles in the United States is?
Mimi MacLean:
Oh, I would say a couple thousand because I think a lot of it comes from overseas.
Greg Peterson:
Yep, exactly, somewhere between 1500 and 2500 miles. There’s something called leptin in food. So let’s talk about a peach and a peach picked in Peru and shipped to the United States. That peach has to be picked when it’s not ripe because if you pick a ripe peach, it’s going to be dead by the time it makes it into the box and the factory. Peaches need to be eaten right when you pick them off the tree. That an unripe peach is high in leptins. And as food ripens, these leptins start to disappear. If you pull it off the tree, you have just discontinued the ripening process of this peach on the tree and discontinued the reduction of those leptins.
The moment you pick something, it starts degrading nutritionally. If I pick an apple off of that tree when it’s ripe, the leptins have mostly disappeared. The nutritional value has skyrocketed. Have you ever taken a bite of something, and it’s like, “Oh, my gosh. That is the best, of the best, of the best”? Right?
Mimi MacLean:
When you go strawberry picking yourself, and you’re like, “I’m not going to wait until I get to the car. I just want to eat it out here.”
Greg Peterson:
Exactly. The nutrition when it ripens on the vine, it’s most nutritionally dense; it’s best for you that way. This whole thing is called a Brix Meter, B-R-I-X, and I know that they use them in the wine-making industry to measure the nutritional sweet density of grapes for wine. A friend of mine who used to live with me 20 years ago had a Brix meter, and he would measure the Brix ratings out of our food here at The Urban Farm, and it was through the roof when we were harvesting things when it was ripe and ready to eat.
Mimi MacLean:
So how do they get produce to ripen? Does it stop? Or do they ripen in the box? Or do they spray them?
Greg Peterson:
So I’ve heard that there is ethylene; I think it’s ethylene gases that they use. So here’s the thing, we have an amazing food delivery system in this country. We have this food delivery system that feeds over 300 million people a day. However, people aren’t paying attention to exactly what happened a year ago when COVID hit and the grocery store shelves went empty.
Greg Peterson:
This goes back to my most important thing: we need to figure out where our food comes from and grow our own because we have a three-day supply of food in any grocery store. It’s called a just-in-time model. We need to be figuring out how to grow our own food. You just need to know the rules. Growing your own food is really simple. It’s effortless. You just need to know the rules. And where do you live?
Mimi MacLean:
Connecticut now.
Greg Peterson:
You’re in Connecticut. I’m in Phoenix, Arizona. Your rules are different than my rules. So if you’re going to grow food where you’re at, you have to know the rules for where you live. If you move from Connecticut, and you’re a master gardener in Connecticut, you are a master at growing things in Connecticut. And so a lot of the education that we do online through Urban Farm U is teaching people that rules, or how to decipher and figure out the rules for your area because it is super simple. And the easiest thing to grow, and the most expensive thing to buy, what do you think that is?
Mimi MacLean:
I was going to say tomatoes, but I don’t know.
Greg Peterson:
Tomatoes are fairly easy to grow, but they take a little bit more effort. Herbs.
Mimi MacLean:
Oh, yes. You’re right. The herbs. That’s the only thing I actually do know how to grow because I use them all the time. So that’s the only thing I always go to because it costs so much money for mint, and mint is a weed.
Greg Peterson:
And mint is a weed, exactly. I have a garden bed in my backyard with a weed in it that’s taken over the bed. It’s got to be six foot by 20 feet long, and it’s mint. To grow basil, you can grow basil in a pot on a sunny windowsill. I use basic practically every day here at The Urban Farm when I grow in the yard.
Mimi MacLean:
That’s great. It’s true. You touched on a point where I think it’s super important that we need to be self-sufficient going forward. I think two things came out of this pandemic. If you don’t have two sources of income and rely on your company, and you don’t have stacked up savings, you’re in trouble because the government’s not coming to save you. So you need to have a second source of income or a good six-month lead time of being able to take care of yourself financially. And two, I think you need to sustain yourself food-wise.
Greg Peterson:
Yep, the most important thing we can be doing right now is figuring out where our food comes from and how to grow our own. That’s another thing. I’ve been self-employed for 45 years. I’ve never missed a rent payment. I’ve owned a house for 32 years. I’ve never missed a house payment, never turned off the electricity. That was all me. I had to figure that out. And there were some times that I was eating ramen-ish along the way.
Mimi MacLean:
Right. You had to figure it out on your own. And that’s important for getting kids back; it’s funny, I went to a school called IIN in New York City to become a holistic health counselor. And this was back 13 years ago. And at the time, he was trying to encourage all of us to get into urban farming. And at that point, nobody had urban gardens.
Greg Peterson:
There you go.
Mimi MacLean:
Well, at least where I’ve gone. In LA, even LA, where our school … Because I just moved from LA, even our elementary school, where we didn’t have a grass patch, they planted in our backyard a cute little garden. I felt like it was so much more prevalent than it was 13 years ago. I feel like every town, or every other town, has farmer’s markets now.
Greg Peterson:
Right. Oh, yeah.
Mimi MacLean:
But they didn’t 13 years ago.
Greg Peterson:
Nope, that is the case.
Mimi MacLean:
So it’s definitely becoming more aware. People know what GMOs are. They’re demanding it. You can get organic and Costco and Wal-Mart, so we’re getting there. We’re getting there. But being able to take care of yourself, I think, is the most important. Right?
Greg Peterson:
Yeah.
Mimi MacLean:
And you save a lot of money like you just said. So instead of spending $10 on basil, you’re going to spend $10 on a basil plant that will keep giving you basil all summer.
Greg Peterson:
Right. Yeah, exactly. We’ll often do what we’ll do when we go to San Diego on vacation; one of the grocery stores that we go to, Boney’s in Coronado, usually will have an organic basil plant that we can buy. So we actually buy the basil plant, use the basil for a week, bring the plant home, and stick it in the ground when we get home.
Mimi MacLean:
Oh, that’s great. That’s a good idea.
Greg Peterson:
Yeah.
Mimi MacLean:
So, Greg, this has been amazing. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think we should be covering?
Greg Peterson:
Yeah. So growing your own food is simple. One of the key factors in success for growing your own food is knowing how to create healthy soil. Building healthy, organic, nutrient-dense soil is the key to a green thumb. I actually have a series of videos on that at healthysoilhacked.com, if anybody’s interested. You can go there and sign up for that and get the videos on creating healthy soil. The other thing is don’t overwhelm yourself.
I had a young lady on tour and she stuck up her hand in the backyard and sheepishly said, “Oh, my gosh. Where do I start?” And I looked at her, and I said, “First of all, take a deep breath. What you see here at The Urban Farm is a process of 25 plus years of work. This doesn’t happen overnight.”
The next thing is to pick one thing. Don’t try and convert your entire landscape to edible. Pay attention to your yard for a year and pick the perfect place to put a five-by-five garden. Or, as we did this year, plant your front porch with edibles.
This year with COVID, we said, “Let’s just plant food in the pots on the front porch.” So we did that, and we harvested an amazing amount of food out of the pots on the front porch. So what I encourage people to do is don’t overwhelm themselves because what happens is that you get discouraged if you overwhelm yourself. You say, “Oh, I’ve got a brown thumb. I can’t do this.” But if you pick one thing, get really good at it, grow basil in a pot on your windowsill. Get good at that. That is simple. And then do pots on your front porch. Then maybe put in a five by five garden. But do it step by step because if you overwhelm yourself, you’ll discourage yourself, and you’ll quit doing it? And the last thing we need right now is people getting discouraged around gardening.
Mimi MacLean:
I appreciate all your suggestions and comments. This has been amazing, and I really appreciate it. You got me inspired. Maybe tomorrow, Saturday, I’ll go out and get my basil. Thank you so much.
Greg Peterson:
Sure. My website’s urbanfarm.org. I’ve been doing the website for over 20 years, and you can find all kinds of information there.
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