Louis De Jaeger - SOS: Save Our Soils

Today I'm talking with Louis De Jaeger author of SOS: Save Our Soils.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.  You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Louis de Jaeger in Belgium.

00:29
and he's an author of a book called S.O.S. Saving Our Soils. Good. I don't know what time it is in Belgium. Good day, Louis. How are you? No, very happy to be here on your podcast. It's so nice. What time is it in Belgium? It's 10, 12 here in Minnesota. Well, it's 5 p.m. 5, 12 here. So almost time for dinner. OK, so good afternoon to you, Thanks. Good morning.

00:58
Thank you.  So I was very surprised when you reached out to ask about being a guest on the podcast. And then I saw what you do.  And all my surprise went away because you are trying to save the earth by teaching people about soil. Exactly. And so I would love to know what your background is and why you got involved in this in the first place. Yes. So

01:25
I actually  have two grandmothers that grew up on farms  and they had to  move from the countryside to the city because there was actually no future anymore  for farming.  that actually  influenced me  until a point that when I was 18 years old, I actually wanted to become a farmer.  The only

01:48
problem was is that I didn't have land anymore in the family and land is like super expensive in Belgium. It's around 100k per hectare or  like, let's say 40k per acre.  And  so  that wasn't really an option for me. And I was  kind of curious about why that is, how things are going.  And also was thinking about what kind of farmer would I like to become.

02:16
For that, really was  looking for answers and the more I kept looking for answers, the more I realized that the farming system worldwide is actually pretty screwed. that the way we farm today is a  lot of the reasons we farm today as we farm today is because of governments,  of lobbyists pushing us in certain directions. actually  nobody's winning,  only big corporations and not the farmers themselves and certainly not

02:46
not the consumers. So  yeah, we need to do something about that urgently.  Okay, that explains the drive for you to write this book and do all the other things you've done over the last, I don't know, 12 years.  And you're only 31. Yeah, correct. You're baby.  My daughter's 35 and she's the oldest of four. So yeah,  you could be my kid.

03:16
So  what I want to know is in all your travels, because I know you've traveled a lot looking at your website,  who is doing it the best out of the worst? Well, the good news actually is that I've traveled to like half of the states in the United States. I really love America. I've also traveled to Canada, to Central America, South America.

03:41
And  every country that I visited, there are farmers that are really showing that it's possible to  grow crops,  very high  yields and taking care of the planet at the same time. And also not unimportantly having more profits than their neighbors.  So that's actually the good news that there's no one country doing better.  are just like a lot of pioneers

04:09
spread across the world, spread across the United States as well.  if more people would know about them,  if more farmers would see that,  like a farmer living only 50 miles away is like, gone by one Porsche car every year because of the savings and pesticides, then more people will  make a transition to a more natural way of farming.  Well, I'm glad that America doesn't

04:39
fall way down at the bottom because I live in America. And my husband is a gardener. He does a farm to table garden. It's 100 feet by 150 feet. It's a little garden. We're not a farm. We're a homestead. And he uses no pesticides, no herbicides, no chemical fertilizers. As close as we get to chemical fertilizers is our chickens manure.

05:08
And it works. mean,  when we don't get rain for six weeks from May to the middle of June, like we did last year,  we have a really beautiful, productive garden to the point where we have too much and we sell it. Wow, that's great. So it can be done on a small scale. For sure, we're doing it.  But  how do farmers who are doing it big scale handle this? Because

05:37
For a long time in America, it has been all about weed control and  pushing bigger yields and using things that aren't good for the earth to make that happen.  how can bigger farmers do this without doing it in a bad way? Yeah, that's really an issue we need to tackle. And a lot of the time people think, well, or you go very small scale and you go regenerative.

06:05
or you go very large scale and then you can't to regenerate. Well, the good news again is that you can also do it on large scale. example, let's say  a farmer that really don't live too far from me.  He has about, let's say 20 acres of land  where he grows vegetables, which is not small for like really having a lot of different vegetables.

06:33
And  he has  not given any irrigation for the last 20 years.  He has  very high yields  and  the same with another farmer in  the United Kingdom in England.  Also, I think it's even bigger than that.  Every year his yields are getting bigger and he doesn't irrigate and he doesn't even use animal manure or chemical manure whatsoever.

07:01
just by using wood chips that grow for free next to his  farm.  He spreads it very thinly on his fields.  He activates the microbial life, the fungi and the bacteria. And these actually create the fertilizers from the rocks. They extract it from the rocks that are in the soil and  make them accessible to the plants.  that's like vegetable growing, but  you have large scale.

07:29
growers of wheat, cereals on thousands of acres,  who are showing that it's perfectly possible with high-tech machines  to sometimes even do polycultures, mix different crops together and harvest them at the same time. then  mechanically, separate the different seeds they harvest. And it's just amazing  the results they're having. And also, yeah.

07:58
the bottom line, the profits they're making. It's really incredible.  Okay. So  I happened to catch your Facebook post about changing things in five years. I can't remember what exactly the title of it was.  Do you remember by any chance the name of the video that you put up about that? That you can make a transition in five years? Or  you mean with restoring water cycles and cooling down

08:27
your microclimates. That one. Yeah. People think that it's too late. They think that that Earth is doomed. And I  want to make it clear in talking with you that the Earth does not need to be doomed. We are human beings and we are ingenious  and we are creative and there are ways  to still make a change so  the Earth is not doomed.

08:54
and your video kind of explains some of that. So could you talk about that? Yeah, no, definitely. And that's a nice thing is that if you watch the news and we watch the news too often, in my opinion, then  you think that we're living in an apocalypse. You see  wars, see terrorism, you see shootings, you see whatever. But  the news is actually click bait.  The writers of articles are baited by

09:23
how many people watch their news articles or  television shows or whatever. they actually,  the more scared they make you, the more they get paid. So step one is to  watch a little bit less news  and then try to  look at stories of  get good things going on because there are so many good things going on. And  one of these things is  the regeneration of landscapes and  also even the

09:52
manipulating of the weather and most of the time when you speak about weather manipulation or climate manipulation, you think about cloud seeding.  But you can actually cloud seed by planting more trees on your property.  And that's like a relatively new theory that scientists have discovered. And it's,  it's called the biotic pump theory.  It's  the small water cycle.  What they found out is that

10:22
Just like us, we humans, we sweat,  it's actually water that becomes vapor. And because of this, actually have  your warm, sweaty vapor that rises. We all have learned in schools that warm air rises, right?  It's like an air balloon, it rises  because you warm up the air. And because you have like planted trees on your property,

10:50
all this sweating of the trees because trees sweat all the time.  Like hot air balloons, you have this upward motion  and the air is going upwards. And because the air is going upwards, you create a low pressure zone because everything is going upwards. And you actually pull the clouds towards you. And if  you can do that  on a large enough scale, can literally  attract the rain clouds  to make it rain.

11:18
in your  region.  people have been doing this  around the world and literally being able to create more rain because it's not only  the clouds that you attract, it's also the  sweaty sweat that goes into the atmosphere when it  becomes high enough in the atmosphere, it actually transforms in rain again.  And they, for example, did some experiments, they checked

11:47
the rainfall and they checked like the isotopes of  the raindrops and they found out that  sometimes up  to 50 % of the rain that's falling on earth is actually created by a tree and doesn't come from the ocean, for example. So if you want more rain, if you want more  steady climate, we actually have to integrate more trees in our landscapes and you can do this like having hedge rows or having riparian buffers or creating

12:16
a food forest or agroforestry having  between your rows of annual crops, can have bushes or trees and that's also a win-win for a farmer because then you  bet on different horses at the same time.  Yes, exactly. And I wanted you to explain it because you understand it far better than I do.  So  let's get to your book for a second. Your book, S.O.S. Saving Our Soils.

12:45
is coming out June 24th, is that right? Yeah, correct. Yeah. Okay.  And  is it, I  don't want to say this, it's to sound snotty.  Is it very sciency or is it where someone who has no science background can read it and go, yeah, that makes sense. I want to try this.  Very good question.  Well, actually to

13:09
To give a funny answer to your question, I sometimes get attacked by scientists because I try to explain things too simple.  And that's exactly what I've done with the book.  try to  have a very scientific, difficult stuff, try to explain it with as simple as possible that even a 10 year old can understand it.  Because science is great, of course, but if you  read a scientific paper, it's

13:38
almost impossible to read. You need to explain things  as simple as possible. And that's why I make a lot of comparisons  with things that are super easy, understandable.  Good, because  in my experience, I'm a reader. I really, really do love to read and I have been getting into like historical stuff lately.  written, I've read.

14:06
two books on President Lincoln's  presidency lately, just because they came through as something that I could get my hands on. And I've never been interested in President Lincoln in my whole life, other than the fact that he's on the penny.  And these books were fabulous. Like I learned so  much, so many things that I didn't know about  the Civil War, the part Lincoln played in that, blah, blah. And you're not from America, so I don't know how much you know about this, but.

14:36
Either way, sometimes a book hits you when you need it the most.  And so what I want for this one for you is that it hits people  now  when they don't even know they need it so that it can sit in the back of their brain and percolate. Yeah, definitely. And  that's so true. We need to touch people with emotions and not facts and figures.  It's important, of course, to that these facts and figures are some place and  scientists use

15:05
these facts and figures. Otherwise, I wouldn't dare sit in an airplane, for example.  We need numbers, otherwise our airplanes would crash.  But  like you say, we have to emotionally  connect with people. And the best way to do that is via stories, is to tell stories about how farmers have overcome their struggles, how farmers have really thought out of the box. And also by understanding very simple concepts,

15:35
For example, that's why the title I think everybody knows  SOS save our souls.  That's, that's  something you learn from a very early age. A lot of people even know the Morse code for it.  And  that's why I chose the title SOS save our soils,  because it's actually the same.  And that's  if that's  concept if I only like have one concept that sticks in the people

16:05
minds that saving our soils is saving our souls.  That is  actually exactly the same thing than I'm already a super happy guy.  Yes,  and I'm glad you said it that way because  most people do not understand that our soil is where everything springs from.  Water, food, animals, everything.

16:32
And if our soil dies, we're  dead. Yeah, that's so true.  It's the air we breathe, it's  everything. Yeah. And so if you want to explain why that's all true, because I know, but I'm terrible explaining it.  Yeah, no, of course.  Well, it's even just the reason that life became to exist on planet Earth.

16:59
You know, at the very beginning, the earth was just one giant rock was all rocky, there was no soil. And when there is no soil, no plants can live. And if there's there are no plants, it's hard to have even oxygen on this planet, you have some oxygen from the plants living in the sea from the plankton.  But  you need you need soil. And it's actually the plants that that created the soil by

17:27
by working together with fungi and bacteria, by grinding the rocks.  And when the plants died,  it's like organic materials,  very rich in carbon. They mixed together with these  grinded stones and that's how soils were formed.  And because of that, there are larger and larger animals that could be supported. If  there was never soil, there would maybe only be ants on this planet or like little creatures, but it's because

17:57
these plants kept on grinding the rocks together with all the microorganisms  and kept on dying too,  together with animals dying as well and kept on mixing to create richer and richer soils, permitting bigger plants like bushes and trees to form.  And then the animals could become larger and larger. And one day the monkeys  started to develop and these monkeys turned into humans.

18:27
And that made sure that we humans actually are what we are. If we  didn't have soil, we wouldn't have trees.  And if we wouldn't have trees, we wouldn't have hands. Because the reason we have hands is because monkeys like to climb in trees.  That's actually how our hands were formed. So no soil, no tree, no human. And today, the air we breathe comes from the plants that live in the soil and the food we eat, of course.

18:56
come from the soil. But it's more than just the food we eat, because the problem is with us humans is that we don't have microscope eyes, we can only see big things, we can only see the apple we're eating. But we don't realize that if you go in the  nature and you pick a wild apple or a wild pow pow,  or another wild vegetable or fruit, if you would have a microscope with you, you would see that this apple is full with

19:26
microorganisms full with little creatures living on that apple. And the first time people hear this, they are often very shocked because they're afraid of these little animals.  And then I always tell them a very shocking truth that a lot of people are very shocked to hear for the first time.  And that is that we actually are no humans. We actually exist of  more non-human cells.

19:56
than human cells.  And that's a crazy thing to wrap your head around. We're like  vehicles of little creatures living inside of us.  And they're actually the ones that keep us healthy. Imagine you have the  humanity and  our ancestors and the primates before us. For the last hundreds of thousands of years, they've been putting all kinds of things in their mouths from leaves to

20:24
little eggs to worms to  whatever and and all these plants or things they put in their mouth was full of  of these little microorganisms, these little creatures and they said, Hey, Mary, if I can stay in your body, I will take more iron out of your broccoli. Can I stay in your body? What do you say? Yeah.  And then then that's type of creature installs themselves in your body and now is

20:53
responsible for more iron uptake and you're very happy that little creature is happy.  And then another one comes in and says, Oh, I can protect your guts against intruders. Can I stay, Mary? Uh huh.  And before you knew it, hundreds of thousand years passed, a lot of negotiations happened.  And our guts now are like brimming of these little creatures.  an important fact is our guts are

21:21
It's actually perforated. It has these little holes inside of it.  And it needs to have a lining of bacteria  that actually stop the bad guys from coming in. And because we live so  sterile nowadays, we use too many hand gels, we use pesticides on our food. We don't get all these loads of microorganisms of bacteria  inside of us. So they're going away. And that makes our

21:51
gut unprotected. So these little  perforations in our guts actually are now  unprotected than are these little holes now that can leak stuff. And then you get a leaky gut, for example. And before you know it,  you get a chronicle disease. Why? Just because you don't have this microorganisms, this connection with the soil. And the thing is, of course, these microorganisms, they all live in the soil. So if you go and do

22:19
chemical warfare and you start nuking the soil, then yeah, they all will run away and they won't be on your food anymore. So if you put an apple in your mouth that has been sprayed 25 times with pesticides, no organism is left on it. And then our guts are becoming more more empty of these beneficial little creatures and we all get sick basically. Yeah.

22:46
Absolutely. And you did a fabulous job of explaining that as a story because you could have done that in very scientific terms and people would have zoned out after one minute. So  I appreciate the fact that you, that you made it a story and you made it actually kind of cute.  Yeah. People don't,  I don't want to say all people cause that's not true, but

23:10
So many people don't understand the system that nature put in place in the beginning.  And they don't understand that scientists have tried to thwart that system  for a very long time. And my theory is if it isn't broken, don't fix it.  know, nature knows what she's doing.  We  used to go camping at this very rustic campground. Like it had  the two sets of bathrooms, you  know.

23:40
Two for  dudes, two for girls  on opposite sides of the campground.  And there was like a fire pit so you could  cook over an open fire. And there was a pad to put your tent on. And I loved this place.  And they ran out of money. It's a state run campground. And it closed down.  And I drive by there now and then and nature has taken it back over. You would never know there had been campsites there.

24:10
And the other thing is, if you go hiking, you know,  I'm sure that you've been hiking in the woods.  If you go to woods that are not traveled very often,  mostly the only places that things don't grow is where the animals have made trails through like deer,  deer trails, because nature abhors a vacuum. She wants to fill in everything  with

24:35
little lives. It doesn't matter if it's bugs or plants or animals.  She's going to fill that gap. Yeah, definitely. So I don't know where I was going with that, but I thought I was thinking about it this morning. I missed that campground so much. It was so much fun to go there.  Camping is just the most magical thing ever, sleeping under the stars  and being in  nature during the evenings because we tend to spend so much time inside of boxes.

25:05
Sometimes we have forget their connection with nature. We need to go more camping.  Yeah, even if it's not camping, just go for a day trip and go hiking.  Be out in trees and grass and air that's open.  It's really important because

25:29
Not only is it important for your soul, but it's important for your body because if you're outside hiking, you're probably going to be in the sun for a little bit.  And the sun provides vitamin D, which is really good for your body. They're portuting the sun as something dangerous  and everything in  big doses is dangerous. Even if you drink too much water, you will die.  We need sunlight to be healthy. have been nurses who actually put their patients

25:58
in the sun  for a while  to treat their ailments and they actually have  a higher rate of getting better and they get better faster.  nature is actually one of the biggest  healers out there. Well, very interesting thing as well is  if you go into the forest, you have this phytoncides, it's these  chemical substances that trees emit and they actually are very good for your health.

26:28
And so  doctors should prescribe more forests.  Yes, I agree. I think you're right. And in Japan, they're doing it. So it's  there. The doctors literally prescribe and say, hey, guy,  you need to go more to the forest here than forest first visits.  Get outside.  exactly.  Before we moved here, we moved to our new house like almost five years ago.

26:57
And when we were looking at where we wanted to move to buy a new house,  my husband floated Alaska.  And, I said, absolutely not because I can't spend four months in darkness.  I can't, I will die.  And he was like, people do it all the time. People live in Alaska. I was like, no,  no,  I don't want to live where I don't see the sunshine for more than an hour and a half a day,  four months out of the year. This is not a cool thing with me.

27:26
So we ended up staying here.  I really love bright  sun, shiny days. There we go.  I also love a good soft rain day where it's just kind of sprinkly all day.  Yeah.  Cause we need that too. It has been dry for three months now here and we finally had our first days of rain after three months and we were so happy  for all the plants. It's crazy.

27:56
Yeah. Also, that actually leads me to a good question and a good way to wrap up the interview.  Why  do you think that the weather patterns have been  so insane over the last couple of years? Because you were just saying you guys haven't had rain for three months.  Well, it's all about land management. Of course,  we have changing weather patterns because of the climate is literally warming up.

28:25
But also because  the land management,  when I was traveling to the United States, first of all, I was  so impressed by the beauty everywhere.  But I was also impressed by the history,  more specifically the Dust Bowl.  That was really a story that shocked me and that really that I felt that that is a very big trauma for a lot of families and

28:55
One of the stories I heard was that if you would cut down a tree,  you would be sent to jail.  One guy told me because they all knew that the trees actually  would keep the soil together and would prevent these dustballs. But  we are humans sometimes have a very short term memory and kind of forgot about the dustball. I have the feeling because like only a couple of days ago I was talking to a

29:23
to an American and she said that  her home village just had a very severe dust storm,  very, very severe. And she was saying that,  look,  this is the dust bowl happening all over again.  We're just waiting for it to happen. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can  really influence the climate by turning our soils into sponges.

29:52
And one of the easiest things  to do that is  to have different farming methods to stop ploughing the soil or ploughing less to using more cover crops to having hedgerows to planting trees in between  row crops.  these actually slow down the wind. even stop disease from flying in your fields. For example, the potato disease, fitoptera,  it stops the

30:21
the spores of the bad fungi  so it doesn't  get in your fields and kills your potatoes. So you don't have to  use chemicals anymore. once you  save your soil,  it becomes a sponge. All these little  soil microorganisms, they come again, they reproduce, they become bigger in numbers and they will have the plants to grow higher.

30:51
a big aha moment for me was when I learned more about how fungi  work together with plant roots. Like I'm sitting here right now on my desk and I want to have a  glass of water, but I can't get it because it's like the other side of the house. So imagine if I could make my arm 100 times longer and I could just reach for that glass. Wouldn't that be fantastic?  Plant root, it can just do that. It can make  roots.

31:19
100 times longer just by working together, collaborating with this fungi.  So these fungal spores, make like this tiny roots to get water from huge depths to  suck the water up. And that already  puts the plants in touch with much deeper water layers. And because of this connection, these plants will be able to grow bigger, will be able to sweat more.

31:47
And like what we talked about just before, when they sweat more, they'll have more sweaty air going like air balloons in the air and will attract more rain.  by that, we can actually stabilize the climate. should have this, like  a lot of people actually are  sometimes discussing about climate change. met farmers in the US who say, it's all a hoax and  other farmers swear that it's changing. to be honest,

32:16
I don't even care what people think. We all agree on that we want clean air. We all agree on that we want a healthy soil. We all agree on that we want clean water.  We all agree on that we don't want any droughts.  So we have to just focus on the solution, no matter what we believe. And it all actually comes together with something that I really love  from my time in the United States is  the striving for freedom.

32:46
I think it's a very universal thing, correct me if I'm wrong, that in America, freedom is like something very important to most of us. And it all comes down to freedom. Me too. Again, that's why I love America and the American people. I  want freedom. And if you look at, what does it mean, freedom? It means that I can do whatever I want.  And one of the  prerequisites to do whatever you want is

33:15
to be healthy. If you're not healthy, if you have to lay in bed or can't move or are have to sit on the toilet all day, you're not free. That's the opposite of freedom. Then you can say, woohoo, freedom, but I have to stay in my bed. No, that doesn't work that way.  Or, oh my God, I just had a  giant flood that destroyed my entire house.  like almost my all my savings  are now gone because I have to replace all my furniture and appliances and I have to

33:45
put a new windows, there goes my freedom.  Or, or my harvest just there are like, there was a hail storm as big as giant tennis balls and, and destroyed my harvest. Well, where is your freedom? It's gone.  like, treating the soil in a better way  is the only way to really achieve this freedom. Because if our souls turn into sponges, we'll have

34:14
we  have a better resistance against droughts and we have more freedom. If we stop using pesticides and  herbicides and we have less disease, have less Alzheimer's and less Parkinson's and even less miscarriages because if you're a woman and you're pregnant and you're exposed to pesticides, the chances to have a miscarriage  or a child with autism or with another,  even with brain damage.

34:42
It's so much bigger if you live near  places where they use pesticides. It's crazy.  And then where is your freedom if you have a child  and you have to go into hospitals every three months  by freedom? And  it's all these things, human health, climate,  regulation, it all  goes back to a healthy soil. And  in order to create a world where freedom is a possibility, then...

35:11
Having a good soil is like the most important thing there is. It's step one. Yes.  All right, Louis, thank you so much for your time. can people find you?  Well, can find me on LinkedIn or go to my website, very easy, louisdj.com. I'm not a real DJ. It's just my last  name. Or they can find the book SOS, Save Our Soils on Amazon.  yeah, just say hello on social media or via my website.

35:41
Yeah, and I'm assuming you're cool with answering questions if someone wants to reach out. Yeah, definitely.  Yeah. Great. Thank you.  All right. I appreciate your time so much, Louis. As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Have a great evening. Yes, well, very nice to meet you, Mary. You too. All right. Bye-bye.