Welcome back to another episode of Amir Approved. Today's special guest is Curtis Stone. Curtis Stone is a farmer, author, speaker, and consultant. His area of expertise is in quick growing high value annual vegetables for direct consumer market streams. His book, The Urban Farmer, demonstrates organic intensive techniques with a focus on business and systems to streamline labor and production. He offers a new way to think about farming, one where quality of life and profitability coexist. Curtis Farm, Green City Acres, is located in Cologne, British Columbia, and was established in 2010. In an eight month growing season, the farm generates over 75,000 per year on only one third of an acre. This is done by specializing a select group of high value, quick growing crops, allow for multiple plantings and same beds, as well as calculated intercropping strategies. The farm has been recognized internationally as a flagship example of how profitability and productive urban agriculture can be. Curtis, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so that's an old bio. I should have given you a new one, man. That's okay, that's okay. But the reason why I have you on the show is, actually, I'll tell you a funny story, how it got you on the show. So I used to live in Cologne eight years ago or something. I mean, yeah, eight, nine years ago, my wife was finishing her undergrad there at the University of British Columbia, which, by the way, has probably the nicest campus of any university campus I've ever seen. And Cologne is nice, man. I'm coming from a big city. It took time for me to get used to, but the quality of life is obviously much different, much more peaceful. Right in the middle of the heart of nature, I live beside Knox Mountain, like Cologne is right there. I can go hiking every, yeah, like the area is fantastic. Dears walking up to you on a weekly basis is amazing. And I was just searching, you know, Cologne and seeing what's going on, and you pop up. And I'm like, oh, cool. You know, I like farming. I actually spent a month helping my buddy in organic farm here in Guelph, just learning some things for shits and giggles. I just like to learn new stuff. And I went down the rabbit hole of what you're doing. And you were talking about urban organic farming. I spent a lot of time in Cuba. And yeah, so Cuba, if people aren't aware, they have one of the, I'm not too sure how it is right now. I haven't been there in a while, but they have one of the most interesting use cases of urban farming because of the trade embargoes and the sanctions that the special period. Exactly. So that was kind of my first exposure to kind of like, let's call it like urban, organic, whatever, like, at a, at a sheer necessity, we need to figure out how we're going to grow crops in this kind of city based environment that we have.  And, you know, my first question to you is what was that kind of like catalyst or the inception that started you down this journey for organic urban farming? Well, it was kind of geopolitical. I was, I was, I was living in Montreal as a hipster musician.  And so that was in 2006 and 2007. And then in 2008, when the recession started there, I just figured I don't want to be here because this is, I was just, I was getting really freaked out about the way the world is going to go at that time. And so I just didn't really want to be there. My music career at that point was kind of burning out. I was getting really tired of it. It had been, you know, kind of 15 years running, trying to make a, make a living as a musician. And I just got tired of being on the road. And, and I just said, I want to try something new. And, you know, I thought I always been passionate about sustainability and kind of living off the land. And that became more and more valuable to me as I started to think about what a future would look like with, you know, a debt based system and all that. And that's, that's how I got into farming was that that motivation was to get out of the city and learn some skills that have some intrinsic value. And so what made you choose Kelowna though out of all places? Well, I was born and raised here. Like I left here for a long time. I actually lived in Guelph for a year. I came back because I didn't really know where else to go. You know, I knew, I knew I wanted to, like at this time, I literally thought this was it. Like I thought we were going to go into this massive depression in 2008. And so I was, I was buying precious metals and stuff. I was like, ready to be like a full on prepper. And I still am even more so today, actually. But I just figured, well, I want to get back out West because I don't want to live out here in this hellhole.  And so I figured, well, I might as well learn how to grow food because as a, you know, I could write a nice four part harmony and direct a rhythm section. But, you know, in tough times, the skills don't really have a lot of value. And so that's why I kind of got into it. And that was my motivation. I rode my bike down the West coast. And I visited a bunch of farms and homesteads along the way. And I just kind of got inspired. And then when I came back, I just wanted to do something. And starting my urban farm was the only really option I had, because I didn't have any money. And I had student debt and all that. So I couldn't buy land and start farming that way. So I got into urban farming basically just out of necessity. And I wanted to start learning how to farm. So I was like, well, this way I can just bootstrap it and learn the skills. And if I want to buy land later, then I can do that. And so going back to the original journey of urban farming, was there sources of knowledge or was there a library or somebody can turn to? Like I'm kind of curious of where did you pick up the knowledge that you have today for your urban farm? Mostly books, because back then there wasn't as many YouTubers. And it was books. And I just bootstrapped it really. I read a book, Elliot Coleman's book. What was it? The New Organic Grower. That was kind of my Bible. And then I met a guy in Saskatoon, Canada, doing a thing called Spin Farming named Wally Satswich. And he kind of took me under his wing for a couple years. And I was really good. I was kind of a boy wonder when I started. I kind of figured it out pretty quickly. Like I was able to make a profit, like right away. And, you know, not huge money, but I was making money out of making a living. I didn't have to have a day job, you know, to support it. And then it became better and better.  So even more profitable than what I wrote on that older bio that you had. But yeah, so I kind of had a few resources like that. And I just bootstrapped. I just kind of figured it out. I made a shitload of mistakes. And I had local mentors too. I had a number of organic farmers in the area that taught me a lot about soil and crops, not a lot about the business. I kind of had to figure that out myself because there was nobody really doing what I was doing. And yeah, I just made a ton of mistakes. And now, you know, we're 10 years in now. So let's run through something like, we'll do a kind of a case study over here. If people, okay, we'll even do a case study with me. If I'm interested in doing my own urban farming, let's say I move out of Toronto where I got here, I give example, I got six acre law just north of Toronto. I got a cottage. So I got land. You know, what's the first step? Like what are things that people can do right now in looking back in hindsight through your decade of experience that can start implementing today? Maybe not necessarily to make money, but more or less to have accessibility to food of their own. Well, I mean, yeah, the context is huge. If you're in it to make money, it's a completely different strategy than if you just want to go and grow food. I would say, you know, no matter what your context is, starting small is really important, you know, six acres is a lot of land. You don't need to grow on six acres. My family homestead here, like I own my own property now, but I didn't want to start it. And you know, I grow, I would say 99% of the produce and fruit that we eat just on this little quarter acre lot in Kelowna downtown. I've got it. I'm in a greenhouse right now. I have a, it's called the passive solar greenhouse. So I have lemons and figs and things like that in this greenhouse right now.  So you don't need to have a lot, you know, start a small garden, start a 1000 square foot garden, then scale it to 2000 and then go from there, you know, starting small is really probably the most important thing. Are there any like crops or vegetables or certain species that you recommend? I mean, it depends on the context, right? If it's money, yes, I'd have a lot to recommend. If it's just homesteading, it's whatever you want, right?  It's important to, let me just pick, I'm just going to say making money because that's just the context that I normally operate from. I can offer more value in that context. If you're in it, if you're going to make money at this, you want to grow at the market sells, you know, you're a marketing guy, you know a lot about that. And so farming is no different. Farmers think it's different, but it isn't. It should be approached as a business. And you really need to look at what are people asking for? What's their demand for? What can you grow that gets the best price with the least amount of work that specifically can change from place to place? Certainly, if you're selling in the GTA or if you're selling in, you know, say a suburb further outside of Toronto, Orangeville or something like that, you're going to find a different niche. But it's really important to pay attention to the market. And I often tell farmers, you know, through the tons of consulting I've done over the years is that before you even consider turning up the ground and putting something in there, you should know where you're going to sell it, who your customer is, what kind of products they want and what kind of prices they're willing to pay for them. And until you know that, there's no point of doing anything because you're just going to waste your time. I've just seen so many farmers that just want to get into it and just go and dig up the ground and then go, what the hell am I planting? And they start planting stuff because they think that's what they should do. And then July rolls around and can't sell anything. What's the worst crop not to plant? Well, again, it depends on the context of your market and the context of your farm. I would say probably overall corn is probably the worst crop to sell. Anything that goes into the commodity zone is not something that's really worth your time, especially on a small scale. You know, there's certainly farmers that make money in the commodity markets, there's no question about it. But they're really leveraged on debt. Well, they're also subsidized by the government too. They're subsidized too, absolutely. So that's not, you know, a space that I offer value to. I've kind of gone more at the small business niche market type farms, and that's kind of where I advise people there because then you can start a business with very little cash. Like I started my farm on $7,000. I never had a loan to start my farm. I started with cash. I used to do tree planting in BC. So I lived in Montreal for eight years. I lived in Ontario for the year before that, and I lived in Nelson, BC, where I went to music school before that. And for all those years, I used to go out in the Canadian bush and tree plant for two, three, sometimes five months a year, and then go back to wherever I was, work on my music career, and I'd put myself through school that way. But when I started my farm, I had money left over from the previous tree planting season. I had 14 grand, and I didn't even spend all of it when I started. I spent $7,000 the first year to get the basic hand tools and a simple walk-in cooler and basic infrastructure. And then I just bootstrap it. Like I said, I made tons of mistakes in the early years. Was it a deal that you had that was like a rental agreement with the landowners at the beginning? Yeah. And I did that all the way until I'm actually not even farming now. I have a whole career as a content creator now. And so it's led me into, I've built online courses. I own a tools company in California. I have a membership website. I do all this other stuff now. But yeah, it was, what was the question again, sorry? The renting of the farm. Oh yeah, the renting of the land. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The whole business was based on that. So I never owned land. Mind you, I did buy this house a number like five years ago, but before then, and even while I had this piece of land, I was still running my farm from this home base. I still had leases on all these of the lots. And so those leases either worked as like a cash lease, an annual cash lease or a vegetable box that I delivered to them each week. And so that's how I kind of bootstrapped it without any upfront cost really. Yeah, it's smart. So I'm just trying to break this down for like listeners. So obviously context matters. That was like a decade ago and things are different now. It depends on where you live. But for the sake of the conversation, you had $7,000, you made some arrangements for cash leasing, some arrangements for like a JV split. So X amount of produce goes to the owner. What was your initial crops that you decided to kind of invest your time on cultivating? Mostly salad greens. Like basically, in my book, I kind of characterize there's kind of five characteristics that make a profitable crop for a farmer like me. And that is days to maturity. So like how quickly the crop can grow. So something fast 60 days or less is really ideal, especially in Canadian climates. The next thing is how much yield you can get per square foot. The next thing is, and these aren't in any order of importance, they're all important. The next thing is the popularity, like how in demand the crop is. Next thing is price per pound. Like how much you can get. So obviously you want something that's higher value. You know, things that are like in the eight to 10 to $20 a pound range are far better for a small farmer than things that $1 a pound or 50 cents a pound. And then lastly is seasonality. So like how many different types of seasons can you grow that crop in? So things like salad greens, baby root vegetables like radishes, turnips, beets, sometimes carrots. Those are great crops. Microgreens are great. Herbs, cilantro, parsley, dill, basil, those are all really good crops because they have all of those characteristics. And if you get those, if you can have all five of those characteristics, that's where you can literally be making, you know, half a million dollars on an acre of land because you're getting the maximum amount of yield and the maximum amount of price in the least amount of time to the highest demand market as you can. How would you want to calculate? So for example, if I want to be planting, you know, you mentioned carrots or kale or any of these, you know, these vegetables or herbs, how would I go about like any business? Like how would I go about putting that into my Excel spreadsheet? So I have the cost of the seeds. I have the cost of I say maybe water or some other minerals, you know, overhead cost to produce this. But then I really don't know how many of these carrots or kales will grow and is it is a sold per weight? There's a sold per unit? Like how do you go about calculating that? Well, there's just benchmarks. Like in my book, I lay out a lot of those benchmarks. Like this is how quickly this crop typically grows. This is how much you can get per square foot of yield. If you plant it in the way that I'm planting it, you know, kind of give those basic specs. So, you know, anybody starting out, there are benchmarks like my book has benchmarks. There's a few other books that have different types of benchmarks. And you'll start from there and you'll modify them based on your own context, you know, like everybody's climate is slightly different. So there's lots of there's infinite variable variables and farming because, you know, weather, soil, local climate, daylight hours, air quality, like there's so many variables that things never quite grow exactly the same everywhere. But that's okay that you can get you can get a start that way. And that's exactly what I did. Like I found as much data as I could before I started and I started making calculations like, okay, I want to sell this much per week of this particular product. And so planting a farm is kind of like counting backwards. You start at the end. But and this is similar in other types of marketing too, like this is how much I want to make. And then what do I have to do to get there. And so it's, you know, in farming, it's like, okay, this many customers, let's say I'm selling I want to sell 100 units, one pound bags of carrots a week. Okay, well, then I need to have 100 pounds of carrots available every week. And so if I want to get that in the field, how many rows in a bed is that or or whatever, whatever your unit of measurement is. And then just go from there. And then, you know, the thing the thing where it gets complicated in farming is, especially in Canada, or most places in the US too, is our seasons change so much from the summer solstice of the winter solstice, you know, maximum daylight hours for me here in Kelowna, the summer solstice is 18 and a half, down to now I'm approaching the winter solstice, I'm like less than eight. So crops grow significantly slower and faster, the closer or further away from those equinoxes. And so that's where planting gets complicated. Because if if we were in the equator, and the temperature was more or less the same all year round, and this daylight hours are more or less the same way around, you could pretty much plant the same types of crops that you want it available each week every week, and you would get them. But in Canada, in these cold climates, it's different. So you have to you have to change your planting cycles, they tighten and widen out, depending on how close you are to the equinoxes or the solstices. How do you like the greenhouses play a role in this? Because you mentioned you're in a greenhouse right now. Yeah, I mean, they help because they stabilize the temperature. They don't stabilize the light unless you're supplementing light, but they certainly stabilize the heat units. So it just means that there's more of a sweet spot. So let's say without greenhouses on a farm in a climate like mine, starting about the end of May or early June until the first week of September, I can pretty much plant any of the types of crops that I would on my farm in that time period and get it more or less around the same time. Like if it says on a seed package like radishes are 28 days, I can plant those radishes in that timeframe and pretty much get them in 28 days. Maybe at the summer solstice it'll be 21, but it'll be more or less the same. So by adding greenhouses, it'll extend that period a little bit further out on the shoulders. So maybe maybe with a greenhouse that's unheated, I can get that same period starting from early April till late September. And then with heated greenhouses, I can maybe extend that all the way to early March to mid-November. And then once you get in the winter, you're pretty much just stagnating unless you're supplementing light because like I have right now, I pick a cucumber like an 18-inch cucumber still in my greenhouse that I'm in right now every single day. But that's because I planted all of those cucumbers in the early fall and they basically grew to a point of maturity where they just kind of grow slow now because it's not very much daylight, but it's warm in here so they're not freezing. And they've got a lot of fruit set that just kind of sits there. So I can just harvest it. Whereas in the summer, the cucumber plant will grow six inches a day and you'll get a new cucumber constantly. But that's not how it works in the winter. Things just kind of stagnate and sit there. So when I was farming greens on a fairly large scale with my farm, we had multiple greenhouses. They were unheated, but they extended the season a lot. We would plant everything out in the fall. Like you do it all at once. Whereas in the summer, you got to just plant every single week. But in the fall, we would set everything out. Starting early September, all the way to mid-October, we would be planting large amounts of spinach, kale, and lettuce and things like that that can handle freezing temperatures in a greenhouse. And then they just sit in the ground stagnant and we harvest them all winter. But they don't keep growing back because it's dead cold. But they're basically alive and dormant in the ground. Is there a reason you don't use artificial lights in the winter? Cost. It's just a cost-benefit thing.  If you're growing weed, then yeah, you know, I grow my own weed here. And I've got a nice little kind of big LED light here. I turned it off because these are autoflowering now. But I mean, yeah, with that kind of thing, it makes sense. But it doesn't really make sense if you're counting dollars to supplement light too much. It's just like, what's the point, you know, unless you just, if it's not a business thing and you're doing it because you want it as a hobby, then that's worth something to you. And then you're willing to pay for it. But, you know, it gets to a point in with the lack of daylight hours and just how many inputs we need to put in in the Canadian climate here. It just gets to a point where you're better off buying lettuce from an even more organic grocery store from California than growing it because it's too expensive. But that's if you're trying to just supplement everything. Like I said, there's techniques, how you can extend these crops into the winter by keeping them dormant in the ground. And certainly in the Toronto area, like I know tons of farmers out there. So there's people that do it. Like you've got all these Quakers and Mennonites and stuff like that around. Yeah, the GTA that do that. Like my family's from Toronto. So I spent a lot of time there, even when I lived in Montreal. And yeah, I've seen that. These guys have greens all winter long. You know, I'm also then curious on the other end of the spectrum. So, you know, you're growing all these crops or vegetables that have high demand within the marketplace. You're looking, it's like any other business, right? You're looking at labor costs that you're putting in material costs. You're looking at the yield that you can get. Obviously, it's like, okay, cash, labor, can I get a profit from this? How did you go about then distribution? Like is it getting the network like farmer's market, getting the stores, what kind of strategy did you do for that? Yeah, I mean, I've always been a fan of the path of least resistance. That's been my kind of modus operandi as an entrepreneur. You know, I can do a lot of different things now outside of farming. And at that time, when I started, the path of least resistance was to get into the farmer's market because it was just there and it was available. You know, farmer's markets are a great place to start because you can kind of just show up with stuff and people will more or less buy it. You know, once you get into wholesale and retail and things like that, you have to be consistent and you have to have the same standing orders all the time. Otherwise, you'll lose those accounts. Is it though hard to get into the farmer's market? Is it just like a license? It depends on where you are. You know, there's, I mean, licenses, you're speaking to an anarchist, so I don't really care about licenses. But yeah, I mean, sometimes there's, you know, requirements to get into particular farmer's markets. And so, you know, you got to respect those if you want to sell at that market. So sometimes there's things like that. There's not here. And for the most part in North America, you know, most of my work has been in the United States as far as consulting and public speaking. So I spent a lot of time down there. And it's more or less the same.  And then if they approve you, you can show up and sell your stuff. Now, there's a fee, a daily fee you'd pay. But it's definitely the lowest barrier to entry market in general. You know, like these kinds of farms that I've been touring and visiting for years and teaching on are typically referred to direct consumer markets. So that means that they're selling directly to the end user. So that could be a chef at a restaurant. That could be a community supported agriculture, like a box program where you're selling a box of veggies to people that buy in, like they buy a share. And then the stock they get each week, the dividend is a basket of produce or farmer's markets. Those are the most typical ones. And then, but I actually found later in my career, the place that I made the most amount of money with the least amount of effort was in retail, believe it or not. And that was just because food trends changed. Like I, when I started this 10 years ago, I would have never thought that I'd be selling in grocery stores. But that's where we eventually put all of our everything 100% into. Whereas like, I kind of started at farmer's markets for the first, you know, I did farmers markets for seven years, the whole way through. But then I second and third year, I really started getting to sell into chefs. And then I got into running a box program. And then I really started to get into chefs, like pretty much to the point where I dropped my farmers market. And I was totally specialized in selling like really high end niche market vegetables to like exclusive type restaurants for really, really good prices.  Oh yeah. It's insane. Totally, totally. There's, yeah, those, those opportunities are out there. You know, I kind of burnt out on that. I got really tired of the foodie scene, to be honest.  Like there's, you know, restaurants are so notorious for not paying their bills. I'd been screwed. And notoriously, I grew up in the restaurant business actually. My dad, my dad franchised like a fish and chips restaurant when I was a kid and it was my first job. And I kind of worked alongside him and I saw what was going on behind the scenes. And it's just the business is tough, you know, and, and I later became a super specialized guy with culinary. Like I worked with some of the top chefs in the area here and they all knew me. They all called me by name. They phoned me and I would do all these special things for them. But it's just a pain in the butt dealing with high maintenance people that have ridiculous demands and are often late to pay. So that gets, that gets tiring. So I eventually found solace in just selling to like retail grocery stores, bagged greens that I don't have to sell. I just drop them off and then they sell them.  And eventually I found that because at that point, like I started doing that in the last two years of my farming. At that point, I'd been really involved in other enterprises. Like I wrote a book and I'd been doing a lot of touring around the world speaking. And then I built an online course and I started to get into all these other entrepreneurial online things. And then it worked well because I was still micromanaging my farm at that time. Like I had a guy who was like a foreman. He like ran the farm and I trained him for he worked for me for five years, four or five years. And he was good because I could be in Europe doing speaking tours and he could pretty much handle everything. And so that's how I kind of transitioned to where I am now is I had a key guy who I could really lean on. Otherwise I would never, I wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't have him at that time. Going back to the retail, was there any specific strategy or did you have some kind of distributor that you worked with that got you the foot in the door to enter the retail space? No, I just did it all. I became pretty good at sales. I really got into the sales stuff like how to win friends and influence people, think and grow rich. I was really in the grant card own and I really became good at it. I could go in and talk people up and present a good product and make a good case. And I never really had a hard time doing it. I mean, I did it when I first got into it. I was terrible at it. I never knew how to sell anything. But I really started to kind of walk the talk with this is just proximity around the Okanagan Valley or is it beyond that? Well, yes, mostly, you know, actually, I did, I did have a number of like I sold stuff as far as Calgary through a another distribution hub, actually two different distribution hubs. And then I even got to a point where I was putting stuff on like refrigerated freight trucks and sending it up northern BC.  Like my farm was its most profitable at a quarter acre. So I my farm had been up to two and a half acres with eight full time people. That was the year I made the least amount of money and worked the most amount of hours. I run it. But the year that the farm made the most amount of money was a quarter acre.  I closed at a high point. I stopped farming at a high point. And, you know, I was taken $50,000 to $70,000 home a year. I mean, it's good for 30 to 40 hours a week of work with something that you really like. You know, of course, things are different for me now with all this, you know, online contents, infinitely scalable farming isn't. I think it's also important as a society to be self-sufficient. I think people really don't understand how broken our food supply chain is. Oh, people don't know anything about really, really broken, you know, and, you know, regardless, it doesn't matter how much money you have at the end of the day, it's about being self-sufficient.  Oh, absolutely. Really good. Absolutely. And, I mean, we're a long ways from that. I mean, that has still to this, like, I've been into this stuff for 20 years. I mean, it wasn't really until 2008, which I really started to take a step towards doing something about it. Like, I've been reading books about it and researching it and geeking out about it for a long time before that. But yeah, absolutely.    I'd say I'm actually more of a hardcore prepper now than I've ever been, because now I have skills. Like, I can actually, the whole idea of, you know, I dreamed about buying land and going off grid long time ago, like way before I was farming. But I had no idea what that looked like. Now I do. And that's what I actually, looking back at what I did, I loved the fact that I started farming without owning anything really, because it was just like, Hey, the clock is ticking. Now I don't have a lot of cash, but I might as well gain some experience because people, you know, this might segue into a broader conversation, but people don't really value other forms of capital because they don't know that other forms of capital exist. We live in a world that, you know, all we think exists as money as a form of capital, but there's many forms of capital resources are one, social capital is another one. That's actually social. Well, and knowledge, you know, human capital is important, really important. And that's what I gained by just bootstrapping it, because I learned how to farm kind of the hard way. And I'd moved my farm three different times. I'd moved the location, the main location of my farm three different times. And I've prepped over 20 different sites. And then I've consulted on, I don't even know how many now, I've been doing consulting, starting my second year farming, I've set up farms in five different countries or help set up farms. So I've seen, okay, so now it's like, I'm looking to buy over a hundred acres and go out there. And it's like, no problem.  Yes, that's been my kind of my passion project of recently. Yeah. So what's going on with that? Well, I mean, it's a global trend, you know, this is definitely this segue into a broader conversation. But it's, you know, we got this thing called Agenda 2030. It was Agenda 21 brought in to the United Nations in, I believe it was Rio in 1991.  It's all under this guise of, you know, we need to stop killing the planet, which I agree with. But the details of how we do that is where the debate lies. Because I people off, like I used to be one of these guys that was a hardcore environmentalist and I am still in principle, but the whole environmental movement has been co-opted in my opinion by big finance and big government people. And they want to control everything.  And they're using the guise of climate change and instilling fear with people that were all screwed tomorrow to push through regulations that continuously erode the rights of people living on land. Primarily, that's farmers and homesteaders. And so I got caught up in a thing, you know, because I'm a YouTuber, I've got a fairly big audience, and people sometimes reach out to me and say, Hey, Curtis, can you help us get this message out? And, and a lot of the time, I don't have time to read 90% of my emails, but you know, sometimes they get through to me and some people on Vancouver Island reach out to me and said, Hey, do you know about this thing that's going on with the ALR? So for those that don't know, in British Columbia, there's like sort of a Marxist land trust thing called the agricultural land commission or the agricultural land reserve. It's run by the agricultural land commission. And it's basically, they said in the 1970s, Oh no, you know, development's going to swallow up all the ag land. So we better create this program to stop that from happening. And you know, like that sounds like a reasonable thing, you know, like, because if you, most people in British Columbia have an opinion, like most people have an opinion on the ALR and most of it's good, but it's because they don't know the details. And I'm a farmer. And I know thousands of farmers and I know the details and I've read the acts and there's nothing in this that actually protects farmers. It just, it does protect land in that it creates so much incentive to not farm that, yeah, that land doesn't get developed, but it basically just sits empty and just grows grass or alfalfa and it's not growing food. So this, my opinion is I've tied this to UN agenda 2030, which is this thing called the Wildlands project, which is to push everybody that's in the rural areas into cities and then leave the rest of the world to go back to nature under the guise of, well, that's how we can save climate change, right? And so, but it's just a bunch of BS in my opinion, because I've read, I've gone down a rabbit hole recently, it's what led me to start a new podcast called Liberty on the Land where I just interview people that are like fighting this stuff and coming up with solutions because it's a global trend. Like, let me ask you this and the listeners, whenever in your life has government regulation become easier to navigate? Never. Like it doesn't endlessly gets more complicated. Government is like an amoeba. Absolute power crumps absolutely all. You can't take away power. That's it. And so these, but these people who have the power, they don't want to lose it. And people that are homesteaders, and you know, like you've expressed some interest in, you know, living off the land and growing your own food, like that's a threat to the establishment in the sense that people who are resilient can grow their own food and can take care of themselves are less controllable. They're less governable. It's why when you go out to a rural area, which I've done all over the United States have been to 42 US States, you go through, and I've been all across Canada and multiple countries, and you go into the rural areas, people in the rural areas are resilient as hell. Like there's a problem. They solve it. Something needs fixing. They fix it. People in the cities are dependent. I mean, generally, I'm not speaking about everybody. Of course, there's exceptions. But generally speaking, you'll find that people in the country are anti-fragile. They, you know, to quote Nassim Taleb, if you're familiar. They substitute convenience over personal responsibility. Absolutely. And so personal responsibility isn't a conversation that the establishment want to have. They want us to be dependent. And as a farmer, the way I see it is just farming. You know, if you're farming animals, you'd rather farm cows than wolves, right?  They make great farm animals. And that's the system I think that's kind of where we're at today is like we're so domesticated now. And people in cities have been so comfortable with wealth, all these conveniences and benefits that we've been offered by the system that we just kind of go along with anything. I have a different thesis. My thesis is I think we're going to see, we're going to see an exodus of people living cities in the next decade. That's happening. I agree with that. I don't think we're, I'm kind of speaking about what the establishment wants. I think you're a hundred percent right. We're seeing that now. That has not hit critical mass yet, but I really hope that, I hope there is an exodus. I could see that we get to a point where there is sort of the cities become city states. They become like isolated states. And it's kind of like in Stalinist Russia. That's how that's what happened with communism is that they couldn't, they couldn't regulate the rural people. So communism existed in the cities, but then the rural is where all the commerce capitalism and anarchy happened really. I think that's what's going to happen because the cities are getting, you know, in Toronto, try to open a business in Toronto. Like it's insane how it regulated these places. I've been screaming city states for the last five years. I'm a big proponent of city states. It creates game theoretical models. That's better. One thing that people don't understand is in a, we'll bring Canada in it. Canada is a unique example. So for the size of land that we have, we have the smallest population. Like we have the second biggest land mass of a nation after Russia. We have a diverse, diverse ethnicity in Canada, you know, quite multicultural. We're more or less like passive people. We come here for greener pastures, right?  A lot of people of Russia, China, et cetera, you know, it's much more greener grass over here. And you see the climate kind of heating up right now. So you have the federal government. So if you look at the Canadian constitution, kind of clearly, especially on page 1011, it clearly states what the federal government is responsible for. And it's not responsible for much. And it's the opposite today. They're their response. I want to say they're responsible. They've put their fingers in pretty much every aspect of governance when it comes to society, from municipal to provincial to federal, they shouldn't be in municipal and provincial. They should just be concerned for federal stuff. And when you look at broad laws, laws that might help Ontario, not necessarily will help Alberta, because we have exactly, we have native problems for Ontario, we have our own issues, and the laws that we pass here should not be dictated or seated on Alberta. Vice versa. The laws that pass in Alberta should not be seated on Ontario. This is why people are pissed off with Quebec, you know, Quebec's creating these rules that doesn't benefit Ontario, doesn't benefit Alberta. This is why you see Alberta right now pushing, they want to separate.  Switzerland's a good example where you have the cantons. Yeah, the cantons, exactly. Yeah, I'm totally, I'm a pretty hardcore, when you were talking about the constitution, when you were talking about 1982, the Pierre-Elie Trudeau constitution, yeah, so that's, you know, the funny thing with that is Read Article 59. Article 59 in the Canadian constitution stipulates that the whole constitution is subject to Article 59 in that until Quebec allows every one of its residents to teach the language of choice to their children, the constitution's null and void. So we don't have a constitution. It never came into effect. Canada, I mean, this is one thing that I get into in my podcast, like as I've gone to the rabbit hole and I've been reading acts and statutes in Canada for the last three months, we don't have a country. Canada doesn't exist. Canada is a myth. Canada was never confederated. And when Queen Victoria created the Statute Revision Act, or she pulled out Article 2 of the BNA Act through the Statute Revision Act, which ended the monarchy after them because the Dominion got too expensive in the early or the late 1800s. So they ended the Dominion. When Queen Victoria died, Canada, as we know it, ceased to exist. And then in 1931 or 1936, they brought in the statue to Westminster, which officially ended it. We have in Canada a de facto state. Canada is just a corporation. And the provinces are corporations. It's just a big racket. It's interesting because it's like, it's almost this crazy free market thing. It's just nobody knows what it actually is. We think we have this government. And that's what I discovered with all this land stuff with the Agricultural Land Commission is what I discovered is that the acts themselves don't have force and effect because they're supposed to receive this thing called royal assent from the Governor General. And if you read the Royal Assent Act of Canada, it says right in the preamble that royal assent is granted by written declaration. But when you look at a royal assent, what they did is they converted it into this ceremony because nobody, everybody in power wanted to keep their powers. They didn't want all the Canadian people to realize like, oh my God, we're sovereign. We don't actually need these cronies. We can form our own constitution like the US did. But they never did. And so they created all these layers and layers of illusions. It's actually all there. It's neat. It's really hidden in plain sight. It's like, there's actually no lies printed. It's all truth. It's all full disclosure. It's just nobody reads the terms of service. So they created this royal assent thing which became this ceremony they do in the legislative assembly where the Lieutenant Governor just sits there and gives a nod. So the ministers come out and read the bills, but she doesn't sign them. And the reason she doesn't sign them is because that would actually be committing fraud because the Lieutenant Governors and the Governor General have no real authority because the Queen died in 1901. And Queen Elizabeth is just a sort of a fake figurehead that they've used. I don't know what the arrangement between Canada and the royal family is anymore, but it's BS. So I learned this on my farm because I had a bureaucrat tried to shake me down. I had a guy from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency tried to come to my microgreens operation, which used to be in the screen house that I'm in right now. And he said, we're going to come and inspect your farm at this time and this time and this time. And I'd been learning enough about the legal stuff before then where I said, okay, and I know the best way to win with these bureaucrats is to take what's called the conditional acceptance. So instead of saying, no, you can't come to my property, you go, okay, I'm happy to have you here on my property on these conditions. Number one, I would like to see a copy of the royal ascent written on the CFIA Act of Canada. Secondly, I'd like to see all the documentation that says you have the authority to act under Her Majesty and Good Faith. Thirdly, I want a consulting fee. Fourthly, you've got 30 days to respond to the offers and I'll avoid. Guy disappeared, never came back.  And it's the same thing with the farmers in the ALR. So the, but the big thing in British Columbia is that there was no treaties ever signed here. Even if you look at the original, what Canada was, it was called Rupert's land in the Hudson's Bay Charter. It ended at the Rocky Mountains. British Columbia was, is unceded. And that's what, if you go to any government event here in British Columbia today, the first thing they will do is they'll stand up and say, we just first want to recognize that we're standing on the unceded land of the Silux territory, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It just sounds like pointless virtue signaling, but it's actually full disclosure. They're actually telling you 100% the truth. There is no Canada here. There's no Canada, period. But there's certainly none in BC. And there in BC is just a private corporation. It's registered on the United States Security Exchange Commission.  But you tell this to the average person, they go, no, no, no, no, because they can't handle the cognitive dissonance. They just won't go there. But I think this is actually our path to freedom because this whole thing will disappear really quickly. More people start to realize that you don't have power over us. Where do you get your authority from? Start calling them out? Where does it come from? No, the power is always in the people. We're the one to elect you. We're the ones to pay taxes for you to be in power. But going back to the city states, it's interesting that you brought that up. Technically, we have city-states in Canada. It's Aboriginal land. So if you look at what they have, right, they're city-states. They have their own constitution. They have their own cops, their own taxes. Well, they're sovereign nations actually. That's technically what they are. Yeah. And so for me, I'm like, well, there's our example right there. I don't have to think of anything or create anything right there in front of me. Why can't I just duplicate that?  That's why. Our birth certificates are corporate bonds. They're sureties. When you're born and your mom fills out your live registration of birth and then fills out your birth certificate, that's a surety that goes to the corporation that handles that. And then that's a bond. And that bond is that, so you're owned. But the thing is, is people don't realize that that legal person, your name, all caps letters, isn't actually you. It's just like in the matrix, man.  This is flesh and blood. This is me. I'm a child of God. Well, that's what we are. That's to give you a sin number. It's not your name.   And so the problem with revolution, per se, is that you're still a legal fiction. And until you uncouple yourself and become a sovereign man, a lot of the First Nations have already done this, man. I've met, I know a lot of people that do this stuff. And until you're sovereign, you don't have jurisdiction over your own body because you've accepted the legal authority of them. You ever read the book, Sovereign to the Vindul? The Sovereign to- Sovereign individual? Yeah. No.  Solid read. I read a lot of stuff on this stuff, though. My take on becoming like, I agree with you 100%. I think when you're born, whether you believe in God or not, the divine life form, you're sovereign. Government does not give you permission for freedom of speech. The government doesn't give you permission to practice what sexuality does. Government doesn't give you permission to marry or not marry. That's sovereignly given to you when life is created. Earth itself. Absolutely. However, I'm a realist as well. I look at laws of nature and I look at history. And history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. You mentioned revolutions. Revolutions don't work. Violence doesn't work. At the end of the day, people that have more power, whether it's through means of force or means of coercion, whatever, they're going to overtake you. I'm a firm believer in better technologies and better education slowly, not through a quick sweep, but slowly over time generates a better society.  Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? I wouldn't want to live 100 years ago.  It's a tool. It's how you use this tool, right, that matters. I'm talking about guns. It's not the gun that kills people. People kill people. It's their psychology. Absolutely. And so for me, I see the writing on the wall. I'm in the crypto space. You see Bitcoin transforming how the way things are done. You see now, privacy is becoming more and more important. I see there's a reassurgence around the world. You see what's happening in Hong Kong. See what's happening. Even Europe, people are waking up. You see what's happening in Latin America. I think just the advent of more evolved technologies are superior to old technologies that will slowly outpace. And at the end of the day, certain powers that be don't really have a choice. They have to adopt or else they're out of power. Yeah. I think I agree with a lot of that. Yeah. I think there's some kind of awakening happening. Like I'm seeing it. I mean, I travel a lot. I meet so many people and I see people switching on. The thing is that, you know, what the powers that be have a really, they're really good at, but once you start to see these things, you see the patterns that they use is that they do co-opt movements to basically like take power away from those movements. And I'd seen that because I'd been an environmentalist since I was 12 years old. I'm 40 years old now. So, I mean, I've been at this kind of for a long time in that. And, you know, I've seen that movement be completely co-opted by big finance who just use it as a mechanism to control people. Like the Greta Thunberg, you know, They need a time magazine person.  I can't stand it. It drives me crazy. Because she, you know, I saw this great meme that was like Iceberg, shows a picture of an iceberg like on the top and then the big, you know, like 90% of it's underneath the water.  It's like, perfect. But it's, yeah, you know, they've co-opted it.  In that climate change is being used as a mechanism to control everything, every resource, every piece of land. And like, they're shooting themselves in the foot. And I'm seeing it constantly. I want to want to wake people up to it. But it's like, man, like that's a religious space, you know, like in it, in an era of modern secularism, where you know, climate change has become the new religion.  And I've, I've certainly paid quite a cost for coming out with some of the things that I've said, I just don't care anymore.  If you don't like what I'm saying, Nietzsche has a saying about the most dangerous thing a man can do is to be by himself. Most people, we want to be part of a tribe or they want to be accepted by a herd. It's the few that accept, the few that accept to be ostracized and ridiculed. They're the ones that make change. It's not the will. It's, it's not, people think democracy makes the change is not, it's a will of the few that dictate the course of civilization. Oh, totally. You know, the neat thing I found though, as a content creator, you might find this yourself too, is that you get to a place, certainly not at the beginning, you know, when you're starting out, you kind of have to pick your lane and kind of stick to it. But, you know, I've got like 300 and something thousand followers on, on YouTube, I've been at it for six years. I'm at a point where I've come out and said some things, you know, and, you know, I get labeled this, that or the other. And let's say I lose 10% of my audience right away from something I say, well, those are probably 10% of people that I probably don't care about anyways. If they're, if they're so offended that they can't handle me saying something that rubs them the wrong way and they're ready just to like throw it all in, fine. But what happens in the meantime is you drop a little bit of dead weight and you kind of get some Spartans that come in as people that want to help you and join your tribe who are like a thousand times more effective than some of these followers who just get offended by everything, like kind of snowflake people. So I found where I'm at, like I started kind of speaking my mind a bit more when I was over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube. And I found it actually didn't hurt anything of my numbers. Like I was worried at first, like, you know, I start talking about something this, is it going to hurt my book sales and stuff like that? Hasn't at all. It's actually, as far as I can tell, it's all still grown. I think, I think the more honest and real you can be is just a way better game to play because the world is so full of charlatans and bullshitters. It's not necessarily a numbers game. It's a quality game.  Well, it's memetics, right? It's the herd mentality as Rene Jarrar talks about, especially when it comes to social media, people rarely think for themselves. They don't use critical thinking tools or skill sets or heuristics. I had a conversation with an environmentalist acquaintance, I wouldn't say friend. And I'm like, listen, we're not getting rid of oil. I don't know where the cognitive dissonance comes about that computer in front of you. That's oil. Your phone is oil. The house is oil. Construction's oil. I don't know why you guys think just fuel is oil. But nonetheless, let's continue the conversation. And this person was adamant about we have to stop. We have to stop Alberta. I'm like, okay, let me follow your train of thoughts. They're crazy. And I'm like, listen, I'll play along with you. I'm just going to say all oil is evil. Whatever. Okay. Just for the sake of conversation. I'll fancy it. You are literally saying that you have zero empathy or remorse.  Let's let's put them on the streets. You know, forget about them having a house. Forget about them supporting their families.  I'm like, do you hear understand what you're saying?   Oh, yeah. Their gears are like, well, it's ironic, especially coming from people in Ontario.  And like, I totally get the Wexit movement. Like, I, if Canada was a country, I would be, I think it'd be a great idea.  And then he sent them all the evidence. There was a book that came out in like the early sixties called Ho Canada, H O Canada, you can find it online explains the whole thing. Like, there is no Canada. It was never confederated, never had sovereignty from the people. It's just a de facto nation.  So the whole Wexit thing is like great in spirit, but it's totally stacked on ignorance. This is like, nobody knows anything about our history. Like, it's crazy because like I, I've been reading like stuff like I've gone down the rabbit hole is reading legal documents, like reading all the acts, like interpretations act, all the primary acts, the Hudson's Bay Charter, the BNA Act, I've got all these documents here. And it's like, it's all there. It's just like in public school, they don't tell you any, they just tell you the highlights, you know, like all the, all the sexy points, but they don't talk about the fact that when Queen Victoria died, that was it. Like we were done. So I mean, the Wexit thing is great, but I'm with you with the city States, man. I mean, I, you know, if I could have, if I could wave my magic wand and have it my own way, it would be sort of bio regional areas like watersheds, you know, you, you, you could form local governments around watersheds, but like for me, it would have to be based on common law.  Like you don't, you don't need all these laws saying all you need is the Bible. Like the 10 commandments are really all you need to govern a society.  You're not, you don't own anybody's labor. You can't go and take somebody's like income tax is goes against common law, but because we've accepted the personhood, we've taken the birth certificate, we've taken the benefits package. We're now an employee and now we're obligated. And so don't get me started income tax. That's the worst part. That's beyond slavery.  Oh yeah. But it's a touchy subject to talk about income taxes because you can, you can freak people up pretty quick, but like, you know, read the income tax act, read the first sentence says the persons and citizens shall pay income tax. What does that mean? Who's a person or a citizen? I'm a pretty big libertarian, but more on the realist side.   I'm with you. It's not going to happen. I care about results. I want something. One is better than zero. So how do I get to one? Yeah, exactly. So it's like, I'll give you one thing that I would like. Okay. I don't see us stopping income tax. Right. I don't see taxes going down. I see taxes going up. Okay. Yeah. Actually, I wouldn't feel that bad paying some taxes if I knew exactly every single penny where went. I want the government to be 100% transparent and line item everything. Okay.  Great. They do that on your land tax, but that's it. I want everything. I want to know all of the taxes of Canada. It's because the CRA is a private corporation. It's even offshore. And 100% of our income taxes do not pay a single service in this country. The only thing that pays for services in this country that we use is number one tax. When you get your land tax like I own a home, I get the statement. It tells me exactly what those taxes pay for. Okay. I get that. That makes sense. And then gas tax pays for the roads. You know, we pay for medical services here. That pays for what it is in BC. Income tax 100% is a private racket. It pays debt primarily. It's total BS. But all you got to do is read the act. It's all there. The more people start to read the legal language, I'm not calling for revolution.  But the whole thing is BS. The Income Tax Act says people or persons and residents or persons and citizens, those have legal definitions. That means legal fictions. It doesn't mean men and women. It doesn't say men and women shall pay Income Tax. It's because they're not talking about men and women. They're talking about persons. And unfortunately, the thing is only people that have means of resources to kind of legally bypass. I'm going to say bypass is like whether it's holdco or different types of corporation and tax structures, et cetera. But that takes a pretty fair penny to set that up and to maintain it on a yearly basis. Not cheap, right? So it's literally the richer you are, the more less taxes you pay. Not because you're in a race. Not because you're in a ferris or evil because you've worked very hard for it and you're doing everything within the legal umbrella not to be fucked. Oh yeah. Well, I mean the real rich don't... I mean, it depends on the rich you're talking about. I mean, there's... I'm not talking about the Amazon. I'm talking about semi-entrepreneur rich. Right. But you know, like Robert Kiyosaki, like Rich Dad. His latest book is called Fake. And it's really good because he kind of explains like how the rich don't pay taxes. And it's basically just like sheltering your money in income appreciating assets, but then leveraging debt so that your debt underrates the income. That's how the rich like him don't pay taxes. The real rich, the George Soros, the Rockefellers, those guys never pay taxes because they do everything in trust. They've been around long enough that they knew the system before the system we have today. And they ran it under common law. And they had all these structures in place to not pay... That's why you never see Rockefellers on the Ford 500 list. Ford 500 lists is for peasants. You know, Bill Gates and more about... They're peasants. Those guys all pay taxes.   They're not residents. They're not citizens. They're sovereign. And they've been sovereign because their families were sovereign forever. But I think this kind of stuff is coming out more for other people to figure out. And you know, I could talk way more about it, but sometimes it's hard to talk about these things because it's like really over people's head. But the First Nations have been doing this forever. And not all of them because the Indian Act is an incredibly racist document that if you're an Indian in the Indian Act, you're fucked.  Oh yeah, to read the Indian Act, man, you want to read... It's almost like Adolf Hitler wrote it. Like, it's crazy. They can come and take your kids without any pre-warning. If you don't vaccinate your kids, they can take your kids. Like, it's brutal. It's like you're farmed.  And you know, that's why I think this whole du jour government, you know, like you got a guy in Toronto named Doug Force, who's been talking about this, the myth is Canada. He's been talking about establishing du jour governments under a constitutional convention and doing kind of what the US did. The US lost it though, right? Like the US has a neat system because they have a du jour and de facto system because they have the United States, which is the du jour republic, but then they have the United States of America, which is the maritime law corporation, why the Statue of Liberty is out in the water because it represents maritime law. They have a dual system, but maybe Trump's bringing back the republic. That's what some people seem to think. But it's interesting times, man. Yeah, man. I think we'll leave it at that, man. I think we can keep on talking for hours about this all day. Yeah, all day. But Curtis, if people want to get to know more about you, learn about the farming, learn about your courses, what's the best resource? They could probably go to the urban farmer.co. That's kind of the central hub. And then my, you know, you got my YouTube link there. And then my membership site is where I actually put most of my content now is from the field.farm. It's kind of like a online video magazine where basically each week I go and I tour around North America. I go and visit farms and do really in-depth videos where I just follow them around on the camera and we just talk shop. And so it's kind of getting harder and harder to produce content like that on YouTube, just because YouTube has been so like, it's, it's pilfered. It's just, it's, it's not what it used to be. And so the private membership place is where content creators like myself can actually afford to make good content and travel to do so. And people are willing to pay a little, pay a few bucks a month for it. And, and I can deliver good information.