The Veganic Grower’s Handbook with Jimmy Videle

But I'm gonna just start with a specific question. This is really from the middle of the interview, but because you're in Canada and it will be a little out of date by the time people hear it, but I don't see any point in talking about anything without talking about the fires. Can you just tell us a little bit about what is happening where you are, and how you're dealing with it?

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, starting about middle of May, there's been almost 2 million acres that have burned in northern Quebec alone.

There's about 130 active fires and the closest one to us, thankfully, is about 200 kilometers north or 120 miles. So the fires themselves are not that close, but of course the smoke comes in, just like it did throughout Philadelphia and New York State and all on the Northeast. And, it's a detrimental impact to those people out there that have, respiratory issues, lung issues, if the plants can't breathe like they would. So that's what's going on. It's pretty bad. It's never been this bad so early in the history of Quebec, usually there's only about 4,000 acres burned at this point in the season.

So what? Mid-June and we're almost at 2 million acres. So this is pretty extreme. Put this into context as to why, more than likely in Northern Canada, it's because of massive deforestation from logging. We don't have massive deforestation in Northern Canada from animal agriculture, but we do have it from over logging, quite substantially.

Mariann Sullivan: I mean, of course it's connected to climate, but I had not realized that it was exacerbated by logging practices.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, because the more that we log, the more that we tear up the landscape, whether it's from animals or whether it's from mining or whether it's from logging, we create these sort of understory growths, right?

And those understory growths, they grow very fast, but then when it gets dry, they become very dry very quickly. So this is where the fires will start then, because the snow pack this year up north wasn't as good as has historically been. As soon as that fire hits the crowns, and this is mostly conifer woodlands, things like spruce and firs and pines, as soon as it hits the crowns it just jumps. And it's just heartbreaking for all the wild fauna that lives in these parts. So again, it's from anthropogenic sources that is causing these fires and who's suffering the most is all the wildes creatures that live there.

Mariann Sullivan: Always, always. And, you know, I wanna talk more about that and all of the implications of climate.

But now I'm gonna go back and start at the beginning rather than that horrifying but very timely topic. And so I was really excited when I first saw your book, I wasn't familiar with your work before that. And, because I wanna know more about veganic growing.

And I am really not a gardener, but I do have a little yard and I'm trying to make it like a little better. And I found it's pretty hard. Like, nobody knows what you're talking about and everything has animal ingredients in it. So let's start with definitions. What is your definition of veganic growing?

Jimmy Videle: So veganic growing is the cultivation of food and fiber crops with the minimal exploitation of all animal beings. So in that we as veganic growers would not use any animal manure, animal byproducts that come from the slaughterhouses, like bone meal, blood meal. We don't use any products fished out of the ocean, like shellfish meal or fish meal or fish emulsion.

We don't use urea from animals. We don't use any animal products at all. But veganic takes it a step further in that we also do not spray any kind of pesticides. Now, organic growing does unfortunately use a vast amount of organic pesticides to control insect pressures that are eating the crops that we wish to eat.

But in veganic, what we do instead is, we let the faunal and the insect community work our fields. So we plant more flowers, we plant more biodiversity. We create a system so that if there is, say an insect, like an aphid that wants to eat the juices from our lettuces, then we have a nice colony of ants or spiders or green lacewings or praying mantis that will then eat those aphids.

Because in the natural world, there is an actual prey-predator relationship in basically everything because they don't have the choice. Certain beings don't have the choice like we humans do to eat what they're supposed to eat. So a praying mantis must eat aphids. They can't just decide to all of a sudden eat fruits.

But to go back to why this is important is because then instead of trying to control it with some sort of spray, which just destroys the entire balance that even organic growers are trying to create, the balance itself is then helping the crops that we wish to grow.

Mariann Sullivan: And, you've been farming for a while, for a long time and in different places, and you have been paying attention to ethics and animals for a fairly long time from what I could see from what you wrote. But you had not yet discovered veganic growing. Can you tell us a little bit about that trajectory and the evolution of how you went from paying some attention to ethics to really getting it about veganic?

Jimmy Videle: Yeah. So in between my farm in Arizona that I had, which was an organic farm, which I did raise animals for their milk and for their eggs, I raised goats and I raised chickens.

And when I left that farm, I traveled around, I ended up in Montreal, and I had a job as a volunteer and as a consultant on a farm on the west island of Montreal. And during that time, it was like late 2013, all of a sudden I received an email from a longtime friend, an old college roommate, Kip Anderson, who is one of the co-directors of Cowspiracy and What the Health.

And his, subject line, said, "What do you think about veganic growing?" And I said, "Oh, that sounds great, but there's absolutely no way that you can grow without animal manure." And that was my stance. And that was in 2013. From there I was linked with Keegan Kuhn, the other co-director.

And then I was linked with an organization from Quebec called the Veganic Agricultural Network. And, from there, I started gaining the understanding. And because Kip was convincing me- even though it still took me almost a year to become vegan- was convincing me that we can grow veganically, that we must become vegan for the animals, for the environment, for the planet. I was like, "Well, okay."

And I knew that I was gonna have another farm. I didn't know where at that point, and I didn't know what it was gonna look like, how big it was, but I knew that there was gonna be another one. And it just so happened that we found this place here in Quebec in 2014.

And because I was newly vegan, just a couple of months before we decided to go for it, my wife and I both became vegan. And we just decided to go for it. We're just like, "We don't know. There isn't that much information out there. We're just gonna try from scratch, no manure, no animal products, not raise any animals, and we're just gonna see how it functions."

And because I've done this, this is my second time, I was like, "You know what? I'm gonna take really good data. I'm going to do all the research necessary so that it can then be replicatable later. Because if I don't, then I won't know. And who else is gonna do it?" And even though I didn't even think that I was gonna be the one to write this book, The Veganic Grower's Handbook, it ended up becoming that way.

And it was only easier. I can't say it was easy, but it was easier because I had all of that data and all that reference that I had jotted down before.

Mariann Sullivan: You know, I read the book. I mean, there's a text part and then there's the plant part. And, somehow it escaped me that it was that recent that you went in this direction.

I mean, 2013, 2014, like that is not very long ago. So that is really exciting and it is really exciting that you wrote the book. Because we all hear about veganic growing, but one of the things that I think, especially since, you know, a lot of people listening probably really try to buy organic, and there's a tendency to ignore or not be familiar with the many vegan problems with organic growing and the ugly reality. Maybe not as ugly as some other food topics, but still a lot of problems. You mentioned some of the things that are wrong with organic, but can you go into that, especially the manure issue?

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, so the manure issue is a big one because this is the basis of a lot of the fertility that organic farmers use to feed their plants.

The way that the organic standards are written in both the United States and Canada is that if it is not available to have organic manure, then it is acceptable to use conventionally raised manure. So now what you're talking about is feedlot manure, dairy cow manure, dairies that are in stanchions manure.

And these are animals that are also, they're very poorly treated. They are fed GMO crops. And what we have known scientifically is that GMOs kind of uptake in the body. So once they are in the system, even when the manure flushes it out, the GMO can still be there. We also don't know when something is sprayed because all GMOs are sprayed with an herbicide. So GMO corn that is fed to animals that organic farmers can use is sprayed with glyphosate, which is an herbicide that kills the herb, but doesn't kill the soybean or the corn plant.

And that's because the corn seed and the soy seed was genetically modified to be resistant to that specific herbicide. So when the animal eats that corn eats that soy that interestingly, then people eat, so you're eating GMOs too. If you don't think you're eating GMOs, you're eating GMOs. If you're eating animal products and you're eating all of that chemical, because all of that chemical residue stays in the seed, in the grains that the animals are eating.

So all of that ends up back in the manure. So what the study found, and I think it was out of Austria, what they found is that when they were using manure from animals that were fed GMOs that were sprayed with this herbicide, plants did not grow because they died from the herbicide residues that were still in the manure.

But that's only one of the problems. The biggest problem that we have with manure, especially in the United States, is that the animal agriculture industry produces enough manure in just five days to cover the entire continental United States with an application that's basically six to 12 inches.

Mariann Sullivan: Oh my God.

Jimmy Videle: So, yeah, it is nutty. And I wrote all about this. I did a bunch of reports for the Humane Political Party USA. So if you go to HumaneHerald/publications, you'll see that report. And it was mind blowing. Like I had no idea. I mean, we knew that the manure was going in the groundwater, it was getting flushed in the Mississippi. It was causing the ocean dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, but we had no idea that it was piling up this quickly. So if you think about that, where does it go?

Well, you wonder why all you can seem to find in nurseries and hardware stores to plant your gardens is manure. Why? Agricultural extension universities, all the ones that promote organics or even conventional farming practices, they will all say use manure. Why? Because there's just so much of it. And, that is why we're in the state that we're in.

Mariann Sullivan: Wow, yeah, and it's, it's just one more, maybe not the biggest one, but one more income stream for the factory farm industry, it's putting together all of those income streams that makes them profitable.

People talk about something being a byproduct, and I bet they talk about manure being a byproduct of animal agriculture, so it doesn't really matter, but it's not a by, it's one of their products that makes them profitable. I had no idea. So your point is that mainly all of this advice about growing with manure is so that we can get rid of some of the manure.

I mean, that's the main purpose. But let's talk about the other side, like since we're talking about manure, what is it that makes for good soil? I mean, everyone is told that manure is what makes for good soil for growing conditions. And you point out that in nature things grow and animals alright, they poop, but it's kinda occasional and here and there.

So how does soil get to be soil in the right way?

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, that's very interesting. And before I answer that question, I just wanna say that, think of manure as a product. Let's just take a very sort of benign situation where you're talking about grazing cows.

Let's say they don't even get slaughtered. Let's say they're raised in a sanctuary. And let's say they're grazing and they're eating the grass, then they're depositing their manure. This is exactly what regenerative agriculture is talking about. Right? They're depositing their manure and then that manure is then feeding the grass that then they eat again.

Well, that manure has taken out of it all of the nutrients that the grass has, because that's what the cow is now utilizing to create its massive size because cows are huge and can get very, very huge because of all the nutrients from the grass that they eat. So when they have their manure, there's basically nothing left.

It's basically just, whatever they didn't want to use and it's not specific. Like manure can be tested from different sources and you will never know what it's gonna be. Depends on how fast the manure came out and how much was actually digested by the animal. But let's go back to the question.

So, how does soil become soil? So my best example is to take a look at a forest, right? So if you look at a forest ecology, what you have is you have slow growing plants. You have middle growing plants, you have middle-sized trees, and then you have really large trees. And if you live in the north, if you live in any kind of place where it's dormant or even if you live in the tropics, what ends up happening is that when winds come, rains come, snows come, all of that plant material sort of dies back.

And in the tropics there's a cycle where the rains, it knocks off, leaves, it knocks off tree limbs and all of that just starts decomposing. Well, the soil itself is not actually just a dead ingredient. The soil is actually made up a bunch of living microorganisms. So there's no such thing as just dirt really, it's actually little animals that are eating the plants, eating each other, pooping, doing that. So on a very, very small microscopic scale, yes, it's manure, but it's manure from really, really tiny, tiny beings that we don't raise and we have no control over. They just do what they do. And what we know, which is really cool, is that microorganisms change over the course of seasons.

So even in California, there's four seasons and every season the microorganisms change to be able to decompose what it is that is being dropped onto the ground at that point in time. And every region is different. So the microorganisms that live in the region I live in here are gonna be vastly different to what they are in Hawaii or Panama, or California or Southern Georgia. It doesn't matter.

But as that goes, those little creatures, they basically biocycle all that plant and all that animal material that's in the soil. What we don't have in a forest setting is a lot of piles of manure anywhere. There's no cows that in northern forest, we do have deer and we have wolves, but I can walk through the forests around my home, 365 days a year, and it would be rare to see a deer carcass.

And even though I do see eastern wolves, they don't stick around that long. I mean, they walk, they poop, and that's it. So the manure that we have, again, is just that. It's just that microorganism manure, which it's not just manure, it's the microorganism, breaking down, eating, chewing, all that plant material.

Mariann Sullivan: It's so crazy that we don't all know this. I was reading George Monbiot's book recently too, along with your book, and they both brought home this idea that soil is what we live on. It's what we grow everything on. And we know so much less about it than we should at this point.

And it's so complex and fascinating. We just think manure, which, you know, as you point out, like the minute you said that in the book, I thought, "Well, yeah, there aren't animals pooping all over the place all the time and we have loads of great soil."

It's just crazy that we don't know more about this and that, you know, you don't learn about this stuff in school. We have so much to cover and there's so much to talk about, but I wanna hear about the farm, La Ferme de l'Aube. Is that all right? I'm so embarrassed to pronounce French. I always feel like I'm screwing it up, but tell us about it. Tell us about how it started and what it looks like right now.

Jimmy Videle: In 2014, I planted garlic just basically by taking out some of the wild flora that was there, and planting garlic. Thinking like, okay, I'm gonna do the most minimal amount of removal of flora that I can. Well, it didn't work really well. So after that...

Mariann Sullivan: Welcome to my experience of gardening. Like apparent...I'm glad to hear that things don't grow for you too, sometimes.

Jimmy Videle: Oh, yeah. You know, it's not easy. I mean, one, you have to compete with climate. You have to compete with rains coming when they shouldn't, or droughts coming when they shouldn't.

And you have to compete with the flora that wants to grow better than anything else that you put into the ground. So, yeah, and if you don't have a fence or if you don't have a way to keep deer out or groundhogs out, or any other little creature out that wants to specifically eat your radishes or turnips or lettuce greens, well then you're gonna even have more problems.

So, yeah. It's a challenge. It's challenge anywhere you start. So for me, even though I had already been growing my own food for the better part of 15, 16 years before we came here, it was still a challenge. It was like relearning everything again, because the seasons here are quite different.

Everything's quite different. So 2015 we kind of started, we created beds. And really when you're starting, you really need to create a system where there isn't any natural flora in your beds to start. Eventually you can let it come back in, but if you don't take that out in some way, let it decompose in some way, and I talk all about that in my book, how to do that, then you're not gonna have a soil that is going to be able to plant your little seedling or your seeds. Because the thing is about wild flora is it wants to grow and it wants to grow where you live better than anything that you plant.

It's a little bit sort of hypocritical to be a person who does agriculture because you're trying to manipulate the system to grow what we humans want to eat, but it's not necessarily what the earth or the land wants to grow. But because we are human, we can't eat grass. I've tried just eating clover. It doesn't work. There are certain wild plants we can eat, but we've created a diversity of food sources that we have seed saved from for a very long time that it's okay that this is the way that we work it. We just need to be diligent and be patient and you need to start with a surface that's free of that wild flora.

Mariann Sullivan: I'm so tempted to start asking you questions about my backyard instead of continuing with a real interview.

But this is one thing I'm struggling with, and it's relevant to this question, is invasives. You talk about, like you don't like the word weed, and I totally hear you. These are just plants that are trying to grow where the native floor have always grown.

But my backyard is, and I think probably people in urban and suburban areas have this problem too, is nothing but invasives- bindweed and things that are very, very hard to get rid of and that really do kill anything around.

Do you have the same benign attitude towards them? And, can you just pull them up and make the things grow that you wanna have grow?

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, it's a great question. Probably the best way, and you'll see this, if you actually try to go out and you start your garden and you start pulling out that native floral, we'll just call it weeds for now, for this minute, you start pulling out those weeds or those...

Mariann Sullivan: Talking specifically about the ones that aren't native, but also the native ones, but yeah.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah. And, you know what, there's probably a lot in a lot of regions that aren't, but it's all the same premise because now they are native, you know? I mean, yeah. Okay. They're invasive.

Mariann Sullivan: They moved in.

Jimmy Videle: Now they do. You can call 'em immigrants if you want, but they live here.

Mariann Sullivan: They're no less native than I am.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, see, there you go. And, to be honest, your tomato plant is super foreign to your soils. Like it's absolutely the most foreign thing that you can put into the ground, like the soils anywhere in North America don't know what a tomato is unless you start talking about central Mexico and then in which case you're talking about a tomato that is about as big as a raisin.

So, it's all the same premise.

Mariann Sullivan: Okay.

Jimmy Videle: You can either, so if you were to take out that invasive and you see that intense root system, cuz that's the thing about those invasive plants, is that they have that really incredible rizomes that the plants pop up from the roots pretty much everywhere.

And if you pull that out, what you're pulling out with it is all of that good soil. You're pulling out microorganisms that have learned to adapt with that, right? So really what's better, and I know over the course of my YouTube shows and talking about it over the last couple of years, people do not like this at all, and I get it.

But what I can say is if you put a piece of black plastic and you don't leave it there, you only put it there for about a month and you put it on the patch just where you want to grow, not on the sides, not your entire yard, just where you want to grow it, and you leave it for a month. If you take it off, what's gonna end up happening is that all of that flora is going to be decomposed.

Then when you create your space with just a very small cultivator, which can be like a three or a four pronged handheld thing, or you could, we have a standing one, you just start pulling up the roots and because all the bind weed, or here we have couch grass, is kind of already brown and dying. The roots are not dead but it's a lot less strong.

So you just start taking that out where it is that you wanna go and yeah it's a process and we do it every year. Because every year, even though the way that our farm is set up, we have 50 foot rows, and then in between sections of 50 foot rows, we have about a five foot by 200 foot strip of just greens.

So it's like clover and that same couchgrass. And of course, at the end of season we are getting tired and all of that starts wanting to come into the beds. So if we don't take that out, then eventually it'll just take it over. And if you've ever tried growing anything with Bindweed or couch grass, nothing will grow with it.

So start small and take out just a little bit at a time. Just do a four foot by eight foot plot. Don't envision it as a as big as you need it to be. Everything that I need to feed myself. But just start with a little section and see how that feels to you. A four foot by eight foot piece of black plastic you can find recycled at a hardware store because most lumber is packed in it.

So you just put it on the ground, the heat beats on it, it creates that heat in the soil, which is basically the microorganisms working. They start decomposing. And what's really, really cool is what we found here, not only does it create a healthier, more fertile soil after you take it off, but what we find is it creates homes for gopher snakes.

It creates homes for, mice and voles and moles and shrews, which are all a part of the cycle. it creates homes for ground beetles, for ants, for spiders. So even when we kind of pull it off and we fold it up and we put it to the side, those creatures, they either go right back in or they take their families and they go to another place.

But it's so close, it's not even relocation. So again, it's about the most minimal of exploitation possible to grow the food that we want to grow. And I can tell you that if you do it in this particular way, you're doing it so much less exploit than any place you can buy it from. Yeah. Whether it's pure, conventional, or organic.

Mariann Sullivan: No, I love this idea and I love your attitude that you don't think of any of these plants as being enemies. I find it very hard not to hate bindweed, I admit it, but I'm gonna try to have a better attitude towards it. It has a terrible attitude towards me. It think it wants it to kill me.

It just keeps coming closer and closer to the house. So, alright, I'm gonna stop talking about myself, my own problems in my own garden, right? Because I wanna talk about how you produce so much food. You grow on half an acre, it boggles my mind. How do you like, tell us how much food you produce and tell us how you pull that off.

Jimmy Videle: So here in Quebec. on that half acre, the most that we ever produced, our best year ever was 2021 and we produced over 5,400 pounds of food, on a half an acre.

Mariann Sullivan: A half an acre!?

Jimmy Videle: On a half an acre. It's not very much but here's what I can say is that I have done this a really long time, and every plant is different.

And as a grower who's sold to the public for over 15 years, actually this is my 19th year as a farmer, so over 19 years, I know that if I'm selling my customers fruits, vegetables, and herbs, they want as much diversity as possible. And in order to do that, that means that we plant as much diversity as possible.

But by doing so, so if we have over 300 different varieties of edible plants that we're trying to produce and sell, we need to get to know every single one. So what I can say is, the only way that we produce this much is because me and my wife, Melanie, have learned what it is that every single one of these varieties need.

But by doing it in that kind of diversity, here's the key, here's the kicker, is that for sure we're gonna have losses every year. We always do. Like I go out there now and there we have a little problem with a gray cutworm, and it is the larvae of a night moth that we like to have around. Moths are really important for pollination of fruiting crops, but they lay their eggs in the winter and in the spring they come and they just ate, I don't know, 50 of my small little cone-shaped cabbages, which we really like and our customers really like.

Being that we have more cabbages being planted, what's called succession planting, not planting everything at the same time, we're able to sort of mitigate the losses that we have, either from disease or from drought or from too much rain or from insects and get available harvest at different times of year.

So this is what allows us to do that- the diversity, the succession planning, and the intricate knowledge of every single variety that we grow, and I talk about that a lot in my book like creating an observation log, creating a log where you document your journey as your own growing.

So when you plant something, for sure you're gonna have losses. It is 100% assured, but you're also gonna have successes. But if you don't write down what the seed was, why you think that was, what insects you observed, were there any diseases you observed? Were there any weeds or native flora that, or wild flora that grew with the plant that you actually didn't have to take out?

Like we have that. That happens too. Then it becomes you a better grower. And that's a lot of what I discuss in my book is how you can, yeah, if you haven't done this before, how you can become really good and if you have done this for 40 years, how you can become even better and produce even more than you were doing before.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, it's fascinating. And the book, I mean, when you say that that's what you're doing in the book, I just wanna make clear you're talking about the methods, but it's actually, as you pointed out, up to each person to act. You have to learn from your own land and from your own situation.

Like, like nobody can tell you what's going to grow there. But you can help people understand how they can look better and how they can see better, and understand better, what their land is telling them. I mentioned in the beginning that you deal with this both on a micro level and a macro level.

I'd like to kind of switch to the macro level because this really brings up your idea about this kind of global idea of how we should get food, and looking at the state of the world. And we have a few problems in the world. And, for you, an ideal farm is a pretty small farm, isn't it?

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, my ideal is a really small farm.

So my wife Melanie and I, we run the half acre by ourselves. We don't have any employees. We've never had any volunteers. It's specific because I wanted to see like how much size, what the scale was that was possible for two people. And what I found is any more than one acre for two people is way too much.

And there are market gardeners and growers out there that are doing an acre or more, and then you start having tractors and then you need to find help. But what I really wanted to know was how it could be possible for two people, how much land would be possible for two people to cultivate and nourish themselves and nourish a good amount of the population.

And extrapolating on that, I've actually recently wrote an article for an organization and for a magazine that I write bi-annually for called Growing Green International, which is with the vegan organic network out of the UK. And I actually wrote an our called The Veganic Way: how do we envision the transition to a hundred percent plant-grown, plant-based agriculture system?

And for me, it is specific, the reason why I believe we should have a small farm approach is because, one, you can adapt to the climactic conditions more readily. If you have a loss, you can replant like right away. You're not talking about 500, 600 acres of one crop. You're talking a few feet, 50 feet, 40 feet or 30 feet of one crop.

And if something happens, you can replant right away. Something else that'll come in so that, you know. So if you lose cabbage, well you can grow, say a mustard green, which the nutrient level is pretty similar. So you can go ahead and work it that way. But the other most interesting thing about small scale, and this is been studied and, journaled, around the world, is that there is very, very little waste on a small operation.

Our operation here has 1% post harvest waste. So if we produce 5,000 pounds of food, we lose 50. That's it. Now most farms, because of their size and scale, will lose upwards of 30 to 40% of their crop before it'll ever make it into the hands or into the mouths of the consumers. So out of that same 5,000 pounds of food, now you're talking 1500 or 2000 pounds of food is wasted because it doesn't get to storage fast enough, because it gets rotted in storage, because it doesn't get sold after that fast enough.

This is the problem with the capitalistic viewpoint of agriculture. Agriculture should not be functioning in this model. It should be functioning from the idea where I am your small farmer and I calculated that on one acre of land I can feed 15 people year round.

Okay, so this is year round. Like I'm talking everything from dry beans to flax, even some grains like oats, all your potatoes, carrots, some of your small fruits, all your herbs. Now, it's not 100% of everything you need, but it is a vast majority of what a vegan person would need or what a person would need to eat.

So on one acre, we can feed 15 people year round. And this is pretty much anywhere, because anywhere there are crops that grow really, really well based on regionality. So if we look at that system, then me as a one acre farmer, me and Melanie, we would feed 15 people, the closest 15 people to us. There would be absolutely no transportation costs.

There would be almost no fossil fuel costs. We would completely eliminate the number one driver of carbon dioxide or carbon dioxide equivalents in the atmosphere, which is fossil fuel use. And number two driver, which is agriculture predominantly, and the biggest culprit animal agriculture. Right?

So if we were to keep it on this really small scale, just feed our really, our tightest community, it would give us, as farmers, the income that we would need to live. And it would give access to the people around us, the absolute best food. Because really most people are buying their foods from the grocery store, and we don't know where this is going.

Some people are buying it from the farmer's market, but even those are in places that are far enough away that the farmer has to go and then the people have to go. And there's still massive fossil fuel costs, even though it's better than the sort of regional distribution system of getting food from the farmer to a distribution site and then to a grocery store.

It's not as good as just me feeding 15 of my closest neighbors, or me and Melanie, plus 13, so 13 of our closest neighbors. Right? But this would require a massive agricultural shift worldwide. I mean, we're talking about, and this is the craziest part that I thought about. So if you think about that model in the United States alone, we would need 45 million farmers.

We would need basically a third or a quarter of our entire workforce to be in agriculture, which incidentally and interestingly is exactly what it was back in 1850. So yes, I am actually talking about a model that we go back to where we were. But the greatest thing is, is that we have technology now. We have innovation now.

Yeah. We have more skilled, we have better seeds now actually than what we had before because of breeding by small... cuz we're a seed company too. So we seed select for the best sources of tomatoes or the best sources of carrots. So the best sources of peppers and other growers are doing the same.

And this is becoming a huge movement right now in Canada, but also in the United States, of young farmers starting to realize that they really need to start saving their own seed and then get that seed to small growers. So yeah, I believe that we need to go backward to go forward. This, somebody else had mentioned this before, but it requires more than just the want and desire.

There needs to be a lot of help along the way. As we know, land prices are going through the roof. They're actually taking farmland in Ontario and they're wanting to buy up that farmland to build affordable housing. Well, I agree with affordable housing. I think it's super important, but not for the sake of land that is in agriculture.

If we're gonna do anything with agricultural land, we grow veganically. Use half the land that we're using currently and let the other half rewild so that all beings have a place to live and thrive. We can create affordable housing from all the second homes and all the cities that have vacant homes and vacant buildings, and that's where we can put affordable housing as we need to.

Mariann Sullivan: I really love that. You know, sometimes the small farm movement drives me crazy because it's frequently animal-oriented. It's frequently quote unquote humane. It has this image of going back to the past and that really puts me off. But I really love your vision of taking what was good from the past, but doing it in a way that's very modern, that's learned a lot about what we're doing and leaving out these really destructive parts of what we used to do in the past, and which we're now doing at a level that is almost incomprehensible, the destructiveness of animal agriculture.

And, I hope this is a movement that, I mean, as you point out, there's a long way to go from where we are to there, but even though it would take a really lot of people farming, I think a really lot of people like to farm. It's something that people love if they can make a living at it and live a good life at it.

Which brings us to an organization that I really wanted to talk to you. About the North American Veganic certification, which is one of your efforts to kind of grow this movement to get a real foothold in turning this into a movement and not just something really nice that you're doing.

Can you tell us about that and the standards that are being applied and how people can join that?

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, so the North American Veganic Certification standard, or NAVCS, and you can find us at certifiedveganic.org, we just launched it. My founding team of Susan Craig and James McQuaig and I founded this just at the beginning of the year.

So we're really, really new, but it really is a threefold approach. First, we wanna end animal agriculture forever, as vegans, we all want to do. Two, we want to transition to a 100% plant grown or veganic, plant-based agriculture model. And then the third key is that we wanna recruit and keep young farmers farming and on the land.

This is incredibly important. I will be 51 this year. This is going to be 25 years growing my food. This is my 19th year of farming. And I can tell you right now, I do not have the stamina or strength that I did even five years ago.

Mariann Sullivan: Well, you look great, Jimmy! I mean, other people can't see you, but I'm telling you, never would I guess that you were 51.

Jimmy Videle: Thank you so much. yeah. So, but I do know that there is a certain amount of time that we should do this. And it's not just from my own experience. When I was working on farms in Quebec, there was a couple that were in their mid to late fifties, and he'd been farming for about 35 years.

He was falling apart. He had bad knees, he had a bad back. He, was having heart trouble. You know, this is just, it's because of the stress, it's because of the work. It's because of the hours, it's because of everything. So I really believe that in order for this to work, and my team believes this as well, is that we need to get young people into the movement and the NAVCS is there.

We are there to create that sort of consulting advising contingent that will help keep people on the land and on farming. The standard that we created is very, how do I say? We needed to create something tangible so that when somebody looked at our website or when somebody wanted to become a certified veganic grower, they knew exactly what they needed to do to do that. So we spell out everything from how to treat the land, from what amendments you can use, what you can't use, what kind of barriers you should use, how you should deal with insects, how you should deal with diseases, how you should deal with small mammals even so far as how you should package, how you should store, how you should treat your employees, because all of this is important.

We believe that not only should we end the exploitation of animal agriculture, we need to end the exploitation of all wild, floral and faunal beings. And we need to end the exploitation of ourselves, because agriculture is the most exploitative industry for humans on the planet. You know, we're using immigrant labor in the slaughterhouses. They're working massive amounts of hours in the fields in California without health insurance.

And these are the people that are feeding the world and they need to be treated fairly. There needs to be the slaughterhouses, obviously, closed, but those that are working in the fields and picking the fruits and vegetables that all of us eat, they need to be paid what the people that are citizens of that country are paid.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah.

Jimmy Videle: They need to have healthcare. They need to have all of the rights of the citizens that are living in that state or that country or that province or wherever. Region to region. So you can go, if you are a grower, and this is specific, we talked a lot about whether or not we were gonna have corporate donations.

We were gonna just have individuals that could support us. Well, you could support us by telling people that there is this thing called certified veganic, which is actually the certification of produce grown in a veganic way. But we don't take donations and we don't take corporate sponsorship.

And this is specific because we wanted to make this certification farmer run. So when we have our annual meeting at the end of the year, all the certified farmers then get to come together and they get to decide how things are working. Are there things that need to be changed? What do they wanna see in the future?

And then as the core team, the three of us, or whoever else becomes part of the core team, then we decide during the course of the year how we're gonna market it, how we're gonna advertise it, how we're gonna be interviewed about it, how we're gonna talk about it, and how we're going to promote it further.

But we're also in a position where we were okay with it starting slow, building very grassroots and organic slash veganically so that everybody who becomes involved becomes 100% invested. Those farmers that are involved, or even if you're a small grower, let's say you have a small plot of land that you grow and you just wanna have validation.

You're a vegan person and you're like, "You know, I really wanna have a certification that says that I grow things in a veganic way because maybe I do vegan festivals, or maybe I do other craft fairs, or I do something where I wanna promote what it is I'm doing." You can just say there's something out there.

Or even as a small grower, we have a couple of animal sanctuaries also that have taken their manure, put it aside, used it for other purposes, and are only growing their gardens veganically. So when they do farm tours, they can show the difference.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah.

Jimmy Videle: Which is a really neat concept. You have the animals that have their manure. They're actually using that in a very productive way. But then the gardens themselves are actually just grown veganically.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. I love that.

Jimmy Videle: So yo can say this is how. Isn't that wonderful? So this is who we are certifiedveganic.org, the North American Veganic Certification Standard. We are here to certify all growers in Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

And our hope is little by little we get the name out there. We are already starting to see people that have promoted it. I had a really, um, we have a farm that we're gonna certify here in the next couple of months. They are from Slabbert Family Farm. They're from outside of Vancouver. And they just did Planted VegFest, which is a huge vegan festival in Vancouver. And they were there promoting Veganic gardening and North American Veganic Certifications Standards. Very cool program going on.

Mariann Sullivan: And so from what you're saying, I just wanna be clear, since probably a lot of people listening, some of them are probably like me and just, you know, find gardening, like incomprehensible and are trying, but probably some of them are accomplished gardeners, but they're gardeners, they're not farmers.

But you're almost saying there will be like a place for people who are kind of halfway there who grow a lot of food, but that's not their business. Even they will be able to get advice from, and, if they meet the qualifications, certification from this organization, because it's pretty daunting to grow veganically.

Like, well, your book is a big help, but there's not a lot of advice, you know, when you go into a gardening store and everything, as we talked about before, has animal inputs and just knowing how to do it and what to do. Will this organization can it serve those kind of people as well?

Jimmy Videle: Yeah. The greatest thing about it is if you go specifically to the website and you click on the veganic standard, you'll see right there exactly what you can use and what you cannot use, what we recommend and what we don't recommend. And then after that, if you have questions, yeah, contact us through, we have a web form there.

Contact us. We're more than happy to answer your questions, especially if you're growing. I mean, I really believe as much as I believe in the small farm, I believe even more in the idea that all of us should be growing some, if not a lot of our own food. Because yeah, it is daunting and everything is, imagine starting a new job, a first job for the first time.

Imagine going...meeting your in-laws for the first time. Like everything is daunting. Right?

Mariann Sullivan: Life is daunting. No doubt about it.

Jimmy Videle: Life is daunting. But if you do it, If you use what I write in my book, if you look at the North American Veganic certification standard in the book, I also have a lot of other resources.

If you go to the Veganic Agriculture Network, if you go to the vegan organic network, you can find vast amount of resources and videos and information about what it is that you need to do. Now, like what you said very interestingly before is that every region is different. That was what made it so incredibly complicated to write this kind of book is because some of what I say like snows falling may or may not be appropriate in Jacksonville, Florida.

But what's interestingly is all the techniques for growing vegan organically I created so that an individual could say, okay, composting, that makes sense to me. Anywhere that's universal. Looking at insects in this way, looking at wild plants that are getting into my gardens in this way. All of that is universal.

How to prepare your beds, how to grow cucumbers, how to grow kale in the back, the 125 page prop profile section. So all of this information is there. And what's so great about it is I set it up and my editor's help set it up in a way that was so easy that you could just flip to wherever you are in the season, you can go right to the crop. It is all there. Like really, if you're a vegan, this is really the only growing book you need. You don't even need to mess around with all the other ones that are gonna tell you why you should use manure, why you should use animal products, why you need to spray for insects or "pests" or why you should pull out all the weeds. No, you can look at it in a lot more holistic, balanced, harmonious kind of way.

Mariann Sullivan: And if you do have to go to the gardening store, you come armed with a little information, which really helps because it's hard. You walk into these places and they're overwhelming and everybody seems to know everything about everything and you say the word vegan and they just look at you like you're crazy.

So enormously helpful for that. Yes, I totally agree. We'll put the websites in the show notes, but tell people where they can get the book. It's pretty easy to get books nowadays. You can get 'em everywhere and where they can get the seeds.

You mentioned that. We didn't get a chance to talk about it in depth, but you are now selling seeds, and you can tell us a little bit about why they're good and also where people can find out more about the North American Veganic certification?

Jimmy Videle: So starting with North American Veganic Certification Standard, very simply go to certifiedveganic.org and it's all there. And me and my team put together, it's there. Like I said, there's a web form, you can go ahead and write NAVCS, and one of us will respond to you, whatever your question is, whatever our skillset happens to be based on your question.

Next seeds. So lafermedelaube.com, we have a seed boutique online. Now, I have to say, with all my trials and everything that I'm trying to do, I'm super not tech savvy, but everything is in French. So if you don't speak French...

Mariann Sullivan: I went on your website, just Google Translate asked me do I want this in English? And I said yes. And it was in English.

Jimmy Videle: There you go.

Mariann Sullivan: So see, you don't have to be tech savvy anymore! Like the computer just does it for you.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, that's great. No, that does work. The only thing with Google translation, you can't order from the English side. You just have to write down what it was you wanted in English.

Okay. The great thing is that we have created it so that we ship throughout Canada, we ship to the United States. We can ship to the UK, ship to France. We can ship pretty much anywhere shipping is available. I've tried shipping to Nigeria, and it didn't work. So, I'm sorry, my African friends, I cannot ship to you.

Mariann Sullivan: What about Australia? We have a lot of Australian listeners.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I can try. Um, we'll see. We can see it really just depends on how it gets there. I know that, but we can try or we can always try anyway. So lafermedelaube.com, we still have seeds available from last year's harvest and we're gonna start harvesting our seeds so every year it gets updated.

Yeah. Lafermedelaube.com seed botique.

Mariann Sullivan: And these are not just any old seeds. I just wanna make clear. We don't have time to go into what all this means because it was very complicated in the book. But they're open pollinated, heirloom seeds, right? And that means they're very, very good.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah. So some of the seeds are open pollinated, some of the seeds are open pollinated and heirloom.

And very simply what that means is that when you have an open pollinated plant, you save the seed and the seed is true from that plant, as opposed to a hybrid seed, which is a crossing by a plant breeder of two plants, put together say two different kinds of broccoli plants. Two different kinds of broccoli species to create the hybrid.

But if you were to save that seed, you don't know which parent you were gonna get. So that's the difference. So we don't sell any of those hybrid seeds. We sell just open pollinated. And some of them are open pollinated heirloom. And heirloom is very simply the fact that it has been a seed that has been seed saved for basically three generations.

And there's a really cool part in my book where it discusses all about seed knowledge, but I'm gonna leave that to the book. I'm gonna leave it that you have to buy the book to understand what a seed means.

Mariann Sullivan: I agree. There's so much I wanna say now about how the plants learn what they need to do.

But, but no, we, we can't do that now. It's so interesting though. I was fascinated. It sounds very airy fairy, but it actually isn't. It's really how the world works. But that's enough. We'll leave it there. Gotta read the book.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah. So, so read the book. So where can you find the book? This morning I realized that it is now available in over 20 countries, which is very, very, very cool.

The majority of those countries, you can find them through Amazon, and any country, but what I always recommend is seek out your local bookstore. Your local bookstore should have the opportunity for you. So if you have a local bookstore that you like, that you, that you browse at, ask them for it, and they should be able to order it for you.

Mariann Sullivan: And that's always an educational opportunity as well. Then the bookstore people learn a little bit about veganism.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, that's it. And one of my major marketing initiatives back in the late winter in January and February, was to actually specifically contact independent bookstores.

Because for me, independent bookstores is where it's at. Amazon's gonna be there, unfortunately, for the rest of time. But it doesn't mean that we have to shop there all the time. We can go to these independent bookstores that are still open, that are still fighting to keep them open. And these places are just vast resources of information.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. And they're starting to thrive. So really wanna support that movement. I agree.

Jimmy Videle: Yeah, so you can go to your independent bookstore. You can ask for it by name, the Veganic Grower's Handbook by Jimmy Videle or Amazon. You can look at it through thrift books. If you're looking to save a little money, they're sort of like a warehouse for different locations around the United States.

Half Price Books has it, both Barnes and Noble also carries it. And I just got a wonderful email from Chapters Indigo, which is the biggest bookstore in Canada. And they recently said that they are now going to stock it on their shelves. Yeah. So that was very cool, I was very excited about that after four months of working on it, to get them to do so.

So anywhere that you like to shop, any fine bookstore, you'll be able to find it. And like I said, it's in 20 countries. It's in Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Germany, France! Wonderful! It's so exciting!

Veganism, veganics everywhere!

Mariann Sullivan: It's everywhere. It's everywhere. The world is shifting.

Thank you so much, Jimmy, for sharing. I've kept you far too long and I actually am gonna keep you a little longer for our bonus segment, but it's just been so enlightening and your enthusiasm is contagious. So thank you so much.

Jimmy Videle: It's my pleasure. And this is such a wonderful program, Our Hen House. And all the listeners that you've had follow you for all these years, I thank you to you, also. For whatever your activism is and whatever work that you do and whatever part of your life that it's brought you.

I know that you speak about veganism. I know that you're there for the planet, for the animals, for the environment, for us humans, for everyone. And without you my book wouldn't have sold. But without you, veganism doesn't prosper.

Mariann Sullivan: I think everybody listening to this is helping veganism prosper. And we thank you for this

book to help us help do that.

Jimmy Videle: My pleasure. Thank you so much.