Ted Talk & Paid to Farm: Weight of Our Brain vs. Microbiome

“The three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you might be more important than every single gene you carry around in your genome...”  Rob Knight



 "And we've just over the last few years found out that the microbes in different parts of the body are amazingly different from one another. So if I look at just one person's microbes in the mouth and in the gut, it turns out that the difference between those two microbial communities is enormous. It's bigger than the difference between the microbes in this reef and the microbes in this prairie. So this is incredible when you think about it. What it means is that a few feet of difference in the human body makes more of a difference to your microbial ecology than hundreds of miles on Earth."

You're 99.99 percent identical in terms of your human DNA to the person sitting next to you. But that's not true of your gut microbes: you might only share 10 percent similarity with the person sitting next to you in terms of your gut microbes. So that's as different as the bacteria on this prairie and the bacteria in this forest."




"It turns out that our first microbial communities depend a lot on how we're born. So babies that come out the regular way, all of their microbes are basically like the vaginal community, whereas babies that are delivered by C-section, all of their microbes instead look like skin. And this might be associated with some of the differences in health associated with Cesarean birth, such as more asthma, more allergies, even more obesity, all of which have been linked to microbes now, and when you think about it, until recently, every surviving mammal had been delivered by the birth canal, and so the lack of those protective microbes that we've co-evolved with might be really important for a lot of these different conditions that we now know involve the microbiome."

Ted Talk, full transcript, above quotes, here.  Ted Talk, video, for talk, above.



More about children raised on farms healthier than those not, here.
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"The Government is Spending More to Train New Farmers Than Ever Before

Both veterans and under-resourced communities are top priorities."

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Did you know the age of the average USA farmer is... 58.3 years old?

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 “The USDA is very concerned about the continued aging of the American farmer,” Auburn says. “This program is part of a department-wide push to … keep the land under stewardship by people who care about it. It’s to have people interacting with their communities and to keep rural communities and economies healthy. It’s to have people out there interacting with consumers, who are increasingly interested in who it is who’s growing their food and how it’s grown.” 

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Education includes, "...raising poultry, sheep, and goats.

Annie Donoghue helps run the program along with her husband and project director, Dan Donoghue, and seven other partner organizations, which include USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the Farmer Veteran Coalition, the University of Missouri, and the National Center for Appropriate Technology.

Arkansas’ program offers free online courses in both English and Spanish, as well as hands-on, in-person public trainings and Armed to Farm boot camps for veterans, where participants learn the basics of poultry production, skills such as poultry-house building and even how to find appropriate markets for their businesses.

The program has been popular, as veteran-targeted education about this segment of agriculture was scarce. “There really wasn’t a lot of information for this group interested in poultry or small-ruminant production,” says Donoghue. “This program provides an opportunity for these veterans to consider careers in agriculture.”

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Full article,   The Government is Spending More to Train New Farmers Than Ever Before .

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Wendell Berry has been writing about the loss of farmers, farm habitat, farm communities, and collateral loss of human health & knowledge gained from agricultural living since the 1960's.  He says,  "Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty — the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Wendell Berry (Photograph: Guy Mendes)

There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair — done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.

Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much.

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.

For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness can forgive?

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments."

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Finally, the work of Andrea Wulf, Washington Post, review of, 

Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, 

           " In this lively and deeply researched history, Andrea Wulf (best known for her prize-winning chronicle of 18th-century English gardening, “The Brother Gardeners”) examines the botanical pursuits of America’s first four presidents. Those men were, it turns out, obsessive gardeners, but gardening was much more than a preoccupying hobby. It was central to their vision of the American republic. Jefferson and Co. believed that the agrarian life would safeguard the new republic’s virtue and that the future of America lay with the independent farmer. As Washington summed up, “Our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands.”

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More about connecting the dots of agriculture & health, here.

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Connection of agriculture & horticulture?  It is our generation, post WWII, separating them.  Prior civilizations knew they were inherent to survival, no separation.  What does this mean?  Agriculture crops can yield 80% more with proper pollinator habitat.  That, is money in the bank.  More, Berry lovingly narrates the decimation of land, family farms, rural communities across USA as industrial agriculture with its machines & chemicals have waged war against an unwitting opponent, us.

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Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara

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Pics via my Pinterest: Changes Board .    Need to get the Farming article, top of this post, further afield.  Anyone needing a grant, the article has great links.  Changes Board?  Collecting pics of good gardens needing a slight tweak.  Will use them in my Garden Design classes.