Mind, Body, and Soil

Blair is a farmer, a mother, a homeschooler, a milkmaid, a renegade. On this episode, I sit down with Blair Prenoveau who you might know as @startafarm on Instagram. In this episode, she unpacks why you might start a farm including the deep purpose, nutrition, and connection it offers. She doesn’t, however, shy away from the hardships and together we deep dive into the financial hardship that is owning a very small farm. We also talk about intimacy with your food and connecting to death. She shares about her journey raising 4 homeschooled kids largely solo and what it has meant to be a single mother farming. The positive feedback loop on eating nourishing food is an important topic, and we posit why it may just be the most important step in getting people to start more farms. 

We Also Talk About: 

• Mending 
• Milking
• & so much more 

Find Blair:

Instagram: @startafarm 

Timestamps:

00:00:00: Kate on a note of hope 

00:05:23: Nervous Systems

00:08:33: What Good Shall I Do Conference 

00:10:15: Our own labor counts when raising our food 

00:13:22: Blair’s background

00:22:43: Start a farm 

00:44:15: Connecting deeply to our animals 

01:03:29: Bucking the system 

01:18:00: Farming and parenting

01:28:00: Farming finances 

01:45:40: Raw cream saves the world 

Mentioned in Intro

Irene Lyon’s SmartBody SmartMind Course

What Good Shall I Do Conference

Current Discounts for MBS listeners:

• 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
• 20% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% off
• 15% off Bon Charge blue light blocking gear using code: MINDBODYSOIL15

Join the Ground Work Collective:

Find a Farm: nearhome.groundworkcollective.com

Find Kate: @kate_kavanaugh

More: groundworkcollective.com

Podcast disclaimer can be found by visiting: groundworkcollective.com/disclaimer

Maren Morgan and Jake Marquez are on a journey to find the truth and the root of connectedness through their film, podcast series, and future book - Death in the Garden. In this episode, we unpack a lot of the stories, mythologies, narratives, and perhaps truths of what it means to be human. At the beginning, Jake and Maren lead us through the garden whether they are the physical gardens we tend, Eden, or our conception of utopia. In those gardens, they touch on concepts like consciousness, order, chaos, nature, agriculture, and beyond. Underpinning those conversations are questions like: what is the human role with earth? In a time when misanthropy runs rampant, how do we reclaim our place in the garden with the rise of AI and the machine? We unpack Jake and Maren’s past and history with food, with veganism, and whether or not eating meat imbues us with more aliveness and a sense of the sacredness of relationships. But there is no food without death and so next we unpack death and what it means to practice dying, to try to control death, to accept death, and to look at death not as an end, but as an alchemical space of transformation. Jake weaves in our own more recent mythologies, and how Harry Potter and Star Wars have become a part of our narratives around death.

We also talk about:

• Intimacy with food
• the Hero’s Journey
• and so much more!

Timestamps: 

00:07:24: the Death in the Garden Project and Being ‘In Process’

00:17:52: Heterodox Thinking and Developing a Compass for Truth

00:25:21: “The Garden”

00:48:46: Misanthropy + Our Human Relationship to Earth

01:06:49: Jake + Maren’s Backstories // the Hero’s Journey

01:18:14: Death in Our Current Culture

01:31:47: Practicing Dying 

01:46:51: Intimacy with Food 

02:08:46: the Latent Villain Archetype and Controlling Death: Darth Vader meets Voldemort

02:21:40: Support the Film

Find Jake and Maren:

Substack

Death in the Garden Film + Podcast

IG: @deathinthegarden

Jake IG: @arqetype.media

Maren IG: @onyxmoonlight

Selected Works from Jake and Maren:

The Terrible and the Tantalizing Essay

We Are Only Passing Through Essay

Resources Mentioned:

Daniel Quinn

The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Frances Weller

Where is the Edge of Me? By Nora Bateson 

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Fall of Civilization Podcast

Current Discounts for MBS listeners:

• 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
• 20% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% off
• 15% off Bon Charge blue light blocking gear using code: MINDBODYSOIL15

Join the Ground Work Collective:

Find a Farm: nearhome.groundworkcollective.com

Find Kate: @kate_kavanaugh

More: groundworkcollective.com

Podcast disclaimer can be found by visiting: groundworkcollective.com/disclaimer

Alex Rosenberg-Rigutto could not be defined by a single metric, maybe other than to say that her joy and zest for life are definitively contagious. In this incredible episode, Alex details the arc of her life and her journey to farming, stopping along the way to explore important aspects of what makes us human from our interaction with our environments to the importance of every day ritual. Kate and Alex explore the impacts of being medicated as children and how formative experiences shaped their idea of discipline, laying the ground work for a big conversation about the ‘Discipline/Pleasure’ axis. Alex shares about how her experiences with addiction led her to farming and teases out an important difference in how we seek to re-create various environments when, really, we are trying to find connection. Throughout the episode are themes of dissolving boundaries, finding a place outside of the small box society often puts on us, and building skills on the farm, in the kitchen, and beyond. 

Timestamps:

00:01:33: Introducing Alex + A Note on Discipline

00:08:42: Home of Wool 

00:11:53: Alex and Kate are obsessed with salt

00:18:23: Alex’s childhood environment and an exploration of overmedicating children

00:25:49: Recreating vs re-creating; drug use and the search for connection

00:32:31: Finding home in farming and being in service to land

00:50:24: On ritual: from the every day, to earth based Judaism, and beyond

00:59:11: Creating layers in the kitchen 

01:22:13: Exploring the Discipline/Pleasure Axis

01:47:44: Building Skills and North Woods Farm and Skill

01:55:03: Kate + Alex Share a side story about teeth and oral health journeys

02:12:31: Alex closes with a beautiful wish for farming 

Find Alex:

Instagram: @alexandraskyee 

@northwoodsfarmandskill

Resources: 

Bean Tree Farm - Arizona

Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday 

Discipline/Pleasure Axis Graphic

What Good Shall I Do Conference

Current Discounts for MBS listeners:

• 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
• 20% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% off
• 15% off Bon Charge blue light blocking gear using code: MINDBODYSOIL15

Join the Ground Work Collective:

Find a Farm: nearhome.groundworkcollective.com

Find Kate: @kate_kavanaugh

More: groundworkcollective.com

Podcast disclaimer can be found by visiting: groundworkcollective.com/disclaimer

YouTube Page

Brian Sanders is the brain behind the upcoming film series Food Lies and the Instagram account by the same name. His work with Food Lies and his podcast, Peak Human, is about uncovering the lies we’ve been told about food. We dive deep in this podcast to explore where the engine driving the lies in our food system might have gotten its start. How far back does it go? We look at the beginning of agriculture all the way to the Rockefellers to find answers. The shaping of our food system has major implications for the systems of modern day life past the food system and we peek at our education system, medical system, financial system, and more. At the heart of this conversation, though, is how our relationship with food makes us human and whether or not we can return to the meaning of the Homo Sapien (wise human) or if we’ll continue to fall for the lies we’re being sold. 

We Also Talk About: 

• Community as a nutrient and its role in our lives
• Satiety and its importance 
• & so much more 

Timestamps:

0:12:08: Brian’s Background

0:17:43: Where being human and food intersect

0:25:42: Power structures and food

0:31:23: Where the food lies begin. 

0:42:19: Where the food lies meet big money

0:46:07: The weaponization of the greater good 

0:52:09: What to do to get out of a broken system/exit the matrix

1:04:08: Are humans wired for comfort and how do we dig into discomfort?

1:14:00: Are humans capable of long term thinking?

1:26:00: Community as a nutrient

1:29:49: Satiety 

Find Brian:

Instagram: @food.lies

Podcast: Peak Human

Film Website: Food Lies 

Resources: 

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt

Eat Like a Human by Bill Schindler

Peak Human Guest: Gary Fettke

Peak Human Guest: Ted Naiman on Satiety

Peak Human Guest: Mary Ruddick on Debunking Blue Zones

Justin Wren on Joe Rogan re: Community

Also Mentioned in Intro:

What Good Shall I Do Conference

Current Discounts for MBS listeners:

• 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
• 20% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% off
• 15% off Bon Charge blue light blocking gear using code: MINDBODYSOIL15

Join the Ground Work Collective:

Find a Farm: nearhome.groundworkcollective.com

Find Kate: @kate_kavanaugh

More: groundworkcollective.com

James Connolly is a film producer (most recently - Sacred Cow), co-host of the Sustainable Dish podcast, avid reader, and passionate about food. It’s hard to encapsulate this conversation in a description - we cover a lot of ground. At its core, it’s the broad strokes of just how we ended up in our current paradigm. We start about 150 years ago, where we follow threads of the move from rural to urban environments and how the idea of ‘cleanliness’ begins to take hold. We cover the Great Grain Robbery and the formation of commodities that would change the agricultural world and how technology has played a role in these early formation of food systems and how it’s playing a role now, leading into a conversation of techno-utopias. James covers school systems, as someone who has run a non-profit for schools in New York, and how we’re taught what to think, not how to think and the compulsory education experiment. We also dive into the history of medicalizing the human experience using some personal anecdotes around grief to explore the world of psychiatric medication and beyond. All of this leads into a discussion of the techno-utopia that we’re often being marketed and the shape of the current food system. It’s a big, rolling conversation filled with all the book recommendations you need to keep it going.

We also talk about: 

• Butchery through the lens of two butchers
• The vilification of meat 
• Effective Altruism 
• & so much more (seriously, so much more)

Timestamps: 

09:30: The Sanitization of Humanity 

18:54: The Poison Squad

33:03: The Great Grain Robbery + Commodities 

44:24: Techno-Utopias The Genesis of the Idea that Technology is the Answer

55:01: Tunnel Vision in Technology, Carbon, and Beyond

1:02:00: Food in Schools and Compulsory Education

1:11:00: Medicalization of Human Experience

1:51:00: Effective Altruism 

2:11:00: Butchery 

2:25:00: More Techno-Utopias 

Find James: 

Twitter: @jamescophoto 

Instagram: @primatekitchen

Podcast: Sustainable Dish 

Reading/Watching List 

The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman

Daniel Quinn’s Works

The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum

Mister Jones (film)

Shibumi by Trevanian 

Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

Three Identical Strangers (film)

Related Mind, Body, and Soil Episodes:

Dr. Anthony Gustin (for more on decentralizing food systems)

Will Reusch (on the education system and teaching kids how to think)

Brett Ender (mentioned throughout the podcast)

Current Discounts for MBS listeners:

• 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
• 15% off Bon Charge blue light blockers using code: MINDBODYSOIL15
• 10% off Home of Wool using code: KATEKAVANAUGH

Join the Ground Work Collective:

Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh

Find a Farm: nearhome.groundworkcollective.com

More: groundworkcollective.com

In this short solocast, Kate catches us up after her impromptu break before we start the new year with a huge slate of exciting episodes. But first... a little business to attend to. The Ground Work Podcast is becoming the Mind, Body, and Soil podcast. Same Kate, same amazing guests, new title!

Kate also shares some big business news, a little about her thoughts on New Year's, and a little thank you to all of you.

Anna Borgman is a butcher, slaughterwoman, ardent reader, and curious student of life. In this episode we dive deep into one of the most unexplored aspects of our food system: the processor, the butcher, the slaughterhouse. The place where animals make their transition to food through the portal of death. We dive into what this means: what it means for the people working there, how our current culture misses this step in the food chain, and what it means to “turn the hard work of farmers into food.” Anna and I also talk about our own relationships with death and how anxieties around death led her to get closer to understanding something that can never be fully understood. We didn’t stop there, though, and in this episode we talk about how our bodies may just be vehicles for microbes, seeking out disconfirmation, leveraging curiosity, and so much more. 

We Also Talk About: 

• Body Image and Butchery
• Humans place on earth 
• & so much more 

Find Anna:

Instagram: @annaborgman, @foragefed

Website: Forage Fed 

Resources from the Episode:

The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky

Red Meat Republic by Joshua Specht

The Meat Paradox by Rob Percival

North Bridger Bison

Custom Knives: @jessevosler_vigilanteforge

Current Discounts for GW listeners:

• 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
• 20% off Home of Wool using code BLACKSHEEP20 (until November 30th) and code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% off after that.

Join the Ground Work Collective:

Instagram: @groundworkcollective

Find a Farm: nearhome.groundworkcollective.com

Find Kate: @kate_kavanaugh

More: groundworkcollective.com

Dr. Suuzi Hazen is a wife, mother, farmer and healer who raises goats in the rugged fire country of north-eastern California. She is the founder of Mother's Best Liver Pills, the original microbrewery of grass-fed beef liver supplements. Suuzi is a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and in this episode we dive right into the liver, looking at it not just through the lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine, but through an ancestral and spiritual lens. Suuzi goes on to unpack traditional lifeways and how we can find a connection in our modern world when it comes to child rearing, raising a family, and beyond. As two goat owners only could, we discuss the ways that goats connect us back to a different time. We also dive into marriage and sexuality and unpack the highs and lows of long term partnerships. This is a jam packed episode with an incredible guest.

Note: this episode contains explicit content.

Find Suuzi:

Instagram: @drsuuzihazen

Website: Mother’s Best Liver Pills

Related Ground Work Episodes:

Hamid Jabbar

Tara Couture

Current Discounts for GW listeners:

• 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
• 20% off Home of Wool using code BLACKSHEEP20 (until November 30th) and code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% off after that.

Join the Ground Work Collective:

Instagram: @groundworkcollective

Find a Farm: nearhome.groundworkcollective.com

Find Kate: @kate_kavanaugh

More: groundworkcollective.com

Lily Nichols, RDN is shifting the paradigm on what it means to eat for your health in your child-bearing years. Author of Real Food for Pregnancy and Real Food for Gestational Diabetes, Lily is leading a grassroots movement on getting back to eating nutrient dense foods and is at the cutting edge of the research on just how important they are for the health of mother, infant, and future generations. In this episode, we cover the journey from pre-conception through post-partum nutrition, highlighting just where the history of foods recommended for pregnancy begins to go awry. Lily’s book is incredibly comprehensive in breaking down vital nutrients and their whole food sources and with many podcast interviews under her belt - we dive into some different topics. Looking at the importance of nutrition not just through the lens of the developing baby but also the health and vitality and resiliency of the mother. We talk about the importance of whole food nutrients together in their food source and the synergy of those nutrients in things like liver, egg yolks, and collagen-rich cuts. We also dive into body wisdom and whether or not we should listen to cravings. This is an incredible episode for women and men both thinking about their long-term health and conception journeys - Lily’s dietary recommendations aren’t just for those trying to conceive or pregnant - they’re good recommendations for anyone seeking a more nutrient dense diet. 

We also talk about: 

• Glycine and the importance of collagen 
• Making regenerative meat more accessible
• & so much more

Find Lily

Website: lilynicholsrdn.com

Instagram: @lilynicholsrdn

Books: Real Food for Pregnancy, Real Food for Gestational Diabetes

Further Reading Mentioned: 

Protein Requirements in Pregnancy Article by Lily Nichols

Nourishment

Vitamin A deficiency linked to diaphragmatic hernia

The Dorito Effect

Wired to Eat

Related Ground Work Episodes:

Dr. Stephan van Vliet on the science behind regenerative ag

Initially, my husband, Josh Curtiss, and I conceived of this episode as a way to share about the importance of play and imagination in our relationship and as a 2-year wedding anniversary present to ourselves (and 14 years together). But after I put a question sticker on Instagram for relationship questions and received a massive response - it became a place for us to dive into not just play, imagination, and fun but also the highs and lows of our relationship. So often, we are not afforded peeks inside of a real relationship, but on this episode we are real and honest and totally transparent about the good, the bad, and the spicy. We cover fighting, cheating, forgiveness, keeping it sexy after 14 years, always having something to talk about, staying curious about your partner, and so much more. This episode was built for those who love love, who want to hear about the choices we make in relationships to stay through the tough stuff, and about how to evolve together. We also answered all of your questions! Do we want children? What are our love languages? And so many more.

As a note, this episode does contain some explicit content where we talk about sex, though it is not graphic in nature.

Find Josh:

Instagram: @thejoshofalltrades

Website: westerndaughters.com 

Resources Mentioned: 

From the Core by John Wineland

Artist in Love by Madelyn Moon

Related Ground Work Episodes:

Collecting Skills with Josh Curtiss

Current Discounts for GW listeners:

15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15