Symphony of Nature
Chef Daniel de La Falaise in conversation with—visionary, farmer & educator—Bob Cannard, at his herb and vegetable garden in Glen Ellen, Northern California. REGAIN Magazine #1
Bob Cannard, aka the Soil Whisperer, has for the past 4 decades been at the forefront of a novel approach to regenerative agriculture. Perched up in the sun-kissed Sonoma Hills of Glen Ellen, he embodies his mantra: “50% for food - 50% for Nature”. Natural Process Farming as he calls it, with its focus on flavor and vitality, waves a dissentient flag in the face of yield-driven “conventional agriculture”.
Bob’s agricultural vision is one where the farmer stays closely attuned to the needs of his or her plants and the land on which they are growing. The objective is to create a self-nourishing system where less human intervention yields better quality crops; to nurture a harmonious balance between crops grown for human consumption and crops grown for soil improvement.
Bob is a founding father of the San Francisco, Bay Area Food Movement. He taught at Santa Rosa College for more than 20 years, and in 2000 founded the Green String Institute in Petaluma. He has long fought for the rights of independent farmers to sell directly to the consumer. Agribusiness interests attempted to crush Northern California Farmers’ Markets in the 1970’s; Bobs’ tenacity and courage played an inestimable role in their survival.
You will not hear Bob toot his own horn; nor will you see him comply with rules imposed by convention. He is at once a scientist, and a paysan. Mother Nature is his guide, and his mission is simply to keep on learning. He heralds the arts of observation and of perception. “Plants are naked. They let us know everything we need to know about their health. It is enough to observe them”, he says.
The critical point, according to Bob, is flavor. Flavor is an indicator of both the health of the plant, and that of the soil. The ethos of 50% for food - 50% for nature is to harmonise a symbiotic regenerative relationship from soil—to table—to soil.
Bob has supplied Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ iconic restaurant in Berkeley for over 40 years. As fresh produce is delivered daily, so the vegetable peelings and herb stalks are promptly collected. They return home to his farm to be composted and complete their life cycle, providing food for the soil biology—to grow soil.
Bob is as passionate as I am about the rainbow of flavors that are offered up by herbs over the course of their life cycle. From the tender young shoot to the bolting sprig, to flower and onto green seed (a fresh spice of sorts).
The occasion of my visit was thanks to an invitation extended to me by the above-mentioned Alice Waters, with whom I was catering an event in San Francisco. Several days earlier Bob had graciously welcomed me to Glen Ellen. We had walked the farm like peckish deer on a dawn run grazing upon every succulent morsel that caught our eye. And to my delight I was back, this time to interview him for the French quarterly REGAIN Magazine: Journal de Campagne.
We installed ourselves on the veranda of the little wooden hut that bridges the stream, serving as the washing station for the salads and herbs as they are dispatched from the farm. We raised a glass of spring water to Mother Nature, and nibbled bolting sprigs of arugula, parsley, and cress all prized from the meticulously trussed boxes that surrounded us. We tasted his excellent olive oil and cleansed our palates with Meyer lemons; eaten as you would an apple, skin and all. A perfect moment, stolen from time!
Bob Cannard: Have a seat, and we will have a conversation
Daniel de La Falaise: As I was driving back through Sonoma to San Francisco the other day after our morning of enlightened grazing around your 30-acre garden of herbs and vegetables, it struck me that when you had offered me calendula flowers, I had turned my nose at the idea instantly, warming to it only as I saw the flowers at our feet which were smaller and of a more vital color to those I am accustomed to. I tasted one, and I was sold. A thought—something you said—rang anew in my mind, “I once cured a lady’s aura with them, in tisane”, were your words.
BC: Ah, I did!
dLF: And this struck me, for as a young child I was sensitive to the energetic fields around people and plants, and it was not until I became self-conscious about it aged 5 or 6 that this ability receded. I still have a keen intuitive sense which serves as my compass, and which for want of a better description I will refer to as an innate, dog’s nose instinct. A radar to vitality. It suddenly occurred to me that this is what you are doing here atop this valley: you are reading the land, the soil, the water, the plants, and seeking to optimize vitality between these disparate realms. What I mean to say is that, essentially your industry is the nurturing and culturing of vitality.
BC: It is, about vitality. It is vitality. In the west, in the US, probably in France as well, we have a strong tendency to be materialistic, and the concept of the spiritual elements of life are heavily diminished, not even recognized in very many senses. As a child, you say you saw the world differently, and that you saw some of the auric fields, the character of life surrounding life. There is more life around us than there is in us. But that is all bred out of us. When you were born you did not know how to speak English and you did not know how to speak French, you didn’t know any of the stuff, you were a dumb kid, seeing the glow of life, and that is wiped clean from most peoples’ brains and minds and consciousness, and we don’t get to see any of that. If you pay attention, it is still there. And that is really important. In dealing with the plants… they are the harbingers of generosity. You plant one apple seed, and you get an apple tree that produces so many fruits over so long a period of time, and that is the manifestation of generosity. And plants came way before people on this planet. And all of the other animals came way before people. And what people are is an amalgamation of gifts of all of the organisms that came before us. And, your organs look like soil organisms, and your pancreas looks like a nematode, and your digestive system looks like a worm, and your blood systems and circulatory systems, and nervous systems are allied to the worm, and your nervous system is allied to the fungal population of the earth, and the brain is like the mushroom. And all of the things have come together, our bodies are an amalgamation upon the physical world, and yet we are imbued with this spirit of all of it, and there is more energy between your cells than there is in your cells, and there are more biological cells that aren’t you that comprise you. You eat a potato, and there are more bacteria in a potato than… a potato is a colony that is manufactured by the soil biology, and a gift from the relationship with the potato, synergistic, and then you get the potato. And, same with all of the other organisms.
dLF: Is that to say that we are barnacled to bacteria?
BC: Yeah!
dLF: Rather than have bacteria inside of us, rather, we are barnacled to it.
BC: There are more bacteria between and in your cells than there are cells of you.
dLF: Extraordinary!
BC: And the energy of each… A single cell, there is the DNA inside that replicates it, that’s all it does. The intelligence of the bacteria is on the outside. And, they say that we are intelligent, and that a turkey or a goat has no intelligence—malarkey! You take the bacteria, you take a little petri dish of cultured food and you put the agar in there, you put a drop of good-tasty food for bacteria to live and grow on one side of the dish, and you put poison food on the other side of the dish, and then in the middle you plant the little colony of biology. That little biology grows directly towards the good food. Take a garden, a sandy field where the is not enough water, you plant a corn plant, and a hundred feet away you have a dripping faucet—water drip-drip-drip. The corn plant sends one root in the direction of the water, of the dripping faucet, it has the vibrational intelligence…
dLF: This is dowsing!
BC: Totally… the root shoots right over to where the water is, to get those nutrients. Every plant is naked. It doesn’t have any deception. It doesn’t have any…. Like we all lie all the time, and we wear perfumes to cover our natural aromas, I won’t call it fragrance, we put on powders and make up and we have our clothing to clothe the character of our bodies and… humanity is a hugely deceptive organism in terms of dealing with one another! The plant on the other hand, is naked, it doesn’t run away. No deception! All that it has is itself, its generosity, and it is for you to observe the plant. The plant in its nakedness and its purity will tell how it is. It’s root systems have different characteristics. They have seeking root systems—like if you go to the nursery and the nursery grows its plants in artificial medias and chemical fertilizers, the plant roots through that media, that soil, in the pot and it knows that it does not get, in there, what it needs for the summation of its life. So, the seeking root goes to the bottom of the pot and around and around trying to get out, just like a tiger in a cage seeking around the outside. The root went a seeking in the middle, it knows that it is not going to get what it needs in the middle, it’s not going to get out in the middle, so it’s looking on the outside. It goes around and around, and so develops long stringy seeking roots. But if you grow the plant in good rich biologically inoculated compost with mineral substances—everything that the plant needs—it sends its little establishment root down, it hits the bottom, and it knows that what it went through was all delicious and wonderful—and so, then it develops fibrous feeding roots. And so, you have the two root systems: the seeking root that is a manifestation of discontentment, and you have the feeding root that is a manifestation of contentment.
dLF: So interesting.
BC: And then the plant sprouts up and grows up to physical completeness. While it is growing it is a water soft body, filled with water, filled with nitrogenous substances, growing quickly, it is soft and watery. As it comes to maturity, it starts draining from deep in the soil to get all the minerals it can. As it comes to maturity it starts to flower, with the minerals that it has drawn from the soil it starts making seed babies and transferring all of those accumulated nutrients into its next generation.
dLF: Which are the things that we harvest…
BC: The seed buds, and the…
dLF: All those flavorsome and textured delectable things that went into last week’s herb and herb flower salad with Alice.
BC: And that is what I like about you and your concept of the delicious buds, and bolting sprigs and flowers, bullets and grenades and green seeds as fresh spice…. Those are so delicious because they are coming greatly into their maturity. You are French and so I assume that you like girls, and you probably liked girls when you were kind of young…
dLF: Yes!
BC: But your lovemaking when you were young, and she was young… eh! But when you come to a greater degree of maturity, love making is much more complex and deeper and of greater fragrance. Same with the plant. As a plant comes to a greater degree of maturity it accumulates—the essences of itself. It has gotten more sunlight, and more minerals from the soil environment, it’s lived longer, it’s bloomed longer, it’s practiced its lovemaking with the surroundings of its environment, and it comes to a greater degree of its perfection. It modifies the chemistry of its body, and it accumulates the intensity of its fragrances, the intensity of its flavors, and the intensity of its medicinal characteristics. It’s going to bring maturity and health and clarity to your body as you consume it, to your cells—this is very-very important! As the plant comes to maturity, it drains its body, all of the good stuff goes to the seed.
dLF: So, in a sense, the salads that we are composing consist of about as vital a plate of food that there is in the green world.
BC: Absolutely! The little green baby plant, that is alright. But, the mature plant, the mother plant that grows and comes to the fullness of maturity gives everything it has accumulated in its whole life to its seed babies.
dLF: Everything it needs to propagate.
BC: Everything it needs to propagate, every good thing it got, it gives to its seed babies. And then the old plant dies of physical contentment. It dies of maturity and of contentment. And, that contentment is incorporated in the terroir of the soil as it returns to the earth, to come again the next season. There in the soil, the organic material of the dead plant body consists of durable tightly bonded hydrocarbon. Over a longer than one year half-life of digestion the dead plant body breaks down, providing food for the soil food web, for the soil biology, and so becomes a steady-state food supply—that actually grows soil. If humanity is to live and become better, we have to make decisions not to leave a wake of misery behind us. We have to learn how to grow soil whilst we grow food. And you do this, not as is done in so many places where people will say “I’m organic, I don’t use fertilizers, I grow a green manure cover crop”. Because, growing and killing off the green baby plant is like losing your daughter at first blood, there is no contentment there. There is no joy there. Losing the old plant, the plant that has died of maturity, of contentment, leaving its durable body to succeed and support the lives of successive generations—that’s like losing grandma at ninety-five years old. To be expected, and there is a certain joy in her passage.
dLF: So, in fact, green clover crops ploughed back into the land is a no more than a visionless quick fix.
BC: That is infanticide—that’s killing the babies! And the same thing in the degrees of how we eat. In this country, there has been a movement towards the baby vegetable. The eating of the baby vegetable. The baby zucchini. Now, you get a zucchini that’s a baby, that has not even been pollinated yet, and you smell it, and you cook it, and it is high nitrogen and high moisture-content. And if you overcook it, even slightly, it has a tendency to get mushy and grey in color. Whereas if you allow that zucchini, that squash, or courgette as you call it…
dLF: Courgette, yes!
BC: To ripen, to mature… that squash then brightens in its color and gives off an incredible aroma, and it doesn’t shrink, and give off water, and turn gray and become mushy as you cook it. A high nitrogen zucchini, one that has been forced to grow, will do that. But if you allow the plant to become pollinated, and to attain a degree of maturity then the color of its greenness—if it’s a zucchini—it actually becomes brighter, it turns emerald, it dries, and if you are sautéing it with some garlic and some olive oil, it gets a beautiful crispiness to it, to the tongue and the tooth feel. It’s delicious, a wonderful thing. But the commercial one that is forced to grow, with the high nitrogen and lots of water, it turns to mush—it’s nothing.
dLF: Those fields look tragic, don’t they?
BC: Arrghhh…they are tragic! And that’s the majority…
dLF: Spring meadows artificially green and forced for early silage with bean-stalk grasses that fall at the first clap of thunder.
BC: Yearrghhh… high nitrogen, high water, no minerals—forced to grow! You can force anything to grow. But you can’t force things into sweetness. You get physical sweetness, and the etheric sweetness of physical completeness. When you grow a plant with lots of minerals and good digestion, the plant wants to grow to physical completeness, and it grows to physical completeness, and there you get the etheric sweetness. When you eat it, you feel its energy suffusing in your blood veins and bringing you to the brilliance of its capacity. You feed and eat that kind of food and you are going to have vegetable dreams.
dLF: Laughter…
BC: When you get vegetable dreams, you are going to feed that to you and the mother of your children, and the foetuses that are inside the mother are going to have those vegetable dreams. And, if you do that it takes about three generations to have an influence—in a breeding program—and if you do that… If humanity was to learn to grow good food, fresh, local food, and be connected; then subsequently in three generations perhaps people would start acting like the organism they have the potential to be. The true nurturers and managers of the world environment.
dLF: This is what we were talking about last time I was here.
BC: Yarghhh…!
dLF: That we are so blessed to have the sensorial reference to ripe seasonal ingredients, that we do. It is a privilege. I know that due to my great grandmother, my grandmother, my father, my green-fingered mother etc… that, I am able to appreciate these things and that the responsibility is upon me to pass it on to my son.
BC: Aye… and they should be better than you.
dLF: And they should be better than us—absolutely!
BC: If you grow your cover crops to full maturity, then your soils become better than when grandma had them.
dLF: Right!
BC: And the soils produce plants that have more physical contentment in themselves, more of the etheric sweetness, the spiritual or etheric sweetness of the universe, and more of it comes into your son, your daughter, and they then have better children than any of the previous generations. It should get better as each passing generation occurs.
dLF: There is a miracle garden that still is in the family, my cousin India Jane is its guardian now, it was our great-grandmother, Rhoda’s Garden. Rhoda was a green fingered cook. She established the vegetable garden in the 1920’s, almost a century ago, and it is exactly what you describe, a plot of land with nurtured soil and happy plants.
BC: Well, it should be like that. All of our foods should be like that, but—they are not! And you go to some more urbanised places, not the south of France, but Paris—or pretty much anywhere in this day and age for that matter—and the food is horrible. The pastries are disgusting. You go into the store, and you want to get some sort of dairy product and it’s not even refrigerated. It comes in a carton, and it’s good for years. I mean, it’s not food!
dLF: My 2-year-old son requested meat the other day.
BC: Arghhh!
dLF: He said, Papa I want snake! Which is what he calls steak. So, dutifully off I went. We were staying with my mother-in-law at the time.
BC: Pahhh, ba, ba ba…
dLF: So, I went to the store, the kind of store where the clientele isn’t pinching pennies, a place where you would hope and expect to find quality produce.
BC: Hmmm…
dLF: I went to the butcher counter, tipped my hat, said good evening, and asked the butcher for a steak for my toddler son. I pointed to a rib-eye and asked him about its provenance. He replied, “this beef is raised with growth hormones and antibiotics”. Thank you, I replied. So, I pointed to another and asked, how about this? “This beef is raised without growth hormones and antibiotics”, was his robotic response. I mean he was trying to be diligent; he was perhaps not the sharpest card in the deck, and he had surely been schooled in what he was compelled legally to relate to the public… and was doing so—literally. I was struck by the sadness of this distorted reality. For the animal, for the butcher, for the consumer, for the whole process, from feedlot to microwave. The terror of it all. Needless to say, Louis did not eat snake for dinner that night.
BC: The food supply that we are, as a whole, offered, it’s pathetic! Absolutely pathetic.
dLF: Somebody is making money out of it, and that is it.
BC: That’s it. We turn our food into a commodity.
dLF: This root, the seeking root, the dowsing root—is fascinating! The fact that plants dowse, did you dowse water here? Did you dowse as a boy with a pendulum and an elder stick?
BC: Not as a boy, but I definitely dowse. I have dowsed for water on different farms, very successfully. I dowse for health. I dowse for selecting herbs for different patients, for their ills. I dowse for plants and for soil, to ask what nutritional requirements are required. Dowsing is connected to the unknown spiritual world, and it definitely requires a stable and clear consciousness to be able to achieve appropriate results.
dLF: Connection you mean?
BC: Yes, if you have an urban area, a group of people, a small city, if you have 2% of that populace that practice transcendental meditation, and it doesn’t have to be regular by the book TM, but just meditative, focused, centred, peaceful people… And you take the square root of that number of people, that will be the amount that crime is likely to decline in that community. It doesn’t take much. Each one of us has a tremendous influence upon our surroundings if we recognise it and are willing to recognise it. But in our culture, first off, we are deliberately suffused with the wrong vibration. Our music was modified to—I don’t remember the numbers, 440 Hz or something, you’d have to look it up—all of our musical instruments are at a discordant vibration.
dLF: Ok?
BC: Whereas nature vibrates at the 432 Hz range.
dLF: Such as when you slow down the sound of crickets, and it sounds like a harmonious symphony?
BC: The vibrational rate of nature is at a lower level than the vibrational rate that our musical instruments have been tuned to. The change was effected during the Hitlerian period. A fella, who wants to control the minds of everybody, a certain Goebbels convened a conference at which the disharmonious tuning of 440 Hz was adopted worldwide. It is not a natural vibrational rate; it is a little jaggery! It keeps us all anxious! A little off.
dLF: The music?
BC: Yes, the music itself. The tuning of the music.
dLF: The tuning of musical instruments was adjusted?
BC: Yes, the tuning of musical instruments was adjusted and standardised.
dLF: Mind boggling!
BC: You look into that. It is very important! Total vibration. All the music that we hear. Everybody is so tuned into the vibrations of music. You know, you listen to a commercial on the radio and there is a background of music, everything, it’s all an unnatural intonation that…
dLF: That distorts, and draws people to a place where they can be herded…
BC: Exactly, you got it…
dLF: Herded and corralled.
BC: So, that is something you need to look into, I know little about it. My friend Suzie Schroll, a lady whose father escaped the Nazis, her father lived up in the high mountains of Austria, and the Nazis were coming to get him—he knew how to get the Jewish people out of Austria, he knew the high mountain trails, the path to the West. He saw the cars coming up to get him, and he jumped on his skis and escaped. And Susie is his daughter, Susie Schroll, Miss Schroll, the way she has her pianos and all of her musical instruments tuned—oh my, so peaceful, and the notes are so integrated…
dLF: It’s evil this thing that you are describing!
BC: Oh absolutely! It is evil and very twisted. And it’s part of the goal; through denigration of food quality, to control you! And denigration of the vibrations that we live in, through the music, to control you. And it’s all associated with the business of the few rising and controlling the many. Forestalling the spiritual interaction of the many from embracing the structure of nature… the economy of generosity… from living peacefully together with a sense of interactive community. You know, like when we started this country it was a long time ago, and during the same period of time, the 1770’s, the French had a little uprising against the Kings—but it didn’t work. They had a little uprising, but then it collapsed. In this country, when they started and we had all of our old founding fathers, they got ideas for writing our constitution from the Iroquois nations. The native people. From the Iroquois came the idea of human rights. Our bill of rights, this comes from the indigenous people from the Iroquois nations. These people had gotten along for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. These tribes had gotten together as a union to protect themselves. This is why we have the arrows held on our shields upon our money and whatnot, the thirteen arrows… because they are together. Hiawatha, one of their leaders, picks up one arrow (those indigenous people were there at the constitutional convention). Hiawatha picks up one arrow, and he shows how you can snap it easily. Then he picks up a group of arrows, one from each entity, and he has thirteen of them, and he cannot break them. Strong we stand together! And our country’s founding fathers adopted it. But they were European, where the male was more important, and one thing they left behind in those indigenous peoples’ business, was that the female was the boss. And the male, the male’s primary complaint was that the women sent us to war too often!
dLF: So, the best we can do is to look to Mother Nature for companionship and for guidance.
BC: Totally! Pay attention to a plant.
dLF: Nature is our teacher.
BC: Nature is your teacher, and your healer. Within walking distance of any natural place, you will find all of the herbs, and all of the herb spirits that are required to heal you of your disorders.
dLF: That is a perfect note to close on. Thank you, it has been a great honor to meet you, thank you for your time and generosity.
BC: My pleasure having met you sir!
Text & Photography ©DdLF 2023
This is the english version of an article first published in REGAIN Magazine #1