John and Molly Chester traded city living for barren farmland

Brut America

They traded city living for several hectares of abandoned land. Their challenge? Transforming it into a beautiful farm in harmony with nature. This is the story of John and Molly.

Transcript

00:00Well, when we first got here, the farm looked pretty rundown,

00:29although at the time we didn't really even know how bad it was.

00:31There were no cover crops growing under the orchard trees.

00:35It was completely white dirt.

00:37It wasn't even brown dirt or dark.

00:39It was like a white, almost sand.

00:42So we were basically dealing with this rocky, sandy soil that had no life.

00:47We needed to create a farm that would both first reawaken an ecosystem

00:52and then secondly, try to integrate the farm into the reawakened ecosystem

00:57without creating collateral damage, because we were going to use nature

01:01to solve the agricultural problems.

01:17Post office called us at what time?

01:18Five thirty. For this.

01:21What do you think of this, Todd?

01:46First thing we realized is that we had opened Pandora's box.

01:49We had this, you know, incredibly sort of dreamy idea of bringing nature back.

01:53Well, nature doesn't necessarily want to cooperate with your agenda.

01:57Nature is just going to do its thing.

01:58Coyotes killed 350 chickens over a couple of year period.

02:02But then we had, you know, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of snails

02:06that are non-native to this area that were attacking our citrus trees

02:10because we were growing this really healthy cover crop.

02:13And they love cover crops as well as gophers love cover crops.

02:17And so we had this massive epidemic of of gopher explosion.

02:20The gophers eat the roots of the citrus trees and other trees.

02:24But they also then we've got above the ground.

02:26We've got these snails destroying the leaves of the citrus trees,

02:30you know, prohibiting their ability to photosynthesize and grow fruit.

02:33And so we had to figure out how to mitigate all these things

02:36and what in nature existed at our disposal.

02:40Or could we bring back into the farm to try to find some balance?

02:43It's all about looking deeply into the problems

02:46that exist in front of you in nature and try to understand why they exist.

02:50And then when you start to build up this catalog of all these issues

02:54and all these reasons why these issues occur, you start to see threads

02:57of connections where you can put things together and create balance.

03:02We realized that if we got rid of all the coyotes,

03:05we would still be left with this massive problem of gophers and rabbits.

03:09And we wouldn't have the help of the coyote.

03:12So if we could just figure out a way to discourage the coyote

03:14rather than kill all the coyotes,

03:17then we might have a helper on our hands versus just a pest.

03:20I mean, that's what we're experiencing as a human, you know,

03:24species right now on our planet is that we've dominated it to such a degree

03:28that we've destroyed more than 40 percent of the biodiversity in the last 50 years.

03:32In the last 260 years, we've lost a third of the world's topsoil.

03:36We've deforested 46 percent of the trees.

03:39We've watched the carbon numbers go from 260 parts per million

03:42to two to over 400 parts per million.

03:45And what we are destroying is our planet's immune system.

03:49And agriculture plays a significant role in either the regeneration

03:54or the extraction and destruction of our planet's ecosystem slash immune system.

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