A Year of Food From the Land with Robin Greenfield – Epi-3907

The Survival Podcast

Robin Greenfield joins the show to discuss his recent year-long experiment of foraging 100% of his food and medicine without any gardening.

Key takeaways

• Robin Greenfield consumed approximately 310 pounds of fish, primarily salmon and smelt, during his year of foraging.
• He utilized roadkill deer as a sustainable protein source, harvesting roughly 100 pounds of venison.
• The One Million Community Fruit Trees Initiative uses grassroots micro-nurseries to grow trees from seeds and cuttings at low cost.
• Wild rice and acorns served as the primary caloric staples for his year without a grocery store.
• Robin emphasizes that 'everything I eat is a medicine' through the use of plants like willow, mint, and elderberry.

Main topics

• 100% Foraging Experiment
• Sustainable Hunting and Fishing
• Wild Food Staples

Notable quotes

Everything that I eat is a medicine.

Conclusion

The episode provides an inspiring look at extreme self-sufficiency and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:24) We're getting into numbers that even I go, wow, we've been around that long, over 18 years we've been doing this. I have a special guest coming on who, the last time we had him on, goes back further than most podcasts ever exist. Almost six years, we just figured that out talking offline before we went live with you guys. His name is Robin Greenfield. The last time I had him on, he was just finishing up an amazing project. He actually lived in like a tiny house in Florida. And he, for a year, lived off only what he could grow or forage or barter for. Not being one to ever be willing to be content and sit back on his laurels, Robin recently started and completed another project. I think he's done with it now. But if not, he's close to it, from what I know. For a year, this time, he had to forage. all his own food. So no even gardening or anything like that. Only what he could go out and acquire from Mother Earth. And he's got a great story to tell us. He'll be with us in just a moment. We'll talk about that. I think as people are concerned with environmentalism, preparedness, et cetera, there is a ton that we can learn from this and some stuff we can take a deeper look at. And I'll have him on in just a moment. Before we do, let's go ahead and thank our sponsors. for supporting the show and helping us be with you today and uh sponsor of the day number one today is above phone above phone lets you actually own your own technology they have some of the best privacy phones tablets and laptops on the market i personally love my above book use it all the time it works the same pretty much as anything else There's a little differences here and there, but it comes preloaded with all these videos to tell you how to do it. If you get an above phone and you're worried about that, they have an expert that will give you a one hour onboarding free consultation. Make sure you are completely squared away with how to use your above phone. And what you can stop is the fact that your device manufacturers, the app manufacturers and your providers all spy on you and steal your data and sell to anybody else. And basically, you can make that all go away and have complete autonomy that way. And I was just reached out to. By the folks at Above Phone, they're actually coming up with their own AI product that's really cool. And we have Hakeem booked to come on the air, I think, next month and tell us all about it. It's going to be completely different than like your chat GPTs, your clods, et cetera. And AI that connects you with the real world is the way that was described to me. So we'll discover that together. You definitely want to check out Above Phone because they're always doing cool things like that to further autonomy for individuals. Next up today, hey, I bet you Rob would have like. chewed off his arm to get his hands on this while he was in his foraging mode, right? This is Bill Tong from Bill Tong USA. That's Anton von Viren. Anton came on board with us just about the time, the last time I had Rob on, actually, and it was because COVID came, and he had just opened, like, a small, like, store that sold a bunch of imported food and things like that, but also had, like, a little cafe and restaurant attached to it, and boom, everything got shut down. And he realized, hey, I can actually ship Biltong all over the world, certainly all over the country. That was the beginning of Biltong USA. The stuff he makes is amazing. He actually pays me in meat. I'm serious, right? Like, that's how he pays for his sponsorship. He sends me Biltong. He sends me Drew Wars. He sends me Calabonazzi sausage. He sends me Biltong sticks. Check him out. Hey, if you are in the North Texas area where I am, he's actually doing a braai. That's like a kind of bring stuff and just hang out. barbecue that's happening this the end of this month. I'm not sure the exact date. I can't look it up for you right now, but I'll give you some more information on that tomorrow. If you're on his email distribution list, you should have gotten an invitation to that this morning. So I'm going to try to get up there. I've got a trip planned up to Oklahoma right about the same time. I don't know that I'm going to be able to do it, but if I can pull it off, I'm going to try to be up there at least for a couple hours. Anyway, with that, let's bring our special guest on Robin Greenfield. Okay, let's click the button again. Okay, there he is. Robin, welcome back to the Survival Podcast, brother. Speaker 1 (4:32) Hello, Jack. It's very nice to Speaker 3 (4:33) see you Speaker 1 (4:34) and good to be back after many years. Speaker 3 (4:36) Yeah, we were just saying it was right before the COVID insanity kicked off that you were on. It was December of 2019. That is a while ago and you are a busy dude and you've been doing some things since then. But I want to start off with this. whole thing. Well, actually, I want to start off with, there's probably plenty of people that came on board in the last six years, don't know who you are, right? I've never heard of a Robin Greenfield before. So before we even get into this project, just who is Robin Greenfield? And how did you end up in the place that you are now where you're doing all these cool things? Speaker 1 (5:13) Sure, absolutely. And last time, for those of you who are listening to this podcast, seven years ago, it was Rob Greenfield then. So some of you might even wonder. I thought it was Rob. So I've returned to Robin. That's actually my birth name. I went by Rob for a long time. Okay. And I was named after the Robin Bird by my mom and dad, who very much loved the outdoors and loved the earth for a long time. And a little bit about myself. I was, for a long time, pursuing this sort of American dream. I was very focused on material possessions and financial wealth. I just... you know, was kind of doing what I had seen on movies, TV, you know, magazines. I was just kind of following along with a lot of the societal norms. And in 2011, when I was 25, I just started to watch documentaries and read books and talk to different people. And I learned that so much of what our mainstream society sells us is ultimately a lie. You know, our government, our corporations. There's just so much untruth there. And a lot of that untruth is about our actions and how they impact the earth, the people we share this home with, and the plants and animals. So for the last 15 years, I've been on a journey of breaking free from the systems that no longer serve and really aiming to live in a way that's in alignment with my beliefs. And that means living in harmony with the earth and with all life that we share this home with. So I practice that, and then I do activism that's designed to bring people along on this journey too. Speaker 3 (6:50) Yeah, and one of the testimonials or quotes or something like that in the media area of your site said something like, he's the Forrest Gump of ecology. And, you know, I was in my early 20s when that movie came out, and it really took the country by storm back then. And it does actually track. especially if you think about the point in that movie where he was going coast to coast jogging and people just started following him and everybody thought he was doing it for some reason. And he just turns around one day and goes, I'm tired now. I think I'm going to go home. Speaker 2 (7:27) Everybody's out there in the middle of the desert like, what do we do Speaker 3 (7:29) now? And it was a fantastic movie, but you can kind of like, you just do all these really cool things. And I think it brings awareness to things. that most people really don't even think about. And that's why I think it's so cool. Speaker 1 (7:44) Yeah. And I will say Forrest Gump is my favorite movie of all time. Really? Okay. I loved when that, you know, when that saying came up in the media. Speaker 3 (7:54) And Speaker 1 (7:55) two things. One, yeah, one of the things about Forrest that's so inspiring is... is how many epic things that he did in his life. And so that's where that kind of comes from, is I do extreme adventures that are designed to catch people's attention, get them critically thinking, question their societal norms and structures. The big difference between Forrest and I is that I'm trying to get people's attention, and Forrest was just another level because he was... Fumbling through. Speaker 3 (8:31) Yeah, so you did this thing, and again, I think you're finished. I think you wrapped it up like a couple weeks ago. Two Speaker 1 (8:38) weeks Speaker 3 (8:38) left. I have two weeks left. Oh, you got two weeks left. Okay, so two more weeks to go. For a year, you're 100 % of your food and medicine, right? So medicine, too, must be foraged, which means you have to be able to obtain it from nature. Speaker 3 (8:54) When you did the thing in Florida, you had your garden and you had community gardens and you were spreading that. You also had barter in that system as well, where this has to actually actively collect it. What the hell made you decide you were going to do this? It sounds like biting off a pretty big hunk of cookie in one bite. Speaker 1 (9:13) Yeah, absolutely. My exploration is in the global industrial food system, which I see is clearly broken and is so outside of the belief system of so many of us listening to this podcast. And so during that year in Florida, it was grow and forage, no barter then. So I had to either grow it in my gardens or forage it. Speaker 3 (9:39) OK, Speaker 1 (9:39) now I've removed the growing in the gardens and now it's just foraging. So one easy way to say that is that I have to harvest it from, you know, nature. But then, of course, you start to get to really know, quote, unquote, nature. And then you see it's like, well, what really is that? We have human beings have impacted the world so much. So but basically to try to put words to it, it's foraging. harvesting 100 % of my food and medicine without growing any food. So just what is being pretty much grown without human beings' hands. That said, of course, there's a lot of food like abandoned apple trees from old homestead sites. And of course, even like our deer and our fish are managed. It's not like super clear that it's just what the earth provides, but no garden, just what's foraged. And so for most people, it would be pretty wild. And it has been pretty wild. Today is day 350 without a grocery store, without a restaurant and without a garden. And I will say that I have really learned a lot about what is growing in this world and what, you know, the abundance that is real. Speaker 3 (10:58) Now, when I talked to you six years ago. Speaker 3 (11:04) I was like, this guy's nuts because of what you bit off back then. But then when I got to talk to you, we were able to find out like, I'm not going to show up with nothing and no, no understanding anything. Just like put up my little tiny house in this dude's backyard and then like start eating from what's there. Like you had a lead up period where you, you followed your own rules to that with getting some starter food, seed stock. et cetera, but you were prepared going in. From what I've read about this experiment, you sort of did the same thing. Like you went out in the field, you probably collected some stuff that you could actually have as a starting point, but you also got some instruction from people. Like you didn't just decide one day, hey, I'm going to do this and then just start wandering around, right? You had a lead up to it, right? Speaker 1 (11:50) Indeed. So in 2022, I did a month of foraging 100 % of my food and medicine. And so that was my practice to see that I could indeed do it for a month. But at that time, that was it. At the end of that month, I went straight back to the grocery store and I bought myself some pecan butter. And I just and I went and got a bunch of pig fat that I rendered down from a local farm. I was, you know, I didn't have enough fat. And so that was one month, but a pretty substantial practice round. And I've been foraging a lot. Over the last 10 years, I've learned a lot. So going into this year, I didn't have too many big questions. I more or less knew exactly what I needed to do. There were areas where I didn't have the experience, where I had to actually learn it through hands-on. But there wasn't too much that was a real wild card. I gave myself three months to prepare. Speaker 1 (12:52) When I had a garden for the first time, I gave myself six months and ended up being 10 because then you got to get your garden going and everything. But with this, the earth is doing the work. So I didn't need so much preparation time. So July 1st was when I began harvesting food and anything I had harvested before then would not be a part of the year. So I gave myself from July 1st. to what ended up being October 9th, so three months. And I wasn't stocking away huge quantities of food. It was a lot of things that you would have just in the summer, like certain herbal medicines, herbal teas. And then in the fall leading up, I started to harvest my apples, you know, pears, plums, some fish. I went into it having part of a deer stored. So, yeah, I went into the year with a decent little stock of food, but by no means a year's supply or anything like that. Speaker 3 (13:57) Yeah, well, that actually tracks really well with what you're emulating, which is the human hunter-gatherer in historical perspective, that summer was the time you could pretty much get what you needed as you needed it, and as you moved into the fall, you began to prepare for that long winter. So that tracks really well with that. I was going to ask you about protein here. So you mentioned the deer. So part of this foraging is also hunting, right? Yes. You're out there. Robin, man, Robin Hood, right? Are you a bow hunter, Speaker 1 (14:30) rifle hunter? Like, how does that work? So number one is fishing. I'm most effective at fishing. I have eaten 310 pounds of fish this year. So that's about a pound of fish per day. So I'm very fish heavy. That's a white fish with salmon, smelt being the main ones. The smelt I net and the white fish and salmon hook and line. I live on Lake Superior, so we have a real wonderful fishery here. And then as far as deer go, I'm a rookie hunter. I'm a beginner hunter. and I planned to hunt a deer last year, but just with all of the elements going on, you know, so many different things to harvest as well as other aspects of life, I did not manage to get a deer. So my venison has come from harvesting deer that are hit by cars, what other people call roadkill, which I imagine we probably touched on in our first. podcast together because I did do that during the year of growing and foraging all my food as well. That was when I first ever harvested a car killed deer. Speaker 3 (15:49) No, I get it. And I participate, even though technically here it's illegal. It doesn't say it's illegal, but no one cares is kind of how it works. I talked to several cops about it and they're like, look, man, a game ward would have to do it. We don't even have like, I don't have something in my book to write you up for. And I've even had a cop help me throw a deer in the back of my truck. And it's about another month when they really start running heavy around here with the rut, maybe another month and a half. And what I'll do, I have a certain route I'll drive and I'll drive it in the evening. And that way I know if there's a deer out there and then I'll drive it in the morning. And if there's a deer where it wasn't the night before, I know it's only, you know, a few hours. It's probably got hit either right at dark or right at sunrise. And then I'll check the animal out. Is there enough worth harvesting it? And I'll bring it home. Yeah. And I've gotten probably more deer that way than I have with a gun or a bow in the last 10 years because I don't Speaker 1 (16:40) have time to hunt anymore. Wow. Yeah, I'm really happy to hear that. I mean, and for anybody, for everybody listening to this, the main thing that prevents someone from doing this, if they're a listener of this, would be the concern of what people think, ego. When it comes down to it, if you do your diligence and use your common senses, it's totally safe to harvest car killed deer. Talk about an incredible resource. You don't have to do hardly any work. You're already driving. You can just pick it up as you're going. And it's just an incredible resource. So I've harvested, I harvested this year parts of about five or six deer. And I wish I had the math already in front of me, but I think it's about probably about 100 pounds of venison is what I've eaten this year. And that said, I just. Just went out crossbow hunting last weekend. This, actually, no, just a few days ago. And I missed a perfect shot, broadside, 20 yards. Somehow I missed it when I was perfectly, you know, targeted in with all of my practice round. And it was pretty disheartening, very disheartening. I searched for five hours, never found it. And then I got home. Speaker 1 (18:02) And I had a text from someone that said, hey, there's a fresh car killed deer about 15 miles from your house. And I went and picked it up and it was the most perfect deer. No damage. I ended up getting 50 pounds of meat from it. So I'm eating. I'm eating very good right now. Speaker 3 (18:19) Yeah. Sometimes you lose a lot on them and sometimes you get almost everything. One I picked up a few years ago, it must have been a bumper or the truck just tapped it in the rib cage. There was a black and blue mark about the size of a 50-cent piece when I skinned it. That's all there was. And there was a chunk of bone. I felt bad for this little button buck. There was a chunk of bone about four inches long, jagged as heck. It broke, and it went into the rib. And that's Speaker 1 (18:44) what Speaker 3 (18:44) took him down. But, I mean, it was like my