Jack and Liv, two Midwestern homesteaders and Bitcoiners, discuss their farm, food health and how Bitcoiners inherently understand symbiosis.

This edition of the “Bitcoin Homesteaders” series brings you a conversation with Jack and Liv, homesteaders in the Midwest growing some of the best produce I’ve ever tasted. Having lived and traveled in Europe, we cover the differences in the two food systems and the impact on health.

We also discussed how they’re tackling the struggle of looking for suitable land, and the many tactics they’re using to maximize yield from their crops. Finally, Liv and Jack gave their two cents on why Bitcoiners naturally understand the benefits of homesteading and growing your own food.

For more about the homestead, you can follow Liv on Twitter at saw Syngenta — a producer of atrazine — paying $105 million to cities for water filtration systems to remove atrazine from their drinking water. Source.

That shows how poisoned our local food is. We’re trying to find a little pocket of nature that these companies and industries haven’t polluted. You can find that in the Northern Midwest. What is awesome about this area is the freshwater resources of the Great Lakes.

Even beyond agricultural pollution, there’s industrial pollution as well. Even next to a highway, you get brake and tire dust and exhaust fumes. That might seem paranoid, but at one point we also thought lead was fine and asbestos was the next great building material.

We’re looking into these chemicals as well with the structures we’re planning to build on our homestead. What are these products, are they carcinogenic or could they potentially be harmful? It’s incredible what they will sell at the Home Depot or whatever hardware store you’re getting materials from. They’re all treated, from wood to insulation. We’re trying to look forward and think about what products could be harmful in the future, just to be safe.

Sidd: When did you start to go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole? It sounds like both of you have this long history of anti-establishment thought. Did that play into your discovering of Bitcoin as well? 

Jack: I think we might differ quite a bit on this. For me, personally, my dad always had me question everything — including authority — and taught me to verify things for myself. Probably in high school, I started thinking a bit more politically and was disgusted with our lack of options. I was introduced to Ron Paul, and thought there might be a third option where we don’t rely so much on the right or the left to fix our problems. We can actually make our own independent decisions. That’s where the rabbit hole started for me; a bit of Libertarian thinking.

I discovered Bitcoin in college through Reddit forums very early on, maybe in 2010 or 2011. However, computer science was never my strong suit and I was not technical enough to be able to really understand Bitcoin at that time. It sounded like a good idea, but I had not the slightest clue on how to acquire some even if I wanted to.

Year after year it just never died, and after the run up of 2017 I decided to at least get some skin in the game. I bought at the peak while living as a nomad in South America and held through that bear market. Thankfully I didn’t go all in, but I did put a lot of my travel fund in which made traveling hard for a while!

I kept slowly learning about it. When COVID came and central banks started talking about printing not hundreds of billions this time, but trillions, it clicked. I thought this had to be a problem for inflation, and Bitcoin with its limited supply was a no brainer. I felt the ship was sinking, it’s time to grab a lifeboat. In 2020 I had a lot of time to educate myself through podcasts, books, articles and the like.

For the past three years, I haven’t stopped consuming content, thinking about different aspects, and discussing with people. We started a Bitcoin meetup in our city, just so that we could have face-to-face conversations. Liv, what about you?

Liv: I studied psychology in Europe with a focus on behavioral economics. I learned about the incentives that led to the 2008 financial crash, and 2020 was a real case study in how irrational people actually are. At the same time, I had Jack, who would talk morning, day and night about Bitcoin! At the beginning, it was pretty intense.

However, what I observed during COVID got me on board. All the small and local businesses growing organic food were devastated because they couldn’t keep up with the regulations, while the big businesses thrived. So I started to become more interested in Bitcoin, in understanding what money is and the politics that can lie behind it.

And now, I’m convinced that this helps people because it gives us all a different perspective on life. Same as gardening. When you know what you grow, the work it takes, and the satisfaction of eating it, you are more sustainable. You try hard not to waste anything. It’s the same with money: The money you don’t earn, that’s printed out of thin air, is easy to spend. Truly scarce money makes you think harder about why you’re spending it.

I see a lot of people in the Bitcoin community have struggled in the past; but they change as they begin to understand the money they earn and store in bitcoin cannot be inflated away. They can think more long term, and having that kind of attitude and perspective on life is, I think, very important.

Sidd: Before we conclude, I’m curious about the differences in the food systems between America and Europe. Are there different regulations or practices that affect food quality? 

Liv: So, I recently spoke with someone who worked in the food system about this topic, and he said there is really no organic certification here in America we can rely on to certify that a plant hasn’t been treated at all. In Europe there is a label called “Demeter,” which signifies biodynamic farming practices. These are truly untreated. If you haven’t implemented a permaculture system, you can’t keep up with the Demeter certification — it’s just too much work and cost if the land isn’t doing it for you. 

Jack: Speaking of labels, I’ve noticed in both Bitcoin and farming that terms are very important. For example, take the term “tomato.” What that means to people is the GMO, pesticide-laden tomato on the grocery store shelf, whereas what I’m growing is an organic tomato. I think the tomatoes we’re growing should be simply tomatoes, and we add treatments and modifications to other kinds of tomatoes. Then there’s processed foods.

When you go through the middle aisles of the grocery store you can’t identify anything as actual food that you would grow in a field. And you wonder why we’ve got all these health issues as a society! This doesn’t happen if you get into the symbiosis of how the real world works, how nature actually works. You work with it, rather than trying to control it. That’s the whole permaculture idea.

In Bitcoin, we have something similar with terminology and control. For example, some government agencies want to label wallets as “unhosted” wallets. It’s just a wallet. The custodied wallet should have separate terminology, not the basic wallet you control yourself.

Our political system has tried to control money with the same results as trying to control food. If we just go back to obeying physics and mathematics with our money, we can design our world on that solid foundation instead of trying to intervene constantly and control the money. Ceding that control means markets can be in symbiosis more.

I think Bitcoiners and people who eat natural food understand that working with the natural cycle of things is in the long term a lot more sustainable, and just frankly better.

Liv: I think fear plays a big role in all the attempts to control as well. Like in food for example: If you sell your own eggs in front of your house, and one egg is bad and happens to get someone really sick, suddenly there’s a whole cascade of fear. That leads to a push to change the system so it prevents this. More and more control comes from those urges to prevent bad outcomes. 

Jack: Texas Slim always says “return to the source of the seed” — it all starts from the ground, from the underlying mechanism. Bitcoin is that base layer a stable economic environment can be built on top of. Same thing on the farm. If your soil is bad, you can’t do anything. And same thing with yourself, your own health. If the gut you use to digest nutrients is bad, good luck. It’s going to be very hard.

Sidd: Last question: Do you have any advice for new homesteaders?

Jack: For anyone who has started or gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, remember how intimidating that was at the beginning. But you get through it — you buy some, you read more, you get a hardware wallet, you listen to podcasts. You just start, and keep asking questions as you go. Don’t overextend yourself. Even just growing from seed can be a bit difficult. Don’t go buy a 400-acre farm thinking you’ll be able to handle it, even if you have all that money. Take it easy. If you’re in an apartment with a balcony, buy a pot of soil and start a tomato plant or something simple. If you like spicy food, try some chilis.

Also, if you have a small backyard you can consider chickens. Two or three chickens and a small coop are easier to handle than you think. You can feed them grain from the store, and they’re fascinating to watch.

Just start, and as Liv said earlier: observe. Take the time to observe what you’re doing and what you’re growing. Also, start paying attention to what you’re consuming, even if you’re buying from the store. Just take that extra second to look at the ingredients and choose products that are simple. Pick the peanut butter that’s just peanuts, not a bunch of highly-treated oils and sugar. 

Liv: Remember that you can eat more parts of the plant than you might think: for example, I’m boiling the leaves of beetroot, and they taste like spinach. Also, Swiss chard is easy to get started with. Grow it once and keep cutting leaves forever. If you want to cut down on the bitterness, boil it a bit. Salad lettuce on the other hand is very difficult to grow. It needs the right soil. So just try things and observe. 

Having a community to learn from is important too. Through more experienced people you get hints and ideas on how to accomplish things. Due to differences in your climate or just your soil, almost nothing will work exactly as someone advises, so you’ll need to experiment on your own.

Most of all, just get started. 

Sidd: Thank you so much for those words of wisdom and sharing all your experiences!

This is a guest post by Captain Sidd. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.