VIDEO 1 Transcript

Understanding Business As A Food Forest

Welcome to Sacred Growth: Nurturing Your Online Business like a Food Forest!

I am so excited you’re here. So excited to share this body of work with you. And so excited that for all that you’re going to be able to unlock through installing the Food Forest Framework for Online Business Success.

If you’re here I’m going to assume you know who I am, but in case a friend forwarded this training to you, here’s a quick 10-second intro.

HI! I’m Sam Garcia, founder + lead strategist of Dirty Alchemy Digital Marketing, a boutique marketing agency for thought leaders and course creators whose businesses are devoted to revolutionizing the world + live on an off-grid regenerative farm my husband designed and stewards on Maui.  I wrote the bestselling book Regenerative Business which is about how to use Nature’s design principles to have a more impactful, joyful, abundant, and easeful business.

Which is what this video series is about too.

First - housekeeping:

Over these 4 videos you’ll be designing your business as a Food Forest - if you don’t know what that means, I do not expect you to + will explain shortly:

Video 1. What a food forest is, setting the goal of your business as a food forest, and “prepping your site”

Video 2. The different types of Food Forests + You’ll choose one based on your goals

Video 3. The 9 layers of a Food Forest to set within your business

Video 4. Addressing the climate and soil quality of You, and your Energetic Blueprint

I am trying to keep these as distilled as possible for maximum potency, so you can focus on actually taking action. The point of this is not to just load you with info — the point is for you to lay the groundwork of a regenerative business. That’s why you’ll find companion activities below each of these videos.

And as a neuro-spicy human I am very aware that different people have different learning styles, so you will find the full transcript below each video if you prefer reading. I’ll also publish the audio from this video as an Expiring episode on my podcast, Regenerative Business with Sam Garcia if you want to listen on the go.

All 4 videos are available now incase you’re a binge-watcher like me, and I’ll also be sending you reminder emails to go through everything in case you’d prefer tackling it in smaller chunks.

Please note that these videos, podcasts, and activities will only be available for free until November 26th so this isn’t work to put off.

Okay! Now that that’s clear - let’s jump into our first training!

…

The concept of a Food Forest is something I learned when I got my Permaculture Design Certification in 2012.

• • The term perma-culture is a play on the words “permanent agriculture” and was coined to describe designing food growing systems that mimic how Nature grows food. 
  • Of course it doesn’t actually originate there —
  • The food forest concept I first learned in “permaculture” echos the forest gardens common among the Indigenous societies of North America’s northwestern coast, and worldwide.
  • Indigenous peoples around the world have lived and continue to live in relationship with land.

Nature doesn’t grow food like large-scale commercial farms, with rows and rows of the same crops acting like a salad bar for bugs, requiring pesticides and human intervention, and centered around making a profit. Nature grows food in forests.

• • Rainforests cover less than 2% of the Earth’s total surface area, yet they are home to 50% of the Earth’s plants and animals.
  • Out of the 3,000 plants the U.S. National Cancer Institute has identified as useful in the treatment of cancer, 70% of these plants are found only in rainforests.
  • At least 80% of the developed world’s food originated in the tropical rainforest. Its bountiful gifts to the world include fruits like avocados, oranges, tomatoes; vegetables including corn, potatoes, winter squash; spices like black pepper, coffee and vanilla; and nuts like Brazil nuts and cashews.

[Source]

These food forests or forest gardens are apart of our human nature and are resilient as fuck.

A sad example showing this is the forest gardens established around First Nation villages in Alaska — colonists forcibly removed the indigenous people from their villages 150 years ago but the forest gardens are currently thriving without human intervention.

The land is waiting for its people to return.

[Source]

These systems don’t require pesticides to thrive. Or human intervention. They don’t require humans at all. Nature designed them to be self-reliant and to self-regulate — through many species of plants, animals, fungi, insects, bacteria, and rocks, minerals, molecules, elements, all collaborating and cohabitating in a multidimensional cycle of death and growth, all in the name of increased alive-ness of the system.

In ecological succession, most ecosystems end up like a forest. And without significant disturbances, like wildfires or severe climate changes or humans coming through a clearcutting it, the forest will endure indefinitely, because the system becomes stable and self-perpetuating.

So within permaculture, whether you’re designing a backyard food growing system, or a 100+ acre farm, you’re using this concept of a Food Forest in its design.

Because who’s the most fertile, abundant, resilient systems designer? Nature.

And when we design like Nature does, our systems are less reliant on us. We get our freedom and time back. And we create something beautiful and wild for the world, that can shock the current Industrial status quo.

• • And it doesn’t have to stop at food-growing systems.
  • We can use Nature’s principles and teachings to design our business systems too.

Our focus today is an important one. You may want to skip it because it’s less flashy than the next couple trainings, but this step is absolutely necessary to complete before starting the next 2.

Today we’ll be setting your Food Forest goal and analyzing your site.

This is different than your annual revenue goal or anything like that.

1. SETTING YOUR ULTIMATE GOAL

Before designing a Food Forest you need to be clear on what your goal is. Because a goal of growing enough food for your family with as little work required from you as possible, versus you creating a community hub and demonstration site, versus you wanting as much food production as possible so you can sell your extra to local restaurants and create value added products to sell at farmers markets, all of those could be done on the same plot of land, but what you plant and what systems you set up would be significantly different.

Down below this video you’ll find a list of questions to go through today to get clear on your business’s ultimate goal — it’s essentially a short quiz whose answers will enlighten the decisions you’ll be making in the next 2 videos.

Let’s go through them together now - you can mark down your answers as we go along, or return to this later. DO record your answers in a journal or Notes app.

Please really tune into what you REALLY want, versus what’s flashy or what you could brag about. It is just as worthy and valid and valuable to want to design your business to support your preferred lifestyle and help your people in your corner of the internet, as it is to want to build a massive organization where you’re featured on The View.

First - let’s let go of any current stress or outside influence…

[MEDITATION]

- Close your eyes and adjust so you’re comfortable

- Take 3 deep breaths - 6 counts in and out

- Relax your muscles from the top of your head to your toes

- Feel the weight of your body being pulled into the earth

- See a pillar of white light coming down from the center of the Galaxy and clearing your body

- Shake it out

Let’s go through this from a 3-5 years from now perspective. If you can think back 3 years ago - actually do this now, where were you in your life and business 3 years ago - recognize how much can drastically change in 3 years. So let’s assume you can start putting regenerative business systems in your business now, so 3 years from now your experience of life and business is drastically different and very intentional.

Where do you want to be? Let’s get specific —

QUIZ:

1. How hands-on do you ultimately want to be in your business? (Think 3+ years from now)

A. I actually love my work! I want to be working hands-on every week in my business (knowing that work is 80%+ in my zone of genius and can be full- or part-time depending on my preferences)

B. I want to be in my business but with a very flexible schedule. A ton automated or handed off to a team, but I still want to be making the main decisions and the creative source

C. I want to be very hands-off — mainly collaborating with my business in a visionary role

2. Do you want to be the face of your business, or have your business/brand be the “face”?

A. I want to be the face of my business

B. It doesn’t matter to me — whatever serves the mission!

C. I like being behind the scenes + would rather my business/brand become famous

3. How much visibility do you want you/your business to have in 5-10 years?

A. I don’t care about visibility, I just care about having satisfying work + a lush income.

B. I’d like to be a respected name + go-to person/brand in my industry

C. Yeah bitch, I want me/my business to be FAMOUS! I see my work featured on Oprah or on the cover of Times…

4. In 5 years how much money would you love your salary/profit to be?

5. In 5 years how big of a team do you want?

A. Solo-preneur automating as much as possible

B. Lean team with 1-2 people supporting you taking annoying stuff off your plate

C. I’d love my business to give more people more fulfilling work/careers

6. In 10 years, what do you want to be known for?
(Don’t freeze from this question - if you’re newer in business then it’s totally normal to be unsure, but the best advice I can give is to commit to something and go all in - this is the best way to know for sure AND you get to change directions anytime you like, with no negative repercussions)

7. Is that similar to or different than what you’re doing now?

8. What is the ultimate goal of your business?

A. I want a fulfilling career that impacts the world for the better.

B. I want a self-reliant business that provides fairly passive income for my desired lifestyle.

C. I want to build a legacy for my family and/or my community and/or my industry.

D. My mission is my life-blood and I am all in on drastically changing the world through my business.

Tune into your body. Is there anything else that comes through that feels important to note down right now?

Okay great - we will use these answers over the next couple of videos to determine the type of forest-like system you should install for your business.

Again, don’t answer this the way you think you “should” answer. See yourself in the future and the type of life you want to have. Try and let go of any “good girl” programming on what the “right” or “good” answer is. Just tune into your heart/gut/body and be honest about what you want + what really feels right for you.

Go back and update any of your answers that feel like you only answered that way because of programming or you would get in trouble or be judged if you answered how you really wanted to answer.

2. ANALYZING YOUR SITE AS IT IS NOW

When I got my permaculture design certification they told us that ideally you will sit and observe for a year before installing your system. I thought they were nuts. I’m impatient - what can I say. But a decade has shown me the immense value in it. Don’t worry. I am absolutely not telling you to sit and do nothing for the next year. But I am telling you that a certain amount of planning and observing will give you the results you want faster and easier. That’s what we’ll start doing here.

You, your business, the industry you’re in, the internet, the collective - it’s not in a neutral place. There are things happening here and now that’s different for each of us, and knowing what that is will help you prevent any roadblocks or hiccups.

On a piece of land - you would observe over the course of a year, over all the seasons, how water falls on the land - does it natural flow because of how the earth is leveled, are there divots where water pools. You would observe how the sun shines at different times of the year; what parts of the land get the most sun or shade. When frost begins, or when the first flowers of spring bloom. You would notice what plants are already there - what animals roam through, what mushrooms pop up.

All of this observation informs the site plan. You can pair your goals with the current site’s flows and rhythms.

And there is the reality of different plants being better suited for different environments. 

For example, palm trees are fantastic in hurricane areas for their flexibility — their trunks can go almost sideways in hurricane level winds without breaking, and their leaves may be tattered afterwards, but they handle, unlike large solid rigid trees, which despite their massive size, will break. So in business - if you’re in a turbulent industry or country, you need to plan around that! You need things that can pick up and go, they can change quickly and easily, or you’re diversified enough to handle changes in your field.

So let’s jump into what observations you’ll be making before jumping into video 2.

Take out your journal and answer the following questions:

How stable is your industry?

How stable is your personal life?

Do you have an established business?

Do you have an established customer base?

Do you have a seasonal business?

Are there already people doing what you’re doing? (This isn’t a bad thing - this signals that there are already people interested in buying what you sell)

What are common prices in your industry?

What offers have you sold in the past? List the price(s).

What offers are you currently selling? List the price(s).

What offers do you plan to sell in the future? List the price(s).

What have you seen other people sell that you haven’t that feels super exciting to you?

Do you already have an array of different offers that touch different investment levels? (Think both time and money investments)

What has felt really easy about business for you?

A. Writing in a way that attract my perfect-fit people

B. Doing my craft

C. Managing myself / my team

D. Tech

E. Sharing about my work publicly + consistently

F. Coming up with unique ideas

G. Managing money

What has felt really hard?

A. Writing in a way that attract my perfect-fit people

B. Doing my craft

C. Managing myself / my team

D. Tech

E. Sharing about my work publicly + consistently

F. Coming up with unique ideas

G. Managing money

Tune into your body. Is there anything else that comes through that feels important to note down right now?

Amazing work! In the next video we’ll dive into the 3 types of food forests and you’ll decide which one is the best for your business. You can jump into that now by hitting the button below, or schedule a time tomorrow on your calendar to return!