Homesteading on the Moon with Kevin Espiritu

Summary

StarTalk Radio: "Homesteading on the Moon with Kevin Espiritu"

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guest: Kevin Espiritu (Epic Gardening / Epic Homesteading)
Date: May 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

This Special Edition of StarTalk delves into the future of sustainable food production—on Earth and beyond. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-hosts Gary O'Reilly and Chuck, and gardening expert Kevin Espiritu explore home gardening, novel growing techniques, and the challenges (and creativity) required to grow food in extreme environments like the Moon. The episode blends science, pop culture, and comedy to demystify modern homesteading, urban agriculture, and space farming.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Rise of Home Gardening & Homesteading

• Home food production is undergoing a revival, driven by interest in sustainability, food security, and DIY culture (04:15).
• Kevin’s journey: from a tiny north-facing balcony to a third-of-an-acre urban lot in San Diego, now hosting 30 fruit trees, annual crops, chickens, rainwater capture, solar energy, and graywater systems (05:18–07:01).
  • “We’re not necessarily growing it like an urban farm might, but there’s enough space to grow hundreds and hundreds of pounds of produce per year.” (Kevin, 05:55)

2. Water, Energy, and Resource Management at Home

• Rainwater harvesting: Even a small roof (1,000 sq ft) can collect substantial water (1 inch of rain = ~600 gallons) (08:29).
• Graywater use: Repurposing shower/laundry water for irrigation with the right systems and detergents (07:27).
• Solar investment: Effective for energy savings but rainwater systems are a sustainability play, not a short-term financial win (10:11).
  • “...Putting in a 2,000 gallon cistern, you will not pay that off for a very long time. So it’s more about security or sustainability...” (Kevin, 10:23)

3. Hydroponics, Aeroponics, and Vertical Farming

• Hydroponics: Water instead of soil; roots need oxygenation; can speed plant growth, but flavor doesn’t always match traditional soil-grown (15:10–18:51).
• Aeroponics: Nutrient-rich mist feeds plant roots suspended in air; even more efficient resource use but less common for home growers (19:05–20:24).
  • “You’re not growing it, of course, it’s growing itself. You just have to cultivate that right environment.” (Kevin, 25:28)
• Vertical farming: Maximizes yield per square foot by adding the vertical (Z) dimension; essential for urban/indoor agriculture but creates lighting challenges (22:35–23:43).

4. Optimizing Light for Plants

• Sunlight is broad-spectrum; early grow lights ("blurple") oversimplified plant needs.
• Newer LED grow lights approximate more of the sun’s full spectrum, including far-red and some infrared, which plants do use (29:18–31:21).
  • “...Plants are green because they reflect green. And it’s not entirely true... about 80% of green light is absorbed.” (Kevin, 31:21)
• Plants evolved adaptations to specific light environments—shade-loving vs. sun-loving species have distinct tolerances (26:09–28:03).

5. Space Farming & Growing on the Moon

• Lunar soil ("regolith") lacks organics and microbes: “Dirt is soil; soil is dirt plus the life that you talked about, microbes, fungi, bacteria.” (Kevin, 36:24)
• Viable lunar/Martian agriculture will require hydroponics/aeroponics in controlled, pressurized habitats with supplemental lighting (36:55–37:32).
• Aquaponics: Integrating fish as living fertilizer closes the nutrient loop—viable in closed systems on the Moon (38:59).
  • “Fish become the fertilizer...you can eat the plants and the fish.” (Kevin, 39:34)

6. Nutrition and Self-Sufficiency: Kevin’s 30-Day Challenge

• Kevin’s experiment: A month living only on what he could grow/fish/forage, with just a 15 x 30 foot plot plus a terrace (42:32–46:57).
  • Emphasis: Potatoes and beans for calories, grunion fish for fat/protein.
  • Result: Lost 13 lbs (mostly muscle)—“Being fully self-sufficient on your own property is sort of a fool’s errand...It’s much better to have a community.” (Kevin, 46:57)

7. The Sustainability Trade-Off: Big Ag vs. Regenerative Practices

• Industrial agriculture ("Big Ag") feeds billions but depletes topsoil and creates ecological side effects (50:22–51:01).
• Topsoil is vital: “Everything happens for the plant in the top three or four inches,” because that’s the biologically active layer processing organic matter (51:05–52:15).
• Downstream effects: monoculture farming and synthetic input use necessitate managed pollinator industries and create chemical runoff, driving ever more technological interventions (53:45–56:38).
  • “If you try to solve every problem... you end up basically just recreating what nature already was doing.” (Kevin, 56:23)

8. Regenerative & Urban Agriculture: Returning to Nature with Innovation

• Cover crops, crop rotation, animal integration (e.g. chickens for fertilizer) are seeing a resurgence among small/urban farmers (60:41–61:44).
• These practices mimic natural ecosystems for resilience and sustainability.

9. Can Everyone Growing Food Make a Difference?

• During WWII, US Victory Gardens generated 15–20% of national produce—but that took a World War to motivate (64:02).
• Collective home growing wouldn’t overhaul Big Ag immediately, but could cause a cultural “sea change” toward sustainability (64:42).
  • “What you’d see the biggest impact is… the entire culture’s attitude toward sustainability and food systems would change for the better in a meaningful way.” (Kevin, 64:42)

10. Frontiers: Science, Flavor, and Synthetic Food

• Kevin’s most-wished-for scientific breakthrough: Understanding the deep drivers of flavor in crops—can we optimize tomato acidity at home like wine terroir? (65:38)
  • “What can I do as a home gardener to impact the acidity of that tomato...?” (Kevin, 65:56)
• Neil: Chemistry and AI may yield “designer flavors” for both plants and lab-grown meats—flavor as a programmable condiment (66:24–68:42).
  • “Flavor is just chemistry. It’s just what is the flavor molecule intersecting with your taste buds.” (Neil, 67:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Hydroponics’ Surprises:
  • “The roots actually need oxygen. Otherwise they’ll simply drown in the water.” (Kevin, 17:19)
• On Plant Intelligence and Adaptation:
  • “Plants are just doing the best they can do with what they got.” (Neil, 33:07)
• On Food Self-Reliance:
  • “A huge part of my meals that month were what I called grunion potato pancakes... I ended up losing 13 pounds.” (Kevin, 46:15)
• On Resilience of Nature vs. Technology:
  • “You end up basically just recreating what nature already was doing.” (Kevin, 56:26)
• On Cultural Change Through Gardening:
  • “The entire culture’s attitude toward sustainability and food systems would change for the better...” (Kevin, 64:42)
• On Flavor Chemistry:
  • “If you make the mirror image molecule of mint, you get the flavor of caraway.” (Neil, 68:14)
• On Community:
  • “It’s much better to have a community anyway—I grow this, you grow that...” (Kevin, 46:57)

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Important Timestamps

• Home garden scope & resources: 05:18–07:01
• Rainwater & graywater systems: 07:27–10:50
• Soil vs. hydroponics & nutrient cycles: 15:10–18:51
• Light, spectrum, and plant needs: 26:09–31:21
• Growing food on the Moon: 36:18–39:54
• 30-day eat-what-you-grow challenge: 42:32–46:57
• Discussion of Big Ag and sustainability: 50:22–56:38
• Regenerative agriculture practices: 60:41–61:44
• Potential of home gardening to drive cultural change: 64:02–65:08
• Frontiers in flavor science and lab-grown meat: 65:36–68:42

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Final Thoughts

The episode champions both technological innovation and a return to natural wisdom in food production. Whether you’re homesteading on Earth or (someday) on the Moon, understanding ecology, biology, and community is as crucial as engineering mastery. The show’s blend of humor, science, and real-world advice makes the future of food—anywhere in the universe—feel within reach for everyone.

Find Kevin Espiritu online:

• Epic Gardening (YouTube)
• Epic Homesteading (YouTube)

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“As always, Neil deGrasse Tyson, bidding you to keep looking up.” (72:04)

Transcript

[Kevin Espiritu]

Hi, diva. It's Rachel and Jordan. Yeah, hi. Quick question. Why are you not spending your Venmo balance? Yeah, we're concerned you can, like, buy stuff with it.

[Chuck]

Ugh.

[Kevin Espiritu]

You love buying stuff and earn cash back on eligible purchases. Mm. You love purchasing eligible things.

[Ad]

So the money your friend sent you

[Kevin Espiritu]

yesterday, that's today's ramen or rideshare or eye patches. The skincare kind, not the pyro kind. Spend with Venmo and you can earn cash back with Venmo Stash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and Exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Terms, Idaho. Verification required to use a Venmo balance.

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You mean I can grow my own food and not have to go to the store?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

Make the best of your backyard.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Can I do it in the moon?

[Gary O'Reilly]

I don't believe fresh direct goes there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Coming up, all the things you can do to grow food in your backyard on StarTalk Special Edition. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins with right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition, which of course means I got Gary O'Reilly.

[Chuck]

Hi, Neil.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chucky, baby. Hey, man, how you doing?

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm doing great, Lord Chuck.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Lord Chuck.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Nice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We got a special edition here.

[Gary O'Reilly]

What do we got?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is on the future of growing food.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I like it. Cause I like food. Keeps me alive.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, see, I would say that the future of growing vegetables because you're not growing a cow.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Well, right now, we're not growing. Right now, we're not growing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It might be a cow plant.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We will be planting cows one day.

[Chuck]

Genetically modified, okay, Genetic.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So that you can grow them in a pot.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's right. I would love it. Go water the cow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, Gary, take us into this.

[Gary O'Reilly]

What do you have?

[Chuck]

All right. Let me just stop laughing. Right at home. Farming or homesteading has seen an uptick in popularity in the past few years, which begs the question, where can we grow plants? Is there a limit to where we can. We'll get into fake light versus real light, soil science, and the science of why our guest, who you'll introduce shortly, can grow a whole farm in his backyard. How big is his dad? And with some of us, can hardly keep a cactus alive. This guy's growing a farm in his backyard. Amazing. Where does the future of farming and sustainability actually take us?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm ready to get all in this because I think about this topic all the time.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because when I go to Mars.

[Chuck]

Yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You don't want to eat poop potatoes. You want something more than poop potatoes when you go to Mars. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think we can be a little more innovative than innovative. Yeah. So we've got gardening youtuber extraordinaire Kevin Espiritu. Kevin, welcome to StarTalk.

[Kevin Espiritu]

What is up, gentlemen? Glad to be here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, you're calling in from where? Where are you?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I'm in San Diego, California. Which gardening world is called Zone 10B. And I'll get to that in a second. But it's a great climate for growing.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, it's a great climate for everything. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Zone San Diego, 10B.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I miss San Diego, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Isn't there a movie called Zone 10B? Or was that the District 11?

[Gary O'Reilly]

District 11.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you for helping me.

[Chuck]

I don't think there's much growing plants.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Great. District 11, Zone 10B.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Next to District 11. I don't know.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I don't know.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, but first, how big is your backyard?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, the backyard I'm growing in now, it's about a third of an acre lot. So the house.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my gosh. It's not the back 40. No, a third of an acre.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah. We never got that. 40 acres, by the way. Just trying to let you know.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm still waiting on mine.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, well, he's working. He's working out a third of an acre here. I'm delighted to learn that, because that means it's hope for people who don't have large space that's out there.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And you could have a garden anywhere, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Cause when I think of farming, I think of huge fields. You know, factory farming, agri, you know, big aggregate business. So tell us, where do you come to this with what you do when you're back? One third.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And let me tell you, people, when you hear Kevin answer, Kevin does not look like he grows anything. He actually looks like he grows weed, to be honest. Like marijuana. That's what, like in a closet? Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He's got the gimme hat and the unshaved face.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah. Yeah, he's got the beard. I mean, he looks like a totally, like, laid back chill dude.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like, he's the guy in the corner. I said, I need some weed. You got some weed?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Exactly. He doesn't give me dime bag. Exactly.

[Chuck]

So is he still there?

[Kevin Espiritu]

All I'm gonna say, guys, is I've grown a lot of plants. I'll just put it that way. A little secret for you guys.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And there's a reason why marijuana is called weed. Okay? All right, so just give us an overview of what you got going in the back. One third.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it didn't start out that way. I started growing in an apartment. Then I moved to like a small kind of front yard lot, like 15 by 30ft. I grew. I grew enough in that space to poorly survive off for about a month. But we could talk about that in a bit. Yeah. Now I'm on a third of an acre. And because we have a YouTube channel and we grow a lot of different crops, we're not necessarily growing it like an urban farm might, but we definitely could. Like, there's enough space there to grow hundreds and hundreds of pounds of produce per year. And if you're living there with yourself and a partner or something, that's. That's enough produce to live off of. But I've got, let's see, 30 fruit trees.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Did you say 30 fruit trees?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, yeah, 30 different fruit trees.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Excellent.

[Kevin Espiritu]

About half of them are citrus because it's San Diego and you know, it's. You can pull citrus off there. And then I've got maybe like 40 or 50 different annual crops that I'm growing depending on the season.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Remind me, annual, you have to replant every year.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Annuals. Yeah, they're gonna live and die in a single spring, spring to fall sort of cycle.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Whereas perennials come back every year.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Gotcha's are gonna come back every year. And then, you know, you get into some like, weird, weird sort of situations where there's like a self sowing annual, like chamomile that'll, that'll produce its seed at the end of the season. It's gonna drop, go dormant. It'll come back still. An annual still lives and dies.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Not when Monsanto finds out.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, that's very true. Monsanto is now Bayer, just so you know.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, really?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Monsanto? Okay, please.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So.

[Kevin Espiritu]

So the whole project was like this, this idea of how far can you take being so called self sufficient on like a standard urban lot? So I've got chickens on the property. I've got rainwater capture. I've got gray water conversion. So taking like shower and laundry water and actually using that on the property

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

and in the, in the apocalypse. What's your address so we can all move in with you?

[Kevin Espiritu]

It's redacted. I hid it from Google Maps. No one can see it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, when the grid goes down, the water goes down, everything goes down.

[Gary O'Reilly]

When, when infrastructure fails completely. We're not going to go to Kevin's house.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I got you guys. I got you guys.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right, so let me ask you about the gray water, because that's interesting. Isn't gray water contaminated? And what exactly do you use it for?

[Kevin Espiritu]

It it is like semi contaminated, hence the gray. Because like if you were going to use sink water, which is considered black water, you wouldn't, you wouldn't use that. You're not really allowed to.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay.

[Kevin Espiritu]

So what I did is for my indoor shower and an outdoor shower that I have, I have a valve that I can turn. It's like a three way valve. So I can either shunt the water to the city or I can go into, in my case, my orchard is where I send it. Because a lot of water.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Kevin Espiritu]

The only thing you have to do is change the detergents that you're using so you can use standard detergents.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That was my concern is, you know, I'm not sure if. And I want, you know, tide tangerines.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, wait, wait. So you're saying sink water is called black water?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, because I think it's just because of the, the different things that end up going down. The sink ends up being.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, sorry, the water that comes out of the sink.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Out of the sink.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I thought, I thought you were talking about the water goes in the sink, not the faucet, not the stuff you drink. Okay, got it, got it, got it, got it. Okay. Where's rain water off your roof?

[Kevin Espiritu]

What's that rainwater off your roof? I think it's just captured rainwater.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Kevin Espiritu]

What you see that is like the house I, I bought is like a thousand square feet. It's not big. So the roof is a thousand square feet. And I believe it's like an inch of water on a thousand square foot. Roof is 600 gallons.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Which is a crazy amount when you think about it because the inch isn't that much rain. And so what I did is I built a system to pull that water off the roof, filter it, because you're going to get like particulate matter. You're going to get leaves and stuff like that. Filter It. And. And then it goes under the ground to a huge cistern in my backyard.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, so you have a cistern and. Because the other way you can do it is a bladder, there are some people that use, like, it's just a flat. Looks like a. Like a hot water bottle. And then the captured rainwater ends up going into that, and then they somehow pump it out to whatever they have to use.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, yeah, you can do it that way or you can do, like, rain barrels off of rain barrels. It's like I've got a shed that isn't connected to that roof system, so I've got a rain barrel on that shed.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Very nice. That's cool, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And you said you could send water back to the city. Do they pay you for that water?

[Kevin Espiritu]

You can't send water back to the city. What I mean by that is, like, let's say my laundry machine, which has a gray water system on it. If I'm running, let's say, a load of laundry that requires a detergent that I don't really want in the ground, then I'll just turn the valve and it'll send that water output to the city.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I thought you meant the rest of the filthy animals. We don't know any better.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It goes into the gutter of the city.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Got it. Now. Now I think I'm up with all your. Your lingo there.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So let me ask you a conservation question. Are you seeing. Because some people just don't give a damn. Let's be honest. They just don't care. All right? Are you. Everybody cares about their money, all right? Are you seeing any significant savings in doing all of this in water?

[Kevin Espiritu]

So I did the math. I have it on our second YouTube channel where I kind of chronicled it over the years. I put a bunch of solar on the roof that has ended up being a good investment that's paid itself off over the last, like, five years or so.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Very good.

[Kevin Espiritu]

The water. Water ends up being so inexpensive that putting in, let's say, a 2,000 gallon or $2,000 cistern, you will not pay that off for a very long time. So it's more of like a security or sustainability move that you're actually paying for rather than, like, saving money.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And just to understand, your solar panels, when it's raining, are not gathering sunlight, but they are directing water that falls upon them into your gutters so that you can collect it.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Right? Yeah, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just to be clear.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Interesting.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

By the way, people just. If you don't mind. If you'll indulge me. Solar energy is the cheapest energy on the planet. Don't let anybody tell you differently. There's nothing cheaper than solar energy. Just wanted to say that, you know, just in case somebody out there might want to drill, baby, drill.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You know, that's all. Okay.

[Chuck]

Kevin, are you finding people are following your lead with this sort of project because it's not so much the financial investment which we've kind of touched on, but people may not understand just how easy or how complicated it can be to. To install this sort of facility.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, I mean, I think showing it from the perspective of me who, like I was saying, prior to buying the house, I had a 15 by 30 square foot garden in my urban yard in San Diego. So when I bought the house, I was learning everything about owning a house at the same time as I was putting out all the videos. And so I think just learning in public, which is always what I've. I've done on the channel, has inspired people. Like, it's really not that hard. It seems overwhelming. It's really not that bad. You can start small. Obviously, I went extreme. Our channel is called Epic Gardening, after all. But, you know, condensing that back down to, like a simple barrel or, you know, a little cistern here or there, people have. I mean, I've gotten tons and tons of pictures of people doing it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And by the way, let me just reaffirm what you just said. If you learn along with your viewers that that's a bond that is forever, because you're. You're like garden buds at that point. And.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, I mean, I don't have, like, a formal training in gardening. I just. I got into it because I was addicted to playing video games and I wanted to get off the computer.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So once.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Once I got into it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Admit it, your mama kicked you out of the basement.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Let's be honest.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just tell us.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Come on. I told you that in confidence, Neil.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, I'm sorry. You said it offline and now it just came out.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's great. I mean, the fact is that. So. Okay, here we go, guys. So I'm an avid gardener. I love it.

[Chuck]

It doesn't show.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I know. It does not. It does not. You would never look at me and think, this guy gardens. But. And I don't plant vegetables. My mother had a awesome vegetable garden growing up, but she also had a rose garden as well. Which roses F. Them. They suck because I tried to plant one and they hate me. But anyway, gardening is probably One of the most relaxing, rewarding endeavors that anyone can can partake at. Period. I'm. I'm. I don't know why I'm saying this. I just. Happy now? I just.

[Chuck]

You feel, you feel.

[Gary O'Reilly]

The first time I ever told anybody I love gardening.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Chuck, I'm here for this, man. I'm here for your tour.

[Gary O'Reilly]

First time I've ever done it, so. Love it.

[Chuck]

Are you, Are you old school? Drill a hole, plant, seed, water something, walk away, come back, rinse, repeat. Or are we into some very more modern techniques?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Are you inventing new methods, tools and tactics?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I wouldn't say. I wouldn't be as bold as to say I've invented anything all that crazy in the gardening world. Definitely some weird tactics. Like we put a video up a couple days ago about growing zucchini vertically, which is. It's a cucumber squash style plant, so it wants to kind of sprawl out.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Which can be annoying. And then there's this whole meme in the gardening world of leave a. Leave a squash on your neighbor's, like, doorstep day. Because by the end of summer, you just get so many squash. Yeah. Sick of them.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so you're not being kind. You're being. Take my. I wouldn't have eaten anyway.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Absolutely.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Because squash is like a weed too.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, you get it, Chuck, right? Like, as a gardener, you're like, okay, I have way too many squash. I don't need these. But you go to a guard, someone who doesn't garden, and you give it to them. You look like this saint, you know? Oh, they grew this for me. And you're like, this is just my.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, and really, it's your trash. It's your garden trash. Squash is garden trash.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And he's giving out the squash and not the oranges from his orange tree.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, yeah. Well, you know, no one's taking my stitches.

[Kevin Espiritu]

No, I mean, I think that, you know, when I started gardening, I didn't even have the. The 15 by 30 spot that I was telling you guys about. I had. I was living in a condo townhouse with a north facing balcony. There was no light whatsoever.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right, well, talk about that, man. Because honestly, I'm going to say for a lot of people listening to us, you know, our concentrations are in cities, big audiences. I mean, that I've never done. As much as I love gardening, it sounds like more of a pain than anything to have a box garden on a balcony. What did you grow and how did you maintain it?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, I really didn't even have much of a balcony to get light. And so I was googling around back then, this was like maybe 13 years ago. I was like, well, how do you grow plants without light from the sun? And the answer was hydroponics. And I being like a kid who grew up with an obsession of like growing crystals and all sorts of different science things, I was like, okay, let's go ahead and do it. So I did it with my brother and I got a five gallon bucket, filled that bucket with water. I put something called an air stone in, kind of like the thing you'd see in a, in an aquarium that's oxygenating the water. I put some nutrients in that water and I put a grow light on top of it. And I grew probably the world's worst tasting cucumbers of all time. And I fed him to my brother and he said he almost threw up. But I got hooked on, you know, that, that aspect of like watching a plant grow and cultivating it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, tell me more about hydroponics.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And what, what works in hydroponics and

[Gary O'Reilly]

what strain of marijuana is best to grow hydroponically.

[Chuck]

Now I know why you've got a love for gardening.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, I got, I got these hydroponics, aeroponics, vertical farming, just these things people are doing with plants. And now we're here at my office at the Hayden Planetarium. We're in Manhattan. There are buildings in midtown Manhattan where plants are growing on the wall and then others, the people are growing on their roof.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Nice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So it's like, is Earth not good enough for you? Are these solutions to problems that people had encountered?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I think yes and no. I think if you go to hydroponics and aeroponics, those first two, hydro of course, meaning water, arrow meaning air. Ponic's coming from a ponos, which means work. So these are methods of growing where either the water or air does the work. Instead of what? Instead of soil. Right. Which is where.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, pretty much every. Neither of them have soil.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Neither of these are soil based ways to grow. And so if you, it's kind of, it's kind of weird because if you think about it, you think, of course a plant needs soil to grow. And I might even argue as a gardener that is kind of true, I do prefer it. But what, what a plant really needs is what's in the soil or what the soil is providing. And the soil is almost a medium for oxygen, water and nutrients.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

And so when you're growing in a hydroponic environment, like my cucumbers, well, there's no Soil. So the plant, you start a seed and like a little growing medium. In this case it was something like, called rockwool, kind of like spun molten rock. And like this little fibrous cube, you put a cucumber seed in that, it grows up the plant, you know, the tissue grows up, but the roots grow down. And those roots grow down and hit the water. That water does have to be oxygenated, which is crazy because you think, well, you know, plants are taking in CO2 and releasing oxygen, right? Roots though, respire. They're not photosynthesizing, so the roots are breathing. So the roots actually need oxygen. Otherwise they'll just, they'll simply drown in the water. You can drown them in soil, you can drown them in hydroponics. And, and then of course, the plant needs nutrients which would have been in the soil. So you have to add these synthetic nutrients in a hydroponic environment. And so the roots, like in a hydroponic environment, you open that, that five gallon bucket up and you just see these perfect white roots kind of sprawling out in an almost unnatural way because they're not fighting against anything. They're not kind of crawling through the soil. And they look, they look amazing. Like there's a whole thing in hydroponics of like showing, showing your roots and like the people will show pictures of them all this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Who's got the most beautiful roots?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, totally, yeah. And, but, but the crazy part is it grows. Plants grown hydroponically tend to grow faster and they tend to have roughly the same kind of macronutrient profile of like when you were, if you were to eat that food. But the flavor is kind of up for debate. I think, to me at least the flavor does feel like a little bit flatter.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Kevin it seems to me that if you have some control over what's feeding the plant, then there's no end of ways you can manipulate that to create whatever flavor profile you might want in a food and possibly even patent it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Nice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How does this work with air? Because with a fluid such as water, I can see you can dissolve something in it. New nutrients can hang out. But air, how does it pull nutrients out of the air? In aeroponics?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, in aeroponics I messed around with this, I would say a little bit back in the early days of starting epic gardening. The whole logic behind the aeroponic method is, well, the plant, the plant roots don't really need to be bathed in water. They're, you know, in soil, they're not bathed in water. And of course you have to oxygenate that water with one of these air stones, kind of pumping the dissolved oxygen level up. So why don't we just separate the water from the system? Imagine that same five gallon bucket and we'll actually bring in sprayers that will spray or mist in like a nebulized sort of level, like very small droplets of nutrient rich water. And we just will. They'll mostly be sitting in air most of the time. So it's not that there's not water used, it's just that the roots aren't sitting in water. And I don't know off the top of my head, like, is that more efficient than hydroponics or not?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Are you nebulizing the leaves as well as the roots or just the roots?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I think most people would just do the roots. But then there's this whole concept of like what's called foliar feeding or feeding the leaves where some things are uptaken by the leaves and used in certain ways. But of course the roots are like the most common way that things are being up to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Doesn't it nebulizer sound like some weapon on Star Trek?

[Gary O'Reilly]

I love it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Kevin Espiritu]

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[Chuck]

Let's go back. You mentioned the zucchini and I think zucchini and the vertical farming. Is that just another way of saying this is a space saver? Because we've got the old traditional. It's flat land, it's acreage. This now we can stack and stack and stack and stack and you don't have it anywhere near the real estate that you would otherwise have.

[Kevin Espiritu]

A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean the zucchini method I was using was just in soil, like with a little, with a little steak, growing it up. But you're totally right. Like some of the. So instead of like imagine you have your soil like this. That's one plane horizontal. Yeah. It's just one plane that you can grow on. And of course, when you're out in the Midwest farming soy, that's fine. Like you can just do that forever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

But in, you know, in Manhattan or in Brooklyn, if you're trying to grow, I don't know, a very high end basil or something like that, that'd be really inefficient use of probably the most expensive real estate on earth. Right. And so what they'll do is they'll create, usually it's like a hydroponic or aeroponics type system because then they don't have to deal with the soil and they'll create like little channels or little grids or some sort of way of growing it. And then they'll just stack those on top of one another.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Kevin Espiritu]

The problem then becomes the light. Like you're, you're blocking off how to

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

get light in there.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, exactly.

[Gary O'Reilly]

What about yields? Because do you get the same amount of yield from the same amount of space vertically than you do horizontally or does it change you?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Well, you'd get, you'd get more yield on like a per square foot basis because you've got the Z dimension. Right. Or the Y dimension now that you're, you're dealing with.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We'll take the Z. Z is good. Yeah, we took the better XYZ goes straight up. We're good.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Z's up. Okay, great.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We good.

[Kevin Espiritu]

And then you've also got the density at which you can plant. So if you were. I'll just go back to my house, for example. Let's say I'm growing peaches and citrus in my yard. If I'm A commercial peach grower. I'm growing those trees out to like 15ft wide, 15ft tall, basically expressing their full genetic potential. So I can only space these trees maybe like 15ft apart or so. But here in my yard, I've got my trees like four or five feet apart, and I'm doing a little more active pruning, a little more active management. And so my yield per square foot probably beats out the orchard, but it's, it's just a trade off, you know?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Chuck, the way you pose the question, I think you meant what's the yield per plant. Yes, but that's not the metric of measure here.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's what's the yield per square foot.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And that makes sense.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that wins now.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That wins all the time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You add a dimension to something, right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You're always going to win.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You win.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, it's not, not like they wouldn't try to squeeze out more yield per plant too. Like, let's say hydroponics is going to get you a little more, more efficient growing. Like, that's also going to happen. But they're, I mean, you're talking like pretty razor thin margins, I would imagine, on some of those setups. Like, I know that these companies have raised like a bunch of money, you know, so they're going to do everything they can.

[Chuck]

Is this more intensive in terms of your management or anyone's management? If you're vertically farming, for sure, yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, because otherwise you just let

[Chuck]

Mother Nature do her thing and you can sit back and go read a book or whatever it is.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, totally. I mean, I always like to say, like, well, people will say I grew this or I can't grow this. And the way I think about it at least is the truth is no one's really ever grown a plant. Like, as a gardener, what you're really doing is you're putting a plant in the environment in which it knows how to grow best. And so you're not growing it, of course, it's growing itself. You just have to kind of cultivate that Right. Environment. So in soil. Yeah. It's a lot easier.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Chuck]

So looking at the nutrients, the one thing we always think of is going to need some sunlight or light. You mentioned in your balcony you had your own little grow lamp. Why is it that you've got some plants that will flourish with less and some just won't flourish unless they have 12 hours a day?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, this one is kind of interesting. So take like a, like an eggplant that's like a Classic summer crop. It loves a lot of sun. And then take something like maybe spinach, which, it's a leafy green, it grows low to the ground. If you were to give it a lot of sun, it might actually. The leaves might actually bleach and get damaged.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

And you think about it, it's like, well, they're both photosynthesizing, so wouldn't more light just equal better growth across this background?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Naively, that's exactly what I would think.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Right. And that's, I think, really, that's what I would think too. But when you think about it, like, all these plants that we grow in a traditional garden, like, even take a salsa garden, which we think of as a group of plants that make sense together. Like, you got your jalapenos, you got your tomatoes, you got your peppers, your onions, whatever. From an evolutionary perspective, though, these plants did not just, like, grow up as a salsa garden somewhere in the world. You know, we sort of cherry pick them from around the world in all these different environments where they adapted to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But you have to grow tortilla chips, too. Do you have a tortilla chip?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Just get that corn, baby. Just grow that corn, you know?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, I want it. I want it to come out as chips. Right? Chips.

[Kevin Espiritu]

We might need to go into GMOs.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Triangle leaves. Triangle triangular leaves that you can just pull off become chips.

[Kevin Espiritu]

All right, so if you think about that, like, take that spinach. I don't know where that's where it's endemic to, but regardless, wherever it evolved, it was low in the canopy. It was low in entire sort of hierarchy of the plants around it. Right. So it was basically fighting for photons to photosynthesize with, whereas, like, a nice tall, like, banana plant or something like that that's growing in the tropics, it has no problem with that. So of course it can. It can tolerate more. And what ends up happening with, like, a shade plant that gets too much sun if you put it in the wrong spot is what once was good, the light actually starts producing. I forgot what it is in the plant. But basically, it starts producing too much of a certain compound that starts damaging the plant's ability to photosynthesize. So basically too much of a good thing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So what you're saying is if the plant wanted to survive but didn't have much light, it evolves to use that much light.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And if then it has less or more light than what it evolved to have, that can't be good for the plant because it didn't evolve that way.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Absolutely. And you see that even in some flowering plants, not even for consumption, but when you plant certain flowering plants that need what they'll say partial shade. That's where it grows back. I've seen them say they said a partial shade. And the reason is you end up kind of frying the plant if it's in the sun all day long, you know, so. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So tell me, with the switch over to LED lights, has this changed the response of the plants to the light? Because the sun, at least what the sun gives off that gets through our atmosphere, includes some infrared, some ultraviolet. And the pure LED lighting systems we have today, you have the blue, you have the green, you have the red, the rgb.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Rgb.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But it's not giving you infrared and it's not giving you ultraviolet. And whereas the sun has some of that reaching Earth's surface. So are there plants that will not do as well under your LED grow lights than they would out under the authentic sunlight?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, I wouldn't go as far to make a bold claim to say, like all of them would do better under normal sunlight, but I kind of do think that's the case because there are studies that prove not only do plants use far red, so, like above the 700 nanometer range, just to be

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

clear, the 700 nanometers is like the accepted edge of the visible spectrum where we would identify it as red light. And you can have light energy beyond that, and we call it infrared, but your eye can't see it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You can't see it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. But of course, the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, they have different sensors than we do. So we should not be defining what they care about and what they want.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Don't tell me what I can see and what I can't see.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm a plant.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're right. Like, like the. The first sort of LEDs that came out back when I was growing cucumbers, Chuck, back in my old place. Yeah, they came out and they were called, like blurple lights, Blue, purple, red. Because basically whoever was designing them back then was like, well, plants mostly use light between 400 and 700 nanometers, kind of like the visible spectrum. So they'll use blue light for vegetative growth. They'll use red light to signal flowering and stuff like that. So whoever was designing the lights back then was like, well, let's just give them exactly these ranges, like 450 nm or 660 nm, whatever it is. And then these days, lights that are coming out, LED or otherwise are trying to express, like, put out more of that spectrum. Because it's been proven, like you said, Neil, they're using light in the far red spectrum. They're even using green light, which we didn't know for like a century because, you know, you always hear like, well, plants are green because they reflect green. And it's not entirely true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, Just to. Just to put some punctuation on that. So if we see a plant and it's green, it means it's sending green light back to you. And it's not using the green light, by and large. Right. Which is a fascinating. We think green as nature green is the color it's rejecting. Right. So what you're saying is not all plants are rejecting all green.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Not all plants are rejecting all green. So if you take red and blue, just colloquially, those ranges, I think the plant is using somewhere between like 91 and 95%, depending on which. Which color it is green. You would think, like, well, it's reflecting green. So it's using like 0% or maybe 10%. It's still absorbing in the range of like 70 to 80% of green light.

[Chuck]

Are we talking mood lighting here for plants?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Pretty much.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Pretty much.

[Chuck]

Because we hear about plant stress, we're now creating the right kind of light bulb for specific plants. Are we, at that point?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yes, yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Should we also allow them to have a little Marvin Gaye while we're at it?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Play him a little music, man. Why not?

[Chuck]

Oh, now you. Now, now, I know. If you want. If he talks to his plants now,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I need to know if he's, you

[Kevin Espiritu]

know, I get it all the time. Like, do you talk to them? Do you name them? Do you? I don't. I'm a little bit brutal to them sometimes, you know.

[Chuck]

All right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah. I mean, if you're going to eat them, there's no sense in, like, you know, getting to know them, serenading them. Right? Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

No.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So are you saying or implying that even though plants are green, they're not reflecting back all the green that they're receiving? They're keeping some of it?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah. I mean, the whole leaves, like normal plant leaves, are absorbing maybe about 80% of green light or so. So they're reflecting back at 20, which is pretty much what we're seeing. But the way it ended up working in the study that kind of turned everyone on their head realizing that we actually do use green light with plants is that it's penetrating deeper into the canopy. So, like, the red and the blue light Is getting used up first, absorbed at a really high efficiency. The green light gets deeper into the leaf, gets lower into the canopy. So it is being used. It's just that it's not being used as efficiently.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. Again, plants just doing the best they

[Gary O'Reilly]

can do with what they got.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do with what you got.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Plants are like black people. I don't have no money, but we gonna make the rent, baby. Don't you worry about it.

[Chuck]

All right. We hear about plants being able to adapt and survive in extreme conditions. I suppose it wouldn't be the same unless we asked you about growing plants in space and the extremes of the environments that would be encountered.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And before you answer that, can I tell you, when I was in high school, I grew a plant upside down.

[Chuck]

Is it Australian?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I said to myself, well, does it really know which way gravity is? And does it really know which way the light is in advance? Because if I take a plant, turn it upside down, hold it with Saran wrap, the soil so it doesn't come out, and I have all my light at the bottom.

[Gary O'Reilly]

From behind, from beneath.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's correct. So the plant, it kept trying to go up, but the light kept it coming down. So it didn't grow in a straight way. It was, like, confused on its way in.

[Kevin Espiritu]

What plant was it? Do you remember?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I have to look. I'm sure I kept the notes.

[Kevin Espiritu]

And then were you growing it in, like, a chamber where the only light source was below?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It was the only light source. It was a box. It was a box.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Oh, that is interesting, because I've grown peas upside down and I grew tomatoes upside down. The same thing happened, but my experiment was not one in which there was a controlled light source at the bottom. So it was just outside. And so it. But it did. Basically, gravity was pulling it down, and then it kept pulling itself back up towards the stronger light source.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It got the same results.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Stair stepping type effect.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Nice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. That's basically the results I got. And I got an A plus on it, too. Oh, very nice. Yeah.

[Chuck]

So did you mark your own work?

[Gary O'Reilly]

No.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just to be clear, in high school, you normally take biology, then chemistry, then physics.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But in my high school, I took physics first, and then I took chemistry and I took biology as a senior with all of these freshmen.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I was, like, the oldest kid in the biology class.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Neil Degrasse Tyson, biology bully.

[Chuck]

All right, Kevin, we're gonna throw you into space.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's go back to space.

[Chuck]

Yeah, metaphorically. Are we gonna just take what we do here on Earth and just say, yeah, we can do that in space, or are we gonna have to think a lot differently?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because Kevin, you know, we speak of the lunar surface, it's not soil. No. It's what the geologists call regolith, which is powderized rock created by micrometeorites that

[Gary O'Reilly]

on Earth would be what burned up in the atmosphere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly. As a shooting star.

[Chuck]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No such thing on the moon.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They hit and they pulverize the rock. And it's been doing that for a billion years. So all you have on the moon is rock, rock, soil. And as I understand

[Gary O'Reilly]

rock, soil.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm sorry. So as I've come to understand it, the good Earth is rich in microbes that the plant needs. So how are you going to grow something where you don't have the microbes or the fertilizer? What are you going to do?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, I honestly think you just can't. You're right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I mean, bummer, dude. On Earth, here, go on.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Regolith, like that's basically dirt. Right. And the difference between dirt and soil is. Dirt is soil, Soil is dirt. Plus the life that you talked about, the microbes, the fungi, bacteria.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right? Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

And so if you can't do that on the moon. Well, first of all, there, there's no oxygen, there's no atmosphere. Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you have to figure that out too.

[Chuck]

Well, if we're growing plants here on

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Earth, that's a side detail.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Buried the lead here, guys.

[Chuck]

So if we, if you're growing plants without soil here on Earth, we just replicate that kind of practice.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I think you'd have to grow them hydroponically or aeroponically in like a pressurized chamber. And I think you'd have to use artificial light. Cause what's the moon's like night?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, moon's got light. No problem with light. Oh, moon, sorry. Moon has a moonly cycle. So a day on the moon lasts a moonth.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah. So then you're in trouble because plants evolve for a 24 hour light cycle. Right. And so you would need to supplement with light. They wouldn't survive for what, like 14 days?

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So 14 days in darkness.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so you have to like phase that somehow. Yeah, well, just bring grow lamps.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, I think you just gotta bring grow. I mean basically just.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Well, that's what they do in every sci fi film. It's they, you know, the horticultural deck is what they have. They all have the horticultural.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you.

[Chuck]

Aren't we going to just take genetically modified plant material with us? Yeah, has been built Constructed to grow in extremities, but to maybe deal with moonth, I've learned a new word.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's where the word month comes from.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yes, the moonth.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, let me tighten that question. So, as far as I know, plants like carbon dioxide. So if we're on the moon and we're all exhaling carbon dioxide, why don't we just capture that and stick it in the chamber where it holds the plant? Where it holds the plant. Do we exhale enough carbon dioxide to serve plants? And then it's a cycle of life. We exhale, they absorb our CO2, they give us the oxygen. Can that be sustained? In fact, let me ask another way. How much plant life do you need to satisfy your daily ingestion of oxygen?

[Kevin Espiritu]

That is such a good question. I wish I knew.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We want to know that, right?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I wish I knew. I don't know it, but I think there is. There's definitely an amount that, like, on a per person basis, is it one tree per person?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's a lot of. Because a lot of trees on Earth. I just Learned There are 3 trillion trees on Earth. Oh, my God. I said, I don't believe that. I ran some math on it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It was like, yeah, 3 trillion. Yeah, not for long.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's right. We'll be cutting them down.

[Kevin Espiritu]

You know what else you could do on. On the moon? I just thought about it, is you could go aquaponics. So we talked about hydroponics and aeronautics. We didn't talk about aquaponics yet. All right, which basically is because, remember, in hydroponics, aeroponics, you don't have the soil, so you don't have the nutrients. Right. Do you need to input those nutrients synthetically? If you go aquaponics, though, you. You have fish in that. That water medium. Those fish excrete ammonia that converts to nitrites and nitrates, which is used as nitrogen by the plant. So basically, the fish become the fertilizer. So on the moon, you could feed the fish. The fish excrete, they feed the plants, and you can eat the plants and the fish.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, so the aqua refers to what in that context?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Good question. I think just.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Just the water.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, but you just said hydroponics. The hydro referred to the water.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's probably why they made it aqua, because they're like, you know, aquaman talks to fish.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I think that's actually scientifically.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Save the next idea.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so that's interesting. So you bring some fish with you.

[Chuck]

Now you've really got the circle of circle.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank You? Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. I don't think NASA's thought about that.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, it's a pretty cool idea.

[Chuck]

I wonder, however, water and weight, everything is about weight.

[Kevin Espiritu]

But has a fish ever been brought to space? Do you guys know?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I don't know. And I'd hate to be that fish. Because fish align themselves vertically because they're skinny and long vertically because they know which way gravity is.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In zero g. Oh, you're gonna mess with that fish. That fish is gonna be totally.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's hard enough when you pull em out of the water and they have to explain what happened back to their friends.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's why they all look surprised with their eyes on you. Ain't never seen a fish that doesn't look surprised. It's like,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So now you take a fish not only out of water, you put them back in water in zero G, they'll be flopping. They wouldn't know which way.

[Gary O'Reilly]

There is no up. They don't know which way is up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But what you could do. This is all kind of pointless conversation because sci fi people have figured this out forever.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You just rotate the spaceship.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Rotate the spaceship.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's your gravity.

[Gary O'Reilly]

There's your gravity.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's that. So, Kevin, if they use your recipe for cucumbers on the moon, is there going to be a mutiny on the first moon colony? Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Cut you off right there. Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's going to be terrible because you're making nasty cucumbers.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, I grew the worst cucumbers of maybe anyone's ever grown. They were yellow, they were deformed. Like they had all these deficiency. I still ate it, but you know, it was bad.

[Chuck]

I mean, are we going to have to just, if we're interstellar travel, just come to the conclusion that, you know, flavors are something in the past?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, you get a flavor capsule. Flavor is just chemistry.

[Chuck]

Thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, it's just, it's just a flavor thing attaching to your taste buds. Who cares what's delivering the flavor?

[Chuck]

So basically flavors become a condiment.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Oh, flavor is a condiment.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right. Put some more flavor on it.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah. Maybe you just grow like the most efficient vegetable you can grow and just flavor capsule it with like grow potatoes and just flavor capsule it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, no, we're back to the potatoes Potatoes. The poop potatoes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So before I want to take this into a sustainability question and maybe the transition to that is tell me about the plot of land that you experimented on where you fed yourself for 30 days and that Was all the food you ate? So did you get your protein? Did you lose weight? Did you look pale and sickly? Did you look healthy? How much land? And what was the mixture of fruit and vegetables that was on that land?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Okay, let me lay this out for you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And were you the only one consuming that food?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I have to tell you the set of rules I gave myself. Good start the challenge.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Love it.

[Kevin Espiritu]

So I came up with the idea. It was like February of 2019.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Love it. Brilliant idea. Love it.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Right? I go, can I do this? And remember, back then, I was in a 15 by 30 foot grow space with like, some raised beds and containers and stuff like that. So I gave myself that amount of space. And then I also utilized, like one of my friends little terraces, and I say, okay, I want 30. I'm giving myself 90 days of lead time. So by June, I'm going to start the challenge. So I have to survive from June 1 to June 30 off of everything I can either grow fish or forage for. Because I knew right away, just off the quick math, I was like, there's no way I can. I can get enough calories out of. Out of this space for a man of my size. I think I needed 78,000 calories for the month.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What do you mean by fish? Use the fish as a verb. What do you mean?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Like, literally, go fishing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's allowed.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I allowed it in the challenge room.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can fish then.

[Kevin Espiritu]

No, but hold on, hold on, hold on. This is why. This is why. Because, okay, Name a plant with a ton of protein.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, you know what's interesting?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Legumes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What's interesting is that potatoes are like 1/4 protein. The problem is they're a way higher percent water. So if you took the water out of potato, they have.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You have a dense protein source.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So it just. Potatoes are just full of water. That's the problem. But otherwise. Yeah.

[Chuck]

So, well, you look at nuts for protein.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So you didn't grow nuts, Teneo. That's a nut country, isn't it?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, but I had 90 days, so I can't grow a tree from scratch, right? So it had to be produced from that moment on. Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, okay, Gotcha, gotcha.

[Kevin Espiritu]

So, so here's where I go. I go, okay, I need 78,000 calories to live for 30 days and not lose weight. I even got a DEXA scan before just to see, like, what I was at. Even my body comp to the point of losing muscle. And so I said, okay, well, I. I basically have to Grow calories. I don't really, I can't really worry about the macronutrients of it. Protein, fat, carbs. I just need literally calories. And in 90 days, the only things you can do that are going to get you enough calories are going to be beans and potatoes. And I. So I maxed out on potatoes like crazy. I think I ended up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The starches.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's like carbohydrate protein too.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

But anyway, so. So I grew about 800 pounds of potatoes and some amount of beans. I forgot what it was because the protein and fat, specifically fat, actually harder than protein to grow quickly. If you think about plants with a lot of fat, you're thinking about like there's like a coconut or an avocado or something. You can't grow those in 90 days. And so I did allow myself to fish just because I was like, I think I will seriously struggle nutritionally if I don't get enough fat. In San Diego, there's. And actually along the whole western coast of California, there's a fish called the grunion. And they'll do something called a grunion run and they'll basically flop themselves. Like hundreds of thousands of them on the beach. And you're allowed to go harvest them with your hands. You can't use tools. And that was happening in June. So I was like, okay, I'm going to bank on the grunion run for my fat.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What kind of dumb ass species is this to say, let me go on and flop around so people can take me. Eat me.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Life is too hard.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I think it's one of those where like there's just so many, it doesn't matter kind of approaches.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Because there's like tens of thousands of them.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And do they flop around only because when the tide pulls out or they just purposely do this?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I think it's the full moons or something like that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, that would be at the tide. You get a strong tide.

[Gary O'Reilly]

They beat.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

Okay, maybe they beach.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Well, what happens is the females come up and like dig a hole and like lay their eggs in it and then the males come up and drop. Fertilize the sperm on the hole. Yeah, exactly.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Look at that. Always sex. That is the end of a man chasing sex.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I scooped them up. So, yeah, I mean a huge, A huge part of my meals that month were what I called grunion potato pancakes where I like mashed the potatoes and put them in a pan and like put the fish in that and then just ate that and that's pretty much what I ate the whole month. I ended up losing 13 pounds in 30 days and nine of the pounds. This is the part that made me so mad. Nine of the pounds were muscle. I just, I just ate my muscle away. Although I did make it to the end of the challenge. Basically what I learned is that you need way more time than that. And honestly you need like being fully self sufficient on your own property is, is sort of a fool's errand. Like it's much better to have a community anyways. I grow this, you grow that, I go, I get my eggs from you, that kind of thing.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I mean that's the way it was before we had our modern day capitalist society, agrarian and trade and totally yeah system.

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[Gary O'Reilly]

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[Kevin Espiritu]

Hey, this is Kevin the sommelier and I support StarTalk on Patreon. You're listening to StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Are we just Screwed. When the apocalypse comes, we're just screwed, right? Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What about, like, the victory gardens that people had in the Second World War to show your solidarity with the rationing? So in Apocalyptic Earth Earth, you're one of the survivors, right?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I would make it. Yeah. I mean, you'd put me in your apocalypse crew, I think, because I could feed you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, absolutely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Give us your address again. Yeah, Because. Yeah, no, I mean, the canned food can last essentially forever until at least the next civilization comes around. Right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But you can dry your grunions if you have a cool, damp basement and hang them out, you know, Hang them out and dry.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Get back in the salt. Yeah. Okay. So tell me about sustainability going forward with Mega Agri. What do you call it? Farming.

[Chuck]

Big Ag.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Big Ag farming.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know, that is the solution to our own problem. Yet people are saying we shouldn't do that. It's feeding everyone. No longer is anyone saying, one day we'll run out of food that is gone. Whereas in our childhood. I don't know how old you are. I think we're older than you. In our childhood. That was the big.

[Gary O'Reilly]

The big fear was the population explosion would strip us of all of food on the planet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It was very Malthusian thinking at the time. But science has cured that. We can produce more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before. So how should people think about this problem? Should we cheer the fact that everyone is being fed, or should we lament the fact of what it's doing to the environment? In order to accomplish this goal, man,

[Kevin Espiritu]

I think it has to be a.

[Chuck]

Both.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Right? I mean, you're right. We grow corn, soy, wheat across most. Most of the Midwest of the USA. California grows like 80% of the produce of the country especially.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I did not know that.

[Kevin Espiritu]

We grow such an incredible amount here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, Kevin, my whole life I've heard about topsoil, but I don't have any understanding of it, even as a scientist, because the seed grows up into the air, goes down with roots into the soil. Who cares about the top three or four inches?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, I mean, we should all care about the top three or four inches. The top three or four inches is basically where everything actually happens for the plant. So you're right, like, the roots are down in the soil. Right? And yes, sometimes those roots go pretty deep and they can mine for specific minerals or nutrients that they might need. But in contrast to, like, hydroponics, like we've been talking about, in the soil, there's basically what's called a soil Food web. There's bacteria, there's fungi, there's insects. There's all sorts of creatures that are mobilizing the organic matter. Because think about like a forest floor, things are going to fall from the forest, Animals are going to die, insects are going to die or be consumed and defecate and all that kind of stuff. All of that material needs to be broken down to smaller and smaller particles to the point where it's effectively at the elemental level to be used by the plant roots. That's happening in a natural ecosystem, by the environment, in the topsoil. All of that is in that first three, four, six inches or something like that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why isn't it in the six inches below that?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I wouldn't know the exact, maybe evolutionary ecosystem reason for this, but my hypothesis, I guess, would be that it's because it's efficient for the plant roots to not have to go that far to get the nutrients.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. That kind of feels. That feels right. So what's happening to the topsoil?

[Kevin Espiritu]

So we're losing it dramatically faster than it's being regenerated. Why? Because we're. The way that we farm in industrial agriculture is we're effectively. It's almost like you're growing hydroponically in the soil because you've now, let's say you've stripped all the topsoil, just hypothetically. Right. Well, now you're growing in effectively dirt. There's not a lot of life in it. There's not a lot of nutrient content in it anymore. So what do you do? You big, huge machines come in and till in the synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium that you need. So you're basically saying the dirt's now the growing medium, and I'm taking these synthetics that I've maybe mined from some cave somewhere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Kevin Espiritu]

And transported with fossil fuels.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. The phosphates, too, and things. I mean, is that.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, it can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we're sort of like taxing the earth and not repaying it enough. And there will be a point at which there's like you've crossed the sort of horizon of being able to do that, and then you may actually see yields fall. Fall off like crazy because we're just losing it way too fast.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But you just said we can manufacture what the topsoil would have done if we till it back into the soil. So who cares at this point? Okay, so we've outsmarted nature.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But no, what he's talking about is sustainability. Cause you. What happens once you get dirt is now you must do that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So what?

[Gary O'Reilly]

All the time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So what? I'll do it all the time. So what?

[Chuck]

But that's solving one problem to create another whole lot of downstream problems.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just solve that problem. What's the downstream problem?

[Gary O'Reilly]

So the downstream problem with that is

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

we don't let the man. I'm sorry, the one who has a YouTube channel on this.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, okay. I was going to go an ecological climate and sustainability, but. Kevin, go ahead.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Well, we'll riff off of it. Chuck, I've got one for you. So California grows a ton of almonds, right? We grow most of the almonds in the country. So the way to do it efficiently in the industrial, you know, Neil, method

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm going to call it for, I'm just being. I'm just trying to put it out

[Kevin Espiritu]

is you're going to put only almond trees in the orchard, Right. You're going to strip away everything else. And what do almond trees need to produce the almonds? Well, they have a flower. That flower needs to get pollinated. How is that flower going to get pollinated by the bees that are native to that area, typically? Well, there are no bees anymore because there's no other crop in that area that bees would naturally forage from. So what has to happen as a result? This is just one example of a second order effect. There's a whole industry now called managed bee pollination where people will produce bees, put them in hives, drive them around

[Gary O'Reilly]

the country and allow them to pollinate.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Exactly.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But bees are no longer naturally there because what you did was the other flora you eliminated.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's what keeps the bees in place. Okay?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So now. So it created an industry. You know, half B will travel, have b will. Okay, so that's all right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But here's another reason why. Because when those chemicals go in, a lot of times they run off as well. So what you get is farm runoff of all of these chemicals that you put in. And everything's a chemical. So you know what I mean, where's it gonna go? That stuff, the stuff that's needed and what that does, it goes into our water systems, it goes into our groundwater. I mean, you know, it's not.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so now I filter the water. So then it's back to the rain. So now what?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Once another industry, right.

[Chuck]

So now you've put another industry in there. This goes into groundwater that goes into the rivers. The rivers will go into the sea. And then we're just moving stuff into the ocean.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We have a mouse problem. That's okay. Let's get some hawks all right, now we've got a hawk. Let's get the snakes. All right, well, now we need mongoose.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like it never ends.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, it never ends. And then in the end you end up, like, manually reinventing what nature already was doing is the way that I think about, you know, and how do we.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait?

[Gary O'Reilly]

We have to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's a profound thing. Could you just say that again?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Okay, sure. So if you try to solve every problem that you created from these large scale agricultural systems, you end up basically just recreating what nature already was doing.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right. Oh, that's a great. That's a great way to put at it. I need to look at it.

[Chuck]

I mean, you go around in a circle and come back to the point you originally were to realize you had it good and then you just changed.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like the war in Iran.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So what did they do before we did this commercial farming, which is commercial agro? Did they just rotate fields and not use them and then you come back to them and, you know.

[Chuck]

Totally.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And so.

[Chuck]

Yeah, please.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, in the past, I guess you're kind of right, Neil. Like 100 years ago, you would have spent part of your actual life producing the food. Right, right. Let alone, let alone buying it. But you know, in the past we, we used effectively like regenerative agriculture principles where you're not taking more from the land than you are putting back into it, which right now we are doing. And when you, When I say taking more, putting back at. What are these things that we're taking and putting. It's. It's the nutrient inputs, it's the, the topsoil loss, it's the organic matter that you're taking. Because if you think about like a garden, you're growing, let's say you grow a plot of corn, that corn, when you harvest it out, you're taking mass from the system, you're taking it out. And yeah, some of that is being generated by, you know, photosynthesis and carbon that's being sort of sequestered from the air.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But from the CO2 in the air.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, from the CO2 in the air. Yeah. But what people will do these days are stuff that. Stuff that like we'll do in our backyard or we'll promote is regenerative practices where you are adding back as much as you are. And yeah, maybe you are leaving something for a crop called a cover crop, which you're basically just growing to generate biomass that you will cut and leave in place.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Leave in place.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Interesting, right? So with corn lately, I've noticed by the way I was astonished, forgive me for even being so ignorant, that every stalk of corn makes only one ear of corn. That felt so wrong to me.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I didn't believe it until he made me go look at a stalk.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You didn't believe it?

[Gary O'Reilly]

I did not believe it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We were driving down the road and

[Gary O'Reilly]

it's near your house, it's where all that corn grows. And he goes like this, you know, each one of those stalks is only one piece of corn. I was like, no, that's not true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

One thing, okay, so now what I see them doing is you harvest up the ear of corn and the rest of the stalk gets sort of mulched back into the field. Because all of that came out of the field at some level, right?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think corn's an interesting one because corn is one of the crops, of course, that we've, we've modified. Right. So most, most of the corn that you're seeing like in those fields is like a single ear hybrid corn variety that, that is only going to produce one per stock. Where there are corn that produces more than one, like two. Like two, you know, like two. You know. But yeah, like people will do that. I mean, we'll do that. Sometimes you'll cover crop and you'll let like barley or rye or oats or something like that or some sort of legume. Because legumes do something called nitrogen fixation, where not only will they take CO2, like every plant will, from the air, they'll fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Into the soil, which is great.

[Kevin Espiritu]

And so you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's called nitrogen fixation.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, they're like a pump.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Because the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yep.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we got the nitrogen and so it takes that and puts it back into the soil, which serves as, in some way as a fertilizer.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Well, yeah. Nitrogen. Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are the three major elements that plants need to grow. Nitrogen being probably the most needed.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Kevin Espiritu]

And so I love that I never

[Gary O'Reilly]

heard that term cover crop, but it

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

makes, that makes complete sense.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, Kevin.

[Chuck]

I mean, back, way back, you know, when the agricultural revolution took hold, they would leave a field fallow to let it rest.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I remember that. And we don't hear about that anymore.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Chuck]

And I'm going to get to that follow up question. Then they. When you say cover crop, would that be. You'd plant that crop in that field and then that would then become absorbed back into the soil? You wouldn't harvest it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You wouldn't harvest it.

[Chuck]

Are People out there still practicing these old, old traditional farming methods, or is that just gone? Just give it chemicals and let's, let's. Let's grow everything.

[Kevin Espiritu]

The group that's doing it the most are these urban farming folks who are farming on maybe, maybe a third of an acre, like me, although I'm not traditionally farming.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sure.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I've got a. I've got a buddy here in San Diego. He farms on an acre. I think he makes about 150 grand a year selling his produce at market. He. He loves that lifestyle.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And give us his address, too.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, I got you. When you ever come down, we'll go do a whole tour. Yeah, but he'll do. He'll do a lot of that stuff, Gary. He'll. He'll run his chickens through, which, of course, they're going to be eating. They're going to be eating insects, Right. They're going to be taking a little bit of forage here and there. What are they doing? They're making droppings. Those droppings are extremely high in nitrogen. Right. So you're using animals. People will do something called, like, I think, silvopasture, where they'll run, like, pigs through forests. There's like all these weird combinations people are coming up with to try to

[Chuck]

get sympathetic and a symbiotic relationship between maybe animals, the plants, and growing other crops around other crops, just so.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah. What's that called? Nature.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, I mean, that's where I get to. I go, nature's kind of doing it already. But you can come up with, like, really creative techniques, like running the chickens through the field. Right. Instead of solving the problem that you created by creating this problem, by creating

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

that problem, you know, so the Jonathan Swift, who's famous for authoring Gulliver's Travels. Oh, okay. One of gulliver's travels, this 1726, I think it was. One of his visits was to the Legato Academy, which was a academy where there's just scientists doing completely batshit crazy things. Okay. But one of them was, you read their experiment. It sounded kinda like. But then you think about it, it's like, no. So one of them was, they didn't wanna have to till the soil, so they said, let's bury apples in the soil and then send pigs out onto the soil. They'll sniff, find the apples, dig up the apples, poop, and they'll keep doing this, and that way they can till the soil and fertilize the soil at the same time.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, and how'd that work out?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It didn't how about that? They were already tilling the soils to dig up the soil to plant the apple. Yeah, See, So it's. At first. It sounds clever at first. Right, but it's not. So you were saying try to double duty on the chickens. If they just poop on the top, does that get down into the soil or does that get water?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Well, they'll scratch through. So, like, you know, my hens will. They'll come out in the garden, they'll scratch through, like, 3, 4 inches deep, sometimes hunting for little bugs and grubs. And so, yeah, it's not like the most.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

My hens. You heard that These. My hens. My hens. Well, they are.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Don't come at my hens, Neil. You come to my address for some produce. You're not getting my hens.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do you. Do you name your hens and then slaughter them and eat them?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I don't eat them. If I ate them, I probably wouldn't name them, which probably sounds irrational, but it's just what it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's what we're just checking here.

[Gary O'Reilly]

They do give eggs, though, right?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Oh, yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, Cool.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So obviously not everyone has a plot of land to grow food, but everyone who pays rent has some household square footage and in principle can buy a grow light for not much money. So how much of a difference can everyone growing something to eat make in this world?

[Kevin Espiritu]

It's such a good question. I mean, you brought up Victory Gardens earlier. I think back in those times, we produce something like 15 to 20% of our produce as a nation from the Victory Garden movement. But that took, like, a world war to galvanize everyone to do, you know? So, like, what would it take? I'm not really sure. If everyone did it, what do I think would happen to the food system? I mean, it would meaningfully change. But then you got to remember, like, what are most of the crops being produced in America? It's like soy, corn, and wheat. Even though, like, those aren't probably going to be grown a ton, even for. If. If, like, tens of millions of people started home gardening, they'd probably be hitting the tomatoes, the basil, the this, the that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I would say what you'd see the biggest impact is, is probably, like, the entire culture's attitude toward sustainability and food systems would change for the better in a meaningful way. I don't necessarily know you'd, like, solve the topsoil crisis by doing that, but it could.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It could. Could create a sea change in how people think about the environment. That could have other beneficial Decision making consequences in people's lives. Absolutely.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I mean, before I started gardening, like I said, I was addicted to playing video games. I didn't know anything about this. Now I have changed my entire life and habits because of just getting into it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because your mother kicked you out of the basement.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah, we've established that too.

[Chuck]

All right, well, let.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We gotta land this place.

[Chuck]

Yeah, but before we do, Neil, um, let's. Let's wrap it up with final question. So, Kevin, what's the question about plants and. Or food systems? If you like that. You think science hasn't answered yet?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Ooh, I like that.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What are you waiting for scientists to figure out?

[Kevin Espiritu]

There's a lot. There's a lot of them, man. But the one that just selfishly I'd be interested in is how to impact flavor at a deeper level. Because when you think about crops that are like, like, like wine. Right. People get very snobby about their wine. Oh, the terroir of this land. This or that. It's true for all crops, though.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Kevin Espiritu]

You know, just. Just because it's wine, of course, that's a high value crop. I would love to know, like, what is impacting the flavor, let's say, of a tomato. I actually went to Bear Monsanto once in the belly of the beast, and I did a 50 tomato taste test. And there's this whole wheel you're tasting these tomatoes on. I would love to know, like, what can I do as a home gardener to impact the acidity of that tomato more or so what you need flavonoids,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

you need a home genetically modified organism laboratory or something.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Or something like that.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Or something.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow. Yeah. So flavor. And by the way, the counterpart to that in the grown meat movement, I don't know where that is now, but last I checked, there was a lot of investment money going into the. What's it called? Grown meat laboratory. Meat laboratory synthesize meat, but it's actual meat protein.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's meat protein.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's meat protein grown in a dish, grown in a dish that you didn't have to kill an animal to provide. All right. Maybe the first one to get the stock, but after that, you didn't have to.

[Gary O'Reilly]

What they found out is all the flavor is released when you kill the animal. So doesn't work without killing the animal.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But if I in my laboratory develop a cocktail of flavors that I infuse into those meat fibers and then I sell it as my. You know, the first of these would probably be a ground beef. It's gonna be a burger it's gonna be a burger.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Definitely be burger.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's gonna be a burger. Right. And so I'm gonna have a proprietary burger flavor. And I think that's the next frontier. Cause like I said, flavor is just chemistry.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's just what is the flavor molecule intersecting with your taste buds?

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's so true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's all it is. Back to AI and in fact, there's one molecule. I learned this. And I think it's true that the molecule for mint, it has a certain chirality to it. Chirality is a mirror image. It would be opposite of a mirror image of it. It turns in a way that the mirror image of that molecule is not the same.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's not the same.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's just a mirror image of it. Okay, all right, all right. That mint tastes one way on your palate. If you make the mirror image molecule of mint, you get the flavor of caraway.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Really?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So the caraway and mint are flavor profiles of the same molecule written.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Just flipped.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Flipped in a mirror.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Chuck]

So we need a flavor wheel. Like you get a color wheel.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And. And you get two of this and three of that and put it through this.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Can I have a cotton candy burger, please?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Wow, that's so interesting because caraway is in the like the carrot or parsley family and mints in its own.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What about the flavor?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Just the flavor.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, just the flavor, not the rest of its substance. Right.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Still, that's still fascinating to me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just to be clear, I heard that multiple times, but I've never officially read it in a journal, and I've never seen anything to counter it. So I'm putting it out there. But whether or not what I just said is true.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, it's true. Cause there's the same thing with banana. And I forget the other flavor, but it's the exact same thing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Our crack team of researchers just verified what I just said.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, definitely, I believe. Yeah. Same thing with banana. The banana molecule, which gives you the flavor of banana. The other same thing, the flip of it, it gives you something else. And I.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like what?

[Gary O'Reilly]

I can't remember what it is. You know, I don't know.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Roquefort. Well, Mr. Espiritu, you've been highly illuminating and enlightening to this conversation. And we're delighted that such as you exist in this world and you have an ever growing YouTube channel on this topic. And tell me about your second YouTube channel real quick.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Yeah. That one's called Epic Homesteading. It was just the story of Building out that property that I've been telling you guys about.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. All right, so we can find you in two ways there. Yeah, and what's in. So we can find you. What's the name of your YouTube channel?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Epic Gardening.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Epic Gardening. And Epic Gardening. Epic homesteading.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There you go. That works. Yeah, that totally works. Well, congratulations on your following and the success that. That you've produced. And I love people just getting the job done themselves.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And now with YouTube and other platforms, we can all participate vicariously with your experiments and your successes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And vicarious is the word. Cause I'm going to Whole Foods.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Buy your food. All right, dude, we gotta call it quits there. But this entire show, you kept saying we. So who's behind the scenes there? Or are you a puppet?

[Kevin Espiritu]

I'm simply the face now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The beautiful face. The face of what? Well, who do you have behind the scenes there?

[Kevin Espiritu]

Well, no, I mean, Epic Gardening. It started as a little blog back in the day, became a YouTube channel. It's now a team of 55 people. Yeah, we own a seed company, so we sell 750, 800 varieties of seed around the whole country. And so when I say we, I mean like the team of gardeners at Epic, which includes master horticulturists, master gardeners, etc. And me, the guy who we got

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

stuck with you when we could have had a master horticulturist.

[Kevin Espiritu]

You could have. I know, I know, I know. They just put the. They put the face on for you guys.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Nice. All right, dude, keep up the good work.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Keep it up. Keep it going. It was delight to have you, and good to see that it's become an empire. A seed empire. Yeah, we're all. We're all behind you on this. And next time, give us your address. So in the apocalypse, we're bunking at your place.

[Kevin Espiritu]

I'll send you guys an email. I got you guys covered. All right, take care.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, guys. Bye.

[Kevin Espiritu]

Peace out.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So this has been another installment of Stark Talk Special Edition. You're coming up with these special editions.

[Chuck]

I love them. You got to credit the Lane. Lane over in la.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, LA office is part of the Special Edition portfolio.

[Chuck]

But there's still so much to land on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. Well, Chuck, good to have you. Always, always a pleasure. This has been Star Talk Special Edition, all about farming. In your back 40. Nice. Except you don't have 40. You do it in your back. One third of an acre.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And if you don't have 40 acres in a mule, don't expect it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

As always. Neil DeGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking after.

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[Kevin Espiritu]

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