When we think about gardening, composting, a lot of the sides were sort of looking to the past,

how things used to be, the methods of old, the tried and true, and maybe sometimes we don't

look far enough ahead into the future, not only of food systems and gardening, but also things

like composting and vermicomplencing. So Steve, I'm actually really curious, you're so plugged

into this world, it's actually a crazy time geopolitically right now, economically, it's a little

bit uncertain, well more than a little bit, to be honest. And so where do you see vermicomplasting

playing a role and call it the future of sustainability? Yeah, it's interesting because I think

that there's sort of a back to the earth, back to our roots sort of thing going on anyway,

in agriculture as people are realizing, hey, maybe I don't need this synthetic fertilizer,

maybe I don't need the fancy stuff, maybe we just kind of get back to doing what we used to do,

and finding ways to scale those practices too, actually, which is people are getting really good

at that. So, you know, this is a gardening podcast, so of course, naturally we want to talk about

Ukraine and Russia, but for those of you who have bought fertilizer anytime actually since the

beginning of the pandemic, not just since the beginning of the war, you've noticed that the

prices have gone up. So nitrogen, which is produced in, let's see, Russia is the biggest exporter of

it followed by somebody else and then Belarus, who is also involved. They are the biggest exporters

of nitrogen in the world, and so they actually, even before the the war put a ban on exports of

fertilizer. So that made prices absolutely skyrocket to the point where we are now paying

we, by we, I mean anybody that's using synthetic fertilizer, is paying five times more than what

you would have paid in 2019. And one of the cool things about, one of the cool things about

compost and about vermicompost is that it has that microbial population. I know I've talked,

you know, your ear off about microbes, but one of the things microbes do is allow

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