On today's special episode, host Kate Kavanaugh shares a talk she gave in Fredericksburg, Texas for the What Good Shall I Do Conference. It is an exploration of the myriad of ways that we are deeply interconnected - pulling threads from soil science, ecology, botany, cellular biology, mysticism and spirituality, and philosophy. At the end, is a message of hope and healing. Kate introduces the episode with an exploration of what it means to be a 'participator' rather than just an 'observer'...

Andreas Weber has studied marine biology and cultural systems alongside his work with theoretical biologist Francisco Varela. Andreas has worked over the years on the concept of enlivenment and looking at the “biosphere as a meaning-creating and poetic reality”. This episode is about dissolving the boundaries of a mechanistic worldview and finding a new depth of meaning, reciprocity, and service. Becoming edible is the touchstone for the talk as Andreas walks us through ideas of reciprocal...

Cate Havstad-Casad is redefining what it means to be a holistic entrepreneur. Using her lens of holism and looking at how to scale businesses while still keeping in mind natural limits of growth, she has built Havstad Hat Co and Range Revolutions and Casad Family Farms in conjunction with her husband, Chris. She is as passionate about soil as she is about her community and as passionate about her community as she is about changing the world. In this episode we talk about her incredible closed...

As the digital world looms, this discussion is an exploration of built and natural worlds and how they impact us as a species. Daniel Vitalis, host of WildFed on the Outdoor Channel and formerly host of the podcasts Rewild Yourself and Wild Fed, joins Kate in a conversation that finds humanity at different points in time and with different viewpoints of time itself. It’s an exploration of the environments that shaped our species, from our hunter-gatherer roots, to agriculture, and into our...

Katie Forrest, together with her husband Taylor Collins, is the founder of Epic Bar and one of the minds behind Force of Nature Meats and Roam Ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas. Katie herself is a force of nature as a business owner, mother, wife, rancher, and human. Together, we explore the perennial nature of hope and how we can think about modeling businesses after lessons we learn in nature. Spread throughout are messages from the land and from our children about learning to slow down and to...

So many of us have had the experience of nature, of farming, bringing us back to ourselves. Adrian Grenier’s story isn’t much different - several years ago he found himself disconnected and in a state of constantly numbing. Coming back to the idea of ‘chop wood, carry water’ he came home to a place after changing just about everything. Adrian and I talk about the nature of disconnection and the connection we can find in nature. We start with the idea that everything has to die - even versions...

Heidi Boucher is a home funeral guide and writer and director of the documentary ‘In the Parlor’ where she follows the intimate journey of three families as they navigate caring for their dead at home. Heidi’s work with death is tender and truly beautiful. In this episode we unpack how funerals moved from the parlors of our homes to funeral parlors in just 150 years including the rise of the funeral industrial complex. We explore the very human emotion of conflating our fear of grief, loss,...

Scott Carney’s book ‘the Wedge’ changed my life a little bit, and it has led me down a rabbit hole into his work over the years. From the Enlightenment Trap, to What Doesn’t Kill Us, and into some of his interviews around consciousness. In this episode, we dive deep into death and how our biological programming to fear it can be both a hindrance and a reason to challenge ourselves. We talk about how the wellness industry wants to sell you living forever, and that might not be such a new idea....

Quick Note: A technical glitch in new recording software meant that my audio was recorded not on my microphone. My deepest apologies for the decline in audio quality! It’s still great, just a little tinny, won't happen again! Caroline is a rancher, cow girl, an entrepreneur, and a newly minted podcast host of Chews Wisely. In this marathon episode, we cover a lot of ground, but central to the conversation is an exploration of the stories we’re telling ourselves as individuals, as farmers and...

Dr. Bill Schindler is an experimental archaeologist, anthropologist, restauranteur, hunter, butcher, father, husband…. And Renaissance man when it comes to early man. Author of ‘Eat Like a Human’, Bill and I dive right into a conversation about the origins of homo sapiens and how technology and morphology shaped our modern form. We talk about hunting and the consumption of meat vs animal and how butchery evolves alongside humans. Bill owns a restaurant, Modern Stoneage Kitchen, and we take a...

Blair is a farmer, a mother, a homeschooler, a milkmaid, a renegade. On this episode, I sit down with Blair Prenoveau who you might know as @startafarm on Instagram. In this episode, she unpacks why you might start a farm including the deep purpose, nutrition, and connection it offers. She doesn’t, however, shy away from the hardships and together we deep dive into the financial hardship that is owning a very small farm. We also talk about intimacy with your food and connecting to death. She...

Maren Morgan and Jake Marquez are on a journey to find the truth and the root of connectedness through their film, podcast series, and future book - Death in the Garden. In this episode, we unpack a lot of the stories, mythologies, narratives, and perhaps truths of what it means to be human. At the beginning, Jake and Maren lead us through the garden whether they are the physical gardens we tend, Eden, or our conception of utopia. In those gardens, they touch on concepts like consciousness,...

Alex Rosenberg-Rigutto could not be defined by a single metric, maybe other than to say that her joy and zest for life are definitively contagious. In this incredible episode, Alex details the arc of her life and her journey to farming, stopping along the way to explore important aspects of what makes us human from our interaction with our environments to the importance of every day ritual. Kate and Alex explore the impacts of being medicated as children and how formative experiences shaped...

Brian Sanders is the brain behind the upcoming film series Food Lies and the Instagram account by the same name. His work with Food Lies and his podcast, Peak Human, is about uncovering the lies we’ve been told about food. We dive deep in this podcast to explore where the engine driving the lies in our food system might have gotten its start. How far back does it go? We look at the beginning of agriculture all the way to the Rockefellers to find answers. The shaping of our food system has...

James Connolly is a film producer (most recently - Sacred Cow), co-host of the Sustainable Dish podcast, avid reader, and passionate about food. It’s hard to encapsulate this conversation in a description - we cover a lot of ground. At its core, it’s the broad strokes of just how we ended up in our current paradigm. We start about 150 years ago, where we follow threads of the move from rural to urban environments and how the idea of ‘cleanliness’ begins to take hold. We cover the Great Grain...

In this short solocast, Kate catches us up after her impromptu break before we start the new year with a huge slate of exciting episodes. But first... a little business to attend to. The Ground Work Podcast is becoming the Mind, Body, and Soil podcast. Same Kate, same amazing guests, new title! Kate also shares some big business news, a little about her thoughts on New Year's, and a little thank you to all of you.

Anna Borgman is a butcher, slaughterwoman, ardent reader, and curious student of life. In this episode we dive deep into one of the most unexplored aspects of our food system: the processor, the butcher, the slaughterhouse. The place where animals make their transition to food through the portal of death. We dive into what this means: what it means for the people working there, how our current culture misses this step in the food chain, and what it means to “turn the hard work of farmers into...

Dr. Suuzi Hazen is a wife, mother, farmer and healer who raises goats in the rugged fire country of north-eastern California. She is the founder of Mother's Best Liver Pills, the original microbrewery of grass-fed beef liver supplements. Suuzi is a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and in this episode we dive right into the liver, looking at it not just through the lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine, but through an ancestral and spiritual lens. Suuzi goes on to unpack traditional...

Lily Nichols, RDN is shifting the paradigm on what it means to eat for your health in your child-bearing years. Author of Real Food for Pregnancy and Real Food for Gestational Diabetes, Lily is leading a grassroots movement on getting back to eating nutrient dense foods and is at the cutting edge of the research on just how important they are for the health of mother, infant, and future generations. In this episode, we cover the journey from pre-conception through post-partum nutrition,...

Initially, my husband, Josh Curtiss, and I conceived of this episode as a way to share about the importance of play and imagination in our relationship and as a 2-year wedding anniversary present to ourselves (and 14 years together). But after I put a question sticker on Instagram for relationship questions and received a massive response - it became a place for us to dive into not just play, imagination, and fun but also the highs and lows of our relationship. So often, we are not afforded...

In this special ‘Thanksgiving’ episode, Frank Reese and Jed Greenberg of Good Shepherd Conservancy are talking turkey. Frank gives an incredibly fascinating in depth run down of the history of the poultry industry, from the incredible men and women that defined standardbred poultry in the 1800’s to the rise of industrial poultry in the mid 1900’s and how the industrial model really set the tone for other confinement operations with other species. He discusses how he came about preserving...

Molly Haviland is a soil microbial ecologist and self proclaimed soil dork who works in land rehabilitation with her company, Haviland Earth Regeneration (HER). In today’s episode she shares the contents of her microscope, illuminating the beautiful universe beneath our feet, through story. She begins by walking us through ways we can open up a dialogue with the plant realm and form a relationship with nature. We then dive below the Earth’s crust as Molly walks us through a peek into the soil...

Nicolette Hahn Niman is an environmental lawyer, a former vegetarian, an advocate for meat, and also a mother and a cattle rancher. Often times on this podcast with guests that have done many interviews, I will take a more unexplored path - but you can always find other interviews in the links. In this interview, Nicolette and I explore Defending Beef and where meat was in 2014 at the time of its first publication and where it is now 8 years later with the new edition. We briefly touch on...

Themes: Healing Chronic Illness, Animal-Based Diets, Intersection of Big Food and Big Pharma, Decentralization of Systems, Listening to your Gut Brett Ender embarked on a healing journey in 2016 that would see him hospitalized from debilitating ulcerative colitis and taking a 65,000 dollar drug once every 8 weeks to having no signs of inflammation or microinflammation in 2019. What happened in between? In 2018, Brett went full carnivore and within 2 weeks saw a complete abatement of...

In May, Erin Pata and I sat down and talked about ranching, art, raising kids, and climbing mountains. It was also about navigating life as a highly sensitive person, listening to your inner knowing, and consciously creating your path in life. If you didn’t catch this first episode - I highly recommend returning to it before diving in here. Erin is full of as much wisdom as she is humor, a true delight to listen to. At the time of our last episode, she was looking towards the summit of Mt....