Episode Five: Judy Wicks Talks About Her Life's Work to Build Economies Based on Local Self-Reliance

Sponsored by Tierra Farm | Music by Aaron Dessner

Martin welcomes activist, author, entrepreneur, and long-time friend Judy Wicks into conversation about her life's work to build economies based on cooperation and local self-reliance.  In 2001, she founded the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, and co-founded the international Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. BALLE now includes some 30,000 local independent businesses in the U.S. and Canada. Judy envisions an economy that provides for the needs of all people while working in harmony with natural systems.

2:50 All Together Now began in 2019, Judy talks about the impulse for founding this initiative.

4:00 Judy talks about the importance of building an economy with local self-reliance at its core.

5:00 We need a revolution of values. Many of our problems stem from a society that values money more than life itself. 

5:30 Judy's first experience with indigenous people was when she lived in an Eskimo Village in 1969 as a VISTA volunteer. She recounts what this experience taught her about collaboration and sharing and how these lessons impacted her life.

7:45 Judy’s second experience with Indigenous wisdom was during the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. This experience taught her the concept of local self-reliance. NAFTA was threatening the survival of the Zapatista people with GMO corn by making communities dependent on long-distance supply chains controlled by increasingly powerful multinational corporations that were putting local farmers and food-producers out of business.

10:25 What led to the founding of BALLE – network of locally self-reliant businesses.

11:30 Judy goes to Standing Rock to support Indigenous People in their efforts to honor Mother Earth, and protect children and the future by stopping the Dakota Access pipeline.

14:00 Lakota Prophesy of the Black Snake: fossil fuel industry and pipelines.

14:30 Judy realized the Black Snake in PA is fracking – and she takes up cause to stop fracking and begins to understand that the only way to go about this is by electing the right politicians.

16:00 Now more than ever we need to look to Indigenous wisdom to find the path forward. 

17:00 Story of White Dog Café and Judy’s epiphany about ethical business practices.

18:45 Transformational moment for Judy in what makes a sustainable business work: cooperation and a sustainable business system.

20:00 Judy sells White Dog and dedicates rest of her life to building local economies; and starting nonprofits as the vehicle to do so.

22:15 Judy’s work in increasing supply and connecting farmers and entrepreneurs; and increasing demand through educating the public about importance of local self-reliance and wea

Thanks for listening to Hawthorne Valley’s Roots to Renewal podcast. We are an association comprised of a variety of interconnected initiatives that work collectively to meet our mission. You can learn more about our work by visiting our website at hawthornevalley.org.

Hawthorne Valley is a registered 501c3 nonprofit organization, and we rely on the generosity of people like you to make our work a reality. Please consider making a donation to support us today. If you’d like to help us in other ways, please help us spread the word about this podcast by sharing it with your friends, and leaving us a rating and review.


If you'd like to follow the goings-on at the farm and our initiatives, follow us on Instagram!

Transcript

Heather Gibbons (00:03):

Hi, I'm Heather Gibbons, and this is Hawthorne Valley's 50th anniversary podcast Roots to Renewal. Thank you for joining us. As we mark the significant milestone, we decided to try our hand at podcasting as a way to help share our story, as well as those of our friends and contemporaries from around the world who dedicate their lives to meeting the ecological, social and spiritual needs of our time. Roots to Renewal is made possible by the generous support of Tiara farm. A family owned environmentally conscious manufacturer and distributor of organic dried fruits and nuts. Learn more at TierraFarm.org. Judy Wicks is an author activist and entrepreneur. She founded Philadelphia's iconic White Dog Cafe in 1983, which became a pioneer in the farm to table movement and a model in sustainable business practices. She founded Fair Food Philly in 2000 and the sustainable business network for greater Philadelphia in 2001, also in 2001, Judy founded the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, known as BALLE. In her retail career, she found a Black Cat, which featured locally made at fair trade gifts for 20 years. In 1970 Judy, co-founded the original Free People's store, now well-known as Urban Outfitters. Her work has earned numerous local and national awards, including the James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award, the International Association of Culinary Professionals Humanitarian Award and the Women's Chefs and Restauranteurs Lifetime Achievement Award. Judy was inducted into the University Science Centers, Innovators Walk of Fame in 2016. Good Morning, Beautiful Business Judy's acclaimed memoir won a national gold medal for business leadership and has been translated into Chinese and Korean. She continues her work to build a new economy of beautiful businesses and mentors. The next generation of entrepreneurs in Philadelphia recently, Judy brought her boundless energy to a conversation with Martin and we are thrilled to be able to share her wisdom and enthusiasm with you now.

Martin Ping (02:25):

We could spend a good deal of time just catching up on Altogether Now. And then I'm guessing that as we thread our way through that conversation, we'll hit on some natural, little tributaries that will take us into some of the rest of your story, which is always so good. And I personally never tire of hearing any elements of it. And I think our listeners of the podcast will agree.

Judy Wicks (02:50):

Okay, great.

Martin Ping (02:51):

So you began All Together Now in what year?

Judy Wicks (02:56):

2019.

Martin Ping (02:59):

And what was the, what was the impulse?

Judy Wicks (03:02):

I guess a couple of things. One is my age that I realized that I wanted to use all I have learned, uh, over the last, you know, 30 to 40 years around building local economy. So as an entrepreneur and as an activist and how I could apply all that I've learned into one last great hurrah, and to bring it all home to my home state of Pennsylvania. Well, there are a number of things that contributed to this, to a sense of urgency, mainly around climate change. That long distance supply chains are going to be increasingly disrupted by weather and social upheaval and pandemics. And that was proven to be the case during the COVID-19 shutdown. And so how, how do we decrease our dependency on long distance supply chains, uh, strengthening the local ones? So I feel that there's an urgency around this because I feel that what we do today to build local self-reliance and basic needs will determine the survival of future generations when things get tough, oh, we need to make sure that communities can depend on their regional economies to produce their food, their textiles, their energy, their medicine, their building materials.

Judy Wicks (04:17):

And so I started with hemp because hemp was legalized after an 80 year ban. And once I started understanding how hemp actually addresses all of our basic needs, uh, hemp, uh, can be used for clothing, um, can be used as a food - hemp can be used as a building material. Hemp can be used as a medicine. It could be used as a fuel. So I decided to start with hemp because I saw that as a new industry, we had the opportunity from the ground up, you know, to build an industry that was locally based, that the heart of what I'm doing, um, is what Martin Luther king, uh, called for in the sixties, which is a revolution of values because so many of our problems, perhaps all of our problems, stem from a mentality that values money more than life itself. That's the underlying cause that we have to address, uh, and really changed the way people think about making economic decisions and for maximizing the wellbeing of our communities and natural world

Martin Ping (05:21):

Values seems to be a very good place to start. And maybe you could say something about where you saw these kinds of values being practiced in your earlier life that started you on this journey. As far as a different way of thinking about the economy.

Judy Wicks (05:39):

I would say that a major influence in my life along these lines has been from indigenous people. And that there's really kind of three main examples of that. The first is a year I spent living in an Eskimo village in 1969. I had just graduated from college and was a VISTA volunteer. And there in this Alaskan village, I witnessed a society, a culture based on sharing, uh, and cooperation, which was a contrast to the society that I grew up in, which is, uh, one that's based on competition and hoarding, basically that we measure success by how much we hoard, where the Eskimos, the idea of having more than your neighbor was unheard of. And, so a memorable experience for me was attending an Eskimo seal party. And I learned that the tradition is that after a long, hard winter, when a man catches his first seal in the spring, his wife has a seal party and invites everybody in the community to their house.

Judy Wicks (06:35):

And the seal meat is divided equally between all the families and then anything else that the family has accumulated during the year that they don't need for survival is distributed to the other families. So it might be canned goods, it might be fabric, buttons, and so on. And then at the end of the party, they symbolize this giving by throwing candy and bubblegum up into the air and the women all catch it in their skirts. And this was symbolic of their vision for community life, in which everything is shared. It was something that, that changed me without my knowing it. But years later, I made a crucial decision in my business, which was to share with my competitors. I feel that deep down inside, I was able to make that decision because I had lived in an Eskimo village.

Martin Ping (07:24):

So you've mentioned that you have three indigenous stories and I want to hear the other two. And then if you would be so kind, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the business decision, because you haven't said what your business was. And I think it'd be great to, uh, elaborate on that.

Judy Wicks (07:41):

In the 1990s, I was very curious about the Zapatista uprising and Chiapas Mexico that occurred on the day that NAFTA went into effect. I went down there and this was part of my international sister restaurant project. I at the time owned the White Dog Cafe, which I started in 1983 and sold in 2009. And we had an international sister restaurant project to take our customers and staff to different countries to learn how US foreign policy affected the lives of others. So I decided to go to Chiapas, find a sister restaurant there as a way of understanding about what the Zapatista revolution was about and what foreign policy the U S should have towards this. So I ended up going to Chiapas every year for 10 years, I was so enchanted with the Zapatista movement and it taught me something that I had neglected to understand before this, which was the concept of local self-reliance.

Judy Wicks (08:48):

I had never thought about this, but that is really the basis of what the revolution was about. The Zapatistas were demanding that they maintain their local self-reliance in food, that they grow fruits and vegetables for their family, and to sell in the domestic marketplace, they saw that NAFTA threatened their survival by allowing US corporations to dump subsidized corn, including GMO corn into Mexico, and putting out of business the domestic market producers, and forcing the farmer peasants off the farms to work in factories, producing cheap clothing for export to the United States and Europe. They realized that their lifestyles and their survival in their way of life depended on, on local self-reliance. I began to see that my own community at home in Pennsylvania and communities around the world were losing their local self reliance to globalization, that NAFTA and the WTO and so on. We're really creating all of our communities to be vulnerable.

Judy Wicks (10:01):

That, to be dependent on long distance supply chains owned by the corporations to deliver us our basic needs all controlled by increasingly powerful multinational corporations and putting out of business, local farmers and food producers, local clothing makers, and so on. So this then became part of my, my life's work that led to the founding of BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, because I realized that this was a national, if not global problem, uh, that needed to be addressed. And so BALLEactually, we intended originally to include Canada and Mexico in our collaboration. Now we did get some Canadian business networks, but I never did get down to South America or Central America. But the idea was to learn from each other, to create an Alliance of these local business networks that could share success stories, and knowledge with each other to build this network of local economies that were self-reliant in their basic needs, and then could trade amongst each other for what was not available locally, exchanging what one community might have in excess, or what was special about a community, a special wine or cheese or fashion or entrepreneurial innovation that produced an excess in our own community.

Judy Wicks (11:24):

It could be traded for what we didn't have, like coffee and bananas. And so on more recently, I went to Standing Rock at Thanksgiving of 2016. I felt compelled to go there because I saw these indigenous people willing to risk their lives to spend their time, their energy, everything, but to do two things which indigenous people have repeated over and over again, which is to honor your mother and protect your children. It's very simple. And yet we white people, uh, don't get it. This is the most important thing we can do is to honor Mother Earth and protect the future generations throughout history. This is how survival happens. You know, when you look at other animals, non-human animals, they'll do anything to protect their young, to create the conditions for new life. That's how life continues to evolve. The nature continually creates the conditions for new life.

Judy Wicks (12:25):

And we, as humans have stopped doing that. We are no longer creating the conditions for new life. In fact, we are destroying and disrespecting our mother and doing nothing for the seventh generation as indigenous people do. So I went to Standing Rock originally to cook Thanksgiving dinner for 200 water protectors. I talked to an indigenous leader from the indigenous environmental network to find out whether it would be appropriate to have a Thanksgiving dinner. And he said, absolutely. And my, my strategy was that Standing Rock needed to be noticed by the media and they weren't up until this time. So I thought, when do white people think about Indians? Well, they think about indians at Thanksgiving time. So if we went to do a Thanksgiving dinner, at Standing Rock, it would be the opportunity to draw attention to what was happening there. And all the pieces came together.

Judy Wicks (13:18):

I found a chef, uh, who, uh, through the Schumacher, uh, Society and event they had, who was cooking over fire. And so I just took a chance and said, Hey, any chance you'd want to go to Standing Rock and cook over fire, cook a Thanksgiving turkeys over fire. And the chef said he would go that he needed $5,000 to mobilize this whole team to drive out there with their rig. Anyway, long story short, Ben Cohen from Ben and Jerry's ice cream, uh, provide the $5,000 to pay for the chef and also provided the ice cream for dessert for Thanksgiving. We ended up serving 2000 people. While there, I learned the little Lakota prophecy of the black snake that a thousand years ago the prophecy was that a black snake would rise up out of the ground and move across the land causing great sorrow and hardship.

Judy Wicks (14:06):

And the leaders today said, they finally discovered what that black snake is, and it's the fossil fuel industry and the pipelines. And the prophecy goes on to say that if the people of the world do not unite to defeat the black snake, that the world will end. When we left Standing Rock, the leader said, when you get home, find the black snake and slay the black snake in your own community. So I got back to Pennsylvania and figured out that the black snake in Pennsylvania is fracking. So I went on a tour to see the damage done to the environment and to the communities where the extraction was taking place. And so I took up that cause to stop fracking and started organizing, I got arrested, you know, blah, blah, blah. I finally realized that all these people were trying to stop the fossil fuel industry.

Judy Wicks (14:51):

The politicians were siding with the, with the industry. And so then I got into electing the right politicians to stop fracking and to move us to a hundred percent renewable that that hasn't happened yet. We're still controlled by the fossil fuel industry in Pennsylvania. And then I realized like, hey, I didn't want to be against, against something a better use of my time is building. So that's when I started all together. Now I wanted to build the alternative to a corporate controlled economy that was fueled by fossil fuels. So that's when I started All Together Now to unite rural and urban communities to build local supply chains that produced our basic needs as close to home as possible. And while we are building those local supply chains to ensure that they provide ownership opportunities and green jobs to communities that have been marginalized. And also that we hold up, uh, restorative agriculture practices as well.

Judy Wicks (15:51):

So it's sort of like, okay, if we're going to create a new economy, let's do it right. Let's have it be restorative, but right now, more than ever, we need to look to indigenous wisdom to find the path forward. And it still goes back to those two basic principles, honor your mother and protect your children. Um, and we need to start doing that. We need to have this revolution of values to move us as Dr. King called for, from a materialistic consumer society to one that cares for all, uh, build the caring economy that cares for all people and cares for a planet and the children of tomorrow.

Martin Ping (16:29):

Wow. Beautifully said, and, uh, care for our mother and care for our children who could argue, you mentioned your business, a decision early on to share with your so-called competitors. And certainly building a local economy will be built on relationships and trust and transparency. And you mentioned very briefly the White Dog. I wonder if you wouldn't mind going back to that moment at the White Dog, when you had that epiphany around taking what you had come to in your own understanding of, of ethical business practices and deciding to share that out.

Judy Wicks (17:14):

Yeah. Uh, the White Dog Cafe, just to give the listeners a little background, um, is a restaurant. And I founded it in 1983 in Philadelphia, one of the first farm to table restaurants, probably on the east coast. I guess we were inspired by Alice Waters on the, on the west coast to build relationships with local farmers. I was very proud of, of this, uh, the network that the White Dog built. When I found out about the cruelty of factory farming, I searched to find farmers who raised pigs on pasture. And this became my passion to make sure that all the meat that was served at the White Dog was raised in a humane way and processed in a humane way. I'm not a vegetarian or vegan, but I would never eat meat that comes from a system based on cruelty. And so the White Dog over many years found farmers to supply us with pastured chicken and eggs, grass fed beef.

Judy Wicks (18:20):

When we found local beef, he was finishing it on grain and we asked them to raise beef solely on grass for us. He had never done that before we began the first restaurant in Philadelphia to offer grassfed beef. So anyway, this, I saw as, as our market niche for our competitive advantage. So we were the only restaurant doing this. And then I had this transformational moment when I suddenly recognized that there is no such thing as one sustainable business. You can have all the practices you want, which we did. We paid the living wage. We use renewable energy. We bought from local farmers. We composted all these things were all for us, but, um, you know, that's, there's no such thing as just one business being sustainable. We can only be part of a sustainable system that local food system and that we needed to cooperate in order to build that system.

Judy Wicks (19:15):

So that's when I, I thought to myself, Hey, you've got to get your competitors, the other restaurants in town to do the same thing to buy from these same farmers. And at first I thought, oh my God, I can't do that. You know, that's my competitive advantage. I could, I could lose sales. I could go out of business. You know, that you don't do that in business. But I made the decision to do that because of my love for the pigs. I just couldn't stand the idea that people over town were eating pigs, you know, that were tortured basically. And it was really my love for the animals, as well as the family farmers that raised them with kindness. That caused me to overcome my fear of going out of business and, and doing as the Eskimos did, you know, to share. So that informed the rest of my life. Eventually I ended up selling the White Dog because I was in my sixties and, uh, restaurant work is it's for the young, so it was time anyway, but I really wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to this work of building local economies and starting non-profits as my vehicle for doing so

Martin Ping (20:19):

Well. I'm thinking, uh, here, the importance of education, which is one of the things that we're doing at Hawthorne Valley, the lesson that you've got in, you said not even subconsciously when you spent the time in, uh, the Eskimo village and also obviously lessons from your earlier life that gave you the, what we would call educating the whole child, the whole person that you, you figured out so much of this for yourself, based on your love for life. So you had the compassion and the heart forces. You, you had the intelligence to figure out how to do it, and you had the will and the volition to get it done. And I think it's the embodiment of what we hope to foster here at Hawthorne Valley, that people of all ages can really actualize their entire being into putting themselves into service to the world and to the future.

Martin Ping (21:18):

And you're such a great example to me, of somebody who's done that who's been a, a real pioneer and path creator, many of these things now that we all take for granted and have labels for it that they, they didn't really even exist yet. And you just did it. And then people would say, oh, triple bottom line, is that what you call it? Hmm. It's uh, really encouraging Judy to just witness a biography like yours. And I would encourage everyone who's listening to get a copy of Good Morning, Beautiful Business, because you get to hear more of Judy's story or read more of Judy story in there. Her wonderful memoir there. You're with All Together Now, you're building different sectors of the economy and integrating them all together in Pennsylvania. Maybe you could say a little bit more about those areas that you're working in, how they're interconnecting

Judy Wicks (22:16):

In general, our work is in two major buckets. One bucket is an increasing supply. So that's the work we're doing in connecting the farmers with the entrepreneurs and looking for what the barriers are for local supply chains and so on. And so then the other bucket is in increasing the demand. So that's the bucket of education. How do we educate the public about the importance of local self-reliance and the importance of, of supporting local businesses and buying our basic needs by producers that are local and weaning ourselves from corporate globalization. So they're really equally important and they have to be addressed together because you don't want the supply to grow larger than the demand, because that's not fair to the farmers and other producers, and you don't want the demand to go higher than the supply, because that's a waste of energy to have all this demand that's, can't be met.

Judy Wicks (23:14):

We've just started doing, uh, you know, educational programming. And we have four coalitions that are focused on specific supply chains. The first is in industrial hemp, and that's been focusing mostly on a hempcrete as a sustainable building material that replaces the pink fiberglass and styrofoam as an insulator, uh, and is also a wall surface. It's not structural like concrete, hempcrete is a mixture of the woody curd that's the center of the hemp stock with a lime and water, and then it's either packed or sprayed into a form, uh, that forms the wall that goes around the studs and the electricity, or whatever's in that wall and it forms the wall surface on both sides. It continues to absorb carbons indefinitely and it hardens indefinitely. So it becomes harder over time instead of deteriorating the hemp plant itself, while it's growing absorbs more carbons than trees do it also regenerates the soil.

Judy Wicks (24:24):

So the plant itself, the growing of the plant is, is environmentally valuable. And then the hempcrete itself is mold resistant, pest resistant, fire retardant, and so on. There's so many qualities to it. And when you're in a room that's made of a hempcrete, you can just feel the, the, the healthy breathing, it's just a beautiful building material. Hemp also produces CBD. And so we have a plant medicine coalition that includes, uh, traditional herbalists are local farms that grow herbs such as lavender and golden seal. And so on and Pennsylvania medical marijuana has been legalized. And so we were including locally owned dispensaries on our website where people can support those companies. But in the last month, the last two locally owned medical marijuana dispensaries in Pennsylvania were sold to multi-state large corporations in Florida and Chicago. And this was a blow. I became enraged about this because now that New York and New Jersey have legalized adult use Pennsylvania will be next.

Judy Wicks (25:44):

And probably within a year, we'll be legalizing adult use. Meanwhile, these large multi-state corporations who are controlling all of our medical marijuana in this state, which last year grossed $910 million just on medical marijuana. It's estimated that once we legalize adult use, it will be $2 billion a year. And the medical marijuana licenses have formed a very strong and powerful lobby, and they expect to get the licenses for adult use. That's why these big corporations are coming in and buying them up because they're lining things up for this even more lucrative industry. So if we don't act now, 90 to 95% of, of the dispensaries in Pennsylvania will be owned by outside corporations. There'll be very little left, uh, for our small farmers. And in particular really wanted this legalization to help, uh, black and brown entrepreneurs from communities that been devastated by the war on drugs, to have a leg up, getting into the legal business.

Judy Wicks (26:47):

Instead, all this is going to go to outside. Corporations will be draining $2 billion a year out of our pockets for any of us who, who buy marijuana. And that will go out to multi-state corporations in Chicago and Florida and elsewhere, rather than being used to uplift our family farms and rebuild our inner cities. So All Together Now is forming a campaign called, uh, Pot Profits for Pennsylvanians. And so we're beginning to organize, to write legislation with allies where we now have the Pennsylvania farmers union as a partner in this effort and growing. Um, so our, our goal is to get legislation passed that would disallow outside corporations from owning adult marijuana licenses. And we're also forming a, uh, urban, rural, uh, cannabis collective of small farmers who, who want the licenses and black and brown entrepreneurs who want the licenses so that we can put some faces to these applicants and start a sort of a ground groundswell movement in Pennsylvania.

Judy Wicks (27:53):

We're going to stand up against this. We want that money to go to work for our folks. Actually, this is the first time I've talked about it publicly. And I'm just looking now for allies that can help us write the legislation that can help fund a marketing campaign, uh, to get the people on our side. When you think about what that money could do for our farmers and our inner city communities, and just the injustice. When you think about how there's black and brown people in jail right now for doing exactly what white men are making money from, and it's, it's an outrage and it's right up our alley, because we are about uniting rural and urban communities to build local supply chains. And so part of what our, our, our movement is doing differently is that we are combining the interests of urban and rural, uh, people.

Judy Wicks (28:40):

Politically, I feel like we're covering our bases because the farmers are mostly represented by Republicans and the inner city mostly represented by Democrats. This is a bipartisan effort to serve the common good. One of the things about the legalization of hemp, which resulted in the CBD craze, but also the legalization of THC is that we're paying attention more to plant medicines in general, it's an opportunity to lift up the plant medicine industry. So we have that, the hemp going to plant medicine going, and then the other two coalitions are clothing and textiles. We have members of that clothing and textile coalition that are working on a supply chain for flax and for hemp, there's a lot of steps in processing textiles, and some of them are very expensive. So it's going to be a while before we have a dirt to shirt, supply chain in Pennsylvania, that's our vision. And then the last coalition is a heritage grain coalition where we're connecting grain farmers and millers to our urban bread, bakers, brewers, distillers, noodle makers, pasta makers, and publicizing again to the public to buy those particular products. So those are the four coalitions, the grain coalition, the plant medicine coalition, the hemp coalition and the clothing and textile coalition, and then industrial hemp coalitions, mostly focusing on sustainable building.

Martin Ping (30:01):

I think the name says it all Judy, All Together Now you speak of building these coalitions of, of creating relationships, uh, reminding people of relationships that have, have gotten us in many ways, you know, this far along as a species and, uh, and the importance of the urban and rural connections. And I think that the divide and conquer strategy is, is an old one, and we shouldn't fall victim to it any longer. So I think every state needs an All Together Now. We need, we all need to come together around these issues and to, to honor our mother and to build a better world for our children. I really want to thank you so much for spending a morning with us and for all of the inspiration that you have, have, uh, provided for me and for countless others and all of the years that I've been privileged to know you and follow your work. And I look forward to your next visit north, and the next time with a Grade 12 seniors at Hawthorne Valley as we're going into our next 50 years.

Judy Wicks (31:15):

Well, that's always a delight for me to, to visit you Martin and, and, uh, and, uh, Hawthorne valley. I always am, uh, so inspired by the work that goes on there. And I want to wish you a happy 50th anniversary. As you know, one of my passions is around farm animals. And I just to hold up as a model Hawthorne Valley, how you allow the baby calves to stay with their mothers and to nurse where other dairy farmers remove the babies from their mothers immediately in some cases or within a couple of days. And so I, I just love how Hawthorne Valley has created a different model to show that as we once did in the old days that humans can share, I thank Hawthorne Valley, uh, for creating this, this model of a humane way and the relationship with cows. And that's one of the things I love to watch when I come to Hawthorne Valley is the cows coming home, uh, from pasture. It's such a, a peaceful serene scene. And, and knowing that the babies and the mothers are in a happy relationship as it should be.

Martin Ping (32:23):

Thank you so very much. Judy has been as always a real pleasure.

Heather Gibbons (32:27):

To learn more about Judy's work and her current projects All Together Now, and Proud Pennsylvania visit Judywicks.com, alltogethernowpa dot org, and proud pennsylvania.org. Thanks for listening to Hawthorne Valley's Roots to Renewal podcast. We are an association comprised of a variety of interconnected initiatives that work collectively to meet our mission. You can learn more about our work by visiting our website hawthornevalley.org. Hawthorne Valley is a registered 501 C3 nonprofit organization and we rely on the generosity of people like you to make our work a reality. Special thanks to our sponsor Tierra Farm, who makes this podcast possible. We're grateful for their continued support and the support of grassroots contributions from listeners like you. To make a donation visit Hawthornevalley.org backslash donate. If you'd like to support us in other ways, consider sharing this episode through social media or leaving us a review wherever you listen to this podcast, thank you to Grammy award winning artist, Aaron Dessner for providing our soundtrack and to Emma Morris for once again, lending her invaluable editing and production support.