- [Narrator] Throughout the country, people are planting seeds of innovation, harvesting a bounty of ideas to help care for the only home we have, planet earth.

With billions of people on earth it is more important than ever to open our eyes and minds to alternative ideas, both new and old about food, energy, resources, health, housing, and more.

The core of sustainability is meeting the needs of today's society without compromising the world for future generations.

In this series, our field reporters will explore eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to, "My World Too."

- [Narrator] Mother nature produces thousands of herbal elements that have been utilized by humans for many generations.

Let's join My World Too field producer, Michael Wunsch in Boulder Colorado.

- I consider myself a kitchen or community herbalist and I own a little herbal apothecary in Boulder Colorado called Rebecca's Herbal Apothecary and Supply.

And it is such a pleasure to be in this setting today.

This is Earthstar Farms , which is just right up the foothills from Boulder and this is the heart of herbalism.

- I am a trained clinical herbalist.

I work with individuals on their healing journey with plant remedies.

But here we are in Earthstar Farms where my other passion is to be part of stewarding the land and growing the medicinal herbs.

- So share with us Rebecca, what is an apothecary?

- An apothecary a good way to think about it is like if you went into a pharmacy maybe 2, 300 years ago.

So it is sort of it's like a pharmacy.

But what we have is plant based medicines.

- Here in the garden, we have a lot of plants that you might find around in the wild as well.

But this is a cultivated space.

And we also utilize the other 100 acres on the property for wild crafting.

wild crafting is a way to go out into the wild spaces and harvest with mindfulness, the medicinal plants that are present there.

- Sustainable harvesting is really innate in herbalism.

And because you want to connect with that plant, and it's in your best interest for that plant to continue to come back.

So you know, I think a lot of it is observation, you know, living with the plants and watching how their seasons go, but also in the ways that you cut them and just watching where do the plants naturally like to be and letting them be themselves and letting them thrive where is their natural instinct to do so.

- So we do follow ethical harvesting practices, especially when we're out in the wild spaces.

Just because you see a large grouping of plants in front of you, it doesn't mean that that is plentiful and the rest of the bioregion.

So we're always making sure that when we go out to harvest that we're only taking the amount that we would need leaving a lot for the pollinators leaving a lot for next year's growing and just not harvesting the entire stand of plants.

- Our apothecary provides dried plant material which is used in teas, and a lot of it is used in culinary things, but also in potpourris or for making body care products.

But we also carry all the bulk ingredients like Shea butters and almond Doyle's and anything I like to say we provide everything you need to use or make botanical medicines.

- We're in the drying shed on the farm.

It's just a simple construction where we, after we harvest the plants, they end up on these trays, they're screen trays.

And then the plants are dried thoroughly and completely here.

So we're able to process them down into smaller pieces that are more utilized for teas and tinctures and things like that.

And then that's what is being sold to the apothecaries, so we want to make sure that everything is dried with high integrity that the color is still really vibrant as well.

And that it's in small enough pieces where it's utilized for teas, and just making sure that the aroma is still really present.

- These are the dried plants.

So we have flowers and we have leaves and we have some roots in here too.

And this is really the heart of everything that we make.

So some of these will come from the Pacific Northwest, some are coming from the northeast, some may be coming from Europe, some may be coming from India.

So the shop was a way to have everything that you needed.

It's actually quite selfish because I have everything I want to play with.

But also it was very political as an avenue to connect people with plant medicine, which I keep saying is everyone's birthright.

So I wanted to have a place that created that accessibility to the community.

- It feels like a great honor to do this work, to teach people about plants to engage people's curiosity and their hearts.

- I would say, start with herbs that are more like food that are nutritive, you know, you don't need to take anything that's gonna like throw your body into a different place.

- So we're in the production room, or we like to call it the kitchen too here at the shop.

And this is where we make all of our products and we process the plants.

And this is the summertime is the time for fresh Arnica.

So we're going to make an Arnica infused olive oil.

This was harvested, I think about a week and a half ago.

First thing you always do is smell, your sense of smell is gonna, yeah, so what I'm doing right now is I'm stirring the Arnica, we're gonna have this in this organic olive oil for about six weeks or until it smells done.

And my job here today is I've got to stir it, it's a good time to check in on the preparation.

And also it needs to stir so that it can let its medicine out into the oil.

Smell is one of the most important things we do here when it comes to medicine making.

I never use a jar without smelling the jar first, you want to make sure that jar is completely dry and completely clean.

Cleanliness is vitally important not only cleanliness, but also following you know, having lot books and procedures.

It's amazing, you know, I started herb school and I love hugging trees and digging in the dirt.

And now I love a great standard operating procedures so much.

But it's a trust thing, we're in a position with the community where, they're trusting us and I always say if I don't want my family to have it, I'm not going to sell it.

- Rebecca one thing I've always thought about living on an herbal farm myself is that to one person, it's weeds, to other people, it's medicine.

- In herbalism, we have a saying a weed is merely a plant whose potential has yet to be recognized.

And I believe that firmly.

I mean, I think that every plant has medicinal use, even if I don't know it.

70% of the world is still using plant medicine as their primary form of medicine.

A lot of pharmaceutical medicines have their basis in plant medicine.

For myself, personally, I'm really grateful that a hospital is there.

If my son broke his leg, I want to bring him to the hospital.

But I can use really nourishing teas and poultices to help speed up the healing of that broken bone.

We can work together.

My great grandmother used to saute up feverfew for the boarders who lived in the house for their headaches, it's a wonderful sort of migraine remedy.

But also just knowing that the dandelion that's growing in your front yard is a great edema remedy so it can help you know if you have swelling in the ankles you could be eating your fresh dandelion greens.

Every single culture that has ever existed has plant medicine in its history and base.

And I really think a lot of medicine making is very similar to cooking.

Isn't in this pretty though?

When you cook you know your ingredients and the tastes and what they do with medicine making you know their constituents and who they like to pair with and, different preparations or extractions that pair nicely with that plant.

So it's you know, a lot of it is of course study, but also experience and time.

You don't just go into the woods and start eating things if you have no idea what they are.

Well, that's the same with using plant medicine.

But I really want to impress that this is everyone's right and it should be simple.

No dosing is a really interesting thing and of course it's different with every single plant is different.

And every single body is different.

And you know like here this Arnica is going to be incredible topically but you do not want to take this internally, it'll close up your throat, you know, so this is but dosing, there's a lot of good.

There's a lot of good references on like children and elders and that sort of thing, but you have somebody with a stronger constitution maybe needs a little more than, it's why I personally like to stay with very tonicy plants that I mean, the definition of a tonic is a plant that you can ingest quite a bit of over a long period of time.

It's more like food medicine.

You wouldn't go into modern pharmacy and just start pulling drugs off the shelf and ingesting them.

I think it's really important to know which herbs you're taking.

So you know, especially if you're picking them yourselves be with someone who really knows what they're doing.

That being said, I want to say that this is the people's medicine, so it is really theirs.

This should be accessible.

There's a lot of simple herbs that are accessible to everyone.

As long as you know who they are.

There are so many resources out there.

And it is really important to know what are the plants that you are picking and using.

There's the American herbalist guild that has a great resource of herbalists all over the country.

There's, you know, now with the internet, you can find really, really great practitioners and there are wonderful texts, and there's online courses now.

I'm really seeing a wonderful resurgence of this incredible way of life.

- [Narrator] In the heartland of our nation, a State University uses the earth as their classroom.

- So the three themes right now are life management and the impact on nutritional quality, maintaining soil quality and soil health and our cover cropping program and OREI project.

And then again, looking at the use of grafted plants and trying to increase plant productivity.

And you're here at the Kansas State University Olathe Horticulture Center, we've got about 350 acres, but most of it, we farm very intensely on a small portion of the land.

And we do a lot of research looking at high tunnel production and trying to improve not only nutritional quality, but also the basic productivity and economics for our small farmers.

- So we're on a facility that used to be a an ammunition plant.

It was the Sunflower Ammunition plant, that plant developed ammunition for several wars.

And when there was no longer a need for the production of those materials and services, then the land was granted back to different public agencies and organizations like Kansas State University.

It doesn't take much to produce a lot of planting material with a sweet potato.

And usually they'll reserve a canner grade or a small grade sweet potato, for propagating your vine cuttings.

- That's kind of one of the things that was really important to me in my master's program to get more hands on and have this unique opportunity that I do have to basically use the earth as my classroom.

- So we grew 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre, after we go out there and do the sampling.

So I think that's very encouraging.

You know, in terms of sustainability, even in organic systems, we need to reduce our inputs, and especially if we're trying to manage soil quality in these tunnels.

- I think the Sustainable movement, it's incredibly important also, because it's kind of helping with our mean age of growers and farmers around the area.

And it tends to be farmers that may not come from a farming background.

Or maybe they have an inkling of farming background, but they need, you know, to really get their hands dirty and see what really is happening.

And so it's a good way to start and also it seems like it's enhancing the youthfulness around here.

- For this field day is basically an annual field day that we have that allows our growers to get a chance to actually get out and walk around and check out the research plots and learn from the students.

You know, in fact, what they're doing on that particular day.

This is one of the major missions of the land grant university is we have to teach the next generation of farmers how to do it in the most efficient, most sustainable way.

- So we have a large research farm happening here only for graduate students.

I have a great interest with fruit and vegetable production but mostly on the post harvest side looking at the nutrient analysis.

- Well food is everything, we all eat food, food is rooted to so many important social and public health issues.

And we're finding more and more that the way we develop our food system has a tremendous impact on the communities that it serves.

- And then we are rotating the planting of the tomatoes on the north south axis.

And then we're also incorporating a sort of late season cash crop with spinach in the spring and early fall.

- With the type of production systems that we work in which are largely within protected structures, or it's called controlled environment agriculture, using high tunnels or greenhouses.

Making sure that you have crop diversity is really important piece of mitigating pest and disease pressure on plants.

- So what our growers are trying to do is really reach to those local markets where they can provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the public.

And one of the things that consumers really want, especially in the world of fruits and vegetables is for them to be fresh, local and potentially organic if they can.

- Buying local supports your local community, supports your local farmers and it really supports your overall well being.

Because if you're supporting that local community, you're getting the fruits and vegetables that have higher nutritional quality.

The closer you can get it to you, the higher nutritional content is more likely to be because it's had less time in transportation.

- Within a sustainable movement, they have a large focus on enhancing nutritional quality.

And so that's my entire project is seeing how if you're going to grow in a small location, how you can have a high value item, because it's also densely packed with all of their phenolics and anthocyanin and flavonoids and carotenoids, and all these nutrient compounds that are like essential for health.

- Get your hands in the dirt.

Go outside and start a garden, even if it's in your apartment, just buy a pot and start planting, just see what you can do with your space.

And get in the mindset where you want to grow your own food, I can guarantee you once you start, you'll never want to stop.

- [Narrator] Powered by solar and the energy of music.

This artist is the only US citizen chosen by the United Nations General Assembly as one of 17 Young Global Leaders promoting sustainability efforts for our planet.

Let's meet AY Young and learn about his battery tour.

- It better work, we just split the power.

We set out to do the battery tour, so we hope our goal is to send, see that we got a solar panel over there, you can barely see.

And we hope to send that to somebody across the world or America who needs electricity.

So at the battery tour, we kind of use music, right is the universal language we bring people together, have a good time dance, my homie is about to dance too, whats up bruh?

Music is the most important ingredient to what we do at the battery tour, I mean, ultimately, music is a universal language, it brings people together of all races, all ages, all demographics, united and plugged into each other.

So we simply at the battery tour, just use music as a vehicle to plug people in both physically, digitally, and around the world, around sustainability.

So without music wouldn't be possible, we will get plugged in.

What a lot of people don't know, man is that there's over a billion people around the world who don't have access to electricity.

Like so we have the battery tour here just using music as a vehicle to bring people together to raise awareness about that issue, and to help send you know, promote, develop and deploy, you know, renewable energy to people around the world that need it.

And to be able now to have solar technology to literally send to people who do not have electricity, like there are people walking miles for water for electricity.

We are super lucky in America, okay?

Like for real.

So make some noise, man, 'cause we are lucky.

(crowd cheering) I thought okay, we can use this music to raise money to build one of these boxes and send to one person at a time, right?

So that's what I've been doing actually all over America, we did over 230 battery tour concerts last year.

And you know, each concert is built to raise money to build one of these boxes and send it to someone around the world.

We've gotten actually over 17 countries so far plugged in with renewable energy.

We've sent boxes to Haiti, Honduras, Honduras was really special last year, because not only were we able to get some villages plugged in, but we were able to pull off a battery tour concert completely powered by renewable energy.

So that for me was incredible in a third world, like developing nation to do a concert powered by renewable energy shows that anything's possible.

And here's the thing about like, a lot of these places that don't have energy, a lot of these developing nations and third world countries, they pay for their food, like with their phone.

So it's interesting.

They may not have infrastructure, all these different things, but they have cell phones and they pay for their food with cell phones.

So without energy to charge the cell phone, they can't eat, you know.

So energy access energy, being able to charge your phone and pay for food at the marketplace or not having to walk four or five miles for water or access to energy is literally a life and death situation.

Are you guys ready Kansas City?

Let's do this for the world.

One more time, all right.

Like everyone is an outlet for change, we talk about that all the time.

That's the logo of the battery tour, it's an outlet.

It's in every home in America, it's in every kitchen in gym, you are an outlet, and you can make a difference.

I do truly believe that energy should be a right because it's everywhere.

I mean, we should be sharing energy now.

I'm a musician, I'm an artist.

And so I obviously need energy to perform.

So the best way to prove that method, honestly, is by action.

So I think proving the fact that you can store energy and power a concert, when I think about sustainability, I just think about, it's a bunch of outlets plugging into each other, to save the planet, to keep us moving forward to help each other.

Now, whether that's an urban farming and how we grow and develop food, so we have a longer, better soil and life right at what we eat is better, whether that's to music and entertainment now that now we're powering shows with renewable energy, and not fossil fuels, whether that's a small action, like recycling, or not throwing things in the ocean, I just feel like it's humanity, it's the world plugging into each other, doing the right thing.

You know, ultimately, it's leading by action.

A lot of people say like, everything's "Hey, man, be sustainable, or, do some yoga," or, you know, there's a lot of artists out there that also don't know how to be sustainable, or what that means.

We decided to just by action.

Here's a concert powered by renewable energy.

And we're going to take, you know, whatever was donated, or whatever we make to help get someone around the world plugged in, because there's a billion people that don't have access to energy.

And I'll do it one by one, one family at a time, one village at a time, and continue to plug one person at a time one post on social media at a time, one new corporate or business or local sponsor at a time.

And we're here to plug the world in, however long it takes.

(upbeat music) We were recognized, the battery tour was recognized by the United Nations and we were invited to the UN General Assembly, General Assembly is a huge deal.

There's world leaders all over the world came and gathered.

And we were able to showcase the battery tour for all those different people, it was incredible.

I see the world recognizing that they're an outlet for change, I see the little girl who is 10 or 12 and thinks about sustainability, really understanding that well I can make a difference like my recycling efforts, or my eating habits are changing and affecting the world.

My vote counts, you know, all these different things that we push with love I can see the world adopting it, I can see corporations buying in on it saying, "Oh well, it's cool to be sustainable."

But I can see the world plugging in even if it's one person at a time.

That's what I can see.

You guys are making my dreams come true, thank you.

(crowd cheering) Well love is the battery tour.

We talk about how it's all about all you know, all ages, all generations, you know, all types of people, you know, coming together and yeah, and plugging into each other and spreading love.

I mean, the world needs more love right now.

There's so much divisiveness and we are in this together.

We are all humans.

I mean everything and music is love, right?

We're using the language of music which connects everyone and is a universal language to bring everyone together.

You know the umbrella of love, So how else can you bring people together though?

If you think about it, it's like how can we bring people that have different ethnic backgrounds that believe in maybe a different God or none at all?

That are from different spectrums of like, social status.

This guy's rich, this guy's poor, so you know when I look at the shows and the event, it's one of the most amazing things and look at the battery tour.

It's the one place I've literally seen what people say or personify America is right?

This melting pot of different people, that's what the battery tourism is.

It's honestly incredible man, life changing.

♪ So I, say hey, wave to the world ♪ ♪ This my day, somethin' like B.K.

♪ ♪ Have it my way, this my time, imma shine, imma shine ♪ ♪ So I, say hey, wave to the world, this is my day ♪ ♪ Somethin' like the radio, an imma play ♪ ♪ So to my haters, good night, good night ♪ Make some noise Kansas City, what's up?

(crowd cheering) - [Narrator] Share your sustainability story or learn more about sustainability and earth-friendly innovations at myworldtoo.com.

- Doug, Cindy.

- Tom, how are you doing?

- Good to see you.

- Hi, welcome to Longevity Farm.

- I've heard a lot about this place.

Now, is it true that a lot of this farm and your outbuildings is all built from Craigslist throwaway materials?

- Pretty much I'd say 90%, it's built from Craigslist.

There's also stuff that I've gotten from the jobs, I do construction.

I have leftover stuff from my jobs incorporated.

- This is the urban Lumber Company showroom.

And inside the showroom, we have all sorts of different kinds of local species of wood that we have taken from the waste stream.

So this is all logs or tree parts that came from, they weren't cut down for like a commercial lumber mill but were cut down for whatever reason development or insect or whatever, and they're in the waste streams, they're gonna be ground up and turn into mulch, and we take them out of the waste stream saw them up and make beautiful lumber out of it.

- We're in Palisade Colorado, which is the western slope and we're in the high desert.

Our farm sits at 4800 feet.

So it's a very arid climate, very dry we have about an average of nine inches of rainfall a year.

So all our irrigation water comes from the Colorado River.

And it makes it just a great climate for growing lavender.

It likes to be stressed at times and then it produces really great essential oil.

We use all drip irrigation.

(soft music)