(uplifting music) - [Jenny] 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.

In the second season of "My World Too," discover with our team ideas in sustainability both new and old.

From high tech eco innovations to homegrown local solutions, we'll learn about sustainable trends in transportation, housing, energy, food production, climate change, carbon reduction, resource management and so much more.

Join our field reporters as they explore eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to "My World Too," short stories of sustainable living and earthly innovations.

In Lawrence, Kansas, a man has his hands and heart immersed in the soil focusing on food security for those in need while upholding ancient growing traditions.

- I think it's most important that everyone not only just feel like everyone should have food but ensure that everyone has food.

If we were to really focus on our systems and make sure that the people who don't have food have it first, I mean, everything else would follow.

Food is so tied into every part of our lives that, you know, if everyone here was fed, the entire society would benefit from it and everyone would be in a better spot.

We're here at Maseualkualli Farms in North Lawrence, Kansas.

Maseualkualli Farms is a no-till, no fossil fuel machine farm primarily growing fruits and herbs.

Maseualkualli Farms means the people's farms in Nawatl which is an indigenous Mexican language still spoken by over a million people.

I really got into this work to do food security work and to do work for people who need food.

It's one of the reasons I wanted to call it people's farms.

I want to get more people involved in agriculture.

My cultural background is Mexican, or Mexica.

My great-grandfather came here from Guanajuato, Mexico in the early 1900s so I've kind of traced that ancestry back.

When he crossed the border with his brother, the border patrol people actually told him that, you know, if he continued to speak any language other than English, his children's children would not have a good life here.

And so, part of, part of naming things the way that I am is also reclamation work.

So it's not only, you know, crops that were ancestrally grown by the people where my great-grandfather came from, but also using the practices that were used then.

So one of the projects that I've worked on is a no-till project that actually utilizes instructions from a codex from the 1500s that describes how to grow corn.

And I did a USDA SERA research study on that already a couple years ago and I still grow corn that way to this day.

It's also about breeding seeds that will be more drought tolerant, more tolerant just generally to harsher environments than here.

Also just being able to taste and feel a part of the life that like I haven't yet experienced because of the nature of my kind of diaspora from Mexico.

The corn that I'm growing is a variety of corn from Guanajuato.

I've been selectively breeding it for about three years now.

The seed, the seed actually came from one of the seed banks in Ames, Iowa so one of the USDA seed banks, and I was able to get that from them for cultural research specifically.

I sifted through thousands of sessions of corn to to find that one specifically from where my great grandfather was from.

And, I noticed on it, you know, if we're thinking about climate change and we're thinking about inputs on farms, it's one of the varieties that in a really simplistic way actually produces this gel that has a bacterial symbiosis that fixes nitrogen from the air.

So, a lot of corn that we have today that has been completely bred out for the purposes of how long can it store, how much can it yield, but there's actually quite a few more ancient varieties that have this symbiotic relationship built into it.

It's really important to grow the types of corn that pull atmospheric nitrogen out so that we reduce these nitrogen inputs because those nitrogen inputs, which are often pumped way too heavily into them become runoff that poisons our water.

I do try and make a living off of the farm and the other purpose to it is food security work.

Food security is really important to me as someone who has been food insecure in my life.

It's, you know, something that between 12 to 14% of the population faces on a daily basis.

It's something that we have not taken systemic approaches to actually do much about.

There are programs but if we look at statistical data the last 30 years, nothing must just change.

So food security work is extremely necessary from a systems approach so that we can actually make sure that everyone is fed properly.

I would actually prefer to be called a food security worker or a food systems worker than a farmer.

It's the work that I would really rather do.

It's fun going to market and doing really fun, fancy things with restaurant chefs, but ultimately I'd like my career to become something that's much bigger than that, something that it really is focused on helping people in need.

I would like to accomplish what I'm calling food is a public work.

That's where we actually start subsidizing the production of food versus solely subsidizing the consumption of food.

Food is a public work would essentially be a public works program where the city and or county government would employ farmers to produce food just to feed people for the purpose of feeding people.

I believe that, you know, food is a human right to way bigger extents than just making sure that people have three meals a day or enough calories in their diet.

I believe that food security work is also making sure that people have culturally relevant foods and that people are able to really have the diets that they choose for themselves and for their communities.

I'm very proud of my farm and all the local food systems workers here in Lawrence, Douglas County.

There's a lot of us doing really, really important work, helping not only, you know, sustain our families, but helping feed other people as well.

And I think if more places were like this and we had more people involved in agriculture overall, we would have a lot brighter, a lot brighter future for sure.

- [Jenny] Let's go across the field to a plot of land dedicated, to growing community support, knowledge and awareness for local indigenous people.

- So we are in the same farm plot as Maseualkualli Farms.

We are a sister farm.

We are the Indigenous Community Center and we are focusing on food sovereignty.

Food sovereignty is important because it connects us to where our food comes from.

Learning how to cultivate medicine with the earth and feeding our soul and our communities is very important.

So I am from the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen nation out of California.

To me, it's extremely vital to get our community, our indigenous communities back to the earth, back to eating healthy after being colonized.

My tribe was taken over by the Spaniards so we are actually considered mission Indians and any native group in this country was colonized into a way of eating government food.

Government food was absolutely the lowest quality and, you know, created a lot of health problems that indigenous people didn't have before.

So the importance of this farm and food sovereignty is to get our people back to the ways of our ancestors.

The Indigenous Community Center, otherwise known as ICC started because there is a real need to create space for indigenous people to come together and connect and heal and rebuild community and share stories and storytelling and a lot of traditional things that, you know, otherwise we would miss.

This plot of land is the foundation of creating that space.

It's bringing us back to indigenous ways of growing, of farming.

You know, a lot of farming mentality has been colonized in a way where it's all about production, where here we really focus on the importance of community and togetherness and the medicine that we share when we're working together.

And that is vital for communities to heal.

We are on an acre plot and we have a huge variety of fruits and vegetables that we're growing, a lot of herbs too.

The idea of our farm is to create a pay as you go system for BIPOC communities who might not have the funds to buy organically at the local farmer's market or our elders who aren't being able to get out to buy fresh produce.

Along with the Food Sovereignty Garden, Indigenous Community Center has created a missing and murdered indigenous women or person chapter.

We're the second chapter in the state of Kansas to be established.

We also started an indigenous skate team.

And the idea of that was creating space for our youth to come together and feel like they belong, feel like they're connected, give them more of a community of their own that understands them but with the support of the center to kind of create a safe space for that.

The ICC wants to create a space where anybody can get involved and become part of the healing process.

I personally think with the work that I'm doing I am not only finding peace within myself, I am learning about other cultures, I'm learning that it's okay to ask questions, it's okay to learn how to support other entities from throughout the world from different countries.

And I encourage everybody to do the same, look within their own communities, look up what kind of native land you are on because all of this land is native.

This hat, "You Are on Native Land" is a reminder.

Anybody who sees it kind of just stops 'em in their tracks and makes them remember.

And even if it's just a double take or they ask questions about it, it's just a reminder of what this country was truly built on.

- [Jenny] Mike with "My World Too," visits a small family business in the Western Iowa Hills, building a unique line of bikes designed to sustain people's health, wellness, and comfort.

Sustainability on two wheels.

- Kelly, it's great to be here with you.

Will you share with us where we're at and what you do?

- Yeah, well, we're in beautiful Southwest Iowa and we call it God's country and it's a beautiful place.

And we're at the world headquarters of Day 6 bicycles.

And our house is a hundred yards from our business, which is awesome.

I have, my wife helps me so it's truly a mom and pop cottage business.

Well, the great thing is we have the building and our home on the same property and I'm able to walk to work.

Sometimes I'll ride my bike to work, but it's only a hundred yards so that's not a huge deal.

But yeah, it saves everything on driving, on time.

I can spend more time at work, I can, you know, I'm not in the car as much.

- Working from home or near home is wonderful.

So great to be able to just walk home for lunch and come back.

Love it.

- Where do you see bikes going in this country, especially in this time of, you know, all these changes in our society and whatever, where do you see the bikes fitting in?

- I'm not sure we'll ever be Amsterdam, but we're definitely increasing.

We're getting more and more bike paths, bike friendly routes, big features.

Our population's getting older so more people are wanna extend their sustainability for themselves and ride bikes longer.

In Iowa, there's tons of rails to trails, they've torn up railroad tracks.

I read somewhere where the number one real estate in America is bike path.

So not ocean view, but if your house is near a bike path within a mile, that is like primo property.

And that's why Florida's so good 'cause they have long, wide planned bike routes for people to ride their bikes.

So that's why there's a lot of biking in Florida.

It doesn't hurt that it's flat and warm too.

- I was gonna say, not too many hills either- - Right.

- There in Florida.

- Right.

- Which on that note, electric bikes.

Tell us, where are they now, where are they going?

It's something a few years ago you didn't seem to hear too much about.

- One thing you gotta keep in mind is the cyclist kind of ran the biking industry.

This is my opinion.

They ran the cycling industry for years and it was the guy with the chiseled legs and that's great.

You know, if you can ride a 100 miles, more power to you.

But now it's more of the average Joe, the regular cyclist.

And so what these people want, they don't want a skinny, tired bike that's really uncomfortable.

They want something that's more comfortable.

But the motor allows them now to ride way farther than they used to.

So if they used to get tired at 10 miles, they can go 40 or 50 miles now.

Now they can get up the hill that they weren't able to get up before.

- So truly the electric bike is extending the pleasure of bike riding for people.

- Oh definitely.

You know, one of the misnomers is electric bikes is cheating.

And it's like, I always tell people is, well, do you put your milk in the creek or do you put it in the refrigerator?

And it's like electric bike, it's not cheating if you need it.

And so somebody that's obese or has bad knees or anything like that, an electric bike is a wonderful thing, 'cause it helps reverse that as well as giving them the pleasure of biking.

- I love bikes.

Bikes are so fun.

So the happy stories really make it, you know, worthwhile to me when you've got somebody who's just really experiencing good health where they were struggling before because they're now out riding their bike.

That was a, that's really the happy part of the business.

- When was the bike in invented?

- I think the first one was called the Bone Crusher and it was the one I've seen was from 1865 and it didn't even have pedals on it.

It was just a wooden frame with two wheels and you just kind of used your feet to propel it, so the late 1800s.

The interesting thing about bikes though, is if you go to the late 1800s and you look at the bikes and they were mainly made for racers, but if you look at today's bikes, yeah, today's bikes, they have titanium and carbon fiber, but the geometry is really hasn't changed a whole lot because the old guys nailed the geometry back then for racing.

And so what we've done again is we've changed that whole thinking pattern into more, something more casual for the average rider.

So it is truly different.

- So would you mind sharing the world headquarters with us of Day 6?

- Oh, yeah.

Yeah, let's go look.

- All right, sounds good.

Awesome.

- So this is, this is one of our Day 6 bikes.

And what we did was when we started it, we basically just took, we listened to people and we looked at the boxes they wanted checked off.

And there was five boxes that pretty much everybody talked about, especially as we get older.

And one of 'em was, they didn't want to bend over the handlebars so we have higher handlebars.

One of 'em was, they didn't want a skinny seat so we gave it a wider seat.

They didn't want to have trouble getting on and off the bike so we lowered the step through, they wanted to be able to reach the ground when they stopped and so we lowered the seat and then we added the backrest for comfort.

For those who wanted to get up hills and go further, we have the electric version.

So we really checked off all the boxes that they were looking for when we designed it.

- What are the advantages of electric bike?

- Yeah.

Well, there's actually many.

Now instead of stopping your ride at a certain distance, you're gonna be able to ride a lot further than you could before.

They're gonna be able to get you up hills.

So it's gonna change where you ride.

People that traditionally would never ride a bike, even here in the hills it's really difficult so this allows you to get up and down the hills.

People who are faster than others, now people that are at different skill levels can ride together instead of never riding together.

We see that a lot with husbands and wives, and now we're getting them together again.

Being able to go faster and further and uphills, ride with their grandkids, with their spouse, with athletes, there's no downside to that.

And to be honest, if you don't want to turn the motor on now, you got an extra 16 pounds and you can get a better workout than you did before.

So, just they're awesome.

They're they really are positive in every imaginable way.

- Where do you see it all going?

- Well, the beauty of being in the bike industry is there's so much variety here.

I mean, we have a bike for people who have certain characteristics.

They're older, they're heavier, they don't wanna go as fast.

But there's cargo bikes, there's racing bikes, there's carbon fiber bikes, there's aluminum bikes, there's recumbent trikes, there's all kinds of things in this industry.

And no matter where you're at, there's gonna be a bike for you.

And it's gonna help you no matter what you wanna do.

If you wanna ride to the grocery store, if you wanna ride to work, if you wanna get a workout, if you wanna go on a 40 mile ride on a beautiful bike path, they just do so much and they allow you to take your body and do things you can't normally do.

I mean, you can go 20 miles an hour on a bike pretty easily, but very few of us can run 20 miles an hour for a sustained time.

Maybe for 200 yards, but you can ride a bike for 10 miles at 20 miles an hour.

So they just have so many benefits, they're not a lot of money and they give you fitness, they give you the chance to see the countryside, to get to work, to do all kinds of different things.

- On that note, it makes me wanna ride a bike.

- Yeah, well you came to the right place.

- Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

- Yeah, thank you.

- [Jenny] Next let's join Fritz from "My World Too" in Papillon, Nebraska, as he chats with a visionary electric vehicle expert who has been ahead of the EV revolution for decades.

- The whole thing actually began with a bicycle.

I went to the local bank here in Papillon and I was waiting to talk to one of the officers and I opened up "Business Week" magazine and there's a two page spread for an electric bicycle.

And I thought, what the heck is this doing in "Business Week" magazine?

And so, as I got to digging deep, I thought I gotta find out about this.

So I left the bank, rushed down to the city library and spent the next couple hours cruising the internet, trying to figure out what all this electric vehicle stuff was all about and that was the origin of EV World.

- [Fritz] So that was almost 20 years ago.

- [Bill] That was the summer of 1997.

- [Fritz] And I look around, I see several electric vehicles, the bikes.

- Yep.

- [Fritz] The lawn mower, the skateboard.

- Yep.

- You're kinda living the EV lifestyle.

- I am living the EV life.

I made a pledge.

It took time, it didn't happen in 1998, it didn't happen in 2000.

But eventually, I made a pledge I will not use gasoline, petroleum products any longer if I possibly can.

Now of course, I've got a Prius, you know, that still uses gasoline.

But the car that we use almost inevitably all the time is the all electric Fiat 500 which I've had for about three years now.

- Now you were involved in the early days, but now every automotive company is basically making this- - That is so ex- - More focused.

- It is so exciting.

Every one of them is making that pledge.

They're starting to now say, we're not even going to build internal combustion engines before the end of the decade or shortly thereafter.

That's really exciting because now we're starting to see the progression of, when I called it EV World, what I hope we'd finally get to.

We're now starting to see television ads for electric cars.

You know, there's- - The Super Bowl is dominated by that.

- Yeah, Super Bowl dominated, regular nightly television now is covering that.

I was 20 years ahead of my time.

I thought this was gonna happen 20 years ago.

So my timing wasn't exactly perfect but- - We'd love add a few years in our garage.

- I've lived long enough to be able to finally see it happening, yeah.

I would love to have all my neighbors around here having one of these babies parked in the garage.

But will that transformer in my backyard handle all those cars?

What if everybody comes in here at 5:30 at night and they plug their cars in to begin charging?

What happens to what happens to the power?

Can we handle that?

- So Bill, with the rate of vehicle adoption rising so dramatically, what needs to happen with infrastructure to more or less prepare for the next level?

- Well, obviously an electric vehicle of any kind, be it my bicycles, be it the skateboard, be it my electric car is where does that electricity come from?

What is the energy source that generates that power, right?

And so for some sections of the country and globally, that comes from fossil fuels.

Critics that say, well, electric cars are only, you know, as clean as the power source, that's right.

But what's happening is is that that power source is increasingly becoming cleaner as we start to idle coal plants.

I think something like this year, there's something like 12 coal powered plants are gonna be idled, being replaced, of course, in some cases by natural gas but eventually those are being replaced by solar, those are being replaced by wind, particularly wind in this area.

There is what's called the Southwest Power Pool, which is a group, collection of utilities basically from the Texas border to the Canadian border, from the Missouri river west to the Colorado Rockies.

There are times on that pool, like for example, yesterday when over 60% of the electric power being generated within that pool was coming from wind.

So I try, so I monitor that, I take and plug this car in because I'm getting at least half or more of my power is coming now from wind and not from natural gas or not from coal or not even from nuclear.

I mean, coal is now one of the most expensive forms of power that you can have now.

So they're gonna take the bids from the wind turbine, from the wind farms because it's just cheaper.

So the grid becoming progressively cleaner and greener.

So we're getting there and this is on a global basis.

Even Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest sources, not the biggest source of fossil fuels are beginning now to install and build solar farms 'cause what do they have?

Sun, lots and lots of sun.

- And Bill, if you just explain a little bit about lithium and the key role it plays and how it works.

- So the advantage of lithium over let's say the normal lead acid battery that you'd find in the starter battery in your car, for example, it just has this wonderful ability to be recharged many times and hold much more energy, which is why that's what we're using in our phones.

You remember back when the when a mobile phone used to be a brick?

Well, that was, the reason for that was partial electronics, but also because of the battery they had to use.

There are studies and concerns that are being raised about, do we have enough lithium?

In fact, I saw one study says that we're good at this point to like the end of the decade.

And then we're gonna have some issues providing enough lithium to meet all of demand.

And the thing about lithium is, is that lithium is a renewable resource.

Unlike extracting coal or extracting natural gas out of the earth, those, once you burn 'em, that's it they're gone.

Lithium, that's in the batteries in this car can be pulled out, can be recycled and then put in to new batteries.

So it's not a resource that is consumed and it's gone.

It's a resource that we can use over and over and over again.

- Bill, well, thank you for having us up here.

Been great talking with you.

I'm so excited about what's coming up with the future, but I'd like to hear a little bit about what you think the next 10 year brings.

- Wow, let me go into the other room and get my crystal ball.

We spent the last century building a society around these to fit their needs.

We need to begin to think about how do we restructure that society so it is less dependent on these and more dependent on things like these.

You know, I've been writing about electric vehicles for 20 years.

It took me nearly 20 years to finally get one of these, right?

So things like that don't happen overnight but it's a goal.

(upbeat music) - [Jenny] Share your sustainability story or learn more about sustainability and earth friendly innovations at myworldtoo.com.

(mellow happy music) (mellow hum) (melodic hum) (melodic piano music)