Mind, Body, and Soil

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 y...

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 cul...

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...

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 generation...

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, imag...

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 fo...

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...

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...

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 bet...

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 de...

Anne Biklé and Dave Montgomery are a husband and wife team and authors of the newly released What Your Food Ate and the trilogy: Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations, the Hidden Half of Nature, and Growing a Revolution. Together, with Anne’s lens of biology, and David’s lens of geology, they explore the topics of soil, land, and human health. In this episode, we explore all things soil. Starting wit...

China Tresemer is at once writer, artist, winemaker, farmer, and something else altogether. Her new website, Still Life with Field Notes, is dedicated to weaving together the threads of her work in collaboration with the earth - from her art, writing, recipes, and beyond. At home in the space where the Hood River meets the Columbia River, between rainforest and desert, China grows plants, animals,...

Brandi Stanley is a walking and talking paradox and you are, too. This episode is a long-form podcast between two people that don’t know how to be bite-sized. Often discussed through the lens of paradox where paradox is the answer and not the problem, and pleasure is found in the pursuit of all the questions. In it, Brandi discusses finding purpose in her life as a generalist for whom curiosity is...

Dr. Anthony Gustin is a man leveraging his curiosity to find opportunities in the problems of our modern age. He started as a chiropractor working with elite level athletes and saw the need for education around nutrition. That first crossover led him into founding Perfect Keto, Equip Foods, and helping put together Zero Acre Farms. He’s as much of a disruptor as he is a dreamer - and lately, he’s...

This is an episode you won’t want to miss, chock full of conversations around rightness, death, farming, and preservation - not just of food - but of ways of life. Caught in the heat of August and the peak of harvest, we talk about what it means to preserve something beyond just what is going into our freezers, cans, and solar dehydrators. We talk about preserving a different way of life. In it, w...

Will Harris of White Oak Pastures is a 5th generation rancher in Bluffton, Georgia. Will switched from a conventional model of farming to a holistic model in the 90’s and has been building not just soil organic matter, but also community, in his small rural town - once named one of the poorest in America. Now raising 10 different species, with integrated processing facilities, and a team of over 1...

In this episode, Irene Lyon breaks down not just the fundamentals of the nervous system but just how fundamental healing your nervous system is. It’s where we deepen our connection to ourselves and our environment. You’ll learn about how the nervous system is set in early childhood and how that forms the foundation for how we interact with the world. We dive into how we can harness neuroplasticity...

In this episode, we dive into the nervous system’s connection to chronic illness. Over 50% of Americans have at least 1 chronic illness and 46% of American children also suffer from a chronic illness. Diet, toxin exposure, circadian biology all play a role in chronic illness but what about the nervous system? In part 2 of our journey into the nervous system with Irene Lyon, we explore the nervous...

Your mineral status is reflected in the mineral status of the soils, of your mother, and of your grandmother. Hammid Jabbar is exploring the way the mineral matrix affects our energy and the way minerals connect us back to our universal nature. In this episode, we look at the mineral depletion in soils and what that might mean about our own mineral status. Hamid first got interested in minerals th...

Dr. Stephan van Vliet is at the forefront of researching what he calls the ‘dark matter’ of nutrition. Beyond the nutrition facts panel, beyond just protein, fat, and carboyhydrates and beyond the vitamins and minerals we are familiar with lies a world called metabolomics where thousands and tens of thousands of compounds and phytochemicals exist. Dr. van Vliet is looking at these compounds and in...

Ashleigh VanHouten is at the center of exploring muscles - both building them in the gym and cooking them in the kitchen. Author of cookbooks Carnivore-ish and It Takes Guts and pioneer of women’s strength training programs her work makes cooking and exercise feel easy and accessible. During this conversation, Ashleigh and Kate explore the world of incorporating organ meats into your diet from a p...

Brandi Stanley, who is an incredible interviewer and explorer of paradox, was generous enough to share this interview of Kate from her podcast, This Plus That. In this interview, Kate explores the paradox of life and death, the desire for things to taste better and what that means ecologically. She expounds on the difference between conventional and ‘regenerative’ agriculture and the history of re...

Will Reusch has 16 years of experience as a high school teacher first in a public school in East LA and now in Private School -  a teacher of history, civics, geography, government, and more - his main mission is to teach kids not what to think, but HOW to think. We explore the pitfalls of the current education system, everything from the unnatural environment of fluorescent lights to how cur...

Lacey Jean is. Lacey Jean is many things, a polymath at heart, at once butcher, mobile processor, hide tanner, shearer, and shepherdess but none of the many hats she wears defines Lacey Jean. This is one of those incredibly juicy conversations where you walk away feeling more alive for it, dripping with honesty and earnestness, triumph and failure, and the meandering path we are all taking as we t...

Sarah Kleiner has been on a health journey and each leap she has made has been because of her children. In this episode, we talk about finding fertility and upending the traditional paradigm of fertility treatments and preconception diet. Sarah’s journey truly begins when her daughter was diagnosed with autism 13 years ago, leading Sarah to explore the world of diets from vegetarian to carnivore....