What If Food Forests, Not AI or Crypto, Are the Next Disruptive Technology?
I know that’s a big “what if,” but stick with me because in this video I’m going to explain what food forests are and why they’re so revolutionary. And by the end of the video, you might just be ready to cash out your Bitcoin and plant some trees instead.
Cyclone Pam: The Vanuatu Story
Overnight, the storm hit like a wrecking ball. Farms vanished. Fishing boats were shattered. Tens of thousands of us woke up to find our food supply gone. But there was one place—one place—where the food was still growing.
In 2015, Cyclone Pam, a Category 5 monster, ripped through the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Farms that had modernized, growing vast fields of a single crop, were utterly destroyed. And because the roads and port infrastructure were also in shambles, these farms struggled to replant quickly.
While industrial farms were devastated, the traditionally stewarded food forests of Vanuatu were remarkably resilient. The forest’s deep roots held the soil in the downpour while their dense canopies softened the wind. And because the stewards value a wide range of plant species useful for food, medicine, and building materials, this biodiversity allowed the forest to bounce back quickly—quickly.
Within days, those who had access to these food forests were already harvesting food, while those dependent on conventional supply chains faced shortages for months.
This story holds important lessons about the fragility of modern food systems and the critical role that diverse food forests can play in our uncertain future.
What Is a Food Forest?
A food forest is an intentionally planted ecosystem that mimics a natural forest, but specific species are chosen for their ability to provide for human needs while also restoring the ecological health of the land. Food forests can operate on all different scales, from small urban backyards to modest homesteads, all the way up to farm-scale systems.
You could also think of it kind of like a very diverse orchard or multi-layered garden that also provides habitat for wildlife, builds soil fertility, cleans and stores water, purifies the air, and stabilizes the climate. Food forests can produce everything from fruits, nuts, herbs, and greens to fiber, fuel wood, animal feed, natural fertilizer, medicine, building materials, and more—just about all the resources you need to run a sustainable society.
The big difference is, instead of growing these plants as one large monocrop of a single species—as is done on conventional farms and plantations—all these different species are grown together in what’s known as a polyculture. And each plant serves multiple ecological functions that benefit the whole plant community.
Apple Orchard: Conventional vs. Food Forest Approach
For example, in a conventional apple orchard, all the trees are planted in blocks of one single variety. They’re sprayed with chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and the grass beneath them is suppressed with herbicides. They even have to paint the trunks to protect them from sunscald.
In a food forest approach, the apple trees would be interplanted with other tree species like Mulberry, which is in a whole different family so pests won’t as easily spread from one tree to the next, and Northern Bayberry, which is a nitrogen-fixing plant that actually pulls fertilizing nitrogen out of the air and into the soil where it can be taken up by neighboring plants.
Small shrubs like currants, gooseberries, and gomi can be planted on the sun-facing side of the trees to both protect from sunscald and provide an additional berry crop (and gomi is another nitrogen fixer). Certain carpet-forming plants can be planted to compete with grass while providing additional benefits, like mint or oregano, which have strong scents that deter deer and rabbits that might chew and damage the plants, or yarrow, which has small flowers that attract tiny wasps that prey on apple pests like codling moth. Other flowering plants can be added too, to attract native bees and other pollinators to help improve the fruit tree yields.
Polyculture Yield Study
One study found that corn planted in a polyculture with beans and squash yielded 29% more calories per acre than corn just planted by itself in a monoculture.
As you can see, by mimicking the interconnected relationships of native ecosystems, food forests don’t need continuous human inputs of fertilizer, pesticides, or weed control. They’re designed to be mostly self-sustaining once established.
The Edible Trails Project
Actually, I have a good story that demonstrates this. Back in 2014, my good friend Jonathan led a group of us into planting multiple public food forests here in town with the support of many local nonprofits. He called it the Edible Trails Project.
As time went on, life carried us in all different directions, and the food forests were mostly neglected. But when we came back to them recently, many years later, most of the plants were still alive—and bigger—and some were beginning to bear fruit.
Sadly, Jonathan is no longer with us, but all his friends and family get together now twice a year to do a work bee at the main food forest in his memory. And the place is thriving.
So while food forests are mostly self-sustaining, they do best with some basic human maintenance. And maybe that’s for the best, because a food forest is not just some thing you add to your collection of stuff—it’s a living community you participate in. It’s your human habitat that you nurture and embed yourself into.
Food Forest Origins
Now, where did this wild idea even come from? It’s actually existed for thousands of years in certain subsistence and traditional land-based cultures, like the ancient Hawaiians that I mentioned in a previous video, or the Indigenous stewards of the Vanuatu Islands whose human management played a crucial role in their resilience against the cyclone.
The practice of food forestry also goes by many other names that you can look into, such as edible food forests in temperate climates like where I live, traditional home gardens in the tropics, or coppice farming in Brazil. In modern times, food forests have become popular as a central element of permaculture, which is a design system and movement for creating sustainable human societies.
Why Food Forests Matter
Why go to all this effort—buying plants, hauling wood chips, planting trees, and creating an entire edible ecosystem—when you can just go to the store?
The truth is that the supply chains that we rely on to meet our needs are becoming less and less reliable.
Imagine you were on Vanuatu Island when the cyclone hit. Even if you had all the Bitcoin in the world, it would have been useless after the cyclone wiped away the power grid. And even if you’re lucky enough to avoid natural disasters, there are a bunch of global trends that suggest that turbulent times are ahead for just about everybody.
It comes back to this big idea that humans had about 10,000 years ago—the Neolithic Revolution—when our ancestors started shifting from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to settled agriculture. We went from living within ecosystems to displacing them with our farms and settlements. Diets shifted from a diverse mix of seasonal plants, animals, and fungi to a handful of staple grains.
Skeletal records show that this transition to settled agriculture resulted in increased nutritional deficiencies and higher rates of infectious disease due to higher population densities. Famines became more common because bad weather or a plant disease could wipe out the majority of a people’s staple crop for the season.
Today, 75% of our calories come from just four crops—corn, soy, wheat, and rice. And the way we grow them is depleting the topsoil rapidly. Deep underground water aquifers are also being pumped dry way faster than they recharge, and surface waters are quickly becoming polluted by cancer-causing plastics and forever chemicals.
This highlights a critical blind spot of our modern culture—the biosphere is the foundation of all life, including ours. So we need a new way forward—one that meets human needs without destroying everything else in the process.
And that’s where AI comes in…
Oops, sorry—I meant that’s where food forests come in.
Food forests give us a hands-on, nuts-and-bolts vision of what a sustainable society could actually look like day to day—not just theory, but the actual species, plant configurations, and cultural practices that make it work.
But even deeper than that, I think we need to rethink who we are as humans. The world doesn’t exist to serve us—just one species. That’s the mindset of a parasite. But we do have a healthy role to play, like all our non-human neighbors, if we choose it.
It’s like the Tao Te Ching says: “Help the ten thousand things find their own nature. Don’t venture to lead them by the nose.”
A world where food forests and intact ecosystems form the foundation of our supply chains, communities, and economy isn’t just sustainable—it’s thriving. That means long-term stability, abundance, leisure, and resilience. That means healthier people who have a deep connection and respect for the living world that sustains them.
I’m not saying we should abandon modern life and go back to foraging and loincloths. But we also can’t keep plowing ahead blindly, turning ancient miracles into toxic mud. Instead, we can collaborate with nature. We can blend the ancient and the modern—stepping back into the forest while we step forward into the future, with the wisdom of nature to guide us.
Concluding Thoughts
So now that you’ve seen what food forests can do, what’s the better investment for your future? Some made-up symbols that we pretend have value, or something real—something you can touch, taste, build with, or heat your home with? A technology that will be just as functional 10,000 years from now as it is today?
I know where I’m putting my money.
Check out the description below for some resources where you can learn more. And in the next video, I’ll walk you through exactly how to get started with food forests—even if you’ve never grown a plant in your life. So make sure you subscribe.
Thank you for watching, and thank you for caring. We need more people who care.
