(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome to "A Shot of Ag."

I'm your host, Rob Sharkey.

I'm a farmer from just outside of Bradford, Illinois, which is a long, long way from Chicago.

I don't know anything about farming in Chicago, but I wanna learn.

Luckily today's guest is Steve Archer from Chicago.

How you doing, Steve?

- Outstanding.

- We had you here last week and you were so good.

You stayed in Peoria for a whole week, didn't you?

(Steve and Rob laughing) - My wife and kids miss me.

- Yes.

You are, among a lot of things, you're an urban farmer and a beekeeper up there.

- Yes, sir.

- Yeah.

So when I think Chicago, I don't necessarily think farmer.

- My sister Priscilla is from Texas.

- [Rob] Okay.

- And she's learning beekeeping, so when she comes to Chicago, she can help.

So she's here these last couple days, but before she was at a little event for beekeepers, The High Superheroes, and there's a gentleman from Chicago, and she had to give him my phone number so that he could call me because he could not believe that I had eight working hives in the city of Chicago, in Inglewood.

So Inglewood is considered a bad neighborhood in the city of Chicago.

Farming is difficult in the city of Chicago, because of the lead in the soil from the years and years of cars driving through there, heavy car traffic down the expressway.

So anytime you want to grow in the soil, you have to remediate the soil or you have to grow in raised beds.

So most of the things that you'll see in the city of Chicago will be people growing in raised beds.

I don't like raised beds because it's another one of those things where you're always having to put in another input, whether it's buying oils to keep your wood safe from the mycelium and mushrooms or insects, or just buying more compost.

If you use permaculture, permanent agriculture as part of your farming, then you're more likely to have a sustainable farm, and over time, you'll be putting in less inputs.

- Is there nothing that can grow in the soil with the lead?

Are you worried about the plant absorbing the lead?

- Depending on who you talk to.

- [Rob] Yeah.

(laughs) - Right?

Some flowers can remediate lead.

Some flowers cannot remediate lead.

They do take up other substances from the soil, but nothing really wants to uptake lead.

There's no safe amount of lead, and the reason, if you dig deep into it that they don't want people growing in it, it's not because it's going to end up in the plant, but on the plant, and as you move through that soil, you're gonna kick up and impart dusts and particulate matter and you're gonna inhale that, and because there's no safe amount of lead in the soil.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- There's no safe amount of lead for you to ingest.

- [Rob] Oh.

- So... - More of a tillage thing?

- More of a tillage thing.

- Okay.

- So if you add more organic materials to your soil, eventually you'll get it to a point where you can grow in that soil, or just remove... - What's the first thing someone wants to do, right?

Grab the giant rototiller and just.

(makes whirring noise) - So we brought in Precision Construction and they removed the top eight inches of soil from one part of the farm and another 10 inches from another part where we intended to plant potatoes, sweet potatoes, and then you put down an engineered barrier, there's an engineered barrier called Raffi cloth, and it's supposed to prevent certain oily materials from rising up while allowing water to go through, and then you cover that with compost and wood chips and all those kind of things to rebuild the soil, is what I did.

Other people will take their raised bed gardens, build their boxes, or if they're, in my opinion, smarter, they'll use cinder blocks because cinder blocks are gonna out last us.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- And as long as you build the, as long as you tamp it down, just like you were building a deck, it's less likely to tilt and fall over, but you can build it as high as you want.

You can add to it, you can paint it, all those sorts of happy things.

- Yeah.

Welcome to "Lead Chat" on PBS.

(Steve and Rob laughing) - Alright, bees?

- Yes.

- I think having a beehive in Chicago, and I think just people getting constantly stunned.

- No.

- What are you telling me?

- So mostly bees and honeybees, they can only sting once.

So if you're looking at a sunflower, you can walk up and you can pet a bumblebee on the back.

- Really?

- Seriously, you could.

I have video of doing it.

I show people all the time 'cause we have so many sunflowers.

It's like, look, they don't care, right?

As long as you're not jumping towards them.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- They don't care when they're collecting nectar or pollen.

Now, if you show up to their house and you knock on their door, they respond a lot differently.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- So with the honeybees, they come out and check you out when you get a certain distance in front of them.

So in front of the hives, I have a patch of grass that's about six feet long and it's wide as where the beehives are, and that way I have a visual reminder to anybody coming out that if you walk through that area, the bees may take interest in you.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- And there's certain things you can eat that smell like pheromones that the bees produce.

- [Rob] Really?

- Yes.

So if you're going to go on a tour with bees, don't eat bananas.

- [Rob] Ah.

- So bananas are supposed to have a similar scent to their alarm.

- It's like catnip for a bee?

- Catnip make cats happy.

Bananas does not make bees happy.

- Oh.

- It makes them more aggressive.

- It's like anti-catnip.

- It's anti-catnip.

- You gotta get there eventually.

(Steve and Rob laughing) - Right.

- So, you've found places.

I mean, how do you even know where to put these?

- So honey beehives.

- [Rob] I mean hives.

- Right, so honey honeybees are special because they're cold-blooded insects that as a super organism are almost warm-blooded.

If you did a temperature check on the hive in the wintertime, it would be about human temperature, would be somewhere between 96 and 98 degrees, right?

Those bees are in there and they kinda disconnect their wings from the shoulder and they just shake all one along.

They're having a big old party, but there are no boys invited to the party.

- Oh, oh.

- Because come wintertime, the females recognize that the males haven't done any work.

All they do is eat.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- And try to impregnate the new queen, and so come wintertime, there are no new queens.

Why do we need these guys sticking around, eating up all the food?

So the boys get kicked out.

But a honeybee in her lifetime, and depends on which beekeeper you talk to.

They do anywhere from a quarter teaspoon to a half a teaspoon of honey over their lifetime.

I'm certain some of your people will be like, "Ah, not that much, even," but it takes a lot of bees to make a little bit of honey.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- And a beekeeper's job is basically to make sure that the things that are not in nature are not causing the bees more stress or the fact that we have this many hives next to each other, the fact that they're not in a tree stump, all of these things we have to worry about to keep the bees alive.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- So that's your job, is to keep the bees alive and get out the way - You're a neonico, whatever it was called?

- Neonicotinoids.

- Yeah.

- So that's what you, are you a hippie?

That's what all the hippies talk about.

- Oh my gosh, so, right, so if you talk, I have a good friend from college, and he goes, "Steve, you know, we always thought you were smart and all of this, but why do you have so many conspiracies?"

I was like, "Oh my God."

I was like, "Oh no!"

It's like, look, if something is factual and you can point to the facts of the case, then it's not a conspiracy.

I'm not saying that anybody's working together to do anything.

There's a law like Murphy's Law.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- But it basically says never attribute evil to something that stupidity works for, right?

So if people are just trying to make money and this thing kills bad plants, then, yeah, let's go ahead and do it.

So it's not that people are out to kill insects or wipe out insects.

It just happens to be a bad product released by a corp, I don't wanna call FDA a corporation, but a group that gets paid by the people that they're supposed to be supervising.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- So it's... - It's what a hippie would say.

(laughs) - Right, right.

I'm just trying to keep my bees alive, right?

So I'm keeping my bees alive so I can get honey and wax from my ladies, and the same thing, I wouldn't feed my chickens stuff that I don't want to eat.

- Yeah, well, no, okay.

I was joking, but go ahead and talk about the neo stuff?

- So, I do eat granola.

I do.

(Steve and Rob laughing) - He was telling me in between shows that they used to call 'em Moonbeam.

(Steve and Rob laughing) - Moonbeam Starshine.

You gotta get the whole Moonbeam Starshire.

- Yes, so what is your concern with them?

- With the neonicotinoids?

- [Rob] Yeah.

- When used inappropriately, it has a negative effect on wild populations of insects.

- [Rob] Okay.

- And it's just that simple, and more of our pollination of our crops, the non-corn crops or the things that don't require pollinators, a significant amount of pollinators would be native pollinators, but at this point, we're shipping bees into Florida and California to pollinate these orchards because the native species are no longer there, and there's nothing we can do about it.

And when we get to a point where we don't have the native species to reinvigorate the spaces, we'll be in trouble.

And there are fewer beekeepers, they're fewer bees than there was just 10 years ago.

And you know, the average age of farmers, what, 56 now?

- I think it's about 88.

(Steve and Rob laughing) Goodnight.

Retire, boys - Retire boys.

- It's time.

- Yeah, that's the thing.

You know, corn, self-pollinating, soybeans does not.

It doesn't need bees, right?

- Yep.

- So we in agriculture have done a very good job about learning how to grow two crops that are vital to the world.

I do think this next generation, because we get, farmers get very defensive, right?

- Yeah.

- That's where it's, "Ah, darn hippies," and all this stuff.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause we feel like we're being attacked.

But I do think that is changing, and there is a mindset, you do see farmers putting in more pollinators, doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add to their bottom line, but hey, you know, we like to see the monarchs.

- Yeah.

- We like to see the meadowlarks and all that stuff.

- Yeah.

- The meadowlarks are very...

So I think there is a happy medium.

- I think there's common ground there.

- Yes.

- And I think that's where we need to get to without the, all that.

- Yeah.

- The buttin' of heads.

- The buttin' of heads, yeah.

There's lots of opportunities to use conventional farming methods in such a way that it doesn't impact the stuff downstream.

And I think it has to do with making sure that the people selling the product is not overselling the product.

So we might be able to use less to get the same... - [Rob] Yeah.

- To accomplish the same mission, and I think that's where we should be looking at, is making sure that we are using targeted methods instead of scorched earth methods.

- Yeah, I agree.

Let's take a second to brag about yourself.

- Oh, oh my goodness.

- What is that?

- Okay, so this is an award from the Veterans Organization.

The Farmer Veteran Coalition picks a couple of farmers each year, and then they choose one of those farmers to be the award winner, and I was fortunate enough to be the award winner for 2024, mostly because I grow food and give it away.

So in the city of Chicago, we have hungry veterans, we have hungry children, and even some of the people that are being shipped in from other countries, you know, nobody deserves to be hungry, right?

Nobody deserves to be punished in that fashion.

So if there are organizations that are already giving away food, then I can grow healthy food that's not labeled organic, but grown using organic methods so that I can teach people about growing tomatoes and cucumbers and the different pests that are going to affect those things, and that is why they chose to award me, was because of that urge to create new farmers.

And it was through that urge to create new farmers that I started to find out all the information about how farmers are aging out and how these super corporations are coming in and buying up our small and medium-sized farms.

And when they control it all, then it'll be Walmart all over again.

- Yeah, and we all know how well that turned out.

Listen, you'll not do this thing justice on TV.

This is, it's like a piece of art.

- Yes.

- And if you can hold it in your hands, please tell me, this is not like in the back of your garage where people can't see it.

(Steve laughing) - No, so when I'm at the farm, I put it up.

I hang it up when I'm working at the farm, but other than that, I tend to leave it in a place where nobody's gonna end up selling it for scrap metal.

(Rob laughing) - So you gotta be proud of it, right?

Because I mean, I know you don't like talking about, you know, good stuff that you're doing.

I mean, everybody's humble, but I mean, what you're doing is helping your community, helping the world.

I mean, good people, good places, and you are recognized by your peers at that.

That's gotta make you feel good.

- It does.

Growing up Catholic, in the city of Chicago, the humble shall inherit the earth.

The meek shall inherit the earth.

You don't...

I wasn't raised that you brag on the things that you're doing.

The way that you leave this world is not with how much money you had or how much of a high score you racked up, how big your house was, but the people who remember you're after you're gone.

- [Rob] Right.

- So that's what I want is, because I tell people I'm living on borrowed time.

I had a terrible accident, probably shouldn't have survived.

Shattered pelvis, torn ACL, torn PCL.

- Oh my gosh.

- This femur was broken (snaps fingers) clean in two by the steering wheel, and when the dashboard hit me, hit my knees, it shoved this femur through my pelvis.

- Holy cow!

- Breaking the top of the femur, and... - You kind of need those.

The femurs, you need them.

- So I had two broken legs and I was fortunate enough not to have the steering wheel smash my chest.

So they told me after the accident that I was in the only spot in this vehicle where I could have been and still been alive after having a truck, the back part of the truck, the trailer go up and over the vehicle I was in.

- [Rob] Oh gosh!

- So I'm laying in the hospital bed in my living room for six months trying to think of what I can do to give back, and this is what came down, is that I needed to feed people.

You know, I needed to educate people so that we are aware of the things that we're losing by not being aware, if that makes sense.

- I think it makes a lot of sense, and you're better at that than I am.

I'll just... How about, if you want a compliment, that... - Well, thank you kindly.

- Yeah, actually it's not.

I'm a horrible person.

(Steve laughing) How do you say it, Miyawaki?

- Oh, Miyawaki.

- [Rob] Yeah, what is that?

- The Miyawaki method or the Tiny Forest method is basically a method of growing trees within close proximity of each other, preparing the soil and then just letting them grow wild.

They'll compete with one another.

Trees will exchange resources using the mycelial network.

Mushrooms.

- How do you know all these words?

- Oh, there's so many Latin words I don't know.

(Steve and Rob laughing) So mushrooms, right?

We call 'em mushrooms, but the mushroom is the fruiting body.

Most of it is underground.

We can't see it.

So that's how the trees communicate.

They trade resources using the mycelial network, so they put all these trees together and basically in a very small area, you create basically a forest, and we know that the more canopy there is in the neighborhood, the more peaceful it is, right?

- [Rob] Explain that.

- So the more tree coverage lowers the temperature in the city.

- And that's peaceful?

- It's peaceful when it's not 105 degrees and you're standing on the asphalt.

- Asphalt, yeah, that'll make anybody mad.

- That'll make anybody mad.

- Yeah.

- And then there are systems in our bodies that want to be in nature, that enjoy fresh air, otherwise nobody would fish.

(Steve and Rob laughing) - Chicago Peace Fellows.

- Chicago Peace Fellows.

- Yes.

- Is an organization...

I'm in the 2024 cohort, and basically they gather a bunch of people from Chicago and the surrounding areas, and they say, "Here's a couple dollars, do some good stuff," and then they stick us all together and then we try to figure out good things to do.

My good thing that I want to do is to make the little free libraries, to make those little boxes.

- [Rob] Oh, I seen those.

- Yes, yes, yes.

And so basically people stick them up and then people add books to them.

So I want to do those, but at the urban farms in the city and the community gardens so that we can talk about feeding minds and bodies.

Not every time somebody goes up to a farm, do they actually have the courage to go and say, "Hey, how can I help?"

Sometimes... - Yeah, farmers are so friendly sometimes, too, right?

- Well, in the city of Chicago, I'm not allowed to have the weapons that I might have in other places, so they frown on that.

(Rob laughing) - Those libraries, alright, I'm gonna admit something here.

I thought they were kind of silly, right?

- Yeah.

- But I was, where I get my hair cut, they have one outside there.

- Yeah.

- And I remember I was getting my hair cut, and she doesn't have me face the mirror.

That's a whole 'nother story.

So there was this car that parked and this kid gets out, I don't know, maybe eight, whatever, and he runs up there and he opens it up, he puts something back and he gets it, and he's, you know, flipping, and he's so happy.

- Yeah.

- I'm like, you know what?

Who am I to say things are dumb or not.

To that one kid.

- Yeah.

- He was having a ball.

- My father took my youngest three to the library that he used to go to when he was a kid, and he told them that the library seemed much smaller than what he remembered as a child, but him telling those stories about the farm and about hiding out in the library from his friends that wanted him to hang out and do wrong things, sometimes hanging out in the library, must have been impactful on me.

I decided I was gonna be an English major.

My bachelor's in English literature.

I married a woman who's a communication major.

My children are readers, and there's so much in society from the media that makes reading seem like a bad thing, and we're defunding the libraries and public... - [Rob] Are we?

I didn't know.

- Oh, and in New York City, he closed the libraries on the weekends, the mayor of New York City.

- [Rob] Oh?

- Because he said they didn't have enough funding.

- [Rob] Huh.

- So we are losing libraries as they try to pivot towards something that allows them to feel like they're providing something for society other than a place for people to cool down in the summer or warm up in the winter.

- [Rob] Yeah, so.

- It's hard, I think, for librarians right now.

They're just not...

They don't, librarians and teachers rarely get any respect until somebody's... - [Rob] You don't have 'em.

- And so somebody's had some their kids over the summer for a couple months, then they... - I find you fascinating, and I'll tell you why.

I've probably, I think we are at close to 5,000 people that we've interviewed over our career.

- Sure.

- Not just on this show, but with the XM show and all that stuff.

Very few people I can say communicate with the level that you do.

I don't know if that's natural.

I don't know if you've worked on it, but the way that you tell a story, the way that you connect, I'm assuming with the audience, it's very, very rare.

Is that just natural?

- My father's a storyteller.

- [Rob] Ah, genetic thing.

- Right, right?

Like, nurture, nature, it's something in there, and I think there was just a love of those stories growing up, and the jokes and what we call playing the dozens.

One of my twins, she likes to play the dozens.

So for the audience at home... - We hope somebody's watching.

- Right, right?

So anyway, the playing the dozens or signifying was a form of entertainment for people.

They would sit out on the porch on a hot day instead of being in the house, and you would just talk about one another.

You would make jokes at somebody else's expense, but you'd have to learn how to live with it.

So my daughter Maya and her sister Ella, they're identical twins.

Maya looks to her mother, Jamie, and she goes, "Can you plan identical twins?"

And my wife says, "No, Maya, what are you talking about?

No, you can't plan identical twins."

- Well... - And right, right?

And so Maya looks at her sister Ella and says, "That means one of us is a mistake."

- [Rob] (laughs) It's genetic.

- So is it's genetic, right?

So lots of laughter.

- [Rob] Instagram.

- Oh, sorry.

- [Rob] Archer Urban Farms Initiative.

- Yes.

- And your Facebook is Archer Urban Farming Initiative.

And your wife is running those, right?

- My wife runs those, yes.

- Okay.

- So she's the boss of me.

So if anybody's ever concerned if you see me out on the street doing something I shouldn't be doing, you call her right away and let her know.

- You wanna put that number down?

- No.

(Steve and Rob laughing) - Does she understand your drive, what you're doing?

- I think she understands my need to be moving.

She took care of me for those, and I wouldn't be here.

I would not have made it if she had not been the person caring for me during those months when I could not move.

I was no weight bearing on both legs, and she nurtured me back to health, so she understands how difficult it was for me to sit there and not participate in life, and so she gives me enough space to do this, and I really appreciate her for it.

I love her so much and, you know, but what do they say?

Behind every great man, there's a mother-in-law saying, "I didn't believe it."

- That's what women say.

(Rob laughing) Yeah, talk about conspiracies.

- Yeah, well, right.

(Steve laughing) You don't need a conspiracy when you have facts.

- We'll leave it there.

That was very nice.

Steve Archer from Chicago.

- Thank you for that.

- Very, very impressive, what you do.

Very impressive how you help people.

So I know it was not a short drive to come down here to Peoria, but I appreciate it, and I'm sure the people that you are creating food for up there in Chicago, too.

So Steve, thank you very much.

Everybody else.

- Thank you, sir.

- Yeah.

- Everybody else, we'll catch you next time.

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