DEEP DIVE: Green & Clean: Decoding Natural, Organic, & Eco-Friendly Products with Gay Timmons

Trina Renea  0:07  

Hey everyone, welcome to Facially Conscious. I'm Trina Renea, a Medically Trained Master Esthetician here in Los Angeles, and I'm sitting with my rockstar Co-Hosts - Dr. Vicki Rapaport, a Board-Certified Dermatologist with practices in Beverly Hills and Culver City, Rebecca Gadberry, our Resident Skincare Scientists and Regulatory and Marketing Expert, and Julie Falls, our educated consumer who is here to represent you. We are here to help you navigate the sometimes confusing and competitive world of skincare. Our mission is to provide you with insider knowledge on everything from product ingredients to medical procedures, lasers, fillers, and ever-changing trends. With our expert interviews with chemists, doctors, laser reps and estheticians you'll be equipped to make informative decisions before investing in potentially expensive treatments. It's the wild west out there, so let's make it easier for you – one episode at a time. Are you ready to discover the latest and greatest skincare secrets? Tune in and let us be your go-to girls for all things facially conscious. Let's dive in.

Rebecca Gadberry  1:27  

Hello, hello. 

Trina Renea  1:30

Hello.

Rebecca Gadberry  1:32  

Hi, Trina. I'm Rebecca Gadberry and I'm the Local Cosmetic Chemist/Scientist/Educator and Marketer in the group, and you just heard our beloved Trina. Say hello.

Trina Renea  1:45  

Hi, I am Trina Renea, Esthetician on the show.

Rebecca Gadberry  1:49  

Super esthetician. Mega, M.E.G.A Esthetician. 

Trina Renea  1:55  

I’m also vintage now. 

Rebecca Gadberry  1:57  

Yes, you’re vintage now. Okay. Well, we were talking about the benefits of an older expert being you know, in one of our past episodes, so. 

Trina Renea  2:07

We're smarter because we've been along longer, we learned more.

Rebecca Gadberry  2:10  

No, I don't really think that's the case. I know a lot of people in my age group who are not necessarily smart. Neverminded, we will not be going there. 

Trina Renea  2:22

Yes, reel the back in. What are we doing here today? 

Rebecca Gadberry  2:25  

Ancient wisdom are kind of a myth that is promoted by people in my generation. We're talking to Gay Timmons again. 

Trina Renea  2:35

Hi, Gay. Welcome back. 

Rebecca Gadberry  2:37  

Hi, sweetie.

Gay Timmons  2:35  

Hi. Nice to be. Thank you. 

Rebecca Gadberry  2:39  

Oh, we loved having you when we were talking about organic cosmetics of a few weeks ago. And we wanted you to come back as soon as possible. Now, for those of you who did not hear the episode with Gay Timmons, let me just recap a little bit about her intro. She is like one of the icons in the Organic Cosmetic Industry. And she's been around a long time, like we were just saying about people have been around a long time. 

Trina Renea  3:08

What part of the industry is she in? 

Rebecca Gadberry  3:10  

She is in the organic industry. The organic part of the cosmetic industry…I will kill you soon, I want you to know that. If she's not on future podcasts, don't come looking for me. No, she's a founder of Oh, Oh Organic, which is a company that's committed to supplying certified organic, sustainable and non-GMO ingredients. So, we're going to be talking in this episode about what those terms mean. As a matter of fact, we're going to spend the next whatever time we take with Gay talking about terminology that is confusing, misleading, misinterpreted, all connected to the organic, natural cosmetic market. And I cannot think of anybody better to talk to than Gay Timmons, because Gay is probably one of the people who helped define some of the terms that we'll be talking about. So, if we want a horse's mouth, Gay, I think you qualify as the leading horse in the race. Bet you've never had that great of an introduction before, the leading horse race. If you want to learn more about Gay, by the way, just visit www.faciallyconscious.com/guests and it will take you right to her bio. If you want to read any of her blog posts that she's written for the www.OhOhorganic.com site. We have taken the opportunity with Gay’s blessing to repost some of the ones that we really love, not that we don't love every one of them that's out there because you're a fantastic writer. But we took some for just highlights to put on www.Faciallyconscious.com/blog. And you can go and read some of her writings there. And I highly recommend that you do. I know, Trina you said you hadn't read any of her blog posts, and now, you understand the need to do that. 

Trina Renea  5:16  

Yes, for sure. I mean, being an esthetician, we should know these things, these terms, we should know about organic ingredients. Because, you know, a lot of your clients will be using them. And it's important, you're ahead of the game and know what they're talking about.

Rebecca Gadberry  5:29  

Right. So today, we're going to be talking about definitions. The clean, green, natural, organic, kind of definitions that we banty around as if we know what we're talking about. We really don't.

Trina Renea  5:43  

So, what's the first one? What's the main one?

Rebecca Gadberry  5:46  

I think we should start with organic, just a real simple definition, like it's an agriculturally grown source or something like that, Gay, but let's go to you to ask you that.

Gay Timmons  5:58  

Okay, so organic, is under the in the United States of America, and in the EU, and in Japan, and in Mexico, and in Canada, and in many other countries, there are regulations that define what the word organic means, when it's used as a claim about an agricultural ingredient. That was a lot, wasn’t it?

Rebecca Gadberry  6:22  

Yes, there is. And if people want to know more, go to the first episode in our episode list that says “Gay Timmons”, and we spend almost an hour talking about that.

Gay Timmons  6:34  

But that's how I look at it, and that's how it is legally viewed now is it has to do with an agriculturally or plant derived, there are a few things that are not necessarily from farms, but plants. So that is putting organic ingredient is and it has to be grown and processed in accordance with the regulations that are defined.

Rebecca Gadberry  6:56  

Are there animal derived organic materials? 

Gay Timmons  6:59  

Yes, yeah, there are. And there's organic lanolin there are… I mean, you can get organic milk all day long. Anything has to be derived from a farm based, and livestock is covered in that, we have a special livestock category in the law.

Rebecca Gadberry  7:23  

So, you can have an organic but not vegan product. So, if you're looking for organic, but you want only plant source also look for vegan, is that the tip there? 

Gay Timmons  7:36

Absolutely. 

Rebecca Gadberry  7:38  

Okay, good. How does organic and natural differ? What's the definition of natural? 

Gay Timmons  7:42  

So, natural actually does have a legal definition under the EPA. And it's defined under a term that is Naturally Occurring Substance. And all it means is that it has to come from the earth, and it has not, by virtue of its processing been changed chemically. So, if I take oil seeds and squish them, which is actually called Expeller Pressing, and I get vegetable oil out of those seeds or out of those nuts, that is a natural product. If I then applied hexane to it, I will be changing the molecules and hexane would not be allowed to still call that vegetable oil natural. You have to realize though, petroleum is natural. So that's it's covered in that definition. But again, if you crack and change the molecules, if when you start pulling apart crude oil, then you have a very different situation because you have changed the molecule again. So, there is a legal definition of ‘natural’, there is not really a legal definition of ‘natural’ under FDA. There are some green guides under the Federal Trade Commission – the FTC, and they increasingly are trying to wrap some descriptions around how we think of natural for consumer products.

Trina Renea  9:18  

So, what is green? What does that mean, the green?

Gay Timmons  9:23  

I think that means whatever somebody wants it to mean.

Trina Renea  9:28  

So, anyone can use the word green. 

Gay Timmons  9:31  

That is a completely unregulated word, as is clean. So, green and clean, they’re marketing terms.

Trina Renea  9:38  

Ah-uh. So, they have nothing to do with natural or organic, but now natural and organic can use the words green and clean.

Rebecca Gadberry  9:45  

Okay. I think we need to take a timeout for just a second what Gay is talking about is words that are regulated by the government versus words that are not regulated by the government, or marketing words. Anybody can use any of those terms. But if you use a term that's regulated by the government, you have to meet that regulation. If you … well, not necessarily on that, either. If you use a marketing term, it's whatever the company or the brand wants to define it as. 

Gay Timmons  10:21  

Yes. And actually, there was a lawsuit years ago, and I think it was Jason Cosmetics. And they had made a natural claim. And somebody said - You're not natural, because you have synthetic ingredients in your products. And when it went to court, they were able to demonstrate that on their website, they had described quite clearly to their customers, what they meant by the word natural. So, they won that lawsuit. And so, it really has to do with how well you describe what you mean, and what those claims are to you. And if they're not regulated, then you need to do the due diligence of have been pretty clear with consumers about what you mean.

Rebecca Gadberry  11:10  

Right. And that goes back to the Sephora lawsuit that's going on right now about what is meant by “Clean” because there's no regulatory definition by any government within the United States. So, it's what the brand determines it to mean, not what the consumer thinks it means. 

Gay Timmons  11:31  

I think they have that on their website, so one would hope that they will persevere. I think it is confusing. I feel sorry for consumers, because there's so many different words that people are using. But that means that as a consumer, you just have to get wiser and wiser about asking the question, what does that mean, and trying to find an answer and being comfortable with that answer from a brand.

Trina Renea  11:56  

So, what about when people use the word fair trade?

Rebecca Gadberry  11:59  

Well, hold on just a second, let's pursue the green thing a little bit more. Because even though it's a marketing term, not a regulated term. Gay, is there any commonality among the brands making a green claim? Or is that like the wild-wild west?

Gay Timmons  12:15  

I think this goes into a whole…

Speaker 2  12:20  

A whole different episode.

Gay Timmons  12:24  

It kind of does. I mean, I think that what happened was originally … okay, I know exactly what happened. Credo started using certain claims, they got sued. They started using the word ‘Clean’, because it was not regulated. And they described it clearly on their website, and they have been okay, since then. 

Rebecca Gadberry  12:47  

Who was that? Credo?

Gay Timmons  12:49  

Yes. And that was quite painful, because they, you know, I think the thing that is common is that people who are in that general direction, for the most part, are trying to make products that are renewable, that primarily come from plant derived materials, that they in some way think may be safer, because they've identified certain ingredients that are not the best for people or the planet. And so, I think there's a who … I'm trying to think of the term, you know, they aspire to something, but it's always as well defined as it should be.

Rebecca Gadberry  13:35  

The ideal, if you will. Okay, what does “Renewable” mean?

Gay Timmons  13:41  

Just exactly what it means. In other words, it’s pretty simple. Plants are renewable, you can plant them and they'll regrow year after year, either seeds or cuttings or whatever. Once you use up, you know, when we see these mountains of molecules that do not break down like most of the plastics, in fact, plastic, by definition does not break down. Plastic is plastic. And it does not, once we have taken that petroleum product and made it into a plastic, it does not degrade back into crude oil. Because crude oil, that’s dinosaurs, right. So, we don't have plastic back to dead dinosaurs. Yeah. It's a problem. It means it becomes a forever sort of chemical and those molecules are around all the time, so they are not renewable. And crude oil is not really renewable unless we can figure out how to get that backwards molecule from plastic back to dead dinosaurs.

Rebecca Gadberry  14:48  

Okay, so you had one that you wanted to do?

Trina Renea  14:51  

Yeah. What does Fair Trade mean?

Gay Timmons  14:55  

Fair trade is a Philosophy of ensuring that farmers, especially farmer groups, so for example, cocoa, coffee, tea, a lot of the herb growers, where there will be a region in which a particular kind of plant grows really well like coffee, and then there'll be one or two processors. So, the processor makes all the money because all the little guys who might have small farm plots will bring their product to him or her, usually him and he'll process it and sell it. And so, Fair Trade is intended to give them a fair price for those commodities and that's really where it started just with coffee and cocoa and things like that. They've tried to expand it to other growing, you know, it's kind of hard like in the United States, we have laws that protect people, we have minimum wage laws, we have child labor laws. Well, we did until recently. We have a lot of things to protect people and therefore, you're not going to have that if you have a great big farm that grows soy beans or corn or whatever. But the smaller growers can benefit from that. Generally, it adds a premium. There are over 200 Different Fairtrade standards. And right now, they're little problematic to me, and this happened with organic. Before organic was a law, like in the United States in 1996, there was something like 46 different organic standards, and they didn't have reciprocity. They didn't talk to each other. So, if you wanted to make a canned soup, and you had to buy organic ingredients from five different vendors, and they had five different certifiers, you couldn't put a single certified name on that, and that's one of the reasons we ended up with law. Fair trade is a similar situation. They do not share recognition or have reciprocity of the different standards. And some of them are much better. Eco CERT is a certifier. They have a fair for life standard. They put a lot of money back into the community, that community has the ability to spend that money as they see fit. You'll see this with a lot of women's groups like with shea butter, and argan, things like that. Fairtrade USA has a good standard. But again, they don't recognize each other. So, unless something's changed, but I don't believe they do. 

Rebecca Gadberry  17:47  

So, the logo that might appear on the container could say Fairtrade, but you don't know which one you're dealing with?

Gay Timmons  17:54  

Well, you can't use that logo, because that logo is a trademark. Usually, it's only going to apply to things like coffee. So, you're buying from one source that's fairtrade USA or fair for life. I sell products that are fair for life. I have a rose hip oil that is fair for life certified. I have, you know, some argan oil, some shea butter, things like that. But they are individual ingredients, they are not a finished product, which ideally, if you want to support women's groups, for example, if that's super important to you, you may want to have to use multiple ingredients from parts of the world and they're going to be certified under different Fairtrade standards, and necessarily make a claim.

Rebecca Gadberry  18:51  

So, a company that comes up with their own logo that says ‘fairtrade’ could mean anything. It's according to what the company says. 

Gay Timmons  19:02  

Yes. And it's a little mushy, you know, this is a rough one. And because there is a premium, there's not that many people in the United States who use it for cosmetics, again, it's mainly coffee and tea and cocoa butter.

Rebecca Gadberry  19:20  

What about RSPO? I mean, I've seen that on products that I actually make. So RSPO, that's become a new certification terminology, and it's rather controversial. What does it mean? 

Gay Timmons  19:36  

So, it stands for the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil - RSPO and there are four levels to that standard. Most of the large palm oil producers in Southeast Asia are members and the highest level is complete traceability so that you know, everything that you bought came from a particular farm just like we do in organic, where there's full transparency back to the grower. And then they have these other levels. And I should review that I haven't looked at it in a while. But one of them, for example is mass balance. So, you may buy 25% of that highest level, and then the other stuff comes from the other levels. So, your mass balance is 25% is the highest level of the RSPO. One of the things that people should do when they're buying RSPO as an ingredient is say, what level is this and look it up, you know that it's broken down on the website. Organic is automatically completely traceable back, I work with an organic palm project, you know, we have 200 growers. So again, it's grower groups with one processor.

Rebecca Gadberry  21:08  

Okay, got it.

Gay Timmons  21:10  

I work within Ecuador, so, you can see that same kind of thing happening there. They're certified through that processor. I forget which, whether they're their ECO Cert, Fair for Life or Fair Trade USA.

Rebecca Gadberry  21:31  

And what a processor does is take the raw material that's grown in the soil, and then turn it into whatever marketable good will be produced.

Gay Timmons  21:44  

Yeah.

Trina Renea  21:48  

Okay. I have a question. I'm moving on to another word. There's Degradable, Biodegradable, Compostable. What are the differences between those three?

Gay Timmons  22:04  

And you know, what's really interesting is it depends on which regulatory agency you talk to. It is like the lead limits, you know, the lead limits are different under FDA than they are under the EPA. You know, it's different. It's one thing for drinking water, and it's a different thing under CPSC for the kids protection stuff, you know.

Trina Renea  22:28  

They're basically all kind of the same, just a little different, like if you say it's filtered water, however, it's filtered, it doesn't matter. It's just filtered.

Gay Timmons  22:38  

it actually, there are very particular standards, and usually they're scientific. And so, it'll be something that is 100%, biodegradable, operative word being “Bio” there means it will degrade back to the biological subset that it probably came from. So, if you have you know, even lawn clippings, they are biodegradable, unless they have really a lot of synthetic pesticides on them. And then you have a portion of it that is not biodegradable. Generally, the definitions of these when you look them up under EPA, and EPA is the primary entity in the United States that looks at this, it will say how many days it will take under what conditions. Occasionally, I will get these hilarious things that say it will degrade. Now, Degradable just means a molecule will come apart. So, if you have one of those polymers, there's a polymer that's quite popular right now. It's an aqua late polymer, something … there's like three or four names in the inky name and two of them are Acrylate and Polymer. Acylates to do not break down and they talk about it being degradable, because the other three parts of the molecules will… the whole molecule will fall apart, it will degrade. But it does not biodegrade. It does not go back to what it was originally made from. 

Trina Renea  24:13  

Compostable. Isn't that the same thing as biodegradable because it's like a compost is stuff that goes back to dirt, right?

Gay Timmons  24:24  

A little sort of. So, compost is defined under USDA, and I think under forestry actually are some part of the USDA, the Department of Agriculture. And that talks about what you're doing composting is usually done on top of it, there's aerobic and anaerobic composting, and that specifically for creating new soil. So, it does kind of do that it does have to biodegrade but it doesn't always 100% biodegrade that's why we're having the problems when people start talking about plastic molecules or you know, little bits of microplastics being in thing. That will happen and compost, for example. There we are working on these things. In fact, I talked to a woman at a society of cosmetic chemists scientific forum in December in Los Angeles, who was on the federal program to redefine all of these terms, because they just really need to kind of get up to speed.

Trina Renea  25:37  

That is very confusing for that normal person. 

Gay Timmons  25:40  

Yes. But that's what your SDS is supposed to tell you, when you have an SDS sheet or a Safety Data Sheet. There is a section on biodegradability and it should be filled in and if it is not, people should go back to their supplier and say, give me the information. 

Trina Renea  25:56  

Because that’s what transparency is? 

Gay Timmons  26:00  

I would say so. Yes. You know it, and a lot of it is because they don't want to take the time to go back. Especially with supply chains, if you have some distributor who's bought something and it's gone through five other people's hands. When they're making their version of the SDS, did they get the information? It's available, but you have to take the time to get it and put it on that document.

Rebecca Gadberry  26:27  

And I know them is MSDS as the Manufacturer Safety Data Sheet. But all places of business over a certain amount of money that they sell or their revenues, have to have these on premises including salons and dermatologists office. And you can also look them up online, can't you if you're a consumer and you're concerned? 

Gay Timmons  26:57  

Yeah, I looked them up frequently to see certain things like your dishwashing soap and stuff like that. You can look all that up. 

Trina Renea  27:05  

So, have 10 more minutes. Can we talk about the words that everybody needs to know right now, in the last 10 minutes? We might have to come back for another episode.

Rebecca Gadberry  27:17  

Well, I'm curious about Wild Crafting. I see that and I mean, I know how I interpreted it, but how would it be interpreted by wild women?

Gay Timmons  27:40  

But it's actually a regulatory phrase, you can be certified to the wildcrafting standard, okay, which is incorporated in the organic regulation under the Department of Agriculture. So, for example, I sell a well, Shea butter is wildcrafted. Those trees are not farmed. They're indigenous to the area. And they contribute to the revenue of women who live in West Africa. And in the case, I'm thinking about there's I think 11 groups of women. And so they go into the forest, they collect the Shea nuts when they're ripe and then they do the initial processing and off we go. And so that is wildcrafting, they're collecting them from the wild. There is a certification process, and it's pretty simple, you have to prove that you are not hurting the plant. So, you have to know how much you can harvest without damaging the plant, or putting the ability of that plant to reproduce at risk. And you have to demonstrate that there's no what they call prohibited materials, which would be pesticides and things like that applied to that area. So, for people like I also work with rose hip project out of Patagonia, same thing. Those are indigenous groups who live in the area to the Chilean government, they have protected those areas so that the indigenous peoples who live there can collect those rose hips and process them for rose hip tea and rose hip seeds to make rose hip seed oil. And those can be sparked, like the one I have is certified as wildcrafted. So, it's technically considered organic.

Rebecca Gadberry  29:34  

Okay, I know.

Gay Timmons  29:37  

It can be defined, but sometimes people will say wild sourced. That's where we got witch hazel for years, you know, grows like by rivers and, I mean, every plant has its special little place to be and, you know, sometimes those are things that aren't necessarily farmed.

Rebecca Gadberry  29:59  

Hmm, I know Meadow Sweet. I worked with a company for years, I designed almost all their products for the first two years, called Garden Botanica, this was back in the late 80s, early 90s. And we sourced a wild crafted meadow sweet that grew on the sides of highways in Oregon. And I always love that story. And today, I mean this last week, I was sourcing a wild crafted Marula oil from Africa. 

Gay Timmons  30:32  

Yeah, it's the same thing as the Shea. It's an indigenous tree and grows everywhere. And it provides an enormous amount of nutrition and then the nuts that can be converted into an oil.

Rebecca Gadberry  30:46  

And it's also not going to be necessarily identified in your product. So, you really need to know the brand and who they are, what they stand for, and whether you can trust them.

Trina Renea  30:58  

Why would you want to… I mean, would there be another way that isn't wildly crafted of getting a Shea if it's… so they do have farms that make the Shea trees?

Gay Timmons  31:17  

I have not been to West Africa. I can't answer that. I've been to a lot of the places where I work with ingredients, but I have not been there. So, I don't know. I think almost all of them, they actually are refurbishing the forest, they are planting them. But it's not like a crop year where you go out and you plant a crop and you harvest it. It's time. And it's not like the orchards we have, say in California of nut trees.

Rebecca Gadberry  31:51  

What's a Black List? I've heard of that.

Gay Timmons  31:55  

Yeah, Black List they always make. That's where the whole clean and green industry kind of stuff to create. But so, there's a big difference between a regulation and a standard. Regulation is the law, there's enforcement, there are people who violated the organic laws, for example, who went to jail. It has happened. But a black list, I think the easiest way for people to say these are when you say we don't use all of these things, and they start listing all these chemicals. The problem is that is you know, I think in the inky dictionary, there's something like 13,000 chemical names, and you can't list you know, you can't find all the things in those 13,000 that you're not going to use, because a lot of them are sort of analogs of another, you know, if you don't use Sodium Laureth Sulfate and Ethoxylated oil, which is a particular type of chemical process, how many can you ethoxylate any oil. So, you can have the Sodium Lauryl, which is Lauric acid, which comes from say coconut. And then you can have all other kinds of ethoxylated versions of different oils, both of them are in blacklist or not, I don't know. 

Rebecca Gadberry  33:21  

So, Ethoxylate is an oil or a material of fat that's been treated with a petroleum ingredient called ethylene oxide. And you can recognize its use in the ingredient that you're looking at, because part of the ingredient will end in ETH, or it might have PEG, all caps usually, in the ingredient name. The problem with them, are that they have components of them. First, it's a petrochemical that's being used, and as we've discussed with Gay before, we want to start moving away from petrochemicals for many reasons, listen to the past podcast because we go into it for about five minutes. But the other reason is, is because there are contaminants leftover from the processing that can be carcinogenic. So, unless you have a highly purified ethoxylated material. And the reason that we do ethoxylation is to reduce irritancy to increase water solubility of this fatty material. When we process it, we have to remove all of the contaminants and one of the contaminants that can be left behind is one comma four dioxane and we know that that's a carcinogen so we want to make sure that they're completely removed. Unfortunately, as a consumer, there's no way for you to know if that's been done. So, you need to again get to know your brand and get to know how ethical they are and whether they care about those things, right.

Trina Renea  35:05  

Okay, well.

Rebecca Gadberry  35:07  

Is your brain spinning now? Is your mind spinning?

Trina Renea  35:11  

I'm going to let you take the takeaway for this episode.

Rebecca Gadberry  35:15  

I think I just gave the take away.

Gay Timmons  35:17  

One thing we didn’t talk about was Regenerative because I keep getting people ask.

Rebecca Gadberry  35:21  

You wanted to talk about that. 

Gay Timmons  35:24  

Yeah, I do just because people keep saying do you regenerative ingredients… regenerative is a new-ish, not really version of organic. And I think that one of the things they're trying to do is it starts with the organic standard, and then it adds some other sustainable things to increase the sustainability of farming. And so, unfortunately, at this point in time, from what I have read, they're only doing regenerative for actual crops, not for processed products. And it's sort of a moving target at this point.

Trina Renea  36:11  

Is that what you tell people when they ask that question, you say it's for the crops, really?

Gay Timmons  36:16  

Yeah, right. And I haven't seen anything in the processed world that says it's regenerative. I know, for example, that the palm project that I mentioned, like they're growing their own trees, they're sort of integrating the whole process of replacing their trees and having more robust healthy trees and working with more biodiversity around the plant and the plantations. So, that's the direction they're going, they just haven't gotten to the processed product part of it. Because I mean, Regeneration has a very particular meaning and I don't think that it really applies to processing. So, I'm not quite sure how they're going to do it other than to somehow track it through from the crop. 

Rebecca Gadberry  37:11  

Well, for me regeneration, as a gardener means that I'm using the seeds that I grow in my garden to regenerate the plants that I've already planted to for new generations regeneration. Is it similar to that?

Gay Timmons  37:29  

That's part of it, certainly. And I think biodiversity is a huge part of it, the potential loss of flora and fauna on the planet is increasingly concerning to anybody who looks at the natural world and in ensuring that we have a bio diverse environment around farming operations, is intended to help address that, right.

Rebecca Gadberry  37:59  

Because then we get more robust plants. 

Gay Timmons  38:05  

You can tell. I mean, it's just the soil is healthier. And that's the other thing is, is really big focus on soil health. And that means you want to have lots of bacteria and micro life in the soil that's helping keep everything as it should be.

Rebecca Gadberry  38:32  

A diversified microbiome.

Gay Timmons  38:34  

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. The microbiome of the soil. 

Rebecca Gadberry  38:39  

So, when we take a look at this type of soil, we started talking, the first episode that we did with you about carbon dioxide, CO2, being trapped in organic soil. Is this part of what we're talking about here?

Gay Timmons  38:57  

Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean, when you talk about the regenerative stuff, it's like when you compost, the materials from your garden that you cut up and then you can put they turn them into soil and put them back onto your soil. You're keeping you're adding humus material you're capturing CO2, you're adding nutrients, and you're returning it is truly renewable and therefore regenerative.

Rebecca Gadberry  39:25  

Excellent. Oh, I love that definition. All right. 

Trina Renea  39:29  

Can you do a proper take away? Oh, wait, no, we'll let you go. We'll let you go, Gay. And then we'll do it so you don't have to.

Rebecca Gadberry  39:37  

Go buy organic produce. I love organic produce.

Gay Timmons  39:44  

So, go to my Munnery market over in Berkeley, so thank you so much. I really appreciated it. 

Rebecca Gadberry  39:51  

Oh, that was amazing. I loved it. And I think upcoming episode on GMO and non-GMO and another one on fermentation, which is fascinating. So, we'll be bringing back… 

Trina Renea  40:10  

Oh, fun. Are we going to talk about wine?

Rebecca Gadberry  40:11  

We might. We’ll be talking about beer, we’ll talk about wine, but we'll be talking about skincare as well.

Trina Renea  40:14  

Oh, right. 

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