Aaron Nichols talks with Matthew Britt, a Canadian entrepreneur at the intersection of renewable energy and regenerative food systems.
Matthew explains how his companies, Food Forest Abundance and The Commonstead, are helping families, schools, churches, and communities set up sustainable free food systems that pair naturally with solar and battery backup.
You can connect with Matthew on LinkedIn here.
Listen to this episode here, or on:
* YouTube
* Spotify
Expect to Learn:
* Why most people dramatically underestimate how much electricity and food they can generate on a small suburban lot.
* How solar and sustainable urban agriculture can work hand-in-hand.
* What the average person can do to make their home resilient and safe, no matter what the world throws at them.
Quotes from the Episode:
“Abundance is already here. Our food, our water, our energy – it’s all around us. We just haven’t been harnessing it the right way.”– Matthew Britt
“We don’t grow food. Nature grows the food. Our job is to work with nature instead of fighting it every step of the way.”– Matthew Britt
Transcript:
Aaron Nichols: Hello, everyone. And welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today’s guest is another very special guest. I am very interested in how renewable energy intersects with food systems, and I’ve said for years, I don’t want to save the world I want to save the wild.Today’s guest intersects with all of that perfectly. He helps people take their power back. It’s Matthew Britt, ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to introduce yourself.
Matthew Britt: Yeah, it’s awesome to be here. Thank you so much for having me on, Aaron. You know, it’s always awesome to connect with people who are on similar value driven missions and trying to make an impact.So I really appreciate you opening this up to me. And yeah, Matthew Britt, live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. So Canadian born and raised and really have a personal mission of life, health and prosperity.I’m a father, I’m a father of three. And I have spent the past 25 years in the making a difference space.
At first, I was in the personal training and health and wellness industry, and I helped people improve their lives and their health through movement, and breath work, and good food, and really the foundation being movement.And then from there, moved into the renewable energy sector and, you know, really spent a big portion of my life in the coaching, personal development, movement, all of that stuff space and then really extended that beyond by going into: how can I provide solutions that impact billions of people and what do we need now based on our world?
And when I got aligned and really understood that making the biggest impact where you can impact the most people and the biggest size of the marketplace really gives you that ability to make serious long-lasting change that adds tremendous value that gives you tremendous value back. And that’s where the renewable sector came into play, first with the solar and storage, but then learning all about the different efficiency technologies and things that could be done there.
And then realizing that one of the biggest things we can do is take our power back when it comes to our food, and stop fighting nature.And when I got exposed to where I’m an owner and employee with now called Food Forest Abundance, and then leading into what’s The Commonstead, it really became about how do we give people the awareness back that has been taken from us around the abundance that nature provides.
Nature is abundant. Food is grown by nature and it should be grown everywhere. No one should be without. And we’ve got this belief that you need to have a green thumb or you need to be a farmer in order to have food growing.But the reality is those people don’t grow food either. Nature does. Nature grows the food.
And nature harnesses the sun, right? Solar energy to drive high value natural things that are meant to interact with us, that give us energy, thereby being the food, right?So when we take care of the soil, which we’ve neglected forever, and we stop growing ornamentals all over our lawns and our yards that don’t want to be there anyway, that are liabilities for us, that we invest time, money, energy, and resources into to get no value back, really.
And we’re not saying replace all your grass, but utilize a portion of your property to produce some food and let nature produce that food for you.So, our mission over at Food Forest Abundance is to build a localized and decentralized poison-free food and plant medicine supply around the world, using the science of permaculture.
Aaron Nichols: And I’m interested in what do you think the average education gap is for, let’s say, the average homeowner.I know that you mentioned ornamental plants. I think a lot of people don’t know that lawn grass is the most watered crop in America.And poisoned.
Matthew Britt: Yeah.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah. You’re correct. Poisoned. Yeah.So, what do you think the average homeowner doesn’t understand about food systems?And also, how do solar energy systems, what we do, fit into this larger picture?
Matthew Britt: Yeah. So, the main thing is that there’s a gap as far as what they believe is possible.Right. Because when they think about growing food, they typically have one or two images that pop into their minds. One is they see an annual garden that mom or grandma, grandpa, maybe they keep and they say things to me like “I don’t have a green thumb,” or they see a monoculture farm and they say things like “I’m not a farmer.”
And when they think of both of those things, what they’re thinking of is something that does take a lot of time, energy, money and resources in order to manage.And the reason it does is because they fight nature every step of the way. Right. And nature is relentless. It doesn’t matter how much chemicals you put on anything, it does come back. Nature is relentless.
So instead of fighting nature, what if we started working with it? And that’s the first gap we have to close, helping people realize that we, I don’t grow food.You don’t grow food. We don’t grow food. Nature grows the food. If you live in Ontario, you might not get to grow pineapples.
Yeah, you grow what grows natively in that climate zone. But there are hundreds of thousands of edible and medicinal perennial plants that once you plant them, they come back year over year over year over year over year over year for decades, sometimes centuries, sometimes for millennia, depending on the plant, and will produce food, value for you that whole time.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah. And I know that you have history as a solar energy entrepreneur as well, and I’m interested in how it fits into this whole picture for you.
Matthew Britt: So, the solar energy piece definitely has to do, again, with taking your power back. The sun is hitting your roof. Why is it just damaging your shingles when it could be powering your home?Right. And why not store some of that electricity?
So, I’m all in on solar and storage, and even the other systems that exist today for energy production, and all of them have their place.The great thing with solar is it hits everybody’s house and not only does it go on roofs, there’s more and more technology improvements happening there.
Next thing you know, the whole exterior of the home is gonna be able to collect energy.
Aaron Nichols: Right. It’s not gonna be long, right?
Matthew Britt: We’ll be able to paint it on pretty soon. You’ll be able to paint it on, exactly. So it just makes, again, logical sense to be able to capture what is already here for us in abundance.See, we’ve been fooled to believe that everything is scarce, right? But it’s the opposite. Abundance is everywhere.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah. But there’s no money in abundance.
Matthew Britt: Right.
Aaron Nichols: Right. Yeah.
One of the guys on our team, Dave Hammes, who I’ve interviewed for the show and I think his episode will come out probably the week before yours, has mentioned that he wants to change the narrative and he wants to stop talking about solar deployment and talk about solar harvesting because it’s already there.You already get the sun. The sun is just shining on the earth and we now just have these things that you can just lay out in the sun and they will produce electricity.They don’t require you to dig up something and burn it one time so that you have to then go find more things to dig up and burn.We have better ways to do things.
Matthew Britt: Yeah, exactly. It’s extremely valuable. And I’m very grateful to be a part of that serious energy transition that’s happening right now.And I think that we’re going to see a rapid increase in the amount of people that are really ready to take on the adoption.
And, you know, I think the great thing now is everybody’s so much wiser. We’ve gone through the solar coaster as they say and it’s been ups and downs as an industry really finds itself, it gets its feet under itself and it really starts taking off. We’ve got all kinds of incredible innovations happening when it comes to energy and energy efficiency, all extremely important as we have more and more energy demands happening every day.
Where are we getting that from? Well, one, we should be able to use the energy we already have more efficiently, two, we need to produce more.And the wisest place that I can think of to be producing it from is the sun. It’s there for us.Let’s get it, right?
Aaron Nichols: I’m interested in what motivates people to come to you. Because I think, you know, for people to find a solution, they generally have to hit a threshold of a certain type of pain.And I’m interested what kind of pain drives people to you.
Matthew Britt: So we’ve got two kind of different businesses that we’re talking about here. One with Food Forest Abundance, and that’s where we’ll go first. That is the awareness of the poisons in the food system and the awareness of control mechanisms being applied to people in general and them wanting to take control of some of those things.
They know that the food system is full of chemicals and not so good stuff. So why not have the ability to take care of yourself in one way by producing some or all of your own food.And then two is just preparation; you know, people realize that there’s only three days’ worth of food in your average grocery store.
Right. What happens in a major interruption?
Aaron Nichols: Yeah, we saw that during COVID.
Matthew Britt: Now imagine that goes three weeks.If all the food is gone in three days, what are we doing for the next 17 of those three weeks?Right. And unfortunately, most people aren’t prepared. They don’t have anything at their homes extra. So when the grocery store runs out, they’re uh-oh, they get desperate.And desperate people do desperate things. So let’s try to prevent all of that from happening. Let’s grow food everywhere we possibly can.
Every house, let’s do a little.
Aaron Nichols: Oh, every house, let’s do a little. I’ll edit that section out, sorry, keep going.
Matthew Britt: Yeah. Yeah. Every house just grew a little.
Aaron Nichols: Right. And I mean, that same resiliency applies to solar energy. If you’re worried about your family’s safety, and you have solar and battery systems that, you know, in some kind of disaster, can power your home, then you live on a safe little island with the people that you love during an emergency like this. And if you add the ability to grow your own food, I mean preserve your own food, you have something very, very few Americans do.
Matthew Britt: Correct.And I help a lot of people add solar and storage to their lives still to this day. I just sold a system yesterday.This gentleman’s building the family compound and he’s buying three different storage systems. The first one he got, say, 40 kilowatt backup.And then he’s buying probably two 16 kilowatt hour backup battery systems. So we’ll have three big batteries on his property as well as solar for each one of those units.And it’s all because he wants to be resilient and self-sufficient just in case.
Aaron Nichols: And so I guess the next place to take it, I’d be interested in testimonial stories like general overviews, you don’t have to be too specific, but, you know, someone you’ve taken from zero to three. How does that person generally feel? What kind of things do they tell you after that? What’s that journey like for someone?
Matthew Britt: It’s extremely rewarding for them, because it now is giving them a consistent resource of food that is full of life force, right?You’re talking about fast food. What’s faster than walking out your front door, your back door, and grabbing the stuff right there.
And the journey is fairly quick for people. They go through a design process, and once we have that design finalized, then it’s about bringing that design to life on their property.And then from there, the implementation of all of that, depending on the age of the plants that people buy, takes a certain amount of potentially seasons for it to grow, or if you’re starting from seed, but if you’re growing a tree you’re going to have a few years before it’s producing the fruits or nuts or whatever it is that it’s bringing to you.
But if you buy older stuff, then it could be that same season or a year or two later.But we definitely try to set them up where they have both the long-term as well as immediate production, so we’ll implement annual crops in the beginning too, that then can be kept or not.
But everybody’s, we’ve done stuff at schools. Those are the most gratifying, and orphanages, churches. So we’ve done five different schools, two churches, an orphanage. We’ve done over a thousand design and builds in 54 countries now.And it’s, you know, teensy-weensy but what I liked about it was I’ve expanded my impact beyond where I was in 23 states doing solar and storage. I’ve now made an impact in 54 countries.
So I also saw there’s a much greater ability to scale my impact with this particular entry into the “help a person change their life, become more empowered, take their power back” world.It was a simple foundational entry point, which then I could help them also implement solar and storage.Right. And I can help them implement water systems.I can help them implement everything that they need to be self-sufficient on every level. Food, energy, water, healing, education, privatization, all of it.
Aaron Nichols: Right. And there’s such a snowballing effect there. I mean, one of the most interesting projects we’ve been lucky enough to do: last year we did a ribbon cutting for it, but we designed a ground-mounted solar array with a battery backup that serves an off-grid greenhouse on the property of a charter school in Philadelphia.
So they have this big field and now they have a hydroponic gardening system in there that is completely off-grid and the students get to handle the whole process of zero to food and they get to prepare some of that food in an on-site kitchen and run a local farmer’s market a couple times a year.And the interest in that has been incredible. I mean, as a ribbon cutting we did, you know, a local or actually our state congressman showed up for that district and that eventually landed us a backlink in NPR and we got featured there.And there’s a lot of interest in this stuff.
But I’m interested also in, let’s say, the average person that doesn’t have a lot of land, the average suburbanite. Are they able to get involved in this stuff as well?
Matthew Britt: So people can grow food inside their home. There’s technologies that are implemented in that case. Vertical growing systems, I got a partner I work with called Harvest Today.They make something called the Harvest Wall and it’s literally a wall that actually you can be double-sided if you want it to be that big, and you can grow 720 plants in a couple of panels.It will produce a lot of food for you.
You can grow on balconies. You can grow on your countertop. I have another partner called Go Microfresh, and they do countertop microgreen systems that are stackable and all beautifully designed, technology driven, nutrient-dense food growing right in your countertop.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because if you put solar on your home to power those things, it’s almost like you bypass—it’s like you put a barrier between photosynthesis, but you’re still powering it with the power of the sun. Like the sun there is…You can put them near windows and then also still power it from the power of the sun for sure. Yeah.
Matthew Britt: Right. The other thing too is, depending on, you know, you got a lot of people that obviously live in a city that are now today in condos and apartments. Right. But if they don’t live in a condo or apartment and they actually have a house even in the city with a small lot, you can grow on very small pieces of property.Right. That’s the great thing. It can be done anywhere.
You can put those plants in pots if you want.But then as you get, you know, into the larger yards, anything a quarter acre is a fairly large yard.But anything under a quarter acre we do designs for all the time.Right. But then we go up from there; our next, like we got three sizes. You know, we got under quarter acre, up to one acre and then up to three acres as kind of like our primary sizes. And then beyond that it gets very, very custom in size.
But everything is a hundred percent custom design specific for your size of property, utilizing local native perennial edible medicinal plants and all designed in a system that works with nature, meaning we design in seven layers of production. When you look at how people normally grow food in their mentality, them growing the food, they do it in either rows of just one thing or a whole system of just one thing.
That’s one layer. We go in seven, which is how nature does it, right? If you go outside to any green space that’s got some forestry around it, go look at that forest and you don’t just have one thing.You’ve got a mass diverse system in multiple layers. Your things that are growing underground, your ground cover, your small shrubs, your bushes, your understory trees, your canopy trees, and then oh yeah, you got vines in there and fungus.
So you’ve got a massive system that produces a serious amount of abundance in a smaller space.
Aaron Nichols: And how long does it take for the average person to start producing that abundance on their own land? If they, let’s say, you know, they go from a green yard that’s had a bunch of pesticides sprayed all over it to wanting to do this, how long does that usually take?
Matthew Britt: First of all, we can heal their soil very rapidly. And then as far as the design process, depending on the size you’re a month or up to, say, six to seven weeks, depending on how big your food forest is.And there’s multiple interactions with that customer.
And then from there, it is the implementation, which depends on how fast they want to do it. Because they get that design back, they can DIY that install themselves, they’re just following a blueprint. It’s just buying the plant and putting it in the ground.Or they can have someone come and do that for them, and then it just depends on scheduling on when that’s able to be booked and completed.
But once that stuff is all in the ground, things start growing right away, they start taking. Some stuff you’ll be able to utilize very quickly. Other stuff does take longer, right?So, you have a mix of speeds, depending on the plants that you’re utilizing at those times, but people’s journeys, it’s an ongoing thing. I think it’s kind of a better expectation: this is bringing something to life on your property that’s going to produce you value. It’s always going to be growing and evolving.
But to get it in the ground is inside of three months, and you don’t need permitting or things like that.Unless you’re HOAs; then they sometimes make them ask permission or tell them where they can grow. But you’re not waiting on, like, there’s no rules and regulations necessarily around like some of the blockages we have in the solar industry, right?
Like I’m trying to get solar installed someplace in a neighborhood, I’ll have the hydro company block me from doing it because they only want to allow 12% of homes in this area to have a solar array.Because the grid is so old, and if they’re going to add more, they have to go out and spend all this money to add new transformers and the big boxes, etc.We don’t have those type of things that hold us up in projects the same way.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah, there’s so much to solve, but I think people like you and people that run the local farm that I hang out at a lot and who work with their land rather than against it. There’s such a vision of a better future being painted there. And unfortunately, the way that things are now, it incentivizes not using the land the right way.
Matthew Britt: It does, yeah. I think, as we move forward, I mean, we have to adapt to these things or, you know, it’s just not going to be good, we’re just not going to have a world to live in that we want to live in.No, it’s very unfortunate, you know, the future generations, our kids, they’re the ones that are really going to feel the impact of all this.
Like, I would say it’s impacting us. But, you know, what’s that future look like if we continue to poison the earth like we are, poison the air, poison the water, poison the soil.It’s not—and unfortunately, you know, everybody is trying to do their best, right?
There’s these big agricultural producers, these farmers, there’s a lot of them that don’t want to use what they use.They feel trapped. They don’t have the education to do it a different way.
It’s definitely a mix of all these different things, right? Education, don’t have enough time to get the education, or at least that’s a story they tell themselves.They’re busy farming. They’ve also got quotas to hit, production numbers to hit. So for them, it’s a big risk to try something different because if they miss a quota, their whole season is out.Right. All the money for that year basically goes, poof.
Aaron Nichols: No. Well, as we’re thinking about that brighter future and we’re bringing it home, I end this podcast with the same question for everyone and it comes from the fact that a couple months ago, I was at my grandma’s 80th birthday party.
And as I was writing the LinkedIn post about it afterwards, I realized that she was born into a world where renewable energy, as we know it, did not exist.That was, you know, she was born ten years after the Rural Electrification Act in 1945. So the only way we knew how to generate electricity was to dig things up and burn them.And she was nine years old when the first PV cell was invented. And that was a fringe technology for years and then it’s only recently that we’re seeing the prices per watt that we’re seeing now and we’re starting to see mass adoption.
So if you’re just going to spitball and fantasize about the future, what do you think clean energy looks like in 80 years?
Matthew Britt: Well, the first thing would be that every roof, every exterior wall, every exposed space that we live inside of is all going to be collecting and producing energy.I think we’ll probably even finally have maybe some of the free energy devices that I think have existed for a long time, but have been quietly suppressed.
They seem to be making a reappearance quite rapidly, and the internet is disseminating and decentralizing that information very quickly. So it’s hard to shut up new advancements that are very abundance driven, very freedom driven, and because of that, the power of the internet and the decentralizing of the knowledge, I feel like we’re going to have a lot more abundance around us in every way.
All of our food, all of our water, all of our energy is going to be—it’ll be available for all of us.It already is. We’re just not harnessing it the right way. And I think we’re seeing a big awareness level increase right now amongst the greater general population.
And people are trying to see what’s possible. And because of that, the whole shift is increasing in momentum. And because of that, we’re going to have a lot more people asking for it and demanding it and doing it and inspiring others, which will then just continue to feed upon itself.
So I think the future is very bright in abundance. I’m excited to be a part of that, and grateful to have you a part of that as well and look forward to seeing, you know, what we can do together to accelerate the adoption and creating a world of abundance that really is here for us all.We all deserve it. It’s our birthright. You know, we’re born into this incredible place where we all live and abundance is here for us all.So let’s go get it.
Aaron Nichols: Amazing. And if people want to find you, where can they find you?
Matthew Britt: I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on LinkedIn, under Matthew Britt, and you know the other place would just be to send me an email.You can send me an email: Matthew at The Commonstead, The Commonstead, Matthew at The Commonstead, and I’d be happy to talk with you.
Aaron Nichols: All right. Thank you so much for coming on today, Matthew. For everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar and I look forward to talking to you next week.
