Adam Stevens | Growing Grateful Harvests: Heirloom Seeds & Community with Mr. Permie Bear
Adam Stevens, aka Mr. Permie Bear, joins InnerVerse to talk about his exodus to Beartaria, how he left the world of banking and finance behind to start minting a new currency, through the infinite abundance of seeds. As one the men behind Grateful Harvest Seed Company, Adam now provides his rural Missouri community with ancient kernels of life-giving magic, with endless return on investment. We'll also discuss the need for authentic community as society diverges into parallel heaven and hell systems, healthy soil tactics, the wealth of family, and much more.
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In this episode
Core themes
From Stockbroker to Missouri Farmer
Adam got into financial services young and landed a stockbroker job, expecting a hard city life chasing the dollar, until marriage and a first child in Texas raised the question of what to feed his son. A 10 by 10 community garden plot in North Austin soon doubled, a brutal Texas drought pushed the family to the Pacific Northwest, and he left the stock market for banking after seeing things he could not unsee. Raw milk, a farm internship and 32 acres followed, until a client who wholesaled organic dry goods told him to get off the fence. Two years later the family sold up for Missouri.
Faith as an Action, Not Lip Service
Asked whether unseen forces helped when he jumped, Adam offers what he calls a theory: God can either be listened to or can make not listening painful enough that you eventually do. He says he took a promotion he had waited three years for on the day a buyer was coming back to see his house, then was left siloed after a bank merger until he quit and relisted. His advice is to just do it, knowing plans shift, since his own Missouri plan has changed a dozen times. Chance frames staying in work that harms the soul as telling God "I don't trust you" and calls faith an action.
Permaculture as a Way of Seeing Patterns
Adam says permaculture changed his life in every way, one of the biggest being that he now sees patterns everywhere, from the dendritic branching of trees and rivers to a rare tomatillo whose seed pulp looked like a morel, along with behavioral and spiritual ones. He treats the patterns God has given, or those observed in nature, as a template that makes function stacking possible. His own ventures show it, since building a house on rural land opens talk of a permaculture design, a garden and seeds. He encourages people to turn hobbies into side businesses, and Chance adds that pursuing what resonates can grow into something fruitful.
Building Soil From the Microbes Up
Adam describes a fork between the chemical route and the natural one, and says his path led to soil, still an enigma to him. Matt Powers' book Regenerative Soil was his game changer, gathering ideas from Elaine Ingham's soil food web, John Kempf's work on complete photosynthesis and Chris Trump's preps, then laying out home methods like biochar, bioinoculants and liquid plant foods. Instead of asking why a plant is sick, he says, ask whether the microbes are healthy, since he sees deficiency climbing the food chain to us. He argues that food trucked in from far away lacks the resonance of where you live.
Can Soil Hold a Memory?
Chance loves the idea that soil could hold dormant genetic information, even of extinct life, and asks whether frequency could clear the Earth's emotional blockages. Adam points to horizontal gene transfer, then argues that silica, which he calls the main component of clay, silt and sand, stores energy and information the way computer chips do. He is still on the fence about electroculture, though his tomatoes and cucumbers on metal cattle panels do better. Chance suggests soil memory surfaces when needed, like memories in an energy field, and relays a story about dinosaur shrimp appearing in Arizona. Adam calls it an intelligence people may meet in old growth forests.
Quotes
“My favorite conspiracy theory, you might say, that everything's going to be fine, and nobody can stop you from living a healthy and vibrant life.”
“I think just being willing to stick your foot out there and see what that next step feels like, whether you stumble or whether you run, that's the big thing.”
“When we're playing in the corporate Babylon world, there's all these illusions set up and constant messaging set up to make you afraid that what you need is not available in your environment.”
“The patterns which God has given us, or as a lot of people would say, the patterns observed in nature, that's your template.”
“If you have hobbies, things you're going to do anyway, how do you turn those into a business? How do you make a side hustle from that?”
“Instead of starting with, "Why is my plant sick?" You got to go way, way, way down and say, "Are my microbes healthy?"”
“Transhumanism is about trying to get the human being to route all of its processes through a central processor like computers do.”
“I think one of the really interesting things to me about being human is I believe that we can be the greatest force for destruction or the greatest force for good.”
Adam Stevens, known as "Mr. Permie Bear," left a career in banking and finance to co-found Grateful Harvest Seed Company, growing and selling heirloom seeds from rural Missouri.
See all Adam episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
