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The earth offers a lot of things that make us and the entire planet healthier – we only have to know which things are genuinely good for us. Ric Scalzo joins Corinna Bellizzi to share how he masterfully combines his knowledge with herbal medicine, regenerative farming, and ancient traditions to bring healing to people and the world as a whole. Ric explains why he believes the future of medicine begins with a microbiome of the soil and ourselves, as well as how to grow high-quality crops through regenerative practices while keeping the soil healthy. Ric also shares the many lessons he has learned from founding Gaia Herbs to starting his newest venture Kokora Life.

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About Ric Scalzo:

Ric Scalzo began his exploration of herbal and naturopathic medicine in 1980, delving into fields such as Naturopathic Herbal Medicine, Eclectic Herbal Medicine, Ayurvedic Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and various diagnostic methods. He earned a master’s degree in Herbal Medicine from the School of Herbal Medicine and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Naturopathic Medicine from Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. After several years of medical practice, Ric founded Gaia Herbs in 1987 and grew Gaia to the most respected and successful herbal company in the country. After selling Gaia in 2019, Ric established the Institute of Botanical Research in Arizona and established CR Medicinal Farms, a regenerative organic farm in Costa Rica. These became the stepping stones for his new adventure called Kokora, a herbal products company focused on regenerative organic cultivation with a mission to “create the finest herbal remedies that promote health and vitality for all”. Celebrated for his pioneering work in Herbal Medicine and his dedication to preserving herbal integrity for over four decades, Ric continues to innovate in the field and plays a key role in integrating regenerative agriculture with herbal medicine.

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kokoralife

Guest Website: https://kokoralife.com

Guest Social:

Show Notes:

• 00:03:08 – Ric’s Origin Story
• 00:06:44 – Merging Traditional Wisdom With Modern Science
• 00:10:25 – Making Herbal Products Palatable
• 00:14:50 – Nutrition Density In The Soil
• 00:21:03 – Differences Between Regenerative And Organic
• 00:28:09 – Weeds: The First Succession Of Life
• 00:30:58 – How The Regenerative Movement Grows
• 00:39:50 – Growing Your Own Ingredients
• 00:45:10 – Ric’s Five Core Principles
• 00:51:27 – Plants As Teachers
• 00:50:25 – The Story Behind Kokora’s Name
• 01:09:19 – Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

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Healing The Soil Through Regenerative Farming With Ric Scalzo

Our guest is a pioneer in herbal medicine and a true champion of the regenerative movement, Ric Scalzo. Before we get started with Ric, I have to share a tree planting update through our partnership with ForestPlanet.org. We planned to plant over 20,000 trees in 2025. As of April 24th, 2025, when we’re recording this episode, we’ve planted over 8,300 trees, which means we are well on our way.

You can help us screen past that 20,000 objective. We’re planting a tree for every new subscriber, whether on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or to our newsletter on CareMoreBeBetter.com. That means we’ll plant more than one tree for each of you. Open up those apps, smash those buttons, and follow along to help us create a greener world.

You may know Ric Scalzo as the Founder of Gaia Herbs, a brand synonymous with integrity and herbal potency. After selling Gaia in 2019, Ric turned his attention to deeper regenerative practices, founding the Institute for Botanical Research and establishing CR Medicinal Farms in Costa Rica. He’s leading Kokora Life, a new venture that weaves his four decades of herbal medicine experience with the wisdom of regenerative agriculture.

In this episode, we’ll explore the intersection of ancient herbal traditions and cutting-edge soil science, discuss the potency of plants grown regeneratively, and discover why Ric believes the future of medicine begins with a microbiome of the soil and of ourselves. This will be a regenerative conversation. With that, Rick, welcome to the show.

Thank you. What a beautiful introduction. Thank you.

Ric’s Origin Story

It’s well-deserved. You’re an icon in the industry. I can say that comfortably. Thank you so much for joining me. I’m thrilled to learn more about you. I’ve listened to you guest on a few podcasts, including Jeffrey Burke and his show. I believe he’s a collaborator of yours at Kokora. I wonder if you could start by telling us what originally drew you to the healing power of plants and a bit of your origin story.

That’s an interesting question to start off with, because when I got involved with plants, it was in my college years. I was looking for some answers to the origin of the universe and who God was. I was majoring in philosophy in college. I wasn’t getting clarity or the answers that I was hoping to get, so I went out and meditated in nature one night and asked for some answers. The only thing I could come up with was that if I wanted to get closer to the origin of the universe, I needed to study plants.

I dropped everything. I did a 180 and went to herb school. I went to naturopathic school and began my journey. This was long ago. That led me into a lot of different avenues of plant medicine, diagnosis, and treatment. I worked as a medical herbalist in a medical office and saw over 10,000 patients. The whole experience has led up to this moment. This moment is about, for me, how to live a regenerated life and what that looks like. You mentioned something beautiful about the soil food web as a very important part of regenerative life. That’s been a big focus for the last few years of understanding where it all begins.

You and I have both been in this industry for a long time. I also got my start on the herbal side of things back in 1999, working for Draco Natural Products. I was working with brands to create formulas that harness the full potential of herbs that were full-spectrum and then standardized to a key marker. I had this sense even then, as I was getting to know supplements in this field, having come from the perspective of an undergraduate study in anthropology, wanting to know more about people, and wanting to explore and understand what motivated us.

One of the things that drew me to working with nutrition over going to become Ms. Archaeologist was the fact that I felt I could have more impact by learning more about how nutrition could impact the lives of people. What people eat in a day is dramatically reduced, not just because the foods are mass-produced, but because they’re not even eating a wide variety of foods anymore.

There’s research that says most people consume only ten plants a week. That’s their variety or their bread basket. It’s the bounty, the lettuce, cucumbers, celery, carrots, and maybe a few other things. The bounty available to us has become something that we’re, generally speaking, as Americans, less familiar with than we should be.

Merging Traditional Wisdom With Modern Science

I feel like what you’re doing and what you have done with your history with Gaia and also with Kokora is that you’re encouraging us to stay integrated with these roots. I wonder if you could talk about this journey that has consistently merged with what that traditional wisdom is with modern science and what lessons you might have integrated from Gaia that are informing what you’re doing with Kokora.

The whole thing about making good herbal medicine, which has been my journey, how to bring the very finest herbal products to the world, all begins with growing good herbs. It is knowing the plants from which these medicines come. There’s a whole lot packed into that in terms of supply, cultivation, seed selection, and being sure that you’re selecting the right variant or cultivar.

I’ve spent a lot of time at Gaia when I was there, looking at cultivars and which are the more authentic cultivars that go back into traditional use and being sure that what we’re claiming is indeed the correct genus and species that is used traditionally. I’m proud to say I made some impacts on certain crops, ashwagandha being one of them. Holy basil was a big one.

We looked at over ten cultivars that had been used in the industry unclaimed to be holy basil, but not the original cultivar used traditionally in medicine. We cleared that up. I brought that cultivar to Costa Rica. A big point for me is bridging this knowledge for the consumer and the retailer because they don’t think about these things. They don’t think about what goes into making a quality medicine. Do I have the right genus and species? Am I  extracting it properly?

It was back in about 2010 or 2009. You went through a bit of a rebrand at Gaia. You had this transparency QR code or something to that effect on the box where people could trace the origin of every herb, right?

Yeah. We’re doing this with Kokora. It probably would be more of a story we tell with Kokora since we control a lot of the raw materials that we grow in Costa Rica. My point, to answer your earlier question, is that there are so many components if you are going to adopt the traditional use of medicine and how that converges with the research and science on herbal medicine and all the different components that are involved in bringing good quality herbal products to the market. It’s vast. I hope your consumers would appreciate what goes into making a quality herbal product. It’s not about the fancy packaging or the convenience of being a gummy, because it tastes sweet and good. What goes on in making a quality herbal product is pretty vast in my world.

Making Herbal Products Palatable

You could speak to that broadly. What goes on behind the scenes to make a quality supplement of any stripe is complicated, frankly, especially if it is an organoleptic. Full disclosure, your team sent me a kit, which included a variety of your first products with Kokora. I have been sampling them. One is a mushroom mocha, which I can proudly share with people.

I tried your golden milk. You’ve chosen not to sweeten these at all so people can sweeten to their palate. Traditionally, in the golden milk space, they might include things like coconut sugars, honey crystals, or sugar of some sort in a golden milk. They don’t give you that option. I like to use local honey. The reason I like to use local honey is that I suffer from seasonal allergies, and I like to support local businesses.

What I have found as a major controller for any seasonal allergies I suffer from is that if I get honey from a local apiary that’s in my neck of the woods, I don’t get itchy or sneezy issues. I don’t have my eyes swelling up. I’m not going, “The corners of my eyes  itch, hurt, and all that.” All of that goes away. If I routinely consume local honey, everything’s good. Your product allows me to do that.

What I’ll also say is that by having this history of formulating with herbs, I know some of them don’t always taste very good. You’ve done a pretty good job of making that very palatable. Cacao, in particular. I’ll always do cacao. I eat raw cacao nibs. I’ll put it on my yogurt. It’s delicious. There’s coconut milk and Turkey tail, which is Trametes versicolor. It’s the correct one.

There’s mucuna seed, reishi fruit body extract, lion’s mane, shiitake, maitake, Chaga, Cordyceps, ginger root, and monk fruit. The monk fruit does sweeten it a bit, but it’s not there in the flavor too much, which is good because sometimes, that’s too much. You only put 40 milligrams in. Talk to me about how you’re able to formulate these to make them palatable and enjoyable, and what something like this could do for my health. You’re giving so many extracts of fruiting bodies of mushrooms. People don’t necessarily understand everything about why mushrooms are so helpful.

Mushrooms are a unique contribution to the health and wellness space. They are very unique because they connect us to 50 million years of evolution that have taken place in our soil from the first hyphae and mycelia masses that were created by the leaf-cutter ants, of all creatures, in our soil. They were the first regenerative farmers, the leaf-cutter ants.

They milk an aphid, don’t they?

They do create an excrement that enables the generation or production of single-stranded hyphae, which is what the workers in the nest feed off of. It creates fungal growth around it. That single-stranded hyphae is indeed the first aspect of regenerating soil. When you talk about mushrooms, they connect us to a long history of what breeds life and regenerates life, and I believe that’s in the soil.

This whole soil food web, which mushrooms tap into so beautifully and are an expression of soil that’s rich in the food web, and I’m talking about beneficial fungi, bacteria, nematodes, arthropods, macro arthropods, and protozoa, is the soil food web that makes the magic in our food and our medicine happen. It brings nutrients to the roots. It enables the environment of the soil to be compatible for the plant to grow in. It increases nutrient density.

Nutrition Density In The Soil

Will you stop there for a second? I want to talk about that nutrient density piece. I’m afraid that otherwise, we might meander into a path that takes us away from it. There’s so much to learn, specifically about how soil affects nutrition. Two things. First, if people want to envision what the mycelia of mushrooms are like in soil, they’re almost like capillaries that deliver nutrients from one thing to the other. I say almost because it’s not exactly true, but it provides a mechanism through which plants can communicate.

What we know is that when you have a healthy microbial presence in the soil, trees in a forest can sacrifice some of their sugars to other trees to help them survive if they get hit by another type of fungus that destroys the tree or pests that comes and hits their bark, their leaves, or something to that effect. There are all sorts of ways in which these trees can communicate through this mycelial network.

We are also starting to be able to document that healthier soil produces plants with a better nutrition profile. This would make sense, but conventional farmers have said it isn’t true forever. Yet, we know that before 1970, spinach had more iron in it than it does now. What are you seeing in the science where you’re growing?

I’ll give you a couple of examples. We grew turmeric root organically on our farm in Costa Rica for 2 or 3 years before we converted to regenerative. Our yields were about 2.5% and 3% total curcuminoids. After one year of switching over to regenerative organic agriculture, meaning that we attended to the soil food web and built that up, and a number of other factors, the total curcuminoids in 1 year went from 2.5% slash 3% to 8.5%, almost a three and a half to a fourfold increase. That’s very significant. Also, for those farmers who would say, “I can’t afford to do this,” I would argue in my case, our biomass yield from that same hectare that’s about two acres and a little over, but in exactly the same area that we grew previously and got 15,000 kilos per hectare growing regeneratively, we got 80,000 kilos per hectare.

Turmeric looks a lot like ginger. For those who aren’t familiar with turmeric root, you can see it at some grocery stores. Sometimes, they’ll have it in the bin right next to the ginger, but it’s more orange. It’s the rhizome of the turmeric plant, right?

Yeah, it is. We use the rhizome, the little fingers. I say that to respond to your question about nutrient density. In this case, nutrient and phytochemical density are synonymous in terms of turmeric. I’m talking about the phytochemical density, but the nutrient density is much higher as well. This makes a whole lot of sense. If you’re growing food with more nutrients in it, you’re going to be healthier. If you’re growing medicine with more phytochemicals in it and extracting it properly, you’re going to get more benefit.

If you are growing food with more nutrients in it, you will be healthier. If you are growing medicine with more phytochemicals in it and can extract them properly, you will get more benefits.

There is an important thing that’s the unseen factor. You alluded to it, and I wanted to pick it up because what you were saying earlier is relevant. There is wisdom in nature. Nature has intelligence. This is what enabled these two trees to connect in an unseen, non-communicative way. There is wisdom and intelligence at play.

When our plants grown in regenerative soils are being exposed to a higher value of microbiology, that is implanted. Energetically, that microbiome of the soil is implanted into the plants that we are going to make as medicine. Thus, anything that’s grown in a microbiome-rich soil is going to have the blueprint of that for our own gut when we ingest it. It is going to benefit in a way that connects us to nature so beautifully.

The story is deep. It makes sense. I like that we’re getting to a space where the science is following logic. If you put more nutrients in the soil, as well as more minerals and everything else, the plant grows better. It’s going to be healthier. It will also have a better nutrient profile. Farmers who grow in vertical farms indoors and control every input notice the same thing. Why wouldn’t it be the same when we bring it into the soil and grow plants in our natural environment? Why would it be different?

The work done at the Rodale Institute, which is a big advocate of regenerative farming, the work that they’ve done on an amino acid called ergothioneine, and in growing legumes has shown that growing legumes in regenerative soil with a higher soil food web produces more ergothioneine in the bean or the legume. This is an amino acid that’s essential for our longevity, but we don’t get it in our foods anymore because our soils are so depleted.

Differences Between Regenerative And Organic

It’s proving out. I wanted to speak with you for a moment about something I’m doing some research on, and that has to do with consumer perception, even the perception of industry professionals like yourself, me, and certifying bodies. This is the story of regenerative versus organic. Kokora Life emphasizes regenerative organic agriculture. I would like for you to define for our audience, from your perspective, how you define the difference between organic and regenerative organic, and then regenerative on its own.

In terms of growing regenerative versus organic, at Gaia, we grew organic for 25 years. However, my organic program was crop rotation. It was cover cropping. It was composting a little organic fertilizer. Over the years, I was able to replenish the soil. What I was never able to do was move the needle. Every year, when I would test for the nutrients in the soil, I would think, “I’m doing all this to the soil. Next year, my soil is going to be more nutritious.” It wasn’t. It was always the same year after year. Until I started to reflect on this going to regenerative farming. I understand why I wasn’t moving the needle.

Can I guess?

What would you think?

I would think it was tilling.

Trailing is a big part of it. For your readers, tilling is exposing the microbiome, the soil food web, to the sun. All of this release takes place in the atmosphere. You’re losing all of the essential nutrients that sustain the soil food web. You lose it. Tilling is an important part of it. In regenerative farming, we don’t till. We make beds, so we work on the top few inches, but we don’t plow our soil.

The biggest thing I did was develop my bio fermentation facility. I built a bio fermentation facility. We call this MM in Costa Rica. It stands for Mountain Microorganisms. We went to the forest around the farm, gathered some of the top half-inch or three-quarters of an inch in the understory in the forest, and brought it back to the bio ferment lab. We mixed it with molasses, rice semolina, coffee hulls, cinnamon, and cloves. There are a few other ingredients I know that are in there.

We took all of that, mixed it all up, put it in a large 55-gallon sack, tied it up, put the sack in a 200-gallon tank of water, and let it ferment for 2 weeks. Our entire farm is treated with this fermentation process. We’ve made our own nutrients with this ferment. We’ve made potassium, phosphorus, iron, zinc, calcium, and whatever we need for the soils. We’ve made our own pathogen control remedies, our own trichoderma and streptomyces, that’s used if we see any pathogens on the plant.

We’re fully nourishing our farm with what was originally the wisdom that was originally in the forest floor, which has fermented and created its own biome. How we get it deep into the soil is that we use an implement called the yeoman’s plow. It’s a 24-inch shank that’s only 1 inch wide. It’s not a plow. It doesn’t turn over the soil. It creates a 1-inch wide space 24 inches deep. We inject this mountain microorganism solution into the soil, and there’s an explosion of life that takes place. It’s amazing what we see year over year. Our soils are transformed.

I feel like I need to see this fermentation process. At first, I was thinking something more like what you do with vermicomposting and making black teas or something like that from it.

That’s a whole separate function of our farm. We do our own vermicompost and vermicompost tea with worm castings. Bioferments and making your own microbiome solutions are a big part of our regenerative practice that differentiates from organic to regenerative. You mentioned tilling. We don’t do tilling. We did do that in organic agriculture.

We do something that I haven’t done, which is intercropping. Meaning, if I’m growing ginger, I’m going to grow a nitrogen-fixing crop within the same bed as the ginger. That’s important as well. The results on soil transformation are tremendous. If you want a good characteristic of whether your soil is alive, see if it’s producing mushrooms. Every spring in April, you can see a hundred acres of mushroom bloom in my soil. I smile and say, “Nature is doing it.”

If you want a good characteristic of whether your soil is alive, see if it is producing mushrooms.

The only reason I don’t like seeing mushrooms in my yard is that some of them are toxic to dogs. My dogs don’t always know what’s best. I pick the fruiting bodies when that happens and keep them safe. I don’t know enough to identify which ones are the hazardous ones.

There are mushrooms that specifically emerge from mycelia that are fixers of microbiological activity in the soil. That’s typically what we see.

That’s amazing.

It comes, and then a day later, they’re gone.

Weeds: The First Succession Of Life

One person who helped me think about things like weeds differently was Paul Hawken. I’ve interviewed him a couple of times on this show, first about regeneration ending the climate crisis in one generation, and then about his book Carbon: The Book of Life. It feels very much like your philosophy and his are entwined.

His perspective is that we need to create more life on Earth. He helped me to understand that weeds are there for a reason, and often, it is to fix the soil, much as you’ve shared the mushrooms or doing that repair work. I wonder if there’s other wisdom that you feel you’ve learned that is perhaps a bit unconventional and maybe what you haven’t already shared.

Regarding weeds, weeds are the first succession of life. When your soils are ready to plant, the first thing that comes up are weeds. That’s what I mean about the first succession. However, the reason why many farmers confront weed overgrowth is that the form of nitrogen is not the correct form of nitrogen. You need ammonium nitrate for the beneficial type of weeds in the weed control system to be managed properly. The way to do that is to change the soil food web.

I used to say it’s not enough to be carbon neutral anymore. It’s not enough to think, “We can sequester carbon.” The idea of drawdown is so relevant that we have to actively practice lifestyles that draw down our carbon. One of the most significant ways we can do that is what Paul said, which is to keep the earth green. A big tenet of regenerative agriculture is to never leave your soil exposed.

It has changed how I deal with weeds in my heart, too.

It’s okay to have weeds, but you can get to a point where you have the right weeds.

Dandelions are something that I’m glad is there. It’s like, “It’s nice to see you, my favorite dandelion friends.” I use their greens. I feed them to our Guinea pigs. People need to remember that this is a medicinal plant, too. Everything’s useful in a dandelion, from its flowering head to the roots. It’s an incredible herb.

How The Regenerative Movement Grows

We’ve talked a bit about regenerative versus organic. There are some in the space like Gabe Brown, for example, who’s a bastion of hope for the regenerative agricultural field, working to get more conventional farmers over to work in a regenerative capacity to reduce their chemical inputs and move forward by not tilling, allowing fields to rest when they’re needed, doing things like interspersing different plants, and having grazers come on the land. All of these things are common sense, which we used to do but got away from as we monocrop and shove all these oil-based soil amendments to grow more crops.

We’ve been doing it in a broken capacity. He’s working hard to get these farmers who have farmed in a more conventional way back to traditional methods in regenerative agriculture. His certification, Regenified, does not require that you be first organic certified. I wonder what your thoughts are about that, and overall, how you see the movement progressing at the present time.

I am a big fan. There are many reasons why I feel having the start of an organic cert program is important. I have many farmers that are part of a co-op we’re creating who want to grow for us. I would love them to be regenerative certified, but the steps to be regenerative certified with our agency, which is the Regenerative Organic Alliance, are that you first get organic certified, then you get Fairtrade or some trade organization. We use Fairtrade. You could be FairWild or some other one. Get that certification, and then you can apply for the ROC or Regenerative Organic Certification.

I like that because there are layers of accountability there and layers of responsibility that might not otherwise be there if you were to say, “I’m going to go and use this agency to become regenerative certified.” The industry of regenerative farming is so new. We need to follow the proper guidance. Accountability is so important. It is not just accountability, but we also need to draw back on documentation. Having a history of organic farming leading up to regenerative gives us a lot of data points that we can say, “This is working or it’s not,” and so forth.

It all makes a lot of sense to me, but I also hear his perspective, which is that we need more farmers to move to regenerative practices as quickly as possible so that we can stop degrading our soils and bring life back home, so to speak. If we look at carbon as life, because we’re all carbon-based beings, so as all life on earth, and bring carbon back into the soil without continuing to degrade our top soil, making that priority one, and then creating a path where some of these conventional farmers who are largely monocroppers can work towards something that is better with time.

I’ve heard criticism from, for example, the Bronner’s brand. A leader over at Bronner’s wrote a critical article about that perspective around Expo West 2024. That was in March 2024. That was the time that the film Common Ground was coming out and debuting at Expo West. Regardless of your perspective, I recommend that if you have any interest at all in regenerative agriculture that you should watch the films Common Ground and also the predecessor, Kiss the Ground.

It helps you get an understanding of where we were, where we’re going, and the potential of moving in this direction overall for not only creating food systems that are healthier for us, but also of being part of the climate solution and a significant part of the climate solution. Those films are both available on Amazon Prime. If you pay for an Amazon membership, you can watch them for free. Kiss the Ground is still available on Netflix as well.

At any rate, I’ve interviewed people who have been involved in those films over the years, including Josh Tickell, who is the filmmaker and producer behind both, and also some other individuals I’m sure that you know, too. I’m still waiting to interview Gabe Brown. I want to hear from him from that farmer’s perspective and help him bring that forward, working with cattle ranching and beyond. What is your perspective on the integration of animals in some of these processes? I hear from vegans a lot that they’re still uncomfortable with this perspective, but I’d like to hear from you where you think animal integration is positive.

We use manure. We don’t have animals on our farm. Animals provide the nitrogen. You talk about carbon. Every farm needs the four building blocks of life, which are carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. It’s essential to have a good amount of nitrogen in the right form of nitrogen going into your soil. I feel like if we had animals, it would be a little bit more work.

For example, with cattle, we would have to take the poop and transform it into healthy compost because it wouldn’t be functional for us to have cattle roaming dropping their poop all over the fields. We run the risk of having crops high in E. coli, so we’ve got to do something with it to break it down properly and transform it into compost. For that reason, we have built a very large, probably 30,000 or 40,000 square foot, composting facility. In that facility, we use chicken manure and fish byproducts. Those are fast-acting nitrogen. They work to help break down all the carbon and so forth that we’re putting in there.

That’s critical to understand the basics. We need these inputs. You have to figure out a way to include them, whether or not you have cattle coming through and grazing on your cover crop, and then leaving their poop behind or doing something else. There’s also this big push to lay aside tracks of land to more wild perspectives so that the land itself can rewild. How do you see your work coming close to that? I know that in Costa Rica, there are some agroforestry projects, which are almost in line with that rewilding perspective. I wondered if you had thoughts to share on that.

I don’t know the bigger story of Costa Rica, but around my farm, it’s so important to sustain the forest around the farm as an important part of the farm. There, you have hundreds of thousands of years of wisdom that is retained in the forest floor. You can mirror what’s on the forest floor right around your farm and replicate it on the farm because you’ve got all those life forms. You’ve got all those fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and nematodes that are on the forest floor. That’s what you want in your fields. It’s good to protect, preserve, and somehow find a way of integrating the forest into your farming practices, like we do with the bio fermentation facility. It makes it work.

Growing Your Own Ingredients

People have already got a taste for this perspective that you seem to come from, which has a lot to do with growing many of your ingredients yourself, if not all of them. With Gaia, you had an active farm on the property there. I know that your employees would take home baskets of vegetables and work the garden itself, too. You’re doing this in Costa Rica with CR Medicinal Farms. I would like you to talk about why you’ve made that choice, what it makes easier, and perhaps what it also makes harder.

We have partners in the US who are regenerative agriculture growing herbs. They’re growing temperate crops, but to grow tropical crops. A lot of the tropical crops that infiltrate our industry are sourced from India and Southeast Asia. The controls on quality are not in place. Some of them come from Central America, and some come from South America, but the quality control is not in place. I know that some of them come from China. I’ve seen what the organic certification program is in China, and unfortunately, it’s not up to my standards.

I took Costa Rica as a location to grow tropical plants. I’m talking about turmeric root, ginger root, passion flower, holy basil, bacopa, which is a beautiful herb for function, and mucuna. We’re growing moringa trees. There are a good half dozen others. Ashwagandha is a big one for us. That could be grown temperately, but growing it in the tropics is a whole other story. I wanted to bring some of these crops that are available in our industry but are not controlled properly at the supply. We’ve done an amazing job doing it. When Kokora’s capsules launched, the herbal singles and the herbal blends were 100% regenerative organic sourced from our farm.

They will bear the ROC on the front of the label. That’s fantastic. Why Costa Rica? I ask this because we had Tom Newmark on this show, as one example. He started farming ginger and such in Costa Rica long ago when he was leading the charge over at New Chapter. He continues to do projects there and continues to focus on regenerative growing conditions, much along the same lines that you are. I’m curious to see why Costa Rica.

It’s a friendly country, for one. The government is interesting. I don’t like to get involved in politics, but the process side of our farm is in what we were granted by the government as a duty-free zone. That means a tax-free zone to do the post-harvest processing. That means the government gets involved. It was interesting to see how interested this government is in regenerative farming.

We have been working to set up a model that the government can replicate with other growers in Costa Rica and some very large ones. I find it interesting how our influence can spread much more easily in a country like Costa Rica. We’re about to do the same. Pre-show, I told you about El Salvador. We’re about to do the same. We’ve been invited by the government of El Salvador to go and make presentations about regenerative agriculture conversion for the whole country in El Salvador. We’re off to a very good start in Costa Rica. I love the fact that they are receptive to this.

To be frank, this needs to be a global effort. We need to work on these types of solutions, not just in our own backyards, but everywhere we’re growing food, everywhere we’re growing herbs, and everywhere there’s soil to be protected. I’m very appreciative of that fact. I wondered, in some cases, if it was also because it’s a nice place to live.

That wasn’t my first reason, but it is a lovely place to live. I love being here. Doing farming in Costa Rica the way we’re doing it has attracted a lot of attention, and I’m proud of that.

Ric’s Five Core Principles

That’s fantastic. I hope that I, one day, get to come visit and see it in person. Can you speak on the social impact side of your work thus far? I realize that this is a fairly nascent brand. You’re about a year old at this point, if I have that right.

We launched our first products. The 7 Mushroom Mocha was one of our first products. We have been involved in telling our regenerative story online on social media, whether it be Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. We’ve been doing it for a year and a half or two years without a product line. This was all about telling me the story about how to build a regenerative life. What does it mean to live a life regenerated? What are the regenerative principles of nature that we can adopt into our life, our culture, our business, and our leadership style?

I’ve worked hard on codifying those principles as I have learned them and I have observed them from nature. It’s important that this is not just about the products that Ric is creating, which are beautiful products. It’s also about the impact it’s going to have on the narrative we speak about a regenerative life, how we can share that narrative with others, and how we can populate it all over the world. What I’ve been doing is building a narrative of what these principles are that nature has been governing with for eternity, how do we adopt those principles into the leadership and culture of Kokora and our narrative that we share on social media, and energize this concept of a life regenerated?

Are you integrating with that work a set of core principles or values that can be visible on your website, for example?

Yeah, we are. If you wish, I’ll tell them quickly. I won’t elaborate on all of them. I’ll say the Latin name first and then translate. The first principle is the vis medicatrix naturae, which is the principle in naturopathic medicine that translates to the healing power of nature. This embraces the thought that everywhere in nature, the construct is set up to guide us to wellness. This is how nature is set up to guide us to wellness. This is how business should be set up to guide us to a healthier and more vital dynamic in our business culture and our interpersonal relationships in business.

Nature is set up everywhere to guide us to wellness.

The second principle of nature that nature always uses is primum non nocere. It translates to first, do no harm. This is so important when you establish goals and objectives that have embedded in them the do-good philosophy of helping, to lift people’s vitality up, not at the expense of some other part of life. The 3rd and 4th principles of regenerative wisdom in nature are tolle causam and tolle totum, which stand for treat the cause and treat the whole person.

In leadership and practice in business culture, we need to have this attitude that whenever we make sound business decisions, we take the whole organism in mind, not just what we want to think, like, “If we launch this product, we’re going to get a lot of money. We’re going to be very successful.” What’s the impact on the environment of doing so? We have to look at the totality of life, and nature does that all the time.

The fifth principle is discere et docere. This is so important to me because I view myself as a teacher. It is the idea that as a CEO of a company, I should never show up as a boss. I should only show up as a teacher to all the people in the organization. I should have a practice of imbibing as much of the wisdom that I have accumulated over my years in my observations of nature, and so forth. I should share that wisdom with the next generation. It is the teacher as the leader. It’s such an important foundation on which to guide your life.

The sixth and final one is preventare, which means practice prevention at all times. Every decision you adopt in your work and your culture, you want to have the idea that you’re adopting it for the totality or the wholeness of the organism, and that we’re not disrupting life in any choice we make. Those principles, I can elaborate on them, but that’s a quick summary of them.

That’s helpful for people to understand. It’s a philosophical perspective. I wonder how different, if at all, they are from the leadership principles you espoused while you were at Gaia Herbs.

They’re an evolution, frankly. I was not thinking in a regenerative mindset then at Gaia. I was thinking in terms of doing what I could to the very best that I could do. Now, I’m also employing the concept of doing what I do to the best I can do it, but do it regeneratively.

Plants As Teachers

On this theme of teachers, many herbalists consider plants to be their teachers. Are there particular herbs that you believe offer important lessons for us in this particular age of ecological crisis?

That’s a packed question, and it’s an important one to think about. To what capacity can plants sequester carbon? To what capacity can plants regenerate the soil food web? To what capacity can plants aggregate more nutrient density more quickly? There is a lot of power in that question. The answer isn’t so simple. It’s quite complex. I would like to think that, in every way, plants can be our allies in far greater ways than we realized in the past.

Sometimes, even asking the question will be the seed of thought, right?

Yeah.

You’ve spoken of regeneration as both a personal and a planetary journey. What do you think this word regeneration means to you on a more human level?

It’s interesting because I spent the last few years traveling to Europe to the Blue Zones. I’ve been looking at the lives of centenarians, doing a lot of filming and documentary work. The takeaways are, what it means to live a regenerative life means that we must nourish, connect, and move. Those are the three tenets of healthspan and lifespan.

When you talk about how to build a life regenerated, it correlates to our organ systems. If you want to talk about Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, or the anatomy of the body, we need to nourish it in a way that protects our nervous system, our brain, our vagus nerve system, and our overall autonomic nervous system. That part of nourishment correlates, in Chinese medicine, to the upper jaw and the upper part of the body.

The connect part of it that I relate to is so important. It is to outwardly or externally make socially responsible connections that are so important for a regenerative life. Internally, this is associated with both the middle jaw and the fascia in our body, the tissue that connects every cell in our body. The concept of connection internally and externally is so important for healthspan and lifespan.

The third part of it is the idea of movement. You can’t have longevity or healthspan without staying active or without being in motion. We talked pre-show about your athleticism. In Chinese medicine, this is associated with the lower jaw. The vital energy is stored in the kidney systems. First of all, you have to protect and preserve it for a regenerated life, but you also have to be able to move it to the right parts of the body. Nourish, connect, and move internally and externally are what regenerative life means to me. The more you can enliven those qualities, the more you will contribute to your health span and lifespan.

I’ve so enjoyed this conversation. I feel like I could keep talking to you for hours. I’m sure we could talk about your perspective as a leader and teacher, as it connects to concepts of sustainability and education. It’s what I’m pursuing as my PhD, at any rate. I may do my own episode reflecting on this one and sharing some thoughts because there are so many things that connect the philosophy of regeneration, leadership, the way that you see it, the way that I see it, and then also, the concepts of connection that are so important.

There are several threads to pick up there. I’d love for you to have the opportunity to share any closing thoughts. Perhaps there’s a question that you wish I’d asked or something you’ve been thinking about through the course of this interview that you want to bring up. We could continue going for another 10 or 15 if you still have time.

I have time. In our world of stress, we all need to take time to recognize that the opposite forces of life are essential to nurture. We’re focused on a world of stress, and we’re trying to move through it. It’s pushing us to more outward expression of activity to mobilize here and there to stay alive. We are spending less time being still. Dynamism and stillness are two opposite foundations of regenerative life.

Dynamism and stillness are two opposite foundations of regenerative life.

If I were to leave anyone with any thought, it is to balance out the dynamism in your life with equal and opposite value of stillness in order to stay in a state of equilibrium. The second thing is to take time to observe. Nature is a powerful teacher. There’s wisdom embedded in every moment and every location in nature. Take time to get still and see it. Get to know it, observe it, and be partnered with it because that will nourish your life as well.

For me, personally, this journey with Kokora and all the products that Kokora has launched and is about to launch is about giving a venue for these connections to take place. It’s what I’ve spoken about. How can we make these touchpoints using some of these herbs? It seems a wonderful way to enable the narrative to continue.

I have to say, I appreciate how accessible you make this conversation. I feel like we’ve talked about a lot of very deep concepts, but at least made them something that my audience can understand and absorb, even if they’re new to the subject of regenerative agriculture, regenerative organic, and these sorts of things. I conducted an interview with a friend to get a perspective on what they knew about regeneration, and I was surprised to learn that they had no awareness of any certification on regenerative. There was none at all.

The Story Behind Kokora’s Name

What would you think it means with regard to food? You and I both care about the meaning of words, at least that has come through. You’re sharing the original Latin for some of these concepts, which also seem to echo traditional Chinese perspectives in some cases as well. The power of words, the power of a phrase, the meaning behind them, and even the meaning behind Kokora, which we didn’t get into. I would love to know that before we depart. What is the meaning of Kokora?

I wanted to find a brand name that started with K. There’s something special about the resonance of the sound of K when you hear it and how it resonates in the brain, how it’s easy to retain the name, and how it sets a vibration of joy and happiness in the body. Kokora is from the name kokoro from Japanese culture. In Japan, Kokoro means the connection of spirit, heart, and mind. Kokora is a little bit more of a feminine twist on kokoro. The moment I thought and I said to myself, “Kokora,” I thought, “This is it. This resonates, and it resonates well with its meaning with the regenerated life.”

I suspected there was something there. I’m glad you shared it. At any rate, asking people what these words mean to them is one way to help you understand where the meaning of words is shifting with time. People are getting a better understanding of what it means to be organic, what it means to be fair trade, and what it means to be regenerative, even if they aren’t familiar with the certifications yet.

Every bit that we can do to help broaden people’s exposures to these terms, their understanding of what it means to live a life regenerated, to be able to integrate principles of truly sustainable living into their lifestyle from the materials they might seek to build with when they repair a home to the foods that they buy and put in their bodies to the supplements that they purchase.

You are using plastic pouches. I also use plastic pouches and packaging for Orlo Nutrition. We also make them with post-consumer recycled waste. Yours are made with 20% to 60% post-consumer recycled plastic, which is better than about anything else out there. Ours are close to 70%, but never at 70%. It’s hard to do. The fact is, so much of the plastics that is out there are not recycled. If you get something in the second life, at least you’re reducing the amount of new plastics that are being used.

One of the things we have to serve is the stability of powders going into pouches like this.

That is what we have to do on the soft gel side, too, and powders.

I started a company a long time ago called. We have cracked the nut for rigid packaging, which means bottles, food containers, and dietary supplement bottles. The patent is there. The technology is there. The actual performance of the material is greater than plastic. The only drawback is that biodegradability comes through industrial composting, not home composting.

Maybe you can speak to this about what consumers value greater, whether it is something that is more compostable or something that is plant-based. The material that we developed is 100% compostable in an industrial environment through an ASTM D6400 rating, but it won’t necessarily compost in your backyard like your food waste or other waste might compost.

It might have grounded up, maybe. If they had a paper shredder that could manage it, then maybe. Something like that. I get what you’re saying. People can’t be bothered with complicated answers to questions in a way because we have so much information coming at us at a given time. Even sometimes sorting recycling and compost gets to be too much for people.

We’re pretty adamant at our house. I was part of a coalition of people that pressured Santa Cruz County to start composting. I was thrilled when it finally happened. We do have industrial abilities. I can put that stuff in our compost bin, and it’s taken care of at an industrial site. I also home compost. All of my organic materials mostly go into my home composter, and then it’s those materials that I can’t do much with that go to the industrial side of things, like our yard trimmings and things like that.

I wonder if your audience and consumers would value that we’re getting away from plant-based plastic entirely, which excludes the whole microplastic problem, as solution number one, and then try to address composting as a secondary solution, or is composting the first problem they want to tackle?

It’s simpler to think plant-based first. There are plant solutions. You can even make plastics from algae or things that act like plastic that are rigid like algae. There are sneakers that are made from algae bloom. There is this company that goes out and harvests the out-of-control algae bloom and then uses that bloom to make the foam that goes into certain sneakers. It does mean that they are a friendlier waste product than would be your typical shoe.

When it comes to food material or supplements going in a bottle, though, you have to have the correct heat deformation performance. You have to have correct elasticity.

It has to be FDA cleared, too.

Great point. You have to have an FDA allowance for food. There are these performance criteria of where it breaks down. This is why it’s hard to get powder in a pouch that’s plant-based and remains stable without absorbing moisture back through the material. There is a solution there. For me, that’s one of my objectives. When you talk about what life regenerated means to me, it’s got to include these kinds of issues. The plastics one is a big one for me.

I’m right there with you. Things like an aluminum can are also coated in plastic. The people are doing demos on TikTok where they take a can of Coke and soak it in a solution. What dissolves is the aluminum can, and what’s left is a bag of Coca-Cola. It’s like, “What?” It blows your mind. I never thought about it. I thought that BPA liner was only in acidic foods, but Coca-Cola is acidic. It can dissolve a tooth if you put the tooth in a glass of Coke. It has to have a barrier.

This is one of the challenges. Many of the materials we use, even though aluminum is nearly infinitely recyclable, when they recycle it, they’re burning up the plastic that’s inside the can. Where does that go? It goes into the environment in one way or another. It’s not like they’re somehow extracting it and doing something with it. It gets burned up.

We have to find a real solution.

We need to continue thinking bigger about things from a materials perspective so that we can do things like bring people the berries that they want, not in a plastic clamshell anymore. I try to only buy berries when I go to the farmer’s market, but my farmer’s market isn’t open from November to May. That’s half the year. What do you do? Am I not going to eat berries the rest of the year? I do get them from the frozen aisle, though. That’s less packaging, so that’s good. At any rate, thank you so much for joining me. This has been my pleasure.

It’s truly a pleasure for me. It’s a pleasure to meet you and a pleasure to delve deep into some of these issues.

I’ll invite you back anytime.

I’d love it.

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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

Thank you for joining me for this rich conversation with Ric Scalzo. I hope his journey from Gaia Herbs to Kokora Life has left you as inspired as I am to deepen your connection to earth and to the regenerative power of plants. If you found value in this episode, I invite you to help us grow and help us grow something beautiful. For every new subscriber to this show, whether it’s on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our newsletter on CareMoreBeBetter.com, we are planting a tree through that partnership with Forest Planet.

Go ahead, click that subscribe button wherever you tune in, and I’ll continue planting those trees to help us build a greener planet. Together, we can regenerate more than just soil. We can regenerate hope, health, and a thriving future for all. Until next time, stay curious, stay kind, and remember, when you care more, you can do better, too. Thank yoU.

Important Links

• Kokora Life
• Kokoro Life on Instagram
• Kokoro Life on TikTok
• Kokoro Life on Facebook
• Kokoro Life on YouTube
• Kokoro Life on LinkedIn
• Institute for Botanical Research
• ForestPlanet
• Paul Hawken
• Carbon: The Book of Life
• Gabe Brown
• Common Ground
• Kiss the Ground
• Regenerative Agriculture: The Answer To The Climate Crisis With Tom Newmark