Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott are the visionary couple behind Solar Punk Farms in Guerneville, California. They transformed their lives from careers in brand strategy and bioengineering to create a community-focused, environmentally conscious farm. Solar Punk Farms grows food and flowers, enabling Nick and Spencer to host memorable community gatherings and provide environmental education in hopes of making the sustainable revolution irresistible.
Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott are the visionary couple behind Solar Punk Farms in Guerneville, California. They transformed their lives from careers in brand strategy and bioengineering to create a community-focused, environmentally conscious farm.
Solar Punk Farms grows food and flowers, enabling Nick and Spencer to host memorable community gatherings and provide environmental education in hopes of making the sustainable revolution irresistible.
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Shelby Stanger:
Many of us city dwellers have probably dreamt of leaving everything behind to move to the country and work on a farm. It sounds idyllic. You get to spend the entire day outside in the sunshine working with your hands in the dirt, picking flowers and plants you can actually eat. The reality is that farming is both extremely fulfilling and a ton of work. Spencer Scott and Nick Schwanz learned this first hand when they moved out of San Francisco to start a regenerative farm.
Nick Schwanz:
We had started a little garden in the back of our tiny San Francisco home and to be totally honest, the move up to the farm was really going from setting two to setting 11. We joke about how we're like, we grew four cherry tomatoes, so we're like, let's buy a 10 acre farm.
Shelby Stanger:
That's Nick. In 2020, Nick and his husband Spencer bought a piece of land in Guerneville, California about an hour and a half North of San Francisco. They named it Solar Punk Farms. Their vision for Solar Punk is multifaceted. Of course they want to grow food and flowers, but they also want the farm to be a place for community gatherings and environmental education. These are big dreams and Nick and Spencer are making it happen. I'm Shelby Stanger and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. Before their transition into agriculture, Nick and Spencer's lives were on very different tracks. Nick had a career in brand strategy at Impossible Foods, the company that makes plant-based meat. Spencer had gone to school for bioengineering and he was working in cancer therapeutics. Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I'm so excited to talk to you both.
Nick Schwanz:
We're so excited to be here.
Spencer Scott:
Yeah, thanks so much for having us.
Shelby Stanger:
We haven't had such cool farmers on in a really long time.
Nick Schwanz:
Don't know if we're cool farmers but.
Shelby Stanger:
I don't know. You guys sound really cool. How did you two meet really quickly? Let's just get a little background.
Spencer Scott:
We met super romantically on Instagram.
Shelby Stanger:
That's so romantic. What happened? Did someone slide into your DMs?
Spencer Scott:
Yeah, I think, Spencer here. Nick saw a photo of me on his explorer feed and started following me and then a couple months later I slid into his DMs.
Nick Schwanz:
I'm glad you took ownership of that one. Normally we're each trying to pawn the buck off on who slid into whose DMs but.
Spencer Scott:
Yeah, it was me.
Shelby Stanger:
What about you guys attracted you to each other?
Nick Schwanz:
Yeah, Nick here. I mean, the honest truth is the algorithm was like, hey, you like cool outdoorsy guys with six packs. You're probably going to like this person. And I looked at his profile and was like, oh, actually he's really smart and into all the same things I'm into and then tried to secretly flirt with him for a while by following and commenting on things but never really talking to him directly.
Shelby Stanger:
But were guys,-
Nick Schwanz:
It was a true 21st century romance.
Shelby Stanger:
Were you guys living in the same town?
Spencer Scott:
We weren't. I was in San Diego finishing grad school and Nick was in the Bay Area, but when I moved to the Bay Area and I knew Nick lived there, I slid into his DMs and was like, "Hey, I'm new to town, show me around." For my part, he's a long distance marathon runner and his Instagram was all beautiful sunsets, like out running in the hills and I was like, this guy seems cool and is into outdoors as well and also had a six-pack so it didn't hurt.
Nick Schwanz:
Had.
Spencer Scott:
Had.
Shelby Stanger:
You know what? I also like someone with a six-pack, so I'm equally shallow. I love that.
Spencer Scott:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
So I'm curious, how did you guys each get interested in farming? What were you doing before you two met and started Solar Punk Farms? Spencer, do you want to start or Nick?
Nick Schwanz:
Yeah, Nick here. It was interesting. We kind of had very different but mirrored pathways to this in that we both had jobs that we had been focused on for a really long time and then we got interested in the climate crisis for different reasons and then we were like, hey, okay, now we're working a lot in the climate space, but we want to be doing something that's a little bit more hands-on and connected to actual soil and actual earth. And so we like everybody else, saw The Biggest Little Farm.
Shelby Stanger:
I knew it. I knew you were going to tell me you saw this movie.
Nick Schwanz:
We joke that we have a biggest little farm jar here at the farm. Anytime people ask if we've seen it, we're like, okay, put a dollar in there. But I'm from Idaho. I had had farm and not climate farm, but just agricultural dreams for a long time, but it was always kind of a way off thing and we'd romanticized it a ton and as soon as COVID hit, we had a screw it moment and started looking around at places, found this place and the rest is history.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, this is amazing. Backup Spencer, I want to hear what you were doing during this time.
Spencer Scott:
My entry into climate was very much from the scientific perspective. I'd always been interested in environmentalism and ecology and in 2018 the IPCC report on climate came out, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and I was just like, you know what? This is a really important and dire issue and I was feeling stagnant in my professional life and I'd always wanted to exercise a little more creativity. So I made plans and ended up leaving my job to try to be a climate communicator and educator. And so together we started reading books about regenerative agriculture and taking care of soil and it just became our hobby and we started ideating, like what if we took on a little bit of a regeneration project?
Shelby Stanger:
Regenerative agriculture involves working with natural systems to enhance soil, improve biodiversity, and make the land more resistant to climate change. In 2019, Nick and Spencer started hatching a five-year plan so they could explore this method on their own piece of land. They casually started looking for property outside of San Francisco and then COVID hit. Their five-year plan accelerated into a one-year plan. That's when they found 10 acres in Guerneville, California.
Spencer Scott:
It is a queer vacation destination town, an hour and a half outside of San Francisco. It was within our budget and just had all of these things going for us and so we went out to look at spots here and we weren't even committed at that time. We were still like, is this what we want? And when we walked onto this spot, it was like, yes, this has to be the project. This has to be the space.
Nick Schwanz:
The big thing is that we did not buy a farm. We bought an old horse property. There was literally nothing except for pigweed growing anywhere. So we bought a dead piece of land and the goal is to turn it into a farm and that's kind of the really fun part of this whole adventure, is oftentimes we'll say, oh, we started Solar Punk Farms, but we're not farmers. We have not earned that moniker. We are ecological hobbyists and storytellers and really passionate about what we do, but we are becoming farmers over time just like the soil is becoming a farm over time.
Spencer Scott:
Yeah, I think that's a very important distinction because we actually weren't looking for a farm. We were specifically looking for a place that needed regeneration because we wanted to go through that dirt to soil process.
Shelby Stanger:
Can we talk about that? Because when I watched The Biggest Little Farm, for people who haven't seen it, they buy this giant patch of dirt like you guys did. I mean, it's been a while since I've watched the movie, but they do a lot of things to make this stuff from clay dirt to actual soil where you can grow crops in. How did you know that this was a hell yes for you?
Nick Schwanz:
Well, one of the big reasons we knew is A, there's the emotional side of it where you just have a big warm fuzzy feeling, which we definitely had that. And then the actual area that we're on, the piece of land is surrounded by redwoods and it's in this part of the country that's technically like a rainforest. All of the stuff around it felt absolutely incredible and there was a lot of just gut sense of hell yeah. But one of the real reasons that we kind of committed to this is that when we came here, Spencer had done some research and reached out to a local institution called the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, which is a very famous permaculture education location here in Northern California. And one of the founders agreed to come out and basically walk the land with us and you could see her eyes opening up and she was able to see all the stuff we couldn't see. Right.
We would see this big dead piece of dirt and she would be like, "Well, there's dock over there so I can tell this is where water is settling and there's nothing but really bindweed over here, which means that the soil is really compacted." She just told us all of these things and our eyes just started getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and when we finished our walk around, we were like, "Well, what would you do?" And she's like, "It's not about what I would do, it's about what you guys would do and I think you guys can do really cool stuff here." And I think that really stiffened our backbone in a great way.
Shelby Stanger:
The land they purchased was a glorified dirt patch and at 10 acres it was an overwhelming amount of space. Nick and Spencer had a lot of work on their plate. They needed to clear dead plants and inorganic materials, amend the soil and start building new structures for the farm. You bought this land and it wasn't in amazing condition. You said horses had been trampling on it. What was the first thing you did to transform it?
Spencer Scott:
Everything we learned about regenerative agriculture, it's like don't till the land. You're going to disturb the life in the soil, but you get an exception when there isn't any life in the soil to begin with. And so the first thing we did was we decompacted the soil with a big excavator that dug it up once and then kind of mixed it together and then we immediately planted the cover crops and those serve multiple functions. One, they help retain water, they help shade the soil from the UV rays, and they also put nutrients back into the soil. So life is really good at creating the conditions conducive to life. That was kind of step one.
Nick Schwanz:
And we did a bunch of other strategies too. We brought in oyster shell and compost and chicken manure. It was really just about getting as much organic and biologically active material back on site as we possibly could, and then with great rain and great biological material come great worms and we now have tons of worms and we also have chickens, which we use to kind of turn our organic into nitrogen rich fertilizer. Then that was the first start, is really just thinking about soil is the biggest asset. Currently, we don't have soil, we just have dirt. How do we start turning that into biologically diverse organic rich soil and then from there we can start planting out.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you take me on an audio tour of your farm? I can't see it. Can you take me on a tour and then explain where you guys live in relation to this place?
Nick Schwanz:
Totally. Yeah, so there's basically sort of this bowl of redwood trees that kind of just hugs the farm, and so when we first moved it was just basically all flat dirt, but now five years in, we've kind of created these couple different sections. On the right-hand side as you go in, there's what we call the food forest, and that's about a three-quarter acre area where we have now planted between 80 and 90 different fruit and nut trees, so everything from apples, pears, oranges, all that kind of stuff to more fun things like hazelnuts and almonds and mulberries, and it's kind of its own little ecosystem that you can just walk through and snack your way through and that'll be open to the public as an educational experience. On the left-hand side, we've recently built a community garden area so that we can have folks who don't have gardening space come and garden at our spot.
A little bit farther in is our kooky crazy Solar Punk greenhouse, which is very not practical, but super, super beautiful and so we love it anyway, and then we have a market garden area where we grow all of our traditional veg and flowers that we sell at market. And then a little bit past that is our main house and that's where we live and our farm manager lives. Behind the house is this flat area that when we first moved in it was kind of dead and we have, because we didn't have time to do a full plan on it, we've turned that into a wildflower meadow that just kind of sits there for the next couple of years until we figure out what we want to do with that space. And then all the way in the back is where the sort of open bowl ends and you go into the forest and the forest area is kind of where we do events like music shows or weddings or book talks because the redwoods are an incredible place to gather and celebrate different things. Did I miss anything?
Spencer Scott:
The only thing that Nick missed is the barn. We have a big barn where it used to be a five stall horse barn and we've kind of transformed it into a party barn slash event space, and then out in front of the barn is a large percola that Nick and his dad built. So that was important for having a place to gather and it's become kind of the center of the social activity for larger events.
Shelby Stanger:
When are you guys going to have a Netflix show?
Nick Schwanz:
Honestly, you want to hear a funny story? When we first moved up here, my friend worked in reality TV and they were like, "We see this great opportunity to have this queer farm story." And so they got somebody from Bravo to come and do an interview with us and they interviewed us and then the next day my friend called and she was like, "Oh yeah, so apparently you guys aren't dramatic enough, so they're going to pass." And to me I'm like, that is now my brand. I'm like Solar Punk Farms, not dramatic enough for Bravo.
Spencer Scott:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott own Solar Punk Farms, a regenerative farm near San Francisco. The pair left their city life behind for a 10 acre horse property in 2020. Since then, they've been working to make it a hub for growing food and flowers, gathering community, and educating others about climate change. As a nod to their altruism, Nick and Spencer chose a unique name for this project, one that signified the hopeful sustainable future that they're working toward.
Spencer Scott:
Enter Solar Punk. It was like the genre in response to cyberpunk and steampunk that are these very dystopian visions of the future. And the core brilliance behind Solar Punk was that we need to start populating people's imaginations with what could happen if we get it right. And so that's what we loved about it. It was like, okay, we want to imagine this future that is worth fighting for, worth working towards, and then we want to start making it happen.
Shelby Stanger:
It also just sounds like fun.
Nick Schwanz:
That's kind of the strategy. We talk a lot about how climate change has been, people motivate with sticks, right, but we need to start motivating with carrots. And so that's kind of what we try to make every single thing at the farm feel like, is that you're not here to save the planet, or volunteer, or do hard work because it needs to be done. You're here to goof around and be silly and enjoy yourself in the context of regenerative ecology, which is why every couple of weeks we do something called a work play weekend. It's kind of a traditional volunteer weekend, but even calling it a volunteer weekend puts you in a specific mindset, right, where you're like, oh, I need to do something good for the world. I need to feel like I'm serving something else.
And that may be true, but it's not what you feel like when you're up here. It's work play weekend because we do some work, but then we play. We put Beyonce on the speakers and we have a really good lunch and we drink natural wine and we get silly. And there's a strategy behind that which is let's make interacting with this place feel like something you want to do, not something you should do.
Spencer Scott:
And I think the converse side of that is that we're trying to reimagine the aspirational weekend where on the flip side of volunteerism is just pure hedonism, like let's go stay out late drinking and party all night, which we love too in doses, but we also want there to be an option that is equally fun that can compete, that is also productive and helping regenerate ecosystems.
Shelby Stanger:
In addition to bringing folks out to work alongside them, Nick and Spencer also invite school groups to the farm for education sessions, put on events for local schools and organizations, and they throw some pretty incredible parties. The two even hosted their own wedding on the farm in 2023. Tell me about these programs you guys have started and events you've had in the last year.
Nick Schwanz:
The events has sort of been the thing that's been super fun because we're starting to see like, if you thought of the first couple of years as really investment years, right, we're now kind of seeing return years because all of the time and energy and money that we put in, in the first couple of years is starting to turn into really fun enjoyment for folks. The party barn that Spencer mentioned is super kooky. It had five different stalls for horses and we turned each of them into a different themed bar. So there's a beach bar filled with sand. There's a western bar where you have an old piano and tumbleweeds. We have a little Japanese sake bar. We turned the tack room into this fun, we call it the cuddle puddle room. It's just like floor to ceiling covered in lavender fur with black lights and everything.
And the point is, again, like you said, events are super fun and we want people to have a really fun, silly time in the space. So we've done everything from dance parties to themed drag shows and dinner parties. We've also partnered with the senior center across the street to do big brunch events for senior pride for queer seniors in the area. We had the local theater come out and do a big symposium on the intersection of storytelling and climate change. We've had a Mean Girls themed fundraiser where we raised money for our local schools like mathletes program. It's just like any dumb thing you can dream up where climate and community intersect, we can do it in there.
Shelby Stanger:
How has it been inviting so many other people into your life?
Spencer Scott:
That's people number one questions. We have people here all the time. We had an 1000 person natural wine festival at our home, and a lot of people don't know that this is our home. We live here full time and there's just constantly strangers coming in. Our sign-up for our volunteer weekends, it's just totally blind. We meet 12 people every weekend that we've never met before, and every single one of them has been incredible.
And I think a lot of people do recognize and tell us because we don't even really realize it, that it's not a normal thing to just be totally fine with strangers constantly being at your house. But we love it. I don't know, just some aspect of us that I think part of it is because we moved out of the city where we're used to a certain level of social interaction and now we're just bring it on. We're up here and you guys make this fun for us. And that's been such an essential part of it. And I do think that we have lots of stories of people who have come up here and kind of like, it's opened some pathways to them and inspired them to do things differently.
Nick Schwanz:
Yeah, I think we're also just at a time where everybody wants to be doing something that's more in line with their version of humanity and being in a space where you see A, somebody else who's doing all these cool things is helpful, but also B, being in a space where you can see people doing it imperfectly like we are. I truly believe that people watching us mess up is more valuable than people watching us do it right, because it gives them permission to be able to do the thing that they want to do, but they know they're going to do it imperfectly.
Shelby Stanger:
So for people who want to just start small, what are some things we can do to incorporate regenerative practices? Like maybe someone who has a couple of raised beds at home or they have a plot at their local community garden, like what can those people do?
Spencer Scott:
I think food waste is one of the largest climate issues. A lot of things that go into food production for that food to just end up being thrown away is the worst possible thing. Then the next best thing is for you to compost it. Home composting is an amazing way to make sure that that food is at least returning to the soil and its nutrients are being used to create new food. I think that's probably one of the big ones.
Nick Schwanz:
Yeah, some other really low hanging fruit is minimizing the plastic that you're using. So trying to find ways to use natural materials if you want to do weed guards or metal tools as opposed to plastic tools. And then also obviously for home gardeners, really look at the inputs that you're using. So any fertilizer, making sure that they're not synthetic fertilizers, but trying to use natural biological inputs. There are tons of ways to use what you already have, like the leaves that fall down from your tree, use that as mulch or put that at the bottom of your garden bed and let that decompose. Another great way for folks to kind of maybe take what they're hearing and kind of apply this to their own life. Spencer and I, when we first started thinking about putting our brains together around climate stuff, we sat in a room with a big whiteboard.
Because we get the question all the time. We're like, "Okay, you guys are constantly talking about sustainability and climate. What should I do in my own life?" And so we were like, how do we do this in a productive way? So we drew out this thing that we now call the Pentagon, which is the five main areas that somebody has individual autonomy to create positive change from a sustainability climate perspective. And they are, I'm going to try to remember all of them. It's like your financial life, your behavioral life, your professional life,-
Spencer Scott:
Social.
Nick Schwanz:
Your social life, and your civic life. And so those are the five sort of domains that you have the ability to affect things. Your financial life is where do I spend my money?
Spencer Scott:
Who do I bank with?
Nick Schwanz:
Who do I bank with?
Shelby Stanger:
Who do you invest with?
Nick Schwanz:
Right. So what is the financial assets that I have? What is that's impact? Your professional life is who do I work for? What do I do for them? What kind of impact do I make internally? Your civic life is like who do you vote for? What organizations are you involved with? How do you interact with your world as a citizen? Your behavioral life is like, how do you go about your day? How do you get to work? What kind of products do you buy? That's kind of like your day-to-day stuff. And then your social life is what kind of relationships do you have with people? Who can you influence? Who influences you? How do you interact with your social sphere?
And so obviously that's a ton of stuff, but that's a way of sort of brainstorming and being able to say one piece at a time. Got it. Here's something that I think I could tackle and I'm going to make a small change in this way. And that's going to look different for everybody depending on their context, their superpowers, their passions, and their resources.
So when we started talking about Solar Punk Farms, we're like, where does Solar Punk Farms fit in this pentagon? And we were like, oh, actually, there's something at the center of all of this, which is like, you're not going to do any of these things affect your social life, affect your civic life, change where you invest. You're not going to do any of that unless you both know about the problem and care about the problem, meaning care about the thing that we're actually protecting. If you don't care about the earth, then you're not going to spend any time trying to make it better. And so we've actually now gotten really focused on that knowing and caring piece, and so much of that is being outside and playing and taking ourselves way less seriously and giving ourselves permission to be goofy, little dorky weirdos is, to me the most liberating way that you can interact with climate.
Shelby Stanger:
I think Nick's advice is really great. The world can be a heavy place. In any way that we can bring silliness, joy, laughter, and revelry into our lives is a big win in my book. If you want to see what events are coming up at Solar Punk Farms, you can find more on Instagram at Solar Punk Farms or at Solarpunkfarms.com. That's S-O-L-A-R-P-U-N-K-F-A-R-M-S. Spencer is also writing a book about his journey from the biotech industry to regenerative farming, titled As If We Were Staying. You can find out more on his Substack at Spencer R Scott. That's S-P-E-N-C-E-R-R-S-C-O-T-T. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.