Regenerative Skills

Welcome back everyone to the second of the Deep Dive episodes. In this new format the intention is to bring complexity back into the conversations around regenerative agriculture. Myself and many of my peers have been observing the discourse online, and especially on social media devolve into catch phrases and buzz words with little meaning and I want to embrace the complexity and many perspectives around many of the topics that get debated online. We’ll be testing out a mix of investigative journalism, key interview snippets, and narrative weaving, not to assert a single stance on any issue, but rather to guide listeners through the fact that there are rarely any easy answers and that there’s so much more to these conversations than the over-simplified arguments that we gloss over on click-bait titles and polarizing debates. You may remember in the last Deep Dive, we looked into the question of WHO has the authority and credentials to say what Regeneration is. As a continuation to this question, today we’ll be exploring HOW to measure the journey of regeneration. One thing is to establish standards and validity, but as we’ll see in these discussions, this is much harder to do than to talk about. This is a subject that is very relevant to my own work here with Climate Farmers because I helped to work on the creation of our our Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification program (MRV for short) and I continue to think about how such a complex and nuanced journey can be measured and communicated as I build and refine the educational programs in the Climate Farmer’s Academy.  The question of HOW to measure regeneration also contains many sub-questions, such as what is the end goal? When does the timeline for measurement start and stop? What tools and resources are available for measuring? Where do we set the parameters for observation? I mean, is it just the ecology of the farm that needs improvement, or do we need to look at the economy of the farm business and the state of health of the people involved and the community around them? It’s also very important to ask why we’re bothering to measure this at all. Who gets the data? What are they going to do with it, and how will this information affect the relationship between farmers, policy makers, and the end customer?

Welcome back everyone to another panel session. In light of all the stories of extreme weather and emergencies around the Iberian peninsula and other parts of Europe in the past months, we’re going to take a closer look at the realities on the ground for our farmers. These storms and floods are becoming more and more common and frequent, and though we’ve talked in the past about the need to adapt to an increasingly erratic climate, these points of catastrophe are an essential part of the conversation. In this session we’ll hear from three farmers in Iberia and their experiences of enduring the constant storms and service interruptions of the past months. We’ll also explore how they are recovering from the disasters, how they plan to mitigate these events in the future, as well as a longer term view towards adaptation in the face of increasing frequency of events like this. In order to get a deeper sense of the impacts and challenges brought by the storms, flooding and erosion that our panelists experienced on their farms, I encouraged them to share pictures and videos of their land in the aftermath. Obviously these images can’t be conveyed over audio, so if you want to see what we were looking at in the introductions, you can see the video version of the panel session on the Climate Farmer’s YouTube channel or through the links in the resources page on our website at ClimateFarmers.org. So with all that out of the way, let’s jump into this month’s session.

Welcome to episode two of season ten of the Regenerative Skills podcast. As I mentioned last time, the show is changing this year: we’re moving to two episodes a month, and I’ll be alternating between two formats. The first is the panel conversations that have become a favorite over the last couple of years—three guests, three perspectives, one question that keeps surfacing inside the Climate Farmers community. The second format is what we’re launching today: Deep Dives. These are my attempt to bring complexity back into regenerative agriculture at a time when the online discourse is increasingly dominated by slogans, hot takes, and click-bait certainty. In these episodes we’ll weave narrative, investigative threads, and carefully chosen interview excerpts—not to land on a single “correct” stance, but to help you feel the texture of the problem and the tradeoffs behind each position. Today’s Deep Dive is a question that provokes strong opinions for good reason: who gets to say what “regenerative” means? Rather than offering a definitive answer, I’m inviting you to sit with the motivations and incentives that shape any definition—whether it’s coming from farmers, certifiers, nonprofits, corporations, or measurement platforms. You’ll hear from Joao and Diogo of Monte Silveira in central Portugal—one of the first large farms in the country to achieve Regenerative Organic Certification—on why certification mattered to their market strategy without changing how they manage the land. You’ll hear from Ana Digon of the Iberian Regenerative Agriculture Association on how organic standards became diluted and why her network built a farmer-led, principle-based definition to protect integrity. We’ll bring in Benjamin Fahrer, who helped guide the ROC certification process and wrestles with who should have the authority to set standards, and we’ll close with Phil Fernandez, who led Climate Farmers’ MRV work and explains why definitions become unavoidable once monitoring, reporting, and compliance enter the picture. Along the way I’ll name the many other perspectives shaping this debate online—from soil-health purists and carbon-first programs to agroecology, corporate “regen” initiatives, and the often-overlooked critique of appropriation from Indigenous and peasant traditions—and we’ll end by pointing to the deeper issue behind the whole mess: the loss of relationship and trust in our food systems. Next month we go practical: measuring regeneration—what’s worth tracking, what gets distorted, and how we stay grounded when dashboards start pretending to be truth.

To start off the year, I wanted to explore a topic that often gets swept under the rug. Mental well-being, or the lack of it, in farming communities has reached epedemic levels. Farmers in Europe face a nasty mix of chronic overwork and poor recovery, high uncertainty and low control in their work, and heavy admin/compliance pressure, often while working in social isolation with a culture that can discourage help-seeking. Those pressures stack and reinforce each other (less sleep and more stress lead to worse decisions, more conflict and injuries, tighter finances, and even less time off) driving burnout, anxiety/depression, and in some contexts elevated suicide risk. The stress factors for farmers are only increasing too, as weather variance, economic pressure, bureaucratic stress, and social factors mount. For this reason my hope in this panel session is to shed some light on mental health, and some ways to avoid burnout in the upcoming season from a number of different perspectives. 

There’s no way around it, governance of the agricultural industry has a massive impact on how farms and the agrifood system are managed. Policy, regulations, and incentives are driven by many forces and stakeholders. Yet the political machine is slow and heavily influenced by financial interests. Where does this leave farmers themselves, and most notably, farmers who strive to steward their land and ecosystems in ways that policy hasn’t caught up to or in some cases, doesn’t even allow? In this panel we’ll explore these and many more questions with speakers who are closely connected, not only with the political side of this discussion, but the growers and land stewards affected. Is there hope for positive change and better incentives, or will those committed to advancing regenerative agriculture continue to swim against the current?

Welcome back to another episode in our panel discussion series. In this edition we’ll be focusing on the challenges and opportunities of climate adaptation with examples of farmers in different key and representative zones of Europe. There's no question that the climate is shifting in severe and unpredictable ways. The question is how can agriculture adapt to this new reality. Like all systemic challenges we'll take a look at this broad topic from a number of farmer perspectives as we explore the adaptations that can be made on the land, in the business, and the support mechanisms needed from the wider agri-food sector to assist in the transition.

Alex got a chance to follow up with Luwayo Biswick in Malawi. Luwayo had been on the Regenerative Skills podcast when it was still Abundant Edge for episode 71 in 2018.    As the Founder of the Permaculture Paradise Institute, Luwayo and his family have built an enterprise that helps local farmers throughout the whole country learn how to integrate regenerative practices. The Institute works on a trainer model that helps farmers get access to the tools, seedstock and livestock they need to create a steady stream of productive, diverse foodcrops. As a country with thousands of smallholders, the gap between conventional agricultural practices and resilient abundance requires peer learning, and access to new tools and techniques.   You can learn more and support the institute on their website: https://permacultureinstitutemw.com/ -- you can also learn how to sponsor farmers and farm training there! 

In our tour of Sub Saharran Africa, Alex followed a recommendation from Thiang’o to talk with Ripura Hewick. Ripura is based in Namibia, and manages a dryland farm for the non-profit Steps for Children.   Ripura started as a traditional Agrobusiness management student University of Science and Technology (NUST) graduate with a Bachelors of Agriculture  but left conventional agriculture, disappointed in the business. After a hiatus he returned to as a farm manager of a permaculture project connected to one of Steps for Children’s schools.    In this interview, Ripura describes the unlearning and relearning process he had to go through to figure out how to successfully build a community integrated market garden, that provides nutrition, education and seedlings for the local community.

400 episodes down and some big changes coming.  It's been almost 9 full years since I started this little show and I'm amazed at the journey that it's accompanied me on, from my apprenticeship in bamboo building in Guatemala, to starting a homestead, leaving it to move to Spain just ahead of the pandemic, and where I am now, putting down roots in central Catalunya on my little farm with my partner Alba.  This is hardly then end though. despite a tough year where I've even considered shutting down the show, some new opportunities have come up that will take this podcast in a new direction.  I would love for you to be a part of how the show takes a new shape in the coming year. Please take the time to fill in the short survey here if you'd like to guide our new direction.  And of course, a sincere thank you to all of you who've supported this podcast and it's growth over 9 years. There's no way I would have persisted this long without you. 

Welcome back everyone and welcome back to the monthly panel sessions. In this session that I hosted with Climate Farmers, we dive into the lives of three passionate farmers, Julia, Anne, and Mateo, who are not only dedicated to regenerative agriculture but also deeply invested in their communities. Each farmer shares their unique journey, challenges, and successes, from establishing cooperative farms to activities that bring people to participate in the work and bounty that they’re creating.    This conversation explores the essential role of social design, community engagement, and the diverse activities that make their farms resilient and impactful. We also go into practical steps on everything from building relationships with local communities to navigating cultural differences, all while highlighting the importance of personal growth and understanding in fostering a thriving, regenerative ecosystem.

You may remember a handful of weeks back when I interviewed Kristina Villa about the work of the Farmer’s Land Trust, and how they’re helping to make farmland affordable as well as giving new options to retiring farmers to preserve the legacy of their farms. Today will be a continuation of that discussion but with a practical example. I’m joined today by both Ian McSweeny, the co-founder and co-director of the Farmer’s Land Trust along with Kristina, and also by Alex Tanke, a farmer specializing in tree nut breeding who is now in the process of setting his farm up as an agricultural land trust and working with Ian and Kristina along with other local stakeholders to make that happen. In today’s session we’ll take a deep dive into Alex’s case study of how he came to decide to put his land into a trust, and the process of doing so, which is still ongoing. Both he and Ian also explain the considerations and options that others can choose from and the expectations one should have before entering into a process like this. Because of the hurdles to creating an agricultural land trust in US the Carya Farmland Commons, the Trust that Alex has fully donated his 43 acre farm to create, they’re looking for donations to conserve the farm and turn it into a resource for the region and serve as an option for other farms to also be held as commons. They only need 20 or more people to donate $50 or more to reach their goal. So if you feel inclined to help them out by the end of this episode, you can go to thefarmerslandtrust.org/commons/carya to learn more and donate. Don’t worry, I’ve put all the links in the show notes for the episode to make it easy. Carya Farmland Commons   Carya Farmland Commons financial sheet   Carya Farmland Commons donate link

Thiong'o Gachie is a permaculture trainer in Kenya, focused on inspiring smallholder farmers on how to apply permaculture principles, such as crop diversity, to strengthen their yields and build greater community.   Alex sat down to talk to Thiong’o about his own process about setting up a small 1 acre farm, developing community, and understanding the larger agriculture-sector wide changes happening in Kenya, such as seed sovereignty and ubiquitous agrochemica use.   If you want to help Thiong’o, he has a really active LinkedIn and Instagram highlighting education and insights for communities in Africa. He recently started a GoFundMe focused on funding a pond-liner, which is comparatively hard to purchase in Kenya. 

Though there are only a handful of bugs and invertebrates that humans consider edible, productive, or beautiful, they are an essential element in any healthy ecosystem. All too often the ones that we don’t derive beauty from or direct use from are considered an annoyance at best or actively destroyed and eradicated in all too many cases. It’s long overdue that I highlight just how valuable insects are to out world and our own wellbeing on this show, and to help me to do that in this episode is Vicki Hird.  Vicki Hird is the Strategic Lead on Agriculture for The Wildlife Trusts UK and was until recently Head of the Sustainable Farming Campaign for Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming. She is also a published author and runs an independent consultancy. As an experienced and award-winning environmental campaigner, researcher, writer and strategist working for the past 30 years mainly on food, farming and environmental issues and solutions, Vicki has worked on government policy for many years authored ‘Perfectly Safe to Eat? The facts on food’ in 2000, and has led teams at FoE, War on Want, WSPA and SAFE Alliance. She has co-founded many organisations including Sustain, Hackney Food Partnership and the Eating Better Alliance – and has written and campaigned extensively at a global, EU and national level. Vicki’s other passion is insects and other invertebrates and she has a Masters in Pest Management and is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society (FRES). Her new book – ‘Rebugging the Planet-The Remarkable Things that Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – and Why we need to love them more’ will be our focus of today’s conversation. Vicki helps me to understand the significance of invertebrates in ecosystems, exploring their role, challenges, and conservation efforts. Together we go over how promoting biodiversity, sustainable practices, and community engagement is crucial to protect these essential species and support whole ecosystem health.  We also cover practical actions that anyone can take to support insect habitats in their area such as adopting habitat-friendly gardening practices, advocating for conservation policies, and understanding the impact of individual actions on invertebrates to maintain the delicate balance of nature.

I’ve been so happy to see how popular the concept of growing one’s own food has become in recent years. Especially since the pandemic, a lot of us have connected deeply with the need to build food resilience by cultivating our own gardens, and quite a few have even gone further and started to grow at a market scale.  It’s a beautiful thing to be able to eat fresh healthy produce from your own land, but I’ve often wondered as well, how we can cross the long dark and cold period of winter, when fresh local veggies are tough to come by. Though there are quite a few volumes about season extension in the garden, I had never really come across anyone who was actively planting for deep months of winter, and so I was thrilled when I found that New Society publishers were putting out a whole book on exactly this subject. Building on years of research, experimentation, and collaboration, and co authored by Catherine Sylvestre and Jean Martin Fortier “The Winter Market Gardener” is a beautifully illustrated practical guide to winter vegetable production for small farmers growing in northern climates.  I got to speak with Catherine Sylvestre who is a professional agronomist and director of vegetable production and leader of the market garden team at la Ferme des Quatre-Temps (The Fours Seasons Farm) in Quebec, Canada. She develops, implements, and teaches best practices for cold-season growing, specializing in crop protection and greenhouse production for northern climates. In this episode we cover just about every focus in this very complete book, from where the interest and research into winter growing started, sources of knowledge and inspiration for their ongoing experiments into winter growing, strategies and season planning, and even sales and marketing advice for the off-season produce. Catherine also gives crucial advice on the very practical side for things like structures and season extension tools, greenhouse heating devices, disease and pest protection, harvesting and cold storage, and even lists of plants that have grown well for them as well as those which have struggled. This episode could very well be the key to extending your home production of fresh veggies, whether at home or in a market garden, for the entire year, so you may want to have a notebook for this one and follow the link in the show notes to get your own copy. 

This past month we took a look at the timely topic of agritourism and the potential for farms to serve as community and educational centers. This summer we saw a lot of protests against mass tourism and the effects that it's having on tourist centers like Barcelona near where I live. The antidote to this is something that we debate in past episodes I've done on the developing series on regenerative tourism and in this panel session, we'll take a look at it from a farm perspective.  In this session I speak to three people who either have integrated farm visits and agrotoursim as a significant part of their farm enterprise, or are working to empower farmers to integrate tourism and commuinity events into their operation.  I was lucky enough to get three fantastic guests who I happen to know personally and exemplify some of the best in entrepreneurial tenacity, creativity, and experience.

have you ever wondered what the difference between a garden and an edible ecosystem is? Do you want to know how you can create one in you own yard? In this episode with author Zach Loeks from the Ecosystem Solutions Institute, you learn all that and more. We’ll walk you through how to choose your site, even if all you have is a 5ft by 5ft patch of earth. From there we’ll look into orienting the garden spot, improving the soil, and choosing your plants for form, function, and potential. The coolest part is that this system is modular and you can expand it from a tiny spot in an urban yard to a whole farm with the permabed system. While there are tons and tons of tips and information in Zachs book on edible ecosystems, the smallest and most basic form revolves around the modular permabed system that he pioneered in his first book. Starting with a 5”x5” patch of earth, you mound compost or topsoil like you might in a garden bed, with the low sides being on the south and north ideally to create tiny microclimates that favor different types of plants. in the center row at the height of the mound you can plant your key plant, which will usually be a fruit tree or berry bushes. This creates a center point with full access to sunlight and space around to plant your support species. I’ll use the example of a pear tree guild from the book. in the center is the pear tree, ideally a bare root sapling which will cost less than a potted on and is less likely to be root bound. Along with the tree on the top of the mound you could plant grape vines on either side which will use the tree as a trellis as they grow taller. strawberries are a great perennial ground cover which will help to shade out weeds and bear delicious fruit on the south side where it gets full sun. on the shadier south side of the mound you could grow a few asparagus shoots. they’re a highly nutritious perennial vegetable that will keep coming back year after year. Some echinacea planted around the top by the pear and grapes will offer some visual beauty from the flowers, attract pollinators, and is a powerful medicine too.  This is just one example of a micro edible ecosystem. If you have more space you can group multiple 5×5 squares into a row, or add multiple rows in what Zach calls a triad. play with different combinations of plants that can support one another and explore the full diversity of what grows in your climate. The options are almost limitless.

Building on the series with my friend Alex in Urugay on the challenges and opportunities of regeneration in areas of the world that are more economically and resource limited, Alex was able to connect with our mutual friend through the Regenerative Skills Discord server, Bobby Dimitrov.  Bobby not only has a unique perspective because of living in Bulgaria, one of the lowest income regions of Europe, but also because he's had a lot of success in leveraging his skill in building community to overcome many of the financial and material access challesges of where he lives.  This episode focuses on his personal journey and how he and his family have built connections in their neighborhood that is consistently yielding benefits that even having a large land base or a massive bank account could bring.  I love this conversation because it reinforces the necessity of building relationships caring for the people around you as the foundation of resilience

Welcome back to another panel session. This month our topic of focus was the role of livestock in regenerative farms. This is a contentious issue for many people either strongly entrenched in the idea that animals should be removed from our farming systems from a range of reasons due to prevailing animal cruelty, the massive environmental resources and contamination that is pervasive in conventional livestock operations, and even reasons of efficiency of food conversion into calories and nutrition being that it can be much more effective to grow human food rather than feed animals and then eat them or their products like milk and eggs. On the other side is the perspective that we’ll be highlighting today which aims to answer those concerns, dispel myths and misconceptions, and offer data and case studies from professionals and practitioners in the field themselves.

For a long time now, our food system has been a primary indicator for so many markers of health in our society, from the way that our food is produced, what kinds of food we eat, how we cook, how it affects our health and even our ethics as consumers. For the next four weeks I’ll be taking a look our food system from a variety of different view-points and analysis in order to shed light on some of the lesser know factors that influence how we eat and how our dietary choices shape the food industry at large. To kick off this series I spoke with Jon Steinman, author of the new book “Grocery Story: the promise of food co-ops in the age of grocery giants.” Now Jon has studied and worked with everything about food for more than twenty years. He formerly produced and hosted a popular podcast called Deconstructing Dinner, was a writer and host for a web series by the same name, and now curates the annual “Deconstructing Dinner” film festival of compelling food documentaries. Jon was also an elected director from 2006-2016 of the Kootenay Co-op – Canada’s largest independent retail consumer food co-op, serving as Board President from 2014-2016 Now I consider myself fairly well informed about the food industry from personal research and that fact that in the last decade I’ve worked directly in many branches of the industry from refrigerated shipping, industrial farms, organic farms, fish processing, many different roles in restaurants, and even the permaculture farm that many of you have heard me talk about for over a year now, but I never knew so much about the influence that the giant grocery chains and supermarkets have on every aspect of our food from how it’s grown till it gets to our plates. This is a very eye opening look, not only at the broken aspects of the food industry, but the very tangible and accessible solutions that co-op grocery stores can be, not only for getting access to better food and transforming the way the industry is incentivized to operate, but also for the positive impact that co-ops can have on our communities and local economies. We also talk about solutions for access to high quality food for low-income neighborhoods and much more.

A lot of my work these days revolves around communicating with farmers around Europe who are at various stages of a transition towards regenerative management. For many different reasons farmers are looking for solutions outside of the conventional industry of chemical and technological manipulations and are rediscovering the potential of partnering with natural cycles and processes. Though there are a handful of examples of growers who’ve been pioneering these practices around the continent, the vast majority are fairly early in their journeys. It’s still rare to find an experienced commercial grower who has found success through organic, no-till, low input systems.  Luckily there are a few who have shown that this is possible and are sharing their knowledge and experience and I’m thrilled to feature one of them in this session. Helen Atthowe has worked for 35 years to connect farming, food systems, land stewardship, and conservation. She currently farms and does soil- and natural enemies’ habitat- building research on her new 5-acre farm in Western Montana. Helen has an M.S. in Horticulture from Rutgers University and even studied with renowned Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. She has worked in education and research at Rutgers, the University of Arkansas, and Oregon State University and was a Horticulture Extension Agent in Montana for 17 years. Helen was a board member for the Organic Farming Research Foundation 2000-2005 and advisor for Wild Farm Alliance in 2018 & 2019.  She first owned and operated a 30 acre certified organic vegetable/fruit farm in Montana and later co-owned with her late husband a 26 acre certified organic orchard in California. Together they then moved to a 211 acre organic farm in Eastern Oregon doing mainly orchard and vegetable production. The two of them also created educational videos on their YouTube channel called Agrarian Dreams, and did video presentations about their ecological farming methods. She is the author of “The Ecological Farm: A Minimalist No-Till, No-Spray, Selective-Weeding, Grow-Your-Own-Fertilizer System for Organic Agriculture”. And that is exactly what we’ll be focusing on in our interview today. As a reflection of many of the discussions happening within the Climate Farmer’s community at the moment, Helen and I really dug into the unique goals she and her husband had during their farming careers and how they gauged their success. We talk about the way they measured progress on their journey towards a healthy yet low input system for both their orchard and vegetable crops as well the routines and practices that brought them the best results. Much more than just the knowledge and practices of her farming experience, Helen brings a remarkable mindset of constant learning and experimentation to this conversation that is now informing her new 5 acre project in Montana. We also cover the most important learnings that she has gained through her career and how it informs the establishment of all her new research.