Podcast – Page 19 – Regenerative Skills

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Kill your lawn, to bring life to your yard

Lawns are the most costly agricultural product in the USA, using more fertilizer and chemical treatment than any other major crop including corn and soy. On top of that, they’re the largest consumer of water, especially in arid regions that can’t naturally afford to keep green lawns all year. And all of this for what? Grassy lawns don’t give us any food, they do almost nothing for the soil since their root systems are very shallow and create compaction beneath, and they’ve only been common in our culture for a short time. They originated in the gardens of English and […]

Regenerative Agriculture for a better world

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Interviews

Bringing farmland back into the hands of our communities, with Ian McSweeny of The Agrarian Trust

One of the biggest challenges that I’ve heard repeatedly both in the interviews in this series on regenerative agriculture as well as with peers and clients that I’ve collaborated with, is the difficulty for aspiring farmers to get access to land. This is true back in the States as well as in Europe and other parts of the world where I’ve traveled, and it’s part of a much larger problem in the trends of land ownership that reduce land to a commodity. As prices for land soar and the rapidly aging population of farmers struggle to keep their businesses afloat, […]

Regenerative Agriculture for a better world

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business building

Uniting women in agriculture for a regenerative food future, with Lisa Kivirist

Though this series on regenerative farming has covered a ton of different farming models, land management techniques, food production methods and design methods, one of the glaring absences in the perspectives I’ve included has been that of women, and I’m well aware of it. I did reach out to a lot of women farmers in an attempt to set up interviews, but many of them either didn’t want to be interviewed or were simply too busy to be able to schedule a call. I can imagine that with all of the nonsense and instability around the pandemic it must be […]

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homesteading

How to start implementing your design before it’s finished

Developing a full regenerative design can be quite a long and involved process. Looking deeply into your holistic context and trying to understand both the nuances of the ecosystem and community you’re working in doesn’t get done overnight. Many of you are like me however and just want to get started doing something as soon as possible. The problem comes when you realise that if you start to implement big and costly projects too early or before you’ve finished your design, you could end up having to undo them or your design could suffer from them being poorly placed. So […]

Regenerative Agriculture for a better world

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Regenerative living

Applying syntropic farming methods for dryland regeneration, with Jacob Evans

Over the years I’ve been hearing about a new pedagogy of land management that has been gaining in popularity, especially in agroforestry circles. The trouble for me has been that until recently a lot of the resources have been in portuguese, and so I kept my eye on it from a distance. Syntropic farming is a term first coined by Ernst Gostch, a swizz farmer who emigrated to Brazil in the 80’s and pioneered this new form of farmland management on his land in Bahia. But today, to speak about the principles of syntropic farming and how he’s adapted them […]

Regenerative Agriculture for a better world

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Podcast

Restoring Spain’s degraded farmland with regenerative agroforestry, with Alfonzo Chico de Guzman, president of AlVelAl

As I’m slowly becoming better connected here in Spain in the last year, one of the main projects in regenerative agriculture that keeps coming up in my research and the conversations that I have, is a fairly new project called AlVelAl which is located in Southern Spain, roughly in between the cities of Granada and Murcia. The name AlVelAl relates to the first letters of the comarcas (or counties) where the initiative started: Altiplano de Granada, Los Vélez and Alto ALmanzora. Today, the AlVelAl territory covers more than 1,000,000 hectares of degraded steppe called the Altiplano Estepario. I first found […]

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Design Criteria

How to build a digital base map for your design

Recently my partner and I have been looking for a home near where we live that we can transform into a regenerative paradise. Looking for land anywhere is a long and tricky process, especially because we have very specific criteria for what we want and need. As we’ve been looking around I’ve been making a ton of maps to get a better understanding of the places we’re looking at. It used to be that making maps was one of the most time consuming parts about designing a land based project. Now there are some really powerful and simple tools available […]

Regenerative Agriculture for a better world

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How to

Regenerating the rainforest by growing cacao with Alejandro Solano of Choco Mashpi

Though I’ve spoken to some great orchardists through this podcast, many of them are growing cold tolerant trees in far northern climates, but I wanted to get a perspective on running a holistically managed orchard in the tropics to explore how the beneficial interactions between some of the most prized tree and perennial products in the world can be grown in a way that fuels the restoration of these incredibly biodiverse and robust ecosystems. I’ve known quite a few orchardists from back in Guatemala where I used to live and work, and I’ll link to those interviews in the show […]

Regenerative Agriculture for a better world

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High Quality Food

What would agriculture look like with zero inputs? with Shane Simonsen, author of zero-input agriculture

Though I’ve been inspired by all the amazing examples of regenerative farming through the people that I’ve interviewed through this series, there’s one glaring commonality between all of them and that’s the fact that the success of their enterprises all rely heavily on the destructive infrastructure that we currently have in place to get the organic and feed inputs for their enterprises, the seeds or young animals that they then raise, and the fossil fuel system that then transports their food products to market. I’m not at all criticizing these people of their work. It would be near impossible to […]

Regenerative Agriculture for a better world

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regenerative agriculture

Is permaculture still relevant to small farms and local food security? With Loren Luyendyk of Permaculture Intl.

Permaculture has done an incredible job of raising awareness of natural land management techniques and teaching people to observe and read the patterns of the natural world to inform their interactions with the environment, but it often gets criticized for being impractical when it comes to apply its methods to profitable farming enterprises. There’s a long running line of questioning on this show, especially when I’m speaking with producers and farmers about where they have to compromise their choices for the earth with the needs of their businesses and the efficiency required to turn a profit, so to help me […]