Regenerative Skills

I’ve touched on this topic briefly in previous interviews, but it bears repeating. Agriculture around the world is going through a critical moment. The skyrocketing prices of petroleum products, meaning most agriculture chemicals and fertilizers as well as machinery fuel, is causing a tipping point for many farm businesses. Operations that have long been dependent on these synthetic inputs are facing tough decisions. Do they double down and continue to keep their land on life support, sticking with the system they know, but which is becoming more and more unsustainable, or do they take a gamble on new management methods that prioritize soil biology and multiple ecosystem services?

There are no easy answers since for most growers who’ve relied on these inputs for years if not decades, there will need to be a period of transition, even if they chose regenerative management, in which their yields could suffer.

Luckily, there are a few well qualified professionals out there with a track record of guiding farmers through the challenge of transitioning their land management practices, and I had the chance to speak to three of them in a special panel discussion. In today’s session I’ll be speaking with Ian Robertson, Ben Taylor-Davies, and Ed Brown. Between these three fellas they have decades of experience at the forefront of regenerative agriculture, and continue to push the advancement of agroecological innovation at both the individual farm scale as well as the institutional level.

All three of these guys are good friends who attest to speaking to one another just about every day and you’ll hear the characteristics of their friendship come out in this insightful and also light hearted discussion.

One of my favorite topics to explore on this show is how other people with unique skill sets and talents look at the natural world and the ecological design process. I’ve been fortunate in my network of designers, educators, farmers, and academics to peer into the specialties of ecological understanding and design thinking from many points of view, and today is one of those opportunities.

I first met Henry Anderson through a design project that our mutual friend Juan Pablo was working on in Portugal through the Climate Farmers Pioneer program. We were looking at a feasibility test for a 50 hectare plot that some investors were considering as an investment in regenerative agriculture. Juan Pablo introduced me to Henry as a colleague who would look into all the potential for leveraging native plant communities for ecological restoration and high value crops. I was immediately impressed by Henry’s extensive knowledge of biomes and plant communities in Portugal and together we all developed a really elegant mixed agroforestry design for the clients. 

Long story short, the investment wasn’t picked up, but all three of us have been good friends ever since and now I’ve got Henry back to share some of his knowledge and experience as a biologist and designer. Henry is a Scottish multi-disciplinary designer based in Lisbon, Portugal with a background in landscape architecture, urban design and ecological planning. He has accumulated over fourteen years of professional experience working for leading architectural and landscape offices around the world, including in Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom and Portugal. Henry now specializes in delivering best practice regenerative solutions for landscape architecture, agriculture and ecological restoration projects within the Mediterranean biome, and follows an ecology led process that delivers multi-functional outcomes specific to each project's unique context.

In this conversation we talk at length about the process by which Henry starts to assess and investigate the state of ecological health and identify the plant and wildlife on a site, essentially his form of reading a landscape. We also look at the tools and resources that can expand the research process and give insights into historical land use and plant communities to open up more options for a design. 

Together we also dissect the concept of natural succession and how you can leverage this trajectory to enhance and speed up the development of your project, and a lot more as well.

For those of you who love the deeper science of ecology and biology, but find the academic approach to it a bit too disconnected, this is the interview for you since Henry has a unique way of explaining and making connections between the abstract concepts and real life applications.

I’ve been looking forward to today’s session for a good couple months now. 

Though it’s been years since I got excited about seed saving and heard the first little bits of the ideas around landrace gardening, I only recently got a window into its real potential. I honestly feel a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know more about landrace plant breeding until recently since it’s the reason we have pretty much all the domesticated and semi-domesticated varieties of food that you can find all over the world. It also turns out to be an incredibly approachable practice that throws out the traditional rule book of plant breeding with its meticulous adherence to detailed record keeping, isolation distances, and inbreeding.

But instead of hearing about it from me, let me introduce you to Joseph Lofthouse. Joseph adopted the principles of landrace gardening in response to the harsh growing conditions in a high-altitude, short-season, desert garden. Instead of relying on expensive poisons, labor, and materials to coddle the plants, he instead encourages genetic diversity, cross-pollination, and survival of the fittest, allowing the plants to adapt themselves to the current and ever-changing ecosystem, thus simplifying gardening and seed saving. Joseph is the author of Landrace Gardening: Food Security Through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination, and he was kind enough to send me a copy ahead of this interview.

I don’t always have the chance to read the books that get sent to me by publishers and authors in their entirety, but I have to admit I ate this one up and fully got through it cover to cover. In our conversation today, Joseph and I start by uncovering his personal pathway as a farmer early on and the failures and frustrations with seeds available in the stores that led him to experiment with landrace growing. 

Not only does Joseph face many challenges in the high desert environment up at more than 5000 ft of elevation in Utah, but he also practices what he calls “vacant lot farming,” which quite literally means he’s farming on abandoned plots of poor soil. From there we get more technical by clarifying the difference between a heirloom variety, a hybrid, open pollination, and a landrace, and why it’s so important for us as growers to move away from the industrialization of seeds and plant breeding. 

I also wanted to expand on the initial knowledge around the basic concepts of landrace gardening that we explored a couple weeks ago on this show in an interview with Julia Dakin who is a collaborator of Joseph’s. Together they created the “Going to Seed” network and free online course platform to promote landrace growing and seed sharing. In that interview we covered a lot of practical information and basics, and so I will recommend that you go back and listen to it in case we’ve skipped any essentials in this session. 

So building on that previous interview we dug into some of Joseph’s personal experiences and stories from trialing hundreds of landrace projects on his farm and some of the truly unique findings and evolutions that he’s witnessed. He also offers essential insights into not only the tips and tricks that have led to his successful breeds, but also the mindset and expectations that have helped him remain open to unexpected outcomes and the patience required for growing and reproduction cycles.

Touching on a deep interest of mine within the broader topic, we also navigate the challenges and potential of landrace trees and perennial crops. Joseph has a close family connection to walnut breeding and shares insights into the legacy work that this practice is for him. Over almost 7 years of listening to different ideas and practices from so many people all over the world, I’ve identified a few that, for me anyway, hold the most potential in various aspects of ecological restoration and regenerative growing practices. For example, working to restore the hydrological function of a landscape can yield outsized results for the amount of time and resources put into it.

Capturing and propagating indigenous microorganisms has an outsized impact on long term soil regeneration.

Landrace gardening looks at the challenge of growing food in diverse conditions and ever changing variables and switches the narrative from, how do we manipulate the environment to make it conducive to grow ever more narrow plant genetics, to, how do we increase and promote the plant (and animal) genetics to become resilient to both the challenges of our current growing conditions and the ever growing variables that the future will bring.

These are the efforts that every grower around the world both knowingly and unknowingly contributed to in order to produce food in the past, and I believe it’s essential for agri-cultures to embrace them once again. 

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.

Welcome to a very special episode of the regenerative skills podcast. This is the 300th episode that I am publishing today, and to make the occasion I wanted to try something new. At this point the show has grown immensely from where I started it and I would imagine that most of you who are tuned in now haven’t been here since the beginning. 

For that reason I’m going to revisit the origins of this show and explain the context in which this podcast was started, how it’s evolved along with my own personal journey, and bring you up to speed about where I am currently. We’re also going to check in with my dear partner Alba who is appearing only for the second time on this show. She’s bravely confronting her self consciousness about speaking English on a recording in order to share her perspective and ask some questions, and though I doubt she’ll ever listen to this episode, I want all of you to know how much it means to me to include her in this milestone and share my gratitude for all the support and patience she’s shown me in getting to this point.

  I also get a chance to speak with my dear little sister Emily, who has been my closest friend and confidant for my whole adult life. She and her three daughters, my nieces Selma, Rawan, and Lujane are here visiting for the first time since we moved to this farm and are spending two months of the summer with us. You’ll get to hear from all of them later in this session.

By the end I’ll also share some insights into the vision for both this podcast and the broader aspects of my work that the show is contained in. As with any future vision there are a lot of variables and uncertainties, but you’ll get a peek into what I have in the works at the moment before I hopefully announce them happening in future episodes.

Today’s episode touches on a very timely topic for me. I’m currently developing a program to assist European farmers in their transition to regenerative management of their farms, and the big challenge is to make a program that is relevant for the vast array and contexts and differences that farmers across this continent are working from. No set of information is appropriate. No one teaching style is going to connect with everyone. 

Even the regulatory frameworks and incentive structures can vary a lot. I’ve long since observed this as an obstacle for design frameworks like permaculture which have a solid foundation in the principles and patterns of nature, but often get lost in the details and techniques like swales, chicken tractors, or herb spirals. I’m of the opinion that we’re all overwhelmed with information and possibilities in our bizarre anthropogenic world and more options and information often only serve to make choosing and taking action tougher. 

I believe that simple and reliable processes and organizational support have a much bigger role to play in helping us to set priorities, put parameters on our options, and make the overwhelm more manageable, especially when it comes to the complexities and timescales of working with living systems. 

Lucky for me, one of my friends and respected colleagues in the permaculture space has just developed a course and accompanying tools to assist precisely in this area.

William Horvath, founder of “Permaculture Apprentice.” William studied permaculture in Australia before quitting his job as a geologist for the mining industry there and moved with his wife back to Croatia where he is originally from. 

For years now he’s been developing his own permaculture paradise and writing and educating about his experiences on his blog and through his design and consulting services through permacultureapprentice.com. He has also begun teaching permaculture courses for people looking to start their own farms and transition to a regenerative lifestyle.

In today’s session we pick apart the common hurdles that lead to inaction and paralysis despite having all the knowledge and information we may need. We talk about the common problem of having lofty goals, many projects going on at once, and limited time and resources to do them.

From there we go deep into defining the What, Where, and How of your goals in order to build them into a process. William talks about how to break them down into manageable chunks from there through phases and steps of development as well as sharing tools and advice for keeping everything organized and scheduled in calendars and to-do lists so you never miss essential windows again.

I really want to express just how important I believe that this piece of the puzzle is for all of us in reaching our goals. I know from my own experience how much getting organized, building routines, planning ahead in detail, and creating loops of experimentation, monitoring, and revision have all been in my life and in my success with clients and in business. 

Though I’ve come a long way personally, I still have a lot of learning in this area and doubling down on preparation and planning has always paid dividends for myself and those I know who excel in their chosen fields.

Before we get started, I’ll also recommend that you go over to the links in the show notes where William has given exclusive access to some of the tools and templates that feature in his course in order to get you started. 

And if any of you want to stay up on the development of the transition program I’m building for Climate Farmers, the beta program will be available for members of the Climate Farmer’s community this fall and you can sign up now on our website at climatefarmers.org.

Today’s episode is going to require some context for anyone who’s not familiar with the origin of this show.

Back in 2017 when I started this podcast I was doing an internship with my friend and mentor Charlie Rendal on bamboo building in Lake Atitlan Guatemala. I had been traveling back and forth from Guatemala for a number of years.

I had originally gone down there with a friend to learn Spanish and I ended up coming back for years to see friends and just because I love that country.

In my time there it was impossible not to get connected with all kinds of projects and initiatives to try and improve the living conditions for local people.

Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the second poorest in Latin America by GDP. While I understand that that’s not the only meaningful metric for quality of life, there was no ignoring the fact that the opportunities and resources that I saw in most other places I traveled and had taken for granted in my life up until then were drastically lacking in most parts of that country. 

For this and many other reasons which we’ll touch briefly on in today’s conversation, everywhere you go in Guatemala you’ll find Non Governmental Organizations or NGOs as well as all types of charities and aid entities claiming to work to address everything from malnutrition to ecological challenges, sanitation, infrastructure, education and everything else in between.

It seemed like every foreigner who I met who wasn’t a backpacker worked for one of these groups and when my friends and I eventually bought a small plot of land and started to put down roots, we began to learn a lot about the aid industry all around us.

Between rumors, first hand stories, and even my own experience it became clear that more than a small percentage of these organizations were not as altruistic as they projected. It was well known that many were fronts for money laundering.

Others simply paid out large salaries for foreigners to attend events and fundraise while little worked on the ground. Stories of corrupt sequestering of funds were common, and even among these entities that were really committed to their work, I heard so much about communities having solutions forced on them with little say in the matter.

Projects getting abandoned before completion, technological fixes handed over with little or no training, and so many others I could go on about. Despite this grim picture I’m painting of the aid industry in Guate, I did get to know and make friends with a handful of people who really took the time to understand and integrate with their chosen communities before devising solutions.

I got to know folks who were also putting down roots and really had some skin in the game when it came to the outcomes of their work and impact. Today I want to take a look at one in particular, called Seeds for a Future, as much for the work they’re doing as for the approach and learnings that guide their initiative.

This organization first came to my attention when my close friend Leilani reached out to put me in touch with Daillen Culver who is their director of operations. Leilani has been on the show before and she is one of the few people I know who has traveled extensively within Guatemala and has an intimate knowledge of both the good and reprehensible aid work that is happening in that country.

So when she brought Daillen and Semillas para un Futuro to my attention, I knew it would be worth looking into. In this session both Daillen and Leilani join me to talk about the simple beginnings of this project and the unique context in which it got off the ground.

They help to outline the challenges that the communities they work with are facing and the long term approach to co-create solutions along with the people they collaborate with.

We also cover the principles that guide the progress and decisions within the project and the external challenges that Daillen and Leilani work from outside to support. Charity and aid work continue to be fraught with controversy and skepticism, and I will not make the assertion today that the approach that Seeds for a future is taking is the only effective one.

I do however appreciate the perspective and insight that both of these women bring to such a tricky subject and I hope that it will make space to continue this conversation in future episodes as well as on the Regenerative Skills Discord Community.

Since the three part series that Nick and I recorded about the vast array of drought mitigation and recovery solutions for people in different living situations we’ve gotten a lot of follow up questions from listeners who want to go deeper into this subject. 

Luckily one of my friends and mentors who’s had an outsized influence on my educational journey and inspiration to work with farmers and land managers in helping them to make the most of the water resources has just come out with a new book. 

Many of you know Mark Shepard for his seminal book, Restoration Agriculture, I’ve also had him on this show in the past to talk about his previous book Water for Every Farm. Most recently I spoke about Mark a lot with Jake Takiff when he and I went to design and install a water retention landscape in Nicaragua as representatives of Mark’s company Restoration Agriculture Design. 

That brings us up to this point where Mark has just released the field manual to accompany the book Water for Every Farm which is intended to assist any designer or practitioner with the engineering specifications for various water retention features and earthworks. These will not only help you to ensure proper due diligence but also to navigate the jargon and regulations, specifically in the USA, that the USDA and army corps of engineers uses in order to better communicate and perhaps even find support from those entities. In this chat Mark and I explore the details of his masterline system and how it can be adapted to the needs of modern farmers at any scale. We also explore the flexibility of the design system to be relevant for diverse and complex topographies. 

For me it was also important to explore the topic of long term maintenance for earthworks and water retention features since so much emphasis is put on the design and installation, and then, due to poor maintenance planning, the project can be quickly degraded or even fall apart. With someone with over 30 years of experience, this is an essential aspect to consider.

Just checking in while still on a short holiday. I just dropped my mom off at the airport at about 3 yesterday morning after a wonderful week of her visiting us, my sister, and her girls at the farm. It’s been such a blessing to have almost all my favorite women under the same roof for a time. My family is scattered all across the world, so these moments when a number of us can be together is really precious to me, and a big motivation of why Alba and I moved out here to begin with. Though we only moved into this place back in December, it’s already fulfilling the dream of bringing mine and Alba’s families closer together. 

The down time has done me a lot of good as well. Though wrangling a bunch of little kids is anything but relaxing as most of you know, it’s thoroughly fulfilling to watch them discover a few abilities and life lessons while finding their feet and bearings through this gorgeous natural environment. 

They've been learning to take care of the chickens, identify plants that we can eat, and which ones are stingy and pokey. We’ve been playing in the river and making erosion barriers. Yesterday we planted trees for a new hedge, and made some rainwater diversions in the road. 

I also had the time to have some deep conversations with my mom and sister looking ahead for what we want in our lives. My mom and dad are reaching retirement age, and they’re looking at references of my grandparents, all of whom are in their 80s with rapidly declining health. We’ve talked about how we should be taking care of ourselves and one another as we age and change from roles of care receivers to care givers. Things like risk factors, maintenance, and even graceful decline came up, all of which are very relevant to this ongoing topic of holistic health that we continue to explore in this show. 

So with that said I’m excited to bring you the second part of this conversation I had a good few years ago with my close friend and nutritionist Crystal Honeycutt. This second part focuses on the topics of supplementation for faster recovery, the nuanced definition of regenerative health and how we can rise above our low standards of health as they currently are to reach our superhuman potential.

Over the next two weeks I’m going to be taking some much needed recharge time with my family here on the farm. I've got my little sister Emily here and her three little girls Selma, Rawan, and Lujane who came from Kuwait city to spend the summer with us, and my mom who just arrived on Wednesday who will be spending a week with us. We’ve got outdoor education time around the farm (which we call Jungle School), a number of fairs and local festivals in the area we’re going too, and a lot of good food to indulge in made by our neighbors and broader community around the comarca of Osona in central Catalunya that we’re going to explore. 

Going hand in hand with the family time, I’ve been aware of a need to find a better balance in my home life. It goes along with this series on holistic health that I’ve been building, and both my partner Alba and I have been re-examining here at home. 

Alba has been suffering from some acute inflammation in the gut recently which has really impeded on her quality of life. In my case I’ve been flirting with burnout as I juggle between my work, the projects around the farm, and now looking after three little kids. Though I’m not in pain or discomfort, now that I’m in my mid thirties I notice that I can’t abandon my health routines and self care for as long without feeling the consequences as I did a decade ago. As a result, Alba, my sister and I have been asking ourselves questions about the necessary adjustments we need to make in areas of our diet, rest cycles, personal care, and balance of obligations to ensure that this journey is enriching and fulfilling in the long run. 

For this reason I’ve also been thinking a lot about a previous series of talks I had with my good friend Crystal Honeycutt. 

I recorded a two part discussion with her back in the early days of this show when it was still called the Abundat Edge Podcast and I was living in a little shack while I built our bamboo house on our homestead farm in the mountains of Guatemala. We went into a lot of the considerations and personal analysis that I’m now revisiting, but since I recorded a pretty decent introduction to the conversation I’ll let my highly curated podcasting voice from 2018 set us up for the interview.