Regenerative Skills

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. 

Join Chiara Dragone, co-owner of Pulicaro Farm in Italy, known for its livestock and agritourism, Andy Frogat from Grimona Farm in Slovenia, renowned for olive oil tours, and Charles VandeKerkhoff, a tourism expert focused on regenerative practices. They discuss transforming farms into educational centers, the impact of COVID-19 on tourism models, and the importance of effective communication to attract visitors. The panel highlights innovative practices in regenerative agriculture, emphasizing community connections and unique visitor experiences.

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.