Regenerative Skills

Welcome to the fourth of the monthly expert panel discussions. As I mentioned in the past, each month I’ll be hosting discussions and debates between some of the most prominent voices in regenerative agriculture, soil science, restoration land management and more. If you’re a subscribing patreon member, you’ll also be invited to the live events and the open Q&A for listeners after the panel.In this session, I hosted a discussion on regenerating agricultural soil with my friends and colleagues at Climate Farmers, a non-profit organization working to advance regenerative agriculture in Europe.In this panel I got two of my favorite educators on the subject of soil science together to talk about how to build fertility and holistic health in agricultural soils. Since these discussions are longer than the regular weekly episodes, I’ll keep the introduction short and jump right into the introductions for our two panelists John Kempf has taken on the bold mission of having regenerative models of agriculture management become the mainstream globally by 2040.In addition to being a former grower himself, John is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, Crop Health Labs, Ozadia, and the Regenerative Agriculture Academy. He also hosts the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where he interviews top growers and scientists about the principles and practice of implementing regenerative agriculture on a large scale. Dr. Ingham discovered the soil food web nearly 4 decades ago and has been pioneering research ever since. Widely recognised as the world’s foremost soil biologist, she’s passionate about empowering ordinary people to bring the soils in their community back to life.Dr. Elaine’s™ Soil Food Web Approach has been used to successfully restore the ecological functions of soils on six continents. She has helped to make soil health knowledge available to people with no relevant experience – making it accessible to individuals who wish to retrain and to begin a meaningful and impactful career in an area that will help to secure the survival of humans and other species. So let’s jump right in! Get the resource packet for this episode! Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://johnkempf.com/ https://www.advancingecoag.com/ https://www.soilfoodweb.com/

I remember distinctly the time that a storyteller came to my middle school when I was in 7th grade. At that point my school experience, like for many others, consisted of being talked to all day by someone at the front of the class while I struggled to pay attention and not fidget. But this was different. This woman’s story and the way she told it managed to hold an auditorium full of 12 and 13 year olds in silent attention hanging on her every word. I remember how she raised and lowered her voice to build tension. How she would quicken or slow her speech to convey energy and pace, and use emotion to transport us into the viewpoint of the characters and feel what they were feeling. I was truly impressed. Since then I’ve loved storytelling, especially live stories, and envy those people who’ve mastered their way of speaking to elicit real emotion and connection with an audience or even just in individual conversation. And that’s why, today I'll be exploring the importance of storytelling in our modern lives with one of my personal favorite authorities on the subject, Shannon Leahy is the cofounder of lighthouse storytelling and works with individuals and organizations to effectively communicate their stories through better writing and speaking. She told me right away just how far back storytelling has played a big part in her life and why it was so important from a young age. Before we go in deeper about techniques and strategies for better storytelling, lets establish a baseline of where we’re at as a storytelling culture, because digital and social media have changed the ways we tell stories through their various platforms. Get the resource packet for this episode! Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://www.lighthousestorytelling.com/ Want to hear more episodes like this one? https://regenerativeskills.com/how-to-ask-better-questions/ https://regenerativeskills.com/abundantedge-loxley-and-rhapsody-of-the-story-connective/ https://regenerativeskills.com/abundantedge-bill-reed/

If you don’t know her from her books, Fibershed and Harvesting Color you’ll likely remember Rebecca Burgess from the panel discussion two weeks ago that I hosted with the team at Climate Farmers in which she and Aroa Alvarez Fernandez spoke about the potential of regenerative fashion and textiles to transform the current clothing industry. After that discussion I felt compelled to speak to her again to explore some of the options that are available to everyone to rediscover the value in our wardrobes and care for our clothing as investments.  This is no minor change. The fashion industry around the world is now second only to the oil industry as the largest polluter on Earth. This affects everyone and is tied to many aspects of our lives, from growing fibers, to processing fabrics and dying them, to the millions of people who work in the industry from farming to retail. It’s responsible for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions due to its long supply chains and energy intensive production, but even more severe is the industry’s impact on our water supplies. For example 85 % of the daily needs in water of the entire population of India would be covered by the water used just to grow cotton in the country, and yet it’s estimated that 100 million people there do not have secure access to drinking water. In most of the countries in which garments are produced, untreated toxic wastewaters from textiles factories are dumped directly into the rivers. The contamination eventually reaches the sea and then spreads around the globe. But while the destruction of the clothing industry is staggering, there are a lot of simple things that all of us can change in our consumption and care habits to do our part to fix this. Since this is certainly not my own area of expertise, I asked Rebecca what her own hierarchy of clothing purchases are and how she decides what garments to invest in.  Get the resource packet for this episode! Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://fibershed.org/ carboncycle.org https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/fibershed/ colorhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52510936-fibershed?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=9GnJJbKvzv&rank=1

On this show I’ve often taken a strong focus on the actions that we can all take to restore ecosystem function and productivity, whether it be planting trees in an agroforestry system, repairing the hydrology of a landscape, or building our homes with natural materials. I’ve centered around these topics because frankly, they’re the ones I have most experience with and can speak about with some confidence, but there are also many other angles on regeneration that are equally important.  Many of you will agree with me that, as essential as it is to get out there and work in nature directly, planting trees is only useful if there isn’t someone right behind you coming to chop them down. Worrying about how ethically your food is sourced doesn’t do much good when we waste a third of it. Oftentimes the harm of the industries and actions that we inadvertently support more than undo the positive steps we fight to take.  That brings me to the focus of today’s episode which is on Regenerative investing, and the compelling story of Marco Vangelisti, the founding member Slow Money, a nonprofit that is centered around no-harm investing.  We’ve long been told that we as consumers vote with our money. The decisions we make about what to buy is equivalent to what we support and what we want to see more of, but most of our daily shopping is a drop in the bucket compared to the amounts of money being invested in speculative markets and commodity trading. This is the money that often determines the expansion of industries and new operations. It’s the banking and investing sectors that are funding the destruction of our planet, but I’ll let Marco tell you how and when this all connected for him.  Get the resource packet for this episode! Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://ek4t.com/ https://ek4t.com/tanhi21Q2/ https://slowmoney.org/ https://ek4t.com/how-do-we-deal-with-climate-change-by-restoring-the-hydrological-cycle/ https://ek4t.com/greta-and-sallie/

Welcome to the third of the monthly expert panel discussions. As I mentioned before, each month I’ll be hosting discussions and debates between some of the most prominent voices in regenerative agriculture, soil science, restoration land management and more. If you’re a subscribing patreon member, you’ll also be invited to the live events and the open Q&A for listeners after the panel. In this session, I hosted a discussion on regenerative fashion with my friends and colleagues at Climate Farmers, a non-profit organization working to advance regenerative agriculture in Europe.Since these discussions are longer than the regular weekly episodes, I’ll keep the introduction short and jump right into the introductions for our three panelists. Rebecca Burgess is the executive director of Fibershed, chair of the board for Carbon Cycle Institute, and the author of both Fibershed and Harvesting Color. She is a vocationally trained weaver and natural dyer. Burgess has built an extensive network of farmers and artisans in the Northern California Fibershed to pilot an innovative fiber systems model at the community scale. Aroa Alvarez Fernandez is a sustainability entrepreneur who is one of the founders at Trace Collective & Trace Planet, an activist fashion brand and community organisation on a mission to make the fashion industry a driver of environmental regeneration, and to help communities reconnect with the products that they buy. Real quickly before we get to the panel, we had some technical difficulties when recording and lost the first minute of the call, so we jump into Rebecca’s answer a bit abruptly, but the question I asked in the lead up is, What does a global regenerative fashion industry look like in terms of fiber and material production? She started by stressing the need to take care of this at a local in order to better inform a global scale. Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://fibershed.org https://www.thetracecollective.com/

Let's take a look at the 1st step in the process of creating a design for building your permaculture property. In working in regenerative design for a while and being connected with many other people who make their living this way, myself and a lot of others have begun to identify patterns in the questions and troubles that people reach out to us consultants and designers for. I haven't been in this line of work though nearly as long as the team at Verge Permaculture and so it felt really good to hear that many of the commonalities that they’ve seen from clients and students mirror my own experience. The truth is that permaculture is a very broad design philosophy that can feel overwhelming even with years of experience, especially at the beginning of a project when you’re still gathering information about your ecology and context and when you see so much potential in front of you. For this reason it can be extremely helpful to have a guide that outlines a process that can illuminate and simplify the options available to you and cut through the overwhelm.  Throughout this season I’ll be teaming up with the members of Verge Permaculture to show you the process that they’ve outlined in their new book, Building your Permaculture Property.  In five clear steps, their process can guide you through the minefield of choices and pitfalls while designing your project and then implementing the design.  Step 0 inspect your paradigm Step 1 Clarify your vision, values, and resources Step 2 Diagnose your resources for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats Step 3 Design your resources to meet your vision and values Step 4 Implement the Right Design That Will Most Improve Your Weakest Resource Step 5 Monitor Your Resources for Indicators of Well-being or Suffering In today’s episode I’ll be speaking with Takota Coen of Coen Farm in Alberta Canada about Step 0 and Step 1 to start you on the process of design and implementation.  For those of you who want to get ahead of the game and learn from more than 15 of the biggest names in Permaculture on how to transform your property, the authors Takota, Rob, and Michelle will be hosting their online summit for the release of the book from April 23-25th. The summit is completely free and you can register at mypermacultureproperty.com So let’s get started at the beginning. Takota began our discussion by explaining the 5 common problems that he and the team at Verge repeatedly hear about which lead to the 5 step process in the book. Get the resource packet for this episode! Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://vergepermaculture.ca/building-your-permaculture-property-summit https://vergepermaculture.ca/ https://www.coenfarm.ca/ Want to learn more about permaculture and regenerative design? Check out these previous episodes: https://regenerativeskills.com/abundantedge-daniel-halsey/ https://regenerativeskills.com/https-www-abundantedge-com-abundantedge-daniel-christian-wahl/ https://regenerativeskills.com/abundantedge-nelson-lebo/

With regenerative agriculture and agroforestry increasingly becoming popular topics in environmental and even political circles. I wanted to do a one-on-one session with one of my favorite speakers in this sphere, Patrick Worms.  Many of you frequent listeners will remember him from the panel discussion on agroforestry two weeks ago that I hosted with Climate Farmers. I got to know Patrick’s work and perspective more intimately as part of the online course on ecosystem restoration design that we both teach on. Patrick is the Senior Science Policy Advisor at World Agroforestry, President of the European Agroforestry Federation, and trustee of the International Union of Agroforestry, he’s also a valued member of the advisory council with the Ecosystem Restoration Camps. In the courses and conversations I’ve seen with him, I’ve always been struck by the stories and compassionate understanding of the people that Patrick has met in his work and travels. In order to make some of these stories and insights available to you listeners, I let go of the usual focus just on actionable information to let this chat take its own course. Though we still cover a lot of practical advice in this talk, what I often take away from listening to Patrick is a renewed reverence for the individual people who are working to manage their lands and produce food around the world. It’s easy to think of agriculture and the food industry as these monoliths without faces, but the lives of the people who make up these systems, from those to tend the land all the way through the logistics, distribution, transportation, all the way to our kitchens are important to remember ad pay attention too as well.  To get us started off with some background though, Patrick shed some light on the history of agroforestry and it’s deep traditions in Europe specifically. Get the resource packet for this episode! Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://www.worldagroforestry.org/ https://www.cgiar.org/ https://euraf.isa.utl.pt/welcome https://www.iufro.org/ https://www.evergreening.org/ https://ejpsoil.eu/ https://www.renature.co/ Check out these other episodes on agroforestry! https://regenerativeskills.com/the-potential-of-agroforestry-expert-panel-2/ https://regenerativeskills.com/alfonzo-chico-de-guzman/ https://regenerativeskills.com/how-to-start-a-profitable-elderberry-farm/ Don't forget to check out

Since last week’s episode was an expert panel discussion on agroforestry, I wanted to expand on that theme and help to bring some practical and actionable information on how to plan your own reforestation project. I reached out to Michael Pilarski first since I’m helping to organize and launch the knowledge exchange platform for Ecosystem Restoration Camps, and as an advisory council member, Michael has a ton of experience and knowledge on this subject. In today’s episode we’ll cover the most important steps in designing and implementing a reforestation project, whether it’s for a conservation project, or a profitable agroforestry enterprise.  So let’s dive right in with Michael’s calculations on the feasibility of doubling the world’s forest cover within our lifetimes. Get the resource packet for this episode! Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://friendsofthetrees.net/ https://globalearthrepairfoundation.org/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNPSTkjWIrl7FD31xbJ5STg https://www.ecosia.org/ https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/news/cocoon-tree-growing-counters-desertification-mediterranean Check out these other episodes on reforestation! https://regenerativeskills.com/alfonzo-chico-de-guzman/ https://regenerativeskills.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-state-of-the-worlds-forests/ https://regenerativeskills.com/11-inspiring-examples-to-give-you-hope-that-the-worlds-forests-can-be-regenerated/ https://regenerativeskills.com/how-to-grow-a-healthy-native-forest-in-record-time-with-afforestt-founder-shubhendu-sharma-146/

Welcome to the second of the monthly expert panel discussions. As I mentioned last time, each month I’ll be hosting discussions and debates between some of the most prominent voices in regenerative agriculture, soil science, restoration land management and more. If you’re a subscribing patreon member, you’ll also be invited to the live events and the open Q&A for listeners after the panel.  In this session, I hosted a discussion on agroforestry from three distinct perspectives with my friends and colleagues at Climate Farmers, a non-profit organization working to advance regenerative agriculture in Europe. Since these discussions are longer than the regular weekly episodes, I’ll keep the introduction short and jump right into the introductions for our three panelists Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://www.ecosia-regenerative-agriculture.com/ https://new.worldagroforestry.org/ https://einhorn.my/einhorn-condoms/

It's time we take a look at How To Make Biochar Enriched Compost For Epic Veggies. A lot of what I spend my time on these days, between working with Ecosystem Restoration Camps, Climate Farmers, and running this show, is researching techniques and solutions for people who are working to regenerate damaged landscapes, either for generally healthier environments or for rich and abundant farmland. Since a lot of both of these goals revolve around the health of the soil as a foundation for mycorrhizal and plant life, I continually come back to the power and potential of pyrolyzed carbon, more commonly known as biochar. There are tons of examples of people making this remarkably simple product all around the world and using it to restore health to poor and degraded soils, but since I’ve been here in northeastern Spain for a while now, I wanted to hear from someone nearby whose worked biochar into a profitable and ecological business. Meet Christer Söderberg, the gentleman behind Circle Carbon Labs on the island of Mallorca. Get the resource packet for this episode! Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community Links: https://circlecarbon.com/ https://www.permachar.net/kon-tiki-biochar-kiln/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy9k0_sX1xU