Regenerative Skills

Wherever you’re listening to this right now you’re probably feeling the changes this summer in a big way. It’s not only us here in the Mediterranean region of Europe who are experiencing record heat waves, droughts, and wildfires. I’ve been watching news reports from all over the world and the other day my Mom in Spokane Washington even told me that fires had nearly reached their home. I have no desire to go into the doom and gloom of climate reality, but we also can’t ignore two very important things. The first being that massive action needs to be taken to restore the damaged ecosystems of the world, and two, governments and industries just aren’t going to act fast enough. It falls to all of us to inform ourselves and get to work. This episode today is meant to help you do just that. Today I spoke with Lorenzo Costa who has been on the show a couple times already, but now that I’m in Italy and have been observing the effects of this severe summer weather, I knew I had to get in touch with him again and get his perspective as someone who travels the country working with growers of all types to restore the hydrological function and cycling of their land to build resilience in their operations. While it’s worth going back to his previous episodes where he talks about his own vegetable operation in the Chianti region of Tuscany, as well as the water projects he was doing a few years ago, in this episode we get an update on the patterns and learnings from all the new projects he’s seen and worked on recently. 
Now that we’ve covered a lot about the concepts and theory behind watercycles and how they interact and are affected by landscape management, as well as how my colleague Nick Steiner and I assess and read a landscape ahead of a project, we’re going to be focusing increasingly on practical restoration options and case studies from innovative farmers and restoration workers from around Europe. So let’s jump right into this exploration of the current challenges and potential in Italy from Lorenzo

Following up from the last episode in which I explained some of the broader concepts of water cycles and their relationship with land, vegetation, and management practices, we're going to go down to ground level to explore what it means to read the landscape for water restoration potential. More than a conceptual exercise however, this discussion is one I recorded with my colleague and water restoration practitioner Nick Steiner. Together we went out to assess the water retention potential on a farm of clients of ours in southern Portugal. For those who don't know, this area has been on a long trajectory of degradation and drying out. The whole region is in severe need of a change in how they manage water as the status quo of the last decades has desertified the area. Though we'll be speaking about the unique conditions and context of this farm and bioregion, the steps and considerations from our assessment process are widely applicable to any landscape or climactic region. My hope here is that you'll be able to go into any landscape and begin to observe how water move through and is received by the space your in. This is the first step in being able to design for water management on any farm. You can share what you observe and learn from your own land in the Climate Farmer's community where we have a dedicated channel where we talk about water management with our group of more than 800 farmers around Europe. 

As we’ve explored in recent episodes of the Regenerative Skills Podcast, there’s an unfortunate disconnect between academic institutions, independent research, and real farms. We all know there are endless opportunities for new learnings and scientific studies that could benefit farmers, especially in traditional and regenerative enterprises which have often been overlooked.
Yet frequently we see universities and other institutions struggling to accommodate the realities and needs of these types of farms, and similarly, these profiles of farms struggling to adapt to the needs of the institutions. In this panel episode we’ll talk to farmers and researchers who’ve overcome some of these hurdles in unique ways to advance the learnings that stand to benefit all involved.
Together we’ll explore the challenges and opportunities for collaboration as well as the stories that offer insights and inspiration for future cooperation. In this panel episode we’ll talk to farmers and researchers who’ve overcome some of these hurdles in unique ways to advance the learnings that stand to benefit all involved. Together we’ll explore the challenges and opportunities for collaboration as well as the stories that offer insights and inspiration for future cooperation.

Today we're going to pause our deep-dive episodes to launch a new series supporting a regenerative agriculture master’s program being developed with European universities, starting with regenerative water management . Interviewed by Marina Bartoletti, Oliver Goshey explains macro vs. small water cycles, emphasizing how vegetation drives local cooling, evapotranspiration, and rain formation via biological nuclei like bacteria and fungal spores, and how devegetation can disrupt precipitation patterns and intensify drought, wildfire, and flood extremes. The episode links Iberian Peninsula heatwaves, shifting rainfall, and desertification to land management, and outlines farm-level responses: boosting soil organic matter and infiltration, reducing runoff and erosion, using shade and windbreaks, improving water quality, and considering nitrogen fertilizer impacts on plant drought stress. It introduces Climate Farmers’ free Water Management Guidebook and previews upcoming case studies and a watershed-scale restoration blueprint.

Farm viability depends on much more than what happens in the field. While we often focus on production and farm management, many of the biggest challenges farmers face are shaped by what happens.
After harvest: processing, packaging, distribution, and access to markets. As processing facilities and post-production industries become increasingly consolidated, primary producers are left with fewer options for where and how to sell their products.
Not long ago, much of this work happened on farms or through small-scale enterprises in nearby towns. These local processing systems allowed farmers to capture more value, reach customers more directly, strengthen rural economies, and create meaningful employment close to home.
In today’s panel, we’ll speak with farmers and small-scale processors who are keeping these local industries alive while finding new ways to make them viable in an era of mass production and industrial consolidation.
Together, we’ll explore practical opportunities for adding value to raw farm products, the real challenges of setting up micro-processing operations, and the lessons learned from people already doing it.
We’ll also look at how farmers can start their own processing enterprises or collaborate with others in their community to transform their products, diversify income, and rebuild more resilient local food economies.

After the biodiversity panel from the last episode, I got to thinking about how protecting biodiversity is so often reduced to the life forms that humans value. The ones we find beautiful, friendly, or otherwise useful to us directly. Cuddly mammals, majestic birds, colorful butterflies and flowers, etc. 
 
In many ways though, these living beings are only able to survive and thrive if the critters that we dislike are abundant in the same spaces. Many flowers are pollinated by bugs most would find annoying. A lot of cuddly mammals feed on weed species or our own crops. Eagles and owls need an abundance of rodents and reptiles if their populations are to grow. Many invasive exotic species are working tirelessly to restore damaged and imbalanced ecosystems. 
 
It’s kinda like trying to lose body fat in just one area of your body. You can’t just pick the parts that are desirable to you and expect the whole interconnected system to accept that. Collectively we need to embrace the restoration and stewardship, especially of the lower trophic levels of the food web that support all the higher levels above. 
 
In the last panel we touched a little on the tolerance and adaptation required to share space with predators and birds that threaten livestock and crops, recognizing their role despite the challenges that come from having them around. 
 
Today I’ll be revisiting some of my favorite interviews from previous seasons in which we talked about three specific categories of overlooked and undervalued wildlife. 
 
My hope is that we can welcome these into a broader conversation about biodiversity, and maybe even convince you to work to promote greater diversity and open pollination of your crops and livestock, the full range of insects, and even rethink your management of invasive species in your land or on your farm. 

This month we’re tackling the challenges and benefits of wildlife in all its forms. Wildlife and wild spaces are often spoken about as if they're at odds with the goals of farms. We often talk about battling weeds, deterring predators, and eliminating competition from undomesticated forms of life. It doesn't need to be this way though, and as farmers build beneficial relationships between all forms of life around them they're finding incredible benefits to the farm as well. In this panel we'll speak to farmers who've made care for the wild a part of their management practices. They'll share what they do to make their land more welcoming to all the life around them and how the health and productivity has responded as a result.

It’s been over a year now since Climate Farmers let go of its Carbon credit program, and yet I know that many people who’ve been following our company don’t know the full story about how we got started in the carbon market, why we let it go, and what we’re continuing to do to help improve carbon markets to assist farmers in their transition to regenerative management.
Today I’m going to fix that as my dear friend and colleague Esther Dalkman takes us on a journey through the history of our former carbon credit program and what we’re doing with 5 years of learnings from trying to use the carbon market to finance regenerative agriculture.
 
Along the way we’ll hear from the former managing director of Climate Farmers, Ivo Degn, about his learnings and observations of the wider carbon market, as well as Joao Martins who used to be our business lead and is now leading the new company Terra Madre which is continuing our carbon credit legacy as they work with farmers in Portugal to access transition finance for a wide variety of ecosystem services beyond carbon.
By the end we’ll talk about what it would take for the carbon market to adapt to the needs of real farmers and we’ll get candid advice on what farmers should know  if they’re considering participating in a credit program before they sign up. 

The only real way to learn and gain experience in farming is to get your hands dirty and put knowledge into practice. For that reason farms play an essential role in training others to get into this sector and navigate the challenges and learning curves of making a living on the land. While most of the farms in our network have shown interest in offering educational opportunities, actually becoming a school is outside of the capacities of most of them. At the same time there are many ways to offer training from offering courses and workshops to student, volunteer, and apprenticeships. In this panel we’ll explore many of these possibilities from the perspective of farmers with many years of experience helping others get their foot in the door as well as those who are just starting to explore how to participate in offering learning opportunities. We’ll cover essential considerations, key learnings and advice, and new ideas that our panelists are exploring to improve their offerings for both learners and themselves. Join us live to get your own questions on how to set up or improve your trainings answered live by our panelists.

In today’s deep dive episode we’re taking on the behemoth of a topic that is the broken system and relationship between academic institutions and farmers on the ground. For a long time there was traditional and experiential knowledge that helped to guide farming practices and cultures based on eons of experience and place based relationships. As agriculture became more technologically driven, traditional practices began to be replaced with mechanized and chemical centered management. Traditional knowledge was supplanted by academic knowledge which was guarded by universities and research centers as scientific trials and studies offered roadmaps of how to integrate these new products into farming. For the most part these institutions guarded their information and disseminated it through research papers, formal agronomists, and extension services. Since much of the research on specific products and the practices of using them was, and still is, funded by the industries that sold them, much of the knowledge has a severe bias in favor of the efficacy of those products and studies helped to push them onto farms. Most of the research done on farms happens on specific research farms run by universities themselves, which isn’t to say that they don’t create valuable learnings and insights, but the studies there are often done in highly controlled environments that working farms can almost never recreate, and the research then gets published in journals that farmers either don’t read or can’t access. For their part, farmers are constantly running experiments and trying new things to stay ahead of the endless variables and challenges of trying to get consistent yields out of a dynamic and living landscape while operating in shifting markets. The ones I know are endlessly tinkering and experimenting and looking for new knowledge. In theory these would be the ideal collaborators for researchers, but for a number of reasons that we’ll explore in this episode, the communication and collaboration just doesn't happen.  So here’s where we come in.Climate Farmers started more than 6 years ago, and while we used to be best known for our carbon credit program, which we closed back in 2025, we now operate entirely as a non-profit dedicated to advancing a regenerative food system in Europe by helping farmers to successfully transition to regenerative management of their land and businesses. Yet one of the core aspects of our work here still goes largely unnoticed by the farmers in our community, and that’s the projects we’re involved in through our research and innovation labs. This is where we’re working to connect academia and research institutes with real farmers. The idea is to bridge the gap that many of us have observed between the institutional research that churns out papers and studies that few farmers ever read, and instead get farmers involved so that they can help guide these studies and perform trials on their own land that can create validated information that’s relevant to them and their operations. The research and innovations labs at Climate Farmers are run by my colleagues Fabio Volkman and Alexander Berlin who are guiding us through today’s Deep Dive into both the challenges and the potential of better connecting scientists and farmers. They’ll also give us a look into some of the many projects we’re involved in that illustrate how we help make these connections happen as well as the valuable outputs that have already been created as a result. But just telling this story from our own perspective from within Climate Farmers hardly meets my standards for a Deep Dive, so you’ll also hear from a researcher who’s broken the mold for on-farm studies by conducting holistic and relationship focused research. You’ll hear from an agronomist helping to manage over 20k hectares of arable land and pastures who’s become a bridge between local universities and farmers in Estonia, and we’ll speak to a farmer with a long established track record of collaborating with researchers to create useful learnings on his own farm while helping push forward innovative knowledge in the institutions as well. If you’re a farmer listening to this, you’ll want to stick around till the end where we’ll also talk about how you can get involved in these European projects and research studies as well. You can learn more and reach out to us directly through our website at this link. https://www.climatefarmers.org/research-and-innovation/