Regenerative Skills

John Kempf on the trends and future of regenerative agriculture

My guest today needs no introduction if you’ve been paying attention to the regen ag scene in the last decade, but just in case you’re new to this topic and community let me catch you up to speed
 
John Kempf is an entrepreneur, speaker, podcast host and teacher. He is passionate about the potential of well managed agriculture ecosystems to reverse ecological degradation.
It is John’s mission to have these regenerative models of agriculture management become the mainstream globally by 2040.
In addition to being a grower, John is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, Crop Health Labs, Ozadia, and the Regenerative Agriculture Academy. He 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.
I had John on the show twice now and in the first conversation I didn’t know much about him or his work and so we covered many of the softball questions about things like the definition of regen ag and its importance in a new ecological food system. Since then I’ve become an avid listener of his podcast and have a much better understanding of just how important his work and that of his companies have become in leading the way in this scene. As a result I wanted to explore some of the deeper questions that very few people have enough of an overview of this movement to be able to see, and that’s exactly what we cover in this session. Together John and I navigate where regen ag  is in this current moment and the drivers that have brought it this far. John reflects on the patterns and learnings from the vast clientele of AEA about the commonalities and characteristics of successful farmers who’ve transitioned to regenerative management as well as those of the coaches and consultants that are effective in assisting them in their journeys. 
We also look into the influences outside of farming directly, the external factors that set boundaries on producers from the large food companies, retail outlets, commodities trade, investors, and politicians that wield so much power. Since John’s work is already one of my go-to sources for information on the newest innovations and state of progress for regen ag, it was a unique pleasure to be able to gain insight into his vantage point and strategy on how to bring this movement forward further.

Will Harris reflects on his career and his return to giving a damn

Despite the popularity of regenerative agriculture at the moment and the fact that there are many inspiring farmers involved in the movement, it’s still rare to find experienced farmers, especially in large scale operations that have been working to regenerate their ecosystems and communities for more than 20 years. 
For this reason I was thrilled to connect with Will Harris of White Oak Pastures for a second time to dig into the remarkable career he’s had and the journey of transforming his farm into one of industrial beef production to a holistically managed multi-species farm that has been a beacon of the potential of regen ag in his region. For those of you who didn’t catch the first episode I recorded with him, Will Harris is the owner of White Oak Pastures, in Georgia’s semi-tropical Coastal Plain. Described by his daughters as an “organic icon” of the Real Food movement, he is one of the very first people to bring grass-fed and humanely raised meat to the mainstream. Harris is one of the most outspoken critics of industrialized, centralized, and commoditized agriculture and is one of the most recognized leaders in the regenerative and resilient agriculture space. 
In this episode we focus on the new book that he’s just published titled A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food. 
We start by talking about the origins of his family’s tenure on the farm almost 150 years ago and how management and practices changed through the generations. 
From there Will shares his personal journey from following in the footsteps of his father who was a skilled industrial cattleman, to his awakening that gradually began to transform the way the farm was run. 
Along the way the town of Bluffton, GA where they’re located began to change and grow along with them and we discuss the role that White Oaks played in the revitalization of the community.
We also cover a wide range of insights from Will’s career from the challenges and hurdles that have been working against their vision from the political and industrial forces in the food system in the US, to points of hope and inspiration that make the difficulties worthwhile. 

Key insights from reviving soils around the world, with Matt Slaughter

Though we’ve covered many aspects of soil health on this show in previous episodes, this is an area of scientific and agronomic study which is constantly growing and evolving. It seems that there are a growing number of specialists who are pioneering research in very specific and detailed aspects of soil health which helps to expand our overall picture of the ecosystem under our feet. 
At the same time it’s essential to be able to translate all of this advanced biology, chemistry, and even physics into information that someone from outside of academia can translate into action on the land and a soil care and fertility strategy. Thanks to another great recommendation and connection from my friend Anja at Soilify, I was put in contact with Matt Slaughter to explore this kind of practical information. For 20 years Matt has been helping farmers around the world understand their soil microbiology and finding ways to help them "bring soil back to life".
He is the Founder, President and Laboratory Director of Earthfort where he’s primarily focused on customer support through consultation and education, but is also responsible for product research and development. As the creator of Earthforts products, he is constantly striving to help customers understand and use the products to the greatest advantage of the end-users. As a scientist, philosopher, and poet, Matthew is always learning and attempting to integrate natural, holistic processes into agriculture. 
Matt was also an early student of Elaine Ingham and worked with her for years going out to consultations in remote places around the world. In this interview, Matt starts by sharing some incredible stories from those early days in the field and the key learnings that have stayed with him until this day. We talk about how he has developed the soil amendments and products that his company is known for and what he’s learned about how they work over years of study. 
We also get into a broader understanding of soil health and function as well as how it can differ across contexts and use cases. Matt gives his thoughts on many other soil amendment strategies like bio inoculants, different types of compost, biochar and the like as well as what all this research and working with farmers all around the world has taught him about the commonalities and patterns of productive soil and land. I’ve often been careful not to go too deep and academic into the topic of soil health because of how technical and unapproachable it can be, but Matt does a great job of making all the immense knowledge and experience he has simple and approachable so I know you’ll find valuable insights that you can use to develop your own soil care strategy.

Building a regenerative food system in Europe, with Patricia Wiklund

This week I want to build on the panel discussion that I started previously in the panel episode with the group from the Alpbach forum. In that conversation we looked at various visions on what a regenerative food system could look like from representatives from Nestle, Agrana, and a conservation farmer. 
Today I want to bring another perspective into this idea of building healthy and resilient food systems from a friend of mine who has been working on this by connecting stakeholders throughout the entire food value chain in Finland.
Patricia Wiklund is the CEO of Invenire, a making ideas-happen-agency working with food & the bioeconomy, circularity, biodiversity & thriving rural landscapes. She has been instrumental in creating a “living laboratory” on the Åland Islands in southwest Finland. She is also a hub leader in the Baltic region of the Savory Institute Network promoting holistic land management, and a partner in Gens, a company working for upward spiraling farm life. 
Patricia and I met almost two years ago during my work co-coordinating the first Climate Farming conference. She along with three other fascinating colleagues of hers from Finland attended the event and were my first window into the budding regenerative agriculture movement in that area of Europe, which I otherwise knew next to nothing about. 
Since then I've been looking for an opportunity to follow up with her in order to see how their projects and collaborations develop. It turns out Patricia and her team have been advancing some fascinating experiments in connecting members all through the production, processing, and retail sides of the food web in her area and this is the main focus of our conversation in this session. 
We also cover the challenges and opportunities of working in a small microcosm like the Åland islands where she works, and some of the advantages of dealing with food systems that haven’t yet been over developed and retain some of their traditional structures like local markets and diverse local production. Patricia also shares insights into how we can all work, in very tangible ways, to become active and participating citizens in our food systems instead of just consumers.
This session holds a lot of new insights and options for people who care to become more resilient on a community level in terms of food security in ways that have nothing to do with planting a veggie garden or becoming a farmer, many of which are relevant even to those of us who do produce food. 

From planting to harvest. How to care for your fruit trees, with Suzan Poizner

The growing popularity of permaculture food forests and backyard multispecies orchards is part of a movement that I’m 110% in support of. Any addition of native and food producing plants in diverse multispecies configurations is a wonderful thing. 
I want to see as many people as possible find success with these plantings, and that’s why I’ve been a bit concerned by the way that many designers and landscapers oversell the benefits and expectations to people who want to plant their first fruit trees and expect to get a yield from them. 
That isn’t to say that it’s a ton of work and you shouldn’t expect to get meaningful harvests from your fruit trees, but I want to make sure that first time growers have realistic expectations of the maintenance and growth cycles of their fruit trees so they can manage the and find the success they’re looking for. 
Caring for a fruit tree or small orchard is a growing journey for both the plants themselves and the people who care for them, and to shed light on the full journey of growing fruit trees I got in touch with Suzan Poizner. 
Susan is an urban orchardist in Toronto, Canada and the author of the award-winning fruit tree care book Growing Urban Orchards. She is an instructor of Fruit Production at Niagara College in Ontario and the creator of the award-winning online fruit tree care training program at www.orchardpeople.com. Susan is also the host of The Urban Forestry Radio Show and Podcast and an ISA Certified Arborist. 
In this conversation Suzan and I talk about the differences between caring for a few fruit trees or a small community orchard in the city, and what most people associate with orchard maintenance in a farm context. 
From there we go methodically through the essential considerations of selecting fruit tree varieties for both resilience and production, planting considerations to give them the best conditions to start with, maintenance and pruning in the early years to ensure vigorous growth, tips and tricks to increase harvests and fruit quality, and a whole lot more. 
We even talk about Suzan’s learning journey in developing a community orchard and some of the unexpected challenges that came up.

Ecological regeneration through profitable farming with Jake Takiff

Any of you who’ve been following the show this season will remember one of my favorite episodes from the beginning of the year in which I documented a water restoration job I went out to Nicaragua to go in collaboration with Restoration Agriculture Development, the contracting company founded by Mark Shepard.
There I worked under the guidance of Jake Takiff, RAD’s dryland restoration specialist and the lead designer on that job. 
I got along famously with Jake and learned a ton from working alongside him on that project. So much of his personal journey and the story of the development of his own farm and restoration design in Western Colorado didn’t make it into the episode we recorded back then, but I knew I would need to follow up and share his story with all of you.
Well we were finally able to find time and make our long overdue catch up call happen. 
So let’s start with a little intro to set the context.
Jake and his wife Meghan started Cedar Springs Farm back in 2016 on the Western Slope of Colorado where they’ve built a home and now have two children.
They are focused on building soil, fostering biodiversity and managing water. The project utilizes scaled up permaculture techniques and regenerative farming practices including silvopasture, rotational grazing and agroforestry.
The management practices have transformed the landscape from an arid, high desert into a lush system of pastures with trees and yield high quality beef and pork.
Jake also hustles as a project coordinator, consultant and field manager for Restoration Agriculture Development through which he’s had the opportunity to design and install regenerative systems for farmers all over the world.
His experience on his own farm, combined with the many installations he’s managed for clients gives him a unique perspective and approach to the regenerative farming movement.
In this conversation we’re going to unpack that approach piece by piece. We start with a little background into his first experiences in farming and the elements that clicked and have stayed with him his whole life.
We go into the key connections and learnings that have informed his growth and capabilities as a farmer and land manager, as well as the mentors that have shaped his path.
Jake shares the details of his design approach to his own farm and how the patterns of the various ecosystems where he’s farmed have helped to inform him about the hydrology, plant communities, animal communities and the essential relationship between all of them that have come together to make his medium sized farm work so well.
We also dissect some of the specifics of the experiments he’s run over the last 7 years, those that have worked, and those that haven’t, and contributed to the evolving transformation of the land that continues to get better and better. 
In general I’m a big admirer of people who have come to develop such a close and observant relationship with the land and living beings of the places they inhabit, and Jake is an exceptional example of someone who has centered his life around a deep connection to all the diverse and nuanced elements of his ecosystem from the natural ecology, his own family and local community, and even the complexities of the economy and socioeconomic realities that they participate in. 

Visions for a regenerative food system in Europe

At the end of August I had a unique opportunity to attend the European Alpbach Forum in Austria, as I was invited by organizers at Nestlé to moderate an event they were organizing. This was a unique session that included a guided hike in the Alps around the town and a discussion centered on the core themes of which structures, innovation, incentives, models, and mindsets are necessary to enable the transition to regenerative food systems. 
As listeners of this show already know, I’ve explored these concepts a lot in the past but mainly from a farmer and land steward perspective, only a few times exploring the wider industry that processes, distributes, and markets the end products that most people buy. So I was curious to understand how some of the biggest food companies globally and in Europe see the concept of regenerative food systems and their roles and responsibilities within them. 
The event included three speakers, Katja Seidenschnur (the sustainability director at Nestle), Ulrike Middelhoff (Group sustainability manager at Agrana which is a large processor of food ingredients like sugar and starch), and Hans Gnauer (farmer and deputy chairman at Boden Leben, which roughly translates to Living Soil, a conservation ag consulting and education company). Together they represent perspectives from different sized food processing companies and the supply chain from field to final product. 
Since we knew we wouldn't be able to record the event itself, The night before, we got together for dinner in the little town of Reith in Tirol and recorded this conversation in a cozy little restaurant. In this case cozy also means that the old wooden benches were quite creaky and that's the sound in the background which I'm not enough of a sound engineer to have removed completely. Oh well. In this conversation with the three of them we started by talking about each of their visions for a regenerative food system and what actions and resources they think are needed to make them a reality. I picked apart a few of the answers to get beyond the easy proposals and challenge a few of the assumptions beyond them. We also go into the roadblocks and challenges that are holding these ideas back and the responsibilities that each of them and their representative companies or communities have in transforming the current food system to one that goes even beyond sustainability. I’m really glad to have had the chance to get to know each of the speakers during our event and it gave me some valuable insights into the paradigm and thought process behind each of these representative members of the food system that has changed so much of how we eat and experience food in recent decades. I really hope to continue to participate in conversations like this and help to shape the dialogue and priorities that these companies base their policies and practices on. If any of you out there would like to hear me explore any particular topic or perspective from other aspects of the food industry, you can join the conversation and make requests on our Discord community which you can sign up for for free on our website at regenerativeskills.com.

Pioneering regenerative dairy production, with Phyllis Van Amburgh

At this point I’ve covered a wide array of practices and management styles that fall under the broad umbrella of regenerative agriculture. Some could be considered traditional while others are more modern and innovative and they span continents, climates, biomes and industries. Nonetheless I’ve noticed a pretty big gap that I’ve yet to cover in detail that I hope to begin to fill in today. 
Dairy farming has been under sharp criticism in recent times. Scrutiny over everything from the appropriateness of dairy in the diet to the methane emissions of cows and the controversial practices of early separation of calves from their mothers to maximize milk production have all contributed to a diminished reputation. 
Though these critiques are very legitimate, what if there were solutions to all of them without the need to turn to non-dairy alternatives?
Today to explore these solutions is one of the leaders in regenerative dairy and a growing movement of dairy producers working to develop a new way of managing dairy cows and the pastures they coexist with. Phyllis Van Amburgh along with her husband Paul and their family are leaders in holistic land use, biodiverse cultivation, Organic dairy herd management, and more. 
Together they are dairy farmers in upstate New York, and have been involved in key innovations in the dairy industry, mostly in western parts of the world, re-integrating dairy cows as a cornerstone for ecological health and for human communities to thrive. Phyllis and Paul have also helped develop the Grass-fed certification program with NOFA-NY and PCO. 
In this interview Phyllis starts by sharing her inspiring story of transitioning away from her previous career as she and Paul embraced a gradual move into full time farming. 
We explore the intuition she had that much of the conventional wisdom and ways of doing things in the dairy industry were not really in the interest of either the cows nor the farmers and how that led them to rethink their own dairy operation. 
Phyllis outlines the key aspects they consider essential for managing a dairy herd regeneratively and the pioneering journey they’re on to make exclusively grass fed dairy cows viable through selective breeding and holistic managed grazing. 
We also explore Phyllis’ insights from her work helping large dairy operations in the USA and Europe to transition to regenerative management and the challenges and opportunities that the wider industry has to transform.

Akiva Silver on propagating plants and starting a nursery business: Part 2

 This is part two of the conversation started last week with Akiva Silver. Co-owner of Twisted Tree nursery and homestead. If you haven’t yet heard the first part, you can find the link in the show notes for this episode on the website at regenerativeskills.com
You’ll remember from last week that one of the first projects I encourage people to do when starting any land based project is to start a plant nursery. Not only will you start the long process of coaxing plants into maturity which is worth beginning as soon as possible, but you’ll also learn valuable plant care and propagation in the process. Planting your own nursery can also save you money when you eventually begin planting out your design, and if you enjoy it enough and can find a market for saplings and seedlings, you can make good money selling nursery stock as well. There are also real advantages to growing your plants in the soil and environment where they’ll live so they get the chance to acclimate rather than suffer a harsh adjustment from the heated greenhouse and chemical fertilisers so common in most plant nurseries. 
 
In the first portion of this episode we dove into how Akiva first began to propagate trees and his transition into making a business out of it and supporting his family by growing plants. We also got into all kinds of propagation methods and where and how to find the best materials for growing nursery stock. This week I’ll conclude this interview by exploring how to build a business around growing the plants you love, improving your soil enough that you can eliminate fertilisers and other inputs, the maintenance and care of your nursery through the different seasons, and the sales and marketing side of the business. 

Akiva Silver on propagating plants and starting a nursery business: Part 1

After the last few weeks of focus on the intricacies of Holistic management and building community in agriculture, I wanted to go back to some technical information on specific farming enterprises. 
One of the most common questions I get asked from listeners and clients who are starting new projects is about where to begin. Those of you familiar with permaculture will know of the common advice to live and wait a full year on your site before beginning to design and implement your vision. This time of observation and information gathering can be essential to avoiding common mistakes and preparing your place and design adequately to begin, but it can be frustrating for many people who just want to get started. For that reason, one of the first projects I encourage people to do is to start a plant nursery. Not only will you start the long process of coaxing plants into maturity which is worth beginning as soon as possible, but you’ll also learn valuable plant care and propagation in the process. Planting your own nursery can also save you money when you eventually begin planting out your design, and if you enjoy it enough and can find a market for saplings and seedlings, you can make good money selling nursery stock as well. There are also real advantages to growing your plants in the soil and environment where they’ll live so they get the chance to acclimate rather than suffer a harsh adjustment from the heated greenhouse and chemical fertilisers so common in most plant nurseries. 
In order to get a better understanding of just how easy and enjoyable it can be to start a nursery, I spoke with Akiva Silver who owns and operates Twisted Tree Farm, a homestead, nut orchard, and nursery located in Spencer, New York, where he grows around 20,000 trees per year using practices that go beyond organic. His background is in foraging, wilderness survival, and primitive skills. He has been observing nature intensively for the last 20 years, and cultivating a deep appreciation for life in that time. 
This is a longer episode for this show and it’s packed with useful and practical information so I’ve split it into two episodes. This first one dives into how Akiva first began to propagate trees and his transition into making a business out of it and supporting his family by growing plants. We also get into all kinds of propagation methods and where and how to find the best materials for growing nursery stock. Next week I’ll conclude this interview by exploring how to build a business around growing the plants you love, improving your soil enough that you can eliminate fertilisers and other inputs, the maintenance and care of your nursery through the different seasons, and the sales and marketing side of the business.