Regenerative Skills

Now that I've wrapped up the series on waterway regeneration, I wanted to transition into a two episode deep dive into an essential component of water cycle health and how it affects the land by analysing the most elemental component of a healthy ecology, and that of course is soil. There’ve been a ton of new developments and research in this field in a very short time as scientists and agronomist...

We’ve covered a ton of angles to this topic already, from fixing broken water cycles on the land with keyline planning and earthworks, to marine ecosystem restoration through conservation and even farming. In today’s episode I got to speak with Bruce Kania of Floating Island International which developed their patented Biohaven floating island technology as a solution to algae-ridden and nutrient...

Welcome back friends and family to this ongoing series on waterway regeneration. In the past three episodes I focused on marine regeneration through conservation as well as farming. Today we're going to take a look at fresh water systems and specifically, how to decontaminate them through biological methods. I'll be sure to put a link to that interview in the show note on the website in case you m...

Welcome back friends and family to this ongoing series on waterway regeneration. We’ve covered so many approaches to this subject up until now, and over the last two weeks I’ve been exploring regenerative solutions to the environmental degradation of marine ecosystems. Today we’ll be looking closely at some creative ways of protecting and even reseeding coral reefs in my interview with Celia Grego...

Continuing today with this ongoing series on waterway regeneration and a deep dive into marine ecosystems, I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian Von Herzen.  Brian is an ocean scientist, engineer and entrepreneur, though much of his career has been in Silicon Valley where he developed innovative technical solutions for companies like Pixar, Dolby and Microsoft. Brian is also the founder and Ex...

Over the last month, I’ve been focusing on interviews with people who are pioneering the repair and regeneration of the water cycle as it pertains to landscapes. We’ve explored the installation of ponds and dams, permaculture earthworks and water retention landscapes as well as keyline design and planting the rain in drylands. These are all great interventions at the beginning of the water cycle’s...

In the last handful of episodes we’ve explored permaculture earthworks for water harvesting landscapes and keyline design on large scales. As a complement to those topics I got in touch with Brad Lancaster, the author Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, volumes one and two which have recently been re-released as expanded new editions. Brad is an expert in the field of rainwater harvestin...

Since the last two episodes focused on earthworks, specifically water retention and catchment features, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite interviews that really helped me to understand the fundamentals of keyline design and how many different configurations it could take, even on the same piece of land. The keyline system was pioneered of course by PA Yeomans in Australia back in the 1950’s a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSoKv2x4H0o Tying in perfectly with last week’s interview with Zach Weiss about building ponds and water harvesting features, I spoke with David Spicer, affectionately known as Doc Spice, an accomplished permaculture designer who has specialized in earthworks installation. Having taught and worked on various projects extensively within Australia and internationally,...

Welcome back to the ongoing series on waterway regeneration. Today’s interview is the second conversation I’ve had with Zach Weiss, the Protégé of revolutionary Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer and founder of Elemental Ecosystems, a company that designs and implements water harvesting landscapes and features for clients around the world.  Zach is best known for blending a unique combination of systems...

As we continue into this series on waterway regeneration, I reached out to Judith Schwartz, a wonderful author who tells stories to explore and illuminate scientific concepts and cultural nuance.  Her two most recent books, Water in Plain sight, and The Reindeer Chronicles both feature incredible case studies of the importance of a healthy water cycle, to the health of our ecosystems and global cl...

Welcome back to the second episode in this series on waterway regeneration. In this series we’ll be looking into the often overlooked role of the water cycle and its effects on the climate crisis. I’ll be speaking with experts and innovators about how repairing the hydrological cycle and the health of our waterways can lead to the restoration of all sorts of ecological services and the health of e...

Welcome to the first episode in a brand new series focusing on waterway regeneration. In the last few years of hosting this show it’s become vividly clear to me just how important and yet overlooked an issue that the health of our water cycles are.  While the climate change narrative has mostly focused on the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere since the industrial r...

Today’s guest is James Ulager, the author Beginning Seed Saving for the home gardener, and though this certainly isn’t a talk about farm scale seed saving and propagation, I thought it was essential to include in this series. In my opinion, seed saving and selective breeding is one of the best ways that anyone with even a small yard or garden can participate in ensuring the food security of future...

One of the biggest challenges that I’ve heard repeatedly both in the interviews in this series on regenerative agriculture as well as with peers and clients that I’ve collaborated with, is the difficulty for aspiring farmers to get access to land. This is true back in the States as well as in Europe and other parts of the world where I’ve traveled, and it’s part of a much larger problem in the tre...

Lisa Kivirist Though this series on regenerative farming has covered a ton of different farming models, land management techniques, food production methods and design methods, one of the glaring absences in the perspectives I’ve included has been that of women, and I’m well aware of it. I did reach out to a lot of women farmers in an attempt to set up interviews, but many of them either didn’t wan...

Over the years I’ve been hearing about a new pedagogy of land management that has been gaining in popularity, especially in agroforestry circles. The trouble for me has been that until recently a lot of the resources have been in portuguese, and so I kept my eye on it from a distance. Syntropic farming is a term first coined by Ernst Gostch, a swizz farmer who emigrated to Brazil in the 80’s and p...

As I’m slowly becoming better connected here in Spain in the last year, one of the main projects in regenerative agriculture that keeps coming up in my research and the conversations that I have, is a fairly new project called AlVelAl which is located in Southern Spain, roughly in between the cities of Granada and Murcia. The name AlVelAl relates to the first letters of the comarcas (or counties)...

Though I’ve spoken to some great orchardists through this podcast, many of them are growing cold tolerant trees in far northern climates, but I wanted to get a perspective on running a holistically managed orchard in the tropics to explore how the beneficial interactions between some of the most prized tree and perennial products in the world can be grown in a way that fuels the restoration of the...

Though I’ve been inspired by all the amazing examples of regenerative farming through the people that I’ve interviewed through this series, there’s one glaring commonality between all of them and that’s the fact that the success of their enterprises all rely heavily on the destructive infrastructure that we currently have in place to get the organic and feed inputs for their enterprises, the seeds...

Permaculture has done an incredible job of raising awareness of natural land management techniques and teaching people to observe and read the patterns of the natural world to inform their interactions with the environment, but it often gets criticized for being impractical when it comes to apply its methods to profitable farming enterprises. There’s a long running line of questioning on this show...

Ray Milidoni Though regenerative agriculture has made huge leaps forward in the last decade, it still only accounts for a very small percentage of the farms around the world and even less in over developed countries. While we still have a long way to go make ecological land management practices the norm around the world, there are a lot of people dedicated to accelerating the progress of recent ye...

Michael Ableman Welcome back to another episode in the ongoing series on Regenerative Agriculture. Up until now I’ve spoken with growers and producers on cutting edge of profitable regenerative landbased enterprises and management techniques in rural areas, but there’s also a growing movement to produce food closer to where the heaviest concentration of people are, and that’s in cities. While the...

In the past I’ve talked to quite a few orchardists and agroforestry practitioners, especially in the series on Reforestation and Agroforestry at the end of last season, but I was really glad to be introduced to Michael Phillips’ work by a great friend of the show, Nick from Minnesota. After speaking late last year with Stephan Sobkowiak, Nick recommended that I look into Michael’s incredible books...

I’ve been meaning to get in touch with someone who could explain to me the nebulous and exploding new farming industry around the ancient yet newly legalized hemp plant, and I found a gold mine of information in Doug Fine, the author of Hemp Bound and American Hemp Farmer. Doug is known as a solar-powered goat herder, comedic investigative journalist, and pioneer voice in cannabis/hemp and regener...