Welcome back to the Deep Seed podcast.
Today's episode is absolutely packed with useful information and incredible stories from someone who has spent most of his life studying regenerative food systems.
His name is Roger Schulte.
He's a researcher and professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands,
the number one university in the world for agroecology.
The overarching theme
of our conversation is redesigning the future of farming and food.
And to illustrate the conversation,
Roger uses real world examples from the Lighthouse Farm Network.
And that's a network of farms from all corners of the world that have been selected specifically by Roger and his team at the university because they are pioneers and innovators and they are demonstrating that alternatives to conventional farming systems can be
more resilient,
more profitable,
and just better for farmers,
for consumers,
for biodiversity,
and just for the planet in general.
This episode was made in partnership with Soul Capital.
I'm your host,
Raphael,
and this is the Deep Seed Podcast.
Hi Roger.
Hi Raphael.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah,
welcome to Wageningen.
Yeah,
thanks a lot for taking the time to meet with me for this interview on the Deep Seat podcast.
It's great having you.
Thanks a lot.
For a little bit of context for people listening,
we are at
Wageningen University.
Is that how you pronounce it?
That's right.
Wageningen University and Research.
Yeah,
the full title.
So it's a university that combines research institutes and the university.
Great.
And I know that it's renowned worldwide for its work on
agriculture,
food systems and...
Yeah,
we're a relatively small university actually.
We're one faculty university,
the Faculty of Life Sciences,
but within that area Wageningen is very well known and if you believe some rankings it is and has been the number one in the world for quite a while.
Nice.
Could you start by briefly introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your personal and professional journey?
Sure.
My name is Roger,
Roger Schulte.
I'm a professor of the Farming Systems Ecology Group here at Wageningen.
I guess my journey really,
where we are now,
my journey really started in
Ethiopia, of all places.
And I wasn't working for Wageningen yet,
but as part of my previous work,
I was brought to a community in Ethiopia that was famous for the way they were farming.
And famous for the ways that they managed their landscape.
Now,
when I landed at the local airport there in Mekelle in northern Ethiopia,
I actually found that hard to believe,
because when you arrive there,
it's more or less a moon-like landscape that you have to drive through for two hours.
And it's barren soil,
it's stone,
it is eroded,
it's harsh in the sunshine.
And you see some farmers trying to make a living out of that land,
but you wonder really how that is possible.
And until we came to the atzpi.
community,
as they are known.
And it's hard to describe in words,
but it's almost an emotional experience where literally you scale a mountain pass and then you look down into this valley.
And it is this green,
lush valley full of trees,
full of activity,
full of people,
full of houses,
full of crops.
And it really,
really struck me for the first time,
wow,
these people are doing something radically different from...
all their neighbors in their neighboring communities,
what is it?
What is it that they're doing differently that they can turn this moon landscape into an oasis?
And that's where the first time my interest was awakened in terms of what people can do in a positive sense when they put their minds to it.
Then I thought there must be other places in the world that are like this.
And we started looking for them.
We started looking for these.
positive stories,
these positive exemplars where people against the odds,
it should be impossible,
but somehow that managed to break the rules and found positive solutions.
And that's where what we call them lighthouse farms,
because they're like beacons on the horizon,
shining a light for others to follow.
That's where the idea was born of the lighthouse farms and how we've brought them together in the global network of lighthouse farms.
That's the origin story,
if you like.
Right,
yeah.
I love the name,
by the way.
Lighthouse Farms is a beautiful poetic term,
right?
Thank you.
So sometimes a little bit too poetic,
because at times people then,
after I've explained everything,
they say,
where's the lighthouse?
But it is metaphorically a lighthouse.
Yeah,
but then you can explain and people can picture it.
Exactly.
It's hard to forget.
Yeah.
Ahead of this interview,
I asked you which topics you were the most passionate about.
And you answered?
In one sentence,
we take an on-farm perspective rooted in science to redesign the future of farming and food.
Yeah.
Could you please unpack that sentence for us?
Yes,
that's a bit of a mouthful,
isn't it?
Let me give you two answers,
Raphael.
I'll first give you my personal story to that and then what we do as a group.
Let's start with the on-farm perspective because there's actually a personal reason for that.
In that
I dabbled a little bit in farming.
as a student myself.
I studied,
happened to study here at this university and I was a bit of a nerd.
So I made sure I always passed my exams throughout the year because in those days that meant you'd have a three month holiday.
And
I always used those three months to go to Ireland,
to the west of Ireland,
where I worked on a farm as a summer job.
I was milking goats and making goat cheese.
And at the time there was a lot of excitement about that because it...
had just become clear that goat's milk can be used for lactose intolerant people.
So it was a very exciting time.
And I learned a huge amount from that experience,
even though it was only a summer job.
But I learned to see the world through a farmer's eyes.
And farmers don't think in terms of a practice that they need to adopt or a new measure that they need to implement.
Farmers very much think in terms of...
farming systems.
They have a system that has evolved,
that they have developed,
that works for them.
And that system,
they have to be experts in so many things.
They have to know about crops,
they have to know about animals,
they have to know about finance,
they have to know about marketing,
they have to know about health and safety.
And of course,
now they also have to know about water quality,
about greenhouse gases,
about soil carbon.
But they have to somehow combine that.
all inside their head and then turn that into a management of their actual farm.
Now,
I still carry that experience with me in how to think like a farmer.
And that is quite different from what we see policymakers,
industries,
also NGOs,
asking from farmers.
They often come with individual measures,
like you should do mintillage or you should do.
one thing or the other,
and then they want to roll it out over so many hectares or so many farms.
But in many cases,
if a farmer is to adopt a certain practice,
minimum tillage,
that has implications for their whole farming system,
and they have to think that through.
Now,
we want to make sure that we take that approach within our science.
We start with the farming system.
What works?
What works here for this farmer?
What doesn't work?
Why does it not work?
What are the obstacles that need to be removed before the farmer can adopt a certain practice?
So that is the on-farm perspective.
We always start by thinking like farmers.
Then we move to the science part.
And in our group,
we tell stories about farmers'experiences.
But there are already so many stories out there on the internet,
on LinkedIn.
on YouTube.
On the Deep Seat Podcast.
And how can we know which stories are based on fact and which stories based on fiction,
if I say it disrespectfully,
but which are stories that are nice stories,
but don't stand up to scrutiny,
which are the stories that will stand up to scrutiny.
Now that's where we come in as scientists and where we underpin all our stories with scientific research.
And we do that in the form of master's research or PhD thesis,
but we make sure that all our experiences,
all our narratives are firmly rooted in science.
So that's the scientific part.
And the last part?
The last part,
the redesign of farming and food.
Yes.
Well,
you could say that the whole university here around us is working on sustainability and depending on how you define regenerative,
and we'll come to that.
A lot of people are working on more sustainable practices.
Within our group,
we distinguish ourselves by what we call radical redesign.
That's what we do as a group.
And let me explain that term.
That is the opposite of what we call nudging.
Most research,
most groups work on what we call nudging.
And nudging is about doing things a little bit better every day,
a little bit more efficient,
a little bit greener.
Great work.
Needs to continue.
But we specialize.
in the opposite.
We say,
okay,
but what are the needs of society?
What are the needs of farmers?
What are the needs of the planet in 2030,
2040,
2050?
And how do those needs differ between continents,
between soils,
between diets?
And what kind of farming systems do we need to design that meet those needs?
And...
Then we work backwards.
What do we need to do now to get there by 2040?
So that's the radical redesign bit.
Okay,
so instead of trying to improve farming little by little by small improvements here and there,
you're trying to think about how we can shift completely,
change mindset,
change the system so that you can have a radical change.
If it was that easy that we could help farmers
transition bit by bit to a future that is needed,
it would have already been done.
There is a reason why that is difficult.
It is because farmers are locked into their current trajectory,
into their current farming system.
It's very simple.
It's about 10 years ago that the EU phased out the milk quota,
for example,
and that allowed farmers to expand their milk production.
Now,
many dairy farmers responded by that by increasing their cow numbers and getting the finance for that.
from a bank,
from agricultural banks,
say the Rabobank or other banks,
for the next 20 years,
they're paying off that finance,
that investment.
They've invested in sheds.
They've invested in very high-yielding cows.
They cannot just replace all that tomorrow while they're still paying off.
It takes years to redesign buildings.
It takes many years to breed towards a different type of production system.
More importantly,
farmers cannot do that on their own.
They cannot just wake up in the morning and start a completely new farming system that requires different finance,
different markets.
They need help.
So they're locked in to the current system.
And where we help is by designing an alternative systems and then working backwards who needs to do what to help the farmers now unlock from their current position into a future that's sustainable for them.
and for society.
I see,
yes.
I have a bit of a maybe a silly question,
but I think it's a great place to start here.
Why do we need to redesign the food systems?
I mean,
I go to any supermarkets,
there's maybe a three or four at a
300 meters radius around my flat in Brussels.
They're all packed with foods,
all year long.
It seems to be working great.
Why do we need to redesign it?
It's a great question.
And we often hear that and we often say,
the food system is broken.
But then,
is it?
And as you say,
you go to the supermarket and food has never been so plentiful,
so cheap and so diverse.
And even within the COVID lockdowns,
food was the one thing that more or less stayed plentiful,
diverse and cheap.
However,
that is from a consumer's perspective,
the current food system is working.
But there's two other actors for whom it's not working.
One is actually farmers themselves.
Because farmers themselves all around the world,
not just in Europe,
but all around the world,
are finding themselves squeezed now between the many demands of society.
Because on the one hand,
consumers want food,
choose food that is cheap and plentiful.
But on the other hand,
they're demanding,
increasingly demanding for sustainability credentials,
for food safety credentials.
And the companies,
the food companies pass all that pressure and that responsibility on to the farmers.
for the farmers to do something differently.
And farmers find themselves with their back against the wall,
with their mortgage,
with their current infrastructure,
being asked to do something completely different.
So that's one.
The second actor for whom the current food system is not working is,
of course,
the planet.
And we see that in Europe,
we're not meeting our environmental targets,
we're not meeting our climate commitments,
but also in other continents we see...
We still see large-scale deforestation,
we see land degradation,
degradation of good quality land degrading,
eroding,
which is simply not sustainable in the long term.
Not even to maintain current food production,
let alone increase it to feed a growing population.
Makes a lot of sense,
yes.
And I can think of a third actor who it's not working for.
It's the people,
the consumers,
not in terms of obviously having cheap...
abandoned food but in terms of health we have a big health crisis that is also related to the food system we have the dual health crisis of this unfortunately growing undernourishment again in parts of the world and of course the overnourishment in many western parts of the world in
our email exchanges you highlighted the word resilience as maybe the most important concept you said that resilience
is the new efficiency.
Yeah.
Could you elaborate on that?
Yeah,
yeah.
We've lived for...
about 80 years now,
with the efficiency paradigm.
And for good reason.
I think if we want to critique and change the current food system,
we also have to understand where it came from and why it is as it is.
And then we know what we can change and why we should change it.
And in Europe,
of course,
the whole food system emerged in response to and guided by the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe.
SL.
But that had a good reason,
because the Common Agricultural Policy came directly from the hunger that ravaged across Europe at the end of the Second World War.
And sometimes I have to remind myself and our students that we're one generation away from hunger in Europe,
large-scale hunger.
Actually,
in fact,
my own mother experienced that in the last year of 1945,
where there was no food.
in the towns and the villages in Europe.
And as a two-year-old child,
as many other children,
she was shipped to farms in the region that they didn't know,
but they were handed over to farmers because babies were handed over to farmers because farmers still had a little bit of food on their farm.
My mother's first memory is actually after the war was over,
her parents collecting her from the farm.
but not being able to spend,
she wanted to spend time with her parents,
of course,
my parents are back,
but her parents couldn't spend time with her because first they had to put in two days labor to pay the farmer for feeding their baby.
Now that is a story that's unimaginable in this day and age,
but it's only a generation away.
From that came the pledge of the Common Agricultural Policy,
this will never happen again in Europe.
From now on,
we will always be able to feed ourselves.
And that's where the drive for the efficiency came in.
Getting the most out of the land,
getting the most food and feeding the people.
In a way,
it has been more than a success story because Europe is now a net exporter of food.
Well,
with that comes also,
of course,
the export of problems and also the problems,
the environmental problems,
where we've started to use resources beyond our means.
So that's number one.
Number two is that we have really moved into a pathway of,
in order to get efficient production,
you need to specialize.
Because if you're good at a step in the food system or in the value chain,
you need to make sure that you do that as efficiently as possible.
You focus only on that.
You cut out all the other things that are less efficient.
And you specialize with your entire farm on a commodity or a step in the food system.
And that has led to this large-scale industrialized agriculture that we have today.
That works on the condition that your environment is stable,
that your climate is stable,
that your policy environment is stable,
that your demand is stable.
a given environment,
there is an optimum efficiency and you can fine-tune it to meet that efficiency.
But now we see a change.
70,
80 years into the Common Agricultural Policy,
we see suddenly that environment is wobbling and is wobbling a lot.
And we can think of climate change.
10 years ago,
climate change was something.
that was an outcome of our models,
of our predictions,
something we talked about as a future thing.
Now,
with climate change is here,
it's everywhere,
every continent,
every season we see it.
And farmers are the first to experience it.
They're at the front line of climate change.
We see unstable policies,
we see policy fluctuations,
we see supply chain disruptions on a scale that we haven't seen before.
We see war in Europe,
which has had a direct impact.
impact on energy prices and very closely tied to energy prices are fertilizer prices.
Fertilizer prices have doubled and or tripled in some cases over the last two years.
And suddenly that means that that optimum efficiency has changed.
Because if your price of fertilizer is doubled,
that means that your farming system is not financially efficient anymore.
And you need to start looking for a new optimum efficiency.
But before you get there,
something else has changed again.
And all these shocks are becoming the norm.
The shock used to be something that could happen that would disturb the status quo.
And you try and get back to the status quo.
But there is no more status quo.
That means that farmers now need to get ready and need to enable themselves to deal with any shocks,
whether they're abiotic in terms of weather,
biotic in terms of pests and diseases,
or socioeconomic in terms of prices and supply chain disruptions.
They have to be ready for the next shock.
And that is what resilience is.
So that's why we say resilience is the new efficiency,
where we've worked on efficiency for the last 80 years.
Now we're entering an era where resilience takes that place.
And does that make sense from an economic perspective as well?
Well,
it depends what you mean by an economic perspective.
If we've optimized the net margin for farmers under stable conditions,
and we used to deal with shocks in the form of insurance,
where you'd pay for that security.
to return to the status quo.
But now we see many insurance companies already pulling out of covering climate shocks because it becomes unaffordable.
So now the question is not how do I optimize my net margin?
Yes,
I do want to have a living as a farmer,
but I also want security.
I want security that I can absorb the next shock and that I won't be wiped out.
That is equally important to my net profit.
Okay,
I see.
I want to...
Come back to that phrase that we started with,
right?
And the three parts,
the on-farm approach,
the science approach,
and then how we use that to redesign the food systems and take them one by one.
So you mentioned the global network of Lighthouse Farms before.
I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into that because it sounds very interesting.
Well,
maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about that initiative,
where it came from,
what are the objectives and so on.
As I said,
Raphaël,
the story started in Ethiopia,
in that catchment that clearly was doing something different.
than all the other communities around them.
And that started me thinking.
And when you think about it,
there are about 550 million farmers in the world.
And I suddenly realized these farmers know the pressures that are coming.
They know that climate change is threatening their livelihoods.
They're very well aware of the demands of society,
that society wants something different in farming.
Then you have 550 million farmers who get up every day thinking,
what can I do differently?
What can I change?
And when half a billion people try to think of solutions every day,
some of them are bound to come up with ideas that we haven't thought of yet,
that you haven't thought of yet,
that policymakers haven't thought of yet,
but that work.
And we made it our job in the Farming Systems Ecology Group to find those farmers.
around the world.
In some cases,
they're individual farms.
In some cases,
they're communities of smallholder farmers.
In some cases,
they're a network of farmers that work together.
And we brought them together and we specifically looked at the diversity of solutions that they bring to the table.
Because there's one thing that we're very clear on,
there is no single solution for farming worldwide.
It's not as if we're coming up with one technology or one practice or one principle that can be applied everywhere.
We need many solutions for many different soils,
many different climates,
many different farm sizes,
different crops,
different diets,
different cultures.
So we brought together different farms that represent that diversity of solutions.
Some are very large scale,
thousands of hectares and very high tech.
a lot of concrete and steel and technological solutions.
Others are very much ecologically focused,
are very much looking at nature-based solutions.
Some are smallholder communities,
others are larger communities.
Some are led by women,
some are led by men,
some focus explicitly on regenerative,
others focus on things like circularity or organic.
We want to have that diversity of solutions so that for every farmer in the world,
there's one lighthouse farm that inspires them.
That's what I think.
I never thought of that.
That's a great idea.
And that doesn't necessarily need to be the lighthouse farm that's closest to them,
but it's the rule-breaking,
the thinking differently,
that is the inspiring part.
I hope you're enjoying this conversation.
I'm just taking a very short break to tell you about the official partner of the podcast,
Soil Capital.
Soil Capital is a company that supports the transition to regenerative agriculture,
and they do that by financially rewarding farmers who improve the health of their soils.
They're a company I've been following for a long time,
and I'm actually really proud to be partnering with them for the Deep Seed podcast.
If you'd like to learn more about them,
I will leave a link in the description of this episode.
Could you provide specific examples of lighthouse farms that have managed to successfully improve their resilience to climate change?
Yeah.
There's three examples that come to mind,
unsurprisingly.
No,
actually four.
Unsurprisingly,
all of them are in the Global South.
Very well documented.
is our lighthouse farm community in Indonesia that we'll actually be traveling to this summer that has really worked on what is called complex rice systems where instead of growing monocultures of rice,
which are highly productive,
but also highly sensitive to shocks,
climate shocks,
dry weather or wet weather or price shocks,
you can see that the income of those farmers is like a yo-yo.
We have worked with the University of Brabijaya
in Java to develop complex rice systems where farmers combine the growing of rice with the growing of azolla,
that's a nitrogen fixing water plant,
a little bit like white clover for the rice paddies,
if you like,
where they work with ducks to control the pests and diseases and also to produce some protein in the form of eggs and duck meat,
where they grow fish to do the same trick on the water,
and border plants to diversify the diet.
but also to create habitats for natural enemies on the bunds around the rice paddies.
Now,
with data we've collected with the university there,
they've collected many years'data on the performance of those systems.
And in terms of productivity and yield,
they are equal to the monocultures.
In terms of diversity of diet that they provide,
they're much more diverse.
But...
especially in terms of resilience,
they're far less prone to shocks,
individual price shocks or indeed individual climate shocks.
And when you say equal yields,
that's including all of the different outputs from the diverse system,
including the meat,
the eggs,
the fish and all of that?
Or is it just talking about the rice itself and the discounts extra?
If you look at the rice yields per se,
what we see is that on average through the years,
the yields are equal.
There's always a year where the monocultures perform better and reach that theoretical maximum yield,
and that is very difficult for the complex rice systems to yield.
And that is often the one quoted for monocultures.
This is the yields we can reach.
But in the monocultures,
the rice yields also drop more sharply when there is a climate shock or a pest or a disease.
So overall,
over the years,
the yields are similar of the complex rice systems.
with the other benefits on top.
On top,
added to that.
Okay,
that's considerable.
Yeah.
And that is the nice thing where we say rooted in science,
because I can tell you that is a story,
but we actually have the scientific papers and the data and the tables that show that,
yeah,
that's the case.
And that's something that you've seen replicated in other places?
Because if it's so successful,
why are not more farmers in the region starting to replicate it?
That's a really good question.
And that's the big question we get all the time is what is referred to as scaling.
How do we scale this?
Very nice system,
very nice community.
How can we scale this?
Now,
this is where we see a lot of companies coming in,
see a lot of governments coming in and they ask how we have now you have 100 hectares or 1,000 hectares of complex rice system.
Next year,
we want 100,000.
And the year after,
we want a million.
How do we do that?
And we say.
That's not how it works.
It's not copy and paste.
When you start scaling,
you really need to adapt those systems to local conditions.
And that is what we've also done with our friends in Indonesia.
There's a science in that where you work with the farmers,
which elements work here,
what needs to change,
how would you do it?
And then with farmer field schools,
the farmers together experiment and teach each other these locally relevant rice systems.
Now.
Such is the demand around the world to learn about scaling and about successes that we've actually started
Lighthouse Farm Academy,
where we teach what we teach for students in our master's course.
We have a two-year master's course where we teach these things for the next generation of decision makers.
But for the current generation of decision makers,
people in companies,
in policy,
in NGOs,
they don't have two years'time to do a master's.
So we started to...
condensed our program into a program for professional education.
It's called the Lighthouse Farm Academy,
where we bring the participants to these lighthouse farms,
where we teach them these elements,
for example,
of scaling this summer in Indonesia.
The nice thing,
where they actually get to experience it on the ground.
And the really exciting thing is that the week after we've taught that in a course,
we'll actually go with the...
Indonesian government officials and the university to Kalimantan,
a different island,
to see how can we scale these complex rice systems in a different island,
in a different environment,
in a different cultural setting.
So then we have to put in practice what we teach.
That's going to be a really exciting prospect.
Yeah,
very.
Do you have any more stories?
That was a great one.
I would love to hear more on-farm stories of improved resilience.
Well,
I'm just back from Ethiopia,
where actually it is northern Ethiopia is now has been literally through hell.
They've had droughts,
unprecedented droughts.
They've had a plague of desert locusts that has ravaged the fields.
But most importantly,
they've been through a grueling and horrible civil war where more than a million people have died.
And they have somehow have.
had to deal with all these shocks at the same time,
all within the space of two,
three years.
And
I've come back from there both horrified in what they had to put up with,
but also amazed by the resolve that they had to find solutions,
to come up with solutions to survive all these shocks.
And there's a lot that we can learn from those communities in terms of working together.
in terms of,
yeah,
the resolve of if we don't do this,
then there is no future.
So we have to do it.
And
I was introduced with a beautiful story to
Atto Hawi.
That's the local name for it.
It means Mr.
Spark.
And he is a community leader in one of the catchments that is severely threatened by climate change.
Either droughts or when it rains,
there's such severe rains that...
everything erodes away.
You have these massive gullies where just everything is flushed away.
A while ago,
the government officials came to his village and he was the leader,
and they said,
we need to evacuate your village.
We're giving up hope for your village,
it's going to erode away.
We need to move your entire community to town,
where we will build a community for you because of the droughts and because of the floods.
And Mr.
Sparks said,
How is that possible?
How can both droughts and floods be threats when they're each other's opposites,
when they cancel each other out?
And he said,
let me show you that we can cancel each other out.
So together with his community,
he set on a program of where they caught the water and they,
through infiltration holes,
through storage,
water storage that they built themselves with hand tools,
with check dams,
they managed to regulate.
The water,
they're quite simple dams made of stones and concrete that slow the water down and then the sediment settles within the dams.
And by replanting areas for infiltration with grasses and with acacia trees.
In northern Ethiopia,
the key to that all is that every person in the community donates or dedicates 50 labor days to their community each year.
So basically one day a week is...
where they work together,
they donate their labor to do community projects.
Because one farmer cannot regulate the water coming from the mountain,
but together they've shown that they can.
I'll fast forward to this year where the local town that they were supposed to move to came to their village and said,
we're going to put a deep well here because you have so much groundwater for our town.
And the community leader said,
very well,
we're going to pay for it.
And they managed to convince the town.
The town is now paying 50,000 euros a year to the community for producing clean water.
because they've managed to capture that little bit of rainwater that falls in these big deluges.
They managed to put them,
as he says,
a rich man puts his money in the bank.
I put my water in the ground so I can withdraw it later with interest.
And now they're selling their groundwater to the town.
And that is a remarkable story from a community that the government had given up on and wanted to move to a community that is now not only providing food,
but also water to the people.
What an incredible story.
Amazing.
Thank you for sharing it.
Yeah.
It just feels good to hear good stories like this one sometimes.
Like the world we live in is harsh sometimes and we hear a lot of bad news coming from the
TVs and newspapers and online.
And it's great to see that there's good news as well.
And often,
Raphael,
the most hopeful stories come from the most desperate places or what we think of.
as desperate places.
It is the Iraqs,
the Ethiopias and the Columbias of this world where we find the most inspired people because they know that change is needed.
You don't have to have a discussion with them,
oh do we need a transition or is change needed?
They're there,
they're at the front line and they're doing it.
How does that impact your personal wellbeing and feeling of
hope,
maybe happiness in the world.
Because you're,
as a scientist,
you're confronted with the reality of what is happening right now with climate change,
environmental destruction,
loss of biodiversity,
the issues with the food systems.
So you're well aware of the severity of the situation.
At the same time,
you're directly connected to a lot of changemakers and people who are doing amazing things and to a lot of students who are here.
learning about this,
trying to come up with solutions as well.
So you have a bit of both.
How does that work for you personally?
Yeah.
How does it work for me personally?
Yeah,
there's two answers to that question,
Raphael.
At a deeply personal level,
you're absolutely right that when I look at the headlines,
when I look at the figures at the conferences,
when I look at LinkedIn,
it's very easy to get depressed because it all seems to
There's bad news and then there's a discussion about us and them in various formats,
whoever is us and whoever is them.
And I have to remind myself that actually it's just a layer,
a layer of society.
Most people,
when you actually talk to people one-on-one,
most people are really good,
are really kind.
Most people would look after someone in need.
Most people do have good ideas.
And it's there where we have to...
find the hope and the inspiration is actually in the everyday interactions.
Most farmers
I talk to want to do the right thing.
Most industry people that I talk to want to do the right thing.
And it's about finding those positive sparks of inspiration.
But everyone is searching.
Everyone is,
and no one can solve it on their own.
And that's why we all get frustrated,
because we know that change is needed.
We know we need to be part of it.
part of the change we need to be part of the solution but how it's so limited in what i can do and that is where the second part of my answer is how does it affect me is we've made it our mission to connect all these different actors with each other and
to equip them all with the same knowledge base the same stories because together it's amazing what can be achieved and that's where we bring literally bring people together in the lighthouse farm academy where they
online,
they get the same knowledge base,
and then they spend a week together at one of the lighthouse farms in what we call a lighthouse lab.
That's a week-long workshop where they get a common challenge that together they have to solve.
And we see really nice sparks of inspiration coming from that,
where people who would normally,
who probably on LinkedIn or Twitter would be arguing with each other,
suddenly have a common cause and start working together after the workshop,
independent from us,
but in the real world.
New connections are being made.
That's where I got my inspiration from.
That's amazing.
Talking about connections,
I'm pretty sure that there's actually one of the farms from the network has been on the Deep Seed podcast in the past.
And for people who have been listening to the past episodes,
just to connect the dots between what we're discussing here and that episode,
that was
La Jonquera in Spain with Alfonso Chico de Guzman.
And it's also a beautiful water story.
It's interesting that you mentioned that because
we're very much kindred spirits with Yannick and Alfonso.
They really take the on-farm approach in their Regeneration Academy.
We take the scientific grounding approach from the university here.
I told you we have a Lighthouse Farm lab in Indonesia this summer.
In November,
we'll meet up at
Yannick and Alfonso's farm for a Lighthouse Farm lab specifically dedicated to...
to regenerative agriculture and indeed this water story.
And to make the cycle complete,
we'll also have colleagues and farm advisors from Ethiopia,
from the community that I just told you about,
coming to Spain both to teach and to learn on regenerative agriculture.
And who else is taking part in these,
how do you call them?
Lighthouse Farm Labs.
The labs.
Yeah,
the labs.
They last for a week,
you said?
They last for a week.
A week.
So who participates in these?
We have had participants,
very diverse participants,
exactly how we like it.
So we've had people from the food industry.
We've people from the financial institutes.
We've had people from ministries.
We've had people from NGOs.
We've had people who are very large,
who have inherited large areas of land from their parents,
but haven't farmed yet themselves.
But they know they want to do it differently,
but they don't know where to start.
So they come to our labs and we really foster this diversity because people,
they don't just learn from us or from the farmer.
They learn from each other and we learn from them.
If I talk to a banker,
I find out that maybe a solution that I've come up with,
oh,
you should just have to provide a loan.
It's not that easy for a bank to do that.
They also have their realities,
but they may come up with another solution that I haven't thought of yet.
So it is really this diversity that we treasure.
Are you still looking for people to join these labs?
We still have a few places available for this autumn,
yes.
Right.
So if anyone listening is interested,
then where can they find information about this?
Lighthouse Farm Academy Wageningen.
You will find it on Google.
Great.
Yeah.
And in the description of this episode then.
Fantastic.
So that was for the on-farm approach.
And maybe we can move on to the next part,
which is rooted in science.
My first question.
is how are you measuring,
monitoring,
collecting data?
What kind of data are you collecting?
And then what are you doing with that data?
Yeah,
and that's a question we get a lot,
Raphael.
And I think it's good to first of all say,
we are not in the business of certification of farms.
So the lighthouse farms don't have a certificate that their data meets these thresholds.
That is not what it's about.
There's enough other labels out there that do exactly that,
that we don't want to compete with.
The second question is,
what would you measure?
Now,
that is a hot topic that we are involved in through various research projects,
very large scale research projects,
because you're not the only one asking how can we measure success or how can we measure regenerative agriculture?
We've had similar questions from Deloitte,
their sustainability unit that wants to...
work with food companies to help their transition.
And they also asked,
what are the figures?
What should we measure to know whether farms and food companies are regenerative or not?
That depends on the context.
Many people are looking for a list of indicators,
of very simple indicators that they can measure worldwide,
and that then tells them how green a certain farming system is.
I'm afraid it's not that simple.
It would be really nice,
and science has been
trying for tens of years to come up with such short lists.
But the problem is that what you measure and what you call success,
first of all,
depends on what you want and what is important to you.
Is it biodiversity?
Is it greenhouse gases?
Is it water quality?
Is it all of the above?
But secondly,
it also depends on where you are.
And one example,
very simple example there,
is people often propose that we should use soil carbon as a measure of how the regenerative system is.
But what is good soil carbon depends hugely where you are.
If you are on Yannick's farm or on Alphonse's farm,
then if you have 1% or 2% carbon,
you're doing well in such an arid climate.
And you get a lot of benefit from that 2% of carbon.
If you're in Finland...
You're probably on soils that have 40,
50%,
sometimes even up to 80% carbon,
the peat soils.
And does that mean that soil management is in order?
No,
it just means you're on a high carbon soil in a very cold and wet climate.
It's not an indicator of how green you are.
It's an indicator of your environment.
So that's a very extreme example.
The fact that the Finnish soil has 80% carbon doesn't mean it's a better soil than the Spanish soil.
So we need to interpret all the different indicators.
in their context.
What we have developed and what our colleagues in the university are currently testing at very large scale across Europe in a big European research project is,
can we come up with a framework for how to select the right indicators that is transparent and that follows clear guidelines on who should be involved?
How do we set objectives together?
How do we select the right indicators together to make sure,
on the one hand,
that we allow for different indicators in different parts,
in different farming systems,
different parts of the world.
But at the same time,
that we avoid that in 10 years time,
we come up with nice data and people say,
oh,
that's greenwashing.
You've just cherry picked your data.
We do need to make sure that we can select indicators that's not cherry picking,
but that is guided.
by the best science.
So the selection process needs to be harmonized between companies,
between countries,
between farming systems.
But which indicators are selected,
we need to make sure that we have flexibility and that they're useful also to the farmers.
Okay,
yeah,
it's very difficult.
But a lot of people have spoken to a lot of different organizations,
they're all working on their own different indicators.
And so how do you talk to each other?
How do you make that work?
in terms of regulations,
subsidy,
markets,
all of these things.
You kind of need universal,
ideally universal indicators that you can use,
right?
I'm not sure we need universal indicators.
At the moment,
it's the Wild West.
And anyone can accuse anyone else of cherry picking and saying you just picked those indicators because they suited you.
And we need to make sure we can't do that.
So we need the process of selecting the indicators needs to be transparent.
and needs to be clear what choices are made and why they're made.
That doesn't mean we come up with the same indicators.
I'll give you another example.
If we work on greenhouse gases,
two countries that struggle with greenhouse gases from agriculture are Ireland and India.
Both have a big challenge set for them that they need to reduce methane emissions.
Now in Ireland,
methane emissions come from the rumen of the cows.
In India,
most methane comes from the rice paddies.
that emit methane from the soil.
Now,
if you want metrics of success,
how do you measure that?
Well,
in Ireland,
you probably have an inventory.
You start your indicators,
an inventory of how many cows you have,
what breeds they are,
what feed do they get,
because that can determine how much methane they emit.
So you use those indicators.
They're useless in measuring methane from rice paddies in India.
There you look at what is the size of our rice paddies.
how long,
what period of time in the year are they underwater.
You can measure that from space.
You use satellite imagery.
You come up with very different indicators for the same impact category,
for methane,
for greenhouse gas emissions.
The key is how you select those indicators needs to be transparent.
That there are different indicators for the same problem is inevitable.
Okay,
I see.
There's a bit of a long-winded,
scientific answer,
but that is at the heart of the debate that we have with governments and also with industry.
And there are efforts on both sides to harmonize these approaches.
So the European Commission has just funded a very large project called Benchmarks to do that across Europe for policy questions.
And at the same time,
we're also working with World Business Council for Sustainable Development,
who's trying to do the same for business.
We tell them the same story.
Right.
I had a conversation a few weeks ago here in the Netherlands with a farmer called Anne van Leeuwen.
She's part of the EARA network,
the quite recent network of regenerative farmers.
And they worked on a proposal for reforming the cap.
And I asked her about indicators.
And if I remember correctly,
there's two things that she mentioned was one was
She talked about biomass production and about soil life.
Are these two indicators you find interesting?
And can you tell us maybe the pros and cons of using these indicators?
Yes.
Biomass is,
of course,
a measure of many things.
It's a measure of productivity,
but also it's a measure of the greenness of a landscape,
which usually the greener,
the more biomass you have,
the fewer problems you have with your soil or with biodiversity.
Also,
soil life,
soil biodiversity is key to everything that's in the soil.
But they are,
I would call them,
they're not indicators per se.
Soil life is important.
It's a cornerstone,
I would call it a cornerstone of regenerative agriculture.
But how do you know how much soil life you have?
You need to go a step further.
What is it you're going to count?
Is it microbial biomass?
Is it nematodes?
Is it earthworms?
Is it respiration?
Is it,
what are your indicators?
And then I go back to the same principle that to measure soil life in Spain,
in an arid soil,
you'll need to count different things and look at different things.
than when you measure soil life in the Netherlands.
Or for example,
in many temperate soils you could count earthworms.
But if you go to a peat soil,
there's no earthworms.
There's just no earthworms in peat soil.
Doesn't mean it's a badly managed soil,
but you need to look at a different type of soil life there.
It's the frustrating thing about agroecology and about these complex systems,
right?
It's that they are complex.
And we'd all love to...
We would all love to...
have a simple answer and say this makes sense everyone agrees this makes sense let's change things so that we take these indicators into account and let's go it's so much more complicated than that and that's that's a bit of a it makes it harder i guess to transition towards these systems you hit the nail on the head that is where i actually get excited where it gets complicated is where i get excited and rather
than being scared of the complexity we all have to lean into it in fact
One of the outcomes of our first five years of Lighthouse Farms is we've looked at common ingredients amongst the Lighthouse Farms,
despite all their diversity.
They're different in every aspect.
What are the common ingredients that they share that make them successful?
And the first one that we came across is they all make use of the power of complexity.
They don't step away from complexity,
they lean into the complexity.
and purposeful complexity,
not just throwing things together randomly,
but designing a complex system.
I already mentioned the complex rice systems in Indonesia,
where they've combined these components almost as Lego blocks to build something that is more robust.
But we also see it in the Netherlands with the strip cropping.
We see it in Brazil with the agroforestry.
It's complex and it comes at a...
Well,
first of all,
the complexity gives us the best of both worlds in all those cases.
It gives us food and it gives us those ecosystem services.
They come with one big trade-off and that is they're difficult to manage.
It's very difficult because you have to think of so many things.
And that's where we come back to that combination of science and farmers.
Because as scientists,
it's our job to look at the generic rules or the generic relationships.
But we need a farmer.
to make sense of it on their soil,
on their part of the earth,
in their reality.
Because no one knows that reality better than farmers.
And that's where we need to work together.
And that's where the whole concept of living labs has now arisen across
Europe, where science and farmers work together for exactly that purpose.
I see.
Coming back to the science part,
and we drifted towards the indicator.
It was such an important conversation.
I'm glad we went there.
So the
specifically indicators and how do we communicate about that but what kind of science are you doing like you mentioned master students phd students working on different thesis like what kind of science is happening within the lighthouse farm network network yes yeah yeah
i've already mentioned the research in indonesia where we actually studied all those different permutations of complex rice systems and which ones performed best under under which conditions
That's one example of a very elaborate PhD study supported by many master's students,
also from Bravujaya University,
where we can put facts and figures and tables underneath our stories to underpin our stories.
Now,
we've also just finished a similar study for the agroforestry farms in Brazil that we're working with.
And the question there was,
we see many different types of agroforestry emerging.
from very simple ones with just trees in rows with crops or silver pasture between them,
to very,
very complex systems where you don't even,
you literally can't see the trees from the wood anymore because you think you're walking through a jungle,
even though every plant is a crop or has a function.
That comes with that trade-off of management and labor,
those complex systems.
And for that PhD,
the question was,
is there an optimum level of complexity?
Is there a point where a farm has enough complexity and is still manageable by an individual farmer?
And what is that level of complexity?
Now,
of course,
the answer is always more complex than the original question.
It depends on where you are,
it depends on where you want.
But that research led to a certain prototyping.
of different types of agroforestry that farmers can choose from,
depending on their own circumstances.
They're just two examples,
Raphael.
In total,
we have 14
PhD candidates,
theses being researched,
being written on the different lighthouse farms,
some on individual lighthouse farms.
Others also look across lighthouse farms at a certain theme.
For example,
we now have a PhD on the science of carbon farming across multiple...
lighthouse farm communities in Europe and great diversity of stories that come out of there.
Some of the stories are focused at farm level,
but sometimes we also look then at what would be the implications if we were to implement it at this regional or national level.
And one example of that is in our lighthouse farm in Finland,
where it's actually one of the farmers themselves has done a PhD with us on their own farm.
But then
didn't just look at the workings of their own farm.
They also looked at if we were to copy and paste this across the region,
would it work?
If not,
why not?
What needs to change in terms of policy?
What needs to change in terms of businesses for that to work?
And what would Finland look like if we all were to follow this example?
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And I hope that you're enjoying it and that you're gaining value from this conversation.
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Thank you so much.
and let's get back to the conversation.
So we've talked about the on-farm approach,
we've talked about the science,
so let's move on to the last part,
redesigning the farming and food.
In a previous episode with Chuck de Lidekerk from Soil Capital,
I asked him the question
can we transition every piece of land to regenerative agriculture?
And his answer was,
I don't think we have a choice.
What do you think about that?
Very interesting.
It depends a little bit.
What do I think about it?
It depends a little bit what you consider in the regenerative agriculture.
And that's a big debate at the moment.
I hear many different concepts of what regenerative is that range from almost business as usual.
just a little bit different,
to complete deep green transition.
For that reason,
actually,
because we heard so many different definitions,
and to get a bit of clarity,
we actually did a very extensive scientific literature review on definitions of regenerative agriculture.
And we brought that together in what we call the scientific definition for regenerative agriculture,
which is basically where it's an approach.
to sustainability that takes soil and soil management as the starting point for a transition,
looking after the soil.
to improve ecosystem service delivery with the aspiration to also improve on farmers'livelihoods and social well-being.
And there's three layers in that definition.
What we found is that regenerative agriculture is very well defined in terms of soil management and soil practices.
It's literally on solid ground there.
It starts the journey towards sustainability by making sure that the soil is in order.
that you already referred to soil life,
to soil quality,
soil health is the new phrase.
The purpose is to regenerate ecosystems,
to make sure that we not only do things less bad,
but actually improve on biodiversity,
improve on water quality,
improve on the atmosphere.
But then that third layer is often just aspirational,
in order to improve farmers'livelihoods and social well-being.
That is often mentioned,
but without any practical guidance on how that can be achieved.
And we know from our lighthouse farms in
Spain and in Ethiopia that social elements are actually crucial to the success of regenerative agriculture,
both in Spain and the inlands.
Well,
you've been there.
the dry inlands of Spain.
I haven't been there in person unfortunately.
Alfonso came to Brussels for a conference and I had a chance to meet him there,
but I would love to.
Yes,
well you should visit it because,
but also in Ethiopia it is this working together.
It's very difficult for one farmer to change their soil in their environment,
but working together that is possible.
So for us there is a bit of work left to be done there by science and by practice to make that social element also central to regenerative.
But that also points at that,
in our view,
regenerative in the more narrow definition that we put forward,
there's a place for that where soil is the entry point to improvements in sustainability.
So it is very,
very relevant.
And it also has originated in many cases in areas where threats to soil quality or erosion or desertification.
were the main threat to agricultural sustainability.
Indeed,
in the Spains of this world,
in the United States,
in
Ethiopia, that is where the soil is literally either washed away or blown away.
And where if you want to rebuild agriculture,
if you want to regenerate the landscape,
you start with the soil.
We recognize that there's also other approaches to sustainability or deep sustainability.
with the same objectives that use many of the same ingredients,
the same principles,
many of the same practices,
but combine them in a different way.
And we've recently looked into five of those approaches that somehow have found traction with the big,
with the FAOs and the World Banks of this world.
And regenerative is one of them.
Circularity,
circular agriculture is a very hot topic as well.
Agroecology,
you mentioned it yourself.
Climate smart agriculture or carbon farming is being talked about a lot.
And organic is,
of course,
one of the oldest and the only truly globally certified form of sustainable agriculture.
What we've done is we've looked at all of them.
What do they share in common and how do they differ?
And how do they all use a different entry point or a different recipe to combine those same ingredients to come up with a movement?
or farming systems and which are most relevant in which parts of the world.
So it worries me a bit when governments,
the European Commission,
industry or NGOs sign up to one shade of green,
as we call it,
and want to roll that out across the whole world and start competing with momentum,
with initiative,
sometimes funding,
with other shades of green that...
actually have the same objectives,
but use a different entry point.
We shouldn't have discussions about which is better.
Is it circular agriculture?
Is it organic or is it regenerative?
We shouldn't have those discussions.
We should see how can we all work together to achieve the same objectives.
In some cases,
we choose this approach.
In other cases,
we choose a different label.
Same objectives.
What would these objectives be?
When you look at the five that I mentioned,
It is always to get the best of those both worlds.
It's to produce food,
but at the same time to look after our planet and to look after our farmers and to look after the society in terms of diversity of food.
Some put the emphasis...
on different impact category as we call them.
Of course climate smart farming or carbon farming put the emphasis on the climate,
the climate benefits and actually in the climate science all the other things,
water quality,
biodiversity are called co-benefits.
A co-benefit of the climate action which I think is underplaying their importance a bit.
But similarly regenerative farming takes the soil as the starting point and takes the others.
as the resulting benefits.
I see,
yeah.
But one definition,
one broader definition of regenerative agriculture could be just that it's regenerating instead of degrading,
right?
And so if you're regenerating,
if you're improving biodiversity,
improving soil health,
improving water,
improving things,
you are regenerating.
So you mentioned these common objectives that all of these types of farming have.
In a way,
they're all regenerative,
right?
If you take a broad definition of regenerative,
then all of them are regenerative because they all contribute to the other objectives.
Be careful that you don't take too broad a definition because then a lot would be counted as regenerative that I think you and I don't really call regenerative.
Right,
okay.
In my view,
a farm that uses less pesticides than before.
is not necessarily straight away a regenerative farm.
So we have to be careful that we don't cast the definition too wide.
Then we venture into greenwashing.
I see.
Okay,
yeah,
sure.
So the big question,
because I've had all these conversations on the podcast about the need to transition to these more regenerative food systems,
agroecological,
climate smart,
or whatever you want to call them.
And the big question is always,
how do we get there?
What is...
lacking today?
What is missing and what is stopping us from scaling these faster?
I think one thing that we've really stumbled across,
a stumbling block that we've stumbled across,
is that in many of the initiatives that are put forward,
whether they're policies or industry initiatives,
the point of initiative,
the onus for action is almost always put at the feet of the farmers.
It's the farmers that have to do something differently,
have to do a different practice,
a different type of cropping,
a different type of rotation,
you name it.
If it was easy,
if it was as profitable as many of those initiatives promise it to be,
farmers would have already done it.
In many cases,
there's reasons why it is not possible for farmers.
to make a change in the current climate,
literally the current climate,
but also the current policy and business environment.
Because we have to realize that the entire policy environment and the business environment have evolved to serve the current,
if efficient,
industrial farming model that we've developed over the last 80 years.
So it's not there to serve a change in farm practices.
In our research,
we have shown
that in many cases it makes more sense to put the point of initiative at one of the many actors that surround the farmers.
We've done mapping exercises of how many actors surround a farm and have an opinion or have a piece of information that they're sending to farmers about what farmers should do differently.
In many cases it is 10,
20,
up to 100 different actors that tell farmers what to do and it's up to the farmer to make sense of it.
In many cases,
it makes sense to first put the point of initiative,
the point of change,
with one of those actors before it reaches the farmer.
Because those actors think of an advisory service or a company or a feed company.
They have the resources to put a team of experts on a certain topic.
I'll give you one example from Latvia where we examined that.
Where do farmers get their information from?
And we asked them,
when do you get your information on productivity,
the information on climate change,
the information on biodiversity?
Very simple questions.
And we mapped all the different actors.
The information on productivity,
they really trusted their farm advisory services.
They had a great relationship with their advisors,
who is the state body that advises the farmers on how to farm.
But the advisors only advised the farmers on...
productivity.
And when we ask,
where do you get your information on greenhouse gases or biodiversity,
they would say things like,
oh,
I got that knowledge from my neighbor,
my neighbor told me that,
or I saw a clip on YouTube of a farmer in Italy that did that and I copied it.
Now,
that worries me.
A farmer in Latvia copying a farmer in Italy because they've seen a YouTube clip,
that worries me because Latvia is very,
very different climate and soils than Italy.
In our research,
the recommendation that we made to the government was,
rather than putting the onus of change at the feet of your farmers when it comes to climate change and biodiversity,
first,
the point of initiative of the first change is in your advisory services.
Train your advisors.
Train your advisors in climate issues.
Train your advisors in biodiversity.
Or appoint new advisors that are trained in those.
because farmers already trust the advisors.
They already trust the information they give.
And now the advisors,
because it's not one advisor who has to do that,
but the whole advisory body,
they have the person power to integrate all this knowledge into coherent advice that makes sense from a production point of view,
from a climate change point of view,
and from a biodiversity point of view.
Together,
they have the capacity to come up with good plans and good advice.
that they then can share to the farmers who already trust them.
So that is one example of where if we want to make a change,
we need to stop putting always the point of action at the feet of the farmers,
but first look at what can we do?
Not what should the farmer do for us,
but what can we do to help the farmer make the transition?
In that example,
how do you make...
them accountable like the agronomist and the you said put the point of initiative with them training them is a great start i'm sure but how do you incentivize them to to go beyond that and to really try and help the farmers improve their their farming system for the better of the environment and yeah
yeah there's two roots and they're often a little bit in conflict with each other at the end of the day that's
That responsibility lies with you and me and all other individuals in society.
There's the route of business incentivization through companies,
through the supply chains,
through the value chain,
where consumers demand from a company that they work on their sustainability,
and the company then works with farmers to incentivize green practices.
That's one route.
The other one is through policy.
Through...
where policies are put in place to,
for example,
train the advisors,
the farm advisors,
who then train the farmers in certain practices.
The problem is that most of us have a split personality because we are both consumers and we are citizens.
And as citizens,
we want,
and who vote,
if we're lucky enough to live in a democracy,
we vote.
We're quite inclined to vote for green policies,
but then we're also consumers.
And then we're quite inclined to vote for the
inclined to go for price at the end of the day.
And that those two don't add up yet.
And we see that a lot of challenges are actually at the intersection of business,
of the value chain,
and territorial initiatives.
And by territorial,
I mean policy.
So national or Europe-wide policies.
To get those aligned,
that's a really big task that still needs to be cracked.
New Zealand has tried it.
and keeps trying,
where they have policies that make the dairy companies responsible for all their greenhouse gas emissions,
including the on-farm emissions,
greenhouse gas emissions.
And now it's in the interest of the dairy processor to work with the farmers to reduce their carbon footprint,
and the advice is coming from the same person,
a coherent advice on productivity and greenhouse gas emissions.
However,
in New Zealand,
unfortunately,
it's a bit of a yo-yo movement because it depends on who is in government,
whether that policy is instated or withdrawn.
And we yet have to see it fully implemented and see the benefits of that.
That's a key issue,
isn't it?
Is that nature works in a very,
very long timeline.
Yeah.
And politics works in very,
very short cycles.
Yeah.
And these two don't really work well together.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And we see that playing out also when we do take the long timelines,
like we have with,
for example,
the IPCC and many of the other very large policies that do allow for time.
Then the challenge is to keep the momentum up and actually how do you turn that into action?
Because if you take more time,
well,
it also allows you to take more time before you take action.
So that is,
we're now at the heart of the...
of the big challenges that we have yet to crack as society.
Right,
okay.
It's been such an amazing conversation so far,
don't want it to end,
but we're gonna have to start moving towards the conclusion.
What is your vision for the future of food and farming,
let's say in
10, 20 years time?
I get that question a lot,
Raphael,
and I used to be a lot more certain in my answer than I am now.
The world is becoming more unpredictable.
What I do see is that agriculture,
food and land will become the hottest talks going forward.
They will get hotter and hotter.
because they will affect more parts of society in different ways.
We see big shifts,
we see big movements,
we see a lot of tensions.
We also see tensions not only in terms of the efficiency model and the more resilient community-based model,
but we also see tensions,
for example,
with green initiatives clashing with indigenous land rights.
where areas of land are being bought or being reserved for carbon offsetting,
that clashes with the rights of indigenous people or smallholder farmers.
And at the same time,
we see also land grabbing for large-scale monocultural food production.
So we see all sorts of tensions and turmoil in that world.
And maybe we need to go through that phase.
One important aspect of a transition or of doing things differently is what is called unfreezing.
You first have to unlock to unfreeze the current status quo.
We have to,
as long as we're still asking the question,
why would we need to change?
Why?
Then we're not ready yet for the change.
So maybe this turmoil makes it clear that business as usual is not an option,
that we all agree on that.
And
I think now we make the decisions about what will come next.
The seeds are being planted now.
I don't,
as I said earlier,
I don't have one solution.
I don't have one seed.
So we are trying to encourage the many actors in the world,
whether they're smallholders or big business,
we work with everyone to start planting the good diversity of good seeds now.
So in 20 years time,
there's good growth.
Yeah,
it reminded me of a phrase from another Dutch farmer
I had on the podcast recently called Jeroen Klompe.
Okay.
He said that the system is like a huge ship that is not steerable.
Yeah.
And we're going to hit the iceberg at high speed.
Yeah.
And he said things need to get a lot worse before they actually can get better.
So I was wondering if that's something you agree with.
Because you said it yourself,
we need...
quite a radical shift.
We need people to be ready for that shift,
but it doesn't seem to be the case yet,
despite the science,
the IPCC,
despite the obvious climate change.
So is there any way we can have this radical shift without hitting the iceberg first?
I hope that by having the turmoil now and the discussions now,
that were in time to redesign the ship into a fleet of more agile ships.
Lifeboats,
yeah.
Lifeboats,
yeah.
And lighthouses.
And lighthouses,
yeah.
Yeah,
and then you come full circle.
Yeah,
nice,
nice.
If you could give one piece of advice to young people interested in pursuing a career in sustainable agriculture,
what would it be?
I'm asked that question a lot by the students actually,
because many of them
do pursue a career in stand-by culture,
whether that is in policy or business,
or indeed some of them actually start farming themselves and new entrants into the farms.
Two things that I would,
that I always say.
One is enrich yourself and your experience by working on farms and try and work on a diversity of farms and not just the lighthouse farms or the ecological pearls that are out there.
But also everyday farms.
Try and enrich us.
Try and learn why things are as they are.
First learn the rules,
because then you know how to break them.
In that kind of sense.
I see students who do that and who find it much easier to place all the concepts in reality.
To relate reality to the concepts that we're teaching.
So that is the first piece of advice.
And the second one is connect,
connect,
connect.
When the.
particularly when you start a new farm.
can be quite lonely,
can be quite isolating,
but also quite vulnerable if you're trying to do it on your own.
And the successful students,
I don't know if you've come across Howard from the Beasterhof.
He's one of our students who started his own farm.
And their success of him and Cloudy,
his partner,
is that they connected to all the different answers who all were able to contribute a piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
that they needed,
whether it's markets,
whether it's the change in regulations,
whether it is a labor requirement.
Everyone was able to offer them something that their job was to manage all these pieces and all these connections rather than trying to have to plow through it all by themselves.
The last question I ask this question to all of my guests at the end,
more of a fun one.
If you could organize a dinner party and...
invite any three people from past or present,
who would you invite,
why,
and what would you cook for them?
It's a really tough question,
Raphael.
Of all the questions you send to me,
that's the toughest one,
because there's so many interesting people.
I would actually choose,
I make a point,
try and make a point in my own life to also keep looking outside my own bubble and my own direct research interests.
It's really,
I also need to...
keep myself grounded so that I don't float away in my bubble,
if you like.
One way of doing that is very much through music.
I like music.
I understand your background is in music.
And
I sing in a choir.
And beautiful,
I like all sorts of music,
but beautiful music brings me closer to real life again and why we're here and what's needed.
One particular composer that I think masters that is from Estonia.
It's Part Usberg.
And I would love to have dinner with him,
just because it's a world I know very little about,
how his creative process,
how does that work?
Another way in which I try to keep grounding myself is by reading things outside my area of work.
And a book I was particularly taken by is Clara Anderson.
Have you read that?
Have you come across it?
It's about the near future and the butch.
how robots interact with society.
And it's beautifully and very subtly written by Kazao Ishiguro.
I have to write down his name because I've never met him.
But it is beyond the eye.
He paints a future that is neither utopian or dystopian.
It's neither one or the other.
It is just what it is.
And he does that in such a...
subtle way where also the beauty is found in the little things rather than the big things that I would love to also learn more about how he sees the world and how he comes to those to that writing.
And I'm going to finish up with a lady called Teber.
She is a community leader in the Ethiopian catchment that we started this conversation with.
And as I told you,
she's been
With her community,
she's guided her community through war,
through plagues,
through climate change.
And yet when I visited,
she shared bread and honey and drinks with me.
And her spark of inspiration is,
at the end of the day,
what it's all about.
It's,
I work for people like her because she's,
you and I talk,
she's making the future.
Beautiful.
And it sounds like a very nice company to have for a dinner.
Thank you.
Yeah,
and I probably,
going back to your question,
what I would cook,
I like to think I make a mean pokeball.
So that's probably what I would do.
Very nice.
Thank you so much,
Roger,
for taking the time.
Thank you,
Raphael.
Such a great time.
It's been a lot of fun.
This conversation with you is such an honor and pleasure.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah,
thank you.