- Speaker #0
I was surrounded by people who told me I would fail and I couldn't, I wouldn't be able to do it. And by taking one step at a time, change happens. You've got to make so many mistakes before you find the system that works. A dirty secret around the cap is that even if it's obviously supported food production, it has driven people out of farming.
- Speaker #1
11 years ago, Ariane decided to move from the United States, where she grew up, to take over the family farm in Tuscany. She arrived there with a strong held belief that organic farming was the way forward. However, no one else around the farm supported that vision and in fact, most people, including the farm manager at the time, were strongly opposed to the idea. But she held strong and through tough times and challenges, she eventually emerged as one of the top Regenerative organic pioneers in the whole of Europe. This episode has three key chapters and I've decided to separate it in three parts. You're listening to part one where we meet Ariane and talk about her and her farm transition journey. In part two we visit one of her rice fields and she tells us everything about her beautiful complex regenerative system. And finally, in part three, we talk about farm policy and the CAP, the Common Agriculture Policy. Because you see, before becoming a farmer, Ariane was working in farm policy back in the US. And therefore, she gives us this unique perspective of someone who has both farming experience and the farm policy knowledge. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I am your host, Raphael, and this is the Deep Seed Podcast.
- Speaker #2
Thank you so much for welcoming me here on this beautiful farm on this beautiful sunny day of July. It is July so I bet you must be very busy on the farm,
- Speaker #0
right? Hi Raphael, it's wonderful to have you. Welcome to Tenuta San Carlo. We are very busy. It is July so we're in the middle of our... grain harvests right now and my farm crew is out in the rice fields because they're a peak kind of vegetative growth for rice and then we also have a lot of guests coming through our agritourism these days so it's a it's a busy time of year.
- Speaker #2
Yeah well thank you so much for taking the time. How how's it going actually how has this year been so far?
- Speaker #0
Yeah every year brings with it its challenges, especially in... as climate change kind of becomes a bigger impact and bigger factor in what we do. And so on the one hand, things have been going well because I have a really good team of people here who's working with the farm and it's great to have finally a full team that's fully aligned with the values and the goals of what I'm trying to do here. On the other side, we are dealing with challenging weather situations and We had an extremely wet May, which is when we normally plant rice. And so the field prep that goes into about, usually that takes 10 weeks for us, was smushed into five. So that was a very intense time.
- Speaker #2
Why is that? Is it because you can't go onto the fields with the machinery? What's the reason for that?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, well there are a few different reasons for that. The first is that We rely for our irrigation water on the river water. And the infrastructure that we have right now for water distribution on the farm is all in underground tubes. And so if it rains a lot, the water gets murky and the tubes get full, and we need water to start rice production. So we're looking at other ways of dealing with the beginning of the... you know, of rice planting to deal with that. And it just means that it's raining and so you can't do field work essentially and the ground's really wet. I have started to implement certain practices that help us manage that climate risk but actually because it rained way more than it usually does last October, those practices weren't available to me this season.
- Speaker #2
Okay. Could you maybe start by introducing yourself a little bit? Tell us where we are and a little bit about the history of that place and what connects you to this place.
- Speaker #0
Absolutely. My name is Ariane and we're in Tenuta San Carlo, which is right along the southern coast. of Tuscany. So we're our, to place you in a landscape which is where how I usually start, we are two hours north of Rome and two hours south of Florence along the coast. Right, obviously you hear that I speak English with an American accent. I was born and raised in the U.S. because my mother is American, but this land is my family's land on my father's side. This whole area, and we'll get into it throughout our conversation today, was a former marshland. And that identification as a former marshland really still guides what we do here. And in the 1930s, Mussolini drained the marshlands here. He had big landscape-level engineering projects throughout Italy, and what happened here was that an area that was undeveloped and unavailable for cultivation and for agricultural purposes, but for economic purposes generally, was drained. And my great-grandfather, who lived in northern Italy, with the availability of arable land, came down and bought this land in 1936. As a matter of fact, if you drive around this area, you'll still find families that have roots in northern Italy. And so he bought the land in 1936. World War II happened shortly thereafter. And so the large development, you know, the real kind of identification of this land as a farm occurred in the Second World War, post, after the Second World War with my grandparents. Right. So they... They built buildings, they planted forests, they started growing grains. And in the 1960s, they looked around this landscape and they said, you know, there are characteristics of this landscape that we think might be suitable for rice production. Because we're in Tuscany, but if you think about rice-producing areas, and if you think about Tuscany, those two things don't usually go together. Right, Tuscany is usually hills with olive trees and vineyards. But they still had contacts up in northern Italy where they do grow rice. And they started growing rice here because the soils are good for rice production. If you think about what a marshland is, it's an area that is poorly drained, that is flat, that holds water, and that has very heavy soils. And those are the characteristics that rice plants also need for successful production. And so in the 1960s they started growing rice, along with many other things obviously. And then my father managed the farm for a while, but he really went to the U.S. to study and met my mother, and my sister and I were born and raised there. And we used to come to the farm here to see my grandparents when we were younger. during the summertime, but until recently, I didn't know, I didn't think I was going to come here. I had developed, started to develop a career in the U.S. I was working in sustainable, at that time, organic agriculture policy. At the federal level, I was working in sustainable agriculture at the time, and at a certain point, my sister and I had to decide whether we were going to keep the land and give it a future or pass the land or sell the land onto somebody else who could steward it, right? Because between when we were little and we were adults, my father passed away when we were very young and my mother was American, decided to keep the land but rent it out essentially and raise us in the U.S. And so I came here, I guess, 11 years ago. unclear whether I was going to be staying six months, a year, and 11 years later I'm still here. I'm still here and so that's the story of my family on this land.
- Speaker #2
Okay sweet and if we focus on the farming aspect a little bit, I suppose in the 60s when they started growing rice here It was a time where farmers were very much incentivized and pushed towards intensive, conventional agriculture. So I assume that happened to some extent here, right?
- Speaker #0
Absolutely.
- Speaker #2
But today you're organic and you also practice regenerative agriculture, agroecology. So I'm curious to know how that transition... happened, what was the starting point and the process of transitioning to that?
- Speaker #0
Absolutely. So a little bit about my background before I came to the farm. I was born and raised in New York City. I am. But when I was 17, I went to work on a farm in Maine, which is in the northeastern part of the United States on the border with Canada. And from there... I worked with a farmer who really taught me my land ethic, and I started to understand that I didn't need to, you know, my career paths didn't necessarily need to be a doctor or a businesswoman or a lawyer, that I could actually pursue what was at that time an interest in environmental studies and the natural world and look at it through and work at it through the lens of food production. And so I learned the principles of the land ethic that I still practice today. And that was really the moment that I started on the path of sustainable agriculture. So I'm 42. That was when I was 17. The terminology was around sustainability and not around regenerative agriculture at the time, but the core concepts of producing in sync with natural cycles. Improving soil quality and biodiversity and working with nature instead of against it were really part of my early imprinting and farming experiences. From there, I really started to do some internships on farms in the U.S. I studied environmental studies. And then right before I came, I was involved in policy work at the national level because policy is such an important part of. the type of food systems and food production systems that we have at the time, right now, or generally, is such an important factor. The farm was conventional, was a conventional commodity farm, right? The primary crops were rice and wheat, and they were grown conventionally, both by, during my grandparents' time and my father's time, but also... In the time after my father's death, there was a farm manager that did manage some of the land. All conventional. And so when I came here, those were the two main crops and it was all conventional. My values obviously do not align with conventional farming. And so one of the first things I did, but it leads then to the kind of bigger mission of the farm, was to start to apply the theory that I learned and the policies, you know, concepts that I was interested in at a certain scale. Because we're a 480 hectare farm, so not small, not super large, but we are a mid-scale farm, and I do, you know, produce a certain volume of food. And I started, the first step was the transition to organic agriculture. Now I focused on rice also because it's a crop that is not, well there's nothing easy about organic agriculture in any crop. When I started looking into how to transition the farm, that first step right to organic agriculture before you start some of the more we call innovative or barrier pushing practices, of regenerative agriculture, I was met with complete, I don't know, obstinance. I remember there's this funny, not funny story, but when I was trying to find marketing partners, right, for organic rice and organic grains, I went to a fair, an agricultural fair, and I met with, at that point, the head of one of the largest rice millers, organic rice millers in Italy. And he told me directly and straightforwardly, you will fail. You won't be able to produce. And you will go into your rice field at night to spray herbicides. And so there was a little fear around the transition in part because there's not a lot of, at the time there wasn't a lot of knowledge about the actual practices and how they might work, let alone how to So... implement them here, right on this land. But fortunately, I do have an international network of contacts. I do through the networks I have in the U.S. and now in Europe. There are excellent farmers who were willing to share their experiences, and so I started that transition. Part of the transition to organic, and I think, you know, any farmer would say this, is all... It's not just a practices transition, it's a mindset transition and a business transition, and a management transition. The management part is really, instead of spraying, you know, because there's a problem, you anticipate what the plants need and you respond and work with your environment. So you've got to listen closely to and know your land and listen closely to what the plants and animals are saying to you and how to interpret that and how to then as a farmer work with that and have a conversation with that land and with the plants and with the animals. It's a business transition because you're finding new markets, right, and new partners and trying to identify and communicate new values and it's a mindset transition. There was a farm manager Here, when I arrived, after three and a half years, we decided to part ways because he did not believe in the objectives, the new objectives and mission of the farm.
- Speaker #1
Just a very quick pause to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast, Soil Capital. Soil Capital is a company that accelerates the transition to regenerative agriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve things like soil health and biodiversity. They're an amazing company and if you'd like to learn more about them, I will leave a link in the description of this episode.
- Speaker #2
We're going to visit the farm later on and we'll get a lot deeper into the farming side of things. But for the time being, I would love to have a little bit more information about how you transition the farm. What were the steps to transition a whole system, a whole farm?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I think that's a really important question also because when we think about, you know, Helping farmers, or helping farmers, if there are, if we have goals around wide-scale adoption of more regenerative practices, that does require a transition for many farmers, right? And so thinking about the steps and the actual technical and financial support in different, at different moments of that process, I think could help facilitate adoption of practices, right? And so one of the... One of the first steps that I took, I didn't immediately start the organic certification because I needed to learn about the land itself. And you don't do that quickly, and obviously you don't do that in a year or two. But I had to go through a couple of farming cycles here because this landscape is so different from the one that I'm used to. in the northeast of the United States. Even if I came here on summer vacation as a little girl in the month of July, I really didn't know the agricultural cycles of this place. And a Mediterranean climate is very, very different from my climate of origin, we could say. So the first thing is really knowing and observing and understanding your land and the cycles. the natural cycles around it. For example, just a simple thing, in the northeast of the United States there's nothing growing in January and February, right? It's just, it's cold, it's winter, there's not much. Here in January and February all of our grains are growing, we're planting legumes, even if the days are shorter there's a certain, there's a fair deal of agricultural activity happening, right? And at a time like in July and August, everything's kind of, the landscape is quieting down in a sense, right, and getting ready for the fall rains. But then at a certain point you have to have the courage of your convictions and start taking the steps to transition a farm. And for me that was identifying new markets first so that I'd have some supply chain partners. that would be willing to, you know, start that process with me. The farm at the time was selling raw commodities, and I still sell a high percentage of my crop as a raw commodity, right? We have our own label and our own brand, and I started creating products that a consumer can buy, right, and that we sell. but yeah a good portion of what I do still gets shipped out in trucks, right? Two other supply, two supply chains that where I've created a partnership over time. And those supply Chains have to recognize the value, your added value, whether it's certified organic, regenerative agriculture, somehow the price needs to match. There's a whole aspect around technical assistance and all of the technical information that you need to be able to make a transition like that. And so for me, I started the transition About a year and a half after I physically arrived here, right? And in that year and a half, in addition to spending a lot of time on the land, I also spent times off the land and made connections, as many as possible, with farmers who had values that were aligned with mine. Because here locally, while I have very good relationships with my neighbors, obviously they do not. they were like, you're crazy, this is not going to work, right? Transitioning this big farm to organic and doing organic rice, and it just doesn't make sense. But searching, you will find, right? And there are great networks now of farmers in Europe, in Italy, and I have contacts in the U.S., and so that support was really important. In part because when things don't work, which is often and always, you have to either you have to have the experience to think through those problems yourself, or you have to have people whom you can call to compare notes with. And I've absolutely found that the farmer to farmer exchange is the most valuable exchange there is. I've done research with universities. I've worked with agronomists. But the people who really, you know, the exchange with other farmers is the most valuable knowledge for me. And so creating those farmer networks was really, really important. And then, as I mentioned, finding people to work with you who believe in your vision, that was the hardest part.
- Speaker #2
It must have been really difficult starting from scratch, being new to the... the area, I mean although you knew this area for a long time, but moving here, working the land here and being in an environment where there were very few people actually believing in organic agriculture, regenerative agriculture was not really a thing yet, so it must have been tough to stand your ground and become a pioneer really in this space. Do you feel like the space has changed a lot since and you've managed to really kind of... create this ecosystem that new farmers now can rely on if they need to?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I think it was challenging. And sometimes when you look back, when I look back on those first few years, I just block them out of my head, right? Some of the stories and the challenges, the day-to-day challenges, just really the difficulty in changing. in making change, right? Yeah. But now I do think that farmers or people who are interested in adopting new techniques, experimenting with regenerative practices, there's much greater wealth of information and you have networks throughout Europe of farmers who in different types of production systems and different climates who have really been pioneers themselves. homes. and are now connected with each other. And obviously digital media and all of our digital tools has helped a great deal with that connection. But also this awareness slowly that if you do ask the right questions, you will find people who can help you find those answers. Yeah. Right? And not that... Farming is easy and regenerative agriculture is easy. Nothing is easy about that. But there are more resources and networks available now. And there's more of a general understanding of what we're trying to do in farming is no longer an alternative method of farming, but it's the way that we have to approach farming systems if we're going to deal with. you know, our climate crisis, our economic crisis, the social crisis, everything that's kind of falling apart around us.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, absolutely. We're going to get into all of the amazing things you do here about regenerative agriculture, about the successes, but since you mentioned the really hard times, times at the beginning. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that, like maybe describe some of the biggest challenges you faced and the hard time that you had.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, there were a few really big challenges. The first was that the farm manager who was here at the time just did not believe that we could do it, that transitioning to organic made sense. that it was a valuable thing. And I think more than anything, it was hard because at the time, you know, conventional commodity markets were failing. You know, the prices obviously were low. European subsidies were changing, so we were going to be losing a lot of subsidies that had been. You know, a whole model was crumbling, right? That conventional commodity production, heavily subsidized by the EU, that was starting to come apart. And that markets were changing. And there was no acknowledgement of that. So everything that we talked about was just no. Not just even like transition to organic, but even like, okay, we're harvesting our clover seed today. You know, the farmer co-op that I've just met tells me that there's a way to ensure that we have a slightly higher price on that clover seed. if we do a bit of paperwork ahead of that. And he was just like, no, it's not worth it. We're not changing anything. And so more than the technical resources and financial resources, it's really the human resources and human capital and the people who work with you that make all the difference. And so that took a few years to... really work through. And I made big mistakes. I made big mistakes, both in terms of, at times, maybe trusting someone whom I shouldn't have trusted, in terms of the validity of the economic or the agricultural information. I didn't know much about agricultural contracts at the time, and so I got, I got... screwed a couple of times um and you learn quickly right and you make a mistake once and you improve and you change and then you know now 11 years later i've got a great team of people working the farm is known for for what it does we have very clear values around um regenerative you know holistic landscape management call it what you will right and we're now being contacted as you you know, a lighthouse farm for research projects. You've got to make so many mistakes before you find a system that works. I have had fields that have failed, right? And those are big experiences. And the biggest, apart from the farm manager, the biggest kind of... Mark from that time for me is also, there was a big, big drought in 2017. So I got here in 2014. We were in the middle of the organic transition. Commodity prices were low. I didn't yet have a certifiable product. And there was an enormous drought here, right in this area. And that meant that the yields were low. because there was not a lot of water. We had just started things like, you know, starting, just starting to do some crop rotation, think about cover crops. I would just started, so you don't have that base, that soil base built up yet to help you manage those kind of climate shocks, which are now regular occurrences. And I lost a lot of money in that season and had to, um I had to go to the bank for a loan for like an operating loan which definitely made the next few years much more challenging from just like a cash flow and budgeting standpoint but I learned a lot obviously in that period of time.
- Speaker #2
Yeah it must be so stressful you're obviously you're convinced about what you want to achieve but everyone else around you is saying No, and saying this is not going to work, and you're literally betting the family farm on it, right? Yeah. It must be super stressful.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, and I think that's where the fact that the farm already had some diversified income helped to... absorb that hit a little bit, right? Because we did have an agritourism, it was a project that my sister had started, so we had some tourism income. We do have, you know, at that point I was also kind of restructuring the cows that we had, so it was a really big hit, but it... It was softened by the tourism, the fact that we do have some tourism income. And so I relied on that and kind of built out some of the options that we had. And then it was also that year that given that I didn't have product that was yet certifiably organic and the conventional commodity prices had dropped, that I started a year sooner than planned. to process my rice and create a farm label, right? So that at least I could, from the harvest that we had, start to get a little bit more margin on the product. But I had to fast-track that plan, which I had planned to have for the start of the certified organic product line, but anticipated that by a year. at least to be able to cover some of those cash needs then. Yeah.
- Speaker #1
This is the end of part one. Thank you so much for listening until the end. If you'd like to support me and my work, you can actually do that in just a few seconds by clicking on the deep seat page and clicking the follow or subscribe button. It only takes a few seconds and it makes a huge difference for me. So thank you so much in advance and see you tomorrow for part two of this amazing interview.
- Speaker #0
Bye.
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