- Speaker #0
Welcome back to the Deep Seed podcast. Those of you who regularly follow the podcast will already know this, but for the others, a quick reminder of my current situation. With my wife Natalia and my little dog Ginzu, we decided to go traveling for seven months around Europe to visit some of the most advanced regenerative farmers and experts. We started about five weeks ago at a regenerative farm in Switzerland, then visited a regenerative vineyard in Provence in France, then a regenerative and organic almond farm in the southwest of France, not too far from Toulouse, and finally last week we visited a biodiversity expert in Biarritz. This is now week five of this journey and this time I'm visiting a farm in northern Spain in the Nevada region, about halfway between San Sebastian and Pamplona. The couple who started this farm here about 10 years ago are Megan Sapp and her husband Inigo. Megan is also well known for being a leading figure of the IATA, the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture, but today we focus on her role as a farmer and a horse breeder. So central to this discussion is the topic of holistic management of land, but using horses. We often hear about holistic grazing systems using cows, but not so much with horses. So this was an interesting case to explore for me. We also talk about food quality and nutrient density and also about other animals on the farm, like chickens, goats and dogs. The episode has been adapted so you can easily follow and understand everything in audio version right here on streaming platforms. but I definitely recommend watching the video version on YouTube for a more immersive experience. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I am your host, Raphael, and this is the Deep Seat Podcast.
- Speaker #1
Onigatōre, Curly Quick Ranch. I'm Megan. I'm Inigo. And we came here a bit over 10 years ago now, when we were on the look for a place to develop our energy project. We wanted to demonstrate sustainability in all of its senses. So we were looking for a farm or a piece of land where we could demonstrate off-grid living. So sustainable construction methods. how to produce all of our own energy, producing clean water, processing our wastewater, and of course, having the horses. That's the idea. Megan is a third generation horse breeder. So that's why everything started there.
- Speaker #0
It all started with the horses? Yeah. Yes? Yeah. And then so from an energy project evolved into a whole complex ecosystem, a farm?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, exactly. So, um... Somewhere around, what, 2018, I guess it was, 2018, through my university in the U.S. online, I took a course randomly on holistic management. And that's when we first discovered the methodology developed by Alan Savory and started to implement it here at the ranch. Then finding holistic management, I was like, this, this. puts together makes a lot of sense. Everything that I had learned over the past decade or so working in Africa, connecting sustainable energy with sustainable agriculture, food production, food security, sovereignty and all the rest. And it made sense. So we're like, well, why don't we start to implement it here at the ranch? And in the first year, we were able to drop the maintenance costs for the horses by 80% just because we flipped it on its head. So rather than managing the horses how I had been raised by my grandma, we started working with the natural cycles. And when we saw how quickly the costs dropped, we thought, oh, this makes sense. This has a lot of legs. So then I started training, training, more training. I became an accredited professional. I started getting into EOV, Ecological Outcome Verification, it was the methodology that we used for environment and monitoring in the SAVERY Institute. Then, with some colleagues, got together and we opened Hub del Norte, which is the accredited hub for the SAVERY Institute for Northern Spain and France. So now... The ranch is the learning farm for Habdel Norte. The big switch for us was the pandemic, as it was for many people. I had been traveling all around, doing all these renewable energy projects. We were doing a bit here with the horses, a couple of tomatoes, a couple of chickens, nothing very intense. Just for us. Just for us. And then the pandemic came, and everything came to a screeching halt. And we lost about a third of our revenue. And we went, oh, crap, what do we do now? And it was like, oh, we have a farm. And so that's when we started to scale up. So we're still very small, but we supply to 30 families in San Sebastian, so about 45 minutes from here. We sell to an old people's home about 15 minutes from here. We sell eggs and vegetables all through the valley nearby. We're going to start selling to our restaurant in Pamplona later this year, which is very exciting. And of course, we produce about 70% of our own food.
- Speaker #0
That's incredible. That's great. Before we start the farm visit, the tour, could you tell us a little bit about first where we are geographically? How big is the farm? What is it that you grow and that you do here? and just give us like a... an overview, a summary before we get deeper into it.
- Speaker #1
Of course. So we're in the village of Escoz in the valley of Imots in Navarra. So we are about 45 minutes south of San Sebastian and half an hour north of Pamplona. Our valley has eight villages in it with a whopping total of 450 residents living here. Our farm itself is only about three and a half hectares, most of which we use for pasture with the horses. We also have some goat lawnmowers that we help to support with the horses. We have about 80 laying hens. We do a couple hundred fattening chickens a year, 15 fattening turkeys a year. And we have about 700 square meters of market garden, which thanks to this restaurant, we're going to be increasing to about a thousand. Yes?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Awesome. Let's start the visit. So that was it for the introduction of this episode. For the next part, I asked Megan to go in a little bit more detail into the topic of holistic horse management. Because I really wanted to understand in much more detail how it actually works and what the benefits are for the soil, for the ecosystem and for the farm in general.
- Speaker #1
So within holistic management, we see livestock as tools for managing the ecosystem. So if we disconnect to the idea that horses must be free, running the range, typically overgrazing and destroying the land, and we flip it on its head and talk about how we can use them to manage the resources. I mean, really what we're looking to do is to ensure soil health, animal health, people health, right? And having all these work together. So if... The idea is that we're able to produce as much as our own forage as possible, reduce our costs, right? To boost that forage production, we need to consume the forage. So we need to understand how and when to use the animals, when they should be eating, how long they should be occupying a space, how long the pasture then needs to rest afterwards. With horses, we... I've seen that they are a bit more excitable than your typical cows or sheep. So we have to take into consideration their behavior, their natural way of interacting. We also have to take into consideration the context. So here, we're very blessed to be in a very wet and rainy kind of place. We have a 1,200 millimeters per year average rainfall. But as we know... with the way the ecosystem works, it's not how much rain you get, it's how often you get it. And lately, we've been getting it an awful lot. So thankfully, because of the way we manage our pastures, the water infiltrates and is retained. And then it's available for when the sun comes out, then it starts to grow again. So we've had a lot of issues in this area because there's been so much rain in the last several months. that those who are managing their land conventionally with a lot of tillage or overgrazing their land, when it rains then the water rushes off. Ours thankfully infiltrates and we have had no runoff that we have been able to detect even when we've had days with 130 or 140 millimeters in 24 hours. But it's because we're paying attention to how the animals are interacting with the land. As we've seen, they're very excitable, the way their hooves interact with the soil. They can, if you leave them in a place too long, cause damage. What we do is make sure that we have fast movements year-round, which means that they'll never be in a place, when it's raining like this, never be in a place more than 12 to 24 hours because it's too much animal impact. So that's what we're trying to manage. So what we've been able to do... is taking into consideration that we have a lot of slope in most of our pastures. This is just about the flattest one that we have. We have up to 16% slope. So making sure that they're moving and never in one place for too long. And what that does is it helps to cycle the biomass that's already there so that those nutrients are then available for the plants to grow back again. So depending on the time of year, we can bring the horses back. in 30 days or 45 days or 60 or 90, depending. So what we've managed to do by managing holistically with the horses for the past six years is we've increased our productivity by about a third, which means that that is less hay than we need to buy.
- Speaker #0
When we say productivity, you mean the growth of the...
- Speaker #1
Yeah, productivity of the pastures. So we're able to increase... how much hay production or how much forage production we have for the animals. We would like to have much more, but the truth is, is that if we take into consideration the slope and the moisture, we don't have enough land in order to be giving the proper textbook amount of rest to all of these pastures. So we've been in negotiations with the neighbors in order to get a couple more hectares, which will allow us to do that even better. and increase our biomass yields even more and hopefully get to the point where we can reduce or even eliminate our hay purchases.
- Speaker #0
Okay, so now that we understand a little bit better what holistic horse management is, we decided to go and sit in the middle of a pasture close to the soil to discuss the positive impacts that this management has had on soil health, on biodiversity, on the ecosystem. in general?
- Speaker #1
Moles. The great thing about moles is what they do is they dig up your soil. So what we're able to see then, real easy, without having to get a shovel, is the soil structure, right? So you can see how crumbly it is. Look, I even grabbed a worm. Good. Beautiful. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
How different is that soil to when you... arrived here and you started this management?
- Speaker #1
So when we first got here, it had been managed by the local dairy co-op for several decades, which meant a lot of tillage, tractors, dairy slurry, all the rest. So just in the same way that we take a lot of care with the moisture of the soil when we put the horses in, and the impact they're going to have. they did not take care when they were coming in with the tractor. So we had extreme compaction. So much so that the year after when we no longer had the dairy managing the land and we took over, we had all of this was two meter high thistles. And thistles, we didn't know at the time because we were still learning, thistles decompact the soil. They have their deep pivoting route that breaks things open. All we saw was we didn't have forage for the horses, right? But if you can imagine, we had, what, two and a half hectares, basically, of a thistle forest. So that was, what, eight years ago, I guess, at this point? Yeah, so that was eight years ago. So again, not understanding how the ecosystem works, not knowing regenerative agriculture. We did what any normal person would do, which is come in with a tractor. We got our neighbors to come in with a tractor and cut down the thistles. What we didn't understand was by doing that, we were going counter to what we want, which is to decompact the soil. So they came in and so it took a bit longer. But we were able to bring in the horses already that next year. And the first couple of years with the horses, we did what we call continuous grazing, like what many people do, which is what ends up with overgrazing in many cases. But having horses overgrazing was still a huge improvement to having tractors work in the land at the wrong time. on this slope. So it got better, it got better. There was more forage, there was less thistle. But then when we started implementing holistic management, so six years ago, so that would have been two years later, doing the holistic plant grazing, doing the animal impact at the right time, at the right moment, for the right reasons, we made a huge change in a very short amount of I think it was only probably two years. Yeah So now as you can see here, we have no thistle. We'll go down further on the hill where you can see that, you know, you'll get a couple, you know, one or two or three or four, which is perfectly fine because that's part of the diversity that we're looking for because those indicator plants are bringing up nutrients to the surface that, you know, a lot of the more superficial plants or the perennials, which is what we're trying to transition towards. wouldn't be able to get to. So it all works together. It all balances out. But yeah, we're quite happy with what we've been able to do in a pretty short amount of time.
- Speaker #0
Sweet, amazing. And do you have any sort of data maybe to illustrate this? They haven't been able to do soil sampling and things like that.
- Speaker #1
Of course. So we were one of the first farms to be EOV monitored in Spain. So this will be the fourth year that we do the monitoring. In June, we're going to do it. When we do EOV, there's annual monitoring that we do, short-term monitoring, and then there's long-term monitoring. So every five years. So when we did the first baseline four years ago, that's when we did the soil monitoring. And at that point, we had... pretty high. We had four and a half to five and a half percent soil organic carbon, depending on where you were. That's not surprising considering how many years this was basically a dairy slurry dumping ground. What is going to be really interesting is when we do that big monitoring again in two years, and we'll see what those changes of not just the soil carbon, but also the biodiversity of plants. that's what we're really looking for. Because if we think that when the dairy was managing this land, it was being seeded with annual ryegrass, which is what they would use for silage. As you can see here, we've got a whole lot more plants growing on than just, in fact, very little of what we have here is annual ryegrass. So we've got at least eight or nine plant families just in this. you know, square meter or so. Having a wide diversity of plants in your pastures is really important because on one hand you're providing a varied diet for the horses so that depending on their health needs, their nutritional needs at the time, they have available what they need when they need it.
- Speaker #0
And they sort of know, the horses, what to pick and what to eat depending on what their needs are?
- Speaker #1
Absolutely, but not just horses. All animals know. Just humans, we know too. If we see a strawberry that smells sweet and tastes sweet, we know that that's much different than a strawberry that tastes like water, tastes like nothing. Same thing with tomatoes, same thing with anything else. We have in our monkey brain this inherent understanding of what is nutrient dense and what are empty calories. And so the animals do that as well. Unfortunately, there's a lot of domesticated breeds that have... been transitioned over the years or into housed or stabled conditions, that then you try to bring them back out to the land and they don't necessarily understand what's going on here.
- Speaker #0
Which is why when we're looking at doing pastured beef or pork or sheep or cows or whatever, we're looking for those more rustic breeds that still have that natural instinct that allows them to then, you know, if we think of a food as medicine sense, it allows them to self-medicate. It gives them the nutrients they need at the right time.
- Speaker #1
And in terms of... soil health and biodiversity and all of that, this also comes in too.
- Speaker #0
Absolutely. So by having diverse plants, they're photosynthesizing and then they're sending down into the soil different exudants, different kinds of carbon. So whether it's carbohydrates or it's sugars or it's amino acids or whatever. And by having those different carbon forms sent down into the soil, that is then attracted. the different microbiology, which is what we need in order to make sure that these plants that grow are then as nutrient dense as possible. Because you have those relationships between the bacteria and the fungi and the macrofauna that's in the soil and everything's all working together. So what it does is it helps us to shift our, through the succession of species, it helps us to shift to ever more diversity and ever more resilience.
- Speaker #1
Just a quick pause to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast, and that's Soil Capital. One of the biggest levers to enable farmers to transition towards regenerative agriculture is financial incentives. And that's essentially what Soil Capital does. They financially reward farmers who improve things like soil health and biodiversity. And by doing that, they contribute to accelerating the transition to regenerative agriculture. They're a really cool company. I love what they're doing and I'm super proud to be partnering with them for the podcast.
- Speaker #0
I just want to brag a bit on my fava beans because we have for a number of years now been guardians for the local seed network. And these fava beans are a local variety that we have been keeping seed for six years. One of the biggest challenges for fava beans in this area, which is one of our star products because they are so good, very high quality, we sell out every year, is that because they're a spring crop, it's very common for hailstorms. And there have been years where when hailstorms come, it knocks off all the flowers and destroys our entire crop. However, last year was the first time that... We had a hailstorm. In fact, we had three hailstorms in one day, which in other years would have knocked off all of the flowers, but we didn't lose a single one and we had a full crop. And I could attribute this absolutely to the health of our soils and making sure that these plants that are not only adapted to the local conditions, but the health of the soil is making sure that they are strong enough to... restrain or to continue to survive after those kinds of storms.
- Speaker #1
Okay. And what's the secret for your, the health of that soil here?
- Speaker #0
Haha. So as you can see, we have raised beds. That was because this area wasn't flat when we bought it. This is all kind of fake in a sense, because as I had mentioned before, we have a 16% slope. But in order for us to have some usable land, early on we did this excavation work to make sure that we had terraces. So that means that inherently the soil is quote unquote compacted. So rather than working directly into the soil, which would have taken many, many, many, many years in order to get it productive, what we did was we built these raised beds, which are connected to the soil. They've got an anti-mole. netting to make sure the moles don't come up and destroy the crop. And then we put large wood trunks and branches, then some leaves from the forest next door that then provided the microbiology to decompose those trees from the local environment. Then we have a thick layer of worm casings and then compost. And then depending on the crop and the season, we will then put newspaper or cardboard and straw on top. And then we do no dig at all. So no movements, no hand machines, no nothing. Everything is just on top, on top, on top. So every year we add another layer of compost. The compost that we use, we produce. from our different animals. And then we just do that newspaper and straw on top. And so everything is all working and cycling together.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so next, we want to check out the chickens and the goats to better understand their role in this complex farm ecosystem.
- Speaker #0
When we first got chickens, we got six, like many people do. And then We got 12 and then the pandemic hit and we got 80 and then we got 100. And so now we fluctuate between about 80 and 100. We're really focused on happy chickens. We have a mixed flock, so mixed breeds and mixed ages. So some of the chickens we have here, even though most of them are industrial breeds, they're three, four or five years old. We have mixed breeds because we market rainbow eggs, which in the US is... pretty common at a homestead level but in Spain nobody does it. So we have green eggs, blue eggs, dark brown eggs, white eggs, tan eggs and so we sell rainbow chickens and our clients love them.
- Speaker #1
So you mean that when you sell the egg boxes there's a rainbow of colors inside of the box and it's like you open it up and you see all these different colored eggs rather than the standard usual. Just exactly the same egg that you find at the end of the supermarket.
- Speaker #0
Exactly. So, you know, it's a bit kitschy, but you know, it's pretty, people like it, but really people come to us for our eggs because of the quality of the eggs.
- Speaker #1
And how do you explain the high quality of the eggs?
- Speaker #0
That absolutely we attribute to them having a high protein diet, foraging out in the grass.
- Speaker #1
Where does that protein come from?
- Speaker #0
It comes from the insects and the worms and the bugs and everything that they're eating when they're out in pasture.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so because they're on a healthy pasture and because you're doing this sort of plant grazing with them, the pasture itself is becoming healthier and healthier. It attracts more and more insects. And so there's more of these insects and more protein for them to eat. And therefore the egg quality is higher.
- Speaker #0
And for us, eggs are what we refer to as the entry drug. Because people come to us for eggs. And then they ask us, what else do you have? So it's a great marketing opportunity. But also, you know, again, it comes back to quality. People, even at times when our eggs have been more expensive, now with egg prices going up, we're actually about the same price as conventional. But even when our eggs were a third or more expensive, then people would still always come back to us because of that quality. That baby! Yeah, you can come in, but you gotta close the door when you come in. It's not about her coming in, it's about them getting out. So that's Jolene, this is Mama, and over here is little Mr. Man.
- Speaker #1
What role do these goats play in your farm ecosystem?
- Speaker #0
Ah yeah, well, I mean we tease and we call them goat lawnmowers, but that's just because at the moment we only have two. We have had up to seven, and what their role was... was to help us to process and cycle biomass that wasn't edible by our horses, right? So things that we would consider weeds, right? Things that are spiky, that are not palatable to horses. Goats love, right? So what happened was we had a lot of this, as we explained about the previous management with the dairy co-op and all of the thistles and everything. But we have, thanks to them as ecosystem tools, transitioned a lot of that undesirable plants into desirable plants. So now we have far fewer spaces that produce those kinds of plants. So we have far less need for goats. We've actually got much more now that is correct for horses or for cows or for sheep. But at the moment, we don't have cows. or sheep. So what we did was just reduce the number of goats. So we use them surgically. We put them into the exact places that we need them to be intervening. And so in that sense, we use them as tools.
- Speaker #1
So yeah, you were telling me at the start of the conversation that you were possibly going to start supplying a restaurant very soon. That's something really exciting, but also it really makes me wonder about The relationship between the management you're doing here and the care you're given to soil health, to biodiversity, and to all of these things. And the quality of the food that you produce, the taste and the nutrition, because chefs, especially these kind of high-level chefs... They are obsessed with quality, right? And taste. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, happy to. They are local to Nevada and absolutely obsessed with elevating traditional Nevada crops and products. They love working with farms. They love buying directly from farms. But they have a big challenge because every year, at least some of their... suppliers go out of business because there's no generational transition, because they don't make enough money with the economic model that these farms have developed. So what we're doing is we're working with them not only to grow the crops that they're looking for, but hopefully expand into a deeper relationship where we can help to be training other farmers. where they can be bringing chefs so that we can be doing education with chefs so that they understand that deep relationship between the soil and the quality of the products. When they originally approached this, it was because they couldn't find really good tomatoes. And where we are in the northern half of Nevada, typically it rains too much and it's too cloudy. But as you can see on this beautiful sunny day, We are at 620 meters south facing and we grow amazing tomatoes. And because I'm quite a bit of a seed nerd, we grow at least 12 or 15 different varieties of heirloom tomatoes every year. And when he saw the pictures of what we do, he went absolutely crazy. And he's like, I want all of it. And I was like, OK, great, easy, easy. He's like, no, no, no, I will bring my team and we will harvest ourselves. We can do a team building exercise. together where they can learn directly from you what is a good tomato and what makes up that nutrient density and everything so they can all understand the relationships working together.
- Speaker #1
That's an amazing story. Do you think that starting to really understand the relationship between soil health and food quality creates new incentives to invest in regenerative agriculture?
- Speaker #0
I would hope that we can get to the point where we can really be having these food is medicine conversations. It's much more advanced in the U.S., I feel. Here in Europe, it's just starting to kick off. But I think people are beginning to see those relationships. Of course, there's more and more research that shows the data, that shows, you know, the better omega-6 to 3 ratios. in grass-fed and in regenerative systems rather than conventional, for example. There are some researchers in the Netherlands that are doing quite a lot of lab work trying to show the nutrient density, but also the nutrient bioavailability of regenerative products compared to conventional. So once people start to understand that our bodies really are temples. And we begin to respect what we put in it, knowing that that's going to have a much higher quality of life, much longer quality, much longer lifespan without all the drugs, the diseases, the medicines, where we begin to appreciate ourselves instead of spending all of our extra money on expensive mobile phones or fast fashion or cheap holidays or whatever. You know, the point is there is that we need to be changing our priorities so that we're investing in the food that we put in our bodies. But we're also investing in our rural communities and having that relationship directly between the farmer and the consumer.
- Speaker #1
This is the end of this episode. It comes a little bit abruptly, I'll grant you that. That's because we recorded a conclusion message that was really, really cool, really nice with Megan. Unfortunately, we had a little problem with the microphone and I was not able to include that last part. But I really wanted to thank you all for listening this far into the episode. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, don't hesitate to go and check out the video version online. It's really, really nice to actually see everything that we talk about in this episode. If you'd like to support me and my work in... doing this podcast every week you can actually do that in just five seconds so Whichever streaming platform you're using right now to listen to this, you can just click on the Deep Seed page and hit the follow or subscribe button. It actually makes a huge difference. So thank you so much and see you next week.
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