- Speaker #0
Welcome back to the Deep Seed Podcast. This week I sat down with Dimitri Tsitos for a really deep and really insightful conversation about the tree crop industry in Europe. The number of hectares planted with super intensive tree crops in the Mediterranean region has been growing really fast in recent years. And the core of Dimitri's work and therefore our conversation today is about how do we make these super intensive systems regenerative. I push him quite a lot on the question of does it even make sense to design and plant these kind of systems in the first place and we have a very healthy debate on that question but ultimately Dimitri tells us that whether we like it or not these systems are here right now and they will be here for the foreseeable future. And so his job is to help these farmers be more regenerative. And he makes a very strong case to demonstrate that actually, we could potentially have super intensive tree crop farms that are also organic and regenerative. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I am your host, Raphael, and this is the Deep Seed Podcast. Hi Dimitri, welcome to the Deep Seed podcast.
- Speaker #1
Hi Raphael, thank you so much for having me on today. Really appreciate it.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I'm really, really happy to finally meet you in person and have this discussion. And when I started this podcast, your podcast was one of my biggest influences.
- Speaker #1
So that's super nice to hear. Yeah, that's awesome. Yep.
- Speaker #0
Okay, so I always like to start the conversations on the podcast with this one question because it It brings us. right into the deep end, into the heart of today's conversation. So here it is. What is the one key message that you really want every person listening to this conversation today to come away with?
- Speaker #1
I'd say that... If we want to really scale regenerative agriculture, we need to align and to work with the industry, with the farmers that are in a very conventional system currently, but that represents the majority of the farmers that are producing. And in order to work with them, we need to approach them and collaborate with them in a non-judgmental way. We need to, there's a tendency in the RegenX space to kind of point the finger and to say, you know, you're doing conventional, you're spraying, you're doing all these things and in a judgmental way. But if we come in with a much more empathetic approach, where we are understanding that farmers are managing a lot of complexity with very high risk levels. It's probably one of the most challenging jobs out there. and understanding that the current, you know, the practices they're currently implementing them are the best that they know at this moment. And we come in and we support them. And we gradually, as I said earlier on, we gradually help them and accompany them in this transition by within a human approach, through communication, through demonstration, come to them in a professional way with data, etc. Then we can see them change. And we do see them change. And we do see them open up and get more interested. And so I think that it's important for us to work with the industry, work with these farmers and develop solutions that are not too idealistic, but that are scalable.
- Speaker #0
Right. Yeah, yeah. Really like what you're saying here. And it really resonates with a conversation I had on the podcast quite recently with Nicolas Verscure from Sol Capital Farming and Cultivae. And he was telling me that while he really appreciates those super advanced, super talented regenerative farmers, he's more interested in bringing in the 80-90% vast majority of full conventional farmers on a path to regeneration. And doing that by being non-dogmatic about it and offering a path that is realistic and accessible for the farmers.
- Speaker #1
I think that farmers want us to solve their problems. And so if you're coming in very strong with an ecological discourse, you're adding problems for them. You're telling them you're adding pressure, you're adding more things that they need to do in order to be considered good farmers, for example. And so... What you need to do is you need to come in and you need to identify their problems and then you need to solve them one by one. And after the first problem that you solved, you'll see just how much more they trust you. And so I think it's a lot about this. It's a lot about fixing their issues and making their life easier. Many times they're facing problems and they don't necessarily understand where the problems are coming from. We're managing a very complex system, which is an agro-ecosystem. It's nature. it's it's difficult to diagnose and so we are we have we're lucky enough that we have developed experience and knowledge on how these things work and we can come to the farmer and we can help the farmer identify what's the problem and um and then find solutions for uh for for the farmer so that's that's our approach at agrosystemic and and how we try to um approach
- Speaker #0
our regenerative transition so yeah so you're trying to help the farmers first and foremost and regenerate ecosystems while doing that.
- Speaker #1
We're trying to regenerate the farmers' agroecosystem for the farmers' benefit, first and foremost. Right.
- Speaker #0
So it seems clear to me that you have a very systemic view of the global food system and in particular the tree crop industry in Europe. And I would love to retrace your journey so that we could understand better how you arrived at that systemic vision. So could you please tell us a little bit about your personal journey? starting with what brought you into the regenerative agriculture space in the first place and leading up to well where you are today and what you do today sounds very good so yeah i come from a family that doesn't have doesn't come from an agricultural background um
- Speaker #1
always lived in rural areas but not farming ourselves this was a few generations back um and i grew up in france and in England as well. and I studied economics at university. And then from when I left university, I realized that I didn't want to work in either banks or investment firms or these different things that were promoted at the time. It wasn't resonating with me, and I decided to try and find out what I wanted to do. And I very quickly encountered agroforestry at the start, which was for me, from my economics background, I was always interested in the ecological issue, but always thinking, you know, how can we make it work economically? Understanding that if it doesn't work economically, it's not going to scale. And then agroforestry seemed like a good mix between, you know, we can reforest and make some money out of it. And so that was obviously right at the start. So then I started digging deeper. I went through different experiences. I went to work in Brazil for some time with Ernst, who does the syntropic farming. I did lots of, as many courses as I could, read as many books as I could on it. Was talking to my dad and my mum, and we decided to start a farm in Greece, which is called Mazzy Farm. So this we started seven years ago. And spent three years there, working on the farm, experiencing the challenges of farming. first hand, because it was not easy, and especially doing alternative practices. So that's been an interesting process there. And afterwards, I decided that I was going to leave the farm, because I was feeling limited in my experience and my knowledge, and I needed to experience other contexts, see different things. At Massey Farm, we planted lots of tree crops. Obviously, with agroforestry goes trees, and with trees, we planted tree crops. In the Mediterranean, it's perfect. So we planted pistachios, almonds, figs, and prickly pears. So I started having a big focus and developing a strong passion for tree crops and nuts and fruits, et cetera. And so I've been really geeking out on that for a while now. That's been my main focus. And little by little, I kind of shifted towards not so much agroforestry, but more towards um how to produce tree crops regeneratively. In the meantime, started a podcast as well on agroforestry, which at the time, that was when we were at Mazzy Farm with Etienne, who's the co-founder of Etienne Compagnon, who's the co-founder of the podcast and a very good friend of mine. And we realized we don't have good access to content and to farm experiences. So we decided to do it ourselves. Thought that we were going to have 200 listeners max, but it grew a lot and it resonated with a lot of people. So that was a great experience. Since then, I was not necessarily able to continue the podcast. We're trying to revive it in different ways. But I've had to focus more on my activity at the moment, which is my company, which is AgroSystemic, that I co-founded with my wife, Haiza. And the objective of the company is to scale regenerative agriculture in the Mediterranean, focusing a lot on tree crops, but we also work with corn. and actually we also have a project in in Brazil with citrus, with orange, a large orange producer. So we're basically having the system's view, as you were saying earlier on, of how do we, if you're asking the question, how do you transition farmers in a specific context? It's not just about going there and knowing how to plant a cover crop. It's about knowing how to talk to the farmer, understanding firstly the context of the farmer, diagnosing not just the soil issues, but also the human issues, the economic issues going on there. so you can provide some pertinent solutions yeah otherwise you're you're not really you know listening and adapting yeah so yeah that's the process at the moment we live in portugal um And we've got a lot of projects here with the company. And little by little, we're building the company. We're now five people in the company working with different advisors and high-level agronomists that have been doing this for 20 years, that are part of the team. And we're together grinding and developing projects. We've got some cool R&D projects we'll talk about later on, things like this.
- Speaker #0
Great. Awesome. That last part about agro-systemic and everything you're doing at the moment. This is going to be the main focus of our conversation today and I really want to dig as deep as possible into all of that. But before we get there I want to stay on your personal story a little bit longer and in particular Mazzy Farm. So you already gave us some information about it but I would love for you to to go a bit deeper to tell us more about your experience of starting a farm, the challenges, the successes, the evolution of the farm over the years and yeah all of that.
- Speaker #1
So I literally just came back from there before yesterday, or maybe three days ago. And it was really beautiful. It was really... Because you basically visualize this. We started on a piece of land that was completely overgrazed on a hill in a rocky mountain area of Greece. So very challenging environment. A lot of wind. Just... hard to grow anything really. It's an area where there's a lot of animals because they adapt well to the context there. Soil is very poor soil, aged and degraded soil. Naturally poor, but also poor due to the overgrazing that was taking place there and the different practices. And so it was this kind of barren, stony, rocky. You'd arrive there and it was all just yellow and rocks. In the winter, of course, it grew some plants, but you know they didn't grow very well or they needed fertilizer to develop well and um and now i went there and we had we had a quite good rainfall not fantastic but definitely better than the last three years on the land and it's just so green and lush and you see a forest we applied lots of agroforestry practices and organic tree crop just practices and a lot of innovative as well regenerative practices we kind of really pushed hard on the how alternative and how it was really a big kind of R&D project in a way. So lots of different practices that were quite alternative at the time. And so arriving there and I just felt the land alive and with a cover crop this big, green everywhere, the trees are doing well. And so it felt good because at the beginning it was a bit of a grind. It was quite a big challenge due to the context and also us trying to work it out. us not having that much experience, but also us trying to apply techniques that hadn't been applied before. So obviously you make mistakes. So for me, that was a big learning ground where we really, I did a lot of mistakes there, which I still carry to this day. And still, when I work with farmers, I'm like, let's not do that, because I've done that and it doesn't, or let's do it this way. So yeah, I think that's the experience there at Massey Farm. Lots of different practices and now we really have a forest and the soil organic matter levels have shot up. We worked a lot with biomass management. So we planted lots of trees just to prune them, just to produce biomass. That's a technique that's quite inspired from Syntropic, but the concept is let's produce biomass on site by pruning, by coppicing or pollarding trees and chipping them and using that wood chip as a source of regeneration of energy, of carbon for the soil. And so we've had the soil has transformed in its quality. and the organic matter has shot up, we've gained in a few years. We're waiting for the next analysis, but the first analysis we did a month ago, we've seen that we've gained about 2-3 percentage points in our organic matter.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, okay. I haven't seen the farm yet, I would love to visit it at some point, but it reminds me of the biggest little farm, you know the documentary, this amazing documentary about this couple who start an organic farm, and how they struggle the first few years, but the guy there, advisor says it's going to take some time, maybe seven, eight years, but then at some point the system is going to start to click. And maybe that's what's happening now. It seems like it.
- Speaker #1
The problem is the past three years, we've had a massive drought. And so that's the time when you really test the system. And what's interesting is that even though production hasn't been great due to that, because the wells dried up in the whole region. So we've got some major issues with water we had to dig a a much deeper well to get access to some water. But we were giving the minimum irrigation during this time. I mean minimum. If in a conventional system you're providing 3000 cubic meters for olives, we were here providing 200 cubic meters per hectare. And the trees didn't die. The trees are well. And this year with a bit of rain, the trees are exploding. So we're seeing super good vigor. So it's, and the cover crop is marvelous as well. So you see that when biomass is being produced, you know, that's a sign of, that's one of the key KPIs for regeneration, you know? So fruit trees are growing, cover crops growing, the support species as well growing, everything is doing well. And so even though we've had some really harsh years, so that for us is a big sign that things are going well. Now we're focusing a lot on how do we take it to the next level now that we've regenerated the land. We've installed a lot of ecological infrastructure, such as windbreaks. There was a massive issue with wind. Wind that was coming from the sea that has a lot of chloride and sodium in it. And that was burning the leaves and creating toxicities and nutrient absorption issues. And so we created lots of windbreaks that took obviously a bit of time to establish. But back in the days, you'd walk on the land and just constantly have this wind in your ear. And it was irritating. It was difficult. Now you walk on the land and you feel calm and the trees are growing. They were growing sideways, you know, now they're going straight and up. And so we've established, it took time to establish the ecological infrastructure through agroforestry. And in this context, agroforestry was a really important tool. We've increased organic matter levels, we've built our farm infrastructure. And so now, you know, we're kind of set. And the trees have grown, have established themselves. And now with good years and with a bit more irrigation support, we're set to enter into some higher production, which is obviously effective. So let's see. This would be good.
- Speaker #0
But it's amazing that you took a piece of land that was quite degraded and really harsh and already turned it into a regenerated piece of land with more organic matter, with more biodiversity, with trees growing.
- Speaker #1
It took seven years, but it happened.
- Speaker #0
It must feel amazing though, to feel like all of the hard work you put in.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, that's what I felt this year when I was there. It's like,
- Speaker #0
pfft,
- Speaker #1
felt good.
- Speaker #0
I really love how you decided to start this podcast because you were looking for knowledge. So you went right to the source. You identified people you thought were interesting in the space, who had knowledge that you could benefit from, and started this podcast to interview them. What probably happened, the reason why you built such a following around the podcast as well, is that a lot of people were in the same situation and they were like, great, like they can identify with you as being new to this space, wanting to find information, struggling to find it. And yeah, I love that you did that. You mentioned that you were not able to keep doing the podcast in the last years because you're too busy with other things. And I obviously fully understand that, but I hope that you'll find a way to get back to it because I miss it. Yeah,
- Speaker #1
yeah. I appreciate you saying this. And I've had a few people giving me that feedback as well. I mean, we put out 54 episodes and each one is still really relevant today because each one is a study of a farm, you know, a case study of a farm. And it was a really great, I mean, it's so good. It's amazing to be able to create content and to put it out there and to get a person's story into so much detail, right? Because sometimes our episodes are often they're one hour and a half and we go into really nitty gritty details with these people. So, I mean, it's really good that But it's the... we've done this work but of course now we're looking to to see if somebody else can take on um take on and expand the the podcast and keep interviewing and if we have a few opportunities that we're working on so hopefully soon something happens and we're starting to reactivate it yeah sweet with another voice um but the project continues it won't be me uh doing interviewing but
- Speaker #0
uh hopefully the project will continue right great i'm really looking forward to that We have a tendency on this podcast and probably on other podcasts and channels about regenerative agriculture to focus only on the the most advanced pioneer regenerative farms and farmers right and i love that today we're going to be looking at this topic from a completely different perspective because we're going to be talking about super intensive super conventional tree crops um so yeah maybe you could first give us an overview a summary of the tree crop industry in europe in particular in the mediterranean Context.
- Speaker #1
So, yeah, it's a good question. And I'm going to describe a bit the evolution of tree crops, tree crop production in Europe over the years. So we started with a lot of traditional, what we would call traditional orchards. So these are orchards with a very wide spacing, with quite nowadays very old trees, you know, some of them 100, 150 years old. And these orchards were usually located around the villages. to harvest the olives for example to produce the olive oil very wide spacing with animals underneath very agroecological no irrigation rain fed hardly any spraying the main costs were pruning or main let's say operations were pruning and harvesting and the animals underneath managing so that was the traditional system which these systems still exist they haven't They haven't necessarily been cut back and cut down. They're still there. But as the demand for olive oil has increased globally and it's become quite a big commodity due to, in recent years, a lot of the Mediterranean diet becoming more and more famous. We're actually in a phase of increased demand, world global demand for olive oil. For example, if we focus on olives, we've seen people producing, planting orchards with what we would call intensive orchards. Spacing is 6x6, 5x6, maximum 7x7, usually less. Animals have mostly left the system at this point. Very rational irrigation has come in. Technology has come in as well. We're starting to spray them, to fertilize them. And that lasted for a little while until they invented the superintensive system. So superintensive is, if we have a 6x6 spacing for intensive, we then shift it towards 4x1 spacing. So we went from 300 to 400 trees per hectare to 2000.
- Speaker #0
Okay, so when you say four by one or three by one, you mean that every row has three or four meters between the rows?
- Speaker #1
Exactly.
- Speaker #0
And every tree has just one meter between each tree?
- Speaker #1
Kind of like a vineyard system, but much taller. It's what we call a hedge orchard. In Portuguese it's called cebe, olivalen cebe, which is a hedge olive grove. because it looks like a hedge. You know, you don't see the difference between the trees, it's all just a line of olives. And so that was, why did people do that? Because one of the big challenges with olives is the harvest. And in traditional orchards, in traditional especially, but also in intensive orchards, one of the biggest costs was harvesting these orchards with big teams that needed to go onto, under the olives, lay out nets, shake the nuts onto nets and pick up the nets. And they basically shifted to this system because they realized that they created a machine which is called an over-the-row harvester. It comes from the vineyard, from the grape industry, from the wine industry. And they applied it to the superintents, to the olives. And so they were able to drive on top of the olives, shake the olives and harvest for half or less of the cost. And so it reduced a big part of the cost and also solved another problem, which is labor. availability, quality labor availability in the agricultural sector, which is a big issue. Everybody's moved out and gone to the city and farms are getting larger. Fewer people need to manage more land. So you see the transition between these three different systems where we've gained efficiency and we've entered with more technology. The super intensive systems, typically they have quite a significant irrigation. They don't need to be necessarily irrigated. but they typically do. They get irrigated, they are fertilized quite heavily, they depend quite a lot also on what are as done nowadays. They use a lot of agrochemicals as well to produce. And so you get a very high yield, like very high yield, averaging 12 tons of, in Portugal for example, averaging 12 tons of olive per hectare. Okay, so that's about 2,000-2,500 liters of olive oil. which is very high compared to a traditional orchard which will be producing between 200 and 400. um so very big difference economically much more viable less dependent on on labor yeah for harvesting more efficient on a variety of treatments and operations but with other issues around the intensity so when we call intensive and super intensive we're also talking we're talking mostly about the density of plants yeah but There's a bit of confusion there. Because one thing is the density of plants, but another thing is the intensity of the production system. Nowadays, you have super intensive groves, which are done organically and rain fed. It's just they've kept that kind of density of the hedge style. So typically, the super intensive went with a very intensive production approach, a lot of irrigation, etc. So high yields, as I said, but a lot of issues around dependency, for example, on water and fertilizers and agrochemicals, degrading agroecosystem health and socially and culturally creating some issues. A lot of people are happy with them because they're bringing work and etc. But a lot of the villages in Portugal, for example, and in different areas of Europe are complaining and are unhappy with the change in the landscape, with the intensity of the chemical use, the intensification of... of the basically of the landscape so there's it's it's also a political issue at the moment in portugal yeah okay so we need to be sensitive when we talk about this because um we need to take into account the socio-economic context here and um and be sent be sensitive to that um so yeah that's where we are right now focusing a lot because we see the issue but we also see the opportunity of these systems these systems us have solved many many problems and have have providing some efficient solutions so now we're trying to see if we can take these systems and shift them and maintain the planting density intensity but start to shift towards regenerative production okay okay yeah and um so yeah that's focusing quite a lot on
- Speaker #0
on on olives almonds is slightly different but the tendency of intensification is similar okay okay yeah yeah you have these um these very intensive systems and they're allowed to produce a lot more for a lot cheaper using less labor and obviously for many people that's good it's more production more people fed um it's economically more interesting for the farmer or the landowner and all of that but on The minus side is that it puts a lot of pressure on the environment. It's, as you said, reliant on water, on inputs, on many things,
- Speaker #1
right? Not just the environment. Also, what you're seeing is, and this is a typical pattern with intensive production systems, not just with tree crops, but we're also seeing it a lot with corn, okay, as we're working with corn. The intensity of production and of inputs is causing issues in resilience. So we're seeing the farmers are depending every time more on chemicals, for example, whilst having at the same time fewer and fewer options due to regulatory issues. So due to basically active substances being removed from the market by European regulation. So there's a variety of things going on there, which we can unpack. But it's not just in terms of the ecosystems, but it's also in terms of the medium term business strategy for the farmers. You're seeing a degradation in soil health, which means that right now they have lots of water and they can And irrigate them quite a lot but all we need is two or three years of drought in the summer or sorry in the winter with poor rainfall and suddenly we'll be needing to reduce the farmers will be obliged to reduce the amount of water they will apply and if that's the case the degraded soils will be the ones that will be the most hit so the tree crops on a degraded soil condition will struggle a lot more than the ones on a healthy soil condition okay okay so it's also what we're seeing here is that this this intensity of production is degrading the agroecosystem health and reducing the services, the agronomic services that the soil and the functional biodiversity are providing. So you're losing resilience and you're gaining dependence little by little as well. You're gaining dependence on the inputs that are causing the issue. So it's basically a vicious cycle.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it's the same story we hear over and over, right? It's the short-term amazing gain for long-term problems.
- Speaker #1
Exactly. And an orchard lasts 30 years or 25, depending on the system. And so the issues that you're causing in the short term, you're going to feel them because it's going to be the same plant that's established there. You're not resetting the system with a good plowing and a good tillage and you plant your corn seed again. With the olives and the almonds, they're planted there and they're going to be there for 25, 30 years. So what you do at the start is extremely important for the results, for the longevity of the orchard. And the kind of results, the economic returns you get over the cycle.
- Speaker #0
Okay, but so... If the decision initially to plan these really dense and really intensive systems is the cause for all of these potential problems that you just described, why not in the first place design a system to be more extensive and less reliant on inputs on water and less prone to these problems that you have to later come in and try and fix?
- Speaker #1
So you said something at the start which is extensive. Yeah, so. Here we have to understand the nuance of each farmer, each fund, each cooperative will have their own objectives in terms of what they want. So we as a technical support company don't come in and tell people you should be reducing your production or your economic objectives here. You need to reduce your profits. your profit, what do you call it? Your profit objectives. We come in and we tell them, okay, you're in the context that you are now with your objectives. Let's see if we can improve. So we never come in and say, we're going to be going towards reducing the intensity of production. We're saying, and this is, for example, in the case of a farmer that wants to continue maximizing profits and yield in his orchard, we say, okay, so we're going to, instead of doing intensive, production with a conventional highly input and chemical focus we're going to say okay let's maintain that intensity but let's use other tools let's use high intensity of biological management so we're trying to get as much nitrogen in there as possible and as much nutrient cycling and phosphorus potassium production as possible but through cover crop management through biological enhancement microbiological enhancement So I like to say we're kind of bio-intensive. Yeah. And then another person can come up to us and tell us, okay, so now we've seen the system, we like the hedge system, but we want to make it more extensive, less intensive. Okay, so let's space it out some more. Let's reduce the amount of trees. Let's maybe think about an organic system, et cetera, et cetera. That is definitely an objective, but there's so much like the landscape. Yeah. of the farmers and the systems, etc. is quite diverse.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I imagine.
- Speaker #1
But the intensive one, we are now working on maintaining the intensity, but with a biological in terms of life, not necessarily biological in terms of organic certification, but with a strong biological focus. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
okay, I hear you. And I can't help but feel like there's a clear trade-off between productivity and resilience, because if you design a system to be as productive and as... profitable in the short term as possible, you need to compromise on the regenerative aspect of that system, right? Because you're much more dependent on inputs, on chemicals, on fuel, on water, on machinery, and all of these things have a negative impact on the health of your ecosystem, right?
- Speaker #1
I think that if I understood correctly, you're mentioning a trade-off between profitability and resilience. I think they both go together because if you are developing a resilient system, you're going to have a more profitable system. But not in the short term. The problem is the time thing. Because firstly, to build resilience in the system, it's going to require a system change. It's going to require new practices. It often is going to require an investment in your soil. You're going to have to buy that compost, which costs 35 euros a ton delivered to your farm. and you're going to be applying minimum 10 tons per hectare. So it's already €350, which represents about 10% of, or a bit less, but between 5% and 10% of your olive oil OPEX cost, of your olive, sorry, super intensive olive OPEX costs. It's quite a significant investment just to try and invest in compost. So these are the short-term costs where often we're talking about the J curve of a transition, where initially you will have slightly higher cost of production. You can have slightly higher cost of production. Again, this depends a lot where the farmer starts. That's something we need to just clarify later on. But you have a J curve where you have slightly higher cost of production. So your profit goes down. But in the future, it goes up. Depending on context, it can be sooner or later. And what we're trying to do is be very efficient with our practices so that the J curve is as small as possible. And we as soon as as quickly as possible get to the point where we're making more money. How are we making more money? Because either we're increasing yield, difficult and highly intensive systems. They're already maximizing yield. So what we're trying to do here is trying to reduce costs. And you reduce costs by having a system, a soil system that's providing agronomic services to you. One of them is resilience, but another one is just this year, it's providing nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and micronutrients because it's got an active nutrient cycling. And so that's the situation where suddenly you can cut down on fertilization costs, but also because you've got a healthy soil microbiology, you've got a healthier tree. And so you're also cutting down on other costs like treatments, etc. So that's where we want to get to. And so that is also the place of resilience. A healthy soil not only provides these benefits I mentioned, but also provides the resilience, a better resistance to drought, for example. And so both go together.
- Speaker #0
Okay, yeah. I'm pushing you a little bit on this because I'm trying to really understand if it's possible to have these super intensive systems that require a lot of inputs, that have so many trees, you said, what, 2000 trees per hectare, which looks super, super dense, and be truly regenerative. And is it, are we talking about helping those super intensive systems be a bit less bad and a little bit better by using all of these methods that we're going to go into more depth in later in the conversation? Or can we actually have this level of intensity? and density and be truly regenerative meaning that we're improving soil health we're improving biodiversity we're improving water cycles all of these things that's a really good question and that's the question that we receive quite a lot we are um so
- Speaker #1
i can't tell you this like yes i mean i'd like to be able to provide a simple answer here but it's not a yes so i need to go into a bit more detail firstly we created the arbo innova project where we are measuring a variety of KPIs, including water, biodiversity, plant health, looking at soil health. So we're looking at, for example, soil diversity. And biodiversity, we're looking at insect populations and calculating and measuring between our regenerative and our conventional plots, comparing the two. So we're really looking at it from an ecosystem health perspective as well, not just an agronomic performance. So we'll be able to, when the data starts coming out in a few years, we'll have the first set of data in a year and more robust data in two years. In three years, the project's closed, or at least the first set, which will have been four years of agronomic practices. We'll be able to answer those things quite clearly. We'll be able to see, you know, what can we do or what have we been able to do with regenerative practice? So the data on this is... quite sparse in terms of then the science. It's not easy to find a lot of science on. Clearly, you see that currently the super intensive olive systems have less biodiversity than traditional systems, if we're going to compare. The problem is there's very few regenerative super intensive systems out there. So there's a lot, very little data on what we can do with regenerative. But what we do have is organic farmers that are using the super intensive system. Again, not a crazy amount of data on this, but what I've experienced myself here in the context where we're having an organic, just next to our farm, we have an organic, a few kilometers away, we have an organic producer there. And he's got this hedge, super intensive system, 2000 trees, he's irrigating, getting high yields, he's 20% below conventional yields, and he is in an organic system. his fertilization is just with manure he sprays two to three times a year with organic he hardly sprays insecticides he mostly sprays fungicides in organics or copper-based fungicides in two or three times during the year so we're in a situation where when you know when i started talking to him and understanding his system and visiting his farm and seeing the soil i dug in the soil and i saw all of this this mushroom growth there and or mycelium growth and it just it just felt different you go in there and it was a lot of life a lot of insects so This is the kind of feedback we're getting from the field where it's possible to keep this planting density, but apply an organic system to it, which we know very well from studies, just how much better organic is in terms of biodiversity and ecological metrics. So that's very promising. Now, the question is, how do we adapt the conventional? Can we maintain a conventional? production system and make it regenerative. I was more hesitant at the start a few years ago. Now I'm quite confident that we can significantly improve these systems. And I think that these systems can become, if we transition them and especially get pretty close to organic in terms of reducing the use, significantly reducing the use of external inputs. I think we can get towards a system that is a net producer of ecosystem services. Okay.
- Speaker #0
Just a really quick pause to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast, Soil Capital. Most farmers I've met love the idea of transitioning to regenerative agriculture, but a lot of the time they lack the financial incentives to do so. And that's where Soil Capital comes in. They financially reward farmers who improve things like soil health, water cycles and biodiversity. They're an incredible company. I personally really love what they're doing and I'm really proud to be partnering with them for the Deep Seed podcast. Okay, so we've established that there is... a growing, a fast growing number of super intensive tree crop systems being planted in Europe, especially in the Mediterranean region. And so the question we're going to be looking at for the rest of the conversation is, how do we make these systems as regenerative as possible? How do we stop damaging these ecosystems and start regenerating them and doing that while maintaining production and profits? Okay, maybe you could talk us through the different practices and methods that you use to achieve that.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, just to bounce off what you were saying initially as well. It's clear that we are moving towards intensive and a lot of intensive orchards are being replaced with super intensive orchards. Traditional orchards are generally not being taken out and replaced. They're maintaining because there's a market as well for high quality olive oil, which is one aspect. which we can talk about, but the super intensive systems tend to have a lower quality olive oil compared to traditional systems. But the intensive systems are being changed to super intensive, and there's more and more super intensive systems in general being planted. So there's an increase in area. So yeah, this is a trend. As I said, there are some socioeconomic parameters and factors beyond our control that are defining this movement towards this. And this is a trend that we're seeing throughout agriculture, the intensification. And it's also a trend that's being driven by higher population. So increases in population, which is still continuing to increase. So taking that context as a given, that we're not challenging that too much, that we say, okay, we've got this at the moment, we've got this need for high production, high yield, high profit pressures as well, what can we do? And that's when, of course, we come in with, okay, so what can we do with our our regenerative practices. And so your question was what are the different things that you can do within the orchard? And so what we're doing when we're just to clarify for people, because there's obviously a lot of different practices, a lot of things going on, let's separate them into a basic framework. We are working on the soil, the plant, and the landscape. Beyond this, the different regenerative practices, we're also working with another approach or complementary approach, which is we usually start off with best practices and then we go towards the regenerative practices, implementing new practices. What do I mean by best practices? I mean optimizing the current practices that are being used on the farm. For example, we are spraying herbicides four to six times a year. with 3 to 4 liters of the product per spray. Our objective with best practices is to reduce the amount of sprays and to reduce the quantity of the product used by optimizing, for example, water quality or timing of application. So you can do that and there's a significant need for improvements with best practices in our specific context in Portugal, but this is usually what we're seeing in many places. best practices are not always applied. And so there's quite big cost savings and ecological gains from just being optimising, from just being more efficient within the current logic, which is, you know, using herbicides, we are putting out fertilisers, etc. So we can reduce our fertiliser use, we can reduce our herbicide use, and we can often also optimise our spraying and spray less. That's the first step because obviously it frees up a bit of OPEX. operational expenses to be able to invest in new practices. And that's where we often see, not often, but we can see, depending on where the farm is starting, that we don't actually have a big increase in costs with regenerative because we are reducing costs with best practices. And then we're occupying that space with a cover crop, for example, planting for a few years, which generates a return on investment after the second and third year. And so we can be kind of positive, economically positive, the if the farmer has a big opportunity or is not optimized and not efficient in his farm. Okay, so it depends where we start. So we first start with best practices and then we start to implement, or at the same time as well, we slowly start to implement regenerative practices. These regenerative practices are structured in, as I said, soil, plant and landscape. The soil ones specifically focus on enhancing soil health. So amendments, cover crops, for example, amendments would be making sure we're applying our calcium amendments when necessary, making sure we are balancing our soil in terms of the major nutrients and minor nutrients as well, and micros, making sure we're applying compost to start to feed the soil with some organic matter, let's try and increase the level of microbiological activity and water infiltration, preventing erosion, which is a big issue. in our orchard so really working on that as a big focus with the cover crops starting to produce biomass so the the biomass is the key for soil health so when the biomass decomposes the soil starts to activate itself itself so that's the soil then we've got the plant um on the on the plant level we are starting to work in improving the plant health okay uh so and that is usually a nutritional perspective and also phytotoxicity perspective so we're trying to improve crop nutrition. Bye. by making sure that we are doing the right analyses, that we are providing a complete set of nutrients. And then in terms of reducing phytotoxicity, again, we're trying to reduce and remove as much as possible chemicals like glyphosate or like herbicides, which have a phytotoxic effect on plants. They chelate metals and micronutrients, which then become unavailable to the plant for uptake. There's a lot of things going on like this with this in these intensive systems with high chemical use, because you get the positive side, which is I don't have weeds or I'm fertilizing, but the negative side is also I'm creating toxicities which the plant needs to recover from. So that's what we're working on in terms of the plant. And I'm summarizing here. And then the landscape, we're starting to look at how do we optimize landscape function? So that is looking at flower strips and biodiversity areas, looking at planting hedges, planting riparian areas as well. Reducing, often that we are applying herbicides in areas which are not necessary, which we can just leave for some natural growth, which provide a lot of basically benefits in terms of functional biodiversity. What's functional biodiversity? It's biodiversity not just for the sake of biodiversity, but biodiversity for the sake of producing agronomic services to the farm. Okay. So those are the three approaches and some of the practices we implement.
- Speaker #0
Okay. If we focus a little bit on the cover crop aspect for now, or the soil health. And go a little bit deeper into that. What kind of cover crops have you used? What kind of results have you seen so far?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, so cover crops are very soil, are very context specific. It's such a boring thing to say. We hear it all the time, you know, especially in the regenerative space, but it's very true. Because when you're working with life, of course, you know, life looks a bit different in different places and different soils, especially. And so we're seeing, we're planting two different types of cover crops because we're actually testing this scientifically. We've got one of our trials is testing a cover crop that is very rich in legumes, so very legume focused. And another one which is more rich in, well with a very, with a high biomass focus. Both contain a mixture of species, six plus species, you're typically around ten, but In one instance, we're really pushing it in terms of legumes. They occupy maybe 60% of the mix, whilst on the other, they only occupy 30, 20, 30% of the mix. And we're working with cruciferous plants and grasses, and cereals, basically, annual grasses. So we're testing both of them on all farms. And what you can see is that we've got one farm, which is very sandy soil, and another farm, quite acidic, and then another farm, which is this calcareous vertisol, which is basically 60% clay. Very, like... the clay some of the most clay rich soils that you have in the world and so you can see that the cover crops are behaving differently in both contexts um in the sandy soil we're seeing that the the legume mix is behaving very well because there is a lack of nutrients and so the the the legumes are able to fix their own nitrogen in an in a condition where you have limited nutrient availability compared to the clay to the to the clay soils where we've got a much better development of the biomass cover crop. because it's got the resources there already available due to the clays that allows it to develop well. So in both instances, you can't say, again, one is better than the other, you'd say, what is the best in these conditions?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, okay.
- Speaker #1
So that's what we're seeing a lot with cover crops.
- Speaker #0
And I guess all of the work that you're doing, testing, measuring, trialing different cover crops, and gathering all of that data is going to help in the future, right? Do you think that soon we'll be able to prescribe very specific cover crop mixes to farmers in order to solve their specific problems in their specific context and get the best possible results?
- Speaker #1
I think we already have quite a bit of knowledge. For example, certain plants and species we know are best adapted to acidic conditions, others to calcareous conditions. Some plants don't tolerate very well excessive water in the soil. So water logging conditions, even if they're temporary. Other plants need, you know, they don't like sandy soil. So we have this knowledge. Of course, we're refining it now. Okay. Yeah. And so we're finding it and we're especially... putting it to test because many times in farming and i think that a lot of farmers listening to this will will be able to relate to this but in theory they say this and then in practice you see something different it's very common so we're also you know really testing it so but just to answer what you're saying um of course we are going to get to a point where for this specific system and this specific soil type which is quite representative of the region we'll know this is the cover crop mix that does well here for these specific objectives. Because a cover crop is not, you don't just plant a cover crop, you plant a cover crop to meet an objective. Sometimes the objective is cleaning the soil from nematodes, so then you're going to fumigate with cruciferous plants. Other times the objective is really nutritional, let's boost nitrogen in the soil. Other times it's structural and erosion prevention. So you want to first start with a good diagnostic and understand what are the key limiting factors or the key opportunities in the system. And once you've identified those, you prioritize and you start interventions that specifically target those challenges. And that's what I'm saying. That's an example of how we want to be really efficient in our regenerative intervention. If we want to be limiting the costs of the regenerative transition and the regenerative practices, and at the same time, maximizing the benefits to reduce this J curve, we're gonna this is the kind of detail where we're needing to work on yeah so it's really okay so we're specifically targeting this and we've got these different tools and in fact what's interesting as well is that the objectives change through time so the beginning when we've controlled erosion because we've put a good enough layer of biomass we can start to focus on the on on the nitrogen for example and we can start to focus on on the the nutritional aspects right is that something that you see a lot in these uh super intensive systems that the biggest problem first is trying to control the erosion. It depends on the soil conditions. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the slope, depends on the soil type, as I said. But typically there is a lot of erosion. Why? Because you have an intensive system. It means intensive inputs. Intensive input means you need to get out there and put them out. So intensive sprays, if you're going to be spraying, you know, 10 to 12 times in a year, it means you need to take your tractor out there and you need to do it, which means that you have a lot of tractor passes. And the problem with the super intensive is that you have very small lines. And many lines, because it's four meters instead of six or seven. So you have basically the area affected by the tram lines, by the tractor passes, is much higher relatively to an intensive or traditional orchard. So you have a high concentration of impact from the tractor tires, which leads to, and especially in high clay soils, leads to major issues in terms of what we're seeing with these vertisols. is that the vertisols are made of clays that are expansive. And so what happens is that the compaction means that it just completely breaks the structure of the soil. And when the soil dries in the summer, they crack open. They have one big crack per tramline that just opens up and you can literally put your hand in and you can go up to this depth, you know? And that means that the roots that are trying to go into the interline to feed themselves, they're snapped open, they're literally broken apart, broken in half. They don't resist the pressure. And so the tree is stuck on the tree line and doesn't have the ability to explore the soil profile. And so that's one of the examples of resilience. You're not resilient to water because your tree roots don't have the capacity to expand and to explore other sources of soil water. So when a drought comes, you're just dependent on that irrigation. And when the irrigation is limited due to... you know like happened in france recently because there was droughts and they didn't have the water infrastructure the the hydrological infrastructure to to supply water to all the farmers they reduced significantly their um their water allocations and the farmers were pretty desperate about that and so if that that's the resilience thing that we're that's the like the specific link to the resiliency so we want to get the tree roots to expand out and so we're working there's different techniques that we're doing one is of course preventing erosion second is improving that structure. the soil structure and another one is spreading fertilizer out more instead of concentrating all the fertilizer on the tree line we spread it out to the interline because the objective is to get the roots to try to work to get there you know get them to
- Speaker #0
get out to explore because they have to because they want to find you know nutrition so yeah there's a few of the things we're doing so yeah in those cases then the your cover crops you will really try and work on the soil structure on trying to improve that structure and to repair the damage done by the tractor passes and all of that exactly and what you were saying is that after a number of years one two three years when the soil structure is better then you can focus more on the nutrition and nitrogen fixing and things like that and so those those cover crops
- Speaker #1
they will evolve through exactly through time through the years depending on what is the biggest concern right now right exactly they will evolve completely apart from cover crops and what what else do you do for soil health so um another big one for soil health is um we're working with a a pretty cool technique which is mulching of course everybody knows of mulching but we're doing we're we're using a machine that is able to cut the cover crop and it's a flail mower basically so it's able to um to cut down a cover crop and some branches not too many branches otherwise it doesn't process the the the thicker too thick branches but it's able to cut it and then it spreads it on the tree line and so what happens is as i was telling you um the the tree roots are very concentrated on the tree line because of the concentration of fertilizers there and the compaction etc. And so that's where you have the highest amount of tree roots. It's also where you can have the highest benefit of applying practices. You want to focus your attention there so you can enhance the soil health in that specific area so that you can get benefits in terms of plant health, so that you can get then benefits in terms of reduced input use, so reduced chemical use and therefore less tractor passes. So you start to activate a spiral. a virtuous spiral. And so what we're doing is that we're cutting the cover crop biomass and we're throwing it onto the treeline. And that's creating a mulch layer, which is protecting the treeline from the sun and concentrating biomass. And as I said before, it's really important to remember that soil health is pretty much equal to biomass, how much biomass you put on it. For salt to function, it needs to be digesting food. You know, carbon is the main energy source of life, including soil microbiology. And so we're basically in a regenerative system, we're trying to be really efficient and smart about biomass management. Sometimes we import it from outside, we're trying to maximize the production from inside, within the plot, and we're trying to use it and allocate it efficiently. So each ton of dry matter biomass counts. It needs to be attentively managed. So in the early years, when the roots are still very concentrated on the tree line, and we haven't yet explored the interline, we are concentrating that biomass from the cover crop onto the tree line.
- Speaker #0
Okay, so you're growing a cover crop. between the rows of trees in the interline, that cover crop, as it's growing, it's capturing carbon from the atmosphere, it's getting nutrients from the soil and so on. And then you're cutting down that cover crop.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
You're mulching it and sending that mulch at the base of the trees so that the nutrition present in those plants as it decomposes is available for the plant where it needs it the most.
- Speaker #1
Exactly.
- Speaker #0
What about the prunings of the trees? What do you do with them?
- Speaker #1
So that's also a conventional practice. We're not doing anything different, but they lay out the prunings in the interline. So we have the tree line and the interline, if we're talking technically. So they lay out the prunings in the interline, which is the space between the tree rows. And they will pass a mulcher or mower that will just break it down and leave it on the spot. So what we're doing is that we're saying, okay, some of that will stay on the spot because to be honest, there's so much that, especially in these super intensive systems, we have a lot of biomass from the pruning. So we leave it there, but part of it, we will apply on the tree line. Instead of just concentrating it on the interline, we apply it on the tree line. Same logic. So what we're doing is the manual prunings, we leave it on the interline. And then the topping from the mechanical topping, they're basically hedging it. They're basically coming with discs that cut in the top, that shape the hedge. that stays in the middle and then we pass with our mulcher and that gets thrown onto the tree line okay yeah that's the that's the um 100 of of uh of that stays on the farm goes back in the soil yeah nothing gets exported no no everything stays and we're trying to find ways to bring more biomass in yeah so you can bring more biomass in through composts we're applying compost there as in so one other thing that's important to note for the soil health is that you want to do things to regenerate the soil health, like putting roots in with the cover crop, you know, plants, biomass, nutrition as well, getting a healthy nutrition profile. But you also want to reduce the things that are having a negative effect on the system. So at the same time as you're enhancing the system, you're also reducing the things that are basically hitting the system on the head with a hammer. What are those things? Usually it's fertilizers and agrochemicals, as we set. We've got the example of glyphosate and herbicides, which we mentioned, which have an effect on soil microbiology and soil chemistry. We've also got fertilizers. So a lot of excessive use of, and I mentioned excessive here because using some fertilizer can actually boost soil health. But excessive use of fertilizer and especially certain types of fertilizer has shown, or we see in studies, that it simplifies the soil microbiological community, prevents certain microorganisms such as fungi. and mycorrhizal from developing, which are really important for the soil health. And then certain types also have, for example, there's a lot of use of potassium chloride, and the chloride has a strong salinizing effect on the soil and creates some nutritional disbalances. So in general, we're trying to cut back the effect. So how do we cut back the effect? We are diversifying our use of fertilizers. So instead of just using liquid MPK, we are looking at, okay, well, first year we stick with Liquid N, so we use a calcium nitrate or something. And then we will apply the phosphorus and the potassium through a compost. Compost typically doesn't provide a lot of nitrogen, but it provides quite a lot of potassium and phosphorus. Or we're also applying it in an organic form, or as a potassium sulfate, not a potassium chloride, which we're spreading around the orchard. So we're diversifying and changing the type of fertilizers that we're using. without changing the units, we're still applying, in this example, we can still apply the same amount of potassium and nitrogen, but we're just using different sources that are more respectful of the soil microbiology. So we're using sources of inputs that are respectful to soil health. And of course, many times that comes in an organic form. It can be manure, or it can be composts, it can be organic fertilizers. So these are
- Speaker #0
kind of the some of the other practices that we're doing to reduce the the damage to the soil yeah compost seemed to be a great solution for many many farms right and that's one of the first things that i hear every every interview every farm i visit and i i was wondering the other day i never actually asked the question if it's so great to use more compost and less chemical fertilizer um how do they compare economically is it a lot more expensive a lot more Yeah, okay, so that's a really united cost if you want to reduce your chemicals and increase your compost.
- Speaker #1
So, I mean, we're getting into so many nitty-gritty details here, and that's very fun for me. I think it's amazing, but compost provides some nutrition. but they also provide a microbiological boost. They also provide, especially, and they enhance the structure of the soil. They have quite a significant effect on structure, which has effect on water infiltration and et cetera. So compost provides nutrition in terms of the macros, the minors and the micros, and so it enhances biological health and enhances physical health. When we talk about soil health, we often have chemical, physical, and biological, right? Those are three kind of the triangle of soil health. So compost tackles all of them. But compost costs 35 euros a ton, you know, and you need to apply quite a significant amount to get those benefits. I said 10 tons earlier on, they need to apply per hectare, but you need to do that over a few years if you really want to. It's not a tool that is at the moment economically viable. And there's another issue with it. It's that there isn't enough compost for everybody. And this is where we need to think about scale, because it's great on one farm. But if we're working on a regional level, We need to understand how is the region going to transition? How are all the olive farmers going to be able to apply regenerative practices? And compost is not scalable enough. We are not producing enough compost to meet the needs of all of the olive producers if they all get on board. But it can be a tool to kickstart. If we say like, you know, when you plant an orchard or the first year of transition, for one or two years, you use it to kickstart the system. What we say is like we're trying to prime the pump. The soil health is really degraded. It's struggling. So often the soil health needs a boost, an initial kind of strong input, so just past the next succession level. New microbiological populations, a new state of soil health, of physical health, sorry. And so what you're trying to do here is you're trying to give it quite a bit of inputs to try and get it to the next level. And compost can be a tool in this context, because not all farmers will be doing this at the same time. Okay, so compost is a tool, especially in the short term. but it is not, or on a more infrequent basis, but it is not a year-by-year tool that you can use in terms of costs and in terms of availability. But that's okay, because we can produce biomass in other ways. Compost provides, you're providing, you're applying 10 tons of compost. It's got, you know, like, I don't know, 80% humidity. So you're applying eight tons of dry matter. And out of that, the organic content is maybe, you know, 60%. So let's say you're applying six tons. We can produce with a cover crop. we can produce between three and six tons of dry matter per hectare.
- Speaker #0
Thank you so much for listening this far into the conversation. I really hope that you're enjoying it, that you're learning new things, and that this podcast is bringing value into your life. If that's the case, I would be super, super grateful if you could help me and support me in my work. And you can actually do that in just three seconds. So wherever you're listening to this right now. whether it's spotify apple podcast or another platform just click on the deep seed page and click on the follow or subscribe button you'll be surprised to find out how much it actually helps me reaching more people every week with these super important conversation and topics and helping the whole regenerative movement grow so thank you so much in advance very grateful for that and well let's get back to the conversation
- Speaker #1
If we're trying to find solutions and to build solutions for a large farm, we need to be precise. We need to be precise with the technique that we're using, how much it costs, the benefits that we're expecting. And so in the Ahamboy Nova project, what we're really focusing on is developing the data in order to de-risk the transition for the farms. So we want to come to the farms and be very clear about the costs and the benefits. It's basically a cost-benefit analysis. When we're looking at a regenerative transition, this is really important because usually, typically, and that will depend really on where we're starting with the farmer or where the farmer is at, but typically the initial years represent a bit of a higher cost for the farmer who is in a regenerative transition.
- Speaker #0
Where does that extra cost come from? You mentioned compost, I guess, seeds for cover crops. What else?
- Speaker #1
Seed for cover crops, compost, potentially machine, new machine they need to buy. We talked about mulching. So there may be an acquisition of a machine to be able to mulch. There may also be alternative inputs, such as alternative fertilizers or alternative pesticides. So biological alternatives, these tend to cost a bit more. But they are inputs that are less damaging to the agroecosystem, to the soil. So we're using alternative inputs with the objective of reducing the effects, the negative effects on soil health, for example. So it's an investment because they cost a bit more at the start, but the objective is to enhance soil health so that then the soil is providing more agronomic services to the crop so that we don't need so many inputs. So that's the objective. You're using different kinds of inputs at the start, you're investing in your soil through the compost, etc. And then the objective is to have the soil kind of work more independently, a soil that's more autonomous. Okay,
- Speaker #0
so you can reduce your cost. Then you can reduce your input use. Exactly. Everything kind of starts reducing and then your profits can start going back up.
- Speaker #1
Exactly, that's the idea. And that's what we call the J-curve. Yeah. Okay, so the J curve is basically the beginning, we have a slight reduction in profit due to the higher costs. But then in the future, we're expecting, and this is what a lot of regenerative farmers have demonstrated, you are looking and you should get higher profitability because your cost of production have reduced. The thing is, what we're trying to do here is, this is very good theoretically, but farmers believe what they see to start off with. And also, farmers need data to be able to be confident in activating this transition. And not just this, we also need data to know which techniques are the most relevant, are the ones we should focus on as a priority in the early years, how we implement these techniques. There's so many ways to plant a cover crop with so many different... Firstly, there's so many mistakes that you can make in planting a cover crop. But then there's also so many ways to go about it with different objectives. So it's basically about being very precise so that we can control this J-curve. We can tell the farmer, this is how much cost we're expecting and these are the benefits that we're expecting and by when we're expecting them.
- Speaker #0
Okay, and you have very strong data to back it up. It's not just one or two examples. You have strong data to know that what you're saying is right, basically.
- Speaker #1
As strong as possible. As strong as funding will provide because of course these are And when you're working with universities, these are quite big projects that have quite a big financial investment. So right now, this project is funded by the Avina Stiftung. It's the Avina Foundation from Switzerland that's supporting a variety of regenerative and alternative food solutions in Europe. And yeah, so it's basically a project that is quite large. But this is the type of projects that's necessary to produce that detail, or that quality of data that we can then present to the pharmacy. And we don't have that data yet, because the project started two years ago. The first year is an evaluation year and baselining year. The second year, first practices come in. And now we're going to be entering the third year. So after two years of practices, you start to have data. Okay. Okay. So it's going to come in little by little, but yeah, we're testing all these practices. We've got different modalities going on on three different farms, three different contexts, different soil types. So it's quite complete from a data perspective.
- Speaker #0
Okay. Yeah. Very interesting. There was one of the questions I wanted to ask you is about how do you convince farmers to follow you on this regenerative journey, even though they know it's going to be an increased risk and increased cost in the first years? So I guess they already answered that question by coming with them with strong data and experience to know and to be confident that you can present to them a strategy that will in the long term be beneficial for them.
- Speaker #1
There is a nuance here linked to this J-curve. And we talked about the best practices at the start. on where the farmer starts. If the farmer is overusing fertilizers, we can in the first year by just having, let's say, good agronomical practices, by coming in with best practices, we can quite significantly reduce the farmer's operational expenses.
- Speaker #0
If that's the case, we can free up a budget to invest in our in the regenerative agriculture. So the J curve is not always very pronounced. Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Okay, you're reducing the intensity of it.
- Speaker #0
With one of our farmers here that we're working with, the first year we reduced his fertilizer use by 20%. The second year we reduced it by another 25%. So we're at like 40 to 45% reduction fertilizer use. We've kicked out about one or two treatments as well. So that he would otherwise have applied, but was not based on, we came in, we analyzed, we started monitoring and tracking, we started to implement best practices. So for example, with insect treatments, you have to be very precise at the timing of application. So there's many times farmers are applying when it's not necessary or it doesn't have an effect. So being precise in this way enables to reduce operational expenses. And then you can reinvest that. into organic into regenerative practices okay and what's also interesting important to know is it's the speed at which you want to transition so if you want to have an regenerative transition and meet your kpis in three years you're gonna have to be investing a lot more if you're expecting to have this to meet these objectives over five years or seven years or ten years you're gonna be going through a much smoother j curve okay because you're gonna be optimizing the system little by little you're going to go through kind of a slower approach okay where you're optimizing little by little so the process is more it's it takes more time but it's a process that is um that is less expensive in the early years okay yeah yeah i think there's um there's a really important element of nuance that we need to bring to this j curve conversation because when
- Speaker #1
we talk about the j curve we are comparing a conventional farming system and the profits expected over time of that farming system to... what that same system would be like if we transition it to regenerative. So you would have this dip in the first years because of the investment you have to make in regenerative and because it takes time for the results to really boost your profits again, right?
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
But that's assuming that the profit margins of the conventional farmer will keep going in a straight line uninterrupted. And I think it's completely forgetting the fact that we're heading into a very unstable global environment with... a lot of shocks ahead like climate shocks, biodiversity collapse, geopolitical shocks, economic crisis, things like that, that will massively dent that growth line, that profit line for the conventional farmer and for the regenerative farmer as well, but much less so. And so by transitioning to regenerative agriculture, yes, there is a cost and yes, you are creating this small dip j curve and your profits in the first years, but by making your farm a lot more resilient, improving soil health, water retention, biodiversity and all of that, you're protecting yourself against future shocks to some extent, right?
- Speaker #0
That's the objective, yes. And it's very clear that a healthy soil has a big impact in times of drought. So you really, where the healthy soil really expresses itself, where you really note the difference it's in times of stress yeah yeah so this is kind of what we're trying to we're trying to pitch regenerative agriculture going back to the question you said earlier on about how do you convince farmers we're pitching regenerative agriculture as a as a medium and long-term strategic decision a business strategy decision not just as something we need to do we don't pitch it to farmers as something that they need to do for ecological reasons Because many farmers care about the ecological reasons. They would like to see them happen. But if they don't have their basic economic needs met, they're not going to be focusing on that. It's normal, you know, you're going to care about yourself and about how you're running, and then you're going to be looking at... So you don't come to them with this discourse. But what's interesting is that the ecological benefits are at the same time producing benefits on their farm. An improved, let's talk about biodiversity. an improved functional biodiversity is great for an ecosystem perspective. But it's especially great for the farmer's natural pest control. Okay, so a lot of the biodiversity that you see when you have a good and beautifully flowering cover crop are predator insects. These predator insects can many times, their larvae, let's look at for example the syrphid larvae, can eat up to 50 aphids per day. some and the studies that show up to 80 aphids per day i mean these are very you know effective tools to manage pests so if you can enhance this on the farm it's great for you know all the all the ecological kpis and sustainability objectives and you know development goals etc but it's especially good for the farmer not having to put one more treatment out there well it's great when the two can align right and most many times it does in most cases it does
- Speaker #1
so that that's the opportunity there so that's we that you can depending on who you talk to you you adapt your your your your kind of yeah your speech yeah on most of the farms i visited and the farmers i've spoken to on the podcast one of the key tools that they use for regenerating ecosystems is integrating animals into the system is that something that you've been testing and experimenting with
- Speaker #0
So you like to ask the hard questions. Animal integration in intensive and super intensive systems can be quite complex for a variety of reasons. I'll give you an example of one of our Ahabu Innova trial areas which involves an organic almond orchard. The farmer there has lots of animals, so it's a 700 hectare farm. and they have lots of sheep available. So just the fact that the farmer is managing the sheep means that we can quite easily integrate them into the orchard. The thing is, we have to wait for the orchard to be three or four years old because sheep love to eat tree leaves. And the issue with olives is that sheep, for example, which are kind of the most adapted due to their size and to put into orchards, they love to eat bark. olive bark and when they eat olive bark they can quickly girdle a tree and kill it. So you have to wait a few years before you put them in and then you have to be, this is very context specific, will depend on breed, will depend on the nutrition of the sheep as well because they often compensate or find nutrition that they're not getting in the grass in the bark of the trees. So there's a lot of factors there that you have to understand we have to, let's say, be careful of. But in super intensive systems, the other challenge is that the rows are very small and the sheep need to, when they're moving around, they can create quite a bit of damage. And they can especially start to eat the lower, the trees are quite small, quite tight, so the lower branches, which are productive branches, are available to the sheep. So if they start to be browsing on the lower branches, you may reduce quite significantly your canopy area. so it's an annual production so there are some challenges there it doesn't mean it's not impossible definitely it's easier to integrate animals in intensive densities than super intensive densities yeah so that's one benefit to the intensive densities yeah you can produce more cover crop as well in um in super intensive uh sorry in intensive densities yeah i guess you have more space you have more light space more interline area more lights exactly so It does seem that, going back to the question that you said earlier on, that we can get better results, at least from a regenerative perspective, we could go faster if we were in an intensive density. But then there's the economic constraint, right? Of the difference in efficiencies that needs to be taken into account.
- Speaker #1
What about chickens? In my mind, I imagine that you could have these chicken tractors kind of things that you move every day, That could be... that could fit between your rows. Is that something anyone has ever tried in one of these super dense, super intensive systems?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, you need, at a thousand hectare scale, you need quite a lot of chickens to be able to manage the area.
- Speaker #1
But that adds, you also add a chicken production or eggs or chicken meat production to your system. So you add also value.
- Speaker #0
It's possible. A lot of people, what they're doing, this is something that happens a lot in France, where you have basically, a chicken producer that enters a collaboration with a grain producer, for example. It's difficult for a tree crop farmer to manage a lot of complexity. This is one of the issues with the diversification of the farms, especially at that scale. There's something to be said about economies of scale. you know what i mean and and the knowledge required to manage these systems well so then you need to manage the trees and you need to manage the chickens on a large scale so there's this this can be challenging for the farmers so this partnerships can overcome that issue where you get a professional chicken grower and a professional tree crop grower and then they integrate and they and they collaborate together this is not something that's very common you don't see it a lot yeah you know yeah but uh i think that there's quite a lot of potential there for one to use the land of the other, the other could, you know, the chicken farmer could be paying a certain rent per hectare to the olive grower, which increases his revenue, whilst providing soil benefits, because obviously the animals provide quite significant benefits to the soil, and that's been demonstrated. So it's more about finding the logistical and socio-economical systems to make that work. But there's something else to be said. In almonds, integrating animals in almond orchards can be challenging. And there's some regulations due to floor harvesting as well. There's many growers that harvest their almonds on the floor. And if you do floor harvesting mixed with chicken manure, you know, or mixed with sheep manure as well, that can be an issue. So there are some regulations around timing and potentially... certain certifications, like global certifications that the farmers need to subscribe to or need to follow in order to sell their products on commodity markets may not allow that.
- Speaker #1
Okay, fair point. But you're not harvesting on the floor with these super dense systems, right? You said that you're actually...
- Speaker #0
Exactly. In this case, no. In this case, the main challenge is the logistical, how tight everything is. We are looking to integrate sheep there. We just have to be extra careful about the damage and how to manage it. You know, there's a lot of details like how fast they go through that area, how much time do they stay. If they stay longer, they can get more bored and start to browse more. There's a lot of details that need to be covered. But that's not also where we're focusing at the initial years. A regenerative transition, you need to take it slow at the start. It's already adding quite a lot of layer of complexity. It's risky to over-complexify for the farmer. So we don't come in the first year or first two years telling, let's put chickens inside or let's put sheep inside you know that's something that comes little by little first we'll optimize the system and then the second year we'll start to put the cover crops in and start to change a few parameters of fertilization and fight sanitary treatments and then you see what i mean it's like a gradual we gradually onboard new practices and we create a kind of a gradual change in the system yeah okay it
- Speaker #1
does seem like the super intensive system mean that you have to do a lot of compromises. And there's a lot of... options that are available for regenerative agriculture are a bit difficult to apply, because as you said, with this amount of density and productivity, you kind of have this economy of scale, you need to simplify your system a little bit and it's harder to bring in diversity, diversity of plants, adding animals, you have to make a little bit of a compromise there.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I think that... I think, as I said earlier on, I think any agricultural system is a compromise. I think also each agricultural system will have their own compromises. So just comparing almonds with olives, almonds with the floor harvesting of almonds, they may have a lot more room, a lot more space. They're on a wider spacing, but the floor harvesting just really limits the type of species you can use with a cover crop, for example. You need species that very quickly decompose, otherwise there's a lot of residue left on the floor and it messes up the floor harvesting. Compared to olives, where you can play much more with the species that you can use, super intensive olives. You can use many more species, you can manage it in a, you can let them get older and dry up more. You can manage your biomass in a very different way. So each system will have their own constraints and their own benefits. And I think what's important for us as well is our positioning with our clients and in our projects is not to tell them one system is better than the other. We don't have an influence on do farmers plan super intensive or not.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, no, I get it.
- Speaker #0
Farmers come to us with a super intensive system and they're telling us how can we do this better? Or we're telling them many times you can do this better. Let's work together to optimize the system. So that's where we come in.
- Speaker #1
Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. um something i wanted to discuss also is irrigation um um you said that these crops they require irrigations in these intensive systems right super intensive systems where does that water come from typically depends
- Speaker #0
on the farm it can come from dams by basically overflow capture or it can come from boreholes which are you know 100 150 meter deep boreholes where they tap into... subterranean water reserves, or it can also be through basically large dams that are placed in, you know, in not mountain areas, but in southern Portugal, there's a lot of them. So each municipality or some municipalities will have a large dam that they've built and they will be distributing, the local water company will be distributing the water to the farmers. Okay. In southern Portugal, we have the biggest dam in Europe. It's called the Alqueva. It's the biggest, basically, they cut off the Guadiana River and they created a huge dam. The biggest in Europe. So this water is serving a huge amount of super intensive olive hectares in the region.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so that's sustainable?
- Speaker #0
There's a lot of conversation around dams. right, in terms of their ecological impact. I'm not a specialist on that. My understanding is that it's not ideal, but again, it's something that is difficult to... Sure, yeah.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, but I just thought it's an important question because some systems, we had a previous episode, we talked about almond production in California. and how they're using a lot of irrigation water from underground water which is limited yeah so i mean it can work really well and make you a lot of profit right now but that's not a long-term solution at some point they're going to be limited by that factor and so i was just wondering if you meant sustainable in terms of how reliable it is um if you can keep doing it for generations without depleting the resource basically yeah the the resource depends on rainfall and so the question is
- Speaker #0
To what extent can we depend on rainfall? The dam has, the Alkeva has three to four years, I think they say four years of water. So if it doesn't rain, it can store water for four years of use. The problem is what happens, well firstly, I mean, I don't know where they get that necessarily that number from and etc. But what happens if we have successive years of drought? And reserves go very low. And so I think that take into account the current climate context it's not far-fetched to think that we need to be very careful about or at least incorporate into our risk analyses the fact that potentially we won't be able we won't be allocated as much water in the future if we have successive years of drought yeah so from that perspective yeah it's it's one more risk that needs to be managed yeah yeah and from that perspective is that also something that you integrate in your designs I mean,
- Speaker #1
you're... is to have this regenerative water management, try to, I don't know, create ponds or swales or harvest water in some ways to make sure that you're less reliant on that irrigation.
- Speaker #0
The best way to store water is in the soil. Of course, we can build dams on the farms and this is, many farms already come with their dams. But from our perspective, from a regenerative agriculture perspective, it's extremely important. important that we regenerate our soil so that we can capture as much of the water that comes down in rainfall and it doesn't go off in overflow and erosion, that we increase organic matter so that the soil has the capacity to absorb more water, that we break compaction issues so that the water in the soil has the capacity to move effectively up and down. important flow of water from lower reserves in the deeper soil strata towards the surface. So when you have a compaction layer, this movement is blocked and the trees don't manage to tap into deeper water sources. Okay, and then there's also the importance of reducing evaporation from the soil. So by covering the soil with biomass, especially during the summer months, doing the mulching that we talked about as well. So all these different practices. are helping us are helping the farmer on every square meter to manage water better and these have significant influences on these practices have significant influences on water management so we're more on we're more looking at optimizing water on the on the whole orchard than managing for example swales etc because and even in terms from an economic perspective but also but also from an ergonomic perspective, swells are effective. when you have a situation where you have a very steep land, for example, and there's excessive water flow. But organic matter in the soil and a well-structured soil with a good infiltration rate can manage, you know, can do what a soil does, but on the whole landscape very effectively. You can really, and it's one of the first parameters that you see change, is the water infiltration. It's one of the main KPIs, the first KPIs that's improving in a regeneration, in a regenerative transition. So we can really improve water infiltration at a pretty large scale with all these practices we talked about. Awesome. Yeah, that's our focus for water.
- Speaker #1
Something else I really wanted to ask is the question of quality. Do you see a difference in the quality of production? And especially when you would talk about the olives. the quality really matters right and so you see a difference in quality between different systems so the different density of systems but also when you make a system more regenerative with better soil health and everything do you measure better quality of products basically
- Speaker #0
So we are in our current R&D project at Ambuinova, we are measuring nutrient density. So we're going to have an understanding of the effects of our practices in a conventional and intensive setting. So that's going to be interesting to see. What the studies are showing with olives, because it's something that's quite They are tracking these things with olives due to the polyphenol content and the importance that that has on the quality, the taste quality, the storage of the olive oil as well. And what you're seeing is that the more fertilization you apply, the lower the quality. So typically, the higher the yield the lower the quality. What's lacking from this is the fact that Fertilization here is obviously a conventional synthetic fertilizer based fertilization. What happens when you have a different kind of fertilization? You're still going for an intense production, a high production, but with a fertilization that is based on a regenerative approach. There's no data on that. That's what we're going to be doing and that's one of the of the most innovative parts of our project, because we could then see Hopefully, if what we do understand about nutrient density and about the quality of the product is that it's very linked to microbiological health. And so if the regenerative practices are able to regenerate microbiological health, then we could theoretically say, or the hypothesis is that if we have, we can maintain yields, but increase quality. And then we're on a win-win. Again, as you can see, I'm constantly coming back to this thing of maintaining yields, right? That's like our approach in order to communicate to the industry, it's we maintain yield or at least maintain profitability, right? Because yield is not always correlated to profitability. So that's kind of theoretically that we should be going in that direction. But now let's see in practice and in our context, if that's really the case. What I can also say is that going back to an organic producer in the region that is producing with Super Intensive, this producer is winning awards with his olive oil and he's producing 20% less than the conventional producers. And that's about standard for organic. So he's still on very high yields in super intensive systems. So it's super intensive density. Exactly. So that's quite promising because this person is getting very high levels, nutrient levels in a very high density and with very high yield and fertilization. But obviously the fertilization is organic. So that's the nuance there.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so it kind of suggests that your gut feeling about being able to improve the quality while maintaining the density would be possible.
- Speaker #0
I think it should be possible. I have more of a gut feeling when it comes to soul health and what we can do there than when it comes to the density of the food, of the olive oil, of the quality. So I'm hesitant to affirm this too strongly, but I think that there's some pretty interesting, we're going into a pretty interesting direction. Yeah,
- Speaker #1
that's something super important to follow. And if that's the case, if you can prove that, I think it's kind of huge, no? because the When we talk about olive oil, the quality, the nutrient density, the level of polyphenols, all of that really impact the price that the farmer can sell his olive oil for, right?
- Speaker #0
Depends where the farmer is selling. If he's selling to the commodity markets, then he just needs a minimum amount of polyphenols. And that's the issue. And when we're talking about what it takes to activate the regenerative transition, and when we're working with the industry, we have to align with the buyers. Currently, the buyers, even for olive oil, they're saying you need X percent of polyphenols above this and X acidity. If you meet these standards, you have a extra virgin olive oil and you can sell it. And what we also need to understand is that the people that are selling on more the higher quality olive oil to different markets, the more niche markets only represents a certain percentage of the olive oil sold. So there isn't space in the market for everybody to start selling high quality olive oil. You see what I mean? Okay. So what we need to do is that we need to start engaging in conversations with the buyers and start to say, would you be ready to give a certain premium for a higher quality olive oil? Or maybe for them, it's more about they would be paying a premium for a more ecologically healthy olive oil. So we need to find the pressure points. of the buyers so that then we can start to align vertically connect the suppliers and the buyers and we can start to build an incentive program for regenerative transition.
- Speaker #1
How do you see technology fitting into all of this? And I'm saying specifically we've talked about how technology improves efficiency, yield efficiency and all that, but I'm specifically thinking about. helping farmers be more regenerative.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, and that's spot on. You understood well, I think, the point here, which is... Technology and especially precision agriculture technology, so data management, data production on the farm, that really helps farmers be more efficient and apply best practices. That's actually a big part of best practices. If we look at the water example, more and more farmers are using soil humidity sensors and have their own weather stations so that they can then be very efficient in their irrigation programming and they can save, they can reduce or maximize. let's say, their water use efficiency. So that's one of the key roles of technology. From a transition perspective, so from a regenerative transition, so looking at technology to support the implementation of regenerative practices, there is a tendency, so my understanding and where I stand with this is that these practices are kind of like biotechnology. So in itself, they are new technologies that are coming into the space. Many times, these biotechnologies are requiring a very visual and hands-on approach. You know, a cover crop, for example. If you want to know what's the KPIs that you're tracking for your cover crop, it's the development of the different species, the biomass production. Okay, that's a key one, the biomass production. And so... You can't use technology to measure biomass. You have to go out there and do some sampling and weigh them and be able to understand your biomass so that then you can understand your nutritional contribution of the cover crop. It's also another KPI for the cover crop is looking at your legumes and how well your legumes have formed the rhizobia nodules on their roots. So you have to literally pull out a plant, get a knife, cut open the rhizobia and start to see if they're red and how many there are. So these are the kind of things which it's still a very, you know, hands-on, manual, observational approach. And so technology is kind of limited in the way that it can contribute. There are some things that are happening. One of the technologies that's interesting is alternative weeding solutions like laser weeding. Another one is drones for application, but this is still entering. These are still entering kind of best practices, I think. I wouldn't like drone applications of nutrients, etc. It's still, I mean, it's an interesting technology, but I would still put it into the category of we're applying efficient applications of fertilizers. One aspect where technology is helping is for basically MRV. So monitoring, reporting and verification. Because there is a lot of satellite technology now and remote sensing that is enabling us to understand the evolution of the farm. Is the farm getting greener, for example, with NDVI? Are we seeing a bigger, are we seeing farmers produce or plant more cover crops? Are we seeing a longer duration of covered soil? So there's a lot of different metrics like this that are monitored by satellite remote sensing that then allows for companies to be doing efficient MRV and reporting back to, you know, this is a kind of a supply chain transition conversation. conversation. Yeah. But for the specific practices, technology to support us in these practices, we're using biotechnologies such as different types of analyses like sap analysis. It's these kind of technologies that are useful, but not usually what we consider kind of a modern, more technological technology.
- Speaker #1
Okay. So what's been the hardest moment you've experienced so far in that journey?
- Speaker #0
I think the challenge... in implementing new practices in a new context is the learning curve at the beginning. And learning curve means making mistakes. And so I think that in this whole journey, actually for seven or eight years now doing this, the most difficult has been the amount of mistakes necessary to get it right. So as I said earlier on in the conversation, there's so many things you can get wrong with a cover crop. the planting depth of the seed the planting type of the seed the seed selection and the variety selection um you can look at the soil preparation beforehand if you did it well or you messed it up or there's so many things that can go wrong um and I think the most challenging has been when you're coming to a new context and you're trying to do things for the first time, inevitably you're going to make mistakes and you've just... I wasn't expecting it to be psychologically kind of... You see things not working and you've just got to just keep going, keep grinding. Because at some point you're going to get it right, and then when you get it right, you've worked it out. And each failure and each mistake is a huge experience to understand, okay, what are the factors that i need to consider to get it right so to get one thing to do things something really well you need to do you know you need to make maybe three or four mistakes so you understand okay and and then you have a solid then you have knowledge then you have experience so um i think that's been the most challenging right yes absolutely um
- Speaker #1
when i first came into the space the regenerative agriculture space a couple of years ago i was looking for very clear solutions to very clear problems. Very... binary kind of mindset, right? And over the last couple of years, I learned that, you know, nature doesn't work that way, that it's very unpredictable and everything is so context specific. And it's kind of frustrating when you're looking for clear answers because the answers are always more complicated than you expected. But yeah, I guess the lesson I've learned from this is that making mistakes is part of the regenerative transition. It's impossible to just get it all right from the first time just because you read the book or because you had the right advisor. There will be some mistakes made no matter what. And that's just it's part of it. Right.
- Speaker #0
There's a really good expression which is called safe to fail trials. And basically, when you're doing a regenerative transition, OK, so we're working with the client. We don't just apply practices on their 500 hectares straight right up. We set up trials, safe to fail trials. So that means that if a mistake goes wrong, it doesn't have a big economic burden on the operation. And little by little, there's a learning curve. Even if the consultant or the technician knows the context and comes in, the teams don't. And so everybody involved in the operation is needed to make sure that the new practice works well. So it's not just about the consultant coming in and saying, And you know, this is what you need to do. It's everybody together needing to get things right for it to work. And so there is inevitably a team learning curve. And that's, you kind of overcome that by setting up trials and by slowly transitioning. We often think that regenerative agriculture is a lot about agronomy and ecology, but it's much more so about humans. So even within a team, when you're coming on a big farm like this, and they've got a technical team and operators and tractor drivers, and there's a whole set of people, they're not always on board. They don't always really believe in what you're saying, and neither do they really want to help you out so much. So there's a lot of overcoming that psychological, kind of those psychological barriers, people that have been doing these things a certain way most of their life. And then you're coming in with something new and crazy. And, you know, it's challenging. And so you have to onboard them, you have to convince them, you have to show them, you know, there's a lot of communication involved. And so I think that's one of the key aspects about regenerative agriculture that's potentially not talked about enough. It's not just about agronomy, it's much more about humans.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, awesome. We're going to close the conversation here. Thank you so much, Dimitri, for giving us your time, your knowledge, your passion, and for explaining all of these. quite complex topic in such a clear understandable manner i really appreciate it and i'm sure the people listening did as well so thank you thanks hafell thanks so much for having me here and um and yeah good luck with everything thanks
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