- Speaker #0
In the previous episode, I spoke to a farmer, Michael Kavanagh, about the incredible potential of regenerative agriculture for farmers, and in particular for the resilience of their farms. He very convincingly demonstrated that his regenerative farm was much better equipped to face extreme weather events, such as extended periods of dry weather, followed by crazy rain events, where it all just comes pouring down in a very short period of time. We've seen these type of events. multiply lately and it really shouldn't come as a surprise because climate scientists have been warning us for a long time. Thankfully we have incredible solutions in the form of regenerative agriculture, agroecology, agroforestry, regenerative hydrology and so on. And the big question I'm obsessed about at the moment is how do we facilitate and accelerate the transition of the entire global food system from extractive and vulnerable to regenerative and resilient. In this episode, I'm talking to Simon Kramer from the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture about public policies and subsidies as a key lever for that transition. This is a short 15-minute conversation we had backstage at the Regenerative Agriculture Summit in Amsterdam just a few weeks ago. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I am your host. Raphael and this is the deep seed podcast hi Simon and could you start by giving us your definition of what is regenerative agriculture?
- Speaker #1
So many are now asking how we are defining regenerative agriculture and also putting forward a kind of understanding that if we don't define it reductionistically, that is to say positively, that we cannot really work with it. And I think here is already the beginning of the paradigm shift. we can work with if we want to work with a holistic regenerative revolution. And I might cite Oscar Wilde who said, all definition is restriction. And that's exactly what we need to learn. If we want to enable regenerative agriculture, we must not believe that we define it measure by measure, plot by plot, but we just must define what we all want as the outcomes and then trust and enable. the farmers and the people in the system to bring us there together.
- Speaker #0
Okay, I see. So maybe we shouldn't try too hard to precisely define what regenerative agriculture is, and we should focus more on the desired outcomes, what we want agriculture to deliver. So in your opinion, What are the outcomes that we should be striving for?
- Speaker #1
So, then we come into the next problem of always wanting to put just another outcome, because maybe the other outcomes we identified don't speak for everything or there's some risk. We like to say good enough for now, safe enough to try. So, we need to be aware that especially we need to be able to convince the large breadth of conventional farmers. of transforming the practices and that cannot be achieved by two complex MRV systems and reporting standards and outcome lists. So we really believe in the outcomes of overall net primary productivity which is the basis of all life living biomass and then another outcome is of course soil health. And starting from there we can already, with easy indicators, define the outcomes.
- Speaker #0
Okay, so you've identified these two key indicators, net primary production and soil health. Why those two in particular?
- Speaker #1
So in the 500 million years in which our planet was growing conduciveness to complex life. It's basically a symbiosis of plants and animals to make ever more photosynthesis, to grow ever more healthy soils, which can support ever more complex life forms, all the way to us humans. And today we have reduced the living biomass on this planet by half in comparison to the birth of Christ. And that is really at the heart of our nature and climate crisis. also at our public health crisis. And we need to regenerate this living biomass. Another example we can make, during the age of the dinosaurs, we had much warmer climate, but a stable climate. And that was because in times of the dinosaurs, we had over double the amount of living. biomass that we had at the birth of Christ.
- Speaker #0
Okay, I wanted to come out of the conversation for just a second to add some information that I felt was missing here. Personally, I wasn't familiar with the concept of net primary production, so I did a little bit of research and for people like myself who are listening to this and wondering what the hell are we talking about, here is some explanation. Think of net primary production or NPP as the total amount of energy plants capture through photosynthesis and turn into new growth, like leaves, stems, roots, flowers, fruits, anything like that. So when you are increasing the NPP, you are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide, nutrients and energy captured by plants. and transformed into different forms of organic matter. And that organic matter is then feeding the whole web of life from microbes to birds and everything in between. Ultimately, this leads to healthier soils with a lot of microbial activity, with better soil structure, better water holding capacity, infiltration rates, and so on. So looking at it this way, It does sound like a very interesting indicator to look at. And the other huge benefit of that indicator is that it's quite easy to measure using satellite imagery. And that makes it really affordable and accessible for everyone. So yeah, definitely something I'm looking forward to explore in more detail in a future episode. In the meantime, let's get back to my conversation with Simon. Despite a growing number of farmers transitioning to regenerative agriculture, they still represent a small minority. How important is policy change in order to speed up that transition?
- Speaker #1
So globally we have more than 700 billion dollars annually that goes from our taxpayer money to farmers through subsidies. That's the existing capital flow to which, for example, voluntary carbon markets have no matching in whatsoever. And currently all this money is either paid out to farmers directly for price support or land ownership, or in terms of measures for which they are paid. However, this is all in a top-down reductionistic paradigm. We have basically zero of these billions that are paid in an emergence facilitating way, through results or outcomes that are context and journey specific. And their public policy must change in a way that it's able to steward ecosystems and agents for biocultural diversity and their own capacity growth. for our society's adaptation to the multiple crises we are facing and hopefully in some sense alleviating these crises and there we have a lot of work to do in thinking out ways of doing performance-based subsidies in agriculture could
- Speaker #0
you maybe illustrate this by sharing real-world examples of policies that you would like to see change
- Speaker #1
Yes, so in the last 20 years our common agricultural policy in Europe, the largest part of our European budget, is spent basically in two ways. That is direct payments to farmers. So if you have a hectare of land you get x amount of money just for keeping it in agricultural use. And then mostly the other part of the money we spend in a measure-based system. So for example, we tell you cut... your grassland on the 1st of June and you will get X amount of euros. And we do that because there was some scientific study that said if we cut the grassland in date X we will help butterflies or other insects to grow better. Then the farmer is actually doing that measure because it's very well paid in terms of his profit loss on his economics on that grasslands. It has a huge impact this amount of money. However, in climate change maybe it was raining three weeks before this first of June. So the farmer is going out anyways to cut the grass not to have the butterflies but to get that money. But maybe, there through, we are compacting the soil for five years to come and kill all the capacity of the soil to host insects that would breed there. So we can actually have a negative ecological impact through our public money that's trying to pay for ecosystem services. Then we have another, arguably even worse, social impact, because we are teaching the farmer to basically be a drug addict. to the subsidy payments instead of trying to farm more holistically in symbiosis with nature for his or her own goals which is productivity and making a living for the family with
- Speaker #0
iara so the the european alliance for regenerative agriculture which you are a part of. I know you put together a proposal for reforming the CAP and you had an opportunity to go and present it to policymakers in Brussels recently. How did they respond to it?
- Speaker #1
So we have presented this approach firstly in on the technical workshop of the European Commission on agricultural sustainability where we were also the first really to introduce a concept of regenerative agriculture and the problems with greenwashing, the fears of the organic sector of cannibalizing the price premium margins and other issues. And then in April we did the launch event in Brussels of our policy paper where we are really in detail on 60 plus pages lining out the approach as well as the legal, technological, political aspects of this whole context specificity of the Common Agriculture Policy. Right now we are doing a Europe-wide study to produce the empirics of that proposal, so both of the technological operation ability as well as of the connection of input and output of farming performance, what the OECD calls sustainable total factor productivity, in correlation to the indicators we propose. And policy makers, I mean, it's very far out of the box what we have been proposing. So we are met with a lot of healthy criticism, I would say, but also with a lot of excitement that this thinking out of the box and in such a detailed way by pioneering farmers for all farmers has happened.
- Speaker #0
That's really. interesting and I would love to dig deeper into this topic but unfortunately we don't have time today so it will be for a future episode and so to close up this conversation
- Speaker #1
I have one last question what's the one key message you would like to share with people listening today one key message for the people to hear I would say although around us we are going into deep crisis at all levels and and people are suffering and exploited around the world. We have good reason to be pessimists of intellect, but even better reasons to be optimists of heart and will. And the whole regenerative agriculture revolution as a true etymological meaning of agriculture is the greatest real materializing seed of hope. That we see in the world
- Speaker #0
Thank you for that beautiful message and thank you for your time. It's been a great conversation. Thank you Simon So that was a really interesting conversation and I just feel a little frustrated that we didn't have more time to go deeper. But there was a few really important messages in there that I want to highlight one more time. The first is that most of us are trying too hard to precisely define regenerative agriculture and maybe we should turn our focus more on defining the outcomes we want from agriculture and enable the farmers to get there by themselves in their own terms. The second is that we spend collectively $700 billion each year of taxpayer money on agriculture. And right now, that money is being used to subsidize destructive forms of agriculture. And if some of that money was progressively redirected and used more and more to subsidize regenerative forms of agriculture, it could make a huge difference. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can support my work and this podcast in just five seconds. Whichever streaming platform you are using right now to listen to this, just click on the deep seat page and hit the follow button. And if you want to go one extra step, you can also leave me a five star review. It makes a huge difference for me. It's really kindly appreciated. So thank you so much for that and see you soon.
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