Building a Regenerative Food Paradise in Portugal [THE FARMING CHEFS] | Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Description

Two fine-dining chefs moved to rural Portugal to build a regenerative agriculture project focused on market gardening, nutrient-dense food, and soil health. Meet The Farming Chefs! 👨‍🍳

Philippe and Sophie are blending regenerative farming, no-dig gardening, rotational grazing, and nutrient-dense cooking on their five-hectare farm in central Portugal. Using mobile chicken tractors, compost teas, and a thriving herb garden, they’re regenerating the land... and teaching the world how to grow tasty nutrient-dense food at home!

🍅 In this episode, we cover:

How a no-dig market garden can out-yield bigger farms (with less work)
Why nutrient-dense food tastes better (and how it can restore your health)
How to integrate chickens and sheep to regenerate degraded grasslands
How to build a thriving herb garden from local cuttings… for free!
Why edutainment is a powerful tool to scale the regenerative movement

📌 LISTEN FOR:

🟢 15:32 – The aquatic plant that’s feeding chickens free protein

🌿 26:10 – Sophie’s 150+ plant herb garden

🍳 41:00 – Why chefs are the secret weapon of the regenerative movement

📣 47:45 – “Farmers deserve rockstar status. They’re regenerating our future.”

USEFUL LINKS:

The Farming Chefs also run a fast-growing YouTube channel where they teach regenerative practices through fun, practical, visually rich tutorials. Their blend of storytelling, flavor, and ecological wisdom is one of the most inspiring in the movement today.

❤️ This episode was produced in partnership with Soil Capital, a company that supports #regenerativeagriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve soil health & biodiversity.

Thank you for listening, all the best,

Raphaël

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome back to the Deep Seed Podcast. This week I am in quite a remote area of central Portugal to visit a couple known as the Farming Chefs. After both working as chefs in the Netherlands for a number of years, Philippe and Sophie decided to move to Italy where they started their own farm-to-table restaurant. They wanted to cook the best possible food and they knew that the key was quality ingredients. But they were struggling to find the quality they wanted so they decided to start growing their own vegetables and raise their own animals thus becoming the farming chefs. Eight years later having made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot from that first experience they decided to start a new chapter buying a five and a half hectare piece of land in Portugal in the region where Philip was originally from so going back to the roots and starting a new farm from scratch. That was about three years ago and this is the farm that I am visiting today. This episode was created in a video documentary format and I definitely recommend watching it on YouTube to better visualize everything we talk about. However, I adapted it in audio format to make sure that you can easily follow this conversation right here on streaming platforms. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I'm your host Raphael and this is the Deep Seat Podcast.
Speaker #1
Hello, we are the Farming Chefs. I'm Filip and this is my wife.
Speaker #2
I'm Sophie, very nice to meet you. So of course the question what do we do here on this farm? We are the Farming Chefs and so the name says it. We are both farmers and chefs. We come from the kitchen and in this latest venture of ours we operate in the space of what we would like to describe as edutainment where we try to educate in an entertaining fashion on our functioning regenerative farm which we use as a backdrop in order to teach people how to grow, cook, preserve. choose and consume nutrient-dense food from regenerative farms. All right, so we have a five and a half hectare farm. It's really wonderful because it has lots of different altitudes and little nooks and crannies, so lots of microclimates. Our productive side is the market garden, so we feed our local community with fresh veggies. And then we have other enterprises that are more in function of all the content creation and of the education, so that is basically our broilers and our laying hens, and then we have a small herd of sheep. We have a wonderful herb garden. What we are trying to do is to create a really resilient food system that will supply us mainly and of course the vegetable garden also our local community and then over time we progress into something even more productive. Our main objective is to regenerate the land and to create a really beautiful oasis for people to come and get inspired and learn about regenerative agriculture.
Speaker #0
Such a beautiful project, a beautiful dream.
Speaker #1
it's wonderful to live as well like it's a wonderful life again it's i think if people in urban areas would know how it is to live like this you guys were all coming here you know everybody was running to the countryside yes okay
Speaker #0
now that everyone has been introduced we can start the tour of the farm first up a place that is central and key to their system and operation here the market garden
Speaker #2
All right, so we're here in the market garden. This is Philippe's number one favorite place, I think, on the farm. Philippe is our master gardener. I also very much love it, by the way. I love standing here, especially in days like this when the sun is shining. We are growing fresh veg for our local community. We do that in a veggie box scheme. We have currently around 56 beds. We have another garden that we sometimes use, don't use. And we collaborate with some local farmers as well to add stuff in our boxes. But we mostly try to grow really fast turning crops in order to fill our boxes and people seem to love it because we're in a bit of a food desert I would say. In terms of you know locally sourced fresh available stuff it's not easy to find here especially not chemically free or regeneratively grown so our local community really appreciates us and we really enjoy growing for them.
Speaker #1
We really appreciate them too.
Speaker #2
We really appreciate them too. Love you guys. So yeah, we made the decision to mark a garden because when we set up our company, the Farming Chefs, we really knew that we had this skill and we were going to do it for the educational purposes. And then in our minds, it made sense if we're already going to be growing, we might as well also sell. And that is, you know, basically here what we're standing in the garden. On this farm, we have a more like we're limited by the amount of water we have on the farm. So I think like... if we had unlimited water, we would go probably a lot bigger still. But there's also, yes, only so many hours in a day and we've got already a lot of things going on. So also going bigger would mean more work. But I think, yeah, you asked me before as well, like, is this a lot of work? And I said sort of... semi-bragging like Philippe easily does this but I think that that's also really because of the techniques because what we're doing here is the classic no-dig market garden style so like J.M. Fortier, Charles Dowding, Richard Perkins there's many people that have inspired us to to grow like this and it's all about efficiency and using you know very minimal tools and intervention in a very efficient way and then you get to work a lot of land just with one man without any
Speaker #1
It's not even a lot of land, it's quite a short land, but it's highly productive land. So the turning is very fast. I think if you're going to measure it by kilos, we can produce much more kilos per square meter than any other big farm that you can imagine. All these small market gardens, they really crank the production up because that's what the economy brings after. It's like, don't get bigger land because you get more work.
Speaker #2
get smaller land and just intensely work it and yeah it works it's working what's the secret what's the process to getting your land so productive on a small good compost yeah good compost like having you know like we just said don't step on the beds we're sort of religious about that so having really nice loose soils um working on your fertility program we have our own compost set up We don't have a fully closed cycle, so we do actually still have to import some compost, but we hope to mitigate for that when we get a few more animals on the land. And just introducing a lot of microbiology. We have a compost tea set up. So we basically have a machine upstairs by the house. We pump our water from our sharkas up to the house, and there we inoculate it with all kinds of microbiology. We don't do that every time we irrigate, but we do that on a regular basis. And much TLC, tender love and care. Yeah,
Speaker #1
plans apparently also don't have a reactionary actions on the garden just take care of the problem before he exists so you will never have it like for example one of the most known things in no dig market garden is the weeding aspect of it just if you just pass your wire hose very early in the seasons when the weeds are very very tiny it takes you maybe half an hour to do all the garden and you will not have weeds but if you're going to wait until the weeds are big and and then you're going to weed it, it's going to take...
Speaker #2
a bunch of hours so just work it before it's happening this is sorry this is like a cue for me to start talking because this reminds me of the first farm that we had and we spent many times knees in the beginning when we didn't really know much about gardening yet and so i always like to joke like there will be no more kneading on our knees ever again and i think that no dick market gardening is really perfect for that because basically you do a lot of the work standing up And yeah, it just feels very efficient. Also, in terms of trying to make money growing veg, it's not easy. Like the margins are very low. So you have to be super efficient. And that's what we really like about this system.
Speaker #0
One thing I really like to do on the Deep Seed podcast is ask really basic questions. Because first of all, I think that going back to basics never hurts. But also, I want to make sure that those of you listening who are new to these topics can learn. these basic concepts so that as we get deeper and more technical into the conversations everyone can follow along so yeah the next question i asked was what do we mean by no dig or no-till farming do you want to take this you go you go so
Speaker #2
basically no-till is where you don't turn over the soil so you try to minimally interfere with your soil in order to respect all the microbiology that is living there so bacteria fungi your nematodes everything You just want a really thriving system where everything is alive and teeming with life. And basically when you till over your soil, you oftentimes are bringing certain organisms into earth layers where they actually don't belong. So there's not enough oxygen for them there or that's just not where they're supposed to thrive. There's not enough air, water or compaction in those things. So that kills it off. And it's actually... that microbiome that makes nutrients available to plant roots so if you constantly disturb that you're actually setting your system back and bringing up loads of weed seeds and stuff so yeah no till just means minimal disturbance really for the benefit of the soil health you just want to start this one like one bed yeah and you're starting from scratch what's the process So basically the first thing you want to do is clear your area and that means trying to get as much of the weeds and other plants because you know what's a weed what's not a weed a weed is just a plant that you don't want to grow there you need to get rid of that so the best way and most effective way is first the tarp and that means it's covering the ground so before that you might want to decompact that's maybe step number one depending on where you're going to start so if you're starting at a place where heavy machinery has passed many times you can check this by taking a stick and poking it down in the ground and if you start to feel compaction really you know very shallow or even if you you go lower and let's say 50 60 centimeters and you feel that there's a lot of compaction there because you can't push your stick through that means you have compaction down below and then you might want to take the intervention of just one time pulling through like a yoma plow or a ripper to take care of the compaction let's say so to basically to loosen it all up this means that plant roots will be able to grow deeper then you level it out because it's really nice to work in a level space then you tarp bit. with the tarping what you're doing is you're basically making all the weeds germinate and then die off again because they don't get sunlight once that has been done properly the timing of that depends a little bit on what you have growing if you have very invasive weeds and stuff you want to tarp for longer if not then you can do it for a little bit shorter but let's
Speaker #1
say like the best of the best one year is the perfect because you got all the seasons so you had the summer weeds coming.
Speaker #2
the winter weeds coming they both die and then you can start in the white clean sheet make sure that you can irrigate underneath because you also want to create some humidity so like you couldn't tarp just without irrigation in that scenario which is very long most people don't have a year so this this is like the long version then you can have the short version which the short version would be tarp as long however long you can tarp take the tarp off then you cover your area with carton like cardboard cardboard without let's ink and other types of treatments so as natural as you can find it and as thick as you can find it and then on top of that you layer your compost spaced at the space of your bed which ideally is like 75 centimeters then you have a path which is 40 centimeters this is for ergonomical stepping over and then i mean the higher you can go in terms of how thick you layer it the better we did about 15 centimeters at the onset and then you fill your paths up with wood chips this is to promote fungal life but also because when it rains and stuff you get to really nicely walk in your paths and then you're more or less ready to go what you then first want to do still is inoculate your compost with a lot of microbiology so we irrigate it with a lot of very um i want to say like lively water water that had a lot of life in it just to kick start that process and then immediately plant as many plants in here as you can because you want to have living roots in the soil because they basically bring sugar via their roots into the system and that then jump starts that whole beautiful process so um what's the format that you sell those vegetables in can people pick or order individual vegetables to use the boxes how does it work it's a really good question because i feel like that's like a big thing in the market gardening world and also obviously Everything is super context related and our context is that we're in a very rural place, which is unfortunately not like the most rich area of Portugal. So you always work within the context. If you're closer to the city, then doing it by the kilo or by the bunch and everything is quite a good way to go about it. In our context, what we do is a weekly veggie box and people basically opt in because they like the idea that it's varied and that it's seasonal and that you get... you know you get to choose if you don't want to participate or not but you sort of agree with what is in the box um so we're a little bit less flexible like that that's also because of our setup and because we have you know our digital format as well so we want to provide our community with with food but at the same time also we don't want to over complicate and with our water situation this is like the best way to get good variety and a steady output without it being like, okay, everybody bought all the carrots and then some people don't have carrots because we're not huge, right? We're not a huge market garden that can basically provide everybody to have their specific choices, wishes, yeah, abide by, or I don't know how you would say that. But I also think that that is a key selling point because actually that's the feedback we get from a lot of people, which is that they like the surprise box and that they like to sort of be inspired by the ingredients. and then to cook with it. And I think we can get away with that much easier here in the countryside than maybe you would be in the city. That's just my, you know, sort of take on things.
Speaker #0
While we were recording this conversation, standing in the middle of the market garden, I noticed at the back that some of the beds were completely covered with cover crops. So we went to sit next to these beds, and I asked them to tell me more about these cover crops and how they integrate them into their rotation.
Speaker #2
Yeah, you asked me if we do anything specifically for the soil. And I thought you were talking about like, you know, like production crops, like cash crops. But I forgot to mention that we, of course, also cover crop. So we try to have living roots in the soil at all times and just to really enhance our soil biology by living plants. So we do that as often as we can. It's always a bit tricky because, of course, when you put a cover crop in, it's like you're in some way losing that productive time in the bed. But then what you get back is really incredible. and So we found that, you know, cover cropping with things like legumes or veg or rye and things are really beneficial for the soil and that yields afterwards really increase. So that's part of our cycle and it's always still a bit of a work in progress on how to rotate it well. I don't think we're experts at that yet, but I think we're doing a good job at trying to.
Speaker #1
Well, we didn't do no soil analysis, but all the nitrogen fixes are the plants that you want to use as cover crops because they fixate your nitrogen on the soil. So that's, how do we know that when it's time, when it's flower, it's the best time for it. It's when it's at its highest as nitrogen. So it's when it has the flowers, it's time. You don't let the flowers become fruit. You just, on that time, you just cut the plant and you just, a lot of people turn it into the bed. What we are trying to do is just cutting it, laying down. and just put a thin layer of compost on top and leave it like that. Yeah. And yeah.
Speaker #0
This slowly decomposes, but I guess then you need to wait a little bit until you can plant your next bed.
Speaker #2
It's always a bit tricky on what you're going to plant in next. So like if you can plant something right into it, something big like, you know, you could do pumpkin or cabbage or something like something that is quite sturdy, like one plant. Obviously, direct seeding then becomes very tricky because that's best done in super fine compost. So that's always a bit the way off. And no, we didn't do any soil analysis. Of course, if you get really into it, I'm very geeky about all the levels and the pHs and stuff, you can get really into it. That's not really the way we farm. We have quite a holistic sort of intuitive way of farming where we just observe the system and we see what works and doesn't work. And coming here to this new climate has been really interesting. But we always start a bit off with cover crops. So, for instance, this is the newest part of the garden. So before we start producing in here, we'll cover crop it then plant into it afterwards and then try to bring in one cover crop annually in each bed sometimes we have to be honest we like you know prolong the season a little longer just because we need a lot of production um but yeah we try to just find times in the year could be spring could be autumn could be winter like we can grow all year round here so we just find a moment in the year what's like the
Speaker #1
sort of biggest mistake you used to make as a market gardener that you've learned not to make anymore till i used to we used when we started farming we used to we wanted we started by doing organic but then in the conventional with the conventional methods and very soon in three months we just we said like this doesn't work like this you know our methods have to be different also just just being organic and using the conventional way it it doesn't like tilling and it doesn't It doesn't help nobody, it's not helping us, just creating more work, so it has to be more than that. So then we started looking for and we came to.
Speaker #2
We had a very big epiphany moment in this sense because we used to use the rotor plow, you know, just the walk after tractor. Rotortiller, yeah. And we just did a lot of weeding, we were farming in heavy clay, so also like the water management on the farm was terrible. We didn't have nice wooden paths, so when it got wet it got like really... hard to work and all the clay would stick to your boots and even working the machinery would be really difficult to find like exactly right time in the year and then we had a very big amount of What was it? What's that? It's not a cow. It's from the mozzarella. I'm forgetting it. The Buffalo manure So we had a friend that had an organic Buffalo farm and he just was like Oh, I can bring you a great amount of this Buffalo manure And then we let that decompose for a whole year and we used that as like a really heavy compost on some of the beds and then we accidentally sort of did this no dig yeah and then we stumbled upon it of course also online and that's when it changed and we just changed our complete perspective on it like oh we don't really want to be using the machines and we just really want to feed the soil life as before we were just thinking in terms of not using chemicals and being organic like wanting to respect the environment but not really understanding the fertility cycle well and not understanding that it was actually like the microbiology in the soil feeding the plants. So we very much had this naive that shows that we didn't have it back. and it was when we started composting and using less of the machinery.
Speaker #1
After the first year that we just had plowed everything like everybody does and everybody told us to do and that's the way you should have done but after we did it and plant the first plants on the beds we saw that with the first rainfalls everything went away because we were in the quite I don't know the percentage of the inclination but it was quite a steep slope so we found out very quickly that this cannot be like this because all the good soil ends up by the river on the bottom so that's the first change that we did was living pads that was one of the best things that we did there so here we do wheat chips because it's very hot uh but in italy we just had a living pad just grass around clover we just uh yeah and that would hold the whole garden nothing you could go in the winter in rainfall and you walk on top of that five ten centimeter clover and it would be like dry would be it was great and it hold the whole Garden in place, the soil in place. That was the first big change. And then it was like, why are we rototilling the beds then? We shouldn't rototill the beds too. So then we started, okay, let's instead of rototill the compost, we're going to lay up the compost on top. And that was it. never went back again.
Speaker #2
And also I think that that's when we started getting into the whole idea of no dig and you know not plowing and of course you know there's a scale where that works really well and we've always been small to medium size like our last farm was much bigger than this in terms of production for gardening but we used to see where we lived in Italy was a lot of grain and a lot of sunflower production so every year like they plow it at least two times and when we then have rain all the streets are just like covered in topsoil so you just have this massive wash off and i feel like that really also changed our perspective on everything when we started learning about it and we started seeing like all the damage that was being done that before we were blind to it and it's sort of that that classic feeling of getting friends over and driving through beautiful green landscapes and everybody's like oh this is so beautiful and then you're sort of looking at it like this is so destructive you know like it's a road it was green and green and people thought oh so natural. Yeah, not natural. And I think like that's, yeah, I hope that we with the farming chefs also just spread that message, you know, the importance of topsoil and like to prevent erosion and to use, you know, to treat our land as this sacred, you know, resource that we have that is basically the source of all our food and that we should be really appreciative of it and let all that life flourish and not kill it off and have it washed away with every rainfall, with every, you know, blow away with every wind event.
Speaker #1
let's keep the soil in place one last question about this what's your favorite source of information and inspiration about market gardening here in portugal we have a whatsapp group with all market gardeners and it's an amazing community we were talking about this yesterday and it's one of the parts that i like more that we are very different from any other industry because we will share every information possible that we have with our colleagues and that's something very special
Speaker #2
in this area that's amazing i guess it's really important so it's a feel that you're very you people doing totally very important you're not alone yeah i think it's a very strong uh general sense like in terms of the energy that you get when you get a lot of people that are operating in this regenerative space that have a clear vision of you know basically improving the place that they're farming and leaving it better for the next generation i think you share a very strong common value. and i think everybody that works the natural system let's say knows that it's not always easy so it's good to to have this community of people and sharing sort of secrets and tips and tricks and like how how do you do this where do you buy that um you know what are what are your grand successes what are your grand fails and stuff and that's nice and that is true tulip saying i think that that is a special sort of energy that lives within this community which is really energizing
Speaker #0
So This closes our chapter on the market garden. We then walked over to another part of the farm, a beautiful meadow with big old olive trees and really lush grass full of diverse plant species and flowers.
Speaker #2
So yeah, we're sitting in our meadow and it's a beautiful moment to maybe discuss a little bit the animal integration that we do on the farm. We are very consciously trying to restore the soils here on this farm by using animals as a tool and so we have a small herd of sheep and we graze them rotationally on our farm in very small paddocks. We try to just very intensively graze them in order to fertilize the land and eat the grass and capture the carbon out of the air into the soil. via the root systems and then we also have behind us they're not beautiful to look at but they're the the chicken tractors so we do have a little production of broilers which are meat chickens and eggs egg producing chickens so laying hens they are more for our home consumption so they're very small herds but what we basically do is we graze them through the field in order to use them as fertilizers. That sounds weird.
Speaker #1
Pest controlers.
Speaker #2
In order to use them to fertilize the land and to increase our grass production, which then eventually will increase our meat production. So we very much like to think of it as that we're farming grass and then whatever gets to live on that grass brings us yields in terms of meat or eggs. And that's what we're trying to achieve here. It's a very basic setup. It is like a super, super low cost structure that just provides shade and shelter. And you just move them manually. onto a new piece every day until they hit about halfway through their life cycle when they get a bit bigger and then you do it twice a day and so what happens is that they you know have their feces basically quite intensively manure one area and then you move along and then that takes time to decompose and then when you see that the grass has recovered to the point that it was or a little bit higher than it was before ideally you bring back the animals on the cycle and we graze our sheep first then and then we bring on the chickens
Speaker #0
Okay, so how do they work together? So you say you first graze with the sheep? Yeah. You let it grow back first or?
Speaker #2
Well, no, you can basically do that quite intensely after each other. So because you can get the benefit of all the animals that eat the manure of the sheep, that can also be sort of a feed for your chickens. So if you've timed it correctly, it's even better with cows, but we don't have cows.
Speaker #0
But they're actually complementary.
Speaker #1
Yes,
Speaker #2
they are complementary. Yes, indeed.
Speaker #1
So you have to imagine that you have 30, 40 centimeters of grass. And we will graze the sheep quite fast, one day basically, in a small space. They will bring that grass like about 10 centimeters height, so quite short. And after that we put the chickens. So the chickens will start eating the larvae that are created or that are raised.
Speaker #2
A week after more or less, because you want to time it so that the poop that has been... deposited by the sheep will then have like some eggs and maggots and you know there's sort of life coming to digest the poop and then you can have the benefit of especially with your laying hands it's nice for the egg quality to get some really live insects in there protein and then they of course leave their manure and then you leave it to rest that's very important the resting time because if you don't time the resting time correctly you could actually be degrading your grassland but what you're trying to do obviously is to to grow it stronger and to have ever more producing grass so it's important to give the plant really the time to recoup the its growth underground which will reflect in the growth above ground and then once you see like it's basically come back to the stage where you've had it at its peak you know then it's ready to be grazed again if you come back before that you're making it harder on the plant to come
Speaker #0
up over grazing it okay in the only three years since you've been here have you seen a change in the in the landscape
Speaker #1
I want to say yes.
Speaker #2
Yes, we have and you can see even like the amount of species that we find on the square meter has changed. We're not successful on all parts of the land yet because it's very much the time where you need to you need to monitor very well to understand the impact that you have on different parts of your farm. Because for instance we have some areas that have bedrock quite shallow so there's not a lot of topsoil there. And then we have other places like where we're sitting right now. where we actually have much deeper soil profile, where we have bigger layers of topsoil. So this is an easier part to regenerate because there's already quite a lot of life in the soil and that cycle is already functioning. On some more degraded pieces it's trickier because we deal with extremely hot summers, so I feel like it always takes a hit. So biology in the ground, especially on those spots where there's very little topsoil, it's just such a shallow layer and with the very high temperatures, you always get a big dip. in life in the soil which you then need to basically mitigate for again with your animal intervention and timing that correctly can be a little challenging also because we are you know a lot of our setup is manual so it all it's all about timing and there's a lot of things that we're doing so sometimes I think we try to just
Speaker #1
right before the summer I think at around end of May that nothing else is growing we try to let the sheep go everywhere and trample a little bit the grass because there's always like a 60% trampling of grazing animals. And that is great in our case because the trampling creates a layer that is covering the ground for the three months of summer that are coming that are very intensive. So it's not that it stays humid, but it keeps the life longer at play. So if it was completely grazed it will dry out very soon and it would be completely dead and just stone and sand. but with the animals passing and the trampling, that grass just covers our soil for the summer. In the place where we are, it brings a small problem that is the fire dangerous, the fire hazards. So we could have floor fires, that's what they call here, a floor fire, but we believe that the moist under will keep us away from that.
Speaker #2
And we try to secure more.
Speaker #1
Righto.
Speaker #2
And we try to work in terms of the parameter of the farm. So we basically, you know, here legally you're supposed to cut down all your brim and stuff. These are all the pioneer plants that are actually helping to restore soil. So there's something very counterintuitive to that. If you're a regenerative farmer, you don't want to be taking away all your pioneers constantly because they're actually the ones that are going to kickstart, you know, that whole cycle of regeneration. So a lot of neighbors frown upon us because they're like, oh, you don't mow your land. You don't plow everything. You know, it's sort of... We're using methods here that aren't conventional in this setting. And that also, you know, some of them are, there have been many forest fires. So I also understand why people are doing that. But the way we mitigate for that is by trying to really secure a parameter. And then we are obviously banking on being able better than others in the area, maybe to capture a lot of the water in the soil and have much more resistance against forest fires. And yeah, well, we have water in many areas.
Speaker #0
areas of our farms if there would be a problem we could you know hopefully take care of it very quickly before we move on to the next part of this farm visit let me take just a really short break to tell you about the official partner of the deep seed podcast and that's soil capital one of the biggest levers to enable farmers to transition towards regenerative agriculture is financial incentives and that's essentially what soil capital does They financially reward farmers who improve things like soil health and biodiversity. They're an amazing company. I love what they're doing and I'm super proud to be partnering with them for the podcast.
Speaker #1
So,
Speaker #0
Filip, could you explain what you're doing here?
Speaker #1
So we're using this natural resource that we have here. And it's this kind of water trifoli. I don't know exactly the name of this plant, but... This plant is 40% protein of its own weight and it grows 75% of its size daily. So it's something that you can come here every day and the next day you always have the same thing. And this is chicken, we use this as chicken feed right now. But it can be used at any feed, chicken feed, pig feed, sheep feed. And we use this just so we minimize the amount of bought feed that we have to give to the chickens. and it's a nice natural resource that we have here at the farm so uh so it just produces fresh protein protein every day of course this has to be a fresh water source so there's a source of water under this well it's not just a well from the top that the water comes from the top there's a source there that makes that these wells can produce this uh this plant this aquatic plant that it's a great resource
Speaker #0
Do you know the name of that plant?
Speaker #1
I don't know the name, but I can check for you upstairs.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
I've seen an American guy using this to feed their pigs and they made an analysis to the meat. And the analysis from the lab came out that those pigs had a certain amount of omega-3 in the meat. That's very rare because omega-3 you find it in fish. But with feeding this to the animals, they just get that intake of it. And yeah, you spare money, you get healthy animals. And it takes very little time of your day to do this. Not even five minutes. And we have here around a kilo of this thing. So probably we have around 300 to 400 grams of protein here. Free protein for chickens. Let's go give them. So we're at the orchard and at the orchard we let the layers run through. We have everything by rows so we would let the every three days I'll move the net with around 25 layers and we have a little chicken tractor that has no bottom that allows that the poo falls down directly to the floor every time. So what we do is we move that car between the rows of the trees and we try to park the car. right next to every tree, so every night there's a discharge of chicken poo, chicken manure into that tree, and so we're trying to... every tree gets one day of discharge and we run this, all these rows let's say it, and these rows are about 90 days time to come back to the same place where we were, so you can see it's beautiful green The chickens were here before, you can see it's a little bit bare, but you can see the result behind you, that's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker #0
so you're using the chicken manure as fertilizer for your young trees that you're growing here in this orchard.
Speaker #1
Yes, and another thing that the chickens also do very good is the trampling from the grasses, and because we're in central Portugal it's very dry Very hot. and the part of the trembling becomes very important because you're just covering your soil with grasses and the chickens do that like amazing they will scratch a few spots but they will trample a lot and basically it's a protection layer for for the soil awesome and you're gonna be moving the chickens now let's move the net let's move the chickens and uh right it's a easy easy job let's go so
Speaker #0
how many chickens do you have and
Speaker #1
25 right now.
Speaker #0
And so how many square meters do you have per chicken? Is there some kind of like calculation that you need to follow?
Speaker #1
Square meters? No, it's... You have to see how much impact are the chickens creating into the soil. So you could have a hundred chickens in this space, but you would have to move it three times a day, for example. So we have 25 chickens. in the 50 meter fence and normally it's three days time for each pet okay you look at the floor you see how trample it is how how does it look like okay so you move them every three days and because you figured out that this is the right amount of time for this amount of chickens yeah yeah yeah so the car moves three times inside the same pen so it starts there tomorrow we'll be here and After tomorrow we'll be there. And then the day after we move the net and he goes to the next one. So the car walks slowly inside the pen itself. So it has also to do how is your floor, how is your fauna, let's say on the on the ground, because if it's already quite bare, you don't want to let the chickens so long in it. So when it's like this nice and height, like as a good height, the three days are perfect. and the chickens are happy they have fresh food yeah you can look at them you taste the eggs so yeah yeah the eggs are delicious you can see good with the by the feathers of the chickens you know they're not being packed so there's very low stress into these chickens that's one a sign of stress is like chickens packing on chickens and then you start to see like chickens with the back completely clean like no feathers that's a very big sign of stress in the in the pack of these chickens but you can see here there's like yeah they're just they're just very healthy they're just very very how does the system benefit both the landscape and the chickens well the chickens you can see you know they give you eggs that's the plus of what we're doing here what's more important here for us is actually the soil itself and we can see we've been here for three years. And we can see this pasture that just has layers on it. It doesn't have broilers or it doesn't have sheep on it. It's just layers. And I think layers are one of the animals in the farm that have a greater impact to your soil. Because they just trample a lot. A lot of people say, oh, it's a waste of your... beautiful grass but it's not a waste because it will come to you eventually again into the fruits into the fruit trees into the fauna that you have here so yeah they're a very important part of the of our system the layers so
Speaker #0
you just moved them here to this new patch like minutes ago and they seem so excited they're running around it's like a
Speaker #1
you know easter egg chasing hunting yeah that thing right it's because they're they're hunting for fresh insects and all fresh things you can see that i put the food there yeah but just a few have quite interest on it all the rest they just go like oh my god this is a new paradise look at this yeah so my favorite food is is what like uh bugs bugs bugs bugs yeah chickens are like small t-rexes they are very aggressive and very powerful you know like if this animal would be a little bit bigger would be man would be a problem for us a problem for humanity uh and they are fiercely they will scratch and eat all animals are you flies you see them sometimes jumping to catch like butterflies or stuff like this so yeah animals that's where they source their amount of protein so no i think normally a chicken would eat around 150 grams of feed a day We give around 70, 60, 70 grams because the rest comes from here and also with the supercharged grass from the well. We don't need to give more and they lay perfectly. They lay around 80% of the number that they are.
Speaker #0
How long ago did you plant your trees here in this area?
Speaker #1
Two years ago.
Speaker #0
Two years ago?
Speaker #1
Two years ago.
Speaker #0
Like you can see they're already quite big and healthy.
Speaker #1
Yeah, and they've already been attacked. by sheep more than once so it was a little a small setback uh that's why we also decided okay let's not put cheap here anymore for the first few years just have the layers so let the tree grow without no uh attack sheep attack because it's devastating for me and for the trees itself okay
Speaker #0
So after Philip finished moving and feeding the chickens, we went back to the main house to meet again with Sophie. Surrounding the side of the house, there is a beautiful, lush, vibrant herb garden. We sat there with Sophie to talk about this herb garden. So we're sitting now in your beautiful herb garden. It's just surrounding the house. It's beautiful. It's full of colors, of smells. And it's really something that I wanted to talk about with you. So maybe you could give us an overview of what's going on here.
Speaker #2
Indeed, this is like a little sanctuary that is embracing the house. And that's how we designed it, how we built it. And it's an oasis of plants. There's so much diversity in this garden. And it brings me, of course, lots of delicious culinary herbs and some medicinal. But it also just brings me lots of joy. So I always like showing this garden when people come and visit. It's a place where pollinators come to thrive, where we come to harvest for the kitchen. And I think it's just a really great testament to how well plants thrive when they are planted together and when they are competing and working together. And sort of that beautiful synergy between some struggle and aid and everything is just flourishing here. We were talking earlier a little bit about how this... garden came to be if I was seeding it from seed or if I was doing it from cuttings. And I was telling you this story about, you know, the vigor of life and how strong plants actually are, which is in a testament to Philippe's mother who showed me some very unconventional planting techniques. So most of the plants here that are able to propagate from cuttings were brought to me by Philippe's mom or I harvested them here in the area and we just mob planted, seeded. did everything here and everything just took. And that was done in a very rough manner. So before I was much more careful in the way I planted things and transplanted things. But I found out that you can be really, you know, quite harsh with them. And the life force is just so strong that things grow. And I think that that is just another great testament to nature's force and life force. Yeah.
Speaker #0
How many different plants would you say you have here in this garden?
Speaker #2
You know that I've never counted them. but I would say definitely over a 100, 150 maybe. And a lot of them are culinary, but also there's quite some ornamentals here. I never used to grow any ornamentals. I was very much in the mindset of productivity. And as I get older, I think there's much to be said for beauty and surrounding yourself with beautiful things because they're also very good for the spirit. Some of them, I don't even know the name because Philippe's mom brought them. But many of them of course are also culinary and edible flowers, delicious, fragrant, aromatics.
Speaker #0
a very wide variety indeed i will count them now after you ask me this question yeah okay so yeah you said that a lot of it you've found from local areas where you found some herbs and plants that you were interested in you just took some cuttings and then just yeah came back put them in the ground yeah and let them grow i think that's a really great thing to do because uh first of all if you're doing it in your local area the chances that the thing will thrive is you know are very big and
Speaker #2
also i found that most people that like gardening and that have very nice gardens they're really into this idea of sharing. So for instance, if people come here for a course, I always have them leave with a bag of whatever they want from the herb garden. People can just pick and choose and whatever will survive after propagation. We just dig out a bit or break off some branches because things regrow really fast. It's a great way to start a herb garden is you don't need a lot of money and you don't need to buy everything in a garden center. You just need to go somewhere that somebody is already doing it. Just smile at that person and be like. do you want to share some of your plants with me and most people that like planting they will so i think that's just a nice community has anyone ever said no to that no nobody has ever said no to that i think that with a good smile and you know some enthusiasm most people will happily
Speaker #0
share with you it's uh it's a lot cooler than collecting pokemons isn't it like yeah it's it's really a fun way also to keep your eyes open when you're walking around or when you're visiting someone else's garden and be like, oh, that's a very nice herb that I would love to add or a flower or something.
Speaker #2
Definitely. And totally. And also what's really nice is if you're a bit like towards the end of summer, a lot of things obviously are already in seed and sometimes you'll walk past something and it'll just look weird, but you won't know what the flower looks like yet. And then you'll collect the seed and then it's sort of like a surprise. I have lots of envelopes of seeds that I don't remember where I took them or what they are. And then it's sort of like this wonderful surprise. You just look at it and think, shall we try this? Yes, let's put it there. And the only thing I wouldn't do that with is if it's really strong, big climbers that get very woody, because just popping those anywhere wouldn't work out. But most annual plants, especially flowers, are really great because it's sort of like a surprise waiting for you to happen in a few months' time. And you see it grow and it's like, ooh, what kind of flower will it be? So yeah, I like that.
Speaker #0
After this, we followed Sophie around the farm as she was collecting a lot of different ingredients for dinner. She then invited us into her kitchen and while she was cooking, we had a really nice chat about food, about the relationship between soil health and ingredient quality and about nutrient density. You started as a chef.
Speaker #1
We already discussed this at the beginning of the video.
Speaker #2
We did.
Speaker #0
Right? You then opened a restaurant, like Métodie, a palm-to-table layered restaurant.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Do you still cook food professionally for a living?
Speaker #2
Right now we're actually at a very interesting stage where we are still cooking professionally, but not directly for the public unless it's for courses and stuff. So we do it now for the content creation, which has been a shift in our way of cooking, which has been interesting. And this moment is no different like we're standing here in our professional kitchen where we do a lot of filming and it's really it's fun having you guys here and doing it for once so i'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out um yeah so we do cook professionally but not for a restaurant and uh it's been uh much calmer yeah
Speaker #0
so how different is food that you buy from the supermarket to the food that you grow yourself here in the nordic Garden.
Speaker #2
It's cannot compare guys. It's like apples and pears, you know, you're comparing two things that should not be compared. Well, of course It's sort of funny because I think the first time that I realized the difference between something Tasting so different depending on where it came from was when I was working in soup and so as these are the last bosses that I ever had basically when I was working for somebody else and we were writing this cookbook transforming their recipes and me and this other chef who were just like what makes this soup delicious like how much gram of this spice and we were trying to like scientifically figure out like what made a really good pumpkin soup right so we did all these trials and then in the end it just came down to like it's all about the pumpkin like if it's a nice pumpkin it's going to be a nice soup if it's a shitty pumpkin you know it's going to be less nice right and that was the first moment where I sort of thought like yeah where does actually all this food come from like we just order it comes into a box, you open the back door of the restaurant, bring it in, and every day you order more or less the same ingredients depending on where you're working. But basically you're just like one salad isn't the other, right? And that was like this moment where I started to think about like where does it come from and does it make a big difference? And it does. So I think the biggest difference is obviously taste, but also health because you're not eating chemicals and all those, you know, great benefits that you're not poisoning your body with poisons. But if you're going the hedonistic route, I think it's really about how nutrient dense it is, and also about just the general flavor profile of things. So I think that's the biggest game changer for anybody that loves to cook. It's that you can compare them side by side, and there is a very big difference in the flavor.
Speaker #0
Okay. What do you think about the topic of nutrient density? Just the fact that we are finding out more and more that food grown in a healthy soil with a healthy microbiome in the soil is actually more nutrient dense. So between the carrots that has been mass produced in a very intensive way that you buy at the supermarket or the one that you grow in your soil here, you will have a massive difference in terms of how much nutrient the carrots holds.
Speaker #2
I find that such an interesting topic and we both know Dan Kittredge who's basically like a big advocate for this and showing you know the difference in the nutrient density profiles and like how that is related to soil health. So I think that that is just like it's super fascinating. It also is something that we've had as a physical on-site feedback loop of eating the food that we produce, where it's like you taste the difference so clearly between a store-bought tomato and a tomato that you pick off the vine on your... you know, regenerative organic farm. As a chef, I can only say what a great attribute that it's not only nutrient dense, it's not only healthy, but it's also tasty. Like those to me, when they go hand in hand, it's like a win-win for everybody, right? Because if somebody was telling you, you need to eat these nutrient dense veggies, but you're just like, I don't like veggies and they're not that tasty. And now it's sort of like, okay, you get to eat a carrot, but that carrot will also taste better than the average carrot that you're maybe used to. So for me, it's, yeah, it's one of those things that it's a win-win. A win-win and you know.
Speaker #0
Tasting density and taste go hand in hand.
Speaker #2
Yes.
Speaker #0
Actually related.
Speaker #2
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the flavor profile.
Speaker #0
is actually better, right? If you have a more nutrient-dense carrot, it shows that it's shown scientifically that they taste better. And I think it's an exciting prospect that there's going to be a tool for us as consumers to basically check, like scan our ingredients at the supermarket or at the farmer's market or at your local farmer and just see like, is this actually like a very nutrient-dense product or is it just, does it look, you know, every carrot looks the same to the consumer, but inside they're not the same. And I have great hopes that if we're sort of empowered with this tool, that that's going to change a lot of, you know, it's going to change the game. And I'm looking forward to that moment. Yeah, sure.
Speaker #1
Okay, so we're now moving on to the very last part of this episode. And Sophie and I put out some chairs outside of the house in a beautiful spot overlooking the whole farm. And we had a bit of a longer... kind of conversation. I would say a bit more in the classic podcast style. So we talk about a lot of things, including the business model, the education part, and then also a more personal conversation about what it's like to live on a farm, to raise children on a farm, and a few other things as well. So at the start of the conversation, you told me that a big part of what you're trying to create here is about education, and we haven't really spoken about it yet, so I would love for to tell me more.
Speaker #0
Wonderful, I'm really happy to talk about it as well. Yes, it is actually, I would say, the main thing of what we're trying to do here, and that is sort of like raise awareness and that, as I said before, I'm calling it sort of edutainment because I think it's always fun to learn through storytelling. It's also why we chose sort of YouTube as a medium to, you know, get videos out there and to draw attention to the regenerative movement. It's also one of the ways where I feel like our sort of, of in-house people, planet profit. could get into balance where it's like I really strongly believe that it shouldn't all be about economy or all be about personal interests or all be about the impact or it should be you know how you can bring your own skill set together and make money that way while also having purpose and doing something good for the planet and I feel like this model that we've created does all three of those things because we get to live a really yeah meaningful and yeah I want to say healing, but that sounds as if we're sick, but sort of nurturing existence in this beautiful place. Like you've been here now. I hope you can attest to sort of the feel here. You know, it's really calm and peaceful and beautiful. And we get to create this space that is going to over time just become more productive. So from a personal perspective of where you want to raise a family, this is a really great location. And it's also a really great location to teach from. So to get people involved and show them, you know, all the different plants and how you can grow and how you can cook. And These are these basic things that people do, I mean, especially the cooking. Every day, right, you're every day making a choice when you buy something in the supermarket. Every time you put something in your mouth, it's like a political act, basically. And I felt that combining education with this farming and cooking is just bringing our skill set together. So what we try to do is empower people to cook with regeneratively grown produce. to grow it as well and a lot of people think when they hear like learn how to grow your own food like grow all of your food that's not necessarily the aim it's more to yeah encourage people to take back a little bit of control over their food system and experience
Speaker #1
the joy of cooking some of your own food really amazing um and so that education comes in different forms because you mentioned the youtube channel you've been doing so you spend a lot of time trying to educate people online about farming about cooking about
Speaker #0
a lot of things right yes and then there's also a physical uh version of that where people come here and you teach people how does that work yeah well i i so i'm a very big advocate for in-person events like i love the digital space when it's used sort of for good right social media can be very toxic but i also think that there's a lot of really great information out there you're an example where basically you get to find like really good information and really inspirational stories so i think that the digital space is great for growth and for scaling um But I also very much am a social creature. Like I like to connect. I like to talk. I like to get the instant feedback at which sometimes the internet is like less capable, right? To give you that instant feedback of what do people really think about this? Maybe you'll get the extreme haters or you get the extreme people that are really, you know, supportive and positive. But there's also just a large part of the population that watches and doesn't say anything but thinks something. But you don't really get that feedback. And so... I always wanted to combine the two and have people come to the farm and take courses here also because it's a much better indicator for you as the person creating the educational content to get like good feedback on what are people really looking for like what are their struggles what are their you know what are their wants and then you can better cater to them so okay yeah so what what What form does it take?
Speaker #1
Is it people come... For regular lessons? Is it a sort of a camp where they come for a whole week?
Speaker #0
So currently we have the format, we have basically the growing part made now. So there's more education on the way, let's say. But what we have live right now, of course, is around growing. And so basically helping people to set up their little vegetable plots and sort of food systems. And you can come do that in one day workshops or you can do that in a two day workshop. So some of them are more geared towards like one specific part of it so for instance composting or how you take care of your seedlings and stuff or garden design for instance and then we have a two-day course which is super intensive and it sort of like hits all the you know it hits all the parts that are important for you to successfully grow vegetables regeneratively so there's a module that starts out with your holistic vision and sort of takes you all the way through to how to design and what drives fertility and then you know basically like crop planning more of the technical aspects of it and then you get access to our digital course so we do have a digital course as well which is basically an add-on for the inside or you can take it on your own at home anywhere in the world whenever you want and then you know learn that way awesome
Speaker #1
so yeah messages out there for people who are interested in learning more about starting their own market garden yeah and what about cooking are there cooking lessons they're gonna come
Speaker #0
They are. We have a lot of tutorials out there right now about growing and about cooking. And for the growing, we've got our digital product set up and of course our onsite events. And then for the cooking, we're working on that. We are of course also cooking for some onsite events that we host where we have farm tours. So if you want to come enjoy our food, you could come visit a farm tour. And there are tutorials out there, but there's no in-person cooking currently happening. There will be in September and stuff. So if you're into that, then check out our website, I'm sure.
Speaker #1
So how do you bring all of these different elements into your business model? Because there's the market garden, the growing of food, the regenerating the ecosystem, the chickens, there's the education part. How does all of that come together and how does your economic model work?
Speaker #0
Wonderful, that's a good question. I just wanted to also just draw back to one thing you said before, where you said you want to learn people how to market garden. Of course, it's very much what we do. So we do show people a lot of those techniques, but Our courses are also very much geared towards people just wanting to grow for themselves. So it's like basically the average consumer and then people who might want to market garden, they take our courses as well. But maybe there are people in the space of like becoming a professional market gardener that are like Jean-Martin Fortier or other people that are really geared towards the business side of things. I think we are very much geared towards people that are looking to give their own gardens a useful purpose. So we're more in the consumer section, I would say. And as for our business model, which is a really great question because we have a lot of stuff going on. So I would say that we sort of have two business running alongside each other and that our place serves as both the backdrop for the education and there are certain aspects to our farm that aren't necessarily needing to be profitable on their own as a singular enterprise. Like I was explaining to you, for instance, the chickens that, you know, it's more for just. us regenerating the land and for the eggs and then using that for the content and for the videography and education the same goes for like our sheep and our our broilers so we see them as parts of the regeneration tool but not necessarily as you know we're making money from selling eggs for instance right um philippe is very much the gardener of the two of us and i'm much more more the storyteller. So I think we found a really great way to combine two businesses alongside each other and take the benefit of both. And so if you see them as a zero, as individual entities, I would say that our main focus is on the content and the digital creation. And then our market garden is working in function, but obviously needs to generate an income. But it's not something that we necessarily want to scale to great lengths, let's say. Okay.
Speaker #1
And so you managed to make it work at the moment with the income from the market garden on one side and the courses and education part of the operation?
Speaker #0
Yes, well, we are obviously still only in the second year and we have had to invest quite a lot in terms of getting the system up and running. But yes, things are looking very positive, like growth is going strong and we have our KPIs to reach in a couple of years. So I would say that we are managing to make it work. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker #1
What's the long term vision? Like maybe 10 years from now, how do you imagine this place being like and how do you imagine also the model?
Speaker #0
Yeah. Well, in 10 years time, I hope that we're standing in this, you know, location with everything that we've implemented. Having, you know, like I would say. having great impact and success so that our fertility levels have gone up. We can have more animals on the land. Our trees are thriving. We are still supplying our local community with food because that is definitely one of Philippe's purpose driven desire for his life. Like he loves to grow. He loves to grow plants. He loves to garden. He loves to be outdoors. So I envision us doing that. As for the digital side, I think that If we are successful, a lot of people will know who the farming chefs are, and a lot of people will associate that with a very positive influence that has had on their daily lives in terms of what they do in their kitchens. So I hope that we have inspired many, many people to buy organic, regeneratively grown local food. And I hope we have inspired many people to feel that they are also capable of growing some of their own food. How that will evolve in 10 years' time, I think that there will be many spin-offs and many different types of courses and areas to explore. or also... showcasing other successful regenerative projects is something that I'm very passionate about. We did a mini series and I would love to get out on the road also and sort of go beyond this location and I see it as a wonderful home base.
Speaker #1
It's amazing so you're really really passionate about trying to obviously to have an impact on the land that you own here and you're doing something amazing here I believe but also beyond that yes trying to reach a lot of people online. through courses through going to visit other farms yourselves to try and get the knowledge out there to to get people inspired about uh about farming about regenerating about community and all these things right exactly i think the storytelling is super important i feel like that's where there's a lot of um room
Speaker #0
still in in our movement like when i feel like we're in this early adaption phase that we discussed earlier and i feel this need to to tell the story like i feel something burning inside of me that is just like guys this is so great like everybody needs to look over here and not I don't mean here like our farm but I mean like hey regenerative ag is amazing look at all these small farmers that are doing a great job I feel that because we know a lot of you know small farmers we've been small small skill farmers for a long time now and I sort of feel like uh yeah farmers need to get to this sort of rock star status not for the personal fame but for the sake of sort of, you know, the... the respect that the job deserves and the support that it should receive from the community, from the local community. So yeah, there's maybe a little bit of a missionary in me. And I also think that there is a really strong case to be made that, you know, as love and relationship goes through the stomach, I also think that change in the world can come via like the kitchen, if you will. And I think that's a unique perspective we bring. and it's a fun one. I think people like food and like cooking and like good stories and I think I think we have all of those do you miss the sort of chefing life and having your own restaurant yeah well I don't flip dust like I think if it was up to Philippe we would probably be opening a restaurant like tomorrow but I sort of trying to I'm trying to hold that off a little bit because of the family aspect and Yeah, and sort of the... Yeah, as I said before, it's sort of what you want from your personal life. And I feel that even though restaurants, you know, it's a super satisfactory job because you get to perform every day. It's a high stress. When you succeed, you know, you get the room full. You serve everybody great food. Everybody goes home. You have that feeling of. a victory and that happens over and over again and maybe sometimes you have a bad night but most of the time you just have this constant feedback loop of like success success and that's really really empowering and i think philippe also thrives under this adrenaline kick um but from my perspective as a mom you know i sort of see how hard it is on family life and so i always joke that we'll do it maybe when the kids can do some dishes yeah but i can understand how like
Speaker #1
Well, my dad was a chef. I worked in a lot of kitchens in my younger years.
Speaker #0
Yeah, so you know.
Speaker #1
And I know that it's a very tough life. And it's very tough in terms of working evenings and weekends. And for your family life, it must be very difficult.
Speaker #0
It's always when the kids are free, you're working. So it's sort of like you don't get to see your kids anymore. You know, because it is like holidays. You're at your busiest. Christmas, you're at your busiest. Weekends, you're at your busiest. So it's always sort of that you sacrifice to some extent family life for that. And there are many great chefs that are doing that. I think that, you know, we're lucky that we get to eat really nice food and that people are sort of, I don't want to say sacrificing their families because I'm sure that they'll find a way to make that work. But for me personally, I just felt like it was...
Speaker #1
Fair enough. Is there maybe...
Speaker #0
a way you could reintegrate the cooking and the chefing into your business model without being you know a full-time restaurant high intensity high stress yeah it can be like a pop-up you know we we discuss this quite often like in summertime doing more events and things and that is definitely in the books but i don't know if i would call that restaurant you know what i mean like it is but it isn't in it's not the same it would never take the same form as it did yeah i i really love I love it when I see these pictures online of these
Speaker #1
tables put out. in the farm or in the vineyards in the summers beautiful table i feel like people are looking for experiences that's something magical that you get to do i think there will be a man for that i'm sure you could do something really cool yeah i know and it will happen like it definitely is in the books maybe maybe in
Speaker #0
my mind maybe because we've ran like a super busy restaurant life i'm just thinking like i don't know can we call that a restaurant can i get away with calling that restaurant life but yeah definitely like having really nice food events is like super super nice and especially what you were saying. Like here we could just put up tables in the field and, you know, sit between the olive trees. Or here where we're sitting now with these beautiful flowers in the backdrop will be magical. I agree. And there are a lot of nice initiatives out there of people doing this sort of catering pop-up events and stuff. So that's for sure. Like, yes.
Speaker #1
What would you say is your favorite thing about being a farmer and having this farming life?
Speaker #0
There's actually quite a lot of things that I really like about it. I think the best thing about it is that you get to witness the natural cycles and I think that that is a very empowering experience because I think that seeing you know that that cycle of like things slowing down coming up again getting more energy full-on like thriving garden seeds and then it decaying sort of again. and silencing down, it sort of makes you much more aware of that rhythm, the pace of life. And it puts things in perspective because you also see the force of nature, how the life force is so strong and how you can see things that are actually quite damaged still then end up being these beautiful thriving plants. So I think there's something about it that is just innately energizing and healing. That's one of the things. And you get that by just being in the garden, harvesting, working in the garden. So that's super nice. I think there's a very healthy side to it, let's call it like that, mentally. Very empowering. You start to feel one with the natural, you know, you start to feel... that you're a part of it which is something that i didn't feel growing up so much when i was living in cities and i think that that sort of stepping back into the natural is very good and very healing um obviously i enjoy the good food i enjoy the abundance that we enjoy i enjoy the i enjoy the flavors i enjoy the the sort of learning that as a cook even certain things go really well together because they're in season together and sort of being being guided by nature in that sense in your creative journeys in the kitchen. I like that our kids get to experience this and that they have this connection to the land that they go out and they eat their little edible flowers and that's like part of their daily routine where they just go harvest and yeah sort of those romanticized images that people have about farming are very true. I think those are the reasons I think that people enjoy farming and I get to feed people. And I think that's really nice, like that other people are grateful that you're doing this.
Speaker #1
So your two daughters, they enjoy that farm life too? They don't miss being closer to the city and stuff like that?
Speaker #0
Sometimes I worry a little bit about that. That's a very good question. I think our youngest is very adventurous and sort of like hands-on outdoorsy. So I think she really thrives in this setup. Our eldest is very creative and sort of like dreamy and, you know, loves to make. plays and paint and stuff so she's a bit more maybe inward if that makes sense. But I think they do both enjoy it. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to put a little disclaimer here for all the parents watching. Our kids also watch screens and like they are not just always happily prancing around in the fields but it is a part of it and I think they do enjoy it. But yes maybe when they start turning you know 12, 13... Maybe then we'll start getting some questions about why are we far away from city life. I hope to balance that with just regular visits to family and friends and sending them into the city just enough so that they can experience it and figure out for themselves if that's what they want. They'll probably live in cities because everybody needs to revolt against their parents' choices and then come back to it.
Speaker #1
probably at some point yeah but i don't know i personally think it's amazing childhood to have for kids to be so connected to nature in this beautiful place here yeah with beautiful nature with amazing food with this yeah being not completely disconnected because you still have screen internet and all of that but i think that's that's amazing um i
Speaker #0
also agree Having said that, that touches on a subject that I want to just quickly put out there. I think as humanity we need to do so much more for what happens in schools because our kids are not homeschooled. So we send them to public school. And in general, I don't have much critique about, for instance, our school here locally, right? There's people working there very hard and with lots of love. But for instance, I don't really have much control over what they eat there for lunch. And that's one of the things that I find still hard to sort of accept where, you know, we... try our best to give our foods like quite nutritious and healthy things to eat and then yeah but in school they just eat random crap i want to call it let's just call it crap i'm sorry it's crap yeah and that's so so even in our setup it's not perfect right like it's just you can't can't
Speaker #1
control everything so you do the best you can like sure yeah so we talked about all of the the positives the amazing parts of living here being a farmer all of this but i would maybe also like to know what's the you know the opposite side of things and i'm sure there are some things that are hard and yeah maybe the question is what's the the hardest part about this about farming yeah or about this life well yeah i was gonna say it ain't all sunshine and roses isn't it like no
Speaker #0
life is also yeah there are hard parts of course and i think like that is one of the things that i was i suppose also hinting at when we were down there where it's like if you want to farm you need to be realistic about what that takes and about not only the physical labor, small scale farming is obviously not very machine dependent. So a lot of it is you, right? Like you physically showing up every day, come rain, come shine. So I think that's one of the harder parts about farming that, you know, and the good days is really nice, but there are days that it's just the sheep escape. You find out that something ate that crop that you were tending to for the past few months and you're not going to now be able to sell it. There's maybe gonna be, you know, sort of regulatory things that you need to deal with that are very bureaucratic and you don't really have time for them and now you're gonna have to just soldier on and like push through because like you need to do this, right? I would say that one of the hardest parts about being a small-scale farmer in general is making a profit. Like it isn't easy to make a profit, you need to be smart, you need to have like great accounting. You want to make sure that you are not over investing, because I think that's the easiest thing that you can do in the quest for making things easier. But then that obviously needs to be justified at the other end. So, yeah, especially as well, like vegetable growing. I think of all the enterprises you could run on a farm, because what we're doing here is obviously market gardening, but within a farm setting, right? I would say that every enterprise has its... It's struggle, so I mean that in terms of like you could be growing meat, you could be growing veg, you could be, you know, growing flowers and stuff. So I think that the market gardening in general is just like quite intensive job. So it's a lot of hours that need to go in and you're probably not going to get like super, super rich in all contexts, you know, because there's a big difference if you're close to a city or if you're further away from a city. There's a big difference if you're in a economically... potent area or if you're in a less potent area so it's very context driven and we are definitely not in the easiest context for making money with market garden um so i say like yeah you just got to be very on the ball in terms of what you're doing and uh and where you're spending your money and if you're spending it wisely and i think that comes with time like you know where to invest and you know but if you start off it's easy to make mistakes and it's easy to lose money quite quick quite quickly if you don't get on top of it. Having said that though, I feel like we have somewhat of a different experience than maybe other market gardeners because we're coming from this background with the restaurant. So even on our last farm, we always like the value was always brought in the transformation, like in the, you know, really in the hospitality side of it. And here as well, like we have that educational branch to our business model. So for us also the drive to make lots of money on the veggie growing, it's maybe not as, you know. as pronounced as it is in other businesses.
Speaker #1
I suppose it is really, really important to find different ways to create value from what you're doing, like being a pure market gardener and putting all of the pressure on. that being the the sole income source of income is really tough but being able to diversify and create value from either cooking or now educating people yeah are many other things that people try to do is well yeah it'll be quite healthy you know i think it is i think it very much depends on your personal background i always think like you bring value with your skill set right so i
Speaker #0
think there are people out there that are doing a great job and they're killing it market gardening and that's the only thing they're doing so i don't think you need the diversification per se but i do think it's important to sort of place yourself within your context and be very realistic about what that means for you because for instance if you would tell me hey sophie three years ago i wanted you to move to portugal and i wanted you to become like a super successful market gardener and only make money with the market garden i would not have chosen this location do you know what i mean like um i'm not saying it's impossible because you can but it's it's not uh it's probably not the best business move to then you know
Speaker #1
selling a product that basically is quite labor intense in a not super rich area you know it would be smarter than to go closer to a city yeah of course yeah sweet um well it's been an amazing conversation i loved it like love the farm the tour everything you're doing here a great energy and thank you so much for also hosting us for a couple of days here on the farm we absolutely loved it and thank you for
Speaker #0
cooking this amazing food for us as well i'm so grateful for all of that so yeah thank you well you're very welcome and thank you also i'm really happy that you made the journey out here we're far out so we really appreciate it and it's been really lovely having you and i've been you know we've been blessed to show you around and it's it's great to share this place with others and you're always welcome both of you so thank you guys as well
Speaker #1
Thank you so much for listening to the whole episode, really. More and more people listen to our episodes every week, which is amazing. But the stats show that actually only a small percentage make it all the way to the end, maybe 25 to 30%. Between the recording, filming, editing and everything... An episode like this actually takes me two whole weeks of work. And I would be super, super grateful if you could help me out by simply following The Deep Seed here on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode right now. If you'd like to go one small extra step, you can also leave me a five-star review. Basically... All of this will tell the algorithms that people enjoy this content and it will bring these amazing stories to the ears of more and more people. And God knows we need more people to hear about regenerative agriculture and the amazing work that these farmers are doing. On that note, I wish you all an amazing day or night and a beautiful life and see you next week.

About Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Welcome to the Deep Seed Podcast, your ultimate source for all things regenerative agriculture, soil health, and ecosystem restoration!

Join your host, Raphaël, on an exciting journey into the heart of sustainable farming and environmental resilience. The podcast is packed with inspiring conversations with regenerative farmers, cutting-edge innovators, and leading experts who are pioneering the movement towards a more regenerative food system.

Whether you’re a passionate advocate for sustainability, a professional in agriculture or environmental science, or just curious about the future of our food systems, the Deep Seed Podcast is your gateway to the vibrant world of regenerative agriculture.

Key topics discussed include:

Agroecology and its role in creating sustainable food systems
The power of agroforestry in boosting biodiversity and productivity
How carbon farming can fight climate change while benefiting farmers
The benefits of no-till farming for soil health and erosion prevention
Holistic grazing practices that restore ecosystems and enhance animal welfare
Crop rotation and polyculture for nutrient-rich soils and resilient farms
Exploring the potential of food forests and other nature-based solutions
The critical link between soil microbiology and plant health
Restoration agriculture and the future of land regeneration
Climate solutions that leverage regenerative practices to sequester carbon
Promoting biodiversity through sustainable farming approaches
Insights into the importance of sustainable diets and their environmental impact
Rewilding and its role in ecosystem restoration and preservation

Produced in partnership with Soil Capital, a leader in supporting regenerative agriculture and rewarding farmers for improving soil health, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in sustainable farming and climate action.

Get in touch with me LinkedIn - Raphael Esterhazy

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Welcome to the Deep Seed Podcast, your ultimate source for all things regenerative agriculture, soil health, and ecosystem restoration!

Key topics discussed include:

Agroecology and its role in creating sustainable food systems
The power of agroforestry in boosting biodiversity and productivity
How carbon farming can fight climate change while benefiting farmers
The benefits of no-till farming for soil health and erosion prevention
Holistic grazing practices that restore ecosystems and enhance animal welfare
Crop rotation and polyculture for nutrient-rich soils and resilient farms
Exploring the potential of food forests and other nature-based solutions
The critical link between soil microbiology and plant health
Restoration agriculture and the future of land regeneration
Climate solutions that leverage regenerative practices to sequester carbon
Promoting biodiversity through sustainable farming approaches
Insights into the importance of sustainable diets and their environmental impact
Rewilding and its role in ecosystem restoration and preservation

Get in touch with me LinkedIn - Raphael Esterhazy

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

Two fine-dining chefs moved to rural Portugal to build a regenerative agriculture project focused on market gardening, nutrient-dense food, and soil health. Meet The Farming Chefs! 👨‍🍳

🍅 In this episode, we cover:

How a no-dig market garden can out-yield bigger farms (with less work)
Why nutrient-dense food tastes better (and how it can restore your health)
How to integrate chickens and sheep to regenerate degraded grasslands
How to build a thriving herb garden from local cuttings… for free!
Why edutainment is a powerful tool to scale the regenerative movement

📌 LISTEN FOR:

🟢 15:32 – The aquatic plant that’s feeding chickens free protein

🌿 26:10 – Sophie’s 150+ plant herb garden

🍳 41:00 – Why chefs are the secret weapon of the regenerative movement

📣 47:45 – “Farmers deserve rockstar status. They’re regenerating our future.”

USEFUL LINKS:

❤️ This episode was produced in partnership with Soil Capital, a company that supports #regenerativeagriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve soil health & biodiversity.

Thank you for listening, all the best,

Raphaël

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome back to the Deep Seed Podcast. This week I am in quite a remote area of central Portugal to visit a couple known as the Farming Chefs. After both working as chefs in the Netherlands for a number of years, Philippe and Sophie decided to move to Italy where they started their own farm-to-table restaurant. They wanted to cook the best possible food and they knew that the key was quality ingredients. But they were struggling to find the quality they wanted so they decided to start growing their own vegetables and raise their own animals thus becoming the farming chefs. Eight years later having made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot from that first experience they decided to start a new chapter buying a five and a half hectare piece of land in Portugal in the region where Philip was originally from so going back to the roots and starting a new farm from scratch. That was about three years ago and this is the farm that I am visiting today. This episode was created in a video documentary format and I definitely recommend watching it on YouTube to better visualize everything we talk about. However, I adapted it in audio format to make sure that you can easily follow this conversation right here on streaming platforms. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I'm your host Raphael and this is the Deep Seat Podcast.
Speaker #1
Hello, we are the Farming Chefs. I'm Filip and this is my wife.
Speaker #2
I'm Sophie, very nice to meet you. So of course the question what do we do here on this farm? We are the Farming Chefs and so the name says it. We are both farmers and chefs. We come from the kitchen and in this latest venture of ours we operate in the space of what we would like to describe as edutainment where we try to educate in an entertaining fashion on our functioning regenerative farm which we use as a backdrop in order to teach people how to grow, cook, preserve. choose and consume nutrient-dense food from regenerative farms. All right, so we have a five and a half hectare farm. It's really wonderful because it has lots of different altitudes and little nooks and crannies, so lots of microclimates. Our productive side is the market garden, so we feed our local community with fresh veggies. And then we have other enterprises that are more in function of all the content creation and of the education, so that is basically our broilers and our laying hens, and then we have a small herd of sheep. We have a wonderful herb garden. What we are trying to do is to create a really resilient food system that will supply us mainly and of course the vegetable garden also our local community and then over time we progress into something even more productive. Our main objective is to regenerate the land and to create a really beautiful oasis for people to come and get inspired and learn about regenerative agriculture.
Speaker #0
Such a beautiful project, a beautiful dream.
Speaker #1
it's wonderful to live as well like it's a wonderful life again it's i think if people in urban areas would know how it is to live like this you guys were all coming here you know everybody was running to the countryside yes okay
Speaker #0
now that everyone has been introduced we can start the tour of the farm first up a place that is central and key to their system and operation here the market garden
Speaker #2
All right, so we're here in the market garden. This is Philippe's number one favorite place, I think, on the farm. Philippe is our master gardener. I also very much love it, by the way. I love standing here, especially in days like this when the sun is shining. We are growing fresh veg for our local community. We do that in a veggie box scheme. We have currently around 56 beds. We have another garden that we sometimes use, don't use. And we collaborate with some local farmers as well to add stuff in our boxes. But we mostly try to grow really fast turning crops in order to fill our boxes and people seem to love it because we're in a bit of a food desert I would say. In terms of you know locally sourced fresh available stuff it's not easy to find here especially not chemically free or regeneratively grown so our local community really appreciates us and we really enjoy growing for them.
Speaker #1
We really appreciate them too.
Speaker #2
We really appreciate them too. Love you guys. So yeah, we made the decision to mark a garden because when we set up our company, the Farming Chefs, we really knew that we had this skill and we were going to do it for the educational purposes. And then in our minds, it made sense if we're already going to be growing, we might as well also sell. And that is, you know, basically here what we're standing in the garden. On this farm, we have a more like we're limited by the amount of water we have on the farm. So I think like... if we had unlimited water, we would go probably a lot bigger still. But there's also, yes, only so many hours in a day and we've got already a lot of things going on. So also going bigger would mean more work. But I think, yeah, you asked me before as well, like, is this a lot of work? And I said sort of... semi-bragging like Philippe easily does this but I think that that's also really because of the techniques because what we're doing here is the classic no-dig market garden style so like J.M. Fortier, Charles Dowding, Richard Perkins there's many people that have inspired us to to grow like this and it's all about efficiency and using you know very minimal tools and intervention in a very efficient way and then you get to work a lot of land just with one man without any
Speaker #1
It's not even a lot of land, it's quite a short land, but it's highly productive land. So the turning is very fast. I think if you're going to measure it by kilos, we can produce much more kilos per square meter than any other big farm that you can imagine. All these small market gardens, they really crank the production up because that's what the economy brings after. It's like, don't get bigger land because you get more work.
Speaker #2
get smaller land and just intensely work it and yeah it works it's working what's the secret what's the process to getting your land so productive on a small good compost yeah good compost like having you know like we just said don't step on the beds we're sort of religious about that so having really nice loose soils um working on your fertility program we have our own compost set up We don't have a fully closed cycle, so we do actually still have to import some compost, but we hope to mitigate for that when we get a few more animals on the land. And just introducing a lot of microbiology. We have a compost tea set up. So we basically have a machine upstairs by the house. We pump our water from our sharkas up to the house, and there we inoculate it with all kinds of microbiology. We don't do that every time we irrigate, but we do that on a regular basis. And much TLC, tender love and care. Yeah,
Speaker #1
plans apparently also don't have a reactionary actions on the garden just take care of the problem before he exists so you will never have it like for example one of the most known things in no dig market garden is the weeding aspect of it just if you just pass your wire hose very early in the seasons when the weeds are very very tiny it takes you maybe half an hour to do all the garden and you will not have weeds but if you're going to wait until the weeds are big and and then you're going to weed it, it's going to take...
Speaker #2
a bunch of hours so just work it before it's happening this is sorry this is like a cue for me to start talking because this reminds me of the first farm that we had and we spent many times knees in the beginning when we didn't really know much about gardening yet and so i always like to joke like there will be no more kneading on our knees ever again and i think that no dick market gardening is really perfect for that because basically you do a lot of the work standing up And yeah, it just feels very efficient. Also, in terms of trying to make money growing veg, it's not easy. Like the margins are very low. So you have to be super efficient. And that's what we really like about this system.
Speaker #0
One thing I really like to do on the Deep Seed podcast is ask really basic questions. Because first of all, I think that going back to basics never hurts. But also, I want to make sure that those of you listening who are new to these topics can learn. these basic concepts so that as we get deeper and more technical into the conversations everyone can follow along so yeah the next question i asked was what do we mean by no dig or no-till farming do you want to take this you go you go so
Speaker #2
basically no-till is where you don't turn over the soil so you try to minimally interfere with your soil in order to respect all the microbiology that is living there so bacteria fungi your nematodes everything You just want a really thriving system where everything is alive and teeming with life. And basically when you till over your soil, you oftentimes are bringing certain organisms into earth layers where they actually don't belong. So there's not enough oxygen for them there or that's just not where they're supposed to thrive. There's not enough air, water or compaction in those things. So that kills it off. And it's actually... that microbiome that makes nutrients available to plant roots so if you constantly disturb that you're actually setting your system back and bringing up loads of weed seeds and stuff so yeah no till just means minimal disturbance really for the benefit of the soil health you just want to start this one like one bed yeah and you're starting from scratch what's the process So basically the first thing you want to do is clear your area and that means trying to get as much of the weeds and other plants because you know what's a weed what's not a weed a weed is just a plant that you don't want to grow there you need to get rid of that so the best way and most effective way is first the tarp and that means it's covering the ground so before that you might want to decompact that's maybe step number one depending on where you're going to start so if you're starting at a place where heavy machinery has passed many times you can check this by taking a stick and poking it down in the ground and if you start to feel compaction really you know very shallow or even if you you go lower and let's say 50 60 centimeters and you feel that there's a lot of compaction there because you can't push your stick through that means you have compaction down below and then you might want to take the intervention of just one time pulling through like a yoma plow or a ripper to take care of the compaction let's say so to basically to loosen it all up this means that plant roots will be able to grow deeper then you level it out because it's really nice to work in a level space then you tarp bit. with the tarping what you're doing is you're basically making all the weeds germinate and then die off again because they don't get sunlight once that has been done properly the timing of that depends a little bit on what you have growing if you have very invasive weeds and stuff you want to tarp for longer if not then you can do it for a little bit shorter but let's
Speaker #1
say like the best of the best one year is the perfect because you got all the seasons so you had the summer weeds coming.
Speaker #2
the winter weeds coming they both die and then you can start in the white clean sheet make sure that you can irrigate underneath because you also want to create some humidity so like you couldn't tarp just without irrigation in that scenario which is very long most people don't have a year so this this is like the long version then you can have the short version which the short version would be tarp as long however long you can tarp take the tarp off then you cover your area with carton like cardboard cardboard without let's ink and other types of treatments so as natural as you can find it and as thick as you can find it and then on top of that you layer your compost spaced at the space of your bed which ideally is like 75 centimeters then you have a path which is 40 centimeters this is for ergonomical stepping over and then i mean the higher you can go in terms of how thick you layer it the better we did about 15 centimeters at the onset and then you fill your paths up with wood chips this is to promote fungal life but also because when it rains and stuff you get to really nicely walk in your paths and then you're more or less ready to go what you then first want to do still is inoculate your compost with a lot of microbiology so we irrigate it with a lot of very um i want to say like lively water water that had a lot of life in it just to kick start that process and then immediately plant as many plants in here as you can because you want to have living roots in the soil because they basically bring sugar via their roots into the system and that then jump starts that whole beautiful process so um what's the format that you sell those vegetables in can people pick or order individual vegetables to use the boxes how does it work it's a really good question because i feel like that's like a big thing in the market gardening world and also obviously Everything is super context related and our context is that we're in a very rural place, which is unfortunately not like the most rich area of Portugal. So you always work within the context. If you're closer to the city, then doing it by the kilo or by the bunch and everything is quite a good way to go about it. In our context, what we do is a weekly veggie box and people basically opt in because they like the idea that it's varied and that it's seasonal and that you get... you know you get to choose if you don't want to participate or not but you sort of agree with what is in the box um so we're a little bit less flexible like that that's also because of our setup and because we have you know our digital format as well so we want to provide our community with with food but at the same time also we don't want to over complicate and with our water situation this is like the best way to get good variety and a steady output without it being like, okay, everybody bought all the carrots and then some people don't have carrots because we're not huge, right? We're not a huge market garden that can basically provide everybody to have their specific choices, wishes, yeah, abide by, or I don't know how you would say that. But I also think that that is a key selling point because actually that's the feedback we get from a lot of people, which is that they like the surprise box and that they like to sort of be inspired by the ingredients. and then to cook with it. And I think we can get away with that much easier here in the countryside than maybe you would be in the city. That's just my, you know, sort of take on things.
Speaker #0
While we were recording this conversation, standing in the middle of the market garden, I noticed at the back that some of the beds were completely covered with cover crops. So we went to sit next to these beds, and I asked them to tell me more about these cover crops and how they integrate them into their rotation.
Speaker #2
Yeah, you asked me if we do anything specifically for the soil. And I thought you were talking about like, you know, like production crops, like cash crops. But I forgot to mention that we, of course, also cover crop. So we try to have living roots in the soil at all times and just to really enhance our soil biology by living plants. So we do that as often as we can. It's always a bit tricky because, of course, when you put a cover crop in, it's like you're in some way losing that productive time in the bed. But then what you get back is really incredible. and So we found that, you know, cover cropping with things like legumes or veg or rye and things are really beneficial for the soil and that yields afterwards really increase. So that's part of our cycle and it's always still a bit of a work in progress on how to rotate it well. I don't think we're experts at that yet, but I think we're doing a good job at trying to.
Speaker #1
Well, we didn't do no soil analysis, but all the nitrogen fixes are the plants that you want to use as cover crops because they fixate your nitrogen on the soil. So that's, how do we know that when it's time, when it's flower, it's the best time for it. It's when it's at its highest as nitrogen. So it's when it has the flowers, it's time. You don't let the flowers become fruit. You just, on that time, you just cut the plant and you just, a lot of people turn it into the bed. What we are trying to do is just cutting it, laying down. and just put a thin layer of compost on top and leave it like that. Yeah. And yeah.
Speaker #0
This slowly decomposes, but I guess then you need to wait a little bit until you can plant your next bed.
Speaker #2
It's always a bit tricky on what you're going to plant in next. So like if you can plant something right into it, something big like, you know, you could do pumpkin or cabbage or something like something that is quite sturdy, like one plant. Obviously, direct seeding then becomes very tricky because that's best done in super fine compost. So that's always a bit the way off. And no, we didn't do any soil analysis. Of course, if you get really into it, I'm very geeky about all the levels and the pHs and stuff, you can get really into it. That's not really the way we farm. We have quite a holistic sort of intuitive way of farming where we just observe the system and we see what works and doesn't work. And coming here to this new climate has been really interesting. But we always start a bit off with cover crops. So, for instance, this is the newest part of the garden. So before we start producing in here, we'll cover crop it then plant into it afterwards and then try to bring in one cover crop annually in each bed sometimes we have to be honest we like you know prolong the season a little longer just because we need a lot of production um but yeah we try to just find times in the year could be spring could be autumn could be winter like we can grow all year round here so we just find a moment in the year what's like the
Speaker #1
sort of biggest mistake you used to make as a market gardener that you've learned not to make anymore till i used to we used when we started farming we used to we wanted we started by doing organic but then in the conventional with the conventional methods and very soon in three months we just we said like this doesn't work like this you know our methods have to be different also just just being organic and using the conventional way it it doesn't like tilling and it doesn't It doesn't help nobody, it's not helping us, just creating more work, so it has to be more than that. So then we started looking for and we came to.
Speaker #2
We had a very big epiphany moment in this sense because we used to use the rotor plow, you know, just the walk after tractor. Rotortiller, yeah. And we just did a lot of weeding, we were farming in heavy clay, so also like the water management on the farm was terrible. We didn't have nice wooden paths, so when it got wet it got like really... hard to work and all the clay would stick to your boots and even working the machinery would be really difficult to find like exactly right time in the year and then we had a very big amount of What was it? What's that? It's not a cow. It's from the mozzarella. I'm forgetting it. The Buffalo manure So we had a friend that had an organic Buffalo farm and he just was like Oh, I can bring you a great amount of this Buffalo manure And then we let that decompose for a whole year and we used that as like a really heavy compost on some of the beds and then we accidentally sort of did this no dig yeah and then we stumbled upon it of course also online and that's when it changed and we just changed our complete perspective on it like oh we don't really want to be using the machines and we just really want to feed the soil life as before we were just thinking in terms of not using chemicals and being organic like wanting to respect the environment but not really understanding the fertility cycle well and not understanding that it was actually like the microbiology in the soil feeding the plants. So we very much had this naive that shows that we didn't have it back. and it was when we started composting and using less of the machinery.
Speaker #1
After the first year that we just had plowed everything like everybody does and everybody told us to do and that's the way you should have done but after we did it and plant the first plants on the beds we saw that with the first rainfalls everything went away because we were in the quite I don't know the percentage of the inclination but it was quite a steep slope so we found out very quickly that this cannot be like this because all the good soil ends up by the river on the bottom so that's the first change that we did was living pads that was one of the best things that we did there so here we do wheat chips because it's very hot uh but in italy we just had a living pad just grass around clover we just uh yeah and that would hold the whole garden nothing you could go in the winter in rainfall and you walk on top of that five ten centimeter clover and it would be like dry would be it was great and it hold the whole Garden in place, the soil in place. That was the first big change. And then it was like, why are we rototilling the beds then? We shouldn't rototill the beds too. So then we started, okay, let's instead of rototill the compost, we're going to lay up the compost on top. And that was it. never went back again.
Speaker #2
And also I think that that's when we started getting into the whole idea of no dig and you know not plowing and of course you know there's a scale where that works really well and we've always been small to medium size like our last farm was much bigger than this in terms of production for gardening but we used to see where we lived in Italy was a lot of grain and a lot of sunflower production so every year like they plow it at least two times and when we then have rain all the streets are just like covered in topsoil so you just have this massive wash off and i feel like that really also changed our perspective on everything when we started learning about it and we started seeing like all the damage that was being done that before we were blind to it and it's sort of that that classic feeling of getting friends over and driving through beautiful green landscapes and everybody's like oh this is so beautiful and then you're sort of looking at it like this is so destructive you know like it's a road it was green and green and people thought oh so natural. Yeah, not natural. And I think like that's, yeah, I hope that we with the farming chefs also just spread that message, you know, the importance of topsoil and like to prevent erosion and to use, you know, to treat our land as this sacred, you know, resource that we have that is basically the source of all our food and that we should be really appreciative of it and let all that life flourish and not kill it off and have it washed away with every rainfall, with every, you know, blow away with every wind event.
Speaker #1
let's keep the soil in place one last question about this what's your favorite source of information and inspiration about market gardening here in portugal we have a whatsapp group with all market gardeners and it's an amazing community we were talking about this yesterday and it's one of the parts that i like more that we are very different from any other industry because we will share every information possible that we have with our colleagues and that's something very special
Speaker #2
in this area that's amazing i guess it's really important so it's a feel that you're very you people doing totally very important you're not alone yeah i think it's a very strong uh general sense like in terms of the energy that you get when you get a lot of people that are operating in this regenerative space that have a clear vision of you know basically improving the place that they're farming and leaving it better for the next generation i think you share a very strong common value. and i think everybody that works the natural system let's say knows that it's not always easy so it's good to to have this community of people and sharing sort of secrets and tips and tricks and like how how do you do this where do you buy that um you know what are what are your grand successes what are your grand fails and stuff and that's nice and that is true tulip saying i think that that is a special sort of energy that lives within this community which is really energizing
Speaker #0
So This closes our chapter on the market garden. We then walked over to another part of the farm, a beautiful meadow with big old olive trees and really lush grass full of diverse plant species and flowers.
Speaker #2
So yeah, we're sitting in our meadow and it's a beautiful moment to maybe discuss a little bit the animal integration that we do on the farm. We are very consciously trying to restore the soils here on this farm by using animals as a tool and so we have a small herd of sheep and we graze them rotationally on our farm in very small paddocks. We try to just very intensively graze them in order to fertilize the land and eat the grass and capture the carbon out of the air into the soil. via the root systems and then we also have behind us they're not beautiful to look at but they're the the chicken tractors so we do have a little production of broilers which are meat chickens and eggs egg producing chickens so laying hens they are more for our home consumption so they're very small herds but what we basically do is we graze them through the field in order to use them as fertilizers. That sounds weird.
Speaker #1
Pest controlers.
Speaker #2
In order to use them to fertilize the land and to increase our grass production, which then eventually will increase our meat production. So we very much like to think of it as that we're farming grass and then whatever gets to live on that grass brings us yields in terms of meat or eggs. And that's what we're trying to achieve here. It's a very basic setup. It is like a super, super low cost structure that just provides shade and shelter. And you just move them manually. onto a new piece every day until they hit about halfway through their life cycle when they get a bit bigger and then you do it twice a day and so what happens is that they you know have their feces basically quite intensively manure one area and then you move along and then that takes time to decompose and then when you see that the grass has recovered to the point that it was or a little bit higher than it was before ideally you bring back the animals on the cycle and we graze our sheep first then and then we bring on the chickens
Speaker #0
Okay, so how do they work together? So you say you first graze with the sheep? Yeah. You let it grow back first or?
Speaker #2
Well, no, you can basically do that quite intensely after each other. So because you can get the benefit of all the animals that eat the manure of the sheep, that can also be sort of a feed for your chickens. So if you've timed it correctly, it's even better with cows, but we don't have cows.
Speaker #0
But they're actually complementary.
Speaker #1
Yes,
Speaker #2
they are complementary. Yes, indeed.
Speaker #1
So you have to imagine that you have 30, 40 centimeters of grass. And we will graze the sheep quite fast, one day basically, in a small space. They will bring that grass like about 10 centimeters height, so quite short. And after that we put the chickens. So the chickens will start eating the larvae that are created or that are raised.
Speaker #2
A week after more or less, because you want to time it so that the poop that has been... deposited by the sheep will then have like some eggs and maggots and you know there's sort of life coming to digest the poop and then you can have the benefit of especially with your laying hands it's nice for the egg quality to get some really live insects in there protein and then they of course leave their manure and then you leave it to rest that's very important the resting time because if you don't time the resting time correctly you could actually be degrading your grassland but what you're trying to do obviously is to to grow it stronger and to have ever more producing grass so it's important to give the plant really the time to recoup the its growth underground which will reflect in the growth above ground and then once you see like it's basically come back to the stage where you've had it at its peak you know then it's ready to be grazed again if you come back before that you're making it harder on the plant to come
Speaker #0
up over grazing it okay in the only three years since you've been here have you seen a change in the in the landscape
Speaker #1
I want to say yes.
Speaker #2
Yes, we have and you can see even like the amount of species that we find on the square meter has changed. We're not successful on all parts of the land yet because it's very much the time where you need to you need to monitor very well to understand the impact that you have on different parts of your farm. Because for instance we have some areas that have bedrock quite shallow so there's not a lot of topsoil there. And then we have other places like where we're sitting right now. where we actually have much deeper soil profile, where we have bigger layers of topsoil. So this is an easier part to regenerate because there's already quite a lot of life in the soil and that cycle is already functioning. On some more degraded pieces it's trickier because we deal with extremely hot summers, so I feel like it always takes a hit. So biology in the ground, especially on those spots where there's very little topsoil, it's just such a shallow layer and with the very high temperatures, you always get a big dip. in life in the soil which you then need to basically mitigate for again with your animal intervention and timing that correctly can be a little challenging also because we are you know a lot of our setup is manual so it all it's all about timing and there's a lot of things that we're doing so sometimes I think we try to just
Speaker #1
right before the summer I think at around end of May that nothing else is growing we try to let the sheep go everywhere and trample a little bit the grass because there's always like a 60% trampling of grazing animals. And that is great in our case because the trampling creates a layer that is covering the ground for the three months of summer that are coming that are very intensive. So it's not that it stays humid, but it keeps the life longer at play. So if it was completely grazed it will dry out very soon and it would be completely dead and just stone and sand. but with the animals passing and the trampling, that grass just covers our soil for the summer. In the place where we are, it brings a small problem that is the fire dangerous, the fire hazards. So we could have floor fires, that's what they call here, a floor fire, but we believe that the moist under will keep us away from that.
Speaker #2
And we try to secure more.
Speaker #1
Righto.
Speaker #2
And we try to work in terms of the parameter of the farm. So we basically, you know, here legally you're supposed to cut down all your brim and stuff. These are all the pioneer plants that are actually helping to restore soil. So there's something very counterintuitive to that. If you're a regenerative farmer, you don't want to be taking away all your pioneers constantly because they're actually the ones that are going to kickstart, you know, that whole cycle of regeneration. So a lot of neighbors frown upon us because they're like, oh, you don't mow your land. You don't plow everything. You know, it's sort of... We're using methods here that aren't conventional in this setting. And that also, you know, some of them are, there have been many forest fires. So I also understand why people are doing that. But the way we mitigate for that is by trying to really secure a parameter. And then we are obviously banking on being able better than others in the area, maybe to capture a lot of the water in the soil and have much more resistance against forest fires. And yeah, well, we have water in many areas.
Speaker #0
areas of our farms if there would be a problem we could you know hopefully take care of it very quickly before we move on to the next part of this farm visit let me take just a really short break to tell you about the official partner of the deep seed podcast and that's soil capital one of the biggest levers to enable farmers to transition towards regenerative agriculture is financial incentives and that's essentially what soil capital does They financially reward farmers who improve things like soil health and biodiversity. They're an amazing company. I love what they're doing and I'm super proud to be partnering with them for the podcast.
Speaker #1
So,
Speaker #0
Filip, could you explain what you're doing here?
Speaker #1
So we're using this natural resource that we have here. And it's this kind of water trifoli. I don't know exactly the name of this plant, but... This plant is 40% protein of its own weight and it grows 75% of its size daily. So it's something that you can come here every day and the next day you always have the same thing. And this is chicken, we use this as chicken feed right now. But it can be used at any feed, chicken feed, pig feed, sheep feed. And we use this just so we minimize the amount of bought feed that we have to give to the chickens. and it's a nice natural resource that we have here at the farm so uh so it just produces fresh protein protein every day of course this has to be a fresh water source so there's a source of water under this well it's not just a well from the top that the water comes from the top there's a source there that makes that these wells can produce this uh this plant this aquatic plant that it's a great resource
Speaker #0
Do you know the name of that plant?
Speaker #1
I don't know the name, but I can check for you upstairs.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
I've seen an American guy using this to feed their pigs and they made an analysis to the meat. And the analysis from the lab came out that those pigs had a certain amount of omega-3 in the meat. That's very rare because omega-3 you find it in fish. But with feeding this to the animals, they just get that intake of it. And yeah, you spare money, you get healthy animals. And it takes very little time of your day to do this. Not even five minutes. And we have here around a kilo of this thing. So probably we have around 300 to 400 grams of protein here. Free protein for chickens. Let's go give them. So we're at the orchard and at the orchard we let the layers run through. We have everything by rows so we would let the every three days I'll move the net with around 25 layers and we have a little chicken tractor that has no bottom that allows that the poo falls down directly to the floor every time. So what we do is we move that car between the rows of the trees and we try to park the car. right next to every tree, so every night there's a discharge of chicken poo, chicken manure into that tree, and so we're trying to... every tree gets one day of discharge and we run this, all these rows let's say it, and these rows are about 90 days time to come back to the same place where we were, so you can see it's beautiful green The chickens were here before, you can see it's a little bit bare, but you can see the result behind you, that's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker #0
so you're using the chicken manure as fertilizer for your young trees that you're growing here in this orchard.
Speaker #1
Yes, and another thing that the chickens also do very good is the trampling from the grasses, and because we're in central Portugal it's very dry Very hot. and the part of the trembling becomes very important because you're just covering your soil with grasses and the chickens do that like amazing they will scratch a few spots but they will trample a lot and basically it's a protection layer for for the soil awesome and you're gonna be moving the chickens now let's move the net let's move the chickens and uh right it's a easy easy job let's go so
Speaker #0
how many chickens do you have and
Speaker #1
25 right now.
Speaker #0
And so how many square meters do you have per chicken? Is there some kind of like calculation that you need to follow?
Speaker #1
Square meters? No, it's... You have to see how much impact are the chickens creating into the soil. So you could have a hundred chickens in this space, but you would have to move it three times a day, for example. So we have 25 chickens. in the 50 meter fence and normally it's three days time for each pet okay you look at the floor you see how trample it is how how does it look like okay so you move them every three days and because you figured out that this is the right amount of time for this amount of chickens yeah yeah yeah so the car moves three times inside the same pen so it starts there tomorrow we'll be here and After tomorrow we'll be there. And then the day after we move the net and he goes to the next one. So the car walks slowly inside the pen itself. So it has also to do how is your floor, how is your fauna, let's say on the on the ground, because if it's already quite bare, you don't want to let the chickens so long in it. So when it's like this nice and height, like as a good height, the three days are perfect. and the chickens are happy they have fresh food yeah you can look at them you taste the eggs so yeah yeah the eggs are delicious you can see good with the by the feathers of the chickens you know they're not being packed so there's very low stress into these chickens that's one a sign of stress is like chickens packing on chickens and then you start to see like chickens with the back completely clean like no feathers that's a very big sign of stress in the in the pack of these chickens but you can see here there's like yeah they're just they're just very healthy they're just very very how does the system benefit both the landscape and the chickens well the chickens you can see you know they give you eggs that's the plus of what we're doing here what's more important here for us is actually the soil itself and we can see we've been here for three years. And we can see this pasture that just has layers on it. It doesn't have broilers or it doesn't have sheep on it. It's just layers. And I think layers are one of the animals in the farm that have a greater impact to your soil. Because they just trample a lot. A lot of people say, oh, it's a waste of your... beautiful grass but it's not a waste because it will come to you eventually again into the fruits into the fruit trees into the fauna that you have here so yeah they're a very important part of the of our system the layers so
Speaker #0
you just moved them here to this new patch like minutes ago and they seem so excited they're running around it's like a
Speaker #1
you know easter egg chasing hunting yeah that thing right it's because they're they're hunting for fresh insects and all fresh things you can see that i put the food there yeah but just a few have quite interest on it all the rest they just go like oh my god this is a new paradise look at this yeah so my favorite food is is what like uh bugs bugs bugs bugs yeah chickens are like small t-rexes they are very aggressive and very powerful you know like if this animal would be a little bit bigger would be man would be a problem for us a problem for humanity uh and they are fiercely they will scratch and eat all animals are you flies you see them sometimes jumping to catch like butterflies or stuff like this so yeah animals that's where they source their amount of protein so no i think normally a chicken would eat around 150 grams of feed a day We give around 70, 60, 70 grams because the rest comes from here and also with the supercharged grass from the well. We don't need to give more and they lay perfectly. They lay around 80% of the number that they are.
Speaker #0
How long ago did you plant your trees here in this area?
Speaker #1
Two years ago.
Speaker #0
Two years ago?
Speaker #1
Two years ago.
Speaker #0
Like you can see they're already quite big and healthy.
Speaker #1
Yeah, and they've already been attacked. by sheep more than once so it was a little a small setback uh that's why we also decided okay let's not put cheap here anymore for the first few years just have the layers so let the tree grow without no uh attack sheep attack because it's devastating for me and for the trees itself okay
Speaker #0
So after Philip finished moving and feeding the chickens, we went back to the main house to meet again with Sophie. Surrounding the side of the house, there is a beautiful, lush, vibrant herb garden. We sat there with Sophie to talk about this herb garden. So we're sitting now in your beautiful herb garden. It's just surrounding the house. It's beautiful. It's full of colors, of smells. And it's really something that I wanted to talk about with you. So maybe you could give us an overview of what's going on here.
Speaker #2
Indeed, this is like a little sanctuary that is embracing the house. And that's how we designed it, how we built it. And it's an oasis of plants. There's so much diversity in this garden. And it brings me, of course, lots of delicious culinary herbs and some medicinal. But it also just brings me lots of joy. So I always like showing this garden when people come and visit. It's a place where pollinators come to thrive, where we come to harvest for the kitchen. And I think it's just a really great testament to how well plants thrive when they are planted together and when they are competing and working together. And sort of that beautiful synergy between some struggle and aid and everything is just flourishing here. We were talking earlier a little bit about how this... garden came to be if I was seeding it from seed or if I was doing it from cuttings. And I was telling you this story about, you know, the vigor of life and how strong plants actually are, which is in a testament to Philippe's mother who showed me some very unconventional planting techniques. So most of the plants here that are able to propagate from cuttings were brought to me by Philippe's mom or I harvested them here in the area and we just mob planted, seeded. did everything here and everything just took. And that was done in a very rough manner. So before I was much more careful in the way I planted things and transplanted things. But I found out that you can be really, you know, quite harsh with them. And the life force is just so strong that things grow. And I think that that is just another great testament to nature's force and life force. Yeah.
Speaker #0
How many different plants would you say you have here in this garden?
Speaker #2
You know that I've never counted them. but I would say definitely over a 100, 150 maybe. And a lot of them are culinary, but also there's quite some ornamentals here. I never used to grow any ornamentals. I was very much in the mindset of productivity. And as I get older, I think there's much to be said for beauty and surrounding yourself with beautiful things because they're also very good for the spirit. Some of them, I don't even know the name because Philippe's mom brought them. But many of them of course are also culinary and edible flowers, delicious, fragrant, aromatics.
Speaker #0
a very wide variety indeed i will count them now after you ask me this question yeah okay so yeah you said that a lot of it you've found from local areas where you found some herbs and plants that you were interested in you just took some cuttings and then just yeah came back put them in the ground yeah and let them grow i think that's a really great thing to do because uh first of all if you're doing it in your local area the chances that the thing will thrive is you know are very big and
Speaker #2
also i found that most people that like gardening and that have very nice gardens they're really into this idea of sharing. So for instance, if people come here for a course, I always have them leave with a bag of whatever they want from the herb garden. People can just pick and choose and whatever will survive after propagation. We just dig out a bit or break off some branches because things regrow really fast. It's a great way to start a herb garden is you don't need a lot of money and you don't need to buy everything in a garden center. You just need to go somewhere that somebody is already doing it. Just smile at that person and be like. do you want to share some of your plants with me and most people that like planting they will so i think that's just a nice community has anyone ever said no to that no nobody has ever said no to that i think that with a good smile and you know some enthusiasm most people will happily
Speaker #0
share with you it's uh it's a lot cooler than collecting pokemons isn't it like yeah it's it's really a fun way also to keep your eyes open when you're walking around or when you're visiting someone else's garden and be like, oh, that's a very nice herb that I would love to add or a flower or something.
Speaker #2
Definitely. And totally. And also what's really nice is if you're a bit like towards the end of summer, a lot of things obviously are already in seed and sometimes you'll walk past something and it'll just look weird, but you won't know what the flower looks like yet. And then you'll collect the seed and then it's sort of like a surprise. I have lots of envelopes of seeds that I don't remember where I took them or what they are. And then it's sort of like this wonderful surprise. You just look at it and think, shall we try this? Yes, let's put it there. And the only thing I wouldn't do that with is if it's really strong, big climbers that get very woody, because just popping those anywhere wouldn't work out. But most annual plants, especially flowers, are really great because it's sort of like a surprise waiting for you to happen in a few months' time. And you see it grow and it's like, ooh, what kind of flower will it be? So yeah, I like that.
Speaker #0
After this, we followed Sophie around the farm as she was collecting a lot of different ingredients for dinner. She then invited us into her kitchen and while she was cooking, we had a really nice chat about food, about the relationship between soil health and ingredient quality and about nutrient density. You started as a chef.
Speaker #1
We already discussed this at the beginning of the video.
Speaker #2
We did.
Speaker #0
Right? You then opened a restaurant, like Métodie, a palm-to-table layered restaurant.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Do you still cook food professionally for a living?
Speaker #2
Right now we're actually at a very interesting stage where we are still cooking professionally, but not directly for the public unless it's for courses and stuff. So we do it now for the content creation, which has been a shift in our way of cooking, which has been interesting. And this moment is no different like we're standing here in our professional kitchen where we do a lot of filming and it's really it's fun having you guys here and doing it for once so i'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out um yeah so we do cook professionally but not for a restaurant and uh it's been uh much calmer yeah
Speaker #0
so how different is food that you buy from the supermarket to the food that you grow yourself here in the nordic Garden.
Speaker #2
It's cannot compare guys. It's like apples and pears, you know, you're comparing two things that should not be compared. Well, of course It's sort of funny because I think the first time that I realized the difference between something Tasting so different depending on where it came from was when I was working in soup and so as these are the last bosses that I ever had basically when I was working for somebody else and we were writing this cookbook transforming their recipes and me and this other chef who were just like what makes this soup delicious like how much gram of this spice and we were trying to like scientifically figure out like what made a really good pumpkin soup right so we did all these trials and then in the end it just came down to like it's all about the pumpkin like if it's a nice pumpkin it's going to be a nice soup if it's a shitty pumpkin you know it's going to be less nice right and that was the first moment where I sort of thought like yeah where does actually all this food come from like we just order it comes into a box, you open the back door of the restaurant, bring it in, and every day you order more or less the same ingredients depending on where you're working. But basically you're just like one salad isn't the other, right? And that was like this moment where I started to think about like where does it come from and does it make a big difference? And it does. So I think the biggest difference is obviously taste, but also health because you're not eating chemicals and all those, you know, great benefits that you're not poisoning your body with poisons. But if you're going the hedonistic route, I think it's really about how nutrient dense it is, and also about just the general flavor profile of things. So I think that's the biggest game changer for anybody that loves to cook. It's that you can compare them side by side, and there is a very big difference in the flavor.
Speaker #0
Okay. What do you think about the topic of nutrient density? Just the fact that we are finding out more and more that food grown in a healthy soil with a healthy microbiome in the soil is actually more nutrient dense. So between the carrots that has been mass produced in a very intensive way that you buy at the supermarket or the one that you grow in your soil here, you will have a massive difference in terms of how much nutrient the carrots holds.
Speaker #2
I find that such an interesting topic and we both know Dan Kittredge who's basically like a big advocate for this and showing you know the difference in the nutrient density profiles and like how that is related to soil health. So I think that that is just like it's super fascinating. It also is something that we've had as a physical on-site feedback loop of eating the food that we produce, where it's like you taste the difference so clearly between a store-bought tomato and a tomato that you pick off the vine on your... you know, regenerative organic farm. As a chef, I can only say what a great attribute that it's not only nutrient dense, it's not only healthy, but it's also tasty. Like those to me, when they go hand in hand, it's like a win-win for everybody, right? Because if somebody was telling you, you need to eat these nutrient dense veggies, but you're just like, I don't like veggies and they're not that tasty. And now it's sort of like, okay, you get to eat a carrot, but that carrot will also taste better than the average carrot that you're maybe used to. So for me, it's, yeah, it's one of those things that it's a win-win. A win-win and you know.
Speaker #0
Tasting density and taste go hand in hand.
Speaker #2
Yes.
Speaker #0
Actually related.
Speaker #2
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the flavor profile.
Speaker #0
is actually better, right? If you have a more nutrient-dense carrot, it shows that it's shown scientifically that they taste better. And I think it's an exciting prospect that there's going to be a tool for us as consumers to basically check, like scan our ingredients at the supermarket or at the farmer's market or at your local farmer and just see like, is this actually like a very nutrient-dense product or is it just, does it look, you know, every carrot looks the same to the consumer, but inside they're not the same. And I have great hopes that if we're sort of empowered with this tool, that that's going to change a lot of, you know, it's going to change the game. And I'm looking forward to that moment. Yeah, sure.
Speaker #1
Okay, so we're now moving on to the very last part of this episode. And Sophie and I put out some chairs outside of the house in a beautiful spot overlooking the whole farm. And we had a bit of a longer... kind of conversation. I would say a bit more in the classic podcast style. So we talk about a lot of things, including the business model, the education part, and then also a more personal conversation about what it's like to live on a farm, to raise children on a farm, and a few other things as well. So at the start of the conversation, you told me that a big part of what you're trying to create here is about education, and we haven't really spoken about it yet, so I would love for to tell me more.
Speaker #0
Wonderful, I'm really happy to talk about it as well. Yes, it is actually, I would say, the main thing of what we're trying to do here, and that is sort of like raise awareness and that, as I said before, I'm calling it sort of edutainment because I think it's always fun to learn through storytelling. It's also why we chose sort of YouTube as a medium to, you know, get videos out there and to draw attention to the regenerative movement. It's also one of the ways where I feel like our sort of, of in-house people, planet profit. could get into balance where it's like I really strongly believe that it shouldn't all be about economy or all be about personal interests or all be about the impact or it should be you know how you can bring your own skill set together and make money that way while also having purpose and doing something good for the planet and I feel like this model that we've created does all three of those things because we get to live a really yeah meaningful and yeah I want to say healing, but that sounds as if we're sick, but sort of nurturing existence in this beautiful place. Like you've been here now. I hope you can attest to sort of the feel here. You know, it's really calm and peaceful and beautiful. And we get to create this space that is going to over time just become more productive. So from a personal perspective of where you want to raise a family, this is a really great location. And it's also a really great location to teach from. So to get people involved and show them, you know, all the different plants and how you can grow and how you can cook. And These are these basic things that people do, I mean, especially the cooking. Every day, right, you're every day making a choice when you buy something in the supermarket. Every time you put something in your mouth, it's like a political act, basically. And I felt that combining education with this farming and cooking is just bringing our skill set together. So what we try to do is empower people to cook with regeneratively grown produce. to grow it as well and a lot of people think when they hear like learn how to grow your own food like grow all of your food that's not necessarily the aim it's more to yeah encourage people to take back a little bit of control over their food system and experience
Speaker #1
the joy of cooking some of your own food really amazing um and so that education comes in different forms because you mentioned the youtube channel you've been doing so you spend a lot of time trying to educate people online about farming about cooking about
Speaker #0
a lot of things right yes and then there's also a physical uh version of that where people come here and you teach people how does that work yeah well i i so i'm a very big advocate for in-person events like i love the digital space when it's used sort of for good right social media can be very toxic but i also think that there's a lot of really great information out there you're an example where basically you get to find like really good information and really inspirational stories so i think that the digital space is great for growth and for scaling um But I also very much am a social creature. Like I like to connect. I like to talk. I like to get the instant feedback at which sometimes the internet is like less capable, right? To give you that instant feedback of what do people really think about this? Maybe you'll get the extreme haters or you get the extreme people that are really, you know, supportive and positive. But there's also just a large part of the population that watches and doesn't say anything but thinks something. But you don't really get that feedback. And so... I always wanted to combine the two and have people come to the farm and take courses here also because it's a much better indicator for you as the person creating the educational content to get like good feedback on what are people really looking for like what are their struggles what are their you know what are their wants and then you can better cater to them so okay yeah so what what What form does it take?
Speaker #1
Is it people come... For regular lessons? Is it a sort of a camp where they come for a whole week?
Speaker #0
So currently we have the format, we have basically the growing part made now. So there's more education on the way, let's say. But what we have live right now, of course, is around growing. And so basically helping people to set up their little vegetable plots and sort of food systems. And you can come do that in one day workshops or you can do that in a two day workshop. So some of them are more geared towards like one specific part of it so for instance composting or how you take care of your seedlings and stuff or garden design for instance and then we have a two-day course which is super intensive and it sort of like hits all the you know it hits all the parts that are important for you to successfully grow vegetables regeneratively so there's a module that starts out with your holistic vision and sort of takes you all the way through to how to design and what drives fertility and then you know basically like crop planning more of the technical aspects of it and then you get access to our digital course so we do have a digital course as well which is basically an add-on for the inside or you can take it on your own at home anywhere in the world whenever you want and then you know learn that way awesome
Speaker #1
so yeah messages out there for people who are interested in learning more about starting their own market garden yeah and what about cooking are there cooking lessons they're gonna come
Speaker #0
They are. We have a lot of tutorials out there right now about growing and about cooking. And for the growing, we've got our digital product set up and of course our onsite events. And then for the cooking, we're working on that. We are of course also cooking for some onsite events that we host where we have farm tours. So if you want to come enjoy our food, you could come visit a farm tour. And there are tutorials out there, but there's no in-person cooking currently happening. There will be in September and stuff. So if you're into that, then check out our website, I'm sure.
Speaker #1
So how do you bring all of these different elements into your business model? Because there's the market garden, the growing of food, the regenerating the ecosystem, the chickens, there's the education part. How does all of that come together and how does your economic model work?
Speaker #0
Wonderful, that's a good question. I just wanted to also just draw back to one thing you said before, where you said you want to learn people how to market garden. Of course, it's very much what we do. So we do show people a lot of those techniques, but Our courses are also very much geared towards people just wanting to grow for themselves. So it's like basically the average consumer and then people who might want to market garden, they take our courses as well. But maybe there are people in the space of like becoming a professional market gardener that are like Jean-Martin Fortier or other people that are really geared towards the business side of things. I think we are very much geared towards people that are looking to give their own gardens a useful purpose. So we're more in the consumer section, I would say. And as for our business model, which is a really great question because we have a lot of stuff going on. So I would say that we sort of have two business running alongside each other and that our place serves as both the backdrop for the education and there are certain aspects to our farm that aren't necessarily needing to be profitable on their own as a singular enterprise. Like I was explaining to you, for instance, the chickens that, you know, it's more for just. us regenerating the land and for the eggs and then using that for the content and for the videography and education the same goes for like our sheep and our our broilers so we see them as parts of the regeneration tool but not necessarily as you know we're making money from selling eggs for instance right um philippe is very much the gardener of the two of us and i'm much more more the storyteller. So I think we found a really great way to combine two businesses alongside each other and take the benefit of both. And so if you see them as a zero, as individual entities, I would say that our main focus is on the content and the digital creation. And then our market garden is working in function, but obviously needs to generate an income. But it's not something that we necessarily want to scale to great lengths, let's say. Okay.
Speaker #1
And so you managed to make it work at the moment with the income from the market garden on one side and the courses and education part of the operation?
Speaker #0
Yes, well, we are obviously still only in the second year and we have had to invest quite a lot in terms of getting the system up and running. But yes, things are looking very positive, like growth is going strong and we have our KPIs to reach in a couple of years. So I would say that we are managing to make it work. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker #1
What's the long term vision? Like maybe 10 years from now, how do you imagine this place being like and how do you imagine also the model?
Speaker #0
Yeah. Well, in 10 years time, I hope that we're standing in this, you know, location with everything that we've implemented. Having, you know, like I would say. having great impact and success so that our fertility levels have gone up. We can have more animals on the land. Our trees are thriving. We are still supplying our local community with food because that is definitely one of Philippe's purpose driven desire for his life. Like he loves to grow. He loves to grow plants. He loves to garden. He loves to be outdoors. So I envision us doing that. As for the digital side, I think that If we are successful, a lot of people will know who the farming chefs are, and a lot of people will associate that with a very positive influence that has had on their daily lives in terms of what they do in their kitchens. So I hope that we have inspired many, many people to buy organic, regeneratively grown local food. And I hope we have inspired many people to feel that they are also capable of growing some of their own food. How that will evolve in 10 years' time, I think that there will be many spin-offs and many different types of courses and areas to explore. or also... showcasing other successful regenerative projects is something that I'm very passionate about. We did a mini series and I would love to get out on the road also and sort of go beyond this location and I see it as a wonderful home base.
Speaker #1
It's amazing so you're really really passionate about trying to obviously to have an impact on the land that you own here and you're doing something amazing here I believe but also beyond that yes trying to reach a lot of people online. through courses through going to visit other farms yourselves to try and get the knowledge out there to to get people inspired about uh about farming about regenerating about community and all these things right exactly i think the storytelling is super important i feel like that's where there's a lot of um room
Speaker #0
still in in our movement like when i feel like we're in this early adaption phase that we discussed earlier and i feel this need to to tell the story like i feel something burning inside of me that is just like guys this is so great like everybody needs to look over here and not I don't mean here like our farm but I mean like hey regenerative ag is amazing look at all these small farmers that are doing a great job I feel that because we know a lot of you know small farmers we've been small small skill farmers for a long time now and I sort of feel like uh yeah farmers need to get to this sort of rock star status not for the personal fame but for the sake of sort of, you know, the... the respect that the job deserves and the support that it should receive from the community, from the local community. So yeah, there's maybe a little bit of a missionary in me. And I also think that there is a really strong case to be made that, you know, as love and relationship goes through the stomach, I also think that change in the world can come via like the kitchen, if you will. And I think that's a unique perspective we bring. and it's a fun one. I think people like food and like cooking and like good stories and I think I think we have all of those do you miss the sort of chefing life and having your own restaurant yeah well I don't flip dust like I think if it was up to Philippe we would probably be opening a restaurant like tomorrow but I sort of trying to I'm trying to hold that off a little bit because of the family aspect and Yeah, and sort of the... Yeah, as I said before, it's sort of what you want from your personal life. And I feel that even though restaurants, you know, it's a super satisfactory job because you get to perform every day. It's a high stress. When you succeed, you know, you get the room full. You serve everybody great food. Everybody goes home. You have that feeling of. a victory and that happens over and over again and maybe sometimes you have a bad night but most of the time you just have this constant feedback loop of like success success and that's really really empowering and i think philippe also thrives under this adrenaline kick um but from my perspective as a mom you know i sort of see how hard it is on family life and so i always joke that we'll do it maybe when the kids can do some dishes yeah but i can understand how like
Speaker #1
Well, my dad was a chef. I worked in a lot of kitchens in my younger years.
Speaker #0
Yeah, so you know.
Speaker #1
And I know that it's a very tough life. And it's very tough in terms of working evenings and weekends. And for your family life, it must be very difficult.
Speaker #0
It's always when the kids are free, you're working. So it's sort of like you don't get to see your kids anymore. You know, because it is like holidays. You're at your busiest. Christmas, you're at your busiest. Weekends, you're at your busiest. So it's always sort of that you sacrifice to some extent family life for that. And there are many great chefs that are doing that. I think that, you know, we're lucky that we get to eat really nice food and that people are sort of, I don't want to say sacrificing their families because I'm sure that they'll find a way to make that work. But for me personally, I just felt like it was...
Speaker #1
Fair enough. Is there maybe...
Speaker #0
a way you could reintegrate the cooking and the chefing into your business model without being you know a full-time restaurant high intensity high stress yeah it can be like a pop-up you know we we discuss this quite often like in summertime doing more events and things and that is definitely in the books but i don't know if i would call that restaurant you know what i mean like it is but it isn't in it's not the same it would never take the same form as it did yeah i i really love I love it when I see these pictures online of these
Speaker #1
tables put out. in the farm or in the vineyards in the summers beautiful table i feel like people are looking for experiences that's something magical that you get to do i think there will be a man for that i'm sure you could do something really cool yeah i know and it will happen like it definitely is in the books maybe maybe in
Speaker #0
my mind maybe because we've ran like a super busy restaurant life i'm just thinking like i don't know can we call that a restaurant can i get away with calling that restaurant life but yeah definitely like having really nice food events is like super super nice and especially what you were saying. Like here we could just put up tables in the field and, you know, sit between the olive trees. Or here where we're sitting now with these beautiful flowers in the backdrop will be magical. I agree. And there are a lot of nice initiatives out there of people doing this sort of catering pop-up events and stuff. So that's for sure. Like, yes.
Speaker #1
What would you say is your favorite thing about being a farmer and having this farming life?
Speaker #0
There's actually quite a lot of things that I really like about it. I think the best thing about it is that you get to witness the natural cycles and I think that that is a very empowering experience because I think that seeing you know that that cycle of like things slowing down coming up again getting more energy full-on like thriving garden seeds and then it decaying sort of again. and silencing down, it sort of makes you much more aware of that rhythm, the pace of life. And it puts things in perspective because you also see the force of nature, how the life force is so strong and how you can see things that are actually quite damaged still then end up being these beautiful thriving plants. So I think there's something about it that is just innately energizing and healing. That's one of the things. And you get that by just being in the garden, harvesting, working in the garden. So that's super nice. I think there's a very healthy side to it, let's call it like that, mentally. Very empowering. You start to feel one with the natural, you know, you start to feel... that you're a part of it which is something that i didn't feel growing up so much when i was living in cities and i think that that sort of stepping back into the natural is very good and very healing um obviously i enjoy the good food i enjoy the abundance that we enjoy i enjoy the i enjoy the flavors i enjoy the the sort of learning that as a cook even certain things go really well together because they're in season together and sort of being being guided by nature in that sense in your creative journeys in the kitchen. I like that our kids get to experience this and that they have this connection to the land that they go out and they eat their little edible flowers and that's like part of their daily routine where they just go harvest and yeah sort of those romanticized images that people have about farming are very true. I think those are the reasons I think that people enjoy farming and I get to feed people. And I think that's really nice, like that other people are grateful that you're doing this.
Speaker #1
So your two daughters, they enjoy that farm life too? They don't miss being closer to the city and stuff like that?
Speaker #0
Sometimes I worry a little bit about that. That's a very good question. I think our youngest is very adventurous and sort of like hands-on outdoorsy. So I think she really thrives in this setup. Our eldest is very creative and sort of like dreamy and, you know, loves to make. plays and paint and stuff so she's a bit more maybe inward if that makes sense. But I think they do both enjoy it. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to put a little disclaimer here for all the parents watching. Our kids also watch screens and like they are not just always happily prancing around in the fields but it is a part of it and I think they do enjoy it. But yes maybe when they start turning you know 12, 13... Maybe then we'll start getting some questions about why are we far away from city life. I hope to balance that with just regular visits to family and friends and sending them into the city just enough so that they can experience it and figure out for themselves if that's what they want. They'll probably live in cities because everybody needs to revolt against their parents' choices and then come back to it.
Speaker #1
probably at some point yeah but i don't know i personally think it's amazing childhood to have for kids to be so connected to nature in this beautiful place here yeah with beautiful nature with amazing food with this yeah being not completely disconnected because you still have screen internet and all of that but i think that's that's amazing um i
Speaker #0
also agree Having said that, that touches on a subject that I want to just quickly put out there. I think as humanity we need to do so much more for what happens in schools because our kids are not homeschooled. So we send them to public school. And in general, I don't have much critique about, for instance, our school here locally, right? There's people working there very hard and with lots of love. But for instance, I don't really have much control over what they eat there for lunch. And that's one of the things that I find still hard to sort of accept where, you know, we... try our best to give our foods like quite nutritious and healthy things to eat and then yeah but in school they just eat random crap i want to call it let's just call it crap i'm sorry it's crap yeah and that's so so even in our setup it's not perfect right like it's just you can't can't
Speaker #1
control everything so you do the best you can like sure yeah so we talked about all of the the positives the amazing parts of living here being a farmer all of this but i would maybe also like to know what's the you know the opposite side of things and i'm sure there are some things that are hard and yeah maybe the question is what's the the hardest part about this about farming yeah or about this life well yeah i was gonna say it ain't all sunshine and roses isn't it like no
Speaker #0
life is also yeah there are hard parts of course and i think like that is one of the things that i was i suppose also hinting at when we were down there where it's like if you want to farm you need to be realistic about what that takes and about not only the physical labor, small scale farming is obviously not very machine dependent. So a lot of it is you, right? Like you physically showing up every day, come rain, come shine. So I think that's one of the harder parts about farming that, you know, and the good days is really nice, but there are days that it's just the sheep escape. You find out that something ate that crop that you were tending to for the past few months and you're not going to now be able to sell it. There's maybe gonna be, you know, sort of regulatory things that you need to deal with that are very bureaucratic and you don't really have time for them and now you're gonna have to just soldier on and like push through because like you need to do this, right? I would say that one of the hardest parts about being a small-scale farmer in general is making a profit. Like it isn't easy to make a profit, you need to be smart, you need to have like great accounting. You want to make sure that you are not over investing, because I think that's the easiest thing that you can do in the quest for making things easier. But then that obviously needs to be justified at the other end. So, yeah, especially as well, like vegetable growing. I think of all the enterprises you could run on a farm, because what we're doing here is obviously market gardening, but within a farm setting, right? I would say that every enterprise has its... It's struggle, so I mean that in terms of like you could be growing meat, you could be growing veg, you could be, you know, growing flowers and stuff. So I think that the market gardening in general is just like quite intensive job. So it's a lot of hours that need to go in and you're probably not going to get like super, super rich in all contexts, you know, because there's a big difference if you're close to a city or if you're further away from a city. There's a big difference if you're in a economically... potent area or if you're in a less potent area so it's very context driven and we are definitely not in the easiest context for making money with market garden um so i say like yeah you just got to be very on the ball in terms of what you're doing and uh and where you're spending your money and if you're spending it wisely and i think that comes with time like you know where to invest and you know but if you start off it's easy to make mistakes and it's easy to lose money quite quick quite quickly if you don't get on top of it. Having said that though, I feel like we have somewhat of a different experience than maybe other market gardeners because we're coming from this background with the restaurant. So even on our last farm, we always like the value was always brought in the transformation, like in the, you know, really in the hospitality side of it. And here as well, like we have that educational branch to our business model. So for us also the drive to make lots of money on the veggie growing, it's maybe not as, you know. as pronounced as it is in other businesses.
Speaker #1
I suppose it is really, really important to find different ways to create value from what you're doing, like being a pure market gardener and putting all of the pressure on. that being the the sole income source of income is really tough but being able to diversify and create value from either cooking or now educating people yeah are many other things that people try to do is well yeah it'll be quite healthy you know i think it is i think it very much depends on your personal background i always think like you bring value with your skill set right so i
Speaker #0
think there are people out there that are doing a great job and they're killing it market gardening and that's the only thing they're doing so i don't think you need the diversification per se but i do think it's important to sort of place yourself within your context and be very realistic about what that means for you because for instance if you would tell me hey sophie three years ago i wanted you to move to portugal and i wanted you to become like a super successful market gardener and only make money with the market garden i would not have chosen this location do you know what i mean like um i'm not saying it's impossible because you can but it's it's not uh it's probably not the best business move to then you know
Speaker #1
selling a product that basically is quite labor intense in a not super rich area you know it would be smarter than to go closer to a city yeah of course yeah sweet um well it's been an amazing conversation i loved it like love the farm the tour everything you're doing here a great energy and thank you so much for also hosting us for a couple of days here on the farm we absolutely loved it and thank you for
Speaker #0
cooking this amazing food for us as well i'm so grateful for all of that so yeah thank you well you're very welcome and thank you also i'm really happy that you made the journey out here we're far out so we really appreciate it and it's been really lovely having you and i've been you know we've been blessed to show you around and it's it's great to share this place with others and you're always welcome both of you so thank you guys as well
Speaker #1
Thank you so much for listening to the whole episode, really. More and more people listen to our episodes every week, which is amazing. But the stats show that actually only a small percentage make it all the way to the end, maybe 25 to 30%. Between the recording, filming, editing and everything... An episode like this actually takes me two whole weeks of work. And I would be super, super grateful if you could help me out by simply following The Deep Seed here on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode right now. If you'd like to go one small extra step, you can also leave me a five-star review. Basically... All of this will tell the algorithms that people enjoy this content and it will bring these amazing stories to the ears of more and more people. And God knows we need more people to hear about regenerative agriculture and the amazing work that these farmers are doing. On that note, I wish you all an amazing day or night and a beautiful life and see you next week.

About Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Welcome to the Deep Seed Podcast, your ultimate source for all things regenerative agriculture, soil health, and ecosystem restoration!

Key topics discussed include:

Agroecology and its role in creating sustainable food systems
The power of agroforestry in boosting biodiversity and productivity
How carbon farming can fight climate change while benefiting farmers
The benefits of no-till farming for soil health and erosion prevention
Holistic grazing practices that restore ecosystems and enhance animal welfare
Crop rotation and polyculture for nutrient-rich soils and resilient farms
Exploring the potential of food forests and other nature-based solutions
The critical link between soil microbiology and plant health
Restoration agriculture and the future of land regeneration
Climate solutions that leverage regenerative practices to sequester carbon
Promoting biodiversity through sustainable farming approaches
Insights into the importance of sustainable diets and their environmental impact
Rewilding and its role in ecosystem restoration and preservation

Get in touch with me LinkedIn - Raphael Esterhazy

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Welcome to the Deep Seed Podcast, your ultimate source for all things regenerative agriculture, soil health, and ecosystem restoration!

Key topics discussed include:

Agroecology and its role in creating sustainable food systems
The power of agroforestry in boosting biodiversity and productivity
How carbon farming can fight climate change while benefiting farmers
The benefits of no-till farming for soil health and erosion prevention
Holistic grazing practices that restore ecosystems and enhance animal welfare
Crop rotation and polyculture for nutrient-rich soils and resilient farms
Exploring the potential of food forests and other nature-based solutions
The critical link between soil microbiology and plant health
Restoration agriculture and the future of land regeneration
Climate solutions that leverage regenerative practices to sequester carbon
Promoting biodiversity through sustainable farming approaches
Insights into the importance of sustainable diets and their environmental impact
Rewilding and its role in ecosystem restoration and preservation

Get in touch with me LinkedIn - Raphael Esterhazy

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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Description

Two fine-dining chefs moved to rural Portugal to build a regenerative agriculture project focused on market gardening, nutrient-dense food, and soil health. Meet The Farming Chefs! 👨‍🍳

🍅 In this episode, we cover:

How a no-dig market garden can out-yield bigger farms (with less work)
Why nutrient-dense food tastes better (and how it can restore your health)
How to integrate chickens and sheep to regenerate degraded grasslands
How to build a thriving herb garden from local cuttings… for free!
Why edutainment is a powerful tool to scale the regenerative movement

📌 LISTEN FOR:

🟢 15:32 – The aquatic plant that’s feeding chickens free protein

🌿 26:10 – Sophie’s 150+ plant herb garden

🍳 41:00 – Why chefs are the secret weapon of the regenerative movement

📣 47:45 – “Farmers deserve rockstar status. They’re regenerating our future.”

USEFUL LINKS:

❤️ This episode was produced in partnership with Soil Capital, a company that supports #regenerativeagriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve soil health & biodiversity.

Thank you for listening, all the best,

Raphaël

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome back to the Deep Seed Podcast. This week I am in quite a remote area of central Portugal to visit a couple known as the Farming Chefs. After both working as chefs in the Netherlands for a number of years, Philippe and Sophie decided to move to Italy where they started their own farm-to-table restaurant. They wanted to cook the best possible food and they knew that the key was quality ingredients. But they were struggling to find the quality they wanted so they decided to start growing their own vegetables and raise their own animals thus becoming the farming chefs. Eight years later having made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot from that first experience they decided to start a new chapter buying a five and a half hectare piece of land in Portugal in the region where Philip was originally from so going back to the roots and starting a new farm from scratch. That was about three years ago and this is the farm that I am visiting today. This episode was created in a video documentary format and I definitely recommend watching it on YouTube to better visualize everything we talk about. However, I adapted it in audio format to make sure that you can easily follow this conversation right here on streaming platforms. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I'm your host Raphael and this is the Deep Seat Podcast.
Speaker #1
Hello, we are the Farming Chefs. I'm Filip and this is my wife.
Speaker #2
I'm Sophie, very nice to meet you. So of course the question what do we do here on this farm? We are the Farming Chefs and so the name says it. We are both farmers and chefs. We come from the kitchen and in this latest venture of ours we operate in the space of what we would like to describe as edutainment where we try to educate in an entertaining fashion on our functioning regenerative farm which we use as a backdrop in order to teach people how to grow, cook, preserve. choose and consume nutrient-dense food from regenerative farms. All right, so we have a five and a half hectare farm. It's really wonderful because it has lots of different altitudes and little nooks and crannies, so lots of microclimates. Our productive side is the market garden, so we feed our local community with fresh veggies. And then we have other enterprises that are more in function of all the content creation and of the education, so that is basically our broilers and our laying hens, and then we have a small herd of sheep. We have a wonderful herb garden. What we are trying to do is to create a really resilient food system that will supply us mainly and of course the vegetable garden also our local community and then over time we progress into something even more productive. Our main objective is to regenerate the land and to create a really beautiful oasis for people to come and get inspired and learn about regenerative agriculture.
Speaker #0
Such a beautiful project, a beautiful dream.
Speaker #1
it's wonderful to live as well like it's a wonderful life again it's i think if people in urban areas would know how it is to live like this you guys were all coming here you know everybody was running to the countryside yes okay
Speaker #0
now that everyone has been introduced we can start the tour of the farm first up a place that is central and key to their system and operation here the market garden
Speaker #2
All right, so we're here in the market garden. This is Philippe's number one favorite place, I think, on the farm. Philippe is our master gardener. I also very much love it, by the way. I love standing here, especially in days like this when the sun is shining. We are growing fresh veg for our local community. We do that in a veggie box scheme. We have currently around 56 beds. We have another garden that we sometimes use, don't use. And we collaborate with some local farmers as well to add stuff in our boxes. But we mostly try to grow really fast turning crops in order to fill our boxes and people seem to love it because we're in a bit of a food desert I would say. In terms of you know locally sourced fresh available stuff it's not easy to find here especially not chemically free or regeneratively grown so our local community really appreciates us and we really enjoy growing for them.
Speaker #1
We really appreciate them too.
Speaker #2
We really appreciate them too. Love you guys. So yeah, we made the decision to mark a garden because when we set up our company, the Farming Chefs, we really knew that we had this skill and we were going to do it for the educational purposes. And then in our minds, it made sense if we're already going to be growing, we might as well also sell. And that is, you know, basically here what we're standing in the garden. On this farm, we have a more like we're limited by the amount of water we have on the farm. So I think like... if we had unlimited water, we would go probably a lot bigger still. But there's also, yes, only so many hours in a day and we've got already a lot of things going on. So also going bigger would mean more work. But I think, yeah, you asked me before as well, like, is this a lot of work? And I said sort of... semi-bragging like Philippe easily does this but I think that that's also really because of the techniques because what we're doing here is the classic no-dig market garden style so like J.M. Fortier, Charles Dowding, Richard Perkins there's many people that have inspired us to to grow like this and it's all about efficiency and using you know very minimal tools and intervention in a very efficient way and then you get to work a lot of land just with one man without any
Speaker #1
It's not even a lot of land, it's quite a short land, but it's highly productive land. So the turning is very fast. I think if you're going to measure it by kilos, we can produce much more kilos per square meter than any other big farm that you can imagine. All these small market gardens, they really crank the production up because that's what the economy brings after. It's like, don't get bigger land because you get more work.
Speaker #2
get smaller land and just intensely work it and yeah it works it's working what's the secret what's the process to getting your land so productive on a small good compost yeah good compost like having you know like we just said don't step on the beds we're sort of religious about that so having really nice loose soils um working on your fertility program we have our own compost set up We don't have a fully closed cycle, so we do actually still have to import some compost, but we hope to mitigate for that when we get a few more animals on the land. And just introducing a lot of microbiology. We have a compost tea set up. So we basically have a machine upstairs by the house. We pump our water from our sharkas up to the house, and there we inoculate it with all kinds of microbiology. We don't do that every time we irrigate, but we do that on a regular basis. And much TLC, tender love and care. Yeah,
Speaker #1
plans apparently also don't have a reactionary actions on the garden just take care of the problem before he exists so you will never have it like for example one of the most known things in no dig market garden is the weeding aspect of it just if you just pass your wire hose very early in the seasons when the weeds are very very tiny it takes you maybe half an hour to do all the garden and you will not have weeds but if you're going to wait until the weeds are big and and then you're going to weed it, it's going to take...
Speaker #2
a bunch of hours so just work it before it's happening this is sorry this is like a cue for me to start talking because this reminds me of the first farm that we had and we spent many times knees in the beginning when we didn't really know much about gardening yet and so i always like to joke like there will be no more kneading on our knees ever again and i think that no dick market gardening is really perfect for that because basically you do a lot of the work standing up And yeah, it just feels very efficient. Also, in terms of trying to make money growing veg, it's not easy. Like the margins are very low. So you have to be super efficient. And that's what we really like about this system.
Speaker #0
One thing I really like to do on the Deep Seed podcast is ask really basic questions. Because first of all, I think that going back to basics never hurts. But also, I want to make sure that those of you listening who are new to these topics can learn. these basic concepts so that as we get deeper and more technical into the conversations everyone can follow along so yeah the next question i asked was what do we mean by no dig or no-till farming do you want to take this you go you go so
Speaker #2
basically no-till is where you don't turn over the soil so you try to minimally interfere with your soil in order to respect all the microbiology that is living there so bacteria fungi your nematodes everything You just want a really thriving system where everything is alive and teeming with life. And basically when you till over your soil, you oftentimes are bringing certain organisms into earth layers where they actually don't belong. So there's not enough oxygen for them there or that's just not where they're supposed to thrive. There's not enough air, water or compaction in those things. So that kills it off. And it's actually... that microbiome that makes nutrients available to plant roots so if you constantly disturb that you're actually setting your system back and bringing up loads of weed seeds and stuff so yeah no till just means minimal disturbance really for the benefit of the soil health you just want to start this one like one bed yeah and you're starting from scratch what's the process So basically the first thing you want to do is clear your area and that means trying to get as much of the weeds and other plants because you know what's a weed what's not a weed a weed is just a plant that you don't want to grow there you need to get rid of that so the best way and most effective way is first the tarp and that means it's covering the ground so before that you might want to decompact that's maybe step number one depending on where you're going to start so if you're starting at a place where heavy machinery has passed many times you can check this by taking a stick and poking it down in the ground and if you start to feel compaction really you know very shallow or even if you you go lower and let's say 50 60 centimeters and you feel that there's a lot of compaction there because you can't push your stick through that means you have compaction down below and then you might want to take the intervention of just one time pulling through like a yoma plow or a ripper to take care of the compaction let's say so to basically to loosen it all up this means that plant roots will be able to grow deeper then you level it out because it's really nice to work in a level space then you tarp bit. with the tarping what you're doing is you're basically making all the weeds germinate and then die off again because they don't get sunlight once that has been done properly the timing of that depends a little bit on what you have growing if you have very invasive weeds and stuff you want to tarp for longer if not then you can do it for a little bit shorter but let's
Speaker #1
say like the best of the best one year is the perfect because you got all the seasons so you had the summer weeds coming.
Speaker #2
the winter weeds coming they both die and then you can start in the white clean sheet make sure that you can irrigate underneath because you also want to create some humidity so like you couldn't tarp just without irrigation in that scenario which is very long most people don't have a year so this this is like the long version then you can have the short version which the short version would be tarp as long however long you can tarp take the tarp off then you cover your area with carton like cardboard cardboard without let's ink and other types of treatments so as natural as you can find it and as thick as you can find it and then on top of that you layer your compost spaced at the space of your bed which ideally is like 75 centimeters then you have a path which is 40 centimeters this is for ergonomical stepping over and then i mean the higher you can go in terms of how thick you layer it the better we did about 15 centimeters at the onset and then you fill your paths up with wood chips this is to promote fungal life but also because when it rains and stuff you get to really nicely walk in your paths and then you're more or less ready to go what you then first want to do still is inoculate your compost with a lot of microbiology so we irrigate it with a lot of very um i want to say like lively water water that had a lot of life in it just to kick start that process and then immediately plant as many plants in here as you can because you want to have living roots in the soil because they basically bring sugar via their roots into the system and that then jump starts that whole beautiful process so um what's the format that you sell those vegetables in can people pick or order individual vegetables to use the boxes how does it work it's a really good question because i feel like that's like a big thing in the market gardening world and also obviously Everything is super context related and our context is that we're in a very rural place, which is unfortunately not like the most rich area of Portugal. So you always work within the context. If you're closer to the city, then doing it by the kilo or by the bunch and everything is quite a good way to go about it. In our context, what we do is a weekly veggie box and people basically opt in because they like the idea that it's varied and that it's seasonal and that you get... you know you get to choose if you don't want to participate or not but you sort of agree with what is in the box um so we're a little bit less flexible like that that's also because of our setup and because we have you know our digital format as well so we want to provide our community with with food but at the same time also we don't want to over complicate and with our water situation this is like the best way to get good variety and a steady output without it being like, okay, everybody bought all the carrots and then some people don't have carrots because we're not huge, right? We're not a huge market garden that can basically provide everybody to have their specific choices, wishes, yeah, abide by, or I don't know how you would say that. But I also think that that is a key selling point because actually that's the feedback we get from a lot of people, which is that they like the surprise box and that they like to sort of be inspired by the ingredients. and then to cook with it. And I think we can get away with that much easier here in the countryside than maybe you would be in the city. That's just my, you know, sort of take on things.
Speaker #0
While we were recording this conversation, standing in the middle of the market garden, I noticed at the back that some of the beds were completely covered with cover crops. So we went to sit next to these beds, and I asked them to tell me more about these cover crops and how they integrate them into their rotation.
Speaker #2
Yeah, you asked me if we do anything specifically for the soil. And I thought you were talking about like, you know, like production crops, like cash crops. But I forgot to mention that we, of course, also cover crop. So we try to have living roots in the soil at all times and just to really enhance our soil biology by living plants. So we do that as often as we can. It's always a bit tricky because, of course, when you put a cover crop in, it's like you're in some way losing that productive time in the bed. But then what you get back is really incredible. and So we found that, you know, cover cropping with things like legumes or veg or rye and things are really beneficial for the soil and that yields afterwards really increase. So that's part of our cycle and it's always still a bit of a work in progress on how to rotate it well. I don't think we're experts at that yet, but I think we're doing a good job at trying to.
Speaker #1
Well, we didn't do no soil analysis, but all the nitrogen fixes are the plants that you want to use as cover crops because they fixate your nitrogen on the soil. So that's, how do we know that when it's time, when it's flower, it's the best time for it. It's when it's at its highest as nitrogen. So it's when it has the flowers, it's time. You don't let the flowers become fruit. You just, on that time, you just cut the plant and you just, a lot of people turn it into the bed. What we are trying to do is just cutting it, laying down. and just put a thin layer of compost on top and leave it like that. Yeah. And yeah.
Speaker #0
This slowly decomposes, but I guess then you need to wait a little bit until you can plant your next bed.
Speaker #2
It's always a bit tricky on what you're going to plant in next. So like if you can plant something right into it, something big like, you know, you could do pumpkin or cabbage or something like something that is quite sturdy, like one plant. Obviously, direct seeding then becomes very tricky because that's best done in super fine compost. So that's always a bit the way off. And no, we didn't do any soil analysis. Of course, if you get really into it, I'm very geeky about all the levels and the pHs and stuff, you can get really into it. That's not really the way we farm. We have quite a holistic sort of intuitive way of farming where we just observe the system and we see what works and doesn't work. And coming here to this new climate has been really interesting. But we always start a bit off with cover crops. So, for instance, this is the newest part of the garden. So before we start producing in here, we'll cover crop it then plant into it afterwards and then try to bring in one cover crop annually in each bed sometimes we have to be honest we like you know prolong the season a little longer just because we need a lot of production um but yeah we try to just find times in the year could be spring could be autumn could be winter like we can grow all year round here so we just find a moment in the year what's like the
Speaker #1
sort of biggest mistake you used to make as a market gardener that you've learned not to make anymore till i used to we used when we started farming we used to we wanted we started by doing organic but then in the conventional with the conventional methods and very soon in three months we just we said like this doesn't work like this you know our methods have to be different also just just being organic and using the conventional way it it doesn't like tilling and it doesn't It doesn't help nobody, it's not helping us, just creating more work, so it has to be more than that. So then we started looking for and we came to.
Speaker #2
We had a very big epiphany moment in this sense because we used to use the rotor plow, you know, just the walk after tractor. Rotortiller, yeah. And we just did a lot of weeding, we were farming in heavy clay, so also like the water management on the farm was terrible. We didn't have nice wooden paths, so when it got wet it got like really... hard to work and all the clay would stick to your boots and even working the machinery would be really difficult to find like exactly right time in the year and then we had a very big amount of What was it? What's that? It's not a cow. It's from the mozzarella. I'm forgetting it. The Buffalo manure So we had a friend that had an organic Buffalo farm and he just was like Oh, I can bring you a great amount of this Buffalo manure And then we let that decompose for a whole year and we used that as like a really heavy compost on some of the beds and then we accidentally sort of did this no dig yeah and then we stumbled upon it of course also online and that's when it changed and we just changed our complete perspective on it like oh we don't really want to be using the machines and we just really want to feed the soil life as before we were just thinking in terms of not using chemicals and being organic like wanting to respect the environment but not really understanding the fertility cycle well and not understanding that it was actually like the microbiology in the soil feeding the plants. So we very much had this naive that shows that we didn't have it back. and it was when we started composting and using less of the machinery.
Speaker #1
After the first year that we just had plowed everything like everybody does and everybody told us to do and that's the way you should have done but after we did it and plant the first plants on the beds we saw that with the first rainfalls everything went away because we were in the quite I don't know the percentage of the inclination but it was quite a steep slope so we found out very quickly that this cannot be like this because all the good soil ends up by the river on the bottom so that's the first change that we did was living pads that was one of the best things that we did there so here we do wheat chips because it's very hot uh but in italy we just had a living pad just grass around clover we just uh yeah and that would hold the whole garden nothing you could go in the winter in rainfall and you walk on top of that five ten centimeter clover and it would be like dry would be it was great and it hold the whole Garden in place, the soil in place. That was the first big change. And then it was like, why are we rototilling the beds then? We shouldn't rototill the beds too. So then we started, okay, let's instead of rototill the compost, we're going to lay up the compost on top. And that was it. never went back again.
Speaker #2
And also I think that that's when we started getting into the whole idea of no dig and you know not plowing and of course you know there's a scale where that works really well and we've always been small to medium size like our last farm was much bigger than this in terms of production for gardening but we used to see where we lived in Italy was a lot of grain and a lot of sunflower production so every year like they plow it at least two times and when we then have rain all the streets are just like covered in topsoil so you just have this massive wash off and i feel like that really also changed our perspective on everything when we started learning about it and we started seeing like all the damage that was being done that before we were blind to it and it's sort of that that classic feeling of getting friends over and driving through beautiful green landscapes and everybody's like oh this is so beautiful and then you're sort of looking at it like this is so destructive you know like it's a road it was green and green and people thought oh so natural. Yeah, not natural. And I think like that's, yeah, I hope that we with the farming chefs also just spread that message, you know, the importance of topsoil and like to prevent erosion and to use, you know, to treat our land as this sacred, you know, resource that we have that is basically the source of all our food and that we should be really appreciative of it and let all that life flourish and not kill it off and have it washed away with every rainfall, with every, you know, blow away with every wind event.
Speaker #1
let's keep the soil in place one last question about this what's your favorite source of information and inspiration about market gardening here in portugal we have a whatsapp group with all market gardeners and it's an amazing community we were talking about this yesterday and it's one of the parts that i like more that we are very different from any other industry because we will share every information possible that we have with our colleagues and that's something very special
Speaker #2
in this area that's amazing i guess it's really important so it's a feel that you're very you people doing totally very important you're not alone yeah i think it's a very strong uh general sense like in terms of the energy that you get when you get a lot of people that are operating in this regenerative space that have a clear vision of you know basically improving the place that they're farming and leaving it better for the next generation i think you share a very strong common value. and i think everybody that works the natural system let's say knows that it's not always easy so it's good to to have this community of people and sharing sort of secrets and tips and tricks and like how how do you do this where do you buy that um you know what are what are your grand successes what are your grand fails and stuff and that's nice and that is true tulip saying i think that that is a special sort of energy that lives within this community which is really energizing
Speaker #0
So This closes our chapter on the market garden. We then walked over to another part of the farm, a beautiful meadow with big old olive trees and really lush grass full of diverse plant species and flowers.
Speaker #2
So yeah, we're sitting in our meadow and it's a beautiful moment to maybe discuss a little bit the animal integration that we do on the farm. We are very consciously trying to restore the soils here on this farm by using animals as a tool and so we have a small herd of sheep and we graze them rotationally on our farm in very small paddocks. We try to just very intensively graze them in order to fertilize the land and eat the grass and capture the carbon out of the air into the soil. via the root systems and then we also have behind us they're not beautiful to look at but they're the the chicken tractors so we do have a little production of broilers which are meat chickens and eggs egg producing chickens so laying hens they are more for our home consumption so they're very small herds but what we basically do is we graze them through the field in order to use them as fertilizers. That sounds weird.
Speaker #1
Pest controlers.
Speaker #2
In order to use them to fertilize the land and to increase our grass production, which then eventually will increase our meat production. So we very much like to think of it as that we're farming grass and then whatever gets to live on that grass brings us yields in terms of meat or eggs. And that's what we're trying to achieve here. It's a very basic setup. It is like a super, super low cost structure that just provides shade and shelter. And you just move them manually. onto a new piece every day until they hit about halfway through their life cycle when they get a bit bigger and then you do it twice a day and so what happens is that they you know have their feces basically quite intensively manure one area and then you move along and then that takes time to decompose and then when you see that the grass has recovered to the point that it was or a little bit higher than it was before ideally you bring back the animals on the cycle and we graze our sheep first then and then we bring on the chickens
Speaker #0
Okay, so how do they work together? So you say you first graze with the sheep? Yeah. You let it grow back first or?
Speaker #2
Well, no, you can basically do that quite intensely after each other. So because you can get the benefit of all the animals that eat the manure of the sheep, that can also be sort of a feed for your chickens. So if you've timed it correctly, it's even better with cows, but we don't have cows.
Speaker #0
But they're actually complementary.
Speaker #1
Yes,
Speaker #2
they are complementary. Yes, indeed.
Speaker #1
So you have to imagine that you have 30, 40 centimeters of grass. And we will graze the sheep quite fast, one day basically, in a small space. They will bring that grass like about 10 centimeters height, so quite short. And after that we put the chickens. So the chickens will start eating the larvae that are created or that are raised.
Speaker #2
A week after more or less, because you want to time it so that the poop that has been... deposited by the sheep will then have like some eggs and maggots and you know there's sort of life coming to digest the poop and then you can have the benefit of especially with your laying hands it's nice for the egg quality to get some really live insects in there protein and then they of course leave their manure and then you leave it to rest that's very important the resting time because if you don't time the resting time correctly you could actually be degrading your grassland but what you're trying to do obviously is to to grow it stronger and to have ever more producing grass so it's important to give the plant really the time to recoup the its growth underground which will reflect in the growth above ground and then once you see like it's basically come back to the stage where you've had it at its peak you know then it's ready to be grazed again if you come back before that you're making it harder on the plant to come
Speaker #0
up over grazing it okay in the only three years since you've been here have you seen a change in the in the landscape
Speaker #1
I want to say yes.
Speaker #2
Yes, we have and you can see even like the amount of species that we find on the square meter has changed. We're not successful on all parts of the land yet because it's very much the time where you need to you need to monitor very well to understand the impact that you have on different parts of your farm. Because for instance we have some areas that have bedrock quite shallow so there's not a lot of topsoil there. And then we have other places like where we're sitting right now. where we actually have much deeper soil profile, where we have bigger layers of topsoil. So this is an easier part to regenerate because there's already quite a lot of life in the soil and that cycle is already functioning. On some more degraded pieces it's trickier because we deal with extremely hot summers, so I feel like it always takes a hit. So biology in the ground, especially on those spots where there's very little topsoil, it's just such a shallow layer and with the very high temperatures, you always get a big dip. in life in the soil which you then need to basically mitigate for again with your animal intervention and timing that correctly can be a little challenging also because we are you know a lot of our setup is manual so it all it's all about timing and there's a lot of things that we're doing so sometimes I think we try to just
Speaker #1
right before the summer I think at around end of May that nothing else is growing we try to let the sheep go everywhere and trample a little bit the grass because there's always like a 60% trampling of grazing animals. And that is great in our case because the trampling creates a layer that is covering the ground for the three months of summer that are coming that are very intensive. So it's not that it stays humid, but it keeps the life longer at play. So if it was completely grazed it will dry out very soon and it would be completely dead and just stone and sand. but with the animals passing and the trampling, that grass just covers our soil for the summer. In the place where we are, it brings a small problem that is the fire dangerous, the fire hazards. So we could have floor fires, that's what they call here, a floor fire, but we believe that the moist under will keep us away from that.
Speaker #2
And we try to secure more.
Speaker #1
Righto.
Speaker #2
And we try to work in terms of the parameter of the farm. So we basically, you know, here legally you're supposed to cut down all your brim and stuff. These are all the pioneer plants that are actually helping to restore soil. So there's something very counterintuitive to that. If you're a regenerative farmer, you don't want to be taking away all your pioneers constantly because they're actually the ones that are going to kickstart, you know, that whole cycle of regeneration. So a lot of neighbors frown upon us because they're like, oh, you don't mow your land. You don't plow everything. You know, it's sort of... We're using methods here that aren't conventional in this setting. And that also, you know, some of them are, there have been many forest fires. So I also understand why people are doing that. But the way we mitigate for that is by trying to really secure a parameter. And then we are obviously banking on being able better than others in the area, maybe to capture a lot of the water in the soil and have much more resistance against forest fires. And yeah, well, we have water in many areas.
Speaker #0
areas of our farms if there would be a problem we could you know hopefully take care of it very quickly before we move on to the next part of this farm visit let me take just a really short break to tell you about the official partner of the deep seed podcast and that's soil capital one of the biggest levers to enable farmers to transition towards regenerative agriculture is financial incentives and that's essentially what soil capital does They financially reward farmers who improve things like soil health and biodiversity. They're an amazing company. I love what they're doing and I'm super proud to be partnering with them for the podcast.
Speaker #1
So,
Speaker #0
Filip, could you explain what you're doing here?
Speaker #1
So we're using this natural resource that we have here. And it's this kind of water trifoli. I don't know exactly the name of this plant, but... This plant is 40% protein of its own weight and it grows 75% of its size daily. So it's something that you can come here every day and the next day you always have the same thing. And this is chicken, we use this as chicken feed right now. But it can be used at any feed, chicken feed, pig feed, sheep feed. And we use this just so we minimize the amount of bought feed that we have to give to the chickens. and it's a nice natural resource that we have here at the farm so uh so it just produces fresh protein protein every day of course this has to be a fresh water source so there's a source of water under this well it's not just a well from the top that the water comes from the top there's a source there that makes that these wells can produce this uh this plant this aquatic plant that it's a great resource
Speaker #0
Do you know the name of that plant?
Speaker #1
I don't know the name, but I can check for you upstairs.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
I've seen an American guy using this to feed their pigs and they made an analysis to the meat. And the analysis from the lab came out that those pigs had a certain amount of omega-3 in the meat. That's very rare because omega-3 you find it in fish. But with feeding this to the animals, they just get that intake of it. And yeah, you spare money, you get healthy animals. And it takes very little time of your day to do this. Not even five minutes. And we have here around a kilo of this thing. So probably we have around 300 to 400 grams of protein here. Free protein for chickens. Let's go give them. So we're at the orchard and at the orchard we let the layers run through. We have everything by rows so we would let the every three days I'll move the net with around 25 layers and we have a little chicken tractor that has no bottom that allows that the poo falls down directly to the floor every time. So what we do is we move that car between the rows of the trees and we try to park the car. right next to every tree, so every night there's a discharge of chicken poo, chicken manure into that tree, and so we're trying to... every tree gets one day of discharge and we run this, all these rows let's say it, and these rows are about 90 days time to come back to the same place where we were, so you can see it's beautiful green The chickens were here before, you can see it's a little bit bare, but you can see the result behind you, that's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker #0
so you're using the chicken manure as fertilizer for your young trees that you're growing here in this orchard.
Speaker #1
Yes, and another thing that the chickens also do very good is the trampling from the grasses, and because we're in central Portugal it's very dry Very hot. and the part of the trembling becomes very important because you're just covering your soil with grasses and the chickens do that like amazing they will scratch a few spots but they will trample a lot and basically it's a protection layer for for the soil awesome and you're gonna be moving the chickens now let's move the net let's move the chickens and uh right it's a easy easy job let's go so
Speaker #0
how many chickens do you have and
Speaker #1
25 right now.
Speaker #0
And so how many square meters do you have per chicken? Is there some kind of like calculation that you need to follow?
Speaker #1
Square meters? No, it's... You have to see how much impact are the chickens creating into the soil. So you could have a hundred chickens in this space, but you would have to move it three times a day, for example. So we have 25 chickens. in the 50 meter fence and normally it's three days time for each pet okay you look at the floor you see how trample it is how how does it look like okay so you move them every three days and because you figured out that this is the right amount of time for this amount of chickens yeah yeah yeah so the car moves three times inside the same pen so it starts there tomorrow we'll be here and After tomorrow we'll be there. And then the day after we move the net and he goes to the next one. So the car walks slowly inside the pen itself. So it has also to do how is your floor, how is your fauna, let's say on the on the ground, because if it's already quite bare, you don't want to let the chickens so long in it. So when it's like this nice and height, like as a good height, the three days are perfect. and the chickens are happy they have fresh food yeah you can look at them you taste the eggs so yeah yeah the eggs are delicious you can see good with the by the feathers of the chickens you know they're not being packed so there's very low stress into these chickens that's one a sign of stress is like chickens packing on chickens and then you start to see like chickens with the back completely clean like no feathers that's a very big sign of stress in the in the pack of these chickens but you can see here there's like yeah they're just they're just very healthy they're just very very how does the system benefit both the landscape and the chickens well the chickens you can see you know they give you eggs that's the plus of what we're doing here what's more important here for us is actually the soil itself and we can see we've been here for three years. And we can see this pasture that just has layers on it. It doesn't have broilers or it doesn't have sheep on it. It's just layers. And I think layers are one of the animals in the farm that have a greater impact to your soil. Because they just trample a lot. A lot of people say, oh, it's a waste of your... beautiful grass but it's not a waste because it will come to you eventually again into the fruits into the fruit trees into the fauna that you have here so yeah they're a very important part of the of our system the layers so
Speaker #0
you just moved them here to this new patch like minutes ago and they seem so excited they're running around it's like a
Speaker #1
you know easter egg chasing hunting yeah that thing right it's because they're they're hunting for fresh insects and all fresh things you can see that i put the food there yeah but just a few have quite interest on it all the rest they just go like oh my god this is a new paradise look at this yeah so my favorite food is is what like uh bugs bugs bugs bugs yeah chickens are like small t-rexes they are very aggressive and very powerful you know like if this animal would be a little bit bigger would be man would be a problem for us a problem for humanity uh and they are fiercely they will scratch and eat all animals are you flies you see them sometimes jumping to catch like butterflies or stuff like this so yeah animals that's where they source their amount of protein so no i think normally a chicken would eat around 150 grams of feed a day We give around 70, 60, 70 grams because the rest comes from here and also with the supercharged grass from the well. We don't need to give more and they lay perfectly. They lay around 80% of the number that they are.
Speaker #0
How long ago did you plant your trees here in this area?
Speaker #1
Two years ago.
Speaker #0
Two years ago?
Speaker #1
Two years ago.
Speaker #0
Like you can see they're already quite big and healthy.
Speaker #1
Yeah, and they've already been attacked. by sheep more than once so it was a little a small setback uh that's why we also decided okay let's not put cheap here anymore for the first few years just have the layers so let the tree grow without no uh attack sheep attack because it's devastating for me and for the trees itself okay
Speaker #0
So after Philip finished moving and feeding the chickens, we went back to the main house to meet again with Sophie. Surrounding the side of the house, there is a beautiful, lush, vibrant herb garden. We sat there with Sophie to talk about this herb garden. So we're sitting now in your beautiful herb garden. It's just surrounding the house. It's beautiful. It's full of colors, of smells. And it's really something that I wanted to talk about with you. So maybe you could give us an overview of what's going on here.
Speaker #2
Indeed, this is like a little sanctuary that is embracing the house. And that's how we designed it, how we built it. And it's an oasis of plants. There's so much diversity in this garden. And it brings me, of course, lots of delicious culinary herbs and some medicinal. But it also just brings me lots of joy. So I always like showing this garden when people come and visit. It's a place where pollinators come to thrive, where we come to harvest for the kitchen. And I think it's just a really great testament to how well plants thrive when they are planted together and when they are competing and working together. And sort of that beautiful synergy between some struggle and aid and everything is just flourishing here. We were talking earlier a little bit about how this... garden came to be if I was seeding it from seed or if I was doing it from cuttings. And I was telling you this story about, you know, the vigor of life and how strong plants actually are, which is in a testament to Philippe's mother who showed me some very unconventional planting techniques. So most of the plants here that are able to propagate from cuttings were brought to me by Philippe's mom or I harvested them here in the area and we just mob planted, seeded. did everything here and everything just took. And that was done in a very rough manner. So before I was much more careful in the way I planted things and transplanted things. But I found out that you can be really, you know, quite harsh with them. And the life force is just so strong that things grow. And I think that that is just another great testament to nature's force and life force. Yeah.
Speaker #0
How many different plants would you say you have here in this garden?
Speaker #2
You know that I've never counted them. but I would say definitely over a 100, 150 maybe. And a lot of them are culinary, but also there's quite some ornamentals here. I never used to grow any ornamentals. I was very much in the mindset of productivity. And as I get older, I think there's much to be said for beauty and surrounding yourself with beautiful things because they're also very good for the spirit. Some of them, I don't even know the name because Philippe's mom brought them. But many of them of course are also culinary and edible flowers, delicious, fragrant, aromatics.
Speaker #0
a very wide variety indeed i will count them now after you ask me this question yeah okay so yeah you said that a lot of it you've found from local areas where you found some herbs and plants that you were interested in you just took some cuttings and then just yeah came back put them in the ground yeah and let them grow i think that's a really great thing to do because uh first of all if you're doing it in your local area the chances that the thing will thrive is you know are very big and
Speaker #2
also i found that most people that like gardening and that have very nice gardens they're really into this idea of sharing. So for instance, if people come here for a course, I always have them leave with a bag of whatever they want from the herb garden. People can just pick and choose and whatever will survive after propagation. We just dig out a bit or break off some branches because things regrow really fast. It's a great way to start a herb garden is you don't need a lot of money and you don't need to buy everything in a garden center. You just need to go somewhere that somebody is already doing it. Just smile at that person and be like. do you want to share some of your plants with me and most people that like planting they will so i think that's just a nice community has anyone ever said no to that no nobody has ever said no to that i think that with a good smile and you know some enthusiasm most people will happily
Speaker #0
share with you it's uh it's a lot cooler than collecting pokemons isn't it like yeah it's it's really a fun way also to keep your eyes open when you're walking around or when you're visiting someone else's garden and be like, oh, that's a very nice herb that I would love to add or a flower or something.
Speaker #2
Definitely. And totally. And also what's really nice is if you're a bit like towards the end of summer, a lot of things obviously are already in seed and sometimes you'll walk past something and it'll just look weird, but you won't know what the flower looks like yet. And then you'll collect the seed and then it's sort of like a surprise. I have lots of envelopes of seeds that I don't remember where I took them or what they are. And then it's sort of like this wonderful surprise. You just look at it and think, shall we try this? Yes, let's put it there. And the only thing I wouldn't do that with is if it's really strong, big climbers that get very woody, because just popping those anywhere wouldn't work out. But most annual plants, especially flowers, are really great because it's sort of like a surprise waiting for you to happen in a few months' time. And you see it grow and it's like, ooh, what kind of flower will it be? So yeah, I like that.
Speaker #0
After this, we followed Sophie around the farm as she was collecting a lot of different ingredients for dinner. She then invited us into her kitchen and while she was cooking, we had a really nice chat about food, about the relationship between soil health and ingredient quality and about nutrient density. You started as a chef.
Speaker #1
We already discussed this at the beginning of the video.
Speaker #2
We did.
Speaker #0
Right? You then opened a restaurant, like Métodie, a palm-to-table layered restaurant.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Do you still cook food professionally for a living?
Speaker #2
Right now we're actually at a very interesting stage where we are still cooking professionally, but not directly for the public unless it's for courses and stuff. So we do it now for the content creation, which has been a shift in our way of cooking, which has been interesting. And this moment is no different like we're standing here in our professional kitchen where we do a lot of filming and it's really it's fun having you guys here and doing it for once so i'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out um yeah so we do cook professionally but not for a restaurant and uh it's been uh much calmer yeah
Speaker #0
so how different is food that you buy from the supermarket to the food that you grow yourself here in the nordic Garden.
Speaker #2
It's cannot compare guys. It's like apples and pears, you know, you're comparing two things that should not be compared. Well, of course It's sort of funny because I think the first time that I realized the difference between something Tasting so different depending on where it came from was when I was working in soup and so as these are the last bosses that I ever had basically when I was working for somebody else and we were writing this cookbook transforming their recipes and me and this other chef who were just like what makes this soup delicious like how much gram of this spice and we were trying to like scientifically figure out like what made a really good pumpkin soup right so we did all these trials and then in the end it just came down to like it's all about the pumpkin like if it's a nice pumpkin it's going to be a nice soup if it's a shitty pumpkin you know it's going to be less nice right and that was the first moment where I sort of thought like yeah where does actually all this food come from like we just order it comes into a box, you open the back door of the restaurant, bring it in, and every day you order more or less the same ingredients depending on where you're working. But basically you're just like one salad isn't the other, right? And that was like this moment where I started to think about like where does it come from and does it make a big difference? And it does. So I think the biggest difference is obviously taste, but also health because you're not eating chemicals and all those, you know, great benefits that you're not poisoning your body with poisons. But if you're going the hedonistic route, I think it's really about how nutrient dense it is, and also about just the general flavor profile of things. So I think that's the biggest game changer for anybody that loves to cook. It's that you can compare them side by side, and there is a very big difference in the flavor.
Speaker #0
Okay. What do you think about the topic of nutrient density? Just the fact that we are finding out more and more that food grown in a healthy soil with a healthy microbiome in the soil is actually more nutrient dense. So between the carrots that has been mass produced in a very intensive way that you buy at the supermarket or the one that you grow in your soil here, you will have a massive difference in terms of how much nutrient the carrots holds.
Speaker #2
I find that such an interesting topic and we both know Dan Kittredge who's basically like a big advocate for this and showing you know the difference in the nutrient density profiles and like how that is related to soil health. So I think that that is just like it's super fascinating. It also is something that we've had as a physical on-site feedback loop of eating the food that we produce, where it's like you taste the difference so clearly between a store-bought tomato and a tomato that you pick off the vine on your... you know, regenerative organic farm. As a chef, I can only say what a great attribute that it's not only nutrient dense, it's not only healthy, but it's also tasty. Like those to me, when they go hand in hand, it's like a win-win for everybody, right? Because if somebody was telling you, you need to eat these nutrient dense veggies, but you're just like, I don't like veggies and they're not that tasty. And now it's sort of like, okay, you get to eat a carrot, but that carrot will also taste better than the average carrot that you're maybe used to. So for me, it's, yeah, it's one of those things that it's a win-win. A win-win and you know.
Speaker #0
Tasting density and taste go hand in hand.
Speaker #2
Yes.
Speaker #0
Actually related.
Speaker #2
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the flavor profile.
Speaker #0
is actually better, right? If you have a more nutrient-dense carrot, it shows that it's shown scientifically that they taste better. And I think it's an exciting prospect that there's going to be a tool for us as consumers to basically check, like scan our ingredients at the supermarket or at the farmer's market or at your local farmer and just see like, is this actually like a very nutrient-dense product or is it just, does it look, you know, every carrot looks the same to the consumer, but inside they're not the same. And I have great hopes that if we're sort of empowered with this tool, that that's going to change a lot of, you know, it's going to change the game. And I'm looking forward to that moment. Yeah, sure.
Speaker #1
Okay, so we're now moving on to the very last part of this episode. And Sophie and I put out some chairs outside of the house in a beautiful spot overlooking the whole farm. And we had a bit of a longer... kind of conversation. I would say a bit more in the classic podcast style. So we talk about a lot of things, including the business model, the education part, and then also a more personal conversation about what it's like to live on a farm, to raise children on a farm, and a few other things as well. So at the start of the conversation, you told me that a big part of what you're trying to create here is about education, and we haven't really spoken about it yet, so I would love for to tell me more.
Speaker #0
Wonderful, I'm really happy to talk about it as well. Yes, it is actually, I would say, the main thing of what we're trying to do here, and that is sort of like raise awareness and that, as I said before, I'm calling it sort of edutainment because I think it's always fun to learn through storytelling. It's also why we chose sort of YouTube as a medium to, you know, get videos out there and to draw attention to the regenerative movement. It's also one of the ways where I feel like our sort of, of in-house people, planet profit. could get into balance where it's like I really strongly believe that it shouldn't all be about economy or all be about personal interests or all be about the impact or it should be you know how you can bring your own skill set together and make money that way while also having purpose and doing something good for the planet and I feel like this model that we've created does all three of those things because we get to live a really yeah meaningful and yeah I want to say healing, but that sounds as if we're sick, but sort of nurturing existence in this beautiful place. Like you've been here now. I hope you can attest to sort of the feel here. You know, it's really calm and peaceful and beautiful. And we get to create this space that is going to over time just become more productive. So from a personal perspective of where you want to raise a family, this is a really great location. And it's also a really great location to teach from. So to get people involved and show them, you know, all the different plants and how you can grow and how you can cook. And These are these basic things that people do, I mean, especially the cooking. Every day, right, you're every day making a choice when you buy something in the supermarket. Every time you put something in your mouth, it's like a political act, basically. And I felt that combining education with this farming and cooking is just bringing our skill set together. So what we try to do is empower people to cook with regeneratively grown produce. to grow it as well and a lot of people think when they hear like learn how to grow your own food like grow all of your food that's not necessarily the aim it's more to yeah encourage people to take back a little bit of control over their food system and experience
Speaker #1
the joy of cooking some of your own food really amazing um and so that education comes in different forms because you mentioned the youtube channel you've been doing so you spend a lot of time trying to educate people online about farming about cooking about
Speaker #0
a lot of things right yes and then there's also a physical uh version of that where people come here and you teach people how does that work yeah well i i so i'm a very big advocate for in-person events like i love the digital space when it's used sort of for good right social media can be very toxic but i also think that there's a lot of really great information out there you're an example where basically you get to find like really good information and really inspirational stories so i think that the digital space is great for growth and for scaling um But I also very much am a social creature. Like I like to connect. I like to talk. I like to get the instant feedback at which sometimes the internet is like less capable, right? To give you that instant feedback of what do people really think about this? Maybe you'll get the extreme haters or you get the extreme people that are really, you know, supportive and positive. But there's also just a large part of the population that watches and doesn't say anything but thinks something. But you don't really get that feedback. And so... I always wanted to combine the two and have people come to the farm and take courses here also because it's a much better indicator for you as the person creating the educational content to get like good feedback on what are people really looking for like what are their struggles what are their you know what are their wants and then you can better cater to them so okay yeah so what what What form does it take?
Speaker #1
Is it people come... For regular lessons? Is it a sort of a camp where they come for a whole week?
Speaker #0
So currently we have the format, we have basically the growing part made now. So there's more education on the way, let's say. But what we have live right now, of course, is around growing. And so basically helping people to set up their little vegetable plots and sort of food systems. And you can come do that in one day workshops or you can do that in a two day workshop. So some of them are more geared towards like one specific part of it so for instance composting or how you take care of your seedlings and stuff or garden design for instance and then we have a two-day course which is super intensive and it sort of like hits all the you know it hits all the parts that are important for you to successfully grow vegetables regeneratively so there's a module that starts out with your holistic vision and sort of takes you all the way through to how to design and what drives fertility and then you know basically like crop planning more of the technical aspects of it and then you get access to our digital course so we do have a digital course as well which is basically an add-on for the inside or you can take it on your own at home anywhere in the world whenever you want and then you know learn that way awesome
Speaker #1
so yeah messages out there for people who are interested in learning more about starting their own market garden yeah and what about cooking are there cooking lessons they're gonna come
Speaker #0
They are. We have a lot of tutorials out there right now about growing and about cooking. And for the growing, we've got our digital product set up and of course our onsite events. And then for the cooking, we're working on that. We are of course also cooking for some onsite events that we host where we have farm tours. So if you want to come enjoy our food, you could come visit a farm tour. And there are tutorials out there, but there's no in-person cooking currently happening. There will be in September and stuff. So if you're into that, then check out our website, I'm sure.
Speaker #1
So how do you bring all of these different elements into your business model? Because there's the market garden, the growing of food, the regenerating the ecosystem, the chickens, there's the education part. How does all of that come together and how does your economic model work?
Speaker #0
Wonderful, that's a good question. I just wanted to also just draw back to one thing you said before, where you said you want to learn people how to market garden. Of course, it's very much what we do. So we do show people a lot of those techniques, but Our courses are also very much geared towards people just wanting to grow for themselves. So it's like basically the average consumer and then people who might want to market garden, they take our courses as well. But maybe there are people in the space of like becoming a professional market gardener that are like Jean-Martin Fortier or other people that are really geared towards the business side of things. I think we are very much geared towards people that are looking to give their own gardens a useful purpose. So we're more in the consumer section, I would say. And as for our business model, which is a really great question because we have a lot of stuff going on. So I would say that we sort of have two business running alongside each other and that our place serves as both the backdrop for the education and there are certain aspects to our farm that aren't necessarily needing to be profitable on their own as a singular enterprise. Like I was explaining to you, for instance, the chickens that, you know, it's more for just. us regenerating the land and for the eggs and then using that for the content and for the videography and education the same goes for like our sheep and our our broilers so we see them as parts of the regeneration tool but not necessarily as you know we're making money from selling eggs for instance right um philippe is very much the gardener of the two of us and i'm much more more the storyteller. So I think we found a really great way to combine two businesses alongside each other and take the benefit of both. And so if you see them as a zero, as individual entities, I would say that our main focus is on the content and the digital creation. And then our market garden is working in function, but obviously needs to generate an income. But it's not something that we necessarily want to scale to great lengths, let's say. Okay.
Speaker #1
And so you managed to make it work at the moment with the income from the market garden on one side and the courses and education part of the operation?
Speaker #0
Yes, well, we are obviously still only in the second year and we have had to invest quite a lot in terms of getting the system up and running. But yes, things are looking very positive, like growth is going strong and we have our KPIs to reach in a couple of years. So I would say that we are managing to make it work. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker #1
What's the long term vision? Like maybe 10 years from now, how do you imagine this place being like and how do you imagine also the model?
Speaker #0
Yeah. Well, in 10 years time, I hope that we're standing in this, you know, location with everything that we've implemented. Having, you know, like I would say. having great impact and success so that our fertility levels have gone up. We can have more animals on the land. Our trees are thriving. We are still supplying our local community with food because that is definitely one of Philippe's purpose driven desire for his life. Like he loves to grow. He loves to grow plants. He loves to garden. He loves to be outdoors. So I envision us doing that. As for the digital side, I think that If we are successful, a lot of people will know who the farming chefs are, and a lot of people will associate that with a very positive influence that has had on their daily lives in terms of what they do in their kitchens. So I hope that we have inspired many, many people to buy organic, regeneratively grown local food. And I hope we have inspired many people to feel that they are also capable of growing some of their own food. How that will evolve in 10 years' time, I think that there will be many spin-offs and many different types of courses and areas to explore. or also... showcasing other successful regenerative projects is something that I'm very passionate about. We did a mini series and I would love to get out on the road also and sort of go beyond this location and I see it as a wonderful home base.
Speaker #1
It's amazing so you're really really passionate about trying to obviously to have an impact on the land that you own here and you're doing something amazing here I believe but also beyond that yes trying to reach a lot of people online. through courses through going to visit other farms yourselves to try and get the knowledge out there to to get people inspired about uh about farming about regenerating about community and all these things right exactly i think the storytelling is super important i feel like that's where there's a lot of um room
Speaker #0
still in in our movement like when i feel like we're in this early adaption phase that we discussed earlier and i feel this need to to tell the story like i feel something burning inside of me that is just like guys this is so great like everybody needs to look over here and not I don't mean here like our farm but I mean like hey regenerative ag is amazing look at all these small farmers that are doing a great job I feel that because we know a lot of you know small farmers we've been small small skill farmers for a long time now and I sort of feel like uh yeah farmers need to get to this sort of rock star status not for the personal fame but for the sake of sort of, you know, the... the respect that the job deserves and the support that it should receive from the community, from the local community. So yeah, there's maybe a little bit of a missionary in me. And I also think that there is a really strong case to be made that, you know, as love and relationship goes through the stomach, I also think that change in the world can come via like the kitchen, if you will. And I think that's a unique perspective we bring. and it's a fun one. I think people like food and like cooking and like good stories and I think I think we have all of those do you miss the sort of chefing life and having your own restaurant yeah well I don't flip dust like I think if it was up to Philippe we would probably be opening a restaurant like tomorrow but I sort of trying to I'm trying to hold that off a little bit because of the family aspect and Yeah, and sort of the... Yeah, as I said before, it's sort of what you want from your personal life. And I feel that even though restaurants, you know, it's a super satisfactory job because you get to perform every day. It's a high stress. When you succeed, you know, you get the room full. You serve everybody great food. Everybody goes home. You have that feeling of. a victory and that happens over and over again and maybe sometimes you have a bad night but most of the time you just have this constant feedback loop of like success success and that's really really empowering and i think philippe also thrives under this adrenaline kick um but from my perspective as a mom you know i sort of see how hard it is on family life and so i always joke that we'll do it maybe when the kids can do some dishes yeah but i can understand how like
Speaker #1
Well, my dad was a chef. I worked in a lot of kitchens in my younger years.
Speaker #0
Yeah, so you know.
Speaker #1
And I know that it's a very tough life. And it's very tough in terms of working evenings and weekends. And for your family life, it must be very difficult.
Speaker #0
It's always when the kids are free, you're working. So it's sort of like you don't get to see your kids anymore. You know, because it is like holidays. You're at your busiest. Christmas, you're at your busiest. Weekends, you're at your busiest. So it's always sort of that you sacrifice to some extent family life for that. And there are many great chefs that are doing that. I think that, you know, we're lucky that we get to eat really nice food and that people are sort of, I don't want to say sacrificing their families because I'm sure that they'll find a way to make that work. But for me personally, I just felt like it was...
Speaker #1
Fair enough. Is there maybe...
Speaker #0
a way you could reintegrate the cooking and the chefing into your business model without being you know a full-time restaurant high intensity high stress yeah it can be like a pop-up you know we we discuss this quite often like in summertime doing more events and things and that is definitely in the books but i don't know if i would call that restaurant you know what i mean like it is but it isn't in it's not the same it would never take the same form as it did yeah i i really love I love it when I see these pictures online of these
Speaker #1
tables put out. in the farm or in the vineyards in the summers beautiful table i feel like people are looking for experiences that's something magical that you get to do i think there will be a man for that i'm sure you could do something really cool yeah i know and it will happen like it definitely is in the books maybe maybe in
Speaker #0
my mind maybe because we've ran like a super busy restaurant life i'm just thinking like i don't know can we call that a restaurant can i get away with calling that restaurant life but yeah definitely like having really nice food events is like super super nice and especially what you were saying. Like here we could just put up tables in the field and, you know, sit between the olive trees. Or here where we're sitting now with these beautiful flowers in the backdrop will be magical. I agree. And there are a lot of nice initiatives out there of people doing this sort of catering pop-up events and stuff. So that's for sure. Like, yes.
Speaker #1
What would you say is your favorite thing about being a farmer and having this farming life?
Speaker #0
There's actually quite a lot of things that I really like about it. I think the best thing about it is that you get to witness the natural cycles and I think that that is a very empowering experience because I think that seeing you know that that cycle of like things slowing down coming up again getting more energy full-on like thriving garden seeds and then it decaying sort of again. and silencing down, it sort of makes you much more aware of that rhythm, the pace of life. And it puts things in perspective because you also see the force of nature, how the life force is so strong and how you can see things that are actually quite damaged still then end up being these beautiful thriving plants. So I think there's something about it that is just innately energizing and healing. That's one of the things. And you get that by just being in the garden, harvesting, working in the garden. So that's super nice. I think there's a very healthy side to it, let's call it like that, mentally. Very empowering. You start to feel one with the natural, you know, you start to feel... that you're a part of it which is something that i didn't feel growing up so much when i was living in cities and i think that that sort of stepping back into the natural is very good and very healing um obviously i enjoy the good food i enjoy the abundance that we enjoy i enjoy the i enjoy the flavors i enjoy the the sort of learning that as a cook even certain things go really well together because they're in season together and sort of being being guided by nature in that sense in your creative journeys in the kitchen. I like that our kids get to experience this and that they have this connection to the land that they go out and they eat their little edible flowers and that's like part of their daily routine where they just go harvest and yeah sort of those romanticized images that people have about farming are very true. I think those are the reasons I think that people enjoy farming and I get to feed people. And I think that's really nice, like that other people are grateful that you're doing this.
Speaker #1
So your two daughters, they enjoy that farm life too? They don't miss being closer to the city and stuff like that?
Speaker #0
Sometimes I worry a little bit about that. That's a very good question. I think our youngest is very adventurous and sort of like hands-on outdoorsy. So I think she really thrives in this setup. Our eldest is very creative and sort of like dreamy and, you know, loves to make. plays and paint and stuff so she's a bit more maybe inward if that makes sense. But I think they do both enjoy it. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to put a little disclaimer here for all the parents watching. Our kids also watch screens and like they are not just always happily prancing around in the fields but it is a part of it and I think they do enjoy it. But yes maybe when they start turning you know 12, 13... Maybe then we'll start getting some questions about why are we far away from city life. I hope to balance that with just regular visits to family and friends and sending them into the city just enough so that they can experience it and figure out for themselves if that's what they want. They'll probably live in cities because everybody needs to revolt against their parents' choices and then come back to it.
Speaker #1
probably at some point yeah but i don't know i personally think it's amazing childhood to have for kids to be so connected to nature in this beautiful place here yeah with beautiful nature with amazing food with this yeah being not completely disconnected because you still have screen internet and all of that but i think that's that's amazing um i
Speaker #0
also agree Having said that, that touches on a subject that I want to just quickly put out there. I think as humanity we need to do so much more for what happens in schools because our kids are not homeschooled. So we send them to public school. And in general, I don't have much critique about, for instance, our school here locally, right? There's people working there very hard and with lots of love. But for instance, I don't really have much control over what they eat there for lunch. And that's one of the things that I find still hard to sort of accept where, you know, we... try our best to give our foods like quite nutritious and healthy things to eat and then yeah but in school they just eat random crap i want to call it let's just call it crap i'm sorry it's crap yeah and that's so so even in our setup it's not perfect right like it's just you can't can't
Speaker #1
control everything so you do the best you can like sure yeah so we talked about all of the the positives the amazing parts of living here being a farmer all of this but i would maybe also like to know what's the you know the opposite side of things and i'm sure there are some things that are hard and yeah maybe the question is what's the the hardest part about this about farming yeah or about this life well yeah i was gonna say it ain't all sunshine and roses isn't it like no
Speaker #0
life is also yeah there are hard parts of course and i think like that is one of the things that i was i suppose also hinting at when we were down there where it's like if you want to farm you need to be realistic about what that takes and about not only the physical labor, small scale farming is obviously not very machine dependent. So a lot of it is you, right? Like you physically showing up every day, come rain, come shine. So I think that's one of the harder parts about farming that, you know, and the good days is really nice, but there are days that it's just the sheep escape. You find out that something ate that crop that you were tending to for the past few months and you're not going to now be able to sell it. There's maybe gonna be, you know, sort of regulatory things that you need to deal with that are very bureaucratic and you don't really have time for them and now you're gonna have to just soldier on and like push through because like you need to do this, right? I would say that one of the hardest parts about being a small-scale farmer in general is making a profit. Like it isn't easy to make a profit, you need to be smart, you need to have like great accounting. You want to make sure that you are not over investing, because I think that's the easiest thing that you can do in the quest for making things easier. But then that obviously needs to be justified at the other end. So, yeah, especially as well, like vegetable growing. I think of all the enterprises you could run on a farm, because what we're doing here is obviously market gardening, but within a farm setting, right? I would say that every enterprise has its... It's struggle, so I mean that in terms of like you could be growing meat, you could be growing veg, you could be, you know, growing flowers and stuff. So I think that the market gardening in general is just like quite intensive job. So it's a lot of hours that need to go in and you're probably not going to get like super, super rich in all contexts, you know, because there's a big difference if you're close to a city or if you're further away from a city. There's a big difference if you're in a economically... potent area or if you're in a less potent area so it's very context driven and we are definitely not in the easiest context for making money with market garden um so i say like yeah you just got to be very on the ball in terms of what you're doing and uh and where you're spending your money and if you're spending it wisely and i think that comes with time like you know where to invest and you know but if you start off it's easy to make mistakes and it's easy to lose money quite quick quite quickly if you don't get on top of it. Having said that though, I feel like we have somewhat of a different experience than maybe other market gardeners because we're coming from this background with the restaurant. So even on our last farm, we always like the value was always brought in the transformation, like in the, you know, really in the hospitality side of it. And here as well, like we have that educational branch to our business model. So for us also the drive to make lots of money on the veggie growing, it's maybe not as, you know. as pronounced as it is in other businesses.
Speaker #1
I suppose it is really, really important to find different ways to create value from what you're doing, like being a pure market gardener and putting all of the pressure on. that being the the sole income source of income is really tough but being able to diversify and create value from either cooking or now educating people yeah are many other things that people try to do is well yeah it'll be quite healthy you know i think it is i think it very much depends on your personal background i always think like you bring value with your skill set right so i
Speaker #0
think there are people out there that are doing a great job and they're killing it market gardening and that's the only thing they're doing so i don't think you need the diversification per se but i do think it's important to sort of place yourself within your context and be very realistic about what that means for you because for instance if you would tell me hey sophie three years ago i wanted you to move to portugal and i wanted you to become like a super successful market gardener and only make money with the market garden i would not have chosen this location do you know what i mean like um i'm not saying it's impossible because you can but it's it's not uh it's probably not the best business move to then you know
Speaker #1
selling a product that basically is quite labor intense in a not super rich area you know it would be smarter than to go closer to a city yeah of course yeah sweet um well it's been an amazing conversation i loved it like love the farm the tour everything you're doing here a great energy and thank you so much for also hosting us for a couple of days here on the farm we absolutely loved it and thank you for
Speaker #0
cooking this amazing food for us as well i'm so grateful for all of that so yeah thank you well you're very welcome and thank you also i'm really happy that you made the journey out here we're far out so we really appreciate it and it's been really lovely having you and i've been you know we've been blessed to show you around and it's it's great to share this place with others and you're always welcome both of you so thank you guys as well
Speaker #1
Thank you so much for listening to the whole episode, really. More and more people listen to our episodes every week, which is amazing. But the stats show that actually only a small percentage make it all the way to the end, maybe 25 to 30%. Between the recording, filming, editing and everything... An episode like this actually takes me two whole weeks of work. And I would be super, super grateful if you could help me out by simply following The Deep Seed here on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode right now. If you'd like to go one small extra step, you can also leave me a five-star review. Basically... All of this will tell the algorithms that people enjoy this content and it will bring these amazing stories to the ears of more and more people. And God knows we need more people to hear about regenerative agriculture and the amazing work that these farmers are doing. On that note, I wish you all an amazing day or night and a beautiful life and see you next week.

About Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Welcome to the Deep Seed Podcast, your ultimate source for all things regenerative agriculture, soil health, and ecosystem restoration!

Key topics discussed include:

Agroecology and its role in creating sustainable food systems
The power of agroforestry in boosting biodiversity and productivity
How carbon farming can fight climate change while benefiting farmers
The benefits of no-till farming for soil health and erosion prevention
Holistic grazing practices that restore ecosystems and enhance animal welfare
Crop rotation and polyculture for nutrient-rich soils and resilient farms
Exploring the potential of food forests and other nature-based solutions
The critical link between soil microbiology and plant health
Restoration agriculture and the future of land regeneration
Climate solutions that leverage regenerative practices to sequester carbon
Promoting biodiversity through sustainable farming approaches
Insights into the importance of sustainable diets and their environmental impact
Rewilding and its role in ecosystem restoration and preservation

Get in touch with me LinkedIn - Raphael Esterhazy

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Welcome to the Deep Seed Podcast, your ultimate source for all things regenerative agriculture, soil health, and ecosystem restoration!

Key topics discussed include:

Agroecology and its role in creating sustainable food systems
The power of agroforestry in boosting biodiversity and productivity
How carbon farming can fight climate change while benefiting farmers
The benefits of no-till farming for soil health and erosion prevention
Holistic grazing practices that restore ecosystems and enhance animal welfare
Crop rotation and polyculture for nutrient-rich soils and resilient farms
Exploring the potential of food forests and other nature-based solutions
The critical link between soil microbiology and plant health
Restoration agriculture and the future of land regeneration
Climate solutions that leverage regenerative practices to sequester carbon
Promoting biodiversity through sustainable farming approaches
Insights into the importance of sustainable diets and their environmental impact
Rewilding and its role in ecosystem restoration and preservation

Get in touch with me LinkedIn - Raphael Esterhazy

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

Two fine-dining chefs moved to rural Portugal to build a regenerative agriculture project focused on market gardening, nutrient-dense food, and soil health. Meet The Farming Chefs! 👨‍🍳

🍅 In this episode, we cover:

How a no-dig market garden can out-yield bigger farms (with less work)
Why nutrient-dense food tastes better (and how it can restore your health)
How to integrate chickens and sheep to regenerate degraded grasslands
How to build a thriving herb garden from local cuttings… for free!
Why edutainment is a powerful tool to scale the regenerative movement

📌 LISTEN FOR:

🟢 15:32 – The aquatic plant that’s feeding chickens free protein

🌿 26:10 – Sophie’s 150+ plant herb garden

🍳 41:00 – Why chefs are the secret weapon of the regenerative movement

📣 47:45 – “Farmers deserve rockstar status. They’re regenerating our future.”

USEFUL LINKS:

❤️ This episode was produced in partnership with Soil Capital, a company that supports #regenerativeagriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve soil health & biodiversity.

Thank you for listening, all the best,

Raphaël

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome back to the Deep Seed Podcast. This week I am in quite a remote area of central Portugal to visit a couple known as the Farming Chefs. After both working as chefs in the Netherlands for a number of years, Philippe and Sophie decided to move to Italy where they started their own farm-to-table restaurant. They wanted to cook the best possible food and they knew that the key was quality ingredients. But they were struggling to find the quality they wanted so they decided to start growing their own vegetables and raise their own animals thus becoming the farming chefs. Eight years later having made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot from that first experience they decided to start a new chapter buying a five and a half hectare piece of land in Portugal in the region where Philip was originally from so going back to the roots and starting a new farm from scratch. That was about three years ago and this is the farm that I am visiting today. This episode was created in a video documentary format and I definitely recommend watching it on YouTube to better visualize everything we talk about. However, I adapted it in audio format to make sure that you can easily follow this conversation right here on streaming platforms. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I'm your host Raphael and this is the Deep Seat Podcast.
Speaker #1
Hello, we are the Farming Chefs. I'm Filip and this is my wife.
Speaker #2
I'm Sophie, very nice to meet you. So of course the question what do we do here on this farm? We are the Farming Chefs and so the name says it. We are both farmers and chefs. We come from the kitchen and in this latest venture of ours we operate in the space of what we would like to describe as edutainment where we try to educate in an entertaining fashion on our functioning regenerative farm which we use as a backdrop in order to teach people how to grow, cook, preserve. choose and consume nutrient-dense food from regenerative farms. All right, so we have a five and a half hectare farm. It's really wonderful because it has lots of different altitudes and little nooks and crannies, so lots of microclimates. Our productive side is the market garden, so we feed our local community with fresh veggies. And then we have other enterprises that are more in function of all the content creation and of the education, so that is basically our broilers and our laying hens, and then we have a small herd of sheep. We have a wonderful herb garden. What we are trying to do is to create a really resilient food system that will supply us mainly and of course the vegetable garden also our local community and then over time we progress into something even more productive. Our main objective is to regenerate the land and to create a really beautiful oasis for people to come and get inspired and learn about regenerative agriculture.
Speaker #0
Such a beautiful project, a beautiful dream.
Speaker #1
it's wonderful to live as well like it's a wonderful life again it's i think if people in urban areas would know how it is to live like this you guys were all coming here you know everybody was running to the countryside yes okay
Speaker #0
now that everyone has been introduced we can start the tour of the farm first up a place that is central and key to their system and operation here the market garden
Speaker #2
All right, so we're here in the market garden. This is Philippe's number one favorite place, I think, on the farm. Philippe is our master gardener. I also very much love it, by the way. I love standing here, especially in days like this when the sun is shining. We are growing fresh veg for our local community. We do that in a veggie box scheme. We have currently around 56 beds. We have another garden that we sometimes use, don't use. And we collaborate with some local farmers as well to add stuff in our boxes. But we mostly try to grow really fast turning crops in order to fill our boxes and people seem to love it because we're in a bit of a food desert I would say. In terms of you know locally sourced fresh available stuff it's not easy to find here especially not chemically free or regeneratively grown so our local community really appreciates us and we really enjoy growing for them.
Speaker #1
We really appreciate them too.
Speaker #2
We really appreciate them too. Love you guys. So yeah, we made the decision to mark a garden because when we set up our company, the Farming Chefs, we really knew that we had this skill and we were going to do it for the educational purposes. And then in our minds, it made sense if we're already going to be growing, we might as well also sell. And that is, you know, basically here what we're standing in the garden. On this farm, we have a more like we're limited by the amount of water we have on the farm. So I think like... if we had unlimited water, we would go probably a lot bigger still. But there's also, yes, only so many hours in a day and we've got already a lot of things going on. So also going bigger would mean more work. But I think, yeah, you asked me before as well, like, is this a lot of work? And I said sort of... semi-bragging like Philippe easily does this but I think that that's also really because of the techniques because what we're doing here is the classic no-dig market garden style so like J.M. Fortier, Charles Dowding, Richard Perkins there's many people that have inspired us to to grow like this and it's all about efficiency and using you know very minimal tools and intervention in a very efficient way and then you get to work a lot of land just with one man without any
Speaker #1
It's not even a lot of land, it's quite a short land, but it's highly productive land. So the turning is very fast. I think if you're going to measure it by kilos, we can produce much more kilos per square meter than any other big farm that you can imagine. All these small market gardens, they really crank the production up because that's what the economy brings after. It's like, don't get bigger land because you get more work.
Speaker #2
get smaller land and just intensely work it and yeah it works it's working what's the secret what's the process to getting your land so productive on a small good compost yeah good compost like having you know like we just said don't step on the beds we're sort of religious about that so having really nice loose soils um working on your fertility program we have our own compost set up We don't have a fully closed cycle, so we do actually still have to import some compost, but we hope to mitigate for that when we get a few more animals on the land. And just introducing a lot of microbiology. We have a compost tea set up. So we basically have a machine upstairs by the house. We pump our water from our sharkas up to the house, and there we inoculate it with all kinds of microbiology. We don't do that every time we irrigate, but we do that on a regular basis. And much TLC, tender love and care. Yeah,
Speaker #1
plans apparently also don't have a reactionary actions on the garden just take care of the problem before he exists so you will never have it like for example one of the most known things in no dig market garden is the weeding aspect of it just if you just pass your wire hose very early in the seasons when the weeds are very very tiny it takes you maybe half an hour to do all the garden and you will not have weeds but if you're going to wait until the weeds are big and and then you're going to weed it, it's going to take...
Speaker #2
a bunch of hours so just work it before it's happening this is sorry this is like a cue for me to start talking because this reminds me of the first farm that we had and we spent many times knees in the beginning when we didn't really know much about gardening yet and so i always like to joke like there will be no more kneading on our knees ever again and i think that no dick market gardening is really perfect for that because basically you do a lot of the work standing up And yeah, it just feels very efficient. Also, in terms of trying to make money growing veg, it's not easy. Like the margins are very low. So you have to be super efficient. And that's what we really like about this system.
Speaker #0
One thing I really like to do on the Deep Seed podcast is ask really basic questions. Because first of all, I think that going back to basics never hurts. But also, I want to make sure that those of you listening who are new to these topics can learn. these basic concepts so that as we get deeper and more technical into the conversations everyone can follow along so yeah the next question i asked was what do we mean by no dig or no-till farming do you want to take this you go you go so
Speaker #2
basically no-till is where you don't turn over the soil so you try to minimally interfere with your soil in order to respect all the microbiology that is living there so bacteria fungi your nematodes everything You just want a really thriving system where everything is alive and teeming with life. And basically when you till over your soil, you oftentimes are bringing certain organisms into earth layers where they actually don't belong. So there's not enough oxygen for them there or that's just not where they're supposed to thrive. There's not enough air, water or compaction in those things. So that kills it off. And it's actually... that microbiome that makes nutrients available to plant roots so if you constantly disturb that you're actually setting your system back and bringing up loads of weed seeds and stuff so yeah no till just means minimal disturbance really for the benefit of the soil health you just want to start this one like one bed yeah and you're starting from scratch what's the process So basically the first thing you want to do is clear your area and that means trying to get as much of the weeds and other plants because you know what's a weed what's not a weed a weed is just a plant that you don't want to grow there you need to get rid of that so the best way and most effective way is first the tarp and that means it's covering the ground so before that you might want to decompact that's maybe step number one depending on where you're going to start so if you're starting at a place where heavy machinery has passed many times you can check this by taking a stick and poking it down in the ground and if you start to feel compaction really you know very shallow or even if you you go lower and let's say 50 60 centimeters and you feel that there's a lot of compaction there because you can't push your stick through that means you have compaction down below and then you might want to take the intervention of just one time pulling through like a yoma plow or a ripper to take care of the compaction let's say so to basically to loosen it all up this means that plant roots will be able to grow deeper then you level it out because it's really nice to work in a level space then you tarp bit. with the tarping what you're doing is you're basically making all the weeds germinate and then die off again because they don't get sunlight once that has been done properly the timing of that depends a little bit on what you have growing if you have very invasive weeds and stuff you want to tarp for longer if not then you can do it for a little bit shorter but let's
Speaker #1
say like the best of the best one year is the perfect because you got all the seasons so you had the summer weeds coming.
Speaker #2
the winter weeds coming they both die and then you can start in the white clean sheet make sure that you can irrigate underneath because you also want to create some humidity so like you couldn't tarp just without irrigation in that scenario which is very long most people don't have a year so this this is like the long version then you can have the short version which the short version would be tarp as long however long you can tarp take the tarp off then you cover your area with carton like cardboard cardboard without let's ink and other types of treatments so as natural as you can find it and as thick as you can find it and then on top of that you layer your compost spaced at the space of your bed which ideally is like 75 centimeters then you have a path which is 40 centimeters this is for ergonomical stepping over and then i mean the higher you can go in terms of how thick you layer it the better we did about 15 centimeters at the onset and then you fill your paths up with wood chips this is to promote fungal life but also because when it rains and stuff you get to really nicely walk in your paths and then you're more or less ready to go what you then first want to do still is inoculate your compost with a lot of microbiology so we irrigate it with a lot of very um i want to say like lively water water that had a lot of life in it just to kick start that process and then immediately plant as many plants in here as you can because you want to have living roots in the soil because they basically bring sugar via their roots into the system and that then jump starts that whole beautiful process so um what's the format that you sell those vegetables in can people pick or order individual vegetables to use the boxes how does it work it's a really good question because i feel like that's like a big thing in the market gardening world and also obviously Everything is super context related and our context is that we're in a very rural place, which is unfortunately not like the most rich area of Portugal. So you always work within the context. If you're closer to the city, then doing it by the kilo or by the bunch and everything is quite a good way to go about it. In our context, what we do is a weekly veggie box and people basically opt in because they like the idea that it's varied and that it's seasonal and that you get... you know you get to choose if you don't want to participate or not but you sort of agree with what is in the box um so we're a little bit less flexible like that that's also because of our setup and because we have you know our digital format as well so we want to provide our community with with food but at the same time also we don't want to over complicate and with our water situation this is like the best way to get good variety and a steady output without it being like, okay, everybody bought all the carrots and then some people don't have carrots because we're not huge, right? We're not a huge market garden that can basically provide everybody to have their specific choices, wishes, yeah, abide by, or I don't know how you would say that. But I also think that that is a key selling point because actually that's the feedback we get from a lot of people, which is that they like the surprise box and that they like to sort of be inspired by the ingredients. and then to cook with it. And I think we can get away with that much easier here in the countryside than maybe you would be in the city. That's just my, you know, sort of take on things.
Speaker #0
While we were recording this conversation, standing in the middle of the market garden, I noticed at the back that some of the beds were completely covered with cover crops. So we went to sit next to these beds, and I asked them to tell me more about these cover crops and how they integrate them into their rotation.
Speaker #2
Yeah, you asked me if we do anything specifically for the soil. And I thought you were talking about like, you know, like production crops, like cash crops. But I forgot to mention that we, of course, also cover crop. So we try to have living roots in the soil at all times and just to really enhance our soil biology by living plants. So we do that as often as we can. It's always a bit tricky because, of course, when you put a cover crop in, it's like you're in some way losing that productive time in the bed. But then what you get back is really incredible. and So we found that, you know, cover cropping with things like legumes or veg or rye and things are really beneficial for the soil and that yields afterwards really increase. So that's part of our cycle and it's always still a bit of a work in progress on how to rotate it well. I don't think we're experts at that yet, but I think we're doing a good job at trying to.
Speaker #1
Well, we didn't do no soil analysis, but all the nitrogen fixes are the plants that you want to use as cover crops because they fixate your nitrogen on the soil. So that's, how do we know that when it's time, when it's flower, it's the best time for it. It's when it's at its highest as nitrogen. So it's when it has the flowers, it's time. You don't let the flowers become fruit. You just, on that time, you just cut the plant and you just, a lot of people turn it into the bed. What we are trying to do is just cutting it, laying down. and just put a thin layer of compost on top and leave it like that. Yeah. And yeah.
Speaker #0
This slowly decomposes, but I guess then you need to wait a little bit until you can plant your next bed.
Speaker #2
It's always a bit tricky on what you're going to plant in next. So like if you can plant something right into it, something big like, you know, you could do pumpkin or cabbage or something like something that is quite sturdy, like one plant. Obviously, direct seeding then becomes very tricky because that's best done in super fine compost. So that's always a bit the way off. And no, we didn't do any soil analysis. Of course, if you get really into it, I'm very geeky about all the levels and the pHs and stuff, you can get really into it. That's not really the way we farm. We have quite a holistic sort of intuitive way of farming where we just observe the system and we see what works and doesn't work. And coming here to this new climate has been really interesting. But we always start a bit off with cover crops. So, for instance, this is the newest part of the garden. So before we start producing in here, we'll cover crop it then plant into it afterwards and then try to bring in one cover crop annually in each bed sometimes we have to be honest we like you know prolong the season a little longer just because we need a lot of production um but yeah we try to just find times in the year could be spring could be autumn could be winter like we can grow all year round here so we just find a moment in the year what's like the
Speaker #1
sort of biggest mistake you used to make as a market gardener that you've learned not to make anymore till i used to we used when we started farming we used to we wanted we started by doing organic but then in the conventional with the conventional methods and very soon in three months we just we said like this doesn't work like this you know our methods have to be different also just just being organic and using the conventional way it it doesn't like tilling and it doesn't It doesn't help nobody, it's not helping us, just creating more work, so it has to be more than that. So then we started looking for and we came to.
Speaker #2
We had a very big epiphany moment in this sense because we used to use the rotor plow, you know, just the walk after tractor. Rotortiller, yeah. And we just did a lot of weeding, we were farming in heavy clay, so also like the water management on the farm was terrible. We didn't have nice wooden paths, so when it got wet it got like really... hard to work and all the clay would stick to your boots and even working the machinery would be really difficult to find like exactly right time in the year and then we had a very big amount of What was it? What's that? It's not a cow. It's from the mozzarella. I'm forgetting it. The Buffalo manure So we had a friend that had an organic Buffalo farm and he just was like Oh, I can bring you a great amount of this Buffalo manure And then we let that decompose for a whole year and we used that as like a really heavy compost on some of the beds and then we accidentally sort of did this no dig yeah and then we stumbled upon it of course also online and that's when it changed and we just changed our complete perspective on it like oh we don't really want to be using the machines and we just really want to feed the soil life as before we were just thinking in terms of not using chemicals and being organic like wanting to respect the environment but not really understanding the fertility cycle well and not understanding that it was actually like the microbiology in the soil feeding the plants. So we very much had this naive that shows that we didn't have it back. and it was when we started composting and using less of the machinery.
Speaker #1
After the first year that we just had plowed everything like everybody does and everybody told us to do and that's the way you should have done but after we did it and plant the first plants on the beds we saw that with the first rainfalls everything went away because we were in the quite I don't know the percentage of the inclination but it was quite a steep slope so we found out very quickly that this cannot be like this because all the good soil ends up by the river on the bottom so that's the first change that we did was living pads that was one of the best things that we did there so here we do wheat chips because it's very hot uh but in italy we just had a living pad just grass around clover we just uh yeah and that would hold the whole garden nothing you could go in the winter in rainfall and you walk on top of that five ten centimeter clover and it would be like dry would be it was great and it hold the whole Garden in place, the soil in place. That was the first big change. And then it was like, why are we rototilling the beds then? We shouldn't rototill the beds too. So then we started, okay, let's instead of rototill the compost, we're going to lay up the compost on top. And that was it. never went back again.
Speaker #2
And also I think that that's when we started getting into the whole idea of no dig and you know not plowing and of course you know there's a scale where that works really well and we've always been small to medium size like our last farm was much bigger than this in terms of production for gardening but we used to see where we lived in Italy was a lot of grain and a lot of sunflower production so every year like they plow it at least two times and when we then have rain all the streets are just like covered in topsoil so you just have this massive wash off and i feel like that really also changed our perspective on everything when we started learning about it and we started seeing like all the damage that was being done that before we were blind to it and it's sort of that that classic feeling of getting friends over and driving through beautiful green landscapes and everybody's like oh this is so beautiful and then you're sort of looking at it like this is so destructive you know like it's a road it was green and green and people thought oh so natural. Yeah, not natural. And I think like that's, yeah, I hope that we with the farming chefs also just spread that message, you know, the importance of topsoil and like to prevent erosion and to use, you know, to treat our land as this sacred, you know, resource that we have that is basically the source of all our food and that we should be really appreciative of it and let all that life flourish and not kill it off and have it washed away with every rainfall, with every, you know, blow away with every wind event.
Speaker #1
let's keep the soil in place one last question about this what's your favorite source of information and inspiration about market gardening here in portugal we have a whatsapp group with all market gardeners and it's an amazing community we were talking about this yesterday and it's one of the parts that i like more that we are very different from any other industry because we will share every information possible that we have with our colleagues and that's something very special
Speaker #2
in this area that's amazing i guess it's really important so it's a feel that you're very you people doing totally very important you're not alone yeah i think it's a very strong uh general sense like in terms of the energy that you get when you get a lot of people that are operating in this regenerative space that have a clear vision of you know basically improving the place that they're farming and leaving it better for the next generation i think you share a very strong common value. and i think everybody that works the natural system let's say knows that it's not always easy so it's good to to have this community of people and sharing sort of secrets and tips and tricks and like how how do you do this where do you buy that um you know what are what are your grand successes what are your grand fails and stuff and that's nice and that is true tulip saying i think that that is a special sort of energy that lives within this community which is really energizing
Speaker #0
So This closes our chapter on the market garden. We then walked over to another part of the farm, a beautiful meadow with big old olive trees and really lush grass full of diverse plant species and flowers.
Speaker #2
So yeah, we're sitting in our meadow and it's a beautiful moment to maybe discuss a little bit the animal integration that we do on the farm. We are very consciously trying to restore the soils here on this farm by using animals as a tool and so we have a small herd of sheep and we graze them rotationally on our farm in very small paddocks. We try to just very intensively graze them in order to fertilize the land and eat the grass and capture the carbon out of the air into the soil. via the root systems and then we also have behind us they're not beautiful to look at but they're the the chicken tractors so we do have a little production of broilers which are meat chickens and eggs egg producing chickens so laying hens they are more for our home consumption so they're very small herds but what we basically do is we graze them through the field in order to use them as fertilizers. That sounds weird.
Speaker #1
Pest controlers.
Speaker #2
In order to use them to fertilize the land and to increase our grass production, which then eventually will increase our meat production. So we very much like to think of it as that we're farming grass and then whatever gets to live on that grass brings us yields in terms of meat or eggs. And that's what we're trying to achieve here. It's a very basic setup. It is like a super, super low cost structure that just provides shade and shelter. And you just move them manually. onto a new piece every day until they hit about halfway through their life cycle when they get a bit bigger and then you do it twice a day and so what happens is that they you know have their feces basically quite intensively manure one area and then you move along and then that takes time to decompose and then when you see that the grass has recovered to the point that it was or a little bit higher than it was before ideally you bring back the animals on the cycle and we graze our sheep first then and then we bring on the chickens
Speaker #0
Okay, so how do they work together? So you say you first graze with the sheep? Yeah. You let it grow back first or?
Speaker #2
Well, no, you can basically do that quite intensely after each other. So because you can get the benefit of all the animals that eat the manure of the sheep, that can also be sort of a feed for your chickens. So if you've timed it correctly, it's even better with cows, but we don't have cows.
Speaker #0
But they're actually complementary.
Speaker #1
Yes,
Speaker #2
they are complementary. Yes, indeed.
Speaker #1
So you have to imagine that you have 30, 40 centimeters of grass. And we will graze the sheep quite fast, one day basically, in a small space. They will bring that grass like about 10 centimeters height, so quite short. And after that we put the chickens. So the chickens will start eating the larvae that are created or that are raised.
Speaker #2
A week after more or less, because you want to time it so that the poop that has been... deposited by the sheep will then have like some eggs and maggots and you know there's sort of life coming to digest the poop and then you can have the benefit of especially with your laying hands it's nice for the egg quality to get some really live insects in there protein and then they of course leave their manure and then you leave it to rest that's very important the resting time because if you don't time the resting time correctly you could actually be degrading your grassland but what you're trying to do obviously is to to grow it stronger and to have ever more producing grass so it's important to give the plant really the time to recoup the its growth underground which will reflect in the growth above ground and then once you see like it's basically come back to the stage where you've had it at its peak you know then it's ready to be grazed again if you come back before that you're making it harder on the plant to come
Speaker #0
up over grazing it okay in the only three years since you've been here have you seen a change in the in the landscape
Speaker #1
I want to say yes.
Speaker #2
Yes, we have and you can see even like the amount of species that we find on the square meter has changed. We're not successful on all parts of the land yet because it's very much the time where you need to you need to monitor very well to understand the impact that you have on different parts of your farm. Because for instance we have some areas that have bedrock quite shallow so there's not a lot of topsoil there. And then we have other places like where we're sitting right now. where we actually have much deeper soil profile, where we have bigger layers of topsoil. So this is an easier part to regenerate because there's already quite a lot of life in the soil and that cycle is already functioning. On some more degraded pieces it's trickier because we deal with extremely hot summers, so I feel like it always takes a hit. So biology in the ground, especially on those spots where there's very little topsoil, it's just such a shallow layer and with the very high temperatures, you always get a big dip. in life in the soil which you then need to basically mitigate for again with your animal intervention and timing that correctly can be a little challenging also because we are you know a lot of our setup is manual so it all it's all about timing and there's a lot of things that we're doing so sometimes I think we try to just
Speaker #1
right before the summer I think at around end of May that nothing else is growing we try to let the sheep go everywhere and trample a little bit the grass because there's always like a 60% trampling of grazing animals. And that is great in our case because the trampling creates a layer that is covering the ground for the three months of summer that are coming that are very intensive. So it's not that it stays humid, but it keeps the life longer at play. So if it was completely grazed it will dry out very soon and it would be completely dead and just stone and sand. but with the animals passing and the trampling, that grass just covers our soil for the summer. In the place where we are, it brings a small problem that is the fire dangerous, the fire hazards. So we could have floor fires, that's what they call here, a floor fire, but we believe that the moist under will keep us away from that.
Speaker #2
And we try to secure more.
Speaker #1
Righto.
Speaker #2
And we try to work in terms of the parameter of the farm. So we basically, you know, here legally you're supposed to cut down all your brim and stuff. These are all the pioneer plants that are actually helping to restore soil. So there's something very counterintuitive to that. If you're a regenerative farmer, you don't want to be taking away all your pioneers constantly because they're actually the ones that are going to kickstart, you know, that whole cycle of regeneration. So a lot of neighbors frown upon us because they're like, oh, you don't mow your land. You don't plow everything. You know, it's sort of... We're using methods here that aren't conventional in this setting. And that also, you know, some of them are, there have been many forest fires. So I also understand why people are doing that. But the way we mitigate for that is by trying to really secure a parameter. And then we are obviously banking on being able better than others in the area, maybe to capture a lot of the water in the soil and have much more resistance against forest fires. And yeah, well, we have water in many areas.
Speaker #0
areas of our farms if there would be a problem we could you know hopefully take care of it very quickly before we move on to the next part of this farm visit let me take just a really short break to tell you about the official partner of the deep seed podcast and that's soil capital one of the biggest levers to enable farmers to transition towards regenerative agriculture is financial incentives and that's essentially what soil capital does They financially reward farmers who improve things like soil health and biodiversity. They're an amazing company. I love what they're doing and I'm super proud to be partnering with them for the podcast.
Speaker #1
So,
Speaker #0
Filip, could you explain what you're doing here?
Speaker #1
So we're using this natural resource that we have here. And it's this kind of water trifoli. I don't know exactly the name of this plant, but... This plant is 40% protein of its own weight and it grows 75% of its size daily. So it's something that you can come here every day and the next day you always have the same thing. And this is chicken, we use this as chicken feed right now. But it can be used at any feed, chicken feed, pig feed, sheep feed. And we use this just so we minimize the amount of bought feed that we have to give to the chickens. and it's a nice natural resource that we have here at the farm so uh so it just produces fresh protein protein every day of course this has to be a fresh water source so there's a source of water under this well it's not just a well from the top that the water comes from the top there's a source there that makes that these wells can produce this uh this plant this aquatic plant that it's a great resource
Speaker #0
Do you know the name of that plant?
Speaker #1
I don't know the name, but I can check for you upstairs.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
I've seen an American guy using this to feed their pigs and they made an analysis to the meat. And the analysis from the lab came out that those pigs had a certain amount of omega-3 in the meat. That's very rare because omega-3 you find it in fish. But with feeding this to the animals, they just get that intake of it. And yeah, you spare money, you get healthy animals. And it takes very little time of your day to do this. Not even five minutes. And we have here around a kilo of this thing. So probably we have around 300 to 400 grams of protein here. Free protein for chickens. Let's go give them. So we're at the orchard and at the orchard we let the layers run through. We have everything by rows so we would let the every three days I'll move the net with around 25 layers and we have a little chicken tractor that has no bottom that allows that the poo falls down directly to the floor every time. So what we do is we move that car between the rows of the trees and we try to park the car. right next to every tree, so every night there's a discharge of chicken poo, chicken manure into that tree, and so we're trying to... every tree gets one day of discharge and we run this, all these rows let's say it, and these rows are about 90 days time to come back to the same place where we were, so you can see it's beautiful green The chickens were here before, you can see it's a little bit bare, but you can see the result behind you, that's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker #0
so you're using the chicken manure as fertilizer for your young trees that you're growing here in this orchard.
Speaker #1
Yes, and another thing that the chickens also do very good is the trampling from the grasses, and because we're in central Portugal it's very dry Very hot. and the part of the trembling becomes very important because you're just covering your soil with grasses and the chickens do that like amazing they will scratch a few spots but they will trample a lot and basically it's a protection layer for for the soil awesome and you're gonna be moving the chickens now let's move the net let's move the chickens and uh right it's a easy easy job let's go so
Speaker #0
how many chickens do you have and
Speaker #1
25 right now.
Speaker #0
And so how many square meters do you have per chicken? Is there some kind of like calculation that you need to follow?
Speaker #1
Square meters? No, it's... You have to see how much impact are the chickens creating into the soil. So you could have a hundred chickens in this space, but you would have to move it three times a day, for example. So we have 25 chickens. in the 50 meter fence and normally it's three days time for each pet okay you look at the floor you see how trample it is how how does it look like okay so you move them every three days and because you figured out that this is the right amount of time for this amount of chickens yeah yeah yeah so the car moves three times inside the same pen so it starts there tomorrow we'll be here and After tomorrow we'll be there. And then the day after we move the net and he goes to the next one. So the car walks slowly inside the pen itself. So it has also to do how is your floor, how is your fauna, let's say on the on the ground, because if it's already quite bare, you don't want to let the chickens so long in it. So when it's like this nice and height, like as a good height, the three days are perfect. and the chickens are happy they have fresh food yeah you can look at them you taste the eggs so yeah yeah the eggs are delicious you can see good with the by the feathers of the chickens you know they're not being packed so there's very low stress into these chickens that's one a sign of stress is like chickens packing on chickens and then you start to see like chickens with the back completely clean like no feathers that's a very big sign of stress in the in the pack of these chickens but you can see here there's like yeah they're just they're just very healthy they're just very very how does the system benefit both the landscape and the chickens well the chickens you can see you know they give you eggs that's the plus of what we're doing here what's more important here for us is actually the soil itself and we can see we've been here for three years. And we can see this pasture that just has layers on it. It doesn't have broilers or it doesn't have sheep on it. It's just layers. And I think layers are one of the animals in the farm that have a greater impact to your soil. Because they just trample a lot. A lot of people say, oh, it's a waste of your... beautiful grass but it's not a waste because it will come to you eventually again into the fruits into the fruit trees into the fauna that you have here so yeah they're a very important part of the of our system the layers so
Speaker #0
you just moved them here to this new patch like minutes ago and they seem so excited they're running around it's like a
Speaker #1
you know easter egg chasing hunting yeah that thing right it's because they're they're hunting for fresh insects and all fresh things you can see that i put the food there yeah but just a few have quite interest on it all the rest they just go like oh my god this is a new paradise look at this yeah so my favorite food is is what like uh bugs bugs bugs bugs yeah chickens are like small t-rexes they are very aggressive and very powerful you know like if this animal would be a little bit bigger would be man would be a problem for us a problem for humanity uh and they are fiercely they will scratch and eat all animals are you flies you see them sometimes jumping to catch like butterflies or stuff like this so yeah animals that's where they source their amount of protein so no i think normally a chicken would eat around 150 grams of feed a day We give around 70, 60, 70 grams because the rest comes from here and also with the supercharged grass from the well. We don't need to give more and they lay perfectly. They lay around 80% of the number that they are.
Speaker #0
How long ago did you plant your trees here in this area?
Speaker #1
Two years ago.
Speaker #0
Two years ago?
Speaker #1
Two years ago.
Speaker #0
Like you can see they're already quite big and healthy.
Speaker #1
Yeah, and they've already been attacked. by sheep more than once so it was a little a small setback uh that's why we also decided okay let's not put cheap here anymore for the first few years just have the layers so let the tree grow without no uh attack sheep attack because it's devastating for me and for the trees itself okay
Speaker #0
So after Philip finished moving and feeding the chickens, we went back to the main house to meet again with Sophie. Surrounding the side of the house, there is a beautiful, lush, vibrant herb garden. We sat there with Sophie to talk about this herb garden. So we're sitting now in your beautiful herb garden. It's just surrounding the house. It's beautiful. It's full of colors, of smells. And it's really something that I wanted to talk about with you. So maybe you could give us an overview of what's going on here.
Speaker #2
Indeed, this is like a little sanctuary that is embracing the house. And that's how we designed it, how we built it. And it's an oasis of plants. There's so much diversity in this garden. And it brings me, of course, lots of delicious culinary herbs and some medicinal. But it also just brings me lots of joy. So I always like showing this garden when people come and visit. It's a place where pollinators come to thrive, where we come to harvest for the kitchen. And I think it's just a really great testament to how well plants thrive when they are planted together and when they are competing and working together. And sort of that beautiful synergy between some struggle and aid and everything is just flourishing here. We were talking earlier a little bit about how this... garden came to be if I was seeding it from seed or if I was doing it from cuttings. And I was telling you this story about, you know, the vigor of life and how strong plants actually are, which is in a testament to Philippe's mother who showed me some very unconventional planting techniques. So most of the plants here that are able to propagate from cuttings were brought to me by Philippe's mom or I harvested them here in the area and we just mob planted, seeded. did everything here and everything just took. And that was done in a very rough manner. So before I was much more careful in the way I planted things and transplanted things. But I found out that you can be really, you know, quite harsh with them. And the life force is just so strong that things grow. And I think that that is just another great testament to nature's force and life force. Yeah.
Speaker #0
How many different plants would you say you have here in this garden?
Speaker #2
You know that I've never counted them. but I would say definitely over a 100, 150 maybe. And a lot of them are culinary, but also there's quite some ornamentals here. I never used to grow any ornamentals. I was very much in the mindset of productivity. And as I get older, I think there's much to be said for beauty and surrounding yourself with beautiful things because they're also very good for the spirit. Some of them, I don't even know the name because Philippe's mom brought them. But many of them of course are also culinary and edible flowers, delicious, fragrant, aromatics.
Speaker #0
a very wide variety indeed i will count them now after you ask me this question yeah okay so yeah you said that a lot of it you've found from local areas where you found some herbs and plants that you were interested in you just took some cuttings and then just yeah came back put them in the ground yeah and let them grow i think that's a really great thing to do because uh first of all if you're doing it in your local area the chances that the thing will thrive is you know are very big and
Speaker #2
also i found that most people that like gardening and that have very nice gardens they're really into this idea of sharing. So for instance, if people come here for a course, I always have them leave with a bag of whatever they want from the herb garden. People can just pick and choose and whatever will survive after propagation. We just dig out a bit or break off some branches because things regrow really fast. It's a great way to start a herb garden is you don't need a lot of money and you don't need to buy everything in a garden center. You just need to go somewhere that somebody is already doing it. Just smile at that person and be like. do you want to share some of your plants with me and most people that like planting they will so i think that's just a nice community has anyone ever said no to that no nobody has ever said no to that i think that with a good smile and you know some enthusiasm most people will happily
Speaker #0
share with you it's uh it's a lot cooler than collecting pokemons isn't it like yeah it's it's really a fun way also to keep your eyes open when you're walking around or when you're visiting someone else's garden and be like, oh, that's a very nice herb that I would love to add or a flower or something.
Speaker #2
Definitely. And totally. And also what's really nice is if you're a bit like towards the end of summer, a lot of things obviously are already in seed and sometimes you'll walk past something and it'll just look weird, but you won't know what the flower looks like yet. And then you'll collect the seed and then it's sort of like a surprise. I have lots of envelopes of seeds that I don't remember where I took them or what they are. And then it's sort of like this wonderful surprise. You just look at it and think, shall we try this? Yes, let's put it there. And the only thing I wouldn't do that with is if it's really strong, big climbers that get very woody, because just popping those anywhere wouldn't work out. But most annual plants, especially flowers, are really great because it's sort of like a surprise waiting for you to happen in a few months' time. And you see it grow and it's like, ooh, what kind of flower will it be? So yeah, I like that.
Speaker #0
After this, we followed Sophie around the farm as she was collecting a lot of different ingredients for dinner. She then invited us into her kitchen and while she was cooking, we had a really nice chat about food, about the relationship between soil health and ingredient quality and about nutrient density. You started as a chef.
Speaker #1
We already discussed this at the beginning of the video.
Speaker #2
We did.
Speaker #0
Right? You then opened a restaurant, like Métodie, a palm-to-table layered restaurant.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Do you still cook food professionally for a living?
Speaker #2
Right now we're actually at a very interesting stage where we are still cooking professionally, but not directly for the public unless it's for courses and stuff. So we do it now for the content creation, which has been a shift in our way of cooking, which has been interesting. And this moment is no different like we're standing here in our professional kitchen where we do a lot of filming and it's really it's fun having you guys here and doing it for once so i'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out um yeah so we do cook professionally but not for a restaurant and uh it's been uh much calmer yeah
Speaker #0
so how different is food that you buy from the supermarket to the food that you grow yourself here in the nordic Garden.
Speaker #2
It's cannot compare guys. It's like apples and pears, you know, you're comparing two things that should not be compared. Well, of course It's sort of funny because I think the first time that I realized the difference between something Tasting so different depending on where it came from was when I was working in soup and so as these are the last bosses that I ever had basically when I was working for somebody else and we were writing this cookbook transforming their recipes and me and this other chef who were just like what makes this soup delicious like how much gram of this spice and we were trying to like scientifically figure out like what made a really good pumpkin soup right so we did all these trials and then in the end it just came down to like it's all about the pumpkin like if it's a nice pumpkin it's going to be a nice soup if it's a shitty pumpkin you know it's going to be less nice right and that was the first moment where I sort of thought like yeah where does actually all this food come from like we just order it comes into a box, you open the back door of the restaurant, bring it in, and every day you order more or less the same ingredients depending on where you're working. But basically you're just like one salad isn't the other, right? And that was like this moment where I started to think about like where does it come from and does it make a big difference? And it does. So I think the biggest difference is obviously taste, but also health because you're not eating chemicals and all those, you know, great benefits that you're not poisoning your body with poisons. But if you're going the hedonistic route, I think it's really about how nutrient dense it is, and also about just the general flavor profile of things. So I think that's the biggest game changer for anybody that loves to cook. It's that you can compare them side by side, and there is a very big difference in the flavor.
Speaker #0
Okay. What do you think about the topic of nutrient density? Just the fact that we are finding out more and more that food grown in a healthy soil with a healthy microbiome in the soil is actually more nutrient dense. So between the carrots that has been mass produced in a very intensive way that you buy at the supermarket or the one that you grow in your soil here, you will have a massive difference in terms of how much nutrient the carrots holds.
Speaker #2
I find that such an interesting topic and we both know Dan Kittredge who's basically like a big advocate for this and showing you know the difference in the nutrient density profiles and like how that is related to soil health. So I think that that is just like it's super fascinating. It also is something that we've had as a physical on-site feedback loop of eating the food that we produce, where it's like you taste the difference so clearly between a store-bought tomato and a tomato that you pick off the vine on your... you know, regenerative organic farm. As a chef, I can only say what a great attribute that it's not only nutrient dense, it's not only healthy, but it's also tasty. Like those to me, when they go hand in hand, it's like a win-win for everybody, right? Because if somebody was telling you, you need to eat these nutrient dense veggies, but you're just like, I don't like veggies and they're not that tasty. And now it's sort of like, okay, you get to eat a carrot, but that carrot will also taste better than the average carrot that you're maybe used to. So for me, it's, yeah, it's one of those things that it's a win-win. A win-win and you know.
Speaker #0
Tasting density and taste go hand in hand.
Speaker #2
Yes.
Speaker #0
Actually related.
Speaker #2
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the flavor profile.
Speaker #0
is actually better, right? If you have a more nutrient-dense carrot, it shows that it's shown scientifically that they taste better. And I think it's an exciting prospect that there's going to be a tool for us as consumers to basically check, like scan our ingredients at the supermarket or at the farmer's market or at your local farmer and just see like, is this actually like a very nutrient-dense product or is it just, does it look, you know, every carrot looks the same to the consumer, but inside they're not the same. And I have great hopes that if we're sort of empowered with this tool, that that's going to change a lot of, you know, it's going to change the game. And I'm looking forward to that moment. Yeah, sure.
Speaker #1
Okay, so we're now moving on to the very last part of this episode. And Sophie and I put out some chairs outside of the house in a beautiful spot overlooking the whole farm. And we had a bit of a longer... kind of conversation. I would say a bit more in the classic podcast style. So we talk about a lot of things, including the business model, the education part, and then also a more personal conversation about what it's like to live on a farm, to raise children on a farm, and a few other things as well. So at the start of the conversation, you told me that a big part of what you're trying to create here is about education, and we haven't really spoken about it yet, so I would love for to tell me more.
Speaker #0
Wonderful, I'm really happy to talk about it as well. Yes, it is actually, I would say, the main thing of what we're trying to do here, and that is sort of like raise awareness and that, as I said before, I'm calling it sort of edutainment because I think it's always fun to learn through storytelling. It's also why we chose sort of YouTube as a medium to, you know, get videos out there and to draw attention to the regenerative movement. It's also one of the ways where I feel like our sort of, of in-house people, planet profit. could get into balance where it's like I really strongly believe that it shouldn't all be about economy or all be about personal interests or all be about the impact or it should be you know how you can bring your own skill set together and make money that way while also having purpose and doing something good for the planet and I feel like this model that we've created does all three of those things because we get to live a really yeah meaningful and yeah I want to say healing, but that sounds as if we're sick, but sort of nurturing existence in this beautiful place. Like you've been here now. I hope you can attest to sort of the feel here. You know, it's really calm and peaceful and beautiful. And we get to create this space that is going to over time just become more productive. So from a personal perspective of where you want to raise a family, this is a really great location. And it's also a really great location to teach from. So to get people involved and show them, you know, all the different plants and how you can grow and how you can cook. And These are these basic things that people do, I mean, especially the cooking. Every day, right, you're every day making a choice when you buy something in the supermarket. Every time you put something in your mouth, it's like a political act, basically. And I felt that combining education with this farming and cooking is just bringing our skill set together. So what we try to do is empower people to cook with regeneratively grown produce. to grow it as well and a lot of people think when they hear like learn how to grow your own food like grow all of your food that's not necessarily the aim it's more to yeah encourage people to take back a little bit of control over their food system and experience
Speaker #1
the joy of cooking some of your own food really amazing um and so that education comes in different forms because you mentioned the youtube channel you've been doing so you spend a lot of time trying to educate people online about farming about cooking about
Speaker #0
a lot of things right yes and then there's also a physical uh version of that where people come here and you teach people how does that work yeah well i i so i'm a very big advocate for in-person events like i love the digital space when it's used sort of for good right social media can be very toxic but i also think that there's a lot of really great information out there you're an example where basically you get to find like really good information and really inspirational stories so i think that the digital space is great for growth and for scaling um But I also very much am a social creature. Like I like to connect. I like to talk. I like to get the instant feedback at which sometimes the internet is like less capable, right? To give you that instant feedback of what do people really think about this? Maybe you'll get the extreme haters or you get the extreme people that are really, you know, supportive and positive. But there's also just a large part of the population that watches and doesn't say anything but thinks something. But you don't really get that feedback. And so... I always wanted to combine the two and have people come to the farm and take courses here also because it's a much better indicator for you as the person creating the educational content to get like good feedback on what are people really looking for like what are their struggles what are their you know what are their wants and then you can better cater to them so okay yeah so what what What form does it take?
Speaker #1
Is it people come... For regular lessons? Is it a sort of a camp where they come for a whole week?
Speaker #0
So currently we have the format, we have basically the growing part made now. So there's more education on the way, let's say. But what we have live right now, of course, is around growing. And so basically helping people to set up their little vegetable plots and sort of food systems. And you can come do that in one day workshops or you can do that in a two day workshop. So some of them are more geared towards like one specific part of it so for instance composting or how you take care of your seedlings and stuff or garden design for instance and then we have a two-day course which is super intensive and it sort of like hits all the you know it hits all the parts that are important for you to successfully grow vegetables regeneratively so there's a module that starts out with your holistic vision and sort of takes you all the way through to how to design and what drives fertility and then you know basically like crop planning more of the technical aspects of it and then you get access to our digital course so we do have a digital course as well which is basically an add-on for the inside or you can take it on your own at home anywhere in the world whenever you want and then you know learn that way awesome
Speaker #1
so yeah messages out there for people who are interested in learning more about starting their own market garden yeah and what about cooking are there cooking lessons they're gonna come
Speaker #0
They are. We have a lot of tutorials out there right now about growing and about cooking. And for the growing, we've got our digital product set up and of course our onsite events. And then for the cooking, we're working on that. We are of course also cooking for some onsite events that we host where we have farm tours. So if you want to come enjoy our food, you could come visit a farm tour. And there are tutorials out there, but there's no in-person cooking currently happening. There will be in September and stuff. So if you're into that, then check out our website, I'm sure.
Speaker #1
So how do you bring all of these different elements into your business model? Because there's the market garden, the growing of food, the regenerating the ecosystem, the chickens, there's the education part. How does all of that come together and how does your economic model work?
Speaker #0
Wonderful, that's a good question. I just wanted to also just draw back to one thing you said before, where you said you want to learn people how to market garden. Of course, it's very much what we do. So we do show people a lot of those techniques, but Our courses are also very much geared towards people just wanting to grow for themselves. So it's like basically the average consumer and then people who might want to market garden, they take our courses as well. But maybe there are people in the space of like becoming a professional market gardener that are like Jean-Martin Fortier or other people that are really geared towards the business side of things. I think we are very much geared towards people that are looking to give their own gardens a useful purpose. So we're more in the consumer section, I would say. And as for our business model, which is a really great question because we have a lot of stuff going on. So I would say that we sort of have two business running alongside each other and that our place serves as both the backdrop for the education and there are certain aspects to our farm that aren't necessarily needing to be profitable on their own as a singular enterprise. Like I was explaining to you, for instance, the chickens that, you know, it's more for just. us regenerating the land and for the eggs and then using that for the content and for the videography and education the same goes for like our sheep and our our broilers so we see them as parts of the regeneration tool but not necessarily as you know we're making money from selling eggs for instance right um philippe is very much the gardener of the two of us and i'm much more more the storyteller. So I think we found a really great way to combine two businesses alongside each other and take the benefit of both. And so if you see them as a zero, as individual entities, I would say that our main focus is on the content and the digital creation. And then our market garden is working in function, but obviously needs to generate an income. But it's not something that we necessarily want to scale to great lengths, let's say. Okay.
Speaker #1
And so you managed to make it work at the moment with the income from the market garden on one side and the courses and education part of the operation?
Speaker #0
Yes, well, we are obviously still only in the second year and we have had to invest quite a lot in terms of getting the system up and running. But yes, things are looking very positive, like growth is going strong and we have our KPIs to reach in a couple of years. So I would say that we are managing to make it work. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker #1
What's the long term vision? Like maybe 10 years from now, how do you imagine this place being like and how do you imagine also the model?
Speaker #0
Yeah. Well, in 10 years time, I hope that we're standing in this, you know, location with everything that we've implemented. Having, you know, like I would say. having great impact and success so that our fertility levels have gone up. We can have more animals on the land. Our trees are thriving. We are still supplying our local community with food because that is definitely one of Philippe's purpose driven desire for his life. Like he loves to grow. He loves to grow plants. He loves to garden. He loves to be outdoors. So I envision us doing that. As for the digital side, I think that If we are successful, a lot of people will know who the farming chefs are, and a lot of people will associate that with a very positive influence that has had on their daily lives in terms of what they do in their kitchens. So I hope that we have inspired many, many people to buy organic, regeneratively grown local food. And I hope we have inspired many people to feel that they are also capable of growing some of their own food. How that will evolve in 10 years' time, I think that there will be many spin-offs and many different types of courses and areas to explore. or also... showcasing other successful regenerative projects is something that I'm very passionate about. We did a mini series and I would love to get out on the road also and sort of go beyond this location and I see it as a wonderful home base.
Speaker #1
It's amazing so you're really really passionate about trying to obviously to have an impact on the land that you own here and you're doing something amazing here I believe but also beyond that yes trying to reach a lot of people online. through courses through going to visit other farms yourselves to try and get the knowledge out there to to get people inspired about uh about farming about regenerating about community and all these things right exactly i think the storytelling is super important i feel like that's where there's a lot of um room
Speaker #0
still in in our movement like when i feel like we're in this early adaption phase that we discussed earlier and i feel this need to to tell the story like i feel something burning inside of me that is just like guys this is so great like everybody needs to look over here and not I don't mean here like our farm but I mean like hey regenerative ag is amazing look at all these small farmers that are doing a great job I feel that because we know a lot of you know small farmers we've been small small skill farmers for a long time now and I sort of feel like uh yeah farmers need to get to this sort of rock star status not for the personal fame but for the sake of sort of, you know, the... the respect that the job deserves and the support that it should receive from the community, from the local community. So yeah, there's maybe a little bit of a missionary in me. And I also think that there is a really strong case to be made that, you know, as love and relationship goes through the stomach, I also think that change in the world can come via like the kitchen, if you will. And I think that's a unique perspective we bring. and it's a fun one. I think people like food and like cooking and like good stories and I think I think we have all of those do you miss the sort of chefing life and having your own restaurant yeah well I don't flip dust like I think if it was up to Philippe we would probably be opening a restaurant like tomorrow but I sort of trying to I'm trying to hold that off a little bit because of the family aspect and Yeah, and sort of the... Yeah, as I said before, it's sort of what you want from your personal life. And I feel that even though restaurants, you know, it's a super satisfactory job because you get to perform every day. It's a high stress. When you succeed, you know, you get the room full. You serve everybody great food. Everybody goes home. You have that feeling of. a victory and that happens over and over again and maybe sometimes you have a bad night but most of the time you just have this constant feedback loop of like success success and that's really really empowering and i think philippe also thrives under this adrenaline kick um but from my perspective as a mom you know i sort of see how hard it is on family life and so i always joke that we'll do it maybe when the kids can do some dishes yeah but i can understand how like
Speaker #1
Well, my dad was a chef. I worked in a lot of kitchens in my younger years.
Speaker #0
Yeah, so you know.
Speaker #1
And I know that it's a very tough life. And it's very tough in terms of working evenings and weekends. And for your family life, it must be very difficult.
Speaker #0
It's always when the kids are free, you're working. So it's sort of like you don't get to see your kids anymore. You know, because it is like holidays. You're at your busiest. Christmas, you're at your busiest. Weekends, you're at your busiest. So it's always sort of that you sacrifice to some extent family life for that. And there are many great chefs that are doing that. I think that, you know, we're lucky that we get to eat really nice food and that people are sort of, I don't want to say sacrificing their families because I'm sure that they'll find a way to make that work. But for me personally, I just felt like it was...
Speaker #1
Fair enough. Is there maybe...
Speaker #0
a way you could reintegrate the cooking and the chefing into your business model without being you know a full-time restaurant high intensity high stress yeah it can be like a pop-up you know we we discuss this quite often like in summertime doing more events and things and that is definitely in the books but i don't know if i would call that restaurant you know what i mean like it is but it isn't in it's not the same it would never take the same form as it did yeah i i really love I love it when I see these pictures online of these
Speaker #1
tables put out. in the farm or in the vineyards in the summers beautiful table i feel like people are looking for experiences that's something magical that you get to do i think there will be a man for that i'm sure you could do something really cool yeah i know and it will happen like it definitely is in the books maybe maybe in
Speaker #0
my mind maybe because we've ran like a super busy restaurant life i'm just thinking like i don't know can we call that a restaurant can i get away with calling that restaurant life but yeah definitely like having really nice food events is like super super nice and especially what you were saying. Like here we could just put up tables in the field and, you know, sit between the olive trees. Or here where we're sitting now with these beautiful flowers in the backdrop will be magical. I agree. And there are a lot of nice initiatives out there of people doing this sort of catering pop-up events and stuff. So that's for sure. Like, yes.
Speaker #1
What would you say is your favorite thing about being a farmer and having this farming life?
Speaker #0
There's actually quite a lot of things that I really like about it. I think the best thing about it is that you get to witness the natural cycles and I think that that is a very empowering experience because I think that seeing you know that that cycle of like things slowing down coming up again getting more energy full-on like thriving garden seeds and then it decaying sort of again. and silencing down, it sort of makes you much more aware of that rhythm, the pace of life. And it puts things in perspective because you also see the force of nature, how the life force is so strong and how you can see things that are actually quite damaged still then end up being these beautiful thriving plants. So I think there's something about it that is just innately energizing and healing. That's one of the things. And you get that by just being in the garden, harvesting, working in the garden. So that's super nice. I think there's a very healthy side to it, let's call it like that, mentally. Very empowering. You start to feel one with the natural, you know, you start to feel... that you're a part of it which is something that i didn't feel growing up so much when i was living in cities and i think that that sort of stepping back into the natural is very good and very healing um obviously i enjoy the good food i enjoy the abundance that we enjoy i enjoy the i enjoy the flavors i enjoy the the sort of learning that as a cook even certain things go really well together because they're in season together and sort of being being guided by nature in that sense in your creative journeys in the kitchen. I like that our kids get to experience this and that they have this connection to the land that they go out and they eat their little edible flowers and that's like part of their daily routine where they just go harvest and yeah sort of those romanticized images that people have about farming are very true. I think those are the reasons I think that people enjoy farming and I get to feed people. And I think that's really nice, like that other people are grateful that you're doing this.
Speaker #1
So your two daughters, they enjoy that farm life too? They don't miss being closer to the city and stuff like that?
Speaker #0
Sometimes I worry a little bit about that. That's a very good question. I think our youngest is very adventurous and sort of like hands-on outdoorsy. So I think she really thrives in this setup. Our eldest is very creative and sort of like dreamy and, you know, loves to make. plays and paint and stuff so she's a bit more maybe inward if that makes sense. But I think they do both enjoy it. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to put a little disclaimer here for all the parents watching. Our kids also watch screens and like they are not just always happily prancing around in the fields but it is a part of it and I think they do enjoy it. But yes maybe when they start turning you know 12, 13... Maybe then we'll start getting some questions about why are we far away from city life. I hope to balance that with just regular visits to family and friends and sending them into the city just enough so that they can experience it and figure out for themselves if that's what they want. They'll probably live in cities because everybody needs to revolt against their parents' choices and then come back to it.
Speaker #1
probably at some point yeah but i don't know i personally think it's amazing childhood to have for kids to be so connected to nature in this beautiful place here yeah with beautiful nature with amazing food with this yeah being not completely disconnected because you still have screen internet and all of that but i think that's that's amazing um i
Speaker #0
also agree Having said that, that touches on a subject that I want to just quickly put out there. I think as humanity we need to do so much more for what happens in schools because our kids are not homeschooled. So we send them to public school. And in general, I don't have much critique about, for instance, our school here locally, right? There's people working there very hard and with lots of love. But for instance, I don't really have much control over what they eat there for lunch. And that's one of the things that I find still hard to sort of accept where, you know, we... try our best to give our foods like quite nutritious and healthy things to eat and then yeah but in school they just eat random crap i want to call it let's just call it crap i'm sorry it's crap yeah and that's so so even in our setup it's not perfect right like it's just you can't can't
Speaker #1
control everything so you do the best you can like sure yeah so we talked about all of the the positives the amazing parts of living here being a farmer all of this but i would maybe also like to know what's the you know the opposite side of things and i'm sure there are some things that are hard and yeah maybe the question is what's the the hardest part about this about farming yeah or about this life well yeah i was gonna say it ain't all sunshine and roses isn't it like no
Speaker #0
life is also yeah there are hard parts of course and i think like that is one of the things that i was i suppose also hinting at when we were down there where it's like if you want to farm you need to be realistic about what that takes and about not only the physical labor, small scale farming is obviously not very machine dependent. So a lot of it is you, right? Like you physically showing up every day, come rain, come shine. So I think that's one of the harder parts about farming that, you know, and the good days is really nice, but there are days that it's just the sheep escape. You find out that something ate that crop that you were tending to for the past few months and you're not going to now be able to sell it. There's maybe gonna be, you know, sort of regulatory things that you need to deal with that are very bureaucratic and you don't really have time for them and now you're gonna have to just soldier on and like push through because like you need to do this, right? I would say that one of the hardest parts about being a small-scale farmer in general is making a profit. Like it isn't easy to make a profit, you need to be smart, you need to have like great accounting. You want to make sure that you are not over investing, because I think that's the easiest thing that you can do in the quest for making things easier. But then that obviously needs to be justified at the other end. So, yeah, especially as well, like vegetable growing. I think of all the enterprises you could run on a farm, because what we're doing here is obviously market gardening, but within a farm setting, right? I would say that every enterprise has its... It's struggle, so I mean that in terms of like you could be growing meat, you could be growing veg, you could be, you know, growing flowers and stuff. So I think that the market gardening in general is just like quite intensive job. So it's a lot of hours that need to go in and you're probably not going to get like super, super rich in all contexts, you know, because there's a big difference if you're close to a city or if you're further away from a city. There's a big difference if you're in a economically... potent area or if you're in a less potent area so it's very context driven and we are definitely not in the easiest context for making money with market garden um so i say like yeah you just got to be very on the ball in terms of what you're doing and uh and where you're spending your money and if you're spending it wisely and i think that comes with time like you know where to invest and you know but if you start off it's easy to make mistakes and it's easy to lose money quite quick quite quickly if you don't get on top of it. Having said that though, I feel like we have somewhat of a different experience than maybe other market gardeners because we're coming from this background with the restaurant. So even on our last farm, we always like the value was always brought in the transformation, like in the, you know, really in the hospitality side of it. And here as well, like we have that educational branch to our business model. So for us also the drive to make lots of money on the veggie growing, it's maybe not as, you know. as pronounced as it is in other businesses.
Speaker #1
I suppose it is really, really important to find different ways to create value from what you're doing, like being a pure market gardener and putting all of the pressure on. that being the the sole income source of income is really tough but being able to diversify and create value from either cooking or now educating people yeah are many other things that people try to do is well yeah it'll be quite healthy you know i think it is i think it very much depends on your personal background i always think like you bring value with your skill set right so i
Speaker #0
think there are people out there that are doing a great job and they're killing it market gardening and that's the only thing they're doing so i don't think you need the diversification per se but i do think it's important to sort of place yourself within your context and be very realistic about what that means for you because for instance if you would tell me hey sophie three years ago i wanted you to move to portugal and i wanted you to become like a super successful market gardener and only make money with the market garden i would not have chosen this location do you know what i mean like um i'm not saying it's impossible because you can but it's it's not uh it's probably not the best business move to then you know
Speaker #1
selling a product that basically is quite labor intense in a not super rich area you know it would be smarter than to go closer to a city yeah of course yeah sweet um well it's been an amazing conversation i loved it like love the farm the tour everything you're doing here a great energy and thank you so much for also hosting us for a couple of days here on the farm we absolutely loved it and thank you for
Speaker #0
cooking this amazing food for us as well i'm so grateful for all of that so yeah thank you well you're very welcome and thank you also i'm really happy that you made the journey out here we're far out so we really appreciate it and it's been really lovely having you and i've been you know we've been blessed to show you around and it's it's great to share this place with others and you're always welcome both of you so thank you guys as well
Speaker #1
Thank you so much for listening to the whole episode, really. More and more people listen to our episodes every week, which is amazing. But the stats show that actually only a small percentage make it all the way to the end, maybe 25 to 30%. Between the recording, filming, editing and everything... An episode like this actually takes me two whole weeks of work. And I would be super, super grateful if you could help me out by simply following The Deep Seed here on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode right now. If you'd like to go one small extra step, you can also leave me a five-star review. Basically... All of this will tell the algorithms that people enjoy this content and it will bring these amazing stories to the ears of more and more people. And God knows we need more people to hear about regenerative agriculture and the amazing work that these farmers are doing. On that note, I wish you all an amazing day or night and a beautiful life and see you next week.

About Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Welcome to the Deep Seed Podcast, your ultimate source for all things regenerative agriculture, soil health, and ecosystem restoration!

Key topics discussed include:

Agroecology and its role in creating sustainable food systems
The power of agroforestry in boosting biodiversity and productivity
How carbon farming can fight climate change while benefiting farmers
The benefits of no-till farming for soil health and erosion prevention
Holistic grazing practices that restore ecosystems and enhance animal welfare
Crop rotation and polyculture for nutrient-rich soils and resilient farms
Exploring the potential of food forests and other nature-based solutions
The critical link between soil microbiology and plant health
Restoration agriculture and the future of land regeneration
Climate solutions that leverage regenerative practices to sequester carbon
Promoting biodiversity through sustainable farming approaches
Insights into the importance of sustainable diets and their environmental impact
Rewilding and its role in ecosystem restoration and preservation

Get in touch with me LinkedIn - Raphael Esterhazy

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Deep Seed - Regenerative Agriculture

Welcome to the Deep Seed Podcast, your ultimate source for all things regenerative agriculture, soil health, and ecosystem restoration!

Key topics discussed include:

Agroecology and its role in creating sustainable food systems
The power of agroforestry in boosting biodiversity and productivity
How carbon farming can fight climate change while benefiting farmers
The benefits of no-till farming for soil health and erosion prevention
Holistic grazing practices that restore ecosystems and enhance animal welfare
Crop rotation and polyculture for nutrient-rich soils and resilient farms
Exploring the potential of food forests and other nature-based solutions
The critical link between soil microbiology and plant health
Restoration agriculture and the future of land regeneration
Climate solutions that leverage regenerative practices to sequester carbon
Promoting biodiversity through sustainable farming approaches
Insights into the importance of sustainable diets and their environmental impact
Rewilding and its role in ecosystem restoration and preservation

Get in touch with me LinkedIn - Raphael Esterhazy

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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