Speaker #0What we have to be aware of is that none of these assumptions still hold up at this point. What we're entering now is sometimes called by experts degenerative volatility. That basically means we always had a certain amount of volatility from year to year, right? Like sometimes, you know, we have an earlier or later frost. Sometimes we have a bit more rain, a bit less rain, but generally the volatility was stable. We have more and more volatility now from year to year. So one year we might have large floods, then we might have two years of drought, then we might have a flood, then we might have a drought. And this is, in the end, the new normal now that is much more unpredictable. At the same time, the baseline is shifting. So if... before we had a bit more rain, a bit less rain, a bit more rain, the average was stable. This is not the case anymore. Our baseline is degenerating throughout the system. So basically we are in a situation where our system is receiving more and more shocks, but we have less and less buffers. So for example, our soils do not have the capacity to absorb water and hold water in the same way as They used to because we have degraded them. through our agricultural practice, leading to a year of drought. The soil is hardening, the soil is sort of baking almost, and then we get very intense rains, and that rain does not soak in and then sort of brings the soil back alive, but it hits the baked surface and runs off, carrying a lot of the fertile topsoil off with it, which is something that we're seeing all over the world, And then, of course, in regions... that have this more extremely, let's say the south of Europe, this is stronger, but we're also seeing this more and more in the north of Europe. So, of course, our biodiversity has suffered, our soils have suffered, the rainfall patterns are less predictable. But we are also seeing this in our input systems. We have a very concrete example right now with renewed conflict in the Middle East. And it is clear that we will have less access to fossil fuels, leading to a surge in prices in fertilizer. We have already experienced this in the Russian aggression in the Ukraine that led to fertilizer prices in some cases going 10x. So suddenly farmers that might have bought the fertilizer at somewhere around 100 euro suddenly bought them at 1000 euro. Of course, this massively impacts what farmers can do. And we're going to experience this again now in the conflict in the Middle East. We have more conflicts. So right now in Europe, we source a lot of our fertilizer, for example, from Egypt. Before, we would have balanced that from other countries, such as, for example, Russia. But given the sanctions, we can't do that anymore. So simply our system has more chokeholds. And we have less ability to balance this out. We have our third factor, which is the generational renewal. Our farmers are over 60 years old on average in Europe, which means that a lot of farmers are over 60 years old. Very few are significantly under 60 years old. So there isn't a lot of... new farmers coming in. We have the case of vegetable production, horticulture in Germany, where in all of Germany, there's about 100 farmers actually being trained in vegetable production, which is incredible if we think that, of course, we need to replace a lot of farmers going out of business in the coming years. Just one detail, we have the same in pretty much every production, every region in Europe. Finally, The last assumption on the free flow of material, we are already seeing cases where breadbaskets, where regions where a lot of certain crop is being produced that sort of the rest of the world has depended on, are limiting the exports in years of drought or floods. So an example for this is India a couple of years ago experienced a drought. and severely limited the export of rice. A lot of the Asian population depends on rice as sort of their staple food. And so if one of the five major countries producing rice suddenly limits exports and makes sure that rice is produced in a way that is not polluted, Rice is only available for their own population. We run into big problems in other regions. So the World Food Programme already has major issues buying, for example, wheat to feed people that cannot afford it themselves because we simply have less supply in the world in general. So the more that we're going to experience climate change, the more we're going to experience the drought and flood cycle, the more we're going to see countries limiting exports, and so the food is still available for their own population, but it will be less available for the rest of the world that maybe doesn't produce wheat or rice or potatoes or maize in the same way. All of this added together means we are moving our conversation about regenerative food systems. away from one of ecological sustainability, of sort of doing the right thing, to one of food security. The thing we need to be clear about is that agriculture is not just a nice-to-have. Agriculture is the foundation of our civilization. Everything that we produce that is not from fossil fuels comes from soil. So whether we're talking about food, that obviously comes from soil, fiber is produced from plants in the end, unless it is plastic, which is fossil. Medicine, so also our social coherence, our rural spaces, all of that depends on agriculture as a foundation. So unless we make sure that our agriculture works and works well, we as a civilization run into a problem. The positive thing about this is the future already exists. In any crisis, there is the seed of transformation. And it always depends on how we treat the crisis, whether it's an opportunity for transformation or whether it's just trauma. What we have is, let's call it the emergence of biology first systems. The research on our understanding of soils has improved significantly over the last couple of decades. And on the other hand, we have the lived experience from practitioners who have experienced that by managing their ecosystems in a holistic way, they can replace a lot of these inputs, a lot of these dependencies with the active biology of their soil. This is work that has been done by the organic community for... over a century. This has been done by the agroecological community for a long time. And nowadays, this is something that we often call regenerative agriculture. So farmers at some point decided to break out of what everybody else did and test something new, taking on a ton of risk. In some of these cases, they were successful, and they generously decided to share this with the rest of the world. Other farmers saw these success cases and took them on and sort of adopted them, applied them to their own context, adapted them, and then shared the learnings again. So we have more and more knowledge about how we can apply biology-first systems, systems with low inputs but at the same time high outputs. And for a long time this was, yeah, okay, these are edge cases and maybe this works in this context but this would never work in my context. But we have more and more research now, we have more and more data now, that this is actually working in a lot of different cases, where farmers again achieve a significantly lower input rate. So a recent study by the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture saw about 70% reduction in inputs at almost no loss of output. So the significance of this needs to be stated. We're talking about a system that is as productive as nothing else in human history, right? Like our industrial input-heavy system produces more food than we have ever before in human history. And what these farmers are managing now is to reduce 70% of the inputs to the system and still produce the same output, which is absolutely unbelievable. So we are starting to see a viable system. on the horizon as our other system is starting to have problems. So we sort of have a fork in the road here. There is an almost knee-jerk reaction on intensification. It's often now called sustainable intensification. So we're talking about taking our industrial system, but reducing its negative impacts, reducing the input costs, using more technology, becoming smarter about it. Lisa the AI-enhanced tools that we're getting more and more in agriculture now. This is vertical farming, this is lab-based product, but it's also precision agriculture in the field itself. The reaction is just like anything in human psychology. This is sort of our highway, our neurological highway. This is what we have already established as the way to go. Our tendency as a system is to double down on our industrial system. And so right now there's a certain amount of land that we put aside in the European Union for conservation purposes to support biodiversity and such. And if, let's say, we run into a wheat shortage in the coming decades, our tendency is going to be, OK, let's dig up these conservation areas. Let's enhance our production area so we can produce more. to get over this sort of short-term problem that we're having. Of course, if we take the longer view, we know that this is not a one-time thing, that we're not just running into this weed harvest problem that one time, but that this is going to happen continuously. So we have an alternative path that is much less used in our brains. That is what I described before, our biology first system. So to say, okay, well... we have a wheat problem, maybe we have the situation that wheat in a lot of the previous production areas is simply not viable anymore because the climate is changing. And so it makes sense to look at different crops that actually make sense here. So we would have to trial new seed varieties. We would have to maybe trial new types of food, new production areas. We might want to go away from a monocrop annual production and go towards a perennial system, or at least go towards a silvo-arable system, meaning the integration of trees in, let's say, a wheat field or a maze or similar. This is not intuitive to us. As a whole system, our intuition is to double down on what we already know works. So the question that is then often asked is if on the one hand we have a failing industrial system and on the other hand we have a promising alternative approach, why is not everybody doing this already if this is so great? We do have ample data that it is the more resilient, it is the more profitable solution. In many cases it is also on the same level of yield. What we need to be aware of is that we have a number of structural barriers. So we do not have an issue of farmer motivation, even though this is sort of what a lot of people assume. We need to make farmers or we need to convince farmers or we need to incentivize farmers. That's not the case. If you think that what we're talking about is a system of ecological, economic and social health, this is in the intrinsic interest of a farmer in principle. It's neither really a knowledge problem in and of itself. Farmers often, not in all cases, but very often already know what needs to be done locally. The problem is structural. The farmers are locked into a specific system, whether or not this is what they want to do. We have looked extensively into this over the last couple of months, and we have identified six or seven barriers. The first one... is land tenure, or basically the security of access to that land, access to farming that specific plot of land. This goes directly to the motivation question. If we say that regenerative management is about increasing the ecological, economic, and social health of that farm, of that land over time. This only works if I farm that land over time. If my lease contract is only five years long, which is the case for many leased plots of land, the interest is simply not there. I will not work to plant trees that take 10 years to grow. I will not improve the carbon that takes 5 to 10 years to accumulate, improve the biodiversity, etc. of that plot of land. very likely in five years the landlord is going to increase the price and I cannot afford it anymore as is the case in many areas where land is being leased. So land tenure, the long-term access to land is basically the enabling factor for regenerative management. The second key barrier that is there right now is advisory. Right now we have an advisory model that couples inputs and advisory, meaning farmers often receive the advisory for free and the advisor is paid by a percentage of the product that they sell. So let's say the advisor has the question, how do I improve my corn production this year? Or how do I avoid this disease that has come in new in my corn or in my hazelnuts or in my wheat? And so the advisor is going to come in and is going to say, well, you know, you can do this and this and this. And here's that great product that you can use that is going to decrease the pest problem. and the advisor gets paid as a percentage of... the sale of that product to the farmer by the input company. So obviously this does not lead to a decrease of inputs on the farm. It does not lead to a decrease of dependency of the farm, therefore does not lead to an improvement of the ecological and economic health of the farm. So it is crucial. that farmers have access to independent and need to understand the context of the farm well enough to say, for you, for the person that you are, for the farm that you have, for the soil that you have, for the climate that you have, and for the climate that is coming, what makes sense to do is this. The third barrier. is the public space. So this is both regulation and subsidies. There is the part of what farmers are allowed or not allowed to do, and then there is what farmers receive subsidies for or do not receive subsidies for. An example for this is in the livestock sector. A lot of the regulation in Europe for the livestock sector comes from the assumption that livestock is produced in large industrial systems. And that... in practice makes it very, very difficult or often impossible to run smaller, more diversified livestock operations. On the other hand, we have our subsidy system. And in many cases, a region would have over the last decades run a specific crop. So let's say there's a region in southern Spain that has focused on arable crops, so let's say wheat. for example, so crops that only last for one season. But it's a very, very dry region. It doesn't really make sense to focus on that particular crop. It makes more sense to go for silvopasture system, meaning we have trees and animals integrated with each other. They can withstand sort of the drought situations much better. But in that region, historically, this wasn't done. Therefore, there are no subsidies for this. Another case is regions such as Germany has been for a long time, and I think in many cases still is, where planting trees on fields means your status changes and your field becomes a forest and you lose the agricultural subsidy altogether. So these are cases where sort of the way that subsidies are built impedes the implementation of practices that actually already really make sense, But no farmer is going to... take on the investment for, for example, planting trees, if at the same time it also means they lose the funding that they're getting through subsidies. The next barrier on a similar level is the offtake structure, meaning who does the farmer sell to? Very practically, again, we have built a commodity system. So for a lot of farmers in Europe, we have a system in which they produce pretty much a single crop and sell that crop to a single offtaker. And why that is, is the processing infrastructure. So you have to think that the raw product that comes from the farm needs to be processed often in several steps before it can be sold in the supermarket to the consumer. There are some cases, like for example vegetables, that can often be sold directly, right? So this is why market gardeners would typically try to be close to cities so they can sell directly to consumers. But if we're talking about grains, they are very rarely sold as grains to the consumers themselves. They have to at least be milled into flour. And so what a farmer in a particular region can sell, often depends on whether or not there is processing infrastructure for that particular product. So if a region, as I was saying earlier, in the south of Spain, would have primarily produced wheat for the last couple of decades, then you would have a wheat mill to create flowers from it relatively close. If now you start holistic management with cattle in that region, You simply don't have an abattoir, you don't have a place to bring the cattle to be butchered and to be processed. And so the farmer has to transport the animals for sometimes 500 or more kilometers to be processed, making it much less economical to produce this particular crop. This is also the case if we're talking about diversification. So if we're talking about an arable farm that would have grown a single crop, Earlier, we are now saying, well, it would make more sense to have cover crops, to integrate more legumes, to have more diversified rotation, to have longer rotations. So, you know, in some cases we're talking about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight different crops that are in a rotation. That would be great for the soil in many cases. But that means you have to have either an offtaker that has an interest in all of these different crops, in all of these different... outputs, or you have to have a lot of different ones in that region that can process the product and that can sell the product, which in many cases simply isn't the case anymore. So again, we have a structural lock-in where we have invested in particular infrastructure, such as, for example, a mill, that is difficult to change. It's not easy, it's not cheap, it's not fast to uh build an abattoir and a mill and a legume processing facility etc in a region to make this kind of diversification possible this is one of the major problems another one is simply the logic of of offtake very simply you have traders that buy the product from Hmm. the farmers or from so-called aggregators. They're often farmer cooperatives, so people that sort of buy up all the grains or the legumes or the meat from a particular area. And they sell to a trader that then sort of has a larger aggregation. And of course, they have an interest in buying as cheaply as possible and selling as expensively as possible. And so you have an actor within that system that effectively have an interest in price volatility. So let's say we are producing wheat. The traders would often have the infrastructure, physical infrastructure, to store wheat, corn, peas, sort of durable product for the time when the prices are high. And that's just good business. At the same time, it creates a major problem in the supply chain, as we have talked about. So there are several sort of structural issues within our given supply chains that make it likely that the farmer is going to produce a single crop and is going to get the lowest possible price. If, on the other hand, we have aggregation structures that are farmer-owned or, in a way, purpose-owned, that make it their mission to support the farmers, several farmers in a region could come together and say, we will buy the physical infrastructure, we will grow, we will build the physical infrastructure to take all of our harvest, put it in our silo, and then sell it when the price is good for us. And we will have the capital to give the farmers to withstand that sort of period. But that really takes coordination as a region, and it takes the building of physical infrastructure that will make it likely to be possible. Next barrier that I already mentioned earlier, over the last decades, 70, 80 years, we have incentivized farmers to move away from a low input, low output system, as was sort of the norm in most of Europe before the Second World War, towards a high input, high output system. meaning that rather than working with a system that... produces what the land can give. We bring in nitrogen, we bring in high production seeds, we bring in pesticides from outside, and we can produce a lot of food with those kind of inputs. So we have moved from our low input, low output system to a high input, high output system. What this means is that at the beginning of a cycle, The farmer takes on debt, so to buy seed, fertilizer and pesticides, to then produce a lot of food, to then make a profit hopefully, pay off the debt and have some money left over. This debt is paying off much less often than it used to. In some cases in the past this was very successful. In some cases this is still successful. But in more and more cases, this is not successful anymore, because if you take on a lot of debt to grow your wheat again, and you have a hailstorm, an untimely rain, frost, drought, any of these, or if a war is happening and the fertilizer prices are going up because the gas prices are going up, this bet does not work out anymore. And you're stuck at the end with... the debt. So a lot of our high input farms have a high debt load already. What is important to add to this is that a lot of these farmers have been incentivized over the last decade by us, right, by public support, by public pressure sometimes, by public incentives, to invest in infrastructure. So this could be industrial livestock stables, so the pig, the poultry, the cattle stables, the industrial agriculture that we have such a big moral issue with, but of course also ecological. We have incentivized farmers to build those. We have asked farmers to build those. On the other hand, we have tractors, we have machinery, we have all of these sort of assets. that are needed for successful industrial agriculture. And farmers have followed these incentives and have said, OK, well, if I get a really good loan for this by the bank funded by the public, I will build this 3 million euro pig farm and then I will produce a tongue and that will allow me to pay that off. And later in my career as a farmer, I'm going to be making a lot of money. Now, those assets are stranded. If that system isn't working out anymore, if every year the farmer produces but ends up with a loss, then at some point you have the 3 million, you have the stable, but it doesn't make sense to continue anymore. So the farmer ends up with infrastructure, ends up with debt and can't move out of this anymore because they still have to pay off the debt. And so this is a structural lock-in that if the farmer knows that it is insane to continue this, it does not make sense, they might still have to do it. Simply because 20 years ago, they have taken that decision that we have asked them to take, that we have educated them into taking. Our sixth barrier is one that is entirely under-discussed and it is extremely influential. And that is our social and community identity. Agriculture is something that has a lot to do with identity. It's what farmers do all day. It's what they are. parents might have done, it's what their grandparents might have done. They might have done it in the same way. So there is a lot of identification with the way that agriculture is being done. So a choice to move away from a particular production system is not just a casual decision, it's something that says something about who I am as a person. Not only does it say something about who I am as a person, it also says something about what I think about my neighbors. It says something about what I think about my family, my ancestors. So if, as a farmer, I am deciding to do something differently to what everybody else is doing, implicitly it is understood that I'm saying what you are doing is wrong. What my parents have done is wrong. But that leads to major conflicts in the family. And because, of course, it's a judgment about the last 50, 60 years of the father farming. So even if the practices make sense economically, let's say even all of these other barriers weren't there to say I will farm differently might. mean that the farmer is shut out from their local peer group. It might mean that they can't go to the local bar anymore, that they can't meet their old friends anymore. And this, of course, is a major factor influencing decision-making that is completely overlooked. So the existence of regenerative management peer groups is crucial for farmers, as one farmer once told me to know, I am not crazy, I'm a pioneer. Because it's really something that they are being told, you are crazy, this will never work, you're destroying your parents' legacy, you know, why are you criticizing our way of life? We have always done things like this. And for this farmer to say, I will walk out from this way of life and I will walk on on that journey when everybody else tells them not to, is something that really, really takes a lot of guts. And it takes a community of support around them. So if we look at these six major barriers that affect different types of farms differently, but they are all sort of present in this conversation, it's clear that not one of these barriers can really be moved independently. So as an example, the community pressure might be there because the head of the local cooperative that also runs the bar Yeah. might also be the representative of the input company in that particular area. So by saying, I will move away from inputs, you have this. So all of these things are interdependent. And the important thing to understand is that this is not an accident. It is often said that the system is broken. This is not the case. The system is working exactly as we designed it. We built the system this way, and the system has immense resilience, which is what we wanted when we built it. We built it in a different context and we built it under the assumptions that are not true anymore. So the system is working. Now we need to design a different one because the context has changed that we are in. None of these can be changed independently. So to build a new innovation, a new company that provides an alternative to synthetic inputs, is difficult because we don't have the regulation for it. We don't have the regulation for it because we have the influence of major farming lobbies that depend on this kind of input. All of these things are very, very interconnected, which is why the work that we are doing as a resource is sort of on an umbrella layer. This is something that we need to move on. At the same time, on many different leverage points, so points in the system where we can actually have a significant impact with relatively few resources. What we have right now in the European agri-food system is a unique opportunity. And we have this combination of an increasing crisis that increasingly is being recognized. It's increasingly being talked about. We have an alternative. that we already have data for, that we already have enough cases, enough critical mass to say this is actually working. We have very, very dedicated leaders throughout the system. One of the very special things about the regenerative agri-food space is the very hopeful vision that we have here because we're talking about not just changed agricultural practices, we're changing about a different outlook, we're changing about a different paradigm. of the European agri-food system, and in the end, also on us as individuals, on our society, on our future. We're talking about a society that, in the end, lives in close coordination and harmony with the natural world, which is something that a lot of us... really aspire to. So there's this powerful vision. There's very dedicated leaders throughout all stakeholder groups. So whether we're talking about finance, whether we're talking about the farming community, whether we're talking about the NGO space, the researchers, the policymakers, the grassroots organizers. So the whole system is activated for this. What we're doing as resource to support this is to find those individuals and invite into conversations, invite into conversations both for sense making, so for us to build a more complete vision of the systems to better understand how does this influence that and where does this play with this and where do we actually have the possibility of intervening here, but it's also the resourcing. So making sure that the individual leaders, the Maybe 50, 100, 200, maybe 500 individual leaders that are fighting every day for this, that are working every day for this, have the resources to make these fundamental changes happen. And resources can mean financial resources, so to make sure that the NGOs that are working for this, that the research, that the grassroots organizers have the means to continue this work. But it's also the emotional, psychological resources. We are all confronting deep, deep trauma. We are all facing mourning about the future that has been taken from us, the future that we have imagined. It's the peer group in the same way as the farmers. It's also the industry and research and policymakers that are walking out of an established system. So there's also a need for a peer group to exchange with. So it's building the infrastructure around the change makers that will make it possible for them to sustain this work and facilitate this major crisis, this catastrophe into a transformation. Because in the end, that's what it comes down to. You can have a major pain, you can have a major crisis. that can lead to a breakdown or it can lead to a transformation. If we look at agriculture, almost every one of the sort of known pioneer stories in regenerative agriculture start with a major crisis. It can be an economic crisis, it can be a personal crisis, but it starts with this. And from there, some of us break down, and that is very fair. But with the right kind of support, it becomes more possible. for us to move into new decisions and the transformation of the system, leading over time from our own systems to the larger systems that we are also a part of. I think to sort of the last thing that gives me personally a lot of hope, if we look at how systems evolve, what has power in a system, there's a sequence of these things, right? So it is more powerful. to change something about the rules of the system than, let's say, the individual farm, right? We can try and affect the practices of the individual farm, but if the rules that govern all of the farms work against this, you know, it's less powerful. More powerful than the rules of the system is the goal of the system. This is what everything else is oriented around. And the goal of the European agri-food system you And this is very important. The goal of the European Union, the founding idea of the European Union, is food security. So for the first time, we have a case where the goal of the system and the more decentralized and more resilient and more bottom-up, more water-positive, biodiverse, soil-supporting, community-supporting agriculture. is actually in line with the larger goals of the system that we have built. This is something that gives me immense hope, makes me believe that we are on a path of transformation here, but we also have to be ready for the significant disruptions and the pain that is ahead of us. We are looking at major disruptions of food systems and there will be a lot of farms. that will have to close in the coming decades. So this will not be easy, but it is, I think, the most hopeful outcome of the major disruptions that we have in the global system is the potential emergence of a regenerative agri-food system that might just be the inspiration for a regenerative society.
![Why the Food System is Breaking and How to Fix it [IVO DEGN] cover](https://image.ausha.co/fTFEznYzZMBV799WOkfBCMki1hJ0DZkYk6BVMkAC_400x400.jpeg)
![The Farming System Is Broken... And Farmers Know It! [DAVID WHEATLEY] cover](https://image.ausha.co/pPSdi7HHsBeoSeeil7RTNv7u8w6Shoezx40smCYL_400x400.jpeg)
![How This Regenerative Farmer Cut Costs and Increased Profits [JAMES BUCHER] cover](https://image.ausha.co/PJWVLa3P7A7kUzgITQDmVEsmst7HUZ1nY5c7tO6Q_400x400.jpeg)