In this panel session, we’re exploring one of the most practical and underused opportunities in regenerative farming and rural life: learning to see waste streams as life streams.

Across farms and villages, huge amounts of biological “waste,” offcuts, by-products, and overlooked materials are still treated as problems to be removed, when in many cases they could be transformed into fertility or new forms of value. We’ll look at where the biggest missed opportunities are, from manure and bedding to prunings, wood waste, food scraps, greywater, and more, and ask how these materials can be cycled back into living systems in ways that are realistic, affordable, and adapted to local conditions.

Just as importantly, this conversation will focus on how to make loop-closing actually work in practice. At the heart of the discussion is a bigger question: how can farms become better at turning overlooked outputs into long-term ecological and economic assets? Through concrete examples, we’ll explore what it looks like when closing loops improves not only land health, but also resilience, efficiency, and the bottom line.

Welcome back everyone to the second of the Deep Dive episodes. In this new format the intention is to bring complexity back into the conversations around regenerative agriculture. Myself and many of my peers have been observing the discourse online, and especially on social media devolve into catch phrases and buzz words with little meaning and I want to embrace the complexity and many perspectives around many of the topics that get debated online. We’ll be testing out a mix of investigative journalism, key interview snippets, and narrative weaving, not to assert a single stance on any issue, but rather to guide listeners through the fact that there are rarely any easy answers and that there’s so much more to these conversations than the over-simplified arguments that we gloss over on click-bait titles and polarizing debates. You may remember in the last Deep Dive, we looked into the question of WHO has the authority and credentials to say what Regeneration is. As a continuation to this question, today we’ll be exploring HOW to measure the journey of regeneration. One thing is to establish standards and validity, but as we’ll see in these discussions, this is much harder to do than to talk about. This is a subject that is very relevant to my own work here with Climate Farmers because I helped to work on the creation of our our Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification program (MRV for short) and I continue to think about how such a complex and nuanced journey can be measured and communicated as I build and refine the educational programs in the Climate Farmer’s Academy.

The question of HOW to measure regeneration also contains many sub-questions, such as what is the end goal? When does the timeline for measurement start and stop? What tools and resources are available for measuring? Where do we set the parameters for observation? I mean, is it just the ecology of the farm that needs improvement, or do we need to look at the economy of the farm business and the state of health of the people involved and the community around them?

It’s also very important to ask why we’re bothering to measure this at all. Who gets the data? What are they going to do with it, and how will this information affect the relationship between farmers, policy makers, and the end customer?

Welcome back everyone to another panel session. In light of all the stories of extreme weather and emergencies around the Iberian peninsula and other parts of Europe in the past months, we’re going to take a closer look at the realities on the ground for our farmers. These storms and floods are becoming more and more common and frequent, and though we’ve talked in the past about the need to adapt to an increasingly erratic climate, these points of catastrophe are an essential part of the conversation. In this session we’ll hear from three farmers in Iberia and their experiences of enduring the constant storms and service interruptions of the past months. We’ll also explore how they are recovering from the disasters, how they plan to mitigate these events in the future, as well as a longer term view towards adaptation in the face of increasing frequency of events like this. In order to get a deeper sense of the impacts and challenges brought by the storms, flooding and erosion that our panelists experienced on their farms, I encouraged them to share pictures and videos of their land in the aftermath. Obviously these images can’t be conveyed over audio, so if you want to see what we were looking at in the introductions, you can see the video version of the panel session on the Climate Farmer’s YouTube channel or through the links in the resources page on our website at ClimateFarmers.org. So with all that out of the way, let’s jump into this month’s session.