Regenerative Skills

The only real way to learn and gain experience in farming is to get your hands dirty and put knowledge into practice. For that reason farms play an essential role in training others to get into this sector and navigate the challenges and learning curves of making a living on the land. While most of the farms in our network have shown interest in offering educational opportunities, actually becoming a school is outside of the capacities of most of them. At the same time there are many ways to offer training from offering courses and workshops to student, volunteer, and apprenticeships. In this panel we’ll explore many of these possibilities from the perspective of farmers with many years of experience helping others get their foot in the door as well as those who are just starting to explore how to participate in offering learning opportunities. We’ll cover essential considerations, key learnings and advice, and new ideas that our panelists are exploring to improve their offerings for both learners and themselves. Join us live to get your own questions on how to set up or improve your trainings answered live by our panelists.

In today’s deep dive episode we’re taking on the behemoth of a topic that is the broken system and relationship between academic institutions and farmers on the ground.

For a long time there was traditional and experiential knowledge that helped to guide farming practices and cultures based on eons of experience and place based relationships. As agriculture became more technologically driven, traditional practices began to be replaced with mechanized and chemical centered management. Traditional knowledge was supplanted by academic knowledge which was guarded by universities and research centers as scientific trials and studies offered roadmaps of how to integrate these new products into farming. For the most part these institutions guarded their information and disseminated it through research papers, formal agronomists, and extension services. Since much of the research on specific products and the practices of using them was, and still is, funded by the industries that sold them, much of the knowledge has a severe bias in favor of the efficacy of those products and studies helped to push them onto farms. Most of the research done on farms happens on specific research farms run by universities themselves, which isn’t to say that they don’t create valuable learnings and insights, but the studies there are often done in highly controlled environments that working farms can almost never recreate, and the research then gets published in journals that farmers either don’t read or can’t access.
For their part, farmers are constantly running experiments and trying new things to stay ahead of the endless variables and challenges of trying to get consistent yields out of a dynamic and living landscape while operating in shifting markets. The ones I know are endlessly tinkering and experimenting and looking for new knowledge. In theory these would be the ideal collaborators for researchers, but for a number of reasons that we’ll explore in this episode, the communication and collaboration just doesn't happen. 

So here’s where we come in.

Climate Farmers started more than 6 years ago, and while we used to be best known for our carbon credit program, which we closed back in 2025, we now operate entirely as a non-profit dedicated to advancing a regenerative food system in Europe by helping farmers to successfully transition to regenerative management of their land and businesses. Yet one of the core aspects of our work here still goes largely unnoticed by the farmers in our community, and that’s the projects we’re involved in through our research and innovation labs.
This is where we’re working to connect academia and research institutes with real farmers. The idea is to bridge the gap that many of us have observed between the institutional research that churns out papers and studies that few farmers ever read, and instead get farmers involved so that they can help guide these studies and perform trials on their own land that can create validated information that’s relevant to them and their operations.
The research and innovations labs at Climate Farmers are run by my colleagues Fabio Volkman and Alexander Berlin who are guiding us through today’s Deep Dive into both the challenges and the potential of better connecting scientists and farmers. They’ll also give us a look into some of the many projects we’re involved in that illustrate how we help make these connections happen as well as the valuable outputs that have already been created as a result.
But just telling this story from our own perspective from within Climate Farmers hardly meets my standards for a Deep Dive, so you’ll also hear from a researcher who’s broken the mold for on-farm studies by conducting holistic and relationship focused research. You’ll hear from an agronomist helping to manage over 20k hectares of arable land and pastures who’s become a bridge between local universities and farmers in Estonia, and we’ll speak to a farmer with a long established track record of collaborating with researchers to create useful learnings on his own farm while helping push forward innovative knowledge in the institutions as well.
If you’re a farmer listening to this, you’ll want to stick around till the end where we’ll also talk about how you can get involved in these European projects and research studies as well.

You can learn more and reach out to us directly through our website at this link. 
https://www.climatefarmers.org/research-and-innovation/

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.