Episode 153: Soil, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge with Dr. Anna Krzywoszynska

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. This is Jon Kempf. And you know the nature of the conversations we have here. I really enjoy having discussions around how do we regenerate our agricultural ecosystems, our landscapes, how do we regenerate relationships, how do we regenerate public health? And all these pieces that tie in together. And today, I've been looking forward to having a conversation for a while with Anna K. Because relationships are at the foundation. They are the fundamental of what it means to have a regenerative agriculture. And she has been thinking for quite some time about what regenerative relationships actually mean and how we begin to approach those. So, Anna, welcome. I'm really glad to have you here. Tell us a bit about yourself, your background, what brought you to the scope of the work that you're doing.

Thank you, John. It's really wonderful to be here. As was said, it's been a long time coming. We met at Groundswell and I was so impressed by your warmth and your wisdom, and it's a wonderful, really wonderful opportunity to finally be here in the studio. So to introduce myself fully, my name is Anna Wosinska. I'm an associate professor in transdisciplinary human environment relations, which is quite a mouthful, at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oulu in Finland. But myself, I'm Polish and I did most of my education and my professional career in the UK until coming to the Nordics about three years ago. So a new ecosystem for me also, which has its own interesting things we can reflect about. And I am an environmental social scientist. So this transdisciplinary human environment relations in my title is a way of describing my interest in how humans relate to the environment and the multiple forms of knowledge that we need to bring in to understand how we relate to the environment and how we can improve these relationships. So what does that mean in practice? These are all very long, kind of complicated words, right? But in my career, what I have done as a social scientist is I have predominantly studied farmers and I have studied farming landscapes, and I have studied scientists and scientific institutions. And the reason why I put these two together is that the way that we produce food today really has been so strongly shaped and continues to be so strongly shaped by what happened in the past and what's happening in the present of natural science research and natural science understanding. If we think about sort of the baseline that most of us in the west, in the global north, in many places, the baseline that we have for understanding what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to have nature? These understandings have really been shaped by the scientific, the natural scientific understanding. And this is so, so clear in agriculture. And we'll go into much more detail on this, I'm sure, but maybe to, to, for the listeners to kind of get into a bit of a mood, okay, what is this strange person, this, this social scientist talking about farming? What does she know? And in fact, when I was talking to my dad many years ago, when I was telling him, you know, I think I'm going to start researching soil, I think soil is really interesting. And he looked at me and said, what? But I mean, farmers already, what are you going to tell them? They already know, like what to do with soil. They, they have all the knowledge. And I said, yeah, I know. That's what I'm interested in. What do the farmers know? I want to know what the farmers know and how they came to know these things. So my first, like, big research project actually wasn't on soil, but my first big research project, which was my PhD research, was actually in organic farming, organic and biodynamic farming, but in the context of wine production. So I spent a year working as a farmhand or as a vineyard hand or as a winery hand in these different businesses in Northern Italy. You know, many hours with wet, cold feet, pruning endless rows of vines, many hours in the winery mixing the wine, like getting very dizzy on the fumes. So that really was my first experience of what it actually feels like, like in the body to grow plants.

This sounds like we have some very enjoyable cans of earthworms to reveal, as the saying goes. So the way you described studying what are asking the question about what farmers know about the land versus what scientists know about the land, how they relate to it differently, how they think about it differently, reminds me of this particular snapshot. I was just a teenager. We had a seminar on vegetable production by local academic extension agents in, at my father's farm. And in that meeting there was an elderly farmer who disagreed very emphatically with one of the points that one of the academics was making. And most of the farmers in the room agreed with him and he was, he was quite strong. This one particular soil health practice that the academics had a negative opinion of had made a significant difference on his farm. And they, they really got into it. They got into this debate back and forth. And the farmer finally, finally concluded the conversation by saying, well, the difference between my perspective and your perspective is I make my living doing this stuff and applying it. And you make your living telling Me how. And it was, it was kind of this perfect encapsulation of a moment. We now, as. As I've engaged and been deeply in the regenerative agriculture space for the last two decades, my general perspective is that farmers broadly do not have. They. They seldom have neutral relationships with people in academia if they have an interest in regenerative agriculture. There are many individuals within academia that they have very strong resonance with people who are interested in these types of approaches. And then there is a segment of academia who has no interest in region of agriculture, who still very much supports the contemporary agriculture that has become mainstream for the last half a dozen decades.

Yeah.

So from your perspective, what are, what have you learned? What are the differences in perspective between academic perception and farmer perception?

I think, you know, I would like to start with actually a commonality, because when we have these kind of dichotomies, these strong differences between farmers and scientists, I think it's important to recognize that both of them, these imagined figures, are trying to make a living. And while we, especially your listeners, maybe in general, we have a better understanding of what does it mean to make a living as a farmer, we don't really have an understanding of what does it mean to make a living as a scientist. And there we are going into a sort of the political economy, like the set of values and practices that informs how scientists make a living. So how do they design their experiments? How do they choose what is important to study? How do they collect data and how do they report the data? And the political economy of science is such that the less it touches the real world, the more valuable it is for the scientist.

Wait, wait, wait, What? The less it touches the real world, the more valuable it is to the scientist.

Yes. Yeah. And what I. And that's like a big statement, so let's unpack it a little bit. So the most successful academics, the most successful scientists are those whose findings can travel. So they are able to develop a general theory. They are able to find or construct some process or material or idea that can travel from a lab in Beijing to a lab in San Francisco to a lab in Adelaide. It can work anywhere. That's what I mean, that it doesn't touch the reality. It is the more generalizable, the more universal, the more high level, the better it is for scientists. And what that means is that for individual scientists who may come to a farmer's field to take some samples, they. They may actually genuinely care about things like increasing the sustainability of agriculture or making the water in this particular stream even cleaner. Or whatever it may be, these particular, like very specific localized cares through their employment situation. It's incredibly hard for them to actually act on that because that is not recognized by, by their peers. They don't get paid for it. In other words, they will get paid like if you publish a paper in Nature, that is, you will get paid for it in some way or another, but you will not get paid for advising farmer John Kemp on how wide the buffer stream, the, the buffer zone needs to be between his field and his stream. So I think it's really also important when we talk about these differences between farmers and scientists to recognize that everybody is human and everybody is trying to make a living. And the reason why we have this split has a lot to do with how institutionally science, how far it has come, how far it has gone away from touching reality. Apart from when we are talking about science that serves capital interests and there that we can also talk about.

Where you're leading to reminds me of the quote that I think originated with Upton Sinclair, one who wrote the Jungle. And I'm sure I won't recall it perfectly, but something to the effect of it's incredibly difficult to get a man to understand something when his earning his living depends on him not understanding it.

How is it reminding you of that.

In the sense that relating back to my previous observation of this interaction between a farmer and an academic and your comments that academic pursuits need to be more or are often benefited from being more universal when the opposite is true for the farmer, they are benefited by being at the more directly and more direct and local knowledge. Now this, this whole conversation is fascinating. Just the realization that there are very different almost. I, I'm hesitant to say polar opposites, but on opposite ends of the spectrum, motivations for scientists and farmers generally, as you're describing them, or you know, motivations, but rewards.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, there is, of course there are many scientists who are dedicated to their work having what is known as, you know, societal impact. There are many scientists who will come to farming conferences, who will give lectures, who will collaborate with farmers. But more often than not, they are doing that on top of maintaining an academic career. They are doing that on top of having a livelihood as a scientist. As a result, these are often people who are already established, like professors, they can sort of afford it, or they are people who, you know, have decided that this is actually what they are going to spend their energy on. And the other things, you know, the career pursuit can take a lesser importance in their life. So I think it's important to recognize that for these people there is a personal cost and that the only way that we could overcome this is through a form of structural change within academia itself. Because at the moment, the scientific research that farmers have the easiest access to is the scientific research that happens within businesses. So this is when Bayer or whatever, they have their labs, they have their scientists who are very intelligent people working very hard to make this crop more resilient or to produce this new chemical. And there, that's the science that really does touch the field very quickly. That's how it's designed. That's how the system is designed within these companies, that when you're producing something, it has to come and touch the fields. Of course, there again we have a very problematic logic from the perspective of regenerative agriculture in that that science touches the field as long as it touches it through something that can be sold. So as long as you produce something that the farmer has to pay for, whether it is, you know, a chemical or a seed that is patented or sometimes now increasingly even advice, like a platform, you know, you're agronomous in your mobile phone sort of platforms, or the drone or whatever, our. Our package of support for you as a farmer. Tm, you know. Yeah. So there again the logic of what is valuable to focus on, of what is valuable to research. And so what kind of knowledge we end up producing is directed by an end, but this again, kind of universal because for, for a chemical company, it is much more valuable to produce a chemical that can work in Zambia and in Indiana, because they can sell it to both Zambia and Indiana. Right. They are not interested in producing something that will work in a specific field. And so again, we lose this specificity, this knowledge of how do we actually adapt to a specific location, how do we actually adapt, how do we improve a specific farm system which is ovid regenerative agriculture is about, of course.

So what is the structural change? How do we change the structure of academic research to overcome these barriers?

There are some positive trends because there are. There is like a coalition of the willing within academia. There are people who push for this model. There is a bit of a fear being put into the hearts of academics and of academic funders because of the increasing distrust in science since the pandemic, actually, and especially since more and more. I don't think that this is seen really by most people, but the way that I have come to understand it is that one of the big problems, one of the really big kind of challenges and the reasons why we have an increasing distrust and lack of cooperation with science is that most of the time people meet science. As my colleague Leslie Green writes at the end of a gun. So when somebody comes to you and says, you can't do this anymore, and you're like, why I've done this, I've done this always, or you're telling me to limit nitrogen fertilization, but you're building a third Runway on the airport, you know, why should I be the one that's sacrificing rather than somebody else? So that's also a real problem that we still have science that is working in this way. So I think I don't have really an answer, but this is something that I'm really working on myself with the projects, the research projects that I currently have. One of the current ideas that I'm pursuing is how do we transform research stations into spaces that actually serve the local community? So I'll give you the example of this project that we have just started in the north, north, north of Norway. It's like the northernmost bit of Norway, right at the border with Russia. And there is a research station there that was established in the 1920s, I believe to be an agricultural research station as part as Norway of Norway's colonization, this internal colonization, right? So they wanted to make this remote part of Norway more like southern Norway. And the way to make that happen was to start to discipline the local population, who was more sort of herding, gathering, fishing, doing small scale agriculture, to discipline them, to educate them to be more like a real farmer, a real Norwegian farmer. And a real Norwegian farmer has fields and grass and, you know, modern farming. So they established that research station. And that has a really problematic history. Then this research station, in line with what has been going on in research as a whole, became more sort of interested in universal knowledge generation. So we started to do a lot of ecological monitoring. But now there is an interest to return to this local specificity. Researchers are starting to genuinely ask, how do we change the way that we produce science so that it comes to matter to the people that live next door to their ideas of what it means to live in this land, on this land, from this land, in a good way that helps them support the future of their children, that stops the region depopulating, that ensures food security. So we have started to work with this group of scientists on these questions. And the outcomes are really, really interesting and very surprising.

Interesting and surprising in what way?

Well, it leads to a rethinking of what is science for, not only as a machine, for Producing knowledge, but also as like an institution. So, for example, this research station, this is a remote part of Norway. The population is very scarce and there are actually very few meeting places. And there is a growing number in this particular region of farmers, young farmers, people who have come back to the region and they want to farm, but they don't have the knowledge because they are usually coming in from the outside of farming and they don't have a place to grow together, to grow this knowledge together. So the research station has started like, you know, a Thursday tea sort of thing, where the farmers can come and meet in a nicely lit, warm place. You know, this is a. We're talking about the place where in winter it gets to minus 20 and it's completely dark. So it's important to have this facility and you know, they have talks and they are starting to just be like a community space. And that means that the scientists are working with, starting to work with this farming community as people and starting to think, okay, how can we play the system that we have to operate in in such a way that it serves this community? How can, can we write this local community into some research grant? Can we include their needs in our infrastructural development for this station in the future? Can we have a little field trial as part of this already funded project, but with the research question actually comes from this group of farmers. So these are really small things, but they add up to something that's very, very profound.

Yeah, they don't sound like such small things. Actually, I want to bring our conversation back to where we started. I asked you a question of what are the differences in perspective between academic perception and farmer perception. And you answered that question in a beautiful way by describing the, the different rewards that motivate the world view of those, those different pursuits or those different perspectives. And I feel like possibly there's more there in, in a different answer to that question.

Yes. And I want to again, avoid generalizing, you know, so I have done a decent amount of research on farmers knowledge of soil, especially in this context of modern western agriculture. I have studied especially farmers who would describe themselves as conventional farmers, just normal farmers who have been transitioning into regenerative agriculture. And I have been looking at what happens to their understanding of soil and their valuing of soil as they go through the regenerative agriculture transition. And we can understand that transition as a sort of process of learning and unlearning. So there is overall in modern agriculture this, there is this idea of soil as a, as a resource base There is very little understanding of how soil works as an organism, as a hydrology, as a system. This has never been looked into. In fact, modern agriculture sort of depends on soil being inert, inactive, dead. Like the less the soil is doing, in many ways, the better, because then the more variables you can control, right? The soil is something to transform into a particular state, very fine, ready for seeding. Maybe it needs irrigating, but really we're not even talking about soil. It's the plants that need the irrigating. Right? So the soil is trying to make it disappear. And that is the understanding of soil that has been created also through this idea of what constitutes good agriculture, as led by natural science, as led by agronomy. So this is in line with a sort of traditional, we would say outdated, but very much alive and kicking modern agronomy. And I want to stress this alive and kicking, right, because I have colleagues who, for example, study small scale agriculture in South Africa, where there is a very rich and still very much alive valuing of soil as something that is alive, something that is responsive, something that requires care, something that you have a responsibility towards. And then we have agronomists coming in and trying to change these forms of valuation, trying to convince the farmers that no, they need chemicals, no, they need tillage, no, they need, you know, all these things that we can sell, right? So this, this model of making soil inert is also alive and kicking because it makes money for certain people. And then we have this return or like this pre discovery or a discovery, a creation of new understandings of what soils are and what are our responsibilities towards soils in such movements like regenerative agriculture. And here we are, you know, we're starting to think about it and there is a lot of shades and I think we don't have in the regenerative agricultural community. There isn't a shared understanding and the same thing within, you know, natural sciences. There isn't one understanding. If you talk to a soil ecologist, they will tell you a slightly different story to a soil physicist, to an environmental humanities scholar who studies soils.

So I've described from my perspective, regenerative agriculture is fundamentally about regenerating relationships at all levels. Regenerating relationships between soil microbes and plants, between plants and livestock, between livestock in the landscape, between humans, in the landscape in between. I think perhaps one of the foundational prerequisites to, in the modern economic environment to facilitating a regenerative agriculture is regenerating relationships between both the customers and the suppliers, the providers of the farmers, where Those relationships are not inherently extractive as they have been here in the Western world for the last century or more.

I think it's a wonderful way of thinking about it. And what it makes me think is that this regenerating of human relationships and the regenerating of relationships with, for example, soil is inseparable. And what I mean by that is, you know, to come back to our. To our focus on, on knowledge and how do we know what, for example, soil is and what does it need from us and how we should value it and how should we care for it? How do we make it better? We can't come up with these answers on our own. We can't come up with these answers as individuals. We always need a community, a community of practice, a community of knowledge that will. With people with whom we can reflect, people with whom we can experiment, with whom we can learn. And that's another, you know, that's another relationship that has withered in modern agriculture. We have a model of a family farm where there's usually now an individual farmer with fair machinery, never seeing anybody, you know, growing so bored and desperate as to be pushed to suicide more and more often. Like this is a reality that, that is absolutely terrifying. We have a huge crisis of, of. Of farming, aging, right? That we don't have young farmers coming into the profession because it's not seen as desirable, it's not seen as interesting. So, but, but on the. And then on the other hand, when I think about the really inspiring, influential and happy regenerative agriculture farmers whom I have interviewed, with whom I have spent time, what characterizes these people is that they have a community and they are part of a community. And this learning more about the land, learning more about the soil, learning more about how to be a good farmer is part and parcel of learning with other people, talking with other people, having a richer relationship with your community, even changing your business model to start to bring other people onto the farm, or, you know, rethinking the sort of atomic family farm model into cooperatives or exchanges or other stuff. So this regenerating relationships with people and regenerating relationships with nature and with land, I think they really do come hand, like, go hand in hand. And here again, the science kind of comes in as a sort of disturbance more often than not, because this is, you know, this is the generation of knowledge that is by farmers and for farmers, right? And I get very cross when I talk with my colleagues sometimes who would like to put a definition on regenerative agriculture, say what it is and what it isn't, say how it should be and how it shouldn't be. And I feel very, very strongly that it is absolutely not for science to say. And it's also like a waste of time to try to define it from a scientific point of view, because instead all of this energy should be put by science into supporting farmers in creating these relationships that you talk about. So supporting farmers in having the tools and the time and the skills to interrogate what their soil is doing to provide them spaces in which they can talk about their observations to other farmers to think about, provide them with like models for how they can change their businesses so that they are more, they have these richer relationships. All of this stuff, all of this work on relations is where I feel scientific research needs to be ready going. And that's what I like, what I kind of push for and try to convince my colleagues to go in that direction.

What you just described gave me a different perspective on. It's certainly not a new idea of learning in community and learning from community, but the idea of the acceleration that can occur from learning in community, learning with each other. In the, in the business world, we celebrate startup accelerators. Well, why are they called an accelerator? You, you get a cohort of 20 or 30ambitious young enterprises and you put them together in the exact same environment where they're surrounded by each other and they, there's this buzz of energy where everyone is working on these projects, they're working together and they're learning from each other. So there is this environment that facilitates accelerated learning by everyone who is on a similar journey. And this is an, an element of what you're describing.

Absolutely. And you know, there are some attempts now, at least on paper, to support that by scientific funding. And now say something very specific. There is an instrument, like a funding instrument that the European Union is now using to fund research on agriculture, which is called living labs. And the idea is that you create this constellation of experimental places where farmers and researchers work together on a shared problem. And these are located in different places in different contexts. And then you have exchange and you have co learning. So there's some attempt now to incorporate that into how science works. I think for the regenerative farming community, it's extremely important to go in that direction as well. And of course we have seen that also. Right, so we have the regenerative agriculture movement, the. What is it called? Is it the Regenerative Agriculture alliance or European Alliance? Various events like Groundswell, the Northern Roots, these are all sort of attempts to make these happen. But there's more. There's so much more. There's so much more that that can be done and I'm excited to see how this will be done.

There, there are all of these events where people gather together in one place for a few days at a time. And, and generally the regenerative agriculture events tend to be very high energy events. There's a lot of buzz, there's enthusiasm, there is hope. And the presentations can inspire many people. But the recurring theme when you ask the, the attendees of these events is where they gained the greatest benefit. And it's seldom from the presentations, it's from the conversations they had in the hallways and from meeting other people. And so it's again an expression of an environment facilitating accelerated learning from each other.

Yeah. So how could we make that part of what it means to be a farmer today? What resources are needed, you know, and usually it's like a salary for a coordinator. So there is this kind of model in the uk you can get this little grant that will pay for somebody to be a coordinator for a local farming group. And then the local farming group gathers every once, two or three months and has a chat and has an invited speaker and they have these facilitated spaces for exchange. So how can we make that happen in more contexts?

Well, one of the ways, one of the ideas that comes to mind and one of the ways that we can make more of that happen is to not wait for the grants and not wait for the coordinators, but do it on our own.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's one of the, one of the very rewarding parts of my life is I, I enjoy. My passion project is beekeeping. Well, I call it a hobby. My wife mildly disagrees at 100 colonies, but I, I started hosting. There were local beekeepers that I wanted to learn from, learn from, and others that I wanted to be able to learn together. There was a group of us who were quite intent on studying the science and accelerating the science, moving things forward. There is a great deal of dogma in beekeeping as there is in agriculture. And so we initially started with a group of, I think around 20 people that got together once a month and that list has now shortened to about half that. I think between 10 and 12 will show up in a, in a typical month. But in the last two years we have made so much distance and so much progress. We, we've become incredibly close to each other as a group, but also we have solved collective problems and we've solved each other's problems. There has been so much momentum and Every participant in the group has said that this is the highest value conversations that they have ever engaged with. Just. And it was. It took. It took so little effort, a space, someone to make, willing to make the call and say, you're welcome to all come to my place on such and such a date. That was it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Do you think it's easy for people to do that, or do you think it takes some sort of something special to. For that to happen? Because you described it so naturally, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, no, when I made a call. Or maybe that's it. Maybe John Kemp made a call and that's why it all happened. Right. So I'm thinking, no, no, it's my.

My reputation in the local community is not like my reputation. And it's like I'm. I'm unknown. I'm just. I'm just John Kemp. I'm just another beekeeper. Nobody knows about my work in regenerative agriculture, at least not initially. Many of them have been exposed to it over time. But it wasn't the fact that I made the call. It's. I. I'm hesitant to. I'm never quite sure what it is like to walk in other people's shoes, but I've found that this is my. My opinion.

Yeah.

Many cases, I think people are unwilling to extend that invitation because there is something they're afraid of. They're afraid of being vulnerable. They're afraid of being exposed. Our home environment is imperfect. There's always a mess, there's always a disaster. But that is true for everyone. It's in, in everyone's life, there is always. There's always a tractor whose wheel has come off or it's. Life is never perfect. And so, at least in. In my own culture, culture that I grew up in, the expectation was that everything has to be perfect before you invite other people into your life. Well, that, that attitude at it, it's very hard. Makes you less 1. It makes you less likely to invite people over. Also it makes you less approachable. New you are. People have a difficulty relating with that. So that's. That's my own lens, my own perspective. I'm sure many other people have a different one, but I would suggest that the question we should ask, if we're unwilling to just open ourselves and invite people to come visit, what is it that we're afraid of?

That's a very good question. That's a very good question. Yeah. And, you know, there's. I feel, in the farming community often this sense of, yeah, there's certain distrusts and certain competition, as if you were really competing with a person next door, but you're selling to the same global market. I mean, it doesn't matter. Your success is the other person's success. If your soil is better and that your neighbor's soil is better, then together your area is more resilient to disease. If your stream flows clear, and then it's even more important that an upstream from you, the stream also flows clear because you're all in the same watershed. If you're happy and your kid is happy, and then they go to the same school as your neighbors, isn't it important that their kid is happy also? And they have like a safe home to go back to and a secure and economically secure family that can support them. It's just better for the whole community. So, yeah, this thinking across the field fence I think is really important. And you know, we can think also. Okay, what, how to lower sort of a barrier for entry. Right. Okay, so don't invite people into your home. Find the third space, like find a local bar or cafe, you know, or a hall where you could just do this, you know, starting small, but also from this point of view, then, okay, so what is this for? You know, what's the next step? I'd also like to say that there, I know that the situation in the US in terms of research funding at the moment is something else, but, you know, this too shall pass. We will have some sort of new normal, whatever that will be. And money attracts money, organizations attract organizations. If you have a group, then you can speak in one voice and you can say to your local agricultural or land grant university, you know, we'd like to meet with your research team and tell you about what we're interested in and see maybe somebody in the university is interested in this too. And increasingly academics are on the lookout for these kinds of groups. And once you have a group, it becomes possible for an organization or a university, for example, to write you into a research proposal, because you have a name, you have an entity, and then some money can flow and then some experiments can be set up, and then your knowledge can be deepened with the use of scientific tools, with the use of scientific expertise, but for your own purposes, for the answering of your own specific research question for your field. How cool would that be?

Well, another, another dimension of what you're describing is that we started this group with, with a dozen not, not entirely selected at random, but they were leaders in, in the space, in the local region and the Process of getting together facilitated accelerated learning to the point that most of the beekeepers in the group, and I think I can safely say all of them were quite quickly asking questions that had not previously been considered by people in academia. And so they were reaching out to. To research scientists and ask them, hey, have you considered this? And have you considered that? And within a matter of six to eight months, our small informal group began to be recognized by many people in the. Many leaders in the. In the. A honeybee scientific research community because we were asking questions that no one else was asking.

And the scientist loves nothing more than an interesting question.

Indeed.

Great. It's. That's so wonderful to hear. You know, I'm kind of talking here theory, and here you come with an example to completely validate it. So that's. That's really wonderful. And I'm sure that there are thousands of these stories, millions of these stories out there, and each of them is. Should be celebrated and grown. And there is such potential to do that. You know, I really, really think that like, from a. To. To step back into this kind of large perspective, we are moving to a world that is more localized. This has like, good. This is for good reasons and for bad reasons. The situation is very uncertain. We have war on the doorstep. I'm talking about Europe. You know, I live in Finland. We have a long border with Russia. This is like an everyday reality here. People are looking to the locality. They are thinking about these questions of how do I feed my region, how do I feed my family? These are. These can be harnessed for good. This focus, again, on the local as opposed to global flows of commodities, as opposed to global markets for farming. Specifically, this focus on the local, this sort of flavor in the water can be really harnessed to further the cause of or like the mission of regenerative agriculture, which is to have farming that works wherever it is right to have farming that is using the local resources, that is strengthening the local community, that is making for beautiful, resilient, productive landscapes wherever they are, through knowing more about how these places work and how to work with them. So that's also something to kind of keep in mind that now, in a perverse way, it's a good time.

Yeah, yeah. Simultaneously, the best of times and the worst of times. And you know, there's this interesting. This interesting characteristic of humans generally is that we tend to avoid making changes until the pain of not making those changes becomes greater than the perceived pain of actually making them. Yeah, yeah. So, Anna, as you have studied the relationships of farmers to Soil to their ecosystem. And with academia, etc, these multidimensional relationships. What have you observed that surprised you or that was unexpected?

You know, I think what continued to sort of surprise me was the. Was where people stop, where people choose to stop. So what do I mean by that is that there are many instances that I have seen where people have, you know, farmers who are coming to regenerative agriculture, they are becoming better, they're becoming more confident, they are starting to trust themselves a bit more. Right. They are regaining a trust in themselves as experts. I know what is going on here. I can learn. I have the capacity to learn. I don't need to go and constantly ask an agronomist. I don't need to follow what is written at the back of the bottle. I can make my own judgment. And I have seen that some people who will start on that, with that attitude, on that way, on that, on that sort of pathway, they will stop. They will reach a certain point beyond which they don't want to go. They will go back to saying, okay, but probably these people know better, or probably I should go and talk to an expert. And so often that happened when there was no community to reassure them, no community to say, okay, yeah, no, I know you had a bad harvest this year, but that's just part of it. You know, you could try this, try that. Failing is also learning. What was it somebody said to me today? Make new mistakes. Make new mistakes every day. If you're. Or somebody also said that at groundswell, you know, if there isn't something that you're failing at, you're not trying hard enough, you're not doing enough.

Yeah.

Like there should always be something that you're failing at. But this failure, of course, is difficult. And you need somebody that will tap you on the back at that point and say, no, this is okay.

It's intriguing to me how our relationship with mistakes changes throughout our life. When we watch young children learning how to walk or learning how to ride a bike, we celebrate the mistakes. They fall off the bike. Oh, that was awesome. Let's get back on and try it again. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

We celebrate mistakes. And then at some point as we age, we develop the expectation that we should be perfect from this point forward and never make mistakes again. And from that point forward, mistakes are criticized. And so instead of celebrated. But what if we adopted the. The value and the mindset of celebrating our mistakes rather than criticizing them?

Yeah. Mistakes are how you learn. If you know that something, if something's not working, it's it's like a sign.

If you're not falling off the bike, you're never going to learn how to ride.

That's it. This is a very silly, a very silly example, but you know the ice cream company, Ben and Jerry's, they have a flavor graveyard. You can come and visit all the failed flavors that they have tried, but they are commemorated, they are remembered. Each of them has a nice little neat tombstone. You know, we tried, it didn't work. But we remember, we went there, we tried this one. You know, macaroni and cheese. Maybe not.

I love it. That's celebrating mistakes. That's awesome.

Yeah, yeah.

What important topics have we not yet talked about?

Gosh, there's so much. You know, the regenerative agriculture movement is growing so rapidly, so explosively. Sometimes it makes me scared how fast it's moving. I wonder if the different parts of the community are talking to one another enough. You know, if there is the issue of greenwashing by huge corporations. You know, Nestle now have a regenerative agriculture something, and Bayer and whatever. How far do we trust these people? How do we position ourselves in relation to this? But the thing that I continue to come back to and to sort of celebrate is the energy that I get from regenerative agriculture. Farmers who are on this pathway. There is just such a great sense of life in regenerative agriculture that makes me so hopeful for the future.

It's interesting that you choose the word hopeful because in addition to life, I would suggest that my perception is that many farmers in traditional agriculture often don't have a strong sense of hope. They feel trapped or stuck to some degree. And when they begin adapting a different pathway, there is this surge of hope and enthusiasm. And as the mistakes that they make facilitate more success and there is more hope for the future there than there has been.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The sense that. Yeah, that the sort of walled in reality actually isn't. And some of it, I really feel, has to do with the reconnection to the abundance of nature. So this, if you conjure in your mind this idea of a modern farmer as somebody who is sitting in a tractor in a barren field, traveling as they are preparing the seed bag, the seed bed, up and down in this barren, gray, monotonous, lifeless space. That is not how human beings live. Like this is not how we should live. This is. This is profoundly depressing to our bodies, to our souls. It's not life giving. And if you contrast that with a diversified farming landscape where there are different crops growing, when the Logic becomes a bit more diverse, abundant, where you have, you know, companion crops, where you start to have animals coming back and birds coming back. Whenever I interview regenerative agriculture farmers, they will always take me like to where the nests are or they will point out what life wildlife has come back into the fields. And then you start to feel that, okay, there's also this non human community that's with you, that's here that you can learn from, that is teaching you how to be in this land. So that's something that goes in many ways beyond what we think about as agriculture today. But this is where agriculture came from. If we go back to indigenous farming, if we go back to indigenous knowledge about farming, all of these tales will in one way or another say we are the last ones who came here. All of these others were here before us and we are learning from them. They are explaining to us what does it mean to live here and to live here? Well, so we also like, are starting to get there now, I think with the regenerative agriculture movement to this realization that the teachers are also coming from nature itself.

That was a beautiful, beautiful ending note. Anna, thank you. Thank you for all the work that you do. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, John, thank you. It was really wonderful to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test, we analyze and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.