Building a regenerative Agrifood System in Europe with Climate Farmers. Co-founder of Love Foundation, VCA NL & Hug Records. TED Countdown & BMW Responsible Leader. Exploring what is regen culture & regen leadership.
One of the biggest barriers that I see in scaling regenerative agriculture is reliable and scientifically valid data on soil regeneration on farms in Europe. Which is why I was delighted when?Wageningen University & Research?reached out to us in October 2021, with the proposal to write a Horizon Europe application together. The purpose was to run real live experiments on farms all across Europe and to create a shared understanding of soil health criteria. The name of the project roles smoothly over the tongue and its BENCHMARKS - Building a European Network for the Characterisation and Harmonisation of Monitoring Approaches for Research and Knowledge on Soils. Benedikt?and?Fabio?from our team joined the proposal writing team and amazingly we won the grant last summer and kicked off the project this week. I am honored and humbled to have Climate Farmers in a consortium with some of my favorite organizations such as?Commonland, Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF),?Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL)?and?INRAE?and I can highly recommend to anybody interested in soil health to check out the project website in the comments. I can not wait to see the findings that we will make over the next five years and to see how we can support the entire regenerative agriculture movement in Europe with them. Thanks to Natasha Sena for the beautiful image. #climatefarmers #horizoneurope #regenerativeagriculture
Congratulations. I am glad to hear about the Project and the funding. Your introduktion got me thinking: one of the biggest barriers is reliable and scientific valid data. Two thoughts: 1. Another big barrier for scaling regenerative is free-out the pioneers so they have time to help others. For what is RegenAg. I am afraid we are chasing a moving target. I hear again and again, specially from science, there is not a scientific clear definition what RegenAg is. I am afraid by defining it we might rain to strangle it, as we did with ecological farming. We are not finished developing better practices. An additional question could be why haven’t we changed behaviour with the knowledge we have. Or do we not have enough data about the damage Conventional Ag is doing. Destroying soil, killing biodiversity and feeding calories but nut nurturing with nutrients just to mention some. So additional barrier for change could be identified by understanding why few tries another road. 2. Another big barrier for change could be the interaction within the whole food supply chain from field to table. Without a market no survival. How many have stopped smoking due to data. This barrier is about behaviour change. Good luck with your project.
Can we contribute? We have great baseline data from our farm and are following a purely regenerative path. We already have a system for open source data with some UK Universities!
Happy to be part of the project with Wij.land. Looking forward to generate some real tangible and practical results ????. Vincent De Leijster
Fabulous!! What you are describing is at the heart of the matter and, done well, will help unlock informed progress ??
from 2007 Scale-linking Design for Systemic Health: sustainable communities and cities in context https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/scale-linking-design-for-systemic-health-sustainable-communities-and-cities-in-context-f38e090795e9
Hi Philippe Birker, we would be delighted to take part and contribute with soil sampling and remotely-sensed data from our olive groves in Italy!
Sylvester Rish?j Rose Luxhoi Iversen and Arne Driessen, btw you guys should connect over regen agri and food:)
How to become a candidate farm ?
Fabulous Philippe Birker so happy for you and well deserved. So much needed indeed, we need data, and organisations like Climate Farmers to power this transition!
Building a regenerative Agrifood System in Europe with Climate Farmers. Co-founder of Love Foundation, VCA NL & Hug Records. TED Countdown & BMW Responsible Leader. Exploring what is regen culture & regen leadership.
2 年Find all the details here: https://soilhealthbenchmarks.eu/