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1:00 Outside of this window, you would have seen about two kilometers to the next hills, let's say without forests. It was a poor land. But the terrain was weak because the people were very hard to burn fire, burning fire and planting a tree. It was a very difficult situation. But 70 years ago, small farmers who made the biggest destruction, they went away. It was abandoned
1:48 for 70 years. It had been blamed by local people that I bought. The best land, I have the best land of Bahia, and bought it for a price of breakfast. The Zizinho always thought that he would not do anything. He thought that he would work like Zizinho, the next part of the region. But he changed the work. He worked in another way than we did not. The main commentary was he's a crazy guy, because I planted trees all over the place. We who worked
2:38 on the land here at the beginning, as we worked on the village of the region, used adubo, used things in the forest. Then we put adubo, used agrotects, used it in the forest. É simples. Eu faço isso junto com a natureza e não contra a natureza. Se você cooperar com a natureza, todos os plantas, animais, bactérias, etc., todos eles cooperam. Nós não temos inimigos. Todas as espécies living on
3:25 this planet, they all appeal for one same reason. This is to increase life, not to steal, not to exploit. This is Ernst Scotch. 40 years ago, he left Switzerland to venture deep into Brazil's Atlantic rainforest. No forest ecosystem on the planet has suffered as much loss as the Mata Atlantica. Today, only a sliver of it remains. 90% is gone. But this isn't just another story of destruction. It's the story of a mission, ambitious and a bit unconventional. To harvest fruits from an ecosystem on the edge of collapse, while striving to bring it back to life.
4:16 We're here because a term has recently been making waves. Regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture. It's spikening scientific papers, showing up more in our Google searches. And even some of the biggest food companies are pledging to practice it. Depending on where you live, you might already see regenerative agriculture all around you. Or it might start showing up soon. One of its core principles is to leave the land in a better state than it was before one farmed it. And Ernst Gottsch's story, as we'll see, proves that it's possible. But Gottsch doesn't like to
5:04 label his methods as regenerative agriculture, and there are good reasons for that. Over the past year, I've asked farmers and scientists worldwide, what exactly does regenerative agriculture mean? Is it just a trendy buzzword? Or is it here to stay? And why do we need it? This is our journey to find out if regenerative agriculture lives up to the hype. Let's go back a little. When agriculture first emerged in human history, it gave humanity the power to imagine and plan for the future. People settled. Communities grew,
5:51 individuals became skilled at different jobs, but life for our ancestors was far from perfect. Droughts, floods, pests, nutrient-forced soils were constant threats. Famines and diseases were common. Farmers needed a way to boost their production and protect their crops. So a big invention was bound to come, but we'd have to wait thousands of years for it. It's what experts usually call Inputs. Inputs. Inputs. Inputs. Inputs. Across the 1900s, scientists developed agricultural inputs, specifically fertilizers and pesticides. In the simplest possible terms, they're like food supplements and antibiotics for plants. In the meantime, new machines
6:38 began transforming the landscape into vast, manageable patches of green and gold, reducing physical demand for farmers. Genetic modification made plants grow bigger and faster. By the 1960s, these innovations were adopted globally, making it easier than ever to produce food. Experts now refer to this approach as conventional agriculture. It's curious that we call it conventional agriculture, when actually it's relatively new. We call it this way because this type of farming has become the norm around the planet. Fertilizers alone, one of the building blocks of conventional agriculture, are set to feed half the world's population today. We could not live without it.
7:26 But conventional agriculture may have broken its biggest promise. Hunger is increasing while yield is actually also increasing. So that is very strange and also a very bad situation. Between 800 million and 2 billion people suffering from either acute hunger or malnutrition. Another probably 2 billion people who are unable to afford access to food. And it's not like everything else has been smooth sailing. Two thirds of fertilizers are not even absorbed by our crops. And instead of feeding our plants, they feed algae, which overgrow and suffocate marine life.
8:15 They taint our groundwater supplies, pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and disrupt ecosystems both on land and in water. Pesticides are also overused. That generates, of course, adaptation and resistance, which then leads to more outbreaks and move to more applications. So this is kind of a... Bicious circle water, also called the pesticide treadmill. For soil overloaded with chemicals and compressed by tractors, it has become harder to hold on to moisture and nutrients. We have forgotten that soil is also something alive. There's a lot of biodiversity in the soil, under the soil, making sure that the soil works the way it does. For the past century, we've treated the farm like an isolated industrial machine. But land is not a machine. and our methods
9:04 are compromising future resources. The idea that somehow we would be able to continue farming as we are and feed ourselves, it's like complete fiction, right? It's also scary to see how long we've discussed these issues. This 1995 article from National Geographic talked about a farming revolution. Sustainable agriculture seemed to be shaping up in organic farming, ready to take over. Those days felt revolutionary to many, but there were two agricultural revolutions. One pushing for industrial scale farming,
9:50 the other advocating for organic methods. Each believed that they were pioneering the future of farming. We know which revolution has prevailed until now. Organic farming has been on the rise across Europe, but it still only covers about 10% of agricultural land. In the US, that number drops to just 1%, and globally, it's only 2%. In the meantime, conventional agriculture has spread across the globe. That may also be because organic farming benefits the land, yes, but comes with strict regulations, high certification costs, and often lower yields. So where does regenerative agriculture fit in? The term
10:37 regenerative agriculture has roots in the organic movement. Back in the late 1980s, Robert Rodale, a big name in organic farming, started pushing the idea. because he thought that the term regenerative was more powerful than the term sustainable. I'm not satisfied with the term sustainability. I think it's very appealing to policymakers because they think it's simple and they can understand it. I don't think a average person aspires to live in a sustained environment. They want to live in something that's expanding and going better. So I think the idea of regeneration is more healing point the way to opportunities. We're not just going to produce more food, we're going to actually do it in
11:22 a way that feels good for the planet. When you farm, you're actually leaving the land and the environment in a better state than before you were farming. So you're making things better. Regenerative agriculture has been seen by some as a further step from organic. But that's not everyone's interpretation. Regenerative agriculture seems to be often emerging as an alternative to both conventional and organic farming. But pinning down what regenerative agriculture really is? If I were to ask you what to define, to say what regenerative agriculture is, how would you define regenerative agriculture? If you were to try to define regenerative agriculture, what would you say? That's where things get tricky. Regenerative agriculture is not uniformly defined throughout
12:11 Western Europe or even not in the world. Regenerative agriculture combines food production with ecosystem restoration, having sufficient attention for the soils, for water quality, for biodiversity. And beyond that, it also looks for social sustainability and economic sustainability. It is a strategy, it's a policy. It's a concept, it's an idea, it is not a practice. It's not a certification, no? It's a set of principles. If you're feeling confused, you're not alone. I've been digging into this topic for over a year, and the one thing that's crystal clear to me is that regenerative agriculture is intentionally vague. And that's kind of okay. Let me explain.
12:56 Unlike organic, which follows strict practices, Regenerative farming is all about following a set of guiding principles and aiming for tangible outcomes. So farmers have the freedom to interpret how they apply these principles to achieve those outcomes. Meaning there's no one size fits all method. It's up to each farmer to figure out what works best for their unique situation. The North Star of the movement is all about enhancing soil health and boosting its ability to store carbon. because soil is the unsung hero of our food system. It's packed with microbes that help feed plants, which in turn feed us. And it acts like a giant carbon sink.
13:41 As plants grow, they suck up carbon dioxide from the air to build their tissues. When plants die, they decompose, and that stored carbon is transferred into the soil, where it can remain locked for centuries. But bad farming practices, which deplete the soil, can transform a virtuous cycle into a vicious one. This is exactly what regenerative farming claims that it's trying to stop. Why is soil health a useful term? I think because it recognizes that the soil does more for us than just give us something to produce crops in. It's important to maintain soil well so it doesn't erode because it takes a lot. It takes millennia to form soil and we
14:27 can lose it. very, very quickly in a storm if things go badly. But since the regenerative term has not been legally certified like organic, any farmer can decide which practices they want to use to apply those principles and achieve those outcomes. But this means that anything goes. What worries soil scientists at this point isn't just the soil itself. It's the myths and the misinformation that can cloud our understanding of the issues. In particular, a dramatic claim has been circulating among the regenerative movement. The idea that soils around the world are so eroded that we might only have 60 years of harvests left.
15:15 The problem is, it's unclear where this number came from. This comprehensive study on soil erosion, which reviews 240 studies from 38 countries, So it paints a different picture. According to the study, in the next century, we could lose 35% of bare soils, 20% of farmed soils, and only 7% of so-called well-managed soils. What does this tell us? Well, we're not on the brink of a global food collapse, but it is true that we're losing a lot of soil. And restoring it could take decades, sometimes even centuries. an issue we can't afford to ignore. The study also confirms that better farming practices can
16:02 significantly reduce soil damage, which is great news. But can farming ever truly leave the land better than it was before it was farmed? This is the question that led me all the way to earn scotch in Bahia State. For millennia, this place had been beaming with the life of the Atlantic rainforest. But relentless deforestation and farming for timber, sugar cane, coffee, cattle ranching and urban sprawl left much of it unrecognizable and unproductive. No large tropical forest ecosystem in the world has suffered so much loss as Malta
16:52 Atlantica. This map shows just how little remains. It was a land area, defasated. All the wood were removed. The wood was removed. The people who had wood were cut, and cut the most strong wood, which had everything inside. Here, the land here, the old people, the older people, before me, this people were working planting a mandioca. They cut the land, they destroyed, passava fogo e plantava mandioca nessas áreas aqui. E continuava fazendo aquele trabalho. Depois passou a vender os terrenos, outras pessoas foram comprando e trabalhando e fazendo... Levou
17:39 para uma quantidade de anos isso aqui sem ninguém fazer nada. Mas só que o terreno era fraco, porque o pessoal estragou muito botando fogo, queimando, fazendo queimada e plantando mandioca. Aí ficou uma situação By the 1950s, locals called these 500 hectares of land in Piraido Norte those who fled dry land. The land was left barren and abandoned for 70 years, until this guy showed up in the 80s. Ernst Gottsch, then a Swiss in his 30s with a background in genetic improvement,
18:30 arrived with a family to feed and a fresh perspective. And now Ernst believed there was something missing in conventional farming methods, and he set out to prove it. During his childhood, he had seen his father work on the family farm on the shores of Lake Constance. I got interested in farming since childhood. Testing how things function, how plants interact, how to get better results without destroying something, let's say, without degrading soil. He had an intuition, which to us today might sound trivial, but it wasn't at the time. The health of a plant doesn't depend on the treatment it
19:20 receives individually. It depends on how it interacts with all the other plants and animals around it. Perhaps it could be more intelligent to focus on the conditions they offer to the plants. So in the 70s, while the world was jumping on pesticides and fertilizers, Ernst was figuring out how intelligent design could make us less dependent on them. His tests had been successful in Switzerland and Costa Rica. His method seemed to work. So it was just a matter of time before a Brazilian landowner and cocoa producer would knock on his door to extend him an opportunity, or rather, a
20:08 challenge. Now you will look for land. It must be in the cocoa region. It has to be more than 200 hectares. It has to be seen by the cocoa authority as not recommended to plant cocoa. As I say, so-called bad land. His mission was clear. Find the worst land and turn it into the best. Here's how he tackled the challenge. First, he started by cutting everything down and covering bare soils with organic matter, compost and mulch. Then he introduced pioneer species, fast-growing, hardy plants that help to quickly cover the soil.
20:57 Next, he planted a mix of vegetables, fruits, herbs, and perennials, arranging them in layers that mimic a forest canopy. This setup creates different heights and shades, much like a natural forest. I'm making it sound easy, but he has a very sophisticated way of deciding what trees to plant and where. For the past 40 years, Ernst has been out in the fields every day at sunrise, pruning and mulching. And he won the challenge. Against all odds, the thriving cocoa in his land is recognized among the finest in the world. And that's not all he produces. His land teems with bananas, Brazil nuts, acai, jackfruit, mangoes, and countless other species,
21:44 all flourishing without a single drop. of additional irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides. After just five years, his land had already transformed into a thriving small forest. Ernst was soon able to purchase the businessman's share of land and settled for the long term. But all of these years, he hasn't been working alone. He's orchestrated an ecosystem where Pollinators, insects and animals play integral roles in the farm's ongoing renewal. They do it for me free. That's to say you can learn how they do it and they do it moved by inner pleasure. That's to say they need no salary. In his farm's ecosystem, even plants and bacteria
22:33 usually considered weeds and pests are embraced as valued contributors, each serving a purpose. For me, those so-called pests and diseases, they are the best friends of me, that's to say. They are my teachers. He calls his method syntropic farming, from the ancient Greek term syntropy, that describes the system's tendency towards order, cooperation, and complexity. Today, Ernst's syntropic farm looks and behaves like a thriving forest. It's one of the most astonishing places I've ever seen. And to me, this is the definition of regeneration. There is no species on the planet which would not have a
23:20 function. Each of all these functions is in pro of life and not against life. And this is what I point at ourself, that we have lost. We appeared in the same way as any other species or all other species to favor life, to contribute. to increase life. And if we would understand this, we would ask, first of all, what is the first human right? It's to be serviceable to life. The farm is known as óleos d'água, water ice, because rain has come back too. Just 10 years after urns settled, technicians from the Brazilian Institute for the Environment decided to visit the farm because they had seen surprising
24:07 aerial pictures like this one. At the time, a severe regional drought was ongoing. But the images revealed a thriving forest and clouds hiding a highly productive area. That's because the farm isn't just a small ecosystem. It also creates a humid microclimate from the water evaporating of the plants. Earned success as rainmaker during that drought finally earned him the respect of many of his neighbors. It's a test that he lives here, and here it rains, sometimes it rains. Por incrível que pareça. Se falar isso, só quem converve aqui pra ver. Tem vezes que aqui cai a água, lá não cai. E eu fico aqui a 4km daqui. Porque dá floresta. Mas tem vizinho ainda que não tá ainda... Ainda não acreditou ainda no trabalho dele.
24:58 Pra pegar o sistema dele aqui, assim como esse e outras pessoas, tem gente que pega o sistema assim, tem gente que não quer mais usar aquelas coisas mais... I can understand why his figure can still be divisive. His is not just a farming method. It's a worldview that connects wisdom from biology, agronomy and ancient philosophy. Lao Tzu says, things are not to be done. They are being done. I say things
25:47 are being done by all species of all time. They occur equipped to realize their task, to fulfill their function, moved by inner pleasure. It's being done, moved by inner pleasure. And I am doing my work. moved by inner pleasure. That's to say, my first question every day, every moment is always, what can I do? How can I interact so that the result of my interaction, of my participation, will be beneficial to all submitted, affected, and present one of my
26:36 interaction? Because we are part of a macro-organism. And in a macroeconomic system, we are something like cells. And if you were serviceable to life, then you are happy. Because then this gives you the energy, a good feeling. Finding joy in the work Though it isn't always enough to solve the broader challenges farmers have to face. For starters, after putting in so much work to grow their food, then it can rot quickly if they don't find the buyer fast. So the processing part, like drying, fermenting, whatever, you know, is very
27:27 important to give it a longer shelf life and also to be able to sell it and to add value to it. This is Gudrun, Ernst's daughter. She's taken her father's principles and built on them with her business, Selvei Paths. Her focus is on turning their farms and the neighboring farms abundance into products that can last and thrive in the market. But Gudrun's path wasn't always clear. There was a time when she was curious about a different life. I was born two kilometers from here at my dad's farm. I moved away by the age of 12. All my Well, I only have one brother, so all my siblings had moved away already. I asked my parents to go with him because I was all alone. I didn't have
28:15 anyone to play with. And I wanted to go to school. When I left Brazil, I always say, one day I'm going to go back. I'm going to come back. And I came back to Brazil when I was 27. What was the impression that you had approaching European agriculture when you went there? I think I couldn't imagine me living in Europe from agriculture. I don't know, I didn't connect with that. I can't imagine myself going a different direction, like, or supporting something that goes towards, like, monoculture and... conventional
29:01 agriculture. So I think giving more value to what farmers do would be really great for the world. And you see even farmers don't feel like they themselves don't have value. For those of us who'd rather have our food come from places like Ernst and Gudruns rather than vast monocultures, the question isn't just about sustainability. It's about recognizing the dignity and viability of farming as a career. Because there's a big limit to scaling up this type of agriculture. Labor. Unlike monoculture
29:48 operations where machines can handle much of the work, diversified regenerative farms require dedicated people And despite what the 1995 Nat Geo article forecasted, today the world is going in the opposite direction. So many people moving away from the land, like selling their land to buy a house in town because they think there's more security in the city than there is on the land. So farmers is like something They look at it from above and even farmers feel like they're worth less. Even when they go to town, they will put on nice clothing and scrub their hands so that people won't see
30:34 that. If farmers don't grow food, we will starve. I mean, this is so obvious, but I think there's people that don't even know that farmers actually produce food. because they just go to the supermarket. So they think that food comes from the supermarket and not from the farmers. Farmers are still the invisible backbone of our food supply chain. But they're also among the lowest paid in the industry, their wages barely scraping by. In some cases, their situation borders on modern slavery, trapped in a cycle of exploitation with no escape. For these reasons, many people are turning elsewhere for a living. Why are the salaries so low? Why is it regarded as a bad job? Why is it so hard?
31:23 I mean, the question that often comes when we talk about agriculture is like, who's going to do it? Who's going to do this work? The answer is, possibly no one. In Europe, only 4% of the employed population works in farming. In the US, 2%. The World Bank's numbers for employment in agriculture show that the decline has been sharp. If we follow this trend, over the next few decades we'll have a big problem. So yeah, we might have soil in good enough shape for the next 300 years. But we could also run out of farmers in the next 30. There's a place in Europe where the shift away from agriculture is painfully clear. Ibiza. Out of all of the land available, only 10%
32:12 is being farmed. So the majority of agricultural land in Ibiza is simply not used at all. It's left fallow. From the 1950s and 60s, as tourism really exploded on the island, what happened was many farmers left their land to pursue other jobs that had more of an economic benefit. Currently, 96% of the food that we eat in Ibiza is shipped in. And so if we were to see any sort of disruption, we would find ourselves in a really vulnerable place where we have maybe two or three days of food left. Finn Harris and Christian Joknick have shifted their careers to do something about that. Finn Harris has already worn many hats, from YouTuber to media co-founder and environmentalist to... a master's
33:00 thesis looking at the intersection between regenerative agriculture and architecture. I was trying to understand what it looked like to design regenerative systems. Christian Döcknick comes from a Swedish family running a successful cosmetic business. And he has always been interested in volunteering on social projects looking at eating disorders, antisocial behavior and drug abuse. But his work used to be less socially driven. I moved to London, started studying finance, and ended up working in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department of Goldman Sachs for two years, which was the opposite end of the spectrum. Juntos Farm was born in 2018, when Christian and his family decided to leave their busy London lives behind,
33:48 to start a small farm in Ibiza, driven by a desire to reconnect with nature and support the local community. It didn't take long to figure out that farming in Ibiza is no easy feat. They realized that there was a real lack of access to resources and infrastructure and distribution for the food that they were growing. So Juntos evolved from an organic regenerative family-run farm to social projects focused on restoring agriculture on the island. Part of this project is about making sure that we connect with the existing farmers on the island and support them and try and understand what are the major bottlenecks for them. Juntos is a project to invest in infrastructure, resources and services to make it easier to
34:38 start farming in a small scale diversified organic and regenerative system. Christian believes that right now it's almost impossible to get into farming without relying on monocultures and supermarkets. So he's now focused on doing what he can to change that. The challenge with the cooperatives today is that they are operating in the system of the monoculture. So here you have the Beekeepers Association and here you have the grain producers cooperatives and here's the the livestock cooperative. But if you're a small scale diversified producer and you have bees and you have chicken and you have sheep and then you have trees and you have grains and you have a veggie garden, you cannot go to five, six different cooperatives that
35:28 are two to three hours away. If you can link these units together into a global movement, then you can have shared offset agreements. Through that, replicated model, I can get access to scale. And this is a model that I think can work. I can't help but think that while these solutions offer hope, they face a tough test. Could they work in places that don't have the luxury of tourism or affluent residents? For many small farmers, this kind of support just isn't available. Despite The fact that we have a small local population, about 150,000 residents, we have 4 million tourists who come through every year. And so a key to this project succeeding is being able to tap into that tourism industry. And the
36:18 irony there is tourism is one of the reasons that we've seen a decline in agriculture. And so we're trying to almost reverse it. We're trying to make sure tourism becomes one of the key factors that supports agriculture here in Ibiza. But farming is harder for those who have less agency on their land and the fruits of their work. Some say that the solution to the social and economic struggles of farmers lies in embracing technology, even if it means taking farming away from the farmers themselves. They argue that farming is a tough job, so it's not necessarily bad news if one day no one has to do it anymore. And look, there's no easy answer here. But the farmers we spoke to see it differently. I do
37:03 work for getting money because I want to be able to travel, to visit my siblings and to do all this thing. But at the end, if everything crashes down, I know how to plant, to harvest, what to do with all that. So it's okay. I'm fine. That's something that gives me such a deep trust in life, in myself, that, you know, if everything goes wrong, I live on a land where I can grow my own food. For me, it's one of the greatest jobs a person can do. You're in contact with nature, you have challenges every day
37:51 that you get through. I mean, I'm super happy with my life, I would say. And that involves, you know, about 75% of my day doing farming and dreaming farming. So... probably is 95% of the day. Also, right now, tech is great for conventional farms, but doesn't quite fit complex ecosystems. That might change soon. But for now, if we're serious about fixing environmental issues, we're going to need farmers for the foreseeable future. It's this social dimension of farming that makes some people skeptical in front of big companies' commitments to regenerative agriculture. For 12 years, I was on the Sustainable
38:39 Sourcing Advisory Board for Unilever. So I was at this meeting, and it was in 2019. I remember it very clearly. And people in the meeting were talking about regenerative agriculture. Now, as a professor working in the field of agriculture, I thought, what on earth are they talking about? I hadn't heard of this. Over the past few years, some of the biggest food production companies in the world have jumped on the regenerative agriculture bandwagon. From meat and dairy producers and suppliers, including JBS, to grain companies such as General Mills, to agrochemical producers like Bayer and Syngenta. There are very few actors who define kind of everything from prices to what's being produced, what's being consumed, and how it's distributed and all that.
39:27 But not everyone in the regenerative agriculture movement is thrilled about big companies co-opting the term. What they're really advocating for are fundamental changes in our economic system. Changes that could actually challenge big companies, not reinforce them. The regenerative agriculture, the agroecology, they sign up often to issues of fairness and equity and things which go beyond the actual crop production to the way that the whole food system works. We have studied during the last 100 years how to squeeze out at the lowest price the products out of plants, out of animals,
40:18 and out of people. That's why Ernst is reluctant to call his agriculture regenerative. terms for ecology are being appropriated by those trade enterprises, which often do the contrary of what those terms, when they had been opted for or created. It's very dangerous to give you an answer. It is regenerative agriculture. But there are other reasons regenerative claims by industry aren't well received. Big agricultural companies often link regenerative agriculture to carbon storage in the soil.
41:09 McDonald's, for example, claims to be combating climate change by improving soil health. That's a pretty bold claim. But how much truth is there to it? What we know so far is that While regenerative agriculture is undeniably beneficial for the environment, its potential to mitigate climate change is limited. The thing is, we don't know for sure whether regenerative practices can actually sequester additional carbon, or how much. So when it comes to soil quality, it depends very much on the original soil quality, where it is, the climate conditions, what is what ecosystem services this soil could provide. And then it's not one size fits all. It's
41:58 very, very difficult to find indicators that we could really use in a consistent way to tell a story and to monitor the benefits of what we're doing, I'm afraid. Meanwhile, McDonald's remains one of the biggest beef suppliers globally and emits more greenhouse gas emissions on its own than American Airlines. So could going regenerative really make a dent in its huge emissions, or is it just for show? And is it just bad news that big companies are committing to regenerative agriculture? The fact that strong companies actually invest into this, you know, I feel it's positive, you know, whether
42:43 the intention is legitimate or not, you know, The fact that they are interested into this, I feel like it's going to be a positive change for the regenerative agriculture in general. Well, of course, those companies are there for profit. But the people that I work with who are working within those companies, I think, are genuinely committed to trying to do their very best within the boundaries that they can. Sometimes I feel like they're trying to put a nice cover to their own companies, but it's not I hope I'm wrong, you know, I hope they're actually really interested in what they're doing. For example, I came across like huge coffee monocultures in Brazil where you would
43:30 have the beautiful, biodiverse, much atlantica rainforest and they have like, I don't know, some two, three meters of coffee trees there and the soil is just bare and there's no biodiversity at all and super high inputs of pesticides fertilized. And I call it regenerative. They make some calculations to show it's carbon positive because, I don't know, they compare it to baseline where there's probably nothing. And then this is branded regenerative. there's a fine line to be walked. Regenerative will need clear standards to avoid misuse.
44:19 My fear for regenerative is that before it has a chance to be taken seriously and to be sort of established with proper frameworks and processes, that it's overused to the point where consumers lose their trust in that term. But it will also have to be adaptable enough to bridge that organic and conventional farming divide. You know, funnily enough, in some ways, I think that the lack of a clear definition is actually a benefit. If you end up with a clear definition, usually that's something, thou shalt not do this, thou shalt not do that. It's usually a set of rules which progressively, if you like, eliminate the freedom or the
45:04 creativity of farmers to be able to do their own thing to try and achieve a goal. There are a whole set of overlapping terms like regenerative and organic and agricultural that each of them have multiple meanings and uses. They may be heading in the same direction but represent really different levels of ambition. Now, will regenerative agriculture feed the entire world? Maybe that's not the right question to ask. I imagine it as a powerful tool for small scale farmers. a way to restore degraded lands, a lifeline for communities still deeply connected to farming and the method to combat desertification. It may not redefine global agriculture overnight,
45:55 but its importance in these struggling pockets of the earth is undeniable. The forest started to return all over again. Today it rains more than at those times. I think everyone has to say, Regenerative agriculture is maybe more than anything a shift in perspective. It compels us to see our habitats not as lifeless resources to be exploited, but as intricate ecosystems to be nurtured and sustained. Today, Ernst welcomes young farmers at Olhos d'Agua. He tells them they're not there to pick up a set of recipes, but to
46:42 understand mechanisms. They learn how nature works, so they can adapt syntropic farming's principles to the local conditions of their farms. I am sure that nature functions on clean, logical principles. For me, the whole universe is a living being. But each element of each part of this universe has its peculiarity, but they function all on the same principles. And there is no beginning, no end. Similarly, regenerative agriculture doesn't seem to be about finding a universal fix. It's
47:28 about rethinking our approach to farming, embracing the idea that each piece of land has unique needs. is what nature would do without us. This is more than just a practice or a nice label. Maybe it's that long-awaited agricultural revolution, one that also embraces a different way of life. And those leading the charge are already in motion. Part of the solution is not about fixing the food system. It's about fixing how we live our lives. I think we're not talking about enough is how not only how do we need to change the way we farm, but how do we need to change the way we consume? Consumption is a political act. It's something you can do in silence
48:19 to change the world. Whether this revolution will live up to National Geographic's promises from a few decades ago, or we're on the brink of a farmer-less era, remains uncertain. In the end, I like to think that The future of farming will just come down to what we collectively decide to value. I really believe that we have the power to create our reality. And this is being done with what we think, what we say and what we do.
