Regenerative Skills Regenerative Skills

Over the next two weeks I’m going to be taking some much needed recharge time with my family here on the farm. I've got my little sister Emily here and her three little girls Selma, Rawan, and Lujane who came from Kuwait city to spend the summer with us, and my mom who just arrived on Wednesday who will be spending a week with us. We’ve got outdoor education time around the farm (which we call Jungle School), a number of fairs and local festivals in the area we’re going too, and a lot of good food to indulge in made by our neighbors and broader community around the comarca of Osona in central Catalunya that we’re going to explore. 
Going hand in hand with the family time, I’ve been aware of a need to find a better balance in my home life. It goes along with this series on holistic health that I’ve been building, and both my partner Alba and I have been re-examining here at home. 
Alba has been suffering from some acute inflammation in the gut recently which has really impeded on her quality of life. In my case I’ve been flirting with burnout as I juggle between my work, the projects around the farm, and now looking after three little kids. Though I’m not in pain or discomfort, now that I’m in my mid thirties I notice that I can’t abandon my health routines and self care for as long without feeling the consequences as I did a decade ago. As a result, Alba, my sister and I have been asking ourselves questions about the necessary adjustments we need to make in areas of our diet, rest cycles, personal care, and balance of obligations to ensure that this journey is enriching and fulfilling in the long run. 
For this reason I’ve also been thinking a lot about a previous series of talks I had with my good friend Crystal Honeycutt. 
I recorded a two part discussion with her back in the early days of this show when it was still called the Abundat Edge Podcast and I was living in a little shack while I built our bamboo house on our homestead farm in the mountains of Guatemala. We went into a lot of the considerations and personal analysis that I’m now revisiting, but since I recorded a pretty decent introduction to the conversation I’ll let my highly curated podcasting voice from 2018 set us up for the interview.

Welcome to the final episode in mine and Nick’s 3 part series on drought. In the first episode we talked about how drought was affecting our two homes at the moment. His home on the island of Tenerife, and my own in Northeastern Spain. We went over the definition of drought and some common myths and misconceptions, as well as the major factors that can make drought more common and severe. 



In the second episode we turned to look at the myriad of options that are available to mitigate and even reverse the effects of drought focusing first on the sequence of design considerations. We looked into stopping points of drainage and damage, minimizing the need for use, and then capture and retention. From there we take a specific look at small scale to medium scale living space. Apartments and condos all the way up to small homes to homesteads of a few acres. 



In this last episode we’re going to wrap up the layout of different drought mitigation strategies for medium, large and even regional scales. More than home infrastructure, this session focuses on land management with interventions like earthworks, road and access design, and even restoration of water bodies like rivers and streams. 



The regional scale is an aspect of drought mitigation that I believe everyone has a responsibility to get involved in, and there is a need for a variety of approaches, from political action and institutional reform, to coalition building, and even direct work on the ground.Hopefully by the end of this series you’ll feel much better informed about what drought really is and some of the many options available to you to create resiliency against this increasingly common and severe occurrence in many parts of the world in order to take action and change the trajectory that your home and your community is currently on. 



Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community



Links:



https://www.instagram.com/regenerative_skills/



https://www.instagram.com/permanick_permaculture/



https://www.permanick.com/welcome/




https://vergepermaculture.ca/product/erwh-bookandtool/




https://permacultureearthworks.com/



https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1234602.Design_for_Water



https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12528817-let-the-water-do-the-work



https://quiviracoalition.org/techguides/



https://www.anabranchsolutions.com/beaver-dam-analogs.html



http://www.restorationag.com/product/water-for-any-farm-2/




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74zRegYj1JA





https://regenerativeresources.co/




https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/



https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/580219.Rain_Gardens



http://www.buildingnaturalponds.com/



https://homesteady.com/4984632/alternatives-to-septic-tank-systems




https://regenerativeskills.com/galen-fulford/





https://regenerativeskills.com/abundantedge-tom-duncan/





https://regenerativeskills.com/joost-wouters/





https://regenerativeskills.com/bruce-kania/





https://regenerativeskills.com/brian-von-herzen/




https://www.harvestingrainwater.com/



https://oasisdesign.net/




https://lacasaintegral.org/




https://community.waterstories.com/

Continuing with our deep dive into drought, my good friend Nick Steiner and I are going to move now from defining drought and the its myriad of causes and factors that make it worse, to a wide range of solutions and opportunities available to people who are living in different environments and with different access to land and space. 



You may not be surprised to hear that we ended up running long and so I split the episode into two parts. In this session we cover mostly the order of consideration for a retrofit of a home or even a landscape design geared towards water harvesting and rehydration. Then we look at the options available to people in small living spaces like apartments and condos in urban or peri urban areas. We also start to explore the next size up which would be small to medium sized homes with access to anything from a small garden to a couple acres of land. 



The great thing about looking at things in this order is that pretty much all the options available to small scale living or land access are also available as you size up. I also think it’s important to explain that there’s no reason you need to own or have access to large amounts of land in order to have a meaningful effect and influence on the water catchment in your local area, or often even more importantly, assist in shifting the culture of water use and abuse that is baked in to many of our modern societies to one of reverence and respect for water and the life it enables. 



Now, it’s impossible that Nick and I mention and explore all of the options at the various scales of living that we cover in these next two episodes, so please reach out to us if you think there are other possibilities we should be aware of or mention in future talks. We’re always excited to expand our own understanding and have a better grasp of the new and emerging knowledge for working with water. 



Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community



Links:



https://www.instagram.com/regenerative_skills/



https://www.instagram.com/permanick_permaculture/



https://www.permanick.com/welcome/

It’s that time again. In todays’ regenerative round table, my good friend Nick Steiner and I give updates on our respective projects. Him on the Island of Tenerife and myself in the mountains of central Catalunya in Spain. In the update we talk about some of the challenges we’ve been experiencing this year. The big topic at the moment for us, and many other in this area of the world, is drought. Partly because Nick and I live in parts of the world where drought is a common factor we’ve been researching it for some time. 



In this episode we’ll break down some of the common myths and misconceptions about drought and its causes. We’ll also talk about the link between drought and other common natural disasters such as floods and wildfires and then give concrete examples from our respective home bases. We go into some of the hidden factors that lead to regional droughts and some of the science behind the way water works in the environment to cool the atmosphere and create more moderate conditions in the climate. 



This chat is the first in a two part look at drought and will set us up for a second episode next week where we’ll break down some of the wide ranges of actions and changes that can make a difference, not only in mitigating the effects of drought but also reversing the trends in the long term and rehydrating your landscape. 



Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community



Links:



https://www.instagram.com/regenerative_skills/



https://www.instagram.com/permanick_permaculture/



https://www.permanick.com/welcome/

A couple weeks ago I had a wonderful conversation with my good friend Harriet Mela, the independent researcher from Austria who has helped push the boundaries of soil science and plant physiological understanding. We focused last time on how plants handle water stress, specifically drought and the management practices that can either help or inhibit their natural adaptation to this stress. Harriet also made it clear that she had a lot more to say on this topic and behind the scenes we talked about how to frame another discussion. In that time I shared a link to research done by Dr James White demonstrating how plants can absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere via enzymes in the stomata of their leaves. Turns out that Harriet is of course in close correspondence with James and she suggested that we invite him to our next session to explore the newest discoveries and experiments that they’re both conducting. How could I say no to that!



So a quick intro to Dr James White to get us oriented. James is Professor of Plant Biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey where he and students conduct research on ecology of microbes that inhabit plants known as endophytes. James White is the author of more than 270 articles and book chapters, and author and editor of seven books on the biology of plant microbes. He is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Associate Editor for journals Symbiosis, Fungal Ecology, MycoScience, Biology and Scientific Reports, and also serves as Chief Editor for the Plant-Microbe Interactions Section of the MDPI journal Microorganisms and has presented extensively at international industry and academic conferences focused on regenerative agriculture, plant biostimulants and crop microbiomes.



So as you can imagine, between James and Harriet, we get into some epic material. 



Though this session takes us in many directions, a couple of which I probably can’t even pronounce correctly, the overarching theme that we explore is the workings of plants and their symbiotic relationships with other organisms that helps them to adapt and overcome stress in their environments. We start by looking at this topic from the perspective of drought tolerance to wrap up the previous conversation, and then we expand from there. We even get into genetic adaptation, the problems with industrially produced seeds, and by the end uncover a key piece of the puzzle that could help you cut the time it takes to transition to regenerative management of your farm into a fraction.



Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community



Links:




https://www.jefflowenfels.com/books-by-jeff-lownfels/





https://kindharvest.ag/courses/ra-cc-carbon-course/