Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
315 Felipe Pasini - Walking the land of Amadeco Syntropic Farm with regenerative farmer
What if you could turn a dry, water-scarce plot of land into a thriving ecosystem? In this new episode of Walking the Land with a Regenerative Farmer we follow the journey of Felipe Pasini, as we explore his transformative work on the Amadeco farm in Depressa, Salento, Puglia.
Through syntropic farming - also known as syntropic agroforestry or successional agroforestry -, a set of principles and practices created by the Swiss researcher and farmer Ernst Götsch, Felipe and his partner Dayana Andrade are bringing a revolutionary approach to intensive agricultural production adapted for the Mediterranean climate. Felipe shares a detailed design featuring strategically spaced tree lines and aromatic plants like sage and rosemary that create a self-sustaining ecosystem. We also talk about the critical role of pruning in syntropic agroforestry and how mechanization can be harmoniously integrated into these complex systems as well as how to maximize biomass production and minimize water dependency, even in the most challenging environments.
We also delve into the long-term benefits of regenerative agriculture over conventional methods. Felipe provides real-life examples of increased biomass and faster timber growth, illustrating the transformative power of proper land management. We explore multilayer agroforestry design principles and the potential role of AI in sustainable farm management. Finally, Felipe gives an inside look at innovative olive farming techniques that promise to revolutionize the industry.
This episode is also available in video format on Youtube.
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Welcome to another Walking the Land with a Regenerative Farmer, where we walk the land with a farmer and explore regeneration. Please let us know what you think. Today we walk with Filippo Passini and we walk the Amadeo farm, masseria, in Depressa, salento, puglia, in southern Italy, a syntropic agroforestry farm which really is operating at the cutting edge of agroforestry in Italy and the rest of Europe. Enjoy, enjoy, a very warm welcome to the second episode depending when you listen to this, obviously of Walking the Land with the Regenerative Farmer, and today we're in southern Italy.
Speaker 1:We're going to paint the context a bit. We're going to make it as visual as possible. You might be able to see this, we might put some imagery as well, but this is primarily an audio version. So I want you to take a cup of tea or go out for a walk or whatever, go into meditation or you listen to this and try to make it in your head as visual as possible, because that's what we try to do as well.
Speaker 1:It's a beautiful day, it seems the first day of spring, which is ridiculously early, the middle of February and there might be some background noise of birds, some cars, some pruning, maybe because Felipe obviously has scissors and a small saw in his hand. So that will be some of the noises that will accompany us in this trip. So thank you first of all for having us here, Felipe, having us back here. This is a recurring theme in our journeys, in our trips through through the continent. Where are we when, when people come in here if I mean they, they come from somewhere, so they understand, but when, imagine, people just dropped here out of nothing, um, where would you tell them we are?
Speaker 2:and then we'll start our, our visual walk okay, first of all, thank you, uh, for this another invitation and it's very nice to have you back and to have you and your family. It's always a pleasure to be together with you all, like three consecutive winters Feeling like spring, as you said. Okay, we are here at the entrance of this beautiful Masseria, which is this very traditional way of organizing the land in southern Italy. What we can see here is already like the vision that really spot my attention when I first came and made me think that this place is wonderful for trying different designs, because, although it is a 10 hectare 9 point something, almost a 10 hectare land, it has almost like different rooms, different spaces, that is all divided by this technique of dry walls. I mean this traditional techniques where, like I mean old farmers, they just took rocks out of the land because it's very rocky soil and they build these beautiful walls without using any cement, just piling them up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so imagine around us like there are a lot of pretty straight walls, actually of a meter 20 high, maybe made of rocks, removed from the field, so the entranceway is like that and a lot of the fields are sort of squarish. With these walls, you can easily look over them, you can see beyond, but they definitely provide a very physical barrier or boundary between between the different fields yes, you remember the first time you came on this property hmm, like the first time you drove on this, this property.
Speaker 1:You walked on it, if I I remember, yes. What was your feeling?
Speaker 2:Was it immediately I felt there was a lot of potential yes, I mean for not only the potential that I already knew about this place, because it's a challenging place where agriculture is kind of, I would say, dead or difficult, at least because of climate conditions, degradation, and I mean soil degradation, and water scarcity, and the water that comes from the boreholes are salty or salinized.
Speaker 2:Since 2009, the landscape became quite difficult because of the Xylella fastidiosa and the syndrome of the olives, and so, yes, I remember it's a place full of potential.
Speaker 2:But a good surprise was not only to meet this scenario, which is nice and challenging for us, but also this organization of this farm, because it's not, as we said, it's not a nine hectare straight plane of nine hectares that we have to divide. It is, we can see, almost like a frame for each area that we can try and discuss ideas and designs and see how they integrate with the local and traditional ways of organizing a space. We want to not only respect but pay a tribute to the tradition, which is absolutely beautiful, that exists here, and also to propose new ways or new readings of these spaces and propose new aesthetics as well. I find not our areas and of course I'm suspicious to say, but I find they're not only like a regenerative, they're not only like this agroforestry that improves the soil, that brings diversity, but they're also very beautiful and, I think, aesthetically, if we think about multifunctional landscapes and include how do you, how you say, how you call this is it's coming paisagismo uh, pleasantry.
Speaker 2:No, the the landscape view, that's not a word, but the how the landscape looks yes, I mean it's a kind of, uh, almost a gardening in a way, because it's.
Speaker 1:It's really also, which is a view that's not being used, or at least never or very rarely spoken, I think, outside certain circles in agriculture like it's like view and aesthetics and how it looks and feels and it should be.
Speaker 1:It should be nice and beautiful to look at is uh, it's not something you see regularly and, just as a bit of background, I will definitely link them. I'm pointing below, but nobody sees that. We'll link them below. We've recorded the deep dive with you two years ago on syntropic agroforestry, or syntropic agriculture, and we've had the pleasure to interview your partner in crime and partner in life, diana, in the field actually, which we filmed, which I'll also link below, so you can learn a lot more there of, of the background, and we'll touch about, touch upon a lot of those pieces here as well, but in a way less structured way, so that that is good as a background if you want to listen to that or just stay with us and then you will go on a, on a trip as well. But the aesthetics here yeah, it's spectacular compared to to most other things you can see.
Speaker 1:I will also link your Instagram account here, where you, with the whole team, actually are capturing this beauty in a in an absolutely stunning way and getting people out of their pre-conceived notions of what trees could be or what trees in a landscape could look like, and capturing that with all the new technology is just breathtaking. So I will make sure people can follow that from far if you're in a city somewhere, if you're looking at mostly concrete and get your daily shot of nature through through these kind of accounts. So we're looking here on the left, I mean, we can start walking actually, because we're on the entry point, there's the house which we're not going to pay too much attention to. Actually, we've recorded another episode there as well with one of the owners of this place and one of the starters, jan Giesbert, who also talked a lot about his journey which eventually led to Puglia. But then, on the left, here, I think, is the second field.
Speaker 2:We'll get to the first one later which we yes, covered with with the camera, but this is the second, well, well, actually this one is the third field although it's closer, but really finished organizing sooner, actually last spring. So it's going to be. It's less than one year, Wow, and this year will explode.
Speaker 1:I hope. So what are we looking at in terms of what should we imagine if we're listening to this?
Speaker 2:Okay here. The goal of this place was to propose a design for more intense vegetable production, but adapted to this place. You don't have to imagine like a lot of vegetable beds, because it's not like that. We have here one tree line every 5.2 meters and the tree line is composed by one fruit tree every four meters. Between these fruit trees we have an emergence tree that could be popular as eucalypt, making the emergence layers.
Speaker 2:Fast growing super, super. Yes, those that are for I mean we'll prune, I mean we'll keep the we'll control shades with this plant. I mean we'll prune, I mean we'll control shades with this plant. And then in the lower layer, we have all the fantastic aromatics that we have here in the Mediterranean. Okay, I will describe what I see. I mean we're seeing the sage.
Speaker 2:We plant a lot of carciofi as well, artichokes and rosemary, and of course, we have other trees that will fill this median layer which are growing like pistachio lenticels. We have oleander as well, because it's a very fast growing, rustic and we can prune very easily. It's good for pruning. And we have our triplex halimus, which is here. It's called herbaceae. It's also also desalinizes the soil, grows. It became one of our fastest growing plants, allies that we use for pruning a lot, so it becomes a very spread out bush covering all the soil. We have more sage. We have Budileia. It's a plant that we tested from the first year and it's showing a fantastic capacity to attend the dry season, growing all the time, growing, growing, growing.
Speaker 1:Because that's what you're looking for here, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, we want biomass production.
Speaker 1:Green biomass production cover, especially not in February, but especially in those extremely hot dry.
Speaker 2:Yes, without. I mean that can stand like a little water or almost no water, because this is slightly irrigated. I think it's a kind of a system that we try to educate our plants to depend almost with no water and in the future, with no water. So the ideal is, as we see already in the giardino, we start with something, but we try to train them not to depend on water, and all the plants here are capable of doing that. If it was not for the fruit trees I mean all of the fruit trees we have here in this space, and there are almost 90 fruit trees and there's a little bit over 2,000 square meters they come from nurseries so we can't expect them to survive in harsh conditions Because they've been pampered a bit too much and then we give some water in the beginning, and so continuing.
Speaker 2:We have the pistachio lentiscos, more artichokes, we have cineraria maritima, which is also a very fast-growing bush, more rosemary and we also let me see if I find some here I mean more lenticels. But we are adding the future as well, I mean. So we'll find some oak trees that we are planting to be the trees of the future, for example the eucalypt and even the poplar. They can stay here for long, but as long as we have the climax, species that belong to this landscape, like the oak trees, will slowly in succession, because it is one of the pillars of this approach they will.
Speaker 1:It took us five minutes, yeah, no, ten minutes, and we talk about succession, which is no I'm making half a joke but actually very fundamental piece here, because people would go like, oh, eucalyptus and oh and, but everything here has a role, a plan, and at some point it's it's an end and it's fine as well, or it serves for the next phase and that's planned and pruned for and that's okay, like that's scheduled into the idea, the pruned for, and that's okay, like that's scheduled into the, the idea, the design and the system. Um, to get to kickstart, because where we're walking now, we're walking on wood logs, actually in between the um, the field, which is not only anti-compaction but also a great fertilizer. What was this field before you started?
Speaker 2:this actually was not. Uh, of course it's. I mean it's everything was difficult and poor. Poor, I mean poor for our agriculture, but this was, I guess, the previous owners. They did some kind of a vegetable garden here and so it was not the worst place because at least it didn't have like tractors passing every year and plowing happening constantly. But still, I mean average of a place. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, just small herbs that grow in here and a dominance of this calendula, which is, I mean, we love the calendula, but it's also an indicator of a soil that still lacks like nutrients and capacity to hold more demanding species. And one thing that that is interesting, because sometimes it's more accurate to describe this type of system not in hectares but in linear meters, because here we are in a 2,000, a little over 2,500 meters area, but we have almost one kilometers of lines because it's the lines that count in terms of production and biomass.
Speaker 2:And yeah, because they are very close together. So here is is for walking. That's why we said it. This is, this suits like a small to median farmer that doesn't have a lot of land and wants to maximize and optimize production and diversity. I mean of we intensify all the layers here and we kind of put a condensed design. So between these 5.2 meters we have three beds, I mean three vegetable beds, and they are divided by the wood logs that you were mentioning, that we laid on the ground because we don't want to create islands of fertility. I mean the paths where we walk. They shouldn't be like roads of compaction that we come even with a wheelbarrow or walking. Instead, we take a lot of work, I mean it is a lot of work to do that but we place wood logs that we I mean for trees that we pruned here, even the olives that were cut down, and so they decompose in the future. I mean we see if we can, can raise some.
Speaker 1:We see some fungi already being, and that's one year and that's yeah, I mean you notice a difference, like we walk here and it's sort of very uneven. I'm not saying uncomfortable, but you have to pay attention when you walk, when you go to the older field, the giardino, basically it's already, it's flat, it's really already being decomposed.
Speaker 2:Also, since we planted a lot of perennial plants, I mean the roots keep growing and the trees, the roots keep growing, so we want these roots to communicate under these logs. I mean they travel under this log and they participate with the microorganisms that they bring that grow together with the roots to participate in the decomposition of this organic matter. And so it is a lot of work. At the beginning it is like an investment of time, not too much, but it is an investment, but the benefits are absolutely worth it. So we are happy for doing this and, okay, continuing here. Yes, I said the Boudelaire, which is amazing, and now, after the third year using this plant, we see it fills the medium like a low to medium layer of this fast-growing consortia very well, which makes us really happy.
Speaker 1:What's the biggest surprise in terms of plants? Because when we talked two years ago, obviously you were very much at the beginning. I think a bit was planted, but you came on this land two years and a few months ago, so it was very early. Now you've had a few seasons, a few years, let's say, in your pocket and what has been the great surprise in terms of plants to work with as your allies in regenerating these pieces of land.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, although we've been working in the Mediterranean for, I mean, a little bit more than five years now, each place has a particularity. I mean, we use the aromatics, we use some similar trees, but they behave differently depending on where we are. But they behave differently depending where we are. And here, for example, compared to the place where we lived in Portugal and then later Spain with our friends from La Loma Viva, here, although the summer is very hot, here we have much colder winters and we have frost. Some plants we can't even plant in fall, as we hoped. We are trying to anticipate the planting season so say they can build some muscles to stand the frost. We're doing some trials like that. But, uh, we are learning that we have our I wouldn't say favorites, but some that we, we know we can't live without. Yes, I mean, for example, the salvia. Here you see that they really, in this first year, they dominate everywhere because Sage is huge, huge, leaves huge growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first year they don't complain about frost they really don't care about it and they keep growing, growing, growing. They are fantastic for pruning. That's why we are integrating them with our vegetable production, which I will speak about in a minute, our vegetable bed. But anyway, they are the ones that provide a lot of biomass in the first year. The rosemary, for example, that normally grows faster in other places here they're a little bit slower in the first and second year and then they explode. They make a good pair, because now we are seeing our, like, our, like an oak tree, roverella, like that is a very traditional here. That is, we planted very close together to a poplar, and so this poplar will grow and the roverella, which is a fast growing, it will follow and in let's see in how many years it will take it will eventually replace the thelar. Yeah, so this is the tree line that we are still walking, and on my left we have, like a vegetable bed.
Speaker 2:We really tried something new here and something a little bit different from what people would expect, because we have an 80 centimeter bed that we can really mechanize the preparation. Our decision was to make a perennial line of aromatics in the center. So we have sage, we have cineraria, we have oregano and we have santolina and plus rosemary. So we have these plants that they're making a line of perennial aromatics and on the sides of this line of perennial aromatics we place, we have just like two lines of vegetables, I mean one each side. So our idea here is not to have every time that we want to replace our vegetables to come with a machine and even plow this 80 centimeters, but we only work the line that we are going to replant them and we prune aromatics so they will produce the biomass, they will produce the mulch for our vegetables and as our aromatics regrow, I mean they will also send a signal of our hormones and exudates of new growth for these plants, I mean for our.
Speaker 1:Basically we'll get a full bed into new growth.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, I mean like, so you plant and prune at the same time.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And this year, this spring, we'll do even more because I mean, since we didn't have a lot of biomass at the beginning, a lot of mulch, so we brought this mulch from outside. So we have a layer of wood chips plus straw this sound you can hear. It is a good layer of straw, but working with straw is very uncomfortable. I'm really fed up of working with straw. I'm not cursing it, I mean I love the straw and it's very useful. But, as in the same concept of irrigation of or any kind of fertilizer, we we have to reduce it over time. So in order to be, to really be like a syntropic, we need to to use them as a first push and then we have tried to make our system to work and to function by its own dynamics. So what we're going to do here this spring is we'll take cuttings of these aromatics and we'll also add I mean on the other side, On the outside, close to the path.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know how you will describe this to your listeners, but our idea is to have, as if we have like a line of small bushes and in the middle of these lines we'll have our vegetables.
Speaker 1:So imagine an 80 centimeter bed where on the side, when you start from left to right doesn't really matter is a line of aromatics, then a line of vegetables, then another line of aromatics, perennials, just like the other side, and then another line of vegetables and another one of aromatics and then you get to the other food path. So very dense, everything alive, everything pumping, exudates all the time, very intense, but very, I mean intense production, but at the same time not so intense, because the all the aromatics, of course you can eat, you can fry, you can use them, but they're mostly the workhorses of the, the system providing the biomass, and the vegetables are completely surrounded about, surrounded by life, basically yeah, so what we'll try to do, what we'll do is to reproduce what we do with our trees, I mean when we prune emergence trees to bring biomass to our or induce the flowering and the fructification of our medium layer or canopy layer, fruits or low layer.
Speaker 2:We'll do this dynamics just in a very, you know, as a miniature, Using aromatic. Imagine if aromatics are trees and then we're just pruning them and using all the biomass they produce to kind of simulate not simulate, but creating a disturbance that will boost a new growth with the seasonal plants in it, because that's a fundamental piece as well.
Speaker 1:right, the disturbance, the pruning, not just because you like to prune, but because it's absolutely essential to this.
Speaker 2:It is the pulse, uh, that will will give a new boost of really growth. I mean ernest, uh, ernest gutch, that is the creator of this approach.
Speaker 1:I'm laughing because it took us 20 minutes. That's actually pretty, pretty good before we but the the disturbance piece, and how much of a fundamental shift that is from our normal narrative I think many people underestimate. Like, like the disturbances when done.
Speaker 2:Well, fundamental, yeah, I mean it's just, it's part of it. We can't not do it if we want to produce something. I mean as Ernest says. I mean a forest is not a museum. Museums say it's not something that just stays there, it has dynamics, and animals did this dynamic. The megafauna did the dynamics.
Speaker 1:They did the pruning.
Speaker 2:Yes, they did the pruning and now we don't. I mean, we don't have the megafauna and we can't do this ourselves. And Ernest did a lot of very interesting researches and some of the trees that he researched, the trees that he uses for pruning. They produce up to five times more biomass compared to the unpruned ones. Pruning for biomass, I'm not talking about pruning like a technical pruning for fruit trees production. I'm not talking about this kind of pruning, although they are part of it as well, but I'm talking about that type of pruning that we use to induce biomass production, to induce the growth post like bring back the system, to not bring back to the way it was before, but to use that accumulated biomass to give a new push forward, really like a post in the system.
Speaker 2:I mean, the system accumulates biomass, we prune, and it gives a boost of growth for the next group of plants. So overall, the idea here which I think is important it is the novelty that we're bringing to this place is that although this is a vegetable-driven design, we have only, I would say, 20% of this area will be devoted to seasonal plants, to annual plants. The rest is absolutely perennial. So we are having 80% perennial plants that will not only produced by themselves because we have fruit trees and etc. But we have also I mean they will also support 20 percent of seasonal. Is that deliberate?
Speaker 1:80 20? Is that deliberately chosen, like the 80 20?
Speaker 2:no, no, it's, uh, it's just probably too much like, because no, it could be, it's it's just, it is a choice.
Speaker 2:I mean, here we are doing like this because we can't afford actually to plow this place every year, so we need to have, I mean, a very little like soil disturbance, as little as possible, because we just can't, I mean we can't use a lot of water. So if we want to have vegetables in this place in a, I would say, ethical way or responsible way, I would say we need to come up with new solutions. I know, and I hope, we won't need the straw anymore, so it will be less volume of the straw here, and I want to find a way even works line in a more mechanized and elegant way. I mean we can't do it. It's not. I mean, the technology is not inexistent, but we need need to just adapt. So we keep working just this small I would say 20 centimeters wide line where we'll place our vegetables. We'll find a way to do it mechanized so we can do this operation in elegant and as little as possible soil disturbance.
Speaker 1:And you bring up the, the role or potential role of technology and mechanization in the last years here. Have you seen like, has that? Because I think often it becomes, yeah, it's amazing, um syntropic agroforestry if we only had the machines or if we only xyz. Has that been, has it? How has that conversation changed over the last years? Have you seen more machinery makers visit? Have you seen conversation changed over the last years? Have you seen more machinery makers visit? Have you seen? Is it starting to?
Speaker 2:to bubble. So there are we, still at the beginning. I wish I had a good answer to that, but we are still struggling yeah, we need more smart machine makers to get bitten by the syntropic bug no, absolutely, and and not, I wouldn't say just uh. I mean to use the term syntropic because it uh, I don't want people to perceive people, to perceive it as a kind of a brand, because it's not.
Speaker 2:It's just like a way of interpreting natural ecosystems and how we only in terms of techniques, but also in terms of the vision and ecological relationships. I mean bringing the succession, bringing the diversity and the complexity of the diversity, including the trees, and not only the trees, but in succession, like a succeeding consortium of trees. That brings a lot to the table. And bringing this a lot to the table in terms of complexity also brings very big challenges to our technological front.
Speaker 1:But it's fascinating to realize how big of a step that is, even from quote-unquote relatively traditional agroforestry of integrating one type of tree into a field and just like this is almost going from 2D to 3D or 4D, like it's really it's seeing a space completely different and that transformation over time and the succession will dictate almost everything. But yeah, of course we don't have the machines adapted to it. It doesn't mean they cannot be there, like it's definitely fixable. It's just the question of when and how.
Speaker 2:Yes, as we keep saying, the problem is not the lack of technology, the problem is that people who could do that they don't know the questions we have and they haven't so far internalized the questions that we're trying to solve. And technology always is not something that works on itself, but it always it feels a purpose and is trying to answer to some questions our society, I would say, imposes. And that's why we do this work, because we do this work to be visible.
Speaker 2:We have to make it work, although I would use the word compete, I mean with the brackets here he's doing air practice air brackets with a traditional model in terms of profits and stuff, because it's more I mean it's more intense, it's more work at the beginning, but we hope that we can show and we are showing it that it has, it works, it produces, it saves water, it improves the soil without the use of external fertilizers. Yeah, I mean all the fronts. It brings benefits From the climatic perspective. If we think about like a biotic pump, if we think about the role of the trees with the atmosphere and the relationship with the atmosphere, and if we think about the soil. If we think about that, we're adding a lot of perennial plants in the system and perennial trees that we now know how beneficial they are and the role they play ecologically. But we don't have a machine that can prune trees in different layers.
Speaker 1:Maybe in the future, with AI, with the drones, with all the automation, I think it will come from from that, from that universe, probably because I mean, if technology is an expression of the questions we ask and we haven't asked these questions, um, consistently or to the right people then once that happens, then brilliant minds, what we see with, let's say, the bigger tent of regenerative agriculture in general. What's been most fascinating with the podcast is seeing very, very smart people that have been working elsewhere in other sectors of non-food and ag or even food and ag. Once they get bitten by the soil bug or they go down a rabbit hole, they can't stop. They start absorbing.
Speaker 1:We had a friend here actually not so long ago. They start absorbing books, like they start absorbing. We had a friend here actually not so long ago. They start absorbing books, they start visiting farms, they start and they naturally will start building things. It could be machinery, could be brands, could be education, but they go down the rabbit hole and will start doing things that will be beneficial for farmers. We need way more people to be worried about soil and to start asking those questions, because they will start making the machines or making whatever we will need. We don't even know yet.
Speaker 1:I totally agree At the moment it's 2% or whatever it is, and it's just not enough.
Speaker 2:The type of agriculture we do as a humankind is a decision that the civilization does, but most of these people are actually not deciding. They are deciding as consumers, but they don't participate in any other part of this process. So I totally believe in that as well. That's why we also I mean everything that we try to do, and not only us, but our colleagues that work around the world in this kind of approach is also to communicate, because that's how we bring people on board and we find allies to work in other fronts, with public policies, with machines, with training, with whatever it takes to start changing or addressing the most urgent questions when it comes to agriculture and a few of those urgent questions are around succession and perennialization and words that you, I don't think, hear in any policy document ever.
Speaker 1:I mean, you just had a full school class, I think, of 14-year-olds on the farm as well, and soil quality and runoff and those. We just don't talk about it nearly enough. Imagine if we do. We since walked to the first field. That's why we hear a bit more car noises, even though it's a saturday afternoon and it's relatively quiet, and this is very pretty but also very impressive, because I remember walking here when there was nothing, and that's only two years and two, three months ago, four months maybe, and I see some trees that are reaching what is that? Four, five meters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, five, five plus. Yeah, we'll prune, yeah, five plus. And so what?
Speaker 1:are we Giardino, as you call it, the garden? What are we looking at here? For people that are walking somewhere, listening or maybe cooking or painting, whatever you might be doing, driving.
Speaker 2:Well, here was our first design. It's a little bit different from the other one, but it's one year and two months ahead of the other one, so I hope that one that we just saw I mean at least the tree lines will look like this in one year you have to come back to see. So here we have more, this landscape design for like a productive garden, because this is a smaller area. I mean, planted here we have like a thousand five hundred and it's gonna we're gonna expand the rest of the line, so it's gonna be like a two thousand square meters, which is kind of not uncommon piece of backyard some people have here in this region. So our idea was to revisit the functionality and the use of these spaces and to give new meaning to it in terms of like a more intense food production, not to make beautiful gardens so people can walk and smell flowers which nice as well, they're also here, these flowers you can smell but also for production. So when we started, we decided to do six lines. Now we expanded another two lines and we did a like a different design. You can see like one of the first posts on our Instagram. Now they really are hidden by the plants, but we worked here in nests. So we have one nest, like a round nest roughly, with like 1.2 meters in diameter and with a fruit tree in the center of this nest. And they are three meters apart and we have like a little connection between them where we planted emergent trees and, as I said, in the center of this nest we add like a fruit tree. So here we have almost 70 nests, so almost 70 fruit trees and, as we described before, we have all the aromatics, all the bushes and everything else composing the consortia, but in a more advanced way. I mean they're almost like three years now. So they, they have grown so well. I mean you see the like, and I started pruning this yesterday. I will continue. I did up to this line. Now I have to continue the other side. So it's been very pleasant already to to finish, I mean to already give the form of the fruit trees and we're still doing the, the formation pruning to them.
Speaker 2:But I mean the poplars and the eucalypt. It's so nice because they are finally reaching their strata. I mean they will be above all the fruit trees. I mean really making that extra layer that people couldn't see at the beginning because they were all kind of growing together. But now people when they come they say, ah, okay, now I understand and we are as we say.
Speaker 2:The translation maybe is not the same, but in Brazil we say that we are going to raise the skirt of this poplar in the Eucalypt, that we are taking the lower branches, so the fruit trees that are close by they occupy that space, and those emergent trees they will open their crown really up there in their layer, in the emergent layer, so underneath the other trees will just be able and have space to express themselves. And we are also will start doing some pruning. We are doing already some pruning in the corbezzolo, which is the strawberry tree that will be under some of the fruit trees, and yeah, so it's, it's another stage and I'm loving to to play with this stage because it's when we have a lot of biomass production. It is the moment when we don't regret planting too much because we have things to prune now and so hopefully we will really I mean this straw. Hopefully we won't need to add any other straw, because the place is already able to produce its own biomass to keep the soil covered all the time, and in the same way as we just described from another area.
Speaker 2:Here we add vegetables at the beginning, together with this, aromatics, with everything. In the first year we only irrigated this area eight times, so it was an amazing result. I mean here normally people from when spring comes after. Normally you have to irrigate almost every day or every other day, and here we just did it eight times during the peak of the summer, in the hottest weeks, and even though we produced lots of tomatoes and eggplants and zucchini. So you took a lot of water out and not added a lot of water yes yes, that is one of the advantages of, and this is anybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's say, if you have this kind of backyard or close to your farm or plot of land, this is very manageable to do by hand, this is very manageable to do by eye. This is not. I mean, it's intensive to start, but, as you said, once it gets going and you're saying this summer this field particularly will explode, then it produces just so much. As long as you keep pruning and planting and harvesting, you're fine.
Speaker 2:This size. I talked to Diana. I mean, it's a fantastic retirement plan.
Speaker 1:More than you can eat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's much more than we can eat and it's a fantastic playground and you don't get stressed with hectares and hectares of land and your responsibility. We still can have some chicken here if we want, if we want some eggs, and so it is a good space and it is a lot of fun. And, yeah, it's a lot of diversity. We have here like 30 plus species, considering all the aromatics bushes, and many of them are edible during all the aromatics bushes and many of them are eatable. And I mean now we are here standing in front of the lines that we did during a workshop in September, following the same design.
Speaker 2:We'll still add the straw here. We are concluding the vegetable, the winter vegetable harvest, and they're just like at the end of their cycle. But here we can already see the logics of it. For example, we harvested, or are still finishing to harvest, this cavolo nero, this kind of Brassica, but we have I mean here we can't see because it's a deciduous tree, but I mean we have a leguminous tree here that will take over the space and here is another, here is a Melias d'Araque that will also take this place.
Speaker 1:At the moment it's just a stick. Yeah, the moment is just a stick, Just to be a bit blunt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we have this that we are trying. This is an Australian, it's called, I mean, they call it a flame tree. I'm planting it for the first time to see how it behaves. You always like to try different trees.
Speaker 1:Because you never know.
Speaker 2:And so we have this. I mean a collection of perennial and annual plants, like the vegetables that we harvested. I mean because now these aromatics, they will explode, they will grow a lot and we have the option to prune them and have another cycle of vegetables, like the summer, spring vegetables. We can add our tomatoes, our melanzania, I mean our.
Speaker 1:When you want it. So basically, just to give a bit of context, they will cover most of this nest. When you want to plant, you basically cut them back, prune them, leave all of it there, obviously, and plant in a tiny bit of uncovered yes, uncovered place you plant a tomato, etc. Instead of a perfectly quote unquote, I'm doing air quotes again and just to conclude and people say, oh, but it's a lot of work.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just, instead of bringing your yes, your cultivator or your tractor to plow in the field and to dig a hole to break compaction and adding your fertilizer and adding everything else, we prune. We don't kill any plant, we just prune them.
Speaker 1:And you plant your fertilizer, and you plant your anti-compaction and you plant, which is a lot of work in the beginning, but then it's maintenance cutting, reducing a bit and planting in a bed that is already ready for a tomato or an eggplant. Or, if you don't want, you skip a year, perfectly fine, the aromatics will love it. You still have to prune them because they will love the extra pulse, but it doesn't change.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we have the pleasure of seeing a place that is improving year after year.
Speaker 1:That's not to be underestimated. I mean the town is called Depressa not for that reason, but it's, let's say, as many agricultural regions.
Speaker 1:This is, from an agriculture perspective, a struggling place. The olives are dying, the employment in agriculture, unless it's super intensive, is just very, very difficult. And to see a place that actually improves without adding a whole lot I mean adding time and labor and sweat, but without adding whatever chemical fertilizer, npks, et cetera, et cetera, and seeing it increase and improve every year is not to be. That must do something to your mood.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it is a because it is a long term investment and some people they don't want to see.
Speaker 1:It's not so long, I agree.
Speaker 2:I agree, but people sometimes they. When we compare to conventional agriculture, sometimes, like the spreadsheet and the business plan, it goes to five years. It goes to, of course, I mean like a short term or even like a two-year thing. We tend to think it's too much. But you know, we say that most of the work we do in the first year will never do again. It is one time like one time.
Speaker 1:It's the the and and if you can do five times the biomass and I've heard you share stories as well on timber and in like shaving of years of timber trees to be ready. I mean that's just our lack of understanding and putting it properly in a spreadsheet. That's not because the numbers are not there, it's like really because if you do timberland investment, if you do timberland, it's 30 plus years, like we're.
Speaker 1:It's like there is a group of people that is used to those long terms. They're just not used to this yet. But and also vegetables, if you're doing, if you're planning to do that, at least five to ten years, you put a lot of effort in, like industrial scale extractive vegetable production. There's a lot of preparation, a lot of money that actually goes in. The issue is it's put in in a way where the asset doesn't improve but actually just degrades, which means every year you have to do something more.
Speaker 1:This is the fascinating piece. Like that, I think most number minded people, or economically minded or financial minded let's say minded people still have to wrap their head around that agriculture could be an asset or a place that improves because of management, not like it's not a building that you have to maintain. This is you maintain, but it gets better over time and we have completely been unable to capture that in in numbers and we see some very smart people trying to do that and capitalizing on that and saying, look, I see this is you can harvest while improving a field like what is and and maybe we don't have the, the language yet or we don't know how to value land that has been improved, or we don't know, et cetera, et cetera. But the gap is there. Because of management, you can improve your field and your asset. You don't have to be an Excel genius to figure out that that makes sense. But yeah, we just have to catch up to that. I think it's the of course if you make a two-year plan, but most things don't make sense.
Speaker 2:Solar panels don't make sense in two years, like there are many things that this, like this sorry, no, no, it's not really I, I, I totally, of course, I, I agree and we feel it, but it has to fit in a spreadsheet if you want to raise subtle like, uh, like pleasures as well to see we are designed to enjoy, like when we see a place that is improving.
Speaker 2:We have this biophilia, which is, I guess, is more complex than the concept of biophilia, but we we really feel a pleasure when we start working with a, with complexity of life and life forms, and we see year after year, like the place prosper.
Speaker 1:Could it be one of the reasons because most people are not in those circumstances of so much depression, like we see a lot of things going backwards even though a lot of things are improving. Many other things are not, but I don't think many people have the pleasure of seeing a natural system getting better.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not an expert, I mean I'm not a professional in that, but I can only speak for myself and my perception is in regular, like in conventional agriculture, each year, like after the harvest, the place gets a little bit worse than it was before. And in the first year you added I don't know one ton of some inputs, and the next year you have to add a 1.2, and then next year. So it's this coming back, this always taking a step back to move forward. It's I don't know how to put it, but it kills the spirit of a farmer because we don't see it moving ahead, whereas, for example, here I mean you remember, I mean mean we were just seeing some oak trees that we planted, together with poplar, here we can see how it gets after almost three years. So from, I mean from seed, I mean we have a poplar now that is is, yeah, 70, 80 centimeters, uh, tall it's, I mean, and yeah, shouldn't grow this fast.
Speaker 2:In the afternoon I was here and I mean just seeing that and and everything is waking up, starting to wake up now because the spring in the horizon, so it really brings another layer of enchantment with nature, with its capacity, and not only because it's beautiful, because it's fantastic, because it's the most astonishing technology we can possibly see, but also we see the potential that all this can be. Before we started here, we did soil analysis and I would just quote the organic matter in the soil here. Overall we had between 0.3 and 0.1. I mean, it's really almost nothing. This place, this giardino here, is now 1.9. And we don't add fertilizer, we add a little bit of simple soil at the beginning, but really a dust compared to conventional recommendation.
Speaker 2:It's really that concept of a push to the plants. For example, now we see the only old trees that there were in this place. There were six citrus trees that were suffering here when we arrived and I am following their development with a lot of curiosity because I mean how will they react without fertilizers, without any external input? And year after year they are improving. I mean this year, for example, I mean the first year, we just have one tangerine that produced not very good, and this year we had three citrus that started producing and they are old trees.
Speaker 2:They were just not producing and so I give jumps of happiness. It's really nice to see that.
Speaker 1:And then let's walk to your new playground.
Speaker 2:You want to go to the fruttetto or the new olive?
Speaker 1:tree. No, I would say I would go to the new olive tree. What do you prefer actually?
Speaker 2:But have you been there in the fruttetto?
Speaker 1:I mean that's a the one. Yeah, I mean we can pass by.
Speaker 2:Let's do both if you feel like it if you feel like it, because these are, I think, these next two areas that we'll see. They belong to a different objective because they are more like bigger scale designs the two that we spent, I don't know, almost an hour talking about they are. We were into human scale, small scale designs and now we are heading to a one hectare plot.
Speaker 1:We're crossing a field where there are a few olive trees, still like a few lines of olive trees, a bit to our right, to our left. There's nothing except one tree, Very poor soils. I mean. Stuff is growing, but yeah, but you see, just a small herd.
Speaker 2:I mean, if we were to rely on this biomass production to start a new system after a rainy season or during a rainy season, we see that the place just doesn't produce enough. Yes, it's basically the calendula that grows up to 20 centimeters starts flowering. I love calendula, I love the smell and I have nothing against the calendula, but it's not enough to set up a system to host plants that will feed us or to feed large animals.
Speaker 1:It would take too long. Yes, so what are we looking at here? A lot of lines, a lot of straw and in between space, which is interesting, a lot of trees planted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, here we had, like a traditional olive grove, that olives 10 by 10 planted, all which means like 100 trees per hectare.
Speaker 2:And we decided to I mean to do lines, three lines between these olives, and we did it. We connect these olives diagonally. It's going to be hard to explain this, but I mean I invite you to watch on our instagram and because we did that to make the lines, to orient the lines north, south, so we have an even distribution of light both sides and by doing this we have one line with the olives every almost 13 meters and between these olives that now they are also roughly 13 meters apart, we added three fruit trees, one emergent and other two that are lower layers. And since here is a bigger, bigger area, we organized a little bit more to facilitate harvest, so we have groups of trees of the same fruit trees in the line. So if we come with a vehicle and there is space here to come with a vehicle, light vehicle of course to help with the harvest and even to help with the pruning, and so we have three fruit lines between the olives and of course I mean we have all the layers underneath. I mean the same scheme.
Speaker 1:Sage is present.
Speaker 2:Sage, rosemary and poplar, and also the novelty that we brought, because 13 meters would be too far apart to have this olive line. And then we decided, sorry, why is that? Because then we have a huge strip with nothing, because we can't have here, it's very hard to find. I mean we can't have cover crops here. I mean we can, but just for winter. I mean we can't have perennial cover crops, as we do in Brazil, for example, that we can have grasses and everything, but it's still 30 meters, because it would die in the summer basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, here it just dries in the summer, but also it's a big area without trees, without stratification. So we decided to add another line in the middle that we are calling the evergreen line. We favored evergreen plants in the middle to fill a series of purposes. I mean one is the biomass production. We want more biomass being produced in this area. The other one is to make a perennial green wall to protect, to slow down wind.
Speaker 2:When we have this climate change, there is a lot of energy in the atmosphere, so the winds here are very strong and sometimes the olives being the only productive and evergreen tree, it takes all the heat alone when there is no other. I mean here we have this luxury of having this bosquito, I mean. I mean this small pineous plantation in the back, but normally all the areas here are very exposed so the wind is very strong and very fast. So we are doing this to have like windbreaks. Every 13 meters we have a windbreak that will protect the, the production trees, I mean the, the olives, during the winter and will produce a lot of biomass for us, and we have also we plant a lot of artichokes and I mean, of course, to make it why not?
Speaker 1:and that's, I think, another one of. I mean, we keep repeating those concepts of competition, like many people would see here. Like you know, wouldn't it compete? And we we covered it in length in, uh, in the first conversation. We we recorded and I think we even titled the the podcast. When, in doubt, plant more trees or plant more in general, because you can plant water, um, if they are fine, if they are not stressed, etc. Like there's that whole idea of there's a finite amount of of space, there's a finite amount of water and nutrients, so we need to reduce, because we only want the olive to grow or we only want the artichoke, etc. Etc. And here you're. Just, we need biomass, we need life, we need root exudates, we need way more. So we plant, we over plant to all systems, like in all models.
Speaker 2:This is over planting, but it works really really well yeah, because it is, uh, and that's one, one very nice thing that, uh, ernest's interpretation brought, because we can survive and we can live really well in our agricultural life without really using concepts of competition, because it's actually not, it is. What we avoid is the overposition of plants, overposition of functions, which means we don't plant like two species that belong to the same strata and to the same successional step, next to each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because then they will say, okay, it's either you or me. I mean, it's okay, it's not OK, it's a competition, they're fighting. No, it's just an overposition of function, as it says. And so what we try? That's why it requires knowledge and experience, because we have to organize our designs in a way that it won't happen. So it's really like a 4D puzzle. So we try to make the consortia of stratified multilayer plants to succeed one another really quickly, complementing each other, not one tied and taking the space of another, but quite the opposite, one helping and fitting together in the space and in time with each other. And so when we do that sorry, when we do that that's how the system works and that's how, as Ernest says, water is planted and that's how we have the maximization of photosynthesis and everything that results from that, which is the biomass reduction, the more roots exudates and more soil protection, because we have more biomass and we have more things to prune and recover the soil. And by having all that we have the formation of soil aggregates.
Speaker 1:And by having the formation of soil aggregates we can retain more water, we can host more soil organisms that stay here during the whole year, not only in the during the rainy season, so it's a and but that level of knowledge and understanding really the function of plants at this moment and in time going forward, like when you see people coming here like how long does it take to for for this specific context? Because you have to every time have to rediscover that basically wherever you go and of course, with all the knowledge you have from before, so it goes much faster. But this is that to have the level of knowledge to be able to design and then maintain and prune and actually not maintain, like actually to to excel the evolution of a system. Does it take years, decades?
Speaker 1:What do you see? I mean, of course it depends on people. What do you see? Because it sounds. For somebody who was born next to the zoo in the Netherlands, in the city center, it sounds. You have to know what you're doing because otherwise you prune wrong or you plant wrong. How complex is it to wrap your head around? You see, have you noticed or seen?
Speaker 2:yeah, as you said, depends on people, on their background and, believe it or not, sometimes when people come from a conventional agriculture background, because we have to undo some of the paradigms to start thinking a different way. But nonetheless, we can't escape practice and and I say we never stop learning, because it is a long-term system and we are always learning some, something new. But what I think it shouldn't be neglected is this the principles of it. So we see a lot people I don't know people attend the workshop. They see how things are organized and they try to copy and paste. You know that system and and then after two, three years, they enter in crisis because they don't know how to to manage or they don't know how to correct in case there is a mistake and they're always mistakes and and so it becomes trickier for the decision making.
Speaker 2:And that's why we I mean studying is. Studying is, of course, it is fundamental, and now there is more with YouTube, with a lot of other very skilled and knowledgeable farmers sharing knowledge, and we have Diana making our propaganda here. We did, we wrote a book about this. I mean really focused on the principles on this. I wouldn't say only the philosophy, but also, as we say the toolbox on how to think about these systems, and another friend, like fernando in brazil, also wrote a very nice book, more technical, and so yeah, I mean the information is out there and also people need to practice, because one thing that we keep saying, we learn with the tip of our fingers, so we need to do it. We need to do it. It's not something that we'll learn at university and only watching YouTube videos. We have to have our aha moments by doing in a couple of years, let's say in a place.
Speaker 1:If you are observing well enough, you should be able to grasp most of it, we always it's not decades of work it always improves.
Speaker 2:Let's see here, this is the first I was curious to see. Two years, decades, it's not decades of work. Yeah, no, it always improves. Oh, let's see here. This is the first.
Speaker 1:I was curious to see. Yeah, I mean two years, like the citrus. Two years, first fruit after two years. And I'm standing next to an eucalyptus that just went three, four meters and has part of a tree that's bigger than my hand, and this is planted when.
Speaker 2:This was after the giardino, it was in so less than two years two years. Yes, precisely two years. I mean a little bit less than two years actually, because it was in actually, in March, may it has been proved no not yet just here but this year, I mean very soon, we'll start to top it.
Speaker 2:So May, no, march, april, no, not yet just here, but this year, I mean very soon, we'll start to top it. So we'll raise the skirt, I mean we'll cut the side branches and we'll let it really open the crown up there, and so the chileajo I mean here the cherry tree will also let it open the crown a little bit under the eucalypt crown, the cherry is already a meter taller than you.
Speaker 2:Yes, and we want the cherry, for example, to respect its layer because it likes to be in the hide, not one of the unfortunate things here in the Mediterranean?
Speaker 2:I mean not here, only in the Mediterranean, but all those trees treat them as uh bushes as bushes and some trees, they want to go to the, to the canopy layer, and some want to go to the emergent layer, but we don't allow them and here, and that's why it's difficult to see a stratified, a layered system, because we want all the plants to be within the reach of our hand. And that is another technological, uh like a challenge as well, because I understand. I mean, it's much easier to to pick a fruit when you just walk in and it's, it's in at your range but I mean, we can't have both.
Speaker 2:We can't have, like you know, like a soil improvement and a multi-layer design if we want all the trees to belong to the same layer and cooling and all the atmospheric yeah benefits of of the layer, the stratification.
Speaker 1:So we need either, like a flying uh see a beautiful bird of prey, by the way, on one of the olive trees Either a drone where we sit on and then we fly through the tree lanes, or automatic picking. I know you talked about platforms like light platforms that just move up and down where you're picking. I mean, this is all definitely solvable, like we've done we drove a car on the moon, yes, but yeah, the demand or the questions we've asked to the machine building industry, or the machine building industry hasn't paid enough attention yet to the fundamental questions here.
Speaker 2:But when that happens, you will see a lot of wacky designs, but maybe very useful ones, I hope the moment is now, because all this technology is really coming and they're amazing and they can really do a very useful service. So let's hope.
Speaker 1:And do you see, before we get to the last piece of this walk, I called it your playground. But do you see a role also in the planning for technology, for AI to either make it simpler for people to understand or even do combinations and things that even you and Ernest et cetera couldn't have come up with, because it's dealing with so much data and potential? Like, actually, what if you do the design like this and what if you use this consortium in that way? Or what like? Do you see a role for software there? I mean, we talked a lot about hardware hardware but the software side of things.
Speaker 2:I, I do see it.
Speaker 2:I do see if, uh, because it is amazing how it processes information.
Speaker 2:I don't know how, but I think like a trained ai, a trained software, trained app that can process this amount of information that we give input, for example, of all the strata, the climate models yes, input everything and to work with this.
Speaker 2:As Antonio Nobre I mean the Brazilian scientist who we work with and we admire a lot, he says that it's not about AI. It looks like a fungi that is kind of digesting all the information that is just sitting on the internet that we cannot process because it's just too much. It's been piling up for decades now and we can't process all that information. And maybe, like the AI, will be analogous of a fungal community that can just digest all that information and make it more available to us in a comprehensive and coherent way. So, yes, I think I don't know still how I mean, of course, I'm very suspicious still and I try to be optimistic that all the tools can be positive if we, if we have the good intention of making it like a positive. Yeah, here we are in the oliveto. Here's the area where we see like old olive trees roughly 30 to 50 year old olive trees which is not old for olives.
Speaker 1:But yeah, they look like they're suffering.
Speaker 2:Let's say that's, that's for sure yeah, they were attacked by the disease and so they are kind of, they're still alive but not as productive as, I mean, everybody wanted. But we are like making an effort to keep them alive and we are bringing like a new design to compose this. I mean, we don't want to take them down, but we want to include them in new systems and this area, which is in total, is 3.6 hectares and we are starting now to do one hectare that we'll do this season and uh, and we did. I mean here we have like two designs. We did the first one a very late, almost I mean touching summer, because I wanted to start here. We added more olives in the olive lines and in the middle, middle, we added two lines with acero campestre I don't know how to say in English and wild almonds, that we're trying some experiments with grapes growing on trees, just for really experiment, I mean just for fun, for research. But the bigger design was actually I thank ernest a lot for that because he pushed you yes, yes.
Speaker 2:He was saying to me like uh, felipe, courage, do this way it will work, because what were you planning to do here?
Speaker 1:let's, let's take it from the, the less courageous actually planning something else.
Speaker 2:I mean, I liked my the other design as well, but it would be more dense with other two lines here and I would do like the olives in uh, I would say in Kinkunzio. It's one here, another here, so they would complement it, they would almost touch each other and it would be it would look like more forest and also with the fruit trees, with the picanat in the middle. But I must admit that when we think about more disruptive possibilities and what ernest discussed with me and what he proposed, it makes more sense because this working it will be a bigger transformation. So what we have here, which might sound very, very bold for most of people, that we are planting every almost 70 centimeters Actually here we put 75, so we can fit like between the olives. We can fit 16 new olives between, like the Speaking of dense.
Speaker 2:Existent olives, so we have really a hedgerow of olives, I mean, but it is not the same as the intensive or super intensive I can. I can hear people in listening.
Speaker 1:Me too, me too. This is not super.
Speaker 1:It is super intensive, but not the super intense if you see in spain and and unfortunately starting to pop up in other places, um hedgerows where big machinery, heavy machinery, travels over. If you want to just google super intensive olive groves and you'll find um some examples. You see big machinery, a lot of chemical inputs, desert underneath. Basically, and and one of the reasons I mean we're recording this beginning of of 2024, why, while olive oil prices have never been higher, I think, or at least one of the highest moments ever, is because the sp, the Spanish region of Andalusia, collapsed, I think two years in a row. The super high, intensive didn't produce, or produced a lot less because of a huge mix of reasons, but mostly a very intensive, fragile system that was hit by a late frost or a drought, heated at the wrong moment and send prices through the roof. So this is intensive, but without all the machinery, without all the input, without all the negative externality and a very different, absolutely different logics, and I will explain.
Speaker 1:But it's a lot of trees in the line.
Speaker 2:It is a lot of trees but they will behave in a very different way because the olives we have, the variety is the Celina di Nardò, which is more of a tall variety, and we want to keep using this variety because the oil is absolutely amazing and actually we planted here wild olives by seed. I mean they were planted by seed and we'll graft them here with the Celina. But the thing is first, first off, this intensive and super intensive models. They use very specific varieties and they keep them low so the machines can come almost over it like a coffee harvest and just sweep it and do the harvest, and here we won't do this. I mean here, first off, the idea is to make it to its layer, which is a canopy layer, so we let them go up and it will do like a, like a bifurcation, as a y.
Speaker 1:It will open up two layers, two sides, to the left and the right.
Speaker 2:Yes, and they and so that's they will cover this canopy layer, and underneath we still have other plants, I mean between them, because we have 70 centimeters. So we'll have rosemary and we are having. We'll plant at the beginning also some alfalfa to cover the soil and we might even add other. We can add some vegetables and stuff at the beginning. The idea is that we'll really cover the soil.
Speaker 1:But no other trees.
Speaker 2:No other trees, because I mean pretty soon, we just can't have it Because it will be really dense. But then we have okay, stick with me, because then we have another olive line 12 meters apart, and then we'll add another line in the middle, so six meters. We'll have another line, so this line, we'll add the other layers. So, whereas the olive line will have the line, so this line will add the other layers. So, whereas the olive line will have the canopy layer and we'll try to push it to 50 percent of the taking the plot as a whole, they will respond to 50 percent of the coverage, will push to 50 percent, because normally they are 40 percent, but we'll push it to 50%.
Speaker 1:Meaning closing 50% of the service, above, of course, because we're talking high.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're talking about almost like a horizontal section. It will respond to 50% of the photosynthesis you say we will push it.
Speaker 2:That's going to be pruning management to push it beyond what you normally would do with an olive, which is 40 percent, and here in the middle we'll have, we'll add, for example, a consortia with with figs, with limes, lemons, and we can add some mulberries, and we have some emergent trees as well.
Speaker 2:So the other layers will be here and in the interlines. We'll keep working on the interlines in order to establish a good system and good perennial plants. I mean including all the perennial bushes that can grow and stand the summer here in the Mediterranean, and we'll try to do it in a way that we can I wouldn't say rotate, but we can cut and mulch and they regrow without, of course, having to plow it every year. So the idea here is going to be a stratified system. I mean, what we see from above is really a hedgerow, but together with a lot of strata and diversity of plants. So it's not a monoculture and it's not a monolayer of plants. So I'm very excited about this and hoping it will bring new ways of seeing an olive grove and the form of an olive tree.
Speaker 1:What made you get convinced by Ernest to go for?
Speaker 2:it. It's going to be easier to implement, it's going to be less work and, I might say, even less complex to establish. It makes a lot of sense, and so the design that I was doing it wouldn't give an easy answer to, for example, neighbors and people that come here. I mean, I'm sure it would be very nice and hopefully very productive as well, but it would still look more, more complex. So this is, I think, more comprehensive. This is easy to understand. If people would be here, they would see that it's not something you know that we need to explain a lot.
Speaker 1:It is kind of uh it would be easy, easier for people to grasp and then maybe implement on their fields and and because there is a huge hunger here or need for new olive systems it is easily.
Speaker 2:It's easier to mechanize as well. I mean here, I mean we couldn't, because we are, we are keeping the old olive, so we cannot just come with a tractor and make our, our beds I mean our first lines with a tractor, because we just can't. But if we are starting from scratch it would be much easier to do it, because you just do and plant like one after another, and in the middle we add your two, three plant consortia. So it is easier, it is more comprehensive.
Speaker 1:And thus potentially more disruptive, because it might be implemented on way more hectares if this takes off. And harvesting, because one of the reasons the ultra or super intensive, etc. Took off was because of harvesting, because of quote unquote easiness, traveling over Mechanization of that because of the traditional ways of harvesting take a lot of hands and and there's a lot of slave labor involved in that as well. So there are a lot of issues with harvesting in general and mechanization took one direction and and might have another direction here. What do you envision? Because you have six meters, so you have space. You have a layer you told already like it's going to be perennial, but it's going to be perennial, but it's going to be cut, mulched, it's not going to be in the way of nets, potentially. What do you see as harvesting options?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, at the beginning we have to do with nets. We have no other option. I mean doing as people do here with the stall varieties. We don't have any other disruptive technology to do that and definitely we don't want the super intensive way of doing it. So this is we'll do like that. I mean, we are a 3.6 hectare, we will manage to do it in this way. But of course it would be nice in the future if technology looked at it to find more disruptive ways of harvesting, and I'm sure it will come. It will come. I I can really see like a small automated vehicles just doing the harvest and but of course this is I don't want future, future yeah be like a sci-fi.
Speaker 1:I've seen the first for sure. I talked about it somewhere in an episode the first drone in an apple orchard not actually I mean a vehicle that drives by itself with two drones attached to it and then going up identifying the apple with a little sucking mechanism, taking it like the ones that are ripe because in apple orchards apparently 10-15% stays on the tree when it's the right season to harvest because of lack of hands to do it and then so it sucked the ripe ones and dropped it, then already sorted into the device.
Speaker 2:So if we can do that I'm not saying we're going to suck one olive at a time because it sounds, but there will be smart people figuring this out and one thing that is important to note is also, we are because we want to use these local varieties, because they are juice of what has been created here in the Salento. So I mean, here we have very special oils and of course it's not the same as the Superintensive. We have the Leccino, we have the Favolosa, so we have those varieties that were bred to attend this demand of the super intensive, but here the type and the quality of oil that we are targeting is completely different. I mean, it's a completely different story. So that's why also, we, even if we want it, so we couldn't use these machines that exist, because the trees, they behave in a different way, which means we have to adapt the machines yeah, come up with machinery that can adapt.
Speaker 1:I think we made full, we have made a full circle and are back at the entry road. I want to thank you so much for sharing yet again and, for me, absolutely fascinating, I hope for whoever listens as well. We link a lot of things below in the show notes or in the description, and I would urge you to follow this farm on on Instagram and all the other social channels to to see visually the the development as well, and I took you away from an afternoon or a few hours of pruning and so I'm sorry for that but you will you will get back to that.
Speaker 1:I want to thank you so much for for the walk and talk.
Speaker 2:I thank you and it's as usual. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and, yeah, it's a. It's wonderful anytime. I I hope you come more and more and not only you, the family and to see how this place grows. The same way, we're watching, we are following your beautiful girls growing.
Speaker 1:They definitely enjoy being here. Yeah, that's uh, and the flavors and the taste, and eating directly of the land helps as well.
Speaker 2:So that's well, so that's a thank you for the invitation. Thank you you.
