Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

369 Ichsani Wheeler - We need more large animals in our landscapes

• Koen van Seijen • Episode 369

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Ichsani Wheeler, co-founder of OpenGeoHub and Envirometrix,  challenges dominant assumptions in land use and agricultural design, making the case for more large animals in our landscapes—not fewer. She explains why understanding the maximum ecological carrying capacity of agro-ecological systems is essential for restoring function, productivity, and resilience in both natural and farmed environments. Wheeler advocates for granular, place-based research to better inform ecological planning, arguing that broad generalizations fall short when it comes to the complex realities of nutrient cycling and biomass distribution. Megafauna plays a critical role in ecosystems as mobile nutrient cyclers, creating disturbances that stimulate plant growth and biodiversity. Without these interactions, ecosystems become shadows of what they could be – efficient, resilient, and abundantly productive as animals' absence leads often to stagnation and imbalance.

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/ichsani-wheeler.

This episode is part of the Role of Animals in food and agriculture systems of the future series, supported and co-produced by the Datamars Sustainability Foundation.

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Speaker 1:

It's not magic, it's physics. The energy comes from the sun shining, so you must have the plants capturing that energy. You need to have the animals eating it, turning it over, reusing that nutrient again and again, More, more, more, More nutrient in the functional ecosystem, not in the bottom of the ocean. I think the biggest issue that I see for large-scale integration of animals into ecosystems at landscape level, the way we talk about it, is that our form of land ownership. In Western modernity. We don't price land based on what it can produce. We put fences around it. We use it to park large amounts of money. Quite large indigenous populations. We're fences around it. We use it to park large amounts of money. Quite large indigenous populations were managing their food supplies in ways that Europeans came along and went wow, look at this you know this natural abundance.

Speaker 1:

Oh, and these savages over there. I mean it says much more about the European philosophy and point of view than it does about the people they were encountering.

Speaker 2:

This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. This podcast series explores the key role of animals in the food and agriculture system of the future. This series is co-produced and supported by the DataMars Sustainability Foundation. Find out more on DataMars Foundation or in the link below.

Speaker 1:

All right, we're going to go for a walk through the forest.

Speaker 2:

So welcome in a very special episode. It's the beginning of a new series on the role of animals in the future of food and agriculture, and I'm here with Ishani, who we've had on the podcast before, together with Tom, your partner, together with what's the research called Lenka Lenka, which was really, really cool. I remember.

Speaker 1:

Doing well on her PhD.

Speaker 2:

So unfortunately not with open job at the moment no, we'll get it back, sort of the last piece she did with you was the podcast, so we'll link all of those below. We'll link a lot of things below as well. We're going to mention different papers. We're going to probably get some numbers wrong here and there, so don't shoot us for that please no but all the links.

Speaker 2:

We'll put all the links in the show notes so you can go and find them. We're in a forest, it's public holidays and there might be some bikes, some mountain bikes and things passing by. You still hear the very loud jungle fowl that wants to be eaten apparently Make a lot of noise. And, yeah, we're in a forest. You're going to hear some birds. You're going gonna hear some birds. You're gonna hear some other animals, but of course, not big ones, which we're going to be discussing today and maybe start with the concept of empty forest. It's not a syndrome, right? It's more a concept. You you shared it like in preparation for this yeah, I read this.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, he's on empty forest and it was very applicable to walk in a forest not completely empty.

Speaker 1:

But definitely not completely empty, thank goodness. But you know there's been a significant downsizing of animals, and I mean larger animals, let's say above you know dog size, let's say In the wild, since 1970, I think there's about half left as to what was around.

Speaker 2:

And is that the total number or the total weight, or both? I think it's yeah, relatively both.

Speaker 1:

I think these are population counts, but you know it's a precipitous decline in natural wild populations of animals and you know this is very close to being in our lifetimes. Okay, I was born in 1970, but not that long after.

Speaker 2:

Our parents were. Yeah, they were there, they were around.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And.

Speaker 1:

So empty forest, as in, there would have been a lot of deer here. There would have been pigs there's still probably some pigs around, actually We'll probably see some of the signs of them but just more animals. A forest of this size and of this kind of productivity. You know where are the animals? There's some birds.

Speaker 2:

It's very nice you're saying large animals, larger than a dog, larger, some mega fauna which are? Yeah, hundreds of kilos, or at least a good 100,.

Speaker 1:

let's say yeah so deformation of the ecosystem usually looks at the last 50 years or so and you know these are very worrying declines. But if you go back to well, what was here 100,000 years ago, if you go back to basically before humans impacted most things? There was a lot more, according to some studies, and this is one of the topics that we're looking at and researching. So we read a lot on it and we actually find quite some conflicting stories about megafauna. So like a megafauna is above 50 kilos or 40, 50 kilos an animal, so we're a megafauna. So like a megafauna is above 50 kilos or 40-50 kilos an animal, so we're a megafauna. Humans are megafauna.

Speaker 2:

So you could say we actually increased quite a bit with our 8 billion.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we did well.

Speaker 2:

On the planet. I think we've done all right. We eliminated most of the other megafauna, except for, of course, a lot of livestock which we'll be talking soon about as well, and I realize we didn't really do an introduction but you say we in terms of research? Just briefly for the people that didn't listen to you, the other podcast, which I will link below what brings you here. Why are you interested in megafauna, empty forest and the research side of things?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I'm a research coordinator of Open Geohub Foundation. We are in the Netherlands, right next to this beautiful big forest. We're very lucky and, yeah, we focus on making very large global and continental data sets about the environment, compiling them together, making them easily accessible in public domain, open source, etc. Open access and software using that information and data. So most of our funding is Horizon, europe, european research funds. So you know, we're scientists and we compete for research funding and, yeah, and then also some international funders as well, and our topics are like open earth monitors we're bringing together the open source community to build more software to monitor the environment. And then also like we're a big part of AI for Soil Health another Horizon project.

Speaker 1:

Together with us yeah, yes, together with you guys. Thank you for amplifying the message. I don't want to say scientists are rubbish communicators, but yeah, you just did, but yeah. Yeah Well there is.

Speaker 2:

It's an echo chamber like many others, or a bubble like many others, and I think what's happening, what you're touching upon, is so vital that it's a shame to keep it within the, let's say, scientific community only, like there's we were just discussing. We'll get to that as well. Like past, your management observing, like we're talking, satellite remote sensing observing, which is an absolutely exploding field in terms of the amount of data, the precision that's getting better every other day. Certainly, models are getting way better every other day. It looks very different now than it did five years ago and it will look very different in five years, but you're getting to a point now you can start actually giving data to farmers on almost day-to-day or week-to-week decisions on pasture management, for instance.

Speaker 2:

And grazing and you're getting to a point where it's not great for five to ten year policy decisions, but also for livestock managers, land stewards.

Speaker 1:

Wow, there is a large airplane coming over, there is definitely a flyover. Well, maybe we'll wait for that.

Speaker 2:

yeah it's like how do we use the eyes in the sky, let's say, in terms of management, and make changes and understand what is possible and what was here a long time ago? Like there are so many, so much application there that it's yeah, it's a shame and it's always an honor for us to put a spotlight on that and a slightly bigger audience so, yeah, like a lot of our work in the last five, six years has been on taking past data and reconstructing essentially the last 22, 23 years of information.

Speaker 1:

So we're talking about, you know, tree species distribution. We're talking about soil, carbon layers, the whole soil suite. We're talking about also pasture, so where the grasslands are, where they're planted, where they're semi-natural, and livestock density mapping. So we have a large research project with global pasture watch, where we're, yeah, essentially mapping the grasslands where they are, where they're not, because it turned out there really wasn't much information. Well, there was a lot of information, but it was disjointed.

Speaker 2:

It was difficult to get an actual number where, with grass walls, which is interesting if you would consider, like, how much claims we put on in terms of lives, of number, in terms of land use, etc. A lot of that you would imagine is pretty accurate and you're saying no, it's not well, look, they're the best numbers we have, but in terms of nothing yeah, it's than nothing yeah, it's certainly better than nothing, but there's certainly a lot of improvement that could occur.

Speaker 1:

Let's say and yeah, part of that is just, you know also, technology has moved really fast. We have now enough remote sensing record, we have enough computational capacity, we can really start making these layers of information and making claims. Well, we try not to make claims 's the info for others to make yes, we kind of like focus on just going. Okay, we just want to like we don't write the books, we just try and make the printing press, something like that. Right, I don't.

Speaker 2:

I don't want to tell people what to say, and maybe design the letters so people can come up with the stories in the books themselves.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we do. And the last, especially this last year, we really have seen that even though we, you know we're at petabytes of data, we're having trouble finding places to put this information because we're exceeding the capacity of the public repositories. It's that, even though we put it out, there's still quite a gap to everyday usage of the public repositories.

Speaker 2:

is that, even though we put it out, there's still the there's still a quite a gap to everyday usage and there's some interesting developments in like this chat to geo and so this like ai interfacing with geographic information, that yeah, it's what tom, your partner in crime and in life, discussed on the last podcast, like yeah, he wasn't too impressed with ai, but making maps and like very easily summarizing or making things visual, yes, he could see already a huge as a communication, because it would take yeah, him or somebody, I don't, I don't remember like a day, and now it would be a few prompts and like look back 10 years on this, make a map that matches xyz and go yeah, it really, at least for us.

Speaker 1:

I mean, we've been using machine learning since, yeah, since it came out basically since the dawn of time. I mean to the point where postdocs call it like grandpa ai, so AI. But it's not magic.

Speaker 1:

A model needs training, data and if it's shitty data, it's gonna be If it's shitty data, it's shitty models, and usually we spend a lot of time on trying to neaten up the information, make our processing chains transparent and make uncertainty estimations so that people can get a sense of the quality of the information and, you know, make decisions on it. But that's a scientific question often, and we find that the actual public desire or appetite for uncertainty is not as great as we thought it was.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so they just they just want to know, like a good enough chance, what was it? Okay, that's, that's fine, but yeah. So we've been focusing on building this, this kind of backward facing catalog, and now we're starting to move into the forward facing information, into the kind of the more dynamic mapping. So that's where we get to biomass and near real-time biomass for specifically for grazing which is fundamental, because that's what you need to plan your next moves.

Speaker 2:

Of course we're talking here animals outside, not inside, on pasture, turning biomass into something more useful or differently useful, and past year management or biomass growth is absolutely fundamental and most of it now is done on intuition without the help of technology, maybe something online or something on a computer or it's just paper, like I'm planning. My next Grazier moves. What can technology do there? What do you see?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a double-edged sword. I mean I don't want to pretend that technology can suddenly enlighten everyone. I think there is a lot of very good knowledge when it comes to rangelands, grasslands, like traditional pastoralist communities. They hold in their minds and in their culture really strong information about their environment. So one thing that I look at is like okay, how can we, if we could get the technology to a point where people that still rely on rangelands for their, for their livelihoods which is a lot, by the way, it's like a billion people or something. So I don't expect to reach a billion people, but, you know, to someone who really knows what they're looking at, if they can see their own understanding in the data that we show particularly, the longer term.

Speaker 1:

See their own understanding yeah, if they can read it, yeah, then I think we're on to something and then I would feel a bit more confident to you know.

Speaker 2:

Essentially, share it wider to those who maybe have less praxis or place-based knowledge, so that they could start to build their information, their understanding which is what is what is disappearing as well, like we have people that have been on the land for generations and build on, but we also have a lot of new entry.

Speaker 1:

Or we have people that no longer want to graze, or or, as like there's, there's a an older generation of of people that hold that place where there's knowledge that is starting to die out, or yeah transition to another, another universe, and then like, unless we train the next group or somehow, yeah, we need to find a way to transfer knowledge, to create new knowledge, at a faster rate, you know us changing climate plus like well yeah, that's the, the elephant in the room for a lot of this that the, the patterns that we're knowing are shifting.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I see it as a as a gardener I'm a chronic gardener, my whole life is that. You know, I think it was around. I was in australia around 2010, 2009, 2010. The gardening community really noticed that the, the flowering shifted earlier. Right, we see it and we still see it now. You know, I've been in the netherlands a bit more than 10 years and I've been gardening the whole time here and I really see more uncertainty.

Speaker 2:

Like the year has flipped.

Speaker 1:

Last year was a horrible slug year.

Speaker 2:

Really wet just horrible. This year. Andres, yeah, shows a few tricks on the podcast, but it was. I think his carrots got eaten three times or something.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it was and then he stopped.

Speaker 2:

He was like I'm not planting them again just doesn't make sense yeah, it was.

Speaker 1:

It was a really it was a really shocking year. And then this year now it's really dry and warm, so it's this kind of even in the last year. It's like fluctuating year to year, flipping from one extreme to another, and I mean, that's that's. People think climate change is just like this. You know it's, oh, it's a few degrees extra. It's just going to be a little bit of an increase in the average. You're not even going to notice.

Speaker 2:

I'm like, yeah, that that an average hides all the variation and it's probably an interesting argument for like silvopast, like partly perennial and partly animal systems, because they are flexible they're more resilient more resilient, they can move. Yes, as in migrate to a certain extent. We're a long way from that.

Speaker 1:

I think so maybe the rewilding camp up north, like the northern parts of europe?

Speaker 1:

yeah, I mean that's one of the. You know we're in the netherlands. There is some issues with the amount of animals here and how they're kept and the consequences of that. But you know most of northern and also, I think, big parts of eastern europe. When I look at the, the maps on deformation, there's just there's no animals left, they're no longer in their environment and from a nutrient cycling. So a fertility perspective, from an ecological functioning perspective, that is a real issue.

Speaker 2:

From a functional ecosystem perspective. I mean, apart from the fact that we put all the animals, or most of them, inside, why does an ecosystem need animals, especially larger ones? As we started this, conversation.

Speaker 1:

Why is an?

Speaker 2:

empty forest, not just fine with a lot of birds.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean the role of animals in an ecosystem is generally they are the cyclers of nutrition, like nutrients, so they will eat in places that are of a higher concentration of nutrients. So anywhere you go, like Netherlands is like a wetlandland, it's a delta, so you have a lot of nutrients that come and congregate in deltas, in lowlands, in these kind of these lower sections, and so there's a lot of biomass and if there isn't a mechanism for that animals, for that biomass and nutrient it hold to be moved, well then you end up with an over accumulation of nutrients in one place and a depletion in another.

Speaker 2:

Upstream.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, upstream, the same thing holds land to oceans, right? All the massive fish schools, the big bird migrations, even like whales, and the larger animals. Depletion of these decreases the rate at which nutrients come back from the ocean. So in a long timeframe yeah, it's not a good thing, right? A solid ecosystem, or solidly functioning ecosystem, will actually increase itself. It will aggregate more nutrients. It will aggregate more organic matter, more biodiversity, more trees, like it makes more makes more of itself meaning, the pie is not fixed no, the pie is not fixed.

Speaker 1:

The size of the pie is in relation to, essentially, the nutrient cycling capacity of the place, and I mean you would see it from taking a degraded piece of land that's lost all of its ground cover, it's lost its structural, it's like it's eroding, the water is running off, it's taking the soil and if you put yourself there and do work on it, you can turn it around. You can turn it back into an aggrading ecosystem, something that is gathering energy, structure, order, nutrients, and switch it from being a degrading ecosystem and this is a philosophical but also very fundamental piece.

Speaker 2:

I think that we in western modernity, we find it very difficult to a philosophical but also very fundamental piece. I think that we in western modernity, or whatever it's called like, we find it very difficult to imagine like the moving baseline syndrome we we're very used to degraded landscapes and the great views of land and sort of find it struggle to see that it could be more, more life, more animals, more biomass, more larger trees that are definitely part of the the kingdom obviously. More fungi, more, more, more instead of yes more slightly less or less bad, etc.

Speaker 2:

I find it such a difficult one to land with people and and potentially more animals, like how this is a series or the role of animals in the food system and agriculture system of the future. I'm imagining we're going to get pushback and we're gonna we're gonna unpack some of the pieces. This is also definitely a shout out for more support, like it's very underfunded research in the space, like what is the, for example, to use a nice term, maximum carrying capacity yeah why is it so difficult to say in a context, in a landscape, this is the amount of life that this could support?

Speaker 2:

you would imagine we, we figure that out and we're like now we're an overshoot or an undershoot, or at least we have an idea of what to shoot for yeah, we look, we're definitely in a degrading situation, right, but it's, it's the cycles of degradation.

Speaker 1:

I mean, we've got degradation that goes over many different time frames and the current reductions of animals are, yeah, lots of habitat fragmentation, a drastic rise in the number of, essentially, poisons we use in agriculture and they're essentially they're fragrant flagrant use. It's destabilizing food chains, right, so it's it's killing off the food of other creatures, and that's the thing about, let's say, a maximum ecosystem state is that everything is being eaten by something else and it's connected right by that interchange, by that eating and being eaten, you know, living and dying. Let's say Essentially, yeah, things have been broken apart and it's becoming more and more fragmented, more and more reduced, essentially, so what would be needed to even imagine?

Speaker 2:

of course, we can look back by whatever amount of years we can look back by whatever amount of years we can but in a changing and shifting climates and shifting climate, weirding to even say, okay, actually in five or ten years this could be in this place yeah, I think there's, there's this.

Speaker 1:

There's this line I always take when I'm teaching with students. Is that a place, kind of it, wants to be something right, it wants to be a forest, or it wants to be a wetland, or it wants it like there is a state.

Speaker 1:

Listen to nature, that the place is moving towards, and you know working with that state is going to be easier you're not fighting the wind, right. So I think that's the one part of it is to understand what could this place be essentially? What does it want to be if we weren't interfering with it? What, what would, what would it tend towards?

Speaker 2:

all right, so I think at least that's my interpretation of working with nature- but interfering is an interesting point there, as we interference like what is a natural interference, without megafauna, like what were. How do we square that?

Speaker 1:

Well, I think maybe you know, the more let's put it this way the more megafauna, the more large-bodied animals that you have, the more interference that's probably not the right word the more interactions that you have the bigger the disturbance, the relationships between things and ecosystems do well on particular types of disturbance, right, and that's kind of a difficult point to get across, because you know I've heard people who are in my gardening group and they're like, yeah, the more I learn about soil health, the more I don't want to dig and I'm like, well, you know soil, know, so gets dug a lot. I mean, you just look around places where there's still moles, it gets turned over a fair amount. So it's not really any one practice, it's not really any one way of doing things it's not the plow, it's the how are you saying?

Speaker 1:

I don't want to say it's not the plow, it it's the how. But yeah, let's say I'm.

Speaker 2:

I've heard stories of farmers that, like minimum tillage sometimes actually was very beneficial in a certain I mean.

Speaker 1:

I'm from Australia. Right, we have very old, very fragile soils and, yeah, minimum tillage is a thing, because if you weren't doing it, you wouldn't be growing anymore in a dry land area, whereas when I first came to Europe I couldn't believe it. I'm staring at the window. I'm like, wow, I've never seen actually full moldboard plowing across the field, like I think I'd seen like a couple of instances, but it was just, and I really it took me a while to understand.

Speaker 2:

We could still get away with that here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, the soils here are much younger. You know it was glaciated 10,000 years ago. They're young soil. Australia has soils and drylands, so Southern Europe soils that are hundreds of thousands of years old. So that that has a there's a differences that come across. I'm probably going to bore everyone to tears if I go into detail.

Speaker 2:

I think it's the. The disturbance has a place, but really, of course, well managed, depending on the context of what a place can be, wants, wants to be, should be. Well what it's tending towards, and many or most functional ecosystems have large animals as part of that and that disturbance.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I mean, in Europe you would have had these very large. Well, obviously there is these mammoth-y creatures now up north and then there was also aurochs and big bears and you know all these larger creatures and you know they some of the papers say they were knocking down smaller trees, creating clearings, so creating this kind of like patchworked forest sort of ecosystem, and you, you know, every time something is knocked down it becomes food for something else. Right, and maybe that's more the point. It's not really the disturbance, it's like does this source of nutrition have a place to go?

Speaker 2:

Does it unlock that and does it get eaten then?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Is it going into somewhere? That's a desirable state, or are we going? We've just done a big loop, or are we going into, you know, essentially a state that we don't want, a degrading state? Is the nutrient going somewhere else? Is it washing away in the water? Is the soil washing away? Is the number of species, the biodiversity of a place decreasing? And I mean not so much from the point of view of is it decreasing in terms of? Oh, you know, you had 20 varieties of birds and now you have 18. No, I'm talking about do you have birds in each functional niche? Do you have the ones that eat insects? Do you have the ones that eat fruit? Do you have the ones that you know are scratching around on the ground, the poultry? Yeah, yeah, you know I'm a functionalist. I like biodiversity. It's great but I don't spend a great deal of time looking at individual species. I much more follow, essentially, the function of those species in large graze.

Speaker 2:

I mean, of course we don't have the aurochs anymore and these large, large animals, let's say in the European landscape, yeah, and a lot of regionalistic grazes, et cetera. I would then argue then we do it with cows. Sure, is that fair in a like or is it like? No, actually the woolly mammoths would have grazed very differently. Can we replace things, or do we need to clone them back, let's say, to a certain extent?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Look, I think that functions are. Usually there are much less functions in an ecosystem than there are species that do that function in an intact ecosystem. So if we focus on the function that that group of species is performing and we find something to fill it, then I would do it if it were up to me it's good enough yeah.

Speaker 2:

It's as good as it gets at the moment, it's better than nothing. But it's way worse to not have the function. Specialist Kind of Then. Yeah, yeah. Which is what a lot of the region let's call them gurus, the Joel Salatin, the Richard Perkins like stacking different animals.

Speaker 1:

Yes, they stack animals. They're stacking functions, yeah. Absolutely On top of land.

Speaker 2:

And they get some pushback, of course, left and right. How come no, from the, let's say, the more militant non-animal crew?

Speaker 1:

Oh, okay.

Speaker 2:

What do you say today? Like we're exploring this what's the role of animals in the future of food, the system? What's the role of animals in in the future of food, the system? What's you're saying? There's often a pushback or there's often a notion of we need less, we need them outside, like there's no discussion. I don't think we have any. Any. We need to do any k for everything we discuss until now nutrient cycling, etc. Is not happening there or is happening in a wrong or suboptimal way.

Speaker 1:

So animals should be outside. The nutrients are being wasted. So if the nutrients Pollution is everywhere. Pollution is everywhere. Pollution is caused. You see it on these trees actually something in the wrong place, in a place that doesn't belong Right, and you know it's a delicate line, because you know I have chickens in our big vegetable garden and they chickens in our in our big vegetable garden and they are in essentially a fort knox of chicken because everything likes to eat chicken so you know, when you care for animals, you do need to care for their welfare and it's easier on their inside.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, in the fort knox, literally in the fort chicken. Yeah, definitely, fort knox chicken. So I don't want to. You know I don't want to. You know I don't want to say no, don't put your animals in a shed Like it's. It's very. But maybe, maybe if we could move away from putting all the manure in water, maybe move it back to putting the manure in a solid state mixed with high carbon substrates, anything. I mean, this is a wetland that produces a lot of carbon. I used to tease my students that with the amount of nitrogen in the Netherlands, you could compost your way out of sea level rise. And it's funny, some of them get it. Others are like what are you talking about? This weird witchy woman telling us to compost out of sea level rise?

Speaker 2:

But it's, it's, it was always this you can make a lot of land.

Speaker 1:

We used to make a lot of land. Yeah, you made land again. So it's there's no silver bullets. And you know I get nervous when people say, oh, if we just did this one thing, everything would be great.

Speaker 2:

That's always and that's. I think I have that a bit with, especially the militant non-animal side, like we just all eat plants and then it would be fine. I think that's fading away a bit that notion, because it seems a bit fertility. Well, plants are good right, plants are absolutely good, but what's the role of animals? Is there a role of animals?

Speaker 1:

I think we established that and then yes, of course animals are the cyclers of nutrients. Okay, they are. They are a fundamental integral part of an ecosystem. If you remove animals from an ecosystem, it becomes less. And what state are you aiming for with the ecosystem? Well, that's going to be up to the person who's in charge of that ecosystem. Basically, it's not realistic that you could put aurochs in the forest here. It's not going to happen, right. But is it realistic that you know larger animals or other types of animals could spend more time outside, that their manure could be going to better use? Certainly?

Speaker 2:

We safely establish that animals let's not really be religious about it but should be outside most of the time integrated in their ecosystem. Joelle Salatin likes to say engaged in the ecosystem and as we are, engaged in our airplane system celebration of liberation, and then what about the numbers? The numbers of Ooh? What?

Speaker 1:

I just said I didn't want to quote.

Speaker 2:

No, not the quote, but like when people say yes, but we have so many animals currently livestock animals inside there's no space for them outside or they're way more than we could or should have. Like that's a tendency. And again, not quoting numbers, yeah, but just to as a narrative it's very strong. Yes, all nice and funny, region grazing and holistic and adaptive multi-paddock. You could never support the same numbers as we currently are feeding in a confined situation with feed, which I think there's some. I think Alan Williams did an interesting calculation somewhere on what is possible just in pasture in the us. But the narrative is very strong, like we have too many animals.

Speaker 1:

they're inside but there are too many it's a simple story and yeah, probably if they are confined and the food and the manure are completely disjointed from the wider ecosystem, and yeah, look it's, it's, it's essentially the system makes large losses, right, huge losses of nitrogen, huge losses of fertility as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if you do a proper calculation, I mean, a lot of people are making money, but if you do a proper one, if you count all the costs, there isn't money right and it's.

Speaker 1:

It's in the negative. And I want to be careful here because you know these kind of systems. They were designed for a very clear purpose Feeding people as much protein as possible.

Speaker 2:

Yes, for the lowest possible price.

Speaker 1:

And the concerns were not essentially wider ecosystem impact. It was how do we survive, how do we keep our children alive, how do we take care of each other? So, and you know, many of these systems were designed by people like me. They were designed by scientists, by people who taught me and the people who taught them.

Speaker 2:

Because an entrepreneur asks the question of a farmer. How do I do this more?

Speaker 1:

efficiently? No, usually, or is there?

Speaker 2:

another way around.

Speaker 1:

Usually I mean, look, it will vary greatly depending on the country, but if you look at the kind of the history or the view of agriculture, at least in Europe, it was that people needed to be freed from the subservience to agriculture to pursue higher goals. To move to the city, yeah, let's just say fill the factories, maybe.

Speaker 2:

I was using a marketing term. Pursue your dreams in the city, in a factory yes yeah, look it's, it's.

Speaker 1:

Whenever you take an action, there's always consequence. There's the desired state that you want and there's consequence things, often things that you don't intend or maybe you didn't look for.

Speaker 1:

You know and yeah yeah, I, you know I put the responsibility of that one on the the feet of reductionism, to be honest. So I've never met a farmer that would willingly knowingly mistreat their animals or mistreat their environment, right, and so I'm not a supporter of the vilification at all. But there are consequences to actions and, to be honest, the environmental degradation is a better class of problem than the widespread starvation that was faced by past generations, starvation that was fast faced by past generations. So, even though it's it's terrible and if you focus on it too much, it poses real and significant risk to us, it's a better class of problem what does it mean?

Speaker 2:

a better class of problem?

Speaker 1:

well, it's more important.

Speaker 2:

It's higher in the hierarchy. It's not like what? What do you mean by better class? I can fill it in, but I don't know it's.

Speaker 1:

It's it's something I say to myself to try and keep myself sane. Is that any type of system or structure that that we research and that we work on? I tell myself that the best I can do is to give a better class a problem to my children and the next generations, because silver bullets are a fantasy.

Speaker 2:

Okay, I get it. We fix the starvation piece to a certain extent, I mean still starve for nutrients, and we have health issues but at least a big chunk of the hunger is…. There's plenty of calories. There's plenty of calories in most places, there's plenty of calories. There's plenty of calories, plenty of calories, yeah well as a total.

Speaker 1:

There's more than enough calories, there's a distribution issue, but that's a social, that's a social challenge, social economic challenge, and so now we can focus part of our attention to the next best. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so a better class of problem is pollution.

Speaker 2:

let's say is pollution a better class of problem? Is Pollution? Is pollution a better?

Speaker 1:

class of problem? Yeah, when compared to starvation, certainly. And yeah, you know we're always going to face problems as society, as a species.

Speaker 2:

Let's get back to the question of more. Like the narrative of some, actually the world will be better without cows.

Speaker 1:

It's too simple, it's very myopic and we need less animals.

Speaker 2:

Can we support more animals? Can we support the same amount of animals that we currently have inside? If we would magically I think somebody said it on the podcast, I remember whom a long time ago like with the magic wand question, I would move in all the animals outside. It would just this. I mean, of course, transition, blah, blah, blah, but that would reconnect so much in our food system. Yeah, okay, is there even a way of scientifically saying wow, beautiful view.

Speaker 1:

By the way, of saying that it's possible or not.

Speaker 2:

Or do we need research? Do we need, like, what's the answer? Even Because that kind of questions are going to come up in the future of livestock If we keep eating them, which most likely is going to happen, which we will, which we will, and and then the nutrient or the pollution side of things keeps getting worse, which will at some point, we're going to say, okay, what are we going to do?

Speaker 2:

yeah. So we're going to knock on your door and saying okay, what you're as the scientist? Where do we put the animals? Where do we put them and how?

Speaker 1:

and which ones, where and how?

Speaker 2:

yeah, those are very practical and very relevant questions that we're starting to ask in this series.

Speaker 1:

I mean, the first thing I would start with is what is the natural habitat of this animal? If I look at the Netherlands, where we're standing now, we're about to get to a glorious view in a moment. A glorious view in a moment. You know, there would have been some larger natural herbivores here, but there would have also been a lot more geese and fish and wetland animals, you know, migratory birds, eels. These are the kind of animals that used to live here a lot more.

Speaker 1:

Could you support all the cattle and pigs and chickens that are in the in the barns just here? No, obviously not isn't that specifically?

Speaker 1:

well, it is rich system yeah yeah, also belgium and germany and many other places around here, but it doesn't mean, if you take a bigger territory, that you couldn't, and that's probably one of the questions. Yeah, it's a question that we've been looking at and researching and considering for years now, actually, because we make maps of pasture. We've got a bunch of maps coming out on livestock density across the world Best as we can do. But yeah, how much could really exist?

Speaker 2:

In a certain area, in a certain area.

Speaker 1:

I mean, the average number across the world applies to everything and then applies to nothing, right? Because again it's like the. The temperature in relation to climate change. Oh, it's only a one degree or one and a half degree. It's not much, but within that number is a very huge, large variation in space and time. So I mean, from an agroecological point of view, if you, if you want to maximize your ecosystem function, you're maximizing the diversity of your plants in your production system. If you're just growing one thing, yeah, your land is not eating as much sunlight as it could and usually when we look at like a field of wheat or something, it eats in a year about half the light that the scrubby, useless bit of land next to it that people don't regard it eats about half the light that that does and that's the big one eating sunlight and transforming it yeah, so the sunlight is the obviously the source of the energy to turn all the cycles over.

Speaker 1:

And the animals are very good recyclers, very good movers. You know they shift. They shift huge amounts of nutrient in their bodies, in their manure, around, and and that's broken. And it's not broken everywhere, but no, we keep.

Speaker 2:

We harvest some of it, we bring it to the shed, we feed it in. I mean, that's a.

Speaker 1:

Certainly. I mean, there are very good examples of agricultural systems that do an excellent job of managing nutrients and fertility. You could be a farmer for however many centuries using these systems, but you've got to remember. It's a fair amount of knowledge. It's quite specific to a place and a combination of the climate, the soil types, the dietary preferences etc.

Speaker 1:

And it's quite a bit of labor and that that might be one of the ones that would be the the pinch in all this is that how could we follow more ecological or agroecological principles yet still use the wonderful benefits of technology, mechanization, industrialization? That to me, is like the juicy grail. One thing is planning, working out how much an area could have held 100,000 years ago, and some of the papers we've looked at and we found some models for it. It's a lot Like. It's so much that I'm uncomfortable talking about it too much because I I don't want to be.

Speaker 2:

You know, I don't want to be misquoted a crazy abundance, but there's story, I mean anecdotal stories, obviously written. Think, like I think there's something in dan barber's book, the third plate, on the amount of sardines, probably, or tuna in the mediterranean. Yeah, you could walk to the other, you could walk to morocco or walk to the other side, to spain, wherever you came from. The amount of whales migrating, the amount of birds, the amount of bison obviously is. Is the the prototype of this?

Speaker 2:

yeah these stories but the amount of life phenomenal we can't even begin to imagine, which is okay but sort of also holds us back. Because we look at the state, think, oh yeah, it is pretty alive, like what you're saying before. The birds in the first, that's nice, that's nice. Do you get to a jungle and you're like, okay, these are birds yeah, yeah, like for me, it's so nice to hear birds again.

Speaker 1:

I mean I grew up in a very remote part of australia and it's nice to to hear birds again. I mean I grew up in a very remote part of Australia and it's nice to just hear some birdsong. But my benchmark as a kid is that it was so noisy you couldn't hear each other talking. Dawn and dusk, you just can't hear anything. Right, it's that loud and so I mean I know it's a different ecosystem et cetera, but it's it's it's a shadow of what it could be.

Speaker 1:

Kind of yeah, I mean the best models we've found in so far on this, like the metabolic scaling models, and there, there there are. There are what appear to be quite clear relationships between the different trophic levels in an ecosystem how much energy is in each one and can be partitioned to the next one and trophic levels for the non what size of?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So it's sort of you start from the very tiny little plants and animals and you work your way up, basically, so you know the basic principles. I think for agroecological design, you would be number one. You're looking to increase efficiency, right, and we're not talking about efficiency as an economist looks at efficiency.

Speaker 2:

It's not a factory. Yeah, well, let's say it could be a factory.

Speaker 1:

It is a factory, but it's the most complicated factory you've ever encountered and you probably only understand a slight amount of it.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So when you say efficiency, what do you mean?

Speaker 1:

So I mean Economists pay attention. So you can certainly take a wetland, drain it, you know, remove the extra water, remove the geese, remove the fish, remove all the things that that place wants to be and push it towards something else. So you know we're sitting here, so I'm going to use this example for dairy cattle, for instance, this example for dairy cattle, for instance, and you know that was a priority and it was an important priority for very good reason. But there's always consequence for action. So, in terms of efficiency, I would say, well, it's like fighting against the wind. The place doesn't want to be this, and there's more consequences from the action. The further away you get from what a place wants to be right and the harder it is to maintain. So, efficiency in terms of what is your ROI, your return on investment for your effort into setting up the system that would and by system I mean it's not just money- no, no, it's an ecological system yeah, ecological system, and then you know it would be.

Speaker 1:

You know, I think the the general things we're taught in agricultural science. You put on nitrogen. Half of it is wasted, at least half.

Speaker 1:

And I mean, if you want to look at money, that that is a massive loss of money, right, and so that's an increase in efficiency would be hey, you know, learn more about nitrogen and how it works in your system and how you can add as least as possible for the best results. And of course, I know there's the tension that it's cheaper to over-apply, depending on the prices that year, that it's cheaper to over-apply than to risk the potential decrease in yield, and that's a very real concern on a business-to-business basis. So I mean, I find those things should be the realm of policy and public support to support businesses in these areas to do that minimization approach. So, yeah, and I think there's a number of efforts that have started in that regard. So, and then it'd be like substituting practices.

Speaker 1:

Why do you need to buy in so much nitrogen? You know, or say you're keeping animals and you have a big barn and you have a massive abundance of manure. What else could it be? Where could it go? How else could it be treated? Can you switch to a dry basic system, right, so you're not washing it away in water and putting it into a big ammonia pool? Yeah, a big vat, where you know? If anyone listening doesn't know, the only things that should be shitting in water is kind of fish and birds.

Speaker 2:

Mammals should not be doing their business in water?

Speaker 1:

Yes, and I know the Western sewer system was developed primarily also to limit disease, right, because the manure and the the feces got into the water and it spreads disease. So the advent of water-based sewer systems for humans like we are the first CAFOs. That is a system we do to ourselves and it's a difficult one. I struggle with it. Every time I flush the toilet it's like my bathroom thought Not that I really want to tell everyone my bathroom thought, but it is. I'm like, wow, that's such a waste. Every single time. But if you've got a million people living in a city you don't have the immediate land Right to do that. So that's about dislocation no longer in the ecosystem, no longer connected to the other parts of it, that your waste is glorious food for another.

Speaker 2:

But it's not because it's all separated.

Speaker 1:

Because it's separated, because it's treated in ways that are more efficient for cleaning the barn floor, but it's certainly not good for reuse. And you know, on one hand I'm worried about getting picketed by farmers or vegans, and now I might get picketed by other sciences.

Speaker 2:

Or by barn developers or barn developers, who knows?

Speaker 2:

They're all different groups, so we're exploring here and we're going to explore it way more in other episodes, like what are the questions to ask, what are the things to research as well? Because, interestingly enough, this maximum carrying capacity for agroecological focus is not super known or not super no, are we afraid to look into that? Like, what could this be? Are we? What is it with? It would be so nice to paint, like a, a proper picture of a landscape, and to to imagine like, wow, it could be 10x or whatever the number is. It could be in terms of life, in terms of, yeah, functions, in terms of, and then we have to figure out, of course, how it makes economic sense and how to harvest in a way, and but those are all like the more life you have, the easier that gets and the more yeah, more things you can actually harvest.

Speaker 2:

That's the irony like it's, and that's what we see with a lot of farmers, like once they hit a certain like region farmers and farmers on the region path, whatever you want to call it once they hit a certain threshold, it starts to go like the, the the cycles start to turn, the animals start to eat more. Like, of course, not easy at all. I'm not saying this is a, but more life helps.

Speaker 1:

It's more resilient.

Speaker 2:

More biomass, more things to like in many of the syntropic systems once they plant, after a couple of years, like. The problem is the amount of pruning you need to do, not any amount of fruits you have to harvest and the amount of like. The problem is the amount of pruning you need to do not, yeah, and the amount of fruits you have to harvest and the amount of like that the issue becomes management in an abundance.

Speaker 1:

It's a very good problem, a better class of problem then, oh my god, this tree doesn't grow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, let's throw something on it so I I mean I would say every time you see so much nutrient pollution or algae in the waterways, things like this. This is the natural system, so the ecosystem is well, it's taking that nutrient. Ecosystems don't like waste. You know the waterways should be very low in nutrient. In a natural system there's not that much nutrient in the water at all. It's in the bodies of the animals, it's in the biomass, it's in the water at all, it's in the bodies of the animals, it's in the biomass, it's in the soil, it's in, it's in the ecosystem the things that we call nature in life and that's how there's more so the flip side of the coin, we go hey, there's all this massive nutrient pollution.

Speaker 1:

Wow, it's just a gorgeous, abundant ecosystem waiting to happen.

Speaker 2:

You can just I don't know work out how to do that do you see this conversation or this, this kind of questions being asked in the scientific?

Speaker 1:

this is like this is um, yeah, like I was a bit puzzled with the, the initial question for the podcast. I'm like what do you mean that we have to talk about the importance of animals in agriculture? How is that not known? What do you mean? You'll be surprised.

Speaker 2:

yeah, how many would say the world would be better without cows? And of course, there's a statement in that in terms of CAFO and the current agriculture system yeah system, but in the science community, is this in the agroecology science part or in also the remote sensing, the technology side?

Speaker 1:

what could be. Yeah, most remote sensing people don't really know much about nature, ecosystems or agriculture. The majority and mostly not to speak ill of them, many of them are trench coat. They serve defense et Right. This is the biggest return on investment in remote sensing right. When you get down to the level of like, oh, I'm going to look at land cover, I'm going to look at something about the environment. Yeah, it's low money, low return investment, and probably all the startups who are doing, you know, amazing work in this space, trying to scale up some business, are going to not agree with me, but I've seen a lot of businesses come and go that do the kind of things that I would like to see done and they don't find a market for it. So I don't have an answer for that one.

Speaker 2:

But is it an interesting question from a scientific point of view?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that it's. As far as I'm aware, it's well known. There's plenty of literature about it. There's I mean this defaunation thing that we started the podcast with. That was a statement signed by 15,000 scientists. Try and get 15,000 scientists to agree on something.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I saw that it was a large number.

Speaker 1:

It's a very large number, but scientists do not agree. As a matter of professional, you know, training, we're like yes and or suboptimal, it depends.

Speaker 1:

You know, it depends because it always does so. In that regard, scientifically I'd say it's well-known. I don't think the discipline of redesigning landscapes exists scientifically. I think that it's very fractured, like maybe you get some in landscape architecture where they take this big view but then they're only thinking about you know more, like the buildings, maybe the drainage systems when the tree grows and the roads systems where the tree goes and where the tree grows and what size nutrient pill you need to give the tree and you know, then you get it's.

Speaker 1:

It's, I would say yes, but it's fractured across probably a hundred different disciplines, maybe more and do you see it in the funding side?

Speaker 2:

like you work a lot with the EU funding Verizon, a number of large foundations, do you see a start of a notion Like I see? On the investor side it's starting to shift, but for quite a while it was very like animals are very. It's a very touchy subject.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's very touchy, I mean it's also good, but it could be very relaxing. What is it? Cow hugging and things like that. But it was a very touchy like mentioning any animal in any system. You sort of has to excuse yourself. That seems to be shifting, but maybe just just my bubble is is livestock other animals are? Are they considered part of this, like in the in the funder side of things, because that at the end doesn't decide but of course decides part of where research goes?

Speaker 1:

yeah, I think I mean the one line like with this metabolic scaling and what, what is the like, the maximum ecological capacity? Like what was the planet a hundred thousand years ago before we as humans, you know, spread out and ate everything? Because of course there's this huge argument still in science was it climate?

Speaker 1:

or was it humans and I don't know? I've never been terribly convinced by the climate argument. I'm sorry, and I mean, if you're walking around and you go to a new environment and the animals don't recognize that, you're a predator, and a very effective predator.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, with spears and very specific.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, of course. I mean you have kids. You know how hungry they get and how feral they get when they're hungry, of course, right. So I'm very much, we eat everything, but that you know, to take down an animal, that is, you know, a cow is half a ton and cows kill a lot of people. Now Can you imagine going up against something that's like two tons, three tons in size? You are not doing that alone, you're doing that with your community, with planning, with, like you know, their strategy. That stuff is dangerous. So you know, I, yeah, but how much was there, right? That's the interesting part of it, because there is an argument saying, well, we only got to this number of people because we have nitrogen, like we, we have a haberdorff process, we can make nitrogen fertilizer right and we can break the dependence on natural nitrogen cycling x billion of people wouldn't have been alive this number of people wouldn't been alive.

Speaker 1:

But, yes, I could say, yeah, something, there's something to that argument. But equally, I'm like well, but there was clearly a lot like the models that go how much life would there have been in terms of biomass? They come up with some shockingly large numbers 100,000 years ago.

Speaker 2:

Without the Haber-Bosch process. Obviously Sorry, without that, without the Haber-Bosch.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you know Haber-Wosch process. Obviously Sorry, Without that, Without the Haber-Wosch yeah, you know, Haber-Wosch process is very inefficient.

Speaker 2:

So we were very efficient or we as a like, as nature in unlocking nutrients or storing them, reusing them constantly. Like, the harder the element is to get get, the more times it's reused in the natural system which is a very hopeful message in that sense yeah, I mean it's very energy intensive where most of agriculture depends on it, and a lot of it could be done with animals well, certainly, but you know it creates new problems and that's always the trade-off.

Speaker 1:

There's what they call trade-offs. I'm like, well, it's a journey right. If you take an action, there's going to be outcomes.

Speaker 2:

What are some of the trade-offs you're not worried about but looking at when thinking about integrating animals?

Speaker 1:

Not worried about but looking at when thinking about integrating animals. I think the biggest issue that I see for large-scale integration of animals into ecosystems at landscape level, the way we talk about it, is that our form of land ownership in Western modernity we don't price land based on what it can produce. We put fences around it, we use it to park large amounts of money like as real assets. I would tell, like some of the permaculture students I would teach you, know they go what? What could you grow in the netherlands to make money? And I'm like your only viable crops here are really people, so services to people, and then probably illicit things that you shouldn't be growing anyway, or at least I'm not going to tell you to grow.

Speaker 1:

So that that's that's in a nutshell that's a product of a completely different system that we're running, and so I would say land, land ownership, especially in areas with higher concentrations of people. Yeah, I don't think we're going to see aurochs in this forest and I don't know if I'd want to, because those are very large animals and if you've ever come close to even a fully domesticated cow, you need to respect that animal. You don't mistreat them. They're not stupid. They have feelings, they have instincts. You know, just because you've forgotten yours doesn't mean they've forgotten theirs. So I wouldn't expect it here where we're sitting. But there are large parts of Europe without that many people in them and large areas of land abandonment and large areas that you know used to be used for various crops are now, just, you know, in a form, rewilding, which I think is good, but without the large but without the larger animals which?

Speaker 2:

means it's an empty. It will become an empty forest it's already an empty forest it is yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Basically. But I mean, this is always like the discussion in Australia. Australia is enormous, Like it's a continent. You have no idea how big it's big until you fly across Australia. Right, it's enormous and we have a huge amount of animals, like huge amount of animals, and you know an environment like that. Yeah, the numbers of grazing animals are staggering and there are big areas that are degraded right, but there are many sources of degradation and it's not like it was some pristine environment that nobody had touched until the English came along. I mean, you had indigenous people for 60,000 years or more Managing, and they were managing it. It was not wandering around in the wild, it was essentially it's essentially agriculture. It doesn't look like the European sense of it, but it is, and it's the same in South America, same in North America. You know these large areas with quite large indigenous populations who are managing their food supplies in ways that Europeans came along and went wow, look at this you know this natural abundance.

Speaker 1:

Oh, and these savages over there. I mean it says much more about the European philosophy and point of view than it does about the people they were encountering, right, they just didn't even know what they were looking at right?

Speaker 2:

No, and also in many cases they didn't. They saw some people not, not the amount that was there because of the diseases that we brought in the first place.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, south america.

Speaker 2:

So you saw a huge amount of death, obviously, and that's sort of this completely exploded abundant system without many people. Because they were, they died of disease which seemed like this natural pristine, et cetera, but of course, it wasn't managed until very recently. Yeah, ecosystem, and the manager was killed.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, think about avocados, right, you've seen the size of an avocado seed. Think about the size of the animal that used to eat that. Yeah, so if you're going to be comfortable, eating that fruit, you're quite large.

Speaker 2:

And digesting that. And depositing it somewhere in a nice big pile.

Speaker 1:

So there's this great book I read that basically said avocados are still existing because humans have been using them and cultivating Because the megafauna that used to distribute these seeds is gone. And you know, that's also an interesting thing. We have kind of stranded species where the animals that were there for seed dispersal, for spreading those plants around, basically, are gone. So I mean, it's a bit like the climate change and the shifting biomes. It was a few years ago where we basically said, yeah, okay, if you care about it, you have to be ready to pick it up and move it somewhere else. Right, the, the, the climatic zones are shifting faster than seed dispersal rate and that's by like wind. Right, imagine animals. And imagine, yeah, now there's no animals dispersing stuff either. So, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1:

I think I used to discuss it with my students and I go okay, you know, it's really down to this how do you see the future of ourselves and our culture in the natural system? Like it's? Either like this june movie, it's this huge desert planet, it's hostile and you know, there's these indigenous wise people and but you're separate and you're just mining the value out of it, or is it, you know, something like Avatar, where there's these massive creatures that are all talking to each other, also trying to eat you. Okay, like that, that's the other thing.

Speaker 1:

Don't forget, we were not the top predator. We didn't evolve as the top predator. We were certainly eaten. You know, I tell my kids because they're terribly afraid of the dark, I say it's okay to be afraid of the dark, it's normal and natural.

Speaker 2:

It used to help us.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the ones who were not afraid got eaten.

Speaker 2:

I bring up a picture of all the megafauna that was around there were lions here not so long ago yeah not so long ago, like the romans, in the roman times, there were lions in the world, yeah, so that's 2 000 years, just for a record and only 2 000 I I saw there. There was a great presentation at. Anna valero. A friend of the show was there as well, like of the megafauna in the netherlands not so long ago, and they were saying let's, maybe, let's not get them back yet.

Speaker 2:

No, right, but there's what it was a fascinating poster of, of what was here, like when some of the tree no, not here, but like it's like some of the mega fauna is around now probably had a lion under them, interestingly enough, which is like whoa.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, that's. I mean, it's not a yeah, so we started with integration of animals.

Speaker 2:

But it's a much, obviously a much. It's a very technical, but also a much bigger conversation on this connection of natural environment Like how vibrant and abundant do you want it In a practical sense.

Speaker 1:

Please don't bring back saber-toothed tigers Yet.

Speaker 2:

Yes, Unless you have the predator species which might be us.

Speaker 1:

Unless you've got the space for it. Okay, please don't bring it back here. Probably it wasn't saber-toothed here. I think they were North American, but anyway, detail, detail, detail it doesn't matter, some very violent predators yeah there was this I think it was not melbourne zoo, a zoo down in south of australia where they had life-size replicas of megafauna, and there was this one that was like this giant lizard and this thing was like I'm very tall, I'm like 180 something centimeters, and this thing was like I'm very tall, I'm like 180 something centimeters, and this thing was like above my shoulder, it was huge, and it had this huge like alligator kind of crocodile head, massive teeth, and I'm looking at it.

Speaker 1:

I'm just like this thing only disappeared 40 000 years ago. That's at least a 20 25 000 year overlap with indigenous people, so that means someone someone of my ancestors somewhere looked at this thing in the eye. I mean that is terrifying. This thing is huge, would have eaten my. My kids were like climbing all over, it would have eaten them in one gulp, right. And that's the stuff where it's like, yeah, these things were here and we could use these principles to increase the ecological carrying capacity, but maybe let's not bring back the big things that ate us too much.

Speaker 2:

Which I think is a perfect way of wrapping up this conversation. I want to thank you for the walk, for the sit we had, now for the practical warnings on reintegrating animals, especially large lizards let's stay away from that no large lizards.

Speaker 2:

We'll put it on the non-funding list and for shining a light on a concept we don't. We sometimes talk about carrying capacity, but very, very even on farm level, like what could, what could, what? What does nature, what does this piece of land wants to be? I think is a which any region farm will tell you like it's way easier to go with nature. I had to find a hard way because I tried for 10 years to grow this and that it didn't work, etc. Etc. But also, what is the maximum carrying capacity? What is which should, from an economic perspective, also make sense, like, okay, what are we shooting for? What are we?

Speaker 2:

what is possible.

Speaker 1:

It's a relationship to the amount of energy coming in, right to the amount of sunlight. So this is yeah, this is a research direction we're looking at at the moment, because we we map how much sunlight is coming in, how much could potentially be taken by the plants versus how much actually is, which is a nice gap analysis yes, in many places there is a significant gap are there places where there isn't?

Speaker 1:

yeah. So things like the model sort of breaks down in like any way that's irrigated or like obviously along the nile, so if the water right, the model can only do so much it can do like general state, and then there is always exceptions and then, yeah, then we have this whole line of work on sulcarbons. There's a whole lot of sulcarbon maps that are coming out over time because we're trying to make this again, this dynamic mapping. I don't want static, I want dynamic mapping so it can be updated and we can get a better picture over decades. And then we have this yeah, we have a large carbon registry project that will be starting in a few months, building a carbon registry for europe, and I guess the main difference for it is that it's an intergenerational carbon registry, because I want to see the amount of carbon in the soil, the trees, by like everything, increase over the generations.

Speaker 1:

And that's the kind of timeframe that you need to look at these problems in. In ecosystems don't work in, you know, quarters or or three-year time horizons, right, many things run over many decades and we need to have monitoring systems that function for those periods of time. But then I'm left with the existential question of what are we filling that registry with right? So now we're going, okay. So we have a lot of anecdotal evidence from a lot of region people and some good scientific evidence here and there that you know, going with nature, as we'll call it, you get more soil carbon, you get more biomass, you get more. The ecosystem is an accumulation engine or transactions.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you get more flow of everything.

Speaker 1:

The more relationships you have, the more different functional groups use that nutrient before it's lost to the wider environment. The bigger the pie, the bigger the pie becomes, and I think probably, if there's anything that everyone that if there's anything I want people to take away, it's that there is a theoretical maximum.

Speaker 1:

I don't think we're close to it good, there is some good evidence that it was a lot more in the past and we are looking to work on mapping that so we can use like at a higher resolution, so that we can use that for sort of planning purposes, because what, what would work here in the Netherlands in a place that wants to be a wetland, is going to be very different what works over there or even just right here on the, on the dunes, on the sandhills, right the, the, even though we can average out between them that average doesn't mean anything in the place.

Speaker 1:

So we're trying to get the numbers to the point where it's like well, actually you know this field of wheat there. You're only eating half the light. So I'm not going to tell you what kind of plant you add, how you complexify your system, but I'm going to tell you what kind of plant you add, how you complexify your system, but I'm going to tell you you're only getting half of what you could. So then it's.

Speaker 2:

Do with it what you want.

Speaker 1:

Do with it what you want, but at least on our side we can provide. We're seeking to provide more basic information to move towards agro-ecosystem redesign.

Speaker 2:

And you could even tell the farmer of that piece of wheat at some point. Here's a plot of land. It's very similar to you but it's capturing 70 or 80 percent. Go and have a look. Go and have a look what they are doing differently. See what they're doing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that that's the exciting stuff about it.

Speaker 2:

That's that's often what landholders want.

Speaker 1:

When they see some of our our work about long-term trends, etc. They look at their neighbors yeah or somewhere else.

Speaker 2:

It could be that whatever piece of land in portugal is very similar to something in sacramento yes, certainly you can easily compare and say look, there are much more, much more efficient eating light what are they doing there?

Speaker 1:

how are their production systems?

Speaker 1:

and then also you can go okay, well, I expect climate change will be these, of course more difficult scenarios that we've been trying to avoid and so, therefore, this place will end up being more like that place in however many decades. Let me plant the forest for a hotter climate here now, so that whatever I'm planting in has a much better chance of survival and producing well, so that kind of long-term planting. But yeah, we would really like to answer better the question of peak theoretical capacity on a place-based basis. Yeah, it's just sort of to answer that theoretical maximum ecological capacity of plant biomass, animal biomass, on the place base, because the averages they do exist the Russian nice papers with averages on very large resolutions. But to do planning we need to be a lot more granular in that information and it's not really about you know going, this is what you should be doing and this is what you're doing. I don't want to point a finger, but I do want to say, hey, you know there's space, because I know there's this argument that you know there's too many, too many humans, too many cows, too many this, too many that. And I'm just like you know, I don't think that's the case.

Speaker 1:

I see a world that's emptying out and becoming less. I don't see a world that is over full. I see practices that we're doing now that cause big problems and they cause big wastage. But, as I said, I'm the sort that sees the Dutch nitrogen crisis as just the opportunity to grow yourself at a sea level rise, with enough composting. That's what I see, and I mean that was part of my training and how I was brought up. You know it's a problem, it's just an opportunity waiting to be found. So, yeah, we want to contribute to that. More life, more things, more positive, more aggregation of energy in the soil, in the biomass, because, you have to remember, it's not magic, it's physics. The energy comes from the sun shining, so you must have the plants capturing that energy. You need to have the animals eating it, turning it over, reusing that nutrient again and again, more, more, more, more nutrient in the functional ecosystem, not in the bottom of the ocean, right, it's no good to us there, it's good to us here and, yeah, I guess, bringing it closer to ourselves.

Speaker 2:

Keep it close to us as long as possible.

Speaker 1:

And I mean there was this terrifying paper that just recently out, saying quantifying how much water has been lost from the land in the last 20 years, how much fresh water.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for asking a lot of questions and attempting to answer some directions, some directions. Perfect way to kick off this series and to go deeper into the role of animals, the questions to ask, the practicalities, the non-practicalities, the opportunities, the challenges and all that comes with having a world more alive and definitely less inside, counting us as the first cave of the human. And thank you so much.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no worries, good luck with it. I hope you find some really good stories and more animals not less, but more with good relationships to their environment. If you break the relationships, you know the consequences get bigger and bigger. So more relationships, I would say.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend and get in touch with us on social media, our website or via the Spotify app, and tell us what you liked most and give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really really helps us. Thanks again, and see.

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Koen van Seijen

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