Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic, left Greece a decade ago, spent years working across European farming systems, and eventually landed in Portugal to run what has become one of the most rigorously monitored regenerative trials in Mediterranean intensive tree crop agriculture. He is the lead on the field research side of the Arbo-Innova project, a multi-farm, multi-consortium research platform focused specifically on the question of whether regenerative practices can be meaningfully integrated into the intensive orchard systems that now cover hundreds of thousands of hectares across the Iberian Peninsula.

A five-hectare plot of intensive almonds at Monta Silveira Farm, in Portugal, fenced against deer, planted at the same density as the conventional neighbours surrounding it on all sides, and now in its third growing season: that is where this conversation takes place. The trees are about two metres tall. The interlines are green with different cover crop mixes. One area is under plastic mulch; another has clovers growing in the tree lines themselves. The data is beginning to come in, and what it is showing — on nitrogen levels inside the tree, on herbicide use, on fungal disease pressure, on water infiltration — is quietly shifting the conversations Dimitri is having with an industry that, until recently, was mostly watching from a distance.

In this walk-and-talk episode, recorded at 8am on a May morning in Portugal, birds audible throughout, with the 8,000 hectares of conventional intensive almonds next door visible at every turn, we get into why cover cropping can fail spectacularly at 70 euros a hectare and why that matters enormously for adoption, what clovers on the tree berm are doing to nitrogen inside the almond tree (and what they’re competing for in return), why the most intellectually honest conventional growers are the ones leaning in first, how the J-curve of regenerative transition can be quantified and eventually financed, and why the real metric of progress might be the moment a farmer asks you to slow down.

WHY RESEARCH IS SO IMPORTANT IN THIS SPECIFIC CONTEXT

Intensive almond and olive orchards are commodity businesses, often owned by financial investors and operated by hired agronomists, running on tight input budgets where a single failed experiment — a cover crop seeded at the wrong depth, a mix that doesn’t establish, 70,000 euros gone in an afternoon — is likely to be the last experiment that operator runs for several years. The bar for evidence is financial. Nobody in this industry moves without being shown that something works, at real scale, in their specific climate, soil type, and pest pressure context. That is the design principle behind the Arbo-Innovafive-hectare plot: not a university trial with isolated variables, but a real commercial block with stacked practices, on a real farm, surrounded by the industry it is trying to influence.

“We need data for people to make confident decisions. There’s already a lot of data on cover cropping, on soil health, on compost effects. Individual practices have been studied a lot, and we should rely on this to start moving forward. But what’s unique here is that we’re stacking all of these practices and trying to understand the real potential of stacked regenerative practices on tree performance.” — Dimitri Tsitos

INTENSIVE TREE CROPS: SUPER DESTRUCTIVE, SPREADING FAST, AND FULL OF OPPORTUNITY

Almonds and super-intensive olives are among the fastest-expanding agricultural systems in the Mediterranean. The economics are compelling: high yields, established commodity markets, mechanisable harvest, reliable demand. The environmental picture is the inverse: heavy reliance on synthetic inputs, 15 to 20 tractor passes per year in the interlines, serious erosion on sloped land, significant fungicide pressure, and soils that struggle to absorb the irrigation water being applied to them. Hundreds of thousands of hectares now run on this model across the Iberian Peninsula alone. The scale of the problem is also, Dimitri argues, the scale of the opportunity: unlike niche or low-volume systems, if you can shift the economics here even marginally, the impact is enormous and the industry itself will carry the change because it is commercially driven.

“We’re looking at the intensification of tree crops, which is increasing a lot in the Mediterranean with every time more super intensive olives, intensive almonds. There’s a huge opportunity to bring in alternative regenerative practices — these systems are very productive and economically viable, but they’re also highly dependent on inputs and cause serious soil issues.” — Dimitri Tsitos

THE MASSIVE OPPORTUNITY: REGENERATIVE PRACTICES IN INTENSIVE ORCHARDS

Three years in, the question Dimitri was asked when he started — can you really do regenerative in super-intensive olives? — no longer feels open. The data coming back from the Arbo-Innova plots is showing meaningful movement on input use, soil biology, nitrogen availability, and fungal disease pressure. The organic test plot, treated three times with a bacterial-based fungicide instead of the neighbours’ ten synthetic spray rounds, is not showing the fungal disease pressure it should. Herbicide applications have been halved in a single season on the conventional plots. Nitrogen levels inside the trees on the clover-berm plots are higher than in conventionally managed neighbours. The industry’s most forward-thinking operators, the ones who have pushed conventional fungal management to its limits and found it reaching its ceiling, are now asking what comes next.

“If you were to ask me three years ago ‘can you really do regenerative in super intensive systems?’ I was thinking, I believe we can, but it wasn’t based on data or five years of experience. Now I don’t question it anymore. We’re starting to get the results coming in, we’ve had our three years’ experience working in this system, and I’m telling you it’s possible to really progress with regenerative practices in these systems.” — Dimitri Tsitos

DATA, DATA, DATA

The resistance Dimitri encounters most often is a request for local, specific, operational data: not what cover cropping does on a research station in California, but what this mix does in this soil in this climate in year two of an intensive almond orchard, and what it costs to manage, and what the tree response looks like at leaf-level nitrogen analysis in September. That precision is what the Arbo-Innova project is designed to produce. In comparison the retrofit of a commercial building for energy efficiency is routinely financed by banks because the numbers are known. The same logic should apply to intensive orchards, but the numbers don’t yet exist in sufficient granularity to structure a financing product around. Producing those numbers — the J-curve quantified, the cost of transition per hectare, the likely timeline to input reduction — is the project’s central economic ambition.

“What’s important to know is that there’s already a lot of data on individual practices. Individual practices have been studied a lot, and we should rely on this data to already start moving forward. What we’re doing here is stacking practises, pretty much from the start, and trying to see what is the potential, how far can we go. That’s the difference.” — Dimitri Tsitos

LIVING MULCH: THE PROMISE, THE TRADE-OFF, AND THE DANCE

The clovers are growing in the tree lines, not in the interlines, where cover crops are a relatively low-risk, well-documented tool, but directly on the berm, right at the base of the trees. The nitrogen results are striking: leaf analysis shows significantly higher nitrogen inside trees with clover berms than in conventionally managed plots, and the clovers are fixing that nitrogen biologically rather than through synthetic inputs. The complication is water. The clovers compete with the young trees for moisture, and in a climate where water availability and water use efficiency are already the industry’s primary concern. The plot is now testing a staged approach: establish the tree with plastic mulch in year one and two, then remove alternate lines of plastic and introduce clovers in year three, to see whether the tree is by then established enough to tolerate the competition and whether the nitrogen benefit outweighs the water cost.

“When we have the clovers on the berm, we have much higher nitrogen levels inside the tree, and the clovers are furnishing a significant amount of nitrogen — that’s really interesting in terms of nutrition. But we are observing, across different farms, an indication of competition happening, especially around the water.” — Dimitri Tsitos

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED

Koen and Dimitri also talked about:

• Farmer psychology. The most encouraging sign is not data but behaviour: when a farmer who started sceptical begins asking what else they can try, and you have to tell them to slow down, you know the cultural shift has happened;
• Economics and the J-curve. The transition costs money upfront (cover crop mixes, organic amendments, additional passes, soil mapping), yields a return only after two to four years, and the shape of that curve needs to be quantified before banks or institutional investors can finance it;
• Stacking regenerative practices. Unlike university trials that isolate variables, the Arbo-Innova approach stacks everything simultaneously to understand the combined effect; this requires adjusting other management decisions in response (pruning canopy height to let light into the interline so the cover crop can produce biomass; timing mowing to maximise nitrogen mineralisation before the tree’s peak demand period);
• Water and disease management. The two issues the conventional almond industry cares most about right now; regenerative soil health practices are beginning to show a connection to both (better water infiltration and retention from improved soil biology; reduced fungal disease pressure potentially linked to more active microbiology), but the science is not yet fully validated and Dimitri is careful to present it as a promising hypothesis rather than a solved problem.

LINKS:

• Agrosystemic
• Arbo-Innova

RELATED INTERVIEWS:

• Raiza Rezende – Soil health and human health: why the science is still years behind the hype
• Dimitri Tsitos – Making regenerative intensive tree crops profitable
• Diogo Pinho – Europe’s biggest silvopasture system is dying and grazing can fix it
• Simon Kraemer – The €120k study showing regenerative agriculture can feed the world
• Douglas Sheil – Why fixing water fixes carbon

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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.