Abby Rose is an experienced agricultural storyteller, co-host of the award-winning podcast Farmerama Radio, and co-founder of the soil monitoring and data platform VidaCycle. With a background spanning technology and hands-on farming on her family’s farm in Chile, Abby has spent nearly a decade amplifying the voices of the regenerative farming movement and creating tools to help farmers build healthier soils.

This July, Abby is back on the podcast to share an update on her six-part podcast series Cereal, about the new grain movement, and Cereal Revisited, which returned to the series years later to ask what happened after people listened. What did those stories change? And what does that tell us about the power of storytelling to change the regenerative agriculture system?

When two podcasters walk into the ‘recording studio’ for a conversation, the central question is bigger than podcasting: is good storytelling one of the most neglected and underfunded pieces of the regenerative agriculture and food transition? If people are going to change careers, start farms, build food companies, become millers or join the agroecological movement, they first need to see and feel that another way of working is possible. Cereal offers a striking case study: farmers started operating their own mills, listeners went on pilgrimages to meet people featured in the series, and at least one listener moved from engineering into milling.

Koen van Seijen and Abby Rose — two regenerative agriculture podcasters — turn the microphone back on themselves. They talk about what six relatively simple episodes did years after release, why systemic storytelling is difficult to fund, and why the hero’s journey may be the wrong model for food systems.

THE POWER OF STORYTELLING TO SHIFT FOOD SYSTEMS

Good storytelling is increasingly recognized as one of the most neglected and underfunded pieces of the entire regenerative food and agriculture transition. The shift toward a regional food system requires an absolute influx of new talent—people willing to change careers, start farms, launch food companies, build agro-advisory firms, or become local millers. Yet, this massive movement can only begin if people can recognize, see, understand, smell, feel, and taste what true regeneration can be.

“This only works if you can recognise if you have seen, if you have understood, if you have smelled, felt and tasted what regeneration can be. And most city people, which are most people, never do. Hence the power of storytelling.” – Koen van Seijen

THE COMMODITY SYSTEM AND THE FIELD OF WHEAT

The global grain market operates as the original commodity system, built on high volume, low nutritional density, and a complete disconnection between production and consumption. In fact, the systemic degradation is so acute that standard regulations require manufacturers to synthetic-fortify white flour just to give it baseline nutritional value. For most people, agricultural fields are merely an anonymous, single-crop backdrop passed by on a highway, entirely divorced from the food on their plates.

A profound personal shift occurred for Abby during the 2017 art installation A Field of Wheat. Alongside 40 co-investors under strict Quaker communication principles, she faced the complex financial and agronomic realities of managing a 20-acre heritage crop in Lincolnshire. Facing the imminent loss of the entire harvest, she found herself voting to apply synthetic nitrogen—a choice that challenged her lifelong organic preconceptions and illuminated the deep traps and economic constraints modern farmers navigate daily.

“I was part of this art project in 2017 called A Field of Wheat… It was a completely mind-blowing experience for me cause I put in 200 pounds then… and suddenly here I was finding myself voting to apply nitrogen. And I was like, ‘Whoa, what is happening?’ But I understood that the farmer had a bigger stake in the field, they’d invested more money, and that if we didn’t apply nitrogen to this specific type of grain probably we would lose the crop completely.” — Abby Rose

CEREAL: DIVING INTO THE ORIGINAL COMMODITY

That became the starting point for Cereal. Cereal looked at six episodes about the new grain movement and the system surrounding it. Grain is easy to overlook: bags of flour are not as immediately seductive as tomatoes, peaches or plums. Yet grain sits inside a huge commodity system, and Abby’s Field of Wheat experience showed her how little most people understand about what happens to those fields.

The series followed the connections between breeders, farmers, millers, bakers and eaters. It highlighted how deeply degraded the modern commodity grain market has become, where commercial flour is stripped of its biological density to the point that it essentially acts as empty filler, requiring legal intervention to restabilize it. The series followed the connections between breeders, farmers, millers, bakers and eaters.

We recognize that the majority of flour that we eat has zero nutritional value. Why are we going through all of this work to produce something that goes on the shelves and has zero nutritional value? The law says you’ve got to fortify and put nutrients into the flour so that it has some nutritional value. What went wrong in that system?” — Abby Rose

WHEN THE STORY LEAVES THE PODCAST

A simple example of the impact of Cereal came when a farmer tasted bread made from his own grain for the first time. He had been farming for around 25 to 30 years and had never tasted his own grain. The experience brought him to tears. Other farmers responded to the series too, with several going on to buy small or larger mills so they could mill their own grain.

Years later, people have continued discovering Cereal, sending Abby voice notes describing what the series had changed for them. One listener moved from engineering into milling. Another farming couple who had been going through a difficult period began changing their system after listening to the series. Over the following six years, they developed a farm shop, started milling their own grain, began baking and selling bread on site, and changed the way they kept and sold livestock. Abby says they are now more profitable and happier with the system.

The point isn’t that a podcast single-handedly caused these changes. It’s that a story can give people something to act on — a different way of seeing their work, their business or their place in the food system.

“One of the outcomes was that by showing the whole system and how it’s interconnected … it gave people a new understanding of their agency in the system. How can we tell more of these interlinked stories so that people can really see a whole system and then understand like oh that’s why I’m powerful in this system and that’s where power lies for me.” — Abby Rose

THE FUNDING REALITIES OF STORYTELLING AS LEVERAGE FOR CHANGE

Two regen podcasters walk into a studio, they discuss: is telling good stories one of the most neglected and underfunded pieces of the regenerative agriculture and food transition? The reason is practical. People need to imagine themselves as farmers, millers, entrepreneurs, advisors, processors, investors and builders before they can take the risk of becoming one.

But systemic storytelling is difficult to package for funders. Farmerama normally raises funding for individual series, often from philanthropic organisations, and rely on some core funding and Patreon support.

Systemic storytelling has not received a strong response from funders because it can be difficult to understand what action follows from a complex story. That creates a circular problem: the stories may help people act, but the stories themselves can be difficult to explain as an intervention.

“I asked one funder specifically and they said it’s just difficult for us to get our heads around how we take any action, and it’s not an easy story to tell. How do we [through our platforms] share about something that is a more complex way of understanding the world, how to really get that message across so that funders are excited about it so that they know where to go to fund more things, and what does it even mean a systemic story ” — Abby Rose

STORIES YET UNTOLD

Abby is currently working on her next series, a follow-on from Landed. Cole Gordon, who featured in the first series while returning to his family farm in the Highlands of Scotland, has since taken over the farm from his father. The new project would explore relationships with land, including what can be learned from other contexts and from people who lived on the land before modern enclosures.

She is also interested in landscape-scale stories: large restoration projects, watershed and bioregional work, Commonland’s Four Returns framework, and Cooking Sections’ work with communities and local businesses on the Isle of Skye. The attraction is the possibility of storytelling at a scale where landscapes, people and businesses transform together.

And then there is Death and Farming. Abby wants to explore what farming’s proximity to death can teach urban societies that have become increasingly separated from the cycles of life. She sees a more nuanced conversation hiding underneath the meat-versus-no-meat debate, including questions about what happens when death is pushed out of sight.

“I think there’s a lot of fear of a dead body. What are we missing out on in our urban experience by not being more in tune with what it means to be part of this cycle of life, and that the death part of it is part of it? Can we connect more with that in today’s world? And what do farmers have to share from that perspective that maybe we have lost by becoming non-land-based peoples?” — Abby Rose

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED

Koen and Abby also talked about:

The Lincolnshire art project “A Field of Wheat” in 2017 where forty people co-invested in a wheat crop and made collective decisions using Quaker principles to guide discussions.
How the conventional grain commodity system is designed around forward markets and feed crops, leaving the majority of white flour with little nutritional value.
The maturation of the regenerative food movement over the last 15 years, with companies like Wildfarmed, Crowd Farming, and Boerschap reaching tens of millions in revenue.
The emergence of a passionate Gen Z listenership and the crucial need for easy, structured entry points into food and agricultural careers.

LINKS AND MORE MENTIONED IN THE CONVERSATION:

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Feedback, comments, suggestions? Reach me via Twitter @KoenvanSeijen, in the comments below or through Get in Touch on this website.

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Abby Rose — Storytelling in Regenerative Agriculture: Who Funds Stories That Shift Systems?