Category: Animals’ Role

Alfonso Chico de Guzmán – The ag-tech that brings cows back

9th December 2025 koenvanseijen Animals' Role, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of Animals 0 Comments

Straight from La Junquera farm, in Murcia, Spain, a Walking the Land episode with Alfonso Chico de Guzmán, a regenerative livestock farmer. This is a story about the reintroduction of animals as a tool, with all the animal welfare worked out, on a farm that has been transitioning to perennials, transitioning away from annual crops, and seems to have found the puzzle pieces to actually make it thrive. And now the question is: how to get more cows? How to get sturdier cows? How to get stronger cows that can survive outside and thrive outside? And that is surprisingly difficult. Getting cows from too far away almost guarantees that they won’t adapt quickly and won’t thrive.

And yes, there’s work to do. Are the numbers large enough to see the impact on the land? Not yet. Can we see that the land is not suffering with the animals on top? Absolutely. What is the maximum carrying capacity? Nobody knows. They’re grazing in a landscape where cows have disappeared or they’re inside in factory farms and where sheep are disappearing. How are you going to manage these landscapes at scale? How are you going to support against fires and really impact the landscape?

Beyond cows, this is a blueprint for dryland regeneration. Ponds slow stormwater, aromatics stabilize slopes, and planned grasslands increase infiltration and biodiversity. We talk nutrient density, flavor, and how management changes meat quality; we talk permits, grazing rights, and the talent it takes to ride 70 kilometers in two days. Most of all, Alfonso make the case for patient capital and watershed thinking: if funding timelines matched ecological timelines, more farms could switch from extractive annuals to living systems that pay their way.

Jonathan Lundgren – You need more cows, not fewer, to save the planet

28th October 2025 koenvanseijen Animals' Role, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of Animals 0 Comments

A new conversation with Jonathan Lundgren, one of the world’s most interesting and most cited scientists when it comes to regenerative agriculture. For the last four years, Jonathan and his team have been in full swing with their 1000 Farms Initiative, where they document research and follow regenerative farms, actually closer to 1600 farms now.
An episode where we talk about data, data, and more data. We unpack a four-year effort that spans commodities, ecoregions, and management styles, revealing how regeneration scales in the real world. The results are striking: equal or better yields, stronger profits, higher biodiversity, improved water infiltration, and a path to substantial soil carbon storage, all without needing more land.

But it isn’t just about that. It’s about farmers’ health and happiness. It’s about pushing our imagination of what farmland could look like. It’s about the outliers in these studies that show us what is possible: more people on the land, more farmers connected to every acre being managed. It’s about producing food for your family and community. It’s about revitalizing rural communities and bringing back the life that has been sucked out of there. Enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Jonanhan (though, as always, it feels too short!).

Dianne, Ian and Matthew Haggerty – Food, not commodities: how regenerative agriculture works at scale on 63,000 acres

9th September 2025 koenvanseijen Animals' Role, Farmers First Tech, Ownership, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of Animals 0 Comments

Legend alarm on the podcast! We are happy to welcome the Haggerty’s family, Ian and Dianne, together with their son Matthew, on the podcast sharing their 30+ year journey- from being considered the hippie weirdos to leading a movement in Western Australia- showing that you can absolutely farm regeneratively at scale, in this case over 60,000 acres, with deep regeneration.

They regularly take on new land, but only if they feel the land wants and needs them to manage it. In other words, they don’t go looking for land, the land finds them. Often this land is extremely degraded, and they bring it back to life with the help of sheep, whose gut microbiome kickstarts regeneration, followed by well-integrated annuals.

We talk about how fundamental it is to allow anything that wants to grow to grow in a brittle environment. They don’t have the luxury of discussing the concept of weeds: anything that can stay green and alive, with living roots in the soil pumping out exudates during the brutal hot summer months, is welcome.

We also dive into the different water cycles they are influencing and how these have even affected local rainfall. Of course, we unpack the massive mindset shift that is fundamental in the regenerative transition, vibrations, quantum agriculture, and rebuilding local supply webs. We cover it all.

Walking the land with Benedikt Boesel – Fully integrating 300 cows into a 1000-hectare arable very sandy farm

24th June 2025 koenvanseijen Animals' Role, Diet Change, Nutrients to Soil, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of Animals 0 Comments

It just doesn’t happen very often we record in a field surrounded by cows just after a cow gave birth to a calf. There is not more fitting place to explore the super complex role of animals in the food and agriculture space than walking the land- and standing amongst the cows- with Benedikt Boesel, founder and farmer at Gut&Bösel, in Alt Madlitz, in Germany.
Very few topics will divide people in and outside the food space quicker than cows. So we are walking that fine line literally surrounded by three hundred cows who are an integral part of the fertilisation of Benedikt’s 1000-hectare arable farm with very sandy soils. We discuss everything from how much joy animals bring to a farm and how complex it is to treat them well and how they are a direct mirror of your actions. We talk as well about the moment in which the cows are taken out of the system, and how Benedikt does that (we are sorry if the first part of the episodes shocks you, but this is also part of the food and agriculture sector to face and consider. Even if you don’t consume animal protein, your fields are going to be fertilised by either fossil fuel fertiliser or animal manure).

Ichsani Wheeler – We need more large animals in our landscapes

10th June 2025 koenvanseijen Animals' Role, Nutrients to Soil, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of Animals 0 Comments

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, their absence leads often to stagnation and imbalance.