Diogo Pinho started his scientific career in the first DNA sequencing lab in Portugal, then did a hands-on PhD on the soil microbiome of cork and holm oak, studying why the trees get sick, before spending two years with Biome Makers, a soil microbiome analysis company, running labs and translating bacterial and fungal profiles into colour-coded, farmer-readable reports for growers around the world. Three years ago, a chance conversation at a farm visit twenty minutes from where he was living led him to Monte Silveira, a 700-hectare farm in the Alentejo, where farmer Joao Valente had been testing regenerative practices for years. Diogo came on board as head of research, hired two more scientists, and is now coordinating fifteen different research consortia — universities, policy makers, and environmental associations — all running in parallel on one working farm.

Portugal produces 70% of the world’s cork. And every year, the Montado, the vast savanna-like silvopasture system of cork and holm oaks that makes that possible, and that once covered much of the Mediterranean, is losing between 4,000 and 5,000 hectares. Not to disease, exactly: the disease is just the final hit on a tree already too weak to resist. The underlying cause, Diogo says, is simpler and more fixable than most people realise. The Montado is a system built by human management, and the one thing it was always managed with — grazing animals cycling nutrients back into the soil — has quietly been removed. Bring the animals back, do it well, and the trees can recover.

In this episode — recorded walking the Monte Silveira land on a mild May morning, with horses and sheep audible throughout — we get into how Diogo went from genome sequencing to working on a regenerative farm, why he sees the Montado’s decline as a chronic disease rather than a single crisis, how soil organic matter went from 1% to 3% in seven years without importing fertility, what a clover carpet growing underneath intensive almond trees is doing to herbicide use and nitrogen budgets (and why the 8,000-hectare conventional industry next door is already paying attention), and how a transition finance programme for twenty neighbouring livestock farmers is quietly building a model that could scale well beyond one farm.