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.