João Valente, owner of Monte Silveira, took over his family farm in central-eastern Portugal that was running on tobacco, broccoli, and melons with sixty-five people employed year-round, the rotation designed entirely around subsidies. When the tobacco subsidy disappeared at the end of the 1990s, he found himself with a question: what does this land actually want to be? That question led him to organic agriculture conferences in Portugal, to a magazine showing no-till, to a German seed company that flew him to New Zealand and Australia to see holistic planned grazing in action, and eventually to the first Climate Farmers Congress in a castle in Germany, back in 2021, where he helped write the manifesto, brought ham, wine, and olive oil, and met much of the regenerative agriculture network he’s been working with ever since. Today, Monte Silveira manages around 700 hectares of Montado and irrigated annual crops, runs five species of animals, carries sixteen active research projects, has three full-time scientists on staff, and has been no-till since the year 2000.

One plus one, in companion cropping, is not two. It might be three, four, or five: two or three species in the same field, each supporting the others, the vetch fixing nitrogen for the wheat, the wheat stem holding up the climbing vetch, and if one fails the other covers it. João has been doing this long enough now that the yield comparisons with neighbouring monoculture fields aren’t theoretical. And after decades of absorbing the risk alone, he’s at a point where he can start handing the knowledge on, to neighbouring farmers who are curious but can’t afford to fail, to the Portuguese government, which recently invited Monte Silveira to one of only three private companies at the table for the country’s seven-year environmental strategy document, and to consumers through brands, built on cereals and legumes priced to compete with conventional supermarket products, not just to sell to those who can already afford the premium.

In this episode, recorded under the shade of an old farm building during a May heat wave in the Portugal, too hot by then to keep walking the Montado, we get into how a tobacco subsidy became the turning point of a farming life, why João thinks the two groups most drawn to regenerative research are newly graduated scientists and recently retired professors (and almost nobody in between), what it takes to bring the most important conventional almond consultant in Portugal from sceptic to practitioner in under a year, why he would mandate no-till for all dry-land cereal producers in Portugal if he had the legislative pen, what he’d do with a billion euros, and why, given a magic wand, he’d change human ego before he’d change a single farming practice.