portugal – Investing in regenerative agriculture

Dimitri Tsitos – The massive opportunity of regenerative practices in intensive tree crops and why data is the only thing that will unlock it

21st July 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

This is a check-in conversation, an update on what three years of stacked regenerative practices on a real commercial almond plot is beginning to show with Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic and leading the Arbo-Innova project with real data now starting to come in.

Regenerative practices clearly work in these systems. But which ones? In what order? And how many at the same time before you’re doing more harm than good?

Take the clovers growing in the tree lines — what Dimitri calls living mulch. They fix nitrogen and push more of it into the tree than conventional fertilisation does. But in the first years, they also compete with the young trees for water, leading to slower early growth. Is that trade-off worth it? Do the trees catch up?

What the first data is already showing: Herbicide applications halved in a single season. Nitrogen levels inside trees on clover-berm plots higher than in conventional neighbours. Fungal disease pressure significantly lower on the organic test plot — with three bacterial spray rounds versus the neighbours’ ten synthetic ones. And an industry that, until recently, was watching from a distance, now leaning in.

None of this is easy. The J-curve of transition is real. The compromises — between tree establishment and soil cover, between water competition and nitrogen gain — are real. But the first data is clear: regenerative practices offer massive opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of intensive orchard systems in a profitable way. More resilient industry. Huge environmental wins. A transition that pays.

João Valente – 26 years No-Till, outcompeting monocultures, and now teaching his neighbours

14th July 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

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.

Diogo Pinho – Europe’s biggest silvopasture system is dying and grazing can fix it

7th July 2026 antonellatotaro 1 Comment

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.

Raiza Rezende – Soil health and human health: why the science is still years behind the hype

23rd June 2026 antonellatotaro 3 Comments

Brazilian-trained chemical engineer, Raiza Rezende left a career path lined up by petroleum, gas, and pharmaceutical companies to study syntropic agriculture with Ernst Götsch, then WWOOFed her way across Spain, Portugal, and Greece before co-founding two organisations working from opposite ends of the same problem: Agrosystemic, which helps large farms in Portugal and Brazil transition toward regenerative practices, and RHEA, the Regenerative Healthcare European Association, which is trying to prove — with hard data — that healthy soil produces healthier people.

Pull one carrot out of the ground and test it, and the number on the lab report tells you almost nothing. Is its vitamin A content high or low? Compared to what? That’s the problem sitting underneath the entire “nutrient density” conversation, and it’s the one Raiza keeps running into: without thousands of samples across farms, regions, and varieties, a single result is just a number with nowhere to stand.

In this conversation recorded in a Lisbon park, with the podcast’s producer Antonella Totaro taking over hosting duties for the first time, we get into Raiza’s path from an oil-and-gas-sponsored engineering campus in Rio to the most desertified farmland in Portugal, why Agrosystemic refuses to tell conventional farmers they’re doing it “wrong”, what four real farms and 40-plus measured parameters are starting to reveal about nutrient density, why €700 billion a year in EU disease treatment costs hasn’t yet connected soil research to health research, and why, with a magic wand or a billion euros, she’d skip the technology and put the money straight into farmers.

James Barrett – Europe has a water retention problem

9th June 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

Europe doesn’t have a water problem — not the one most people picture, anyway. The rain still falls; we’ve just spent a few hundred years engineering it off the land as fast as we can, which James Barrett likens to hauling your garden clippings to the dump only to drive back in spring and buy compost.

James is a regenerative hydrology consultant, founder of Decent Water Company and lead regenerative designer for Ten Lives Festival in Portugal — where 150 people spent their mornings digging rock-lined “smiles” into a semi-arid, 70-hectare site that sees barely 400mm of rain a year. Sitting between two almond trees, he explains why he favours many small, low-risk interventions over one big dam, how those rock linings passively harvest daily fog and condensation much like the fog nets of Chile, and why transpiring trees hand a landscape a longer growing season and a few degrees of cooling. He also shows how LiDAR and AI let him read 70 hectares from a laptop, finding where water wants to pool before he lifts a shovel.

It’s a practical field lesson in keeping water higher in the landscape — and in why where you choose to dig decides whether soil, ecosystems and the economics all start to regenerate together.

Dimitri Tsitos – Making regenerative intensive tree crops profitable

11th March 2025 koenvanseijen 2 Comments

A deep dive into the world of intensive—or super-intensive—tree crops, particularly olives and almonds with Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic, the Regenerative Agroforestry Podcast, the Arbo-Innova project and Mazi Farm. In Portugal, the sector is booming—highly profitable yet highly destructive—due to its high- input, high-output nature, with heavy reliance on fertilizers and chemicals.

This raises the question: can there be another way? That’s exactly what Dimitri and his team have been researching over the past few years—on real farms, running large-scale regenerative plots alongside conventional ones. The bad news? It’s not easy. It demands a systematic shift in machinery, protocols, and inputs. But the good news is the results are extremely promising: much higher quality olive oil, only a slight drop in production, significantly better price points, lower costs from day one, and biodiversity that bounces back remarkably fast.

It’s a booming industry that, like CAFO factory farms for animal protein, is reaching its limits in terms of public acceptance, climate risks, biodiversity loss, quality concerns, and rising input costs. But don’t despair—this is a hopeful discussion. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit (pun intended) ready to be rolled out quickly, following an initial phase of research and development.

Marta Cortegano – How to start the regenerative revolution from one of the driest places in Europe

2nd May 2023 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Marta Cortegano, cofounder of Terra Sintrópica and one of the leaders of the regenerative agriculture movement in Portugal. Straight from one of the driest and emptiest places in Europe where climate change is hitting hard, we talked about farming in challenging conditions, syntropic agroforestry and more.

Tag: portugal