A walking the land episode with Sarah Hellebek, deputy head at Krogerup Højskole, who spent years at the heart of Denmark’s climate activist movement. By most measures, she was successful, climate made it onto the political agenda, though never strongly enough. But the fight came with a cost: it also made her pretty depressed, she was in our own words mostly shouting in front of the Parliament. 

Until a tour visiting progressive Danish farmers exposed her to the world of regeneration and she dove right into it. After spending a lot of time on different farms she noticed the need to train the next generation, as the current ag school system in Denmark (and everywhere else for that matter) doesn’t prepare you to run farms and embrace complexity. So she started her own school, outside the free super subsidied Danish school system and it took off.

We talk about why the next generation of farmers has to be trained by practitioners not teachers and why your holistic context is so important and pretty scary to dive into that in week 1 of your education; and why the students need to work full time on regenerative farms throughout the country and bring that knowledge back into the lessons classroom (which of course is on a farm). Like this, the teaching is done with real case studies of the top regenerative farms through out Denmark. Bye bye outdated text books. This is cutting edge.

She felt she had to get some dirt under her nails and set up a market garden which hosts a lot of activities. We end with some very concrete calls to action and, of course, a mini deep dive into our role as positive key stone species.