Marc Leiber, founder of Grow Back and farmer at Quinta das Abelhas, in Portugal, grew up between Germany and the Netherlands, studied International Horticulture and Business Management, spent nine months on Ernst Götsch’s farm in Brazil after organising the agroforestry pioneer’s first-ever visit to Northern Europe while still a university student, and arrived in Portugal […]
As a child in Nairobi, Benedetta Kyengo spent holidays climbing trees and eating mangoes and papayas at her grandmother’s food forest in eastern Kenya. Eight years later, every tree was gone — replaced by maize and beans — and her grandmother, who used to send food to the city, was depending on money sent from it. That reversal, from abundance to dependency in a single generation, is the wound this episode is about healing.
Benedetta — founder of Feedback to the Future and a practitioner of syntropic agroforestry in Kenya’s semi-arid east — bought five acres of severely degraded land in 2020 and spent the next four years turning it into a 100-species food forest. She describes how terrible droughts almost forced her to quit, why she teaches farmers to be “greedy with water” — stealing runoff from neighbours’ plots and slowing every drop into the soil — and how training hundreds of farmers across 300 acres has measurably changed local rainfall patterns. She also explains how she plans to make this food accessible not to wealthy Nairobi consumers, but to the slum communities she grew up in: by stripping input costs to near zero, saving indigenous seeds, and packaging in the small quantities the slum economy actually runs on. For anyone asking whether regenerative agriculture can work in brittle, semi-arid landscapes — and at a price point that serves ordinary people — this episode is a field report from someone already doing it.
A conversation with Antonio Nobre, Brazilian agronomist by training and world’s leading Earth scientist, serving as the scientific director of the Biotic Pump Greening Group. He has dedicated his career to studying the Amazon’s ecological dynamics and its crucial role in climate regulation and is an expert on water cycles, native Indigenous knowledge, and much more.
We talk about how Antonio found his way to the Amazon after being born and raised in São Paulo, how he rebelled against the Green Revolution during his time at agricultural university, and how he discovered the incredible workings of forests—especially rainforests.
We also explore the overview effect—the transformative experience of seeing Earth from space—and how it often turns astronauts into environmental activists.
What if you could turn a dry, water-scarce plot of land into a thriving ecosystem? In this new episode of Walking the Land with a Regenerative Farmer we follow the journey of Felipe Pasini, as we explore his transformative work on the Amadeco Syntropic farm in Depressa, Salento, Puglia. Felipe reveals how he tackled the challenges of traditional dry stone walls, rocky soil, and limited water supply to create a productive, visually stunning farm organized into innovative elements.