From soil to flavour. A conversation with the heroes of regenerative agriculture
Welcome back to our “Redefining Luxury” interview series, where we contemplate the essence of luxury and explore its many forms and definitions. Through open conversations with creators, entrepreneurs, and passionate individuals we talk about the process behind designing luxurious, pleasurable, yet thoughtful creations and their importance in the modern world. In search of joy, marvel, and inspiration.
This edition is little special. It’s a bit of a full-circle moment.
A few years ago, I worked on a project called Food Fragility, a series of hand carved stone spoons, designed to create awareness around the fragility of our food system and the disconnect between eaters and their food.
I realised that the current food system is not sustainable in the long run, that it’s the number one cause of climate change, and that it’s killing our fertile soil at a very high tempo.
So I wanted to do something about it, to create awareness without being pushy, to use beauty to deliver a message.
This project slowly turned into the brand Sarah-Linda is now.
It’s a true honour and pleasure to be able to give back today, to really contribute to this change through my 1% For the Planet membership and donations to non-profits working on soil regeneration and the transition to regenerative agriculture.
The element creating the full circle here is the Soil Heroes Foundation.
I had a deep conversation with Mellany Klompe from Soil Heroes Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to educating farmers about sustainable and regenerative farming.
Being a member of 1% for the Planet, I was looking for a local soil-regeneration organisation to donate to. I found Soil Heroes, loved their mission, donated 1% of my first-year sales to them and later called Mellany to visit their farm and have a chat.
Mellany shared with us her deep knowledge on the topics of soil regeneration and regenerative farming, fertilisation, biodiversity, nutrition, and collaboration with nature. She has a strong background in environmental sciences, biodiversity, and nature conservation. Her husband Jeroen is a farmer. They are both determined to make a change from within and passionate about operating their business in the most sustainable way possible. Leading by example and doing it with regenerative agriculture practices.
About 7 years ago, Mellany discovered regenerative agriculture on the internet at a time when it wasn’t known in North-West Europe at all. South Africa, Australia, and the center of North America were already practicing this concept, mainly due to severe drought issues.
WORKING WITH NATURE
“Regenerative agriculture is mainly about working with nature. When I’m talking to colleague farmers about regenerative, it’s painful for them. Because for them the word “regenerative” often automatically means that they did it wrong all along.
That’s what I often hear, but it’s not true.
And I’m always saying no, you didn’t do it wrong. You did it with the knowledge you had at the time and you were farming the best way you could. But do you have problems with soil compaction? Yes. Do you have problems with decreasing organic matter? Yes. Do you also experience that your input is increasing and your yield isn’t going up any more? Yes.
So by just hearing that I’m thinking that something needs to change.
Soil health is our main aim and the whole farming system needs to adjust to that soil health improvement.
Everything that we do must add up to soil health.”
Mellany & Jeroen are taking multiple initiatives to contribute to the solution of this complex problem we are all facing right now, on so many levels. At the time they started, about 8 years ago, the main issue they were fighting in the field was soil density.
The amount of organic material was decreasing, and the use of machinery became heavier and more intense. In conventional farming, it’s about getting more out and less in: a farmer just farms on his plot during the season, growing a plot like cereal, potatoes, or onions, and then after harvest, he plows it and the plot stays bare during winter.
Bare soil increases erosion, droughts and floods. So in regenerative agriculture, after harvesting the “cash crop”, a mixture of plants is sown, called cover crops.
This way, bare soil is avoided. Cover crops also add biodiversity, improve soil structure with their roots, and keep temperature, humidity, acids and nutrition as levelled as possible.
“You can use a mixture of plants that have a nitrogen-fixing capacity. Clovers and legumes for instance are nitrogen-fixing. By using those you can nurture the soil again in a natural way.”
To prepare the soil again for the cash crop of next season, they mow it, mulch it, mix it with the top layer, and spray a self-made biofertilizer based on lactobacillus. It’s a milk acid microsystem, that’s increasing the amount of compost in the biomass which is in the top layer. This way the organic matter becomes available more quickly.
“We are aiming for 365 days per year of covered soil. With conventional farming, soil is only being covered for maybe 6 or 7 months and the rest of the year it’s bare soil. And knowing how expensive soil is, they simply aren’t using the power of it anymore. With the discussion about the nitrogen problem, I think we came to the point where at least the government realised that this needs to stop. We need to break through the current system. Farming systems need to change generally.”
Another big step their farm took towards a more regenerative future was stopping with the plowing. This touches up on a very sensitive topic for a farmer. Farmers plow to suppress weeds. But there is no such thing as the turning of soil in nature. At the Klompe farm, they substitute plowing with shallow tillage, only touching the top 10 centimetres.
“With conventional plowing you go down about 40 centimetres and flip the deep soil on top. The very fertile first 10 centimetres with all your soil biology in it is turned around and it comes deep below the surface, where it’s less moist, there’s almost no air (because of the soil density problem), and there’s no organic matter there. So that’s killing your soil biology.”
Just by cutting out the plowing, adding cover crops, and experimenting with biofertilizers, the Klompe’s already saw big differences in their farm management. Seeing there was so little knowledge about regenerative agriculture, they came up with the idea to amplify the need for change and started a foundation.
Soil Heroes is mainly about knowledge sharing, and applying that on their showcase farm as an example for North-West Europe, where they follow the guidelines of regenerative agriculture in practice.
“The transition to regenerative asks a lot of investment from farmers, especially the first years, because you’re not setting your production, your yield, at number one. You’re setting your soil health as a first priority. So that means having temporarily less economic revenue and more investments.
So the transition requires more cost at the start, but on the long term it will be better and save money. And it will prevent you as a farmer to have low yields 10 years from now because of soil exhaustion. We can’t hold up with the current system. So if you start to invest in regenerative now, you know that in 10 years your crops will at least be on the same level as they are now. We already have ridiculous yields compared to the rest of Europe, so if we manage to stay on the same level, I’m already very very happy. We must be reasonable.”
SOIL HEALTH
Mellany is also in the process of building a platform that’s totally divided from the foundation, to promote the transition to regenerative practices. The farmers that stick to the requirements of regenerative practices can upload their plots to the app, their soil gets measured at the beginning of the regenerative journey, and is monitored every year - mainly focusing on carbon, biodiversity, ecosystem services, water holding capacity, and soon also nutrition. Because obviously, healthy soils will produce healthier food. They have started a new internationally funded project on nutrition to prove that there is a correlation between healthy soils and healthier crops.
“I know a lot of people that take food supplements like magnesium, zinc… and if I’m looking at my own soil analysis, the nutrients that we’re lacking are magnesium and zinc. If it’s not in the soil anymore, it can’t be in the produce either. We are swallowing it now as a supplement. But if you could produce good quality food and combine that with a diverse and healthy diet, then our health would be the best, I believe”
We’re doing research together with the University of Amsterdam to see how natural pest control works. Mainly we’re aiming at natural pest control to figure out how we can contribute to the population of insects, birds, bees, and bumblebees, and we have had great results so far. It’s about creating a mozaïque of enough biodiversity around your plot. We are now doing that for the third year and we still haven’t had the need to use insecticides.”
Luckily, regenerative farming is becoming more and more common these days, but most of these projects are still on a small-scale, says Mellany. What Soil Heroes want to be an example for is a large-scale highly industrial farms, showing that regenerative farming is possible on an industrial scale as well.
“Us humans, we’re forcing our own will upon nature, but in the end, you can never win. So we need to make a systemic change and look at how we can collaborate with nature instead.”
FROM SOIL TO SOY
“When you pursue great flavour, you also pursue great soil health. It might sound obvious. And it is.”
Based on this principle, Mellany’s husband Jeroen also co-founded an exceptional soy sauce brand, Tomasu.
From soil to bottle, they do everything at the farm. They grow their own regenerative soy beans and wheat, and have their own brewery at the farm. It’s a product loved by inspiring world class chefs such as Dan Barber, who thinks this is the best soy sauce available.
(As a side note, I highly recommend his book The Third Plate, tracing the connection between healthy soil and flavour.)
“We believe nature holds the key to its own restoration. That’s why we work with nature, rather than against it.”
TRUE LUXURY
“For me, true luxury is if we could run the farm independently from the banks and the retail system. Regaining our farmer power again. If you look back in history, the people who were growing the food were at the center of the whole society and now we’re at the edge of it.
Anonymous, almost forgotten. And knowing that soil is the center of everything, healthy soil could give us much more of a beneficial situation than the one we’re in now worldwide.
The banking system and the government are some of the big systems that brought us in this situation. I think the government is now realising and wanting to turn things around, unlike banking. Because banks are making big money on the current system.
I can just give you the example of our farm: of course, first we need to put all our efforts and investments into growing a crop. About 1.5 years later we’ll know if we did it well or not. So we get a liquidity loan. The initial investments are in the millions, there are almost no farmers with enough money to invest in crops and all of the labor in advance. 1.5 year after investing all the energy and liquidity they hopefully sell the products for more than the cost.
If we were able to sell our food for a fair price instead of the low prices we have now, farmers could be much more independent from the banks.
Retail is making real money, buying food for the low prices and selling it for much higher. That is where the margins are. If you are spending 1 euro on potatoes, only 10 cents goes to the farmer.
So if we could farm independently of those two systems, that would be pure luxury. Because then we could really make our own decisions and follow our heart.”