Hello Everyone, my name is Lea
and I live with my partner, Maarten,
and our toddler, Puck, here in this yurt
on our land in central Portugal.
We have been living on this land
for about a year, and before that we used
to live in the Netherlands, where we both
worked full-time in education.
When I became pregnant with our daughter,
we decided it was time for a move,
time for change, and so we bought
a camper van and started traveling,
and that is when we found this place
here in Central Portugal.
We found this land a little over a year ago,
and when we found it, it was completely overgrown.
This land has a story of much of the
interior of this peninsula.
It used to be farmed, but the children of
the owners moved away to the cities to find work.
And so for the last few decades, it was quite neglected.
This last year we have been working really
hard to get some life back into this land.
In this video I want to show you
5 projects that we have done to regenerate this land.
The first thing that we had to do when we
came on to this land was to cut down all
of the dominating brush.
When we bought the place there was only
a little track that was kept by the
neighbor, and other than that all the
bushes were 2 or 3 meters tall.
We got to work, we trimmed down all
of the brush and all of the broom and all
of the rockrose, which was quite a lot of work.
As soon as we took it down and had a
little bit of rain, grass started growing
and we had a beautiful spring with lots of wildflowers.
In order to regenerate the land we had to
get rid of the most dominating brush.
This was also important because we have an
array of olive trees, and cork oak, which
will be a source of future income for us
as small farmers.
Another important aspect of regenerative
agriculture is water management.
One of the things that we did with all of
the brush that we cut down was put it in to lines.
Here in our olive field we placed them on
some of the sides of the terracing that
was dug here a long time ago.
And on the other side of our field, we put
them in lines on contour of the hill.
We did this in order to create a little
bit of a water break, and this creates a
good environment for new trees to come up,
and for trees that we might plant in the future.
The dry season in Portugal is
increasingly long and hot so we need to
do everything we can to keep water on the
land as much as possible.
The old systems were really created
to get the water away from the land as
quickly as you can, and so we need to
rethink that, and putting these lines up
here is one of the ways we are doing that.
In addition to that we will create some
ponds all over the property, as well as
maybe putting some key limes on our other hillside.
Another thing we do a lot here is composting.
All of the brush that we cut down, we put
in to rows, and that helps it to compost
down and to scatter all over the land.
We also have some heaps like this one,
where we just put everything in a big pile
and let it slow compost over the next
couple of years.
The traditional way of dealing with this
much dead brush would be to burn it, and
even though that does make a very quick
and tidy space, it also burns all of the nutrients.
Our way, we can feed it back
to the olive trees and into our garden.
Next to this type of composting, we also
compost our kitchen scraps, and we have a composting toilet.
Another thing that we have done here on
the land that is in line with regenerative
agriculture is to have a low till policy.
Except for here in the garden, we have
not really tilled the soil anywhere.
Here in Portugal it is very traditional
to plow the field a couple of times a year.
This is done to keep the grasses low
because they are a fire risk, but the
thinking is also that it opens up the soil
that way when rain does fall, it can permeate easily.
It does make for a very bare and
low-nutrient top-soil.
What we have decided to do is
"chop-and-drop", which means that we
have cut down all of the grass that came
up during the winter, and now it is laying
on top of the soil to protect it from the
harsh Portuguese summer sun, as well as
overtime breaking down and feeding back
into the soil, so that in the coming
years we can build our top soil this way.
The final point that I have for you today
is one for the future.
Now that we have cut down so much brush
we can think about animals that can
graze among our cork oak and our olive trees.
This is a system called "Silvopasture",
and you could do it with donkeys,
or sheep, or goats.
We have yet to decide, but this is a good
system because the animals keep the
grasses low, their manure feeds back
into the soil, and you get multiple uses
for one piece of land.
I hope what we have seen from these last
few points is that regenerative
agriculture is really about thinking in
systems, as well as seeing multiple uses
for one piece of land, or one aspect on your land.
I hope it maybe even gave you some
inspiration on what you could do on your
land to help regenerate the soil.
Thanks for watching!
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