FoA 242: Regenerative Research and Demonstration with Jonathan Lundgren, Ph.D.

Big shoutout to two new members of the FoA community this week, Italo Guedes and Sara Faivre, thank you both for your involvement and support. If you’d like to support this show and join a community of some really smart people passionate about ag, you can do so at www.patreon.com/agriculture. 

For years, I have been on a somewhat public quest to understand regenerative agriculture. Where is the line between regenerative and not regenerative? Are these claims I’m hearing of more profit with very few inputs credible? Where is the science that backs all this up? Where does ag innovation and technology fit into this model? These are just a few of the many questions I have asked. This goes back to episode 44 in 2017, and shows up again and again in episodes 64, 109, 135, 182, 199, 216, 222, and 232...just to name a few. Frankly, I’m often left with more questions than answers. Not because my guests haven’t been forthcoming - they have. I think it’s more due to the fact that it’s more complicated. As my guest on today’s show will say, it’s not about practices, it’s about principles. 

As it has caught on in popularity, there are a lot of people who have wanted to come on the podcast and talk about regenerative agriculture. But the people that I have gravitated to most on the subject are the practitioners themselves, the farmers making this work. And the scientists trying to provide the data to separate fact from fiction. We have on today’s show, someone who is both a farmer and a scientist, Dr. Jonathan Lundgren. 

Dr. Lundgren is the director ECDYSIS Foundation, and CEO for Blue Dasher Farm in South Dakota. He received his PhD in Entomology from the University of Illinois in 2004, and was a top scientist with USDA-ARS for 11 years. His research and education programs focus on assessing the ecological risk of pest management strategies and developing long-term solutions for regenerative food systems.