♻️ I Want to Become a Regenerative Farm

In February, I decide to see a psychologist for the first time in my life. I have various reasons, though I struggle to verbalise them; I guess I just feel stuck, and my mind exhausted, even though I don’t do that much... In fact I hardly ever feel like I’m doing enough. Enough freelance work to pay the bills, sure, but when it comes to my own art practice, I feel a constant lack of time while ideas pile up and doubts hold me back from starting, and I get very, very frustrated with myself. I’m not sure if this is a cause or an effect of these psychological struggles, but I want something to change.

After a lengthy intake session, the psychologist tells me there seems to be a significant disconnect between my head and body, or my thoughts and feelings. I guess she might have a point. She starts explaining how basically being constantly overactive in my mind causes my sympathetic nervous system (responsible for the 'fight or flight' response) to work overtime, while the parasympathetic nervous system (promoting rest and digestion) isn’t getting enough time to help me relax, recover, regenerate. I have a very visual brain so I google an image to try and understand this theory better. It makes me see my body as a big system, which feels helpful, somehow. I imagine all the organs and muscles and limbs as places with little roads between them, some of them with happy energetic cyclists on them, others with a long traffic jam of heavy trucks filled with feelings, some roads completely blocked. This is how my mind works, I can’t help it.

To help me restore the mind-body-imbalance, the psychologist refers me to another therapist, a more alternative one with a ‘holistic’ approach that focuses not just on talking but on the body as a whole. I have no idea what that entails, exactly, but I feel open to it and book an appointment for April, after my upcoming trip.

In March, I take the train to Spain. To get away and hopefully think and write up new project ideas, and also to visit my youngest sister Renée, who is working at a farm in Múrcia for four months, and has invited me to stay with her there. She is finishing her masters degree in Resilient Food and Farming Systems with an internship at a regenerative farm, specifically researching the needs of its cows and their holistic grazing methods.

From what I understand, regenerative farming is all about improving the health of the entire ecosystem rather than just focusing on high yield. It aims to help build up the soil’s fertility, improve water retention, and boost biodiversity, while reducing the dependency on chemicals and pesticides. It’s about working with the land rather than against it. The goal is to create a sustainable system that benefits both the land and the people relying on it, making farming more resilient to climate change and other scary future challenges. It all sounds complex, abstract, and quite utopian to me.

I am excited to spend time with Renée, and to learn more about her research and regenerative farming in general. I know next to nothing about agriculture and I am not even that interested in it, but whenever Renée passionately shares her biodynamic wisdom with me I can listen to her for hours. She has a very captivating yet clear way of talking about nature, and so much detailed knowledge on how plants and animals and insects and fungi all work together and communicate among each other and keep the ecosystems in balance. To someone like me, who spends most of their time in cities (and too much of it behind screens), listening to such information sometimes truly feels like inhaling fresh air.

I arrive at the finca that hosts all the students and interns working at the farm, about ten of them. It’s a big house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by large groves of almond and olive trees, with rolling hills and rugged mountains in the distance. We put an extra bed in Renée’s tiny bedroom. On the floor there is a box with loudly chirping baby chicks that just hatched last night. I’ll be staying for eight days.

The other inhabitants are all around my sister's age, from different parts of the world but all studying something agriculture-related. Here at the farm they each have a very specific research topic they are exploring, using the farm fields for their field research. Some are taking soil samples or placing sensors in it to measure infiltration rates, some are working on ways to improve existing structures like the vegetable garden and the grazing schemes. There is a student who is researching compost, measuring the temperature of different compost-heap variations every day, and another one working on building various insect hotels on the farm premises. He knows exactly which insects live in the area, and which one benefits the ecosystem most, so he is trying to find out what would be the perfect sized holes for those particular insects and building them the ideal habitat. Such care!

I am in awe of the amount of time and attention that goes into getting to know this land and its needs, in such detail, all with this shared goal of regeneration. These students are dedicated, giving attention to such a specific aspect of the landscape, together helping to slowly regenerate and improve the farmland. It’s inspiring. I don’t know exactly in what way, but I feel inspired.

Life is slow here. In the morning, we get up whenever we feel like it, usually when the sun hits our pillows. We go down, make coffee, and drink it outside on the sunny patio. We do some stretches and talk to whoever is there having breakfast too. We check on the baby chicks and feed them. No one seems to be in any type of rush, ever. All day I see people reading, napping, baking treats, watching shows, and hanging out, even on weekdays during 'work hours’. I catch myself wondering, 'Don't they have more... work to do?’. Renée somehow seems to read my mind and says “Now that you are around, I am so aware of how little I actually do here. Of course we have more intensive days where we plant trees or do other physical stuff. And I work on my research, but only around four hours a day. Those are my productive hours. The rest is for living.”

Something about this way of living feels so right.

‘This is my kind of tempo,’ I think to myself.

I feel lucky that Renée has so much time because she can spend so much of it showing me around the area and telling me about the farm. She takes me to the stables to visit the horses, and to cuddle the new puppies at the farm, and to spy on the shy turtles in the water reservoir. She shows me the vegetable garden and then the tree groves.

The pistachio trees are still tiny and leaf-less. Renée constantly kneels down everywhere looking closely at the small plants growing in between trees, then telling me their name and their special qualities, and how they help the trees get more nutrients or attract certain insects that are somehow beneficial. I love learning all these little things even though I don’t really understand them. I do start to understand on a larger level how everything is connected and influencing one another. In the evenings we cook and eat together and watch movies or play crossword puzzles in Renée's room.

This is the perfect time and place for me to do nothing and rest, and I am definitely more relaxed than before, but I still feel quite restless. I try to live in the moment but can’t stop thinking about my work and what direction to take it in. I wonder which part of my nervous system is winning right now.

I brought my laptop with me to write and work, so one day I install myself on the patio to do some of that… but I feel unsure of what to work on. For the first time in what feels like years, I don’t really have to do anything. No assignments, no commissions, no deadlines. Enough savings to last a few months, enough time to start something new, something I really want to spend my time on. I’ve been craving this moment, but it feels quite scary now that it’s actually here.

I try to remind myself of the things that inspire and excite me these days, but my mind goes blank. I think back to the last big project I felt excited about, which happened almost a year ago –far too long by my standards of productivity. That work started from workshops I did with teenagers in which they mapped their inner emotional worlds as landscapes, which then became a film about them showing us around those emotions. How very ironic that I created this whole method for kids to understand and express their feelings, and now I’m in therapy for that same thing. Maybe I should have tried mapping my feelings into a landscape first…?

I imagine myself as a collection of farm fields, meadows and orchards, rolling hills and rugged mountains in the distance. There are fields where feelings grow and forests full of ideas and desires, and a water reservoir where energy is stored. Everything is connected and influencing one another.

In April, I’m back home again, but I keep thinking about that wholesome week at the farm. I tell my holistic therapist about how much I loved it, but that I did feel guilt for not working. She tells me I have an unhealthy relationship with work, and derive too much of my self-worth from how productive I feel. I guess she might have a point. And yes, I would love to return to that place of creating from joy and inspiration, rather than from this abstract pressure to perform and meet a self-imposed standard of productivity or success, I’m just not sure how. My therapist says it’s a journey we are going on together. I imagine me and her, walking through my inner landscape side by side. I wonder if we might need a tractor.

After therapy I need a breath of fresh air, so I call Renée. I tell her I want to turn all the regenerative farming inspiration from my visit into some sort of project, and ask her to tell me about how it works again, starting by explaining the opposite, ‘default’ way of farming.

“Ok so, conventional agriculture is all about getting the biggest yields possible using intensive methods. Farmers use a lot of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides to control pests and boost plant growth. This helps produce a lot of food, which is great for feeding large populations and supporting global food security. It’s often monoculture planting—so growing just one type of crop over large areas—and that’s super efficient. They can use machinery and streamline everything, which lowers labour costs and increases productivity. But the big downside is that all these chemicals deplete the soil’s natural nutrients and harm all the good microorganisms in it. Also, sticking to just one crop can lead to soil erosion and reduce biodiversity. It makes the whole system more vulnerable to pests and diseases, creating an even bigger dependency on chemical inputs. It’s not sustainable in the long term.”

Am I operating too much like a conventional farm? If my body is a landscape, growing all these feelings and energies, like farmlands waiting to be harvested, maybe my mind is farming my body in a conventional way, slowly exhausting it?

"Haha, yes,” says Renée, “I guess if you are working like a conventional farm, you are constantly enhancing your performance by adding certain substances. Like caffeine and sugar, and also intangible things like stress, external pressure, and expectations from yourself and others, all ensure that you keep going, year after year, always trying to improve yourself and seeking a higher level of achievement. But it isn’t really for yourself, it feels like you’re doing it mostly for others. Essentially, the work controls you, and your body gets exhausted, and you can give less and less.”

What would happen if I applied regenerative farming methods to myself? How would that change things?

“If you want to be a regenerative farm, if you were to live regeneratively... Instead of just focusing on high productivity, you would aim to restore and improve the health of your entire system. It’s all about working with your body rather than against it, and also being very conscious of what you put into it. It creates this positive cycle where you feel better and better, and in turn your work gets better and you can also give more to the people around you. You might not be as ‘productive' right away, but in the long run, it’s way more sustainable. By living this way, you can give more, generate more value. And value doesn’t just mean work and money, it can mean quality, health, love even. This way, doing work doesn't cost you all your energy, but can even give you more energy back!”

I imagine my mind as the farm that controls my inner landscape:

In May I call Renée every week. She tells me more biodynamic stories and things she learned at the farm, which function as great tips and inspiration on how to be more like a regenerative farm.

“So we went to visit this forest today.. There’s two kinds growing there: one is a native Spanish tree and the other one is an invasive pine species.

An invasive species is a plant or animal that ends up outside its original habitat and spreads so fast that it pushes out the native species. A good example is the grey squirrel that came here from America. It steals food from the native red squirrels, breeds more easily, and is way less shy, so it started to dominate, and now the red squirrels are becoming endangered. Plants can be invasive too. Like they once tried to introduce this bamboo-like reed in Europe, because they thought it would be cool to create a ‘European bamboo’. But this reed then pushed out the native reeds, and sucks up a lot of water from other plants, and it isn't even as strong as real bamboo, making it pretty useless.

So yeah, invasive species are a real threat to biodiversity and the environment, they mess with the natural balance and damage ecosystems, so it’s quite important to be aware of their impact and try to prevent their spread.”

I wonder if I have any invasive species living in my inner farmland. Things that weren’t there when I was a kid, but that slowly worked their way into my mind. Like the fear of failure, the perfectionism, the guilt around not working. I wonder how to prevent their spread.

“There used to be a lot more oak trees in this forest, back in the day. Oak trees are a lot less prone to forest fires, in fact pine trees are the worst for forest fires because when a pine cone sets fire, it kind of explodes and launches itself metres far, spreading the fire super quickly.

The thing is, it’s kind of a fact that once every five years there will be a huge forest fire somewhere in this area. It’s sad, but they need to prepare for it. So today this farmer explained how they are redesigning this forest, in a way that they give lots of space to all the little baby oak trees that are sprouting there, but get too much shade from the pine trees. So they find these baby oaks and look at what they need: where does the sun come from, which pine trees could we remove to give the oak more sun and space to grow bigger? And then they can only log the invasive pine trees, because the native ones are protected.”

I can think of some invasive thought patterns I’d like to chop to make room for baby oak thoughts to grow bigger. It will take some time, but in case of a forest fire like life-disaster, I will probably thank myself later.

“A regenerative mindset is essential. Like this week, we planted a bunch of trees. Right now, they are just little saplings, but when they are bigger, they bring so many benefits to the ecosystem. They store carbon. Their deep roots improve water absorption and distribute nutrients in the soil. They also have a cooling effect by creating more shade, and promote biodiversity, by creating habitats for birds and rabbits. It’s like a big win-win-win situation for the ecosystem in the long run, but now, in the beginning, it’s hard for those trees to survive. They need a lot of water right now, which is not exactly a ‘win’ for farmers, financially. It’s really expensive to transport water tanks, and even if the trees are donated, four full-time workers are needed to plant trees every day for six months and they need to be paid salaries as well.”

That emotional mapping workshop I developed a few years ago is really starting to pay off now. It took a lot of time to get to the current format, but now I just get bookings and I don’t even have to think about what to do. I simply run the workshop and it gives me income, and a sense of purpose, and joy, and motivation, and it leads to other opportunities.

In June, my holistic therapist is doing acupuncture on me for the first time. She explains how all our organs are connected and work closely together, communicate between each other, and depend on one another.. and how they in turn are linked to our emotions and mental well being. She says that every needle is giving special attention to one organ or part of the body, giving them a little boost, helping the overall body, and also releasing emotions and other tensions.

I smile while she tells me all this, because somehow the way she describes things reminds me of Renée, and the farm, and this essay I am trying to write. I try to hide my smile because as the woman trying to help me put less pressure on work is putting needles in my back, I am secretly thinking about work. But she is helping me, because she just described me as an ecosystem and now I am sure I am on the right path to regeneration.

I imagine the tiny needles are little students, dedicated, all giving attention to a specific aspect of my landscape, together helping to slowly regenerate and improve my inner farmland. It feels good.