150: Richard Perkins - Creating Regenerative Agriculture Ecosystems
The Natural State with Dr. Anthony Gustin
Dr. Anthony Gustin
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2022
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Richard Perkins, author, educator, and leading expert on regenerative agriculture comes on the show to discuss everything he’s learned since running his regenerative ag farm for over ten years.
Richard shares his background, how he learned to fend for himself living in a gypsy community, how animals are irreplaceable, and more.
He also answers questions like: is regenerative agriculture available to small farms? Can it be scaled? What does it take to start a regenerative agriculture farm?
Richard also chats about why he switched from growing vegetables to animal husbandry, the negative consequences of our current farming practices, mineral depletion in our soil, how to create a profitable farm that can provide for a family, and what to grow based on your farm size.
With over 10+ years of running his own regenerative agriculture farm and teaching others how to do so, Richard is an incredible wealth of knowledge on the subject. He’s also so well-versed on biodiversity and understanding what species grow best where. Richard shares as much of these details as he can in this episode.
Whether you’re dreaming of owning a farm one day or you’d like to turn yours into a regenerative agriculture farm, or you’re just interested to learn more, this episode is for you.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s in store:
- How Dr. Gustin found Richard and his work
- How Richard found himself in this space and his journey throughout the years
- What it was like to live in a gypsy community
- The problem with modern farming and how it got to this point
- Why Richard chose to leave vegetable farming for animal husbandry
- How the health of our soil is affected by our current farming practices and what can be done about it
- The downsides of row crops
- Mineral depletion in soil and how to restore it
- How fertilizers, pesticides, rodenticides, and fungicides are killing the health of our soil and planet
- How to improve the health of our top soil
- What are the most profitable farm activities to help people make a living?
- Richard’s number one advice for starting your own farm
- What you can grow or raise based on your land size
- How to deal with the downsides of running your own farm and what those really look like
- Why we have an urge to fix the world, why this rarely works, and what to do instead
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Natural State podcast. I'm your host Dr. Anthony Guston. It is my |
| 0:10.4 | belief that the natural state of penny living organisms' health and that our artificial |
| 0:14.4 | habitat has forced us into having artificial health problems. This show is my attempt to |
| 0:18.7 | dive deep and learn about using nutrition, sleep, movement, relationships and more to help |
| 0:23.8 | you reclaim your natural state of health in a modern world and show you how to thrive |
| 0:27.7 | in an environment that's stacked against you. If you enjoyed today's show, you can find |
| 0:31.3 | out more details and information at Dr. Anthony Guston.com. Very excited to welcome Richard |
| 0:37.8 | Perkins to the podcast today. Richard is one of the world's leading experts on regenerative |
| 0:43.6 | agriculture. He has a textbook, a crazy, super in-depth, what I think to be the absolute best |
| 0:50.6 | resource you can possibly buy on regenerative agriculture. Title regenerative agriculture |
| 0:55.1 | details, his journey setting up his roughly 25-acre farm in northern Sweden and the level |
| 1:01.6 | of detail that this guy goes into is absolutely insane. He is, again, the most, I think, |
| 1:07.0 | well-versed when it comes to species, biodiversity, why and really can this work for small farmers |
| 1:16.5 | at scale? We get into a lot of these different things, talk about his background, how he |
| 1:20.2 | lived with gypsies when he was young, Girland, how to fend for himself at that point, how |
| 1:24.2 | animals are absolutely irreplaceable in the cycle of life and a bunch of other learnings |
| 1:29.3 | on how his life has transpired in the last 10-plus years running his small farm in the north |
| 1:33.6 | of Sweden. He is, again, the pre-imminent leader in education in this space and just an absolute |
| 1:39.1 | wealth of knowledge. And so without further ado, I hope you tune in and enjoy the conversation |
| 1:44.1 | I had here with Richard Perkins. Before we get into the show, I'd like to introduce |
| 1:50.4 | Equip Foods if you guys haven't heard about it. It's a brand that I started many years |
| 1:54.7 | ago at this point, have kind of been off and on with it throughout the years, but we're |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr. Anthony Gustin, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Dr. Anthony Gustin and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.