Episode 156: Data-Driven Regeneration with Jonathan Lundgren

Regenerative Agriculture Podcast

AEA Marketing

Earth Sciences, Science, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 546 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jonathan Lundgren is an agroecologist, farmer, rancher, and beekeeper, and founder and director of the Ecdysis Foundation and Blue Dasher Farm. Ecdysis Foundation is leading the Thousand Farms Initiative, providing data to validate regenerative agriculture's impact on soil health, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. His work challenges conventional farming by fostering farmer-scientist collaboration and advocating for sustainable practices that address global ecological issues.

In this episode, John and Jonathan discuss:

How fully regenerative farms can store carbon equivalent to seven years of U.S. emissions, acting as carbon sinks.
How biodiversity, including fungi, insects, and birds, rapidly returns to regenerative farms, enhancing water cycles and soil fertility
Prioritizing connections with nature, family, and community
How row crop farmers face increased depression, Parkinson's, and cancer
How resistance to innovations impacts organic and regenerative growers

Additional Resources
To learn more about the Ecdysis Foundation and the Thousand Farms Initiative, please visit: https://www.ecdysis.bio/featured-project

About John Kempf
John Kempf is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA). A top expert in biological and regenerative farming, John founded AEA in 2006 to help fellow farmers by providing the education, tools, and strategies that will have a global effect on the food supply and those who grow it.

Through intense study and the knowledge gleaned from many industry leaders, John is building a comprehensive systems-based approach to plant nutrition – a system solidly based on the sciences of plant physiology, mineral nutrition, and soil microbiology.

Support For This Show & Helping You Grow
Since 2006, AEA has been on a mission to help growers become more resilient, efficient, and profitable with regenerative agriculture.

AEA works directly with growers to apply its unique line of liquid mineral crop nutrition products and biological inoculants. Informed by cutting-edge plant and soil data-gathering techniques, AEA's science-based programs empower farm operations to meet the crop quality markers that matter the most.

AEA has created real and lasting change on millions of acres with its products and data-driven services by working hand-in-hand with growers to produce healthier soil, stronger crops, and higher profits.

Beyond working on the ground with growers, AEA leads in regenerative agriculture media and education, producing and distributing the popular and highly-regarded Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, inspiring webinars, and other educational content that serve as go-to resources for growers worldwide.

Learn more about AEA's regenerative programs and products: https://www.advancingecoag.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, friends. This is John. Welcome back to the regenerative agriculture podcast, where we have all kinds of great conversations related to soil health and plant health and improving biodiversity.
0:09.9	Today I'm back with a previous guest, someone who I have a great amount of admiration and respect and appreciation for all the work that he and his team have continued to do.
0:18.8	That's John Lundgren from McDiasis.
0:21.1	Jonathan, thank you for being here. Thanks for all the work you're doing.
0:25.2	Last time you were here, we had a great conversation around some of the challenges that
0:30.9	pesticide research and some of the historical work that you'd done. And I think it was a year or two
0:36.6	after our conversation, you launched the Thousand Farms Initiative. And I think it was a year or two after our conversation,
0:38.3	you launched the Thousand Farms Initiative. And I've been watching that with a lot of interest.
0:42.6	So why don't you catch us up to date? Tell us a little bit about what you've been up to and all the
0:46.6	good stuff that's going on. Yeah. Oh, life isn't boring. It's not dull. I'll tell you that.
0:55.2	We, yeah. Once it gets to that point, it's time to do something different.
1:00.9	Yeah. Yeah. We kind of saw that there was a lot of farms that were doing some really amazing things.
1:15.2	But we're scientists, right? And I thought that there needed to be data behind it, that that could help, that science
1:21.9	had a role to play in this whole thing, that we could take and understand what these farmers were creating,
1:30.3	put numbers behind it so that people that had never really experienced that before could say
1:36.3	that there was some credibility behind these farmers' claims about regenerative food systems.
1:42.3	But what I didn't, I mean, I think in my gut, I probably knew this had to be a big study.
1:51.2	But I didn't quite understand how big it had to be in order to describe in an empirical fashion a continent's food system.
2:02.0	That's what we ended up setting.
2:04.4	That's a pretty big bite.
2:06.0	It was a very big bite.
2:08.0	I mean, we've been on 35 food systems, cropping systems at this point,
	...

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