 Hello everyone my name is Lea and I live with my partner Martin and our toddler Puk here in this year's on our land in central Portugal. We've 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's when we found this place here in central Portugal. So 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 they moved away to the cities to find work and so for the last few decades it was quite neglected. This last year we've been working really hard to get some life back into this land and in this video I want to show you five projects that we have done to regenerate this land. So the first thing that we had to do when we came onto this land is we had to cut down all 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 two three meters tall. So we got to work, we streamed down all the brush and all the broom and all the rock rows which was quite a lot of work. As soon as we took it down and we had a little bit of rain there was grass started growing and we had a beautiful spring with lots of wild flowers. So 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. So one of the things that we did with all the brush that we cut down is that we put it into lines. Here in our olive field we place 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 trees that we might plant in the future. The dry season in Portugal is increasingly long and hotter 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're doing that. In addition to that we will create some ponds all over the property as well as maybe put some key lines on our other hillside. Another thing we do a lot here is composting so all that brush that we cut down we put it in the rows and that helps it to compost down and scattered 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 years. The traditional way of dealing with this much that brush would be to burn it and even though that does make a very quick tidy space it also burns all the nutrients and this way we can feed it back to all of 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've done here on the land that's in line with regenerative agriculture is that we've done a low till policy. Except for here in the garden we haven't really tilled the soil anywhere. Here in Portugal it's very traditional to plow the fields a couple times a year. This is done to keep the grasses low because they are a fire risk but also the other thinking is that it opens up the soil and that way when rain does fall it can permeate easily. It does make for a very bare and low nutrient topsoil so what we've decided to do is do a chop and drop which means that we've cut down all the grass that came up during the winter and now it's laying on top of the soil to protect it from the harsh Portuguese summer sun as well as over time it breaks down and it feeds back into the soil so in the coming years we can build our top soil that way. The final point that I have for you today is one for the future now though we've cut down so much brush we can think about animals that can graze amongst our cork oak and our olive trees. This is a system called silver pasture 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 and I hope it maybe even gave you some inspiration on what you could do on your lands to help regenerate the soil. Thanks for watching.