Just weeks ago, I published a piece on Substack titled: Two 'Regen' Farmers Walk Into An Oval Office Debate Blind-Sided – and exit with the 'most support we’ve ever had’. Those two farmers are legends. Will Harris from White Oak Pastures in Georgia, and my guest today, former USDA scientist, now farmer and independent researcher in South Dakota, Dr Jonathan Lundgren.
Jon’s story is the stuff of blockbuster films – kind of like the Michael Lewis stories that inspired The Big Short and Moneyball. Jon was a gun researcher with the USDA, but as he came to find deep concerns with chemical use in agriculture, he came to find deeper concerns with the political suppression of that research.
It was actually while receiving a distinguished award from another President that it hit him, ‘playing by the rules of the game wasn’t going to change how we produce food.’ Profound upheaval ensued. He quit his job and began planning what became a successfully crowdfunded farm and research foundation, propelled by a vision to transform food systems.
Just the other day, Blue Dasher Farm and Ecdysis Foundation celebrated their 10th birthdays, and a brewing paradigm change in food, farming and the health of people and planet.
And the Foundation’s 1000 Farms initiative, whose extraordinary findings proved pivotal to the Executive Order that emerged from the Oval Office that day, and now believed to be the largest database of regenerative food systems in the world, is going global, including to Australia, without any cost to farmers, or for that matter, to the rest of us.
Jon joins me at dusk on the farm.
If you’d like to go straight to a particular part of our conversation, or essentially view a table of contents, you can navigate via the chapter markers and transcript.
Recorded 27 August 2026.
Title image by Katie Bell at the Regenerate Conference 2024 (where ep231 was recorded – A Force for Mending?).
Register your farm via the 1000 Farms link above.
Update on the situation at Kachana Station, as a bid is launched to save the donkeys. Thanks to everyone who has responded with your support.
Music:
Open Wide, by Russo feat. Roy Dotan (from Artlist).
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden.
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