Star of Disney’s Farm Rebellion issues new rallying call

“Farmers are the custodians of our world and future generations,” says the star of popular Disney+ documentary Farm Rebellion, Benedikt Bösel, on the latest episode of Inside Ideas.

Which makes sense – they are the stewards of our nourishment systems, the choices they make today have life and death consequences for the future of our planet.

“We have developed an agricultural system that is very, very good at producing masses at the cheapest possible price. But that came at the cost of soil health, biodiversity loss, and water depletion,” says Bösel.

This is systemic, this is ecological, this is social innovation.

Benedikt Bösel

On his Gut&Bösel farm near Berlin, the former investment banker has been busy redressing the balance. With the support of his fellow rebels, Bösel’s team – who founded the Finck Foundation in 2021, have taken 3000 hectares of sandy, dry German soils and transformed it into a thriving ecosystem, showing that regenerative farming practices can transform degraded soils to create resilient ecosystems.

Teamwork

A strong advocate for collaboration between farmers, scientists, and policymakers as a means to drive systemic change in the agricultural sector, Bösel also wants humanity to enjoy a more visceral relationship with our soils. Throughout his regenerative farming journey he has placed huge importance on this, inviting people along to the farm to see and better understand what they are doing.

“We need to touch people’s hearts,” he tells me. “The DNA of our farm has always been to invite people here and to hopefully touch their hearts, make them understand why we are doing what we’re doing. If people actually experience something emotionally and they touch it, they feel it, they smell it, that changes you, that sticks with you.”

With these actions Bösel, author of the bestseller Rebels of the Earth, is trying to help society recognise the value of agriculture beyond food production, in a bid to increase support for the transition to regenerative practices, as he pursues his mission to promote the need for systemic, ecological, and social innovation in agriculture.

Bösel also points to support received from organisations like Follow Food and the Schmidt Heine family in the growth of his farm, as the types of partnerships that are key to growing regenerative farming.

And for Bösel it’s very simple: “agriculture and farming have to be at the epicenter of coolness”. And you can collect some cool points by watching the show, where you’ll learn more about regenerative farming – find out why it’s not all bad news for cows – and discover the true value of agriculture.

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