There is life here, ”says Benedikt Bösel, reaching into the damp soil.
The field looks inhospitable on this dreary morning.
The sun barely makes it through the clouds, and a cold wind sweeps over the hill somewhere between Berlin and Frankfurt an der Oder.
The farmer is crouching in front of a row of narrow trees that divide the length of the field.
With his hands in the ground, he suddenly pauses and pulls something out of the ground: a writhing earthworm.
The inconspicuous creatures are important to Bösel's endeavors here.
In order to preserve the sandy arable soil on his castle estate in Alt Madlitz, the 36-year-old is experimenting with forms of agriculture that replace synthetic fertilizers and pesticides with different arable crops, cows and trees.
But it is not a hobby, but should one day pay off.
In this way, the 1100 hectares of arable land of the farmer, who used to work as an investment banker, should become more fertile, even more productive, and at the same time defy extreme weather conditions.
Such cultivation methods are called regenerative or regenerative agriculture.
It started in a hot summer
The idea is not new. The farmer and publicist Robert Rodale propagated the idea in North America as early as the 1970s. Today, the world's largest food company, Nestlé, invests billions in regenerative projects. Danone, Kellogg's and Unilever are also active in this area. In Europe, on the other hand, regenerative cultivation methods are only just beginning. Benedikt Bösel is a pioneer.
It all started for him three years ago in the summer. Back then, Bösel was in the same place as it is now. From the hill, on which no trees grew at that time, he looked at measly ears of grain on parched stalks and a drought-torn earth. Now the sandy soils and the comparatively low rainfall in Alt Madlitz have always been a problem for conventional agriculture. But she couldn't cope with the hot summer of 2018. "That's when I realized that I had to change something," says Bösel. A short time later he started the first experiments - with scientific support.
Katharina Helming, for example, works at the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Research in Müncheberg with the sustainability assessment of land use changes. For the professor, many of the regenerative methods are not really new, but they have been forgotten. Even Bösel's father did not go completely new ways when he converted the farm to organic farming in 2004. Since then, old grains such as emmer and spelled have been thriving here instead of monocultures. But now opposite peas bloom in brilliant white.
Their roots loosen the soil in the deep and stimulate the soil life. “There are more organisms on a teaspoon of soil than there are people on earth,” explains Bösel. The earthworms are only their most visible representatives here. There are also all kinds of arthropods, bacteria, fungi and myriads of unicellular organisms. “All of the soil's organisms have not yet been researched,” says Helming. They have the extremely important task of forming the humus, the mostly organic substance of the top soil layer that supplies plants with nutrients, stores water and, due to their high carbon content - which without them would end up as CO2 in the atmosphere - also has an impact on the climate. “Humus is the engine of the entire system,” says Katharina Helming. On light soils, such as that of the Mark Brandenburg,however, there is particularly little of it.