"Children are the anchor that places you in time."
A love that began in the laboratory and ended in a shared regenerative agriculture project.
Farmer Francesc Font fell in love with his partner, Nuri, in an unusual setting: in a university laboratory analyzing soils. They were both studying agronomy and were in the same group. Before becoming a couple, they had been friends for many years. It was during their final year projects, when they shared a lab, that they also began to share a life project. For them, a perfectly romantic opportunity was to visit Cap de Creus and analyze the soils together. "It's interesting because over the years we've ended up using that data to transform our family's conventional farming project into a regenerative agriculture project," Font explains. "In the first years of our relationship with Nuri, we realized that what we'd been taught at university wasn't aligned with what we thought the world and agriculture would be like. We're happy knowing that with each season we'll leave much better soils and a farm for our children, if they ever want to continue our work."
Regenerative agriculture is one that reverses climate change by restoring organic matter and biodiversity to degraded soil. It's a philosophy—leaving the best of what you've found—that the farmer also tries to apply to personal relationships. "Nuri and I have been together for twenty years, and like all couples, there are difficult moments, but as a couple, we try to do the same thing we do with the land: continually regenerate the relationship and avoid degeneration. Sometimes weeds or pests also appear, and we try to combat them as best we can, always with a long-term perspective."
Their passion for regenerative agriculture has taken them all over the world, sometimes bringing the whole family with them. "Seven years ago, we took the kids out of school and went to Australia for three months. We worked on farms in exchange for food and sleep. One day one of us worked and the other spent time with the kids, and the next day we swapped places. It was a very enriching experience for everyone. Children are the anchor that grounds you in the future," she said. "I'm happy to think that perhaps we can leave a slightly better world for our children and, above all, leave better children for this world."
