ENG #68 Richard Perkins, Unscripted: A Live Q&A From Sillegården

At the end of the Regenerative Agriculture Festival, we kept the mics rolling. What follows isn’t a curated interview — it’s a full hour of the crowd putting real questions to Richard Perkins, unscripted and unfiltered, straight off the stage.

It might be the most useful episode we’ve published. One question about raising broiler chickens turns into a masterclass on doing right by the animal without letting “industry standard” be the excuse — Richard weighs every flock, every week, and treats data as the actual price of welfare. Another, about an old Christmas tree plantation, becomes a deep dive into agroforestry: hardy tree hazel as rootstock, chickens ranging safely beneath grafted hazelnut trees, and why so many “food forest” projects look beautiful and feed almost no one. Someone asks how to fix waterlogged, degraded soil, and Richard skips straight past the fertilizer aisle: a single particle of humus holds four particles of water, so the fix is always biology, never drainage.

Then it turns personal, in the way only a live, unscripted room can pull out of someone. Richard is blunt about the brutal math of hiring on a small farm — a trained worker needs to add roughly a million kronor in turnover before their salary makes sense — and about trusting what people’s hands do over what their mouths say. He talks about spending on marketing the way Coca-Cola does, not assuming good eggs sell themselves: one video of his hands lifting eggs from the mobile coop has made him hundreds of thousands of euros over the years, more than any advert he’s ever paid for.

A few things that stood out:

* Regeneration has a “critical mass” — a handful of grazing animals changes nothing, but hundreds moved daily can flip an ecosystem in a single season

* The unglamorous truth about hiring small: watch what people’s hands do when they think nobody’s looking, then put everything you have behind your best people, not your average ones

* His answer to “global weirding” — his term for the erratic, shifting seasons he’s watched for over a decade — isn’t anxiety about the planet, it’s excellence on the acre in front of you

It’s an hour that moves from broiler welfare to marketing budgets to farmer mental health and never once loses its footing.

One question to sit with while you listen: if the best farmers you know aren’t the ones with the prettiest Instagram, but the ones who plan obsessively and never stop watching — what does that actually say about what makes a farm work?

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