Building a regenerative food system in Europe, with Patricia Wiklund

This week I want to build on the panel discussion that I started previously in the panel episode with the group from the Alpbach forum. In that conversation we looked at various visions on what a regenerative food system could look like from representatives from Nestle, Agrana, and a conservation farmer.

Today I want to bring another perspective into this idea of building healthy and resilient food systems from a friend of mine who has been working on this by connecting stakeholders throughout the entire food value chain in Finland.

Patricia Wiklund is the CEO of Invenire, a making ideas-happen-agency working with food & the bioeconomy, circularity, biodiversity & thriving rural landscapes. She has been instrumental in creating a “living laboratory” on the Åland Islands in southwest Finland. She is also a hub leader in the Baltic region of the Savory Institute Network promoting holistic land management, and a partner in Gens, a company working for upward spiraling farm life.

Patricia and I met almost two years ago during my work co-coordinating the first Climate Farming conference. She along with three other fascinating colleagues of hers from Finland attended the event and were my first window into the budding regenerative agriculture movement in that area of Europe, which I otherwise knew next to nothing about.

Since then I've been looking for an opportunity to follow up with her in order to see how their projects and collaborations develop. It turns out Patricia and her team have been advancing some fascinating experiments in connecting members all through the production, processing, and retail sides of the food web in her area and this is the main focus of our conversation in this session.

We also cover the challenges and opportunities of working in a small microcosm like the Åland islands where she works, and some of the advantages of dealing with food systems that haven’t yet been over developed and retain some of their traditional structures like local markets and diverse local production. Patricia also shares insights into how we can all work, in very tangible ways, to become active and participating citizens in our food systems instead of just consumers.

This session holds a lot of new insights and options for people who care to become more resilient on a community level in terms of food security in ways that have nothing to do with planting a veggie garden or becoming a farmer, many of which are relevant even to those of us who do produce food.