Yes, I speak publicly—on podcasts, from stages, and in print—about better ways to grow food.

But I never villainize farmers. Not conventional farmers. Not farmers locked into systems they did not design. Not farmers working with razor-thin margins, massive equipment debt, weather risk, and policy pressure stacked against them.

No one wants to be the generation that loses the farm.

And yet that is exactly what is unfolding across Europe right now...and quietly, steadily, in the United States as well.

Over the past two years, farmers across Europe have mobilized at a scale that should dominate headlines. Instead, it has been treated as background noise.

In the Netherlands, farmers have protested nitrogen rules that would force mass farm closures—even among low-input and regenerative operations. In France, farmers have blocked highways and surrounded Paris with tractors, protesting fuel taxes, land-use restrictions, and impossible compliance burdens. In Germany, tens of thousands of farmers drove tractors into Berlin over the removal of diesel tax exemptions that many farms rely on to survive. In Belgium, farmers dumped produce and manure outside EU buildings in Brussels. In Poland, Romania, and Hungary, farmers have protested cheap imports and regulations that apply to domestic producers but not foreign competitors.

These are not isolated events. They are sustained, multinational protests by people who feed entire continents.

And yet the coverage is minimal, fleeting, or framed as an inconvenient disruption rather than an existential warning.

European farmers are not protesting environmental responsibility. Many already practice conservation, reduced inputs, rotational grazing, cover cropping, and soil-building methods.

What they are rejecting is regulation divorced from reality.

Under policies driven by the European Union and initiatives like the European Green Deal, farmers face rules that impose arbitrary nitrogen caps per acre, treat synthetic nitrogen and organic nitrogen as if they are identical, require land to be taken out of production regardless of local context, and demand extensive reporting and compliance that small and mid-size farms cannot absorb.

This is no longer about practices. There are fully regenerative farmers—no chemicals, integrated livestock, biologically active soils—who are still being regulated to death.