Regenerative Soils Series – Caroline Grindrod in Conversation with Abby Rose

Regenerative Soils Series · In conversation with Abby Rose

Traditional farm consultancy hands over a list: these inputs, this schedule, this prescription. Caroline Grindrod thinks that list is the problem. In Vidacycle’s Regenerative Soils Series, she sits down with Abby Rose to make the case that real regeneration begins not with a product, but with a way of seeing.

A prescription quietly removes the farmer from their own conversation with the land. It swaps someone else’s judgement in for the farmer’s autonomy, and it treats the farm as a machine to be corrected rather than a living system to be understood. For Caroline — regenerative farm designer, coach, and co-founder of Roots to Regeneration — that swap is where most transitions quietly fail.

Her own model puts the numbers in an order that tends to surprise people. A regenerative approach, she argues, is 50% mindset, 40% farm design, and only 10% practices.

The practices — the rotations, the multispecies leys, the changes to grazing — are the part everyone wants to talk about. They are also the smallest part. What carries the weight is the shift in how a farmer thinks, and the design decisions that flow from it. Get the mindset and the design right and the practices follow almost of their own accord. Reach for the practices first, with the old machine-thinking still in place, and they rarely hold.

So Caroline’s work is less about prescribing and more about reteaching: how to reconnect with the farm, how to think in whole systems rather than line items, and how to tune into the observation feedback loop that drives a genuine transition. Watch the land closely. Read what it tells you. Act on it, then watch again. Do that for long enough and something shifts — the soil itself becomes the teacher.

The farmer who can read their own land doesn’t need a consultant’s list. The soil is already the mentor.

Where Soilmentor comes in

That loop only works if you are actually recording what you see. This is where Soilmentor, the observation app built by Abby Rose at Vidacycle, earns its name. Rather than handing back a generic prescription, it gives the farmer a structured way to build their own observation framework and feedback loop — earthworm and dung beetle counts, water infiltration tests, plant diversity, the small repeated measures that, taken together, tell you what your particular ground is doing. The soil does the mentoring; Soilmentor simply helps you keep listening, season after season, in the specific context of your farm.

In this episode

Abby Rose and Caroline cover:

1. How observation has, in Caroline’s experience, improved both farm profitability and resilience
2. Practical tips and frameworks for beginning a regenerative transition
3. Why systems-thinking is the key to making that transition stick

The throughline is the one that runs through all of Caroline’s work: regeneration isn’t a kit you buy or a checklist you follow. It’s the confidence, the design literacy, and the tools to hold the conversation with your own land — and to keep holding it long after any consultant has gone home.

Written in dialogue with Claude (Anthropic). Ideas, arguments and experience are mine; AI helped research, structure and articulate them.