Commensalist

05/09/2026

🩲🔬 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐠 𝐍𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐥 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝟐,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐢𝐥 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡.

The cool thing: you can do it yourself in your own garden (with your own underwear) 😅

Honestly? It is one of the most brilliant pieces of citizen science I have seen in years.

Professor Marcel van der Heijden and his team at Agroscope and the University of Zurich recruited 1,000 citizens and farmers across Switzerland.

Together they buried 2,000 pairs of cotton underpants and 12,000 teabags in fields, gardens and forests across the country.

The idea is simple and genius. Cotton breaks down through microbial activity in the soil.

The faster the underpants decompose, the more biologically active and healthy the soil. After a set period, they dug them up, compared the breakdown rate and mapped soil health across the entire country.

The results gave researchers a nationwide picture of soil biodiversity and what drives it.

Organic and regeneratively farmed fields showed significantly more decomposition, meaning more life in the soil. Intensively managed fields showed far less.

Alive soil eats your underwear. Dead soil leaves it mostly intact.

The Ig Nobel Prize honours research that first makes you laugh, then makes you think. This one does both.

Because behind the absurdity is a genuinely important message: we are farming the life out of our soils, and most people have no idea.

A pair of buried underpants communicates that faster than any scientific paper ever could.

Congratulations to Marcel van der Heijden, Franz Bender, Pia Viviani, Atlant Bieri and the entire team + all the citizens 🌳

👉🏼 We design regenerative landscapes and farms where the soil is alive enough to eat your underwear: www.commensalist.com

👉🏼 More on why living soil is everything, in my book:
🇳🇱 https://www.standaardboekhandel.be/p/red-eerst-jezelf-en-dan-pas-de-planeet-9789020970616
🇬🇧 https://books.by/louisdj

Via Marcel van der Heijden. If you are the copyright holder and want us to delete or properly attribute this content, please let us know.

04/09/2026

A simple nature prescription made a remarkable difference. Melissa Lem shares how spending more time outdoors and reconnecting with others helped one patient feel dramatically better in just a month. Sometimes the best medicine starts outside. 🌿
🎧 From the Food Forest Podcast – Ep. 48 w/ Melissa Lem
Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/food-forest-podcast/id1870837259
Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/5ylFpxff6dfY4PsRq8ZSc8
YouTube – https://youtu.be/hBQWQ28HCQo
✏️ Show notes – https://www.commensalist.com/food-forest-podcast/episode-48

04/09/2026

🌲🫁 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐩 𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐬𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭? 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐧, 𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐨𝐨.

The chemicals trees release into the air have a name: phytoncides.

Volatile oils like alpha-pinene, beta-pinene and limonene, emitted to defend the tree against insects and bacteria.

Dr. Qing Li, immunologist at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, spent more than twenty years measuring them in forest air and found them almost entirely absent from city air.

Then he measured what happened when people breathed them.

In a series of studies published in PubMed and Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, Li found that people who spent time in forests showed significant increases in natural killer cell activity, the immune cells your body uses to fight tumours and virus-infected cells.

Stress hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline, dropped measurably. The increased NK activity lasted for more than seven days after a single forest trip.

He then repeated the experiment in a hotel room, vaporising phytoncides from hinoki cypress oil while people slept.

Same results. No forest required. Just the chemicals the trees release.

The evidence base is still growing and the studies are mostly small, but the mechanism is consistent and biologically plausible: phytoncides enter the bloodstream through the lungs, reduce stress hormones and activate the immune system.

A walk in the forest is not just good for the soul. It is measurably, physiologically good for the body. And cities designed around trees rather than concrete give people that effect every single day. 🌳

👉🏼 We design gardens, food forests and landscapes full of trees: www.commensalist.com

👉🏼 More on why trees are the answer, in my book:
🇳🇱 https://www.standaardboekhandel.be/p/red-eerst-jezelf-en-dan-pas-de-planeet-9789020970616

🇬🇧 https://books.by/louisdj



Thanks Seth Itzkan for sending this. If you are the copyright holder and want us to delete or properly attribute this content, please let us know.

03/09/2026

🌱 She saves farmers $25 billion every year. It took 40 years studying microscopic bacteria.

Dr. Mariangela Hungria is a Brazilian microbiologist who spent her entire career at Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, asking a question most people thought was ridiculous: could naturally occurring soil bacteria replace synthetic nitrogen fertilizer?

When she started in the late 1970s, everyone told her she was crazy. Soil microbiology was an afterthought.

Fertility meant chemicals. Nobody believed microbes could compete with industrial fertilizers.

She kept going anyway.

Her breakthrough: certain soil bacteria, particularly rhizobia and Azospirillum brasilense, form a symbiotic relationship with crop roots and convert atmospheric nitrogen directly into a form plants can use.

No factory. No fossil fuels. Just a microbe doing what it has always done.

The results are staggering. Her bacterial inoculants now cover more than 40 million hectares of Brazilian farmland.

The treatment costs around $2 to $3 per hectare. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer costs $30 to $50 per hectare for the same effect.

Brazilian farmers save an estimated $25 billion a year in input costs. And the technology prevents roughly 230 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions annually.

In 2025 she was awarded the World Food Prize, the most prestigious prize in agriculture. The first Brazilian woman to receive it.

She calls it the Micro Green Revolution. And she is right. The original Green Revolution fed billions through chemistry.

This one feeds billions through biology, and it does it cheaper, cleaner and in a way that builds the soil instead of depleting it.

🎧 We discussed the science behind soil bacteria and agroforestry with her in our food forest podcast:
https://www.commensalist.com/nl/food-forest-podcast/episode-40

👉🏼 More on why living soil is everything, in my book:
🇳🇱 https://www.standaardboekhandel.be/p/red-eerst-jezelf-en-dan-pas-de-planeet-9789020970616

🇬🇧 https://books.by/louisdj

Via . If you are the copyright holder and want us to delete, please let us know.

02/09/2026

🌿 New Episode: Food Forest Podcast – Melissa Lem: How to Prescribe Nature Instead of Pills

What if one of the most powerful prescriptions didn't come from a pharmacy – but from nature? In this episode, host Louis De Jaeger speaks with Dr. Melissa Lem, Canadian family physician and pioneer in nature prescribing, about bringing the healing power of nature into modern healthcare.

Together, they explore the science behind nature prescriptions, the health benefits of green spaces, and how food forests and gardening can become part of preventative care. The conversation also looks at the growing global movement to reconnect people with nature – for the benefit of both human and planetary health.

In this episode, Melissa explores:
🌿 Why nature is powerful medicine
🏥 The science behind nature prescriptions
🌳 How green spaces improve physical and mental health
🌱 Food forests and gardening as preventative healthcare
🌍 Reconnecting people with nature for a healthier future
✨ Why healthy ecosystems create healthier communities

🎧 Listen to Episode 48 now:
ApplePodcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/food-forest-podcast/id1870837259
Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/5ylFpxff6dfY4PsRq8ZSc8
YouTube – https://youtu.be/hBQWQ28HCQo
✏️ Show notes & more: https://www.commensalist.com/food-forest-podcast/episode-48

02/09/2026

🌱 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐍𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐢𝐞𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐬.

Iain Tolhurst has been farming organically for forty years on ground with barely any topsoil. Mostly stone. And yet vegetables have been coming off that land for four decades.

His answer to that ground: bring as much life onto the field as possible. Between his vegetable rows stand dense lines of trees and shrubs, and they are not there for decoration.

"The trees are really important because they bring in fungi that we know are beneficial to the soil. All soils, even the most depleted ones, contain nutrients. The key to unlocking those is fungal activity."

Through the trees and the wood he harvests from them, that fungal activity has grown, and his plants can finally reach the nutrition that was always there, locked in the stone beneath them.

There is another reason those trees stand where they do. The weather remains the great unknown, says Tolhurst, so a farm has to be resilient. Trees are one of the things that make that possible.

Poor soil, in other words, is no excuse. You will never get the maximum out of it, but you can absolutely produce well on it.

"It is about bringing the environment to our farm, and making the farm part of the environment." — Iain Tolhurst

This is one of the stories in Eat More Trees. Farmers who found a way, not despite the limitations of their land, but through them. 🌳

👉🏼 Eat More Trees is in Belgian cinemas from 9 September:
https://kinepolis.be/nl/content/film-facts-eat-more-trees/

👉🏼 www.eatmoretrees.org

02/09/2026

01/09/2026

👣🌿 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐮𝐥.

Look at this photo. Somebody planned a path here. Drew it, costed it, poured it in concrete. Then everyone who actually needed to get somewhere walked around it, and within months the grass gave up and a new path appeared where the first one should have been.

There's something wonderfully honest about that.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐬
A record of the gap between how a space was designed and how it's lived in.

• Nobody organised it
• Nobody voted on it
• Hundreds of people independently found the same shortcut and wore it into the ground

It's the closest thing a landscape has to an opinion. And the best designers read it as feedback, not damage. Some universities even wait a year before paving anything, just to watch where people actually walk.

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐈 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤
Design should begin with real needs. Where do people want to walk, sit, gather, rest? Get that right and a space feels effortless.

And here's the part I love: beauty and function are not a trade-off. The most beautiful landscapes are usually the ones that quietly do exactly what people need. When you design from need and craft it with care, you get both. 🌿

The lesson from every desire path is simple. Watch how life wants to flow, then design with it instead of against it.

That's exactly how we approach gardens and landscapes. Want one that works and feels beautiful? We can help 👉 www.Commensalist.com

📗 Read more in my book:

🇬🇧 ENG: https://books.by/louisdj

🇳🇱 NL: https://www.standaardboekhandel.be/p/red-eerst-jezelf-en-dan-pas-de-planeet-9789020970616



Source: shared from .

Disclaimer: shared for educational purposes. If you are the copyright holder and would like credit or removal, just send me a message.

01/09/2026

One of THE regenerative agriculture pioneers just left this planet 🚜

Peace, Wendell Berry. In the same soil you farmed.

Wendell Berry passed over yesterday at the age of 92, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, on the same land his family had farmed for generations and that he farmed himself for more than forty years.

He wrote: "The world is not given by our fathers. It is borrowed from our children."

Berry was a farmer, a poet, a novelist and an essayist. More than fifty books. More than six decades of saying the same thing in a hundred different ways: that the land is not a resource to be extracted, but a living community to be cared for.

That a farm is not a factory. That a community cannot survive without farmers who know their land and love it.

His 1977 book The Unsettling of America was not a gentle critique. It was a direct indictment of industrial agriculture, of the myth that bigger is better, of the systematic destruction of the family farm and the rural community.

It is credited with helping lay the intellectual foundation of what we now call regenerative agriculture.

But he did not only write about it. He farmed it. With horses, not tractors.

He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2010. He was arrested in 2011 for protesting mountaintop removal mining. He taught English at the University of Kentucky. He raised grain and sheep. He wrote poems on Friday mornings.

All of it from the same farm. All of it in service of the same idea: that how we treat the land is how we treat each other. And that neither can be treated carelessly without consequence.

The regenerative agriculture movement owes him a debt that cannot be fully repaid. We can only continue the work.

👉🏼 More on why the land is everything, in my book:
🇳🇱 https://www.standaardboekhandel.be/p/red-eerst-jezelf-en-dan-pas-de-planeet-9789020970616
🇬🇧 https://books.by/louisdj



For educational purposes, if you're the copyright owner of this image, please send me dm

01/09/2026

🌱 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐔𝐒 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.

For thousands of years, saving a seed from this year's harvest to plant next spring was simply what humans did. It was the quiet foundation of our food.

Over the last few decades that changed. As corporate seed patents spread, saving and replanting certain seeds became a legal minefield. Growers could be pushed to buy new seed every single season, under the threat of litigation. The message was blunt: the seed no longer belongs to the person planting it.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐝
In 2021, Maine voters pushed back at the ballot box. They passed Question 3 with almost 61%, making Maine the first US state to put a "Right to Food" directly into its constitution.

The amendment protects:

• The right to save and exchange seeds
• The right to grow, raise, harvest and produce your own food
• The right to consume the food of your own choosing

(as long as you don't trespass, steal or harm the land)

𝐋𝐞𝐭'𝐬 𝐛𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬
A state constitution can't erase federal patent law, so this doesn't undo corporate seed patents overnight. But as a statement of food sovereignty, it's powerful. It plants a flag: the right to feed yourself belongs to you, not to a boardroom.

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐈 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬
A seed you can replant is independence. Every jar of saved seed on a shelf is a small act of freedom, and a hedge against a food system that would rather you rented your dinner forever. 🌾

You don't need a constitutional amendment to start. Save a few seeds this autumn. Grow something you can replant.

Designing gardens and landscapes that actually feed you, seeds and all, is exactly what we do. Want one? We can help 👉 www.Commensalist.com

📗 Read more in my book:

🇬🇧 ENG: https://books.by/louisdj

🇳🇱 NL: https://www.standaardboekhandel.be/p/red-eerst-jezelf-en-dan-pas-de-planeet-9789020970616



Source: Maine Question 3 (2021), the Right to Food constitutional amendment, passed with 60.84%. See Ballotpedia and Maine Public. Post via .

Disclaimer: shared for educational purposes. If you are the copyright holder and would like credit or removal, just send me a message.