The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast
A that explores how land, capital, and community come together in practice.
Hosted by Neal Collins, the show features conversations with landowners, developers, investors, and practitioners navigating the real-world challenges of regenerative development, including financing, governance, land stewardship, and long-term value creation.
Rather than focusing on theory or trends, the podcast examines the tradeoffs, constraints, and decisions that determine whether regenerative projects actually endure.
The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast
Redefining Luxury: Soil, Sovereignty, and Community with Thomas Patton of Lega Vera Farm Village
Modern life offers speed and convenience, but often at the cost of connection to the systems that sustain us. In this episode, regenerative rancher and developer Thomas Patton joins us from just outside Panama City, Panama to explore what happens when land, food, and daily life are brought back into relationship.
Thomas shares the evolution of his family’s 7,000 hectare property from conventional agriculture to the Coquira Soil Project, and how that work expanded into Lega Vera—a farm village designed around soil health, food sovereignty, and community. This conversation explores regeneration as a practical pathway forward and a redefinition of luxury rooted in resilience, stewardship, and belonging.
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This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:
Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.
Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.
The greatness of having a farm. I have learned how enriching life at a farm can be. I have learned how liberating and how much freedom you have when you have access to your own small ecosystem where you and your family are the only ones that that that control those variables. You control your water, you control your air, you control your food, and that is priceless.
SPEAKER_01:A show about human environments and how they can be used as a force for good. Conversations that educate and inspire people looking for a different way to do real estate. I'm Neil Collins, and on this episode, I'm joined by a regenerative rancher Thomas Patton, someone who is reshaping what's possible for large-scale regenerative agriculture in the tropics, while creating a lasting legacy with a new agrihood called Legivera. There are farms that have become legendary in the regenerative movement. Names like Polyface, White Oak Pastures, Brown's Ranch in Apricot Lane. These are more than just farms, they're icons. They've inspired a new generation to dig deep, build soil, embrace biodiversity, and feed their communities with nutritious food grown in harmony with nature. And now, a new name is rising in that lineage, the Kokira Soil Project, located just outside of Panama City in the country of Panama. Back in 2017, Thomas Patton took the helm to his family's farm, disheartened by what decades of conventional practices had done to the land and its vitality. Plantation-style pineapple, overgrazed pastures, diminishing returns. It just wasn't working. For the land, for the people, or for the future. What Thomas and his wife Adriana have done since then is nothing short of transformative. Through regenerative ranching, permaculture-based food forests, and a deep commitment to soil health, they've turned Kokira into a thriving living system. They've gone even further, welcoming chefs, school kids, artists, and guests into the experience of the land with agritourism. And now, with their new agrihood development, Legavera Farm Village, they're setting a bold vision by redefining luxury as that rooted in health, connection, and community. This is a story of returning to the land, not just to steward it, but to heal it, and in the process to build something beautiful for generations to come. So without further ado, let's get into it with Thomas Patton of the CoCure Soil Project in Legivera. Thomas, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I have been wanting to have you on because there is a couple stories that we need to get through. You and I have been working together for some time now to create this new farm village and bring it out to the world. Why don't you introduce yourself and just like who you are and where you're calling in from right now? And then we're gonna we're gonna dive deep into some family background here. But why don't you say hi to the audience first?
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Hi Neil. Hi, audience. Thank you for the invitation, Neil. I also have been looking forward to this interview because you know there's a story we we wanna we wanna tell about what we've been working on and why, and what are the inspirations behind it. So thank you to everyone that's tuning in. I hope you you like the legacy that we're starting to build.
SPEAKER_01:Thomas, where are you calling in from?
SPEAKER_00:I'm calling in from the Republic of Panama. Uh I I commute sometimes uh between the farm, which is 45 minutes away from the Tocumen International Airport, and the city, which is 15 minutes from the Tumumen International Airport.
SPEAKER_01:So I I came out in July of this year. I flew into uh the airport, and I was thinking, yeah, okay, Panama City, like it it's gonna be a small uh but bustling Latin American city, and I just was completely uh shocked at it was a really cosmopolitan city, really big towers. Um it is it felt really international. How far back do your roots go there?
SPEAKER_00:Oh no, we've been here since uh well, my grandfather's great-grandfather arrived from Cuba. Originally from Spain, from Spain to Cuba, and from Cuba to Panama. Uh half of his brothers continued the journey to California. That's why they came through Panama. And if I'm not mistaken, he went to California and decided to return to Panama.
SPEAKER_01:So our our story is gonna get into this really incredible farm project that you've been calling Coquita Soil Project. Um, and and we're gonna talk about Lake Overa, which uh is is ultimately where we want to be going with this to showcase really how community building and homes can work hand in hand with regenerative agriculture. But I want to know because the farm itself is just shy of an hour outside of this really metropolitan city. Um so you're within a stone's throw. How how much land and and like what what's the family history to to really start to put together what what will become Kokura Soil Project much further down the line?
SPEAKER_00:Okay, we currently manage, uh my wife and I currently manage uh 2,500 hectares. That is a little more than 5,000 acres. A portion of it is rice land, which we currently rent out to a third party who knows how to do rice a little better than us. And uh most of the rest is managed by us in regenerative cattle grazing. The history goes back to the 1850s. Uh the farm for a while was more like a, you know, like in like a natural preserve. Uh some of it is still a natural preserve. And my grandfather started uh learning about cattle, and he really liked the cattle business. Uh it wasn't his it wasn't his main business. Uh it was uh kind of like his hobby, but he enjoyed cattle. He he reshaped some of the land, and uh we've been trying to we've been trying to work with the cattle ever since.
SPEAKER_01:Is that is that typical there to have cattle in Panama? I'm thinking like tropical forest and there is tropical forest a lot.
SPEAKER_00:Uh it's the Mesoamerican corridor, yeah. So so Panama kind of joins uh North America and South America. Uh for a while it did not exist. It was two different continents, but now we're really going way back. But but yeah, Panama has some cattle. It is Panama has always been a shipping, logistics, and uh service center, including back in the time of my grandfather's great-grandfather. Uh, you know, people passed through Panama all the time. So even though cattle exist and agriculture exists in Panama, most of these farms are, you know, large farms, uh not completely dense or stocked in terms of animals. They aren't really businesses. They're they're mostly, you know, to keep the land, to to have somebody inhabit the land. And when I mean somebody, I mean like no the animals. Uh so Panama is used to being a service uh industry country, and it's part of the problem, part of the problem because we expect uh we expect to keep cuts from everything that that that goes through. But with with with the past couple years and what we've been experimenting, including the pandemic, uh food sovereignty is something that you know uh me, my wife, and my organization decided to take very seriously.
SPEAKER_01:Well, so when did when did you first start stewarding the land out outside of Panama City and Chepo? Were you were you working for your grandfather, or was this something that was expected of you as part of the the lineage?
SPEAKER_00:That's uh that's a that's a tricky question. I went to college uh four years in the US. I arrived uh one evening and I started work the next day. It's it's funny because the next day was a holiday in Panama. It was Labor Day, actually. So I started working on Labor Day, and that kind of marked the rest of my 20 years at the farm. When I was in college, almost uh my last year, I I was set to, you know, I was gonna take my series seven, I was gonna work in in Florida for uh for a financial firm. And something something told me that that wasn't the correct uh uh path. And I asked my grandfather if he had a job for me. My mom begged me not to. I think my grandmother even told me, like, eh, maybe you should try another route. But all my uncles worked for the family, all all my, you know, his sister, my grandmother's sister, like there were a lot of people working for this conglomerate that at that point I, you know, did not really understand who was who. I did not understand, like, you know, the the hierarchy or or or the roles. But that was what I thought was expected. So I did ask for that job, and they said, uh, my grandfather said, well, I just became a partner in a pineapple farm in Panama, and that's a large farm, but but it doesn't hurt if I do a small farm myself. So I started working in a pineapple export uh company. Uh I worked there maybe five years, I think. We we turned cattle products into a four-container per week operation. We exported pineapple to the US sometimes, uh to Europe mostly. We sent uh containers to Rotterdam. And it's funny because at that point I was super excited. I was young, fresh out of college. I thought we were gonna be able to grow that business exponentially and that, you know, a couple, a couple years later I was gonna be a magnet in the pineapple uh industry. But I was tasked with ruining the land. We did not know I was ruining the land, but I was in charge of herbicides, I was in charge of making sure that uh the tractors and the tillers were working nonstop, that we were actually pulverizing the land, because to plant pineapple, uh you kind of want no competition because a pineapple is more like a cactus and and it feeds you know mostly uh from up top. So what we needed to do was clear the land, pulverize it as much as possible, make perfect beds, rows, so we could plant as many pineapples per hectare, uh, and that was a business. Uh erosion was not considered, uh the health of the soil was not considered. We just wanted no competition for the pineapple that was going to end up in the box.
SPEAKER_01:I think you told me about dipping the pineapple in chemical too for freight. And that really turned me off a pineapple.
SPEAKER_00:Everything that has to travel past the concept of eating local uh is probably being sprayed. In the case of pineapple, the crown was sprayed because you could not have any single bug in that crown when the container was opened in the other side of the world. The pineapple was also glossed, it had like a wax with fungicide. All these were, you know, I guess green label pesticides because they're not yellow or red, but still, you know, uh, how many parts per million do you need to actually make you sick? You know, that that's the question that that we keep asking ourselves in the current world. But yeah, every every single food item that you buy that is not produced locally has probably had a lot of extras added to it in order to keep it fresh, to keep it pretty. And uh, it's really a shame because as a pineapple farmer, we discarded so many pineapples that just you know, for one specific flaw or blemish did not make the cut. But you know, I carried them in my in my trunk and I gave them away. And you know, it was great. It was great to give away free pineapples. People loved it.
SPEAKER_01:So you're you're cutting your teeth on monocultured industrial style pineapple cultivation. At what point do you start to have the I don't know, see see a different writing on the wall? Um when do you start to to really move in in a direction towards a different type of agriculture?
SPEAKER_00:Uh the pineapple company was one of the companies of the farm. We had a rice production and and rice mill. Uh we sold, you know, rice in the supermarket, so uh we had the whole chain of rice. We had a big uh pig KFO, concentrated animal feeding operation. It I think it was around 3,000 souls, uh, the female pigs. Uh we had a lot of cattle with in vitro fertilization, with artificial insemination. My grandfather really wanted, you know, in the beginning it was a hobby. Then as he got older, he he really wanted to be an agricultural uh you know superpower. He loved it. He he was happy with it, he was he was curious with all with all the the alternatives that that agriculture brought to real life. But while I was in my last couple of years in the pineapple, I noticed that the farm as a whole was not really healthy. The summers were harder and harder. I did not see hope. I did see investments. I did see uh times when we invested in seeds of grass for the cattle. I did uh notice when we did like these large artificial insemination programs. Uh there was a lot of investment. But as the years went by, uh everything looked a little worse. Uh fast forward a little bit. Uh my grandfather decided to close down the pineapples because you know there was a little bit of profit, but maybe not enough uh for it to be worthwhile. The pineapple operation had about 150 employees. A lot of considerations, a lot of overhead. So we decided to kind of tight trade down uh when we could. We were dealing with a with a variety of pineapple that that was like a new variety, but as always, the people who make money are the the early adopters, and we were kind of almost the early adopters, but not really. And uh the price was kind of coming down worldwide because they were now planting the seed, you know, a lot in Costa Rica, a lot in Africa, uh in Asia. So we decided to titrade down. When we titraded down, uh he from one day to the other, they called him with a cattle problem. I did not like the cattle very much. I did not understand it. Uh they called him with a cattle problem, and he said, Well, that's Thomas' problem, and hung up. So I was uh without without uh my consent, I was transferred over to the cattle industry, uh, which I did not enjoy too much, but uh I knew that that was what he liked, and maybe it would have been easier to work with something that he liked because we would argue a little bit less. So I decided to kind of like, you know, take take take the challenge, uh work a little bit on on the cattle. And at that point I was tasked with uh pedigree certificates. Uh I had to make sure that, you know, uh the bull and and the mother were both both pedigrees, and then I had to uh make sure that I got the certificate for the calf. And I noticed that that also was very inefficient. Uh nobody was paying more for that. My time was, you know, super stretched. Uh these organizations were not keeping up to date with the certificate. So so there was a lot of inefficiency with that. And one of the one of the first events was we wanted to do a artificial insemination program, and they needed all the cows like not pregnant in order to inseminate. And we finally, you know, gathered them all up and checked how many were pregnant, and like 75-80% were pregnant, which is in the cattle business. That's you know, they're pregnant, that's good, that's what we need. And I got I got you know cursed because uh the cattle wasn't ready for the artificial insemination. So that kind of started giving me an idea that maybe we were chasing the wrong, the wrong goal. Uh we were worried about price calves, we were worried about you know the fancy bull and telling other people and other farmers that that was the son of the bull that came from the best uh bloodline in Texas, and and that wasn't paying the bills. So combining that with a little bit of my my hobby, since you know the farm began as my grandfather's hobby, uh, in order to survive the farm that I didn't understand at that point much, my hobby was fitness. Uh fitness, working out, bodybuilding, CrossFit. That that merged into the paleo diet, which we talked about. We owned the CrossFit gym, my wife and and I and and another partner, we owned the CrossFit Gym, and and well, people were asking questions, people were trying to get, people were trying to to up their well-being. Uh we we came across a paleo diet. It worked for us. Uh and and my wife started telling me, like, oh, maybe we should plant our own stuff. And and now, and I was like, oh, that's I I do want to, but that's a little complicated because the farm is very industrial and there's like no staff for that, and you know, there's there's nobody tending to crops. This is this is like a mass industrial thing going on, and tractors here and tractors there. Like, you know, it's not it's not a little like you know, community garden or or or a kitchen garden. So anyway, I started making parallels because my grandfather would always say, Oh, if only corn and soy were subsidized here, like they are in the US, I could feed my cattle in a feedlot and make them more marbled or more tender. And at the same time, the paleo diet, which I was following and reading and like super excited to learn more and more, was telling me, do not eat grain-fed beef, try to make sure it's grass-fed, the omega-3s, the omega-6. So I started seeing that what we were chasing at the farm was the opposite of what we were chasing at the gym. Then it started getting a little bit interesting because I was also, you know, seeking this the well being and, you know, the concept of biohacking back then. Uh, since I worked in a farm and I was most of the day alone in my car, I listened to a lot of podcasts. Back then, this I'm talking 2006, 2007, the initial podcast, uh, all these audiobooks about, you know, different different alternative, you know, what they call alternative, but but actually like the type of knowledge that isn't the mainstream knowledge. And I started finding these grass-fed cattle farmers in the US that had written books and publications. And I read at some point every time you put a tractor between your animals and their food, you're losing money. That was one of the things that I noticed that we were trying to do because we were trying to plant sorghum in a field, and right next to it, we had uh the cattle in a feedlot. In in our version of feedlot. They were still being fed grass, not grain, because we couldn't afford the grain, but we were planting here to move it over here. So I started noting these inefficiencies and, you know, to fast-forward the story and not not make it longer, I noticed we were doing everything wrong. And that's when I finally started liking my job because then I had a purpose. I had to untangle everything I had, I had messed up, that that we were all messing up. I had to, I had to start fixing the soil that a couple years before I had ruined myself in order to plant the pineapples. And uh it just it became a journey that we're still on today.
SPEAKER_01:It's a it's a big undertaking. At what point did you start to even call it the Kokita Soil Project?
SPEAKER_00:In 2017, my grandfather began dialysis, and I knew that he wasn't gonna be able to go to the farm as often. I had to decide uh between two choices. One, should I keep learning and chasing these regenerative practices that I was reading about? I was not sure if it was gonna work. But the other choice was to keep doing it the way we were doing it, which I knew was not gonna work. I did not have his checkbook. I could not subsidize the farm as I had seen it being subsidized the past 13 years that I had been working there. So uh I I I had to I had to try I had to try the regenerative path to see what would happen. And I was hoping, you know, really hoping that when he returned at some point I had something better to show.
SPEAKER_01:And and is that whenever you you called it Kokira?
SPEAKER_00:Yes. In the beginning of 2018, as as as we were reading more and more, I realized that it was all about the soil, and we can go a little more about that. Well, in terms of cattle, uh we don't call ourselves ganaderos. Ganaderos is like a cattle person. Yeah, we are ganaderos, but we're actually like grass farmers. Because the only way to make a a cattle farm or a sheep farm more profitable slowly, but but but in a positive way, is to have more grass per meter. The more grass per meter that you have, the more animals per meter you can also host and feed on your farm. So it became all about the soil. It was, it's it's the same purpose. I still sell cows, but instead of focusing on the cow, I focus on the soil, which ultimately leads to a healthier and more cows per hectare.
SPEAKER_01:Who were those early regenerative ranching influences for you? Was this like Joel Salatin or Will Harris or somebody like that?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, correct. Those two in particular, Joel Salatin, Will Harris, uh Acres USA is also a publication that I started following. Uh Joel Salatin is an editor in uh Grass Farmers USA. We can actually put it on the show notes, but I do have, you know, like 12 books that I bought uh in a specific period of time that helped me reinforce the ideas that I was, that I was already having. But before I was already interested in gut health, for example, I started learning and understanding about the gut microbiome and how these things lead to more of the outcomes than you know any other superficial thing that you might be trying to tackle. So the fact that I understood a little bit about the gut microbiome helped me understand that, yeah, it was not crazy to think about the soil. I started understanding that the soil was alive. We always, in our, I guess we're gonna talk about that more, in our agritourism uh tours, we try to make the person picture about the dust that comes out of your tire when you're driving in a in a country road. And that same dust actually, left alone, left without the sun, adding a cover crop, that same dust becomes topsoil. And the only difference between those mineral particles that at some point were dust and now are part of topsoil is the life in between it, you know, the mycelium, the the fungi, everything that lives between it. So we actually learned, and and and it's you know, it's it's still kind of like impressive when I say it to myself, but it's so obvious that, you know, it's it's the soil is alive. And when we understood it, we definitely had a new purpose for the farm, a new hope for the farm. And well, Kokira is the name of the port, pretty close to our farm. It was a dead end up to like last year when they built the bridge, but it was a dead end, and we were most of this road uh was us. So we decided to call it Kokira Soil Project because it was more like how do we fix the farm? We fix the soil. I I did not know if I was gonna end up in cattle, if I was gonna end up in sheep, if I was gonna end up in ducks. Like it made no difference. Uh as long as you have a healthy farm, your options are limitless.
SPEAKER_01:Whenever I visited Thomas, it was incredible because I I did not get the sense that there was tractors going here and there. In fact, it was well, there's there's cowboys on horses with flocks or herds of of cows on these beautiful, very green pastures with like such incredible looking grass. And then, you know, you go further down and and you see it, you know, I think it was the the chickens or the ducks, and you know, even coming back to the lodge, and it's a a really charming B that you've got there. Um I was just so struck by like the permaculture approach to to really an edible landscape reminiscent of the food forest that I think so many people talk about whenever they talk about permaculture, to where there was mango steens and bananas and mangoes and cacao and all kinds of stuff that you had growing out there. And I it just it's really impressive to to say, okay, you're starting to think this way in 2017. Here we are in 2025, and you've come a long way. It it doesn't seem like that many years to actually take an about phase for the farm. Uh, what was that experience like for you?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we've learned that the planet heals itself. If allowed, and given the proper uh tools and and ingredients, the planet will heal itself. Uh as you were saying, we were working on on the cattle. Uh we we we we made some changes, uh, as you say, no, not as many tractors. We cut our diesel bill to a third. Uh we stopped buying all sorts of synthetic fertilizers. Uh we just started like observing the land where the cattle was. But the farm also had an old, nowadays 105-year-old uh wooden. It used to be a hunting lodge. Uh, it's about eight bedrooms on the top, and in the bottom it's an open terrace. Uh, and then it it had a fence on its own, and it's about a two-hectare, maybe a four-acre uh plot that during the summer was dry and dead, and during the winter was soggy and and very uncomfortable to walk around, but we still had to take care of it, and we still had to rebuild the house before you know the humidity and the and the mangrove pulled it back. So, so so we had this extra chore on the side, which was uh getting this lodge uh up and going to look pretty enough because actually, this is a funny story. Let me let me I the cattle was on its own was not gonna be able to pay for the lodge because of course we were trying to get this this cattle company that wasn't that this productive because we were focused on pedigree and not on fertility. We had to get we had to get this lodge up and going because I thought I was gonna be judged by my grandfather and grandmother if if when they showed up, the lodge was worse than it already was. So we had to fix it. And in 2018, when we started calling it the Soil Project, and my grandfather fell ill, my wife started going with me because she had she had seen me go to the farm, you know, including Saturdays till 5, 6 p.m. for 13 years. So she loves the farm, she loves the animals, she loves horses, and she's like, okay, now's my time, I'm gonna start going with you. So we started, even though the lodge was not in good shape, we started, you know, having our meals there. And uh we were sitting there and and and we decided that that this land that we had to still take care of, these these four acres around our our old home, we we decided to start just planting, planting food for us, planting bananas, planting plantain, uh cassava, all these, all these tubers and fruits and everything that we could eat. We also started planting things for the animals to eat. Uh we call it boton de oro, forage, forage that the animals could eat. So so we basically started planting without knowing much. We we just started putting things on the ground, making sure that that as much production could occur, because we knew that we were gonna use it in some way or the other, whether it be for humans or for animals. It became a food forest. Uh nowadays we call it a a food jungle, bosque comestible, uh selva comestible, because we are in the tropics. And yeah, abundance is what what began when we actually started treating it like we should. Remember that I said that we stopped buying fertilizers? So what we did is that we uh we just started adding horse manure uh to the plants and and and we started moving, you know, the mangles that were rotting on the floor, we started moving them somewhere else where we thought that that the soil needed help because it was bare. And we we just we just started shifting resources around uh without spending much in order to see how we could add life to it. And it really it really answered back.
SPEAKER_01:I want to shift over into something that that I'm really curious about because one of the things that I observed about Kokira is that you had school groups coming through and you've got a chef and you're putting out um not just you know, hey, let come learn about the the cycle of life, but it it's like come eat here, come try the flavors of the food. What uh what's the temperature in in Panama towards organic local clean food, grass-fed beef? I mean, is there was there a huge demand there right away and it was opening the floodgates, or are you having to build the marketplace?
SPEAKER_00:We're having to build the marketplace because it's not that the food was grain-fed, because like I said, uh Panama does not subsidize grain, uh, so we cannot feed our cattle uh grain. So there there isn't really much grain-fed beef in Panama. There's probably a little bit of grain-finished beef because some people are chasing the wrong, uh, the wrong price. But it wasn't that there was very little good food and bad food. It was that people weren't really asking questions. Like no, like the trend or or or or or the interest or or the awareness was not there. Panama, like you said, let me circle back. Panama is like a little Miami for Central America. People come here for for the hotels and uh and the pools with the good vistas, and you know, people come here for for the restaurants and uh and the fast life, at least for a weekend and the shopping and everything is glamour, you know, in Panama City. So people aren't really asking questions about their food. As long as it's uh affordable, uh pretty and trendy, that's what people were eating. So we kind of had to build our own our our own niche. And we started telling the story of what we were doing. We we we had teacher friends that came to our farm because we told them, like, hey, come visit us, and they're like, Oh, I have to bring our kids. And we're like, no, no, no, we're not ready. And they're like, no, no, you are ready. So we started, we started appreciating that that interest. And when people started showing up, people started saying things like, oh, my wife uh had these terrible like stomach pains, and it took us a year and a half, and everybody called her a hypochondriac, and eventually we realized she was like gluten intolerant, or or my son, my baby boy, was crying all night, and it took us you know a year and a half, and no doctor could tell us what it was, and we suddenly realized that he was allergic to formula, and you know, all these things that we had already heard about in the gym. Uh we owned the CrossFit gym for about four years, if I'm not mistaken, maybe more, uh five to six years. And we we were listening, we were CrossFit coaches, and we were, you know, we were leading a group of athletes that uh athletes of all sorts, of all ages, of all capacities, and we were hearing uh their problems. We were learning about you know sleeping patterns, we were learning about circadian rhythm, we were learning about gluten intolerance, we were learning about uh corn and soy and natural foods, and we were learning about uh pesticides and what they do to our gut lining. So when we opened this agritourism, it was it was more like a like a validation that everything we had learned a couple years before was correct, that everything we were doing at this point was also correct. And well, let me let me let me circle back to a story. We considered that being cattle farmers was like having a monocrop, too. So so even though we weren't planting rows of one grain or rows of the other, we were still only having like one animal. And the ecosystem was not gonna be healthy was with one animal. So we actually added chickens to go behind our work horses because you know the cowboys used to uh use the horses, and the horses were usually like, you know, the most vulnerable. They were always sick for one reason or the other. The stables were a mess. So I decided to put them out of the stables, uh, treat them like a herd, just like the cattle. They would rotate every day to leave their poop. So any animal that's walking out of their manure on a daily basis is an animal that can become healthier and healthier because he's not he's not ill with his own uh parasites. And we learned that the chickens were actually the best anti-parasite medicine that you could have in a farm. So we added chickens behind the horses, then we added ducks because there was a pond there and it just felt natural because our our farm is next to a mangrove, the Kokira soil farm is next to a mangrove, so so it was kind of like a wetlands thing. So we added ducks to kind of like take down uh the mosquito load. Then we added uh sheep because my wife and I were sick of listening to the weed whacker while we were working, and you know, it was, you know, it was always had to had to replace something on the weed whacker, and the prices of the weed whackers were getting worse and worse. So we're like, let's add sheep. And and all these things gave us a healthier and healthier ecosystem because uh their manure, they're they're their services. So we learned that every animal had a role. So all of a sudden, instead of having just beef, we had four different animals. Uh, our our edible food forests were getting better and better, we were having more supply. And we decided that it was, I never wanted to go into hospitality or the restaurant business, but we decided it was kind of like we were we were tasked with with telling a story. Uh we had already done it in the gym and we helped a lot of people. So we figured that if we had a farm in our hands and we already had the understanding and the interest in something that nobody else was talking about, that it was kind of like our duty to begin talking about this.
SPEAKER_01:What's so interesting to me about Kokira is that there are these farms around the country and the world that you're like, oh, you know, I know that place. It's it's like infamous. You know, there's books written about this, and people are going there all the time. And looking at Kokura, it's it feels like one of those places that is gonna be known. Like it is, it's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when as more and more people come through there, and it just seems like the local temperature has has increased uh since you really began on this journey. So if before we get into Lake of Arab, I do want to transition into how you go from running this regenerative ranch and hospitality uh farm into building out an actual community. But give me a rundown of all the things that you're doing on the farm right now. Like what's getting rotated, what's growing, what's that look like from a high level?
SPEAKER_00:Okay, we are growing our cattle herd. We have about 1,200 heads of cattle. We know we can, using regenerative principles, we know that can we can double, maybe even triple our herd. So we are implementing a lot of electric fencing. Uh it's been working great. Before the electric fencing, uh, it was kind of hard to clean the paddocks. It was, it was humans think that with uh checkbook and machinery, you can accomplish a lot. And you can, but Mother Nature will claim it back and you'll have to reinvest in the same thing over and over. I had noticed that happened. So we're trying to grow our cattle herd. We're not trying. We are actually working hard on growing our cattle herd and making it healthier and and and and more numerous. We are growing our sheep herd because uh the sheep help us trim and keep the areas healthy that might be too small for the cattle to get into. We are advancing on our chickens, uh, we have ducks. We knew that in order to make a multi-species farm, we needed the right type of dog. So we actually imported Anatolian shepherds from the U.S. We imported a male from North Carolina and a female from Nevada, and we made our own little family of Anatolian shepherds. Two of them hang out with the sheep, two of them hang out with the ducks, another one hangs out with the chicken. So the dogs were an important part of it. We actually we also added uh Australian cattle dogs, just because we're talking about dogs. And they actually are very good in in helping uh the cows come when. The terrain might be a little too tough, too soggy, or too many shrubs for the horses. So when there's a horse and a cowboy that want to get a cow that's running the other way, the dog will do it on its own and will kind of like, you know, make it easier on the cowboys. When we got the dogs, because every animal has a role, and we finally understood that in order to have a functioning farm, a multi-species functioning farm, we needed the proper type of dog. We didn't want to feed them too much kibble because kibble is mostly, and I, you know, I might make some people angry, or I might not know what I'm talking about. But at that point, I figured that kibble was corn and soy. And if we were avoiding eating corn and soy ourselves, and we were avoiding eating corn and soy for our cattle, we should avoid eating corn and soy for our dogs. So we decided that every animal that maybe had an injury or, you know, something on their on their leg that we actually sold at a discount price to somebody that would come and kind of like claim and appreciate whatever was left of the sick animal or broken leg animal. We decided to harvest it ourselves inside the farm to feed the dogs. When this happened, we noticed that we had a bunch of extra tripe, uh, the tripe that couldn't be eaten, maybe not the liver or the heart, but but but other types of tripes. And we brought in the black soldier fly. The black soldier fly is a larva. This fly deposits eggs. Uh, this larvae grows, it feeds on organic material. It not only gives us good uh compost like like like the hummus, uh the hummus of uh the California red worm, but this larva is also fed to the chickens and the ducks. So what we were trying to do was like it decrease the load of feed that we had to buy in the store. So this is another like another species that we have. And and it's it's a bioconverter. We we turn we turn uh waste into food. And that got a little exacerbated too. Uh that that that feeling, that need uh was also reinforced with the pandemic because for a while it was kind of hard. Panama had a lot of uh restrictions during the pandemic, and it was hard to get to the store. And we decided that you know we weren't really free or we weren't really sustainable if we could not feed our own animals. So nowadays they ask us, like, how many animals do you have? And I'm like, as many animals as as I can feed. It's not how many, how much feed I can buy, it's how much feed I can produce ourselves. So that's what we're doing. We're trying to make sure that we're we're we're closing circles, we're moving waste from one point to the other, and we are on a weekly basis trying to produce more and more and more food and more forage so we can feed our own animals. In case someday something happens again that makes the supply lines a little more critical, we do not have to sweat it as much as other people. Or we're trying to show and teach that farms should not have to sweat when supply becomes critical.
SPEAKER_01:Let's let's make this transition because this is where I, you know, you're almost kind of defying the laws of of what one person can do, realizing that this is this is not a small operation. You've got 5,000 acres uh to steward, you know, I'm guessing I saw maybe 20 to 30 farmhands and cowboys, and now you've got a hospitality staff and you're you're putting out just really delicious, super high quality food with school groups and visitors coming through. Then you you take on this project called Lake Avera, that whenever you came to me, you said, look, we're we want to build this village. And and I was like, wait, what? You're doing what? Farm village is not something that that people are talking about uh too often these days. What what's the genesis of this idea, Thomas?
SPEAKER_00:Well, the short answer is that we wanted neighbors. We we wanted neighbors. We we lived at the farm uh a a couple uh a year before the pandemic. My my my kids were at that age where in in Panama, faraway suburbs and like homesteads are are non-existent. You either live like very rurally or you live in the metropolitan city. I had lived in the city. I I knew the pros and cons. And as you age and as you try to become more holy and as you try to become more spiritual, you you try to know, I mean, you you undeniably learn more about the cons of city living. My wife decided that it was the right time and the right age of my children to, you know, drive us to the farm. So we actually lived in the farm for a year and a half before the pandemic. And it was great. We felt super healthy. It was, you know, my kids had that experience that, like I say, nobody in in a Panaminian city would have, which is kids putting away the chickens at night, putting away the sheep at night. But it was a little lonely. We had we had no friends doing the same uh thing. We had no conversation with with with other like-minded people. So we actually knew that we had to find them. And then the pandemic came, it became even more lonely. But we learned a lot. We kind of moved around during the pandemic, uh, trying to find somewhere where we could keep this rural living. We did not want to come back to the city. Like I said, Panama had a lot of restrictions. So everybody we knew was locked in their apartment. And uh we were bouncing around between our farm and another uh community far away from the city, but but another community, and we started blending, blending what what we were enjoying of each of these places. So we decided we needed neighbors. We decided that, well, my wife's dream is to live in a farm with her horses, and I said, okay, but we need to create a group of people that can help me, you know, have a little bit of the social life that I would have somewhere else.
SPEAKER_01:I think what's so unusual, I guess, is um the way in which you put together a design that I think is totally unique. I mean, we're working on agrihoods and agriculture-based developments primarily across the US. And it's all about, okay, let's create the housing. We're gonna densify it, we're gonna preserve as much open space for the farming as possible, but there's still there's a farmer, right? Uh, or maybe like a couple farmers that come together to form a collective. Lake A Vera is something completely different than that. It is like really targeting those folks that see the world as you do around food sovereignty, clean eating, local, organic, flavorful, and really the folks that that I think would be attracted to ensuring that they're eating the the highest quality nutrition that they can possibly find in the world. Um but you're saying, come come grow it, come cultivate it with us. And I and I'm curious why go in that direction rather than, you know, this kind of country club approach of like, come live next to the farm but and and eat the food, but don't have necessarily much involvement in it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we we wanted to give the opportunity to the people that wanted to do it. Uh like I said, in Panama, it's it's it's really polarized, whether you are in the city or you are out in the country. And we had met throughout the years when people asked me, like, so what do you do? Uh maybe even in my in my son's pediatrician's uh appointment, or at the dentist, or at the lawyer, everybody's asking, like, what do you do? And I'm like, Oh, I'm a farmer. It's like, oh, my grandfather used to have a farm. I used to love going there. Or, oh, when I retire, I really want to buy a farm and I want to move out there to the country. Or at some point I bought a farm, but it was so far away, so hard to get there, and the conditions were so hard for me that I actually had to sell it at a loss and come back, you know, disappointed. So we started grabbing all these ideas and and all these uh, you know, uh experiences of other people and tried to see how we could simplify giving people the opportunity to become farmers. We started as as we were aging, you know, we're not, I'm not as old, but as I was aging, I started understanding a humans' desire to connect with nature. And I noticed that it was a trend. It's like, not a trend, that's a terrible word. It's it's it's in our DNA to be connected to the environment and to the planet. If we had 5,000 acres to manage, uh, why not grab a piece of it and share with other people that I had heard that also wanted to connect with the land? And I did not want an agrihood where I was responsible to show up at your doorstep uh with a bag of food. And basically you were just, you know, you were living in an in in just another development. The only thing was that it was not, you know, inside the city, it was just a little further away. I I really wanted to give people the opportunity to become that farmer without uh the big learning curve or without all the negative uh aspects that maybe trying to find a farm by yourself uh would bring. Not only might you find a land that isn't properly titled, you wouldn't know your neighbors, uh, you would have to hire a you know, like a like a superintendent that you didn't even know long term, that could probably steal from you, you know, all these all these unknowns might, if in the best case scenario, they would leave you lonely like we were in our farm. In the worst case scenario, it wasn't gonna work and you would have to resell the farm and come back to the city. So I was like, how how do we help people live out this dream of being a farmer without me having the responsibility of showing up at your doorstep with arugula and you know cassava? And how do I make a community for myself and for the people there where conversation would be about learning, it would be about you know comparing comparing experiences in the farm and not maybe the type of conversations that happen in a city.
SPEAKER_01:How do you do that? I'm really honing in on that the learning curve. You know, if somebody wants to go out and get into farming, cultivating, even if it's that kitchen garden, there's a there's a pretty steep learning curve. And it it takes uh a lot of time and effort. So what what is the plan there? I mean, do you really think that people are gonna come out and all of a sudden be able to just get it?
SPEAKER_00:Well, uh we've had to find a a few advisors ourselves, uh permaculture advisors, uh regenerative, uh veterinarians, you know, holistic, uh, you know, we've we've had to find them ourselves. And in the process we have learned, and most of the time, most of the time, it's the mindset that that will give you an advantage or not. So if you do a bunch of research and you go to the to the agriculture store and you ask all the mainstream veterinarians, like if you do your research, you'll probably end up spending money that you shouldn't have. If you go the holistic route and you start trying to find all these like testimonies of of people who aren't doing it the conventional way, you are in uh, like you said, you didn't see tractors in our farm. Uh we we spend you know a third of the amount of money we used to spend on diesel. And I I didn't get a PhD to figure that out. Uh I learned to sit back and observe, and I had conversations with the correct people. So I think that to help out in the learning curve, it's just being around the people that can help you look at the problems in the proper way. And uh yeah, I I I guess we have we have spent a lot of money on our farm, and we've done it wrong many, many times already, uh, in order to be able to advise you of how to do it correctly and how not.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I and I'm gonna set the audience straight a little bit here, Thomas, because I I love this story. I remember riding with you, and you're telling me about how you got bored during the pandemic and you ended up getting a master's degree uh from John Hopkins on on what what was the degree in?
SPEAKER_00:Uh environmental science and policy.
SPEAKER_01:So you're you're on your way to a PhD, but I I think what um you know putting words in your mouth where you are really creating something unique here is through the farm concierge program. Uh because I I I just I think that's the key if you want people to come out and cultivate is you've got to you've got to give them support, not just like, oh, okay, here's how you can do this theoretically of you know, it's multi-species and you close loop cycles. Um but I think where the rubber meets the road is really can people get the support on the design, on the maintenance, on the installation. You know, if you're gonna if you're gonna go out and do something, like doing it in community and with help is imperative. And and I don't think that you could actually pull this plan off very well in the United States. I feel like there is something really unique about the circumstances of having your experience, your farm hands, the tools, the expertise, the proximity with this 5,000 acre farm next door. Look, tell tell me a little bit more about how you see the farm concierge program working.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, well, even if you if you get 10 neighbors, like random, random farm neighbors together, you still have to go through the process of you know getting to know them, getting to trust them, uh uh asking for a tool, uh, you know, keeping it maintained, giving it back. So, so so so there's still a lot of uh variables that aren't controlled when when when a few random neighbors come together. You know, it might take a lot more time. Since Legavera has a HOA, uh we have a common security, we have an administration that is there to just you know keep security going, keep the roads maintain, keep, keep the community in check because we will have you know a community director and a bunch of activities going on. We we also uh feel that that using this organization that already exists is a way to split up the responsibilities and the costs of some of the equipment that you might need on a farm. For example, if you wanna if you wanna install a fence, uh you don't have to go try to find out who can loan you the machine or who can rent you the machine. You already know that the farming concierge has the machine available. And in a way, let's say it is kind of like crowdsourced between the 50 farms. So this machinery exists. You you don't have to pay for it when you're not using it, but you already know where to go to get it when you want to use it. So if you want to install a fence, the machine is there. If you want to harvest uh pigeon pee or mangoes or coffee or cacao or whatever you need to harvest when the time comes, and you don't want to have, you know, four or five ranch hands on staff just for the season of harvest, uh, or you don't want to try to find them yourselves because you know they might be unreliable, they might, you know, you don't know them. You're welcoming people into your farm. But if you go to the farming concierge and and there's always the same, the same couple of people uh doing doing these chores, then it's it's it's easy to trust, or it's easy for us at the farming concierge to correct. It's easy to, you know, to to keep quality control. Our best example is if you have a small farm, a maybe a three hectare farm, and a tree falls in your driveway, and you don't own a chainsaw because it's not a large farm, you don't want to go out today and buy a chainsaw to get rid of the tree, you call the farming conservative, they'll say, okay, it's it's 30 bucks an hour or or or whatever. Somebody will come chop it up, put the lumber where you want it, and you're done. You don't, you don't have to, you don't have to pay for the social security of the person, and you don't have to pay for the chainsaw, and you don't have to maintain it, and you don't have to go get the gasoline in order to solve your problem. So what we're doing is is is uh just building a team of services that we know that you're gonna need, and the idea is to lower your costs.
SPEAKER_01:Let let's switch into out of the agriculture piece um directly and really talk about the land plan. I feel like you also found uh a just a gym of a land planner and designer in Edward McGrath, uh, who just created this beautiful village center along with small farms and and ranches. Uh can you tell us more about what what the village is and and how the plannings come together and who who's gonna be living there over time and and the type of amenities that that's getting built out?
SPEAKER_00:Okay, we we have really my wife and I have really understood uh the benefits of uh rural living. Uh like I say, in the US, it might be very common to have towns nearby. Uh the the the western or the country life is is available. In Panama, you are either a city person or you're a country person. So we we started to pool together things that people like. People like horses. I have a bunch of friends asking me, hey, can my daughter keep her horse at your farm? And and things like this. So the village, the village right in the entrance of Legavera, is gonna have uh stables. We we are keeping, preserving, and maintaining around 20 plus kilometers of horse trails. We will have a community. Garden. If I will not lie if I say that I do not know of a single community garden in the country where you can go and rent a few meters of soil to have your own vegetables. You could do it in a backyard, but there aren't any community gardens. So we build a we build a village where we could interact between neighbors and with the town.
SPEAKER_01:Tell me more about the village and what that looks like.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, the village is going to have a community garden. The village is going to have a nursery where our new neighbors from Legera might not have to source cacao trees all around the country. Maybe, you know, the person running the nursery can actually like cater and deliver what each farmer might need. We will have a market that we plan to make sure that becomes a weekend destination where this market will consolidate all of the production that will occur in all of these farms. And of course, the 50 farms in Legavera will have a very vast uh array of production. Because somebody might uh just want sheep, but somebody might want to create five types of cheese from that sheep's milk. Or somebody, you mentioned mango steen, and somebody might want uh to do coffee, and somebody so what we're gonna do is make make sure that we we we consolidate, offer, and even organize uh the distribution for all of all of this production that will be occurring in all of these farms. So we will have a market, we will have a a on the weekends at least a petting zoo for more people to enjoy the country life uh to come to come and interact with uh with the country. Originally, when I came to the architect, I had the idea of five hectare farms, which was kind of like the number that we felt that it wasn't too large and it wasn't too small. He came up with the smaller homesteads, which he's totally correct, the ones we call Las Fincas, because uh we had we had met a few people that might be like, oh, I really like your concept. I I would definitely be a neighbor, but at this point in my life, I do not want to maintain, you know, five hectares. I'm good with a little kitchen garden, and I'm good with, you know, having maybe one horse, maybe a few chickens. So uh this diversity of those two types of uh uh sizes uh came together. The village in the front is basically where you will go get your services and eat it. We'll probably have a laundry mat. Uh, we will have a few commercial spots where you know any type of professional might have a little office there. Uh we will have a plaza where we where Kokira will sell our beef, our sheep, our our ducks, our chickens. The idea is also to enable the neighbors as you move in. You will most probably, most certainly, not have your own beef available pretty soon. You probably will not have your own food. But if you're interested in Legavera, then you're interested in clean food and food sovereignty. So Kokira Soil will be like the little anchor store, at least in the beginning, that can supply uh everybody else.
SPEAKER_01:We I don't know, there's so many let let's uh talk about who you think Lake of Era is a really good fit for. And I'm gonna preface this with there's so many kind of eco-village type of uh projects that happen in Latin America. They become enclaves for expats from the US, Canada, and Europe. Is this is this something similar, or do you see who do you really see being the residents of Lake Vera?
SPEAKER_00:I I understand, respect, and even uh enjoy the fact that many people are trying to find a a different type of urbanization where to you know uh become an expat at or or or or or where to evolve. And the fact that nature is nearby or farms are nearby is is is really fulfilling and enriching. However, our specific neighbor will be a person uh interested in food sovereignty because uh whether your neighbors produce it and you can get it from them, and if they don't, you can produce it yourself. Five hectares might not be a farm that you can scale up and make a large food manufacturing farm, but it can most definitely be a create a very viable business or uh be a security deposit for future generations. I believe that anybody who has who has read uh the concept that they aren't making any more land, or or anybody who feels that land would have been a good inheritance that they would have received and they haven't, maybe that person uh feels that that they can be the patriarch that that that makes a move in 2025 and enables all the rest of his generations to at least have access to their own land. We talk a lot about uh what the true luxury nowadays is. Today, uh technology, uh globalization, uh credit systems are built in such a way that anything you want you can get today. However, clean food is it's not available, and uh land security is becoming more and more scarce. So so Legavera is for somebody that says my next stage in life or my next luxury is not gonna be a a condo uh in a big city or or it's not gonna be a yacht uh that basically just spends money. My my next investment is gonna be something that we'll appraise, something with that that not appraise in land value, appraise in in freedom. Because if your if if your future generations have somewhere to call it their their own landscape, that is something that isn't available to many people. You might have a great job, you might have a great income, but if all you have is a very, very fancy condominium, when the food system or the supply lines or or pandemics or or wars or any type of social conflict arises, you might have wished you would have a little bit of land, at least to have peace, family values, and and a nice community to live at. And we know, like I know, even though at some point in my life I did not enjoy much or understand much the the greatness of having a farm. I have learned how enriching life at a farm can be. I have learned how liberating and how much freedom you have when you have access to your own small ecosystem where you and your family are the only ones that that that control those variables. You control your water, you control your air, you control your food, and that is priceless.
SPEAKER_01:Thomas, I I think that's beautiful. Uh I really think that you've created something so special with Lake Avera. I highly encourage people to go to your website at Lakeavera.com to check out what the community is. Uh it is truly a pleasure to spend time on the land and at CoCura Soil Project. I just the the sequence of events to actually have Kokura be in existence already is is so different from other projects that we work on where you know the farm is going to come. Let's build the houses first and the farm's gonna come later. And and some people get they get a little suspect. They're like, well, is it ever gonna come into materialize in in my lifetime or in the next 10 years? Or when when are we talking? And I think that's what's so cool about um Legovera and the relationship it has already with a working farm. It it has been highly tempting to talk with a lot of my friends to say, look, we need to why don't we go build a multifamily compound and grow our own mangoes and coffee and cacao? Um, particularly as it feels like there's a big dumpster fire that's raging in in the United States, and it feels more and more disingenuous to call this place home. Um so I I just think it it's really amazing what what you're building. I'm so excited to see what this is going to look like. And as the farm and and all the enterprises just continue to build momentum and and be a positive force in the world. And I think that's what it means to not just have regenerative agriculture, but to have regenerative development and create community uh where sovereignty and freedom and health and well-being is is the pillars. Um so I wish you great success and and I hope uh more people are gonna come check out what you're building down there.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Thank you. We really want to share uh what we have defined as true wealth. And uh I thank you for helping us tell the story. There's so many things I I would like to say that you have helped me kind of like pinpoint those, uh summarize those, but at the same time, I'm looking forward to anybody that wants to come pick their own rancho. Uh our our little ATV is here, and we're super happy to take you to the land to to start feeling what you have been describing that you have already felt when you came down to Panama. And you know, the tropics is the tropics is paradise, the tropics is abundance. Uh it it it fixes itself so quick and it evolves so quick. So these these farms, once again, uh in in contrast to an to an agrihood, you are not you're not gonna get a home and call it, you know, just your home next to a farm for a long time. When you get a home here in Legavera, this is the start of a multi-generational canvas that you can grow into because five hectares are a lot, and you can begin with you can begin with cacao and in 20 years decide that you want to add coffee, and 20 years later decide something else, and and and you might use your neighbor's chickens to fertilize your crops and and vice versa. So we are really we're really looking forward to to helping everybody achieve this dream that we call like the ultimate wealth.
SPEAKER_01:But I don't want this to be a one-way conversation. I'd love to hear about the projects and ideas you're working on. The best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn, just search Neil Collins. And if my team at Hamlet Capital or Latitude Regenerative Real Estate can help bring your vision to life, whether it's buying or selling a home or developing a community integrated within a farm, do not hesitate to reach out. Let's build something meaningful together.