020 Jean Pullen & Alan Cacao: Living Seed Banks & the Breadfruit Revival

Regeneration Nation Costa Rica

In today’s episode, we get the privilege of visiting with not one but two leaders in the regenerative space, Jean Pullen & Alan Cacao. Through their project Regenerate Your Reality, Jean & Alan have been tirelessly promoting permaculture education, seed propagation, food sovereignty, & community-building projects throughout the country.

Regenerate Your Reality is a permaculture, agroforestry, and education project working to bring sovereignty and happiness to our communities. ⁣It’s their mission to restore the relationship between humans and the earth to build a regenerative present.

They start the conversation by describing their work educating people at their biodiversity sanctuary in the mountains, near Platanillo, up the hill from Dominical. If you schedule a visit to their 1-hectare food forest, you’ll be welcomed to a tour of more than 300 species of food they have planted there. All of which is a living seed bank.

We discuss their partnerships with Kiss the Ground & Jungle Project and how they’ve been empowering local farmers with a regenerative livelihood, growing syntropic food forests with a focus on the abundantly producing breadfruit tree.

With the help of Earth University, INA (Costa Rica’s National Institute for Learning), and Kiss the Ground, these two life advocates and the rest of their friends at The Jungle Project provide ongoing, multi-year technical assistance to small-scale farmers on a variety of organic regenerative practices.

The organization’s mission is Trees, Training & Trade. The farming families learn to restore and maintain the ecological health of their farmland in ways that improve their nutrition and their income.

This crew is actively seeding a regenerative nation.

As Alan put it, connecting with the earth is our first medicine and one worth practicing daily. Participating in a world where the color green is ever out your window, and the sounds of birds and insects are perpetually punctuating the periphery of your awareness - for me, that’s a life I want to live. It’s the one I want to participate in preserving and passing on to my grandchildren.

I loved the moment when all three of us were relating to the transformative power we’re gifted with when we embody the experience of volunteering or interning at a permaculture center. You become a product of that project. It changes your life forever.

I was impressed to learn that the Jungle Project is rewarding partner farms by buying 80% of the fruit they produce.

Their mission is to substitute grains in people’s diets with breadfruit. Changing people's habits can be a long road, but it doesn’t stop them from walking it. After the inter

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