Porto: Where Two Roots Met

We arrived in Porto in October 25 with two ideas that did not quite fit.

One was rooted in a very concrete reality. Across Europe, many young people inherit small plots of land they do not know how to manage. Land that is underused, abandoned, or degraded. The question was not only ecological. It was generational. How can heirs of land become stewards instead of passive owners? How can inheritance become regeneration?

The other idea was rooted in data. A system capable of measuring decarbonisation impacts and soil restoration outcomes with scientific rigor. Transparent metrics. Aggregated evidence. Scalable evaluation.

At first, these two directions felt distant from each other. One deeply human and territorial. The other systemic and technological.

Instead of choosing between them, we reframed the question.

How might we connect people who inherit land with the knowledge, data and communities needed to regenerate it?

That shift was decisive.

The data framework moved from being a large scale carbon measurement system to something more relational and grounded. It became a way to evaluate the impact of thousands of small scale soil interventions. A cornfield in southern France. A reforested slope in Sicily. A flood prone plot restored with water retention practices. Each action measurable, but never isolated.

The youth inheritance challenge also evolved. It was no longer only about young Europeans reclaiming family land. It expanded into a wider network of soil stewards, municipalities, researchers and citizens who could collaborate around shared land challenges.

And then the metaphor emerged.

Mycelium.

Not an army of landowners.
A living network of stewards.
Invisible connections linking soil, science and society.

But Porto was not only synthesis. It was also honesty.

We identified clear turbulences.

The gap between data driven abstraction and lived rural realities.
The tension between global platforms and local stewardship.
The speed of technological innovation compared to the slow time of soil regeneration.
The question of who owns soil data and who governs it.
The risk of excluding rural women and smaller landholders.
The uncertainty around long term financial sustainability.

We understood that regeneration requires more than tools. It requires trust. It requires governance. It requires time.

By the final presentation, we were no longer presenting two separate projects. We were staging an ecosystem. The land heir. The scientist. The AI consultant. The entrepreneur. The policymaker. Each one dependent on the others.

Mycelium stopped being a concept and became a shared infrastructure in imagination.

What began as two roots ended as a network.

And when the Bootcamp closed, the network did not dissolve.

It continued underground.