Thorsten Arnold
Resilience and food system analyst, business designer and climate advocate
My name is Thorsten Arnold. I have dedicated my work-life to promoting climate resilience in its various facets, and believe it is time for me to share my insights more publicly. With my wife Kristine Hammel, we co-own Persephone Market Garden, an ecological vegetable farm that produces healthy, fair and simply good food. We also practice holistic adaptive multi-paddock grazing, silvopasturing and woodlot managment. We are slowly building this into a community hub, having worked with summer farm camps, WWOOFing and internships, farming workshops. We hosted a farm & forest school pilot for a year and continue looking for a partner to revitalize this.
Academic Training
Thorsten received academic training environmental engineering (BTU Cottbus) and in Earth Systems sciences at CvO Univ. Oldenburg, Germany, at the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the sea (ICBM). He later pursued a dissertation in watershed sciences and agricultural economics (Univ. Hohenheim, Germany). His academic training uniquely bridges the two pillars of climate dynamics: the global greenhouse gas forcing and the role of regional land use and agriculture. Thorsten advocated against selling public water utilities to international investors and against some destructive aspects of global trade deregulation and worked with national and international development agencies. He also was professional educator for the Savory Institute in 2020-2021.
Experience
Climate change, resilience in and adaptive governance of a changing world are the guiding pillars of Thorsten’s life. During an earlier internship, Thorsten was invited to attend the 2001 UN conference on the Kyoto protocol in Marrakesh. His master thesis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research focused on multi-causal drivers of land use change in Mexico. As a scholar for the Sustainable Agriculture & Rural Development (SARD) Initiative at the Food & Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, he instigated work in scaling up SARD. He studied equity impacts of increasing climate variability in the context of Chilean water rights. Thorsten published on adaptive management in watershed agencies in Ontario. He also offers workshops on planning for Climate Resilience on farms, and as a speaker who raises awareness on the soil sponge and the biosphere’s climate self regulation.
Thorsten works as food system advocate, analyst, and design consultant. A successful project is the farmer-driven cooperative Eat Local Grey Bruce, which he designed, incorporated, fund-raised for, and started. His projects range from socio-economic-environmental impact assessment (e.g. Fresh City Farms), environmental monitoring on farms, business analysis for wholesaling meat (for Eat Local Grey Bruce and for the Organic Council of Ontario), traceability in food chains, and recently a climate resilience assessment of farms (with EFAO and Arrell Institute, University of Guelph). Thorsten authored various professional articles, including newspaper articles and professional magazines (e.g. two front page articles in the US-based Growing for Markets on collaborative marketing, and on planning for climate resilience). He also works with the Land & Leadership Initiative as food system expert.
Thorsten is a well-connected ecological food and farming systems advocate. He is currently board member with the Grey County chapter of the National Farmers Union. Thorsten is past board member of the Organic Council of Ontario, he was “Strategic Initiatives Coordinator” with the Ecological Farmers of Ontario, presenter with the Local Farm & Food Cooperatives network, advisor to Sustain Ontario, contributor to the Organic Value Chain Round Table, and convenor or presenter at the Living Soil Symposium of Regeneration Canada and numerous other events. In a 2021 assessment, the Fair Finance Fund described Eat Local Grey Bruce , a coop that Thorsten designed and started, as “structurally sound” and “Ontario’s leading local food cooperative”. Thorsten shared his food & farming system vision in an Sustainable Living interview and is currently coordinating the project Regenerate Grey Bruce on narrative change.
Thorsten’s other professional interest is in the governance of numerical modelling of watersheds, as assessment and decision tools in a changing climate. After supervising consultants around delineating drinking water protection areas in his home region, Grey Sauble/Saugeen, he combined his academic background in integrated modeling, work in consulting, and co-ordination from a government perspective. He co-authored one of the first guidelines for managing numerical modelling processes ever, for the Oak Ridges Moraine Coalition and the Toronto Region Conservation Authority (link). This guideline offers tools and procedures for governing modelling projects between consultants and public agencies. Other projects included developing a pragmatic yet model-based approach to assessing drinking water threats (Arnold 2015), an assessment of Ontario’s institutional lessons on watershed modelling (Arnold & Marchildon 2018), and recently a generalized framework for the management of numeric models in the public sector (Arnold et al., 2020). This work on model management in public sector agencies builds on his academic work during his PhD and on his work experience in diverse government institutions in Chile, Germany, Peru, Ontario, and at UN level in Rome.
With his wife Kristine, Thorsten co-owns Persephone Market Garden, a mixed vegetable farm that markets directly to customers and to restaurants in the Owen Sound region. He is well familiar with production processes of fruits and vegetables, and increasingly interested in woodlot management for biodiversity.
Private Life
At home, Thorsten values time with family and farm and garden projects. Thorsten has learned Aikido for 20 years and has also taught small groups. As aficionado of Argentine Tango, he and his wife taught in Owen Sound for four years. Thorsten is also an avid juggler and enjoys offering workshops for youth or at music festivals.
EDUCATION & CREDENTIALS
Ph.D., Irrigation management at watershed level, University of Hohenheim, 2010
MSc., Marine Environmental Sciences, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, 2002
B.A. eq, Environmental and Process Engineering, Brandenburger Technische Universitaet Cottbus, 1998
Publication list
Download Arnold_Publications_2020.
Video features
We were featured in several documentaries.