Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

Gonçalo Pereira Miguel is 24 years old and the first person in three generations of his family to return to their 700-hectare Montado farm in Portugal’s Alentejo. The farm had been degraded by decades of continuous grazing, treated as an inheritance rather than a business. In 2023, a severe drought made the damage impossible to ignore. Two years after introducing 85 cows and a precision rotational grazing system, the results are striking: hay costs that once consumed half of a farm’s operatin...

Peter Herz spent his career as a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley deep tech: chips, semiconductors, data storage. Then a doctor's visit in 2010 changed everything. Today he is co-founder and general partner of 1st Course Capital, one of the best-performing food funds you've probably never heard of. So what does a former chip designer invest in? Alt proteins, vertical farms, AI farm software? Not quite. The portfolio is half tech, half food brands, with no engineered foods. And the better...

Four or five eggs, swimming in butter. For breakfast! That is how Dr. John Schoonbee eats. A trained doctor and Global Chief Medical Officer at Swiss Re (a $43 billion reinsurance giant), John studied medicine in South Africa and worked as a GP before following his love of maths into reinsurance. His job is to spot the health trends that shape how long people live; and for the past decade, one trend in particular has caught his attention: nutrition. It’s a breakfast that goes against almost e...

What if the best argument for regenerative agriculture isn't the planet, but the profit? Francisco Roque de Pinho didn't set out to become a regenerative farmer. He came from capital markets, carbon trading, and strategic consulting — and stumbled into farmland management when distressed clients needed someone to rescue underperforming assets in Uruguay. What he found, through trial and careful observation, was that precision grazing — intensive rotational cattle management on short cycles — ...

Jacob Israelow is the founder of Dirt Capital Partners, an investment platform that partners with regenerative farmers and ranchers to help them secure long-term access to the land they farm—and ultimately own it. He left Goldman Sachs and returned to the New York area in 2012, bringing a background in real estate and investing and a growing interest in local food systems. After spending about a year talking to hundreds of farmers, land trusts and others across the Northeast, he built Dirt Ca...

Five years ago, many people in the regenerative agriculture space thought that simply paying farmers for soil carbon storage would rewire the agricultural system in a heartbeat. It turned out to be considerably more difficult. The European soil carbon market has not scaled at the speed needed. The voluntary carbon market has not delivered the financing that was hoped for. Is regulation part of the answer? The solar market suggests yes. Christian Holzleitner is Head of Unit for Land Economy an...

Only 4% of Benedikt Bösel's customers scanned the QR code on their meat — even though that code would have shown them the life of the specific cow they were eating, its pasture, its movement, everything. The other 96% either trusted the brand completely, or simply didn't care. That number sits at the centre of this conversation. This episode was recorded live at Groundswell 2026, the UK's largest regenerative agriculture festival. Koen moderated a 55-minute panel on a question that matters as...

Eric Smith is the founder of Edacious, a company building the infrastructure to make food quality and nutrient density measurable, objective and comparable. After spending years building a nutrition-testing platform capable of measuring macronutrients, micronutrients, bioactives and phytochemicals, alongside the benchmarks and data systems needed to make those measurements useful, he returns to sit down with us to share what they have been building, how the field of nutritional testing has ev...

Abby Rose is an experienced agricultural storyteller, co-host of the award-winning podcast Farmerama Radio, and co-founder of the soil monitoring and data platform VidaCycle. With a background spanning technology and hands-on farming on her family's farm in Chile, Abby has spent nearly a decade amplifying the voices of the regenerative farming movement and creating tools to help farmers build healthier soils. This July, Abby is back on the podcast to share an update on Cereal, her six-part se...

Water always wins. The question is whether we let it cool the planet while it does — or keep fighting it until there's nothing left to fight with. Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, and is currently writing her second book, Roots to Sky: How Life and Water Can Help Cool Earth's Climate, due in 2028. She is an environmental journalist who has spent more than a decade travelling the world to document how communities are rebuilding their rela...

An orange farm near Valencia, abandoned for a decade, a family debt, and a website. Seventeen years later: 500,000 customers, 350 partner farmers, 400 employees, and not a single discount ever run. Gonzalo Úrculo is co-founder of Crowdfarming, the direct-to-consumer platform that connects European consumers directly with farmers — no wholesaler, no distributor, no price negotiation after harvest. He came back from his Erasmus in Berlin, talked his family out of selling the grandfather's farm,...

200 euros in a bank account, no contract, and a vision. Six and a half years later: 160,000 trees, a soil temperature at 15cm depth of a constant 21°C — while the bare field metres away peaks at 38°C — and a landscape so full of birds that visitors ask to walk through it in silence. Marc Leiber, founder of Grow Back and farmer at Quinta das Abelhas, in Portugal, is German agroforestry practitioner who spent nine months on Ernst Götsch's farm in Brazil, arrived in Portugal's Alentejo with almo...

Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic, left Greece a decade ago, spent years working across European farming systems, and eventually landed in Portugal to run what has become one of the most rigorously monitored regenerative trials in Mediterranean intensive tree crop agriculture. He is the lead on the field research side of the Arbo-Innova project, a multi-farm, multi-consortium research platform focused specifically on the question of whether regenerative practices can be meaningfully ...

João Valente, owner of Monte Silveira, took over his family farm in central-eastern Portugal that was running on tobacco, broccoli, and melons with sixty-five people employed year-round, the rotation designed entirely around subsidies. When the tobacco subsidy disappeared at the end of the 1990s, he found himself with a question: what does this land actually want to be? That question led him to organic agriculture conferences in Portugal, to a magazine showing no-till, to a German seed compan...

Diogo Pinho started his scientific career in the first DNA sequencing lab in Portugal, then did a hands-on PhD on the soil microbiome of cork and holm oak, studying why the trees get sick, before spending two years with Biome Makers, a soil microbiome analysis company, running labs and translating bacterial and fungal profiles into colour-coded, farmer-readable reports for growers around the world. Three years ago, a chance conversation at a farm visit twenty minutes from where he was living ...

Lara Espírito Santo grew up shuttling between Rio de Janeiro and her father’s industrial farms in Paraguay and Brazil, traded a planned career in politics and international development for a kitchen job at Silo in London, and went on to co-found SEM, the zero-food-waste restaurant in Lisbon she ran with her partner George McLeod until closing it ten days before this conversation (not for financial reasons, but to figure out what comes next). Source the cream instead of buying butter, and one ...

Brazilian-trained chemical engineer, Raiza Rezende left a career path lined up by petroleum, gas, and pharmaceutical companies to study syntropic agriculture with Ernst Götsch, then WWOOFed her way across Spain, Portugal, and Greece before co-founding two organisations working from opposite ends of the same problem: Agrosystemic, which helps large farms in Portugal and Brazil transition toward regenerative practices, and RHEA, the Regenerative Healthcare European Association, which is trying ...

John Gilliland is a sixth-generation UK farmer and advocate for sustainable agriculture with a legacy in policy, academia, and innovation. As a leader of the ARC Zero project, his own farm is a model for "Beyond" Net Zero practices, where willow cultivation, livestock grazing, and renewable energy initiatives work together in a circular system. He has credits he could sell tomorrow and hasn't sold any. The reason cuts to the heart of the whole carbon market: on the voluntary market, he says, ...

Europe doesn't have a water problem. The rain still falls; we've just spent a few hundred years engineering it off the land as fast as we can, which James Barrett likens to hauling your garden clippings to the dump only to drive back in spring and buy compost. James is a regenerative hydrology consultant, founder of Decent Water Company and lead regenerative designer for Ten Lives Festival in Portugal — where 150 people spent their mornings digging rock-lined "smiles" into a semi-arid, 70-hec...

The Midwest: 140 million acres of corn and soybeans, rural economies slowly dying, a system with no real long-term future in terms of soil or human health. It's also where roughly 25% of farmland could flip the entire region toward regeneration—but only if you coordinate capital the right way. Ivana Gazibara, Director of Systemic Investment Programmes at the TransCap Initiative, spent two years mapping the intervention points needed to drive systemic change across the agricultural heartland. ...

Daniel Vidal, head chef of Baldío, LATAM's first zero-waste restaurant, joined Koen in the kitchen in Mexico City to talk about what it actually takes to make radical food accessible to the people it was always meant for. When Baldío won a Green Michelin Star, Daniel didn't think to take his mother there for her birthday as the restaurant back then could win over critics but not his own community. Daniel walks through how Baldío rebuilt its menu from the ground up shifting from a Nordic-infl...

As a child in Nairobi, Benedetta Kyengo spent holidays climbing trees and eating mangoes and papayas at her grandmother's food forest in eastern Kenya. Eight years later, every tree was gone, replaced by maize and beans, and her grandmother, who used to send food to the city, was depending on money sent from it. That reversal, from abundance to dependency in a single generation, is the wound this episode is about healing. Benedetta, founder of Feedback to the Future and a practitioner of synt...

Fermentation is the oldest food technology on earth. It happens in our guts, in the soil, in every cup of coffee and most restaurants still throw the juiced lime away. At Baldío, Mexico City's zero-waste restaurant, Chris Locke has built an entire philosophy around that lime: a Korean-style raw syrup, a lacto-fermented powder for seasoning, a tapache, and finally a koji-based shoyu. Four products, zero waste, from something already used. In this conversation, recorded inside Baldío's pr...

An ancient farm system, built by hand on top of water, hidden inside one of the largest cities on earth and almost nobody knows it exists. The chinampas of Xochimilco are human-made islands, constructed over centuries in the lakes that Mexico City was built on. At their peak they fed an entire civilisation. Today, more than 60% are abandoned, the city is slowly swallowing the edges, and once a chinampero stops farming, another one rarely takes their place. Pablo Usobiaga from Arca Tierra is t...

When Janet Maro started building training programs with farmers in Tanzania, she didn't arrive with a curriculum. She asked farmers what they knew, what they needed, and what they could bring to the table — and built from there. That instinct, to treat farmers as the architects rather than the audience, turns out to explain most of what makes Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania unusual: why groups keep meeting and planning years after projects end, why an organic shop opened in Morogoro in 2012 ...

Mexico has thousands of bean varieties. Most people living in cities know four to five. Silke Gérman is on a mission to change that. She is the founder of La Comandanta, a premium heirloom bean and salsa brand now in its twelfth year of connecting smallholder milpa farmers in central Mexico to retail shelves in Mexico City, the US, the UK, and Germany. Ancient Mexican bean varieties — grown for millennia in the traditional milpa polyculture system alongside corn and squash — are disappearing...

Gut & Bösel in Alt Madlitz, Brandenburg is one of the largest regenerative farms in Europe — 3,000 hectares of arable land and forestry on some of the sandiest, driest soils in Germany. For years, farmer Benedikt Bösel and his team have been experimenting with agroforestry, holistic grazing, and composting at scale, with no blueprint and no neighbours to learn from. That experimentation costs money, takes time, and generates knowledge that other farmers benefit from for free. So they set ...

Sylvia Kuria started with a kitchen garden and a refusal to use chemicals on food for her newborn. Seventeen years later, she runs Sylvia's Basket, aggregates organic produce across Kenya, trains smallholder farmers on half-acre plots, and helped get agroecology written into county government development plans with real budget behind it. The journey from that first bottle of pesticides to a funded policy win is not a straight line — and the business realities along the way are rarely the ones...

Argentina has just issued its first grazing-based carbon credits and the story behind them is forty years in the making. Pablo Francisco Borrelli, co-founder of Ruuts, has spent the last decade building the infrastructure to get farmers in Patagonia and beyond paid for what their land is actually doing: sequestering carbon, retaining water, and growing more grass than anyone thought possible. The carbon credit is not the point. It is the door. Once a farmer steps through it and experien...

Your tongue might be the most underused tool we have for understanding food quality — and for moving consumer buying power toward regenerative farming. Sherry Hess, culinary professional, nutritionist, and founder of The Flavor Remedy, makes the case that taste is not a nice-to-have. It is a powerful biological signal, and the food processing industry has understood this far longer than we have. We go deep on the five tastes — salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami — and on why ultra-processed...

African soils were once so alive, nobody called it regeneration, the land just gave. Dr. Kofi Boa, founder of the Center for No-Till Agriculture (CNTA) in Ghana, has spent decades proving they can give again. Boa traces his journey from a burned family farm to one of Africa's most compelling soil restoration demonstration models and makes the case for a distinctly African approach to regeneration: grounded in what fallow land has always shown us, driven by farmers who need a full granary befo...

The healthiest economies will show up with drinkable rivers. That is the image Laura Ortiz Montemayor works backwards from — every Monday morning, every investor meeting, every slide deck. Laura is a regenerative finance strategist, founder of SVX Mexico, and co-founder of LARIS — the Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit. This is her third time on the show, and a lot has happened since we last spoke. LARIS 2025 sold out — more than 200 people, billionaires, farmers, and practitioners...

Regenerative agriculture really works. Data shows that the ability of crops, from planting to harvest, to withstand weather shocks (50-year droughts and floods happening every year, anyone?) correlates very strongly with regenerative agriculture practices. To enable that at scale, MRVs are crucial. Happy to welcome back on the podcast Anastasia Volkova, co-founder of Regrow Ag, the AI-powered platform to make agriculture resilient, who just made another acquisition. We check in with th...

Seeds, seeds, seeds. It all starts with power and who controls the seeds. But who is actually building scalable companies in this space? Today we have one: a decentralised seed company in Uganda that only works with indigenous seeds, is farmer-owned, and gives power, value, and control back to the farmers. The farmers are trained to select seeds and to grow them, and Emmanuel Luwemba, the founder of Eden Seeds, helps sell the best varieties to other farmers without extracting all life from th...

Why are we completely ignoring our biggest organ, our skin? The skin care and cosmetics industry is a 200 billion industry and growing fast, often with great margins. Most of it is filled with barely legal chemicals, but there is a fast-growing natural, even regenerative, beauty space and we talk to one of the leaders. We cover everything with Pierluigi Scordari, Sustainability Manager di N&B Natural is Better: ferments, probiotics and prebiotics, the skin microbiome, how they started, wh...

Carbon is life, not the enemy. And in this wide-ranging conversation with the legend that is Paul Hawken, we get into all of it. Paul is an activist, entrepreneur with Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration and prolific writer who started a natural food brand back in the 1970s. We trace his journey through writing Drawdown, Regeneration, and Carbon: The Book of Life and why people loved Drawdown so much even though that was never really the point. Regeneration got closer to the core. And C...

We sit down with Olusola Sowemimo, a lawyer-turned-farmer and founder of Ope Farms in Nigeria, to unpack how grief became a blueprint for organic, traceable, and profitable agriculture. Her catalyst was a cancer conference in California where survivors only ate what they could trace—an idea that reshaped how she thinks about soil, inputs, and integrity. Back home, the early days were rough: antibiotic-laced manure wiped out hundreds of tomato plants, a strong tobacco extract burned cucumbers,...

It’s a very interesting time for African agriculture and food, the continent is realising it’s potential to help feed the world, money is flowing into infrastructure to unlock this, more and more talent is coming into the space and the realisation that agro ecology or regenerative agriculture is no longer a nice niche with big margins but has the potential to become the predominant way of agriculture is performed. After putting over $20 million to work in East Africa, Ivan Mandela, foun...

The food, agriculture and planetary systems, for that matter, are all in serious need of change. No news there. But how? Individual investments and grants, however large, will never be big enough to move these systems. What we need is a serious, deep analysis of the food and agriculture space within a certain context: hundreds of hours of interviews with many stakeholders to map the players, the positive and negative feedback loops, and the intervention points with huge leverage (or not...

Think about where and how you live. Close your eyes and picture your ideal neighbourhood. We bet it looks something like this: a walkable neighbourhood designed around a fully functional farm, with different types of houses built from healthy, non-toxic, natural materials, multifamily, aging-proof, small but not too small, with plenty of privacy, and affordable. The neighbourhood is designed for meeting your neighbours, hence the word neighbourhood. Cars are confined to a designated area, and...

A conversation with Sylvia Banda, Zambian business woman, restaurateur and social entrepreneur about her journey started when when she was 12. She opened her first food company, and she hasn’t stopped since. She now runs a multi-million-dollar business with over 15 restaurants in Lusaka, Zambia, a food- processing company selling traditional Zambian food worldwide, and has trained over 60,000 smallholder farmers to produce higher-quality products and process them to receive better prices.&nbs...

We are at an interesting moment in the dairy sector. For years, smaller farmers with around 200 cows, who were also great graziers, could undercut the costs of large concentrated dairy operations, keeping costs low, taking healthy margins in good years, and surviving the bad ones. But something has changed: CAFO dairies have grown bigger and bigger (10,000 cows is now normal, and 100,000 is no longer an exception) and their economies of scale mean they are undercutting the grazers. Of course,...

The difference between agroecology and regenerative agriculture is the deep social change we need in the food and agriculture system. As Laura Ortiz Montemayor told us once "ecology without social justice is just gardening". Million Belay, who leads the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, the largest social movement on the African continent, is very clear stop intervening with agriculture on the continent, stop imposing all kinds of rules, practices, seeds, inputs etc, which don’t serve ...

This is deep dive into common misconceptions about red meat, methane emissions from cows, and the feasibility of transitioning to grass-fed beef production. We discuss the health impacts of red meat based on the cow's diet, the actual environmental effects of methane from ruminants, and busts myths surrounding CAFO operations and land use. Cows. Methane. Climate. The debate is louder than ever — and still full of myths. That why, after recording a podcast on why building a $100B home fo...

What is needed to truly move the needle on health? Create more research, more trials on nutrient density, more advocacy? Or, as Martin Reiter, founder of RARE argues, create the next regen Nestlé or Unilever: a 100 billion (yes, that’s a B) regenerative consumer goods conglomerate, with only better-for-you and better-for-the-planet brands. The demand is there; the current incumbents are unable to innovate in regen, as they are built on chemical ingredients. The story usually goes like this: a...

How to get more entrepreneurs building in the regeneration space? If you are a regular listener of this podcast, you have heard us discuss this so many times you probably lost count. No, we are not saying entrepreneurs and companies are the solution to all our problems. But entrepreneurial people who set up companies, but also non-profits and movements— basically people who don’t accept the status quo and get to work to change it—are always the ones who change the world. So how do we get more...

Bill Gates Foundation works in Africa: what goes through your mind when you hear those words? We all probably quickly have our thoughts ready, but hold on a second. Just as we often talk about farmers without asking them, we often talk about the African continent without asking people actually living there. So, we never fully grasp how big, how interesting, how full of potential, and how fundamental it is in a regenerative future. In this new series on The African Regenerative Frontrunners, w...

AI is transforming agriculture, how can farmers and land managers be sure it works for them? What digital twins, soil health metrics, novel robot sensors and other technologies can do to support profitable farming and enable ecosystem service payments—while also addressing critical questions about data rights, governance, and ownership like: How can farmers and landholders retain control of their own data and capture more of the value AI creates? How can the new tech help farmers to monitor, ...

Regenerative practices lead to higher quality and much higher prices in year one and, over time, to lower costs, which makes the regenerative business case in certain cash crops that are exported (spices, tea, coffee, etc.) so strong that it almost spreads on its own. Nothing is easy, but this is really hopeful. In this conversation with Thekla Teunis and Gijs Boers, founders of Grounded, Grounded Ingredients and Grounded Investment Company, we discuss why quality is intimately linked to rege...

This is our 2025 wrap episode. If 2025 had a soundtrack, it would be pressure: pressure on systems, on people, on animals, on land. Heat. Drought. Fire. Flood. Repeating across regions and headlines. But this year we also paid attention to what doesn’t always make the news. We spent time in real conversations with farmers testing new practices in their fields, scientists challenging outdated models, investors reassessing what risk really means, and builders putting regenerative ideas into pra...