Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

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 ...

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 o...

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 ...

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 ...

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 Ba...

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,...

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...

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 r...

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...

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 traditi...

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 genera...

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 ...

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...

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 &...

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 al...

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 ...

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 agricultu...

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 ...

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, probiot...