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 a...

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 tec...

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 atte...

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...

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 fa...

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 y...

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 festi...

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 h...

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...

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 travell...

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 ...

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 o...

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 q...

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 Po...

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 convers...

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 w...

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 ...