Shows
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food387 Douglas Sheil - Why fixing water fixes carbonYes, we’re talking again about water cycles and this time with Douglas Sheil, Professor of Forest Ecology and Forest Management at Wageningen University, one of the most famous agricultural universities in the world. Why has it been so difficult to get scientific discoveries, like the biotic pump theory in physics, to enter other fields like climate science and forestry? We talk about the huge pushback biotic pump scientists have faced in publishing papers and gaining recognition over the past 20 years.But we also talk about optimism, why water is a much easier sell than ca...
2025-10-141h 01
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food386 Lauren Tucker - Inner regen work, gut molds, almonds groves in the Central Valley and taste budsThis is a check-in conversation with Lauren Tucker, co-founder of Kiss the Ground and Renourish Studios. We talk about wrapping up the cohort at Renourish Studio, where they’ve worked for three years with a diverse group of entrepreneurs and investors across the US food and agriculture system.How do you bring the fact that we are part of a living system into your work in commercial organisations? Lauren shares lessons learned, and what they’re doing moving forward. How much of this work is inner work—how we see the world, what we think is pos...
2025-10-071h 06
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food385 Maria Jensen - Giving cows a voice through epigenetics while improving animal welfare and profitabilityA conversation with Maria Jensen, co-founder of Antler Bio, helping dairy farmers identify and address factors limiting their herd’s full potential. What if cows could speak? Especially dairy cows. They would probably share not only the horrors of the dairy industry, but also stories of many dairy farmers who truly try their best to care for their animals and yet still fail. Their cows are neither healthy nor happy, their bank accounts look worse every year, and their mental health and marriages are shaky. Intensive dairy, unless you are massive, is a very difficult industry.So ho...
2025-09-301h 28
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food384 Thomas Kliemt - A farming incubator with a 75% success rate (that nobody knows about) lands in GermanyA check-in conversation with Thomas Kliemt, formerly part of Kulturland, which has been growing and they are suddenly, after 10 years in the making, an overnight success. In the first 6 months of 2025, they accelerated their fundraising by 100%, raising the same €2.5m they raised in all of 2024.Once you enable access to land, transition it into the commons as an anti-speculation measure, and remove the huge debt burden new farmers face, who is actually going to farm this land? That’s what Thomas’ next venture is working to solve, inspired by a highly successful French model which has trained hundre...
2025-09-2353 min
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food383 Rasmus Nørgaard - From bricks to soil: rethinking real estate from the ground upStraight from Copenhagen, a conversation with Rasmus Nørgaard, co-founder of Urban Partners, Home.Earth and Nordhus with over two decades of experience in real estate, pushing the boundaries of sustainability within conventional systems. With Rasmus we dive deep into the world of real estate. The built environment is one of the three major sectors that needs a complete systems change, alongside with agrifood and energy.What happens when you reimagine real estate development from first principles? What can the regenerative agriculture and food sector learn from one of the pioneers of sustainable real estate? Rasmus shares t...
2025-09-161h 23
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food382 Dianne, Ian and Matthew Haggerty - Food, not commodities: how regenerative agriculture works at scale on 63,000 acresLegend alarm on the podcast! We are happy to welcome the Haggerty's family, Ian and Dianne, together with their son Matthew, on the podcast sharing their 30+ year journey- from being considered the hippie weirdos to leading a movement in Western Australia- showing that you can absolutely farm regeneratively at scale, in this case over 60,000 acres, with deep regeneration. Leading regenerative farmer and co-founder of Natural Intelligence Farming (NIF), the Haggertys' farm is a living example of a harmonious alignment of soil, plant, animal, and human microbiomes in farm ecosystems.They regularly take on new land, but only if...
2025-09-091h 31
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food381 Sarah Hellebek - Training Denmark’s next farmers with practitioners, not professorsA walking the land episode with Sarah Hellebek, deputy head at Krogerup Højskole, who spent years at the heart of Denmark’s climate activist movement. By most measures, she was successful, climate made it onto the political agenda, though never strongly enough. But the fight came with a cost: it also made her pretty depressed, she was- in her own words- mostly shouting in front of the Parliament. Until a tour visiting progressive Danish farmers exposed her to the world of regeneration and she dove right into it. After spending a lot of time on d...
2025-09-0259 min
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food380 Frederik Lean Hansen - Double-purpose chickens and the regen dating agency matching landowners with land seekersA barefoot conversation across his Danish farmland with Frederik Lean Hansen, advisor on regenerative farm finance, revealing the efficiency of his pasture-raised chicken operation and Abunda, the revolutionary business he's building to connect land holders with entrepreneurial farmers.How many times have you visited a farm or heard a story from a farmer or landowner who wished for more people on the farm? Someone to start a market garden, run a chicken operation, or build an advanced biofertiliser brewery? More stacked enterprises, more diversity, and more hands and eyes on the land- of course, only...
2025-08-261h 06
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food379 Cindie Christiansen - Top 50 Farmers update and the simple tweak to raise millions for regenerationA check in conversation with Cindie Christiansen, founder of Foodprint Nordic and Top 50 Farmers (no, it’s not a ranking, so nobody “won”). We spoke just six months ago, but this time we met in person to talk about the progress of turning farmers into the next superheroes of climate, water, health, and more.We unpack her vision for systems change in food and agriculture. Directly from one of the world’s leading culinary scenes, Copenhagen, we ask: why hasn’t a strong farm-to-table, local cuisine movement led to real change in the agrifood system yet? And more impor...
2025-08-1955 min
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food378 Darren Doherty - 35 years in regeneration training farmers and the role of tech and AIA conversation with Darren J Doherty, co-founder of Regrarians, in the space of regeneration and regenerating for over 35 years, about the role of technology, AI, and large language models in training farmers and agronomists. We touch on how expensive and too-short workshops are hurting everyone, and why a hybrid model, grounded on the land and in person, combined with much longer online engagement, might be one way to move forward.We also explore what it means to reinvent yourself after spending years deeply immersed in a project, only to resurface and realise the regenerative world has shifted...
2025-08-121h 43
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food377 Rob de Laet - Water is key to cool the planet within 20 yearsA conversation with Rob de Laet, project lead of Cooling the Climate and co-author of the book Cooling the Climate: How to Revive the Biosphere and Cool the Earth Within 20 Years. The science is pretty clear and getting clearer by the day: water cools the planet. The more living, healthy vegetation we have on this planet, predominately perennials and thus trees, agroforestry systems and healthy forests, the cooler the climate is and the less extreme weather events occur. Living plants literally make the Earth sweat and remove heat from the biosphere.Humans have systematically devegetated the planet...
2025-08-051h 12
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food376 Sheila Darmos - Why Greece is leading the regenerative agriculture movement and what the world can learnA conversation with Sheila Darmos, co-founder of the Southern Lights, based in the southern Peloponnese, Greece with the mission is to spread knowledge, techniques, and the mindset for regenerative practices across all domains of human activity. Sheila is also a co-founding farmer of the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA) and serves as an EU Soil Mission Ambassador.A question we get very often is: which place or country is leading the regenerative movement? It’s obviously a very complex question to answer, but after talking to Sheila, our answer might be Greece. Having battled numerous economic an...
2025-07-291h 04
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food375 Matt Orlando - From Noma to building the world’s most circular restaurant and disrupting the chocolate industryA conversation with Matt Orlando, chef, entrepreneur, and former head chef at Noma. He is also the founder of Amass, one of the most circular and fully organic restaurants in the world, which closed at the end of 2022. He then focused on a project in Singapore and is now back in Denmark, currently very busy with, among other things, a new restaurant in Copenhagen.What happens when someone who worked as a head chef in one of the best restaurants in the world, Noma, starts going deep—deep—down the rabbit hole of sustainability and responsibility?We...
2025-07-221h 56
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food374 Birker, Bösel, Mazzola – The Regenerative Agronomy Gap: who do farmers call?A conversation with farmer Benedikt Bösel, farmer and regen agronomist Matteo Mazzola and Philippe Birker, co-founder of Climate Farmers. We need regenerative agronomists. Because let’s face it — most farmers trust their agronomist, and the chances that their agronomist is trained in regen are pretty small. We’re moving from the first group of super ambitious, entrepreneurial, and slightly rebellious farmers who have made the transition, to a larger group who want to transition but can take less risk and will need support. So, who do they call when they want to start t...
2025-07-1549 min
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food373 Anat Shenker-Osorio - Why climate messages don’t land and how to rewrite the regenerative narrativeA conversation with Anat Shenker-Osorio, founder of A.S.O. Communications, a progressive political communication bureau known for slogans such as “Don’t take the temperature, change it” and “A great message doesn’t say what’s already popular; a great message makes popular what needs to be said".We try so hard in the regenerative (and probably any other progressive) space to work on our messaging, how to communicate, how to reach people inside our bubble and beyond. We try to speak to those within the agrochemical and food industry, to make them see how environmentally sound, healt...
2025-07-0851 min
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food372 Anand Ethirajalu - Harvesting the clouds: how to transition over 10,000 farmers a year, reducing input costs and increasing profitsA conversation with Anand Ethirajalu, farmer-turned-ecologist and project director for the Save Soil movement.We don’t talk about it much, but we should: a remarkable transition has been unfolding on the Indian subcontinent over the past few decades. Hundreds of thousands- if not millions- of farmers have been trained in regenerative practicesand have successfully made the switch. Yes, with higher yields and greater profits, largely due to significantly lower production costs.In the conversation, we focus on one region where the Save Soil mo...
2025-07-011h 23
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food371 Benedikt Boesel - Fully integrating 300 cows into a 1000-hectare arable very sandy farmIt just doesn’t happen very often we record in a field surrounded by cows just after a cow gave birth to a calf. There is not more fitting place to explore the super complex role of animals in the food and agriculture space than walking the landing- and standing amongst the cows- with Benedikt Boesel, founder and farmer at Gut&Bosël, in Alt Madlitz, in Germany. We discuss everything from how much joy animals bring to a farm and how complex it is to treat them well and how they are a direct mirr...
2025-06-241h 11
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food370 Thomas Hogenhaven – The €22M regen fund that said no to €7MAfter three years, Thomas Hogenhaven, founder and managing partner of Planetary Impact Ventures, is back on the podcast. Thomas and his team just turned down a $7 million investment in their fund. That’s right—said no to $7 million. And this wasn’t some shady source of capital either. This was a serious, institutional investor, fully compliant with KYC requirements. So… why walk away?More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/thomas-hogenhaven.==========================In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agricult...
2025-06-171h 14
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food369 Ichsani Wheeler - We need more large animals in our landscapesIchsani Wheeler, co-founder of OpenGeoHub and Envirometrix, challenges dominant assumptions in land use and agricultural design, making the case for more large animals in our landscapes—not fewer. She explains why understanding the maximum ecological carrying capacity of agro-ecological systems is essential for restoring function, productivity, and resilience in both natural and farmed environments. Wheeler advocates for granular, place-based research to better inform ecological planning, arguing that broad generalizations fall short when it comes to the complex realities of nutrient cycling and biomass distribution. Megafauna plays a critical role in eco...
2025-06-101h 22
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food368 Béla Hatvany - Born in 1938, now thinking AI, enoughness, precision fermentation and building a care economyA conversation with Béla Hatvany, pioneering entrepreneur in the automation of libraries and the information industry, born in 1938, turned into angel investor and philanthropist, on his journey, what’s enough, the role of AI and EI (empathetic intelligence), and the potential of precision fermentation.Growing up during WWII with bombs literally blowing through his window, Bela's early anger about the state of the world transformed into action after a pivotal moment of self-reflection. This led him to create businesses with what he calls "six bottom lines" - serving employees, investors, suppliers, clients, communities, and Earth in bal...
2025-06-031h 00
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food367 Anthony James - Learning from the legends how to become a positive keystone speciesA conversation with Anthony James, host of The RegenNarration podcast, a Prime Ministerial award winner for service to the international community and Honorary Research Fellow at UWA. He has had many legends at his microphone and joins us to share what he’s learned, what he sees, and what he thinks is coming next in regenerative food and agriculture.The pioneers who spent decades developing innovative approaches to land stewardship won't be around forever, but they're actively passing their hard-earned wisdom to a new generation eager to accelerate positive change. Anthony shares how his own journey from bu...
2025-05-271h 28
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food366 Austin Unruh - Silvopasture, planting trees on millions of acres of grassland, is the most scalable and profitable regen solutionA conversation with Austin Unruh, founder of Trees for Graziers, about the investment case for silvopasture. What if we could plant hundreds of millions of trees on degraded, low-value pasture land and make money from it? What if we planted trees that are beneficial for livestock—ruminants, pigs, and poultry? The market for meat and animal products is fairly stable (unless we get a massive breakthrough in precision fermentation soon, but that’s hard to predict). Trees can dramatically lower costs and increase production.Austin argues that this is the best entry point to get many more trees into...
2025-05-201h 07
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food365 Philip Kauders - From Goldman Sachs to investing hundreds of millions in agroforestry in BrazilA conversation with Philip Kauders, CEO and co-founder of Courageous Land, working on reforesting landscapes via large-scale biodiverse agroforestry. We can invest hundreds of millions into regenerative agroforestry, maybe even billions. No, we don’t need new regulations or new technology (drones that prune, for example— sure, they’ll help, and they’ll come, but they’re not essential). According to Philip the puzzle pieces for making large scale multi strata agroforestry systems are there. The place: Brazil. The land: the former rainforest which is currently bare or maybe grazed a bit, so underperforming financially and ecologi...
2025-05-131h 13
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food364 Paul McMahon - Why regen forestry is natural capital’s Trojan horse for institutional investorsA conversation with Paul McMahon, co-founder SLM partners, about forestry being the gateway drug for natural capital for institutional investors to put money to work. Why? Because they are used to investing in forestry — it is a well-established investment sector with very long-time horizons. Rotations here are 30+ years, but it’s also one with many challenges: current practices usually mean cutting down a forest after 30 years and completely replanting it. That basically scars a landscape for life — mostly monocultures.Interestingly, alternatives have been popping up over the last few decades. Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF), where you selectively harves...
2025-05-061h 07
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food363 James Arthur Smith - Mercury-free, microplastic-free, and Omega-3 rich: the future of seafoodA check in conversation with James Arthur Smith, founder of Seatopia, about their data-driven focus on nutrient density (plus mercury/microplastics testing) resonates more strongly than abstract “sustainability” marketing strategy and it ultimately driving real ecosystem restoration. We explore how Seatopia defines regenerative aquaculture in a multi- trophic system—integrating finfish alongside shellfish and seaweeds, how they measure and quantify our impact at every step and how they partner with artisan milling companies developing species-appropriate feeds that eliminate fishmeal, soy, corn, and canola oil—pivoting toward insect protein and algae-based oils.More about this episode on https...
2025-04-291h 08
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food362 Mike Velings - VC & PE won’t deliver regeneration — €250M evergreen proves itA conversation with Mike Velings, co-founder of Aqua-Spark, a global investment fund for sustainable aquaculture, about how an invite he should have never received lead to the creation of the largest aquaculture fund in history, with over $250 million in assets under management (AUM) and ambitious plans to grow to $2 billion or more. This conversation goes beyond the billion dollar question—it’s already been answered. We explore why focusing on long- term investments is essential for transforming an industry and why current venture capital and private equity fund models might cause more harm than good. How can we b...
2025-04-221h 25
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food361 Herb Young - After 36 years at Bayer, growing regen citrus with 8x the nutrientsA conversation with Herb Young, farmer who, after 36 years in the chemical industry working for Bayer, retired and bought a small farm in Georgia—where things quickly got out of hand. While researching organic premiums, Herb came across regenerative agriculture—and fell deep, very deep, down the rabbit hole. For over a year, he read everything, listened to everything, and then planted his first trees. A few years later, Herb is now one of the leading regenerative citrus growers in the country, conducting cutting-edge research while selling his first harvest directly to consumers in over 36 states. And the m...
2025-04-151h 07
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food360 Ethan Soloviev - AI, good food at Davos, food as medicine and regen taking offA check- in conversation with Ethan Soloviev, Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood, about how regenerative agriculture is truly taking off, its position within large food and agriculture companies, and whether we risk watering it down or falling into greenwashing (Spoiler: Surprisingly, we're doing a lot about it!). We also get an update on HowGood—they're doing well and focusing more on nutrient density-, plus, we talk about Regen House, which is revolutionizing the way good food fosters meaningful conversations at major events like COPs, climate summits, and Davos, bringing farmers, indigenous community members, an...
2025-04-0857 min
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food359 Louis De Jaeger - Eat More Trees: a Masterclass with thé storyteller of the Regen SpaceA conversation with Louis De Jaeger, international keynote speaker, author, award-winning filmmaker, and landscape designer, about dreams, action, and storytelling—how to reach and touch people. We discuss why storytelling is highly underrated and underfunded, and why he is organizing a festival—not the next Burning Man, but a regeneration festival.He shares his excitement about small water cycle restoration, the biotic pump, and much more. And in the end, it all boils down to one simple message: Eat More Trees.During his 5-year sabbatical that turned into a lifelong mission to rege...
2025-04-011h 20
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food357 Kiira Heymann - From Non-GMO to Non-ultra-processed: everyone has the right to know what’s in their foodA conversation with Kiira Heymann, Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Non-GMO Project and the Food Integrity Collective. After the success of the Non-GMO Project in the U.S., which is now featured on almost 63,000 products, the team is launching the Non-Ultra-Processed Food verification. In this conversation, we discuss why—why introduce another label? And why is it so important for the food sector to focus on increasing consumers' capacity to demand more from their food system, rather than just adding another label?This isn't just another label—it's a carefully considered intervention designed to reconnect people with...
2025-03-1845 min
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food356 Dimitri Tsitos - Making regenerative intensive tree crops profitableA deep dive into the world of intensive—or super-intensive—tree crops, particularly olives and almonds with Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic, the Regenerative Agroforestry Podcast, the Arbo-Innova project and Mazi Farm. In Portugal, the sector is booming—highly profitable yet highly destructive—due to its high- input, high-output nature, with heavy reliance on fertilizers and chemicals.This raises the question: can there be another way? That's exactly what Dimitri and his team have been researching over the past few years—on real farms, running large-scale regenerative plots alongside conventional ones. The bad news? It's not easy. It demands...
2025-03-111h 30
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food354 Dan Barber - AI-Powered natural breeding: The End of GMOs, Gene Editing, and CRISPR?An overdue check-in conversation with Dan Barber, chef, co-owner of Blue Hill restaurants and co-founder of Row 7 Seeds, where we dive into the fascinating world of seeds and how breeding is evolving with the explosion of AI and other technologies. No, we don’t need GMOs, CRISPR, or other risky blunt instruments. We discuss the implosion of the fake meat hype, which was at its peak when we last spoke four years ago, why insane umami flavor and potentially self-nitrogen-fixing tomatoes are revolutionary. This is a deep conversation about bread and wheat—and why breeding wheat specifically for whole meal...
2025-02-251h 06