This 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 possible and not—vs. outer work like planting cover crops, digging swales, showing the financials and nutrient density of almonds, and demonstrating how regenerative farming systems are more alive by measuring biodiversity? How do we open up to opportunities like small water cycle restoration, instead of only thinking about cover crops on our farm?
We talk about:
- Why pre-competitive collaboration really works
- Breadfruit: the importance of operating loans and the role banks could play
- A deep dive into the almond industry in California’s Central Valley
- The water cycle in the Central Valley—and how we might restore it
- Flavor and reconnecting people with their taste buds
- The molds living in your gut (don’t worry, we can hack them )
- Or… maybe they’ve already hacked us! Do you also feel bitten by, and controlled by,the “Soil bug”?
What if the fastest way to transform agriculture isn’t a new metric or tool, but a new way of seeing? We sit down with Lauren Tucker, co-founder of Kiss the Ground and Renourish Studios, to unpack a three-year experiment that brought founders, buyers, farmers, and investors into a community of practice focused on regenerative thinking, not just regenerative sourcing. We explore the power of pre-competitive collaboration: how shared science and honest dialogue can cut through stalemates.
PRE-COMPETITIVE COLLABORATION REALLY WORKS
Lauren discusses the success of The Almond Project, a multi-stakeholder initiative. She explains how bringing competitors together to fund research and tackle systemic challenges has proven to be an effective model for creating change. Lauren shares as well why the most impactful lever might be financial, operating loans priced down when soil outcomes improve. If banks, brands, and growers align around resilience, more acres will move faster than premiums alone can ever reach.
“What’s happened is there’s been so much more interest in our work, and we’ve added all of these streams of work and collaborations, and now we have much larger companies joining us. We have a large company that joined us that is a silent partner, and we have tiny companies in the fold and medium-sized ones. And so, working with all these purchasers of almonds and then a few different farms and a processor, yeah, we’re seeing that that pre-competitive collaboration is really working.” Lauren Tucker
BREADFRUIT
Lauren describes a potential future project focused on the crop breadfruit. She is curious about building a global export market for it in a non-extractive way that could also reinvest in and benefit the local communities where it is grown.
“We have a potential client who’s really interested in us helping to bring breadfruit to market and looking at how you would grow an export market for breadfruit in a non-extractive way.” Lauren Tucker
WATER CYCLE IN THE CENTRAL VALLEY OF CALIFORNIA
From there, we widen the lens to water cycles and landscape design. Cover crops and hillside vegetation aren’t just “nice to have” practices; at scale, they can influence the small water cycle and nudge local rainfall patterns. The challenge is coordination: prioritizing zones, sequencing efforts, and measuring outcomes so public funds, corporate programs, and farmer ingenuity amplify each other. We explore a practical roadmap for the Central Valley, mapping nodal points, aligning procurement with multi-crop rotations, and replacing transactional pressure with relational accountability.
The conversation turns to the large-scale impact agriculture could have on local climate patterns. Keeping the ground covered on a massive scale could influence the small water cycle and bring rain back to a drought-prone region.
“If we could just keep all of the ground covered in California. And if we could do that on a large enough scale, we should be able to see a small water cycle impact to that and actually bring back rain to a region that is suffering from very odd weather patterns and seasons of drought.” Lauren Tucker
GETTING PEOPLE BACK IN TOUCH WITH THEIR TASTE BUDS
Flavor and nutrient density offer a bridge to human health. Early almond assays hint at antioxidant gains with soil health practices, but the deeper insight is experiential: when food is grown in living systems, we taste it. Lauren connects this to the inner work of leadership: tuning nervous systems, undoing cravings shaped by molds and ultra-processed foods, and using shared, on-farm meals to spark curiosity over fear.
A colleague from her cohort focuses on the connection between flavour, nutrient density, and regenerative agriculture. The core idea is to help people rediscover their innate ability to sense nutrition through taste.
“She was really into getting people back in touch with their taste buds and looking at the correlation between what we taste as really tasty and nutrient density and regenerative agriculture and all those links.” Lauren Tucker
OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED
Koen and Lauren also talked about:
- Molds living in your gut
- The Almond Project details
- Financial challenges for farmers
LINKS:
LINKED INTERVIEWS:
- Lauren Tucker – The regenerative business studio ReNourish seems to be working but what is success?
- Lauren Tucker, co-founder of Kiss the Ground helps the next generation of regenerative businesses to thrive
- Stef van Dongen – Regenerating a 100.000HA watershed in Spain while preventing the forest from burning and people from burnouts
- Kevin Wolz – Starting an agroforestry industry in the belly of the beast, the soy and corn monoculture heartland of the US Midwest
- Ali Bin Shahid, one of the few who can model and calculate water cycle restoration
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.