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 almost by accident, when distressed clients needed someone to turn around underperforming farms in Uruguay.

Francisco co-founded The Land Group in January 2016 alongside his business partner Joaquin. Today they operate 20,000 hectares across seven farms in Uruguay — and are now expanding into Iberia, drawn by the neglected potential of Portugal’s ancient Montado landscape. But what makes their approach distinctive isn’t the land. It’s the language.

They don’t pitch regenerative agriculture to investors. They pitch precision grazing, higher yields, lower costs, and better asset values. And it works. In this conversation recorded in Lisbon, Francisco explains why the sector may be its own worst enemy, what the real financial returns look like, and how he’d deploy a billion euros if given the chance.

HOW A CAPITAL MARKETS CAREER LED ACCIDENTALLY TO REGENERATIVE FARMING

Francisco spent his early career in capital markets and carbon trading, followed by strategic consulting and buy-side work in the renewable energy sector. None of it was pointed at agriculture. The Land Group was founded in January 2016 alongside business partner Joaquin, initially as an advisory and asset management operation focused on Latin America. What changed everything was a phone call from a client who had bought a farm in Uruguay — the deal done at a cocktail party, as Francisco describes it — that was seriously underperforming.

Francisco and Joaquin agreed to take over the operation. They rebuilt it by structuring cattle-sharing agreements with local partners, building a 5,000-head cattle business on a 9,000-hectare farm without deploying additional investor capital. That first project set the template for everything that followed: identify distressed agricultural assets — what they call “cocktail investments,” bought at social events with no management plan — restructure them operationally, and make them profitable. Today The Land Group manages seven farms and 20,000 hectares in Uruguay across mixed cattle, crops, and forestry systems.

“We were accidental regenerative farmland operators. We didn’t start because of a passion for the land. We started because our clients had a problem.” — Francisco Roque de Pinho

THE FINANCIAL CASE FOR PRECISION GRAZING: 30-40% MORE CATTLE, LOWER COSTS, FROM DAY ONE

The numbers Francisco describes are significant. By moving from conventional extensive grazing to rotational systems with paddocks as small as half a hectare, with 24-hour rotations and up to 500 head of cattle per paddock, The Land Group has achieved stocking rate increases of 30 to 40% — and in some cases up to 50% — on the same land, without additional inputs. Yields go up because grass utilisation improves dramatically: cattle graze what they would otherwise avoid, and pasture quality and diversity improve over time as the system regenerates.

On the cost side, the benefits compound. Labour requirements fall, because well-trained cattle learn the system quickly and move between paddocks in seconds. Veterinary costs drop because intensive rotation breaks the parasitic lifecycle. The infrastructure investment is modest — fencing and water points — and the returns arrive immediately, not after a costly transition period.

“Our job is really to grow grass. We are gardeners. And if half of that grass is not grazed simply because it doesn’t taste well, it’s a wasted resource.” — Francisco Roque de Pinho

WHY THEY NEVER SAY “REGENERATIVE” WHEN PITCHING TO INVESTORS

The most provocative thread running through this conversation is one The Land Group has learned through hard experience. They do not use the word regenerative when pitching to investors. They call it precision grazing. They talk about an efficient use of a resource. They describe stocking rates, cost reductions, and asset value improvement.

The reason is practical. Francisco describes investors — particularly North American institutional investors — who have “regenerative” on their exclusion list, or who associate the word with compromised returns, experimental practices, and activist agendas. Before a conversation starts, the door closes. He recounts a North American pension fund call where he opened by naming the issue directly: “We manage animals, and I know you cannot invest in animal protein.” The investor paused, said that was actually changing, and asked to hear more — only to close by saying, “Send me materials and come back in a few years.”

The deeper frustration is that regenerative agriculture, as a term, has become too broad to carry meaning. It is simultaneously a marketing claim for fast food corporations, a scientific framework for soil ecologists, and an investment thesis for impact funds. Investors don’t know what they’re buying when they hear it — and their default assumption is lower returns.

“The regenerative agriculture sector is its own worst enemy — it tries to speak to everybody. If you want to raise capital at scale, you need to be specific. You need to say: this practice, in this system, delivers this result.” — Francisco Roque de Pinho

Francisco’s conclusion — uncomfortable for advocates who have fought hard to establish the term — is that for livestock-based systems, precision grazing should be presented on its own financial and operational merits, without the regenerative wrapper. He calls the long-term value creation the “regenerative alpha,” a concept he was surprised to find already named in a Phil McMahon white paper, which calls it “the Edge.” The alpha exists. But investors need to see the numbers before they can understand why.

THE MONTADO: PORTUGAL’S 12,000-YEAR-OLD SYSTEM AND WHY IT NEEDS CATTLE BACK

Moving from Uruguay to Iberia required Francisco to understand a fundamentally different system. The Portuguese Montado — an agro-silvo-pastoral landscape of cork oaks and silver pastures — has been managed continuously for around 12,000 years. It is ecologically sophisticated and economically productive when managed well. It is also, Francisco observes, currently being mismanaged at scale.

The reason is counterintuitive. Many landowners and managers in Portugal have removed cattle from Montado systems, believing this protects the trees. The opposite is true. Cork oaks depend on grazing animals for fertilisation. Without cattle, the understory becomes rank, fire risk increases, tree health deteriorates, and the system degrades. The trees are dying not because of too many animals, but because of too few.

“Portugal is the opposite of Uruguay. In Uruguay, we have an extensive system that is professionally managed. In Portugal, we have an extensive system that is not managed at all — and it’s degrading.” — Francisco Roque de Pinho

THE BARBELL STRATEGY: URUGUAY + IBERIA, AND A VISION FOR A GLOBAL GRASSFED BRAND

When Koen poses the billion-dollar question — what would you do with €1 billion under management tomorrow? — Francisco’s answer reveals the full strategic architecture he is already building. The path of least resistance is Uruguay: approximately 10 million hectares of natural pasture at average prices of around $4,500 per hectare, giving an addressable market of $40-50 billion. The thesis is simple: buy conventionally managed farmland at conventional prices, convert to precision grazing, and capture what Francisco calls the “regenerative alpha” — the yield uplift and cost reduction — while waiting for the market to price soil health improvement into asset values.

Francisco’s conviction is that within five to ten years, buyers will begin to distinguish between conventionally managed and regeneratively managed farmland — not because of ideology, but because of documented production data and track records. Today, when The Land Group sells a farm, it achieves the same price as comparable conventional properties. The market is not yet sophisticated enough to price the difference. But the data is being built.

“If you want to have impact at institutional scale, you need to go for practices that make financial sense. That’s what worked in renewables. That’s how it will work in agriculture.” — Francisco Roque de Pinho

The barbell allocation — 60% Uruguay, 40% Iberia — provides geographic and currency diversification, with contrasting ecological restoration profiles. Uruguay is scale and speed. Iberia is complexity and ecological depth, with the Montado systems offering significant restoration potential and proximity to European consumer markets. The third leg of the strategy is a global brand for traceable, naturally reared, grassfed beef, starting with restaurant supply and expanding to direct-to-consumer — something Francisco describes as a live discussion with a large platform already interested in partnering.

WHY CHANGING PERCEPTIONS ABOUT CATTLE IS THE ONE THING FRANCISCO WOULD CHANGE OVERNIGHT

Francisco’s answer to Koen’s closing question — if you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the food and agriculture system — is perceptions about cattle and beef. He traces the problem directly to his earlier career in carbon markets, where he worked extensively with methane accounting.

The failure, as he sees it, is a widespread inability to distinguish between biogenic methane — produced by ruminants as part of the carbon cycle, a flow of carbon that has been circulating for millions of years — and thermogenic methane, released by the burning of fossil fuels and representing a genuinely new addition to atmospheric carbon. If a cattle herd’s numbers are stable over time, its methane output does not increase atmospheric concentrations. It cycles. The chemistry is different. The climate impact is categorically different.

The problem is that this distinction is complex to communicate, and the livestock sector has made it easier for critics to conflate the two by producing most of its beef in confined systems that genuinely do carry a high carbon footprint — not primarily because of the methane, but because of the fossil fuel-intensive crop systems required to feed confined animals at scale. As Francisco puts it, separating arable and animal agriculture after the Second World War was the worst trade we ever made — for climate, for animal welfare, and for human health alike.

“Beef has very bad press. Rightly so, if you look at confined systems. But people think it’s because the cows produce methane — and actually, if your cattle stock is stable over time, it does not have a net impact. It’s just part of a cycle.” — Francisco Roque de Pinho

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED

Koen and Francisco also discussed:

• Carbon credits: Francisco, who worked in carbon markets at their peak, remains deeply sceptical and excludes them entirely from financial models, listing them only as an “unaccounted upside” not to be relied upon — and extending the same scepticism to biodiversity credits
• The El Castillo before-and-after fence-line photograph: how a nine-month aerial image of a converted Uruguayan farm — green on The Land Group’s side, brown on the neighbour’s — became their most powerful investor communication tool, even as the team cautioned against overclaiming soil organic matter improvements on that timeframe
• The 150-farmer workshop: how the dramatic pasture transformation on El Castillo attracted ranchers from across Uruguay, turning a single converted farm into a regional case study and positioning The Land Group as the benchmark for rapid farm conversion
• The geopolitical safe-haven appeal: why European and South American family offices are increasingly interested in Uruguayan farmland as a stable, long-term store of value — and how the current wave of geopolitical instability has dramatically increased inbound enquiries to The Land Group in the past three months

LINKS

• The Land Group

MORE INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES:

• The Role of Animals series
• Meat Mythbusters: Debunking Red Meat Myths on Health, Methane, and Sustainable Solutions

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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.