Ask Me Anything Webinar – June 4th, 2020

Thank you so much for joining this Ask Me Anything webinar! Thank you for your great questions and I hope I could cover most of them.

Some topics we discussed:

  • how to measure the growth of regenerative agriculture (from space?)
  • are 10% returns possible?
  • how to scale regenerative agriculture? (and do we even want that?)
  • why we should buy ‘the whole rotation’, or all the forest products in an agroforestry system, not just the ‘fancy’ cash crop

Here all the links we discussed:

Books to read on regen ag and other sources

Interview with Nicolas Verschuere of Soil Capital, where we talk about the efficient use of current chemicals. Always with the goal of facing them out completely (but over time, not cold turkey)

Interesting automation/robotics (I haven’t interviewed them yet):

Labor shortages because of Corona creating a lot of stress and opportunities

Joel Salatin on Joe Rogan, talking (among many other things) about the boom for local food systems and the issues with loosing restaurant clients.

The Sustainable Food Trust is running a great podcast series with people in the space responding to Covid like:

Another story, many small farmers will go bust in this crisis, survey by Dan Barber.
Check also this video!

Farm of Jon Lundgren (ex USDA scientist, now independent)
– His Blue Dash Farm
Interview with Jon, about the role of academia and farmers and profits and regen ag – His foundation Ecdysys

Most subsidies have been working against regen farmers, maybe in Europe something is changing with the new Farm to Fork strategy:

We interviewed Andrew Vorsey of Soil Capital, when the European taxonomy on sustainable investing (especially the part on ag) was being written:

The potential of regenerative agriculture and land management, John Kempf interviewed Walter Jehne on his podcast and they had a fascinating discussion.

Fransjan shared in responds to a question of Lenny (www.12Tree.com) about:
By the way of (hopefully) response to Lenny’s question: in Dutch food forestry now, we are hooking up with organizations like Slow Food and Dutch Cuisine, groups who can boost the demand for food forestry products. We are currently expanding our basis in terms of designing and establishing systems and actually have some time – a few years – to work on this, and it needs to happen, in many other ways as well. New products need introduction to be able to scale up.

Organic hotspots and how organic has spread in the US. Maybe relevant for the regenerative growth!

Study on the potential of agro ecological (regen) farming in Europe combined with diet change

On transitioning conventional farmers, the Perennial fund is doing very interesting work here, we did a QA with them a few months ago, and are releasing a long podcast soon!

Earthworm foundation is doing very interesting work in commodity value chains (interview coming soon)

Root Capital as well in terms of trade finance

To learn more about impact investing, measurement and management

The Impact Management Project

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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.

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