In order to save and more importantly restore biodiversity we don’t need biodiversity or carbon credits; we need biologists to find super profitable business models within the magical deeply complex world of nature. It’s the case of Toby Parkes, founder and CEO of Rhizocore, with whom go deep into the third, mostly ignored, and much more complex kingdom: fungi.
Meet Julia Kasper, cofounder and CEO of Zukunftmoor, a company rewetting drained peatlands and growing sphagnum moss to transform how we think about agriculture. Their powerful approach reduces greenhouse gas emissions and makes climate-friendly farming possible in peatland regions.
Peatlands, peatlands, peatlands: the biggest climate opportunity in agriculture isn’t cover crops or even silvopasture, but rewetting the humble peatlands. They cover only 3% of the global land surface, yet hold immense amounts of CO2. And when they’re drained- as many are- they release it, not just once, but year after year after year. Like a bathtub with the plug out and the shower still on.
These lands, at least in Europe, are often farmed and not very profitable. But before these farmers risk their livelihoods, we need concrete alternatives to transition. That’s what Julia works on: how to grow something that can replace current agricultural methods on peatlands while rewetting them. And it seems they’ve found a big part of the puzzle: rewetting peatlands and growing sphagnum moss. Currently, when you buy a plant in a shop or when plants are grown in greenhouses, the growing medium contains a lot of extracted peat, which comes with huge emissions and will soon be illegal in Europe. Sphagnum moss can replace this 1-to-1.
It’s still early days, but the signs are promising. We talk about how to rewet a peatland, how to seed it (hint: with drones and by hand), how to harvest — and much more. How do you create enough investor interest to actually build a company?
Can you pay a decent year-round salary to farm workers, enough to go to a bank, get a mortgage, and still not charge prices that make your produce accessible only to the happy few? What do vibrations, pest management, nutrient density, and processing have to do with it?
With Nicola Giuggioli we walk the Quintosapore land, on a hilly but stunning landscape in the green heart of Italy, Umbria, where GPS auto-steer tractors don’t exist because simply keeping the tractor in a straight line without slipping down the hill is already an achievement. Quinto Sapore is new farm, only 5 years old and 2.5 years into serious business, but it is making huge steps.
They are building a brand, paying attention to revenue and costs, measuring nutrient density, and paying living year-round wages. Is it easy? Of course not. But for the past few years, they’ve been going deep, very deep, into the next frontier of agriculture: vibrations, frequencies, and more. In this episode we cover it all: seeds, living wages, trying to intervene as little as possible, quantum agriculture and transformation, and processing. Of course, not ultra-processed, but actually old school and high tech at the same time.
A 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.
Yes, all dairy cows (and cows in general) should be, depending on the context, almost permanently outside. And yes, calves should stay with their mothers as long as possible if we are even going to start talking about regenerative dairy. But for many dairy farmers, this is still a distant pipe dream. We need to meet them where they are. If we don’t give them concrete tools now, they will never change and instead go out of business. And no, dairy won’t disappear any time soon. The market will just be absorbed by even bigger dairy cow factories, where cows never see grass or sunlight.
So how do we change this gridlock? By taking technology from the racehorse industry to let cows and herds speak: to share what’s missing, what could be improved. And, surprise, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit in improving dairy cows’ lives practically overnight from better minerals to more water points, and of course the holy grail: super-diverse pasture management.
This leads to healthier cows, fewer vet costs, and more milk. Importantly, it also points toward potentially healthier milk, and thus healthier people. It’s still too early to connect this directly to nutrient density and quality, but that’s the direction we’re headed.
We also touch upon much more: the risks of raising money from the wrong parties for such a disruptive technology, the fact that while animals and farmers win, input companies and pharmaceutical companies will likely lose. Suddenly it becomes clear which interventions work and which don’t.
And what about raising finance as a female founder? Surprise surprise—it’s not easy. Male investors, especially, waste a lot of your time.
Get ready for a conversation about disruptive tech, dairy farming margins, raising capital, and horse racing.
A check-in conversation with Thomas Kliemt, a true serial entrepreneur in regenerative farming systems and previously part of Kulturland, always busy with the big topics in agriculture and never afraid to take them on head first. We catch up on what he has been working on: access to land in Germany, how Kulturland- the organization he has been involved with for the last 8 years- has been growing, and why 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.
Then we shift to the next piece of the puzzle: 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. Over the last 20 years, this approach has trained hundreds of farmers in running their businesses through incubator farms: new farmers work their own land for 3 years, run their enterprises, and receive a salary. Afterward, they are ready to take over a farm elsewhere and, remarkably, over 75% of them do. Many of the rest join other farms as employees. This is an incredibly high success rate for any incubator, and the model has already scaled to Belgium, Spain, and Finland. Now Thomas is bringing it to Germany, and the timing seems perfect.
He has already raised several million in government funding, with different regions competing to host these incubator farms. This could become the launchpad for a much stronger regenerative farming movement. We talk about the huge impact successful regenerative farms can have on their regions, the importance of community, and why this mission is so deeply personal for Thomas.
Legend 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.
They regularly take on new land, but only if they feel the land wants and needs them to manage it. In other words, they don’t go looking for land, the land finds them. Often this land is extremely degraded, and they bring it back to life with the help of sheep, whose gut microbiome kickstarts regeneration, followed by well-integrated annuals.
We talk about how fundamental it is to allow anything that wants to grow to grow in a brittle environment. They don’t have the luxury of discussing the concept of weeds: anything that can stay green and alive, with living roots in the soil pumping out exudates during the brutal hot summer months, is welcome.
We also dive into the different water cycles they are influencing and how these have even affected local rainfall. Of course, we unpack the massive mindset shift that is fundamental in the regenerative transition, vibrations, quantum agriculture, and rebuilding local supply webs. We cover it all.
A 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 our 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 different farms she noticed the need to train the next generation, as the current ag school system in Denmark (and everywhere else for that matter) doesn’t prepare you to run farms and embrace complexity. So she started her own school, outside the free super subsidied Danish school system and it took off.
We talk about why the next generation of farmers has to be trained by practitioners not teachers and why your holistic context is so important and pretty scary to dive into that in week 1 of your education; and why the students need to work full time on regenerative farms throughout the country and bring that knowledge back into the lessons classroom (which of course is on a farm). Like this, the teaching is done with real case studies of the top regenerative farms through out Denmark. Bye bye outdated text books. This is cutting edge.
She felt she had to get some dirt under her nails and set up a market garden which hosts a lot of activities. We end with some very concrete calls to action and, of course, a mini deep dive into our role as positive key stone species.
A 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 importantly, what can we do about it?
We dive into her work with Foodprint Nordic and how they’re about to expand it to the rest of Europe. Very simply, but of course, it’s not that simple, the idea is to access a whole new pool of money not yet active in this space: the money of us eaters, and funnel it as quickly and with as few strings attached as possible to farmers ready to expand regenerative practices, planting trees, buying compost equipment, and more.
And even more importantly, how this approach could serve as a blueprint for real regional, and potentially national, action, helping shape government policy that truly supports regenerative farmers on the ground.
A 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. Suddenly, you need to work harder to get attention, to find work, and to fill your courses. And yet, there’s so much value in being able to draw on decades of experience and the thousands upon thousands of farmers and land stewards you’ve worked with through times of transition.
We ask why larger corporations haven’t reached out to tap into this expertise: why aren’t they calling about training their farmers or agronomists? It seems we may be exiting the phase of dogmatic pioneers, the era when it had to be permaculture, or holistic management, or keyline design, and entering something more pragmatic. A moment where the focus is shifting toward whatever actually works: on your land, in your human context, and within your market.
A 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 and non- economic crises, it seems that those who have stayed don’t have much to lose. There is a strong back-to-the-land movement, well-organized local organizations helping farmers and land stewards’ transition, and people who want to return to the land more easily.
Perhaps the fact that 10% of the workforce is still active in agriculture helps, along with Greece’s long history of farming without fully going down the super-mechanized, industrial, extractive path. The rural-urban divide is very real and it’s not easy at all, but maybe farming and food are the way to break down those barriers.