Category: Diet Change

What we learned in 2025 about making regen bankable, animals, water, chefs, scale, Al in ag, agroforestry, education, food as medicine, ROl, storytelling

26th December 2025 koenvanseijen AI 4 Soil Health, Beyond Food, Diet Change, Ecosystem Services Payments, Farmers First Tech, Farmers' Philosophy, Investor Stories, Landscape Design 2.0, Landscape Tech, Nutrient Dense Food, Nutrients to Soil, Ownership, Policy and Legislation, Regeneration Newsroom, Regenerative Agriculture, Regenerative Aquaculture, Regenerative Education, Regenerative Mind, Role of Animals, Role of corporations, Short Food Webs, Soil Builders, Transition finance, Walking the Land with a Regenerative Farmer, Water Cycles 0 Comments

If 2025 had a soundtrack, it would be the sound of stress: stress in the system, stress in humans, stress in animals and in all other non human beings.

And then the cycle of Heat. Drought. Fire. Flood. Over and over again.
And yet, between the headlines, something else seems happening. We spent the year in conversation—with farmers walking their fields, scientists questioning old assumptions, investors rethinking risk, and builders experimenting in the real world. Online and offline, we found ourselves in rooms where regeneration wasn’t an abstract ideal, but really happening.

As 2025 comes to a close, it’s hard not to feel cautiously optimistic. The signals are there. Regeneration works and the direction is becoming clearer.

Andres Jara – How a chef-butcher-farmer turned legumes into a scalable, clean-label food that rewards farmers

23rd December 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Regenerative Agriculture, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

How do you make legumes great again? Don’t worry, this is not a political episode. It’s about something far more urgent: giving legumes the role they truly deserve in our food system. Together with Andres Jara, co-founder of Favamole, we explore what it really takes to build a regenerative food brand in the middle of today’s industrial food landscape.

How do you play the game while sharing shelf space with giant food companies, big retail, massive processors, and catering empires? And more importantly: how do you scale fast, influence as many hectares as possible, and not lose your regenerative soul along the way? We dive into regenerative business models, flavour as a lever for change, regenerative finance, scale, money, and impact, all while walking on the stunning, sunny, and very cold fields of Jeroen and Mellany Klompe.

Erin Martin – Making America Healthy Again with food as medicine, not Ozempic

16th December 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

Make America healthy again: is that helping the food as medicine movement or hurting it? And why is it so important to focus on quality food as medicine- which means nutrient density and real quality- rather than settling for simply “more fruit and vegetables”? Why would you, if you can, deny people with severe diabetes and lower incomes the best-quality food possible, especially when it has the biggest ripple effect?

A check-in conversation with Erin Martin, one of the leaders advancing the food as medicine movement in the US. It has been an exciting, interesting, and challenging few years — from speaking on the Hill in Washington, to passing a food as medicine act in her home state of Oklahoma (which has some of the worst health crises in the country), to scaling their program of prescribing produce to reverse type 2 diabetes to over 500 patients. But also: politics, making America and children healthy again, a global and local health crisis spiralling out of control, GLP-1 drugs breaking through, and somehow food and regenerative agriculture becoming polarising, a political minefield.

So much to talk about: the first social impact bond, which isn’t a bond but an outcome-based payment scheme,  is coming in early 2026 in Oklahoma. And super important: real data is showing massive savings when it comes to prescribing healthy vegetables, fruit, and cooking classes.

Simon Kraemer – The €120k study showing regenerative agriculture can feed the world

25th November 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Nutrient Dense Food, Nutrients to Soil, Policy and Legislation, Regenerative Agriculture, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

How do we feed the world? It’s all nice and cute this regenerative agriculture and food stuff, but how do we actually feed the world? By 2050, we’ll need to produce double the amount of food. This is a question you, like me, get a lot, we bet, from banks, pension funds, large institutional players, investors in general, entrepreneurs, and eco-modernists.

Our go-to answer was always: go to the most pioneering farmers and see what they can produce. But the counterargument was always: “Show me the research!”. Now we have the research.

In this Walking the Land episode, recorded straight from one of the most advanced farms in Europe, we talk to Simon, Kraemer, executive director of the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA) and the lead author of a revolutionary study where they looked at 78 of the most pioneering farms in Europe and compared them to their conventional neighbours. They analyse everything from fertiliser use, finances, and pesticides to the holiest of grails: photosynthesis. And guess what? Regenerative outperformed conventional in almost everything. Similar or higher yields, more than 75% reduction in NPKs, significantly reduced chemical use and, best of all, over the seven years they compared them, the regenerative farms kept getting better and better. Imagine what that looks like after 15 years! And imagine applying all that knowledge to new farms or new fields. There’s an S-curve and exponential growth in regeneration when you look at photosynthesis on regenerative fields.

So how did this study land in the agri-food world in Europe? What about the large food companies, and policymakers in Brussels who decide about the biggest pot of agricultural subsidies in the world: the €400 billion CAP, renewed every five years?

Nicola Giuggioli – Building a regenerative brand: from soil health to living wages

4th November 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Farmers First Tech, Nutrient Dense Food, Nutrients to Soil, Regenerative Agriculture, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

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.

Cindie Christiansen – Top 50 Farmers update and the simple tweak to raise millions for regeneration

19th August 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Farmers First Tech, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture, Transition finance 0 Comments

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.

Darren Doherty – 35 years in regeneration training farmers and the role of tech and AI

12th August 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Farmers First Tech, Landscape Design 2.0, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

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.

Matt Orlando – From Noma to building the world’s most circular restaurant and disrupting the chocolate industry

22nd July 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

A 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 down the rabbit hole of sustainability and responsibility? Join the fascinating journey of one of the most interesting chefs in the world, who not only redefined what a circular, sustainable restaurant means (and no, it isn’t more expensive to run, and it doesn’t require a lot of tech, etc.) but it does require a completely new mindset and way of thinking.

He shares some fascinating examples and data, like monetary savings- €17,000 in a year on water costs, for instance- which were only possible because of a mindset shift. We talk about the role of fine dining and the hospitality world in transforming the agri-food system, the role of technology, and of course, fermentation, and the VC-funded BS in food tech and fermentation.

We discuss their new restaurant concept, still very much under wraps, but exciting. And also, how they are disrupting the very dirty cacao and chocolate industry with an upcycled, fully organic, price-neutral spent brewers’ grain, which you can already find in “chocolate” cookies in the Nordics without tasting the difference.

Walking the land with Benedikt Boesel – Fully integrating 300 cows into a 1000-hectare arable very sandy farm

24th June 2025 koenvanseijen Animals' Role, Diet Change, Nutrients to Soil, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of Animals 0 Comments

It 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 land- and standing amongst the cows- with Benedikt Boesel, founder and farmer at Gut&Bösel, in Alt Madlitz, in Germany.
Very few topics will divide people in and outside the food space quicker than cows. So we are walking that fine line literally surrounded by three hundred cows who are an integral part of the fertilisation of Benedikt’s 1000-hectare arable farm with very sandy soils. 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 mirror of your actions. We talk as well about the moment in which the cows are taken out of the system, and how Benedikt does that (we are sorry if the first part of the episodes shocks you, but this is also part of the food and agriculture sector to face and consider. Even if you don’t consume animal protein, your fields are going to be fertilised by either fossil fuel fertiliser or animal manure).

Herb Young – After 36 years at Bayer, growing regen citrus with 8x the nutrients

15th April 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

A 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 most surprising part? His citrus is, on average, eight times more nutrient- dense than conventionally grown oranges. That means you’d have to eat eight regular oranges to match the nutrients of just one of his. Suddenly, the idea of food as medicine becomes very affordable. And, of course, his citrus is incredibly tasty.

We also discuss his history in the agrochemical industry, what his former colleagues think of his new “hobby” and what excites him most about the upcoming second season.