Landscape Design 2.0 – Investing in regenerative agriculture

Bart van der Zande – A venture studio is the solution to all our regenerative challenges

20th January 2026 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

How to get more entrepreneurs building in the regeneration space? If you are a regular listener of this podcast, you have heard us discuss this so many times you probably lost count. No, we are not saying entrepreneurs and companies are the solution to all our problems. But entrepreneurial people who set up companies, but also non-profits and movements— basically people who don’t accept the status quo and get to work to change it—are always the ones who change the world.

So how do we get more of those started in the biggest challenge of all: how to regenerate a severely degraded world? And when people get bitten by the “soil” bug, how do we give them all the support and resources to make sure the chances of them succeeding against most odds are as high as possible? Or, in the words of Bart, how do we create the best enabling conditions for them and others to succeed?

Enter the venture studio. We have had Bart van der Zande, co-founder of the Fresh Ventures Studio, on the show twice before, and it really was time for a check-in. They have run three cohorts now, built 10+ regen-focused companies, and are gearing up for their fourth cohort. We talk about the venture studio and what is holding back the sector: more early-stage funding, but also why it is so difficult to get early-stage funding in. Everyone who has done a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation on starting a fund to focus on “early” stage quickly figures out that small tickets don’t really make a lot of sense. So how does Bart think they can make it work?

We also talk about the best place to look for real regen innovations: on a leading regen farm. But what usually happens? The super-forward regen farmer invents something that works for him or her (e.g. a special bio-tea compost extract sprayer that fits on the existing cover-crop planter, etc.) and then? It stops there. Maybe she or he will make a few for neighbours, and that is pretty much it. How do we commercialize and, more importantly, spread these super context-specific but super relevant innovations? Again, the answer is entrepreneurial people who set up companies around the inventions, where the farmers can choose how involved they want to be.

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 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.

Stef van Dongen – Trees don’t send invoices so a Catalan valley is rewiring water, forests and finance

2nd December 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

From the Muga Valley, one of the largest watershed regeneration projects we know, we talk with Stef van Dongen, founder of The Pioneers of Our Time about nature credits, taking into consideration water, carbon biodiversity, regenerative forest management, but most importantly, how to build trust again between communities living in the valley, trust between people living there, but also with local and regional authority.

This is a region which if there isn’t a strong series of interventions over the next years, most likely will be hit by a massive forest fire, which will burn all the way to Basque country. And slowly that sense of urgency is landing. What is needed is a lot of experiments and then a lot of public private partnerships, which is easier said than done, but it seems to be going really fast in this landscape, and we try to find out why.

We talk about why the small water cycle restoration space is still not really landing with people, policy makers, investors, entrepreneurs, and what to do about it.

Toby Parkes – Mapping the underground fungi world by building a unicorn

18th November 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

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.

Julia Kasper – Rewetting peatlands is the biggest climate opportunity to cut CO2

11th November 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

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?

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

12th August 2025 koenvanseijen 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.

Rob de Laet – Water is key to cool the planet within 20 years

5th August 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Rob de Laet, project lead of Cooling the Climate and co-author of the book Cooling the Climate: How to Revive the Biosphere and Cool the Earth Within 20 Years. The science is pretty clear and getting clearer by the day: water cools the planet. The more living, healthy vegetation we have on this planet, predominately perennials and thus trees, agroforestry systems and healthy forests, the cooler the climate is and the less extreme weather events occur. Living plants literally make the Earth sweat and remove heat from the biosphere.

Humans have systematically devegetated the planet as Judith D. Schwartz likes to say, and the ongoing climate weirding suggests we may have gone too far. Now we’re seeing real calculations: how many square kilometres do we need to regenerate to lower the global temperature by just one degree?
If this is all becoming increasingly evident, why isn’t it common knowledge yet, especially in the headquarters of banks, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and governments?
This is the story of a successful entrepreneur getting drawn into water cycle restoration, planetary cooling and all the good stuff that comes with it. We share notes on why this movement, maybe the defining story of our time, hasn’t broken through yet and what we can do about it.

Sheila Darmos – Why Greece is leading the regenerative agriculture movement and what the world can learn

29th July 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

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.

Anand Ethirajalu – Harvesting the clouds: how to transition over 10,000 farmers a year, reducing input costs and increasing profits

1st July 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Anand Ethirajalu, farmer-turned-ecologist and project director for the Save Soil movement, on groundwork.

We don’t talk about it much, but we should: a remarkable transition has been unfolding on the Indian subcontinent over the past few decades. Hundreds of thousands- if not millions- of farmers have been trained in regenerative practices and have successfully made the switch. Yes, with higher yields and greater profits, largely due to significantly lower production costs.

In the conversation, we focus on one region where the Save Soil movement, led by Sadhguru (yes, the same man who rode his motorcycle around the world to raise awareness about the importance of soil), has been training farmers. More than 10,000 farmers per year have participated in these programs for decades.

There are countless lessons to be learned. Soil can recover quickly, but shifting farmers’ mindsets often takes much longer. One key strategy: don’t risk the whole farm. Start with just 10%, and show immediate financial results—higher profits. Provide crucial support in the early years, especially during the first growing season.

Farmers are now connected through WhatsApp groups, where they can receive expert advice for pest or disease issues within 24 to 48 hours—always with solutions they can prepare themselves, without relying on expensive toxic inputs.

More and more farmers are also joining programs to plant permanent crops like timber and fruit trees, both as a form of insurance and with the broader goal of planting enough trees (currently over 12 million a year) to begin “harvesting the clouds”. Yes, this is part of restoring the small water cycle.

We also take a look at the political landscape, as the Indian government has made natural farming a national goal for the coming decades. This is likely a global first. While it will require a tremendous amount of work to implement effectively, and while there will be pushback from the agri-input industry and, of course, government policy will never be perfect, this is still a massive milestone worth celebrating.

Austin Unruh – Silvopasture, planting trees on millions of acres of grassland, is the most scalable and profitable regen solution

20th May 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Austin Unruh, founder of Trees for Graziers, about the investment case for silvopasture. What if we could plant hundreds of millions of trees on degraded, low-value pasture land and make money from it? What if we planted trees that are beneficial for livestock—ruminants, pigs, and poultry? The market for meat and animal products is fairly stable (unless we get a massive breakthrough in precision fermentation soon, but that’s hard to predict). Trees can dramatically lower costs and increase production.
Austin argues that this is the best entry point to get many more trees into the landscape. When chosen well, these trees provide shade (a basic need), but more importantly, they offer feed during the most difficult periods of the year—like high summer, or specific fruits that drop in the autumn, full of sugar and energy, just as cows prepare for the colder winter months. Especially with pasture-raised pigs and poultry, you can save massively on expensive (organic) feed, which is mostly grain. And as a bonus, pastures grow better with partial shade.
So, when in doubt, plant more trees on pasture. Of course, this isn’t always easy. You need to make sure pigs—who are notorious diggers— don’t destroy the young trees. You need to ensure the trees survive the first few years. You’ll need financing to bridge those early, non-fruit-bearing years. But all of that is fixable. And you’ll need a massive tree nursery to supply quality trees—preferably large ones—at scale and at an affordable price. Finally, we discuss why the beauty of a savannah-like landscape is so important.

Category: Landscape Design 2.0