Nutrient Dense Food – Investing in regenerative agriculture

Raiza Rezende – Soil health and human health: why the science is still years behind the hype

23rd June 2026 antonellatotaro 3 Comments

Brazilian-trained chemical engineer, Raiza Rezende left a career path lined up by petroleum, gas, and pharmaceutical companies to study syntropic agriculture with Ernst Götsch, then WWOOFed her way across Spain, Portugal, and Greece before co-founding two organisations working from opposite ends of the same problem: Agrosystemic, which helps large farms in Portugal and Brazil transition toward regenerative practices, and RHEA, the Regenerative Healthcare European Association, which is trying to prove — with hard data — that healthy soil produces healthier people.

Pull one carrot out of the ground and test it, and the number on the lab report tells you almost nothing. Is its vitamin A content high or low? Compared to what? That’s the problem sitting underneath the entire “nutrient density” conversation, and it’s the one Raiza keeps running into: without thousands of samples across farms, regions, and varieties, a single result is just a number with nowhere to stand.

In this conversation recorded in a Lisbon park, with the podcast’s producer Antonella Totaro taking over hosting duties for the first time, we get into Raiza’s path from an oil-and-gas-sponsored engineering campus in Rio to the most desertified farmland in Portugal, why Agrosystemic refuses to tell conventional farmers they’re doing it “wrong”, what four real farms and 40-plus measured parameters are starting to reveal about nutrient density, why €700 billion a year in EU disease treatment costs hasn’t yet connected soil research to health research, and why, with a magic wand or a billion euros, she’d skip the technology and put the money straight into farmers.

Silke German – Creating the Tesla of beans by saving the milpa regenerative growing system

5th May 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

Mexico has thousands of bean varieties. Most people living in cities know four to five. Silke Gérman is on a mission to change that. She is the founder of La Comandanta, a premium heirloom bean and salsa brand now in its twelfth year of connecting smallholder milpa farmers in central Mexico to retail shelves in Mexico City, the US, the UK, and Germany.

Ancient Mexican bean varieties — grown for millennia in the traditional milpa polyculture system alongside corn and squash — are disappearing from fields and plates at the same time. Silke’s answer is neither a seed bank nor a subsidy. It’s packaging, storytelling, and making a purple runner bean from Puebla feel like something worth paying for. Along the way, La Comandanta has brought income back to communities that were emptying out, kept ancestral seeds in living soil rather than frozen storage, and built a value chain that pays farmers fairly — one bag of heirloom beans at a time.

Sherry Hess – Hijacked Flavour: reclaiming taste from the food industry

14th April 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

Your tongue might be the most underused tool we have for understanding food quality — and for moving consumer buying power toward regenerative farming. Sherry Hess, culinary professional, nutritionist, and founder of Legendary Spice, makes the case that taste is not a nice-to-have. It is a powerful biological signal, and the food processing industry has understood this far longer than we have.
We go deep on the five tastes — salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami — and on why ultra-processed food has been so effective at training us toward intense sweetness while stripping out complexity. Sherry argues that bitterness isn’t a flaw to engineer out; it’s the missing piece tied to polyphenols, antioxidants, detoxification, glucose metabolism, and satiety. The good news: chefs already know how to balance bitter with umami, fat, protein, and spice. We don’t all need to go to culinary school — we just need to borrow a few of their moves.
We also take apart the “chocolate steak syndrome”: the fitness industry has built an entire pipeline of protein products with steak-level nutrition engineered to taste like chocolate and in doing so, trained a generation to completely ignore what flavour is actually telling them. For investors and brand builders, Sherry has a practical provocation: if a product claiming to be regenerative needs five or six flavourings on the label, it’s almost certainly masking the low quality of what’s underneath

Paul Hawken – Carbon is life, not the enemy

17th March 2026 antonellatotaro 1 Comment

Carbon is life, not the enemy. And in this wide-ranging conversation with the legend that is Paul Hawken, we get into all of it. Paul is an activist, entrepreneur with Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration and prolific writer who started a natural food brand back in the 1970s. We trace his journey through writing Drawdown, Regeneration, and Carbon: The Book of Life and why people loved Drawdown so much even though that was never really the point. Regeneration got closer to the core. And Carbon is chuck-full of nuggets of wisdom about the magical, magnificent role carbon plays in our lives. Yes, there’s too much of it in the atmosphere, but there are also many places it can go, quickly and safely.

We talk about his work with large food companies, and the pure joy of bringing top executives to real regenerative farms and watching the lightbulbs go off, followed immediately by the panic of realising just how far their current supply chains are from anything like that. We get into food as medicine, and how furious Paul was with the healthcare and food system after he cured his lifelong asthma at 18 simply by changing what he ate. He had never taken a full breath of air until that moment. And we talk about his genuine excitement about the new generation of scientists coming up.

One advice: just go outside for as long as possible, and listen to this episode somewhere beautiful and alive.

Sylvia Banda – How she trained 60,000 farmers and transformed Zambia’s food system

17th February 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

A conversation with Sylvia Banda, Zambian business woman, restaurateur and social entrepreneur about her journey started when when she was 12. She opened her first food company, and she hasn’t stopped since. She now runs a multi-million-dollar business with over 15 restaurants in Lusaka, Zambia, a food- processing company selling traditional Zambian food worldwide, and has trained over 60,000 smallholder farmers to produce higher-quality products and process them to receive better prices.

We talk about why researchers should take a back seat and let farmers and entrepreneurs lead now; why the hand tools many farmers still use belong in a museum and why mechanisation is key, but with care; why processing and preserving are essential to ending hunger; and about nutrition, traditional food versus imported food, and how she taught urban people to re-appreciate what is often considered “food for the poor” that is traditional, nutrient-dense, and tasty food. To supply all of this, she set up two factories and trained over 60,000 smallholder farmers, changing many lives.

Enjoy the story and the knowledge of a true Zambian and Southern African powerhouse.

Joe Tomandl – CAFOs have caught up, can regenerative dairy still win?

10th February 2026 antonellatotaro 1 Comment

We are at an interesting moment in the dairy sector. For years, smaller farmers with around 200 cows, who were also great graziers, could undercut the costs of large concentrated dairy operations, keeping costs low, taking healthy margins in good years, and surviving the bad ones.

But something has changed: CAFO dairies have grown bigger and bigger (10,000 cows is now normal, and 100,000 is no longer an exception) and their economies of scale mean they are undercutting the grazers. Of course, this leads to massive manure lagoons, animal welfare disasters, and all kinds of other externalities, but nobody is paying for that yet. Not to mention that you can only push biology so far before it literally breaks.

So what’s next for regenerative grazing? Joe Tomandl, 4th generation dairy farmer, founder and director of the Dairy Grazing Alliance, argues instead for focusing on the transition of mid-size farms with 300– 700 cows that have surrounding land which could be grazed but currently isn’t. You need grazing experience and a long-term offtake agreement, but it can be done.

And what about nutrient density and quality? What’s good enough in terms of grass-fed, 50% on grass or 70%? We talk decentralised processing, consumers who are waking up to where their food comes from, and the huge fragility and risks of a super-centralised, heavily indebted system. Enjoy this deep dive into dairy, regenerative, grazing-based dairy in the US!

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.

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

16th December 2025 koenvanseijen 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 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 2 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.

Category: Nutrient Dense Food