Ecosystem Services Payments – Investing in regenerative agriculture

How EU regulation could unlock the soil carbon market for European farmers and investors – Christian Holzleitner

15th September 2026 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

Christian Holzleitner is an economist by training who has spent his career studying one question: when does a market work, and when do you need regulation? That question took him through the EU’s Emissions Trading System, the Innovation Fund, the Modernization Fund, and finally to a unit at DG CLIMA that sits at the intersection of all of them — Land Economy and Carbon Removals. He is one of the architects of the EU’s Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF), the framework designed to create a common certification standard that works for both public subsidies and private carbon credit buyers, and to stop farmers from having to report the same information five times for five different schemes.

Five years ago, many people in the regenerative agriculture space thought that paying farmers for soil carbon storage would rewire the agricultural system in a heartbeat. It has turned out to be considerably more difficult. The voluntary carbon market has not delivered the financing that was hoped for, and the soil carbon credit market in Europe has not scaled at the speed needed. The question this conversation addresses: is regulation part of the answer? The solar market suggests yes. Germany’s feed-in tariffs, later adopted in Spain and across the continent, created the demand certainty that turned a technology few had heard of into an industry. Carbon farming may need the same scaffolding.

In this episode — part of the podcast’s Carbon series, supported by the OGCR project — we get into why Christian sees a European-regulated market as fundamentally different from the international voluntary carbon market, how the Innovation Fund’s competitive call model could be adapted for carbon farming, what the EU ETS reform means for demand outside the agricultural value chain, why portfolios of small certified projects are the path to pension fund investment, why peatland rewetting in Finland is the landscape-scale intervention that excites him most, and what he would do if he could get a single line into the EU’s next seven-year budget.

Marc Leiber – 200 euros, 160,000 trees, and how to build a syntropic paradise from scratch

28th July 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

Marc Leiber, founder of Grow Back and farmer at Quinta das Abelhas, in Portugal, grew up between Germany and the Netherlands, studied International Horticulture and Business Management, spent nine months on Ernst Götsch’s farm in Brazil after organising the agroforestry pioneer’s first-ever visit to Northern Europe while still a university student, and arrived in Portugal […]

Max Küsters – Why every pioneering regen farm should sell ecosystem services

26th April 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

Gut & Bösel in Alt Madlitz, Brandenburg is one of the largest regenerative farms in Europe — 3,000 hectares of arable land and forestry on some of the sandiest, driest soils in Germany. For years, farmer Benedikt Bösel and his team have been experimenting with agroforestry, holistic grazing, and composting at scale, with no blueprint and no neighbours to learn from. That experimentation costs money, takes time, and generates knowledge that other farmers benefit from for free.

So they set up a foundation next to the farm to do the research properly — 10,000 soil samples, four university partners, climate sensors across 300 hectares, and a carbon credit programme that is already generating revenue. Max Küsters, managing director at Gut & Bösel, talks with Koen about how regenerative farms can start turning their hard-won data and ecosystem restoration work into actual income streams — through carbon markets, biodiversity credits, and eventually the insurance industry, which is slowly waking up to the fact that healthy soil is cheaper than flood damage.

Pablo Francisco Borrelli — Grazing carbon credits: the Trojan horse transforming Argentine grasslands

21st April 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

Argentina has just issued its first grazing-based carbon credits and the story behind them is forty years in the making. Pablo Francisco Borrelli, co-founder of Ruuts, has spent the last decade building the infrastructure to get farmers in Patagonia and beyond paid for what their land is actually doing: sequestering carbon, retaining water, and growing more grass than anyone thought possible.

The carbon credit is not the point. It is the door. Once a farmer steps through it and experiences what holistic management does for their land and their bottom line, the market can disappear and they won’t go back. This is a grounded account of what it takes to turn forty years of agronomic pioneering into a verified, sellable outcome and why the hardest part was never the science.

Anastasia Volkova – Building the world’s largest MRV provider

31st March 2026 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

Regenerative agriculture really works. Data shows that the ability of crops, from planting to harvest, to withstand weather shocks (50-year droughts and floods happening every year, anyone?) correlates very strongly with regenerative agriculture practices. To enable that at scale, MRVs are crucial.

Happy to welcome back on the podcast Anastasia Volkova, co-founder of Regrow Ag, the AI-powered platform to make agriculture resilient, who just made another acquisition. We check in with the MRV pioneer and successful entrepreneur about why they are merging with the leading LATAM player. Last time we talked, five years ago, they had also just merged.
We talk about the current state of the MRV world: who is paying, who isn’t, who is doubling down on remote sensing, and who is investing in resilient agriculture.

What do the current wars everywhere (we are recording this in mid-March ’26, when the Iran war is in full swing) mean for resilient agriculture and the investments needed to unlock it? We also talk- just as we did five years ago- about fertiliser and the double role it plays. In the Global North we can easily cut 70%- yes, 70%- without meaningful yield drops, but in the Global South it’s desperately needed in many places. With the current exploding prices and energy costs, that will be difficult.

We discuss AI and its ability to unlock insights from large (cleaned-up) data sets, and why she is stepping into a more living-systems way of thinking. She’s optimistic that watershed- scale regeneration is almost at our fingertips.

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.

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

11th November 2025 koenvanseijen 2 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?

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

29th July 2025 koenvanseijen 1 Comment

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.

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.

Philip Kauders – From Goldman Sachs to investing hundreds of millions in agroforestry in Brazil

13th May 2025 koenvanseijen 3 Comments

A conversation with Philip Kauders, founder of Courageous Land, working on large-scale reforestation and conservation through agroforestry and meeting the growing demand for climate-positive food, ingredients, high-value hardwoods, and carbon credits.

We can invest hundreds of millions into regenerative agroforestry, maybe even billions. No, we don’t need new regulations or new technology (drones that prune, for example— sure, they’ll help, and they’ll come, but they’re not essential). According to Philip the puzzle pieces for making large scale multi strata agroforestry systems are there. The place: Brazil. The land: the former rainforest which is currently bare or maybe grazed a bit, so underperforming financially and ecologically ecosystems. The knowledge is there because of 10000 years of agroforestry experience- the Amazon is a managed agroforestry system-, the financial system is ready because agroforestry is a thing in Brazil. Companies are sourcing products from these systems, bankers are investing, and large-scale projects are already on the ground.

The missing link? The game changer which might make real scale possible? Carbon credits. I know what you thinking about the voluntary markets and the scandals, but regen agroforestry systems are amazing carbon sinks. And many companies—especially tech giants with high margins—have made massive climate commitments and continue to buy high-quality carbon credits. That demand makes many of these projects investable, bankable and scalable.
Of course, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns—there are plenty of challenges ahead. But the main point is: we know what to do, and we know how to do it. So… what are we waiting for?

Category: Ecosystem Services Payments