Peter Herz spent his career as a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley deep tech: chips, semiconductors, data storage. Then a doctor’s visit in 2010 changed everything, and today he is co-founder and general partner of First Course Capital, investing in the food system.
What if decades of nutritional advice have got some things wrong? In this episode, Dr. John Schoonbee, Global Chief Medical Officer at Swiss Re, explores the links between dietary fat, blood sugar and metabolic health, and why some people with type 2 diabetes are achieving remission through changes in what they eat. We also look at why a reinsurance company is investing in nutrition programmes, the business case for preventing metabolic illness, and what a shift towards healthier food could mean for food producers and regenerative agriculture.
What if the best argument for regenerative agriculture isn’t the planet, but the profit? Francisco Roque de Pinho didn’t set out to become a regenerative farmer. He came from capital markets, carbon trading, and strategic consulting — and stumbled into farmland management almost by accident, when distressed clients needed someone to turn around underperforming farms in Uruguay.
Francisco co-founded The Land Group in January 2016 alongside his business partner Joaquin. Today they operate 20,000 hectares across seven farms in Uruguay — and are now expanding into Iberia, drawn by the neglected potential of Portugal’s ancient Montado landscape. But what makes their approach distinctive isn’t the land. It’s the language.
They don’t pitch regenerative agriculture to investors. They pitch precision grazing, higher yields, lower costs, and better asset values. And it works. In this conversation recorded in Lisbon, Francisco explains why the sector may be its own worst enemy, what the real financial returns look like, and how he’d deploy a billion euros if given the chance.
Jacob Israelow is the founder of Dirt Capital Partners, an investment platform that partners with regenerative farmers and ranchers to help them secure long-term access to the land they farm—and ultimately own it. He left Goldman Sachs and returned to the New York area in 2012, bringing a background in real estate and investing and a growing interest in local food systems. After spending about a year talking to hundreds of farmers, land trusts and others across the Northeast, he built Dirt Capital around a simple question: could investment capital help good farmers become landowners without taking value away from them?
The mechanic at the heart of Dirt Capital is a lease-purchase model. The fund buys a piece of farmland alongside one specific farmer or rancher, signs a ten-year lease with a purchase option locked in at a pre-agreed price at year five and again at year ten, and lets that farmer buy the land back once their business, and their balance sheet, have caught up. It is a way to get farmers onto land conventional lenders will not yet finance, without turning them into permanent tenants.
In this episode, Koen and Jacob dig into what sits underneath that model: how Dirt Capital manages real estate risk while leaving the farm business risk to the farmer, why regenerative practices do not automatically make land worth more, what happens when a purchase does not go to plan, and how a firm that has put roughly $80 million to work over the past decade is about to try to raise $100 million for its next fund.
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.
Recorded in person at Groundswell, the UK’s largest regenerative agriculture festival, held each summer in Hertfordshire, this is a 55-minute panel session moderated by Koen van Seijen, bringing together four practitioners who spend their working lives at the intersection of farm data, investment, soil science, and biodiversity monitoring. The question on the table: who actually benefits when data is collected from farms? And is the answer changing?
The four panellists: Ichsani Wheeler, a soil scientist who grew up in permaculture and now uses open-source satellite data and AI to map soil carbon and gross primary productivity at 30-metre resolution across the globe; Benedikt Bösel, farmer of a 1,000-hectare arable and 2,000-hectare forestry operation in eastern Brandenburg, Germany, who has been running a full digital twin of his farm alongside the physical operation; Antony Yousefian, co-founder of The First Thirty — a reference to the first thirty centimetres of soil — an investment firm focused on the infrastructure needed to turn farms into preventative healthcare systems; and Matthijs Westerwoudt, co-founder of Wilder Land, who is building what he describes as a Strava for biodiversity, using AI-powered acoustic monitoring to give farmers real-time data on the birds, bats, and insects living on their land.
In this session, opened with a recording of birdsong from a regenerative farm in the Netherlands played to the 9am audience, the conversation moves from remote sensing and registry projects to the £30,000 value the NHS places on a single quality-adjusted life year (QALY), from the danger of farm data being used to set geographically-based input pricing against the farmer who generated it, to the moment Benedikt’s doctor told him she had never seen iron levels like his wife’s after giving birth, and why only 4% of his customers scanned the QR code that would have told them everything about the specific cow whose meat they were eating.
Eric Smith is the founder of Edacious, a company building the infrastructure to make food quality and nutrient density measurable, objective and comparable. After spending years building a nutrition-testing platform capable of measuring macronutrients, micronutrients, bioactives and phytochemicals, alongside the benchmarks and data systems needed to make those measurements useful, he returns to sit down with us to share what they have been building, how the field of nutritional testing has evolved, and the critical insights they have uncovered.
At the heart of Eric’s work is a simple belief: if consumers can access and verify the quality of their food, they will demand products grown in ways that prioritize soil health and regenerative practices. This increased market demand will structurally direct more money into the pockets of farmers and land stewards, enabling them to expand regenerative agriculture across more hectares, creating a self-sustaining loop of human and ecological health. To ground this concept in science, Edacious leverages the GEM framework—Genetics x Environment x Management practice = Nutrition instead of Yield—moving beyond subjective labels to deliver objective, verified data.
This episode is a deep, down-to-earth dive into the nuts and bolts of quality, nutrient density, and systemic agricultural change. Eric teases the science behind Edacious’ preeminent nutrition lab, which has processed over 6,000 food samples and generated nearly a million analytical data points. The conversation exposes the compromises of industrial crop breeding through the story of carrots, compares apples to apples, reveals the massive nutritional differences hidden in the skins of produce, and explores how Eric’s own eating habits have transformed since he gained direct access to the data, including a surprising advocacy for frozen food and ancient grains.
Abby Rose is an experienced agricultural storyteller, co-host of the award-winning podcast Farmerama Radio, and co-founder of the soil monitoring and data platform VidaCycle. With a background spanning technology and hands-on farming on her family’s farm in Chile, Abby has spent nearly a decade amplifying the voices of the regenerative farming movement and creating tools to help farmers build healthier soils.
This July, Abby is back on the podcast to share an update on her six-part podcast series Cereal, about the new grain movement, and Cereal Revisited, which returned to the series years later to ask what happened after people listened. What did those stories change? And what does that tell us about the power of storytelling to change the regenerative agriculture system?
When two podcasters walk into the ‘recording studio’ for a conversation, the central question is bigger than podcasting: is good storytelling one of the most neglected and underfunded pieces of the regenerative agriculture and food transition? If people are going to change careers, start farms, build food companies, become millers or join the agroecological movement, they first need to see and feel that another way of working is possible. Cereal offers a striking case study: farmers started operating their own mills, listeners went on pilgrimages to meet people featured in the series, and at least one listener moved from engineering into milling.
Koen van Seijen and Abby Rose — two regenerative agriculture podcasters — turn the microphone back on themselves. They talk about what six relatively simple episodes did years after release, why systemic storytelling is difficult to fund, and why the hero’s journey may be the wrong model for food systems.
Erica Gies is a California-born environmental journalist who has spent more than a decade reporting on water from every angle — drought, flood, irrigation, hydropower, urban infrastructure, indigenous stewardship — and whose first book, Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (University of Chicago Press, 2022), brought together stories of communities on every continent rebuilding their relationship with water rather than fighting it. She is now writing her second book, Roots to Sky: How Life and Water Can Help Cool Earth’s Climate, which goes further into the atmosphere to explore how the water–land–climate nexus connects land restoration, water vapour, and the cooling of a heating planet. It is due in 2028.
The common climate narrative — decarbonise, bring fossil fuel emissions to zero, problem solved — is no longer sufficient on its own. Water vapour accounts for roughly half of the greenhouse effect, and 75% of the land on earth has already been degraded, much of it by draining it. Record-breaking summer heat across the northern hemisphere in 2026 cannot be explained by CO2 alone; land use change is a major driver. The good news, which Erica explores in both her TEDx Boston talk and her forthcoming book, is that this is something we can change relatively quickly through land restoration — and that water is absolutely the key lever.
In this conversation — recorded in July 2026, part of the podcast’s ongoing Water Cycle series — we get into why Erica shifted from below-ground water management to the atmosphere, why a 1970 MIT Press report already knew that pumping groundwater raises sea levels and we have only accelerated since, what beavers in California are teaching conservative farmers who spent eighty years shooting them, why investors who optimise single variables are going to run out of natural buffers faster than they think, why land back for indigenous peoples is one of the highest-return interventions available, and why Erica’s magic wand answer — caring for non-humans — is less idealistic than it sounds.
Gonzalo Úrculo, co-founder of Crowdfarming, is a Spanish entrepreneur who came back from studying in Berlin to find his grandfather’s orange farm near Valencia on the verge of being sold, spent two years barely covering the costs, accidentally killed half the trees switching to organic, and then somehow built, over seventeen years and without any hockey-stick moment, one of the most quietly radical food businesses in Europe. Today Crowdfarming connects 500,000 customers directly with more than 350 farmers across the continent, employs 400 people across two companies, has helped the original farm survive and expand to six properties, and has not run a single discount or promotional offer since it launched.
The mechanic behind it is simple and almost offensively obvious once you hear it: fruit is only picked when it is ordered. No intermediary, no warehouse, no price negotiation after harvest. A Valencia orange reaches a kitchen in Germany in three to four days, compared to a minimum of seventeen if it goes through a conventional supply chain, including the organic one. The freshness is not a marketing claim; it is the structural consequence of removing every step between the tree and the person who ordered from it. And the adoption model — where a customer names a specific tree, receives updates on its progress including the bad news, and pre-pays for their harvest at the start of the season — gives a farmer something no subsidy has ever delivered: predictable income before a single piece of fruit is picked.
In this walk-and-talk episode, recorded in the original citrus field near Valencia where Gonzalo started, the trees around him all carrying small name tags of their adopted owners across Europe, we get into how a German article changed everything from 20 to 240 orders in a single day in 2012, why the first customers who travelled to visit their trees accidentally designed the adoption model, how Crowdfarming launched with eight farmers in 2017 (all still on the platform today), why Gonzalo believes agricultural subsidies are not going to farmers but to supermarkets, what regenerative farming does to soil organic matter over eight years and why that makes farmland a better asset than investors currently understand, and why his magic wand answer — predictable income for farmers, not subsidies — is the same thing he built his entire company around.