A conversation with Luni Libes, serial entrepreneur and investor, about the enormous opportunities of African food companies and on buying from smallholder famers and selling into the local regional markets. We also discuss why the traditional venture capital model doesn’t make any sense and a holding company does, plus why and how he wants to take the holding company public in a few years’ time.
The 200th of this podcast sees Koen van Seijen in conversation with Emma Chow, former head of food at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Emma Chow, former head of food at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, she’s back on the podcast to talk about her journey, her burnout, coming back from the Amazon to London and re-engaging with the food space. In a second part of the interview, though, Emma and Koen switch mics with Emma becoming the host and asking Koen about his lessons learned over the past 200 episodes.
Wow! What a year it has been. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any crazier we find ourselves in a war in Europe, crazy energy and food prices and extreme high inflation rates in general.
In an ideal world farms applying regenerative practises are more resilient, but as we saw with the story of Josh Heyneke, founder of Parc Carreg, farms can get into trouble very quickly when input prices spike (in this case organic grain from Ukraine to feed the ducks). It seems like Josh and his partner Abigail will make it through the winter and are building hard on their more resilient future, which will include climate neutral eggs!
With this post we wrap up the year and we look forward to regenerating more soils and many more hectares in 2023 and beyond!
A conversation with Eric Archambeau, co-founder of Astanor Ventures, about the early-stage space slowly getting crowded, the enormous influx of talent focussing on food, agriculture and soil, health care costs, AI/ machine learning, the computational power and the future of regenerative agriculture.
A conversation with Wouter Veer, entrepreneur, impact investor, founder of Lenteland, about inequality, impact investing, land ownership, unsustainability, Charles Eisenstein, and starting and funding a venture and a movement in the Netherlands.
Toby Kiers, Executive Director & Chief Scientist at SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) shares about their research into the mycorrhiza network, mapping biodiversity, DNA sequences of mycorrhizal fungi and a lot more about the wonderful world under our feet. She is the Jane Goodall of fungi (according to the words of previous guest Rose Marcario, former CEO of Patagonia).
We can learn so much more from farmers than how to restore soil. Regeneration goes much further and deeper. The first episode of the Farmers’ Philosophy series is a conversation between Koen van Seijen, host of the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, and Jeroen Klompe, farmer and owner of Klompe Landbouw.
A conversation with Douglas Eger, CEO and founder of Intrinsic Exchange Group, about how to value nature and make it the centre of our economy and not some non-calculated externality, and more.
A conversation with Hervé Dupied Bokx, who currently works on a farm in France and at a university for farmers and, most importantly, on changing the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). We talk about policies, the CAP, which spends most of the European budget on a not very regenerative way of farming, and more.
A conversation with Fred Provenza, professor emeritus of Behavioural Ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University, about domesticated animals, their ability to self-select medicine and food and figure out what they need in terms of energy, vitamins and phytonutrients. We also discuss what they can teach us about rediscovering our nutritional wisdom.