Category: Regenerative Education

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

20th January 2026 koenvanseijen Farmers First Tech, Landscape Design 2.0, Regenerative Agriculture, Regenerative Education 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 AI 4 Soil Health, Beyond Food, Diet Change, Ecosystem Services Payments, Farmers First Tech, Farmers' Philosophy, Investor Stories, Landscape Design 2.0, Landscape Tech, Nutrient Dense Food, Nutrients to Soil, Ownership, Policy and Legislation, Regeneration Newsroom, Regenerative Agriculture, Regenerative Aquaculture, Regenerative Education, Regenerative Mind, Role of Animals, Role of corporations, Short Food Webs, Soil Builders, Transition finance, Walking the Land with a Regenerative Farmer, Water Cycles 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.

Thomas Kliemt – A farming incubator with a 75% success rate (that nobody knows about) lands in Germany

23rd September 2025 koenvanseijen Farmers First Tech, Ownership, Regenerative Agriculture, Regenerative Education 0 Comments

A check-in conversation with Thomas Kliemt, a true serial entrepreneur in regenerative farming systems and previously part of Kulturland, always busy with the big topics in agriculture and never afraid to take them on head first. We catch up on what he has been working on: access to land in Germany, how Kulturland- the organization he has been involved with for the last 8 years- has been growing, and why they are suddenly, after 10 years in the making, an overnight success. In the first 6 months of 2025, they accelerated their fundraising by 100%, raising the same €2.5m they raised in all of 2024.

Then we shift to the next piece of the puzzle: once you enable access to land, transition it into the commons as an anti-speculation measure, and remove the huge debt burden new farmers face, who is actually going to farm this land?
That’s what Thomas’ next venture is working to solve, inspired by a highly successful French model. Over the last 20 years, this approach has trained hundreds of farmers in running their businesses through incubator farms: new farmers work their own land for 3 years, run their enterprises, and receive a salary. Afterward, they are ready to take over a farm elsewhere and, remarkably, over 75% of them do. Many of the rest join other farms as employees. This is an incredibly high success rate for any incubator, and the model has already scaled to Belgium, Spain, and Finland. Now Thomas is bringing it to Germany, and the timing seems perfect.

He has already raised several million in government funding, with different regions competing to host these incubator farms. This could become the launchpad for a much stronger regenerative farming movement. We talk about the huge impact successful regenerative farms can have on their regions, the importance of community, and why this mission is so deeply personal for Thomas.

Sarah Hellebek – Training Denmark’s next farmers with practitioners, not professors

2nd September 2025 koenvanseijen Farmers First Tech, Regenerative Agriculture, Regenerative Education 0 Comments

A walking the land episode with Sarah Hellebek, deputy head at Krogerup Højskole, who spent years at the heart of Denmark’s climate activist movement. By most measures, she was successful, climate made it onto the political agenda, though never strongly enough. But the fight came with a cost: it also made her pretty depressed, she was in our own words mostly shouting in front of the Parliament. 

Until a tour visiting progressive Danish farmers exposed her to the world of regeneration and she dove right into it. After spending a lot of time on different farms she noticed the need to train the next generation, as the current ag school system in Denmark (and everywhere else for that matter) doesn’t prepare you to run farms and embrace complexity. So she started her own school, outside the free super subsidied Danish school system and it took off.

We talk about why the next generation of farmers has to be trained by practitioners not teachers and why your holistic context is so important and pretty scary to dive into that in week 1 of your education; and why the students need to work full time on regenerative farms throughout the country and bring that knowledge back into the lessons classroom (which of course is on a farm). Like this, the teaching is done with real case studies of the top regenerative farms through out Denmark. Bye bye outdated text books. This is cutting edge.

She felt she had to get some dirt under her nails and set up a market garden which hosts a lot of activities. We end with some very concrete calls to action and, of course, a mini deep dive into our role as positive key stone species.