Investing in regenerative agriculture

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

21st April 2026 julia 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.

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

Kofi Boa — You can see soil health in a single season

10th April 2026 julia 0 Comments

African soils were once so alive, nobody called it regeneration, the land just gave. Dr. Kofi Boa, founder of the Center for No-Till Agriculture (CNTA) in Ghana, has spent decades proving they can give again.

Boa traces his journey from a burned family farm to one of Africa’s most compelling soil restoration demonstration models and makes the case for a distinctly African approach to regeneration: grounded in what fallow land has always shown us, driven by farmers who need a full granary before they need a carbon credit, and proven through evidence you can walk through and see for yourself.

From community-led adoption to the tension between carbon credit schemes and food security, this is a grounded, honest account of what building a regenerative agriculture movement looks like from the inside, in the soil, with the farmers, over decades.

Laura Ortiz Montemayor – What if healthy economies meant drinkable rivers

7th April 2026 julia 0 Comments

The healthiest economies will show up with drinkable rivers. That is the image Laura Ortiz Montemayor works backwards from, every Monday morning, every investor meeting, every slide deck.

Laura is a regenerative finance strategist, founder of SVX Mexico, and co-founder of LARIS – the Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit. This is her third time on the show, and a lot has happened since we last spoke. LARIS 2025 sold out. More than 200 people, billionaires, farmers, and practitioners in the same room, conversations moving from spreadsheets to love and frequencies. LARIS 2026 is coming bigger: hosted on a wetland in Bogotá, May 12–14, with WATER as the central theme.

We also talk about the collapse of USAID and the damage it did across Latin America, how the sector is rebuilding with local capital, and the question this whole conversation keeps circling: how do you make investors fall in love with life. One hint: start the spreadsheets.

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.

Emmanuel Luwemba – The decentralised business disrupting the seed monopolies in East Africa

27th March 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

Seeds, seeds, seeds. It all starts with power and who controls the seeds. But who is actually building scalable companies in this space? Today we have one: a decentralised seed company in Uganda that only works with indigenous seeds, is farmer-owned, and gives power, value, and control back to the farmers. The farmers are trained to select seeds and to grow them, and Emmanuel Luwemba, the founder of Eden Seeds, helps sell the best varieties to other farmers without extracting all life from the countryside like most seed companies do.

What about yields? Emmanuel went deep into what farmers actually need. Of course, yield is important, but so is profitability. Dirty little secret: hybrid seeds are often very expensive and need a lot of very expensive inputs to perform. They often don’t perform in challenging circumstances (droughts, extreme weather, etc). Taste, flavour, and nutrition are important too. Indigenous seeds are naturally high in iron, for example and there’s no need for a multimillion-dollar, donor-funded GMO or CRISPR project to change hybrid seeds to add extra iron. Just breed, grow, and eat the indigenous variety selected over time for iron. That’s not to say we can’t develop these seeds further or that they are frozen in time, of course we can and should. If indigenous seeds got a quarter of the funding hybrids get, they would outperform everyone.

Pierluigi Scordari – Skin care: the profitable Trojan horse for regenerative agriculture

24th March 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

Why are we completely ignoring our biggest organ, our skin? The skin care and cosmetics industry is a 200 billion industry and growing fast, often with great margins. Most of it is filled with barely legal chemicals, but there is a fast-growing natural, even regenerative, beauty space and we talk to one of the leaders.

We cover everything with Pierluigi Scordari, Sustainability Manager di N&B Natural is Better: ferments, probiotics and prebiotics, the skin microbiome, how they started, why they are fully vertically integrated, why they specifically grow plants for their active ingredients (aka nutrient density), and why processing fast (less than 2 hours after harvest) is so crucial, otherwise the ingredients aren’t alive and thus not working anymore.

Does it sound familiar? There are so many overlaps and similarities with the food space, except that this skin care space is full of really well-built brands with great margins. So, we have some work to do! And for many regen farmers, growing something for the skin care industry could be very interesting. Many plants which thrive almost naturally in the hard Mediterranean climate (rosemary, lavender, olives, etc.) are fundamental ingredients.

Yes, this involves frequencies, thinking about playing music to the plants and asking permission before removing leaves, all to achieve the highest possible quality and effectiveness. We spent a lot of time unpacking the almost superpowers of the queen of healthy plants: aloe vera.

Paul Hawken – Carbon is life, not the enemy

17th March 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

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.

Olusola Sowemimo – How a Nigerian lawyer built a profitable organic farm with standards, data and community

13th March 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

A mother’s passing set off a mission: rebuild trust in food by rebuilding the way it’s grown. We sit down with Olusola Sowemimo, a lawyer-turned-farmer and founder of Ope Farms in Nigeria, to unpack how grief became a blueprint for organic, traceable, and profitable agriculture. Her catalyst was a cancer conference in California where survivors only ate what they could trace—an idea that reshaped how she thinks about soil, inputs, and integrity. Back home, the early days were rough: antibiotic-laced manure wiped out hundreds of tomato plants, a strong tobacco extract burned cucumbers, and buyers were nowhere in sight. What changed? Relentless record keeping, strict organic standards, and smart design—corner plots with buffer zones, on-farm worker housing, and a refusal to cut down trees.

Olusola details how rabbits and carefully managed poultry helped her close nutrient loops, why fruit trees are the most underrated cash-flow asset for new organic farms, and how processing gluts into shelf-stable products saved revenue. She shares the playbook for market fit—from salad staples to premium greens like kale—and the power of traceability in winning home deliveries, retail partners, and even international lab validations for turmeric and ginger. We also explore the human side: training that prevents avoidable mistakes, social media that tells an honest story, and the mindset shift needed to move beyond “organic is impossible”.

Ivan Mandela – Unicorns can wait, African farmers can’t

10th March 2026 antonellatotaro 1 Comment

It’s a very interesting time for African agriculture and food, the continent is realising it’s potential to help feed the world, money is flowing into infrastructure to unlock this, more and more talent is coming into the space and the realisation that agro ecology or regenerative agriculture is no longer a nice niche with big margins but has the potential to become the predominant way of agriculture is performed.

After putting over $ 20 million to work in East Africa, Ivan Mandela, founder of SHONA Group, has learned the hard way: chasing Western style so called unicorns might not be the right approach for a predominantly agricultural society. So he shifted his approach and started investing in real companies, to help create a functioning main street a functional real economy where unicorns will naturally start to occur. We discuss why Ivan ends up mostly backing female entrepreneurs, his tips for young students and his takes on nutrient density and quality.

Ivan Mandela is co-founder of Shona capital, which provides East Africa’s SMEs with flexible debt to help them grow and achieve their full potential, and co-founder of Rootical, a start-up studio enabling purpose-driven entrepreneurs in Uganda to build and own their regenerative agri- food companies.