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.

Farm data, nutrient density and biodiversity: who owns the value farmers create? Live @Groundswell ’26

8th September 2026 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

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 – Why nutrient density data is changing everything we know about food and farming

1st September 2026 antonellatotaro 2 Comments

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 — Storytelling in Regenerative Agriculture: Who Funds Stories That Shift Systems?

25th August 2026 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

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 – The water, land and climate nexus: why restoring water cycles is the missing piece in climate action

11th August 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

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 – Direct sales make regenerative farming possible: inside Crowdfarming’s model of 500,000 customers and 350 farmers

4th August 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

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.

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 […]

Dimitri Tsitos – The massive opportunity of regenerative practices in intensive tree crops and why data is the only thing that will unlock it

21st July 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

This is a check-in conversation, an update on what three years of stacked regenerative practices on a real commercial almond plot is beginning to show with Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic and leading the Arbo-Innova project with real data now starting to come in.

Regenerative practices clearly work in these systems. But which ones? In what order? And how many at the same time before you’re doing more harm than good?

Take the clovers growing in the tree lines — what Dimitri calls living mulch. They fix nitrogen and push more of it into the tree than conventional fertilisation does. But in the first years, they also compete with the young trees for water, leading to slower early growth. Is that trade-off worth it? Do the trees catch up?

What the first data is already showing: Herbicide applications halved in a single season. Nitrogen levels inside trees on clover-berm plots higher than in conventional neighbours. Fungal disease pressure significantly lower on the organic test plot — with three bacterial spray rounds versus the neighbours’ ten synthetic ones. And an industry that, until recently, was watching from a distance, now leaning in.

None of this is easy. The J-curve of transition is real. The compromises — between tree establishment and soil cover, between water competition and nitrogen gain — are real. But the first data is clear: regenerative practices offer massive opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of intensive orchard systems in a profitable way. More resilient industry. Huge environmental wins. A transition that pays.

João Valente – 26 years No-Till, outcompeting monocultures, and now teaching his neighbours

14th July 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

João Valente, owner of Monte Silveira, took over his family farm in central-eastern Portugal that was running on tobacco, broccoli, and melons with sixty-five people employed year-round, the rotation designed entirely around subsidies. When the tobacco subsidy disappeared at the end of the 1990s, he found himself with a question: what does this land actually want to be? That question led him to organic agriculture conferences in Portugal, to a magazine showing no-till, to a German seed company that flew him to New Zealand and Australia to see holistic planned grazing in action, and eventually to the first Climate Farmers Congress in a castle in Germany, back in 2021, where he helped write the manifesto, brought ham, wine, and olive oil, and met much of the regenerative agriculture network he’s been working with ever since. Today, Monte Silveira manages around 700 hectares of Montado and irrigated annual crops, runs five species of animals, carries sixteen active research projects, has three full-time scientists on staff, and has been no-till since the year 2000.

One plus one, in companion cropping, is not two. It might be three, four, or five: two or three species in the same field, each supporting the others, the vetch fixing nitrogen for the wheat, the wheat stem holding up the climbing vetch, and if one fails the other covers it. João has been doing this long enough now that the yield comparisons with neighbouring monoculture fields aren’t theoretical. And after decades of absorbing the risk alone, he’s at a point where he can start handing the knowledge on, to neighbouring farmers who are curious but can’t afford to fail, to the Portuguese government, which recently invited Monte Silveira to one of only three private companies at the table for the country’s seven-year environmental strategy document, and to consumers through brands, built on cereals and legumes priced to compete with conventional supermarket products, not just to sell to those who can already afford the premium.

In this episode, recorded under the shade of an old farm building during a May heat wave in the Portugal, too hot by then to keep walking the Montado, we get into how a tobacco subsidy became the turning point of a farming life, why João thinks the two groups most drawn to regenerative research are newly graduated scientists and recently retired professors (and almost nobody in between), what it takes to bring the most important conventional almond consultant in Portugal from sceptic to practitioner in under a year, why he would mandate no-till for all dry-land cereal producers in Portugal if he had the legislative pen, what he’d do with a billion euros, and why, given a magic wand, he’d change human ego before he’d change a single farming practice.

Diogo Pinho – Europe’s biggest silvopasture system is dying and grazing can fix it

7th July 2026 antonellatotaro 1 Comment

Diogo Pinho started his scientific career in the first DNA sequencing lab in Portugal, then did a hands-on PhD on the soil microbiome of cork and holm oak, studying why the trees get sick, before spending two years with Biome Makers, a soil microbiome analysis company, running labs and translating bacterial and fungal profiles into colour-coded, farmer-readable reports for growers around the world. Three years ago, a chance conversation at a farm visit twenty minutes from where he was living led him to Monte Silveira, a 700-hectare farm in the Alentejo, where farmer Joao Valente had been testing regenerative practices for years. Diogo came on board as head of research, hired two more scientists, and is now coordinating fifteen different research consortia — universities, policy makers, and environmental associations — all running in parallel on one working farm.

Portugal produces 70% of the world’s cork. And every year, the Montado, the vast savanna-like silvopasture system of cork and holm oaks that makes that possible, and that once covered much of the Mediterranean, is losing between 4,000 and 5,000 hectares. Not to disease, exactly: the disease is just the final hit on a tree already too weak to resist. The underlying cause, Diogo says, is simpler and more fixable than most people realise. The Montado is a system built by human management, and the one thing it was always managed with — grazing animals cycling nutrients back into the soil — has quietly been removed. Bring the animals back, do it well, and the trees can recover.

In this episode — recorded walking the Monte Silveira land on a mild May morning, with horses and sheep audible throughout — we get into how Diogo went from genome sequencing to working on a regenerative farm, why he sees the Montado’s decline as a chronic disease rather than a single crisis, how soil organic matter went from 1% to 3% in seven years without importing fertility, what a clover carpet growing underneath intensive almond trees is doing to herbicide use and nitrogen budgets (and why the 8,000-hectare conventional industry next door is already paying attention), and how a transition finance programme for twenty neighbouring livestock farmers is quietly building a model that could scale well beyond one farm.