Tag: carbon

John Gilliland — Why a top UK regen farmer hasn’t sold a single carbon credit yet

16th June 2026 antonellatotaro Carbon, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

John Gilliland is a sixth-generation UK farmer and advocate for sustainable agriculture with a legacy in policy, academia, and innovation. As a leader of the ARC Zero project, his own farm is a model for “Beyond” Net Zero practices, where willow cultivation, livestock grazing, and renewable energy initiatives work together in a circular system.

He has credits he could sell tomorrow and hasn’t sold any. The reason cuts to the heart of the whole carbon market: on the voluntary market, he says, the same people who measure your soil also buy your credits. They are judge and jury in one. Until that changes, his carbon stays in the ground.

We get into why his 250-year-old woodland — kept fenced off from animals for most of its life — has no earthworms, a soil pH of 4.8, and trees toppling in storms, while feeding willow leaves to his cattle has cut their methane by 28%. John walks us through the fertiliser crisis he thinks is bigger than the Ukraine war, the chicory root he uses instead of a diesel subsoiler, and a 36-hectare trial that lifted meat output 83% while cutting nitrogen 65%.

Paul Hawken – Carbon is life, not the enemy

17th March 2026 antonellatotaro Carbon, Diet Change, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture 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.

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.

Julia Kasper – Rewetting peatlands is the biggest climate opportunity to cut CO2

11th November 2025 koenvanseijen Ecosystem Services Payments, Farmers First Tech, Landscape Design 2.0, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

Meet Julia Kasper, cofounder and CEO of Zukunftmoor, a company rewetting drained peatlands and growing sphagnum moss to transform how we think about agriculture. Their powerful approach reduces greenhouse gas emissions and makes climate-friendly farming possible in peatland regions.

Peatlands, peatlands, peatlands: the biggest climate opportunity in agriculture isn’t cover crops or even silvopasture, but rewetting the humble peatlands. They cover only 3% of the global land surface, yet hold immense amounts of CO2. And when they’re drained- as many are- they release it, not just once, but year after year after year. Like a bathtub with the plug out and the shower still on.

These lands, at least in Europe, are often farmed and not very profitable. But before these farmers risk their livelihoods, we need concrete alternatives to transition. That’s what Julia works on: how to grow something that can replace current agricultural methods on peatlands while rewetting them. And it seems they’ve found a big part of the puzzle: rewetting peatlands and growing sphagnum moss. Currently, when you buy a plant in a shop or when plants are grown in greenhouses, the growing medium contains a lot of extracted peat, which comes with huge emissions and will soon be illegal in Europe. Sphagnum moss can replace this 1-to-1.

It’s still early days, but the signs are promising. We talk about how to rewet a peatland, how to seed it (hint: with drones and by hand), how to harvest — and much more. How do you create enough investor interest to actually build a company?

Douglas Sheil – Why fixing water fixes carbon

14th October 2025 koenvanseijen Regenerative Agriculture, Water Cycles 0 Comments

Wow, it seems so simple: healthy forests bring in and trigger their own rain. But, since most rain comes from elsewhere, shouldn’t we be more interested in this “elsewhere”? Why aren’t farmers, investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers in agriculture, forestry, and land use more engaged with this bigger picture? For example, if China realises that most of its rainfall comes from beyond its Western borders- even as far as Europe. would they get involved in restoring farms and forests all the way to Europe? Big ideas. And you could argue: it doesn’t get much bigger than this.

Yes, we’re talking again about water cycles and this time with Douglas Sheil, Professor of Forest Ecology and Forest Management at Wageningen University, one of the most famous agricultural universities in the world. Why has it been so difficult to get scientific discoveries, like the biotic pump theory in physics, to enter other fields like climate science and forestry? We talk about the huge pushback biotic pump scientists have faced in publishing papers and gaining recognition over the past 20 years.

But we also talk about optimism, why water is a much easier sell than carbon, and how it could spark far more cross-border cooperation. Still, to make it work, we need to think big and get much better at working together, which is no easy feat. It’s a wide-ranging conversation on tropical forests, science, the Sahel, natural regeneration, and politics.

Henk Mooiweer – If you can get paid now by Nestlé, Shell and Microsoft to change grazing practices, why wait?

1st July 2024 koenvanseijen Ecosystem Services Payments, Regenerative Agriculture, Transition finance 0 Comments

A conversation with Henk Mooiweer, co-founder of Grassroots Carbon, about the current state of carbon markets, high quality soil carbon removal credits, how this company manage to sell 5 million dollars’ worth of them, and where the market is going. Why did Nestlé, Microsoft and Shell start buying? Why does Henk argue that now is the time to sign up as a rancher and not wait to sell your carbon later? Where is the science in all this regen grazing? What about methane? And why is this actually not about carbon?

Jason Hayward-Jones – Corporates paying for low carbon grains and why virtual twins are key in gaming and Scottish whiskey

25th June 2024 koenvanseijen AI 4 Soil Health, Ecosystem Services Payments, Farmers First Tech, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

A check-in interview with Jason Hayward-Jones, founder & director at REGENFARM Ltd., and Sustainable Agriculture Specialist at Cefetra, about why corporations are suddenly paying for low-carbon grain, what it has to do with virtual digital twins, why that is such a potentially disruptive technology and, finally, why it is connected with gaming and Scottish whisky.

Jonas Steinfeld – The many shades of green of agroforestry systems

24th May 2024 koenvanseijen Ecosystem Services Payments, Landscape Design 2.0, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

A conversation with Jonas Steinfeld, a researcher and consultant based in Brazil specialising in agroforestry systems, about the many different levels of complexity in agroforestry. Does complexity lead to more or less work? Does complexity lead to more or less carbon storage, and why? And are complex agroforestry systems more profitable? The scientific world has been quite clear up until now that adding more complexity to agriculture, especially with perennials like trees, almost always makes massive environmental differences. So what is holding us back? Why aren’t we planting trees everywhere?

REGENERATIVE MIND – Emma Chow and Calla Rose Ostrander – In our healing is our evolution as a society

12th January 2024 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Farmers First Tech, Regenerative Agriculture, Regenerative Mind, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

Emma Chow and Calla Rose Ostrander explore the regenerative mindset and the importance of integrating human behaviours into natural cycles, recognising abundance and the physical capacity for healing, burnout, the perception of time scarcity, prioritising regenerative activities, and much more.

Tim Coates – Sell flood mitigation to institutional players to finance water cycle restoration

15th September 2023 koenvanseijen Ecosystem Services Payments, Regenerative Agriculture, Transition finance, Water Cycles 1 Comment

A conversation with Tim Coates, co-founder of Oxbury Bank, the UK’s only specialist agricultural bank, about flood risk mitigation, water quality, water cycle restoration, selling flood mitigation to institutional investors and much more.