food – Investing in regenerative agriculture

Chuck de Liedekerke – Paying 1600 farmers to change their practices and just raised €15M

10th September 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A check-in with Chuck de Liedekerke, CEO and co-founder of Soil Capital and one of the veterans of the regen space, whom we interviewed almost 6 years ago! We talk about paying farmers for ecosystem services and why they seem to have hit an inflection point in the last two years. Working with over 1600 farmers to get them paid for carbon and more through corporations that buy from them. Corporates in the food space finally start to wake up to the opportunity and necessity of investing in their supply sheds. And to top it off, we talk about water cycles and landscape-scale regeneration!

Last week Soil Capital has completed its €15M Series B funding round.

Nettie Wiebe – We have become monocultural in our fields and minds

6th September 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Nettie Wiebe, organic farmer and long-time small farm activist in Canada and globally, one of the founders of La Via Campesina, part of the IPES food panel, and coauthor of the recent Land Squeeze report. We talk about land purchases and prices. In many places, over 70% of the farmland is controlled by 1% of the farms. This is just one of the many challenges the latest Land Squeeze report of the IPES food panel addresses. We talk about the results of the report and what to do about it, how go get speculative money out of farming and why green grabbing needs to stop.

Land squeeze: one of the biggest issues in regenerative farming is access to land. Why is that? Farmers in the global industrialised north are ageing, and many of them don’t have a next generation taking over the farm; many other people would love to farm and are, in many cases, able, but can never finance the land purchase because land prices and value are completely disconnected. They face competition from ever larger industrial extractive, well financed farms.

Eduard Müller – Regenerative education is the answer, whatever the question was

3rd September 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Eduard Müller, founder of University for International Cooperation (UCI) and leading Costa Rica Regenerativa, about regenerative education: what does it mean, and why is it so powerful to focus on educating people who want to learn more about regeneration? Eduard makes a very strong case against trying to convince the people in power, in industry, in chemical companies, in fertile companies, in large ultra-processed food companies, at the UN, etc. He has tried and failed, and he truly believes in on education and unlearning. That is why he started his own university 15 years ago. He started with online education in 1998, focusing on scaling regeneration in Costa Rica and showing the numbers and data behind it to reach the tipping point.

Eduard and Koen also discuss how the combination of on-the-ground, large-scale regenerative projects with science and data and the global reach of over 4500 alumni can replicate in their context what is being learned in Costa Rica.

Matthijs Westerwoudt – Paying farmers for cultivating weeds and making biodiversity super tasty by selling drinks and teas made from native plants

27th August 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

Matthijs Westerwoudt is the co-founder of Wilder Land, a company transforming native plants, often considered weeds, into highly desirable products. These plants, once dismissed as unwanted, are now being used to create delicious drinks, herbal teas, kombuchas, fermented teas, and even pasta. The company pays farmers more per square meter than they would earn from any other crop. How do they achieve this? First, by ensuring that these products taste as good as, or even better than, those made from monoculture crops. Second, through exceptional branding—highlighting the appeal of “nature-restoring” drinks over the concept of “biodiversity-restoring” beverages. The secret to success lies in continuous testing and refinement. In short, they are making biodiversity not just important, but incredibly tasty.

In the Netherlands, many things are well-organized, but the country also holds the unfortunate title of being a world leader in biodiversity loss. This raises the question: how can farmers be compensated for the extra biodiversity they create or support? While the idea of biodiversity credits might come to mind, these are difficult to measure and not yet fully developed. Wilder Land found a different solution for it.

Mark Lewis – After putting half of their $50M fund to work in regen, what has one of the leading VCs in the world learned?

23rd August 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A check-in interview with Mark Lewis, managing partner at Trailhead Capital, about the inevitability of the “regenerative revolution” and the potential for significant financial and non-financial returns in this space. What does putting almost half of your $50 million VC fund to work in businesses active in the regen space in North America, taught Mark about the space and what has changed since 2021, and what big opportunities haven’t we collectively invested in? What is missing and what is needed? And we discuss why Mark is no longer hunting for unicorns but is still very positive about the potential for financial returns in the regenerative food and agriculture space.

Clare Hill and Annie Rayner – The counter-narrative to industrialised chicken: what does it mean to produce deeply regenerative chicken and eggs?

20th August 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Annie Rayner and Clare Hill, founders of Planton Farm, Roots to Regeneration and Impeckable Poultry, experts in poultry welfare and regenerative agriculture transition pioneers in the UK. We discuss where to start when you want to integrate livestock as a farmer. Many would say poultry, but there are a lot of issues, from lockdowns because of bird flu to feeding because these aren’t ruminants, so they can’t just graze, while another big one is genetics. We have bred birds to be either egg or meat birds, and that is incredibly inefficient and horrible for animal welfare. Annie and Clare are on a mission to answer the question: What does it mean to produce deeply regenerative chicken and eggs?

Willem Ferwerda – Kickstarted the restoration industry with Commonland 11 years ago, now finally big money shows interest, but we need billions

13th August 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Willem Ferwerda, one of the founders of the regeneration space, which barely existed 11 years ago when he started Commonland. How and why is it so fundamental to take a landscape view and get all the stakeholders to look at a map- yes, a physically printed large map- together? Because chances are they never have done that. The farmers, the real estate developers, the nature conversation professionals, the local politicians spent most of their time in their own silos and if they talk to each other often it isn’t very friendly.

How do you get them to develop a shared vision of what they want their landscape to look like in 20 or 30 years? How do you trigger that kind of inspiration? Nobody likes to live in a dying landscape where biodiversity has left, where people have left or are leaving, schools are closing, and shops as well.

We are at the beginning of what was barely a space 11 years ago, of course holistic landscape management existed in indigenous circles and ecology silos, but barely outside of that. And now we see the financial space starting to dip its toe into this and we will need them, as we talk billions of real green infrastructures, not hard infrastructure made of concrete, but soft, healthy spongy soils, thriving ecosystems, beneficial keystone species including people coming back to the countryside and managing landscapes holistically.

Felipe Pasini – Walking the land of Amadeco Syntropic Farm with a regenerative farmer

30th July 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

What if you could turn a dry, water-scarce plot of land into a thriving ecosystem? In this new episode of Walking the Land with a Regenerative Farmer we follow the journey of Felipe Pasini, as we explore his transformative work on the Amadeco Syntropic farm in Depressa, Salento, Puglia. Felipe reveals how he tackled the challenges of traditional dry stone walls, rocky soil, and limited water supply to create a productive, visually stunning farm organized into innovative elements.

Sowmya Balendiran – How to turn seaweed farming into an industry? Start by farming 1000 football fields of tropical seaweed in Indonesia

23rd July 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Sowmya Balendiran, co-founder and chief business officer at Sea6 Energy, about regenerative aquaculture, how to restore the oceans and use them more to reduce the pressure on land systems, get fossil fuel use down drastically, like in fertiliser, plastics, and in food of course.

Sowmya is one of the pioneers who helped create the first signs of a tropical seaweed industry. What do you do if you have to invent both sides of the business? How do you grow seaweed industrially at scale and price points that make sense? And how do you process seaweed into products that sell for an interesting enough margin?

Someone will soon mention seaweed. It sounds magical, some species grow super fast, you can harvest them year-round, they don’t need any inputs, don’t need land but sea, which we have a lot of, etc. So, why hasn’t seaweed taken over the world yet? What is needed to industrially farm tropical seaweed? Industrial might sound like what we don’t want, but in tropical seaweed, most work is done by hand, standing knee-deep or neck-deep in the water. We can agree that that won’t scale and get us to a seaweed industry that can replace large amounts of fossil fuels.

Jay Albany – Despite the graveyard of D2C companies, it can actually work in the world’s most remote city

19th July 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Jay Albany, CEO of Dirty Clean Food, about what it takes to build a successful direct-to-consumer business- basically buying from regen farmers and delivering to consumer, restaurants, etc.- in the regen space and in the most remote city on the planet. Despite all challenges of B2C, Jay makes a passionate case for the contrary. A deep dive full of golden nuggets of direct-to-consumer companies, what works and what doesn’t, but also a long conversation on the power of transparency within businesses and the most important return of all, inspiration.

What are the lessons learned? Looking at the graveyard of direct-to-consumer companies we have seen, especially in COVID years, raising a lot of money, struggling, or shutting down. Does that mean disrupting the current supermarket oligopolies isn’t worth it?

Tag: food