regenerative agriculture – Investing in regenerative agriculture

Ivana Gazibara – Deploy $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to transform the Midwest agricultural system

2nd June 2026 antonellatotaro 1 Comment

The Midwest: 140 million acres of corn and soybeans, rural economies slowly dying, a system with no real long-term future in terms of soil or human health. It’s also where roughly 25% of farmland could flip the entire region toward regeneration—but only if you coordinate capital the right way.
Ivana Gazibara, Director of Prototyping at TransCap Initiative, spent two years mapping the intervention points needed to drive systemic change across the agricultural heartland. She uncovered something unexpected: money isn’t the problem. Coordination is. Venture capital, public funders, and philanthropists all allocate capital into regenerative agriculture—but almost never in the same room together, much less actively collaborating. The result? Capital that’s supposed to be systemic lands as scattered bets.
The solution: the Regenerative Agriculture Capital Orchestrator (RACO), a blueprint for deploying $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to attract $7.5 billion more, organized around four pillars—system intelligence platform, capital matchmaking, catalytic finance, and field building. This is systems change made concrete: what it costs per acre, how to move money at scale, what happens when you stop treating regeneration as a one-off problem and start treating it as a reshaping of incentives across lending, insurance, and investment. Because you can’t finance a transition you haven’t mapped, and you can’t scale a transition money isn’t deliberately coordinated to reach.

Benedetta Kyengo: Bringing back through Syntropic Agroforestry her paradise that the Green Revolution stole

14th May 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

As a child in Nairobi, Benedetta Kyengo spent holidays climbing trees and eating mangoes and papayas at her grandmother’s food forest in eastern Kenya. Eight years later, every tree was gone — replaced by maize and beans — and her grandmother, who used to send food to the city, was depending on money sent from it. That reversal, from abundance to dependency in a single generation, is the wound this episode is about healing.

Benedetta — founder of Feedback to the Future and a practitioner of syntropic agroforestry in Kenya’s semi-arid east — bought five acres of severely degraded land in 2020 and spent the next four years turning it into a 100-species food forest. She describes how terrible droughts almost forced her to quit, why she teaches farmers to be “greedy with water” — stealing runoff from neighbours’ plots and slowing every drop into the soil — and how training hundreds of farmers across 300 acres has measurably changed local rainfall patterns. She also explains how she plans to make this food accessible not to wealthy Nairobi consumers, but to the slum communities she grew up in: by stripping input costs to near zero, saving indigenous seeds, and packaging in the small quantities the slum economy actually runs on. For anyone asking whether regenerative agriculture can work in brittle, semi-arid landscapes — and at a price point that serves ordinary people — this episode is a field report from someone already doing it.

Pablo Usobiaga – Zero waste and sourcing from Chinampas and smallholder farmers, building nature’s favourite restaurant in a 20 million city

9th May 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

An ancient farm system, built by hand on top of water, hidden inside one of the largest cities on earth and almost nobody knows it exists.

The chinampas of Xochimilco are human-made islands, constructed over centuries in the lakes that Mexico City was built on. At their peak they fed an entire civilisation. Today, more than 60% are abandoned, the city is slowly swallowing the edges, and once a chinampero stops farming, another one rarely takes their place. Pablo Usobiaga from Arca Tierra is trying to reverse that not by fighting the city, but by bringing it in through a dining experience.

This is part one of three episodes series recorded around Arca Tierra: Pablo Usobiaga built a restaurant — Baldío — around one idea: source everything from peasant farmers, waste nothing, and use fermentation to turn what would have been bin bags into the best things on the menu. It just became the first restaurant in Mexico City to earn a Green Michelin star. This conversation is where it starts: on the chinampas, where the food comes from. Parts two and three go deeper into the fermentation lab with Chris, and into the kitchen with Daniel (episodes coming out in the next weeks).

Janet Maro — Farmers are the architects, not the audience

6th May 2026 antonellatotaro 0 Comments

When Janet Maro started building training programs with farmers in Tanzania, she didn’t arrive with a curriculum. She asked farmers what they knew, what they needed, and what they could bring to the table — and built from there. That instinct, to treat farmers as the architects rather than the audience, turns out to explain most of what makes Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania unusual: why groups keep meeting and planning years after projects end, why an organic shop opened in Morogoro in 2012 has since seeded eight more across the country, and why a conflict between Maasai pastoralists and smallholder farmers that had turned violent was resolved not through outside intervention but through a simple exchange of manure and crop residues, negotiated by the communities themselves.

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

21st April 2026 antonellatotaro 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.

Million Belay – Why the USAID shutdown was a gift to agroecology in Africa

3rd February 2026 antonellatotaro 6 Comments

The difference between agroecology and regenerative agriculture is the deep social change we need in the food and agriculture system. As Laura Ortiz Montemayor told us once “ecology without social justice is just gardening”. Million Belay, who leads the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, the largest social movement on the African continent, is very clear stop intervening with agriculture on the continent, stop imposing all kinds of rules, practices, seeds, inputs etc, which don’t serve in this context (and we could argue in the context we come from as well, how many European banned pesticides are exported to the continent?)

We talk about the shut down of the USAID which was actually a good shock to the system. And finally donors, which unfortunately dictate quite a bit the direction, are talking and slowly also acting around agroecology. We discuss how through lobbying they managed to get many countries to adopt agroecology policies in the last few years, what Million would do with a billion dollar and what his message for investors is.

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 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.

Tag: regenerative agriculture