research – Investing in regenerative agriculture

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.

Raiza Rezende – Soil health and human health: why the science is still years behind the hype

23rd June 2026 antonellatotaro 3 Comments

Brazilian-trained chemical engineer, Raiza Rezende left a career path lined up by petroleum, gas, and pharmaceutical companies to study syntropic agriculture with Ernst Götsch, then WWOOFed her way across Spain, Portugal, and Greece before co-founding two organisations working from opposite ends of the same problem: Agrosystemic, which helps large farms in Portugal and Brazil transition toward regenerative practices, and RHEA, the Regenerative Healthcare European Association, which is trying to prove — with hard data — that healthy soil produces healthier people.

Pull one carrot out of the ground and test it, and the number on the lab report tells you almost nothing. Is its vitamin A content high or low? Compared to what? That’s the problem sitting underneath the entire “nutrient density” conversation, and it’s the one Raiza keeps running into: without thousands of samples across farms, regions, and varieties, a single result is just a number with nowhere to stand.

In this conversation recorded in a Lisbon park, with the podcast’s producer Antonella Totaro taking over hosting duties for the first time, we get into Raiza’s path from an oil-and-gas-sponsored engineering campus in Rio to the most desertified farmland in Portugal, why Agrosystemic refuses to tell conventional farmers they’re doing it “wrong”, what four real farms and 40-plus measured parameters are starting to reveal about nutrient density, why €700 billion a year in EU disease treatment costs hasn’t yet connected soil research to health research, and why, with a magic wand or a billion euros, she’d skip the technology and put the money straight into farmers.

Simon Kraemer – The €120k study showing regenerative agriculture can feed the world

25th November 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

How do we feed the world? It’s all nice and cute this regenerative agriculture and food stuff, but how do we actually feed the world? By 2050, we’ll need to produce double the amount of food. This is a question you, like me, get a lot, we bet, from banks, pension funds, large institutional players, investors in general, entrepreneurs, and eco-modernists.

Our go-to answer was always: go to the most pioneering farmers and see what they can produce. But the counterargument was always: “Show me the research!”. Now we have the research.

In this Walking the Land episode, recorded straight from one of the most advanced farms in Europe, we talk to Simon, Kraemer, executive director of the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA) and the lead author of a revolutionary study where they looked at 78 of the most pioneering farms in Europe and compared them to their conventional neighbours. They analyse everything from fertiliser use, finances, and pesticides to the holiest of grails: photosynthesis. And guess what? Regenerative outperformed conventional in almost everything. Similar or higher yields, more than 75% reduction in NPKs, significantly reduced chemical use and, best of all, over the seven years they compared them, the regenerative farms kept getting better and better. Imagine what that looks like after 15 years! And imagine applying all that knowledge to new farms or new fields. There’s an S-curve and exponential growth in regeneration when you look at photosynthesis on regenerative fields.

So how did this study land in the agri-food world in Europe? What about the large food companies, and policymakers in Brussels who decide about the biggest pot of agricultural subsidies in the world: the €400 billion CAP, renewed every five years?

Ichsani Wheeler – We need more large animals in our landscapes

10th June 2025 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

Ichsani Wheeler, co-founder of OpenGeoHub and Envirometrix, challenges dominant assumptions in land use and agricultural design, making the case for more large animals in our landscapes—not fewer. She explains why understanding the maximum ecological carrying capacity of agro-ecological systems is essential for restoring function, productivity, and resilience in both natural and farmed environments. Wheeler advocates for granular, place-based research to better inform ecological planning, arguing that broad generalizations fall short when it comes to the complex realities of nutrient cycling and biomass distribution. Megafauna plays a critical role in ecosystems as mobile nutrient cyclers, their absence leads often to stagnation and imbalance.

Dan Kittredge – Local, regenerative and organic have no connection to nutrient density, soil health does

30th April 2024 koenvanseijen 2 Comments

A long-overdue check-in interview with Dan Kittredge, founder of the Bionutrient Food Association. We discuss their involvement in the revolutionary beef study, all the research they have been doing and where they have been showing absolutely no connection between the labels, local, organic, regenerative, farmer’s market, etc., and nutrient density.

What has been shown is a correlation between soil health and nutrient density. All the claims about regenerative agriculture that leads to more nutrient-dense food, they are only true if it leads to healthier soil, and in some or many cases, it actually doesn’t. It all starts with the soil. Plus, very interestingly, the potential of nutrient density: most of the crops they researched scored very very poor compared to what they could have scored. The pessimist would say: look at the empty crops we are eating depleted of nutrients, the realist would say look at the amazing potential. Crops could be (on certain aspects) 10x or 20x more nutrient dense. Let’s get to work!

Paul McMahon – With over $500M invested, there is a regenerative edge of about 1-3%

27th February 2024 koenvanseijen 1 Comment

A conversation with Paul McMahon, co-founder of SLM, about why it makes so much sense to put money to work in real regenerative agriculture, yields, and more importantly, profits and the regenerative edge, and more.

Few papers in regenerative agriculture have been shared more than the Investment Case for Ecological Agriculture written by Paul McMahon. We have shared it countless times, learned a whole lot from the simple investment terms describing why it makes so much sense to put money to work in real regeneration. Now it has been updated, even better, it has been completely rewritten and with a lot more science and a lot more experience from the field.

In the conversation with one of the most experienced regenerative farmland investors, we explore the modules of our recent video course on why we need to change agriculture and food systems urgently, and why now is the time to do it.

Yasmine Cathell – Deep nutrition research on a 350 hectare commercial arable farm, everything from counting worms to sap analysis

6th June 2023 koenvanseijen 3 Comments

A conversation with Yasmine Cathell, Nutrition Project Manager at Soil Heroes Foundation, about her journey into regenerative agriculture, and her MBA studies until her cutting-edge nutrient density research in the south of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on a large commercial potato, onion, and wheat farm.

Toby Kiers, the Jane Goodall of fungi and mycorrhizal networks on being an underground astronaut

6th December 2022 koenvanseijen 3 Comments

Toby Kiers, Executive Director & Chief Scientist at SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) shares about their research into the mycorrhiza network, mapping biodiversity, DNA sequences of mycorrhizal fungi and a lot more about the wonderful world under our feet. She is the Jane Goodall of fungi (according to the words of previous guest Rose Marcario, former CEO of Patagonia).

Anne Biklé and David R Montgomery – After studying more than 1000 papers the definitive answer, we are what our food ate

19th July 2022 koenvanseijen 5 Comments

Anne Bikle and David R Montgomery, writers of What your food ate, join us to talk about the connection between soil- building agriculture practices and human health, and the differences in healthy compounds in our food, both plants and animal protein connected to the way that food has been grown.

Tag: research