seeds – Investing in regenerative agriculture

Emmanuel Luwemba – The decentralised business disrupting the seed monopolies in East Africa

27th March 2026 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

Seeds, seeds, seeds. It all starts with power and who controls the seeds. But who is actually building scalable companies in this space? Today we have one: a decentralised seed company in Uganda that only works with indigenous seeds, is farmer-owned, and gives power, value, and control back to the farmers. The farmers are trained to select seeds and to grow them, and Emmanuel Luwemba, the founder of Eden Seeds, helps sell the best varieties to other farmers without extracting all life from the countryside like most seed companies do.

What about yields? Emmanuel went deep into what farmers actually need. Of course, yield is important, but so is profitability. Dirty little secret: hybrid seeds are often very expensive and need a lot of very expensive inputs to perform. They often don’t perform in challenging circumstances (droughts, extreme weather, etc). Taste, flavour, and nutrition are important too. Indigenous seeds are naturally high in iron, for example and there’s no need for a multimillion-dollar, donor-funded GMO or CRISPR project to change hybrid seeds to add extra iron. Just breed, grow, and eat the indigenous variety selected over time for iron. That’s not to say we can’t develop these seeds further or that they are frozen in time, of course we can and should. If indigenous seeds got a quarter of the funding hybrids get, they would outperform everyone.

Dan Barber – AI-Powered natural breeding: The End of GMOs, Gene Editing, and CRISPR?

25th February 2025 koenvanseijen 1 Comment

An overdue check-in conversation with Dan Barber, chef, co-owner of Blue Hill restaurants and co-founder of Row 7 Seeds, where we dive into the fascinating world of seeds and how breeding is evolving with the explosion of AI and other technologies. No, we don’t need GMOs, CRISPR, or other risky blunt instruments. We discuss the implosion of the fake meat hype, which was at its peak when we last spoke four years ago, why insane umami flavor and potentially self-nitrogen-fixing tomatoes are revolutionary. This is a deep conversation about bread and wheat—and why breeding wheat specifically for whole meal flour is so important, where Row 7 Seeds, his seed company, is headed and why they’re launching a CPG brand using pressure-cooked vegetables (because processing isn’t a dirty word).

When your vegetables come from incredible seeds and are grown in healthy soils, you don’t need unhealthy additives. We kick things off with mouthwatering winter spinach and dive into a long conversation about the role of technology in food and agriculture. No, we shouldn’t go back to the past. No, we’re not Luddites. In fact, Dan is incredibly bullish on the role of AI in natural breeding—perhaps the best of both worlds, enabling faster breeding for local conditions rather than global crops that lack flavor, nutrients, and rely on excessive chemicals.

Get ready for a firehose of stories on food, seeds, soil, and culture!

Adrien Pelletier – Why all farmers or most farmers need to become seed breeders again

26th March 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Adrien Pelletier, farmer, breeder, and baker, about wheat, seeds, no till organic farming, why all farmers or most farmers need to become seed breeders again, and why it is really difficult to bake sourdough with traditional organic wheat seeds that are not breed for high productive farms.

Why Adrien want to start changing the world in the most difficult place, at home, which is a large industrial, mostly extractive, commodity wheat-growing region in France? Picture a sea of wheat, large relatively flat fields and no trees. He argues we are in the prehistoric area of organic farming, and there is so much to discover, especially around population wheats. We also learn about no till organic farming is the way to go (and super difficult).

Nicolas Enjalbert – Let’s disrupt the oligopoly seeds industry, currently bad for everyone, people, planet and flavour

9th January 2024 koenvanseijen 0 Comments

A conversation with Nicolas Enjalbert, CEO and Co-Founder of SeedLinked, an innovative company digitizing collaborative breeding, about our current seed system, flavour and nutrients, collaborative seed research, and much more.

Seeds, it all starts with seeds (and soil) but mostly seeds. And our current seeds system is structurally not able to grow seeds that are adaptive to local niches, weather, let alone flavour or nutrients etc., but only able to grow seeds for large large monoculture agriculture systems. But 97% of the global farmers aren’t large monoculture farmers, and 70% of our global food is grown by them. Who grows seeds for them, and how are we going to innovate and adapt there? This interview takes a deep dive into the world of collaborative seed research, about yields, nutrients and flavour? And yes, we also tackle thorny topics like GMO, CRISPR and your favourite heirloom tomato.

Edie Mukiibi – From a small farm in Uganda, disillusioned by hybrid seeds and agrochemicals, to leading a global movement for good, clean and fair food

24th October 2023 koenvanseijen 1 Comment

A conversation with Edie Mukiibi, farmer, agronomist, activist, and current president of Slow Food International, about modern input-heavy agrochemical agronomy education, the disillusionment with agrochemicals, hybrid seeds, and much more.

Erwin Westers – Supermarkets didn’t care about his quality so he focussed on selling seeds to other regenerative farmers

12th September 2023 koenvanseijen 1 Comment

A conversation with Erwin Westers, regenerative farmer, about soil biology, the German regenerative movement, the seed business, healthy seeds, healthy soils, healthy people, epigenetics, taste, flavour and why there is so much to learn in the German-speaking world on regeneration!