TRANSITION FINANCE FOR FARMERS SERIES
A special series of Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast dedicated to Transition Finance, the appropriate finance through which many farmers can speed up regenerative agriculture on their farms.
Follow the co-hosts Koen van Seijen and Benedikt Bösel on their journey to find out what are the key principles of transition finance for regenerative farmers!
WHY TRANSITION FINANCE?
There are many farmers ready to transform their traditional or organic farm into a regenerative one. They need capital though and a local bank loan often isn’t feasible because of the short duration, lack of flexibility and the farmers lack of collateral. Furthermore, there is a limit to how much equity a farmer is able or willing to give away.
This series is for all aspiring to be regenerative farmers, to understand how they can scale their regenerative pilots throughout their whole farm.
Koen van Seijen and Benedikt Bösel are interviewing leading practitioners in the regenerative agriculture and food finance space. They share their insights on how they would finance the speed up of the regenerative transition based on a practical case: Benedikt’s farm in Germany, one hour from Berlin.
Benedikit’s Story
Grown up on and around farms and after a career in investment banking experiencing the financial crisis first hand, Benedikt Bösel decided to turn his focus on innovation in the ag space. Before taking over responsibility of the Gut&Bösel family farm in December 2016, he was a Venture Capitalist with a focus on environmental technologies and AgTech startups.
www.gutundboesel.org
Beyond Farming Vision
Benedikt envisions the regenerative farm Gut&Bösel based on three pilars:
- Beyond Sustainability: Grow soil. Enhance biodiversity. Be profitable.
- Beyond Food: Spread the importance and fascination of land-use and nature based solutions with regard to soil, the microbiome, health, nutrient-density and taste.
- Beyond Farm Business: co-create, collaborate, co-develop businesses. Incubate startups. Facilitate art & education and improved rural livelihoods.
Gut&Bösel Farm
The Gut&Bösel is a family farm in Eastern Brandenburg with sandy soils and extremely low precipitation. Benedikt and his farm are faced with the challenging environment every day. As such they are constantly testing and implementing alternative multifunctional land-use models and soil enhancing methodologies with a variety of experts and different partners. They believe that technology development from a regenerative mindset will be key for agriculture in the future. The total area of the farm of roughly 3.100 ha (field: 1.000 ha, grassland: 100 ha, forest: 2.000ha) is used for organic agriculture, forestry, a bed & breakfast, a bakery (opening in 2020!), English garden and for multiple event rooms and infrastructure.
YOU CAN FIND ALL THE CONVERSATIONS ON GOOGLE PODCASTS, APPLE PODCASTS, SPOTIFY AND OTHER PODCAST PLAYERS.
THE SERIES:
- Introducing Transition Finance with Benedikt and Koen
- The role of Triodos, one of the world’s leading sustainable banks, in financing the transition towards regenerative agriculture with Jurriën Appers of Triodos Bank
- The approach of two of the most experienced impact investors in the financing of regenerative transition with Sallie Calhoun and Esther Park of Cienega Capital and the #NoRegrets Initiative
- The systems thinking necessary to design investment products with Robyn O’Brien of rePlant Capital
- The role of fully vertically integrated products in the regenerative transition of a farmer with Bert Mulder of Tomasu and BoerBakkerBert BV
- Is Transition Finance key for every farmer? with Nicolas Verschuere of Soil Capital
- How to finance a radical transition while having skin in the game with Phil Taylor and Brandon Welch of Mad Agriculture and The Perennial Fund
- The role of the crowd in the transition finance for farmers with Thomas Rippel of Kulturland Genossenschaft
- Long term off take agreements are more important than transition finance for farmers with Benedikt and Koen
DO YOU HAVE ANY SUGGESTIONS? GET IN TOUCH!
This is an open process. There are no answers yet, just a lot of questions, so please feel free any examples of transition finance you have seen, other inspiration, people to interview, etc…
For feedback, ideas, suggestions please contact us through Twitter or through Get in Touch on this website.
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