Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

Επεισόδια

• 426 Ivana Gazibara - Deploy $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to transform the Midwest agricultural system 02.06.2026 1ώ 16λ

  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 Systemic Investment Programmes at the TransCap Initiative, spent two years mapping the intervention points needed to drive systemic change across the agricultural heartland. ...
• 425 Daniel Vidal - How to build a zero-waste restaurant with deep ancestral Mexican roots 26.05.2026 29λ

  Daniel Vidal, head chef of Baldío, LATAM's first zero-waste restaurant, joined Koen in the kitchen in Mexico City to talk about what it actually takes to make radical food accessible to the people it was always meant for. When Baldío won a Green Michelin Star, Daniel didn't think to take his mother there for her birthday as the restaurant back then could win over critics but not his own community. Daniel walks through how Baldío rebuilt its menu from the ground up shifting from a Nordic-infl...
• 424 Benedetta Kyengo - The Green Revolution stole her paradise, now she's bringing it back through syntropic agroforestry 22.05.2026 1ώ 15λ

  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 synt...
• 423 Chris Locke - Fermentation is the future of food 19.05.2026 36λ

  Fermentation is the oldest food technology on earth. It happens in our guts, in the soil, in every cup of coffee and most restaurants still throw the juiced lime away. At Baldío, Mexico City's zero-waste restaurant, Chris Locke has built an entire philosophy around that lime: a Korean-style raw syrup, a lacto-fermented powder for seasoning, a tapache, and finally a koji-based shoyu. Four products, zero waste, from something already used. In this conversation, recorded inside Baldío's pr...
• 422 Pablo Usobiaga - Building nature's favourite restaurant in Mexico City 12.05.2026 56λ

  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 t...
• 421 Janet Maro — Farmers are the architects, not the audience 08.05.2026 53λ

  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 ...
• 420 Silke German – Creating the Tesla of beans by saving the milpa system 05.05.2026 1ώ 2λ

  Mexico has thousands of bean varieties. Most people living in cities know four to five. Silke Gérman is on a mission to change that. She is the founder of La Comandanta, a premium heirloom bean and salsa brand now in its twelfth year of connecting smallholder milpa farmers in central Mexico to retail shelves in Mexico City, the US, the UK, and Germany. Ancient Mexican bean varieties — grown for millennia in the traditional milpa polyculture system alongside corn and squash — are disappearing...
• 419 Max Küsters - Why every pioneering regen farm should sell ecosystem services 28.04.2026 1ώ 13λ

  Gut & Bösel in Alt Madlitz, Brandenburg is one of the largest regenerative farms in Europe — 3,000 hectares of arable land and forestry on some of the sandiest, driest soils in Germany. For years, farmer Benedikt Bösel and his team have been experimenting with agroforestry, holistic grazing, and composting at scale, with no blueprint and no neighbours to learn from. That experimentation costs money, takes time, and generates knowledge that other farmers benefit from for free. So they set ...
• 418 Sylvia Kuria - Farmers should grow their own food first 24.04.2026 1ώ 6λ

  Sylvia Kuria started with a kitchen garden and a refusal to use chemicals on food for her newborn. Seventeen years later, she runs Sylvia's Basket, aggregates organic produce across Kenya, trains smallholder farmers on half-acre plots, and helped get agroecology written into county government development plans with real budget behind it. The journey from that first bottle of pesticides to a funded policy win is not a straight line — and the business realities along the way are rarely the ones...
• 417 Pablo Francisco Borrelli — Grazing carbon credits: the Trojan horse transforming Argentine grasslands 21.04.2026 1ώ 16λ

  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 experien...
• 416 Sherry Hess – Hijacked Flavour: reclaiming taste from the food industry 14.04.2026 1ώ 10λ

  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 The Flavor Remedy, 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...
• 415 Kofi Boa - You can see soil health in a single season 10.04.2026 42λ

  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 befo...
• 414 Laura Ortiz Montemayor - What if healthy economies meant drinkable rivers 07.04.2026 44λ

  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...
• 413 Anastasia Volkova - Building the world's largest MRV provider 31.03.2026 52λ

  Regenerative agriculture really works. Data shows that the ability of crops, from planting to harvest, to withstand weather shocks (50-year droughts and floods happening every year, anyone?) correlates very strongly with regenerative agriculture practices. To enable that at scale, MRVs are crucial. Happy to welcome back on the podcast Anastasia Volkova, co-founder of Regrow Ag, the AI-powered platform to make agriculture resilient, who just made another acquisition. We check in with th...
• 412 Emmanuel Luwemba – Disrupting the seed monopolies in East Africa 27.03.2026 57λ

  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 th...
• 411 Pierluigi Scordari - Skin care: the profitable Trojan horse for regen ag 24.03.2026 1ώ 5λ

  Why are we completely ignoring our biggest organ, our skin? The skin care and cosmetics industry is a 200 billion industry and growing fast, often with great margins. Most of it is filled with barely legal chemicals, but there is a fast-growing natural, even regenerative, beauty space and we talk to one of the leaders. We cover everything with Pierluigi Scordari, Sustainability Manager di N&B Natural is Better: ferments, probiotics and prebiotics, the skin microbiome, how they started, wh...
• 410 Paul Hawken – Carbon is life, not the enemy 17.03.2026 1ώ 11λ

  Carbon is life, not the enemy. And in this wide-ranging conversation with the legend that is Paul Hawken, we get into all of it. Paul is an activist, entrepreneur with Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration and prolific writer who started a natural food brand back in the 1970s. We trace his journey through writing Drawdown, Regeneration, and Carbon: The Book of Life and why people loved Drawdown so much even though that was never really the point. Regeneration got closer to the core. And C...
• 409 Olusola Sowemimo - How a Nigerian lawyer built a profitable organic farm with standards, data and community 13.03.2026 1ώ 19λ

  We sit down with Olusola Sowemimo, a lawyer-turned-farmer and founder of Ope Farms in Nigeria, to unpack how grief became a blueprint for organic, traceable, and profitable agriculture. Her catalyst was a cancer conference in California where survivors only ate what they could trace—an idea that reshaped how she thinks about soil, inputs, and integrity. Back home, the early days were rough: antibiotic-laced manure wiped out hundreds of tomato plants, a strong tobacco extract burned cucumbers,...
• 408 Ivan Mandela - Unicorns can wait, African farmers can't 10.03.2026 59λ

  It’s a very interesting time for African agriculture and food, the continent is realising it’s potential to help feed the world, money is flowing into infrastructure to unlock this, more and more talent is coming into the space and the realisation that agro ecology or regenerative agriculture is no longer a nice niche with big margins but has the potential to become the predominant way of agriculture is performed. After putting over $20 million to work in East Africa, Ivan Mandela, foun...
• 407 Tania Rodriguez Riestra - Systems change investing done right 03.03.2026 1ώ 40λ

  The food, agriculture and planetary systems, for that matter, are all in serious need of change. No news there. But how? Individual investments and grants, however large, will never be big enough to move these systems. What we need is a serious, deep analysis of the food and agriculture space within a certain context: hundreds of hours of interviews with many stakeholders to map the players, the positive and negative feedback loops, and the intervention points with huge leverage (or not...