Podcast
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Hosted by Koen van Seijen · EN
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
31episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
430 Lara Espirito Santo - Source the cream, not the butter: fixing food waste through regen sourcing
1w ago01:27:06Tap to summarizeLara Espírito Santo grew up shuttling between Rio de Janeiro and her father’s industrial farms in Paraguay and Brazil, traded a planned career in politics and international development for a kitchen job at Silo in London, and went on to co-found SEM, the zero-food-waste restaurant in Lisbon she ran with her partner George McLeod until closing it ten days before this conversation (not for financial reasons, but to figure out what comes next).Source the cream instead of buying butter, and one ingredient quietly becomes four: butter, buttermilk, then whey and cheese once you split the buttermilk again. That unglamorous bit of dairy chemistry is the mechanic behind Lara’s central claim: you don’t get to zero food waste by managing waste better. You get there by going further back up the supply chain than most kitchens ever bother to look, and only then does the creativity actually start.In this episode, recorded in Lisbon, we get into how watching the birds disappear from her father’s 20,000-hectare farm pushed her toward activism and then back into restaurants, why SEM’s food costs ran at 17%, against an industry standard of 25–30%, why she closed it anyway, the case for an EU-wide black market in regeneratively raised organ meat, oyster shells turned into dinner plates, and why she’d spend a hypothetical billion euros de-risking the years it takes a farm to convert.More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more hereSupport the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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429 Raiza Rezende - Closing the gap between soil health and human health
2w ago00:40:28Tap to summarizeBrazilian-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.More about this episodeThoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more hereSupport the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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428 John Gilliland - Why a top UK regen farmer hasn't sold his carbon yet
3w ago01:20:27Tap to summarizeJohn Gilliland is a sixth-generation UK farmer and advocate for sustainable agriculture with a legacy in policy, academia, and innovation. As a leader of the ARC Zero project, his own farm is a model for "Beyond" Net Zero practices, where willow cultivation, livestock grazing, and renewable energy initiatives work together in a circular system.He has credits he could sell tomorrow and hasn't sold any. The reason cuts to the heart of the whole carbon market: on the voluntary market, he says, the same people who measure your soil also buy your credits. They are judge and jury in one. Until that changes, his clocks keep ticking and his carbon stays in the ground.We get into why his 250-year-old woodland — kept fenced off from animals for most of its life — has no earthworms, a soil pH of 4.8, and trees toppling in storms, while feeding willow leaves to his cattle has cut their methane by 28%. John walks us through the fertiliser crisis he thinks is bigger than the Ukraine war, the chicory root he uses instead of a diesel subsoiler, and a 36-hectare trial that lifted meat output 83% while cutting nitrogen 65%. More about this episode.This podcast is part of the Carbon Series supported by the OGCR project, with aims to create a trusted open source framework and make sure the benefits of carbon are shared across generations.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more hereSupport the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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427 James Barrett - Europe has a water retention problem
4w ago00:22:54Tap to summarizeEurope doesn't have a water problem. The rain still falls; we've just spent a few hundred years engineering it off the land as fast as we can, which James Barrett likens to hauling your garden clippings to the dump only to drive back in spring and buy compost.James is a regenerative hydrology consultant, founder of Decent Water Company and lead regenerative designer for Ten Lives Festival in Portugal — where 150 people spent their mornings digging rock-lined "smiles" into a semi-arid, 70-hectare site that sees barely 400mm of rain a year. Sitting between two almond trees, he explains why he favours many small, low-risk interventions over one big dam, how those rock linings passively harvest daily fog and condensation much like the fog nets of Chile, and why transpiring trees hand a landscape a longer growing season and a few degrees of cooling. He also shows how LiDAR and AI let him read 70 hectares from a laptop, finding where water wants to pool before he lifts a shovel.This is a practical field lesson in keeping water higher in the landscape — and in why where you choose to dig decides whether soil, ecosystems and the economics all start to regenerate together.More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Support the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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426 Ivana Gazibara - Deploy $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to transform the Midwest agricultural system
Jun 201:16:32Tap to summarizeThe 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. 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.More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more hereSupport the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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425 Daniel Vidal - How to build a zero-waste restaurant with deep ancestral Mexican roots
May 2600:29:21Tap to summarizeDaniel 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-inflected à la carte that impressed visiting chefs to a tasting menu grounded in tamales, tacos, and corn in every single dish. He explains why familiarity is the gateway drug for getting locals to try ant eggs, grasshoppers, and beef treated with koji to mimic the texture Mexicans already know from corn-fed imports. Daniel unpacks the 60-ingredient mole built almost entirely from kitchen waste — banana peel tart trimmings, English sauce offcuts, insect protein — as both a culinary feat and a zero-waste accounting exercise.This is the third episode of a three conversations series recorded on location at Baldío, in Mexico City: farm, fermentation lab, kitchen. More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/Support the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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424 Benedetta Kyengo - The Green Revolution stole her paradise, now she's bringing it back through syntropic agroforestry
May 2201:15:10Tap to summarizeAs 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.More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more hereSupport the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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423 Chris Locke - Fermentation is the future of food
May 1900:36:01Tap to summarizeFermentation 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 production warehouse in Mexico City, Chris unpacks the three real drivers of fermentation — flavour, health, and waste reduction — and why most kitchens only chase one. He explains why the menu at Baldío functions like an ecosystem, where removing one dish breaks six others, why consistency is the wrong obsession for any restaurant working with small regenerative farms, and how 200 litres of surplus corn vinegar a week is pushing the project toward a retail product line. A UK chef who built his fermentation practice in Toronto and a circular innovation kitchen in Melbourne before arriving in Mexico City and waited four months for a job that didn't yet exist, Chris brings a rare cross-cultural precision to a practice most people still associate only with natural wine. Fermentation as a tool for closing loops, building shelf-stable products, and making the economics of zero-waste food actually work.More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/Support the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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422 Pablo Usobiaga - Building nature's favourite restaurant in Mexico City
May 1200:56:03Tap to summarizeAn 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 (episode 423), and into the kitchen with Daniel (episode 425).More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more hereSupport the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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421 Janet Maro — Farmers are the architects, not the audience
May 800:53:01Tap to summarizeWhen 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.More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more hereSupport the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.👩🏻💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORKJoin GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! =======🎙 YouTube channel🔗 Linkedin📸 InstagramJoin our newsletter!=======The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!
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