Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

Koen van Seijen
  • 4.8 (92)
  • Investing
  • Updated Weekly

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.

  1. 426 Ivana Gazibara - Deploy $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to transform the Midwest agricultural system

    3d ago

    426 Ivana Gazibara - Deploy $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to transform the Midwest agricultural system

    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. 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 here 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 WORK Join GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! ======= 🎙 YouTube channel 🔗 Linkedin 📸 Instagram Join 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!

    1h 17m
  2. 425 Daniel Vidal - How to build a zero-waste restaurant with deep ancestral Mexican roots

    May 26

    425 Daniel Vidal - How to build a zero-waste restaurant with deep ancestral Mexican roots

    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-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 WORK Join GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! ======= 🎙 YouTube channel 🔗 Linkedin 📸 Instagram Join 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!

    29 min
  3. 424 Benedetta Kyengo - The Green Revolution stole her paradise, now she's bringing it back through syntropic agroforestry

    May 22

    424 Benedetta Kyengo - The Green Revolution stole her paradise, now she's bringing it back through syntropic agroforestry

    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 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 here 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 WORK Join GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! ======= 🎙 YouTube channel 🔗 Linkedin 📸 Instagram Join 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!

    1h 15m
  4. 423 Chris Locke - Fermentation is the future of food

    May 19

    423 Chris Locke - Fermentation is the future of food

    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 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 WORK Join GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! ======= 🎙 YouTube channel 🔗 Linkedin 📸 Instagram Join 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!

    36 min
  5. 422 Pablo Usobiaga - Building nature's favourite restaurant in Mexico City

    May 12

    422 Pablo Usobiaga - Building nature's favourite restaurant in Mexico City

    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 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 here 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 WORK Join GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! ======= 🎙 YouTube channel 🔗 Linkedin 📸 Instagram Join 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!

    56 min
  6. 421 Janet Maro — Farmers are the architects, not the audience

    May 8

    421 Janet Maro — Farmers are the architects, not the audience

    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 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 here 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 WORK Join GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! ======= 🎙 YouTube channel 🔗 Linkedin 📸 Instagram Join 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!

    53 min
  7. 420 Silke German – Creating the Tesla of beans by saving the milpa system

    May 5

    420 Silke German – Creating the Tesla of beans by saving the milpa system

    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 from fields and plates at the same time. Silke's answer is neither a seed bank nor a subsidy. It's packaging, storytelling, and making a purple runner bean from Puebla feel like something worth paying for. Along the way, La Comandanta has brought income back to communities that were emptying out, kept ancestral seeds in living soil rather than frozen storage, and built a value chain that pays farmers fairly — one bag of heirloom beans at a time.   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 here 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 WORK Join GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! ======= 🎙 YouTube channel 🔗 Linkedin 📸 Instagram Join 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!

    1h 2m
  8. 419 Max Küsters - Why every pioneering regen farm should sell ecosystem services

    Apr 28

    419 Max Küsters - Why every pioneering regen farm should sell ecosystem services

    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 up a foundation next to the farm to do the research properly — 10,000 soil samples, four university partners, climate sensors across 300 hectares, and a carbon credit programme that is already generating revenue. Max Küsters, managing director at Gut & Bösel, talks with Koen about how regenerative farms can start turning their hard-won data and ecosystem restoration work into actual income streams — through carbon markets, biodiversity credits, and eventually the insurance industry, which is slowly waking up to the fact that healthy soil is cheaper than flood damage. This podcast is part of the AI 4 Soil Health project which aims to help farmers and policy makers by providing new tools powered by AI to monitor and predict soil health across Europe. For more information visit ai4soilhealth.eu. 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 here 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 WORK Join GumroadShare itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! ======= 🎙 YouTube channel 🔗 Linkedin 📸 Instagram Join 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!

    1h 14m
See All (508)

Trailer

4.8
out of 5
92 Ratings

About

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.

Information

You Might Also Like