Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

Koen van Seijen
  • 4.8 (91)
  • 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. 413 Anastasia Volkova - Building the world's largest MRV provider

    2D AGO

    413 Anastasia Volkova - Building the world's largest MRV provider

    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 the MRV pioneer and successful entrepreneur about why they are merging with the leading LATAM player. Last time we talked, five years ago, they had also just merged. We talk about the current state of the MRV world: who is paying, who isn’t, who is doubling down on remote sensing, and who is investing in resilient agriculture. What do the current wars everywhere (we are recording this in mid-March '26, when the Iran war is in full swing) mean for resilient agriculture and the investments needed to unlock it? We also talk- just as we did five years ago- about fertiliser and the double role it plays. In the Global North we can easily cut 70%- yes, 70%- without meaningful yield drops, but in the Global South it’s desperately needed in many places. With the current exploding prices and energy costs, that will be difficult. We discuss AI and its ability to unlock insights from large (cleaned-up) data sets, and why she is stepping into a more living-systems way of thinking. She’s optimistic that watershed- scale regeneration is almost at our fingertips. More about this episode. Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message! LARIS 2026Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit (Cumbre de Inversiones Regenerativas de América Latina). Be part of the movement that is regenerating the way we learn, invest, and live. Bogotá, Colombia May 12 - 14 https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ 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
  2. 412 Emmanuel Luwemba – Disrupting the seed monopolies in East Africa

    6D AGO

    412 Emmanuel Luwemba – Disrupting the seed monopolies in East Africa

    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. More about this episode. ========================== 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 Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message! LARIS 2026Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit (Cumbre de Inversiones Regenerativas de América Latina). Be part of the movement that is regenerating the way we learn, invest, and live. Bogotá, Colombia May 12 - 14 https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ 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!

    58 min
  3. 411 Pierluigi Scordari - Skin care: the profitable Trojan horse for regen ag

    MAR 24

    411 Pierluigi Scordari - Skin care: the profitable Trojan horse for regen ag

    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, why they are fully vertically integrated, why they specifically grow plants for their active ingredients (aka nutrient density), and why processing fast (less than 2 hours after harvest) is so crucial, otherwise the ingredients aren’t alive and thus not working anymore. Does it sound familiar? There are so many overlaps and similarities with the food space, except that this skin care space is full of really well-built brands with great margins. So, we have some work to do! And for many regen farmers, growing something for the skin care industry could be very interesting. Many plants which thrive almost naturally in the hard Mediterranean climate (rosemary, lavender, olives, etc.) are fundamental ingredients. Yes, this involves frequencies, thinking about playing music to the plants and asking permission before removing leaves, all to achieve the highest possible quality and effectiveness. We spent a lot of time unpacking the almost superpowers of the queen of healthy plants: aloe vera. More about this episode. Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message! LARIS 2026Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit (Cumbre de Inversiones Regenerativas de América Latina). Be part of the movement that is regenerating the way we learn, invest, and live. Bogotá, Colombia May 12 - 14 https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ 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 6m
  4. 410 Paul Hawken – Carbon is life, not the enemy

    MAR 17

    410 Paul Hawken – Carbon is life, not the enemy

    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 Carbon is chuck-full of nuggets of wisdom about the magical, magnificent role carbon plays in our lives. Yes, there’s too much of it in the atmosphere, but there are also many places it can go, quickly and safely. We talk about his work with large food companies, and the pure joy of bringing top executives to real regenerative farms and watching the lightbulbs go off, followed immediately by the panic of realising just how far their current supply chains are from anything like that. We get into food as medicine, and how furious Paul was with the healthcare and food system after he cured his lifelong asthma at 18 simply by changing what he ate. He had never taken a full breath of air until that moment. And we talk about his genuine excitement about the new generation of scientists coming up. One advice: just go outside for as long as possible, and listen to this episode somewhere beautiful and alive. More about this episode. ========================== In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message! LARIS 2026Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit (Cumbre de Inversiones Regenerativas de América Latina). Be part of the movement that is regenerating the way we learn, invest, and live. Bogotá, Colombia May 12 - 14 https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ 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 12m
  5. 409 Olusola Sowemimo - How a Nigerian lawyer built a profitable organic farm with standards, data and community

    MAR 13

    409 Olusola Sowemimo - How a Nigerian lawyer built a profitable organic farm with standards, data and community

    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, and buyers were nowhere in sight. What changed? Relentless record keeping, strict organic standards, and smart design—corner plots with buffer zones, on-farm worker housing, and a refusal to cut down trees. Olusola details how rabbits and carefully managed poultry helped her close nutrient loops, why fruit trees are the most underrated cash-flow asset for new organic farms, and how processing gluts into shelf-stable products saved revenue. She shares the playbook for market fit—from salad staples to premium greens like kale—and the power of traceability in winning home deliveries, retail partners, and even international lab validations for turmeric and ginger. We also explore the human side: training that prevents avoidable mistakes, social media that tells an honest story, and the mindset shift needed to move beyond "organic is impossible". More about this episode. ========================== 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 co Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message! LARIS 2026Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit (Cumbre de Inversiones Regenerativas de América Latina). Be part of the movement that is regenerating the way we learn, invest, and live. Bogotá, Colombia May 12 - 14 https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ 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 20m
  6. 408 Ivan Mandela - Unicorns can wait, African farmers can't

    MAR 10

    408 Ivan Mandela - Unicorns can wait, African farmers can't

    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, founder of SHONA Group, has learned the hard way: chasing Western style so called unicorns might not be the right approach for a predominantly agricultural society. So he shifted his approach and started investing in real companies, to help create a functioning main street a functional real economy where unicorns will naturally start to occur. We discuss why Ivan ends up mostly backing female entrepreneurs, his tips for young students and his takes on nutrient density and quality. More about this episode. ========================== 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. ========================== 👩🏻‍💻 YOUR OUR WEBSITE  📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE  💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK Join Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message! LARIS 2026Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit (Cumbre de Inversiones Regenerativas de América Latina). Be part of the movement that is regenerating the way we learn, invest, and live. Bogotá, Colombia May 12 - 14 https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ 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 1m
  7. 407 Tania Rodriguez Riestra - Systems change investing done right

    MAR 3

    407 Tania Rodriguez Riestra - Systems change investing done right

    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), trying to make sense of the messiness of a system. No, a map is never the territory, but it’s better than no map. Then what? How do we go from mapping to action? It is key to build dedicated funding vehicles for-profit, low-return, no-return, philanthropy, the whole capital spectrum concentrated on the highest leverage points in a system. And then, and only then, we might have a chance to move something. CO_ is one of the most interesting regen investment vehicles we have come across, combining deep systems research with long-term, on-the-ground work, weaving until you have a common vision, and then deploying serious capital to make it work. More about this episode. ========================== 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. ========================== 👩🏻‍💻 Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message! LARIS 2026Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit (Cumbre de Inversiones Regenerativas de América Latina). Be part of the movement that is regenerating the way we learn, invest, and live. Bogotá, Colombia May 12 - 14 https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ 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 42m
  8. 406 Neal Collins – Agrihoods for free-range kids: a Trojan horse for regenerative agriculture

    FEB 24

    406 Neal Collins – Agrihoods for free-range kids: a Trojan horse for regenerative agriculture

    Think about where and how you live. Close your eyes and picture your ideal neighbourhood. We bet it looks something like this: a walkable neighbourhood designed around a fully functional farm, with different types of houses built from healthy, non-toxic, natural materials, multifamily, aging-proof, small but not too small, with plenty of privacy, and affordable. The neighbourhood is designed for meeting your neighbours, hence the word neighbourhood. Cars are confined to a designated area, and most importantly, there are lots of free-ranging kids and chickens. Why are we talking about real estate? Because so much agricultural land is being swallowed up by “development”. Cities are expanding, often building super ugly, incredibly toxic suburban homes on that land with big gates and big cars parked in driveways or garages, and kids who never go outside. At the same time, real estate is very good at raising money and investing it, often without taking negative externalities into account. So, what can we learn, and how can we use the highly developed real estate capital markets to build agrihoods and thriving regenerative farms, enabled by well-planned, healthy neighbourhoods? And yes, we can achieve market-rate returns.  Happy to welcome on the podcast Neal Collins, founder of Hamlet Capital. More about this episode. ========================== 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 Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message! LARIS 2026Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit (Cumbre de Inversiones Regenerativas de América Latina). Be part of the movement that is regenerating the way we learn, invest, and live. Bogotá, Colombia May 12 - 14 https://regenerativo.org/en/laris/ 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 21m
See All (495)

Trailer

4.8
out of 5
91 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