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What if the best argument for regenerative agriculture isn't the planet, but the profit? Francisco Roque de Pinho didn't set out to become a regenerative farmer. He came from capital markets, carbon trading, and strategic consulting — and stumbled into farmland management when distressed clients needed someone to rescue underperforming assets in Uruguay. What he found, through trial and careful observation, was that precision grazing — intensive rotational cattle management on short cycles — delivered superior financial results from day one. No yield dip. No transition cost. Just 30-40% more cattle per hectare, lower veterinary costs, lower labour costs, and dramatically improved pastures. The Land Group, which Francisco co-founded in January 2016, now operates 20,000 hectares across seven farms in Uruguay and is expanding into Portugal and Spain — drawn by the neglected potential of the ancient Montado landscape, and by a growing wave of European investors looking for stable assets far from geopolitical risk. But they never say "regenerative" to investors. In this conversation, recorded on a walk through Lisbon, Francisco explains why the word triggers the wrong assumptions, what language actually raises capital, and what a $1 billion precision-grazing strategy would look like across Uruguay and Iberia. Topics covered: — How The Land Group started: from distressed debt to "cocktail investments" in farmland — The financial case for precision grazing: 30-40% yield uplift, lower costs, from day one — Why "regenerative" closes institutional investment doors — and what language opens them — The Montado system: why Portugal's ancient cork oak landscape needs cattle back, urgently — Carbon credits: why Francisco excludes them entirely from financial models — The $1 billion barbell strategy: Uruguay + Iberia, and a global grassfed beef brand — Why biogenic methane from well-managed herds is categorically different from fossil fuel emissions — The "regenerative alpha": when soil health will be priced into land values. 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!

Jacob Israelow is the founder of Dirt Capital Partners, an investment platform that partners with regenerative farmers and ranchers to help them secure long-term access to the land they farm—and ultimately own it. He left Goldman Sachs and returned to the New York area in 2012, bringing a background in real estate and investing and a growing interest in local food systems. After spending about a year talking to hundreds of farmers, land trusts and others across the Northeast, he built Dirt Capital around a simple question: could investment capital help good farmers become landowners without taking value away from them? The mechanic at the heart of Dirt Capital is a lease-purchase model. The fund buys a piece of farmland alongside one specific farmer or rancher, signs a ten-year lease with a purchase option locked in at a pre-agreed price at year five and again at year ten, and lets that farmer buy the land back once their business, and their balance sheet, have caught up. It is a way to get farmers onto land conventional lenders will not yet finance, without turning them into permanent tenants. In this episode, Koen and Jacob dig into what sits underneath that model: how Dirt Capital manages real estate risk while leaving the farm business risk to the farmer, why regenerative practices do not automatically make land worth more, what happens when a purchase does not go to plan, and how a firm that has put roughly $80 million to work over the past decade is about to try to raise $100 million for its next fund. 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!

Five years ago, many people in the regenerative agriculture space thought that simply paying farmers for soil carbon storage would rewire the agricultural system in a heartbeat. It turned out to be considerably more difficult. The European soil carbon market has not scaled at the speed needed. The voluntary carbon market has not delivered the financing that was hoped for. Is regulation part of the answer? The solar market suggests yes. Christian Holzleitner is Head of Unit for Land Economy and Carbon Removals at DG CLIMA, European Commission, and one of the architects of the EU's Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF). He is an economist by training who has spent his career designing market frameworks — including the EU's Innovation Fund and Modernization Fund — and is now applying the same logic to soil carbon. This episode is part of the podcast's carbon series, supported by the OGCR project. In this episode: — Why the CRCF is designed to solve a bureaucratic problem: farmers reporting the same data five times for five different schemes — How the solar feed-in tariff model could work for carbon farming — cover the funding gap until the market scales — What the EU ETS reform means for demand outside the agricultural value chain — Why a portfolio of small certified European projects is more attractive to institutional investors than a single large project in Africa — Why peatland rewetting in Finland is the landscape-scale intervention that excites Christian most — Why carbon is a means, not an objective — and what that means for how investors should think about this space — His magic wand answer: a single call for European carbon farming projects in the next EU multiannual budget. 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!

Only 4% of Benedikt Bösel's customers scanned the QR code on their meat — even though that code would have shown them the life of the specific cow they were eating, its pasture, its movement, everything. The other 96% either trusted the brand completely, or simply didn't care. That number sits at the centre of this conversation. This episode was recorded live at Groundswell 2026, the UK's largest regenerative agriculture festival. Koen moderated a 55-minute panel on a question that matters as much to investors as to farmers: who actually benefits when data is collected from farms? The four panellists: Ichsani Wheeler, soil scientist at the OpenGeoHub Foundation and satellite data researcher building an open-access soil registry; Benedikt Bösel, farmer of a 3,000-hectare operation in eastern Brandenburg running a digital twin alongside the physical farm; Antony Yousefian, co-founder of The First Thirty, an investment firm building the data infrastructure to turn farms into preventative healthcare systems; and Matthijs Westerwoudt, co-founder of Wilder Land, building what he calls a Strava for biodiversity using AI-powered acoustic monitoring. Video credit @Commonland. In this session: — Why Benedikt says most farm data has been useless — and what is finally changing — Why Antony believes the cost of communicating with plants has collapsed — The NHS values one quality-adjusted life year at £30,000 — and why that number should reframe the entire food system — The 2013 US case where aggregated farm data was used to set surveillance pricing on inputs against the farmers who generated it — Why only 4% of customers scanned the QR code with full cow data — and what that tells us about the real entry point to consumer behaviour change — How Wilder Land is turning bird species counts into a biodiversity score farmers can put on a product label — What Benedikt's wife's iron levels after birth have to do with all of this ------- This session 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. 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!

Eric Smith is the founder of Edacious, a company building the infrastructure to make food quality and nutrient density measurable, objective and comparable. After spending years building a nutrition-testing platform capable of measuring macronutrients, micronutrients, bioactives and phytochemicals, alongside the benchmarks and data systems needed to make those measurements useful, he returns to sit down with us to share what they have been building, how the field of nutritional testing has evolved, and the critical insights they have uncovered. At the heart of Eric's work is a simple belief:  if consumers can access and verify the quality of their food, they will demand products grown in ways that prioritize soil health and regenerative practices. This increased market demand will structurally direct more money into the pockets of farmers and land stewards, enabling them to expand regenerative agriculture across more hectares, creating a self-sustaining loop of human and ecological health. To ground this concept in science, Edacious leverages the GEMP framework—Genetics by Environment by Management practice equals Yield by Nutrition—moving beyond subjective labels to deliver objective, verified data. This episode is a deep, down-to-earth dive into the nuts and bolts of quality, nutrient density, and systemic agricultural change. Eric teases the science behind Edacious' preeminent nutrition lab, which has processed over 6,000 food samples and generated nearly a million analytical data points. The conversation exposes the compromises of industrial crop breeding through the story of carrots, compares apples to apples, reveals the massive nutritional differences hidden in the skins of produce, and explores how Eric's own eating habits have transformed since he gained direct access to the data, including a surprising advocacy for frozen food and ancient grains. 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!

Abby Rose is an experienced agricultural storyteller, co-host of the award-winning podcast Farmerama Radio, and co-founder of the soil monitoring and data platform VidaCycle. With a background spanning technology and hands-on farming on her family's farm in Chile, Abby has spent nearly a decade amplifying the voices of the regenerative farming movement and creating tools to help farmers build healthier soils. This July, Abby is back on the podcast to share an update on Cereal, her six-part series podast uncovering the polarised world of cereals, from seed to loaf, and Cereal Revisited, which returned to the series years later to ask what happened after people listened. What did those stories change? And what does that tell us about the power of storytelling to change the regenerative agriculture system? When two podcasters walk into the ‘recording studio’ for a conversation, the central question is bigger than podcasting: is good storytelling one of the most neglected and underfunded pieces of the regenerative agriculture and food transition? If people are going to change careers, start farms, build food companies, become millers or join the agroecological movement, they first need to see and feel that another way of working is possible. Cereal offers a striking case study: farmers started operating their own mills, listeners went on pilgrimages to meet people featured in the series, and at least one listener moved from engineering into milling. Koen van Seijen and Abby Rose — two regenerative agriculture podcasters — turn the microphone back on themselves. They talk about what six relatively simple episodes did years after release, why systemic storytelling is difficult to fund, and why the hero’s journey may be the wrong model for food systems. 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!

Water always wins. The question is whether we let it cool the planet while it does — or keep fighting it until there's nothing left to fight with. Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, and is currently writing her second book, Roots to Sky: How Life and Water Can Help Cool Earth's Climate, due in 2028. She is an environmental journalist who has spent more than a decade travelling the world to document how communities are rebuilding their relationship with water — not by controlling it better, but by understanding what water wants and working with it. The common climate narrative — decarbonise, bring fossil fuel emissions to zero, done — is no longer sufficient on its own. Water vapour accounts for roughly half the greenhouse effect. We've degraded 75% of the earth's land surface, largely by draining it. And more sea level rise comes from pumping groundwater than from melting glaciers — something a 1970 MIT Press report already knew. We've only accelerated since. The good news: this is something we can change relatively quickly through land restoration. And water is absolutely key. In this episode: — Why water always wins and what it means to ask what water wants rather than fighting it — How growing up in California, built on extreme water engineering, shaped Erica's obsession — Why she shifted from surface water to the atmosphere for her new book Roots to Sky — The 1970 MIT report that flagged pumping groundwater raises sea levels — 55 years of acceleration since — Why 87% of wetlands drained, two thirds of rivers dammed, and cities doubled since 1992 have made our water problems worse, not better — Why the best water solutions are modular and decentralised — and why that's empowering — What beavers in California are teaching farmers who spent eighty years shooting them — Why investors optimising single variables are running out of natural buffers faster than they think — Why land back for indigenous peoples may be one of the highest-return interventions available — Her magic wand answer: caring for non-humans — and why she thinks we're closer to it than it seems. 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!

An orange farm near Valencia, abandoned for a decade, a family debt, and a website. Seventeen years later: 500,000 customers, 350 partner farmers, 400 employees, and not a single discount ever run. Gonzalo Úrculo is co-founder of Crowdfarming, the direct-to-consumer platform that connects European consumers directly with farmers — no wholesaler, no distributor, no price negotiation after harvest. He came back from his Erasmus in Berlin, talked his family out of selling the grandfather's farm, and spent the first two years renting a van to sell oranges face-to-face at markets in Paris and Berlin. The record before a Guardian article ran in 2012 was 20 orders a day. The day it ran: 240. The website collapsed. The mechanic behind everything that followed is almost offensively simple: fruit is only picked when it is ordered. A Valencia orange reaches a kitchen in Germany in three to four days. The same orange through a conventional supply chain — including the organic one — takes a minimum of seventeen. We walked the original citrus field together, trees all around us carrying name tags of their adopted owners somewhere in Germany, France, and Austria, and talked about the argument Gonzalo makes that gets him in trouble at French farming conferences. In this episode: — How the tree adoption model was invented by customers who showed up unannounced to visit their trees — Why the business-plan target was 1,000 adoptions and they hit 10,000 in under a year — Why customers forgive almost anything if you communicate honestly and in advance — How picking only to order cuts waste structurally — not as a policy but as a consequence of the model — Why predictable pre-season income is the one thing that makes regenerative transition economically rational for a farmer — Why CAP subsidies are not going to farmers — they're going to supermarkets — What Gonzalo would do with €1 billion, and why his magic wand answer is the same thing he built his entire company around 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!

200 euros in a bank account, no contract, and a vision. Six and a half years later: 160,000 trees, a soil temperature at 15cm depth of a constant 21°C — while the bare field metres away peaks at 38°C — and a landscape so full of birds that visitors ask to walk through it in silence. Marc Leiber, founder of Grow Back and farmer at Quinta das Abelhas, in Portugal, is German agroforestry practitioner who spent nine months on Ernst Götsch's farm in Brazil, arrived in Portugal's Alentejo with almost nothing, and has been quietly building what he calls a Montado-plus, adding the missing layers back into Europe's most famous silvopasture system, ever since. We walk the land together, step outside the gate to stand in the bare control field metres away, and talk about what six and a half years of syntropic-inspired practice actually looks like when it works. Including why eucalyptus, widely considered a villain in the Portuguese landscape, might be one of the most generous trees in it. In this episode: — How a student group got Wageningen University to fund Ernst Götsch's first visit to Northern Europe — Starting a farm with 200 euros, no contract, and acorns gathered by hand for six weeks — Why the Montado's structure is ecologically upside down and what restoring it does to temperature, water, and biodiversity — Why eucalyptus is not the problem — and how to use it to grow a native forest — How to prune cork and holm oaks so they actually thrive — Why in these systems, one plus one equals three or, as someone put it, syntropic farming is measured in cubic metres, not square metres — What Marc would do with €1 billion, and why his magic wand answer is a shift in mindset rather than a farming practice 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!

Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic, left Greece a decade ago, spent years working across European farming systems, and eventually landed in Portugal to run what has become one of the most rigorously monitored regenerative trials in Mediterranean intensive tree crop agriculture. He is the lead on the field research side of the Arbo-Innova project, a multi-farm, multi-consortium research platform focused specifically on the question of whether regenerative practices can be meaningfully integrated into the intensive orchard systems that now cover hundreds of thousands of hectares across the Iberian Peninsula. A five-hectare plot of intensive almonds at Monta Silveira Farm, in Portugal, fenced against deer, planted at the same density as the conventional neighbours surrounding it on all sides, and now in its third growing season: that is where this conversation takes place. The trees are about two metres tall. The interlines are green with different cover crop mixes. One area is under plastic mulch; another has clovers growing in the tree lines themselves. The data is beginning to come in, and what it is showing — on nitrogen levels inside the tree, on herbicide use, on fungal disease pressure, on water infiltration — is quietly shifting the conversations Dimitri is having with an industry that, until recently, was mostly watching from a distance. In this walk-and-talk episode, recorded at 8am on a May morning in Portugal, birds audible throughout, with the 8,000 hectares of conventional intensive almonds next door visible at every turn, we get into why cover cropping can fail spectacularly at 70 euros a hectare and why that matters enormously for adoption, what clovers on the tree berm are doing to nitrogen inside the almond tree (and what they’re competing for in return), why the most intellectually honest conventional growers are the ones leaning in first, how the J-curve of regenerative transition can be quantified and eventually financed, and why the real metric of progress might be the moment a farmer asks you to slow down. 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!

João Valente, owner of Monte Silveira, took over his family farm in central-eastern Portugal that was running on tobacco, broccoli, and melons with sixty-five people employed year-round, the rotation designed entirely around subsidies. When the tobacco subsidy disappeared at the end of the 1990s, he found himself with a question: what does this land actually want to be? That question led him to organic agriculture conferences in Portugal, to a magazine showing no-till, to a German seed company that flew him to New Zealand and Australia to see holistic planned grazing in action, and eventually to the first Climate Farmers Congress in a castle in Germany, back in 2021, where he helped write the manifesto, brought ham, wine, and olive oil, and met much of the regenerative agriculture network he’s been working with ever since. Today, Monte Silveira manages around 700 hectares of Montado and irrigated annual crops, runs five species of animals, carries sixteen active research projects, has three full-time scientists on staff, and has been no-till since the year 2000. One plus one, in companion cropping, is not two. It might be three, four, or five: two or three species in the same field, each supporting the others, the vetch fixing nitrogen for the wheat, the wheat stem holding up the climbing vetch, and if one fails the other covers it. João has been doing this long enough now that the yield comparisons with neighbouring monoculture fields aren’t theoretical. And after decades of absorbing the risk alone, he’s at a point where he can start handing the knowledge on, to neighbouring farmers who are curious but can’t afford to fail, to the Portuguese government, which recently invited Monte Silveira to one of only three private companies at the table for the country’s seven-year environmental strategy document, and to consumers through brands, built on cereals and legumes priced to compete with conventional supermarket products, not just to sell to those who can already afford the premium. In this episode, recorded under the shade of an old farm building during a May heat wave in the Portugal, too hot by then to keep walking the Montado, we get into how a tobacco subsidy became the turning point of a farming life, why João thinks the two groups most drawn to regenerative research are newly graduated scientists and recently retired professors (and almost nobody in between), what it takes to bring the most important conventional almond consultant in Portugal from sceptic to practitioner in under a year, why he would mandate no-till for all dry-land cereal producers in Portugal if he had the legislative pen, what he’d do with a billion euros, and why, given a magic wand, he’d change human ego before he’d change a single farming practice. 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!

Diogo Pinho started his scientific career in the first DNA sequencing lab in Portugal, then did a hands-on PhD on the soil microbiome of cork and holm oak, studying why the trees get sick, before spending two years with Biome Makers, a soil microbiome analysis company, running labs and translating bacterial and fungal profiles into colour-coded, farmer-readable reports for growers around the world. Three years ago, a chance conversation at a farm visit twenty minutes from where he was living led him to Monte Silveira, a 700-hectare farm in the Alentejo, where farmer Joao Valente had been testing regenerative practices for years. Diogo came on board as head of research, hired two more scientists, and is now coordinating fifteen different research consortia — universities, policy makers, and environmental associations — all running in parallel on one working farm. Portugal produces 70% of the world’s cork. And every year, the Montado, the vast savanna-like silvopasture system of cork and holm oaks that makes that possible, and that once covered much of the Mediterranean, is losing between 4,000 and 5,000 hectares. Not to disease, exactly: the disease is just the final hit on a tree already too weak to resist. The underlying cause, Diogo says, is simpler and more fixable than most people realise. The Montado is a system built by human management, and the one thing it was always managed with — grazing animals cycling nutrients back into the soil — has quietly been removed. Bring the animals back, do it well, and the trees can recover. In this episode — recorded walking the Monte Silveira land on a mild May morning, with horses and sheep audible throughout — we get into how Diogo went from genome sequencing to working on a regenerative farm, why he sees the Montado’s decline as a chronic disease rather than a single crisis, how soil organic matter went from 1% to 3% in seven years without importing fertility, what a clover carpet growing underneath intensive almond trees is doing to herbicide use and nitrogen budgets (and why the 8,000-hectare conventional industry next door is already paying attention), and how a transition finance programme for twenty neighbouring livestock farmers is quietly building a model that could scale well beyond one farm. 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!

Lara 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 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!

Brazilian-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 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!

John 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 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!