Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

African soils were once so alive, nobody called it regeneration, the land just gave. Dr. Kofi Boa, founder of the Center for No-Till Agriculture (CNTA) in Ghana, has spent decades proving they can give again.

Boa traces his journey from a burned family farm to one of Africa's most compelling soil restoration demonstration models and makes the case for a distinctly African approach to regeneration: grounded in what fallow land has always shown us, driven by farmers who need a full granary before they need a carbon credit, and proven through evidence you can walk through and see for yourself.

From community-led adoption to the tension between carbon credit schemes and food security, this is a grounded, honest account of what building a regenerative agriculture movement looks like from the inside, in the soil, with the farmers, over decades.

More about this episode. 

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Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
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Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here

Support the show

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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.

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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.

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The healthiest economies will show up with drinkable rivers. That is the image Laura Ortiz Montemayor works backwards from — every Monday morning, every investor meeting, every slide deck.

Laura is a regenerative finance strategist, founder of SVX Mexico, and co-founder of LARIS — the Latin American Regenerative Investment Summit. This is her third time on the show, and a lot has happened since we last spoke. LARIS 2025 sold out — more than 200 people, billionaires, farmers, and practitioners in the same room, conversations moving from spreadsheets to love and frequencies. LARIS 2026 is coming bigger: hosted on a wetland in Bogotá, May 12–14, with WATER as the central theme. We also talk about the collapse of USAID and the damage it did across Latin America, how the sector is rebuilding with local capital, and the question this whole conversation keeps circling: how do you make investors fall in love with life — without losing them on the spreadsheets?


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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.

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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!

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.

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.

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.

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 

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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!

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 regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.

==========================

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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 professional for investment advice.

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

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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!

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!

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 

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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!

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.

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

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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!

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 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

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==========================

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==========================

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 professional for investment advice.

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 

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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!

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

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==========================

🎙 LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST AND SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL OR WATCH IT ON  📽️ our YouTube channel

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==========================

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 professional for investment advice.

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 Gumroad
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=======

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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!

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.

==========================

👩🏻‍💻 YOUR OUR WEBSITE 

📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 

💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK

• Join Gumroad
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==========================

🎙 LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST AND SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL OR WATCH IT ON  📽️ our YouTube channel

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FOLLOW US!

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==========================

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 professional for investment advice.

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 Gumroad
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=======

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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!

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 an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.

==========================

👩🏻‍💻 YOUR OUR WEBSITE 

📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 

💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK

• Join Gumroad
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==========================

🎙 LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST AND SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL OR WATCH IT ON  📽️ our YouTube channel

==========================

FOLLOW US!

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==========================

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 professional for investment advice.

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 Gumroad
• Share it
• Give a 5-star rating
• Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 

=======

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=======

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!