A long-overdue check-in interview with Dan Kittredge, founder of the Bionutrient Food Association. We discuss their involvement in the revolutionary beef study, all the research they have been doing and where they have been showing absolutely no connection between the labels, local, organic, regenerative, farmer's market, etc., and nutrient density. What has been shown is a correlation between soil health and nutrient density. All the claims about regenerative agriculture that leads to more...

A conversation with Chris Henggeler, a second-generation high-density, low-duration herder using herds for land management. From one of the most remote places in Australia, we explore big myths like many animals damage the land, to a huge question: can we actually put the new megafauna to work? Farms need to get smaller, and ranches need to get bigger. If you want to retire in security, you have a vested interest in healthy landscapes. How do we invest as if our grandchildren mattered? How do...

A conversation with Jojo Mehta, executive director of Stop Ecocide International, about making ecocide a crime, something you can get arrested for and end up in prison. How do we get it from a discussion in lawyer circles and academic circles into international criminal law? And why is it going much faster over the last 5 years than anyone has expected? Law: an area we rarely touch but has the potential to shift our food and agriculture system, and many other systems, completely. Making...

A conversation with Maria Virginia Solis Wahnish and Mateusz Ciasnocha, both involved in the Farm of Francesco. Maria Virginia is founder of Drink Matera, while Mateusz is the CEO of European Carbon Farmers and member of the EU Soil Mission board. We discuss why it is so important to connect with policymakers and how to actually do that, the importance of farmers' education and a very detailed answer to the 1 billion euro question to enable many more people to get involved in farming. And...

A conversation with Emiliano Mroue, founder of WARC, about their recent funding round, being close to the farmers and why he left a corporate job in Germany to start a farmer focussed anti poverty company in Sierra Leone which turned into a company serving today over 20000 farmers, mostly in Ghana, in the transition to more regenerative practices. What is their secret to be close to the farmers always, not quite often but always? Smallholder maize farmers at the edge of the Sahara, brutal...

A conversation with Sonja Stuchtey, co-founder of The Landbanking Group, about innovative financial strategies, accountancy standards and rules, reliable sourcing, better quality and lower prices, investing in the value chain and more. Let’s say you are an orange juice or chocolate bar producer: your margins are under pressure because the costs of buying raw ingredients have exploded the last few years. What do you do? In any other business you would likely invest in your supply to secure...

This is a special episode, the first one ever of the Walking the Land with a Regenerative Farmer, where we walk the land of the farm with a farmer while we talk about regeneration. [On Youtube you can find a video version of this same conversation!] Walking through Iside Farm on the Iseo Lake in Italy, with regenerative farmer Matteo Mazzola, we unlock the secrets of regenerative agriculture as we traverse the innovative landscapes crafted by Matteo, Paola and the Iside crew. We embark on...

A conversation with Adrien Pelletier, farmer, breeder, and baker, about wheat, seeds, no till organic farming, why all farmers or most farmers need to become seed breeders again, and why it is really difficult to bake sourdough with traditional organic wheat seeds that are not breed for high productive farms. Why Adrien want to start changing the world in the most difficult place, at home, which is a large industrial, mostly extractive, commodity wheat-growing region in France? Picture a sea...

A conversation with Chris Bloomfield and Daniel Reisman, co-founders of Collie, a provider of virtual cow guidance system for managing production in grazing, about enabling regenerative dairy, how virtually fencing and cow guidance drastically reduce labour and boost production. To feed ourselves and the planet sustainably, we need to include animals as part of agriculture. We dive deep into going from vegan to grazing, animal welfare, and the state of our planet. How do we enable more...

A check-in interview with Clint Brauer, founder and CEO of Greenfield, company powering chemical-free agriculture with advanced AI-powered robots, about his dream to get chemicals and expensive machinery out of broad acre, row crop farming (AKA soy corn farming which currently occupies millions of acres around the world, especially in large industrialised agriculture countries), the ending of the era of the chemical, and much more. After interviewing Clint in September 2020, we check in on...

A conversation with Alfred Grand, farmer at Grand Farm, an organic farm with a high proportion of research, about vermicompost and seed inoculation, but also what policymakers should know about farming. Plus, the role of technology in the regenerative transition and why Alfred is so excited about AI and robotics. Have you ever witnessed a complete transformation that strikes at the very heart of our connection to the earth? Alfred's path from bike mechanic to pioneering farmer at Grand Farm...

A conversation with Sebastiaan Huisman, large-scale organic farmer and advisor, about consulting on many large farm transitions, including the British royal family and working with Wildfarmed. Why is he so optimistic about biodynamic, holistic, and regenerative farming, and why does it all start with children? Picking apples on an biodynamic farm at age 12 led to setting up one of the largest biodynamic farms in Europe, almost 2000 hectares in Poland, on very very poor soil, Sebastian had an...

A conversation with Anthony Myint, co-founder and executive director of Zero Foodprint. Award winning chef, Myint was disappointed about his impact on acres by his farm to table restaurants and he is now fully committed to systems change. Koen and Anthony talk about how to really move the needle on many more new practice acres which are acres where regenerative practices are used for the first time, opting out mechanisms where a small opt out fee is added to restaurant bills and food...

A conversation with Paul McMahon, co-founder of SLM, about why it makes so much sense to put money to work in real regenerative agriculture, yields, and more importantly, profits and the regenerative edge, and more. Few papers in regenerative agriculture have been shared more than the Investment Case for Ecological Agriculture written by Paul McMahon. We have shared it countless times, learned a whole lot from the simple investment terms describing why it makes so much sense to put money to...

A conversation with Abby Rose, co-founder of Vidacycle and Farmerama, about the role and potential of AI in observation, alternative investment, the power of transparency, why regenerative viticulture is so interesting, and more. Why did someone who didn’t really need the money and had serious and reasonable questions about the tendency of startups, both in and outside the regenerative space, to keep raising money, ended up raising funding? Not in a traditional, potentially extractive way,...

A conversation with Brett Hundley, President of Agroforestry Partners (AP), a fund that invests in agroforestry projects on farmland with the strategy of providing uncorrelated and attractive nature-based investment opportunities for investors.  We talked about moving away from an agricultural system that relies on annuals to a system that relies more on perennial trees. If trees are the answer to whatever the question is, how do we get millions of more trees into the ground? How do we...

A conversation with Joachim Ewechu and Hannes Van den Eeckhout, co-founders of Rootical, a start-up studio that enables purpose-driven entrepreneurs in Uganda to build and own their regenerative agri-food companies. We talk about why Uganda is the place to launch and build agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and food companies, why Uganda enjoys political support for agroecology, the importance of different steward ownership models, the importance of different investment models, and...

This is the wrap-up of the Regen Mind series, where Emma shares more about her motivation for this series, her lessons learned, the themes that emerged, and of course, her surprises like like how quickly the conversations evolved from mind/mindset to consciousness. Find out why the mind is like soil and how we can adopt a systems-thinking lens, which is imperative for system change. --------------------------------------------------- Join our Gumroad community, discover the tiers and benefits...

A conversation with Heather Terry, CEO and founder of GoodSam, about how an exit from a chocolate company led to a female-led consumer goods company, how education of consumers is key, networks vs. chains, multi-crop buying, and much more. Every CEO and high-ranking manager working in food companies should be obligated to visit the farms and farmers they source from. So many decisions in the board rooms would be taken differently. With Heather we dig into a story of a company about how an...

A conversation with Martin Reiter, former senior manager at Airbnb and Wayfair, and prior to this at McKinsey and Groupon, about what excites him about regeneration, where are the Steve Jobs and Elon Musk of regeneration going to build their companies, and how can we help more talent flow into the space? Why did Martin, after he grew Wayfair's European Business by 100x over 8 years and led Airbnb's International Expansion, read more than 50 agriculture books and all the papers he could get...

A conversation with Jessica Hutchings, a Maori researcher and apothecary, about indigenous knowledge, letting go of old mindsets, our relationship with nature and the deities of our landscapes. A deep dive in the New Zealand food system, indigenous ways to connect with soil and the food web, sound of plants, vibration of nature and much more. This episode is part of the Regenerative Mind series, supported by our friends at Stray who are exploring systemic investing with awe and wonder as...

A conversation with Keith Agoada, CEO and co-founder of Producers Trust, a global network of farmers, farmer groups, and producer groups, about indoor greenhouse growing, aggregation, sorting, quality control, packaging, processing, and more. From indoor greenhouse growing to founding a company, which is now turning into a regenerative landscape orchestrator, and why we are in the perfect storm at the moment. In the last 12 months, or even the last 6 months, we have seen an explosion of...

Emma Chow and Calla Rose Ostrander explore the regenerative mindset and the importance of integrating human behaviours into natural cycles, recognising abundance and the physical capacity for healing, burnout, the perception of time scarcity, prioritising regenerative activities, and much more. Regenerative mind is about healing. It makes Calla Rose think back to her experience suffering a brain injury, which taught her what it means to heal — her brain was literally regenerating itself. The...

A conversation with Nicolas Enjalbert, CEO and Co-Founder of SeedLinked, an innovative company digitizing collaborative breeding and a seed breeder, about our current seed system, flavour and nutrients, collaborative seed research, and much more. Seeds, it all starts with seeds (and soil) but mostly seeds. And our current seeds system is structurally not able to grow seeds that are adaptive to local niches, weather, let alone flavour or nutrients etc., but only able to grow seeds for large...