I asked a friend of mine what her favorite podcast was and she said Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food. I suspect it might be quite a lot of people’s favorite podcast. The groundbreaking podcast interviews a lot of the key players in the regenerative food and agriculture space - the investors, the farmers, the growers, the herders, the locals, the educators, the policy makers, the bankers, the conservationists, the food industry people, the restaurant folk, the distributors, the biologists, the ecologists, the atmospheric scientists, the hippies, the filmmakers, the regenerative water-ists, the techies, the economists, the writers, the corporate executives, the tree planters, the foundations, the startup incubators, the cryptogeeks, and the fund managers. It tells the rich tapestry of vibrant stories that intertwine to emerge this innovative space that has important implications for earth’s future.
Koen van Seijen, the host of the podcast, reached out to me a year and a half ago because he was planning to explore the water cycle space with a series of podcasts, and wanted to understand more about water. He had been reading my then newer Substack newsletter, was very encouraging of my efforts, and has been very kind and helpful since then. He interviewed me for his podcast, as part of their water cycle series. I am now very happy to get a chance to interview him in return now for the Climate Water Project podcast. We discuss both investing in regenerative water and in regenerative agriculture, so I morphed his podcast name, to get the title of this essay Investing in water and regenerative agriculture.
Below is about half our our conversation from the podcast, edited for brevity and clarity, with a little context added where needed.
Alpha: Welcome today to Koen, who runs the podcast Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Koen: Thank you so much. Thank you for switching, having me on the other side of the mic. It's always nice to get to join other podcasts and other platforms.
Alpha: Yes, you actually found me and interviewed me first on your podcast.
Koen: And it was by far the most listened-to episode of last year. We went sort of viral on LinkedIn, and as much as a podcast can go viral, which is not too much, but you definitely hit a nerve with the water cycle piece, which was part of a much larger water cycle series we did. It was a lot of fun and it was a really nice conversation.
Alpha: Did you get started first in investing or the whole regenerative space?
Koen: Definitely the investing and entrepreneur side. I was always interested in business, and how business worked. I got very interested in renewable energy. I was definitely worried about the effects of climate change and climate weirding. I was always interested in food, but not necessarily from a solution perspective, more like, if we eat a bit better, and we pick our groceries slightly differently, then we'll be fine. But I never knew of the potential of the food sector to be part of the solution until I stumbled upon holistic grazing and discovered the potential of soil and soil carbon 13 years ago. Until then, I never paid any attention to soil.
Alpha: And you started off working at an investment group Toniic, is that right?
Koen: Yeah, 10 years ago, I joined Toniic, which is a group of active impact investors. They are all family offices, high net wealth individuals, and a number of foundations. They are making investments according to their values - meaning they would like to sleep at night while knowing how their money is managed. It is surprisingly difficult to invest with values. About 10 years ago I joined them, not as a member but as a staff member, because I definitely don't have the wealth to be a member of Toniic. I saw a lot of interest mostly in the energy transition, not so much in food and agriculture.
Food and agriculture is such an important sector in terms of the transition and what is needed. Not only in terms of emissions, but also all the other goals we want to achieve. But back then I saw little activity. And that was surprising because I had started to see fund managers and other people talking about regenerative agriculture and food. But I didn't really see any investor action there, which led to me start recording conversations with people about putting money to work, which led to the birth of my podcast.
Alpha: Can you explain what's the difference between investing and impact investing?
Koen: Yes, sure. I mean, all investing is impact investing. The issue is that you most likely have a negative impact. Traditional investment world looks at risk and return. You only look at the bottom line, and you try to make an estimate of the risk, which is of course super difficult.
People started to realize that a lot of their investments, which happens if you have a bank account or a pension fund etc, at work somewhere, it's probably doing things you're not really happy about. It might be funding an oil pipeline, or a weapon factory. And if you don't want that, you have to start screening, you have to start saying no to certain things, you have to actively de-list some things, like, okay, I don't want to be part of the fossil fuel economy, I don't want to be part of certain agriculture companies etc.
Alpha: You have a background in storytelling too. Could you tell a story or two about an impact investor, and how they came to be doing this?
Koen: I know people that come from, let's say an entrepreneurial family, maybe their great-grandfather or grandmother started a company, maybe that company was sold at some point or they started diversifying, meaning investing in real estate etc. These people grew up in wealth, knowing that they would steward that wealth at some point. They have a lot of pressure on their shoulders to not mess up, to not make any bad investments and yet also to invest with their values.
Some just don't want anything to do with that life, and they go to work somewhere else completely outside the family company, because they don't want that pressure of stewarding the wealth. Some really embrace it and start wrestling with the beast, to start divesting from things they're not happy about.
There is also another sort of category. These are people with first generation wealth, people who in their lifetime really quickly became rich. They maybe had an awakening moment of : I want to have a positive impact in this world. A big lever to do that is the money they manage, or the money people manage for them. How do they start getting out of stuff they're not happy about, and instead put money into regeneration, into renewable energy, into education, into places where they can have a positive impact? It is a super difficult journey because the financial sector usually optimizes for one thing and one thing only. And that's the financial return.
Alpha: Can you explain who is looking for these impact investors?
Koen: It could be farmers that have reached a certain scale, and want outside capital to help and/or to grow faster. Then there are funds - impact investing funds, pension funds etc that collect investments from investors. Bundled it could be 50 million, 100 million or way way more. They make investments in technology companies, maybe farmland, maybe other places. The returns will come back to the fund if they did their job well.
There are also some regenerative brands coming up now, it could be technology companies that are working and measuring, or technology for fencing and grazing, that look for investors.
We, in the regenerative space, should learn more about money as a tool and use it, because there's a lot of money out there, wanting to do good. I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm not saying it's easy to get to, but we can use it, we can see it as a tool, just as we see water and fire as tools. Many things are a tool for great destruction, and also for great creation.
I think we need to learn how to at least talk about it, how to handle it, because the extractive side of things is really good at money, using money as a tool, and we're just not as good yet, and we miss out. There's a lot of money out there that should be doing more interesting things e.g with the soil.
Alpha: When you started your podcast, who were some of the people you interviewed at first?
Koen: The founders of Sustainable Land Management, which is a fund/funds that invests in organic in the US, or grazing in Australia. We interviewed Land Life Company, which was doing a lot of reforestation projects. We interviewed a wine company in Italy. It was very sporadic and not very structured at the beginning, which is seven and seven half years ago; it was whoever we thought was interesting and could get in front of our mic.
Alpha: With land funds and reforestation funds, are they investing in individual farms and individual pieces of land, or did they try to more systematically invest?
Koen: Until now, mainly what they do is partner with successful regenerative farmers. Let's say the land of the neighbors comes up for sale. What some of the successful land funds are doing, because usually land is very expensive, and most farmers don't have the resources to buy their neighbor’s. These funds step in to buy the land and then have some kind of agreement with the farmer to manage it, and operate it for/with them. Then they share the profit or the farmer pays a fixed rent/lease etc.
I think it's absolutely fundamental we should think beyond a piece of land, even if it's a massive farm. We should start thinking at a watershed scale level and what does that mean for investing. I have not seen anybody doing that.
Alpha: Investing at the farm level is good for the water because richer soil absorbs more water, and trees help with the water cycle. But, if we're thinking of the watershed that's a very interesting question, because then you are looking at how the waters from many pieces of land are feeding into the rivers, how the rivers overflow, and how the aquifers fill up.
Koen: Yeah, because if you think from an investor perspective, you don't want to invest in a farm where all the neighbors are, let's say, not focusing on soil health, because it makes your investment more risky. If you could invest in a region or an area or a watershed that is progressing and regenerating as a whole, it just makes so much more sense for your individual investment as well.
So the question is how do you do that, because you cannot buy a whole watershed, or I hope you can't because that would mean concentration of wealth and ownership, but how do you enable a whole watershed with funding or investment is a huge question. I don't have an answer just to be clear. I would love people if they have an answer to get in touch because I want to interview them. How do you restore the water cycle with funding? How do you help farms to regenerate faster - it’s an investment question and it's a practical question. We can finance solar panels, because we've calculated exactly what they do. There's a whole industry around financing these things. I think we have to start thinking in those terms if we want to finance trees at a large scale, if we want to finance regenerative farming at a large scale.
Alpha: You might want the people in a region to self organize first, maybe for the farmers to form a collective, maybe in conjunction with the town. Then approach impact investors.
Koen: Absolutely, because then you're much stronger. An individual farmer, he or she is going to be a very difficult investment one on one, but if it's a collective or a group, the risk gets lower because the risk is shared among people. When the size gets bigger it is good, because every investment has lots of costs for research and to do due diligence. The costs are pretty much the same if you do a 1 million, 10 million or 100 million investment. You get access to whole different sizes of investors and investments. It is interestingly that it is almost easier to raise 100 million sometimes than one million, which sounds completely crazy if you think about it.
Alpha: In India there's something called the Water Cup where different villages compete to see who can best capture the water in the monsoon season and save it for the dry season. They reforest the areas, which has then sometimes helped bring back rain. It’s an investment because they have a prize for the villages. So at that level, you can invest in possibly bringing back rain, if you have a region that's large enough.
Koen: I know this example and it almost sounds like magic, so I think what we need to do is repeat that story or those stories as many times as possible, just to get it into the ears of people, that we can bring back rain, just the simple concept that you can restore water cycles to an extent, that rain comes again regularly and abundantly, and not too much. That's knowledge that we know, we've seen those examples, or we might have talked to the people that visited those places. But if you're in a financial center in London, or in Delhi, or in Hong Kong, this may sound complete voodoo to you, it doesn't sound like it's possible to bring back the rain. We have to repeat repeat in all different ways, through great storytelling videos and podcasts, through case studies to show people this is possible. We have to make sure that people with control over wealth, at least know that we can bring back rain and rivers, because if we don't know that we just delete that proposal. There's a role there to play for everyone to keep repeating that this is possible at scale, because most people I meet have no idea.
Alpha: I started out in the permaculture eco-restoration space where it’s a little more common to know about the small water cycle, and the idea that the forest evapotranspiration adds to the ocean moisture to create rain. Then I got interested in the science of it and explored what the atmospheric scientists and hydrologists were saying. I realized there were many scientists working on this. They called the small water cycle something different, they called it precipitation recycling. They were studying how forests and soil affect rain. There's lots of papers published on this. I just wrote an article about Rong Fu, a UCLA atmospheric scientists who was studying how the forest causes the onset of the rainy season to happen earlier in the Amazon, and in the Congo rainforests. Other atmospheric scientists studying precipitation recycling are Francina Dominguez, Millan Millan, Anastasia Makarieva (those three I interviewed in podcasts), and also Diego Miralles, Antonio Nobre, Eneas Salati, Paul Dirmeyer, Adam Schlosser, Kaye Brubaker, Hubert Savenije, Ruud Van der Ent, Roni Avissar, Nobelist Syukuro Manabe, Axel Kleidon, Martin Claussen, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Jules Charney, and many more.
The climate scientists who are working on this often don’t realize there are eco and regenerative agriculture people interested in the topic of the small water cycle, and vice versa. The two camps need to talk with each other. And they need to work with marketers to spread this story.
Koen: That's why it's so important what you're doing. Like, how do you first of all find all those papers, then read the papers, because it's not an easy feat, and then start translating or retelling the story in a much more accessible way. This is not common knowledge at all. This is what we need before we can get major banks to finance it. It’s like solar 30 years ago, which was also just a space technology, and not bankable at all. There were just weird hippies putting it on their houses more or less. Now it's a sector, with issues, but also with an amazing track record. It’s bankable, it's investable, and we got there because of a lot of in-between steps and a lot of work keeping track of things. I would urge anybody if you're working on the watershed level, please do good base-lining, and record as many data points as you can possibly imagine, because somebody's going to ask it for it.
Okay, let's go back five or 10 years. We can learn from solar, we can learn from renewables. How do you make this investable? How do you make billions literally flow into the space to restore at scale? What are the incentives and what are the dangers? How do we prevent a lot of farmland turning into solar panels which is now an issue? How do we make sure the incentives are right.
We could get a nice 4-6% return with regeneration. Those returns might be possible. Then we unlock a lot of interest. But it's step by step. It’s first getting the narrative out there, because that narrative is just not there in any major city, decision making place, or with politicians. Have you ever heard any of them talk about small water cycle? I did not yet. I hope to find somebody soon.
Alpha: Water security is such a big issue in so many places. It's maybe the big issue in some places. Our food systems depend so much on the rain.
Koen: Yeah we really need the rain. We can have water rights, but what if the water isn't there? For some agricultural regions it's literally about survival.
Alpha: Soil feels like it suddenly exploded into the consciousness in the last decade and a half. There's some lessons that can be learned from the soil movement, for the regenerative water movement. Can you talk about what's happened in the soil sector, and who's investing in the soil movement?
Koen: It's fascinating, because, 13 years ago I started following grazing first, and then went down the rabbit hole of soil. If you talked to investors then, and mentioned soil, they weren't really interested, to say the least. That has really changed over the last few years, I would say. What led to that, I think, is that very smart people started to connect a lot of dots and saw that many things, like inequality and health, ended up connecting to soil. Floods, and climate change, many of these threats, if you follow them deep enough, get to soil. Many people have come through the journey. Movies definitely help, like Kiss the ground, Common ground, and Biggest little farm. And the whole food space became more relevant.
What can we take from the soil movement for the water cycle movement? Documentaries definitely. I've seen examples in Brazil, where friends of ours actually, wrote the story lines for some big telenovelas, reaching hundreds of millions of people, where the story lines is about sustainability, planting water, and agroforestry. Done in a very dramatic way of course, because it is a telenovela. Those are strategies to reach people outside our bubble.
We need to be lucky to catch a wave that’s rising. At the moment there are fires, floods, droughts and people start searching for it. I think one of the reasons our conversation went semi-viral last summer was because at that moment Europe was on fire.
The water cycle podcast series we did last year, which were 10 episodes, it’s the one we get by far the most comments about from people. This series pushed me down a rabbit hole and I'm still trying to climb out of it. We definitely want to repeat that because there are so many other stories to tell.
Alpha: Kiss the ground was a beautiful movie about the importance of soil. Now they give grants to people who improve their soil. Kiss the ground got extra money from restaurants and then that extra money they could invest in farms to improve their soil quality. The restaurants would buy their food from those farms.
Koen: I think another model like that is Zero Footprint started by Anthony Myint. They add a small fee to restaurants and use that money to to invest in compost on the farms, that is actually supplied from the restaurants. They are now moving to make that much more systemic and on a much larger scale. We just released an interview with him.
Alpha: Maybe there's a similar thing you could do for water. Add a little charge on the restaurant bill if you want to improve the watershed in that area where the farm is producing food.
Koen: That could also reduce potential flooding risk for your house.
Alpha: You interviewed Tim Coates about flood insurance.
Koen: He was one of the people that got bitten by the water cycle bug as well. When we restore soil at scale we reduce the risk of flooding downstream. He said we're going to reduce your risk of flooding by working with farmers in the watershed. The crucial piece is to restore their soils so they can absorb a lot more water. He said that's the key, don't talk about nutrients yet, don't talk about climate, don't talk about carbon, all of that is nice, but its about benefits. He said if we can prove that we can reduce the floods, we can actually finance a lot of regeneration.
Alpha: So who puts up the money to do that work?
Koen: It depends. It could be the insurance companies. You need to look at who's getting hurt and who's picking up the bill and then make a case to them that the bill could be lower if they invest in prevention. For example, data centers, where if the distribution centers are flooded, you can't work for a week.
Look where's the pain, where can you reduce that, and if you take a small percentage of that reduction and you can finance regeneration, then off you go. Of course it's more complicated than that, you need measurement, maybe a few parties to be involved. Maybe it's local governments, as well, that have to pay out.
Alpha: Going back to your story of your podcast, how did it blossom into something bigger?
Koen: I wish I had a plan or a grand explanation for that but we just kept going. After a few years, we made the decision to structure it more, and started doing it every month, then twice a month, then every week, and it became a small media company. But before it was just hanging out with interesting people doing interesting things, and trying to share that story with people that have resources to make them go faster, and make as many introductions between people with resources, people looking for resources to invest, and people with knowledge. We're now at 300 episodes and I could never have imagined doing that.
Alpha: What impact do you think your podcast has had on the whole regnerative ag and food space?
Koen: We get quite a few emails of people that are using us, the podcast to get up to speed, to see what's happening, to see where there are big blind spots e.g. nobody's working on XYZ or water cycles. We help with the general knowledge, with sharing in the space, and to speed up connections.
Alpha: Media and journalism is an important part of the whole regenerative ag and food movement. That also needs to be funded. How did you get your podcast funded?
Koen: I mean, we're very lucky. In terms of business model, we didn't have one for a while, to be honest. We just made them on the side. I was editing them myself the first 40 episodes. And which is horribly painful. I don't know how you like listening to your own voice. I don't. It's not interesting to me at all. And then we hired a freelance editor and we started to professionalize a bit and we opened a Patreon account first, and then Gumroad. Basically, we allow people to support us monthly or yearly. We can send an invoice. We are perfect for companies where we can expense it as literature or as research. We're super lucky with a big group of people supporting us monthly or yearly, which covers some of our time, mostly editing, hosting, all the fixed costs we have of running it.
Then we have a few foundations or family offices, which are investment funds of a family, that basically support a specific series e.g. the Water Cycles series was supported by the Nest family office in Belgium. They don't have any say in what we interview or not, but they can get their name there if they want to. That's another nice income stream. We do two series, three series per year, maybe. Let's say we do about 75 episodes and then maybe 20 or 30 are supported this way.
Then we have a video course where we summarize what we've learned over the last 250 episodes when we made that course. Now we are at 300 episosdes. Let's say we summarize in 80 minutes, pretty much in video, what we've learned, what are the main topics and themes and frameworks, what we think is important, which is of course biased and personal, but we try to help people that are new to this space, to quickly get up to speed and not have to listen to 300 episodes, or read all the reports and books and things. That course is pay what you think it's worth, an idea inspired by Charles Eisenstein. And people do pay, even though you can put zero, and please put zero if you don't have the means, this is not meant to make money or to extract money, but if you have the means and you learned a lot from it, then apparently, or not apparently, people do pay for that. And that's another nice income stream.
So if you put those three together - monthly supporters, sometimes supported series and a video course - that gets you to a small media company size.
Alpha: And so when you got that money coming in, you were able to hire more people and grow more and do more episodes?
Koen: Yeah. We've done a series actually with another voice, Emma Chow. And so we're trying to expand how to make it beyond me asking the questions, how to do more on video. We did a few filmed interviews on the land with farmers, which is way more costly, but also very interesting. The money allows us to experiment and to do more, there's so many stories to tell. I'm constantly feeling I am running behind if I look at the production list of conversations we want to record.
Alpha: Let's say you're a regenerative farmer, and you needed some investment money for your farm, who should you go see?
Koen: Maybe Sustainable Land Management. They would buy, or they might help buy land next door to expand. Could be Mad Agriculture in the US, it really depends. It could be some banks that provide flexible capital. We just interviewed Agroforestry Partners. If you want to transition to agroforestry, they can provide the financing for that.
Alpha: I think its good to have transition finance model because your farm may lose money for a while while you're transitioning to agroforestry.
Koen: Yeah, if a chestnut takes six, seven years and then stays there for 50, that shouldn't be scary, that should just be a finance question. Okay, what do you need to not have an income for five or six years if that's the case? If you structure it like that, okay, that's something you can calculate. Just as we see with solar panels, they cost a lot of operational cost to install, but then they last for 30, 40, 50 years.
Alpha: Thank you very much, I really appreciate you coming on this podcast.
Koen: Thank you so much for the amazing work, I deeply enjoyed the conversation and also the Substack articles that you write.
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Here are the lists of soil building funds, Investing in regenerative agriculture and food made. Here and here
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Investing in water and regenerative agriculture : Koen van Seijen