Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

How do we change the entire agriculture and food system? Insurance. Specifically, crop insurance. Farmers who practise regenerative agriculture — cover crops, no-till, crop rotation — are less risky to insure. The problem is that the current US federal crop insurance system doesn’t recognise those practices. It’s backwards-looking by design, which means farmers can’t get insured for the practices that would reduce their risk, and without insurance, they can’t get their operating loans. The sy...

Nicole Masters is a regen trainer and coach who has worked around the world with some of the most advanced regenerative farmers and agronomists. She’s the founder of Integrity Soils and The Learning Field, the author of For the Love of Soil, and is now writing her next book, Keystone. “Humans are a plague.” It’s a line you hear often in climate and biodiversity circles, and given the damage we've done as a species, it’s hard to refute. Nicole has seen the other side: humans as a positive keys...

Dave Oates is a seventh-generation farmer, on land in Cornwall his family has farmed for more than 250 years. When he first went to Groundswell five years ago, he thought the farm was 20 years behind. He left thinking it was 20 years ahead: they had been farming regeneratively all along, and now payment schemes, grant funding and technology are coming around to meet the way they already farm. In this episode, we talk about what seven generations of farming teach about making it last. His rule...

Gonçalo Pereira Miguel is 24 years old and the first person in three generations of his family to return to their 700-hectare Montado farm in Portugal’s Alentejo. The farm had been degraded by decades of continuous grazing, treated as an inheritance rather than a business. In 2023, a severe drought made the damage impossible to ignore. Two years after introducing 85 cows and a precision rotational grazing system, the results are striking: hay costs that once consumed half of a farm’s operatin...

Peter Herz spent his career as a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley deep tech: chips, semiconductors, data storage. Then a doctor's visit in 2010 changed everything. Today he is co-founder and general partner of 1st Course Capital, one of the best-performing food funds you've probably never heard of. So what does a former chip designer invest in? Alt proteins, vertical farms, AI farm software? Not quite. The portfolio is half tech, half food brands, with no engineered foods. And the better...