Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features 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.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
393 Simon Kraemer - The 'We’ll starve without fertilizer' crowd forgot to check the fields
How do we feed the world? It’s all nice and cute this regenerative agriculture and food stuff, but how do we actually feed the world? By 2050, we’ll need to produce double the amount of food. This is a question you, like me, get a lot, we bet, from banks, pension funds, large institutional players, investors in general, entrepreneurs, and eco-modernists.
Our go-to answer was always: go to the most pioneering farmers and see what they can produce. But the counterargument was always: “Show me the research!". Now we have the research.
In this Walking the Land episode, recorded straight from one of the most advanced farms in Europe, we talk to Simon, Kraemer, executive director of the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA) and the lead author of a revolutionary study where they looked at 78 of the most pioneering farms in Europe and compared them to their conventional neighbours. They analyse everything from fertiliser use, finances, and pesticides to the holiest of grails: photosynthesis. And guess what? Regenerative outperformed conventional in almost everything. Similar or higher yields, more than 75% reduction in NPKs, significantly reduced chemical use and, best of all, over the seven years they compared them, the regenerative farms kept getting better and better.
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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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How do we feed the world? It's all nice and cute, this region stuff, but how do we actually feed the world? By 2050, we need to double the amount of food. I bet you, like me, get this question a lot. From banks, pension funds, large institutional players, investors in general, entrepreneurs, eco-modernists, engineers, etc. My go-to answer was always go to the most pioneering farmers and see what they can produce. But the counter-argument was always, show me the research. Now we have the research. Today, a walk in the land episode where we talk to the lead author of this revolutionary piece of research, where they looked at 78 of the most pioneering farms in Europe and compared them to their conventional neighbors. Everything about fertilizer use, finance, pesticides, and the holiest of grails, photosynthesis. And guess what? They outperformed them in almost everything. Similar or higher yields, 75% reduction in MPKs, significantly reduced chemical use, and the best thing? Over the seven years they compared the region ones, they got better. Imagine 15 years. Imagine if you apply all this knowledge to new farms and new fields. There is an actual S-curve, an exponential growth in region when you look at photosynthesis on region farms. But how did this study land in the agri-food world in Europe? With large food companies and super importantly with policymakers in Brussels, who decide about the biggest pot of subsidies in ag. I think the CAP, the Common Agriculture Policy, is about 400 billion every five years. We also talk about why it has been so difficult to conduct this kind of research. What has been flawed in almost every other agriculture productivity focused research, and of course, what's next. This is only the beginning, and the next phase has become even more exciting. More granular satellite data, for instance, looking at temperature if the fields at 3 p.m. instead of 10am, so you can really see the huge difference in permanent living ground cover. The issue here is the 10am satellite is free and the 3 p.m. one costs money. Looking specifically at difficult years, comparing certain data not at a national but at a regional level, and this is potentially a big one. Comparing the health of leading region farming families to their neighboring families. This and so much more in this special Walking Land episode. Enjoy! This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food Podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities, and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. I would say the golden hour we are walking through on a magnificent farm. This is a walking the land episode, so welcome to that. You're gonna hear some background noises, some dogs, some cats, some chickens, some donkeys, maybe, some people. And we're here with a farmer, but wears also quite a few other hats which we're gonna explore here. And we're not walking your land, we're somewhere else, but we I really wanted to record this episode in person because you're the lead author, or one of the authors, and one of the main researchers of an absolute fascinating report that came out in June this year, 2025. Welcome, Simon, and welcome to a Walking the Land episode.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much for having me, Cohen, and thank you so much for doing the amazing work with your family to bringing these Walking the Land episodes and your whole podcast to life.
SPEAKER_01:They might interrupt at some point as they are also walking the land, but in Versus home. And just a bit of background. What brings you? We always like to ask this question, spending most of your waking hours thinking about this case the European but also beyond food system. Like what was what brought you there? Did you grow up on a farm? Did you always loved uh, I don't know, nutrient-dense food? What's what was your journey towards the food system?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I grew up in the food system in the sense that my dad is a learned chef and my mom is a learned butcher, and then they met studying food technology, and my dad had a career in the small and medium-sized food industry in Germany, and then on the dinner tables the topic was yeah, either food safety packaging, surviving against the big retailers, uh, developing new supply chains, this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Was agriculture ever like the growing of the food? Because many chefs, of course, have a deep understanding, but surprisingly, also many don't of where the food actually comes from. Like it stops at the guy or girl showing up from the wholesale truck, bringing the fresh produce. Oh, yeah, it's great flavor. And then that's it. Like, was that like provenance as well, a conversation at the table?
SPEAKER_00:That developed. So the brother of my grandma is the last farmer in the family. He was a dairy farmer and he stopped in the 90s when German farmers had to start doing accounting, basically. And then it wasn't until 2010. So my dad works in a beef business that's maybe the biggest grass-fed beef importer to Germany. He also grew a farmer program in 2014, and then yeah, since those days, also because of the whole anti-livestock and cow debate and so forth, we really got into, and then sometime in 2016 or something, we got to look. Walter Jean, then it exploded.
SPEAKER_01:Ah, but it's maybe that's immediately a deep dive into the water cycle stuff. Yes. Another okay, and grass-fed, of course, has many faces, but it's very interesting as well. And so for you professionally, then, okay, kitchen table is one thing, but then choosing what to spend your significant hours during the working day on is a whole different one. Like, how did that lead you to where you are now?
SPEAKER_00:I studied international business management and economics in my bachelor and had really no connection. Actually, I was a vegan who fully fell into the trap of some arguments that wandering around.
SPEAKER_01:Which I think if you're we're doing a full animal series now and you mention it quite strongly as well in or significantly in the report, it's if you're far away from the farming reality, it's a very normal way or a very logical way to start thinking, okay, animal protein by definition is or not by definition, it's an issue, so fixing it is taking it out and removing that fully from the equation.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so with Ciao and with Walter gene, it was luckily yeah, the Walter cycle, but Walter gene is uh to my understanding was also one of the first to properly explain hydroxic oxidation and how methane in fully grass-fed and then of course holistically grazed pestra systems is actually not an issue. And not an issue at all between of ethanol genesis of the soil, they lay down when they do leafing, etc.
SPEAKER_01:And uh so that when that exploded, were you vegan at the time, like at the kitchen table, or did that lead to a lot of interesting conversations?
SPEAKER_00:No, I I think there was a time when my dad had lost the greatest hope. I was living also in the I was studying in the United States, I had a sports scholarship, so I was in different spheres, let's say. What kind of sport? Soccer. Okay. So but then I had yeah, I I did I traveled Panamericana and went basically to all kinds of farms, from the infinite grain farms of Saskatchewan and Canada, down to the slaughterhouses of Buenos Aires, small older farmers in Chiapas in between and so forth. And then I studied agroeconomics or political agroeconomics in.
SPEAKER_01:And then he got help again. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And then where did, let's say, the European food system come into play?
SPEAKER_00:I started in food industry consulting, so basically developing sustainability departments from packaging to supply chain programs. We also had failures and learnings, for example, setting up the kind of supply chain program, carbon sequestration, insetting stuff with farmers in eastern Germany, where we, for example, brought the completely non-context specific agronomists who were not fitting the farm types of those farmers and all this kinds of stuff. And at the same time, I started working for NAVU, which is a German nature conservation organization, and they developed their soil health lobbying, which actually in these days, I think next week or the week after is the vote in the European Parliament, the ultimate vote on the soil monitoring.
SPEAKER_01:And so that started fooling you. I think you wrote a report or did quite a bit of research on profitability and transition in the specific German context as well, which I think those slides get quoted quite a bit around. Like where did the profitability or let's say the financial angle come in, or that was logical because you studied international trade and the financial language is second nature there?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we wrote with the Boston Consulting Group a big study, but this was still a study of a different nature, so a standard modeling study of regenerative agriculture diffusion or adoption on the conventional farmers of Germany and the impacts of that. And I think the profitability was always this yeah, political and economic realism with which I grew up, and also, of course, the economics departments in which I studied, or international business in the US, there's not much else than profit basically.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And then you said that's quite a traditional, was still quite a traditional study. When did, let's say, the framework or the idea or the realization of the study with Ayata, European Alliance for Gender Agriculture, when did that surface? Like we should really do a completely new way or a new way or next frontier of studying real farms, first of all, and larger farm or larger groups of farms and pioneering farms, because they're usually left out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that is comes for that study actually with the Boston Consulting Group. We got attacked, and me personally too very heavily, for example, of the owner of the largest organic supermarket chain in Germany.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:And then, of course, not only what was the attack? Yeah, but attacks from two sides. And I think that's the attacks that the region movement in general was facing and which are now slowly fading out, but I think we'll get that. So from the organic side, it's mainly because they are scared that consumers could get an understanding that the organic certification is not the epitome of farming in syntropy with nature. And on the other hand, the conventional agricultural establishment from research science and institute and so forth, where we in Germany see that, for example, in our capacity of reducing mechanical soil disturbance in arable farming as a very simple thing, we are superpath-dependent because we have heavy lobbying because we have, for one, big machinery producers like KLAS, like Lemken, like Amazona. And then we have, of course, our Bayer and BISF friends.
SPEAKER_01:And they input providers and the input, let's say, distributors in terms of machines would rather not.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they try everything, and tried everything to make everyone believe that if we would reduce pesticides or if we would reduce till, we will have to compromise on yields. So it's a trade-off which we lose. And that was really the motivation to do the study from one perspective, because as it's walking the land of many farms, we have been already in a capacity to achieve much better results, our most pioneering farmers, than the scientific and political establishment would even believe is possible in 2040.
SPEAKER_01:But nobody is studying them, or very few, because they're the outliers and there must be something else magical going on, or I don't know where they get their fertilization from, or something else, and there couldn't be a way that's possibly possible to replicate it in other places. There's an assumption there that's so strong that the trade-off is really interesting, like the pie is fixed, and unless you add more stuff, you're not gonna grow more food, or you're not gonna there's a really interesting scarcity piece there, of course, because said interest. And so even they attacked the Boston Consultant Group research also on that, because you showed things, and that even on a modeling research, not even looking at the outliers, not even looking at the absolute pioneers, just looking at basic data and the organic space. Okay, we understand why that's happening. So they also attacked that one, and you were triggered like, oh, is this there's something here, or what did that lead to?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, first of all, that led to that we were growing ARA, which is capacity which enabled us to do the research. And on the other hand, also I think as a regenerative movement, we have in that sense failed so far a little bit, because almost the most systematic and widespread analysis of these achievements were done by the corporates publishing about their region programs, which are far of what we can do, because it's usually looking at the farmers who are paid to do it, not at the innovators who are creating those innovations. And then another thing where I'm still very much troubled, and I hope we get there in the next phase of the study, but that depends also on our financial resources, most of all.
SPEAKER_01:So if anybody's listening, just I'm really good at asking money for others. Uh, fund studies like this, get involved, ARA, get involved, get in touch with us, we'll put you in touch because this is such a I can't imagine how many people I sent this study to you with all its limitations, with all its, but how many people still come in big organizations and basically throw you the bone of, but how are we gonna feed the world? And there's a study, looked at real farms, real productivity numbers, and we're not gonna starve, don't worry. And we'll be fine. You can reduce 75-76% fertilizer on across the board, of course, exceptions, etc. Pesticide use enormously reduced. You can go to zero if you want to, and nothing dramatic will happen except a lot of good things. Like just, and that's but we need more of those because you cannot have one stick to hit this one. I need more sticks. So if anybody is in a position, these are the things to to put some money behind because I think the amount needed to do these studies is ridiculously low compared to the potential impact of it. Anyway, depends on the funding next phase. Let's this is what I would get up. I'll get off my funds too.
SPEAKER_00:Because just we are now trying to get more money because we didn't have a name before, so we did it on the list. We did this study on 125,000 euros. If you look how much money we are pouring into horizon studies to produce reports which are still moving, and then it's 14 million or whatever. So it's really it's just taking the innovation, it's also humbling again because it sees that the innovation is growing from the farmers, and now we can take it to the other spaces of policy and science because it's the same innovation. It's going to looking at the results and not being prescriptive about the complexity. Like in the what I wanted to say too, we have the LCA thing is a standard example. On the cows, we still the white oak pastures quantity studies the closest we've come to a newer doing of LCA to show in the legitimate ways of looking at data that cows can actually be nature positive in a system, which is still very limited.
SPEAKER_01:Because there's only half I remember with the lead scientist talking about it, and I'm gonna butcher quote upon unintended that piece because it only looks at half. I don't think it looks at soil carbon. It doesn't look like it's very limited, the LCA piece, even in the white oak study. Exactly, we can now do so much better. LCA life cycle assessments. I will put the link below if I remember the name. I'll put the link below of that that conversation, which was so interesting because she she did most of those, and we talked about limitations and the power of it, and why life cycle assessments are not the tool to use in these cases, and all of those. But every time we I see this world-in-data graph where beef is like the one that goes all the way to the right, and of course, we should all eat more beans and lentils, but that data is not real, like it's been garbage for a long time, it's not in field. Anyway, we're now getting to a new phase of where we can do those studies much better and differently based on real examples and real measurement. I think some of the roots are deep. Scientific studies had the flux towers, etc., they could actually sense the methane, they could like way more in-field because most of this stuff is model and or within a K4 installation, which for all the reasons we know is not the right thing to study. Okay, so you with this when it started to trigger with Ayata you were building, when did it dawn? Like, we can do a study here, actually, pan-European, different countries, different farms, that has a size and significance and a weight behind it that it could mean something instead of a nice white paper or a nice case study, which we have and we need more of. Like, when did you think, oh, this is a study?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think relatively fast because exactly our founding moment was also the founding moment of our white paper writing. So, okay, we had a white paper, and then everyone knew that kind of we wanted to produce that data. And then a part of just showing maybe I can share three main objectives that we had, which one was exactly as we discussed until now, we needed to show that we are already empirically better than they believe we can be in 2040, which is this whole in Europe, the Green Deal discussion, but the discussion is everywhere. And then the second part is, and that's getting a little bit technical, our another part of this where we as a region movement have not been performing so well, is in translating all this innovation which so far we have theoretically put down, if that's the Regrarian's Handbook or Holistic Management or Green Bridge in Germany, books and so forth. But we have never done the work. We are trying to translate that into the language of conventional farmers so we can inoculate them and help them to get on the journey. We haven't done that for our public servants. And so our public servants that work on economics and agriculture and food system, they work in the mindset of total factor productivity, which is their economic term to assess how efficiently and effectively the agriculture the farm, the region, or the nation or the continent is using mainly money to produce food. As an agricultural food, kilocalories, but mainly more money. And that is basically coordinated by the OECD. And that is just like the ACA. It's completely off guards of what we know today. It's like they don't see even the Potsdam Institute for Climate. If you look with your regenerative mind into what they are publishing, how our yields will be impacted by climate change by 2050, like you will think, come on, guys, you have never smelled yeah, they haven't smelled the region movement or anything of that. So we wanted to translate that at the same time. We also wanted to produce something that's at least so we had many meetings, for example, Koen de Koenig from the OECD is a great guy. We had many meetings with them, and we basically used two models in Europe for agriculture, and then the USDA and the US has a similar model, and actually, Chinese and stuff, they have then in the end taken up a lot of that stuff, which is normal neoclassical economics. And we wanted to produce something that could also be understood by them as yes, they are past-dependent on where they're coming from, like a conventional farmer. So we need to pitch the innovation in a way that they can at least think with us.
SPEAKER_01:Because otherwise you lose them at the first page and it will never it will never influence the minds of the policymakers and the people because it will just be too far off or too weird or too out there or too different and too caught.
SPEAKER_00:And they also just we can be humble in the way they are public servants, they sit in the car. If we don't, and it's painful work in the sense, because trying to explain to them is you need patience and patience. And the third objective was specific to here in Europe, but also we hope can grow wider, is at the same time we want to show how we can look at strategic proxy indicators. Because we as an advocacy organization at ERA at the heart of our understanding is that we want to grow something what we can understand as regenerating policy, which is a policy like today, pedagogy, where we don't prescribe micromanagement, what you have to do, or we give you a list of what you can do and what we pay for what you do, but you are the champion of your context, and we pay for your performance in an abstract way. So how you get there is up to you. Exactly, and so that the biggest re-indigenization and biocultural diversity can sprout, actually, the more abstract indicators we are paying. And that is an argument where policymakers are out right away, like scientists too. They get so scared. And so we wanted to show at least to begin, and we will have to continue to do that. That what the every region farmer understands after 10 seconds, the holy grail is photosynthesis. Everything else is just something, maybe also soil cover.
SPEAKER_01:Every farmer is a sunlight, is a sun energy operator.
SPEAKER_00:And we wanted to show that actually, yes, we can also look at every farm into everything to the milligram of what kind of pesticides you use and whatnot. But in the end, the correlation is very much good enough that actually, if the farmer is increasing context specifically, photosynthesis over time, by default, it's them who are reducing pesticides, reducing plowing, increasing biodiversity, etc.
SPEAKER_01:And so how has it landed since we're now talking autumn in the northern hemisphere 2025? It's been five, four or five months. Of course, summer months in in Europe are slow, not for farmers, but for policy, yes. How is the what did you expect and what did you not expect in terms of reception of this report? Have you been attacked personally? Or no. Are you disappointed by that? No. At least now McDonald's would come, right?
SPEAKER_00:No, actually, from that perspective, what I wouldn't have expected is a great resonance. Because, for example, on the regenerative agriculture summit in Amsterdam, which is a corporate event, but there were people coming up, like the chief agronomist of Barilla, the largest hard weed buyer in the world. And he comes up and says, Yeah, on page 18, you know what? I'm like, man, I don't know what's on page 18.
SPEAKER_01:Super readable, by the way, if you haven't read it, do right. But it's a dense thing, yeah. A lot of nice pictures. Some of this farm, actually. I recognize some Kaspar Dietrich shout-out because you made them. And okay, so people are reading it. Yeah, that's making the places where you're gonna be able to do it.
SPEAKER_00:That's also what I wouldn't have expected because, as you say, we did the executive summary, and then the whole thing has 80 pages, and who today reads 80 pages.
SPEAKER_01:Nice appendixes, which I read, yeah. I interesting.
SPEAKER_00:That's on the positive remarks. So I would say in the whole finance and private sector region world, it has by far outstripped my expectations. Then in the policy world, there I think it's we are now having the core messages which we can carry there. But they are I don't know if I would say under pol I didn't have expectations because I have spent too much time in that realm. But I think that could be better for sure, and but we also can get better in yeah, servicing again to the language. Um I can also say it was in the end, it was a huge struggle for us because we did it on very little resources. It was the first kind of publication of our organization. We wanted to have it as direct democratically farmer led by the unity and diversity of our different farmers. So we had meetings recurring on the methodology over here and stuff, but then in the end, also as it everything we do for the first time, it was of course in the end we agreed on a publishing date so we could do a proper publishing with the and that's something positive actually. So we got into serious the conventional agriculture journalism where we also before didn't really penetrate. So, for example, now I'm invited to present the report in on the largest conventional farmer gathering in Denmark in the beginning of in front of 3,000 conventional.
SPEAKER_01:And that's that's let's say if there's any country I learned over actually in June. I probably read it when I was in Denmark that has that is farming most of its land, it's Denmark. I think it holds the like 78% of the land is farmed. Like you don't find like of land based because very fertile soil, huge industry, and huge issues. I think it's mentioned specifically in the report in terms of it's always hauled up, just like the Netherlands, as the crown of productivity, etc., without forgetting the input costs are or the input in general and the issues with it's just the amount of calories in, calorie out is not very beneficial. And that in the sea around, and you that in the air quality, and that in yeah, basically no trees left. There's now a big push to restore some of that. But yeah, that's that wouldn't have happened a year ago, probably.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, and we're not gonna be right. Yeah, no, we also we did our regenerating Europe to a stop there. So I think Denmark is a great example of also like the Netherlands, exactly as you say, in standard total factor productivity in the old world of the Green Revolution, they were the most innovative, let's say. With all the externalities, and now again they are at the spare heading. Now, for example, the Danish that's why we did our first tour start there, because right now the Danish government holds the presidency of the European Council. And now, actually, just some people who I know was like the Danish government called a meeting in the council with the Commission specifically on regenerative agriculture. Wow. But this also we can say again that's now Denmark with its specific political leadership right now. But wants to show it's a whole movement.
SPEAKER_01:It's movement and it's movement. That five years ago, ten years ago would have been impossible. And even two years ago, probably. And so that's okay. And now we can talk more about report, but what's next? What is if there would be funding, what would you do more? Like where would you dream of taking the next phase? Because this is not a one-off, this is part of a much bigger lineage of work that needs to be done and show you. Like you have to hit these things multiple times from different angles with more data, et cetera, before anything moves. What would be next if you had a nice amount of resources?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we now planned our, we call it our research program. There was the first phase. We now planned the second phase, for which we already fundraised some of the core, and we have basically three aspects in that phase. One is continuing the hardcore agroeconomic ecological work where we want to, we had 78 farmers, we want to grow to 250. Also, one must say this whole report is a part of us doing the work of, but at the heart, it's also by the farmers themselves, because we had no money to remunerate them for the opportunity cost of giving us their data in the way we could process it. So all of those 78 farmers did it for the movement. We want to grow to 250, so we also want to grow some finances to remunerate the farmers. And then what we want to achieve is hitting back on the yield because we can actually, we would have already better figures than we showed. So we looked only at three years of full productivity analysis. We want to look at five, and we want to look at the specific stress years and hotspots, and show them then, of course, our yield difference even much better than just.
SPEAKER_01:Because what you did is you compared leading farms throughout Europe, the natural average, specific context as well, look like if it was an olive producer, a grain field, etc., to what it would have or what it produced, let's say, nationally. And of course, bringing in stress years makes that very interesting because that's where we would expect them to shine, let's say.
SPEAKER_00:And then we also, I mean, we we compared them nationally on agroeconomic data and pedoclimatically context specific on ecological data. What does that mean? We that means that all the satellite analysis we did for comparing photosynthesis, soil cover, and also uh surface temperature, which is another thing we want to improve because if you are really nerdy and go into the scientific discussion of the report, you will see that, for example, we would have much better results on the different surface temperatures of the pioneering farms versus the others and the evapotranspiration performance. But we had to work with the free satellites, which take in Europe the picture at 10 a.m. in the morning. So of course it's 10. So that is also expensive. We are talking with some providers if they can give us some pro bono or whatever, but that would be amazing. And then in general, of course, not only the performance in the climate stressed, I mean, we are climate stressed, but in the hardcore stuff, but also over time. Right now we show over time only the photosynthesis data that if you're a region freak like us, you take that as the almighty holy grail, but the others don't. So we want to show also how the yield resilience, the curves are basically splitting, which right now we haven't been able to show so well.
SPEAKER_01:And with 250, which is like 3x the amount of farms, also it gets much more robust and it's easier, more difficult for people to point at it and say, oh, it's only 78, and oh it's only Yeah, but also that is actually not so people point that out, but it's that's getting really in the scientific methodology part because what we do in all of the other studies. I wanted to go there. Yeah, what's the and then have another question? What do what is the main, let's say, feedback or negative, what would people point out? But let's go to the other studies because what I love in the report is that you show other studies that have been done that we sometimes refer to and how they are limited, let's say. Flawed is a too strong word, but what's what is so unique about this? If you had to speak about, let's say, the scientific studies have been done on food production potential, input, output, etc., and comparing that to this one, what are the main differences?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I would honestly say flawed is not too hard of a word because some of them are intentionally flawed, driven by a very specific special interest. But the main difference is the same difference as we have in region egg. We don't care so much about the specific practice anymore. We care about the results and the journey and the continuous improvement. And what the normal studies do is they collect literature analysis or field tests and then they compound them in some way and extrapolate them in some way.
SPEAKER_01:What if we would do this at national scale, regional scale, European scale, blah blah blah.
SPEAKER_00:But then also the problem of only 78 pharma is not so much of a problem because what are they doing actually there? We do a field trial here and we do three different trials. And we run them over three years where we change only one variable. That's how proper methodological positivity studied.
SPEAKER_01:You could accelerate the 78 easily to all over Europe. It's not an issue. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly, because here we cannot know anything. Let's say, okay, we do a cover crop, once we do it with one more species, one with two more species, one more, but all the other stuff we leave the same. So 20 centimeters of tillage, 100 kilograms of N, and a good round of whatever. First of all, no farmer would do it. Second of all, this is super context-specific. If we do the same field trial in Hungary or in Portugal, we have completely different outcomes. So that's the main audience. And then into that comes a selection bias, and we have endless arguments about that. For example, Agora Agra, which is a highly financed think tank, standard professors in Germany, producing, in my very humble opinion, life-negating shit. Because what do they do also? Okay, they what they do is we collect results from peer-reviewed studies, cluster them somehow, and then make some assumptions of their adoption over the next years. Well, there's an infinite amount of peer-reviewed studies, so they don't have they don't take into consideration in their report all the peer-reviewed stuff like Roots Ode, Carbon Cowboys, to name just a few, then the whole world of conservation agriculture, publications, and all the different routes of regenerating agricultures. And what do they take? The studies in which we are measuring some new nice inputs, which often than not are produced by some companies that want to get on a new business strategy to sell something. So that's the main core difference. What we did in comparison, we looked at the actual results of the farmers today and compared them to the neighbors.
SPEAKER_01:To actual other farmers neighbors. And that's is that first have you found because for sure you did a bit of a look around globally, like this kind of, or is it a thousand farms of Jonathan Lundgen? Does it get and the team now it's audacious, it's 1,300, I think. Looking at actual farms and comparing them. Has that been done beyond that?
SPEAKER_00:I would say I'm unfortunately still I'm much very much better in reading than farming. And I don't know. We tried to refer to, and I would gladly, if you have some, please point them out to me. I think what is difficult, and that's something we need to bring out or want to improve also in the second study, which second phase, which I think is more important even than many more farmers, is now we compare their economic. So let's say we have a grain farmer, now he has uh let's say 10 tons of wheat yield, and then we compared it to the publicly accessible data in Eurostat, which is at the national level. But we have actually regional level data, only it's not publicly available. So we are right now working on getting access to that data, which would make the comparison much more even much more meaningful.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because depending on the country, actually, every country, like it depends so much. So were you able to compare to the neighbor, or it's like a virtual neighbor based on Eurostar data?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so on the satellites we compare to the random same land use category neighbor, and then on the country we average, so let's say in our let's say we had five farmers in Germany that were growing rapeseed. Then we take their average yield and compare it to the Germany average yield, and then we ran a control test on mapping in what soil zones our pioneering farmer was in comparison to the standard distribution of soil zones. And that's actually an undernamed point because we know region pioneers usually start where it's a little bit harder. So we have the same yields, and you can look into the study we run that, they are on average much worse soiled than the average of the country.
SPEAKER_01:So we're not just gonna not starve, we're actually gonna have more food. That's what you're if we roll this out on better soils. And what surprised you the most in the data and in writing this report?
SPEAKER_00:Most, I think the last year of the photosynthesis curve. So year three. No, we look at I think seven years of of comparing the which is a good transition like period.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And you can see a lot of three interesting things in that curve, which I had no idea. I couldn't even think about expecting something in that sense. Which and also we don't we didn't take specific, we asked the farmers for that data. So in what year on that field did you start your journey? We actually asked them to contribute the fields where they had first started. So we look at 2018 until 2024. We have not run a complete analysis of how long on average this field was in the transition. That's also something we should improve in the second phase. But in 2018, the pioneering farmers, on average, context specifically, have 5% more whole year photosynthesis, which is quite a lot if you think of highly capitalized professionalized European agriculture. And then in 2024, we're already at 8% more. So that's a great development. Then there are two interesting years. I think it's 2020, where actually, so a part of getting better over time, how much photosynthesis the farmer has, context specifically, is still the good old standard farmer saying there was a good year, this was a bad year, because we had drought or we had frost or whatever. So that impacts, of course, how it's developing. And in the beginning, so 2020, I think it was, we had a year where the pioneers actually got worse than the year before, while the standard farmers were still okay. Or keeping them. So maybe a year in which, just by chance, a lot of the pioneers struggled in some form in their transition, would be my across the board, across geography. Yeah, would be just an induction. COVID was a mess. Because all the other years, they always develop in correlation. Of course, a little bit different, but generally, if it was a bad year, it was for everyone a bad year, worse year than before. But then now in the last year, whereas the conventional farmers go significantly worse in the year before, for the first time in all the data we have there. It's a decoupling. Exactly. And the pioneers go up. So in nerdy regen egg movement language, we could maybe say in the S-curve, it's the inflection point to the exponential growth. And of course, to my for the humanity, a super hopeful message because we are still those scientists writing in Nagoya, they are claiming no, with climate change, we don't even have a chance to put more carbon into our soils because it's all oxidating. We it's impossible. We still have stuff like this. But no, we can get better even as climate change is getting worse.
SPEAKER_01:And would it be possible in next phases to also look at how the farmers are improving in terms of you're looking at this one field or the field over time, the oldest one, let's say they've been practicing these practices. And could you look at a field that they've taken on recently and if it goes faster as they've learned? My assumption is like seven, eight years in, if they would do it differently, if they would do it again, start from zero, probably with all the lessons they know. If they would take on a new field, I'm thinking like Jurun Klompe, on different fields in different trend phases of transition, they now do things differently. They if they take on a new field, or if they a new field comes into a region transition, they apply everything they learned in one shot instead of that, would be an interesting comparison. Like, where are different cohorts of fields? Because I think, yeah, totally. Because then you can see the progression of the farmer and their knowledge and the sector as well, because the global knowledge increases. Okay. If I now go in, I think we had it with Marco Carbonara, Pulicaro farm in in Lazio, partly Lazio, partly Umbria, and I'm discussing if you take on a new field, yeah. Of course, I apply everything I know now compared to 7, 10, 25 years ago. I didn't know anything, or the agerty's in Australia. Every new field gets a gets the top uh approach because we apply what we know. And you probably would be able to see different cohorts almost within farms as well. Like, how fast does this S curve inflection rocket ship, whatever you want to call it? Rocket ship and photosynthesis are an interesting combo. Very interesting. So, second phase: more farmers and much more granular in terms of geography and comparison.
SPEAKER_00:We hope so. We have filed now with the European Commission on getting that data and so forth. So we will see if they are too scared or whatever. But there's two more other things. So that is like the basis of which we are already also sure. We don't have enough money yet for paying the farmers, but we'll be for sure able to produce a second phase in that sense. But then there's two more modules which we are fundraising for and we are hopefully getting, which is A is this LCA. So we wanna take 10 of the most pioneering livestock farmers and bring this LCA to life, which we talked about. We have also a nice LCA office that is looking into it.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, we're by the way, eating a fig if you hear any sounds. So we couldn't resist. And then okay, really focus on. I shouldn't speak when I eat, really focus on livestock.
SPEAKER_00:Or also we will even, I think, bring it home closer, so I assume it would just be the holy cow and CO2E efficiency for the very simple-minded, and then of course there's other benefits with water around. You mentioned the world data, it's the same with the water consumption of the cow where they look at all the rainfall on the grassland.
SPEAKER_01:So, yeah, interesting. And because you mentioned specifically also in this one, like the let's say feed efficiency or feed distance more that on the livestock producers that are featured in this one, really like it. I don't remember the percentage, it's very high up in the 80s or 90s, I think, of the feed that stays that comes from within the region.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it would be now it's 100 because I know it was 98%, and I know exactly which farmer has a 2%, which was José Luis for his amazing pasture-raised chicken production. But now we found the regeneratively producing soil grower closer to him, which grew out of because some of our other farmers knew another guy of the Arabic croppers and so forth. So, yeah, that's so in what we're showing is that we produce the same yields as today in Europe, including our crazy key for production, but without any non-European feed imports.
SPEAKER_01:And then the whole discussion, we get to like animal feed versus human food, how does that go into that? Of course, it's nuance. What parts do you eat? What part could you eat? That's but what's your standard answer there? Basically, if you have to talk in front of your ex-vegan or your friends, it might still be your friends, but at least you're not vegan anymore. What's your standard answer in the feed food discussion?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I first of all one thing is that today people are starv sisters and brothers of us around the world are starving at a rate that has never been happening before in the world. And that's not because we feed. We are too many humans. That's not even because we have the garbage cafe system, that's simply because of distribution and people deciding. I make to make a simple example. If in 2022 the World Food Program would have supplied, they think cost a meal cost for them about 50 cents. And they only to keep someone alive, it's one, they consider one meal a day sufficient. Even if you would have given every starving person two meals a day, of all the quantitative easing and money printing that we did in response to the COVID crisis, yeah, of that money we would have given some to the World Food Program to buy the World Commodity some grains with 0.0000 so on. So and then in the study now we show also, I'm still agreeing that we don't need to feed animals so much of human edible food because the most holy animal before we really fucked things up as humans was a cow. And the cow doesn't need our grains. And the birds were the meats of the kings, and I hope we want a world without kings, so they can be I'm and we see it in the regeneration paths of the carbonara, as we were already with them. The birds are amazing to kick it off again when it's really degraded and you want to grow the agroforestry system. But as soon as they can, they bring in the herbivores, and then they continue, then they come with the sheep, like here at Matteo, and then as soon as they can go bigger, they come bring in the cows. So I and in the report, we have two great examples, and I hope we will produce more. Which then the other argument, in conjunction with that, is then basically, oh, they eat so much land. They need so much land. And in one main difference between total factor productivity and our regenerating. Yeah, so that's this economic efficiency term. Where everything is calculated against the monetary value. And we basically calculate everything on the square meter of land because we think that's our most important and our most limited resource. In the end, we can increase everything. We can do quantitative easing, we can have we can't increase the quantity.
SPEAKER_01:And we lose a lot of land. I think it's what is it, 600? Yeah, 600 foot profit.
SPEAKER_00:Like that's a huge limiting factor. And we show now that, for example, Christine Bayoa, who is one of the pioneers of holistic management, AMP grazing, and all this movement in Germany. We are comparing the way she is producing beef with the standard way how 95% of the beef fattening is happening in Germany. So let's say they are still completely indoor, they have mostly made silage, then they get some still some grass, grass silage. If they're lucky, yeah, and some better stuff like soil, but small quantities. And if you compare her with that, where you would say, okay, even she's not using, of course, any antibiotics, she's not using any anti-wormers anymore, nothing. She uses of the only thing she uses is like 40 liters of gasoline to make hay for the darkest winter months when they also have a lot very wetland problems and stuff, rain problems. And she's producing per land more or less the same.
SPEAKER_01:So land including the land to grow to feed. Exactly. And then it gets interesting.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, but of course, if we're looking just at the K4 of the square meters of the KFO, then it's of the charts. But of course, it's not arable cropping is not so much more productive than our most sophisticated grassland management. It is, of course, in some sense, of the grains and the calories, but we also need proteins, and then of course comes a whole nutrient density discussion just as a top-up.
SPEAKER_01:And because that's always a big argument indeed in any regen discussion. Again, how do we feed the world? And specifically, somehow it seems to be around livestock. The by default thought or thesis, or like it will be less. The carrying capacity is less. There's sort of default, like if you do regen, are you gonna produce less? And actually, we're showing even in route so deep, but most of these farmers have a way higher carrying capacity, they can carry way more animals on the land than the neighbor in that case, and in this case than even K4, at least the same or similar.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that is even a status quo picture because if you want to think a little bit bigger, there was, for example, one of a very famous German agronomist and professor in only a hundred years ago, and he described the soils around Berlin in Brandenburg of four to eight percent organic matter. A hundred years later, we had 0.5 to 2. What do you think is the carrying capacity of that?
SPEAKER_01:It is in a graded degraded state.
SPEAKER_00:And that's only a hundred years. We are on a degradation path of 2000 years when the dinosaurs were living. We had a biocapacity that was three times as big as now.
SPEAKER_01:And we're discussing this as we pass by some sheep that are doing their evening grazing. Very interesting. So that's a big piece of the next phase as well, if you can. LCA deep dives into livestock or cows specifically. Anything else that's on the for sure, there is a lot of things.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, now it comes the most exciting while we'll also see how far we can take it. And you are deep into that discussion. So the nutrient density discussion.
SPEAKER_01:Bring it on. Because you didn't look at quality quality is very but you the report doesn't look obviously at quality yet, but that's something that's on the radar. Exactly. One thing just thing by kiwis, by the way, if you don't even know it, they're so they produce so much and they're just on the walkway that they came down. They're not ready yet, but so we've been, if you don't look around and it's getting slightly dark, but I we got hit by kiwis.
SPEAKER_00:I forgot to take one of the most majestic apples to come back to the one to my partner.
SPEAKER_01:Like it's crazy. Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And actually the closest circle because I have a bias certainly, but I'm convinced you can in haptic taste the nutrient density in that apple because the fibers are just so much more dense and powerful. Um so we have a crazy idea in which we don't need to do what other people are doing. We want to support and complement in the sense. So we want to show the idea is to look at some of the pioneering farmer families, like here, the Matazolas or the Carbonaras, from the health perspective, and we want to, and we have been discussing with some pioneering scientists in the movement, like Stefan van Wielet, who's doing great stuff, and some uh pioneers of the medicine sciences who are now making uh light year innovations in days with AI and the data they have lying around basically from CT scans and so forth. And we want to analyze farmer families that have been eating from regenerating soils for a relatively longer time and to a relatively larger share of their whole diet. Like farmer health, but then and then compare them to families in the classes of their children, and then look achieve at least the comparable demographics, and then the argument is the same, and we also don't have to run away from that argument. There's infinite amounts of variables in that, so we don't want to prove any causation again. We want to show a very nice correlation that makes a nice narrative with data.
SPEAKER_01:Very interesting. I remember talking to Geert van der Veer, founder of Herenboeren, the movement, one of the founders in the Netherlands at the beginning, and I don't know, I don't remember if they did the study. I don't think they did because I've not seen anything saying with the first one in Boxtow and then now they've 20, I'm gonna say 25 could be off farms running, community-owned farms, they're gonna go to 60, 70 in a couple of years. What would it look like if you would properly investigate and scan and research the families that join in Hirenburen? Of course, they might come from other organic farms, they might come from other, but what happens the moment they join their local farm? They show up regularly, they have to pick up the food, or they could pick up the food, they might help a bit. What does that do to a family that joins it? Apart from the social piece, all the other that before and after King Sea, and they have 200 families on every farm. So there's a nice cohort, like there's a nice group that you can compare to another, would just be fascinating. Got microbiome, like this is food coming from healthy soil. What does it Do and on the farm level, yeah, that would be and then if you can follow some conventional ones in transition, that would be interesting.
SPEAKER_00:We have even we all know the stories how some of our pioneers of the movement now have originally started because of their own health problems.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, many, yeah. Wow. Okay. I think that's a really good moment to wrap up. There's so much else to discuss, but I don't want to keep you too long. It's getting dark. It was a long day. And tomorrow there's another one. So thank you so much for this insight into the scientific research piece of regen, which we often overlook and we only say, what if it would be great if there would be more data? Yeah, it takes a lot of work, takes a bit of funding, and it takes a lot of dedication to get that out, and then we all use it. And so if you haven't, definitely read the study. If you can contribute in any form or way, definitely do. And please spread it to your policymakers, to institutions, corporates, banks, financiers, etc., because it's a fundamental piece. So thank you so much, Simon, for the work you do and for coming on here to talk about it after a very long day.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much for the work you guys are doing.
SPEAKER_01:So what? Why is this such an important milestone in research? Why is this such an interesting piece? First of all, we get interrupted by a chicken, a rooster, sorry. If you haven't, please read the study. It's super readable, fascinating, you really get so much more data out of it, so much more thinking, and so much more context. Like, why has it been so difficult to conduct this kind of research in the past? And second, really uh spread it, share it. If you haven't already, I would strongly advise you. I've done it a number of times. This is such a good tool to use, such a good piece of content to share with people that are using that argument. How do we feed the world? Like study shows this and that. And basically to be able to unpack that or to disarm disarm that argument is really powerful. And I'm super excited about the next phases, as you could probably tell in the conversation. And also limitations, of course, the limitations with this study but the fact that you look at the outliers that are normally left out of research and actually taking that as a base. Like this is where we with very limited support, because you think about the region space, how little money has flown into that to really optimize for biomass growth or photosynthesis. We've been optimizing for good reasons, but a very path-dependent other path, let's say. And so imagine the pioneers that can push the envelope this far, imagine with proper support, how they can push it. So I'm super excited about this, really thankful. It was only an hour and a bit, we could have done three, four hours, we might do it at some point. I definitely encourage you to sit down with Simon, with the other authors as well, to sit down with Ayara and these pioneering farmers because they show something that often gets lost in the general narrative around regen. You don't get less. This is not a sustainability story where we have to go with less, etc. A lot of eco-modernists use that argument. Yeah, but it's still less, and a lot of anti-organic people with all the flaws, etc., use that argument. Like this is only for rich people, this is only where we have access to food and import from elsewhere. This kind of study showed that's a nonsense argument, and really we need to shout it more and put it in the right places and inoculant it so nicely as Simon said. So thank you so much for listening and see you at the next one. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website, investing in regenerativeagriculture.com/slash posts. If you like this episode, why not share it with a friend? And get in touch with us on social media, our website, or via the Spotify app and tell us what you liked most. And give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.
