This is an extract from a longer interview with Chuck de Liedekerke of Soil Capital for the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast series. Full interview with Chuck
The suit in London and the farmer in Argentina need to start speaking each others language. The first one needs to learn the challenges of farming, the farmer needs to understand the level of reporting and milestones the fund manager needs to raise capital.
If Chuck could change one thing: he would come up with a KPI to measure soil carbon and the correlation to financial returns.
Chuck’s advice for investors::
1. Meet with regenerative farmers and have meaningful conversations
2. Talk to investors who have been allocating capital to regenerative agriculture for a couple of years
3. Plus learn about the food sector at large and the global challenges:
Feeding frenzy of Paul McMahon
Paul's interview:
Thoughts from the episode:
- When you demonstrate that the right economic choice is regenerative you will completely transform how money is allocated in agriculture. And there are trillion of dollars invested in agriculture
- If you want to drive meaningful environmental change you are going to need to make it more profitable
- Carbon seems to be the best proxy for the (health of the) rest of the agriculture system
- Farmers for the most part are still price takers, even if they grow a crop which is better for the planet for probably healthier for us
- Farmers could come for the regenerative premium and stay for the cost savings
- Big buyers could also share in the cost savings
- When retailers and processors are going to see healthy soil means healthy plants, there will be a very clear way to differentiating between a crop that is grown in a healthy soil and one that is not
Soil Capital's approach:
1. fine tune the agro chemical package which is currently applied to the land and optimise it for the plants needs.
2. that will immediately allow for some cash savings to occur,
3. part of that cash flows back to the land owners
4. part is used for regenerative trial areas (composting, cover crops)
5. to demonstrate as fast as possible that no short term negative economical impact was necessary to kickstart a transition
6. scale to the whole operation
Soil Capital's regenerative agriculture conditions:
- Minimal land disturbance
- Keep the soil mostly covered
- Biodiversity in time (rotations) and in space (companion crops)
- Minimum agri inputs (with the goal to go to zero) with a route to organic
- Context specific design on large scale farms
Carrefour/Danone/BlueApron on agro ecology
Rodale / Patagonia / dr Bronner’s
Savory Institute land to market
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.
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