On February 27-28 RFSI held the second annual RFSI Europe event in Brussels where hundreds of investors, funders, farmers, businesses and other system stakeholders gathered for robust conversation, problem-solving, and connection around the goal of advancing investment into regenerative agriculture and food systems. The dialogue that rung throughout the event was a clear sign of the advancement of the space and investment into it. While the insights were more plentiful than we can share here, these are few that stood out…

1. From Why to How…

As the RFSI Europe program progressed, many questions were answered and, naturally, other questions began to pile up. As they did, we noticed something: all the questions began with one word: how?

Why does this matter? Because just a few years ago, as a community, we were still deeply entrenched in the why questions. For example: why should farmers transition to regenerative? Why should investors look to invest in regenerative agriculture and food?

But we, as a space, are moving beyond the “why” to the crucial point where diverse players are asking how? How do we make it work for us? How do engage? This, in itself, is a significant sign of progress for regenerative agriculture.

Driving this transition from “why” to “how” is an understanding that…

 

2. Regenerative Drives Resilience and Risk Management

Nature, climate, agriculture, supply chains… risk is inherent in all of these, and increasingly so today. From the opening comments to the final panel at RFSI Europe, a key message was that regenerative agriculture can drive resilience in the face of increasing risk. Despite lingering ambiguity about a definition of “regenerative”, it’s clear that stakeholders across the system –from farmer to investor – understand that regenerative production and supply systems have beneficial outcomes that make investment in regenerative an imperative for building on-farm, business, and systemic resilience.

This point was echoed across the event by those engaging at different points of the value chain and investing via different asset classes.

Dr. Katrina Hayter, Global Head of Sustainable Land Use and Supply Chains at HSBC shared that her company’s motivation for engagement with natural capital in food and agriculture: “It makes business sense. Our corporations aren’t doing this because of Scope 3 or regulations, they’re doing it because it makes sense.”

Thekla Teunis added perspective with the example of her work with producers and supply chains in Africa. The farmers that her company, Grounded, works with in Africa produce regeneratively and it has proven to be a successful and resilient model. However, buyers they work with aren’t paying for “regenerative” or the environmental or social outcomes it can bring, they are ultimately paying for quality. She explains that regeneratively produced crops are simply of a higher quality and this has helped secure buyers and on-going contracts.

Richard Focken, founder of 1-2-Tree, explained that this – resilience – is the key to engaging investors in this space. Investors may see “regenerative” as an unfamiliar blip on their radar but resilience and risk management are concepts that investors can more easily grasp on to. Tying investments into regeneration to these core investment criteria is key.  

 

3. Questions Are Natural Given the Sector’s Nascency 

Despite the advancement of understanding that regenerative is a business imperative, along the growth curve for regenerative as a sector, we are still fairly early. As a result, there is still a lot to figure out and many questions remain. And they aren’t easy questions, their questions that involve thinking beyond our existing models and thinking and working across stakeholders.

Questions that came up throughout the program include:

• How do we bring nature and natural capital into the traditional balance sheet?
• How can traditional insurance mechanisms be adapted to serve and enable the regenerative transition?
• How can we continue toward blended approaches where public, private and industry can work together to fund transition?
• How do we support niche innovators throughout their growth cycle and as they try to operate within the context of the current system?
• How do we create the pathways, business case, investment case and systems architecture that will facilitate scales capital to engage here?
• AND how do we ensure that all the capital coming into regenerative agriculture and food – operate with regenerative principles…

All these questions are a natural progression as we build the regenerative sector. We must remind ourselves and others that just because questions remain, it does not mean that regenerative, and investments into it, are not viable.

It simply means we have more work to do.

 

4. Numbers Tell a Story

An uplifting indication of the advancement of investment in the space was the ability of so many in the room to not just speak to what they want to do but speak to what they have and are doing. Some examples:

• Phil Taylor of Mad Capital spoke to how the company he cofounded to support row crop farmers transition in the U.S. has already secured more than $30 million on the way to their $50 million target for their Perennial Fund 2.
• Alessia Lenders spoke in session about how diverse funders are investing in different asset classes on behalf of SLM Partners, which recently held their final close for its €30 million European Agriculture Fund.
• Terra Regenerative Capital’s Calla Rose Ostrander share their approach to investing in the missing middle of the regenerative supply chain and market access – already with more than seven investments in the space.
• Zuzanna Zielinska shared HarvestCare’s pilot for the First Dutch Food Pharmacy program, demonstrating a possible savings of €2,000-3,000 per diabetes patient in treatment costs by moving from current treatment to her program, which also gets farmers paid. (Read more in the next section.)
• RFSI was able to share that in 2024 we tracked nearly $2.5 Billion worth of investments into the regenerative agriculture, aquaculture, and food space, as well as more than 17 funds launched to address investments in the space. While we know the capital investments we tracked are only represent a fraction of what actually transacted, it serves as a frame of reference for the types and scale of investments currently taking place in the space.

Despite what has felt like a slow investment landscape for several years, the numbers tell a story of growing increasing traction for regenerative as a viable investment theme.

 

5. A New Investable Lever: Human Health & Nutrient Density

“Food is at the heart of both our greatest health challenges and some of our most promising solutions,” explained Dr. Amy Godfrey, a former practicing doctor, turned analyst for venture capital firm, The First Thirty.  She goes on to describe the health crisis with two key data points: 50% of adults over the age of 18 have at least one chronic disease and 70% of deaths worldwide are caused by chronic diseases, which can be largely attributed to food. The associated costs to this are in the trillions of dollars. Amy went on to host a conversation that underscored the power of regenerative agriculture to restore both planetary and human health, while offsetting the costs of our human health crisis.

The conversation, first with Ali Morpeth of Planeatry Alliance and Eric Smith of Edacious and then in presentation from Zuzanna Zielinska of HarvestCare & RHEA, underlined an increasing opportunity to invest in regenerative agriculture and enabling technologies to advance human health and nutrition. Eric, for example, is seeing strong evidence backed connection between the soil health practices and human health based on how nutrition is mediated from the soil into the plant and then into human bodies. But there is still a lot more research needed to figure out what and how to manage for different nutritional outcomes. This is an investable opportunity and indeed, Edacious recently raised $8.1 million in a seed fund raise to work towards these insights.

Ali emphasized that, generally, humans are eating too little of the foods that can save their lives. For example, a diet low in whole grains is directly responsible for 3 million deaths per year, which brings us to HarvestCare and RHEA. Zuzanna explained that of the 700 billion Euros that the EU spends on treating and managing chronic diseases, 0% goes to farmers to produce healthy foods. She describes an aspiration for an “agri-health system” that breaks down the silos between soil health and human health and that can incentivize regenerative agriculture by using health care incentives. HarvestCare’s Food Pharmacy program in Rotterdam does this by increasing access for type 2 diabetes patients to healthy foods using financial incentives and behavior change support from health professionals. Preliminary results on similar work in the U.S. shows there is money to be made in this model, however, right now, this work is funded by grants. To address this, HarvestCare is currently piloting a new Agri-Health Outcome Payment Model that would create a vehicle that could sustainably build demand for farmers and increase health outcomes for patients.

Our understanding of the deep connection between food production and human health is still only scratching the surface but we now know enough to understand this to be a key investable lever to advance planetary and human health outcomes.

 

6. The Evolving Role – and Magic – of Data

In a fascinating kick off to day 2 of the event, Jelle van Wesemael of Soil Capital and Ichsani Wheeler, PhD of OpenGeoHub Foundation sat down with AgFunder’s Louisa Burwood-Taylor to talk about the role of data in advancing regenerative agriculture. Two key points that emerged were how data should serve farmers and the system and an acknowledgement that data is still catching up to pioneering leaders in regenerative farming.  

Jelle explained that as we seek data to support the transition, we should be measuring more than carbon. The power of data lies in its ability to objectively and holistically measure farm performance, from carbon to biodiversity, water management, and soil health to even farm socio-economics. But he explained the real magic happens when the data can be organized and translated to serve as a guide for farmers, providing clarity and confidence in transition.

Ichsani, who works with landscape level data, presented a key juxtaposition of using data models to advance regenerative: current data models are based on conventional agriculture and degraded soils, so they fail to capture the full potential of regenerative pioneers. She posed a crucial question: “How can we include the stars of the regenerative movement in the models?” … or adapt modeling to account for this omission.

Both the potential for data magic and the challenge of creating data models that account for regenerative pioneers, gave the audience plenty to reflect on.

 

7. Capital Facilitation Will Be Key for Growing Investment

The opportunity to scale investment in regenerative agriculture and food – both scale in the number of investments into more farmers, start-ups and funds and also scale in the size of checks written – is of utmost importance if we also want to scale the beneficial impacts of these systems. However, often the complexity of agriculture in general and the additional complexity of transitioning can serve as a hindrance to new investors coming into the space. To address this, we are seeing an increasing number of system intermediaries – organizations that can facilitate both indirectly or directly appropriate capital engagement in the space. These may include fund managers like Kempen or Terra Regenerative Capital, which ease the burden of due diligence and deep sector knowledge and invest on behalf of investors. They could include system-coordinators, such as Transformational Investing in Food Systems (TIFS) or OP2B that each work to bring diverse players together to identify systemic needs and the diverse pools of capital that can fund different parts of the system. Or these intermediaries may even lie in re-imagined organizations, such as venture studios like Fresh Ventures Studio, that are already doing some of the development and finance facilitation work for start-ups in the space.

To date, these roles have been somewhat undervalued for the work they do in orchestrating capital to impactful projects but as the push to grow capital to the space continues, their roles are also likely to grow in need and value. They will serve as a crucial connective tissue that can address the knowledge and complexity barrier that prevents capital from engaging and help ensure that new capital coming into the space is allocated with a regenerative mindset.

 

8. A Systemic Approach to Investing is Needed

This one is a recurring theme for RFSI but one that bears repeating…

All the complexity and interconnectedness of the agriculture, food, health, policy and financial systems that was underlined in many of conversation on and off the stage at RFSI Europe, is a call to those working and investing in the space to do so with a holistic or systems-based lens.

At RFSI Europe, we saw tangible examples of this approach throughout the program. Climate Farmers shared about their systems-based approach, which includes the European AgriFood Systems-Change Consortium that recently released the new Agri-food Systems Map to help inform work and investment in the space. OP2B brought together representatives from diverse corners of the space – from the European Commission, PepsiCo, Carlsberg Group, and LENS to work through how each plays a role in enabling the transition at the farm level – it will take collaboration between public, private, corporate and farming stakeholders. And several fund managers and investors shared their evolution to systems-based approaches to investment.  

Taking a systems-based approach to investing in agriculture is crucial because agriculture operates within a complex web of interdependent factors, including environmental sustainability, economic viability, social equity, and technological innovation. Investors who consider the full system can better anticipate shifts – such as those in consumer preferences, regulatory changes, technological innovation, and markets. A holistic lens also helps ensure that the well-being of all stakeholders is accounted for, because ultimately, if investments aren’t enabling all stakeholders to thrive, they aren’t regenerative. By addressing agriculture and food as an interconnected system rather than in silos, investors can drive sustainable impact, reduce risks, and create long-term value.