What is regenerative agriculture?
It’s a question I get asked every week by other investors and people in business. I often respond with a long explanation about improving soil biology and working in partnership with nature—an explanation that often sounds too abstract for most. This frequently leads to a second question: If we can’t boost productivity with the help of chemicals, how are we going to feed the world?
The underlying issue here isn’t really the fear of how we’ll feed the world but the myth of productivity—a deeply ingrained narrative our modern Western culture has exported to all corners of the globe. This story claims that human progress and technology allow us to maximize productivity limitlessly. It’s embedded in our myth of progress and serves as the foundation for our current worldview.
Let me share my personal story of productivity. I’ll start 10 years ago—from the top, or at least what my early-30s self defined as the top. I was running my own up-and-coming live marketing agency and was called on stage to receive the Golden Alligator for the Best Incentive Travel award of 2013—a program we had designed and executed for one of our top corporate clients in Africa. It was finally my own hero’s journey moment. An outsider entrepreneur with no industry experience who had started a travel company in his bedroom was now, sevens years later, on stage with his new business partner, receiving the industry’s most prestigious award in Brazil. Another one of those stories of hard work and maximum productivity.
My secret sauce for success? Never letting go of that weird gadget from the 2000s named after a fruit and responding to emails sent by clients within an hour, no matter the time zone.
The next day, I saw myself in a picture, proudly lifting the Golden Alligator in an industry news post. But who was that guy in the picture? I could hardly recognize him. Years of chronic stress and anxiety from managing corporate events around the world had taken their toll. I was roughly 12 kilos heavier than when I started, looked 20 years older, and was constantly overheated and sweating. My Western medical checkup results looked great, but a Chinese doctor had diagnosed me a couple of weeks earlier as a time bomb. Ask me a few personal questions, and you’d get the full picture of rapid degeneration: poor sleep, a diet consisting mostly of ultra-processed foods—including 7 to 10 cans of Coke Zero a day to keep me hyper-productive—eased out in the evening with almost daily pints of beer or glasses of wine.
I was still jogging almost daily, part of my hyper-productive routine, but all the long event hours and work stress were taking a heavy toll. Something else was happening that same year: I had started meditating. Twenty minutes in the morning as soon as I woke up, and 20 minutes in the evening before happy hour.
I couldn’t really tell if it was working, but I kept at it. A brief space began to open, and the hamster wheel started to make less sense—until one day, while jogging on a beautiful morning in Helsinki between events, I had a deep realization. I needed to get rid of that business, no matter what, and find myself again before it was too late.
The path I took in those 10 years was not a linear one of constant progress that we humans love, but a bumpy road full of uncomfortable and joyful experiences that cannot be summarized into a recipe for personal healing. It required the support of the ecosystem around me in collective action and the discipline to get back on track after every missed step.
Now 10 years later life is very different. My work now has deeper meaning, the 12 extra kilos are gone, and I feel more connected to nature. I no longer work as a slave to a smartphone, pushed to the limit by my inner critic. In my current role, I’m supported by an inspiring impact community of investors and entrepreneurs striving for systemic change. It’s as though my roots are now planted in more fertile soil, and the drive for maximum productivity to feed off external validation is no longer relevant.
My diet has improved, and so has the colony of millions of microbes in my gut biome. I walk every day as my own living proof of the power of regeneration.
The trap of productivity that defined the first 35 years of my life is no different from what we do to plants in conventional agriculture. We grow them to be hyper-productive, fueled by chemical inputs in unhealthy soil lacking the support of an ecosystem. These plants may produce more fruit, but their overstressed systems are extremely sensitive to external factors. This is no different from the overstressed human worker who gets sick or burns out.
When we transition from hyper-productive chemical agriculture to regenerative agriculture, we respect the plant’s nature. We allow it to be supported by the ecosystem, enabling it to produce quality output within its natural capacity. In return, we gain resilience, nutrient density, and an agricultural system that is less vulnerable to climate change. The soil that sustains the plant becomes healthy and regenerated.
The healthy biome of the soil supports the plant in ways we are only beginning to understand. We now know that healthy soils are connected to a healthy human microbiome, and this health spreads throughout the food chain. This is the story of regeneration—a narrative that will enable the emergence of a new food system.
A system not built on the myth of productivity, but on nutrition and resilience. A story not about an individual hero fighting against nature and all odds to achieve maximum productivity, but a collective narrative of symbiosis and collaboration. One where humans, nature, soil microbiomes, and gut microbiomes are all interconnected. A story where we aim to regenerate the soil that sustains all life and focus less on the individual—no longer forced to produce more as a reason for existence
