426 Ivana Gazibara - Deploy $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to transform the Midwest agricultural system

The Midwest: 140 million acres of corn and soybeans, rural economies slowly dying, a system with no real long-term future in terms of soil or human health. It's also where roughly 25% of farmland could flip the entire region toward regeneration—but only if you coordinate capital the right way.

Ivana Gazibara, Director of Systemic Investment Programmes at the TransCap Initiative, spent two years mapping the intervention points needed to drive systemic change across the agricultural heartland. She uncovered something unexpected: money isn't the problem. Coordination is. Venture capital, public funders, and philanthropists all allocate capital into regenerative agriculture—but almost never in the same room together, much less actively collaborating. The result? Capital that's supposed to be systemic lands as scattered bets.

The solution: the Regenerative Agriculture Capital Orchestrator (RACO), a blueprint for deploying $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to attract $7.5 billion more, organized around four pillars—system intelligence platform, capital matchmaking, catalytic finance, and field building. This is systems change made concrete: what it costs per acre, how to move money at scale, what happens when you stop treating regeneration as a one-off problem and start treating it as a reshaping of incentives across lending, insurance, and investment. Because you can't finance a transition you haven't mapped, and you can't scale a transition money isn't deliberately coordinated to reach.

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Transcript

The Big Midwest Transition Goal

Koen van Seijen 0:00

Deploying 1.4 billion to transition 25% of all farmland in the Midwest in ten years. Which should lead to a tipping point, and the whole of the Midwest should go through a transition after that in one generation. Imagine the Midwest, 140 million endless acres of corn and soybeans, slowly dying rural economies, and no real future for agriculture in terms of soil health and human health. The US Midwest is an absolute agriculture powerhouse, but also under immense pressure to change. But how? First, by mapping endless interviews with all stakeholders and building an interactive map of the system and identifying crucial intervention points. But then you have to finance these interventions. Hence the record, the regenerative agriculture capital orchestrator, and the plan to deploy 1.4 billion in catalytic capital, which should attract another 7.5 billion in investment capital. Which should be enough to transition 25%, which is usually a tipping point, of all farmland in the Midwest in the next 10 years. Enjoy this conversation. 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. Welcome to another episode. Today we're going to talk about the Regenerative Agriculture Capital Orchestrator in the American Midwest, or RECO. And we have the director of prototyping of the TransCap Initiative. Welcome, Ivana.

Ivana Gazibara 1:31

Hi, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Koen van Seijen 1:33

And this has been a long time in the making, not a long time in the making, as it took a long time to record, but there's been a lot of work going into this. It's been very interesting to see the mapping of the space first in Midwest, and we're going to talk about why the Midwest and why they work specifically there, why it's such a nodal point or an intervention point or such an important one in terms of agriculture systems to tackle, and also how you went from mapping to action, which is such an important moment and such an exciting one as well to start talking about very big words, capital orchestrator, and to see how that applies to other places, other spaces, other geographies, and also in general. We've seen that, I've had you present on a number of occasions also at Tonic, feel the need for more orchestration or feel that somehow this individual investment or granting into a space just doesn't really work or doesn't really has the effect. It works maybe individually, but doesn't really have the bigger effect. So I'm very much looking forward to unpacking a lot of the systemic pieces here, the system change investing. But start with a personal question, as we always do, is how did you end up in this space? And by this food and agriculture space, and it's specifically on capital orchestration in the Midwest, which is quite a stretch for somebody from Canada but living in London.

Ivana Gazibara 2:50

Well, it is and it isn't.

Koen van Seijen 2:52

It's funny because all

Why The Midwest Is A Lever

Koen van Seijen 2:55

roads related to Rome, right? Yeah.

Ivana Gazibara 2:57

Oh, all that's right. And I find since we've started doing this work, almost everybody I've spoken to has some kind of connection to the Midwest. So we talk to people from all over the place who go, oh yeah, but I am from Chicago, or I've got family.

Koen van Seijen 3:16

Let's define what is the Midwest for anybody listening outside the US atmosphere, hemisphere. It's the main, it's the Midwest, right? Part of the US.

Ivana Gazibara 3:24

Yes, that's right. So geographically and visually, when you look at it, it's that, as you say, middle bit. It's often defined by the upper Midwestern states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Montana, and Kentucky. But it does sometimes vary, but that is often how we've defined it in our work. And it's about 130 or so million acres.

Koen van Seijen 3:54

Not small.

Ivana Gazibara 3:55

So it is a massive agricultural region. And in saying that, I think I'm probably partly answering your question of why Midwest. And I guess the other part of answering that question is so I am Canadian. I too have family in the Midwest, believe it or not. So I've got a Midwestern connection to rural Indiana, actually. And the reason we started doing this work, I suppose I've personally been working in the food and agriculture space for quite a long time and have been actually a listener of your podcast for quite a long time. So it's particularly nice to be here as a kind of fan of the podcast. And I guess so I started out my working life in Food and Ag doing sort of coalition building and system change work, trying to put, I guess, the system together, all the different players in a particular sector or system, whatever you want to call it, whether that's dairy or tea or protein. And I did that work at an organization called Forum for the Future that very early on realized that actually, no matter how hard you work one-to-one with organizations, no matter how willing, how hardworking that is, actually, it's really hard to create system change through one-to-one work or single projects done again and again. So we started working on building these coalitions for change. And then over time, one of the things that started to show up again and again is actually money was never in the room enough, or often enough, or early enough. And so this is what led me to actually systemic investing work and the TransCap Initiative, which is a sort of as a field builder of systemic investing. And what that means in kind of practical terms and in very plain English is that we're trying to find more transformative pathways for how we use money in order to solve the big complex problems of our time. And so obviously, coming at this from somebody who does food and food systems work, I really wanted to look at how do you try and create financing blueprints for these large-scale transitions that we need to make? And we need to make those transitions in a whole bunch of human systems, and agriculture is obviously one of them. It's possibly the most kind of quintessential, fundamental, essential system, isn't it? In some ways.

Koen van Seijen 6:27

That's probably people are listening to the podcast because of that. Yeah, but were you did you join TransCap specifically to shape the food and egg piece, or were you like coming into TransCap, okay, I want to do more systems change, investing work, and then happen to, of course, and land up again in food and egg? Like how did that go?

Ivana Gazibara 6:45

So it was probably the latter. I was looking, I was seeing this challenge of money is such an underappreciated and underutilized lever for change, and money really matters. And I was starting to the pattern of absence of capital was showing up in my own system change work, which is why I decided actually to shift at looking more closely at how do we change the way that money moves across the system, and then of course wanted to apply that in the food and ag space and have them from the start pushing TransCap to do more work in that area. And then we part of it is opportunistic in that we just came across a funder collective called the New Capitalism Project, who really believed in the idea of looking at how do you shift capital deployment in service of these collective impact missions? And said, Well, let's find a let's find a sort of sandpit for this work. And the Midwest is such an obvious space.

Koen van Seijen 7:52

Did they come up with that or was it your analysis? Did you do an analysis of spaces or geographies, watersheds, whatever we want to call it, regions that you thought, okay, it could be certain places in Brazil, like was the or was it the funder or funders collective saying, we really want this to happen in the Midwest?

Ivana Gazibara 8:09

No, they didn't have any vested interest in the Midwest. They said, could you do something in the States? And then we went, okay, well, to do this in the Midwest is really an opportunity for regenerative transformation at scale. And then of course, it's funny that you mentioned Brazil because there are other agricultural systems, whether it's Western Canada or Brazil, that are in some ways share the characteristics of the agricultural system in the Midwest, where potentially this could be a kind of blueprint for a regeneration in some of those places as well.

Koen van Seijen 8:43

Yeah, and of course it helps being in a region. We can describe the agricultural system as it is now later, and just give people that haven't traveled through the region, let's say, to understand what we're talking about. A region, it's massive. I'm saying it's like just a province, which of course it's not, it's multiple states, etc. But also it helps you're in the US, and there there are pockets of money, there are foundations, there are there's a lot of flowing things happening, of course, with political changes. A lot of the state support changed and is changing. We're recording this April or end of April 26th, just to give you a perspective. But yeah, it's not a bad place to start, probably. Did you look at other things, like I don't know, the Agriculture Powerhouse California? Did you look at other places or Citrus in Florida, which is under massive stress, to see where else, or was it quite an easy choice?

Ivana Gazibara 9:33

So it was an easy choice in our case, but this is one of those things where sometimes you go with where the energy is in the system when you're doing system change work. And at that particular moment in time, this was before the latest administration came into power, so it was quite a different context. And there was a real kind of conflagration of people and organizations doing work in the upper Midwest, who we also just happen to know and be doing other work with. So sometimes it is a little bit opportunistic, and I think that's what happened here. So we didn't actually do extensive blueprinting of other agricultural regions in the US in order to land on this because sometimes it's important to just you will know this, it's important to start just start doing the work, isn't it?

Koen van Seijen 10:23

And then with start doing the work in this case, such a massive place, an absolutely industrial agriculture powerhouse. Where do you start?

Ivana Gazibara 10:33

So we started initially we zoomed in. We worked in partnership with the Meridian Institute, now defunct, sadly. We zoomed in on Indiana at first and started looking at, okay, well, could we

From Systems Work To Money

Ivana Gazibara 10:50

do this at a state level? But very quickly it became obvious that a lot of this work transcends state boundaries, right? So it's when you start thinking about systems work and looking at what do you finance if you want to affect system transformation, you start to get things showing up. There's a lot of latent wind in the Dakotas that could be used to power facilities in Minnesota. And really quickly those state boundaries start to break down, whether that's about where crops get processed or where the markets are, etc. So that was one thing which kind of led us to zoom out a little bit in the work that we were doing, but also the amount of deal flow and just the project ecosystem becomes more meaningful and bigger. You get you end up with a bigger pool in this case when you zoom out a little bit and look at the region as it were, as opposed to just a single state or even going hyper-local, like a single county. We consider that as well. And then we started to do some mapping work. So we thought, okay, do we do a systems map? Well, no, because actually so many have been done before, and in some ways we found them a little bit too like not normative enough, as in they don't really give you a sense of direction. They often tell you what how a system shows up. What is a status quo, right? They're pretty good at that. And then people step back and gain awareness of how the system is behaving. But people weren't really doing transition mapping in the sense of, okay, well, if we want to look at how we affect change in a systemic way, what are the nodal points where you need to really focus your attention and your resources and your efforts onto? So that was kind of our objective with the transition map is to look at what is needed to support, what do we need to do? Where do we need to, where are the tipping points? Where are the some people call them leverage points, other people call them acupuncture points? Use what language you will, but the areas where we really need to crowd in effort to support a large-scale transition to happen. So we obviously took a look at that from the lens of capital. We said, okay, well, where can capital allocators really focus in if they want to support the transition from conventional to regenerative farming in the Midwest? And that was the starting point of the work, was really developing that system map. And funnily enough, we debated whether to even publish that because we thought people really it's good to work with a map and a mapping process. The process is really important. The visual artifact often is really hard to understand if you haven't been involved in producing it. It's very messy. There's a lot to get your head around, and often they're of limited value as there a way to unlock that in a way.

Koen van Seijen 13:57

I've been thinking about that very briefly, but like the amount of hours of interviews you do to make those maps, the amount of connections, the amount of background work, and then it becomes a map. And it's interactive now because we can make easy interactive sites, websites, but it's like interactive in the sense you can click somewhere, something changes, something resurfaces, etc. But almost now I was thinking with AI, is there other ways to argue with it or to really interrogate or to like to get into the map almost? Because I agree, like I clicked through it, I read a lot of the pieces, I think the description was very important to make it accessible. But I think for most people, yeah, unless you are, let's say, systems change agriculture nerd, it's not going to be too valuable. And it's very a process is in this case probably more important, so it's not to discount the work at all, but are there ways to make it more literally interactive or workable for people that yeah, just want to prompt it or just want to ask you some stupid questions, just to see what, okay, why is core reserve just very not basic, but make it more useful in that sense.

Ivana Gazibara 14:55

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I'm not caveat is I'm not an expert at these things. When we decided to publish our initial map, we wanted to do that thing you're describing of making it as interactive as possible. And funnily enough, it resonated it resonated with a lot of people, this map. A lot of people liked it and called up and wrote to say, hey, I saw your map. And actually, I have been doing this thinking or doing this work for a long time. I know all these things, but somehow it all came together very nicely in this map. So it was a good calling card to start to gather that ecosystem around.

Koen van Seijen 15:34

Within the region, you mean as well. Yeah, specifically.

Ivana Gazibara 15:36

Within the region and beyond the region. So people within the region were saying, yes, this is this is true. This is actually the thing we need to be doing. And I know that because I've been doing this work for a long time, and those leverage points, they make sense to me. And yes, so we so the feedback on the map was very positive, but I totally recognize what you were saying. So I just stretched it for no reason. Yeah, no, it's got limited value, right? Unless you can make it a living map in some way, and this is part of what we want to do as a next step, and I'm sure we'll get into talking about this more broadly, but part of the Capital Orchestrator is this ambition to almost transform this map into a sort of systemic intelligence platform for the regen movement, where actually, if you can imagine, you can click in on each one of the leverage points and look at okay, what are the indicators of change that, for example, are telling me how things are evolving in this sort of transition finance space or in capacity building for region, et cetera, but also you can look at funding flows. So this is something that over time we've come to see as really critical, is that there's a lack of a cohesive map tracker, whatever you want to call it, that shows you where is money going today. Because once you know that, you can then start to sense where money is missing and where it needs to be going. Because you've got that sort of framework of the leverage point, so you know where money should be flowing for transformation, right? And then the final piece of that is of course deal flow. If you can organize deal flow systemically in the context of that map, then that is something that I think could really help people who are interested in supporting regen but are really struggling to find entry points.

Koen van Seijen 17:43

Yeah, no, you mentioned somewhere in the white paper as tracking life system transformation, which is like the tracking piece and life, I think is very interesting and very tricky at the same time. And deal flow as well, to organize that to to orchestrate flows of capital and also current to map the current system and the current flows of capital, because it's not that capital is not flowing, it's there is a lot of capital flowing in the current non-regenerative or extractive system. And so you mapped it and or you mapped it, is of course never done. You chose a certain frame to map the Midwest in that sense and look at capital potential or the potential of finance. And then how did the orchestrator surface out of that? Because I think you mentioned very early on already there, this will need

Transition Mapping Beyond Status Quo

Koen van Seijen 18:30

an active component. Like we cannot just map it and then leave it to the space and say, hey, now you've been mapped. Good luck.

Ivana Gazibara 18:36

That's right, yeah. So the mapping process was important for us in that we got to surface all kinds of useful things, right? The blockers and enablers of the transition, the systemic challenges that this gives rise to, those leverage points that I was mentioning earlier. But the other thing that showed up, which is a slightly more meta, is to do with how capital behaves in the system, right? So what we noticed was that there is a lot of money flowing into region ag. This is something you will know really well. There's different kinds of money flowing into region ag as well, right? So you've got the venture capitalists, you've got the public funders, you've got the philanthropists. Everyone is allocating their pot of money into the type of asset they have a mandate to invest in, let's say. But what isn't happening very much is those different types of allocators are very rarely in the same rooms together, much less actually actively coordinating their capital flows. Even though everyone is notionally working towards the same collective impact thesis, everyone wants to support the region ag ecosystem. Actually, no one is deeply collaborating in terms of how they coordinate capital. And so we then started to think, okay, well, but how do you do that? So the very idea of capital orchestration actually, in some ways, emerged from this piece of work because we were seeing this show up on the ground, this kind of lack of orchestration. And then inside Transcap, we started to have conversations about this, and different people were seeing the lack of capital coordination through different pieces of work. So it was emerging from practice, and then we internally started to think, okay, but what does that look like if you are orchestrating capital? What does that actually mean? In terms of a structural entity you have or not? Or is it a kind of network of organizations acting together? How do they behave? What do they actually do? How are they governed? All these questions started to pop up for us. So we decided to really focus in on this the capital orchestration as a concept, but also in practice, what would it mean to actually build one? Which is how the second phase of this work was born, because we decided to actually experiment with designing a capital orchestrator. And then we also thought, well, we need to let's do this with others. So if we were to run it as a piece of collective design where you, and this is where I really dipped into my roots and went, okay, let's put the system together in a room. So if you had farmers designing financial platforms with asset managers, with academics, with impact investors, with NGOs and funders, like what does what will they produce together? And that was the start of that journey was pulling together 20 different organizations into the room to do this kind of collective design work together.

Koen van Seijen 21:51

And and how long does that take? What's the just to put it in perspective, like mapping and then going from mapping to action and now launching. Orchestrator, it takes time just for people to give some perspective.

Ivana Gazibara 22:04

Yeah, it does take time. Take all of this with a grain of salt because a lot of this work was the first of its kind. So the transition mapping took at least a year, but that was pre-chat GPT days, and it was also, we were bastardizing a system mapping methodology, right? And trying to create our own. So that took a while. And then we had to think through well, how do we do the design work to be able to present this to the external world in a way that makes sense to them? So that was probably in total a year and a half.

Koen van Seijen 22:40

And when you say pre pre-ChatGPT, that suggests now it's going to be a lot faster, or what's your suggestion there?

Ivana Gazibara 22:47

Totally. So one of my colleagues did it again for another piece of work TransCup is doing, and he did it in two months.

Koen van Seijen 22:54

Wow. Because of AI.

Ivana Gazibara 22:55

Just to give you a sense, yeah. And it was simple, much a much simpler version. It involved much like we did a lot of one-to-one consultation with stakeholders from across the Midwest. We did a lot of kind of what you would call manual research, I guess, trawling through literature, all that sort of stuff. But also with the capital orchestration piece, right, you have to remember we were sort of experimenting with designing a process that hadn't really been run before, doing participatory financial platform design, again, not really a thing. So you have to sort of invent it a little bit as you go. And I guess that probably took another year between sort of process design, engaging all the design council members, and then actually running that process and getting to the point where we had designed the model and written it up and published it, in fact, as well. So yeah. So it took a while, but again, I like to say it's a bit like the first lab burger. It cost a million and took a year, but then that's the prototype, isn't it? So once you move past the prototype, it gets faster.

Koen van Seijen 24:07

And this process of mapping and then to action, we said it in our session at Tonic as well, I think is very relevant for any other agriculture system, first of all, and anyone else that wants to drive change at scale, and also other sectors. So there's the combo, it's just very powerful. And now we're talking end of April, beginning of May 26. Where are you now? The orchestrator, let's say, white paper or paper has been published, you're you've been working on it. We're gonna unpack what it actually means, but what's currently, let's say, on the stove.

Ivana Gazibara 24:45

Yeah, so we are currently both doing the detailed design of the four programs of work we've collectively set out for the orchestrator and doing the fundraising to be able to stand it up and structure it, and just generally doing a bit of communication and engagement to bring the concept to new audiences and socialize it a bit more because of exactly what you said, that it's relevant for other agricultural contexts, but also potentially as a blueprint for other large-scale change initiatives more broadly. So, yeah, we're firing on all cylinders, basically. It's busy.

Koen van Seijen 25:36

And raising money while you're building it is, of course, not easy. And so let's get into what your, you say four pillars which are exactly building or want to build, of course, depending on fundraising as well, and to really the analytic piece you did on like how much money is needed, so a number of billions for being flown around, and why that amount per hectare as well. Like you really did quite a deep analysis on what is needed to really drive regenerative transition at scale. That's just the money part, and then of course there's the system intelligence, the catalytic side, but also the field building. So let's unpack a bit what you are building at the moment while fundraising as well.

Ivana Gazibara 26:15

Yeah, so those four components, Kuhn, are we've already talked a little bit about the system intelligence platform, which is this kind of digital data platform that is essentially taking that transition map and using it as a sort of systemic capital deployment framework, right? Where you start to track, you identify and track key indicators of system health against each of the leverage points. You start to track financing flows, and candidly, this is very hard. So both of those things, in case you are wondering or were going to ask me, no, we have not worked it out.

Koen van Seijen 26:57

Figure it out yet. We can draw cover crops from space, and that's a good indicator, but there are a lot of other things are yeah, beating.

Ivana Gazibara 27:05

Well, there's stuff that you can publicly scrape, right? Like public funding flows, but there's lots of private capital flows that we that are much harder to get at. And then, of course, there's this thing of being able to organize deal flow across those leverage points and host it on that platform. So that's one piece of the capital orchestrator. And then the other piece that links directly to that is a matchmaking program where you're you effectively using that platform, that data platform, to start to act as

Making The Map Useful

Ivana Gazibara 27:40

a matchmaker between sources of capital and deals, right? And again, it's all using that system lens. So you're building investor coalition across those systemic needs areas and starting to identify synergies between individual investments in a way that really speaks to that transition map and as a framework for change. So that's the second piece.

Koen van Seijen 28:05

Which is very manually, I would guess, right? At the beginning.

Ivana Gazibara 28:09

You're right. That is sorry.

Koen van Seijen 28:11

It's not a swiping Tinder, whatever app you're using. No. Matchmaking could sound like that, but I think what have we seen in finance, unless it's publicly traded, where you can automate everything, the rest is very there's a lot AI can do, but there's a to reduce a lot of research time, probably, but at the same time, it's such a manual and in-person or personal experience.

Ivana Gazibara 28:35

It's such human work. You're so right. And you know this because of the work that you do at Tonic, and others do this work, and so part of what I would like this platform to be is to create infrastructure for the system where we start to open up some of those communities because Creo has a similar community of investors, Fora has a similar community of investors, the impact does, you guys do, and so it's like how do you bring them together and start to sort of open source deal flow a little bit more and create something that's really tailor-made for region, right? Because that's the other thing. There are matchmaking round tables, like deal maker round tables going on. There's nothing that's specifically geared for region, particularly in the Midwest. So that's one of the things we want to test out is what does that look like? And then how do you down the line, obviously, the data platform can start to support that, but it's very relational work. And I think we need to start building the coalition of investors to begin with, and that's very manual human-scale work, isn't it?

Koen van Seijen 29:44

No, no, absolutely. We see that with the podcast as well. It's such a art or to be able to know who to reach out to and when and how and what for which, because we get a lot of text, we do a lot of introductions in the background and the art of figuring out, okay, this could be interesting and relevant for someone asking for that, sharing the proposal, sharing the opportunity of the project or whatever it is, and figuring out where it connects. I think there's a lot we can do to not automate, but I think part of the augment that and to really figure out okay, how to get more people at the table in that sense, or how to remember who the people should be at the table is probably a better way to frame it. But it has to be super personal, at least in the beginning, and maybe in five or ten years when the flows of capital are much more automated, and this is not the asset class, but like a lens that we just apply across asset classes, and we know what KPIs we look for, we know um what ground cover or farmer in involvement we want, etc. etc. Then it becomes a different thing, but it's still so early.

Ivana Gazibara 30:47

Yeah. Agreed. And it's very word of mouth, isn't it?

Koen van Seijen 30:52

And FOMO.

Ivana Gazibara 30:52

So you hear, yeah, and there's a lot of things. Oh no, they are raising.

Koen van Seijen 30:56

Oh, they're raising, really, really. Yeah. There's space. Yes, there's space.

Ivana Gazibara 30:59

And if one family office is investing in something, they'll throw it to their friends and network members and they and so it would be nice to be able to systematize that a little bit more.

Koen van Seijen 31:14

Do you think that's possible? There's a general tension there, probably, to systemize such a flow, non let's say, non-linear or non-rational, because people think fundraising is rational, but it's not a process that really happens because of word of mouth and FOMO in many cases, or because they went to the same school or are playing golf at the same place. I'm just making up stuff. But is that what what's your feeling there?

Ivana Gazibara 31:42

I think you can probably systematize part of it. Like even just some of the by eliminating some of the inefficiencies in the process, like actually getting the right community of people convened together very deliberately at particular tables. Real, yeah, this is the level that I'm talking about. Sharing diligence, some of which happens already, but we could probably optimize that a little bit. And again, bringing this kind of systems lens to it. I think that's the real opportunity here, and that's the real kind of missing piece.

Koen van Seijen 32:19

Yeah, yeah, no, agreed, agreed. Um the fact that it's so manual now doesn't mean it cannot be partly automated or at least improved, augmented.

Ivana Gazibara 32:28

Yeah, exactly. So it so systematizing it, I guess, doesn't necessarily mean making it more automated. It could do.

Koen van Seijen 32:40

No, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, yeah. Yeah. And then there's a catalytic capital or finance piece as well.

Ivana Gazibara 32:47

Yeah, and so again, this is like a piece of the puzzle of orchestration in the sense that part of what's needed is this kind of flexible pot of capital that can address some of the unmet needs in the system, and by doing that, bring more capital allocators to particular tables, helping to unlock some of that broader participation. So you can see how it can be very complementary to the matchmaking piece as well. And so that's part of what we want to do is have the capital orchestrator actually host a catalytic fund and deploy capital. And then the fourth component is field building, which is really just about building the knowledge and the momentum for the transition across the investor community. So this is about all the stuff that we know is needed, like developing a shared understanding, being able to tell the compelling stories. We hosted

Why Capital Needs Orchestration

Ivana Gazibara 33:45

a kind of online launch a few months ago, and one of the things that came out of that was just that there is very little in the way of case studies of where catalytic capital has really made a difference in the region's space, how it has acted, what we learned from that.

Koen van Seijen 34:07

So just even being able to when you say catalytic capital, what do you mean by that?

Ivana Gazibara 34:14

Well, the sort of capital that comes in trying to explicitly do the sorts of things that commercial capital can't do in exchange for lower or no returns, and is geared at providing a an on-ramp for more commercial capital as well. So in the regen space, you will know this better than most people, but it's it's the sorts of things like guarantees, first loss commitments, yeah, taking that like a very high-risk early stage equity, yeah. All of that.

Koen van Seijen 34:50

So if you have examples of that, they should get in touch with you because that's what investors like to see our grantors, etc., before they do more. They need examples.

Ivana Gazibara 35:00

Yes, absolutely. So that is part of the reason why we actually decided that a catalytic fund should be part and parcel of the orchestrator, is exactly that is that we need demonstration deals out there that showcase how this work can happen. And we need to do that quite quickly, actually. So part of the objective is just move money quite quickly in order to create demonstration projects in the field that we can then, through the field building work, sure offer up to the community and say, Hey, you're the community of practice for this. Here's what we're learning. How can we align around this more with a broader audience? And how can we use it to build momentum for more of this kind of work?

Koen van Seijen 35:51

Yeah, and you have quite ambitious goals in that sense. I think I read like 1.4 billion in terms of catalytic capital, and that should mobilize an additional 7.5 that should be enough to transition 25% over the next 10 years of the Midwestern farmland. Can you walk us through those numbers just through not the exact amounts, but why that kind of of course the scale I understand, but why the 25%? Is 10 years reasonable? Is it like why the 1.7 versus 7.5%? What is that sort of core block of your goals?

Ivana Gazibara 36:27

Yeah, so I guess the first thing to say there, right, is that transforming the entirety of the Midwest farming system is a generational project. So it's not one that we are tackling alone, or in 10 years for that matter. But the 25% is really something that is about the fact that a kind of persistent, consistent minority can over time influence the majority. So we know this. There's been a lot of work around social tipping points and the point of social contagion being when a minority reaches roughly that 25%, research shows us across a number of different contexts that the influence of that minority becomes self-sustaining and starts to spread. So this is why the 25% is because of that minority influence theory.

Koen van Seijen 37:30

Because remember Nassim Talap talked about it, the stubborn minority. Is it farmland or farmers?

Ivana Gazibara 37:37

It's farmland. So we are thinking about this as a quarter of farmland acreage across the Midwest.

Koen van Seijen 37:44

Which should mean you this was really the biggest ones out there, right? That's the fastest or not. What's the what does it mean for strategy?

Ivana Gazibara 37:51

Uh good question. Good question. So this is a this is something I probably can't answer at this point. And in some ways, it might be a sort of trial and error practice. And again, like this is for us a sort of indicative orientation rather than something we're holding as an immutable goal. But we that's what we started with in order to then start to think about how do you cost out the transition. So pretty imperfect. When you look at transitioning a quarter of the farmland in the region, you can then start to think about, okay, what are the excuse me, what are the numbers? So you got to define what's in, what's out, what does that mean? What's a quarter of the acreage? So in this case, it's probably just shy of a 40 million. And then you start to look at, start to estimate the cost of the transition, which again is not perfect. You can say, okay, maybe it's $500 per acre, and you might have a 40 to 60 capex to opex split. And then you have to make some assumptions about how much your dollar of catalytic capital can mobilize in terms of commercial capital. So we did that as well. And we said, okay, well, if we take a punt at a dollar of catalytic capital, then mobilizing an additional six of commercial capital, that sort of gets us to some of those numbers. So your 1.4 billion in catalytic over, let's say, a decade needs to be able to mobilize an additional 7.5 billion. Now, this is of course just investment capital. The transition will cost more than that. And the devil in the detail that candidly we still need to work out is precisely what does transition mean?

Koen van Seijen 39:44

I was gonna ask that. Yeah. What's what's what's success, quote unquote? I'm doing air quotes that nobody sees. What does success look like? Yeah.

Ivana Gazibara 39:52

Yeah, so so you know, that's we still need to really pinpoint what that means, but presumably you start with conventionally managed land, farmland, you then have to have a set of regenerative practices that have been adopted that you need to define. How many, which ones, and still you need to acknowledge that the land might not be fully regenerated. Because you and I know this like these sorts of ecological outcomes that we're looking for can take years. So transition is a key word here. It needs to acknowledge that soil recovery can take anywhere from three to ten years, that farmers are gonna have learning curves, that they're gonna need financial buffers, that in the early years you might not show any positive outcomes. So there's quite a lot that we still need to bottom out, like which practices for how long? Is it verified? Is it self-reported, practice-based or outcome-based metrics? What would cause your acres to no longer qualify? All that stuff, I think.

Koen van Seijen 40:55

Can you go back? Yeah, yeah, to come. And yeah. How does that land with funders that you have not figured this out, which are not as a critique because these are very tricky to figure out, but how is that how does that land with potential funders for the orchestrator? Like that's part of the job and part of the work to actually figure that out over time, and it might move because regenerative forms of agriculture will continue to evolve depending on your context, depending on how agroforestry takes off in the Midwest, etc. How does that land with funders as fundraising saying we're actually gonna figure that out over time?

Ivana Gazibara 41:29

Well, we so we haven't yet started having conversations with all the funders, right? So at the moment in time, at this moment in time, we're still focusing on raising core operating support for the capital orchestra. Yeah, but I mean with to be able to stand it up.

Koen van Seijen 41:50

By doing that, do they require you to have more clarity on these things, or actually they know that this is part of the process?

Ivana Gazibara 41:57

I think most of the funders that are in our ecosystem right now know that this is part of the process. But I think one thing that actually will challenge us potentially even earlier than that, is the structure of the fund. So we're actually working on the fund design at the moment, and part of what I'm already hearing from funders, investors, and others in the ecosystem is just keep it simple, right? Press the easy button.

Koen van Seijen 42:34

If there was one.

Ivana Gazibara 42:40

So if you are, as we are trying to do, is create a capital stack that should really span from non-commercial system building money to fully institutionalized institutional investment over time, if you want to do, if you want to build a fund that really demonstrates a different way for capital to behave, then it's probably not the easy button.

Koen van Seijen 43:06

No, no.

Ivana Gazibara 43:07

So I I think in some ways, if we

The Four Parts Of RECO

Ivana Gazibara 43:10

get to the point where funders are saying, How are you verifying outcomes? We're probably in a good place in that we will have overcome that initial hurdle of people saying, Yes, I'm on board with a really polycapital financing vehicle that orchestrated just different types of money into different types of interventions, and I'm gonna trust you with that.

Koen van Seijen 43:38

Which is not an easy one to get to for a first time fund manager in that sense, and in general, such a uh yeah, complex and complicated in in both ways, space. In general, it's difficult to fundraise. Imagine say, we're gonna do 15 different things. We know we're gonna be really good at it, but we don't know, we can't show you that yet. And just trust us. With with all your types of money, please. Yeah.

Ivana Gazibara 44:03

Yeah. So that is what I am anticipating.

Koen van Seijen 44:07

Yeah. And to shift gears a bit to questions we always like to ask is on the investor side, let's say we do this in front of a an audience of investors in in Chicago, in in the financial heart of the Midwest, which I guess is Chicago, I'm not sure. And we do it in the theater and we do it live, and we have an amazing meal before, and it's an interesting conversation on stage. What do you want them to remember the next day when they go back to their offices and when they have to do things? What's the one seed you want to plant in the minds, let's say, of investors? Could be their own money, could be managing other people's money around this transition that you're trying to achieve.

Ivana Gazibara 44:48

So it's probably this idea of one plus one equals three investing. So the idea that we actually need to invest in strategic portfolios so that each individual investment we make is actually reinforcing the other. You have to look out. At TransCap, we call this combinatorial effects, but you can call it whatever you want. The idea, the basic idea is to just illustrate it with an example. Chestnuts, sure, you need to be able to support the commercialization of those through a kind of accelerator model as well, which is actually growing that entrepreneurship ecosystem. But you also need to start thinking about processing facilities for chestnuts or whatever else it is you're supporting. So that's a different, that's a kind of, I don't know, mix of debt, equity. It's a sort of infrastructure investment, isn't it? You probably need to support a TA program that's gonna help farmers learn how to grow chestnuts. You probably need to provide a sort of first loss tranche into a loan product that's gonna help them help incentivize those farmers to farm the chestnuts, etc. etc. Right. So it's this ecosystem of interventions that you really need to support that mission. And so that I guess that's the it's not simple, it's not a one-liner, but that's the thing. It's one plus one equals three. That's what we need to make happen.

Koen van Seijen 46:56

Which probably is the case for all interventions in agriculture and food, going from not the simplest, but no-till, going from water cycle restoration, going from reducing or eliminating chemical inputs from fossil fuels in agriculture, etc. etc. etc. Yet the single solution probably isn't there, and every solution needs like a whole suite of approaches, because not a lot of these things are super shovel ready and waiting to be quote unquote exploited or waiting to be okay, let's just scale this as crazy and fast as possible, because then yeah, that the rest will just take care of itself. These are not SaaS models.

Ivana Gazibara 47:36

Totally. Totally. And it takes, if you just go back to everything we've just talked through with the chestnuts example, it takes different kinds of money.

Koen van Seijen 47:46

And different kinds of people, probably.

Ivana Gazibara 47:48

And different kinds of people.

Koen van Seijen 47:49

I argue that it doesn't have to be the same. It's crazy to put that on a on an entrepreneur that set up a chestnut bar or whatever product or flower and say, yeah, but you have to figure out all the other pieces as well. You definitely have to think about supply, and you can think how vertically integrated you want to be. But in any other sector, we call it specialization and we build it up.

Ivana Gazibara 48:10

That's right.

Koen van Seijen 48:11

And so why in agriculture has that been so separated? What agriculture has been. I mean, there's a huge processing industry, there's a huge farming lending industry, there's a huge, depending where you are, a machinery in industry. All these pieces are there, just not necessarily for the regenerative side of things. They're very extractive, but very well organized and very well orchestrated, or there are very big farmer boards, huge cooperatives, like we've organized a lot of these things just for one direction of a system.

Ivana Gazibara 48:42

Well, yeah, that's inevitably true. The system is not, the system is working. Often people say the food system is broken. It's not broken. It's just working towards a certain set of incentives, right? That we've put into place. These are all human-made structures. It's just right now it is not working, as you say, towards regenerative outcomes.

Koen van Seijen 49:08

And so why do you think so it would that suggest that it's I'm not saying easy, but definitely are those case studies we can point to almost? Like we we know how to organize machinery and rent it out, we know how to finance farms, we know how to process stuff at scale, probably a bit to consolidate it, but we know how to move food around, etc. This is not new. We don't have to invent it, we just have to retool or re-he purpose.

Ivana Gazibara 49:35

I think that's right. And I I think you're absolutely spot on to pinpoint that we have a lot of the structures that are needed, right? So it's not the starting point for our work is not that we are saying we don't need farmer lending or we don't need insurance, crop insurance, we just need to borrow your word, retool how it works because it's all about incentives. And then those incentives over time get ossified and create culture, don't they? So if we have out there crop insurance products that are actively disincentivizing regenerative practices, because for instance, as a grower, you can't really get insured if you do crop rotation in a lot of cases.

Koen van Seijen 50:31

Just to let that land, people. That's where we are.

Ivana Gazibara 50:35

Yeah, exactly. Let that land. And if lending products out there don't allow you to bridge that financial and yield gap we know exists during the transition, then you're up the shit creek with no paddle.

Speaker 1 50:50

Yeah.

Ivana Gazibara 50:50

Right? So and those kinds of disincentives, they become structural after a while. So they start to shape the culture of farming. So then you start to get into just inertia to change as well. So in some ways, it's not that the structures don't exist, it's that we need to shift incentives. Uh shift incentives, exactly.

Koen van Seijen 51:16

And and of those, like in the Midwest, those structures, you've talked to many of those people in that system, in the lending system, in the insurance part, how is their sense of urgency or how is their interest in transitioning? Or is it it's so ingrained we're doing this tramline and we're we can't get out because our wheels are going in there anyway. Even if I wanted to go to the right, I'm basically forced to go straight.

Ivana Gazibara 51:43

So I guess I would call the stage we're in a kind of prototyping stage. There's lots of conversations happening out there about the need for different insurance products and the need for different lending vehicles. And there's there's a few pilots, but we are not at the point where we're really consolidating that, right? And it and there are, of course, insurance is regulated differently to other financial instruments, and so that that will be a challenge, but there's a lot more talk than our demonstrator projects out there that show a different way. It has been my observation about the last few years of work, which is part of the reason why we'd like to just keep building the plane whilst flying it and start to move money in different directions in order to be able to create more of those demonstration effects out in the field. It's funny, you had a you sent me a set of questions ahead of this podcast, didn't you? And one of your questions was if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the agriculture industry, what would it be? And I thought about it this morning ahead of getting on the call with you, and I thought, actually, if I could wave my wand and change one thing in the agriculture industry, it would be to change the finance industry. Right? Because it would shape that's that incentives point again.

Koen van Seijen 53:14

And what would you do as you're asking your questions now? Yeah.

Ivana Gazibara 53:18

It's being able to, that's why we're doing the work that we're doing. It's about changing the amount of support and the type of support that farmers get in order to create a different incentive structure, which can then start to shift practice. And I think with a capital orchestrator, it's for us that task is to create a kind of catalytic fund that demonstrates a different way for capital to move.

Koen van Seijen 53:45

And so I think that answers another question we love to ask as well. You're shy of 400 million, but what would you do with a billion dollars? You're shy of the 1.4 you you need over the next 10 years, which of course could be less or more depending on how things develop. This is a budget and calculation, not something set in stone. But if you would basically have access to that kind of resources overnight, I guess you have a pretty detailed plan. What would be the main buckets? What would be to put that to work, which could be very long term, doesn't have to be short term, luckily, but it has to be put to work. What would you do?

Ivana Gazibara 54:19

Yeah. So I love that you said one billion and not one million.

Koen van Seijen 54:24

We've that with inflation on the podcast, so it's been we're adding zeros. No, if we actually ask one billion from the beginning, and so which is almost ten years now, I have to look actually if that if the normalness of a billion has has changed or not. My feeling is that we might have to add a zero at some point because the billions have been thrown around much more than 10 years ago. But let's keep it at a billion. I wanted to ask a crazy amount of money, concentrated resources, and what would you do? Not saying that anyone should have access to that overnight. One person, I don't think that's uh that's safe at all. But what if it happens? A long lost aunt somewhere, I don't know, that passed away and you didn't know, she didn't suffer, but you do check your bank account in the morning and sell a leader, and you call your bank and you're like, is this a mistake? And they say, No, it's not. What would you do?

Ivana Gazibara 55:12

So I don't know if you're a hockey fan, Kuhn, but in the immortal words of Wayne Gretzky, we have to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is. And so I think I would want to do some investing that effectively focuses on that holistic ecosystem engineering, right? So

The 25% Tipping Point Math

Ivana Gazibara 55:40

you'd want to use a venture sleeve to change what is getting built, you'd want to use a credit sleeve to change what is getting financed, you'd want to invest in funds, actually, as well, because that way you're changing what is getting scaled. You use the catalytic capital to change what is getting de-risked in a way, and then you also use grants to uh change what's possible in the system. So you're I would say build the capital stack that spans uh that whole spectrum, really.

Koen van Seijen 56:21

And do you see because part of the reason we ask this question as well is because we see, or but my assumption is, and I don't know, I'm curious if you agree to a certain extent or not, if that these kind of money, which means large nine zeros and more, is starting to show up in this space. Or like sooner or later, we'll get those knocks on the door of insurance companies, of private wealth, of let's say that kind of capital that somehow somewhere got bitten by the soil bug or regeneration or sees all the roads lead to Rome, as Tania Rodriguez likes to say, and realizes okay, agriculture has to change. And my assumption is that it's not necessarily that we don't have that money will come into the space. I'm not sure if we have the structures to absorb that money, if the infrastructure is there. Literally, like the pipe. Like, how do we get if Wall Street wakes up to the potential of regeneration, and we can argue how deep that is or not? But it's also a very interesting investment opportunity if large uh grand foundations start to wake up to the absolutely fundamental underlying need of regenerating soil at scale. Are we ready to absorb all those? Do you see that? Have you seen that shift also over the last years that it's not the millions but the billions starting to knock? I'm not saying it flows yet, but I'm starting to sense it's not that far out because it's such a the realization of the food and agriculture system, as you said at the beginning, is starting to dawn on people. Like it probably is one of the biggest, if not the biggest one to tackle and it's urgent.

Ivana Gazibara 57:54

So I think in order for that kind of money to flow more, we need to create the aggregation vehicles. So this is the other thing that we ponder with the Capital Orchestrator is actually part of what you need, a kind of aggregation vehicle that can absorb, as you say, that kind of money. And then building that sort of system change stack so that you're following a degree of logical progression so that your grants are about building enabling conditions, your catalytic capital is about the de-risking. Once you've done those pieces, you've got the credit piece that finances the farmers, you need the infrastructure piece, which is about the processing, the kind of storage aggregation, and build out the venture, which is about the new things that you need to build, but also a fund of funds that can really scale capital that feeds that ecosystem. Because you and I know that there's all kinds of intermediaries out there that exist already that cannot absorb that type of capital.

Koen van Seijen 59:01

But maybe in fund two or three they could, if fund one actually gets funded, which is not the easiest thing to do, as we know.

Ivana Gazibara 59:07

Which is not the easiest thing to do, yeah. But also if you had a kind of aggregation fund of funds that can absorb that kind of capital that then feeds the different players in the ecosystem with the amount of capital they can absorb in that moment in time, they will eventually get to the point of scale capital as well.

Koen van Seijen 59:27

So you're saying if we build that, those aggregate aggregation vehicles, the money will flow. Is the money currently already in knocking on the door, but there are there's no way to open the door? What do you see? Do you see the money already there? You say, actually, we have to build the vehicles first, otherwise it just doesn't, it doesn't show up.

Ivana Gazibara 59:44

So I think we we have to build the aggregation vehicles, but I also think that there's different ways in which that money doesn't show up. So there's there's uh an entry point for also smaller funders. There's smaller pots of money which are also completely disaggregated right now, and where actually you might have a smallish foundation that writes smaller order of magnitude checks and just doesn't think that it has an entry point, is interested in supporting regenerative agriculture, but doesn't really think that they can make a meaningful contribution.

Speaker 1 1:00:25

So they don't, yeah.

Ivana Gazibara 1:00:25

So there's so they don't, and so there's that level of aggregation of smaller pots of money which are currently totally fragmented, and then there's more institutional scale checks, and there I think it's missing vehicles, but also there's something around which keeps showing up again and again is actuarial quality data that that is going to be needed. And so there's something around building data layers that can eventually provide that. And so this is just like literally the impact that regenerative practices have on things like yield, on climate resilience. We don't have that yet. Yeah, we have anecdotal, but not not not in a yeah, anecdotal piece pockets of data, right? It's not we're not at ground zero, but it's not at the level at which it needs to be, it's not pulled together, it's not open. One might argue that certain data layers need to be open so that not everybody has to reinvent the wheel every time they have to underwrite something.

Koen van Seijen 1:01:35

Yeah, in terms of longer-term work here, do you see TransCap leading this work for this is a generational work you mentioned, like local involvement, local ownership? How do you think about that around this orchestrator?

Ivana Gazibara 1:01:52

Yeah, so this is that's a good question. We've obviously been thinking about that a lot. This is a spin-out for us. We are really interested in the design and implementation of the financial blueprint, the model. It's obviously a very place-based initiative, and it needs to live in that place. And so if we manage to set it up and implement it, it will gradually emerge out of TransCap and start to live as its own thing, run by people who are embedded in the region. But also in the run-up to that, we are thinking quite seriously about governance now, right? So we will be pulling together a sort of stewardship council, which even whilst Transcap is incubating this and setting it up and getting it running, the stewardship council is very much about bringing regional stakeholders together as the kind of leaders and strategic stewards and decision makers of this initiative. So that's the rough plan.

Koen van Seijen 1:03:06

And as a final question, which usually leads to other final questions, but what do you believe to be true about regenerative agricultures, that agriculture, sorry, or regenerative agriculture forms, I think is the more safe way now of mentioning it, that others don't believe to be true. This definitely is inspired by John Kemp and a question he often asks on the podcast, but where do you are where are you contrarian? Also within, let's say, our circles, our bubble, etc., or maybe within the systems change community, where do you have some strong contrarian opinions?

Ivana Gazibara 1:03:37

Yeah, well, look, I think there is a lot of skepticism in the environmental movement about regenerative agriculture, right? So when you step out of the regenerative agriculture bubble, there are a lot of people out there that think that Regen Ag supporters are apologists for the meat industry. I'm sure you've heard this before. And I think it's one of those terrible examples of how binary we can sometimes be as humans. Because, of course, there are people out there who think that a bit of no-till and a bit of cover cropping equals regeneration. And a bit of spray and a bit of spray of the movie.

Koen van Seijen 1:04:19

But it's it's an argument we hear. It's funny because it's something.

Ivana Gazibara 1:04:22

Sure.

Koen van Seijen 1:04:23

I'm not saying daily, but weekly, especially, like you say, people outside the bubble. And the enemy part is, I think, way more sensitive in that sense. But yeah, the let's say regen washing and how that gets framed also by input companies mostly. Like this is fundamentally part of the regen movement, and basically it's very difficult to do regen without spraying. But then we can do no too, and then we're good. And that notion is ooh, that's yeah, interesting. Let's say that the framing is getting there now. But of course, I don't think anybody, not anybody, but most people in deeper in the bubble would agree on that. The problem is yeah, what the rest of the people outside the bubble think.

Ivana Gazibara 1:05:07

Yeah, and this is, as you say, this does exist. But then these things also then become memes, right? It's the way that we've had the organic can't feed the world meme, right? That's been a meme for decades now.

Koen van Seijen 1:05:21

Uh and organic doesn't make any difference in nutrients, which we even in the bubble sometimes feed, which I'm like, I'm not sure if that's relevant, even though I think a lot of research has shown significant differences can be better. I'm not saying that none like soil health and organic is in some cases definitely an issue, but yeah, the meme is definitely not wholly true. But yeah, it's been a very strong narrative. Okay, great, but how are you gonna feed the world in general in regen as well? Okay, this is a great thing, this is very cute. But yeah, I've heard that we're all gonna starve if we do that.

Ivana Gazibara 1:05:54

Yeah, and this is so the this is a global meme, right? How are we gonna feed the world, right? It's not That it's just within region circles. These are the like large the large-scale memes. The other kind of large-scale meme is the carbon footprint of beef, right? And that just continues to haunt the region movement. Of course, if you do a bit of digging, you

Incentives In Insurance And Lending

Ivana Gazibara 1:06:20

know where that comes from. And it's that kind of seminal Nemichek and Moore paper from Oxford University that basically assessed, I can't even remember, 50,000 farms are in the world, so it's the biggest sample yet, and assess the carbon footprint of different farming systems. However, of course, the challenge with that is that it's a vast generalization. So of course, if you're eating beef from a huge feedlot that's fed imported soy, it's gonna have a massive carbon footprint and water footprint, et cetera. But of course, the beef from your local farm that operates a closed herd, it's small, it's grass-fed, et cetera, it's gonna have a really different footprint. But the issue is that our human brains like to just minimize that complexity, right?

Speaker 1 1:07:02

Those are bad.

Ivana Gazibara 1:07:03

And then yeah. And the message of how we eat and how that affects our ecosystems is a really complex one. It challenges that simplicity we like to have in our and hold in our brains. And of course, integrated farming systems have a lot of benefits for soil, for nutritional density, for the ability of soil to absorb carbon. And I really believe that to be true. And that is part of the challenge that we have in the region ecosystem is explaining the nuance and complexity of that. So, yes, eat more plants, generally speaking, but if that means consuming large quantities of grain crops that are grown in large-scale intensive monocrop systems and lots of imported produce, then probably not.

Koen van Seijen 1:07:54

And do you see that with funders? I see it often with curious about regeneration, then starting not doing so much digging, and then get really confused.

Ivana Gazibara 1:08:04

So I think within our kind of ecosystem of funders and investors, it's mostly the first movers still. So they're the people who understand this stuff and want to support this stuff. Of course, everybody has certain points of confusion, and this is a complex field. I think where I see it more is outside of that region circle. Maybe with I sit on the advisory board for a sustainable investment fund where we have these sorts of conversations all the time of but can organic feed the world and the carbon footprint of beef? And so I think it's the it's the wider communities that are maybe region curious rather than already. Yeah, just needed to system doing the work.

Koen van Seijen 1:08:54

What have you seen when somebody says that can organic feed the world or how can you eat red meat? Or that's a personal tourist apart from the growing system. What's your normal response to that? Go go and look at the real data, it's not really effective. Like, what's the what's your normal go-to answer to that without going into a three-hour lecture about methane and cows because that's not very effective, I think?

Ivana Gazibara 1:09:22

No, I think I've started to go like really plain English in in the sense that if somebody's talking to me about something that I'm not an expert in and don't fully understand, I just want them to strip out all the jargon and talk about how rotational grazing, like moving your cattle from one pasture to another, is actually really good for biodiversity and how hoofs pack in the soil, and that's really good for soil carbon storage. Talk about things that people have seen because the beauty of the food system is that it's visible to people on some level, right? It's not like the energy system, it's just impenetrable and invisible. Like electricity.

Koen van Seijen 1:10:03

Who has seen electricity? I'm sorry, but yeah. Is it really there?

Ivana Gazibara 1:10:07

Right. Maybe if you've seen the Tesla coil demonstration, you're like, I've experienced it. But food is really different. And I think so, it like really plain English education, the way we talk about things really matters. I always think 90% of our problems really are communication challenges in some ways. I think most people can understand the concept of cows grazing on grass and crops growing in fields. So playing on the some of the simpler messages, I think, is better. And that's how I've approached it when people throw the George Mombio art argument of should shouldn't we just move it all into the lab, etc.

Koen van Seijen 1:10:55

I feel like he's he's toned it down a bit again. I mean, he he does his waves. People have been arguing we should get him on the podcast. I don't really see the added benefit. But doesn't it?

Ivana Gazibara 1:11:03

No, I'm not sure. Yeah, I think I would agree with you. But the thing he does well, and I think we need to do more of, is storytelling. I don't know if you've ever watched him. He always opens with a story, he just dives right in. There's no introduction.

Koen van Seijen 1:11:18

Let me tell you a story. I was on the problem. Yeah, no, I've seen him we need to be way better storytellers. But does that mean maybe part of the should the order of buckets you're building reverse in terms of field building first and basically put all the 1 billion or 1.4 into turning the practitioners in our space into better storytellers?

Ivana Gazibara 1:11:40

That's a great question, and in so in some ways it will be answered in part by what's feasible? What's because of course something has to come first, and what is the most viable thing to do first? And in many ways, we will start with field building and already have through some of the gatherings we've had, but of course, the field building is directly linked to the matchmaking for us and the work that we do. So we'll be field building in a way that is also building a community of investors that can act in this space collectively.

Koen van Seijen 1:12:16

I think it's a perfect moment to wrap up and to thank you for the work you do. I think there's I had a few lines here that summarizes really well to change the way money moves through the agriculture system in the region so that the right kind of capital in the right amount flows to the areas with the greatest strategic potential to accelerate the transition to regenerative agriculture. Thank you for coming on here. Thank you for your work, the pioneering work you're doing, and of course, I hope to check in how the orchestrator, the capital orchestrator, is taking shape over the next years.

Ivana Gazibara 1:12:47

Thank you for a great conversation. I think the podcasts that are a kind of free-flowing, fun

Beef Carbon Myths And Regen Nuance

Ivana Gazibara 1:12:55

conversation are always the best. And I think that's what we've done today. So that's felt wonderful. And that that what you've just read out feels like a mouthful. So I think I might now go away and boil it down into simpler English. That might be my task.

Koen van Seijen 1:13:14

We'll check in when that happens, yeah.

Ivana Gazibara 1:13:17

Thanks, Kirin. It's been lovely.

Koen van Seijen 1:13:22

So, first of all, thank you for listening all the way to the end, obviously. And let me know what you think or what you thought. I think we often talk about systems change or how to change very complex systems, and one of them obviously is the food system and the agriculture system. And then when it gets concrete or real, okay, we need 1.4 billion, we need 10 years, it needs to attract at least another seven and a half to get to 25% of farmland, etc. etc. It makes it very, very real and very interesting, very relevant, but also potentially scary. Like, is that possible? Can you plan systems around that like our systems so complex that you can't, or do you need to try anyway? So I'm very, very curious what you thought about this episode. Because as soon as you have identified crucial intervention points, in this case in the Midwest and agriculture system, the question becomes how are you gonna finance it? And I think that we see now with some of the work in Europe around the agri-food systems change map and Mesa, which is a co-founding alliance, and now also in the US, with Reiko, the question really becomes okay, we can identify very relevant intervention points where a system could really tip and really change. How do we put money behind it? So if this triggered you at all to explore that in your regions, please let me know and any other feedback as well. As always, you can find us through the social media channels at the website. And as always, thank you for listening and hope to hear you 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 regenerative agriculture.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.