A Decade in the Field: Chuck de Liedekerke of Soil Capital

When Chuck founded Soil Capital back in 2013, agriculture wasn't widely viewed as a scalable avenue for carbon outcomes. A decade later, regenerative programs have gained prominence as a viable solution for food system resilience and climate risk reduction.

That rise mirrors Soil Capital's own growth. The company's first corporate partnership was a modest €3,000 agreement. Today, Soil Capital is designing programs with vastly larger corporate backing and far more impact for producers, paying farmers €20 million and counting for their transition towards regenerative agriculture.

The way capital enters the system has changed dramatically in this time. Chuck and team started by convincing individual farmers to adopt new practices backed by a single program funder. They’ve since moved to demonstrating value to multiple corporates across a full crop rotation, and are now getting the attention of actors outside the supply chain like banks, investors, and policymakers. Each new stakeholder has helped direct capital more effectively than the last.

As investment has matured and diversified, the science of measuring outcomes has also grown more sophisticated, revealing a fuller and more positive picture of regenerative agriculture's impact.

From convincing farmers to convincing capital

At first, Chuck explained, the work was about convincing farmers that regenerative practices were necessary and finding one funder willing to back a program. Over time, that had to expand. First the industry had to prove the business case to corporations, and now to bring banks, investors, and policymakers into the fold. Each group, once it understands the case for regenerative agriculture, is able to direct capital toward it in ways the last group couldn't.

That evolution is visible in how corporations themselves have engaged. 

"The corporates that need to be involved today to actually enable change to happen at farm level are not the corporates that are willing to fund pilots," Chuck said. "It's those that are prepared to deploy capital that are going to impact a large amount of farmers on a large area."

The trajectory has been consistent: "[Corporations] went from pilots to big projects, and now they're going to need to go to firm-wide or group-wide projects, to generalize across the whole supply chain."

Much of that shift was driven by a hard lesson about doing it alone.

"None of these corporates wanted to be alone in financing the transition [to regenerative practices]," Chuck said. "It put them at a competitive disadvantage and it made programs fragile." The response has been a real move toward shared, pre-competitive investment:

"For a long time, everyone has said the words ‘pre-competitive’... I think we're starting to understand what it looks like in a scalable way now."

Policymakers have always been part of the industry’s evolution, but they seem to be making more of an impact today. Chuck sees policymakers moving with real intent as other sectors begin to prioritize nature-based climate solutions and supply chain resilience. 

"I'm really glad to see that the European Commission is thinking quite pragmatically about how to build a market," he said, pointing to early talk of a buyer's club. 

Even mandatory regulation, often viewed warily by corporates, is starting to look more like an asset than a threat: 

"We've heard from quite a few businesses that if a mandatory regulation helps create a level playing field that is going to mitigate risk for everybody, then actually that might not be a bad thing." In the nearer term, he sees public-private partnerships as the practical starting point: "We need the public sector's involvement, probably in the first instance through public-private partnerships."

Industry growth comes from understanding value

What's brought farmers, corporates, and now investors and policymakers to the table is the value of investment becoming concrete and immediate. Regenerative agriculture, in Chuck's framing, helps companies reach their climate goals and reduce climate risk, helps farmers support their operations financially, and builds food system resilience that holds up across sectors, sourcing regions, and ingredients. This isn't a narrow, single-issue benefit, and it isn't a distant, future payoff either.

The business case, of course, begins with farmers. Chuck is direct that none of the rest works without them, a position Soil Capital has always prioritized

"Farmer needs come first," he said. "If you can't cater to the basic needs of the farmers... then you're not going to have a transition to begin with." Crucially, the value of regenerative practices isn't dependent on external payment alone: 

"Regenerative agriculture is better agronomy and should translate into better economics," he said.

Good practices should pay for themselves before any outside capital even arrives, which is part of what makes the broader case so durable to new investors evaluating it from the outside.

That durability also depends on thinking at the right scale. “Change needs to happen at ecosystem level today, not just at field level.” This framing matters as much to a bank assessing landscape-level risk as it does to a farmer improving a single field.

The science has caught up: a fuller picture of impact

Alongside that widening circle of stakeholders, Chuck pointed to a parallel shift in how regenerative program outcomes are measured. Changes in measurement have changed what the industry believes regenerative agriculture actually delivers. "

We went through the whole carbon tunnel vision debate," he said, "but biodiversity and water stewardship need to be measured in their own rights."

Where the conversation once began and ended with carbon, it now routinely includes carbon, ecosystem outcomes and long-term supply resilience.

This assessment of regenerative outcomes, which has gained traction in recent years, has revealed a wide-ranging positive impact and made the value case easier for new stakeholders to trust. It's also made the underlying efficiency of the approach harder to ignore. "Agriculture and nature-based solutions in general are a very efficient way of delivering the change we need on a landscape level," Chuck said. He points to the 1 million tonnes of CO2 farmers in Soil Capital programs have collectively reduced or removed.

Looking ahead

Chuck is confident the hardest proof point is already behind the industry. "Today we have a very competitive blueprint for scalable transitions at farmer level," he said. What we need now is to continue to widen that circle of capital, at a pace that matches how ready farmers already are to make the change.

Learn more about the evolution of regenerative agriculture in our series, A Decade in the Field →