regenerative-agriculture
(30)
Stone Road Built a Beautiful Cannabis Brand. Then the Bills Got Ugly.
Lex Corwin paired an off-grid California farm with packaging made for the design shelf. The harder trick was learning when to outsource, when to shrink, and when a sale was not worth chasing.
The Dirt Is Cheap. Proving It Is Not: Yard Stick's Bet on Better Soil Carbon Data
Soil can store carbon, but the proof has been slow, costly and easy to distrust. Yard Stick is building the measurement layer that tells carbon-project developers and food companies whether the dirt is actually doing what the spreadsheet promised.
The Chemical Engineer Who Roasted Her Way From a Kitchen in Rural Virginia to a National First
Candy Schibli left engineering and international development to build Southeastern Roastery - now the first Black-woman-owned certified organic coffee co-packer in the country. The method is part chemistry, part conservation.
GreenPoint Is Turning the Forgotten Corners of Infrastructure Into Operating Systems
The New York investment firm has raised more than $1 billion to combine land, operators and software - from truck terminals and fleet-charging hubs to farms and housing.
The Yellow Can Is Now Yerba Madre - and the Name Change Is the Least Interesting Part
After nearly three decades as Guayakí, America's dominant yerba mate brand changed the label, kept the yellow can and made its real product easier to see: a market for the forest left standing.
The Flour Company That Turned Free Advice Into a Business Moat
King Arthur Baking sells flour, but its real edge is the confidence wrapped around the bag: tested recipes, patient teachers and a hotline for cakes in distress. After more than two centuries, the employee-owned company is still finding new ways to make bakers come back.
The egg company that put a farm's name on every carton
How a 20-hen Texas farm turned radical transparency and 108 square feet of pasture per bird into a $759 million business - one carton at a time.
Frontier Co-op
A two-person spice operation that began in an Iowa river cabin now links tens of thousands of member-owners to growers around the world. Its real product is not only what sits in the jar - it is a supply chain designed to keep quality, livelihoods and accountability in the same conversation.
General Mills
It began as one flour mill on the Mississippi in 1866. A century and a half later, General Mills fills roughly nine in ten American pantries - and is betting its next chapter on cereal, snacks and, increasingly, the dog bowl.
Nature's Path Foods
Forty years ago a berry-farmer's son turned his father's one-line advice into a cereal company. Nature's Path is still family-run, still refuses to sell, and still puts organic breakfast on tables in more than 40 countries.
ButcherBox
How a founder who once lost investors' money built a half-billion-dollar meat company on a Kickstarter, a trash bag of grass-fed beef, and a refusal to take venture capital.
Bel Group
How a Jura cheesemaker became a 120-country snacking machine - and why a 160-year-old family business is now spending it on regenerative farms and lab-made dairy.
Bayer
Bayer is trying to make one science company work at three speeds: the long clock of drug discovery, the seasonal rhythm of farming and the everyday urgency of self-care. Its turnaround will depend on whether that range becomes an advantage rather than a burden.
ADM
The company you have never heard of is inside almost everything you eat. Here is how a linseed-crushing shop from 1902 became the invisible spine of the global food supply.
BioLumic
BioLumic is a New Zealand-founded agricultural biotechnology company that uses precisely tuned ultraviolet light treatments to program desirable traits into seeds and seedlings without genetic modification. Applied in seconds, its patented 'light recipes' switch on plants' natural genetic expression to deliver double-digit yield gains, stronger disease resistance and stress tolerance across crops including corn, soybean, rice and ryegrass. The company partners with seed producers to commercialize non-GMO, climate-smart traits at scale.
Loam Bio
Loam Bio is an Australian agricultural biotechnology company using naturally occurring microbial fungi to help crops store more stable, long-lasting carbon in soil. Founded in 2019 by a group of farmers and climate scientists, it coats seeds with its CarbonBuilder inoculum so plants pull atmospheric CO2 into recalcitrant, mineral-bound soil carbon, and pairs the biology with its SecondCrop program that helps growers measure, verify and sell soil carbon credits. Backed by more than US$119M from investors including Lowercarbon Capital, Wollemi Capital and Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, Loam is scaling from its Orange, NSW base into the United States.
Solena
Solena is an agricultural biotechnology company that reads the microbiome of farm soil the way a doctor reads a blood panel. Farmers mail in a soil sample; Solena sequences the DNA of the microbes living in it, scores the soil's biological health with its MISS index, and its Prometheus platform turns that data into AI-driven prescriptions for what to apply, when, and how much. The goal is fewer synthetic inputs, healthier soil, better yields, and eligibility for carbon and regenerative-agriculture incentives.
Verdant Robotics
Verdant Robotics is a Hayward, California agtech company building AI-driven precision farming robots. Its flagship SharpShooter is a tractor-pulled implement that uses computer vision and a bank of aiming nozzles to treat individual plants - weeding, thinning, fertilizing and spraying with millimeter accuracy - instead of blanketing whole fields. The pitch to growers of high-value specialty crops like carrots, lettuce and onions: cut chemical inputs by more than 96%, reduce hand-weeding costs, and collect plant-level data along the way. Founded in 2018 and led by roboticist Gabe Sibley, the company raised a $46.5M Series A in 2022 and commercially launched the SharpShooter in 2024.
Foray Bioscience
Foray Bioscience is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech company growing plants and plant products from single cells. Founded in 2022 by MIT PhD Ashley Beckwith, Foray pairs plant cell culture with AI to make lab-grown plant material predictable across species - unlocking harvest-free wood and materials, rapidly scalable seed supplies, faster crop improvement, and even conservation and de-extinction work. Its Pando software acts like a 'Google Maps for plant growth,' helping researchers navigate the dozens of variables that govern how a plant cell grows.
Terraton
Terraton is a San Francisco climate-tech company that turns agricultural waste into biochar - a stable, carbon-rich material that locks away CO2 for centuries. It packages financing, hardware, and software into a 'biochar business in a box' so agribusinesses in emerging markets can launch carbon-removal facilities, while corporate buyers get verified, high-durability carbon credits delivered at scale. Backed by an $11.5M seed round co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Gigascale Capital, Terraton already runs facilities in Ghana and Kenya.
Applied Carbon
Applied Carbon (formerly Climate Robotics) builds tractor-pulled machines that turn crop residue into biochar in a single pass across the field. The Houston-based startup converts post-harvest plant waste into a stable form of carbon that improves soil health and locks CO2 underground for centuries, selling carbon removal credits to buyers including Microsoft.
Nitricity
Nitricity is a Fremont, California climate-tech company turning air, water, renewable electricity and discarded almond shells into organic nitrogen fertilizer. Its flagship product, Ash Tea, replaces fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers with a regionally produced, OMRI- and CDFA-certified alternative that cuts emissions by more than 90%. Founded in 2018 by three Stanford PhDs, the company closed a $50M Series B in September 2025 and is building its first commercial plant in Delhi, California.
Kula Bio
Kula Bio is a Massachusetts climate-tech company turning naturally occurring nitrogen-fixing microbes into living fertilizer factories that run inside the soil. Born from Harvard chemist Dan Nocera's 'bionic leaf' research, the company supercharges Xanthobacter autotrophicus with a renewable-energy carbon source so the bacteria deliver plant-available nitrogen at the root zone, on demand. Field trials show its flagship Kula-N can replace as much as 80% of a farm's synthetic nitrogen use without the runoff or the fossil-fuel footprint of conventional fertilizer.
Little Sesame
Little Sesame is a Washington, D.C.-born food company that makes freshly spun, organic hummus from regeneratively farmed American chickpeas. What began in a 500-square-foot basement beneath a deli has grown into a two-part business: a fast-casual hummus restaurant and a national consumer-packaged-goods brand sold in more than 1,000 retail doors, including Whole Foods, Sprouts and Wegmans. The company pairs chef-driven flavor with a direct, traceable supply chain that supports regenerative organic farmers and treats good agriculture as a climate tool.
Terradot
Terradot is a San Francisco and Stanford-born climate company turning Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) - one of nature's slowest permanent carbon-removal processes - into a measurable, global-scale climate solution. By spreading finely crushed basalt across tropical farmland, Terradot accelerates the natural reaction in which silicate rock binds atmospheric CO2 and locks it away for thousands of years, while improving soil health for farmers. The company pairs field deployment with rigorous biogeochemical measurement, and has signed landmark carbon-removal agreements with Google, Microsoft and Frontier totaling nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2.
Varaha
Varaha is an India-based climate-tech company that builds high-integrity carbon removal projects in the Global South. Working with roughly 170,000 smallholder farmers across about 1.7 million acres, it generates verified carbon credits through four pathways - regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering - and quantifies the results with a measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) platform powered by remote sensing, machine learning and field science. Its credits are bought by buyers like Google, Microsoft, Lufthansa and Swiss Re.
Uncommon Cacao
Uncommon Cacao is a specialty cacao trader that buys high-quality beans from thousands of smallholder farmers and sells them to premium and craft chocolate makers worldwide. Its signature move is radical openness: it publishes a public Transparency Report disclosing the prices paid at every step of the supply chain, and remains the only international cacao trader to do so. Founded by Emily Stone and built on the back of its Belize export operation Maya Mountain Cacao, the company is a certified B Corp and Public Benefit Corporation working to decommoditize cacao and pay farmers more.
Allbirds
Allbirds is a San Francisco footwear and apparel company that built a global brand on wool sneakers and a sustainability-first ethos. Co-founded in 2015 by former pro footballer Tim Brown and biotech engineer Joey Zwillinger, it turned superfine merino wool, eucalyptus tree fiber and sugarcane into low-carbon shoes, became the first fashion brand to print a carbon footprint on its products, and reached a $4 billion valuation at its 2021 IPO. After years of declining sales, store closures and a stock collapse, Allbirds agreed in March 2026 to sell its brand and assets to American Exchange Group for roughly $39 million.
Andes
Andes is a climate-tech and agricultural biotechnology company using beneficial soil microbes - applied as a seed coating on corn, soybean, canola and wheat - to convert atmospheric CO2 into stable soil inorganic carbon. Founded in 2016 by Gonzalo Fuenzalida and Tania Timmermann and headquartered in Alameda, California, Andes pairs microbial biology with field-scale measurement to deliver permanent, low-cost carbon removal across millions of acres of working farmland.
Pivot Bio
Pivot Bio engineers nitrogen-fixing microbes that live on crop roots and feed corn, wheat, sorghum and small grains directly, replacing a portion of synthetic fertilizer with a biological alternative that does not volatilize into the atmosphere or leach into groundwater.