Part One: Q&A with Antony Yousefian, General Partner at The First Thirty
We spoke with Antony Yousefian, General Partner at The First Thirty (TFT) and VC investor in AgriHealth, on the burgeoning connection between regenerative agriculture and healthcare.
This is part one in a two-part series.
We’ve long known that the quality of our food directly impacts our health. But in the UK, we spend £250 billion a year on the NHS, while we direct just 1% of that (£2.5 billion) to the farmers who grow our food.
Antony Yousefian argues that, as technology makes it easier and more affordable than ever to track our health and the quality of our food, customer demand for nutrient-dense whole foods has the potential to shift power away from incumbents and towards farmers and the companies that connect them to consumers.
In 2022, Antony joined Naeem Lakhani as Partner at what was then called Future Food Ways – a venture capital firm that rebranded as The First Thirty (TFT). TFT invests in companies that work at the intersection of farming, food, and human wellness.
“If our health is driven by our gut microbiome, that is driven by what we eat. So, really, we should be asking what our food ate. In this way, the first 30cm of soil is the most undervalued asset on the planet.” – Antony Yousefian, Partner at TFT
If you're building with regenerative agriculture and developing product-market fit, this conversation is for you.
Below is our Q&A with Antony, lightly edited for brevity.
Q: Hey Antony! What brought you into regenerative agriculture in the first place?
I started in asset management and investment banking post-financial crisis. Back then, we were investing in sustainability and clean-tech energy mainly because there was a clear opportunity. Our clients were getting worried about rising environmental risks – or in other words, a lack of resources. So, we began investing in decarbonisation strategies.
That journey of investing in the declining resources of the planet led me to think about food: specifically, agriculture and supply chains.
Then I joined a Chinese investment bank backed by the Chinese sovereign wealth fund, and I saw they were directing money toward their top priority: food security. They were investing internationally, looking for assets that would secure food for the people of China because they saw it as an increasing risk.
So now, I could see two sides: both public and private money were essentially saying the same thing, or signalling the same concern. As supply chains were getting riskier and resources were depleting, food and agriculture sat right at that intersection.
What I found in investment banking was that investors tended to herd into the same positions, allocating capital seemingly inefficiently, and placing a premium on people who said good things but didn’t actually do anything measurable.
I concluded that we needed to invest in data in order to better understand the environment and biology.
That decision led me into early-stage technology. I followed the signals that the market wanted data to better understand biology, and as we’re supposedly growing as a world, our environmental risks just keep increasing. In 2015, I put money into my first business, then got so excited that I ended up helping build it.
So, I left banking altogether and soon found myself in the deep end of building technology in agriculture and food. That first company made wireless sensors connected to the cloud, so farmers could practice precision agriculture in greenhouses and fields for the first time – seeing their water levels, plant temperatures, and more all in one place.
It was here that I really began to understand the issue of our food system. It wasn’t the “feed the world” narrative that we all talk about; it was a question of quantity and volume. Despite our technology helping farmers increase their yields, I saw they were giving away all that productivity gain. The retailer was scooping up practically all of it, while the farmers seemed stuck as price takers.
My aha moment came when I found a set of growers who weren’t optimising for volume, but for quality. And they weren’t growing food either. They were actually growing for a pharmaceutical company.
Their KPI was to grow as much as possible with maximum nutritional density. The farmers encouraged me to look at soil health, which sent me into a black hole. I became totally fascinated by the biological complexity of soils, the way that nature has been doing R&D for four billion years. These farmers were working with it to create a far more productive crop, one that delivered exactly what we all wanted: more nutrients from the soil and the environment.
So, now that we could achieve incredible levels of productivity by working with rather than against biological systems, I realised these were the exact outcomes I wanted as an investor. So, why couldn’t we grow our food in this way?
The answer was that the farmers were being financially supported to grow in this way.
So then, my question became: How do we make the food system move in that direction?
“It was here that I really began to understand the issue of our food system. It wasn’t the “feed the world” narrative that we all talk about; it was a question of quantity and volume.”
Measuring carbon as a proxy for nutritional density
Back then, measuring nutritional density was hard, so I thought measuring carbon would be a good proxy. It allowed for commercial differentiation but also, crucially, signalled to other investors that this would support a cleaner, greener, and more sustainable supply chain.
That led me to launch an agtech business on a large apple farm, where I met Jon and Pete. Our aim was to measure ecosystem services and understand their value.
What I learned was that measuring all of this was really expensive. The cost of measuring biology was outweighing the value of the carbon credits. Yet, promisingly, we saw evidence that buyers – like major retailers – were willing to pay more without explicit quantification or the absolute value of the carbon credit. They were using it again as a signal of quality, lower risk, and, again, supply chain security – similar to what I saw in the stock markets.
After that, Jon, Pete, and I again joined forces – this time at Wiliot, an ambient IoT company that makes battery-free Bluetooth tags, small enough to attach to individual food items.
It was here that we validated what we could do together. Before, we realised that we could measure the difference but lacked the infrastructure to move the needle. Now at Wiliot, we have proven we can place digital tags on food to track it through the supply chain, from orchard measurements to the retailer.
Together, those three experiences shaped my thesis that, to transition the food system, we need to focus on health first. All these converging technologies mean that we can really understand the biology of ourselves and our environment. And those two things are linked. Agriculture and human health are intrinsically connected. We and nature are the same, and the food system is the communication layer that tells the story.
We’ve used stories before, but now, we can finally measure them.
“Agriculture and human health are intrinsically connected. We and nature are the same, and the food system is the communication layer that tells the story. ”
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