Robert Appleby is founder and chief investment officer at Cibus Capital, a London-based private equity platform investing in food and agricultural.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of AgFunderNews.
On June 25, President Trump signed an executive order aiming to advance regenerative agriculture and strengthen American farm resilience, placing it at the heart of the Make America Healthy Again agenda.
This drops us straight into the dilemma at the heart of Charles Mann’s book “The Wizard and the Prophet.” On one side stands Norman Borlaug, the wizard, convinced that human ingenuity and technology can keep stretching the planet’s carrying capacity. On the other is William Vogt, the prophet, warning that there are ecological limits we ignore at our peril.
For decades, agricultural policy and capital markets have overwhelmingly sided with the wizard. The Green Revolution held that synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation systems, and genetically engineered crops were the tools of a credo that said, in effect, we can always innovate our way out of scarcity.
That vision fed billions, but it also drove soil depletion, biodiversity loss, nitrogen loading, and a dangerous dependence on fragile supply chains and cheap fossil energy, as the most recent wars make blindingly obvious.
Vogt’s warning was that those so-called externalities were not external at all. They were accumulating in the very systems that make life possible: soils, water cycles, climate and human health. Overshoot the planet’s boundaries, he argued, and the correction will not be gentle.
For a long time his voice was easy to dismiss as pessimistic or anti-progress. Now, as we experience climate volatility, chronic disease burdens, and mounting geopolitical shocks to food systems, his perspective looks less like doom mongering and more like basic risk management.
Technologically sophisticated, ecologically bounded
That is why Washington’s recent pivot matters. I am not usually an admirer of the President’s messaging, which can feel more brand building than evidence based, but here his MAHA announcement gets something important right. Regenerative approaches, from crop rotations and cover crops to mob grazing, minimum till or no till seeding and biological inputs, are not about retreating from technology. They are about re-engineering our systems so that technology amplifies the work of living ecosystems instead of replacing it.
This is where the binary choice between wizard and prophet becomes unhelpful. The future of food must be both technologically sophisticated and ecologically bounded.
We need wizards who can design better seeds, build and operate sentient robots, and use data to optimize supply chains. We also need prophets who insist we measure success in terms of soil organic matter, water retention, nutrient density, farmer livelihoods, and community health.
Cibus Capital’s experience over the last 11 years shows that this synthesis is not just philosophically attractive; it is commercially compelling. Across our 34 investments in private equity, real assets, and venture, we see the same pattern.
One example is our portfolio company EarthOptics. It’s soil measurement and mapping technology gives farmers a field-level picture of soil health, helping them save $30 an acre while lifting yields by up to 20%. Companies that embed resilience through regenerative practices, energy efficiency, integrated pest management, and better irrigation are more valuable over time than those that chase short-term gains through ecological and social depletion—what we call “extractive farming.”
At its most fundamental level, resilience means soils that hold water in drought and drain in flood. It means inputs less tied to volatile fossil fuel and chemical markets. It means crops less vulnerable to pests and disease because they are part of diversified systems. It means business models that can withstand regulatory shifts and changing consumer demands.
In financial language, resilience is reduced downside risk and more predictable cash flows. In human terms, it is farmers staying on their land and communities staying healthy.
The deeper point reaches beyond any single executive order. For a century we have built an agricultural paradigm that treated the Earth as a warehouse of raw materials, not as a living system with thresholds. The wizard promised we could push those thresholds indefinitely. The prophet warned we could not.
The emerging regenerative movement, and the companies Cibus backs, are proving that we can honor the prophet’s boundaries without abandoning the wizard’s tools. We can design technologies, processes and financial structures that regenerate the very foundations of our prosperity.
In that sense, the new attention to regenerative agriculture is not the destination but the invitation. It invites policymakers to embed resilience into the rules of the game. It invites investors to recognize that discounted cash flow models must now price climate, health and social risk as core variables. And it invites all of us, farmers, consumers and entrepreneurs, to accept a simple truth: in the long run, the only companies truly worth more are the ones that sustain, rather than erode, the systems that keep us alive.
