Building Bridges: Finance, Farming and Jersey’s Regenerative Opportunity
What happens when finance and farming truly meet?
At the Regen Gathering, we explore a simple but powerful idea: resilient food systems and resilient communities cannot exist without aligned capital. How money flows, where it is invested, what it values, and what it overlooks, shapes our land, our health, and our future.
Jersey is uniquely positioned to become a bridge between these worlds.
Markets are not fixed laws of nature, they are social agreements. And they can evolve.
What we are witnessing today is not the collapse of financial systems, but their composting. A shift from extraction to regeneration. From fragmentation to integration. From short-term gain to long-term resilience.
Regenerative food systems invite us to reimagine value, to recognise health, biodiversity, dignity, and connection as forms of wealth. Finance can be a powerful force for good, but only when it is rooted in the living systems it depends on.
Why Finance Matters to Food
From the crops farmers grow to the food on our plates, finance quietly determines what is possible. It influences what is viable, scalable, and ultimately valued. For decades, financial systems and food systems have operated on parallel tracks, often disconnected, and frequently misaligned.
Global food systems have been optimised for short-term efficiency and return: yield per acre, shelf life, volume. Health, ecology, and community wellbeing have too often been treated as secondary concerns. The result is a system that extracts value from land and people, while externalising long-term costs to ecosystems, healthcare systems, and future generations.
This isn’t driven by bad intent, it’s the logic of a system built on outdated assumptions. But those assumptions are changing.
Around the world, finance is beginning to recognise that degraded soil is not only an environmental issue, but a financial one. Natural capital, climate risk, food-as-medicine models, and regenerative agriculture are moving from the margins into the mainstream. Capital is starting to look for outcomes, not just returns.
Why Jersey?
Jersey is a living case study in convergence.
The Island has a world-renowned agricultural heritage and a globally connected financial sector managing land-based assets across the world. Many within finance come from farming families. The wisdom, empathy, and shared values already exist, they are simply not often brought into the same room.
Jersey has done this before. From influencing the Green Revolution through early agricultural research, to the global impact of Jersey cows on food security, the Island’s contributions are often quiet — but never small.
Today, Jersey has the opportunity to lead again: to align capital with land stewardship, food quality, biodiversity, and community health. Not by importing solutions, but by building on what already works here — from LEAF-accredited dairy farming to carbon-sequestering soils and innovative local producers.
The Role of Regen Gathering
The Regen Gathering was created to spark this reconnection.
It is a space where farmers, financiers, policymakers, and practitioners come together to ask deeper questions:
How can capital support regeneration rather than extraction?
Where can investment meet community, not just charity?
How do we translate shared intent into practical action?
These conversations move beyond climate targets and balance sheets. They reconnect money to soil, data to story, and profit to purpose.
Looking Ahead
What we started at Luminaries Gathering last Spring Equinox. We hosted Jenny Anderson, Jenny Scott, Tamara Gilstoff. We heard from the WWF and John Fullerton as leader in regenerative finance.
2026 will bring it to Regen Gathering where we will continue building bridges between capital and cultivation, mapping Jersey’s regenerative potential and anchoring global ideas in local relationships.
Regenerative change doesn’t happen from the top down. It grows from the ground up, through collaboration, trust, and shared purpose.
Jersey has always been a place of convergence — of tides, trade, and tradition. The opportunity now is to remember that future prosperity depends on healthy land, healthy people, and capital that serves life.
