Lessons from Nature

Table of Contents

• Fields & Frontiers

• New In Ag-Tech

• Tending Dreams

• Till You Laugh

Fields & Frontiers

A Full-Lifecycle Move in Agrifood Finance: Dutch impact investor Pymwymic has taken over the Food Transition Europe Fund from Triodos Investment Management, bringing it into its newly launched Healthy Food Systems Growth Impact Fund III. The strategic takeover means that Pymwymic now manages more than €170 million in total assets. This includes three funds and a portfolio featuring over 40 companies across 16 countries. To keep the fund's current portfolio running smoothly, three important later-stage investment pros are moving straight from Triodos to join Pymwymic's larger 14-person deal team. As Triodos shifts its institutional capital towards clean energy and nature-based solutions, this acquisition positions Pymwymic as a comprehensive agrifood specialist. They’re now equipped to support mature, privately owned businesses that are enhancing ecological resilience throughout the entire food value chain. For more, visit Impact Loop.

A Molecular Shift in Reformulation: Green-tech food innovator Nambawan Spain has commercially launched Thaûma™. Thaûma is a plant-derived thaumatin II sweetener and flavor modifier produced via sustainable plant molecular farming. The business is using crops as biological factories to scale up the ultra-high-intensity sweet protein. This solves the problem arising from the unstable and scarce supply chains of wild-harvested West African katemfe fruit. With a sweetness level up to 13,600 times higher than sugar, this non-calorie, non-glycemic substance is acknowledged as the most powerful natural sweetener currently known to science.

When Your Tractor Needs a Bulletproof Vest: Nobody designing the STEYR Terrus CVT had a war zone in mind. And yet, here we are. Austrian tractor manufacturer STEYR introduced a Protected Tractor Concept at Eurosatory 2026, Europe's largest defence exhibition. This concept showcases an armoured version of their standard farm tractor, featuring a reinforced cab to protect operators from outside threats. It still maintains full hydraulic capability, compatibility with implements, and off-road mobility. The idea came together with input from defence experts and is designed as a versatile platform for engineering, logistics, infrastructure, and recovery tasks in challenging environments. It’s not meant to be a commercial product, but rather a showcase of the potential future of modern agricultural machinery platforms. The main point is definitely something to think about. Tractor manufacturers have been working for years to get autonomous guidance just right, along with building powerful engines and making sure they can handle all kinds of terrain. Governments are just starting to recognize that those capabilities remain valuable even after the farm gate. The farm machine is becoming a defence asset. That boundary isn't coming back.

The Farm Hand That Never Clocks Off: It is now a matter of when, not if, we will see humanoid robots; the only remaining questions are where and when. According to a Morgan Stanley research, the number of operational humanoid robots will reach thirteen million by 2035, and it will reach one billion by 2050. "They are no longer just prototypes; they are becoming coworkers, collaborators, and everyday assistants" Futurist Bernard Marr noted. Agriculture is located directly in their way. There is an immediate and strong case for the sector. Seasonal migration, incentives for automation, and agronomic training programs have not alleviated the chronic manpower deficit in Europe's agricultural sector. Humanoid robots fill a need that task-specific machinery cannot: the shortage of enough general-purpose farm workers. These robots can operate in unstructured situations, adapt to different tasks, and work constantly.

New In Ag-Tech

From Toilet to Field

Fifteen years of Swiss research just produced the world's first certified fertiliser made from human urine. Europe's fertiliser crisis made everyone stop laughing.

The Problem With Growing Food on Borrowed Nutrients

Every bag of synthetic Nitrogen fertiliser put to a European field begins as atmospheric gas. The atmospheric gas is transformed into plant-available form through the Haber-Bosch process at a high energy cost. Every flush of the toilet transports phosphate and potassium, nutrients that took millions of years to collect in the earth's crust, to a treatment plant, where they become someone else's problem. Every bag of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser put to a European field begins as atmospheric gas, which is transformed into plant-available form via the Haber-Bosch process at a high energy cost.

When you observe the circularity failure, it's almost laughably evident. We harvest finite minerals, apply them to soil, eat the food they create, and then use more energy to remove those minerals from wastewater before dumping it into rivers. In 2022, European farmers experienced a 149% increase in nitrogen fertiliser prices. The surge was not caused by a lack of nitrogen in the atmosphere. It resulted from a scarcity of cheap petrol to convert. The dependency is systemic, and no one has properly addressed it.

David de Chambrier, CEO of VunaNexus, is direct about what his company is doing: "Urine is a very concentrated resource. This is not a hippy thing to do. We are recycling minerals."

It Took Fifteen Years

The research behind VunaNexus kicked off at Eawag, which is the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. It all started as a project named VUNA, focusing on the Valorisation of Urine Nutrients in Africa, and it received backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim was to get nutrients back from urine and help farmers in decentralised communities across South Africa. Vuna translates to harvest in isiZulu.

After ten years of research and starting the testing phase in 2015, the fertiliser, Aurin, got full approval from the Swiss federal government in 2018 for use on all plants, including those we eat. Then, in 2019, Liechtenstein followed suit, and Austria came on board in 2022. VunaNexus AG was founded in 2022 with the aim of bringing the technology to market. The process takes 1,000 litres of urine and turns it into 100 litres of Aurin and distilled water, using just air and electricity as inputs. They've sold over 10,000 litres of Aurin and recycled more than 160,000 litres of water so far.

How it Works

Urine is collected at the source using dry urinals or toilets that divert urine. A biological nitrification reactor helps to stabilise and concentrate nutrients while getting rid of pharmaceutical residues and micropollutants. This process leads to the production of Aurin, a liquid NPK fertiliser that includes nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and trace elements like iron, zinc, and boron, all without any heavy metals.

VunaNexus has set up a treatment plant at the European Space Agency headquarters in Paris, and they're running a swine urine treatment system that processes 3,000 litres a day on a farm alongside Schauer Agrotronics. In Germany, the company is involved in the Horizon Europe P2Green initiative in Hanover and the ZirkulierBAR project in Berlin. Right now, municipalities in Zurich, Lausanne, Winterthur, and Paris are using it.

What This Actually Changes

Does Aurin cost less per kilogram of Nitrogen than synthetic alternatives? While this is a valid concern, it tends to deviate from the bigger picture.

• Aurin eliminates import dependency for the nutrients it replaces.

• It generates a recoverable water output.

• It reduces the ammonia and nitrous oxide emissions associated with synthetic nitrogen application.

On a 20-hectare market garden or urban farm supplying local retail, these factors have measurable value for carbon accounting, supply chain traceability, and retailer sustainability requirements.

The more consequential question is what Aurin makes possible downstream. A grower who can document locally sourced, circular-economy nutrients with verified zero heavy metal content is building a supply chain story that is increasingly worth money to food brands, retailers, and eventually to CAP eco-scheme auditors. VunaNexus' nutrient recovery infrastructure in cities serves as the foundation for a local food system that is structurally less vulnerable to geopolitical fertiliser price shocks. That is system resilience, and it grows over time in ways that a cost-per-kilogram comparison can never represent.

Aurin is available through the VunaNexus online shop for horticultural use. Commercial agricultural pricing for treatment system installations is not publicly listed and requires direct engagement with the company.

The NetWorth Farmer Verdict

Who This Is For: Agribusiness advisers and food system thinkers tracking circular economy inputs, especially those with clients on Farm to Fork supply chain transparency or CAP eco-scheme compliance.

Strategic investors watching the nutrient recovery category as a structural hedge to European fertiliser price volatility.

AgTech founders in water, sanitation, or bioinputs who want to understand how a 15-year research project generates a regulatory moat.

Who it's not for Just Yet: Farm operators looking to get access at an agricultural scale across the EU in the near future might have to hold their horses. Aurin is doing business in Switzerland, Austria, and France. The wider deployment in the EU needs regulatory approval and treatment infrastructure, which is still in the works.

Questions to Ask Before Engaging: In which EU member states is Aurin currently approved for commercial food crop use? What is the per-litre cost at agricultural volumes relative to equivalent synthetic NPK? Does your building or facility generate sufficient urine volume to justify on-site treatment installation?

What this Makes Possible: A producer using verified circular-economy nutrients with a documented local origin and zero heavy metal profile is not just saving on fertiliser. They are building an ingredient provenance story that premium food brands, organic certifiers, and sustainability-linked supply chain contracts are beginning to pay for directly. The infrastructure VunaNexus installs today is the foundation for a localised nutrient system that becomes more valuable, not less, every time synthetic fertiliser prices spike.

NetWorth Farmer is Watching: EU-wide approval under the Fertilising Products Regulation 2019/1009, the outcome of the German Horizon Europe P2Green trial, and whether any European agricultural cooperative begins piloting urine-derived fertiliser at field scale. Sources: VunaNexus, Eawag, The Guardian, Swiss Food and Nutrition Valley, ESA Business Applications, Venturelab Switzerland, Bertrand Piccard Foundation.

Digital Pasture

Tending Dreams

What if the Best Farming Manual Was Written by a Forest?

Nature has been running the most efficient food production system on earth for 3.8 billion years. No inputs, no subsidies, no wasted nutrients, not a single bankruptcy. And we largely ignored it.

Benedikt Bösel studied Business Finance in the UK and then spent three years in investment banking. In 2016, he returned to Alt Madlitz, Brandenburg, to take over his family's 3,000-hectare farming and forestry estate.

He returned with a mind buzzing with tech ideas and a plan to bring things up to date. Then the sky just gave up on us. Two back-to-back dry summers really took a toll on the farm. The soil was mostly sandy, and the humus levels were between one and two percent. It was already one of the driest in Germany. At that moment, Benedikt understood that just relying on technology wouldn't be enough to ensure the future of farming.

Standing on cracking Brandenburg soil, he made a decision that would define the next decade of his life: to stop fighting nature. Instead, he started copying it.

The YouTube Rabbit Hole That Turned Tides

Benedikt came upon the work of Ernst Götsch, a Swiss-Brazilian farmer who used syntropic agroforestry to rehabilitate damaged land in Bahia. Syntropic Agroforestry is a technique based entirely on how trees regenerate. Götsch's technology increased soil fertility and repaired local ecosystems so well that researchers witnessed rain returning to the area after years of drought.

This is biomimicry in its purest form: observe what a healthy ecosystem does, then replicate it on farmland.

Benedikt was transfixed. He sold his car and cashed in shares from his banking days to raise startup capital. He founded LandVision GmbH, hired a forester named Renke as his first permanent employee, and in winter 2019 planted the farm's first syntropic agroforestry system, a diverse mix of fig trees, blackberries, nut trees, and fruit varieties. By May that year, Götsch himself came to Alt Madlitz for a workshop.

A Living Laboratory, Not a Farm

Gut & Bösel has evolved into something very impossible to define in standard agricultural language. Because it no longer operates within conventional agricultural categories.

Trees and shrubs now grow in long, curving strips over arable areas. Cattle are moved continuously over the ground using moveable fencing to simulate the feeding patterns of natural herds. Where pine monocultures once existed, biodiverse ecosystems are now thriving. In winter 2021 alone, the team planted 17.5 kilometres of tree and seed strips, seeded 1.5 million seeds, and erected over 250 nesting boxes for barn owls and other birds

The Farm Becomes the Research Institute

Here's what separates Gut & Bösel from an inspiring farm story and pushes it toward something with genuine European significance.

In early 2021 Bösel and his team established the Finck Foundation. This is a scientific body running in parallel to the farm, with 10,000 soil samples taken across the estate, climate sensors deployed across 300 hectares and formal partnerships with four university research institutes including the Julius Kühn Institute and the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology.

That research infrastructure is now yielding real cash in the form of carbon credits . Managing director, Max Küsters, sees biodiversity credits and insurance industry collaborations as the next frontier, as insurers progressively catch up to the idea that healthy soil is cheaper than flood damage.

The farm is footing the research. The study is verifying the farm. And the knowledge created, paid for by one team in Brandenburg, is available free of charge to every farmer in Europe wanting to learn from it.

The Lesson Nature Has Always Been Teaching

Forests don’t bring in fertiliser. They don't really need irrigation engineers. They haven't applied for drought relief. They take care of their own nutrient cycles, manage their water needs, spread out their risks, and bounce back from any disruptions.

Benedikt Bösel looked at 3,000 hectares of degrading Brandenburg sand and asked a simple question: what would happen if we ran a farm the way a forest runs itself?

"The soil is the most valuable asset. We must invest more in it, not in technology and machinery," he says, pushing a spade into the earth. The freshly turned soil smells of humus. On land that was once on the verge of becoming desert, that smell is everything.

More Fields & Frontiers

The Scale of the 2026 FIFA World Cup: The 2026 FIFA World Cup has completely transformed the tournament's structure, moving from the usual 32 teams to an exciting 48-nation lineup. This expansion brings the schedule to an impressive 104 matches over a 39-day campaign across the US, Mexico, and Canada. A continental footprint, the tournament covers 16 host cities and stretches across four time zones, creating quite the logistical challenge. The maximum transit distances can exceed 3,400 miles between venues like Vancouver and Miami. To make it through this tough tournament, teams now have to tackle a whole new round of 32 knockout phase. This means that the future world champions will need to play eight matches instead of the usual seven to take home the trophy. For this and more interesting world cup facts, check out FIFA.com.

Natural Language Rules the Atmosphere: Swiss weather intelligence firm Meteomatics has launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing enterprise AI agents to directly query its high-resolution meteorological data using plain-language commands. The open-standard integration completely bypasses the need for custom API wrappers or manual coding. The server gives agentic AI models like Claude and ChatGPT real-time access to the company’s exclusive US1k numerical model. This model maps out the contiguous U.S. and Gulf of Mexico with a detailed 1 km grid resolution and refreshes every hour. The system exposes over 1,800 data parameters from aviation, energy, and agriculture to natural language reasoning loops, allowing autonomous agents to cross-reference changing microclimates, assess localised operational risks, and make grid or logistics decisions in just milliseconds.

The $100,000 Selfie: Somewhere in Atlanta this week, a drone pilot looked up at a World Cup stadium, thought "what a shot," and is now explaining themselves to the FBI. Thirteen times, apparently. The FBI's Counter Drone Enforcement Team was hard at work during last night's World Cup game and the events surrounding it. They made sure that drone pilots were sticking to the FAA's Temporary Flight Restrictions. As they promised, anyone who didn't follow the rules got cited, and their drones were taken away. The FAA has marked World Cup stadiums as strict No Drone Zones on match days. This means there are restrictions within a 3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level. Violations can lead to fines reaching as high as $100,000 and even federal criminal charges. One will also lose the drone itself. Likewise in agriculture. European farmers operating drones near airports, hospitals, crowds and restricted zones face identical enforcement logic under EU regulations and ignorance of airspace rules is not a defence in any jurisdiction.

The Most Dangerous Song Ever Written: Frank Sinatra didn't like "My Way." He found it self-serving and couldn't get it off his shoe, according to his daughter Tina. Had he known what it would eventually trigger in the Philippines, he might have felt considerably worse about it. From 2002 to 2012, there were at least twelve people who lost their lives over singing "My Way" at karaoke bars in the Philippines. They faced tragic fates like being shot, stabbed, or beaten, often for reasons like singing off-key, hogging the mic, or even the seemingly unforgivable act of playing the song on repeat for hours. The violence got so well-known that bar owners decided to take the song off their machines completely. They brought in some gay or transgender staff just to help smooth over any karaoke disputes. A bill was eventually introduced in Congress that suggested a karaoke curfew. A professor from the University of the Philippines gave a straightforward take: "The Philippines has a lot of violence in its society, so when people break certain social rules, karaoke just brings out what's already there. The song's lyrics come off as really triumphant, a bit unapologetic and almost arrogant, which didn't help matters at all. Sometimes a song is simply a song. Sometimes, it's the very last thing someone hears.

Till You Laugh

Disclaimer

Follow