Agri-Health Webinar Series: Innovative finance for Agri-Health
The link between diet and chronic disease is among the most robustly documented findings in global public health - as is the evidence that investing in prevention generates long-term savings for health systems. And yet the financing structures needed to translate that evidence into practice are largely still missing. The fifth and final session of our Agri-Health webinar series brought together two experts working within the financing and agri-health space: Dr Amy Godfrey, a former NHS intensive care physician now working in venture capital investing in food and agriculture, and Hans Uldall-Poulsen, an economist with over a decade of experience designing outcome-based financing programmes across Europe.
Agriculture as an underpriced health delivery system
Non-communicable diseases are responsible for three-quarters of deaths worldwide. The Global Burden of Disease study attributes 11 million deaths per year to diet alone - outranking tobacco as the leading mortality risk factor. After more than a decade in NHS intensive care, Dr Godfrey decided to work to break that cycle, realising that the damage she was treating had been shaped by food environments and lifestyle choices made long before anyone reached hospital.
From the conviction that agriculture should be treated as a determinant of human health, The First Thirty — the venture firm Dr Godfrey works with — invests in companies that make food quality measurable across the supply chain. As Dr Godfrey puts it: “you can’t price what you can’t measure.” The First Thirty focuses investment on three pillars: improving the nutrient profile of food, reducing its toxic load, and addressing systemic agricultural risks to human health such as antimicrobial resistance. Portfolio companies include Edacious (quantifying nutrient density and creating transparency in the food supply), Rhizocore (restoring below-ground soil biology that underpins how crops are grown), and Antler Bio (using transcriptomics to read how an organism actually responds to what it consumes, not just what went in). Dr Godfrey sees venture capital as the instrument to fund this measurement layer and build the evidence base, while public financing instruments will need to carry the longer-term task of paying for health outcomes realised years downstream.
Making prevention investable: the Aarhus impact bond
Hans Uldall-Poulsen identified three structural reasons why prevention remains underfunded despite the evidence: the time lag between costs and benefits, the fragmentation of those benefits across multiple actors, and the uncertainty about whether savings will ever be captured. Without taking those constraints into account, it is very difficult to create a successful financial model.
The social impact bond launched in Aarhus - the first of its kind in the Danish healthcare sector - was built to address all three. Developed in partnership among the City of Aarhus, Steno Diabetes Centre Aarhus, and the National Social Investment Fund, the programme offered a tailored 12-month intervention to 450vulnerable citizens with type 2 diabetes who were at risk of serious complications. It combined individual consultations with healthcare professionals, group-based cookery courses and physical training, bridge-building activities with civil society, and structured aftercare. The payment mechanism was anchored in a single metric - HbA1c, long-term blood glucose - with the investor bearing the delivery risk and the municipality committing to pay if targets were met. Using validated statistical models, the partnership translated that clinical change into projected avoided complications and their associated care costs, creating a shared impact currency that gave all parties a transparent basis for agreement. Building that financial engine - connecting a measurable clinical outcome to an economic value the municipality could act on - was one of the most critical steps in making the bond viable.
Early indications from the programme were encouraging. Beyond the clinical outcomes, the experience directly catalysed the establishment of a €15 million internal health investment fund within the municipality, shifting how it thought about health spending altogether. Denmark now has more than 50 active outcome contracting programmes. As Hans put it:
“The problem is never a lack of investors. The problem is a lack of investable programmes.”
What this means for the AHOPM consortium
This session closed a five-month learning journey covering food as medicine, ecological medicine, nutrient density, and the implementation of produce prescription programmes. For the AHOPM consortium, the Aarhus model is a direct reference point. Our randomised controlled trial generates the kind of clinical data - HbA1c, BMI, quality of life - that could form the basis of a similar impact currency. The Dutch context is more complex, with health insurers and municipalities sharing prevention responsibilities as separate entities with separate budgets. The lesson from Aarhus is to identify the economic engine strong enough to anchor the first programme, prove it, and use that proof to bring further stakeholders in over time.
What participants thought going in
During the webinar, we captured the audience’s views on the topic through a short poll. Participants were mostly unanimous that nutritious food should be financed as a prevention and public health tool, with government seen as the primary actor to catalyse that finance and health insurers as a secondary partner. For local and organic sourcing, cost alone was not considered sufficient — sustainability was either a significant factor or a priority wherever feasible. Most participants had heard of impact bonds but did not yet understand the mechanics, and while a majority leaned towards seeing them as a feasible tool for food-is-medicine models, many felt they still needed more knowledge to decide.
This webinar was part of the wider Agri-Health webinar series, made possible by the EIP-Agri subsidy from the Province of South Holland and the European Union. Within the AHOPM consortium, we are working to connect agriculture, healthcare, and impact finance to make healthy food a structural part of the healthcare system and to create new market opportunities for organic and regenerative farmers.
