Advisory work on soil, capital, and the systems that connect them.
For fifteen years on Wall Street, my work was tracing ripple effects. An event in Lagos moves a portfolio in London. A policy shift in Beijing reshapes a balance sheet in São Paulo. The discipline was never prediction — it was understanding what depends on what.
The same discipline applies to land. Disturb the biology beneath a field and you alter what grows above it, what lives among it, what eats from it, and eventually what arrives on a dinner plate a continent away. The mathematics of interdependence does not change when the asset class changes.
Most of what passes for modern food production is the obscene end of a long chain of those disturbances. The work now is remediation.
The reverse has never been true, though we have spent a century pretending otherwise. Capital that ignores the living systems beneath it is mispriced capital. Land managed for extraction alone eventually stops producing the thing being extracted.
These are not moral claims. They are accounting ones.
Three areas of work. Engagements taken selectively, and only where the leverage is real.
Diagnostic and design work for landowners, foundations, and operators converting conventional systems to regenerative ones. Soil biology, water, perennial systems, food forests.
Advising allocators and family offices on where regenerative agriculture is genuinely investable, where it isn't, and how to evaluate the difference. Drawing on fifteen years pricing risk in conventional markets.
Advisory to ministries, development institutions, and large landholders on the design and implementation of regenerative agricultural policy at scale. Translating ecological first principles into instruments a government can deploy — and a province can feel.
In finance, my job was to figure out the magnitude of a ripple. In land, it is to quiet the ones we should never have made.— Aamar Khwaja
I take engagements where the leverage is real — where a decision moves a province, a watershed, a generation of farmers. If that describes your work, write.
Get in touchI spent fifteen years in global finance — Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan, Bank of America — pricing mortgage-backed securities, then running programs for senior leadership at firms whose decisions moved markets. The work taught me one thing well: how to model what depends on what, across borders, across time, across systems most participants never bothered to look inside.
I left in 2007. The reasons were partly personal and partly that the chain of ripple effects I was paid to model had begun, in my reading, to point at something the industry was not prepared to discuss honestly. The decade that followed proved the reading correct.
The years after were spent traveling — more than thirty countries, much of it in the Muslim world, much of it on the ground with farmers, builders, and the communities still holding the older agricultural knowledge intact. I was not researching. I was looking. By the end of it I understood that the same analytic discipline I had used to price risk in capital markets applied directly, and almost no one was applying it, to the living systems beneath food.
That is the work now.
I advise on soil, on capital allocated toward regenerative systems, and on agricultural policy at the institutional and national scale. The clients are landowners, family offices, foundations, waqfs, ministries. The projects are selected. The standard is whether the engagement can move something real — a province, a watershed, a generation of farmers learning to steward land their grandparents stewarded before extraction agriculture displaced them.
I am presently writing a policy paper on regenerative transition at the national scale, and developing a food forest in Austin, Texas, as a working reference site for the design principles I advise on elsewhere.
NYU Stern, 1992. Wharton and Penn Engineering executive program, 2005. Fifteen years across Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan, and Bank of America. Seven years of independent travel and field study across the Muslim world, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. British by birth, currently based between Austin and the road.
I take a small number of engagements each year. The fit matters more than the fee. If your work touches land, capital, or the place where they meet — and the leverage is real — write.