169 Cath Tayleur on why measuring biodiversity is one of the key levers for regenerative agriculture

Cath Tayleur, Head of Nature Positive Supply Chains in NatureMetrics joins us for a discussion of environmental DNA (eDNA) and its implications in biodiversity, as well as the other steps we’re yet to take in transitioning to regenerative agriculture.
---------------------------------------------------

Join our Gumroad community, discover the tiers and benefits on www.gumroad.com/investinginregenag. 

Support our work:

• Share it
• Give a 5-star rating
• Buy us a coffee… or a meal! www.Ko-fi.com/regenerativeagriculture

----------------------------------------------------
Through its DNA-based monitoring systems, NatureMetrics work with different sectors such as mining, property development, and infrastructures to study biodiversity and its operational impacts.

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/cath-tayleur.

Find our video course on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/course.

----------------------------------------------------

For feedback, ideas, suggestions please contact us through Twitter @KoenvanSeijen, or get in touch through the website www.investinginregenerativeagriculture.com.

Join our newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P. 

The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Imagine if you could, with a single or a few samples of water collected downstream in a watershed, map all of the biodiversity in that watershed. Instead of sending teams to survey the different bird species, placing camera traps, hoping that you capture these crucial species, you can use environmental DNA to map all of the species from bacteria to blue whales. And if you do that regularly, you can actually see if the biodiversity is increasing or decreasing. This is already possible around mining areas and conservation areas, and imagine applying this to landscapes full of agriculture? And what if we add soil sampling and even more cutting edge air sampling to monitor the biodiversity in a landscape? Welcome to another episode of In March last year, we launched our membership community to make it easy for fans to support our work. And so many of you have joined as a member. We've launched different types of benefits, exclusive content, Q&A webinars with former guests, Ask Me Anything sessions, plus so much more to come in the future. For more information on the different tiers, benefits and how to become a member, check gumroad.com slash investingbridge Welcome to another episode, today with the head of Nature Positive Supply Chains at Nature Metrics, the home of cutting-edge biodiversity monitoring. Powerful, scalable biodiversity data delivered safely and sustainably using DNA. From bacteria to blue whales, they monitor biodiversity in contexts ranging from conservation to environmental impact assessments. Welcome, Cath.

SPEAKER_02: 2:04

Hi, great to be here.

SPEAKER_00: 2:06

And shout out, first of all, to Paul Chatterton, who mentioned nature metrics that I didn't know about yet. A shame on me, obviously. And got very, very interested in what you are doing in the conservation space and starting to look at the agriculture space. So we'll unpack all of that, what it means, the Using DNA, what it means, the water side, how can you measure blue whales and all of that. But let's start with a personal question. How did you end up going this deep into biodiversity?

SPEAKER_02: 2:32

So I think my whole life has really been around biodiversity and nature. I mean, as a kid, I loved being around animals, being outside. I grew up in New Zealand where we have amazing biodiversity on our doorstep. And it really, as I grew up, it was what I wanted to do as a career choice. I sort of studied zoology at university and then really became aware of the challenges that the world's nature is facing and decided that that was what i wanted to do with my life i wanted to try and help restore nature biodiversity to make sure that we were going to have something around for future generations

SPEAKER_00: 3:13

there are many different paths that you could have even in that specific let's say tree of life branch you could have taken and you ended up working at a very exciting startup what was the journey like it wasn't straight to that you've worked in many different places like how did you decide at some point to maybe not stay in academia but actually to join the corporate world or to join let's say the commercial world and then ending up at a startup where life is not always easy and quite exciting but also quite challenging I can imagine compared to being in a university somewhere and studying super interesting biodiversity stuff obviously in New Zealand I mean there are places you can spend your whole life studying stuff there but you decided to move

SPEAKER_02: 3:50

yeah so I started it off in academia and I love research but there was this growing frustration about the fact that academic research so much of it just goes and sits on a dusty shelf and nobody reads it or uses it and there's this huge disconnect between the practitioners and the people that really need the evidence and the researchers that are producing it and for me it was just feels like a really sometimes a really inefficient way to create impact you know you spend years years and years trying to answer one very specific question. You then spend years trying to get that published as an academic article that nobody reads. So I really wanted to do something that was driving change on the ground a little bit more. So then I moved more into the conservation sector, working with NGOs, with practical projects on the ground. And again, that was great, but I wanted to try and drive impact at a slightly bigger scale. And I was just really conscious through the work that I was doing of the impact that the private sector was having on biodiversity, but also the power that they had to change. You can see that they can be so nimble. When they're motivated, the private sector can change at a much faster pace than policy can change, for example. Through that, they can have massive impact. That was when I started to work more closely with corporates on helping them understand understand how they could start to measure their impacts on biodiversity and then manage those impacts.

SPEAKER_00: 5:28

And when you were in academia, I imagine, I've never worked in academia, but it's relatively easy to stay there for a long, like once you're in, you can stay there for a long time. You said, no, there was this growing frustration with time as well, like not the most efficient way of creating impact. Was that a slowly growing thing or was there one example? Like, okay, I spent four years studying this one bacteria and then it didn't get published or something like was there a slow process to say okay I need to go out of academia or was there one moment that at some point okay this is enough and now let's do something else

SPEAKER_02: 6:02

I don't think there was a single moment but it was working more with communities on the ground in you know I worked with a project an amazing project working in West Africa in a protected area and it's just that disconnect between the practical tools that local local communities need to enact change on the ground and the kind of questions that you're answering with some research project conducted by predominantly Western scientists on the other side of the world. But also, you sort of mentioned that you could get comfortable in academia. I think it's really hard for people entering that career space now. There's much less job security. It's driven by grant funding. Grant funding is really competitive which in itself is a really inefficient use of resources you spend a huge amount of time and energy chasing grant money with you know one percent chance of success so just the whole system

SPEAKER_00: 7:03

sounds like fundraising

SPEAKER_02: 7:05

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 7:05

yeah even worse yeah

SPEAKER_02: 7:07

it's a bit like fundraising but yeah it's such potluck so I sort of felt like there was better ways I could be spending my time

SPEAKER_00: 7:13

and then in the corporate space at what point did you sort of notice that the tools were missing or the tools maybe weren't there, but not adequate, not cheap enough, not accessible enough, or not specific enough, or maybe too specific. What was that process? And then, of course, joining Nature Metrics, which we're going to unpack. But what was there? Like, okay, there's actually something to do on the tool side and on the practical, like the shelves and what of this sector and not necessarily also, but we first need to get the tools better to start asking much bigger questions about how to change those supply chains and have those impacts down the road or down the watershed.

SPEAKER_02: 7:51

So my work with corporates is really focused on companies with supply chains. So their impacts on nature are really concentrated at the production of the raw materials that they're purchasing. So that tends to be agriculture. So we see in the space of kind of corporates and biodiversity. So the extractive sector, for example, is quite well advanced in how they measure their impacts on biodiversity. But that's partly because they make a lot of money out of a small area of land. And there's also a lot more regulation around it.

SPEAKER_00: 8:21

Meaning the mining sector, anything that literally digs stuff out of the ground is usually, I mean, even though they're big, it usually are relatively concentrated on around and in the mine. And there's a lot of regulation around what they can dump in terms of water use, et cetera. Like they're under a lot of scrutiny compared to some other also extractive sectors that maybe they dig a bit less deep, like a lot of the players in the agriculture space.

SPEAKER_02: 9:35

Yeah. So the mining sector, I mean, also infrastructure. So people building things Yeah, those sort of sectors, they've got a much longer history of trying to understand their impacts on biodiversity. But like I say, they've got the money to spend on it. So they can send out teams of surveyors to these places to, you know, these technical experts that can go out in the field and identify birds and mammals and fish.

SPEAKER_00: 10:02

So how does it work? Let's say I own a mine in, let's say in West Africa, and I need to, because of regulation and because of my own policy, assess the impact on biodiversity? I fly in a team. Is that what I'm hearing from you? How does that work and what do they do? How should I imagine that process currently works or used to work or currently works if I want to understand my impact of this mine on biodiversity?

SPEAKER_02: 10:24

So I'm not an expert in this sector, but yes. So in general, they'll start off with environmental impact assessment. You'll normally have some sort of desk-based assessment where you're kind of trying to understand what the risk is. Is this mine in an area with lots of endangered and protected species? an important habitat but then yeah absolutely you will need experts in the field and sometimes they may have access to local experts but a lot of the time they won't and so they will be flying in teams of people who have expertise to go out and survey these sites for different

SPEAKER_00: 10:58

birds etc so they go around and spend weeks in the areas for quite a few days I'm imagining to survey and to capture the biodiversity the full scale, which is super difficult and very expensive, I'm imagining.

SPEAKER_02: 11:13

Yeah, absolutely. So you can imagine that when you then think about a different sector like agriculture, it's just not feasible. You can't send out teams of experts to a farm where the profits that you're making out of a hectare are just a fraction of what a mining company is going to be making out of the same area of land. So the challenge that I was working with, with supply chain companies how do you create a scalable way of monitoring your impact on biodiversity when you potentially have thousands of suppliers and you know thousands of suppliers who are producing commodities but aren't making huge margins off that so you're not and there's also not that same regulation regulatory incentive to spend lots of money on this biodiversity monitoring

SPEAKER_00: 12:05

and so what was the solution you came up with or one of the solutions like what was the direction going, okay, we cannot fly in teams of people and send them two weeks into farm areas or whole watersheds to start surveying the amount of birds and the amount of insect wildlife and use it as a proxy to see what's happening. That would be amazing in many cases, but it's also incomplete and very, very expensive. So that's not an option. What are other, I mean, people talk about satellite, remote sensing, sensors, et cetera, but you took a different route to a potential solution.

SPEAKER_02: 12:34

Yeah, absolutely. So remote sensing is a great option, but it doesn't really let you see individual species. You can't necessarily see biodiversity from space. So that was when I came across Nature Metrics, which surveys biodiversity by looking at the DNA that species leave behind in the environment. So it's a bit like crime scene forensics, but for animals. So we can collect through samples of water or soil and even air. You can collect a sample and then we can process that in the lab and look for these little fragments of DNA that species have left behind. And the thing that really appealed to me is that I love spending time in nature. I love watching animals and birds, but I'm a terrible field biologist.

SPEAKER_00: 13:29

Why would you say terrible? What does a good field biologist look like and why would you be a terrible one?

SPEAKER_02: 13:34

Well, so for example, I've spent a lot of time working with ornithologists, so bird experts, and a lot of time working with the data sets that they produce. But these are people that can go out in the field and they can identify a bird species by song. from quite some distance away and they can normally tell you where 10, 20, 30 metres away that bird is. And to me, yeah, I can't do that.

SPEAKER_00: 14:03

But it sounds like something, yeah, we can do. Let's say if you would record that, in this case, it would be audio waves, obviously, like a computer would be able to tell you as well. Like we can train software to do that. At some point, I'm not sure, like the acoustic space feels like something, okay, I would, I mean, we're recording this now. So I'm in my simple mindset thinking, okay, that's a fixable thing, but it's only a very small part of the biodiversity of a place to capture that, analyze that. And then, but you're saying we're capturing We're doing water samples, air samples, and soil samples, and then give you almost a full spectrum of what has been living and now has let something go, which could be poop, which could be other DNA, which could be a lot of different things, has been living upstream, or at least where the wind or the water came from. And that's, I think, the interesting piece. You're saying 10, 20 meters, but in this case, if you do this analysis, it can be a much larger area that you can sample with a few samples only.

SPEAKER_02: 14:56

Yeah, potentially. So acoustics is another fantastic technology and there are some really amazing people working on that. But as you say, with... So we call it environmental DNA. So that's the fragments of DNA that animals are leaving behind in the environment. So with eDNA, we can sample the whole diversity of life. So we can look from bacteria to blue whales, I think, as we mentioned earlier. And for me, what's really exciting about DNA is that it gives us this really unbiased view of the ecosystem. So a lot of these traditional surveys led by technical experts in the field. They're focused on those really charismatic species. So the birds and the chimpanzees and

SPEAKER_00: 15:44

elephants and... And even in the birds, maybe the ones we know the song of, the ones we don't know, we are not even captured, as we mentioned.

SPEAKER_02: 15:51

Bird experts would probably know, be able to cover everything that was in the relevant local environment. But whilst, you know, those charismatic species are the things that we really connect to and think about when we think about nature, that is not not necessarily the biodiversity that's fundamental to a functioning ecosystem. So that's not necessarily the biodiversity that is really underpinning our economic systems.

SPEAKER_00: 16:21

Which would be the bacteria, the insects, like the non-sexy ones basically are the ones we actually should be and we're not following them. Would you say we have no really good overview in many places, like many conservation areas, but also many farms for sure? or most of it is sort of in the dark?

SPEAKER_02: 16:38

Absolutely. So the soil microbiome is fundamental to global agriculture. Without a functioning microbiome, we don't have crops. But we know just a tiny amount about the bacteria and the fungi and the insects that are living in the soil and how different combinations of different species are important for making crops grow.

SPEAKER_00: 17:04

And so how did you end up then so you found nature metrics you mentioned and then let's now I think it's time to go what is nature metrics doing analyzing this eDNA and what does it tell like what are typical clients you work with or customers you work with typical use cases where you might be measuring the blue whales or the bacteria or both and so what should people imagine okay it's not we're not sending a huge team listening to the song of birds but we're doing something else and we're getting a different image or maybe a better or more accurate or more relevant image of the area we want to to survey?

SPEAKER_02: 17:36

So we have a huge range of clients. So as I mentioned previously, a lot of our work is with the extractives sector, so mining companies, infrastructure, so property developers. And what we're doing in those sectors is we're replacing the need to send out these huge teams of technical experts to the field.

SPEAKER_00: 17:57

You're not making friends with that, I think, because this used to be, I think for a lot of these technical experts also, I'm not saying nice trips, but important trips and relevant trips. But yeah, you're on undercutting them probably by a significant amount in terms of price. And I mean, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 18:11

So you still need people out in the field, but I think one of the fantastic things about what we do is that anybody can take a sample. You don't need to be an expert to take a sample.

SPEAKER_00: 18:21

So how do you take a sample? Walk us through visually, because of course we're an audio. If I want to take a sample, how would it work?

SPEAKER_02: 18:27

So for example, probably our most developed kits are our water kits. And so with that, you collect a few liters of water in a bag that we supply and then we have a little disc which is a filter which captures the DNA and then you use a syringe, you syringe up the water and then you just push it through the filter. It's just a small round disc maybe five centimetres in diameter and you will push a few litres of water through the disc and then that's it. That's your DNA sample you pop it in the envelope and you send it back to our labs and we then process that

SPEAKER_00: 19:11

in the lab and so I don't have to send water which probably logistically makes it a lot easier and then you said a few liters like in a normal circumstances how what kind of area can I cover with that or how often should I do it if I'm running a mine of I don't know 50 hectares or something like what it depends on the terrain obviously but should I do many samples or is it relatively like the ratio of one disc to like how big is the ratio that I should normally consider of course it depends

SPEAKER_02: 19:40

it's sort of a million dollar question of how many samples is enough and I can't give you an answer to that because it really depends on the question you're trying to answer and the content

SPEAKER_00: 19:51

what would I like to see yeah like how much do you miss in one in a few liters of water

SPEAKER_02: 19:55

yeah so how sure do you want to be that you've sampled all the biodiversity in the area you need a slightly more intensive sampling approach then I'm just interested to know generally what here and then the next step is kind of do you want to be able to track changes through time but in general you can sample at a much lower field work effort than you would with a traditional survey approach and if you're thinking about things like water catchments it can be a really effective way of sampling biodiversity at that catchment scale because DNA does of course move with the water so if you're sampling downstream you are capturing some of the biodiversity from upstream as well.

SPEAKER_00: 20:37

And you've seen surprises in there, right? In conservation areas where people thought, I think Paul mentioned at Chatterton of that certain things were or extinct or didn't, were living anymore in that part of the river system and only in the other part. And actually the DNA showed that they were absolutely also living in other areas than we thought until now. Because of course, if you have very thick jungle, for example, yeah, we can only go so far with the search teams and the DNA doesn't lie. Like if it's there, it had to be upstream in the watershed somewhere. It's not that it just comes, it doesn't go up upstream by itself.

SPEAKER_02: 21:10

Yeah, we've had some great examples of, yeah, species that are new to an area that we've rediscovered. But I think one of my favorite examples is the pygmy hippo, which is, as you might guess, it's a tiny hippo. It lives in West Africa. It's incredibly rare and endangered. I worked on this conservation project in Sierra Leone and we knew there were pygmy hippos around this national park but you could I mean people that had lived adjacent to that national park their whole lives had never seen the pygmy hippos and we spent a huge amount of money on putting up camera traps and doing all sorts of surveys to try and find these pygmy hippos you know and you might get one photo across thousands of nights worth of camera trapping effort and then when you use a eDNA approach you can just take samples of the water and there are pygmy hippos all over the place

SPEAKER_00: 22:42

can you see how many as well or you can maybe see over time if it increases or decreases like how likely is it that this DNA mixes like in water in terms of like it gets picked up probably that's research you're doing now like what is the ratio of missing things versus capturing it even if you like how big was this watershed and how many samples did you have to do or was it literally like you said a few liters and we understood that in this national park or around it actually were quite a few pygmy hippos

SPEAKER_02: 23:08

hippos. So it was more than a couple of litres to find these particular pygmy hippos and this particular project was in Liberia. So we don't, you can't directly equate the we sort of look at more presence absence of animals. So sometimes if you have a greater amount of DNA in your sample that tends to correlate quite well with abundance but it's not a one-to-one ratio.

SPEAKER_00: 23:38

It's not a gram-to-pygmy-hippo ratio. No, but you know the direction. If they suddenly disappear or the quantity starts increasing over time in multiple samples, I mean, there's an indication of something is happening.

SPEAKER_02: 23:51

Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you're going back to the same place at the same time of year to repeat the sampling and looking at the same species, then that gives you a great way of looking at trends. And we also, within Nature Metrics, have a fantastic team of data scientists who are working on amazing modeling techniques which help translate that one or two or hopefully more samples into what is the likelihood that we missed a species that was actually there.

SPEAKER_00: 24:21

And have you done any work around the agriculture part of this? Because runoff is a huge issue. As I said before, somebody, I don't remember which farmer said it, it's probably the best way to analyze a farm or to know if a farm is going in the right direction or not. is to analyze the water that leaves the farm at the lowest point on the farm. But of course, these are also extractive industries, but not as profitable as certain other ones. So have you done any work in agriculture? And if not, why and how can we fix that?

SPEAKER_02: 24:51

So agriculture is an emerging sector for us. So we can see lots of potential applications of the technology. So as you mentioned, we can look at water quality. So there are groups of particular species that are really good indicators of whether water is polluted or not polluted. So what we're working on at the moment is how do we turn our kind of list of species into useful metrics that can then inform decision-making. So freshwater... pollution indices are a great application of our technology. But of course, in soil, I think the most exciting thing is looking at the soil microbiome. So, yeah, with a small sample of soil, we can look at the bacteria, the fungi, and the invertebrates that are living in that soil and start to understand how how that correlates with a healthy or regenerative soil.

SPEAKER_00: 25:56

And you mentioned probably our water part is the most developed. What is different when you're analysing soil? And could you be analysing soil also indirectly through water that is runoff that went through the soil? How different is that approach if we say, okay, we want to analyse a few litres of water and if we do that in a number of places, it gives us a good idea of the watershed, which sounds like huge. In soil, I don't know, it feels immediately to me that, okay, we have to do more of that because it's more local? Is that a right thought? Or how different would soil sampling or soil analytics be compared to water? And then we go to air, which also sounds amazing, but I don't know how, I cannot even imagine how to do that.

SPEAKER_02: 26:34

So yeah, you're right. I think the biodiversity in the soil is not moving in the same way that the DNA in a waterway is. So you need a different sampling approach. So if you want to characterize the microbiome of a field, you would want to take probably multiple samples, of that field. Or if you are not that worried about the variation within a field, you just want kind of to know in general what the microbiome looks like across that field, you can use lots of subsamples. So you take lots of subsamples across your field, a bit like you might do for chemical sampling, mix it all together, and then you kind of get an average result.

SPEAKER_00: 27:15

And then do you need to, because you cannot push it through a filter, like then you need to run water through it to sort of dissolve? Or how does it work?

SPEAKER_02: 27:22

So we don't use a filter for the soil samples. You would literally send us a small, yeah, few grams of soil and that's what we would analyze in the lab.

SPEAKER_00: 27:31

And would, I mean, how different is that result or would that result be compared to, for instance, after a rainy day, taking a bit of the runoff water from a field? Would they be able to tell us fundamentally different things or would you say, no, the soil sampling is in this case better, more complete or, because as we see with the conservation side like this bacteria or the DNA left over they travel with water how would that differ or it's not such a relevant approach to look at that low like the water running off from a farm or travel through a farm

SPEAKER_02: 28:03

I think it would depend on your question but I think runoff you wouldn't get the same you wouldn't get a very accurate representation of kind of the soil on the field from which the runoff came I guess

SPEAKER_00: 28:16

and then air how would air or how does air work like an air sample I mean I can imagine you open a pot and you close it but that's probably not the approach

SPEAKER_02: 28:24

so this is a cutting edge that's why I want to know work so this is probably a great example actually going right back to academia I mean nature metrics work is founded off the back of so our founder Kat Bruce she did her PhD on meta barcoding which is what we call that's what we call when you're processing a sample and looking at lots of species basically looking for all the species in that sample. So really, Matrix Metricus was founded on the idea of, well, we've done cool science, but we really need to find a way to apply it and have impact. So AirDNA is complete cutting edge. It's work that we're looking at in collaboration with academics that are leading on this. The idea is that you have some sort of suction system to filter the air itself. But it's the same idea. I mean, we know that DNA exists all around us. We're all shedding DNA the whole time. Animals are no exception. We can capture that.

SPEAKER_00: 29:28

animals and trees and plants etc although probably in water it's I wouldn't say easier but it moves downstream like you sort of know where it comes from and where it didn't come from before but of course it could be influenced by rain it could be influenced by many many other things now I'm just thinking that it's not that easy but air feels like it just moves randomly so how do you contribute that to a place or a biome or a watershed or but then it probably tells you a lot more different things if you're able to do that

SPEAKER_02: 29:57

so sure air is going to move and water moves. But the reality is that you still get a much stronger signal from things that are in their immediate environment. So you're much more likely to pick up the person standing right next to the filter than you are the rhinoceros that's 20 kilometers away.

SPEAKER_00: 30:16

True. And so you said agriculture for us is an emerging space. What needs to happen? What would be an ideal agriculture client in the space? Could be, of course, a large food company or something. But if somebody is listening, what would what they should imagine as an ideal case to push the boundaries or to be on the cutting edge to do maybe both air and water or soil and air, et cetera. What would really excite you on the agriculture side, on the soil side?

SPEAKER_02: 30:42

So I think we're really interested in soil sampling in the agricultural context and working with people that can help us translate the data that we get into meaningful metrics. So the soil microbiome, it's not just a list of species. You don't get a list of 20 birds or whatever. It's thousands of bacteria and fungi and invertebrates. And turning that into something meaningful is much more difficult. And it can really depend, right? I mean the ideal ratio of bacteria to fungi in one cropping system might be different for a different cropping system or soil type. So what we're really interested in is just testing out the approach in as many different contexts as possible. What I'm particularly interested in, though, is how do we create a scalable monitoring system for the agricultural space? So it has to be a different business model to how we operate with extractives because you're not making millions of dollars out of... Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 31:59

except maybe a few small areas where we make very, very particular collective wines for collectors. But the rest of the ag industry, unfortunately, is not operating on those margins now. So it has to shift from like, it has to be a different approach. That's what you're saying.

SPEAKER_02: 32:14

Yeah. And so what I'm really interested in is we have all these big corporates who are dependent on agricultural outputs and they're making big commitments to things like regenerative agriculture. How they're implementing those commitments, how they're supporting their suppliers, sometimes a little bit opaque. What I'm really interested is bringing the corporate players to the field level to push them to develop the measurement approaches they need to really evidence the claims that they're making and hopefully supporting their producers in. And for that, I think we need... Yeah, a different scale of approach to monitoring. And where I think DNA has real value is, you know, we were talking about water catchment, so monitoring biodiversity at the scale of water catchment. So can we do that at the same time? scale for agriculture. So can we start to monitor biodiversity at the landscape scale? So rather than having the onus on an individual farmer to fund the measurement approach himself, we look at the bigger picture. We get people to co-invest in the measurement. And yeah, we look at kind of measuring those outcomes at a much larger scale. So sort of thinking along the lines of, you landscape and jurisdictional approaches developing as solutions to sustainable commodity production. So let's kind of harness that model and see if we can deploy biodiversity monitoring as part of those programs.

SPEAKER_00: 33:59

And let's say you have a landscape where one or two or multiple corporates are buying a considerable amount. So there's an influence, there's an interest to monitor. How would you approach it to figure out where to sample? Like how do you pick like okay we don't work on a farm level so we can pick any farm or any spot on a farm how do you normally approach that as well but how would you do that in agriculture okay what we have three ways of sampling where to do what and why how difficult is that on a but if you have the whole landscape and there's somebody paying for it is it then still very tricky to figure out okay we have to be there there and there and that point probably is not so essential to measure but it would be nice like how do you prioritize with like you get of course you only have limited resources now that you can do 10 thousand sampling so how do you prioritize the spots where you catch air water and or soil

SPEAKER_02: 34:49

so I think that's probably what we're really looking for partners for the opportunity to test out I mean there are kind of rules of thumb I mean you know you can look at your landscape you can look at the different crop types and landscape types and habitat types and you can you know break those up and you can sample a bit in those different different types of areas But it also is driven very much on the kind of information whoever's funding and undertaking the measurement wants to get out of it. Do the farmers want meaningful information that might inform their farm management? Then we probably need to look at perhaps more intensive sampling at the field level with soil. Are the corporates not so interested in that, but they want something to tell them about how they're improving charismatic spree season across the landscape. Then we might look to use the water sampling, for example. So I should have said, water's great because you don't just pick up the species living in the water, you pick up a lot of the species living around and interacting with that water.

SPEAKER_00: 35:59

Not just the hippos, but also the birds, yeah. But it's a much wider net and doesn't tell you specific on a field level, obviously, like what's, if a field is moving forward or not and if it's improving. And then, of course, you might have in a landscape also the conservation area where there's a different need as well to what to communicate and what you want to learn. But I think that, I mean, we keep coming back to that on the podcast as well. The landscape approach is absolutely essential, not just for the biodiversity measurement, but in general, because you want to be changing your practices and improving your land if you're a farmer in a landscape that's also moving forward because otherwise you're really fighting against way too much. So that seems to be, keeps coming back as an absolutely crucial, crucial piece of the puzzle.

SPEAKER_02: 36:42

For me, I think it's a really practical way of taking corporate engagement in agricultural sustainability forward particularly around the context of biodiversity and nature because Biodiversity is not the same as carbon. A ton of carbon is the same whether it's released in Brazil versus America, whereas the impact you're going to have on biodiversity is going to be very different depending on your sourcing your ton of soy from Brazil versus America. So context is really important. But of course, these global multinationals who are making all these commitments to regenerative agriculture, very few of them have traceability to the site level. They're not working with individual farmers. So I see a key way for them to engage in this space is at that landscape scale because they will know, well, we know we are sourcing soy from the Sahara in Brazil or cocoa from Cote d'Ivoire. So they know the landscapes that they're operating in and I think that's kind of the right spatial scale for them to engage in sustainability initiatives.

SPEAKER_00: 37:57

Yeah, and then it becomes much more practical as well too. And it is part of that decommodification, like you are working in a landscape, it's something you can just switch and go to some cheaper soy somewhere else, which happens a lot, but the whole process of decommodifying, it means you have longer ties to the same traders and to the indirectly to the same farmers. And you want to make sure that that is moving forward. And let's say in terms of costs, I'm imagining it's much more bearable to be bearable for the large corporates. Like if you want to, because a carbon as well. And it requires a lot of sampling to say something irrelevant about it. Of course, there's a lot of sensing, but it has its limits. Like this is an easy add-on to that, like in terms of cost to monitor biodiversity. And I guess it's, would it be easy to add it to these kinds of projects because the cost is there, but relatively limited or also there we have to work to bring down that cost of like some companies are doing in the carbon side, like easy measurement tools, not that deep, but still really innovating on that side. Or would you say like, actually, this is in the grand scheme of things of a landscape approach of a corporate this would be I wouldn't say a rounding error but it's not so difficult to get it into a project like that because it's compared to extension agents changing management different machinery this is relatively small

SPEAKER_02: 39:11

I think it probably is a relatively small cost but there is still a mind shift mindset shift that's needed these big corporates are not prioritizing resources for measurement I don't think they don't have the budgets to do this sort of work. I mean, I think there's an obvious business case for it. And they're doing all this work on carbon. A lot of the work they're doing on carbon has benefits for biodiversity as well. So for marginal additional investment, they could capture that information and really shore up their sustainability claims.

SPEAKER_00: 39:51

Because if you're doing a soil sample for carbon, I mean, the step to sending it also to you is relatively small. I mean, of course, you have to pay for the analytics, but somebody already did a soil a sample.

SPEAKER_02: 40:02

Yeah, it's maybe not quite that straightforward, but if you've got somebody in the field taking samples, then absolutely, they could be taking samples for biodiversity at the same time. But traditionally, I mean, we have this challenge that nature has historically been undervalued by our economic systems. I mean, we are in this

SPEAKER_00: 40:22

situation. That's an understatement, yeah. Undervalued is an understatement. It's mostly been at zero or negative, yeah, as a cost, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 40:28

Not valued, yeah. I mean, we're in the situation we're in because big corporates farmers I mean we get these ecosystem services for free and so it does require a change of thinking to suddenly be like well there is value in collecting information about biodiversity there is value that I'm willing to pay for I mean I still have a lot of conversations with these multi-billion pound companies where they're expecting biodiversity data to be served up to them for free to be produced by conservation NGOs. A lot of them are still not quite at the place where they're willing to invest. in that data collection.

SPEAKER_00: 41:10

In that as a crucial, just as they're investing in other accounting parts of their other systems within their accounting, just to have a good understanding of what's happening in factories, what's happening in their supply chain sensors here and there to understand if things got frozen or not. I mean, that's all sort of, we take that for granted. That's part of the cost of running your operation. But of course, being able to understand what's happening in the landscapes you're supplying from is just as much part of that as keeping an eye on your containers are around the world and if the temperature went up too much during the trip or not and if you should be worried about what's coming out when you open it in whatever harbor you open your container yeah no that's a very good point actually there's yeah it's and so this brings up a question i always like to ask at the end as well but would it be something like if you had a magic wand and the magic power to change one thing overnight would it be something on that side or something completely different like you can mention anything from global consciousness i usually say better taste or having a carbon price, like taking away all subsidies? We've had a lot of different answers to this question. It doesn't have to be on corporate biodiversity awareness, but what would you do if you had a magic wand?

SPEAKER_02: 42:56

That's the most difficult question, I think. I mean, fundamentally, I think if we want to reverse the situation we are in, and that is the dual crisis of both nature and climate, we need a way to value and embed the biodiversity, ecosystems, better into our business practices. And I don't think businesses will achieve it alone. I think we need much better regulation. But yeah, if I could wave a magic wand, for sure. Would we have a price on biodiversity? I think it's not perhaps quite the place I would take it to. But there needs to be incentives and disincentives. for how we operate and use our natural capital.

SPEAKER_00: 43:51

And what if you would be on the other side of the table, not on the corporate side, but let's say on the investor side, there are a lot of people, even people are setting up quite significant funds saying we're going to invest in biodiversity, we're going to put money to work, et cetera, et cetera. Two part question. First part of the question, what would you tell them? You probably meet them sometimes, I mean, at conferences virtually and offline. Like what would you say to the finance people that are starting to enter the space and say from London city, from Zurich, from wherever, like we want to invest in biodiversity. What would you tell them without starting to laugh in some cases, obviously, because it's quite, it sounds a bit naive sometimes, but how would you approach and say, okay, go and look a bit deeper there, or this is our interesting areas to go deeper into, obviously without giving investment advice.

SPEAKER_02: 44:34

I think they need to do their due diligence. They need to build good partnerships, right? you sort of see this narrative of suddenly nature exists and has value because finance has realized. Decided. Decided. And, you know, there are fantastic people that have been working on this challenge for a long time and they have a lot of knowledge. So I would say, yeah, build good partnerships with those conservation organizations. Be humble. Yeah, be humble and bring in expertise. You are not going to become an expert on biodiversity and nature because you've listened to a few podcasts or read a few articles. I think I would really like to see some people embedding people with backgrounds and expertise in this space when they're building these new portfolios or...

SPEAKER_00: 45:33

Get the experts on board as well. No, I think it's the same. We see a lot of, I get a lot of decks on carbon companies and are focusing on soil carbon, et cetera. And I always click very quickly to the team page. First of all, see the diversity, which is often shockingly low, but also where's the farmer? Like where's the person that actually is dependent on a farm for his or her livelihood and decided that this is an interesting endeavor to spend some of his or her time on, which is usually running very, very low. And most of these shockingly don't have any connect to any farmer. And the first question I always ask her, when was the last time you were on a piece of land? And it's scary to get the answers to that and how much money gets raised and burned. And I think Robin O'Brien of Replant Capital mentioned in an interview a long time ago, he sees these Silicon Valley ones raising crazy amounts of money and then not going anywhere because they don't have any product market fit because they didn't really go to the market and they didn't really spend the humble time on farms. And I'm imagining it's the same in biodiversity. They There's a lot to learn on the field and in the field and in the water streams and with the people that have spent a lot of time there. So it's absolutely crucial. So what would you do if you would be in charge of a large investment fund? Like tomorrow morning, you wake up and have a billion dollars or even 10 billion. Like the billions keep growing these days with inflation. So we might have to put an extra zero. But let's say a lot of money or a billion pounds to invest and put to work could be very long term investments, but definitely investments. I'm not looking to an exact pound amount, but what would you probably What would be the main themes or parts or technology or is it investing in? What would you focus on?

SPEAKER_02: 47:11

So I think like you've just mentioned, the connection to the farmer is key. So investing in farmers, I think particularly smallholders who are going to need the most support in making any big transition. I'm much less interested in big agribusiness. I think if they have the will to change, I'm sure they can make the change. But there are a lot of people that are fundamental to our agricultural systems, food systems, that will need a lot more support. And I think if you can empower them with the right tools and training, then we could make quite a big difference. And I guess a frustration I have, and I'm I mean, we see so much of this money, you know, it's run by people, you know, behind desks in Europe or America or wherever it is. You know, how can we find a much better way of deploying that money with local communities? You know, we see some amazing things that can happen with microfinance. For example, this project I talked about in Sierra Leone, you know, There was a cocoa agroforestry project around this national park. But there were these fundamental challenges about, they were suffering from things like crop raiding from animals that were coming from the national park. So how do you put in place the economic financial mechanisms to ensure that they can value the biodiversity in the national park while also supporting their livelihoods? You get these really cool solutions like these little micro-insurance systems where you give them some seed funding and then they're off and running and they have that safety net in case something happens one year. So yeah, connecting with the farmers, particularly with smallholders, particularly empowering people who are actually producing the commodities to empower them to make changes And I guess the other thing that I would be on the lookout for would be investing in innovation.

SPEAKER_00: 49:34

And when you say innovation, what do you better air sucking machines? No, what is innovation you get excited about or you wish we had already and not still being developed?

SPEAKER_02: 49:45

So, I mean, my background, of course, is much more about monitoring and evaluation, which I guess is the less exciting side of a sustainable transition. If I knew more about innovation that was going to help drive the sustainable practices great I would invest in that but I am really excited about the innovation that we see in better ways to understand our agricultural systems so whether that's eDNA or some exciting you know there's this really cool startup that's using acoustic monitoring to look at pollinator populations for example

SPEAKER_00: 50:21

tell me more about that because it sounds like we want to interview them yeah no I think like the tools the enabling tools I think the shop and how to build this industry is fundamental.

SPEAKER_02: 50:33

Yeah, I mean, I think... We have overlooked the value that good monitoring can provide. It can inform more effective decisions. It can inform more effective resource use. It can inform more effective investment decisions. And we're on the edge of such an exciting space of the deployment of technology to answer some of these monitoring challenges. I think a really good example of has been how deforestation gets monitored now in international supply chains. We have a global map. That gets updated pretty much every day, showing exactly where deforestation is happening in the world.

SPEAKER_00: 51:23

Something like that for biodiversity would be amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 51:27

So if you had that for biodiversity or a global map for soil health, that you could track the changes on an annual or a monthly basis, depending on climate and... and other things. How cool would that be if you could see soil health or biodiversity from space?

SPEAKER_00: 51:47

Yeah, no, we just recorded, just a few weeks ago, recorded an interview actually with Ish and Tom on OpenGeoMap, OpenGeoHub, sorry. And one of the articles they wrote is everybody has the right to know what's happening on our home planet or on our planet. And we were discussing like how do we get access to the satellite data? How do we translate it into something useful for the land steward, the farm manager, whoever, like exactly the conversation we had here so I will link that one below as well because I think we are in the crypts of starting to actually know and see what is happening on our home planet and then hopefully we take action but first is knowing it is no longer good enough to say okay I didn't know that tree was being felled or I didn't know that legal road was being built or I didn't know that that field was being sprayed even though we're paying the farmer or even though the company taking the grain had an agreement that it should be organic or should be beyond organic etc etc like that's kind of level of transparency we need it because we're on a full planet and we're having to manage these resources fundamentally

SPEAKER_02: 52:48

different so yeah there's this fundamental way you can use this information to encourage compliance but I think there's also you can flip it right in terms of knowledge is power and we can also use that to do things better in future like testing interventions

SPEAKER_00: 53:06

absolutely yeah we can see the effect of things if we have a good map of biodiversity even on a landscape level. Like, okay, we start switching certain fertilizer inputs, especially with these high prices. But in general, we start switching to certain biofertilizers. We start integrating trees into ecosystems. What does it do to the overall ecosystem? Biodiversity is something we, I don't think, have ever really monitored, at least not at scale. And then, of course, looking at the climate and all of that, like, how does it influence that full ecosystem and the full landscape is extremely exciting super now I want to thank you so much I want to be conscious of your time as well and thank you so much there's so much more to ask but we'll have you back and unpack more especially as you're getting more and more into the ag space let's say and the exciting ways of using eDNA into changing management practices and changing large scale or changing the practices at a large scale or at a lot of hectares or acres or whatever we're managing because that's the impact we need so thank you so much for your time today

SPEAKER_02: 54:08

yeah my pleasure very happy if anyone has any questions or wants to find out more about dna-based monitoring happy to talk to them

SPEAKER_00: 54:16

super yeah i'll put quite a few links in the show notes and so anybody interested to run tests pilots etc get in touch and we'll get you in touch with kate obviously to start pushing the work more and more into the other extractive industry which is ag sounds good if you found the investing in regenerative agriculture and food podcast valuable there are a few simple ways you can use to support it number one rate and review Thank you so much and see you at the next podcast.