173 Jonathan Lundgren on why all agriculture scientists should become farmers first

A check in conversation with Jonathan Lundgren, founder of Blue Dasher Farms and the Ecdysis Foundation, who talk about the 1000 Farm Initiative, the real innovation on regen production in the United Sates and beyond, and his scientific approach to regen farming practises.
---------------------------------------------------

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

----------------------------------------------------
What has happened over the last 2 years since the last conversation with Jonathan? Has traditional science started taking regenerative agriculture seriously? Is there finally more research into profitability and regenerative practices?

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/jonathan-lundgren-2.

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

Checking in with Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, one of the best USDA ag scientists who left and started his own farm and research foundation. What has happened over the last two years since we first chatted? Has traditional science finally started taking regenerative agriculture more seriously? And do we finally see more research into profitability and regen practices? And what about and what is the 1000 Farm Initiative that John is working on right now? This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, Investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume. And it's that we as investors, big and small, and consumers start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community. And so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you, and if you have the means, and only if you have the means, consider joining us. Find out more on gumroad.com slash investing in regen ag. That is gumroad.com slash investing in regen ag. Or find the link below. Welcome back to another interview. Today... We have back Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, the founder of Blue Dashers Farms, and I'm going to butcher this foundation name, Ekdysis Foundation. We had him in May 2020. You got it. Which is almost to the day two years ago, which were an interesting two years to say the least. And we talked about almonds, profitability, grains and profitability and the connection to regenerative practices. And I think a lot has happened since then, but it's much better to ask it to the man himself. So welcome back, John. So good to be here again. Yeah. For the people that, of course, I will put the link below on the interview we did before, for the people that didn't listen to that, shame on you and go and listen. Not now, but stay here. In a few minutes, how would you describe your ag research journey and where did you get to where you are now? Also, a few more minutes. It's always interesting to hear this story.

SPEAKER_01: 2:30

I was a scientist within the traditional scientific matrix. I worked for USDA for around 11 years and I was very good at that world. He's

SPEAKER_00: 2:43

not saying that to brag, by the way. Just Google it. You will see.

SPEAKER_01: 2:50

But I could drive through Iowa or eastern South Dakota and look at acres and acres of corn and soybeans and cattle and it was like, you know, my research isn't changing anything. Farmers aren't getting better. It's getting worse for farmers. It's getting worse for society and my research has been And so I decided it's time for a fundamental shift. And so I quit. And we started something totally different. We started grassroots style science that's rethinking how science is applied in order to support an evolutionary shift in our food system towards regenerative agriculture. And ever since then, I've been making a lot of mistakes, but having a few wins as well along the way. And just been a part of a movement that's going on in the United States, as well as all over the world right now to save our planet or our place on this planet using our food system.

SPEAKER_00: 3:51

And I think the first major step you took, as you said, I have to become a farmer again, or I have to become a farmer first and then a scientist. And that would be good for many other scientists, I would say as well. But these wins you mentioned, what are the, let's say the highlights, but what were the things you look back on now over the last couple of years and then we'll talk about the last two years obviously of things you you like to share the most when somebody asks okay what have you been up to what are the things you like to look back on could be the the mistakes as well obviously but what are a few things you'd like to point to

SPEAKER_01: 4:23

Well, I think that, you know, the relationships that we're building with farmers are one of the biggest successes and the trust that we're building with farmers and trying to figure out what is the motivators of decision-making on farms. And we like to think, oh, you know, it's all about profit, right? But honestly, if farmers were really interested and driven by profits, they wouldn't be growing corn and beans. They'd be growing something totally different. And so, there's some other sociological elements there and cracking that nut has been a really important part of this and Yeah, just becoming a farmer and our own changes on Blue Dasher Farm here in South Dakota. I'm watching that and how that's changed our approach to science and our approach to life has been a really fun outcome of the, an important outcome of this whole initiative. You know, scientists have to be farmers. We can't be addressing farmer needs without experiencing that firsthand. And the relationships and trust that are associated with that end up driving a far grander impact of our research than could be attained if we were just working at a normal

SPEAKER_00: 5:48

institution. And so what have been, let's say, the last two years, the biggest surprises, what have you learned the most of running the farm alongside doing a lot of research? Because the farm, I think, I'm guessing, started five years ago. I don't remember the exact date. It's It's been relatively new and fresh. And then especially the first five years in any transition are full of surprises, let's say. As a farmer, putting your farmer hat on, what have been the biggest lessons learned over the last two years since we spoke?

SPEAKER_01: 6:22

We became a livestock farm. We started real focused on crops. That's what I knew and thought was the important thing. And now I think our bread and butter is lamb production pork, poultry, eggs, and honey. Those are the things that we think are the most beneficial for the land as well as for ourselves and our community. Those are the things we enjoy producing the most.

SPEAKER_00: 6:52

What triggered that if it's not profitable? Because you just mentioned farmers are potentially not driven by, or probably not driven by profits alone. What triggered that? Because you went into it as a crop farmer, potentially a vegetable farmer, And livestock is very different. What was their moment? When did that realization came? Okay, we need or we want animals on this farm?

SPEAKER_01: 7:14

Well, you know, I mean, I think it harkens back to when we got started, one of my friends who was a farmer, 75 year old fella, really good regenerative farmer. He's like, you know, a farm just doesn't feel like a farm without livestock. And I think he was right. you know there's something fundamentally human about about being around animals that that I don't know if it's a spiritual thing or

SPEAKER_00: 7:45

you cannot see it but he's smiling a lot when he's talking about animals yeah

SPEAKER_01: 7:49

yeah I just I don't understand what it is but there's fundamentally something that we feel connected to when we're raising our animals and caring for those animals and so I really like that aspect of But the other element that I'm starting to realize more and more is that in order for us, you know, regenerative agriculture isn't really even the answer to our planetary scale problems. It's a more fundamental sociological shift that needs to happen right now that we need to, as a society, slow down. We need to start growing our own food. We need to start connecting with Because I feel like we're just losing track of where we fit in this world anymore. And as an artifact of that, this industrialized food system that's having all kinds of problems ends up evolving. And a culture ends up evolving that uses currencies that don't make us feel whole anymore.

SPEAKER_00: 9:02

And animals, I've heard a farmer say that the ideal way of living is herding animals or sort of moving with the animals in their migrations or their nomadic lifestyle and our lifestyle is a bad word here, but do you feel like The shift or the addition of animals on farms is one of those missing puzzle pieces or one of those to slow down, to force to slow down or to force to ask harder questions, which you don't have to ask if you're doing vegetables or row crops.

SPEAKER_01: 10:27

Yeah, you know, I really do. And, you know, as a scientist, I can step back and say, okay, well, there's a lot of ways of penciling this out and saying, well, the resilience of the operation is improved with an additional revenue stream and all of these other things, right? And there's a lot of roles that livestock play as a tool for managing vegetation and all this other sort of things. And all of that's true. But then there's also this element of, you know what, I'm connected to this place it forces me to get out of bed in the middle of winter and go out there and feed the animals and there's something very mentally stimulating and healthy about that yeah there's just it's bigger than that and it's harder to put a number on it

SPEAKER_00: 11:19

and then Does it bother you or do you get pushback on the whole do we have to eat them then discussion, like the slaughtering, like the caring for what about the one bad day, as Joao Salatin mentions it? Do you then put your scientist hat on? Okay, it's fundamental for the land, for us, for health, for the economics, or what does the non-scientist and the farmer hat or the rancher, in this case, I think we'd livestock, we have to call you a rancher. How has that been for you over the last two years to also be there with the bad days?

SPEAKER_01: 12:01

I think that's a great way of saying it, that that's a really bad day. That's not something that I crave or look forward to, but it's a part of this whole thing. I respect the hell out of the animals that are on this farm and treat them as well as I possibly can and they're a part of me and so yeah that cycle is there and that's another part of being human too is understanding that that there's a, that there's an end and, and accepting that and being a part of that. And, and yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:43

And then when you put your scientist hat on, like how, I wouldn't say like, how does it scale? Because that's such a, but going or looking at the, the current agriculture or animal agriculture system, the, the industrialized cave operations, et cetera, how does, I wouldn't say how would that transition, but do you see a transition possible there? Do you see with getting the animals back on the land, caring for the land or caring for the animals, is there a shift happening with that or is it still very much one side, okay, let's squeeze in as much grain and beans as possible into these animals in a closed system and then there's some grass-fed and finished people on the other side and the vegan movement in the other corner and they were all shouting at each other basically. Has something shifted there in the last two years as you've become a livestock farmer yourself now as well? Do you take a middle ground or do you feel maybe more extreme than before? What has happened in that? Has it shaped your research even as well?

SPEAKER_01: 13:49

Yeah, so there was something that happened last year that was really fundamentally changing to me and it pertains to this question. We started started working in regenerative dairy and the first step in that question is what the hell is regenerative dairy i mean what does that look like right and and nobody's really tried to define that and so the first step in that process was me experiencing different dairy operations me and the scientific staff and so we started to do some tours of some operations

SPEAKER_00: 14:23

alexandra farms and things like that

SPEAKER_01: 14:27

and going into this is i mean there's a ton of large Right. Why not? Yeah. And so, I went in there with that viewpoint. And then I met the farmers that were doing it. And these farmers care about their animals. And they have automation and technology to try to assess, you know, what's going on. if there's an injured or sick animal and they try to treat it within that context and they are 100% confined. The confined animal on a dairy or in a CAFO or in a hog yard or anything like that, in the animal, it's the farmer. They are stuck. They are saddled with debt for generations because somebody convinced them, the CAFO builder convinced them that this would be a good business decision. And for the rest of their lives, they are trying to dig themselves out of that horrendous debt. And I felt differently about that, that I wanted to be there to give another option and to try to figure out how to help these people. If one of those milking machines goes down for even a day or two, the whole system starts to break, right? They can't go anywhere. And

SPEAKER_00: 16:42

so how are the conversations with them then? What do you talk about? I mean, they must have Googled you before you came and you come with very different operations as well, let's say. Are they curious? Are they asking questions? Or maybe they don't want to see because it just makes you very sad if you're locked into something and you see, I would say, the green grass outside, but you see other options. It could also be very, very depressing.

SPEAKER_01: 17:08

Well, you know, I think admitting that... that you're trapped and that your children are trapped. They can admit it on one hand, but not understand that there's an alternative. And, and so that's, that's kind of the confinement, I guess, is that there.

SPEAKER_00: 17:31

And have you seen alternatives? Have you seen other, like you visited multiple ones, I'm imagining multiple styles or systems and were the ones that made you, made you happy and made you, even though the dairy gets always the, the huge pushback of like your, like, wouldn't we, should we even be consuming milk because of the, the whole mother calf, let's say challenge and like, What do you see there in the best performing or the best ones you visited? How do they approach that tension or that dynamic?

SPEAKER_01: 18:03

You know, the best ones have animals that are on green grass every day. And we literally saw... We went from that CAFO dairy to a small pasture dairy operation where they grow local milk for their community that's raw milk. And the animals were literally like... jaunting and running through the pasture they looked like totally different animals right and their calves were in association with them and yeah it was just a it was a totally different ball game but the scale was much smaller and the more that I think about this the more I you know we have to understand that that we need a lot more farmers and we need to be connected to our own food production. I mean, when you think about scaling, like farm to school or farm to local communities or something like that, when you have millions of people aggregated, not all of those people can learn their farmers. I mean, when you think about, okay, if you've got 400 kids in a small elementary school or something like that, that's 400 carats a day that you need to produce. And And the scale that's needed there, suddenly you start thinking, okay, how do you accomplish this? And I think more people need to grow food.

SPEAKER_00: 20:14

And so why aren't we, in a sense, I mean, it seems to be happening as well. Is that... Partly that we don't think there's a career there. We, I mean, people in the city, let's quote unquote, let's generalize here, but like what would be needed to unlock many more people? Let's go from 1%, I think in the US is involved in farming to 10%. Like what would be needed to do that? Or do you have any ideas on that? Maybe you'll say, I don't know. This is an impossible question. We think

SPEAKER_01: 20:45

about these issues every day. We have conversations here in our research team every day. every day, our scientific team. And that's just a part of our culture, right? There's enough people throwing their hands up saying, I don't know, we need somebody that's doing something. And, you know, steps in this process are, number one, again, it harkens back to this concept of our society needs to change. Our best farm sales was the day after COVID was announced because people weren't running to the fast food restaurants. They were thinking about cooking. They were thinking

SPEAKER_00: 21:25

about local production. Some of that stuck, like after, in the end, because I saw some of these things obviously went 300%, et cetera, and most of them, some things stayed there. Not all, but many of the direct-to-consumer ones and not direct-to-restaurant ones. I mean, that's a difficult business, although it's coming back. But direct-to-consumer, some of that stayed. Is that the same with you? Are you now operating at a higher level of sales?

SPEAKER_01: 21:50

Yeah, I think we are, and people are understanding that a little bit more, too. It did, you know, I mean, society resumed its rat race, but at a different pace, I think. There's a larger proportion of the United States population that are just slowing down and not going back to work, realizing that they were working to pay somebody else to raise their children, for example, or... To grow their food. Yeah, or to grow their food. And that shift, I think, is going to amplify. I think there was a lie that was told to society that we believed, and that was that the currency that was most important was money. And there's a lot of other currencies that make us feel like ourselves, like human beings. And that's not saying that money isn't important or anything like

SPEAKER_00: 22:50

that. the guy that the only one that ever did research on profitability and regenerate but yeah that doesn't mean that profit is the only thing that drives you obviously

SPEAKER_01: 22:59

so isn't that isn't that interesting i mean that's been a real evolution over the last two years for us sure we can provide that those numbers but

SPEAKER_00: 23:06

which are very compelling let's let's not i mean anybody that's interested ah can it be profitable to go and look at the papers they are extremely compelling

SPEAKER_01: 23:15

profitable and we're about to have one on rangelands coming out and and we have a cash group systems in the northern plains coming out we're in vineyards and cherries and apples and and all across the united states a thousand farms we're going to be visiting and we'll be doing full economic analyses on each of these things right

SPEAKER_00: 23:36

and in all these different crops the general because i always say obviously you look at higher profitability or at least the same lower volatility lower costs is that a general or does it really depend on the crop or is that the general, say the, the red thread that goes through all of these, when you're looking at all of these different crops and different contexts, et cetera, if you had to summarize it, what would be there? There is there a connection between region practices and well done well, obviously, and profitability.

SPEAKER_01: 24:07

Yeah. Um, and so essentially it's let's, we'd really dumb it down. It's lower input costs and greater profits. And, and depending on the system that you're looking at the relative contributions to the overall profitability are different. Like for corn, lowering input costs was the primary reason for the overall net profitability increasing. In almonds, you know, you didn't lose money by going regenerative, but you did gain money based on premiums that are associated with that in product. And so... It depends. But yeah, it's the

SPEAKER_00: 24:48

bottom

SPEAKER_01: 24:48

line. It depends, but it's always... that net profitability is always higher

SPEAKER_00: 24:53

yeah and we talked about it as well last time on the element side i remember like a small of course it's not all about and it shouldn't be about profitability but a small increase there could mean your children stay on the farm and a small increase on these things mean a fundamental difference if you're so at the edge in terms of margins and profitability 10k 20k or whatever per year and somehow makes an enormous difference because somebody can stay and makes an enormous difference because new energy comes in it makes an enormous difference to drive this or gets other currency which means which could be family or time around or whatever other currencies we come up with so it is fundamental to I think to dispel the myth of this is all nice and fun but only if you are a rich landholder that doesn't have to live off the farm you can do this kind of hobbies that's the like yeah that's not true no it's not that

SPEAKER_01: 25:47

at all right it is you know it's the only way that we're going to our farming community is going to remain profitable

SPEAKER_00: 25:55

and what holds the rest back like if this data is is available i remember that almond farmers finally won like the two farmer one of the two you looked at visited the other one and and looked at the profitability or looked at the pest number sorry and saw that even though he sprayed five times a year did exactly what the universities told him he had the same amount of pests as his neighbor who never sprayed like that was a trigger moment like what other trigger moments do we need if this if the data is so clear what is holding us back to seriously scale or is it happening and we're just not seeing it yet because it's so much it's like an underground movement

SPEAKER_01: 26:32

you know that one farmer just to take one step back in year one or after that study that we published he couldn't believe it right but he changed 160 acres over to regenerative the next year and now he's changed his entire 1000 So, what is it that inspires those changes? The thing that we've had to realize is that we have to have the data, but it's not sufficient. And when we got started, I mean, we can have that conversation. Two years ago, regenerative was a dirty word in almonds. I mean, you couldn't go into the Central Valley of California and talk about regenerative because regenerative was a dirty word. regenerative doesn't work here, right? Like it's a thing. And even after seeing the data. Right, right. The data, even after the data came out that said it was twice as profitable and all these other wonderful metrics, carbon sequestration, life promotion, water is huge out there. That wasn't enough, right? Regenerative still isn't okay. You know what changed is we had a presence there. The scientists would show up and we would talk to the farmers and we weren't selling them anything. right? Instantly, the farmer, when you walk onto a farmer's field or into their office, they're wondering, what's this guy going to sell me? And suddenly, they were like, oh, you want to give us, you know,$7,500 worth of free information about our farm because you just want to help? That was like a weird, weird thing. Yeah, I wouldn't trust it either, but yeah. We had a field day a couple months ago, 320 people from up down the central valley came to that field day and it was regenerative almonds the almond board showed up even and um and was there a lot of skepticism we had that or was there in

SPEAKER_00: 28:37

real interest yeah

SPEAKER_01: 28:41

there was real interest and we're working with some of the largest almond producers in the state now helping them to make a transition and when they say you know this can't work you know i'm not going to make that management it's like all right to hell with you then you know what we don't have time for this. If you're serious about change, we'll work with you. But if you're not, don't waste our time. And you know what? What I told them that really got their attention is regenerative agriculture is the future of your industry. You can either change and evolve with it, or you can go out of business. And I don't care one way or the other, but I'll be there if you're interested in making that change. Yep, they got that. They're not used to somebody saying that.

SPEAKER_00: 29:29

No, because everybody tries to sell them something, obviously. And has the last, I would say, six months of political tension and obviously the war we're in now, especially around input prices, has that, we all expected or maybe I expected that that would start some serious conversations about high input driven extractive agriculture, very, very fragile because inputs come apart from the fact that they're extremely damaging and all of that but also just very fragile because they come from far and support certain regimes that we're not too happy about let's say has that like have the last months been more intensive in terms of inbound calls people are interested people that were a bit on the fence of this weird biofertilizer stuff and compost and etc like suddenly you're like let me give it a try because these prices are not sustainable or has that not happened yet

SPEAKER_01: 30:21

um you know we're hearing about that we're making that a part of our dialogue you know uh it hasn't really changed anything except maybe in terms of magnitude, but the same trends were there. Input costs, I mean, farmers haven't made more money over the last several years. Input costs continue to rise, profits, you know, there's a lot more money being made off of farming, but it isn't about from the farmers. It's about all of the other people that have come in to make money off of these farmers. And so as input costs rise, the farmers are, yeah, I mean, prices can go up, right? Corn and soybean prices are through the roof right now, but farmers aren't going to make more money. They're going to put it all into the inputs. And so these companies that are parasitizing the farmers are making a ton of cash, right? but that isn't okay, right?

SPEAKER_00: 31:24

And so what is it? You mentioned it before, but let's unpack it a bit. The 1,000 Farm Initiative, I think it feels really to bring this type of research to a whole new level and a whole new scale because 1,000 sounds like a lot. What was the reasoning or the thought behind it and what is this initiative? And then we talk about how people can get involved, obviously.

SPEAKER_01: 31:46

Sure. So we're on the edge of a cliff. We're looking over and there's a real sense of urgency. We just drove down to Kansas City to visit some family this weekend and we watched the dust blow the entire way down. Oklahoma, Kansas right now are burning. Colorado burned last year. We had to wear masks in South Dakota because Manitoba was burning. This is end of days kind of going on right now all right um and so we decided you know we we know what the answer is how do we get this done how do we move the ball down the field much more quickly and um we know the style of science that we're doing is something that only we know how to do and let's amp it up and so we decided to run a full systems assessment on a thousand farms per year around north America with plans to upgrade this or upscale this globally, where we deploy scientific teams to measure entire systems, deep carbon, soil, physical, chemical properties, water, invertebrates, microbes, plants, birds, mammals, nutrient density of the foods, economics on each of these fields, a thousand fields per year across the country to show or to ask, does regen work no matter what you grow, where you grow it? Farmers are developing systems of regenerative agriculture. How can we use empirical assessments to make roadmaps to remove risks associated with this transition process? And then does regen deliver on its promises? Is this the solution to climate change that people are talking about? about? Does it reverse desertification? Does it improve rural community status? And so we've been, we've done these assessments on more than 100 farms this year already. And

SPEAKER_00: 34:07

it's on a farm level, so not just on a field level, but on a farm scale, or depending on the farm, I imagine. Our

SPEAKER_01: 34:12

experimental unit is the field, but yeah, just because we have to. A farm ends up becoming a much more complicated endeavor, but yeah, this should scale to the whole farm once you start incorporating the different elements of it.

SPEAKER_00: 34:32

And so... How soon do you want to get to 1,000? So 1,000 this year, 1,000 fields on farms, you're en route for that.

SPEAKER_01: 34:43

We're on 500 farms this year and we'll be on 1,000 farms per year next year through 2026 or so. And then we'll be monitoring those transition farms for up to 10 years. But we'll be, yeah, when we come out of a field, we have almost all of the data in hand so we can give that back Act free for the farmers. And then we can consolidate it. It's all anonymized, right? None of the farmer's information is associated with it. But then we can kind of give that off to decision makers, policy makers, people that are coming up with verification ideas for regen, people that are trying to conduct forecasting models on carbon or what have you. We've got ground truth data on a scale that never even been attempted before. And

SPEAKER_00: 35:42

Have you already seen, like, what are the first, I wouldn't say results, but first things you've seen in this 100 farms or farm fields until now? Is there something you can share on surprises or non-surprises you've seen until now?

SPEAKER_01: 35:56

You know, the consistencies across these systems. I mean, you can walk into, but they're, yeah. We're also, in terms of results, right? I mean, you go onto a regenerative field and, you know, life is just through the roof compared to its conventional That's

SPEAKER_00: 36:14

what you do as well. You look like a conventional counterpart or conventional neighbor. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 36:18

that's our control group. Yeah, so those are our controls. We're benchmarking everything against conventional, successful conventional operations. But the differences are palpable and the solutions are palpable. What does palpable mean? Like available? You can feel it? You can... They steal them. Okay. Yeah. I mean, as a scientist, I have to turn everything that I'm seeing into a number. And that's hard sometimes. I mean, you walk onto a regenerative almond operation in the middle of the hottest part of the Central Valley and where they tell us that regen won't work. And you can, I mean, the Central Valley used to be a wetland and now it's a desert. And you walk onto one of these farms and And the temperature is cooler and you hear birds in the air and you can smell life. And turning that into a number is really

SPEAKER_00: 37:25

challenging. So what do you do then? What do you do, John? How do you turn it into a number that we can send to policymakers? We

SPEAKER_01: 37:31

take redundant metrics and measurements of each of these different facets of the system and consolidate it. But boy, won't that be nice when we can consolidate that into an index of some sort of environmental quality or something based on how many birds, how many bugs. It's all trends and scales together. Even the profitability is scales with how much life you have on that farm.

SPEAKER_00: 37:56

So are there really no trade-offs there? Have you seen trade-offs there, maybe on the speed of the transition or on the complexity? Maybe that's not even possible, but over-complexify. Have you seen any trade-offs in the signal so far or the results so far?

SPEAKER_01: 38:13

No. So

SPEAKER_00: 38:15

just an amazing good story, basically.

SPEAKER_01: 38:19

It's crazy how consistent it is across all of these different elements of the system. Just crazy. Does it make you

SPEAKER_00: 38:28

suspicious as a scientist, putting your scientist hat on? Too good to be true? No, it

SPEAKER_01: 38:33

makes total sense. It makes total sense. This is, from an ecological standpoint, this is the answer to planetary scale problems. And when you walk away from that almond orchard I was talking about and saying to yourself, you know what, we can turn this back into a wetland if we strategize this correctly, or we can actually, you know, solve climate change and offset all of our carbon emissions in the Central Valley or of California using the Central Valley.

SPEAKER_00: 39:07

Because that's what it suggests now, because we see a lot of pushback from certain circles and have to mention on this carbon piece we see a lot of hype I think as well which is I think good to a certain extent because suddenly people realize that there used to be a lot of carbon in the soil and it could potentially go back but also a lot of cowboys standing up setting up companies selling very shady credits and less shady credits and all of that like what gives you hope on that carbon piece looking at the science and looking at the fields you visited

SPEAKER_01: 39:37

I think it's the only answer to the carbon crisis right and and you If we make this a dialogue about carbon, then we're losing before we start because we have to understand that really all carbon is is an artifact of life. And so if we establish an incentivization program that's focused on carbon instead of on promoting life on a farm, you're going to lose. There's too many cheaters that are going to move in and try to take advantage of that system. And that's what got us into this mess to begin with. But if you focus those incentive programs on promoting plant and animal life on your farms or microbial life, you can't lose. You can't cheat. Can't shape with life.

SPEAKER_00: 40:26

And so how would you, how would you shape a system like that? If somebody says, okay, John, I would give you the power to, to shape, let's say an ecosystem service, even though the word is horrible, um, system where we're going to sell it's an ecosystem services to others in a, in a forced market. Like everybody has to, like, how would you shape, what would you measure? It's going to be reductionist because we cannot measure everything. We can actually measure the complexity of life and that's a okay, as long as we acknowledge that, what would be good proxies for you if it's not carbon?

SPEAKER_01: 41:01

You know, I don't know that that's even a question for us because what's happening right now is an evolution of our food system, right? under the current constraints to our society and our planet and our food system, the current system is going to die. It's going to implode. We're so close to it that it's really alarming. And the only way that we're going to survive is with regenerative agriculture. And so the regenerative food systems, because of our profit analysis, they don't have to have incentive programs, right? I mean, if those incentive programs can make it more attractive to change or something like this

SPEAKER_00: 41:48

or de-risk like you mentioned before the transition risk we could even be in your head obviously it doesn't have to be real risk but if it's perceived

SPEAKER_01: 41:55

risk perceived risk right yeah and that that's fine but but it's not necessary and I think that that's what yeah as additional farms fail the only ones that are going to be standing are the regenerative ones and so From our perspective, do you incentivize life or carbon or whatever? No, I don't think you need to incentivize any of it. You just need to stop giving incentives to poor practices and remove some of the food safety issues or laws and things like this that are real hindrances. Remove crop insurance that are supporting a dead and broken system.

SPEAKER_00: 42:41

And you mentioned we compared to successful conventional ones do you see even the successful conventional ones struggling or are close to the edge or are let's say the top in the conventional extractive ones are probably last one standing of that sector or are they even there on the edge or are they looking at transitioning as the almond grower we talked about before

SPEAKER_01: 43:05

you know some of them are looking at transitioning and some of them aren't and that's always the way with society right the You know, our economic analysis isn't complete. We don't do whole farm analyses or anything like this. We focus kind of the ins and outs. It's almost a checkbook balancing operation for a particular field operation. And that tells us the relative profitability in that one snapshot. What it doesn't reflect is the brittleness of a larger operation. We had one farmer on A friend of mine would say, you know, I am a farmer. Every year I borrow$800,000 to make$850,000. And our economic analysis doesn't reflect that. It doesn't reflect where people are at. How on earth... If an acre of land is$10,000 an acre, which it is pretty often around our area and around there, how on earth, even with the best corn prices, would you ever in your lifetime pay that off? And our farming community is so overextended on debt and just trying to squeeze out being able to pay that mortgage in order to keep the chemical companies and the seed companies and all the other companies that are making money off of them in business.

UNKNOWN: 44:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 44:43

We're going to break down mentally before we break down economically. But I have a feeling both of those things are already happening.

SPEAKER_00: 44:51

And so what will happen? Will they collapse or one-on-one? And then will the land prices collapse as well and give access to a whole new generation? Or will they stay high and will the largest one surviving that still has an okay relationship with the bank buy the neighbor and keep getting bigger? What is needed? Do prices need to come down at some point to reflect the real carrying capacity.

SPEAKER_01: 45:16

Yeah, I think that that's going to happen. And right now, you end up seeing corporate ownership and investment firms buying land and inflating prices, land prices, keeping them inflated. You see more elderly farmers that have some equity reinvesting that equity back into land but not being able to really pay that. And so the land price are artificially swollen and that bubble continues to swell but it will burst and it's going to be painful to watch but we're real close to that right now and when that happens you know there is a lot of young farmers that are interested in coming in and turns out you don't need 190 million acres to produce food to pay our to feed our society you don't need that much land um if your girl food. Instead of feed,

SPEAKER_00: 46:18

yeah. And so what... Are you hoping to establish, even this year with 500 farms, to start a bigger debate on these crop insurance, on the subsidies, on the land prices in general, or just to publish these results and then hope it sticks somewhere? What are you going to do with the results even this year?

SPEAKER_01: 46:46

At the end of this year, we'll have a pretty darn good... systems-level assessments, including economics on, I don't know, 300, 400 established contrasts around the US.

SPEAKER_00: 47:03

That's a pretty good data set. Plus like a control group next to it in most

SPEAKER_01: 47:07

cases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that's a pretty good sample size to make some assertions, multi-geographies, multi-food systems, you know, orchards, cash grains, vegetables, all of these sorts of things. to kind of say, okay, here's the big punch, right? Here's the big punch of does this work? Yeah, I'm sorry, but it does. And I'm not sorry, actually. It should. This is the answer to a lot of things. And so, the data is going to support that. I mean, that's based on our previous experience, not my ideology.

SPEAKER_00: 48:25

What are your traditional colleagues in like the university world or in the ag traditional ag not even traditional let's say the rest of the ag industry research community think has that changed their their approach to to you and your work in general of course of the foundation over the last years has it been more collaborative or is it really like do they start to see the potential of this as more research keeps coming out telling the same story like look it works there's a lot of potential like let's let's not um Let's not keep ignoring it. Have you seen a shift in the scientific world around this type of work?

SPEAKER_01: 49:08

Yeah, I think that, well, you've seen a lot of, there's a lot of greenwashing too. And so, you see university departments that, you know, open up some, they see this as a cash cow. And so, they end up forging departments in regenerative systems and all this other thing, but they don't really understand what's needed here. The style of science that Ectasis does, which is driven by farming, and on-farm and multi-geography, multi-food systems. We can cross a lot of barriers that other institutions are constrained by. It opens up a lot of opportunities for us to kind of shape the scientific community. When we got into almonds, nobody was working on regenerative almond production. They were thinking about small components. By the time this year I mean, there's four, at least four regenerative almond research operations that are going on or projects that are going on. And so the other research institutions do fall in line. It just takes somebody to show them what it's done. And that's kind of our role at Adyces. Our new slogan is we're the pebble that starts the avalanche.

SPEAKER_00: 50:35

And the rest of the world, like what have you seen beyond the US, beyond North America? Are you in touch with other institutions that are doing similar work? What is your, if you have a view, your view on beyond the borders or across the ocean or across to the south, to the east, to the west, et cetera? What have you seen there? Have you been in touch with many or not? What has been your connection to the rest of the world?

SPEAKER_01: 51:01

You know, I think it's a similar situation around the world as we have in the United States. This movement is not being led by the research community or the scientific community or the governments. This movement is being led by farmers. And there's extremely successful farming operations that are regenerative in every habitat that you visit. Even in the United States, that's been an interesting thing. You know, when we started Thousand Farms, we... posted a database where people could register their farm. And within a couple of weeks, we had almost 900 some farms that were registered from the United States and even some from outside of our borders. You know what that means? I mean, if in a typical crowdfunding situation or something, if you get 10% of people to click on the link and of those 10% to actually do something like register themselves or something like that, That's a pretty good response rate. So you're suggesting

SPEAKER_00: 52:04

there's 100X.

SPEAKER_01: 52:06

There's thousands of regenerative farms just in the United States alone that are operating under the radar screen that are not being served by anybody in terms of science or policies or anything like that. There's a lot going on. And maybe one of our jobs is to help highlight that.

SPEAKER_00: 52:28

So how can people get involved? What do you need? to make this 1,000 potentially much more farm initiative an even bigger success.

SPEAKER_01: 52:40

If you have a farm that you're interested in getting involved in this, we're looking for the leaders in regenerative and those folks that are trying to transition. So if they're just in their infancy, we want them to register. It takes about two minutes. Go to the ecdysis.bio website. You'll see the link. Really doesn't take any time. It doesn't hurt you a bit. That's the first step. It costs us about$7,500 per field to do this analysis, and we're trying to keep it free for the farmers. So if there's philanthropic opportunities or grant opportunities that can help to sponsor farms, this is going to be one of the most powerful research experiments in human history, I think. I truly believe that. And so please help support that. We can really use the help. Get this involved with your networks. Help coordinate clusters of farms because that's how we keep the price down. is by having clusters. We can't go out into the middle of nowhere in Nebraska and have one farm, right? We have to try to strategize this a little bit.

SPEAKER_00: 53:50

So definitely get in touch. I'll put the links below as well. If you want to be on the research side and if you want to, obviously, if you have a foundation and in grant capacity, anything helps in this case, but especially if you have larger capacity, it would help if you get involved. And I think with that, what is, you mentioned a lot of research that's coming out over the next years. I'm thinking, what are you most excited about that's coming, say in the next months? What are you busy with now? Is there anything that's almost ready to be released just to finish up this conversation. It's not the last one we'll have, I'm pretty sure on that, but just to end with, or an interesting surprise over the last weeks in research or in farm business you've done. What is the first thing that comes in mind, the first story that you would like to end

SPEAKER_01: 54:40

this with? Yeah, there's two things. Number one is that we have a couple of three-year transition stories that are starting to come out because we've been monitoring the same farms up in Canada and down in Kansas. And the rate of changes and magnitude of change that we've seen in just one year is pretty profound. So this isn't going to be as risky as we thought it was.

SPEAKER_00: 55:05

And they'll come out as case studies or as research? Yeah, we'll be

SPEAKER_01: 55:08

publishing those. We'll be submitting those within the next couple of months. And then looking at birds as well as invertebrates and things and how those change in relation to... to soil quality and all those other wonderful things. And then the other thing is, you know, this Thousand Farms Initiative is exposing us, you know, like getting our hands dirty on just about every food system in every region on a continent. And the stories that are involved there really get me excited about sharing, you know, the success story of these farmers but in the personal stories of the people that are really making a change so we're exposing ourselves to our food system and an intimacy and scale that has never been I don't think anybody else has that but then also we're studying this at a key pivotal point in human history of evolution of our food system and a real change and so that's I think that telling that story is going to be really fun for us.

SPEAKER_00: 56:21

And probably a key point, and I wouldn't say even in human evolution as well, or the earth evolution, not just the food system, this touches, as we mentioned at the beginning, absolutely everything. And we have to slow down and we have to start somewhere with food problem.

SPEAKER_01: 56:38

Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 56:38

I think it's a really good way of starting. And with that, I want to thank you so much for your time. Be conscious of your time as well. And thank you for sharing this morning and hopefully a lot of interesting case studies, a lot of interesting stories backed by science, backed by non-reductionist science to give wings to this movement and this transition. Thank you so much for, of course, the work you do and coming on here for the second time to share.

SPEAKER_01: 57:04

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for giving us some time.

SPEAKER_00: 57:14

Thanks again and see you next time.