179 Mariko Thorbecke - Let's focus on making agriculture fossil fuel free

Mariko Thorbecke, expert in Life Cycle Assessment, independent consultant bridging between corporate climate, net-zero commitments and regenerative agriculture, joins us to talk about the importance of fossil-free farming, the greenhouse gases presented into a single metric of CO2 equivalents and much more.
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If you care about the climate, you stop eating beef. For sure, you have seen these kinds of headlines and, as a listener and follower of this podcast, you know the reality is more nuanced and way more complex. Today we dive deep into the research side of regenerative agriculture. Most of the research, if not all you have seen, about the climate impact of agriculture is completely wrong.

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/mariko-thorbecke.

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

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you care about the climate, you stop eating beef. For sure, you've seen this kind of headlines. And as a listener of this podcast, you know the reality is much more nuanced and way more complex. Today, we dive deep into the research side of regenerative agriculture. And I feel confident to say that most of the research, if not all, you've seen about the climate impact of agriculture is completely wrong. For instance, did you know that most life cycle assessments or LCAs, that's our current standard to compare the environmental impact of products to each other, never took in to consideration the soil carbon sequestration potential of agriculture. So it only looked at the emission side of things. And as we'll discover today, that is extremely, extremely simplified. Or the amazing topic of CO2 equivalent, which tries to boil everything down to one number and doesn't look at the differences between methane, CO2, fossil carbon, etc. And you might have seen the status of a few articles a few years ago about claiming that beef and other animal protein can be farmed carbon positively or negatively, depending on your point of view. Where did this research come from and how was it done? And most importantly, what are the challenges? What are the pieces still missing in this lifecycle assessment world? And how can we make this type of research more robust? Enjoy. 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 time 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 RegenAg. That is gumroad.com slash investing in RegenAg. Or find the link below. Welcome to another interview today with Mariko Torbeck, independent consultant bridging between corporate climate and net zero commitments and regenerative agriculture. Welcome, Mariko.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Thanks, Colin. Thanks for having me.

Where did you fascination for soil came from?

SPEAKER_01 2:29

And maybe some people won't recognize your name, but I've definitely seen your work on the lifecycle assessment pieces and especially looking for the first time in many cases into soil carbon, into multi-stack species operation, et cetera, operations, et cetera, et cetera. But to start with a personal question, when did your fascination for soil or how did you roll into the the life cycle assessment space focused on regenerative agriculture what was that do you remember how you got into this space because you can do life cycle assessments and this kind of research anywhere or in many many other places and ag is definitely not the first place people think about and somehow you ended up working mostly on this how did that happen

SPEAKER_00 3:10

yeah i mean for me personally i would say it's it's really been for the love of food um my husband and i had We have a two acre micro farm where we have dairy goats and chickens and ducks and a really big garden. I think at this point, many people know that food and health are intricately connected. I think working in nature and with nature and mental health are intricately connected. And I think that a big part of what I enjoy is kind of bridging between the sort small scale, having a little agricultural sandbox area in my own home and figuring out how does that then scale globally and within the context of what a lot of the global food and ag companies are looking at, which is typically using LCA or life cycle assessment as a tool to better understand where the impacts and opportunities lie within agriculture.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

And farming yourself as well on a small scale but nonetheless farming what's been the biggest surprise or the biggest lessons learned doing this yourself and not just quote unquote obviously researching this from a distance with your academic head on

SPEAKER_00 4:33

yeah I mean maybe it's no surprise but I think one thing we've definitely discovered in the last three years is that the best laid plans almost never come to fruition but there are always important lessons to be learned along the way. I mean, a few examples this year has been absolute insanity with the highly pathogenic avian influenza that's been going around the US. So I had my entire rotational grazing plan in place for the goats, the ducks, and the chickens. And then all of a sudden, we were basically told that we to quarantine all of our birds and keep them confined inside. So that's an example of where things didn't go to plan. But I think that soil health and really understanding the interactions between the livestock, the plants, the soil, and as well just there's so many things to learn about even like parasite management and livestock management that we've definitely learned a lot in the last three years, made several mistakes, but every year we see some really good improvements to what we're doing.

White Oak Pastures Life cycle assessment

SPEAKER_01 5:54

And just to look at that, I think many people in the space saw some of your coming out and now I think two or three years ago on white oak pastures. And I think the first LCA is honestly looking at a larger regenerative system and got very excited when they saw the infographics, like you could store this amount of carbon and This was done when you were working at Qantas and I think paid for by General Mills. Can you summarize? I mean, I will link below, obviously, the papers, which I recommend everybody to read and go deeper into this just to understand the dynamics and limitations and the opportunities, et cetera. But can you summarize it in a few sentences? What was the body of work? Why is it so unique? And then we'll go to the outcomes as well and what it tells us and what it doesn't tell us.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Yeah. And summarizing all of it in a few sentences might be a bit challenging. A few more. A few more is fine or we have

SPEAKER_01 6:49

time.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, I mean, this work, the bulk of it was done back in 2018. So that's, I guess, around four years ago now. And basically at that point in time, most companies were leveraging lifecycle assessment to better understand the sort of impacts and opportunities within agriculture. However, one of the challenges with lifecycle assessment at the time was was that it was basically a tool that was quantifying or estimating emissions associated with agriculture and not looking at, you know, carbon's part of a cycle. So there's emissions of carbon, but then there's also carbon sequestration and carbon sinks, such as in soil and biomass. So basically LCA was looking at one half of the equation. Which makes agriculture

SPEAKER_01 7:43

really bad.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Which makes agriculture look insanely bad. and wasn't looking at the sequestration potential. Now, anecdotally, at the time, there had been a lot of articles and sort of examples of farms that were using regenerative grazing practices, things like rotational grazing, using multi-species. And anecdotally, we're seeing improvements to the health of their soil, to the increase in their topsoil and the health of the land. And what we wanted to do was to try and see, could we capture some of these benefits in an LCA? And how might that change the narrative around what, you know, agriculture could look like beyond just looking at how do we produce food in a way that's as carbon efficient as possible from an emissions standpoint to looking at if we start to look at the sequence sequestration, do some of these systems that a lot of people would consider to be inefficient, either inefficient uses of land or inefficient uses of carbon, would they actually fare better if we started to quantify the soil carbon sequestration? This work was funded by General Mills. At the time, they had just acquired the Epic brand, which makes like animal protein, like beef jerky type and they had one farm in their supply chain in particular called White Oak Pastures, who had been basically practicing this regenerative grazing, holistic land management for, at the time, around 20 years. And so it kind of provided the perfect opportunity to combine General Mills' desire to better understand regenerative agriculture, to better quantify their company and their supply chain, subsidiaries carbon emissions in a more holistic way. And yeah, that led to this body of work.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

And what shocks me is that on the LCA side or on all of this research is that the potential or the drawdown potential wasn't really looked at until now. Mostly the pollution side of things or the emission equivalent, which is always a tricky one because we put everything under one number at the end, but we'll talk about that as well. So this was and is revolutionary work. Have you seen since then, because you mentioned this is work you did four years ago, or the research site was four years ago, then it, of course, written, peer-reviewed, and published, which means we're four years further down the line. But have you seen others taking that challenge of even... I mean, the first challenge of trying to quantify the potential of drawdown in soil and biomass, or unfortunately, it has been... a very empty field until now.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Yeah, no, I think at the time, if one was to do a literature review on soil carbon sequestration in LCA, there was almost nothing that was popping up. Now we know others were working on this simultaneously, but due to the nature of research and publishing, we didn't actually see those papers coming out until several years later. So I would say since then, A lot of papers and articles have been focused on how do we start to quantify the drawdown, the soil carbon sequestration. And in particular, it's been a pretty hot topic amongst the corporate climate commitment space. The Science-Based Targets Initiative back in February just published their draft forest land and agriculture guidance for how companies can set targets related to land and agricultural-based emissions. And it now looks like they're moving from a previous state, which was not allowing companies to account for soil carbon sequestration or for any sort of sequestration towards their targets, to now allowing them to do so. And that's really, I think, going to change the way that companies think about the potential of agriculture, exactly, to meet their climate targets.

The results in and on the soil

SPEAKER_01 12:16

And so that's on the carbon potential. And so just to what were some of the conclusions or what were some of the outcomes you saw out of that study and body of work? Because what you did, I think, is looked at, of course, the 20-year land, like the pieces of land and the fields that they've been working on for 20 years. And I encourage anybody to go deeper into the work of wider pastures because it's very, very interesting to say the least. But you also looked at some newly acquired land, degraded land that they bought recently. I mean, now five years ago, probably, and how quickly that started to change. And what did you see there in quite an advanced and complex regenerative or farm using regenerative practices? How fast were changes that you saw and how instrumental was that compared to the total emissions of the farm? Because obviously that's what Epic and General Mills wanted to know. Like, does it stack up? Is it relevant in what we emit? And what is the potential of the sequestration, basically?

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Yeah, no, that's a great question. And maybe that's a good time for me to just kind of explain how the soil sampling worked. I'm not a soil scientist. We partnered with a soil scientist to handle all of the sampling work. So that was one thing that was unique about this study is in other cases where people are trying to quantify the soil carbon, a lot of times they're relying on models where they're collecting data inputs, they're plugging those inputs into some sort of model that's then giving an estimate of what the soil carbon potential might be. For this study, we really wanted the results to be as robust as possible, so we did opt to take soil samples directly from the farm. That comes with its own set of limitations and uncertainties that are different from modeling, but it does give us a little bit more confidence in the results that we were seeing. So there's two main approaches to kind of sampling soil carbon over time and understanding those changes. One is to basically take a sample in one year, wait a few years, take another sample, wait a few years, take another sample. Same spot, same

SPEAKER_01 15:10

depth, same time of year, same day, same everything.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Exactly, exactly to the extent that that can be controlled. If we had wanted to do that with white oak pastures, We would have had to have started this work 20 years ago. So that was not a good option for this study. It could be an option for future studies. Are there farms that have done that? Are

SPEAKER_01 15:30

there farms that have been doing it? Because that would be an amazing body of data, basically. Or has somebody done that? Like retrospective, just making sure we take, as we take a picture every year in some places just to follow or a shot actually for a video or documentary, like the biggest little farm, I think they did for seven years in certain spots every year. at the same time, et cetera. Have we taken any of those for the soil carbon side or that's been wishful thinking? Or maybe 20 years ago, we weren't so much looking at that.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

You know, I'm pretty sure there are scientists who have looked at that. But again, you know, soil is so specific to the region, to the thing that scientists are trying to study, whether it's an ecosystem, whether it's agriculture. I don't know for sure, but I've definitely seen soil health lectures where they'll show Gabe Brown's soil carbon data. So he's one of the kind of US pioneers of RegenAg. But I've definitely seen graphs that talk about his soil carbon data all the way back

SPEAKER_01 16:39

to 1993. Yeah, I've seen that as well. And I think in Rothamsted in the UK, because for sure we'll get emails now, they have the largest soil sample library and history book-based where I've been in that library actually and it's absolutely stacked with soil samples going back I think 160 years or something on their farm on their research farm so there is something and then of course you could you could now take some sampling and go and run it through the new sensors and labs we have so there's for sure ways to do it but I don't think on these active farms yeah most people didn't have the time nor the budgets and the research to to do that on every field or every piece okay so that's that's one approach we you couldn't do because you couldn't travel back 20 years. So what's the other approach that you opted for?

SPEAKER_00 17:26

Yeah, so the other approach is called a chronosequence approach. And in essence, it's substituting space for time. And so the reason that this site was so well suited to a chronosequence approach was because it had sort of its, when we were doing the study, the total farm acreage was, I believe, around 3,000 acres. However, it had kind of started with a smaller amount of land and almost every year in the last 20 years had acquired new land. So basically what that meant is we had some portions of the farm that had been under that management practice for 20 years, and we had other portions of the farm that had been purchased, you know, had just gotten started. And so basically, I don't remember the exact years, but we were able to identify uses using the kind of soil, there was like a soil database, because we wanted to make sure when we were sampling fields, we were sampling fields that had as similar soil profiles as possible. And we were basically able to identify, I think there was a year zero field that they had just purchased, had not been under any sort of animal influence. And then I think there was like a three, five, seven, and then like all the way up to 20 year. Exactly. And so using the chrono sequence is basically saying, let's pretend like this year zero field is what the year 20 field started out as. And basically then you can see that the year 20 field was storing a lot more carbon than the year zero field.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

And that sort of assumes, and I know that's not true, that the exact management practices stay the same. How do you work with that as they learned, I think, a lot into that past 20 years and have been adjusting their approach? How do you adjust in that for, in the research, basically, that it's not every field has had the same treatment for 20 years or 15 or five or 10?

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah. And I mean, that's where our goal as kind of the LCA practitioners was to really understand directionally what is happening and get it as close to a magnitude as possible. But yeah, if we had been doing this to advance soil science, we might have been a lot more careful to say, okay, what was the exact management practice on the 20-year field? How did that differ from the seven-year field? What's different? But overall, the things we were pretty confident in were that the original land use before being converted to perennial pasture was pretty consistent. So in that region of Georgia, I think it was predominantly being the crop rotation was something like wheat, peanut, corn, and soy that were basically being grown in very chemical intensive systems. A lot of erosion had occurred. So you had very, very degraded land that they were starting with. And then, yeah, wheat We did see like there was quite a bit of variation in the soil carbon that was stored in each of the different fields. And that's probably reflective of the fact that the management wasn't identical over the last 20 years. But what we did see was a very strong directional trend line of the carbon sequestration. And basically that trend line was around five to six times higher than what would be considered normal for grazing systems in that region of the US.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Okay, so five to six times higher. What does that mean in terms of potential of soil carbon sequestration in terms of what's the 5x or 6x here?

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Yeah, so they were essentially drawing down carbon five to six times faster using their multi-species rotational... Compared to what we know now

SPEAKER_01 21:55

or compared to what is the standard of perennial grazing there and thus what we've been using in models as well? So does it suggest we're way off in terms of what we calculated until now?

SPEAKER_00 22:07

No, so that was compared to what the literature said was likely the potential rate of sequestration of perennial pasture in that region of the US. Wow. That was likely not integrating multi-species and not... doing the same adaptive multi-padded grazing. That's

SPEAKER_01 22:30

a massive difference, like five to six times. I mean, it depends what the starting point is, obviously, but it's a very big difference. And then how did that lead into, because I saw the headlines and infographics of basically claiming carbon negative beef. And of course they compared it to some plant-based or let's say non-beef burger ones, which did very well on the infographics But what was the quote unquote conclusion? Because you can never conclude these things because then we're going to talk about the limitations or let's say the possibilities of further research. What did that lead to compared to the emission side? Because of course, that was what you mentioned. We want to bring in the potential of sequestration into the normal work of LC-ASIS, which is looking at the emission side of things. How did those two stack up basically?

SPEAKER_00 23:20

Yeah, so there were two parts to the study. One was that we did look at the entire farm when we were trying to capture the emissions. And then because General Mills through Epic was sourcing beef from the farm, they wanted to understand specifically the footprint of that beef. So we looked at the whole farm and then we looked at the beef footprint. This is where some of the LCA jargon comes into play. But essentially, the way that you understand the beef emissions in the context of an entire farm And I don't think I mentioned, but at the time the farm had, they had beef, they had chicken for meat, they had egg layers, they had pork, sheep, goat, duck, guinea fowl. So they had quite a few species. So part of the challenge is untangling, you know, from a complex multi-species operation. How do we understand what the beef footprint is in the context of that. And in some ways, that's a bit of an arbitrary exercise. We use the best practice in LCA, which is essentially economic allocation. And so all of the animals were contributing to the soil carbon sequestration that was occurring on the farm and to the...

SPEAKER_01 24:46

But which one did what is obviously tricky. Exactly. Which one did what

SPEAKER_00 24:51

is a tricky question. So essentially what we did was from the entire farm, we were able to pretty cleanly separate the beef-only emissions because in our models, we were looking at things like, yeah, how many head of cattle did they have? What were their age ranges? How much manure were they producing? And what did the models say the emissions from that were? How much feed were they digesting? And what did the models say were the emissions from that? These are the same models that predict the

SPEAKER_01 25:26

solar carbon potential where we're five to six times off. So how do we know, let's say, do we need a lot more research also on that side of things? Because I think a lot of this data comes from and not from these kinds of systems. So how do we, let's unpack that later. So you were taking this into account now because I'm really wondering and I've seen more and more, I wouldn't say suggestions, but a lot of this data on the methane side, on the emission side comes from a CAFO So the factory farm side of things, which is a very different kind of approach, let's say the least, if you have been in one compared to something like this. And so we might be off by a factor X when we look at emissions and emission equivalent, which probably makes all these infographics look really odd or weird if you had to go deeper into that. So that's a side note. But so you looked at all of that and then separate out the beef side because that went to Epic. And that was, of course, what General Mills was interested in. in and then what was there, basically a bit tricky but still doable conclusion coming out of that?

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Yep. So then for the sequestration, we basically had the total sequestration, well, the annual rate of sequestration for the farm because an LCA typically looks at a single operating year. We then looked at the total sequestration that occurred in that operating year that we were looking at. And then through LCA best practice, we did economic allocation. So basically that looks at all of the revenue that's being generated on the farm. And then basically, you know, if beef is say generating 50% of the revenue, it says 50% of the sequestration can be allocated to beef. So this isn't a perfect, you know, scientific way of doing it, but it is the industry best practice for, when allocation needs to happen. So basically the conclusion was that within our estimates, we do think that the net total emissions for beef is likely negative. We'll probably touch on some of these uncertainties and error bars and things like that. Yeah, because I saw a huge bar on

SPEAKER_01 27:44

methane and a very conservative number even on that, which is very interesting. But if you look at the beef alone within this system, it seems like like a carbon negative, which is a positive thing, let's just be very clear here, a carbon negative footprint. And then looking at the farm as a whole, it was a different outcome. It was significantly less carbon, but not a carbon negative conclusion, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Yeah, so looking at the whole farm, and I had to pull up the PowerPoint to remember this number, it looked like the soil carbon sequestration in that operating year was offsetting around 85% of the total farm's emissions for that year.

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Which is massive. Now we go into the uncertainties there. So what would be, I think that's a massive conclusion, a massive potential. Was that a surprise to you? Did you notice? What was, when you first saw these results or when you were making these PowerPoints to present this as well, what was the biggest surprise you found in doing this research?

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say the results were surprising, but I think what was most exciting is I was on the farm when the soil samples were being taken. And so we're going field to field. We start with the kind of year zero, you know, the lower year fields. And basically the soil is, it's bright red clay down there. And the year zero field had basically no dark topsoil on it. It was just basically an all red clay core. And we did meter deep cores. So this was like a truck going down a whole meter so you could see the, you know, the different horizons, which was very cool. By the time we got to the fields that had been under management for several years, all of a sudden, you could visibly see the topsoil layer, the dark, rich, you know, organic matter topsoil layer on top visibly growing. And so, you know, by year 20, you had just a core with a significant, you could visibly tell with your eyes that the topsoil on this farm was increasing. And watching- We had somebody, we had

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Nicole Masters, actually, that said you could smell it as well. Like you can, even if we're not trained, Like if you're not a farmer, you can smell the difference if your eyes closed between healthy soil and unhealthy soil. But of course, we can see it as well. And you saw it.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

I believe it. And that's the amazing thing about animals on pasture is you can go and enjoy the farm and not be overwhelmed by the aromas that a lot of people would consider to be not very pleasant.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Our nose is a very strong sensor. Yeah. And good compost, good stuff doesn't smell. It smells

SPEAKER_00 30:43

earthy and very... Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

There's something, that's a whole different discussion, but there's something I think deep in there that suggests something that we generally like this earthy smell. smell and don't like the smell smell, let's say.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Exactly, exactly. But yeah, so what was there was kind of the waiting period between when we sent the samples off to the lab and we're kind of waiting to get the quantification of carbon for each sample back. So it was very, very exciting to see those soil cores and what you could visibly see as soil health improving throughout the 20-year chronosequence to finally translate that into what we thought was the sequestration rate at the farm, and then to visibly see how that stacked up to what a typical LCA would consider to be the emissions side of the equation. So that was very exciting. I don't know that I was surprised by the result. Yes, I was. I think in many of these cases, you're sort of fearing the worst. You're fearing that you're going to be working on a study. Beef is already so controversial, so you have all of these emissions, and you're worried that the sequestration is going to be meaningless. If that's the case, it really becomes even more difficult to make the case for regenerative agriculture, for livestock integration, for rebuilding our ecosystems and reintegrating animals to the land. see these results, I think it does show some really good promise for what the potential of using animals to restore degraded land could be from a carbon perspective.

SPEAKER_01 32:37

And to unpack another piece of that puzzle before we go to what can be improved or how can we make these results much more robust, which sounds like we need to revisit the models on the emission side as well, but there's in the paper, the final paper, there is this mention of it. It all sounds super amazing and very interesting. Significantly lower emissions are significantly lower total emissions when you count the sequestration, but it does require twice and a half times the land. Can we unpack that a bit? What leads to that? Because it's such a low input way, it's intensive and extensive at the same time. How can that lead to two and a half times more land? Or how is that land calculated, let's say, in other systems? which require an enormous amount of land beyond that to mine the fertilizer. How does that stack up if we look at it two and a half times? Should we be really worried? Can we still feed the world with these things? I mean, I think many people when they saw it were like, oh, okay, this is going to be an argument that's going to be used against, let's say, region ag quite strongly. What is your response to when somebody said, yes, but it uses two and a half times more land and we can't have that because we have to feed the world?

SPEAKER_00 33:51

Yeah. And I mean, this is, that there could be a whole podcast episode on this question itself. But I think a few thoughts are that, you know, A, this type of system has the opportunity to use marginal land that would otherwise not be croppable. And if you're not able to grow crops on a certain piece of land, that land wouldn't be able to support, you know, growing animal feed. For example, for confined animals, In the US, I think the majority of our land is actually kind of pasture and range land, most of which is unsuitable for growing crops. So there is an opportunity to add a little bit more nuance to the discussion about where is this appropriate from a land use perspective, where is this maybe not appropriate from a land use perspective. But I think that the other sort of thing to unpack is that I mean, I focus mostly on the U.S. context, but we have quite a bit of cropland that is not actually growing food for people to eat, to consume directly. And so, you know, somehow we've gotten to a point where we have somewhere between, you know, 300 to 400 million acres of cropland in the U.S. And, you know, for scale, a country like Switzerland is 10 million acres. So we're talking about quite a bit of cropland in the U.S. And, you know, somehow 70% of that land is basically growing just two crops.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

7-0, just 7-0, not 1-7.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

It's massive. 7-0, 70% of our U.S. cropland is pretty much growing just two crops. And a large majority of those two crops are going into livestock feed. Now, because of the efficiencies that have come with, you know, things like synthetic fertilizer. We have been able to increase yields of those crops to the point and that along with the, you know, the animal genetics where now we have animals that, you know, I think a Cornish cross chicken grows to market weight in six weeks or something like that. So we have incredibly efficient animal genetics, incredibly efficient, you know, corn and soy farming that basically combines, you know, when you confine all the animals to a small space, gives a very, very small land footprint. However, that small land footprint is not without consequence. So, for example, we have nitrate pollution pretty much everywhere in the U.S. in the groundwater. Part of that is from the fertilizer runoff for growing the feed so intensively. Part of that is from manure runoff from the confined livestock operations. There are air pollution concerns as well with confined animals, kind of going back to the aroma that apparently can be smelled for miles away. So it's one of those things where I think land is worth a much more nuanced conversation about how should we be using our land? What should we be growing out of our cropland acres in the US? I think less than 1% is growing fruits and vegetables and nuts and things like that. A lot of it is really going towards growing the animal feed. So yeah, I think there's more to unpack there than just it uses two and a half times more land.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Yeah, I think there's the question which you raised at the beginning, what kind of land? Second, if we take an old land into consideration, plastics, annalities, okay, that's a whole different discussion. And also, is that land of all the feed and ethanol, which is another huge issue, the land is there, let's say. It's just not used to grow food in many cases. It's used to grow feed or fuel, and both of that should immediately and this does seem to suggest that there is especially the multi-species and holistic grazing or adaptive grazing or whatever we want to call it for sure getting emails about this as well but it is a very intensive way of producing quite a lot of calories like did you compare that as well like what this size farm almost per hectare per acre produces compared to the neighbors in Georgia that are producing maybe the wheat corn rotation that you were mentioning before like compared to the neighbors, like the amount of calories that people actually eat, um, white oak pastures is, is producing must be completely off the chart compared to neighbors and not taking in a lot of inputs because they are very input low. Do they import a lot? Like does the system as a farm, therefore at a farm level need a lot of things coming into the farm or is it mostly quote unquote self-sufficient? Like what inputs do they, do they bring onto the farm? What have you, which you obviously counted as well into, into the LCA.

SPEAKER_00 39:20

Yeah. So I, the answer to answer your first questions, we didn't look at like a calorie per calorie basis. I think that's also a very nuanced conversation. Exactly, exactly. But in terms of the inputs for the farm, the the beef, sheep and goats were almost self-sufficient, like 100 percent grass fed. They were bringing in some minerals. So ruminants typically need they had a mobile mineral bar. And then, you know, the cows and the animals know exactly what their body needs. And so that's a very, very small input. But otherwise, for the hogs and the poultry, those are monogastric. So they can't, at least the species that we've bred right now, they can't survive on just the grass alone. So they were bringing in feed for those animals So grains. But otherwise, I think those were the major inputs. You know, there's a little bit of fuel for them running their own, for running their trucks and being able to get around the 3,000 acres. Okay, I have it right here. Poultry and pig feed, the mineral bar. Oh, the year kind of zero and one fields. They were seeding those fields with grass seed or the mix of their grass seed in the first few years. And then once it was seeded, they weren't doing any more of that. And then it was fuel, electricity and water. So pretty, yeah, the poultry and the pigs are hard because they do require the external feed, but the ruminants were almost self-sufficient. So

SPEAKER_01 41:23

would that then suggest if the non-ruminants are, first of all, needing inputs and maybe because of that, and we'll get into the models later, but are not the biggest contributor, let's say, to the soil carbon side or they're a big contributor to the emission side, would you then suggest, obviously not making farm suggestions, to get rid of that part of the system and keep the ruminants that clearly can survive on grass itself? Yeah. after the seeding, obviously, and after transition period? Or is that just a very simplistic reductionist way of looking at some of this data?

What needs to happen to make these results more robust?

SPEAKER_00 42:17

Yeah, no, that's an excellent question. And I think that the important thing to remember is that the LCA is an oversimplified model of what is happening on the farm. And in our case, we were looking at a single component, which was the carbon and the greenhouse gas emissions coming from the farm. Whereas when you visit the farm, when you hear Will Harris talk about the system and the cycles that he's recreating, it becomes very apparent that having the multi-species is a really important part of the operation. There are still things we're learning about how to best manage for livestock parasites, which can live in the soil for years and years and years, and actually having multiple species and especially the chickens help to kind of scratch, the chickens follow the cows, they kind of help to scratch and incorporate incorporate some of the manure. They eat the fly larvae that is growing in the manure, so they decrease the fly population, which can be quite a nuisance when you have livestock. They're getting some additional feed and protein from eating that larvae. And there's some evidence that having the multispecies can help to reduce the parasite loads as well within the pastures. So we do know anecdotally and depending on what the field of study is that there are innumerable benefits to having multiple species. Oh, that's the other thing is different species eat different grasses that are growing on the pasture. So the cows are going to have the things they like, the goats are going to have the things they like, the chickens are going to have the things they like. So you kind of have a more balanced, healthier, more biodiverse pasture as well if you have the multi-species. The question on feed is that kind of goes down an interesting rabbit hole because what you're optimizing for determines kind of the approach to the solutions. So for example, if we're optimizing for the most efficient CO2 equivalent animal protein, pork and chicken typically end up being much more CO2 equivalent efficient compared to beef because because of the methane emissions. However, if you were trying to optimize for something like farming that's free of fossil fuels, all of a sudden the ruminants are probably gonna have the biggest potential to achieve that. And that's where I think as we're sort of moving towards better understanding the role that agriculture plays in both climate change, but also in the potential to help producers adapt and potentially mitigate climate change, the conversation is gonna evolve as to how we want to prioritize our different land use, animal protein, what we grow for annual crops, et cetera, et cetera.

SPEAKER_01 45:28

Yeah, I think that's an excellent point that many people forget. And so what needs to happen, let's say, on the other side of the equation, you mostly look now at, let's say, the potential and the sequestration side of the LCAs that has been missing until now, and then luckily other people are working on that as well, How do we bring the positive potential to an LCA and to this kind of research? But then looking at the other side, what we've been mentioning as well is that a lot of these models on methane, a lot of these models on emissions are models and don't reflect what has been happening on these kind of pioneering farms. So do you see that work is needed to make these LCAs more robust also on the, let's say, the emission side? And if so, what needs to happen there? What would be interesting interesting research projects to make the emission side more robust as well and not based on potentially outdated, maybe not, but potentially outdated models.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

Yeah, no, this is something I think about a lot in my line of work, where there's a saying, I think it's something like, all models are wrong, most are useless. And I think that applies very much to LCA as well, where the original goal of LCA was to pretty much help companies understand where the emissions hotspots were over an entire lifecycle. So the goal is to take a holistic approach to look at all elements of production from, if we take agriculture as an example, the upstream production of fertilizers, all of the transportation of those fertilizers to the farm. When you get to on-farm, you're looking at the application of those fertilizers, emissions associated with that, emissions associated with-

SPEAKER_01 47:21

Which are massive on methane and nitrogen and all kinds of other emissions.

What should smart investors, who want to invest in Reg ag and food look out for?

SPEAKER_00 47:27

Exactly. Exactly. And then, you know, after the farm gate, looking at what what's needed to convert, say, wheat into wheat flour, you know, how much fuel and energy and then how much energy does take to transport all that flour to General Mills or whichever company is using it. So the original goal was to understand the hotspots that were occurring across an entire sort of lifecycle approach. The challenge is that we're now moving from a point in time in which companies wanted to understand the hotspots in the areas of opportunity to companies wanting or I guess needing to quantify their emissions in a much more accurate way. And that's been a really kind of difficult thing because pretty much all of the databases that we rely on to do our LCA assessments, they're based on generic data. And a lot of times it's it's looking at data at, say, the country level. So, for example, it might have a data, a data set that's, you know, wheat grown in the U.S., but there's not a data set that's, you know, wheat grown using regenerative practices or. Or in Georgia. Wheat grown using irrigation or wheat grown in Georgia versus Kansas. Wow. So the the LCAs that we have been relying on, they give us essentially an estimate, but not a very accurate picture of what would actually be reflected on a specific farm or a specific operation. And I think this is where a lot of the tension is, is that because of that, we have a lot of groups that are focused right now on improving the accounting and improving the methodology development, basically to try and make the numbers more accurate to kind of reduce the uncertainty and the error bars that are associated with those LCAs. But I think what's interesting here is that we're sort of at a stage where, because we've had so much LCA work done on different food and ag products in different countries, we're at a stage where we really know what drives farm-level emissions. And from a soil health perspective, we're learning new things every day, but We also have a general idea of what practices are going to lead to improved soil health. But the challenge that I see in my industry is I think we're getting very caught up in trying to figure out how to quantify those emissions better, as opposed to focusing on how do we make the changes that we know that we need to see. So an example is that our nitrogen cycle right now is completely out of whack. And ideally, we would focus on figuring out how do we get those nutrient management plans in place so that we don't have nitrates building up in our groundwater and in our surface water. We also know from a climate change perspective that we need to figure out how to eliminate the fossil carbon from agriculture. That's both for the on-farm fuel in tractors and equipment, but also for the production of, say, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. So there are things that we know we could focus on that would help agriculture align to what is needed to be aligned with the 1.5 degree future. And yet there's a lot of time and energy going into arguing about methodological improvements and especially things like the permanence of soil carbon, which is a pretty

SPEAKER_01 51:20

interesting topic. So what would you tell, let's say we're in a theater I always like to use this example because I hope we imagine listening to this wherever you are listening. It could be on a tractor, on a horse, on the land. It could be somewhere in a commute, et cetera. But imagine we're in a nice old theater and we're on stage and we're doing this in person and the room is full of investors or people working in finance. What would you tell them, obviously without giving investment advice, but to focus on in this field of work when they walk out of that theater? theater in the evening and say, okay, tomorrow morning, I'm going to dig deeper into X, Y, Z. What would you tell them? What are interesting places to start digging deeper and to understand more of this potential, but also the challenges and opportunities of, let's say, the LCA work or the measurement and trying to quantify these things? Which direction would you give them?

What would you do if you were in charge of a 1B investment portfolio tomorrow morning?

SPEAKER_00 52:21

I have so many thoughts, but maybe I'll start with what I think investors really should be or anyone working in the space should really be cautious about. And I think that's being really cautious about carbon as a topic and in particular soil carbon sequestration. I think in many ways what's happening with soil carbon sequestration and the associated work to develop carbon models and accounting is really taking a reductionist view of something that is actually part of a much more complex carbon cycle. So for example, there's the temporal element. In order to be able to account for soil carbon sequestration, we have to pick an arbitrary point in time as a baseline state. Now that baseline state is usually representing a very recent state rather than a historic state. So basically when we restore soil health and sequester carbon, a lot of times it's happening on degraded lands, at least in the US. So essentially what we're doing is we're putting the carbon back that was lost from that land over the last several decades of soil degrading agricultural practices. So setting a baseline of degraded lands where you then have a huge potential to put back the soil carbon and then trying to sell that carbon as say offsets for companies to continue emitting. I would say it's a little bit questionable and it's definitely not aligned with what's needed to achieve a 1.5 C future. And I think the other really interesting element is that when we try and account for soil carbon sequestration, we're basically limiting soil carbon sequestration to a mere subtraction of carbon from the atmosphere. And we're kind of ignoring the whole, you know, complex carbon cycle that's associated with that. So in a healthy carbon cycle, the goal is not to lock up that carbon permanently and store it in the ground, which I think has largely been the focus of, say, soil carbon markets. But it's really to put that carbon to work as the lifeblood of our ecosystems. And so I think ruminants are a really good example where you have grass that's pulling carbon down from the atmosphere as it grows. Ruminants can consume this grass. In turn, that tells the grass to keep growing, keep sending those sugars down to their roots. And in the process, the animal's depositing manure, which is helping to feed the soil microbes. It's helping to put carbon in the soil as well. And humans can't digest that grass. Ruminants can because they have those special microbes in their rumen. And there is an associated release of methane from that but methane is a short-lived climate pollutant. So basically it stays in the atmosphere for around 12 years before it then breaks down back into CO2 and H2O, which again are the building blocks for more grass. And so the cycle then begins again. And I think there's really a danger in separating all of those pieces out because then you get the kind of conventional thinking of methane methane is bad, soil carbon is good, which leads to people trying to figure out ways of minimizing methane and maximizing soil carbon sequestration, but oftentimes with solutions that continue to perpetuate distancing animals from the land. And so I think really smart investors and people working in this space should realize that our goal should be to better understand what is the healthy carbon cycle? Where are our carbon cycles currently broken? And how can we restore the balance of carbon, you know, going into the atmosphere and carbon coming back out in a way where it's constantly flowing through the food system? So that's kind of the way that I like to think about this space is how do we really, you know, move from soil carbon sequestration being just a single piece of the puzzle, one half of the equation to how do we invest in restoring and rebalancing broken cycles, which are going to be much more long-term, deeply rooted solutions to, I think, many of our agricultural problems right now.

SPEAKER_01 57:06

So what would you do if you would be in charge of a large investment fund or a large investment portfolio, let's say a billion dollars? What would you focus on in terms of investments? How would you put, how and where would you put money to work if tomorrow morning you would be in charge of a considerable sum of money with complete freedom of how to put that to work? Obviously, or not obviously, as investments, but the time horizon could be 20, 30, 50, or 200 years. What would you focus on? Where would you start? What would you prioritize if you had, I wouldn't say unlimited, but almost unlimited resources?

SPEAKER_00 57:46

Yeah. I mean, for me personally, as someone who works at the Intersection of climate change and agriculture, what I would invest in is really fossil-free farming, investing in ideas and creative solutions that basically get the fossil fuels that are embedded in our conventional agricultural system completely phased out, ideally by 2050, at the latest, ideally sooner. But ultimately, for agriculture to be a with a 1.5C future. We basically have to find ways to phase out all of the embedded fossil fuels. I think I mentioned a lot of this is in the synthetic fertilizer production. A lot of this is in the on-farm tractor fuel and energy. There's quite a bit in transport as well. And most people don't realize that the carbon footprint of row crops, at least in the US, is typically more than 50% from fossil fuels. Wow. And that

SPEAKER_01 58:53

comes mostly, I mean, is there an 80-20 there as well? Is it the mostly fertilizer or mostly tractors? It's

SPEAKER_00 59:01

pretty much 50-50. Wow, okay. 50-50 producing. So electric tractors

SPEAKER_01 59:06

make sense and focusing on all the biofertilizer stimulants and everything and how to produce massive amounts of high quality compost, et cetera, should get equal attention in your fund.

SPEAKER_00 59:19

Exactly, exactly. And I think what's happening right now is soil carbon, soil carbon sequestration, it's having its day in the sun right now. But when we think about specifically the climate ROI, finding ways to invest in phasing out the fossil carbon of agriculture is going to have a much higher climate return on investment than storing carbon in the soil. There are definitely benefits to increasing soil carbon stocks. We absolutely should be doing that. But really, when we're thinking about this Paris Agreement, this global goal of trying to limit warming to 1.5 C, then we need fossil fuels to be phased out and soil carbon to be sequestered, but they're not interchangeable. So we can't just use soil carbon to offset our agricultural fossil carbon emissions. And I think that's where I see a big opportunity because right now, the way that LCA are presented they combine all of the different agricultural greenhouse gases into that single metric of co2 equivalents um but if we start dividing out um these now we get to a

SPEAKER_01 1:00:33

whole different podcast but yeah i'm absolutely listening because this is fascinating no no it's it's i think it's one of those huge issues we put everything on their equivalent and they're not equivalent like methane is 12 years and it's a building block for other stuff

SPEAKER_00 1:00:46

so when we when we

SPEAKER_01 1:00:47

start splitting that like what would it look like um and what would you focus on then?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:53

Yeah, so when we start splitting it, that's when we realize just how significant the fossil carbon portion of the emissions are to agriculture. But also, one of the really key elements is that methane and nitrous oxide, they are biogenic emissions. They're emissions that are an inherent part of our ecosystems. Even if we didn't have any humans, living on Earth, we would still have methane emissions, we would still have N2O emissions. Whereas, so there's the biogenic carbon cycle, there's the fossil carbon cycle, and they need to be treated differently. And that's because, you know, as we think about what's needed to achieve a 1.5 degree future, we still need deep reductions in methane and N2O, but the goal is not to fully eliminate methane and N2O. The goal is to make sure

SPEAKER_01 1:01:51

that- Stop burning dinosaur bones. Yeah, that's the-

Magic wand question, if you could change one thing?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:54

Exactly, exactly. So that's why it's really important that they're treated differently and why there's sort of a danger to the oversimplification of LCAs in the agricultural space using CO2 equivalent. And the analogy that I like to use is, if you went to your doctor and you said, I need help making sure that I have a healthy balanced diet. if your doctor basically told you just count the number of calories that you're eating, you would probably be a little bit skeptical because you'd probably dive deeper and say, well, how much protein should I be eating? How much fat should I be eating? How much carbohydrates should I be eating? And if all they say is calories, then you would probably try and find another doctor. And I think it's similar for LCA and agriculture and climate change, where the predominant way we've been thinking about things is sort of CO2 equivalent as basically the calorie metric, where it combines everything into one metric that looks clean, I guess, on a nutrition label. But if you dig a little bit deeper, you realize that we have different targets for methane, we have different targets for nitrous oxide, and we have different targets for fossil carbon. And if we want a healthy balanced carbon cycle, a healthy balanced nitrogen cycle, and ultimately a climate that's not unsafe for a lot of our populations, we need to start digging deeper and tracking progress towards those individual targets and start to move away from the oversimplified CO2 equivalent metric.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:36

And would that be, this is a perfect bridge to the magic one question I like to ask, if you can change one thing in agriculture and food or in LCA's in general or in the sustainability space or regenerative space so you're no longer in in charge of your fund, but if you would be able to change one thing overnight, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:57

Yeah, I thought a lot about this question because there are quite a few areas that would be interesting to see change in. But I think what I came up with is that if I could change just one thing, it would be a collective societal agreement that we will no longer tolerate agricultural pollution. So at least in the US context, all across the US, we have groundwater that's polluted with nitrates. That's not only a health hazard for people, but It's also quite costly. The water treatment plants to remove these nitrates could run a small rural town of 700 people, something like$2.4 million to install. And we have dead zones- Let's say it's cheaper to pay

SPEAKER_01 1:04:42

farmers to change practices,

SPEAKER_00 1:04:45

I think. It would be much cheaper to do some preventative- Like usually, also in

SPEAKER_01 1:04:51

healthcare, that's the same,

What do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don’t?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

yeah. It's funny how that works. It's funny how that works. Yeah. article recently that said, you know, even if every farmer in the U.S. stopped fertilizing tomorrow, it could take decades for the nitrates that are already in our U.S. groundwater to actually dissipate. So that's groundwater. We have dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Chesapeake Bay. It's really wreaking havoc on our ecosystems. And it's very disappointing when, you know, water is unsafe to swim or to fish from due to agricultural pollution. So I I think we're kind of at a stage where, you know, in many cases, the pollution that is directly tied to agriculture is, it's incompatible with, you know, having life and thriving ecosystems and thriving communities. And I think if we were at a point where, if we could collectively agree as a society that we were not, no longer willing to tolerate those nitrates in our groundwater, to tolerate having dead zones unsafe drinking water, unsafe fishing and recreational water, I think that would go a long way towards changing the agricultural landscape, how we manage our land, what we grow, et cetera, et cetera.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:10

And as a final question, I mean, you've mentioned a few things, but maybe there's something that really stands out. What do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't? And this is definitely inspired by a question that John Kempf always asks or usually asks. Yeah. recently to see if he still asks this, but what do you believe to be true? Where are you contrarian?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:33

Yeah, I mean, it's always hard to know who's thinking what in this space because it's so big. But in my opinion, I think we're really only scratching the surface of what regenerative agriculture could be. Now, this is speaking from someone who's coming at this from the corporate regenerative agriculture side of things. And I think a big part of this is to do with potentially confusing what is a basic best practice for managing soil health and agricultural pollution, such as erosion and runoff with regenerative practices. So, you know, I've seen kind of proposals for regenerative agriculture pilot projects, corporate funded pilot projects that focus solely on, say, a single practice like cover cropping, and that's called regenerative agriculture. Now, I'm pretty sure the NRCS in the U.S. has been trying to promote cover cropping for the last 50 years as just a basic best practice for soil health. Another example is that livestock integration gets talked about a lot as a basic principle of regenerative agriculture. And yet, you know, most of the corporate pilots related to regenerative agriculture are focused on growing feed regeneratively while still keeping those animals distance from the land Sort of cutting you

SPEAKER_01 1:07:59

off from all the potential that we just discussed for the last hour plus, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:04

Exactly. And I think that begs quite an interesting question that I think is being danced around right now in the region ag space, which is around, you know, what is the role of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in regenerative agriculture? Because region ag, most people are talking about it in terms of, you know, farming in harmony with nature. We do have several kind of early adopters or pioneer examples. I think Gay Brown said he hasn't been using synthetic nitrogen fertilizer for almost two decades now. And that's through animal integration and very careful rebalancing of the carbon and nitrogen cycles and the soil biology within his operations. But I have yet to see a corporate funded regenerative agriculture pilot with a stated goal of either deeply reducing or eliminating synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. And then I think one last thought I had on this question is that, you know, our food system as a whole really has quite a few large cracks. So, for example, you know, when you go to, at least in the U.S., if you go to the supermarket in the middle of winter and pick up, you know, one pound of tomatoes, you can think about the fact that the farm worker was likely paid on the order of a single penny to pick that pound of tomatoes. And I think regenerative agriculture could give us an opportunity to start to address some of these cracks. But in order to do that, we have to really acknowledge that they're there. And I think the current regen ag landscape is it's sort of dancing around the cracks or the fissures in our food system and just trying to come up with solutions that take our existing system and turn it regenerative. But I think what's cool is in Japan, they have a term called kintsugi, which is basically where they repair cracked pottery with gold. And then I think that piece becomes even more valuable. The cracked piece becomes even more valuable. And I see an opportunity to do that here with regenerative agriculture where we can start a somewhat uncomfortable dialogue that acknowledges where some of these and brings to light where some of these cracks are so that we can find collaborative ways of, you know, sealing them back up in a way that really brings kind of long term, deep rooted solutions, as opposed to potentially more, you know, shallow rooted, not holistic solutions to a lot of the problems that we face in our agriculture and food systems.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:51

I think it's a perfect and a perfect metaphor. I mean, there are very uncomfortable cracks in this agriculture system. And we need to have a deep look at how we got to such an extractive system in many places, not just a few decades, but a few millennia. And I just finished a book. It should be on the podcast soon, hopefully, Healing Grounds of Liz Carlisle, her latest book, which I'll put in links below as well in the show notes. And we really have to face the social side, but also the land ownership side, the non-diversity side globally, the indigenous side, the access to food side. I mean, there are many uncomfortable but I think absolutely essential essential cracks to talk about because otherwise as I think it was Lauren Tucker saying of Renourish Studio if we keep talking about soil health and focus everything on soil health that's what we're going to get healthier soil and not fix any of the other things that we very uncomfortably got ourselves into I'm not blaming anybody we all did this we all were part of this but it is definitely a system that needs a bit more than a few cover crops here and there and a few extra animals on the land and a bit of compost and then we'll all be fine this is a this is a much deeper and it does a much longer transition that we you know we need to be ready to get uncomfortable

SPEAKER_00 1:12:08

I agree I agree

SPEAKER_01 1:12:10

and so I want to thank you for that this is we can go in 10 other directions for another hour but I want to be conscious of your time and of the listeners but this means we need to have you back at some point and thank you so much for the work you do for explaining the magical interesting challenging world of LCAs and thank you for for coming on and sharing about it

SPEAKER_00 1:12:29

anytime happy to be here

SPEAKER_01 1:12:35

Thanks again and see you next time.