Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features 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. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
211 David LeZaks and David Strelneck – Why the USDA gave a grant to $600k to figure out how to pay farmers for quality
A conversation with David LeZaks of The Croatan Institute and David Strelneck of Nourish about regeneration and the nourishing economy space, nutrient density and diversity, the connection of soil health and human health and more.
This series is supported by the A Team Foundation, who support food and land projects that are ecologically, economically and socially conscious. They contribute to the wider movement that envisions a future where real food is produced by enlightened agriculture and access to it is equal. The A Team are looking to make more investments and grants in the space of bionutrients.You can find out more on ateamfoundation.org.
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The Croatan Institute and Nourish, plus other partners, recently got a USDA Grant to figure out how to pay farmers more than for yield. A check in interview was due with David and David, who have been working in the regeneration and nourishing economy space for many years. What are they seeing and why did the USDA fund their work with $600K?
More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/david-lezaks-and-david-strelneck.
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The Croton Institute plus Nourish and a number of other partners recently got a USDA grant to figure out how to pay farmers more than only for yield. So a check-in interview is due with David and David, who have been working in the regeneration and nourishing economy space forever. What's the lay of the land when it comes to nutrient density and diversity, connecting soil health and human health? What are they seeing? What is exciting them? And why did the USDA fund their work with$600,000? What are the connections between healthy farming practices, healthy soil, healthy produce, healthy gut, and healthy people? Welcome to a special series where we go deep into the relationship between regenerative agriculture practices that build soil health and the nutritional quality of the food we end up eating. We unpack the current state of science, the role of investments, businesses, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and more. This series is supported by the A-Team Foundation, who support food and land projects that are ecologically, economically, and socially conscious. They contribute or get in touch directly info at a team foundation.org or check the information in the show notes below. Welcome to another episode today with David and David. David Lezacs of the Croton Institute and David Strelnak of Nourish. So I'm very excited to unpack the nutrient density side of things. But as David Lezacs has been on the show three and a half years ago, I think we need to do a new introduction. And other David hasn't been in the show ever. So we need to do a proper introduction there as well. So let's start with David, who has been on already to briefly introduce. I'll put a link below, obviously, on the soil wealth report you wrote with the Croton Institute and many of the other amazing work, but describing in a few sentences or a few more your work at the moment and what brings you to soil would be great.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for having me. Good to be here again. Yeah, so I'm based in Madison, Wisconsin, work with the Croatan Institute, a nonprofit working to leverage finance to create pathways to a just economy. And since we were on the show in 2019 talking about the Soil Wealth Report, investing in regenerative agriculture across asset classes, clearly been busy with a number of other reports across the space and other projects as well, including a conservation innovation grant funded by the USDA to develop soil wealth areas that we just finished up and a report coming out on that soon. We were also actually, we did a quick
SPEAKER_00:interview with you. Yeah, I just remembered, we did a webinar. We did a Q&A. Oh my God, I forgot. Yeah, the Q&A with my
SPEAKER_01:colleague Mandy Ellerton on our regenerative agriculture and human health report that came out in 2021. Nexus. We had a report on investing in regenerative ag infrastructure that was also clearly related to the subject area. We've done other reports with the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, WBCSD, on investing in soil. And then we're working on building this new soil wealth community, and it's specifically focused on developing financial de-risking mechanisms to help transition to more regenerative agriculture. And in other places in Croatan Institute, my colleague Charlene Brown's leading work on redirecting capital to accelerate racial equity. So our work is not just in agriculture and soil and health, as we'll talk about here, but really across this spectrum of how we can leverage finance to create pathways to a more just economy.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect. And Ado David, welcome to the show. And could you, I mean, you've been working together for over 10 years and we're going to dive into that, but could you briefly introduce yourself as well?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, thank you. Really happy to be here. My name is David Strelnick. I founded and lead an organization called Nourish at www.nourishn.com. The N is an exponent, nourish to the nth degree. And
SPEAKER_00:because nourish.com was already taken, they're not
SPEAKER_02:there. No. When you see the logo, you'll love it. So, gosh, I've spent about 30 years helping design and implement environmental initiatives in many parts of the world. And I'm trained in environmental policy and environmental economics. And about 10 years ago, in the course of that work with a lot of social entrepreneurs in a lot of different countries, we began to see a pattern of success that really said that the entrepreneurs who are linking the health of the land with the health of people were just unbundling all kinds of value. And, you know, The systems thinkers amongst them were really turning that value into phenomenal enterprises and initiatives and approaches. And so I launched my current organization coming out of that body of work to try to help spread that economic model in the world. I met David Lazax about 10 years ago in the course of this work before words like regenerative agriculture were being used. I was interviewed by Ozzy seven years ago with them saying, what do you think think of this term? And I was like, well, it's interesting. It sort of describes some of what we're doing, you know? And so David and I have been on a path for a long time through different organizations and projects together towards this sort of shared goal, I think, of a better world where the life of people and the life of the earth itself are thriving based on relationships with each other.
SPEAKER_00:So
SPEAKER_02:that's what I work on.
SPEAKER_00:And I think we can spend a other episode unpacking a lot of the work which we will do but in this case you've been working like together on different projects for 10 years and recently got a significant USDA grant to work on this nutrient density piece or the soil health and the connection to human health and what does that work entail and why is it so relevant now and also actually why is the USDA now funding that like what has changed because 10 years ago nobody knew the term region ag let alone nutrient density and this whole I mean of course in the original organic space 100 years ago this was all very clear and probably indigenous knowledge a few thousand years ago everybody knew this and acted on it but we're rediscovering a lot let's say and why suddenly now is there funding to do work around this specific topic or this very broad but this specific term let's say
SPEAKER_01:well from the broad perspective USDA they haven't fully accepted or promoting the term regenerative agriculture It comes up here and there. But as you've probably seen, many of your listeners have probably seen that Climate Smart Agriculture grants a couple billion dollars for those. This work is hosted out of the NRCS Natural Resources. So
SPEAKER_00:Climate Smart as a term is less contagious than Regenact. That's interesting, though.
SPEAKER_01:It's interesting. It's a term that makes the least amount of people anxious.
SPEAKER_00:angry
SPEAKER_01:yeah yeah so the natural resources conservation service their primary objective is really around these natural resources around soil even soil health is something that you know even over the last 10 years they've just began to adopt that terminology before that it was soil quality you know so it's really been an evolution within within USDA and we've been successful in a number of these kind of competitive grant processes first with the the Soil Wealth Report grant that we started in 2017 to 2019, then the Soil Wealth Area Report and project, and now with this new collaboration with David, we got$690,000 from USDA to identify, to show, to explore, to, I don't want to say prove as maybe too far of a stretch, but what we've identified with with the work that's going on in this space now is that I think that there's clearly more to learn and there's clearly more to unpack and to understand of the relationship between how we grow our food and what the nutritional qualities and characteristics of that food are. That those relationships are there, which I think just being able to say that is something we may not have been able to say in some cases just a couple of years ago. But the question for us is now, so what's going to happen because of that new or rekindled knowledge? And the NRCS's perspective is if you can use specifically market drivers or investment or movement of capital in one way or another to get more conservation on the ground, great. Because what we do through or what they do, the NRCS does specifically through their EQIP project and program to kind of get money, cost share dollars to farmers to implement conservation practices, cover crop and no-till and alley cropping and agroforestry and managed grazing. All of these, you can get cost share money through. And that's usually how they spend their money. But this conservation innovation grant program, the intent is if you can figure out another way that these dollars will be leverage to unlock more conservation on the landscape, then that's the bar that we have to get over in order to make these grants and these projects successful.
SPEAKER_00:And so what does the work entail? So basically your bar is, okay, if we pay farmers directly to do cover crops or other practice changes, we know what we get more or less. And in this case, like, let's try to figure out another route to India or another route to get to where we want to be. They don't know, of course, we don't know how that would look like. Like paying for quality is not a known thing, except maybe in wine and maybe some very small other niches. So what, like, How do you even start?
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And in the ad, I went back before the recording of this episode and looked at our proposal and what we said we would do. And we said that today's agricultural food market doesn't value the myriad of outcomes from conservation. It's not internalized into prices and incentives that come from the market. And so our job in this two-year project is to figure out what drives these prices, what new or different incentives are, and how not only new market structures might be set up, but what's the relationship then between financial institutions who are extending credit or to investors who are investing in businesses? How does that thesis get unpacked and how does regenerative agriculture become bankable, not just because of the environmental aspects of conservation? but of the nutritional and human health aspects of conservation as well.
SPEAKER_02:And I think, this is David S., And part of what this funding from USDA is allowing us to do is lend some structure and formality to a number of the other economic side values that are created through these types of farming practices that are often not recognized or they're only recognized locally. They're very place-based, and yet they have immense economic value. So if we go into what we mean by health in a community relationships lens, local food system resilience when an economic shock comes along, local ecological resilience, water system, clean water and water quality systems that provide clean drinking water to lots of people that survive better if the land has been managed in certain ways, cultural values and traditions amongst substantial groups of people. All of this is economic. It drives behavior and value in society And it's completely, well, almost completely off the radar of those who look at it from afar and try to put it on the spreadsheet and say, well, what's the value of the output that's being produced? And so another thing this grant is giving us the opportunity to do is to take not only those ideas, but each of the things I just listed and more are represented in actual enterprises we work with and the coalition I help coordinate around the world. And so these are real. Each one of these is very specific and real, but not at all generalized. So it's giving us a chance to sort of roll back the economics a little bit and say, okay, all of these economic values are related to each other and how the land is being managed by the farmers. And food quality can clearly be at the forefront of those economic drivers. But when you farm that way, you get this whole additional package of economic services. And how can we activate that in the world? in ways that reward farmers for managing land this way with climate smart benefits and nutritional quality benefits, but also this other range of benefits in their communities and society more generally. So I think part of a response to your question is we made that pitch to USDA. And they're
SPEAKER_03:like,
SPEAKER_02:yeah,
SPEAKER_00:really? You
SPEAKER_02:think so? I'm like, I think so. like
SPEAKER_00:okay there's some early there's some such i think there's a paper somewhere for sure you know many more like on um successful organic farms lead to better i am gonna say slightly higher job wages like nearby and also more other successful organic farms like you have to spill over effect of organic farms and there's some of this early suggestion of course you have the successful examples like white dog pastures i don't know i mean 180 people on the the payroll like that that's probably not like that's a big cost but at the same time local community wise very interesting of a town that probably has less than that like the impact on housing the impact on the local coffee place the impact on the school the impact on I mean is massive but you would never see that on your investment balance sheet if you did that loan to Will Harris I mean you would never see that you would never count that in so is that your goal like to understand those kind of other benefits or how does that tie into to quality or where, okay, you won the grant and now, like what are you now going to do as you won the pitch? But now, of course, the work starts.
SPEAKER_01:Let me just say that you were referring to the 2016 study put out by Penn State and also, I think, in collaboration with the Organic Trade Association that showed organic hotspots in the U.S. had higher, there was an increase in median household incomes and a reduction in local poverty levels because of these hotspots of organic agriculture.
SPEAKER_00:Which is fascinating. We can put it in the show notes. I was, of course, referring to that one and I didn't remember the exact details of it. So thank you for quickly Checking that, because that's interesting. It's very narrow focus, but it's still very significant, if done well. I don't know the study, of course, but...
SPEAKER_02:I think that your question highlights two aspects of our work. So there's this USDA grant within the body of our broader mission. My organization's broader mission is to spread these economic principles in the world. So yes, let's go help that happen in a lot more places. Let me give you one more example that comes from the early days of our work. Gosh, eight or nine years ago We started working with a group in Western Ireland called Burn Life, the Burn Project, which basically... Burn as in burning, burning? No, no, burn, the region of Ireland, B-U-R-R-E-N, burnlife.something. I will find it, yeah. And led by a close colleague of mine now who... The short story would be he set out to stop the degradation of traditional sheep farms and wildflower biodiversity in this ecologically and culturally rich part of Ireland, where a lot of the famous Western poetry was written and all of these things, but where sort of the growth of volume-based sheep farming was degrading all kinds of things. We can tell the story later of how he went about it, but the success is it worked. And it worked in part by incentivizing sheep farmers to restore fields with fewer sheep and more biodiversity in ways that drew in more tourists to the region, which then reinvigorated the inns and the bed and breakfasts in town and lots of the other economics of the whole region. So that the whole region then began to subsidize the sheep farmers because they are producing fewer sheep, but they're bringing in immense economic benefit to everybody right it's a really exciting and compelling model it's led by a man named
SPEAKER_00:basically the underlying the underlying notion which is ridiculous that we don't think about it more often but healthy land leads to healthy communities and healthy people and economies and unless you have healthy land unless you're a sea-based economy like everything else sort of falls apart
SPEAKER_02:yep yep
SPEAKER_00:slowly or quickly in many cases slowly so we don't really see it we're sort of used to degradation landscapes around us, but we don't really see the destruction.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and if you take the lens of diversity, you begin to see things differently too. You begin to realize how diversity of species and economics and all these things begin to interplay in this complex system that really are often left out of more linear economics. I'm going to invest in this to get this return, right? And another Offside, is there even some sea-based economies now where we're seeing these dynamics come to play? I'll say in the United States, in Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest, we have increasing examples of seaweed farming to produce micronutrient-rich soil amendments on the land. We also have examples of big efforts to restore wild salmon migration up rivers, in part because it's become clear that when millions of salmon migrate from the ocean up the river and die after they breed, they're transporting nutrients from the ocean back into the land. And there's a big nutrient cycle thing going on that was broken by the damming up of a lot of rivers. Which
SPEAKER_00:has to be restored, otherwise we have to truck it up.
SPEAKER_02:Within the context of our U.S. Department of Agriculture grant then, which isn't to look at all of that, but it does give us the opportunity to focus in and say, okay, what are the implications of these observations of economics and value propositions that are actually at play, right? And can we get them on a single list? Can we correlate them with food quality production, right? And
SPEAKER_00:can we- So not just organic certified, like, yeah. Yeah, no. So actually,
SPEAKER_02:under this grant, we have what we call our reference framework now that lists about 38 farming practices involving soil and the surrounding ecosystem and seed selection, right, and cultivar selection and management that correlate one way or another with some aspect of food quality, phytonutrient production, micronutrient production, reduction in toxicity of the food, that each of these farming practices has a clear and direct connection, though not quantified in detail by science yet. And so then part of the thesis of our grant is that as you look at the farming practices that produce that higher quality food, you can look at the other economic benefits, those same farming practices we're also producing at the same time. And we can begin to say, okay, if the same thing that produced higher quality phytonutrient production through either soil management or or use of natural pollinators, those same things are producing a more vibrant ecosystem, higher carbon retention. Can those economics be packaged and handed to a farmer in a way that gets them really excited, not just morally, but financially? This is a really good business to be in. I'm going to start getting paid for all these benefits I'm producing.
SPEAKER_00:Is that payment then coming from the myriad of different programs that the USDA or others are already handing out? out already paying for a flower biodiversity lane here and there or like is this also a potential effort to bundle a lot of those things or what is the result um is it an advice is it a pilot or experimentational um outcome as well or what what what is an ideal result look like what does i mean david
SPEAKER_02:you should address that but but i think of it as a discovery process we're not trying to construct we're trying to discover you're not doing transactions yeah yeah we're Where is the demand? Where is the supply? What economic models or mechanisms or approaches in the private sector, in the public sector, wherever, are actually putting this into play?
SPEAKER_01:And I think that gets to the broader question of how do we move from a food system based on quantity to one based on quality? And we're clearly not the first ones to say that. We've heard that from Dan Kittredge of Bionutrient Food Association. We've heard that from Eric Smith of Audacious and the Grantham Foundation and many others in this field who see that just the weight or the size or the amount of food is is not the sole characteristic or one of the few characteristics that we should be transacting on. And if we realize there's this difference and a differentiation of many different quality aspects of that food, including ones that are related to not just short-term health, but long-term health, then how do those play into the transactions that happen every day when two people or two organizations to get together to transact around this, around food. And from the perspective of USDA, you know, they're interested in kind of more on the production side that, you know, they do have some, you know, consumer facing, you know, parts of that government agency. But, you know, you look at the health side and that's in the health and human services division. And many, many governments and even many markets are really siloed in this way where, you know, And even for me, coming from a PhD in environmental science, I've looked at food from the lens of its environmental outcomes most of my career until one day on a walk with some colleagues, I said, well, Earth Day was like 50 years ago. And yeah, there's no more Dust Bowl, but have we gotten as far as we need to as it relates to this relationship between how we do agriculture what the damage or repair to our landscapes, how that's shaping up, and what's happening to people in all of this. Fundamentally, we do agriculture to feed people. And thank you, David, for this terminology, and to nourish them, to stay healthy. And I think that role of food in society more broadly, I think we've lost some of that. I think we've lost the... the central role of taste and aroma and how we feel and treat food. We know that we spend the least amount on food than we have, at least in the US and in many other Western nations, than we have throughout most of history and spend the least amount of time working with that food. And there's been severe implications for that. And I think that a lot of this is coming up, again, through the data David Montgomery and Anne Bickley book through the Rockefeller Foundation-led report last year on the true cost of food. That was, for me in this journey, something that really just put a pin in knowing that we were on the right track in terms of their work, talking about the$1.1 trillion that are expended on food in the U.S. This is a U.S.-based study But there was an additional$2.1 trillion of additional costs related to food and food production and consumption. And of those$2.1 trillion of costs, about half of them,$1.1 trillion were related to human health. So we know that we're growing food and we know that the chief impact area is in health. It's not on the environment, which is actually surprising to me. And I think this is surprising to a lot of other people that where there's You know, we're talking about carbon labels and we're talking about riparian buffers as it relates to food production, but it's really the impacts are on the health balance sheet, less so, they're still there, but you know, it's clearly on the environmental balance sheet, but the primary negative impact of food production is on health. And I think that from a consumer and market perspective, focusing in on supporting and developing enterprises and business cases around developing a more regenerative agriculture that benefits human health in addition to the environment is a way that may gain traction faster with consumers and in the marketplace than a purely environmental message that still may resonate, but maybe not as strong as the health one.
SPEAKER_00:And for you, David, when did that happen? click in terms of the connection of healthy soil to healthy produce healthy gut system healthy people and then of course healthy ecosystems do you remember was that a process was it a moment was it a walk like other david
SPEAKER_02:yeah there's there's again there's this backstory um that that comes out of the world of social entrepreneurship um that frequently sort of operates uh with groups like ashoka or the skull foundation or others right who are sort of in parallel with but not really synchronized with the more traditional disciplines, right? So, engineering and science and economics, you know? So, I spent a lot of years working with the social entrepreneurs. And so... Seven or eight years ago, we convened a conference in Frankfurt, Germany, with a couple of hundred of these Ashoka and Skoll fellows from around the world who had built successful initiatives, private or public sector, that looked to me like they were connecting the nutritional health of the land to nutritional health of people. That isn't necessarily how the social entrepreneur talked about it, right? Brendan in Ireland talked about bringing back wildflower biodiversity so that our ancestors would be happy with us again he's spot on it's his initiative that's the one I mentioned earlier but if I look at it I'm saying what you're doing is you're cycling nutrients that's another lens on the exact same work right so we spent several years and several million dollars of the Gates Foundation's money through Ashoka looking for successful innovators in rural economies around the world this was this This was eight or nine years ago. And it took five years to find 100 that met the rigorous Ashoka criteria for being a system-changing social entrepreneur who had actually demonstrated a new idea that had never been done before. You find 100 of those people, you get them in the room together, and they sort of tell you, look, look, here's what's going on. Healthier people come from healthier land, right? So that idea began to crystallize back then. There was a specific... enterprise and product developed in South Africa called EPAP. EPAP is a traditional staple and a lot of the meals served and EPAP was an innovation around it that developed, invented by a social entrepreneur named Basil Kranzdorf. Basil has since passed away, but he did a great service to the world, I think. And what he did was developed a version of this food supplement, that's like a porridge or a powder. This is what really crystallized it for me, right? That when included in the diet of children who were in health clinics because they were suffering illness of tuberculosis or HIV AIDS or other things, the children consuming the meals that included this porridge responded to the traditional medicines better than the same cases in the same clinic who weren't being fed that meal they were being fed the traditional meal so the question began to arise why what's going on with this magic powder that's got these these children coming you know their immune systems are responding more effectively to the medicine they're being given right and the the long story made very short or maybe i'm being very long is um basil said you know all i know is we did refine the grains we didn't ultra process them or bio fortify them we just included all the organic matter and from naturally raised you know foods in the porridge that we manufacture and something's going on and and uh i'm not going to wait around and try to prove what that something is i don't care children are getting healthier faster i'm going to put all my time and energy in to producing this product and getting the world to accept some of these principles, right? That's really when, for me, the sort of the, I mean, he, because I come from the environmental side, and he sort of said, look, there's the direct health benefit of eating healthy, fiber-rich, organic food with all the stuff in there that we don't understand. And he created a very successful enterprise out of it.
SPEAKER_00:And in this case, it was, because often in these examples, it's not necessarily, it doesn't talk about about how it's been grown, but in this case, it was grown... This could be a case of non-processing instead of only soil health. That's correct. But in this case, you trace it back all the way down to different soil practices as well, or what was the difference in the processing or in the farming
SPEAKER_02:side? All I know right now is the stories that Basil told, which was that they sourced organically produced foods, but I don't even know if that means... certified organically, right? Or what? So it
SPEAKER_00:was both the ingredient and the processing that made the difference. I
SPEAKER_02:think so, personally. And now, again, even with this U.S. Department of Agriculture grant, it's taken many years of trying to convince some funders to put attention on this. I mean, the Grantham Foundation ignored me five and six and seven and eight years ago for suggesting that this is something that you should be focusing on, right? I'm so excited that in more recent years, they've taken up that mantra. But one of the interesting things to think about, perhaps from an investor's perspective or a nutrient density perspective, both of those, which you've said you're interested in, right, or your audience is, is A, what happens when you get the entrepreneurs in the room together and let them do the thinking? Maybe frame the question. And so in that conference, I told you about in Frankfurt that we organized. We had Basil from South Africa. We had Brendan from Ireland. We had Sylvia from Zambia. We had Marta from Ecuador. And they each come from a different part of the story. And getting them in a room for a couple of days, you know, things happen that would never come out of a more linearly planned conference or an analytic process. So there's something there about where you're going to put your funding, perhaps, or some of the funding if you really want to spark new ideas and actions and approaches. The other piece, let me just say briefly, is that something that that group and subsequently in the science research we've done and certainly in the economic side, we shied away for many years from the term nutrient density because it seemed to indicate increased density of certain nutrients, whereas what we saw at play was this diversity question again. We started talking about nutrient spectrum, the different types of nutrients, the relationships between those nutrients, the interplay of all of that in your gut for your gut health, which then begins to correlate with every other aspect of your health, right? So there's a question here about, okay, what do we mean by density, right? And I'm on paper arguing, you know, It's diversity. It's not the perfect term.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. And so where are we now? We're at the beginning of 2023. It's early, of course, in the grant work as well, but what are the big opportunities you see or what is ripe for innovation or ripe for entrepreneurship now at the beginning of 2023 that maybe wasn't possible five years ago? What are interesting places that you're excited about Based on the work you're doing now with the USDA, but of course also under 10 plus years, you have been looking at a lot of these things. I'm curious about both of your answers. What excites you now on this quality piece or nutrient spectrum piece that is starting to, seems to be at least bubbling faster than I've seen it doing in a long time?
SPEAKER_01:I think that there are... A number of new entrepreneurs who are using the messaging around nutrients, nutrition, and health that are bringing products to market that I think is very interesting. And we're looking very closely in conversation with some of those entrepreneurs. I think there's a fire hose of data that is just getting turned on, which some of those entrepreneurs are using. And I can give some examples in a moment. And then I think there's this broader market question around how we began to transact around these quality metrics of food in ways that is different than how we have in the past. So for instance, Costa Rina is an olive oil company that is using their management practices and they're picking the olives at a certain time to increase the antioxidant composition of their olive oil. There's some interesting work done with Dan Barber and Jill Clapperton around the wheat variety that he thought as a chef tasted better. And Jill came in from a measurement science perspective and said, actually, there's more nutrients in this compared to other types of wheat. A new company or new products by a company called Big Bold Health that's introducing Himalayan tartary buckwheat to the market in its multitude of kind of health benefits from increased antioxidants and polyphenol composition of that food. Pasture Bird, on its website, a pasture poultry company out of California, it says three times the amount of omega-3s, 50% more vitamins, 21% less saturated fat, and most interesting to us is part of this project, we're actually working with Dan Kittredge and the Bionutrient Food Association. They have this beef study going on with Stefan Van Vliet of Utah State University looking at the...
SPEAKER_00:head on and should be out when you're listening to this. And we have Paul of Pastor Bird next week. So let's drop some names. I had no idea. I promise. I promise. But these are the people
SPEAKER_01:who are at the cutting edge. And so we're working with them to kind of get grass-fed beef producers to sample their soil, the animal poop, the animal and the, sorry, the the soil, the grass, the manure, and the meat, and looking at the nutritional composition and the microbiomes of all of those different things. And one producer, Carter Country Meats, on their LinkedIn site right at the top says, we are 64% more nutrient-dense than other grass-fed beef companies and 239% more than grain-finished beef. So it's really interesting, I think, from our perspective of seeing where these data are being used when you begin to arm these entrepreneurs.
SPEAKER_00:Which could be just a complete outlier in this study. I mean, it's fascinating to see it, but it's scary as well to see those numbers there.
SPEAKER_01:I am not judging or placing value on that yet. I'm simply observing that once the data are out there, people will begin to use them. And Stefan, either he did tell you or I'm sure he told you that the data that they've collected so far is preliminary and and they're looking to get more data, and science, that chapter is not closed yet, but once you start to generate data, people are going to use it. And then there's, I know you had Blu Blancour on the show a couple of years ago. David Strelnak worked very closely with an entrepreneur named Zoe Finch-Totten when she had a company called The Full Yield, which was one of the early kind of food is medicine companies.
SPEAKER_00:Was, as in closed? Was, as in closed.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. And the main reason being that she had started that company right before the economic crash of 2010, 28, 2010. So there's
SPEAKER_02:a story there. It was a or maybe the early example of the insurance, the health insurance industry and putting forth real resources to maintain the health of the people they insured so that there would be fewer claims, health claims.
SPEAKER_00:Seems to me A lot of sense.
SPEAKER_02:The logic is compelling. It elevated its way through a case study at Harvard Business School, so it has some credibility. But the macroeconomics fell apart. The whole market exploded. The marginal funding that those insurance companies and others had to put into this sort of thing, everything collapsed back then. So she's still very active, but that's the was in the story. We think the was was
SPEAKER_00:extremely close. Will she be back? That's the question. I mean, I don't think she can Stay
SPEAKER_01:tuned, I guess, is the answer
SPEAKER_00:to that. So there's stuff happening, stuff failing, obviously, or not succeeding. But it seems like, yeah, it's buzzing. And as it
SPEAKER_01:relates to capital, as part of the last year, there was a White House summit on health, nutrition, and hunger. A group of private sector investors announced the launch of the Food, Nutrition, and Health Investor Coalition and pledged to catalyze$2.5 billion into this space. And so we're tracking not just the entrepreneurship side, but what are the companies and the investors kind of where are they dipping their toes in or where are they going in whole hog into this space? And I think that the, you know, insurance companies as they worked with the full yield as an example, there's another example of John Hancock Insurance providing, you know, food boxes. And I think this is this, you know, broader conversation around, you know, food is medicine. You know, we see some opportunities to refine the food is medicine approach to not just work for people who are already sick, but work as a preventative medicine approach. But it's these examples where we're seeing this, where there used to be a siloing of agriculture and food and health, we're now seeing them being drawn closer and closer together. And we see, I think, one of the things that we're looking for and are hoping to more actively, or are more actively engaging in, is how do we begin to get the capital that's flowing into healthcare and into food and agriculture not see themselves as being different as well
SPEAKER_00:because let's face it there's a lot of money flowing in healthcare either as cost healthcare cost or investments in all kinds of biotech stuff and things like that and hardly ever looking at the underlying health conditions or the reasons for being like is there any progress there as well Like David, you wanted to say something.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, a couple more examples related to your question also of where's the buzz, right? Where's the excitement? But came back to a critical question that I think this conversation touches on, which is where's the consumer demand? Okay, we just listed, David just listed a number of really exciting production side, producer side, product side, supply side examples. But where's the demand? Where's the consumer side, demand side action? I think that's a super important question to be asking. Let me say that from my perspective, a piece of what should be the exciting buzz if you take that 10-year frame is that we even have language to discuss this. We can now argue about it. Five years ago, we would convene people and they would look at each other in the room because we didn't even know how to talk to each other about some of these ideas. Now we do. That's real progress. We may not We may not have reached conclusions, but we now have language and ideas to think critically about and argue about. And that's what's going to spark some of the innovation and progress. The other thing, I want to see more consumer side demand. I don't have an answer to that question, but that's part of what our USDA grant is helping us explore. Where are the segments and the differentiation where you actually have consumers picking up these products? Institutional consumers, individual consumers, what are the demographics of those consumer groups and what and why and how and price points. This all matters. I think another piece of the buzz that is understood conceptually and is finally starting to be applied is the world of big data and AI for correlating some of the outcomes of these farming practices because the reductionist linear scientific approach of trying to prove them, you
SPEAKER_00:know, one at a time. Would it be an example of that in terms of?
SPEAKER_02:Well, so the big example, the pot of gold, I think, at the end of the rainbow maybe is when the healthcare sector is able to say, we definitively see, because we have enough data now, that human health is better on these metrics when people eat those kind of foods.
SPEAKER_00:And those kind, like, is that then all the way tied to, because we had a list Elizabeth, I'm blanking on her name. David is much better at this, on basically providing organic meal boxes to people coming out of the hospital after severe surgery, et cetera, and not connecting necessarily to the soil health. Like how much of this is simply getting rid of a lot of processed food and just eating better? Like how much is needed or is it really fundamental to look at the soil health piece? I mean, for the environmental outcomes, yes, because you can still farm organically and harm the soil. Like there's no discussion there. But for the health outcome, how crucial is that connection to the soil? Or is it simply getting rid of a lot of things and eating a lot better is good enough?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I'm not a scientist or a medical doctor. I've watched this stuff for a long time, right? And so I don't think we know the answer. And I think there's different layers of the analysis, right? And some of those are based on your economic status, your socioeconomic status, and your ethnicity in some cases, which foods are better for you, what's your, you know, do you have access to the food you need, et cetera. And so there's got to be different layers of intelligence to thinking about that. But we do now know that certain farming practices do create different health attributes in the foods, higher antioxidant levels, different micronutrient profiles in some cases, different fatty acid profiles in some cases. This is, right? And it's early, but it's evidence. It's clearly true. And so I think an inquiry, a question is, okay, within that layer... Does it matter? Or do all these other things matter more? Is it just more important just to eat a diverse diet, right? And a fresh
SPEAKER_00:food diet or a local diet? Yeah, with Zach Bush's work on many of his patients who got sicker even though they ate kale and broccoli isn't really helpful. So are there specific crops or part of this massive food system you're focusing on? I mean, you mentioned beef and pasture bird and like an olive oil, which are very diverse. Like is a specific, like, okay, we see there we can show the most, or is it a really broad piece of work?
SPEAKER_01:At this point, it's really broad. And I think to answer your first question before you ask that one is... If you're seeking a certain bundle of nutrients in order to satiate different needs that our body has, if you know that you could have one apple with... you know, X number of nutrients or one apple with 2X number of nutrients, we'd probably want to choose the one that had 2X the amount of nutrients. And I think that's, you know, one way of looking at it is like, oh, can't you just eat or if you had the apple that had half the nutrients, why can't you just eat two apples? Well, if you begin to scale up that response, then we have to double the size of our agricultural production in order to meet those nutritional needs of what we actually need. And so we began to think about not only from a food perspective, but from a landscape perspective. And again, from a quantity versus quality notion of how we began to have, you know, manage for nutritional landscapes and nutrition from landscapes as opposed to quantity from landscapes. And one of the frameworks that we introduced in the 2021 Regenerative Ag and Human Health Nexus paper was this idea of four different levels of interventions, where level one being replacement of can we have less junk food and more whole foods, regardless of where they came from or how they were grown. Level two being, can we provide foods that are free from chemical and drug inputs? We know from many studies that pesticides have been linked cancer and reproductive harm and kidney disease and endocrine disruptors. And some of those endocrine disruptors are actually obesogens. They actually put you on a pathway toward obesity, which is scary in and of its own. Moving to level three, where we have this differentiated nutrient density, and then level four being this microbiome-centric way of thinking about human health and soil health. So there are ways to kind of move up those levels and ways in which I think there's value that can be attributed to each of the components and how we relate to them in terms of meeting basic needs now for what are you going to eat today, which is oftentimes a very different question and oftentimes a near-term economic question, making sure that people are able to get food on their plates versus how is that going to change health outcomes in 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years from now. And And similarly, on an agricultural perspective, how are you going to pay your bills and send your kids to college if you're a farmer versus what is the soil going to be like and what is the water going to be like and what is the climate going to be like when you turn over the farm to the next generation or the next owner? And so we're very much caught in this kind of short term, needing to make decisions on a short term versus being able to have the luxury of making decisions based on the long term. And David and I always kind of look over the edge of the cliff where we see the structure of capitalism as it defines many of these activities. But we know it's down there. We know that at least as part of this project, we can't really dive as deeply as we want to into there. But I think that whether it's on climate or whether it's on food and health connections, the ability to for investors, for farmers, for eaters to make decisions that are going to have a long-term positive effect is in many times much harder than meeting today's needs.
SPEAKER_00:And what would you tell investors? Like sort of, this is the lay of the land, let's say. What would you, of course, we're not giving investment advice, but let's say we're, I always like to use the example, we're doing this in a theater, we're on stage and the room is full of financial types, let's quote unquote. And they get very excited, of course. I mean, you saw the announcement you mentioned, et cetera. Like what would you, what would be your main message to them? Like go and dig a bit deeper there or go and look there, go and read this or go and taste that or go and wait a while because we're figuring out a lot of things and maybe we're not ready for our investments? Or what would be your main message? Of course, asking both of you to reflect on this.
SPEAKER_02:David, go ahead. I have the privilege of not working much in the financial or investment sector. So I can say, you know, unbiased and sometimes uninformed things, just ideas I have. We'll see. But... Something, a clear, I think, from an investment perspective, a value investment opportunity, a value proposition, right? Opportunity for value investing is... is looking at localities, places where, again, I'm going to use this word entrepreneur, where this proposition of what we call nourishment economics, nutrient cycling frameworks, regenerative ag, but there's other aspects to it like waste recycling and stuff, right? Where those dynamics are in place in a community and there's an entrepreneur afoot. And just invest there. It's like Warren Buffett, perhaps years ago, buying up hilltops when cell phones were invented, knowing that someday those hilltops are going to be valuable for something. And then eventually, it turns out that all the cell phone companies want to build towers on all the hilltops and he owns them all. That was a huge investment, a financially successful investment, right? So I'm saying go to the places where these nutrient cycling dynamics are happening and there's a sense of agency or entrepreneurship afoot, put resources there, even if you don't know quite what the outcomes are going to be. Because there's so many local value propositions that emerge when these dynamics take off. So that's one idea. One other one I would suggest, so again, I have these sort of perhaps unconventional examples. I do a lot of work with the CEO of a company in Zambia called Komako. Komako is a regenerative food company, if if you will, that sells 21 packaged processed food products and sells carbon on international markets and takes grants for elephant and wildlife conservation, right? Kamako is 20 years into its story and we now have just over 230,000 farmers sustaining and being sustained by the company. This is not 180. This is 231,000 across 42 2,000 square miles of territory, right? It's a real big example. Dale was invited to the recent climate negotiations to present this case, et cetera. And a piece of the investment story there is to see how the environmental benefits and the food system and health benefits can leverage each other financially. So in fact, in this case, we've been able to leverage carbon funding to help stand up the food production side of the company through debt. Social venture, social capital, not quite good enough interest rates, but okay, right? And so the carbon and the food production are leveraging each other at fairly big scale. But it took a long time to find the debt side investors for some of that because it didn't fit neatly into the box that they have on their desk. Smartly, for good reasons, saying, well, okay, but what are the analytics here? And like, well, you got to take the elephants into consideration. Like, what are you talking about? Right? So be willing to go there. The value is there. It's clearly there. As an economist, I'm saying the value propositions are clearly there. It just hasn't been formalized and articulated quite yet. But invest early and realize the returns will later.
SPEAKER_00:And for you, David?
SPEAKER_01:Agriculture is multifunctional. That I think we know, that I think is at least common knowledge. And so for investors, and we see many investors, and I talk to investors most days at this point, who are seeking or are asking, in many cases, very similar questions of, I'm interested in food and agriculture, or sometimes health. What should I do? And I don't give them advice. That is not my role, but I am able to lay out the landscape. And oftentimes my advice includes, try not to look at agriculture or investing in food systems from a singular lens, because in many cases you may be disappointed if that project or that company or that landscape doesn't just give you one thing. It actually gives you a lot of different things. So knowing that that's not always the case, that there is a fun set up with a thesis and it has to do this thing in that amount of time at this return expectation is that i think that there's enormous opportunities for partnership partnership with those other sources of capital who may have different expectations who may want different things out of their investments and so you know oftentimes we've you know we from a philanthropic perspective said you know talk to your you know have a a program officer bring your uh investment advisor to the same table in order to have these discussions. And I think that what we need to see more is this collaboration and being able to have agriculture for food, agriculture for health, agriculture for climate, for water, being in discussion with each other and figuring out what these capital stacks look like that each of these different pools of capital with different needs can more effectively work together in order to fund these multifunctional landscapes and multifunctional companies in many cases. And so we know that our report that my colleagues at Croatan worked on a few years ago with the Healthcare Anchor Network tallied up all of the investment assets. This is pre-COVID, so these numbers might not be the same, but All the investment assets that U.S. healthcare systems had, that was about$400 billion. That was ready to be invested. So where are we seeing collaborations between healthcare systems and ag investors? And maybe it's the ag investors who want the climate and water and local economies benefit, and it's the health investors who are interested in the health outcomes. Where can we see these, whether it's pooled funds or investments, investments structures that have engaged different investors. But right now, just as we talked about the silos that we're seeing between food and health in the way in which we're at least talking about them, I think from an investment perspective, those silos are less connected. And I think that opportunity is there to really begin to tie those together more closely. And I think an opportunity for that is some of these conferences, whether it's the next iteration of the Regenerative Food System Investment Forum, or some of these other, whether it's health conferences, traditionally health conferences, traditionally ag conferences. I think we need to see more blending in this space in order to find the right kinds of capital that can be able to work together.
SPEAKER_00:And I want to be conscious of your time, but ask a final question to both of you. What if you had a magic wand that could change one thing in this space? What would that be?
SPEAKER_01:Do we get the billion dollars? I know you asked that. Usually that question comes with a billion dollars. Or is it just the magic wand?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it usually comes... Okay, let's rephrase. That's a good point. I'm a
SPEAKER_01:listener too, as well as being on the podcast. So I know your question.
SPEAKER_00:I wanted to make... Because that could lead up to a whole other Pandora of answers. So let's start with the magic wand. And then let's ask how you put a billion dollars to work, which we sort of alluded to already, but I'm still curious. No, you're right. I'm still curious about both of your answers. So let's start with the magic power, which we then unfortunately take away. But let's start with the magic power first. One thing only, obviously, which is always a tricky one.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that was pointing to me, David. I thought you were raising
SPEAKER_01:your hand to speak first. I was pointing to you. You can go first, Mr. Strelnik.
SPEAKER_02:It would be something I've already mentioned, and I think we all know. And the good news here is that... people are working on this, the bad news is it's really hard, which is if there were a transactable metric that clearly indicated the nutritional results of farming in different ways. And I think it's possible because of what I said about big data and AI and the way the science is headed. We're going to get to a point where there is a number and currently major transactions happen in the world based on bulk yield, volume. I want two tons of wheat, right?
SPEAKER_00:And so you're saying there should be a two ton of wheat with this number on it, like two ton of wheat of 10 or two ton of 99, whatever.
SPEAKER_02:Whatever it is. And I had a conversation in the headquarters of the big commodity trader Bungie in Geneva eight years ago, where we discussed that if there were a number that indicated the nutrient quality that they could buy and sell futures in, they would do it. But what's that number? So I would wave the magic wand and say, oh, here's the metric. Now let's start buying and selling based on that metric.
SPEAKER_00:And the metrics probably, because how do you summarize all of that, what we discussed until now, in one number? It's like impact measurements in impact investing. We can spend 10 days on that and still get somewhere with frameworks. I don't
SPEAKER_02:know if it's a number or an indicator, but it's a something tangible where a buyer and seller who don't have a relationship with each other already agree on the unit they're going to transact in that reflects these participants. More than the price and the quantity. Exactly. or more than the number of calories, which is sometimes how it's rejected today, or the weight.
SPEAKER_00:Protein content or something, but it's not an indicator of quality.
SPEAKER_02:And that's my magic wand wish because I think it would just open up massive commerce that is in alignment with all these principles we're discussing.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And then you're thinking that the price difference that potentially is there, I'm not saying it is, but is that then less relevant if we can add that other number to it?
SPEAKER_02:I think it's less relevant because, again, because of this factor we keep mentioning that all these other positive economics accompany it. So I think that the rewards, again, as someone who's studied economics a lot, I believe, it's a belief, it's not an analytic conclusion, that the economic rewards will accrue to those producers so that this single unit price doesn't have to carry the full cost of all of their production. And I think that'll become clear fairly quickly, but right now it's too messy. We don't even know where to start. It's
SPEAKER_00:decommodifying. Not even decommodifying it. It's adding a number to the commodity to make it... To sort of decommodifying it at the end, because you want to tie it back to other outcomes and to the land.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, we've had arguments in my team and with my advisors about, are we trying to turn nutrition into a commodity? Or are we trying to decommodify? I don't know. But it's reflecting these principles. And again, the ideas are on the table. A couple months ago, I was at the annual Borlaug Dialogue and World Food Prize conference. in Iowa. And I've been there before. I got to chair the nutrition panel a few years ago at that event. Because of the impact that these crazy social entrepreneurs were having, it was totally different than how the mainstream thinkers were attacking the issue. And there was discussion this year that there's never been in the past when I've been at the event. Not a lot of it. It wasn't on the main stage, but there was discussion of these ideas, these metrics, these concepts. There was argument, whereas before you couldn't even argue with each other because you just saw the world so differently.
SPEAKER_00:So how far are we off then? We're getting to you, David, but how far are we off to have the data to put a number or to put numbers or a metric or a spectrum there in terms of... We know a lot of the data on the degradation side, so how far are we on the positive side?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Under this U.S. Department of Agriculture grant, we've spent seven months reading papers. It's a lot of reading of papers with our colleague, Andrea. And I think we're not very close. We're able to structure the metadata now. We're able to say, oh, these are the structures and the data elements that matter. And here's some anecdotal examples of how they change in different circumstances. And so establishing your metadata, is top priority for being able to then prove the
SPEAKER_03:case. But we're not there. And it's
SPEAKER_00:like
SPEAKER_01:in the near term, like, are we getting there yet? I'm sorry, go ahead, David. that way of doing agriculture isn't damaging and extractive. And that to me is maybe just a different nut to crack is that shouldn't we put the predominant forces of today's food system on trial to prove that they should maintain that position as opposed to needing to demonstrate that the alternative where we have anecdotal but building evidence that this may allow us to get out of the 21st century alive and intact as a society. It seems like, pardon me for taking that approach and looking at the broader picture here, but it always strikes me as funny.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it's where the power, the current power lies and probably, well, you've got a significant but still relatively small grant if you look in the grand scheme of things of where money flows and to research that so what would you do if you had a magic wand would that be your let's let them prove their let's say not even positive but not negative impact
SPEAKER_01:not negative I mean I only have one so I came up with this one before we went there we'll put that one in David's bucket we'll give that as associated with his one but I'd say why David and I work well together is because we complement each other so he gave you something very tangible the metric data I'm going to go with the intent intangible route and or slightly more intangible and draw from a quote from Wendell Berry, where he said that people are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food. And so if I could, I would like to change the reflection that is captured by that quote and what he said in thinking about how we change culture and how we can have people that are fed by the food industry, which pays to health and are treated by the health industry which pays attention to food. And that is changing the construction of our society and the silos that we've built and being able to really think differently about how the parts of our society are constructed. And that's gonna take changing of culture, changing of mindset, changing of all of these things that have become fundamental to the construction of our economic system, of our mostly capitalist society. And it's maybe harder, maybe, again, complementary to building of metrics and building of the data. But I think it's the mindset in many cases that's going to be very challenging to change. But ultimately, if we can't change that, I think the other pieces are going to be even harder.
SPEAKER_00:And... It feels like a stretch, but I'm still going to ask the$1 billion question. How would you put, both of you put a billion, not that you both get 500, like you both get a billion to put to work. Any long-term, I mean, as investments. So in this case, I'm not interested in specific amounts, et cetera. I'm interested where you would prioritize, where geographies, but also would you focus on land? Would you focus on measurement companies? Would you focus on vertically integrated food companies? Where would you put your, put your, dollars where your mouth is in case you had sort of, I mean, they're not unlimited resources, but quite a significant pool of capital that can do long-term investments. But the intention is to have it back at some point with a return. Could be very low, but still a return. So not the grand side. So what would you, both of you, I mean, whoever wants to take it first, what would you focus on and what would you prioritize?
SPEAKER_01:This is new and a bit raw, so we might need to edit this one out later, but... Over this last break, I had the opportunity to watch the social network and I've been following kind of the news around TikTok and the role of social media around really changing behavior and ultimately, I think, changing culture is part of that. So I think, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this. So how can a company that I haven't seen exist yet use tools like that that have primarily been used for, I would say, the creation of more capital and driving advertisers and other influences to change ultimately consumer behavior, what would a company look like that we can invest a billion dollars in that would work to change some of these kind of core underlying components of the food system in relationship to behavior and culture look like? How can we begin to put food and nourishment and community and nutrition back is part of the dialogue as opposed to how fast can we get you the cheapest amount of calories possible. And whether that's a click, but whether that, you know, yeah, eventually that's going to take land, it's going to take infrastructure, it's going to take all of these things, but how do we change the messaging? Where are the, you know, where are the minds that have been used to date to just drive capital through advertising advertisers, and social media platforms, how can we use those skill sets to help to change the way we as a society looks at agriculture and begin to shift those value systems? That's what I want my billion-dollar shoes for. I already wrote the Investing in Regenerative Ag Infrastructure paper, so all the
SPEAKER_00:other stuff out there is... I know, I know. That will follow after the cultural change, of course.
SPEAKER_02:And you, David? So I think the– thank you for the question. I think the complementarity, the flip side, the reason David and I will pool our billion dollars and have two billion to work on together is my response is I think of it as parallel but on the individual actor side of the story. So who is the citizen that's receiving that message? It's the same language David just used. What is the behavioral change? But, you know, the great successes we're seeing and have seen for 10 years, et cetera, are not exclusive of others, but the ones we saw and said something's going on here that's really powerful is the place-based, community-based action.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You put this value proposition, this what we call our nourishment economies framework, in front of people who care about the community they live in, whether it's a little teeny community or a big 230,000 farmer community in Zambia, and they begin to come up with and activate new ideas. It's clear from our work. We prototyped an approach we called a nourishment economies action summit just before the pandemic. It was hugely successful in the a couple of places we got to do it. One was in New Mexico, including with a number of communities in the Navajo Nation, but also traditional colonial communities and others. And when you put this economic framework in front of local people who care about their community, they see these opportunities. And the entrepreneurs amongst them begin to bubble up. So I don't know if I need a billion. If I had just a million, we could do some phenomenal work. but I'll take the billion and go bigger. But let's take the understanding of how the economics of nutritional relationships between soil and people, how that translates into clean water, good tasting food, better, healthier babies, carbon sequestration, more resilient landscapes when a disaster comes along, more resilient food systems when an economic disaster comes along. and profit for the producers, and just introduce that proposition in a million communities. We can do that. And let the sparks fly.
SPEAKER_00:So basically how to, somebody else said it, shout out to Bart, how to make big money small, like how to cut it in enough small pieces to arrive in the places where it has the largest impact. And I
SPEAKER_02:think the largest impact, I have a strong opinion on this, is an enabling impact. It creates a sense of agency, right? So it's not where the big money is tried to predefine what the outcomes will be. is investing in those outcomes because there are too many, they're too diverse. But where it really activates the local stakeholders and owns a piece of the pie. So whatever the pie is that they end up baking in that community, you get your piece back. But you're not trying to predetermine which piece of the pie you're going to get because that ends up constraining the local creativity.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Letting go of control, which is what many farmers need to do in this transition as well.
UNKNOWN:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00:So with that, I want to thank you both so much for a proper lay of the land of where we're at in this moment in time in terms of nutrient density. And of course, love to check in after the two years or during the two years when this work will be drawn to a conclusion. And for sure, there will be a lot of work following that because this is not a two-year marathon. This is a much longer one. So thank you so much for the time today and for sharing. And of course, hoping to check in to follow this process along.
SPEAKER_02:Great to think through this with you. Thank you for the opportunity.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much. Great to be here again and looking forward to what comes next.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks again and see you next time.
