222 Peter Byck – Roots So Deep (you can see the devil down there)

A conversation with Peter Byck, filmmaker and a wrangler of scientists, about regenerative vs conventional grazing and his new 4 part documentary series Roots So Deep (you can see the devil down there).

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Transcript

Why are you doing what you are doing? Why Soil?

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today's guest gathered a bunch of scientists and very innovative farmers and their neighbors to answer one of the big questions in regenerative agriculture that so far we only anecdotally answered. does regenerative grazing work to restore soil, people, local communities, biodiversity, insect, birds, store a lot of carbon, reduce methane, all of those things, and create more farmers' wealth? The first data seems very positive. But very importantly, what happens if the conventionally grazing neighbors were presented with this data? And remember, they share a fence line, which means they have exactly the same climate, the same soil type, everything is the same except the management. So what would happen? Would they change? Would they change their behavior? Would they change their management and would they also transition? Find out today with today's guest. Thank you very much. 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 episode today with filmmaker and wangler of scientists, Pete Bick. Welcome, Pete. Thank you. It could be here. And I mean, we're going to touch on both of those angles, obviously, but let's just, for people that haven't seen your work, let's take us under a brief tour back of what got you into focusing on soil, which is not, let's say, the normal topic for filmmakers, at least. It's starting to become more, like I said, become slightly more fancy, obviously, over the last years. But when you started, I don't think it was a topic that was easily, let's say, captured in front of a camera.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

It was. wasn't talked about very much. And it was a bit lonely out there at first. My entree into documentary filmmaking about these subjects started with seeing an Inconvenient Truths world premiere at Sundance. And it hit me as, oh my gosh, climate change is a really big problem. What are the solutions? And so we made a film called Carbonation, which was all about solutions to climate change. And in the making of that film, I was taught about soils being both a huge problem and a huge potential resource for slowing down climate change that soils in their natural state are actually inhaling carbon at a massive amount. Soils in their unhealthy state are exhaling carbon in a massive amount. It's interesting you

SPEAKER_01 3:24

used that breathing metaphor, which is true. You can see the earth breathing if you look at certain satellite images.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it was a scientist named Wendy Silver who really showed me that, talked me through that she's at UC Berkeley and so it was people that she was working with like John Wick who started the Marin Carbon Project and Pete Willis down in South Africa who taught me some more about this grazing and then the folks at the Rodale Institute and Tim LaSalle and the folks there were teaching me about soils and compost and the ability for soils if they're covered to be incredibly vibrant microbial universes and so Wick all that in my mind as I toured carbonation for three years. At the end of that touring in 2012, I was really wanting to focus on the one thing. If I had one solution I could just focus on for solving climate change, helping to solve climate change, what would that be? And I was looking at the soils as the biggest scale, the biggest potential. And then within that, my research kept bringing me to grazing. And so the fellow who did the narrative A guy named Bill Curtis had a company called Tallgrass Beef Company, and his advisor was Alan Williams. And he said, if you want to learn about any kind of regenerative grazing, you need to talk to Alan Williams. And so Alan and I spoke in 2012, and that was the beginning of my life as it is right now. Alan introduced me to Gabe Brown, who introduced me to Neil Dennis. And those three gentlemen are the stars of the first short film I made in this world called Soil Carbon Cowboys. And we made 10 short films around the U.S. and the U.K. of farmers in very different ecosystems, severe drought-ridden New Mexico, Kansas after a massive couple of years of drought, incredibly wet Mississippi, insanely wet Cornwall and Devon, and everything in between. And the type of grazing these folks were doing, which we've come to call AMP grazing, adaptive multi-paddock grazing, was working in a way that was in every one of those ecosystems. It was saving water in the dry places. It was getting water flushed through cleanly in the wet places. And all those short films, we made 10 short films. And that showed me, I couldn't find a place where amp grazing wasn't working, but there was no science, very little, very, very little science. And so concurrently to making all those short films, I helped organize a team of scientists, thus the Wrangler part of my introduction. And we designed a project to test whether amp grazing was better for the land and whether it was better for the farmer and whether it was a greenhouse gas sink. Those were our three main questions. And so we spent many years designing, many years fundraising. And in 2018, we hit the road to start doing research on five farm pairs in the on the other side of the fence. And we spent from 2018 to 2022 gathering data. And I concurrently made a documentary about all that. And that documentary is called Roots So Deep. You can see the devil down there.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

And I encourage everybody to see the trailer. First of all, go and see Carbon Cowboys. Definitely, I'll put everything below. But go and see the trailer. You can see the wrangling happening and you can see the journey, which is a very long one, but there is quite a fun one, or at least that's what the documentary tries to show. This is a journey filled with laughs as well.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Yeah. And when people have seen the films we've screened, episodes one, two, and three have been done for almost a year. And episode four, we still had to wait for our greenhouse gas cycling data, the most comprehensive study of greenhouse gas cycling on grazing we've been told we have done. And it's incredibly complicated and incredibly incredibly expensive. So it was the last thing we got funded and it took longer than all the other, all the other teams. And so we just got that data in December and really our scientist is still analyzing it, but we got like the most conservative numbers from her so we could put it in the film. So we just finished the film episode four last week.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

So the four episodes are like four, no, they're not four different forms because you have five. So walk us through the why four episodes and my hunch is that the data side is at the end. But what are four, why four chapters or four episodes of this story?

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Yeah, so the way it worked, where we started in Woodville, Mississippi, that farm pair was just naturally the way to start the film. It just worked out that way in the editing. I shoot a lot and it takes a lot of work for the editing to get done because there's no script, there's no structure. We just shot and shot and shot. We didn't know we were shooting a four-part series I thought I was shooting a documentary film that was going to be 90 minutes. But we just had too many stories, too much information. When did

SPEAKER_01 8:45

you realize it was going to be more than that? Like you're sort of, what is it, Peter Jackson moment? Like it should be three films. I mean, not that we were shooting. I think he managed to do that before convincing the studio. But when was the moment like, we're just never going to fit this in 90 minutes?

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Well, when you just said Peter Jackson, I thought you were going to be talking about Get Back. No, no, Get Back, the Let It Be documentary. Oh, wow. Both of them said, I think you've got a series here. And then once we really got into it with the editor that made the film, his name's Ben Daughtry. Once Ben got really into the footage, he said the same thing. And I didn't tell him what other people had said. And so it was three completely different editors who'd seen all the footage to that point saying the same thing. And I was like, oh my God, we didn't raise money for this, the work it's going to take. And it took a lot of work. So episode one is the Woodville, Mississippi pair. Episode two is a farm pair in Piedmont, Alabama. I'm sure you've heard of Piedmont. And episode three is in Fort Payne, Alabama. Episode four is in Sequatchie Cove in Jasper, Tennessee. I'm sorry, I'm going wrong. I'm telling you the farm numbers, not the episode numbers. Episode one is definitely Woodville, Mississippi. Episode two is definitely Piedmont, Alabama. But then episode three, we have the rest of the farm pairs, Fort Payne, Alabama, Sequatchie Cove, Tennessee, and then Adolphus, Kentucky. And then that was all filmed in the first two years of our research. And then we had to wait two more years for the scientists to do their analysis and get their lab work done. And then we went back out. So episode four is us giving the farmers the data.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

I understand. Yeah. And how difficult was that? but also to find those pairs. Like what's the, I mean, I'm not imagining, I mean, sort of me imagining that finding the regenerative one or the one that is on this journey for a while is maybe not the difficult one with the connections you have and your friends. But then the pair, like how easy is it to, and what do you need from them? Like how deep are you looking into their kitchen, let's say, and their soils?

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Yeah, I like that phrase, how deep are we looking into the kitchen? Because everyone's private. And I think farmers, maybe more so, you know, they don't even want to be going into an office if they can help it. Unfortunately, a lot of farmers do have off farm jobs because that's how they make their ends meet. What we did was we sent out a survey that went to thousands of farmers across the US, but we let them know we were focusing on the Southeast US first. We got about 90 surveys back that had some form of AMP grazing, some form of moving their animals multiple times in a week and keeping them in one or two herds, those sorts of things, those parameters that we were honing in on ourselves. And then of those 90, we found 25 that were worth scouting. And so Steve Affelbaum, our lead ecologist, and Ry Thompson, who's his project manager, and I scouted those 25 ranches in the Southeast. That was in 2017. And of those ranches, we picked four, four AMP ranches. farms. And then one of those four said, you need to check out this guy in Piedmont, Alabama, John Lyons. So John became our fifth. And so instead of four, we had five. So then we had to go to their neighbor across the fence on most of them. Three are across the fence, two are down the road. and see if indeed their neighbor had the same soil type and see if the same soils were sloped the same way and aspect towards the sun the same way. We were really specific about trying to get it as apples to apples as possible. And then we had to ask the farmers, can we do research on your land? And they all said yes. And they all, you know, some were very suspicious. But we said, hey, listen. They said yes

SPEAKER_01 13:57

because you came in with like their neighbor or you just. knocked on it like look where we're doing because I'm imagining some of these farms are probably known as the weirdos in their community like they're definitely not the conventional path so or did you just like how do you do that like because that's always the I mean we're getting to that but like you see over the fence line a farm probably objectively doing a lot better or feel doing better or at least more alive more production the farmhouse might be in order I still remember why I'm into this space because I read on article on holistic plant grazing in in Australia and they were touring these as a consultant touring these properties and most of them that have have applied these practices were just doing a lot better and had more time on their hands some started a solar business next next to it because they just had too much time and others were like yeah our carrying capacity is x and our costs are way lower and and always asking the question as well uh Tony Lovell and Bruce Wade who are unfortunately no longer with us like why is your neighbor not going and and and we're like yeah they look at us and then they see the house that isn't not falling apart and somehow they just convince themselves it's a different climate or a different soil. And so they knew they could be confronted with that it was management, not climate. And still they say yes.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

They said yes. Two of them said yes because it was their neighbor, right? Who they trusted. One of them said yes because it was his cousin. And two of them, we had to just start from scratch. We didn't know them. They didn't know us. They didn't know the neighbor that we were using So we had sort of the spectrum of that. And we basically said, we're looking at farming. We think we found a way that can make you more money with less expenses. But we can't find out unless we do the science. Would you let us do the science? And we're going to be covered beautifully with insurance so that you're not going to be at risk on any front on that. And you can kick us off anytime you want. And so... we make it really easy for them to tell us to leave if they want to. So far, we've been lucky and none of them have told us to leave. We've made friends. This project has been a life-changing project for me and my family. And now there's 10 farms in this country that I can go visit anytime I want. And there's more farms because we've been meeting farmers for a long time now. But it's just been great. And And the one thing I wanted to tell you about episode four was the beginning is when we give them the data, right? And so we're bringing them together. We're bringing the neighbors together on a porch and telling them what each side is like. But then we wait another year or big chunk of time to see if it has any effect. Because the big question

SPEAKER_01 16:47

is, yeah, does it lead showing the data? Like we keep saying, oh, we need more data, data, data. Does it lead to the shift we would like to see?

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Yeah, well, that's episode four. So folks will have to watch episode four, but all I can say is I'm in a good mood. And if we can help farmers make more money and treat their land even better, every farmer cares about their land. There's no question about that. But if they can learn ways to make their land more pleasant for birds to come migrate to them, which is what we're seeing, I think every farmer would be open to it. It's just how it's presented to them. And then what's the next step, right? And so as we make this project and we've done all this work and all this research and all this science and all this filming, now the question is, can we get other farmers to change where it doesn't take a 10-year project or a four-year visit to their farm or a four-hour documentary? Can we get them to change from watching the four-hour documentary? And then if they want to change, then we just introduce them to Alan Williams and Gabe Brown and then walk on to the next farmers, really. That's the goal

SPEAKER_01 18:01

and was there a reason besides I'm imagining funding to because Carbon Cowboys was more global to keep it in that part of the US to I mean luckily probably with Corona maybe you filmed most of it before but anyway that didn't happen but was there a reason to keep it in the pairs let's say there

SPEAKER_00 18:22

yeah so when our team got together in 2014 we had two big meetings the science team and we put We decided that there were nine regions in North America that we wanted to study, and really in the US, eight in continental US and Hawaii, because why not? But the fundraising was so difficult and hard. And in 2014, there weren't a lot of people that wanted to study this type of grazing at all. And the fact that we got big companies to see a reason to study this type of grazing shows that we were making a good case and that they were you know what we were talking about and so we we um we had to pick one region we thought we were going to raise money for two regions and we had to just pick one now we are doing the science in that second region now we raised the money for that so that's the northern great plains now why the u.s is because we're all based here and just you have to go to those sites a lot while you're working um but we we have colleagues in england australia new zealand in France who are getting some amp grazing research going now. Um, we need more, we need more. Um, I'd love to do some in the Netherlands. I'd love to do some in Germany. Um, you know, I don't know a lot about what just happened in the Netherlands with this new political party because the farmers were being told that they were going to get their cows taken away because they were methane emitters. Um, but that was a real interesting, you know, just from the, I'm watching that from afar. Um, I can tell you from our research, our greenhouse gas cycling research is incredibly rigorous with many different methods of gathering the data, both old and new. And amp grazing in the Southeast US is a greenhouse gas sink at a large amount. And like

SPEAKER_01 20:19

carbon, like CO2 equivalent, because it's always that little word that we see underneath. Yep. Where we see this beautiful but very annoying infographic that is based on all the life cycle assessments, et cetera, but like the beef versus, et cetera, which, yeah, I always get annoyed when I see it on LinkedIn because it's not true, but the underlying, we need that data and we need that science underlying because otherwise these infographics just keep making the tour and the rounds and it's just not leading anywhere. So it's an emission sink across the board. That's what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yeah, so when you gather the CO2, the methane and the nitrous oxide, And you account for that properly, which is which ones are the long-term, the nitrous oxide and the CO2, which one's short-term, methane. And very conservatively accounting for it, the numbers from our film, it's 12.2 tons of CO2e per hectare per year is coming down on the amp side. And three tons of CO2e is coming down on the conventional side. So we were surprised the conventional was actually also a sink, but AMP is a much stronger sink. Now, this doesn't account for what happens after they leave the farm. Our research is on the farm. So if you're going to send the animals to a feedlot where they're getting corn and how's that corn raised and grown and how's the feed grown, then you're going to be getting a huge carbon footprint, a massive carbon footprint. But if you're going to be finishing these animals on grass and selling it that way, it's a sink. It's a sink. Now, obviously, the biggest part of grazing in North America does go to feedlot. And if we change the way all the animals are grazed while they're being grazed, that first year for calves and things like that and all the mama cows for their lives, we're We can still have a big impact, a big impact. It's a stepping stone in the right direction. It's fascinating. It's massive.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

And I mean, first, what is the difference between amp grazing and let's say holistic managed and rotational and the different terms we hear people use around? I think most people are more familiar with the holistic one simply because of the Savory Institute. How do you describe the difference between, let's say, those two?

SPEAKER_00 23:01

I'm not sure there's a big difference. So why do you use the word amp?

UNKNOWN 23:07

Well,

SPEAKER_00 23:09

We use the word AMP because we felt like holistic management, to my understanding, talks about a lot more than just the grazing. It's the whole economics of the farm and the community. It goes well beyond the farm. We were finding as we were fundraising that we weren't getting traction with holistic management as the phrase. And that when we did the research with the farmers from all my short films, we We as a team were asking, what's the best way to describe this? What's a way that describes it in a way that's quick and that's specific? So adaptive, got it. Multipaddock, got it. Grazing, got it. So AMP grazing came about as a way to help us get the project going. And then we've tested it with ranchers all over the world, farmers, cattle farmers, and all of them like it. All of them, except for one, Neil Den wished I called it mob grazing, which is, you know, you can call it anything you want, you know, call it anything you want. Um, but that's, that's the history of why we went down the road towards AMP grazing.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

And it probably also gets you out of a bit of the focus of, of the George Monbiot and others, I think on holistic grazing and specifically Alan Savory, which they continue to pick fights, I think on Twitter all the time. And, and mainly on that, or not mainly on that point, mainly he keeps George keeps saying there's no data there's no science there's it doesn't work etc etc and of course the other side starts screaming yeah there is data there's science and look at my pictures of the fence line it does work and I don't feel like we're getting anywhere but I think this this study could at least in those regions let's let's call it be conservative really answer that question like show me show me the rigorous data and this sounds like very rigorous data do you think it's going to help in that conversation on It's the how, not the cow? What is the sentence there?

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Yeah, it's not the cow, it's the how. That's Russ Concert, who you've interviewed. For me, with someone like George Monbiot, I would like to present him the data. How he accepts or doesn't accept the data is up to him, right? That's his choice. But there is data. And I, you know, you talk to the most conservative scientists on our team and they'll say, yes, we've just shown it's working in the Southeast US, right? But we randomly picked the Southeast US. We randomly picked the farms we used. We very randomly found the neighbors to compare. And quite frankly, we got really, really talented conventional farmers. The grazers on our study, the conventional grazers are really good. And we have the data to show that. So it wasn't like we cherry picked the worst on one side and the best on the other. We got good on both sides. You just go to these farms anywhere. Everywhere I've been on the planet, I go to these farms and it's so significantly different. The smell, the squishiness of the soil, the sound, the life. And so I'm just wondering, for folks who dismiss the fact that regenerative grazing is successful and a positive, I'm just wondering if they've been visiting these farms because it's such a powerful, that's what got me, right? I mean, I've changed. I mean, when we made Carbon Nation, I thought meat was bad. We made a movie, we made a short cartoon about how, you know, eating meat was going to kill all the rainforests. We were in that position. We say in the thing at the end of the film, what you can do. Meatless Mondays, just, you know, that's where we were coming from when I learned all what I learned when I made Carbonation. But then I met these farmers, I visited these farms, and then I really got into the filmmaking, and then I really got into the science. And I've changed. I've changed. So if I've changed... Maybe other people can change. It's good news. That's the thing. This is actually good news. There is a scalable, massively affordable, profitable way to help slow down climate change, to help mitigate climate change. All the while you're rewilding farms. That's what's happening. That's what these farmers are doing. Wildlife is coming to their farm and not across the fence. That's what our data is showing.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

Have you looked at the quality piece as well? Like in this time, maybe this wasn't the thing when you were fundraising, but the whole nutrient density piece, like comparing the two pairs as they're so similar, soil, slopes, the whole thing you just described. Did you have a bit of budget left to look at what's in the end product? Or for sure you tasted it, but is there anything you can say about that?

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Yeah, that piece was not in our scope. You have to stop someplace. Of course. But there's a great scientist Stefan von Fleet, who's studied with Fred Provenza, who's a great scientist. They've been looking at that for a long time, so that's going to be in their world. We met Stefan a little late in the game, or we would have tried to do that work. It's tricky because tracing animals once they get into the feedlot system is very difficult. But we've talked to Stefan about our work in the a biopsy like a really a flash biopsy from the animals in the fields and see if we can do that so we're talking to him about that um obviously that's that's a very important piece to the to the puzzle

SPEAKER_01 29:33

yeah and i was just wondering because you have these quote-unquote perfect pairs of course now it changed because you've presented results to them and so probably management potentially you're optimistic you said so i'm imagining and my hunch is something has changed at the neighbors but um we we need those pairs not i mean there will be many of those because everyday farmers get on the transition and we can compare it to their neighbors. But it's an interesting, it's a very interesting angle. We're running a full nutrient density series on that with Stefan, Fred, et cetera. But I was just wondering, of course, you have to stop somewhere. You cannot just, especially from the fundraising, because also this kind of research isn't cheap and you need the right kind of labs and all of that. And then what was the most surprising finding out of the research piece? You said you really, we really went deep on every possible angle you can imagine. So I'm imagining insects, everything we can see and cannot see. What has been your biggest surprise?

SPEAKER_00 30:32

My biggest surprise was something you alluded to earlier when we were told that all the conventional neighbors thought the AMP farmers were crazy or goofy or different or weird and all those sorts of things. They judged them and they didn't want to talk about anything. That's what we were told. But what we discovered, science is always, you think about data, you think about soil samples and greenhouse gas. measurement, but these are all about people. This whole thing is about people. The scientists are people, the farmers are people, the filmmakers are people, the editors are people. And what I was blown away by very early in the filming was that the conventional farmers didn't judge their neighbors. They were really curious. So they

SPEAKER_01 31:27

were looking over

SPEAKER_00 31:27

the fence line. But they're absolutely looking over the fence line and they saw more grass and they saw healthy animals, but they were too polite to ask.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

So you're saying the regenerative revolution has been not unfolding because we were too polite to ask.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

And the ant farmer was too polite to toot

SPEAKER_01 31:48

their own horn. Which I can, I mean, that part I can get like, okay, I'm not going to tell them what to do because who am I? This is the biggest, yeah. So the fact that you got them on the same porch, even without data, you probably would have, the fact, okay, you had the excuse of the data to get them on the porch and have tea or coffee or whatever we were drinking. And, but just to compare or just how have that conversation, which they normally never have because both sides were too polite to ask. Like, can I ask you what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 32:15

That's exactly it. And so that scene that's in episode one, you know, I was hearing this curiosity from the conventional farmer.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Because there's a scene in the teaser, in the trailer that says, do you think they will change? I don't remember the exact, but, and they were like, yeah, I don't know. Of course, talking to the regenerative focus one, I don't know, maybe yes, maybe not. And it follows that of course edited into a trailer and yeah there was of course a bit of suspense like is that going to happen or not do you think or is it too late or too old or too conventional or too to do so there's a scene in episode one where you felt and heard that politeness

SPEAKER_00 32:56

yeah well it was I heard the conventional farmer was curious I knew that the ant farmer had answers for him and would love to talk to him but just didn't want to they were friends

SPEAKER_01 33:08

Did you make that match happen? Or do you also think that's going to jeopardize my scientific journey at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 33:15

No, I guess it was a gamble by making that match happen. But again, these are people. And people, I care about people. And so I asked them, hey, when we come back in July, this was the first summer of filming, we were there all May and a bunch of June. I'm like, hey, we're going to come back in July. Would you two like to sit on the porch and just ask each other questions and just talk about this and they both said yes and it's I mean at some point I would like to just put the three hour conversation up online because it's It's fascinating. And, you know, obviously we have good editors and we cut it down to fit the flow of the film. No, but still, that image,

SPEAKER_01 33:58

that would be very, very powerful because that's transition happening in front of your camera, basically. And that's... From good farmers, like you were saying before. It's not that the conventional were... Talented. Like badly, like the soil was run down and not looking after anything. Like these were basically top of their game, conventional farmers.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Top of their game, conventional... been doing it for generations and you know now we're getting data showing that the difference between their farm and their neighbor's farming what are they going to do about it are they going to do anything about it that's the through line for our series what's going to happen and that for me that's the through line for the next chunk of years of my life because i know that this is a solution not the but a and i now need to make sure every farmer that wants to hear this hears this because then they have a choice they can make and it will be beneficial to society. It'll be beneficial for their neighbors and their watersheds. I love the idea of getting enough farmers within a watershed to focus on nature first and then that water coming off the watershed is cleaner and the cities downstream spend less money cleaning the water. The cities downstream have less flood mitigation problems because more of that water is soaking in. for the transition. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's, it's, there's so much money that can be made. It's just, there's so, the markets don't exist. How do you, how do you market, how do you build an instrument of a city saving money from, from cleaning their water less? Like where does that exist yet? And so I know you,

SPEAKER_01 35:43

I think New York has something on the, I don't remember when, but in the upper Hudson Valley, yes, they were supposed to great story. They were supposed to put like another filter installation, which cost, just random number, 2 billion something. And they figured out it was cheaper to work with farmers to lose less chemicals.

SPEAKER_00 35:58

Yeah, that was... So water seems possible

SPEAKER_01 36:03

because it's sort of downstream. It's very easy. Like it drops something here and it's going to end up in your water tank. Like there's no question. And somehow we haven't seen many of these outcome-based schemes yet, I think, but the time seems right.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

You know, the whole phrase ecosystem services, you know, many smart people have been working I've been working on this for a long time. How do you monetize the water piece? And that's being monetized. That's happening. It's just it needs to happen more. What I wish, I wish the United States lines were all, like all of our state borders were watershed lines.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

And

SPEAKER_00 36:41

that's

SPEAKER_01 36:41

straight,

SPEAKER_00 36:42

yeah. Right? So that each state's water, they really saw what, they couldn't send it downstream, right? Like in Kentucky, where I'm from, there's like, Lake Cumberland. And there was a company that was wanting to stay on Lake Cumberland and keep polluting, but everyone was really upset because Lake Cumberland's also a great tourism spot. And so the company was, at the time, the biggest employer in the state of Kentucky. They left. They went to Arkansas. But it wasn't just Lake Cumberland they were putting effluent into. It was the river, the Cumberland River goes down into Nashville, right? Another state, another government, another whole thing. And so if the Cumberland state existed, you know, it would have been their own backyard. There would have been their own front yard that they would have been polluting. It would have been different. It would have been different.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

And so on the ecosystem services side, how important or not at all, do you think the carbon side is going to be like the carbon credits, the soil credits? There's a lot of hype feels very hypey to me, but, um, there's, there's, there's real money being paid to some ranchers here and there. Um, so, What is your take of having spent a lot of time with farmers at the front end of this battle, journey, transition, et cetera? They must be approached. They must be having thoughts about it. What do you think?

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

SPEAKER_00 38:03

I think the farmers are getting approached all the time and they don't know who to trust. I... I'm still learning about the market piece, but the idea of carbon being a financial driver for change has been on our minds since the beginning of this team that started with Alan Williams and Russ Conster and me getting together in 2012, 2013, and then bringing in the rest of the team. We thought about carbon markets from the beginning. We did our science with the idea of a carbon market. We did the measurement with verified data. Vera, VCS, it was VCS at the time, protocol number 21, right? I mean, we, that one of our, that Steve Affelbaum, our ecologist and his team developed and paid for. So we've been thinking about this. We went to Shell. I went to Shell Oil specifically because they've got such a carbon problem, such a carbon legacy, and they're spending billions of dollars on carbon capture and storage, which is, you know, incredibly expensive. We've been thinking about this. Why not spend that same money getting farmers to change and be a climate beneficial company now? And that's how Russ and I met. He was at Shell. And so I've thought about these markets. We've all thought about these markets since the very beginning. And we did the science because you got to start being able to measure and verify these claims that carbon is being brought down into the system. And is it going to be permanent? There's nothing. Nothing in nature that's permanent, but is it going to last decades or centuries? is expensive right now and we're pushing as a team to make it cheaper and cheaper through through the folks on our teams that are working on flux tower data ways to measure greenhouse gas cycling get it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and that's a good strong piece to that and so there's a lot of people that just want to use models for their carbon market data right now and there's no model out there that that that models amp grazing i'll give you a guarantee of that um and there There's the models. There's probably good bits and bobs of all the models out there or some of the models out there. It just doesn't exist yet to really be robust. And so that's one of the things that we are working on. We know other people are working on. That's what needs to happen. So the folks who want to make it cheap and just use models to do the carbon without measurement, without verifying it, without getting the soil samples, I don't– I don't trust that as much as just doing good old-fashioned soil sampling, but then you can create a model with AI, satellite data, soil sampling, flux data, and then we'll get going. We'll really make this thing a robust thing. I think we're just a little bit ahead of the game right now to really make it accurate. And so the concern on our team is that so many people are going to be making deals right now, so many farmers, and when the stuff's just not that accurate, it yet and then people get burned and it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths so that's our concern as a team that the technology is there we can measure it it's just it's not cheap yet

SPEAKER_01 41:56

and so what would be your main message to of course without giving investment advice but to impact investors let's say we're doing this at an audience so we have a screening of the four parts we're really committed or we do two evenings and so I After that, people are, of course, super excited and interested and say, okay, how can I leave this theater and get to work? What would be your main message if I'm interviewing you on stage after that to them, people wearing their financial hats, either investing their own money, investing other people's money? What would be places for them to go to dig deeper, to learn, to smell, to taste, et cetera? Where would you send them off to get to work?

SPEAKER_00 42:35

Okay, so I am not a financially knowledgeable person very much. much. You

SPEAKER_01 42:42

raised money and made a film.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

More than most people. This project is a$10 million project and I was the lead fundraiser for that.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

Which was brutal, I can

SPEAKER_00 42:55

imagine. It's a lot of work and it's very fulfilling to ask someone to help you save the planet. It's an easy ask. Then I became an advocate for farmers as I was worrying about the climate. Then I meet these farmers and now I'm out there trying to help farmers, which feels The places where I've thought of that were financially interesting are the flux towers, the companies that are inventing and getting those going. The team that we have came out of Exeter and their company is called Quantera. That to me is a really necessary piece of this puzzle to get that carbon and methane measurement to work. They're working on the carbon right now, cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Basically, a flux tower, I mean, we discussed it with Ross as well, but it's a tower. It's a piece of aluminum. But it basically sniffs the gases that pass. It can literally feel or make the breathing of the plants and soil life beneath it visible because it keeps going up and down. Everything that passes, it's being measured. It measures what's going

SPEAKER_00 44:07

down into the soil system and what's coming up. And the reason that our greenhouse gas data took so long to get was we had to make sure that the methane we were measuring was at the cows or not so we had cameras 360 and then a still shot every 30 seconds for two years and those had to be analyzed to make sure that the methane we were counting was at cows or was it natural and that's why it took so long so that's

SPEAKER_01 44:32

not the same thing that's technology I mean yeah that's an interesting distinction like it was cow or natural meaning coming out of the sauna or yeah Yeah, or whatever wildlife happened to burp underneath

SPEAKER_00 44:46

that. Yep, yep, yep. That's a lot of images. That's how rigorous we're working to make sure our data is accurate. And so... Financially, the... So really on the

SPEAKER_01 45:01

sensor side, that's what you're saying, like the unlocking that and making it dramatically cheaper to measure.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

The opportunity of developing this model to me is an ideal place to be. Working with all the different pieces of the puzzle, that's a place that I, if I had a ton of money, would focus and I'm looking to raise money to focus on that. I've been in a philanthropic world and I'm seeing the potential for business. And so it's an interesting place right now for me to be watching where I'm watching from. The other thing that I think is a really important piece to this is the loans to farmers to change, financial loans. The data I've seen and the conversations I've had, farmers who focus on nature are paying their loans back quickly. quicker and more, more fully

SPEAKER_01 46:02

and not defaulting. And is that something I, maybe I missed that in, when you said we captured everything on these pair of farms, did you look at the financial side as well? Or was that too private in the kitchen?

SPEAKER_00 46:12

Well, that, that, that's where I liked about your, your, how, how close are you looking in the kitchen? I love that. That must be a Dutch phrase that you're translating. That's a good one. It's, it's good. Whatever, wherever it came from, if it came from you, it's good. Um, so what I, what, What I want to... Because you make that statement like they are better.

SPEAKER_01 46:33

Nature-focused farmers, nature-first farmers

SPEAKER_00 46:35

seem to be... We ask a lot of questions. But farmers are very reticent to give you all their financial data. And so what you do is you use proxy data. How much are they spending on feed? How much are they spending on medicine? How much are they selling their animals for? Those are the data that we could get, self-reported data And the AMP side was, let's see, it was$100 cheaper per animal to feed them and$400 more per animal to sell them.

SPEAKER_01 47:13

Which

SPEAKER_00 47:13

is massive. If I'm remembering my data right. But it's a massive gap,

SPEAKER_01 47:16

like whatever the exact, it's a massive gap. So why do you need transition

SPEAKER_00 47:21

finance? But check this out, check this out. And I'll answer your question about transition finance.

UNKNOWN 47:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 47:28

Over and over again, when Alan Williams is out doing his work, he's saying that when people transition to AMP from CG on grazing, that they're raising their... Sorry, AMP, I

SPEAKER_01 47:38

understand. What was the second thing you said? Continuous

SPEAKER_00 47:40

grazing. I'm sorry, CG, conventional grazing, continuous grazing, yeah.

UNKNOWN 47:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 47:46

That's just our abbreviation. I want to keep it accessible. Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that. I try not to do that, actually. So when the farmers transition, they raise their carrying capacity, the amount of animals they can raise, double and triple. Which is such an overlooked thing. And this particular piece of data might be the biggest carbon data that a scientist who we were giving her this data who... I would call her a very conservative and very skeptical scientist when it comes to looking at grazing as a solution. Where she's been, who she's studied with. And when I told her that in our Piedmont pair, the farmer that we didn't even know about, but one of the farmers said, you should go there. He's got three and a half times more animals on the same acreage as his neighbor. And that's the same rainfall. I mean, they share a fence, right? And so that's a significant difference. So when we think about feeding neighborhoods, feeding communities, feeding states, feeding countries, we're scratching the

SPEAKER_01 48:55

surface of what is possible.

SPEAKER_00 48:57

Scratching the surface. And there's so little data on stacking of enterprises, right? So little data. Like you go down to Will Harris's farm, White Oak Pasture, he's got 10 different types of animals grazing on his land. We have a short film called 100,000 Beating hearts. And his dad had 2,000 beating hearts on the same acreage. He has 100,000 beating hearts. Same rainfall, no irrigation. He is importing feed for the poultry, so that has to be factored in. You know, so that heavily increased productivity to me is really important. And so there's a debate even amongst, you know, you get two scientists in a room, you're going to get an argument, right? So we have 10 or 20 scientists on our team. So there's all kinds of debates within our team. And a big debate we have is, does amp grazing take less land, more land? And even if we go down the road of it takes more land than conventional, we have so much degraded land, so much degraded land across the planet, that if we have a way of regenerating the land and more acres of regeneration, that's actually a positive. That's actually a positive so even if you look at that as a negative it's not it's a positive

SPEAKER_01 50:18

and so coming back to the question why does a farmer then need transition finance if it's such an obvious for for like a spreadsheet farmer to see like okay three and a half times i pay less for feed i might have more fence costs but maybe i'm going to virtual fencing or that i can factor in and i get more for my animals hopefully if you're connected to the right slaughterhouses the right infrastructure locally which is an issue in many many places i'm not absolutely not saying that's easy at all but let's say you do then what are the loans for you were mentioning before

SPEAKER_00 50:49

yeah so let's say that you're growing row crops arable land and you want to start grazing you need a perimeter fence that's not cheap and a lot of the farms that we've been on the ones that run water throughout their land the piping that that's a really good way to do it it's an initial cost but it pays itself back quickly And so those are the two costs. And then if you're going to be doing a different type of grazing, do you need a different type of animal? Which takes time and does cost. And so if you need to– like the South Pole is a breed of animal that Teddy Gentry, who's in our Fort Payne study, he helped bring about over the last 40 years this breed. He put different animals together, and it's this beautiful red-coated– animal that works great when it's hot and humid right so you'll see all the black cows you know they're they're black they're angus cows they're all standing in ponds in the summer when you go throughout the south and rightfully so because they

SPEAKER_01 51:58

get incredibly hot i mean we and the red nobody would think to get a black car and that it doesn't make

SPEAKER_00 52:04

any sense yeah exactly and the red cows aren't they're and they're just built better for this type of grazing so that's a cost um and then some people say that in a transition you'll have a year or two possibly of a productivity dip especially if you've been using a lot of fertilizer right and all of a sudden you stop the fertilizer that you'll have this dip i've been told by some that they don't see the dip i've been told by others they do so i it seems to be formed by farm but that dip then becomes a factor as well so and then the idea of risk right risk management risk in the mind um and so those are all the reasons that I think loans would be a really good idea. I think a really smart bank would make huge amounts of money from that instrument. That's another place where I think money can be made. I actually look at it, like I say, I think of this philanthropically. I look at this as sort of a collaboration between a bank and a philanthropic organization who is very interested in impact investing right so we talk about you know regenerating soils but the money could be constantly reused so if you loan money to a farmer he pays it back quickly you then take that same money and loan it to the next farmer you could use the same dollar many many many times to make the change happen

SPEAKER_01 53:32

and why do you think that hasn't happened yet at scale because i remember stumbling upon holistic grazing 14 years ago and already there there were stories in australia and for sure in the us and for in Mexico and many other places of farmers just doing a lot better than their neighbors, you would imagine that some smart finance people would have figured something out by now. And somehow, maybe email me if you have and you want to be interviewed, but somehow it doesn't seem to, like, were we waiting for the data? Were we,

SPEAKER_00 54:02

what is missing there? I think the fact that it took us, I think the fact that it took us, a filmmaker and a bunch of renegade scientists to do this research, why wasn't this research done before? Why wasn't this research done in the 70s and 80s and 90s? And so the people who were out there well ahead of us, did they try and they just didn't get it funded?

SPEAKER_01 54:26

We haven't heard too many stories. Like the Gabe Browns and others as well, like the pioneers in this space. I'm completely understandable that you didn't measure everything in your transition because you were in a transition and you were the only one by, I don't know how many miles. So I get that. But at some point, a researcher should wake up and say, okay it's actually like we know we have had John Lundgren and others on the show and like we see some of it and the LCA of Will Harris is very interesting we did a deep dive on that with Mariko Torbecker which I will link below as well but it seems very few and then even when it shows profitability being fundamentally different I would imagine people that have to put money to work either their own or others that would be interested at least or jumping on it like why haven't we seen

SPEAKER_00 55:13

well come It comes back to this people question, right? It comes back to the people question. And how are people being told about this? to do this work. I was a bit of a pit bull on making sure that we got the funding. So it's a team, right? Everyone has their spot. And you were not a

SPEAKER_01 55:53

scientist nor a farmer, which means you wanted to make this movie or these four parts. You didn't know that at the time, but which

SPEAKER_00 55:59

probably gave you a different role. I didn't do this to make a movie. But you knew it was going to be

SPEAKER_01 56:05

an interesting movie. I didn't. No, I didn't. You thought it was... No, I did not. When did you decide to pick up the camera then in this one?

SPEAKER_00 56:11

No, I mean, when we were building and... spending so much time fundraising and designing this project, I had stopped filming for a long time. And then I realized, oh, I got to get back out there. So that's when I went back out. So the short films sort of were a roller coaster of busy and not busy during that five-year period from 2013 to 2018. This was a science project because I wanted to know if amp grazing was a climate change solution. That's why I did this. It made sense to film it, so we put it in the budget, and we raised enough money to start the filming. I thought I was going to be making a film about the soil, short films. When I wrote the proposal, I thought I was going to make more short films, the soil team, the bug team, the microbe team, the grazing team, the animal well-being team. I didn't know I was even making a feature. I just prepared myself to just go film whatever was happening. You do not know. You don't know if your film's going to be any good. You don't know if you're going to get any good footage when you film this way. We just went out. So I was managing the scientists and directing a feature film. So I had no clue. I prepared myself for the luck of something good happening, right? Like the three-hour

SPEAKER_01 57:37

conversation.

If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing overnight

SPEAKER_00 57:37

I hired a former student who came out and shot with me. We had two cameras. And... We shot a lot of footage. We shot everything. And almost immediately, that's when I was like, okay, this is going to be interesting. But each step of the way, I had to put the science project first and the film back here. So there's many times where I would have done something as a filmmaker and But I couldn't because I couldn't do anything to jeopardize the fact that we needed to be on these farmers' land for two years, right? So the film was always secondary, always. And so, no, we did not know. We just kept filming. And then during that first year of filming, it's like, oh, that's a cool scene. That's a cool scene. But we had no clue of arc because we had no arc. So it took years to even find the arc. So it was very, very uncomfortable. for a decade. I mean, you're seeing me right now. We just finished the film last week. The science is now coming out. It's eight papers published. Another 10 are going to come out. This is a different place than when I was a month ago, two months ago. Timing is

What do you believe is true about regenerative agriculture that others don’t believe to be true? Inspired by John Kempf

SPEAKER_01 58:49

everything. And we got connected through Russ concert, I think two weeks ago or a week ago. Yep. And so shout out to him. Hopefully we'll be listening. Absolutely. And I want to be conscious of your time as well, which I always say, and end up asking way too many questions. So let's try to start wrapping this up. But I'd love to ask a question. If you could change one thing overnight, I ask as a magic wand, so you have the power to change one thing, but one thing only, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 59:20

Every government policy around agriculture, the North Star would have to be soil health, soil regeneration. Every decision has to go through that metric. Is what you're doing and what you're subsidizing making the soil healthier or not. That would be the thing that I would, one wand

SPEAKER_01 59:41

waved. And another one I like to ask, which is inspired by John Kempf, he asked it slightly differently, but where are you, let's say, among the hemp grazer grazing peers in your little bubble, which is within the little bubble of regeneration and regenerate, where are you contrarian? Where do you think differently? What do you believe to be true that others in your little bubble don't believe to be true?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:07

I don't know If I'm contrarian, I've mentioned Steve Affelbaum a couple times. He's our lead ecologist and good friend on this project and in life. He is seeing that the amp grazers aren't using native species as much as they could on their fields. And he's seeing the native species growing in the ditch by the highway right at the fence line outside the farm. So we have a sort of a wonder. It's not contrarian. It's a wonder. Have we just scratched the surface with amp grazing and could it be much, much better if we had more... of these native species whose roots go even deeper. And then that, you know, deep roots. Yeah. And then you can really see the devil down there.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:56

Would that mean like introducing them or sort of facilitating or creating the circumstances that they move from the highway onto the fence? Because of course they don't, they don't care about the fence line.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:06

It would be a seeding thing. It would be, um, a planning thing. Um, you know, some of these

SPEAKER_01 1:01:13

seeds are dormant for years and they just haven't found the circumstances to.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:17

Well, we've seen that the name, you know, that latent seed bank folks have seen that a lot. Like if you look at our short film, a fence and an owner, um, that was done in the, in the high desert in New Mexico. And they had a serious drought and they changed from conventional grazing to amp grazing. And this big drought happened and they saw plants come up that they hadn't seen in that part of the world for 50, a hundred years. And those, plants saved their herd. So, you know. Yeah. But what's your hunch

SPEAKER_01 1:01:53

in like with these five or like why or you and Stephen?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:57

I think a lot of the South and Southeast was so destroyed by cotton. The cotton monster destroyed so much soil. I'm not sure what's left in the soil. A lot of the soils that we were studying were like were mapped in the 30s. And I think a lot of those maps were inaccurate because those soils are gone. top layer was just about gone. So that's my thinking there, but you'd have to ask much smarter people than me to get a better answer, a more accurate answer. But I'm not really contrarian with folks. What's interesting, the contrarian would be stuff outside of the soil health. I don't vote the same way a lot of the farmers that I'm friends with do. So we would be contrarian if we spent all day talking about what's on TV. But we don't spend all day talking about what's on TV. And that's what's really pleasant for both of us. We're having a great time talking about something we do agree on. And we know how powerful that is, that it lessens all the other stuff. It really does. Because wow that's theater

SPEAKER_01 1:03:15

and this is real i think it's a perfect moment to end this conversation the defeat side could be a whole different podcast which we're not here for and we like to like to keep it real no that's a bad sentence anyway we like to focus on the real stuff the the soil and everything that it can do so i want to thank you so much for the time um thank you happy to to catch you at the the end of a cycle here and the beginning of a new one with with features theaters tour shows and and all of that. And I'm looking forward to see the four part movie. Yeah. The tour is going to be in theaters and Barnes. So it'll be perfect. Yeah. We'll send everybody to carbon cowboys.org. You can follow, you can request a screening, get involved, host this. If you can take care of your space and, and, um, um, basically resources to do that and make sure, um, this message gets out. And I'm looking forward to, I mean, it won't be only at the U S I think there's a lot of grazing enthusiasts around. around the world that they're looking forward to this. And we're just going to step over the question. Of course, you picked one region and it's going to be slightly different if you go to very wet Cornwall or if you go to other regions, but it just opens hopefully the discussion of other people doing the same, like go and do that research elsewhere as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:31

The methods, it's called adaptive multi-paddock grazing, right? Adaptive is the key word. You adapt to your circumstances. You adapt to the weather this week. You adapt to the weather this morning. But the universal methods, I've seen work in every region I've been to, every ecosystem I've been to. That's what's so amazing about it. Suspicious or it's a good idea. I mean, I'm all for suspicious and skeptical and things like that. I've been on hundreds of farms over a decade and a half, and it's so consistent. So that's all. It's just observation. That's

SPEAKER_01 1:05:14

all it is. Perfect. Thank you so much, Pete. And good luck with the next phase. Thank you. Thanks again and see you next time.