311 Henk Mooiweer - If you can get paid now by Nestlé, Shell and Microsoft to change grazing practices, why wait?

A conversation with Henk Mooiweer, co-founder of Grassroots Carbon, about the current state of carbon markets, high quality soil carbon removal credits, how this company manage to sell 5 million dollars’ worth of them, and where the market is going. Why did Nestlé, Microsoft and Shell start buying? Why does Henk argue that now is the time to sign up as a rancher and not wait to sell your carbon later? Where is the science in all this regen grazing? What about methane? And why is this actually not about carbon?

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:19

Join me for a conversation about the current state of the carbon markets. High-quality soil carbon removal credits. How did this company manage to sell $5 million worth of them and where is the market going? And why did Nestle, microsoft and Shell started buying? Why does our guest argue that it's time to sign up now as a rancher and not wait to sell your carbon later? Where is the science in all of this regen grazing? And what about methane? And why is this actually not about carbon?

Speaker 1: 0:51

This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast Investing as if the planet mattered. Where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume, and it's time that we as investors big and small and consumers, start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community and so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you, if our work created value for you and if you have the means and only if you have the means consider joining us.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Find out more on gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg. That is gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg, or find the link below Welcome to another episode Today with the co-founder of Grassroots Carbon. They paid over 5 million US dollars since 2021 to ranchers and they're the owner of Pasture Map, which is actually one of the few exits in the Regentech space. Welcome, henk.

Speaker 2: 2:16

Yes, thank you so much, Koen. It's an absolute pleasure to be here and talk about regenerative practice and what it actually can do?

Speaker 1: 2:22

Yeah, it's been. I checked four years since we had Ed, which is one of the co-founders of Soilworks, which is the owner of Grassroots Carbon, and four years just seems like a lifetime ago. In Regents, I'm very happy to check in into one of their, let's say, daughter companies. And, of course, what happened to Pasture Map and what's happening to ranching and real money is changing hands, it seems. But to to start with a personal question we always like to kick off with how do you, how come you spend most of your awake hours thinking about soil, carbon and ranching?

Speaker 2: 2:58

yeah, indeed, most of my awake hours I do think about soil, carbon and ranching and how to improve that and how to increase the scale even there, but also the remark that 12 years till 12 years ago, I never thought about soil in my life, like probably most people. And that all changed when I met Peter Bick. Peter Bick is a movie maker professor from Arizona State University. Peter Bick is a movie maker professor from Arizona State University and I worked at a large Dutch-British energy company and I worked in a group called Game Changer where we invested in people with crazy ideas, ideas which were too difficult to invest in for a normal company. But the Game Changer group had a budget to actually do that.

Speaker 2: 3:39

And Peter Bick came to us with this idea that you can store massive amounts of carbon in soil. It's not only about carbon, it's also about ecology, restoration of birds, insects, wildlife, water storage. But he also improved the life of the farmers and ranchers who are actually doing this type of stuff and he said you need to invest in that. And I became the project manager and said, yeah, sure, that sounds like a fairy tale. That's not possible. All these positive benefits.

Speaker 1: 4:07

I mean, I guess you heard a few of those in your time, exactly.

Speaker 2: 4:12

So we thought this is another one. Where is the flaw? So we started to dive into this and start to think where are the flaws? This may be not scalable, maybe it's not proven, maybe it's not robust, maybe it's not robust, maybe you cannot do it fast enough All these typical questions you ask as an investor. We start to measure soil carbon storage on ranches left and right side of the fence. So one farmer is actually doing the regenerative practice and the neighbor is not doing this. We did that on about 10 ranches in Canada and when the results come back and you talk to more and more experts all over the world, you start to realize oh, how could we miss this incredible opportunity of storing carbon at a massive scale, with all these other benefits? So that was 12 years ago. That started. Before that I never told about soil really, and after that moment when we interacted, peter Brick, soil never left me and it changed literally my life as well.

Speaker 1: 5:11

And why do you think that is? I mean, I stumbled upon probably around the same time 13 years ago on the work of Alan Savory, bruce Wade and Tony Lovell mostly the last two in Australia which gave birth to aslm partners and and also there the carbon piece was a very fundamental piece. But then I saw the deck of them raising money for a real asset, a real farmland fund, and they didn't mention the carbon piece and asked tony about it and he said I want to be taken seriously about by institutional investors, mostly pension funds etc. And so it was almost then a shame to talk about the carbon potential, which is fascinating. Of course this is 13, 14 years ago, so things have changed. But why do you think it? It I'm not saying this is hallelujah story of the, the. The solution to everything is underneath our feet, but why have we ignored at least a big part of the solution for so long?

Speaker 2: 6:05

That's an excellent question, I think. I think it starts with the training of farmers and ranchers. It starts about society moving away almost from nature and I think the last 100 years moving towards technical solutions to cure issues we see in an ecosystem. I think about the fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and that kind of almost I don't want to step on anyone's toes, but a kind of naive engineering mindset that you can solve problems by single issue management turned out to be kind of wrong and I think why this is getting more interest now is that we reached maybe the boundaries of a system. There are so many ranchers and farmers in kind of dire straits economically that a ranch is not profitable. With the climate change we start to experience we see that in the United States continuously extreme weather events, probably driven by climate change.

Speaker 1: 7:08

You see the you reach the boundaries of what your system can handle if you're not going back to making that system more resilient, how nature used to be and how nature used to work and yet you see many and you live in Houston and many other places as well really still doubling down on the technology solutions or potential solutions, from direct air capture to precision fermentation and a lot of these things.

Speaker 1: 7:35

I think if you calculate the energy piece, it doesn't make any sense and it won't for a very, very long time, if ever, very, very long time, if, if ever. But still, we, we really um, or a big chunk of us, let's say probably not none of the listeners of this podcast, obviously, um, but a big chunk of all of us, let's say the bigger us, is still going down that techno solution um route like do you see that shifting also in your, let's say, outside's say outside your soil bubble, that people start to look more at these nature-based solutions? Or people that are not close to soil or haven't studied it for 12 years starting to open up to that?

Speaker 2: 8:14

Or is it still… yeah, Kuno, I hope you avoided the direct air capture, because if there's one button, you should not press you should ask about direct air capture.

Speaker 1: 8:23

Six minutes in, there we go.

Speaker 2: 8:25

Yeah. So there we go. That's the topic where I said really have to stay calm and keep breathing, because it's one of the most irritating things you actually see. Again, it's the naive engineering type of mindset to focus on a single issue. So I completely agree direct air capture is most likely not scalable, not affordable. Enormous amount of energy and material use and maybe logistics involved, so almost insane to waste money in there. So you know, funds are precious and scarce, so please invest them in those solutions which can have an incredible impact, in which you scale one direct air capture pop and not one of them.

Speaker 2: 9:08

It starts, I think, with the kind of mindset that you want to solve these problems in a technical way, and that's how engineers were trained, that's how companies operate, and you can go back to the old Einstein quote from you cannot solve problems within the framework in which you were created and it's very hard for people to break that mental frame of thinking. So I've had a lot of conversations with folks in the energy industry and it's a very robust frame. It's very difficult for them to break it. Of course there's also an economic reason, so it's of course the business models are there If we create a technology to do something with carbon. We can probably make money from carbon again. At first we made money from carbon getting it out of the soil, out of the reservoirs, and now we get money by putting the carbon back. So there's also strong economic reasons, but it's indeed a very naive technology mindset solution in in solving these problems that way.

Speaker 1: 10:09

Yeah and then why does it seem like you are having a moment in other places as well, around, let's say, soil, carbon and the credit side. I mean you're paying real money and I see that in europe as well on low carbon grain and other things like. There seems to be a shift, at least on the corporate side, on on spending money on this, sometimes on the insetting within, let's say, products that come from, in this case, to be for the grain, but also just companies that need to offset credits, and they start to look at the soil side of things. Has that shifted? Does it seem just from the outside, like where I'm looking, like how has that changed over the last, of course, 12 years, let's say when you started looking at it with Peter? How has the market side of things changed?

Speaker 2: 11:00

Yeah, I think there's absolutely a shift noticeable. So companies are interested, of course, in high quality carbon drawdown. First of all, I think there's a huge shift from avoided emissions credits where basically, I sometimes make a little bit of joke, I have a tree and please pay me, otherwise I'll chop down the tree. It's almost a carbon hostage situation. So that's avoided emissions and nature-based credits to a situation where you have carbon removal, carbon drawdown credits and where you take a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere, reliably store it in soil or in other nature-based systems that can be trees as well, of course. The shift is there.

Speaker 2: 11:40

I think the focus is really on high quality. So what can you do to absolutely ensure that it's a ton of CO2, is a ton of CO2 stored and not just an estimate? I think that's a trend you clearly see and a lot of companies are interested in these benefits beyond just carbon. Sometimes we say this is not about the carbon storage, this is about really restoring grassland ecology. And yes, then automatically you also store carbon. You get all these other amazing impacts from 10 times more water storage on certain properties, complete ecology regeneration, and the latest movies from peter bick and ruthudeep will also tell these stories and provide the evidence beyond all the scientific papers written about it. So companies start to realize that there is so much more than just carbon and if you invest in these carbon, the nature-based carbon removal credits, you get these impacts beyond just carbon, which are really important.

Speaker 1: 12:44

And so on the scientific side, because I think that the holistic management or amp grazing or regenerative grazing movement got and still gets a lot of pushback from very loud voices George Monbiot and some others that keep actually now a lately drawdown project, drawdown on food again again really questioning or basically saying we're not good at math and the carbon potential of of grazing differently, like, have you seen a shift there as well? Because for these companies to be able to put this on their books, to actually invest real money and not I mean, shell did it back in the day, but it was a different kind of investment these are buying credits and you you're gonna have journalists asking questions about it at some point, etc. On the scientific side of things that we talked about with Peter as well, of course, shout out to Peter what has changed on the scientific side that larger companies can actually buy these and not have the scrutiny and not have a lot of pushback from some very loud voices.

Speaker 2: 14:19

Yeah, I think science is evolving from small little test plots, where you try to mimic regenerative grazing, to more landscape studies. That's also what Peter Bick has been doing with his team of top scientists in the US for many, many years now. You see a lot of other universities are looking at whole systems and that's, of course, really important. You see these differences when you visit the ranches. It's amazing, of course, to also listen to the stories of ranches. You can't call it yeah, that's anecdotal stories, but it isn't, and you get it over and over. You see tremendous differences in what can happen in just a matter of a few years on the ranch. You see water streams coming back, birds, insects, wildlife and of course, you can measure these type of things.

Speaker 2: 15:08

If you go back to soil carbon, there are several ways of measuring it. So in grassroots carbon our company we take one meter deep core samples, three feet deep core samples. That's more expensive but you measure a lot more carbon that way and it's way more resilient and robust in doing it that way. So I think it's important to measure. If you combine that with flux towers where you measure basically any covariance towers where you measure also streams, there's absolute. You can almost see the land breathe on a daily basis, so there's a lot of data available to actually do that.

Speaker 2: 15:44

Of course, like with any scientific paradigms, there is an immune system which will fight back to these type of new insights, because it's almost too simple, and I think that's almost a handicap. This is so simple and so natural that if you start to work with nature and not against nature in other words, alan Williams used all the time things start to change tremendously. So you can measure it, I think. So back to your carbon credit questions. There is a trend as well that carbon the companies who buy these high quality carbon credits wants to see the evidence and the transparency and the data transparency. So that is really important. And of course, there were players in the market who looked at two different satellite pictures and can tell you that carbon was stored. But that's not the way, of course, to reliably quantify how much carbon you store.

Speaker 1: 16:38

I'm laughing because this is the second interview I'm recording today and we had Brigitte I'm not sure if it's going to be out when this is out but very clearly stating that satellites cannot measure soil carbon and cannot look into the ground. Let's repeat that for the people in the back. But it's funny that it comes up in two different, two different, completely different conversations. Um, and then, like, what kind of questions or pushback do you get in? Let's say the procurement uh departments of these companies? What are the usual questions they ask and how do you counter them? Um, when, when you get in and probably are compared to other um, let's say, nature-based soil carbon credits, because you need to stand out and need to be part of a tender or need to be part of a process, yeah, it's quite a spectrum.

Speaker 2: 17:23

Some companies have never heard about soil carbon storage. That's basically where we're in the situation where I was 12 years ago or 13 years ago, so I completely understand where they are. So it's a lot of education, a lot of resources, providing resources and try to get them to a ranch if possible so they can actually see, see what's happening and that's the most convincing part. You put your hands in the soil and see what happens and how it feels. It's very convincing. We've done that with with a marathon oil company in houston basically also had an interview between marathonathon Oil and Wrenches Very, very nice, put on video. So they believe in, indeed, the incredible impact you have beyond just carbon.

Speaker 2: 18:05

There's a perception, of course, that nature is fragile. So nature is fragile, it's not robust, it's not like steel. It's really that mindset from steel and the reactors and pipes and compressors is robust and you can measure it robustly and nature is fragile. I think nature is not fragile at all. Nature is incredibly resilient in handling carbon. Carbon is stored on the planet and Peter Bick used these data as well all the time. There's more carbon in the first three feet of soil globally than all biomass and all atmospheric carbon combined. So if you take the Amazon jungle and the forest in Indonesia and all the grasslands and all the atmospheric carbon combined, that's less than what's in the first three feet of soil globally. So nature puts carbon in soil. It's a very natural thing and nature's doing that for hundreds of millions of years. So keep that in mind. As long as photosynthesis is around, it's being done that way.

Speaker 2: 19:08

So, very resilient. It's drought resilient. So if you have a drought for a couple of times, you will not lose your carbon stock. You will not add a lot more because you need water for photosynthesis, of course, but you won't lose it. You can have grassland fires. It will not negatively impact the carbon stock. You can just measure it. So, very, very resilient actually. But that's the mindset companies need to have. The whole thing of measurement yeah, measurement is a challenge. If you have, you know, 5,000 acres and you need to determine the carbon stock Carbon, of course, not equally distributed, especially in grazing lands, so you need to take sufficient samples to get a reasonable assurance how much carbon is there. You have to come back five or 10 years later and remeasure. So you have to do that really based on scientific insights, with the right sample technique and light stratification techniques to get reliable numbers there and is it another one that that's been thrown at you for sure, often?

Speaker 1: 20:15

yeah, great, it sounds amazing. Regenerative practice, etc. What about feeding the world? And I'm not asking that specific question, but I'm asking what have you seen from like all the ranches you've been working with, in terms of carrying capacity, in terms of production of vital nutrients? Yes, it's not about the carbon, it is about the biodiversity, but it's also about producing a lot of food, um, and, of course, by reducing drastically inputs. I don't know the ranches you work with, are they using a lot of outside inputs or not, but what's that? Um, let's say that that transition towards way less or no input or very little, to producing food, meaning turning sunlight into something we can eat and taking that off the landscape. But what are some insights, what are some stories, what are some narratives you have there?

Speaker 2: 21:02

Yeah, that's an excellent question. I think that's almost part of this kind of fairy tale. You can hardly believe it. Free lunch If you start to think about it. And that's also all the information we get from Alan Williams and Gabe Brown and their organization Understanding Ag, who have worked with thousands and thousands of landowners in the US and outside the US, by the way to actually help them in implementing these regenerative practices. What you see basically is that these ranches, once their ecology systems start to regenerate, after a few years they can increase their stocking densities and we don't be afraid now that, oh my gosh, that will give you way more methane emissions. So it's bad. It's not the cow, it's the how you see quite often and the first results start to come in also from Peter Bick and other research teams that methane emissions from cows eating this regenerative diet from lots of different plant species. They have much lower methane emissions. From cows eating this regenerative diet from lots of different plant species they have much lower methane emissions.

Speaker 1: 22:00

How much lower are you seeing?

Speaker 2: 22:03

How much lower are we talking about? I want to be careful with numbers. I think they need to be peer reviewed, but I think incredible, incredible differences in numbers. It can be much, much lower. So I want to be very careful with quoting a number because some people say oh, that's not true and it depends, of course, on the property you are and on the type of animals you have. But it's much lower.

Speaker 2: 22:24

Back to your feeding the world. You see that most of these ranches can actually increase their stocking densities and carrying rates. And why is that? It's because the land grows more forage. So Alan Williams always said it's the easiest way to double the size of your ranch is to move to regenerative practice. You just grow more forage so you can have more animals there. And if you really look at the large system, of course this is moving away from growing corn in Minnesota and Iowa to feed the animals somewhere else in the United States. So this is about actually working with nature, mimicking how bison moved over the Great Plains in the United States with millions of animals. It's basically restoring how animal impact and grasslands work together in a normal, natural ecology and just to double click on or to repeat the methane piece.

Speaker 1: 23:20

I think it's not to be underestimated how important that research is in field, because most, if not all, of the data we see and all of those graphs of the methane or actually emissions or carbon it's always nice the CO2 equivalent, the little e of beef etc. Is for, as far as I've seen, based on research in CAFO operations and that kind of feed obviously leads to a lot of disturbed cow stomachs and does a lot of methane. So I've been asking where is the data from field? And the data is starting to come out drastically lower. Let's see the number Drastically lower. Yield, and the data is starting to come out drastically lower. Let's see the number Drastically lower.

Speaker 1: 23:57

There's a lot of discussion, I think, if certain bacteria in healthy grasslands can absorb that as well. And so it seems I don't know, I don't want to be too not dramatic but it doesn't seem like methane is a huge issue in, let's say, holistically managed or regeneratively managed or well-managed grasslands. And then let's not underestimate the immense carbon and other emissions that come out of grasslands being turned into arable Like the plow I think you're saying it's super durable. The soil is very resistant until we take the plow and the moment that happens. So, even if we don't harvest the meat and eat the meat, I think we owe it to to the world to keep grasslands healthier and keep the grassland grassland and not transitioning to to arable, because we know from science that that's absolutely destructive in terms of emissions and in in biodiversity. Um, so I think that's, but many people need to wrap their head, I think, around what is possible there and how basic agriculture can be turning sunlight into something. And, of course, if you have more solar panels, aka more plants and more leaves, you do more. And what we see outside in grazing is just the beginning or the scratching the surface pun intended, intended of what's possible in terms of biomass production, in terms of.

Speaker 1: 25:17

But then we get these romantic stories of bisons and I think we lose people there, partly because then, um, it's just, yeah, but like, who do we know? Like, like, I don't know if that's a very convincing story, like it used to be. Hundreds of millions of bisons, yeah, okay, but I don't think we can even imagine what it means in terms of ruminants now, but then, like, so it seems to be that these kinds of arguments start to convince more and more companies. Have you reached a tipping point there, like, do you see that now the interest in this kind of nature-based I think there were some announcements last week as well, or two weeks ago in terms of large procurements, you see, microsoft is a customer, nestle is a customer, of course, an oil company is a customer. And do you see a tipping point? Or are you still like we're at the beginning of that? Uh, hopefully exponential growth.

Speaker 2: 26:09

It's hard to predict, of course, what happens. I think we're at the beginning of an exponential growth. So more education, more data, more quality research to indeed regenerative systems will start to appear. Much better measurements start to appear. Yes, we're at the tipping point there, in combination with the realization that technology solutions, although they are shiny and look very cool, might not do the job at the end of the day. So they're not scalable, they're too expensive. But even besides just expenses, the cost of technology solutions how can you envision to scale them to the billions of tons of CO2 we actually have to take out of the atmosphere? And nature can do that much faster, much more impactful.

Speaker 2: 27:09

And it's not just about carbon. Even if we would build the fantastic CO2 sucking machine, we probably don't solve climate change enough. It's about all the other impacts which are important as well. It's soil erosion, it is water quality, it's cooling effects, it's a grassland cooling effect. With just water evaporation of water, it's enormous. That might be even more important than just carbon storage. So, yes, we're at the tipping point. It helps, of course, that well-respected companies like Microsoft and Nestle start to buy significant volumes of these credits, and it's not easy to, of course work with their technology teams and procurement teams. They ask all the questions and they want to have all the evidence that we do that in the right way. They're very careful for greenwashing, and rightfully so, so that starts helping Our life in selling more credits is now much easier than it was four years ago.

Speaker 1: 28:06

And now let's switch a bit to the rancher perspective. Why would he or she engage now and not wait? Um, engage now and not wait? What? What kind of contracts do you and conditions do you do you work with? Um to avoid, of course, let's say, the ones that have done a lot of practices for a long time are not getting compensated for the work they've done before. Like, how do you work with ranchers and what do you offer?

Speaker 2: 28:31

yeah, that's an excellent question. So so a few years ago at least, the statement was it's kind of a carbon wild west. And so it's. The market is in full development and it's all over the place. So why not wait? And I've spoken at many venture conferences in the US and addressed a couple of these questions.

Speaker 2: 28:57

Carbon credit companies are really interested in doing the right thing for landowners, providing the right amount of financial stability and income there. Participating now, provided that you have a contract which allows you to benefit from any increases in the carbon prices on a year-to-year basis, is actually beneficial. You get paid. Why wait? You get paid now. Be very careful what you sign up to. Ensure that you have a good profit-sharing contract. Ensure that the carbon price can increase on an annual basis. So ensure that you are the main beneficiary for many improvements there are. But hey, starting now can really help. So, as you mentioned before in the introduction, I think we've paid ranchers over $5 million so far, so that's real money. So, yes, you can wait, but you miss out on an opportunity there.

Speaker 1: 29:49

And for ranchers, like how big of a difference is this, let's say per acre, per hectare? Like how meaningful is this? Is this a nice extra and does the real benefit come from the changing practices reduced cost, improving carrying capacity, less veterinary bills, all the other benefits we know or is this a real driver to get people on the train, let's say to change practices?

Speaker 2: 30:15

We have about 90 landowners, or land stewards, as we call them, sometimes under contract, and the feedback we get. This really helps. It's not the main driver. The main driver is to indeed improve the ecological health from your ranch and that's what any rancher tries to do. But this helps them if you implement these regenerative practices or hemp grazing type of practices or whatever you want to call it, the focus on soil health. At the end of the day, it helps you with your forage and helps you with your animal health. That's the main driver.

Speaker 2: 30:47

Carbon payments at this point in time is a fantastic additional stream of income to also help you with some of the investments you need to do in, sometimes water systems, sometimes flexible fencing systems. So it helps you to remove one of the barriers in moving to regenerative practices. But there's way more barriers. Sometimes it's the lack of knowledge where to start, how to do this, what do I need to do with my ranch? So, with one of the companies we're working with, we also provide a budget for on-site training by Understanding Ag, alan Williams, kay Brown I mentioned a few times, I think one of the top experts but also the Savory Institute. So to get on-site support from where to start, how to do it, what mistakes to avoid, and we also try to build this kind of thriving community with our ranchers. We just hired a very senior rancher success manager in our company to basically exchange these kind of experiences what worked, what didn't work, what to avoid, how can ranchers help each other?

Speaker 2: 31:56

So it's not just the financial benefits from a carbon payment that helps, but it is also removing some of the other barriers to make that change. We understand it's difficult. It's doing something different to what your parents have been doing, what your grandparents have been doing, what your neighbors are doing. I'm obviously not a Texas rancher, despite my West Texas accent, but if you talk to them which we do all the time they're sometimes very alone in a certain region in implementing these practices. You have to be a little bit of crazy to start doing this, implementing these practices. You have to be a little bit of crazy to start doing this. So crazy for me is the good word for being innovative and being at the forefront of creating change. Sometimes we also observe that's being driven quite often by if the ranch is in financial difficulties. So you're being forced to create change and that is very normal innovation, of course, if you're comfortable in your, your comfort zone and there will be no change. But you sometimes need a little bit of pressure to make that change.

Speaker 1: 33:03

Yeah, and how important is the market side of things for the, the meat basically coming off these, these wrenches? How developed is that for the ranches you work with? Maybe that's super different, but how, how much of this is is interesting and relevant for, for buyers, and interesting and relevant for for end consumers. Might be restaurants direct to consumer. Like what? What's the market side of things? Or is this much more reducing input, reducing costs, getting paid a bit extra but selling into a more commodified market?

Speaker 2: 33:39

It's both. So I'm certainly not an expert on the market side of a ranch, but what we hear from our ranches and some of them have fantastic direct supply chains into restaurants, into farmers' markets, into meat delivery or protein delivery systems Very important. I think the profitability for regenerative and grass-fed beef or other types of proteins can be much higher. But it's indeed a combination of less inputs, less fertilizer, less herbicides, less mechanical treatment of the land, which saves you labor and fuel and equipment you don't need anymore, plus a higher price for your potential product, plus a payment for the carbon you store in your soil year after year. That can make your ranch twice to three times more profitable if that works out well. So that can be very, very influential indeed on how the ranching community actually start to flourish again from a situation where it was really difficult to do that.

Speaker 1: 34:50

Yeah, because just to paint a bit of a picture, it's not that the ranching community is or was doing well inside the current system. Let's say or the conventional or conventional is not the right word but let's say that the current status quo is absolutely not a walk in the park.

Speaker 2: 35:09

I agree with that. So, absolutely. So yeah, also, creating change is not easy. No, no, no, no. So deep respect for the land stewards who have the courage and the resilience to create that change. I think that this would be my range. I can imagine how stressful that can be to completely change how you start implementing these practices. So that's. I think it's also very important to get support from experts who've been doing that, not to tell you what to do, but to help you to avoid, maybe, certain common mistakes. It's also very important for the ranchers we work with that they are in control of the ranch. We're not going to tell them what to do. We make it easier for them to implement the right practices. It's very important to a rancher is in control of the ranch. Obviously, they know best what they should do, but give them access to the support to make that a little bit easier.

Speaker 1: 36:03

And of course, this depends on the context, but what are numbers that you've seen in terms of carbon removal per hectare? Probably easier than acre. But what have you seen and what are numbers that you're comfortable with, let's say, in terms of actual carbon taking out of the atmosphere?

Speaker 2: 36:21

yeah, so in the united states we work with the total co2 per acre per year, um. So if you want to translate it to the scientific numbers, you have to do the little math to turn tons of carbon per hectare. But we work with total co2 per year. Obviously it depends where you are.

Speaker 2: 36:37

There's basically two really important factors which determines the carbon storage. It's your location, so what type of soil type? What is your local weather conditions? Especially, of course, how much rainfall do you have? Because at the end of the day, it's photosynthesis, where CO2 reacts with water. So if there's no water, there's no CO2 storage.

Speaker 2: 36:57

And then the second really important thing is your land management practices. So if you do a fabulous job in regenerative grazing, you are really mastering that. You can store more carbon everywhere. That can even be to the far west, where there are very dry and arid conditions, to the far west, where there are very dry and arid conditions. So, but it's of course way less carbon storage than if you're close to the Gulf of Mexico with tremendous rainfall and tremendous long growing season. So numbers are reported from you know higher than six tons of CO2 per acre per year in areas in the US and you know the Texas Gulf Coast, where you have a long growing season, a lot of rainfall, to, of course, way less than half a ton of CO2 per acre per year if you go to the West where there's not a lot of rain. So it all depends, and it can depend strongly from range to range. So that's why it's important to measure actually what the increase is.

Speaker 1: 37:54

And that's like two and a half to the hectare basically.

Speaker 1: 37:58

So that's significant, you did the math yeah, yeah, no, it's significant, and it is significant, yeah, and, and of course then comes the question of course it also depends. But have you seen like plateauing, like how does it depend? How degraded, like have you seen already ranches that start to to plateau at some point in certain fields where the storage has been filled? Let's say that's always the fear of many of the people in this way? I haven't seen any of that in real life yet, but what have you seen on that?

Speaker 2: 38:29

Yeah, we're not long enough in this business to observe that. But if you talk to experts like Steve Appelbaum, who's in this field for over 30 years, and Jason Rowntree and Richard Teague, famous professor from A&M, they don't believe so much in the plateauing situation. First of all, I think US grasslands have lost maybe 50% of their soil carbon in the last 100 years due to overgrazing, due to the use of chemicals, fertilizer, all that type stuff. That's kind of an average number. You must be careful with these numbers, but it's a lot. It's a lot and I think globally you can see similar type of numbers.

Speaker 2: 39:06

The other aspect from the plateauing is that you see, if you start implementing regenerative grazing, your soil starts to also build on top. You start to increase the thickness of the layer of healthy soil. So really positive thinkers and I think, actually realistic thinkers see that you can increase the layer of topsoil carbon-rich topsoil, over and over and you can see that in certain areas, of course, where it's meters deep, it's about restoring that. So before you reach a plateau, we probably that might be 50 to 100 years, if at all you might keep increasing the thick layer of carbon-rich soil?

Speaker 1: 39:47

And what about the avoidance of non-organic fertilizer? Is that something? First of all, is that an issue? Not an issue? Is that an input used very, um, very often? I know in europe in many cases it is, and the only the avoidance already of that on grasslands, combined with better grazing, basically starting to grow more grass with grazing and avoidant that is a huge emissions avoided because chemical fertilizers obviously have a massive, massive footprint. Is that an issue? Is that interesting, relevant for where you're working, or not at all?

Speaker 2: 40:21

it's less relevant. I think some ranches in the in the us are, or farms use the name farm rancher are used depending where you are, as some smaller farms, I think, will use fertilizer. So so, yes, if you move to regenerative practice, you can get rid of the addiction to fertilizer because you don't need it anymore. You need way less, depending on where you are. It really helps If you go more to larger ranges in Texas that are not using fertilizer in the first place.

Speaker 2: 40:51

They're way too large. That will be unaffordable, but there you just basically the natural fertilization because of the higher stocking densities and the long resting period will do the trick for you there. The credits we deliver in CrossFit Carbon are pure carbon drawdown credits, so you will not get avoided emission credits. So it's absolutely fantastic to not use fertilizer anymore from a carbon perspective, but we will not give you the credits for it and we only look at the credits being taken out of the atmosphere and reliably stored in the soil for long term, and that's important for most of the buyers. A company like Microsoft one of our customers only wants carbon removal or carbon drawdown credits and they don't want nature-based avoided emission credits.

Speaker 1: 41:35

And what about biodiversity you mentioned a few times on? I don't think there are many, if all, credits yet, but is that something? And waterside like something you're looking at, something the customers are interested in? What about the biodiversity piece, objectively probably more important than carbon? I mean, if you take care of biodiversity, carbon will be taken care of and not the other way around. So what about the birds, the bees and everything around it?

Speaker 2: 42:02

Yeah, you're spot on. It starts, of course, all with ecology regeneration and that's all about biodiversity birds, insects, wildlife, soil, health, soil microorganisms everything you can see there vegetation, tremendous diversity. We have measured that a few times. We're not systematically measuring that. It's very high on our agenda to start doing that and finding a simple, scalable and affordable way of doing that. Good luck. There's, of course, all kind of technologies where what you can use to actually tell the biodiversity. We're starting to work with to actually tell the biodiversity. We're starting to work with two very large environmental organizations in the US who have also experience in doing that, so we're very positive in collaborating with these organizations to actually make big progress on how to scalable, reliable measure biodiversity. Water is also very high on our agenda. You can measure water infiltration rates rapidly fast. We're not doing that, but it's the plan as well to start doing the first water measurements on ranches, hopefully even the end of this year.

Speaker 1: 43:14

And so what's the bottleneck at the moment? Is it more on the ranching side, the training? The bottleneck at the moment is it more on the ranching side, the training, the, let's say, the market side of the credits. What's what's holding you back to, to, to stay in silicon valley terms, to go 10x to 10x on carbon or on biodiversity on your size, on on your impact, on your impact it's, it's a pure demand, it's.

Speaker 2: 43:38

It's not landownersowners. I think the landowner transition point is passed. Tipping point is passed there. There's many, many, many landowners interested in joining our program. Crossfit's carbon is very conservative. We first want to ensure that we sell the credits before we sign up the landowners, so not that we sign you up and you keep your fingers crossed maybe we sell your carbon storage at one day. We walk the other way around. We first want to ensure that we've sold to the credits and then we actually offer contracts to landowners and we quite often take a year. We talk to the buyers that we need about a year to basically fulfill your order, depending on the size of the order, of course. With many of these buyers you have longer-term contracts. It can be five years, 10 years for very large volumes. So from our perspective it's the demand side, so working indeed with companies to buy large volumes consistently for longer terms of carbon storage, carbon removal.

Speaker 1: 45:15

And does it hurt now, or like the tendency? It seems, currently at least, some of the ESG targets and some of the, let's say, sustainability targets of large corporates are being reduced, or at least seem to be like there was a tendency, I think, until a year ago or so, of large corporates are being reduced, or at least seem to be. There was a tendency, I think, until a year ago or so, that everything seemed to go through the stars or to the stars and back, and now it seems I don't know if there's realism but quite a few targets are being scaled down a bit. Do you see that in your specific part of the market as well? Or not yet, or not at all? Actually, in terms of commitments, in terms of buying, what's the market compared to like a year ago or so?

Speaker 2: 46:02

Ooh, you see a little bit of hesitation by some companies to wait, and I think that partly has to do, of course, with the environment in the United States, where we operate at this point. We're not. We're not operating in Europe at this point in time, but it might change. Where you know, there's just a voluntary market. There's no hard requirements to do this. You do this because you want to mitigate risk or you want to have a better market position, but those are the drivers. I think there's some hesitations over companies. Let's wait till elections were in the United States, see what happens, and maybe you can buy a few years of not being active.

Speaker 2: 46:42

There's also a lot of companies basically are in this space that they feel carbon pressure. I think very few companies are in a business as usual situation. Most of them feel a carbon pressure. They have to do something. But then what? So they're in this situation that they have to map their carbon footprint, which can be very complex and complicated if you have a large integrated operation, and then you have to come with a carbon strategy, and that is really difficult. So what now? There are so many options, what to select. So that whole process of moving from a realization that you have to do something towards action can take a lot of time.

Speaker 2: 47:20

And then there's what hurts as well, I think, is the negative press on carbon credits and so, in general, well, carbon credits are not really a solution. That basically is, people should just have less emissions. Well, I think carbon credits, especially carbon drawdown credits, are a fantastic solution to start doing right now. While you're working on your carbon footprint and your mitigation strategies and reducing your emissions, you can do something right now of immediately taking action and removing carbon out of the atmosphere. So it's not an end of the solution type of end of all your carbon solutions type of opportunity. It is something which you can do immediately and I think that's a kind of a mindset which companies need to adopt.

Speaker 2: 48:10

And I think if the negative press about carbon credits in general maybe from the purists we don't need CO2 anymore is actually not helpful Because at the end of the day, even if we stop with all the CO2 emissions, we still have too much carbon in the atmosphere. So we have to remove carbon out of the atmosphere. Companies can do that right now with nature-based carbon drawdown. I think that's the beauty there. That again requires education, requires mindset shifts, so that's a little bit of the challenge there.

Speaker 1: 48:43

Yeah, the scandals around Vera and others, north Pole or South Pole, sorry, definitely don't help. And do you see interest from like the, the companies that were in setting could be interesting, where they are actually buying meat or they're they're, let's say, exposed to the, the beef industry. Are they starting to be interested in this? Because in their scope, three um emissions for sure, the biggest part, or one of the biggest parts, must be their production or their indirect production. If they don't own the wrenches, how is that starting to develop in your field?

Speaker 2: 49:23

Yeah, I think insetting is important. So, yes, we work with Nestle and Nestle is very interested, of course, in insetting, so we're doing that. And Nestlé is very interested, of course, in insetting, so we're doing that. You see the connection. It's an easier sell to companies who have a connection with agriculture and care about soil health and ecological health.

Speaker 1: 49:42

So with Nestlé, you're actually working with their beef producers that then end up in Nestlé products.

Speaker 2: 49:47

We're working in the supply sheds of Nestlé yeah, absolutely yeah. So that's very fascinating and we're exploring how to expand that. Even so, companies with a connection to agriculture and soil that makes it easier, of course, to get the connection to regenerative practices and the regenerative-based carbon storage practices and regenerative-based carbon storage other companies realize that the benefits beyond just carbon can be very important as well, and that can be the narrative. So, yes, it's not just the carbon we remove, but we increase water storage, we increase biodiversity. So that's why it's important as well, I think, to start measuring water and biodiversity impacts as well, to basically have measuring water and biodiversity impacts as well, to basically have better data behind just a narrative yeah, it's interesting if you look at your, your client base, it's sort of two groups.

Speaker 1: 50:40

It's the food companies or company in this case Nestle, case Nestle and, let's say, businesses with very high margins and um and good, good cash flow and they can afford this in, in this case, the Microsoft, the, the Shells, etc.

Speaker 1: 50:55

They should, of course, be all doing it, but especially industries. You see the Shopify and mostly Stripe in the carbon space, not necessarily the natural carbon space, but you see, of course, industries where there's I'm not saying easy money, but where there's money, and these things become easier because a few million here and there is is not something they're going to miss, let's say, at the end of the, at the end of the year. I'm shifting a bit to the finance space. If we would do this in um, the financial capital of texas, which I could be used and could be austin, I don't know, but maybe or let's say, san Francisco or New York, and we do this conversation, live in front of an audience of investors, either their own money or institutional capital, so other people's money what would be your main message you would like them to walk away with? Of course they're going to be inspired and walk away excited about the future, in this case. But if there's one seed you want to plant in their mind, what would that be?

Speaker 2: 51:55

yeah, I think investing in um regenerative it's training would be really important. I have to think about how to build a business model around it and so it's about. The impact you get is by removing these barriers to implement regenerative practice, and there's a whole series of barriers around it. So make it easier for folks to invest in the range infrastructure they might need and make it easier to get support and training, and those might not be the kind of sexy investments you get. That's not an investment in the shiny steel object of direct air capture. However, the impacts the regenerative impacts and the business impacts from a range can be tremendous and much, much higher. So there is something there. It will be cool to explore these type of business models. So how can an investment in unlocking this regenerative capacity lead to tremendous value? And it's there because that is we talked about it before. It's a way of doubling basically virtually doubling the size of your ranch, doubling the output, making the ranch economic again. So there is a tremendous value generation opportunity there and it sounds a little bit fragile.

Speaker 1: 53:13

No, it's up to the investors to figure it out, and entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1: 53:16

It is interesting because the education piece keeps coming back. And of course, you have amazing consultants and a number of people that have built actually consultancy businesses around it. I mean Kate Brown and the crew of Understanding Ag, john Kempf, but not many others. And also there the question is always how scalable is that, how repeatable, like how do you get from 4 million acres to 40 million and to 400? And I don't know if I don't have the answer at all, but I think we need way more people that are entrepreneurs mainly, that are going to try to crack that code, and I think somehow we can learn from the permaculture movement that also with some very small investments at the beginning, I think there are now trainings everywhere and the amount of people I speak to not necessarily building permaculture farms or gardens now, but went through a permaculture design course and it changed their life because it changed their perspective on design, business, on nature and ecology, biology, etc.

Speaker 1: 54:15

The people that funded that at the beginning might be just a group that set it up. Their impact is immense without that. It needs continuous investing. There's something to learn from grassroots movements like that. How important is technology in that? How important is PastureMap in the education piece in your work?

Speaker 2: 54:36

Yeah, technology can be of great support and great help. Pasturemap is basically a tracking tool to help you with scheduling your cattle rotations in a more effective way. We're working on PastureMap to collect way more data. It's also actually the data of showing what happened on a ranch to measure additionality and you need to do something different on the ranch to qualify for Carmen credit. So PastureMap is a beautiful tool to do that but also measure all kinds of other things. Pasturemap can be converted into a ranch simulator. So, wow, if you have this ranch look, can you start playing with managing the wrench in a different way and then getting an indication, maybe on the dashboard, from hey, this is how your ecology changes, this is how your soil carbon might change. So it can be a good wrench simulator type of tool as well.

Speaker 1: 55:27

Almost becomes like a digital twin or virtual twin so you can play with different scenarios, which, it seems like, with the immense compute power that we're starting to play with against an interesting cost, becomes very fundamental because you can play a lot of different scenarios and a lot of different grazing scenarios as well, and maybe integration of trees or what kind of herbal lay you're using, or what kind of herbal lay you're using, if you're seeding your grass at all or not, and how that might change, et cetera, and see that in advance and almost walk through it with Jason of Regent Farm on might be out at this time, might be not, but they were talking like it was very easy for them to turn it into a virtual reality piece that with glasses you could actually walk through how a farm would look like and how a square meter by square meter could see how millions of different models or different scenarios which the world where you come from, the scenario planning uh, department of shell is famous but millions of different scenarios.

Speaker 1: 56:26

You can see where, where a piece of land or a farm could go to or not, depending on climate, depending on practices, etc. That kind of tech seems to be coming now or seems to be there now. It wasn't there a few years ago or maybe just in a few very small, very expensive places.

Speaker 2: 56:41

Yeah, so I think that can certainly be helpful. I think the other tech aspect is how can you get more live data from your ranch? And just of course, a ranch now looks at vegetation and looks at soil, but can you have remote sensing technologies? Can you look at bird sounds? Can you look at insect sounds? Can you look at DNA samples much faster? There's a lot of opportunities there, I think too. But also there satellites can play a tremendous role, of course, to see what's happening on a ranch very rapidly, get early warnings that you're in the right direction or, hey, that something is going in the wrong direction. So I see a lot of opportunities there as well.

Speaker 1: 57:20

Yeah, and I mean, these are massive properties where you're talking about, like there's no way you can keep an eye on all of it. There's no way you're going to be on your horse, in your helicopter or on your quad surveying every nook and cranny of your rent. It's just not going to happen. And so how do you, you know, how do you monitor and measure and and make management decisions based on on real data and real, real grass growth and instead of modeled or potential or excel or paper, which I think most of? I remember some interviews somewhere with the founder of pasture map, like, like she was saying, we move people from paper planning to to digital planning, like that's the big step and then we can do a lot of other things, but that's the first like switch and then we can unlock the power of of technology there, um, which I think seems like you're, even now, only at the beginning of yeah.

Speaker 2: 58:15

So passion map is now actively being used by by our landowners to do much better planning, but also much better record keeping. It's quite often if you, uh, if you go to ranches now you ask, hey, how, what did you? How did you rotate the last three years? And well, you know, um, let's see if we have a notebook somewhere where that's being tracked. So there's this lack of record keeping rightfully so I understand that. But doing that in a better way might also help you capturing learnings much faster.

Speaker 2: 58:45

Passion Map has a lot of features for different type of animals. There's photo tracking. So every time you move animals from one paddock to another paddock, there's photo tracking. So every time you move animals from one paddock to another paddock, there's photo capturing. There's also evidence that you did that. So it also helps with the quality behind the credits at the end of the day, seeing that transitions were made, were really additional and that really practices were implemented. That's what a lot of the standards, of course, require that you have hard data and do that in a way that's not painful for a landowner to capture.

Speaker 1: 59:17

Yeah, because that's one of the fears, I think, for many people oh, another thing that I have to fill out, and another more paperwork or digital paperwork, and another set of questions, et cetera, et cetera, set of questions, et cetera, et cetera. And if we would flip the question or the position and put you in the driver's seat of an investment fund or an investment portfolio, let's say, and you had to put, let's say, a large amount, a billion dollars, to work, what would you focus on or what would be important pieces of your portfolio, if you had to put that to work and get a return at some point, get it back at some point, but it could be very long term. So you're pretty free, let's say, to put this kind of money to work.

Speaker 2: 59:58

Yeah, that's fantastic, cool, thanks for that question. That's cool. It's all about scale, I think. Really the potential of regenerative grazing and the impact that has on grassland ecology, water storage, incredibly important biodiversity and also soil carbon is there. The potential is enormous in the United States and a lot of other places in the world. So it's about scale. How can we unlock that scale much faster?

Speaker 2: 1:00:29

I think that's where the $1 billion should go to. It starts with a huge chunk of the $1 billion should go to scalable education and support. It's not just education, not training. It's support on your ranch to educate you and help you to learn how to manage your ranch in a different way. So that's one. The second will be, indeed, to better measurement systems, to have much better feedback loops so you can do that even easier. That's how we'd spend the $1 billion. And then potentially also, if there's infrastructure needed in the supply chain to get access to higher value markets for the products coming from a range, cool, let's use that as well. That will only. So it's basically looking at what are the barriers at this point in time to implement these practices on a range and remove those barriers. It's not about carbon. Carbon will automatically come. So I'm not talking about an investment in carbon measurement or whatever. That's probably not what it is. This is about unlocking the enormous potential from nature of restoring ecology and restoring soil carbon storage.

Speaker 1: 1:01:44

And how important do you think the health side of things is going to be? It maybe already is, with the research coming out of the, the group around stefan von fleet and, uh, the bionutrient food association. I know it's not really part of root so deep because I don't think there was budget to do the, the measurement on health, um, but like is, especially on the protein side, it seems to be the most interesting place to start, which is, I think, literally what what eric jackson of the bio-nutrient food association said, like, what do you see there? Um, you don't have a lot of exposure, of course, to the market side of things, where the beef ends up and but what are? What do you hear on on the ranches and like is is the health? Healthy soil leads to healthy grass, leads to healthy animals and healthy gut system and people. Is that a conversation already or not yet?

Speaker 2: 1:02:37

It is a conversation. At the beginning, you probably can compare it a little bit to healthy soil microbiome and healthy gut microbiome leads to healthy human beings and healthy animals. That relation should be almost there if you think about it. Human beings healthy human beings also is a complex system. It's like soil. So how do you measure the in in complex dynamic systems impacts? It's a similar type of problem. How do you measure impact of regenerative grazing on total ecology systems? So that that requires a holistic approach of looking at that type of research rather than changing one single attitude. I think we're getting there. The connections are really there. That's just a matter of time before that becomes more important. To look at nutritious food, look at nutrition density in food, look at the foods created without a lot of chemical use. The trend is there, I think, but more evidence will come over time.

Speaker 1: 1:03:43

Yeah, so it's absolutely what I hear. It's not part of conversations yet in terms of a potential driver for the consumer side of things of a potential driver for the consumer side of things.

Speaker 2: 1:03:56

You see, I think there's a thriving farmer market community in the US where people and you see that probably in Europe as well, maybe even more so where people are very conscious where their food is coming from, local foods grown in the regenerative way. If you go to a farmer's market and use them, you can actually see that some farmers use regenerative, grass-fed grazed animals. So people realize that that is different. So it's getting there. It's, I think, a very small micro fraction, but the trend will be there. At the end of the day, producing food this way doesn't have to be more expensive at all. It's moving into a system where we start paying, I think, for nutrients nutrients rather than just the kilogram or the pound scale. So how many nutrients do you actually buy? And the pricing will be very different. I heard that on the conference. It was very, very fascinating to Fred Provenza. So where are you actually looking? What are you actually buying? Is that a pound of of protein or is that a pound of nutrition?

Speaker 1: 1:04:59

and that that makes you look at the pricing also in a different way and when you go to these conferences and like to the the grazier conferences, where of course, everyone, or almost everyone, is on board on amp grazing and regenerative grazing. And this question comes from from john kemp, who asked us conferences where of course, everyone, or almost everyone, is on board on AMP grazing and regenerative grazing. And this question comes from John Kempf, who asks where do you think differently than your peers, or what do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't? And I like to ask it in your bubble, when you go to these conferences, what do you believe to be true? That most people there don't? Where are you contrarian within the bubble of regen grazing and carbon?

Speaker 2: 1:05:35

So we go to a lot of different conferences and we also go to large general agricultural conferences and grazing conferences and you know, estimated maybe, that 95% of the farmers and ranchers in the United States are not deploying these types of practices, so they look at it as from whoa. These guys are a little bit crazy and that's also the but they must have heard about it right.

Speaker 1: 1:05:56

They must have seen somewhere somebody in Ellen Savory speech by accident. A TED talk Like what's the? Is there interest, curiosity, what's the general feeling, or just hostile?

Speaker 2: 1:06:09

It's the spectrum. Some of them will be hostile, some of them will be very interested. I think peter bick does such an an incredible uh, if any one of your listeners has the opportunity to look at the roots so deep and the latest streaming in the us and canada now, so anybody stream it. Go and watch it, you can download it.

Speaker 1: 1:06:27

Yeah, we can. We do a screening here in a bit when this is out.

Speaker 2: 1:06:30

We've done the screening, the first european one, but it's out in in the us and canada, so go go and see it please and and let us know it's amazing in storytelling with how, basically, neighbors have one of the neighbors is deploying and grazing regenerative practice and then the other neighbors not doing it, and they look at each other but they don't ask questions. Um, so peter connects them and have the conversation going on. So that's very insightful. So there's a spectrum. Some of them are more hostile, I think, some of them curious. But I completely understand it's.

Speaker 2: 1:07:06

It is must be very, very difficult to completely change how you operate your land and how your parents and grandparents were doing that. So that's not an easy decision to make. So it's very easy for for people sitting in an office say, well, you should just change your practice, but of course it isn't that way. That is your livelihood, it's your income, it's your family heritage, so that cannot be a light decision to make that change. You see quite often also that something happens in the families, that maybe there's a death in the family or the new generations start taking over the ranch, where there's more interest to explore new type of practices. And of course, the more these conferences are being held, the more success stories there are. And of course, the more these conferences are being held, the more success stories there are, you know, the more this becomes a kind of a new norm and a new paradigm, and then, when you go to, let's say, the regen grazing conferences and the grass-fed exchange or whatever they're called, where are you different there?

Speaker 1: 1:08:07

Where do you think different there? If you're among the hardcore region grazers, what sets you apart?

Speaker 2: 1:08:17

In these conferences. It's absolutely great, of course, to see the tremendous energy and the openness of the attendees to help each other and share information and share what works and what works. So, going there it's important to go there sometimes to get the energy back from yes, we're doing the right thing. This is actually really working at scale. Look at all these incredible success stories from how this all worked. So that's really important. And being able to help remove some of the barriers by carbon payments is actually amazing, of course, and folks who start implementing these type of practice so they start doing something additional and you can actually support them by paying real money for the carbon they store is really making a difference and and do they, let's say, meet you with suspicion as well, like the, the next one that comes and promises to pay for change, and and like they must have had quite a few knocking on their door, let's say the ranchers, especially the ones that are relatively ahead of the game?

Speaker 1: 1:09:20

Is there a bit of suspicion in that room then as well, because you come from very large food corporates and very large fossil fuel companies. And promising to pay, promising to Like, what do you? What do you sense there?

Speaker 2: 1:09:35

yeah, there should be suspicion. So we always encourage landowners to be very careful what they sign up to and and also, when it comes to a contract, do their homework. Ensure that they get lawyers involved. So be very, be very careful what you, what you sign up for. Our rancher team so our team in Groswitz-Carmel who interacts with the ranchers all have regenerative farms. They implement these practices themselves. So they speak at the level you know. They understand what the challenges are. So we never try to force someone in doing these practices if they're not, if they're not ready for it.

Speaker 2: 1:10:13

It's, I think, the respect for how difficult it is to create this change. So it's very doable, but it's also very difficult in making that decision to to implement a change and so, yes, they should be suspicious. Be very careful if someone is offering you money, so look at the terms and conditions. Ensure that I think very important that you benefit from a carbon price increase. We offer really a profit-sharing type of agreement. I think that's very important. Most of the benefits will go to the landowner. In our case, that's 70% or 80% of the profits will flow to a landowner. Ensure that you don't have to pay to participate. Look very carefully at the risk when something goes wrong at your ranch, when you have a drought, what are the impacts? So look very carefully about the exposure you have as a landowner and see if you can benefit enough from the upsides. Yes, you should be suspicious, do?

Speaker 1: 1:11:09

your homework. And as a final question if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing overnight, what would that be?

Speaker 2: 1:11:18

Yeah, so we already spent my billion dollars on the rancher training. It will be the realization in companies with a tremendous carbon challenge that nature-based solutions can offer a fantastic, fast, affordable and impactful solution. So I think there's all those engineers, but also procurement people and ESG managers If I could use my magic wand, I would immediately get it in their heads that nature-based solutions, when done right, are really worth your time of looking into. That's the realization I want them to have. It's a real solution. And compare that to your technology solutions and then make up the balance. So I'm not saying that you. It's good to have a healthy portfolio of carbon solutions in any company, but give nature-based solutions the opportunity it deserves, because there's actually very, very little alternatives with this amount of impact beyond just carbon scalability and affordability.

Speaker 1: 1:12:27

I think it's a perfect end to this conversation. I want to thank you, henk, so much for coming on here, of course, the work you do, but also taking the time to share, and I'm looking forward to not having another four years before checking in again with, let's say, the world of soil works and grassroots carbon. So thank you so much for coming on here. It's an absolute pleasure.

Speaker 2: 1:12:47

Thanks for all the work you're doing, koen, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 1:12:58

Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time.