Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
103 Dan Kittredge, our biggest lever against climate change is paying for food quality
Why are we not paying farmers for quality? A long overdue interview with Dan Kittredge of the Bionutrient Food Association on their work of measuring of nutrients the connection to quality and taste.
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We discussed Dan's vision of the food and agriculture system in 2030 and why if we focus more on setting up structures and systems to pay farmers for quality, carbon, biodiversity and water will also be fixed.
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Why are we not paying farmers for quality? A long overdue interview with Dan Gittrich on their work of measuring nutrients and the connection to quality and taste. Plus his vision of a food and agriculture system in 2030 and why if we focus more on setting up structures and systems to pay farmers for quality, carbon, biodiversity and water will take care of itself. Music Welcome to another episode of In March last year, we launched our membership community to make it easy for fans to support our work. And so many of you have joined as a member. We've launched different types of benefits, exclusive content, Q&A webinars with former guests, Ask Me Anything sessions, plus so much more to come in the future. For more information on the different tiers, benefits and how to become a member, check gumroad.com slash investingbridge or find the link below. Thank you. Welcome to a new interview with Dan Kittredge. Our last interview was in May 2019, and I will definitely link that interview below. But I'm so happy to have Dan back on the show because so much has happened and it's really, really time to check in. So welcome back, Dan. Thanks for having me, Koen. Glad to be back. And you're walking outside, so if there's some bit of background noise, you're in your hoop house, so you're definitely on the land.
SPEAKER_01:I'm in my hoop house, actually, if I may, yes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely, please. I mean, describe it at some point if you need to, to make some of the concepts more visual because obviously we're in audio land but let's all imagine a very lively green or very lively hoop house what should we imagine where you are
SPEAKER_01:it just snowed last night and so the snow hasn't come off the top yet there's spinach and greens in the beds underneath layers of remay nice mulched pathways it's quiet calm it's a beautiful beautiful place
SPEAKER_00:very nice place to start a podcast i shouldn't ask more often where people are mostly they are at a desk or something so it's not yeah and that's so interesting so let's say i mean last time we did a deep dive, obviously, your work at that moment, which is almost two years ago, I mean, time flies. Let's start with actually a short intro for anybody that has no clue what we're talking about at the moment. Go and listen to the other interview, but in a few minutes, what are you working on? You are an organic farmer for many, many years, but what is, let's say, what have you spent the last decade on or the last five years on mostly? And what is this bionutrient stuff that we hear so much about?
SPEAKER_01:I've been an organic farmer for 30 plus years, grew up on an organic farm, so it wasn't too hard or didn't have much choice, let's say, but haven't left it. For the last 10 years, I've been running an organization called the Bionutrient for Thank you. And in the past four years, we've started a collaborative venture called the Real Food Campaign, which is a partnership of a bunch of different other nonprofits, farmers, general consumers, companies, researchers, foundations. It's a broad swath of businesses. allies who are interested in this question of nutrient density. And so we've got three things we're trying to accomplish. One is to build a handheld meter that can be used at point of purchase or anywhere, flash a light and get a reading on the actual nutrient levels of food. That's the one objective. The second is to figure out what nutrient density is. So people throw the word around, this is nutrient dense, but we don't actually have a definition. So in my mind, it's not about organic or not organic. It's about a continuum. So are you at the 80th percentile of what a carat could be or the 20th percentile. Until we have a definition of that variation, we can't calibrate the meter to give you a reading that means anything. So step one, build a meter. Step two, figure out what quality is. And step three, figure out what causes it. So document all the environmental conditions, management practices, soil type, seed, microbiome. What are the dynamics that correlate with higher nutrient levels or lower nutrient levels in crops, which we think correlate with flavor, aroma, health-giving attribute, soil health, carbon sequestration, ecosystem services. We think our hypothesis is that food quality can be a proxy for all these things and can be an economic lever. So we've moved along quite nicely. We started in 2017 with our first generation meter. We built our first lab in 2018 and tested a couple different crops, carrots and spinach, found massive variations. 2019 went to six crops, and we got the first basic calibrations for our meter. 2020, we did 20 crops. We've got now three labs, our main one in Michigan, one in France, and one in California, and it's building and spreading. We're sort of deepening the process of understanding and starting to be recognized and engaged by people that you otherwise would think would have credibility.
SPEAKER_00:Which is That's a good thing. So in 2019, you looked at six different crops. You said, what was the most shocking results? What was the shocking data you've seen among those six crops or on the 20 you've seen in 2020? But I think that some of the data still has to come out. So let's look at 2019 if that's easier. So what was the most shocking thing you've seen there?
SPEAKER_01:I'm pretty sure it was antioxidants and spinach. And I think it was 364.5 to 1 was the variation.
SPEAKER_00:And what does it mean in layman's terms?
SPEAKER_01:That means that this one leaf of spinach had as many antioxidants in it as that leaf of spinach if you ate one of it every day for the year. Wow. So you eat this spinach, like whatever you get in the box in the store, you eat one leaf of that spinach every day for a year, and you get the same level of antioxidants as from this one leaf grown differently. That's the biggest variation we've found so far, is literally 365x. And
SPEAKER_00:grown differently, in this case, Did you see that connection?
SPEAKER_01:We don't know all the details.
SPEAKER_00:You don't know it yet.
SPEAKER_01:We don't, I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Something is different there.
SPEAKER_01:Definitely a different source. So it's obviously gone differently. What were the exact things? I don't have that in my head. But we've been saying it's 5 to 10x at least on, is the high to the low on minerals, copper, zinc, phosphorus, potassium in crops, this carrot to that carrot. It's not 5% or 10%. It's 5x or 10x Huge differences. Is the mineral levels. And then when you get to these other compounds, the flavor compounds, the health-giving compounds, I think it's 25 to 360x. That's the range we're seeing.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. So nutrient variation is massive. And what does it mean? I mean, do we know what that means health-wise for us, eating it, observing it, or not observing it? Is there anything known? Or is that, let's say, step four after your three steps?
SPEAKER_01:Well, there's all kind of work with nutrients. on omega-3s and omega-6s and, you know, antioxidants and vitamin C and, yeah. So we do know that these nutrients are critical for health and, you know, the compounds as well as the elements. So I'm not sure what it is, what percentage of the world's population is zinc deficient. It's massive, yeah. Maybe a third of the world's population is zinc deficient. So if you can get, grow this crop differently and you get 6X on the zinc, that's meaningful.
SPEAKER_00:That's massive. And did that depend on Looking back at that spinach, is that then the same type of spinach, the same type of seed? No. It's different.
SPEAKER_01:Different soil, different seed, different management. So what we're doing is identifying the variation and trying to tease out the correlations. So if we can say which of our many thousands of samples have perhaps showed up most nutrient dense with the highest levels of nutrition in them. And then we can go back and say, now what were the environmental conditions that were causal? Was it a fertility program? Was it management practices? Was it the cultivar? Was it the epigenetics? Was it the climate dynamics? What is epigenetics? Epigenetics is how the health of the mother plants affects the baby plants. So if you have three generations of ancestors that were in the presence of toxins and died from cancer young, then your vitality is probably going to be low. And so that applies just as well for spinach seed as it does for humans.
SPEAKER_00:So it seems like you're in the middle. I mean, it's definitely a lot further along than 2019. The meter that we talked about last time as well, or the first 3D printed version, and we're now at the end of January 2021. Where do you stand at the moment? What is going to happen this year? I think you're going to make some huge steps. It's not a linear growth anymore, but what's going to happen over the next months, over the next year? with all this work around the bio-nutrient meter and the labs and obviously also the data sets behind it?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think the first generation bio-nutrient meter available for sale, I think it was the end of 2018 and started shipping them 2019. We only had a few hundred that we made and we pretty rapidly sold out. So now we're in our second generation and we've updated it and we've built the calibration standard onto it and a few other things. So now we have, and we have not just the instrument, but we have some data to calibrate it to.
SPEAKER_00:Meaning that we can order at like version two now or not yet?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, it's like it's version 1.1 or 1.2 or something. It's not a, it's still an Apple II. It's not an iPhone yet. Okay, okay. But it's, you know, it's now it actually, Actually, you don't have to write the code. Now it comes with some code, right? Basically, we're gonna be shipping the next batch out in June of 2021, and it should have calibrations for at least six crops. Which one? Like a red, yellow, green. Carrots, spinach, lettuce, cherry tomatoes, grapes, and kale. Potentially a number more.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so main thing, like I'm scanning it and it gives me a green, yellow, or red, meaning I'm in the highest percentile, the middle, or the lowest.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the red is the bottom quartile, the yellow is the middle 50%, then the green is the top quartile. That's roughly how we're presuming. That's what our statistics are giving us the numbers for. It's like we can reasonably well predict that. It's not 100%. No,
SPEAKER_00:of
SPEAKER_01:course. We're not actually measuring the nutrients. We're predicting based on the metadata, if that makes sense to people. No,
SPEAKER_00:we should explain that. What does it mean? You're not measuring it, but you're basically basing it on the metadata. What does it mean when I scan, I ordered in June and I scan my cherry tomato in July and it gives green. How does it get to green?
SPEAKER_01:So the first question is, The question is, what is the meter and how does it work? So there's this term spectroscopy, which is a sort of form of assessing things. I like to use the example of astronomers, and they speak with great confidence about this star has this percent hydrogen and this percent helium and this percent other elements at these levels and ratios. And it's not because we've ever been to a star and sampled it. It's because every element in chemistry, hydrogen or helium, vibrates at a certain frequency. And so literally the light, that vibration of that star, has encoded within it the chemical makeup of the star. And so if we can take a picture of light from light years away, and see what something's made up of, then we can take a picture of light from something a millimeter away and see what something's made up of. And so basically our spectrometer, it flashes a light at the carrot or at the lettuce, and it takes a picture of the light that bounces back, and based on a bunch of lab work that we've done where we did this with thousands of crops, we've brought them into the lab, we've flashed a light at them, took a picture of the light that bounced back, and then ran those crops through a sampling process where we tested the copper and the zinc and the antioxidants and the polyphenols things like that, we now have enough data where we can say this structure of light or this picture of light means high levels of antioxidants. This one means low levels. So it's not perfect by any means, but it's... But you read the light and know
SPEAKER_00:because of the lab work.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, exactly. So that's where we're at right now is we have taken a basic instrument, built enough metadata to calibrate it. Which wasn't the
SPEAKER_00:case before. No, no. The one in 19, I remember scanning an apple. and getting some data out of it, or a slice of Apple, and then the question was, okay, what's next? You get
SPEAKER_01:a graph. Yeah, what does this graph say? Until we can understand what it means, we don't know what it means.
SPEAKER_00:I knew that when I ordered it that that was going to be the result. It's not that I was expecting, but I wanted to be part of that first iPhone movement as well, or the Apple one.
SPEAKER_01:We hope we were honest about where we're at, and we have been the whole time. Yeah, so now we're at a point where that graph gets converted to a reading. So that's, in and of itself, quite significant and I feel very proud about that. But I think what you were asking about in your question is the next generation. So as I said before, this is an Apple II. It's not an iPhone. But we have just recently gotten some significant donations to start the process of that next generation. And I would say we're going to go from a 1.1 to a 4.1. I think we're going to skip the second and third generational cycles.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. So how would that look like? What should we imagine? That's basically going to the Apple Watch immediately or to the iPhone 12. What's the
SPEAKER_01:version? Even an iPhone 1, I mean, that would be a significant accomplishment. What
SPEAKER_00:does this thing do? Fly as well? It grows food?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it looks like we'll be able to actually get specific numbers on things. We won't just be building a calibration, it'll actually be a scientific instrument so we can actually test the number of polyphenols, parts per million, or copper parts per million. Potentially, it'll be able to even go down below that into parts per billion. That's what we're doing this year.
SPEAKER_00:Which is something that now only is possible in the lab or not possible at all?
SPEAKER_01:This is very much possible in the lab. You can go to parts per trillion in the lab if you've got the fancy equipment.
SPEAKER_00:Not in the field or in the shop?
SPEAKER_01:It depends on how many dollars you have to spend and how heavy it is.
SPEAKER_00:Normal people or normal farmers can't.
SPEAKER_01:You can buy a$50,000 10-pound handheld thing that will give you parts per million right now. So there's stuff out there. But to really get it down to not much bigger than a smartphone and at least below a couple grand, if not below 500. It'll take a couple generations, but it feels like we actually are on the development path to accomplish that now.
SPEAKER_00:Timing? What do you think? You mentioned significant donations, meaning you can speed up this process significantly. What did you I wouldn't say promise the donations, but what's your timing, your hope, your timing for this version 4? Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:well, I think based on the potentials we've got, it won't just be one. There probably will be a different version for the agronomist and farmer than there would be for the consumer, or perhaps other people in the supply chain. So that's what we're going to do over the next year is see. I would expect we're going to have prototypes of some sort by the end of this year, 2021, and I would hope that we have something marketable in 2022. I don't think that's unreasonable, but it certainly is ambitious. But yeah, for the time being, we've got our biometric meter version one that actually is now functional. But yeah, what is exciting is that we've always known that the version we've got right now is never going to be the mass-produced, slick, consumer, easy, functioning thing. It was really about, like, is it possible to do this? And I think we've pretty clearly shown it is possible. And now we're in a place to really do what we think needs to be done. So I feel very excited about that. I feel honored and blessed. And I think, you know,
SPEAKER_00:it could be significant. It could be very, very significant. So the field in general, looking at when we talk almost two years ago, I mean, at least in my bubble, it seems to have exploded the attention for soil regeneration, regenerative agriculture approaches practices. We see it everywhere from Walmart to Cargill to obviously the organic or the soil building farmer at the corner. What have you seen in your niche of or your part of the nutrient discussion? Has that changed a lot over the last years or hasn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, I think it's It's gone from a concept that people didn't agree was true, that there was meaningful nutrient variation in
SPEAKER_00:food. Meaning that people said every carrot is more or less the same.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And when we started 10 years ago, that was kind of what the assumption was. Like it wasn't even discussed, really, in my circles. And I was traveling in the organic circle for 20 years. Why do you think is that? Or was that? Well, I mean, it just sort of, when the organic started, they wanted to be able to test to see if it was better. But but they didn't have the ability to. And so it went to a sort of a practice-based standard. Like, don't do this, follow these practices, and then you get to be certified.
SPEAKER_00:You're saying if the meter was out there and the software, et cetera, at that point, Organic might have taken a different street.
SPEAKER_01:I know it would have. Absolutely. I mean, my parents solved some of the first standards in the 80s. Yeah, that was exactly the struggle they were having was...
SPEAKER_00:The tech wasn't there, basically.
SPEAKER_01:We should be doing this because it's better, not just because it's less bad. But we don't have any way of testing better. So we're just going to make sure you don't do bad. Maybe a bit of a simplification, but I think that's effectively it.
SPEAKER_00:No, no, but it makes a lot of sense, yeah. And now it's different because this stuff is coming, yeah, and coming out.
SPEAKER_01:Well, now I think, well, what's exciting is that we have this confluence of events where, you know, especially with the climate conversation pushing it along. I mean, even five years ago, the climate piece wasn't so big.
SPEAKER_00:Nobody was talking about soil carbon five years ago.
SPEAKER_01:No, it really was a very small cadre of people who understood that possibility. I mean, some people have been talking about it forever, but as far as the broader conversation, that hadn't gotten there. And so we'll say that the regenerative, the term, the movement, quote unquote, has brought the climate consciousness energy into what was already a very well-established alternative, sustainable, organic, permaculture, biodynamic, agroecology world. It's brought, that wisdom was already there and well-established, and now we've got the companies and the angst and the climate concerns and the people trying to make money on carbon and everything. So, when you put those two things together, the most powerful economic lever, in my mind, is the nutrient density of the food. And so, that's what's exciting to me right now, over the past, even just a few months, but definitely over the past couple of years, is that a lot of the people that I consider to be, you know, I think a lot of people would say are leading lights, thoughtful people, respected voices, are coming to the conclusion that nutrient density sure looks like it's got a lot of potential to be the economic driver that facilitates takes these objectives.
SPEAKER_00:Meaning it's not enough or maybe not even crucial to be paying for carbon storage in the soil as long as we're not paying for quality. Because if we do that and we can measure quality and we know what nutrient density is, I mean, there are a lot of ifs there, obviously. By definition or because of these practices, you will be storing carbon and restoring biodiversity and water storage and all of those. But it's focused on quality first.
SPEAKER_01:You will be doing all those things also, but the incentive for you is a farmer, it's an economics thing. You will make more money because your plants are healthier than you will from the carbon.
SPEAKER_00:It's a nice extra, obviously, but it's not the driver.
SPEAKER_01:Well, the carbon's great, and the ecosystem service markets are great, and I'm not saying people shouldn't get paid for it, but the more we get down to the rabbit hole and people start to look at carbon and labile carbon and stable carbon at 10 centimeters and at 30 centimeters, we understand what a complicated problem it is to try to monetize it. It's going to require any number of really, whatever, I mean, that's the whole conversation, and I don't want to say people shouldn't follow it. I think it's great that that's the entranceway to a deeper conversation.
SPEAKER_00:That's a nice way of putting it, yeah. And then, I mean, it's such a fundamental shift to look at quality instead of quantity. And obviously, we still have to look at quantity because we need to produce. But the quality discussion is, every time I talk to somebody about it, it's such a, the quality and taste and the nutrients in food, et cetera, it's such a completely new field that people enter, basically. Like, oh, that's actually possible. And of course, because you know, people know that taste is different, but the connection to health and the connection to nutrients is often not made. Well, it's assumed.
SPEAKER_01:It's kind of one of those things that when you say to people who are like, obviously that's the case, or I would be very, very surprised if it's not the case. But the fact is we have no thoughtful, systemic data to confirm or deny it. And so because we don't have the data, we can't say anything.
SPEAKER_00:We can just say it tastes, wow, this tastes amazing of this tomato I buy at the farmer's market, etc. But we never dare to make the food as medicine claim after, which sort of logically follows.
SPEAKER_01:There's any amount of data which would suggest that's the case, but it hasn't been categorically put together. And that's what we're trying to accomplish. Our thought is if we can use science to verify these things, which we are fairly certain are the case, then we can use economics to incentivize them and facilitate that rapid global transformation to a more balanced climate and
SPEAKER_00:culture. So what you're saying, the biggest lever or the fastest potential point to kickstart or accelerate this transition to more regenerative approaches, more regenerative farms and farmers, more soil being regenerated is the focus of quality and paying our farmers that are doing the right things or part of the right things or most of the right things to more because they grow quality and move up the rest in that process.
SPEAKER_01:I think it's going to end up being easier to focus on quality than to focus on carbon. And it's going to be more economically
SPEAKER_00:advantageous. Let's talk a bit about a conference that's coming up. Actually, it's not a conference. Let's talk about the 10th Annual Soil and Nutrition Conference. You used to do, I mean, nine times, obviously, otherwise it's not the 10th, a big conference focusing on all of these topics and really pushing the agenda here. Obviously, in COVID times, a big conference isn't happening. You've chosen a different route. Can you elaborate a bit on that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, I think we've, you know, looked at the ecosystem and said, there's a whole bunch of people doing two-day intensives in December, January, February, and March, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. So let's not try to compete in that space. What's not being done? And so I think it's like the podcast style, something that comes out every week. What we're planning on doing is we had a bunch of speakers lined up. Amazing speakers, yeah. Well, we try to usually get good speakers.
SPEAKER_00:I was very impressed. I was bummed that I couldn't travel. I and
SPEAKER_01:go. Yeah, instead of having them be across from each other, so four things at a time or five things at a time all over two days, we said, let's give each person enough space so they get an hour and a half instead of an hour, and everybody at the whole conference can listen to them and pose questions to them, and we'll spread it out over the year. So basically what we have is over the next eight months, starting beginning of February, a webinar series, which we're calling the 10th Annual Soil Nutrition Conference. which has got four sort of tracks. One is the real food campaign, so everything we're doing with the testing and the meter and the science and the farm partners and how you can engage and collaborate. A second one is the agronomy track, so principles of best management practice. One is the nutrition track, so what we understand about how we can correlate this to our health, et cetera, et cetera. And then the final one is what we're calling mycelial culture, so thinking about decolonizing our minds, our culture, the wisdom about the indigenous perspective and what is that and how can those of us who were not brought up in it step back and tune into what I think is intuitive for all of us. It's just a question of whether we had the nurture in our childhood of that. I think this is part of what is exciting about the regenerative community is very much aligned with these deeper symbiotic principles. And so that's our fourth track. And so we basically have these different speakers from different tracks that are going to be alternating from February to September. And we've gotten amazing registrations from people all over the planet. It's going to be quite an exciting.
SPEAKER_00:Where can people find out more?
SPEAKER_01:Soilandnutrition.org.
SPEAKER_00:I will definitely put it in the show notes.
SPEAKER_01:Scholarships are available and we have got a global community price of$21 for anybody who's not in Europe, North America, or Australia, New Zealand. So if you're from South America, Africa, Asia, then it's$21 And if that's too much for you, we've got scholarships for you also. So yeah, I'm not sure if the Oxford Real Farming Conference did a really wonderful job, I think. Spread it out over a week, basically, yeah. But they got 5,000 people and they had a global price and they really had speakers from, I think they had 500 presenters. Yeah, it
SPEAKER_00:was massive.
SPEAKER_01:5,000 attendees, a really, really wonderful model for I think a lot of the other organizations about how to broaden the base. Let's take the privilege we've had of going to these conferences that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to at the end of it and make that community knowledge share process available to everyone on the planet that feels like a really wonderful opportunity
SPEAKER_00:I think they did an amazing job and I'm sure you're doing as well to really rethink what that conference meant and bring it completely online obviously but then make it incredibly accessible and completely shifting also what presenters meant there because before obviously it was only the people that could travel to Oxford or to the UK or in this case to you as well that could present and Thank you. Most of the people can't. And so they did an incredible job of completely switching it from UK focus, mostly UK focus to global and an incredible array of presenters and audience that responded and joined.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, that's what we're up to is we're spreading it out.
SPEAKER_00:Which is great. I mean, you can bite size pieces is probably better than a full two day deep dive. And the community piece, I'm sure that will come back like the privilege of spending time together quality time offline will be hopefully something we cherish much more, but will happen in the future. in smaller groups, hopefully on nice locations, on nice farms, et cetera, to do that. But the online piece just makes it much more accessible for all.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's one other exciting piece of news we have at the BFA is that we're about to get our hands on a 360-acre farm here in Massachusetts to have as an education demonstration research hub, which is, in my mind, going to be, in large part, helping to provide farmer training and farm tenure for land access land tenure to people who want to be part of that transition. So in my mind, at this point, it's not that we haven't figured a lot of things out. It's that we don't have the structure of local dissemination on the ground. I think it's one thing to learn things in podcasts and recordings, and that's really wonderful. And so it's a great support to people that are kind of out in the wilderness. It only scratches the surface, yeah. Well, I think we need a hub, every county in every country on the planet. We need a demo in a 10 or 20 mile radius or ish globally where we're actually implementing and training and grounding as far as I'm concerned.
SPEAKER_00:It's not the first time this comes up. This comes up actually on the podcast, which is very interesting.
SPEAKER_01:So we're going to have one and we're going to do what we can to model everything and share as much as possible.
SPEAKER_00:And what's the current, what are the management approaches or agriculture approaches currently on that farm? Like how extreme is going to be the shift? That's my question.
SPEAKER_01:It's been hay for the last 20 years. Wow. It was, was actually on the Olympic trials. It was owned by horse people and made to look really fancy. Prior to that, it was a dairy farm for 200 years.
SPEAKER_00:That's going to be a shift.
SPEAKER_01:It's a beautiful canvas.
SPEAKER_00:Do a lot of sampling before you change the management practices because it's going to be a very interesting sample size.
SPEAKER_01:Our intention is to really engage a thoughtful scientific process and to document any number of different little experiments. Yeah, if we've got the lab equipment to be able to test all kinds of stuff in real time, we can have all kinds of little experiments going on wow yeah i don't know
SPEAKER_00:so that'll be fun a question that i not recently but i've been asking i think after we recorded our previous podcast it's been a regular but i haven't asked it to you yet i think and it's a bit of a mind shift there like imagine you wake up tomorrow morning i mean now you're waking up to also a massive farm and actually you're getting some interesting donations in but let's say for a moment we push that aside and you are an investment manager and you actually have a billion dollar investment fund under your management you you can invest that whatever shape or form, et cetera, you like. It is meant to be an investment or investments, meaning it should come back at some point, but the duration and the returns, et cetera, are up to you. I'm asking these questions to people because I'm very interested in the decision-making framework. What do people prioritize? What do they focus on? I'm not so interested if you're going to invest, like what's the exact breakdown of what you would do, but I'm very interested. Would you prioritize if you had a large investment fund at your disposal tomorrow morning?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, you sent me that email. with that question a couple hours ago, and I certainly haven't gotten to the point where I haven't answered that question. I can take a couple shots, but I haven't really meditated on it.
SPEAKER_00:The first thing that comes up is usually the best.
SPEAKER_01:Well, the first thing that came up was that, you know, let's replicate what we're doing here with this big piece of land. And I think education is massively important. You know, what I feel like we're doing is the most important thing. So the nutrient density piece, documenting, verifying, calibrating, whatever it is, establishing some empirical framework around this deeper conversation so that any number of other businesses can succeed by leading in this space feels like a very valuable investment. Our struggle has been that because we're a non-profit, we only do this off charitable donations for the commons. We want all that core information to be in the commons, not to be proprietarily controlled. So that's going to be counter to the incentives of somebody looking for an ROI because we're not offering any.
SPEAKER_00:You would invest it in utter high basically like the one you're building now, which could be, I mean, very interesting investment, very long-term, but definitely, I mean, people have done very interesting things in education.
SPEAKER_01:There's a group out here in Massachusetts and Western Mass that's been a little bit inspired by a group in Vermont, but they're looking at the food system regionally and saying, where are the holes, like the slaughterhouses, the creameries, the commercial kitchens, whatever it is, what are the infrastructural holes in the system that are keeping the local farmer community from being economically viable. So there's a ton of relatively small investments in any regional ecosystem that could intelligently be made that would actually probably spin off reasonable return. But I think to do that right probably would require having a base in that community first to be able to discern what its needs are. And I know there's various funds that are looking at this kind of a model, but I think I would say engage in the networks that you're part of in an active way if you can get your hands on a big piece of land and you can begin to implement practices and produce crops that will give you good reasonable profits then if it's only 2% or 5% you're looking for you want a reasonable return but you're creating all amount of cultural value I would say that's how you should be thinking about your returns on a billion dollar investment I mean I'm not a I don't have much money at all but I don't think you'd need that much money and the question is when you do have that much money how do you use it most well for the greatest good not just for the ROI in a capital stamp point.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's an excellent answer. And actually, it's an interesting segue into something I wanted to ask as well is how Because you mentioned it briefly on the Q&A webinar we just did, your vision for agriculture. And it's interesting because you just got your hands on a big piece of land and your vision that you laid out there, but I would love to hear it here again or a bit more elaborated because we had a few minutes only left, is actually not necessarily gigantic farms. What is your vision? Let's say we're now in 2021. So in nine years, so the decade to the end of the decade, what do you see if a lot of the things we've discussed will happen around quality, around focus, obviously on soil, etc.?
UNKNOWN:?
SPEAKER_00:what do you see happening for the next nine years and what's your idea there?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think broadly, I mean, I've always said that this nutrient density thing and the spectrometer is just a shiny object. This is a little thing to catch people's attention, to bring them down a rabbit hole that will provide all kinds of wonderful, you know, a path that's very inspiring. So for me, the end game looks like, to some degree, more of a traditional human civilization with culture and with community and with relationship with land. And I would say with some level of empowerment and agency as well, I think to a large degree is missing in the colonized culture. I would like to see people supported in having land tenure, in having some level of self-sufficiency. I'm not saying that the only thing you do to make your living is grow food, but if you can have access to land where you can provide a lot of your needs, then the actual money you need is much less and your agency, your freedom, your safety Which we
SPEAKER_00:all learned
SPEAKER_01:last year. on the land in chunks of land that are smaller, 5, 10, 20 acres. It's going to be a different level of empowerment broadly. If somebody in your family has land that's not you, then you've got access to that. Then there's all kinds of things that are possible. It's one of those things you bring people out of the city and onto the land and you watch them and they go through all these processes of deep, profound experience, tears. It's a really interesting process and I think that's where we're heading is cultural revitalization. I think with the insights we have about how we can re-green the massive areas of the continents that are brown, we can look at this from a global standpoint and see the opportunity there to move towards much greater empowerment. And as people feel that agency and ownership and they have the cultural strength, they will be able to manage the land most well to re-green it, to re-engage the water cycle, to much more actively facilitate way more carbon sequestration than it would have occurred in a big monoculture So, I mean, yeah, we need to deal with the environmental issues. We need to deal with the cultural issues. And I think that that comes foundationally with more people being in deeper relationship with land. So that's what we're going to try to accomplish with our piece of property is use it as a training education site. We've got regional land trusts immediately adjacent and in very close proximity that have thousands of acres here in central Massachusetts that they are trying to get people to take land 99-year leases on, and nobody wants it. We could facilitate in this one town with this one land trust 80 people each having 10 acres.
SPEAKER_00:That's
SPEAKER_01:massive. in Massachusetts. And so act locally, think globally. And good living coming up the land. There's all these people that are looking for an alternate lifestyle and structure. Let's facilitate that education. In large part, people have not been brought up on the land and their practical skill sets are very low. So we need to facilitate that training. Including mine. Most people.
SPEAKER_00:I was born in the city center and I definitely...
SPEAKER_01:You're a product of the culture.
SPEAKER_00:My skill set is not on the land.
SPEAKER_01:That's
SPEAKER_00:fascinating and I I would especially find, I mean, many more people have said similar things. We need more, I mean, we need more people on the land and it always stays sort of as a wish, like the move to the land piece, et cetera, et cetera. But what it's fascinating about your work is one of the underlying principles is it needs to be more profitable to be a good farmer or to be a good soil farmer. And for that, we need to focus on quality. Like there's a very practical X step and the steps could be many, many, many, but if we don't pay for quality, if we don't know even what quality is and we don't start paying and finding those farmers or those collectives that are doing a great job of managing their soil and thus managing the health coming and the taste coming of their farms, then we can wish that everybody goes back to the land, or many goes back to the land, but it sort of is impractical. But that one lever of quality can really unlock many farm lives.
SPEAKER_01:It can help leverage it. It's not that we don't already know how to grow plants well, and you don't have to have a label like organic or nutrient-dense. If your customers are looking for quality, they'll choose your stuff over anybody else's. And when your plants are healthier, your cost of production is lower. That was my experience being a much more active farmer than I am now. The last couple of years, the organization has just gotten too big. And so I had to do much less farming than I was recently. But my experience farming is that when your plants are healthy, your cost of production is lower and you don't need to charge top dollar and your profitability is higher. But I grew up on a farm and I've got that sort of 30 years of experience. So if we can use the research process to to document which management practices and which environmental conditions are most appropriate and share that openly globally. And we can begin to have some of these economic levers in place. And we can correlate that with local demonstration practice sites and tenure. I think we can align a number of really powerful incentives. And the cultural upheaval over the past year has been a perfect preparation for that. It's really caused a lot of people to think deeply about where they are and what they want to do with themselves.
SPEAKER_00:And what would you say to, like, what would you tell investors that are listening? I mean, I asked this about a question last time, but I'm curious if the answer has changed or if you have any other, like what people that are thinking deep about themselves, what they want to do, not only with their hands in terms of land, I think many people I know with wealth as well, want to be practically involved. And I think that's amazing. But the second part is what should they or could they be doing with their wealth? Where should they be looking or not looking? What would you tell them to? Because many more people have spent the last year forcefully thinking a lot. Where would they look to start deploying to become active if you have, let's say, more than average wealth and you want to put that to work?
SPEAKER_01:You know, it's not a circle I travel in. That's why I'm asking it. I hear about all these things that are out there. As far as I'm concerned, I have to go back, so I really believe in what I'm doing. What we're doing with this data collection openly to build structure in a sort of a pre-competitive space kind of manner, I think is going to leverage billions and billions of dollars worth of profits. So I'm trying to do all the work that I can to create a structure where all those investments, if they're really supporting good work, will become more profitable.
SPEAKER_00:So this is the time to get on the quality bandwagon.
SPEAKER_01:I would say take... 1% of your investment money and donate it to the BFA. And we'll have the interest to you faster.
SPEAKER_00:That's a good answer. I mean, this space needs support. And at the same time, it's going to unlock an enormous potential. And it's going to show a lot of things on food, food quality that we maybe didn't want to know. We sort of always knew, but we don't really want to. But it's also going to create an incredible space over the next year. So I think it's extremely exciting.
SPEAKER_01:The sooner we figure this out, the sooner we'll be able to really support the transition, not just make money. Ideally, not just doing this to make money, doing this because we want to facilitate a better world. So I think having that empirical framework where we can categorically connect environmental conditions, management practices, soil health, ecosystem function, farm viability, nutrient levels, human health, the more we can tie those things together empirically in a really confident fashion, the faster and more successful this transition will be.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's a perfect place to end. I want to thank you so much for your time again to check in to share where you're at, I will definitely check the version 1.1 in June later this year. Will it be basically like, can I use my current version? So will it just be a software update or do I have to get a new one?
SPEAKER_01:Well, we have built into it a calibration metric. We didn't have a way to sort of bring it to zero. I like to use the example of the kitchen scale. The tar button. Yeah, the tear button. We've got a tear button on it now. That's exactly what we've got. So other than that, it's the same thing. People who do have the previous versions, it might just be easier for you to send it back, and we will update it and send it back to you, and it won't cost that much.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, that's a good point.
SPEAKER_01:But the version 1.1 meters, we do have only a limited number of boards, so they're available for sale now, and I expect that we'll be sold out of them long before June when we start shipping them.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, get your hands on one if you want to.
SPEAKER_01:If enough people pre-order, then we may get another batch of boards from Asia, but right now there's a limited supply.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect. Get your hands on some. Not
SPEAKER_01:to be trying to be a No, no.
SPEAKER_00:If it's the truth, then it's good marketing and good sales. Get your hands on one if you want to.
SPEAKER_01:We're not trying to mass produce these things. We're doing them in batches of hundreds. And we don't have the consumer meter yet. This is an iterative process. But there are only a few hundred out there in the world.
SPEAKER_00:I'm very excited to have one. And I'm definitely going to upgrade it. So thank you so much, Dan, for your time. And I wish you a great day. And of course, we'll be checking in.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Kun. Thank you for all the work you've been doing. It's wonderful how you've stepped up and really done so much. If
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