113 Sarah Mock on treating farms like businesses

With  Sarah Mock, author of Farm (and Other F Words) , we dive deep into the good, the bad, and the ugly of farm businesses. This is a conversation on farming as business and why she thinks indigenous people should run them.
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Forget everything you thought you knew about US Agriculture, the family farm myth and "successful" regenerative farmers, and take a deep dive into why should we treat farming as a business.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Everything you thought you knew about US agriculture, the family farm myth and successful between brackets regenerative farmers and take a deep dive into the good, the bad and the ugly. Why should we treat farming as a business and why indigenous people should run them? Welcome to another episode of investors, big and small, and consumers start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. 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 investingbridgeandegg or find the link below. Thank you. Welcome to another interview today with Sarah Mock, head of marketing and communication at Sylvan Aqua Farms and a freelance farmer world researcher and a writer of Farming and Other F-Words. Welcome, Sarah.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

I'm very much looking forward to this interview, but I want to start with a personal question. Actually, I'm also interested in the personal side of this. Why are you going so deep in ag and soil?

SPEAKER_01 1:43

So I actually grew up on a small family farm in Wyoming. So my roots go all the way back to the beginning. And, you know, know before i went off to college i kind of felt like i was that the world of farming and agriculture was kind of pastoral and quaint and cute and like a great place to grow up as a kid but not necessarily the kind of important work that i felt as whatever an arrogant rural kid that i felt like i was going to do in my life so

SPEAKER_00 2:08

so what was important work you wanted to do it like that

SPEAKER_01 2:11

like work for the state department i guess i went off to georgetown to study international affairs and thought like i'm gonna be a spy or yeah i don't know being a spy is a bizarrely common thread among other kids who grew up in Wyoming. I don't know if it's like some combination of like patriotism, but also worldliness and then just physical fitness, I guess. I don't genuinely don't understand where it came from, but.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

But there's like a big group of agents that are coming from that region or it's just an idea that then doesn't happen.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Yeah, not agents, just kids, high school kids who want that.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

That's interesting, but they also end up doing it like a significant percentage or... No, I

SPEAKER_01 2:52

would just say they end up like either joining the military, which is a great first step in terms of being headed in that direction, or like going to off to study like international affairs, global affairs. I live in Washington, D.C. now, and there's a surprising amount of former Wyomingites here who left the state to go abroad and spread democracy. I don't know, whatever the things that Americans say are and have ended up many of them that I know have ended up doing environmental work at the end of the day. But But yeah, so I went off to college, started learning about international affairs and basically got to a point where I was like, wow, agricultural development is such a big part of the international affairs conversation. It was so interesting to me. And it was one of the unique things that I could actually speak to that a lot of my classmates who are interested in it couldn't. That, you know, having a background in American agriculture, which is very much driving the international picture in terms of development. And I actually got the chance to go abroad for a year. I spent six months in South Africa learning about sustainable Yeah, absolutely. with American agriculture, because there are a lot and we export them all the time. And we pretend like exporting our problems is like a gift to other people.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

And

SPEAKER_01 4:31

they should be happy. And yeah. I agree. Like if you didn't grow up on a farm or if you don't have all this experience in agriculture, then there's the sense that like you can't speak. You don't have a say because you don't have the background. And one, that's like very stupid and a great way to homogenize a group and keep it very homogenous. So being able to like kind of wade back into that and start asking some of the questions around like, you know, why do we gatekeep this so bad?

SPEAKER_00 5:12

You could because you grew up on a farm. So you basically passed the gate without even trying.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yeah. Bit of a Trojan horse over here. But yeah, and just, you know, coming back, starting to ask those questions. I actually came back to the U.S. and went straight to Silicon Valley, was super interested in ag tech, saw technology and entrepreneurship as like this really impactful way to push on agriculture, which is traditionally in the United States, very relationship oriented, very conservative, very conventional. And tech seems like this place where

SPEAKER_00 5:42

you're speaking in the past. I'm hearing there's a bet coming, but

SPEAKER_01 5:45

yeah. Oh, yeah. So, you know, where money and economic opportunity were meeting these like environmental goals and this appetite for change. Spent about two years working in ag tech. So much that I loved about it. A lot of things that basically were just like, at the end of the day, I saw a lot of ag tech companies bowing under the pressure of just, you know what, like they try and have an environmental focus. They try to do a double or triple bottom line, have double or triple bottom line priorities. They try to center communities or address some kind of like justice issue. And at the just not really a market appetite for that. And when you've accepted venture funding and you need to have some big deliverables, like you abandon all that stuff and you get farmers to pay you to do stuff. And the farmers who have money to pay are the farmers who want you to help them make more money doing often conventional industrial agriculture. Or if you can't help them make more money, at least make their job a lot easier or make it possible for them to farm in even bigger ways. So my experience was that on the tech side, a lot of companies were diving in with all these high ideals and then over the course of their relatively short lifespans gave them all up and just were trying to eat the lunch of the big players that were already in agriculture which I found kind of frustrating and didn't see it as the motivator of change that I was looking for. So at the end of my time in tech I was like well how do you get paid to just ask the hard questions in agriculture? Journalism was the answer to that. I wish I had looked a little harder about how nobody makes any money in journalism.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

It's kind of your question Like how do you get paid? Like the payment part wasn't the question, but yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

So ended up at RFD TV, which is a national rural, like ag rural and ag focused TV network based in Washington, DC during like right at the beginning of the Trump administration followed for three years, you know, ag policy from a journalistic perspective, did a daily story, you know, hundreds and hundreds of daily stories on what was happening in Washington, which was a phenomenal experience and just being totally disillusioned. abused of the idea that american policy could have any impact on agriculture

SPEAKER_00 7:54

so you went from tech which doesn't have any impact from policy and and then where did you land

SPEAKER_01 8:00

yeah so i

SPEAKER_00 8:01

very depressed maybe yeah

SPEAKER_01 8:03

well i took a hard look you know actually after having some of these realizations and realizing that these places where we've put kind of our eggs in the basket of like you know if we could just get policy to change then agricultural will change or if we could just get tech to change then agricultural will change realizing that those were the I went back to the stories that I'd done and thought, you know, who is actually able to keep the ideas that they came into this with? And weirdly, right when I started reporting, I met Chris Newman at Sylvan Aqua Farms, did a story on him. And three years later, I went back to him. And the rule, basically, in like regenerative ag among farmers I knew, especially on the East Coast of the United States, was that like farmers that I met at the beginning of my time reporting, 90% of them were out of business. by the time I was freelancing. Three years, like, was a pretty good time for most of them to either have, like, dramatically changed the way they do their business, like, went from being a business to being a hobby, or just, like, left farming altogether, or had made some other big change that basically, like, they couldn't make it work, so they're gone now. And Chris Newman somehow was still around, and he was thinking about things very differently, and he was trying to make some big transitions and had come, had realized some of the same problems that I had seen. And so when I had the stories in a very different way than i had when i was full-time as a staff journalist i was like well i might as well like if i think chris newman and sylvan aqua farms is doing some revolutionary things and i think that this of all the possible solutions i've seen this seems like the most likely to succeed might as well help so came on board there and have been uh i work with them almost full-time at this point doing marketing and communications helping them grow their team troubleshoot through many different levels of scale that they're going through kind of all at once, which is nuts, but super fun. And yeah, I mean, we're really tackling, I think, some of the big questions in agriculture in fundamentally different ways than a lot of people have ever thought about it.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

And do you think, I mean, compared to all the other farmers you've seen start in those three years and didn't continue, like are there, of course, the lessons learned, but what are the key ones that are different with Chris and the team or the ones you've seen there that really didn't work? Like what are the big pain points based Yeah. So there's

SPEAKER_01 10:27

two big, especially among young regenerative, like people who come into the work for the passion of farming or for like environmental justice reasons or for like racial justice reasons, like people who come into the work for the passion of farming. If you don't own land, it's not going to work. The fundamental part of this conversation that like no one ever really wants to talk about is that fewer than two million Americans own three trillion dollars worth of farmland in the United States. And that's just like, you know, we talk a lot about the price of food and how the price of food should be higher, especially when it's high quality food like that, which was grown with sustainable or regenerative practices. But the reality is like the price only goes so high when there's a really low price alternative around like people, you know, no matter how good we see this in other spaces, too. Right. Like no matter how good your super fancy like distilled alcohol is or your super fancy restaurant is like you can have a French laundry and people will pay$250 to eat your tasting menu. But they can't do that every day. There's like a limit to how much people can possibly spend on really high priced stuff. So how farmers make money when they can't charge enough to make a living is their farmland value appreciates over time. It's a store of wealth and that like growth and wealth makes it possible. to like keep to stay in business to cover the cost of property taxes which are also insanely low for agricultural land in the United States and just like yeah even if you are breaking even every year as long as your property value grows which it always does like land values almost never drop in the United States and they've beaten the S&P 500 as a matter of fact as an investment class for most of the last 50 years yeah as long as like as long as you have that that's fine and on the other hand if you don't have that and you have to rent farmland and you're farming it regenerative That means your landlord is actually charging you twice because you are both paying a competitive land rent, which you're competing against conventional agriculture, which is my extracting the resources. And we know that regenerative agriculture is more costly in terms of right. We're internalizing the costs that conventional agriculture externalizes. So basically, like, you know, when I'm a small farmer, I'm if I was like 32 years old and I got into Virginia and I rent 10 acres and I sell at the local farmer's market. I have to charge a price that pays for my land rent and for the cost of my regenerative practices, which means I have to raise my price and ask my customers to carry the weight of double rent.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

And for the subsidies you're not getting, which is a missed opportunity cost and for many other things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

Yep. And if I can't do that, if my customers won't pay that price, then I just have to stomach it, which means basically like nobody in regenerative ag is paying themselves a living wage. No one is paying workers a living wage. And eventually that just like crushes you. You can only lose money for so long before you realize like hey i have a college degree i'm just gonna go get a job this

SPEAKER_00 13:15

is called a hobby

SPEAKER_01 13:16

yeah exactly maybe i can keep farming on the weekends or maybe i can do something or maybe my partner can get a job that can support us both and the farm but eventually i know you know probably less than five percent of small young regenerative farmers that have gotten started in the last like 10 years that i know are still farming you just can't it just the economics don't work

SPEAKER_00 13:37

of the land so the land ownership the smallness probably is a big piece of that so you said there are two things so land ownership and what was the second

SPEAKER_01 13:44

so the other thing is that is the labor challenge which is tied directly into the cost of farmland which is we just pretend like it's not there most of the time in regenerative ag is like because we expect that farmers are getting like a lifestyle bonus they just should be so chuffed to be out

SPEAKER_00 14:00

because they always have the view and they're outside

SPEAKER_01 14:03

yeah it's beautiful and that's what people want and that should be enough well guess what verizon wireless does not accept a lifestyle change for your cell phone bill, but you need a cell phone bill even just to operate your business. The problem is that we have built in this idea and we do it in other ways in regenerative ag.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

It's a business. It's interesting. You mentioned it. You call it a business, which a lot of people won't, but it's absolutely crucial to call it a business. Like this is an agriculture business and we haven't been operating it as a business.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Because it would be bankrupt a long time ago.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Exactly. And that labor question, you know, there's lots of ways we get around paying for labor, especially in regenerative. We do like lean really heavily on volunteers which is not things that businesses do you should not have to donate to a for-profit business that's just not how that works we also do like right you do a lot of farm apprenticeship programs and things like that where people get paid like a hundred dollars a month to work 12 hours a day in exchange for education there's no one regulating what it means to be like educated in regenerative ag but you know those the problem of not paying for labor and agriculture is the american agriculture history like the whole thing is just like Farmers don't pay for labor. So it's certainly not regenerative ag's problem alone, but it's not a problem that I think most regenerative farmers have taken on and tried to solve in any serious way.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

And they have to, if you want to grow this movement and take on conventional extractive input-based ag, because they don't need to make money in the normal way, in the sense of selling food, because they're not. And they just need to keep, as long as they don't go bankrupt and they keep the land, they are fine because it keeps going up in price and That's the only thing they do. And as long as they keep their head above the water, they're okay, but not high enough to actually pay themselves. And that's a difficult standard.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah. Well, and it's, and there's this really odd thing, this really odd mindset in American ag that coming from tech was hard to put my finger on at first, but once you see it, it's hard to not see it. And I, so did I have a farmer I talked to recently who farms outside of LA and farms, you know, does value added food products that he sells at farmer's markets, his whole vision of like his life and like why things have gone well for him are basically his like motto is I can't afford$15 an hour salespeople and I can't not afford$25 an hour salespeople. And it's like, yes, this is a thing we've forgotten in agriculture that when you pay people, you get better people. Like there's this idea that like all farm labor is the same and that it's all like valueless basically that you just like have to get bodies to do the work for you.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Hands. Yeah. Basically hands.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

And they're interchangeable. And if you get a robot, it's also fine. Yeah, that's the...

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Exactly. A robot's fine. Free labor's fine, right? The whole idea that like you can run your business with volunteers is insane if you think that your business is about value at all. Because value, like everyone should not be able to add the same amount of value in your business. You should be adding specific value.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

And so definitely we'll link the interview with Chris below, obviously in the show notes. You, and I'm taking you plural here, taking a very different approach to that. We've touched upon it with Chris, but I would love to, for anybody that didn't listen, because this is a massive... undertaken and also basically challenging all the things we thought about. Okay. What is a farm? What is a farming family? What is a farming operation or company actually looks like? And basically deconstructing it and designing it from the ground up again. So can you walk us through what it actually looks like ideally? And then let's talk about what it looks like now, but ideally, how would we get around a lot of these or these two main issues like labor or work in general and land ownership?

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Sure. So in the most ideal sense, it basically, those Those two problems are solutions to each other. with ownership. Like that's how you do it. Startups do this. Like this is nothing that agriculture will be like blazing a brand new trail and figuring it out all on their own, right? We have like decades and decades of, in America, you only have to be 10% employee owned to be technically employee owned, which means all startups are employee owned, which I think for a lot of people, you hear employee owned farms or communal farms and people are immediately like, oh, it won't work. It's socialism. It's, there's all these examples in history where it's broken and it's failing. And it's like, no, employee owned businesses are quite successful the world over. There's lots of good examples of employee-owned businesses.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

And owns could mean very different things, like different levels, etc. But it comes down to the essence of, I don't have a lot of cash on hand because I'm building soil, we're building businesses, etc. But I can pay you if you believe what we're doing here. Apart from that, I pay something, obviously, because you have to eat and pay your Verizon bills. But I also, you grow in wealth because of ownership.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Exactly. And that's how, you know, when I talk to farmers about, you need to hire better people. You know, one of the big things that I hear when I talk Yeah, exactly. question is right there and I think people don't want to access it and the number one reason why when I tell farmers like have you considered offering like an ownership path for your employees farmers say well how am I going to pass it on to my kids if I let my employees be owners

SPEAKER_00 20:21

if they want to be employees they can otherwise they can't

SPEAKER_01 20:23

yes

SPEAKER_00 20:24

but nobody ever says that if they are a tech entrepreneur like how am I going to pass this on to my kids like what are you talking about

SPEAKER_01 20:30

yeah could you imagine Larry Page being like well I'd love to have good engineers but I really want Google to be passed on to my children so like I How could I possibly? I

SPEAKER_00 20:38

hope they're good at coding.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

I'm sure they are because they've just been hanging around me for a while. So I'm sure they'll be great.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

They'll be great. But do you know when, I have no idea if this is a relevant question, but when that sort of concept started in tech, like that wasn't something natural, was there a period where they didn't do it and they got to the limit of that smallness and then said, okay, we just don't have the cash to pay, but we have ownership of something that might be extremely successful in the future. So let's offer that. Was there a moment somebody that came up with this idea or was it a gradual thing? Do you know at all?

SPEAKER_01 21:11

I am not the tech historian that would know the answer to that question, but I actually think, I mean, from my experience with tech companies, it starts long before like a small business is running out of money, right? Because most tech startups don't start out as small businesses. They're never like family owned. They're just, you are like a founder with a founding team maybe, and you're just going to investors and trying to raise money. And what you're selling to these investors is like a stake in your business, which means you have to have the business ownership divided up already It's

SPEAKER_00 21:37

easy to do it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Yeah, there's not a perfect comparison there for sure. But yeah, the whole idea of employee ownership in agriculture and using farmland assets and other capital assets as a way to compensate employees necessitates a deep interrogation of... Are you farming as an investment so that your kids can inherit it? Because when you're worried about inheritance, you're worried about your investment. You're not worried about your business in that moment. So is this a business or is this an investment? I think that's an important question. And I think, honestly, American agriculture would be operating entirely differently if it was treated primarily as a business and not primarily as an investment class. But I think if we're– especially when we're talking about regenerative ag, when we're talking about changing diets, when we're talking about being– more environmentally resilient. We have to be talking about farming the business, not farming the investment class. Because farming the investment class, there's just nothing. There's nothing you can do. Because it's just like maximum extraction, right? That's what an investment is, is how do I get the most cash? How do I optimize between long term, long run gain and cash today? Soil doesn't factor into that conversation. It like can't really. So if we're talking about farming as a business, then yeah, if your kid wants to become an employer, and work their way into ownership, like other employees have a chance to, then great. And then you can pass that down. I mean, other, that's not uncommon in other parts of the economy too. Law is a good example. Like, you know, if your dad was the partner at a law firm, you'll probably get a job there. You'll probably get a chance to be a partner. But are you the only person who will ever get a chance to be a partner? No.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Architects the same. Yeah. It's very, I mean, you get a huge leg up, obviously, but you still have to work. That's the, and you have to prove.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Well, and the law firm will probably die if like, No other one is considered except for you.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

And so how would that work? Because we now talk hypothetical. How would it work in, I would say, practice or how would it work in this example? Like what's needed to get that done? Obviously, you get when you share that with farming friends that the first, I mean, as soon as they respond saying, what do I give to my kids? That means they look at it as an investment, not as a business. But let's say they say, oh, that's very interesting. What should I do? What would be your answer?

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Yeah, that's a tough question because I think it looks kind of different for Because I'll talk about Silvanacqua first. Silvanacqua doesn't own any farmland. So there's not big capital assets that you can say, you know, here's, you know, our net worth.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

Is it in the plan to own it at some point or not?

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Silvanacqua is like kind of a complex and unique situation where there's like going to be a land trust and wealth created that way. I would say also there's like a mission focus that doesn't necessarily, for me, I am more interested in making a model that's kind of of flexible and that different people can accommodate to their different situations because like I hear it and we actually were just talking about this yesterday the idea that like if I own 500 acres and I don't want to farm it by myself and I don't want to run because this is the fundamental problem for a lot of small holding farmers right if you don't want to be the agronomist and the hydrologist and the accountant and the like investor relations person and the marketer and then you all of that falls to you you're a small business owner and you have to do all that stuff or you have to hire someone to do it for you and if you don't have money to hire people then you need to have partners that help you do it and that does not mean like you have to find someone and then like give them half of your business that's not the only way to do it and like you can write how startups do it is you offer shares and then people still buy in it's at usually you know a relatively low rate and they when it's startups it's also a relatively small amount of the company that is available to them but you know I think it takes a level of And business

SPEAKER_00 25:28

sophistication.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

For sure, which all of farming should require a certain level of business sophistication that it largely does not in the United States a lot of the time. But yeah, you know, I think in a lot of ways that's still being figured out in other people's operations. You know, we've been in communication with a lot of folks who are interested in this. I think it's hard. One of the other really challenging things in this space compared to, say, tech is it's really easy to split up someone else's money. between you and your partners. It's much harder to say like, this is all my capital that I brought into this relationship and I'm going to meet it out to other people. And I think because in the US, there's basically no differentiation between farm wealth and family wealth. Those are interchangeable, which is problematic, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Other businesses, that is not true. There's like a clear distinction between.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

It becomes problematic in family companies as soon as it's pretty much the same thing. And then, you know, it's a recipe for disaster.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Yes, for sure. I think this is a point that I am like always trying to make, which is just like we exceptionalize agriculture in a lot of ways and basically every way possible. But the reality is it's not significantly different from most other family businesses and its problems and its challenges and its benefits in the ways that it is regulated and unregulated. And so I think in a lot of conversations I've had with people about, you know, like, why don't you consider equity? Why don't you consider like buying your employees into your business? There's There's a lot of like, oh, well, maybe that works in other businesses, but not in agriculture. The answer to that is just always like, yes, it does work in agriculture. There's no reason it wouldn't work in agriculture.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Yeah, it's a bit of the same discussion of many farmers. Like, ah, but yeah, he or she is doing, I don't know, holistic grazing or completely different ways of farming. That would never work here because it's a different climate. No, it's not. Like, it's a neighbor. Like, if it works on the other side of the fence, it also works for you. If you want to, if you want to explore, you could do differently, et cetera. But it doesn't mean, like, it's not unique. It's very difficult to find a unique situation.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

Exactly. And there's so much pushback around like, well, you know, this has been in my family all this time. This is my heritage. This is my legacy. Everyone's family business is their legacy. Everyone's family business is their heritage.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

And I know many people that sold it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Yeah. And like, guess what? If we were still paying all the cobblers in America, all the descendants of cobblers just to cobble because like their parents and grandparents did it. And like, that's the thing that we like believe they should do. We would be in a very weird situation. So let's like walk away from all the our And it is a different sector for at

SPEAKER_00 28:18

least the environmental destruction and the environmental opportunity. Like it's so. big in terms of simple acreage, et cetera. Like it does affect all of us. Like if you run your bicycle shop or a bicycle company in another amazing way, it does affect all of us as well. But if you run your large, large farm estate in a very destructive way, it affects everyone around you. Plus everybody far away because of climate change, et cetera. So it is all of our problem quite dramatically. And you kind of say, it is my land, so I do whatever I want, which currently is because it does affect. And at some point will come, like at some point there will be enough regulation to push you and it's not going to stop at the gate. Like you cannot keep this out. It's sort of, sort of all of our problem.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

Yeah. And which is all such good points and why it's so frustrating to see the absolute lack of environmental regulation on American farms, because it's okay. The environmental working group can basically show point source, like nitrogen runoff, a phosphorus runoff from farms directly. So even the argument that like, we can't tell which farm it came from. So how could we possibly regulate them is there's nothing left. We know, we know that the, like the hypoxia in the Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

As

SPEAKER_01 30:10

a matter of fact, the Gulf Hypoxia Task Force met in 2007 and made the goal to reduce runoff to the Gulf by 50% by 2015. In 2015, they re-evaluated and found that they had actually increased runoff by 20%. So they're actively moving in the wrong direction. Payments directly to farmers have gone up over that time period, resulting in$46 billion in direct payments last year that overwhelmingly went to the top 1% of farmers, which for me is a very discouraging part of this whole conversation about how can companies get in on paying farmers to do more regenerative practices sorry we've already paid we've already like sunk a lot of money into these farms like taxpayers at this point it's hard to say how they are not the number one investors investors in businesses get a say they get to tell you how to do your job by definition like when you're an entrepreneur and you've taken investment money you have a boss now you're investors and that is just like never part of this conversation it's always about how farmers are in a bad situation and how they don't have the resources they need to do better and that is just not true and that's I think a very frustrating part of this whole thing and it comes from this idea of like right that these are farm families and they're just they're just individuals like trying to do what's best for their land and trying to perpetuate their legacy but the reality is farms are businesses which is okay it's fine for farms to be businesses that's always what they've been

SPEAKER_00 31:37

but let's treat them as businesses

SPEAKER_01 31:39

exactly we have to treat them as businesses. Putting family in front of the word farm does not mean that it's not profit-seeking. It has to be profit-seeking.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

But they're so cute on the pictures of the products I buy. I mean, it's fascinating. I'll link the article below. You picked a fight with the carbon credit peoples. I think you got a lot of response to that recently. Let's see when this interview comes out, but it's for sure you picked a fight with somebody else before that. But the image of the struggling American and I think we can actually take that to many other continents, a family farm that is really, we should really pity. And the truth is, and if you look here in Europe on the direct payments, go to the top one or 2% of the farmers that absolutely don't need it and are by far the most destructive farmers we can possibly find and are really not the people you want to pay. And we're not getting results by the way for paying. And yeah, it's a mind boggling and it grew out of sort of, I wouldn't say necessity, but it didn't, nobody designed the system to do that, but it's somehow over the last 30 40 50 years depending on where you start it grew that way and we completely distorted anything and you get paid for plowing and you get paid for many other things that let's say are not growing food definitely not nutrient dense but not even food in general and that's it's pretty distorted but it's interesting like this is a depressing picture but do you see is something changing is something are we getting to a breaking point of all of this or are we going to see that in our lifetime what do you think

SPEAKER_01 33:07

I can only speak to the US I'm very hyper focused for better or worse, but I think between the massive amount of payments that farmers got during the Trump administration, north of$100 billion in direct payments, and the fact that we just spent 13 months, and we'll likely spend 6 or 8 or 10 more months being in this pandemic, which has impoverished people, left tens of millions of Americans hungry. We completely botched any food aid. We continue the most recent coronavirus aid bill that's going through. Congress has more payments for farmers, more flexibility for them. We know that paying farmers does not contribute to food security. We know that farm prices are way up. International commodity prices are at 10-year highs right now, and they're still going to get more payments. I think what happened in America's meatpacking plants, unfortunately, since literally The Jungle was written 100 years ago, we've never cared about meatpacking workers. We only care about food safety, but that's a whole other question. And it's absolutely in the United States about racism and where we think that, like, the right place for immigrants is. But I think that there is a opportunity in this moment to say.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

Enough.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Yeah. For people to say like, hey, I'm done paying farmers. They're not doing the right thing. You know, I think the farmer I talked about in that article is getting paid for planting cover crops. Cover crops is not enough. First of all, you can already get paid for it in the state of Maryland where he farms. You can already get paid for it by the USDA. And he literally said in another article, not the main article where he talked about getting the money but in another article that it has been a net benefit for his business just by existing because it's limited the amount of passes he has to make in the field so he's saving on diesel he's saving on right he would have done this anyway that's not what we're supposed to be paying for and basically what we're rewarding at this point is holdouts we're telling farmers the longer you hold out the more we'll pay the longer you hold someone made this analogy to me the other day it's literally like farmers are standing in their yard with a chainsaw in their hands saying, if you don't pay me, I'll cut this tree down.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

And we're saying, please keep the engine running, but don't touch the tree yet. Yeah. And we're putting diesel or petrol in the machine just to continue running.

SPEAKER_01 35:20

And we're just letting it happen. Instead of just saying, like, you know, putting a fence around the tree or taking away the chainsaw, we're just saying like, okay, okay, don't worry, we'll pay. We'll pay. And it's like, no, no, we already paid. Like, this is over. We're not doing this anymore. And, you know, I think I was actually just reading a fascinating part of the end of the myth. Greg Grandin's book that he published last year and won a Pulitzer for, he talks about basically during the New Deal in the United States that New Deal Democrats in particular like had gone to Mexico, spent a lot of time with the Mexican government at a time when the Mexican government was doing massive land reform and how many benefits that the Mexican government saw and the Mexican people saw and also how much like FDR is basically like administration, including people at the USDA were excited about about like, oh, we see how many of our issues in the United States are tied directly to the fact that like way too few people own way too much land. And that's the thing. And like, I talk about this quite a bit in the book, but like that owning too much land is what causes labor exploitation. Like if you own too much land and you can't monetize it, then you have to get labor for free to work it. There's no other way. And that like, you know, it led to chattel slavery. It led to the Procero program. It led to, you know, Japanese and Asian American racism in California. It led to today's like modern immigration system. The evidence is everywhere in American agriculture that we have too much land in too few hands that can't afford to work it. And so we like abuse labor to get it done. And all we do is further concentrate the land in fewer and fewer hands. And at the end of all of that, we get sad that farmers are so old and that young farmers can't find a way back to the land. But of course they can't. Saying why don't more farmers own farmland, young farmers own farmland is like saying why don't more young people have trust funds?

SPEAKER_00 37:12

You need money to begin with. So how does that go into Sylvan Aqua? As you mentioned before, you don't own the land, you're farming and you don't own the land in the future, there will be a land trust, etc. How does that work on fixing that land ownership issue or partly fixing it or at least make a step in the right direction? What's the thinking and more importantly, actually the doing there?

SPEAKER_01 37:31

Yeah, so two different things are happening. So on the one hand, we are very lucky, Chris Newman built this amazing business, which, you know, I think, in Sylvan Aqua's case, the brand Brand alone has a lot of value. Again, another thing that a lot of farms don't think about very thoughtfully is that like, yes, when you build a successful business, things besides just your tractor and your acres have value.

SPEAKER_00 37:52

Like the Instagram account. Yeah. And the Goodwill and the sales and actually having clients and that whole infrastructure.

SPEAKER_01 37:59

Exactly. The sales channels, all of that stuff has value. So we are at this moment, even though we don't have land and even though we can't do the thing of like, yeah, everyone gets some land. So So that we all, even when, you know, our paychecks aren't very big, at least we know we're growing long-term wealth. We don't have that opportunity, but we do, we are growing a business, a real business that has real value. And every person at Solven Aqua has a path to ownership. I am personally on a path to, a path to partnership. So not like exclusive ownership, but I'm on a path to partnership, which is really exciting for me.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Coming from journalism where that's not the case.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Never the case.

SPEAKER_00 38:32

Or you start a paid, I mean, book, obviously, but it really has to go well to make any sense. And, or the subs world of this, the premium, et cetera. But yeah, I think ownership in a farming business and a food business is more interesting.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

Oh, for sure. Not to mention that it's just, it's a team and working with a good team is never something to be taken for granted because it's rare. So that's how we're dealing with ownership and partnership on our end. And then in addition to, so that's within Sylvan Aqua Farms, which is kind of the central umbrella of the organization. And then within the system, there's networked farms. So we have right now 40 Acres Community Ranch and Choptico Farm. which are both separate businesses with their own owners owned by Fortier Community Ranch is black owned and run right now. And Choptico is a like a vegetable produce operation that is currently owned and operated by this really cool group of people. So there's basically those two ways you can either join Sylvan Aqua as like a part of one of the businesses and work your way into ownership of that business. Or you could join as a business and just kind of get plugged into the network. And we have some standards around what that means, what that looks like in terms of both environmental stewardship and economic interrelation with the other businesses in the organization. The land trust element of this and how we get the land ownership piece is a little bit further down the line for us right now. We're actually in the market, the non-profit part of what we do, which is called Something Else Society, is going to have a land trust, going to hold some land in common that we can then distribute leases for our farms, the farms in the system.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

Yeah, because you don't want to be the one, like a lot of people are leasing. You're building a lot of, first of all, you're building a business, you're building soil, you're rebuilding a lot of things that somebody else extracted, and then you're kicked off the land and you have to move somewhere else, which is painful, but also just very, very destructive. And you don't want that.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

Yes, totally. So we are, that organization will buy farmland and rent out to, you know, do like 99 year leases with organizations in the network, which is great. One way to do, and you know, we're taking our cues in particular from people like the Hutterites in the Dakotas in Montana here in the United States, which have basically, you know, by doing many of the things that we are doing, which is like farming communally, paying people well, acting like businesses instead of small family independent farms that are really about transferring land wealth. They have just out-competed all other land buyers in their area. Like they just, it doesn't matter if they want land, they show up to an auction and they just like, they just can beat every bid for land they want. And for us, you know, Sylvanak was based in the Chesapeake Bay this is our food shed this is our watershed like we care about this land a ton and we just want to owner control and be able to have an influence over as much of this land as possible whether that means by buying it whether that means by leasing it or by doing a third thing which is called farming as a service which is where we help people do landscape management basically we do like indigenous landscape management for private landowners usually like you know people who own like estates or big pieces of property that they would like not like move manages natural systems for hunting or fishing or outdoor recreation, whatever that looks like.

SPEAKER_00 41:43

Basically to influence as much as possible whenever you can buy and bring it into the commons, you do. And as you have a very, very long-term view anyway, like pieces will come on the market at some point or will be, I wouldn't say donated, but for lower prices as you've been working with some of these estates over the years. I mean, that will happen. I have to think of a story once, I think from a museum that was looking at a piece for a long, long time to buy it and basically said, yeah, we're in this business for centuries and anyway so at some point it will come like we'll know exactly could take 40 years could take 50 it doesn't really matter we're in this watershed for 100 years at some point we'll control or at least influence most of it and we're not tied to one piece yes or one piece no it doesn't really it doesn't really matter that's interesting

SPEAKER_01 42:24

exactly and so to like the indigenous ethic that informs you know this comes from chris newman and also other indigenous people on our team yeah i mean agriculture in its added its essence like operates at the landscape level nature doesn't care where your property line is so when we're talking about, you know, our ethic, it doesn't make sense to say, you know, we're just going to buy this 70 acres and we're going to take really good care of it. And like, by golly, I hope everyone else does too.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

I've knew it's not going to happen.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

Yeah. The right way to think about it. Yeah. That's it doesn't. Yeah. You know, water that's been polluted, air that's been polluted, soil, invasive species, like those things do not stop at your property line. So we know that if we want to rejuvenate the ecosystem around here, if we want to feed our communities, in a culturally relevant way that it cannot be small. We have to operate at scale. And so, yeah, we're not afraid to one, realize that like we need hundreds of employees and we need to compensate them in basically whatever way that they need to be compensated in. We need to support lots of different kinds of businesses run in lots of different ways. It's truly a system. It's truly decentralized and it's still very much being built.

SPEAKER_00 43:31

That's what makes it exciting. I mean, it's interesting to go to Mondragon in Basque country, et cetera, where it's still being built as well, but it feels much more exciting. established with, I don't know how many banks they have in universities and one of the biggest corporatives in the world. But this is like those guys 40, 50, 60 years ago, which is potentially, I mean, we still don't know, but it's very interesting to see that birth of a lot of these things.

SPEAKER_01 43:53

Yeah, hopefully. I mean, yeah. And we're, you know, one of our priorities is very much just like transparency and communication. We spend a lot of time talking on social media and elsewhere about what we're doing and just trying to get people excited, get people involved and yeah, trying to push back on some of these ideas around you know I'm sure that's something that Chris talked with you about was just so many good intentioned people out in the world who are just like oh like let me come by the farm let me volunteer let me do whatever I can and just like trying to change the conversation around that of like we're a business and we don't actually want or need volunteers because that's not how our business runs but like we appreciate it we like love fans and we'd like love for you to buy our product and like figure out what it means what products we can carry for you to buy them it's just we've really trained people, especially people who are really mindful about the environment or really care about regenerative food. I like to think of us, I'm definitely part of this, the like omnivorous dilemma generation of people who were awakened by those kinds of writings.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

The training you got out of that is like volunteer farms, shop at the farmer's market, pay attention to farms, like basically like what cater to their needs. And so we're trying to do a little bit of retraining around like, Hey, it's okay for you to tell us what you want. We're a business. We're going to respond to your needs as a customer.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

Either be a customer, invest or come work with us. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:16

Exactly. But you don't need to like volunteer. You don't need to.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

Be sorry to ask a question. Yeah. Yeah. And so let's shift gears a bit because I'm going to be cautious of your time. I think we can talk for hours, but you wrote a book. You just sent it in last week. We're talking beginning of March. It's going to come out the 21st of April, the first one, the second one in December. What's the book about farming and other efforts, which by the way, is an amazing title. But what's the essence of why should people pre-order in a couple of weeks when the pre-orders go up?

SPEAKER_01 45:45

Sure. The subtitle is The Rise and Fall of Small Family Farms. So I will say it is about my journey of... You know, the book spans several years. I started writing it in about 2015, 16. You'll meet Chris Newman on his very first farm outside of Charlottesville, VA. And then, you know, journey across, you'll meet old farms, new farms, big farms, small farms. I promise it's not a Dr. Seuss book. I'm realizing just now that that's what it sounds

SPEAKER_00 46:14

like. Don't worry. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:15

And basically, I just, you know, I look at all of these questions, so many of the questions that we've talked about here really closely. I think I, at different points in this journey, really came to a lot of the questions I had and kept coming back around to centered around exploitation. And I think there's so much exploitation in agriculture, exploitation of natural systems, of farmers themselves and their families, of workers, obviously, for obvious reasons, of the animals and plants involved in agriculture. And just looking, you know, We have this idea of what a good farm is. This idea of like the good farm is very central to the book of just like, you know, if I told you we're fighting for small family farms and you said, yeah, you're thinking of a very specific farm. You're thinking of like a, you know, maybe a few dozen to a few hundred acres owned and operated by a family where the family contributes all their labor and like, you know, earns not an excessive income, but you know, a stable income. They have a very centered focus on the community and feeding people local to them. They're the original environmentalists. They're very mindful about the way that what they do might impact future generations. They're super hardworking. They have this incredible land ethic. They wake up really early, you know, down to like their kids play in the hayloft and they drive the tractor. I

SPEAKER_00 47:30

feel there's a but coming.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

Well, so basically like the point of this book, like what I was doing is just like, can I find that farm? Yeah. Like how close do we get? And in what ways do the farms that actually exist in the world fall short? And there's a lot of data in there. There's a lot of interesting kind of examination of what's available from USDA, where the USDA falls short in counting farms, which is like a whole other thing. You know, who gets money? Who are we helping when we like go to Farm Aid or when we donate to nonprofits or when we go to the farmer's market even? I tell, I'll spoiler alert for the first chapter, so it's not that big of a spoiler, but I talked to a farmer I know in the Pacific Northwest who has been doing like a market garden, 15 acres of market garden for 25 years You know, came on at the very birth outside of Seattle at the very birth of kind of the food movement, was producing over 200 vegetables regeneratively and sustainably by the time that she, you know, spoiler alert, quit farming. And it was basically like, you know, the most interesting tidbit that she told me was that when she first announced that she was going to quit farming, the number of people who came to her and or sent her an email or something to say like, oh, I'm going to be so sad to not see you at the farmer's market. She hadn't been to the farmer's market in six years. So just like this whole whole idea of like, you know, all of these things that we learned being children of the omnivorous dilemma of like, you know, go to the farmer's market, get to know your farmer, ask a farmer when you have a question, like there's those ideas that we strive for. And then there's what's actually happening. And I think that kind of the point of this book is to just try and understand, you know, we have our ideals and we have in a lot of spaces in agriculture, we let the nebulousness of the ideal stand as just like, you know, this is how when you hear someone from the Farm Bureau say, like, we need to do whatever it takes to defend small family farms, and then somehow you hear someone from, like, the environmental community agree with them, and you're like, oh, they must be on the same page. And just, like, how much ambiguity there is in the middle of, you know, what exactly do different people mean by a good farm, and what does that mean for people who think that there's problems with the food system, people who think there's a problem with the farming system, and, like, basically where we go from here. And that's what Farm and Other F-Words is about, is Basically, you know, is the small family farm really the unit of agriculture that makes the most sense if we're talking about a hotter, drier future where we need to feed more people better? I

SPEAKER_00 49:54

have a feeling it's not.

SPEAKER_01 49:57

Deeper book spoiler, I will say, is just like, you know what? Only in America, really, or in America and Europe, do we think that small family farms were ever like the peak of human existence. It's not common in the rest of the world that we like all strive to retire to a farm one day most people in the world don't do that

SPEAKER_00 50:16

no

SPEAKER_01 50:17

and then the second book is like the second part of that it doesn't have a title yet i'm working title is like big team farms it's basically a playbook of i've called it like the lean startup of farming where it's just like how to what are big team farms where do they exist right now how are they working what are their challenges what are their solutions etc

SPEAKER_00 50:36

it'll be super interesting and now i would love to end with a few questions i always like to ask and to start with one i mean You mentioned, let's not see farming as an investment, but let's say you somehow magically tomorrow morning are in charge of a$1 billion or any large amount because it doesn't have to be$1 billion investment portfolio and obviously charged. And okay, how do we make farming regeneratively, but actually regenerative to the core, meaning including everything, not just soil. What would you focus on? What would you invest or how would you put this money to work? How would you prioritize? That's mostly why I asked this question.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

Yeah, that is tough. And if it wasn't just, I mean, if the main priority is regenerative agriculture is like environmental outcomes.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

No, I would say regeneration in general. Like this is much, I see usually ag as a nice Trojan horse to get into a lot of other conversations on inequality, access, health, very wide health, not just physical health, et cetera, et cetera. So if you literally, you have the freedom to invest it, whatever you want. Could all be an ag tech if you really want to, but.

SPEAKER_01 51:41

Oh yeah, no, no, no, definitely not. Well, I guess the other question is like, what is my timescale for having a return on this money? But.

SPEAKER_00 51:48

So it has to come back at some point. The return could be zero or very low and it could be very, very long. So you actually have the freedom and space to do 99 year things if you want to. Okay. It's not a 10 year fund, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 52:01

Okay, great. Because that would make a difference. You know, I think you could do something really interesting with like partnering with, I would love to get, I mean, We talk about indigenous leadership and regenerative ag a lot. I think you could partner with, with a billion dollars, you could partner with a tribe and buy a significant amount of land back. And just like, you know, I think the impact that that kind of experiment would have just on people seeing what's possible. We talk a lot about, you know, indigenous communities protect the vast majority of remaining wildlands in the world.

SPEAKER_00 52:32

And biodiversity, while only owning a very small percentage.

SPEAKER_01 52:36

Yeah, seed keeping and like advanced seed breeding so much of that that is being discovered right now is actually indigenous knowledge that has been captured or recaptured or repurposed or their role is often erased. Yeah, absolutely. built this really amazing skill of operating in the world despite that. Operating with fewer resources, operating, you know, on the margins of communities.

SPEAKER_00 53:31

And fixing stuff and getting stuff.

SPEAKER_01 53:33

Yeah. And that's the thing is like, I think a billion dollars given to a tech company would be a lot more wastefully spent than a billion dollars given to an indigenous community.

SPEAKER_00 53:41

And get out of the way. Probably that's the best.

SPEAKER_01 53:43

Oh, yeah. And then make sure that you use, I mean, maybe you spend some amount of that money making sure people get out of the way. But yeah, I think, you know, if you could buy back the other half of Oklahoma and just giving it to local tribes there. If you can buy a lot of North Carolina for a billion dollars, it sounds insane to say that, but I think it's true. And, you know, offering more empowerment to like the Lumbee tribe or something like that, the Gullah Geechee in the coastal Carolinas, you could buy not a lot of beachfront for a billion dollars, but you could buy a lot of like coastal upland that you could do some awesome regenerative ag stuff with. And then I think, yeah, so much of what we've accepted as part And I think carbon markets are in the same place of, you know, we farmers, especially big conventional farmers, sat out of climate discussions and were active climate deniers for decades, decades and decades. And the minute they walk into the conversation and decide to participate, we let them be in charge. What? What is that instinct? Like what? And we know where the instinct comes from, right? From like all of us being trained to like ask a farmer and who can make rules for farmers except farmers. We have to let farmers do it. Would we say the same for an oil executive? like would we let the oil industry run their own regulation or

SPEAKER_00 54:56

we do a bit but yeah but we at least we know yeah

SPEAKER_01 54:59

we don't feel

SPEAKER_00 55:00

good about it

SPEAKER_01 55:01

we aren't saying like yes we're doing this right because like we're letting

SPEAKER_00 55:04

look at this round table

SPEAKER_01 55:06

yeah yeah i think we serve up right so many of the possible solutions that we've taken off the table in agriculture whether it's like communal farming whether it's changes in the way that we that land is available and like tax credits work for land ownership and doing you know like letting indigenous leadership i get that pushback all the time, which again is blatant racism of like, when I plug indigenous agriculture, people are like, we can't go back to being hunters and gatherers. Well, one, you're an idiot. Native Americans were not hunters and gatherers. They were advanced agriculturalists. They created corn, which is literally so advanced. We don't understand how it works. Like we don't understand how it evolved.

SPEAKER_00 55:40

And they managed incredible landscapes at a size that we can only dream about.

SPEAKER_01 55:45

Yeah. There are places in Mesoamerica where they have grown corn and other highly extractive crops for 4,000 years continuously. There's no place else on earth that can like make that claim, that can say we were such advanced agriculturalists that we were able to continuously crop this area over and over again for not a generation, not three generations or five generations, 4,000 years. So the idea that people are like indigenous people, you know, don't have the capacity or don't have the skills or don't have the abilities to be leaders in this is one, just like revisionist history, it's all It also is just like something that we've accepted as, you know, oh, well, white people own all the land. So I guess white people have to be the solution and have to be the people who choose what's next. And that is just if anyone has a claim to being a successful long term agriculturalist in the Americas, it goes indigenous people and then black people and then Asian people. And then literally white people have never been good at it. We've never done it successfully for a long period of time. We've spent the last like two to four hundred years.

SPEAKER_00 56:51

Extracting.

SPEAKER_01 56:53

Yeah, advancing technology to lengthen the time period that extraction can continue.

SPEAKER_00 56:58

To slow down, yeah. And so would you spend some of it on lobbying, like on the policy side of things? You could call it an investment, that's a separate discussion, but would you bring some of it, let's say, home to where you're now in Washington and try to take on the tax part, take on all of the other things?

SPEAKER_01 57:15

Yeah, so I don't think I could argue that there would be an investment or a return on investment for that, but If your return is just like more regenerative act, yes, totally. tax credit so that unfortunately would have to be state by state to deal with and there is a lot of strong advocates against it basically because the argument is like if you don't have a tag land tax exemption then it'll all just get developed immediately which is just blatantly not true but also there is like some weird development pressure there so you'd have to have a thoughtful strategy around doing that that I don't know if anyone has tried to put together basically because nobody likes to make rich people mad in America and then on the other hand I think there is some very easy like i am shocked that there hasn't been more coordination around there are so many common parties who could push against the way that our ag subsidy system currently works from like you know like food hunger people hunger advocates they should be getting the money that's going to farmers if like the point of the farm bill is to make sure americans don't starve to death then farmers should not be getting that money food banks should be getting them probably or we should just regulate companies to pay a living wage would be another option but we don't want to do that either. You know, like the far super capitalist purists hate the farm bill because it's all subsidization and market distorting, which like, great, I'll take an ally where you can get one. Environmentalists, obviously, we've very unfortunately seen a lot of environmental groups in the US like just get on board with conventional ag and just say like, we'd rather work with them than not work with them.

SPEAKER_00 59:16

Just sort of the impact investing argument of let's not divest from some of the impact, I'm not saying, but let's not divest from fossil fuel companies because we can have a dialogue. And I think there are very strong arguments that that doesn't work, even though you proxy vote and all of that. I mean, they don't really care. And divest is starting to scare them. Or the new businesses around renewable energies are starting to scare them more. So I think let's focus our energy on the new businesses instead of trying to transform an old one anyway.

SPEAKER_01 59:42

Yeah. And I think the easiest place, the easiest inroad to address what's going on in agriculture and to change the policy is just around the basic farm bill risk management payments. Yeah, right. Because I think people don't understand that between subsidized crop insurance and revenue protection risk management programs, you're insured against both bad weather and bad prices. Those two things are inverses. When there's bad weather, there's good prices because there's not a lot of stuff. And when there's bad weather, there's good prices because there is a lot of stuff. So when you're insured against every eventuality, that's not insurance anymore. It's guaranteed basic income. If we're going to have a guaranteed basic income for anyone in america is it going to be for the two million people who own three trillion dollars worth of land i think there's like a real conversation that could be had there that like is not very controversial that's just like hey do we want to give rich people these direct payments or would we like that money to go literally anywhere else or at the very least could we attach should there be some strings attached to getting this money like rather than paying farmers for conservation practices you have to do conservation practices to get this money

SPEAKER_00 1:00:49

to get anything

SPEAKER_01 1:00:50

yeah and one other quick thing which I think is super hopeful to me and really interesting is that there actually are some really interesting ag law folks in the United States who are looking really hard at basically doing something that looks like tenant laws in farmland in the United States. So like I live in an apartment building. The apartment owner is not allowed to rent me an apartment that's not fit to live in. It has to have running water. It has to have like a toilet and a shower. And it has to like not give me cancer or like the roof is not allowed to fall in on me. There's lots of arguments in agriculture that you can't possibly regulate the quality of farmland. But because then no one would buy it, I guess is the argument. Because like if it's not a perfect money making investment, then like people won't be interested. The thing is,

SPEAKER_00 1:01:35

in real estate, it works like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:37

Yeah, exactly. Like I live in Washington, DC. And it's not hard to see that people are clearly making money off of renting apartments. And so I don't actually think that's a good argument. And there's people who are working on the idea of having a required minimum quality for farmland to be able to rent it. And actually, we also do that for ownership, right? A of repossession by like the government or something. So the idea that there is legal things happening to say you can't just degrade your land into oblivion. Like there is actually requirements. Your land is part of a system that is part of a public system that we pay for as a country and hold collectively at some level. So yeah, no, you can't just like burn it all down. You're not free to do that. We don't live in a society where that's okay. So holding people to, you know, that would fundamentally transform what it means to be a tenant farmer because then yeah you wouldn't be paying for improving your landlord's property your landlord would pay you for that like my building employs a guy who does maintenance in the building that doesn't make this apartment building not work financially it actually helps it work much better so you know the idea that we would have actual maintenance happening on farmland improve the quality actually invest in like the professional skill of farming and farmland you know maintenance i think there's other ways besides just changing farm bill policy to do that. I think there's potentially legal routes. I think however much I'm a deeply impatient person and impassionate about that future, I think it's probably pretty far off.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

So we took away your fund, unfortunately, but you have a magic wand. You can change one thing in the ag and food system. What would that be or industry or whatever you want to call it?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:22

No question. Enforce all the existing laws because we basically don't. We basically don't enforce any environmental laws on farms. We basically enforce like almost no labor laws on farms. If there was just a serious enforcement mechanism for, I mean, right, I don't know a farmer who hasn't sprayed a pesticide off label. That's illegal to do, but they just don't care. No one enforces it. No one ever checks. You know, at this point, I don't know a farmer who thinks that the organic certification is enforced. I just talked to a farmer who just got his organic certification renewed not too long ago. It was literally just like a guy drove onto his farm, handed him his certificate through the truck window and drove away. Right. Like that's organic certification. So just like any oversight, you know, give enforcement to EPA to regulate pollution, give enforcement to the Department of Labor to regulate how workers are treated, how workers are housed, how workers are paid, remove all the exemptions from small family farms and just say like you're a business and we have expectations for how businesses treat public resources, customers and employees. And now you're going to start acting like it. I think that would be true. transformative

SPEAKER_00 1:04:32

act like a business I want to thank you so much there for your time we have a lot more to discuss but it will be another one I'm very much looking forward to the book or the books actually and to obviously your work with the team at Sylvan Aqua and to follow to follow your journey and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast

SPEAKER_01 1:04:49

yeah thanks so much for having me this was super fun can't wait to be back

SPEAKER_00 1:04:54

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