118 Anastasia Volkova on how to monitor whole landscapes and watersheds from space

With Anastasia Volkova, CEO of Regrow, we discuss remote sensing and how their digital platform combines agronomy and scenario planning with monitoring, reporting, and verification.

-----------------------------------------------------

Join our Gumroad community, discover the tiers and benefits on www.gumroad.com/investinginregenag.
Other ways to support our work:
- Share the podcast
- Give a 5-star rating
- Or buy us a coffee… or a meal!
www.Ko-fi.com/regenerativeagriculture.

------------------------------------------------------
With Anastasia Volkova we kick off our new series about the technologies needed to bring regeneration to a landscape scale. The Landscape Tech series is supported by the Grantham Environmental Trust, which supports strategic communications and collaboration in solving the world’s most pressing environmental problems. More at granthamfoundation.org

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/anastasia-volkova.

Find our video course here:
https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/course/

-----------------------------------------------------------

For feedback, ideas, suggestions please contact us through Twitter @KoenvanSeijen, or get in touch through the website www.investinginregenerativeagriculture.com.

Join our newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P.

The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Support the show

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is already possible with remote sensing and what isn't? For example, you can currently monitor the farming practices and approaches of the whole Midwest of the United States and see where regenerative agriculture is spreading faster and slower and do something about it. Tempering climate change, bringing back rivers, preventing floods, and obviously lots and lots of nutrient-dense food. The promises of RegenEgg often sound straight out of a science fiction book. And for these promises to be met, we need to significantly scale regeneration to a landscape scale within this decade. Welcome to a new series where we look into the technologies needed to bring regeneration to a landscape scale. In this series, we'll look at already existing technologies, digital tech, ag tech, new financing, And we'll ask the question, what is missing? What needs to be urgently developed over the next years? We're very happy with the support for this series by the Grantham Environmental Trust, which supports strategic communications and collaboration in solving the world's most pressing environmental problems. You can find out more at grantham.org. at grantemfoundation.org. In March last year, we launched our membership community. 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 investing region egg or find the link below. Thank you. Welcome to another conversation, today with Anastasia Volkova, CEO of Regrow, unlocking the profit potential of resilient agriculture. Agriculture has the power to reverse climate change, as we all know. Regrow combines the industry-leading expertise of Florosat and Dagam to drive resilient agriculture adoption across the supply chain. Their digital platform combines agronomy and scenario planning for monitoring, reporting, and verification. Welcome, Anastasia.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Thank you so much, Koen, for having me.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

And to start with a personal question, how did you end up working on technology and, most importantly, on soil?

SPEAKER_01 2:22

I don't have a straight answer for you.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Take the long answer.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

I've meandered to get here. As a remote sensing engineer, I wanted to work on something that did help our planet. That was definitely one of the goals that I had. And I grew up in a very agricultural country in Ukraine and then studied in Poland, France and Australia. They're all agricultural countries. So I had the pattern there of being able to see how agriculture is done. I'm a huge foodie. And so I'm seriously interested where the food comes from, even as a remote sensing engineer. And then due During my PhD, I've effectively discovered that the technologies I was working on with some of the satellite monitoring and other remote sensing could be used easily in agriculture with very little adaptation. And I started digging to understand why aren't they being used. And so we focused for the four years of FloraSat, pre-recent merger with Dagon, on crop sensing. So something that you could do from space with satellites plus agronomic modeling. You can see the crops. You can see when things go wrong. You can also use the information that is a little bit predictive because the sensors on satellites see it earlier than we do with our naked eyes. So this is something that's given an important edge to the farmer in terms of being able to respond. But then ultimately, we understood that shifting the focus to soil health is more of a long-term game, which is very important. And going from a crop which is pretty annual sometimes it is a perennial but it's still an exercise of inputs and outputs soil health is like a bank you're building across a longer time frame and when we met Dagan and understood their technologies around soil modeling we understood that this is where the diamonds are in the soil this is the holy grail

SPEAKER_00 4:18

and so walk us through the so because you mentioned a lot of obviously relatively technical terms so in the Florisat times soil So crop sensing, using satellite imaging, but also obviously more than we can see with the naked eye. You already mentioned that. Satellites see a lot more than we can see. And basically, me as a farmer, I would be having a good overview of my annuals in many cases and seeing where things are on a regular basis going either well or not so well. And I could act. There was a management decision there to be made. Like, okay, I need to focus on that piece of the parcel or that piece of my land because something... Like the system is warning me like something is going to happen there or is already happening, even if you don't see it yet.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

That's a great summary. That's exactly what it does. And we have automated the manual tasks out of it. So you don't need to look at the imagery or look at the information and see how the weather correlates with the imagery. We do have agronomic models that look at both of those things and tell you this should be the growth stage. If you're not seeing that growth stage, maybe something's going not so well. If we're predicting at later growth stage but we're seeing a earlier growth stage also an indication and some deficiency and we do raise alerts around certain areas of the fields where things seem to not be going so well even in most subtle way that you won't be able to see this is also critically important because this is where usually the disease and pests come from

SPEAKER_00 5:48

and it works in any climate weather clouds non-clouds and regularly because that's of course it can change from week to week and from almost day to day like how often I'm a farmer somewhere with this plant monitoring and then we get to the soil park because that's where the rest of the exciting stuff starts but it works very regularly or is it how does that how up to date is it and how difficult it is to get that consistently because that seems to be for me from a non-technical perspective tricky but how often does the satellite pass over basically?

SPEAKER_01 6:20

A couple of times a week or at least once a week twice a week depending on where you are. There are satellites that pass over those fields every day now as well. This is the additional kind of commercial satellite that we could add to the service depending on where the farmers are at and how much data do they need, do their crops need, because some crops grow a lot faster than other crops and you have shorter windows of making decisions. We are still combating clouds as everyone in the industry of using satellite data, but luckily you can use radar satellites to get through clouds. So not only you have cameras, but also you have radars that are looking through the clouds that you can interpret the response of that radar satellite and be able to combine it with your optical information to then say, well, here's a consistent picture. Because we know that the crops are the highest in areas where it rains a lot. If it rains a lot, it's very cloudy. And this is the part and parcel of remote sensing constantly seeing, peering through the clouds and trying to understand how the picture completes what we've seen before the clouds came.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

And so you realize that this plant monitoring was already possible a number of years ago. And then do you remember when the, of course, when you merged with Dagan, et cetera, but when did you start to be interested or maybe you always were interested in the soil piece? So what happens underneath the plants or the annuals and the perennials or what happens on the ground? Do you remember when when that got triggered or was it over time?

SPEAKER_01 7:59

Yes, I would say there was a specific moment. When we were growing Fluorescent, I definitely was adamant and still am about remote sensing not being a solution to all problems. And I believe that process models, so the ability to simulate the entire plant growth, including what's happening in the soil, is going to be that edge that will give our technology the ability to scale globally. Because from remote sensing perspective, you can see what's happening, but you need to understand the reasons and what you can change or amend and what effect it likely is going to have. To have that if-then-else modeling or scenario planning, you need to have modeling frameworks that allow you to project the behavior of a certain plant. And luckily, there are a few out there in the world. We were the closest to one from Australia, Agricultural Production Systems to APSIM. So we started adopting APSIM and this was the start of my soil journey. This was 2018 and I started rapidly learning about plant available water, root zone, all of the nutrient availability parameters and how the different soil and depths of soil really impact them and how we might be able to parametrize some of these models because it's hard to ask the pharma to go and actually calibrate such a model, you need to have a better way of delivering the solution to them and ask for way fewer inputs from the user. We needed to make it much more commercially available, so to speak, through these processes of simplifying it and reducing the number of inputs from the user by inferring more, by looking at the plants and understanding what assumptions we might have gone wrong, by getting some of the large-scale soil maps. This is where it all started, learning about the soil triangle all those things

SPEAKER_00 9:59

and so where are you now we're talking spring 2021 what is already possible when it comes to remote sensing and the soil and then we'll talk about obviously what you you're developing what's coming but what's the current status let's say in the remote sensing and soil monitoring and soil carbon space and soil health space

SPEAKER_01 10:21

yeah i would say i was a bit late to understanding the soil game but it's Even that model, Epsom, has been in development for 30 years. So it's something that's continuously is being improved by a group of scientists and we're a commercial benefactor of that work and we sometimes contribute to it as well. So I would not want to misrepresent that area that has a lot, a lot of research, decades of it. And similarly, the soil research on soil carbon and greenhouse gas emissions is equally not very young or young on the scale of the age of the universe, probably. And in terms of the technology, it's quite old when you think of some software just being a couple of years old. Having a few decades on your code, it's a big deal. So what's possible? What's possible is connecting the measurements of crop parameters that we get from satellites to crop models so we can better understand how the soils need to be parametrized. So effectively, we're using plant- a sensor to understand what's happening to the soil. And now we're going even further through the addition of the technology from DIG and through the recent M&A. What we've added is the DNDC, denitrification decarbonization model. Effectively, another model, just like the one I described for crops, but for the soil. The one that obsesses with soil microbes and understands in what environment, in what conditions, the soil microbes are going to produce more or less greenhouse gases. And those are also producing the soil organic carbon and helping sequester it or affecting how much N2O is leaching or how much methane is being emitted if you're planting something like rice. So what's possible is how our chief strategy officer says connecting satellites to soil microbes, understanding what's happening in the soil by observing what's going on with the plant and doing multi-year modeling. and ends up being fairly accurate and hits that sweet spot between having enough accuracy and bound uncertainty and a low cost, which is really important to support a lot of applications we care about in the climate world.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

So basically, you mentioned using the plants as a sensor. So you're observing the plant with remote sensing. And with the models, you can now even tell what's going on with a pretty good accuracy, what's happening actually under ground in the soil based still on what the plant is doing or what a plant is reflecting, what you're seeing with the satellite eyes. Am I going in the right direction or there's more to that?

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Yeah, this is part of it, of course. And part of it is being able to model what the human interventions would have been because agriculture is pretty standardized. And so we can use some defaults to understand, well, this is roughly what's happening if it's wheat in Kansas or if it's corn in Nebraska or if it's potatoes in Idaho tomatoes in California. And by knowing that more traditional way of farming that established itself, we can at least model a baseline. And then if the farmer has additional information they can add, they could add it in our tool and get more accurate estimates. But we get to that baseline that is relatively credible and quite useful for very large scale monitoring quite quickly.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

And so who is using that large scale monitoring? What's the client or the partner or whatever you want to call it at the moment. And then we can talk also obviously what's coming, but what's the current client interested in large scale monitoring of a lot and a lot of acres, because that's what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Yeah. Interestingly for our conversations, we would usually start with NGOs. So the likes of Nature Conservancy, we love working with Nature Conservancy and with other non-for-profit organizations that really care and understand the concept of we need to measure to match. Thank you so much for joining us. effect using the models. So you infer some of the human activity by looking at satellite imagery, and this fits your puzzle of what you're expecting to be happening to the crop. It can be that you're adopting the practices that are good for sequestering carbon. It can be that you have to use some of these practices that are not so good, and you're trying to understand from a niche. Conservancy perspective, for example, is where do they deploy resources? Where are they getting most progress? What is the pattern of adoption? All of those critical questions to be asked. And this is what helps us create that larger scale baseline. Whilst, of course, we have customers across the agri-food supply chain that then look at the more regional supply chains on their own.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

And so I think you touched upon a very important piece, like how do we bring this regeneration and regenerative approaches to a landscape scale or to a much larger scale? And maybe the first movers there are the nonprofits like TNC and that have a landscape approach. Do you have an example of somewhere you are applying that, like basically monitoring a lot of farmers in a landscape or an ecosystem and then helping someone to, let's say, focus their limited resources, even if they're a large organization like TNC, to focus their resources on specific farmers or specific areas or specific parts of the watershed, etc. Can you walk us through an example of a landscape approach there?

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Yeah, I can give you a couple of examples there. So we have mapped the conservation practice adoption and its soil health outcomes for entire Midwest, upper Midwest. So it's many, many states and we've mapped it 15 years back because this is what we need to have baselines of carbon sequestration. And we are on an ongoing basis, adding on an annual basis, new data products to it.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

So basically following in the whole Midwest, let's say the application of no-till, which can came up in that time, cover crops, which came up in some place. And you can basically say, okay, in the last 15 years, in X percent of the acreage, there's this and this has been applied in another X percent. And we model the outcome in terms of carbon, in terms of nitrogen, less nitrogen leaks, hopefully not the other way around, and or more, and basically do a sort of status report over the last 15 years, because you have the satellite data for the last 15 years, I'm imagining. You cannot go back further, but still 15 years is a long time. You can see what are the most surprising changes you have seen in terms of practices and then outcome in a huge area like the Midwest.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

And I just wanted to add that we are going to get it to the national scale this year, and we're going to continue producing the national scale baseline. So quite exciting times, a lot of work, but very exciting work. And indeed, imagine a map, a map that shows you on the crop report and district scale or watershed scale or Going deeper into the county scale or all the way to the field level, you can zoom in and you can zoom out all the way to the state level and see what states are adopting a mix of conservation practices, adopting no-till, adopting cover crops, and in what areas we need a lot more support. So there is one of the trends that we're seeing that not all areas around the Great Lakes are equally adopting those practices, and we understand there are some challenges with it, and those challenges need to be solved. I got We need to think of better ways of managing cover crops, of adopting no-till. This is where we see clearly colored target on the map where we need to deploy our efforts.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

You see the lagging places. Yeah. And do you also see like the ones, do you see the example farms as well? Like the ones that we hear about or like, do you see like, wow, this piece, I'm just saying green, not because it could be like, do you see something that like really stands out in terms of practices? outcome, do you see those examples or is it you cannot zoom enough to really understand almost on the farm level where you see like, okay, let's go and figure out what he or she's doing there because this is not something we expect to happen in that area or something that's out of the ordinary?

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Yeah, a good example of that would be the partners that TNC works with, maybe extension agents or even checkoffs, the organizations for all of non-American listeners, the organizations that are getting paid by farmer tax dollars from their local at the state level they are funding a lot of this research and we are working with several organizations farm organizations or checkoffs to help deploy this technology on very local scale as well as on the broader scale for monitoring across the entire say federal program of that checkoff and what you're finding is we are mapping those fields at a acre by acre level so we can see what's happening happening even on a subfield level. And if, for example, if half of the field is managed differently all the time, we'll be able to pick it up. We're not going to just be tied to the field boundary that we're seeing. We will actually look at what is the consistent crop mask, so to speak, like what is the area that is consistently managed there. So when you think of it from a perspective of a Chekhov, for example, that is similar to TNC, but more of a local perspective, what they would like to understand is who are some of the farm where it is working. Maybe there are some areas, some counties where it's working better. Go and talk to the local population, understand if there are champions of this approach. Very often that is the case. Someone who's able to provide a technical assistance, the support in adoption of these practices, answer questions. How can we scale those local grassroots communities that can support many more of their neighbors in adopting these practices? This is what you're usually seeing. So in a way, by looking at that landscape and the rate of adoption, you can see who Who can you leverage as much as who needs that support the most?

SPEAKER_00 20:59

And you can get like this spillover effect. You can find the ones, the knots that are going fastest.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah, and hopefully leverage them to help those who are still struggling not so sure about adoption it's a different way of farming it looks different it's not a clean black piece of land over winter

SPEAKER_00 21:18

that's why you can see the difference yeah from above that's the that's one of the yeah no it looks and feels it's very different i think there's some research i don't remember the exact term calling it something like the organic spillover effect like if you saw somebody growing organic in a county then very if they were successful obviously you saw that others like neighbors were starting to adopt it and you had this sort of oil spill happening. And probably you can see that from space. Like you can actually watch that adoption happening over time because they do a very different farming compared to their neighbors. And then maybe the neighbors start to do something similar. And then you see that spreading, which in terms of how do we scale this over the next decade and a half or decade is extremely valuable information.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

It's true. You're right. Understanding the adoption patterns and understanding the challenges and some of the regenerative farmers are talking about still being few in their area, although they've been talking into their neighbors about it for a long time because of the social stigma of well you have spider webs in your cover crop over winter this is not a good look you lazy farmers whilst actually they're keeping the living root in the soil all year round they are really bolstering the ecosystem and biodiversity of their crops to help pollinators to help the soil environment to be more enriching for all of the little critters that we see and cannot see

SPEAKER_00 22:39

like the The spiders.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Even those that are micro size that we can't see with our eyes. It's an important ecosystem. And I think farming is a management of an ecosystem and it's a very different generational shift that is required. And we're seeing a lot more, a trend of course, in seeing the newer generation wanting to come back to farm and actually shift the gears to more regenerative production. I think it's a very important trend because you have people coming in who do not have the stigmas of how it used to be or if they have seen it being done they understand the climate urgency a lot more than just conforming with the norm of the certain stereotypical farming

SPEAKER_00 23:23

and so what is let's say paint us a picture over the next years you say we have a lot of work to do this is possible now what will be possible in a year's time in a few years time like what do you see obviously we're not going to hold you accountable like in 12 months exactly it should be that but what do you see coming in terms of technology but also in terms of other movements as you're such a central piece of the remote sensing and more like what's going to happen over the next 12 24 maybe even more months basically that's suddenly going to make things possible that we didn't know were possible before or not maybe we have everything and we just need to implement it that's also possible

SPEAKER_01 24:03

no there's still some science that we're developing and i would say the way to think of my motivating and rewarding farmers to be good stewards of our ecosystem is what we're calling ecosystem service markets now. So being able to be paid for additional soil carbon you sequestered. And we think soil carbon is only the tipping point of the iceberg, where in the next few years, what we will see is more credits for water stewardship, for biodiversity, for other things on the farm, for, of course, nutrients, for application, for sparing application of fertilizer. So seeing that unfold is something that I'm really looking forward to and we're looking forward to supporting.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

Literally seeing it unfold, yeah. That's your role in seeing it. And like biodiversity and let's say water, is that something that is already possible to observe remotely basically, either directly or through models?

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Yeah, great point. So this is actually something that is on the chopping board of our R&D team. They are working on it fairly actively. As I said, the science in this space is evolving. And so we know that we can, I think, Yeah, absolutely. And this is actually something that clearly will improve the water quality, as being able to detect it and as being able to model the outcomes, once again, follows this pattern of do as much information collection from the satellite, because realistically, the producers do not have the time for it, as well as it's very hard to standardize when you're, let's imagine we would drive out to a farm in your local neighborhood, and I would ask you, well, how much do you think that water quality will improve? windbreak is saving them an erosion or that riparian area is helping them with sediment filtering like neither of us would be able to answer that question

SPEAKER_00 26:19

what would you even measure yeah what would you even where do you even start

SPEAKER_01 26:23

exactly with a tape measure running around your trees i'm not sure so this is where that bird's eye view really helps and being able to quantify the outcomes is something that we're really focusing on now and understanding with what accuracy we can do it but we're really passionate passionate about bringing this more holistic approach to understand an ecosystem so that now what I think we will see the shift from is now we're farming for the yield because there is limited number of incentives to farm for the environmental practices in the US. In Europe, for example, the situation is different. In New Zealand, the situation is different.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

In the UK, it seems to be switching very quickly now. There's some very interesting space now. And do you see that in the next couple of years, also in the US and other places, probably there will be more incentives. What I hear is that there are a lot of incentives, but it's very, very difficult to access or very burdensome, or many don't even bother with it because it's the paperwork, the proving, et cetera, et cetera. There's actually a lot available from public authorities, local, regional, state, country, but many of that either goes to very, very big operations. What we see here in Europe, most of the gap money, the public money coming from Brussels goes to very, very large farms that are not the most environmentally friendly, to say the least. But it usually doesn't get to the most innovative or to the interesting ones. Is that something that technology can help with? Or what do you see there?

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Actually, we're seeing a number of startups also coming up in this space, in the US specifically, those that effectively help pre-qualify the farmer. And currently, it's more done from the manual perspective. But to be honest, this is something that regrowth does for some of our customers. We run eligibility analysis based because we have the landscape baseline and we understand who needs it the most and how they stand against the benchmark. And often it's that comparison with a benchmark that determines your eligibility for a particular area. For example, they want to boost the adoption to a certain extent and hence they will be continuing to invest funds based on that adoption rate that you need to effectively demonstrate yourself against. I wouldn't say that big ag is bad. I definitely don't believe that. I don't believe that the larger firms are always not environmentally friendly, I think that is unsustainable. And I think they do want to be sustainable. I would say the non-diversified operations are less sustainable simply because they can't have enough circularity on their own farm. But this is simply a product of society wanting a lot of the same things at an enormous volume. And I think when we reverse that, and this is the whole discussion of being able to shift to plant-based meats so that we don't have to allocate 70% of our land to cattle production and have more mixed farms that are a bit more maybe boutique.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Actually to cattle feed production. Yeah, that's even the indirectness and the waste. I mean, you can see that probably over the last 15 years, that spread and that growth in basically cattle feed, which in all aspects doesn't make any sense. But it's what I think is interesting. Do you also switch it to the other side? Do you get questions from like, how can we, I wouldn't say punish using the word, but how can we, of course, we going to pay for positive outcomes, but if I then end up anyway plowing, like what's the checks and balances there? And do you see that market going there as well? Like you're not allowed to do this and these practices. And if you do actually, there's a fee and we're monitoring you, or is that a tricky area to go into? I

SPEAKER_01 29:57

think we need to understand first and foremost that in different areas, different practices make sense. And the local variability is actually quite large. So you might go from a field to a field and you have completely different scenario with soil compaction, and you have to disturb that soil somehow to be able to work that soil. And of course, you need a longer term plan on how you're improving that soil texture, aeration, and getting rid of compaction. So of course, longer term, it needs to be something different. But I would say, generally, authorities are careful with the stick approach to agriculture, because it's not a one size fits all industry at all. And what we're seeing in the US is more voluntary private markets. So it's a lot of carrot and incentive, which is important because if we still have so much carrot and incentive and we do not see enough adoption, we definitely need to get the balance right. I would say when you think of incentives, the numbers actually matter because we are the ones who count the numbers. We offer the scenario planning tools to the farmers with the ROI. And I would say it doesn't make a huge different financially to them it makes some over the long run their own soil health and reduction in the need to use chemicals and other additional inputs on the farm is what makes the most difference so it's less of this government payment which effectively we see it as a kick-starting payment to bridge some of the risk that they have to take on because the yield will dip a little bit in the first year but then over the three five year horizon really being able to see the return but How would you be able to, in a system where the farmer is incentivized for their annual production volume, how would you, without that incentive, even being able to bridge that gap? That's one view, a bit more capitalistic. As someone who grew up in Europe and lived in Australia and worked also with New Zealand farmers, I see a flip side of the coin of more of the socialistic approach to it, as well as a little bit more government heavy in involvement. I think fragile ecosystems like New Zealand the fact that they manage it very strictly. And we have a solution in New Zealand that they use for monitoring of their nitrogen leaching and of their carbon footprint at the scope one and scope three. So we actually have a more advanced solution in New Zealand that we have in the US because they've been such an early adopter for a number of years. And what we're seeing there is the local authority that supports the farmers wants to bring them the tools so that they can see their impact And they can continue to have their license to farm, not because of the approach of we want a stick or a carrot. We want transparency and we want everyone to be part of this ecosystem so that the farmers doesn't get exempt from activities allowed in that watershed in New Zealand where they have great yields, but also close to beautiful rivers and other fragile environments.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

And do you see things like that coming, let's say, to the U.S.? We hear a lot about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We know it. comes from nitrogen leaching or at least that's understood can you like trace that back to okay let's say we want to i wouldn't say fix it because it sounds very engineering but we want to make sure that that doesn't happen because of the huge environmental cost a huge social and financial cost as well for the whole fishing industry there and a lot more and so can you then trace that back is it already possible okay what are the areas of which farms which counties should we really focus our attention on the in this case the nitrogen leaching or on the practices to make sure that it doesn't go into the beautiful river or non-beautiful river and ends up in the sea is that something that you get requests from like okay let's connect the dots between huge environmental issue huge economic issue for the gulf of mexico and actually far away farmers and land stewards that are somehow influencing that obviously negatively is that something that's happening or is that something for the future

SPEAKER_01 34:02

you're spot on we do have customers working on this it's oftentimes the non-for-profit or foundations we have for example a large-scale project with the entire Mississippi River and understanding what goes into it, like monitoring the entire watershed and seeing where the additional nitrogen can be, so to speak, added.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Which is a massive watershed, just for anybody who doesn't know the map of the U.S. That's a very big watershed.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

Yeah, and being able to really identify where some of the areas where either the state governments or the federal funding needs to be directed to be able to improve the practices is really something you can be doing. And I think local governments Governments do that well when they understand their own contributories to their watershed. So, for example, I've heard in the New York state, the farmers in the upstate New York getting paid to manage their inputs more sparingly so that the water quality in New York City gets better. And this is a very financial transaction where you motivate people with the real dollar, which goes a long way in this country, to change the way they do things. because you really see the value of it. And I think the more value we start transferring back to the farm for ecosystem services, this is where I think we will change the environment, at least for that 19% of the greenhouse gases that agriculture contributes. And I want to make clear that majority of that is livestock. It's not cropping, but still, as we discussed, majority of crops are grown as feed to livestock. So this is whole system we need to fix.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

And it's interesting, the examples you mentioned are in water. And I always wonder if that's an easier one because it is I mean it is easier to track like if I something leaks into a river here it's going to end up at the end of the river in the sea at some point and somehow that seems to be because this example I will try to find a link to it is actually I think more than a decade old in New York where they had to not build another filter installation because they were working with farmers upstate and upper river upstream basically to not leak as much and not use as much to actually apply regenerative practices or at least more conservation agriculture and it saved them and in enormous amount of money and not building another filter installation for drinking water and somehow these examples always end up being about water and not yet about i mean carbon is coming but water seems to be that it seems an easier easier line to follow basically from cause to effect

SPEAKER_01 36:23

i think it's just because water is something that we actually drink we buy water it's bottled a lot of people go come from places where you can't drink tap water and you appreciate it you also see a lot of fires and lack of water in the environment so you are definitely getting a sense of us depleting.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

You think it's closer to us?

SPEAKER_01 36:43

Yeah, yeah. I think it's a lot closer. It's palpable. If you've ever been stuck on a hike without a water bottle, without something to drink, you feel like you're dying right there and then. And carbon is not something you can really taste or feel.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Nitrogen, you can't

SPEAKER_01 37:00

either. Yeah. And something that, I mean, nitrogen contributes to the water quality and those effects. But with carbon, we're feeling that, okay, we'll car exhaust smells bad, but how do I know what part of it is CO2 and how do I know how much I'm actually emitting? It's nice to have cleaner, greener energy sources as well as appliances, but realistically, even when we're talking with my husband recently, looking at a massive truck passing up the highway, how many dinosaurs per second is it burning in terms of the oil? This is something that's truly thought that I don't think passes everyone's mind on every day basis. So carbon is a lot harder for us. But as long as we focus on the fact that it's 51 billion tons, we need to remove them. Certain amount comes from energy, certain amount comes from transport, certain amount comes from agriculture, and we need to get to work. And even our diets is something that can materially change it. And we do not have as much time as we would need. And the Gen Z, new generations, of course, they're willing to change their choices, but we need a change to happen before Gen Z becomes, you know, the middle class spending a lot of money. We need the change to happen in the next 10 years.

SPEAKER_00 38:22

I always like to ask this question inspired by John Kempf. What do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't? So where are your contrarian? And then we get to the speed as well, like what needs to happen, et cetera. But I like to hear your answer of where you think different within Regen Ag.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

I think my opinion of Regen Ag And we're going to scratch the surface of that opinion, is that I think it is not going to be as standardized as you would want it to be. It's not going to be just like organic, that there's a certain recipe, and as long as you follow the recipe, you can be certified as organic. I think because we have different grounds, because farms are coming from different systems, we will have to measure the ecosystem outcomes and focus on the outcomes, not on the tools to get to those outcomes. those outcomes. And I think that's what makes the mandating of regenerative agriculture challenging. This is what makes unification of those standards a bit more challenging. But I'm sure that we will see countries, states starting to adopt certain standards on what they would want to measure. We're working a lot with California Airview Board. They're quite progressive, and they're really already monitoring a number of systems across crops and with us. And we're seeing that they're pioneering some of the statewide work of how do you do this accounting across your landscape and ecosystem. And they understand that this is not something one size fits all. So my contrarian view is that it's not going to be as simple as the label organic. It's going to be something that will have to be catered, tailored, but we need to first and foremost not focus, oh, tilling is bad. Well, in some cases, you have to till to farm. And in some cases, If we even talk about organic farming for just a second.

SPEAKER_00 40:11

It's a lot of tilling.

SPEAKER_01 40:13

It's a lot of tilling because you need to get rid of those weeds. And whether we all, consumers of organic, who want to improve the nutrition benefits, make sure that there's less chemistry in our food, suddenly stop and think of how much more CO2 that current method is emitting. I'm not sure if you would be more open-minded to GMOs as a result. Because in reality, they're not such a problematic thing. So agriculture is complex. And really seeing what effects certain consumer choices make, I think, is something very practical that every listener can really dive a little bit deeper into understanding what has happened for that food to be delivered to their plate.

SPEAKER_00 40:58

And if you could change one thing overnight, like you have a magic wand, you have unlimited power, what would that be? Could be on the technology piece, could be, okay, we're really missing this magic, I wouldn't say trick, but this technology, that good technology always seems like magic the first time you see it, but could be something else completely, could be global consciousness, could be what you just mentioned. If we dig a bit deeper into that, what would you change if you have that magic power to change one thing overnight?

SPEAKER_01 41:27

I'm going to say something very controversial. I would put strict restrictions around fertilizer use in all agricultural areas. I think because we are on this nitrogen drug. We are getting more and more into unreasonable yield demands. We are not restoring the soil. We're not letting the soil restore itself. We're not looking into practices that people get to when they do not have as much money to buy synthetic fertilizer. And I think as big as that industry is, we need to start dismantling that stronghold somehow. And of course, they will reprofile. Of course, they understand it's coming but it's like an oil industry situation you know that the fact that it's cheap and the fact that it has a sunset to it it has a horizon just doesn't feel right those two things like it has to be more expensive because of the cost of externalities that we're absolutely not accounting for so that would be my radical

SPEAKER_00 42:31

magic wand move and you would monitor it i assume yeah

SPEAKER_01 42:34

yes because i want the water to remain clean and i want the so all hells to have a chance to restore itself and it's very challenging when you're on the constant treadmill of add more nitrogen get more yield and i do think there's a lot of connected inventions that we would rely on even a dwarf in our crops making our corn smaller so that we don't have to feed it so much nitrogen so it can grow into a smaller plant with the same yield something that happened to wheat many years ago and won a noble prize so there's my magic wand move implies probably 15 inventions that we need to make it possible. But I would love for that to be something that does get a lot more attention and more strict monitoring around it.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

Which actually is a great bridge to the next question. So let's say you have a large investment fund, let's say a billion, a billion dollars to invest. There's 15 inventions or whatever it's needed. Where would you, how would you prioritize if you would be running from tomorrow morning an investment fund purely focused on, let's say, ag food? I mean, you can focus on other things as well. If you wanted to fusion, I'm okay with that. But how would you prioritize if you would be a large scale investor with a very long time horizon, if you want to? Obviously, it doesn't have to be paid back in a couple of years. You have the flexibility, but it is an investment fund. So we're looking for investments. What would you prioritize? What would you focus on?

SPEAKER_01 44:00

I actually spoke to such a fund yesterday. So this is easy. And I think what they're doing is actually right. I think you need to invest in decarbonization of economy. And it does come down if you dig deep enough to certain inventions that you need. And when it comes to agri-food specifically, in that sector, something that I mentioned, you need to invest in breeding, very long time horizon, breeding of plants that are more suitable for our climate changed future. Even if we don't warm up by all the degrees that we can, we still will have plants that we'll need to adopt. also potentially even breeding plants for alternative diets so that not only we start consuming plant-based diet, but we actually, if we focus on this concept of needing an input into the system, a source product that will go through a completely different sourcing and processing, that changes the source ingredient itself. So if you really commit to shifting the world to plant-based diet, as some of those large, well-funded startups do, I think it's important for combating the climate change problem. So I would definitely invest in bringing off varieties and crops that are more drought tolerant as people are doing. Dwarfed varieties, so we spend less resources on growing what we actually need to grow. I would also spend time on modeling. I would spend time on collecting the data at a very large scale. So funding someone like us to be able to, even with the bound uncertainty produce an estimate of how are we going because if we don't have a finger on the pulse of this matter it seems like even if we're doing something great we're not achieving that much and we're not focusing our energy and attention where it needs to be and then ultimately understanding how we're actually looking after these ecosystems and being able to some of the technologies that we haven't talked about that are equally important is precision and alternative weaving for example, or avoiding to apply so much chemistry on your plants. Those are all the technologies that I think deserve to be funded and well-funded so that we are going to reap the benefit of cleaner crops. And last but not least, advancing majority of these technologies to the developing world. This is something that is quite hard to do with just private funds when you're trying to look for revenue as a small startup, for example, but funding innovations in that space and being able to have a longer time horizon for holding those investments I think can make substantial benefits to people who need it the most.

SPEAKER_00 46:48

I want to thank you so much for your time today and be conscious of your time as well and sharing a few insights. We just scratched the surface so we definitely need to do this again in terms of what is already possible with technology on the landscape scale, what should be possible and what will be possible in the near future. Thank you so much for joining us and hope to repeat it as some point

SPEAKER_01 47:09

thank you so much Colin definitely enjoyed the conversation and it feels like we just scratched the surface

SPEAKER_00 47:14

if you found the investing in regenerative agriculture and food podcast valuable there are a few simple ways you can use to support it number one rate and review the podcast on your podcast app that's the best way for other listeners to find the podcast and it only takes a few seconds number two share this podcast on social media or email it to your friends and colleagues number three if this podcast has been of value to you and if you have the means please join my member Thank you so much and see you at the next podcast.