What organisations need to be built for a regenerative food system? Fresh Convo

“What we absolutely need more of is people building things in the regenerative agriculture space. Entrepreneurial farmers, funds, investment vehicles, technology, food companies, everything we need for this revolution.” 

Koen van Seijen joins Fresh Convo to discuss what organisations need to be built for a regenerative food system.

The Fresh Convo is organised by Fresh Ventures is a startup studio focused on region agriculture and food companies based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 
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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to a very special episode where we hosted a conversation together with the team of Fresh Ventures, a conversation where we dig deeper into what ventures need to be built, what ventures are we missing in the space of regenerative food and agriculture. We're going to do this more regularly, so enjoy.

SPEAKER_04 0:17

Welcome everyone to the first Fresh Convo, Fresh Conversations that we're hosting. A little bit of background. My name is Bart van der Zonde. I'm one of the co-founders of the Fresh Venture Studio, the organization that set this up. We are a startup studio on a mission to a regenerative and circular food system. We intend to build multiple new steward-owned organizations to help the transition, accelerate the transition to a regenerative food system. And in that In that context, we are continuously looking and getting into conversations on what are the actual problems or where are the opportunities that would require more attention from entrepreneurial teams and talent to work on what would really help the ecosystem forward in bringing about this more regenerative food system. Koen van Zijde, one of the co-hosts today is someone we talk a lot with on this subject And we really like his podcast as well. For those who don't know it, Investing in Regenerative Agriculture podcast, really a lot of great conversations on this subject. And we decided to start hosting sort of open conversations about specifically what are potential opportunities that would need more entrepreneurial energy, I would say, or what are problems that are still very hard to solve that could really deserve some additional attention from maybe a different type of people that are working on it right now. So that is sort of the central question today. Sort of on the technical part, I would like to invite you all very much to contribute. There is no set program for this conversation. So please share your thoughts as well, your questions, things you want to bring into this group of people. I think it's an interesting group. So do so. If you want to say something, I would like to ask you to make a little bit civilized to add a comment in the chat, and then we'll make sure that the people get, or raise your hand like Kundi did, and then we'll make sure that we sort of pass on the talking stick, I would say. Before I move into this, I have one short poll that I would like to do. This is to get a little bit of an idea of the people who are in this space right now, and also that you have an idea of what kind of people are here. It's always a little bit difficult if you're digitally connected and not physically. So Paul is going to start a poll. If you can answer it, two questions, and then we have a little bit of an idea of who we all are. Should be quite easy. And we'll share the results in a little bit so you can see what the rest is doing as well. 85% voted. All right. Everyone voted. So Paul, if you can share the results. The biggest part of this group is an entrepreneur themselves. Investors and knowledge workers come in second. And also quite a quarter of the group is intending to start a new business. Probably a reason to find answers to the question, all right, where to start? Where can I make the most impact? So, all right. Thank you, Paul. My co-host of the day is Koen van Zijde. I said, Koen, you have been doing over 120 interviews. I think you said over five or six years, you've been in the game quite long and you've talked to a lot of people. So I wanted to actually start with you in raising this question on what do you think and what would you say after these 120 interviews are the biggest problems, but also opportunities for venture building?

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, first of all, for organizing this, it's always nice to show up somewhere and not having to do all the background and all the organization. And I'm very happy, obviously, that Fresh got started after many, many discussions with Huppenbart back in the day and over the last years. I think I've done a number of shout outs in the podcast that we need more venture builders while you were building your venture builder. So I'm very happy that it's public now and ventures are being built. So for me, I mean, for anybody that doesn't know, the journey we've been on is I think we started interviewing now about four and a half years ago. It feels a lot more or maybe five, I have to check. But it was very sporadic at the beginning. We just interviewed a few friends, interviewed a few people, honestly, for me to hang out with people virtually that were building or are building interesting things in the regen food and egg space because I didn't know what I wanted to build myself. I'm not the farmer. I don't have the huge urge to start a farm nor honestly the investor because I don't have the wealth. So I really wondered what can I do in this space? And I thought the best way is probably to hang out with people that are building things. And to do that, I had to interview them. And of course, I had also to publish them, but it was not even part of the game. So we did that for a number of years. And since the last two or three years, we really brought some more structure to the table. And now we're releasing an episode a week, and we're doing a number of series, and it really, really became a small media company. In terms of lessons learned, I think first one is it really the attention for soil, of course, my bubble has grown, but really exploded over the last years, which is amazing we need way more attention for the way we treat land oceans and basically our planet and way more attention for the opportunities and what we've seen we sort of identified four themes I think a year and a half or two years ago now which are still very current that we see huge challenges also huge opportunities not necessarily the easiest places to build things but definitely in our mind huge opportunities over the next decade or so these are long term games so don't expect anything fast But we see huge opportunities in food as medicine. So nutrient density, the measurement of how can we show that this tomato is different than that tomato? How can we show that connection between healthy soil, healthy produce, healthy gut systems, healthy people, and then ultimately healthy ecosystems. There's a lot being done. There's a lot of luckily grand capital moving into the space. Companies are claiming all kinds of things, but I think there's still a lot of space. Like what are food companies looking in the future? if we take food as medicine seriously. How it's going to look, I don't know. We're going to see a lot of changes, I think, over the next years. The other one, and Willemijn knows a lot more about that, is lens and also actually Tecla, landscape design. How do we bring this region act discussion and regeneration of an hectare here, 10 hectares, 10,000, et cetera, to a landscape scale? How do we bring that discussion of bringing back rivers, stabilizing climate in certain areas? We need to talk at ecosystem level. and landscape levels because we're literally running out of soil. And we need a lot of innovative companies to do that. Technology, food companies that operate at a landscape level, that buy the full rotation. I literally had a discussion with Nestle, all people yesterday, and they say, we're going to buy the full rotation, which is very interesting at a landscape level. And so people are thinking about it, but we need to look at a larger scale. Landscape or ecosystem or biome is really the operating principles we need to use because otherwise we stay in very, very nice, but very, very small and marginal discussions. Then ecosystem service payments, super interesting as well. Very crowded at the moment. A lot of people are jumping on the carbon bandwagon, obviously. Still, I think a lot of space if you look at payments for biodiversity, payments for things that we all need. Farmers can provide or lend stewards, but we're currently, especially through food, not paying for. Of course, there's a subsidy train you can take, but it's very, very complicated. And we just released, did we release already? Anyway, an interview with a colleague of mine on how to calculate returns at a landscape scale. And I would definitely see that as a piece as well. Like how can you start seeing all the different flows of capital and non-financial returns that come up for generative agriculture? And how do you pay, how do you get more money in the pockets of farmers? I think that's a central question. And then the fourth, transition finance. How do we finance all of these transitions? How do we help farmers to bridge those gaps, the yield gaps, the drops, et cetera, et cetera? How do we make sure food companies go through the transition of sourcing different ingredients, et cetera? There's a lot of innovative ways to travel time there, to bring things forward that we would like to see happening now. Planting trees is an example. They're an amazing investment, but it takes seven to 10 or sometimes even more years. How do you finance that? That's a finance question, but somebody has to build a company to do that. And the fifth sort of theme that we've seen recently, I'm getting very excited about, and that's why I'm so excited of the steward connection here, the steward ownership. is regenerative enterprises, who is not only very ambitious when it comes to building soil or rebuilding soil, but also extremely ambitious when it comes to everything else. All the uncomfortable questions around inequality, land access, profit share, racism, all the big questions agriculture forces us to ask, and we often don't. And I see some organizations taking that head on, like very, very seriously, and I'm very happy about that. And we're planning with the podcast to follow them.

SPEAKER_04 10:43

Thank you, Koen. That's quite a lot, as you like to say, that's quite a lot to unpack as well. But maybe already get a few other people involved as well. And again, please enter your own remarks or as Willemijn does now, share resources with us in the chat as well so we can get you guys involved. Maybe you mentioned Willemijn already, Koen. Maybe we can ask her to jump in because you mentioned landscape design as well. And maybe Willemijn, you can briefly tell a little bit about what you are doing who you are and then yeah I wonder also what your perspective is on this question like what are the main problems but also what are the opportunities that you see that we need to work on

SPEAKER_05 11:30

yeah so first of all thanks for inviting me I feel like I like you are really more an expert than I am but I'll try to do my best to yeah share some experiences and it's great to see Tekla here She's also part of our growing community of people working either on regenerative businesses or on landscape restoration, and there is a connection. So I work for Commonland. It's an Amsterdam-based organization engaged in enabling large-scale holistic landscape restoration, also built on regenerative businesses. So we believe it can be business-driven landscape restoration. So you can actually restore soils and ecosystem functioning by doing business differently. So it can be different products also coming out of the landscape. This can be fiber, food, drinks. So it can be a lot of different things and it's a really exciting space. So I think we're known for the four returns method. So it moves away from maximization of return on investment per hectare. So getting as much as you can out of the land in a short amount of time towards maximization of interaction, hectare. So how can you create more diversity between people, between businesses, but also in terms of biodiversity? So bringing back diversity in all its shapes and forms to move away from this monoculture growth oriented way of using land. And I think the challenges, so I think carbon is an opportunity and a challenge all in one, because it's really, if you want to measure carbon, for example, on a large scale, you're just going to, you're you're going to have to work with proxies and it's going to be incomplete. So that article I just shared has a good analysis also of that. Plus carbon is just one of the multiple things you can create and actually can also create financial streams around. So we are looking at that space and seeing what we want to do with it, but we also sort of don't believe the hype in a way, sort of think from an ecosystem perspective. So how can you indeed reward land stewards for whatever they're performing on the land in terms of producing regeneratively. So that can be biodiversity oriented or carbon oriented or water quality. But just looking at it more holistically, not just running away with carbon and forgetting about the ecosystem. Nevertheless, it's also a huge opportunity. I mean, there is a lot of carbon that can be captured by soil and by different land practices. So definitely a beautiful development, but something to just be aware of. And I really recommend reading that article, although it takes an hour to read. And other challenges, I think... A landscape approach in itself can be a bit challenging. And I think Tekla can also talk to that. It's just, you are effectively engaging in system change. You are working in an ecosystem with a lot of people living there, using the land, infrastructural projects. So you have to deal with everybody in that landscape and that's challenging. So we're trying to also learn from the TheoryU community and how you can you know, engage in a system. It can be education, can be health system, but in our case, it's a landscape system and engage in different types of conversations. So we know how to restore landscapes. Basically, we know how you can restore ecosystem functioning. We know a lot more about how you can restore soils, but the tricky part is getting people to collaborate for longer periods of time. So we're working with a 20 year timeframe minimum, which is basically one generation because an ecosystem is, needs that time to be able to regenerate and create a new stable system, basically. But the trick is to get people to work collaboratively on longer periods of time, because often we speak different languages, we have different stakes, sometimes the funding runs dry. So how do you engage into deeper relationship building between these stakeholders for longer periods of time? And I'm realizing I'm going off on a rant, but I hope it's useful. So that's a second challenge, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:02

Maybe, because I like the renting personally, maybe then we can, because you mentioned Tekla as well, and we can ask her her experience as well. But in this bringing together multiple stakeholders, why is that difficult? I mean, I have my ideas, but I would like to hear from your experience as well. Why is it so difficult to bridge?

SPEAKER_05 16:30

I think because we're so used to compartmentalizing things, you are either active in a value chain or you are active in your own role in the municipality. So everything is very siloed. So breaking through those silos and thinking from what others might also need in that same landscape or that same piece of land requires giving in a little bit and not just thinking about your own stake. Also, what's challenging is the long-termism thing. So we are so used to projects, three years, five years, if you're lucky. And of course, from a business perspective, that longer term can be either the obvious route or your, yeah, I don't know. Short-term, long-termism is interesting from a business perspective, but yeah, just sticking with it for a longer run. That's the challenging thing because we don't have that horizon normally. We're so project-oriented, short cycles. Even in government, we have four-year cycles of people being elected. And then once they know all about the topic and start to understand it, and I think it's a good thing. I mean, you don't want to have monopolies of politicians staying for too long, but it does create this short-termism. Yeah.

UNKNOWN 17:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 17:55

Does that help?

SPEAKER_04 17:57

Yeah, it does. I have a bunch more questions, but maybe let's touch a few more people and then we can engage in a broader conversation. So maybe Tekla, Willemijn mentioned you already. Maybe you could introduce yourself briefly as well and zoom in on a similar question, actually. What kind of problems do you see now? I listened to the podcast you did with Koen today, actually. You're facing quite a lot of challenges in general, I think, but what are specific problems you also see that might be transferable to different contexts as well?

SPEAKER_06 18:36

Yeah, thanks Bart. So yeah, I'm Tekla and I am a co-founder of Grounded. It's an organization, we're actually based in South Africa and we work with farmers in Africa to help them switch to regenerative agriculture and then we build businesses on the back of that where we actually and actually connect them to markets. I've been doing this now for about seven years and encountered many challenges. I think maybe the first thing which I think is quite important to acknowledge is that ultimately regenerative agriculture is about farming with nature and what we have been doing over the past, like 60 years or something, is farming against nature and more in a sort of linear, yeah, I don't know how to actually describe it in English, but not with nature, but it's a more linear approach where it's like, okay, this is the spray program for this particular farm and you need to just execute this and then you're gonna kill all the pests which are on this land if you just follow exactly these steps. And this farming with nature requires a much deeper understanding of an entire system, which is actually specific to every single farm and every single circumstance where you are. So it's maybe we need to all acknowledge that this is extremely hard to do. And in particular, if you take it to a landscape approach, which you already hinted on, which makes this even more complex. So it's definitely not something which is easy it's quite a beast and therefore it also takes more time to create the challenges that's not to say that you cannot have like quick wins in the beginning and it's like there's actually a lot that you can do relatively quickly and you'll see results but it's also hard so in the work that we do on the ground there is just hurdle after hurdle after hurdle and unknown after unknown after unknown and I think it's important that as a community we talk about those things because then we can actually learn and progress just like there's been a lot of science on the sort of conventional agricultural system we need a lot more knowledge sharing and science on the region system and not only saying this is great please give us money and I think maybe two other angles that I can take like to build on what Kun was saying, like what are sort of venture opportunities. If I look at it more in grounded, we take more of a value chain approach. And I think there's quite a lot of focus on initiatives happening on a farm level. So farmers switching to regenerative. And there's also quite a lot happening on the brand side. So brands claiming that they're going to be regenerative. Where I see two sort of gaps is one is what happens before the farm so where does this farmer actually get his or her inputs this is this has been a major hurdle for us so regenerative seeds organically certified seeds what kind of microbial applications can you actually use fungi that you want to actually grow how you make the right kind of compost so because farmers are used to actually getting consultants in who then sell the them whatever kind of fertilizer or spray programs. But in the regenerative system, they have to do something different. They still have to use inputs, which they can often actually make themselves. But how to do that? There's a big opportunity there, I think. And then there is also an opportunity, I think, between the farmer and the brand, where this is a system, our food system is dominated by huge companies that pass all agricultural commodities on one heap and then ship them and transport them and make sure that everything tastes the same. Where there are massive opportunities, I think, to do this differently or to work from within those companies to change them so that products which have been produced regeneratively can also get to the brands that are looking for these ingredients. And then you can have more value transfer. Otherwise you lose the value because everything just goes on the one heap and it's lost. This is an issue we are facing all the time. This is something we have to deal with.

SPEAKER_04 23:59

Thank you very much. Super insightful already. Koen, maybe, I don't know if you want to respond. I have a few questions, but you're always. I

SPEAKER_01 24:07

see actually Albert is asking just in terms of a bit of background work. What kind of crops are you dealing with in South Africa? Just for people who have no idea what you're doing, just to give a bit of background when you say ingredients, what do you mean?

SPEAKER_06 24:21

Yeah, we don't do fresh vegetables or something like that. We work with non-perishable, high-value crops. So we're in essential oils and seed and vegetable oils. So those are like pressed. And herbal tea and spices. We're not only in South Africa, also in Zambia and in Tanzania. So it's a lot of these crops go for export markets. And

SPEAKER_01 24:47

do you see the same issue that actually the Nestle person was discussing that issue of as soon as you are applying regenerative approaches or practices, often crops, farmers start to grow different crops and obviously they need to find markets for the different crops. Is that something you're saying, okay, we're also buying your two other, three other crops, even though the cash crop is honeymoon or is, et cetera. Is that something you're figuring out how to buy the full rotation as a quote that I think Dan Barber once quoted, but is that something you're working on, something you're seeing, or is that getting way too complicated because then you have to deal with three, four, five, in some cases, six, seven, 10 crops?

SPEAKER_06 25:29

Yeah, what we try to do is build it on the back of what the farmers are already doing. And often actually the smallholder farmers that we're working with are already selling. They already have a range of different crops. So they'll have, maybe some maize maybe some spices maybe some vegetables and they'll sell a lot of the stuff into local markets and then we can help them capture a higher value for for instance these spices that we can then actually export and get a premium for so I think yes this is definitely key is you want to find product market combinations for all these crops in the system it's not something that necessarily we as grounded are going to sit between the farmer and the market for all of those things because some of them they will actually be ideally they will be able to sell them off themselves into local markets yeah but it's definitely something you need to take into account if you let them grow crops which they can't sell themselves it totally sucks of course then they there's then they're super dependent and they yeah

SPEAKER_01 26:38

yeah it's a great it's a good bridge actually i see that alfredo unmuted this video. I don't know how you say that. and switch this video on. Alfredo, one, two, three, welcome. I know you're multitasking, very, very busy up here. Can you talk a bit about that? Because that's in agroforestry systems. Obviously, you are dealing with multiple crops, especially as you're moving towards more regenerative practices. What do you see at that? You'll be dealing with a cash crop like cocoa or a cash crop like coffee. And then what do you do with the other crops?

SPEAKER_00 27:09

So thanks for having me and for inviting me. First of all, I would like to just jump in on what was just shared before answering your question. And I seconded totally what was the analysis that was just done on the supply chain and on the opportunities that can be found beside the pure play, let's say investment at the farm level or what the claims of the brands. especially on the organic agri-inputs. I think that that is an important opportunity. And us as 123, we created an incubator exactly for tackling these kind of challenges. And specifically we are now launching an organic agri-input management company. And regarding your question. So when we set up agroforestry systems in our farm, farms, yes, we do have our cash crop that is primarily either cocoa or coffee, but we do, we rely on this cash crop in pairing it with other crops that for us, the first main reason is the climate resiliency of the farm. And also having the possibility of with these other multi-cropping to have a more positive and more profitable first cash crop. So let's make an example that probably everybody already knows, but cocoa trees grow well in the shade. And so for achieving this result, we plant either coconut trees or native trees or bananas and therefore we enrich our product array on one side and on the other side our cocoa grows better and then obviously in the course of the let's say of the growth of the farm and on the field the cropping system is managed and there's some changing and optimization so yeah And on what do we do with these other crops besides just having them in the system and helping us with our, let's say, first crop. Well, a lot of our effort is now geared towards finding, well, and signing sustainable offtake agreements with these crops. brands that are claiming to want regenerative agriculture sourced foods. And we've been able to do it, for example, for our bananas. So we have a good contract with a German supermarket chain. And we are now opening for, for example, coffee and coconut oil and all the byproducts of these crops. So does that answer your question?

SPEAKER_01 30:41

Absolutely. And I have a follow-up question. First of all, just in one or two sentences, because I obviously realize we're talking to the in crowd here. What is 123? And then to briefly mention, because you said something very interesting on the incubator, you're starting to build companies that are serving your farms. So what have you, you've launched two companies so far. What are you, and then what are you missing on that side? Like, what would you love that somebody launches?

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Yes. Okay. So in a couple of words, what is 123? 123 is an asset manager slash operator German company that was founded in 2017 and so far it targets the management of funds of institutional investors so our anchor investor is a group of German pension funds and we together with them and other investors we have we were successfully able to basically have more than$500 million committed to our agroforestry systems and the management of our farms and forestry projects. More or less half of that is actually invested. And we focus on agroforestry systems, climate change mitigations, local communities and social impact. And so we both start the farms from scratch with a greenfield approach. Our specialty is again, cocoa in Latin America, and we have now seven, sorry, 13 projects in seven countries, especially in Latin America. And we focus with projects that scale. So we do not usually do, small farms, but we operate on significant scales, also because of the nature of our investors. But we do also engage with smallholder farmers with programs around our, let's say, big farms. And this is obviously a pure play, regenerative agriculture and agroforestry investment or strategy, if you want to call it. And we soon realized that there was, as was shared before, a need for, let's call it the value chain or the supply chain that goes around what is being done specifically on the farms. And therefore, we decided to launch this 123 Impact Incubator that so far has launched two startups. One is a fertilization company that has already been successfully funded in the first year and now it's tackling projects that need assistance in designing irrigation systems that bring a lot of efficiency to the farms and allow for the applications of input in the fertigation system and just as spraying or direct input. And the second one, is instead an agri-inputs management advisor. Let's call it like this. It wants to act as a one-stop shop for agri-inputs management. Usually, again, we're starting from our experiences. So most of these ventures are born trying to give answers to, let's say, market failures that we observe in our big farms, so usually they are tailored for large-scale farming operations. And what we are trying to achieve with this one is instead helping these big farms and big operations to switch to a more organic and regenerative agriculture approach. What we are looking for next, we identified more or less five major opportunities. Among these, there is definitely precision agriculture, so drones and GIS mapping. And this is probably one of the ventures that we are probably going to launch sooner than others. And as well, data management and all this. But this is still far off for us at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

Thank you so much for that. Sorry, Bart. I went down a rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_04 35:41

That's good. It's good. Thank you also, Alfredo. Great to meet you. We haven't properly met. I've heard about you from Kuhn. I actually also want to get back a little bit to Tekla, what she was saying, because there were sort of three things that you said. The first one was about the knowledge sharing part. And I tend to hear that more often, I would say. So maybe the rest can chip in on that as well. And you say that there's a sort of a a lack of knowledge sharing or we should do it more as well. Maybe you can get a bit more specific on your journey in what moments you've done things that you would have need, well, maybe experiences from others and what would be also a good way to actually get that access, elaborate a little bit further on what's missing there and what we should deliver there.

SPEAKER_06 36:41

Hmm. Yes, there's so much knowledge that you need if you do this, like, if you actually do this on the ground. I think maybe the first thing you need, like, that I wish I would have known is that it is flippin' hard. And that is, I think, something that is quite useful to know before you start. We were told that this was easy. Like, I had read about it and I'd seen all the nice movies, like, you know, know from brown to green and I thought okay this is fantastic I'm gonna actually just do this but it turned out it's a little bit harder you can turn go from brown to green I know just quite quickly if you have good rain but that's another exactly that sometimes that's actually a challenge what's hard on a on a farm level I think is that like what I hinted on already is you need farmers need to acquire a different kind of set of knowledge to be able to operate their farm regeneratively and so you need to look at the soil differently you need to understand what kind of life there actually is in the soil you need to analyze that you need to then fix for things which are out of balance so if there are too many nematodes you need to find a way to fight that without like killing them all and killing all the all the other life in the soil which and it's those kinds of things which which are actually very difficult. Or for instance, deciding what kind of cover crops are you gonna actually plant? What does this particular piece of soil need in terms of nutrients and then which crops can we grow here given the soil and the water availability and sometimes the land may be floods or it's very dry or whatever, you know? So there is just a lot of knowledge goes into actually doing this on a farm level. And I think then on the back of that, what is also really hard is that once you then have all the farming elements right, you need to then get a product that you can get to a market for which you need to have an entirely different kind of skill set. And especially if you have new products that you want to get into new markets, for instance, that we did with essential oils you need to understand how do I get a good quality essential oil so you need to do product development tests chemical analyses whatever and then you need to understand what are actually the requirements of the different buyers who are these buyers how can we access them etc which is a totally different kind of skill set so there's just a lot of yeah I don't know if this kind of answers your

SPEAKER_04 39:37

question well I think especially on the first part that you and maybe Willem I'm not sure if you've been involved, but you're talking about like what do you actually need to do? And I think CommonLand actually build a sort of a toolkit that you can sort of say what kind of conditions you are, what kind of context you are, and you can roughly get some information on, for example, cover crops and what to work with. So on the one hand, I see sort of twofold thing and maybe someone else can chip in on this and maybe Willemijn, but on the one hand, it's like, almost Google it, like, is there an information center? If I understand you correctly. On the other hand, it also relates to, and I saw some questions coming in as well, like the actual experts or the independent agronomists or people that can actually help you and maybe also help you on that input side. And you know, both of these challenges, is that a correct read? Like that you need both of them, like the expert, but also the knowledge database that you can use?

SPEAKER_05 40:45

So I shared a link to a short story, which was called the six biggest lessons learned on regenerative agriculture, which is basically us trying to capture the knowledge in the network of partners like Grounded, similar in other countries, and how they, yeah, what they've picked up on the road to regenerative agriculture as part of a landscape initiative, basically. And one thing that we found was that there's a huge science practice gap. So like you mentioned, there's a lot of research backing conventional agriculture up, but there's no equivalent amount backing regenerative up. Of course you can look at agro ecological research. There's probably more there, but still it's a huge gap. And also there's a mismatch of, if let's say you were to pilot with a group of farmers, different practices, then it's hard to find a scientist that can deal with that level of complexity because you're not just looking looking at two or three elements, you're looking at a whole system. So that was one big thing in terms of knowledge gap. And there was another one. Yeah, so interestingly, we saw that farmer-centric networks kind of were the way to go for farmers to exchange with each other. They have a lot of knowledge already, but just being able to experiment together and share knowledge about that, visit each other's farms frequently invite expert speakers that can help you along that sort of learning journey you're on because once you understand this you also want to understand that and then you want to understand that so it's like it never stops but you just need to pull in the right people at the right time in that farmer centric network kind of so that's from a sort of a helicopter view that's what I saw happening and yeah so the tool you mentioned so we're trying to develop up a couple of sort of yeah general tools that can help sort of move towards that holistic thinking towards for example your regenerative business so we have one tool where you can look at your farm or estate if you have one from a sort of for returns perspective so what are the sort of things you can take into account when you look at your farm we also have another tool a business model canvas just old school like old school business model canvas but then, yeah, sort of twist it a little bit more towards a holistic view and taking a landscape also into account. But it's by no means perfect, but it's just us trying to sort of pin it down and make it tangible. But feedback is always welcome.

SPEAKER_04 43:31

Thank you, Willemijn. We also got a bunch of questions in the chat, Koen, if you...

SPEAKER_01 43:37

Want me to unpack them very quickly? The first one I think of Chris is, it's a very good question. Why are organizations we know not doing 20 million, but a billion, et cetera? I had a discussion that yesterday, my feeling is we're too early, where we don't have the proof of concept like Willemijn is sharing at a landscape level at hundreds of farms doing all kinds of different products at a scale that we can get a billion dollars or more or a lot of money, let's say, because for that you need institutional investors and they need to see a long track record. The first investments in Renew Energy or Renew Energies were also not institutional investors. They were obviously subsidized based, but still it was a slow start before we got to the level where we are now. So my feeling is really we're going to see these examples being built over the next years and all of us will probably feel like they're too small, but they are already thinking about the next fund or they are thinking about their next 10X time, what their need to raise to really make a dent in the Midwest, talking about the metagriculture. But we're still figuring out the recipes. We're still figuring out, really, we're so early on, like we have to, like Taylor says, the whole value chain or the whole value web has to be redesigned and refigured out in terms of ingredients, in terms of expertise. And coming to a question of Paul, farmer consultants, it really depends who pays them. If the input companies pay them, we know what kind of advice they give. That's a whole other business opportunity in terms of education for farmers. Very tricky, very difficult, but there's a huge need to have independent farmer consultants. Capital is working on it. Others are working on it. We need to be able to make sure that farmers have independent advice, that they can trust that it's not sold to them by an input company because if the incentives are aligned like that, we know what happens. It's like Shell is going to tell you we're going to help save petrol, which will be we all know it's not going to happen. Which is not because they're bad, it's just because their business model is different. So I feel we're really early on. We should really crawl before we're going to run or we're going to stand. And we are in the crawling phase. In many phases, in many other places, not necessarily, but as a system, as a movement, we're super, super, super early. And we just don't have, we cannot point the two, three things that are already raised. A lot of money have huge successes or huge acreage, et cetera. Like New Foundation Farm still has to start and they're raising now as we speak. And they're only raising only because it's a lot of money, but 20 million. And perennial, we all see as a huge success, but they only raised 10. And so it's really, we have to build the foundations first. And these are pieces, potentially pieces of the foundation. So I hope that answers it. Alice, I saw a question on the cultural and socioeconomic. Access is an enormous question. How do we make sure this is not, again, another elite game like many of the other food movements have been, farm to table, organic in many examples, et cetera? How we're going to do that without some extra flow of capital in terms of subsidies is going to be very, very tricky. I hope we're going to move the food discussion to medicine, and then suddenly we open up a whole different discussion in terms of insurance, in terms of what am I willing to spend on health and not just on feeding myself. But that's a long, long walk we need to do there. So I don't know the easy answer there. At the moment, it's not as accessible as it should be. And cheap calories and processed calories are way more accessible. So that's very difficult. And there also, there's a huge etiquette. Like we are what we eat, literally. But most people or a lot of people don't see it if you see what a lot of people throw in their supermarkets basket when you when you are at your local supermarket you'll be shocked or you are shocked probably because most of it is simply not food i mean nestle did an internal research which came out unfortunately for them in the financial times i'll put a link below that 65 of their products can never be claimed healthy and so they have huge issues of uh with the new super with the new traffic light system of is it green or not like can it be named healthy in france and australia they're already doing that most of their products are simply too salty and too sweet And so they know that, but how are you going to change a behemoth like that doing, I checked it yesterday, 93 billion a year. So it's, that's a very, I mean, cheap calories are cheap and not very cheap if you take into, of course, true cost accounting could potentially fix some of that. But that's a, it's a very difficult one. How do we keep this accessible to, to all, especially to the people that need it most that are eating the worst food at the moment. And we, because we potentially all here on the call are already shopping locally, are already making sure So there's not too much to win, honestly, when you look at us.

SPEAKER_06 48:22

Yeah, maybe I can chip in there. That's also something on a farmer level that's, I think, relevant to think about because I think most of the pioneering examples that you see on regenerative farms that get everything right are people that also had the cash to spend. And this is something which is very frustrating for some of the farmers that we've been working with because then you point them to those examples you say, look, here, it's possible. And then they're like, yeah, okay, but this guy had a shitload of money and that's how he made it possible. So those examples can be inspiring to outsiders, but they can be super frustrating and actually off-putting to farmers who are just common farmers and who have to make ends meet and who are like, yeah, but that's just unattainable for me. So then you have to go like smaller steps, things which are immediately interesting to them like reducing input costs by making their own compost tea, for instance, which immediately can fertilize their crops and they can see the results. So those are things that we are also working on. It's like, how can you make this transition affordable to farmers who have very little to spend without having to always resort to massive subsidies, for instance? I think that's a very exciting thing to think about. How can you make this show a poor farmer that a small investment can lead to an immediate return which i think is possible in some cases like maybe not for the full transition but in many cases i think that you can actually do things there as well yeah thank you both

SPEAKER_04 50:04

Thank you. We have a bunch of more questions, but maybe, I don't know, Alice or Chris couldn't answer your questions. I'm not sure if any of you wants to respond or has additional questions.

SPEAKER_02 50:19

Well, I would jump in. Yeah, I would ask, I want to poke around, Kuhn, your thoughts on new foundation farms related also to what Tekla said about having a lot of money and being able to put into a farm this decent amount of capital and then wanting to showcase or demonstrate regenerative agriculture as the way to go for other farmers to copy in a nearby location. Is there, do you see evidence of that or do you see kind of potential challenges And I'd also like to, if possible, briefly hear a little bit from Tekla about some of the kind of more specific challenges that you face, whether it's expanding the amount of farmers that you're working with or expanding to another geographical location, kind of the specific things that are really bottlenecks for you in that context.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

You want to go first, Tecla?

SPEAKER_06 51:15

No, you can go.

SPEAKER_01 51:16

So on New Foundation Farms, just for anybody who doesn't know, they are raising 20 million, buying 1,000 acres in the UK, potentially scaling that a number of times and being a fully regenerative, fully integrated regenerative food enterprise, agri-food enterprise as they call it. We're following them with the podcast because I find them extremely ambitious, a very interesting team and doing things very differently, like Chris is saying, and I'm interested because they do things at a certain scale or they are going to try to do things at a certain scale, which maybe unlocks certain things that an individual farmer can't, meaning building a proper food brand, selling into the city, having a farm shop that operates year round and actually drives a lot of the value back to the land, having more than 100 people on staff and operating at a scale that there is an economy of scale. Let's not deny that. It's a very different thing, obviously, because they start with a sort of clean slate They will buy the land. They can do whatever they want with that. They will never sell it. So they have a very long-term, at least, plan. Let's see what they will be following that. So I'm very curious about that because it shows a different operating system or a different model at a different scale that, according to them, makes sense in the UK. Very context-specific, obviously. So let's see. I don't know. I think once you have that brand standing, you can sell a lot of the food through the food brand and proper marketing, proper design, if you see there. their data room, they thought about this a lot and they have a lot of experience with selling food. I think you can absorb a lot of other food from the area, from farmers that are nearby and make this transition a lot easier for people that don't want to, like I said in the chat, every farmer needs a market, that don't want to set up their own food brand, that don't necessarily want to do that because you don't want to wear 15 different hats and they want to have access to the best technology that you can have if you share it with a major hub like that. So I think if you offer a good market and have a good sense of the quality and the regenerative practices then this could be very interesting could fail completely in a couple of years and we look back like this was really this was a bad shot but I think we need to be ambitious we need to be bold in the current sense we need to question a lot of things about agriculture and one of them is the single family farm with a small farm shop and we all hope that that will save the world because I think there are a lot of issues with that so we need professional organizations and companies as well running some of these. And so let's see where they get.

SPEAKER_02 53:45

Cheers.

SPEAKER_06 53:47

Yeah, I will go quickly. I think on the model farm thing and then having other farmers copy that is, I think, very often challenging because in the model farm, like I just mentioned, you then invest a lot of resources and then for the other farmers surrounding that farm can sometimes be difficult to get to that. So that's one comment. In terms of barriers to scale for grounded for us the success in our model lies in making it successful for the farmers because that will allow us to scale so if we can make this work financially for farmers that we work with then we can also scale and barriers there I think there are two which we are now addressing one is money because you often need to have some kind of capital to get this whole thing started so we're looking at raising our own fund within Grounded to be able to scale more rapidly and have a little bit more leeway that we can actually choose areas which we think are interesting and get started. And the other thing is market access. And for that, we are an access to the right kind of markets. And for that, we are launching a platform, hopefully next week, which is geared towards giving really regenerative suppliers access to niche brands. So kind of bridging that gap that I was talking about earlier, we're looking for regeneratively produced ingredients and then hopefully getting those suppliers a better price. And that will hopefully also allow us to scale more rapidly because then we can onboard all kinds of different suppliers who we can then provide support to get better at regenerative agriculture. So we see that market link as a sort of scaling mechanism so we can reach many more suppliers than we are currently doing.

SPEAKER_02 55:57

Nice. Thanks for that. By the way, that's very exciting. Two nice initiatives that you're kind of folding into that. I'm looking forward to see that platform. I wish you guys the best.

SPEAKER_06 56:08

Yes, we're crunching at the moment. Well, not me, as you can see, but my colleagues. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:18

All right, yeah, thank you, Tekla. We're also almost already at the end. It's a one-hour conversation. We're going to do this way more often and maybe zoom in on specific parts of what we addressed today even to get in a little bit more detail. Maybe, Daniel, to mention you, Koen, you responded. Daniel, you mentioned, if I say your name right, Daniel Cezano. Correct me, please. You mentioned a few things maybe it's it's a good closing remark as well because you just you mentioned a few ideas that you think are going to be relevant in the space and maybe you can respond on it as a final uh remark

SPEAKER_03 57:01

so well basically just present myself um i'm the founder of adapta is a startups that works in brazil on regenerative agriculture i currently have joined the idb the inter-american development bank i'm helping them invest a part of their fund in in a larger portfolio on regenerative agriculture. We're creating a green hub to invest basically with the largest multinational companies in Latin America in regenerative agriculture. And I'm also a farmer. So I own a small farm here close to Rio de Janeiro. What I see is that a lot of people usually they talk about transitional finance, but for me, me, this is a second bit as a key. If you don't have a system to manage the transition at scale, then you cannot have transitional finance because transitional finance is a scale issue. And then we have companies like 123 that they actually have the expertise in how they've developed their own system. But how many companies do we need to create to develop this sort of system? So I think that developing a mechanism, a clear mechanism that tries these processes and manages the transition at scale, that will be actually very important. Because when you do that, you start collecting data, and then you're going to have artificial intelligence, and then you're going to have all the satellite data. You know, with Carbon, our network is doing great thing with satellite images for monitoring Carbon, which can be linked to blockchain. You can have traceable products with traceable impacts and ultimately we can up with the marketplace online platform that eventually can substitute current trading structures you can actually and it's my opinion that's where we have to go create trading mechanisms large scale that are going to sell tradable impacts and tradable product with tradable impacts and and i think that's when actually going to start working at the landscape level so you know this should be a little bit my my take on how I actually see the market evolving.

SPEAKER_01 59:23

I think we're on top of the, not on top of the hour, on the bottom of the hour, so Bart, I will give it back to you. I see there's a lot to be built here. Almost every piece of the value chain has to be, value web has to be rebuilt, so we better get to work.

SPEAKER_04 59:40

I think so as well. I'm going to wrap it up for today. First of all, thank you very much all for coming. As I said in the beginning, we recorded the session, so I will follow up with all of you. I'll try to capture a some of the links in this chat as well. Make sure that that is in an email together with the registration so you can watch it again. We are currently with Fresh working hard on this mission, trying to get more teams working on these challenges. So if you know people who want to work in this space, especially we are starting up a cohort at the end of this year, trying to build these new organizations. So also on the input side like ideas or problems that you run into but especially on the talent side currently we are very much open for people that want to build new ventures in this space so yeah please share we will have a next event actually on the 7th of July which is a fresh talks around a similar subject that we will invite probably three different pioneers in this space to tell more on a specific use case that we can dive into. This is more of an open conversation and probably Kun and I will host another conversation like this at the end of July. Let's see how it goes. If you have any ideas on maybe a more focused discussion or topics that you would like to get into in this conversation arena, I would say, or you would like to have some speaking time, please reach out to us. You can either email me or do it via LinkedIn. But Yeah, let's get this conversation going. I think there's a lot more than we could cover today. And especially also thanks for Willemijn and Tekla for being here and sharing your story. So thank you very much. And I hope to see you the 7th of July.