Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
304 Henry Dimbleby - Biodiversity on balance sheet, role and risks of gene editing and AI and the case for less meat
This is the second part of a wider conversation with Henry Dimbleby, founder of Bramble Partners and LEON Restaurants (please find the first below as episode 303). We continue our deep dive into the three compartment model and we discuss what should we grow where and why, the invisibility of nature and why biodiversity is not on the balance sheet. We go from why regen isn’t anti science to making a strong case for reducing our animal protein (mostly meat and dairy) and how to do that. We explore the potential role of precision fermentation and the one of technology, how computing power, machine learning and AI can give us much more insights. We end with the potential role and risks of gene editing, the recent farmers riots, and of course, the financial side of things: why Henry started a £50M fund, how would he invest 1 billion pounds and, of course, the magic wand question!
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Did we cover an invisibility of nature enough? I don't think so yet. Like that as a big piece, a big piece as well. And then we get through the three compartment model, because we have a lot to explore there as well. But let's get to the nature piece and invisibility.
Speaker 2:So we talked about health, junk food cycle. The feedback loop that is going wrong on the environmental side is even more obvious. And Sir Parthadasku, up to who's a cambridge economist, was asked to write a, a piece for the treasury in the uk called the economics of biodiversity. Massive piece, fundamentally important, yeah, extraordinary piece of work. And he pointed out, uh, that nature is invisible. And he says and he calls it the invisibility of nature. And he says not only is nature actually quite hard to measure, so it's often underground, it's literally invisible. It's underground, it's underwater, it's in the air, it's silent, it moves about, it doesn't sit waiting to be measured, but we don't even try. So in most of the ways in which we measure human success, nature is invisible in those measurements. So and he uses the example of you know, you can't count it in your wallet, it's not on the balance sheet of companies, it's not in the way that we measure GDP. And in fact, he points out that it's worse than that. Governments globally give subsidies to a value of $500 billion a year to activities that destroy nature, the three largest ones being fossil fuel, fossil fuel companies, fishing companies and industrial agricultural companies, and those subsidies cause $4 to $6 trillion of damage to nature. So it's not that, as we all know, if you give something as a free resource, people will consume it and produce things from it. We're actually giving a negative value to nature. We're paying people to destroy it. So, in that context, we shouldn't be surprised if we are consuming us at a great rate, and dasgupta even in that thing, he has a this amazing mathematical proof of the rate at which we are, uh, consuming nature and our economic growth, where he goes on to estimate when we will become extinct if we carry on doing these things at the same time, because that is the inevitable. Like we're consuming nature faster than we're producing economic growth. So we're just mining, we're destroying nature to produce economic growth.
Speaker 2:Now, in some ways, that's quite positive, because we know what the answer is. The answer is you stop paying people to destroy nature. You do three things. You say we need to set a target, not just to stop the destruction of nature, but to restore it Net gain, natural capital, net gain. As it's known, we need to pay public money for public goods. So for things that are where there's no private market, such as, you know, biodiversity, clean air, et cetera, we need to pay people to create those goods for the public. So in many ways, that's good news, because you there's a very clear um feedback loop that's going wrong and it is within the state's purview. You're not, you don't have this complicated thing of a biological, evolved appetite. You know making this more.
Speaker 2:The state can simply change the way that it regulates farming and, theoretically, there are three things that it has to do. First of all, it has to set a target for biodiversity net gain. It is not enough to stop destroying biodiversity where it is. We need significantly to increase it if we're going to create resilient ecological systems. The second thing, once you've set that target, is you make it come into being by doing, uh, by paying public money for public goods. So you, you, you for those goods that there's no private market for biodiversity, um, clean water and so forth, you actually pay people to to deliver those goods. And then the third thing is you introduce a polluter pays principle. So you, uh, you charge people for the harm they do to nature, which in the end, stops them, either enables you to clear up the harm or stops them doing that thing. So you have those, those three tools that you use.
Speaker 2:you have to be careful about how you implement them politically because, uh, at the moment the fao hence the the riots, yeah, yeah so at the moment, the, the fao, the un's uh food and agricultural organization, estimates and and the estimates that we did for the uk were similar to this that the food system, it's it's 12 percent of of global g GDP. It employs over a third of the people. It's about 12 trillion of GDP and the FAO estimates that it does about $12.7 trillion worth of damage. So if you were to put the political payers principle in overnight, you would double the price of food and you'd be you'd be uh, kicked out of government within a week. So you had to be careful about how you manage that transition. But the root is there. Then the question we asked is what does the future look like? So if there's some kind of imaginary equation that says how can I use the land that I have to restore biodiversity, produce food, produce energy?
Speaker 1:sequester carbon you have doesn't mean a farm In this case it's the country. I'm like you have to look at a large scale.
Speaker 2:The scarcest asset we have. Or ideally, you do it globally, but that's obviously not possible because we have the nation state. But so you say how should I be using my land? Like, what is the best way to use the land? And what's interesting here is the debate that was ferociously raging when we started in the food strategy work was the kind of scientists who talked about land sparing. So they talked about no, we need to double down on intensification. That will enable us to take land out of production which we can give back to nature, and that's the way we solve this problem. Double down on the science. And then you had the regenerative farmers organic regenerative. At the time, regenerative was more nascent than it is now still not fully defined.
Speaker 1:Some regenerative farmers are offended if you'd call them organic Exactly exactly.
Speaker 2:So you had that whole culture war as well. But basically they were saying no, we need land sharing, we need our farms to share uh, nature with the farm. And actually the work that we did said you can solve that problem. You can can solve restore nature, sequester carbon, produce enough food, create energy. But you have to realize that farms have been with us for so long that actually land sparing on its own does not work, because there are whole ecosystems that have evolved to live on farms. We've been farming since the Holocene, since 10,000 BC, for 12,000 years, and there are whole ecosystems that actually have evolved on farms. So if you had land sparing alone, doubling down on intensification and creating wild land, there actually wouldn't be room for these species, these whole ecosystems.
Speaker 1:So you're saying if we grow the food in factories, which is sometimes the pipe dream of some of this, the techno optimists then actually we lose some biodiversity because they have co-involved with farming, greatly disappeared to a certain extent, like there's there's I mean the biodiversity loss on farms, but there are species that simply wouldn't survive that while they're placed because they're not co-involved.
Speaker 2:Not just some. You know 50% of habitable land. If you take away, you know desert and icy areas, 50% is farmed at the moment. So this is a huge like. If you just did grew all your food, precision, fermented all your food and grew it in vertical farms, you would just wipe out the whole bunch of nature.
Speaker 2:Now, the flip side of this is that actually, as with with current yields, uh, you, you do need to have some intensive farming. And by intensive farming, we didn't, we did not mean green revolution. We don't mean um, you know, nitrogen for synthetic fertilizer, etc. What we mean is monocultures. So, in order to get the yields up, you do need some areas that are just growing wheat in a field that are largely monocultures. Now, increasingly, those will be and some people hate this phrase sustainable intensification. But you, you need to use all the tools at your disposal on those fields, so you will be. You won't be able to have harbour bosh created fertilizer over time. So there are a lot. If you look at even now, a lot of the um intensive farmers are already beginning to use the regenerative toolbook because there are things that help you grow, you know at a high but you can't, you cannot build.
Speaker 2:We could not find any kind of mathematical way that using the strictest version of regenerative farming, so quite broad rotations, ruminants in that rotation, et cetera, et cetera, you could produce enough food. So we called this, and I have some. I slightly think maybe we got the name of it wrong, but I'll come on to that. So we called it the three compartment model. So you basically have wild land, one compartment, really kind of land where you intentionally reduce the yield to bring nature onto the farm, another compartment and then the more intensive land where your your number one goal is to produce as many calories you can, but with total factor productivity, so without polluting, without releasing all carbon et cetera, and that seems where the challenge is right.
Speaker 1:But it's also most excitement, like if we figured that third piece out. We not only tackle the techno-optimist. You cannot feed the world, blah, blah, blah. I think there's an enormous toolbox we haven't been using because we've been focused on a few relatively cheap inputs that we could get for a number of time, and that's okay. Now we move away from that. That's where the challenge is okay. Show us how much you can squeeze, like I think we only scratch the surface in terms of production numbers if you really unleash the creativity we have with all your compost teas, but brew that scale in a brewery, all your precision drones and all your machinery, like. There's so much possible in that third piece that allows all the others, of course, to to to happen, because we still have to feed a lot of people and probably more uh in in the time to yeah, eight, maybe up to 10 billion people and so and so.
Speaker 2:but actually the reason I have kind of slight reservations about the three compartment models of a framing is two things. First of all, it's more of a continuum. It's not like there's a hard line and it's exactly. It's a complex system. The second is that there are people who have seized on the three compartment model compartment model say oh, I can go on doing what I always did and we need this, we need this, uh, industrial agriculture especially when the third one, I think, and you can't because you can't continue to pollute and you can't continue to use all this far.
Speaker 2:You can't continue to mine our food. We cannot mine our food. You know, 30 to if you were one way of looking at it 30 to 50 percent of the calories we currently produce rely on, rely on harbor wash produced fertilizer. So we are mine, we're effectively mining Millions of years of stored sunlight to produce a lot of our food at the moment. That cannot continue. So you cannot have business as usual. So that's but basically you, but you also can't have.
Speaker 2:I mean, I've talked to patrick holden who was um, uh now runs sustainable food trust and they did a piece of work where they looked at if you had effectively organic systems, the whole of uh, the uk, in an organic system, could you produce enough food? And they said, well, you could, but we'd have to eat almost no chicken or pork, more beef. I look at that model. It's still quite carbon intense. So we couldn't make that work. So we could not make a kind of what a lot of us romantically like the idea of, because it fills our soul, settles peace in our soul, soul, this idea of a kind of completely uh, you know, organic or nature-based model. Without any modern science we couldn't make that work and funnily enough I was at a fascinating conference again that mark sainsbury had organized in just before we, before we go, because I know that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:I think that without any modern science is a interesting phrase there, because the, the cutting-edge farmers I know some organic certified, some not, etc. They're so not far ahead of science, but they're definitely at the cutting edge of science, not that they, but it's a different type of science or it's a different um, holistic is such a bad word for this, but it's. It's definitely trying to figure out how biology works, not how you squeeze as much in with. So I think I don't know patrick personally at all, so I don't want to say, but I think without science it's tricky there, because the cutting edge now and and we see that with jonathan landgren, usually a top scientist left because he said the cutting edge stuff is happening on a farm and I need to start a farm and a research institute, um, but I cannot do that from the USDA because the cutting edge is happening on farms and it doesn't fit in my models. And so there's, there's, let's, let's be very clear agroecology and and regen is not anti-science. It's one of those narratives that I I couldn't.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree more, and actually so I probably introduced patrick um there and been unfair on his view. So I actually think again, with the computing power that we're beginning to have, that what had been seen as old wisdom is actually really good science. It's just we haven't been able to understand it in the limited way that we understand science, and so I think you will see emerging understanding how the soil works.
Speaker 1:Those complex systems will become increasingly possible because we'll actually how tree grows like we see examples of speed and and growth numbers in complex agroforestry systems that are completely unheard of. If you you look at the models, if you look at like that's not possible and it's not possible because we have never studied them in that way. So that's the other, but like it's. We're such at the early stage, like in that third piece, and I'm also very fascinated about the wilding piece, like how much management and intervention means. That first bit of the bucket, let's say I'm sort of less interested in the second because I don't know we figured it out. We're like, okay, we know how to bring back nature and such, etc.
Speaker 1:But that third one is how do we intensify while getting fossil fuels basically out of the the system? Not in one day, let's not do sri lanka, um, but how do we transition to that? How do we get way more tools in our toolbox? I think that's the excitement piece. That's exciting from investor point of view, from food security, from quality as well and from biodiversity, because that's where you have the most acreage at the moment and you can have the most impact by undersowing by a bit of complexity from a monoculture perspective, like it makes a massive difference in a lot of this super, super degraded, because most of the farmland we see is like it's dead, basically in terms of biodiversity and in terms of soil life, like there's where the biggest impact will be.
Speaker 2:I agree, I completely agree, and I also think we don't know where this is going to end up. So the most important thing is that people are talking, and that was why I was saying this conference in Cambridge, how?
Speaker 1:was that? Yes, I went to which was half.
Speaker 2:It was at the Sainsbury Laboratory, so half people who'd spent their lives genetically modifying now genetically editing crops, and half regenerative farmers, and most of them descended on each other in the middle to say how can we help each other solve this problem? We know what the problem is. We need we can't continue to pollute. We need to understand the complex systems, and you know, all of those genesis actually really understand complex systems because they're dealing with. They understand how complex just one plant is, and so I'm very hopeful that it's all about exploring knowledge, understanding complex systems and how we can use that to produce food in a less destructive way and a more nutritious way.
Speaker 1:Funny enough, you talked about yeah, I think the three compartments, just to, I think, the question if it's perfect or not.
Speaker 1:It's a continuum, that's all true, but I think the quest, asking the question what to do where and why, is something we never do in policy, never do in farming. We always look on a farm to farm level, more or less like the whales example, like everybody has to plant 10, doesn't make sense probably for most, but in some could make sense to do way more. Exactly that, that question of, okay, what do we do where? What makes sense where, culturally, context, soil, weather, climate and and how do we, how do we grow the most, with the least damage or with the most positive side. Because actually we see in agroforestry, the more more you prune properly, the faster the soil regrows, like there is a positive keystone aspect to us if you manage well. But the question is where you do what and and you have to have a good reason, and I don't think any government has done that on a even a country level no, and I mean the uk.
Speaker 2:Now the england, sorry is doing a land use framework. So they're trying to understand that. My guess is, when they do it, they will not make it there will. It'll be very difficult to publish it without it being incredibly controversial, so I'll be quite careful about that. And then the other thing that we have to be quite humble about is it's going to change the way farm. It makes farm regulation and payments much more complicated, because you don't really know what impact a policy has until the system reacts to it. So there's a good example in the uk at the moment where they've just in january they increased the payment for species rich grassland. Everyone thinks they probably did it paid a bit too much for it, so it's over to.
Speaker 2:So it's like some horticulture is not being planted because it's you make more money and they're going to have to change.
Speaker 2:So actually you know, the line I think is I always come back to is Donella Meadows' book and if you know her, but which is the kind of the book about complex systems, and she says what we have to understand about complex systems is, first of all, you cannot control them.
Speaker 2:Number one, number two, it is actually they are, in some ways, fundamentally unknowable. You can't really understand them, but you can dance with them, and that is what all these regenerative farmers are doing. That is what people who are working in is they are dancing with the system. They're trying things, seeing how their dance partner responds, trying something else, and that is hard enough for a farmer at a farm level who understands his or her farm and is dancing with that farm, but it is even harder for the state. So there's going to be a lot of mistakes and we have to, I think, all be humble and have forgiveness and let the politicians and the people who are devising the new way of incentivizing things make mistakes and change and give them the space that we all have in our lives when we're trying to dance with the complex systems that we did to make mistakes have in our lives, when we're trying to dance with the complex systems that we did to make mistakes.
Speaker 1:And let's go to a, um, a topic that's in your book a lot I mean, of course, in the in the region space it's, it's present which is animal protein, um. You already mentioned another research of patrick with especially ruminants versus non-ruminants. I think it's very clear from your analytics like we have to reduce meat consumption, um and and thus production, not that we have to produce it in a third way, um, and you know name a number of pieces. But I'd also have seen, I think, in the past, like it hasn't been really maybe we have reached peak meat to a certain extent, but we don't have, we haven't seen strong reductions. First of all, why is it so important in the UK context to reduce animal protein consumption and then some examples or some ideas, some directions of how to achieve that.
Speaker 2:So the problem with meat is just that it is incredibly. The way in which we currently produce meat is very inefficient. What do I mean by that? Well, the 80 billion animals that we rear annually for meat and for dairy products weigh twice as much as all humans at any one time. 20 times as much as all land-dwelling vertebrates and birds, much as all land-dwelling vertebrates and birds. In the UK, 85% of the farmland that we have is used either to grow feed for animals or to graze them. In the EU, 62% of crops are used either to feed to biodigesters or to feed to animals. Globally, 75 of our land is used to feed animals.
Speaker 2:It's just too. You know, if we're going to restore biodiversity, sequester carbon, we cannot basically put that food through. You know the bodies of large heavy methane producing animals to produce food, and so things like dairy. You know, if you look at dairy, that's over 60 percent of the of the dairy that china imports, for example, is important in the form of milk powder. It just cannot be right that, if you know so, you could argue that we shouldn't be having milk powder and that that's to do with ultra processed food, and but what we argued was you're not going to change it overnight and in the meantime, it cannot be right that for that milk powder, if you can put it through this huge heavy herbivore, make it produce, remove its calves from from birth, from the cow, and that's which is cruel and then boil that, boil all of that water down. Having gone through all that, and so you form. It's just incredibly inefficient. So that is not to say that you can't have room.
Speaker 2:You know, I think ruminants have a really important role to play in some regenerative systems. Um, so it's not so. It's just saying we reckon to hit the uk's targets by 2035, you have to reduce meat by about 30 percent and by 2050 you have to reduce it by 50 percent. And so you know and that is what worries me about that is that, unlike when we did all of the kind of the consumer research and we did our focus groups and we went around the country to, we had kind of citizens dialogues. Everyone's really in favor of tackling junk food. They're actually up for it. The government is a bit lily-livered, a bit nervous. Compared to where the, where the country is on meat. It's a very different thing. It's a very well as everyone will know who listens to this podcast. It is about the most contentious area people here. When you say something, people hear something else.
Speaker 1:It's uh to some people. How do we go about it? How do we? How do we? Because it seems like it seems essential to take the pressure off, like to dramatically reduce the, the land use of feed and the grazing in the wrong places, because that's the coming back to the three compartment model. We often graze over, graze, don't graze in the right way, and, of course, all the animal welfare pieces which you vividly describe in the book. And it's not going to disappear overnight, it's not going to.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of health issues, etiquettes like, like eddie, actually it was mostly on on, I think, uh, paleo or k2 diet, like what are ways to? Because by 2035 is tomorrow, basically, yeah, and what are ways to? I mean, we have the, the technopath to miss again. You, you, um, quote rethink x as well, like it's all going to be coming from a lab and um, or in a, in a big fat and um, the land prices are going to collapse over time or very soon, etc. Etc. What do you see? Now it's a bit later. Of course the book has been. You wrote it, uh, at the food strategy a while back, like in this current context, 2024, what do you think are significant levers to, to pull and to to get the pressure off so I think there are, there are.
Speaker 2:There are only three levers you can pull. So, um, the first is the kind of tech thing. So we argue that for that ultra processed food like 50% of meat in the UK and similar in America, canada is eaten in the form of a mince in an ultra-processed product. So at the moment all of the techno solutions to that have a problem, which is they don't taste as good as meat and they're more expensive. So we shouldn't be surprised that alternative protein hasn't cut through, because it's very difficult selling things that don't taste as good and are more expensive.
Speaker 2:But that's going to change. So I think the first thing to go will probably be, funnily enough, egg yolks. So there are loads of egg yolks in kind of qu everything, quiches and this that the other avian flu is a massive problem for that. Then it'll be milk powder and I think there just will be a kind of technical substitution and we argue that it is, given that this ultra-processed food stuff is so bad, you might as well use it to help you with the environmental stuff, because you're not immediately going to get people eating fresh food overnight, so you have to use the fact that it's there. So that's the first way that you do it. The second way that it happens is through changing public tastes. Now, that is, who knows whether that will?
Speaker 1:happen.
Speaker 2:That's an easy one but but definitely, you know, I'm doing some work at the moment with one of the tv channels who wants to do a big campaign on eating less meat. I think it is possible, you know, with influencers, with, uh, hollywood people etc. That we do just begin to consume less. I don't know, but that's one route, that it happens that people, certainly in my, having done all the work on uh and I simply skewed case, but we I just like nothing like I'm really careful now about the kind of meat I eat and how much I eat many more beans, and maybe that shifts the dial.
Speaker 2:The third thing is that, while it is completely politically impossible for government to act at the moment, going back to that stat I gave earlier on, by 2035, uh, when climate change will be we will be it'll be much worse, right, it's going to get worse before it gets better and agriculture will be producing potentially 50% of greenhouse gases. I think you might then find a route for government intervention. So I can see, for example, you know it'll start with carbon border taxes, so taxing meat that's been produced from felled forests in south america, and gradually what is politically impossible now might change, because it has become so obvious a that this is a huge problem and b that agriculture is an increasing part of it. So I kind of think you know you have to. We again complex system, who knows? So you have to bet on the technical, on changing public opinion and then on government intervention and then how does it fit with health?
Speaker 1:I mean, of course, if you replace ultra processed the means in ultra processed food with with a lab grown one, probably doesn't change too much. But but at the same time we just talked about Eddie and others that are going on the health tour and eat real food. There's a lot of meat involved, animal protein in a lot of those diets. I'm not saying all, but how does that in a complex system? Of course you can have different streams, but how does that work in your head with, let's say, the healthy food, ultra processed, um people side or food side, and also um a lot of the research now that's coming out on healthy soil, healthy produce, healthy gut system, healthy people. Probably actually we should eat less chicken and and and pork if not done well actually, of course. Different types of dairy, very different results. How do you fit that into the junk food cycle and the healthy side of things?
Speaker 2:On health. Fundamentally, for it to be fixed, we need to have a complete cultural change, and I was quite pessimistic about that. But then I look back and see how many times our food culture has changed in the last 80 years.
Speaker 1:It's like why on earth would sushi used to be dangerous? There were german like tour guides written if you go to japan, don't eat this, this um, this raw food, because it's very dangerous to you.
Speaker 2:And that was not so long ago so we've changed our culture, like food culture, a lot before and basically, you know, michael pollen fundamentally got that right, which is eat food most, not too much, mostly plants. And so there that is. And then at the same time you need to try and reformulate the ultra process stuff to make it less dangerous. But I I don't think that that eat food not too much, mostly plants, cooking from scratch needs to include, I think, the keto. You know eddie bless him, he's a bodybuilder, right, so he's obsessed by protein and by eating enough protein. He eats like 20 eggs for breakfast or something, um, but I don't see that that necessarily needs to become part of that, that shift.
Speaker 2:I do think that for that cultural shift to happen, you know, we need to fundamentally the role of state in that is to make sure that that food when you go to hospitals, you know the state provides about 5% of our calories schools, hospitals, government buildings and that needs to become the norm. There needs to be the good stuff, not the bad stuff. But I think, you know, I don't think necessarily just because you're cooking with scraps you need to eat 20 eggs in a and and liver. I must say I would go. I want somebody to go and give eddie some cooking lessons, because he, he does some amazing things.
Speaker 1:He does like this, this dish where it's like all in one pot eggs, heated eggs, and liver and avocados sometimes you mix it, it blends it as well, but it's I mean, that's what I think the danger, and we talked about it pre-recording like it's amazing because it's from scratch, it's real ingredients, it's not too expensive. He really makes an important point about um like this doesn't have to cost you, because we buy liver by eggs. They're not the most expensive things. But then I know from food science and and health, like if you eat certain types of eggs they can be really good for you or very inflammatory, depending what they ate. So we don't want this to replace, like we replace one problem with another. But then we argue of course, yeah, but if you come from most of the uk, diet is extremely ultra processed or ultra processed, going to at least what he's eating in a lesser. He also shows a lot of vegetables. He chooses not to eat most of those, but he shows them single ingredient things.
Speaker 2:It's way better, regardless how they were produced you're never going to get a perfect mouthpiece, you know. The point is what is great about him? What is great about him is wake the fuck up. It's just like this kind of like look at it, look what we have created and that you know that is very powerful and he should be rightly and I think it's fantastic what he's doing OK.
Speaker 1:so now we answered sort of the first question I always like to ask in one hour and a half into this interview.
Speaker 1:Why are you doing what you're doing? I knew this was happening and that's why it's so good. But I want to also talk a bit about Bramble Partners and the role of money and finance, and let's summarize this first one we did with a question I'd like to ask. Let's say we do this live, we're at Groundswell or in London and let's say the city, and it's full of in the theater, full of investors and people in the finance sector, and, of course, they've got your book, they are excited about the evening, but what is one thing we want them to remember after, if they walked out, if there's one thing only for finance people managing their own wealth or pension funds, et cetera but if they go back to work Monday morning and they remember the next morning and they remember one thing from our conversation on stage, what would that be? What would be the seed you want to plant in the finance world's mind?
Speaker 2:the seed you want to plant in in the finance world's mind. Well, funnily enough, uh, I would want to. I would want to say to them change the food system in your wake, the fuck up in your community. Go into your local school that's where you go and ask if the food's good enough. Go into the food bank. Help, because my theory of change and I I is, I'm not sure that big, finite people who are currently in charge of large amounts of capital, I think they have limited agency in how they can change things.
Speaker 2:So I think you have and I was talking about this the other day, actually, to someone who'd given hundreds of millions of pounds over their lifetime to nature restoring projects. So you have philanthropy first of all. So and this is like by cat france, but I mean stuff you don't get paid for. So for me, that would be the food strategy. It would be chefs in schools, it'd be sustainable restaurant association. So philanthropy, I think, can achieve two things. It can be a sticking plaster what so? While the system is bad, it can help restore populations of certain um, certain ecosystems in various areas. It can help people who are struggling in poverty. It's a sticking plaster, but fundamentally it it's not sustainable, because if the money goes, the benefit goes. The second thing philanthropy can do and this is something I spent quite a lot of my time doing is influence regulation, because fundamentally, none of this changes without regulation. So what do I mean by that?
Speaker 2:I was at a dinner the other day with a whole bunch of the sustainability people for all the big food businesses. I asked the question when has your company ever done something to make your product healthier or more environmentally sustainable, which has significantly reduced your profits? The answer is never. No company will ever do that. So what they're doing at the moment is they're doing the kind of low-hanging fruit that turned out. They were destroying the environment in all sorts of ways that were unnecessary, that they can fix without costing them anything. But as soon as they hit cost, they will stop, and so that's where you need regulation, and so regulation for me opens the space for private capital to move in.
Speaker 2:Government support capital moves in and then at a point they become because of the regulation. They become cheaper, for they take over. So the customer drives the decision rather than government driving the decision, and I think that in the food system, what happens is the regulation changes what it is profitable to do. Then and this is why I'm doing Bramble there is a space for private capital to accelerate the speed at which that market develops. So, tesla, that private capital accelerated the natural transition which would have happened anyway. But it only, you can only make it work if there's that government regulation there in the first place. So I think there is good. For me, it's like I've done all this stuff in the food system, which largely was why?
Speaker 1:why a fund? Now, what's the well, because I've done the kind of philanthropic stuff and I'm still doing.
Speaker 2:I mean, my philanthropic work now is going to be chefs in schools. I'm doing a piece of work on health where I'm interviewing all of the prime ministers and the Secretary of State for Health since 1990 in the UK and saying why has it been so difficult, like from a politician's point of view, to make any progress? And I can be publishing something on that, and I'm doing a bit of work on meat. But that's my kind of philanthropic stuff and the question is, you know, I we sold Leon in 2021. What do I do like with the rest of my time?
Speaker 2:And what it struck me I could do? Is I kind of I've been privileged enough really to understand, to just have this view of the system, of the system through COVID, through everything in DEFRA, understand how it fits together and can I help pull in private capital and focus on those areas of the food system that could be improved as regulation moves? So that's that's the thing of brownwell. How do I help entrepreneurs um become successful, navigate the regulatory environment and accelerate the change towards a food system that is, uh, regenerative, that sequesters carbon instead of emitting it, and that is healthy, and I think there know inevitably. For it to be sustainable, you need both the regulation, but you need people to work out how to create business models that don't require ongoing philanthropic support.
Speaker 1:And with Leon, you were objectively early and we discussed at the beginning of this like you need momentum and you're saying now that you need regulation and then that creates space for private enterprises and companies and thus investors to invest in them. Are we there? Like is there? You said at Brembo. I think the answer is yes, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. But like is there space now for these entrepreneurs to start potentially thriving? Because the government is starting to create, to use your analogy of electric cars, some charging infrastructure, some subsidies, some early signs of this could have wings.
Speaker 2:So, yes, but we are right in the foothills. So, as I said earlier on, this is 12% of global GDP is agri-food and it's causing $12.7 trillion of damage, and we are only beginning to get into the foothills of that. And so the implications that I see all the time people who are trying to do businesses that I think the regulatory space isn't there for yet, but I think it will open all the time now, I think the regulatory direction of travel, despite these little setbacks in Europe prior to the June elections, it's only going one way direct capital towards businesses that are helping farmers understand their regenerative approaches, that are reducing the CO2 levels of inputs, that are making pest control solutions less toxic, that are helping customers buy healthier whole foods, et cetera, et cetera. You know all of that stuff and, funny enough, you know you look at RFSI and you look at.
Speaker 2:My concern about some of the big capital is like people get excited. It's like, oh, we need to. You know we have millions of dollars waiting to go and that can cause problems. So, for example, in vertical farming and in alternative protein, you have these huge slugs of capital coming in which actually moved the system quite a long way, but they fundamentally misunderstood that these are both farms. These aren't tech businesses. They're ways of producing food and they're long-term and big asset-heavy businesses. They're not going to give you big returns.
Speaker 2:I look at RFSI the conference and you can really you can imagine money going in the wrong places, Cause everyone's like everyone asks me like where should I be? You know, I was in. I was in a meeting with one of the big banks who'd set up a food fund and they'd invested in a certain business and they were like what do you think about this? And I was like, yeah, actually I think that's one, that's one of the businesses that's gonna do quite well who knows? But I, they're in the right area and they're like oh, thank god, you know, you can see them getting relaxed, so I do worry some we're at the beginning.
Speaker 2:We're at the beginning we're at the beginning and there's a lot of money that's going to go wrong way. There's a lot of, there's a lot of wild west stuff in terms of carbon capture and carbon credits. I worry that farmers are signing up to contracts on their land long-term contracts on their land that they're going to look back on and think why did I do that? So all of that's going on. But we're right at the beginning. But it is the beginning and it has started but we're right at the beginning.
Speaker 1:But it is the beginning and it has. It has started and and so what are you? I mean, you mentioned a few things. What will be focus areas? You can check it on the website as well, bramble, but just things that you're excited about. Are you mostly uk focused? It's a 50 million fund, um, and what are you mostly looking at like in terms of of an investment thesis or or it's like food system? We, it's complex. We do everything that we need to do if it's a good investment.
Speaker 2:So so our, our view is that what we bring is deep domain expertise. So we really understand the regulatory side, we understand the NGO pressures, we understand the commercial side, having having you know the kind of and the government side, and so we're actually going in other ways. We're going quite broad. We're going to be slightly later, so we're starting at what's known as Series A. So those are businesses that already have revenue. They have a proven track record so we can actually help them. They've got enough scale to be able to be helped all the way through to growth. We're looking along all the way along the supply chain, so from the value chain so right from kind of farm inputs all the way to consumer no-transcript otherwise and we're going to be we hope to be people investing alongside less expert capital. So people want us bringing that in.
Speaker 1:This will be in the system.
Speaker 2:So people say look, will you come into this business with us because we think it's got, we think it's got legs, but we're not the experts. And so that's kind of where we hope to direct capital to the right place. That's the point of of doing it. You know, 50 million on its own in a fund isn't, isn't a lot. But if you are acting as a lightning rod to bring capital to the right places, then maybe we can shift the system a little bit in that way as well.
Speaker 1:Which begs the question a nice bridge to one. What if you had a billion? If you had that crazy amount of money that's trying to enter the space? This could be extremely long-term. We always ask this question, like if you had an almost insane amount of money, we could argue should it be concentrated in one fund or one person? But let's say that happened overnight. For whatever reason, it has to be invested. So maybe a small portion you can use as grant and lobby power, because that would help the rest of the fund. But if you I'm not looking for exact euro or pound amounts, but if you had to choose like what would you focus on?
Speaker 2:Is it the bio-stimulant side or the consumer good side, or like what would be top priorities for you to to tackle if you had a lot of money? The biggest gap, I think, is a public good, so it is something that government I think should be providing. It's quite hard for private people to provide it, and that is a combination of two things. One is we need way more research on farms. So we at the all of the research money goes into, a massive amount goes into genetics and just like a tiny amount goes into complex systems, and that is a big problem. So the reason which is a problem if you make a seed in a lab?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the reason that all the solutions are that shape is because no one is spending the money on farms really understanding the science. And then the second thing is you know we go to grants where we meet all these regenerative farmers. They're right at the cutting edge. They're interested. There is not nearly enough advice for farmers who want to make the transition, and so I think both of those things I don't think that I think they are things that the state should be providing.
Speaker 2:I would probably, if I had a billion, I would probably try and prove that that was a public good. So it'd take one country and like massively accelerate the amount of research going into, or maybe in europe going into, or maybe in Europe going into regenerative farming, on farm farming science projects alongside farmers and then using that knowledge to help a network of farmer support and then hope that I could then persuade you know, over five years, show the outcomes that persuaded the state that this was a good use of their money and if you had, then, let's say, a follow-up one to actually, let's say that happens, then of course, this complete pipe dream, wishful thinking.
Speaker 1:But what would you if you had brembo partners, let's say fund number four or fund number three, and it is. It grew into a large amount because many people co-invested with you, but also many that I would just want to give the money to you and you do it and I don't have to co-invest. Let let's say you get to a billion, which is a lot but not so much. What would you and we're a few years down the line what do you think are sectors or pieces of the sector you would get excited about from an investor and putting your investor head on perspective?
Speaker 2:I would probably separate it into, if I'm allowed to do this, in your question. You could do everything Into two funds. So I think there is. I think we talk about health and environment and, to a large degree, although there is definitely a meeting point in regenerative cooked food, in legumes, in good veg, you could imagine a food system that was fully sustainable but unhealthy. So you could imagine a food system which was regenerative, where we still ate a lot of sugar and refined carbohydrate, but regenerative sugar yeah, but regenerative sugar, but it could still be pretty bad. You know where we're still eating mars bars, but then they're. You know they're created in a regenerative way in a super nice agroforestry system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so that world exists. And likewise, you can imagine a healthy world which is done in an environmentally destructive way. So you can imagine us eating a lot of fruit and veg, 20 eggs, exactly. And yes, there'll be information. There'll be kind of around the edges, but you can imagine those two worlds. So I would split it in two.
Speaker 2:So I I think there is really interesting stuff tech now which is helping people um change the way they cook shop, and we're just at the beginning of that. So, uh, you know, you've got businesses that like, like gusto, which are enabling people to cook from scratch. You've got businesses that are using AI to help people cook for their families much more efficiently. I think people will pay a lot of money for that in the future. I don't know what the solutions are, but I think, as we understand the complex farming systems, I think that um measurement, monitoring of complex systems, different inputs, I think, around. So I would separate. I'd have a kind of farm uh area measure more into one side and then the health at the other side, and that would be two, two areas which I think are only going to grow and grow on in your book.
Speaker 1:As well as these complex systems, we need dashboards, we need observe, like we need to understand, because we make small changes. We don't know what really happens, um, unless we actually monitor properly in the three compartment model, but in general as well, and we need to adjust, probably constantly, because there are complex systems.
Speaker 1:But we can't if we don't have the data you don't have the data exactly surprising how much we, how much, how little data we have on biodiversity, like how few fields we actually survey properly, or on on wild areas, or on on grazing or methane or on like most of this is model based or in labs and not outside in a complex system. So we are on seeds, like we have very little idea, which is super exciting because it means we can start measuring most of that and start tweaking a bit without fully, ever fully, understanding the system. I understand that, but at least understand it from 0.1 percent to maybe one or two, which gives us way more lever to make changes and see if they have.
Speaker 2:So I agree. So you know you were talking about methane modeling, like we, we have no idea. Like, if you look at the interaction between ruminants and soil and methane, it is so variable depending on what kind of farm, what system. We just have like no idea on that and that is you know.
Speaker 1:So my, which drives me crazy, and other people linked it as well with these charts of our world in data and and others, like it's it's good to put it in your face dairy, etc. But it's also good to understand that these are model-based and some life cycle assessments that are not correct, to say the least. That doesn't mean it's not. It's not true. It means we need to like okay, let's see a diverse pasture system with ruminants. How much methane actually gets burped out, observed, and how much actually goes into that? We have no idea.
Speaker 2:One thing that I think is almost certainly the case. One of the, a man who's now become a friend, paul Clark, who was one of my advisors on the food strategy. He was the chief technical officer at Ocado, which is a online delivery platform, but they built this extraordinary warehouse which was a robot swarm. I've seen that and he, you know he said look, I wouldn't even get out of bed without modeling it first, but then you link that model. They had a digital twin, so they had a, a version of that, a version of that uh warehouse which lived completely in a digital world alongside the real one, and constantly the real one would share data with the digital one. But then they could model. They could say what would happen if we had a in terms of like. We had a run. There's a Delia Smith cookery show coming on and she's going to plug this product.
Speaker 2:What do we think will happen to the warehouse if that happens? What do you think will happen if there's a massive drought? What do you think will happen if, constantly you're running stars happen. If constantly you're running stars, I think it is undeniable that at some point in the future, almost any complex system that is really important to man and farms 50 of habitable land are one will be similar. There will be digital twins of your farm. You will have measurement of all sorts of things in situ and you will have a digital twin that is taking that data, suggesting inputs. You'll be trying things you know and you will be dancing with that complex system in a much more technicolor, high definition way than you can dance with it at the moment.
Speaker 1:Wearing your Apple Pro Now. I'm laughing because we are part of it. We are a tiny part of a much bigger ai for soil health consortium, um, run by or financed by the eu and specifically designed to do this, to make the digital twin of farms and um. It's fascinating the point you make. I didn't know. We're going there, obviously. So shout out to the ai for soil health team if you're still listening at this point, if you're listening um to to this far, but it's, it's.
Speaker 1:The importance of that is not to be like how little we know and how much tech technology power we're getting now will enable us to at least observe more, to at least run different scenarios, to at least understand what was what. What if we bring more complexity into this monoculture field? How much complexity is complexity? Let's test, let's run, because you only have a few harvests to do that and of course, you don't want to risk whole farms. Unless you have a research farm, you cannot do that. But we have the technology power to at least understand most of the roads that don't work and then start trying the ones that do.
Speaker 2:I think it's really exciting. One of the books that I made a great impression on me, that I read during the food strategy work, was the Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C Mann, and you know a lot of your listeners will have read it. So basically he's saying you've got these two tribes. The prophet, who is, you know, wants a kind of natural response, and the wizard, who thinks we can take our way out of everything. And Mann says you know they, they keep shouting each other at each other. It becomes a dialogue of the death, which would be fine if we weren't talking about the future of our children, and I think that actually what would be fun if it would be.
Speaker 1:It would be nice entertainment, but it's not fun yeah, I'd be fine, yeah, but nice and tight.
Speaker 2:But the future, and I think what is really exciting about digital twins the ability to understand systems of complex data is actually you're going to see that the wizards and the prophets largely the same people. They're, just they've just done it in different ways, you know, and so I think it's going to be quite irritating, I think, for the prophets, because all the wizards are going to suddenly say, ah, look, this is how complex systems look indigenous knowledge hold on.
Speaker 2:We've been telling you this for for a hundred years, but I think that it you know that ability to use science not just focusing on one seed, but focusing on a really complex system is only going to increase.
Speaker 1:I think that's incredibly exciting I was at those two days. I'm trying to get to a final question, but it's very. It doesn't seem possible in this case, but I wanted to go back to the two tribes. You saw, not the two tribes, but the two days you spent at the Sainsbury Centre. How many of the seed scientists are aware that they're working in a complex system and the limited, like how, how? I don't say it was a clash, of course, with the rich and farmers, but how, how much of them were were were able to see that or or acknowledge that?
Speaker 2:I think most of them. So most of them were thinking this is really interesting. How can I help you with, like, what I do? I think there were, uh, there were one. I spoke to one who was just quite arrogant and was like no, no, no, you don't understand all you, you loopy fruit nuts. You know, this is a, we'll solve it for you. And there there were some people on the regenerative side who, like I, want nothing to do with this at all. So, you know, I, for example, cannot see why, if you could uh accelerate the breeding of a long-rooted wheat through gene editing rather than uh trial and error as we've been doing for years, I don't, I don't have a problem with that. I think we need everything we can to throw at it.
Speaker 1:And there were some people who it's the same discussion with weight loss drug.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Well it's slightly different with the weight loss drug, because what you're doing with gene editing is you're trying to create plants that will work in complex systems. So it's not the same as it's not the same, but the risk is they don't at some point? Yeah, but then every plant if we had to go back to plants that were uh prior to human intervention, to human breeding, and then we would be able to feed.
Speaker 1:No, no, of course, of course, but the risk is that you play with or play you, you interfere in, in, as we're only eating a few crops and they have a massive amount of acreage, and all the soy is more or less the same type, all the chickens are the same, that is that is risk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like when it goes wrong, like the downside risk is so big, yeah, and quite catastrophic because suddenly we lose for whatever reason we don't understand, because we tweaked something that that was in a complex system and we thought we knew and we understand everything, understood the whole risk, but we actually didn't. Yeah, it's if you play with a, an apple or certain crops that don't have that huge impact potentially on food security. It's a different story. If the downside risk is so big and we lose a soy crop a year, that would be the end of quite a bit, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean obviously. I think that what you have to be looking at risk all the time.
Speaker 1:And it hasn't delivered.
Speaker 2:I think we're in a situation where you can't apply the precautionary principle you can't just stop.
Speaker 1:You can't stop the system, so we have to. I mean, it depends if it ends. You're taking the simteleps view and like I don't want to butcher his quotes but if it's, if it's a risk not to humanity, but if it's a big enough risk to you, of course, if it localized risk, who cares? Let's play, let's see how we get. Maybe we get the currency that produces enough, etc. But if it's a global potential risk to humanity, then we should.
Speaker 2:Exactly, but that's not the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle says don't do anything that could be bad.
Speaker 1:The risk based principle says how bad is this going to be? Is this risk?
Speaker 2:worth doing and I think those are fundamentally we should get.
Speaker 1:Nassim on here and explain to us risk Nassim Taleb, for who didn't? But I think it's the. You need to take a risk to figure, but you need to not contain it. But know, okay, it's not going to take down the whole tribe, because then we have a problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, have a problem. Yeah, exactly, and in its way, and we're far enough in the red that we have to experiment, probably a lot more. Yeah, um, but I think that most of the site, that increasingly the science will be going towards complex systems theory anyway, so I don't know otherwise it fails anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what we've seen. Yeah, exactly, and as a as a final question, as we're almost two hours in and this is already the longest interview we ever did on the podcast, which I really enjoy, not saying it as a complaint. Um, if there's, it's the magic wand question. If there's one thing which is super difficult to answer from all of your experience and work, but if it actually only one thing you could change overnight in the food and agriculture system, what would that be?
Speaker 2:make people love lentils.
Speaker 1:So what's not to love about letters people?
Speaker 2:literally people say to me my children love, I know but but like literally.
Speaker 2:So I you know, there's no one answer. People say it's a complex system. There's no one answer. If people ate legumes instead of 50 of the meat they eat overnight, that it would just like we would buy ourselves so much time and so like I say that almost a joke, but also it's not a joke which is like it's so simple and yet it's so hard, because, because we are, I mean, it's a really good example of us being programmed, us being part of the system.
Speaker 2:So if I could if I could, if I could globally hypnotize everyone to eat more lentils, that's what I would do I think it's a perfect end to this conversation.
Speaker 1:Thank you, andrew, for making the time on a sunday morning to talk to us, to bring us an enormous amount of knowledge, wisdom, experience and an enormous amount of energy as well, which you cannot see through the video, because we don't do video, but you can definitely hear through audio. So thank you so much for doing this and for the work you do and for coming on here to share about it.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I mean, I think your podcast is amazing and I have learned a lot from it, so keep doing the good work that you're doing.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time.
