Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
323 Chuck de Liedekerke - Paying 1600 farmers to change their practices and just raised €15M
A check-in with Chuck de Liedekerke, CEO and co-founder of Soil Capital and one of the veterans of the regen space, whom we interviewed almost 6 years ago! We talk about paying farmers for ecosystem services and why they seem to have hit an inflection point in the last two years. Working with over 1600 farmers to get them paid for carbon and more through corporations that buy from them. Corporates in the food space finally start to wake up to the opportunity and necessity of investing in their supply shed. And to top it off, we talk about water cycles and landscape-scale regeneration!
Last week Soil Capital has completed its €15M Series B funding round.
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Checking in with one of the veterans of the region space, which we interviewed almost six years ago. A conversation about paying farmers for ecosystem services and why they have seemed to have hit an inflection point in the last two years, working with over 1,600 farmers to get them paid for carbon and more through corporates that buy from them. Corporates in the food space finally start to wake up very late but finally to the opportunity and necessity of investing in their supply shed. To top it off, we talk about water cycles and landscape scale regeneration. Enjoy, this is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast Investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume, and it's time that we, as investors big and small and consumers, start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work. We launched our membership community and so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you and if you have the means and only if you have the means consider joining us. Find out more on gumroadcom slash investing in regen ag. That is, gumroadcom slash investing in regen ag, or find the link below Welcome to another interview today with the CEO and co-founder of Soil Capital.
Speaker 1:Welcome, chuck Hi Koen, and it's so good to have you back. It's been a couple of years, not that we didn't talk in the meantime, but I checked it was October 2018 and it's five and a half years ago, depending when you listen to this, of course, when we release it, but, let's say, in region space, that's a century and a half, basically, and I'm really, really looking forward to checking in, of course, how Soil Capital is doing, what has happened, what has changed, what has changed in the market in general, what do you see in the region space? Because I think there are few people that have spent more time in the region space compared to you. So it's really good to sit to see where this conversation leads us and, of course, I will link the earlier interview we did below, but I will still ask you to briefly introduce you and Soil Capital. How did you end up spending so much time thinking, acting and working on regeneration of soil?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, indeed, it's been a while since we last spoke. I think you're saying it's a century and you've been around for centuries as well, so I think we've both seen quite some changes. By way of introduction, maybe it's good that we pick it up where we left off, and maybe just as a reminder, last time we spoke, soil Capital's business model was very different to the conclusion that what was needed in the regen space was more professional regenerative operators, and we pursued that business model for a while, and today there's another business called soil capital farming which still operates under that that model.
Speaker 1:Um, your title literally was actually your title at the time sorry for interrupting was we need more regenerative and financially literate farm managers. I think we spend a lot of time discussing discussing that for the flow of investments to to go to farming as it deserves, and we not only need amazing farmers and people that are able to do large-scale transitions, manage different entities and enterprises, but also be financially literate enough not saying the farmers aren't, but to communicate with investors, which is a very different beast, let's say so. We spent quite a bit of time unpacking that and you're saying it has evolved quite a bit since then.
Speaker 2:That's right and I think it's true when we are dealing with um, investment managers, um, and, and obviously they're not farmers and they need to have their farming counterparts in the mix. So all of that holds true. What we did realize in the meantime is that in many areas of the world, including in places that are still very, very industrialized, family farms are still the dominant model, are still the dominant model, and corporate farms, with, you know, investment managers and standards and reportings and benchmarks, are still the exception more than the rule. And that also led us to another conclusion, which was if we wanted to have impact, then we would sooner have impact if we were speaking to this large group of farmers that were managing many hectares than actually managing the hectares ourselves. And this really prompted a shift in in soil capital's business model.
Speaker 2:And so you have soil capital farming, on the one hand, that does the operations on the ground in Western Europe and in Latin America, and then you have soil capital, which today runs a regenerative agriculture program that connects the farmers that are doing the right thing for the ecosystem, delivering better quality of water, better farmer profitability as well on the farm and a number of other metrics connecting those farmers with the corporates that understand that commitments need to be made to build in resilience into the food system, to do their part on environmental stewardship and therefore incentivize and pay those farmers to do the right thing. And so, in 2020, we launched a carbon payment program at the time called Soil Capital Carbon, which in its first year, took in about 100 farmers in Belgium and France, and today we're still active in Belgium, france and the UK. Now we have over 1,500 farmers on over 350,000 hectares in those geographies, and we're not just looking at carbon anymore. We're also looking at the improvements in all of the other environmental benefits that I've described earlier.
Speaker 1:So biodiversity, water, soil health, climate resilience, farmer economics and do you remember that realization Because it's quite a profound one going from let's work with the investors, let's work with the investment managers and it's often a narrative as well and it's for sure happening in certain parts of the world where investors are buying up a lot of farmland, but it's still very, very small in terms of percentage, and you realize at some point the bigger lever are independent farms and working with them to not necessarily attract funding or investing, but actually work with them to change practices and get them paid for it. Was it a realization over time, like we need to do something with non-institutionally owned farmland, or was it a moment that hit you? What happened there? And then you decided in 2020 to start basically a separate entity or a daughter company, basically to target that.
Speaker 2:I think it was a progressive realization. The first realization was earlier than that, when we wanted to be investment managers ourselves. That's why, initially, we're called Soil Capital. We wanted to buy land and then we realized that there was probably more available capital than good farming operators and we thought, okay, then it must be the farmers that are the bottleneck, not the capital. And then, as we started meeting farmers, we realized that the farmers weren't necessarily the bottleneck, but something in the mind of the farmers was keeping them from transitioning. For the ones that weren't transitioning, but still, there was a growing amount of early adopters that were transitioning, and there still is today. I mean it's.
Speaker 2:I don't think that we are, you know, anyone in this space for that matter is unlocking the regenerative transition. We're merely all accelerating a transition that is happening anyways. And so the question there was all right, instead of, you know, trying to manage hectares ourselves, how could we nudge the farmers that you know generally are, you know, thoughtful, careful stewards of their land to to farm regeneratively? And we went through a long process which was trying to understand why they weren't farming regeneratively in the first place. Because if you can better care for your soil's fertility, if you can wean yourself off external inputs while maintaining some good level of profitability and you've spoken at length about this in your podcast. You know reap all of the co-benefits all the way up to nutrient density. You probably have a bigger economic case.
Speaker 2:What was it in the mind of? You know the majority of the farmers that is holding them back from transitioning, and you know we this is. I don't think this is news to anyone, but if you look at farmer situations family farmers we often say that farmers are asset rich and cash poor. They also often have a lot of debt. They operate with very, very small margins and making mistakes means missing an interest payment, restructuring, sometimes maybe losing the farm. So it's not that farmers don't want to do the right thing. It's that they're convinced that they are doing the right thing, that they are, given their context, they are the best stewards for their land and for their, their assets, as is possible, and that there's simply no other way to farm in the context in which they operate. Is that what?
Speaker 1:you see, often like the the the deep. I. I recognize that when, when talking with farmers, like there is no other way in my context, like whatever other people are doing, whatever I see on youtube or what, what I hear wouldn't work here because of xyz, um, and that meant almost a mental blockage. For very good reasons, because you just pointed out, if you make one mistake you could literally lose the farm. I don't think many people realize you miss an interest payment and and you're starting to um, slowly or quickly lose things that maybe your family is worth generations for. But like that mental model of we can't do anything else, we're doing the best we could possibly do here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's not just soils and climate that's part of it, but I think the market is a big part of it as well. The an interesting example is legumes. We all know how powerful legumes can be in in a regenerative rotation for the the their added nitrogen, but in in a lot of markets there simply is no offtaker for legume crops, and so you know, drilling a legume into the rotation means foregoing revenue, and it's really really hard for farmers to get convinced to do that if there's a profitable cash alternative on the other side. So that's just one example.
Speaker 1:So you decided to build a very big legume offtake agreement company.
Speaker 2:Well, we thought about it and we see that some initiatives are actually taking root. Sorry for the pun in that space, but what we see as well is that we can nudge, and that's what we've started doing with Soil Capital. And that's what we've started doing with Soil Capital, because on the other side of these problems that we've identified, what the farmer is looking for is how could I farm differently? And I could farm differently for three main reasons. One, I could farm differently if I had the right technical knowledge about what to do. I know that if I change my fertilization or my land preparation strategy, I'm not going to fall on my face. That's really important. Fall on my face, that's really important. Two, I want some form of an economic incentive. And three, I want strong reassurance that in the long run I'm not going to be worse off than where I am today. And the three are kind of tied together.
Speaker 2:But what we've realized was the first incentive, the most important incentive for the farmer was I want some form of an economic incentive for this and I'm willing to take risks if there's an economic incentive. And if you look at what the history of organic agriculture did, it's exactly that Organic agriculture. The ask in organic agriculture is much tougher than the ask in regenerative agriculture. Not to oppose the two, because I firmly believe that there's a great version of regenerative agriculture that's organic. But if you look at organic in the sense where they don't use synthetic fertilizers, then very, very often you take a big hit on your yields and yet farmers are willing to do that because there's an economic incentive. So if you can provide that economic incentive to regenerative agriculture, then potentially you can unlock change.
Speaker 2:And that's kind of what happened is we realized that there was a market for carbon, although not the one, uh, that we're in today, the the.
Speaker 2:We're not in the offset market, which was the one we had observed back in 2019 and 2020. We can talk about that. There were actually tools that enabled us to quantify soil carbon and carbon emissions at farm level, and there were off-takers willing to pay farmers for improvements in their carbon balance. And the sweetener there was that these off-takers were from the food and ag industry, and so, instead of having to sell offsets to an airline or to an oil and gas company, you could actually start telling these businesses hey, you can invest in the resilience of your own supply chain. You can invest, not in offsets, but what is sometimes called insets, but what we refer to as scope, three reductions for these companies. And if you put those three things together, which is, you know, the ability to measure carbon, the tools to measure carbon and the buyers, then we could offer a solution to farmers that could address that risk-taking element. And I can tell you the story, which was in 2020.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was. I'm curious when did that happen for the first time? When did you see that that actually a company wasn't just interested I need to to offset some, some things left and right but that this case came together for basically a supply chain to invest in their supply chain, of course, get the credits, but also actually invest in the resilience of their own supply chain through their farmers?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a bit of a long story, but it starts actually with you.
Speaker 2:We have time, I really do you remember last time we did this podcast, you asked me what happened if I had a magic wand. What would I wish for? And I said a tool that would measure carbon, soil, carbon for farmers and link that to their economic performance. And the first thing we did before launching a carbon program was we developed a software that would actually look at all of the farmers' inputs and activities and soil types and blah, blah blah, and by feeding this into carbon calculators third-party carbon calculators and by extrapolating and normalizing some form of a cost structure for farmers and looking at their yields, we could get a fair idea of where they were economically. And we tried selling this software to farmers so that they could analyze how they were performing relative to their peers, it didn't work at all.
Speaker 2:For two years we were really trying to ram this to the farmers, who weren't interested at all. It really was more of a pencil farming exercise than anything else really was more of a pencil farming exercise than anything else. But then, when we realized that we had one corporate it was Cargill in this instance who said look, this carbon quantification piece is really interesting and if you can get it certified into a program with the right level of integrity, then we're off-takers. Then we started working on that and so we built this program and you know, it's a bit of the Field of Dreams references If you build it, they will come, and they needed to come from both sides. We needed farmers into the mix and we needed corporates.
Speaker 2:So we had Cargill, we had a few other corporate clients who had made early commitments and which allowed us to, you know, bring in 100 or so farmers, bring in 100 or so farmers.
Speaker 2:And once we had those commitments and only when we had those commitments did we actually tweet in August 2020 that we were rolling out a pilot project to pay farmers for soil carbon in Belgium and in the north of France, and I remember that in the tweet was we're taking in 10 farmers for this pilot. Anyone who's interested, please DM me with the word carbon and I'll get back to you. And within the first hour I had 80 farmers messaging me, and that was really the moment where we understood we had unlocked something. And I think what's important there as well is it's telling about the fact that for a long time, farmers have known that they've been doing the right thing, they've been eager to measuring it and they've been, I think, legitimately eager to get value from this. Because for me, when we say financing the transition, it's not about just the nudge. It's also about recognizing that farmers are delivering a valuable service to society and that they should get paid for this.
Speaker 1:So did you get the pioneers reaching out to you at that point that were already um on the journey, or did you also get the ones that, like the new hectares, potentially, or the new acreage, that were interested but needed that nudge like what was the the first group you you ended up working with?
Speaker 2:yeah, early on it was um very much, I'd say, a mix of almost two-thirds of pioneers, and the way we measure that is farmers that are already net sequesters of carbon, and is it still?
Speaker 1:relevant for them to join, in a sense asking if they have been on this journey for a while. We hear all these things about plateauing et cetera. How do we make sure the pioneers get paid?
Speaker 2:Well, as long as you're still aggregating carbon to the soil, you're fine. And look, we can go into a long technical discussion about how how these farmers, uh, get incentivized, and I'm happy to, but, but, um, I I think what what matters here is um these farmers. Well, first of all, we've degraded the soil so much that we need to add soil carbon for quite a few decades before that plateau effect happens. We need to make sure that the pioneers are incentivized in order not to create a perverse effect where farmers might be tempted to Plow and then get back to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, revert their regenerative practices before they get back to us. And I'm not saying that would happen every time, but the higher the price of carbon goes, the more of a risk there is.
Speaker 1:there you say something very profound on the next decades, which is not something you. Of course it depends on context, but there's some fear, I think, in the climate space that RegenAg is getting a lot of attention because of the climate potential and often arguments, especially from Project Drawdown and others, are like yeah, it's not so much. First of all, the potential. They say I'm not saying that's the case and it plateaus relatively quickly. And the permanence and that's actually you brought it up now and the permanence, like how long does it stay there in terms of carbon is still unknown or is still not sure enough. And there are other things, more important things we should do with climate dollars and euros. What do you say to those, to a group like that?
Speaker 2:Well, look, if you take the climb works example, that spent uh six hundred thousand six hundred million dollars on building a uh carbon removal plant in in iceland. Um, I understand the capacity of that plant is is going to be removing something like 35,000 tons per year. You know, for you know, less than 100 times well, let's just say, for less than 10 million euros. You know, we've been able to build a program where we've seen that farmers are reducing and removing up to 350,000 tons of carbon.
Speaker 1:So your math was pretty good. It was one-tenth for 10 times as much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm not saying that Climeworks shouldn't exist. It absolutely needs to exist, because if you look at where the atmospheric carbon comes from, some of it comes from the soil, but a Some of it comes from the soil, but a lot of it comes from the subsoil. You know the fossil fuels, and so you can only put back in the soil what you've taken out of the soil, and there's still everything that you've taken out of the subsoil. So don't get me wrong, we need those solutions as much as we need regenerative agriculture. But today the costs for one are huge and hopefully they're going to come down really quickly. But in the meantime that's not addressing the food resilience issue, that's not addressing the biodiversity issue, that's not addressing the water quality issue. That's not addressing the biodiversity issue. That's not addressing the water quality issue.
Speaker 2:And so there's so much more behind the carbon topic in regenerative agriculture that just comparing these two programs on that metric would be not seeing the full picture. But let's do that for a second and let's look at timescales. If we want to go fast on storing carbon, then probably bringing that extra nudge to farmers is going to deliver much more impact sooner. And our bet is as long as there's no big perverse incentives, the farmers that go regenerative don't go back. I love the title of one of your podcasts I'm Too Lazy to Farm.
Speaker 1:Differently. I knew you were going to bring up that. I think it's still. I have to look proud of myself, but he said it. It's one of the best titles we had. I'm too lazy to farm against nature. Matt Chatfield shout out yeah, I'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker 2:It's a great way to farm, and so if you can crack the economic piece, it takes a little bit of time for farmers to over you piece. It takes a little bit of time for farmers to over you know they see the nudge. Then they need to overcome the whole systems approach. But eventually they do and they don't go back. And so we can talk about permanence as a physical thing, but we can also talk about permanence through data, and we can see how many of the farmers who start farming regeneratively actually do go back to conventional practices, and I don't think it's that much but if we go back to the leakage, leakage is very little, yeah well, I'd say it's very little and and um, you know, the more years we're going to be into this, the more data we're going to be into this, the more data we're going to have to talk to understand the leakage piece.
Speaker 2:If we go back to the pioneers, why is it important for us to have pioneers in a regenerative program? Well, because there's this peer-to-peer learning that's going on with farmers, and the pioneers are often the people that inspire and that teach other farmers in their regions to do the right thing. And what we've seen is, you know, because of the nature of certifying carbon impact, we collect a lot of data. It's one thing to offer benchmarks to farmers. It's a whole different thing to offer a workshop or a masterclass with a very relevant regenerative farmer in your area, and the latter is much more powerful than the former because it's the whole experience, it's the conversation, it's grounded into something that's much more human than just the data, you know, much more human than just just the data and um, and I think that's that's why our, our program works.
Speaker 2:It's it's, you know, we didn't come into this from from technology. We've known each other long enough, for for you know that we were, I know we were managing a group of farms um early on with a big regenerative mandate. We've been managing farms for institutional owners via soil capital farming, and we've only embraced tech later in our journey because we believe that, you know, there's a limit to the gains that tech will deliver. What we need to do is make sure that farmers can connect to each other and change management practices in the right way and change what's happening within their own minds right.
Speaker 1:The most difficult real estate between their ears, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Putting the farmer back at the center of the equation here was important for us, and we didn't feel that tech would achieve that fully.
Speaker 1:And just to come back one more on the carbon side, you mentioned avoidance and storage, like in the experiences you've seen, because you measure the whole farm emissions like how important are the two compared to each other, but equally important, I think. I mean, I think we often forget how intensive in terms of emissions farming is and how much of that can be reduced relatively. Air quotes nobody sees that relatively easily, like getting fossil fuel significantly reduced or mostly out of conventional farming or farming in general is a huge lever in climate. And then, of course, the storage piece. Like how do you look at those two communicating vats, basically, or those two pieces?
Speaker 2:Like how does one compare to the other?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for you and your in terms of importance of what you've seen. Is it 80-20, 50-50? What do you see as people go on like, switch on, like what is the reaction of markets as well? When you talk about the avoidance side and or the storage, of course people get super excited about the storage potential, but then it's hotly debated as well, the storage potential, but then it's hotly debated as well. I think avoidance, if you don't have to make that route with your tractor, if you do that half the time, like the diesel, is pretty, pretty obvious and pretty expensive. Like what do you? What do you see in those two, those two buckets?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, um, so it's changing over time, right, because we had many early adopters at the beginning and that profile is changing now. We had, you know, um net sequesters of farmers, and so the, the, the removals piece was, was um more important than the reductions piece. By the way, we we prefer speaking of reductions rather than avoidance for um technical reasons that you know around the definition of avoidance, but that's the point More removals in the early stages. We're now seeing a shift towards more reductions. But what's really interesting is understanding what's happening behind that, and there's something we can talk. Let's talk about the strategy to change or to transition to regenerative agriculture.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are talking about how do you finance the transition, and in that question they're saying, you know, is what is the best strategy that not only minimizes costs but maximizes benefits at any moment in the transition? Because if you can do that, then instead of looking at the wall, thinking that you're going to run into the wall, you're you're looking at the road and and thinking, okay, how am I going to accelerate on the road? And what we've seen if you divide the farmers that we work with into four quartiles, between the farmers that are in the last quartile having the highest carbon emissions to the first quartile with the lowest carbon emissions. If you want to move farmers from quartile four to three, what you observe in those differences that the first lever that they're going to use is cover crops. And then if they want to move from quartile three to two, then they're going to reduce land preparation. And then if they want to move from quartile three to two, then they're going to reduce land preparation. And then if they want to move from quartile two to one, then they're gonna move from synthetic fertilizer to organic fertilizers.
Speaker 2:And actually that makes a ton of sense, right, because you're not taking a yield risk with cover crops. Yeah, you might need yield risk with cover crops. Yeah, you might need to destroy your cover crops if they don't work out or maybe they don't establish because of drought, but ultimately that's fine, you can still fertilize your crop. You'll only play with this very sensitive fertilization lever. Only play with this very sensitive fertilization lever when you've gotten comfortable with a regenerative mindset. And going back to your question, reductions versus removals, you'll see that the reductions actually will massively happen when you start reducing your application of synthetic nitrogen, right? So that happens between quarter two and quarter one.
Speaker 1:So that's. But that only happens, or should happen, when you're comfortable with that, because that's a risk. If you do that wrong, you may jeopardize yield, which is a huge lever of your financial or a huge variable of your financial performance, and that's super, super, super risky. But cover crops you're saying yes, have a bit of cost associated with them, but are not risking your yield.
Speaker 2:They might actually help but there's not a huge downside your yield, they might actually help, but there's not a huge downside.
Speaker 1:That's right. And, by the way, carbon payments will actually cover the cost of your cover crops Fascinating, yeah. And then so on the corporate side, you say what has really changed over the last year, or years as well? Like you need somebody to pay these. Of course, you have a few pilots, you have a cargo and maybe a few others. Like in 2020, when you start, you can work with 10 farmers and maybe 100, but how do you get out of this? It's a cute pilot in my csr program, somewhere to actually know this is an integral part of investing in my supply chain to make that, make it resilient and make it so that I can still buy in the years to come. Like have you seen that shift, that mindset shift, that regenerative mindset shift on the corporate side as well, and, if so, when and how?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I don't. I've seen it. You know we have. The amount of business that we've closed in the past year or so is a large multiple of all the cumulative business we've closed with corporates before Wow.
Speaker 1:So there is an acceleration happening. It's not a linear, an organic linear growth curve. Until now, no.
Speaker 2:And we've seen large long-term contracts being put into place by well-established food and ag players. Why now?
Speaker 1:And I think that sorry, why now, what's triggered them? Because we were talking about this six seven years ago, 10 years ago, in many cases 15 years ago. But what has changed the last year?
Speaker 2:So I think and this is only my interpretation but two things happened this year, and this is only my interpretation, but two things happened this year. One is most of the companies have started facing the reality of reporting, not only because SBTI commitments are now made and they now need to start reporting progress on SBTI commitments commitments, which wasn't the case two, three years ago.
Speaker 1:Just for people, what?
Speaker 2:is sbti, the science-based targets initiative, and the science-based targets initiative is a body where um, uh corporates, corporate players, um from all sectors make commitments to lower, to decrease their carbon emissions at a level which is sustainable or commensurate with one of the IPCC trajectories usually 1.5 or 2 degrees and so they now commit that they're going to need to lower their emissions, and when they do that, the emissions of their suppliers, ie the farmers, when it comes to food and ag businesses, are included in what you call scope three emissions. And so you know, the food and ag space. The emissions of the food and ag space come in an overwhelming proportion from farming north of 70, 80% and so if you want to decrease emissions from that sector, you need to start with the farmers Now. These businesses need to report.
Speaker 2:Oh sorry, an important topic on the Science Based Targets initiative is that today, one third of the world's market capital, but also policymakers, a huge mandate to demand from suppliers, to demand from constituents, to demand from corporates that these targets be met.
Speaker 2:And case in point, the europe European Commission has enacted the Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive that now forces any large company to report on a number of environmental KPIs and social KPIs, including carbon emissions and that has really triggered companies into, you know, thinking hard about this.
Speaker 2:So there's the whole reporting and, you know, compliance side, which is one piece of the story, piece of the story, but there's another, much more important piece that I feel is, you know, the one that's going to drive this in a more fundamental way, which is the resilience piece. And you know we're seeing stories where, you know, mcdonald's in India last year couldn't procure enough tomatoes so they had to take tomatoes out of their burgers. If you think of the hallmark of standardization having to do that, you realize that this is becoming a core business risk. Yeah, becoming a core business risk, yeah, and I think that slowly we're coming to terms with the fact that regenerative agriculture is resilient agriculture, that if you want to have a business at all in the future, then you need to start investing in your supply sheds. And you're seeing very targeted but significant investments in supply sheds where corporates are going to be investing for the future.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that that's happening now. I mean, we've seen. How many signs do you need before you start moving? Of course, some corporates have been moving for a while because they saw it earlier on or they were just a bit faster, but it definitely feels like, at least in supply sheds and in procurement. We've seen enough emergencies now that people are starting to move In certain crops and in certain areas, of course, more than others. I think coffee, cacao are a bit ahead of the curve in some places. I see the wine industry starting to wake up, grain and actually quite a few are starting to move and that you're saying that leads or that translates into real euros, real dollars, real yens, real money going to farmers for a change, real dollars, real yen, real money going to farmers for a change.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's the carbon payments. But what we're seeing as well is because of the other environmental benefits, farmers can deliver on those benefits as well, and that's added value for everyone as well, and so we think so how do you add that to the?
Speaker 2:carbon. Well, there are a number of ways. You can either just have a hectare-based payment for additional information, but that's not really providing an incentive to improve, and so you can create scores on a blend of these different KPIs. You can solve for selected ones if you like. There's a series of different ways of looking at it. I think at the level of Soil Capital, we like this idea of a score because you get the measurements but you also get the improvements, and I think that's what everyone wants. It's not only to make sure that we can report something, it's to make sure that every year that a corporate reports, they can report improvements. And so, you know, I often repeat this mantra of if measuring can be improving or measurement should be improvements, then we will be in the right spot.
Speaker 1:On the Brazilian side of the farmers. What is a story you tell? What is an interesting example? Let's say how regenerative or how practices that regenerate soil has led to more resilience with the farmers you work with. Or another example you have what's a go-to story when a corporate needs to be not say convinced, but at least needs to to show a hook or like an angle. Why is why this is so important?
Speaker 2:yeah, so. So there, there are plenty, obviously, and, and, and we have plenty of photos and videos to to talk about, but there's one which I particularly love. I know you're in Italy for the moment, but the north of Europe has been subject to very, very heavy rains over the past nine months now, and it's been difficult to drill in winter crops.
Speaker 2:It's even been difficult to drill in spring crops. There's concern for yields everywhere, simply because of you know mud right. You can't go into a waterlogged field without you know, not only completely upsetting the soil structure but, you know, getting the tractor and the equipment stuck in the mud and not being able to do anything. So we've seen a lot of farms stalling their operations because of the rain. And then there's one of our farmers who sends us this video in one of the areas of France that was the most impacted by rain of France, that was the most impacted by rain. Where he was, you know, he was rolling his cover crops and drilling his cash crop right behind it, singing in his tractor, and you could see that he was under pouring rain and the rain wasn't a parameter for him. He could do it, and this was by far the most impressive example I've seen today of what resilience means. It's not that you mitigate the issue, it's that, in this instance, you fix the issue.
Speaker 1:In this instance, you will most likely have a crop where very few others will.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you're going to benefit from the price increase there as well.
Speaker 1:That's like a hedging strategy. How would you call it in finance?
Speaker 2:Probably a hedging strategy. How would you call it in finance?
Speaker 1:Probably a hedging strategy. Yeah, wow. And those stories. They are anecdotal, of course, but those stories must start to. I'm not saying convince, but really people start hearing about that for sure.
Speaker 2:I think that's the point where, again, you want to talk to farmers. They're the ones responsible for the change, right? So the more you can expose farmers to not just these stories but the people who've experienced them, who've experienced them, the better it is. And you know, we have amazing farmers who have so many of these stories.
Speaker 1:And not a reason to focus on the pioneers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. But even the young guys that arrive and who trial new things a few years in, they're happy to share. They learn so much. And, by the way, we have a lot of agronomists in our team who spend a lot of time speaking with farmers and just exchanging so much knowledge there, just exchanging so much knowledge there. It's really impressive to see how fast you know change happens because everyone's just so eager to learn and eager to test and share. So you know, I think that's the human part there shouldn't be underestimated. Of course. I really want to stress this it wouldn't happen without the economic incentive. That's really important.
Speaker 1:What's been your biggest surprise, sorry, no, go ahead. And then let's go to surprise In the last six years, what has left you Something you underestimated or something you overestimated? But let's go first to what you want to say. You know.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, maybe I can tie the two together. I'd say you know the way we talk about it is. Our role isn't to get farmers to the finish line of regenerative agriculture, because I don't even know if there's a finish line. You can always progress. Our goal has now become to get farmers to pass the starting line of a regenerative transition, and that's actually the hardest thing to do because of the risk that we mentioned earlier. And what's been the most surprising thing to me is the moment they trust that there's an economic incentive, they will take the risk, and the moment they start taking risks, they come alive. It's, it's amazing. There's so much um, you know, uh interest and enthusiasm. Do you have a story there for, like a farmer you met?
Speaker 1:pre, let's say financial incentive and nudge to because it's interesting, you use the word alive, we use it a lot now with like wild farm, like on the field, like products full of life, fields full of life I think it's a very of course in biodiversity but also people full of life. What have you seen there? Because we talk a lot about farmers' mental health as well. We're not enough actually. What have you seen there? Because we talk a lot about farmers' mental health as well? We're not enough actually. And that regen is, or potentially seems to be, an interesting way to enjoy your farming life again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, one of the farmers who came into the first cohort of the program so 2020-2021, the first cohort of the program so 2020, 2021,. We probably spent 10 hours on the phone discussing before he entered the program and he had so many questions about whether this was the right thing for him. Blah, blah, blah. And we really went. And, by the way, farmers pay to enter our program simply because it takes a lot of time from our end to process their data, but also to support them that we want to make sure that they're serious about it, and so the first thing that this farmer needed to do was to pay us, but he spent so much time asking you know what would be the benefits? When he would see the benefits, who else he could talk to, and you could tell that really, this was a struggle for him especially because he was coming from a very very rigorous and thoughtful due diligence and finally he entered the program, decided to drill in a cover crop.
Speaker 2:A little bit of the change trajectory that we mentioned earlier and today. This guy is one of our biggest ambassadors. He brings in a huge number of farmers. He hosts events on his farm with some of the biggest regenerative pioneers in France, but I also think we hosted an event on his farm with people from abroad and he's progressed so fast in three years' time.
Speaker 2:Wow, and he's very, very vocal about it. That, I think, is a good story. But you know, if you look back to what happened earlier, we came in with this very strong ability to pay farmers, and I think this is one of the nice ways that we can look at. What we do is, when you run a regenerative agriculture program well, we have three words for it your hectares are either naked or supported, and when you bring in I mean talking of the history of the interview with matt chatfield.
Speaker 1:I think this is another. There's going to be a good title anyway. Please, please, please. Elaborate more on this concept well.
Speaker 2:so a naked hectare is a hectare that comes into the program and it's not yet regenerating. You know conventional Hector the farmer is paid, the farmer is signed up, accepted terms and conditions, but not doing anything differently, and so there's not much merit to bringing in a naked Hector in the program. It starts getting interesting when a Hector is loaded, which means a hectare is actually regenerating and there are thresholds for what that means. But basically, if change is happening on that hectare, we can say it's loaded. But a hectare needs to be supported to catalyze and scale that change. And what we mean by supported is it needs to be financed, which means that change needs to be rewarded and the farmer needs to see the monetary value of that change paid to him.
Speaker 2:And so the question when you run a regenerative agriculture program is not how many hectares do you have in a program, is how many supported hectares do you have in your program? Because a supported hectare is loaded and is obviously in your program. Because a supported Hector is loaded and is obviously in the program. And that's a much more, I would say, rigorous way of looking at it. It forces you to not just go and grab Hectors, because that's not going to work anyways. It really forces you to make sure that value is recognized at every step and that there's the loaded piece you know happens because farmers are actually convinced and they're improving year on year.
Speaker 1:and the supported piece happens because you know your, your, the off-takers in the value chain are there to support the farmers what do you feel is the biggest risk of this approach now on, let's say, not in setting, I mean you, sometimes you call it in setting, I mean sometimes you call it in setting but within, let's say, the value the supply sheds with corporates, with the farmers, in this sort of flywheel that seems to be starting to move faster and faster. What do you consider the biggest risk for the region movement, or for this not to take off or not to go further?
Speaker 2:Well, I would say there's one risk of this becoming a compliance exercise and forgetting what it is we're trying to achieve and what the substance behind carbon payments could be. There needs to be real change. There's been quite a few scandals in the carbon space over the past years and, you know, given the climate urgency, I don't think we can afford a new scandal like this, and so we need to be really, really thoughtful there about how we go about it. And that's a balancing act of driving change, driving regenerative transitions in the field, knowing that maybe they're not going to be measured absolutely perfectly, but commitments from a company like Soil Capital need to be. We're going to continuously improve on the way we measure in 2020. And those tools have evolved in the meantime because science evolves, because technology evolves, but also because our understanding of regenerative agriculture is evolving. And you know, I think you and I have been around for quite a while in the regenerative space, but I still think the space is in its infancy.
Speaker 2:The progress that we've achieved in the physical and the chemical fertility of our soils and the mechanical fertility of our soils is huge, of our soils is huge, and it's decades, if not centuries, if not millennia old, the progress that we're going to achieve in the biological fertility of our soils is still very young and there's probably some ancient knowledge that we need to retrieve.
Speaker 2:Very young and there's probably some ancient knowledge that we need to retrieve. But there's also a lot of new formalization that needs to happen. Uh, I do think to some extent this needs to be technologically enabled and then it needs to, it needs to um, you know, play out in the markets. You know, are the food markets going to change because of the way we farm? Yeah, I'm convinced they are. I'm convinced that, because of resilience, because of these environmental benefits, over time there are going to be fewer commodity markets and more long-term relationships between certain groups of off-takers and the farmers. So all of that is going to. You know, it's a whole ecosystem, by which we can mean, you know, environment, but also economic system. It's the whole social fabric and fertility fabric that needs to change here.
Speaker 1:I think many people underestimate how big this transition is and how much of a marathon this will be and is, and how early we still we still are in in that. And if we would do this, I like to ask this question, which we didn't ask six years ago, but I mean we asked the same actually what? What we would would you tell investors in the space? Let's say, we do this in a theater in london or brussels where you spend quite a bit of time and the room is full of financially focused people and we give, of course, a nice, interesting evening, a lot of pictures, small videos. We might have some of the farmers you mentioned there, but if there's one thing you would like them to remember from that evening and preferably put to work the next day when they're at their laptop at their office, what would that seed you want to plant? What would be the thing you would tell investors mentioning their own money and other people's money? Um, after all these years in regen, what would be the one message if you had to pick one? Huh?
Speaker 2:I have a knee-jerk reaction to this one because of something I saw yesterday on social media, which is there's a time value of carbon and, by the way, carbon but environmental benefits generally and because of the climate urgency….
Speaker 1:Do it now urgency.
Speaker 2:Do it now. Abating one ton of carbon today is going to be much cheaper than having to do it in 2030. Much cheaper, and so there's a way to Look. I've been thinking that somewhere in a financial institution or a hedge fund or somewhere in a dark room, there's an analyst thinking that there's a position that needs to be taken on um paying as many farmers as fast as possible for their regenerative outcomes, because these benefits are only going to accrue in value down the road, and if you're financing them, because today some corporates aren't, then you probably stand to make a margin there.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, you know, I'm seeing that the corporates are there, and so my second, and probably more long-term response to your question would be make sure that your investments and your portfolio as an investor is future ready, and make sure that the CFOs and the procurement departments understand that if the food system fails, the whole system fails, and that something absolutely can be done today to be on the front foot ahead of those risks. We see it with farmers. The story of the farmer planting into his cover crops while it was raining is a very, very telling one. I hope soon enough we'll be able to come out with more granular data on the actual resilience of regenerative agriculture, but I think that should be the driving force behind an investment decision is let's make sure that we're investing in the safety of the system.
Speaker 1:And that's a natural bridge to a question we didn't ask back in the day what if you would be in the investor seat and had to put a billion to work? How would you prioritize? What would you focus on? What would you not focus on if you had to put that amount of money to work?
Speaker 2:yeah, so I, I, it wouldn't be one thing alone diversity is key yeah, I would, um, probably seek a livestock model that truly recognizes the benefits of holistic management rotational grazing Because we work with arable crop farmers. We don't model yet what's happening on the livestock piece. I know people are working it on it, but for the moment it doesn't seem that it's been fully cracked. Maybe you know something different in which case I can save a bit of my one billion investment, but I think that that's. I don't think it would take that much money, but I think that that's really important.
Speaker 1:To measure, you mean in livestock or what needs to be cracked.
Speaker 2:I think the impact of high well, sorry, yeah, the impact of high impact long recovery. You know short periods of grazing, trampling, defecation, with long periods of recovery. How does that actually impact soil carbon? How does that impact soil structure? How does that impact water quality? Does that impact you know um farm economics?
Speaker 1:have you seen the, the results from roots, roots so deep of peter vick and the team? No, I haven't. No, so they based I mean, I'll put it in the links below. They basically did a farm, five pairs of farms in mostly the midwest in australia and the south actually as well, so literally next to each other Amp grazing, which for a number of reasons they call amp grazing not holistic, but it's pretty much the same Long grass, high impact, one herd, et cetera, versus a conventional neighbor that wasn't doing that or isn't doing that. And they measured everything you can possibly imagine from possibly measure from the birds to the carbon, to the methane, to the sniff towers, insects, of course, with John Terlandgen, a friend of the show and financial health, which is not that easy because most people had off-farm jobs, didn't really keep records. So that was a more tricky. Actually the trickiest part was that. And then their thesis was if you share that data and it is more successful, the AMP regenerative grazing would the conventional neighbor start to change? You have to watch the documentary to see, because they made a documentary, a four-part documentary, which you can see on streaming, some places with the VPN, some without which, with the allowance of Peter Big, the director, definitely do, if you want to see that.
Speaker 1:And people change for different reasons. It might be the birds, it might be the financial, it might be et cetera. Might be the financial, it might be etc. And no more fertilizer use. But, um, I think it's one of the first times I've seen a set of peer-reviewed papers coming out of like, side by side, comparing and we need to repeat it in many places compared with with rewilding, compared with arable, integration with animals, etc. Etc. But we need to do way more of that research. But the first signs are very, very encouraging in terms of avoidance or reduction, and also in terms of um, in terms of storage and in terms of financial. Uh, you see, these neighbors starting to most of them um, starting to to interact differently with their neighbors, start to ask questions and start to implement change.
Speaker 2:Well, that that's amazing. And if we can get A the academic research backing that up, b the right models to be able to feed those models with data and to get the right outputs, and C see scalable programs, because they need to be scalable, then I think we'll have cracked the livestock piece, and we're working on it, by the way, this is something that's pretty actual, so I think that's a good use of a portion of the virtual billion that you've just awarded me. Thank you, the um. The second piece um, I, um.
Speaker 2:I'm a really big fan of this idea of nutrient density and I know that uh, dan Kitteridge and the um Bionutrient Food Association is doing work there. I think it needs to be accelerated. So I'm still a very firm believer in the fact that we're not going to get consumer traction on these topics unless we can directly tie it to human health. I don't see a consumer premium out there. To be fair, for the moment, I see this as corporates. I see regenerative agriculture as a cost that corporates need to deal with today, that they can probably flow into their supply chain in one way, maybe sharing this across the supply chain in one way, maybe sharing this across the supply chain, but I haven't seen it being cracked at a consumer level yet, and I think that the nutrient density could probably do that and that would be a big unlock.
Speaker 2:And then you know, I think we have a scalable model, and so what we're going to do now is expand internationally. We're looking at Eastern Europe and Latin America and you know, the more we can expand and I'm not saying just sort of capital, I certainly won't pretend that we should be the end-all, be-all to the regenerative transition. We need a very strong diversity of of players, um, but we need this to happen everywhere, oh, yeah and uh uh. A last one is I think we need to crack how this is going to work for smallholder farmers, not just the smallholder farmers in the global south, but also the owners of a vineyard in France. The reason being if you have a very, very small farm, the quantity of ecosystem benefits that you can deliver is going to be smaller than if you have a very, very big farm and therefore you stand to make less. And if the quality or if the value of your crop like for a French vineyard is really, really high, then potentially the value of your ecosystem benefits becomes marginal there. So how do you?
Speaker 1:incentivize.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's some form of a curve where smaller farms get a bigger payment where you're still paid for performance, arms get a bigger payment where you're still paid for performance.
Speaker 1:but yeah, there needs to be some, some fine-tuning on the economics piece there and to ask a question that john camp likes to ask in a different way. But you've been in this space for so long and must have some contrarian views. I think last time we discussed also now you mentioned it briefly and we've discussed it with Nicolas as well, one of your co-founders on the cost of the transition. Actually, there's so much waste in a normal farming operation of so much extra appliance of stuff that you can actually save quite a bit of money in transition. So there are, of course, views. But if you would say you come to an RFSI Region Food Investment Summit or to other places in our bubble, where do you really differ with your opinion? Where do you really think differently? Let's say, compared to the usual and it's interesting that we can call it the bubble now because it grew so much the normal region finance bubble when do you think different? The normal region finance bubble.
Speaker 2:Where do you think different?
Speaker 2:So I would have naturally gone to where you've just said that financing the transition is the wrong way of looking at it. In the same way, as you know, if you say how much does it cost to stop smoking it's a bit of a weird phrasing for a question where, naturally, if you stop smoking, the first thing that would happen is you would start saving money um, and there's always a way to throw too much money at a problem you can. You know if you're going to stop smoking, you can hire a life coach and you know, take a membership at the gym and never go. And you know, invest in a really, really sophisticated diet or whatever there's. There's also a way to transition and and lose money. But I think if you do're smart about it, you probably stand to make money.
Speaker 1:Sorry to take away that answer, which is a really good one actually. I like the non-smoking reference, but if you had something else, what would that?
Speaker 2:be. I think the we're missing a very, very big number of players in the room when we're looking at the bubble and you know, you have the big FMCGs and the key suppliers to the FMCGs. But this is a big part of the Western world, the FMCGs, but this is a big part of the Western world. There are trade flows that are, you know, taking, you know, most of the Latin American crops to Asia, a lot of the Ukrainian crops to Africa, and nobody really cares about paying the farmers more in this instance. And we're only going to solve a part of the problem until we bring in the traditional super-commoditized players into the mix.
Speaker 1:And what would be the hook for them?
Speaker 2:I think that I need to be a trader to answer that question, which I'm not. I think that the moment that organizations with long-term contracts, who've invested in supply sheds and, you know, groups of farmers, whether it's, you know, through cooperatives or other organizations that can really build resilience over the long run, organizations that can really build resilience over the long run start outperforming commodity markets for one, two, three seasons, you're always going to have players that are going to say why should I invest in a supply shed where I could just as well buy from another supply shed if that supply shed fails? And that's only going to hold true until there's a Until it doesn't. Until it doesn't, yeah, but traders benefit from volatility. So that's kind of the crux here is maybe there's, you know, there's a conversation to be had with one of your next guests, which is, uh, someone who can understand how to crack the volatility of the commodity markets to play in favor of, of the regenerative transition transition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a tricky one if you. I mean they benefit from some volatility and and not the extreme extreme but many of these traders have also survived quite a long time, so they're quite almost anti-fragile. In a sense. They benefit unless they go bust um from from prices going up and down and crisis is left and right, as long as they can buy somewhere else, and that kind of incentives feels very far from the regen world. But you're saying we absolutely need them because they move so much stuff.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And that might actually be a connection to the last question, the magic wand, where last time you said we need a way to measure soil carbon, and connected to financial and the correlation to financial performance of farmers, and we unpack that a bit already. I think we have some pieces of the puzzle not completely the correlation maybe, but definitely a long way since the last five and a half years. But now if I would ask you if you could change one thing overnight, you had the magic power to do so, might be the same thing and really fixing it or something completely different. What would that be?
Speaker 2:What I'd really like is the reassurance that a large-scale regenerative transition is not only an adaptation strategy, it's a mitigation strategy. And what I mean by that is it's not only going to help us, you know, maintain a productive food system in the face of tougher climate. It can actually make the climate a bit less tough, it can actually fix a little bit of the climate. And there was this farmer, very prominent pioneer farmer in France, frédéric Thomas, who was saying think about it in this way If you have bare soil from the French coast all the way to Moscow, for Western Europe, you know, because at the end of the summer everything's been plowed and the reflection of the sun is just heating bare soil, you're warming the air over a whole continent. And this holds true for the US or, you know, or any Latin America, by the way.
Speaker 2:Now, if you can cover that soil with vegetation, you know, try walking over sand or bare soil in the scorching heat and then try walking over grass and see the difference in temperature.
Speaker 2:If that's not a fix to global warming, just covering the soil, I don't know what is. Plus, all that vegetation is pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the soil. I know it's not to the levels that we need because we've taken so much out of the subsoil, as we were saying before, but surely this must have a positive impact on climate change. And if you think about just the mass of hot air that's rising up from um the the bare soil on the coast and preventing the clouds arriving from, uh, the ocean inland, and if you can mitigate that and if you can increase rainfalls in the southern areas of europe and elsewhere where you actually need it, um, I think that's a pretty good, um pretty good reason to want to stay busy on regenerative agriculture and you would use your magic wand, basically to show that in a, in a watershed or in a landscape at scale, you can actually fix the climate.
Speaker 2:You know, one of my I'd say dreams, when I was thinking about creating soil capital more than 10 years ago now, is if we could find a way to re-green the Sahara within our lifetimes, for that matter. How cool would that be, right? How cool would it be to see from space a big patch of green where there's now this huge patch of yellow, and what would that mean for the planet? And look, I know that soil capital has taken a very different turn from there, but I still think that we need a lot of ambitious thought for how we want to address this huge, huge challenge.
Speaker 1:I think it's a perfect way to end another rabbit hole to fall into, potentially, but we'll keep that for another time. I completely agree. I think the watershed, or the landscape scale, regeneration is. We've done two full series on it and we're going to do more episodes around it, but I think it's the most audacious goal to have and also the most fundamental, together probably with nutrient density.
Speaker 1:But the large-scale revegetation, as Judith Swartz likes to call it, of earth will have a positive effect on climate, on rivers, on rain, on frost, on all of those, because we de-vegetated so much of it in certain places not not so much, but other places definitely and throughout the season, as you said.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you have bare soil until Moscow, good luck with the clouds and the snow and the rain we depend on it will stay on the ocean and will create a lot of issues there, and so I think it's a good wrapping up thought. Thank you so much, chuck, for coming on. Thank you for the work you have been doing in this marathon. Even though it feels like we're only at the beginning, we definitely feel like we've been in it for for a while and I hope it's not going to take another five and a half years to check in on progress, because you see so much, you are so active on the ground, in the ground, etc. So it's always good to to check in with with one of the veterans of the space no, I couldn't thank you.
Speaker 2:Um, it's. It's a real pleasure and privilege and please be aware of the good work that you're doing. It's very inspiring and getting the message out there is so important. You're meeting so many people and, thanks to your podcast, putting a lot of people together, so I really look forward to the next 300 or so episodes and many more to come after that.
Speaker 1:With more and more watershed scale regeneration, I promise.
Speaker 2:Yes, sir.
Speaker 1: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.
