Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
331 Edd Lees - After 23 years in finance, a new career full of life, soil, bread and a famous DJ
What happens when a seasoned finance professional trades his suit for soil? In a conversation with Edd Lees, co-founder of WildFarmed, we explore what it’s like to help create one of the most renowned brands in regenerative agriculture. Inspired by his friend Andy Cato, Edd, the financial mind behind WildFarmed, embarked on a mission to revolutionize food systems, beginning with a bakery in southern France. Today, they work with over 100 farmers across 10,000 hectares in the UK, supplying regenerative flour to some of London’s best bakeries.
We explore Edd's transition from 23 years in finance, his pragmatic approach to changing the food system (avoiding dogmatism), and his strategies for scaling the business. This includes expanding beyond their core market of artisanal bakers and finding ways to introduce their products to supermarkets. For WildFarmed, it's all about scaling up, impacting as many hectares as possible- ultimately at a landscape level- while guiding farms on their regenerative journey, one step at a time, all while maintaining financial sustainability.
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How is it to co-found one of the most famous brands in Regen? That's also because we sadly don't have so many yet. He's the financial brains behind FIRST starting a bakery in southern France together with a famous DJ and TV presenter and now working with over 100 farmers and 10,000 hectares in the UK, supplying Regen flour to most of the best bakeries in London. We talk about his journey from 23 years in finance and being pragmatic and not dogmatic when it comes to food system change and how to get to scale. And yes, that includes getting beyond their home comfortable base of artisanal bakeries and figuring out how to get your product into supermarkets For them. It's all about scale and influencing as many hectares as possible, ultimately at a landscape scale, and getting them on a regenerative journey one step at a time and, of course, being a financially sound business. And please bear with us, we had construction work outside the Wildfarmed offices and outside my recording place. Luciana, our editor, did her absolute best to remove as much as possible, because the content is just so good and after 20 minutes it gets better. 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 RegenAg. That is gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg. That is gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg. Or find the link below Welcome to another episode Today with the co-founder of Wild Farm.
Speaker 1:Wild Farm grows wheat the right way, making regenerative flour and bread that tastes better. It's better for you and for the planet. Welcome, ed. Hi, how are you doing? I'm very, very good. I'm looking forward to this one. We've been in touch, I mean for a long time. I remember, I think, arvidsai 2022, we met in Denver and, of course, already knew about Wildfarm before, and I mean it's safe to say you're famous as a company, but I think there's still a lot that hasn't been covered and a lot of things I'm curious about. Full disclosure with Generation Re, our syndicate. We're an investor in Wildfarm and we're very happy and lucky. We got access to that thanks to you and also Wildfarming Co, your development arm, so we definitely have skin in the game. It doesn't make me less interested to unpack here, but for those who don't know your journey on your story, I always like to ask this first question how come you spend most of your awake hours thinking about soil and, most importantly, about wheat?
Speaker 2:yeah and uh and most of my sleep wants as well. Um, I say you do sleep occasionally um the um. So how did we get here? I mean, why? Why do I spend my time thinking about it? And how did we get here is two different questions. And why I spent my time thinking about it is because it's incredibly important, I think, the most important challenge that we're facing today. I don't think many people tune in for this when we're persuading of that.
Speaker 2:But how did I get here? Is that my great friend and co-founder, andy Cato, that was working as a musician. Around 15 years ago he read an article about modern agriculture that had the amazing bit of journalism that said if you don't like the system, don't depend on it. His reaction to that was to start throwing vegetables for himself at home, which kickstarted a chain reaction of events that dragged myself, my co-founder George and many of the rest of us down to Rabbit Hall. Founder Adriana formed what's now called Wild Farm. It was originally called the Real Food Fight late 2018, mid 2019. And here we are today.
Speaker 1:And how did you get drawn into that? Because I think it's one thing to follow a friend, or to follow from and to cheer of what he or she is doing with purpose in this case but it's a whole different thing to jump into that. What was your journey before that? It?
Speaker 2:was definitely not in selling bags of flour. That's a good question. Andy's and George's and mine skill sets are very, very different. Andy is a very deep thinker, very academic brain, so he was fascinated by solving the agronomic side but then literally got stuck when he couldn't figure the commercial bit out.
Speaker 2:And my background is finance trading one thing or another since I was 14 years old, whether it was, you know, the market stall through to trading complex derivative products and financial institutions, and I was taken by how the system today, for reasons that are well explained, focused only on yields and just missed huge parts of what should be part of the income statement or the balance sheet of agriculture and food and the so-called externalities that I learned about in my economics degree when they actually come to play out rather than just being words on a sheet or numbers in a spreadsheet. It was an incredibly interesting but difficult thing to solve and I think the challenge of trying to figure out how we could do that while helping somebody like Andy, who's so clean, passionately doing an amazing thing, was very attractive to me in the first instance, and probably a little bit romantic, hopelessly naive, but I think sometimes having the outsider's naivety can be very helpful when you're actually trying to change a system, even though that's not what you think you're trying to do in the first instance.
Speaker 1:So what was that first step? Looking like you saw him struggling with the commercial side. Where did you even start? Was it the same time George got on board? What was that first step? Looking like you saw him struggling with the commercial side. Where did you even start? Was it the same time George got on board? What was the first? Of course, completely different than Wild Farm is now, but what was that first? Ok, let me help you. This is something I can do.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. It's like most things you start trying to solve a small problem and then you end up realizing you've bitten off a big problem to solve a small problem, and then you end up realizing you've bitten off a big problem. But in the first instance, Andy, after many trials and tribulations, through buying, he bought a farm in France with heavily degraded soil and the challenge that he was trying to solve was how can I grow a cash crop while healing, improving, protecting my soils, which, while healing, improving, protecting my soils which, as you and I imagine, all your listeners will know, is extremely critical and there's a great video on Groundswell.
Speaker 1:A couple of years ago I think it was 2020 or 2021, and he presented on Groundswell on his journey with a lot of pictures. I'll put it in the show notes because it's highly recommended to see the issue. I especially send it to people that are like oh yeah, there's the dj that bought a farm and then became famous. I said yeah, but he went through 10 years plus of farming failures to figure out things like. He's done done the work and he talks about it in a, I think, a 50 minute, five zero, so you can actually see some of the depths. Go and see that, not now, but go and see that after just to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm really pleased you mentioned that, because I know we're digressing from the question, but that's a point, that that work's not finished. That's an ongoing piece of work where we have so much to learn and rather than Andy doing just on one farm in France, we're now experimenting on north of a hundred farms, mostly in the UK, all different soil types, all different farming experiences, all at different points in their journey, which is helping to accelerate learning. But you know, nonetheless, there's an awful lot of work still to be done. We have not solved this, we're unlikely to solve this. I often compare it to the people who were building the Sagrada Familia in the first few decades.
Speaker 1:They're not going to see it finished. You, they're not going to see it finished.
Speaker 2:You and I are not going to see this finished, but if we can be part of building the foundations for it, then that's a good thing to grow. Your question was what was the small problem I was trying to solve? The numbers simply did not add up. Andy was growing this crop. That was demonstrably better, in whatever way you want to define better. I think it would have ticked most people's boxes. Um, and he really took it to the local grain merchant. That was just basically an extension of durable commodity markets. Numbers simply did not add up. Um and my uh.
Speaker 2:My role in that was to say you need to travel up the value chain, which meant, uh, investing in a small milling and bakery operation, um, which is even more of a business. And I said I can help you build a very basic business model and um, put the finance in for this and um, and when he did that, the thing started to work. When you know, ge George's very important role in this is in helping people tell the story. So Andy had figured out the farming bit I was helping with. How can the numbers.
Speaker 1:So you literally started a bakery and a mill in France, southern France.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, this is classic Andy to a T he didn't know anything about Beijing or milling Andy to a team. He didn't know anything about baking or milling, and the wheats he was growing at the time were mostly heritage wheats or older wheat varieties that have different properties to what many of the bakers today were using. And Andy spent time down at the local library in France reading ancient books, many centuries old books, about how to bake with these kinds of varieties. And when we enlisted the help of a high-skilled baker, an Irish girl called Louise, this fantastic baker to help really formulate what these breads could be like and in version one that's definitely not well-known but was something basically Andy getting back on his feet financially was was making breads out of these products. And again, it's worth mentioning people who don't know that on the second weekend there was a cube of bread in this shop the first time in that town for a very long time and mostly older people saying this is what bread used to taste like.
Speaker 2:And these farming in France will name a number of awards. He's the first Englishman to win the equivalent of the Knighthood for Agriculture in France. So this thing in a very small rural town had started to prove concept and the three of us wanted to bring that to the world, should I say. But the UK initially is George and I are London-based. George is an incredible communicator and storyteller, so that was the early version of what has now become well and at that early bakery, like what was the?
Speaker 1:I mean the quality difference I can imagine, but the price difference as well. Like were people first of all, was there a price difference even though you took out all the steps in the middle and were people happy? I mean happy is one thing, but willing apparently they were. Because the second weekend there was a queue. How did you deal with that? Um, potential difference of the, the very cheap I get, they could get somewhere else yeah, I mean it's going to be with anything small and um and an authentic.
Speaker 2:It tends to be more expensive than mass-produced. But when the nature of the very small farm, the very small bakery, and that the customers could see this system that they were supporting and people are generally willing to pay a bit more, in my experience, to support a system that they understand that brings traceability and transparency without even necessarily knowing that's why they're doing it. But they're saying I vote for someone doing this this way and I enjoy it with what I'm eating. And again, that's exactly what we're doing at Wild Farm today.
Speaker 1:On a bigger scale, the intention is to grow that to a global scale day on a on a bigger scale, and the intention is to grow up to a global scale and and so helping your friend set up a bakery in southern france. I'm not saying that's easy or normal, but you can sort of imagine um, and then bringing it to the uk at a whole different scale, what? What was the reasoning? Because I don't think you set out with with that intention definitely not what? What got you hooked?
Speaker 2:well, this is, yeah, it's um. There was probably two we struggled with. You know, we get into the age, struggle to remember which year was which. We need to sit down and really put a proper chronology on stuff, but it was some time. It was two to three years later when I can tell you it was mid-2019, so mid-2019, quite a few years. We had a conversation, the three of us, which said you were still in finance.
Speaker 2:I'd just been made CEO of the finance business that I'd been working for and 23 years in finance finally got to the seat that everybody well I wanted anyway. And then, within six months, they resigned to go and pursue a life in soil and bread, which, on the face of it, is a completely irrational. Well, not on the face of it, it's a completely irrational decision. So what was the motivating factor there? It's the infinitely complex. Why do humans do anything? Why do we climb mountains? Why do we take on these things? That's seemingly difficult and challenging. It's a combination of. It's not a completely altruistic thing. It's solving a problem. When the problem is incredibly complicated, I think that tends to attract more attractive. I don't know if that's just me or that's everybody.
Speaker 1:And so what was so attractive? I mean what? That conversation with the three of you triggered Wild Farmed in order for the four of you, adrean joined as well. Like triggered Wild Farmed in the UK?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, adrean is a crucial bit of that that's actually worth mentioning, which is the three of us were trying to figure out what this business was. We had and Adriana would have been in finance, and one day she came across Andy talking and I was speaking to him on telephone. I said listen to this. She said if you want to do that, I'll go and do that with you full time, and it often takes a woman to organize three men.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because your famous Financial Times article obviously she's not there. At that point she wasn't there exactly Like three men in a field. But then still, where do you start? You don't have necessarily grain coming from. In the UK, brexit is already happening, happening, so it's not that easy to bring from france. How many bakers, bakeries do you know in, or do you want to set up your own bakery in london? Like, what are? What are the paths there and and what happens next? Don't forget the small issue of um.
Speaker 2:2020 wasn't the easiest time to be doing anything face to face um but a lot of people were baking.
Speaker 1:Yes, a lot, a lot of people were baking.
Speaker 2:So at that time we were importing Andy's grain and his neighbour's grain that had been grown in France, the same that we were selling in our bakery, because Andy already spread.
Speaker 1:basically he already started working.
Speaker 2:So a few of his neighbours, yeah just to grow the amount of inventory, and we came to the UK with an intention of doing the same thing. We said, right, who are the really interesting artisan bakers? Who did we start working with? The first one was Geraldine Bakery, who started from scratch, building a bakery around grains that can't be grown, and then we look to the other tastemakers in that sector. So anything like when you want to start something new, you have to find the people who care the most, and so the bakers who really care the most are the ones who are seeking out the best grain within their size and scale. Obviously we couldn't, but I'm sure there's. I know now there are much bigger baker bakery that care much more, that care just as much, but we just would an irrelevant size and scale.
Speaker 2:But very quickly we realized we have to recruit farmers in the UK and Andy spent a bunch of time coming around doing that and in that process he entered the competition to win a tenancy, the National Trust to put a competition for who has the most interesting sustainable farming model, and he had to do all his interviews via Zoom.
Speaker 2:We didn't know anybody in the organization, we really didn't know what we were pitching for and I think he didn't really expect to win it to the extent where he hadn't really quite briefed his wife and children that they might be moving to the UK in six weeks time before we found out we did with it.
Speaker 2:But that was an incredibly important part of the story because what has now become Andy's home and Andy's family's home at Pulleymore Farm in the Cotswolds has become Wild Farm HQ in the farming area and that became a very good place to sort of show and tell, because, you know, farming is a very visual way of learning, and he managed to invite, through a lot of hard work, many, many, many people to the farm, and you know some of them. It wasn't for them at that time and some people did like it and these people that helped us, you know, continue to evolve it. So I wouldn't want to start naming them, because there's so many really important people along the way who've been very collaborative, who've helped evolve what Andy is doing in France to what we're doing today, which is, you know, it's come in a very long way.
Speaker 1:And the original bakers that started buying from you. Where were they buying from before? Because if you're a high-end, flavor focused focus bakery, I can't imagine you're buying commodity-grade anyway. Like what were you replacing? In that sense, were you better in terms of taste, were you different? Because the story is different, like what was their reason to to switch to to wildfire, partially or fully?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean when you say I can't imagine they're buying commodity grain through absolutely no fault of the farmer, the miller or the baker outside of us, unless it's incredibly small scale. It's very, very difficult to know who grew your grain and how. Even the organic community you have huge admiration for and an awful lot of alliance with, they don't know where the grain has come from, because supply chains that were set up in the 20th century didn't have the technology to trace where things have come and where they've gone. And that technology does exist today. But to try and reverse engineer it into supply chains that were actually developed from the 19th century around the industrial revolution, when a lot of these big mills and big bakeries were first built, it doesn't happen overnight, but the good news is I'm extremely optimistic that we'll be in the next five to ten years at a very common place.
Speaker 1:So you're basically saying it wasn't that difficult, of course, between air brackets to compete in that sense, because you had transparency, plus a really good story, plus good quality and really good taste, like there was a combination that was almost impossible to find anywhere else.
Speaker 2:That's right and the nature of artisans is they're interested in extremely high quality ingredient, whether it's a baker or whatever they're doing. So we came with a very authentic story. And also, if one of the four of us comes to talk to you passionate about a thing, you know it's not that difficult to persuade someone to try something. Just try this. Listen to this great story, try it. It's just that when you try to go, this is the scaling bit that becomes challenging is how do you replicate that one-to-one relationship?
Speaker 1:And that started to take off like the bakery after bakery pasta brand. Like a lot of the higher end or more well-known quality focused ones that are using Flower, are starting to become your customers, which meant you needed supply from the UK, ideally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, that was a huge part of Andy moving here. It was to build a UK-based business. I'm UK-based, jordan's UK-based. Adram is UK-based, I understand.
Speaker 1:You forced Andy to come back. Yeah, Now he's also UK-based.
Speaker 2:Well he is. His children had never lived in England. They were teenagers.
Speaker 1:It was so. Was it also the right move at that time? We have to ask Andy. But as in, how much of a shock was that moving from the Netherlands to the UK?
Speaker 2:Apologies to your French listeners, but we haven't tried doing business in France. It was no, it had to be. It's a business. Let's get that out there straight away. Wild farm's a business.
Speaker 2:I'm sure we'll get into this at some point in our conversation. It's very important to me that it was in the business structure, and all the business knowledge and network that we have was based out of the UK, mostly London, so it had to be done. And also the UK presents a really quite unique opportunity sort of agnostic to Brexit that in a country that's small, green and wet we are in. In spite of that, we're in the bottom 10% of the world's biodiversity loss. We're the lowest in the G8. That doesn't make any sense and it's because we've been creating the wrong incentives to do the wrong thing for too long, for good reason. Nobody set up to create a problem, but the incentive structure is such that we built a system that has destroyed nature and actually what we now want to set up to do is to build a system that works with nature while maintaining similar production levels and not wanting to burn the whole thing to the ground and start from the beginning. We're more pragmatic.
Speaker 1:And so it starts to grow. How do you get those? First other farmers on board, andy starts to farm, and then you have this demand growing on one side as well, because you go bakery to bakery and probably to start sharing as well to their friends, et cetera. And how do you then build up that supply?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one, field at a time is the answer, but by spending time talking to farmers. I know you've met a bunch of farmers and people on this podcast must know this but they're an incredible group of people. They are naturally interested in what they're doing. I've never met a farmer who's doing who isn't interested in what they can do. There's many other things they could do. They they're engineers, they're businessmen, they are dynamists. They're everything wrapped into one. So an idea about how to do a thing in a different way usually caught the attention of a certain group of farmers, and it was with that group some of them Mavericks, some of them from more conservative background that we managed to coalesce around what wildfarmers are becoming. So how do we grow supply? By spending a lot of time and energy A explaining what we're trying to achieve, but B very importantly, listening to the challenges and being very open to adopt, adjust, amend as new information becomes available.
Speaker 1:And then on the demand side, at some point, when do you feel what's the master plan there? When do you feel that you're not outgrown? Because London is a city of 10 million people, there are many bakeries, there's a lot of bread being eaten and a lot of pizza, pasta and all of that. But when do you feel why, going after supermarkets and other categories and and what, what triggered that or what was the? Is the reasoning behind it that we get into the challenges and opportunities there, but why not stay sort of safe within the artisanal bakery community?
Speaker 2:yeah, the the point of wild farm. The reason we exist is to transform landscapes, scale and quickly, to nature-rich, food-producing land. We were not going to be able to do that within the after-sale community alone. I think it's important. An important way to be propitious since day one is that if you're a farmer, just try something. Try doing it for you, or two or three. If you're a baker, try one of your products or a bit of one of your products. You don't have to move everything, and I think eating people in that way has been a huge part of our success, not being dogmatic. And so the business model was always uh, from a, from a demand side was a concentric circle business model. So who is in the very middle small concentric circle? Who is in the circle just outside that in terms of uh? So the really finest artisans in the middle and the slightly bigger privately owned artisans in the middle. Then the slightly bigger privately owned artisans in the next circle and the slightly bigger, maybe not quite nationwide chains, but local chains of 10 to 15.
Speaker 2:Then the bigger ones in each circle then has a section within it. One might be bakery, one might be pizza, one might be the sandwich makers. And then how do we cater for each of their needs and wants and fears? The sandwich makers and then how do we cater for each of their sort of needs and what's the biggest and um? Again, as I said earlier on, well, within their existing supply chain. Just asking people to throw what they've been doing in the bin um, and change to us 100 immediately out of the mouth just didn't seem practical.
Speaker 1:So that's what we've done, which means what you did earlier in france is not really applicable, Like the Harlem varieties, forcing a baker this case actually starting your own bakery to to completely reinvent or look back and how bakery used to be. Like that that was just not going to fly at scale, which didn't mean enough hectares or acres into, into another management full of life, which is your slogan. It was a deliberate choice to be pragmatic in that sense.
Speaker 2:That's right, and there's a bunch of really interesting people doing very interesting things around heritage at Ellen Graves. But our thing is about transforming landscape to be full of life, exactly as you say nature-rich and full of life, while producing similar amounts of food or similar yields or workable yields, should I say and that's a different thing. You know, Andy got into using heritage varieties because the version of farming he was doing at the time required him to have very long, tall graves. But as things have evolved and what was a pasture cropping system has become a system about soil and plant diversity to improve soil health, we're not as dependent on having to have those varieties.
Speaker 1:And what changes when you go out of that artisanal, maybe small chain like five to ten shops, etc. What changes on the back end or what changes on the operation side?
Speaker 2:No, but we're not going out of it.
Speaker 1:to be clear when you're moving not beyond, like when you're moving out of that, of course you're serving them still. We're going to get to that if that delivers any sanctions.
Speaker 2:but when you're moving beyond that, let's say in terms of, uh, surfing yeah, like everything in this journey, you learn a lot of stuff the hard way and some of an occasion make something easier away. But um, no, it was like I said, we set the thing up for scale from the beginning. That was. You know, I'm going to keep repeating that we exist to transform landscape, to be full of life and nature rich, and so when we thought about that from the beginning, we thought we have to build this thing with a very solid foundation, with rigor.
Speaker 2:We've been collecting data from the beginning. We've really been quite. We've invested quite heavy in the proof point side, should I say in the sustainability metric, from early doors and on the delivering a product side. What does that mean? It means always working with the best-in-class partners that we can at the time and building out capabilities way beyond the size of the business which again we continue to do today such that as and when we get these periods of extreme growth, we have the capabilities to deal with and so now we're talking september, october, like, say, fall 2024.
Speaker 1:It depends a bit when it goes out and of course depends when, um, when you listen to this, but where would you say you stand now, like what's, what's wild farm? At the moment, if somebody asks you Well.
Speaker 2:Wild Farm is a regenerative farming food business.
Speaker 1:More than 100 farmers you already mentioned.
Speaker 2:Yeah, more than 100 farmers growing food in a nature-friendly way that's better for people and the planet. Important that Wild Farm food is grown uniquely by our community of farmers we touched upon this earlier but we know who grew it and how they grew it, and they follow a third party independently audited set of guidelines which allows us to give guarantees to people who buy our product. The guarantees are that the grain will always be pesticide-free, the way in which we grow will improve soil health and increase biodiversity. We'll reduce carbon for people who want to count the carbon and we will minimize river pollution. These are the guarantees that we absolutely need.
Speaker 1:Is it on point? You're saying pesticides, not herbicides Like what's your.
Speaker 2:No, no, I would consider pesticides too. So maybe not Herbicide, insecticide, fungicide I put all of those in the pesticide. This word pesticide I have a bit of a problem with anyway, because it sounds like you're getting rid of a nasty little thing that's just sort of getting in the way, rather than indiscriminately killing insects.
Speaker 1:But yeah, anything with the word For every beneficial one, for every sorry every non-beneficial one. I think there's 17 beneficial ones that Jonathan Landgren, friend of the show, researched.
Speaker 2:So setting up this third party order to set standards or guidelines, should I say, helps us to give these guarantees to anybody who buys our food and in terms of the sales, what?
Speaker 1:because this has been a monumental year, let's say in terms of scaling, getting into supermarkets, getting into whole different categories. Um, how did that happen? Why did that happen and what have been the lessons?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we set out at the beginning it was quite deliberate to become a food brand. We didn't set out just to be a ingredient business. Why, yeah, we wanted to be a brand? For a couple of reasons. I'm very strongly of the opinion that brands are what change consumer behaviour. In the UK alone, we've got 463 different eco-type certifications. I think the consumer is confused and disengaged with this. I think it's a 20th century solution. I think in the 21st century, brands can do the heavy lifting themselves, give their own definitions, and there's enough technology out there to demonstrate that you are doing what you say you're doing.
Speaker 1:So for Wild.
Speaker 2:Farm to be a branded product.
Speaker 1:yeah, and so what's the first move then? If you want to do a branded product and not alienate, let's say, your bakers as well, how do you thread that needle?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, from the outset, be very clear what we're doing. When we started selling WellFarm flour, we worked really hard to get our partners, the people who buy it from us, to co-brand. Why would they co-brand? Because if they co-brand, they're helping to tell the story. Co-brand why would they co-brand? Because if they co-brand, they're helping to tell the story. And I'm sure one of your 300, I guess, or two have said before the biggest challenge we've got in this whole thing is education, and I think we use the brands to engage an audience and tell them a story that I didn't know, that George didn't know, that Andy didn't know, that none of us who worked here pretty much knew that what you learn about it is something that you want to be part of. So that was the purpose of being a brand. So why were we not just a flour brand then? Because I think we have to have more pull than just being a caribou brand or just being an ingredient. But it was very important to learn the whole supply chain, to really deeply understand the farming, where we still learn, really deeply understand the various uses of flour, um, which we're still learning every day.
Speaker 2:And then we we actually have a small wholesale bakery in london that sells bread and pastry to friends. We met early who said bakery in London that sells bread and pastry to friends. We met early who said I love you guys, I want to stay. I vote Wild Farm too, but I don't use a lot of flour day to day. I said, okay, fine, we'll start a small bakery, we'll send you some bread and pastries. And then the grocery was always for mass. How do we get mass distribution? And it coincided with Andy featuring on a television show in the UK called Clocks and Sons.
Speaker 1:Which is an Amazon Prime. If you're interested, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:It's a show about a guy who's a famous petrolhead. He became a farmer and he's a very unlikely person to be interested in regenerative farming. But he's come on board as one of our growers and Andy is taking him on a journey of degrading soils to help degrade food in a nature-rich environment, and that has a lot of influence in the country. People are really engaged with the plights of farmers not regenerative farmers, just farmers. So anyway, the grocery brand was an important third part of our flywheel to help build consumer understanding of what it is we're trying to achieve.
Speaker 1:So you're going from co-branding, which means someone is making their bread and a chunk of the flour, of ingredients comes from wild farm. You might be mentioned on the package to really having a wild farm bread comes from wild farm, that you might be mentioned on the package to really having a wild farm bread. How does that happen and what are the the learnings there?
Speaker 2:because it seems like a small step, but it it is a massive one. Yeah, it's gonna be on the shelf.
Speaker 1:It's your, your name on it, it's most of your ingredients, it's your, your reputation as well. Um, and we know the supermarket house can be, uh, the jungle, let's say, in terms of disappearing. How many brands have we seen coming in and disappear in no time? How did you get ready for that fight, or that move?
Speaker 2:Yeah, first and foremost the products got to be great, and so we spent a lot of time trying to work with the best partners who we could find to manufacture product cores to a specification that aligned with what we're trying to do. There's been a lot of focus on UPF this year ultra-processed food, certainly in the UK, I'm not sure how much outside of the UK but the other side of that equation of the food is sort of the process. But the ingredient, if not more important than the process, certainly is important, and we have the highest quality ingredient in the bread aisle and so we have to find partners who will work with the process that complemented that and at the same time try and find a way to engage people. So we're very targeted in exactly who we try and get to pick it up first.
Speaker 2:Uh, which are our ppops? We called them, um, we were like people who find the new thing and then tell their friends about their new thing and then maybe you lose the peacocks because they're on to the next new thing, but hopefully the friend may tell about it will be more sticky, and that's been our initial strategy, um, you know, but we have. We spent an awful lot of time and money and energy thinking about how can we tell the story, because if everybody knew what you and I know about the way food is grown, uh, this will be easy for us. So really it's a huge education piece about, um, why the food cost is, and I'm sure we're going to get on to food cost accounting in the future.
Speaker 1:So how has it been going? You launched, I think, the beginning of May, in Waitrose with a brand, and how did the peacock and their friends that's going well.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm always very ambitious, so we're doing really well. We're in line with all of the projections and expectations. But I like to be. That's the nature of it. We're a very ambitious business. Waitrose is being a great partner and continues to be a great partner, but if we're going to change global landscapes, we need to be thinking um, you know, beyond one range in one retailer in the uk and so has it been selling.
Speaker 1:That's the like in in terms of um, the energy and effort you put into it, and also the margins, like in terms of like, can you sustain the same prices you pay for farmers? Is that something you, you, I can't imagine you touch, but like, how does it work versus selling five kilo bags or 10 kilo bags to, to artisanal bakeries?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's, it's. There's three parts of the business, as we said. There's the ingredients business, um, which which continues to grow as we understand, more and more and more land moves across and, as you say, just to take a small sort of diversion, the amount we pay to the farmers is one way of looking at it, but the farmer's bottom line is how I like to think about it, and Andy's doing a huge amount of work, and has been for a number of years to try and encourage UK government Actually, uk government can be a catalyst for all sorts of private enterprises to help contribute, because it's not just the farmer who benefits from nature. All of us are absolutely dependent upon ecosystems and soil and we need to create the correct incentives to grow through in harmony with this rather than at the expense of it. And there's a false argument that exists today of nature versus food, and we just got to get rid of that. So, to answer your question on the economics of the business, when we solve for that, the whole thing will become it will happen very quickly not just Wildfarm, but way beyond and along the way.
Speaker 2:Wildfarm is a very collaborative business. We collaborate. I think that what's unique about us is whole supply chain. We don't own any of the capex, we don't own the farms, we don't own the processing, we don't own the manufacturing, we don't own the retail space. So we don't and we're not super greedy, we don't need to take a margin at every step along the way. So the more businesses that can collaborate and find a way to spread or share a margin across the entire supply chain, rather than fighting for their bit to be bigger at the expense of another bit, which inevitably is rolled upstream to the farmer in the last number of decades, to the detriment of all of us and nature, I think, the better. So I think where wild farms should be looked at in more detail and perhaps copied by others is exactly that. How do we share across the supply chain a sensible margin where everyone can use it?
Speaker 1:And that profitability for the farmer. How has that been working? I mean, we often hear the goal of regenerative ag is to reduce a lot of the inputs which are extremely costly. To my behalf, some premiums and in with with that delta, it becomes an interesting business, like from an economic perspective of your growers. Um, have they been? Of course there'll be more and more joining, which means it's an interesting um business, a business proposal to them. Um, how have they been? Um, like dealing with the economic side, how profitable has it been profitable for them? And if so, why? Is it the cost side, is it the premium side, or is it somewhere in the middle?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for me it's all about risk reward. That was my background for this. And farmers, while they may not be classic in trading, most of the time in trading risk management they're pretty good. They're pretty savvy, they know what they're doing and I think if you say to a farmer, you could spend one half or one third of the cost to make the same or more profit, that's a pretty good proposition. But the challenge might be if I could change one thing? I know you often ask people if I could change one thing. I know you often ask people if you could change one thing, and this is a stupid answer, but it's like if we could have a harvest once a week, it would be amazing, Because what we need is we need more results, we need to do more tests and trials. The most annoying thing by a mile in agriculture is that we have to wait a year every time we have a new idea, Otherwise. That's why the tech can turn on in a day, have mass adoption With agriculture.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, we don't have that and you see that cycle of innovation and improvement, especially with the 100-plus farms, different soil types, as you mentioned, different approaches how do you gather it's something to ask Andy as well, but how do you make sure they're all innovating and that's being shared, because otherwise it's one guy or girl and wherever, and somebody else and and that's beneficial?
Speaker 2:many of these things have been figured out partially, but just not put together I think if you ask any of the anybody who works at wild farms, uh, what their three or five things they're most proud of, I think the farming community would be everybody's list. Um, so we have a again a quite disparate community who andy has brought together, and I think they've done an incredible job of it. But it's not just him. Now it's it's we have a farming team here, amazingly, amazingly passionate, super talented people. But it's this community of people who don't work for us. They're our partners in trying to advance this.
Speaker 2:You know, something as simple as our WhatsApp group has been a high of activity. It's had to now become a bit more organized, with various meetups and knowledge sharing, all these kind of things. Because I don't know if your audience needs to hear this or not, but for many farmers because I don't know if your audience needs to hear this or not, but for many farmers they can be standing in a field with maybe two or three weeks to make a series of decisions that are going to pretty much determine their whether, permitting their financial outcome for the year, and then being asked to do something quite different to what their parents, neighbours, school have told them how to do. Advisors yeah, paid advisors and I think it's incredibly brave stories when you're generally under stress because there's a lot to happen in a short period of time. That community element, I would what we're extremely proud of, and also it is enormous the benefit that everybody is part of it in advancing the field.
Speaker 1:You know what way beyond welcome and so I have the results been on the growing side. It's been extremely weird years, the last two, three and probably that's going to continue from from. I remember last spring was extremely dry and and then this spring, I think, was incredibly wet. Um, how, how have you dealt with that? Also, because you have these contracts to and and breads to launch and things like that. Like how do you deal with that? And have you seen results? Is the two-part question have you seen results from regenerative practices do to deal better than than the neighbors or the fields that haven't been in conversion or in on the journey?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean without doubt. So, first of all, a lot of people are quite early on their journey, so you know those who are further along and healthy because it's really your goal as well, like we're taking sides up too, too.
Speaker 1:Because I remember andy, on a farm visit in the netherlands, saying once like my goal is, or our goal is, to get as many people on that first few steps. Exactly as many fields, as many chemicals out, as many fertilizer out, like as soon, is it perfect? No, but it's that first step, and then we'll get them on the long run, but it's that hector first step, hector first step. Exactly on the first step.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so they're early, so you don't see so much yet, but even in spite of that, something as simple as a cover crop or a companion crop in times of extreme drought or extreme flood the wettest year in 150 years in most of the UK they fared better. You know, that's quite a simple, quite quick thing to achieve that most people on the regen journey wild farmer otherwise are looking at To the point where water companies in the UK are paying our farmers now to use cover crops and reduce chemical use, because the biggest pollutant in British rivers is agricultural runoff rather than sewage and it's cheaper for the water companies if the chemicals don't go in in the first place rather than trying to remove them afterwards. So I think, to answer your question, how's it been? Yeah, it's really challenging, and I guess I've only been in this for a few years, so my experience is it's just really challenging and really stressful all the time, which makes us quite solution-focused. You know, I think the pragmatism is an important part of it and I think there's.
Speaker 1:I mean there's there's a benefit with grain. You can store it for quite a while. So there's a there. There's some it's not perishable, like vegetables, um and and so you, you have a bit of buffer, but as the same time, you're growing and you're getting new people on board and new actors, because how many farms from from the 100 are most of them like, do they sell everything to you?
Speaker 2:Is that what you need?
Speaker 1:for growth.
Speaker 2:No, most of them are doing a small percentage of their farm at the moment. That was the point. Just start, try something, do something with us.
Speaker 1:So there's massive space for growth.
Speaker 2:Massive space, even within the existing group, and we have quite a long waiting list now of people who should be growing with us.
Speaker 2:But what's become clear to us is we we need to work with people who are going to put wheat where wheat belongs in the in their rotation at the right time, and engage with things like sap tests and this kind of stuff to get the right result. Because, you know, if we're talking a bread making flour, as you know as a bean baker, it has to have certain characteristics. Um, and to your point of, what are we doing? The difficult is, we've done a huge amount of work, um, in the last 12 months for farmers who've mis-spec to find, uh, a home for this grain that isn't going to be in bread making flours. You know that work is going on through doing this interview. In six weeks' time I'll be able to tell you a lot more about it, but we're right in the middle of a lot of negotiations at the end of the year's work. So the farmers who don't make spec that grain can still find its way into a tradable supply chain, picking all the hard work the farmers have done, whether we're matching levels or whatever.
Speaker 1:And don't meet spec basically means protein levels and other things that you need to be able to make good bread out of it. And of course, it's very sad. You work with a farmer for a year or years and part of their harvest or more is not meeting your spec, and then what do you do?
Speaker 2:It's not that you can buy it yeah, and when you say our spec, our spec is significantly lower than, uh, the industry average.
Speaker 1:If you spend a lot of time. What normally happens with that flower? Does it go to animal feed or what's the like?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, this is this is what we're working on now. It would do, yeah, it would do, and that is you think about. So just take wild farm doubts at this for a moment. In conventional agriculture, farmer is doing a deal where they will buy the seed, they will commit to a preordained set of nutrition and chemical treatments. That will be, you know, perhaps three times, four times the amount. That will be perhaps three times, four times the amount the cost of working with us and then if they have to hit a spec that's significantly higher than our spec, and if they miss that, they're all the way down to the conventional fee price, whereas what we're saying is you can spend less, you can have a more forgiving spec and if you miss, we're still going to find some home and can't give you the full bread-making price because we can't get that at the other end. But we're going to work really hard to insulate your downside, which I think is the best way to convince anybody to do anything.
Speaker 1:There's a small number of mavericks out there who will say I just want to see the upside, but actually, if you can cushion people to the downside, particularly in an industry that, for a very good reason, is conservative, that's a good way to increase adoption and you'll be working with them to do whatever they can do next year to not miss the spec, of course, whatever is in there, of course, weather permitting, etc. But that's, that's the like. What can we set analysis, what can we SEP analysis, what can we understand, et cetera, et cetera, to see what is in your control that the other years you don't miss. And, of course, then you get access to a much more interesting market.
Speaker 2:I mean again, we're working with so many interesting people, from agronomists to scientists, universities in the UK, in the US and the EU. To understand exactly this, I'm in Australia, in fact, the Australian audience. Some of the very interesting but completely different climate over there, some of the most, some of the most interesting ideas that we've adopted have come from Australia.
Speaker 1:And why do you think this is happening now, Like we've been you mentioned the organic movement We've been trained in a certain part of the food system the slow food, et cetera, to look at labels, to seek out quality et cetera, and somehow it never really bursted out of the peacock movement. The peacock quantity 6%, 10%, but it is low, single digit. What is different? Is it different now? What is different? Very big open question.
Speaker 2:I mean, I wasn't doing it back then, so I can only tell you since I've started doing it. But my observation is um, there's a number of things. Uh, I think how do I answer? This seems a combination of um, bigger businesses are becoming aware of the impact of their supply chain and, from a resilient standpoint, they know, looking forward 10, 20 years, that they have to change, and if they don't change, then there's going to be an enormous problem. I think farmers have been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed to the point where something's got to give. So new ideas are interesting to them, I think, most importantly the Gen Z millennial. I think they are awake to more sustainable choices. More generally, and crucially, absolutely crucially, I think we're very, very close to there being a much greater awareness that food grown this way is better for human health, and I think that is absolutely the spark of sooner life.
Speaker 1:You really think that connection healthy soil I mean, we've talked about it many times on the podcast, but that healthy soil leads to healthy produce, healthy gut system, healthy people Is that going to matter enough to you to get a lot of friends of Peacock's, let's say, on board?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's not just the friends of Peacock's. I think you know Samora's food system, or the supply chain in the future is going to be collaborative, whether you're a farmer or a process or a manufacturer. You know it's like nature and solar microbes Everyone's got skin in the game. We need less or different, I agree chemicals inputs, more biological and less medical moving parts. You know it's hard, as I said earlier, it's hard to reverse engineer this into the existing structures with massive, massive stunk capex over the last 150 years. But in a similar way.
Speaker 2:I talk a lot about EVs. Electronic vehicles have taken car manufacturing from being all about dealerships and parts and assembly and moving to being about battery power and software, and I think similarly in food and healthcare. I think we need to be spending less money on solving things like chronic illness. Diabetes is the biggest cost to the NHS now. Higher quality food is a very close relationship to this. I can't take this as a plug. Novo Nordisk is the most valuable company in Europe and they are making their money as a result of the batch food that people are eating. So I think this education piece I've been talking about knowing that actually my pace of toast in the morning, or whatever it may be it really is going to help with my fiber, my pesticide-free, higher antioxidant fiber. I think that is the beginning of the mass adoption.
Speaker 1:And it's a very interesting analogy with the EV world. We're in a time now, just putting it in perspective, depending on when you listen Volkswagen just announced to close, potentially, factories in Germany for the first time. Many others are struggling, many others are struggling. Many others are thriving. Like. This is not an easy transition. The charging infrastructure has still a lot to be focused on.
Speaker 1:I read something in Bloomberg that the first many were called not gas stations before, but maintenance places or service stations, because the cars, the original cars, the petrol cars were so bad that they had to be fixed all the time, not necessarily to put gas in them. And most of these places make money because of the other things they sell, not necessarily the petrol. So you have to completely reinvent what EV charging means as well. Like just the charging is probably not going to be the business model, but it ended with we figured this out before. We'll figure it out out. But it also meant probably a lot of the big ones will will suffer, disappear or change, and volkswagen in this case is in the in the spotlights now, but it counts for many. What does it mean for the big commodity traders, the big ones, the processing ones we'd never hear about, because we don't see.
Speaker 1:We see the brands, we might see the farmer, but everything in the middle is sort of on purpose, probably very shadowy. We don't, we don't see any of that. They've made their, their world and their infrastructure in a capex, etc. On commoditization, anonymity, we're talking transparency like how is that? And we see them making big commitments on regen, but it also comes with a transparency question. What do you? I mean, this is a huge rabbit hole, what, what do you see there in this transition to, to, to a transparent food system, um, which then, I think, will be much more sustainable, healthy, tasty, etc. But the transparency piece seem to, seems to be that's going to be an interesting one.
Speaker 2:Let's say, yeah, I mean it's. We can spend the rest of the day talking about this, but to stick on the car analogy for a moment, it's not the management of these businesses that don't want to do this.
Speaker 2:You know, bmw tried to do this years ago and the workers, they don't want to do that because these enormous businesses, they almost become like the state where it's. Oh, we're benevolent owners if it's private businesses or directors of a business and we'll look after you, our workers, based on this ecosystem of, as you say, selling parts and all the other bits that go into cars. How do you change it quickly? I don't know. How do you change it quickly? I don't know. That's where we're small and tiny and those big businesses you talk about would be billions and billions of some topics. I like to think that they will come on board. You know some of the very big ones who are starting stuff.
Speaker 2:They get a lot of criticism from people outside of me saying, oh, they're just doing something to greenwash or they're just doing a little bit kind of hoping that the whole thing fails. I don't subscribe to that attitude at all. I think it's amazing. I'm so happy to hear if the presence of Wild Farms has encouraged one of the bigger businesses to start thinking about doing other regen flowers. And of course, I'll have the reasons why competitive reasons, why I think our award is a better commercial play. But whatever, this is absolutely a rising tide raises all shit moment and I keep using this word collaboration and collaborative. I think these very big businesses, if they can repurpose some of their existing stock capets to make sure that we get identity preservation throughout the supply chain, then I think that kind of collaborative mindset could be great for everybody and we need them.
Speaker 1:I don't think there's there's any doubt that we can do this, building all of these capex from scratch, and and there's there's no way I think it's going to be incredibly interesting to see how it plays out, um, and who will make the transition, just as an in energy. We've seen that, with very large fossil fuel companies turning around and some absolutely not, and they will be forgotten in the fossil age. And we've seen the same in the real world industries. We've seen the same in many industries TV, another one. But we need the CapEx, we need the cables, we need the processing, because this flour needs to get to consumers and we'll be writing case studies and history books about this transition. But it's interesting you keep coming back to transparency. It needs to be from the field to the package, or to the flour that's behind you on the shelf or to the bread that's in the supermarket. You need to be able to fully trace that back.
Speaker 2:But the good news is that those technologies cost a lot less than all the other stuff we were just talking about. In between, those existing processing units are absolutely fit for purpose and can be fit the purpose and can be. It's not easy to reverse engineer but it's absolutely possible and I think actually, you know there's some role for government to play. You know I talk a lot about energy, the job that the German government did to you know, to Defeating terrorists?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:The price of solar energy, I think is one-tenth of what it was 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:Less way less. There you go.
Speaker 2:So it's a nature-based farm. I live in the UK, like I said, so that's where it starts. It doesn't have to just be about that, but higher quality soil and food that comes from it is a massive, massive public benefit comes from.
Speaker 1:it is a massive, massive public benefit, and so what would be a message? We like to ask this question. Let's say we're in a theater in London and the audience is a lot of your former financial friends working in the financial world maybe investors as well either mentioning their own money or other people's money. What would be your main message? What's the seed you would like to to plant? Of course, there are many messages we discussed where, like we do this on stage, live, they're excited, enthusiastic, but also people forget. So if there's one thing you would like them to to remember the next day when they get to work and they open their laptop or they're in their office or somewhere, what would you like them to remember and potentially do?
Speaker 2:yeah. So your audience you just given to me, there is an audience of finance professionals. So the message I would give to those guys is this is inevitable. You don't want to miss it.
Speaker 1:You want to play on the FOMO.
Speaker 2:Well, that's how the whole thing, that's how the whole of finance works, as far as I can tell. But no, joking aside, like government has a role to play. It's catalytic. Banks have a massive, massive role to play, and I have a bit of a beef with banks that they say until the data is absolutely perfect and I have 20 years' practice I can't possibly want to do it. And there's trillions of dollars stacked up that people want to put to use. They have to find a way to mitigate their risk, to get some of this money moving. We need a lot more debt in this system. That is the oxygen of economic growth, and banks need to find a way to finance transition. That can mean a lot of different things to a business like Wellfarm. That is a brand to farmers needing to transition to processes. That is a brand to farmers needing to transition to processes, as we just described, needing um, some uh, you know some funding to to help make the changes to their system.
Speaker 1:But absolutely, uh, finance has a role to play and what would you do if we would flip the conversation and you'll be in charge of a of a fund, let's say, billion pound sterling? What would you prioritize or focus on?
Speaker 2:If I only had a billion, I'd go and get another nine straight away.
Speaker 1:Leverage, leverage that's what every finance person says.
Speaker 2:No, it's. If you gave me a billion for wild card, I would start doing it globally tomorrow. That's what I'll do, because we're working with farmers, manufacturers, food retailers, across the supply chain. We're just doing wheat and bread mostly in the UK, because that's where we are today and that's the size of our business. Our ambition is to be across everything, certainly doing cereals globally and then probably collaborating with other types of other places in the food chain as well, and, I think, scaling up businesses like ours.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons that I want HuffPump to be a financial success, as well as just having impact, is it will attract talent. It will attract the type of people who used to be a financial success, as well as just having impact, is it will attract talent. It will attract the type of people who used to be attracted into finance who are currently, or the last 20 years, being attracted into tech, um, realizing that ultimately, those things can be interesting to a point that the uh, if you could get um a financial outcome, an incredibly interesting thing. That's having a huge impact on the world. That's where the sweet spot of the talent of the next 20 years will want to be.
Speaker 1:And do you think there's a trade-off there with the impact and the financial success?
Speaker 2:No, I think quite the opposite. I think they work together hand in hand. As I said, I think the more financial success, every dollar we make at WealthFund creates more impact, and every bit of impact we have will encourage people to spend more money with us. So it's absolutely a virtuous circle, and the more successful this business becomes, we can attract smart young people not just young people, but smart, talented, experienced young people and this WealthFund as a business has the trajectory that I hope and expect it will. It will attract other businesses to do similar things.
Speaker 1:And this is a question we love to ask, inspired by John Kemp, who I know is in the office around Grantswell. He likes to ask it in the podcast what do you believe to be true? And we ask about Region X? What do you believe to be true and we ask about regionX? What do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't?
Speaker 2:we already mentioned a few like in RFSI or in groundswell in the RFSI audience like in others in our bubble.
Speaker 1:Let's say where are you contrarian?
Speaker 2:I think it's inevitable that it's going to be mass adoption. My biggest concern with our network as it is today is that as a collective, we're not ambitious enough.
Speaker 1:And what does ambition mean For you? What kind of ambition would you like to see? I?
Speaker 2:want to see more faster. You know we look at the national food strategy that Henry Dimbleby wrote. He said 9% of land should be in regenerative agriculture. Well, why are we not going up to 9% of land quickly? You know we meet great friends like the SLM guys who wrote the white paper. Why have they not deployed 10x the amount? You know they know what they're doing. They're smart guys. They've been on this since the beginning. Why is everything not 10x where it is today? People like Phil at Madaff why is it not 10x? It should be? They had a billion dollars. What do you think that is? I'll say those guys very quickly.
Speaker 1:Is it finance what's missing there? Is it the flow of capital? I think it's education, the market. Is it what's missing there? Is it the flow of capital?
Speaker 2:I think it's education, the market, all of us, if we really yeah you ask, however you know 340 people what the dear of the billion dollars that could be 340 billion we could have deployed by now.
Speaker 1:You know it's um give me a call if you have that kind of yeah, get some people. I wouldn't give it to all of them. I think it's selection there. Maybe there's a small filter, but um field there.
Speaker 2:With tech you get these very quick feedback loops. Somebody likes to go in making information that we can't change the speed of the feedback loop but we can change the risk profile of the money that's coming to it, which goes back to banks and other funding sources.
Speaker 1:Just to close off and usually leads to other questions. Give a sense of the size of Wildfarm, Like how many hectares or acres are you touching if that's something you declare, and how many people are working there. Just to give a sense, it's not three guys and a girl selling flour.
Speaker 2:I should have definitely got these numbers for you. I think we're about 45 or 50 today. I should know the answer to that. Let's go with 45. We're 45 people today.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow is another day.
Speaker 2:We've just overrun harvest, so we're in the process of negotiating for a future harvest and I think for harvest 25 we're hoping to have 10 000 hectares 10 000 hectares, which is significant, like that starts to. I mean not if you're in Australia, yeah, but this is like no but if the nine percent of arable land in the UK is 450 000 hectares, and that's where I want to get to.
Speaker 1:And that's a tipping point, dan to Well.
Speaker 2:According to the, National Food Strategy, and Dustin, who assisted Henry in the must of it, is a smart guy.
Speaker 1:And so you were mentioning flour like what's beyond flour? We're doing some grazing in the beginning. I think some of the farmers are doing that. Are you sticking to that? Are other cereal things like?
Speaker 2:I mean cereals, is a big world that's. You know, I'm like andy did some beef boxes when he was in france, and it's a whole other world. And if I think, if we were going to have an impact in the livestock world, um, it would probably be through growing something to feed the animals, rather than actually yeah, it's a whole different case.
Speaker 1:I want to thank you so much, for I want to be conscious of your time. I know it's an extremely busy period and thank you so much for coming on here to check in on Wildfarm the financial side, the brand side, the business side and and hope it's not the last time I'm looking forward to to following it and, of course, doing an update every now and then. Nice great talking to you all. 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.
