Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
336 Kevin Wolz - Starting an agroforestry industry in the belly of the beast, the soy and corn monoculture heartland of the US Midwest
A conversation with Kevin Wolz, CEO of Canopy Farm Management and former founder of the Savanna Institute. Canopy provides tree planting and management services to farmers and landowners in the US Midwest. They establish perennial crops, timber plantings, conservation practices, and integrated agroforestry systems.
We have been talking about agroforestry systems and investing before (see link at the bottom of this page!): trees were the answer to whatever your question was. But how do you start an agroforestry industry right in the middle of the belly of the beast, the American Midwest, where corn and soy are everywhere, leases are 1 to 3 years, and there are no trees as far as the eye can see? And especially here, trees are needed, not as magical carbon sequestration tools but as climate adaptation, against erosion, wind breaks, to protect animals and crops, nutrient leaking into streams, and, of course, to produce a lot of food integrated into the fields. What does it take to build an agroforestry industry here? What about finance, equipment, planting, seedlings, tree nursery, harvesting, markets, and much more?
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We have been talking about agroforestry systems and the reasons to switch to a more or to transition to a more perennialized agriculture system many times before. Trees are the answer, whatever your question was. But how do you start an agroforestry industry right in the middle of the belly of the beast, the American Midwest, where corn and soy are everywhere, leases are one to three years and there are no trees as far as the eye can see, and especially here, trees are needed, not as a magical carbon sequestration tool, but as climate adaptation, against erosion, for windbreaks to protect animals and crops, nutrient leaking into streams and, of course, to produce a lot of food integrated into these fields. So what does it take to build an agroforestry industry here? What about finance, equipment, planting, seedlings, tree nurseries, harvesting, markets and much, much more?
Speaker 1: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 RegenEgg that is, gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg or find the link below Welcome to another episode today with the former founder of the Savanna Institute and currently CEO of Canopy Farm Management.
Speaker 1:Canopy provides tree planting and management services to farmers and landowners in the US the Midwest in the US. They establish perennial crops, timber plantations, conservation practices and integrated agroforestry systems. Welcome, kevin.
Speaker 2:Thanks, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:And we don't pay enough attention to trees on this show. I mean we do quite a bit, but absolutely not the attention it deserves. Let's say so. I'm very happy to look into agroforestry once again, even though we did it a few times, but I don't think it gets the attention. The role of trees, the role of forests, the role of perennials in regeneration is somehow not enough in the spotlight. Let's say so. I'm very happy to dive into this. I think you're in an interesting momentum the Savannah Institute, obviously, and with Canopy we're going to unpack a lot of that. But to start with a personal question, we always love to ask how come you spend most of your awake hours and most of your time thinking and doing and acting around trees and perennial crops? How did that happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been quite the winding journey. I guess I started on the pure kind of ecology side, thinking about savanna restoration, prairie restoration those are the native ecosystems where I grew up and it's really like thinking that that was going to be the solution to all our problems, kind of thing.
Speaker 1:And then I went to school in the Midwest, in the middle of the corn belt or the corn desert, as we call it so just for people, the Midwest is literally like the middle of the country, like, or just for people to understand, yeah, and I went to a school where you could look on the horizon and you couldn't couldn't see a tree or a hill as far as the eye can see, so it's, you know, just corn and soybeans.
Speaker 2:And when I arrived in that landscape I was like, oh, there's, there's nothing to restore here. What do we do? And so I really went down this journey trying to figure out how to marry agriculture and restoration and like, what are the ways that we can integrate those two things together? How can we achieve both ecological goals and productivity or revenue goals? And yeah, that was kind of a hard question, but then eventually led myself to trees and agroforestry.
Speaker 2:And you know, for me it's really climate change is really the big driver for me. Specifically, I've got a four-year-old son now and thinking about him and his future and what that's going to look like is really a major driver. And you know, soil I'm into. It's important, but really it's all about wood. That's where I want to put the car. Biomass yeah, it's, it's. It's easier to see, it's easier to measure, uh, and it requires a lot less nitrogen to keep it there, and so that's. That's a big, big reason why I'm doing what I'm. What I'm doing now with trees? Is trees is really trying to solve the climate crisis?
Speaker 1:turn agriculture into a solution for farmers here in the Midwest conservation or production and life or biodiversity, um, did it come naturally? Because I think in many cases people either go to the the extreme conservation side okay, how can we buy I don't know as many acres of of cornfield and and restore whatever restore nature means there, um, but the notion of actually there could be a lot of life on productive land is still it's still not an a very well-known narrative. Let's say, if that, if more people would know that, I think we'll be in an easier and an easier spot. How did that theme land with you? Or how did you come to the conclusion, like, we need to do things on agriculture land, but doesn't mean agriculture should necessarily stop, or production or food and fiber should should disappear from that landscape.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I think just kind of being trained as an ecologist helped me think through from those different angles and there are no final answers. In ecology, everything is a gray area. Everything's maybe Everything it depends, and I think that agriculture could learn a little bit from that, honestly, and operate more in that gray space in between. In conventional ag here in the Midwest it's all about maximizing yield period. It's not even about maximizing revenue. It's really about yield. That's what the farmers are really focused on. Even if they lose money, they really want to have that come in at the top of the charts with their yield numbers and that's really the focus and trying to have those conversations.
Speaker 1:Do you have an idea why that happened or how that happened? Because, like any other economic sector, at the end it's about margins and profit and not about like squeezing the last yield or the last production out of your bicycle factory, which I always mention as an example. Um, if that means you have to run another shift and lose a lot of money, like you go out of business doing that, like it's not a like many people do it, but at some point you hit a wall and you cannot keep producing books if you're not selling them like for a profit. How did that in? Did that completely get lost in? In some forms of agriculture, of course, if you're subsistence farming, if you're selling at a market, et cetera, you really have to be aware of costs. But somehow in the large commodity ones, it seems like it's only only only yield, even if you're losing money. Yeah, crop insurance.
Speaker 1:Government-supported crop insurance.
Speaker 2:That's the answer. Yeah, a really really kind of weird and screwed up system of subsidies and crop insurance that artificially props up a system that doesn't work very well.
Speaker 1:Do you see that changing at some point? Is the pressure getting high enough? Is it expensive enough? Probably not. Will the wind shift on crop insurance at some point?
Speaker 2:We've had some changes over the last decade that have made the kind of subsidy program more efficient, let's say but a lot more work is to be done, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so you're in the Midwest, in an area of farming where it's heavily subsidized, mostly focused on yield, and you're an ecologist, and that seems like quite a big gap between the two. If you get to trees, how do you start convincing farmers to integrate tree crops, even though it might be very interesting from a margin of profit and revenue side, but it seems like that's not the main driver for many or decision-making factor.
Speaker 2:So the weird thing is we don't work with farmers that much. This is kind of a surprising thing. So in the Midwest most land is farmed by people that don't own the land and they have a one-year lease, maybe a three-year lease, to the land, and so farmers have very little incentive or reason or capacity really to think about trees or think about long-term solutions, because they don't have the land tenure to like make those long-term decisions. Landowners, on the other hand, even though they may not live on the farm maybe they're a bit further away they do tend to have more of a kind of conservation ethic because they want to pass down the land to their kids or their grandkids. They want to get their grandkids back engaged on the farm, for example, and so usually we're working, when we talk about trees, with the landowners. Now that doesn't mean we're not bringing in the farmers and having a big holistic conversation, but it usually starts with the landowner because they're the ones in the position to actually have long-term decision-making power.
Speaker 1:And just for the people who don't know the Savannah Institute, what is it? And then, of course, we'll get to why you decided to spin out canopy farm management as a for-profit. I think people might have heard of the Savanna Institute, might have seen some research somewhere, but for people that are not intimately connected to it, what is the Savanna Institute and why it's important?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, about 10 years ago we had all these landowners, farmers, other stakeholders kind of come to us at the various universities we were at and demand resources, ask for help. You know they were interested in trees, didn't know how to do it, how do we make it happen in the Midwest? And so we started the Savannah Institute, a nonprofit organization, an NGO that works on research, education, outreach, kind of the whole spectrum of NGO type work, but specifically focused on agroforestry, specifically focused in the Midwest, and that's now grown over the last 10 years. We have full research and education departments. We're doing everything from tree breeding on the R&D side all the way to education of farmers, landowners, investors and then even doing technical assistance. So when a farmer does come to us and says I really want to do this, I need some help, we can actually provide one-on-one support to make them actually get to the finish line and put trees in the ground.
Speaker 1:And what kind of trees? Like what kind of systems should we imagine? When you're saying the Midwest, I looked out of the school window and I didn't see any tree. You must be quite specific with which trees you got to put into the ground with farmers, like there's no history of agroforestry, at least recent history of agroforestry. Like what kind of trees, what kind of systems, what kind of context did you go with?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we kind of group people into two different buckets. So the first bucket is what we call revenue first, or people that really want to focus on okay, this is a farm, I want to grow a crop, sell it into a market, make money. That's my primary goal and the conservation, ecological stuff is kind of secondary. So for those farms it's mostly different tree crops such as nut trees, fruit trees the most common would be chestnut, hazelnut on the nut side here in the Midwest.
Speaker 2:On the fruit, we do a lot of small fruits like shrub fruits. Especially if you are into nuts, the shrub fruits are a nice kind of early revenue producer while you're waiting for your nuts to produce. But then the other bucket of people are people that really have the kind of conservation first or even just climate change adaptation first mentality. They want to protect the farm, protect their crops, keep the water clean, and so that's more of these different agroforestry systems such as windbreaks around the field edges, riparian buffers, protecting the streams, trees in pastures, silvopasture, protecting livestock and, you know, have these kind of conservation first goals of doing all that protection. And if we can get some financial gain out of it or harvest some things too, that would be nice, but it's secondary. So both of those are quite common, but people generally fall into one of those two categories.
Speaker 1:And I can imagine with the Savannah Institute, let's say that the work wasn't done yet or wasn't done at all, and of course it continues. What triggered you to start Canopy and to say, okay, we need a for-profit, spin out of the Savannah Institute because nobody else is doing this or it needs to be done? And like, what was the trigger there? Because it's very different, obviously, than running a nonprofit not saying good or bad, but just very, very different. What triggered, okay, we need Canopy.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I had been kind of planting trees and doing some of this on the side in parallel with the Savanna Institute for a long time. But it was really the kind of mom and pop or duct tape and zip ties version of Canopy Very bare bones, trying to figure out what worked, what didn't, how do we make this happen at scale? But no funding, just kind of driving around doing the best we could. But eventually at the Savannah Institute we learned and we kind of realized that that capacity really was a major bottleneck. We can educate people all day long, we can have the best research data, we can even throw money at people and give them all these incentives, but if there's no capacity or knowledge about how to actually plant trees, or capacity to plant them and maintain them and have that equipment and know-how, you don't have anything. If you can't actually execute, you don't have anything.
Speaker 2:In the Midwest, here, conventional ag makes it very easy for a landowner. Any landowner can just pick up the phone, call their local co-op and say I want to do X corn beans. You can even say I want to do it organically anything. Send me a bill at the end of the year, Talk to you later. That's it Done. They just farmed for the year and they hang up the phone. And we need to make it that easy to do trees. If we actually want people to adopt trees, they need to be able to call someone, say I want to do a windbreak, semi-built at the end of the year, or I want to do tree crops, and that's it and they're done, and they don't have to do it themselves. Or they don't have to learn and do all this research.
Speaker 1:They can say I trust you, You're the experts, I want to do it, and so that's what Canopy is really trying to do is be the easy button for agroforestry and tree crops here, make it that easy for farmers and landowners. And so you feel now you're in a position to offer that as well, like you've taken out a lot of the risk, you've done a lot of the research, you've practiced a lot, you have the right seedlings that can get to maturity relatively securely, let's say, even though we're in climate weirding periods, of course. Securely, let's say even though we're in climate weirding periods, of course. Like you feel like you can offer that one click button, almost, or a one-stop shop to landowners in your region.
Speaker 2:I think so. Yeah, I mean, we're always learning, always a lot more to optimize and hone, but we've really figured a lot out. Our model is basically a hub model. So a given canopy hub has a building with staff and a whole fleet of equipment trucks, trailers, tractors etc. It's all mobile. So every piece of equipment we use has to be able to fit on a trailer and drive across the state and so that hub can service some radius around it and then we kind of call that area served.
Speaker 2:And then, as we want to expand into a new area, if there's a critical mass of interest in a new region, we take that hub blueprint and we just duplicate it and put it in a new region and we can serve those people just as well, customized between hubs based on different soil types and different regions or different crop interests. But for the most part we have that blueprint and we can duplicate it. And that execution capacity again is really what investors want to see if they're investing in tree crops. It's what the government wants to see if they're putting subsidies towards all these different things, and having that execution partner is really critical to let investment flow into this space.
Speaker 2:Before we launched Canopy we knew that there were other bottlenecks about getting investment dollars to flow in and investment vehicles and all that, but if you don't have the execution partner, no one's going to actually put money in. Partner, no one's going to actually put money in. And it's really important to have a partner like that on the ground that has the expertise and can adapt to the unknowns that constantly come into agriculture. Last year was the driest year on record. In some of our service area, this year was the wettest year. This is just the norm. Now we have to be able to adapt to that and having a really solid execution partner on the ground is critical to make any of these investments actually, you know, less risky and feasible.
Speaker 1:And how has been the, let's say, the mood changing, or has it changed at all in Agroforestry, because I'm imagining 10 years ago, um, it was not on the radar of many. Has it been shifting now, both on the landowner side but also the investor side, in the last couple of years to see or perceive, like, even in the midwest, where most of it is definitely not perennial, this makes make sense and this can be done like has. Have you seen I mean otherwise we wouldn't start canopy but have you seen a growing realization like the future, or a big chunk of the future of agriculture is going to be perennial systems? How has that been landing in where you are, which is very much focused on annual?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it depends on the day how depressing or optimistic of an answer I might give to that. I mean, you know the reality is. You know we thought cover crops were going to be easy as a regenerative ag solution. It's only like 7% of farms here in the Midwest that actually use cover crops, you know. So it's hard to get new things adopted. So it's hard to get new things adopted. Perennial crops might even be harder because it's a longer term commitment.
Speaker 2:But I do see, especially from farmers they may not call it climate change, but they do see that the weather is not what it used to be. They see that their crops are falling down more and lodging more. They see their fields flooding more. They do acknowledge that they have to do something, they have to adapt in some way. Drive is really what's going to fuel farmers and landowners to get perennial crops and trees in the ground.
Speaker 2:Even though often from a top down, from a funder or institutional level, we're mostly thinking about climate change mitigation, sequestering carbon and preventing future climate change, but from the bottom up, everyone's thinking about adaptation. How do we deal with the climate change that's already here and that, I think, is what's going to really drive things going forward, and so we have to really be aware of that and make sure that the solutions we're shine, because they can, yes, sequester carbon, and that's great. That may be why I'm here but they can also protect crops. Windbreaks protect crops, increase yields, especially in extreme weather events. Riparian buffers protect water, keep nutrients on farms. So all these adaptation type things are also really well done by trees, and that may be what drives their adoption. And then, oh, by the way, they'll sequester carbon too.
Speaker 1:And is that the reason? Like your slogan on your website is like give your farm a second story? I'm imagining it's quite specifically chosen to target that audience or to target the audience through that angle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. People come to us usually knowing or feeling really not really know it. They really feel something inside that, like gosh, when I go out to the farm, something doesn't feel quite right. You know, I see erosion or I don't. I don't see any birds, you know, and they can feel it like something's not right. Something needs to change and they want to make, make the farm have a second story.
Speaker 1:Give us something new again and in terms of bottlenecks I know you set up a nursery as well like what are the big pieces? Is it the quality and quantity of seedlings? Is the equipment needed to, to plant and maintain? You mentioned, like, where are? Sometimes it feels like all of these pieces have to be reinvented. Um, what are the main ones? You see, uh see, in terms of getting many of these trees, and then we get to the finance piece, but let's say, on the hardware and the actually seedlings, have you figured out many of those puzzle pieces or are there still big bottlenecks left?
Speaker 2:No well, I often think about getting the tree in the ground is is the biggest step. The first step and I think there's three pieces to that there's figuring out which tree should go where, so which tree will work on a given farm, and that that does take some thought and knowledge about the different tree species that are available. So we just launched Canopy Compass. It's a new website that's primarily a crop suitability mapping tool, and so this tool uses all the research from the Savannah Institute over the years on what different trees like, what do they like in terms of soil, what do they like in terms of climate, and taking that and all the very high resolution data from the government and mapping that across the whole country, and then we can tell people here's your farm, here exactly where on your farm a given crop will like to grow and won't like to grow, and so people can create these reports themselves on their farms and they can come to us already knowing, okay, these are the species that will actually grow on my farm, given my soil type, given the climate that I'm in, et cetera. That is really empowering for people and it also prevents issues where sometimes we get people that come to us and say I love chestnuts, I want to plant chestnuts, let's plant chestnuts. And then we look at their farm and we have to tell them, unfortunately, like I'm sorry, your farm does not have any soil that's suitable for chestnuts, like they will all die. That's a really hard conversation to have, but it's a really important one to have to prevent failure. So that's a major bottleneck. What goes where? That's the first question to ask. Then we have to grow the things in the nursery. That's a huge bottleneck. All the nurseries in North America are at capacity and sell out every year. It's great for the nursery industry, but not great if you want to plant billions of trees over the next decade to solve climate change. And so we knew that we needed to have a nursery as part of the canopy ecosystem from the beginning.
Speaker 2:Right now we focus specifically on the improved tree crop genetics. The government does a good job growing kind of all the native wild type stuff for right now. But that's really important. We need to do that. We need to do it at scale. It shouldn't cost $15 a tree to put a tree crop on the ground. It should cost, you know, a third of that or something If we can get the nurseries growing at scale using equipment. It's all automated Like that's really, uh, really important to to ease adoption and then actually putting the tree in the ground. That's like the third and final bottle. The big bottleneck is is doing that efficiently. This isn't a grabbing your bucket and a shovel and going out and hand planting every tree. No, this is mechanically planting trees at scale very quickly. We say that we can plant probably 10,000 trees per day per machine or per team.
Speaker 1:That's really the kind of speed and efficiency we need to make it happen, which means the prep of the land, which means the cut you're making, what goes with the tree, what kind of compost, other preps, how do you close it again and how do you keep moving irrigation you might need. All of that needs to be fast and mechanized.
Speaker 2:basically that's your skill if you want to get billions of trees into the ground.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and luckily we can leverage a lot of technology that conventional ag has already set up. I mean, our tractor now is self-driving. It's the same GPS auto steer system that the giant tractors used in conventional ag use. We can benefit from that technology and apply it. The tree planter we use is the same tree planter that was built in 1940 after the Dust Bowl here in North America, and it works incredibly well, but it hasn't had any improvements on it since 1940. That's not great, and so we've been spending a lot of time taking that base tree planter that has almost a century of track record, but then innovating on top of it. We now have an app, for example, that pairs with the tree planter, tells the people sitting on the planter what to plant, gives them beeps to know when to plant and the spacing to keep it super accurate. So we're marrying the old, tried and true technology with 21st century things like the internet and GPS.
Speaker 1:GPS, yeah, and photos and things like that, and what is missing there in terms of what would be a piece of equipment that you would absolutely love to have, if you could just make it up in a second. Maybe it's not there, maybe you have the pieces that you need to keep innovating, but what is something that would be amazing?
Speaker 2:I think one that I'm sure everyone in the industry is thinking about is a better way to mechanize and automate installation of tree protection. So most people here are using tree tubes of some sort with a stake in a tube to protect trees time consuming and draining, like it takes a lot to pound in the stakes and all that. You don't get a lot of stamina doing that. So automating that would be pretty incredible maintenance side.
Speaker 1:Like these trees, how much main? Of course, it completely depends on the trees. But how much maintenance is needed and how much of that is is currently hand, uh, hand, handheld devices, aka scissors and and other electro equipment. But like what? What, in terms of maintenance, are you? Are you seeing across the portfolio of trees you're, you're planting?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, some people do take a hands-off approach and let the trees fend for themselves and see what you get. You do get a lot more mortality that way. You do get slower growth, but in some cases that might be the kind of financially optimal way to go. In general well, especially as the trees get more expensive. So as you move more towards tree crops rather than pure conservation trees, it does become economically worthwhile to actually manage them to make sure you don't get that mortality. And so we do a lot of that at Canopy and it is all mechanized, all automated. In general we say if we can't do it from an air conditioned tractor cab then we shouldn't be doing it, because that's again what it's going to take for this to be happening at scale. If we can't be doing it from a self-driving tractor, then it's probably not going to scale up.
Speaker 1:And so what kind of maintenance should we imagine, Like between three rows? What's the you you need to do or you are doing from your tractor cap?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, I mean keeping we roughly say a one meter radius around trees weed free for the first three to five years is really important, especially grass. Grass. Grass is the tree killer. Why is that? You never want to let the grass get too tall. Their roots and tree roots are just the grass will win every time. So you want to give that tree as much breathing room for those first couple of years as possible, and then after the first three to five years, then a tree is pretty well established. It can maybe fend for itself quite a bit better.
Speaker 2:So weed control whether that be herbicide or mechanical or even different weed mats, whatever your favorite approach that's really the most important thing. Mowing of the ground cover in between tree rows is also really important, but we try to be creative about how to do that in a way that doesn't just cost money. Like you could just mow and that just costs money. But could we actually harvest that as hay and now have a second product coming off the farm and turn it into an alley cropping system or something we're experimenting with? More now is doing these kinds of mow and blow systems. So there are various mowers out there that you can mow in between tree rows, and they actually either shoot or auger out what you mow under the tree lines.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so, because, again remember, we're in a landscape where there are no trees as far as the eye can see. And so, yeah, it would be great to just put wood mulch on all of our trees and have these nice, beautiful wood chips mulching everything. We don't have trees to do that.
Speaker 1:There is no mulch, there's no wood chips.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's no wood chips.
Speaker 1:You have to grow your own biomass?
Speaker 2:Yes, and if we can do that right next to the trees and blow it in there in the same pass as mowing, then it's no extra cost because we're already out there anyway.
Speaker 1:Those are the kinds of efficiencies we're really trying to parse out. And then the big one harvesting. How much of that is automated yet is missing still, Of course, again, depending on the crop, what are you seeing on the harvesting side or the collection side? Let's say yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really crop specific. Every harvester is very specific to its crop and so of the crops we grow chestnut, blackcurrant, some of the other shrub crops all have machines. It's all automated. It's really great. Those machines may or may not be here in the US, but we can just import them from Europe and then we're good to go. But for other crops that we're working on it's a bit harder. So hazelnut here in the Midwest we grow a more shrub type hazelnut. It's a hybrid hazelnut and there is no dedicated harvester that exists for that. So we're using, like modified blueberry harvesters and we're trying to really engineer a hazelnut dedicated harvester. But that's going to take a little bit of time.
Speaker 2:Elderberry is another crop that people are really excited about. It has great markets, it's very exciting, I love it. But there's no way to mechanically harvest it right now, and that is that therefore dramatically increases the cost of production, makes it difficult to even break even when growing elderberry, and that's the major bottleneck. So you know there are various universities working on mechanical harvesters, but again, that's just going to take time and that really becomes a major bottleneck. So before you dive into any crop, you really want to do your research on. How am I going to harvest this and can I afford that machine? What is the scale necessary to rationalize, you know, paying for a given machine? That is one nice thing about Canopy, because we have these harvesters in house and we can come out and contract harvest things. That means that a farmer can be a little bit smaller and they don't need to buy the equipment themselves. They can call us and we can kind of run the circuit, you know, during harvest season and everyone comes out on top.
Speaker 1:That way, and then the market side of things like how easy, again, depending of course on the crop, but, like for tree crops in general, how easy is it to find markets in the US Like how has that been developing on the chestnut side? But also the berry side? It seems like it's getting more attention, of course, tree crops in general, from environmental, health and all those reasons. Is that translating into concrete orders in that sense of markets? Is it easy to break into or do you need massive quantities to be able to access some of these markets? Is it easy to break into or do you need massive quantities to be able to access some of these markets?
Speaker 2:Well, both really. So right now most of these emerging crops are all going into specialty markets, mostly fresh markets, and this is mostly import substitution.
Speaker 2:So a lot of these crops we currently import, the vast majority, and we're just trying to build enough domestic production just to offset that and that's great and there's probably it's really not a ton of acres actually to get to that point. And then there's the big markets beyond that, putting these things into juice or flour for bread or cracker ingredients, the processed lower value, but big markets and for that you do need a lot of product to be able to get to that point. And I don't really worry too much about either of those markets. I think we can make both of those happen. What I worry about is that middle area in between between when we saturate the fresh high-value import substitution markets and before we have enough quantity to really break into the large volume.
Speaker 2:How do we navigate that? Because it does kind of just take one or more growers really kind of bite the bullet and just put a bunch of trees in the ground to get us over that hump and that's really risky, but then that allows us, the whole industry, to get over it and have this big new frontier ahead. So that's what I worry about is when are we going to hit that point and how are we going to navigate that? No man's land in the middle.
Speaker 1:And when do you think that no man's land is? Is that already there? For some crops Is it four or five years down the line, because a lot of trees going into the ground now. Is that an urgent thing at the moment or is that something a bit more medium term?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it is probably four or five years down the line, but I think that's exactly why we need to be thinking about it right now, because that's not that far off.
Speaker 1:And then on the finance side, you also raised, or you are raising, a fund focus on, like, I think, mostly land acquisition, like what made you decide next to canopy? Uh, like the full service part. For somebody to just pick up the phone and say, okay, I want, I want trees, somehow help me figure out which ones, I get it in the ground, etc. Help me, help me harvest and help me sell um to also set up a, an investment vehicle to, to, to participate from the finance side as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, for a long time we've had investors come to us and say, for this topic we were just talking about here, how do we get to that scale to really demonstrate that this works, to really demonstrate to your run-of-the-mill farmer or landowner that this is feasible and not crazy? And so we've had a lot of investors that want to help make that happen and invest in the trees, invest in the leases and get those larger scale farms off the ground. And that's great. But we said, hold on Again. Coming back to, we really need to have an execution partner on the ground. We need to have that capacity, we need to have all the equipment and the expertise ready to go.
Speaker 2:And so we've spent the last few years at Canopy building that we now have a few years to show. And now we're ready to actually okay, we can set up a vehicle, we can take investment and we can start investing in the next thousand acres to really show people how this is going to work at scale. And so that's what Second Story Farms is is that investment vehicle. We're raising $10 million to do the next thousand acres. It'll be very focused on a couple of tree crops, mainly chestnut, blackcurrant, but also mix in other things as well that we're trying to again catalyze to get to that next level. And we really want those farms to be demonstration farms and kind of highlighting all the cool things for people, but also very focused on showing this and how it works at scale.
Speaker 2:And the most important part of demonstrating that in the end will be here's the books you know like, here's how it worked over the last decade and here's what the yields were, here's what the revenue was, so that you can show farmers and landowners and they can believe you and say, okay, now I feel more comfortable, I feel like it's been de-risked, I see the market, I see how to do it, I'm going to go do it myself now. So that's kind of the real role of Second Story Farms and we'll be raising that over the next year and actually we'll be planting our first farm this fall, the first hundred acres of that thousand we planted here in Wisconsin over the next couple of weeks. Actually I can't believe it's fall already. Our fall tree planting season starts like next week. So it's happening, it's great.
Speaker 1:And that means you're buying or long-term leases, or buying the farms and really starting to show this, what it means for landowners that are currently in the annual system to like a what, um, what does a perennial system could look like in in in this context.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the focus is on long-term leases.
Speaker 2:That's really important for us Because, again, I think here, well in Illinois, like 70% of land is owned by these non-operating landowners and they often live a few hours away, they live in Chicago or St Louis and they just want their land doing something good. They want to get their rent check in the mail every year and they want to know that they can come down and visit this beautiful paradise of trees. And so the lease approach is really really important and we've done a lot of work at the Savannah Institute over the last 10 years to develop these long-term lease templates. It's been kind of a new thing. Again, agricultural leases here are typically one or three years and the leases we're signing are anywhere from 15 to 99 years, and that's a very different document than a one-year lease, and so it's taken a lot of work. But we've spent a lot of time on it and I think we have really great lease templates at work for both parties and really enable perennial crops in this economic kind of structure we have here in the region.
Speaker 1:And how has been the response from the investor side? I mean, many have been knocking on the door, help us, et cetera. But that's of course one thing. The second thing is actually investing in a new kind of structure in terms of agroforestry in the Midwest. Has been the response from the investor side with Second Story Farms?
Speaker 2:Well, it's definitely taken a bit of education. You know, second Story Farms is not a standard fund, it is. Trees are not a typical thing included in funds. You know it's taken some some education a typical thing included in funds. It's taken some education. But the investors that we're working with really they're at the table because they want to help figure that out. They want to help write the instruction manual. They don't need to see that it's already been written. So it's really great that the partners that we do have to work together to kind of engineer this reality we want to see.
Speaker 1:And because you specifically didn't take a 10-year fund structure, you're also innovating on the structure itself, right? If I'm not mistaken, you picked an LLC, a limited company, and not a fund structure. Why? I mean, apart from the fact that trees don't really fit in the fund, but most people do go for a fund at the end, with the potential issues 10, 12, 14 years down the line, what made you choose for that and why?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I guess at the end of the day, it was hard for us to say, okay, we're going to exit at 10 years and here's what the price is going to be, here's what the trades are going to be worth, because, like, there's no track record of that, like you can't go and like look up online comparables of oh, here's what a 10 year old chestnut farm sold for from one generation to the next, like that doesn't exist. So how can we promise investors that you're going to have an exit at 10 years and here's what it's going to be? Yeah, so we haven't guaranteed anything like that.
Speaker 2:We want people to become comfortable with. This might be a sit and hold kind of thing. Like trees are a long-term play. We need to make sure that we're doing it right for the landowner, for the farm, and that's kind of the base assumption. Now we want to pursue those kinds of exits. We want to work with beginning farmers, we want to make these kinds of transitions happen. So our intention is to kind of operate ultimately in a similar way to a typical fund in terms of an exit like that, but we wanted to structure it in a way that started making everyone comfortable with the fact that it's not as cut and dry as we might hope it is. Maybe after we do second story farms and 10 years from now we enable all of these beautiful exits and it works and then we have that playbook. Then future people that want to do this again have that and can make different promises and can structure it differently.
Speaker 1:Hence, you set up a normal limited company and people invest in that and they're going to be along for the ride, and let's see how and when and what shape or form exits will happen on the farm or on the leases, and what kind of structures you're looking at at that point. Yeah, and what kind of structures you're looking at at that point, yeah. And so, with all this knowledge and experience, what's your main message apart from a lot of education, obviously for investors to the financial world? I'd love to ask this question. Let's say we do it in a theater in one of the main financial hubs of the Midwest and the room is full of investors that are excited after an evening with a lot of tree pictures and nice tree food, but they also forget the next day. And if they're back at their desk, what's the one thing you want them to remember and to potentially take action on?
Speaker 1:That's a good one.
Speaker 2:I would say the execution partner thing, but I already belabored that a ton so I'm not going to say that again.
Speaker 1:Could be that could be that, like we've seen that in solar, like to unlock the market of large solar. We needed a SunEdison with PPAs and it put the Walmart's and Ikea's together with and a shout out to Jigar Shaw together with Goldman and the money side and the management and who cleans the panels and who makes sure the cables are actually led in a good way and that unlocked I don't know how many billions of market. Of course, different space, but I think we can learn a lot from that, like good execution power on the ground. Going from a mortality rate of I't know, maybe in some cases 10, 20 to, I don't know, five or three, that makes a huge difference. If you plant expensive trees, especially if they cost 15 a tree, um, like that kind of notion might not be the the highest, um, let's say story wise, but be very, very helpful if people remember that. So it could be that. But if you have something else, of course, do that.
Speaker 2:Well, I already talked about the execution capacity being really the most critical piece, but I guess what I would remind investors is take a step back even from that, because it's not just about we have Canopy as the execution partner, but it really is this whole ecosystem.
Speaker 2:It it's not just about you know, we have Canopy as the execution partner, but it really is this whole ecosystem, it's the full supply chain, because it's all got to happen together. You know, we can put trees in the ground great, we can be really good at executing, but then if there's no markets or if there's no R&D to follow up on that, so that's why we've been very intentional about building this kind of ecosystem of players. So we have the Savan Institute on the R&D and education side, canopy on the execution side, now Second Story Farms on the kind of investment and finance side. And so I guess I would just communicate to investors that if you're thinking about participating in any part of this, make sure you're looking at the full supply chain so that you know what the risks are in different parts of the supply chain and maybe actually invest across that, so you're enabling the whole thing to move forward, rather than one piece that's going to then be, you know, be leaving everything else behind and not actually work.
Speaker 1:And what would you do if we switch the question and you are in charge of a billion dollars? I like to use a large and insane large amount of money. It doesn't necessarily have to be that, but I'm interested in priorities like would you focus on investing in equipment if you had to put it to work in long-term leases? In actually buying land, in creating brands around certain crops that really need it at the moment? Like, what would be big buckets that you would focus on if you would be on the investor side and had yeah, consider a round of money to be put to work which could be extremely long-term but still had to be put to work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think I would really split it across the supply chain. I mean, I would take a quarter of it and put it into R&D. That may not feel to an investor like an investment, but that is what's critical to make your investment in the actual what do you mean?
Speaker 1:like what? What are the because in many other sectors now in many like research, like what are you going to research and develop? Because in many other sectors it's completely normal to invest in that like I don't understand why it shouldn't be. But what are main pieces that you would love some movements on? Except for, I mean, the planter you mentioned. That is almost a hundred years old.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I think breeding is the big one. You know we have a lot of great tree crops that have had some breeding work done on them. But you know corn and beans they've been bred for well thousands of years, but really in a modern way. You know a hundred years and the amount of change that we've been able to see, the amount of improvement in those crops, is just incredible. We have such such little work has been done on so many of these tree crops and and the impact of even a minor investment in breeding these different tree crops could just have massive consequences, massive changes for what those trees can, what those can, what they can grow, their disease resistance, all the above, and that would completely change how we're able to manage them, what we need to be managing for, and just completely change the cost of actually growing those trees. So on the R&D side, I think breeding is really what I think about the most.
Speaker 1:And it's tricky in that sense because it's not like soy and corn, where you have a season every season. In this case, before you see effects of that, it could be quite a few years, and if you're making adjustments or you're breeding and you're selecting, et cetera, it's a longer term one, but one with a massive potential impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's definitely longer term, but with the kind of modern genomic techniques we can really speed it up quite a bit compared to historical tree breeding programs, and that's what the Savannah Institute is doing. But that's also why it requires investment, because those techniques tend to cost more and you need more expertise on staff. So you can't just do a backyard breeding program anymore if you want to do it quickly.
Speaker 1:And so, beyond R&D, where would you put the other quarters?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think the land access and actually investing in trees on the ground I think is huge. Again, if I had a billion dollars, I would take a big chunk of that and allocate it towards getting us from that first small level market and I would just get the whole industry through to the small level market and I would just get the whole industry through to the top level market. And we need investors like that that can tolerate that risk of the middle area to just get us through it and get us to the next side so that everyone else can then play ball in a de-risked market. So I would put quite a bit of it into just acreage to make that happen.
Speaker 1:Anything else or there would be the other three quarters.
Speaker 2:Well, I'd say the last third would be post-harvest. So you know we talked about harvesters already, but more than just that, there's all kinds of processing infrastructure that we need. Even before processing, aggregation of these crops is huge. And then product development. I mean once we get to that big scale market level where we need processed, value-added products, we could try to plug our crops in as ingredients to existing products that are on the market, and that'll get us quite a ways. But what we really need is some innovation and some development on new products that use our crops and really bring those mainstream. So that is not at all my expertise, but I think it really is something that we need to be investing in and someone needs to be working on to pave the way for the supply we're going to have.
Speaker 1:And how important is diversity, like when you're planting in in a sense of, how do we prevent I'm going to say air quotes just another monoculture to to be planted? How do you? But, of course, you want to be able to harvest efficiently, you want to be able to to work and maintain and manage these, these tree crops. Like what's the discussion there on the ground? If you say, okay, how many tree crops can we plant per per line? Like, how do you make sure you have the diversity from an ecology perspective, but not too much complexity? Um, until we have super selective drone harvesters, too much much complexity to be completely possible to handle automatically from your airco tractor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a fascinating question and in the little bit of time I still get to spend on research day to day, this is what I geek out about the most what is the scale at which diversity is really relevant? At what scale does diversity actually generate the services that you care about or the benefits you care about? So we could geek out about that all day long, but I guess some practical answers to that question that Canopy goes off of is our rule is when you're doing something for production. This might be different in a wind break, where you're just trying to get diversity for habitat or whatever. But in a production context, one species per row period. That allows you to manage and harvest and do whatever else you need to do in a very species-specific way, using species-specific and species-optimized equipment.
Speaker 2:But then between rows, you can go crazy if you want. You can have multiple species on a farm. You can have it in the same field, you can have them in different fields. We're almost always mixing two to three tree crops in any given field to add that structural diversity, to add some crops prefer some shades. We put those next to the trees that are casting the shade. We do try to create those synergies, but those are happening across tree rows. That's kind of our rule of thumb, so we can still mechanize and scale but hopefully get as many of those combinatorial benefits as possible.
Speaker 1:And do you see a future there, where it's more diverse in the tree lines with different equipment, or is that a long way from where we are?
Speaker 2:from where we are. I think I see it in terms of having a woody crop as one part of that diversity and some sort of herbaceous crop as another. I think you could probably more easily mix and match that, or if you have things that are just totally different seasons, but I think it's going to be hard to mechanize with multiple species in the same row that are, you know, similar functional type.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's the the tricky one around, like extreme diverse systems like in in Centropic et cetera, where, okay, how do you manage and how do you harvest and how do you prune, if it's not by hand and that's possible in some circumstances, but in many places it's not and it's just going to keep a lot of people away from that, because they can press a button and ask for a mechanized help to come soon. But probably, from an ecology and even from potentially revenue perspective, the trees or the systems like that grow so fast and so diverse that it's very interesting. But we have to figure out if we will. But we have to figure out the mechanization side of things and we haven't yet.
Speaker 1:I think there's some work being done, but I haven't seen. So if you're working on that, definitely let me know, because it it's going to be very interesting, but for now we don't have those solutions, so let's get as many rows in the ground as we, as we possibly can. Yeah, exactly, and if you could wave a magic wand another question we love to ask and change one thing, so you're no longer in charge of your fund, um, but if, if you could make a wave a magic wand and change one thing overnight. What would that be in food and ag in general and sustainability like this could be extremely large or extremely, uh, let's say, down to earth and practical so I I would say it really is about a mentality shift.
Speaker 2:You know, I mentioned climate change adaptation before as being a big driver for farmers and landowners, and I think that my Magic Wand would try to get the rest of the industry, the rest of all of us, on board with that. You know, climate change is here already, right now, affecting crops, livestock, in very real ways, very extreme ways, and I continue to hear so much at conferences from investors, from funders, from everyone about carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation and all these things. And yes, that's great, but we need to talk at least as much about adaptation. And how do we start protecting farms right now? Because if we don't do that, we're not going to have an agriculture left by the time we figure out how to start sequestering all the carbon. And I just think that that is just not talked about enough.
Speaker 2:And some things are kind of happening again in extreme ways. Things are kind of happening again in extreme ways when extreme weather events happen or fatalities happen. We just had people die last year on the highway from massive dust storms sweeping across central Illinois. This is Dust Bowl stuff. I thought we were done with that and it's happening again and people are dying because of it, and that kind of stuff needs to translate into action to start adapting our landscape now while we slowly sequester carbon. So I want to change the agenda at conferences and in people's minds to really focus on that.
Speaker 1:And how much of that clashes with the longer term part of of trees, like they take three to eight to sometimes even more time to to get into production and to not say become useful, because they're useful from from day one. Um, but how? First of all is, how do you marriage that tension of of speed? We need adaption now, now, now, and yes, this tree is going to take a while before it actually grows to a meter or two. Um, like, how do you do you get pushback on that? Like great, okay, adaptation, um, but we need something that's actually faster. You say like, or what's your response to that? Like, actually, from year one, this is providing services and with shade, et cetera, because, yeah, it takes time.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I think the clash is we need to grow a vocabulary and a way to quantify how to value trees, even at that young age. Imagine if farm insurance, crop insurance that we talked about before as this kind of negative thing imagine if crop insurance took into account oh, you have a windbreak on your farm or you have a young windbreak and that's setting you up to de-risk you in future years, and so you're going to get a discounted premium now because you are lower risk as a customer to the insurance company in the long run. If we can figure out how to value those trees being integrated now so that things translate into reality for the farmers, I think that's really huge. Some farmland in California is already uninsurable because of climate change and weather effects, and if the Midwest is heading in that same direction, how do we start valuing the things that are steering it in the other direction now? So I think it isn't necessarily about speeding up the trees. It's speeding up our understanding and valuation of the trees as a society.
Speaker 1:And then, from a tree perspective, how scary is climate change in that sense? And moving you're putting trees in the ground that might be there for decades, and some tree species can way outlive us, as we see with all of certain places and things like that Chestnuts, I think as well. How do you answer questions from investors that, yeah, great, but actually the climate or the weather of that place is not going to be the same 10 years down the line? And when we have to sell this farm, if I'm investing in in the, in the LLC, et cetera, like how, how is that adaptation over changing time? Because it's not that you can move the trees, they're going to be stuck there for quite a bit. Um, so, how, how do you? How do you tackle that? So, so how do you tackle that?
Speaker 2:So I mentioned before Canopy Compass, which is our tool to actually evaluate suitability for different tree species.
Speaker 1:It has a forward-looking piece to it.
Speaker 2:It will no-transcript at different climate scenarios and see how things change. And after seeing some of the preliminary maps, it is kind of mind boggling how dramatically things are projected to change, which is scary from a planning perspective, like you're saying. But if you can kind of balance current and future climate predictions and look at those maps together, there is a path forward. But you do have to really consider both. It's a very real thing that's going to change.
Speaker 1:And then, as a last question, which usually leads to other ones, definitely inspired by John Kempf what do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't believe to be true? In this case, the others could be, let's say, other agroforestry people, like, if you go to agroforestry conferences, they must exist. Where are you? Where are you contrarian? What do you believe to be true that others don't?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's two things that I normally get riled up about, I guess. The first one is I really don't like this concept of marginal land that we use a lot, even in the agroforestry world, specifically as a way to prioritize where we're putting tree crops or agroforestry. So marginal land, or that concept, here in the Midwest at least, is the land that's like the bottom 30% of corn productivity. So marginal land is defined based on corn yields. So that's fine, that is truly marginal land and, yes, we probably should be doing something else there. So that's true.
Speaker 2:But then we make this leap often especially academics to say well, that's where we should do trees. Duh, that's where we should do trees. Corn is doing well. Well, trees are going to do great there instead. But that's not true. Just because corn doesn't like it, that doesn't mean that chestnuts aren't going to like it. They're different crops, they care about different things. So again, that was a big driver behind creating Canopy Compass was let's actually look at what the trees want, not just what corn doesn't want and it might be on prime corn land and it's okay.
Speaker 2:It might be, yeah, and that's okay. If that is actual and you can make that economic comparison, you can compare. Certainly the sweet spot would be can you find certain soils or climates that corn doesn't like, that your favorite tree does like? That's like a huge win-win. But the point is you have to consider both parts and too often we're just saying, oh, it's marginal land, we make a map of marginal land and then we just go forward with that and that's only half the story. So I get riled up about that for sure.
Speaker 1:And the second one.
Speaker 2:The second one. Well, yeah, the second one, I would say, is we really like to focus on the edge of field practices first. So I mentioned, you know, cover crops only at 7% adoption here in the Midwest. Which is shocking if you think about it yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was supposed to be easy, but I think a big reason for that is because that intervention requires a farmer to apply it, you know, across their whole field. They're changing their whole operation and it's it's modifying their whole flow of their, you know, it's very binary Either do it or you don't.
Speaker 1:It's not like you cover a third of your field and then like somehow magically don't do the rest.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, so with trees, you know if we want to do alley cropping or silvopasture, it's similar. You're integrating it throughout the whole field. It's a little overwhelming but we always try to start with new clients. With windbreaks and riparian buffers it's edge of the field stuff. The farmer can keep doing what they're doing on the rest of their field while they look at the wind break over there and they relearn how trees work, relearn how weeds in that kind of situation works. How fast do trees grow? What do they look like? How straight are the rows?
Speaker 2:You know wind breaks and riparian buffers are baby steps for introducing trees to farmers and landowners again baby steps for introducing trees to farmers and landowners again. Once they do that, once they see how that works, they relearn all that. Then we can start weaning them onto more complex, more integrative practices like alley cropping, like tree crops, like silvopasture and maybe even cover crops, now that they have seen kind of the edge of the field stuff happen. So we tend to emphasize more the edge of field stuff first than so. We tend to emphasize more the edge of field stuff first than, I think, a lot of other people. They want to just dive right into the whole field and save the whole field kind of thing, and we have more of a baby steps approach for people.
Speaker 1:I mean we need both. Yeah, I think it depends what the landowners are ready for and the farmers are ready for. You don't want them to get burned for you don't want them to get burned, you don't want them to. You don't want people to go all in and then make a significant amount of mistakes and then say, oh, this doesn't work, like agroforestry in this region doesn't work because all my trees died, and of course, those two things are not the same, or it doesn't mean the same and it's tricky.
Speaker 1:I mean, we have this huge push to to get more perennials in the ground. Investors are interested, equipment is coming, markets are growing left and right and and at the same time, there's a lot of things we have to relearn and like how do you actually plan 10 000 trees per day and how do you actually make sure, let's say, 99 of them or 98 make it past the first few years and start production and and be able to not just make it but actually start proper production, because otherwise, why, why spend so much money on them and and get them to to fruition and, yes, the carbon piece and all of that. But there's, it's interesting, yeah, there's, there's, there's this feeling of speed needed and, at the same time, we all know this is going to take five to ten years to even show some kind of scale because, yeah, trees grow faster with the right management, but it's not that they suddenly go from seven to two years.
Speaker 1:They might go from seven to six and that's already a great win. So I was just going to wrap up and and thank you so much for coming on here and and the multiple facets of Canopy and, of course, the Savannah Institute and what agroforestry means at the moment in the Midwest and what it's going to mean over the next years, and I'm very much looking forward to following it over time, because this is such an important story and such a massive agriculture region, a massive agriculture region. Many millions of hectares are acres and hectares are in need of, let's say, living roots all year round, some perennial systems, first at the edges and then in the middle, and hopefully a lot of food, which is not something that comes of these fields necessarily, or, let's say, healthy and wholesome foods would be great. So thank you so much for coming on here and share and, of course, thank you for the work you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me, and yeah, that's exactly why we're working here in the Midwest. It's the belly of the beast, as we call it.
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. Thank you.
