Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features 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. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
354 Dan Barber - AI-Powered natural breeding: The End of GMOs, Gene Editing, and CRISPR?
An overdue check-in conversation with Dan Barber, chef, co-owner of Blue Hill restaurants and co-founder of Row 7 Seeds, where we dive into the fascinating world of seeds and how breeding is evolving with the explosion of AI and other technologies. No, we don’t need GMOs, CRISPR, or other risky blunt instruments. We discuss the implosion of the fake meat hype, which was at its peak when we last spoke four years ago, why insane umami flavor and potentially self-nitrogen-fixing tomatoes are revolutionary. This is a deep conversation about bread and wheat—and why breeding wheat specifically for whole meal flour is so important, where Row 7 Seeds, his seed company, is headed and why they’re launching a CPG brand using pressure-cooked vegetables (because processing isn’t a dirty word).
When your vegetables come from incredible seeds and are grown in healthy soils, you don’t need unhealthy additives. We kick things off with mouthwatering winter spinach and dive into a long conversation about the role of technology in food and agriculture. No, we shouldn’t go back to the past. No, we’re not Luddites. In fact, Dan is incredibly bullish on the role of AI in natural breeding—perhaps the best of both worlds, enabling faster breeding for local conditions rather than global crops that lack flavor, nutrients, and rely on excessive chemicals.
Get ready for a firehose of stories on food, seeds, soil, and culture!
More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/dan-barber-2.
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show 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. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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It's so delicious. And these crinkly little spinach leaves they have viscosity in the mouth. It's another stratosphere of sweetness and flavor. It's really great to taste something that proves what we all know, which is flavor and health are one and the same thing. But I'm not a Luddite, I'm not anti-technology, and I will prove that to you, cohen, by saying I see AI as one of the answers at technology that actually could be utilized in service of biology. I'm bullish on AI. He's back.
Speaker 2:Dan Barber is back, and what a treat it is. A long overdue check-in conversation where we covered a fascinating mode of seeds and how breeding is changing with the explosion of AI and other technologies. No, we don't need GMO CRISPR and all these risky blunt instruments. We discuss the implosion of the fake meat hype where we were in the middle of when we last talked four years ago, and why insane umami flavor, potentially self-nitrogen fixing tomatoes are a revolution. A deep conversation about bread and wheat and why wheat bread to be milled into wholemeal flour is so important. And where's Rosehaven Seeds, his seed company, and where's it going? Why are they starting a CPG brand with pressure cooked vegetables? Processing isn't a dirty word. When vegetables come from amazing seed and have grown in amazing healthy soils, you probably don't need all these unhealthy additives and we start with some mouth-watering winter spinach. A long conversation about the role of technology in food and agriculture, and no, we shouldn't go back to the past. We're not Luddites and Dan is super bullish on the role of AI in natural breeding, which could be the best of both worlds Faster breeding for local circumstances, not global crops that don't taste like anything and are without nutrients and only survive with a crazy amount of chemicals. Anyway, get ready for a firehose of stories on food, seeds, soil and culture.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2: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 the episode. A check-in conversation with with dan barber, which we're also filming, and then it's taking a great, great joy of that.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm saying I'm I'm trying to get for you the purple on the stems, because that's literally the. I wish you could taste this, conan. It's another stratosphere of sweetness and flavor. But this spinach I just grabbed. It's 22 degrees here in New York and I just than 10 degrees Fahrenheit last night, and this we're just harvesting it now I have a you know for service tonight. But this is an example of a spinach that Row 7 has called Bloomsdale and it's been selected for many years. Actually, it has an incredibly interesting 200-year history. The genetics go back literally 200 years and they're selected in Pennsylvania for cold weather spinach growing, which is the best way to grow spinach.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it needs it, and at this particular temperature most spinaches would die. This has been selected to withstand extreme cold, really through meticulous selection, which is something, as you know, I'm very interested in, especially if the goal is flavor and in our climate it's the ability to withstand very freezing temperatures. So this breeder, frank Morton, took the genetics of Bloomberg as I said, it's really more than 200 years old and has been putting it through what he calls half acres of hell, and so he stresses the plant endlessly so that most die 99%. And then what survives, with no water or whatever the circumstances? I mean, he's doing many different trials, but all of them extreme discomfort for the plant, and then whatever makes it and goes to seed is what he's selecting from.
Speaker 1:So what I'm looking at here are plants that have been conditioned to convert all of their starches to sugars to raise the temperature of the spinach to withstand the cold, and in doing that they not only create an economy for the farmer in our era right now, but the flavor is the sweetness. The bricks on this is I mean this. What I'm tasting right now is a sugar pellet on the stem. I mean, really, it's pure sugar. It's so delicious and these crinkly little spinach leaves, they have viscosity in the, in the, on the, in the mouth. It's just like it's like a full I mean, it's like meaty experience eating the spinach, you know.
Speaker 2:And how are you serving it tonight?
Speaker 1:Naked. First of all, I'm going to. I'm going to do this. I was just talking about it before I come on. I'm going to do this, I'm going to serve this first.
Speaker 1:So just for the audio, people listening it takes away the stem, for, yeah, I'm taking away the stem, I'm separating the stem from the leaf and I'm going to serve this first and show this Bloomsdale spinach and talk about the breeding selection and then do a dish with this and sesame and bone marrow. We have bone marrow fat that's left over from one of the beef animals we have, and so we melted down the marrow. It has this very delicious beefy fat and we mix that with sesame oil and create a little vinaigrette with sesame seeds and then that'll be the vinaigrette. It's just gonna be very naked on the plate with that. That's it, uh, but I'm very, I'm just so excited by this stuff. It's like you know why it's like when was we talking about four years ago?
Speaker 1:july 21 we were so much younger than cone. Oh my god, we were kids kids.
Speaker 2:I listened to it yesterday. It was quite sensitive, sensible, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you Sensible or sensitive.
Speaker 2:We talked a lot about the lab grown and technology, and I would bet on biology and not technology. I think we're still in that hype of hey hey, did I say that that's so interesting?
Speaker 1:because, hell man, like I was right, I didn't. I didn't fall into that trap of you know fake meat is going to take over. I wasn't investing in that. And look, here we are, I, you know it took three years, that's okay for a bubble.
Speaker 2:Four years, it's funny, bubbles inflated took way longer sometimes, right.
Speaker 1:Right I, if I had predicted that, I would have said oh, this is going to be a 20-year cycle, everyone's going to come back to biology, but look, everyone's already abandoned that crap. It's so funny, and this is an example of what's possible. If we create a food system rooted in soil, I mean soil has to be. If we can get this hydroponically, I mean, this is soil obviously Frozen soil and it has to be done, yeah that's right and it has to be done locally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right and it has to be done locally, because those are the conditions and that's why seed is so key, because if you get seed right, you sort of can lock it in, but you also have to retrench.
Speaker 1:We got to retrench. We can't have a food system that is supplied from every corner of the world and I think we're starting to see that we all have to retrench. But in order to do that effectively, we really need to breed for it, we need to select for it, we need the right seed, and this seed Bloomsdale, this particular one it's not doing well in Southern California, so it's meant for a place, and when you lock that in, you get this stunning flavor, this, I would imagine, stunning nutrition, and that's the next part of my research is to is to actually prove that it has the kind of nutrition that we all know it must have. And then you get this economy for the, for the farmer. That I think is, but it's just. It's really great to taste something that proves what we all know, which is flavor and health are one and the same thing, the same thing.
Speaker 2:Since those years. We talked about it often and I don't think we can repeat it enough, but we also dove straight in. So first of all, welcome back, chef Dan Barber. Co-owner of.
Speaker 1:Blue Hill in.
Speaker 2:Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barn, and the co-founder of Row 7 Seeds. Don't think you need an introduction, but just did it, just in case people are wondering what are we listening to and what are we tasting? And, of course, writer of the third plate, still one of my favorite books in this space and of course, one of the original, I think, chef's tables, one of the first season, um. So if you want to have a look, if you cannot look at this, you want to look at the kitchen quite a few years ago, go and check that out after you're done here. But welcome back.
Speaker 2:And actually that brings up in. I mean, we're going to talk about seeds, we're going to talk about what you've seen change in the last years and and whatnot, apart from the implosion, obviously, of some of some of the fake or faker or, let's say, technology-based food replacements. Maybe is a word, but do you in the seed industry? There is what do you see? This meticulous selection of seeds takes a lot of time. Do you see ways of speeding that up, as we don't have a lot of time to to improve or to figure out ways and seeds that fix in that fit into certain contexts? I'm not saying gene editing, but do you see, like what are ways to bring technology and things we we can do now versus five or ten years ago or even 20 years ago, to speed up?
Speaker 1:yeah, well, let's go back to the. It's a great question, but let's go back to the bloomsdale spinach.
Speaker 2:This was done over two and a half years. Yes, we don't have it. Think again.
Speaker 1:And we don't have that. So what we do have now is AI, and we have the potential to put in the coordinates that we want. When I say coordinates, I realize unconsciously to the analogy that a breeder once told me fits with his work, which was you got to think of breeding like you're driving down a big superhighway and at some point you got to take the exit to get to a destination. You can choose that point, but at a certain moment you're going to say, okay, I'm going to put on my clicker, I'm going to go off and I'm going to make a choice. I'm going to go down this exit, to go down this parkway, to go down this pathway to get to a final destination, and you can have circuitous routes there.
Speaker 1:And when you're selecting over 200 years, you do because for most of the 200 years we've been stabbing in the dark. When we're getting off the exit, we know the destination we want to go to, but we don't know the pathway to get there. What AI presents for us, I think, is an opportunity to do this kind of thing much faster. That's exciting. On the slightly less inspirational end of this equation of AI, it depends on whose hands it's in, as is true.
Speaker 1:As you know, for any technology always, always, always. Technology's great, but who's using it and to what ends? What are you plugging into AI? Are you plugging in a spinach that grows well in New York, texas, Canada, southern California, europe and Eastern China? If those are the genetics you're looking for, ai can find them and I'm sure as shit they're going to be very dumbed down, because you're talking about so many different ecological conditions that you would have to have a very baseline genetic play Because it needs to work everywhere, that is actually our food system.
Speaker 1:It needs to work everywhere and that is our food system. What I just described? It's hilarious. I was saying it was an exaggeration, but it's true. It's because we have so few seed companies and in that consolidation move, seed companies are looking for varieties that grow in multiple environments and because of that, the genetics are very dumbed down. This is cold weather selection and therefore it really thrives where I'm sitting, literally. But that's our seed selection and our seed culture has gone in the opposite direction. It's one size fits all and that's been a disaster for flavor, it's been a disaster for nutrition and it's been a disaster for farmers because it's the common denominator and that's never served anyone.
Speaker 2:Well, and do you see that changing now? I mean, you run a seed company, one of the few independent seed companies, for sure, the only one focused on flavor. Do you see that technology coming in now and being able to do things or potentially in the near future, of course, if we manage and who owns the data sets underneath, et cetera to do things way faster than we could before and to maybe partially answer that question to people that throw in? Well, we can just gene edit this stuff and look at CRISPR, and I never have a good answer because I don't understand deeply. I'm just very worried that we could cut a bit too deep and we don't fully understand what happens, and then we are in a lot of trouble. So I'm looking for you for some answers.
Speaker 1:When somebody throws that, usual ah, but we can just engineer that right, yeah, yeah, those are people who let's put in the camp of well-meaning I don't know if that's always true, but let's say they're well-meaning. They are thinking about biological systems, like technology, with A to B solutions. So I understand the catnip effect of gene editing. Explain CRISPR, or well, well, did you say?
Speaker 2:explain yeah, what does catnip affect?
Speaker 1:I mean uh, the, the illusion, uh, that there is a one gene to fix a button. The problem, yeah, and the button, yeah, the it's the one gene, one one problem, one gene and this thing-.
Speaker 2:For audio listeners. He shows the spinach again, and this makes me mouth-watering, Sorry. He shows the spinach again.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you, thank you. He shows the mouth-watering spinach and reminds us that we know through the work of pioneering breeder scientists, more modern, that Harry Clay is one of them. He's from Florida, testing tomatoes. What are we tasting when we taste a good tomato? And what he recognized? That we're tasting over 25 compounds that drive our liking and that's what makes plants have flavor. They're synthesized into essential nutrients like omega-3s or amino acids or carotenoids.
Speaker 1:And he studied all this and what he's saying is the plant is saying there's a lot of good stuff in here, you know, but that's not one gene. No way, that's not one gene. And that's why biological systems are so much more complicated and interesting. And the reason I don't buy into the catnip of gene editing for flavor and nutrition is because it's way more complex than that and we know that. But to take a slice off a gene and reimagine the plant is very intoxicating, but I don't think it really works what I feel on. But I'm not a Luddite, I'm not anti-technology and I will prove that to you, cohen, by saying I see AI as one of the answers to the tall order of our environmental challenges that we have in front of us, our health challenges that we have in front of us and a technology that actually could be utilized in service of biology. And I say that because what you could do, service of biology, and I say that because what you could do.
Speaker 1:He is holding up the mouth-watering spinach again and he is saying I think we could find the parent lines that have the genetic traits that allow spinach to express this kind of flavor, with this kind of conversion of starches to sugars, in record time, what our great-grandparents may have taken a lifetime stabbing in the dark and if they're lucky, they found it. Or we could do it within a couple of years through finding parent lines. When I say parent lines, you're finding a whole host of traits that, in a predictive model, can show what happens when they come together, what will get expressed. And that's what these breeders did over hundreds of years, actually, visually and tasting. Yeah, so, visually and through tasting and with intent. Their intent was cold weather, their intent was disease resistance and their intent with intent. Their intent was cold weather, their intent was disease resistance and their intent was massive flavor and within that you get nutrition.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I'm bullish on AI from that standpoint, but again it goes back to do we have the culture that's going to prioritize the environment for which those genetics can be best expressed, because what does it matter if you create a spinach like Bloomsdale spinach if you have it growing in the wrong environment? So there's a lot of variables there, and that comes back to really changing how we think about our food system, which is to become more retrenched. That's where we started. We have to retrench, we have to think about things more regionally, and one of the ways to allow that to happen would be to breed for it. Right now, we breed for the opposite. So I think that is where they say first the seed. That's the expression first the seed.
Speaker 2:I have come to understand that since we last talked in ways that I since we last talked in 2021, in ways that I is profound and on that culture piece since 2021, with fellow chefs and other people in general, of course, people that come through your restaurants, general, of course, people that come through your restaurants, people that interact with row seven have you seen transition there, speeding up of changes? Like what have you noticed in the last three, four years in terms of changes, if at all, obviously in terms of regeneration, in terms of landscape, whole farm menus, like that kind of understanding what we are sharing here. Have you seen anything hopeful or not hopeful in that kind of understanding what we are sharing here? Have you seen anything hopeful or not hopeful in that side of things?
Speaker 1:I see a split screen Cone. On the one side, I do see more recognition that the way the world is being used for agriculture is truly not sustainable. People said, ah, sustainability Nobody really. Now people really see it in ways that are becoming mainstream, I think, and that is a very positive sign, and the recognition that agriculture, as it relates to climate change, is responsible for carbon release in ways that make actually it has more greenhouse gas emissions than planes, trains and automobiles combined. That's agriculture. I think there's more of a mainstream recognition that if we're going to really do something about climate change, we have to do something about food.
Speaker 1:The other flip side, the split screen, the other screen, is a laundry list of solutions that I think don't answer the call and they're mainly technological. When we spoke four years ago, we were at the apotheosis of removing, let's say, the cow or the animal from the equation of sustainability and regenerative agriculture and replacing it with fake meat and plant-based, and that was a bunch of hooey, very diplomatic, I like it. We've come to recognize that, yeah, yeah, we've come to recognize that now. But in the world of seeds, you're quite right that the intoxicating idea that we can fix our problems through gene editing or through genetic modification is also hooey, and there's billions of dollars going into that.
Speaker 2:But that bubble hasn't really popped yet. Huh no.
Speaker 1:No, in part because it's more complicated, I think, and that is that in the pressing moment of problems, the intensity of problems, let's say. I'm trying to give an example the world's getting warmer and a lot of places it's harder to grow staple crops.
Speaker 1:And to tinker with genes that require less water for the plant to use, then it sounds very interesting and it does solve a problem very quickly and to a certain extent it's very cheaply. And it does solve a problem very quickly and to a certain extent it's very cheaply, but those are quick fixes and they do not get to the core of the problem. And I think at the core of the problem is we already sort of touched on it and I just want to nail it is that it's the difference between thinking technologically and thinking biologically, and biological thinking is very complicated and inefficient inefficient, and it's not where our mind goes. So we tend to like labels I mean, that's what we, that's what we like and uh, labels are, have a, have a neat connection to them, uh, and I think that's that's the cause and effect and we're facing a.
Speaker 2:B leads to c and a to b, exactly.
Speaker 1:But what you're saying or do what you said 10 minutes before.
Speaker 2:That's the danger.
Speaker 2:We're facing A to B exactly, but what you're saying, what you said 10 minutes before, I think is very interesting what happens when we start looking at these biological systems with technology to facilitate life and to understand life better, et cetera, et cetera, because that opens up something that maybe four years ago wasn't even possible, let alone 10. The possibilities to answer that call we need more drought resistant staple crops in XYZ. Okay, there is another path Not the only path is of some big agrochemical companies to say we're going to gene edit this, which anyway takes a few years. But if in a few years we actually can have a crop that does way better without doing all that and without all those risks, then we can answer that call way easier I think that's right.
Speaker 1:I think you're you. You nailed it right there. I think that's right.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's certainly going to require a more region because until now we didn't really have that answer, like we didn't really have another, like that's right, yes, that's bad, let's not do it because it's risky. And Nassim Taleb writes of GMOs We've seen the potential. But then it's like, okay, what do we do? Yeah, let's go back to 200-year breeding. Yeah, that's not going to get us either.
Speaker 1:But now we're getting to a point where like Look for those of us who feel defeated in the face of the environmental challenges happening. We should remind ourselves, when it comes to agriculture, that the world still grows food on an average of five acres or less. That's about 90% of the world. So this idea that one size fits all seeds GMO CRISPR otherwise really makes sense when you grow it on a very large expanse with a lot of acreage. That's the only way to make economic sense, but that's not the way the world grows food.
Speaker 2:So I think there are still huge opportunities to do, which are seeds that are specific, to place Very key inner intention in row seven between you need to sell an X amount of seeds to make sense, but if you have a spinach that only grows in your backyard, amazing, but that's not a business. And so how do you deal with that? Because you need to, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you how the seed companies have dealt with it. The seed companies have dealt with it First of all, right now. I think when we spoke four years ago, we had 60% of seed companies were in the hands of four companies. It looks like it's headed to three companies and it's looking more like 65%. So just let's take that and let it digest. A second Our food supply is the hands of four companies. Four companies own. 65% is the hands of four companies. Four companies own 65%.
Speaker 2:And as an extra which we actually, I have this slide somewhere in the video course we've done. It's a very nice overlay with. I'm not nice, it is horrible overlay with the agrochemical side. So it's the seed plus the package of poison and that's scary.
Speaker 1:I should add that the exactly. I should add that the four companies are all chemical companies. They're not seed companies. Those four companies make their money on the chemical, not on the seed. I'll say that again because we might have gotten blurted out. Those four companies make their money not on the seed sales but on the chemical sale. So you're quite right. That is a very scary overlay, because what incentive does a seed company have to produce a plant that's vigorous and strong and can defend itself when it actually loses money on the seed sale but makes the money on the intervention? It's a little bit like the healthcare system in the US seed sale but makes the money on the intervention. It's a little bit like the healthcare system in the US. You're incentivized to intervene in illness. There is very little money in prevention. In agriculture we know prevention works.
Speaker 1:I'm an organic seed company for a reason. The reason is we are starting the breeding process in an organic environment. We are bringing two parent lines together. That the two lines that came together came together here it's more like a menage a trois. There are several lines, but let's just say when they came together they came together without chemical aid. In other words, chemicals were absent from the environment of raising the spinach and because of that, the spinach starting at the root system and continuing up, needed to fight for itself. It needed to drill down for its own minerals and its own feed and it needed to be vigorous above ground to fight off pests and disease and it needed to be opened enough that it created the photosynthesis for strength. That gives you a strong spinach plant, but also a very delicious, and I would argue again and again, deliciousness and health are the same thing. All of them come together in an environment where the plant figures out how to survive and thrive on its own, figures out how to survive and thrive on its own. That is missing from our chemical company.
Speaker 1:Ownership of seeds, which is 65% of the future of food today, and growing. That is a very scary reality. So how does row seven now, david, in the story of Goliath, how do we make this work? Obviously, we're not going to chemicals, where the real money is. We're headed towards growing our produce ourselves and putting our brand on it. So that's one way Seed sales, seed packet. The margins are this Produce, it's okay. You have to deal with a lot of variables. It's very expensive, it's very competitive, there are large growers. But it has a margin that starts to make sense. And then you-.
Speaker 2:Very small margins.
Speaker 1:Let me say that again. You have seed packet. That's very small margins. You have produce, sell it in the store and make okay margins, but really not sustainable enough to have a real business unless you get very large. And in America and in most of the world there's a certain amount of money that you'll pay for a bag of spinach and that's it. So there's a ceiling and unless you grow very large, it's very hard to make it.
Speaker 1:So what we've decided at Row 7 is, instead of growing very large on the produce and growing 10,000 acres of spinach and shipping it all around the world, and we've decided not to do chemical interventions, because that's not our game we are going into consumer packaged goods that allow us to show off our genetics and deliciousness and health, but in a way that is shelf stable and where the margins come into play. So in some ways we're replacing CPG. We're replacing chemicals with CPG. That's our plan, that's what we've sold to investors and that's what we're running to do. But it's an uphill battle. Yes, because for all the reasons that you know, but the world of seeds has been gobbled up by chemical companies and now that I'm's, the world of seeds has been gobbled up by chemical companies and now that I'm in the world of seeds, I understand why.
Speaker 2:And so CPG shelf-stable. What does it do? And if you're wondering about the sound, he's eating one of these spinach leaves. Stems sorry.
Speaker 1:I know I just can't stop. I can't stop. It's really freaking delicious.
Speaker 2:Sorry about that. Anyway, what does it do to the health side of things? The shelf stable the of products. How do you tackle it? I'm not saying processing is bad.
Speaker 1:Once again, you're drilling in right to the main issue. Here's my theory on this. Maybe we'll speak, hopefully, before another three or four years, and I'll have the answer for you. I'll give you my theory now educated theory, but I still need to test it out. Okay, here goes.
Speaker 1:In the CPG ready-to-eat processed food world, there are enormous amounts of additives that create shelf stability color, flavor, deliciousness at least on a certain aspect of deliciousness usually adding fat, salt, sugar and my theory is that one of the reasons that has become so abundant in our food supply is that food doesn't taste good.
Speaker 1:So if food tasted good, we wouldn't need to add all the junk. That's the theory. So I've started a seed company where we start with the genetics and the genetics influence how our seeds perform in an environment. And if we get the seed right and we get the seed right and we get the environment right, we get the flavor and nutrition right. So that's what we've been experimenting with since I last talked to you four years. We're now growing across the country with Whole Foods as a partner right now, and we're growing the produce business so that we are now dialed into large scale farmers, farmers that really grow on huge acreage, and we're testing out the genetics to see that they can scale and scale well. And the next move is how do you create a shelf-stable product without adding in all of the junk that makes food, highly processed, deleterious?
Speaker 2:to our health and not taste very good.
Speaker 1:And I think, as I, yeah, ultra processed. And what I'm saying is I don't think process is bad. We've been processing food for 10,000 years. The issue is what we've added and the highly processed nature of it. But if we dial in the seed right and we get the cultivation and harvest right, the agronomics correct, then we have something that is truly jaw-droppingly delicious. And if we have that, then what we need to do is mummify it, and I do not believe that food processing needs anything else other than the raw ingredient. And so we're launching, as a test run next month, a line of canned vegetables, actually tinned vegetables. We're taking the size of a sardine tin and we're putting our vegetables in there and we're pressure cooking them in the can. This is a long way to answer your very first question, which was how do you keep the flavor and nutrition in a shelf-stable environment?
Speaker 1:It might even increase, yeah, yeah, it increases, I think it increases, I know it does. And what I'm here to tell you and this is crazy for me to say because I'm an a la minute look at me.
Speaker 2:Again for people listening. He's wearing his white chef's ready. I'm wearing wearing my white coat and it's not a chef's coat, not a doctor's coat. He's ready for the kitchen.
Speaker 1:It's a chef's coat. I'm ready for the because I'm about to go back in the kitchen as an a la minute guy. What I've come to understand in the three, four years since we last talked is that you can process food and increase flavor and nutrition Absolutely, and I think one of the ways to do it, one of the ways there are many ways, but one of the ways is through pressure cooking, which is what canning is, because you don't release any of the flavors into the atmosphere You're actually trapping it in the can.
Speaker 1:It's still in the can. Furthermore, what I have come to appreciate in processing is something that I think our ancestors appreciated, which is there is a moment, even with great genetics and even with great soil and a great farmer and great environment, there is a moment where the flavor and health nutrient density is at its peak. If you go out to the field in four weeks, this spinach will be on decline.
Speaker 1:Had you gone out to the field four weeks before now, it would have been a little immature Right now. Height, height. We are climbing peaks here, right, I want to mummify this flavor now, and that's why we're tinning the vegetables. We're grabbing the vegetables at the absolute perfect moment and we are mummifying that flavor and nutrition and keeping it inside the can.
Speaker 1:I've got other ideas for CPG that we're working on, but this one excites me quite a bit because I've never understood why canned vegetables taste so disgustingly unattractive. They're just sort of hammered in the cooking process, in part to get stability, but in part because there are very few people doing it. It's all like soupy and the whole thing's a mess. I think that sleepy aisle of the canned vegetable world could be woken up with super delicious vegetables. You have to start with the seed, because what you're mummifying and accentuating has to start with true flavor, and that's why I think a seed company that is a CPG company makes actually a lot of sense if you have the right genetics and you have the culture that doesn't want a lot of junk in their food, and that's where we're headed, I think.
Speaker 2:That's starting to. Let's double click on that in a second. But I had to remember an interview we did and actually one of our other favorite books in the space of uh, in search of a perfect peach of franco fubini natura. Yeah, yeah, it was going on early, peak and late, like there's radical seasonality, doesn't mean, oh, spinach is a winter crop, no, there's a moment where it's early, like in this case four weeks ago, where it's peak, which is now, and there's a moment where it's late and then, yeah, you're too late and that kind of notion, like if you can mummify it at that point, makes a lot of sense because you're not going to eat all the spinach and there's going to be moments, and probably margins, that make a lot of sense to somehow freeze between brackets, um, 100% freezing that and that culture piece.
Speaker 2:Since we last spoke, ultra processed people came out. I don't know if it's been such a hit in the us, but definitely in in europe, in the uk and let's say the focus on ultra processed foods have been has exploded in last year and a half too, I think I don't know in the us as well. Of course we have seen ozempic and a lot of other. Let's say, the health side of food. I'm not saying there's a lot of culture now, but there's definitely a lot of attention and people have been going through their cupboard finally and seeing, oh, these are 16 other ingredients that I don't know the name of. Probably that should not be in my breakfast cereal and there should be less junk in my food. Do you see that as well, in like when you touched upon culture like a minute ago, of less junk? Is that starting to become a big enough movement that it can actually support companies like yourself?
Speaker 1:I'm starting to see it, yes, in my rarefied world. The truth is, americans, 60% of our food is processed, most of it heavily. So this is a seismic shift of consciousness and understanding. If it continues this way, I think it will. I don't think we're going to go back to embracing highly processed food as the convenience that we viewed it for the last 50 years. I don't think that we're going back, but we have a long way to go because it's like I said, it's 60% of our diet Probably more in some cases.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think it's probably more.
Speaker 2:And so, what have you seen? Have you seen that?
Speaker 1:But let me ask you something. I mean, how much of that reality 60 plus is the result of convenience or how much of it is the result of our food not really tasting very good and you need to highly process it? Very good question, you know, that's a question, I mean it's a philosophical one, because you can't really get the answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I remember like baby carrots super convenient, but if they taste like nothing which they usually do like, it's just water Right and other stuff. So there's a convenient plus Right, it has to be the right seed, it has to be, and often it just doesn't taste like anything. And why would you eat your vegetables? And why would you eat? It needs to be selected for.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and then you get into. Look here, the baker handed me this and he is breaking open a baguette that looks amazing and I want you to notice that he just handed this to me, so I just want you to see Okay, make it visual Talk about it as well.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. So people are leaving out the people. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to tell you. What you're looking at is a baguette made with 100% whole wheat 100% whole wheat. Now we think of a baguette and the first thing to think about is white flour. Right, and it's intoxicating and sweet. But if you compare what I'm holding in front of you to a white flour baguette, I think nine out of 10, you'd choose this. Why would you choose this? Why would you choose this? Well, first of all, it was a new variety of wheat that we have been selecting for whole wheat.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, so hang on a second. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:We've had a long conversation actually for Nico of seedlings on varieties of wheat in northern France, but we didn't go into the selection for whole wheat. Let's unpack that one.
Speaker 1:So in America sorry, I'm just test driving the baguette In America, for the last 100 years, we have been taking the wheat seed and we have been mummifying it Ah okay, we've been breaking it apart. Where, 100 years ago, where I'm sitting right now, is Tarrytown, new York? Tarrytown is Wheat Town. Tehr is wheat in Dutch. This was the epicenter of wheat for export around the world. And what you had surrounding me was 10,000 varieties of wheat, all hyper-localized, but localized for the local regional mill. That would break apart the wheat seed, mill it into flour and it would have a shelf life of a few weeks, in many cases a few days. And that's why you had regional mills and wheat was treated in the same way that you would treat an orange. This morning, if I squeezed orange juice, you'd expect that it was. If I gave you a glass of orange, you'd expect that it was squeezed that morning. But you don't take your bread with your orange juice and expect that the wheat was ground and milled that morning. But I'm telling you that the wheat seed and the orange have the same volatility of each other. We just don't think about wheat as alive in the same way we think about orange as alive. And what we did 100 years ago through technology is create the ability for wheat seed to be broken apart and mummified. We take out the bran, we take out the germ, we leave the white flour, and the white flour is shelf-stable. And once we're able to do that efficiently, then our whole understanding of wheat changes from a fresh orange-like product that's alive to something that's dead, deader than dead, mummified, really dead.
Speaker 1:One breeder said to me the mill, the modern American mill, is the abattoir for wheat, and that's right. What do we do? We take the bran away from the wheat and we feed it to animals. We take the germ, which is only 5% of the wheat seed, where the oils are and where the vitamins and minerals are and, by the way, where polyphenols are, and that little germ with explosive nutrient benefits and flavor. It's not thrown away, it's sold to pharmaceutical companies, that's, who take the germ, and what's left is the endosperm, the white stuff, and we buy that and make our bread from it. And since we eat more bread than we eat meat, we eat more bread than we eat vegetables, fish combined and meat combined. The only thing we don't eat more wheat of in this country is dairy, but it's close. Wheat is our king crop, and yet what we eat is deader than dead, completely flavorless and nutritional-less.
Speaker 1:So what I'm holding to you is actually a revolution and it's not what our great-grandparents were baking. If that's what your YouTube listeners are thinking to themselves oh, dan Barber's getting back to what my great-grandparents did a whole wheat bread and the shaker village crap. No, actually your great-grandparents were trying desperately to get away from whole wheat. They were screening off as much as they could. The Romans were doing it through bedsheets. Everyone was trying.
Speaker 1:Since 10,000 years everyone's been trying to get rid of the brand, to get to sweeter, more caloric, rich wheat. We, just in the last 100 years, have figured out the horsepower to do it very efficiently, and in those last 100 years we've been selecting seed that allows you to do it very efficiently in big-ass mills that supply 60% of the country. So literally, one mill supplies 60% of the country. So what we need to do first, start with seed. Get back to a seed that, a wheat seed that is meant to be eaten whole.
Speaker 1:And I say that because you know you can go to these artisanal bakeries in the US and all over Europe too. It's you know, you'll see signs, for you know old style artisanal breads with einkorn wheat. Einkorn Einkorn is 10,000 years old. That's what Ruth was holding in the Bible, you know, and, and and. The reason that bakers love to work with whole wheat with it is because the bran itself is sweet and it's thin and it's beautiful for whole wheat baking. Modern varieties of wheat have selected against that trait. Right, they want the brittleness because it shatters easier, it's much more efficient and since you're throwing the brand anyway to the pigs.
Speaker 1:What does it matter? Right, and you get bigger, fatter endosperms for more white flour, when in fact what you want, besides keeping that germ intact, is that you want the right percentages of endosperm and sweet bran, nutritious bran, fiber-rich bran. That is right here. That's why this baguette is a revolution. So what I said to the bakers is let's take the one bread that everyone associates can only be made with white flour. Let's nail the baguette and man, we're getting made with white flour. Let's nail the baguette and man we're getting. This thing is so delicious From a flavor, just pure flavor perspective. It's 10 times what the white flour baguette is, and the white flour baguette is also very good. Again, it's complicated calculus, but I said to them 100%, don't do a baguette that has 80% bran. No, we're going to do 100% because that's the paradigm. And we're going to select. We're going to work with breeders and farmers to select modern varieties, not old, 10,000-year-old einkorns, because we need the yields as well, Otherwise it stays just for your restaurant.
Speaker 1:Otherwise it stays in the 1%. Exactly it stays for me, and that's not a revolution, that's an elite 1% thing.
Speaker 2:How long did it take from the moment you said I want a baguette with 100% hoid made for this way?
Speaker 1:Well, it goes back to 2009, when I had a conversation with a breeder named Steve Jones, who was working at Washington State University.
Speaker 2:And I called him because I had a very old the bread lab.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the bread lab. Right, I had a very old variety of wheat that I loved for bread called Aragon 3. It was a Spanish variety that's fabulous for whole wheat baking. So I was looking for that and it was very hard to find, and I called him to see if he could help me get it from the USDA vault of seeds which had Aragon 3. And he the first time. He's a very brilliant wheat breeder and the first thing he said to me the first five minutes of our conversation why would you do that? Why don't we just make Aragon 3 better? And I was like, why? Who is this guy? And that was my starting with the seed.
Speaker 1:I was like, wait, you could have all the characteristics of old varieties but marry them with more modern varieties that do have appropriate disease resistance, do have agronomics that really can scale, because otherwise, what the hell? We're talking about trying to return to a shaker village which we're not going to return to, not in our lifetime or several lifetimes. So we need to be appropriate to the economics of this, and so that's what we did together. We were choosing varieties, parent lines with Aragon 3. And again, that was a menage à trois too. That developed what is called Barbara wheat, and Barbara wheat is what I'm holding here in part is a wheat that is bred for 100% whole wheat and nutrition. That's a revolution. That's not a shaker village, that's not looking to the past. It's repatriating the past for the opportunity to breed with real intent and scale and democratize this nutrition. Because what's more, what's in the Western world? What has the chance to democratize better than wheat? Nothing. Wheat is our king. If we were in the global South, we'd be talking about corn.
Speaker 1:If we're in Asia we'd probably be talking about rice. We're in the West and wheat is king crop and everything should follow from wheat and we need. We've gotten wheat wrong and what we need to do is reinvent wheat. So I want to start with a baguette, because we're so firmly in, intact with this idea that a baguette has to just be a vector for the butter, and it's wrong. It doesn't it? That's a modern baguette and there's a lot of technique and craft that goes into a baguette. But it's infinitely more interesting at 100% whole wheat.
Speaker 1:I find that very humbling. That's what I find and that's the whole thing with seeds. I mean. Wheat has a particular place in my heart Cone because I'm now staring at the field I showed you before. It's like if you and I said, oh, let's go outside, let's close our eyes and let's bring ourselves 10,000 years ago and let's go outside to the wheat field, what would we see? We would see wheat, much like wheat is today. It doesn't look different, it's the same thing, same thing. And I find that from the perspective of like taking a moment with seeds and biology and just saying, oh Jesus, 10,000 years wheat has not wanted to be screwed with, it hasn't wanted to be messed with Like corn. You know, if we said, okay, let's blink our eyes, 10,000 years, walk out to corn, we'd see some. What teosinte was grass, you know, rice rice was a little little weed, so through incredible selection selection selection.
Speaker 1:You get these fat kernels and fat seeds, but wheat, no, no, no, wheat's too, wheat's complicated.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's an argument right that have we domesticated weed or has the weed domesticated us, and probably it's the second Good good good point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very, very, very right.
Speaker 2:I want to be conscious of your time because I know you have to go to the kitchen, but from our last conversation I remember this conversation self-fertilizing, or at least a nitrogen part of a feed corn you were very enthusiastic about last time. That was as orange as a rising sun, or a rising sun in hawaii, I think. You said um, but you didn't taste it yet at the time, like it was a feed corn meant for chickens, but you were like that was something you were working on at the time. No idea if that went anything. So I have no idea if this story is going to be relevant or interesting. What happened?
Speaker 1:I think we were talking about a corn that could fix its own nitrogen, and that's the holy grail. I've gone through some real circuitous routes with this and I'll tell you something that is funny because that woke up my thinking in a way that I just said it's a holy grail and that's what my thinking went to. It was like, if there's one, I hate to say one thing about agriculture. That's wrong with agriculture because it just there's so many things. But if you had to drill yourself all the way down to like had to drill yourself all the way down to like what's the issue here? It's like our thirst for nitrogen to feed plants to grow is kind of like number one issue. You can argue this, but it's the biggest one because it's the one that's the most fossil fuel intensive. Biggest one because it's the one that's the most fossil fuel intensive. This chemical nitrogen, it's the most damaging to our soils, the microbiome of the soil, the structure of the soil, the leaching in our waterways, and it produces food that's not nutritious, that doesn't taste good. Chemical nitrogen is the problem. And yet we can't live without it. We cannot feed. We really can't feed people without it, in the way that our plants have been selected, which is to be essentially hummers that dictate that guzzle, that nitrogen. So you got to change all of plant breeding. But one thing that seems intoxicating to me go all the way to the other end and say, changing plant breeding but change it so that plants fix their own nitrogen. That's wild and we know that is possible because look outside your window and look at weeds. I mean, look at plants they have the capacity to fix their own nitrogen. We need to select for that trait and since you're a chemical company that makes your money on chemicals and not on the plant's ability to fix anything, not to mention its own viability in the world, yeah, your first thing is not I'm going to try and fix it, but that is the holy grail and yes, I was excited about it back then. I still am.
Speaker 1:I happened to meet a tomato breeder that I've grown very close to, who was doing something I'm just going to take a who I have watched create what he's calling the promiscuous tomato. So it's the tomato that doesn't have parent lines or menage a trois but has an orgy of crazy diversity. I mean, you get invited to this party, you're on every side of the fence and in between. It's like he took tomato varieties, going back to Peruvian, you know, first tomatoes, all the way to the modern New Jersey beefsteak, everything in between, and put them together in this sort of bricolage of an environment and has been selecting from that to get essentially breed back what we've bred out of tomatoes, because we've been breeding out a lot of cool shit you know. For of course, we have to, you have to. You're driving down the highway. You got to make choices, right. You make these choices and when you make the choices on the exit that you're going on, you're ignoring all these other exits that lead you to other great destinations. But we choose that right. Okay, so I've been following him since more than four years I'm more like eight years now.
Speaker 1:I don't think I mentioned him in the last conversation, but the reason I'm telling you this is that, while I am fixated on nitrogen fixation for corn, I tasted the latest variety of this promiscuous tomato and I couldn't believe it. It was so delicious, so fascinating. It tasted like aged meat, like you were tasting it, and the smell was like an aged meat locker, like the umami was explosive explosive and you taste it and I was breathing out. For 10 minutes it's all I could taste. Like you're drinking a Barolo. I mean it's wild shit. And I still look. My hair is hanging out on my arms because I'm remembering that moment.
Speaker 1:And yeah, it's showing, the hair is hanging out on my arm. So the reason I'm telling you this whole thing man is A. This guy's a genius and, by the way, he makes no money and has sworn a vow of poverty. So he lives with his mother, he breathes in the field naked, I mean, he has very few clothes. But he also believes that he's really at one with what's happening in biology and he doesn't want anything to come between his selection and the plant. That's fascinating, all stuff that I thought was real hooey, until I hung out with him, until I tasted this tomato four years, eight years after meeting him.
Speaker 1:And the reason again, the reason I'm telling you this is because I met a scientist who studies endophytes. So endophytes are you know what? So endophytes occur in the rhizosphere of the root system and have the ability. Well, it's an undiscovered endophytes. Are this undiscovered possibility for all kinds of nutrition and ecological functioning for a plant not studied well enough? There are many people who are now zeroing in on endophytes, but this particular researcher, that's his expertise and it's tomato endophytes. So we had a conference. I was like, hey, yeah, I got a tomato that I this thing is truly wild because it has the wild genetics in it and, by the way, that joseph's. I asked joseph. I said what, what?
Speaker 2:is your the grower, the tomato, the breeder.
Speaker 1:Sorry, this yeah, the breeder, yeah, it's like where, where you go, like what is? This is unbelievable, but but you don't even, you don't even want to sell seed. You sell he. He doesn't sell anything, but what he does is give away populations so that you sort of have to select from theirs. It's like he makes no money, zero. That's why it's a vow of poverty.
Speaker 1:And what he said to me is my goal is to create a feral tomato, which at the time I was like. I remember I was like it, just I was. It was on our way to the airport. He dropped me off and the whole plane ran home. I was just sitting in my seat thinking the fuck did. He just say to me he wants to create a feral tomato. So that's a tomato that does not need you and me, like you know wheat. That's why I'm associating it to the wheat. It just doesn't. It doesn't need us.
Speaker 1:And that's why, when I found this guy with endophytes, I was like endophytes are really the plant's strength and it's one way to measure a plant's strength. I think in the future we will look to that. So I said to the guy I was like look, I'm going to pay you 10,000 bucks. What kind of endophyte load is in here, because you can measure it in the tomato or you have to look at it in the plant. Sorry, in the roots. You measure it in the roots of the plant. So he took the seed, grew it out.
Speaker 1:Four months later he calls me up and he's like I hope I just I got to send you something because I've never seen this before. So he sends me this picture of this endophyte. I've never seen a picture of an endophyte before. But it's filled. It looks like a tube that's filled with bacteria just bursting. And he's like, yeah, our lab's never seen a tomato like this, with this endophyte concentration. But what's so interesting is it looks like endophytes that are nitrogen fixing. So what he's saying and we're in the middle of the study now but what he was saying is that and I've gone to the lab but the general takeaway is that, like what Joseph, our breeder, our naked vow of poverty, want to make tomatoes feral a breeder has come up with, through this bricolage of crazy diversity and again going back to wild genetics that we bred out is a tomato that is on its way to being feral, because the key component to living on your own is you have to create your own nitrogen. It's the building block of life Tomatoes we bred that all out. Tomatoes are totally dependent on us Maybe one of the most dependent plants on us, as you can well imagine. But what he's done, through simply selection in essentially his backyard, is create a tomato that has the potential to feed itself and become very strong. Now, this is going to take years of breeding.
Speaker 1:I don't know AI, but philosophically, when you step back and think about it, you're just like you know. There is so much we don't know and so much possibility with seed. We are and this goes back to the beginning of our conversation what is your worldview? You know where do you start on this equation and that's why it's not so much I keep going back to, like what Edith Lady Eve Balfour said.
Speaker 1:It was the pioneer of organic farming. She said the best kind of farming couldn't be reduced to a set of rules. By the way, she's very prescient because she lived before organic agriculture became defined by a set of rules. By the way, she's very prescient because she lived before organic agriculture became defined by a set of rules. And what it is, it's really the perspective of the eater, the grower, it's the culture. It's like what are we looking for and do we have the strength of will to follow that exit that will produce the kind of plant that is truly healthy, truly delicious, truly economical for the farmer, without the intervention of tons of chemicals? I think there's a real future there and I do believe technology can play a role in it. As we said, but I think there's such an exciting future and I feel moved by the people who are doing this as outliers right now, very much outliers, but hopefully, through Row 7 and through other means and through podcasts like yours, can become more mainstream.
Speaker 2:I think it's a perfect. See, I tried to tie it all up together in that.
Speaker 1:I didn't even mean to. I love it. I didn't even mean to, but it kind of comes together in the tomato.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I want to thank you so much. We could do this for hours and in person at some point, which we'll do, but for now I think it's a really good check-in after four years. We're not going to do another one, only after four years. We'll come back before.
Speaker 1:Now let's do it again. I really enjoy talking to you and it's very rare to have people who are as informed as you asking questions, because it's really very enjoyable. I do many conversations but I don't enjoy them all, and you're really dialed in in ways that are just amazing, Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for that and yeah, on to the next one. Okay, yeah, on to the next one. Okay, 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.
