388 Justin Bruch - Organic out-earn conventional, how do we transition more farms and farmers?

A conversation with Justin Bruch, Cofounder-President & CEO of Clear Frontier, born and raised 5th generation Iowa farmer.  He has actively farmed on 4 continents and has spent his entire career working in agriculture across North America (USA/Canada), South America, Europe, and Africa.  

Organic makes more money. This is a financial decision first. Of course, it’s context-specific: we’re talking about the Midwest in the US, corn, soy, and specialty crops. But a fund that has been operating for the last six years clearly shows it makes more financial sense to farm organically. Not saying it’s easy, you have a lot of things to manage: crop rotation, pest management, weed pressure, manure, and all of that. But it does make more money.

So now the question becomes: how do we get more farms and farmers to transition? What are the financial models? What are the investment models to unlock this transition at scale?

More about this episode.

==========================

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.

==========================

👩🏻‍💻 YOUR OUR WEBSITE 

📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 

💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK

• Join Gumroad
• Share it
• Give a 5-star rating
• Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 

==========================

🎙 LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST AND SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL OR WATCH IT ON  📽️ our YouTube channel

==========================

FOLLOW US!

🔗 Linkedin

📸 Instagram

==========================

The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

LinkedIn

Contact page website

Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/

Discount code for €200 of: Investinginregenerativeagriculture

Fresh Ventures Studio online course Nov 2025

Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here

Chapters

• 0:00 Template
• 58:48 What is the one thing smart investors, who want to invest in
• 1:05:09 What would you do if you were in charge of a 1B investment
• 1:09:23 If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing, what

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Organic makes more money. Repeat after me, this is a financial decision first. It doesn't mean the whole world should go organic tomorrow, but it's refreshing to hear something like that and to hear somebody say it out loud. Of course, it's context specific, but we're talking about the Midwest in the US, corn and soy and specialty crops. And a fund that has been operating for six years clearly showed that it makes financial sense to farm organically. Not saying it's easy, you have a lot of things to manage, crop rotations, pest management, wheat pressure, manure, and all of that. But it does make more money. So now the question becomes how do we get more farms and farmers to transition? What are the financial models? What are the investment models to unlock this transition at scale? Not too fast, organic scale, obviously, but still scale. That's what we discussed today with one of the leaders in this space. We talk about his personal transition, about his family farm transition to organic, why they transitioned, what the neighbors had to do with it, what health has to do with it, and why he decided to build a significant fund managing over 25,000 acres, all in transition to organic. And we talk about investment horizons and long-term investing and what excites him when it comes to technology and what he would do with$1 billion. Spoiler, he would focus on making conventional more soil health focused and cutting out as many of the nasty chemicals as soon as possible. Enjoy. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture Food Podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities, and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Welcome to another episode. Today with the leading real asset region farmland investment fund manager. They purchase high-quality farmland, partner with local farming talent, and develop industry partnerships to build a specialty crop portfolio. They're managing over 25,000 acres. Welcome, Justin.

SPEAKER_01: 1:51

Thank you, Don. Thank you for having me today. I look forward to introducing what we're doing and giving you a good overview.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58

Great. Yeah, I want to start. You've been in this for a while, and I've seen you. Sonic, obviously, and I've seen you, and this has been a few months in the making. I think we've been trying to schedule. I moved it once, you moved it once, but I have been looking forward to unpacking Clear Frontier for quite a while. So I'm looking forward to this one. But we always start with a personal question, and that's why do you spend most of your waking hours obsessing over soil health and building a fund focused on that? Like what happened? There's so many easier careers in this world, especially in farming. This is not the easiest one, or also outside farming. So, what made you dedicating a lot of your waking hours to this?

SPEAKER_01: 2:35

Yeah, so for me, I grew up on a family farm in Iowa, it was a conventional farm using conventional chemicals, GMO traded, genetics, much like most of the world from a production standpoint. And in 2015, we started transitioning our family farm in Iowa over to certified organic for two reasons. Ultimately, financially, we weren't making the money we wanted to make on conventional ag versus what we thought we could get out of commodity crops and organic. As well as we had some neighbors next to us that were organic that had said, hey, we'll kind of lead you along if you want to make the change so we don't have to leave a barrier between what we're doing. And so we started the transition, and at first I took a total financial view of, well, it's going to be better financially. And I have a degree in agronomy, and I've spent my career working in farming around planet Earth. And I started looking at our soil health and our organic matter and just the soil structure. Once we started transitioning and cutting out all the insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, the synthetic nitrogen. And I really liked what I saw from a soil health organic matter standpoint, uh the earthworms and the change in what we were doing. And so I started going down the path of looking at that from a soil health standpoint, thinking this is way better. And then I started looking at soil organic matter and the quantity of degradation we've had. Was it fast?

SPEAKER_00: 4:11

Was that a surprise to you? Like how quickly did you see re-regeneration and earthworms happening?

SPEAKER_01: 4:17

Yeah, it was a surprise to me that you saw a change in it faster than what I expected. I think two things happened for me. One, I started seeing from a soil health side, and then I realized the quantity of years that I've spent dumping chemicals into sprayer tanks and dealing with stuff that will probably someday kill me of cancer. And you start looking at the nasty stuff you deal with, and then you also start looking at soil health, which partly due to the interest in carbon, I started doing more looking at carbon and soil organic matter and what it takes to go crops from an agronomy standpoint, and then start thinking about how much organic matter we've degraded over the last 150 years. And all of that kind of pushed me to a point of saying, hey, there's a better way to farm that's going to leave the soil and what we produce crops on in better health and better position for the next generation than what we've had. And ultimately, it spurred me to do what I do today at Clear Frontier. It spurred me to change the way we farm on our own family farm. And also ultimately, the way I think about agriculture today. So it's a combination of doing conventional farming for 20 years of my life, and then in an essence looking at the other side of it and saying, hey, there's a way to do this that's going to be healthier for the soil and for the crops we produce and ultimately what we consume at the end of the day. And I will say, because I say this all the time, is I'm not against I'm not against conventional farming. Ultimately, it feeds planet Earth, and 7 billion people on Earth is fed through conventional farming. But do I think there's a better way to farm? I do. I think our system of what we used to do has a lot better benefits. And I think changing what we do from uh soil health and thinking about the long-term future is really important for our generation on how we go about looking at ag. So ultimately, that's what drives me and that's what kind of gets me out of bed every day to want to go focused on what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_00: 6:20

And so so many different angles to take here. But I want to go back to the organic family farm or the farm next to you. I don't know if it's a family farm. Were they on where have they been organic a long time? And were you like how is the relationship with them for you? Because often what we see is like a neighbor, of course, helps. If a neighbor is has already transitioned into certain directions, it's just much easier because the argument of this will never work here is not there because you can see the you can see the fence line in many cases. How was that relationship and how did that go into actually them saying, look, we'll we'll guide you through it, which is an enormous help, obviously. And how serious did you take that or their way of farming in the beginning?

SPEAKER_01: 7:00

Yeah, it's uh they transitioned in 1996, which is the same year I graduated from high school. I went off to university. They transitioned to organic, and so they were on the forefront of it. And you looked at it and realized one, they had laid up made a lot of money over the years, acquired a lot of really good farmland, and did a very good job of what they were doing. So you looked at them and you were like, here's a staple of success. Like they're what they're doing is working.

SPEAKER_00: 7:27

Were you suspicious or not? Were they like on on all these are some some hippies, etc., or not?

SPEAKER_01: 7:33

No.

SPEAKER_00: 7:34

I say there's there's two types of uh not that we should be organic of hippies, don't email me people, but just yes, don't do that.

SPEAKER_01: 7:40

I say there's two types of organic farmers in the US. This is changing a bit, but I think the old mentality, the mentality I probably had 20 years ago was it's more of the people in the Scooby-Doo van that have 10 acres that are out to be with nature, which is okay. I'm not judging. That's fine. Today, what I look at and what like our neighbors helped us get there, they farm 10 plus thousand acres, they do it organically, they do it with manure and crop rotation and manage their weeds. And so they do it on a large scale for big production, producing a lot of bushels or a lot of tons of grain and a very clean way of doing it. And so I looked at that and said, well, if they can do it on that size and scale, and they can do it successfully, and clearly they're successful business people, they've been doing it for what, going on 30 years now, you look at that and say, well, there's a path there to do it. If someone else can do it, I can learn from them, I can follow suit and do the similar thing. So I think a lot of times, a lot of times in business and in life, it takes seeing someone else do it for you to look at and say, Yeah, I can make that work here and I can figure out a way to do that. And and then ultimately sometimes you have to prove it to yourself to say, is this actually a better way to go about it? And organic farming is not easy. I will say that. Controlling not just weeds is very difficult, managing your fertility, it's difficult, your crop rotation and all of those things. But if you can depends what drives a person, but if you can do that and come out of the back end with a better soil, a healthier soil, which to me is worth a better value and produces a better crop, and you can also make more money and have a better way of life through it, I think those are two pretty attractive reasons to try to go change what you're doing out of the normal practice. And they were happy to help because they wanted a neighbor. Yeah, and they were happy to help. I think uh I think if you walked into a if you walk into a cooperative meeting in the state of Iowa, which is core agriculture country in the United States, you walked into there, and there was a hundred people in the room, 99 of them are gonna be conventional farmers, if not all 100. So, but I would say I I do believe that organic farmers are predominantly pretty good about trying to expand the industry and promote other people to do it and say, hey, it's all right, you can be the redhead in the room and come along and farm differently, and your fields are not gonna be perfectly clean and they're not gonna look the same, and they're not gonna yield the same. You probably make more money and you're probably gonna have a healthier way of going about it. So, yeah, they were very helpful for us to tell us here's what we do, and here's the timing we do it, and here's why we do it, and here's how we think about this. So it it was good guidance. And fortunately, today in the world we live in, there's a lot of information on YouTube, and there's a lot of forms, and there's today. It wasn't there at 96 when they started. No, it wasn't there. It wasn't there, but when they were more the early stage people were pioneering this process, that information wasn't there. Today, there's a decent number of field days going on where smart people are talking about, hey, here's what I've done that works, and here's what I've done that doesn't work. And I think that's where the network connection, and as we talk about it through the next hour of time here as well, like what I do today with Clear Frontiers, part of it is how do we pull more people together that are our group that are all organic people that can say, hey, here's what I'm doing, and this works, or this was a train wreck. Don't do this, or try this, or don't try that. And that's part of what we do with our group is we have a Slack channel that all our farmers are all on that talk back and forth. We do annual meetings where we put everybody in a room and we go around a room and we talk about different things. And so I think there's a knowledge sharing out there that's helpful. I think Europe probably is further ahead than the US on a lot of this, in the essence, that it's not easy to go find an agronomist in central Iowa or central Nebraska that is going to be good on organic.

SPEAKER_00: 11:41

And is used to large scale and can really plug into the machinery and all the systems and digital stuff and the drones and everything you use. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 11:50

It's just not yeah, it's just not as relevant because it's not there's 180 million acres of conventional corn and soybeans in the United States, and there's 1.4 million acres of corn soybeans and small grains of organic in the U.S. So yeah, you're just not gonna find the volume of people there. So you've got a you've got a group of agronomists that are good at selling chemicals and synthetic products and are used to using that, and that's a system, and that's okay. So there's a there's just less of a skill set and knowledge transfer out there, and so some of it you got to pioneer, which to me sometimes sounds odd to say we're pioneering things in agriculture in Europe 2025. But the reality is you're pioneering some of the techniques, the crop rotation. A lot of these things hasn't been worse for you.

SPEAKER_00: 12:33

And a lot of new knowledge and science has been out only recently or is coming out, and so you're definitely pioneering, like just as 20 years ago or coming up to 30, like that's it's still early on in many things. What does it mean to cover the right cover crop mixes for the right context, etc.? In many cases, we don't know, or we know partially an answer, and so that's yeah, and then the shift now. Actually, one one setback as well. You mentioned health of the stuff you were throwing in the tank of the tractor. Was that at the time already an a topic of the exposure of farmers and farm workers to a lot of these chemicals that didn't probably is an issue or was an issue? Now, of course, there are massive lawsuits, there's a lot more knowledge out there. But when you said we we started switching, you specifically mentioned health a few minutes ago. Was that in in your mind as well? Like this is not just a financial decision and let's say a soil health decision, this is also a personal health decision.

SPEAKER_01: 13:30

Yes. I farmed for a number of years in Ukraine and I look back at the quantity of insecticides and herbicides that I was around, as well as growing up on the farm and the way we dealt with it. And then if you take the if you take the US and you take the state of Iowa, it's the second highest state of the 50 states for cancer. And actually, and I didn't know this until just recently, there's 99 counties within the state of Iowa. My home county is the highest county for cancer in the state of Iowa, which basically makes it the second highest county in essence in the United States, which I'm not sure why that is. It could not it could be from something completely different. I'm not saying that it is specifically from that, but I know a lot of people in my life that have had cancer between family members, friends, etc. And ultimately you have to step back and look at it and think I'm dealing with a bunch of really nasty stuff that goes in. So health is naturally an issue of your own personal health, and then you also start thinking about some of those things that you put on crops that you then turn around and are going to consume directly or indirectly, whether through a protein of an animal source or through uh direct consumption. And all of those things for me, yeah, they're an alarm bell. You sit back and think, it's interesting, and then you think, what am I doing to the soil if I'm putting all of this stuff on here and some of the things that we know today that it causes? None of these are none of those are good. None of those are good in my book. It's not really the way we want to live our lives or the way agriculture should be in a lot of essence. So all of that for me, from a soil health to where the farm sits for the next generation to food we produce that goes on to feed millions of people, all of that kind of rolled into a play for me of, hey, I want to look at doing agriculture differently. Do it financially successfully because businesses don't work if you don't make money. And so you have to be able to do that, in my view. And then you also want to be able to do it so that you feel good about what you're doing and how you're going about it, and what you're leaving ultimately for the next generation. And so all of those things drive me to be doing what I'm doing and be passionate about organic and regenerative as well. I focus a lot on the organic side, and regenerative is second tier for me on my focus points for a few different reasons. But yeah, it's a lot to do with both physical and soil health and ultimately the system and a broader scale. And the last thing I'll say is much like the neighbor across the fence that took that helped us transition our farm, you take that as a chain reaction. And today I've gone from taking a couple thousand acres on our family farm that we did, to now we have 25,000 acres, which is focused on going there. And so it's a chain reaction of how what do you spur for one thing that rolls into another thing that all of a sudden now at 25,000 acres with our tenants and what they farm, that probably equals 50,000 acres. When you roll that together, and I can look at that today and say it's a short 5% of the US organic market, and it's just a spurred chain reaction of how things happen and also how things fall into place and what you try to go do with it to try to make it actually make a change in what the food system and what agriculture is.

SPEAKER_00: 17:04

And we'll get into the Claire Frontier piece, but have you changed your own eating and consumption as well after going deeper and deeper, let's say, in the health side? And uh of course your own farm has changed and transitioned significantly. So probably exposure to a lot of these things and the toxicity has been reduced. And in terms of the eating side, have you made switches there over the last decade, let's say?

SPEAKER_01: 17:28

Yes, I have. Probably not as much to be completely fair as uh other people that do what I'm doing, but I am definitely much more thoughtful about what I eat, where it comes from, and what that product is. And so there are certain things that I specifically do to make sure they're organic if I'm going to directly consume them, knowing the food system where it is. There's other things that I probably am less concerned about, but it definitely has changed the way I think about food for my own health and my own consumption, without a doubt.

SPEAKER_00: 18:00

And then on the work side, like transitioning your own farm, your family farm, is of course a huge step and one thing, but then deciding to say, okay, how do I take this to many more acres, in this case 25,000, counting? Like that's quite a shift. Like, why did that come naturally or why did that happen? And let's say let's because you could be busy with your own farm and maybe buy a few neighbors' plots, and that's in itself a fulfilling career, let's say, but you decided to take it a bit further.

SPEAKER_01: 19:17

Yeah, I I had a lot of experience farming large scale. I spent seven years farming in Ukraine and farmed about 135,000 acres or roughly 55,000 hectares. So I had done the large-scale convention lag, and then I spent a period of time both farming and managing land in Canada for more of a fun of a fund and looking at it on acquiring land and leasing it to operators. And I was looking at the whole system and I was thinking there needs to be an improvement to what we're doing on the way we go about this and that whole complex of buying land, how you rent it, how you give opportunities to farmers, and then how you go about farming it. I think one, I felt like I had the experience to go do more than what I could do on a family farm. And I my happy place a lot of times is being at home on the farm. That's where I like to be. That's what I'm asking.

SPEAKER_00: 20:16

You can easily do that and just do that and not be bothered with all the other things from fundraising to tenants to a lot of headaches. Fun headaches, it's organic, it's they're fun people, of course, but they're headaches.

SPEAKER_01: 20:28

Yeah, they are. It's it's more of a it's more of the feeling of how do you go out and how do you go out and leave your mark on on the world a bit? And I don't get out of bed saying, hey, I want to be remembered in agriculture when I'm gone. It doesn't cross my that's not something that I I worry about. But how do you go out and do something at a bigger scale and make a bigger change, be, I guess you could say a bigger force for good in in agriculture. That isn't important to me. There's a lot of ways to make a living, whether you're on the family farm or doing something around ag. I think there's uh for me, there's a concept of how do you go out and do that and affect a lot of different people's lives in agriculture. And how do you make that chain effect happen? So today, if I took our 25,000 acres and I took probably roughly 20 tenants there, I can think of it of going from a neighbor across the fence saying, Hey, I don't want to have a border with you, I'll help you switch to organic, to the next chain of myself building a one that's got 25,000 acres, to 20 tenants that then probably extend that out to 50,000 acres. To me, that's part of what the it's part of what I guess maybe why we're on Earth for everybody on doing different things is how do you do things that grow and they grow exponentially so that you make a bigger change or a bigger impact. I think all of those things are important to me outside of just being at home on the farm, which I could do and I could be happy there and fine doing it, but it's it's how do you get how do you make a bigger impact and how do you do more? And I think in what we're doing today here, it's a much bigger impact than just where I would be if I was at home on the farm. I also really enjoy it. I really enjoy the market of land and the business side of how you find the right assets and what that fits for, and structuring that right to make it work for the farmer side and make sure that they can make money and expand what they're doing. And I think there's a whole social aspect that comes into you give the opportunity to a younger farmer that might not have an opportunity to farm, and you help them farm differently in going organic for us, and that they can make a living on a lot less acres with a lot less operating capital, and it keeps them on the farm. Rural America has been dying for a long time of people leaving rural America and leaving the farm. Farms get bigger equipment. How do you change some of that? So there's a lot of things around both the way you produce the crop, the soil health, the way it leaves the farm ground, and ultimately the rural America and the next generation of farming. All of that stuff is important to me, and I think I can make a bigger impact doing what I do at Clear Frontier than what I would just if I was if I was being a family farmer. All of which are all important and actually for me are all things I really enjoy. But it's ultimately where does life take you that you can make the make the right impact and feel good about it and also make a change? And for me, I think this is probably my place where I can make a bigger change that is going to be longer lasting in an effect complex, especially in agriculture, than just being on a family farm.

SPEAKER_00: 23:43

Yeah, because there's a limit, of course, even if you have the most diversified soil health-focused region, organic family farm, there's objectively a limit of the impact you can have there. And in this case, and that's why we're talking, that's what we're trying to focus on the people that take this work beyond their own farm gate if they happen to manage a farm and take on other money than their own. And so, how does Clear Frontier operate? What's your model in terms of a real asset in terms of farmland? You mentioned young farmers, you mentioned, I think you focus specifically as well, or not focus specifically, but have a very high percentage of female farmers. Entry, of course, the organic side, walk us through Clear Frontier. Not in an elevator pitch, we have time, but it's just through through the different steps in the model.

SPEAKER_01: 24:29

Yeah. So Clear Frontier is a manager. We have a fund that sits below it, that ultimately has a fund and a REIT that own the farmland. REIT is a specific real estate structure, right? Yeah. Real estate investment trust that helps with tax sensitivity for investors through passive income. Ultimately, the way I looked at it, and and it's important uh to understand how why Clear Frontier works in that focus of it is if you take the U.S. market and we grow roughly 90 million acres of corn, 90 million acres of soybeans, and about another 70 million acres of other wheat, barley, sunflowers, canola, et cetera. You take that market, and then you take some 1% or roughly 1% on the organic side, or 1.4 million acres of it, and then you look at it and you say, well, why is there not why are there not more farmers farming organic? And so I looked at this system and I said, well, you got roughly 55% of farm ground is rented. Most of that rented farm ground is predominantly on a one-year lease. So you rent that on a cash lease and pay your cash. You drive with your transition to organic of three years, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 25:38

Correct. And so or trees or an actual complex, like you're locked, you're already locked there, basically.

SPEAKER_01: 25:44

Yeah. Correct. And so actually, for me, I have one farm that I have a landlord that's 85 years old and only wants to rent that farm on a one-year lease. And it's the one that is one piece of property that is not transitioned organic because I don't want to be halfway through transition because there is a J-curve, or uh, I sometimes call it the valley of death, where you got to go 36 months of no synthetic applications in order to get to certified organic. And so when you go through that J curve, you're growing a crop organic, you're selling it for conventional prices, therefore you're going to get a lower yield, yet you're selling it at conventional pricing. And that's a J-curve or a tougher time in economics. And so you don't want to be halfway through that and lose that to someone who bids$5 an acre higher across the road. So you look at that in the complex, you say, well, how do we change that? So the way we went about doing that was we set up a fund with the approach of we're gonna go find the right farm ground. And so for me, it's got to be the right type of soil, it's got to be the right type of slope, the right type of infrastructure, the right type of water in the right logistical area where there's a manure source and there's off-take market opportunities, and I can grow the right crops, and it has to make economic sense. So you try and glit all that out, you go find the right asset and you lease it to a farmer. Typically, for us is a seven-year lease. And so you take that and you say, well, it's gonna take 36 months. The first, depending on the time of year you buy that, the first two crops are gonna be in transition. Hopefully, if you buy it in the fall in the U.S., we would typically make our last application in August of a fungicide or possibly an insecticide, but usually a fungicide. If you bought that farm in November, in an essence, you'd plant that in April, harvest it in October, plant in April, harvest in October, plant the next April, and on August, whatever day that last application was at 36 months in a day, it's certified organic. So the third crop is gonna be organic. So if you look at that, you say, well, a seven-year lease, hey, by year three, you're gonna be organic, you're gonna have gotten through the J curve and you're gonna go more of what I call the cash cow cycle of the marketing side. You're gonna be making more money and more revenue. But what do you have? You have runway. And if you're gonna go out and make a change, you've got to have runway to do it. Now you can do it on property you own, but as I mentioned, 55% of farm ground is leased in the U.S. So how do you do that in a structure so that you can actually incentivize people to say, hey, you've got the runway here to actually go through and do it and make the transition across. And so our focus point is, hey, we'll find that right asset. We'll find the operator that will either be an organic operator or wants to be an organic operator. We will help them do everything from the paperwork to the crop rotation to be there when their auditor comes to go through it with them, as well as try to help them find the offtake in the marketing. So we'll try to we'll try to hold as many hands and be as facilitating as possible through the process to help them get there and ultimately give them the road to try to get from conventional over to organic. And by doing that, it gives us the opportunity to work with more women that want to come into ag and be farmers and farm differently. It also gives us the opportunity on, especially on smaller assets, to take that younger farmer that wants to farm that doesn't have the operating line, the capital to go compete against the economy of scale farmer that's trying to be the low-cost producer, gives them the opportunity to be able to go farm 500 acres. And once they get through transition, make enough money ideally that they can make a living doing it, which is different than what we see in an economy of scale or a size type farming. So it's ultimately our vision and what we're doing is how do we help facilitate a shift in agriculture? And we do that for us by owning the asset so that we can structure that out and help someone ultimately be best in class and make that shift from what they were doing to what we'd like to see for best practices and help them through the process of going there. So for us, it's a long-term piece. We're looking at long-term leases, long-term relationships.

SPEAKER_00: 29:58

Yeah, what happens after this?

SPEAKER_01: 29:59

And a long-term process. What's that? What happens after the street? Yeah, typically for us, by year five and year six, we're going to be working on extending those leases out. And a perfect world, we'll re-extend them out for five years, seven years. We've had some, we have some first leases that we've done out as far as nine years, which is rare in agriculture, unless you're in the permanent crop industry. It's rare to do that. So we will ideally we'll renegotiate those and just carry on with them. What I think you find is when people rent farm ground for long term periods, they also farm a farm like they own it. They treat that like it's their own asset and their own farm ground. So you treat something. I've used the example before of how you treat your own vehicle and how you treat a rental car that you pick up at the airport that you're going to drive for. 12 hours. You probably don't you might hammer on or be more rough or aggressive with the rental car that you're gonna have for 12 hours that you're gonna drop back off at the airport when you leave town, as you are your vehicle that you might drive for the next 10 years. It's pretty I think it's pretty natural, it's human nature. So if you take farm ground and someone's gonna farm that for potentially the next decade, that's a long-term period. And so honestly, they want to farm that and they want to make it look just like they would if they owned it. There's pride in it. Half the people in the community might think they do own that because they farmed it that long. And that's great. That's what we're after. So it's really a structure of extending out that lease period and then typically for us structuring a lease so that we can have flexibility. So we may we'll ride the pain through the transition period through a lease structure, whether it's a share in the crop or a share in the revenue or a bushel contract or however. And we do have some cash leases depending on the situation and what it is. But our focus has always been let's share in the economics on that downside period so that it's you're not losing money or going backwards on going through that transition period. And we'll make more money just like you're gonna make more money once you get through and you get to organic and you're producing a higher value crop at a higher premium. And so we'll ride the wave with you to make it easier to get through that transition period. And it works. It those are the type of things that help people to say, well, I've got the longevity of the lease, and I've got a I've got a landowner that's willing to take the compression with me or go through the pain and suffering on the front end for the long-term gain. And when you do that, you get people that say, Hey, I'm willing to go change my practices, and I'm willing to go do that. So that's been our model, and we've refined some things over time as you learn through the practice. But I started this in 2019 on buying the first uh 770 acres in the state of Nebraska. And uh here we are today. We've got uh about 25,000 acres across four different states, all with a very similar structure and process. And I will emphasize we're not all organic today. As you buy stuff, it takes three years to get through transition. And there, in my opinion, good agriculture means you've got to be smart enough to say, well, every farm is not going to be organic with the technology we have today available to us. And by that, I mean there there might be dry land corners or there may be swales or there may be pieces that don't work to farm the same way you would a perfectly flat 160 acres of the right soil that fits for it. So you've got to be that's good farm management, that's good soil health management, and that's just good agriculture and good business management. But predominantly we've gone from 770 acres on the first farm to roughly 25,000 of making that transition, adding tenants and growing through our process. And I would say it works. It has worked for us, it is not for the faint of heart, and it is not easy. Organic farming is difficult. There are a lot of challenges and there's a lot of ways to think about how you do it versus conventional ag and the process there. So it's not easy. Consequently, there's not a lot of people that do it, which is okay because it's not something where you're gonna go say, Hey, I can go put a billion dollars to work tomorrow and just buy a whole bunch of farm ground across the country and collect a check on it on the first of March. And it's a good thing. Yeah, no, we're gonna get it. I'm probably gonna answer your one billion dollar question when we get to it. So it's just not that easy.

SPEAKER_00: 34:30

Transition by field, transition by and you mentioned 25,000 and we're probably influencing double. How many of these tenants are farming their own land as well next to it adjacent in the neighborhood? And how do you influence that? What's the influence beyond the pieces you own, and how does that work?

SPEAKER_01: 34:47

In some examples, not all of them, of course, but how yeah, almost all of our tenants that I can think of, all but maybe two, farm other ground. I don't my predominant focus is I don't want to be the majority of what you farm. I want you to have your own assets, your own farm ground, your own base of operation. And if something happened to us, I don't also want to be the reason you don't have ground to operate on. So I like that aspect. I think though, the I think for us where the influence comes in is if you can help people with the technology side, the crop rotation, the cover crops, the marketing and the paperwork process, you can help people be successful and people watch success. And so when people see other people being successful and having successful farms and better equipment and expanding, it makes the neighbor across the country, hey, what are you guys doing over there? Like, how's this work? What do you yeah? So you all of those things become a chain event of things happening. I had a phone call over the weekend from a friend of mine who's a large operator for the US Wise. He's a very big operator, always been conventional. He called me and he said, Hey, I've watched what you've been doing here for the last five or six years. I know people that farm your ground. I see what it is and I look at what's going on, and you have intrigued me. My boys are coming back to the farm. I'm interested in, I'm interested in learning and possibly leasing some ground from you and having you help because I might not be farming the way I should be farming, and I might look at wanting to do it different. And I said, hey, you're not going to want to go switch 10 plus thousand acres over to organic today. That's not going to work well. But you might start with a couple hundred and go down the process and learn the process and the technology and how you market and what you do and grow on it from there and go. And so you look at those things as that's monumental.

SPEAKER_00: 37:24

That's like a switch. Is it has it changed like in terms of sorry to interrupt on but it feels like people like that, large operators that have been observing, have been looking, have been sniffing out, have been looking over the fence line, have been looking at soil, have been looking at successful neighbors, say, okay, actually I need to look into this instead of just dismissing it as whatever.

SPEAKER_01: 37:45

Yeah. It continues to change. It's interesting. We're in a we're in a downside in the ag cycle. We've got low commodity prices. That that helps because that uh it does, in my opinion. You take the US market, we got low commodity prices, high interest rates, high inputs, high equipment costs, high, high land costs. Today we have tariffs as well that affect both what you're importing in as well as exporting out. You take all that into component, and then you turn around and I'll use corn as an example. We're trading roughly 380 cash to$4 Chicago border trade or Chicago Mercile corn. And it sounds like you take all that into no idea what it means, but it's low. Yeah, it's low. If you took 36 bushels in a ton on$4 corn, you're whatever,$200 a ton, let's say, roughly ballpark math. You take that, and then you say to someone, hey, if for my organic farms, I'm not buying fertility, I'm using manure, so you aren't worrying about a tariff or a component dairy. I'm not using any chemicals that I'm how many have integrated animals, like off your farms, or is it manure coming from elsewhere? It's it's both. Some are off farms, a lot of it is coming out of chicken facilities or dairies or feedlots or pig facilities. It's a combination of both. But you take this, you take someone that stands there and looks at it and says, Well, I'm on the conventional side, I'm about the chemical side, I'm borrowing a lot of money to farm an economy of scale at a high interest rate, and I'm selling four dollar corn. And then you take the organic side and you say, Well, I'm selling eight dollar corn. Yes, I'm going to get a little less yield, but I'm selling it for double the price. I'm using manure. I'm not really you, I'm not using outside things predominantly or getting hit by a tariff side. And I may be farming half the acres, which I may be, so therefore I'm borrowing less money to do it at a high interest rate, and yet my revenue coming off in a corn scenario is roughly double the premium price. So you put all that in components, and then you look at it. It's a fairly compelling story if you're farming and you're looking at it saying, should I be doing something different? And then the subset to that is by changing that, yes, it's the quality of the food that comes off. But for me, all the things that you do in organic from a soil health and from a soil biology standpoint, of cutting out all of those chemicals and going to compost or manure and using a three-plus crop rotation and cover crops. All of those positive things then come in to make your organic certification work. So you ultimately, at the end of the day, I would say farmers are they're entrepreneurs, they're business people, and they're coin operated because we live and operate predominantly so you can make money, so you can have the things that continue to build your operation. So you're a business person, and how do you make how do you make more money? And how do you do that? And ultimately at the end of the day, I believe the economics are better to farm organically and do that, and then you get all the subset benefits that come off of it. So is it a chain reaction? In my opinion, it is a chain reaction, and it takes it will take a lot of years, and people were doing danger as well.

SPEAKER_00: 41:03

Could can the market absorb these kind of organic commodity commodities as well for these prices for a while, or you're saying, anyway, it's gonna be three, four, five, six years, how many acres we're gonna transition? There's not, it's not that suddenly there's a huge mountain of stuff coming onto the market to distort.

SPEAKER_01: 41:19

No, you look at uh you look in the US, organic's about a$72 billion business today, and it's got about a 9% compounded annual growth rate. So what does that tell you? It tells you that the consumer demand is I'm going to buy more organic food at the grocery store or the farmer's market or wherever. So you've got a consumer demand that is is growing. Yes, if you add more acres in and you continue to produce more, you will compress the price premium. I think Europe has probably seen more compression on that. Yeah, there's some suffering in the USS with inflation.

SPEAKER_00: 41:52

But sin, I think 23, 24, people are going to correct me. But this year looks a lot better in terms of like some organic brands I know are in terms of uptake, it's back to the level before. But for the first time in years or decades, there was a suddenly scare in the market of it's not just a constant growth, but three, four, or five percent per year. But actually, it went down a bit, and people were like, Whoa, but it's back to you and doesn't mean we're safe at all, but it definitely continues to grow. So the market is there, and then on the soil health side, do you see those because some of these farms have been, or some of this land has been with you for a while, that it starts to maybe the yield gap gets less or less, or let's say drought resistant. What are the other benefits, like purely also financial, that help these farms to perform in the time we live now over time getting better? Because I still feel many people don't realize that farmland as an asset class or as an asset is when managed well, you can make money over time, which you're showing clearly, but it gets better over time instead of any real estate you're in, like you need a lot of maintenance. Like that. Do you see that as well in in your operation? That it's get better, more resilient, more water storage capacity, all of those things we we hear in the years you've been farming some of this land?

SPEAKER_01: 43:01

Yeah, we so for us, we track the impact, what we call our impact. We track, we track our farmland, I would say, really well. So when we buy a farm, we will zone it. And we use typically something like a varus machine with electrical connectivity to go through, go zone it out. If you took the US, most of the US is broken to one mile square sections, which for from a metric system, which I will argue your metric system is way better than our English system. But you take six, you take the one mile square of 640 acres, you break that into four quadrants, that's four quarter sections or 160 acres quadrant. Most of that was homesteaded in either 80 or 160 acre tracks, and today it still trades predominantly in 160 or 60 acre tracts. There's about five soil types on average that you're going to find if you go through and run a soil uh various machine across there. They're gonna be very uniform within. Allows us to go through, identify those, and pull soil samples when we buy that. And so then we can track that by zone for the life of that 10 years. So then we look at soil organic matter. We know that's roughly 56% of sequestered carbon. Is what are we doing with our soil organic matter? I think the market loves to talk about carbon. I think the market is is wrong. I think the market should look at soil organic matter because that is something you can measure. And as soil organic matter goes up, the byproduct of that is you're gonna have more carbon stored in your soil. And we know higher soil organic matter, every 1% gives you 30 pounds of free nitrogen and 20,000 gallons of water that you can take up from a capillary standpoint. So grow soil organic matter.

SPEAKER_00: 44:32

People are gonna slow down your sentences because you're talking so fast, but it's really important. I know people if you're I know if you're too fast with your podcast, like player. I encourage you to do that if you want to, but this one you want to slow down a little bit.

SPEAKER_01: 44:44

I get excited about stuff, so I talk in that. So I apologize to the listeners on that. However, if you if you look at so if you take your farm ground and you look at an increased soil organic matter, which we've tracked, and we are seeing an increase across the board in our soil organic matter by the change of practices of what we're doing and being able to track that through, you all of a sudden start to see, okay, I've got more usable water and more free nitrogen, which nitrogen being the biggest nutrient you need in a grass like a wheat or a corn. So, and the hardest to come by in in organic as well. So you start tracking all of that and you see an increase in soil organic matter, which improves the yield and the production. As you have increased yield and production, you generate more revenue. If you look at that from a multiples approach, you increase the value of the farmland as the underlying asset that's sitting underneath it, which comes back to your economic piece. So as you look at all of that, yes, you need less water as your soil organic matter gets higher. So you retain more water. You ultimately the higher and richer soil needs less manure or compost to put on it, which is a lower cost, which helps your farm economics. You ultimately see an increased value in the quality of the farm ground and the soil. And I look at soil organic matter all the time when I'm buying farms and quality of soil, as most people do. So you're doing uh, in an essence, a combination of things that are lifting the scales on both sides by changing the practice and seeing a change in that soil health. And I think the right way to do that is you have to track it and you have to be able to actually see what you're doing. For us, I don't believe in the I don't believe in greenwashing. I don't believe in going out and saying, hey, we did all this stuff, it's poofo, and look how wonderful it is. I think that's a lot of the problem with the system and with what drags down more people doing it. I'm more into the real hard facts of here's what it is, here's our soil test, here's our organic matter levels, here's our carbon test that we've done, here's our compaction test that we've done. We have things like autonomous pivot on our pivots to track how much water we're using and when we should be irrigating, etc., from a technology standpoint. It's pulling as many things as you can from a technology base together as well as hard physical facts to come out and say, this is what we've done and here's where it's at, and it is trending in the right direction. It doesn't happen overnight. It'll take the 10, it'll take 10 years to really see good change. And I will tell you, we've done we do our soil tests every year. We have farms at times that we see take a dip, and then we have to step back and look at and say, was it the time we tested? Was it the previous crop? Was it something that happened here? Or is this a natural process of you get these as you work your way up? The important thing for us is it's up and to the right across the board in general. So that tells me we're on the right path, we're tracking the right things that are important to us and to soil health. And ultimately, all of those things roll into two aspects. They roll in from uh for us to a higher quality asset that is improved, therefore has an improved value, it makes more money, and so therefore, it's worth more. And then also for the farmer side, it's more financially rewarding for them. So I think sustainability is a twofold piece in my book. There's sustainability of how we all think about it on soil health and organic matter and water, and then there's sustainability for five for financial reasons. If you take a farm that is not financially sustainable to go out and do what we're doing, they're gonna go back to conventional ag and they're gonna go back to the way it was because in general those farms will make money and you'll be able to pay your bills and raise your family. So you've got to be you've got to have both sides of that sustainability piece work for you in order to have success in making that transition across. And I think today we've seen success in it. Like I'm very happy with what I see for hard-tested results of yes, we're making a positive improvement. Also, our economics are positive on that side.

SPEAKER_00: 49:39

Yes, sir. On your own farm, the family farm, have you seen changes there? Because that's 10 plus years in in this transition in terms of production, in terms of soil quality, in terms of unexpected things, let's say, because it's a proper time, let's say 10 years.

SPEAKER_01: 49:53

Yeah. Yeah, no, we have. I think our soil health, our organic matter, our our water holding capacity, I think it's all improved. I think you you can see it getting down on your knees and looking at the soil, smelling the soil, and then you look at the crops that come off of it. There there is an improvement there. And for us, it's also an improvement financially on it. We our rotation is different for because of where we sit further north in, let's say, the state of Nebraska. We sit closer to the state of Minnesota, so you're further north, your climate is a little different. For us, we grow corn and we follow it traditionally with winter wheat, and then we'll take winter wheat off about 4th of July, and then we double crop soybeans, which is late to plant soybeans, but it's a low-yield short crop. But ultimately, we'll end up with three crops in two years, is a lot of times. A rotation doesn't always work depending on the weather that way. But for me, I see it as where we traditionally take one crop a year, we're taking three, three crops over two years, and in essence, on what we're doing. And then a sh a shift just to our agronomy practices. So, yeah, it it is a positive result for us on both what we're doing from a production standpoint and a financial standpoint. And it's a lot of the basis off of how I look at what we do for Clear Frontier and our processes, how that works. I I farm, I farm part of the family farm because I enjoy it and it's it's emotionally rewarding for me, and I enjoy that part of it. I also do it for the essence of I know then what my fertility cost of my land costs. I know all of my numbers, I know my marketing. So I know very well when we go to buy a farm and I look at it, I know what the numbers should look like and how that ought to be. I also know when I'm sitting with a farm operator, it's harder to BS me on stuff because I also pay my own bills and I also know what it looks like on my side. So I think there's fund managers or people that do what I do that you can sit in New York or San Francisco and manage that. But for me, I want to be in the middle of the farm country and I want to have my own farm as well on the that is my own personal one that has nothing to do with it, so that I know exactly where my when I'm when it's a pain point for me, it's a pain point for everybody else on it.

SPEAKER_00: 52:20

So and I don't really know how long term a REIT is. Like what happens with what happens after a while? Is it a 10-year, 20-year? What are you forced to sell at some point? Like, how does that work in practice in terms of longevity, which is often a challenge, let's say I think in real estate we figured it out, but in farmland, not always. What is long here, and how do you make sure you don't force sell things where you don't want to?

SPEAKER_01: 52:45

Typically, typically it's a 10 plus two, so it's 10 years plus two to one year extension, so it's 12 years. In a perfect world, you love to own farmland. If you get good farmland, you love loaning indefinitely as an asset class. And once you get a transition going, the reality is people that are investors don't always want to be in something for eternity.

SPEAKER_00: 53:06

They want so except if ultimately if you're a Warren Buffett, which is in your hometown where you're now, but it's a very interesting, like the most successful investors on the world are long-term ones, etc. But somehow the other 95% of the investors are addicted to short-term in a way. We'll get to that, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 53:23

It's very true. So typically at the end of this, it a few things happen. Either you get your current investors that buy out a portfolio and they just keep it and have you continue to manage it. That could happen. You could sell it to another investment group that wants the impact and the higher return and the benefits of that. And that could be an option that goes that way. It could get sold back to the farmers that are operating it and they continue to operate it if they can buy it. It can go a lot of different paths. I don't know which way long-term our stuff ends up going. The future will tell us on that. But there's multiple different paths for it. I think for me, I always come back to the fact that I think the next owner down the road, when our investors, when it's a sell for our investors, the next owner of that would have a difficult time looking at that and saying, hey, this farm generates more revenue. It's farmed in a more impactful way, it's more healthy financially and sustainable. I want to go back to conventional. Could they? Absolutely. But would they? I don't think it would make as much sense. I don't think it would make as much sense to do that. So hopefully, hopefully that works that way. In the world of in the world of managing something like this, it's much different. If you're independently wealthy and you can go buy it with your own money, you can say, I'm gonna hold that for eternity, which would be a wonderful investment. Sometimes you deal with what cards you've got when you're trying to go build that and do that. And for us, that means at least today there's a there's an endpoint to it, and you figure out what you're gonna do with that when you get to that point. So we'll see. I would love it to be indefinite or evergreen, as they would say, but that's just not the way the cards always play.

SPEAKER_00: 55:07

The financial world. And has that been, let's say, from an investor perspective, how has the reaction been you're still in business, you're doing this, you've been growing, which means more and more people have invested. You got a really nice shout-out from Lucas Walton in the Financial Times in his first ever interview, I think. And he, I think a few quite a few lines were uh spent on how he met you and investing in Clear Frontier. Mark, how has been the reaction in general from investors? Has there been interest like on the financial side? Because often organic is seen. I'm gonna ask you also, do they throw questions at you like how to feed the world? But like organic makes financial sense. Like, how has that message landed? Apart from all the impact side, of course, but how is that message landed with investors? How have you been able to not even sell, but just convene that message? Like, look, this is there's something is happening here.

SPEAKER_01: 55:53

So, yeah, it's it's a couple things. The I feel like the feedback from our from investors has been very positive, and people like the asset class and what we're doing. I think ultimately you have to look at it and say, farmland is a it's a real asset. It's you own a hard asset that you can feel, touch, and smell. Unlike some infrastructure things that are depreciating assets, land is an appreciating asset. So it goes up over time and appreciates as well as generates revenue from it on an annual basis. Land in general is going to be a lower return than venture or certain other markets. And so investors have to be okay with the concept of what those return numbers are going to look like because they're not going to be the same as other things. But it's also risk and it's also a bit of are you trying to do something that's a positive financial reward, but also really good for ag, food, system, planet, soil. And so I think it takes the right person or investment type group to like what we do. It's not for everyone, I would say that. You've got to, I think most investors that like what we do have got to have a viewpoint that they like. They're comfortable with the return level, but they're also comfortable with the impact that it gets. And so there's a value beyond just a number. And that's not everybody, and honestly, that's okay. There are some that the return is is all that really matters is focus point, and that's okay. That means this might not be your cup of tea. So it's got to be a combination of the two. But you look at what Lucas mentioned in the Financial Times, and I his view of it is hey, it's a great investment to be in. It also makes a really positive impact on our food system, and you got to drive for change, which is a lot of what he has done so successfully and quite amazingly, is how do you do things to drive change? And I think if you can drive change while making a return on it, I think in the old days people would have looked at impact investing type things and said, Well, I'm doing it for the impact, but it's not necessarily financially accretive. Today, I believe you've got to be financially accretive and positive as well as ideally make a really solid impact. So it takes the right, it takes the right person, it's gonna be the right group and it's gotta fit right for what one deems. And that's not everybody.

SPEAKER_00: 58:25

And I often ask this question, let's say we're in a theater, we do this in front of a live audience, could be Chicago, could be somewhere where the room is filled with investors managing their own wealth, other people's wealth, through the pension funds, banks, etc. We have a nice evening, we look at a lot of photos, we have some farmers on stage as well, of course, a nice meal, things like that. But if you want, if you could plant a seat, because people forget as well, like the next day when they're opening their laptop or in their office or somewhere, and you would like to plant a seat, something they remember from that evening. What would be the message you want them to really remember and hopefully do something with?

SPEAKER_01: 59:00

Yeah, the message I'd want them to remember would be that you can you can make a financial rewarding return while changing a lot of posit lives for a positive impact. Both the farmers, the food system, and the next generation. And I don't think that there's that many things in the world today that we look at that say, Yeah, I can invest in this and I can do ultimately a lot of good for not just me, but for a lot of other people. If I look at the US from New York to LA on a food system for the next generations to come when I'm gone. And I can do all that as well as have it be financially rewarding. Yes, are there other things you can do that in? Absolutely, but they're not there's not a ton of them. And so that would be the message I would think that I'd want to wake up the next day and think that's an interesting thing about agriculture and doing agriculture differently.

SPEAKER_00: 59:56

And do they ever throw that question at you? Yeah, great, great, Justin, you're doing this at a relative scale, but of course, this could never scale to all of the US or all the cropland. Like, how do we feed the world? What's your standard answer to that interesting question we look at regularly?

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:13

And honestly, your listeners probably won't love this answer, but it's the way I think of it is being accurate today is I think it can, I think it can and will continue to scale and will continue to grow. I think it'll be a slow process. I also do not believe from farming on multiple continents. I don't believe today, like our system of farming organic, I don't think it works everywhere. I don't there are soil types, there are locations, there are disease pressures, there are insect pressures, and there are certain crops grown that it's super difficult to do with the technology we have today. And in order to feed planet Earth, it's not the it's not the end all of the system what it is. You take the Midwest of what it was 50 years ago and 100 years ago, where every farm had chickens, pigs, a few dairy cows, a beef cow, etc., that system's gone and it's not going to come back. There isn't the label there, labor there, there isn't the biosecurity there. That system has changed. And so the way we used to farm is not the way we're going to farm and feed 7 billion to 9 billion people. So I think you're always going to have conventional ag. I think conventional ag is going to improve at a drastic level on what we put on the soil and how we do it. But I think you're always going to have two tiers. I also think technology is going to change a lot of this. I think when we look at like the laser weed zappers that you see that today work in onions and strawberries and some of the high value crops that are on smaller acres, that you can go out and use a laser to zap the weeds out of a field. That excites me. I do I have seen very little of it to say it's economically feasible for the thousand acre farmer that grows corn and soybeans in the Midwest. To make that work, I don't think it works. So I don't think we're there yet. I think you're going to see some chemicals come out that are natural occurring chemicals that will be great for weed control, are made out of natural plant extracts, etc., versus chemical compounds. That excites me. I also think we'll probably see some genetics that come out that help us on our cover crops, for example, that are maybe through CRISPR technology and different things that help us use the right cover crop that maybe self-terminates or does different things that helps us on that, that controls our weed, that allows more people to go do this. Today, with the technology we have and the systems we have in place and the economics of it, you're just not going to go out and switch 180 million acres and switch it over one, it would destroy the price, too. It would be too complex and too hard. And there's too many places where if you take the Mississippi Delta in the southeast of the United States, they don't get the freeze and thaws the Midwest yet. They've got a different disease pressure and a different insect pressure. Organic, in my opinion, is very difficult there. It's a much different aspect than it is where it gets 30 below zero for two months out of the winter in the Midwest. So there's a change, there's a change to that. There's also a quantity of how much manure is out there and how much compost is out there and how do you feed a crop. So I would ultimately say conventional ag is not going to go away. I think if you're compassionate about how conventional ag happens, it's how do we do it better and at a more sustainable level or a healthier level. But it's not going to go away on feeding planet Earth when you look at the globe from what Brazil does to across to Australia. It's not going to go away, so you can do it better. But ultimately, we live in a world where consumers have choices and operators have choices and business people have choices. And so having the choice to do it differently, where it works for you, I think is the right answer. And I'd like to see as much of that happen as possible. But I think as a realist, you've got to figure out where it doesn't work. And maybe technology changes all this in five years at the level of way AI is going, and I'm completely out to lunch. Maybe it all changes. But I think the reality is conventional ag is not going to go away. And we don't want it to go away. There'd probably be a lot of malnutrition on planet Earth if it went away because the conventional farmer feeds a lot of people on planet Earth and they are going to continue to do that. So time will affect a lot of that, technology will affect a lot of that. And I think all of it at the end of the day is how can we be better at if we're going to be on the conventional side, how can we do it better and continue to produce the bushels or the tonnage that's needed to go about it?

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:36

So that's my view of it. And switching the seat, let's say, there, not the seat, the let the literal the one we sit in, not the one we plant. If you would be on the investor side and you had that billion dollars to put to work to accelerate things, but as an investment, could be very long term. We're not talking 10 plus 2 or seven years or anything. And I'm not looking for dollar amounts. We're not giving investment advice, obviously, here, but I'm looking what practitioners like yourself, people deep in the space, would prioritize. Would you go for the robotic Zeper? Would you go for genetics? Would you go for compost facilities, or maybe all the above? What would you focus on? Would you buy land in other places? What would you focus on if you had a significant, not unlimited, but a significant amount of money available tomorrow morning?

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:18

Yeah, so from a diversity standpoint, I wouldn't put it all in one bucket, but I think land is I think land is an amazingly good asset class and important to the survival of the world on having land and taking care of it. So I think that's a significant piece. I think I think continuing improved genetics and improved genetics that are not the same genetics we've been doing of how do we add more GMO traits on top of each other and doing that more of how do we take some of the non-hybridized crops that we've had in the past that are probably healthier for us? How do we figure out how to do some things with those or make them more relevant? I think there's a lot of work in the cover crop space on how we can make different or better cover crop and promote that side of that to push that to try to get more people to use cover crops to improve soil health. I think there's a lot of technology on water management. We irrigate a lot of the a lot of the US as well as we do on planet Earth. We realistically we over-irrigate all the time. And so for me, a lot of it would be around water is going to be super crucial in the next hundred years. How do we manage our water better where we where we are putting our water and the use of it so that we maximize efficiency on production but don't overuse it? And then I would probably put a lot of money in technology of I'd probably put a lot of money on the technology of how we get away in conventional ag because as I mentioned, I don't see conventional ag going away, and I don't actually believe it should go away because of feeding planet Earth. But how do we do things in there to try to make that less chemical dependent on things like glyphosate and 2,4D and all of the big chemicals that we use that are in our water system and float all over? Like all of those type of things I think are an off-ramp, but not complete organic.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:13

Like how do we drastically, significantly reduce on the other 95% of non-organic lands?

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:19

And one thing I I haven't mentioned on that on the regenerative side, and we have some farms that are regenerative certified, a couple of them that aren't organic certified. I also look at that and say, I love the regenerative concept of farming. Today, at least in the U.S. market, there is no premium on regenerative grain predominantly. And so if you're a if you're a farmer in the state of Iowa and you're going regenerative corn, it's going straight into the ethanol plant like the GMO stuff across the road is. So it's also one of those things of how do we how do we develop that more? Because I come back to corn operated, people are not going to go out and take a yield reduction and spend more money, especially on rented farm ground, that they're looking at a 10-year reward of reduced inputs, let's say, from changing their practice. It takes money to buy whiskey. You've got to be able to produce money, you've got to be able to produce stuff at a higher value. So creating markets around that that consumers ultimately have to pay for, someone has to pay for. Creating that to help build that out would be wonderful. So it doesn't have to be organic, but how do you have a change system? But it's got to be economically driven, which is for me the organic piece. There's an economic premium for doing all of that work in that three-year transition. And that's what makes the world go around on that. So, yes, as I look at that billion dollars, there's a bunch of things in the ag space that I think would be crucially important to drive that change. And you wouldn't put it all in one bucket. Or I think that'd probably be poor management if someone did.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:53

And I want to be conscious of your time. We already went over a bit, but it's been so fascinating. We could do this way longer, and we might do at some point. But as a final question, if you had a magic wand, so we take away your fund, your billion dollars unfortunately is no longer there. But you do have, and this is an impossible question, we've heard all kinds of answers from global consciousness to end of CAFOs and to reinforcement of actual reinforcement of water laws, as practical and unpractical as you want it to be. But if you had the magic power to change one thing overnight, what would that be?

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:32

Boy, yeah, that is a it's a loaded question on how you do that. I think if I think if I had a magic one to change one thing, I think I would possibly say I I would I would possibly go back and change the essence of what we did on GMO traded crops. And there is a value in places for using GMO traded crops for what we produce for the world, but it has caused us to have such an overuse of glyphosate in products like 2,4D that I think the lasting effect from a soil health and from a water cancer and all of these things. I don't think in the 90s when that came out anybody thought of what that looks like 30 years down the road. Has it been successful for developing ag and a lot of what we produce? Absolutely. And there are places I've seen in Africa where people are out using a backpack sprayer, spraying insecticides and walking through it that I think man, a BT type cotton, for example, is a wonderful thing for them not being there. So there are places where there's uses for it, but ultimately in the big picture, if you took your magic wand and said, well, it would be a lot better for the environment, the health, human nature, et cetera, reducing all of that chemical usage that has probably come from that and some of the negative effects, I think that'd be one thing that I would say I'd change. And ultimately, I think you would have driven in the last 30 years more of what we do today on the organic regen side of how do you farm more dynamically with crop rotations to manage disease and pests and weeds. You'd have changed that versus the monoculture that it created. And I think that would have changed the entire outcome of where ag sits today if you took that magic wand and went back and looked at it. That may be the worst answer of all of your 400 podcasts you've got on that question.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:19

And we're gonna ask a large language model on AI to summarize all of those, but I don't think it's a bad answer at all. Because it does that's because organic and regen people are like, yeah, and it's not there in yields in many cases, etc. And I think people forget how much research and money went into not the other side, but other strains in agriculture and how much money we spent on optimizing everything from machinery to outer steer to to all the seeds to all the applications that are for that one system. And if that same or a fraction of that money would have, and the the brains of the last 30, 40 years would have focused on diversity and how do you manage weeds without killing everything around it, like we have a long way to go there in terms of things that like there's a lot of room left. This is optimistic tone, a lot of room left to optimize in these systems because we are so at the beginning of many of the seed developments of many of the of course the technology that's coming now, but also simply of what is the best rotation for this place and how do you actually follow up and what do you how do you break compaction and how do you it's a lot of these things are being figured out now or half figured out maybe, or a third or a fourth, but definitely not okay. This is the system, let's go, which makes it fun for pioneers like yourself and others, but for in order for to break through to the next 20, 30 percent, which is what we need, yeah, you need more playbook stuff, and we just don't have it in many cases because we're not there yet, because we don't haven't spent all the best brains and egg for the last 30 years, a couple of hundred billions on this.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:41

And when you have a when you have an easier button to push, and you so if you have a GMO crop and you can go out and spray it with the non-selective herbicide, it causes you then to say, well, let's how do we get a higher yield out of that and produce more? Versus saying exactly what you just said of hey, how do we look at crop rotation and cover crops and different things to manage that? It just it changes your focus and then what happens. And when you take that from an industry-wide and billions to trillions of dollars over 30 years, yeah, it's those are all things that compound on itself of the direction of where the railroad tracks end up going. But it's okay. It makes pioneering what we're doing and pioneering change, it makes it ex it makes it exciting for us. And ultimately in life, some things have to go one direction to have a reason to go the opposite direction, which is a lot of what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:34

So what goes wrong comes around, and that it's okay. And I think it's a perfect moment to wrap up. Thank you so much for the work you're doing and for taking time in this busy schedule because it is at the time of buying farms as well, because we're in the autumn of 2025. And as you explained, it feels like a few hours ago, but I think it's half an hour ago, this is the moment to get farms on the regen transition because that gets you two harvests instead of three harvests for without a premium. So that's this is an important and timely one. So thank you for taking an hour plus, an hour and 20 minutes of your busy day to share it here with us. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:08

It's a pleasure to meet you, and I enjoyed it. And I'm available for anybody that listens to this and has questions, they can always find me. So I appreciate it. Thank you much for your time. Thank you for the work you're doing. I think it's very important and well respected.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:27

So what? Why is this important? This is a new outro format we are piloting. So please let us know what you think. I think this conversation was fascinating. It's very refreshing to hear somebody say, look, organic makes more money. This is a financial decision. Besides all the other impacts we have on soil, on health, on human health, on animal health, all of that is true, but it's a financial decision. First, it makes really good money with a lot of challenges and issues, etc. Organic isn't easy. So it's been very refreshing to hear that, to see that, and to be to see someone that has been able to sell this to investors as well. And I think it comes to is it perfect? No. Are there many more ways of improving the soil health and the soil life on these farms? Yes. Is it perfect to have a fund own a lot of this land? No. Would we love to have a lot of these farmers buy this land or some of this land going to the commons? Absolutely yes. Is it better than 95% of the other farmland around? Definitely yes. So I think the question here becomes more why are they not more operating like this? And how come uh, let's say, hundreds of millions or billions haven't flown into places like this? What is holding investors back to to get onto uh this train? I have my thoughts about it. I think it's partly not even knowing that this is possible and the financial opportunities are there. Very strong narratives about how to feed the world, etc., are holding people back, even though they're not true, even though we've had many interesting scientists saying other things. So I think there are many things, but I'm also curious what you think. So please let us know in the comments, get in touch what you thought of this interview, and what you think of this interview, and what do you think is holding back investors to really double down on finance first organic regen investments? Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website, investing in regenerativeagriculture.com/slash posts. If you like this episode, why not share it with a friend? And get in touch with us on social media, our website, or via the Spotify app and tell us what you like most. And give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.