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
102 Walter Jehne, stop talking about carbon emissions and focus on restoring the water cycle
An episode about the impact of regeneration on cooling the climate with Walter Jehne, forester and agricultural scientist specialising in soil microbial ecology of plant diseases, nutrition, and land regeneration.
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Forget about drawing down enough carbon to get below 350per per million, but this isn’t a depressing interview a rather hopeful one! Storing carbon in soils at scale is absolutely possible and crucial but not because of the carbon drawdown but because it restores the soil sponge and thus the water cycle.
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Forget about drawing down enough carbon to get below 350 parts per million. But this isn't a depressing interview. It's a rather hopeful one. Storing carbon in soils at scale is absolutely possible and crucial, but not because of the carbon drawdown, but because it restores the soil sponge and does the water cycle. Join me in this eye-opening interview where we discuss the impact of regeneration on cooling the climate and why we all should be incredibly hopeful and get to work. Welcome to another episode of In March last year, we launched our membership community to make it easy for fans to support our work. And so many of you have joined as a member. We've launched different types of benefits, exclusive content, Q&A webinars with former guests, Ask Me Anything sessions, plus so much more to come in the future. For more information on the different tiers, benefits, and how to become a member, check gumroad.com slash investingreach Welcome to another episode, today with Walter Jenner, forester and agriculture scientist specializing in soil, microbial, ecology of plant diseases, nutrition and land regeneration. Welcome, Walter.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, thank you, and wonderful to be with you all, and yes, look, very keen to have this discussion, and coming, filling out on that background, yeah, I basically, that's my academic background, but so I've worked a long time in research with CSIRO, Australia's leading research organisation, but also with farmers, and for the last 15 years have been retired and have set up sort of an NGO called Healthy Soils Australia, and now it's morphed into regenerate earth because we're part of that whole global community of well what do we do how do we address the imperatives of climate change what have you food security and really it's managing the landscape managing the earth regenerating the earth that's really the foundation and our only solution so that's in a sense brings me to this point now
SPEAKER_00:i know you have been extremely busy you say retired but you have a second career basically after but To go back a bit to the beginning, why did you or how did you end up working in soils and focusing on agriculture of the other million options you potentially had?
SPEAKER_02:Okay, well, look, obviously, no, I'm obviously very interested in biology and the natural ecosystems around us. So that interest in forestry and agriculture, that was there. But the soils actually, as you understood biology, it became really quite fundamental because soils actually have how nature created the terrestrial biosphere, right?
SPEAKER_00:Just for anybody, what is the terrestrial biosphere?
SPEAKER_02:Okay, well, that's the life on land, right? That's the terrestrial land.
SPEAKER_00:So everything comes from soil.
SPEAKER_02:And the biospheres are all the forests, agriculture, hydrology, because it's actually soils. If you go back 420 million years, there were no soils. It was just ocean and rock. And it was the fungal processes of pedogenesis, the lichens and the mosses that then dissolved that rock, leaving organic matter behind, creating soil. And it was a soil then that formed for the first time that succession of plants on land. And of course, that built the soil. And with the soil, we built hydrology, the capacity of those soils to retain water, to infiltrate, retain rain before it used to just all run off. And that actually then created life on land, right? So it's really soil in nature is the point of generation. And so if we need to regenerate, it's just logical that, hey, we've got to go back and use exactly the same processes that nature takes. in creating the biosphere we all depend on.
SPEAKER_00:And it's safe to say we haven't been in the last 50 or in some cases 12,000 years. We haven't used those processes of nature. We've done the opposite.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, but we shouldn't be too harsh on ourselves because what we're saying is, no, we have agency. We have a capacity to either degenerate, degrade, or regenerate. So it's a very empowering understanding of soils that, hey, this is our point of agency. It's actually quite profound, too, that when you think of it, humans, it is the only point of agency we have on the planet.
SPEAKER_00:Explain
SPEAKER_02:that. You might contemplate, well, look, what can I do to the oceans? What can I do to the air? But you really have to then come back to soils and our management of soils if you want to influence anything in this biogeological cycle and, yeah, the dynamics of the planet. So now we've got climate change. We've obviously got a planetary emergency. It's critical. But when you think of our point of leverage, even CO2, we have to go back to soils because we have to ask the question, one, where did the CO2 come from? Yes, the oxidation largely of soils, as you said, for the last 12,000 years. But also if we have to draw down CO2 from the air, what can we do? Yes, we can draw it down and put it back into the soil as stable soil carbon. So even managing CO2 is a soils issue.
SPEAKER_00:Because many people are questioning that. They're questioning the carbon piece, the CO2 piece, because they're saying it only gets stored in the first 30 centimeters, according to the comet model. It's not stable because then when we plow and you're saying it's our only point of agency we have is actually the soil.
SPEAKER_02:Well, look, I mean, and the science is very important to mention, there's about 750 billion tons of carbon in the Wow. Wow. might have been eight times more than in the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_02:And in a sense, it's really the buffer. And in a sense, we have altered that buffer. But it's the only point of agency, the only point we have of actually removing carbon from the air, from the ocean, to put it back into this other sink.
SPEAKER_00:Because a lot of the carbon went into the ocean.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yes. Well, actually, it's very serious. It says why soils are so important. Absolutely, when we release carbon dioxide, initially about half goes into the ocean, but then it re-equilibrates and it ends up with about a third of the CO2 we've released is in the oceans. There's some 38,000 billion tonnes of carbon dissolved in the ocean. And it makes the point, you see, that's 50 times the carbon in the atmosphere. And so even if we try to draw down carbon in the atmosphere, The oceans is a big buffered system. We'll just re-equilibrate. So it will take centuries for us even drawing down, even having negative net emissions to change the carbon in the atmosphere in a meaningful way to change its greenhouse effect. So it's actually the evidence that we can't fix the climate anymore with CO2 emissions. emissions reductions because the ocean is such an enormous sink.
SPEAKER_00:And it will release it again as we are drawing it down from the air.
SPEAKER_02:And so we now have to say, where is there a bigger point of agency? And that's where we come to soils.
SPEAKER_00:So just to summarize that point, we have released so much carbon and a lot of that ended up in the oceans. And if we're now going to draw down, which we want to, and we're going to get to that in soils, but for another reason, we're going to draw down a lot of this carbon. It will basically be released from the oceans and so the amount of carbon in the atmosphere won't really go down and will take centuries before that amount goes under 400 parts per million or 350 or whatever we're talking so why are you not super depressed because that sounds very depressing
SPEAKER_02:okay no no look we gave up on worrying about carbon emissions as a tool for reducing climate the co2 atmosphere concentration it can't affect the climate but if we put carbon into the soil then we have another force multiplier. Because if we put carbon in the soil, we can hold more water.
SPEAKER_00:Now we get to the interesting part.
SPEAKER_02:And if we can hold more water, then we engage the next more dominant whole fundamental of the climate, and that is that 95% of the heat dynamics of the blue planet is driven by water. The CO2 component in the air drives 4%.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_02:So now instead of of being trying to manage the climate with 4%, we have 95% leverage effect if we manage the hydrology. But we can only do that if we have water in our soils. And so the carbon in the soil is critical to get the water in the soil. So that's why the soil carbon sponge is such an essential concept. It's not the fact of drawing down carbon. It's about rebuilding the Earth's soil carbon sponge, hydrology, and then our power to cool the planet safely and naturally in time through that hydrological process.
SPEAKER_00:So you're saying we have been pulling on the wrong lever, basically. We've been pulling on the 4% lever while we could be pulling or working on the 95% lever.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:Why are we all so excited about the CO2?
SPEAKER_02:Let's just take a little bit of See, I think we've been focused on the symptom. And we've looked at the symptom of our land degradation, our fossil fuel use, and said the symptom is the problem. And cleaning up the symptom is a solution. But it's not like that. It's just the symptom. It's a resource.
SPEAKER_00:It's like fever.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:If we can take that resource and put it back into the soil, then we can engage hydrology, and hydrology is the driver of the heat dynamics, and hydrology is our potential to safely and naturally cool the planet almost immediately, not the centuries that we can no longer wait for CO2 to have an effect. We can use a 95% lever, as you said, not the 4% lever.
SPEAKER_00:And so it's, The CO2, and we have heard this before, actually. I will link the interview below with Zach Wise, where he called climate change and carbon the symptom of a much bigger land degradation and broken water cycles. And that's exactly why I wanted to have you on it as well, because I've heard you speak on it and read a number of things, and we need to focus on water. And it happens to be the same thing at the end in soil. If we regenerate and restore soils, we store a lot more water because of the carbon, but not because we want to store the carbon, but we actually want to restore the water cycle.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Carbon is the resource that we need to use to rebuild the soils to rebuild the water to cool the planet exactly
SPEAKER_00:and so just to reiterate the water cycle for people that are not spending a lot of time on that what are the key pieces there if you had to explain it to a six-year-old what are the key pieces of the water cycle that we should all know
SPEAKER_02:okay well look i mean obviously first of all you got to look at water 71 percent of the planet is covered with oceans 4 000 meters deep right Four kilometres deep on average. So there's a lot of water on this planet. And it's got this extraordinary capacity to absorb and retain heat. And so that's why it's a key part of the heat dynamics. And even with climate change, 93% of the additional heat that we're warming the planet with is going into the oceans. So what we're recording at the moment is only a fraction of what the system is taking. Thank you. But then we've got to look at water saying, yep, that's the heat buffer effect. But now what are the processes that involve with warming and cooling the planet through these hydrological processes? And there's about 10 steps, both warming and cooling, where water regulates 95% of the heat dynamics of the planet. But they're very simple. And, for example, the key one that we can focus on is to say transpiration. When water is taken from soils by vegetation and taken up into the atmosphere, it has to transfer from liquid to a gas, water vapor. But to do that, it needs to be converted from liquid to gas, and that takes about 590 calories of heat energy per gram of water. So this is an enormous quantity of heat that is taken from the surface by vegetation transpiring and taken back up into the atmosphere. And of course, that cools the surface.
SPEAKER_00:It's like when we're sweating. So if you have a bare piece of land, Exactly.
SPEAKER_02:Solar energy coming in, 342 watts per square metre on average continually. And to have a stable climate, you've got to have 342 watts going out. And of course, we've impeded that heat escape, and that's the greenhouse effect. And we heated the planet artificially about three watts per square metre, which is about 1% unbalanced. But the Earth's transpiration, these latent heat fluxes through transpiration and evaporation, they naturally take 24% of the heat that we're getting from the sun, taking it from the surface back up into the atmosphere. That's 2085 watts per square meter globally, or 24% of the heat energy this process is actually using to take it from the surface. And so theoretically, if we just increase the vegetation 4%,
SPEAKER_00:we
SPEAKER_02:can do that 1% cooling effect, right?
SPEAKER_00:So another argument to reforest, re-green.
SPEAKER_02:To regenerate, right? Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:Take away asphalt, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So 4% regeneration in a sense offsets the abnormal warming of the planet. And, of course, when you think of that, we've basically cleared half the vegetation on the planet already in the last 8,000 years. you know, through deforestation, desertification, agriculture, cities, etc. So we've delimited 50% and we have to regenerate 4%. Sounds
SPEAKER_00:doable.
SPEAKER_02:Well, how easy is that?
SPEAKER_00:That's the interesting part, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, how beneficial and how doable and practical. Another sort of equation, I mean, this is putting just the quantity of energy basically on a forest transpiring, an acre of forest transpiring, takes up heat equivalent to 15 tons of TNT exploding on that acre.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_02:Every day. You see? So the amount of heat energy, the amount of energy that this process is using to cool that acre of forest is equivalent to the energy in 15 tons of TNT.
SPEAKER_00:So that's the heat part. So we can definitely, let's say, get rid of enough heat to sort of stay Stabilize it by regreening. But then there's the water part as well and the water cycle. And you mentioned the forest. And there's some very interesting thing around rain that I don't think many people, at least I didn't or don't understand. So let's talk about another piece of the water cycle that's absolutely crucial because people are saying it rains less, it rains more intensely, but less stable. What can we do about that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, look, I mean, this is just one of the, and as I said, there's about 10 processes in a sequence in the water cycle. But let's now skip forward. And let's mention rain, right? Because that water that goes up as transpiration, then basically when it condenses again, it can form clouds. And then the clouds, of course, they're even more effective at cooling the planet because they reflect solar radiation straight back to Earth. and they reflect about a third of the solar incident solar radiation directly back out to space. So we've had 24% from transpiration. Here's another third. So we're already up to sort of basically, what is it, 57% of incident solar radiation through these two processes. So the cloud formation is, again, enormously powerful and cooling. But to form a cloud, and this comes back to your point about rain, to form a cloud, this water has to, coalesce in droplets.
SPEAKER_00:That's what we learn in school, but there it stops usually. How are the droplets formed? That's the question.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and so it nucleates and forms cloud droplets. Then the cloud droplets, if they get further coalesced, they get bigger and bigger to be heavy enough to fall out as raindrops. And that's, of course, the rain. And, of course, that process is governed then by what are the nuclei, the precipitation nuclei that create that rain. And, again, we look at nature and say, look, there's three core pieces or three core processes that make precipitation nuclei that create rain. And, of course, they're ice crystals. And basically, if we've got ice up there, and you've got ice even on the surface, it will coalesce hygroscopically, you know, coalesce water onto it. So there's ice crystals, there's certain salts, you know, the oceans, that's what causes the rain over the oceans. And of course, we've used that for cloud seeding, where we put silver iodide and what have you into the air to nucleate these clouds. But by far the most important in forested area or inland warmer regions where ice and salt aren't there are certain bacteria okay and these are bacteria that are extremely hygroscopic
SPEAKER_00:meaning they attract to others
SPEAKER_02:louis pasteur identified that hygroscopic they can suck in lots of moisture molecules to make a big raindrop and louis pasteur identified them way back in the 1870s right And it's these bacteria. Now, these bacteria are formed by forests, certain forests in certain regions. And so the Amazon, for example, is generating these microbial precipitation nuclei. And we've got all the radio label data that well over half the rainfall in the Amazon is driven by the trees releasing these precipitation nuclei And so we've got this wonderful sort of reality that actually rain is a symbiotic process of vegetation, of life.
SPEAKER_00:Instead of the other way around. And we always hear like it needs to rain to create vegetation, but actually you need vegetation to make it rain.
SPEAKER_02:Beautiful. And so we now see this rain, the hydrology. So we see hydrology as a part of a dynamic cycle with vegetation and with soil. And so now we have rain. But if the rain falls on rock, it runs off into the ocean, is lost. But if it falls into a well-structured, healthy soil, it infiltrates, is retained for more evaporative cooling. And so we've simplified it. So now we have, yeah, transpiration, clouds, rain, soil. And that can actually drive the whole hydrology of the planet. It can drive the whole heat dynamics of the planet. And it can allow us to cool regions. And now let's get practical. I live in Canberra. It's an artificial city 100 years old. It was created as an urban forest. And in a hot summer's day, as we're already getting now, 40 degrees centigrade, it's 12 degrees centigrade cooler.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_02:In that urban forest areas compared to bare concrete heat island regions three, four, five kilometres away.
SPEAKER_00:That's a lot. That's a big difference.
SPEAKER_02:So we've got natural air conditioning of 12 degrees centigrade in an urban habitat and simply because of this water cycle effect.
SPEAKER_00:And you were on the podcast of John Kemp and he asked, I think, one of the most fascinating questions I've ever heard, which when you said, so trees, and you said in this case, a certain type of forest, and I want to come back to that, but you said trees are actually creating rain, not necessarily because of transpiration, but also because of the bacteria, actually crucially because of the bacteria. And he asked, how many trees do you need to plant to get rain? And I think this is sort of a fundamental question, which is very difficult to answer but I still I want to repeat that and say what's the thinking there
SPEAKER_02:okay there's such an important question and obviously you know you John very very sharp so you're asking them and it's important you do And in a sense, there's details there that we just don't know because nobody's ever studied this. We've always assumed rain was a physical phenomena.
SPEAKER_00:And it's biology, actually.
SPEAKER_02:You know, the physicists talked about, but nobody's actually made the point. But we do have a lot of case studies and examples, for example, where we've cleared forests and we've lost the rain, where we've regenerated forest and restored the rain. And then we have basically actual measurements of, yeah, what numbers of, as on the Amazon, you know, what numbers of these nuclear are being put up and we can identify that. because of their radio label, you know, significant. And we know that over 50% of the rainfall in the Amazon is directly driven by these nucleation processes. In fact, we're very conservative saying over 50, because we know that basically the Amazon is a big, I mean, there's another factor here, but the Amazon basically has seven times more rainfall than it has the outflow, Each water molecule moves continually every day as that water moves across the Amazon, and it basically is cooling and precipitating, cooling and precipitating, And so each molecule that comes in from the Atlantic has a seven-fold multiplier cooling process as it moves across to the Andes and then flows back out in the Amazon River. So it's quite profound.
SPEAKER_00:It's extremely profound. And what would you say to, let's say, imagine there's a virtual theater, and in this case it might be a real one, but it's full of interested investors, active impact investors who are very interested interested in soil and ag are interested in regenerative agriculture and food but maybe never thought about the cooling potential beyond carbon so much what would be the crucial things to focus on you say there's a lot of research still needed which is something that could also be funded look what are where would you focus your energy on if you if you would tell an audience full of people that are extremely interested in this phenomenon obviously
SPEAKER_02:yeah well look obviously some people would say to say, look, can I patent this organism to have a patent on rain? Well, dream on, right?
SPEAKER_00:Good luck, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Good luck. Can I geoengineer that organism? Same answer, good luck, you know, because it's nature. But can I take degraded, arid landscapes and look about Portugal, Spain, Syria, Libya, Tunisia? You know, like, I mean, take Libya. Okay, the Romans basically got all the animals for the Colosseum from a savannah, which was Libya 2,000 years ago. And if you look at Libya now, it's no longer savannah, is it?
SPEAKER_00:It's desert,
SPEAKER_02:yeah. And so now you say, look, what can I do by reforestation, putting in agroforest, sheltered woods, reforestation, can I restore the rainfall? And we've got those sorts of experiments in Australia, and the answer is yes, we can. Wow. When John asked the question, you asked the question, how many trees, how old, how many, that varies site by site. you But look, we've got about a dozen case studies where, yes, here we have regeneration and here it's a hydrological effect.
SPEAKER_00:And what is one of the dozen that jumps out? Like if you had to share one of those dozen?
SPEAKER_02:Well, a classic case is we've got a situation in West Australia. You can see it from the space. It's called the rabbit-proof fence. And what happened after the Second World War, we cleared a lot of forest up to an area we thought then would be too arid to grow well. and so we cleared the wetter area to grow wheat and left the rest as just natural forest. And now the forest gets 20% more rainfall than the wheat area. So we basically have the rabbit-proof fence and once the humid airflow that comes from the Indian Ocean flows over all the wheat land, Without raining, once it comes to the forest area, it starts forming clouds and rain.
SPEAKER_00:Because of the process we just discussed, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Because of that process, you see. And so here we are, we've got these case studies of vegetation-rainfall relationships. And sure, we can't say, quantify, you know, each tree will deliver so many litres of rain. But the point is we have many, many case studies where, yes, we've done that. Charles Darwin and Hooker did an experiment on Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the 1870s. The island would be completely degraded, denuded by goats that they'd sort of put on the island for meat supplies for the Navy. And basically they decided, look, we can revegetate one of these mountains. So there's two mountains. It's called Bald Mountain and Green Mountain. And Green Mountain, now 150 years later, yeah, gets 25%, 30% more rain. It's effectively a rainforest environment, whereas Ball Mountain is still just that, ball, no rain.
SPEAKER_00:It's basically a rain magnet, the outer mountain turned into a...
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And so, look, these are the case studies, the evidence, the reality in nature. Yes, this works, right? But look, we don't have to really do the experiments. We We can go to the Sequoia Forest in America. And they're getting up to 80% of their moisture from mists and fog harvested from the marine air flows, right? I mean, that's not aerobacter necessarily, but this is basically, again, trees harvesting moisture from the humid air flows that are induced, again, by vegetation.
SPEAKER_00:And let's switch the question. I mean, I know you're not, you've worked actually since your retirement with a lot of farmers, a lot of entrepreneurs, and actually a lot in the business world. So what if you tomorrow morning would be in charge of a$1 billion investment fund? What would you focus on? I'm asking that question not because of the$1 billion, but I think a lot of money is trying to enter the space. But what would you prioritize?
SPEAKER_02:Okay, well, look, first of all, what we do is, yeah, we would go and do these scaled up demonstrations, as we say, Libya or Spain to say, look, we can revegetate and we can demonstrate Here is a rehydration of this land, both by conserving and we're building the sponge. retaining more water, building these water cycles, but also harvesting more water from the air, right? So you would then demonstrate that at scale where this is economically, regionally, very, very profitable, very viable. You would then document the scientific and the business case for it to say, yes, we can do this. We have created 5 billion hectares of man-made desert and wasteland on this planet over the last 8,000 But there's$2 billion of that at least that we can regenerate. And basically we should be able to demonstrate with really quite modest amounts of money how we can do this regeneration and then present the business case. to wider investors to say, look, we can very readily, profitably, practically regenerate vast areas of these landscapes, grow food, grow forests, and of course, in doing so, restore our climate, restore the resilience of these biosystems. So nothing is more productive and more valuable for the future than regenerating these degraded landscapes. And so if If we had that money, certainly that's the first thing we'd do. Demonstrate, document, make the business case. The other side of the coin is actually just as important but wouldn't take much money at all, and that's to say, look, at the moment our whole economy– is based on externalizing realities, externalizing the real costs and the real consequences of our stupidity. And all we had to do is bring in a proper accounting system of those real costs And then we would see, look, these alternative, these regenerative alternatives are so compelling economically, socially, politically, that it would be a no-brainer. So for a billion dollars, we could turn the world around. No troubles at all.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's extremely compelling. And very importantly, the focus on large scale. I mean, a lot of the focus in regenerative agriculture and food has been on a farm level, one farm at a time, or even part of a farm at a time. And you're saying, if I understand it correctly, we need to think bigger. We need to think landscapes, ecosystems to really regenerate and restore a lot of these water cycles. It's not enough to have a few hectares here and there, if I'm correct.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. It's got to be a catchment level thing, because as we've explained with the Amazon, what have you, these things are at a scale. I mean, they're planetary scale. Not that we have to have a whole continent, but we've got to work out, yes, I've got to do this at this catchment level. But also economically, this is business. You see, basically, we've got to say, look, here is this new agriculture. But what are the actual supply chains, the value capture chains, the specialist skills? And we've got to bring each of these to critical mass.
SPEAKER_00:And what do you see as the biggest barriers there? Because you've been working with a lot of regenerative farmers. What do you see as the biggest barriers for that sector to scale?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's what you said. It's all fragmented, isolated farms. But see, what we're saying, look, if we now have a scale, a critical mass, then it's worthwhile saying, look, we're not just going to grow a commodity here. We're going to turn that commodity into a higher value food. And it's got the scale to say, look, yes, I can put that eco business in there, a food processing, a food conversion business there. Classic case, John Kemp. I mean, it's a beautiful example because we were basically in Ohio. And there's the Amish, and they're growing exquisite cabbages, right? And so then they're trying to sell a cabbage. And, of course, where they are, the market's saturated with cabbages, and they were getting next to nothing for the cabbages. And yet, if they could have some critical mass, they could convert all those cabbages into boutique gourmet sauerkraut, and they'd be able to sell that stuff in New York for, what,$20,$30 a kilogram more. But see what I'm saying? You really need to have the scale to justify these value capture and supply chains. to get that value proposition, the business proposition. And obviously you need the investment to say, yeah, look, we need to build a boutique factory to make that work.
SPEAKER_00:Which costs a bit of money, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But it's so elegant because that's also then jobs, that's local jobs, that's local economic turnover, multiply effects. And that's in a sense now in this post-COVID world what we're facing. We've got to very rapidly come back into regenerating local jobs, local economic, social equity, and rebuilding, revitalizing communities. On that Zawakrat example, see, there's another end to it, which is what I talked about, externalities. See, the biggest externality we've got at the moment in our industrial food system is the fact that it's actually toxic, that it's generating trillions, tens of trillions of dollars of disease and health consequences. And if we put the real cost of those health consequences of this very, very poor food that we're, you know, the nutritional compromised food that we're marketing, if we look to the real health consequences and costs of that and said, look, who's paying for that health?
SPEAKER_01:All of us.
SPEAKER_02:We can avoid those costs by having healthy food, food with the right nutritional integrity. Then that food would walk off the shelf because it was just so cost competitive, we relative to these health costs. That sauerkraut example not just creates jobs and employment and regional revitalization, but it would save trillions of dollars in disease consequences and social cost savings.
SPEAKER_00:And would that be, I always like to ask the question, if you could change one thing with a magic wand in food and agriculture, actually globally, would that be another accounting system or would you have something else that you would love to change if you had the magic power?
SPEAKER_02:No, look, actually, it's very nice. Yes, it's another step in the argument, right? And so what I'm saying, once you could demonstrate this at scale, once you made the business case, once you sort of said, look, we can now create the economic regional revitalization, eco businesses around it. And yes, we could reinforce that with these externality subsidies, protection rackets that the status quo is operating under. Yeah, they all become parts of a totally compelling paradigm change. And we could flip economies, we could flip health systems, climates very, very rapidly, very, very profitably.
SPEAKER_00:And would you focus on the most degraded pieces? Is that where we can have the most impact? Like Saudi Arabia, like Libya, like, or not? Like, where do you prioritize? Because a billion is a lot, but it's also nothing at the same time.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, okay. No, no, look, you're very important question. And obviously, you don't abandon any But yeah, the priority would be where do you get the most effect? the best results, benefits for obviously the most efficient use of resources. So, no, you would start off actually where we've had good land that we've degraded but able to bring it back relatively rapidly, and then you'd either have good potential land, I mean, in Europe, to say, look, here's Spain or here's the Iberian Peninsula, and it's now at risk of aridification with climate change, loss of water, wildlife, fires etc and then you would say look what do we do to secure the Iberian Peninsula as a highly productive Mediterranean food bowl and yet in the space of 10 years Europe really focused on yes we've got to do that because so much is lost if we don't do it and so much can be gained from just marginal intelligent investment in that very short period and you do that before you say look I'm tackling Saudi Arabia, for example. But of course, they've got lots of money themselves. And so they could do projects as well. But the priority would be, yeah, avoiding the Iberian Peninsula turning into a desert.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So how would you then prioritize within a peninsula? Because Spain and Portugal are relatively small compared to some other countries, but they're still very, very big. Like, how would you approach that?
SPEAKER_02:No, but you've already fixed that problem. Because if you're now saying here are investors, look, here are billions of euro of investment money. And you know very well that there's no point investing in speculative derivatives. Everyone's printing money and it's just deflating. Everyone's looking for where is there a solid investment source. And just putting that business case, then they would be looking at the opportunities and saying, yep, look, agroforests, grazing ecologies, olive plantations. I mean, they would be looking at these business opportunities and saying, right, this is giving me the return on investment, both in terms of production costs, but also this is giving me natural capital and social capital dividends, ecosystem service strategic security for the future. And all those add up into a very compelling business case. So it's no longer up to politics. It would be actually money and investment interests that are driving this change.
SPEAKER_00:And we are, I mean, you said in a post-COVID world, you're in Australia where you're a bit further ahead, I think, compared to some other places. But let's say we're in a post-COVID world. What excites you the most now in, let's say, the regeneration space? What are things that really get you going?
SPEAKER_02:Well, look, look, exactly. How do we relocalize? In a sense, post-COVID, the whole concept of a globalized supply chain and the vulnerability of that is, of course, no longer so sound. So it's all about relocalization, new value capture, but above all, regional jobs from viable eco-enterprise at the regional level. And all of that, all of that can come from regional jobs. regenerative agriculture. And so whether it's Andra Merkel, whether it's Jacinta Ardern, innovative leaders all over the world are seeing, hey, this is one of our only paths to go back to social equity, revitalization, and actually maintaining social stability. So they're all invested in it.
SPEAKER_00:And I want to be conscious of time. I think we have enough content to talk for hours, but we'll keep that for another episode. But I want to talk a bit, we talked in the pre-interview a bit about agency and what gives us the, let's say, the moral obligation because we are the most important agent at the moment in weather, basically, globally. Can you dive a bit into what you mean by agency in this case in regeneration?
SPEAKER_02:Well, look, okay, we're part of nature, right? So we shouldn't get above ourselves. I mean, we can call ourselves homo hubris, but that's only on the way out, right? If we want to be wise, we should come back to being homo sapien. And if we are wise, then we would sort of say, look, how did nature create these biosystems that we fundamentally depend on, right? The water, the food, the climate, the biodiversity, the habitat, we fundamentally depend on them. And basically, how do we recreate those? And then we learn, okay, how did nature do it? And the point of agency is soil. Because That's really how we influence the planet. That's how we influence hydrology, how we influence the climate, how we influence food. I mean, the point of agency we have as humans is through the soil, through effectively agriculture. And so if we have wise regenerative agriculture, we can regenerate these landscapes. I mean, let's be very positive. Innovative leaders in Europe, in Australia, America, everywhere. And
SPEAKER_00:many farmers.
SPEAKER_02:Many farmers, yeah. They can do 10 tons of carbon per hectare per annum biosequestration to rapidly rebuild healthy soils. we can easily draw down 20 billion tonnes of carbon globally every year to go to negative net emissions, provided we use that carbon, not just to do some carbon accounting and get some dodgy money, but to rebuild the Earth's soil carbon sponge, its hydrology and its safe climate cooling within a decade. OK, so we can do all that. And so it's all through the agents of soil. And the other point of agency, of course, and this is where soil comes in again, is us. It's people. It's empowering grassroots individuals. So every school child, every square metre of soil, every courtyard, garden, every acre, we are in charge. So this is empowering us socially and to say, look, the future is in our hands. It's in the soils that we stand on and we can make those decisions. So it's enormous because we've spent 50 years disempowering ourselves hoping that a government committee or a government process, an IPCC will change things or hoping that an economic agreement or world trade organizations will have equity or something. And it's all delusional. At the end of the day, it's us, agency, empowerment, people, grassroots, young people, communities, and then soil.
SPEAKER_00:I cannot think of a better way to end this conversation. Thank you so much Walter I hope it's not the last time we talk I know we're we only talked about soil and didn't talk about oceans but that will be for another time and there's so many points of agency around soil that we haven't covered yet
SPEAKER_02:yeah no look and obviously there's lots of questions that come up and then basically yeah please ask those questions because it's having good questions that's how we innovate how we progress so look think of the discussion and then come back with those questions and yes anytime very happy to help and thank you very much for the opportunity to talk with you
SPEAKER_00:if you would like to learn more on how to put money to work in regenerative food and agriculture find our video course on investing in regenerative agriculture dot com slash course this course will teach you to understand the opportunities to get to know the main players to learn about the main trends and how to evaluate a new investment opportunity like what kind of questions to ask find out more on investing in Thank you very much. Thank you so much and see you at the next podcast.
