Episode 163: How Your Dinner Bill Could Help Fund Regenerative Agriculture with Anthony Myint

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Region of Agriculture podcast. You know, one of the things that is so fundamental to regeneration, if we truly want to have a regenerative agriculture on scale, then at its most fundamental level, we need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship. We need to have more people in the landscape with loving hearts and caring hands who are engaged in the process of being good stewards. But of course, our. At least here in the United States and to some degree in many developing countries around the world, there has been a cheap food policy that has. There's been this active process of extraction, this extraction of resources from the countryside of, and food from the landscape, and this extraction of talent and extraction of people. And all of these are a result of, at its most fundamental level, if we want to regenerate the capacity for stewardship and get more people into the landscape, then we need to compensate them. We need to pay them well. We need to pay them for the amount of dedication, effort that they're putting in, equally to what we would in other professions. And so it's with. With this concept in mind, I've been looking forward to this conversation with Anthony from Zero Foodprint, who has been doing some interesting work in developing their own approach to how we can compensate and reward farmers well, given some of the imbalances and challenges with the existing system. So, Anthony, thank you for being here. Thank you for the work that you're doing. I'd love for you to just start from the beginning. Tell us, tell our audience about your journey, the work that you've been doing, and what it is that you're working on today.

Cool. Thanks, John. I'm really excited to be here because you're such a thought leader and this is the first time I've ever been introduced on a podcast or anything where people are not focused on the fact that I used to be a chef and restaurateur. And so I'm actually going to start there anyway, though, because the restaurant industry is the largest part of the food economy in the US So bigger than retail, bigger than agriculture. I think it's something like 1 out of 10 workers. So just like a really, really huge sector. And yet that's interesting.

And it's, it's bigger.

How bigger?

You mentioned the number of people that it employs. Is it bigger in gross revenue? Is it bigger? Interesting. So people are spending more money collectively at restaurants than they are in retail?

Much more.

I did not know that.

I don't have the numbers today, but a couple years ago it was like you know, twice as big even, or something like it's huge.

Wow.

So it's really big. And yet I don't believe that the restaurant industry is necessarily, not yet at least fully engaged in transforming agriculture. So a lot of chefs and restaurants may buy from good farms, support good farms. That's well known, the farm to table movement, of course. But I don't believe there really is a robust table to farm movement. So I look forward to digging into that. I'll go ahead and tell you kind of the background and how I got here. I was a chef restaurateur in San Francisco, had some successful restaurants, et cetera, had a daughter around 2012, really started to think a lot about food and climate. And so my entry into regenerative ag was from the climate lens. And so at first, zero food print was helping chefs and restaurants go carbon neutral. Among other things, we did lifecycle assessments with about 80 businesses ranking ranging from like Michelin starred restaurants to fast casual to like the corporate cafeteria at Square in San Francisco with like 5,000 meals a day or whatever. And what we found was basically everybody's carbon footprint. You know, the vast majority, like 70% something, was typically ingredients. And I mean that should be pretty obvious right there. The majority of the food print is food, but that the ingredients are actually representing the agriculture, you know, the plowing, the chemicals, the deforestation, et cetera. And so I can say with clarity now something I didn't even understand as clearly back then, which is that in order for a restaurant or a food service operation to make a meaningful difference in their carbon footprint or climate impact, they need a way to change farming to transform agriculture. And so what I meant in that opening remark is basically most of us are consumers, you know, not, maybe not necessarily you or the listeners on the show, but the majority of like the good food movement is people whose orientation is consumption and buying food. And so the tendency is to lean in is to like jump into like, well, let's make better choices. I'm going to, I'm going to buy a better ingredient, I'm going to not buy a worse ingredient, something like that. And then because I know you're tuned into like systems change and incentivization and stuff, basically it's like agricultural supply is inelastic. And I don't think that that slight pull mechanism has a profound enough impact on supply. The example being like organic is 1% of acres after 50 years despite very clear price signals and all that.

Yeah, so this is an important point that I want to dig into a bit, Anthony, because there are many friends and colleagues of mine who hold the perspective very strongly that if you want to facilitate significant change, then the only pathway to really develop that in a meaningful way is by driving consumer demand. And I have mixed feelings about that because on one hand I do think there needs to be, that people generally need to be brought closer to food and have a deeper understanding of it and that there is, there are a lot of benefits from strengthening the demand side. So I, I see the arguments there very clearly. And on the other hand, that is also, that's that's needing to solve. In the case of the United States, you're now trying to solve 150 million person problem instead of, when you're focusing on the supply chain. You can, you can, you have a much smaller number of people you need to persuade. But why, why do you have. I'm intrigued by your comment that, um, the, the restaurant is significant, significantly greater than retail, and yet it hasn't had a significant impact yet on moving the needle. Why is that?

Well, in order to kind of get at that, let me, I'll tell you my restaurant story. So we were working on regenerative agriculture since about 2014. We were running a restaurant called the Perennial, where we were, you know, championing Karnsa. We, you know, we made sourdough every day, made with Kernza. It almost felt like a backroom deal with, you know, the Land Institute to get a palate of Kernza back then. And then we were, you know, we had a whole animal butchery program with beef from Stemple Creek Ranch, which was one of the pilot projects for the Marine Carbon project and UC Berkeley's biogeochemistry department, you know, where they were kind of studying like microbial necromass and mineral aggregate organic matter and these, you know, lofty issues that don't make it normally to like the dinner table discussion. And so we were trying to tell the story, trying to get people excited about the idea that ingredients and, you know, food could be a solution at this major scale. And I remember a conversation with a journalist where they were kind of, you know, typical kind of snarky journalist picking your life apart. And they were like, you know, yeah, but I get it, it feels important, but how does that actually make a change in the field? You know, And I was a chef in San Francisco in kind of like farm to table country. So I just assumed, like many others, that you buy the good thing, you vote with your dollar, supply shifts to meet demand, et cetera, you know, kind of classic economics. And then. But I didn't actually know. I couldn't explain to them how. And so I started to ask the farmers and ranchers we were supporting, you know, oftentimes like over a beer at the end of some event where we had championed regenerative ag and rah rah, the whole event, you know, and hey, by the way, I've been paying my invoice for, you know, three years now back in the napkin. This is $100,000. So how, how has that helped you do the next thing? You know, does that help you, like plant a thousand linear feet of hedgerows or, you know, do this on the next 20 acres or do whatever. How does that advance your, you know, progress in the field? And, you know, the answer kind of shocked me, but it shouldn't have. But it was basically like it doesn't, you know, like zero sense goes to that. I'm trying to make ends meet. I'm trying to keep my operation afloat. I'm trying to get Gans grants from the USDA or the state to do the next thing and the next. But like you're, you're literally just buying my beef, you know, it's not like you're buying my beef for $9 a pound and then I now have an extra $100,000 to like go do all this work. Like it doesn't work out. You know, that's. It should be pretty obvious. And so for me, it is clarifying to think of to start to decouple food and land management so we can dig into that in detail. But another helpful analogy to me is to think about it in terms of renewable energy. And that's actually because as we were kind of coming to terms with this, we decided to close the restaurant. And then we began a collaboration with the state of California. And really it was with the California Air Resources Board, which is the agency overseeing cap and trade. They brought the Department of Food and Ag in. A lot of the way our programs and work are designed and organized are influenced by the chief economist from the California Air Resources Board. She's now on our board. She has since left the agency. But anyway, I'm bringing up renewables because for me it's clarifying to think about consumption based efforts in renewables, like switching to an ev, switching to a heat pump or something like that. You know, these are important. And then you also have production based efforts like improving the grid. And that could be like $1 per energy bill goes to improve the grid. So you can immediately, because you have a basic understanding of tech, like most people understand that, like buying an EV is one thing that actually is independent of the grid. The grid might be the electricity might be produced by a coal plant, or it might be produced by solar or renewable. I'm buying the cv. That's one action. But we also need the grid to improve like we can. This is clear. And similarly, if you use a dollar per energy bill to improve the grid, nobody is crazy enough to say like, okay, but I'm not going to pay my dollar unless you build whole new energy transmission lines to get the energy to my house. I can't have the, you know, coal energy mixed with the community solar project. You know, go spend a ton of money on infrastructure and rebuild everything so that I can have that identity preservation. But I almost think that's the way things are oriented with food because, you know, I'm not going to pay twice as much for the regenerative loaf of bread or something if it's only 5% regenerative, you know, at the ingredient level, if I have a food orientation. But if my goal is improving land management independent of consumption, then of course we could just improve the food grid. And in a way, you could start to conceptualize the entire landscape as like one big biological solar panel. We're trying to optimize, you know, this cell, this field, this farm, this ranch and kind of society could, if magically there was unlimited money, we could just start kind of like regenerating all the land, never mind the consumption side for a minute. So if you start with that logic, then it opens up like a whole world of opportunity.

All right, so you're disassociating. You're disassociating regenerative management with food consumption perhaps, rather than us. This conversation is very important. And let's make it concrete, let's make it real instead of abstract. Why don't you tell us a bit about the work that you're doing today with Zero foodprint and how that all came to be.

Okay, well, I would love to do that, but actually, let's make it real with a farm story first. So let's use two. Actually, let's say that a farmer's growing wheat and I don't know the agronomic specifics, so sorry if this is clumsy, but, you know, they use 100 units of fertilizer, of chemical fertilizer. If that farmer switched and used 50 units of chemical fertilizer and the fertility equivalent of 50 units of something better, whether it's biologicals or compost or something, that would Be better. That would be better for the public. Like the soil would be healthier, different things, the ingredient, the nutrients would probably be better, etc. But it would be very complicated to try to create a certification so that the market and the ingredients kind of the ingredient economy could reward that and pay for the transition. You know, for. First of all, it would be an upfront cost by the farmer. The reward might be later. Second of all, in order to do that identity preservation, you know, if the farmer was selling the wheat to Archer Daniels Midland or some huge mill, you know, now they have to get a few farmers together for a small scale mill or have new logistics, drive in 100 miles extra, something crazy. And so you're absolutely correct, that process is difficult, right? Do we actually need that messy middle. If the goal is improved land management, there's no reason that the wheat supply wouldn't just become 1% regenerative, then 10, then 20, you know, et cetera. And you wouldn't need that one field out of 10 to be ROC certified or something. It could just start improving. So I think that I'm like, for me, the light bulb moment was instead of focusing on changing eating habits, it's possible for society to just change farming itself. And that's almost like such a. It sounds so simple that, you know, it's like disarming. But it is, as you're pointing out, kind of like rare actually in the, in this movement. So that's my one example with crops. Let's use another example with a different production system that might even drive it home more, which is to say beef production. So again, I'm not the beef expert, but generally speaking, cattle are out on grass or pasture for about a year, then maybe they go into a CAFO or a feedlot or something for the vast majority of beef in America. So I'm not advocating for the feedlot, I'm against that. But in this decoupling mode, you can imagine that the rancher makes progress in year one, even if the cow goes to the feedlot in year two. And in fact that is such a massive opportunity, like 760 million acres of grassland or rangeland or whatever. In the US we could be regenefying landscapes regardless of who eats the beef and what labels and things are on the beef. But the kind of regenerative beef movement wouldn't really be for that because it's. Their industry is organized around kind of like the purity of the regenerative beef, let's call it.

Yep, I get it.

Meanwhile, the plant based movement wouldn't be for that because they're move, they're organized against the CAFO in a way. And so even like climate experts, different things are not seeing this like massive, massive opportunity of just, you know, not a purity contest, but just making progress on the land. A dollar per trash bill could get compost onto rangeland to restore rangeland and conserve water and blah, blah, blah, and improve biodiversity and resilience, just like on the energy bill. But people aren't going there because we're thinking too much about eating the beef. And then with the plant forward movement, etc. You can also imagine, and I'm not trying to like cache it on anything, but you can imagine that a million people give up 10 pounds of beef. So you would imagine like, okay, so then the beef industry would produce 10 million fewer pounds in the US or something. But I think we kind of know that actually what happens is the beef industry produces maybe about the same and then maybe exports it to India or, you know, South Korea or somewhere else. And so there's kind of this false, you know, I guess, false belief that our, that consumer choice is actually kind of like a lever that could save the world or make this kind of deep change happen. When in fact I'm not, I don't believe that like the choice actually is changing the system, you know, at the same proportion as people think.

Well, when I look at it purely from a rangeland and an ecosystem health perspective, I would actually argue that we need more beef, we need a lot more beef production out on grass. But that's, that's a bit of a separate conversation, but I want to come back to you've. Now you used the energy example. You said a dollar per energy bill and you talked about a dollar per trash bill just now. Can you give me any examples of where this type of. I'm not sure quite what the right word is, but where these additional incentives are added to the bill after the fact. Like where, where in what spaces or what industries is this being done currently?

So there's a lot of examples of collective economic action. Like a dollar per trash bill. You see in, you know, I'm in Oregon, Portland, where if I go buy a six pack of beer at the store, there's 10 cents per can added, 5 cents per can in California, Michigan, other places buying a tire or a can of paint, there's a dollar added or $1.50 depending on what state you're in for kind of the end of life use of that paint. There's also a whole great program, the Fair Food Program where the coalition of immokalee workers in Florida, based in Florida, I believe got a penny per pound on fast food tomatoes that kind of circumvented the value chain and then just went to improve wages and provided like 13 to 25% wages for fast food tomato harvesters. So basically there are many ways if society gets creative. Some of them are taxes and some of them are optional fees. And so our particular work is organized around optional fees, but sort of with a tendency and preference towards opt out choice architecture. So some of the hallmarks of this approach and what could eventually create a new normal I believe are mass balance and opt out choice architecture.

Well, there are a few things that I, I'm surprising myself a little bit because I tend to come from a very conservative perspective on market dynamics and so forth. But what I, what I like about what you're describing two things. One is I like the beef example where you so eloquently described the, the opportunity that gets missed in, in, in the way that cow calf herds are managed or could be managed and the benefits that could be accrued there. And the second thing that I really appreciate is that if you, if you add increased price or increased incentive to, to the product that the farmer is getting paid for, that just propagates and amplifies up the supply chain every time someone touches it and adds a certain multiplier margin to it.

Right.

That's what ends up, what starts as $0.01 per pound to the farmer ends up being 15 times that by the time it gets to the consumer.

Yep. Yeah.

So, and so by taking this, this opposite approach as you described with the tomato workers, that has, has very low cost to the consumer but significant rewards on the supply side.

Yeah, exactly. So translating that back to beef, you know, instead of advocating for the price of beef to go up from you know, $4 to $10 or something and as much regenerative certified beef as possible. I would say we, we need that and we also, it's kind of a both. And so instead of just farm product purity contest, we could also have a progress mechanism where McDonald's or Burger King is sending 10 cents per burger, you know, something 1% per burger, 5 cents, whatever it is. And then those, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars could go towards improved grazing in year one of that cow's life. Just like a dollar could go to the energy bill to improve the grid. And we can, society can do both as quickly as possible. But I don't believe the food system has yet. The food economy has yet created that collective regeneration mechanism.

Yeah, well, it's. It's complicated, it's complex, it's messy. It's. We could come up with a long list of other appropriate adjectives as well. So what is, how, how are you implementing this with zero foodprint?

So that's, that's almost precisely what we do is we're essentially engaging businesses and, you know, really almost like their customers in this kind of collective regeneration program. So a business will send 1% of revenue and it could be, you know, an optional fee at the bottom of the check. It could be wonky pricing. Like the pasta was $18. Now they're going to change the price. It's going to be 1818. They'll communicate to consumers this 18 cents is going to farm projects, you know, to build healthy soil and conserve water, et cetera. Or they could just eat the cost. You know, there's a whole. Patagonia has a whole 1% for the Planet program where businesses are just donating 1%. Hundreds of millions of dollars goes through that per year. So in a way, our work is kind of like 1% for the planet, but directly for the planet, where 95% of every dollar is being passed through directly for compost. The cost of the COVID crop seed, you know, the cost of the fencing for regenerative grazing, technical assistance, you know, with a conservation district or university cooperative extension. So really just like the actual cost of that transition. So that's kind of the crowdfunding money coming inside and then on the farmer facing side, since I know that's a lot of your listenership, farmers are basically requesting funds. It is a grant program, but it's unlike other grant programs in that it's not kind of like write an essay contest, you know, here's a black box where you don't know if you'll get the grant. Every request is basically just a scope of work and very simple and not judging the farm's practices or anything. So a farmer might request, you know, $15,000 to plant a thousand linear feet of hedgerows, or they might want, you know, $20,000. They're going to use it on switching from fertilizer to compost on 30 acres and, you know, planting cover crops or whatever it is. So basically we field all these requests and then we are organizing the deployment in order of the cost effectiveness of the carbon sequestration of the projects or of the modeled carbon sequestration of the projects. That said, it is not a carbon credit program, and it's not sort of like carbon Tunnel vision or whatever. Like we're basically using carbon as a proxy for soil organic matter and water holding and all the different things. But there just are these existing tools like the USDA's Comet Planner and others that are organized around carbon sequestration estimates.

Can you give me. So are you. You as zero foodprint, are directly administering the. The grant side and the farmer facing side as well?

Yeah, we are. So we started this in the private sector. So we've been deploying funds from, you know, restaurants, packaged goods, et cetera, sometimes an individual donor, a wine company. So we've been deploying these funds and that part of the work is now over $3 million that has gone out to farm projects. And then we also have found an important role as a kind of government contractor that allows governments to have added capacity in this kind of deployment. So we are deploying millions of dollars as part of a California Department of Food and Ag Healthy Soils Program block grant in California. We have contracts with something like 30 jurisdictions to get compost to farms and ranches. We were part of a big climate Smart commodities grant, but that was canceled. We're part of another USDA grant that was unfrozen a few months ago and that is overseeing 88 on farm trials of compost application. So all of that is to say, like, we're pretty well versed now in the deployment of funds and kind of contracting with farmers and managing that process. And so this is a slightly boring analogy, but I see that role as being a critical role, like what a healthcare provider does, where if you think about it, a healthcare provider is kind of getting millions or maybe billions of dollars to patients or doctors or paying for an insulin prescription or something. And the agricultural transition is this giant prospect that needs to occur, this huge effort. And it will require money going to farmers and each field and technical assistance and paying for the next intervention and the next. So I kind of see our role as being that administrator that can allow funds from, you know, 10 cents from a burger or a million dollars from a company or, or a government or whatever to kind of flow together and sometimes even cost share with each other for the projects that are overlapping and relevant to each.

Are all of your grantees farmers directly? You're working only with farmers or also with other service providers who are supporting farmers?

Great question. Typically, farmers every once in a while will have someone like, you know, the Sonoma county wine growers put in a request, for example, for like a certain amount of linear feet of hedgerows, and then they sub awarded that out to land managers, but so basically with farmers, but sometimes with like one added step.

Okay, and as you've, what are the, what has been the response as the businesses who are choosing to support you both and. Yeah, so that's the first question. Then I have a follow up to that.

Well, it's, it's mixed and it's really almost couldn't be a worse time to start asking restaurants to raise their prices and give away money than Covid and post Covid and I think immigration is going to make things worse, you know, and et cetera. So never really a good time to ask for money. But this has probably been the hardest time. And, and yet what a lot of the restaurants are doing is essentially giving their customers this option. So I think in that sense it.

Is an opt out option though, right?

That's. Yeah, that's typically how we try to organize it. Because if it's opt in, it's kind of inconvenient and very few people opt in. If it's opt out, you know, usually the amount is very nominal and people are, you know, there's like 99.9, you know, whatever participation rate. And so I think for businesses on the brink, it's scary, et cetera, that's risky even if it aligns with your values. But then once they participate, the response from customers is overwhelmingly positive. Like a lot of, sometimes people don't advertise it much, you know, they have signs posted and things. But other times it's part of, you know, the tableside spiel or something and the chef and the restaurant are proud of it. And in those cases in particular, you know, anecdotally at least, the feedback is often like, oh my God, that's amazing. You know, who else is doing this? Like, I want to go support those businesses or whatever. And there's a lot of market research that kind of backs up that consumers will pay like a 9.7% premium for the sustainable choice, you know, even with inflation and cost of living and all these things. So the prospect of like a couple cents, 1%, you know, to feel good about your purchase or whatever, like it's almost a no brainer for customers. But it is very hard to get a business to agree.

Well, it's interesting when you think about. I was surprised at the beginning of our conversation when you described the, the volume of retail trade or the volume. Yeah, the volume of retail dollars that goes through restaurants as compared to retail. But it also seems to me that there's not the same price sensitivity there. There's Less price sensitivity on the restaurant side as there is in the retail side. I would guess that's pure speculation on my part.

Yeah, I. I would tend to agree from a consumer perspective, but then from an operator perspective, like, restaurant margins are just as tight as everywhere. Like if. If not negative, you know, et cetera. So, um, so that's the unique thing where it's kind of this affordable luxury industry. So as the consumer, it's no big deal. But then if for the operator, it's just as hard as anybody saying yes.

Yeah, so what you said, you have. You've had 3 million. Is that 3 million per year or 3 million in total that you've had come in so far? How long have you been doing this? And how do you see it? Do you see it scaling in a significant way?

Yeah, so. So that's 3 million total from businesses. But a lot of it is in the past couple years. You know, we started this collective regeneration work in 2021 or 2020. You know, again, it was like deep Covid. So it was pretty tough early on. To me, the trajectory is that, first of all, like, you know, one franchisee, for example, in Boulder, Colorado, of Subway Sandwiches, is participating in our program. So to me, this really speaks towards the trajectory because, you know, here's a gentleman who I think has a little bit of a farming background, cares about compost, et cetera, but as a Subway franchisee, kind of recognized, like, he can't go to the farmer's market every day, you know, et cetera. And so our program was introduced to him by Boulder county, with whom we collaborate. And so he was like, okay, let me give it a try. So he got approval from corporate to participate. And I don't know, I wasn't on the call, but I imagine the conversation was kind of like, you know, hey, you guys are going to make the same amount of money I'm going to do this thing. I think it'll be good for business and aligns with my values, you know, et cetera. Every customer can opt out, so no big deal. So he's been participating now for like, three years. He reports nobody's opted out. If Subway were to do this at all of their locations, that would be over $100 million per year. So that's one corporation you can imagine. Every single other one, you know, Chipotle, Starbucks, everybody could regenerate if they chose to. To me, this is where the opt out is valuable, because in corporate America, you would imagine that if the CFO of Subway miraculously somehow had an extra Hundred million dollars, he would be obligated to disperse that to shareholders. If he didn't, he would be sued. And so that's kind of where that opt out is crucial because what it means is the customer has chosen to send this 10 cents, you know, or whatever it is from their sub to the farm projects. And then that also comes back to policy because typically with a policy like a tax, you would need a 67% vote and a ballot initiative, et cetera. So usually people don't vote for taxes and climate progress is stall and environmental progress is hard. But in this case if it's optional, you don't need a vote. A city council or a county supervisor could just kind of pass an ordinance and decide because it's optional, even if it's opt out. And so that's actually the like kind of through line to where renewable energy programs like that kind of dollar per energy bill or that kind of thing come into being through that sort of like public private collaboration and choice architecture around opt outs for very nominal amounts. But like a dollar per energy bill, that collective action is so powerful that like Los Angeles, San Diego, like a whole city can commit to 100% renewable energy. Everything could change, you know, and as you probably know, like in the fossil fuel industry there's immense, immense subsidies, $700 billion whatever of subsidies. And so the USDA like food and egg subsidies for crop insurance and these things that are misaligned and perverse subsidies are tiny compared to energy sources.

Yeah, they're a few percentage points comparatively.

So I'm just saying that the lever for change with collective action is huge. And because Regenerative ag has such, you know, is such a win, win, win because of water and resilience and nutrition and farmer profitability, this type of policy will manifest at the county level and the state level. You know, in each county that adapts and begins these programs can commit to 100% regenerative or climate resilient or whatever term they use. But that it requires that decoupling and not focusing on procurement policies, but just economic policy.

What would have to happen? Have you had any conversations with the Subways of the world and these major companies at the most senior levels? Have any of those conversations happened yet and what has the interest been?

Well, I can say we, after about two years we were able to get a meeting with Subway Corporate and they declined to kind of advertise like our ask was just to kind of promote this franchisee, you know, drive business. Hopefully more franchisees would get involved, et cetera and I don't know if they like gave a hard no, but they basically didn't respond to emails after that. As an activist, I kind of imagine that their logic was this would be a little bit risky because it sort of lays bare that we're, we're doing something at five locations and we are doing nothing at 37,000 locations. You know, never mind that everybody else is also doing nothing. But it seemed to me like the optics were, you know, that there was some downside.

So, so what, what has your strategy been? What is your strategy going forward? How, how are you envisioning. You mentioned subway as an ideal scenario and they've. In. In the face of operations perhaps not being so receptive, how do you see the pathway forward to scaling and having a significant impact?

Well, this gets back to one of your other questions too, which was like, what's the reception? And so I had initially imagined like every values aligned chef, you know, at these conferences, at all these events, I know hundreds, everybody's going to do this. You know, I'm an optimist. So I just assumed like, oh, of course everybody's. And then probably we talk with.

I'm laughing because I recognize myself, right?

We, you know, probably have a hundred conversations, 80 people say yes, and then maybe one participates. Like two years later, you know something. It's agonizingly slow and disappointing and frustrating. And I think that is because of that disconnect where a lot of people are already making good choices. And so there's a feeling of like, but I'm already good. And they maybe haven't undergone this thought exercise of separating out food and land management. And so they maybe don't understand kind of to your point earlier, that trickle down impact, that better choices just has this dilutive, you know, narrow impact of like, your operation may be good, but you may not be changing the world as much as you think. And then, and then they maybe don't even understand like the continual kind of continuum of progress in the field. And so there's kind of this binary of like, I'll buy the good ingredient, you know, but not total clarity on like, but what if I helped a farmer or, you know, not helped, teamed up with a farmer to make progress on the next acre, you know, etc. And so basically I think that to me, the path forward is in a, in a city or county where we have critical mass of early adopters and chefs and restaurants and leaders and brands, then getting public policy in place. So like an ordinance creating a healthy soils commission in that region. So Kind of like the analog to a public utilities commission, that community starting to collect funds. And it could be, you know, 1% from a hotel or 0.1% from a hotel. You know, any amount from anywhere, restaurants, hotels, trash bill, you know, it could be property tax, like anything, but just money starting to come in and then be deployed in a way that's optimal for the community.

Do you have any ambassadors representing your work to the restaurants and to, to these companies and actively advocating for you? Are you doing all of the outreach? The majority of the outreach work internally.

We're doing the majority internally. I think increasingly now that we've been doing this for long enough, we are starting to have some kind of chef and industry level ambassadors. So I was just in San Francisco last week for an event with one of our longest, maybe even like founding business members, a group called Flour and Water. So it's a restaurant group in San Francisco with a few locations. They also started doing a dried pasta line nationwide. And this small group has now contributed over $500,000 to farm projects. You know, so you can imagine like how many restaurant groups there are, you know, etc. For reference, if you took California's restaurant industry and if that industry was sending 0.1%, so not a full percent, a tenth of a percent, meaning like if you spent $50 at a restaurant, if 5 cents was going towards regeneration at scale, that would be over $200 million per year, you know, so it gives you a glimpse of like how powerful the economy can be if it starts internalizing externalities at all.

Yeah. So I think the, the question that I would ask you and the context is when you talk about $3 million over the last couple of years, I quite like the idea, I like the decoupling, I like the way that you're framing and presenting this. But $3 million in the agricultural context is the proverbial spit in the ocean.

Totally.

We need to scale that by a thousand x.

Totally.

And if we want to have any meaningful impact. And so the question that I would ask you is here, listeners to the podcast. We have many people who are, who are listening, who are passionate about creating change both in, in the farming community itself and also in many ways connected into agriculture in many ways around that. How I'm already, I would already expect that just from you being here on the podcast. It's very common for people to report that after being here on the podcast, they just get inundated with emails and phone calls and people reaching out to them. And so the kind of, the obvious Piece for farmers. The obvious way for farmers to reach out is with a grant application and that could rapidly become overwhelming. So my question for you is for the people who are connected to. Because many farmers supply restaurants, particular listeners here or they supply that, they, they supply that supply chain, restaurant supply chain in some capacity. How could they serve as ambassadors for you?

Yeah, well, thanks. So first, I should say as part of our expansion and during COVID and different things, we're not just working with restaurants, that's a lot of our membership, but we're also working with amazing brands and retailers. So one example is near me in Portland, an amazing grocery store called New Seasons or Grocery Chain. They have about 21 locations. They were sending 1% from their in house product line. So the bread, the pasta, the deli counter or whatever it is for the month of April. And then amazingly they got 50 other brands to also do that for April. So Tillamook Cheese, Mary's Chicken, you know, Carmen Ranch Beef, et cetera, Bob's Red Mill, a bunch of brands were doing this and it just speaks towards like the immense potential they did. A little bit of signage in the store, like the end cap and a little flag on, you know, certain products. The brands saw about a 4% increase in sales. You know, so just that little bit of marketing moves the needle and is a business win notably. And it might be obvious already, but not all of the products were regenerative certified, but they were marketed as, you know, building healthy soil together and part of this campaign. And so if you're a farmer out there, you know, first of all, if you had a CCSA program, add 1% on your CSA program, send it in. If you work with retail or any kind of other business, food service, anybody that has the ability to kind of just nominally tweak their pricing in this way, make the intro, you know, consider that. Have you heard of this? Etc. You know, here's this TED talk from this nonprofit or whatever, but we're presently we're only active in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington. And then we're expanding to the Midwest and in New York in the coming years or months or years. So part of our work is kind of this expansion too. Like we're kind of deepening in our present regions and broadening in other regions. And so somebody may know a philanthropist who wants to bring the program to Michigan, you know, or whatever it is. We're a scrappy nonprofit and we're ready to kind of expand as long as there's a little bit of support for staff time and outreach to businesses and outreach to farmers and technical assistance. Um, so overall, you know, there's a lot of ways to get involved with the, the opportunity is almost too big because once you embrace that kind of decoupling, then it's kind of like, you know, again, it could be the trash bill, it could be tourism, it could be anybody. Any industry could start regenerating now as quickly as possible.

Yeah, there's a number of things that you said that I'd love to comment on if you're a CSA farmer. First of all, if you're a farmer, you keep it all for yourself. Don't send food.

No, no, but, no, but that's the thing. You invite your customer to add $0.50, add whatever to this thing, and it's going, you know, straight back to farmers. So not understand that you would keep it all for, you know, your CSA is 40. Don't give me 40 cents. Let the customer give me 40 cents.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's, that's really the question that I have, and I'm certain many listeners will have as well. Anthony, is. I think the, the idea is an intriguing idea and it's worth pursuing and exploring and developing further. How do we scale at a thousand x? How do we really have impact with it? Because that's what needs to happen for it to be effective.

Yeah, well, I think a thousand x will happen because of policy and because it's a win, win, win. So I think when we crossed paths most recently in April, I asked you about soil as medicine, and I think you took a note. Why don't we say soil is medicine? And so to me, maybe this comes from regional healthcare, where if in the US 1% from healthcare was coming toward to regenerate acres, that would be 15 billion per year.

Right.

So there's money everywhere, and it's just a matter of how to align the cost benefit for each organization or each, you know, each funder to participate in this win, win, win.

Anthony, there's a number of directions we could go with this conversation, but I, I'm not familiar enough with the scope of your work. I'm just going to ask you the question, what are, what are the important topics that our listeners should know that we haven't talked about yet?

So I think that we've covered a lot of, you know, the theory. And then to me, the, the kind of important thing is almost just like for us in a certain region, like in San Diego, in Boulder, wherever in Sonoma county, you know, we might have like five or 10 business members and if or when we're working on policy, these are the people who might show up at the town hall and like, say, yeah, go for it, it's no problem. And then that might change the law. And then once a law is passed, maybe it's gets adopted in another region, another. So I think in a way what we're doing is grassroots organizing, but like with maybe the highest leverage possible. And so, you know, we're out there trying to kind of instigate this systems change intervention, but it is actually led by one person who runs a coffee shop, one person, you know, franchisee of Subway sandwiches, you know, et cetera, just everyday people who want to change the food system. So to me, it's kind of this idea that before, I think a lot of us have maybe even felt some frustration that the food system is not changing fast enough. And I think we're trying to say, you know, here's a way to change it, get involved. It's a counterintuitive mechanism, but it's real.

Yeah, I, it'd be interesting having a further conversation about the policy piece at some point. I mean, the reality is you have 10 of the largest cities in the United States have half of the U.S. population. And so there's. But those are often, those are very mixed jurisdictions. There's a lot of jurisdictions within those as well. On the other hand, if you begin working with some of the major food retailers, take Walmart and Costco for example, this is purely theoretically, but if there was an interest in working with some of those retailer organizations or major CPT organizations at that level, Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, etc. Now all of a sudden you, you have, in some ways this is, this could be an easier conversation and of course of similar or more significant scale and a much easier win than going the policy direction. Let's see. Much easier to navigate, perhaps and perhaps not.

Well, yeah, let's unpack that for a minute. So you, you mentioned a few for whom I'm familiar with their work. So like Walmart and Pepsi, I believe they made $120 million commitment to regenerate 2 million acres, something like that. So that sounds pretty good. That's a big number. You know, I'm a big fan of anything, any progress like that. If you unpack those numbers though, I think it's 120 million over seven years. So it's 17 million per year combined. And then if you look at that as a proportion of revenue, then it's sort of like going to Walmart spending $140 and then one penny is going towards regeneration. So you kind of mention the big corporates, but that's butting heads with corporate capitalism and shareholder primacy and this inability, you know, Walmart couldn't probably send 1% of revenue because shareholders want that profit or, you know, they want that dividend or whatever it is. And so that's kind of where that slight circumvention by just giving the customer the choice or, you know, separate from business operations is kind of the key innovation in a way because it avoids the trickle down of the value chain and the margin multiplier that you kind of touched on, but also because it's sort of to the side of profit.

Yeah, and that's, that is what I was, that is what I was indicating is that there would be this direct transaction outside.

Yeah. And then for that I think you almost need public private collaboration, like in the case of renewables where you know, the, the existing companies and enterprises are happy for business as usual to continue, are not necessarily happy, but it's like they have no, they're not incentivized to blow everything up and change everything radically. Meanwhile, the local government or state or whatever doesn't have enough budget to make this change happen. Like California even has a cap and trade program. And yet that program at the time that we began this work with them had about 5 million a year for the Healthy Soils program. So that's about 12 cents per acre, you know, which isn't going to go far enough. And so I think the logic as creating this program was not like policymakers need to increase from 5 million to 10 to 20. It's like we need a whole separate program with a billion or whatever. Like you said, the thousand X. Yeah, actually in the UK I just saw they got an approved £2.7 billion per year for sustainable farming.

You would, you would not be happy if there were any listeners or any of our audience from the UK who were here in the interview with us because they would laugh you right out of town. Because the uk, the UK government, like, I don't know the details, I'm not inside, but I have many friends from over there and I watch social media posts and the UK government has been systemically gutting all of their historical programs for, for incentivizing stewardship and regeneration, conservation, whatever terms they call it, they've got, they've, they've historically had a number of, of programs there that were quite effective and they're just being systemically destroyed.

Oh man. Okay, I just saw that headline and I Don't know the details. I Wish we had £2.7 billion, you know, in each 40 million acres.

Yeah, yeah. So, Anthony, if people want to learn more, where can they connect with you and where can they learn more?

Definitely our website, 0foodprint.org and then that is a little bit like business and consumer facing. So if you're kind of interested in like the systems change kind of digging in, there are some links there to like Theory of Change and then there's kind of a position paper with links and some kind of background of collective regeneration.

We will link to that in the show notes for all of our listeners. You can find our show notes. They show up on YouTube. They also show up on a number of different podcast apps and we also have the Regenerative Agriculture podcast website that you can find all the show notes from each episode as well. Well, Anthony, I want to say thank you. Thank you for the work that you're doing, the thought you've put into this, and my desire would be for you to be. To continue to be successful and to grow the success in a significant way. So thanks for being here and thanks for sharing your work.

Cool. Thanks so much. Yeah, I hope others join this movement or start their own local movements. You know, it's such a big transition that I don't think we're going to be the only game in that we're hoping to sort of will this model into existence.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test, we analyze and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.