Episode 166: Redefining Farming Through Health, Taste, and Technology with Martin Crompton

Hi friends. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. This is Jon Kempf and today I'm here with someone who is very passionate about what regenerative agriculture can mean from a market opportunity perspective and what it can mean for customers, what it should mean for customers, and how we can the very different pathways by which we can drive adoption of regenerative agriculture coming from a demand perspective rather than from a push perspective. But this has been a fascinating conversation, one that I've had a differing opinion and differing points of view on at various times. So we're going to. We're going to have a fun conversation, perhaps some debate or not. We'll see where we align or where we don't. So my guest for this episode is Martin Crompton from Union Grove Farm and from various other endeavors. I'm not sure what all you're up to, Martin. I guess I'll let you tell us which cookies you have your fingers in at the moment. So welcome. Thanks for being here. Tell us a bit about your story in the context.

Certainly absolute pleasure always to connect with you, John. I regard you as a good friend and a mentor now and I feel very honored to have been invited onto the podcast today, which has been such an incredible learning resource for myself over the years that I've been involved in regenerative agriculture that I'd like to thank you for. As far as myself, I'm one of these people who've come into not just regenerative agriculture latterly, but agriculture and farming as a whole. About eight years ago, I had very little connection with it direct other than earning my bread and butter, as we say in England, which is where I'm originally from. Anybody's wondering why I'm North Carolinian farmer with this particular curious accent. I started off my work career in food, but working for the major corporates, some of the big global companies. And the interesting dynamic with that, even though I worked my way up to leadership level within some of these major corporations, is that I never got to visit a farm or meet a farmer. We visited a lot of manufacturing plants. I got to see a lot of stainless steel and production lines. But farms and farmers were just never even in part of our conversation, interestingly enough. So full circle, several.

Can you give us some context, Martin, for what was the scale and the size of the multinational corporates that you were working for? Were we talking in the top half dozen? The top 20?

I put them in the top 20. So in. In the billions was one of them hundreds of millions? A couple of others that I worked for and several that were at national level as well.

And what was the scope of. Yeah, what was the scope of your experience?

Well, I would cut my teeth on. It was sales and then it turned into business development. I don't like using the term sales. Sales always to me strikes somebody's trying to sell shoes or double glazing. If you really want to develop your business, then you need to have an understanding of what business development is about and that ties clearly into marketing. So that's where the first 15, 20 years of my career were very much involved in building out business development and the marketing side of things in order to optimize whichever company or corporation I was working for. The type of food companies I was working with were fundamentally looking to sell their wares through cpg, we call it FMCG in the uk. UK into the major food retailers.

For people not familiar with that terminology, what is CPG or fmcg?

Fast Moving Consumer Goods. Basically it's anything that you can buy in the packaging. If you go into a food retailer, you automatically walk into the fresh produce aisle. Everything to the rest of the store, which is usually anything between 2/3 and 3/4 of that store is, is bought in a package. A lot of that food is ultra processed as we know. It's come to the fore recently with all the. The MAHA reports that's just been released is that 70% of the food that most people eat is ultra processed and not exactly highly nutritious and good for us. Where we're working towards now within the regenerative movement is to start to provide very good tasting but very high nutrient and phytonutrient healthy foods. So I'm not. You can still get very healthy foods within that CPG category, consumer product goods. But it's it fresh produces where my focus has morphed to over the years since I moved out of that line of work.

Yeah. So you and I have had this conversation going back and forth.

I've.

I've had the perspective that I don't have a lot of evidence of positive consumer demand driving significant market change. And there are, there are two key qualifiers in that statement, one of them being positive demand as compared to negative demand. I mean, if there's, if there's negative demand, if there's a salmonella outbreak in spinach or whatever, then the spinach market responds in a very dramatic fashion. So there are multiple instances of negative demand having had a significant impact. But when you look at positive demand, a desire for improve, improved quality or improved flavor There certainly are changes, but those changes from where I sit have appeared to be incremental. They've appeared to be small. Where we have, I mean, look, after 30 years or 40 years now, whatever the number is, you have organically certified foods that are at best 10% of the marketplace. And that is just one example. There's many other examples, but there is. So there isn't. There hasn't been a dramatic change. But when we look at the proliferation of non GMO verification that's now being applied to all kinds of products that don't even have a GMO counterpart, a natural. There certainly is a shift towards soft labeling to create the perception of improved quality. I'm uncertain how much significance and benefit that has actually had to the farming community at this point. But you have a difference. So my perspective has been that I haven't seen much positive demand actually moving the needle in a measurable beneficial way for most growers. But you have a very different perspective around that. I'd like to understand what that is and why.

Basically tapping into the general zeitgeist. Zeitgeist. By that I mean the thought process, the demand that individuals have these days to want to be healthier, more vibrant and alive. And a big part of that people are realizing more and more is the quality of the food that you can afford to purchase. You referenced organics that as you're quite rightly depending on which research you read, it could be anything from 7 to 10% in total. In fresh produce, that goes up significantly to 15% because people are more directly connected into the foods that they're buying with fresh produce. But it's still a relatively small comparative size of the market. But it's in growth. The reason why it's been in growth is because more and more people are seeking healthier, cleaner alternatives. And by clean and I mean the less synthetic chemicals. I'm not anti conventional farming. I'm a regenerative farmer. Currently I work for an organization called Union Grow Farm. They're a table grape regenerative table grape vineyard operation. And we're looking at approaching the market from a fresh produce perspective and a cpg, a package perspective through freeze drying. The visionary leader of that is a gentleman called Greg Boland. He's come into this again not as a traditional farmer over the last decades, but he's come full circle. He's a vc, so his magic source over the years has been picking winners. And what Greg saw several years ago getting for 10 years ago was the opportunity to almost bet bet the farm as he calls it, it's a VC coming in back into the farming world, but doing it in a way that takes advantage of the, the marketing, the business development, the AI, the ag tech, which I know we're going to be speaking about today. And look at how we can tap into that zeitgeist, tap into that consumer demand. It's what I call, or I've been saying a lot recently within the regenerative movement, the difference between a push strategy which puts all the responsibility on the transition from a regenerative perspective and creates the pull strategy. What's the pull strategies? Consumer demand. So what might surprise people is that the 1, 2 and 3 drivers of your purchase decisions. When you walk into certainly a retailer, a food retailer or shop online, those three key driving decisions for your purchases are not price. Number one, it's taste. People are looking for something which tastes good. Number two, it's price. And number three, it's health. Now if you look at the organic part segment of that market or the regenerative segments, suddenly price isn't the second one, it's that drops down. It's taste and health. So if you've got consumers out there and we're talking about a significant slug of consumers, 15 to 20% and growing significantly, who are looking for the best tasting and the healthiest foods, that's where regenerative comes in. If you want to optimally deliver that as far as food is concerned, you need to be fresh produce needs to be regeneratively grown, put in as you know better than anyone on the planet, putting their health and the vitality, the bioactivity back into the soil, turning that dead dirt lead, as I call it, into bioactive life giving gold soil. From that you can grow plants which are super healthy. They take care of their own immunity needs and then from there the fruit, the vegetables that they produce, or if the life starts grazing on regenerative or organic matter, then you've got the healthiest, most vibrant foods. That creates the opportunity that we tap into. We don't have to create that demand, we have to tap into it. How do we do that? By communicating with those consumers, by communicating with the people who buy the food. And we're looking for what we can offer them. And again, fresh produce, conventional, organic or regenerative can deliver that if you want it optimally. It's a regenerative way of doing it. We have to create the story, the narrative that will attract them in. It's part education, it's part storytelling and opening them to what this is really about and how it benefits them. That then creates a pull, a demand. And what I've learned over my many years in business is nature aboards a vacuum. So if there's more demand than supply, supply will rise up to drive that, in which case that will drive the regenerative movement still further.

Okay, you just preempted two of the questions that were in my head with the next two questions that I was going to ask you. And that is when you, when you speak about the first one is when you speak about a developing a push versus a pull strategy and tapping into that demand. The, the landscape from where I sit, what I see happening is there are many farmers who, I mean, look, the reality is from a macroeconomic perspective, many growers are in a very difficult spot right now. The majority are. There are many that would desire to tap into a demand for a higher quality product and to be compensated accordingly. And so there is, how exactly do you tap into demand? Is there significant existing demand from your perspective for regeneratively grown or higher quality products? And what does when, when you look at creating a pull strategy versus a push strategy, putting the responsibility on the farmers, what exactly does that look like from a practical perspective?

So we're, we're living in an age at the moment where things like regenerative agriculture come to the fore. Organics been around for decades. I've been a, an organic food consumer for 25 years. What I didn't realize that organic, organic is basically based off thou shalt not. So it's looking to avoid spraying synthetic chemicals onto foods or minimizing, mitigating and then eradicating. What I didn't realize was that unless we are also working on the soil, and a lot of organic farmers do, some don't because of the practices that are out there, is that we're not releasing the nutrients and the phytonutrients into the food. As we mentioned earlier, that's what drives both taste and health. Interestingly, I didn't know what a phytonutrient or a polyphenol was seven or eight years ago. I do now and I know the critical importance of that now. The benefit from the farming perspective of taking on these practices is that you eventually, over time, as you build up the soil health as you know then, yeah, you've got healthier crops that need less sprays, they need less labor. So you're reducing down the cost of farm of the farming operation. If you can tie that into an increased demand at the opposite side, then you've got the ideal push pull dynamic as I've seen it over the last five to six years. Overtly the emphasis is on the farm and a lot of farmers are confused by regenerative as they have been in the past with organic. How do we teach them, train them, educate them, open their minds? And it was an interesting conversation I had with someone a couple of weeks back about we were talking about climate change, the impact of climate change and how everybody on the planet is now focused on that. I'm not getting into the ins and outs of whether it's man made or not. The reality is we're facing a lot of extreme weather events. To me time back into the food supply and the quality of the food that we produce is also. And for farmers to move into this as well, we need a change of mindset. It's not climate change that's the biggest challenge on the planet. It's the lack of our ability to welcome and open to change. The best way to do that is to show people the benefits. There's a lot of pain out there in farming at the moment. Farmers, certainly small and medium sized farmers are struggling to make ends meet. So if we can tap into that existing demand as more people wake up, we can also tie into the Maha movement. Again, I'm not going to the politics of this, whether it's the left or the right, irrelevant. The reason why Maha make America Healthy again is sprung up and the particularly focused on children at the moment is that everyone's got a concern around health. We know that there are a lot of broken systems in the world at the moment. The healthcare system and the agriculture system symbiotically joined and I often say it's kind of an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms to call it healthcare. What we've really got out there is disease and illness maintenance. It's not really healthcare. In order to be truly healthy we've got to bring things like exercise, good sleep, rest, but quality, high quality, nutrient dense and clean food. And people have woken up to that now and they're looking for it and they're shopping for it. The regenerative movement has got this opportunity to take it on to the next level. But we have to create the story that will reach out to them, create that narrative narrative and then get that communicated out to people so that they understand. The other key component part of this, as I see it, for those who produce either fresh produce or CPG packaged foods is to do it is to also educate, connect and communicate with the food retailers. We're seeing the likes of what they call the supernatural. Food retailers now leading the charge in the regenerative area. So you've got the likes of Whole Foods and Sprouts and natural grocers. They have long been exponents of organic foods. But it's the whole ethos behind that is to provide healthy, clean foods for customers and consumers who are looking for them. They've now woken up over the last few years to the benefits and the potential of regenerative. So they are moving into this as well. We have to continue the conversations. I know the likes of RLC and Regenefied are already doing this very successfully. That's going to broaden out in the next one to three years and then we need as farmers and farm operations and food companies to be tied into that. Talking of food companies, we said at the start, I started off working for the big food corporations. They've made commitments in the last five years. It was part of the conversation I had with the, the owner and leader of Unigro Farm who's as I said, very, very astute business guy. And I said, follow the money. When you look at the big multinational, multibillion dollar companies talking about regenerative agriculture and change, then you know there's a movement towards that. There's on the back of a napkin, you could probably scratch out about 100 million acres that they've regeneratively transition up to 20, 30, 31, 32. It's tied into the climate protocols, but it's also because they see that that's where the consumer's moving towards and the consumers. I said this all the time. You can vote at the ballot box or you can vote at the cash register. Your dollar oftentimes is not. Will carry a lot more weight than the X that you put on the box on your ballot box, on your balance slip. Because that's where the corporations are going to listen. We underestimate the power that the consumer has. But a lot of that has to be driven by the education side of things.

All right, so you just mentioned the magic phrase. A lot of that has to be driven by the education side of things. So from a practical perspective, I'm a farmer somewhere in the great country of the United States. What impact can I really have and is it my responsibility and how should I expect to be rewarded for consumer education? See the. But I see two challenges with this conversation around consumer education. The one challenge is this conundrum. Charles Walters articulated it once clearly back in the 1970s and I'm sure He probably borrowed it from elsewhere. It's, I suppose you could say, common wisdom. He said that people leave their senses as a group and they come to their senses one at a time. And I suppose we can see this now that there is increasing information being revealed about the health impacts of the shots that were largely forced on people over the course of the last four or five years. There are now very, we're understanding there are very grave and very significant health consequences from those shots. And I think, I don't think that's controversial anymore. And so, but the reality is that a large proportion of people are still bought into this, this worldview that those shots are, were essential and were beneficial. And there is like the majority of the population hasn't woken up yet, at least from the data that I've seen, and from what, from what my understanding is at this moment. So people leave their senses as a group. They come to their senses one at a time. And when you look at consumer education, if you just look at this from the North American or from United States context, all of a sudden you now change from a, you now have expanded the scope of the problem or the audience that needs to be shifted to, I don't know how many buyers are there. From a consumer household perspective, 100 million people, perhaps 80 million people. So from a consumer education perspective, you have this very large audience that needs to be shifted, and they will only shift one at a time until they cross a certain thresh and there's significant demand change. So we, you and I are talking right now on a podcast that is largely listened to by people in the countryside, by, by farmers, by agronomists, by ranchers, and for, for this audience, for the people who are engaged in this work every day, from a very practical perspective, what can they do? What power do they have to actually move the needle?

Maybe farmers specifically are talking. Joe?

Yes, for the moment, let's say that

when I present, I often, in front of farmers, I often ask this question, what are you in business to achieve? And I get a plethora, a smorgasborg of answers coming back. I'm in business because I, I like farming. I'm in business because I want to grow healthy crops. I'm in business because it's. So there's a whole series of answers that will come back in. So I let people give me the answers that they perceive or from that question, and then I ask the question again more pointedly, what are you in business to achieve? And the answer to that, if you're in any business, is to make a profit. If you're not making a profit, you're either struggling or you're going to go out of business, which is what most startups do over a period of short period of time. And small and medium sized farms particularly are struggling right now. Over half of farmers have been in debt for over 10 years. They're struggling to make ends meet. Particularly if you're in the commodity sector side of things. Your inputs are only ever going in one direction when it comes to cost, particularly if they're tied into petrochemicals, which a lot of the inputs are. And we're dealing with nature. Mother Nature is a lot smarter than we are. We talk about battling with Mother Nature. I've always preferred to, I like to call it dance with Mother Nature since I've came into agriculture. She's a lot smarter than we are. So we can tap into the intelligence that's there. Then we've got an opportunity to create a collaborative alliance with nature. So farmers might be very, very good at farming. I've met a lot of great farmers. I've been blessed to meet and have friends amongst the farming community. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are great at business and very few understand the benefits and the necessity of marketing and business development. So being great at growing food is a different skill set from running a market driven business. They don't, they wouldn't think twice about bringing an agronomist in or someone like yourself. Aea. We use AEA products, we use AEA as a consultant. We also use gay brands, understanding ag. So in areas of specific need or focus or where we want to optimize, we will pay to bring somebody in to guide us. But there isn't that thought process yet behind marketing and business development. And you can't, you're not naturally grown into being a marketer or a business developer. So my view these days, and I've been saying this more and more and sharing my not just thoughts but skill sets behind it, is to offer these services to farmers. People say, well we can't afford it, it's what's the end Again, if you're looking to achieve a profit, what's the best way through to do that? You've got to reduce your costs and you've got to increase the demand and you've got to do that in as an intelligent and conscious way as possible, as you said. So the farms, in my view that win consistently treat marketing and business development as core parts of their operations, not as afterthoughts. So for Farmers to want to move on to a different level now and again. This is where regenerative and organic can offer them an opportunity to move into more premium markets. Not everybody can do that, but those that can. This is a real opportunity area and we're seeing this again from big money coming into the agriculture sector. There's companies like Farmland lp, there's companies like Agriculture Capital, these are companies that invest in agriculture land. But they'll take a monocrop or a dual crop farm operation that's conventional and they'll convert it into multi crop, specialty crop, fresh produce, and then move them into organic and regenerative. Why are they doing that? That. Because that puts extra value on the farm operation, on the crops and on the land. So this is tying in again, it's the business ethos all the time that we have to encourage farmers to come on board with. If they feel uncomfortable with that or they feel they need guidance, there's plenty of support that you can tap into out there. And that's what this is about in this next phase of moving American agriculture and global agriculture to the next level.

All right, so once more I'm trying to put myself in the position of, of a common. Well, that word could have negative common connotations, I suppose, but a, a usual, a typical grower and of course growers are, they're growing, producing a wide spectrum, a wide variety of crops all across the country. But putting myself into the shoes of a typical grower, many of them, majority of them are the crops that they're producing. There isn't any. And this, I would argue that this is true for many fresh market produce and fruit and vegetable growers as well, is they don't have significant leverage in having a great deal of brand equity or brand value. The large retailers, for example, that they're, they're usually buying based on market window, what products are available in a certain market window in a certain context. They're of course looking for certain equality characteristics such as storability, shippability and lack of loss in transport through the, through the supply chain. So there, in, in this fresh space in particular, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of value in having a lot of brand equity. Brand equity is usually very fleeting. So within all of, within all that, just I'd like to get your thoughts and your perspective on how do you actually create demand and how do you do business development effectively in that type of environment.

Amongst the dynamic we've been talking about of this greater awareness and greater demand for healthier, better Tasting foods again, fresh produce specifically. But the same applies to cpg. We've seen a movement and if we're going to reference, as you've, you've stated, fresh pressure, fresh, fresh produce particularly. There's been a grind movement over well over a decade of what they call farm to fork within restaurants or farm to table where people are looking at. One of the key dynamics that people look out for, particularly in fresh food, is whether it's local, local. Going to any local food retailer, go go shop at a farmer's market is the obvious case. But going to any local food retailer, whether it's a supernatural like a Whole Foods or a Sprouts or it's one of the, the mainstream boys like a Walmart or a Kroger, you'll see the advertising and the promotion and the story behind local farmers and local food, locally grown food, people buy into that. We've kind of lost connection with where our food comes from. The supply chain. It, everything is bought. Most, as I said, most of the food that we buy is bought in a package. There's no connection with that coming from a farm being grown in the soil or having livestock graze on pasture. It comes in a way that's easily packaged. It's created and manufactured for speed and for convenience and for price. Whereas there's this been a grind movement of the last few years, both in restaurants and in food retail, is for the benefits of having locally produced produce. That's something which farmers, the more astute farmers out there, and there's a number of them who have walking up to this and are doing it in a really excellent way, have taken advantage of. You've got people on a national level that are doing it as well. So the, the opportunity is there to tap into these dynamics. What we've got to have an understanding of what dynamics are specific and advantageous to the crops that you're growing and then other ways that you can embellish that, improve that, optimize that. And this is why, as I said, the potential to move from commodity conventional through organic to regenerative is allowing you to move into more premium prices. And you were mentioning a earlier about how we increase that supply. How do you increase that demand? How do you incentivize that demand to grow so that there's a greater pull through. It's something called the bell curve. It's like a universal law. I'm not going to go into the intricacies of it from an economics perspective, but you have a small slice of people at the front end who they call the innovators behind that. You've got the early adopters behind that, you've got the early majority. You have to funnel people into those different segments. And then once you've got those three coming in behind, the majority of the laggards come in as well. So this is a movement that can start off on a relatively small level, like organic did. In the past, it was less than 1%. Now it's 15, 10 to 15%. Regenerative is going to follow a very similar path. Tie that into local, build the story behind that, and suddenly you've got something which people, people will buy into as a consumer and they will be prepared to pay a price for that. And then how we differentiate that with the people that we've got to sell our products to. So we have a customer as a farmer, not necessarily direct through to the consumer. You can do dtc, which is direct to consumer, whether you're selling online or whether you get people coming to the farm or you sell at the farmer's market. But a lot of the time we're having to go through an intermediate. And this is another great challenge, as you and I have had conversations before about how 95% of the profit that is generated in that supply chain goes out of the farm gate. 5%, usually around 5% is retained by the farmer. The rest of it is gobbled up in the supply chain. So the price the consumer's paying is nothing like the price that the farmer is getting. How do we increase that percentage share for the farmer to make his farm operation more viable and more profitable? And this is again where marketing and business development comes in. We have to give them the tools, we have to give them the education to build this out. The bigger boys are already doing it relatively well. The small and medium size, I feel, have got opportunities to move forward, potentially even looking at a cooperative. We have to be creative in how we create these solutions. So

I'm, I'm thinking about what you're describing and I'm, I'm struggling to reconcile a couple of, of what appear to me to be disparate points. So you mentioned the development of a push versus a poll strategy of a push. The push strategy being that of we are essentially the CPG companies. Whatever, whatever market forces or regulatory forces might come into play in the future where there is this pressure on farmers to shift to regenerative agriculture, perhaps with or without additional compensation or additional rewards for producing a higher quality product or better ecosystem outcomes or whatever the case might be. And then you also spoke about a push versus a pull perspective from a particularly a poll perspective in the context of creating consumer demand. And what I'm hearing you describe, if I'm understanding it correctly, is you're suggesting that we create consumer demand by having thousands or tens of thousands of different farmers and growers communicating their story effectively to the public, which in some sense, and becoming better at marketing, becoming better at business development, which is a different framing, but in a certain sense again puts the responsibility back on the farmers to become better marketers, to become better at business development, to become better at communicating their story. And so it again places the responsibility on them for creating the poll. Is that what you're saying in essence?

Well, as always in life, you can seek to do this individually or you can seek to do it collectively. There's a number of organizations out there now that can offer guidance, support, advice in these specific areas. I'll reference yourself and AEA and Understanding Ag as being standout in that area with regard to agronomic advice and support. I'm sure we will be speaking at some point during the podcast on AgTech, precision agriculture, the robotics, the automation that's coming in from new technology and AI specifically. So all these things are tool. We've got existing tools that have been around since the ark. As far as farm's concerned, we've seen this mass industrial revolution take off over the past century and now we're moving into the information age. And AI, everyone's talking about AI. Let's cover that later. As far as this specific area is concerned, this can be very confusing for many people. People, it's not just farmers and in the farming community, most businesses, most businesses suffer. Most businesses will go out of business. As I said at the start, the vast majority, over 90% of startup businesses fail and a lot of that is because they're not understanding what the consumer demand is, what the potential for what they are building, whether it's a product or service. The same applies to farmers. This is the way we've always done things. It's. It's growing and they build it and they will come. I'll grow it and it will be sold. And what you've got in the, in the day and age that we're in now is more and more farms are suffering. You've just got to pick up any newspaper or any farming online news source and you'll see this is that. And, and a lot of, as you well know, as you and I both well know, a lot of farms, a lot of the farming community is kept Alive by subsidies. How do we move it beyond that? How do we give farmers the opportunity to as I say, move towards making a profit than that allows them to enjoy farming again and create something of real value for themselves, for the families and the consumers. And this is where marketing comes in. And I'll reference a project. We were talking about this just before the project, before the podcast. The gentleman that I've been in conversation with for several months now, gentleman by the name of Surrender Ready originates from farm stock in Southampton in India. He's creating or in the process of building out something called 451 Ventures Initiative. What's that? It's basically a platform that helps build and scale regenerative agriculture companies and projects. So it's using tech as a steward of living systems you might say. And partners with or looks will be looking to partner with farmers and founders and funders because we've got to bring the investment in as well to turn pilots success, create successful pilots out in the farming community. Looking at these different ways of operating into investable real world outcomes. In order to do that we need a coalition. I think probably the best way I could describe it as a coalition style platform. It pairs simple farm tested AI measurement with patient regenerative capital which is somewhat of a bit of a in short supply as we all know as far as investment and finance is concerned, but also ties into that retailer led market pull. If you pull those dynamics together, you've got an opportunity to accelerate towards becoming profitable outcomes verified regenerative farming, particularly in the specialty crops in the fresh produce area. This doesn't necessarily necessarily apply past all farming. What I'm talking about here specifically is the opportunity within specialty crops and farmers fresh produce. So these type of initiatives are out there. I've mentioned ag land investment. There's a growing community of regenerative investment coming in now that isn't just looking at a quick book. How do we turn this into profit and exit quickly so that we maximize our profitability. It's almost like what you might call a philanthropreneur. There are entrepreneurial venture investors who are looking to do good, good and they're also looking to find farmers who are open to change. But we have to make, there has to be change. There has to be an evolution in the way that we're doing things. Otherwise we'll always have what we've always got. So this is an opportunity to come together collaborative, collaboratively in a cooperative style or a coalition style, whatever terminology you feel comfortable with and then utilize people who've got different strengths and abilities and then pull that together for commonality of purpose and benefit.

All right, I'd like to, I think this, there's going to be some meat here for further digestion and further conversation as this conversation goes along and in future conversations as well. But I'd like to shift topics a bit. In several times in the course of the conversation you've mentioned agtech and when we look at, and I think this is something that, that for us as growers, many of us can appreciate is we look at the agtech space and agtech is a mass cemetery. It is a graveyard of enterprises that had a certain degree of hubris and thought they understood what the customer was looking for without really understanding the customer, without really understanding growers. When I look at the number of these agtech companies that don't have, they have limited interaction with growers, they don't have a grower on an advisory board or somehow involved in their organization. We see, we see just a great deal of enterprises, a large proportion of enterprises and some very good ideas that in essence were stillborn because of not closely enough understanding what their customer needed. Where do you see the analogs between that type of environment, those types of development and growers and the way that growers are pursuing marketing? That's one question. And the second question is you have the benefit of an outside perspective that's been developed more recently. What do you see happening in the future of the ag tech space over the course of the next half a dozen years?

Very pertinent question. And it's, it's something which has got people at a much higher level than me within agtech or deeper knowledge of agtech scratching their heads for the very reasons that you state, and I'll cover those as I express what I'm about to say. The other reason is the difficulty of getting hold of finance and investment because it takes a lot of money to bring these solutions to the table and then to implement them them to build them, implement them and then engage with. In this case we're talking agtech with these farm operations. Big, whether you're a big corporation or a medium small size farm. Now that having been said, we've gone through, I mentioned the Industrial Revolution. I'm from a town called Oldham in the northwest of England. What's the relevance of that? Well, it's the birth. The northwest of England was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. It's quite a while back now. But the northwest of England which was that birthplace was. It was all about innovation and it was allied to investment. You have to have the two to make it come to the fore. That created a lot of new systems, new machines that revolutionized the planet as we know it. Some of the unintended consequences of that weren't necessarily beneficial, but it did take the way that we operated in a business perspective in a completely different direction. The complacency that came in behind that and the lack of innovation led to the northwest of England now being an industrial wasteland. So again, we're sort of looking at that from an agricultural perspective now is that this is the way we've always done things. The ones that are going to survive and prosper will have to to move into this innovation phase again. And I refer to this a lot, John, and you've heard me say this is the. The future of farming. Eagle will soar on two wings. This is my firm fact, firm belief and feel behind this. One is regenerative agriculture. One wing is regenerative agriculture, regenerative organics and the other one is agtech and AI. And by agtech we're talking about precision. Agtech is known as precision agriculture and biologicals. So without wishing to go in too much detail that anything that looks like an autonomous vehicle, robotics, harvesters, pickers and sprayers of all different dimensions, we've got drones coming in now, you've got satellites. There's a whole smorgasbord of innovation that's come into or has been presented into agriculture over the last decade and that's speeding up as technology increases. Particularly now that the all seeing, you could say the all pervasive AI has come in. What we've seen, and I speak a lot with people who are a lot more tied into this out in the west, this organization called Western Growers association, they've got an innovation division and what they've explained to me, and I've seen this through my own eyes and research now, is that, is that the investment that was fueling that that kind of fell off a cliff in 2022. There was a huge upsurge in investment because people, the VCs, particularly the PE, saw a huge opportunity to make money in that specific area. However, it's been a lot more difficult than people initially assumed as they have a tendency to do and as AI has come to the fore, it sucked a lot of the investment globally out of many areas. One of those has been agtech. One of the key things you touched on this for that moving forward, it has to be again, I'm very much into collaborations and coalitions, cooperatives the farmers, if we're to move forward into this new bright world of AI and agtech, need to be part of the conversation. They can't be force fed into this. We're all change resistant creatures individually. We are as a species with farming operations. They're multi generational operational. So there's certain things that they've been doing on that farm that they'll have been doing for decades and generations. You've got to therefore go in and explain to them the benefits. It's like we're talking about with marketing and business development. What are the benefits to that farmer and to that farm operation? How can that improve their profitability? How can it reduce the manpower needs? How can it reduce the costs of their operation? These things are not fully explained. You're not going to get a farmer buy into that. And then it needs to be this collaborative approach of how you build these two things that.

Well, I think there's also in, in many cases in the, in the agtech community there has been a fundamental failure to understand how complex and how multi dimensional a farming operation really is and what is really required to implement something successfully. Just from a, from an efficiency and a timing perspective and the narrow windows of, of opportunity, timing expediency, there's. Agriculture is perceived as slow adapters of technology and has been historically and I think the, the very reasonable and the very good argument for that is because they're, they've historically been such a small market segment that the, the various technology, software solutions etc that were developed for them them were not a good fit. They were developed. I mean we don't. Outside of agriculture. I think if you ask the average software engineer which business is the most difficult to develop an ERP system for a farm growing produce or a furniture manufacturing facility with 1500 employees, they would say the furniture facility is probably the most difficult. But in fact it's the farming operation where there are more moving parts, more multidimensionality, more variables in play than there are with a large complex manufacturing facility. One is perceived to be more complex but the other is in actual fact a lot more complex. So there's multiple dimensions there. But you've mentioned the all pervasive AI was the phrase that you used and, and in the conversations that you and I have had over the last several years as we've learned to know each other, you have, I think of all the people that I've interacted with, you are on a short list of probably the top dozen people who've used AI more intensely than most People have. You're not an average AI user. And so I'd like to ask you the question because there are many people in the farming community who, they don't, they don't get it. They don't get what the hype is all about. They've, and I think this is true not just in farming community, but of consumers in general. They, they use one of these large engines like Chachi PT or Gemini or Grok, and they ask it a couple of questions and it's, it's a cool tool, it produces some interesting results for them, but they don't really understand what they have, haven't observed and experienced the value that people are talking about. So I'd like to get your perspective. How, how are you using AI and how are you getting AI to work for you?

Okay, this is the, the key point of the moment, as I said, the pervasiveness of AI in all aspects of our society now and culture and the confusion. There's a lot of excitement around it, but there's a lot of confusion and fear behind it.

It.

As far as farm is concerned, as far as agriculture is concerned, I'm unequivocal about this. I see AI as a farm ally, a very valuable farm ally if it's applied and utilized and therefore understood and trained primarily. First, you and I have had this conversation over the years. I've had the conversation with Gabe and Understanding Ag and many other supplies of, of agronomic support for farmers in the field. There's a, what I call a bandwidth bottleneck in agronomy, and it's real. There's only so many highly qualified agronomists or something from a regenerative and an organic perspective who are trained and educated and have that skill set. It's an art. And as with everything in life, but particularly farming, it's both a science and an art. Art. There are, there are not that many people out there who can tap into the demand that's real and, and needs to be satisfied. So how do we overcome that? Well, you very astutely, and I remember this conversation with you two years ago, came up with Feel Like. It wasn't called Feel like. Feel like at the time you created something, which is, for one of a better phrase, agronomic AI. I see that as being highly valuable and useful because it compresses, it has the potential to compress decades of regenerative knowledge that all the knowledge, not just that John Kemp puts into this or a Gay Brown or a Keith Burns. We could, we could, I could quote all the Olympian gods of the regenerative movement. How. What would it be like if we could download the knowledge, the experience, the foresight into some form of machine that could compress that down and make that available, readily available in different formats under different contexts for farm operators? How valuable and useful would that be? But it needs to be compressed into knowledge that's actionable. First principle answers so what to check why it matters? What's the next best step? If it can give that level of guidance. So use cases that I see practice practicable for that. I've used that within Union Grow Farm. I've had this conversation growingly with other farmers. Now we've got an interest behind it but have been confused by it. Don't know how to best apply it. You could do something like triaging a leaf symptom before it becomes a spot I call a spray and pray week. Tightening the irrigation, nutrition decisions on what to spray and how to spray it, when to spray it, Building up a written reasoning trail that you can review with your agronomist. So we're not replacing agronomists. You can't ever be a shovel in the ground, a shovel in the soil. You can't beat that boots on the ground approach to farming. That's never going to go away. But as I see, it's not replacing judgment. It's the potential to speed and augment good judgment. But like all tools, systems and processes, as we've discussed, they need to be learned and understood before they're optimally applied. So that's where I see AI coming to the fore now is is learning it and be being taught and trained on it like you would if you were given. First time you were given a tractor, first time you were given a satellite link link tractor, you had to be trained by that. You didn't just jump behind the jump, jump in the cab and drive it. The same applies to AI. Yes, you can jump on and use chat, GTP or Google or whichever one one your preference is. But if you really want to optimize it, you need to have an understanding of what the system is and then how it applies to you. The six principles is for those of us who know regenerative agriculture, there are six principles within that. The number one primary principle which is of the most importance is context. So what's the context of your farm? What are you growing? Where are you growing it, how you're growing it. Understand those and then understand how you can take that context and plug that into AI. And to be an ally to the to what you're seeking to achieve. It will take time. The more time and practice you can put into this and certainly working with people like AI, sorry AEA and yourself with feel art, the more benefit we're going to see this coming out and then we need to create a success stories. It's a show and tell people are going to be dubious initially. They're going to be confused by it. So if we can show them successes that have been driven by that and I'm working with a number of farmers at the moment utilizing AI and it's surprising them what it delivers. And then you take that information and as you do with any good farming operation, you trial it. You, you, you go out there and you test, test pilot it and, and do pilot plots and, and trial it and see how it delivers the information into actionable insights and, and deliverable actions.

So can you give us some examples, can you give, give us examples of you're what I would consider a power user? How are you training AI and then what are the results and what are the outcomes of that that are different from an untrained AI, let's say.

Well as I said earlier, it depends what you're doing. One of the primary goals for the farm operation that I've been operational director of over the last seven years, we referenced it at the start as Union Grow Farm. We are growing, are in the process of growing. We're about 100 acres now. We're aiming aspiring to be a thousand acres. The this ties in with marketing, it ties in with business development, ties in with AI. What is, what are, what are we seeking to achieve? We're seeking to become the biggest and best and most regenerative health focused table grape operator not just on the east coast which is a little bit of an outlier itself. 95 to 99, 98 of the table grapes that are grown in this country, not wine, table grapes that you buy in a retailer or in a store are grown in California, probably at the Central Valley. We are looking to become the east coast, certainly the Southeast and then the east coast biggest deliverer of table grapes. There's our pulpit plethora of benefits behind that. What are the prime, what, what's the primary marketable part of what we're seeking to achieve with our fresh fruit and freeze dried crops Health and taste. So AI has shown us ways how we can plug in. We're still doing the analytics. You still got to do your soul tests. We still do our SAP tests and we plug that into the system that gives us Real weight world, finger on the pulse data. But the difference between having that data and either handballing it or going through the systems that you've got to send off and you might wait weeks for is you can plug that in directly. So that suddenly becomes an optimal tool for how we can optimize Brix. So we want the highest bricks possible, but we're also looking at nutrient density and phytonutrients, particularly with our table grapes is something called polyphenolics. That's what gives it its health kick. If we can utilize AI to improve and increase that, then suddenly we've got something which is of high value. And that's an area that we're seeking to move into in the next few months and years ahead.

You mentioned the challenges, and one of the original inspirations for us in developing Field Lark was just this understanding that in order to be a very good agronomist, particularly a regenerative agriculture agronomist, requires such a, a depth and breadth of, of knowledge. And there is so much information out there that is accessible today, much more accessible with AI than it has been previously. That, and it just, it takes so much time to become a good regenerative agriculture agronomist because you've taken away so many or you're seeking to remove so many of the easy buttons, the easy buttons of pesticides and fungicides and so forth. And so the, the, the depth of knowledge required to take a proactive preventative approach is much deeper than to take a reactive approach. And so there's been this significant shortage. It's existed for the last 10 years. And it's just there's a growing shortage of people who are qualified, trusted technical advisors who have the depth and the quality of knowledge and information to bring this forward. And so this was one of the inspirations for the development of fieldlark, is to make that information accessible to anyone and to kind of streamline the learning experience, the learning journey for agronomists and for farmers who, who want to go down a different pathway and to encourage, because I'm completely with you, that we can never, nor should we seek to replace people in the field. Instead, our goal should be to help all those people in the field be better, ask better questions, be more observant. That's really the inspiration where I think field arc is going to shine. So when I look at that from, from a practical application perspective, the opportunity is here to also streamline the understanding of which modes of action, which mechanisms, which products, which ingredients can shift the needle the most dramatically in a given context and in a given situation and I'd love to get your perspective. You've, you've used, you've been a power user of different I believe different AIs. What are the ones that you have found to offer the most valuable to create the most value for you as as a farm manager looking at the agronomy sides and how have you found those to compare to field lark

that all the, all the main ones, the key ones that people talk about out in the marketplace I've trialed I could run through them as you said Google Grock chat GTP chat GDP has stood out for me so far. What I've learned John and this is the same for feel like as I've got to know it better is as is the old adage giggle garbage in, garbage out. It's all dependent on the quality of the information that you feed in and then the other critical part of this and if you do a little bit of research on AI and how to get the best out of it, it's the quality of the prompt, it's the quality of the question that you put into that AI. So if you ask it a short question you're going to get get a relatively short, undetailed, less specific response. When I interact with AI and again I'll reference chat GTP50 and I paid it's worth paying the extra for pay $30 a month for the for the pro version for the paid version in the same way that we pay for feel like as well is the is the quality of the answers that we get from that is specific to the higher level detail that we put into it. So that's the absolute critical thing that I would say to anybody out there is take the time and trouble and effort to put together almost like a thesis of what it is that you're seeking to achieve over time what happens and I'm talking about a year as you say I'm a relatively heavy user. That system gets to know you and gets to know your operation. So it's got a memory far better than I have. I can remember a lot if I don't write it down, if I don't reference it then it's not there. With AI over time, whether it's weeks or months or years, it remembers everything and it can reference that back. So the beautiful thing with this is it's a bit like having an agronomist if we, if I paid as we have done to have as I said somebody from your organization or understanding Outcome in, to guide us in a specific area of need. The quality of advice and guidance is going to be much higher when I've had a relationship with somebody over several months and several years than it is to just bring so many someone and from the get go and that's that, that's the key to whichever system that you choose. That is the absolute key to get the best value out of AI. That level of detail and that level of building an experience and a relationship with it.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you Martin. I think this is, this has been my experience as well as I've played around with it. It is my initially as you're learning about it it as you're playing around your discovery. You start with prompts that are a sentence or a couple sentences long and then they grow to a paragraph and then they grow to five paragraphs and then to 10. And the reality is that as, as you give it more information and give it more context and ask more detailed questions the quality of the outputs just. And you also the interesting thing is that in the way that it responds is if you ask, ask, if you ask a couple sentence question you get a couple paragraph answer. If you ask a five paragraph question you give it lots of context, you get a 10 page response. And I'm just generalizing here of course but the detail of the response that you get back is in direct proportion to the detail of context you provide.

Absolutely, absolutely. And this is again people underestimate the power of the system that's now upon us. And we're as I mentioned chat GTP 5.0. It's a bit like PlayStation whatever it's at now 15. This will continue to iterate the AI that we're interacting with now a bit like AgTech. This is not as good as it will get. This is base level what we're going to see and witness. And this is a global phenomenon that will play into every aspect of our lives. Where we are now, now compared to where we will be in three years it will look like science fiction. We're at the Model T ford element of AI. We can, we'll probably move within three years, not 30 years, not 13 years. Within three years will be a test the equivalent of driving a Tesla compared to a Model T Ford. That's the rate of change that we're going to be seeing. So being becoming conversant with that now at this early stage is very advantageous for you as that ability grows within the systems that are available to us. But as you say, and this is the thing Right now you don't. It's not just a matter of putting a question in, whether it's a paragraph or five paragraphs or a few pages. You can put research papers into it, you can put your mentioned earlier, SAP, whether you've got SAP results, SAP analysis, should I say, or soil analysis. All that can be fed into this as well. Well, so what I would say for people who are uncertain about AI at the moment is to work with people like yourself in aea. And I'm not just saying this because you're, we're on the podcast with you now. People who have an understanding, whoever your current agronomist is, sit down with your agronomist, whoever they are, whether they come from the local co op extension, whether they're aea, whether they're understanding AG, or the plethora of other very highly qualified, very experienced agricultural and farming support experts out there. Whoever you interact with within your farm, sit down with them and get to know how AI can support you both and put all the information, anything that you've got stored in any of your other files loaded into the AI system and in exact. Well, I, I'll put this back to you John. What is the real core benefit in your view of field lock and how, how has that benefit been built into this system?

Exactly what you're describing, Martin. It's, it comes down to, to two things. One is the, the, the data library that it has, that it has been trained on, that is the unique AEA knowledge set and data set of SAP analysis and soil analysis and what the crop performance outcomes of the those were. It is on the, the knowledge archive, all of the publicly accessible papers and books and so forth that are in the public domain. That is a knowledge set that is particularly relevant to regenerative agriculture and just also to agriculture in general. Combined with, combined with the programming that seeks to optimize biological systems and that follows ethical principles. Know this is such an interesting piece. Field ARC has been out there now for a couple of months and we have received almost universally rave responses and very positive feedback at this early stage, which is not a surprise because as you would expect many of the, the early users are familiar with our work at advancing eco agriculture. But we had, we had one, one comment on social media where a grower said something to the effect of oh yeah, this field ARC is biased. And it made me, that made me smile, it made me laugh actually. Because what we did is we deliberately directed field art not to not have bias. We deliberately directed it to frame its logic process and its thought processes in terms of ethical principles and of minimizing damage to biological and ecological systems. And so when, when we asked it to review all of the extensive literature that is out there in terms, in, when it formulates responses, we asked it to not have bias, to remove any bias in favor of green revolution or more modern solutions and instead to look at everything from a first principles perspective of what are the foundational principles and the foundational ethical principles. And when, when it provides answers in that framework and in that context, it appears to be biased to someone who only has that type of, or kind of the contemporary agriculture knowledge set. It appears to be biased when in fact the exact opposite is the case release. It has been deliberately designed to remove bias. Isn't that fascinating?

Well, it's fascinating. It's human nature to expect that there's bias built into it. Just to clarify that for the audience as well, when you're saying it has a pro AEA slant, are you talking about amendments specifically that it recommends or services?

It does not have a pro AEA slant. It's been deliberately, it's been deliberately instructed,

sorry, the bias that you referenced, it's

been deliberately instructed to not have bias other than. And it has been instructed to make all recommendations from a first principles ethical perspective and to consider the impact on the entire ecosystem. So, for example, if you were to ask Fieldlark for a nitrogen application on a corn crop, I'll just pick a common example. It is unlikely to recommend anhydrous ammonia. Not because we've told it that anhydrous ammonia is a bad thing, but because it looks at the research, looks at the literature and says, aha, anhydrous ammonia has, has these negative impacts on the soil microbiome as compared to urea or ammonium sulfate or other forms of nitrogen. So therefore, I'm going to be cautious about recommending anhydrous ammonia. And I'm just, I'm using that as, as an example. But it will look at, it will look at the potential negative consequences and try to minimize those consequences, secondary and tertiary consequences, when it is making recommendations based on ethical principles related to ecosystem health and environmental health and so forth.

The end of the day, we're looking to, as a farm operation, you're looking for continuously looking to optimize all aspects of that farm operation. And that's where we can either say, well, we know it all and we don't need outside help, or we can seek help outsiders. It's how you and I got to know each other. I got led into regenerative agriculture because of a document documentary. I sold a little big farm that led me into biodynamics. And then I found a lady I'm sure you know very well, Dr. Len Ingham. It was regarded at the time as the number one soil biologist on the planet. I saw her presenting to a bunch of English farmers, funnily enough on YouTube talking about this regenerative farming. So eight years ago I didn't know regenerative farming existed. Something about what she was saying and how she said it sold into me. It was only almost the phrase that went through my mind. Whatever you're selling, I'm buying. And I deep dived into regenerative agriculture and saw immediately the benefits, what that could deliver. That was then a very interesting conversation I had with the owner of the business that I'm currently working with, Union Grow Farm. Greg's a very astute business person. He understands farm, but he's business driven and he's very, very good at driving that business into profitability. He and I both saw regenerative opportunities, agriculture as the future. If we wanted to become a profitable enterprise. What AI does now, what operation, what functionality that you deliver with Feel Lock as an example, you can use chat tbt. But if I'm going to be utilizing AI more and more these days, I want something that will have an understanding of the agronomistic challenges that I face. What, what can take my soil and my SAP tests early the field symptoms into a step by step step biology. First recommendations that I can utilize and pull up on my phone out in the field. I could see I can snap something in the field and, and do this as well. You said earlier what other functionality if we have, we've just gone through a whole series of fungal outbreaks on the farm with our grapes over this season because we've never seen rain like we've had this year. We had 22, 23 inches in one month, July. Never seen it like, never seen anything like, like it before. That created like a, a petri dish for fungal outbreaks. Some of these fungals we'd not seen before. I was able to take real time in the field photographs of these different markings on the fruit, on the leaves and feed that into my AI fed it into. I feel like I fed it into Jack chat gtp. So I've got a reference and it immediately threw up suggestions. Now some of those suggestions questions were incorrect. A lot of them were correct right in behind that. It immediately gives you recommendations on how to deal with this Whether it's your protocols, your practices, your systems or amendments, that's something which would have taken a phone call. I would have had to dial somebody in. And again, it doesn't stop that interaction with people within your farm operation, bringing in your vineyard manager, your agronomist. But what it does, it speeds things up. As I said earlier, it augments, it doesn't replace. We've never had that before. I think where we're going to find as we move forward is that this is going to be somewhat of a revelation for people once they apply themselves into it. And that's the key to it. It's a new tool. Learn it and you'll benefit from it. If you don't, then, well, people are not using the plow anymore in a horse. This is what we're moving to. Yeah, I, Agriculture.

Yeah, I, I see similar to you, that the, the speed of evolution, the speed of development of AI is moving so rapidly that if we're at the Model T forward stage, we're, we're going to, I mean there are general assessments that will be at general AI by 2027. Right. By 2030 at the latest. And it, it is the time to learn about it and to become familiar with it is now or to be left in the dust. I mean it's, I think it's. The top performing agronomists and farmers in the future will be the people who embrace this. It will be, it will be as readily and widely used as, as a Google search is today. And I'm using Google as well. We use Google searches and we use Google as a verb now.

Yeah.

As a search engine. We're going to have similar verbs for using AI in the future, in the very near future. Think so. I want to talk a bit about your disease pressure because I am absolutely delighted and impressed with the results that we're getting from Pinyon. It's, it's our first year of having pinion in the field in a significant way and when I, when I, I first developed this product, it's been sitting on the shelf for a decade and we've done some further refinements and improvements as well. We developed it and brought it to the marketplace. But this, it has such, such a, a profound impact at this point. We have, I don't know the exact number of operations that we have it out on this summer. It's, it's quite a number of them and it's been, it's been hitting the ball out of the park consistently on a broad range of fungal and Bacterial diseases. Have you. I'm not sure exactly what the context is here. Have you had the chance to use it yet on your operation with the disease pressure that you have had?

Well, I track your organization and scan your web on a regular basis. Plus I've got my finger on the pulse with yourself and people like Kish and the operatives that we use in the field with aea. So yes I was made aware of Pinion and our in house scientists who's over soil and vine health. Patrick Kavanagh has actually been in conversation with your people at technical level as well as your vineyard heated operations expert Pedro out in in California. The reason why we were searching and seeking for something in this area is for the reason I've just stated it. This year it's been rain. Last year we had close to a drought for six weeks. We talked about this right at the start. The climate is changing. The climate has always changed. We live in a planet where climate as we have extreme weather events. What we've got now with with adjuncts and support with things like AAA and the amendments is something which helps us to deal better, more optimally with the challenges that we will continuously face in farming. So Pinyon came on our radar. I think when I first looked at it on your website. It's literally introducing it. It's got a picture of grapes alongside. We needed something to help us tackle fungal and bacterial pathogens. What my understanding is. And something which would tackle fungal and bacterial pathogens that doesn't disrupt the plant's microbiome. So I don't want to use a synthetic. If, if you're organic you can't use the synthetic. If you're regenerative, you mitigate it with a view to eradicating it. But we've got problems and challenges within farming whatever crop you've got which need to be dealt with immediately or that crop's going gone. So the fact that we heard Pinion was being brought to the market for us was very, very good timing. What we then were a little disappointed to find out was it wasn't available because it had been signed off at official level in North Carolina. So my understanding last time I spoke with Patrick is we're going through that process with you and your internal people to fast track that through and then I think we will very probably be the first farm operation in North Carolina, potentially the same east to be using the product. So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing how can be applied to the challenges that we've got on fungals that'll yeah,

I'll be looking forward to having a follow up conversation with you on that. We have as of this point,

of

course, as our organization has grown, I, I don't, I'm no longer at the level where I personally have context and familiarity with every farm that, that has tried it. But as of this point, point of the many people who've applied it, I know of one particular orchard application where one application actually it's not. Let me be sure to state this precisely. They made applications 50% as often as they did a conventional fungicide treatment and it, it underperformed the conventional fungicide treatment by about 5%. And I'm like, all right, I'm, I'm okay with that result. 50% application. And under like it's, it performed almost the equivalent of a conventional fungicide. That's a result that I'm quite happy with and, and that's the worst performance that I'm aware of at this point on a just a broad diversity, a broad array of different diseases, bacterial and fungal diseases that it's been tried on. So, so I'm quite excited to see where that goes this coming year. So at any rate, Martin, Martin, I've really enjoyed this conversation. There are many topics that we could have talked about that we haven't gotten to yet. What, what's something important that we've missed?

For me, I'll, I'll circle back again. The future for humanity, you might say, is moving away from the competitive culture of society mindset that we've had had for centuries now and moving more towards the collaborative, cooperative approach. And I'm seeing this more and more certainly it's been such a pleasure and an honor to operate within the regenerative movement. And I reference this all the time as a regenerative movement by, by that I mean farming, food, health, investment, research, policy. We're in the regenerative species business with. We've got a lot of broken systems. As we've spoken about throughout the podcast today, the two areas that I work more primarily than anything else is what we met the health care industry and the sorry system. The health industry health system and the food system. The two are symbiotically linked. And in order to move forward now, farms, farmers and farm operations play an absolutely fundamental core role within, in that. And it's not just the health of the system and the food, it's the health of the farmers. So I think if anything I'd like to end on is for people out there who are in farming, who are farmers within farming operations for Those who are listening, who might be a consumer or just an interested third party, farming is one. It's without a doubt. I've worked in seven different industries across the planet in the last 35 years, never coming anything close to the challenges and to the hard work and dedication farm farmers put into farm operations to provide us with the absolute single most important thing that we all need is food. We all need air, we all need water, we all need food. So I'm very grateful to farmers for providing that throughout my lifetime and now what I feel a responsibility towards is to be more supportive of them and their needs and how we can utilize modern technology, different ways of operating, like marketing and business development, to make their lives a little easier, to lighten the burden, to give them some of the time back and to give them an opportunity to make a profitable operation that not only they will enjoy farming in again, but also encourage the generations behind them to keep that baton being led forward into the future.

Thank you, Martin. Thanks for being here, for sharing your perspective and your experience and look forward to having more discussions.

Absolute pleasure. John, thank you for all that you do in the, in the movement as well. It's very much appreciated, sir.

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 go grow, Visit advancingecoag. Com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.