Anthony Myint is the founder of Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit focused on transforming agriculture through innovative economic models. A former chef and restaurateur, Myint transitioned from the restaurant industry to champion regenerative agriculture and address the climate impact of food systems. His organization helps farmers transition to regenerative practices by funding farm projects that enhance soil health, conserve water, and sequester carbon. Zero Foodprint is funded by businesses that contribute small percentages of their revenue, often through opt-out fees.
Zero Foodprint’s approach decouples food consumption from land management, enabling systemic change without relying solely on consumer behavior. Myint’s work emphasizes collective action—drawing parallels with renewable energy funding models—and collaborates with businesses, farmers, and governments to scale regenerative practices. Zero Foodprint now deployed over $8 million total to over 600 farm projects (including government funds, often in concert with funds from businesses).
In this episode, John and Anthony discuss:
The restaurant industry’s potential to fund regenerative agriculture
Decoupling food consumption from land management for direct impact
Small opt-out fees funding farm projects with minimal consumer cost
Limited impact of consumer-driven demand on systemic change
Policy and public-private partnerships to scale regenerative practices
Engaging farmers and businesses to adopt and promote the model
Additional Resources
To learn more about Anthony and Zero Foodprint, please visit: https://www.zerofoodprint.org/
To learn more about Zero Foodprint’s plan on Collective Regeneration, please read this paper.
About John Kempf
John Kempf is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA). A top expert in biological and regenerative farming, John founded AEA in 2006 to help fellow farmers by providing the education, tools, and strategies that will have a global effect on the food supply and those who grow it.
Through intense study and the knowledge gleaned from many industry leaders, John is building a comprehensive systems-based approach to plant nutrition – a system solidly based on the sciences of plant physiology, mineral nutrition, and soil microbiology.
Support For This Show & Helping You Grow
Since 2006, AEA has been on a mission to help growers become more resilient, efficient, and profitable with regenerative agriculture.
AEA works directly with growers to apply its unique line of liquid mineral crop nutrition products and biological inoculants. Informed by cutting-edge plant and soil data-gathering techniques, AEA’s science-based programs empower farm operations to meet the crop quality markers that matter the most.
AEA has created real and lasting change on millions of acres with its products and data-driven services by working hand-in-hand with growers to produce healthier soil, stronger crops, and higher profits.
Beyond working on the ground with growers, AEA leads in regenerative agriculture media and education, producing and distributing the popular and highly-regarded Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, inspiring webinars, and other educational content that serve as go-to resources for growers worldwide.
Learn more about AEA’s regenerative programs and products: https://www.advancingecoag.com
Podcast Transcript
0:00 – 0:02
(Speaker 2) Okay, here we go.
0:02 – 0:05
(Speaker 2) Hi friends, this is John.
0:05 – 0:08
(Speaker 2) Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast.
0:08 – 0:13
(Speaker 2) You know, one of the things that is so fundamental to regeneration,
0:13 – 0:17
(Speaker 2) if we truly want to have a regenerative agriculture on scale,
0:17 – 0:22
(Speaker 2) then at its most fundamental level, we need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship.
0:22 – 0:27
(Speaker 2) We need to have more people in the landscape with loving hearts and caring hands
0:27 – 0:31
(Speaker 2) who are engaged in the process of being good stewards.
0:31 – 0:35
(Speaker 2) But of course, our, at least here in the United States
0:35 – 0:37
(Speaker 2) and to some degree in many developing countries
0:37 – 0:42
(Speaker 2) around the world, there has been a cheap food policy
0:42 – 0:47
(Speaker 2) that has, there's been this active process of extraction, this extraction
0:47 – 0:53
(Speaker 2) of resources from the countryside and food from the landscape and this extraction of talent,
0:53 – 0:59
(Speaker 2) the extraction of people. And all of these are a result of, at its most fundamental level,
0:59 – 1:03
(Speaker 2) if we want to regenerate the capacity for stewardship and get more people into the landscape,
1:04 – 1:06
(Speaker 2) then we need to compensate them, we need to pay them well, we need to payate the capacity for stewardship and get more people into the landscape, then we need to compensate them.
1:06 – 1:07
(Speaker 2) We need to pay them well.
1:07 – 1:09
(Speaker 2) We need to pay them for the amount of dedication
1:09 – 1:11
(Speaker 2) and effort that they're putting in
1:11 – 1:16
(Speaker 2) equally to what we would in other professions.
1:16 – 1:19
(Speaker 2) And so it's with this concept in mind,
1:19 – 1:22
(Speaker 2) I've been looking forward to this conversation
1:22 – 1:25
(Speaker 2) with Anthony from Zero Foodprint who has
1:25 – 1:30
(Speaker 2) been doing some interesting work in and developing their own approach to how we
1:30 – 1:35
(Speaker 2) can compensate and reward farmers well given some of the imbalances and
1:35 – 1:39
(Speaker 2) challenges with the existing system. So Anthony, thank you for being here. Thank
1:39 – 1:44
(Speaker 2) you for the work that you're doing. I'd love for you to just start from the
1:44 – 1:46
(Speaker 2) beginning. Tell us, tell our audience
1:46 – 1:51
(Speaker 2) about your journey, the work that you've been doing, and what it is that you're working
1:51 – 1:52
(Speaker 2) on today.
1:52 – 1:57
(Speaker 1) Cool. Thanks, John. I'm really excited to be here because you're such a thought leader.
1:57 – 2:03
(Speaker 1) And this is the first time I've ever been introduced on a podcast or anything where
2:03 – 2:10
(Speaker 1) 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
2:11 – 2:16
(Speaker 1) the restaurant industry is the largest part of the food economy in the US. So bigger than retail,
2:16 – 2:22
(Speaker 1) bigger than agriculture. I think it's something like one out of 10 workers. So just like a really,
2:22 – 2:25
(Speaker 1) really huge sector. And yes,
2:27 – 2:30
(Speaker 2) that's interesting. And it's, it's bigger, how bigger you mentioned the number of people that it employs, is it bigger in
2:30 – 2:34
(Speaker 2) gross revenue? Is it bigger? Interesting. So people are
2:34 – 2:36
(Speaker 2) spending more money collectively at restaurants than they are in
2:36 – 2:40
(Speaker 1) retail. Much more. I did not know that. I don't have the
2:40 – 2:42
(Speaker 1) numbers today. But a couple years ago, it was like, you
2:42 – 2:54
(Speaker 1) know, twice as big even or something. Like it's huge. So it's really big and yet I don't believe that the restaurant industry is necessarily,
2:56 – 3:02
(Speaker 1) not yet at least, fully engaged in transforming agriculture. So a lot of chefs and restaurants
3:02 – 3:05
(Speaker 1) may buy from good farms, support good farms.
3:05 – 3:10
(Speaker 1) That's well known, the farm to table movement, of course. But I don't believe there really
3:10 – 3:16
(Speaker 1) is a robust table to farm movement. So I look forward to digging into that. I'll go ahead
3:16 – 3:21
(Speaker 1) and tell you kind of the background and how I got here. I was a chef restaurateur in San
3:21 – 3:26
(Speaker 1) Francisco, had some successful restaurants, et cetera. Had a daughter around
3:26 – 3:32
(Speaker 1) 2012, really started to think a lot about food and climate. And so my entry into regenerative
3:32 – 3:38
(Speaker 1) ag was from the climate lens. And so at first, Zero Foodprint was helping chefs and restaurants
3:38 – 3:43
(Speaker 1) go carbon neutral. Among other things, we did life cycle assessments with about 80 businesses,
3:43 – 3:50
(Speaker 1) ranging from like Michelin starred restaurants to fast casual to like the corporate cafeteria at Square in San Francisco with like
3:50 – 3:56
(Speaker 1) 5,000 meals a day or whatever. And what we found was basically everybody's carbon footprint,
3:57 – 4:02
(Speaker 1) the vast majority, like 70% something was typically ingredients. And I mean, that should
4:02 – 4:09
(Speaker 1) be pretty obvious right there. The majority of the food print is food, but that the ingredients are actually representing the agriculture,
4:09 – 4:14
(Speaker 1) you know, the plowing, the chemicals, the deforestation, et cetera. And so I can say
4:14 – 4:18
(Speaker 1) with clarity now, something I didn't even understand as clearly back then, which is
4:18 – 4:25
(Speaker 1) that in order for a restaurant or a food service operation to make a meaningful difference in their carbon
4:25 – 4:32
(Speaker 1) footprint or climate impact, they need a way to change farming, to transform agriculture.
4:32 – 4:37
(Speaker 1) And so what I meant in that opening remark is basically most of us are consumers, maybe
4:37 – 4:41
(Speaker 1) not necessarily you or the listeners on the show, but the majority of the good food movement
4:41 – 4:50
(Speaker 1) 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
4:50 – 4:55
(Speaker 1) make better choices. I'm going to buy a better ingredient. I'm going to not buy a worse ingredient,
4:55 – 4:59
(Speaker 1) something like that. And then because I know you're tuned into like systems change and
4:59 – 5:07
(Speaker 1) incentivization stuff, basically it's like agricultural supply is inelastic and I don't think that that slight
5:07 – 5:12
(Speaker 1) pull mechanism has a profound enough impact on supply.
5:12 – 5:19
(Speaker 1) The example being like organic is 1% of acres after 50 years despite very clear price signals
5:19 – 5:30
(Speaker 2) and all that. Yeah, so this is an important point that I want to dig into a bit, Anthony, because there
5:30 – 5:38
(Speaker 2) are many friends and colleagues of mine who hold the perspective very strongly that if
5:38 – 5:44
(Speaker 2) you want to facilitate significant change, then the only pathway to really develop that
5:44 – 5:46
(Speaker 2) in a meaningful way is
5:46 – 5:54
(Speaker 2) by driving consumer demand. And I have mixed feelings about that because on one hand, I
5:54 – 5:58
(Speaker 2) do think there needs to be that people generally need to be brought closer to food and have
5:58 – 6:04
(Speaker 2) a deeper understanding of it and and that there is there are a lot of benefits from
6:04 – 6:05
(Speaker 2) strengthening the demand side.
6:05 – 6:08
(Speaker 2) So I see the arguments there very clearly.
6:08 – 6:10
(Speaker 2) And on the other hand, that is also,
6:10 – 6:13
(Speaker 2) that's needing to solve in the case of the United States,
6:13 – 6:16
(Speaker 2) you're now trying to solve 150 million person problem.
6:16 – 6:18
(Speaker 2) Instead of when you're focusing on the supply chain,
6:18 – 6:22
(Speaker 2) you have a much smaller number of people
6:22 – 6:23
(Speaker 2) you need to persuade.
6:23 – 6:26
(Speaker 2) But why do you have, I'm intrigued by your comment
6:26 – 6:34
(Speaker 2) that the restaurant is significantly
6:34 – 6:36
(Speaker 2) greater than retail, and yet it hasn't
6:36 – 6:38
(Speaker 2) had a significant impact yet on moving the needle.
6:38 – 6:41
(Speaker 2) Why is that?
6:41 – 6:46
(Speaker 1) Well, in order to get at that, I'll tell you my restaurant story.
6:46 – 6:51
(Speaker 1) So we were working on regenerative agriculture since about 2014.
6:51 – 6:56
(Speaker 1) We were running a restaurant called The Perennial where we were, you know, championing Kernza.
6:56 – 6:59
(Speaker 1) We made sourdough every day, made with Kernza.
6:59 – 7:03
(Speaker 1) It almost felt like a backroom deal with, you know, the Land Institute to like get a
7:03 – 7:05
(Speaker 1) pallet of Kerns out back then.
7:11 – 7:16
(Speaker 1) And then 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
7:17 – 7:21
(Speaker 1) where they were kind of studying microbial necromass and mineral aggregate organic matter
7:21 – 7:25
(Speaker 1) and these lofty issues that don't make it normally to like the
7:25 – 7:31
(Speaker 1) dinner table discussion. And so we were trying to tell the story, trying to get people excited
7:31 – 7:38
(Speaker 1) about the idea that ingredients and food could be a solution at this major scale. And I remember a
7:38 – 7:43
(Speaker 1) conversation with a journalist where they were kind of typical kind of snarky journalist,
7:43 – 7:45
(Speaker 1) picking your life apart. And they were like,
7:45 – 7:49
(Speaker 1) yeah, but I get it. It feels important. But how does that actually make a change in the
7:49 – 7:57
(Speaker 1) field? And I was a chef in San Francisco in kind of like farm to table country. So I just
7:57 – 8:02
(Speaker 1) assumed like many others that you buy the good thing, you vote with your dollar, supply
8:02 – 8:11
(Speaker 1) shifts to meet demand, et cetera, kind of classic economics. But I didn't actually know, I couldn't explain to them how. And
8:11 – 8:16
(Speaker 1) so I started to ask the farmers and ranchers we were supporting, oftentimes over a beer
8:16 – 8:21
(Speaker 1) at the end of some event where we had championed regenerative ag and rah-rah the whole event.
8:21 – 8:31
(Speaker 1) And then, hey, by the way, I've been paying my invoice for three years now. Back in the napkin, this is $100,000. So how has that helped you do the next
8:31 – 8:38
(Speaker 1) thing? Does that help you plant a thousand linear feet of hedgerows or do this on the next 20 acres
8:38 – 8:49
(Speaker 1) or do whatever? How does that advance your progress in the field. And the answer kind of shocked me, but it shouldn't have.
8:49 – 8:52
(Speaker 1) But it was basically like, it doesn't.
8:52 – 8:54
(Speaker 1) Zero sense goes to that.
8:54 – 8:55
(Speaker 1) I'm trying to make ends meet.
8:55 – 8:58
(Speaker 1) I'm trying to keep my operation afloat.
8:58 – 9:00
(Speaker 1) I'm trying to get grants from the USDA or the state
9:00 – 9:02
(Speaker 1) to do the next thing and the next.
9:02 – 9:10
(Speaker 1) But you're literally just buying my beef. It's not like you're buying my beef for $9 a pound and then I now have
9:10 – 9:15
(Speaker 1) an extra $100,000 to like go do all this work. Like it doesn't work out. You know, it should
9:15 – 9:27
(Speaker 1) be pretty obvious. And so for me, it is clarifying to think of, to start to decouple food and land management.
9:27 – 9:32
(Speaker 1) So we can dig into that in detail, but another helpful analogy to me is to think about it
9:32 – 9:34
(Speaker 1) in terms of renewable energy.
9:34 – 9:39
(Speaker 1) And that's actually because as we were kind of coming to terms with this, we decided to
9:39 – 9:44
(Speaker 1) close the restaurant and then we began a collaboration with the state of California.
9:44 – 9:49
(Speaker 1) And really it was with the California Air Resources Board, which is the agency overseeing
9:49 – 9:55
(Speaker 1) cap and trade. They brought the Department of Food and Ag in. A lot of the way our programs
9:55 – 10:01
(Speaker 1) and work are designed and organized are influenced by the chief economist from the California
10:01 – 10:05
(Speaker 1) Air Resources Board. She's now on our board. She has since left the agency.
10:06 – 10:09
(Speaker 1) But anyway, so, and so I'm bringing up renewables
10:09 – 10:11
(Speaker 1) because for me, it's clarifying to think
10:11 – 10:14
(Speaker 1) about consumption-based efforts in renewables
10:14 – 10:18
(Speaker 1) like switching to an EV, switching to a heat pump
10:18 – 10:19
(Speaker 1) or something like that.
10:19 – 10:21
(Speaker 1) You know, these are important.
10:21 – 10:24
(Speaker 1) And then you also have production-based efforts
10:24 – 10:26
(Speaker 1) like improving the grid. And that
10:26 – 10:31
(Speaker 1) could be like $1 per energy bill goes to improve the grid.
10:31 – 10:35
(Speaker 1) So you can immediately, because you have a basic understanding of tech, like most people,
10:35 – 10:42
(Speaker 1) understand that buying an EV is one thing that actually is independent of the grid.
10:42 – 10:46
(Speaker 1) The grid might be, the electricity might be produced by a coal plant or it might be
10:46 – 10:52
(Speaker 1) produced by solar or renewable. I'm buying the CV, that's one action. But we also need the grid
10:52 – 10:58
(Speaker 1) to improve. This is clear. And similarly, if you use a dollar per energy bill to improve the grid,
10:59 – 11:03
(Speaker 1) nobody's crazy enough to say, like, OK, but I'm not going to pay my dollar unless you build whole
11:03 – 11:10
(Speaker 1) new energy transmission lines to get the energy to my house. I can't have the coal energy mixed with the
11:10 – 11:15
(Speaker 1) community solar project. Go spend a ton of money on infrastructure and rebuild everything so that
11:15 – 11:21
(Speaker 1) I can have that identity preservation. But I almost think that's the way things are oriented
11:21 – 11:25
(Speaker 1) with food because I'm not going to pay twice as much for the regenerative
11:25 – 11:31
(Speaker 1) loaf of bread or something if it's only 5% regenerative at the ingredient level if I
11:31 – 11:39
(Speaker 1) have a food orientation. But if my goal is improving land management independent of consumption,
11:39 – 11:46
(Speaker 1) then of course we could just improve the food grid. And in a way, you could start to conceptualize the entire landscape
11:46 – 11:52
(Speaker 1) as one big biological solar panel. We're trying to optimize this cell, this field, this farm,
11:52 – 11:59
(Speaker 1) this ranch. And society could, if magically there was unlimited money, we could just start
12:00 – 12:05
(Speaker 1) regenifying all the land, never mind the consumption side for a minute.
12:05 – 12:11
(Speaker 1) So if you start with that logic, then it opens up a whole world of opportunity.
12:11 – 12:13
(Speaker 2) CB All right.
12:13 – 12:22
(Speaker 2) So you're disassociating region of management with food consumption.
12:22 – 12:25
(Speaker 2) Perhaps rather than us, this conversation is very important.
12:25 – 12:27
(Speaker 2) And let's make it concrete.
12:27 – 12:29
(Speaker 2) Let's make it real instead of abstract.
12:29 – 12:31
(Speaker 2) Why don't you tell us a bit about the work
12:31 – 12:33
(Speaker 2) that you're doing today with Zero Food Print
12:33 – 12:34
(Speaker 2) and how that all came to be?
12:36 – 12:38
(Speaker 1) Okay, well, I would love to do that,
12:38 – 12:41
(Speaker 1) but actually let's make it real with a farm story first.
12:42 – 12:45
(Speaker 1) So let's use two, actually.
12:45 – 12:48
(Speaker 1) Let's say that a farmer is growing wheat.
12:48 – 12:50
(Speaker 1) And I don't know the agronomic specifics,
12:50 – 12:52
(Speaker 1) so sorry if this is clumsy.
12:52 – 12:57
(Speaker 1) But they use 100 units of chemical fertilizer.
12:57 – 13:02
(Speaker 1) If that farmer switched and used 50 units of chemical fertilizer
13:02 – 13:05
(Speaker 1) and the fertility equivalent of 50 units of something
13:05 – 13:12
(Speaker 1) better, whether it's biologicals or compost or something, that would be better for the
13:12 – 13:13
(Speaker 1) public.
13:13 – 13:16
(Speaker 1) Like the soil would be healthier, different things.
13:16 – 13:19
(Speaker 1) The nutrients would probably be better, et cetera.
13:19 – 13:25
(Speaker 1) But it would be very complicated to try to create a certification so that the market and the
13:25 – 13:30
(Speaker 1) ingredients, kind of the ingredient economy, could reward that and pay for the transition.
13:31 – 13:35
(Speaker 1) First of all, it would be an upfront cost by the farmer, the reward might be later. Second of all,
13:35 – 13:41
(Speaker 1) in order to do that identity preservation, if the farmer was selling the wheat to Archer Daniels
13:41 – 13:45
(Speaker 1) Midland or some huge mill, now they have to get a few farmers together
13:45 – 13:49
(Speaker 1) for a small-scale mill or have new logistics, drive in 100 miles extra, something crazy.
13:50 – 13:52
(Speaker 1) And so- CB You're absolutely
13:52 – 13:54
(Speaker 1) correct. That process is difficult. CB
13:54 – 13:59
(Speaker 1) I'm asking, right, do we actually need that messy middle if the goal is improved land management?
14:00 – 14:05
(Speaker 1) There's no reason that the wheat supply wouldn't just become 1% regenerative, then 10, then 20,
14:05 – 14:12
(Speaker 1) you know, etc. And you wouldn't need that one field out of 10 to be ROC certified or something,
14:12 – 14:19
(Speaker 1) it could just start improving. So I think that for me, the light bulb moment was instead of
14:19 – 14:26
(Speaker 1) focusing on changing eating habits, it's possible for society to just change farming itself.
14:26 – 14:30
(Speaker 1) And that's almost like such a, it sounds so simple that,
14:31 – 14:35
(Speaker 1) it's like disarming, but it is, as you're pointing out,
14:35 – 14:39
(Speaker 1) kind of like rare actually in this movement.
14:39 – 14:41
(Speaker 1) So that's my one example with crops.
14:41 – 14:43
(Speaker 1) Let's use another example with a different production system
14:43 – 14:50
(Speaker 1) that might even drive it home more, which is to say beef production. So again, I'm not the beef expert,
14:50 – 14:58
(Speaker 1) but generally speaking, cattle are out on grass or pasture for about a year. Then maybe
14:58 – 15:06
(Speaker 1) 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.
15:06 – 15:07
(Speaker 1) I'm against that.
15:07 – 15:11
(Speaker 1) But in this decoupling mode, you can
15:11 – 15:15
(Speaker 1) imagine that the rancher makes progress in year one
15:15 – 15:18
(Speaker 1) even if the cow goes to the feedlot in year two.
15:18 – 15:21
(Speaker 1) And in fact, that is such a massive opportunity.
15:21 – 15:24
(Speaker 1) Like 760 million acres of grassland or rangeland
15:24 – 15:25
(Speaker 1) or whatever in the US, we could
15:25 – 15:30
(Speaker 1) be regenifying landscapes regardless of who eats the beef and what labels and things are
15:30 – 15:37
(Speaker 1) on the beef. But the kind of regenerative beef movement wouldn't really be for that
15:37 – 15:43
(Speaker 1) because their industry is organized around kind of like the purity of the regenerative
15:43 – 15:44
(Speaker 1) beef, let's call it.
15:44 – 15:45
(Speaker 2) CB. Yeah, I get it.
15:45 – 15:49
(Speaker 1) CB. Meanwhile, the plant-based movement wouldn't be for that because they're organized against the
15:49 – 15:56
(Speaker 1) CAFO in a way. And so even like climate experts, different things are not seeing this massive,
15:56 – 16:02
(Speaker 1) massive opportunity of just not a purity contest, but just making progress on the land.
16:02 – 16:05
(Speaker 1) A dollar per trash bill could get compost
16:05 – 16:11
(Speaker 1) onto rangeland to restore rangeland and conserve water and blah, blah, blah, and improve biodiversity
16:11 – 16:16
(Speaker 1) and resilience, just like on the energy bill. But people aren't going there because we're
16:16 – 16:21
(Speaker 1) thinking too much about eating the beef. And then with the plant forward movement,
16:21 – 16:30
(Speaker 1) et cetera, 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.
16:30 – 16:35
(Speaker 1) So you would imagine like, okay, so then the beef industry would produce 10 million fewer
16:35 – 16:37
(Speaker 1) pounds in the US or something.
16:37 – 16:41
(Speaker 1) But I think we kind of know that actually what happens is the beef industry produces
16:41 – 16:55
(Speaker 1) maybe about the same and then maybe exports it to India or South Korea or somewhere else. And so there's kind of this false, I guess, false belief
16:55 – 17:00
(Speaker 1) that consumer choice is actually kind of like a lever that could save the world or make
17:00 – 17:07
(Speaker 1) this kind of deep change happen when in fact I don't believe that the choice
17:07 – 17:12
(Speaker 1) actually is changing the system at the same proportion as people think.
17:12 – 17:17
(Speaker 2) CB Well, when I look at it purely from a rangeland and ecosystem health perspective,
17:17 – 17:22
(Speaker 2) I would actually argue that we need more beef. We need a lot more beef production out on grass,
17:22 – 17:25
(Speaker 2) but that's a bit of a separate conversation.
17:25 – 17:27
(Speaker 2) But I want to come back to,
17:27 – 17:29
(Speaker 2) you've now, you used the energy example,
17:29 – 17:31
(Speaker 2) you said a dollar per energy bill,
17:31 – 17:34
(Speaker 2) and then you talked about a dollar per trash bill just now.
17:35 – 17:40
(Speaker 2) Can you give me any examples of where this type of,
17:40 – 17:42
(Speaker 2) I'm not sure quite what the right word is,
17:42 – 17:46
(Speaker 2) but where these additional incentives are
17:46 – 17:49
(Speaker 2) added to the bill after the fact.
17:49 – 17:52
(Speaker 2) In what spaces or what industries is this being done currently?
17:52 – 17:58
(Speaker 1) So there's a lot of examples of collective economic action, like a dollar per trash bill
17:58 – 18:05
(Speaker 1) 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
18:05 – 18:11
(Speaker 1) can added, five cents per can in California, Michigan, other places.
18:11 – 18:16
(Speaker 1) Buying a tire or a can of paint, there's a dollar added or a dollar fifty depending on
18:16 – 18:20
(Speaker 1) what state you're in for kind of the end of life use of that paint.
18:20 – 18:27
(Speaker 1) There's also a whole great program, the Fair Food Program, where the Coalition of Immokalee Workers based in Florida,
18:27 – 18:30
(Speaker 1) I believe, got a penny per pound on fast food tomatoes
18:30 – 18:32
(Speaker 1) that kind of circumvented the value chain
18:32 – 18:35
(Speaker 1) and then just went directly to improve wages
18:35 – 18:37
(Speaker 1) and provided like 13 to 25% wages
18:37 – 18:41
(Speaker 1) for fast food tomato harvesters.
18:41 – 18:49
(Speaker 1) So basically, there are many ways if society gets creative. Some of them are taxes
18:49 – 18:56
(Speaker 1) and some of them are optional fees. And so our particular work is organized around optional
18:56 – 19:02
(Speaker 1) fees but sort of with a tendency and preference towards opt-out choice architecture. So some
19:02 – 19:07
(Speaker 1) of the hallmarks of this approach and what could eventually create a new normal, I believe,
19:07 – 19:13
(Speaker 1) are mass balance and opt-out choice architecture.
19:13 – 19:19
(Speaker 2) Well, there are a few things that I'm surprising myself
19:19 – 19:22
(Speaker 2) a little bit because I tend to come
19:22 – 19:27
(Speaker 2) from a very conservative perspective on market dynamics and so forth, but what
19:27 – 19:30
(Speaker 2) I like about what you're describing, two things.
19:30 – 19:36
(Speaker 2) One is I like the beef example where you so eloquently described the opportunity that
19:36 – 19:44
(Speaker 2) gets missed in the way that cow-calf herds are managed or could be managed and the benefits
19:44 – 19:45
(Speaker 2) that could be accrued there.
19:45 – 19:48
(Speaker 2) And the second thing that I really appreciate is that
19:50 – 19:54
(Speaker 2) if you add increased price or increased incentive
19:56 – 20:00
(Speaker 2) to the product that the farmer is getting paid for,
20:00 – 20:03
(Speaker 2) that just propagates and amplifies up the supply chain
20:03 – 20:08
(Speaker 2) every time someone touches it and adds a certain multiplier margin to it.
20:08 – 20:17
(Speaker 2) That's what ends up what starts as one cent per pound to the farmer ends up being 15 times that by the time it gets to the consumer.
20:17 – 20:26
(Speaker 2) Yep. And so by taking this opposite approach, as you described with the tomato workers, that
20:26 – 20:31
(Speaker 2) has a very low cost to the consumer, but significant rewards on the supply side.
20:31 – 20:32
(Speaker 1) Yeah, exactly.
20:32 – 20:38
(Speaker 1) So translating that back to beef, instead of advocating for the price of beef to go
20:38 – 20:47
(Speaker 1) up from $4 to $10 or something, and as much regenerative certified beef as possible. I would say we need
20:47 – 20:54
(Speaker 1) that. And it's kind of a both-and. So instead of just farm to table and this product purity contest,
20:54 – 20:58
(Speaker 1) we could also have a progress mechanism where McDonald's or Burger King is sending 10 cents
20:58 – 21:05
(Speaker 1) per burger, something 1% per burger, 5 cents, whatever it is. And then those, you know, hundreds
21:05 – 21:11
(Speaker 1) of millions of dollars could go towards improved grazing in year one of that cow's life, just
21:11 – 21:15
(Speaker 1) like a dollar could go to the energy bill to improve the grid. And we can, society can
21:15 – 21:20
(Speaker 1) do both as quickly as possible. But I don't believe the food system has yet, the food
21:20 – 21:25
(Speaker 1) economy has yet created that collective regeneration mechanism. Yeah.
21:25 – 21:29
(Speaker 2) Well, it's complicated, complex, it's messy.
21:29 – 21:30
(Speaker 2) We could come up with a long list
21:30 – 21:33
(Speaker 2) of other appropriate adjectives as well.
21:33 – 21:38
(Speaker 2) So how are you implementing this with zero footprint?
21:38 – 21:40
(Speaker 1) So that's almost precisely what we do,
21:40 – 21:44
(Speaker 1) is we're essentially engaging businesses and really
21:44 – 21:47
(Speaker 1) almost like their customers in
21:47 – 21:56
(Speaker 1) this kind of collective regeneration program. So a business will send 1% of revenue, and
21:56 – 22:02
(Speaker 1) it could be an optional fee at the bottom of the check. It could be wonky pricing, like
22:02 – 22:06
(Speaker 1) the pasta was $18. Now they're going to change the price,
22:06 – 22:10
(Speaker 1) it's going to be 18.18. They'll communicate to consumers, this 18 cents is going to farm
22:10 – 22:15
(Speaker 1) projects to build healthy soil and conserve water, etc. Or they could just eat the cost.
22:15 – 22:19
(Speaker 1) There's a whole Patagonia has a whole 1% for the planet program where businesses are just
22:19 – 22:25
(Speaker 1) donating 1%, hundreds of millions of dollars goes through that per year. So in a way, our work is kind of
22:25 – 22:31
(Speaker 1) like 1% for the planet, but directly for the planet where 95% of every dollar is being passed
22:31 – 22:37
(Speaker 1) through directly for compost, the cost of the cover crop seed, the cost of the fencing for
22:37 – 22:42
(Speaker 1) regenerative grazing, technical assistance with the conservation district or university cooperative
22:42 – 22:50
(Speaker 1) extension. So really just like the actual cost of that transition. So that's kind of the crowdfunding money coming
22:50 – 22:56
(Speaker 1) inside. And then on the farmer facing side, since I know that's a lot of your listenership,
22:56 – 23:02
(Speaker 1) farmers are basically requesting funds. It is a grant program, but it's unlike other
23:02 – 23:09
(Speaker 1) grant programs in that it's not kind of like write an essay contest. Here's a black box where you don't know if you'll get the grant. Every request is
23:09 – 23:15
(Speaker 1) basically just a scope of work and very simple and not judging the farm's practices or anything. So
23:15 – 23:21
(Speaker 1) a farmer might request $15,000 to plant 1,000 linear feet of hedgerows, or they might want
23:22 – 23:28
(Speaker 1) $20,000. They're going to use it on switching from fertilizer to compost on 30 acres
23:28 – 23:32
(Speaker 1) and planting cover crops or whatever it is.
23:32 – 23:42
(Speaker 1) 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
23:42 – 23:46
(Speaker 1) or of the modeled carbon sequestration of the projects, or of the modeled carbon sequestration of the projects.
23:46 – 23:49
(Speaker 1) That said, it is not a carbon credit program
23:49 – 23:53
(Speaker 1) and it's not sort of like carbon tunnel vision or whatever,
23:53 – 23:55
(Speaker 1) like we're basically using carbon as a proxy
23:55 – 23:57
(Speaker 1) for soil organic matter and water holding
23:57 – 23:58
(Speaker 1) and all the different things,
23:58 – 24:00
(Speaker 1) but there just are these existing tools
24:00 – 24:03
(Speaker 1) like the USDA's Comet Planner and others
24:03 – 24:05
(Speaker 1) that are organized around carbon
24:05 – 24:08
(Speaker 1) sequestration estimates.
24:08 – 24:15
(Speaker 2) Can you give me, so are you, you as Xero Foodprint are directly administering the grant side
24:15 – 24:17
(Speaker 2) and the farmer facing side as well?
24:17 – 24:18
(Speaker 1) Yeah, we are.
24:18 – 24:20
(Speaker 1) So we started this in the private sector.
24:20 – 24:26
(Speaker 1) So we've been deploying funds from restaurants, packaged goods, etc., sometimes
24:26 – 24:33
(Speaker 1) an individual donor, a wine company. So we've been deploying these funds and that part of the work
24:33 – 24:41
(Speaker 1) is now over $3 million that has gone out to farm projects. And then we also have found an important
24:41 – 24:47
(Speaker 1) role as a kind of government contractor that allows governments to have added capacity
24:47 – 24:48
(Speaker 1) in this kind of deployment.
24:48 – 24:52
(Speaker 1) So we are deploying millions of dollars
24:52 – 24:54
(Speaker 1) as part of a California Department of Food and Ag
24:54 – 24:57
(Speaker 1) Healthy Soils Program block grant.
24:57 – 24:59
(Speaker 1) In California, we have contracts
24:59 – 25:01
(Speaker 1) with something like 30 jurisdictions
25:01 – 25:03
(Speaker 1) to get compost to farms and ranches.
25:03 – 25:05
(Speaker 1) We were part of a big Climate Smart Commodities grant,
25:05 – 25:07
(Speaker 1) but that was canceled.
25:07 – 25:08
(Speaker 1) We're part of another USDA grant that
25:08 – 25:11
(Speaker 1) was unfrozen a few months ago, and that
25:11 – 25:16
(Speaker 1) is overseeing 88 on-farm trials of compost application.
25:16 – 25:19
(Speaker 1) So all of that is to say we're pretty well-versed now
25:19 – 25:22
(Speaker 1) in the deployment of funds and contracting with farmers
25:22 – 25:24
(Speaker 1) and managing that process.
25:24 – 25:25
(Speaker 1) And so this is a slightly
25:25 – 25:31
(Speaker 1) boring analogy, but I see that role as being a critical role like what a healthcare provider does,
25:32 – 25:37
(Speaker 1) where if you think about it, a healthcare provider is kind of getting millions or maybe billions of
25:37 – 25:46
(Speaker 1) dollars to patients or doctors or paying for an insulin prescription or something. And the agricultural transition is this giant
25:47 – 25:54
(Speaker 1) prospect that needs to occur, this huge effort, and it will require money going to farmers and
25:54 – 25:58
(Speaker 1) each field and technical assistance and paying for the next intervention and the next.
25:59 – 26:05
(Speaker 1) So I kind of see our role as being that administrator that can allow funds from, you know, ten cents
26:05 – 26:10
(Speaker 1) from a burger or a million dollars from a company or a government or whatever to kind
26:10 – 26:16
(Speaker 1) of flow together and sometimes even cost share with each other for the projects that are
26:16 – 26:19
(Speaker 1) overlapping and relevant to each.
26:19 – 26:24
(Speaker 1) Are all of your grantees farmers directly?
26:24 – 26:26
(Speaker 1) You're working only with farmers or also with other service
26:26 – 26:28
(Speaker 1) providers who are supporting farmers?
26:28 – 26:31
(Speaker 1) Great question.
26:31 – 26:37
(Speaker 1) Typically farmers every once in a while will have someone like the Sonoma County wine growers
26:37 – 26:43
(Speaker 1) put in a request, for example, for a certain amount of linear feed of hedgerows, and then
26:43 – 26:45
(Speaker 1) they sub-award awarded that out to land
26:45 – 26:50
(Speaker 2) managers but so basically with farmers but sometimes with like one added step
26:50 – 27:01
(Speaker 2) okay and as you've what are the what has been the response of the businesses who
27:01 – 27:09
(Speaker 2) are choosing to support you both and oh yeah, so that's the first question, then I have a follow-up to that.
27:09 – 27:17
(Speaker 1) Well, it's mixed and it's really almost couldn't be a worse time to start asking restaurants
27:17 – 27:22
(Speaker 1) to raise their prices and give away money than COVID and post-COVID.
27:22 – 27:26
(Speaker 1) And I think immigration is going to make things worse, you know, and
27:26 – 27:30
(Speaker 1) et cetera. So never really a good time to ask for money, but this has probably been
27:30 – 27:36
(Speaker 1) the hardest time. And yet what a lot of the restaurants are doing is essentially giving
27:36 – 27:40
(Speaker 1) their customers this option. So I think in that sense...
27:40 – 27:43
(Speaker 2) It is an opt-out option though, right?
27:43 – 27:46
(Speaker 1) Yeah, that's typically how we try to
27:46 – 27:51
(Speaker 1) organize it because if it's opt-in, it's kind of inconvenient and very few people opt-in. If it's
27:51 – 28:10
(Speaker 1) opt-out, usually the amount is very nominal and brink, it's scary, etc. It's risky
28:10 – 28:15
(Speaker 1) even if it aligns with their values, but then once they participate, the response from customers
28:15 – 28:21
(Speaker 1) is overwhelmingly positive, like a lot of. Sometimes people don't advertise it much.
28:21 – 28:28
(Speaker 1) They have signs posted and things, but other times it's part of the table side spiel or something and the chef and the restaurant are proud of it. And in those cases in particular,
28:30 – 28:35
(Speaker 1) anecdotally at least, the feedback is often like, oh my God, that's amazing. Who else is doing this?
28:35 – 28:39
(Speaker 1) Like, I want to go support those businesses or whatever. And there's a lot of market research
28:39 – 28:47
(Speaker 1) that kind of backs up that consumers will pay like a 9.7% premium for the sustainable choice, even with inflation
28:47 – 28:49
(Speaker 1) and cost of living and all these things.
28:49 – 28:54
(Speaker 1) So the prospect of like a couple cents, a 1% to feel good about your purchase or whatever,
28:54 – 28:57
(Speaker 1) it's almost a no-brainer for customers.
28:57 – 28:59
(Speaker 1) But it is very hard to get a business to agree.
28:59 – 29:04
(Speaker 2) Well, it's interesting when you think about, I was surprised at the beginning of our conversation
29:04 – 29:06
(Speaker 2) when you described the volume of retail trade
29:06 – 29:12
(Speaker 2) or the volume of retail dollars that goes through restaurants as compared to retail.
29:12 – 29:16
(Speaker 2) But it also seems to me that there's not the same price sensitivity there.
29:16 – 29:19
(Speaker 2) There's less price sensitivity on the restaurant side as there is in the retail side, I would
29:19 – 29:20
(Speaker 2) guess.
29:20 – 29:22
(Speaker 2) That's pure speculation on my part.
29:22 – 29:25
(Speaker 1) Yeah, I would tend to agree from a consumer perspective,
29:25 – 29:27
(Speaker 1) but then from an operator perspective,
29:27 – 29:30
(Speaker 1) like restaurant margins are just as tight as everywhere,
29:30 – 29:33
(Speaker 1) like if not negative, you know, et cetera.
29:33 – 29:37
(Speaker 1) So that's the unique thing where it's kind of
29:37 – 29:38
(Speaker 1) this affordable luxury industry.
29:38 – 29:42
(Speaker 1) So as the consumer, it's no big deal,
29:42 – 29:44
(Speaker 1) but then if for the operator,
29:44 – 29:45
(Speaker 1) it's just as hard as anybody's
29:45 – 29:46
(Speaker 1) saying yes.
29:46 – 29:54
(Speaker 2) Yeah. So what you said you have, you've had three million, is that 3 million per year
29:54 – 29:57
(Speaker 2) or 3 million in total that you've had come in so far? How long have you been doing this
29:57 – 30:01
(Speaker 2) and how do you see it? Do you see it scaling in a significant way?
30:01 – 30:07
(Speaker 1) Yeah. So, so that's 3 million total from businesses, but a lot of it is in the past couple of years.
30:07 – 30:16
(Speaker 1) We started this collective regeneration work in 2021 or 2020, again, it was like deep COVID.
30:16 – 30:30
(Speaker 1) So it was pretty tough early on. To me, the trajectory is that, first of all, one franchisee, for example, in Boulder, Colorado,
30:30 – 30:36
(Speaker 1) of Subway Sandwiches is participating in our program. So to me, this really speaks towards
30:36 – 30:45
(Speaker 1) the trajectory because here's a gentleman who I think has a little bit of a farming background, cares about compost,
30:45 – 30:51
(Speaker 1) etc. But as a subway franchise, he kind of recognized like he can't go to the farmer's
30:51 – 30:57
(Speaker 1) market every day, you know, etc. And so, our program was introduced to him by Boulder County
30:57 – 31:03
(Speaker 1) with whom we collaborate. And so, he was like, okay, let me give it a try. So, he got approval
31:03 – 31:05
(Speaker 1) from corporate to participate.
31:05 – 31:06
(Speaker 1) And I don't know.
31:06 – 31:08
(Speaker 1) I wasn't on the call, but I imagine
31:08 – 31:10
(Speaker 1) the conversation was kind of like, hey, you guys are going
31:10 – 31:11
(Speaker 1) to make the same amount of money.
31:11 – 31:12
(Speaker 1) I'm going to do this thing.
31:12 – 31:14
(Speaker 1) I think it'll be good for business
31:14 – 31:16
(Speaker 1) and aligns with my values, et cetera.
31:16 – 31:27
(Speaker 1) Every customer can opt out, so no big deal. been participating now for like three years. He reports nobody's opted out. If Subway were
31:27 – 31:33
(Speaker 1) to do this at all of their locations, that would be over $100 million per year. So that's
31:33 – 31:38
(Speaker 1) one corporation. You can imagine every single other one, Chipotle, Starbucks, everybody
31:38 – 31:47
(Speaker 1) could regenerate if they chose to. To me, this is where the opt-out is valuable, because in corporate America,
31:47 – 31:53
(Speaker 1) you would imagine that if the CFO of Subway miraculously somehow had an extra $100 million,
31:53 – 31:59
(Speaker 1) he would be obligated to disperse that to shareholders. If he didn't, he would be sued.
31:59 – 32:03
(Speaker 1) And so that's kind of where that opt-out is crucial, because what it means is the customer
32:03 – 32:10
(Speaker 1) has chosen to send this 10 cents, you know, or whatever it is from their sub to the farm projects. And then that also
32:10 – 32:17
(Speaker 1) comes back to policy, because typically with a policy like a tax, you would need a 67% vote and
32:17 – 32:21
(Speaker 1) a ballot initiative, etc. So usually people don't vote for taxes, and climate progress is stalled,
32:21 – 32:25
(Speaker 1) and environmental progress is hard. But in this
32:25 – 32:30
(Speaker 1) case, if it's optional, you don't need a vote. A city council or a county supervisor could
32:30 – 32:35
(Speaker 1) just kind of pass an ordinance and decide because it's optional, even if it's opt-out.
32:35 – 32:40
(Speaker 1) And so that's actually the kind of through line to where renewable energy programs like
32:40 – 32:43
(Speaker 1) that kind of dollar per energy bill or that kind of thing come into being through that
32:43 – 32:49
(Speaker 1) sort of like public-private collaboration and choice architecture around opt-outs for very nominal
32:49 – 32:56
(Speaker 1) amounts. But like a dollar per energy bill, that collective action is so powerful that like Los
32:56 – 33:01
(Speaker 1) Angeles, San Diego, like a whole city can commit to 100% renewable energy, everything could change.
33:02 – 33:07
(Speaker 1) And as you probably know, like in the fossil fuel industry, there's immense, immense subsidies, $700 billion
33:07 – 33:09
(Speaker 1) whatever of subsidies.
33:09 – 33:13
(Speaker 1) And so the USDA, like food and ag subsidies for crop insurance
33:13 – 33:15
(Speaker 1) and these things that are misaligned and perverse
33:15 – 33:18
(Speaker 1) subsidies are tiny compared to energy subsidies.
33:18 – 33:21
(Speaker 2) There are a few percentage points comparatively.
33:21 – 33:23
(Speaker 1) So I'm just saying that the lever for change
33:23 – 33:26
(Speaker 1) with collective action is huge, and because
33:26 – 33:32
(Speaker 1) regenerative ag is such a win-win-win because of water and resilience and nutrition and
33:32 – 33:38
(Speaker 1) farmer profitability, this type of policy will manifest at the county level, then the
33:38 – 33:39
(Speaker 1) state level.
33:39 – 33:45
(Speaker 1) And each county that adapts and begins these programs can commit to 100% regenerative or climate resilient
33:45 – 33:48
(Speaker 1) or whatever term they use, but that it requires
33:48 – 33:54
(Speaker 1) that decoupling and not focusing on procurement policies,
33:54 – 33:58
(Speaker 1) but just economic policy.
33:58 – 33:59
(Speaker 2) What would have to happen?
33:59 – 34:04
(Speaker 2) Have you had any conversations with the subways of the world
34:04 – 34:06
(Speaker 2) and these major companies at the most senior
34:06 – 34:12
(Speaker 2) levels. Have any of those conversations happened yet? And what has the interest been?
34:12 – 34:18
(Speaker 1) Well, I can say we, after about two years, we were able to get a meeting with Subway
34:18 – 34:27
(Speaker 1) Corporate and they declined to kind of advertise. Like our ask was just to kind of promote this franchisee,
34:27 – 34:34
(Speaker 1) you know, drive business. Hopefully more franchisees would get involved, etc. And I don't know
34:34 – 34:40
(Speaker 1) if they like gave a hard no, but they basically didn't respond to emails after that. As an
34:40 – 34:46
(Speaker 1) activist, I kind of imagine that their logic was this would be a little bit risky
34:46 – 34:54
(Speaker 1) because it sort of lays bare that we're doing something at five locations and we are doing
34:54 – 35:01
(Speaker 1) nothing at 37,000 locations. Never mind that everybody else is also doing nothing, but
35:01 – 35:07
(Speaker 1) it seemed to me like the optics were, you know, that there was some downside.
35:07 – 35:12
(Speaker 2) So what has your strategy been? What is your strategy going forward?
35:12 – 35:17
(Speaker 2) How are you envisioning, you mentioned subway as an ideal scenario,
35:17 – 35:21
(Speaker 2) and they've in the face of operations perhaps not being so receptive,
35:21 – 35:25
(Speaker 2) how do you see the pathway forward to scaling
35:25 – 35:26
(Speaker 2) and having a significant impact?
35:28 – 35:30
(Speaker 1) Well, this gets back to one of your other questions too,
35:30 – 35:32
(Speaker 1) which was like, what's the reception?
35:32 – 35:37
(Speaker 1) And so I had initially imagined like every values aligned
35:37 – 35:40
(Speaker 1) chef at these conferences, at all these events,
35:40 – 35:43
(Speaker 1) I know hundreds, everybody's gonna do this.
35:43 – 35:44
(Speaker 1) I'm an optimist.
35:44 – 35:49
(Speaker 1) So I just assumed like, oh, of course everybody's in. And then probably we talk with-
35:49 – 35:55
(Speaker 1) I'm laughing because I recognize myself. Right. We probably have 100 conversations,
35:56 – 36:02
(Speaker 1) 80 people say yes, and then maybe one participates like two years later. Something. It's agonizingly
36:02 – 36:10
(Speaker 1) slow and disappointing and frustrating. And I think that is because of that disconnect where a lot of people are already making good
36:10 – 36:16
(Speaker 1) choices. And so there's a feeling of like, but I'm already good. And they maybe haven't
36:16 – 36:20
(Speaker 1) undergone this thought exercise of separating out food and land management.
36:20 – 36:26
(Speaker 1) And so they maybe don't understand kind of to your point earlier that trickle-down impact
36:26 – 36:33
(Speaker 1) that better choices just has this dilutive narrow impact of like your operation may be good but you
36:33 – 36:39
(Speaker 1) may not be changing the world as much as you think. And then they maybe don't even understand
36:40 – 36:45
(Speaker 1) the continual kind of continuum of progress in the field.
36:45 – 36:47
(Speaker 1) And so there's kind of this binary of like,
36:47 – 36:49
(Speaker 1) I'll buy the good ingredient,
36:49 – 36:51
(Speaker 1) but not total clarity on like,
36:51 – 36:55
(Speaker 1) but what if I helped a farmer or not helped teamed up
36:55 – 36:58
(Speaker 1) with a farmer to make progress on the next acre, et cetera.
36:59 – 37:02
(Speaker 1) And so basically I think that to me,
37:02 – 37:07
(Speaker 1) the path forward is in a city or county where we have critical
37:07 – 37:14
(Speaker 1) mass of early adopters and chefs and restaurants and leaders and brands, then getting public
37:14 – 37:15
(Speaker 1) policy in place.
37:15 – 37:20
(Speaker 1) So like an ordinance, creating a healthy soils commission in that region.
37:20 – 37:25
(Speaker 1) So kind of like the analog to a public utilities commission, that community is starting to
37:25 – 37:32
(Speaker 1) collect funds and it could be 1% from a hotel or 0.1% from a hotel, any amount from anywhere.
37:32 – 37:39
(Speaker 1) Restaurants, hotels, trash bill, it could be property tax, like anything, but just money
37:39 – 37:45
(Speaker 1) starting to come in and then be deployed in a way that's optimal for the community.
37:45 – 37:49
(Speaker 2) Do you have any ambassadors representing your work to the restaurants and to these companies
37:49 – 37:51
(Speaker 2) and actively advocating for you?
37:51 – 37:57
(Speaker 2) Are you doing all of the outreach, the majority of the outreach work internally?
37:57 – 37:59
(Speaker 1) We're doing the majority internally.
37:59 – 38:04
(Speaker 1) I think increasingly now that we've been doing this for long enough, we are starting to have
38:04 – 38:05
(Speaker 5) some kind of chef and industry level ambassadors. Increasingly now that we've been doing this for long enough, we are starting to have some
38:05 – 38:07
(Speaker 1) kind of chef and industry level ambassadors.
38:07 – 38:13
(Speaker 1) So I was just in San Francisco last week for an event with one of our longest, maybe even
38:13 – 38:17
(Speaker 1) like founding business members, a group called Flower and Water.
38:17 – 38:20
(Speaker 1) So it's a restaurant group in San Francisco with a few locations.
38:20 – 38:30
(Speaker 1) They also started doing a dried pasta line nationwide. And this small group has now contributed over $500,000
38:30 – 38:32
(Speaker 1) to farm projects.
38:32 – 38:35
(Speaker 1) So you can imagine how many restaurant groups there are,
38:35 – 38:37
(Speaker 1) et cetera.
38:37 – 38:40
(Speaker 1) For reference, if you took California's restaurant
38:40 – 38:48
(Speaker 1) industry, and if that industry was sending 0.1%, so not a full percent, a tenth of a
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(Speaker 1) percent, meaning like if you spent $50 at a restaurant, if five cents was going towards
38:55 – 39:01
(Speaker 1) regeneration at scale, that would be over $200 million per year. So it gives you a glimpse
39:01 – 39:05
(Speaker 1) of how powerful the economy can be if it starts internalizing
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(Speaker 1) externalities at all.
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(Speaker 2) CB Yeah.
39:09 – 39:15
(Speaker 2) So I think the question that I would ask you, and the context is, when you talk about $3
39:15 – 39:20
(Speaker 2) million over the last couple of years, I quite like the idea.
39:20 – 39:21
(Speaker 2) I like the decoupling.
39:21 – 39:25
(Speaker 2) I like the way that you're framing and presenting this.
39:25 – 39:30
(Speaker 2) But $3 million in the agricultural context is the proverbial spit in the ocean.
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(Speaker 1) Totally.
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(Speaker 2) We need to scale that by a thousand X.
39:34 – 39:35
(Speaker 2) Totally.
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(Speaker 2) And if we want to have any meaningful impact.
39:37 – 39:43
(Speaker 2) And so the question that I would ask you is, here, listeners to the podcast,
39:43 – 39:47
(Speaker 2) we have many people who are who are listening, who are passionate
39:47 – 39:52
(Speaker 2) about creating change, both in in the farming community itself and also
39:52 – 39:58
(Speaker 2) and in many ways connected to agriculture in many ways around that.
39:58 – 40:04
(Speaker 2) How I'm already I would already expect that just from you being here in the podcast,
40:04 – 40:08
(Speaker 2) it's very common for people to report that after being here on the podcast,
40:08 – 40:12
(Speaker 2) they just get inundated with emails and phone calls and people reaching out to them.
40:12 – 40:15
(Speaker 2) And so the kind of the obvious piece for farmers,
40:15 – 40:18
(Speaker 2) the obvious way for farmers to reach out is with a grant application.
40:18 – 40:20
(Speaker 2) And that could rapidly become overwhelming.
40:20 – 40:23
(Speaker 2) So my question for you is for the people who are connected to,
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(Speaker 2) because many farmers supply restaurants,
40:27 – 40:31
(Speaker 2) particular listeners here, are they supply that they supply
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(Speaker 2) that supply chain restaurant supply chain in some capacity?
40:34 – 40:36
(Speaker 2) How could they serve as ambassadors for you?
40:37 – 40:41
(Speaker 1) Yeah, well, thanks. Um, so first, I should say, as part of
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(Speaker 1) our expansion, and during COVID and different things, we're not just working
40:45 – 40:50
(Speaker 1) with restaurants. That's a lot of our membership, but we're also working with amazing brands
40:50 – 40:57
(Speaker 1) and retailers. So one example is near me in Portland, an amazing grocery store called
40:57 – 41:04
(Speaker 1) New Seasons or a grocery chain. They have about 21 locations. They were sending 1% from
41:04 – 41:06
(Speaker 1) their in-house product lines, so the bread, the
41:06 – 41:12
(Speaker 1) pasta, the deli counter, or whatever it is, for the month of April. And then amazingly,
41:12 – 41:18
(Speaker 1) they got 50 other brands to also do that for April. So Tillamook Cheese, Mary's Chicken,
41:18 – 41:22
(Speaker 1) Carmen Ranch Beef, et cetera, Bob's Red Mill, a bunch of brands were doing this. And it
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(Speaker 1) just speaks towards the immense potential.
41:26 – 41:30
(Speaker 1) They did a little bit of signage in the store like the end cap and a little flag on certain
41:30 – 41:37
(Speaker 1) products. The brand saw about a 4% increase in sales. So, just that little bit of marketing
41:37 – 41:44
(Speaker 1) moves the needle and is a business win. Notably, and it might be obvious already, but not all
41:44 – 41:45
(Speaker 1) of the products were regenerative
41:45 – 41:52
(Speaker 1) certified, but they were marketed as building healthy soil together and part of this campaign.
41:52 – 41:57
(Speaker 1) And so if you're a farmer out there, first of all, if you had a CSA program, add 1% on
41:57 – 41:59
(Speaker 1) your CSA program, send it in.
41:59 – 42:05
(Speaker 1) If you work with retail or any kind of other business, food service, anybody that has
42:05 – 42:12
(Speaker 1) the ability to kind of just nominally tweak their pricing in this way, make the
42:12 – 42:15
(Speaker 1) intro, you know, consider that, have you heard of this, etc. You know, here's this
42:15 – 42:21
(Speaker 1) TED talk from this nonprofit or whatever. But we're, presently we're only active in
42:21 – 42:29
(Speaker 1) California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, and then we're expanding to the Midwest and New York in the coming years or months or years.
42:29 – 42:34
(Speaker 1) So part of our work is kind of this expansion to like we're kind of deepening in our present
42:34 – 42:38
(Speaker 1) regions and broadening in other regions.
42:38 – 42:42
(Speaker 1) And so somebody may know a philanthropist who wants to bring the program to Michigan
42:42 – 42:44
(Speaker 1) or whatever it is.
42:44 – 42:45
(Speaker 1) We're a scrappy
42:45 – 42:49
(Speaker 1) nonprofit and we're ready to kind of expand as long as there's a little bit of support
42:49 – 42:54
(Speaker 1) for staff time and outreach to businesses and outreach to farmers and technical assistance.
42:54 – 42:59
(Speaker 1) So overall, there's a lot of ways to get involved. The opportunity is almost too big because
42:59 – 43:05
(Speaker 1) once you embrace that kind of decoupling, then it's kind of like, you know, again, it
43:05 – 43:09
(Speaker 1) could be the trash bill, it could be tourism, it could be anybody, any industry could start
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(Speaker 2) regenerating now as quickly as possible.
43:11 – 43:17
(Speaker 2) Yeah, there's a number of things that you said that I'd love to comment on. If you're
43:17 – 43:20
(Speaker 2) a CSA farmer, first of all, if you're a farmer, you keep it all for yourself. Don't send it
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(Speaker 1) to yourPrint. No, no, but that's the thing. You invite your customer to add 50 cents,
43:28 – 43:30
(Speaker 1) add whatever to this thing,
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(Speaker 1) and it's going straight back to Farmers.
43:32 – 43:36
(Speaker 1) So understand that you would keep it all for...
43:36 – 43:39
(Speaker 1) Your CSA is 40, don't give me 40 cents,
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(Speaker 1) let the customer give me 40 cents.
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(Speaker 4) Yeah.
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(Speaker 2) Yeah, I think that's really the question that I have
43:49 – 43:52
(Speaker 2) and I'm certain many listeners will have as well,
43:52 – 43:57
(Speaker 2) Anthony, is I think the idea is an intriguing idea
43:57 – 43:58
(Speaker 2) and it's worth pursuing and exploring
43:58 – 43:59
(Speaker 2) and developing further.
43:59 – 44:01
(Speaker 2) How do we scale at 1000X?
44:01 – 44:03
(Speaker 2) How do we really have impact with it?
44:03 – 44:05
(Speaker 2) Because that's what needs to happen for it to be effective.
44:05 – 44:10
(Speaker 1) Yeah, well, I think 1,000x will happen because of policy
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(Speaker 1) and because it's a win-win-win.
44:12 – 44:15
(Speaker 1) So I think when we crossed paths most recently in April,
44:16 – 44:19
(Speaker 1) I asked you about soil as medicine,
44:19 – 44:20
(Speaker 1) and I think you took a note.
44:20 – 44:22
(Speaker 1) Why don't we say soil as medicine?
44:22 – 44:25
(Speaker 1) And so to me, maybe this comes from regional health care,
44:25 – 44:32
(Speaker 1) where if in the US, 1% from health care was coming toward to regenerate acres, that would
44:32 – 44:40
(Speaker 1) be 15 billion per year. So there's money everywhere. And it's just a matter of how to align
44:40 – 44:46
(Speaker 1) the cost benefit for each organization or each funder to participate in this win-win-win.
44:48 – 44:52
(Speaker 2) Anthony, there's a number of directions we could go with this conversation, but
44:53 – 44:57
(Speaker 2) I'm not familiar enough with the scope of your work. I'm just going to ask you the question,
44:57 – 45:09
(Speaker 1) 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 the theory.
45:09 – 45:17
(Speaker 1) And then to me, the kind of important thing is almost just like for us in a certain region,
45:17 – 45:23
(Speaker 1) like in San Diego, in Boulder, wherever, in Sonoma County, we might have like five or
45:23 – 45:26
(Speaker 1) 10 business members. And if or when
45:26 – 45:30
(Speaker 1) we're working on policy, these are the people who might show up at the town hall and like
45:30 – 45:35
(Speaker 1) say, yeah, go for it, it's no problem. And then that might change the law. And then once
45:35 – 45:39
(Speaker 1) the law is passed, maybe it gets adopted in another region or another. So, I think in
45:39 – 45:48
(Speaker 1) a way, what we're doing is grassroots organizing, but like with maybe the highest leverage possible.
45:48 – 45:54
(Speaker 1) And so, we're out there trying to kind of instigate this systems change intervention
45:54 – 46:00
(Speaker 1) but it is actually led by one person who runs a coffee shop, one person, a franchisee of
46:00 – 46:06
(Speaker 1) Subway sandwiches, et cetera, just everyday people who want to change the food system. So to me,
46:06 – 46:13
(Speaker 1) it's kind of this idea that before I think a lot of us have maybe even felt some frustration that
46:13 – 46:19
(Speaker 1) the food system is not changing fast enough. And I think we're trying to say, here's a way to change
46:19 – 46:26
(Speaker 1) it, get involved. It's a counterintuitive mechanism, but it's real.
46:32 – 46:39
(Speaker 2) Yeah, it'd be interesting having a further conversation about the policy piece at some point. I mean, the reality is you have ten of the largest cities in the United States have half of
46:39 – 46:47
(Speaker 2) the U.S. population. often, those are very mixed jurisdictions.
46:47 – 46:53
(Speaker 2) There's a lot of jurisdictions within those as well. On the other hand, if you begin working
46:53 – 47:02
(Speaker 2) with some of the major food retailers, take Walmart and Costco, for example, this is purely
47:02 – 47:06
(Speaker 2) theoretically, but if there was an interest in working with some of
47:06 – 47:11
(Speaker 2) those retailer organizations or major CPG organizations at that level, Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo,
47:11 – 47:22
(Speaker 2) etc. Now, all of a sudden, you have in some ways, this could be an easier conversation and of
47:22 – 47:30
(Speaker 2) similar or more significant scale and a much easier win than going the policy direction. It's much easier to navigate, perhaps and perhaps not.
47:30 – 47:35
(Speaker 1) Well, yeah, let's unpack that for a minute. So you mentioned a few for whom I'm familiar with
47:35 – 47:41
(Speaker 1) their work. So like Walmart and Pepsi, I believe they made $120 million commitment to regenerate
47:41 – 47:45
(Speaker 1) 2 million acres, something like that. So that sounds pretty good.
47:45 – 47:46
(Speaker 1) That's a big number.
47:46 – 47:50
(Speaker 1) I'm a big fan of anything, any progress like that.
47:50 – 47:54
(Speaker 1) If you unpack those numbers, though, I think it's 120 million over seven years.
47:54 – 47:58
(Speaker 1) So it's 17 million per year combined.
47:58 – 48:07
(Speaker 1) 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
48:07 – 48:09
(Speaker 1) one penny is going towards regeneration.
48:09 – 48:16
(Speaker 1) So you kind of mention the big corporates, but that's butting heads with corporate capitalism
48:16 – 48:21
(Speaker 1) and shareholder primacy and this inability.
48:21 – 48:27
(Speaker 1) Walmart couldn't probably send 1% of revenue because shareholders want that profit or they
48:27 – 48:33
(Speaker 1) want that dividend or whatever it is. And so that's kind of where that slight circumvention
48:34 – 48:40
(Speaker 1) by just giving the customer the choice or separate from business operations is kind of the key
48:40 – 48:45
(Speaker 1) innovation in a way, because it avoids the trickle down of the value chain and the
48:45 – 48:50
(Speaker 1) margin multiplier that you kind of touched on, but also because it's sort of to the side
48:50 – 48:51
(Speaker 1) of profit.
48:51 – 48:52
(Speaker 4) Yeah.
48:52 – 49:02
(Speaker 2) And that is what I was indicating is that there would be this direct transaction outside.
49:02 – 49:03
(Speaker 3) Yeah.
49:03 – 49:07
(Speaker 1) And then for that, I think you almost need public-private collaboration, like in
49:07 – 49:15
(Speaker 1) the case of renewables, where the existing companies and enterprises are happy for business
49:15 – 49:21
(Speaker 1) as usual to continue. Or not necessarily happy, but it's like they have no, they're not incentivized
49:21 – 49:29
(Speaker 1) 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.
49:29 – 49:35
(Speaker 1) Like California even has a cap and trade program, and yet that program at the time that we began
49:35 – 49:41
(Speaker 1) this work with them had about five million a year for the healthy soils program. So that's about 12
49:41 – 49:45
(Speaker 1) cents per acre, which isn't going to go far enough.
49:45 – 49:51
(Speaker 1) And so I think the logic as creating this program was not like policymakers need to
49:51 – 49:54
(Speaker 1) increase from 5 million to 10 to 20.
49:54 – 49:57
(Speaker 1) It's like we need a whole separate program with a billion or whatever, like you said,
49:57 – 49:58
(Speaker 1) the thousand X.
49:58 – 50:07
(Speaker 1) Actually, in the UK, I just saw they got an approved 2.7 billion pounds per year for sustainable
50:07 – 50:08
(Speaker 1) farming.
50:08 – 50:13
(Speaker 2) CBS You would not be happy if there were any listeners or any of our audience from the
50:13 – 50:17
(Speaker 2) UK were here in the interview with us because they would laugh you right out of town because
50:17 – 50:23
(Speaker 2) the UK government, like I don't know the details, I'm not the inside, but I have many friends
50:23 – 50:28
(Speaker 2) from over there and I watch social media posts and the UK government has been systemically gutting all
50:28 – 50:35
(Speaker 2) of their historical programs for incentivizing stewardship and regeneration, conservation,
50:35 – 50:39
(Speaker 2) whatever terms they call it. They've got, they've historically had a number of programs there that
50:39 – 50:45
(Speaker 1) 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 either.
50:47 – 50:52
(Speaker 1) I wish we had 2.7 billion pounds in each 40 million acres.
50:53 – 50:59
(Speaker 2) Yeah. So Anthony, if people want to learn more, where can they connect with you and
50:59 – 51:08
(Speaker 1) where can they learn more? Definitely our website, zerofoodprint.org, and then that is a little bit like business
51:08 – 51:10
(Speaker 1) and consumer facing.
51:10 – 51:16
(Speaker 1) So if you're kind of interested in like the systems change kind of digging in, there are
51:16 – 51:19
(Speaker 1) some links there to like theory of change.
51:19 – 51:24
(Speaker 1) And then there's kind of a position paper with links and some kind of background of
51:24 – 51:25
(Speaker 1) collective regeneration.
51:27 – 51:31
(Speaker 2) We will link to that in the show notes for all of our listeners. You can find our show notes,
51:32 – 51:37
(Speaker 2) they show up on YouTube, they also show up on a number of different podcast apps, and we also
51:37 – 51:42
(Speaker 2) have the Region of Agriculture podcast website that you can find all the show notes from each
51:42 – 51:46
(Speaker 2) episode as well. Well, Anthony, I want to say thank you.
51:46 – 51:51
(Speaker 2) Thank you for the work that you're doing, the thought you've put into this, and my desire
51:51 – 51:56
(Speaker 2) would be for you to continue to be successful and to grow the success in a significant way. So
51:56 – 52:00
(Speaker 1) thanks for being here and thanks for sharing your work. Cool, thanks so much. Yeah, I hope
52:01 – 52:08
(Speaker 1) 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 town,
52:01 – 52:08
(Speaker 1) 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 town,
52:08 – 52:16
(Speaker 1) but we're hoping to sort of will this model into existence.
