What if we could have our meat and eat it too? The current system of meat production in feed lots is devastating for the environment, but there is a better way. A way that would restore our grasslands and reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. This method is known as holistic grazing.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I am Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jaspé and Paul Gamble. We are in the Nori offices today. No travel for us. Nice and simple. We have the guests come to us. I have to say I take pleasure in that. Do you not, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: I do. And we’re very fortunate to have a guest who’s actually listened to the podcast before, so he sort of knows what he’s getting into. A lot of research. You say you listen to like 15 of them?
Ben Kessler: Yeah, that’s right.
Christophe Jospe: And he admitted that he enjoys them. So, you know, we bring on guests to just gas ourselves up. We don’t like to have the hard ones on.
Ross Kenyon: We made them flatter us for 10 or 15 minutes and then we moved on. Yeah, we’re like, go on.
Christophe Jospe: But if you are listening to the podcast for the first time and you do think you have or do have something that you’d like to say and come on to the show, and even if you don’t agree with what we’re putting out there, you’re welcome to email us at hello at nori.com. And if you’re just tuning in for the first time, this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast. So hopefully what we’ll talk about in some way, shape or form relates to that. And we talk about pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or blockchains or market mechanisms.
Or something about Ross. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: You were trying to find an insult in there. I could sense it. Nothing came.
Christophe Jospe: Too nice.
Paul Gambill: All right. And let’s add in, make sure you subscribe. We’re on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, all the places you can find podcasts. And it would be really, really helpful if you went on to any of those, especially iTunes, and left us a review.
Christophe Jospe: A sincere review. Without any further ado, Ben Kessler, you’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. How did you get involved with wanting to make that a reality?
Ben Kessler: I have to start this story with my great, great, great grandfather because I’m now a sixth generation returning rancher. My great, great, great grandfather bought a 25,000 acre ranch in the 1880s adjacent to the King Ranch in Southwest Texas.
Ross Kenyon: That’s like Maybe the most famous ranch ever, right?
Ben Kessler: Exactly. And I’m actually coming back to learn more about this heritage. So my grandfather then was a scientist. He was a meteorologist, the first director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory. He also had a hobby farm in central Oklahoma and Where he raised cattle, you know, because he was raised on his great great grandfather’s ranch around cattle. So I learned from my grandfather and kind of grew up around that I grew up wanting to be an astrophysicist that didn’t exactly work out. I ended up joining the Marine Corps straight out of high school.
I did that. I went to Afghanistan. I came home and I started to study environmental philosophy at college. So through environmental philosophy, I learned about climate change. I also learned that my grandfather was actively working on climate change in his retirement. And one thing led to another. At the tail end of college, I was more interested in actually working on climate change as an issue. Than pursuing philosophy anymore. You know, that’s when I realized this is very important. This is what I want to dedicate my life to doing. So I spent a couple years as an organizer around climate change, doing, you know, community groups and a lot of stuff like that.
At which point I decided to become an organic farmer.
Ross Kenyon: I’m always amazed when people just decide to become a farmer. It’s like any other career path would not surprise me if you became it. But the idea of just waking up and being like, I’m going to be a farmer now. I’ve only met a couple people who have done that. I meet them a lot more now. And that was you.
Ben Kessler: Yeah, you know, it’s becoming a lot more common. And it’s interesting because I don’t think I had a really clear idea of That’s not necessarily the point of organic farming other than that I wanted to be out on the land doing that kind of stuff. But just about less than two years ago is when I discovered regenerative agriculture and I immediately knew this is my purpose. This is what I meant to do. Not organic vegetable farming, but actually restoring landscapes using livestock.
Christophe Jospe: We’re sticklers for terms and definitions. And so you threw two of them out there, organic and regenerative. What are they? And what’s the differences between the two? I’m sure people mix them up too, a fair amount.
Ben Kessler: You know, organic is a label. So it’s an official, you know, government designation. It really just means that you comply with this really long list of things you do or do not put on your land and on your crops. In my opinion, a lot of it is arbitrary. I mean, I think as you all know, the difference between chemical and organic is kind of not a real difference. Everything, you know, comes from the universe. So Organic agriculture, there’s a lot you can do within that.
Ross Kenyon: It’s just like the old point about banned dihydrogen monoxide. It’s in everything.
Ben Kessler: Right, exactly. Because that’s a chemical, but water is not a chemical. Water is organic. So regenerative speaks more towards the practices and the results of those practices, which for regenerative, it means that you’re rebuilding the land and the ecology’s ability to continue producing in the future. So regenerative has future mindset, whereas organic is a very methodological set of practices that you have to adhere to.
Ross Kenyon: Being organic might mean that you stop using herbicide or pesticides, but then you still have to practice weed management. So you end up plowing and tilling a lot. So the carbon isn’t going into your soil. It’s being released. Stuff like that is a major difference. One of the reasons why I’ve perceived among some regenerative people, a little bit of a I don’t want to say snoot, but maybe a little bit of snoot towards organic. It’s not enough. We’re trying to not just keep the soil the way it is, but we want to make it better than we found it or we inherited it.
Christophe Jospe: Well, I also think it’s directionally like track the things that really matter. And so sometimes if you’re just having someone come around and certify some things, which is giving them a job to certify, but not actually certifying the things that will point the needle. One common critique that we hear, particularly maybe from the vegan movement or vegetarians, they say, well, no, meat production is bad for the environment. And so here we are, we’re talking about grazing. You come from a grazing family and a history of that. And there are ways to use grazing to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
How does that work?
Ben Kessler: Yeah, that’s right. Grazing is, if you think about the grasslands that used to cover our country, right, the United States, which is now turning into desert, unfortunately.
Unknown speaker: It is turning into desert?
Ben Kessler: It is turning into desert.
Ross Kenyon: The deserts are growing in.
Ben Kessler: Deserts are growing. The rain is decreasing. I mean, part of that is due to climate change, but it’s also due to the dehumidification of land, including soil.
Unknown speaker: We’re just losing topsoil.
Ben Kessler: That’s right. We’re losing topsoil. It’s blowing away and washing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Christophe Jospe: And the rain’s not even staying on it, right? So when it rains and the rain, ironically, might contribute to more desertification because the soil just can’t handle it. Because it’s just a road and it just washes with the rain?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Ben Kessler: That’s right. And what allows soil to hold water is the carbon. Carbon is also the first thing that goes away in your soil. It blows away, it washes away because it’s organic matter. It turns out the grass on the grasslands actually needs the cattle, or in this case, it needed the bison. And we understand that from an ecological standpoint now that you can’t take the animals off the grass. The grass won’t survive without the animals.
Ross Kenyon: Didn’t I bring it up two podcasts ago or something like that? That little twist where you always think grasslands just existed and then the megafauna just find it and start grazing on it. But they actually co-create each other together.
Ben Kessler: I mean, if you think about these environments were around for millions of years. There’s an inherent equilibrium in any system that can last that long, right? And yeah, it goes through changes. There’s ice ages and hot ages. But if you remove an entire huge part of the system, you’re throwing it drastically out of balance. That’s exactly what we’ve done here. We removed the animals, which is a huge percentage of the biomass in these ecosystems. If you’re talking about herds of millions of ungulates, you know, that’s a huge part of the biomass.
Unknown speaker: What a sentence. Is it ungulate? What is it?
Ben Kessler: Ruminance.
Unknown speaker: Ruminance? Ruminance?
Ben Kessler: Yeah. So, ungulates is...
Unknown speaker: Which has cloven hooves.
Ben Kessler: Ungulates, right. It’s about the hooves and ruminance is, you know, about the stomachs. So, there’s lots of different terms.
Ross Kenyon: I’m going to start working in ranching so I can start throwing that term around.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, Ross, you also look really good in a bolo tie. So, from a business development perspective, like...
Ross Kenyon: I borrowed that from Paul, so I don’t know how much credit I truly deserve. Yeah. Tell us how exactly that these ungulates. Ungulates. Ungulates. Yeah, that hard G. Ungulates. How do they help create grassland?
Paul Gambill: It seems like magic to me. This is great. What is an ungulate then? Or can you give an example of one?
Ben Kessler: A cow.
Paul Gambill: Okay. Yeah. But they’re also ruminants.
Ben Kessler: That’s right. Okay. They’re not exclusive. A goat would be an ungulate but not a ruminant. I hope I didn’t get that wrong because goats don’t have a ruminating chamber in their stomach.
Ross Kenyon: We’re going to get a graphic designer to do the Venn diagram or we’ll find one for the show notes. Still not totally clear, but it might not be the best road to go down. How does it work? How do you create grassland?
Ben Kessler: I think this is actually pretty easy to understand. I don’t think everybody has caught on to how to make this easy to understand, but here’s my take on it. Grass, it has a yearly growth cycle. It grows a bunch of green grass and then the grass dies at the end of the year. Pretty simple, right? When the grass dies in places that are dry, if it doesn’t get eaten, it just stays there. It’s just dead brown grass and it sits there all year long. It gets covered with snow. The snow melts and it’s still there the next year.
So it’s really simple. If you have a bunch of dead grass sitting on top of a bunch of living grass plants, the sun can’t get to them. The sun can’t reach the growing point of the plant, which is at the soil level. And The grass can’t grow. It’s as simple as that. You have to have something to eat the grass off of the top and then put it back into the field via feces and urine to recycle those nutrients. Otherwise, every year that you have all this dead grass material uneaten, untampered with, it harms the health of the grass.
Every single year, the grass gets less healthy and dies.
Christophe Jospe: And so the secret sauce, if you will, is to put the ungulates on the grass at the right time and to rotate them around so that all the grass is getting eaten. We’re talking about some kind of structural change. So we’re doing things in a way today that we want to do it differently in the future. We have to go down the whole chain of food production. So how is most of the meat even produced today? In a field, they’re in a feedlot. And so what you’re talking about is moving cattle or ungulates.
Unknown speaker: I love that word. Keep riding the ball, man.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Okay. There was a question. I totally got thrown off. But so we’re talking about we want to have more cattle on more grass at times of the year and away from feedlots. So talk to us about some of the structural shift that you see needing to occur here.
Ben Kessler: That’s right. This again, I believe is really simple. Cows or ungulates are not good or bad inherently. What is good or bad is management practices that achieve a certain result. So what you have in a feedlot, which is where most beef comes from, is you have a bunch of cows standing around In an empty field and then essentially you will have next door somebody growing corn although in reality it’s not next door it’s going to be thousands of miles away. You’re growing these plants for the cows and then you’re putting it on trucks and you’re taking it to them.
That inherently is inefficient but it’s also devastating for the environment because the food that’s being grown to feed these cows Is being grown in monocultures where your soil is being destroyed rather than healed. So cows go from extremely bad for the environment in feedlots, actually carbon positive in a drastic way to going carbon negative when you put them on grass. So cows can be good. It’s not about cows. It’s not even about whether or not we should eat beef. It’s about how do we manage that livestock.
Ross Kenyon: I was in Montana recently and I was on a bison farm or a bison ranch I should say. And what was fascinating to me is it was explained that bison tend to move more where cows will eat the grass all the way down to the root basically. Cows around a lot more to get the managed grazing, whereas bison seem a little more naturally inclined to move. So it’s a little bit easier because you want them to chomp the old grass so there’s room for new life to grow. But if they go down and kill all the new grass too, that’s bad.
Did I learn something on that trip? Was it justified?
Ben Kessler: Yeah, you learned something. I think what you’re getting at is the level of I mean, bison haven’t really been and perhaps aren’t capable of being as domesticated as cattle, but grazing actually gets really complicated from the ranch manager’s perspective. So it’s not simple at all. The planned grazing, it’s not simple enough for me to break down in an easy statement about how it works, but the concepts are simple. And anybody can apply the concepts.
Ross Kenyon: What are they? How would one do this?
Ben Kessler: The main thing that makes it complicated is actually the time aspect because grass grows at different paces throughout different times of the year. So for example, it’s not growing in the winter. You actually need to manage the grass so that you have a stockpile throughout the winter, but you also need to manage it so that it doesn’t get too long and mature over the summer because the animals don’t want to eat mature, fibrous grass.
Ross Kenyon: Does it just become like woodier and hardier?
Ben Kessler: That’s right. As it forms the seed heads later in the season, it takes all the nutrients and puts it into the seeds. So there’s actually a lot less nutrition.
Paul Gambill: So there’s like a Goldilocks zone there where as a rancher, it’s really like thinking of managing your inventory levels. You have an inventory of grass. You don’t want to have too much because the cattle don’t want that. You don’t want to have not enough because then they won’t get through the winter.
Ben Kessler: That’s exactly right. It has to be a dynamic process that you’re looking at your field, you’re looking at the next field, and you’re a grass farmer is really what I think enlightened ranchers understand that they’re a grass farmer. And Animals like cows and bison can mostly figure out what to do if you give them healthy grass to eat.
Christophe Jospe: And when you think about what is the largest crop in the United States, it’s grass. Makes a whole lot of sense. So we’re standing on the shoulders of giants here. I think a lot of the holistic grazing has been worked on. It’s worth calling out the Savory Foundation and sort of Alan Savory and some of his work.
Ross Kenyon: Is that what we’re all talking about? Holistic grazing? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: I think so, right? Yeah. As you go down this road, I think our listeners would be very interested in learning sort of what are some of the challenges you face? What are some of the things you need to fit yourself into? I mean, oftentimes entrepreneurs say, I see a problem and I’m going to do something that is going to solve this problem. And it has to have some value to someone in order for this thing to actually occur. So how are you thinking about this whole space as you go down this path?
Ben Kessler: That’s a lot of questions. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: The more Nori classic right there, the shotgun approach.
Ben Kessler: I’m going to start with the answer that I can think of, which is, I mean, the most obvious barrier for anybody starting out in this is money. Land has gotten to the point where it costs more than its agricultural value because people are getting recreational and lifestyle value out of it. That’s an obvious place where Nori can come into play because y’all are changing the economics behind it by, you know, pricing carbon. You know, that’s a big thing that I’m thinking about. I’m also concerned, not just with my own ability to start a ranch, but really making sure there is a good pathway for more people to do it.
In many ways right now, it’s easier because we’re early adopters. And so there’s kind of, there’s land that is ready to be managed in this way. So I’m kind of answering a different question now because I tend to think about the big picture, but I’m really concerned with how do we get enough people doing this, not just myself, but we need to rapidly change, right? So we need to rapidly change the management from feedlots to grass fed to feed this country and to restore the land. So the economics of land is a huge issue.
Ross Kenyon: So are you involved in land use consulting? Because I know you were thinking about getting a ranch, but now it looks like your path may have changed a little bit. I hope you don’t mind me asking you this on the air.
Ben Kessler: No, that’s great. I mean, I think that going forward, this is what I’m trying to do myself as well, is we need to have diverse ways of funding agriculture. And I think part of that happens through understanding that you’re not just getting food out of agriculture, you’re getting other Ecosystem services and human services. I don’t think it’s possible to monetize all of those, but we need to move towards at least understanding that they have value. And there are people out there with resources that do understand that these ecosystem services have value.
I’m trying to figure out how do we utilize that? How do we bring all these resources in? Because it’s not a zero-sum game. I know you all like to say that, and it’s true, right? If we help each other and build networks where we’re sharing resources, then there’s actually More resources for everybody. Critical mass has a lot to do with this, you know, getting enough people participating and involved. And I think that’s a huge part of the future success for people trying to start ranching like myself is we need more people doing it and a growing food economy and beyond food economy, what y’all are talking about, an environmental economy to support this.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think in general, as a carnivore, I could say the only meat I ever want to eat is grass fed. And by the way, I don’t know if grass fed is the same as holistically managed. Hopefully it is. But if that’s the only thing I ever eat for the rest of my life, I would prefer that. And I want that on everyone else. And it may result in less meat being consumed, but it’s this sort of cattle that’s doing things which are healing the earth. Yeah.
Ben Kessler: I got to tell you, I’m definitely here to spread the good news. We can eat lots of beef. We actually need more animals. There’s room for more beef. And I know, you know, the vegans aren’t going to like, they’re probably not even listening to this podcast.
Christophe Jospe: It’s okay if they are.
Ben Kessler: We’re very inclusive. We like vegans. We like them all. You know, I really believe that the food aspect of this and beef is a bridge. It’s a cultural bridge. You know, if we move forward and say, actually, we can have our meat and we can eat it too. You know, it’s true.
Unknown speaker: I think that’s a great... We’ll be right back.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, externalities can be good too. I also don’t think that’s the correct way to understand externalities.
Christophe Jospe: Don’t economists call that a bad, right? A good or a bad?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you can call it a bad. I think that’s maybe the way to do it. A mal. A mal. Global bad. Whatever it is, yeah. So yeah, that’s kind of what you’re saying though, right? Is that you’re removing a lot of those on the downside on the scale.
Ben Kessler: I don’t think there’s any question that moving from feedlot beef production to grass fed holistically grazed. I mean, it’s win, win, win. It’s the only people losing from that are the giant agricultural corporations that run the feedlots. I mean, everybody else stands to gain.
Ross Kenyon: I would imagine a fair amount of them as they see, I don’t know, this is happening in farming, that agricultural productivity is going down, fertility is going down, and many big players are eyeing regenerative agriculture and saying, this is the future. Is there a parallel with feedlots or are feedlots still so profitable that we won’t see a corresponding shift?
Ben Kessler: That’s a great question. I mean, I hope you’re right about that interest. I mean, one of the things that props up feedlots is subsidies for commodity crops. I mean, the government right now is paying corn and soy producers because what they’re doing is not profitable because of, I mean, the methods they’re using. They’re not using regenerative methods. They have to get money infusion for that to even work. And that’s what’s going to feed the cows.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the subsidies are very big and very difficult to get rid of. We talked about this with Dave Montgomery, too, and he thinks maybe the future we might see it. It’s less untouchable than we might think, and we hope so. But that’s one of the main things that keeps the feedlot kind of rather than the regenerative ag grazing approach from happening.
Ben Kessler: You know, that’s definitely part of it. Of course, there’s cultural issues here and it’s sort of just, I think feedlots, it’s the same as any industry that doesn’t want to change. I mean, they have what exists and changing is hard and you have to get rid of old stuff and get new stuff.
Unknown speaker: And it’s like stranded assets for beef.
Ben Kessler: Yeah, it’s a big, you know, it’s a rearrangement of the current situation and some people don’t want to see that.
Christophe Jospe: I love the stranded assets for beef idea, but the difference is coal-fired power plants are stranded assets. They are huge investments, capital expenses. You can’t change it. But theoretically, correct me if I’m wrong, if you’re a cow and you’re born into a life at a feedlot, and then suddenly the operator of that feedlot says, hey, there’s a new incentive market out here that one, I’m going to destroy. Do because I’ve got the land for it and I’m going to just do away with my feedlot. Could that same feedlot calf know to just go eat the grass instead of whatever commodity corn it’s being fed?
Could we actually see that stranded asset become unstranded?
Ben Kessler: That’s a good question. The answer is not totally yes, because animals do actually have to learn. You can’t directly take a cow from a feedlot and put it on grass. It isn’t going to perform as well. Now you can move herds in that direction. It is possible to transition. It isn’t necessarily that simple though. Animals adapt to their environment through giving birth and actually having successive generations. And part of what a rancher does So the animals can get used to being healthy on grass. So it’s a little more complicated than what you’re saying, but it’s definitely possible.
Ross Kenyon: There are epigenetic reasons why cows won’t easily be able to make the transition.
Ben Kessler: There’s actually biological reasons too. And now I’m not a scientist, but it has to do with the way that grain is digested in the rumen. Actually, my understanding is that it permanently alters the microbiome in the cow’s gut, changing its ability to digest grass. You can’t just give them a cow probiotic.
Paul Gambill: Well, I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: That has to exist. I’m sure there’s probably a lot of money, but the switch, yeah.
Ben Kessler: It probably costs money, though.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
Christophe Jospe: I think in general, and this came up on a previous podcast we did with Brian von Hertzen of the Climate Foundation, feeding less grain to the animals that we’re consuming. So, I mean, we’re feeding fish grain right now. We should be feeding fish absolutely. And similarly, he actually brought up the concept of feeding cows algae and that makes them stronger and healthier and they emit less methane. Yeah, do you follow that? Are you aware of this? Yeah, just testing the waters here. How does that resonate?
Ben Kessler: You know, I... I’ve heard of stuff like this. My idea is that I really only want cows to be eating the things that they’re standing on because I don’t like the idea of putting anything in a truck to take it to feed somebody. So I’m sure that algae could be healthy for cows, but cows like to eat grass and it works great for cows to live on the grass and eat it. That’s the system that works best. I’m happy with sticking with that system.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, Brian told some story. I think it’s also in Project Drawdown’s book about cows walking on the beach and eating them. And that’s how it was discovered that this cuts down on the methane. But yeah, for most cows, I mean, these are cosmopolitan elite cows on the coast, coastal elites.
Ben Kessler: Well, you know, the methane, the cow methane issue has actually been addressed by science. And I can’t explain it well enough for it to be worthwhile. But the methane is not really the biggest issue with cows.
Unknown speaker: When did this change? This is such a common talking point.
Ben Kessler: Okay, I’ll try to explain it. Each cow has its own bubble of methane. 17 years or something like that is how long the methane lasts in the environment. So each cow has its own bubble.
Unknown speaker: Right. Right. Right.
Ben Kessler: Is not constant. It keeps increasing with the same amount of cows. Does that make sense?
Ross Kenyon: You’re saying if you use the cows in different ways in this regenerative ag approach, then the carbon removed outpaces the methane, which stays constant given at the same amount of cows. Is that probably right?
Ben Kessler: Yeah, there’s a certain amount of methane that should be cycling through the environment based on just the existence of ungulates on this planet, right? And just like there’s some level of carbon dioxide that should be, you know, in the atmosphere, that number should be stable. So it’s the same with methane.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, yeah.
Christophe Jospe: And is there a lowering of methane emissions when cows start eating grass instead of corn or whatever they’re being fed in the feedlots?
Ben Kessler: Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha.
Ross Kenyon: I have a weird question. The auroch, right? The ancestor of most domesticated cattle. Yes. I think I saw that they were going to bring it back or they’ve been trying to map its genome and bring it back. Is that so? Do you have any idea?
Ben Kessler: I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: Well, in Drawdown, they talk about repopulating the Mammoth Steppe. We’re big Pleistocene Park fanboys.
Ben Kessler: Good, good.
Ross Kenyon: George Church is our hero.
Ben Kessler: Yeah. Well, to me, the interesting question about that is, so, well, if you think about bison and the Pleistocene megafauna, bison was like one of the smallest ones.
Unknown speaker: Is that right? Wow.
Ben Kessler: And so if you think about it, we had an ice age, it got warmer. So it makes sense that the smaller animal was actually able to survive. So if we think about a warming climate, What we should be thinking about as far as, okay, for example, if you look at cows in hotter environments, they should be lighter, weigh less, have less mass. So if we’re talking about bringing back or bringing in new animals to address climate, it should be based on the changing weather, the increasing temperature. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: So I don’t know if aurochs are appropriate to that actually. Aurochs obviously survived the Pleistocene. I think they were probably hunted right after with the loss of the rest of the megafauna going into the Holocene.
Paul Gambill: Is that, this is beyond your, this is me stretching over here so I don’t feel bad.
Ben Kessler: What I do know is that animals like bison are incredibly resilient and adaptable. I mean, there’s stories of people that took a herd 2000 miles into a totally, you know, 20 degrees different latitude and it doesn’t take long for those animals to adapt to different temperatures and environments. So I think this is the case with nature in general. It’s incredibly resilient. So I think we have the tools we need actually to move stuff around and figure out where things can thrive. We just have to have the political will, right?
Ross Kenyon: Or find some way to appeal to people for economic reasons or find some set of incentives to push people along, which is definitely what we’re into. And it sounds like you are as well. Anything we should look for that you’re working on that you’re starting to wrap your head around or move professionally? Yeah.
Ben Kessler: That’s a great question. I mean, right now I’m trying to focus on how we can accelerate this process. I like a lot of the things that are changing. I’m just concerned that they’re not changing fast enough. So part of what I’m doing And what I want to work on personally is finding a model that can be replicated so that I can actually help the process, not just of having my own successful ranch, but finding ways for more people to do it because really acceleration is the most, it’s crucial.
Ross Kenyon: You said something before we started. I wish I got on the podcast, but you’re saying that one of the problems is that you have these regenerative ag conferences, which are great. The lectures typically focus on you should do this on your ranch or your farm. But then these people go home, even with the internet. It’s still quite separated. The density isn’t there because people obviously need a lot of space to do these practices. So you don’t feel like the change is happening nearly enough. We also know land use consultants who make a career of going around and trying to bridge that gap.
So you think that’s like one of the main problems? You think maybe you fit into a role kind of like that?
Ben Kessler: Yeah, I definitely think there needs to be more communication because I mean, the reality is that pretty much any farmer now I believe could switch to regenerative agriculture and do better, have more profit. The issue is one of communication and getting the critical mass as far as just awareness that this is a thing that exists, but also the critical mass of infrastructure like Nori. And I mean, it’s part of a new infrastructure, right? But we need that.
Ross Kenyon: Good Nori plug.
Christophe Jospe: We did not pay Ben at all for that. We did not, but who knows? In the future, we could have the incentive structure set up so that grazers could think about adopting practices that would put carbon away in their soils. And people like Ben might be the ones who have told those grazers. Here we come. Nori has got a token. It pays for carbon removal certificates. Ranchers are able to make carbon removal certificates. There’s some kind of value proposition that we need to make to them. And maybe it’s not just Nori, maybe it’s kind of the whole pitch.
But if you’re someone who’s going around talking to ranchers who maybe own a CAFO and know a thing or two about managing animals and want to do regenerative holistic grazing, what’s the pitch to them?
Ben Kessler: So I got to tell you, I mean, this is where my bias is going to come out. And my bias is that I like to work with people who are I don’t have to change their mind. They already want to do something and so I can help them do the thing that they want to do. With that being said, there’s a lot of young people like myself that really want to be ranchers or land managers and they don’t need convincing to do these practices because they want to do it right now.
To answer your question, that’s what I want to focus on.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I love it. It’s like you’re preaching to the choir, but they didn’t know that there was a hymn book and you’re just showing them the hymn book.
Ross Kenyon: That was maybe the most successful Christophe Jaspé analogy in Nori history. A plus. Why don’t we wrap it there? That was a neat little bow to put on this. Ben, thanks so much for being here. We’re happy to know you and let’s keep in touch. Thanks a lot.
