The business of the future is a good cooperator, working with other players in a particular space to drive progress. Collaboration is a core part of the ethos at Propagate Ventures as their team looks to leverage agroforestry to contribute to the growing pool of climate solutions and help build a world where people live in a symbiotic relationship with the ecosystem.
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: Hey, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. Paul liked that one. Wow.
Christophe Jospe: I don’t like it when you say hey. I like hello.
Ross Kenyon: No, I’m trying to break out of the hello and welcome to. So I’m sticking with hey. Hey, it’s the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I am Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jaspé and Paul Gamble. We are back with our old friends from, is it Propagate or Proopagate? Propagate.
Christophe Jospe: Depends how you spell it. I think they bought all of the variations online. So just test it out, figure out for yourself, where can you get to the PropagateVentures.com website? I’m sure there are different ways.
Ross Kenyon: There’s plenty. I’m so happy that we’re coming back here. We have to do a nice farm tour. We got to see a lot of the properties that you’re leasing or in the process of buying. It’s very exciting and beautiful up here in the Hudson River Valley upstate close to Albany between Albany and Poughkeepsie up around here. Christophe has been wanting to write an article for so long. It’s been haunting our Trello board called Nori is Hanging Out on Farms. Christophe, will it finally be written now?
Christophe Jospe: Now that you’re calling me out, it’s probably the article that will come with this podcast and probably some color along the way of things we learned. I learned something on the farm today. I learned a lot. I ate some cheese.
Ross Kenyon: That cheese was very good. It was Churchtown? What was the name of that place? Churchtown Dairy. Churchtown Dairy. Yeah, we had some camembert, but it wasn’t regionally specific to camembert, so there’s some generalized term for that variety. I don’t know what it is, but it’s delicious.
Christophe Jospe: Normally, we start out with our guest’s story, but if you’re a long-time listener, you already know all about Propagate. They had the chance to introduce themselves last time, so this version two, we get to go a little bit deeper. But okay, Harry, you’re on the podcast for the first time, so how about you introduce yourself?
Harry Greene: Hey, how’s it going, everyone? My name’s Harry Greene. I’m one leg of the tripod of Propagate Ventures. I head up farm development.
Christophe Jospe: You know, it’s been a year. Ethan, what’s happened in the last year?
Ethan Steinberg: If you’re unfamiliar with agroforestry, it’s the integration of tree crops, fruit, nut, and timber into existing farm operations. So that could be row crop, livestock. In the context of what that fits in with nori, carbon is, of course, the huge component that we all like to jam on. So what’s happened in the last year? A whole lot. Is it too much or too little? It’s a lot. It’s a lot. So we’ve been active. So this has been almost a year to date. And it was last November, I believe. Last November.
Right. So with that in mind, we are now about 100%. 150 acres under management as an organization. So we measure acreage under management, acreage under advisement. So you’ve got 150 acres and growing under management, and then about 3,400 under advisement. So... On the project development and farm management side, that’s more like the 150 acres that we spend our time actively in and out, mostly hairy, doing lots of running through the woods, of course, as a function of that.
Harry Greene: Combining running with farming is really conducive to good observation and figuring out what those systems are doing on your farm.
Ethan Steinberg: Yeah, so a lot of observation, of course, has kind of taken us forward and we’ve turned our observations into action. And as a business, that looks like things, revenue and having a functioning team and operation and kind of really driving things forward. And at the end of the day, our core, core goal is more trees in the ground. I think we probably mentioned last time on the podcast that the short answer is trees are good. Is that something that we said? I think we said it. Trees are good. Well, it’s like very standard.
Everyone knows trees are good.
Ross Kenyon: There’s probably people out there who don’t like trees. You ever meet someone who’s just like, ah, trees.
Harry Greene: Not yet. Trees have to be planted in context, right? Because if we look at a really dry grassland or a desert and just plant trees and expect them to do well without improving that local water cycle, it might not be the best treatment for the land. Maybe... So increasing the effectiveness of the grazing processes on that land, not to dive too deep too quickly, but grazing for those that are in more brittle climates might be a better solution than just trees.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you’re explaining how we’re going through these fields that the process works where you have grass that is maybe not woody. And then as time goes on and it’s left to grow, it turns more woody. And then you see certain types of trees. And then eventually you can come just to an old growth forest natural.
Harry Greene: Exactly. That process is what we call ecological succession. In places where it rains a lot and where that precipitation is evenly distributed throughout the year, we call those non-brittle climates. And in places like say New York or Japan or Germany or Costa Rica, Just places that want to be forest, then if left to rest, that land will turn into forest slowly but surely. But then in places say like Arizona or Kenya or Colorado, if left to rest, Something completely different happens, which as the grazers know is if you actually underutilize over rest land, you can see it desertify.
So where propagate plays in this whole equation of managing land is in these rainy locations where tree crops make a good deal of sense.
Ethan Steinberg: I’ll add to that, and it kind of goes back to your question, Christophe, is I think a lot of what we’re focused on now is thinking about place-based solutions. So if you hit our website, you’ll notice on one of our pages, we talk about the three P’s. So sustainability, but we actually have extended that to the four Ps. So people, planet, place, and profit. So like with that in mind, there’s really like place-based solutions. And going back to the question about context, it’s really contextual to look at outcomes. Land is very different in many places around the world.
So for us as an organization, it’s really understanding what that place-based solution looks like so that we’re hitting our outcomes. And we as an organization have really put our foot down here in the Hudson Valley to really look at the Northeast as what we’re seeing becoming a hub for regenerative agriculture in this part of the country.
Christophe Jospe: So you’re kind of doing what I like our guests to do, which is frame the questions that they want us to ask them. So what’s special about the Hudson?
Ross Kenyon: Do you feel manipulated at all?
Christophe Jospe: No, I wanted to. Maybe. I don’t know. He’s priming me. We’re supposed to prime them.
Harry Greene: It’s a two-way street. So we’d say the Hudson Valley is the Midwest of the Northeast, whereas Vermont and New Hampshire are Yeah. As opposed to say 40 acres of fields in eastern Massachusetts would be pretty big because it’s a region that’s the topography is very diverse and it’s largely gone back to forest. But the Hudson Valley is its state in agriculture for a long time.
Ross Kenyon: This last year you’ve seen more property come under your management. You’ve been speaking with investors and I think you’re buying some property up here that you’re starting to work with directly. What is the state of the business and where are you pointing yourselves towards?
Ethan Steinberg: Yeah, so we’re consistently outlining a lot of things and how the business drives forward, kind of back to place-based thinking. Driving forward as a business, we, on the side of managing and developing agroforestry investments, That’s a lot of thinking about project level investment opportunities. Like individual farms or tracts of land. Right. And in our world, there’s both real estate assets and there’s farmland assets. And we spend almost all of our time And I know one of the things Harry loves talking about is matching our economic cycles with photosynthesis. You talk about that a lot.
I’m like, hey, he’s so smart over there.
Ross Kenyon: He’s about to get weird over here. Let’s do it.
Harry Greene: We’re going to dive. So I think what Ethan’s bringing forth here is that, so let’s think about So, we have things like solar dollars, which is its value derived from energy that was recently provided by the sun. We can turn apples into dollars by selling them versus say mineral dollars, which could be mined resources. So those are very old resources, say fossil fuels or phosphorus that was in ancient seabeds. Those are largely non-renewable. Creating an asset that approaches being able to compete with fossil resources is the direction that we want to head in.
Just to throw in a little bit more clarity into what we do. Trees as an asset can be separated from the land itself. So you can own land and you can own trees on that land together or you can separate them. So an analog would be solar panels. There are solar companies, solar developers that will go in and install panel arrays, but not without owning the land. So, it’s solar panels on leased land. And then they’ll get paid back by the energy those panels produce over time and then share. Those profits between themselves, whoever owns the land and the utility.
Folks like Home Depot do something similar with their buildings. They’ll lease the land, but own the building. And what Propagate’s doing is the exact same thing, but with organic orchards. So we won’t necessarily own the land, but we’ll own and manage the trees on that land.
Ethan Steinberg: I’ll add to that. For us, how do we position this as a business is looking at growth markets. Organic apples have growth year over year in the United States. Looking at that component and looking at what’s happening in supply, it seems like a pretty safe bet to say we should be investing in the infrastructure of organic apples, particularly in the Northeast, because you have access to markets, New York City, Boston, Burlington, etc. Not to forget any of the amazing cities. But at least New York City and Boston are the closest ones to the Hudson Valley.
So there’s really a lot of that thinking in our mind about how do we move forward with things and thinking about photosynthesis as a function of the economics.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And thinking about organic orchards, it was really interesting on the farm tour today as we were driving up to look at some of the trees where you pointed out, hey, look at that space around the tree. It’s all dead. And why is that? That’s because they have to keep on spraying it year over year. And those trees, oftentimes, those aren’t the trees you want to touch, but you are able to find land that... Well, you’re just going to maybe want trees for the first time or in many decades, maybe hundreds of years, and you’re able to say these are going to be organic, we’re going to be regenerative, we’re going to sort of manage this land in a really interesting way.
And I want to go back to... A number you threw out, which is 150 acres under management, which doesn’t seem like that much, but actually it’s an extremely valuable amount of land to learn how to really propagate. And I want to go back to also where a number that really perked my ears up of how I know you guys originally, it was $1 trillion. You’re talking about how do we get 1 trillion trees planted. And so take me through the numbers. You’ve got 150 acres, which are not that many trees, but then you’re going to really get 1 trillion trees.
And then sort of, this is a multi-layered question, as I like to do. Take me through the numbers of how does this accelerate something which is not necessarily in the conventional way that agriculture is being done today, where there are a lot of chemicals, but is in a way that’s regenerating the land.
Harry Greene: Yeah, we can dive right into that. First with... So coming down to Hudson, what drew us here was the opportunity to work with the farms that we’re affiliated with. We’re leasing 25 acres from a larger 2,500 to 3,000 acreage. So, on that land, we’ll be planting an assortment of fruit and nut trees. So, mostly blackcurrant, apples, and chestnuts. And then recently, with an investment... As an investor, we are taking on management of another 125 acres. About 45 is in one section on that land and then open acreage total is about 60.
So, it’s 60 open, 60 forested. And so in order to transition to the trillion tree alliteration statement, let’s look at how many trees per acre make sense. And if we If we redefine what a tree is, say equate a black locust tree and a blueberry shrub or a currant shrub, and we call those trees for now just for the sake of language, you’ll plant about 25%. So, if you’re looking into wider spacing between trees on that, on a silvopastoral setup. So in terms of what scales, we have to look at hours of management needed to manage one acre of land.
And it takes vastly more hours to manage organic berries or organic apples. So, in terms of that trillion tree metric and really the heavy hitting carbon sequestering system, We’re really looking at silvopasture. But silvopasture in terms of timber, that yield doesn’t arise for a long number of years. You don’t get that lump sum cash flow from cutting down the tree until 15, 20, 25 and up years. So creating the model of permanent crops, perennials on leased land with shrub fruit sets the stage for growing this model onto larger acreage with silvopasture.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I want to walk through how this might work. So you’ll lease land. I have no idea how much that costs relative to buying outright under fee sample or something like that. And then there are a couple of income streams I can think of for if you’re doing trees and imagine it’s a fruiting or nutting tree than you have. You have ultimately the wood, right? At some point, you might like to sell that chestnut wood. You can sell the chestnuts in the meantime. Those chestnuts we ate were delicious. Yeah, that was one of the best ones.
I don’t really like them that much as a general rule, but that was really good. And then also, if you’re storing carbon through agroforestry, then there’s also potential to have that monetized through Nori at some point. How fast does that turn around? How does this investment process work for you guys?
Ethan Steinberg: So one thing I’ll say there that I like to think about what are the investment cycles and on the economic front, there’s different timelines as Harry was alluding to in relation to what crops grow and how quickly they grow and when they’re at like maturity for producing that crop or timber. And then on the other side, if we start looking at the ecosystem services, That starts to play much more quickly. So you put a tree in the ground and it starts to do its thing, right? It’s playing with the soil life and it’s sequestering carbon and it’s turning carbon into sugars and totally happy to geek out.
You can say exudates. Yeah, rude exudates. So that stuff in the context of Nori, that stuff can kind of happen, right? So the ecosystem services stuff is happening. Tree goes in the ground, boom. That’s your first revenue supply. Well, Sow as much as it can be monetized. And that’s why what you guys are working on is so important. And from our perspective, there’s that plus the economics, which is what does an investment look like in terms of investing in a tree as an asset from the productivity of the crop it’s producing.
So those are kind of like the two ways that we look at it. And a lot of the things at the end of the day is like diversify your systems, right? So diversify your portfolio is a soundbite that I really like to tell people. Everyone seems to understand that one. And it’s like, great, well, diversify your farm for all the same reasons. And that also speaks in economic terms. So a lot of the work we do is to pinpoint and showcase very clearly what those numbers look like and make it look pretty and show your visuals and data visualizations, et cetera, both on the ecosystem services, carbon, water, nitrogen, phosphorus, et cetera, through to dollars in, dollars out.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, trees seem, this is probably, I don’t know, I know very little about that, so I can imagine that trees seem like they would take less maintenance, because you were also showing us the putting in of shrubs, and they’re blueberry, right, in the first place? Those things seem like a lot to deal with relative to planting a tree. Trees just, they repay you over a longer period of time, whereas you’re selling blueberries maybe, is it one year, two years? Yeah.
Harry Greene: More like four. Currants will yield a little bit sooner, but the shrub fruit, I mean, you get raspberries, which we can’t count as a tree. I mean, canes are great, but you can get raspberries in year one.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Okay. That’s cool. So then there’s, well, Dave Montgomery has some line about this too, where he says, you want your farm to look like old McDonald’s where there’s actually all the animals, all the different plants. If you just have, you’re not diversified if you just have one giant monoculture taking over your entire farm.
Harry Greene: Old McDonald had a farm of many species.
Ross Kenyon: That’s right. Yeah, he sure did. And so you’re trying to do that too. You want multiple income streams. You’re looking at different ways to monetize and go to market at different timelines. Yeah.
Harry Greene: Absolutely. Yep. So the currents will come into yield much sooner than the apples and the chestnuts will, but then they’ll max out in terms of how many pounds you’re going to get per shrub, which is a little bit lower that peak yield. Then an apple tree, which is say an apple tree is 320 pounds per tree after a certain amount of years versus a current, you might get, I mean, max 15 pounds. That would be a raging current shrub, but yeah. Yeah. Raging current shrimp. I was about to say, man, those current shrubs, they’re raging.
Yeah. And I mean, that being said, like black currants per quantity of pounds per acre in terms of nutrient density and just like bursting in your mouth flavor, they’re a good bet.
Ross Kenyon: So if you have a lease, how long until you’re out from under it? And by which I mean how long until that piece of land might become profitable under- Until break even.
Harry Greene: Right, exactly. Yeah, so currents will break even at about your- And then black locusts, not even until 15, 16. Or echinacea or poultry or any annual yield that is quick to yield, then you can make a good old combination.
Ethan Steinberg: Yeah. So this is the systems approach, right? So if we’re looking at the economics of all these different crop types, the cumulative value of all those crops far out seeds just one of those crops by itself. And so we can showcase what that looks like on a chart. And I love this quote from Dwight Eisenhower, and hopefully I get it right. But it’s essentially, if you cannot solve a problem, enlarge it. And that’s kind of alluding to the systems approach, like systems thinking, and then broadening things around how do you solve a concern?
How do you solve an issue? How do we move through things? So, for example, we’re always looking at where the water is moving on the landscape. That’s a huge part of understanding an agricultural system. Water is, of course, part of that. And so, what does that mean from a systems perspective is we’re actually looking at the watershed. We’re not just looking at where our irrigation is. What our irrigation system is on one particular piece of land because we’re part of a much larger context of the watershed that we’re a part of.
There’s a lot of discussion in agriculture around runoff, like dead zones. What you have there is you have chemicals. From conventional agriculture systems that are essentially leaching out into the watershed and that are causing problems way downstream. So it’s like the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, that’s all in a lot of ways directly related to agriculture because of the Mississippi, right? So these are things that like the systems approach that we want to calculate and think about as we... Yeah, fascinating.
Christophe Jospe: There’s a lot that you bring up. One of the drivers, I think, for the whole organic movement is the consumer who wants to say, I want to buy food that I think is good for the planet, is doing certain things that make the planet better. And there are all sorts of certifications that one can get. You can be organic certified. You can be regenerative organic certified. These are sort of all looking at practices. Sometimes, though, these aren’t necessarily the best ways to think about things. And maybe people are able to get away with certain things that might be short-term profitable, but long-term bad for the land.
And from Nori’s perspective, we’ve We’re totally bought into Propagate’s model. We know that you guys are like the ecological stewards who want to ensure that what’s happening at the ground level is the best. And so I guess my question here is, you know, to what extent do consumers who are buying things under a certain label or thinking that they’re doing something that’s doing the right thing helping? And to what extent are they sort of having a greenwash pulled over their eyes? And where can some of our listeners become educated in knowing the difference between Are you getting tag-teamed in over here?
Unknown speaker: Jeremy’s sauntered over here from his position on the couch. Calling in the reserves.
Harry Greene: Yeah, so in terms of consumer knowledge and connection to where our food comes from, the best way you can assure that what you’re eating is good for you and for good for the planet, so the center of good for your health and good for planetary health, the overlap there, the center of that Venn diagram is significant. So how can we assure that food is good? The best way to do that is to know exactly where it comes from. Know your farmer. They say that this is a direction, this is hyperbole, but we should grow our food as far from the kitchen sink as we can throw the kitchen sink.
And that’s not entirely reasonable. You can’t have, I mean, maybe you can, but it’s harder to have cattle next to your kitchen sink than it is herbs. But in terms of branding and I guess relating to food as a consumer... There are certain certifications that make good sense and are very straightforward and it’s easy to learn what they mean. But say the dilution of what is organic, for instance, is it’s something that is... So, let’s take organic dairy, for instance. So, grazing is part of the requirements for milk being organic.
And that’s for a number of reasons. So, one is cows eating grass, it makes the milk more rich in omega-3s as opposed to omega-6s. And that’s perceived to be healthier by lots of nutritionists and just the... The general consumer, and then in terms of cows out on grass, let’s say when a cow turns grass into manure, that manure on a living soil is an asset, but that manure on a concrete floor is an economic and ecological liability because you have to deal with it and you put it somewhere and move it away from that concrete floor, say, into a manure lagoon or whatnot.
That creates, we’ll say, methane emissions, whereas if that manure went directly onto a field, then that’s going to build that soil biology flywheel. So, a little bit of a tangent here, but you can have organic farms where the cows actually go out and graze, or you can have, there’s a really big, I don’t have intimate knowledge of this because I haven’t lived in Colorado for a while, but I might get this number totally wrong. It’s say a 30,000 head organic quote dairy. I think it’s up near Boulder maybe. And them satisfying their grazing requirement just means putting the cows out on the ground.
So that milk can be certified organic, just like the milk from a farm down the road or across the country that is also organic, but actually has cows eating grass and improving their ecosystem. The system around them. And it’s hard for the consumer to know the difference. So one farm is externalizing their cost of pollution and the other one is incorporating that into the system of the farm. So it’s just knowing where your food comes from can help alleviate those discrepancies in what is organic and what isn’t.
Ethan Steinberg: Totally. And I have this thought about throwing the kitchen sink and Harry’s got this whole program called FarmFit. And I’m like, okay, well, if you’re part of FarmFit, you’ll be able to throw that kitchen sink a little bit farther. It’s just something that’s in my head.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like that Nathan for you moving service. Yeah. Is that what you’re thinking? It’s like if you want to like lift all day long, come on out. And it was just a moving company who’s getting free labor, getting paid for people to work out moving. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, I know certifications can be something that there’s a mimicry. And you’re saying knowing your farmers is one way where you don’t they don’t have to go through the hard process that is often expensive of certification. And you actually can see where these products that you love come from.
Yeah.
Ethan Steinberg: There’s also a cultural component here that I know the three of us like to think about, and I’m sure you and your whole team think about it often, is what’s the culture that you want out of your food? So we get asked often our thoughts on container farming. It’s a difficult question to answer. That there’s a micro and macronutrient conversation that needs to be had and where we grow those types of nutrients. But also culturally, where do you want your food to come from? Do you want your food to come from a box in a shipping container in Brooklyn that’s farmed by robots?
Or do you want to talk and know the person who spent time making sure that what you’re consuming is healthy? So there’s a cultural thing to think about there as well. And that’s how we’ve kind of started thinking about this question in particular about different farming systems.
Christophe Jospe: And you can’t sequester carbon in a shipping container in Brooklyn.
Unknown speaker: Oh, we’re aware.
Christophe Jospe: So we don’t, I mean, as far as cool, good for you, Kimball Musk, for financing this stuff and great to grow food closer to where you eat it. But from our perspective, if you’re consuming a whole bunch of energy and that energy is emitting carbon, they better be buying CRCs to make that food carbon neutral.
Ethan Steinberg: Sure. Yeah. I mean, we want to make sure we do total cost accounting and know what’s really getting put out there. So I know we’ve talked a lot about direct carbon capture a lot. And one of the things that keeps coming up in our discussions about... What does it cost to build those machines in terms of carbon? And it should be successful. It needs to be successful given the catastrophe that’s ahead of us. But what’s most applicable right now? And how do we get that done? What’s most cost effective to get it done?
As far as we can see currently, and hopefully our eyes get better, right? But as far as we can see right now, agroforestry is probably at the pretty high on the list in terms of what we can activate immediately to start drawing down carbon.
Christophe Jospe: Absolutely. And when we think about one of the main culprits for carbon emissions, it is the agricultural sector. So if we can be part of the sort of tidal wave that switches from carbon emissions from, you know, moving your till that is, Just ripping up a lot of the soil that’s emitting carbon using a lot of fertilizers that is depleting the soil of its nutrients to actually regenerating the land. Then you sort of kill two birds with one stone and you’re able to leverage this food production to be part and sort of have farmers at the front of the climate change solution that we need to get going on.
Ethan Steinberg: Can I add something to that as well? The food tastes way better. And that’s really important. Everybody eats and it’s really worthwhile to sit down with your friends and family and loved ones and life of all sorts to just reflect on the food that you consume. It’s a tale as old as time. You break bread together and that builds community and that builds things. You can’t really break bread with a robot. It’d be cool if you could. And it seems like that might happen one day. We can talk about that another time.
But that’s really important. Culturally, what we want and being able to sit around a table with food that tastes good and has high nutrient value is pretty important, particularly for us. We did a harvest dinner not too long ago and that was one heck of a celebration. And frankly, we just ate food from what was in our backyards here and It ended like the celebration was fun. So like you’re celebrating around food. And I think that’s really important culturally.
Harry Greene: Sometimes we phrase it as that we should buy food and consume food based on what we want our social and physical landscape to look like.
Christophe Jospe: Absolutely. So, as we said early in the podcast, it’s been a year since we got together. We always sort of knew that we wanted to figure out a way to work together. It seems like now we kind of have. In our parlance, we would call propaganda. And for us, what that means is that you are the group that is either doing it yourself or helping others do it, which has to do with understanding all the things you’re doing on your farm, all the things you need to do to make better decisions.
Yeah, that works. Carbon Removal Claim, which a verifier looks at, turns into a carbon removal certificate. That’s a CRC. And so the data manager actually plays a really key role. So all that’s to say, I’m going to turn it back to you. How do you see that fitting together? And how do you see that creating one more value add to the work that you’re doing?
Ethan Steinberg: Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing is thinking about it and like there’s two sides of it, right? One is being more efficient on the ground to do the things that we already want to do, right? We want to sequester carbon with the farming practices that we have and being able to have a way of Capturing that data on the ground level and having that feed into systems that are verifying that and getting market validation from that is really important. And then the other side of it, telling the story that we’re actually able to go to a market, whether it be a consumer or a B2B market, where we’re actually able to say, we have verifiers who have come in and showed this, really helps us on the ground tell the story of what makes us different comparatively to the apple orchard down the block.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, cool. B2B, that’s business to business. I think one of the things that we like about you guys also is we’re of the same generation. And I think we’re stuck with this climate crisis, us millennials. We must do something. We don’t really have another choice. And when we were driving in the car, we were sort of talking, well, what do the conventional farmers look at you like? Do they think you’re crazy? And Ethan, you were saying, no, actually, they’re watching us quite closely.
Ethan Steinberg: Maybe because they think we’re crazy, but probably not. The interesting story there is conventional apple orchard down the block, right? There’s good relationships there. And he’s like, if you can do organic, I can do organic, right? Because they see the value. There’s been 40 years of history of conventional management. Which, for good reason, has been successful. I mean, you look at the use of those things, they have a direct input that has an outcome, that helps them being able to stabilize their economic benefit. But at the end of the day, They want that premium of organic if they can do it.
So they’re looking at us very closely and for good reason.
Christophe Jospe: I guess the question I wanted to squeeze in there is how do you see what you’re doing filtering into what we could call more conventional or mainstream agriculture?
Ethan Steinberg: I think it’s still early days. You look at the way in which management practices change on farm. You’re looking at years over years. You’re not looking at tomorrow. You make a management decision on a year-over-year basis that might cause Cost you a little bit more money or might reduce an input and you measure the outcome of your yield, right? And at the end of the day, that’s what you’re looking for when you’re a farmer. How good is your product and what price point you’re selling it at and how much are people buying of that product?
If a year-over-year basis we can make an impact in getting conventional farmers to see that these practices actually stabilize their soil health, help increase the nutritional profile of their apples or their currants, whatever it is, over time that escalation. Economic benefit will come back to them. And that’s kind of the core case of what we try to communicate here at Propagate is that we’re really looking at the economics of this. And it’s not just about like improving your soil, trying to save the world, making sure climate change doesn’t ruin the world around us.
It’s really about making sure that they can still sell a product at the end of the day to a consumer that wants that product. I’ll add something on that about resiliency and economics. One of the things that we’re particularly thinking about all the time is, well, at Propagate, we’re essentially putting assets in the ground that are going to outlive our team by a lot. And so how do we work with The next generation to make sure that there’s a transfer of knowledge and that there’s thinking around this. You use the term millennial, so I know we’re killing a lot of things, but in this case, we’re doing a lot of good.
At least that’s what I like to think. In the context of who’s really going to bear the brunt of some of this stuff in 50 years, it’s my 10-year-old cousin. That terrifies me. I don’t have kids. I’m 27. And chatting with my little cousins about it, I’m like, oh my God, what you’re doing is so cool. I’m like, well, yeah. And I think it’s cool too. And they’re way smarter than they’re given credit for. And so at Propagate, we’re constantly thinking about how can we ensure that there’s an open dialogue with the next couple of generations to ensure that this doesn’t get lost when we hit our 70s, right?
Yeah. And there’s a very easy way to do that. It’s by walking around a farm, you learn so much, right? You taste things, you touch things, you smell things. And it’s a very distinct difference between walking around something that functions as an ecosystem versus something that functions more like a factory. And the conventional ag system in many ways has moved us toward that direction. But for people to be brought back into that system, they’re looking for a different experience. And part of that is organic agriculture. A big part of that is trees as part of that ecosystem as well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was thinking about that. I’m glad you ended there. When I think about conventional agriculture, I wonder how much is in an accounting mindset where you can say, with these inputs, it will lead to these outputs in a relatively regular way that is... Not respective of the total ecological health in some sort of holistic or regenerative way or the farming you do. I’ve done bike tours before and I like traveling by bike because it’s just fast enough to feel like you’re getting somewhere but you’re also slow enough that you really take observation of your surroundings.
You can smell things too. You can smell things. I’ve smelled some things on those trips before, guaranteed.
Ethan Steinberg: Sounds like a conversation that we’re going to have to dive into at some point.
Ross Kenyon: It gets weird out there in some of those little things. Yeah.
Harry Greene: I just wanted to say that I really like the point about observation by bicycle. Because when you walk around, you absorb a vast amount of what your surroundings are telling you. You still absorb most of that. You might lose a bit because your peripherals are moving more quickly by you. A bike is the next step up or say a horse. And that’s a very good point of velocity from which to observe. And when we get in our car, when we get in our truck and drive from point A to point B, we’re getting in this glass box and we’re losing a lot of that sensory feedback.
So, it’s something that feedback that whether it’s a positive or negative illusion. And they’re just using different tools. And sometimes there are organic insecticides that we have to use that are sort of organic, but they’re not necessarily broad spectrum, so they don’t kill everything, but they’ll say disrupt the molting cycle of an insect instead of just killing all of the insects in general. A lot of those farmers didn’t go down that road by choice. In, say, post-World War II, the government said, rip out your hedgerows and plant fence row to fence row.
There should be a chicken in every pot. We moved from this culture that ate more beef, a ruminant that eats grass, to a chicken that eats grain. Say the Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon and I believe Ford Earl Butts said, get big or get out. The status quo of these old timers, it might have been their father or their grandfather or their mother or their grandmother that said, do things the way I’ve done them because that’s the way we operate. It’s really not our nature to grow one crop. So as much as organic and regenerative is moving into the future, it’s also going back to a time before chemicals and pesticides.
And I don’t want to say tillage because we’ve been tilling for 10,000 years, but it’s looking at what we have done and what’s been good and what’s worked with the vast and Does your work feel spiritual in this kind of way?
Ross Kenyon: Do you feel very connected to the land? You’re just out there and it’s quiet. Is this something that y’all experience on a regular basis?
Harry Greene: On farm, so this is Harry speaking, I’ll have a lot of outdoor days throughout the season and a lot of indoor days throughout the season. So I’ll have to go out and do the work and come back and record it and do design work and manage people and whatnot. And at the end of my spreadsheet days, I don’t feel very good.
Ross Kenyon: You don’t feel spiritual on the spreadsheet days?
Harry Greene: Less happy. And at the end of my outdoor days, I come back beaming, glowing. And I’m not saying that because I noticed myself that way. It’s people that I’ve known for a long time or people that I’ve just met say, you’re glowing. Why is that? And I said, well, I just spent the day among people. Lots of different species of plants and animals and biology. And I walked up to a deer and said, hello. Not literally, but that sensory inundation, the sensory inundation of a forest or an organic farm is very powerful.
And I’m not a religious person, but at least for me, that’s God. And it’s beautiful. So, yes, I see that. Spirituality is a great part of what we do, but I think Jeremy has something to say on this.
Jeremy Kaufman: I’m not sure you read your partner correctly. I don’t think you could be planting trees and trying to change agriculture if you didn’t have a spiritual kind of thing moving through you. I think whether or not you choose to recognize it is an individual kind of relationship. But you don’t move into this for dollars. You don’t move into this for kind of clout. You move into it because there’s a deep meaning behind it. And that’s why we do the work.
Ross Kenyon: I asked that question. I’m sure you picked up on it, Paul and Kristoff. And Alden was here with us, too, that you’re all so very passionate about the place. You clearly love the Hudson Valley and its residents and its fields and its force. And I’d be lying. Paul and I looked at each other a couple of times. We’re like, yeah, you want to do this instead? Yeah. No, we don’t.
Christophe Jospe: Started to get some plant lust.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, Anne Bicklay uses plant lust as her term. We got some plant lust today.
Harry Greene: It pulls you in. It really does. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, I think it’s really important. Effectively, we’re commodities. And if the proxy of sequestering more carbon aligns with managing this an even better way and provides additional revenue, game on, let’s go. So yeah, this, this has been a great podcast, Ross. I don’t know if you have anything else or if we should wrap it up.
Ross Kenyon: No, I think that was really good. Anything, any, any last words? It sounds so menacing.
Ethan Steinberg: Last words. I have something I want to comment on. This is like connecting the dots on the spirituality thing is I think we, at this table, we would all agree music is perhaps a strong part of that. I just want to comment back on, we, we, We bumped into each other at a conference or at a, sorry, at a concert the night before we recorded our first podcast. And that was a Grateful Dead concert. And before this podcast, we played some music together. We happened to play some Grateful Dead songs.
So Bob Ware, if you’re listening, come hang out on the farm. Yeah. It’s a long shot, man. It’s a long shot. But hey, maybe one day. But I think it’s really important to just connect all the dots. And at the end of the day, we’ve all had good jokes and there’s fun. And music’s been a big part of that for us and being able to bring that. And we’re pretty, we’re very, Very appreciative of the work that you guys are doing and that you’re really kind of churning forward on things.
And it’s important that everyone’s successful across the whole space. Anyone working on climate solutions, like it’s go time and let’s do it. So that’s kind of like the last message. Like we’re here to help however we can add value. We’re happy to have that conversation and we want to have that conversation. I’ll kind of leave it at this and let you guys roll out on it is... Gregory Landway, who runs a group called Regen Network, he made a really cool comment once about the future business. And it’s something like, somebody asked him about competition.
So who are your business competitors? And Gregory’s answer was, well, I don’t see us as having competitors and Somebody was like, what does that mean? That’s not how business works. And he’s like, look, the business of the future is a good co-operator. Meaning if you out-cooperate me, you’re already working with me, which is like totally different mindset than if you out-compete me. And at this table and across our respective day-to-days and across this field in particular in regeneration, I think that’s really... That’s like a hot button issue. That’s what’s happening.
And we’re cooperating together and we’re driving things forward at a more reasonable and faster rate because we are listening to each other and we’re knowing when we’re wrong or at least trying to know when we’re wrong.
Christophe Jospe: Or at least learning from being wrong and then trying to course correct. Those are great words to end with. Jeremy, you look like you want to lean in, so...
Jeremy Kaufman: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things also about that as well is just being able to realize that at the end of the day, the end goal is people being able to live with an ecosystem in a symbiotic relationship. People need to be taken care of in a cooperative fashion, right? Competition oftentimes kind of pushes us to not want to relate to each other in a way that we actually kind of learn from each other deeply that we’re actually able to help build each other up. And a fundamental part of regeneration, whether it be with landscapes or with people, is being able to build things up and not tear things down.
And so that’s kind of a core part of our ethos. We think it’s a core part of how the future of business looks.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I can’t top any of that, so I might as well just call it. Thanks for being on for the second time. Propagate Ventures, all you guys. Let’s do it again. Probably not in another full year. Let’s do it sooner than that. It seems like you’re making enough progress where we can come back and have more fun again soon.
Christophe Jospe: And plus, you guys are going to move back to the Hudson Valley sometime in the next couple years.
Ross Kenyon: There is some mild propaganda in that tour trying to get us to relocate. Not so mild. Okay, thank you.
Ethan Steinberg: Thanks.
