Joshua Hughes, Sara Czarniecki and Amanda Wilson are the CEO, COO and CMO of Blacksheep, a regenerative resource management cooperative taking direct action against landbase destruction by investing in natural capital. Today, Joshua, Sarah and Amanda join Ross and Christophe to define permaculture and explain how Blacksheep began with the intention to recover that 20 acres of eroded land—and how the business has grown since then.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jaspé. It’s been a long time coming. We have long intended to do an episode on permaculture, given that so many people who have passed through the podcast have had connections to permaculture, but we haven’t done one that was dedicated quite yet. Christophe and I earlier this summer went to the Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island. That place is magical. I really enjoyed it. How did you feel about that, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I was having serious plant lust and just talking to the plants and feeling much more connected to them. I think they were talking to me, too. I was trying to listen.
Ross Kenyon: All right, so Kristoff’s setting the energy for this episode, getting a little woo already. So, we’ll just dive into it. Rather than growing in terms of acreage, it grew in terms of intensity and just systems, which really stuck with me. I loved it.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Incredibly therapeutic as someone living in a major metropolis. You’re just able to check out and man. Yeah. I want lifestyle envy.
Ross Kenyon: This comes up every time we talk to farmers.
Christophe Jospe: One of these days I’ll find myself connected more closely to such a farm, but we should probably introduce our guests. This is the first time we’ve had three guests. The entire We’ve got the entire C-suite of Black Sheep is here. We’ve got Joshua Hughes, who’s the CEO. We’ve got Sara Sarneski. Did I get it right?
Sara Czarniecki: Nice try.
Christophe Jospe: We’ve got Amanda Wilson, who’s the CMO. That’s Chief Executive, Chief Operating, and Chief Marketing Officers for you. We tend to start out with people’s stories. We’ve got so many people and so many stories. So I think that we will do a little bit of a change up this time because it’s kind of like permaculture. I still don’t know what that is. And our listener probably doesn’t either. So Sara, we’re going to start with you. Explain all of permaculture. Yeah. Amanda gets to explain it, but Sara...
Ross Kenyon: I think we should start with permaculture first, and then let’s do the stories.
Christophe Jospe: Fair enough. Okay, so Amanda, please explain, what is permaculture?
Amanda Wilson: Okay, well, personally, I see permaculture as a philosophy of systems design. And to be honest, I don’t like to go too much farther than that, because I think a lot of times people kind of Pigeonhole permaculture to just be about gardens. And, you know, as a company, we go well beyond the garden and well into the supply chain and into our business model itself. So maybe I’ll let one of my other team members take it up from there.
Christophe Jospe: Systems design. Yeah. And I heard sort of meshing words together, right? You’ve got perma, which is permanent and culture or agriculture. So permanent agriculture. Yeah.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah, well, we’ve really worked towards what you just said about being on a dynamic farm where it didn’t feel like 20 acres when you were there. We’ve really worked to not just to work on what they call stacking functions, right? So our farm may be 20 acres, but then it’s 20 acres of ground cover and turmeric and ginger. And then above that is a vineyard with superfood nuts like Sachi Inchi. Above that will be a cacao tree producing. Above that will be a lumber tree. So it’s really a stacking of functions that makes 20 acres more cubic than just square acres.
So it feels a lot more intensive because it is. And it also, what we’ve been doing over the years, has kind of proved out that those kind of systems can produce more per acre just in a much different way that leaves biodiversity, nature, and human life a little more manageable.
Christophe Jospe: A word just came to my mind. It’s funny, you know, we’re a software company and you hear this jargon that’s like interoperability, but actually permaculture is having plants that are interoperating with each other, right?
Joshua Hughes: Yeah, well, and other things like we have mushroom layers under the soil. We’ve been tending to and spraying mushrooms for years on our farm in Costa Rica and things that, you know, and I’m not woo-woo at all. I’m like the- The anti-woo-woo. Yeah, I’m the atheist of permaculture. Good. Yeah, no, for real. I’m the anti-woo-woo. Anti-theist, really. So the way trees communicate, though, kind of blew my mind. What I learned while trying to fix the forest down there was that once you enabled anything in that world, it started feedback loops that really produce.
And it healed us. It healed me more than I healed it, I think.
Ross Kenyon: People tend to give vague answers to what is permaculture. And I don’t think that’s a problem because it does seem to be more of a mindset than something that’s super prescriptive. Add this to your soil and why it will happen.
Joshua Hughes: Well, within permaculture, there’s tonnes of really prescriptive things to do. And there’s lots of other names that you’d notice. Agroforestry, silviculture, all these ways to apply it. But it depends where you live. And that’s why permaculture should kind of step back and be more broadly thought of because people leave our courses at Verde Renheia, our main farm, they don’t normally say it’s a gardening technique. They feel that it’s just as powerful in a city as it is in the country. So there’s the farming and there’s the food production, but there’s the way you The way you organize decision making, the way you distribute products, water, logistics are a big part of our permaculture application.
And then distribution and getting people to think about the way they touch the farms. So you’re not just in a city, you’re touching farms all over the world. Coffee farms in South America and chocolate farms in Costa Rica. And I think a lot of us up here, I lived in Portland for years, I grew up in Southern Oregon. There’s a real good connection to the farming world. There’s a lot of CSAs, Community Supported Agriculture Projects. And I see that people really want to connect So I think the next step is connecting that CSA community supported agriculture feel to the way you get your chocolate and your other tropical products as well.
So we try and incorporate all that.
Ross Kenyon: One thing I heard a lot on Orcas Island at the Bullock’s permaculture homestead was the term social permaculture and people thinking about human relationships too. We could start talking about that now, but given what I know about black sheep, it seems like you do have that component.
Joshua Hughes: Maybe it’d be more natural to just let that unfold and you I moved to the farm in 2006 and we moved to what was just deforested cattle land on very steep hills and in a place called Puriscal in Costa Rica. About an hour from San Jospe, hour and a half to our farm. And I didn’t know the word permaculture. I moved there just with a bunch of things I didn’t want to do anymore. I had been in recycling. I had been in the automotive industry my whole life. And I really wanted to get down and dirty with change from the bottom.
We had pepper spray and batons in the early 2000s trying to kind of stand in the way of bad ideas. So we got down there and we decided to just not do any bad ideas. Start implementing all the little good things we could. And about four or five years in, I met permaculturists and teachers and we started having a bunch of input from them and it really made sense. And the things we were already trying to do and people kept asking us to write a book about it and I found the permaculture book and said, well, no, here it is.
This is here. And it is this broad study of Is this the Mollison? Yeah, the Mollison book. And then following up with, I mean, when I got to the jungle, one of the things we really did down there was focus on reading and learning. So we have a big library and people will come down there in their thirties and they haven’t read like that since college. And so we’ve just really dove into analyzing, interpreting all the That’s a Spanish portmanteau. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Green Energy.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah, Green Energy. Greenergy was the name of a little biodiesel collective we had in Portland. So it kind of flowed down there. And we ended up on this land hoping to figure out how to grow energy and how to have a better relationship with energy. And quickly we learned, as you do when you’re involved in those big businesses, that there’s no control over the price of those things. And as a farmer, we had to figure out really dynamic ways to survive and thrive. Because about 1% of Americans are farming now.
It’s become a mechanized thing with maybe just 8 to 10 different kinds of food we eat. So we got engaged in what it took on our own land to do things right. And we moved to a place that was eroded, water springs are dried up, trees are all gone. Our area in Costa Rica is like one of the worst examples of forestry in the world. It was a primary forest 80 years ago, 70 years ago, and it’s just cattle land now on hills. 70 degrees. So it’s a really bad idea, but it was a centralizing of wealth that happened down there really quickly before they had a fortified government.
And now they’re trying really hard down there to protect their place, but not just protect it. Dynamic ways, not to just be in a donation-based economy that requires some abstract carbon trading. It’s very real down there and very direct. When your springs stop, the small farmer’s done. They have to flee their community. So it’s very personal down there. And there’s not really a locals and us attitude. I moved down there with my family. And my little girl, she was three, Kailia, when we got there, she actually did most of the PR, most of the public relations, just by being a jacked little blonde in the jungle.
She’s like basically a tiga now, right? Yeah, I know. And she had to learn Spanish in weeks to play. And I started learning Spanish the day I got there. So I didn’t know. All I knew was hola or whatever. So getting down there in the middle of the jungle to a place where it was sort of like a 40s Catholicism. And way off track. So it was great. It was a good opportunity for everybody to learn, learn from each other without the burden of language.
Ross Kenyon: And you started with this, this one farm that’s a good end.
Joshua Hughes: And that was 20 acres. And it wasn’t a farm when I got there, it was cattle and pigs. And so we got, we got busy trying to figure out how to recover it. And I was really just into reforesting at the time and food production. I quickly learned that there was so much remediation that had to happen because of the years of washing away soil. We get 30 feet of 20 to 30 feet of rain a year in my area. You guys get probably three here, right?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t even know. I know that soil is not always that great to start with, right? Tropical soils, it leaches out all the minerals.
Joshua Hughes: In a good tropical system, there’ll be four inches of topsoil. It’s mostly about the canopy’s relationship with the soil. And the leaves are always falling and re-assimilating. So when you start cutting down the forest or clear cut like they did, it takes no time for the rain to wash it away.
Christophe Jospe: So you’re using some words sort of interchangeably, and I’m curious your perspective and then how you would describe the quote unquote farmer’s perspective. You know, farmers of the conventional sense would look at you and say, these guys are gardeners. Yeah.
Joshua Hughes: No, we’re farming. Well, next year, we’ll have a million and a half pounds of turmeric off our farm. We’ll have 100,000 kilos of cacao coming off there in a few years. We have 25,000 kilos of superfood nuts. We’re building facilities to process this all in big co-ops. So down where we live, it’s not even really farmers. It’s mostly cattle ranchers that just use locals to move cows around. So where we’re at, farming is just coming back into style because food is finally back in style and people seem to want good food.
So you’re seeing some coffee planted near us, but we were in an area that was just ravaged by a few short Short years of bad ideas cutting down the forest for these big land giveaways. And then it turned into the only thing you could do to get anything out of this land this steep was put cows on it because they traverse the whole thing and eat grass. So they dumped grass from airplanes in like the 70s and put this really invasive, this terrible grass from Brazil and this other one from Africa.
Doesn’t belong there. We don’t have big animals in Costa Rica traditionally. This was just cattle food. Just cattle food. And it was like the last thing they could do in those areas. And now kind of palm oil is coming in and sweeping up the rest and buying any of that terrible land and just pouring chemicals on it. Costa Rica uses more chemicals per meter than any country in the world. The US uses two and a half kilos per hectare, two and a half acres. And Costa Rica was 18. 2 kilos.
So it’s higher than China. It’s higher than anywhere. And it’s not for us. It’s pineapples for Americans.
Ross Kenyon: It’s funny because Costa Rica has such a progressive reputation. No, no standing military. It’s supposed to be like a piece of- It’s all about the little green tree frogs and baby sloths. La pura vida.
Joshua Hughes: That’s happening too. 100% clean energy, right? That’s true too. That’s true too, except my opinions on dams are not in line with that.
Unknown speaker: Tell us your opinions on dams.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve got Edward Abbey all over.
Joshua Hughes: Oh yeah, no, Abbey’s my boy. No, but it’s not even just about the rivers here. It’s about the actual energy creation and what’s happening. Dams are basically giant biodigesters. Do you guys know what a biodigester is? You take organic material, have it break down anaerobically, and it breaks down and makes methane. So most of the dams, the amount of energy they create versus the methane distribution to the atmosphere is about the same as a coal plant of actual global... Yeah, so... Yeah, but no one’s counting it, so it’s clean energy, right?
Yeah, well, that’s part of our job in the last years have been to start quantifying all these things and put those externalities into the normal columns on our business and then see what works out for real instead of subsidizing it with the future and or military or destruction of risk. Revers, which is super personal to me being from Oregon, watching the salmon runs die in my life and this amazing conveyor belt of natural capital that was squandered in no time, right? I think we use maybe $7 to $10 trillion a year worth of natural capital and just destroy it.
For me, it’s really personal. And the way we make energy down there, it’s better than coal. And our country is small. There’s only about four, maybe five million people in Costa Rica. About a million of those are Americans and other Central Americans living there. But we’re trying. It’s a duality there. Now, the pineapple industry had power before there was a government with power. So as we dissolved our military and stuff, we didn’t have a way to fight private power there. We’re dealing with kind of the results of that. And please, Americans, don’t eat pineapples unless they’re organic, because 95% of US pineapples come from Costa Rica.
One thing you can do to care about people who grow the food that you’re eating the tropics, especially like please buy organic tropical products. Yeah. Have that same attitude you would about where you get your carrots if you’re thinking about that. And we’ve taken it to other areas too, things like building material even, like we’re getting down and dirty with everything that we need when it comes to energy.
Ross Kenyon: I believe it. I, there’s a, there’s a lot here and I, it sounds like you’re all very passionate about the details of how you’re proceeding. Why don’t you, uh, keep walking us through this story. So you have this first 20 acres and is it, you own this personally? Okay.
Joshua Hughes: I bought it. I bought it initially. I was getting a little too active for my old job. I was doing document destruction and product destruction, working for a bunch of Fortune 500 companies in Portland and Oregon and built a co-op around the US. But as I became more radicalized all the time by the wars and by my knowledge of climate change and what was coming, I wasn’t really allowed behind the scenes anymore all of a sudden. So they paid me to go away and I immediately went away. I went to Costa Rica.
I wanted to try this stuff. So I invested in that with about 10 friends in the beginning and family. And we knew we wanted to do a distributed ownership model. And I wanted something that people were vested in and cared about. But I really didn’t know how many people would care about this. So we had about 10 people to start. And within a year, there was about 15. Another year, there’s 30. Now there’s about 150 people that own this with me. Well, that own all four of our businesses together. Yeah.
We have four companies now all intertwined and vertically integrated to meet the demand of all these small farm projects. So what we realized as we were growing is we figured out good ways to... Regenerate soil, to regenerate the forest, and we started seeing this huge surplus pour back in. And in no time, in about five years, the jungle was in really good shape in the beginnings, right? Ten years in, it looks like a forest around us. Verden at HIA gave me this kind of potent and dangerous activism and business activism because I’ve seen what can happen.
I’ve seen regeneration. We’ve done it together. A bunch of, you know, middle class and lower class kids together with some of our parents and our children moved down there over the years and about 5,000 people participated and about 150 people have stuck there and helped us over the years.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve long been interested in why cooperatives and collectives were not more prominent. People point to things like Mondragon in Spain and other groups like that. And I remember, I think I first got into this guy, I was reading John Stuart Mill and he was talking about How this is sort of like maybe a direction that capitalism could tend towards and it seems like there is natural momentum. But I’ve never quite understood or put together why this isn’t more common because it seems like workers may enjoy being co-owners and having more autonomy.
Yeah.
Joshua Hughes: Well, it was really common in the past. You should read the book, Get Up, Stand Up, if you haven’t, about the late 1800s with the farmer movements and as they built huge co-ops and won several states for presidential election. It was amazing, but banks come in and crush those ideas. It’s taken us an immense amount of work to create Corporate structure that everybody could trust, that people could be engaged in, that we could take investors in and not like dilute people who are working on the ground. So it was a ton of just building contracts and fairness and listening to like what Mr.
Rogers taught me, which is you should share. So we like to offer everybody a vested opportunity to work together. And it seems that people bring their A-game when they’re part of things.
Christophe Jospe: I actually think sharing is one of the most selfish things you can do.
Joshua Hughes: Well, if you do it because you want everybody to know it, I guess, if you’re donating with a check and holding it up, but if you’re just rewarding people for good works.
Christophe Jospe: I meant it more if you own a business and you want that business to be long-term viable, the best thing you can do is share ownership in that business through the people who are working to make that business successful. It ensures longevity.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah. And we tried this. Wall Street sort of had this idea that you build these collectives and you diversify and de-risk for each person so you could do big jobs. Corporations were initially just intended to do one job, build a bridge, build a building, and then they’d be It’s dissolved. But we kind of lost way there a long time ago and the markets became some weird abstraction that just centralizes wealth more and more. So I think we kind of tried. It’s just a matter of reinforcing it and hoping that tax laws and stuff inspire not hoarding.
These days, you don’t text anything for hoarding. It’s very low. So 60, 70 years ago, when these things were happening, when unionization was on, when farmers were joining together and co-ops and granges were all over the land, the tax structure changed, forced all the money up, and then you’re in trouble financially. You have to have access to banks. You have to have access to lawyers. It’s something that’s hard for the people that don’t have a lot of means, I should say.
Ross Kenyon: How do you make decisions as a company or a set of companies in a way that is different from an LLC or C Corp or something like that?
Christophe Jospe: This is a Sara question, right?
Sara Czarniecki: Honestly, we do things pretty organically. Our team works really closely with each other and we know who has expertise in which department and we collaborate and trust the people who are informed to make those decisions. At this point, we don’t have a lot of really formalized structure.
Joshua Hughes: Or bureaucracy.
Sara Czarniecki: Yeah. And to the point you were making earlier about Why people don’t work in cooperatives more often, frankly, I don’t know, because in my opinion, that’s been a key to our success. It’s allowed us to be way more flexible with our business, with our responsibilities, and to ensure we have team members to hold us all up when we need the support. I look at people who are running huge businesses like this by themselves. We have many... Colleagues in Costa Rica who are sort of on their own blazing the trail and I don’t know how they do it.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah. Well, another thing it does is when you’re in this mindset, you’re also pretty, we’re pretty willing to know where we don’t have expertise. So we have the freedom and ability to bring in people. And the fact that we created this this way, it started on the farms. And then it grew up from there. So the managing bodies and stuff, we built the managing bodies we would need as small farmers to have access. And we came at it from the bottom up. So it feels very, like she said, organic. But also then you know what you don’t have.
And you can work to that. And as a sole proprietor, I had to feel like I had to be an expert at everything or trust somebody and who knows. Well, now they’re all involved with us. We have, like I said, about 150 different people that own it together. And we probably have an executive team of nine or 10 people now and management on farms, a dozen people working on our first project now, planting turmeric and cacao. And it just seems to come out of what was really necessary on the ground.
Ross Kenyon: Do you ever worry about how do you split the ownership and are you concerned that, I don’t know, you don’t have the answers if you don’t want to. Are you the majority owner of these companies?
Joshua Hughes: No. No.
Ross Kenyon: So you need a coalition.
Joshua Hughes: I was in the beginning and I sold my percentage down day by day and gave away percentages to people. So I started as about a 90% owner of the first farm. And by the end, I think I’m down to a couple of shares of it. So I might have 5% of it myself. And we spread that. I wanted something that was really... Democratic for real, not just every Tuesday or Tuesday every four years.
Sara Czarniecki: Yeah, and frankly, our ownership structures are very cut and dry. Everyone knows exactly who owns what. It’s really simple in Costa Rica.
Joshua Hughes: And we’ve left a lot of space to give to future people because we don’t know what we don’t know.
Christophe Jospe: So we’re laying this foundation of it because here you are away from Costa Rica, away from doing the work that you’re passionate about, doing what we might call a fundraising song and dance. Yeah.
Joshua Hughes: Totally not our style over the years. We’ve had, at Verdener here, we grew very organically. People would come, volunteer, spend six months there working with us, go back home. Ten years later, they’ve got, they’re now in the workforce. They’re doing well. We have a call to action. We need a new farm purchase because Dole’s trying to clear cut above us or something. And then we just were able to engage with a whole bunch of people who really trusted everything and seen the jungle and loved it. Now we’re up here because it’s the first time I’d left the land or that area since 2007.
I’ve been gone for 13 years. Came back a month and a half ago. Not just to look for fundraising, but to weave together more cooperative action, to finance these things that we need, like processing facilities, which are lacking for all farms. Even if you can grow great things, you end up having things rot or selling them at the wrong time of year. So farmers are in real trouble. They’re at the mercy of the world markets. And so we’re here to make sure that farmers have what they need, that we can buy and invest in more farms and forestry too.
Forestry is a big area that we’ve kind of let go of in the Pacific Northwest and let it all go to just a couple of companies, you know. So I grew up in Southern Oregon where lots of mills existed and lots of different people did these things and it all became Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific over the years. And so we’re here to take back some of that power, get it distributed differently. Hopefully people actually pay taxes on these things instead of avoiding them. So we’re up here to connect it all and to build kind of this tethered tropical to your family’s home connection for the food and building materials and things you need from the tropics.
And so we can not just feel like activists, but we can activate businesses that do the right thing and do regenerative work. So everything we do hopefully leaves a better imprint. We don’t leave footprint on people or on soil. We hopefully leave trees and happier folks behind us. And the way we structured the ownership was really just to make sure people could all participate, feel heard. We try not to have a bureaucratic mess. We did this at our farm over the years. We practiced governance. And you try... Weird things. Try anything you can to make decisions.
And Mollison says just to take your jobs you have to do, put them on a board and then do them. And like he said, have a meeting about consensus to never have another meeting about consensus. And just hire experts and do what must be done. So when it comes to the different personalities, Any one person owns 1%, half a percent, 3%. So no one person is all skin in the game. If somebody had 90% in, it’s hard for them to follow ideas if they think they’re bad because you’re risking everything.
So I took it all in faith in the beginning and I wanted to see if adults would do better when they could. And so far, it’s been pretty good. Out of 5,000 people, we’ve maybe kicked out three people in over 13 years. So it hasn’t been as dramatic as I thought it would, but then it’s very real. You know, things from... You never know. We have one kitchen, sharing one kitchen for 40 people to see how that would go. One fridge.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, one fridge. Oh my. It’s a lot of Sharpies being used to mark down whose yogurt it is.
Joshua Hughes: No, we’d make our own yogurt and then we share it at meals. Cooking food may be one of the most important things we’ve taught. People show up that have never cooked. How do you have a local food revolution if you can’t cook? Whose turn is it to do the dishes? What kind of cloths do you use on the counter versus cleaning up on the ground? We could build pyramids if it wasn’t for the dishes. It’s actually some of the hardest part of having an intentional space or community living is who wants to do mom’s work.
Everybody wants to plant. Or work that has been traditionally assigned to mom. Yeah, so that seems to be the hardest thing to get people to want to do. But that’s where you start actually having flow and community. We’ve experimented with this with thousands of people and feel pretty comfortable in what it means to deal with lots of ideas and try not to have a bureaucracy that slows everything or makes everything cost too much.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds like a fun cult.
Joshua Hughes: It’s a permacult. We’ve had to avoid. Like I said, I’m an anti-theist. That’s going to get me in trouble, I’m sure. No, they’re going to come after us now. Oh, yeah. So I’ve tried really hard. I’ve worked hard. We all have to maintain unity, but no uniformity. Uniformity is not our style. So, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Well, fair enough. Yeah, we’d try to be a pretty diverse podcast of the intellectual traditions people represent and participate in. So I don’t think you’re in any more. I think it’s totally fine.
Joshua Hughes: Oh, you never know, though. One time I had a Mohawk down there and my friend came and he had a Mohawk and another friend of mine did a Mohawk while I was there. Then another guy showed up and goes, do I have to have a Mohawk? Yeah, I was like, no, dude. And I shaved it immediately.
Ross Kenyon: I want to ask a clarifying question too, because we’ve talked about the business of farming quite a lot of the podcast, many, many, many episodes, probably the dominant theme. Yeah.
Joshua Hughes: It’s a big part of the issue.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And we know that when you’re in commodity agriculture, when you’re selling bushels of corn or whatever, you’re sort of a price taker, you go to the elevator, you get what you can get, et cetera. But there’s this parallel force that are cooperatives and my understanding of them is that farmers co-own these and they buy the produce from these farmers. And because they have a lot of weight behind them and a lot of produce that they represent, they can bargain for better prices than individual farmers. Is that correct?
Amanda Wilson: Yeah. So we’re tackling this situation in our own way. It’s a similar model, but we are building our own processing facility, Black Sheep is, so it can purchase directly from all the farms that we own. Other farmers in Costa Rica who are meeting the same ethical standards that our business stands for. And then we’re also, through this process, we’ve seen the need for just supply chain, essentially. So we’re also building a brand that we can sell our regenerative organic products under in the States. So that’s what we’re up to right now.
By building the processing facility, we’re creating value-added products, which allows us to pay Really awesome rates to farmers and then allows the company to recoup through building the brand on the other side.
Joshua Hughes: It’s a big part of it, value adding. I don’t know how any farm does just selling bushels. It seems like those industries actually only happen by the biggest players.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, everyone’s trying to break out of it and have their own brand that they can sell.
Joshua Hughes: Well, what I’ve seen this week is kind of, it’s both heartening and scary because I’ve been gone since 2007. Things have changed. There’s hemp growing in the fields in Southern Oregon, like endless hemp and marijuana and it seems like wine. So I’m seeing all of the good farmland as I drove from San Diego So if we’re going to have anything other than those products, small farmers from what we can see, We can’t survive without value adding and more access to the market. So it’s really important that we take a product and we’re like, you might have an acre of turmeric and get paid 15, $20,000, $30,000 a week.
And by the time we value added, that acre is worth a half a million dollars in the market. So there’s a ton to share. We pay our farmers 10 times more than we get paid in the world markets for the same commodity.
Ross Kenyon: I have two questions. The first one’s super quick. I’ve been saying turmeric. Is that first R silent?
Joshua Hughes: I don’t know. I call it curcuma because it’s easier in Spanish. I call it curcuma. Turmeric. I don’t say the R. I spell it wrong. In the turmeric business a while, I still spell it wrong.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. That makes me feel a bit better, but I’m still never sure what exactly it is. I feel like a pedant when I say turmeric.
Joshua Hughes: Well, we actually take turmeric, extract out the curcumines, which is the part that helps with inflammation, the part that enables a healthy immune response. That’s from our lawyer. And then essential oils and other things. So the essential molecules people want so we don’t have to ship the water and organic material from our country. When you ship away turmeric, you ship away four parts of water out of five. So keeping that in our bioregion.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. And then my real question is, you mentioned regenerative organic. Is that going to be a certification you’re going to go for with Rodale? Or are you... I love the fights over these labels too. And permaculture people, I think, are generally the hardest ones to please. They’re like, we’re the best. We do it the most intensively, ethically. So these are all just fakers.
Christophe Jospe: You’ve got to actually produce them. I love what we learned in our permaculture design course. Be a perm on, don’t be a perm off.
Ross Kenyon: That’s good. I forgot that.
Christophe Jospe: I think we want...
Amanda Wilson: Yeah, we’re definitely becoming USDA certified organic. In fact, our farm, Baird Energia, is this week to be receiving their certification. We’re investigating into their regenerative labels. One thing that we won’t want to do is exclude... Local farmers in Costa Rica from being able to participate in our processing facility by having these like regenerative standards or certifications that aren’t accessible to them. So that’s just something we kind of have to wait and feel out.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah. And we’re working on the actual, on the ground. We just see and feel everything we do and it’s quantifiable in the soil health and these things. So it’s way beyond organic and our branding is all going to have organic products, but be like she said, have the freedom to start helping people transition to not be so sticklers to every detail, but organics are vital. We can’t put one drip of chemicals in our land. I never would. It’s poisoning my neighbors. We live in a place people used to be 110, now they’re 45 and getting cancer.
So it’s very personal to us.
Christophe Jospe: It blows my mind the amount of chemicals that are stats that you were citing. I mean, I think one of the other things we learned on that fateful weekend was, you know, the answer in permaculture is often, it depends. It’s never yes or no. And when I think about organics, even the USDA organic label, There are a lot of crops being produced under that label, which are destroying the earth. That’s right. Monoculture. Monoculture organics.
Joshua Hughes: Or from halfway around the world. It has a huge entropic debt on it by the time it gets to you.
Christophe Jospe: Right. So the dumb consumer in me is very much like, okay, find my local CSA, find the farmer, buy from that person. But also I want to go to a point that you brought up earlier is I’m fortunate to have come from a family that’s never had to worry about where the food comes from and being able to afford putting that food on the plate. And I’m lucky that But, you know, you say, you know, we’re a bunch of lower class, middle class kids. A lot of what we’re talking about is interesting to the elites, but not something that’s accessible to the world at large, which is really what it needs to be.
So how do you tackle that?
Joshua Hughes: Most of the world doesn’t use money. Most of the actions on this planet come from personal relationships, come from families watching your kids and sharing education responsibilities. It’s like 75 to 80% of the world’s economy is actually human on human in relationship. So every day the capital system tries to eat another percentage point of that and get bigger and bigger. But what I see in the, where we’re at, and I don’t want to call it developing, I don’t like the words, but in the world that isn’t in the middle of everything, Costa Rica and the tropics, is that our neighbors actually figure it out pretty well on what it seems like impossible incomes.
We got down there and our neighbors are making a dollar an hour. But they had a lot of food engaged in their own garden. So they weren’t able to buy from the stores. So they just grew it themselves right around them. But the art of organics requires a little different approach. You have to kind of get over the hump. You can’t use chemicals just to subsidize bad soil. So what I see in the developing world and what’s needed for everyone to participate is a little bit of investment from the people who have means to help people get over the hump into production.
And that’s why Black Sheep is purposed on And not just purposed on, but spent two years and a half a million dollars on legal and accounting and our own time in developing ways for investors to play, investors to participate without taking these farms. Because my neighbors are terrified of big companies helping them out or Americans showing up with great ideas. They’re 400 years into imperialism under the boot. Banana Republic. Yeah, we’re in the Banana Republic or former, still is. It’s the Pineapple Republic now.
Unknown speaker: Could you define that for us?
Joshua Hughes: Countries that didn’t have the ability to fight back against private tyranny and that were rolled over by these railroad, the railroads literally that came through to dissolve our jungles and take all of the thousands of years or millions of years of stored up energy and take it in 50 years. And we didn’t have the power or the political will to stop them or the weapons, right? The US rolled through Central America and for many years, Spanish, the Europeans and the Americans, we’ve taken everything we can from there. We work diligently not to have any kind of neo-colonialism kick in and we work hard and our neighbors feel that because we’re neighbors, not us and them, not locals and us, just we live in a neighborhood together in the middle of nowhere.
Amanda Wilson: That’s a constant revisional process. That’s not just like a status that’s achieved. That’s the thing that you have to, with every decision, be like, how does this affect the people around me? How does this affect my constituents and my stakeholders? And where does this position my neighbors and the people that I’ve been somewhat elected to represent who don’t have... The pedestal and the lever, so to speak, that I have.
Joshua Hughes: We’re using the lever of the fact that we’re young Americans, bringing it up here and finding the relationships that we can, that my neighbors who speak Spanish and have never left a dirt road in their life. My neighbor was 88 before he went to the city, 40 miles away. He never been more than about 10 miles from his home. So he can’t reach into Wall Street and speak to their hearts or ask somebody with means or some child of someone who left the money inheritance to go and reinvest this in a safe way, in a safe way for investors, in a way that you don’t give away the wealth you’ve earned and also in a safe way so we don’t end up under the heel of interest rates, which is what happens to most farmers.
And that’s why 85,000 farmers in India alone kill themselves every year because of debt over bad loans and really bad ideas. So we tend to that very delicately.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s very important. I’ve spent a pretty decent amount of time in Central America and read a lot of history. One of the books that stuck with me is called Inevitable Revolutions I read. And it’s funny because almost all of those countries have like the five families, the eight families or whatever. They own like all the arable land.
Joshua Hughes: Oh yeah. The sugar, alcohol, industry, cattle. Yep. Yep. There’s five in Costa Rica. You say that’s how many families pretty much run the big parts of it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and I think that’s, and then there’s also stuff like William Walker. I don’t know if you know.
Joshua Hughes: Costa Ricans killed him.
Unknown speaker: Oh, is that right?
Joshua Hughes: Oh, they surrounded him in Revis, Nicaragua, and burnt the building down he was in. Or they tried, he got away, they got him later.
Ross Kenyon: Do you know that story? Christophe, do you know him?
Christophe Jospe: I don’t. I’ll have to recap on that. It’s a good one.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah, yeah. When you show up at the airport in Costa Rica, there’s a statue of a young man holding a torch. I don’t know why he has a French uniform on. Because it was a gift from the French. Yeah. And he’s holding it. Right as you come out of the airport, people don’t know. This is the guy that burnt gringos who had bad ideas. Here, it’s right there.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, my. He was called a filibuster and it was just like private individuals would come down and try to start new colonies that weren’t officially sanctioned by the United States.
Joshua Hughes: He was the president of Honduras for a minute.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, he actually made a funny story.
Joshua Hughes: Can you declare himself the king? All over Central America, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it happened a lot and it’s part of the whole, I don’t know. That and United Fruit and all the other things that people are quite sent. So I would imagine being a gringo and going down there and owning land is you have to show good faith.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah, a lot. And my neighbors, we live in an area where there was no tourism. I may be the first white person they ever spent any time with. And if it was about me It was me talking with them. If I would have gone down there with my Spanish, if it would have been good, I probably would have blown out most of my friends there immediately. I like to talk about serious things. So whether I’m talking about the past and Vietnam War to the future of the bad ideas that are propelling us there again, Much simpler.
It was walking around, pointing at things, planting together. And these things built family, which built the tie that won’t let me let anyone hurt my neighbors. And yeah, a lot of folks in my position are murdered in Central and South America every year for standing on the front lines of bad forestry policy, cattle, palm oil, protecting animals of any sort. So we’ve had a few moments where we’re standing up to hunters or we’re standing up to palm oil cartels. And I’m lucky to still be alive, actually, because we’re right there on the front of it.
I was in Portland, Oregon. I was screaming about it, reading about it. I got down there. And man, it’s very real when you see people hunting jaguars around here or something. You decide what to do. And I’ve decided to run out and stand in the way. And so have our friends and We’re lucky to be a lifestyle, but it’s fun. It’s been exciting. I get that protester in me, so every now and then you’ve got to run to the front line.
Amanda Wilson: Encouraging palm oil is actually what incentivizes us to buy our second and third farms together. And really start black sheep as you know it now. I think if not for the encouragement of the encroaching palm oil, we may have just been content to have this nice little oasis space of Verde Energia and just kind of chill there and have our little school and be happy there forever. But it became clear that You know, you can have your little island, but water connects everyone. So if somebody goes upstream from you and poisons, it’s going to kill your fish.
It’s going to kill everything that you’ve tried to do. And so nothing really exists in a vacuum. I think that’s like the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from all of this is that you have to think about the world as a whole. And, you know, bringing the conversation back to permaculture specifically, You know, I’m new to the world of permaculture. I discovered it about six years ago. But an attitude that I have observed through like website forums and just talking with other permaculturists who are very garden centered or very like, this is my farm or my backyard space.
It’s like there has to be a moment where they recognize that it’s not just about your own private homestead, like what you do. Affects everyone else and that falls into politics as well. So we can’t just think about things in a vacuum. We have to think about them bigger and think about supply chains and where things come from and how what we’re doing affects everyone else.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah, permies get into the little boat mentality sometimes with their farms. So we’re here to bring like a comprehensive big boat approach to permaculture.
Amanda Wilson: Not to pick on permies.
Joshua Hughes: No, no, no. But anybody who’s homesteading a continent kind of be that way. And then all of a sudden there’s chemicals flowing into your pond or your swimming pool. And it’s really personal. Again, I thought I’d gotten away and they pulled me back in.
Ross Kenyon: That’s like the fifth time that’s come up on this pop. I even once did it in the full Al Pacino. Yeah.
Joshua Hughes: No, it’s real though. I thought I got away and all of a sudden these things were going to go in our water source right above us. And so it forced us to build like this umbrella that we call Black Sheep that can connect all these farms, help protect, invest, be a buyer, be a brand, all the things that we were missing so that we wouldn’t Be under attack. And you mentioned just the water that flows across your land. Well, I knew when Fukushima happened, I was like, oh yeah, we’re all in this together.
This is flowing into our oceans. It’s traversing in the sky and there’s no little boat. The earth is, you know, you can hide it behind your thumb if you’re on the moon. So this is a small boat.
Christophe Jospe: So perhaps we’re burying the lead a little bit, but for the investor who’s sitting at his seat, the edge of his seat, listening to this podcast and wants to invest in black sheep.
Joshua Hughes: Or in anything regenerative.
Christophe Jospe: Or anything regenerative. What’s the elevator pitch? What does the investor get in return?
Joshua Hughes: We’ve created really good returns for these things. So as a result of doing good forestry work, we started having this amazing surplus or profit. If you’re around business, people talk about profits, but this is very profitable for people. It’s not just about doing activism. It’s not just about doing the right thing. We plan to If donation was something that was going to work, we wouldn’t. We’re losing forests way faster. About half the forests cut every day are for tissue. That’s not okay when things like hemp exist and other options. When we got engaged in all this, we were moving into what somebody would call a sacrifice zone, an area that was used up And in that, there’s still a lot of value.
And with a little nudge and with a little permaculture or really paying attention to biodiversity, it started creating a biodiversification, if you will. And so creating vertically integrated systems that bring products from the farms right to the table. Good labeling, good shipping, good logistics. We have a company we’re working with that’s going to be shipping our products on wooden ships with sails from Costa Rica up to Hawaii and Hawaii to Portland. It’s actually carbon negative shipping. Yeah. We were waiting for years for that kind of stuff to exist. Shout out Sail Cargo.
Yeah. Sail Cargo. That sounds like Oh, you need to. Daniel’s great. And these people are great. And they’re building their big ship right now.
Ross Kenyon: And they’re like big clipper ships like they used to have?
Joshua Hughes: Yes. I’ll show you a video when we’re done of these huge ships. They can carry 250 tonnes of cargo. And they have electric motors that are getting them in and out of the bays. And then they’re cooking with the currents out in the Pacific to bring high-value superfoods to the market. And they’re building them with either fallen or sustainable timber. Yeah. It’s serious work. So our trees will actually in the future go to build the boats that will transport our products. Yeah. And joint venturism. Just so we don’t have to do everything.
There’s amazing people out there and we’re investing in good ideas and then creating good deals. And you asked earlier a little bit about how much of this might be like a revolutionary or how hard was it? We do the traditional business contracts or structures. We just write internal contracts that aren’t ridiculous. CEOs don’t make more than the average person in the company. Yeah. Disney, I think they’re making 1500 times more than their average employee. That’s where it goes wrong is in the internal contracts. This business structure is actually open for almost anything.
It’s a good tool if you need it. There’s a lot of precedent there to keep contracts real, to keep promises. So we don’t want to blow all that out and have to reinvent all that. That’s a nightmare. And there’s a ton of protocols already designed. So we just write good contracts and people get treated fair.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t always love the left. It’s not fake. It’s real. It’s being agitated with bad things. The orange guy at the top is not saying the right things to make it better.
Joshua Hughes: He’s making it worse. But for people in Costa Rica, for my neighbors and farmers, it doesn’t matter who the president of the US is. These things march along constantly towards the race to the bottom and wages and watching the mountains disappear. So this is a very political activity. And it’s not political as much as it’s governance and actually getting engaged in the governing of our community where the government has failed and building commons. Things like we don’t want to have to be the ones that build commons in our area. It’s a very expensive, big deal.
It’s a huge project. With every acre of productive land we have, we can fix 10 to 50 acres with an economic driver on that. So we had to get into governing our community because no one would.
Amanda Wilson: Yeah, I think that’s the point I was going to make is that I think a lot of us are kind of tired of waiting for somebody else at the top to fix it. So we’re like, all right, well, I guess we have figured out. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it’s really easy to look around and figure out the things that don’t resonate with you and to say no, no, no, no, which is like part of the process and changing and finding alternatives, right? So this was a time for us to be ready to build the alternative.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah, and voting every day with the way you act, not every four years on a Tuesday. Building democratic systems in your own company so you’re not a private tyranny within a democracy. It’s very personal. We spent a lot of time deep thinking about politics and geopolitics and discussing war and then getting real about why it happens. Not just it’s a bad idea, but it’s like what prepares. It perpetuates and keeps the US interest abroad supply chain open, right? So I take it very seriously when I say no to war that I have to say yes to local actions, to yes to local energy, yes to local food production.
So it is very political. As we grow this, we’re dealing more and more with politicians. We spent a week and a half at the Aspen Ideas Fest. They were putting in our two cents. Every single time there was an event, we were hands up and asking serious questions. Some of the politicians, ex-congressmen, ex-senators. And we find them to be so moderate with everything, that whatever moderates means these days, that I can’t wait for them at all. You can’t wait for them. Our grandkids are going to have no oceans if we don’t get active.
Amanda Wilson: I mean, what did David Attenborough recently come out and say? Like, We need extremist action. I think he used the word extremist. He’s like, there’s no level of extreme that’s too extreme. I don’t want to misquote him, but I do remember seeing the word extreme in there. And it hit very personally because, you know, just coming from the Aspen Ideas Fest and attending a panel discussion specifically about how, you know, moderation is the way to go and we need to take a moderate approach to everything. And it’s like, do we have time for that?
It’s not according to the IPCC again. Doesn’t really look like.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, from Nori’s perspective, we see that there’s more than a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide that we need to remove from the atmosphere. So we’re like, all right, we’re not going to wait for governments to do something about that. Let’s just make it as easy as possible for people who could do that. To access this marketplace to get paid. Yeah.
Joshua Hughes: And maybe less abstract to people than CO2 is biodiversity and topsoil in your area and erosion. I connect with the people in the campo or the outside of the cities through those things. And they don’t want to talk climate change maybe, but they do want to talk about their river drying up or being toxic. So we’re trying to find those connectors points where we can work together and build from there.
Christophe Jospe: Cascading co-benefits when you start getting more regenerative with the land. So I love everything that Black Sheep’s doing. I very much feel like we’re aligned and we’re fellow travelers attacking this problem from slightly different directions. I wish you to raise all the money you can raise so that this can happen so much more quickly. But can you paint a picture for us sort of five, 10 years out, both the direct impact you have and then also the indirect impact? Because it seems like What I love specifically about you is you’re like, we’re not going to do it all.
We’re going to find the right partners who are all connected in this interconnected space.
Joshua Hughes: We don’t want to build another top-down idea and just keep burdening people with that.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And actually, I want all three of your answers.
Amanda Wilson: So direct result, I think, would be a successful business. I would see us funding this process and allowing more people to have more access to market share as well as access to the really, really valuable Products that come from the space in which we’re growing things. Indirect, I would like to think that we’re going to inspire other people to take similar action. And I’m really excited when I think about how like the private sector, how private industry can actually change things. Because that’s something that I personally had a lot of frustration about.
I was like, why is it, you know, there’s so much money in politics. Everything seems to come from the private sector. But if that’s where it’s going, then maybe that’s where we need to be, and that’s where we need to change our culture. So I would like to see more people getting involved and doing similar things, more entrepreneurship.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah, and I got a really interesting indirect result that I’ve just started to experience. Over the years, we’ve been doing what we can to create local jobs for our friends down there and have opportunities. And over the years where we weren’t making any money, but we’re pouring investment into hiring four or five of our neighbors, Where we went out a few years ago and had to buy a few pieces of land around us. And the land where our neighbors normally, their personal, their home farm that they stopped using when they came to work for us.
And our little 20 acres, I thought, okay, we’ve regenerated this. We looked up after 10 years. The five employees we had, they were thriving there with us and they didn’t have to go use cattle and or spray chemicals on their land anymore because it was working from our farm. So as a result, maybe 10 times or 20 times more land was repaired around us just through natural regeneration by not stressing it out. And in the short and medium term, We’re not just like trying to raise money internally like a nonprofit, which is a bummer.
I didn’t ever want to become that. But we’re putting out about $15 million a year worth of tropical goods in the middle of 2021 forever, every year coming out of our farm. So the investments we make have real returns, which can reinvest over and over. So our plans have, we put a million dollars a year back into new farms and new joint ventures every year from about 2022 on. So it’s really about that feedback loop. Creating a much bigger result. And joint venturism, not just being about us and what we can in-house, but how many people we can enable.
Ross Kenyon: Can you top that, Sara?
Sara Czarniecki: I don’t know about topping, but in addition to, I think 10 years from now, we’ll have proven that our regenerative model really works. And we will be operating some sort of larger investment vehicle to... Funnel in bigger institutional dollars away from extractive industries and into regenerative businesses.
Joshua Hughes: We were starting sort of as a divestment firm, but that’s negative right off the bat.
Unknown speaker: I was just about to ask that actually.
Joshua Hughes: Yeah. So instead of just being negative, we went with kind of just being a little dark. It’s been a process of refining language this whole time. But we’re here to build the systems that can take and land investment because my neighbors were very vulnerable to savvy lawyers showing up with a few bucks and helping them this year, but taking away a farm that they could have forever. So we don’t buy land from our neighbors, we buy it with them and invest in them and let the people that want choice, that want to leave the compo, leave.
So not everybody wants this. I initially thought it, I showed up there thinking, oh, everybody will do this. And real soon, real quick, I was like, okay, that guy doesn’t care. This guy’s super conservative, like very religious and thinks I’m a heathen, whatever it is. But over the years, we’ve learned just to offer opportunities and chances and see what people take and like doing. So it’s been the results there with the community have actually been almost nothing but positive. The only problem that we’ve ever really had is a little bit of alcoholism, which is tough.
Unknown speaker: You guys personally?
Joshua Hughes: Neighbors that you want to help, you love, but they drink all day and night. And what do you do? You try, you try. And then some of our community members too, for sure. It’s very real when you live in community. When you live in community here, but maybe you don’t deal with your neighbor who’s got problems until he runs over you with his car. We have to be a little more proactive about it where we’re at. So those parts are very real. But those benefits, hopefully, it’s going away slowly but surely, the depression in our area.
And that’s another thing about living in the countryside. There’s a lot of depression out there because of lack of opportunity and or you have to give up your whole culture and move to some city. And they like their culture out there in the jungle. They like their culture with their family and their church. So I’d like to offer the chance for people to have that choice.
Unknown speaker: If someone wants to get more involved, find out more about black sheep, what can they do?
Joshua Hughes: Well, what we’re doing now is we’re taking investment. We’re also looking for partners that want any producers out there that are using tropical ingredients. We’re helping funnel regenerative organic ingredients into the market up here so people have better choices just in their own products that maybe aren’t about black sheep. We’ll white label things. But we’re also up here to replicate what we’ve learned, to gift out the legal documents and the accounting documents and all the stuff that are very expensive to build. Simple answer. You can go to our website. Yeah.
It’s weareblacksheep.org or you can email us directly at hello at weareblacksheep.org. But out in the regenerative world, I think there’s a huge opportunity for us just to keep offering up this replicable model. So we’re up here sharing that and sharing legal documents and stuff that lawyers probably don’t like to hear, but everybody can’t afford that. So small farmers need a lot of legal help. Oh no, you’re reducing the amount Although our lawyer is a highly activated badass and he tells me he loves me three times on every phone call.
So we’ve got great lawyers and I want more permanent politicians and I also want to help inspire the youth to run for office. So we’re always trying to push people to get into politics. And get into lobbying for the regenerative world instead of the only lobbyists showing up on K Street are there to take from us. So I’d say, you know, regenerative lobbying, all these things, let’s get engaged. Politics is a vital point in this because Monsanto uses politicians to crush the small competitors. So if we leave out that political wing or that organizing body there, we’re probably, we’re not in the even field, you know.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, great. Well, thank you. Thanks for coming up and visiting us. Thanks for being on the show. I think that went very nicely. Thank you. Thanks, guys.
