Dr. Phil Taylor is the Cofounder and Executive Director of Mad Agriculture, a venture that aims to restore our relationship with Earth through the story, community and the practice of good agriculture. Mad Ag works on-the-ground with producers to design Regenerative Farm Plans, heal mismanaged landscapes, and help farmers and ranchers thrive—ecologically and economically.
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. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Alexsandra Guerra and I’m here with my co-founder Christophe Jaspe in wonderful Denver.
Christophe Jospe: It is wonderful. We’re really getting to know this room here in Techstars. We’re still recording in the Techstars office and quite grateful actually to our guest who pushed very hard for us to join this program and put many bugs in many different people’s ears. So thank you, Phil. We are grateful for you, not only for that, but also for figuring out ways to collaborate with Nori in this broader objective that we both share, which is to restore soil health and sequester a bunch of carbon along the way. Make healthier food, shift systems, all this fun stuff.
You’ve heard the podcast before, so you know how we like to start. I actually should introduce you as Dr. Phil Taylor, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Mad Agriculture. You’re also a poet. Maybe we’ll get some like slam poetry.
Dr. Philip Taylor: It could happen. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: I wouldn’t put it past you. But Phil, we like to start out with people’s stories. We want to know sort of what motivates them, what makes them tick, why are they here sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast? How did it all get going for you?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Well, I grew up on the top of the Chesapeake Bay in a family that loved its place and its community. And my grandfather was the only doctor in a rural town. And it was abundantly clear at a young age that everyone in my family uses life to discover their gifts and figure out how to serve them, serve the world with them. And, you know, I spent a lot of time in the woodlands and deciduous forests and coastal areas of the East Coast and really fell in love with nature. And over a period of years, just decided to spend my life trying to figure out how to live within the grand system that we call Earth.
Take the system that’s quite broken right now and start healing it and in that process healing ourselves, healing the land and our relationships to one another. So that’s the short story that It’s convenient to tell. And there’s a lot of hiccups and light-dark cycles along the way, a lot of existential crises about who am I, what am I going to do, how am I going to behave in the world, and what do I have to offer? All of those big, heavy questions that I think a lot of people go through as they want to serve and participate in something bigger than themselves.
There’s been a lot of that, and we can talk about that. Short story is I grew up and fell in love with the earth and believe it’s a home that should be cherished and loved and restored when and where possible.
Christophe Jospe: Amazing.
Alexsandra Guerra: On the last week’s episode with Eric Kornacki, we also talked about relationships and how important it is, like interpersonal relationships and our relationship with food and the planet in terms of how do we actually combat and reverse climate change.
Dr. Philip Taylor: That’s critical. I mean, I think that Climate change is the symptom of a deep disconnection between humans and our dependency on the earth. And so many of the solutions out there are really band-aiding a deeper cultural problem, which I think really the answer to that cultural problem is falling in love with the places that we depend on. And as we fall in love with the places we depend on, it demands of us to use virtue in all of our transactions, business and otherwise. And when we start building in love and empathy and compassion and reciprocity into every transaction that we make, the world will inevitably become a more beautiful place and things like climate change will go away.
Christophe Jospe: Couldn’t agree more. So, somewhere along the way in your abbreviated story, you decided to get a PhD in soil science. I’m interested, what drew you in that direction?
Dr. Philip Taylor: So what originally drew me to graduate school was just a feeling that I didn’t know enough. You know, I had worked in a very short stint in Malawi, Africa. And during that work there, I was actually distributing some seeds and fertilizers as part of an IMF World Bank sort of agricultural extension program. And realized that everything I was doing was not helping at all. It was just further worsening this already broken system of global commodity markets and trade. And so I ejected out of that and went to grad school as a way of finding a home to discover myself.
And so eventually, you know, I got my master’s and my PhD at CU Boulder in rainforest ecology with a focus on soils. And I was just enthralled with the beauty of the earth. I really wanted to discover the essence of how this place works. You know, how does the visible move to the invisible, you know, through gas exchange? And how does photosynthesis work? And what does carbon mean? And what does it mean to live in the carbon cycle? You know, and I was enchanted by it. And That was wonderful up until a point where I felt like a lot of my work was done in an academic container without any real relevance to the problems of the world.
And so that sort of piece of me that demanded service and helping humanity and figuring ourselves out, it wasn’t being served. And that was part of my gifting as well as a human. And so I... You know, I fell in love with soil science in a very academic, kind of theoretical manner, and it’s come full circle into using it as a way to solve climate change and build fertile soils that produce healthy food.
Christophe Jospe: We’re into that. Yeah. And that somehow led to the creation of mad agriculture. Yeah. What is mad agriculture?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah, mad ag. So mad agriculture was inspired by the mad farmer poems of Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry is one of the great agrarians of our time.
Alexsandra Guerra: Episode number two in a row that we talk about Wendell Berry.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah, he’s someone to stand on the shoulders of, as there are many others. And, you know, Wendell Berry has these mad farmer poems that he wrote that really call us to a radical reworking of economy based on love and other virtues in a healthy dose of radicalism. And so, as I was leaving academia... And trying to define and discover what I wanted to do, I had no home. You know, I wanted to work in an organization where I could write poetry and write science in the same day and call that work.
I wanted to be in conversations where we could crack open everything and use the head, heart, and soul to create things.
Unknown speaker: Amazing.
Alexsandra Guerra: No, I want to talk more about what the challenges are for soil science and rainforest. I mean, we could talk about soil science, but I’m very curious and it’s very timely to discuss that.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Well, there are global market forces that are just driving destruction. That’s the heart of it. Supply chains wrap around the globe like roots. And when you feed one of those, it can hide a lot of the destruction away from our consumption. And I’ll hide a lot of injustice. And so when we eat a bag of potato chips fried in palm oil, it has a direct connection to the way that Sumatra is being used for land use. And being a tropical rainforest ecologist, I saw an immense amount of destruction. And I really had a problem with that.
One of ten reasons that I started Mad Agriculture was this overwhelming feeling to do work that was place-based in the community that I feel at most home in because my future is wrapped up with their future in a very clear way. And so, you know, we work mainly across the Great Plains right now, which are systems in prairies and places that I feel very familiar with, increasingly familiar with. And I think our work is a lot more relevant, a lot more impactful, a lot more grounded than what I was trying to do when I was working in the tropics.
Even though I really enjoyed that work and it was an important growth phase for me, But yeah, I think that, you know, the barriers in many ways are the forces we cannot control that require a slow and subversive disruption. And there are many different levers to pull on. And we can talk about those a little later maybe and how we work. But these big systems, you know, it’s very hard to see the systems we’re in. And it’s very hard once you see the system to live outside of it. And it takes a lot of courage and boldness to do that.
And I feel like Matt Ag is kind of on that forefront as well as Nori and a bunch of other people here in the Techstars office. And so we’re at that bleeding edge of creativity that’s very turbulent. It’s very radical. It’s very hard to live at that bleeding edge. There’s a lot of failures that happen there. And then ultimately that’s where growth happens as well.
Alexsandra Guerra: So We have a pretty, like our listeners are pretty well informed and they’re tuned into this, but it’s interesting because when I go home to see my family and, or just talk to other people like in the coffee shop, they’re not like, not everybody’s tuned into this. Like, oh yeah, the fact that we have a completely opaque supply chain, what does supply chain even mean, is what’s leading to massive destruction of our ecosystems and changing our global environments. But I think it’s It’s useful to share that knowledge of like how this is affecting us.
Like, oh, why should I care about fair trade coffee other than it being the ethical right thing to do? I think sometimes when we’re going back to what you said in the very beginning is that we have a disconnect of relationships. Most people aren’t even aware or asking or questioning. Like, where is this coming from? Why should I care? It’s like, no, it’s done. Like, here’s my coffee. Here’s my Starbucks. I’m good.
Dr. Philip Taylor: It’s true. And what gives me hope is that there’s a rising tide of consciousness that’s beginning to care about those things. And as the globe becomes more teleconnected through social media. Teleconnected, yeah. I just said that, didn’t I? I mean, Amazon has been burning for a long time. It’s a very bad year for it, so it’s getting some press. But the public outcry around that has been higher than ever. Right. You know, it’s very difficult to, from a top-down approach, say, hey, stop burning the Amazon. You’re, you know, causing global warming.
That is the wrong approach by far to try to get them to stop burning the Amazon.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. And so you mentioned levers earlier. There are all these levers that we can pull. Now, are these levers that we can pull in order to get people to be more conscious or are they levers that we can pull in order to solve the problems? Maybe it’s both.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah, I think it is both. And, you know, there are levers everywhere. And the way that we work with farmers, I’ll get kind of to what MADAG does on the ground.
Unknown speaker: Let’s do it.
Dr. Philip Taylor: And I’ll tell you about what kind of levers we pull to get things going. MADAG, our main work is to help farmers thrive with regenerative agriculture in ways that creates both ecological and financial wealth. And so we really work at optimizing, you know, how do you create a farm vision that And a farm plan that builds the life you want and builds true value in the holist sense of the word. And so, you know, money, you know, we run in the paper dollar right now, the whole globe, when it’s really run on solar dollars and carbon.
I mean, carbon is the true currency of the life system.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, yeah. I never thought about it that way, but you’re totally right.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Oh, it’s everything. It’s the fabric. I mean, it’s the table here. I think. Yep. Looks wood. You know, it’s a big part of ourselves. Carbon is both the fabric of life and it’s also the energy source. You know, when we eat things, we break carbon to carbon bonds and harvest those electrons. And that’s how we drive metabolism. You know, so carbon is the true currency of all ecosystems, including ourselves. And... We’re so far away from that. So we use paper dollars to do all these financial transactions and survive and live and exchange in carbon in some ways.
But money drives things. And so we’re conscious of that. And so we work with farmers to be both financially successful while building ecological wealth at the same time. And part of that ecological wealth is reinvesting in soil, restoring soils, building carbon-rich soils. And what we’ve learned with farmers is that In many ways, we work with big farmers, commodity farmers that have thousands of acres. Those are the primary people we work with across the Great Plains of America for now. It’s relatively easy to design a farm plan to sort of get out of the industrial system onto that country road of good values and virtues again.
But it’s very difficult to put into action. It’s very easy to dream big about your life. I want a cabin up in the mountains. You can dream easily. But to actually achieve that requires... An entirely different set of skills to actually make it happen.
Unknown speaker: What do you mean?
Alexsandra Guerra: Give us an example.
Dr. Philip Taylor: It takes money. You can dream big, but to get there, it takes a community, it takes knowledge, it takes money, it takes an entire suite of activities to actually pursue your dreams. So what we do is we dream big with farmers about creating a regenerative farm plan. We call it carbon farm planning. It’s kind of method of design that came out of California, the Carbon Cycle Institute and Fibershed and the Marine Carbon Project. It’s basically a holistic design program that uses things like holistic management and regrarians. We ram it all together into a whole farm design system that optimizes the amount of carbon coming into the system.
Farmers, it takes a little while for farmers to get that. You know, it’s like, okay, I’m thinking usually in dollars and I’m thinking about carbon. And we show that actually they’re linked together. And so once we create the whole carbon farm plan or the regenerative farm plan, there’s a lot of words for it. We then activate it with three levers. The first one is just understanding knowledge in a community of support. Like, where do I start? How do I get going? Who are the people in my community that are also taking this risk?
Where do I find brotherhood or sisterhood in my journey in this world? Many farmers, you know, will talk across the fence lines. So who’s talking across the fence line? How can you share that risk? How do you have a sense of togetherness in this? So that’s the first one is what’s the community of change and what’s that support with wisdom and technical assistance to kind of help you on the first step in that journey? The second one is access to money. Most farmers work on razor thin margins. There’s not a lot of room for error.
And the last thing they’re thinking about is adding something to their system that’s not going to deliver a clear return on investment within a year or two. You know, to invest in the long term is difficult to justify that expenditure. However, there’s all sorts of money that can help de-risk that and actually pay for it. One being the government. The government has all kinds of farm bill money from loan guarantees to EQIP funds to NRCS dollars that are actually waiting there. For farmers to use. However, the farmers don’t necessarily know how to get access to them.
It’s low on their priority list. There’s a fear of bureaucracy. So Mad Ag, actually, we develop our carbon farm plans as a conservation plan, which liberates that money. So farmers can get tens of thousands of dollars to do things like cover cropping, rotational grazing, compost applications, and all sorts of things that ultimately build soil health. We’re working on other financing mechanisms too. We’re learning that the government dollars aren’t enough to actually get most farmers kind of over the hurdle and into a more carbon beneficial ag system. So there’s other dollars at play, which we can talk about.
But the last lever is access to markets. One of the big The minute the farmer sells that crop to the grain elevator, they’ve lost that value. They’re now exposed to market forces that could be adjusted by behaviors in Argentina or China. So what we try to do is work with farmers to get out of a simple commodity-based system, expand their crops, and find direct offtake to those crops. It’s more complicated for the farmer because he can’t show up to the grain elevator and sell it. But if we can start cracking that open slowly and saying, hey, don’t grow that GM corn for that feed.
Let’s grow a pinto bean and sell it into this food delivery service that goes directly to feed kids in the Boulder Valley. Those kinds of ideas start eroding the power of the commodity market to determine the fate of the farm.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s awesome. And did you watch that movie, The Biggest Little Farm?
Dr. Philip Taylor: I have. I’ve seen portions of it, not the whole thing through.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, it was so good. I watched it on the plane. It was on an Alaska flight. So if those who are listening are on an Alaska flight, definitely go through your little screen and watch it. It’s so incredible. I cried. I cried. It was very inspirational. But I think that is a perfect example of some of the dream that you were talking about, Phil. Like, how do we... Design a farm plan that’s inspiring, that brings lots of diversity to the land, brings carbon back in. And I was thinking about it.
So tying it back to what you’re saying, I was thinking about they had all these different crops. It was like 200 different crops or fruits and veg that they were growing. And I’m like, how are you finding demand for that? Like, how do you go out? Because then you’re just doing a little bit of everything and you’re not like total expansively selling into these commodities markets.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: What does that look like?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Well, it’s calling up CPG brands, consumer packaged good brands in the Boulder Front Range area and connecting them to like sorghum supply for gluten-free pretzels. Or it’s talking to other off-takers or buyers about taking ancient grains at a higher value, even though the field yield is lower, paying more for those grains that go into sort of higher-end bakery markets. Or buyers, the marketplace is just starting to emerge into something mature enough for farmers to start sort of saying, ooh, I don’t have to sell this elevator anymore. I can actually, you know, drive to Boulder to a Naturally Boulder event, meet some brands, and start growing for them directly.
So that takes a pretty courageous farmer. Most farmers don’t do that.
Alexsandra Guerra: But you’re doing that for the farmer.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah, we sort of operate on behalf of the farmer. And the other thing that we do, which I failed to mention, which is in many reasons why we’re here, is that on that third lever of using markets to drive change on the farm, we also are working to monetize ecosystem services with the chief goal of monetizing carbon. So when a farmer is doing well and right by the land, they can have a long-term reward and incentive to build healthy soil and get paid for it. Going back to that kind of three lever system, the money piece is a great way to catalyze the action and get the farmer kind of up and over the hurdle.
In chemistry, they call it the Gibbs free energy, the curve. And then once you put the investment in for those three years, you actually create basically an exothermic reaction where your farm is, nature is taking off and you ride with nature.
Alexsandra Guerra: And that’s one of the big goals of regenerative ag is working with I love that you just used thermodynamics to describe what was happening and you said gives free energy. So I’m an environmental engineer and thermal scientist. So that made me really happy.
Christophe Jospe: Keep the metaphors coming, Phil.
Alexsandra Guerra: Teach people thermodynamics and farming. It’s important.
Dr. Philip Taylor: I mean, it’s how the world works, including ourselves.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. I mean, I love the interconnectiveness that Madag plays between what the farmer wants to do, which is ultimately be an artist on their land and cultivate something with a sense of pride and with their community and sharing this human capital and I want to into some of the challenges that you face when... What works and what doesn’t work when approaching a grower who might want to participate in this long-term planning process? What do you find being most successful to start thinking about engaging these carbon farm plants?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah, so, you know, farming cultures can be divided up in many different ways, and we’re finding that sort of first movers and early adopters in the social movement vernacular is where we are, you know, and there’s There’s a whole section of, you know, the soil health movement is actually very wonderfully broken up into all of these subcultures. And they could go, you know, from permaculture to the soil health movement with Gabe Brown to conservation agriculture and no-till on the plains, that style. There’s all of these subcultures that is sort of...
Emerge in different sectors and they all have various levels of appetite to adopt holistic farm management, whether it’s regenerative or carbon farm planning or whatever they call it. It’s sort of all different words for the same thing, which gives me a lot of hope that there is sort of a North Star out there that everyone’s orienting to and they’re using the language and their story and their place to best kind of get there. And I really like the way that There’s a natural diversity of the movement kind of starting to bloom or emerge.
I have this massive sense of emergence right now, just even talking with Nori and seeing Regen walk there and propagate ventures. Like we’re all in this like a wildflower field taking place. We don’t know what it’s going to look like, but it’s exciting and active. So back to the challenges. The challenges are just being with the farmer and getting a sense for their land and building trust. And we build trust pretty quickly because we’re not peddling inputs and materials, actually. And we don’t even charge the farmer. We’re not like most ag folks.
We do have revenue models that we work with the farmer on. Like, for instance, Inori... We split the carbon value 15% and 85%. That’s how we get paid. But it’s only once the credits get sold, which we have to wait until the market launches for that. But we go in really clear with the farmer. And that actually says, oh, they have skin in the game with us. They’re interested in kind of going with us through the process. And when we build that trust quickly, it opens up all sorts of conversations.
And every farm... is very different. And so we find that some farms are, we might approach them based on nori, but they’re actually much more interested in, you know, transitioning to organic. And they’re not mutually exclusive.
Alexsandra Guerra: You mean they’re not all totally excited about nori?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Well, they’ve seen other carbon markets come and go. And so I think there’s a little bit of a black eye on the carbon market. And, you know, land-based protocols have historically been really expensive and savvy farmers know those limitations and are concerned about it. So they’re watching cautiously, though they’re excited enough to participate. So I think that’s a good sign.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. And as they should be cautious, but also still optimistic that we can, someone will figure it out and learn from the past experiences of what didn’t work. Hopefully that’s Nori.
Christophe Jospe: I think Nori’s doing that.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thanks so much, Phil. Anyways, I cut you off. Continue.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. So, I mean, it goes back to this question, you know, farming moves at the speed of trust, finding ways to join with the grower as a partner, you know, looking at this long term, let me help transition a plot of land from one thing to another thing, whether we’re looking at like, you know. Production scale agriculture to something that is more regenerative, introduces new crop varieties, transitions to organic, really just hitting all the boxes and saying, where can we stack all the benefits to make this worth your while? So why isn’t this happening more quickly?
Like, why isn’t everyone doing this?
Dr. Philip Taylor: That’s a good question. It goes back to the system. The system that’s intact and been made robust by... Insurance and debt and farm bill and subsidy programs and the simplicity of economic relations between the grower and the grain elevator and those contracts. The system that is currently in place that we’re trying to disrupt is not only very robust from an interest point of view, from all the stakeholders making money in it, but it’s really difficult to break out of because farmers... Of all the individuals that I can think of, farmers are less apt to take risk.
And one way that’s hit me recently is that I live in Boulder where no one is doing the same thing. Everyone is taking risk trying to carve their way in the world. When you drive to the middle of Nebraska, you know, the reverse is true. Most people are doing some version of the same thing. You know, they’re growing corn, they’re growing soybeans. And so to take a risk and break out of that is actually culturally very difficult. Not only financially, but, you know, we hear stories about, you know, I tried to grow a cover crop and now my son doesn’t play quarterback on the football team anymore.
I mean, there are stories like that where... You know, creating change in communities that are not used to change, you can be a social pariah in a heartbeat. So I think from culture to finances, there are all these barriers that have to be systematically addressed. And part of the system of change that I describe systematically breaks them. That’s why our first lever of support, it was what we call wisdom. We don’t call it technical assistance. I mean, that’s so boring. We call it wisdom. You know, most farmers are their spiritual...
People that are there because there’s a sense of belonging and place and something greater than them happening. And so wisdom is the best word, not technical assistance. We connect with their hearts. And their hearts are seeking a world that is more beautiful than what they’re currently operating in. It’s their hearts, not their minds. And so if we can connect with the heart first, everything kind of softens and then we go.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. So it’s not always about science. It’s like the science comes from the motivation. Anybody can figure anything out. And so sometimes I get a little bit frustrated with really heady conversations because while they are super valuable, they’re the second piece. It’s like, how do I motivate you based off of what really matters to you? And it’s important, right? You talked about how In order to break out of the current system, commodities markets as they are today, people need to be comfortable with doing something different. But if their entire community, all their loved ones, all their friends, all their potential love interests, right, are going to look at them like a pariah, then they’ll never do it.
And so how do we make them feel more valued and how do we actually get them to, I don’t know, Kind of be cool in the sense of their communities, like to adopt these practices. I don’t know.
Christophe Jospe: Well, I think it’s also like own the change. It’s not someone’s coming in to convince you to adopt practices, but it’s like these sticking ideas that make it feel like you’ve wanted to do this idea your whole life. You just never had the opportunity in front of you.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Much of the way that we catalyze change is not by being, you know, We don’t see ourselves as the savior with all of these things that we’re offering. What we do is we show up and say, hey, do you know that Steve Tucker is doing that over there? Have you seen him? And some people might be like, oh yeah, that guy’s a wild cat. I’m not going to touch that. That guy’s a wild cat. Yeah, but... In reality, people know that Steve is successful and they’re taking notice.
Alexsandra Guerra: What did Steve do? Who’s Steve Tucker?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Steve Tucker is a farmer friend of ours. He’s actually part of the Nori pilot launch. He’s in Venango, Nebraska.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, yeah. I was just, you could totally say that. I was just like, you know, kind of shrugging, like shrug emoji because I focus mainly on the demand side. And I’m like, oh yeah, I should probably have known that Steve Tucker wasn’t our pilot, but.
Dr. Philip Taylor: That’s okay. There’s a lot of people coming in, I’m sure. So Steve is one of the people we work with. He has 4,600 acres. He farms in Venenga, Nebraska. He’s a charismatic farmer that is just charging hard to do regenerative ag. And he does all kinds of crazy things. He grows hairy vetch and peas in a biculture, and then he harvests them both, and he sorts the seeds, and he gives all the vetch seeds to green cover for more cover crops. He takes the peas, and he moves them into his own animal feed supply chain.
So he’s highly diversified. He’s trying everything. He’s well-respected in the region, and he’s building soil carbon, hand over fist. And it’s really exciting. And so he’s one of, you know, we help him and he helps us, I think, much more. I mean, he lets us show up on his farm anytime we want. We bring, you know, all of the fellows and people in our ecosystem we can bring to his farm and he’ll always take us in and just teach us and show us everything that’s working for him and not working.
Alexsandra Guerra: Aren’t those people amazing?
Dr. Philip Taylor: They’re amazing.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you, Steve. We appreciate you.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah, and they’re everywhere. That’s the great thing. These are like little lighthouses on the hills all over the place. And some have the ability to attract people to them. And some people are more iconoclastic and they’re kind of the lone person doing their thing. And not all farm culture is the same. And you can kind of have both dynamics happen.
Alexsandra Guerra: For sure.
Christophe Jospe: So glad you talked about theory of change a little bit. And we’ve touched on it. But what is Madag’s theory of change?
Dr. Philip Taylor: That’s a good question. Our model of change I outlined, which is sort of farm planning, support these catalytic levers, that’s our model. Our theory of change is fundamentally helping people fall in love with their place. And in that falling in love is an inherent sense of reciprocity that the more that I give to the land, the more that I’ll receive. Not only in terms of yield, which is often where the money comes from, but in terms of long-term resilience to change, an ability to pass on the farm to their family, and a lot more fun.
Facialization, experimentation, growing new things, and not growing corn, soy, corn, soy, corn, soy, corn, soy. It’s a lot more fun. It’s a lot more intriguing. It’s a lot more attractive, not only from an aesthetic point of view on the landscape, but also just from an economic and ecological vitality point of view. You know, the more diversity you have on the farm, the more resilient you are to economic market shifts as well as climate shifts. And, you know, climate change is happening. And farmers are starting to realize that. Whether they use that word or not still is sort of up in the air.
But I think that farmers like the resilience to climate change. They’re feeling the pressure from, you know, intense heats, water. I mean, you name it. And they’re preparing and they know that they’re vulnerable when you grow two crops.
Alexsandra Guerra: It seems like we’re seeing a shift here from the monstrous global economy to just more local economies. And not that there has to be like no global economy, right? That’s just not going to happen at this point. But I think we kind of swung from one side of the pendulum to the other. And we went so far to the other side that people are so far removed and market forces or demand in The US can affect what’s happening in China and people can start destroying the Amazon to raise livestock. And so maybe we’re coming back to the middle.
We’re trying to find that middle where you have local markets and local demand and supply, but then also things that need to be shared globally can, but in a much more transparent and traceable way than we’ve ever seen before. Because I think it’s required.
Dr. Philip Taylor: I agree. And some of the things that really inspire me are seeing the sort of grain revival.
Unknown speaker: What do you mean?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Well, there’s not only a kind of a heritage in ancient grain revival. There’s sort of like what is a whole grain? I think of the bread lab. I think of the work of the Land Institute in Kernza. What are the staple crops that are to carry us forward into the future and enrich the earth and not deplete it? And there is just a tide of people from soil to shelf filling in the entire need.
Alexsandra Guerra: Soil to shelf. I’ve never heard that one. I love that.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Well, I can’t claim. The first time I heard that was from Robin O’Brien. She works with Replant Capital. Okay. So thank you, Robin.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. Thanks, Robin.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah. And for instance, I think of all the virtues and the things that we hold dear about shopping the farmer’s market. Are starting to emerge on the high plains where we don’t have that more wealthy clientele to buy it. And it’s happening through, I think of Hayden Mills and Bluebird Mills and Camas Valley Mills and Anson Mills. These are all essentially aggregators of grain supply that keep transparency and farmer well-being totally stewarded and intact. And they transmit that value down into restaurants and individuals. There’s a whole rising wave of these – I just call it the grain revival.
And it’s one thing that gives me a lot of hope for how we’re going to re-regionalize the rural areas of our country. Because we have to – I mean, at a high level, humanity has to resolve the relationship between cities and the country in a major way. Because cities depend on the country – In so many ways, but that value has been completely extracted. I mean, the way that corporations, you know, the city, you know, the big behemoths of capitalism have hunkered down onto rural economy and extracted it from the soil to the heart and soul of it is egregious.
I mean, so many towns from here to Maryland where I grew up are just boarded up. And there’s a Walmart sitting in the country creating a massive vortex of consumption. And all the mom and pop shops that were of that place, they’re all gone. And so whether it’s a Walmart or whether it’s an ag business selling inputs, it’s legitimized the absolute degradation of the soil. Because once you degrade the soil, you’ve got to prop it up with a ton of Band-Aids. And that’s what ag companies do.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. Yeah. It’s something that people talk about a lot in the corporate social responsibility space is linear economies to circular economies. Like what does a circular economy look like? Green Biz just had their first circularity event this past June in Minneapolis, which is also like the hub of a lot of these ag-based companies. But they were all in attendance. A lot of them were in attendance. PepsiCo, for example... General Mills talking about like how do we restore their lands but the difficulty is like how do they get their farmers in their supply chain to switch over to more regenerative practices which could be another flavor of circular agricultural practices.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah restructuring economy is key.
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s not easy.
Dr. Philip Taylor: In a wholesale manner.
Christophe Jospe: And so it kind of sounds like, I mean, this term comes up on your website and in your publications, the new agrarian culture, which is this force against the sort of commoditization and industrialization that’s depleting rural America. Is that our best fight that we got? And how do you see that fight going down?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yeah, I mean, the word agrarian already turns people off because they think that like there’s a sort of an exceptionalism to rural lifestyle. That’s agrarianism in its true form kind of means something like that. I like the idea of a new agrarian sort of like what does it mean to be an agrarian in Manhattan or Brooklyn? You know, I think new agrarians are.
Alexsandra Guerra: What is an agrarian?
Dr. Philip Taylor: An agrarian believes that, you know, a rural lifestyle of place and belonging and local dependencies is the most righteous way to live. That might be a little hard on agrarians, but it’s something like that. And for me, an agrarian, we can all be agrarians, it’s just being hyper-conscious of our inescapable bond to the earth. We are so far detached from our dependency on the earth. Every inhale and every exhale depends on things that are not from us. They’re coming from other creatures. We are part and parcel. We’re deeply part and parcel of this earth, but as Charles Eisenstein talks about, we live in this massive age of separation where we’ve been completely blinded to our dependency on the oxygen produced by algae in the ocean and the grasses.
And because we’ve been blinded to that connection and relationship, we’ve lost our affinity, we’ve lost our affection for it. And through a deeper understanding of our dependency on the earth, we then create affection. And Wendell Berry again, he wrote an essay called It All Turns on Affection. And I think he’s exactly right.
Alexsandra Guerra: Pound it.
Christophe Jospe: So clearly you’re onto something. You’ve got clients who are... Wanting to work with you, probably got a bunch of farms that are interested in reaching out. Maybe you’ve got brands that are like, hey, Madag, help us figure out how to do this for our supply chain. What’s next for Madag? Where do you see all this going?
Dr. Philip Taylor: Well, like I said, it’s a very emergent time. And the way it feels right now in this moment is like the engine is burning a little too hot on a rough road. It’s like, wow, we are in launch mode. And the number of opportunities coming at us are almost too much to handle. They are too much to handle. So we’re saying no, and we’re very calibrated, trying to go back to our core values and our core model of change. And so we’re starting out with just sort of, I think, big and strong first steps.
And one of those steps is working with Boulder County farmers. We got a contract with Boulder County to help transition a lot of commodity broad acres into more regenerative farm systems. And so we’re working on that. We’re also working, we have about 12,500 acres currently being brought into the Nori marketplace, which is great. I’m excited about that. It’s been, I mean, just as a side, it’s been a total blast of co-learning. We’ve done a lot of work with Ryan Anderson in just kind of the deep work of like, what is it?
Alexsandra Guerra: Ryan’s on the Nori team, guys. I don’t know if you know this, but he’s amazing.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Yes, Ryan’s amazing. And Brandon on my team, Brandon Welch is our Director of Carbon Economy. And he and Ryan have spent just hours and hours in the trenches of like, what does it mean to bring a farm online? What does it take in? And all of the work with Comet Farm, which is kind of the core framework for, you know, prognosticating carbon outcomes. And, you know, we... And yeah, we’ve just spent hours and hours and it’s been so much fun co-learning and I’m really excited about where it’s going. But so to get back to what we’re doing and where we’re going, everything we do is oriented currently around this sort of model of change and we’re testing it with different projects.
One of the projects we’re working on right now is called the Perennial Fund. It’s great to create market attractors for farmers to move their systems towards. Whether that’s a great marketplace, whether that’s Nori, if you can make more money, farmers love to do that. They also need a lot of capital for their operations, for their equipment, for their loans, and all of this stuff. We’ve noticed that there’s a lack of capital to help farmers transition to organic and regenerative techniques. So when a farmer transitions to organic, they often hit a trough where they are losing money during those transition periods.
And so we’re actually putting together a fund. We’re right at the beginning of raising it around $3. 5 million to stack on top of those NRCS and Farm Bill dollars that we have access to. So it’s like we have this Farm Bill dollars coming in for the farms. We also can stack on additional money, which we’re raising from both philanthropic and program-related investments from foundations to take a risk and say, hey, we’re going to actually lend the farmer money for that three-year transition. They’re not going to owe anything back to the fund for those three years.
And then they’ll share 20% of their net profits for five to seven years and pay back the fund. And if they can’t do it in 10 years with all the help we can give them, Then we’re going to forgive the loan. And this is part of that virtue, you know, in human societies for millennia have had a concept of forgiveness, death forgiveness or Jubilee. And we need to embody those virtues in the financial system. And I strongly believe this. High level. Here’s a statement that I really, really, really strongly believe in, which is, you know, until the financial economy embodies all of the virtues that describe good human economy, we will fail to achieve the world that we hope to create or see.
And so we have to take concepts of debt forgiveness and put them wholeheartedly into a fund model. Like it has to be there. It has to be built in. And so we’re flirting with these ambitious ideas within the Perennial Fund. It’s named the Perennial Fund because whatever money comes in that’s philanthropic will just revolve back into the next fund. So anyway, I’m getting kind of the weeds on the Perennial Fund, but it’s essentially a pool of money that can help farmers transition, you know, to organic and regenerative agriculture. And what the cool thing is, is that in that transition period, it actually sets them up to take part in both organic premium markets and the Nori marketplace.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s wonderful. And it goes back to what you were saying at the very beginning, which is on the bleeding edge. And what you just said is quite radical, right? It’s like we need to have really good human economics and just forgive it, the loan. That’s amazing. And I think when we went out to this global economy, that’s what happened. It’s like, oh, I don’t know you. I don’t trust you. Why should I give you the money? So if we’re coming back in, then we should be able to do more things like that.
And What you guys are doing at Madag, doing this with the Perennial Fund is quite risky. But on behalf of people out there, thank you because you’re going to help catalyze the change that we need to see that gets us back to that happy medium.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Agreed.
Christophe Jospe: Well, this has been a great podcast, Bill. If someone wants to get involved or find out more information, how can they get involved and where can they go?
Dr. Philip Taylor: So if you’re a farmer and you want to get involved with the Nori Marketplace and work with Mad Ag, you can email Brandon at madagriculture.org. He’s the director of Carbon Economy. If you want to reach out generally and talk about sort of our model and theory of change, you can reach out to me, Phil Taylor, at philipwith1l at madagriculture.org. And I’d love to catch up and talk about your work.
Christophe Jospe: Well, cool. We did not get the slam poetry, so we will have to probably bring you on for another one, and we’ll make sure that happens. Thanks so much for coming on, Phil.
Dr. Philip Taylor: Thanks for having me.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you, Phil.
