Ranching has been vilified as a major contributor to climate change. But what if it’s not the cow but the HOW? The fact is, animals have always lived and grazed on grasslands, and when we leverage regenerative grazing to raise livestock, we can rebuild the soil and sequester carbon in the grass and soil, sourcing materials like leather, fiber, and meat in a more responsible way.
Chris Kerston is the Chief Commercial Officer of the Land to Market Program at the Savory Institute, a nonprofit working to regenerate the world’s grasslands through Holistic Management. Today, Chris joins Ross to explain how the Savory Institute promotes regenerative grazing and share their vision of a future where farmers and ranchers work together.
Chris walks us through the Land to Market program’s Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) protocol, describing why they measure a breadth of ecosystem services versus sequestered carbon alone. Listen in to understand how Savory is supporting brands like Timberland and learn how the Land to Market Program can help us make more informed choices about what we consume.
Resources:
Savory’s Land to Market Program
Savory’s Partnership with Timberland
Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat is Good for You and Good for the Planet by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf
Peter Donovan at the Soil Carbon Coalition
The Whole Foods Diet: The Lifesaving Plan for Health and Longevity by John Mackey, Alona Pulde, MD, and Matthew Lederman MD
Savory’s Land to Market Brand Partners
Write to me through Substack @ rosskenyon.com.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am the lead strategist at the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Chris Kirsten, Chief Commercial Officer of the Land to Market Program at the Savory Institute. Hey, Chris.
Chris Kerston: Hey, Ross. Thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here.
Ross Kenyon: It’s my pleasure. How has it taken us this long to do an episode on the Savory Institute? Are you offended?
Chris Kerston: No, I’m a fan. I’ve listened to a number of shows and I’m excited to be on. I think that we have such a deep mutual respect for what Nori’s doing and we watch you guys closely. I know we engage often, but I’m just happy to be getting around to it.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks. I appreciate that. I’m sure the rest of the team does as well. We are always very curious what’s happening in regenerative grazing and we see news trickle out, including a rather big announcement y’all had with Timberland recently about some regenerative leather going into boots, which is exciting. And we will get to that, but maybe a good place to start is just what is the Savory Institute and why do you focus on what’s alternatively called regenerative grazing or holistic management? And I’m sure there’s other terms in there too.
Chris Kerston: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of nuance there and it’s worth taking a second and unpacking because I know when people think regenerative, they tend to think farming first and sometimes forget about the grazing side of the equation and the opportunities. But to first take it back a step in history, the Savory Institute was started by a gentleman named Alan Savory. He’s from Zimbabwe, and that’s where the movement emerged. And it’s this concept of what he put together. The language wasn’t there then, but today we would call it a triple bottom line proactive planning process that teaches producers how to mimic nature.
And so at the core level, if any of you come from the business or financial sector, the way that most grass producers or grass-based farmers, even the grass-fed ones, the way that they treat their grass is similar to how somebody might spend cash out of their pocket. That it’s just like, oh, I’m going to go around, I’m going to buy these things here and there, and I’m going to use that grass accordingly. What we put forth is a triple bottom line. And if people aren’t familiar with that term, it’s where you take into account social, financial, and environmental goals together collectively as one greater unit of culture or what you’re trying to accomplish.
We bring that into the grass world, but think about a financial budget. So if you’re running a business, you wouldn’t just spend money based on the amount you have in the account. You’d make a plan. What are our goals for the year? What do we want to accomplish? How are we going to use this resource of money to accomplish those goals? And then how do we make pivots when we aren’t hitting a target or something isn’t quite going to plan? That’s in essence what we do with farmers around grass is we teach them how to use that grass as a resource base and budget it accordingly.
So a lot of times grazers, you know, they go out and they check on their animals on a daily basis and they go, oh, do I have grass for another day or am I out of grass? I should have moved them last night. And what we do is we want grazers to be able to tell us where the animals are likely to be three months from now and why, what goals they’re trying to accomplish. And this is all based on principles within nature that grass sequesters come.
Grasslands are totally the forgotten ecosystem. A billion people live on the grasslands today. It’s still pastoral cultures, but grasslands are the first to be developed. You know, like I said, they sequester more carbon. They recharge water tables really well. They host a myriad of biodiversity, but it’s not always the charismatic species that we’re used to hearing about. It’s really an incredible ecosystem, and there aren’t really grass huggers out there, if you will. There’s lots of other ecosystem huggers, but there aren’t a lot of grass huggers.
When Alan was first doing his work and trying to say, I want to save these grasslands in Southern Africa, in my home world, he came up with these concepts of what are some core principles of nature that need to be baked into management, and then what is this Kind of modular, flexible design process that can be used to help each individual producer create a plan for success. We tend to live in a world that really wants to distill everything down to best solutions. And that’s just not really the nature of how life works.
You wouldn’t take two $100,000 companies and say, you guys should have the same budget. They’re totally different companies. So we help them contextualize it to their specific needs and their region. So that was a mouthful, but the long and short of it is we work directly with farmers. We’ve done that for 50 years. We have 50 field offices around the world that we call Savory Hubs. And these are different than, you know, like extension service. They’re really part of the community. They’re locally led and managed by people in the community.
And their goal is spin up and scale up regenerative agriculture in that region, working directly with the farmers and ranchers in those areas. That’s maybe more than you bargained for, but that’s what we’re about.
Ross Kenyon: No, it’s a nice baseline to set. And I suppose I’d like to give listeners a nice bright line case for how this might work. And when I think about regenerative grazing, I think about it as a form of biomimicry and trying to emulate what large herb So it’s not just keeping large ruminants set in a single pasture. You’re moving them around trying to emulate what would happen with predators in this dance of predator and prey. Is that halfway to the truth?
Chris Kerston: That’s really spot on there, Ross. And the one added component to that, because there’s lots of people that are raising livestock on grass, and there’s lots of people that are moving them around. The next level of evolution and that kind of development from a And so you’re right, we’ve broken. So when we as managers of domestic animals are operating, we want to mimic those things that used to function. And in addition to that predator prey relationship, there’s an added component to that of how long it takes your perennial grasses to recover in your region.
And so that will set the pace of how often you move and when you come back. Overgrazing is a misunderstood concept that people tend to think it’s a function of how many animals are on the land. It’s actually a function of timing that if you leave animals in a place too long where they bite the same plant twice before it’s had time to recover, you’ve overgrazed it. Or if they come back too soon before it’s fully recovered, then you’ve overgrazed. And so we want to get that timing right to where we can maximize efficiency and The plant is our carbon pump.
So what plants and really what grass plants do really well is pull carbon out of the atmosphere. But all photosynthesis pulls carbon out of the atmosphere. It’s going to mix it with hydrogen out of H2O from the water. We all learned a C6H12 crazy thing in high school biology, but at the end of the day, plants make carbohydrates and they do it from sequestering carbon out of the air. What happens though is that in a grass system, when an animal comes and bites that blade of grass, You’ve now removed the solar collectors.
So what’s the plant going to do? It pulls energy out of its roots to regrow the blade of grass, but now it has to let the bottom parts of its roots die off. Or there’s also a whole new world of research coming out of it called exudates, where it actually pushes some carbon into the soil biota when this catalyst of being bitten happens. So it regrows its blade of grass, but now we have to recover the loss of those exudates and for species that root slough, we have to recover the amount of root mass that was let die off.
Both those things are really good things that happen though because we injected organic matter below the surface of the soil. In almost every other ecosystem, Plant litter falls to the top of the soil and has to get worked from the top down. The interesting thing about grasses is so much is happening from their root system that we’re working from a deeper depth up. But if we haven’t had time to rebuild those reserves, those carbohydrates that the plant is using for energy and the animals come back and bite again, We’ve overgrazed.
We’ve now we’ve now have an overdraft charge and that plant has suffered. So everything in regenerative grazing, the crux of it centers around timing. We have to get the timing right. And then in our human constructs above that, we want to make sure that we’re layering in the other components of, you know, cultural and social effectiveness. And, you know, does this fit in with what works in this region, the specifics of that ecosystem and then financial solvency.
Ross Kenyon: Core neglected grasses and grassland. I am going to coin a term. Actually, this might already exist. You’ll have to let me know. But are trees charismatic megaflora and grass?
Chris Kerston: I’ve never heard that. Grass is just neglected. We would tend to kind of see them that way. When it comes to carbon, there’s so much focus on trees. Of course, trees are part of the equation and part of the solution. The interesting thing about trees, though, is that we’re kind of looking at it through a human lens. Because they store their carbon above ground and we as humans can see it. And so it’s really tangible for us to quantify and go, oh, look, there’s a big trunk here that wasn’t before.
There’s all this leaf matter here that wasn’t before. They’re kind of the opposite of grasses. I’m going to say more of their biomass below ground and trees will store more above ground. That creates some added caveats that it puts that carbon at risk of being oxidized when that tree dies and falls over. It’s not as readily available. Right. Right. Right. More heat-trapping compounds than just carbon dioxide, that then those will break back down into carbon dioxide. So there’s no free lunch in all of this.
We need the whole ecosystem to function effectively. But I love where you just went that is the charismatic megaflora. But yeah, absolutely. Help me catch it on. Let’s see what we can do. I love that.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine people listening, at least some of them, I’m sure, associate the raising of animals for meat and fiber and other products is just a drain on the planet and is contributing to quite a lot of bad outcomes. And one of the phrases I hear within the regenerative grazing space is, it’s not the cow, but the how. Do you think you like that little tag? Is that the rejoinder that would be made to someone who’s more vegan-inclined?
Chris Kerston: Yeah, that comes from Diana Rogers and Rob Wolf. And Diana Rogers has just released a book and has, I think the documentary is not out, but it’s like weeks away that really kind of dive into the nuance of how we manage these animals makes all the difference. And I think you’re spot on. I love the way you kind of phrased that question. The challenge that I think we as a civilization and humanity, and I’m Maybe taking this in a weird place that other guests don’t, but I think so much of this is how we as humans perceive the environment.
And we’re all... Generally, humanity is trying to figure out how to be good stewards of the land, and I think we sometimes get lost in our own paradigms. There’s a guy in this space, Peter Donovan, that goes around and collects carbon samples on farms, and he’s kind of this sage philosopher type, and we were at a workshop with him one time, and Somebody asked a question and he just walked up to the easel and started drawing on this pad of paper what was clearly the silhouette or the outline of a human head.
It had the ears and the neck and the head. And in between the ears, he wrote Diameter of the Universe. And I thought, wow, that’s so poignant that it’s only as big as we let it be. It’s only as much as we understand. And... The carbon sequestration one is interesting because it’s only humans that will dissect food We create all these binary silos and cropping versus livestock is a really good one to dive into because there’s nowhere on the planet that has plants growing in a vacuum separate from animals.
And there’s nowhere on the planet that we have animals growing separately from plants. Plants other than in our human constructs, other than agriculture. And so if we’re going to take on the charge and say, okay, nature’s probably smarter than we are, that nature has developed systems that create abundance, that humanity is in the way that we’ve managed these systems, have figured out how to create extractive models. And then our new, you know, kind of North Star for success was sustainable, which I would equate to kind of a net zero.
Let’s not make it any worse. Nature never does that. Nature is always putting back every species of putting back more in than it takes out. You know, sometimes people use the phrase, you know, nature is far more collaborative than it is competitive, or some of us so far to call it ruthlessly collaborative, which I like how it kind of ties that juxtaposition together. But this notion that, you know, should we have Or should we have an animal system defeat us in this, I don’t know, whatever you want to call it, dichotomy between the two fringes of only plant-based or now you’ve got kind of more of this primal trend that some people only want to eat meat.
That’s all in that diameter of the universe. That’s all in our heads. And in reality, everything should be working together. So this notion of one versus the other, I guess I just, I struggle with that a little bit in my own journey and what I’ve seen and what I’ve come to learn that I really don’t think. The solution is going to be an either or. And if it was, that panacea would have shown itself a long time ago. We continue to wrestle with the issue of which is more right because neither is more right.
It’s about them interacting together. And it’s not until we as humanity kind of embrace that concept of union or synergy that we’re really going to be able to start tackling some of these issues in how we feed and clothe ourselves as humanity.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I have a messy relationship to all this too. I’m no fan of factory farming for meat and CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations. I don’t think those are ethical or probably even nutritious and I don’t want to participate in them to the degree to which I do. I’m somewhat of a hypocrite and have not been able to break that link more fully. So I look forward to things that are plant-based meats or lab-grown meat, I think are interesting substitutes since that meat, some of the meat that you’ll get if you get a hamburger is so low quality, I doubt you could tell the difference if it was I don’t think anyone would even be able to tell in a Pepsi challenge kind of scenario.
I think that would be fine. I don’t know if something like I know John Mackey and others have been exclusively like high quality vegan diets. I know I know some vegan diets are just not really that healthy for humans if they’re not done well, but if you can do that super proficiently, that might be the sweet spot. But then I also see stuff like, yeah, I’ve seen Diana Rogers' new book, and I’m curious to what degree does regenerative, grazed, grass-fed, grass-finished meet? Could compete with a pure, high-quality, plant-based diet.
And so anyways, it’s a big muddle. And I’m not sure what is right for all cases or for all people listening. But I think engagement is probably the best outcome that I have right now.
Chris Kerston: Yeah. I want to be, first and foremost, empathetic. Because I think the challenge of what is at hand is that most people... I’m talking about the general public. I think the general public wants to be able to make decisions that don’t make the planet worse, that could maybe potentially make it better. We’ll dive more into that. That’s really what we see on this meat issue. Most people like yourself that we deal with Really don’t have a moralistic issue with eating meat or a religious issue with eating meat.
They want to know that the animal lived a good life. High animal welfare would be the colloquialism that would be used in terms of an elevated claim for a brand, but it kind of... It scrubs all the essence of what that’s really trying to accomplish. We used to have a saying on our farm that our goal was the animals have all good days, only one bad. We want them to fully express their ability to live like the animal that they are and then live up to that point, up to the point of slaughter or the point of harvest.
I think that’s half of the equation. The other half is the environmental side. You’ve got people, and some will be more one camp or the other, but everybody’s kind of a little bit in both. You hear all of this about degenerative livestock, and really the zeitgeist has gone fully polar at this point. I mean, try to find a story in mass media about how animals are doing anything good, and it’s just not there. Based on what I just said about plants and animals working in tandem together, it has to be possible, right?
It has to be something that can be accomplished. So we hear tonnes about this degenerative livestock, and we hear nothing about this opportunity for them to be contributing to the ecosystems that they belong in. You say livestock, someone says deforestation. Okay, like, yes, I get it. The argument can’t just be... Here’s all the things that are happening wrong. But then I think the consumer, again, to go back to that empathy, they’re lost with no transparency about what choices to make that would actually help contribute to the problems at hand.
And so when you bring up some of this lab-grown stuff, my initial personal response is to really take kind of offense to that because I see it as such a I see it as such a kind of myopic and short-sighted response to the opportunities that we have. When you look at how some of those products are grown, and really all the ones that I’ve seen at mass scale, It’s monocultures. It depends on chemical agriculture. It has these really long and highly processed supply chains. There’s a good amount of embodied carbon that still ends up in that product.
And there’s all sorts of other externalities that don’t get addressed. And so when somebody jumps to that as the solution... My heart breaks a little bit because I know there’s a better way. And I know that if given the choice, most people would choose the better choice rather than what feels like this silver bullet that all we’ve heard is bad about this product. I still want it in my life. And so now I’m going to select this alternative that has emerged.
Ross Kenyon: But grass-fed meat is so expensive, man. I try to, when I go to the store, I talk to the butcher, I’m like, oh, this is double the price, sometimes more than that. It hurts. It hurts to do it ethically. Surely some of these options, even if they are monocultures, they’re cheap and maybe on the margin better. Would you at least grant that?
Chris Kerston: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think cost and convenience... are probably the biggest pieces we have to tackle for mass appeal. And sometimes I would put convenience even higher. I don’t know that these fast food chains sell the volume, the billions of units sold. I mean, when I was a kid, McDonald’s still used to put the ticker on the bottom of the Golden Arches sign. And now the number is so big, it’s almost a negative brand halo for them to say how big they are.
They don’t sell those billions of units across all fast food. I’m not picking on McDonald’s, but all of them. They don’t sell those because it’s just cheap. They also sell it because it’s convenient. These alternative food movements have really embraced the slower side of things for the better. But then it becomes kind of this specialty meal. And then the rest of people are like, hey, I’m still running around with busy life. I got kids, you know, both parents work, you know, just life is nuts compared to what it was, you know, let’s say 50 years ago.
Where one parent, and this is in no way anything on a women’s issue thing, I think that it’s just the change of dynamic of history of you used to have the resource of somebody at home that prepared meals and that’s just not there anymore. I think if we are going to change some of these paradigms, we need to look at that again. It should not be couched on one gender. It needs to be a partnership of parents. But if we’re going to create some of these paradigm shifts, we have to make the time for some of those things We also need to recognize not everyone is going to be able to do that.
I think we also have to get to a place that we’re addressing the externalities appropriately, that when we look at the health costs of cheap food, that’s getting embodied somewhere else in the system, certainly not at the point of sale, and maybe not even recognized by the purchaser of the product, depending on the country and the kind of healthcare system they have. They could make poor decisions their whole life, and then someone else is... That sounds like I’m going against... Government healthcare and I’m not. It’s just the nature of the finance doesn’t necessarily send the right signals back to the right place.
So we have to figure out how to account for those externalities in health and environment that someone else is picking the tab up on currently, not necessarily the eater or the purchaser. And I think when we start to address some of those things, Cost and accessibility, I even like better as a convenience term, really start to become front and center that to take this mass appeal, we’ve got to make it affordable and we’ve got to make it accessible to the average person. Deep down this rabbit hole is even yourself still kind of wrestling with, holy smokes, this is three times, two times the price.
I can’t afford this, especially as somebody that’s an activist in this space and not bringing down a corporate C-suite level salary.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you’ve mentioned this already, but there’s competition between arable land for agricultural purposes or grazing purposes, and in some cases, even between arboreal trees and forest purposes. Is there even space enough for how much meat we like to eat in the weird countries, the Western-educated, industrialized, rich, developed, I think that’s it, the global north? Yeah. Yeah. Is there even room for it? Or what would we have to give up? Or should we just make peace with the fact that our meat’s going to be more expensive, but it’ll be better, more nutritious?
And hey, we should probably be eating some other things instead of so much meat.
Chris Kerston: Yeah. So from an arable versus livestock perspective, again, it’s part of that human construct that those things... Need and must be separate. They’re not separate in nature. And so, you know, when we talk about arable land, this is usually our most fertile grounds. Most of those grounds, if we’re looking at this, you know, at kind of a Those are former grazing grounds that have been cultivated and tilled and put into cropping. So I’m assuming most of the listenership, and probably not all, but most I’m going to say is coming from North America.
So we’ll use the Midwest as an example. You had the most recent species of grazer that we’re all kind of familiar with is the bison that was ranging these large landscapes in huge herds, bunch of moving like We talked about with predator pressure. When they’re bunched and moving, their dung and urine will be at such a high level that it creates a zone of repugnance that actually sets that metering that I was talking about of them not coming back too soon. That basically they’re not going to come back until all of that manure has been eaten up and put back down into the soil.
That literally critters and bugs are reaching up and grabbing that manure like dung beetles and pulling it down under the soil. So that was kind of the function for metering. The predators were the function for a bunch to move in. That was the function for metering. If you think about this debate between... What I’m just going to call farming and ranching. And in some countries, that’s not the right terms because you could still have livestock farms. But in the US and North America, it means livestock versus cropping.
So you’ve got farming versus ranching. Somehow, we’ve gotten to the place that farming just gets this kind of inherent free pass. But if we look at what farming, even the best farming is trying to do, it’s by definition scraping away an existing ecosystem and then trying to create a new functional one. And the best farmers are going to micromanage that to create all sorts of edge effects and companion plantings and the right timing and lunar cycle. And all of that is going to come into play to get the crops that we want to need.
Ranching at its best, livestock farming at its best is taking a species that probably belonged on that landscape if we’re talking about true grasslands and now trying to manage them inside of that ecosystem and the best ones are going to be enhancing it as they go along. When you look at it in terms of that, I’m not sure why cropping gets the free pass. I think that cropping needs a certain amount of scrutiny held up to it as well because there’s a large amount of human disruption that’s baked into that system that doesn’t really get addressed when we talk about all of this.
But that being said, you’ve got your highly fertile lands. Those are currently being used for cropping. And what’s left over the hilly ground is now what grazing is kind of relegated to, even though they helped build the soils with That process of, it sometimes is referred to like the love dub of a heartbeat that they would graze and move on, graze and move on. And it created this catalyst for those grasses to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, store it deep underground. That’s how we got the deep, rich soils of the corn.
I’m not going to soften that one or pull any punches on that because it’s just the nature of what conventional monoculture agriculture is doing. And I’m not in any way giving a free pass to the CAFO system that you mentioned as well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you got kind of full Cain and Abel there, going pastoralist versus agriculturalist and throwing some blows at the farmers out there. That’s interesting. It is not a perspective that you often hear. But continue your thought. I think you were trying to finish something there.
Chris Kerston: Well, that’s just it. I mean, this debate goes back to the beginning of our origin stories of humanity. We’ve been talking about this cropping versus livestock forever from the beginning. And I think we actually can get to a place where we put that to bed or we put it to rest. But I think there’s a both and that needs to come here. And that both and to me looks like, let’s continue to have really high quality, high touch, Grazing happening on the hilly ground that is not suitable for arable crops.
And in many countries, that’s all they have. And so when you demonize livestock agriculture in a place like Argentina, they’re not growing peaches and lettuce on their ground there. There just isn’t an option for a lot of cropping. And certainly your small grain is going to be highly disruptive with its tillage and things like that. So let’s keep those animals on the hilly ground and let’s get regenerative outcomes. For the arable ground, the vision that I and we at the Sabre Institute see is, let’s start bringing that hybridization back together, that in the crops that we’re going to grow for human needs, let’s integrate an animal component.
Are we using animals to graze a cover crop and a gay brown model to prepare that field? Are we using them to eat the underutilized portions of it? Maybe that’s crop stubble that’s left over. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the goal of what we’re shooting for here. And to me, again, it becomes how do we stop pointing our guns at each other of the Cain and Abel example there and really embrace one another and say humanity needs both. And there’s an opportunity for us to steward both in a way that gets us to the outcomes that our planet needs for us to continue here.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a fair place to put a pin in that. And we should also talk about your work that you’re doing beyond just philosophically, historically, what is happening with the Savory Institute. You’re working on the Land to Market program and working with brands who are trying to source things more responsibly, trying to source responsibly made, regeneratively made leather, fiber, and meat. I imagine some other things too. So how exactly does that whole process work and what is Land to Market?
Chris Kerston: Yeah, that’s why I love the questions that you’ve started with, because it’s really the questions that we felt that needed to be addressed at the broader scale. There’s this confusion, there’s this lack of transparency, there’s lack of support in supply chains, even local food systems to help consumers make better choices. And so we’re always focused on The two disparate ends of the value chain. We’re interested in helping producers and we’re interested in helping consumers. And the plight of each, producers have predominantly not been marketers. And I don’t know that they should have to become marketers.
We’ve already kind of put the task of them of stewarding the land of, you know, I think a lot about this notion that society as a whole is waking up to the idea that soil can solve so many of our problems
Ross Kenyon: When you’re talking about being marketers as a farmer or rancher, are you talking about someone who goes to farmers markets and has their own label as opposed to selling into the commodity market? Is that what you mean?
Chris Kerston: Yeah. There’s this kind of polarity there that you have the option to sell into a commodity oligarchy or you go direct to consumer. And... Again, I think one of the things that has emerged out of the pandemic is the ability to start talking about privilege, and I know that your guys' show has leaned into that. There is a privilege of being in a weird country, and particularly in this country, on what I sometimes call the parenthetical coast, that you’ve got each far east and far west side of the country that are really where most of your urban populations are.
And then your agricultural sectors are operating in the middle of the country. So if you’re somebody that’s on that edge effect, like I am in Northern California, I’ve got access to amazing markets here. But if I’m in Western Wyoming or Utah, you could satiate Cheyenne and Salt Lake City’s needs with about two ranchers and three farmers. What happens to the rest of the growers out there? So this notion of Ultra-local, direct-to-market sometimes is a little bit of a misnomer of what’s possible. And so I love what the Joel Salatons, Joel Salatons, a close friend of mine, has been a mentor for 20 years.
Joel Salatons, Will Harris, Gabe Brown, giants. Amazing individuals, amazing family farms. In no way am I cutting down what they are doing. And I played early in that space too, direct-to-consumer. Had a very large farm that sold all over the West Coast. That’s not necessarily replicable for everyone. And so if we’re going to have amazing producers to just kind of throw on their back to say, you know, the way to beat this is to sidestep the existing markets and go direct to consumer is not a value prop that everybody can tackle.
And certainly not everybody wants Direct marketing your own product is an entirely different business than growing and it needs to be staffed and resourced accordingly, almost as like a subsidiary or the next business in the chain that just happens to be owned by the same parent company. It truly is a separate business. And so I just, that idea that everyone’s going to be able to kind of direct market our way out of this, I sometimes struggle with and I don’t know that it scales.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ve often heard this posed as what every farmer is aiming towards is having their own label. And it sounds like maybe you’re saying a lot of people don’t actually want to do that. So there’s some middle ground between commodity oligarchy, as you say, or this direct consumer model. And this is partly the model of what Savory is trying to create?
Chris Kerston: Correct. Yeah. So yeah, going back to those kind of two disparate ends of the chain, The farmer in that commodity oligarchy system has always been the price taker. They just kind of get whatever the system provides to them. On the other end of the chain, you’ve got the consumer that, by and large, systemically has had the wool pulled over their eyes. Nobody, until exposés and public pressure, and I think really the age of these democratic social media platforms is really what’s creating an emergence here.
Until there’s pressure put on somebody, nobody, you know, the human organizations do not naturally share more information than they have to. And we’re getting to a place that consumers are demanding that. They say, no, we want to see more of this and we want to be part of the solution ourselves. And so that kind of cliche of Vote with your dollar. We want to take that to the next level as the message that brands at least are hearing, brands and retailers. You know, the other side of this is a true cost accounting approach that governments and world organizations are starting to hold...
Company’s feet to the fire. I worry a little bit that the pandemic has kind of slacked off on that a little bit because it’s just like, hey, do what you need to do to stay in business. But prior to that, you know, if we were having this conversation in February, the idea that brands will have to pick up the cost of externalities that are produced in their value chain and pay the true cost of that. So if they, you know, three or four steps back in their chain or working with a This idea of moving to a true cost accounting world is driving brands to change to say, okay, we need more optics on what’s happening in our supply chain.
We need more transparency and traceability of our products through that chain. And we need to be able to make decisions more informed and effectively about that. That’s kind of the three players that we deal with. The brand is the one that honestly, even though it’s It drives a lot of the other two. The ones that we’re really worried about helping is the farmer and the consumer. And where I was going a second ago on that farmer piece, I think society is waking up to this idea that the soil is the solution, at least part of the solution.
I think most people can get there to so many of the world’s biggest problems, whether that’s climate change or world hunger, water insecurity, struggling rural economies and rural relevance. If the soil plays a piece of that, then that really makes the farmer and the rancher our ambassador to that solution. And yet for all of human history, they’ve been relegated to the peasant class. So we have to figure out how to change that. On the other side, we have what you brought up, that we have... A more disparity in quality of life that’s existing among consumers.
The rich are getting richer, the poor getting poorer. We’ve seen the middle class diminish. And there’s been lack of information provided to them. And so the notion that they’re going to somehow bear the brunt of this and pay more to create the higher quality of life for producers just isn’t a reality. And so we have to figure out how to... How to fix that, what feels like an unsolvable problem with both sides having this kind of challenge. But I think transparency, democracy, new choices is the way that we do that.
That’s where our EOV program set out. We started with this idea of regenerative as the solution to so many of our problems. Livestock kind of already has this added slide against it. People aren’t really sure about it. We said we need to go and measure environmental health or what they call ecosystem services. At the ground level with real empirical science. So we went behind the scenes and we formed an academic consortium. We started working with Nature Conservancy and Michigan State University, super close to us, Texas A&M, Sydney University in Australia.
And we set forth this idea of what if we measured as broad a spectrum of environmental health as possible On the ground in a way that could be deployed the most remote and poorest regions of the world. So we had to develop a protocol that didn’t, you know, as soon as you say, oh, I got to truck out the million dollar LIDAR machine, that’s not going to work. We’ve got to create a way that we’re measuring ecosystem services the same way everywhere with a protocol that uses empirical science that can be deployed anywhere.
And so it took us six years to put that protocol together to get all the players aligned. And what we came out with on that, we call Ecological Outcome Verification. That’s what I sometimes shortly refer to as EOV, the acronym. And it does just that. It looks at this comprehensive aggregate of environmental health that we’re looking at sequestered carbon. We’re looking at soil health. We’re looking at soil water holding capacity, and we’re looking at biodiversity. And the interesting thing is those all exist simultaneously and collaboratively in nature.
Like I was talking about, the plant is making those carbohydrates. It’s pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and making these organic compounds. Those organic compounds are your smallest in the soil. And so they have the most surface area. And so they create this magnetic sponge that water wants to stick to, which is also really valuable in a time where in climate change, we’re seeing more deluge events. So you’re seeing big rainfall events and longer periods of dryness. And when you just look at rainfall for a place, it doesn’t show that because it doesn’t show that Boy, you used to get 15 inches of rainfall spread over 5 months, 10 months, whatever it is for that region.
But now you have two 4-inch rainfall events and the other 2 inches is spread out across that 5 or 10 months. And so we’ve got to be able to soak up that water better and kind of flatten those curves or that volatility of that rainfall. And then when a system has a more stable amount of water, more water and for a longer period of time, that leads to more biodiversity. And so that’s what we created. We now have done measurements on properties on all six continents.
And just in our first 18 months of launching that protocol, this ecological outcome barrier, We’ve done 2 million acres around the globe. We’re set this year to do another 2 to 4 million. We’ll see what COVID does to that, but I think we’ll pretty solidly double that number this year. Our projections prior to COVID, we’re quite exponential, but we might have just a straight doubling year, which is not a bad place to be. And so now we can go and measure those things and get those real empirical outcomes, which can start to influence the conversation upstream and downstream.
Ross Kenyon: When I think about brands trying to source more regeneratively or making this switch in a more devoted fashion, I usually think of it in two broad buckets. One of which is that they want ecosystem service payments to roll inside of their value chain. So if they’re buying from farmers and they have increased biodiversity, they want those biodiversity credits going into the farmers or something like that, or for carbon credits or something like that. I also can see brands just wanting to, rather than monetizing it through some sort of credit scheme, oftentimes just want the ability to stick a label on their product that goes to the consumer and say, hey, we meet these standards and this is really cool.
I imagine some brands try to do both. Which are you? Are you compatible with both approaches or do you favor the label approach?
Chris Kerston: Yeah, we’ve got solutions for really there’s three. There’s the kind of Offset approach, there’s the inset approach, and then there’s the more connecting with consumers on aligned values, and so more forward-facing approach. Offsets, we want to be able to For those that don’t have raw materials in their supply chain, so like a really easy one for people to grasp is, you know, think, you know, Disney or a media company or Netflix or Facebook or somebody that they’re not sourcing meat or wool or leather or any of the products that we touch, yet they still want to be part of the solution.
We can create a world where our data plugs in with those that can sell an ecosystem service credit and create a new Yeah. There’s then the insetting option where I would have your cake and eat it too, that a brand wants to be able to source the raw material product and get the data with it. And so then you have to bundle that credit along with the product that they’re purchasing, which requires a little bit more challenge to create that chain of custody along the supply chain, but it can be done.
And so that’s kind of the next one. And then the last one is just really more your traditional brand halo approach. And this is where a brand wants to connect with those consumers on the things that they hold dear. They want to open the door for the consumer to be able to vote with their dollar and say, hey, we’re going to be leaders in this space. And they’re going to take a very forward-facing approach in that. Typically, the delineation between those two is that inset play is going to be your bigger brands that haven’t quite...
They know they have to meet compliance. They’re thinking long term about this true cost accounting world that’s emerging. They haven’t quite figured out how to align with consumers en masse. Because when you start to look at the general public as a whole, their marketing teams want to slice and dice it so many different ways. And they want to find the polarities that we talked about earlier in this. And they go, OK, maybe this isn’t. For us, we are not quite sure how to tell this story to a mass audience yet.
And so they pull back and they hesitate a little bit. Versus your smaller brands, they’re looking to garner market share. And so they are finding those niches, those categories. Got it.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe you could lay out an example, like perhaps the Timberland example that I referenced at the beginning. How does something like that happen? Or choose from your quiver. I’m sure you have other examples you’d like to tell us about.
Chris Kerston: Yeah, so we work across at this stage because our core competency is around this livestock technical assistance piece that we can teach someone anywhere in the world how to get regenerative outcomes on the land by properly manage their livestock in a way that mimics nature. Because that’s our core competency, the initial rounds of our program of what is called land to market. Land to market is after you’ve got a farm that’s gone through the EOV process and we’re getting net positive results. Now, Land to Market works on the transactional side of how do we create these new value streams for producers?
How do we plug them in with the brands that care? And then which of those three options, whether it’s an offset, an inset, or just a brand halo play, which one do we plug them in with that best fits their use case? One of the things that we’re doing right now, because we’re focused on the livestock industry, is pairing together what we would call what would normally be disparate partners. If the brand is going to do the work to reach back further in the supply chain, whether they’re big or small, that’s an added challenge for them to reach back to the farm.
That’s extra effort for them and it changes their business model. So can we create collaboration in that? And so what we’ve been doing recently, we talk about whole farm and whole animal utility to where we’ll have a meat buyer, a pet food buyer, and a hide buyer all work collectively to do that effort to create those relationships in the value chain to get all the way back to farm and then reach forward from there. And Timberland is a great example of that. We work with a number of brands of all sizes.
The ones that you guys would recognize because they’re bigger would be like Epic Provisions that’s a subsidiary now of General Mills or Applegate, a subsidiary of Cormel. We work with Caring Group, which owns Gucci and Balenciaga and St. Laurent and a number of luxury brands. We work with Eileen Fisher predominantly on their wool sourcing. 85% of their role is now coming through this program. We work with Purina Nestle through a couple of innovation brands. They have Zoox and Castor and Pollux. You see those at Whole Foods and PetSmart in a place like that.
Then, like I said, a number of smaller and mid-sized brands that are super important. They send really positive signals in the whole ecosystem. For the sake of listeners, the ones you’ve heard of are probably the ones that I’ve mentioned there, but you can go on our website and see the rest. But yeah, creating that relationship between farmer and Finish brand like Timberland has been a unique challenge. When we first started with Timberland, we did not have all of those players fully buttoned up and in sync to where you’ve got Meat and Pet and Timberland all together.
We’re working on that now. But the beauty of Timberland, and a lot of this is coming through their parent company, VF Corp 2, that VF is setting some really lofty impact goals. Lofty is the wrong word. Aggressive impact goals. And Timberland has this history of already being a tip of the spear brand, a leader brand, of emerging into the new fringes of what’s possible and kind of being the first one to take it to scale. They did that with Leather Working Group and working with tanneries that don’t pollute.
They’ve done that on a number of fronts. And so what we had to do is get to a critical mass of product that was being verified that could go into a supply chain and then create those relationships with the players. And we have a couple of different partners that have come to the table to make this happen, to be able to get Timberland significant enough supply that they could go To the public, they’re kind of this in-between model that they want to be public-facing and take advantage of that impact data, that we could go to a place to where they could have enough that they could have a line that was segregated and verified to be regenerative.
They have a boot launching in October that is their first regenerative capsule line. It is a men’s and women’s option. And they’ve done a bunch of cool stuff around the other ingredients, the rubber and the laces, all have really cool programs behind them too. But we work with them on the leather side. And they’ve got a boot coming out. It’s the first one. And then we work with brands like Timberland behind the scenes long-term to say, okay, how are we going to overhaul... Your larger supply chain at scale and set some goals around that.
So brands will often work with us creating a segregated line and then behind the scenes, we’re working with them in what’s sometimes called, I get a little wonky in the brand terms, but sometimes called a mass balance approach where You can’t necessarily segregate all the product in the chain, but you know at the beginning, a certain percentage went out regenerative and then that whole batch stays together through supply chain and out the other end, we still know that same percentage is regenerative. So we can work with their whole supply chains in that way and say, Maybe you weren’t able to segregate all this leather at every step, but we know that of your total leather sourcing, 40-50% is now regenerative and you have these 3, 5, 7, whatever might be segregated lines that we have full transparency and traceability of.
So that’s the way that we’ll work with brands and their complexity to be able to scale at the fastest rate possible.
Ross Kenyon: It’s fascinating and I’m happy brands are jumping on this. We have to start wrapping up here, Chris, but one question I should have asked when it came up more naturally is, well, with Nori, we work with U.S. croplands and measuring soil carbon has been a challenge. And it’s been one of the reasons why you haven’t seen soil carbon represented in carbon markets as much as you might otherwise would or why you’ve been hearing about it lately. People have been thinking about this quite seriously. Nori in fact uses a hybrid approach that uses Yeah, once again, is that a whole other show entirely?
Can you give me something that’s a little bit digestible?
Chris Kerston: Yeah, no, no, you’re all over it. So from a ranching perspective, because we’re working in more of a broad acre context, it even exacerbates that another level further, that to go and get a good carbon measure on just even an average size ranch, you’re typically looking at a six figure investment for the rancher. Well, there’s no return on the other side for them to be able to Currently to be able to go and sell credits that would cover that $100,000 plus investment. The reason the cost is so high is that because the carbon models, because we don’t, academia and the scientific community hasn’t fully figured out how carbon moves through a system yet.
What I called earlier, colloquially, the carbon economy, what’s long-term, what’s short-term, what’s volatile, what’s labile, all of that is still being figured out. To get to a place of what’s called statistical relevance, to where we can feel confident that, okay, we’ve taken enough samples that this property is sequestering this much carbon, That’s what they do. They take these huge sample sets to get there. And those sample, the time to take them and the laboratory analysis is expensive. And so everybody’s kind of been wrestling around what to do here and how do we take outcomes and model So, again, because the plant is sequestering carbon, turning it into organic compounds, Those organic compounds are able to hold on to more water.
More water means more biodiversity. It also means there’s corollary relationships between all those things. So rather than taking these huge sample sizes of carbon, we’re pushing on some of the current carbon models by saying, what if we compared it to soil organic matter and water and biodiversity and In addition to taking a verified carbon methodology, but just not the same volume of sampling. So that’s what’s different about EOV. We are working to get that to become, we have to get to a critical mass of data to be able to make that a verified carbon methodology, and I think we’re getting close to that.
But that’s kind of our approach, that we still want to do as much outcome-based ground-proofing empirical science as possible, But we are going to build that carbon model stronger through measuring the whole ecosystem, which actually all has value and all has relevance to the discussion. You can’t really talk about the sake of civilization without also talking about water. And you can’t really talk about the stake of civilization without talking about functional ecosystems, which is biodiversity. So obviously, greenhouse gases and climate change is the most pressing. I’m in no way throttling back on that.
But they’re actually kind of all symptoms of the same environmental degradation. So we have to figure it out collectively. So that’s been our approach to be a little bit more of that aggregate of environmental health.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s a tricky problem. I’m sure it was an intellectual challenge to say the least working inside of it where you’re taking some of these measures are seemingly important. Soil carbon is easy, right? Or the number of tonnes in an acre of soil, that makes sense. Once you start talking about putting a number on biodiversity or tilth or something like that, I don’t know. Maybe it’s easier than I think, but some of those things, I just don’t know. Do they need to be quantified?
I guess they have to in order to measure outcomes, but... Is that even like the correct place of numbers? I love that. Only in a conversation with Nori would you be like, carbon’s easy compared to the rest of that. We’re weird because we all read these sort of, and we’re also suspicious of some of these attempts to enumerate everything and to put everything into markets and put dollar signs on things.
Chris Kerston: And I’m so glad you said that because I want that to be the underpinning to what we say here. We were big on test and learn. And so we have the best knowledge that we have available. We’ve put something together. It will evolve and change over time. I also love that you bring up qualitative versus quantitative. They both have to be there. How we have wrestled that is... If you just measure something like carbon that takes time to build, is expensive to measure, it’s a terrible feedback loop to producers.
We can develop all the fancy monitoring tools that we want, but unless they’re more real-time, We’re just going to be measuring degradation across the globe. Part of that empowerment and that value prop to producers is we have to provide them better optics into what are the outcomes of their management changes day to day. And so the more that we can get more high resolution and more real time, the better we can inform them that it’s like, hey, when you did this, this is what happened. And I know that sounds like a pipe dream in our world of ecosystem services of just any measurement would be good.
But I’ll give an example of that. Rating how quickly dung decomposes would be considered a qualitative score. No one’s measuring the mass of the dung as it’s breaking down. It’s a qualitative score. But through the work that we’ve done and the data set we’ve built, we’ve found that there’s a direct correlation between rate of dung decomposition and how much carbon you’re sequestering. So that’s something that real time the farmer can look at and say, hey, my animals were in there a week ago. And how quickly is my dung decomposing?
Is my soil getting healthier and able to pull down More carbon or not? And so that puts them on that pathway and gives them more tools. Remote sensing and Landsat data is only going to make that better as time goes on. The point you make about quantifying water versus biodiversity are very different. You’re right. Biodiversity is super hard to quantitate. It’s harder than carbon. Water is not. Water has 150 years of good hydrological science behind it. And An example that we can use to kind of, sometimes it’s challenging in carbon because despite all our best efforts, carbon is still highly politicized.
And in a country like ours, climate change is still highly politicized. And so sometimes people aren’t ready to lean into that debate. But if we can start talking about water, here’s an example of If you go to a federal government like ours and add up the zeros that they spend on crop insurance, on disasters like floods and fires, you can draw a really hard line back to the soil’s ability to soak up water really quickly. And no, water’s not political at all. It’s partly, again, because we can see it, because we can feel it.
Everybody has a relationship with water different than they do carbon that We could go and take a measurement and say, look at how fast this soil can soak up water and look at how much more it can hold once normal soil would be saturated. The sponge is still strong and continues to pull more down. The farmer Gabe Brown tells a story of they had a 14-inch rainfall event, a 100-year storm in a two-hour window of time or an afternoon, two, three hours. His neighbor was flooded for eight months and he didn’t have a puddle on his property.
You’ve got situations where farmers go long periods of time, longer than they did before, without rainfall events. And then they have these deluge, like I said, these big heavy rainstorms. If they can soak that up and spread it over a longer period of time, that limits the risk on crop insurance. So water is highly tangible and we see it as a really strong gateway to one, make the carbon model stronger, but also more palatable that we can agnosticize it to some degree or pull out some of the discourse around carbon and GHGs.
Again, mostly in this country, the rest of the world is on board, but here we still continue to struggle with it. That allows it to be freer for other parties to play. We talk to brands a lot that they’re like, ooh, not really ready to say climate beneficial, but I’m ready to talk about soil health. I’m ready to talk about water. I think that’s just going to make it more tangible for everyone to wrap their arms around and create a bigger net. That’s what we need.
We need that rising tide to float all boats.
Ross Kenyon: That indirect financial measurement too of literal downstream effects of controlling floods or crop insurance. That’s an interesting way to measure it by proxy rather than something more, I don’t know, scientific, physical, tactile. Cool. Well, you’ve given me a lot to think about, Chris. Thanks for being on the show. Yeah. I didn’t mean to make that sound so conditional or so uncertain. Thank you for being on the show, Chris Kirsten.
Chris Kerston: No, like you said, I think we’ve both been wanting to do it for a while. And it’s great to be able to share our more internal dialogues with the rest of the world through your podcast here. So it was great. Thank you for having me on. We would love to come back on any time and have a number of team members that can add other breadth and information that I wasn’t able to cover. And maybe it’s less of my core expertise, but... Yeah, we need partners in this world.
And again, I love what Nori is doing. I love where you guys have disrupted stalemates that have existed for a long time and said, we’re going to get moving on this and start creating change and sending those signals. And I think we’re kindred spirits on that front.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks. Thanks for saying all that, Chris. And if someone wanted to learn more about Savory Institute and what y’all are doing, where would you direct them?
Chris Kerston: Yeah, so you can go to savory.global. That’s going to give a ton of information about our network and how we work with producers. We have a landing page and it’ll be on our navigation to look up land to market, which will tell you more about. We’re reaching that critical mass of brands that we’re working with and have now dozens and dozens of products that have a consumer-facing seal on them that really now a consumer can pick up that product and know with empirical data that they’re Their purchase is making the land better.
They’re healing the environment. This product was grown regeneratively at the farm level. We’ll be putting together some holiday gift guides and things like that show the breadth of products that are now available. So check into that. You’ll see more of that as we get closer to the holidays. We’ll launch more of this collection of products that qualify everything from yarn and fiber and sweaters to leather products and pet food and of course meat, whether we’re talking jerky sticks or snack sticks to fresh steaks and things like that.
So a lot of exciting stuff happening. So go check it out.
Ross Kenyon: I also saw Alan Savory in the new Kiss the Ground documentary, which I saw recently walking around barefoot in Zimbabwe, as he does, because that gives you more information, I’m told. Our friends at Kiss the Ground made a really cool documentary. I’ll put the link in the show notes in case you want to be informed when it’s available for viewing. Definitely worth a look. And just thanks again, Chris. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks, Ross. It’s been great. Yeah, it sure was.
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