I'm super happy to get to moderate a panel on investing in our food and agricultural systems. If you were in the plenary opening, you heard me introduce myself by saying no one in my circle these days can get through an entire conversation with me without me talking about the source of our food, where it's coming from, where it came from, who's investing in it, where the money's going for that food. I'm driving away friends by hordes. But this room you guys all decided to be in here, you chose to be here, which means we get to talk about it with your permission. Super happy about that. I'm going to introduce our panelists and then get us into this. So all the way down at the end here, we've got Jesse Simmons, who is the MD of Research and Advisory for Capshift, which is an impact investing platform committed to helping clients and institutions move more capital into impact. Next to him is Caroline Chenoy. She manages the investment notes program at the One Acre Fund. One Acre Fund is a social enterprise funding and serving over a million farmers across Africa. If there's an organization in the world that understands serving farmers at scale, it's got to be one Acre Fund with a million customers. Mark Watson currently sitting right next to me currently serves as the president of Potlaker Capital, a non-profit charitable loan fund, an integrated capital fund that supports sorry, that is dedicated to supporting BIPOC farmers at the intersection of racial and climate justice. Prior to Potlaker, Mark has had a career of over 30 years in financial services, including banking and Wall Street. He's founded multiple funds, advisories, and has a wealth of experience in the racial equity and impact space. I'm so thrilled to be here with each of you. We're going to kick this off with an optimistic question, with a question about where we see the bright spots in the world. Sometimes when we start to talk about food, at least in the circles that I'm in, all that's mentioned is what's gone wrong in our food system. It's a dark conversation about what isn't and what isn't yet and what we don't have and what we've done to our food system. I want to start here. What are you seeing in your individual lines of work that gives you cause for optimism and hopefulness? Let's start with Caroline, because you moved your mic first. Can you all hear me? Great. Well, thanks for starting with optimism, Katie. That's a really nice place to start. Great way and how I'm feeling here at Socap with all of you here. I think what gives me optimism is that agricultural development is potentially the most powerful tool that we have in addressing extreme poverty globally. Seeing all of you here today gives me optimism that a lot of us feel that way too and see the importance in it. According to the World Bank, the ag sector is two to four times more effective in raising incomes among the poorest than any other sector. Given that 70% of the world's poor are rural farmers making a living off of small-scale farming, it presents a huge opportunity to eliminate extreme poverty by serving them. The second thing that gives me optimism is that a lot of the tools that we have to address extreme poverty and make farming more productive already exist. Tweaks in planting and improved fertilizer and improved seeds, these are a lot of things that exist. The challenge is just creating access to them. Just that sort of knowledge and knowing that it's a challenge of access is something that I feel really optimistic about. Awesome. Thanks. Anyone want to take it up from there? Jesse, you look ready to rumble. Sure. A really well-attended food and ag session is definitely something that makes me optimistic. Standing room only, it seems like soon. I think echoing Katie's comments, you can't get far in any of these conversations without food and ag coming up. It seems to be at the tip of everyone's tongue, which is really exciting. Enthusiastic to reflect on the product set reflects that interest. We did a primer on food and agriculture and how to think about investing in food and agriculture last year at Capshift. When we started to pull the product set, we were in like three, four, five hundred fund products that are all representative of folks that are working on solutions to the myriad challenges around our food and agriculture space. The helpers are out there. That makes me very optimistic to sit in a role of helping capital find those helpers and those solutions. I bought enough time. I think I'm excited because I have felt the investment world and the program world have been reductionist in the approach. Now people are seeing the connection between culture, economics, climate, and health with food. We're starting to see investment strategies that are looking to capture all those impacts because when you push on one string, it affects the rest of the line. That's an evolution, I think, for us to see this as a holistic system and not, we're going to grow bib lettuce and it's healthy and feel good about that. But look at the secondary impacts investments that we're making in food and ag. I love that you said that. People often ask where did you come at the food world from. One of the things that's always so encouraging to me is that you can come in from so many different angles and it places you still at the table of talking about our supply chains and food and ag. Whether you came in primarily because you care about climate and what's happening to our planet, you come in because you care about poverty reduction. You come in because you care about taste, which my first blog about food said, hey, I got here because of taste, guys. Some of the grocery store vegetables just don't taste good anymore. But no matter which direction you came in at it, we get to sit at the table and have the conversation together. I find it a really exciting convening topic because of that where we can come to a lot of agreement. I love that. I'm realizing now it is not standing remotely in here. We've been turning people away now, which is unfortunate. But I would like to just do a quick poll of the audience if you guys don't mind. I'd love to see a show of hands if you're in this room as an entrepreneur. Just want to know who's here and maybe leave your hand up if it's an entrepreneur in the food space. It's okay if that's not true, but I'm just curious who we have. And then raise your hand if you are an investor and then leave it up if it's in the food space. Awesome. What's that? Partially.  That's okay. Just curious to know who's in the room as we answer. And so many people in this room just raised their hand showing what Jesse said that the product set has become really large. If you care about investing in our food system, there are a lot of opportunities to do so, which is super exciting. We're going to change gears a little bit from optimism. We're not going to move to pessimism, but a little bit into a more challenging arena. I'm curious how you all would talk about risk in the context of funding for food and ag. Risk is one of those things as far back as you can go back to American dust bowl lending to farms. Risk is always a major part of the conversation. As soon as you start to talk about agriculture, people say, well, farming is risky, right? We can't predict the climate. Well, it's becoming even more unpredictable as we speak. And so riskier, perhaps. What does that mean when we think about funding and investing in the food system? Jesse, don't smile at me unless you want to answer. So I think part of the diversity of the entry points that you can come to food and agriculture from and the product set means that you're in that old fable with a bunch of folks blindfolded, touching an elephant, all describing something totally different, right? Someone says it's a tree, someone says it's a snake, someone says it's a piece of rubber, whatever. That is a wonderful thing in the sense that there's something for everyone, it seems. That's also a risk to our space in that you have an asset holder who's looking for a certain profile of investment, sees one in food and agriculture or in impact investing, generally, that is off of that risk return continuum, off of that risk profile that they're looking for just doesn't match and you have sort of a major threat. And capital ultimately gets gated and capital doesn't move to its ultimate potential. So I think when we're talking about risk unpacking the many underlying levels of where risk shows up in food and agriculture in you can be investing in venture capital in real assets and private credit across asset classes, sectors and geographies, all of which have very different underlying risk profiles and return profiles. And what we're encouraged by is that there is something for it, there seems to be something for everyone, no matter what your risk profile is, there is ability to sort of decrease the overall risk of a portfolio by integrating sustainable food, sustainable agriculture into it. There is opportunity to increase the risk profile and increase the overall financial return profile of a portfolio by integrating agricultural technology or these types of investments. One other comment on risk is thinking in an even more macro sense, which is this sort of portfolio optimization by moving away from industries that are going to be under threat by the negative externalities that they both bring on and are affected by. So when we talk about macro risks to people and planet in terms of soil health, in terms of communities, in terms of things that the food and agriculture, the conventional food and agriculture space has helped bring on, these are externalities that will not stay external forever. They pose a real risk to staying invested in traditional agriculture practices. So another way of thinking of de-risking a portfolio can also be spun into moving away from old ways of doing things, of old destructive ways of doing things towards sustainable and regenerable practices, because they help make a world that we want to live in, but also they're aligned with a more profitable and more sustainable future for our world and our portfolios. I love that comment. And one of the reasons I love it is if you were around this morning, you heard Chairwoman Charlene talk about investing today for the impact to seven generations down the road. And I think sometimes when you think about risk, our time horizon is maybe just a bit short. And there is space, obviously, depending on what you need to accomplish with the funding that you're investing. But I think we need to create some space for these longer time horizons. And when you start to think about these large externalities, it may look risky to be involved in this type of investing. But perhaps it's the risk mitigate, actually, that we need for the long term. So changing the horizon that we look on I think is absolutely crucial. Mark or Caroline, how would you think about risk? This is an old conversation. In 1918, I know this because I had to do research on this. The firm credit system was formed. And why was it formed? Because the banks weren't lending to agriculture because it was too risky. Now, we have many feelings about firm credit system today, but that's not what today's topic as well. But what happened just to give you some more information around that there were cooperatives formed to share the risk. There were guarantee programs to absorb the risk of a period of time in this nation with a certain setup of cabals, I would argue, in the food system. This is a different time. And we have an old system. The number one investors and food, at least for producers, is the banking industry. Number two is firm credit. Number three is FSA. And number four is the insurance industry. The firm credit system sources their money by selling commercial paper. So you have this intention of I'm just I'm going to give a university lesson, but this was interesting to me. So everybody gets an A. But what's curious to me, so you have this behind the curtain investor with these expectations of returns, driving all this other activity that you see the remnants of. It's not willing to finance Regen Ag. It's too uncertain. It's not predictable yet. So to be relying on these institutions that have an incentive to stay where they are actually is increasing the risk. We are not able to move. So one of the points and the reason why I'm optimistic is that people in this room are the nodes of change. It is our money that is creating demonstration models for the banks and firm service agency and the House Ag committee and other entities to start reapportioning the risk to move it to people who can most absorb it. Right now, the risk of Regen mostly sits at the farmer, the one who's least able to absorb shocks. It needs to move to an insurance company. It needs to move to private capital and recoverable grants and and the consumer. So I think risk is always going to be there, but this is a new paradigm. And we need a reapportionment and it means new systems to do that work. Yeah, that snaps. I'm hearing some snaps in the room. I wholeheartedly agree. It's one of the similar to Caroline, most of my experience in Ag prior to the last year was international. And one of the things that always felt so unbalanced to me was the risk that we were asking smallholder farmers to take on that all the risk was landing at that farmstead, these very, very small farms who can least afford to hold that risk. And so, yeah, taking old systems and trying to move into a new world simply isn't going to get us there. We need some reimagination. Awesome. Caroline, not to steal your thunder. No, no, that was a great segue. Yeah, I was going to also just mention the amount of risk that is taken by smallholder farmers. And one just stat that I think is important to share. So one acre fund works with smallholder farmers usually working on one to five acres of land. So very, very small farms typically, really located and just farming to feed their families. But we have a 95% repayment rate. So that might be surprising to some. It might help kind of contextualize risk of this type of investment and what the returns are. That's not to say that agriculture isn't risky. But I think there are kind of ways to de-risk these types of investments. So we don't just provide credit, but we provide supportive services like training and market access initiatives and things that can both help the farmers make sure that this is a valuable investment for them and then protect our organization as well and move into kind of more climate resilient methods. So with agroforestry and then also just one other thing to add is geographic diversification by working across nine different countries, mostly in East Africa, but also in West Africa is another way that we're able to kind of de-risk the work. Can I add one more? This idea of risk, I'm just trying to give people something to hold on to. FSA is a $17 billion portfolio. It's supposedly the lender of last resort. You have to show up with a decline letter to get a loan from FSA. Guess what their default rate is and guess what their write-off is. The default is 4%. The write-off is a half percent. This is the last place you can go to get a loan. That's of a $17 billion portfolio. Farm credit, half of a percent write-off rate as well. This whole idea, we need to figure out where the risk is that we're talking. Is it risk of when you're going to get the money back? Is it risk of write-off? Is it risk that the margin is not going to be what you think? What risk are we actually talking about? It's important to be clear about that. I love that. I also think that in many industries we suffer from a legacy risk perception rather than a risk reality. The beautiful thing for rooms like this is that opens up a lot of doors for innovation when incumbents don't recognize that the risk might actually be lower than they think it is. I'm realizing as we dive, we're going to jump topic to topic because our topic is so broad. If you have questions anywhere along the way, please just turn your head around. We've got our volunteer in the back there in purple. You already have a question? Also helping. You'll get past a card and you can just write your question down, pass it over. We'll start to filter them through as the session goes on. I don't want you to miss a moment. If somebody has a question about risk and we move on to something else, I don't want you to forget about it. Awesome. Anything else you guys want to add about risk? I feel like it's such a huge topic that if we want to dive deeper, we can, but it's okay if not. Maybe to help segue us to scale too. I think two things that both of you all talked about in terms of risk and scale is, like you said, Mark, who is best suited to hold risk? If there's anything good that the financial world and financial analysis has brought to us maybe is this idea of apportioning risk and return to those best suited and willing to hold that risk. With the scale of these problems that we're trying to solve for and helping to overcome, we also have a huge scale of capital in terms of asset holders that are saying, I want to invest for a more sustainable and just future in food and agriculture. There is a lot of capital to help shift and apportion that risk too appropriately, so it's out there. Then connected to the conversations around one acre fund, thinking about scale as a risk mitigant as well, you mentioned your write off rate. There's also a balance sheet of one acre fund that you might have recourse for too as an investor. It's just being willing and eager to push a little bit deeper from our first blush of that's a super small holder agricultural farmer in one of the poorest countries in the world with no additional income and few additional assets. That seems really risky to let's actually think about how my capital is going to help that person and be protected by all the other folks in this one fund that is also participating in providing solutions there. It's an enormous risk mitigant. That's very real. Sometimes it brings the complexity of exploring this wealth of opportunities. All will have risks and risk mitigants, but sometimes it takes looking deeper than the first blush, what's the underlying asset holder to get there? That's a great reminder. I feel like far too often in a conversation of risk, we start the question with, what are the risks? We forget to move on to what are the risk mitigants? Are we really taking into account those real risk mitigants? I'm shocked to hear that a farm lender of last resort only has a half percent write off rate. I didn't know that. I would have thought it was much riskier than that. That tells us something about that market and how unrisky it potentially actually is. I love that and a great segue to a conversation about scale, Jesse. I'm curious just to hear both Caroline and Mark's work focus on smallholder farmers. We all know that the world is in desperate need of large scale change, not small scale change. How should we be thinking about how smallholder farmers fit into that vision? Don't fit into that vision? How should we be thinking about larger systems? Are there some systems that are too large? Should they be smaller? Is there a sweet spot? Curious to hear you guys talk a little bit about scale, large and small. So when we think about scale, we're thinking about the number of smallholder farmers that we're reaching, not their land size because we have a focus on serving the smallest smallholder farmers. But when we think about systems change and large scale problems, I think for me it really comes back to that that stat I shared earlier that 70% of the world's poorest people are smallholder farmers. So if you can change that one profession, if you can help those folks have more productive farms, then you can have really systemic change for a large scale issue like extreme poverty. So that's kind of the approach that one acre fund has towards systems change. And then also has in recent years built out more work with partnering with governments and working on research and development and other ways to sort of plug in and create change in systems. But I think you can work on a small scale and still be solving a large scale issue. I guess our answer a potlucker is when we design this, we decided to measure resiliency. Not how many watermelon somebody sold this year versus last year, but what's their capacity to adapt? And in order to do that in a very oligopoly thank you. And a world that has a lot of oligopolies, it's we need to rebalance the power. So we actually deploying clusters around the country. So five to 10 farmers, producers, distributors in a place, national, but we're also curating in a place. And what that allows you to do is to have impact at the farmer level so you can fund the tractor. But then at the same time they're in a community of practice, so they can share like soil amendment knowledge, or they can advocate to the state funding sources, USDA offices, etc. Or they can go to DC, which we brought people to help put together language for an opportunity for folks like us to actually provide guaranteed loans and not have to go through traditional banking. So we try to do deals that hit on all three of those levels. So there's a systemic impact and that is necessary because I just came back from a pig farming meeting in Mississippi. Was anyone else there? So and it was fantastic was where BB King actually was was born. And I have and I think about my life and I think one day I'm in DC at Capitol Hill and the next day I'm in, you know, with these pig farmers who are fantastic, who are going to be the first region black pig farmers with distribution and access to consumers in Mississippi. I mean, this is and we get to help thank. So that's that's systemic, even though they're small, but think about the impact on the communities and the wages and all that. So I don't think we have to be wedded to you're not to choose resiliency means large and small. We should know that from the pandemic. Can you say more about that? Well, think about and there's a funder here that I will not name. But one of the things that we learned during the pandemic was liquidity. You know, the large system crashed, and the small companies didn't have access to financing. So a funder who's here responded in a big way and we created I was at another firm then Fair Food, and we could overnight a collateral fund, which was a way to assign guarantees to other lenders to keep lending to these small companies, the folks that are in here starting these businesses. One of the reasons why a lot of business fail is because they don't have liquidity is not like the idea what didn't work. It's not like the cash. So I think there are ways to introduce that and the pandemic showed all the crevices or the cracks in our system. And it was a small farmers that kept delivering eggs and it wasn't the grocery store chains. They shut down. So let's invite more of that the next time around. Yeah, it's interesting. I've found in a year now of a food systems listening journey. I end up in too many conversations that make it a dichotomy between solving systemic problems and supporting small producers. And I think my conversation with Mark might have been one of the first where somebody said, hey, the most resilient system involves both. And we need to create a system that supports both really big systems. Some of these systems need to be nationwide or global. We need good distribution. We need lower costs, et cetera. And some of these systems need to be much smaller and some need to be medium sized. And you know that the resiliency of the system really depends on a diversity of size of system. And I think that's truly changed. That was paradigm shifting for me to be thinking about the food system in that way. Jesse, how would you comment about scale? Sure. I'm going to use it to transition also to funding because that's what I'm thinking about. Perfect. One of the models that we try to bring to this amorphous impact investing universe at Capshift is big buckets of capital. Try to put things into these buckets from a portfolio. What type of capital do I or my client asset holders have to deploy and what type of product is out there? And so we talk about align, build, and catalyze as three big buckets. So moving from negative or non-impact into an aligned portfolio, thinking about public markets, aligning our investments with solutions, benefiting from some of the tailwinds of where industries are going to move, maybe helping in moving them to a certain extent. By far, the largest pool of assets that is out there and available to help mobilize some of these changes, but probably the weakest direct causation. So big scale, but in terms of ability per dollar to really generate change, probably the weakest. Moving to the second category, build, which we're thinking of private market investments, private market rate investments. Definitely the second largest pool of capital out there. Still big scale, significantly smaller than the public markets, but a much more direct causal pathway to saying we are investing in these solutions. These solutions are taking this capital and going out and building these solutions and we're getting real change because of it. Then finally catalyze the smallest sort of impact for its private investing pool of capital. By far the smallest pool of capital out there available for this change, but driving immense change on a per dollar space and really providing capital to do things that the market will not provide itself. I think there's a place for all of this capital will continue to exist in portfolios out there that is ready and willing to be activated for change. It's a shame if we don't activate the big pool of public market dollars because they're not doing the catalytic stuff. It's wrong if we're saying, oh, this catalytic stuff should be at scale with the big pool of capital and then we're not doing the catalytic stuff. I think there's a place for all of this type of capital to be activated for solutions that are ready and willing to absorb it at whatever scale it is. As Mark mentioned before, we see innovation moving things that once looked like a scary catalytic impact first bucket to, oh, this is market rate for two. This is getting proven out. Now this is sitting in a different bucket. It's going from my PRI sleeve to my MRI sleeve or from my catalytic bucket to my for-profit bucket and maybe so on up that space. I think there's space for all of it and there's capital on the sidelines that's ready to move to all of it as well. I love it. Jesse started to answer our next question, which is the last question we planned on for up here. If you guys have questions in the audience, please do keep writing them down and we'll get those sent down to me as well. We'll make sure to answer them whether they're questions that relate to the topics we've covered or maybe you want us to cover something that the folks haven't covered yet. Like why won't you fund me for any entrepreneurs in the room? If you want to hear about that, feel free to put some funders on the spot. Awesome. So this question is two part. One, what types of funding support our current food system? And Mark already went into that a little bit for us, but I'd be curious to just hear insights that you all have and Mark may have the deepest history in this. But what types of funding support our current food system? And then how does this need to change or stay the same to fund the future of agriculture and the food systems we want to see? I'll take a stab. So I started as a food analyst picking stocks a million years ago. And the first company I followed was Kraft. That's the first version of Kraft for those of you who remember. And I say that because I bring it up because that was the end of the 80s and the 90s. And all those leveraged buyouts for those of you who remember, I mean food companies were emerging left and right. And all people thought about was cost saves and leveraging and junk funds and there was no conversation about the health of the food. It was all about brand extension. So think about the money and its pension funds. I used to be a pension fund manager, New York City pension fund. Those were dollars that actually had no accountability for the impact other than returns, which I argue were governed by the stock market. That was some 40 years ago. And now we have an opportunity where people can be hold the investors accountable, whether it's an individual entrepreneur or we talk to CPG companies that call up and say, oh, we want to diversify our supply chain. And I get to say, what are you going to do for them? How are you going to make them gap certified? How long is this contract going to be? You don't want them to leverage up and then you walk away after the end of report pictures published. So there is a different moment that I think as intermediaries, as the three of us play, where we can act on behalf of the system we want to live in and negotiate with the system that I started my career in. And that is a very valuable role. It's more valuable than money. I can go on, but I'll just... So I think there's a portal now in 1996. There's a billion two of $1.2 trillion. I'm tired because I have jet lag, so forgive me. $1.2 trillion of impact dollars that did not exist or wasn't classified that way. And we're busy trying to get USDA knocking on the door, let this money come in to help fund Regen Ag. And I'd argue the same is happening for public companies now, potentially, and private concerns. And that's exciting because you get to decide what return metrics you want. It doesn't just have to be numerical. That's extractive. Yeah, super helpful. Anyone else on what the funding landscape looks like for our current system and what would need to change to have the landscape of the future? We want to see. I can go. Yeah. So sort of addressing current landscape and from the smallholder farmer perspective, we see a lot of... I think one thing that you brought up, Katie, that's interesting about this space is that it's so intersectional with people coming from nutrition backgrounds and agriculture backgrounds, commercial food backgrounds. And we see a lot of financing going specifically to climate finance, a lot of concerns around that, but very little of that financing going to smallholder farmers. So less than 2% of global climate financing actually going to smallholder farmers. And so I think that that is one shift that I would like to see in the funder perspective of putting smallholder farmers higher up on the climate agenda, recognizing that they have had the least to do to cause climate crisis and are the most vulnerable to it. And not only that, but also steward a large percent of land and have a lot of opportunity to improve soil health and to plant trees and to prevent erosion and do a lot of the things that we hope to do that can be done through smallholder farmers and they should be considered for that. I just say quickly, I think, as I sort of mentioned before, these chickens are coming home to roost. We're running out of top soil. We're running out of clean water. We are seeing major repercussions of the conventional funding sources for agriculture and what they optimize for. It will not be a choice forever to decide not to optimize for regenerative soil practices or water conservation or any of these other things that will become a necessity in the coming decades, not that far away. And so I think that's incredibly encouraging because those conventional funding sources are not going away. Those pools of capital are not going away. They're just going to need to be looking for other things along with where they're putting their money, which is great for anyone who's saying I'm piloting a new way to do more water efficient agriculture. It's great for anyone investing in a company that's helping with precision regenerative ag, whether it's a tech company or a practice on the ground or a new way of managing land. I think I'm optimistic the capital is coming because it will need to be. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you all. We're getting incredible questions, so thank you guys for participating. I doubt if we'll get to them all, but we're going to do our best in the time that we have left and feel free to keep asking questions as they come up. But something that Jesse was just saying relates to one of the questions I was going to read and I'll do a quick hot take on it. And then if our panelists want to weigh in also, someone said any concerns, I can't read one of the words, sorry, take PepsiCo or Cargill's investments and regenerative ag. Is it genuine or misleading the industry? The concern is about greenwashing. And one of the things that I'll say about that from knowing some people in particular who are very close to the topic Cargill is and at a couple of the other major cereal food companies, there is a very genuine interest and it's a risk mitigant. They're worried that they will not have supply of the grains that they need 10 years from now, five years from now, 15 years from now to make the food that is their cash crop right now. And so many, I don't, this is not true for every major conglomerate that all of their investments in regenerate are genuine. Surely there are some that are not, but the people sitting at the most senior tables and some of those biggest food companies in the US producing things like Cheerios, et cetera, are very worried that they will not have food. Right. And so their investments in the health of the soil are from what I hear quite genuine. So that would be my hot take. Although I think it's not always PC to say those big bad guys are doing genuine work. I think in many cases they are and sometimes out of a genuine heartfelt desire to do good and sometimes literally just a risk mitigant to make sure that the company still exists 10 years from now. Anyone else? We feel free to disagree too. If you do, I mean, I agree and disagree. And I say that because I can't tell you how many calls that I turned down. We had a company call large, famous or infamous depending on which side of the table and asked for black farmers who make a certain product. And I said, well, look, if you if you want to talk to them, I can set it up, but you have to invest for the long term. So we had a preliminary conversation and it became clear that the requirements most of this their product neutralizes was sourced outside the U.S. And so they started listing the criteria for being included in the supply chain. And I stopped the conversation and said the criteria alone is exclusive. But there's no way that you will find who you want in this country who can reduce it that standard because the infrastructure doesn't exist. You have to invest in the infrastructure. What about moving further down the supply chain and in this waste from this product that can be turned into energy? I said, that's an industry that you can put farmers of color at the beginning at the beginning of a burgeoning sector and put your name on it and it fits in your lineup. No interest. And I was doing the conversation. I've had those conversations where where I wonder what the intention is. And then there are conversations, which is how potlicker and jubilee started, where a rice company was interested in sourcing domestically and actually agreed to buy all that would be produced. So we built a rice mill that will be a co-op the first black on a co-op rice mill in Louisiana. And that was from a commitment of not a large CPG company, but a company Lotus Foods that was interested in supporting that. So it's that's why I agree and disagree. It depends. Surely a mix. And I love that you also spoke to risk in that commentary, you know, when someone when a CPG company comes in and says, I'll buy everything you can produce, that alleviates risk, right? That tells the farmer that, you know, you produce a little bit more, you enlarge your land, you take on some rent to do some new land, and you'll have a market for that food. Anyone else want to take a take? We got lots of questions. But if you got a if you got a hot take on large companies and their genuine or lack of genuine commitments to regen ag, I'll avoid that rabbit hole, but happy to talk after. Yeah, yeah. Come on up if you want to talk about that afterwards. This is a quick definitional question, which I realize we maybe should have done this at the beginning. Anyone here want to take a quick stab and try and do this short? But what does a regenerative value chain look like? And what are the top three qualities that define a farmer enterprise to be regenerative? There are a lot of conversations about the definition of regenerative these days. But if somebody could give like the we're not trying to be the the answer, but for anyone in the room who maybe isn't used to using that word regularly, Jesse, I would say regenerative is like you're adding value back to the ecosystem that you're working within. Whereas sustainable would be you are keeping that ecosystem sustainable without necessarily adding value back to it. And is that might relate to a farm? What would that look like on a farm? Mark. So all the practices touch people, planet and product. And it's circular. And you're trying to reinvest. And all those variables are considered whatever the practice where there's livestock. So you're building the soil, building the soil, the cattle are used to for impact on the soil. So that you regenerate the soil, the chickens are part of the process the pigs like it's a system you respect the systemic model that we all that we all really live in, despite these artificial models. And and that's important. But the money needs to follow the same path. And that is the problem. I don't know if anyone else here has experienced this, but I was speaking with somebody recently who said, Hey, in the US, the word regenerative has kind of risen to the top for this. But abroad, oftentimes people use the word agroecology, which I find actually slightly easier to as a framework, like to to think about the whole ecology because ecology is a system, right? But regenerating the system agroecology kind of words interchangeable. I would be remiss, though, there's there's some politics around that word. I just put it out there. Great. So a lot of the practices that are now quote regenerative are traditional practices by indigenous and Africans and other people. We work with people in Alaska and Pacific Islanders and Latinos. And these are practices, people that are ancestral practices that are being rediscovered. I'm not saying they're not being elaborate upon, but they're being rediscovered. So just a word and we have agroecology and all these other. I'm just saying there's an important recognition of the origin of some of this stuff and then the elaboration of it that this should be. Yeah. In your best conversations, you'll hear this talked about as a return to practices that ages ago and generations ago, everyone knew needed to happen to take care of the land. And then there's been multiple revolutions since that have stripped that from the culture. It's a good one. All right. Question across the board. How can we change the paradigm of high risk, high return in the ag space? Should we change it? If it's high risk, I should get high return. I want to push on this word should in some ways. Sure. I didn't write it. No, no, no. In our planning, I think it's in some ways related to the intention question that we were just talking about where asset holders, anyone who's investing is optimizing within whatever their set of priorities are. And that is a fact, right? Some people, some asset holders have priorities that are charitable, outweighing the financial, are willing to sacrifice, able to sacrifice, higher risk, lower nominal return, move across the risk adjusted return spectrum. That's fabulous. That should be celebrated. Those asset holders that can, I would say, should charitable capital sources should be willing to accept the additionality of moving off of a market rate risk adjusted return continuum. There is additional impact that can be had from that capital. It is precious. It helps create new systems that don't exist today. And most investment dollars out there are constrained within this risk adjusted return continuum, right? Where additional risk means either additional return or liquidity. And I think fortunately, there's a lot that can be done within that constraint to help drive us towards more sustainable, more regenerative, more just systems, but trying to push as if that those constraints and priorities weren't there in some ways risks us missing the opportunity that exists within them. I would just add that for an impact for seeking investment, just expanding the view of what return means. So some percent of financial return will come to the investor, but also what is the level of impact return that they're getting and factoring that in so that the risk return balance is not just the risk and the financial return to me, but the risk and the financial return. And maybe that financial return is going to someone else like a smallholder farmer and not necessarily back to the investor. I will give an example. We finance the only regenerative farm in the state of Louisiana, the only one just two years ago. I'm not, it's her work, not mine. But think about how crazy that sounds. So she was telling me, so we started with a little recoverable grant. It was a real loan to her, but for us it was recoverable grant money. Never far before, but had knew how to like navigate the, this is a story which it might be informed informational for people here, but just so she wanted to build a 14 acre tiny farm, cattle, rice, vegetables on 14 acres in Northern Louisiana. And she wanted to sell the hospitals. The soil was so bad and they had no place to get soil. They formed a co-op to buy from Vermont. So this is, this is this part of the country. But we made that loan. We made that 50. I'm thinking about high risk, high return. The risk that we saw was how can we leave this whole part of the country out of this whole movement? And the return is now we have a model. She bought another. We brought some other impact people in. Now she's got 45 acres and it's growing and she's like a learning center for other farmers in Louisiana. So how do you measure that? I don't know. But we took that risk. Yeah, I love that. And that speaks to Jesse's comment about the bucket of capital that says, Hey, I can be over here. I can be this catalytic bucket of capital that can take higher risk on someone who's never farmed before acquiring land that has terrible soil and believe in her vision and say, Hey, it's a recoverable grant for us. If we don't get it back, it's a grant to take that higher risk without necessarily really believing that that high return is going to be there even though you hope it's repaid. So yeah, I love all of those answers. This is probably more of a US question here. Somebody asked, Can you explore discuss the intersection of the impact investing world with policy to drive scale and systemic change such as influencing or not the development of the farm bill? I do a lot of reading about the farm bill, but I'm going to let Mark answer this one because I bet he has. I just want to say we do not lobby. I want to say that because we're 51C3. We educate. And you all heard it here first. No lobbying, just education on Capitol Hill. So these, they are intertwined.  It is the gorilla in the room you have to deal with. We maybe missed that earlier when we were talking about who funds the current system. It is philanthropically subsidized, massively, philanthropically subsidized by our tax dollars. So it's a necessary plan, whether you're an entrepreneur year or an investor, to figure out what your relationship is with policy. You might do it in aggregate, but you need to figure out, you can choose to ignore it, but it needs to be a conscious decision to ignore it. Because it affects your livelihood, it affects pricing, it affects crop insurance, it affects the grants that come to your community, et cetera. And so we're a new firm, Lolita Nan is here, our director of development. Two and a half years ago, I know nothing about this stuff. I never lobby or educate, excuse me, in my life. I have never. And I thought, well, somehow we need to, we need a guarantee so that we could actually support the farmers that we work with and then knock on endowment foundation folks to buy those loans and then do it again. That's the way the other system works. That's what we need it. So we spent time educating House Ag Committee member on both sides of the aisle around the situation on the farmers that we work with. And the dire, they're isolated in the islands all over this country in Puerto Rico and Hawaii with no access to capital. And the way to bring that capital is to invite it in with guarantee support. And I thought, if we could do that, they could come to us rather than XYZ local bank that looks at them crazy. It would change their lives. And no, they could plan their farms to grow and know that they'd have access. So we educated several administrators around language. So there's statutory language. And then there's regulatory language and the statutory language is tied to the Farm Bill, which we are trying to push. There's a pilot to allow alternative lenders to actually get access to these guarantees for underserved farmers and climate-friendly people. So everybody in here could use this if this happened. And it was underutilized in the last Farm Bill. We're trying to re-up it in the new one and also expand it. Big deal. That's a big deal. Why? Because the banks have a cabal. You can stop me. I'll stop you in a moment. But just the banks get guarantees, 95% guarantees, and they sell the loan as soon as you walk out the room. And I just told you the default rates. That's just ridiculous. But we could actually use those guarantees for new entrepreneurs that are sitting in this room and people trying to change the system. And so we had to pay attention to policy. So the short answer is absolutely essential. Those in the impact investing space, in the food space, in the US, so much money flows through that Farm Bill and through federal aid to the agricultural industry that if you're ignoring policy, you're ignoring it at your own peril. So absolutely essential to the space. Awesome. This is an optimism question. So across the board here, although in the private equity space, so that's slightly different perhaps than what we've been talking about so far. But have you seen successful private equity strategies for regenerative agribusinesses? If so, which strategies? Somebody launching a firm. How have you been able to mitigate risks? This just says in an equity strategy. So I'm not sure if that's an adventure type equity strategy or a more of a buy and hold by a dismantle. But anyone successful private equity strategies? Sure. So we've seen a range like starting from venture through growth equity up to like more mature industries bordering on real asset funds. This is like a longer conversation that I'm happy to have afterwards. But I think finding businesses that have either started doing some really captivating regenerative or sustainable practices practices, investing in them and then helping to grow that vertical or that form of sustainable practice. We have a real asset manager in the room now who was just chatting earlier today about finding farm businesses that are doing amazing sustainable things and helping bring scale to them through equity capital and growing those practices. There's a lot there. There's a lot of those smaller things happening though the acquisition may be a large company or a large asset helping to sort of grow those practices or is a big impact and a big potential financial gain as well from that approach. I'll maybe just wrap us up because I think we're out of time. So we're going to need to wrap up with promises that will all stick around for a moment or two and I think are all here for a couple of days. So happy to have more conversations. But the wrap up I would give to the equity side of things is the most successful strategies are the ones that match the type of equity with the type of business the best. The ones that don't succeed are the ones who come in with venture capital or who expect to raise an entrepreneur expects to raise venture. But venture expects an outcome in five to seven years. They want you to IPO. They want you to to go public or to be acquired. And if you're not running the type of business that's going to go public or get acquired you shouldn't take venture investment. And so the most successful private equity strategies in the regenerative space are the ones that that match the type of capital with the type of business with the market with where the market is today. And so I think that's the other mismatch sometimes across the spectrum is that the the market may be here and you want a private equity strategy that wants the market to be here. And if they're not there yet you need a catalytic capital strategy to get us from here to there before your private equity strategy is going to be super effective. So I'm not sure where this person was in the spectrum or what they're looking to do. But I've I definitely have specific examples I'm happy to share of private equity that has worked really well in the regenerative ag space. I'm happy to share this another time.


The National Leadership of Uruguay Development Association has identified those killed in the Tuesday night attack on Amchavillage, Uruguay, Chivdom, Bassa local government area of Plata State. The body said 18 people lost their lives in the latest incident, which residents said last set for over two hours. Given the statistics shortly after returning from the affected community with other officials of the association, the National Publicity Secretary, Uruguay Development Association, Davidson Malison, said while other people celebrated triumphant entry of the year 2022, the Uruguay people entered the year with a lot of unpleasantness.


The president's budget proposal eliminates public media funding. Learn how you can help at lptv.org slash action. One Park Rapids community member has made quite the impact at the Hubbard County food shelf. After reading a local newspaper article about the food shelf's need for a new freezer, the anonymous person with a summer home in the area decided to help out. The man talked to the director of the food shelf on Thursday and then decided to cut a check for $11,000. The freezer is so old the non-profit can't find the parts to repair it and they also couldn't afford a new one. We have other maintenance issues we want to take care of going forward and etc and try to make ourselves more efficient but this is a huge step in that direction. The food shelf says it has ordered the new fridge and it should be installed by the end of next month. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.