- Speaker #0
Today I'm in Switzerland, just about 20 minutes outside of Zurich, to meet with a regenerative farmer called Peter Fröhlich. He transitioned his family farm to regenerative about 10 years ago and he offers a really unique and really interesting perspective because he's a farmer with hands-on experience but he's also a businessman with a scientific background and that allows him to bring together these three different elements. And we get into a really deep and detailed conversation about his farming system, about his rotation, about his use of machinery, of cover crops and many things like that. But at the heart of the conversation is the concept of outcome-based farming systems, where we talk about why it might be detrimental to focus too much on the tools and the practices of farming, and why it might be a better idea to focus more on the outcomes we expect from farming. and allow farmers to use every tool in the toolbox that they have to make that happen, but in a way that works for them, for their specific context, for their specific system, for their specific climate. I'm not going to tell you too much more in the introduction, but trust me, this is a really interesting conversation. I personally learned so much from it. We get quite deep and quite technical about a lot of key topics. So stick around until the end, and thank you for watching. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I'm your host, Raphael,
- Speaker #1
and this is the Deep Seed Podcast. Hi, Peter.
- Speaker #2
Hi, Raphael.
- Speaker #1
And for a little bit of context for people listening, we are sitting right now 20 minutes outside of Zurich in Switzerland, at your family farm, which you told me last night has been in your family for many generations. Is that right?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, I don't know how far back, but probably to the Romans. So pretty long term. We know of the first records somewhere around the year 1000. And since then the family's here has been one farm got split up over time, obviously. But still, this part here is remaining as a family farm. Yeah,
- Speaker #1
that's incredible. That's really incredible. And so you very kindly hosted us last night. Us is me, my wife, Natalia and my little dog Ginzu. And we just embarked on a six months journey across Europe to meet pioneer regenerative farmers all across Europe. And this is our very first stop. And you very kindly hosted us last night. So thank you for that.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, that's great. It's great having you. Thanks for being here. So yeah, let's see what we can look into. Maybe we go to the fields even afterwards. Let's see.
- Speaker #1
I like to start a conversation really strong with this one question. If there's one key message you'd like people to hear today, what would it be?
- Speaker #2
Well, I would say it is that we as a society cannot fail on implementing regenerative agriculture, because that's our ecological income, I feel. So it's really something that matters enormously. And it's not only about the food, it's also about our environment. And actually, You know, I feel that we're currently when it comes to climate and biodiversity, more looking at what we lose and what our cost items are, and not so much on the revenue. And I'm sure that region ag is able to manage this in a way it has to be. So we should start to swap from just looking at cost into what's our revenue and also drive that one.
- Speaker #1
You're talking about ecological income and revenue here. Could you expand on that?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, so if you look at the state of our planet, or let's call it differently. biomass productivity of our earth is pretty much linked to our cost items. So if you see what we're using at a society, it's actually everything biomass based.
- Speaker #1
So when you say using you mean everything we consume, products, energy, everything.
- Speaker #2
And let's for example look into concrete, you could say okay stones. But no, because when you sit in front of that rock, how do you actually work it? you need biomass you need something to heat it that's either oil gas coal wood and so on and that's all biomass so people don't actually make the link of Oil, gas, coal, plastics, petrochemicals, medication, wood, any fiber that you could think of, textile, food, that this is all biomass-based. And even a concrete and iron, you couldn't work without biomass. So pretty much all we use is biomass-based. In history of Earth, compared to the peaks in biomass productivity, we have reached a level of less than 50%, constantly declining. And when that's what we use, then that's our ecological income.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so you say productivity, so the amount, let's say, each year that the Earth is producing biomass, and how much we actually use.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, if that's in balance, we're fine. Then there's no excess climate emissions. because you produce as much as you use, which puts it back in balance. Right now, farmers are just looking at the biomass productivity of the sellable yield, not of the entire plant productivity. And the slash in biomass productivity we have seen is mainly related to deforestation. And even when you look at latest climate calculations, that's still a large chunk land use change and deforestation obviously. So what we actually want to do is to create the awareness of the farmers that there's more than just a sellable yield. That you really should grow plants on every meter square on your farm every day to maximize its predictivity. And that's what Region Ag can do.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so it's not just about producing the sellable crop. It's about producing biomass in every possible form.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, and I would even call that ecosystem services. You can then... I see it on my farm when I look back. So with the biomass increase, with the more plant growth, you have also the biodiversity, the soil, everything coming back. So it's positively linked. So in many cases, we see extensification as a solution. And my personal belief is that that's a mistake. We need to have intense productivity on the fields, but we need to focus on the entire thing and then the ecosystem to have the positive effects more than the negative ones. And we can do that. So I can clearly demonstrate on my farm that with region ag approaches this is possible. But it's more complex than just doing a bit of no-till or doing a bit of cover crops. This goes much beyond this.
- Speaker #1
Okay, I suggest that we come back to this. bit later because there's so much to discuss here but this was just an introduction question i like to ask and now we're going to rewind just a little bit and talk about you i'd love to hear more about your personal story okay my personal story so i i grew up on this farm um yeah
- Speaker #2
um my life is all about all about farming let's say in the first place so i grew up here i started um yeah helping on the farm from little kid onwards i started doing farm work here like really 10 years plus i was mostly on the farm next to being in school i could talk about child labor here but i had a good education so no worries it was all fun for me um and yeah i didn't actually I was doing an apprentice as a farmer, as you do it over here in Switzerland. So I was two years on different farms. One year I was on a farm that was one of the founders of IP Swiss. That's like an eco scheme in Switzerland. It's now more than 20,000 farmers. So more than 30% of Swiss farmers are in that scheme. Which is great. And I learned a lot there already. And then I continued to study agronomics. I started to work first in the dairy industry in breeding. I was a passionate cow breeder. And I also owned some of the most prestigious cows of Switzerland. And then completely went for traveling to South America for a year. came back and then went into crop production. So I joined Syngenta, which some call the evil. I don't see it that way. It's just a business that's trying to help farmers to be productive. causes today too many side effects. So we need to become smarter than this one. But I was working there first in the crop protection part, but then also in trying to find a combination between crop protection and seeds. And then I studied or I did an MBA at the University of St. Gallen. and started my own company called AgriCircle that we want to transform now in a new venture called AgriPurpose, which shall become a purpose venture to actually serve the market in terms of outcome measures on how well you work with the ecosystem. So actually on outcomes of regenerative agriculture.
- Speaker #1
Okay. And then how did you eventually come back to the family farm and
- Speaker #2
take over the farm here well that was a process so i always wanted to do that um it was more about the money side so um and i think that's still a problem we have in general in farming i mean it's not the job it's the most important job on the planet i believe but earning a good living is hard so yeah i took advantage of all my curriculum and actually earned quite a lot of money. And yeah, then came back and started working on it alongside the AgriCircle venture. worked well at that time because my dad was helping me a lot. And also I had an employee here helping me. So I was pretty much doing the management but not too much more. And now my dad became older, I'm doing more and more. but it's actually a good complementary part to what I'm doing with AgriCircle and I'm starting to do with AgriPurpose because I'm working the soil, I'm working everything. My farm is also nice because it's like a valley so you can really see what's happening on both sides of it and you can see if something is not working well in a field very like you don't need to fly a drone you just see it. Knowing every meter square of that farm helps me a lot to relate it to satellite data and to what could be correlations that could actually work out. And I think that bridge, that's what I'm doing well. And it's what I only can do by also working the whole thing. So there's benefits in what I'm doing in terms of me being on the land. So I think, yeah, that just makes it probably... more successful than what others can deliver.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so you have this combination of being a farmer and working the land.
- Speaker #2
Exactly.
- Speaker #1
And at the same time, having this business and science aspects to the work you're doing as well. Yeah,
- Speaker #2
and really looking into all these correlations and so on. If you're just looking at it from the data science piece, I still feel you miss out on a lot of things. Because not everything that you should know... about the land is in the data we have available today. So that's one side that helps me enormous. And the other one is, when I started to dig into regenerative agriculture, I really wanted to understand and measure what I'm doing, if that works, or if I'm just thinking it works, because between you think it works, and it works, there's a big difference. And I see that a lot on farms that they think it's great, but then we see it's not so great. Or the opposite, they think it's not so great, but it's actually great. And getting clear data and good feedback on that one is very helpful.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so would you say that creating a healthy regenerative farming system is a balance of being a farmer and sensing what's happening on your farm on a daily basis and also having the data and the science and finding that right balance between these two but not rely too much on one or the other exactly i think that's it um if we want to be quick and and there's one thing that i see is we
- Speaker #2
should not trust too much into science we should start to trust more the farmers because when it comes to regenerative agriculture Farmers are much ahead of scientists. And so scientists can only validate what farmers are doing because they know their job best. That's why I'm also a bit of anti-defining region ag in terms of tools or measures, in terms of tools or field tasks that farmers should kind of start doing, because there's much more to it. So to fill that with some knowledge. So when you look at farming here in this place, I have all my neighbors here. So it's a small, not even a village, just five farms. And each one has about the same characteristics, I would say. But when it comes to the soil carbon, still there was a big difference. So let's say... The farms had about the same amount of animals. They had about the same crops being grown. They had about, yeah, kind of the same soil tillage, the same varieties. Everything was pretty similar. But my dad was always the one that had more SOC in the soil than the neighbors. That means that a healthy soil is just more complex to achieve than using the right tools. It is really about almost some magic you need to perform to actually bring it to life. And that made me aware that there might be more than just toolkits that farmers should adopt. So that is one important angle that I always try to defend and make people aware of. Region Ag is not so much about the tools used. It's more about the contextualized implementation. of the different steps along the cycle the cropping cycle and that's much harder to to grasp than just some tools being being used and when you when you say tools you don't necessarily mean physical tools you mean um well i mean physical tools but it can be digital tools so it can be a plow it can be strip tail it can be no-till it can be cover crops it can be different fertilizers it can be microbiology compost tea whatever you need as activation micro minerals to be spread on leaves yeah it can be any of those tools in in our case i think what my dad made different to the neighbors is a bit more patience meaning never entering a soil when it's too wet not working it when it's too dry so that's you can do a lot by you you can actually, that's a bit strange maybe to many people, but you can actually build soil with a plow if you do it correctly compared to the status quo. And that's something that's not in a lot of people's heads, but it should be there because it's really about the how and not about the what too much.
- Speaker #1
Okay, yeah, very interesting. Could you tell us a little bit more about the farm? How big is it and what is it?
- Speaker #2
is your system like so we have a 30 hectare family farm around about um and we grow six crops on it so we have uh not a stable rotation but i'm checking that every that I'm never closer to having the same crop every four years. So we grow pumpkins, sugar beets, oilseed, grape, wheat, corn, some grassland. Yeah, and once in a while also barley, depending on the year. So pretty... special crops so it's pumpkins it's a vegetable that's not simple to grow and then yeah also oilseed rape sugar beets that's rather um i would say um not difficult but yeah others call it difficult crops to grow so they're they're a challenge in a sustainable system let's call it like this yeah
- Speaker #1
i would love if we could dig a little bit deeper into this because for me this is still very new this you concept of rotation and why you choose certain crops in one border, depending on what market. So maybe you could go talk us through the different stages of your rotation and explain the thinking behind it.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, I mean, what I'm trying to mix always is a spring crop with an autumn crop. So you have one year an autumn crop and the next one a spring crop that helps you to regenerate the soil better.
- Speaker #1
So you can only have one cash crop a year? Yes. It's not possible to do?
- Speaker #2
No, it's not like in Brazil where they do two or three. Okay. Now we have one crop and then we have to cover crops in between. So in the past, how it worked is you were growing a kind of... cash crop and then you left the soil empty until the next one and then well with the winter crop you covered it over the winter one year and then the next year it was empty over winter and that we have changed from actually doing that to it being covered all the time And by all the time, I'm really talking all the time. So for example, we even do a no-till buckwheat after cereal harvest in July to then plant. oil seed rape in end of August. So that gives me a month for six weeks about to actually grow something and I don't leave my soil open for six weeks or my fields open for six weeks.
- Speaker #1
And that buckwheat has time to grow or you use it specifically as a cover crop?
- Speaker #2
It's a cover crop, it has time to become hip high. and I then use it to actually cover my soil so that I don't need a herbicide for the oilseed rape anymore.
- Speaker #1
Okay. And what do you do with the buckwheat before you?
- Speaker #2
Nothing. It's just like rolled down.
- Speaker #1
You roll it down and then you...
- Speaker #2
And then I plant the oilseed rape into it. Okay. That's one of the innovations we're doing. So this is, well... because others do till the soil and then they do a sub-sowing another crop into the OEC drape another crop mix and that's to my understanding less well it's different but it's working less well than what I'm doing yeah let's keep going uh you mentioned pumpkin pumpkins it's another one so usually pumpkins is leaving a lot of soil open so how i'm doing it is i usually do it after cereals so they get harvest july let's say this year and then i would do the pumpkins in may 2026 so they're pretty late so i'm doing a very quick growing first cover crop right after cereal harvest. And then I destroy that beginning of September for one that is actually growing over winter that I directly till into this. And I try to do that in a way that I have some biomass remaining that's dead, like big sticks and so on. because that's houses for insects to actually survive winter. So it's kind of like their house, let's call it. So I have that mixture. And then in spring, I actually fertilize the interim crop. That's my fertilization. And then that one, I kill it with glyphosate because you either have to... kind of till it because it's the grass that's surviving. So you have to go in with a rotary hoe or something or then you have to kill it with chemicals. So I use two liters of glyphosate to kill it and then I do strip till. into it so I only till the soil about 10 centimeters large every 1 meter 40 and the rest I and then I drill the pumpkins into it roll it after this And then I actually have the cover crop covering the entire soil, the entire year almost. And the pumpkins growing nicely out of it. So that's also a way to do herbicide. Well, it's not herbicide free because I use... glyphosate to kill the grass. It's a rye actually. But yeah, so I always say some death, you need to die.
- Speaker #1
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's so complex. Like you just described only one year of a rotation and there was so much going on there. So you mentioned that after you wheat in July, right? You planted a first cover crop. What do you plant then?
- Speaker #2
It's a mix of 20 species, very quickly growing. A large part of it is Ostinian hemp. kind of i don't know the name anymore and it grows a shit loads of biomass okay like uh it's crazy it's it's becoming tractor high so like a two meter cover crop a lot of biomass and then i just drill um a second one into it over winter that has about 15 components into it yeah you mentioned the second one but i was wondering what the yeah i mean the first you know when you when you roll a plant and it has been flowering it usually dies because it has done its purpose kind of for to propagate so it has flowered when you roll it then it kind of more like a field so
- Speaker #1
let me check if i understand so like later so after that first cover crop has grown properly and you want to um see them a second one into it yeah while you do that you also roll it down yeah and so you're planting the the second one while this one is being rolled down and it automatically dies because it's been exactly
- Speaker #2
flowered already before when you don't have this thing with the grasses then it's pretty easy to to actually kill kill some plants when they have flowered so that's that's also something i could be doing for the overwintering piece that i would have something that would be flowering and not a grass but it's just not producing not even close in terms of biomass your grass or not no if you have no grass inside it's really like um if you grow a grass it's about you twice as much biomass that you can have in the same time okay and um that to me is very important because i'm looking after biomass okay you want to maximize biomass so the first the first cover crop is a mix of 20 different species i guess yeah it's first of all it covers the soil during that period very quickly especially in the summer when
- Speaker #1
it's really hot and dry um it has all of these different benefits you have all different species some a high some low some big roots some wide roots and it really really works for you and then the second uh mix or second cover crop is more of a grass because you want to maximize biomass production exactly and it's also you know that the biggest sequestration we see is usually on grassland and
- Speaker #2
what you're doing there is first of all you are um you are not tilling the soil anymore like nature would actually also do it. And then secondly, you have different growth phases. And I think it's important to have both if you want to build soil, not only to have the diversity, but also to have different growing phases. I think the more you have, the better it is. So I have a friend of mine, Gerhard Weisheupel, he's even going into three or four times that there is more regrowth. Not sure that's better. I don't know it actually. So it could be. so i think we should not only talk about cover crops but also how many times you have a regrowth over the year because that's adding into sequestration i believe regrowth of that cover crop yeah how does that work well you usually kill it then you plant the second one not in a way not in a way that you till the soil so how we're doing it is first of all we're not tilling the soil after cereals so it's a direct it's a no-till operation of the cover crop into it it, which we have seen is also better in dry conditions. So when you drill deep enough, it really always, even if there's almost no water, it gets it high. And then you directly drill the next one into it. So never any touch in terms of soil tillage, apart of the no-till drill that does a little bit of soil work, but really just a little bit.
- Speaker #1
Okay. And then before you plant your next crop, which is the pumpkin, in this case, you said like there you need to kill the grass and the grass, it's like, there's no way around it. You need to kill it one way or another. And you said it's either you plow it in.
- Speaker #2
A lot of plow. No. Well, there's three options. One is a rotary hole where you kind of just mix it with the soil. So you go like five to 10 centimeter deep and mix it in. I did that also. Then I usually use some microorganisms that I spray before that operation. And then I do that. And, uh, that's helping to digest the plant because now you're putting a lot of plant material into the soil and that's also not a natural process yeah so you're trying to help it with some microorganisms that this goes quicker that can really kick start the biology but the downside is you need to have about two weeks of the right weather that can play against you and you're leaving the soil open for two weeks about and then you drill the next one in and then it still has to grow yeah And when it's pumpkins, that means I have 1.40m of nothing. So, okay, I would have to sub-sow something into this. And I'm doing it just like I use 2 litres of glyphosate, which is really not a much.
- Speaker #1
When you say 2 litres, is it per hectare?
- Speaker #2
That's per hectare, yeah. That's 2 litres of glyphosate per hectare. So that's 720g of active. In most cases, people use way more.
- Speaker #1
way more but when you acidize it nicely and everything that's way enough and so the thinking is that if you look at the system as a whole everything you described here if you want the whole thing to work in this case you choose to use a little bit of glyphosate yeah a little bit of poison because it allows the whole system to click and to work and as a whole in the balance of the negative the small negative you get from that poison but all of the benefits you get from everything else it's worth it in the best well you know i i think
- Speaker #0
What I see is establishing a crop how we do it today is a very unnatural process. And somehow you have to do that. I believe glyphosate, I mean, the glyphosate metabolites of it, not the glyphosate itself, but the first metabolite, which is called AMPA, is actually having antibiotical kind of properties. So it's an antibiotics. So you should be careful with it. My philosophy is you should never spray that on the soil because that's your digester. And we know taking antibiotics is not the best for your gut. So same for the soil. So you're trying to minimize this. And so I only sprayed on plants. It should be all green when you do it. That's the first principle. And then never more than three liters. Never, never. I mean, this is never sprayed on a crop you harvest. I mean, this is to me a complete no-go and it's done in many parts of the world. So it's called desiccation, where you try to dry a cereal. Or then it's the non-GMO crops where you spray it onto to kill the stuff in between. And it's known that when you do that, the mineral profile of the crop that you grow is changing. So you have less minerals in the food, which is bad. And so I think it's a lot about how we're going to use it. it so i don't see a proper use of the gmo part i think that's really bad we don't need it and i don't see it that it would be applied on soil so when you do these treatments in the summer where you have just a few bad weeds that you want to kill i mean this is a no-go there's also new technology where you could only spray it and the plants in this case like selective yeah you fly with a drone you detect it or you have sensors on the machine to detect it then it's also okay. But yeah, never on the soil.
- Speaker #1
Because this is something that sparks a lot of debates, right? The whole glyphosate topic. And it's always, as most debates these days, very polarized between one side that will say this is toxic, this causes cancer, and this should be completely forbidden. And the other side that says, we don't have alternative, we need this for farming, and you can't do that. But what you're saying here is that there's a very nuanced in between. That makes more sense.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, and it's, I mean, glyphosate is a pesticide yeah but when what i'm a bit confused about is we use a lot of herbicides in farming and it's actually the most eco-friendly herbicide that we have so let's say you take out the glyphosate what you're going to use is more poisonous more um and more cancerogenic everything so you're actually well let's say it's unnatural to spray something like this but then currently NGOs and everyone targets the best out of the bad. So maybe you should start with some, some others because they're really bad. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. And that's more of how I think what I'm trying to do in farming is to, um, use the least of the bad. So trying to actually, so for example, we went into laser weeding. So we have been killing weeds with lasers on this farm, actually on a friend's farm close to here. So that to me is the future for it, because let's face it, hoeing. It's a very bad operation. And especially on this farm, I don't like to hoe. What's hoeing? It's usually what you do to kill weeds. So you go in with iron, with a machine that actually tills the soil about two to three centimeters deep to kill the weeds. And you usually do that when it's dry. So you have a lot of dust, which is actually wind erosion. So you lose a lot of soil. And here we have all our fields are a bit, have some little slope. And what we see when there's a heavy rain after the tillage, we lose a lot of topsoil. It's getting washed away. I personally don't like hoeing at all. And that's more or less one of the main operations in organic farming. On this farm, very bad. So we're trying to minimize it or not do it. Yeah, and that just leaves you with a certain set of potential options. And I believe there we should really talk about what's the least of the bad. Because, for example, hoeing, you exposed the the dark soil and what then usually happens is that heats up a lot. So you have two effects. One is you kill the weeds, they dry out, but second you kill all the organics in the topsoil. So not organics but all the life because it heats up more than 40 degrees and we also die when we have more than 40 degrees so soil life is dying and when it's beyond 60 degrees which usually happens you start inactivating weed seeds. And that's what people like about it. But it's very bad for the soil. So we should start also thinking about all these things and their real impact, not just thinking, oh, the organic thing is great, and the other one is bad. It's really about balancing what is the... ecological impact of all that thing and how can I minimize all that in my operations which are by far not natural so establishing a crop as we do it today is not a natural process that's just something we do but it's far from being what nature would be doing
- Speaker #1
Yeah, you could argue that farming is not a natural process.
- Speaker #0
Well, there you come, what is natural, you know, what is artificial and all these discussions, but it's not a process that nature would actually do.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, that it could be a great way to start talking about the concept of outcome based systems. Because here, we're talking about different tools, or different methods that we can use to get results. And whether it's plowing, weeding, howling, or if it's using some chemicals. And I hear more and more that instead of telling farmers, okay, you should do this, or you should not do that, or you should not use this product, we should just look at the outcome, what gives you the best outcome? Maybe you could explain that a little bit.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I mean, I'm one of the founding farmers of the European Alliance for Region Agiata. And now we have this I mean, there were 70 farmers in a room, I would say some of the most advanced. I mean, there might be others. I'm not excluding here some others. We invite them to join, Yara. So, but what we have been, there's farmers from all spectrums. So it's like holistic management. It's like eco-scheme farming. It's organic. It's... conservation ag, all the streams are there. And we were about defining what region ag is. And we even struggled with the five or six principles, how they're defined by Gabe Brown and others. So what we said is, in a sense, region ag to these farmers or to us is, first of all, context specific. So it's different on my farm here close to Zurich. than it is somewhere in the south of France or in Portugal or up in Sweden or in the east anywhere. It can be even very different just 15 kilometers from here, which it is by the way. And then it's outcome based. So you really should check what is the things that are the result of your operations in terms of yield, in terms of inputs, in terms of biomass productivity, in terms of soil cover, soil health and so on. And it's a life enhancing process of continuous improvement. So you want to enhance the life on your farm. And the life is mainly in the soil. So we know today 60% of all the species and of all the life is below the surface. So first priority, soil health. And there actually the nice thing is most important with soil health is soil organic carbon. And that's then kind of linked to the climate debate. That's how a healthy soil is linked to climate. But not only this, because that's also the power of life in the soil, let's call it. And the more life there is in the soil, the more life is going to be created above it.
- Speaker #1
Could you maybe just... Yeah. explain that in a little bit more detail the relationship between soil health and soil organic carbon and climate well so about 60 to 70 percent of the soil
- Speaker #0
health is determined by the soil organic carbon that's in it and that's actually the humus so it's a complex thing that hard to define some people say It's not even existing, but so it's the soil organic carbon that's in the soil. Now, when you measure it, you go for a percentage of that soil organic matter in your soil. And you're also going, you need to give it a weight. So you're also going for a per volume weight. That's called the bulk density. When you measure bulk density, you're measuring more soil health parameters because the more dense your soil is, let's say you have soil A, stays the same. The more dense it is, the more compacted it is, the less water infiltration can happen, the diverse is the soil structure. That's something I see on my farm clearly. So there's a link. So actually by going for the soil organic carbon, you're measuring most of the soil health that you need to measure. And now when you have more soil organic carbon, that means you have taken carbon out of the air and put it into the soil. Right now we're doing the inverse. We're killing biomass, so we're deforesting, so we have deforestation. And then we even till the soil which reduces or just don't care about how much biomass is growing there. And then we kind of decreased the... the amount of soil organic carbon in the soil. And that's how it's linked to the climate because this releases CO2 and the right operations bring it back and enrich it in the soil. And on this planet you have only life where there's carbon. There's no life and there's no carbon. So more carbon in the soil means more life in the soil, more microbes, more fungi, more everything.
- Speaker #1
Let me take a really short break from this awesome conversation to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast, and that's Soil Capital. Soil Capital is a company that accelerates the transition to regenerative agriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve the health of their soils. They're a really cool company. I'm a big fan of their work, and I'm super proud to be partnering with them for the Deep Seed podcast. Okay, that was great. Then let's get back to the outcome-based conversation.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, outcome-based. So what we're doing, what we're trying to do is to work in the name of the farmer, but also not only the farmer. I think we have, when it comes to outcomes, you need to define what they are. And there's physics. But then there's also finding an agreement amongst the stakeholders that are having to drive this. What we identified is the stakeholders to drive this are the farmers, but it's also the industry. And then even more, it's all the NGOs that are there and trying to make a living out of it by sometimes objecting or at least checking that things are working well. And then obviously, it's always also the internal view of whatever company is that's the employees. So what we're trying to do is create Agri purpose, which is a purpose venture. So what it does is it splits the capital rights from the voting rights. So the voting rights you would have in a general assembly, the ones that decide what happens on a company. And we try to unite in this those four key stakeholder groups to then define with them which outcomes should be actually monitored and to find a way to define them, but to measure and validate them and to improve them. And I think something neutral like this, and we're looking there into just four buckets. So we look at. biomass productivity overall. We look at soil cover overall. We look at soil health, and that includes for us the soil organic carbon. So it's the bulk density plus the SOC percentages, but also pH and macronutrients, because long-term sequestration only happens when those are in balance too. And then last is the efficiency. So what's the yields you have produced? and then we only look into sellable yields meaning if you produce corn on your fields that you use to feed your cows we don't count it in because that's not something you sell so sellable yields that can be any crop it can be milk wool meat whatsoever eggs And then the inputs you have used for that. And we just look at six items. So it's fuel, it's energy, it's nutrients used. So that can be fodder purchased or sold, mineral fertilizer purchased or sold, or actually organics brought to the farm or taken from the farm. Always just what matters to us is the nutrients inside. Water, the crop protection use. We look at money because the stuff is value priced. So it's actually if you use less money, you have less, you have used less, it's harder to do it anyway, any, any, any, with any other stuff. And then it's the animal load, because if it's too low, it starts to harm soils. And if it's too high, it starts to create excess emissions. And that's pretty much it. So we tried to validate on this one. Okay,
- Speaker #1
so sorry, there's so much information. Yeah, I want to make sure that everyone stays on board, including myself. Okay. I'd like to think that I'm in a good position to do these interviews, not because I am. knowledgeable about these topics, but because I'm not, so I can ask the silly questions and make sure that everyone stays on board with me. So you're trying to define the outcomes that we could build an outcome based system on. And here you're just citing all of the different metrics or the different things that you look at to define outcomes. And so you, let's go through them again really quickly. So you talk, first you talked about net
- Speaker #0
primary productivity yeah it's the biomass productivity it's it's linked it's not exactly the primary productivity it's linked to the net primary productivity and what we know is that one is linked a lot to soil health so actually the more net primary productivity you have the the more soil organic carbon you have the healthier your soil and then you have this positive feedback loop finally So the intention is first maximize net primary productivity, then protect this. So the protect is the soil cover. Because what you should try to avoid is that your soil overheats more than 40 degrees. For that it needs to be covered. Never any dark part of the soil being exposed to the sun. Then it actually should not be exposed to water and wind erosion. And that's the cover. So the more time of the year it's covered, the better. And it doesn't count when you have planted something. The thing is when is actually there some green growing or some structures remaining from plants like that you can see with satellite. So these are the first two that we check.
- Speaker #1
So again, biomass,
- Speaker #0
which is biomass, which is linked to net primary productivity and soil cover and soil cover.
- Speaker #1
And that gives you an indicator you get a certain results.
- Speaker #0
So how we do it is we compare those values that the farm achieves with the neighborhood. So we do that automatically. Automatically? Yeah, and anywhere on the planet.
- Speaker #1
With satellite data?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. And that's the cool bit is when you compare the farm with its surroundings, it's actually always context-specific. So there the context-specific comes into the outcome-based. And then it's the continuous improvement because we want those numbers to be improving against the region. And think of it like algebra, like a formula kind of thing. And when you have things on both sides of the equation, they usually... Or you can just take them apart, take them away. So weather and stuff is all the same. So many things are kind of same farm to the region. So you're actually kind of unraveling the fog through this. And what we're then doing is we're always asking the farmer when he's underperforming or overperforming against the region, what he did. And the cool bit is with satellite data, you can look backwards seven, eight years now. meaning we can learn from the last seven eight years what he did okay and then what went well and what didn't and then you get the right focus to start where you need to start first to improve to actually maximize the outcomes yes so it's not only a measure it's also a very nice toolkit to focus and optimize you
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
And then we go and measure the soil carbon.
- Speaker #1
Soil carbon?
- Speaker #0
So that's soil sampling.
- Speaker #1
So how does that work?
- Speaker #0
So with the satellite, we look at the variation of your soil over the last seven years. Then through this we go and sample at the right places. Most do today that it's optimized for just soil carbon, but we know it's more so pH is as important for long-term sequestration as macronutrients, so we want it to be balanced. So we sample where there's most differences. and then that goes to the lab you get a result and with an ai we can then distribute it at 10 by 10 meter okay is that something easy to do for farmers to to take those samples and to well yeah no no we don't want farmers to take it the reason being is we have seen that they there is the potential to trick the system yeah so we don't want them to know exactly where the sampling happens um for a good reason. So it should be external providers doing that because it's finally, hopefully related to money. And then you need to have some safeguards in place. Okay. So we have a sampler doing that. It goes to the lab with the result and an AI. You get the high resolution soil data. Usually see that this can help with fertilization or as I do it, an optimization of the cover crops. So I make an example. When I see that I lack somewhere in phosphorus, Usually there's enough, it's just no plant available. So what I do is I focus with the cover crops on buckwheat, because that kind of frees up phosphorus, we know that. So I put in the mix additional buckwheat, when I know it's a problem there. Or when it's potassium, I put ceradella. So it's like the same, just for the other nutrients. So you can either do precision farming with all the technology, or you use nature to then balance the field. And you need to see and know that. even on small fields like mine, like two hectares, because there's sometimes huge differences. And then when you have the average, it's like having one arm in cold and one arm in hot water, you're just doing the wrong thing everywhere. So we're trying to actually get this addressed. That's what it does. So we see that farmers are moving quicker and it saves them about 100 euros per hectare per year. So it's a lot of money.
- Speaker #1
It's a lot of money, yeah. But so you need a lot of different samples to be able for the model to get the highest results?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, we need three per, as a minimum. So small fields, that's more, but we only go for one third of the fields because with the first step, we identify which soils are the least performing. and then usually you also there have the right focus so you start implementing where you have to do it first so the satellite data tells you where uh you have the biggest problems which are i have the biggest problems in the in kind of which fields yeah and there i do the most intense sampling so again it's the focus for the optimization yeah and then yeah the last bit is when you're maximizing that primary productivity protect what you have produced improve the soil health, then it's actually how efficiently have you achieved this. And there we look into the yields, but only the soil yields, because that's a better link to what are the calories you have produced for human consumption. It's not perfect, because you still can combine, let's say, corn or soy, and it goes into fodder. but it reduces already the all the intra farm kind of processes so let's see you you do corn silage and then you feed it to the cows again we do not care about this we only care then about the milk the meat the animals you have produced yes and i think that's a better link to what's the efficiency in terms of human food production and then we just check what have been the inputs that came from somewhere else to achieve all this okay and that we want to minimize so we want to maximize all the rest maximize the yield and minimize the inputs in our scheme is as long as you are actually improving on those four items you're in the scheme you can have one year down performance Okay, because that can always happen one step back to take two steps ahead. If you have two years, you need to book a consulting and establish an action plan on your farm to stay in the scheme. That's kind of how we were going to do it as AgriPurpose.
- Speaker #1
You have to improve on each one of the four parameters? Or there's a one score that can combine them all? No,
- Speaker #0
each one of them.
- Speaker #1
Each one of them. There's not like a farm score with a formula that combines them.
- Speaker #0
Well, you know, it's just a start, we might come to that conclusion that that's needed. but I see it on my farm. You can achieve improvements on all of them. Okay. If you're actually, and the cool bit about this is you cannot trick it. You cannot trick it. It's really, if you, and as we said earlier, there's a lot of positive coupling with, for example, NPP. I'll give you an example. So if you just grow one crop and you have a dry year and then one crop is sophisticated, it's kind of not so, well, let's say it's highly affected by drought, let's say corn, then you have a huge yield dip. But if you combine that, for example, with grassland or with, um, in this case, uh, I would say what's pretty stable against it is for example, um, Buckwheat is a good example. Just some crops that are really not so much affected by drought. You have a higher productivity. Meaning if you have a more diverse crop rotation over the years you have a higher productivity. If you have more interim crops or cover crops you have more MPP. If they're more diverse, you have a higher assurance that they grow and that they grow more biomass, so you have a higher productivity, meaning you have more diverse plants on your soil that interact with the soil. You have the root exudates, which then help to stimulate the soil life. And we see that this stimulates also the above-ground biodiversity. One thing I know, for example, is in Switzerland, one additional plant is about 11 distinct insect species that come with it. So if you grow more, obviously you have much more insects. And just one example, I had a sampler, a soil sampler on my fields this spring. He was sampling in my neighbor's fields and in ours. And in my fields, they were really bothered by insects. And it's always a good thing when you look upside when you see that. So when you look to the sky, because then you see all the insects flying around.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so when they were doing the sampling, that was really annoying for them. There were so many insects on your farm.
- Speaker #0
And on the neighbor's farms, it was just silent.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, okay.
- Speaker #0
And that's the crazy bit. It comes back real quick.
- Speaker #1
But it sounds like a very, very strong methodology here in the strong system, but it sounds also very complex and advanced and maybe in a way a bit elitist for a farmer who's maybe interested in getting started with regenerative and let's imagine starts experimenting with a lot of these different methods to improve soil health using carbon crops improving biomass improving soil health but then gets a little bit of a productivity dip for example the first year even minor then to be failing by the system's rules would be very frustrating and very yeah well you you know that you
- Speaker #0
there's the point here. It could be but the point and most see a yield dip. And yeah, we have to account for that one. But it's about the efficiency. Most also use much less inputs when that's happened. When it's happening. So overall, there's there's still in our scheme, they're still fine. But what I see is when you start, let's say you do not till It's not that you're suddenly a better farmer because you're using no-till. Because you need to learn to do no-till. And you need to do it properly. And it's not the right fit in every situation. And that brings you again back to outcomes. Yet it's much simpler when you say, I'll do cover crops and do this and then it's all great. It's not how it works, unfortunately. Because you need to learn how to work, for example, with the reminder of the cover crops. How do you use all that to maximize outcomes? And that brings you back to the outcomes. They, as a farmer, give you the guidance what you're doing well and what you're not. And we see in our scheme that sometimes with a plow, you're having much better performance than with an old-till drill. And I believe, that's my personal belief, that we should stop thinking in these silos. So if you do this, you're a great farmer. If you do that, you're a great farmer. No. The art of the thing is that you do the right thing in the right situation. And that's why my dad had more soil organic carbon than my neighbors doing the same things. So it's not only about the tools, it's about how you use them. And there the outcomes help you too. So I truly believe that when you go to how most people want to define regionality, which are the tools, that this is really counterproductive. The point here is that... Why is it counterproductive? It's first because it's the how. And you can even do bad with those tools, but even worse. First it starts like voluntary, then you're getting some money for it, and then you're tied into it. And it could be for whatever reason a completely wrong thing to do. But then since you're getting the money for it, you're tied to it. And you already see it here. That's more than counterproductive, because now you are actually supposed to do something that you as a farmer know it's not gonna work. And that's just not something we should allow to happen. But every time you start defining in an office what a farmer should be doing outside, that's exactly what you do. And we don't need office people telling farmers what to do. They know what to do if they have the right outcomes as their targets. So that's why I'm... very defensive when it comes to someone defining tools to actually boost region region ag it might be good for a start yes to start the journey and so on but then it should not be binding so and that is a bit of the tricky part in all this and all the definitions i see out there We know through Rockefeller Foundation of more than 160 frameworks out there. And most of them have two things in common. Based on tools. Second, they're actually needing a lot of information. And they add cost to that. So because getting more data points is additional cost. And additional cost... It's not what you need when actually someone is not ready to pay more for regenerative products, but you're already starting to do all the monitoring and asking for more to do, which is more cost, with not actually providing in the same time a higher price. And I think that could make us really fail in RegenEgg and as I said at the beginning, We cannot fail on this. It's our ecological income of the future. So we as a society have to get that right. And farmers have to get it right.
- Speaker #1
Thank you so much for listening this far into the episode. And thank you to all of you who have already subscribed to the Deep Seed podcast and who keep coming back week after week to listen to the latest conversations. I really, really appreciate it. If you haven't subscribed yet, this is your opportunity to do so. It only takes about three seconds and it actually makes a huge difference for me and for the podcast. So thank you so much in advance and let's get back to the conversation. So now that we've described in detail the methodology, maybe we could look at the business model that goes with it.
- Speaker #0
So. First of all, I said it's going to be a purpose venture that has like two benefits. One is it's not about the investors. It's really about the stakeholders that align. So what that does is it takes the company kind of out of the shareholder value race. bad for me because I could probably get wealthier if I wouldn't do it this way. But it's like also a lot of money that would usually go out in dividends and so on that will stay in the process. Then it's not being driven by individuals, it's being driven by stakeholder groups. So we said farmers, retailers, NGOs and employees at the same share. So that ensures that the money that this is really something that's for society and that's how i want to build it and the business model is going to be that there's a price per hectare and what is going to be delivered through this is actually this continuous improvement but also then the carbon tracking the carbon like how much emission is there And what that will lead to is kind of two markets to tap into. One is when it's kind of produced this way, we are now talking to the SAI platform and we have their letter of intent that they would give a purchase preference. not a higher price yet, but a purchase preference to produce that's produced regeneratively, which is a big step. Because today you can have produce that's produced regeneratively and And still they go for something else for whatever reason. So that would be binding that they buy those volumes, which in fact, to a certain extent, is a higher price. But not one that materializes in a payment. It's just like you get your volume sold. And we also see that we can couple this with actually call it smart deals, where you're still not getting a higher price, but you're getting... more of what you produce. to be sellable. So with potatoes, what we would, for example, do is that a bit of the larger ones, a bit of the smaller ones, that you could still sell them at the normal A price. So instead of them going into feed, they would still go into human consumption. Just to the level that it would not be more if kind of costly for the processors. And you can do that with many, with almost all vegetables. uh with almost all fruits i would say for all fruits with with nuts with um with many things it's harder for the big grains and so on so they would need to find a solution but that will enable the region farmers to have more income and that's kind of the business model okay i am
- Speaker #1
I need to get back over some of that because so you started by saying there's a price per hectare.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, that's going to be a price per hectare for either the farmer or a processor. We're not so sure yet where to target.
- Speaker #1
They would pay you.
- Speaker #0
They would pay us. And then on the other side, they would get the purchase reference. Okay, so which usually translates into somehow a higher price.
- Speaker #1
So the farmer first has to prove that methodology was used successfully using the metrics that we discussed before.
- Speaker #0
Exactly.
- Speaker #1
They, for your services, pay you per hectare price and then you take charge of selling their products?
- Speaker #0
No, that's still the normal process, but they would get the purchase preference from the buyers.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so you kind of put a stamp on it. Exactly. saying we did the methodology and therefore it gets this preference.
- Speaker #0
Exactly. So we call this approved regenerative. So he would be approved regenerative and then the producer of that farm would have a preference.
- Speaker #1
Okay.
- Speaker #0
And potentially a smart deal which will lead to more money being on the table of the farmer. It's kind of trying to establish it without the need of additional money. You try to work with the money that's already in the system. What you're doing is you're giving those farmers that are transitioning a bit of edge by having them selling a bit of a lower quality. That doesn't matter for you at all, which is just putting more money on the table of the farmer. But overall in the market, it's still financially neutral. Okay. That's the idea.
- Speaker #1
Have you started that program yet?
- Speaker #0
We are about to start it this or next month. That's the idea. So we're still into last funding, but it looks like we're going to be successful and start it within a few weeks.
- Speaker #1
How do you make that attractive to farmers to join the program? Because there's obviously a big shift that they need to make if they're conventional, let's say, and they need to change their system a lot, learn a lot of new tools, maybe invest in tools as well. There's so much to be done for them. Do you feel like the incentive is strong enough for them to do that?
- Speaker #0
Well, in theory, you're right. In practice, not. So the point that the framework does is it gives you the right focus. And it makes you start at the right place. And we need constant improvement. So we're not looking for the big shifts, we're looking for the small steps. So in a sense that what we're doing is not radical. It's... Also, it's transactional. It's not transformational in the short term. But when you improve 3% each year, let's say 3% each year, you're twice as good in a lifetime. So what we want them to do is to make the little steps, but the right ones, the ones that influence the outcomes the most. And So, in a sense, that makes it the least complex to actually embrace the journey. Because you know where to start, most likely how to do it, and then that's also cost-efficient, because you start at the right point with the right activities. We have one more advantage, which is the first year is baselining, so you're in the program already, and it gives you time. and then you can have one down performance so in a sense year three is really what matters okay so you get some time and you're still already in the program and can earn maybe even more money already i believe that's a great incentive to join. But then you're right, it's actually a bit of a trap. Because once you're in, you need to really change something. It's, you know, you could do a bit of no-till with no effect. That's not gonna work. If your no-till has no effect, you're not improving. That means you need to find ways to improve. And that's a different level than just putting some tool in action. It's to use that tool and put it in action in the right way. And that's a different level. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So you get more... time to perform, but you will need to perform. But I think that's also what we need as a society. We need farmers to perform and we need to find ways to fund and start this without the need of additional farmers.
- Speaker #1
additional money because no one has just spare money somewhere that you can put into regeneration unfortunately it feels to me i don't know why but as a society like you said as a society we need this so that's that's an interesting point because then as a society we need this it's not just a farmer who needs to do this right it's all of us as a society and you said we don't have extra money but we we know that we're spending a lot of money on the you the negative externalities of certain forms of farming. So it costs a lot of money to society. So wouldn't it make sense to also incentivize this process?
- Speaker #0
Look, absolutely. But it's just not what I'm seeing happening. So we're trying to make this scale without it. It's much harder, obviously. But on the other hand... I see schemes out there that are distributing money not having any impact because farmers are just tricking it and more than you think and do we need that to distribute money with no outcome? So it's two-sided. It's almost like you need this hedge that there are really outcomes improving and you're right you can try to then get more money to these farmers with some tricks we tried to apply. But finally, this should have a price. When when when, let's call it the other way. When farmers are saving the ass of our society, they should be paid for this course. And I got one problem here, which is overall, let's take the helicopter and fly up and then say, hey, Is the depletion of soil smart? And I'm telling you, yes, it is. The long-term kind of molecules of soil carbon is stable between nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon. Releasing carbon from the soil frees up nitrogen and phosphorus. That's free fertilizer. So what actually farmers are doing by reducing the soil organic carbon is they're digging for fertilizer. It's mining for fertilizer. So that reduces their cost. up to a certain point where that kicks back in terms of negative. So in terms of yield instability, low water infiltration, erosion, and all the things we see today. But actually, when you need to pay your bills quarterly, that has not been a bad move. So it kind of gave you edge. So you're using a plow, you're steering up the soil, you're putting temperature into it, you increase mineralization, you deplete soil organic carbon, free fertilizer for your plants and we see that it grows more. And now what we do is we need to bring it back. And by the way we need to bring the nutrients back because N, P and C not K and P and C are still there to form this molecule for the long-term carbon to be stored in the soil. And when I now hear people saying that overall to regenerate is cheaper, then I'm asking, so how can it be cheaper to actually build something instead of mining it? So do we need more money for farmers for regeneration? Yes, we do. because we need to bring back what we have just used and mined as we do it with many other things thinking that's just a free lunch and that the party is going on forever we have come to the point where the party is starting to stop yeah so It's going to cost more. And there is really my kind of message to the consumers. We need to be ready to pay more for healthy and good food. And in fact, you're right, we have externalities and we have also externalities of health about us about our health and paying a bit more for food is also living healthier meaning spending less for doctors so not great news for the health industry but So most likely we should think about the transfer of funds from the health industry to the food industry.
- Speaker #1
Right. Yes, maybe that's actually a really big opportunity because... we have free or affordable healthcare systems in most countries in Europe, at least. So that's already money spent by the state. It's already public money being spent. And so if we could actually spend that money to help people buy healthy, nutritious food that is good for their health, which would reduce healthcare costs somewhere else, maybe there's a lever for action there, no?
- Speaker #0
Absolutely. I mean, it's not only that cost, it's also all the subsidies we pay. to farmers to make food cheap. So yeah, I believe there we have a big opportunity, then we have a big opportunity with less waste. I mean, especially vegetables and so on, we just lose way too much in all the process, especially from the fridge of the consumer. So I think there's a lot there. Maybe just could give food a different value than it has today. It would bring more money to the farmer growing it. would be less extractive and more healthy. So, and that, yeah, that shows the power of regeneration and how important that is for the society. It's not only that we need to solve this on the farm. We need to solve this all in all. And I mean, you know, it also starts to me with what is the value of the farmer in the society. And today it's like almost nothing anymore. Okay, he stinks, he's this, he's that. When actually it's the person managing our environment. which we know is directly linked to our life expectancy, the food we eat, life expectancy and health. And yeah, so it's one of the most important people we should talk to and appreciate, even probably more than scientists, which we kind of think is more important. And then also soil. I mean, soil is our life. It's our kind of, it's the source of life. Just these 30 centimeters of soil organic carbon. And we call that one in many times dirt. So we call our life and what we get created of dirt. Maybe not so smart to give it such a bad kind of nuance as a society. So yeah, I think there's big shifts we need to work on as society.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, big work to be done in education as well and awareness.
- Speaker #0
Absolutely.
- Speaker #1
And I really hope to contribute to that with the podcast.
- Speaker #0
That's the great thing. Yeah,
- Speaker #1
I'm sort of on the edge between trying to have very very dense debt in depth conversations so that even professionals in the food systems could learn new things but i also want it to be accessible to a new audience who who might find this disinteresting and it's a it's a difficult exercise totally i see that i mean for yeah but
- Speaker #0
you see if you want to have in-depth conversations you can talk about a week just how you set a no-till drill
- Speaker #1
perfectly so yeah it's maybe not the level we should be going to in such a podcast so yeah your approach yeah um let's talk uh positives and maybe you could describe some of the things you've seen happening on your farm since you've transitioned to regenerative that really made you think okay this is working this is making me like happy with what i'm doing
- Speaker #0
Oh, there's a lot. So, well, what I've seen is I made, I made a very quick transition from conventional to actually totally regenerative. probably too quick because I had quite some backlash in yield. So it dropped too much compared to what I did. So that also led me to the thinking it's a stepwise approach. But you actually even if it's small steps you're taking, the ecosystem reacts really quick. So you see the soil getting darker very quickly. You see soil structure being there very quickly. Maybe not yet the SOC you would love to see, but already the structure that it can start actually to accumulate. You see insects coming back, lots of animals coming back, birds coming back. So it's crazy, but we have some... some birds here and it's my neighbor and I doing region egg. And the birds are 90% of the time in our fields. If you check it out, they're in our fields and that's not coincidence. So they find more food, probably healthier food also for them. Yeah, I'm also measuring certain things in the soil, so we clearly see that stuff is coming back very quickly. I'm not afraid of any heavy rain incident anymore. So we have some manholes where we try to catch water from the streets and then put it into the river. I'm just almost like... closing all of those because I want the water in my field compared to you did not want that water in your field before because it's just like infiltrated and you can use it.
- Speaker #1
It's like a big reservoir in your soil.
- Speaker #0
It's like a reservoir so you're harvesting the water instead of trying to get rid of it. So yeah and then about input so I was able to reduce a bit of fertilizer not too much because i want to build soil you need fertilizer we talked earlier you need fertilizer to build soil but i was able to reduce quite a part of it 20-30 percent because i'm collecting it from the air with the leguminosis and i reduced heavily in tillage so fuel use was cut more than in half so really a lot less i lose much less machines so that's a cost that's a bit hidden but i'm almost at the point where i don't need a large tractor anymore just a small one which is a huge cost for a farm, especially of our size. And I reduce pesticides by 70%. I still need them in oilseed rape. Because that's just the yield drop is just way too high when you get rid of them. And on the other hand, oilseed rape is a crazy soil improver. So I want to keep it as a crop. So yeah, there's always the pros and the cons in everything. That's what I'm trying to balance. But the shift on the farm is crazy in terms of ecosystem services. But it's also how I'm doing it, the shift is also crazy in terms of how it's different to farm. That farm. It has nothing to do anymore with what we did before. Not much, actually. So it's a very different approach to farming with different problems. And as much as that's great, the one downside is... the old system 50 years of experience my dad myself the new system five to ten years of experience and that means you're just doing more mistakes so um yeah it's all that context specific experience that's still lacking. But the shifts on the farm are crazy. So I would never want to go back to what it was before.
- Speaker #1
How has your father welcomed these changes? He's been farming here for his whole life and his parents before him. How did that go?
- Speaker #0
Not well. But it's not even my dad who is the biggest problem. It's the landowners. So, you know, land in Switzerland is owned by at least half by non farmers, older people. And they just have a different opinion on what is good farming looking like. And for many of them, it's like Aidan McCullen you know a nice field of wheat all plants the same no weeds that's how to do it and for that you need to have a high input you need to spray a lot and the first thing you're doing with regeneration is to do less of it do cover crops and they look once this way once that way and in their eyes that's not looking great So yeah, lots of discussions with them, even more than with my dad. And yeah, also for my dad, it's a challenge because it's more this kind of looking back and thinking, hey, it's not that I have been doing everything wrong, no? So more like, why is he doing everything so different? Did I do everything wrong? And I mean, I was a good farmer, so why should all that I've been doing be so bad? And yet they have a different view on it. Field, perfect, nothing in it, just wheat. I don't want that because you need communities of plants. So I think it's a completely different... view on what good looks like. And that's, that's a challenge. Because it's the entire farming community that needs to see that maybe good looks different than they think it should look like today. And that's, that's a challenge. And you know, in farming, you have this kind of self-cleaning environment where people try to bring you to the normal. And I see a reason for that. So if every farmer would become crazy innovative and do all the stuff they have in their mind, and we would actually completely trash the yield of an entire season. That's a huge problem for society. That would mean no food being created, or much less. And, well, we can import still, but if that would happen large scale, that would be a threat to society. So I think there's a reason that there's this tradition and kind of self-cleaning approach to these operations. So by doing all this innovation, you work against this. But I think it's a very great safeguard that is in there for many things. It's just in what we're doing now, not very helpful. But it's got to be there. So it's not something bad. We're working and we need to appreciate that. Even as very innovative farmers, we need to appreciate that these safeguards, they're there for a reason. It's actually exactly this, that we cannot fail on a yield of an entire season. We have to get it right. It's not like an iPhone production. Well, some would care, but nothing would happen if you cannot produce an iPhone this season. You get it next season. But if you do the same with food, yeah, you get it next year. Well, good luck. Yeah, okay.
- Speaker #1
Okay. Can we talk a little bit about the economics of the farm? Because you said that you reduced inputs in terms of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides. So you have reduced costs on the one hand, and you said that you can maybe look at having a smaller tractor. You have increased costs on the other side, I guess, with all of the seeds you have to plant for your cover crops and things like that. So how does your balance sheet look like now?
- Speaker #0
My balance sheet went through a dip. I had no income from the farm for two years. So nothing a normal farmer would be able to afford. So that's why I'm also looking into these stepwise changes and not the radical ones. so we need to be careful there and help them and i have been reducing a lot of cost in pesticides fuel and partly fertilizer but i've increased a lot in seeds so actually that's more or less quid pro quo so like i i just shifted around the the cost from a to b yeah but that's why i mean that's because i'm using 20 species mixtures and so on and so forth i'm doing two not just one cover crop growth phase. So there's a lot of decisions I have taken to do that. I invested quite heavily into new machines. So on a small farm like mine, 30 hectares, you have quite large cycles till you can replace a machine because you need to use it years on years to actually depreciate it. and I had to invest more than 100k into new machines. Compared to a normal investment cycle, that would be more on the 20k side per year that you could afford. So five times more. Again, you could probably more rent machines and do that differently too. But it shows there's quite some cost chunks to digest. All in all, I would say from now onwards, I'm set for more income. But there has been a valley.
- Speaker #1
And yeah,
- Speaker #0
more income. If I even have more income for the next five years, I won't make up for the loss of the two years. Got to keep that in mind. And again, overall, I think regeneration will be a bit more expensive. From what I told earlier about the depletion of nutrients from the soil, getting free fertilizers versus bringing it back now. So there's overarching a slightly higher price. So somehow we got to find ways to remunerate the farmers a bit more for what he produces. And I think there's enough money in the system. If we tailor it correctly, we can do that.
- Speaker #2
Okay. When you look at the future and we know that we... we're going to have a changing climate that swings harder and harder and a lot of instability in different aspects of society also economically maybe in terms of the price of inputs um do you feel though that despite the the challenges so far that you're better equipped to face these challenges i
- Speaker #0
mean that i'm sure about um and i also believe it's harder and harder the later you start the transition because climate change starts to kick in. And as I said earlier, I'm not afraid of heat waves anymore. They have a yield impact, but not as big anymore. I'm not afraid of water, kind of heavy rains anymore. Not a problem to me. So yeah, there's a lot it helps for. So the long-term effect is totally positive that I'm sure about. But there's this phase where you're going to make mistakes. And I mean, there's always, ah, we can help you with this with consultants. I'm like, tough. Because it's not about the big things. It's not about, ah, you should plant that cover crop. No. It's about did you drill it three centimeters deep or five or seven or just spread it or it's about this how and in one situation just spread it or to kind of trill it into the soil just a little can work in other places you need the five and then how do you set the machine that the furrow is nicely closed and all that stuff that's the stuff it is about it's the nitty-gritty it's the small things that you set correctly or not that make it work or not and that's not too much of what the consultant is going to tell you it's it's more about your experience in the different situations and conditions on actually how the things are working and how do you have to set the machines. And then no one helps you. This is your thing and that's where you will do the mistakes. They will happen. So it's more of a question how do you do that, that you have the learning, the hedge. So this is again, it gets back to doing small steps but the right ones and that's what we have to ensure.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. And so you also mentioned the need for finding extra income sources for regenerative farmers. What are the most promising avenues you've been exploring?
- Speaker #0
I mean, to me, you know, with all the latest things with inflation and everything, I don't see that people are yet ready to just pay more for food. And we see this premium market that's like maximum 15% of the market. The rest is reluctant to pay more. And that's a fact. So the question here is, what's the potential sources of money that you could kind of access without making it more expensive? We talked about health, but that's long term. When you buy food, that's a short term decision. So what I see is really this, we call it smart deals, that you try to give preferred quality schemes or whatever to farmers that are into regeneration so that they can sell a higher share of what they have produced. I believe that's how it's to be done. Yeah, and then another one is really like thinking about all the middlemen and all the, yeah, to shorten the supply chains. I mean, this is, it's also a thing about aggregation, but it's a lot more about market in transparency. and the problem with market in transparency is that the people that are having a benefit of it will fight anything that makes things more transparent so but i believe that could be another source of uh uh yeah access to money for farmers and then we have one less last thing which is i just I'm very sure that too much food is wasted today. And that's also consumer's money. So having less waste and using that money for maybe paying a bit more, so you're not spending more overall, but you're spending more on the stuff you buy, but then you eat it, you actually eat it.
- Speaker #2
that i think would be also yeah creating a lot of money that's kind of a paradox right you said that people are not willing to pay more for good food and then people will waste a lot of that food that they buy cheap because it's so cheap that you then you think well it's fine if I waste a little bit of it, it goes bad in the fridge.
- Speaker #0
The dry bread you throw away or the salad that's just not so nice anymore or the vegetables, instead of somehow using them still and so on and so forth. Yeah,
- Speaker #2
tough.
- Speaker #0
I think their education comes into play again. And we have cut back on all that education that we had in schooling when it comes to cooking and everything. And today it's all about convenience and you do it and if it's not fitting you're throwing it away. It's not about cooking a great meal anymore. You know, I think there's also some corrective actions we have to take. How much do you want to... to invest into the third language people should talk or actually some physics. And it's great if you learn all this stuff. But when you then miss out on the basic and that harms our society so much, then I think we should start rethinking if we have taken the right measures.
- Speaker #2
Completely agree. I completely agree. And maybe education systems will need to change drastically in the coming years with AI and all of that. And maybe that's an opportunity to... to maybe leave out a little bit of the stuff that will be done also, or that is not as necessary to a happy, healthy human life anymore. Um, and, and added, added a bit more of the core essentials of life, like. nutrition and food and where the food comes from and community and relationships and things like that exactly and being able to to talk with each other and i just wanted to come back also to something else you said about transparency some sometimes i feel like when you're looking for the problems in society just suggest more transparency and look at who's fighting it you might get a clue about where the problem lies i totally agree um but yeah anyway we It's been an amazing conversation. I feel like I could just keep talking to you about so many different things. You are incredible with knowledge and your experience. And so thank you so much for hosting me here. Thanks a lot for sharing this incredible knowledge with the Deep Seed community. And thank you very much.
- Speaker #0
Thanks a lot, Raphael. It's been great having you.
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