 Okay, welcome everyone. Thank you very much for taking a few moments of your time this evening to join us for a conversation in Q&A on a really great film. I wanted to just go through a few things with you before we get started. My name is Dan. I'm the Director of Development and Programming for the Bed for Playhouse. I want to really welcome you again to what we're calling virtual Playhouse as our doors are still shut thanks to COVID-19. Hopefully we will be reopening soon, but I want to invite all of you to visit our website, bedforplayhouse.org, for some upcoming programs that we have throughout the rest of this month and into March. For those of you who are using Zoom, who are not familiar with the webinar format, we ask that you please direct your questions using the Q&A feature, which is on the bottom of your screen if you are on a PC or laptop, and it is on, I believe, the top of your screen if you're on your phone or your iPad. We ask that you don't really use the chat feature as it gets a little bit confusing for the panelists. So if you have any comments, thoughts, any questions at all, please feel free to post them in the Q&A and we will get to as many of them as possible. I want to thank all the folks on our panel tonight, and especially the folks from Bed for 2030. We do this because we feel it's important, and the partnership between Bed for 2030 and the Bed for Playhouse is one that we hope to keep going for the foreseeable future. So with all that being said, I would like to introduce from Bed for 2030, Midgey Oreo, who is going to introduce you to the moderator and the panels and has a few words. Hi, Midge. Hi, Dan, thanks a lot. Floor is yours. Hi, Dan. I'll start over again. Let's echo. Good evening, everyone. I am Midgey Oreo, as Dan said, and I am the executive director of Bed for 2030. And on behalf of our organization, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome and thank everyone for zooming in tonight. A special thanks to the Playhouse for co-hosting tonight's event as part of our ongoing environmental film series. A big thanks to our amazing speakers for participating audience you are in for a treat. And a great big thank you to the Bed for 2030 team who organized tonight's event, Erin Glocky, our wonderful community engagement manager, as well as Karen Simons and Caroline McGill, B2020 board members and passionate co-leaders of our collaborative community carbon capture project. I'm incredibly excited because tonight's event is the kickoff of this really important high impact community wide project and we are especially excited because apparently over 300 people have registered for tonight's event. So that means the community is interested in this project. And Bedford adopted a new climate action plan last June and set an aggressive new goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2030. That's an audacious goal, but if there's a community who can make that happen, it's this one. Capturing carbon through our natural environment here in Bedford, our trees, our plants, our soil is a high impact strategy within the 2030 climate action plan. So tonight we're going to talk about soil regenerative land practices and really exciting emerging science. And then the really fun part is we're going to talk about how we're going to carbon capture carbon here in Bedford. So without further ado, it is my great pleasure to introduce tonight's moderator, Karen Simons, who has I mentioned is the co-leader of this project, a B2030 board member and principal at Hudson Veric Resources. And Karen, please take it away. Thank you, Mitch. Thank you, Dan. And for the to the playhouse for partnering with Bedford 2030 in the webinar. So hello everyone. I'm Karen Hennacher Simons, this evening's moderator. And I'd like to welcome all of you to the Kiss the Ground panel discussion and to extend a warm greeting to our three panelists. You'll see them soon, but really quickly. We have Chris Covey, scientist and professor of environmental studies and sciences at Skidmore College, Tim Joseph, founder of Maple Hill Creamery, an organic grass fed dairy company based in New York and Dan match manager of Boulder, Colorado based eco cycle, the nation's oldest recycler in zero waste nonprofit. So welcome. I'm going to start this evening's panel by starting with a quick summary of the main themes in the movie. We'll start with presentations by the panelists and followed by a few questions from me and then we'll open up to questions from the audience. As Dan said, please use the Q&A feature down at the, you know, on your screen, whatever gadget is that you have. So hopefully you all watch the film and understand that soil is alive and is a solution to climate change. The film narrated by Woody Harrelson begins by showing how some common land management practices, such as tilling and the use of pesticides have led to degraded soil and ultimately to the degradation of our health and the climate. The film then demonstrates the extensive interviews with farmers, scientists and activists, the power of regenerative land management and soils potential for dressing climate change. I want to take a moment here to define regenerative land management. It's a term that covers many different land management approaches, sustainable regenerative approaches, permaculture, agroforestry, ballistic management, planned grazing, just to mention a few that were showcased in the movie. At its most basic level, the defining principle of regenerative land management is to mimic nature. Or as Ray Arturo, if you saw the movie, the NRSC soil representative in the film says the point is to farm like nature. So in the film, in addition to Ray, we meet a regenerative rancher named Connor Jones. We see Connor as he stands on his farm property line, which abuts a conventional farm. Connor's farm field is lush, while the neighboring farm is dry and filled with invasive. Connor explains his farm used to look similar to his neighbors, until he took up regenerative ranching. The side by side comparison of the two farms is stark and extraordinary. And later in the film, we see a similar imagery. We see how regenerative methods have revived the lowest plateau in China. Once a dust bowl, and now an absolutely stunning demonstration of what can be accomplished using regenerative land management techniques and how soil can be brought back to life. The film also explores how composting food waste and using compost for fertilizers is a critical part of regenerative land management and healthy soil. So why does bed for 2030 care about regenerative land management? Because it restores, builds and maintains soil health and healthy soils still carbon in the top organic matter layer and deeper down. According to a scientist in the film, every 1% increase per acre of organic matter can draw down up to 10 tons of carbon from the atmosphere. 1% increase per acre draws down 10 tons of carbon. Currently, according to the movie, only 5% of farms focus on soil health and organic matter. So just imagine what could be done if a significantly larger number of farms and people have land, land such as lawns, which many of us have here, shifted their land management practices to regenerative principles and focused on soil health. We would make significant progress toward addressing climate change. So there's more examples and incredible amount of information imagery in the film, and I hope you all enjoyed it. I'd like to move on to talk to our experts. We're going to help us understand more about the potential carbon capture in soil. Each comes a carbon capture from different perspectives, the scientific perspective, agribusiness, community composting, and they're each going to give us a short presentation and then we'll move to Q&A. Chris will be our first speaker. As mentioned earlier, Chris is a professor of environmental studies and sciences at Skidmore College. Chris earned his PhD from the old school of forestry and environmental studies in silviculture and biogeochemistry. He's one of the leading researchers into carbon benefits. We're thrilled to have him here this evening. Fundamentally, his research explores our understanding of terrestrial ecosystems in their role in climate life. He founded Quick Carbon Research Program, a cost-effective carbon monitoring technology, and Chris is currently leading an ambitious effort to create a national framework for soil carbon monitoring, which we hope to hear more about. So Chris, I'm going to hand it over to you now. I'm going to mute myself. Yeah, thanks. Really excited to be here and let me put up a couple of slides and I promise they'll be painfully boring, but hopefully it won't be too long. So yeah, thanks so much for being here. I'm really excited to be talking after you guys have all just watched this really passionately presented film. It's a really beautiful piece and I was watching it again today and thinking about what makes me like this movie so much. And I think probably this is the only movie that it's the only one I can think of where you have Giselle Bunchin and Gabe Brown starring, which is really interesting. And then to see that they actually give more screen time to Gabe Brown, this may be the only time that's ever going to happen. So to get a chance to talk after people have just watched that kind of film is really exciting. I'm going to talk a little bit about what I see as kind of our challenges to getting this stuff done. So a few years ago, I started working on this with colleagues and we were working with ranchers out west and we kind of realized that the that soil carbon is kind of the last space in American life where everyone agrees, you know, we talked to some folks who want to talk about soil carbon and climate change and drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere. And then we talked to other folks who want to talk to us about organic matter and rural livelihoods and the sustainability of cropping systems right and everybody is now starting to turn attention to the soil and regenerating soil. And one of the key problems I think is just communicating what it is about soil and agriculture that needs to change and why and I think this film does a great part with that. And then the second thing that I'm more personally obsessed with as a as a sort of someone who's trained as a land manager as my students know and it's great to see so many on this webinar odd that they want to listen to me talk at night but I'm psyched about that. But as they know I'm obsessed with inventory and landscape inventory and because there's this old saying that you can't manage what you can't measure and I think that's one of the critical challenges we have ahead of us with the soil carbon world and so I think this is the basic story that that that film was telling you from a sort of scientific perspective right is that we're going to make some change in our management. And then over time we're going to build near surface soil carbon and we're going to have these things that come along with that right we're going to get better soil properties in terms of aggregation water is going to be able to be able to soak into the soil like a sponge. And of course since it can soak in like a sponge it's going to be held on the soil is going to hold on to it. So along with the water it's going to hold on to the nutrients that stuff's not going to be leaching out into our rivers. And so of course we're going to have better water quality and air quality because we're not going to be turning over all of these nutrients into the atmosphere. And then ideally we're going to get the things that that farmers really care about which is sustained yield and yield stability and so not just farmers but also we talked to a lot of people who are who are really interested in sort of risk associated with farming and farm stability so people give farm loans or who ensure farms right are really interested in this yield and yield stability, the purported suite of benefits that this movie is talking about. And what I when I see this I say well the problem is that we're having a hard time measuring near surface carbon and so if I can't measure the thing that's supposed to be producing all of these benefits, then, then how can I know that I'm getting all of these benefits and how can I know that I'm getting them for a good price. And what I mean by that is that the cost of the management pays pays the farmer back in all of these other things or pay society back for the cost of farming that changes right. And I think we see this reflected in sort of global carbon markets right where we see that people are really excited to buy credits linked to trees half of all transacted volume and global in carbon offset markets is comes from trees and a tiny tiny sliver is coming from the soil. This despite the fact that soil is this enormous pool of carbon and the terrestrial biosphere, larger than the pool of trees so why are we not seeing this activity. And the first thing is, I think gets this movie gets to, which is that when I explain how this works or when we watch one of these people talk about things like tree roots exuding carbohydrates and microbial cycles that then create this sort of beneficial loop and and people glaze over as they often do when I talk. Whereas when we talk about trees I think people intuitively understand that trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere, fix it into carbon and wood right and so we have this larger education that we have to do I think this movie does a great job of moving that ball down the field. The other reason though that I think more at the core is again inventory and if you look here on your left you have the FIA which are the Forest Service inventory and analysis. Inventory plots for the state of Minnesota every one of those little green dots is a place where a person has gone out and measured what the forest looks like they create these huge maps of what the forest looks like. The nearest comparable program is USDA rocker program and that's the plot map on the right for rocker and so what we have is a is a pretty serious inventory challenge where we're not doing enough soil inventory we don't have rigorous methods for doing soil inventory. Foresters have been doing this stuff for two centuries they've been growing wood is their product and it turns out that that then when those carbon markets came along and they said well we need something that is land management that we can then verify the outcomes. The forester is able to very quickly raise their hand and say hey we know how to do inventory we have a whole system for we've been doing it for two centuries. Here you go markets we can prove what we're doing. Soil scientists we have not I say we I'm not a soil scientist but soil scientists have not moved along move that ball down the field far enough to where we can do the sort of rigorous inventories at scale. And so that's what we've been working on at Skidmore College with students and this is Zoe Paglaro and Shay Kaladney who I know Zoe's on here hi Zoe. Working on the Kenny fork farm down in Tennessee it's family Al Gore's family farm, where we've been doing inventory and developing these systems so we're working with app based automated sampling design trying to figure out how can we very quickly design samples. How can we build tools that we can distribute so that we can do inventory at a very low cost or very large areas and make maps that can produce really useful information for landowners at at the landowner scale and can be made affordable. And then can also scale to tell us about how this these these regenerative practices are adding up at landscape regional and and potentially even national scales and so that's what we've been working on and that's the angle that I look at the sort of soil carbon regenerative agriculture space from so really excited for the discussion to come and excited to hear more from all. Thanks Chris. I love your maps. Part of our bed for 2030 initiative for carbon capture is to start developing some land maps around where the carbon is in Bedford so stay tuned to see what we develop and we hope to use some of the tools that you developed in your research, and basically that spectrometer I saw in the corner one of your slides. Okay, so I think this is a nice lead into what I'm going to call our carbon farmer. That, and that would be Tim Joseph. There you are thank you. So he puts into practice. What Chris likes to measure. Tim comes to us as a businessman focused on regenerative farming, and he runs the very successful and prominent organic grass bed dairy brand Maple Hill Creamery. In 2004, Tim and his wife Laura started milking 64 cows on their 250 acre dairy farm in Central New York with no prior farming experience when they read that I kind of wondered but okay. In 2007, by then they transitioned their herd to both certified organic and 100% grass fed. In 2009, Tim created the company's cream line yogurt and his kitchen stove top. Maple Hill has since grown to source milk from 160 family farms in upstate New York, and maple house milk yogurt and kefir are distributed nationally, and they can be bought at our local grocery stores, and they can attest to the deliciousness products. So Tim, I see you're unmuted so go ahead take it away. All right, thank you very much. I have one slide. And it's sort of, it's simple and I thought, given what you all are trying to do at bed for 2030. Let's start this is this is basically the slide I use when I'm, I'm talking about grass fed organic dairy, and you can't make milk with just grass is literally what every vet every. Of course the feed the grain salesman, our neighbors, anybody who was in dairy at the time said you can't do that. And obviously I beg to differ. Nobody had really tried in a very long time. And I guess that's sort of an overarching theme that I'd like to just touch on is, you know, the, the, the message is always you can't feed people this way, you know you can't feed the world with organic you can't feed the you can't make milk with just grass, you can't, you know, raise beef with just grass there's all sorts of naysayers and I just think it's important that people realize that a lot of that comes from, you know, the status quo is comfortable. There's a lot of incentives and industry built around that. But the reality is, is that, you know, it just takes small steps to try, you know, we were conventional farmers, and then we went organic and then we went grass fed and none of those things were easy, but just like every farm that chips to maple Hill today, making those transitions weren't easy, but they just did it one step at a time. And so my point is that it's really, you know, how to eat an elephant, one bite at a time. It's the same thing with what you all are trying to do and really what the world is trying to do around carbon. The other thing I think is important to note is that there's really no downside as Chris mentioned that soil health is something that just about everybody can agree on. As a farmer. There's no downside to having more fertility more carbon in your soil there's no downside to having living soil for consumers. There's no downside to eating food that actually has more nutrition in it. Rodale has been running the longest test of organic versus conventional crops in the world, and showing, you know, time and time again that they can produce as much food, and very often more nutritious food using natural methods. You just have to try. It's important that we, you know, focus on the things we can do. Most of what the issue is around carbon and soil and as Chris mentioned, soil is this massive, massive potential bank where you can store carbon that if you take care of the soil the beauty of it is it takes care of itself. The beauty of grass fed dairy in a lot of ways is, you know, we allow the cows as much as we can to go out, harvest their own feed, leave their manure in the field, and then come back to the barn to give milk. That's very different than most dairy farms there's a lot more work involved feeding cows moving manure and all of those things. Well it's similar to the biological life that exists in the soil. Once you get the soil actually cycling again, that biological life in sort in a regenerative organic system. Really, it does all the work for you while you're sleeping while you're while you're not paying any attention to it whatsoever. It's there working and the potential for putting carbon back into the soil is just mind boggling and the reality the sad reality is the reason why we have such a big issue is that the vast majority of agricultural soil in the US, and probably in the world is dead. Because, you know, we've chosen to go down the path of chemicals and industrial farming and pesticides which literally just take the life out of the soil, and do exactly the opposite of what we need to be doing, which is to foster life and and and literally just get the carbon cycle going again. I love the Chris's presentation with the, it looked like a child, you know, a young person drew that picture of the tree and photosynthesis and all of this is stuff that, you know, most of us learned in grammar and the carbon cycle photosynthesis these are all things that just happen if we let them happen, and we really have to, you know, create the conditions to allow them happen in a better way within farming and allow nature to run its course and really it's a win win for everybody. So, just want to, we'll obviously talk a lot about, you know, some of these options later but it's really just little steps and letting nature do its thing. I don't personally believe, you know, there's a lot of technical solutions being looked at, removing carbon from the air with sorts of things and I just personally believe that it's, it's going to be very hard and expensive to correct what is a natural problem with a technical solution when really literally under our feet is a natural solution to this problem if we just focus on it. Thank you very much. Thank you Tim. I love your work because it's a win win win. Mass fed milk is revitalizing the soil while providing incomes to farmers and increasing farm viability. So, I just think it hammers home on the theme to the movie, which is by food produce using regenerative principles, farmers ship practices when it makes economic sense, because this is a win win win solution. Everything, it just gets better and capture more carbon in the soil as we go. So this is another great lead into Dan matches work and eco cycle. Dan focus on composting food waste, which creates an important input for regenerative farmers. The eco cycles carbon farming project which he'll discuss is a great example of how homeowners can utilize compost increase carbon capture on their properties. Dan has worked in recycling composting organic farming since 1982 is currently spearheading eco cycles. He focuses on utilizing organic waste and other resources in a local and global effort to restore healthy soil and Swiss and sequester carbon to restabilize the atmosphere. In addition to his work at eco cycle Dan serves as a vice chair of Colorado's US compost console state chapter. So Dan, let's take it away. Thank you Karen and great to be here with you all. I'm from Boulder, Colorado. Just get my, it's going here. Okay, so eco cycle is a 45 year old nonprofit based in Boulder. We started as a volunteer driven recycling organization is people back in the 70s. We have our own blocks to for newspaper and, and glass and, and metal collection. We still are the official processor for all of the recycles that get collected in Boulder County. But we also do a lot of other work we do a lot of local and state level policy work. We, we work within the schools we have we have a school curricula. And we do, we do community projects which is what I want to talk to you about today. Our mission is to create zero waste economies, so that we, so that we get out of our linear extraction to landfill model and, and keep our resources in circulation so working on the, on the compostable fraction of our waste stream is a is a new piece for us relatively. We've been working on that for about the last 16 years. And so, so here's, here's an example of a circular economy so back here over here on the left. We started a food waste collection program in 2004. We are now working on a getting a local community owned compost facility within our county right now it's, it's being trucked 50 miles away. And we are working on essentially growing an end market for that for that compost. And not compost is very little used in Colorado agriculture. It's really all really landscaping is the only market for for compost. We'd like to change that. And we'd like to get it on Boulder County happens to own or more than half of the agricultural land in our county that they bought up as to protect it as open space. And we get, we'd like to be able to use locally, locally generated organic waste to to build our own soil. And, and lastly, we'd like to make this connection to climate change. That was a tough. It was, it's been tough to close that loop so far until about 10 years ago when I learned about the marine carbon project which is some research that came out of California. quantified the multiplying the multiplying effect of applying compost so what you see here is this is a surface application of compost, a one time surface application to California range land. The first time what this research did was was actually quantify the what what Chris was talking about that that you have a certain amount of compost of carbon, actually in the compost compost is about 50% pure carbon. So you know you're applying car you know you're increasing your level of carbon in the soil, simply by applying compost. But what this project was able to do is actually quantify that that that carbon does stay in the soil long term. And on top of that carbon, there is there's an increased amount of carbon because there is more photosynthesis. And what they were able to verify is something that you know organic farmers and gardeners have known forever that when you apply compost you are raising the level of life in that soil to a new equilibrium and it, and it tends to stay there. And the. So, so here, down here on the bottom, on the right you see the layout of these trials that there are two compost locations. And, and the, the cows tell you tell you everything you need to know they are self selecting the grass that's growing in the area that has compost because those are that's that is your grass it's that simple. And so here's the fun part that I want to talk about tonight. So, at Ecosycle we see our role here we're not an ag organization. We see our role as translating the opportunity that the marine carbon project started to make us aware of that we might be able to significantly draw down atmospheric carbon, simply by building soil. So, our, what we're focused on is is trying to answer these two questions is is how do you, how do you, how do you get non farmers excited about this, getting farmers excited about is another question but what we're focused on the non farmers. And, and can you actually sequester can you measure carbon being sequestered sequestered in non agricultural soils. So, so what we're, what we're doing here is, it's a citizen science project or community science project. That is as, as Chris and Tim both mentioned addressing, you know, it's, it's, it's addressing three major global challenges that have that have plagued us for for decades now. So, how does the sequester carbon rebuilding top soil and restoring new loss nutrition in soil, because there is not as much nutrition, you know, a carrot grown today is not in nutrition as nutritious as a carrot grown 7080 years ago. And so what we're doing here is we're essentially reproducing the original marine carbon project trials in people's backyards. So you have a, you have the basic layout is you have a 10 foot by 10 foot control area and you have a 10, 10 foot by 10 foot area that you're going to apply compost and then you're going to take some observational measurements and also take soil samples, you have to have soil samples in order to be able to actually measure carbon sequestration. And in doing this. In setting up this project we have linked up with, I think, I think Chris is also involved in this. It's a, it's a, it's a large scale data gathering project called open team. So, so this is, it is largely focus, it is focused on agriculture largely so we're a non agricultural participant. So we are, we are directly contributing data to a meta database that is intended to, to try to quantify the potential to to sequester carbon and all different kinds of soil. You know, all over the, all over the world, growing different growing different crops. So certainly we started out with a three year project where that is a local hands on project. And we are now entering into the third and final year of that project we'll see if we're going to actually measure carbon sequestration this fall. But we have a new do it yourself element that I that I want to talk to you all about that we introduced just last fall. That is, there's a there's a link here, and I will, I can put that in the Q&A to I think I won't do that right now. I'll put that later. So, we are inviting individuals, educational groups, schools, environmental education programs, and communities to participate in this program with us. And it essentially it's kind of open end it's it's up to you to decide how long you want to participate if you're if you're willing to hang in there for years and actually measure carbon. That's cool. If you want to just do it for say a semester as a school. There's a lot of pieces that that we can learn from it there as well. This is a brand new project as I mentioned that we just launched it last fall. I have a team of masters, see you master students who are helping me to to flesh this out this this growing season. And so, so participants. And especially for for for schools community groups who are willing to, you know, work with us and give us some feedback. Tell us what's resonating what's what's not resonating with this project. And then, you know, other pieces of it here are that we, you know, other other messages are contamination reduction because we're focused on, you know, collecting organic waste and turning it into compost. You know, I don't want to eat plastic in my compost. So that's a big deal. And then we're also looking at you know how do we use that how do we, how do we, how do we build this into community planning how do you know how do you sequester carbon and parks in golf courses in public golf courses medians anywhere there's there's soil growing plants you can be sequestering carbon right so so that's kind of our that's our focus and I'm going to stop there and let's open it up to some conversation. Thank you Dan, I love that community farming project and I'm hoping we'll launch something similar here. But in the meantime, if people want to investigate dance project, we're going to put it in the chat and also email it when we send out an email. So, I think the first question that I do want to ask is a question I often get when I talk to people who just learned about carbon capture as a solution to the climate crisis. People say, Oh, it seems so logical, or I never thought of it as a solution to climate change or why haven't heard about this before, or will it work. You know, maybe Chris you take this one and then Dan and Tim, join in, because it's, it's, there's a lot to unpack there. In addition, you know, we seem to be going back to practices before modern agriculture, so I can comment on that as well. I'll leave, I'll leave practices to someone who knows about farming so maybe Tim could, could tackle that. I think the will it work is an interesting question. I think if you ask farmers who do this, and it's not just in it's not just a brown if you ask farmers who do this. They feel pretty certain that it works. And in many of the cases where we do have robust measurement, we find evidence that it works right that it's possible to do this and so based on that you have the sort of range of, you know how big a deal is. So if you take TNC, put out there was a publication led by a Bronson griscombe on natural climate solutions you can look at their nature for climate website. And I think they put the potential of agriculture at around. It's a 4.8 gigatons a year or something so to put that in perspective, emissions to the total emissions to the atmosphere on the order of about 35 inch. Now, going up a gigatons a year and so if you take that number then you're talking about 15% of emissions now then you turn to the Rodale Institute, you know they've been doing a bunch of work. They just put out a white paper and they said actually agriculture could be all of it could be all of the of anthropogenic emissions. So if you turn to the World Resources Institute, another very well respected environmental organization, they'll tell you it's really not worth doing. It's not going to make a big difference right you added up at scale and it doesn't come to anything. So, what do I believe, well, I believe probably TNC is about right but the problem is that belief is not a way to manage each sections of the earth, particularly the sections that produce your food. I think, you know, Tim has good evidence that it works lots of people have good evidence that works. I think if we want to see people adopt it, we need to be able to not only quantify how it works, but also where it works, and under what conditions it works right and so I think until you can find a farmer who's practicing conventional agriculture, and, and quantify those numbers for you because right now we go to them and we say, Okay, well we think you need, we're pretty sure you need to build more soil carbon and they say oh okay well what do I need to do that we give them this list of practices right we say no till cover crops intensive rotational grazing go. And they go well okay I could see I need to sell some equipment buy some new equipment, roll that out. And then well how much carbon will I get, and we say well more, you're going to get more we're pretty sure it's more. Oh, okay, well I'll get more well then when I get this more carbon, how much am I going to get a boost in yield. And then how much more stable will my yields be how much will my wrist drop, and we say well, you'll get more yield, and your risk will fall and they say oh, okay more. How much and we say well, it's hard to quantify. And then they say well okay well my insurance, will the will the crop insurance market so give me a discount. No I'm sorry the as Tim said the incentives just aren't there for that conversion over over right, and then they say thank you very much. And the next day the first rep shows up. And the fertilizer rep says okay at this point in your growing cycle you need to put this many tons per acre down nitrogen, you don't want to follow up with this product, you're going to want to follow up with this product and when you do your yields are going to go up to 1% it's going to cost you this much, the net difference to your bottom line is this if you want this farm to be here for your grandchildren you should probably start putting this down immediately. Right, and until we can tell the same story we're not going to find out what the real potential is. So it's really still emerging, but you know, Tim is doing it every day and he's building a big successful organization. So when when when, and just look at Dan slide where the cows like that nutritious grass better than all the other grass out there so it makes sense but I understand. You need the research to convince people to shift over so Tim that's a, that's a great question for you is, you know, how do you get your farmers to shift over, how many acres have you shifted over. So we've got 160 farms there's probably, you know, somewhere around 30,000 acres in upstate New York that are now grass that organic, just within Maple Hill. There's other organic valley has a another set of farmers horizon has another set of farmers that are all grass that organic so it's a significant amount of acreage. So it comes down to everything in life I believe is around incentives. I mean it's just that simple right and so if there's a few reasons why farmers want to make the move. Very often the largest in dairy farming is pain, right, you're going broke, the way you're doing it now. So, maybe a better, there might be another choice that I'll go less broke or not broke at all. But it's not easier grass fed organic dairy grass fed beef regenerative agriculture. It is not easier. It is harder. It is a thinking, you know, persons farming. It's not a formula, a recipe of MPK that you put down on your soil, and then your soybeans in your corn grow. It's not that it's management intensive. And so it requires really the biggest. The most important thing is, first, is the gray matter in between the farmers years, if they can't get that going in that direction it's just not going to work. And it's not going to work for everybody and honestly, that's okay. I also want to be clear that we, we haven't ended up in this place where are most of our agriculture is based on chemistry and industry, because someone set out with some evil plan that they hatched 70 years ago to get here. It's just not the case right there's one thing after another, you know, after World War two there was a bunch of nitrogen sitting around because we were no longer making bombs and so instead of making bombs. We were making more crops and more grain and more corn, and then it was cheaper and then we could feed it to cows and we could feed it to other things and so inertia really is how we got here. And the only way you can, you know, get it to go a different direction is energy from somewhere else which is right now coming from consumers. Farmers, whether you're organic grass fed conventional, they're all on the edge financially, they're all usually on, you know, just a nice edge from a cash flow standpoint. And what we're talking about here is risk taking right changing my operation, maybe for the long term better, but in the short term, if I can't make my mortgage payment or put my kids through school it doesn't really matter. And so that is sort of the place that a lot of farmers are trapped and so having examples and there are more and more examples of people doing it differently and showing there is a way, and then having consumers who actually want to buy those products. If no consumer is going to buy a product that is grown in a manner that is different than most of the crops today. I think we gotta go home. It's not going to work there has to be money flowing through the system that helps producers actually make this work whether it's dairy or grain or what have you. So, it's, it's, again, it's all connected right what you what you spend your money on at the grocery store directly impacts over time, not a lot, not a lot of time, pretty short amount of time. How farmers grow crops, you know, there's organic triskets today. I love triskets. I'm so happy there's organic triskets. Three years ago, there was no such thing as organic triskets. Now I can get them in any store I want. Why is that because a lot of people like triskets and a lot of people like organic, and now there's organic wheat being grown to make triskets. It's that simple. So, and that complex right, but it just little steps and the consumer is the driver. That's it. The money drives everything because that's what's holding people back from changing everything. Right, like you said, everybody's got a mortgage to pay. Exactly. Yeah. But, you know, and to your point on incentives, we have an incentive system, a federal system that incentivizes certain things and doesn't necessarily incentivize, you know, healthy grass fed milk. Hopefully with the next farm bill and maybe some activism, we can change the incentive structure, but you know, we'll see to be determined. All right, so, so Dan, your approach is to deal with the consumer. I'd be interested to hear from you. I can't experience about getting homeowners to adopt some of these carbon capture practices like you're shifting management practices it's not necessarily people living, but you are shifting their views on how their lawn should either look or be managed. My personal philosophy is it saves money to do regenerative land management but I'd love to hear your perspective and your experience and convincing people to ship their lawn management practices. Well, in, in, in our experience, people are really excited. You know, I think, I think the participation tonight is is an indicator of, you know, that's what we find here, you know, we we host an event. A lot of people show up they want to know how can I, you know, I heard about carbon sequestration. How can I participate in that, you know, I have, I have some land, you know, I have, you know, a vacant lap or something. So people are very curious they're very interested in and how they can plug in both as consumers and as as homeowners and and and yeah I think I think the opportunity that we're giving people is a chance to to reconnect or you know, truly to connect perhaps for the first time with soil and and learn a little bit about it, you know, you have a lawn outside, you know, you've you've got the maybe the automatic sprinkler or something, and you know you don't think about it. But there's soil under there what's going on and I so I think what I what people are enjoying in participating with in our project is that they are, you know, they're getting their own little aha moments about soil, you know, you learn about well, you know, geologically what is your soil down there you know what's what's your texture you know you learn a few things about your own soil. And then, and then, yeah, Karen as you said you you then you can start to learn about how you manage it fast you know if you have if you have sandy soil maybe you're going to want to manage it a little bit different from if you have clay soil. So, so you know it's an opportunity to explore and, you know, kind of remember some stuff stuff from your, you know, your high school science classes. And, but also it is an opportunity to, you know, people are very interested in how as consumers, can we can we create these incentives that that that Tim was talking about here. I think, you know, grass fed that is that's 100% grass feed fed that is something that's that's starting to resonate with consumers like okay. They know you start to understand certain popular percentage of computer consumers start to understand that that term means regenerative agriculture that means you are building soil. That's great. You know that that's that's good for dairy that's good for for meat products. Maybe, you know, then, but that's as far as it goes. So, so what's the model is it. Yeah, like a federal organic certification kind of model or or will we all, you know, wonder, will we all have little cell phone little spectrometer apps and our cell phone and you can you can shine it at the at a piece of produce in the in the grocery store and you know find the most nutrient dense one and know that okay that's an indicator that you know this farmer is is is probably building soil so you know it's still it's as Chris really laid out beautifully, you know that quantification with all the variability in agriculture is it's so difficult to do you know you have weather you're growing all these different crops you have all these different regions. So, you know, that is going to be really tough so I think you don't have an answer yet okay as a consumer here's what you do. You know, we're going to we're going to, you know, point people in a few directions like yeah 100% grass that that's something by that. So, we need to buy and support regenerative farmers, we need to shift our practices at home, and in every way possible, we need to support work like Chris is who figures out and measure the carbon. So we can then sell it to more conventional farmers. There's there's a lot here and we need to support policies that support, you know, farming that is regenerative. I'm realizing it's a 24 this just really flew by. I'd like to really quick. Have each one of you just summarize or give a couple points that some real takeaways you'd like to leave our audience with. And we'll just sort of wrap it up in. And we've gotten to some of the questions from the audience. Not all of them. I think we might be able to answer some of them in the chat as well as send an email with more information so Chris why don't you start. Well, I think I'd love to hammer on the points that both Tim and Dan Dan just made and also kind of call out there was a line in the movie I remember Gavin Newsom Newsom said if you want to move the mouse you got to move the cheese, you know, and I think that's a lot of questions we've been talking about tonight their incentives and for good reason and so what are those incentives look like well I think we define this kind of this market incentive that is going to be consumer driven. Right, I think there is a land stewardship incentive that a lot of landowners farmers feel a deep connection to their land for many it's multi generational, and they feel a sense of pride and good stewardship. And so for that part, we need to be able to, to communicate what good stewardship looks like or at least be able to, again, to tell the story of stewardship, particularly is that as the those generations are turning over. I think the, there's a part of this is a carbon looking incentive that we talked quite a bit about we need to be able to quantify it because we can sell it and we do see that that could be a significant chunk of of income, and potentially that they could cover the costs of this transition right and buffer some of that risk right because farmers ranchers producers are rightfully risk averse and making big changes in an operation, especially one that is producing profit right now. Is it tough sell and so can those markets be part of the incentive to make the transition and carry you through the sort of hangover as you come off of all this stuff. I think there's another part of getting this qualification right that's important is that until you can quantify that carbon and so what are the, what are the practices that result in what amount of carbon, and then how we use that to then link that to the series of co benefits for the other things that were that were concerned about and how do we reward for things like water quality, how do we properly account for risk, our proper insurance system is, I think, widely regarded as as one of the great disasters right. And if we could get our risk profiles aligned with reality and linked to to soil carbon link to practices, then we could start to have this huge now we're talking about the sort of the global carbon market for forests is like $750 million a year, we're spending millions of dollars a year on crop insurance and so you could look at this risk profile, and particularly as we look at this not only as a solution to climate change and as as a sort of rural livelihoods piece but also if we're looking at the resilience of our food and wonder what is going to be pretty extreme climate change moving forward, making that link is going to be super important. And I guess the last thing I'll say is that it's a challenge to do this inventory at scale, but we do it all the time and for us I hear people say oh soils are so variable. You know, forests are very good to and we have great forest inventory, because the product would is something that is valued it's not a mistake. It's not evil that we don't have soil inventories. It's the fact is that we haven't valued that inventory in the past for what it's worth. And so right now there are a ton of people working on this. The problem is going to get solved. And to be honest, it's not going to be all that expensive. And when we do, we're all going to look like a bunch of dreams. Okay, thank you, Tim. All right, I'm sorry, Chris. Tim, go ahead. Really, I just want to reiterate it. It's about small choices that everybody can make in their daily lives that really moves the needle, and it's not really like you need to get all of America buying one thing. And that's where people get hung up and they say well not everybody can afford this, but there's enough people that can afford it that if they actually all did, it would literally change the entire equation immediately. And I reject the fact it's a cop out when people say it can't be done because we can't afford it when anybody in their everyday life can walk around myself included and see what we spend money on. It's a matter of priorities. And the younger generation, the famous millennials have really changed the prioritization of where and how they spend money and prove that a bunch of young people who are not wealthy who don't have huge amount, huge paychecks can actually reorient where they spend their money and change things for the better. Today, in addition to Tris gets I like flat whites from Starbucks I paid $5 and 50 cents for a flat white. It was a venting, but I could buy a half a gallon of grass fed organic milk for 550. I'm not alone in buying drinks at Starbucks for 550. We spent $2,000 a pound on iPhones every year, people of every walk of life, every demographic economic strata. They're all buying iPhones for $2,000 a pound, but can't buy grass fed steak for 1099 a pound that you're literally going to put in your body and it will become your cells in your body. And that's like a problem. It's about reorienting our priorities. And I really believe there's no reason why we can't change things for the better simply by monetizing how and what we eat and what we spend our money on and we don't need to, you know, live like monks to do it. It's just simply changing how we spend our money in little ways, and it changes literally everything. Three to 5% change in a grocery category is huge. And it doesn't take that many people to make these little incremental changes in the grocery store or at the farmers market or whatever. It's so simple and it's just about education. It's about people learning about what matters as far as what they put in their body, how it affects their health, how it affects their kids' health. All of these simple things, like Dan with the lawn. I mean, it's so simple. It's right there at your feet. You know, you're putting neurotoxins on your grass that you walk around with with your kids and your dogs and your cats, you know, never mind the soil, like, how about that, like that's not that's not something anybody would just wake up and say I want to do but they do it every day, and they pay a lot of money to do it right so it's just about education and once you learn that stuff, it flips people's brain forever and I really I'm hopeful and optimistic that it's already happening. It's not happening as fast as we'd like but it's happening extremely fast when you look at how the food world has changed in just 10 years. And I think, you know, it's only just begun. Okay. And Dan, last thoughts. Well, my takeaway would be simply to again, invite you all as individuals or be really exciting as a community to participate in our in our project. I would also like to choose to as a community. I'd love to engage with you further and and look as I say, get your feedback and incorporate your, your thoughts into our project. We really do hope to continue to engage with you and bring the project here to bed for 2030 but anybody who wants to investigate more we will put a link in the email that is hopefully coming out in the next couple days, which will include this webinar. I just want to wrap up by saying, it's going to take incentives and it's going to take choices and education to get the system to move and it's a bit of a pushing a boulder up a hill but you know we can do it for an activist community and if we all put our minds to it, I do think that we can make a difference. So to wrap up support activities organizations food producers everybody working toward healthy soils and to a better planet. I'll say thank you to our panelists playhouse the audience or partners, Aaron block, my co chair, Karen Miguel bed for 2030. Thank you all very much. Good night. Stay safe healthy and warm and dry. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you everybody.