 The RSVP suggests we may have 25, 30 people shows, which means we've got another half or so to go. But people can catch up. I guess, Manna, hello. Christopher, it's good that you could join. Are you still stuck in traffic though? I am not, but I have continued to work out of my vehicle today, as opposed to heading back up to Sonoma. It's like, Christopher, I grabbed him it from another conversation today, and said, no, no, you've got to come this afternoon. So thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for the invitation. And I just pasted into the chat an ad that ran at the bottom of the Axios email newsletter I just now read. And if you'll download it, you'll see. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, do these people know about our call? It's Pepsi saying they're going all in on regenerative agriculture. Pepsi. Yeah, well, I don't know what all in means. And I'm adding that language to the to the ad. But still, I was it was remarkable. It's it's it's solid. Swimock is. Yeah, it means they recognize their poisoning humanity and are trying to greenwash to stay relevant before they die. I also just I also just came up with a new their new tagline for the next decade. It's the new regeneration. Well, well, well, well, you'll remember that their famous ad campaign was the new generation. That's regenerated. No, I like it. They should totally go with that. They don't even have to pay me royalties. Well, that's good. Nestle doesn't get to suck water out of everybody's aquifer for free again. Yeah, Peter, do you have more info on that? Do you want to just talk about it briefly? Oh, just that. Yeah, Pepsi can go as regenerative as it wants, but it still needs water. And and it's I'm sure it's strategy is very similar to to Nestle's in that regard. Nice to see everybody. Jerry, I didn't mean to slow you down either. So I'm going to wait until you decide that the quantum motion coefficient has reached one and we can roll in. I think we should. I think we should kick it off. Really? Yeah, I'll follow you. OK, I'm Dave Whitzel. I'm a coordinator with the Global Regeneration CoLab, one of the co-co-groups in this this this event. And thank you, everybody, for coming. I'm going to turn it over to Jerry McCallsky and Klaus Mauger to lead the rest of the show. I'll stick my email in the chat so if people have questions or concerns or anything, please reach out to me. I'd be very free to feel free to to connect with me. Sounds very awesome. Thanks, Dave. And Dave and I have known each other a long time. I'm not quite as long as I think I've known Pete Kaminsky. But but, you know, we have matching tattoos from when we serve time together at Sing Sing. So that's that's old old school. And this is kind of the co-mingling of two communities that have a lot of shared interests. And we're we're partly just happy here to have these two groups kind of meet and mingle and learn about each other. So Open Global Mind is one of them. And the Global Regenerative CoLab is and Regeneration CoLab is the other one. And our sort of forcing function, our spark is Klaus Mauger, who has a really interesting project. And I'll turn it over to him to sort of set things up and explain it to us. And we're trying, at least from the Open Global Mind, which I'll call OGM perspective, we're in a nascent phase and we're trying to figure out how to turbo charge other people's initiatives. Like how do how do we add OGM's secret secret sauce to initiatives that look really interesting, where Open Global Mind is about open mindedness and how do we think together and how do we create a global shared memory, a collective intelligence of some sort. And certainly we need that on climate change and regeneration and agriculture and all those kinds of things. And I will come back sort of to moderate Q&A a little bit, but let me just turn it over to Klaus and take us in. Yeah, thank you, Jerry. Yeah, what animates us is really a desire to serve, a desire to support and to assist in the development of local food systems to evolve, to go and to scale. And underlying, and we just had a conversation this morning again that got really animated around this topic of climate change. It's an enormous threat to our civilization into our way of life. It's still poorly understood. It's not talked about openly. They are, you know, President Biden is coming out yesterday and talked about cover crops and paying farmers to do the right thing, which was amazing. But overall, this conversation is still not where it needs to be. 2030 has emerged as a year of, as a target setting year, a lot of impactful transformative things as opposed to have happened in the entire economy by 2030. But for perspective, my granddaughter is gonna turn 12 years old in 2030. That's not very far away. And when I think about my granddaughter in 2050, she'll be 32. I mean, what kind of life are we going to see in 2050? So that's really brings it home, you know, for our generation, I'm 71 years old, for my children and grandchildren, life is not going to be the same as we experienced it. So the regeneration of soil, and so coming through a lot of conversations, but bottom line is that the regeneration of soil is the only viable, ready-to-scale option to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere and place it where it belongs, which is in the soil and where it is a force for good. But then at the same time, you know, to my great frustration, the industry that I've spent 40 plus years in is not ready. I mean, I see PepsiCo up there, but you know, I wanna see that happening. The changes required in the food industry are transformative and many business models are unable to adjust without great risk and without really losing maybe a market share. And so they're hesitant basically because they don't know how to do it and they don't know what to do. So we are working in the community level space, now parallel to this industrial food system, trying to set up an alternative. But any food system is a complex undertaking, many moving parts, much of that requires specialist support, deal with legal issues, regulations, financing, accounting, logistics, a long list of things that have to be solved for a food system to emerge and to function. So our intention is to see if we can create a centralized support structure that can link local teams with resources that fit your unique needs in the community. So as an example, there are a range of funding sources specifically directed at the development of local food systems. And much of that comes in form of grants and I posted one such source, but there are now many that have emerged, there are literally billions of dollars available searching for investment opportunities. Grants require alignment. Grant money is not just being handed out, but it is typically structured for a very specific purpose. And to qualify and apply for a grant means that our operation has to be designed to align with the intentions of that grant. But there are social impact investors and government grants, you know, who are searching. There are social impact investors and government also grants who are searching for promising projects that are well-defined, community supported and sourced. I was writing a crime when I first came back to the United States from Working International in 2012. I was attaching myself to a local food hub in Coachella Valley just to see how that works within a community and so on. And I helped them write a grant and the only grant that I could find that sort of matched what they were looking for still required adaptations to the way they operated. So we got them $125,000, but what I learned in the process was how these grants are structured and how you have to really think, how you have to really search, you know, what is out there available that may fit your specific needs. So of particular interests, and this is now from a marketing perspective, there's a new term that I just became aware of and that's called base of the pyramid model. And so to develop base of pyramid models that are sustainable and scalable is of particular interest. Now, what we mean by base of pyramid are basically food deserts in inner cities and in rural communities, in indigenous communities, projects that create food security and even sovereignty in marginalized communities. That's where the economy fails. You know, that's where we have the biggest gap and no one has really figured out how to solve that yet because you're going against market forces that are actually working against such efforts. Crazy as that is. So we would like to provide a platform to host conversations with local teams to develop an analysis. What would you need to scale your operation to access wholesale markets? What business model do you envision to work within your community and what would you need to make that happen? So this is an innovative process where we map out a market and think about potentials and what if scenarios. What if I wanted to do this, what would I need to get to that space? And then at the same time, we, the OGM community and Jordan, who I will explain in a moment what we're doing organizationally, we will partner, connect with and partner with other nonprofits already operating in this space. And there are some amazing examples around the country with groups that have already done wonderful projects and very rich in what they are achieving and the specialist service providers for agriculture, logistics, retail and we will develop a database of potential support for customized applications. So it all starts with a guided self-audit to map your local market, identify potential partners to work with within your community, defining spaces that are available and accessible and then identify gaps in your offering, your service capacity where you would need resources to advance. So when I look for example in my community in Bend, Oregon, I mean, there are local and regional logistics companies who might be willing to engage in an effort like this. There is a self-service wholesaler who we could approach and see if we can get professional companies like this to engage. So we wanted to introduce this concept to you today and we wanted to get your thoughts and feedback on this but first maybe I can run this over to Jordan to explain the organizational structure that we have in mind, thank you. Class, thank you. So hi, I'm Jordan, nice to meet you guys. So one of the, I'm come from a little different space. I'm a builder, so I've spent most of my career building water systems and roadways and bridges and buildings, I'm often in the design build space where you're working to kind of discern intention and figure out how do you transform different domains to bring that into reality. And so a few years ago, we stepped back and kind of started looking at the global problems in whole and there's all these little sub-problems we're sensing are kind of part of a global transformation that's required to get from the kind of dysfunctional disintegrated state that we are into a more functional integrated space as a human species that encompasses all these subsystems. So several years ago, we set out to create legal organizational strategic infrastructure through which we could move to kind of integrate and align a variety of the different initiatives that are moving in parallel. And so we brought into existence a US 501C3 that's the sole shareholder of a C corporation that's able to work to provide kind of the total platform services across for-profit and non-profit all held in trust for the good of society with all the accountability and transparency that comes with that. So we're working with a variety of organizations, Pete's on the phone, Pete's on the call working on human intelligence, Jerry's on the call with OGM, this project in agriculture, different platforms to try to meet these needs and start to align all these efforts across space. So we're here to serve and just help Klaus and Jerry and Dave and all the people here get this structured and in the actual legal organizational platform model that can share technology resources, funds and start to meet the needs that are inherent really in each of these local projects around the globe. So here to serve, thank you, pleasure to meet you guys and look forward to getting to know your projects more. Klaus, you're muted. Jordan, the idea was, I mean, you have developed a 501C3 and then underneath a SQL. And the reason for that is that we would like to be able to generate a revenues and that we would be able to attract talent and pay people who need to make a living who have a family and have to pay rent and so on. So we're really looking at this as a long-term sustainable model that has the capacity to support people who want to participate here. And just to say one more thing on that, I think Klaus is exactly right. A lot of times when we're looking at kind of the impact or regenerative spaces, we're looking at those as kind of this social good that's on the periphery of the economy and lacks the true platform resources technology. Klaus didn't give an intro, but he was responsible for large scale food systems across multiple countries and those kind of rollouts. And so when we're building large scale infrastructure or managing food systems across multiple countries, you see that there's a much greater level of connection and coordination. And so all the for-profit, large international companies have that and have the access, but all the heroic small initiatives on the front lines don't have that same platform and infrastructure. So what we're trying to do is create a legal infrastructure and platform that allows local communities around the world to retain their sovereignty and their unique identity while having access to the same higher level resources and coordination that take to really move the need on these things. So let's do some Q and A for a while because I think there's a lot on the table here and everybody's got a possibly different idea about what this could be, might be. So either if you'd like to ask questions or offer up some frameworks that you've seen work or some solutions, that would be great. We've spilled over into two screens for me, so use the, you can either raise your hand and I'll bring you in or use the hand function in Zoom. But clarifying questions, recommendations, suggestions, anybody? Bueller? Bueller? This is apparently, it's either so clear or so fuzzy that there are no questions here. Who, raise your hand if you're involved or deeply involved to some measure in the food system, agriculture, anything related to food. Raise your hand if that's like your daily ambit. Awesome, thank you. So maybe not quite half of us, but a whole bunch. And there's a few people who were not on icons and so forth. So Kevin, die first and then Christopher. Oh, sorry, you were raising your hand to say that you're involved in food or did you have questions you wanted to jump in with? That's food. Okay, good. And Christopher, same with you? You're muted right now, so you can't tell. Yes, that's correct. I was raising my hand that I'm involved with agriculture. Cool, thank you. Yeah. Ignacio, you're still muted. Hunting for that same window? I'm here because Carl Teetum and the soil for climate recommended that I attend this. I've been sharing with him an initiative that I've started here in Erie County, which is Buffalo, New York, where I started a conversation asking people why so many farms in the area were not practicing regenerative agriculture after having seen all kinds of grazing infrastructure being mothballed and saying what happened to the grazing animals? What happened to regenerative agriculture? As a result of that conversation, I've tried to bring in as many entities and people as possible. And we've come to a point where I'm proposing that we build an incubator farm where young aspiring farmers can enter the farming trade or craft and grow their business in regenerative agriculture while supplying food deserts in the city of Buffalo. And so I'm trying to do this in a holistic planning approach and trying to incorporate as many entities as possible into the discussion. And we've actually identified a farm that could become the nucleus for this as a grounding thing. And we are also testing the assumption that there are a bunch of aspiring farmers ready to go. So I just wrote the description of the farm this afternoon and that's where we are. We're in the discussion stages looking at a place as a grounding for the planning and talking to a lot of entities and people about how we make it inclusive and support the food desert or the need for good food in the food deserts primarily. Thank you very much. Can you point out a couple of things that would really sort of level up your efforts? What kinds of things are missing in your very specific environment? Well, I am proposing that one of the biggest things, questions that come up is what kind of organizational structure this thing would have. There is a resource here in Buffalo called cooperation Buffalo where they support and promote and often finance worker-owned cooperatives. And I see that as one option that we need to explore in order to make this happen. Obviously, we've also, I've reached out to the agrarian commons as an entity that helps acquire farmland so that it becomes accessible to farmers in a less costly way than going out and buying a piece of property to do this. So, I mean, the issue of farm succession is really big in this part of the country. I think everywhere in the States where farmers are getting old and nobody's able to buy their land or continue their operation. So that's an issue that is big is access to farmland. Obviously, access to capital is a big one too. A holistic planning model may reduce those costs because we're trying to get the animals to do the work and the harvesting and use less diesel fuel and less metal. So those are things that are in our favor but access to the land and capital is still big. Thank you, Ignacio, that's really helpful. That illuminates a lot of, I think where we're trying to shine our flashlight because I'm not on the ground where you are and I don't see those issues, but they make a lot of sense. With David and his wife, we visited a farm in north of Sebastopol a couple of years ago and one of the big lessons to me was if you're regenerative and your neighbors aren't, you probably made enemies of the wealthy people in town who sell John Deere tractors and who sell fertilizer and seed and like the mainstay citizens where you live are not very happy with you. And so there's a social aspect to going into regenerative agriculture that I think we might be underplaying and it may be easier to remedy than some of these other things or maybe it's harder because people are so hard to turn on social issues, but even just being able to find other people on the same path and share wisdom and link arms and all that seems to me like an important thing. Yes, and you're pointing to an important aspect of this as I try to work with the existing entities, say Cornell Cooperative Extension, for example, they have been very clear to me that they support what I'm doing and I believe there's a lot of support from individuals within the organization, but as an entity that has a history of as an agency of a land grant university and also funded by the county and by the state, they have a responsibility to serve the needs of agribusiness as well. And if they, it puts them in a really difficult political place if they appear to be favoring one type of agriculture. And I'm sure that, yes, I'm sure the input, the agricultural inputs industry will not be very happy if this takes a lot of, picks up a lot of steam. So it's a difficult thing. The other concern that I have in doing this and I've encountered this whole thing is that when many of the regenerative agriculture products because they are often more expensive to produce because they don't have the inherent subsidies and they don't have the externalities that agribusiness puts on the rest of society, the products are expensive. And the question is how to make those products available to the people who most need them and who have the least amount of income or disposable income to pay for them, which, and so the whole concept of the bottom of the pyramid is really appealing to me because I believe that, we cannot focus only on production. We have to focus on supply and destroy the supply chain all the way down and how to employ people in that supply chain who are living in the cities where they need those jobs, maybe in processing or in adding value to the product or whatever. So it's like, you've already expressed how complicated a food system is. So I don't have to, I don't have to expound on that, but those are the challenges, part of the challenges that we're facing too. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Ryan? Yeah, thank you. This is my first introduction to the group. I'm exactly sure how I got to be here. I got invited by Felicia Chavez who runs the UN chapter from Marin County. I live in Oakland and I've been involved in food justice works in San Francisco and Oakland and the Nama and County. And I love the concepts of looking at local food sovereignty and what's needed to support that. And again, sorry if I'm missing some of the pieces, but curious thinking about what the strategies are for looking at engaging those communities directly or especially looking at how to lift up voices of black indigenous and people of color communities, which oftentimes we have these terms like regenerative or all the other practices that are really just traditional practices. And there's a lot of efforts I know here in Bay Area and Oakland in particular of indigenous groups and groups of color that are really looking at how to transform the food system from the ground up, that if there are ways to think about how to get resources and abilities to expand that work around access to land and economic development throughout the food sector, I think that's definitely a huge need, but just really thinking how those voices can help shape the process and what that could look like or the unfolding of this platform as you're talking about it or the base of the pyramid. I think that's really essential. And yeah, the workforce development piece, I think it's also really important and access to starting up and securing spaces to bring forth those practices. All those stepping stones to getting into regenerative agriculture are kind of slippery and not really in place. And I think they're slippery or in scarcer for people of color, indigenous folk, folk who haven't had sort of access or privilege. I wish Kevin Jones were on the call because he's got a financial initiative to try to help people get loans who don't have a rich uncle and he's working with people who would fall into these categories. Dave Klaus, Jordan, any comments on these questions? You wanna step back in? Yeah, Ryan just well taken comments. And I think we wanted to express that the initiative has to come from within the community. Really all we can do is provide tools to direct the thought process and to enhance the planning process but and then bring resources to the community for self-help. But it has to happen within the community. And there is nothing you can really bring from the outside and other than supporting tools and funding. Is the comment that I would make are that the problems like access to land, to capital, access to markets, et cetera are the problems that are inherent in every single attempt to do this around the globe, right? Or Ryan, you brought up certain communities that may have even additional barriers or limitations of access on top of that. And so I think like one observation I think about the human species is that when we take problems that are inherent in every individual and organization trying to do this and we try to solve them one at a time like locally as if it was a unique problem, you're just making extremely marginal change at the very boundaries of a society without creating anything systematic. And so the idea behind a platform approach is to go listen by geography and around the world to what the unique challenges are. But then when we step back and kind of abstract out, okay, well, what are these central challenges? Access to high quality organic agricultural land is an obvious one. Access to capital is an obvious one. Access to markets is an obvious one. Access to marketing and branding is an obvious one. Access to the logistical services required to get products to wholesale is an obvious one. Like our friends in Africa, cold storage is a huge one. And so all these problems, if we can kind of aggregate the knowledge and the understanding of what the issues are and then solve them as a platform level that makes those solutions available to each individual organization and community that's moving, it might be a much more effective approach. So that's kind of what we're aiming for here is to try to find some of those local communities and voices that we could listen to and hopefully help in the process just of the thought process to discern what those gaps are over the coming quarters. So then we could kind of step back and look at, okay, if we were gonna solve the most acute problems in a systematic aggregate way that would help all these different communities, what would that look like? And I think that's kind of maybe a helpful adjustment because it seems to me that it's the only way that within the next decade we can truly accomplish what we're looking to do not just for one or two communities but for a global community of communities that's moving together. So. Thanks Jordan. Briefly, Ray, do you wanna explain what we adapt is? Which you just put it in the chat and then I'll go to Kerry. Sure, I think it was Stockholm Environment Institute, Tom American and others were behind that. So it's an NGO platform and academics and what everything you were saying sort of resonated with my memory of we adapt. It's not something that's very involved in but I think the mission sounded similar and there's probably some learning and exchange that could happen. Thank you. And I think one function that our communities could offer is sort of a capturing, filtering and sharing of resources like this with some editorial on top which sort of talks about how they work, whether they work, what might work together, what might create sort of a suite or a stack of solutions. Kerry. Thank you. Hi everybody. It's good to see some friends here. So I've met a number of you including class most recently and through primarily my connections in GRC and I'm working with a small group of GRC comrades on developing something called the Global Regenerative Finance Initiative. And our aim is multi-fold but I would say loosely what we're trying to do is effectively wrestle to the ground some definitions and parameters about what we mean by regenerative finance because I think that's being, that terminology is being thrown around a lot right now and risks potential deletion. And to be effectively allowed for applied regenerative finance in other words to be in a position to prove out some of the new and innovative financial models that will emerge and will be developed to regeneratively fund these types of projects. So to hear about the infrastructure that you're looking at Jordan one of the things we've talked about a lot is is this very fact of hyper localized investment and sort of micro plus aggregation, right? Like if you think about what regenerative the best parts of regenerative agriculture as it can be played out in local communities what's often missing are the financial resources to invest in smaller projects, right? Everybody's used to investing at scale. And so what would it look like to aggregate on the back end some investments in smaller scale projects, where that need is quite urgent while also looking at ways to create a kind of regenerative return how will we define that for investors? And so this notion of I mean it's sort of the micro level allotment and assignment and investment with some backend infrastructure that allows for that that the quote unquote scale that people need to see is something that we're very interested in and I've heard about your work from one of my partners. So I'm not really sure I have a question but I do think I think what I'm hearing from you affirms what we're thinking about which is that the scale of these investments is something that requires some innovation. Yeah, absolutely. So just to quickly, thanks, Kerry. I've heard of your work as well. So yeah, I forget which of our friends has been trying to connect us, but let's connect. But yeah, it's like the global corporate platforms who have lots of divisions have all this reach. We don't wanna create another hierarchical one of those but we need to create that global platform that gets hyper local community the tools, resources, finances and access that would be common to all their needs if they were part of one of these global conglomerates. And so it's like the anti-hierarchical global corporation that creates that. So basically I think that the general idea is that okay, we can pretty readily abstract out what are the problems and needs facing every local community, every local organization, every local individual trying to move in this way. And then how do we create the higher order system that fully respects that sovereignty and autonomy and uniqueness and diversity of life but creates those sustainable ladders towards where we wanna help us all move towards. So yeah, I'm looking forward. I've heard of your work as well and looking forward to connecting up. Thanks Kerry, thanks Jordan. Sam. Hey everyone. Thanks for hosting the session today. I'm connected through the GRC working with the likes of Dave and others over there. And I'm also exploring some work on the ground in food here in, I'm in Nolten, Quebec and Canada. And I'm working at a restaurant and then also the summer I'll be working with a food cooperative on food preservation and setting up some systems around that. I'm very interested in what you're talking about. And I think I'm probably a really good case study again. Yes. And having talked with Klaus a little bit I'm definitely interested. I think I'm also pretty skeptical. Partly just wondering how we're going into this with an awareness of like, yeah, what is the work that we're really doing and what are the shifts that we're really trying to make and how are we designing our tools and solutions and our ways of working together so that we're not perpetuating the same problems that we're trying to solve for. And I guess I just wanna put myself out there here in this space and also what I'm thinking and just say that I'm open to continuing conversation and seeing how it can go together. Thanks, Sam. And I think you started listing the big list of big questions for us. So I appreciate that. Tricia. Thank you. Hi. Yeah. Thank you. Hi. Yeah. I'm here in Southern Costa Rica and we've been working for the last eight months on a local food distribution project working with local subsistence farmers. We haven't specifically been focused on regeneration because our strategy has been to first kind of develop this relationship with the growers that we're working with and let them understand that like that we're working together and then with them having a market and with them already having some resources coming in as a result of our work in getting their products sold, helping them with the capacitation and the technical assistance to move towards regeneration. So that's kind of our goal for this year. And we're actually coming up like on a year old. And so we're kind of looking right now at how we want to structure because we just, you know, we just started doing work without structuring anything as far as like, are we a cooperative or we a nonprofit or we a company? What are we? And what we're finding actually is pretty much that everything we want to do is illegal. Perfect. That sounds so simple. No, but exactly. And I think it's something that we see like across the global landscape, you know, is like connecting people with local food that comes from their neighbors that is not within the legal framework on the local level all the way up to the international. So I think that's just an aspect of it that I think is really important to bring into this. And then also just kind of tying into what a few other people have stated is and also just starting with the Pepsi kind of regeneration thing is that, you know, regeneration is such a buzzword now. And what I'm finding is that there's quite a few entities down here that are really doing kind of mainstream work that has a tendency to perpetuate a lot of the same problems that have kind of gotten us into this mess who are now saying regeneration because they also know that it's a way for them to gain additional resources and additional support. So I think that that's something also to kind of keep in mind is how like within structuring something, you know, we really look at the like the real, real grassroots level needs. So yeah, thank you. Trisha, thank you for, thank you for bringing sort of the 600 pound gorilla into the room. Kicking and screaming kind of like in the background behind the curtain. But so like legacy industries have protected themselves so well and so thoroughly around the world in every industry that doing the right thing is often illegal all over the place. And I was trying to remember which economist it was, but I was reading about an economist in the last couple of days who was basically saying there are almost no free markets, perfect markets, normal markets, almost everything has been owned, oligopolized, controlled, monopolized in some, in some kind of way. And so it also brings in the question of political actions that we might undertake or that we might help in different ways because so much of this, so much of this is about ownership and rights and things, you know, baked into law at a pretty deep level. And I grew up in South America, I grew up in food in Argentina, and every now and then you'd hear about reform agraria, like agrarian reform and they would be like, how do we break up the big farms and give them to little farmers and every, every couple generations that happens and then there's a backlash and then it doesn't happen and then we're sort of back to ground zero. So, so I think we need durable, persistent solutions to some of these really nagging questions and to do that we may need to link arms across the globe more effectively than it has been done ever in the past. And here I want to bring in one other little layer which we haven't talked about much but which I have a lot of maybe too much optimistic hope in which is the younger generation and you know whether it's school strikes for climate change and the sunrise movement or other kinds of groups but kids now grow up assuming connectivity. They grow up like I have met way too many young people who know much more than I do and I'm like how the hell did you do that? Like I feel like my knowledge is hard one and yet you know they have a brighter, better outlook on how to how to solve things and then I'll get to in my lifetime. So, so how do we help them? How do we enable them to pick up these pieces and glue them together? Any other thoughts or questions from anyone? Who's interested in sort of the political policy aspects of this? A couple people, okay good. Marnik, to you. Yeah, it just occurred to me, you know, if what we're looking at doing is illegal and yet we all agree that it's in the best interest for the world to move in this direction, you know, what would it, what does it take to help move the needle for the conversations that the policymakers are having, especially right now when frankly I think we would have their ear. You know, I believe the Biden administration is wanting to move in the right direction. There's lots of movement right now around creating new jobs and you know recreating the lead networks of piping and so forth. You know, what if we were able to sort of tack on to this inertia and by the way like let's look at food stuff. I mean like, like he's spoken about I don't know how many of you have heard the class sent out this wonderful interview between the American Farmers Trust I think and the current Secretary of Agriculture and there's these wonderful initiatives to create the food supply chain as something shorter, more resilient and so forth. So if there's a thrust toward this, I think we're well positioned to lend our expertise to those conversations I'm just not sure how and I'm also interested and curious about like what would it take or look like to create some kind of lobbying arm or policy facet of this whole conversation like who are the minds who are really good at that stuff who can help appraise us for the rest of it and then I know in GRC part of the conversation has been well you know how can we sort of create a media arm around this so if there's like a media arm moving forward to you know popularize or amplify the messages of what needs to be done in terms of policy I feel like we're starting to create an armory of functional tools to move forward and that's exciting to me. Thanks. I love that Marna thank you and I just want to add that it's really interesting to me that the decentralization movement is happening in industry after industry after industry and is right next door to what we're talking about and it's not like farms don't need energy and that's being decentralized heavily right now for example so how might these decentralization movements link across sectors and bring these changes sort of wholesale into local places go ahead Hans. Yeah there is a lot of work possible at community level so I spent some time working with food providers and local nonprofit groups who are engaged in that space and then I also talked to for example the catering the procurement manager for the local school system or the hospital and their concern was that in order for us to buy from smaller farmers and regenerative farmers they need to be reliable and typically they're lacking aggregation services where they can provide wholesale volumes to these large accounts and then the other thing is when you're looking at the catering business for example a school with maybe 2000 or 5000 students they know exactly today what lunch they're going to serve on August 15 and to how many people because these menus are all coming in cycles in their pre-planned so they are actually contracting in the supply chain for specific volumes and they have to give their suppliers projections I work for Disneyland as a director of food service we have to give volume projections of six months into the future in order for us to secure the provisions because we were buying container loads of stuff so there is a process that is complex I mean where a farmer needs to engage in contracting and know what crop to put into the ground at what time in order to be ready to deliver these commercial accounts so I think we can probably engage at that level because at every community schools, colleges hospitals and so on are quite willing to engage in the local markets restaurants most certainly a lot of restaurants are very interested in featuring local products but the procurement process right now is rather complicated and based on the one to one so one restaurant has to secure one farmer to call their products and that doesn't scale really well so I do think at community level there is far more opportunity still to be explored than meets the eye Thank you Along the way we were thinking there might be breakout groups here but I'm not sure what to break us into so if anybody wants to suggest some topics for breakouts we could do that and separate into different kinds of conversations around this I'm trying to get a sense of what the topics might be from our conversation and I'm not quite sure yet but if anyone wants to suggest those in the chat or just step in please feel free Can I just make a quick comment before we break following up on what Tricia said that seems to be one of the universal things that we're experiencing multiple parts of the world from the United States to Costa Rica to Africa is that we try to start moving in the right direction and we find that the obvious wise right thing to do is illegal and so that will probably not be solved from the top down through the existing political parties that have made those things illegal there's I think virtually no version of success that runs through the existing political forces that have made it that way what is potentially successful is we've got 30 or 40 people on this call who are all sovereign individuals spread throughout the world and we've been on multiple other calls today with 30 or 40 sovereign individuals spread throughout the world and that starts to be a force that's aware of what's happening that understands that in both Costa Rica and Africa and Myanmar it's illegal to do the right thing right now and so that seems to be the only force on earth that's probably capable of solving this so Marna just to validate what you're saying like there is probably a massive political strategy that's required but it probably looks dramatically different than any kind of lobbying we've ever seen in the past because that's really just mild tweaks to the political parties that are already completely compromised and controlled so but this is the start of it right it's us coming together deciding to link arms and move together a little more unified and if enough people in enough countries move in a unified way we can start to change those things and there's some kind of magic in the middle of that because you get any three people who care deeply about these topics and I've discovered almost every day that they have three very different perspectives on how to fix it and what the key solutions are and what's that but I think the magic here is how to find those points of commonality that everybody can be like yep that thing and maybe it means using appreciative inquiry or something else but how do we find the things where the arm linking is in fact achievable, tenable and seems really immediate and important and urgent and that may take some iteration Michael you commented in the chat about Silver magazine and sort of storytelling if you want to jump in and comment a bit about how the narratives around all this help or hurt or how that works Yeah I was saying it's a slightly cynical take but you know getting boiling down or storytelling to buzz words that can can help move market demand and political pressure among the chattering classes is an important piece here and I feel like a lot of the issues that we're talking about are so both momentous but also complex that it's not as easy to jump on is like oh I'm going to buy organic or I'm going to buy local or I'm going to look for fair trade you know or to have a motto that you can put on a bumper sticker or something that you can get a politician to endorse because they want to get reelected so I don't have the answer there but I think it needs to be a piece of our effort and ironically there's not enough money sloshing around in the systems we're talking about the nascent systems for like operation car wash to be needed later down the road because we managed to bribe and pay off so many politicians to actually do this so I think that avenue is going to be really hard Sam did you want to jump in yeah I was just going to offer to guide a little open space format if we wanted to do that to kind of set up some topics and get everyone into a place that they could enjoy themselves I like that a lot John did you want to offer a similar comment yeah yeah John really like here in Washington state and I've been participating in a bunch of some of these type calls at different levels one was interesting was sponsored by the Walmart foundation which a bunch of us thought might be greenwashing and you know there was a little of that but some large corporate players but also people realizing the system is broken and how do they really fix it so even people inside the large corporations realizing there needs to be change the kind of message I've been sharing people is really today you know especially like in the larger agriculture it's like farmers are really surfs with loans and so they they're getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie the food dollar pie it's like it's the lowest on record just USDA just announced that and what's missing and I'm working a lot on an organization I just founded called Great Plains Regeneration focusing like in Kansas and Nebraska I'll put a link in and folks are you know farmers have to actually schedule out two years from now to get to process a cow like really two years and so essentially the large corporate players you know from the car the cargills and the you know they dominate there's four or five players and they dominate like in the U.S. and it's other places they dominate all the processing and the selling and the aggregation and there's a missing there's a need for a small to mid size processing that's a legislative problem right because there's regs that say that a processing plant must have this this this this this this which means it has to be of a certain scale to be even viable but they're starting to be they're working on in the in the grain space right now so how can we actually create like you can't even buy local wheat flour in Kansas not available you know there's a few tiny tiny little players but literally they're the largest grower of wheat in the world and they can't buy local wheat so all the farmers don't even they don't even bake with their own wheat they grow this is how crazy it is and yet it's kind of crabs in a bucket when they try to come in so they're trying to organize so I've been meeting like I had a regenerative pizza party in Wichita, Kansas two weeks ago with the heirloom heritage variety called turkey red so we're trying to solve that in the wheat and grain area with like a farmer co-op it's just this initial it's an ideation idea so but there needs to be new participants and new processing and that's you know in terms of breakout group maybe but it's different in different areas you know some people would just need to you know it's like it's illegal to do things it's illegal to build regenerative you know like eco housing so not only just food everywhere yeah go ahead class yeah I mean absolutely so we're working I'm also working just business climate leaders and citizen climate lobby and we're working on promoting the prime act it's a bipartisan bipartisan build that would open up the regulatory process for permitting wholesale meat sales to the states so it would give the jurisdiction to the states that may not happen but then USDA may expand as a shortage of inspectors and so on so that is a well understood limitation because the shortage of upper to us at community level which you find everywhere in the world right in every little community in Germany and France wherever you go there's a local butcher and the farmer can bring their poultry and their pigs to that local butcher and sell that in the wholesale market that would open up a revenue stream on one hand for smaller farmers and it would at the same time also bring biomass to the farm right because farms are circulatory and much of the food waste we have today is perfect feed for pigs, for rabbits, for poultry so the opportunities to do things are endless but for breakouts now we would specifically ask you to think about what is it that a group like ours can bring to you to help with you know what kind of support can we can you envision us doing in terms of research in terms of connecting with support services, funding services and so on I think that would be really helpful for us also as we are thinking about how can we help GRC, how can we integrate with GRC in a way that is constructive supportive and offers additional benefits to its members I was going to actually head back to Sam next the schedule time to this call is only another half hour, I don't know if that's enough time to do a small open space but I was going to see if you wanted to guide us into it along the lines of work classes aiming right now that'd be great yeah totally we just had one earlier today in the GRC so it's fresh and alive for me cool so yeah just basically we would get anyone here to offer a topic or question or something to explore in a breakout room and then in order to just kind of get some sense of what everyone's thinking and feeling about I could pose a question like what is the theme that you're noticing right now and if you wanted to respond in the chat box that would be a great place to share so just we could just start by getting a kind of more full picture of how everyone's relating to the conversation right now yeah Craig did you have a question yeah parallel to this call on another screen I've been googling to find out about regenerative agriculture in Thailand here where I live something I hadn't thought of before actually and I have found many instances of initiatives and projects which some of which are ongoing and some are concluded for example 155 rice farmers north of Bangkok are trained in innovative rice cultivation technology where they use cover crops normally they just harvest it and leave it till next season they're using cover crops they're not tilling they're drilling for planting their yields have increased 12% but most importantly in point here and common with everything else that I found in the last half hour here their product was guaranteed to be bought by the initiative which made me think of farm subsidies so farm subsidies are absolutely huge right and close will certainly know all about this they're used in all the wrong places for all the wrong reasons isn't there a great reason to redirect farm subsidies toward regenerative practices perhaps guaranteed purchase of produce to safeguard the economy of the farmer are futures markets around food good for small farmers they work well like what's there is there a consensus is this kind of a good thing globally for farmers or not I don't know yeah typically small farmers don't participate in the futures market but the good news is that the new secretary of agriculture Tom Wilserk has already indicated they will reallocate farm subsidies they have a 30 billion dollar slush fund which they have some discretion over and so that funding from the government level that is happening what is really the challenge though is like the meat markets which I was mentioning is probably one of the most severe hurdles for farmers particularly for ranchers to generate income and that really deserves special attention all on its own but the there is an Oregon groups called eco trust and they have written a paper if you can look it up eco trust agriculture of the middle they have identified farmers that are too big and too small they are too big for farmers markets and CSAs and they are too small for future markets and large wholesale contracts so they may have 80 acres 100 acres or so and they are effectively shut out of the market but those are the most promising participants really to engage in enough volume to provide a significant share of product for the wholesale market so eco trust has a big initiative around it but even they with million dollar backing behind it have not been able to break into the retail market for example or in the restaurant chain market chain restaurant market so there are significant hurdles that need to be overcome and as I was saying before the base of the pyramid markets the food assets and the markets that are marginalized and neglected are providing I think an enormous opportunity to make a difference when you think about today the percentage of the American farmers are using cover crops now maybe it's 4% this year but it's just a very small number and even Biden talking yesterday about use cover crops what do you do with cover crops cover crops are pulses like ooms and in every cuisine around the world they are integrated into our diet you are looking at hummers and cabanzo beans and lentils in the Mediterranean cuisine for example we don't have that but we have to make changes that are far more systemic than meets the eye and they require education and training and the participation of the culinary professionals to bring that all together and I think that is really all happening at the community level there needs to be a team that communicates and educates at community level Sam do you want to propose a few breakout topics and we can set them up and also Dave this is your Zoom so you may need to name some breakouts at the moment so the way this works is that we all offer based on what we are sensing into from the conversation and what people shared in chat so if anyone would like to initiate a breakout room and you can be the pseudo host on any topic I saw some strong ones come up in the chat just please either write down in the chat what you would like to host a conversation on or you could speak out loud and then we will do a little dance to just get it settled for the next few minutes and then we can create the rooms and a couple extra rooms as well for people to jump into those conversations so how about I Dave made me co-host wisely bouncing the ball over this way so I can just create four breakout rooms and let participants choose the rooms and we can rename those as we go that's unreasonable let's create maybe a couple extra just in case people want to have one on one conversations or anything like that okay there are now five rooms with no titles to them so I think I can edit the names or can I Kerry suggested a room on funding that maybe Kerry can host maybe Klaus could host a room on needs and gaps so I don't know how to rename the rooms here which is weird I'm clicking on it's not working so why don't we just type in the chat room one is funding Kerry do you want to host that or I'm happy to sorry to volunteer you Kerry yeah no I'm happy to make room 3d policy policy politics all that what's any suggestions for room 4 if there's interest maybe something on messaging and that's not audience specific in other words like what is the what is the message that will and I'm thinking not so much the policy makers but I'm thinking broader constituency sovereign individuals who might motivate the policy makers you know how do we how do we get the message across basically sounds great we have four rooms and topics so please click on the breakout rooms and find your way to the room number that you like and we will see you there and if somebody wants to suggest a topic number 5 we can figure out what room 5 is I see there's a help moving to a room let us know Kerry would you like to just quickly explain for anybody on the call how to move click on the I think I'm co-host so I might have a slightly different interface now but there should be either a button called breakouts or under more it should say breakout rooms if you click on that there'll be a menu that spills out that shows you room 1 4 5 and you can click on one of those and there's a little blue number on the far right which does not magically attract you if you mouse over that number it'll turn into the word join and then you click on join and it takes you into that room so you can find your way there the clicking on the little blue number thing was not evident to me when I first learned about this but that should work so see you in the breakouts I'm not seeing evidence of any of those clickable items what device are you using zoom on windows pc ah with a chicken in the background somewhere um I've got participants chat share screen record and reactions are there 3 dots next to the reactions 3 dots no oh what's up Craig which one which room would you like to go to I think I can move you there um messaging storytelling sounds great room 4 you are gone thank you anybody else need to be moved hi David looks like me and you are stuck here can I do you want to go to a particular room uh how do I say your name Palmjit Palmjit I can draw I can put you in a room I was just trying to grab up a uh note taking doc if anybody ah you take notes here's a shared doc maybe you can just shove me into one of the rooms you have a favorite um funding closing the gaps policy politics messaging storytelling any of them is fine um right you are going to it's like only two and four are really interested or active the others got ignored so I will move you to four okay thank you okay did you get a prompt yep hey Demary they went to breakout rooms would you like to join a breakout room I'm not hearing you if you're uh muted and we're back yes but we can keep talking on our topic since I press the nuclear code so we the trick with the tiktok thing is we've got to get our single celebrity to do something that they then ask other people to duet yeah duet yeah many troubles I completely changed my mind about food because you know I don't know I mean that's not that doesn't quite work but you get the idea well in tiktok ease that would be tell me you support regenerative agriculture without telling me you support regenerative agriculture there's got to be a dance for that the first rule of regenerative is you regenerate you know the first useful interesting tiktok I watched and I had to watch a few to get there was a young woman who was doing a makeup tutorial and she was busy sort of putting on tweaking her eyebrows purling her eyebrows and then she said and by the way the Chinese are torturing the Uyghurs and putting them in prison camps right and I did like a double take and she proceeded to like go on about a really important issue while she was doing a makeup tutorial it's awesome my apologies for cutting everybody off in mid active of enlightening us but we're back here Dave Klaus do you want to offer a couple words to wrap up yeah we actually had a really good conversation in our breakout here where I think we have commonalities and interests what we would really like to see is half maybe three or four pilots who may already be in a somewhat advanced stage like Carrie is she still here did we just lose her is working in central California with a very ambitious project so could we could we engage with groups that are already working and have and learn what it is that we could do how we could organize and structure ourselves to support that we don't want to reinvent the wheel TRC already has some great programs going and we may be able to provide a support structure to those but so some questions at us and so are some challenges of things that you need help with or that would make a difference and let's see how we can respond to that other closing thoughts yeah I think that was sort of the what we were hoping to get out of this conversation is to have you connect with us and I mean Carl from Sol for climate thank you for being here I mean your group has so many contacts with ranchers we're all trying to get their meat into the market and develop viable relationships there or maybe we can use your network to create a project and so Ignacio you know maybe we can work something together and see where we can think out of the box to partner and support you that's really what we were hoping to accomplish here I will offer as a place for this conversation we have a matter most channel on food and security it's not really well named but it's available for anybody who'd like to come and have a persistent conversation if you go there you can basically join the matter most instance matter most is a more open sourcey thing like Slack and we can sort of keep talking between conversations there and it's easy to post links share resources and so forth and I'm hoping that Ray will just sort of plug himself in and let himself be uploaded directly to the channel but that's one place where we can continue this quick closing comment it's great to meet everybody on here and it's wonderful to convene people in the space like someone said we're all kind of perceiving the same problems that are inherent everywhere and so I think there's only one kind of higher intention and higher consciousness so it's great to see how we can connect and empower each other to solve these things systematically so thank you guys great to meet you and really looking forward to learning about all the things that we're going to do in the future. We do have the chat and the recording if anybody is not on I guess if you're on the GRC or the OGM lists you can we can get to you but if you'd like if you're not and you'd like the chat or the recording link shoot me an email I just stuck my email in the chat and I can send it to you directly cool thanks Dave. Dave thank you for hosting this thank you for hosting everybody thank you for showing up yeah because the ground is just like high on my list of things to watch there's like I like to be this little farm a lot because little farm was weird for me it was almost like well I'm watching this like almost like they invented all these strange things which I'd heard about long ago from other places like they were just out there in the woods like doing their thing and discovering things but it's like golly if we actually had communities that were sharing wisdom they could have saved themselves a whole bunch of whoa and they had a really good guide even right Alan York I forget what his name is who then dies sort of during the production of the documentary but I felt it was a little strange that way cool so thank you very much let's wrap this up. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody. All right. Bye. Thank you bye bye.