 This is Rebecca, and this is Kristen. And I think I'll start by asking both of you how you, why agriculture, just how did that become your calling, and we'll start there. You go first. We were talking about this in the green room. I guess it was sort of accidental where it was the work that I was doing, and then it just became the work that I could do. When you say it was the work you were doing, what do you mean? Just being younger and working on farms and liking manual labor and things like that. But yeah, I mean, I worked for a farmer and his main motto was just everybody gets lunch, and I really kind of became really enamored with that sort of mantra of farming principles can vary, but when we look at sort of agroecology or natural farming or whatever buzzword it gets called, it's actually these really old forms of agriculture that managed to nourish a lot more than we even account for value. And so it really, once I sort of saw the possibility of that, it really became much more than just an occupation. So, yeah. I love everybody gets lunch. Did he, did everyone sit down for lunch together? Or was that, did that happen at all? No, everybody got like a hard boiled egg that you kept in your pocket and you ate in the field. But conceivably, like microbes get lunch in the form of like, you know, being nourished and tending to the soil. Animals get lunch, you account for them in terms of just like what your farm is providing for. And so I think just in our formulations, when we think about climate change, we hear all this data, it's hard to interpret. Oftentimes we think of food as this one sort of static and product when in reality, like really regenerative forms of farming are providing so much more than just one product that we perceive as being this one outcome. So finding a web of relationships that really can connect to and amplify one another. So I think that's what's exciting to talk about here. I kind of came into agricultural and agriculture and food systems through a weird squiggly career path that ended up making perfect sense, but at the time was kind of unexpected. I initially was kind of working in a policy capacity and it spent several years in the Middle East. Got really interested in water policy, the idea of scarcity. And I ended up going to the University of California Davis to study international agricultural development with the idea of kind of going into this in a policy capacity. What I ended up doing was more of the science background, the agroecology approach. I also liked manual labor working on the student farm and just felt that kind of connection to it. And so the direction that ended up taking was kind of becoming really interested in the idea of shared space and shared landscapes and so conservation on working landscapes at the time. So the idea that the areas where we produce food can also host nice things like pollination, habitat. How do we kind of make those things share space? I became increasingly interested in the idea of land sparing. When we talk about scaling up our food system, so land sharing is great. We also need land sparing. What is land sparing? So land sparing is leaving room for nature. So it's great to have agriculture working landscapes that can also host biodiversity, be reservoirs for seed genetic diversity. But it's also important that we leave room for nature as untouched as it can be within kind of our current level of human interference. But that hasn't been happening. And so despite promises of agricultural intensification, we're still chopping up lots and lots of new agriculture, new areas to expand it, new parts of the footprint moving into places that are really important for biodiversity and carbon like the Amazon rainforest, Latin American tropics. So that's kind of how I wound up taking that agriculture background, working as a farmer, coming from a ranch and came to Impossible Foods. It's kind of the idea of how do we transform our food system to just require less land, which in turn goes back to less monocropping, less of an agricultural footprint. So it sounds almost like your experience partly has led you to feel that agriculture is not the best way to feed the planet, agriculture as defined traditionally. You know, it's not that it's, we need agriculture to feed the planet 100%. It's the inefficiency of our current agricultural system and the reliance on livestock to translate plants into their protein and into their calories that really is kind of mind boggling in its extent and the inefficiency of it. And so like I'm happy to really go into that later, but look, we're relying on a system really heavily where you have an animal that's walking around, metabolizing things, they're consuming plants and then we use that animal to translate it to your plate. If you don't have to do that, it's a lot easier on the environment, easier in natural resources. Right, it's a really inefficient way to make protein is to grow crops, to feed to animals that animals become, and those animals become food and that's how we get our protein. And I only started thinking about that this year when we did a big, a whole issue on climate change and food. And I think the main takeaway for a lot of us was that, worked on it was that dairy, you don't really think about dairy as being, you know, as bad as for the climate as meat, but the conclusion was pretty much that a cow is a cow or that a cloven-huffed animal is a cloven-huffed animal. A cow produces a lot of different things. Beef, dairy, especially in places that aren't North America, South America. We have a segregated herd elsewhere, it's all coming out of the same animal, so yeah, it's just kind of about conversion efficiency. Conversion efficiency. All right, well, before we were worried about conversion efficiencies, probably most of the people in this room thought that eating locally and seasonally was not that long ago, seemed to be like, that was great, that was gonna be the solution, and as long as we could all do that, somehow biodiversity would be met, the cycles of the seasons would be maintained, and obviously that did not happen, and it seems like laughably ignorant. And there's so many challenges, there's so, so many challenges, climate change, population growth, everyone, you both agree that there needs to be change, and you come in some ways from similar educational backgrounds in terms of agriculture. So, and Kristen, it seems like you are, what you do, and some of the stuff that you've written and talked about in that monocropping corn and soy is like an existential threat to the planet. Obviously that's what a lot of, at least as of now, the impossible products are made of. So, I don't know, how do we reconcile this? What do you feel the solution is? You have very different solutions, so I think we should just air both of those out. You've got very different solutions to that, one big problem. Well, from my, you know, thrown at my two acres in the 20 acre farm that I at least land in, clearly I'm equipped to tell you the solution right now to this massive problem we're talking about. But I think that there is a shortcoming in how we're defining the problem. Like yes, the monoculture, like clearly I am against that, but that is just indicative of like a whole system that really hinges on like really extractive sort of paradigm, right? So it's not just monocropping is the problem that self-contained, and you know, like over here, it's just one more kind of facet of a really problematic approach that we have to land, our really flawed relationship to how we interact with our landscapes. And so that just contrasts to me with like the type of farming systems that I've been really rooted in and gotten to see and gotten to see these really amazing, robust outcomes. So if you kind of contrast this idea of like an industrial food chain with this kind of more democratized food web, that food web realistically, like you're talking about local and regional isn't going to save us, but you know, the bulk of the world's population, 70% of people living on this planet right now are being fed by that food web, which is using less than a quarter of the resources, including land and fertilizer and things like that. So when we talk about all these measures and these outcomes, sometimes we're not talking about even if we're not putting land in agriculture, that land is having natural gas extracted from it for a myriad of industrial processes or energy is being extracted for other things in terms of the fertilizer needed to grow, yeah, monocultured soy to feed cows or to grow sort of the various food products of your company. And so I think we just really have to pull the lens out a little bit and look at kind of a mentality. And so with something like, I grow a ton of soybeans. I love soybeans, I hate hearing them so maligned, even though I understand like why they're maligned because of what they're used for. But I think that sort of extractive mentality is what lets us look at just like heme or crude protein as the thing that we've taken as like the one trait that has utility and let us kind of ignore all the other traits that have been stewarded. Koreans have grown soybeans since the Bronze Age and every single year for an annual crop like that, that seed is remembering something about its conditions and the world that it witnessed that year. So when you think of centuries of that knowledge being banked, all the behaviors being learned in respect to different regions and different growing practices, there has to be a case made for that sort of regionally robust agriculture. And I do agree monoculture is not the answer but I think that that's just part of a bigger problem that we're facing. There's like so much I wanna dig into on this but I wanna start with soy because I think it's such an interesting kind of microcosm for this whole conversation. Soy is like a miracle crop. I mean, it's amazing. It is a perfect protein. It's high yielding. It fixes its own nitrogen. There's nothing inherently wrong with this crop demonstrably. It would be nice if we had a higher level of genetic diversity that we're farming. That would be great. But one thing that's always been difficult in my role to communicate with stakeholders who are conscious of and critical of food choice as they should be is the perception that soy is the driver of deforestation, is a cause of huge amounts of agricultural expansion. Soy is being planted in these places. Soy has kind of taken over these beautiful savannas in Brazil but the reason for that is not for direct human consumption. It's not for making tofu. In fact, I wanna say like 6% of global supply of soy goes to direct human consumption. The rest of it goes to animal feed. And so what's hard to articulate and hard for people to kind of understand if they don't have this like ecology grounding is consuming a soy based burger, whether it's impossible burger or whatever else instead of a burger from a cow is the single best way to use less soy. So every time you're eating soy instead of eating a burger, you are saving a whole lot of soy. It takes about 36 pounds of corn and soy to make a single pound of beef before it gets to your plate. And so that's where we have this scale issue. That's where we have this problem of we've expanded our agricultural footprint so badly and really kind of bottlenecked the genetics of those different feedstocks that the sheer amount of land use is, I would argue, making it difficult for low intensity farming methods, making it difficult to preserve regionally specific cultivars or types of crops that are really important for kind of future resilience of our food system. So I know I'm getting a little bit wonky here, but it's really important that we transform our food system away from livestock in order to preserve not only reservoirs of genetic diversity of crops, reduce some of that land pressure, but also just the climate implications, the biodiversity implications. If we don't change that system, if we don't figure out a way to wean ourselves off of livestock, off of animal products, especially as demand grows and we add two billion people to the planet, that in and of itself is going to present an existential threat to our food system as a whole. Climate change is not going to do us any favors in agriculture. Biodiversity loss is going to result in ecosystem services loss, pollination, pest control, these kinds of scary things that we need that we don't always account for when we say there's value in nature. And so it's not about monocropping. I think there's a role for high intensity farming, but there should be way less of it. Should we have it blanketing Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri? I don't believe so, I don't believe we need to. And I think it does come at the kind of cost of more diversified methods of farming and inclusion of agroecology. But I think the word scale gets thrown out here a lot and as a way to say that small scale is the only place that diversity exists. And I think that part of what I find troubling is that when we look at these big consolidated entities that are creating this one product, like there's no solution in there that says that soy will be more diversified if it's not going to cows versus going to the processing facility that impossible foods has. And so to me, I think it's still like in this certain type of logic that whether it's soy or the coconut oil that goes into this, like it still is like you're saying it's hitting a genetic bottleneck that is increasingly vulnerable. And so to me, it's just really hard still to understand how this can be sustainable when you're determining what trait makes the most sense at the scale that you wanna be, which is very large. You need to find the trait that kind of has the key to that. So for coconuts or the soybean, you have these places that are going to need to scale to these large kind of genetically homogenous crop varieties in order to export that meat, your need in that supply chain, which is just gonna cause like, we're gonna see the banana go, Cavendish banana go extinct in our lifetimes. We're gonna see like a very precarious violent disruption in our access to rubber for all these same reasons that like Thailand and Vietnam are gonna start growing coconuts that are most suitable for us in the West to process into coconut oil or coconut water and all these products that we get to enjoy. So to me, I still just don't see how the absence of cows makes up for everything else on the back end of that equation to somehow bridge this chasm of logic and then arrive at less of all these bad outcomes. So I think a lot of us probably focus on like, how can I eat less meat? How can I eat less meat? But it also seems like from what you're saying is that we also probably need to drink less soda and eat fewer chips and eat less packaged salads. And like, how is that gonna happen? Like food and the consumption end. I guess I can speak, but you know, it's like you're talking about feeding a demand. And I think for us here, it's like, well, how can we be part of that solution? What can we demand less of? I do wanna address just the idea, number one of scale and number two of kind of the idea of what ingredients to feed stocks are currently and will be used in the future. So when I say scale, I'm really talking about just physical extent. 30% of the ice resurface of the planet is exclusively devoted to livestock. If you include big extensive grazing areas, that's 50%. Those are kind of shared landscapes, but everything is opportunity cost. An animal that's domesticated that is eating grass, that grass is not available to the biodiversity that would otherwise be there. It's a certain amount of productivity on this planet. We're allocating huge amounts of it to livestock. Reducing reliance on cows, reducing herd sizes of domesticated animals is not going to solve everything in our agricultural system. It will set, I believe, the preconditions for ways that we can build resilience, though. I think it opens up the opportunity space to actually make literal room for some of the farming methods that you're suggesting. And in addition to addressing just the sheer demand size for crops like soy, crops like corn that we don't necessarily have to rely on, the supply chain of a future food, a future plant-based food economy is inherently extremely flexible. Just to take an example of our kind of friendly competition beyond meat. They use soy and tapioca, they use, sorry, pea protein, tapioca, we use soy protein, we use coconut oil, sunflower oil, potato protein. I don't know what everyone else has in the incredible burger that Nestle rolled out. Nice branding. I don't know, but there's a huge diversity of inputs that you can use for these. We are a teeny, tiny nascent industry right now. Hopefully that will not continue to be the case. Hopefully we expand dramatically and start capturing market share from some of these livestock commodities, as well as helping span the emerging consumption gap, especially in emerging economies where meat and beef demand is really skyrocketing. If you can even leapfrog that, it's super important. But there's no saying that we need to stick to these same ingredients. Recently, we put forward a letter of support for a grant at UC Davis that's looking at new kind of genomic techniques for understanding temporary beans in better ways that they could be used because they're kind of an underutilized crop. So there's all these leguminous plants, pulses. Sorry, what? Oh, sorry, it's a bean. I just posted on Instagram about temporary beans, actually, because a breeder from Silicon Lab don't have temporary beans. Yeah, it's a traditional Southwestern indigenous crop of temporary beans. T-E-P-A-R-Y. Okay. So my only point being, there's no reason these supply chains can't be flexible. And hopefully that creates demand for, in my opinion, I don't know, this is like a company policy. Hopefully that creates demand for kind of value added different types of underutilized crops. I know, but I'm still not hearing how there's like biodiversity preserved within that because it also scares me because I love the soybean, like to hear temporary bean and all these things that are really important to indigenous communities around the globe, then suddenly having this really vested corporate interest in it, when that kind of mode of scaling most often leaves the consolidation and resources and then the only expansion is in like the intellectual property and like the taking of those plant genomics and deciding what's valuable and then putting a proprietary stamp on it. And so to me, it's like temporary beans should be grown, but do we need to then subject it to this whole lengthy process to turn it into like a meat resembling product versus just talking about how delicious they are on their own. There's like light colored varieties that are super sweet and there's dark colored varieties that are really smoky. Like with this question of like, I think that like we agree, like a plant-centered diet is like what really is needed, but I just don't understand how we get there from this perspective that you're talking about. Well, let's number one, you might be even more cynical than I am about a consolidated supply chains and development. And I'd argue that without a certain level of demand from the private sector, these crops are never gonna thrive because there's not necessarily going to be the demand for them and that is because of consumer behavior. There is absolutely no way quantifiably demonstrably that you get people to truly transition off of meat onto the idea of a veggie forward plate. And this is, we have seen an increase in meat consumption globally, it has continued unabated, it is projected by the FAO to go up by 88% in emerging economies, that's just for beef. We can't rely on the idea that people might suddenly be interested in transitioning to beans away from beef, although that would be wonderful for the environment. They're not transitioning to that, they would have to just be able to preserve that because a lot of the trends that you're talking about like really coincide with sort of neoliberal broader movements and sort of like wealth in these other parts of the global south. Right, I think you're talking about a situation where like let's say in India where the staples were pulses and rice and that was a protein complete diet for a long time, but now there are another fast food there and so that's the consumer behavior that pulls people toward beef because it's available when it's not really necessary. But it seems like what you're saying is that in the real world, once people start eating beef, they don't wanna go back. Beef is delicious and I don't, it is. I'm married to a Brazilian, I know. It's hard to eat tofu or beans when you're getting churrascaria and it's also really important for certain food cultures. So I fundamentally don't believe that we should tell people not to. I think the United States went ahead and deforested half of our country so that we could produce beef. Telling people to stop doing that seems a little patriarchal. So if you provide a consumer alternative that yes is using a commodity soy product and that product is helping spare land is still meeting consumer to need need can be true to food culture. In our case, it's ground beef that can be used in bow, can be used in dumplings, cofta, whatever. That's absolutely net positive for me. And while I can't speak to how private industry commercializes supply chains for commodity crops, I can say that this is certainly a better situation and I don't wanna be precious about the toolkit of expanding our food system. I like the idea of Alice Waters growing vegetables in her backyard. Does that feed the planet? Does that avert climate catastrophe from animal farming? No, it doesn't. So I think there has to be, this is a really big lever to pull. There are many others. I'm not talking about Alice Waters, I'm talking about like the Korean Women Peasants Association and I'm talking about La Via Campesina and I'm talking about grassroots led movements that aren't about this sort of like bourgeois idea of just like the culture and the absolute, just like savoring of how good things taste. It's about like survival foods and that biodiversity providing like foods during famines and just like being really equated to just how civilizations evolved, how culture survived, how people are really left out of this industrial equation, actually still maintain their communities. So to me like I don't disparage tofu and things because that's actually the cornerstone of the culture where I come from and I don't think it's a big leap. Like and I think that to me there's just an inefficiency in terms of saying if we had $750 million that you've raised to have a three year runway to do research and development and do these things, if that money went for farmers to have a similar runway, if I had three years at 1% of that budget to just fail to breed crops in my field to let them be heat stressed, to let them be drought stressed, like we see those outcomes of farmer led breeding and so I think that's part of the thing. Like if we had a fraction of that money to like actually do education to address access points of addressing the barriers of why people can't cook more food at home, why they don't have access and why beans aren't necessarily exciting on their own. Like I think that there are good people working on that. I feel like we're kind of shading beans a lot. I eat beans every day, I love beans but I'm just saying like that's the thing. Like it's not, it doesn't have to come as this like really condescending thing of like teaching people what's good for them. Like I think people know and we have to address more realistically the very complex socioeconomic problems that create these huge disparities in terms of health and things and I don't think more processed food is gonna address the broad spectrum of what's happening with climate change and how it's destroying people's lives. It will in the case of plant-based food. It needs to be a transformative solution and I can't speak to the economic geopolitics of venture capital. I can just say that from an environmental perspective there is no other solution that has proven viable. China has recommended that people reduce meat consumption. What has happened? The opposite. If you don't meet consumers where they're at there is no solution for scaling this food system without absolute environmental catastrophe on multiple levels. So while I agree with you that these things are nice and should be preserved it is a precondition to sustainably scaling our food system to transition away from livestock and I don't see the role of that being veggie forward plates. I see it as being plant-based meat that you can define any food as being processed whether it's bread, whether it's tofu and we can definitely circle back to that. Yeah, we can. I feel that I'm definitely in California. Let's talk about food, other new protein sources that require no agriculture at all. You know, the lab grown bluefin tuna or the lab grown dairy. Do those have agricultural components the same way that like a... Not the same way. No. Yes, I mean so look. Because they're like, look, impossible food is great and all but they can't make a steak. But we can make sashimi. No, we can make a steak, just give it a minute. Oh, 10 years. 10 years at least. No. I mean, lab-based meat, it's not our business model. I don't get it. If it were a better business model would impossible foods do that instead? If it could be more environmentally impactful and scale faster, yeah, but that's not the model because what we've identified is the fact that you can take proteins and fats from plants identifying a lab, how they can interact and basically reverse engineer at a molecular level meat say, okay, we kind of get it. We kind of understand why it smells, cooks taste this way, which is what we did with the Impossible Burger. Bought a lot of ground beef to figure out how to do that in a lab, but you take it out of the lab. And at that point, it's just taking the plant-based proteins and fats that you've identified and squishing them together in a paddle mixer. At the end of the day, that's basically what's happening and those are carefully selected ingredients that optimize for protein that eliminate cholesterol that provide bioavailable iron. These aren't Cheetos. It's not a health food. It's not supposed to be a quinoa bar. It's got a taste good, but it's still, I just want to push back on that definition of processed. Now, with cellular meat, it's a completely different approach. You're basically biofermenting. It's kind of like making beer, but you're making meat. It's much more complicated than that. There's kind of scaffolding that's involved, but the fermentation itself, there's a substrate. There's something that the, that fermentation has to eat. Right, it has to, yeah, it has to consume and that's sugar, it's dextrous, glucose. So that's coming from sugar beets, field corn, sugar cane. So there is an agricultural component to this. It's just not immediately recognizable. And not as intensive, I can imagine. I probably can't use that much, which I feel like might be helpful to your approach because if what we're talking about is really only growing proteins. You use a hell of a lot of that supply chain to grow that protein. I want to make it clear. Well, what if there were a solution where your protein didn't require very much land and that left space for the kind of web of farms that you see as the solution? I mean, I still think they're just resource intensive. Like I think this idea that we've somehow come to equate like needing land to just grow plants that directly are consumed by people is somehow inefficient, but using natural resources to then like synthesize something, remote in a lab makes more sense. I mean, I think it's the eating animals. That's what we're, that is where eating fewer animals and eating more plants is the, that's the tension. I think one area we also need to be thoughtful of with cellular ag is that it's very energy intensive. To run those bioreactors, you're basically slamming oxygen through them at insane rates. Right now, but I mean, you know, I think that's just biological reality. So depending on the grid that you're on, I'm not sure it goes in the right direction, but maybe nuclear cellular agriculture. Things could change. That'd be emissions free. Who knows? And then there's the question of, you know, will people eat it? Because, you know, I think in, you know, we just did a big tasting of plant-based meat burgers and they were much more appealing to people who eat meat than the people who were vegetarians. And there are, I think for a lot of people, probably a lot of people here, just the idea of a, you know, there's an unnaturalness that do you guys feel like that's a barrier or no? 95% of our consumers eat meat and dairy. That's huge for me because as far as I'm concerned, a sale doesn't count unless it's made at the expense of beef. We want a displaced demand. We want substitution. We don't want to add lanes on the protein highway. Americans get enough protein. Let's not do that. And that's not helping the environment. Consumers, I don't believe so. And I think it's probably a one, you know, it's data points of one. It's going to be qualitative. It's going to depend on the person. I have absolutely no qualms about eating soy protein and coconut oil. I can identify what that looks like when it's grown. I can understand how that's been, you know, milled and processed because they all are. So to me, that's not a quick factor. How much is it going to be possible for impossible burgers to be sold at prices where the people can afford, not in the United States, but let's say. Yeah, I mean, we're at a price premium, for sure. It will be sold at Price Parity with ground beef. That's the mission. We want to make it available. And I mean, the proof of concept, we started in Michelin star restaurants. It's really expensive burgers. We're still in those restaurants, but you can also get a $2 slider from White Castle. You can get an impossible whopper for a buck more than a regular whopper. So, you know, we've made good progress, but it can come down more. And I mean, around agriculture, there are, you know, I mean, you can now belong to an elite bean delivery club that costs, you know, $16.99 a month. And that's not what anyone wants. That's not your goal. So how do we work on that? Well, I mean, I think to your question too about other proteins, like I also don't want to discount regenerative grazing. And I know that like you have experience in that background as well. I think that I do, I'm not arguing with you about your framing of the problem of, you know, land and cattle and things like that. I think those specifically, like I did an assessment for the board of supervisor for Alameda County about like actually what type of open space do we have in that whole county and what is that suitable for? And the majority of it under 100 acres is all that's left in terms of capacity for growing vegetable crops, grains, things like that. And so the majority of it is actually most suitable for grazing lands. Whether that has to be cows or it could be other kinds of protein sources like goats or sheep that are actually not as egregious in terms of emitting methane. They're more efficient in producing muscle mass. I'm not gonna start debating about just the broader ethics of whether how much we should be eating animals. But I think there are other solutions out there as well that actually can tie into a broader system of how we engage with our landscapes. Why can't that land just be left? Why does it have to be producing something? And so the reason that I'm asking is with livestock you have a double whammy on climate change. When you leave land alone, and this is actually the point that drives me crazy about quote unquote regenerative grazing, I don't care if you can capture a gram of carbon in your soil if you're a rancher. What I care about is the fact that if you were to leave that landscape alone, not only would you not have the production of methane and nitrous oxide, you would also be allowing the vegetation to grow that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere. Plant-based meat is basically negative emissions technology. So our insistence that every ounce of non-arable land needs to be used to put cows on it or goats on it and graze it is a really dangerous narrative. Yeah, but those landscapes have historically been grazed before. Animals have had a large part in terms of determining successions of ecosystems and how, yeah, annual forbs and wildflowers and perennial grasses give way to chaperone and oak and things like that. And so it's not saying we have to do it at the concentrations. And I'm not arguing with the system that we have being problematic, but I'm also not going to discount the role that animals play in agriculture. Why did you bring up the 100 acres when we were talking about beans? Well, it's just to say, like sometimes we just talk about this idea of open space, like all of it should just be either left alone or it can be used to grow other food sources. But when you look at regional food security for an area like the Bay, which is so population dense, and you look at how food insecurity is, then you do have to wonder like, what ways we can engage with our landscape in a sustainable way that actually relocalizes and creates some form of just inability to feed ourselves when we're not gonna have constant access to the petroleum to truck things in. I won't argue that it's really important from a community and I think local economic perspective to have local farming. I completely agree with that. The issue around sustainability, I believe is simple biodiversity loss. And so I agree with you, it's been incredibly important for the succession of ecosystems to have wild animals or rather to have, you said animals, I think it's wild animals that are vastly more important. There has been a 57% drop in the global biodiversity as measured by the World Wildlife Fund over a single generation. We have lost half of the terrestrial animals that we used to have. So whether or not there used to be bison roaming through Iowa, I haven't seen a tully elk in a while outside of Point Rea's National Park, National Seashore. I'm not saying that we're gonna transition away from animal farming and all of a sudden we're gonna see caribou roaming again. But unless we transition away from it, we're not going to have those wild animals. And that does create a huge resilience issue. And I'm not talking about this because I think polar bears are the best, although I do. It's not being precious. It's literally we need wild animals to live. And so I would also dispute the fact that there's been grazing all over these places at high, and I know you're not saying high intensity, high levels, but the arid west is where we produce most meat, most cattle. Those are incredibly fragile arid ecosystems that didn't have 60 million buffalo tromping around them. And the areas that did have the buffalo or the bison tromping around them are now corn and soy monocrops. So it's a little bit of a false narrative in that we need these animals to effectively manage our ecosystem. No, they're absolutely destructive. And we need to address that at a consumer level. Yeah, I mean, again, I think we've ended up at the same place, fortunately. So we're gonna start taking questions in a few minutes. I just wanted to ask each of you either what is the biggest change that you see coming in agricultural systems that's just going to happen. That's not related to a greater global, not related to climate change more in the area of production and consumption. Sure. No, there it goes, from the consumption side. One study that we've done with kind of our consumer tracking partners is looking at generational differences in food buying and food perception. So you can basically see these stepwise changes across baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, however you want to define these different groups. And the willingness to try plant-based is vastly higher among Gen Z and millennials. And it continues along that gradient as those generational differences go up. The association of meat with an animal also is very different at the young level up to the more kind of baby boomer generation. And so that willingness to purchase is very, very different. Do you mean the word meat or? The word meat, yeah, just the concept of meat is coming from an animal, it's more fixed. It's very sticky with baby boomers and Gen X. It's less so with younger generations. And so I think that's going to inform purchasing decisions as they kind of come into their own household buying decisions. I think that is going to be the functional driver for a reduction in demand on beef and the kind of the agricultural transformations that would arise from that. What do you think, Kristin? I mean, honestly, the people that know me and hear me know that I am really bad as a capitalist. So I don't know how to predict market trends. I don't really know how to make decisions around that. And I don't also, I have like a lot of luxuries that my farm is really small. I have a partnership with a restaurant. And so a lot of the food that I produce gets to go to people that I don't really perceive as consumers, but I get to really see as community. And so for me, my main concerns are about food security, food access. And to me, the thing that I think is really inspiring is that just like the biodiversity being linked to cultural diversity and looking at who stewarded those crops and how they were related to these distinct food cultures. And the thing that really created that opposite bottleneck is these different cultures occurring all around the globe. And so we look at a lot of the health disparities, particularly with like some elder communities in Asian American populations. And similarly, yeah, sometimes it feels like a hard sell with like healthcare providers and things to say, like, can you eat some broccoli? Can you get your grandma to eat some broccoli? And then you find out, you talk to grandma, she doesn't want the sort of like crown cut broccoli they're talking about, but she does want Gailan. And it's just like that little difference. It's nutrient, exactly the same. It's the same species of crop, but just a different cultivar. And so how just bridging these conversations in a different way and actually listening to people actually makes a difference in those health outcomes and how much people are willing to participate where you don't need to talk down to people. You don't need to tell them what's best for them. You need to listen to what they already know. And so I feel inspired with that and seeing the way we can affect some of the really stark health disparities that a lot of our communities face. And just seeing young people. Olivia is like my best seed apprentice on the farm right there. I trust her with my seed collection more than any adult in my life at this point. Eileen, my friends who's here, does all this education with young people. And so I think starting at the ground up where like you're saying perception of food is different. Perception of vegetables are different. Like the diet is changing. The kids that Eileen works with, she's working around food and health in the Filipino community. And these kids, when they come to my farm, I know I have to have a dozen large totes of long beans ready because they treat it like it's absolute candy. And so if you don't have to view healthy habits as an intervention, but rather this through line that exists from the very moment they're eating solid foods, then I think that that's where you affect a lot of change too. And that's from a holistic, really community-driven approach. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I feel like this is such a moment of crisis that people are looking both very far forward and very far back in the idea that like anything is better than this, but we're not sure which way it's gonna go. Okay, we're happy to take some questions. Michelle, do you have a mic? Michelle here. Okay, Michelle. Oh, she has a mic, okay, sorry. And we do have to wait for you to be in the mic because we're recording this and your question won't be heard unless it goes into the mic. Thanks. Well, thank you. I have a question about the cost and maintaining cost parity with impossible meat versus normal beef. And I know you mentioned at Burger King it's still more expensive and wondering what's kind of holding us back from if it really takes 36 pounds of soy to make an equivalent one pound burger, what's holding us back from not just maintaining parity, but being dramatically lowering cost and having that help scale in developing countries and other places. Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. There's no reason it shouldn't become less expensive. It takes a tremendous amount of resources to make a beef burger. It takes us less resources. Therefore, it will eventually become cheaper. The short answer is economies of scale. At least within our company, we're still really small. We have a decent media footprint, but we are like, it was 2016 when we launched our first product. And so the distribution has grown, but we bootstrapped our own operations. We figured out our production process. We still have fairly small volume of purchasing power with suppliers. And you're also kind of waiting for the supply chain to catch up too. There's texturized soy protein that is going to need to scale up at the same time as the rest of the industry that purchases it. And so long answer, but basically it boils down to economies of scale. We've got to get bigger. There's another mic. Hi, so, hi. So I come from the regenerative grazing side of this conversation and was recently speaking to an investor in the alternative protein space. And he was telling me he just had a conversation. I know this is a little bit of a game of telephone, but he'd been speaking to someone from the commercial meat side of the equation. And he had said to him, the best thing that's happening for us in the commercial meat industry is that you guys are fighting amongst yourselves right now. And so I wonder if you can speak to that and what it means to find common ground in sort of what we're talking about and what it means to work together towards the sort of shared goals that we do have in this conversation. You mean the competition in between alternative protein companies and technologies? No, I mean more between the alternative protein versus the regenerative grazing or the vegetarian side of the equation, right? We're all fighting amongst ourselves for this market share that is 1% of protein consumption and big meat is still winning in that equation. And so how can we shift these conversations to be one more of building bridges and finding solutions where we are all on the same team, working against the sort of conglomerate of big meat as sort of what is reigning at this time? Regenerative, quote unquote, grazing scares me way more than industrial meat production, frankly, it's less efficient. Can we define that term just for everyone? I wish I could, I don't know what regenerative grazing is because no one's defined it. There's no kind of body of work or theory behind it like there is for agroecology. I guess you can call it grass-fed with co-commitment practices that they hope will sequester carbon while they're still emitting lots of methane and nitrous oxide. The scale of it is, I keep on using the word scale, but it's real, is vastly higher than it is if you were to feed a cow corn and soy and distillers grains. The life for the animal is not nice in the system that I just mentioned. I'd rather be a grass-fed cow, but at the end of the day, you're still getting a stun gun. So the idea that we can just call regenerative grazing sustainable in any way has been disproven through quantitative analysis. So there's a really great paper that came out of Harvard recently that showed if we were to transition, and this is not regenerative grazing, it's grass-fed. If we were to transition beef consumption to be fed by grass-fed systems, we would increase the emissions of that system by 43% while only meeting the demand of about a quarter of beef consumed in the United States. It doesn't scale. It's a dangerous narrative that it's somehow more environmentally sustainable. And so I'm happy to continue picking that fight rather than, look, both of the systems are the same thing. It's just different incarnations. Did you wanna speak to this point or wait for the next question? Okay, next question. Hi, I was wondering if you guys have any ideas as to the role of insects as alternative protein in the future? I mean, yeah, I mean, look, we are, I think that's very pertinent to the discussion because the question is not only what people should eat but what people will eat. And we at the New York Times Food Section get sent every possible insect product we have. Insect bars, we have insect flakes, we have insect coffee. I make the young ones try it. I'm like, I think I'm just gonna draw the line but I do taste them and they, it's a problem. They don't, they taste like a protein bar. So the question to which, in which those have not yet been made to fit our food system is something. But I mean, certainly that is just a matter of habit. I mean, termites are an excellent protein source and they taste just as good to people who eat them. Probably, I don't know, as beef does to us in some ways. It satisfies a primal need. Things that have intense energy concentration taste delicious to us. So, I mean, I think it is an important food source for a lot of people. I think it's just like, for me, I don't want us to keep veering towards solutions that are like the shiny object that's presenting itself as a silver bullet. So it's like, insects should be enjoyed. Like, we should encourage people to think about what different types of protein sources are available. But when I also confess, I love the show Shark Tank. It's my favorite show, weirdly enough. And every season there's someone pitching insect this, insect flower. And I think that just when we start veering towards this thing that's looking to be this cure-all is where we just get into a problem because it's constantly the issue of scale and how that scale happens and then how that consolidation feeds into that. So to me, I think, yeah, you should definitely eat insects. I've eaten insects, like, when cooked right, they taste great. But I don't necessarily think we should always be like terming things superfoods and hopping onto these bandwagons with so much zeal. The funny thing with those that always captures me is like they're marketed as like extra protein and Americans eat way more protein than they need. But it's true for local kind of regional food cultures. They're super important and hopefully that's preserved rather than expand kind of a higher intensity diet. If those products can help displace demand for more intensive livestock products, that's great. But so far it doesn't seem like there's kind of a one-to-one change there. Yeah, we're not reaching replacement. Next question. I have no power, they have all the power. And this question's for Kristen, but both could answer. What would you do with $20 million from VC funding? Just some back of the napkin math says that you could get maybe 20 or 2,000 acres and irrigated acres in California and maybe have another 1,000 farmers like yourself farming that. And then just kind of compare and contrast what maybe an indoor vertical farm that is growing a monocrop of lettuce, which has been quoted as costing about $20 million would be producing instead. Not quite sure I caught that, but you're offering me $20 million of venture capital, which I would kind of look at with a little bit of side-eye because I don't quite trust where that money's coming from necessarily. But I do think that that investment when we talk about what we could do with that money isn't just about protecting that land or giving farmers tons of land. I think it just would broadly need to be reinvestment in the type of food system that's more equitable. So I think about just like, yeah, it's important to have land accessible to small-scale diversified farmers for those farmers to have a lot of people working on the economic and policy levers that we need to have good markets for that and have good advocates in the market for that. I think there's great community development funding initiatives like California FarmLink that help just, I think the issue of scale for small farmers is about underinvestment and why it gets so devalued is just from being undercapitalized. And so I think some of that capital should be invested in really smart ways that just help farmers bridge the gap in terms of the huge amount of risk you're taking to just sort of help bridge that. Like for me, I'm a seed geek and so I believe a lot is just like, how much could every farmer benefit if you could have a couple years of doing your own research and development on your farm to be developing farm-improved, regionally adapted varieties that withstand drought and heat and things like that. Because in a very short span of time, like a decade that I've had my farm, in three years we bred a zucchini that I plant in April in the Central Valley and I water twice and I'm still harvesting like hundreds of pounds a week, right? And that means it's seen 21 days of triple digit weather and months of extreme heat and drought. And that's me, I'm not like a professional plant breeder. I'm just someone that was willing to stress things to a point where it looked really kind of gnarly in the hope of that long-term outcome. So I believe in some ways we just have to come up with ways to subsidize some of the risk for small farmers to engage these best practices because right now small farmers, the margin is so tight, right? So when we talk about bootstrapping it, it's like you've got maybe like $12,000 to get you through that season, okay? And if you had a little bit of a buffer, you might make decisions differently. You might be able to take risks that you couldn't when you're just worried about the market. I think that's a really good answer. And in the interest of just speaking to things that, look, I am not saying plant-based food is a plant-based meat is a silver bullet. There's lots of other things we need in the toolkit. With the question of investment, something that I think the investment community would benefit from looking at as a longer time horizon for a payback for initiatives like this that don't, you know, they don't operate on a quarterly schedule. This isn't like you're going to your board and you're reporting how much you got off of your investment in a cover crop. So allowing for a kind of a longer horizon on that is, it's not just the amount of money. It's like how much willingness investors have, what's the appetite to wait a little bit? Alo. Okay. There were a lot of people sort of closer to the front. So if you guys could maybe stand down there. My question was about like the role of policy, agricultural policy and government subsidies and how that will influence the future of food in general, I guess, because like with corn subsidies now that influences where we are as, and where our priorities lie kind of and how will that, if those subsidies don't change, how does that affect the future of food? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think the whole state of conservation agriculture and things like that in the 2019 farm bill like is coming in at probably a total of maybe $30 million. So that's all of UC co-op extension. That's all of the USDA beginning farmer rancher programs, socially disadvantaged farmer funds. So it's egregiously underfunded for like an entire country and we expect to hit these certain metrics of climate resilience with that farming. Like it's just not feasible. So I think that's hard. And it's hard to also then put that on the private sector, which like you're saying when profit is like main driving force, there's just some things that, yeah, it needs a longer runway to be profitable or sometimes profit just shouldn't be the bottom line. And that may sound really naive, but I just don't think that sometimes you get to have it always where we're all going to continue to be rich and we're going to say, we're going to fight climate change because climate change is wreaking havoc right now. So it's just severely underfunded in all of these realms. And I think that, yeah, the private level is just funding things that are yeah, existing in that kind of bigger biotechnology realm, right? So all good plant breeders are being poached by, yeah, bigger GE biotech. So it's really hard to think that without that public support coming up that there's gonna be some good contending with that. But I think that part of where all of you get to come in is that we don't have to leave that all to policy, right? Like there are things that farmers need in terms of influencing some of the broader just markets for us that just us regionally get to shape and prioritize, right? Because if we're counting on the government right now, that's kind of terrifying, you know? Hi, hi, sorry. Hi, okay. So, sorry, I'm just like a vampire. So could you guys shed more light on the dairy industry? And for example, is eating or drinking almond milk or having nut-based cheeses or things like that better than the dairy version, like the original version of that? Just because there's a lot of water production involved in nut-based cheeses and milks and things like that. So is it better to source very local, farmer's market version of actual animal products or is it better to try and source nut-based products because like Berkeley Bowl, for example, it's like $12 or $13 for like a round of nut-based cheese and you could maybe get like, you know, an actual cow version for like half that price. So I'm really curious to hear because I think there's been a lot of dialogue about going from eating meat to vegetarian, but there's still not that much dialogue involved about like going to vegan and like actual, fully plant-based. So I'm curious to hear what both of your thoughts are on that. I'll stay pretty squarely within our lane of just kind of environmental efficiency and the almond thing, the nut milk, that's a really good point. I think it's a misconception in some ways that there's more intense water use to produce almonds than there might be for dairy. There's a lot of examples of this, including like just the spotlight on almonds versus any other fruit crop, many of which are heavily irrigated compared to something like alfalfa, which is also pretty heavily irrigated, if then you feed it to a cow. So if you're just looking at the water footprint, it's still bigger with dairy. And the reason for that is you're watering alfalfa, the alfalfa feeds the cow, grass, whatever, service water, all these different things. So from an environmental standpoint, yeah, it's still more efficient. I still have some questions around like health and kind of the parody between protein quality, but environmentally speaking, yeah, plant-based is lower on that resource use. Yeah, I wanted to ask about soybeans, corn. I know they're commodity crops. And I was wondering whether specific, whether trading them as a commodity requires them to be a specific cultivar. And if so, whether kind of broadening that would enable plant-based meat industry to kind of grow into something more like we see with the wine industry, which is much more, much more sort of narrative-based rather than commodity. And enable more of diversity, genetic diversity. I think, I mean, I want to hear your thoughts on this. There's no kind of specific cultivar that you're necessarily selecting for within the market. It's what growers will buy, what they can grow. And so what we've seen is a lot of trait-based selection. So whether that's genetically engineered or whether it's simply a result of kind of the traditional breeding, like, oh, this is good with drought. Oh, this is less susceptible to a certain pathogen. That tends to be what gets selected for. And then you stack things into it if you are making genetically engineered crops like herbicide resistance or it's expressing a BT protein that allows you to kind of kill off the caterpillars that are eating it. So I guess that's kind of the only standpoint that I'm coming from is it's what growers want to buy and it's what processors want to process. I mean, it's a commodity because it's like the big entities that hold the proprietary genetics for that, like want to have farmers grow it. So it's not necessarily that it is regionally suitable for like the east side of the driftless region versus the west side of the driftless region. Like whether you're in Iowa or you're in Wisconsin, you're gonna be growing probably the same cultivar of soy because it's mostly working in harmony not with agronomic practices or environment, but it's working in harmony with like the kind of chemical regimen that it's grown under. So yeah, herbicide resistance, like if it has the BTG in all of these things. So again, I just like don't want to keep harping on the same thing, but I think we do need a system change if we're gonna see like some of that biodiversity reintroduced because right now like we've just honed in on like these things that we've seen as like the desirable ways that soy interacts with these, yeah, herbicides and pesticides and that's what's prompting us growing them instead of having things that like, yeah, farmers in Wisconsin are selecting like a really specific variety now that the spring is starting super late, like shortening the season and early maturing time like more actual, you know, bog resistance almost like you can plant it in wetter fields, but that would involve like engagement with farmers and kind of working in reverse of how our industry is working right now for that commodity crop, which is very, you know, it starts with those sort of biotech companies and it moves downstream to farmers where they're being contracted to grow it, you know, but instead of companies taking feedback and breeding for directly from farmers needs. And then after the farming phase, I mean producers of things like, you know, like Frida Lay and McDonald's, they need uniform, you know, they need their products to behave uniformly across regions, time zones. So yes, that certainly militates against that diversity as well. But I like the idea that we might someday have heirloom, heirloom soy, textured soy proteins. Maybe that will be the solution. But that's all we have time for today. Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you both.