 great honor and pleasure to introduce Rick Ridgway, he's vice president of environmental initiatives at Patagonia. He's also a mountaineer and environmentalist filmmaker and he was part of the 1978 team that were the first Americans to summit K2, the world's second highest mountain. So today, Rick and I, we're going to talk about Patagonia's progress on supporting regenerative agriculture. And let's see if we can get Rick connected. He was connected before when he first joined. So I'm hoping that that was okay. There we go. Great. Lovely to see you, Rick. Great to hear you. And I'm excited about our topic today, regenerative agriculture. I guess my first question for you is why is a clothing company like Patagonia interested in agriculture? Great. Thanks for the question. Am I sounding okay? Great. Well, most people listening to us right now, you know, probably think like you do that or assume that we're just a clothing company. And that's understandable because that's certainly how we're best known. But a few years ago, we made what in business is called a brand extension into food and food production. We have another arm of our company called Patagonia Provisions that's in the food business. And that's what we're going to be talking about this morning in our session. But why are we in the food business? Well, let me go back just for a second to the clothing part of our business, which of course is still the main and biggest part of our company. You know, we're a private company. We're privately held by the owner and his wife, Yvonne and Melinda Shenard. They founded the company nearly 50 years ago. And the company's really in business to use our business as a tool or an agent for environmental protection and social justice. I mean, that is really why we're in business. And our mission is to use our business to try to save our home planet. Now, that's kind of broad, isn't it? But we do that through some really carefully defined core values. It begins with making absolutely the best products that we can that have the highest quality and really important are durable. So they last a long time. So people don't need to have as much stuff. We make those products with absolutely the smallest environmental harm and impact on society as possible. And then we use our business to try to implement solutions to the environmental and social crisis. Those are our core values. So we got into food, extending those same values into the production of food because we began to understand as we studied food production deeper and deeper that food production is really has of all the human activity that we all go about on planet earth. It has the biggest impact on planet and society. And because it also has the biggest impact, it has the the biggest promise for solutions to all these problems that we're facing. And even problems like the global pandemic, we can perhaps get into that. But that's why we're in business. So we have this new business called Patagonia Provisions. And right now we have a relatively small assortment of food products, but we've got a lot of kinds of energy and fruit bars. We have cereal and grain products packaged no surprise. A lot of them are good for outdoor sports. That's our focus, of course. We have several products that are made from fish and ocean products. We have two salmon products. We have a muscle product. We have an oyster product. And we and all and we have a bison jerky product as well. Now, all these products are made with ingredients that are not only resourced organically and sustainably, but increasingly their resource was with what's called regenerative farming and grazing techniques. So that's why we're in the food business. And that's kind of what's maybe top of mind to us right now. That's our current biggest focus for the company. Regenerative farming and grazing. That's great. And as a proud owner of several pieces of Patagonia gear, I can also speak to their durability. Nothing lasts like a Patagonia item. But turning back to this regenerative organic agriculture, could you maybe describe a little bit more what you mean when you use that term and how that's different from what most people think of when they think of industrial farming or even organic farming? Yeah, happy to do that. But also happy that you got a few Patagonia products, of course. And remember that because you said they're durable, so that means that you have to use them as long as possible. And you're not going to buy any more stuff than what you really need. Okay, pledge? Because that's what we're about. You know, if it starts to break or something, well, we'll show you how to repair it. And, you know, bring it back to us and we can fix it for you. But don't buy any more new stuff if you don't really need it. Because we all have to pledge to reduce our consumption on this planet. Patagonia, we're in the clothing and food business. It's really interesting because when you think about clothing and food, those are two things that were that no matter what kind of pandemic we're in, we're all going to need to eat food and we're all going to need to wear clothes. Well, we hope we're going to wear clothes. And we're not going to go back to living in a cave no matter how hard this recession or depression is. So we ask ourselves what kind of clothes are we going to wear? And what kind of food are we going to eat? So we're in the business now of trying to increase the and scale the consumption of food products that are created with regenerative agriculture and grazing protocols. So that's what we're here to talk about. And regenerative, let's just look at regenerative farming. What's that mean? Well, first of all, to us, it means that a farmer builds on top of existing standards for organic food production. You got to start there. We have to control the industrial use of pesticides and insecticides. That is causing so many problems to our society, to our planet and not just us, but to the wild part of our planet. It's a big part of the reason that biodiversity is crashing globally. It's not just climate change. It's this industrial use of insecticides and pesticides. On planet and people, on our health. So we have to start with organic standards. But on top of that, what regenerative farming does is introduce additional protocols that build on organic. And one of them is that farmers stop tilling their soil. They use techniques that prevent the need to keep turning soil over and over. And we'll get into that in a minute. It kills the organic matter in the soil. The second thing that they begin to introduce is use of cover crops. And they also begin to optimize crop rotation. And then they stop the industrial use of fertilizers and they begin to introduce composting. So when you mix all these things together, then what happens is that the soils begin to get increasingly healthy. And the health of soil is defined by the amount of organic matter in the soil. And yet organic matter is both dead and alive. But you know, all of us who remember our organic chemistry class in high school or college know that organic matters made out of what? Well, it's made out of carbon. So what happens is that as soil health increases, two big things begin to happen. You know, once as the one is that as the organic matter increases in the soil, then the soil starts out like a sponge and it retains water. Now in times of drought, which we're facing globally all over the world with climate change, having soil that acts like a sponge makes that soil more productive in times of drought. Now the other big outcome is that one about the carbon. So as the health of the soil increases, then the soil actually starts to pull carbon out of the air and puts it back into the ground. And so regenerative farming becomes an enormously important partial solution to climate change. That is great. That's so interesting. I'd love to hear more. Is there anything, so I think Patagonia has some kind of certification program for their regenerative organic agriculture. Could you maybe talk about that a little bit more and what kind of products you certify? And sort of the, I mean, you talked a lot about the company's values before. I'd love to hear more about how that relates to why Patagonia made such a big commitment to invest in setting up a certification scheme. Yeah, well, again, our goal was to figure out how we could, through our new food division, Patagonia provisions, try to scale globally industrial food production to shift to regenerative protocols. But everybody's going to ask, well, what's that mean? And then once you start to answer the question of what that means, like I just did to you guys, then you need to have a way to manage the use of all those different protocols in a way that is standardized and measurable. So you know, if you're using these protocols, how you're measuring against all your cohorts, whether they're competitors or people that are inspiring you, and you need to have a benchmark so you can know whether you're progressing or not. So that means you need a standard. Organic agriculture has organic standards. When you go into the market and you see that organic label, that means something, there's a measurement behind that. So we needed the same measurement for regenerative farming and grazing. And we needed it to build on top of that organic standard that we already have. And we have it globally too, which is really cool. It's got problems, of course, but there's thousands of people working on trying to shore up and maintain the strengths of that organic standard globally. So we partnered with a number of other stakeholders, principally a group in North America called the Rodale Institute, who has a long history in regenerative farming and grazing. And we worked with all these stakeholders to develop a standard. And it's built on three pillars. Now I've been talking about that, the pillar of soil health. In addition, the regenerative organic certification also measures the welfare and fairness to the farmers and the workers in the entire supply and value chain and food production. And it also brings in measurement of animal welfare, which is particularly important for grazing protocols, for regenerative grazing. But it also is applicable to farming, because to maximize soil health, a lot of times introducing grazing animals into farming lots and rotating them in and out will also increase soil health. So animal welfare is super important. So we have these three pillars in the standard, the animal welfare to safeguard the treatment of animals, social welfare and fairness for farmers and workers in the supply chains. And then that last one, soil health. And we've already talked about that a bit. But to me and to our company, it's one of the most intriguing opportunities that we human beings have in front of us to solve climate change. It is an enormously exciting opportunity. There have been enough farms and farmers and ranchers around the world now who have tested these protocols in enough different climate zones with enough different soil types all around the world, hundreds and hundreds of them at this point, that have also measured the amount of carbon coming out of the air and going back into the soil. They've actually measured it. They measured the carbon molecules being sequestered. And the results are astounding. They're suggesting that if we can really scale this and we can really convert food production to regenerative farming, it will be the biggest contributor to climate change of anything we can do. And those are numbers that they're science based measurement of carbon in the ground. It's not speculation. That is incredible. I love this unity of welfare for the animals, welfare for the people, welfare for the planet. This is an especially fascinating and promising solution to take carbon out of the air and solve climate change. I'm wondering if you've done any estimates to figure out if regenerative agriculture and grazing alone, farming and grazing, if that would actually be enough to pull enough carbon out of the air to solve climate change or if it's one piece of a many piece puzzle. Well, not surprisingly, the puzzle has a lot of pieces, but it doesn't have that many. And that's what's really exciting. It's going to be a giant effort to convert half or more than half of global food production to regenerative, but it's going to happen. We're confident it's going to happen, but it has to happen alongside other efforts. We have to continue to scale the conversion to renewable energy. That has to happen. Another thing that has to happen is that we have to scale the protection of natural areas on planet earth of wild forest and grasslands because forest and grasslands and wetlands are super important carbon sinks for storing carbon. So the more we increase our protected areas, the more we increase the parts of our earth that we allow to be natural where nature can thrive, the more those places are going to sequester carbon. If we can convert 40 or 50 percent of global food production to regenerative and we can scale protected areas and we can scale renewables, the science is coming in that we can keep the planet to 1.5 degrees. We can absolutely do it and we know how to do it and it's already right in front of us. The protocols are there. Now let's get to 1.5 degrees, but then what happens if we continue to scale regenerative and make the full conversion, we're going to go below 1.5 degrees. We can actually pull the planet atmospheric carbon back to where it was before the industrial revolution started. That's why Patagonia is in the food business. We're also converting a lot of our fibers to regenerative production. We have experiments going on right now in India with small-hold farmers. We have over 500 cotton farmers in India that are growing cotton with regenerative protocols and it's super exciting. They're starting to measure the amount of carbon coming out of the air and going back into the ground with their farming techniques. They're producing carbon, they're producing cotton that is a climate change solution and soon we're going to be introducing clothing products made out of that very cotton from those farmers. We're not only solving climate change with these apparel products, but we're supporting small-hold family farmers at the same time. We're giving them better livelihoods. Our dream and vision is that you can put on a Patagonia shirt and we're even thinking about printing on the inside how many grams of carbon that shirt pulled out of the air put back into the ground so that you aware of a Patagonia product are wearing a partial solution to climate change. How cool is that? That's amazing. I can't think of a better place to possibly wrap up our wonderful conversation than on this strong message of hope. I want to thank you Rick and Patagonia at large for your leadership. If every company had the same values and commitment that you did, I think we'd be living in a very different world. Again, I'm just so grateful in the troubling times we're having with COVID-19 and people being home. It's really lovely to hear a message of such hope and inspiration to fortify us on Earth Day as we all go ahead to resume the fight for climate smart agriculture and regenerative grazing and farming. Okay. Here's to saving our home planet. Okay. Thanks, Lauren. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Rick. Bye-bye.