 this meeting. I'm on my iPad for a second because my Mac is still rebooting through an update of the OS, which I should not have said yes to a little while ago. It turned into a half hour thing instead of a usual five minute thing, so there must be some kind of a major update. And we are convening here, oops, we are convening here on, what day is it 28. Oh, 28. Yeah, there it is. We are here on August 28, 2020, to talk about slow fertility and the food nexus, what we might do, how to look at it, things like that. And Klaus, do you want to just start in? Good. Can I take the screen? I believe, give it a try. And if you can't, I'll figure out on my iPad how to give you. Yeah, it's disabled. Let's make host. How about that? Hold on, let me see if I can make you co-host, because I think that might, there we go, assign co-host much better. You should now be able to. Yep, that works. Cool. Okay, so we have my screen. So I've just pulled together a few of my slides from different presentations to build a case, so to speak. And when we start just with the carbon budget, which everyone here is familiar with, as of 2018, we had 193 billion tons left. We are consuming roughly 37 billion tons per year. So the way this looks like in graphic form is in order to have a 66% chance to stay within a 1.5 degree Celsius budget. This is what would have to happen in the global emissions output. And global emissions output is not just energy. It is the entire system. Agriculture, for example, accounts for roughly a third of that number. So focusing specifically on the food supply. If you think about carrying capacity, we're currently at roughly 7.7 billion people. We're supposed to get to 8.6 billion by 2030 and come anywhere near to 10 billion by 2050. There is an organization called overshoots.org and they're tracking the use of global resources, non-renewable resources. And according to their calculations, we're currently using 1.7 times the reproductive capacity of the planet. In more specific ways, 90% of global fish stocks are already either fully fished out or over-fished beyond their replenishment rate. Aquavis are being pumped worldwide beyond their replenishment rate. And we have lost about 40% of our arable land in the soil. So if you take, we are currently, this is an older, this is a 2018 file here, 7.6 billion people divided by 1.7. If you're roughly 4.5 billion people, the planet could support based on current consumption patterns. And so while we are increasing our population, we're also increasing the per capita consumption in countries like China and India in the developing world. Another phenomenon here is risk levels of concentrations. When you look at California as an example and look at the amazing concentration of what California produces in fresh food, yet the state is running out of water and has these amazing droughts. And you can take other key crops where you would find similar patterns. So the industry, of course, over the last 30, 40 years has focused on concentration and scale in order to lower their costs and make themselves more competitive. But here is some of the price we pay for that. The oceans, carbon pollution, carbon has a unique impact on the ocean. One is that it's warming up and causing enormous disruptions there. So warming, the other one is acidification. Coral reefs are expected to be depleted. 90% of the world's reefs will be gone basically by 2050 based on current patterns. And the Arctic sea ice is disappearing. So the seafood supply is completely at risk when you look at this in aggregate. The health of the population here, this just came out a month ago. So the 2020 dietary guidelines, the commission that was charged with this is a group of scientists went beyond what they have been asked to do. For the first time ever, the Trump administration gave them a specific scope and a narrowly defined focus. And the commission went beyond it and said that we have not been asked to do this, but we said we're doing it anyway. So what they are pointing out here is that 70% of the American population are either overweight or obese. 40% of the population have two or more chronic conditions which are nutrition related. On top of it, you have food insecurity and lack of access to affordable healthy food, which is a huge problem. That's actually the first the paper ever wrote after my retirement in 2012 was on food deserts. I had no idea what a food desert is, but there are areas in the inner cities and in rural districts where there is no access to fresh food or to fresh protein. So quick depressing summary here of where we really are. So then you go through all our options. So basically, we have energy and energy has been discussed for decades now. So there is a broad understanding in the population of change your light bulbs, put insulation in the house, drive an energy efficient car. So there has been a lot of micro management of mitigating behavior to reduce our energy consumption. There has been nothing really in terms of photosynthesis. And photosynthesis partly is the use of plants and natural systems to secret the carbon into soil. And that's really where the focus now is getting intensely so of saying we have to focus on photosynthesis for a myriad of reasons, to protect our soil, to absorb carbon into soil, and to regenerate the nutritional value of food. So there's a number of reasons here that come together into a massive umbrella that would define what photosynthesis stands for. There is an organization called the 4 per thousand initiative was founded by France that has single-mindedly focused on soil to increase the carbon content of soil in order to counteract the continuous increase of atmospheric CO2. So I'm linked with the secretary general of this organization and I'm the liaison for the Sierra Club for the citizen climate lobby business climate leaders with this organization and I've been working with them now for a couple years. And that has turned into a global initiative in the United States. It's represented by Regeneration International but the Organic Consumer Association who are really focused on this. There's a very quick three-minute video here. I don't know if it works to play this. Let me see if that on another screen. Soils for food security and climate. Human activities release enormous quantities of carbon CO2 into the atmosphere. This intensifies the greenhouse effect and accelerates climate change. Every year plants recover 30% of CO2 thanks to their process of photosynthesis. Later when plants die and decompose living organisms in the soil such as bacteria, fungi and earthworms transform them into organic matter. This carbon-rich organic matter is essential for human food because it holds water nitrogen and phosphorus which are essential to the growth of plants. The world's soil contains two to three times more carbon than the atmosphere. Increasing this storage of carbon by 0.4% per year or four parts per thousand in the top 30 or 40 centimeters of the soil could stop the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is the proposal of the four parts per thousand soils for food security and the climate initiative. The increase in carbon storage in soils would therefore contribute not only to stabilizing the climate but also to ensuring food security. That is the supply of sufficient food for all people. How can it be carried out? Policy measures must be established to reduce deforestation and encourage ecological farming practices that boost the amount of organic matter in soils and meet the four parts per thousand every year objective. Examples would be avoid leaving the soil bare so as to limit carbon loss, restore crops, pastures and degraded forests, plant trees and legumes that have the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen in the soil, use manure and composts to nourish the soil or allow water to collect at the base of plants. Who is targeted? There are 570 million farms in the world and more than three billion people living in rural areas that could implement these practices. At what cost? To restore agricultural soils it would cost a few dozen dollars per hectare. However agroforestry and the renewal of forests would require more investments. And for how long? The sequestration of carbon in soil would continue for 20 to 30 years after the good farming practices are put in place provided these practices are maintained. Under the four parts per thousand initiative researchers are coming together with farmers, associations, economic stakeholders, regions and countries for the purpose of food security and climate. So this has taken on a lot of energy and you see the Queen O'Deal for example made a host of initiatives that are focused on this particular topic. So that and it's roughly framed as regenerative and I should put in organic agriculture, new land management practices and so on. So there is parts material out there when you go online you can you can find a lot of information of where that is. It's pretty mature at this point. And so coming more towards what we want to talk about the regeneration of soil really depends on local conditions. Now first of all what is the existing condition of soil? What's the local climate? What's the availability of water? And what are the socio-economics? Socio-economics is for example the availability of labor but also preferences, dietary preferences and things of that sort, purchasing power of the population place of all. So the industrial food system cannot reform itself without active participation by an informed public. It's a two-way stream here because any change has to be built from the ground up, community level, nature is local, but changing crop cycles and types of crops requires a corresponding change in menus and dietary habits. And so that's where the crux is. The farmer will have to use for example cover crops, cover crops are legumes. So when you look at the cuisines of countries like let's say the middle around the Mediterranean or you look at Vietnam, Japan, China, their menus are linked in with the foods that they have been producing over generations. Now there are cultures that have lived on the same soil for thousands of years without destroying it. So we are in the process of absolutely destroying our soil and so it requires a significant change in dietary habits and that's being driven by Harvard School of Public Health in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. They are currently, if you go online and you look up menus of change, they currently have a convention under way it's the eighth convention where virtually every corporate chef and chain man, restaurant chains and caterers and supply chain representatives are gathered to listen in on this. This year they have really gone over the top in in explaining the urgent need to shift our dietary practices. Yeah so where to engage and then just a couple thoughts to finish this year. There is a company Egotrust, it's actually located in Portland Oregon and one of the most progressive companies in the country, non-profits, and they have developed a report, a paper, an agriculture of the middle and it defines a farmer who is too big for you know CSAs and farmers markets but it's too small to do contract farming for Walmart or Koga or any of these big guys. So those are the farmers that are really struggling but they are also the key to a rejuvenation of the system. Now you have corporate commitments, everyone has on their website statements of how important local food is to them and how they are intending to do good things about it but in our reality that is really not happening. So I just wanted to open up a conversation starting with this scenario for what it is. The food supply is totally at risk. The way we call our food is depleting the natural systems and the position that the large companies find themselves in, my background is corporate, I've worked as a director of food and beverage for the Walt Disney Company for 21 years and I designed these systems, fast food and then I worked international for a German wholesaler, metal cash and carry and at the time they were in 30 countries and my function was corporate head of target group marketing with teams in each country to develop segmentation strategies on what types of customers should we attract and support and what does it take to get to them. So the difficulty that the industry has to adapt and change is that they have been extremely successful in commoditizing food. So we would source in these big restaurants practically everything coming from processing centers which in turn source from farmers of the core products that are commodified. So they use the same seeds, the same animal everywhere and overpowered the natural systems by using synthetic nitrogen fertilizer by overpowering the natural nature with pesticides and insecticides and herbicides basically and so they can't get out of it because when you think about a company like McDonald's with 34,000 restaurants they are completely locked in to the supply chain, they can't, there isn't a knife or cutting board in the kitchen to work with fresh food and no one is trained to handle the fresh food. So the changes and adaptations that are required in the industry are very costly, some of them may not make it, it's the Kodak versus IBM scenario playing out here and that's sort of a top-level point so from a big picture as is so far. So what comments do you have so far on that one? I'm just stunned by the etymology of farm that Sahid just put in the chat. It comes from the fixed paint from leasing. I knew it was a farm, I knew it was like that was like the origin but it's from the lease, seriously? That's so interesting and Doug can take us down the etymology of capital which comes from kaput or the head of cattle etc etc and like the origins of the terms that we're kind of talking about here are really really interesting. Klaus thank you for laying the table which is an ironic metaphor maybe at this moment in this conversation and I have two questions you don't need to finish answering I just want to put them on the table but the first of them is have you found or is anybody tracking how much the needle has changed on changing behaviors for big egg, medium egg, little egg, food habits and so forth because if the needle has moved you know one percent over the 40 years that I think this has been attempted like you know permaculture is quite has been around for a long time and we're now in regenerative agriculture and I think they're you know organic and other things are in between all efforts to try to get people to switch how food is raised and how food is eaten. If they've only managed to make a one percent dent we're kind of in a world of hurt here so is anybody tracking how much land is now managed you know outside of the old industrial sort of farming paradigm for example and then my other question is really at the opposite end entirely which is we have a whole bunch of people for whom buying the cheap calorie is almost the only way out because they live in a food desert because these are all familiar issues I think to most of us and so much of this depends on pull, depends on demand, depends on you know people's habits and people's frame of mind so are those things being changed? So the market is in a sweet spot the the public is is is widely receptive you know one phenomena of the coronavirus is that your personal immunity system is practically the only defense you have 92% of hospitalized cases from from COVID-19 have a pre-existing condition you know diabetes, heart disease, over 90% so this is not being talked about much because of the implications obviously but people are becoming acutely aware of I'm on my own and I have to be healthy so that is that is one core trifle then we have been talking about health for a really long time but the the industry has unfortunately used their their access to the information the channels you know media advertising and so on to confuse the public and associate health and healthy eating for example with the impossible burger with with their plant-based protein extracts and things of that sort because that fits into their business model they need a hamburger patty of some sort now they need a knuckered chicken knuckered or whatever so they they are transferring that from live animals into a plant-based protein extract but these products test positive for glyphosate so that means they they are calling there they're using commodity crops as a feedstock so that's not the solution you know this is not going to restore soil and it's very difficult so the the the way I see this is the one hand to produce a lot of farmers are really starting to wake up and realize that their farm is at their farm is at risk their land is at risk land owners are starting to realize this now if my soil is carbon depleted that means it is vulnerable to being washed out in rain it's it's it's it's vulnerable to to go away on the other hand you have the consumer who is seeking information seeking an understanding of what should I do and what can I afford to do but in the middle you have the the communication process between producer and consumer completely owned and controlled by these by this industrial system now when you think about billions of dollars they're spending on advertising to communicate with the consumer it is very difficult to walk around this system and connect and that's really the challenge at this point is to connect consumer to producer and the only way to practically do this is at the local level is at community level let me step out of the conversation for a second see what everybody else thinks and where your interests are and so forth it looks like Tony is ready to jump in hi question I mean what's what's the purpose of this effort to come up with possible solutions or is that at the basic level what's the purpose of this these excuse me these discussions clouds so I see I see some phenomenal business opportunities here for upstarts there is so much innovation in the in the market with with groups and I posted one actually that just came across you know a group of three ladies who started up a company to advise on linking their menus and with with the supply chain and so on so I see I see phenomenal business opportunities to bring fresh food and fresh food systems into low income populations because when you think about all the money that is being sucked out of low income groups now they get they get snap money the federal government puts money in and then Walmart and Kroger pull it right back out they just doesn't stay in the community at all so if that money coming in was being dispersed in local systems you know in in small scale businesses it could start rolling and rejuvenate and revitalize small communities and and my my my argument is this this is not really possible to do in the non-profit world you know you have to allow people to make a living doing what they want to do but they still have to feed their families and then pay rent so so I think there is there is a phenomenal way to create business opportunities for for folks who are interested to go off on their own who are seeking solutions so just to reiterate what you said Klaus what you're talking about is understanding things made systematically maybe activities and how they all interrelate then from that identify problems that can be solved and then from that capitalize on the identified problems by you mentioned startups or something like that yeah I was when I first retired you know I was still in this corporate mindset of flying to China to Russia to Turkey and working with my team to figure out what should they be doing locally and so on and there was a design challenge from the AARP you know the American Association of Retired People and it was elimination of food deserts so I have totally my corporate head on and I had no idea what was a food desert you know I mean never heard of it and so I wrote you know a plan which is the typical plan that I would present not in my company that I worked for so and I developed the idea of a soft franchise system see the franchise system is basically consolidating the know-how about how to run a business so when you go look at Panda Express so you look at any of these companies the the franchise system encapsulates everything you need to know to get yourself set up and up and up and running and I developed a soft franchise approach for the company I was working for for Metro Cash and Carry because we were competing in Eastern Europe at the time in we had three regions Asia Eastern Europe Eastern Europe and in Eastern Europe we had we got penetrated by the Burger King and McDonald's and Starbucks and we started to lose market share because we were specialized to work with small traders and small restaurants and basically independent family operations so we developed this soft franchise idea where for example we had the Yoba coffee to compete against Starbucks so we provided you know a graphics package all the equipment you need all the products that you would need to have a sophisticated coffee house and being pitched out so out east in Europe you know Russia you know Romania I mean Bulgaria and it was very successful so we developed several concepts like this called a soft franchise so my thought was that you need you need an anchor in the community that works as a broker what is missing is the brokerage function to connect market participants and and I thought that is where for us you know OGM could be a business opportunity to provide the intellectual foundation you know for for a business on how to to set that up you know that's it. Thank you and Tony you probably have more you want to say about this I was thinking that your question would be a really good question to pose to everybody who's on the call who'd like to answer it because I think that our idea is about how to tackle the problems in the system might be a bit different than our different perspectives on it would be really useful to get on the table because that you know we've just learned what Klaus is looking at and I've never heard of soft franchises which sound really interesting but I'm willing to bet that that Judy and Saheb and Doug and Tony you have sort of slightly different perspectives on it so I'd love to ask your question of you and of everybody so Tony do you want to jump back in I'm sorry did you see me yes well I was okay just again I got a background in systems thinking I'm just saying okay what's the system we're thinking about here I mean if I wrote down regenerative soil regenerate soil carbon replenishment is the overall system that we're going to be looked at to find out identify problems then to identify opportunities but there was also mentioned potential other things out of you know different scopes such as better eating habits and stuff like that so is the effort here limited to just soil regeneration I think we're looking at this as a very intertwined system where really you know sharp changes in any of these angles like eating habits would would have a lot of backwards sort of upstream effects on how farmers farm and what's going on and maybe also major changes in farming and agriculture could change eating but you know like where do we where do we talk on the system is part of what I think we're asking and and causes suggesting a commercial framework for setting people up quickly and easily into business that might tip some of those places right I think that's part of the the soft franchise concept so let's go let's go around to Judy next you're muted I should just leave my cursor sitting there so I can mute and unmute easily I guess I'm thinking about this from a couple of different angles one is that pushing products to market is hard getting products pulled to market is the way companies choose to go and so the best opportunity although it's not the easiest to tackle is attempting to persuade consumers to change their habits and there are a variety of approaches that could be used but it needs to be a combination of health and economics because right now it's expensive to eat healthy and that's a problem for the consumer which is what led to part of the practices that are depleting the resources so yeah sorry go ahead it's expensive to eat healthy if you're going to have beef and lobster and the way to cheap pork and chicken or whatever but if but if you go like veg which few people want to do these days because as people come into the middle class what they want is more more animal products right so yeah I think that that the economics of vegetarianism is an educational opportunity yeah by 25 pounds of soybeans and get all the protein you would need in a variety of useful ways changing it into textures that resemble ground meat and other things but there's a learning curve there and it's also not facilitated I mean it's cheap to buy bulk soybeans, texturized soy is a different matter and so there's a there's a learning curve there of how would you begin to shift the public and is COVID in the danger of poor health a sufficiently big club that we have a unique opportunity to assist that change in the consumer right so part of this discussion I think could break off into more effective ways to influence consumer purchasing which is what ultimately influences economics of doing things because if the consumers aren't buying what you've been doing you either go out of business or you change what you're doing right right and there's an argument right now in terms of the whole economy in general because consumers are not buying other consumer products that are not food related either and so it's threatening many different business models um I'm just that so that's one particular angle the other one that I'm actually interested in is how do we make better policy changes that can influence and and drive some of the necessary changes for survival and that's a whole different arena you know do you start local do you work on community which work their way up to state do you start trying to influence national or international what are those bodies and the national international kind of looks at ogb as a resource or could be we could be positioned as a resource so those are sort of two extremes of what I think would be viable pressure points cool thank you Judy uh Sahib you want to jump in or Doug I think you just unmute it you have your hands up and you're unmuted so let's go Doug then saying okay uh I want to approach this at the strategic level with a bit of a shift which reflects my own thinking uh we divide farming off from the rest of life so it occurs in kind of special uh domains that tend to have a fence around them with no people inside I think it's a lot easier to solve problems sometimes if you make them larger so my view is if we put the growth of food and the need for shelter and the need for culture into the same project I think we might make more success certainly uh the issue of shelter where people live and how they live is going to be crucial in this society as we cut down energy use so why not put uh shelter where people live in the middle of where the food is grown there's many advantages to that and it begins to be a culture of meaning that can actually engage everybody in a new kind of project uh we live in a divide and uh and conquer society and uh I think we need to put the pieces back together again to cope with this crisis that we're in and going through thanks Doug um and I think that our different sort of flashlights into the big hairball or issues here are super super interesting um maybe well before you go to Sahib I want to introduce him to the group uh Sahib and I have been working together uh here's at the Rhode Island School of Design uh a good friend and uh he can speak for himself thanks Doug and great to see you Jerry and a lot of new faces also um I apologize actually the last several minutes I think right when you Jerry you asked Klaus that question it was sort of scatterbrained trying to get out a proposal but um let me jump in on this on this sort of last part Doug is talking about about looking at these issues together I mean I think two things stand out to me is a series of questions about what has to shift if we're looking at culture shelter food together and then maybe a thing to start with and that is thinking about the questions of what do we attend to and what do we now uh you know what do we now ignore what becomes important what becomes obsolete what do we need to actually get rid of what do we need to keep what do we need to continue the way it is already what do we need to repurpose um and I asked this question because uh you know even hearing your suggestion Judith about policy changes it strikes me that without a sort of rigorous set of ethics or an understanding of what ethics should be it's really hard to make uh policy recommendations or changes you know that uh baked within them have a sense of values and assumptions about what ethics are um and then I think building on Doug's great point about considering shelter and food you know habitat how we live the space we're in how we relate to each other all together so I should say comment on something I really like what you're saying Doug about the community-based approach and the proximity to consumption and a bunch of things that change transportation logistics a whole bunch of things a complexity of that is healthcare delivery because the decentralization to local communities of healthcare delivery has become very ineffective given the move to urbanization and central locations of sophisticated healthcare so I just want to comment that that's you know I'd love to live in a small community but at this stage of my life being closer to a medical community is also a consideration and so that's a factor that would have to be thought into the strategy of how we enable that and maybe it's telemedicine there's there's a bunch of things I just want to kind of table the notion that it's going to look at different community models which I really favor because people can form communities they can affect what they're doing they shorten the supply chain there's just so many benefits we just need to take a broad look at that in terms of other implications thanks Judy and Rob is also writing a proposal so he's got an ear in the conversation but I'm Rob unmute yourself if you'd like to jump in otherwise I would I would love to share sort of my perspective on this as well cool thanks so I'll just type in what I'm about to say for a second my own take on this is that this is a really tangly system it's a lovely systems mess I wish Gene Belanger were here so he could share the the kumu diagram that he did that unfolds that talks about you know food system interdependencies and how things work but that would take like an hour to get through just to understand the systems diagram where I think that you know we're having the conversation because we have each of us a pretty good perspective on it but but for me I studied a bit under Russell Aikoff at Wharton and he was one of the original systems thinkers and one of the things he said was one of his early the early lecture points he would make is that there's kind of no such thing as a problem and he used to be the head of the operations research society of america and sorry he was he was an operations researcher from world war two and was offered the presidency of the international society of an or and he rejected it and wrote a one or two famous essays in the journal that said the future of or is past because they had become a tools oriented discipline that had multiple regression linear programming queuing theory Monte Carlo whatever and they were looking at problems in the world collecting data optimizing a solution plugging that back in and hoping to fix the problem and he says the french have a word programmatique which means systems of problems and kind of what you need to do is a little bit everywhere and so and so that informed me a lot in that in that to shift problems as thorny and pervasive as this one where different levels of the system are reinforced mutually reinforcing a dysfunctional setup all together so food habits are reinforcing the economic structures are reinforcing the the current you know farming habits are reinforcing the market rewards and pricing mechanisms are rewarding policy issues that were determined a really long time ago and i've put in the chat that that richard nixon wanted cheap food so the poor people wouldn't rise up so he told earlbutts make make corn and make make calories really cheap and but went out and did that policy wise and we're still basically suffering from that oh cool so so then my the other angle i look at this through is a guy named milton erickson who was a therapist who had polio back in the depression and ended up using hypnosis to try to address people's unconscious i say all of this about milton because his magic was suggesting to your unconscious a new option that you would then be like oh okay next time i'm approaching a bridge because i have this phobia about bridges i'm actually going to pull over and take a couple deep breaths that is a new behavior in my repertory that will cure me from just freaking out as i cross the bridge and maybe like crashing or something um how do we do that at a cultural level through stories through whatever and claus showed us a really nice animation video about the problems in the food system and then his presentation about the problems in the food system which i agree with which i see and which apparently some a whole large crew in the population it's not getting to them they don't believe it they whatever so what is the tiny shift what is the little bit of collective hypnosis that comes out of storytelling that we could get to that would tip any of these different sort of big system levers because i think that pull is easier than push so if we can shift demand if people say if people start saying the hell with stakes um you know i would like this or that i think that's really interesting to complicate matters science is kind of running against natural farming a lot so this idea of beyond meat and just you know we're just going to craft nutrients and if you read any michael paul and he's like eat food don't eat nutrients nutrients aren't food they're not arranged like food they don't process like food and i'm conflicted about this because if we manage to create artificial beef pork whatever without killing animals that would be fabulous and if 30 years down the road um citizens of the world like you remember that time when we used to actually raise and kill large numbers of animals to eat them like it doesn't that sound crazy that would be a great future to have right and and by the way peak horse was around 1910 i think uh either 1910 or 1919 i'm forgetting but remember horses were transportation until the car and so peak horse matches with the advent of the car which creates its own problems so so trying to work the way around this and then from the ogm perspective on this hairball um i'm really interested in how do we amplify any of those messages how do we assess the system better how do we give people tools to tell the story locally better over and over again but how do we simplify the messages so that everybody doesn't have to understand the whole hairball to just know what to do that's right for their spot on earth and and sort of connect into what to do and and to me the reason i was excited about about setting up this call in the first place is that soil fertility to me is one of those little magnets where people most people don't know but if you sort of say hey focus on soil organic matter and if we gave everybody a soil organic matter meter you know some way to test for for som over and over again and then send that into a database and say hey i did a little bit better here and use nudge kind of you know behavioral economics to help farmers do this that might be a little break breakthrough but small other next story i visited jumping frog farms in up in marin north of marin and they were a really delightful delightful sort of permaculture regenerative farm only a couple acres making lots of food all of their neighbors were conventional farmers and it dawns on me that they have made enemies of the local dude who sells fertilizer and the local dude who sells pesticides and the local john dear harvester lee sky who wants to rope you into a contract where you can't even fix the tractor and you don't own the data it's collecting on your farm there's this there's this never mind don't even provoke me to talk about monsanto now owned by bayer and their monopoly on seeds and terminator and all that kind of stuff so so to go to jump over the river into this new world of regenerative ag which sequesters carbon which has all these all these virtues that actually creates nutrients it creates a lot of food off a little bit of land etc etc means means making enemies of your neighbors unless we can crack that code so to me one of the really interesting places to push is to help people make new friends or to create to think about the social dynamics of these shifts everything from the dinner table with neighbors and making it okay to not serve a steak or a roast beef or something like that all the way back to the any farmer or rancher was thinking about you know the land and so if we can kind of tip multiple parts of that and also affect the policy level that juny was talking about we stand a small chance of shifting the needle a lot but but to me any small effort a really great effort at one lever isn't going to tip the system this is like many people have to work at many levers kind of grinding away over time to build relationships build trust make the science work all those kinds of things sorry for the long spiel but but you know I've been perking on this for a while I put the nexus for these topics in my brain in the chat and I'm happy to go to Doug and then turn it back to Klaus because we've just eaten a bunch of our time in the call but I think we put a lot of interesting things on the table so Doug okay I think that we're in a crisis of that's pretty huge and what's likely to happen will be breakdowns in the supply chain that bring us food so what you're going to find is the Safeway truck does not show up tomorrow and everybody gets really exercised and they meet out in the street and start talking about what the hell are they going to do I think that's the way it's going to happen I don't think it's going to come from policy and ideas to action it's going to go from action to looking for policies that might work so it'll be pragmatic responses to crisis that are going to drive most of the change which presents which presents an interesting other approach which is if you leave things at hand for those moments of crisis so that the best path forward is one that fits the solutions to the global problem that could be really useful so you know I think it was Klaus or someone else on one of the calls recently was like I think yeah Klaus I'm pretty sure it was you California is on fire it creates you know most of our veggies the gulf is just being like selenized because you know the weather is going to the ocean the gulf water is going to come in and change the crops there we have all these different sort of moments of crop failure happening already and it's probably going to get worse and never mind that Australia has been on fire and so so so how does crisis precipitate this I say a word but to Judith about the health issue I imagine something like barefoot doctors that is we have local people trained in basic health care and that what you have is a system of moving upscale towards the central hospital for those who need it I saw that working in Mexico pretty well in the 60s it's an attractive way to approach the issue and that everybody should have some basic health education in terms of being a provider not just a consumer two tiny things to that and then to say in Cuba your typical building block has a flat it is a clinic which makes complete and total sense like like utter and complete sense like just take an apartment and make it a clinic so that everybody has a place to go for the stuff the broken foot the whatever whatever and then and then off to hospital for other things Cuba has plenty of other issues around it but they have great health care outcomes and then Brad Templeton was just posting about how he thinks ambulances are going to be the first things that turn into air taxis because it just makes so much sense you don't have to worry about traffic you know nobody's going to argue about the noise created by an air ambulance because it's urgent etc etc so two tiny things sorry say hey go ahead and then I just wanted to bring in a sort of personal anecdote and this comes from actually my great grandmother used to host women's circles this is back in job in rural India and basically you had Sufis Hindu six 40 women were talking 1920s 30s 40s right before partition who would get together one hour a day every day these were women who basically said hey I have four kids or I just got married and had four kids but don't didn't mean to or I just got married into this family with all these expectations what do I do and many of them didn't actually have a way to both some of them did not a cook some of them couldn't you know many of them couldn't afford food but what I think is powerful about that is each of those women were tied to they were coming in the sort of structure was you're coming in needy and will leave us pillars whenever you would like and the sort of metaphor is being a sort of lotus flower that is you know creating the conditions around you you know within and then around whatever context you're in so should the should the surroundings want to thrive and be abundant they're able to you don't have to but should they want to they're able and so what I think is powerful about that example is it's a sort of networking of resources so you know people who couldn't get in line to get wheat you know there were three or four other women who would perhaps make something and offer something to to a family now how that infrastructure we set up it's of course you know it's not just highly localized it's also spread out but what's interesting is that think of 40 women their local networks where they go back to and then creating these kinds of structures within those networks to be able to support each other in other ways I mean it's I can attest to it there was you know I wasn't around but 35 40 years of it you know over 600 women you know who came through who shifted but it's a different kind of local model you know to build on I think some of the points you were making Judith about locality and how does that work yeah so the conversation I just wanted to comment that I think the notion that you're raising Sahib in terms of the networking and community is a powerful one that's available right now for a lot of and it's cheap and it's cheap I also think that that in some communities one of the members of that circle would be a healer of one sort or another it's it's just part of what happens in groups because they're individuals with healing personalities and or healing skills and I think if that person in old days they might have been called a midwife they might have been called a naturalist an herbalist whatever the terms were but I think some of those constructs might be good to sort of keep in the back of our thought process in terms of how do you enable those because they then become a dissemination point let me just build on one really quick and we'll go to class and that is you know I think my great-grandmother saw herself as a sort of Socratic facilitator but people who are coming into those circles were all sort of recognizing what are the roles that need to be played and need to need to contribute and they might have been they might be roles that they weren't even recognizing they already play or could be playing and so to your point about you know healers or naturalists you know those kind of specialties but also just an interest in contributing those roles developed sort of organically through the bonds in the network so love that you're describing the dynamic I'm trying to create an OGM class the floor is completely yours so what what what we're basically surfacing here is the need to have a highly decentralized system that creates enormous flexibility at ground level but follows a structure that guides it into the right direction right so I mean listening in on on the conversation what comes to mind for example is the Israeli kibbutz right so after World War two you had some of the smartest people in the world be found themselves in a in a piece of desert land fighting for their survival and the first thing was we need to have something to eat and they were able to recreate I mean to create an enormous system of cell of food independence in a very short period of time by creating community sort of a co-op type of thing but maybe if you allow me I'll take the screen one more time and I'll share this this uh soft franchise thing that I was working on no actually a really long time ago now so you see my screen yes okay so here is uh you can see it's September 2012 right and I apologize this is like uh this September 2012 thought status right I mean so it's a while ago but so I'm explaining here you know and this was driven by the American Association of Retired Peoples and food and food deserts and I was just like shocked that there is such a thing as a food desert because I came to the United States in 1976 and I had never experienced a shortage of food but it's clearly there so I can put this online later I don't want to go through all the reasonings here but a large number of citizens have limited or no access to fresh nutritionally sound food you know the supply chain in the US US is highly specialized around multi-unit multi-market corporations retailers are vertically integrated into the supply chain or in partnership with large producers so I defined the system as I saw it now at that time my job was to do country audits so I would go to Spain you know and and audited how the wholesale markets are organized in Spain or in China or in India or in you know we were in 30 countries and so so I looked at the American food systems through that lens because I was still hyperactive you know in in this mindset and so what I what I saw was the limitations and the lockdown in the US system that made it really difficult for my company that I work for for example it would have been extremely difficult to break into this market so so what is the challenge now small to medium-sized farms and food processes need open and unrestricted access to markets in order to optimize the operations you know they benefit from crop rotation following the seasons with appropriate products complementary animal husbandry you know food processes can optimize their yields by creating complementary high value recipes I mean in Germany for example or anywhere in in Europe you have thousands of small upper to us every village as they small as their local butcher and every farmer has a few animals and it's policy here that makes that impossible so a polyface farm for example raises chickens which they can slaughter they also raise cattle which they cannot slaughter because of inspection requirements and a bunch of other stuff so they must ship them off to other facilities so so part of this is a policy slice yeah oh yeah they are real the market is completely controlled and the farm bill is a disaster oh my god yes so the target consumer needs access to distribution points return outlets that are within easy reach which operate at low cost the food supply chain should operate operate under a local with limited transportation no more than two to three steps between farm and consumer extremely flexible to deal with seasonal and weather influence fluctuations and so on so then I'm I'm coming up here is this soft franchise idea you know develop a partnership with regional food hubs to act as distribution centers to local retailers and I discovered at the time there is there's a thing like food hubs the Wallace Center as a national support structure in place for food hubs and I actually helped someone set up a food hub in when I was living in Palm Desert in Coachella Valley and I worked here in Ben's and so I tried to engage and I realized you know this this non-profit world operates on a different ticker you know that just it just doesn't work I mean the average food hub has less than a million dollars in sales now and even here trying to get these guys to think commercial and to think in revenue-generating broadening ideas it just doesn't work it has to be it has to be focused on a for-profit environment people wanting to make a living and and and being ambitious about it now so but but what they do need is establish a small business support center as part of attached to the regional food hub to assist local community business development business plans startup micro financing support this facility design equipment planning recommended list of contractors federal state local licensing requirements very practical hands-on issues that need to be solved in order to even have a local small business of any sort so so then I'm saying food hubs now I'm I'm beyond food hubs at this point but there has to be a catalyst you know who who supports this development of of local markets there so I came up with this idea here where you have in the center you know in the center here I'm sort of a consolidating umbrella function that that consolidates the local market by special support structures what are the food sources you know what are the food retail formations that are possible you know what are operation support services customer intelligence marketing support centralized promotion concept guidance and training operational control support and on the other side business development services market segmentation identification most appropriate retail options business plans and so on and so on so that's from a very practical perspective that could be a dozen different companies doing these things but they just need to have a consolidating structure you know so they all work on the same on the same outcome you know and so then now they come in here with regional food hubs there's a big support structure in place never went anywhere I mean this is this had so much potential in the USDA to their credit they're really funding this put pumping money into it and it turned into a bunch of 501 C3s making a living yes I think Doug has yeah go ahead Doug yeah Klaus what do you think of including where people live in the idea of the hub so yeah excellent what I'm thinking is that you would have a let's say a national level think tank that sponsors the development and this is the idea of soft franchise so if someone local comes up and he goes I want to do I want to do brokerage between food sourcing and food retailers and we can say well go for it here's how you have to set yourself up here's a business plan here your licensing requirements here's what you we are funding sources that may help you to get started can you unsure so we can see each other but that's okay so a couple thoughts sort of quickly first thought is really like sort of pragmatic from the OMG perspective I just typed our notes in my in the chat so it's like from the OGM perspective like oh my god your your really good ideas are trapped in a PDF or a PowerPoint or whatever which is PDF from the geek in me is like where information goes to die so part of me is looking at this going why is why why is each of your bullet points not out in the medium that we use to communicate and remember what we've agreed to know and all of that so when you say that there are food deserts like I also shared the node to food deserts in my brain and it's just my brain dammit it's just me sort of curating this it's as obscure as a PDF right now but the goal of OGM is to make this part of our ongoing conversation and memory and then these points wouldn't be novel to everybody would be like raised improving the points that you're making and we would we would then not have to sort of bootstrap our way into the conversation we would be in the conversation as part of how we live so that's one thing a second thing is my own my own strategy about development has really shifted dramatically it's tell stories and then ask how you can help and the store and also leave resources at hand which I think is where soft franchising comes in but but everything must be picked up and adapted to local circumstances so what Doug says about about you know the location is primary like the humans and where they are and they might get shoved off their land that's going to happen with climate crises it's happening a lot you know in a lot of ways but the humans know where they are sort of are the drivers and if they are not interested in it they don't feel like they made this or built this none of this happens so we could create a policy measure that says let's put food hubs everywhere and the USDA could back it nicely and I don't know the story behind food hubs I'm really interested in figuring out why it didn't work I'm suspecting that the food industry didn't want it to work so they managed to throw like sabos in the works does everybody know that the etymology of sabotage World War one a lot of peasants were put to work in factories they took their wooden shoes called sabos and threw them in the machine so it's sabotage so so so I think that the bottom up approach and the business plans and all the structures you've just described which are your version of an optimal set of solutions could be instantiated as software that are available as a service to whoever wants to pick up and build one of your soft franchises right and so so to me and then I say ask how to help because I just listened to a really good TEDx talk where the woman basically says look I you know I've been seeing all these projects around the world we decided there are our approaches going to be to approach locals and say what do you need and to not try to forest on them this is what all development agencies do is we have done a whole bunch of studies we found best practices on this just do this and everything will be okay and it turns out that that's just simply broken and it's been broken forever that we need people need to go oh here's a better way to do it and here's what I can do and then appropriate other people's wisdom they're perfectly open to insight somebody else had like that village seems to be really prosperous oh it's because this person has been making a market in in whatever they're doing let's use that and then they pick up and go and use it so and then I you know and then I added but crises so all of this would be great in normal times except everybody's going to be whacked over the head through shortages crises fires floods whatever so so I think that modifies the plan in the sense of emergency kits soft franchises disguised as emergency kits does that make sense because in an emergency you're going to try to reach out for what's going to fix our problem right now and if that if that fix is actually high capacity and here I'll go to a different idea I was talking to a fellow who does a lot of work in refugees and I'm like why don't we let refugees be first-class citizens immediately hand them a tablet give them an ID an ID that can't be rubbed off their person and off their person and let them accrue I took this course so that certificate attaches to my ID can't be removed from me and and and we can offer like you know the google suite is free to use and it's like world-class word processing spreadsheets and everything else why can't we treat refugees like first-class human beings and let them ladder up out of refugees right and then I wrote in here democracy corners because I had a tiny idea years ago I was working with the national coalition for no it was a deliberative democracy consortium and I suggested to them that they create a template on the web where anybody could go take a corner of their cafeteria take a pc because this is in the days of heavy pcs lock it to a table tape off take some pretty tape and mask off the wall so it looks like a booth like a kiosk and just point the homepage of that pc to a page about deliberative democracy and what it means and this would be a deliberative democracy corner that anybody could pay for and instantiate and maintain on their premises so no no money spent by the ddc only for creating the blueprint the outline for how this thing replicates and then people could just walk past walk up go do it send themselves a link to the page go learn it would just it's just another way to reach people and then finally I said virtualize and decentralized because again I think that making all these resources available virtually means anybody can reach them who wants them the problem is they don't want them right now and decentralized means let's let's not forget about policy because it drives everything so much but let's try to do this where people are uh you know bringing resources up sorry for the long the long thing again but i'm trying to piece together how change happens and how we might make that work better go ahead Doug yeah an opportunity that might be presenting itself is the long lines that are being established at food distribution centers if we could come up with a way of reorganizing those lines so for example instead of the division between the people passing out the food and the people receiving it that people could move out of the line and become workers in the system and you'd have a flexible back and forth between the length of the lines and the people uh it seems to me like the kind of thing that a systems thinker ought to really be attracted to because it's almost uh i mean it's just a good way to think i'm tiny side story my first job in the world was at disney on the jungle cruise and occasionally you had to go do other duty but one of the big things at disney is line control and so on the jungle cruise every 15 minutes you would change positions you would go take tickets you would go in the boat you would take tickets and then you'd go on break and you'd basically rotate that all day um and managing the line was a really big deal because people get bored out of their skulls and disney has has evolved some technology around that but truly when you're in line you could be learning something you could be helping others like you just said like you could be doing a million like waiting for service doesn't need to be waiting surf for service right and so how do we do that and and if they're in cars in a line they've all got a radio in their car so you could say you could put up a sign that says hey tune to am 22 20 and start there and if you've got a smart phone then go to this website and start doing this and if you're interested and you have an hour you can step out and get sanitized and then start doing this all of that's virtually doable yeah all of that's virtually doable i like that would be really cool and claus they could ladder up to the soft franchise idea well i mean for the last few years i've been doing this volunteer work you know and i'm you know working national level with with several NGOs i mean i'm core team member of the seroclub political action committee and all of these things and the citizen climate lobby lobby we have direct access to the two members of congress you know we have a full-time lobbyist and i get a comment on legislation and provide input and so on but what i found is there are good examples for for everything so there are so many innovators out there if you could pull these guys in and say look you're doing a great job how about you share what you know and let us help you structure you know what you're doing so you you can then roll that to other communities which have an equal problem have an equal have a like type scenario that you have already solved right so this this rolling out of best practice cases you know i mean that could be that could be an initiative you know because we don't have to reinvent the wheel i mean i'm literally anything that you're looking for you go online somebody has done it already has solved it already yeah so here's the problem i think is intellectual property what people's ideas about ip uh so paul stamets is like the mushroom magician my problem with paul stamets is that he wants to patent everything and lock away what he knows so that he can make a lot of money from the businesses that grow up around mushrooms and i'm like god damn it if we could convince paul stamets to open source all his ideas and we could just go build this everywhere we could do remediation we could do new foods we could do packaging we could do a whole bunch of stuff except paul is busy like in the middle of this hoarding his ideas right so i think he's a genius but hoarding his ideas and there's someone there's someone there who also does it and who just isn't as sophisticated as paul but he's working open source he doesn't even know the difference so why not why not grab that guy and that would be great if paul doesn't sue him and sort of lock up the whole thing but but yes and so i think part of this is who's willing to share and and how do we build systems where when people share their ideas freely they still benefit really well without locking away the ip and so there has to be a revenue producing model that is associated with that of some sort yeah and and maybe that's we you know we find a pool of money we nominate these people as fellows and the money they get us from a large pool of funding fellows which is something we'd love to do in ogm um but the but the government or an ngo or something that that could just say hey for sharing your ideas you're going to get this much per whatever and it's just going to come from some central pool it doesn't have to come from locking away the information and metering it out like sticks and bubblegum so there is huge money out there waiting waiting to to find a place to invest and i posted actually one call but i was attending a webinar last week and i posted it on ogm in my introduction there somewhere um yeah it's the court court and institute and and so they they have consolidated funders looking for opportunities to invest in community development in in regenerative agriculture um constructing clean portfolios for climate solutions now so we need to become builders between these funding sources and identifying worthwhile projects i mean this could be one opportunity sounds so for me and i apologize i have to leave in about five because i have a an important call at the half that i have to join and i need a couple minutes transition between the two um i can also leave this room open because i'm that call is not in this room and you guys can talk until you're done the part of the reason we're having this huge schism in the country is that apparently more than 40 percent of the human of the population of america maybe 50 percent of it i don't know i'm scared right now believes that our systems including ngos and everybody trying to help is completely broken and they're not getting any help so whatever's been happening for a really long time is simply not happening this is not not helping enough people and that's partly why my brain is flipping to tell a lot of stories leave open resources at hand ask how you might be able to help and don't force anybody to do anything um that that's sort of an approach where the bureaucracy can't really destroy that uh it's bottom up it picks up and then planning kind of the i'm going to call out the user journey i hate that term so much but but seeing how people can ladder up through that and and build larger networks and larger collectives and jump into larger scale businesses and do more stuff sounds great um but but how to intervene i think here's really is really really puzzling because well funded ngos and well intentioned ngos have somehow not cracked the case and government agencies haven't cracked the case and there's half the country has suspicion about all those entities all of them because their their situation on the ground is worse than it was and it's worse because liberals bought the neo conservative the the neoliberal agenda and decided it was okay to let companies ship their jobs overseas and then not do anything about the workers and about the the cities and so there's a whole but there's like a hollowed out middle of america that's like out of work and they're like nobody seems to have given a damn about what we do the financial system has said it's okay to like gut somebody's retirement program and sell off all their assets and hedge funds go to it uh you know you hedge fund billionaires are our heroes when in fact they've been gutting america and and leaving little husks that that that barely can stay alive out there on the landscape and so all of these things are contributing to our problem never mind over protection of intellectual property never mind all these things so i'm trying to figure out how to subvert the system how do we how do we tip it so that we give insane power to the fingertips let them make better decisions that that that help them the that orient in the right direction so the the challenge is to find revenue producing models that may come through funding from an organization like the cotton institute or through direct payments and and and develop a structure you know that that their pulk rich becomes that are paid for or i hate to say it the funding may need to come from the Koch brothers right because that may make it credible in red states i don't know and and you know i i'm like like if if soros were to fund the perfect solution nobody in the middle of the country would pick it up because he's been effectively demonized by the machine that's busy eating everybody's minds in the electoral cycle and before so to the big trend right now is benefit corporations yeah it's it supersedes 501 c3 benefit corporations are clearly for profit but in a in a sense of paying salaries and paying for their own growth but not for a shareholder value if i had a magic button to push i would make every corporation in the u.s a public benefit corporation right i would force all of the large c-corps to become public benefit corps and then shift out the leadership and make them actually think about the social mission as important i would force them all to disclose the skeletons in their closet so we you know i would have them all have truth and reconciliation commissions so we could get over the crap that's that's buried that keeping them from actually being lost i would cap executive pay all these things are part of the problem yeah but we could create a benefit corporate shed absolutely and that would be a really really great project for ogm by the way like you know a lot of us are are eager to sort of get busy and do stuff and framing up a simple public benefit corporation that's doing some of the things you're talking about that can set up that would be lovely so maybe that maybe we do another call and focus somewhere there i mean that does that smell like it's in the middle of what we're talking about yeah you gotta go and i've gotta go to yeah you're muted again judy but but we hear you judy and anthony you both you both have windows behind your head and it just makes you harder to see so if you draw the blinds you'll be easier to see on the on video calls just just as a video tip thank you i understand that but i've tried dropping the shades it doesn't help a lot it doesn't help that much shoot okay um you can also relocate your desk so that you're across the light so i have a big window i have a big window to my left you can do is turn on the lights that are here that i didn't do this morning that helps a little bit cool okay thanks um weekend thanks judy um thanks everybody else claus thank you very very much we ate the middle of our time by going around but i think we made the conversation richard that way so let's do this again rob good luck with your proposal thank you yeah thanks for thanks for joining and uh let's do or let's do another one okay cool