Orchestrate all the Things - Averting the food crisis and restoring environmental balance with data-driven regenerative agriculture. Featuring Continuum Ag Founder Mitchell Hora

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Modern agriculture was broken long before pandemics, wars, supply chain disruptions and fertilizer shortages. Regenerative agriculture can fix that, and data can help. What could a multi-national corporation like Unilever and an environmental leader and activist like Vandana Shiva possibly have in common? Shiva has a history of actively opposing the commodification and appropriation of natural resources for the benefit of corporate interests. Unilever is at the heart of the international corporate web. Shiva, a prolific author, just published her latest book: "Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions for Hunger, Poverty, and Climate Change".  Unilever, whose products need around 4 million hectares of land to grow the raw materials for, recently published a new set of regenerative agriculture principles. There has to be something about regenerative agriculture. Let's take a look at what it is and why it's important, what the data tells us about it, and how analytics and AI may help going forward. Article published on ZDNet

Welcome to the Orchestrate All the Things podcast. I'm George Amadiotis and we'll be connecting the dots together. Modern agriculture was broken long before pandemics, wars, supply chain disruptions and fertilizer shortages. Regenerative agriculture can fix that and data can help. What could a multinational corporation like Unilever and an environmental leader and activist like Vandana Shiva possibly have in common. Shiva has a history of actively opposing the commodification and appropriation of natural resources for the benefit of corporate interests. Unilever is at the heart of the international corporate web.

Shiva, a prolific author, just published her latest book, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture. Unilever, whose products need around 4 million hectares of land to grow their own materials for, recently published a new set of regenerative agriculture principles. There has to be something about regenerative agriculture. Let's take a look at what it is and why it's important, what the data tells us about it, and how analytics and AI may help going forward. I hope you will enjoy the podcast. If you like my work, you can follow Link Data Orchestration on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Yeah, so my name is Mitchell Hora, and I'm a seventh generation Southeast Iowa farmer. So my family farms about 700 acres, corn, soybeans and rye. We've been farming in this area for 150 years, but small farm. And I've always been very entrepreneurial. I started Continuum Ag in 2015 and we are a soil health data intelligence company. So we are helping farmers to implement regenerative ag systems at scale and helping them to be risk adverse in doing so, making sure that they don't screw things up, they don't lose yield, they don't lose money, and then making sure that they have the right resources that they need to

be successful and to improve their profitability. And by implementing regenerative ag systems, we can create a lot of really positive environmental outcomes as well, like improving our carbon footprint, improving our water quality impact, mitigating flooding, and lots of other really great outcomes that can come with regenerative ag. Okay, great. Thank you for the introduction. And well, as it should be obvious to anyone listening already regenerative agriculture is a key thing in what you do and well I do know a few things about it which is actually why I got interested in your story in the first place but my guess is that for most people who are not

professional farmers and perhaps even for many who are, this is not really a very well-known topic. So I would like to ask you to provide a gentle introduction to regenerative agriculture for anyone who may be listening. So how is it different than the way conventional agriculture is done? Yeah, no, it's a good question. And regenerative ag is really kind of a newer buzzword. You know, it's really taken off. It's been a good term, but it is a newer term. And to me, I've seen it emerge out of what I call the soil health movement. And to me, regenerative agriculture is the continual implementation of the principles of soil health.

And those principles of soil health are that we need to minimize disturbance in the soil. We need to minimize chemicals that we're applying and minimize tillage. We need to maintain armor on the soil. We need to keep the crop residue out there to maintain soil moisture and protect against erosion. We need the third principle is that we need to maintain living roots. And in a lot of our cropping systems today, the crop like corn, for example, corn is planted in April or May. And then it's harvested in September, October, maybe November. And over the in-between period from October back again till the next April, typically there's nothing growing. The

fields are laying bare and there's nothing out there over the wintertime. But in regenerative ag, we're looking at having cover crops out there to maintain a living root. There's also opportunity to integrate more perennial crops that have living roots all the time, all year round. So living roots is the third principle. The fourth principle is that we want to foster diversity and not just have monocultures, not just have only corn or only soybeans or only wheat, but try to get more diverse crops growing throughout the season and over time. The fifth principle is to integrate livestock. This mimics the natural prairie and the buffalo and getting that livestock back out there

that can deposit urine and manure and saliva to stimulate biological activity. The sixth principle is that all of these practices and all of these systems need to be integrated in the proper context. It's no one size fits all. You have to understand the context and learn from other farmers, learn from companies like ours so that you can properly implement the principles and ensure that you're going to be profitable. So regenerative ag to me is just ensuring that in our production systems, we're focused on working with biology and with mother nature, not against her. And that by stimulating soil biological systems, we can be a lot more resilient. We can be a lot more sustainable and on the farm, we can be more profitable as well.

But also we can, like I said, we can create better environmental outcomes, like reduce our carbon footprint, keeping the carbon stored in the soil. We can improve our impact on water quality because with regenerative ag, we don't need as much synthetic fertilizer. We don't have as much erosion. So we keep that water, keep the nutrients, keep that soil on the field and lots of other outcomes. So the major difference is that in conventional agriculture, you typically have one crop growing from the spring to the fall. And then there's typically tillage in the fall after that crop comes off, oftentimes tillage in the spring before planting the crop as well.

In regenerative ag, we don't utilize tillage or very, very minimum at most. And you integrate the cover crops and stimulate more diversity into the system. And just overall caring for that biology that's in the soil. And it'll help take care of us and make us more resilient more profitable yeah thanks thanks for uh laying out the uh the principles and uh i have to say that intuitively to me at least even though i don't have a background in in any of that just you know watching some documentaries and films about the topic, it immediately clicked. It kind of made sense,

as some of the people in those documentaries that I watched said, well, basically, in conventional agriculture and livestock, you have a situation in which the two are completely apart. And for agriculture, you rely very heavily on synthetic chemicals, fertilizers and the like. And a big part of what you produce in this agriculture is actually used to feed livestock, but in a completely disaggregated way. It seems like regenerative agriculture is mainly about putting those two back together

and reducing the dependency on synthetic fertilizers, which is also, as you mentioned, very timely with everything that's going on in the world around now. We see that the price is actually going steeply up. Yeah, no, it's definitely a big driver for farmers. And that's what's driving a lot of business to us because part of our business like continuum ag is helping farmers to quantify their soil health and quantify their organic and inorganic nutrients in their soil and and then be able to help them to improve their fertilizer management and through our system we've seen an average decrease in the farmer's fertilizer bill of $106 to 24 cents per acre. So that's about a 25 to 30, even 50% reduction in fertilizer need when you have better data and are implementing better

biological systems. But yeah, most of our crops are still going to be going into, you know, feeding livestock. They're still going to be going into producing ethanol, or they're going to be exported for different overseas markets. But the quality of the product with regenerative ag is significantly better. You can improve the protein and the other quality metrics within the crop itself. But the key short-term benefit is being able to reduce some of those synthetic inputs, reduce your pesticides, and help to improve the healthiness of your crop itself so it can better fend off issues and diseases and things like that on its own. It's just mimicking Mother Nature. It's just getting back to balance. Because in our current agricultural system, we've really thrown off the balance. We've over-applied fertilizer, and that throws things out of whack and causes issues like water

quality problems we've done too much tillage which incorporates too much oxygen into the soil and overstimulates the microbes and then they burn up the carbon that is there they eat it and they respire it back out and we lose a lot of that carbon, a lot of that organic matter. That's why agriculture today is actually 12% of the U.S.'s carbon footprint and about 15% of the global carbon footprint. And a lot of that comes because most farms are utilizing tillage and that releases too much carbon. If you don't have a living plant out there to capture that carbon, that CO2, that CO2 goes up to the atmosphere and causes issues. And so we're able to better capture that CO2 and cycle it because carbon is actually the most needed element to produce a crop. So out of any of the elements on the periodic table, carbon is actually the most utilized to produce crops, which is kind of interesting. A lot of farmers don't necessarily

think about that, kind of take it for granted, but it's a really key component we've got to continue to factor in and be mindful of. So it's, it's been an interesting move. I'm seeing a lot of farmers that are coming to us because they know that the companies, the consumer, the taxpayer, they want us to be more sustainable. They want us to go this direction. They want us to be more resilient. They want us to improve our environmental impacts. So a lot of farmers are calling us up saying, hey, I understand that I'm going to have to get this figured out at some point. Can you help me now while I've got the time to experiment and learn and maybe step into it?

Can you help me now so I'm better prepared for the future? And also, hey, these fertilizer prices are crazy. Can you help me to manage and to apply only what I actually absolutely need? And there's data tools and systems and our software that enables farmers to be able to do that. Okay, great. Well, actually, you just mentioned the magic word, so data. And this is the angle that I use to look at things for my contribution. And actually, that's what I wanted to ask you about next. So hopefully people should already have an idea about the ways in which regenerative agriculture is different. But how can that be quantified in some way?

So what are some metrics that people can use to measure the impact that each type of agriculture has on the environment, but also the kind of output that producers can generate using these two different types of agriculture? Yeah, that's kind of the ultimate question right now, which is, you know, how do we quantify this stuff? How do we define it and create a cohesive definition? Because there's really not one today. I shared my definition, but that's not necessarily an industry standard.

You know, there isn't an industry standard right now. There's no real definition. So a lot of companies are chasing how do we define soil health? How do we quantify these regenerative outcomes, especially quantifying our carbon outcomes, your carbon footprint? But how I like to start is I like to help farmers to quantify their more basic, more basic metrics coming from the soil. Step number one is quantify the biological activity. We can do that by measuring the amount of soil respiration and measure the CO2 that's coming out of the soil.

So microbes essentially utilize oxygen through their respiration process, breathe, you know, quote unquote, kind of breathe in oxygen, just like we do. And they breathe out CO2, just like we do. And we can actually capture that CO2 and quantify it in a lab analysis or in other sensors. And the more CO2, the more active the microbial activity in the soil is. And the more active microbial activity, the more resilient, the less dependent we have to be on synthetic fertilizers and the more we can recycle nutrients and so on. We have to feed those microbes by feeding them liquid carbon. Microbes eat simple sugars like sucrose and fructose and glucose and plants exude those liquid carbons down into the soil through the photosynthetic process and through just

natural plant growth. Plants take in CO2 through photosynthesis, combine it with energy for the sun and up to 70% of the carbon that they bring in is converted to liquid carbon, liquid sugars, and pumped through the roots to feed the microbes. And we can measure that as water extractable organic carbon, WEOC. And we can actually then highlight, you know, how, how much are we feeding those microbes? Are we getting enough food in there to really drive their populations to grow? And as we get more liquid carbon, we feed the microbes, more microbes enables us to reduce our need for synthetic fertilizers. So I also like to quantify the organic nutrients in the soil, like organic nitrogen, organic phosphorus, really helps farmers

to see more holistically the nutrients that are available in their soils. A couple other quick metrics that we can actually measure the solid form of carbon in the soil. It's a component of the organic matter, and it's measured with a test called dry combustion organic carbon. So we've been doing some of those that's really important for carbon markets. Other tests I like to use are looking at water infiltration. If a healthy soil can infiltrate water to make sure that when we get rain or when farmers are using irrigation, that water is actually getting into the soil. It's not running off the soil. Water infiltration testing is a way to do it. But the best tool for farmers, as we're teaching them, the best tool to use is a shovel and just taking a shovel full of their

soil, maybe a shovel full of undisturbed soil from the edge of the field or a more native area. It's showing them, you know, the difference between their soil versus maybe a more of a natural system that hasn't been disturbed and hasn't been farmed the way that they're farming it. We often see that their soils are quite degraded in that farming system. So the shovel is definitely the best, but there's lots of interesting metrics that can be utilized and plenty more to come. Thank you. I know that you have also developed your own platform, which is called Topsoil.

And I'm guessing that many of the metrics that you just mentioned are actually going to there and you probably use them to provide analytics to farmers or whoever else is maybe using the platform. So I wanted to ask you to share the genesis of the platform, really. How was it developed? And how do you integrate? What kind of metrics do you integrate in the platform?

And where do they come from? How do you collect them? And then what kind of users and analytics you can offer your users. Yeah, so when I started continuing my ag in 2015, I started it really just as a direct-to-farmer consulting company. I'm an agronomist by training, and I was helping farmers to utilize this new soil health tool called the Haney Soil Health test to better manage their fertility and make better decisions. We built up a really large data set and we needed a better system to relay the information and to provide the insights and provide the analytics.

So we built our own system called topsoil. And basically what we're able to do is we're able to map out these soil health metrics. We're the only company doing it right now. And what we're able to do is we can able to map out these soil health metrics. We're the only company doing it right now. And what we're able to do is we can take in a farmer's boundary. So farmers, you know, we map out their field and then we can utilize existing data sets that are already out there, government data sets or farmer data that they upload into the platform. And we can run spatial variability analysis, utilizing some basic machine learning and algorithms to evaluate the spatial variance within a farm's operation. From that variability assessment, we can provide zones

to basically map out the different variable areas within the field. Then we send people to the field and they collect soil from the representative zones. That soil is then mailed off to a commercial lab and the lab runs the analysis. Our differentiator is that we specialize in the Haney's soil health test. Nobody else really does it at commercial scale like we do.

And it's because we built the system to be able to really enable it. It's a newer test. It is a little bit more expensive than a traditional soil analysis, but utilizing zones, we're able to make the price point to the farmer very competitive with their traditional soil analysis that many farmers have done for a long time. We charge $10 an acre. So it's very competitive.

And as I mentioned before, we've seen the ability to decrease fertilizer to the tune of $106 an acre on average. So our farmers are spending $10 and seeing the ability to reduce their fertilizer bill by 106. So really, really interesting. But the key for us has been, we're meeting the farmers where they're at. So we're mapping out the fields, mapping out the soil metrics, providing to them a fertilizer recommendation that then they can take to their fertilizer retailer, to their co-op, or they can make the application themselves. And we're just providing to them that recommendation in our third party manner, or unbiased, we're evaluating just what them that recommendation in our third-party manner where we're unbiased. We're evaluating just what the soil is telling us and helping that farmer to make the best decision.

And lastly, we've expanded the software to include the farmer's management practices. They fill out a profile in our platform, and we ask them about all of their management practices on their farm. We help them to change their practices to be more sustainable, more regenerative, and integrate the principles that I mentioned before. What's really interesting is that companies are starting to really come to the table to help to bring about the financing to help farmers to implement these regenerative systems because they want to develop carbon credits or they want to develop sustainability, more sustainable supply chains to connect to the consumer and create value add. So farmers are now in position to be able to capture some of that premium, capture some of that monetary upside, and we just help them to do it and help them to learn and to understand and have a helping hand because regenerative agriculture systems like cover crops are actually only utilized today on four percent of u.s crop ground and no-till is only

used on about 30 percent of u.s crop ground so it's a minority of farmers that are doing these systems, but a large group now, you know, is needing to come this direction. They see it, they're being pressured to be more sustainable, and those farmers need help. And through the data system, we're just scaling our ability to work with those farmers and working with large enterprise level customers to take our systems to a larger scale. So today in our platform, we have farms in 36 U.S. states and 15 countries. So really seeing that ability to work with a wide array of farms and more and more farmers come to the table because they understand they need to get this figured out. Okay. So I guess the fact that you just mentioned that your clientele is spread out, not just across states in the US, but internationally as well, it means that the platform is self-serve. So people don't actually need you to provide extra services to them in order to be able

to use it, right? They can use their local agronomist, not just have to utilize us. So farmers can go to topsoil.ag or anybody listening to this, feel free to go to topsoil.ag. You can check it out. It's totally free to get on there and you can see some example farms and such. The farmers can go and collect the data themselves or they can work with one of our local agronomists. some example farms and such. The farmers can go and collect the data themselves,

or they can work with one of our local agronomists. We have over 400 agronomists in our network now globally that we can connect farms with just to make sure that you're getting access to the right local tools. How we think about it is that we are really more of a SaaS business model now, where farmers can now subscribe into the platform on a per acre basis to access the tools. And then if they need data, if they need somebody to pull soil samples for them, that's basically an add-on service that they can utilize their whatever local resources that they need. Or, you know, we will go to a lot of farms as well and and send our people to go in and collect the data but we are trying to you know continue to automate try to really think about building this out to scale because our mission is actually to help a million farmers profit from improving

their soil health so we're very much thinking global we're very much thinking global. We're very much thinking more automation. We're very much thinking it's got to be very simple to use and create valuable insights for farms of all sizes. And even for people that want to look at maybe what is the kind of carbon impact or my soil health impact of my yard or my garden or even just things at that size. That's not typically our target customer by any means, but I think more and more people are going to be thinking about this stuff and becoming more aware that we want to do the best we can for Mother Nature and natural ecosystems and utilizing some data can really help to enable that. Okay so the other question I had about topsoil and how you approach this basically had to do with

the scope so just listening to your description of what it does and how it does it, it looks to me like it's basically focused around one thing, which is, well, this soil test that you mentioned. And, well, you take different samples and you help your customers map out the health of their soil, basically. To be honest with you, I wasn't entirely sure what the scope was. So I thought that maybe, you know, you possibly integrated the inputs from other sources as well. As you may know, there are proposals, let's say,

and sometimes even experimental applications going around of approaches, like, for example, using IoT sensors to measure different things, such as humidity or even cameras from drones to take live input and use it to do things such as determine the state of growth in plants or whether there are certain pests present and so on and so forth. So I wanted to ask you, what's your take on using data and analytics and AI in approaches like that? Because to me, there may be a symbiotic, let's say, relationship with your approach, but it also depends very much on the context. And there are also other, well, high-tech, let's say,

approaches such as vertical farming. So how do you compare and contrast those different approaches? No, I think those sensors and the real-time data and stuff, that's inevitable that that will 100% replace pretty much all of the sampling that we've been doing. And I'm really excited for that because it'll help us scale. It'll help to make this more cost effective for farmers. And it'll hopefully be able to provide us more ongoing data and more real-time data. So absolutely are experimenting with a lot of those sensors and have been for multiple years,

helping to cross-correlate those sensors to really train those models and integrate in better data systems and stuff. Definitely know that that it'll be sensors going forward. And in our platform is set up to be able to integrate that data too. For us, it's simply more rows and columns of data and the data system doesn't care. That's why we built it the way that we did to expand the data integration capabilities and absolutely know that it's going to be sensors. It's going to be more high tech. But today, most of the time, we still are going out there doing it it mostly the old-fashioned way,

it's still the best way to do it for right now while those sensors are being developed. Okay, I see. You also mentioned previously that, well, you didn't start out with the intention of building out a platform. And initially, pretty much everything you did was centered around service provision. And I also saw on your website that you still do that. You still offer services. You create region roadmaps and you give advice to people around soil management. So I wanted to ask you this.

So regenerative agriculture as a practice is obviously not an entirely new thing. I mean, the term may be, but the practice itself probably has been with us for as long as humans have existed, probably. And so obviously before, you know, sensors and data and analytics and all of those things were available. So the knowledge was basically passed on from generation to generation. So do you see people practicing it that way today still? And I mean, people who you don't need to educate about it, basically, and just have that knowledge passed on to them? Yeah, but I think, you know, most of the farmers today, the knowledge that's been passed on is, is, you know, the kind of traditional way of doing things. And, uh, and a lot of the information coming from the

universities are coming from large ag companies. It's pretty outdated. It's not necessarily talking about the things that we've been talking about here in this chat. Um, so the knowledge, you know, the newer Avenue, um, you know, that's, that's kind of half, we're kind of almost having to unlearn and relearn a lot of these things. It's been, you know, a growing movement though. There's a lot of momentum going this direction. I'm really happy to be part of educating folks and being part of networks of farmers and agronomists that are, you know, very open and very much trying to educate and to teach other people. But as I said, you know, only 4% of farmers are using cover crops today. Those are the most recent numbers. It looks like those numbers are increasing, but those are

the most recent nationwide numbers that we've got available. More farmers are coming to the table. We're seeing really good interest, but a lot of farmers need to kind of baby step into this. It's a big risk to change practices in this manner. It's kind of scary. It's very different than what they're used to. And they need to make sure that they're accessing the right networks, getting the right advice, getting the right access to data if they need that as well. We're happy to play a part there. But for farmers or for anybody that's interested in this, look into it, continue to do your research, go to events.

There's a ton of stuff online as well. Just so many opportunities to learn and to read about this or to watch videos and stuff about it or go and but the best the best resource though is to find local folks that you can learn from you can work with and we're happy to be a catalyst to collect there as well because this this movement is absolutely the right thing we also need a lot more uh consumers and supply chain companies and financial institutions and such. We need those folks coming to the table as well to enable this to scale.

But understand that things are moving in the right direction. It just takes a long time to turn a massive ship like agriculture. But we are moving in the right direction. And there's a really bright future ahead for this space. Yeah, sounds great. And well, as you said, it takes a long time to steer a massive ship like that. So I hope by the next time we speak, well, there's some progress made. And well, good luck with everything going forward.

And thanks again for your time. It's been great to chat and look forward to discussing again. Like I said, this whole space is moving in a great direction. And it's been really fun. It's been really exciting and interesting. And for anybody that wants to tag along, we'd love to have you. Whether you're a farmer or you want to just support the overall movement. It's a really exciting time for agriculture,

and we've got some great opportunities to contribute to a lot of global solutions. So I appreciate everybody's support, and yeah, it's been fun to chat here today. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. If you'd like my work, you can follow Link Data Orchestration on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.