Episode Transcript
Food has been a central part of Adrian's life as long as he can remember. In recent years, he's become more conscious of the source of his food products, and what he learned was a bit concerning. The methods and tools used in conventional agriculture practices, while innovative in some ways, felt unsustainable. During his study abroad quarter in London, he traveled around Europe to speak with farmers about their experience with regenerative agriculture, and how the process of simplifying and working on a hyper-local scale has transformed their businesses. This is his Inspiration Grant story.
My interest in regenerative agriculture, ultimately, the genesis was a pursuit of flavor. I grew up in a family where food was very important. My dad was an accomplished chef and I was constantly sitting on the counter next to him while he was cooking. Fast forward about 20 years, that passion had been indoctrinated inside of me and my biggest pastime outside of work was cooking. As you start to go to farmer's markets, and as you start to read about these sorts of things, you learn about the different methods of agricultural production. As I read about conventional agricultural food production, I started to get a little bit disturbed by what I was putting into my body. These items are farmed with extensive use of chemicals. They're usually farmed in monoculture and it degrades the land on which those products are being grown. And the thing that was most counterintuitive to me was that agriculture was, for centuries and millennia, this process of harvesting the energy of the sun and turning it into consumable food. But the reality was that we were basically taking the natural world out of it, and instead using fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, and all of those sorts of things to grow our food. Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, is this sort of reconciliation with nature, trying to farm in a way that works with that natural process, and it integrates animals which have a role to play. It integrates biodiversity, which has a role to play, both preventing soil erosion and raising the yields of the crops within those fields. Ultimately for me, it improved the flavor of the ingredients that I was working with. What was originally just a pursuit of flavor ended up becoming this sort of universal solution to the problem with conventional and industrial agriculture. And so that's when the passion to actually take action really came to mind for me. I was studying abroad in London this past quarter, it was a perfect opportunity for me to combine that experience with the Levy Inspiration Grant. And so while I was there, I visited tons of different farms in the UK. I went to Copenhagen as well because I had been told by a lot of the farmers that I was visiting with that it represented the example of a healthy and flourishing market for locally grown foods and foods that were produced following some of these principles. And then lastly, I went to Italy, and that's because in Italian food heritage, there's such an emphasis on the quality of ingredients using the ingredients that are local to the place that you live. So for me, for a very long time, that's been aspirational as to how I'd like to cook and now how I'd like to appreciate food. The hypothesis I wanted to test while I was traveling was: can the processes that I care so deeply about actually scale? Above all else, I was mostly interested in figuring out, can this version of agriculture feed the world, and can it be done in a way that's affordable and accessible to everyone, not just myself or other people who share my privilege? As I was going into the trip, and based on my perspective on the price of products in the U.S., I assumed that regenerative agriculture, either through lower yields or higher labor required or anything along those lines, resulted in foods that necessarily had to be a higher price. I thought of it in terms of sort of a tier: there's conventionally sourced food in a grocery store; there's organic, the labels that we're all familiar with, which is quite a bit more expensive than conventional; and then things that had a regenerative label on it, I thought would always be a little bit of a premium to organic even. Early in my trip, I met with a farmer who mentioned that he thinks that that perception is all wrong and that people tend to imagine that regenerative is organic plus some, and in reality, and the way he thinks about it as a method, is that regenerative is organic minus some. And the reason he described it that way is because in an organic food production system, you may still be using fertilizers, pesticides, you're just not using the synthetic and chemical based products, but those inputs are still really expensive. And in regenerative agriculture, you're stripping all of that away and you're trying to rely on creating a self-sustaining ecosystem on the land, so you're no longer paying for inputs. Why he said that that for him was organic less some is it actually kind of was a simplification and a cost reduction on organic production, even if the yields weren't exactly equivalent. I went and visited a farmer in Italy, and originally he converted the farm to organic, but he found that organic was equally, if not quite a bit more, expensive than conventional agricultural production, and nobody in his local market was able to pay those sorts of premiums. So he started to look for a solution rather than reverting to conventional agriculture. He moved towards regenerative, and what he found was that he was able to essentially produce the same products, price it just barely higher than what he would've sold those products under conventional agricultural methods, which was a palatable price point for his local market, and he was already experiencing the resilience that he had built into the land. So the example he gave, for instance, was that his neighbors who farm and organic or conventional ways have had enormous increases in the price of their inputs, their fertilizer and things along those lines due to the war in Ukraine. Whereas because he's not using any of those items he's been able to sustain his business without raising prices because he's not paying for those sorts of inputs. So again, it just kind of reinforced that maybe it's a demand and supply thing that makes the price so high for these products in the U.S., but the reality is that regenerative agriculture can produce products at a price that's comparable to some of the low cost products that you see on the shelf. The challenge that I think most of those producers expressed over and over again was that they needed to find ways to create a market for the food that they produced, and many of them had already found creative solutions on a micro scale. As I look to carry forward some of the takeaways that I've had from this experience, one of them has been trying to help with creating those markets in whichever locality I find myself. I think that's the focus area that I'll have for the near future. My next step will be on a micro scale, creating relationships with people who I wanna source my food from, and then seeing what ways I can help them address that challenge. In a lot of ways, if you know where your food comes from and you know the person who's producing it, it leaves an impact on you. It adds an emotion to the way that you are going to cook with that ingredient, the way that you're gonna celebrate it by sharing a meal with friends and telling them about why you're passionate about that item. It's also very likely to make you feel healthier. I think it's easy, especially here in the U.S. where we have such long food supply chains, to treat food as sort of an abstract concept and most people don't really know or care where their food is coming from or produced or what the ingredients inside of it are, but it can be a really special thing that grounds you in a place, gives you pride about where you live, and gives you pride about who you interact with and what you eat if you just start to pay attention to the provenance of ingredients.
The Levy Inspiration Grant Program is made possible through the generous support of Larry and Carol Levy and is managed by the Entrepreneurship program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. To learn more about the Levy Inspiration Grant Program and other ways we support student entrepreneurs, visit our website at kellogg.northwestern.edu. I'm your host, Tyler Seybold. Thanks for listening.
