Ethiopia's coffee harvest is wrapping up and coffee samples are becoming available and ready to ship in the Arcana Coffee Marketplace. Arcana Coffee connects roasters directly with smallholder farmers in Ethiopia and builds in the hard parts, integrated QC, logistics support and produce-led transparency. With every passing day, new samples are being registered on Arcana's online marketplace with all the information you'll need to help you make buying decisions and build direct relationships with farmers across Ethiopia. Registering for an account now helps you understand timelines and can assist in planning your 2026 buying with confidence, even if you've never bought direct before.
The minimum is around 20 bags and Arcana can pull multiple roasters to meet that MOQ so you can participate without overcommitting. If you're curious, listen to our recent conversation on the podcast with founder Matthew Thornton, then explore the marketplace via the link in our show notes and register for an account. You can also book a meeting with Matthew and he'll walk you through requesting samples, the order process, pooled orders, QC and shipping once coffees are ready. Samples are becoming available now and supporting our advertisers is a great way to support our mission at Mapper Forward to build responsible businesses with responsible pricing models.
Check the show notes for details and explore Arcana Coffee Marketplace today. Welcome to The Daily Coffee Pro by Mapper Forward friends. I'm your host, Lia Safar, and this is episode one of a brand new five-part series with first-time guest, Tony Farmer. Welcome to the podcast for the first time, Tony.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm very excited to have a chat to you. I found you through your amazing Instagram posts and followed you for quite some time and then thought, why am I waiting to invite this woman onto the podcast?
It is so good to have you here. We're talking folks in this series about the evidence of regenerative agriculture. And Tony does not work in the coffee industry. Tony is an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of Tony Farmer's Garden.
Go and follow her on Instagram. The links are in the show notes. The content is awesome. And even though Tony, you're not in the coffee industry, a lot of the content that you're posting is relevant to people in the coffee supply chain because some of them may be farmers and others may be consumers of food and agricultural products.
They may use those raw materials in their businesses. And this situation that we're experiencing with regards to food security, with regards to what's happening with geopolitics, what's happening with regards to the changing climate, all of that is going to be impacting every single person in the world. And so thank you for being here and thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today. I'm excited to go forward with that.
As we get started, I was wondering if you could explain to people a little bit about yourself. So for reasons I cannot fully explain, I have been in love with gardening my whole life. My grandfather was a farmer in Iowa. And I think it might just be in my blood, the desire to put a seed in the ground and nurture it into food is thrilling to me, whereas other people may not be interested.
And so it started as a hobby. It's really all I thought it would ever be. And even when I went to grad school, what had happened was I felt like I had exhausted everything I could learn on my own from reading and researching. And I was like, I'm going to go to grad school and learn everything else I can possibly learn.
And I started right around the point where we were really starting to see the impact of climate change on agriculture. And it changed my focus to be much, much bigger. And it has consumed me. It consumes all my work now.
And so this sweet little hobby that I have has now turned into a mission to teach as many people how to grow food in backyards, in pots, on patios, anywhere they possibly can, as not the solution to food security, but an important tool around the world for food security. We're not going to solve the problem with this, of course not, but it's the one, we all want to like help in the one area we can help. And I help in these areas. I educate the average person who doesn't have the time or stress level to absorb all these like big documents on agriculture and policy.
They just want to hear like a highlight reel. And then they want to know, like, what's that bug on my tomato plant and how do I get rid of it so I can harvest as many tomatoes as possible? And that's the intersection of my work. I think you're selling yourself a little short there, lady, because I watch your reels and I get, you point me in the right direction of where I should be looking with regards to policy.
You put me in the right direction on what impact this current geopolitical and other geopolitical scenarios are having on the stability of our food, the stability of farmers. So I want to give you your flowers there. Excuse the pump, please. No, I love it.
I'll give you your broccoli there. You are not just, and not that it's just, but that your work goes far beyond that. And a lot of us are very grateful for what you're doing. I want to, right at the, before we get stuck into the deep part of this conversation, could you take this opportunity to tell people about your new product?
This is not a paid anything, guys. But I think that anyone that's out there who is interested in this, I want to make sure that you get the opportunity to hear it before we get into the nitty gritty of this conversation. So go ahead, Tony. Sure.
So Instagram limits me to about three minutes a reel. And this company called Patreon reached out and they said, we think that you'd be great here. It's a teaching platform. And it allows me to put long-form videos up and I charge a little bit of money.
It's like $9 a month. It's next to nothing. But what I do there is hand-holding. So for all these people that are, I heard panic in people's voices of I've tried gardening before.
I'm scared about the food system. I can't afford my groceries right now. I just want to do something. But I failed last year or I've never done this before.
And I felt like a little hand-holding would be the way to go. So it's a much smaller community there. And I'm learning everyone's name and answering questions and posting long-form videos about what to do to grow as much food as possible. And then to share it.
That's a big part of my platform is we don't solve this problem if we feed ourselves. We only begin to solve this problem if we create community. We care about those in our, we care about the working single mom who's working all day and does not have time to come home, plant a garden. Is someone going to drop off some fresh produce at her door because they have too much?
Of course. So it's called Patreon. It's Tony Farmer's Garden. And you can join anytime you like and jump in and have access to all the videos I've posted and then jump in the chats and talk to me.
I would love it. We will absolutely include a link to your Patreon in the guest notes section. You remind me of something that my wonderful mother always says. She says, if you're getting fed, if you're feeding yourself, but your neighbor's going hungry, that's not a community.
Amen. Amen. I couldn't even eat happily. I couldn't enjoy a meal if I thought my neighbor was going hungry.
So, yeah, it's a big message. And we need a little more of that energy in the world right now, given what's going on. So I love that you're pushing that kind of rhetoric. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the evidence for regenerative ag.
Where do we start, Tony? So I'm going to start with the Rodale Institute, which is probably the world's most prestigious organic and regenerative organization. It's located in Pennsylvania, but they've got some outposts all over the world in Italy and a couple other places and then places around the country. And why they're so important is not only are they talking about regenerative agriculture, but they've got a 40 plus year trial that's been going on.
The founder of Rodale started this way back when and realized that he wasn't going to be able to convince anyone if he didn't have data. And so they started these side-by-side trials with conventional. So let me just define our terms. Conventional ag is synthetic fertilizers, synthetic inputs, pesticides.
It's a whole menu of chemicals. And I use the term chemicals loosely because everything is a chemical. But items that we would probably like to not have to use. We would like to not have to use paraquat and dicamba and even glyphosate, but we do and they serve their purpose.
But we are now at the point where the research is coming in fast and furious at this point about what are we, what have we really bought into here? And then there's many leaders like Rodale who say we can actually grow the same amount of food if we go back to some indigenous practices. We practice crop rotation. We stop with the synthetics.
We stop with the pesticides. We feed the soil. They become very soil focused, which I absolutely agree on. Healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy people is their slogan.
So if you go look at their research, which they post all online and they update it, and they have a ton of PhDs working for them now in soil science. And they're showing that it takes a few years, three to five years. But if you stop using all the synthetic inputs and you practice regenerative agriculture within three to five years, you get back to the same yield as you would have with conventional synthetic heavy inputs. And you can actually make a lot more money because there's a premium on organics that people are still willing to pay.
And you're not paying for the synthetics, which are very What we've done is we have, over the last decade, we've really begun to understand the microbiome in the soil and also in the human diet. Both of them need to be cared for. And we have destroyed the microbiome in the soil with synthetic inputs, and I can explain why that works, but also pesticides have killed the soil and degraded the soil. The microbiome has degraded or left, run away, died, whatever you have.
And it's also made plants very lazy. So the way the microbiome works in the soil is plants weak something called exudates, and that is delicious food for microorganisms in the soil. They eat that. And it's a symbiotic relationship.
In exchange, they go out and they pull back nutrients that the plant would have a hard time accessing on its own. And they help with water retention, and they help with fighting off disease, and they build, much like a really healthy diet, they build really healthy plants who can then fight off disease on their own. But it takes years to rebuild that soil. So it's like asking all of our farmers to stop relying on the entire pharma world overnight, rebuilding the soil and re-inoculating the microbiome, feeding the microbiome with biosystems, eliminating all the tools they have been relying on forever.
And it's scary. This is their, this is their livelihood. So I have gardeners that switch to this all the time, and I'm like, you don't understand. If your yield's dropping in your backyard and you need more food, you just go to the grocery store.
These farmers have to pay their mortgage, their tractor payment. They're trying to save for their kids' education. And you're asking them just to wing it. And yields will drop to about 10% the first year.
And then somewhere between 30 to 50% the next year, like if you're doing things really right. And we just have so many issues here. We don't have government support really at all. And a lot of the policies we have in place work against us.
So a great example, and you mentioned monoculture. Do you mind if I keep going? Are you all right with that? No, please go on.
Please go on. Monoculture is a huge issue. And you mentioned that. So you've got one variety of coffee grown in this one area of the world.
I guess Arabica is probably the most common, right? And it's genetically not super diverse. And that sets us up for disaster. So the famous history story, I will remind you all of if anyone remembers their history, the Irish potato famine, that was caused by monoculture.
They planted nothing but potatoes and very similar varieties, genetically speaking. And then this fungal disease popped up and it spread like wildfire because there was nothing to stop it. When you have monoculture, there's nothing to stop it. When you have polyculture and you plant multiple crops, these, all these diseases, funguses, bacterial infections, insects, are all, have all evolved to have certain favorites.
And then other things aren't interested in at all. So that blight had stopped where the Irish had planted rice or potatoes or corn or soy or some other crop, they would have had enough to feed themselves. So here we are with coffee. And we have trained it to grow in the same way, the same variety, not a lot of potentially genetic diversity.
And now it's threatened. So instead of having some coffee plants that can survive with less sun or could survive with slightly different altitude or could survive with slightly less rain, everybody's the same and everybody's failing at the same time. And we don't even have those plants to look for. Like that's what a really good farmer does, is it, you know, it, maybe the, maybe a, let's say armyworm takes over your corn crop.
There's always going to be a few heads of corn. That's just, they don't get bothered. They're left, right? They survive.
And you save those seeds and then you plant those and they carry the genetic expression of the genes that will fight that off. So we've lost that. That's what conventional agriculture does, is it rips away our genetic diversity. And I'm a fan, let me rephrase that.
I'm not afraid of GMOs from a perspective of, I don't think, I don't think they're dangerous for humans to eat. I do think they're dangerous for genetic diversity and that really scares me because they are genetically identical for hundreds of thousands of acres. And so you don't have a, you know, you don't have a farmer who's discovering that new variety of coffee. Like, look, this one thrived even though we had not enough rain this year.
This one, you know, these seeds traveled down the mountain and germinated much lower than we expect coffee to germinate. I'm going to save those seeds and see what happens with those. And that's a lot more work. And we have become, I hate to call anyone in agriculture lazy because it's not filled with lazy people, but it's a lazy attitude about- We've become complacent though.
Yeah. If it's not laziness, it's complacency. And excuse me, at least in the coffee industry, we've started, excuse me, we've started to realize that with organizations like World Coffee Research and different hubs around the world that are realizing Arabica's time on the planet is limited. We have maybe 20 years, maybe 18 years of Arabica left.
And if we don't figure out a solution to either another variety or a way to have Arabica withstand the climate pressures and the pest pressures that it's facing, we're going to have a lot more than what's happening geopolitically and what's happening in politics, local politics, et cetera, et cetera, that's making the price of coffee go down. We're going to have a lot more than that to worry about because if we can't grow the coffee, we can't have these jousting sessions about the price of coffee should be higher, the price of coffee, the cost of production should be compensated. All of these things that we're currently talking about. An existential threat right now is the climate and the fact that we're not farming in harmony with nature.
And I guess over the past couple of years, as we've been talking about regenerative agriculture, well, an important thing for us was how do you define this term regenerative agriculture? And for us, it's a progression towards farming in harmony with your ecosystem. How do you define regenerative agriculture? I think that's a terrific definition.
It's very hard for people to grasp though. We don't have any of, if you ask the average person what an ecosystem is, they will have no way of answering that question. And it's become critical to me in my own garden, in my own backyard, but on farms. So there's a great book by Will Harris called A Bold Return to Giving a Damn where he switched his entire cattle ranch.
That's a title. It's such, it is such a good book. Shout out to Will Harris. Phenomenal.
And he spends a lot of time in the book talking about the role of everybody, the role of the frog, the role of the dragonfly, the role of the squirrel that you hate. Everybody plays a role and it is a violent atmosphere. There's incredible competition in a healthy ecosystem. Everybody's killing each other all the time.
And they are, each species is competing for dominance, but a healthy ecosystem finds some kind of balance. And so when I have found that balance in my backyard, I don't know how long I'll be able to maintain it because ecosystems shift and our climate is shifting. But I, I want to scream to the world. I feel like I'm surfing in my backyard right now.
I started inviting back the birds and the things that I'm like, Oh, I don't want birds to eat my berries. I changed my attitude. I care for the soil. There's no synthetic chemicals.
There's nothing. I'm not killing anything. I have bats in my backyard. I have predators.
I like, I have owls and hawks, even though I have chickens, because I understand they're part of a healthy ecosystem. And once the ecosystem is happy, you have fewer battles to face. And I feel like we will combat climate change a little bit better in that way. Yeah.
Yeah. So I feel like coffee is the canary in the coal mine because yeah, it's going faster than it. We're going to have corn long after coffee is gone. And we, I'm glad it's coffee because we're all obsessed with it.
It's only growing in popularity. And every time I mentioned that coffee is in jeopardy, I get panic voice messages in the way I wouldn't if I said soybeans were in jeopardy. So in a way I'm glad it's coffee because it opens the conversation to make people care because the more people care, the sooner we can do something about this. The irony of it is that even though coffee is the canary in the coal mine, it's also the opportunity for a silver bullet because if more and more, there is so many coffee farms in the world.
And so if more and more coffee farmers can find a path to regenerative agriculture, we can start to shift things with regards to agriculture and, and perhaps shift the narrative a little bit because there's huge farms and there's small holder farms. So I'm hoping it can inject some hope into the narrative. Speaking about hope, let's switch to the other challenging spectrum of hope in the conversation. In the next episode, folks, we're going to talk about the current global geopolitical situation and how that's going to impact the food supply chain.
And I will tell you that while this was a very hopeful and encouraging conversation, the next one will be quite a lot more sobering than this one. A little bit. To say the least, just a little bit. So join us for the next episode, guys.
Peace, love and peanut butter. Have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting Map Forward, our guests and advertisers on social media. Subscribe, hit the like button