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If you're ready to amplify your brand's voice and connect with the right people and you share map of forward's brand values, email us at [email protected] or DM us on social media. Check the show notes for all the details and let's conspire to each other's success today. Welcome to The Daily Coffee Pro by Map of Forward, friends. I'm your host, Lia Safar, and this is episode four of a really wonderful five-part series with Tony Farmer from Tony Farmer's Garden.
Please don't forget to check out the link in the show notes to check out Tony's Patreon and also if you are interested in joining two monthly community conversations about what's going on in the coffee industry, join our Patreon as well. You'll see links in the show notes. In this series, we're talking about the evidence for regenerative agriculture, not just in coffee, but in general. And today we're going to be talking about the barrier to regenerative agriculture.
So all the different barriers. And we were talking about those barriers in the end of the last episode from a geopolitical perspective, Tony, but what are some of, from your perspective, where do we start with understanding the barriers to regenerative ag? It costs money. I mean, right, it just, it costs money.
So in order to transition, it's, so in the United States, if you want to transition to organic, it is a minimum three-year process. It costs money. You have to get certified by the USDA. Regenerative is different than organic.
So organic is, I'm not really paying as much attention to the big picture and the ecosystem. I'm not trying to like be one with the land. I'm just trying to stop using a certain set of pesticides. And I'm using a safer set of pesticides in many cases.
And also I really need to point out, we mentioned earlier, not all farms are the same. Not all organic farms are the same at all. They're very different. And I actually find those who are not certified tend to be using more regenerative practices than those that are certified by the USDA because the goals are different.
So if you're certified by the USDA, you can charge a premium for your products. So that was the goal. And then those who didn't bother to get certified by the USDA, they're more like true believers. They're like, I want to actually grow.
So the difference between organic and regenerative is I'm moving back to these indigenous practices. I'm caring for the soil. It's not really about what I spray or don't spray, even though you try not to spray anything. It's how healthy is my soil?
Do I have good water content, like good water capacity? Do I have a healthy microbiome? Am I rotating my crops? Am I practicing polyculture over monoculture?
Is it a biodiverse crop? Am I planting cover crops that have like a radish for breaking up hard soil and a, let's see, peas and beans for fixing nitrogen and alfalfa and all these different mixes. As a matter of fact, last time I went to a farm conference and you know how they do all the breakout sessions, a vast majority of the breakout sessions were on cover crops. Every farmer there wanted to understand how do I decide what my farm needs?
Because the healthier your soil is, the less you need synthetic fertilizers, right? So they're trying to figure that out. Their goal probably is to cut costs and some of them are probably true believers, but that's a goal. But in the meantime, when you stop using those synthetics, as you really have to do to start growing regeneratively, your yield drops drastically because your crop, your soil is degraded and they're used to just this quick input, like taking a vitamin to get their vitamins.
And so we need, I was hoping and praying that the new farm bill would have a ton of money to do just this. And it doesn't, it has almost none. It has $700 million and that's a drop in the bucket for a trillion dollar bill. And farmers are asking for it.
And then another issue, and again, I don't know how this works in every other country, but one of the facets of our farm bill that farmers value the most is crop insurance. It's very important to them. They get a discounted insurance policy that they buy from the government that they can insure their corn or their soy or whatever from many different things. And if things don't go well, they get, like, just like if you insured your home and things didn't go well, you get paid.
So they all enroll in that, but you can't enroll a crop if you haven't planted it for three years. So that's a barrier. So if I am a farmer who's been growing corn and soy and I'm like, you know what, this has been crazy. I want to get out of this.
I want to grow sweet potatoes. I want to grow, you name it, carrots. I want to be a carrot farmer. They can't get crop insurance for three years.
And so, like, why? That's the simple answer. I don't want to insure you until I know you know what you're doing. Like, that shifts all the burden of risk to the government.
Like, oh, you're going to grow carrots? Well, I know you're going to grow carrots this year and you've never grown carrots before. And if you fail, it could be your error. And I don't want to insure that.
But I feel like we're at a point now that I think we need to put that aside. And I think we need to offer designated crop insurance to farmers that have shown a history of success with other crops who maybe they need to check boxes. Like, I show that I got training. I show that I took classes.
I show that I'm working with, you know, other economists or other farmer consortiums to know what I'm doing or my ag extension. And then they can get their crop insurance. Otherwise, they're not going to switch. Or they're going to switch, but they're going to take all the risk themselves.
And that's a lot we are asking of them right now. And then the banks are the only ones that end up winning. The banks are hedged either way because they're going to borrow from the bank. They're going to find a way to either take the land or get paid by the crop.
This just seems like an incredible burden that a government is putting on these smaller businesses to start shifting towards something that is more secure for our supply chain. And, and even bigger businesses, those big corporate farmers, those that every farmer that needs to shift to regenerative ag, there needs to be a relationship between every government, no matter where it is in the world, because we are talking about the global food security here as well as each nation's food security. This is something that is a problem for everybody. The weather is not participating.
We have drawn farmers into the ground with these futures markets that trade these commodities that are absolutely fucking brutal to farmers because they don't get paid. And in countries like the U.S., those bigger farmers can afford to hedge on those markets, but small holder farmers cannot. And in countries like Colombia and Brazil, and the bigger farmers in Brazil can afford to hedge, but only just. Places like Ethiopia and Rwanda and Guatemala, these people cannot afford to use these big massive corporate tools, which are these commodity futures markets.
They cannot afford to use them to hedge their crops. The buy-ins like $15,000. They're not going to sell their whole crop for that. We haven't even talked about migration.
So from a climate perspective, so after a few technical issues, guys, we are back. New background for me. Everything's the same with Tony, but we had a couple of technical issues. So we're going to pick this back up from, you had just started to say, Tony, that we haven't even talked about migration yet.
So tell me about migration and its impact. It's one of the things I feel like, again, we're U.S.-centric, so we don't talk about it in the United States. We talk only about our own migration issues. The immigration issue is huge in the U.S., but this is a global issue.
Most Americans don't understand that. We are seeing migration all over Europe. It's going to get so much worse. So when sub-Saharan Africa becomes uninhabitable and you cannot grow anything, there's already spots there during the height of the season where you literally cannot live.
You cannot be outside. And when those folks finally give up and migrate, we will have, and then the population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to explode, a billion people in the next, forget the timeframe on that. So this means that many countries around the world will have millions of people, hundreds of thousands at their doorstep, all needing to be fed. And we are losing parts of the planet where we can even grow food.
So, you know, I talk about policy a lot and I talk about what's going on geopolitically, but the reality is these issues were already facing us with climate change before We live in a desert, and water security is an important element of the survival, even though the whole area of the Gulf survives on desalination plants. But cloud seeding isn't even particularly effective. No, and that's the point. Exactly.
That's the point. If it was more effective, we would be doing a lot. Maybe we'll get there someday, but right now we don't have the power to create hurricanes and flood areas and boy, what I would do with weather if I could control it. And how about we stop with the harmony?
That's enough. But no, I don't believe that there is a secret group that is spraying chemicals. I mean, we're spraying chemicals. We're spraying other chemicals.
And they drift, but that's not the same thing as whatever this whole conspiracy is about weather manipulation that's going on right now. But again, if I go back to the concept of carbon footprint, a lot of people panic over their personal carbon footprint and go, oh, what should I be doing? They look up, what can I do to make my carbon footprint? Most people don't realize that that was a proposition made famous by British Petroleum to make us feel personally responsible.
Then we stop blaming them. We are so focused on, well, I could have walked to the post office or I really should turn off all the lights in my house at night. And I always say to people, there is no amount of walking to the post office and no amount of turning your lights off that is going to make any difference until we stop drilling for fossil fuels, fracking, burning, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It's a joke.
And building data centers that are going to... Yes, the water and the amount of heat that they're putting into the atmosphere from these data centers, the amount of fuel and energy that they need, and that is accelerating the situation that's going on. I often say to people, if you don't believe that climate change is real, go find any farmer around the world and have a conversation with them. Yes.
And they might call it weather. You need to be prepared for them to call it weather, because if they don't believe that they don't believe in man-made climate change, you can actually have a better conversation if you say to them, how's the weather treating you? They will go off. They'll say things like, I have never seen this in my entire life.
I've never seen this kind of pest pressure. I've never seen this heat or the drought. We're in drought again in the United States right now. It's going to be bad this year.
And El Nino is on the way. El Nino is on the way. Sorry. El Nino.
I just read that yesterday. And that's not good, guys. That's like more dry weather on the way. Yeah.
And more heat in the jet stream. Yeah. Okay. We have one episode to go.
And in this final episode, we're talking about moving backwards to move forwards towards a resilient food system. So join us for the final episode of this fantastic series with Tony Farmer. Peace, love and peanut butter. Have an amazing rest of your day.
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