Scaling up: a much needed direction in regenerative agriculture
For some of those that know me personally, I have been talking about the need to scale up regenerative agriculture for a decade. When I am talking about scaling up just to be clear I’m not talking about achieving the scale of poster child regenerative farms such Polyface or White Oak Pastures. They aren’t very big compared to the large, multi-national agriculture companies out there supplying billions of pounds of produce and proteins. They are a mere drop in the proverbial bucket.
I rode the wave of the “thriving” small family farm, regenerative agriculture model for over a decade. We achieved a little and learned a lot. We learned that all of the things that we intended for from the beginning never quite materialized - primarily quality of life and financial security. Even our landscape ultimately suffered under the economic pressures or trying to eek out a living. Can you imagine doing something for an entire decade and at the end gaining virtually nothing? I’m talking about grinding twelve hour days, seven days a week for years on end. Blood, lots of sweat (we are in South Texas) and too often tears. The beginning of our breaking point was a few years ago when we had our first child. It was a wake up call that the lifestyle we were living was unsustainable. All of a sudden the realization came to me that we weren’t living a fully regenerative life. We were building soil, tending to animals and building community with food, but suffering on a personal level. It started with the realization that what happens when you want to have kids? And further down the road what happens as we grow old, or get sick and so on? Is our farm and business truly regenerative. No, it was hardly even sustainable. Mandy and I were doing all of the work. We were the CEO, CFO, marketer and ranch hand all at the same time. What sustainable business model other than basic start-ups run that way for more than a year or two? It was making a profit, but hardly enough to pay personal bills like buy a newer, more reliable truck, or simply take a small vacation. More than a decade down the road and the story didn’t change.
Why don’t more people in regenerative agriculture share their financials and economics? You always hear the talking heads of regenerative agriculture preach about their practices and how great it is for the soil. But what does their bank account really look like? What would it look like if they weren’t given land or a monetary inheritance. I can think of very few that didn’t have a “fail safe” scenario to get started. I’m not knocking the fact that they worked hard, were successful in their own right and moved the regenerative agriculture needle forward. I truly believe that if small, regenerative farms were more replicable it would have become mainstream by now. It simply has not because it’s difficult, if not almost impossible for most people to make a living as a small, regenerative family farm. What would it look life it they had not written a book, become somewhat famous and paid large sums of money for speaking engagements? I would argue that the vast majority of the farms that do currently work utilize some kind of exploitative relationship with the people who are doing the work. I’m thinking about interns, apprentices, WWOOFers and others that work for free in exchange for the knowledge. That is not a true business model in the real world. You will never be able to grow a movement or scale up to compete in the marketplace with that kind of model. My own story would have been much different if I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to run our business on my family ranch. We paid a fair lease price, but at the same time built much needed infrastructure and more that other landowners would have absolutely refused. We exploited free labor for years on end including ourselves, relatives, volunteers and low wages for employees.
Why do we need to scale up regenerative agriculture? Regenerative agriculture is our only real hope to repair the planet and human health. The current, predominant system of agriculture fails to provide ecosystem and human-health benefits, period. Regenerative agriculture needs to get big to compete with big agriculture. You are simply not going to achieve that with a million individual farmers doing their own thing. It’s massively inefficient, ineffective, uncoordinated and lacking the leverage of economies of scale. Imagine all of these farmers buying their own tractor for a mere 50 acres of land to manage, or a hundred thousand small farms all doing their own direct-marketing, repeating the same work, driving fossil fuel guzzlers down the highway every Saturday and Sunday to a farmer’s market. It’s massively inefficient and a huge amount of our high price point, which ultimately limits our customer base, is based upon those inefficiencies. I’m not saying we have to get down to supermarket, conventional food prices, but for healthy, nutritious food to go mainstream the price has to come down.
I dream of a world in which regenerative agriculture and the healthy food that it provides is available to everyone who wishes to participate, whether your desire is to farm or you simply want to buy healthy, healing foods for your family. Regenerative agriculture shouldn’t just be something young, aspiring farmers do in their early years. Imagine regenerative agriculture businesses that are large enough to employ or cooperatively engage people to provide a product or service. Businesses that provide financial security, health insurance, time off and a fulfilling life. These businesses could own real assets, free and clear, that have value like land and livestock. Reaching economies of scale through efficiencies so that they are constantly becoming more effective. Moral of the story either stay small and enjoy your family farm, or scale up and go big. If you decide to scale your business model you won’t be able to do it on your own and you won’t be able to do everything. Think outside the proverbial box, form cooperatives, seek venture capital or other investors that know how to create real businesses and achieve economies of scale. Regenerative agriculture has the power to heal our landscapes by building healthy soil, influence climate change via the sequestration of carbon, regenerate rural economies, provide food security for our nation, provide clean air and water, and positively influence human-health. We need to fundamentally provide a competitive regenerative agriculture business model that can overcome the current model of traditional agriculture and agribusiness. Let’s get to work!
