390 Nicola Giuggioli - Building a regenerative brand: from soil health to living wages

Can you pay a decent year-round salary to farm workers, enough to go to a bank, get a mortgage, and still not charge prices that make your produce accessible only to the happy few? What do vibrations, pest management, nutrient density, and processing have to do with it?

With Nicola Giuggioli we walk the Quintosapore land, on a hilly but stunning landscape in the green heart of Italy, Umbria, where GPS auto-steer tractors don’t exist because simply keeping the tractor in a straight line without slipping down the hill is already an achievement. Quinto Sapore is new farm, only 5 years old and 2.5 years into serious business, but it is making huge steps. 

They are building a brand, paying attention to revenue and costs, measuring nutrient density, and paying living year-round wages. For the past few years, they’ve been going very deep into the next frontier of agriculture: vibrations, frequencies, and more. In this episode we cover it all: seeds, living wages, trying to intervene as little as possible, quantum agriculture and transformation, and processing.

More about this episode.

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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Big Bet: Living Wages On A Farm
• 6:00 Place, Scale, And Starting From Scratch
• 14:30 From Vegetable Stand To Strategy
• 22:00 Pillars: Biodiversity, Tech, And Social Impact
• 31:22 Biomimic Farming And Letting Nature Lead
• 44:18 Managing Pests By Balance Not War
• 51:58 Revenue Stacking: Fresh, Jars, Experiences
• 1:01:58 Value Over Commodity Pricing
• 1:09:58 Processing Done Right: Safety And Flavor
• 1:19:58 Fermentation, Microbes, And Fast Compost
• 1:28:58 Measuring Nutrients And Flavor Gains
• 1:35:58 Figs As Olive Allies And Other Hacks
• 1:42:58 Investors, Assets, And Brand Value

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Can you pay a decent year-round salary to farm workers? You know enough to go to a bank and get a mortgage, and don't charge prices, which makes your produce only accessible for the happy few. What do vibrations not intervening too much with pests, nutrient density, and processing have to do with it? We cover a lot of ground, literally, on this hilly but stunning landscape in the green heart of Italy, Umbria, where GPS out of steer tractors don't exist, as keeping the tractor going in a straight line and not slipping down a hill is actually already an achievement. This is a relatively new farm, only five years old and two and a half years in serious business. But it's making huge steps. They're building a brand, they're actually paying a lot of attention to revenue and costs, measuring nutrient density, and paying a living year-round wage. Is it easy? No, of course not. But since a few years, they are going deep, very deep, into the next frontier of agriculture. Vibrations, frequencies, and a lot more. In this episode, we cover it all. Seats, living wages, trying to intervene as little as possible, quantum agriculture and transformation. Processing. Yes, I dare to use the evil word. Of course, in this case, not ultra-process, but actually old school and high-tech at the same time. Enjoy. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food Podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities, and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. So welcome to another Walking the Land with a Regenerative Farmer. And I keep saying this is a special one, they're all special, so just forget about that. We're in a very special place actually in the center of Italy, Umbria, which has an interesting energy around, let's say, the region already, but also this place. And we're gonna have a stroll around. It's September, it's warm but not too warm. Sun is out and it's it's lovely outside. It has rained, I think, the last week quite a bit. Wednesday, I Wednesday, that's why we couldn't be here on Wednesday, and so the plants look good, and everything seems buzzing. So welcome, and of course, welcome to my guests today.

SPEAKER_02: 2:06

Hi Colin. Thank you for this incredible opportunity to tell you a bit more about what we do, where you all started, and where we want to go.

SPEAKER_00: 2:17

And just to paint a bit of a picture, where are we in terms of geography, but also in terms of size, and just this is an audio medium. We're not filming this. I'm sorry for anybody that was hoping for another film walking the land. Logistics aren't always easy with filming. So we're gonna paint it and we're gonna make it a bit visual so people visually are here with us. Maybe they're cooking, maybe they're cleaning vegetables, maybe they're gardening when they listen to this, maybe they're driving. Probably not in the landscape as pretty as this one. So we're gonna bring you along this walk, let's say. But to start with, where are we? And if you had to describe this farm and this land in a few sentences or a few more, because we have time.

SPEAKER_02: 2:56

What would you say? So we are, as you said, we are in Umbria, coincidentally called the green heart of Italy, being the greenest region in Italy. It's a region that doesn't lend itself a lot to agriculture, actually. It's very hilly, full of woodlands, but it's absolutely what you would expect from a magical Italian idylli location. We are in a town called Città della Pieve, a small hamlet, became very famous because it was the stronghold of the Etruscan because of its location, and has been influenced by different trading routes and painters and culture. It's a beautiful place to live, there is a fantastic quality of life. And we were crazy enough to open a farm from scratch in a place which usually is, as I said, doesn't lend itself to farming, and no one really grows veg on a scale apart from small vegetable gardens at home during the summer. So we took on our shoulder the challenge to show that in an arsh difficult soil with no easy climate, is either too rainy or too sunny or too windy, it is never stable for more than a week. But that we could grow all varieties of vegetables and actually grow them well, make them nutritious, make them bountiful and beautiful, and run a profitable farm, regardless of the fact that we are offering the stuff good salaries, full-time employment. So we wanted to literally just break all the myth of modern farming and go back to make farming what it should be: a beautiful job, a potentially aspiring career opportunity for young people, and a gorgeous as they can't see it, but a gorgeous office to work in. So that's how we all started.

SPEAKER_00: 4:55

Not an easy feat, and also both of you, or three of you, but let's say the two brothers, when you started, of course, your sister joined as well. You don't have a farming background, you have a lot of food, love cooking, a lot of seed collection, which comes in very handy, and you've grown some stuff in the past, like you knew something, but of course, not at this scale or at this point.

SPEAKER_02: 5:17

We definitely knew how to eat and how to cook. We definitely knew how to run a small vegetable gardens at my parents' house. What we didn't know was, and we actually broke our bones on, was how different it is to grow a vegetable garden as opposed to running a farm of this scale. And we are about 30 hectares, including woodland, so we are considered a small medium scale farm in a location that is not easy. We are on top of a hill, every field faces a different direction, it's got different peculiarity, full of stones, and and a very, as I said, very harsh soil, which thank God was abandoned when we took over the land, so we didn't find any nasty chemicals in it. But also, really, nothing really grew right at the beginning because the soil wasn't really nutritious, it was quite poor and way, way too hard.

SPEAKER_00: 6:15

So, where do you start then? When that's the it was like a deliberate start, I think of your brother to start with, let's grow some vegetables, let's sell and eat something else in life than career before. And but it's quite a step to where it is now, and it's only five years in. Like, what were the first steps to get going after you secured the land? Because I think it came for sale, your parents lived next door, just to protect, basically. You want to make sure nobody else would do anything stupid here.

SPEAKER_02: 6:44

We bought the land to protect it. Um, let's say that both me and my brother, we always had this sort of a little fairy in our ear that told us one day you should grow things. We are 44, so when we are 18 and we had to choose a career opportunity, farming is not really a career opportunity that people choose, to be honest, unless they've got a farm in their family and they obliged to run it.

SPEAKER_00: 7:11

It seems changing a bit though. It's changing now. Numbers in the UK, which they call the Clarkson effect. Like signs up, sign up for ag schools and universities, etc., are way up, which is interesting. And we see young people, but mostly yeah, they don't have access to land or skills or have a very romantic idea of what a farm could be.

SPEAKER_02: 7:32

Yes, and we also had a very romantic idea of what farming could be, to be honest. But yeah, so we we actually had this kind of profound desire of being connected to the land for all our life. But yeah, then I chose a career in sustainability in London, my brother chose a career in the cinema industry in Rome, and then there's been a series of coincidences. The first coincidence was that this land was put on sale right a week after that we sold a little flat that we owned in Rome. And so we decided, you know what, we've got this money, we don't really need to spend them now. So we bought the land to protect it, to avoid people because the land is on the boundaries of our parents' house, and we didn't want anybody to build anything ghastly nearby. Then basically, it's very difficult to talk about this because COVID came, and COVID was an incredibly positive opportunity for us. I know that it was a tragedy across the world, and I'm sorry for what happened. A lot of people had to live stuck in flats for a year or more. But we were lucky enough to be here when the lockdown happened. And we looked at each other and we said, listen, that plan that we wanted to have when we are old, maybe it's time to try. We are here. So we literally started by putting together a vegetable garden with all the seeds that we collected throughout our life. We were a bit gigs at the when we were kids. While other people play football, we were collecting strange tomato seeds. And we did a small vegetable garden and we started selling the veggies on a little car at the petal station. And uh and it went well. It really did went well. The local community appreciated this. As impossible as it sounds, we live in the middle of the beautiful countryside in Italy, and when you buy your vegetables, they generally come from Spain, Turkey, Tunisia. They don't come from here. So having these two young guys growing things here created a great image in the local community. Although we were considered foreigners, we were coming from Rome and living in London and Milan. So there was a bit of at the beginning, well, what do this guy wants to do? They want to teach us how to do things. But then they tasted the product, we were delicious. So they kept coming, they told their friends. So the activity grew by selling very fresh fruit and veg at the petal station. And that's when we started thinking, okay, we can actually build a business with this. But we were mindful that you don't open or launch a business just out of selling veggies by coincidence. You need a strategy, you need uh a vision, you need branding, you need communication, you need an employee structure. So we literally sit down and we said, okay, what do we want to be in the next five years? And the first thing that came out was that we wanted to be the most sustainable farm that we could possibly be, both environmentally and socially. So the initial pillars for us that guided us were definitely invest a lot of efforts in increasing the biodiversity of the local area. So we started with actually 430 varieties of vegetables, and we now grow about 1,500. The second pillar was not all at scale and not all at scales, of course. But we grow all of them. And some things we grow, as we were saying before while chatting between us, we just grow them for fun, or because they're beautiful, or because we think that within the biodiverse system that we've got, they have a value, not necessarily a commercial value. The second pillar was, of course, trying to blend this, was our idea of food sustainability, blend ancient wisdom techniques with cutting-edge innovation and technology. So pulling ideas, we considering we didn't have a farming background, which a lot of people think was a limit, actually, we turned that into our biggest advantage because we didn't have any pre-concepts on this is how farmers have been doing for all their lives, so it works. No, we didn't know. So we said, okay, I like that principle of permaculture, I like that principle of regenerative farming, I like the principle of syntropic farming. And we started mixing them to also understand what could work on this scale. Because it's very easy to make those techniques when you have a vegetable garden at home. It's more difficult when you are growing 18 hectares of vegetables, 3,000 olive trees, three hectares of vineyards, and you need to also run, because I consider an activity of the farm, you need to run the woodlands. You need to make sure the woodlands are healthy, productive of truffle and mushrooms, and they are free of hiding places for wild boars. So this is also the way we manage wild boars. Dears is just make sure that they can't hide inside the farm. And if they want to hide, they have to stay outside. And then we had the social pillar, which was possibly, I think, the most difficult challenge for us. Can we create full-time, long-term jobs which become a career opportunity for young people? And as you know, most farm in Italy, but around the world, they have workers that work three days, five days, ten days a month, then being a bad month, they don't work. No one is gonna give you a full-time fixed salary, you can't take a mortgage, you can't buy a house, you can't beat the family. So we decided to actually understand and calculate the living wage in the area, which came out at about 850, 900 euros a month. We live in the middle of design countries, right? So the cost of living is lower than in a city. And we decided to put our initial salary, so it's a thousand euros for the first six months, then it goes to 1,300 net, and then from then on it only grows. So we today have salaries between 1,300 and 2,000 euros a month for our farmers. They're all full-time jobs, and plus you've got pension, healthcare, we have a welfare, insurance, training, etc. etc. And with a lot of pride, I can tell you that most people in our farm today they bought a house. Some had children, they are sustaining a family. They work hard, but we also play hard. We became our family, and it's very different from what I was used to by running my company in London where I was a CEO and I didn't really mix with my employees, I didn't go out with them. Here, literally, we are this is our best friend, it's our family. We go out together, we celebrate our birthday together, and it's a beautiful environment to work in. We, as I said, we work hard because farming is working hard, but also we play hard. Soundtrack often is the laughter of people on the field. And if they have to stop, they can stop. It's there is a very uh soft leading management style here. Is me and my brother we work hard and follow our example. There's no work that is not important enough for us and or too important for people to do. So everybody has to have a set of skill that is mixed, get involved in all the aspects of the farm, learn from the other people, and especially cancel the sentence. But this works because everybody has been doing it for ages. We don't want to hear that.

SPEAKER_00: 15:12

Because you're really pushing the boundaries and experimenting a lot, also specifically as well on the agronomic side and like what works, what doesn't, what works at this scale, which is a medium-sized farm in this context, very challenging context, obviously, because of the geography, simply like everything is nothing is straight, as your brother was saying at lunch. The main issue here with the tractor is keeping it actually in a straight line, let alone thinking about GPS or other things. And so, but if it if you find things here and it's not small, you find things here, you could not copy paste as we always try to do, but put it in another context, in a larger context, or provide advice or or input to other farmers. And you keep saying your dream is to go to a large American farm and say, okay, these are the things that work or could work, because that's the hectares we need to transition. This is a lab at the end. A 30-hectare lab, which is not small at all, and but has to be also financially sustainable. I think you're approaching break-even with 16 employees, which is a significant one on the amount of hectares you have. So we'll unpack that, like how that works, etc. But also just on the agronomic piece, like just a few stories, like how far you're pushing the boundaries, like where are things that you had to go through a war, and that agronomists said, No, this is impossible. You cannot grow. First of all, I think they said you cannot grow anything here except olives. Um so, how has that journey been? And also, as an optimist, optimistic story and journey, like we're only literally scratching the surface of what we can actually grow, and how healthy you could be, and how pest-free and pesticide-free, obviously, etc.

SPEAKER_02: 16:46

Well, as I said before, you all started from those considerations and pillars, right? So sustainability was the guiding force. Climate adaptation. I've been working before 20 years in climate change, so I I knew in a way what to expect from climate. And as I was saying the other day to another podcast host, I'm not preparing for 1.5 degrees rise, I'm preparing for six degrees rise because I think this is what's gonna happen, not maybe on the average global temperature, but definitely I'm seeing the changes here. And I remember I came to Cittadella Piave that I was eight, and I remember I've never seen the temperature rising above 30 degrees. Two days during the heat wave, the temperature arrived to 40. And I expect maybe in 10 years to have heat waves with temperature edge close to maybe 50 degrees. Maybe the average temperature will only be rising by two. But what a system that can surround it. And so the initial strategy was a bit random, was uh trial and error. See what works. We need to make sure that our soil become uh cultivable. So it's too hard, how do we make it softer? There's no life, how do we bring life back into the soil? And we were literally mixing regenerative and biodynamic techniques mainly in permaculture. Then again, a bad coincidence led us to our biggest light bulb moment since we have the farm. So in 2023, summer, we Umbria was hit by the worst drought in history. It didn't rain from February to November, and we got three heat waves where the temperature arrived to almost 40 degrees, and we pretty much lost everything that year. We were even thinking to close the farm. And we were literally walking back to my parents' house in the evening with my brother, which is next to the farm, and we have to go through a woodland. And as we get into the woodland, as we've always done in our life, we've been brought up picking mushrooms and walking in the woodlands. But that day we came in and both me and my brother had that light bulb moment. We looked at each other and we said, hold on, because here is definitely fresher, moisture, the infestant weeds are here but they don't take over. The parasites, the pathogens are here, but they don't destroy anything. And you don't rotate the crops, you don't fertilize, you don't irrigate, you don't treat anything. What is happening? And we thought maybe what we've done so far, which basically was read books and uh see what people do, and then trying to bring the solution into our farm is wrong. We have always had always since the beginning of the 19th century, so since industrial farming became the norm, we always had the attitude to things that human beings have to teach the land how to produce things. And we thought maybe we need to go the other way around. Maybe we need to stop listening to humans and start listening to nature and copy nature, but not in the so nature is not a single solution, and it's not even a list of single solutions, is a system of solutions that work together, enhancing each other. So we literally split the woodlands into solutions. We saw trees, we saw the soil, we saw the life, we saw the parasites and things like that. And we started studying how that system works. How is it balanced? How does it become a biosphere that is stable, productive, and lush? And how can we create the biosphere artificially into a farming environment? And so we literally started mixing solutions like we need the trees, but we need a tree fast, so we decided to partner with Paulonia Italia and plant Paulonia trees as agroforestry. Yes, they don't produce fruits, but they produce shade within two, three years. It's the fastest growing tree on the planet. We need to rebuild a microbiome into the soil, bring microorganisms back. We could have gone with solution that regenerative farming uses, but it would have taken us 15-20 years in such a soil. So we found this incredible company called EM Italia. They licensed the effective microorganism technology developed in Japan, and that allowed us to put microorganisms back into the soil through the irrigation system cheaply in the space of six, seven months, not 20 years. We needed to increase the softening of the soil, so amend the soil, and we needed to build more water retention. We brought in a solution that is not using farming, it's using carbon capturing, which is biochar. But biochar is a sponge of carbon, which is fantastic for the soil, retains the water and plants loves. So we started putting biochar into the soil. And then probably the most important risk that we took, and the most important result that we're getting today is stop intervening. Stop working the soil, stop cutting the trees, stop cleaning everything. Just let the name stop killing the pathogens, stop killing the parasites. How difficult is that? Because it's You need courage because you don't know what you're gonna get.

SPEAKER_00: 22:20

They might be the whole bloody crop. Exactly. And you need courage to even imagine I think they will stop at 20% or at something.

SPEAKER_02: 22:28

But we had an inspiration, Cohen, which and the inspiration happened during COVID. When the first lockdown happened in Italy, I clearly remember that in the space of three, four weeks, we are not talking years, three or four weeks, the rivers were clean. The wildlife, wild boars in the cities, the wildlife came back very fast. So we thought actually, nature has an exceptional ability to bounce back much more quickly than we think.

SPEAKER_00: 23:17

But it's still seeing uh whatever insect eating, like now the chimney are moving into certain crops, sitting on your hands, even though you have an organic spray or you have to resist the courage to intervene.

SPEAKER_02: 23:30

There is some science though behind, and we did study it before trying it. So in science, when you have so nature is a it doesn't have empty spaces. You see it actually in the soil as well. If you have naked soil, nature grows something in it to cover it. The actual the function of weeds is to either cover it or break too much compacted soil on fixed nutrients in impoverished soil. So nature is never empty. When you kill something, and this is the approach of a lot of farming, also sustainable techniques, even organic. You've got pathogens, you kill it with natural things, but you still kill it. Okay? In that case, you create what is called ecological void. Nature fills a void, and nine times out of ten fills the void with something stronger than before. Because it doesn't want you to kill it again. So by killing things, you are always creating a bigger problem. It's the antibiotic issue, yeah. If you stop killing, you nature can actually re-establish a balance between species quite quickly. So we've got everything here. You saw the stinking bugs, but the question that everybody asks us, everybody, because apparently everybody has this problem in their homes and vegetable gardens, is how do you get rid of slugs? We don't get rid of slugs. We've got slugs. But one thing is imagine this. I actually have a lot of sympathy for slugs. Imagine these poor slugs, they need to eat something green and edible for them. They get into the farm, and the only thing that is available for eating is the salads or tomatoes or the vegetables. They're gonna eat them. When they come here, and you guys can't see this, but Cohen can, everything is green. It's full of weeds, it's full of foraging, it's full of things for them to eat. So they spread. They've got a lot of other food. And yes, sometimes they go and have a salad, so maybe one leaf is damaged, but it's not a commercial damage. And we estimate that we've got due to this, about depending on crops, five to ten percent losses in terms of weight and volumes due to these practices. But actually, I talk to farms that they use chemicals, they lose way more.

SPEAKER_00: 26:01

They lose way more, and on top of that, they have to buy and apply a lot of cost and labor and risk involved as well. And so, but since when like how long did it take you to get comfortable with that, with holding back, and sometimes still intervene, like depending on what like what's the what was the journey there?

SPEAKER_02: 26:23

The journey to cut so I would say within six months we actually had the feeling that this thing was working, okay. We're still uh having to battle against some parasites, but the ethos is not killing them, is moving them, making things here not nice for them, so they move somewhere else. And then there is always a theme that we experience, for example, with our artichokes. There are pathogens arriving today because of climate change that didn't belong here before, a reason and natural predator for them, and so at that point it becomes a big challenge. A lot of trial and error, a lot of studying the behavior of these pathogens or parasites. A lot of time is a lot of manual work. So, for example, we had this coleopter from Tunisia that eats all the artichokes, and we tried with integrated bacteria that could kill them, didn't work. At the end, we had to pull out all of the architecture growth, pull out all the roots, put all the roots lying in a bar and go root by root, looking for the eggs, pulling them out manually, selecting the roots and replant it all completely from structure. And it worked 90%, but we reduced the population massively, and then we discovered that nematodes interact with them. So if the population is low, you can manage them with nematodes and also bacteria. So we haven't eliminated the problem, but it doesn't. It's manageable, it's manageable, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 28:15

It's manageable, and then from a like sales perspective, like you started with the fresh vegetables at the petrol station, which has a limited scale, let's say, even though it's a city of 7,000 people. Then what you said, of course, we need a brand, we need a strategy, we need marketing around that. What when you sat down to to come up with a plan, what was the thinking there in terms of where the produce from this place is gonna land and how it's gonna land?

SPEAKER_02: 28:45

So the I would say that so we are the fifth year of running the farm today. So I think we took two years to do the trial and error process in terms of what business could work. Then we took another three years to develop the farming technique that we call, by the way, biomimic farming. I would say that we started really running a business about two and a half, three years ago. We discovered that the fresh food had limited scalability, that Italy doesn't have the logistics to deliver as a small farmer to deliver the food to Rome, Milan with a customer service level that is good enough. So we decided first to extend the life of our products by transforming them and putting them into just food. And that also allowed us to create a branding, a visible branding for consumers. Then, by coincidence, because of a series of TV programs that involved us, we got approached by tourists that wanted to visit the farm and learn what we could do. And I have to say, in the last three years, that it's a business that developed exceptionally well. We became better by learning, by observing what people liked, what people wanted, and also in terms of our operation to be more effective and more efficient and cost-level to deliver the fresh. The judge, the experience, and also a bit of the academic side. So we have a lot of universities that come here. And I think today, really, what I would say I think is the secret, and for us, and I think is a something that every farmer should consider differentiating your stream of revenues as much as possible. Not only within the product range. So, of course, we grow 1500 veggies. If one variety dies, it's not a big issue. If I was growing one crop, that would be an issue. But also in terms of the activity that brings you money. We sell, we've got a shop, we sell here at the farm the fresh food. We deliver the fresh food, actually. We have a private member club now, and we deliver the produce to Milan and Rome on a weekly basis. We've got the JAS, but also on the JAS, we sell them direct-to-consumer, business to business, but also we do white labeling for other companies, restaurants, or retailers. We've got the experiences, which are visits, but they're also events, weddings, corporates, sites. So, and all of these things together, they complement each other. Everything works like a flying wheel for the other. And I'm happy to say that although we haven't hit breakeven, but we should get there by the end of the year. So 2023 to 2024, we doubled the income of the year before. 2024 to 2025, we doubled the income again.

SPEAKER_00: 31:46

So we are growing at about 100% this year, actually 130% year and is remarkable for any company or medium like SME, but even more probably in in agriculture, not only involved in say, let's say high margin crops like wine and cosmetics or and just on veggies, of course, on wine, olive oil, and then transforming that into experiences and jars. And not even for prices that are experiences, obviously cost, but that's because you attract an American public or you attract a foreign public in that sense. It's not for the people living in the village, you also do experiences for them. But you also sell what you told the story before of potatoes in the square for very good margins and very good prices and very accessible. So I think it dispels that myth of there's no money in agriculture, which I think is a which is an interesting one to put out there, which is could be connected to a question. But I won't ask this. There is no money in the old way of doing agriculture. And so what makes this then so fundamentally different? Diversifying, I get it, transforming yourself, capturing that, of course, building a brand, very important. You're very active on social media, which your system makes you do. Like that's fundamental. If you want to sell, of course, if you sell in the commodity markets, that doesn't matter. Why would you be? But all but what's the what's then the new, I'm doing air quotes which nobody sees. The new way of approaching what could others learn, other farmers learn in that case.

SPEAKER_02: 34:04

Well, uh you actually use the perfect world, the word that I wanted to use. So farmers today, they manage, they're producing a commodity, mainly. So they produce one variety of tomato in a lot of actors to go to a supermarket or to a producer of pasta sauce. Okay. And your clients decide the price. It's not a taker or not a exactly, it's your price taker. So it doesn't matter whether your compost, your fertilizer, your labor costs more this year, you're still gonna get your 15p per kilo of tomatoes. Okay. We don't work with those clients. We try to either go directly to consumer selling a product with a story that creates value, or we work with business partners that are aligned in telling the story and giving the person that their clients the value. It's not about price anymore, it's about value of what you give them.

SPEAKER_00: 35:11

And true, but if your jar would be 25 euros, then but my jar is not. I know, but it's I'm saying it because it's possible to do that, and for sure, many people have seen in the food and egg space a super high-end golden whatever, and that's fine, but you buy it as a gift, that's pretty much it. Like, how do you make this accessible? And you're actually were saying before, like now, actually, with inflation and price hikes of others, we are in many cases competitive or near similar below, like where the price is not a huge, which is another testament of we've been conditioned to think that it by definition has to be more expensive. We'll get to the quality, flavor, and nutrient density piece in a bit, but we're conditioned to think this has to be at least twice as expensive, it has to be super expensive because this is only for the happy few. You're like, no, it's a nice jar, it costs, but it doesn't cost the world.

SPEAKER_02: 36:01

Inflation played a lot in our favor because I remember when we opened the farm, our tomatoes were twice, if not three times, the price of the tomato that you could buy at supermarkets. Today, often they are cheaper. We didn't raise the price, all the rest big supermarkets are raised.

SPEAKER_00: 36:20

You don't have the crazy input costs. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 36:22

Uh but I'll tell you a story, it's very indicative of the way a lot of people buy. And I used to buy like that actually. Last year, a woman comes in the shop. We were selling the small cherry tomatoes at five euros a kilo in the shop. And she goes into a row about how expensive my tomatoes are. Are you selling gold? And I was a bit surprised and shocked, and also because of the behavior. She was very aggressive. And I was like, sorry, but who are you? Who are you? Why are you telling me this? I grew this thing, I put a lot of effort. Why are you telling me this? I said, well, because I just went to the most expensive supermarket in the area, and I bought exactly the same tomato, which of course they weren't exactly the same tomatoes, tomatoes that didn't taste of anything coming from Spain. Nothing against Spain listeners, but yeah. 2 euros 50. And I was like, well, great. Do you want to show me the tomatoes so we see if they are exactly the same? She pulls out this plastic box with a little bit of tomatoes in it, and I just turned the box and I see that there were 200 grams of tomatoes in the box. So she spent 2 euros 50 for 200 grams, which turns into 1250 per kilo, criticizing me that I was selling them at 5 euros per kilo. But she was sure their tray was 1 kilo. She didn't actually look at the weight. And a lot of people, the supermarkets are very smart in this. A lot of people they buy the box thinking that the price of the box is the price for the kilo. And actually they're only buying 150. The salad is the perfect example. The salad is the perfect example, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 38:02

Our friends have some food. Paolo Di Croce loves to use that example. How much you overpay for a ready-washed bag of salad. Which you then, because you're suspicious, which probably you should be, you anyway wash again. Yeah. So that's the whole it doesn't have any point.

SPEAKER_02: 38:17

No, it doesn't have any point anymore. You're probably expansion then. She was shocked and she went mute and she left the shop and never see her again. But you didn't manage to let's taste both of them, let's see. Your bricks analysis. We to be honest, no, I need that up to a certain point because we've got such love and feedbacks from whoever buys our products.

SPEAKER_00: 38:41

Because the fresh one goes to restaurants, they go to people here and nearly. I heard even the local supermarket owner who obviously sells tomatoes from very far.

SPEAKER_02: 39:02

They buy the tomato from us for themselves. That says it all, probably. And it's we keep having exceptional feedback from clients when they buy our products, and uh and that's what really is all about. I I don't need to go into a fight with anybody, to be honest. I'm really I've always been quite afraid of arguments and things. I ran away from arguments, even with my wife, actually. I'm one of those husbands that suddenly run away when you turn in a different direction. So tell me about your relationships. Exactly. So I it's it's not my thing.

SPEAKER_00: 39:37

I it's also not valid. I've learned, I think I spent 15 years now in let's say the regenerative world of food and agriculture. And convincing is not a very helpful, energetically interesting nor. If you're interested, go deep. There I can point you to 6,000 different rabbit holes where you can learn anything you want about quantum nutrient too. Taste it, sit down, taste it, taste it, exactly. Taste it. Like that would have been the interesting end to that conversation. Okay, bring yours and let's cut both of them blind.

SPEAKER_02: 40:10

And a lot of people come with a constructive attitude, and we take critiques from them. And at the end of the day, we've done a lot of this because also growing 1500 varieties, a lot of stuff that we sell, people have never seen, they don't trust them.

SPEAKER_00: 40:24

You were saying before the forage, like in the winter, you buy the you harvest the foraging of the non-productive lanes, like we're looking at the vegetable lanes where there is a product and a productive lane, of course, of vegetables, which is an old construct, I'm thinking about. We're looking at olive trees, sorry, in a row. There's an interesting story with figs, we'll get there. There's a vegetable lane with a nice paper, recycled paper layer to against the weeds. We're growing in this case jalapeno. Jalapeno. And then there is a passage, let's say a passage lane in the middle with where you actually grow a lot of accidental foraging, which you harvest in the winter where you don't have a lot of other things, which you sell for a really good kilo price in your shop. And people love like proper wild spinach and a lot of other edible things that nobody ever sees, or definitely doesn't have these quantities that you can get in a then get to a restaurant.

SPEAKER_02: 41:13

But that's the trick. So a lot of stuff, a lot of times where people were like, I don't know, maybe, but I don't know how to go, which is get half a kilo for free. Take it, try it. Okra. When we started growing okra in cittad della pieve, well, like people are like, What is how do you pronounce it? How do you write it? And for the first year, we literally just gave okra for free to everybody until it became one of the most desired crops in the shop. People love it. Purple beans. I know in England they are very common, but here no one has ever seen purple beans, and people didn't want to buy the purple beans. And so we started giving them for free. Strange varieties of melons and tomatillas and purple tomatoes. And that way of convincing, it works because you are not getting into an argument about why this, why that. It's just try, taste it if you like it.

SPEAKER_00: 42:08

How's been the chef? You work a lot with restaurants. How's been the reception or what's the chef's movement that say in Umbria and in your area?

SPEAKER_02: 42:15

It's not easy actually. Not really easy. Uh we work well with chefs that aligns strongly to enhance seasonality. So most restaurants, they some of them they never change the menu. So they want red bell pepper throughout the year. We can't work with those restaurants, okay? We only grow in the sun and in the rain, no greenhouses. So we've got peppers for four months, that's it. Some crops we give, we have them for a week. The garlic flowers, which are very successful with some restaurants, we harvest them in a week, that's it. Then they're gone. See you next year. See you next year. So we have to work with restaurants which are A, aligned with that. B, it's not about all about the price. You know, because surely they can buy for cheaper somewhere else, but they don't, it's all about quality food. And they love having those kind of uh special plates outside the menu. No, today we've got something with that you can only get it now. Today, that's it.

SPEAKER_00: 43:18

Which is a very enhanced, it's a very interesting concept because you're usually like, oh, what is there today? What's outside the menu?

SPEAKER_02: 43:24

Tell me exactly. And we work well with those kinds of chefs. I think that 50% of the new chefs are actually more inclined to come towards this direction that we just thought about compared to maybe their parents. Interesting. There is a new interest in discovering. There is a lot of interest in wild things like foraging, and there is a lot of interest in processes that are very difficult to achieve if your products are sprayed with nasty chemicals like fermentation.

SPEAKER_00: 43:56

Let's go there, processes. We had a long conversation with Dan Barber on that. And he was like, Yeah, why do all these vegetables in a can, in a he's now doing them in like a sardine can? Why do they taste like he said? My hunch is that it's because they were shit to begin with. And you need either they're blunt or you need a lot of additives to make them taste like anything. And they probably could taste amazing, preserved and in a good way, not the ultra-processed side, obviously, but processed in a way that enhances even and that of course prolongs the season, so you don't have one week of things or even four months of things, because you pretty quickly figured out, yeah, fresh, there's a limit. So, how did that the fermentation but also the processing? The easiest thing is probably tomato sauce, but like what how did that start and where is it now? Because it's pretty impressive what you've built in terms of lab with a few machines, but very specific ones you find or don't find in your kitchen. Like, what's the processing in the optimist or in the positive sense? What does it mean to to Quintus Apoia?

SPEAKER_02: 44:56

Well, to answer your first point, I think that the trick is quality ingredients, first of all, because most of the jars that you buy, they don't have quality ingredients inside. And if you look at the list of ingredients at the back label, you realize that more than a half of the ingredients you don't even know what they are and how to pronounce them. And most of those ingredients are either for make them last longer or to add flavors. Okay, so generally you've got an average of 20 items in the ingredient list, and out of those, only three are the ingredients that you recognize, and they are written on the front label, let's say. All the rest is gibberish, E, numbers and flavors. So that's the first point. Now, in terms of processes, as I told you before, so when we started building the lab, and I was faced with the challenge of choosing the processes and the machines, a lot of companies came to me saying, Well, today you do reverse osmosis cooking, you have this incredible technological things that they can ensure that the nutrient levels and everything. And I was like, Yeah, but ultimately, what does it taste like? And the answer was always, oh well, you need to try it. But I was like, I want things that taste like my mom. My grandmother used to do at home. And they actually did them with a pan and a pot. So I want a very high-tech pan or pot. That's what I want. So we actually chose processes that reflect what you would do at home. The blanching, the condiments, the thing, and then of course, we had to go a step further to have the highest quality, but also to have processes that are super safe from the other point of view. So we discovered machines that can concentrate boiling at 40 degrees rather than 100 by taking pressure out. You wouldn't get that at home.

SPEAKER_00: 46:59

No, so it's a machine that brings it to minus one bar, which means stuff cooks way quicker.

SPEAKER_02: 47:03

Exactly, and boil at much lower temperature. So you remove the water, concentrate the sauce, for example, without having to cook it. We have a vapor compressed vapor sterilizer that allows us to sterilize much more quickly so you don't overcook the stuff when you sterilize or pasteurize. But all the rest actually is driven by uh the classic processes of the mama. With we are trying to innovate to achieve things that we want. For example, I always found that vegetables in a jar they tend to be quite squashy and soft because you blanch them, then you pasteurize them, so you cook them twice, and at the end they get quite slushy. While we decided to, if where is possible, not to blunch but to cold marinate things to keep the chiness. So basically they're raw when we pasteurize them, but we have acidified them through a process that changes time according to the vegetables, aubergines, eggplants, they can absorb acidity much more quickly than, for example, a tomato or a zucchini. So that gives us the idea of how much time, and we measure pH, we measure bricks level, sugar level, of course, and acidity, and then we keep the jar, we monitor it, we open it again, we check again, so we make sure that the products are super healthy, but they have an unexpected mouthful. When you put them in your mouth, you're like, oh gosh, this seems like crunchy and raw. Oh my god. And people are obsessed with this kind of thing. And and the second element is very important, I think, is although we create recipes like I was telling to you, we do the caponata, but rather than doing it in a pot, we do it in a plancha with wood fire so you get a real wood smokiness in it. But ultimately, if you look at ingredients or products, you look at the list and you say, Okay, this is exactly what I would do at home. These are all ingredients that you can virtually buy in the supermarket. We acidify only with vinegar, wine, or lemon. That's it. We don't use any powder, any ascorbic acid, and citric acid, although they're not bad for you. But we just want to do things in the most straightforward way. I don't want to have people not recognizing a name in my ingredient list.

SPEAKER_00: 49:59

And then still adding that sort of high-tech. Yeah. And that enables you to keep crunchiness and enables you to do other things that and to keep health and safety.

SPEAKER_02: 50:10

That's paramount. When you produce jars, the most paramount thing is make them safe. We are talking about products that have to last about 24 months on the shelf, not in the fridge, on a shelf. So the first thing is safety. Make sure that your product is safe for two main reasons. One is, of course, you don't want to kill anybody. Second, if you kill anybody, you end up in prison and you close the company. So there's a double leverage.

SPEAKER_00: 50:35

On that, and you can add, and then we get to fermentation. There are ways, of course, as we know, to almost add nutrients or nutrients to food after, of course, we say fresh, great. But fermentation is an unlock to more complex flavors, different kinds of nutrients, different kinds of absorption, ways, pathways for your body, etc. What are you doing in the except for the wine, obviously, which is fermented.

SPEAKER_02: 51:01

Well, let's say that for people that don't understand fermentation, I think that they could understand the principle by understanding, for example, what we call the Maillard reaction, which is the caramelization of the sugars when you cook things. You put stuff, a steak, you put it in the pan, you don't brown it, the taste is blunt. You brown it, it becomes much more interesting, full of flavor and fermentation, although it's a completely different chemical process, it does that. So it makes something that can be potentially blunt into an umami, salt and sweet acid flavor that makes things much more interesting. Now, we there are different ways of fermenting and different kinds of fermentation, of course. We only use today lactobacteria fermentation, which is also the easiest one. You can do it at home actually fairly easily. It's all about adding the right amount of salt to the ingredients. And you make crowdie, for example. You make crowdy. Basically, you need to add 2 to 2.5% of salt to the weight of the ingredients and just leave it there for a bit. Squeeze and leave. Squeeze and leave. That's it. But that allows us, for example, on some so we we ferment a lot the spicy sauces. So the chilies, the peppers, the ingredients of the spicy sauces are all fermented. And we find that if you taste the difference, because we do that. So we do exactly the same ingredients. One batch we ferment, one we don't. We do the entire process. We taste the one that has fermented, it's got such a level of personality feature. It's incredibly more tasty, more rich, is the thing that you always want more. And it's very healthy for you because laptobacteria acids that get developed during the lactobacteria fermentation are what you actually have in yogurts. You take supplements for. We had the vinegar country. Come on. We use vinegar to acidify and preserve. We always had used vinegar and salt in Italy since this beginning of times. In Asia, they used fermentation. And but so when we were talking before about the challenges of fermentation, the challenges of fermentation is that, well, first of all, it's changing now in Italy, but up until one or two years ago, you couldn't sell fermenting products to the public. You had to pasteurize them, so you killed all the beneficial bacteria of the fermentation, and you were left with an acidity that people are not used to, and so they didn't like. Today, processes are changing. The body that regulates health and safety in labs called Akachi Chipp, H A C C P is allowing live fermenting protocols in farms, and so we are also looking with quite a lot of interest to that part of production. But again, ultimately, my grandmother didn't ferment, and if I want to do a product like my brother used to do, maybe I should avoid fermentation. But my mom and my grandmother didn't do spicy sauces. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 54:37

So I can allow myself to be as creative as I want on that. But it's also there are a lot of things we didn't do a hundred years ago, a lot of things we did in medical science 100 years ago, which probably are not to be repeated.

SPEAKER_02: 54:51

And also, and to be honest, although it's fascinating, and I love cooking, so I love fermenting as an idea, there are products that lend themselves more to the acidity of fermentation and products that don't. It's incredible the difference. For example, when you acidify a product with vinegar, the difference within the different vinegars, cheap vinegar versus expensive vinegar, apple vinegar versus grape vinegar, it changes everything. And so when you produce a product, you have to decide, and we test. We do a lot of tests with different varieties of things to ultimately decide what's the best. And we, as I say, the testing is quite so we we test, of course, but our parents, our friends, our clients, some of our clients. We just get them to test things and let us know. And then we just put together all the different feedbacks and we decide what's the best.

SPEAKER_00: 55:49

And on the fermenting side for the farm, in terms of inputs, etc.

SPEAKER_02: 55:57

We are looking at fermenting for the compost production. So basically, fermentation allows you to fast track compost production. That's why the dog went into switching. Yes. I'm gonna give you a shower. Sorry, our dog has just jumped into a mud pool. Nice. So the usually producing compost from garden waste or food waste takes about a year and a half. If you ferment compost, which basically means adding fermenting bacteria to the compost, you can shorten the period to about one month, one month and a half. And the end result is not only a faster production of compost, but you have a compost which has got a lot of more complex bacterial elements and profile inside, which is in turn more healthy for your soil and for your plants. So that's really where we are going to put a lot of the effort in the next coming years to test, to create a plan to produce this compost, to understand how we reach the level of biomass and the right mix of biomass that we need to produce high-quality compost. And but it is exactly bacteria, I would say that they are 70-80% of what we do in the farm is all about bacteria, microbes, fungi, myceliums in all sorts of ways. From the most basic of not disturb the soil in the woodlands in order to produce good myceliums that gives you good white mushrooms, white or black truffles, to producing compost and to producing products. So it's we still don't know a lot about bacteria and microbes. Most people they imagine the way you and I grew up, or kids are growing up today. If you think about bacteria are the enemy, yeah. We always try to clean every surface. We make our babies perfectly clean. If something falls on the soil, don't eat it. Actually, bacteria are the reason why we are alive. And there is I love this thing. This when you take a teaspoon of healthy soil, there are more bacteria in that teaspoon than human on Earth. And we're mostly bacteria. If you don't like bacteria, you just better move out of the planet because we are full of them. And a lot of them, most of them, I would say, are beneficial to us. They keep us safe, they keep us healthy, they protect us from viruses and illnesses, they allow us to eat. We don't actually feed on the food that we put in our mouth. We feed on the element that the bacteria synthesize for us in our stomach. And that's what we can talk about nutrients in the food and what that means for a lot of different things, also for the cost of the produce.

SPEAKER_00: 59:01

Of course, no, you have that perfect bridge. You've done some research in that direction on or some tests, let's say, of your produce versus let's say to put the rest, the final, put the final nail in the coffin of this is too expensive and blah blah blah. What were I thinking you tested your oil, olive oil, and some cabbages, right?

SPEAKER_02: 59:25

Cabbages and tomatoes. And I think we can get even better than this because we did the test after one year of biomimic farming full implementation. And as you can see, a lot of the trees are not yet grown. The shadow has not really developed. The shadow has not really developed, the soil hasn't been fully regenerated yet. We're doing it very fast, but it's not fully regenerated yet. So on the olive oil, we went from 100 milligrams of polyphenolic acid per liter to 600. So we did a 600% growth in one year. On the curly cale, for example.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:04

The year before, same growth, 100 mil. Is it season or sorry, is it easy? Do you have good years there and bad years as well? Or is it really no?

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:12

You get good year and bad year in terms of quantity and quality because of the parasites. For example, the white fly literally destroys the quality of your olive oil. But in terms of polyphenolic acid, it depends on the variety of the, and we haven't changed the variety on the health of the soil, the health of the plant, and how much nutrients they're antioxidants basically. Yeah, there's the reason. How much nutrients they can pull off the ground.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:38

And we promised the white fly you discovered in the local bar. Yes. Because the white fly is a problem. Well, even though it's a problem, you want to sit on your hands, but you don't because you want to get the white fly out, preferably going somewhere else. How did you start solving that? Or what was your observation and then how?

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:55

So we noticed, and we never understood why. We always thought it was a coincidence because we thought old people they want to have olive but also fruit, and the easiest fruit to grow in Umbres figs. Actually, the easiest fruit to grow is figs. You can't you can't kill a fig tree, trust me. I tried. You can't. We noticed that in our olive orchards there were few fig trees around, and 10 or 15 olive trees around the fig tree didn't literally have the white fly. While on the other ones, we actually needed to put mechanical traps. And we thought, well, they like figs, they put figs, they didn't have the space to put them anywhere else. Then we started showing. With the old people in the bar. And these old men said, No, it's not because we like figs, actually, don't eat figs, but I have them because we know that the white fly is attracted by figs. But the second that it touches the figs, dies. Dies. So that's your mechanical trap. Yeah, our mechanical trap. We can eat it. You can eat it as well. So we decided last year that we're gonna test this thing, and we literally cut it branches from our current figs, and we produced 500 plants, 500 new trees that we're gonna plant this winter, in order not to need to water them as soon as we plant them. And we're gonna start having like live traps and in turn produce a lot of figs that they sell really well, anyway.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:23

So and sorry, coming back to the nutrient part, you did the oil, the tomatoes, and the cabbages. But you're only at the beginning because we're gonna talk about what you're pushing now.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:34

The highest increase has been on the cabbages, where we got 1000% more nutrients than before. Than before or than before? But before we were standing at a very high-level organic product, now we went literally way above that. On the tomatoes, we are talking about 500% more nutrients than what you would buy in the supermarket that is organic. The next phase for us is strawberries. We believe that on the strawberries we could go like literally on the two, three, four thousand more because it's all these nutrients, you know, what people understand, apart from they're good for you, of course. But what gives taste to your food is the nutrients. If you have no nutrients, they don't taste. And that's why a lot of people say stuff doesn't taste as it used to. And your strawberries are exceptional, right? I didn't taste them because it's not the street. I know, but the strawberries are exceptional, exceptional. And that was another thing that made us laugh because it's very expensive for us to make strawberries the way we do, and we can't actually sell them outside the local community because they don't last. They don't travel. They don't travel. Then we harvest them that day or the day after, max. And uh so we decided to put them at 25 euros a kilo. Considering that you buy a kilo of strawberries, organic strawberries supermarket at three euros. People, you guys are crazy. I'm not gonna buy them. So we started making this tiny little tester box at the shop, and we just gave them for free for a week. After a week, we had a waiting line, so we had to buy a notebook for a waiting list, and not everybody gets them, only the first one they're on the waiting list, and so we all our strawberries are pretty much fully booked and already sold before we start harvesting them at that price, and people are like just it's worth spending that amount of money because a lot of people say, I forgot what strawberries should taste like. But most importantly, my wife has always been allergic to strawberries, always, until I started growing strawberries, and we discovered that she was an allergic to strawberries.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:50

She's allergic to the stuff that the spray. It's one of the dirty dozen, right? It's one of those crops that gets sprayed the most.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:56

Imagine that in Italy we so we so the Ultra Consumer, which is this big NGO. The consumer association does the list every yeah and they tested the 19 biggest brands of strawberries in the market, and the best has nine chemicals on it, the worst 19. Wow. Stuff that shouldn't be there. Yeah. It's there because they make them travel for 10 days, it's there because they don't want the slug to eat them, it's there because of many different reasons. Not for your health and not for the taste.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:31

And what does this mean? Of course, this is an investing in regenerative agriculture and food podcast. What would you tell the investment world? Your former world, you've worked in the investment world before you worked in sustainability. You could say you're working in investment still, this is managing resources, natural resources, and financial resources, and definitely you work in sustainability. But I always like to ask this question: let's say we're in a theater in Chita della Pieva or in a financial hub, maybe Rome, Milan in this case probably fits better. Let's wait for the buggy. Electric, I know. Electric buggy, of course. To pass by. So the noise comes from the car and the tires, not from the engine. So if we would do this in a in front of a crowd that's let's say managing their own wealth, other people's wealth. Of course, we have an evening, amazing dinner, like lots of interesting imagery. We have a nice long, let's say, fireside chat on stage, but people forget as well the next day. When they're back at their desk, when they open the laptop, when they went through the commute and they're make decisions on a lot of money, what would you like the seed, what would you like the seed to be that you planted? What would you like to think that they remembered from an evening talking about all of this? It would be nice if we bring them here, but let's say we do it in a more city environment.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:52

I think that from an investor, purely investors point of view, first of all, we are running a company with an underlying asset that can only appreciate rather than depreciate real estate.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:04

How do people get that?

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:05

No one.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:06

That's I've been saying this for 15 years.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:08

Land is gold.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:09

You know, when you manage it, if you run it well, it increases and like your maintenance cost is your harvest that you can sell. Like, how did that?

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:19

But also imagine all the stuff that you buy, tructors, systems, they don't devaluate that quickly as, for example, a car.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:26

There's a good market for them. It's a good market.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:29

You can buy a tractor for 1970 and you still pay 26, 30k for it. So all the immobilization and the real estate are actually very good investments, even if you don't use them. If you use them, please use them. I don't buy your farms and then just become these hobby farms with three trees and coverage. But if you use them if 110, you can only appreciate. Second thing, and I think that a savvy investor already knows this, there are a lot of underlying value that is not captured by the market yet, like carbon sequestration, for example, or natural nature health, that one day I'm sure will become monetizable assets. There are already some, for example, carbon sequentration, you can sell carbon credits. There is value in protecting the land, and soon enough we'll be recognized and we'll be able to monetize this value. The other thing is that, of course, if you are a farmer and you make that extra step to develop a brand, which not a lot of farms do, brands are very high value, low-cost venture. And there is a big volume. If you think about a lot of companies today on the stock market, their stock price is basically based on brand, not really on revenues. And ultimately, I think that there's nothing that is this activity, nothing gets lost. Imagine you're doing t-shirts, and your t-shirt doesn't come out properly, you throw it away, you burn it. I grow produce. If that produce doesn't is not optimal for selling, it becomes a resource for compost, maybe. Mistakes are actually the biggest lesson in farming because you learn a lot of it, and you can turn them into competitive advantages. But also, as you said before, by harvesting foraging from the living path, even if you don't do anything, you can actually capture value out of doing nothing to nature just by letting it be and harvest the produce that it naturally grows. Your white truffles are a prime example. Exactly. So there are a lot of stream, potential stream of revenues if you know how to harvest them.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:54

It almost goes like against our economic thinking or dogma. And maybe we have to like like Kate Roworth. I think we have to really teach economics differently because a lot of stuff on scarcity versus abundance, like the whole commoditization, doesn't runs at the end now and doesn't really run according like how nature runs stuff, which sounds very philosophical, which it is, but also very basic. Like it's not how like it's difficult, I think, for many people to grasp if you're in the financial world specifically.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:28

Not only is there a demand that is growing for this, the produce produced like this. Okay?

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:35

You clearly don't have a problem in selling.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:37

No, we are upward market trend, definitely recognized by everybody, and also by data. You know, we've seen this. But also, I think that a lot of people are waking up to the fact that maybe this tomato is two euros more. But you don't feed on volumes of weight, you feed on nutrients.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:00

So you don't need the difference at the end of the year.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:02

You don't need a kilo of tomato to feel satisfied, you need half a kilo of tomatoes to feel full. And also, then you don't need to go and buy the supplements at the pharmacy, which are insanely expensive.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:13

Insanely expensive, it's a huge market, except for maybe animal protein and wine, but also wine is a lot of story, like really high quality doesn't cost so much more. In many cases, it doesn't cost even and you won't, I promise you, you won't see the difference if you buy high-end, really well-done pasta for the year or olive oil. You don't see it at the end of the year. No, like that would mean there's no difference in your budget, or a slight difference compared to, of course, your supplement stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:40

Also, yeah, I give you a data which is quite shocking considering that we are in Italy, the Mediterranean diet, we definitely buy a lot of health. But yeah. Italy spends approximately 19 billion a year in healthcare for food-related illnesses. 19 billion is 400 euros per person, including infants, a year. And all of these, most of these illnesses are related to the fact that we don't eat well. We ultra-processed food, we don't get the nutrients that we need, and then we resort to eating too much volumes, which is unhealthy. We spend a lot of money at the gym to lose weight. Imagine also how much we spend with sports and things just to look good, not to be healthier, not to be fit, just to look good. And this is all food-related, lifestyle-related.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:33

Like the big question becomes then how do we channel more of that huge chunk of money, which is much more than probably what we spend on food in Europe or in Italy. And I think it's a big topic. Like, how do we get more of the health-related expenditure into this? Because it's a gigantic pot of money that doesn't get to farmers, let's say.

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:56

I think it's a problem that is in common with a lot of crises that we are living today, and is education. We are not most of countries in Europe and around the world they're divesting from education. We are spending less and less money in education. Our education is decreasing in terms of quality, is very blocked. He hasn't updated, the system haven't updated, the subject that we studied haven't updated. And we still have that way of educating people in a very, in a only very standardized academic way. So we don't consider at all emotional intelligence, creative intelligence.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:47

All these dates, or which is ridiculous. You have Claude or ChatGPT in your pocket. Like remembering dates is like the last. And cooking, for instance, cooking education, or even farming. I remember in my primary school, we had three years that we had a small vegetable garden. Everyone had a personal one. And it was a decision of the school to not just have one year, a bigger one, but three years in a row, so you could have that sort of longitudinity, so you could actually see different things, the different crops in different years were different, and then you got an enormous amount of parcel. And of course, you end up drying it or something because what do you need like a forest of parcel? And but I still vividly remember this is I was 11, so that's 30 years ago, slightly less, but still. And so that those imprints and cooking with Byron's, like we had to cook one today a week. Or another chore, but I probably picked a cooking one.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:40

Another game great cook, but you appreciate the lessons and wasn't that exceptionally beautiful. It was a bit of a chore. Yeah, but to be honest, I remember, I remember the first time came to London and I ate my first mango in my life. I remember pineapple, oh my god. Amazing. I was literally like dreaming of mangoes for a week. Then I actually moved to London to live. Yeah, and you had mango every day in the supermarket, you don't buy mangoes anymore. No. I remember when I was here, when I was a kid, I remember you remember the season, so you remember that in the tomatoes are arriving. And summer, basically my diet is to tomatoes every day. And I don't eat tomatoes in the winter. But then I look forward to the following year.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:35

Anyway, but normally not. But normally not. You look forward to the excitement, and then it's pre-ripe, it's not really there yet. Then it's at the height, and then it's yeah, you should probably stop eating them because your overdose.

SPEAKER_02: 1:15:45

We live it today very easily, like with mushrooms. We I'm a passionate mushroom hunter, and we already started since the first rain last week. We are already going in the woods. We are not finding anything, but it's the excitement. God, come on, let's do and then it's all about mushroom now and truffle in November. And you get an excitement of the season, but also let's recognize the fact that nature indeed is a beautiful trend. It produces produce seasonally with the right nutrients for your body for that season. And although today we buy products that have no nutrients, but those things are what make you healthy during the summer, healthy during the winter. You know, why nature has decided to have oranges? The season of oranges is the season of where you have got the cold. Vitamin C packing yourself with vitamin C. And the best oranges are in the winter. So you get the most tasteful, most nutritious, most medicinal crop for you in the perfect moment where you need it the most.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:58

How difficult was it for you coming from finance as well, to get into those rhythms of farming, which for the financial world is slow. It would be lovely to have one every week so you could iterate quickly, like definitely not a software startup. How was that transition?

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:17

He was an incredible uh breaking point for me because we discussed this before. I think the biggest change was to recognize that I'm not producing anything anymore. I'm growing things. And when you grow food, you abide to the rhythm of nature. When you produce food, you don't care about this, you're just producing it. And you take the romance, the fascination away. But also, I was a consultant, I was producing information, and I could do that anywhere, everywhere, any time of the year. Here you're growing, you're dealing with living organisms and living systems, yeah. On one side, you have to do that step, on the other side, doing the step reconnects you completely with what humans should be connected with. There is, we spoke a lot today about energy, and I hope not to sound crazy to your listener.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:18

I think pretty pretty confident about what this audience can handle. So let's go there.

SPEAKER_02: 1:18:23

So that it's we are surrounded by a beautiful chaotic amount of energy, frequency, and vibration. Actually, there is a frequency called zero-point field which connects everything. So we have the frequency in common with a stone, with a leaf of vegetable, with a mushroom, with an animal. We are connected by the same vibration. And that's what I think creates the beautiful feeling of being connected, of being part of something. But most importantly, what we are discovering all, yes, a lot of farmers that you have interviewed already are recognizing this and we are studying this. Is what if we can interact with these energies? What if we can drive this vibration, frequency, and energy?

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:19

We always interact with it. But without knowingly. Intention is there. When we have driving, probably we also interact and move frequency by by moving, by talking, by living, by breathing, by thinking.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:32

But what if we can matter just with frequency? Imagine we start everybody have studied a school the following principle: an atom has a nucleus and the electrons. The number of electrons and level of electrons that an atom has results in what element that is. But what changes between elements? It's just the level of energy. We learned a school that the more energy attracts another electron, and the more energy attracts another atom. So it's all about energy. We studied this, we know this, it's actually ingrained in ourselves. But then we never realized that we could actually use that principle to interact with that energy and to create changes to the physical world. We could increase the growing rate of a plant just by using energy, not even using fertilizer or organic matter or manure. We know today, we've seen tests in science that if you bombard a plant with a frequency of love, 583 Hz, the plant grows at double the rate, and it produces more fruit.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:45

Just with frequency. We always have the examples of vineyards with music, which probably is not about the music, but about the frequency.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:54

It is about the frequency.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:55

People, like really good farmers, they can feel a field, like what's off here, something is not, or something is, and the plants are, and now we're capturing that under an official label of quantum and starting to really go deeper. But we probably need an official label.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:11

We need a discipline that allows us to put things in the skin. We human need skin. It needs to be in a bucket, in a silo.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:17

And so, how are you? We're standing in a very old vineyard. How are you applying that apart from studying it? Like where with such a big revelation, where do you start?

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:30

I think you start by understanding that there is a connection between you and the plant. But that is already new. And we already knew. Then we started testing, for example, how can we give a certain frequency to the plant? And we learned that, for example, water is the perfect medium to capture that frequency and to lock the frequency in. And so, what if we then water the plants with the water in the food with the frequency and we see the effects? It grows better, or we can get rid of parasites. It's a bit different from the standard agricultural practices because it's not about you can't wait to identify the problem and then kill it. You need to have a protocol of constant care. If your tomatoes need calcium, you can buy calcium from the store, which is chemically processed, and probably you just give a dose of calcium to solve the problem. If you do it with informed water, probably you need to have five, seven, eight cycles of informed water. You need some kind of feedback loop, but it's free. But it's free.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:36

It takes time. It takes time.

SPEAKER_02: 1:22:38

It doesn't leave any residue in the soil.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:40

It's probably much so informed water just for the listeners in the back.

SPEAKER_02: 1:22:44

Informed water basically water where we lock in a certain kind of frequency. And we know today, thanks to science, that out of the periodic table of elements that we all studied in the first year science school in high school, I think, every element in the periodic table is characterized by a different frequency. So if you give that frequency to the water, you can, in a way, I wouldn't say copy the effect, because actually you are transforming the water in that element at quantum level. So you're not pretending to be. Transmuting, probably that's the actually the right word, transmuting water into a different element. It still looks like water, it tastes like water, but it acts as calcium of iron or magnesium, potassium, nitrogen. And I think we are literally at the cusp of a massive revolution, both in farming, but also in healthcare, thanks to quantum mechanics. We are starting learning how to use, how to drive, how to log those frequencies. We are starting testing it, we are starting to see the results, and the results are staggering. It works. I've got the feeling that we always knew it did. And I've got the feeling that our unchessed ancestors knew about this. As much as they knew about a lot of other things. We know that, for example, the pyramids they deliver energy beams. Why they built it like that? Because probably they knew something. We don't know yet what, but they do. We also know, for example, one example that I love making because today is considered this incredible technological process, is the production of biochar, which we use. And to produce biochar, you need a pyrolysis machine that costs hundreds of thousands, that can create syngas and biochar and blah, blah, blah. Then, five years ago, they discovered that in the Amazon forest there were massive communities living there. And those massive communities created what is called Terra Petra, a lever, a meter of earth, is packed with biochar. And what how did they do? They just dug a hole in the ground, they just burn things inside the hole, reducing the amount of oxygen, and they created biochar. Easy. So, as I was saying to you before, is our ethos of blending ancient wisdom and cutting edge technology. Sometimes the cutting-edge technology is actually an ancient wisdom, but we have a more expensive and complicated way of doing it today. But the result is the same.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:31

And what's your take on technology in that sense? What are you excited about that's coming, or that you already saw, or machinery? Software AI, robotics, like what's exciting you?

SPEAKER_02: 1:25:44

What is exciting me is all those technology that can make our jobs safer and less stressful for physically for the body because farming is very heavy for the body and it's dangerous. We use a lot of machines that are dangerous. So I imagine robotic tractors, robotic cut uh lawn mower. We cut the grass a lot here because everything is green, so we need to cut the grass, but also all the robotic AI and software instruments that can allow you to measure nutrient moisture right to the centimeter so that you become much more effective in the way you give these elements. Sometimes you don't need to water all the fields. I planted in my house, I needed more shade, so I planted three Paulonias in my house in a line. And they are two meters from each other. One is three meters, one is one meter, and one is seven point five meters after six months. It's literally five meters. Moisture level, probably that plant that grew seven meters. He found some water on his own.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:06

But if we could know on leaf during the growth, and you're like, oh okay, actually, it's just this and this is blocking it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 1:27:12

Let's add, or not, or let's take away, or and then what excites me most more than anything is the quantum-based farming, is how much we can learn about the level of also communication. We I always thought because and we know, we and we always thought that the plant communicated through the mycelian network. We know they call it the telephone of the or the internet of plants. Of plants and trees. Exactly. Yeah. We know that they communicated through the root system. What we didn't know, and we just discovered, is actually they communicate through frequencies and vibrations. Through the air as well. Why do they do that? We don't know. What does that effect have? We don't know. But we will discover soon enough. And again, once we allow ourselves to listen, to communicate, to connect, we can find solutions for farming. But as we were saying before, the same solution of quantum that would work on farming could easily work on healthcare, for example. So we could heal our bodies with frequency and vibration rather than with medicines. And we are literally so close. I think we are talking about three, four years from literally getting a lot of these things, maybe not to become mainstream, but to become available for people. Maybe like you and I, all your listener that wants to listen.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:40

And would that be one of the keys or the keys that unlocks the adoption of these kinds of practices on larger scale, not only larger scale farms, because they might need to be smaller, but also the large, relatively monoculture ones. What do you see there? It's like when you get to a nothing plug and play, but yeah, that's an approach that fits that as well.

SPEAKER_02: 1:29:05

I think, well, on one side, we really need to get to a plug-and-play solution that even people that don't understand the principle can apply. With the products that is economically enough, not to risk too much buying it. The second thing that we need to recognize is a negative aspect of the market, is we are fighting against probably one of the biggest lobby group in the world. It's not a coincidence that the food we eat, the way we farm, is like this. And it's a result of a capitalistic view of economic concentration. It's not about everybody can be producing something, it's about few companies have to produce and earn most of the money in the world. And they've got a lot of money to change legislation, to influence politics, to influence adoption of practices, to influence scientific researches. People don't understand how big is the purchase power that we've got in our hands. We don't understand that buying a product from a company is like giving your political votes to your prime minister. And you do that five times a day. I don't approve what you do. If I buy stuff from you, I approve what you do. So it's a massive power in the end of what we call consumer with actually a people. It's always a nice term. But we've got this massive power, which we don't use at all. And if we start using it, we can change the world. We are definitely enough people if we combine our effort together, we can decide the fate of this planet. And we never have lived a more important period of time like this when we're living now to actually start acting on this. It's very easy to. Surrender to despair when you watch the news every day, especially now the world is going on fire, everything is going down the drain. But the answer cannot be surrender to despair. The answer has to be changing this. Most of the problems of the world currently are caused by three men, white, obviously, in the 70s, which they only want to hang on their pulse power.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:13

Come on. And it leads to a perfect question we always like to ask at the end. If there was one thing you could change overnight, if you had the magic power to change one thing, it could be in food and egg, in general, in sustainability as well. We've heard radical cap changes to global consciousness and everything in between, all animals outside, all of those. So definitely feel free. But if there if you had a magic wand and you change one thing, could change one thing overnight. What would that be?

SPEAKER_02: 1:32:48

Going from a neoliberal capitalism system to a socialist system. So good social. Yeah, today's socialism, not the one that we identified with communism thing. It's sharing things, it's putting things in common, doing things for the people, for the common good, get away from the concentration of economics and power and invest in what really we need to invest in. Imagine the wealth as humans, the wealth we generate, the intellect we have. And then we end up spending money on waging wars, destroying the environment, and causing climate change. Well, we will actually spend them in education, healthcare, public transportation, making people's life better, housing, affordable housing. No, we don't do that. We've got so probably in the next month or so we're gonna have the first trillionaire in the world. When we have half of the world that doesn't really can't put a plate of food on the table every day, we've got trillioners. And it doesn't work. And it's not that it doesn't work for me or for you. We are condemning ourselves to extinction with this. And I have two young kids. I would love for them to live in a world beautiful, natural, full of opportunity with clean air and a great quality of life. And I don't think the current system that unfortunately is capitalistic kind of everywhere in the world, even in the dictatorship of Asia, it's still a capitalism-driven dictatorship. We're not gonna change this until we've got this principle that drive our economy, our social side, which is exploitation and for the good of a few, very few people. So that's what I would change. I know that it's a bit high-level politics.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:44

Not at all.

SPEAKER_02: 1:34:45

And maybe you were expecting to sell more tomatoes, but yeah. No, I would have been disappointed if it was not.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:50

But is it perfect? And others they want to ask a final question, which we love to do is and this actually with your last answer, makes it very interesting as well. I'm very curious. What would you do if you would be in the shoes, not of the trillionaire, but if you had a billion? We like to ask it if you had a billion euros to put to work. Could be extremely long term, could be, but and I'm not asking for exact amounts, of course, this is not investment advice, but I'm looking where would your priorities be? Would it be investing in certain lobby? Would it be in processing? Would it be in buying land? Would it be in genetic development research, or all of the above? What would be your focus or different buckets you would invest if you had that insane amount of resources that I don't think anybody should have, single people? But let's say tomorrow morning the bank made a mistake or some distant aunt passed away, sadly, I'm sorry, aunt, but suddenly there's this interesting amount of money on your bank account and you had to put it to work.

SPEAKER_02: 1:35:46

The principle of microcredit, right? I would apply those principles to micro credit. So I would lend this money to ideas without charging an interest rate, nothing. I just give the money, do your own things. If the company start producing profit, 10% of the profit come back to me so I can feed back the fund and invest in other. It's like a revolving macro, micro, medium credit instrument. Specifically on food or an agriculture? I think every vertical needs there are some vertical that I think, to be honest. Maybe could disappear. Could disappear, like weapon production, defense industry or fast fashion or ultra-processed foods. Fast food, yeah. Exactly fast food. I wouldn't invest in those ideas. But I think that in every vertical there are elements of refirming innovation which can make the world a better place. In even in what is called pseudo-frugal like fashion and design. Yeah, surely the vertical of education and food production and public transportation and energy production would be my priority. Because without having to fix that, it's very difficult then to go into proper control of AI or quantum mechanics innovation. You need to fix the basic first, and today the basics are broken. So I would my priority would be let's fix the basics for a sec. Because today I think, for example, AI, which is a very easy example to make. We don't have the instrument to control it. It's not that we don't want, I know the people want to control it. That's not the education or the instrument to do that. So we are actually, for the first time in the human history, developing a technology that is risking to annihilate us if we don't control it. Because it's not. And that's a term problem. It's not intelligence, it's just artificial, is and it works for his own good. So it's that's what what that's one of the things that I'm actually quite afraid of is that we can easily lose control of that technology, and we're already doing it, by the way. Don't think about Terminator kind of thing. But think about mass unemployment. It's already starting. And we somehow we already live this even without AI. But we, for example, I remember when I went to London, I started working in advertising, and my job was to produce the mood board for the creative, and I had to, we had all this library of books, I have to do the scan, the printing, put them together. And then suddenly Google Image arrived, and from three people, we ended up being one. 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:26

Technology has already done. We have to done the same in agriculture. Done the same manufacturer arrived and reduced very hard work, not saying let's go back to that, to hand plowing, but it enabled people to leave the countryside.

SPEAKER_02: 1:38:41

Yeah, my my I think the difference this time with AI is that we invented a wheel and we started having people building cars. We developed internet and we started, of course, yeah, people got unemployed, but then people got employed into the digital world with a lot of jobs. I don't think AI has the same rate of change, so it's gonna dramatically decrease. It's so fast. It's so fast, and not a lot of people will become programmers or prompt engineers or things like that. So they might become farmers. Hopefully. We need more farmers, actually. You're looking for a few people, right? Yes, we are, we are actually intelligent people. It's a beautiful place, people. It's a beautiful place, it's a great office, and the food is amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:26

And with that, I want to thank you so much for thank you this conversation. It was a joy and a pleasure with an with another region farmer, which was an absolute pleasure. And we'll put the links below, obviously, if people want to visit, if they want to buy, if they want experience, and on your socials, you can get some of the imagery. So you have an idea and we try to speak visually, but pictures, of course, help as well. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:50

If I can invite you all, there's nothing like coming to visit us. Trust me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:54

I can attest to that. So, what is what does this interview or this walking the land episode teach us or show us? What kind of questions did it raise for you? What kind of assumptions that you had are now questioned, or maybe not, maybe affirmed? For me, it really opened a few doors that we don't really open normally or don't even see. Living wages, a very basic topic. Living year-round wages. How do we make sure people want to come back to the land? How do we make sure people can build careers, get mortgages, start a family, buy a house, things that are very simple. How do we get more children on and around our farms? Is by paying our farm workers enough to actually being able to start a family. But of course, that raises interesting questions around prices. How do you build stacked enterprises, which seems to be fundamental in this case, to actually break even and to cover the costs? And it doesn't have to be crazy salaries, but it has to be a living wage. So I think that really raises a lot of questions with me to what extent experiences and expensive experiences in this case are part of that mix. But fresh produce sold locally in a town of 7,000 people, so absolutely nothing fancy, can cover a lot of costs as well. People love the strawberries and pay good money for it, and they make people try them first because, of course, nobody's gonna pay 25 euros a kilo at the beginning, but once you taste it, suddenly they become a luxury product and you can afford them. Or the same with tomatoes, which are very competitive. And processing, definitely one of those hidden ones with relatively small scale but super high-tech, old school, as they like to say. Machinery can turn a lot of vegetables into some very desirable and long-term products. 24 months is very different than a week or a few days when you harvest. And so, but you need to find the right recipes, you need to really focus on quality that people come back. Because let's be honest, most vegetables in tin cans, like we discussed with Dan Barber, or in any kind of sauce, etc., are pretty bland and doesn't taste like anything, or a lot of things have been added. And then, of course, the big one vibrations, frequencies, quantum agriculture. We never really discussed it, I think, until now. We've had many conversations about it, but didn't really record them until now, or record in this kind of vibrations as you can listen to it now. What do you think about that? What do you think? Is that the next frontier of agriculture? How do we interact with plants? How do we, and animals, of course, and trees, how do we step into that world with intention and see the results? It feels like we're at the crusp of a massive wave of things. I don't want to call it a breakthrough, but definitely a very inspiring moment when it comes to agriculture. And it seems like that could be one of the keys, because it's very difficult to do or impossible to do in degraded soils and with degraded plants and unhealthy plants. You need, of course, a plant that's alive to be able to communicate. I know this sounds size fi. If you made it all the way to the end of this episode, you probably found something relevant in it. Let me know in the comments, reach out through the website because I'm really curious what you think of these kind of episodes. See you next time! Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website, investing in regenerative agriculture.com/slash posts. If you like this episode, why not share it with a friend? And get in touch with us on social media, our website, or via the Spotify app and tell us what you like most. And give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.