Can a strategy of cheap food ever be wrong with Mary Shelman

When a delegate stood up and said to the audience “I just can’t understand why a strategy of cheap food could ever be wrong,” at a 1995 Common Agricultural Policy conference no one questioned the wisdom of this statement.  Almost 30 years later, this and other well ingrained paradigms are being re-evaluated. The big questions are whether cheap food is sufficiently valued by our society and how much does cheap food drive increased food waste. Current USDA estimates are that between 30-40% of food is wasted. This is a radicle change from only one generation ago where all table scraps and leftovers that were not eaten where either fed to pigs, chickens or even the household pets. 

 Mary Shelman’s insight and thinking on our food and agricultural systems stems as much from her time leading the Agribusiness Program at Harvard Business School and leading the development and implementation of Ireland’s nations food sustainability programme, Origin Green, as it does from growing up in rural Kentucky and spending time with local farmers. 

We all know the challenges that have emerged around the urban rural divide. What is less discussed in the generational challenges and opportunities facing our societies around food and agriculture. Around 70% of young people today suffer from climate anxiety. Bringing young people into the conversation and leveraging their passions and concerns must become a key component of any food sustainability program. 

I recently caught up with Mary to hear more about her work. You can listen to his conversation here. 

Transcript

Unknown 0:00

Hi Mary, thank you very much for joining me today.

Unknown 0:11

Thank you ash, I'm looking forward to it.

Unknown 0:14

So in in our societies, we have some different conversations going on in the rural space in the Food and Ag space compared to what's going on within the more urban societies in terms of how they see sustainability but also how they see the priorities in terms of sustainability. And at the end of the day, we live on one planet, so everyone needs to be on the same page. And if we can all be addressing the problems together, that's going to be more beneficial. So how do you see I guess those two conversations and how they vary and then ways we can build bridges between those bourbon people which are essentially the market for all that food that's been produced, and the farmers who are producing the food?

Unknown 1:02

Yeah, and I feel like you know, spent my last 35 years or so in Boston, but you know, grew up in Kentucky very much part of, you know, more of a rural economy. My dad was a local farm equipment dealer, and I was always going out with him to the local farms. And, you know, you're so right. I think it's, you know, it's, you know, you've got kind of this rural urban divide, but you also have this kind of in the US depletion, kind of this East Coast, West Coast versus middle of the US. Divide as well. You know, and then we get into the issues around sustainability, you know, one, you know, where the biggest challenge is, I think it's, it's, there's no definition of it that is globally accepted. And in some ways, it's a moving target, right, because when you know, kind of get pumped up on the, you know, people's agendas, maybe, you know, more seriously for the first time back, right in, you know, 2007 2008 at least related to food with, you know, the big stripe and global food prices. And, you know, the same time we had this global recession going on and so we had some critical events is like, Oh, wow, you know, there's, you know, maybe tension in the system and maybe looking out to the future, you know, we have, you know, bigger population, they're eating different things, a limited set of natural resources to push, you know, to come up to, you know, to, you know, to produce those with you know, so a lot of the early conversations are around the environment, and clearly that's still an important part, but then we kind of wrapped into that right, you know, animal welfare, child labor, you know, treatment of workers human health, and it's just so when we look at these conversations, now, you know, people are, you know, they can kind of find the one dimension they like and push on it, and maybe leave the others and so for a number of years, I've been asking this question about, you know, are we, when we talk about sustainability, do we talk about a sustainable farm? Do we talk about a sustainable do we talked about sustainable agriculture? Do we talk about a sustainable food or sustainable food system and kind of depending on your length there, you get different sets of, you know, answers and I think that's a, you know, a big challenge, but you know, so many of the, you know, the farmers that I've talked to over the years, I mean, they always start with, of course, we're sustainable, right? You know, we we, you know, this, particularly if it's a family farm, you know, we've been here for a long time. We're still here today and we want to make sure that it's going forward into the future. And, you know, but the My challenge to them or my question to them is, you know, the big thing you're sustainable today isn't enough, you actually need to be able to prove it. So you need some data to back it up other than the fact that you've managed to have on and maybe grow your operation and things like that, but I'm getting into that question about, you know, how can we maybe help enable those conversations? The first, the first point that I always say, when we're talking about this subject, is that consumers, you know, the answer is usually we need to educate consumers. It's like, well, that's great, but consumers don't want to be educated. You know? You push back on that, right, you know, consumers, you know, they want to engage now, they think they're empowered, though, you know, how do we do that, you know, we can invite them into our operations, we can actually show them how things are done, you know, kind of give them that lens. The second piece of it is is that you have to start young you know, like really, you know, you know, the, you know, think about, you know, kind of the youth today I went to a conference back in May, and a listen to an author speak and she had written a book about kind of taking, you know, kind of green steps one at a time. She cited the fact that like 70, that you today are so concerned about climate, we think they're on social media that they're talking about, you know, like, you know, boys or movies or whatever, and actually talking about, you know, these kind of big social issues, and something like 70% of them suffer from something called Eco anxiety are so concerned about, you know, the world that like one in four of them say that they're not going to have children, because they think that the world is going to be a much worse place tomorrow, you know, in the future than it is today. I think that's very sad. But we have to, you know, but that just said that we need to start early. You know, maybe the answer is like fourth grade, not even you know, high school. And you know, I love the idea things like you know, community garden, you know, gardens at school, anything that you can actually allow someone who has not been involved in agriculture, to go out and realize the challenges that come with actually trying to grow something and to produce food that you eat at the end of it. So I think there's you know, there's a number you know, ways to go about this, but you know, what you've talked about as a huge issue.

Unknown 6:04

I think there are two very interesting points you made there. One is urban people needing to educate farmers or farmers needing to educate the city folk. And most of us hate being told you must do this or you're wrong about your thinking. I think there's enough evidence be that within the US or within our broader geopolitical situations that has that is not a road to success. So how you actually establish those conversations. So it's not educating but more sharing experiences. And it was an interesting another thing that happened to me last year. I was actually at Harvard Medical School for meeting with the professor there on the in the longevity space, and there was some younger guys there and the topic of a mentor or mentor sheet came up. And actually what was discussed is that everyone of our generation should have a mentor that's under 25. And so you know, make us more in touch with with the younger people and hearing their voices and stuff like that. So I think there's that's a that angles there. Is there anything you have to add to that?

Unknown 7:17

Yeah, you know, Asha, that last piece of it about a mentor is, uh, you know, for us is, you know, I think that that's really important because it's easy, you know, just like our, you know, our parents, grandparents, you know, poo pooed what we did when we were young, you know, the music was bad, you know, the work ethic was bad, everything was, you know, bad and then, you know, we get to that spot that, you know, we're all saying those things, you know, so we need to see, I think the brilliance and the passion the, you know, of this younger generation and figuring out how to harness it in a way that actually can help us solve these problems. I think that's the way you get engagement is that you say hey, you know what, we realize you know that we've all got a big job to do you know, let's let's work together to do this. You know, you guys are are the future here and, but they need models of success, right? They need stories that show that we've you know, Malthus back in the 60s Right. He said, You know, the world's gonna not be able to support itself and then you have green revolution, right. So technology is a huge piece of these solutions. So how do you get into these you know, bring it into these conversations about you know, kind of reinventing the food system evolving the food system transforming the food system as opposed to like creatively we have to destroy the food system and build on it back again, which is, you know, kind of scary to think about because we have done a tremendous job and even the numbers you know, kind of before the latest go around with the, you know, global economic situation right now and the war in Ukraine about you know, how many the progress that we didn't made on a global level about you know, pulling people out of poverty but also getting access to better diets is significant and nobody tells that story. Right. You know, nobody kind of that does. That means that you don't have any hope for the future and you never hear about the progress that was made in the past. The second piece of it, I think, is something that I heard at another panel, I was moderating. And it turns out they you know, so how do you, you know, engage with this, you know, this kind of younger generation that, you know, do things like you know, they do like, you know, gaming as a major in university now so you know, eSports like, what is your How can you have a major in eSports and then, you know, first that said, the US dairy industry is working with this influencer by the name of Mr. Beast, and I don't have anybody in my household, really that you know, that's kind of in that mister views generation, but I talked to some other people some other parents don't like oh man we know about Mr. Beast. Turns out Mr. Beast, you know, has like 114 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, and his and his, you know the videos on that YouTube channel. Had like 20 million views? Well, I mean, it's just a staggering number. Right. And then I heard that the dairy industry is actually working with distribution, you know, to get him to, you know, to promote dairy in some ways, as being part of a healthy diet. It's like that's how you reach a group because you find them you know, what's important to them or the voices that they do listen to and, you know, you bring those people on to your side. Now, I know Mr. Beast also has promoted some things that may be contrary to what we would like in the industry. Maybe you know, kind of, you know, plant based milks and other things like that, but you know, you need to understand that that's an important channel. And we need to be part of these new conversations, right, as opposed to, you know, with the traditional, you know, media approaches that we might be thinking about.

Unknown 11:00

You so many, so many points come to mind with what you've said there. I think, one, the it's a broad conversation. There's a billion of us now on the planet. There's not all of us have the same choices or the same desires or ambitions or tastes. So I don't think we need to be and I think social media has probably played into this certain amount that's kind of sent us more into these silos. And in many ways, we need to be speaking to people who we might not agree with, or at least might not agree with on anyone because I don't necessarily even agree with myself on everything, and find avenues to broaden those conversations rather than go to that comfortable place where we feel, you know, where we feel our views. mirrored.

Unknown 11:55

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. You know, it's, you know, so I've spent a number of years at Harvard Business School, right. And the very simple answer is I'm fascinated by strategy. I've always been fascinated by how businesses work and business strategy. And you know, and what I teach at Harvard Business School is really two simple answers. You know, companies can have you know, industries can have, you know, two strategies right you can either be low cost, you can be differentiated, and kind of thinking about that's, you know, that's kind of the challenge in front of the food system right now. Right? You know, do you have this strategy to where you have low cost products that are, you know, affordable and accessible and nutritious and you know, you can get nutrition to the masses, not just in the US but all around the world and, you know, bring it out or do you have this maybe a more luxurious strategy or premium products that have you know, more sustainability attributes into it, you know, built into it, you know, certainly important to do and but sometimes they lead in a way that then pulls up everything else. And the folks that maybe need the you know, the nutrition the most you know, are then kind of blocked out and maybe off to less nutritious products. I think about that, you know, debate or a brand cage free eggs is the one that comes to mind to me, you know, right off. It's funny back way back in 1995. I was at a conference in Paris and they were this early days of the CAAP. They and there was someone from Australia there that stuff in the audience. They said I just can't understand why a strategy of cheap food can ever be wrong. And you know, you can see that now maybe today like can't go all the way in that direction. Because there are certainly an unintended consequences around it. But yeah, you know, it's it's a fascinating discussion, right? You know, whether you you know who it is you're trying to satisfy because people have different needs and a different willingness to pay Europe has made choices, you know, that put them in that more in that high price camp, but then you look at where some of their production comes from, and it comes from, you know, areas of the world like you know, Brazil you know, that others that are, you know, maybe not being exploited, but maybe are exploiting in a different way their resources than if you were European consumer feeling like you're very virtuous. Then maybe if you take a look at that total footprint might not be as virtuous as you expected today.

Unknown 14:27

That's very, very interesting, especially the bit that you mentioned about the cheap food and my my mother and her parents. They left Eastern Europe that directly after the Second World War and moved to Australia as refugees, and they had lived through the Second World War in Europe and they had a very different attitude to wasting food. than many of my contemporaries today. And I guess if things are cheap, do we value them enough? That's kind of my lens on that but is is cheap food actually. Obviously affordable foods different to cheap food. And we have income variation so what's affordable to one demographic is not affordable to another one that that's different to cheap and is food not valued enough? Is the question I'm guess I'm taking out.

Unknown 15:31

Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, my parents to you know, my grandparents before them, you know, living through the Depression, you know, on both sides of the family, you know, on farms always in farming but to port actually on land back in Kentucky, you know, for for generations and generations, and you know, nothing went to waste, right. And you look today at our luxuriousness I think about it actually in the sense that you know, when I would go like visit them on the farm, there was never any waste because whatever you didn't eat was taken out it was either fed to the hogs slob, and turned back into food again or was fed to the dogs and the cats. And you know, and now you're looking at it, we can't even do that anymore. Because you know, the veterinary industry and the pet food industry has turned itself into saying Oh, no, you can't feed your you know, your pets table scraps. So we used to have this really nice circular economy, you know, you know, kind of pig production in China right, a couple of pigs in the backyard, you know, they kept her house warm, because, you know, maybe they were underneath you in the wintertime. And you know, and again, you don't need your table scraps go down. It's like your bank is there because you know, you're capturing it and then you you know, to take them to market and so a little bit is have we you know, caught ourselves you know, kind of valuing things in different ways. The other piece I think about in the US a little bit off topic here, but along that area, you know, have we kind of let ourselves down a path is that my you know, my relatives grew up on on farms and a huge garden so the women spent all their basic like all of their effort, you know, in the summertime, you know, kind of growing food and then canning food or freezing food or, you know, whatever it took to get through the winter there, though, you know, I made all these, you know, kind of younger people who have this romantic view about having a garden out back and you're counting your own food and I'm like, No way I saw that growing up. This is like, you know, we're talking about moving hot baths of tomatoes, you know, in cans, you know, off the stove and a kitchen, you know, the size of a postage stamp and 97,000 degrees inside, you know, I want nothing to do with it. But you think about the US right and maybe the world is there's a message out there that says Fresh is best. But when you think about that precious best, you know, you're automatically putting waste into the system, right? Because if you you know if you freeze it the minute it comes out of a field and you can't at the minute it comes out of the field we know especially with frozen that you actually have a higher nutrient content. But yeah, the produce industry has been done quite a good job about convincing us that you know that you know if you don't eat fresh fruits and vegetables every day then you know you're you're not getting the nutrition you need. And you had to think about how much of it goes bad in our refrigerators, you know, not to mention the supply chain, but you know, in the US I think in a lot of developed places, right? It happens that the refrigerator is like man I don't know what to do with this right? I'm not I don't want to eat leftovers again. We ended up you know, eating out four times this week. So that lettuce that I bought or the pepper or whatever, it just gets tossed in the trash the avocado, and again, it goes back to what you said about kind of not valuing it enough and then maybe not have the skills or the needs to take care of that. And you know, have another meal at home that you already have as

Unknown 19:00

cool as well as that monkey. You mentioned the traditional recycling mechanisms were essentially livestock. Were they chickens, do they wholesale pigs or even ruminants that basically not only recycle the actual food by grabbing more food but then put the nutrients back into the soil or back into your vegetable garden? So

Unknown 19:24

you know, I've been thinking about that piece of it. I know we were talking about that kind of that balance now right that was promoted by COVID That big question the world right? But a very efficient global supply chain for many things right you know, but food was one of those junk food travels great distances you know, it's you might argue that that's bad from a you know, mild standpoint, but you know, from a comparative advantage you know, standpoint if you're in Brazil and you have lots of land and water, then you can produce you know soy or you can produce you know, beef and move it around and basically you're moving raw water around the world. That to someplace that doesn't have it, but yet on the other hand, you know, so So we saw during COVID, right, you know, empty store shelves, and this big is starting to be these questions like you know, can you have said the food system be efficient, or should it be resilient, and I go back to my engineering curriculum, so I'm an engineer by training, not that I've ever practice but I had a, like my senior class and process design reactor design for chemical engineering, you know, it's like, okay, you have to do this. Like, you know, process purification process, you know, what types of vessels do you need? What does it look like? And you know, and you go, and you work it all off and went and took it to the professor and he, and he looked at me and he said, That's great, Mary, no, go add 20% to your design. I'm like, Well, what do you mean 20%? You know, because these are, this is the right answer, right? The numbers are perfect. He said, that's the real world factor. It's the back that you know, processes are completely stable, right. So you need to handle the highs and the lows. And so go add 20% to the size. And I think that kind of you know, is our friends, our food system, whether it's local or whether it's, you know, global it's like you need that 20% But the unfortunate thing is the you have to produce a but in the way the system is structured right now, the majority of the time that you don't use it, the cost of that the penalty of that 20% falls back on the farmer right, because prices come down. And then you know, it's a tremendous, you know, kind of, you know, cyclic movement, which keeps farmers from being able to really make investments, you know, over the long term that they might need to make to adopt, you know, more sustainable practices. You know, whether it's, you know, regenerative AG, whatever you want to call it, like better soil health. You know, even what I like to think about at the farm level, it's, you know, how do we get, you know, farmers to think about, you know, not just thinking about, you know, what is my yield per acre or per animal, but how do you think about it on an enterprise basis, right, you know, what's the value of the fence row? What's the value of, you know, the creek that runs through my farm in Kentucky and the forests that are there there I have, my son and daughter in law were there earlier this year just happened to be like on the during migration time that I saw 37 species of birds, so Wow, in one day, just in not, I think they'd never moved. They were just down there on the farm, you know, and what's the value of that? So we talked about, you know, is food not valued enough? The other piece that's not valued enough, are these ecosystem services that farms and farming offers, and we don't train our farmers to think like that. We don't we're just now starting to see some incentives in that space. You know, I have, you know, land that's in a Conservation Reserve Program and Kentucky which has been, you know, we've been doing for years and years which says okay, you know, this kind of more sensitive land, we get paid not to farm it, and to, you know, treat it in a different way. But, you know, like, how can we shift that mindset from what happens from a, you know, kind of yield standpoint on an acre or an animal to view? What's that, that enterprise value?

Unknown 23:29

There's a couple of interesting, really interesting points in that one is how you mentioned the risk. And essentially, the consumer doesn't take a lot of risk because if a product's not on the shelves, they find something else and even during COVID Not no one here in the United States, starve to death. They might have not had the choice they had, but they certainly didn't starve whereas the farmers taking the the majority of that risk, and they're not necessarily getting the upside from the risk. The other thing and I think the EU is quite an interesting example in this and I'll take what no longer in the EU but the United Kingdom and farmers in the UK people like to drive around the English countryside and see the stone walls and see the lovely hedgerows and have nice small fields and have shaped grazing or cattle grazing in those fields because it feels very, very English. And a lot of the initial subsidies the subsidies are went into those systems, all the subsidies with through, say the milk price or the meat price. And so the subsidies were actually distorting the production economics of the system. And the farmers weren't making a lot of money but the farmers were spending a third or quarter or whatever percent of their time doing countryside management. And it's it's, I guess, I guess it's about aligning the economic situation or the economic incentives with the actual work you want done. And also how we can share the risks because at the end of the day, with the way I see it is in some ways the the environments kind of ended up being the overflow for that risk. Farmers have not looked after themes because they haven't been able to afford to look after things as much because that that's where there's the the short term consequences the year by year consequences. are less there that the the decade or century by Century consequences are much greater than and that's all going to flow on to urban environments and the rest of us if we don't get a right, we can't expect them to take the burden of the risk either.

 Unknown 0:06Yeah, no, I think you're right in some evidence what you said is it's strictly a timing thing. So getting back to that, you know that 1995 You know the Australian point about how can a cheap food system ever be wrong you know that the kind of the French counterpoint to that European counterpoint to that was is that you know, people come to the France and they love to look at the countryside. So you know, we value the beautiful countryside and we pay our farmers to keep the countryside nice, right, you know, and that kind of wealth in Stroud venntro though, what you you brought up is about aligning incentives around you know, what it is that you want to achieve is, you know, I think is super, super important to think about and that it's not just about, you know, that acre or that that again, that animal there, but um, so I was working with a farmers market and Birmingham back a number of years ago, and they they were one of the first really brilliant farmers markets in the US still tremendously brilliant, and that they were trying to figure out how to help them. It was an area that you have kind of a historically black farmers as well down in that area of the world, and they were trying to think about what they could do to, you know, to provide, you know, to support these historically black farmers. And you know, they were like talking about creating this market space, you know, more opportunities to come to market and, you know, my comment to them was this, you know, you need to also provide some way to kind of like manage this. I want to manage the supply side of it, but you know, in the sense of control what's going on the farm to give farmers another option because you know, the big challenge right with farmers that grow for a cash market and you know, take it to the sell on the weekend is like you know, you get these weather influences right if you know if you're growing tomatoes and everybody's growing tomatoes, it's rainy, rainy, rainy, rainy, rainy, there's no tomatoes on the market. So if you actually have a tomato, you know, that's very high value, but suddenly like it stopped trading everybody's got tomatoes at the same time, they'll come to the market, and the price of tomatoes collapsed. And I'm like, you know, my advice to the, you know, to this Farmers Market was she needed to create like a kitchen to go with it so farmers can turn these fresh products into something that they cannot, you know, kind of more manage the you know, the supplanted crops a year right? You're talking to a company like Driscoll they do the same thing. You know, it's, you know, they look at the, you know, the amount of, you know, berries, high quality bearings on the market that you know, the market can bear and keep keep price up and you know, to at a premium level as SP does the same thing with kiwifruits you know, and then like, you know, whatever doesn't meet the quality standards, and might have oversupply, you move it someplace else in the market or you turn it into, you know, a different kind of product that, that you can, you know, don't have to like push it right now, you know, this minute to where you kind of take that risk, but, you know, in Ireland you know, farmers that that grow beef cattle kind of manage it the same way because many of them like in Kentucky tend to be you know, it's kind of like the park they're a part time job they're not full time beef operation. And it's like well, that's my bank out there if I need to the prices aren't good, I won't take it to market and I'll just let it sit out there for a while if I don't need the money right now once I could mark it you know, so that if your row crop farmer you don't quite have that. Let's jump on farm storage may not have played have that same ability to, you know, to manage that piece. Definitely language need to be better marked. I guess the bottom line is that farmers need to do better part of what they do and you know, historically, like, you know, especially in the US, right, farmers have generalists, and I'm talking about you know, kind of diversified. Farmers like Kentucky are ranked by farmers and they're, you know, they're like, you know, they, you know, it's like they take care of the machinery they grow a crop they decide whatever the thing is, and so that so they're, they're good at a lot of things but maybe not like, you know, super, super expert at all of them and I think the thing that you know, often I came to be that maybe the least skill that is in the marketing piece of it, so like, you know, growing and producing, you know, and getting that yield but then it's like when do I actually sell it? Unknown 4:25I think that's that's, that's very spot on. And obviously there's so many jobs on a farm and you know, especially kids that grow up and then take over a family farm. We are marketing's not front and center of any of those kitchen table discussions. I think the actual we're going to keep on jumping back to France today. But I think the actually the wine industry is a fascinating example of that, because at the end of the day, whether it's a $3 bottle of wine from somewhere, or, you know, a $10,000 bottle of French champagne at the end of the day, it's fermented grape juice of it's the same stuff. Pays differently, but it's fermented grape juice. And it's interesting, because, from my perspective, people, people would say, oh, never pay $5,000 or $10,000 for a bottle of wine, but they don't actually well, they very rarely doubt that it's not worth that much that other people will. So there's assumed value, this huge value variation based on fermented grape juice, and their stories about the soil or the climate or the history or whatever. But what do you think there's in terms of the marketing perspective, the rest of the agricultural industries could learn something from the viticulturists Unknown 5:46i It's so true that that's a great story. So for the last probably almost here for the last you know, over you know, something like you know, 1213 years I've been working with the Irish food industry, and they colleague and I were invited in back in 2010. Back when the Ireland economic climate was just a disaster, right? No collapse of Celtic Tiger, all of the you know, huge debts at the financial firms that I own had to pay back and no real indigenous industry other than agriculture, but at the time was very much commodity focused, you know, beef and dairy but you know, sold into international markets without any kind of differentiation at all. And not only differentiation one it was you know, produced in high cost because Ireland and Ireland the costs are higher, no matter what and, and, you know, we heard a story about like two Irish beef producers would go into a supermarket in Germany and they would undercut each other on price. So not only what was it, you know, it wasn't like sold as a commodity was sold as a commodity and it was pushed down to the lowest possible value of at all. So my colleague and I were asked to come in and we had this very simple point of view for them. It's like one you know, like, you got two choices, right? You know, two strategy choices you started there's like either has to be a low cost producer, and you have to differentiate, right? And brand. You're never going to be a low cost producer, so you better choose this differentiation strategy. The second one is that d better work together because you're so small as a country. I think I accused them of being a rounding error on Nestle's balance sheet which they still remember to this day, they call that they better work together. And you know, kind of the third one is you need kind of more innovation, more talent, the industry. But if you're going to brand you have to prove it. And so they're all kind of gathered around and this was all of the CEOs of the Irish food industry supported by board via which is the Irish food board and the semistate agency. And we we were, you know, having this conversation about you know, Ireland so small, how can you brand you know, there's really nothing there and so we kind of sell them on sustainability. Which was just kind of emerging as an attribute. And it's like, wow, you know, but there's so small and so Irish does the head of Valley Irish distillers at the time, but not wine but you know, in the spirits industry, was Alexandre Ricard as a binaural Ricard family. And he had this most important lesson he said, it's all about marketing scarcity. It's, you know, this is it so what you talked about ash about Yeah, you got to water you got these other things. It's really all about marketing scarcity. And so you know, that was always our you know, the learning we took away from the Irish you know, the, for the Irish food system is is like well, we have to market the scarcity. The resources that that Ireland is bringing, which is this you know, beautiful land and abundant water and you know, these happy cows that are outside and you know, but yet we have to support it with proof. So this this origin green program, which is still the world's I think it's the first and still the, I think the only national sustainability program in the world that goes all the way through the voluntary program. So but yet 95% of Ireland's food and drink exports now go out from forage and bring certification. And you know, and it's always about aligning the supply chain and so how do you do that? It was like sharing that vision all the way down. You know, getting the processors to agree, getting bent up low and back down to the to the farmers to get them on board with it because you really needed to upskill the farmers to do this and then collecting the data to support that. So you're marketing scarcity, but supported by data, and I think that you know, is you know a little bit little about your your wine story. But with a little more cheek to it. Unknown 9:55Awesome. I think one of the one of the things that's been constantly reinforced, basically, in pretty much every country I've ever worked in, is that the social and cultural challenges frequently more arduous and complex than the technical challenges. And in terms of what you just described, with the origin for in Ireland, you needed collaboration between Aboriginal agribusiness between the farmers governments had a role there. There's potentially a role for academics and entrepreneurs in that space. What can we learn or what can we do differently to better foster that collaboration to I guess, overcome those those cultural challenges? But yeah, Unknown 10:43so I think that, you know, that's exactly the group that we brought together in you know, and then the orange and green umbrella and it was really masterful first of all, there's no like, silver bullet answer to it. Right. So this was an activation process that took two years, you know, from from basically the conception idea to launch to get everything ready for it and the launch then was just, basically at the processor level. It wasn't at the consumer level. So one, you know, we had a shared vision that, you know, when we first started talking about that shared vision, the we were basically laughed out of the room by the CEOs of these food companies, but that vision was based on it was a very commercial vision. And over the course of kind of coming back and continuing to have conversations that a regular basis committed to to regular basis, the you know, the world was showing signs that like this was actually tremendously relevant to a certain set of consumers and to a certain set of, you know, kind of geographies in the world. And by the time we went through this two year process of, you know, putting this program in place it went from, well, you know, this will never happen, right? We can't agree with anybody, right? You know, we're used to competing and global markets not working together to oh my goodness, why don't we like we have this sooner. So you've got the vision, you have a timeline around it, that's generous. And then once you got to the processors, they actually had to work down and bring the farmers and then the third part maybe which was kind of wraps it all together was very commercially motivated, you know, wasn't just like oh, yeah, we're gonna go out and save the world, you know, there's gonna be a better place we can meet our climate commitments. You know, that's how relevant is that if you're on the farm, you know, unless you actually wrap it back to data, like we don't meet our climate commitments, you're going to be like, legislated out of business, right? You know, you're gonna lose your license to operate, which is the scariest thing to me. Now, if we don't have these conversations that I'm talking about, that if we don't act as a, you know, more coordinated industry level, to be able to say, this is our plan. This is why it's relevant and this is what's going to happen, why it's so important. You know, we look at what's going on with New Zealand and dairy, we look at what's going on in, you know, Netherlands with, you know, the pork industry, with Denmark with a pork industry. I mean, these are countries that are kind of legislating their way, you know, regulating their way out of things that have been very important to their economies, and what ends up happening then and since you're actually, you know, pushing production to someplace else in the world of where the environmental footprint gets worse. And you know, from that global standpoint, I don't think that's the right answer. Unknown 13:26No, I couldn't agree with you more on that that one, the the legislative approach is forcing people to do something. It's almost like if you if you use a positive influence, any of the little side effects are more likely to be positive and if you use a negative influence, all the extra bits and bobs are more likely to be negative. So incentives are always I'd always prefer to take the model but the fact that you Unknown 13:58like carrot, you know, the carrot versus stick piece of it, and maybe you need both of it, but maybe in the beginning you need more carrots than you do stick. But yeah, you have to have teeth to it in the long run right to Unknown 14:10Oh, no, no. I think there's a different jurisdiction. I think COVID has has shown us very much that different jurisdictions or cultures react very differently to the carrot and react very differently to the stick and you don't need to look much further than my homeland of Australia and here in the United States to the different approaches they're Unknown 14:35going through. But again, you know, but I think that's, you know, I think it's positive. I think this food system, your transformation that we need, there's so many pathways out there right now, people are talking about a frequent kind of colleague of mine in Dublin and I've developed this paper, we call it the four DS, like four pathways to a sustainable food system. That that we hear, right, you know, this is you know, you're looking we started out by talking about this show people have different answers to what that means. And the first one we call it kind of, you know, defend like, it's like keep doing what we're doing, you know, let's do you know, do more with less, right, let's really push on productivity let's, you know, kind of, you know, squeeze more out of, you know, all of our resources, you know, and those resources, you got land, but I think water is even more important, you know, and, and not, you know, ignoring sustainability commitments, but you know, using technology really, you know, kind of pushing forward on that, that piece of it and that kids you know, very affordable food you know, it's kind of a world of more abundance. Second day, we talked about this develop, which is like, well, let's take the system we have and like let's find some of these things that people might value more being sustainability commitments, whether it's grass fed beef, you know, grass fed dairy, you know, something, you know, something that's be friendly, you know, ice cream that's be friendly, you know, dairy that's raised, you know, with, you know, like think about Dinoland and they're, they're non GMO approach, even though I think that rhetoric is has died down in the US tremendously. And you know, and then kind of differentiate that product right? You know, go up one consumers that might be willing to pay for it or maybe you're willing to, you know, more likely buy it versus something else. pay farmers more communicate Money takes more communication and it takes more, you know, high prices as a farm level. Or maybe longer term contracts, you know, but certainly more communication that these, but yet the two other parts of the two other days there where it gets interesting, you know, there's a direct call to five, which is like, Okay, we want to change the food system, but we're going to change that by changing what people eat so instead of eating beef, we want you to eat a plant based burger, right? Instead of eating, you know, another form of protein, protein, we want you to eat insects or, you know, something that's kind of, you know, it's been it's really hard to change diets. And we see that now you know, we have all of so much of investment into these spaces. And now we see the performance of, you know, companies like, you know, beyond and impossible really, you know, and I think I think those products are still highly relevant, but they may not be the branded products, you know, the big blast around the brands that we've seen there. And then the fourth D is called is our disrupt model, which is also seeing a lot of investment and that's where, like, we won't change what you eat, but we're going to change how it's produced. So, cultivators made some precision fermentation, biomass fermentation, maybe even controlled environment ag right, let's change how the food itself is raised. And you know, move it into a more capital intensive system, you know, shift the risk on it, you know, make it more like a, you know, a factory you know, and basically move away from land based production. So, you know, all of those, those are there, all of those may be viable ways to get to a more sustainable food system, and I think the opportunity is to tackle all of them, but if you're a company, you need to understand where you are, and where maybe the opportunities are and where you may be, you know, under threat from, you know, you know, Pat Brown from impossible says he wants to get, you know, to do away with animal agriculture by 2035. You know, that's a message that a certain group of people are hearing, so you need to respond to that, you know, but does it mean that you can't continue to push? Unknown 18:39Oh, I think there's, firstly, I think all those different innovations and they all have value and where where that value sets and how might I don't think any of them are silver bullets. I don't think the concept of a silver bullet I think is is just wrong. and the more people try and look for silver bullets, the more they're likely to go in the wrong direction. And there's there's a balance that I would see between those different technologies or approaches, and I would say the balance, the challenge, I think is the balance. is going to be very different in different geographies, or different communities. And that's both within the developing and the developed world.  Unknown 0:05Yeah, it's that's super, super important ash because, you know, people look right now and say, oh, yeah, you know, look, look at these plant based, you know, proteins, you know, they're just they're, they're really, you know, they're collapsing in the US, right, you know, the, you know, my market demands not just fall but it's actually falling but you know, where I look for those kinds of products are in Asia. So China, huge need for food security, right all over Asia, Singapore, 30 by 30 and they want to be producing 30% of their own food by you know, by 2030 You know, you can already buy a cultivated chicken product in restaurants and there you can, you know, they're supporting strong like, you know, precision fermentation, you know, cultivated meats, plant based meats, you know, controlled environment AG. So, you know, we get all caught up, you know, and honestly, I think, still a little bit of hubris, right? You know, if you're in the US Do you think that we are the world leader in technology in you know, so many spaces. I don't know if that's true anymore. I don't even know if we're relevant anymore between the US and Europe used to control these conversations around food right? What happened here was important. Today, I you know, and into the future, I think you have to look to Asia. And, you know, the investments are making, you know, investors like tomasik and New Horizons, you know, Chinese government putting, you know, cultivated meats in their five year plan. You know, those are the things that are going to shape the world of the future, rather than whether the US consumer goes in and buys a, you know, a beyond burger off the supermarket shelf and, you know, whatever supermarket you're shopping at, Unknown 1:44between India and China, you've got roughly a third of all the people on the planet and then there's another third also almost in Africa, I guess. The West, even just obviously, Western has a big role in many many ways. But those different geographies will have both huge implications on terms of what gets developed and produced but also on the ultimate sustainability of any production because of the footprints of those places. And you do have the fact that a huge percentage of the Indian population is Hindu and vegetarian, and there's great vegetarian food. In India, it's easy to go to India and spend a month there and not eat any meat not to have any digestive issues as well. And then China's got a different approach to the consumption as well and they've been essentially eating fermented protein in the form of tofu for centuries. So it's a smaller leap from your beef burger here to an it goes back to what you were saying when you're talking about sitting around the table and the canning and then people thinking this is something amazing and new that's never been done before. Whereas it's actually not as blue sky as the one as many people would be. Unknown 3:23Yeah, completely. So again, so I would keep a strong eye on Asia for you know, for technologies like that. I do think they say, you know, the future of global demand for proteins. In particular and proteins, of course, shapes the demand for everything else, right, because of the big, you know, backwards kind of multiplier effect on the root system, though, you know, I think I think we need it all. So that's the idea and you know, when we have, you know, our four boxes in this very simple two by two matrix, you know, you know, defy developed, you know, disrupt and you know, and defend, you know, people say oh well you know, typical to criteria, you want to be moving from like the fence to defy or something like that. It's like no, like all these boxes actually are important. They all need technology. They all need broad, broad adoption, right. And it's in there certain, you know, minimums that are moving up in the world now as I think as we understand more about, particularly about the implications of climate right now. You know, so yeah, climate is something that that's always changing. You know, it's like, I don't remember different decades over, you know, my, you know, my life that, you know, my dad was selling farm equipment, you know, 10 years, it was like, the rain all the time and 10 years, it was dry all the time, right. And so, you need kind of changes around that and I think from a breeding standpoint, right we can grid you know, we can adapt crops to you know, higher temperatures or you know, grow with less water and things you know, Canada's clearly winning and all this is kind of get gets warmer up there and, you know, strong supporter of you know, bottom line purchases in Canada. You know, as in the south, it's, you know, gets a bit more challenging around that, but I think it's a kind of the variations, it goes back to what we were talking about, you know, how can you have an efficient system when kind of a unreliability of production is a challenge like a constant challenge? Unknown 5:24Is that the mindset? And I guess, I guess, back in my early days working with dairy farmers in Australia, and there was, this is a slightly simplified example. But there's the guy who had to feed the animals when they were milking them and they grazed in the paddock and he had saved 28 paddocks. And there was the first Monday of the month, the second Monday, and they went round, and if it was the middle of spring and grass was jumping out of the ground, they went round the same speed. And if it was the middle of the winter, and there was no grass, they went round the same speed and this whole concept you know, the cows and the climate and the grass, they don't care whether it's Sunday, and it's the weekend, or whether it's Tuesday, or whatever it is. They care about moisture, sunlight, temperature, recent grazing, and we have this concept of looking through it through our you know, human view, lens hands, rather than saying, Well, this is actually nature and all these things that we've made are actually oblivious to that and we need to start adapting to their cycles or natural cycles rather than being so especially when it comes to actually production. Rather than expecting the sort of natural cycles to adapt to us, which they won't. Unknown 6:40Well, I think I think that's a great point. One of the most insightful comments I've ever heard about farming came when I was visiting a good friend of mine in New Zealand and she was a professor at Massey University but also she and her husband had what I would have described as a dairy farm and I always was with him and she said no, Mary's like we're not dairy farmers. What we our job in New Zealand as farmers is to grow grass. Our job is to grow the best crop of grass we can ever grow and then we make a processing decision. What do we want to turn that grass into? Do we want to turn it into, you know, into to milk production? Do we want to turn it into, you know, beef into sheep into, you know, you know, venison and I just thought that if you kind of focus on that fundamental, like we want from this soil this precious, you know, soil and resources, we have to do the best that we can with it right and thinking about your job as growing grass, maybe you move that, that herd in a different rotation right in order to keep that grass right to where it comes back again. And I think that, you know, kind of comes back to my view about that get the focus off of, you know, the yield per acre per animal back into that enterprise level, right, and kind of like, let's figure out the things that really matter to whether it's, you know, sustainability, whether that you know, profitability, economic viability, you know, social sustainability others, you know, the, you know, that kind of human sustainability piece of it into what is it that really matters, you know, as food valuable, yes, but nutrition is more valuable than food perhaps. Right. So, you know, when we talk about do we have to value food more, I think we need to, you know, think you know, again, that stronger that link between you know, what a person eats and you know, their health you know, the cost in the US today, certainly in my home state of Kentucky, you know, to treat illnesses that are related to poor dietary choices is huge, right? Why don't we like move some of that money from treatment into, you know, kind of better foods better diet. And it's not saying that this food is good, and this fruit is bad. It's like, you know, that combination again, go back to the idea, you know, what is it? Do we want to be sustainable as a farm or agriculture or food or food system or is it a sustainable diet? What does that look like? And how can we get people to, you know, to kind of the, the way that the funding works in the world, you know, your big pots of money into like shifted from this camp into something that is, you know, more, you know, not just preventative in nature, but also gives people a better quality of life, right? It's uh, you know, this paging now as we are getting older, you and I you know, it's kind of like you know, you want to get you want to age with you know, something to where you're continue to be active, mentally active, physically active. Unknown 9:55I think there's a huge opportunity, given so many of our current health issues are related to metabolic disease and the inflammatory response to metabolic disease that also increasing this increases the susceptibility to infectious or communicable disease, but also increases susceptibility to things like Alzheimer's and cancers and those sorts of things. And, and then there's this huge resource, the amount of money that's spent on health that to deal with these food initial, I guess, originally food related diseases and health issues, and if we can decrease the costs to the health system, then that also frees up huge amounts of resources that we could then push back into, into having more sustainable food systems and energy systems and all those sorts of things. And obviously, that's easy to say, but implementation is much, much more challenging and there's a huge big hurdles there. Unknown 11:08Well, what you said earlier about silos, right? You know, that's a huge challenge on the human health side as well and I hope those are changing that I remember from my dad my mom both went through, you know, severe illnesses my dad kind of a heart condition, COPD that led to his death at what I would have considered, you know, way too early and my mom had, you know, had a particular type of cancer and kind of navigating that system is like every person that you met in in that kind of health care team. They were thinking about their own little silo, right? So I'm the lung doctor, right? I'm the heart doctor. I'm the person that like the infectious disease person. It's like nobody was thinking about that whole enterprise, right? The patient I was talking to my own GP about it. She's like, it's so scary married. I'm scared to death. You know? Like I've ever been sick, because, you know, so how do we get this in this? Like I'm saying, I don't know what to think about, you know, this, you know, kind of the, from an enterprise little farm. It's like the enterprise level of the person. You know, and that approach that's more know, kind of, based on, you know, the whole human health approach as opposed to you know, we've got these specialties here and they don't necessarily talk to each other and nobody's really thinking about, you know, instead of long term outcomes, that is, you know, maybe the you know, what would be the best for the patient, you know, starting early on, right, you know, as opposed to like treating it you know, at the end of life. Unknown 12:46This I think there's a similar mentality in in both farming and also in in traditional medicine, where you have a disease or you have you say you have an insect pest on your crop and you are a weed, you go okay, I'm going to spray something that will kill that. And it's trying to it's a very linear, single solution single problem wrapped up in a nice neat bow. And say with, you know, you've got a disease and B that a cancer or B that a certain bacterial infection or whatever, and rather that it's the same thing. We're going to go and treat that we're going to treat that one issue rather than looking more holistically. So it's one to one rather than we're going to intervene. And we want to have many, many outcomes are all working, working together. And I guess that's without embracing the complexity rather than trying to ignore the complexity and boiling down to something that we can easily conceptualize? Unknown 13:51Yeah, that was always my challenge I spent in economics, you know, at a very high level and I must say it was not a good bet. Because I kept accusing economists to have some of which have gone on now on one like Nobel Prizes and you know, been like the Council of Economic Advisors are checked with treasury secretaries in the US, you know, telling them that, you know, the problem with the economist is they assumed all the complexity away in the world, therefore, you know, their answers were never relevant. You know, and I think that's a piece that's why I come back and I really liked that answer of my, you know, New Zealand farmer friend and who says, you know, our job is to grow grass and grow the best profit grass, we can grow it and, you know, it's just kind of I think it's, it's, it's hugely complex, right, but it's kind of simple, right? It's a simple answer, but the complexity about growing that wonderful, proper grass, right, and then making a processing decision is that kind of changes where the goalposts are and I think that's what you're saying as well. Unknown 14:54Well, completely. We've gone on for a while, so we probably should not keep on going too long, even though we could probably talk for another hour, Unknown 15:03or we could talk we could talk for days about this. might not appreciate that as much as we do. Unknown 15:09Is there anything else that we haven't discussed that you think should be mentioned? Unknown 15:16You know, I don't know there's so many things in the world. I think we've covered a lot of them, right, you know, the everything from the, you know, the the need to engage, you know, with consumers to you know, an end consumer, even consumers and we need to engage with people right, you know, the enterprise level approach this idea about you no need to get, you know, I think that you know, kind of alignment around a shared vision as an industry. And, you know, technology clearly underpins so many of these solutions. I think the one thing I would come back to at the end, you know, this the most important industry in the world. There's without a doubt right, and I think the thing that we don't do enough is to make that case for our young people. And why if they are so concerned about the world and they want to give the world a better future, that they should come and work in this industry, right. And they should work at it in a in a way that they can, you know, actually achieve scale, you know, that rather than a very, very singular, you know, kind of nice, you know, solutions but that, you know, may not make it's like you know if you can get you know, dairy cows in India, where there's, you know, something like a billion of them, there's tremendous number of dairy cows there. I mean, if you can get, you know, 1% improvement in those cows, you know, maybe that's better than focusing on getting a, you know, a bigger improvement in the US or in Australia where our herds are already tremendously productive. But so I think it all comes down to talent, but always in everything that I do with that, you know, case that please that we need to have, you know, the talent in this industry needs to be absolutely top notch. That means that we'll be able to solve the, you know, the challenges of the future and there are many of those. And that's why I've dedicated, you know, a certain portion of my career to being in an area at Harvard Business School to where you can kind of influence that talent through the national food and agribusiness Management Association where we work around the world to engage certainly, you know, industry and governments around these important conversations but also a to get, you know, young people excited and to to bring them into an industry that you know, maybe they, you know, they have thought about that they didn't realize potential or maybe even they haven't thought about at all. So, you know, I might leave you with that Ash and then explore a future when hugely interesting conversation. Unknown 17:51There, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very, very much. My pleasure. As always, I should say so thank you very, very much. You're welcome.