Marcus is an entrepreneur, researcher and writer, Chief Operating Officer of New Foundation Farms, a UK agri-food enterprise on a mission to disrupt the entire ‘farm to fork’ journey: yep, that’s breaking and remaking everything that’s wrong and harmful about how you get your food.

In this episode, we talk regenerative business - work which creates life not destroys it - the travails of entrepreneurial life more generally, and embracing the end of your start up or company as a means to renew it….

Links

• New Foundation Farms
• Farming Smarter report
• The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World, by Paul Ray
• Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture, by Gabe Brown
• Changing the World We Create: Beyond climate crises, polarised societies and failed leadership, by Mark Drewell and Björn Larsson
• Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast
• Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, by Paul Hawken
• James Quilligan
• Savory Institute
• Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn

Welcome to Peripheral Thinking, a series of conversations with

entrepreneurs, advisors, activists, and academics, intending to inspire

and maybe challenge you with ideas from the margins, the periphery.

Why?

Cuz that's where the ideas which will shape tomorrow are hiding today,

on the margins, on the periphery.

This week, I spoke to, uh, Marcus Marcus link.

Uh, Marcus described himself as a cultural creative, a phrase

I borrowed and liked very much.

He's an entrepreneur researcher and writer.

He's co-founder and director and, and, uh, the Chief Operating Officer of New

Foundation Farms, an a regenerative disruptor enterprise in the UK agri food

sector with the mission of establishing regenerative agriculture at scale, by

transitioning farming practices from unprofitable environmental problem

to a profitable ecological solution.

In November, 2020, the food farming and countryside commission in the

UK published the report, Farming Smarter, the case for agro ecological

enterprise, which Marcus co-authored and which is based on his research.

As a writer, Marcus's special interest is in the theme of human becoming,

and he publishes his essays, poems and stories, exploring the inner

journey on his blog foolsjourney.me.

Marcus, welcome to Peripheral Thinking.

uh, great pleasure to be here, Ben.

Thanks so much for the invitation.

You're very welcome.

Now, maybe you can give us just a little sort of potted history of of who you

are and what brings you to where you are today, as potted as that can be.

Yeah, I'll do my very best may.

Maybe just start with how I'd describe myself in my own thinking today.

I consider myself to be a writer, a researcher, and an entrepreneur.

And in 1, 1, 1 aspect of my life's journey has been to to live through

such paradoxes and then discover that actually these paradoxes have a level

at which they are integrated and they just express themselves in different

arenas of life in different ways.

The challenge that remains then is how do I make time or for one or the other and

and find the space and time to do it all?

Underneath these three pillars, if you want, maybe at a higher

level is something that Paul Ray in 2000 called the cultural creative.

And I'm just gonna quote a little bit there from what that

means, because I think many may recognize this kind of impulse.

and cultural creatives are people who see careers, which are fulfilling

and provide meaningful contribution to their communities or the world

at large because of their emphasis on growth and development, cultural

creatives can be found reading often.

So, what I do is very much tied to a restless curiosity.

I, I want to know about things and that often leads to the confrontation

with the world as it is today, because there is that sense.

Oh, it could be different.

So how do we go about that?

And the cultural creative is not satisfied with the status quo as the best solution.

And I think the world that we live in and the the emergencies we're

facing, like climate emergency but a whole host of other things come

together to this interconnect.

Web of crises.

And the question is, how do we confront these, uh, cuz we can't confront them

at the level that we created them.

so with that little entree, entrepreneur is an important

word for your podcast series.

So I thought I'd reflect a little bit on that.

May, maybe my life began entrepreneurially, not necessarily in

the business sense, but I was born in Ireland, although my parents are German

and English and that's because my father was at the university of Galway back then.

And shortly after I was born, we did return to Germany and I was,

I went to school there, grew up generally, and I then later moved

to the UK where I completed a degree with the Open University.

And that's also an aspect of entrepreneurship is that I tried several

bricks and mortar universities and with different subjects, but ultimately since

my mid-teens, I've always been involved in projects and actually working with people,

earning my own money has been a really important thing about my own identity.

So how different forms from self-employment to employment and owning

a company and paying dividends and so forth, have experimented with all of

that as at the same time as uh, being interested in different kinds of things.

So my entrepreneurial journey from when I was 18, I started a company

that printed uh, T-shirts for sports clubs and school levers.

Now culminates in its latest iteration in New Foundation Farms, an organization

that sets out to be a disruptor enterprise in the UK agri food space.

We believe that it's not good enough to continue the status

quo in food and farming.

It's a major contributor to many of the challenges on the ecological,

economic and social fronts.

And, uh, we've developed a model with which we might change that, at

two ends, at least the production end and the distribution end, the

interaction with the customer.

Another way of describing myself is that I'm a serial entrepreneur

who's walked, worked across technology education and agriculture.

It, technology plays a huge role in particular, through the internet,

as a platform for communication and commerce and information exchange.

I learned HTML one in the very early days and contributed through a project

in 1998 to put an educational platform online, what was powered by a database

very early days, very clunky stuff.

However that, that paved uh, situation for me that in almost every job I've had,

the internet has played a significant role in addressing either commercial

interests, informational exchange issues or communication problems.

And in all projects, somehow all these areas overlapped.

This is also a reason why I dropped out of university.

The first time is that I created a platform called Wind Power Online.com.

On the back of a research with a fellow student into vertical online marketplaces,

for which at the time there was a sort of threshold, they needed X billion dollars

of global turnover to be interesting, but the up and coming at the time was

the whole world of renewable energy.

So we thought, well, that's the future.

Why don't we combine the internet with a platform for renewable energy

and off we went and that opened my journey into venture capital, through

my exposure to venture capital.

I got involved with biotechnology projects, and it was in biotechnology

that I had my first real sort of crisis I'd call it a quarterlife crisis.

As sort of just millennials we were entitled to quarterlife crisis.

And this was a real dilemma for me.

It was the recognition that, and these projects all had a veneer.

Of purpose, but ultimately the reality behind closed doors was absolutely

ruthless, profit seeking and an engineering of a world that uh, that

was designed for the maximization of ultimately personal profit.

Working with other people was an a necessary evil on the way to

one's own profit maximization.

That's how I experienced it.

And I struggled with that because I was interested in the purpose side.

I recognized profit as a as business hygiene, as opposed to a goal in

its end in its own in its own right.

So I finished my degree with the Open University, because that allowed me to

live my life in a way that I wanted to.

Um, I studied philosophy religious studies and did a few business things

on the side because of my interest in how people tick and why are they

motivated to do the things they do?

Uh, with hindsight I chose the wrong subjects, but that's,

that was my motivation.

But that finished.

And then I ended up working in England for an organization called Riverford Farms.

So this was a combination of technology, education and agriculture, where I was

hired to set up the meat box scheme which at the time the business had already

done a very good job of, uh, growing and selling by way of vegetable boxes, which,

which is what a thing that Riverford pioneered and they had many franchisees

across the country and the challenge was how do you take something as complicated

as meat and deliver and, and roll that out at the same time into this network?

So there was a scale an effort of scaling and that was required.

And I brought my technological and managerial background and grew

the meat box production around the vegetable box business and scaled

that up, including all those supply chain issues of working with a small

and large farms associated Riverford.

I coded the software that ran the purpose-built facility, the meat

processing site, and all sorts of other things and took it from five,

uh, boxes a week to 5,000 boxes, by which time I needed a break.

But that was my that was my real engagement with the industry in a business

that to this day, absolutely committed to uh, organic as a way of life as a form

of certification, as a business ethos.

And that has also gone on to do things well beyond my involvement there with

the employee ownership as a, as there are a number of businesses in the UK that

have moved on to become employee owned, but Riverford is one, one of those.

And that's a major role model for me and for New Foundation Farms

in, in that particular aspect.

But also without wanting to be critical of Riverford in my own journey in my

engagement with the planet life and consumerism and so forth, I found

that the organic paradigm is very well intended, but it lacks something.

And there are different angles to talk about this, but essentially

when you farm organic, this is no guarantee that you're actually

having ecologically positive impact.

What organic certification avoids is the routine use of pesticides and

the routine use of fertilizer inputs.

It doesn't mean that you don't use pesticides, it doesn't mean that

you don't use fertilizer, and it certainly means that at the large

scale, you do still use industrial methods, including heavy machinery.

It's a, it's an engineering exercise, a logistics exercise, that uses the soil

as a medium to grow food and fiber.

And that means that the environmental impact in the bigger picture of

things is certainly better than many industrial conventional approaches.

However, ultimately it is not one that has the outcome of regeneration of soil.

It has as its goal, the growing in, within the industrial paradigm

of food and fiber in such a way that it doesn't use chemicals.

And there are lots of people who grow organic, especially on a small

scale who take this a lot further.

But on the certification level, and that's the important thing, the

standard setting organizations, they police the inputs not the outcomes.

So this is this is in terms of my think evolution of my thinking, one

of the big insights is that the way we quality assure the way, uh, we

live within our society with means that may actually be counterproductive

to the values that we espouse.

So when I'm environmentally friendly, I've thought to myself, surely that must

mean that I'm interested in the outcome of actual environmental impact as opposed

to the particular ways in which I do that.

Especially if the way in which I do that has a negative outcome.

I found a solution to that in my ongoing research, in the thinking

of many people outside of geography.

Uh, far away, often south America, north Northern America, lots are

going on in Australia with a 30 year drought crisis there and.

Other areas.

And often what you see the pattern is that people are challenged sometimes

by both economic and ecological or sometimes just one of those

factors that lead to innovation.

And often are going back in time to how people have done things in the past.

And this is the research aspect in me, the curiosity, I wanna know how was that done?

How did people like Gabe Brown, Alan Savory, Richard Perkins, Ethan Solo.

How did they come up with how, what was the journey they took?

Gate brown is probably the big eye opener for me.

He wrote a book called Dirt to Soil, in which he Chronicles his 30 year journey

from uh, being the non-farming son-in-law of a farming family taking on the farm

and then experiencing four years of absolute crisis with hail storms, with

uh, drought followed by floods and always destroying his entire crop, meaning he

was financially at a complete dead end.

And instead of giving up, he went.

And did a lot of research and trial and error and a 30 year journey followed

to be one of the regenerative pioneers.

And he's quite heavily featured in the film Kiss the Ground as a consequence.

Mm-hmm

So there there's, there's a probably many more things that I haven't now mentioned,

but ultimately there's a, there's something going on in the background.

Um, I've got questions.

I'm looking into things and eventually this leads at an opportune moment in

2019 to my co-founder Mark Drewell and me sitting down and in a series

of conversations, ending up with agriculture as the key thing that we

both have experience with and where we see a way of doing things differently,

that isn't just a change of degrees, but that could be a category change

for the way we engage with agriculture.

And agriculture is at the end of the day, one of the key.

Coal faces where humanity engages with nature.

So the way we think about our relationship to nature and the way we then execute

that relationship are really key.

And the reason we called New Foundation Farms is because we imagine that such

a way of doing agriculture could be a new foundation for our civilization.

So it's as small and as big as that.

Maybe actually it makes sense just to, uh, just to capture for a minute, this,

so this idea that sort of organic, not necessarily the outcome of organic, not

necessarily a kind of positive thing whilst the intent might be going in.

And so the kind of difference to, I guess then the regenerative movement,

uh, and obviously regenerative this regenerative that, kind of very

kind of danger, I guess, of becoming a kind of buzzword of the moment.

So essentially in its sort of simple terms, what you mean by

that is out is a positive outcome.

Is that what would be a simple way of understanding the regenerative idea?

Yes.

So, regenerative is many things and it is definitely a suitcase

word that has already been adopted by many, many interests.

What's really helpful though, instead of trying to come up with new words,

which in fact I definitely tried at the beginning of this journey only to find

that all words are somehow tainted and so what on, just on that I was involved

as the main researcher and co-author of a report published by the UK based

food farming and countryside commission.

In November, 2020 we published a report called Farming Smarter, the

Case for Agro Ecological Enterprise.

And I had spent a whole chapter working through the different uses

of the terms, agro, ecological, and regenerative, and my particular take.

So this is me after a lot of reading and conversation and so forth.

I I believe that what we're trying to achieve is to.

Hit that sweet spot in the Venn diagram where we have social economic and

ecological concerns overlapping, and the one approach to farming practices

that has a real grasp of ecology as in the science of ecology that understands

what is actually happening in the soil.

How do interactions with plants, animals, and so forth work is regenerative

agriculture that it has a history.

It's a term that, that features in research.

It emerges out the uh, epistemologically, it emerges out

of con conservation agriculture.

And it is if you want the commercial end of conservation agriculture,

where we are concerned, not just about positive, ecological impact,

but at the same time profitability.

And the amazing thing about the regenerative paradigm

is that we can be both.

Economically positive, sorry, ecologically positive and economically profitable.

And in, in a way that exceeds the current expectations in agriculture,

in the subsidy funded regime by a multiple is it we expect farming to

be hard and uh, not make you much.

And with some exception that is true by and large, if we just look at the, uh,

that this is an amazing opportunity, by the way, politically uh, for

agriculture going through Brexit as we divorce from the EU and the common

agricultural policy and the subsidy regime which does have a huge which has

a responsibility for the way things are in agriculture, in Europe and the UK.

So what in moving away from that it's time for innovation.

And the innovation that's possible, and that we are demonstrating with New

Foundation Farms is that you can farm profitably, significantly profitably

without subsidy regimes, without environmental encouragement programs,

and the, then the trick to that is effectively that biological diversity

and the stacking of economic enterprises to use a technical term go hand in hand.

So if you stack layers of biological activity from sub soil all the way through

to what grows and how you graze and ti and get the timing, right, you can have a very

high density of enterprises on the same land that, uh, previously we might have

only given to one of those enterprises.

And as a consequence, every every layer integrates in such a way that

it may be product, but also input.

And that means that you're reducing the inputs that you need to

purchase because you're getting them from the ecosystem effect.

It increases resilience as the more complex it gets, the more non-linear

it becomes the more resilient it gets.

And as a consequence, you end up with a, what we call a hyperverse

range of produce, where previously you are operating a monoculture.

This at the same time, when you then factor in quality

premiums that might be available.

But even without you are already in in the black, significantly so.

And if you then innovate on your roots to market and sell things, not

as commodities, but as food into your local regional market you suddenly

find that the countryside rural enterprise can be regenerated as well.

Imagine all those people moving back into the countryside and

working for, uh, workplaces where you are treated as a knowledge

worker, rather than as an operative.

Where you are working more in a community kind of way, with all sorts of different

ways of employment, self-employment models and so forth being exercised,

and not only have the enterprises stacked on the land, you go from

four, five employees per a thousand acres to over a hundred in our model.

And so this, going back to the conversation you having with mark in

2019, this is essentially the kind of fruit of that conversation, this epic

endeavor that you are describing here with the kind of myriad benefits, the

myriad profits, this is the kind of fruit of that, uh, of those conversations.

Is that right?

So, and so if you were gonna, if you were gonna the, uh, to borrow the awful phrase

of the elevator pitch of new foundation farms, I mean, how do you describe its.

What it's doing and what it's essence

I'm terrible at elevator pitches because I always want to go into the detail

and tell you all of that, which is why I'm the COO and not the CEO, but

in essence, in investor conversations New Foundation Farms is a disruptor

enterprise in the UK agri food space.

And what that means is that we combine the latest knowledge in terms of

production, but also in terms of direct to consumer marketing with finance, in

order to create, uh, a, uh, a disruptor that's able to produce food and fiber

of high quality profitably at scale.

So, so the one thing just to break out of the elevator pitch, as we're now walking

down the corridor, I've talked a lot about the production end of New Foundation Farm.

So there's a farm and we're raising funds for a thousand acre farm.

On a part of this farm, there may be a ban and that ban is now going to be

repurposed as a processing and retail space of approximately 1000 square meters.

And what that enables is that it suddenly goes from a, an

organization that's got the production right, by being regenerative.

That means it is regenerating the landscape within which it is

based, and not just selling into the commodity market, but actually

processing the food on site means more employees, more enterprises

stacked on the same thousand acres.

And then from the production space feeding into the retail

space, which it's no better way than to smell and taste the food.

Imagine the cafe restaurant imagine that this then becomes the basis

of a logistics hub that distributes food by home delivery, direct to

your doorstep within the region.

And the word region is really important because we believe that long term food is

going to go back to a bioregional model.

Uh, we believe that the journeys for food shopping will by and large become shorter.

We will be able to grow more greater diversity of food in the region.

And instead of being dependent on the global food supply chain, we

will be topping up our local food basket with the global supply chain,

as opposed to being dependent on it.

And that's for us in our view of looking ahead, 10, 20 years inevitable.

And it's also desirable to have a greater food sovereignty

as a, as an island nation.

And so our model goes from developing a thousand acre farm

to a 10,000 acre bio region.

And then to multiplying that five or six times across the UK, helping other

teams in other regions to establish the same kind of things, learning

from all the mistakes and great things that we did on the first site.

And, in rough numbers, it takes it from a thousand acres to 60,000

acres as a combined enterprise.

Right.

I mean, that's, you know, the kind, the scale of it, the ambition of it is, you

know, as also a kind of a fellow sort of entrepreneurial kinda interested kind of

cultural your phrase again, which I keep keeping the cultural creative, which I

think is a brilliant phrase, by the way.

And one, I think, which really speaks to everybody who's

is listening to the podcast.

But the, you know, the, you know, that there is scale built into this, that

there is ambition built into this, you know, into this kind of endeavor for

me is like, is a really exciting thing.

And you know, a really, cuz obviously we imagine certainly within sort of

as an outsider, we imagine when people talk about scale and these kind of

things within a food space, you know, it's images of intensive farming

and uh, you know, the, and kind of monoculture and doing less and less of

a thing, just of extrapolated at scale.

And there's a really nice sort of counterweight, obviously

to what you're talking about.

Yeah, it's very great reflections.

What part of the conversation Mark and I had, uh, we were both change

agents in, but in very different ways market just published a book

at the time called, Changing the World We Create that he co-authored.

And one, one of the lessons from his work and our general conversations

is that the world, our civilization is an institutionalized civilization.

It means it leapfrogs from one, one form of institution to the next and the Bana

model of change, which is a kind of a graph that shows how institutional life

changes inevitably, but it, establishes a new normal and the graph looks a bit

like two intertwined hockey sticks.

And in between the two hockey sticks the decline of the old institution

and the rise of the new, you have the need for transition and it's disruptor

enterprises that Hassan the transition to the new institutional life.

So what they do is they imagine how things will be in the future.

And then they pivot an explore and parallel path.

How are we gonna bring about, for example, renewable energy.

And it was the combination or the tech was there for a long time.

We had solar panels, we had wind turbines a long time ago, but it was the

combination of major VC finance with this knowledge that suddenly supercharged the

deployment of these things in big ways.

And that got governments excited.

And that's the same thing that moved us from landline telephony to mobile phones.

And we see this happening in the way we do food.

The way we grow it, the way we distribute it.

Yeah.

So, it's it the role then of the of the capital bringing partner, the money

bringing partner in simple terms is the thing, cuz the kind of vision you have

say of a kind of bio sort of regional existence, which of course sort of, you

know, makes so much sense and then you think, okay, so what are the things that

need to change to get from the world that we are today, which is obviously not like

that to that kind of world as necessary and as opportun as that might be.

And so you see you your role as disruptor enterprise, bringing in

capital, bringing in that partnership as, you know, being both a kind of

bridge and sparking other bridge.

Yes.

So the key observation is that there are so many hardworking, inspired often

young people in the agricultural space working on small plots of land, home

delivering a small number of boxes.

And what we found is that the a lot of small doesn't necessarily add up to big.

So when you look at the numbers for the UK, there were in 2018, there were

217 agricultural businesses, meaning businesses, farming land the on, on

about 20 million acres of land under agricultural management in the UK.

So how are you going to get the institutional world that's made up

of policymakers, banks, insurers all sorts of other organizations, how are

you gonna get the attention of those?

And ideally, also investors in this space?

You've got to show that this isn't just the domain of the small holder.

You've got to show that we can take care of food production at scale in this way.

And one of the examples that's really astonishing is the Balbo

group in Brazil, the origins of this business go back to the early 19

hundreds, but especially under the leadership of Leon, Tina Balbo Jr.

In starting in the 1980s, this especially this, uh, organization specialized on

sugar production, which now controls 34% of the world's organic sugar.

And it does so on 60,000 hectares of land, that is on the face of

it, a mono crop sugar operation.

But the way they do that is that they actually switch their model from growing

sugar to caring for an ecosystem, looking after the ecosystem that also grows sugar.

And then they innovated along the way and found better ways of harvesting that

leaves the litter straight on the field.

And then they started using the pulp.

That's left over from sugar manufacture as a as the basis for a thermal power

plant that now heats a that provides electricity for a city of 500,000 people.

And what's left of that goes back on the field.

It's totally circular.

And the level of biodiversity on these farms exceeds 50% of the

nearby Sao Paolo national park.

And this is a monoculture on the face of it, a monoculture operation.

So, so there are organ, there are examples around the world of which

is, this is one of my favorites that show, this can be done at a huge scale.

It's not the domain of the smaller holder.

So where you are today, the extent to which where you are today is, uh,

on the kind of, sort of same sort of vision of what you imagined it might be

when you started a couple of years ago.

You know, we know what it's like when we, uh, start and create sort of new

ventures or we take on a new project, they assume a life of their own.

I'm curious about the journey you're on and the extent to which you are in the

place you thought you would be, or what surprising terms have come your way.

Really good question.

I wanna paraphrase this or preface this by something that I've recently

become to realize, which is that I don't I used to think that I create

things and I now come to realize that actually I, at best I am privileged

to be part of channeling things.

So the question is, am I standing in the right channel?

Is this the way the future is gonna hit the present moment?

And that's exactly, as you say, sometimes we find that we're gonna,

we have to adjust the model or the model has a life of its own.

New people join the conversation and so forth.

And so this year we've actually as an organization gone through a very

interesting experience if that's the right word for being on this

rollercoaster of go being out in the market for some six months as a team,

we had over 500 meetings with over 100 investors across the spectrum from

social impact investors, through VCs and, uh, institutional investors, banks, et

cetera, from all sorts of geographies.

And by and large, the problem for us was not opening the door.

They are very interested.

They know this is where things are going.

The problem for us was more that it was difficult for these organizations

to take a model of the complexity that we had in an institutional world that

likes things to be more controllable and simpler and commit money to it.

So at an individual level, generally this was all good.

It was at the level of the decision making committee at the investment

committee that, uh, things seem to get.

So we had large commitments in total of about a quarter of our

investment are so that's 5 million of 20 million, but we didn't have what

you could call an anchor investor.

We didn't have an, uh, an investor that brought both a large amount of

money to the table and the ability to do due diligence and put their name

behind this, that would've then drawn everybody else to, through to completion.

So at this point we felt that maybe we were just ahead of our

time and that we needed to find a different way of doing this.

And we did what probably was the wisest thing of all.

We first took a break.

And then in that break, things started to settle.

Things naturally rearranged themselves in our thinking,

and we came back together to.

Uh, to articulate a refinement of that thinking.

And that was around this question, when you're an entrepreneur, what is it that

actually creates something out of nothing?

Where does the quantum jump in your work happen?

And as a consequence, we were able to articulate that our model is it has a

kernel and from that kernel, it radiates out in concentric circles that make

the impact of this bigger and bigger, but it doesn't change the fact that

at the center of this is one key idea.

And that key idea we articulated as being a systems integrator.

That means we can work with all the innovation that's happening on lots

of the spokes of this wheel, and we can integrate them into a hub.

And when they come together in a hub that is able to take advantage

of all the minute effects that the they have individually, it suddenly

supercharges this to an enormous.

And out from there, you have the possibility to operate land, to incubate

other businesses and to be a landowner.

So this was a really important articulation for us.

And we were just about to go to market with this new articulation, asking

for a lot less money to come to to, to start this idea from the systems systems

integrator point and founding a a food hub together with other businesses

when we were approached by a major global investment uh, organization, an

institutional investor that had back in April, May, picked up a series of

podcasts that we put out about our organization on Koen van Seijen's podcast,

Investing in Regenerative Agriculture.

And they said, we really like what you are doing.

And this year we've gone through a re-articulation of our values.

And you won't be surprised to, to hear that sustainability

comes before everything else.

So we're looking for projects that can spearhead the development of two things.

Firstly, we need to offset carbon and we see that possibility

exists in what you're doing.

But we also see that there's a new asset class in development, an asset

class or regenerative enterprise.

And that is what we're interested in as the future that we're seeing.

So conversations are underway very early stage, and I'm not privileged to

say anymore about it at this point, but what it emphasizes is the unforeseeable

nature of the entrepreneurial journey.

And how, as an entrepreneur, you are actually not just yourself and it's

not just your own conscious effort.

You are somebody who sits at the edge of something and you attract

other people into the conversation and it may take them some time to get

their head around what you're saying.

And maybe one, one thing there is that at this time is a bit like a pressure cooker.

I think that the COVID pandemic, the climate change we've undergone the Zoom

conversations that we've all been through.

And this realization that something has to change or contribute to this.

And it's a, I don't want to use the word younger because it's also

a function of age, but there's a generation in these institutions that

is now somehow empowered to go out and experiment at the margins with how

institutions might change from within.

And that.

also the kind of innovation that's led to this conversation we're now having.

There's somebody who's thought about this thought, how does

this work with my organization?

How do these projects around the world do this and how, where's the overlap?

How are we gonna come together?

Really

important aspect that I totally overlooked.

And to be honest, also dismissed.

Yeah.

So which bit did you overlook and dismiss?

I, I was less optimistic by the, by, by the summer about the possibility of

institutional large global investment companies getting behind this.

Because up until that point, it seemed to me as though there was a need for

these to be invested in very large scale projects that were repeating something

that had already been tried and tested.

So there's obviously loads in there I'd really like to, uh, go towards these.

I'm really curious, like what the sort of the investment house, you know, where

they, what their interest, what they understand regenerative enterprise to be.

Maybe we can come back to that.

The other thing, which would really sort of struck what you're talking

about, which I guess is, uh, a little bit kind of playing on the language of

what you're talking about, but you are in recording those podcast, there's a

kind of an element of planting seeds.

Aren't there, there's throwing seeds to the wind.

Uh, and you don't really know when those seeds are gonna take hold or where

those seeds will find their way to, but the importance of, you know, actively

contributing, actively sharing, because like you say, the entrepreneurial journey

will take, you know, I like you talked to you about the kind of channeling of it.

And actually all we can do is engage with it sort of optimistically,

curiously, positively constructively.

And you know, that is a kind of a sewing of seeds.

Isn't it.

And then who knows where the seeds come back to.

I really appreciate your use of the word seed as a metaphor here as it's actually

something that came to me in September when I found myself on my own quest,

not quite knowing how to take things forward, ended up going on a pilgrimage

in Italy with 11 other leaders from different walks of life, and under the

leadership of Sujit Ravindran I was walking from a small Lakeside village

in Italy to the cathedral of Asisi.

And on the journey, sujit posed this riddle to me.

And he said that my, my farming idea, this idea of regenerative farming,

maybe I should look at it as a a seed, and a seed he said, can be a

tree and it can also be bird food.

And I wrestled because I didn't want it to be bird food, right?

But then I suddenly recognized that there was a whole lot more to this,

that the creative gesture of a tree that gives totally freely of all the seeds.

We know the abundance of forests around us, and we also

know the abundance of birds.

And so there's actually plenty.

And that's precisely what he was on about is that in the ecosystem something

happens then that, that can only happen when we just surrender to it.

And that's, that's what I experienced here is that's suddenly the conversation

came back to us when we least expected it.

So, so in, in just to take this articulation to an extreme, it's a

little as though we surrendered our idea, whatever was gonna happen to it.

We were no longer attached to a particular outcome and it was parti

precisely then that as though that was an invitation and now we could receive

this conversation in a way that we wouldn't have been able to before.

And it wasn't the soil wasn't ready.

So that, that process, right, which obviously in talking is very easily

described, I'm gonna surrender the idea, you know, what will be, you

know, and, uh, I'm not gonna be sort of attached, of course is obviously

much kind of harder in practice.

Was your kind of ability to do that, is that linked to kind of slightly

throwaway line you used earlier about the kind of, we took a break.

I was really curious what taking a break meant.

What did you do?

What was your taking a break?

Yeah, taking a break was for me personally, and that has gotta

be really clear here that I think these journeys are personal.

So in the team, it would've been worked out in different ways by different people.

But I articulated for myself that I needed to accept that this hadn't

worked in the way we had hoped by the date we had set ourselves.

And I had to go personally through a process that I would describe as grieving.

Having invested so much time and energy in all these conversations, all

the preparation, all the emails, all the decks, all the, everything that

goes into that, all the managing your family in the background with that and

that the rollercoaster your family is on, the hopes, the expectations, the

disappointments, the constant attachment to a future idea and a future idea, and

another pivot, I just had to totally step out of that and watch it from the

outside, and I have this experience of it it not having worked and that,

that was a great sadness that, that would I would say that, that made me

depressed in in, so in clinical terms you would call that a depression, but

I'm not it's not the first time that I've been at a juncture like that.

And so the benefit of a, a life experience is that I've come to a place

where I know at this point is not to continue with the same old, not just

to reappear in the office again, it's you need to do something different.

You need to nurture the source, the creative energy inside you.

And as I did that, as I went for, as I went for walks, as I went for swimming

adventures, as I went on camping uh, trips along the Devon coast, I I found

this energy rekindling and I found that the distance ha was reconnecting

me to the project in a creative way that made me feel alive again.

And it's that it's, that's the reason I started it in the first place.

Because I arrived at the conclusion that well, so what, you know,

this is still the major problem.

We, this nothing has changed.

What we have to do is think about how we're going to make it happen anyway.

And just, I cuz I'm really keen on this, how this kind of process happens when,

so in going for walks in going for swims, spending time on the kind of glorious

Devon coast and all of that sort of thing.

Was there, had you, you know, was there an agreement among the team?

Look, we're just putting this down, we'll reconvene in a month's time or something?

Or was there just an awareness that something needed to change?

I guess what I'm curious about the, the formality of the kind of

the break period and the kind of accepting acknowledging of the process.

Yes.

So there was at first so if you want, we did put in place protocols

of how this was going to happen.

And even those protocols of disintegration as it were, they, they also pivoted quite

interesting because we were ready to do go different paths at different times.

So what happened if you want, at the end of this period, was that we had two of

our team of five, namely Wayne and Kirsty step back in, in that they had from the

executive team in that they had other projects they were engaged in or other

needs that they needed to take care of.

And they did so.

Wayne went back to Royal agricultural university and continued the

second year of his masters and been doing a few other projects.

And Kirsty's become the global VP marketing at a

unrelated organization, Speedo.

And Paul, Mark and myself we thought also that we were headed for a dissolution.

But then we just re we ended up having a few conversations, a few walks together.

And the the outcome of which was that we, are now the executive

team, Mark in the role of CEO.

I, in the role of COO and Paul in the role of CFO.

That's the reorganization of the executive team that's taking

this forward at this point.

You said you sort of assumed you were heading towards these,

uh, uh, dissolving essentially.

Uh, and whether that actually is the thing, which then created that, that

assumption, this is where it's going, is the thing which allowed the kind of,

uh, when invited the grief and kind of invited the opportunity for it to go.

So, so there was a kind of active, conscious actually

that is dying, that that

Yeah, I do.

And I do think that death is not a bad term.

I do think that there's a cycle of life and death or rebirth in ways that

what apart from it being an ecological phenomenon I think that it, also,

so in the creative journey is that sometimes we have to accept the life

that something has in and of itself.

And however we attach however attached we are the attachment

isn't going to make it happen.

And it's the surrender actually comes in letting go of the attachment.

And the real mastery is of being able to feel the thing fully and yet being

non-attached I'm still learning that.

But so, so this, at this point, at this particular juncture of my life, I was able

to let go, and in that letting go of my attachment, I found myself reconnected.

And I would say the project has, it is a different project.

And yet it's also clear that it is the same project.

Yeah.

I mean, I could do hours of podcast just on this point, because I think this

inability to let things go, which I is a massive practice for me, you know,

trying to learn how to let things go to create space for new things to go.

And of course, we sort of see this then, you know, in playing out badly in the work

of so many companies and so much about how we sort of exist is actually an in

inability to let things go to let things

Yes, it's rationalism taken to the absurd.

We live in a world that believes that it can control the outcome of things.

And that works as long as the actual outcome is there, but we don't acknowledge

that there is so much more that we don't control that contributes to it.

This is a very slippery slope in terms of the conversation, but I it's often not

talked about and often shied away from, but I think these this creative journey

as an entrepreneur, being someone who is actually creative is really important.

Because it, the passion for this comes from, in my case, from my

concern for something that is greater.

So I consider myself as being in service of something that I find quite

hard to express, and on my LinkedIn profile, I say something about, uh,

better society and planetary viability.

Th those are a bit sort of systems thinking ways of articulating something

that's much more comp complex than that.

It's about the interwoven of all.

And that we all have a decision to make with every act that we perform

as to whether we want to contribute to degeneration or to regeneration.

I've that reminds me.

I was listening to an interview that, uh, Paul Hawkin with his talking about

his recent book regeneration, and just actually articulated in a very sort

of similar way to that actually we, at the end of it, we all then have a

choice in what we choose to do today.

What we choose to buy, what we choose our companies to do, actually, do I want this

act, this endeavor, this effort to be one which ultimately sort of, uh, generates

life or one, which takes away life.

Uh, and I think it's a kind of, it's a sort of start and useful

It is.

And yet there's also immediately the danger again, of the

attachment to a particular outcome.

And that, however hard that one is, I do feel that in my engagement I have

to accept that firstly I may be wrong and secondly, that the way I choose to

do it however, noble, the intent may be wrong and there's a lot to learn.

So the stepping away from the immediate attachment actually

helps me do what I'm doing better.

And because it's not about the doing it's the doing is like the execution

of the higher level intuition of how I am engaged with the world around me.

And it's the openness to that that I ultimately That I'm ultimately powered by.

So this is why something had to die.

What had to die was that this part in the summer, this particular way

of bringing it about was not working.

And it didn't mean that the idea or the the creative impulse was wrong.

And it's the stuckness between the rigidity of my thinking at the

time, and the potential flexibility that I had to rediscover, that's

that's what I needed to shed.

That's that was the skin I needed to shed.

Yeah.

It kind one an idea, which I sort of explored in writing and talking is

one, this idea of creative destruction.

Cause you know, it's just, the dying bit is the invitation to living bit.

Uh, and you know, I think the anything which helps us on that kind of practice,

you know, and just at least remembering the importance of that just feels.

Kind of just really important to me, uh, potentially worthy

again of a whole new podcast.

It's one, one thing I just sort of pick up on, uh, that you referenced.

So you were talking about the kind of institutional, the potential institutional

partner that had bubbled up through, uh, having caught one of the seeds or caught

some of the seeds that you'd thrown.

And you were talking about, you know, some of the work that was happening on the kind

of periphery there and an interest they have, uh, using the phrase this, they had

an interest in regenerative enterprise and curious, you know, maybe this is a

kind of good segue into, uh, into that side of the conversation when, I mean,

so is regenerative enterprise, the phrase that they used or was that what you, how

you described what their interest was?

Uh, I, I would say that the concerns can be expressed in different language.

Some organizations express how they work on a visionary basis

and others may express what they do on a functional basis.

And we know sort of Simon Sinek's uh, the, how the why and the what ideas.

So in this, in these conversations I would say that there are different

levels at work at the same time.

It is visionary.

It is exploratory.

It is in recognition that new things need to dev be developed.

And it is also in recognition that we are at a time of transition.

Meaning there are already things we can do now, carbon

sequestration is, is one of them.

And there's a lot to be said about carbon sequestraion, but it

is one thing that we can now do.

And the, this whole thing comes together in a in a way that is

more aligned with the ecosystem and society than business and at scale

has maybe operated in the past.

And so, and one way of articulating this that I've done in previously is that if

you look at this fascination with ESG as an investment class I, I so slightly

overstretching the point, but to just, but to tease out what I mean is essentially

it's possible for a business to put profit first and then use some of the profit

to buy ecological and social impact, and then be classed as an, as a high

impact ESG, even if the profit initially may not have been derived from actions

that were as ecologically or socially responsible as they could have been.

So that's while I'm sure many people would take umbrage with such a perspective,

I do think that this puzzle piece approach is how some organizations do

it, especially when they find themselves wrestling with major need for change.

So, you buy in the benefit essentially.

So, so what the extreme end, the extreme other end of this is what I

imagine regenerative enterprise to be.

This is that all the actions and all the outcomes and all the consideration for all

the things that we might impact has led to an arrangement of the business and its

operations in such a way that they they maximize the potential for regeneration.

Now there's a, there's an economist called James Quilligan who pointed out

to me that Regenera those obsessed with regeneration often miss the fact that our

economic system takes advantage of aspects of the ecology that are not renewable.

to be really, uh, full about this economic theory, that it is, we have to take into

account that there are things that when we use them we can't recycle them, we

can't make them again, they're gone.

So in, in our economic thinking, we have to think about that too.

But to get to, to not get too distracted with all the potential

pitfalls, the idea of regeneration in this way affects the ecology.

It affects the economy and it affects uh, society.

The idea is that we can regenerate, for example, the countryside.

We can regenerate the countryside as, uh, a place where we live and

work and the amount of money that is there and the account amount of money

that may be available for education and healthcare in these areas.

And that the jobs people have are more fulfilling and more meaningful

that generally this increases the sense of purpose that humans have.

And that is all too off neglected.

Then we can think about the economy in a wider sense.

How does this contribute to more economic activity or a greater density of economic

activity in a particular area with its benefits for the whole elsewhere.

And then we can think about how all of that is stacked ultimately on

the one resource, we don't think about enough, which is essentially

the ecosystem for which we often use this metaphor of the planet.

We're not so good about thinking about the immediate locality of ecology.

We seem to be much better at thinking about sort of global abstract terms, like

save the whales or stop air pollution.

We find it very difficult to think about what we can do right.

Immediately under our feet.

And a regenerative enterprise in my way of thinking about it is one that hits

the ground with all its activities in such a way that it produces, uh, in

our case regenerative or regenerating soil, but you could also talk about

regenerating oceans or rivers or river beds, depending on what the acid is

that you're ultimately embedded in.

Not to overstretch all these metaphors, but this is the point where

the metaphor actually is a uh, is literal is a, it's a literal reality.

And I believe that there is an unfolding possible here or an

overlap, a complete overlap of an economy that is based in an ecology.

Surprisingly, that's not how our economy functions today.

so, so we talk that one, one analysis talks about planetary boundaries.

Uh, what it essentially means is that our our moral or our imperative growth

imperative in the economy doesn't take into account that we have a finite planet,

but by finite planet, we also we don't really know that's an abstract notion.

What it means is that a particular context has a particular

organization of resources.

It has a particular amount of resources like rainfall or sunlight or minerals.

And what we can do with a regenerative enterprise.

In now I'm talking about engaging with that ecosystem

directly to grow food and fiber.

And my the idea is that an regenerative enterprise must be based on the

stewardship of ecosystem health and that healthy ecosystem also produces food.

And from the examples I've seen, I am persuaded that when we do that,

right, not only will we produce more food and higher yields, but we will

produce inevitably a much larger variety of food, uh, within that yield.

So there's a greater yield per area of a part, any particular food, but

at the same time a greater sum total of the varieties we're growing because

we grow them in an integrated way.

So that, that, that is.

And when you do that, you are at the same time looking after all sorts of

things that in our economic language are called ecosystem services.

So we're talking about the sequestration of carbon, which is

a side effect of healthy soils.

We're talking about water quality improvements, drought and flood

resilience, which is again, a side effect of healthier soils.

One gram of healthy soil absorbs nine grams of water.

It acts like this fridge for the ecosystem and it releases the water slowly.

And if you're not putting chemicals in, you're using natural inputs in in

cycles and protocols that are in sync with the way it happens in nature,

you, you suddenly have a system that has all sorts of externalities that

are positive rather than negative.

And all of this comes together to the idea of a regenerative enterprise.

So if I'm listening to this and I think, well, I'm not in the business

of food, so it's not relevant to me.

I mean, is that true or is that not true?

Well it's, I think it's not true, but we're, let's go through

some of the nuances of this.

But let me start with a conversation with an Australia based asset management

company, one of the really big ones.

We had a conversation with them and they said the 30 year drought in

Australia has made us realize one thing.

Every single business activity has to be.

You have to take the sum total of the entire economy and you have to

bring it back down to whether it is contributing to a regenerative

ecosystem to regenerating soils or not.

And we cannot invest in anything we cannot afford to invest in anything

that is not cannot show that hasn't articulated its impact and shown

that it is ultimately regenerative.

I, I thought that was very inspired.

So based on that statement I think humans are all too ready to assume

that they live in a in a sort of urban context, that's divorced from nature.

And it's anything but.

We have we, in fact we a better word is culture.

Humans live in cultures and cultures need to be looked after.

And we are recognizing more and more how fragile these cultures

are that we've built up along the side of rivers or on sea fronts.

Nuclear power disasters, uh, global warming, all sorts of things

are gradually having an effect.

And we're finding that the fortresses we've built are actually quite weak,

and they have a negative impact.

And just to introduce some more concepts here we, our economy currently

thinks in stocks, or another way of putting that it thinks in piles.

So we've got a pile of this, a pile of wealth, a pile of some resource,

but we struggle to think in flows.

Nature works in flows, ecosystems work in flows.

A pile somewhere can be very good for the ego.

It's very satisfying to have a pile of money or a pile or

full a warehouse full of stuff.

The problem is that as soon as there's the pile, a buildup of something in

nature, we usually have a problem.

We have a problem of non distribution, which can be which can be terrible,

but it could also be as it could be disturbing over a small amount of time.

So disturbance, when it's impactful over a short space of time can actually lead

to greater resilience, but human human accumulations, human stocks are generally

of a kind that they have a polluting effect and the toxicity is long term.

So I think anything from the way we flush the toilets how much water goes down the

toilet, the kind of toilet paper we use, the toothbrushes we use, the shopping

bags we use, where we go shopping the food miles, what vehicle we take to this?

Do we really have to have this meeting in person?

Can we not do it digitally?

Who pays, which source of power powers my computer?

There are so many nuances and layers that ultimately all have an ecosystem impact.

And what I'm offering here is a level of awareness, not a level of doing anything

better, just be really clear, right?

I'm surrendering my sense that I know how to deal with all of this.

I'm simply at the point of having an awareness of all the things we aren't

considering, and we ought to consider.

I guess.

So in a sense that's the invitation to everyone listening is as an invitation

to reflect, an invitation, to sort of get their own kind of levels of

understanding and awareness about what the kind of external impacts of their

business of their activities are, to start to understand the flow and the

connection between what's, between what

Yeah.

And I'd like to connect this to an, uh, an earlier aspect of our conversation

where we're talking about audit regimes in relationship to organic.

So, so once again, without wanting this to be a criticism, but wanting

to reflect on a practice and recognize its shortcomings, the audit regimes

and quality assurance regime regimes that are civilization depends on are by

and large, what's called input audits.

They don't assess the outcome of so.

They assess what we put into something.

And then we have the assumption that we, if we leave something out

like chemicals and pesticides, that it's ne inevitably healthier and

inevitably more ecologically friendly.

And we now know that's not yet the case, so there is more work to be done.

We that my, my, thought was connecting this to, well,

how can we do it differently?

The first thing I said at the time was that let's focus on outcomes.

That doesn't mean that the inputs don't matter, but it's the ingredients and

the recipe together that looks at how have we actually increased biological

diversity is the effluent from this farm.

Does it really contain a fewer minerals?

Is the carbon actually sequestering?.

Does the soil run off when it rains?

Those kind of questions are quite relevant.

So how do we then get to a place where we've improved on that?

That, that requires an understanding of the factors at work, in an ecosystem.

But the point I was trying to get to here is that maybe we're

a bit too hard on ourselves.

This is an enormous project that we're trying to stem.

We're trying to stem an enormous tide.

So our articulation is that when we're trying to be

regenerative, we're on a journey.

This isn't about a hurdle rate after which once we've achieved, that we just continue

doing the same believing that it's right, because we passed some kind of a hurdle.

Rather, we see this as a journey of continuous improvement.

Anybody, wherever they are can orientate themselves in the regenerative direction,

wherever you are, you can start now.

And you can do make tiny adjustments, adjustments that you are able to manage

with all the time pressures, with the shopping habits, with the budgets, with

the time you've got with the conversations you can have with your family.

They don't have to be onerous and unachievable because that's

the best recipe to start off very enthusiastically and then find

yourself not getting very far at all.

It's got to be fun.

And you've got to notice that actually you can have an impact.

So the it's fun is maybe the, not the right word, but rewarding.

The reward comes from it being achievable as well as from it having an impact.

So when we start looking at a regenerative direction and decide

that we're gonna put the momentum that we can in that direction,

that's our belief, our articulation.

Then we are beginning the regenerative journey.

This is not an invitation to keep it at a low level.

It is an invitation to start at a low level and see that actually

in, especially in business, your input costs start to go down.

It's rewarding to have greater profitability to find that your

farm is more resilient to pest to pests all out of itself.

These, there are so many benefits attached to this that each farmer on their own

land will discover in their own way.

Every household, every so we can break this down into all

the fractals of our society.

But your question was is, does this just apply to farming or

does it apply to other aspects?

And my answer is I think this is an issue of our civilization, everything

we do, New Foundation Farms.

It's a new foundation, as in the idea is it's a new

foundation for our civilization.

So one of the other things that I was really interested in, which heard

you speaking about before, and you touched on earlier, I think, uh,

coming out of the the, uh, this kind of the relationship between kind of

the ideas of employee benefit and how that might uh, sort of be an expression

too, of these, uh, more resilient ideas, uh, more regenerative ideas.

And so is that another way that, uh, these regenerative ideas are

turning up in New Foundation Farms?

You've heard me talk about.

Creativity and that being the source for my own work, but also my

belief that in a way we all channel something from an inarticulable source

that we don't control or create.

Although we often believe we do.

I believe that values value system can be reflected in the way we work

together as organizations as well.

And one of the things that we've been exploring at New Foundation Farms

is how we might reward everybody who works for and with New Foundation

Farms in a way that allows them to benefit from its profitability.

So I when I started my working life, I had a very uneasy relationship with profit.

I somehow, despite the fact that I wanted some of it, I

also felt it was a dirty thing.

I now recognize that ecosystems depend 100% in each layer on profitability.

That is it's a hygiene factor.

When something works well, it produces a profit and then that becomes

the seed bed of another layer.

So in New Foundation Farms we not only will have many more employees who, so

a much higher density of employees per area of farmland, we also will have

these employees participating in the profitability of the organization.

And for me, that comes with a change of value and a change of culture to

people who have responsibility for their area of work, rather than that, they

are operatives that have a standing operating procedure that they need to

perform and then they will be evaluated.

The reason why there are areas where that might make sense for somebody to

operate in that way, that is a question of the outcome of the job, not of

the need to control an organization at every level, from the top down.

So, and just to, to just to illustrate why this is important, not just as

a value system, that's desirable and that we all might want to work like

that, rather it makes sense when you consider that when you're working with

an ecosystem, every ecosystem is unique.

Working in a regenerative way is something that is context specific.

And the journey of finding out about the context never ends, because

the context actually changes.

So when you're going through an ongoing evolution in the extreme cases of

regenerative agriculture, you'll find that the landscape you're operating in

changes every year on the basis that you are regenerating the landscape.

We are used to agriculture in simplified landscapes, where we put a huge

amount of destructive energy into keeping them at a very simple level.

When we operate with an ecosystem towards its potential, it's gonna change.

And the change will have an impact.

It's a non-linear logic.

And that requires everybody involved to work with the full apparatus of our

sensory instruments that we can bring to the table and be a part of this.

And you what, what that means is you become a knowledge worker.

You are bringing yourself to bear with your knowledge and as valued, and that

means that you've got an opportunity to innovate .And job satisfaction.

I believe comes from many things, including the a variety of different

tasks, the connection of input to output, so if people are connected to the profit

share there, that is a way of the overall team effort being rewarded when everybody

is innovated profitably together.

And the, third thing is control over my domain.

So there's a we currently generally expect people to perform to a job description.

What that, uh, does do, is it excludes the potential for me

to innovate within that job.

And, while there are limitations to everything I've just said, the

limitations should be dictated by the outcome in service of the overall gen

um, organization, as opposed to my management style, because it suits my ego.

And so essentially what we're talking about is roles defined by

outcome, not roles defined by tasks.

In, and I believe that humans independent of their level of schooling,

when it is invited, have a thirst.

Uh, and inquisitive nature that want they are good.

We are naturally good at connecting to other people.

And in fact, the landscape around us when we are when we are invited to do so.

And that that is a journey, there will be many mistakes made and maybe I'll have

to revise my statement, but that is the belief with which I'm going into this.

Yeah.

And I mean, I, yeah, it would be a belief I share.

And I guess one, a fourth point I would add to your three in terms of the kind

of the human response is, which is, uh, touched on what you just said.

There, there is a wish to learn and a wish to develop.

Uh, and of course, you know, if we have that impact output,

we have a feeling of agency.

We have a feeling of being valued and being connected to outcome.

And we have an environment, a culture, which, you know,

is of richer by me learning.

And I appreciate that.

Of course, then there is a kind of dynam in there, which, you

know, has to talk to, who we are.

Absolutely agree.

And I believe this word agency that you've just used is very key.

We are, by and large held hostage by a situation that the natural agency on

authority we carry is often educated out of us for, with the best of intent.

But unfortunately it has the side effect that we are not able to celebrate

ourselves as creative beings, and we depend on the authority of other people

to lead our lives according to this or that latest diet, as opposed to finding

what the diet is in all possible ways.

That is the right one for us.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, I guess, one thing I sort of would like to just to explore before we kind

of finish, and it would be great to revisit a lot of these things as your

journey unfolds, which would be good to follow the, this, the, how the, in

your developing conversations with the possible institutional investor partner,

how is profit being discussed in that?

I mean, have you got that far down the road?

How is profit coming up in, uh, in these conversations with

investors you might do with it?

I I, we are in the early stages of working out an agreement, and

I really need to be vague to allow as much creativity as possible.

I would say that obviously there's an assumption that we will be profitable and

a lot of attention is being given to the fact that we've made claims around this

form of agriculture and working within the agri food system is more profitable.

And there's also a recognition that there's a connection, although it's

not a necessary connection between the profitability and the ecosystem

services that this impacts on.

So, so those things are being recognized as part of the

understanding of what a regenerative enterprise is in this conversation.

And I'm really pleased about this institutional interest in, in, in this,

because it's such a positive sign.

And have you I know sort of cooperative is a loaded word, but just the kind of

principles of involving everybody in the journey, uh, whether that's understood

cooperatively, whether that's understood as kind of employee ownership, those

kind of ideas are those principles and ideas, which, uh, through all of the

conversations you had with institutional partners were respected and acknowledged

and likely to remain on the table, or is that something which, uh, you were sensing

sort of conflict and, uncertainty around?

would say it's a really good question.

And yes, cooperative is a loaded term, but there are in certainly in agriculture,

many very good examples of cooperatives serving a very good outcome in terms

of uh, or running a complex business.

So, so I don't see that I don't see the term or the history

of cooperative as a hurdle.

I I think the main issue for us in our analysis of land ownership was not that

you had to own the land, but that given the mindset that we were working into

at the moment the, fastest um, that the greatest impact in the shortest

possible time is guaranteed if you own the land, if you own and control

the land that you are also working on, and that once that's demonstrated

at scale, you can explore others.

I mean, ultimately the, in terms of the structural conversations we've,

uh, learned much about, it's more important that we consider a some kind

of a split between the land holding and the operations on the land and

how they, so I, I think that overall as a society, we still see that, we

still see somehow that the management of land is tied to the ownership.

I think that actually the commons was a great idea and it was and the

mindset that removed the commons was a short, very shortsighted one.

It was personal gain over collective benefit.

But how exactly that translates into a business model I couldn't tell you yet.

I can say that there are early examples of landowners experimenting with bringing

lots of different people that run different, but integrated enterprises

on the same land together in this way that I described as vertically stacking.

And that is definitely something that's central to the New Foundation Farms model.

So, so it's whether you are an employee or whether you're, self-employed what

matters beyond that what's more important is what impact or what outcome, the.

Integration of all of these activities has.

I think for me, these ideas are all so interesting because

they talk to resilience.

They've talked to adaptability, they talk to creativity and, you know,

in that sort of classic sort of, you know, I was thinking about how our

listeners may come to these ideas.

I'm really interested in the idea that actually the way they might come

to these ideas is because, you know, all entrepreneur, all businesses,

they're looking for resilience.

They're looking for ways we were talking, you know, before the podcast

about how kind of business schools teach the illusion of control,

teach the illusion of management and how we can do all of those things.

And of course, that's also talks to a human nature.

We try to make order, we try to make predictability out of things.

And to the extent of that kinda is possible or not possible, you know,

it is also true that when you are of running an organization, you are keen

to do the things which increase the likelihood of that organization, that

idea gaining traction in it's surviving, and I think any ideas which led with,

you know, which talk to resilience, which talk to adaptability, which talk to of

fostering our own creativity, have to increase the likelihood of that happening.

And I think everything that it feels to me, everything that you are trying to

do with New Foundation Farms and all the ideas that you are talking to actually

talk to that, and that's the kind of really interesting thing to my mind in

a way that might help these ideas become even more accessible to more people.

Absolutely.

I couldn't agree more.

And it's such a shame that we've run out of time because there's a whole

host of management frameworks that have been developed elsewhere in the world

that really allow a day to day operation of an organization in a way that is

non-linear while at the same time builds knowledge, et cetera in, in, holistic

ways that we generally find ourselves not schooled in until we look for them.

Right.

So that is the invitation, because that alone is another whole area I'd be

really keen to get into some of those frameworks, some of those perspectives

that will help people engage with that.

Yeah, just to, I mean, just two things I can drop in there as, and the world

of permaculture and the world of holistic management as pioneered by

Alan Savory and the Savory Institute.

Bit of a Marmite phrase, if I'm permitted to say that a savory also

has people who do not agree with him.

But if you, again, if you look at the outcomes of his work in, across the

globe at the regeneration of landscapes, through grazing approaches you, you'll

see that the grass really is taller where a holistic management hasn't

been applied than where it hasn't.

So there's something intrinsic to the management framework that is able to.

On to, to operate as a form of action research and for the outcome of the

action research to inform management decisions that, that and people have

spent decades thinking about this stuff.

And uh, gradually we're hearing more about this kind of thing in the mainstream.

fantastic.

Marcus, thank you so much for your time.

Contribution, energy insight.

It's really inspiring to hear, uh, and I'm sort of hugely

appreciative of you taking the time

Yeah, absolutely.

The pleasure is mine.

Ben really enjoyed this call.

Really enjoyed your questions and it's not felt like a podcast

interview, but more like, uh, uh, conversations of like-minded people.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Marcus.

Uh, if you like what we're doing and you like the sound of these

conversations, of course, go to the website to check out the others.

Uh, if you search up Buddha on the board.com and look for

peripheral thinking, you'll find everything that we do there.

And of course, if you like it, or you didn't even like it, whatever

it may be, feel free to share it.

Uh, that is the lifeblood of what we're trying to do here is

getting these conversations out to anybody who would benefit.

So if there's anyone, you know, who would benefit, please feel

free to share until next time.

Thanks.