Regenerative Agriculture and the Future of Business as a Force for Good with Ryan Pintado-Vertner
About This Episode
We are what we eat. It's an axiom. We take it as a great truth that the better the food we take on to fuel our human engines, the better those engines shall hum. Our guest this week asks us to both embrace that truth and expand it one further: we are what our food eats.
This is just one of the core principles of regenerative agriculture, a practice celebrated by our guest today. Ryan Pintado-Vertner is an activist and a strategic marketing impact expert who helps purpose-driven founders, CEOs, and their teams stay true to their mission through thoughtful marketing and business growth strategies. Ryan has also spent a good part of his career working in natural foods and consumer packaged goods and works at the intersection of what we consume and how that consumption affects our planet and our bodies.
Ryan is also a noted enthusiast for the transformative potential of regenerative agriculture. Far from a niche concept, regenerative practices offer a powerful trifecta of benefits: sequestering carbon to combat climate change, producing more nutritious food, and fostering healthier ecosystems.
As Ryan explains, the health of the soil is the cornerstone that enables plants to convey the best nutrient benefits to both humans and animals. He illuminates how regenerative agriculture's focus on building healthy soil can allow agriculture to become a net negative contributor to atmospheric carbon. While still in the early stages, hundreds of organizations worldwide are pioneering regenerative practices at various scales.
However, regenerative agriculture is about more than just farming techniques. Ryan emphasizes how it represents a broader approach to life and relationships, one that honors the sacredness of every part of the ecosystem. Embracing regenerative principles means adding value rather than extracting it and recognizing that diversity is inherently essential for any system to thrive.
As awareness of regenerative agriculture grows, it has the potential to not only heal our planet and nourish our bodies, but to profoundly reshape how we relate to one another and the natural world we inhabit. This week's show invites each of us to plant the seeds of a regenerative future, one nutrient-rich carrot at a time. Our great thanks to Ryan for joining us this week on Mission Forward.
Links & Notes
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Speaker 1:
Breaking news.
Breaking news.
It's the year of the chat bot.
The latest setback for climate and the latest Supreme Court ruling.
The court is set to redefine.
In the latest Supreme Court ruling, the court is set to redefine.
Carrie Fox:
Hi there and welcome to the Mission Forward podcast. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B Corporation. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. You are catching us still pretty early into our ninth season, and today we have got a returning guest who I love learning from, and I know you will too. But before I introduce him, let me set the stage for today's conversation. So if you have tuned into our trailer, you know that this season we are digging into the critical issues facing leaders in this 2024 year. From navigating through this unprecedented presidential election year to increased polarization at work, AI in action and DEI under attack, our public health and our personal health, there is a lot to take on this year, including one more critical issue that is the focus of today's conversation. In our season opening conversation with Carol Cone, she said, "For every company, addressing climate and how their business impacts our planet is no longer a nice to do, it's a must do."
So today we're taking on the planet, well as much as we can take on the planet in a 25 minute show, and we are doing it with one of my favorite people on the planet. Ryan Pintado-Vertner. Ryan is Mission Partners' social entrepreneur in residence, but more importantly, he is an activist and a strategic marketing impact expert who helps purpose-driven founders, CEOs and their teams, stay true to their mission through thoughtful marketing and business growth strategies. I have seen Ryan many times in action and I will tell you from each of those experiences working with him that we have such a treat to be with him today. Now, lucky for us, Ryan has also spent a good part of his career working in natural foods and consumer packaged goods, so he's often thinking about how and what we consume and how that has an effect on our planet and our bodies. Ryan, it's so good to have you back here on Mission Forward.
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
I'm honored to be back. I will say yes, anytime you invite me. This is a hundred percent one of the things that I always look forward to. I value you, I value the partnership, I value the friendship so much so thank you.
Carrie Fox:
Awesome. Well, thank you. So let's just get right into this. This is a huge issue and you have really found a way to make it real for us. A lot of people listening, they already know that climate change is real, they already know that our planet is in danger, but they might not realize how much is in their power to do something about it. So take us where you want to take us as we get started.
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
I appreciate that setup and I appreciate what you said about Harrell's thoughts and approach to it because I think we're the generation that is making a critical fork in the road decision, frankly. It is no longer, can we do something, should we do something, might we do something? We are on the precipice of a level of climate change and a level of global temperature rise that would produce irreversible outcomes if our generation does not really step up and accept the challenge. So I appreciate that you're giving some focus to this. I am sure that your audience is tuned into it and cares about it.
And I also think, as you rightly said, there can be moments in the climate crisis conversation where we just feel disempowered. Where it feels like such a colossal problem, such a huge hill to climb that what can we as individual people, what can we as individual consumers actually do about it? And I was introduced to a concept, to a movement, that made me more optimistic on this topic than I have ever been. And I dare say it basically became, I think, the single most important idea in all of the food industry and one of the most inspiring ways that we can each have an impact on climate.
And I'll talk a little bit about it and then we can get into what this idea's bigger implications are for how we relate to one another, how we relate to the planet. The concept is called regenerative agriculture, and that is a mouthful. As communicators, I'll just say it right up front. That is a mouthful. It probably doesn't cue anything in particular. And so before I get into defining it, I'm going to take a step back and start by just dialing into our intuition as human beings. What we all know intuitively is that we are what we eat. We've all heard that phrase. You are what you eat.
We know that the food we eat directly impacts our health, both physically and mentally. Science proves that. We know that the way that we raise food directly impacts the planet's health. That's intuitive. We know also that that adage of you are what you eat doesn't just apply to us as human beings, it applies to the food that we eat too. Two carrots are not necessarily equal. If one carrot had access to better nutrition, if it ate a better diet, if it lived in a environmentally balanced and sustainable context, it is probably healthier. We know that intuitively.
What's fascinating is that the cornerstone of what makes that true is that what plants eat ultimately is, or a huge part of it, is the nutrition that lives in the soil. That is the way the ecosystem is built. That's the way nature is designed, that there is a huge... If you think of how expansive the universe is, there is that level of complexity underground that creates the nutrient rich environment that allows for a plant to be its healthiest self, which in turn allows that plant to convey the best nutrient benefit to us. So all of that adage of you are what you eat and the power of food and nutrition comes down to the health of the soil. Healthy soil leads to healthier plants. Healthier plants leads to better nutrition for us and for the animals that we raise.
Carrie Fox:
I got to just stop you really quick because the first time that I heard you start to talk about this, I was ready to give up my day job and follow you and be like, "We got to do this every day, all day. We have to talk about this." Because the aha I had, and I started to hear you talk about this, is there are things that I think we take for granted as consumers. We have told that you should do most of your grocery shopping on the outside aisles of the grocery store. That's where the plants are, that's where the healthy food is, that's where the fresh food is. Great, we get that. But you know what? There's not labels on your carrots. And so you think you're buying your carrots, you think you're buying your kale, you think you're buying food that's healthy for you. But what you're really saying is there's a whole different level of thinking about and acting on how you are purchasing and consuming the food you choose when you're purchasing food.
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
That's right. It would be great to believe that a carrot is a carrot. Unfortunately, what's true is that a carrot a hundred years ago, a carrot 200 years ago, had a level of nutrient density far superior to a carrot today raised in conventional agricultural methods, and that fundamentally comes down to the health of the soil. So for those who are really paying attention, you might believe that I've lost the thread because the conversation started with climate and catastrophe and what can we do as an individual? And now we're talking about soil and we're talking about food nutrition. Sounds interesting, but how do these two things connect? Here's how it connects and here's why it's relevant to this concept of regenerative agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture is the set of practices that are focused on producing the healthiest possible soil. As a consequence of investing in healthy soil, and we can get into what that concretely means, that will produce the healthiest possible food. Bonus is that the healthiest soil also has a capacity for sequestering carbon that's built into the way soil works. The game changer for me when I learned about regenerative was, not just it connecting some intuitive dots about, yeah, it makes sense that if a carrot is consuming the nutrients in the soil and the soil is nutrient rich, then the carrot's going to be better for me. Got it. I love that just on its own. But when I learned that part of that biodynamic relationship, part of that symbiotic relationship is actually that the soil is sequestering carbon, and that that could literally allow for agriculture to be a net negative contributor to carbon.
What I mean by that is that it's not just neutral, it's not just reducing the rate of carbon contribution. It could actually become a way to decrease the carbon in the atmosphere. It became the rare trifecta where a set of practices can be better for the climate, they can be better for the animals that we steward and raise on the land, and it can be better for us as human beings, all in the same set of choices. So where we are today, for those of you who have been around for a bit, imagine 30 years ago the first time you ever heard the term organic. Fast forward to today organic you can go in pretty much any grocery store and buy it. It's not nearly as big as we would hope.
I wish it were a bigger percentage of the average grocery store. But today, if you chose to pursue organic and reduce the amount of petrochemicals and agrochemicals in your food, you could make that choice. We are in the early innings of regenerative agriculture becoming what organic is. I'm super inspired by that. It has become something that I see as such a profound opportunity for humanity, that it's one of the cornerstones of where I hope Smoke Town evolves. I want it 20 years from now, when I look back on whether the Smoke Town experiment was worth running, I want to be able to say, "Well, more people are eating nutrient dense food. More carbon is being sequestered in the soil because I and my team made some contribution to helping regenerative agriculture go from this niche idea to being on a lot more plates around the world."
Carrie Fox:
All right, so I love that we're at the early stages and talking about this, and I have so many questions. But tell me, first, give me a sense of what the landscape looks like now. Are there folks who are pioneering this field? Is it still early before we're seeing some of the effects of regenerative agriculture coming to market? How early are we?
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
It's an excellent question. I described us as being in the early innings, and I think that that is somewhat true depending on your vantage point, but your question prompts me to get a bit more specific. We are at a point where there are hundreds of organizations, and I'm using the term organization loosely here, that could be nonprofit, for-profit, brands, farmers, producers. There's hundreds globally that are committed to some level of regenerative practice and scale. Some of them are tiny, some of them are huge, like a company like General Mills that has made a commitment to convert a certain percentage of the acreage that it has influence over into regenerative practices over time. So there's a huge range in levels of scale. But we're at the point where though it's early, there are lots of people who are trying to figure out how to move this forward.
So that's one way to answer the question. The other way to answer the question is, one of the trickier parts of where regenerative is as a movement is there's still hot debate around which set of practices should count as regenerative. So if you've got two carrots, since I apparently love carrots, I'll stick with carrots as the reference point. If you walk into your local grocery store and there's two carrots and they both claim to be regenerative, there's a debate over what's the definition that each of those companies needed to clear, what are the things that they had to have actually done, or what are the outcomes that they had that they need to be able to prove, to get a chance to say. That's largely unregulated territory right now. There's really smart people, really passionate people, trying to work that out. So we're at a stage where there's a groundswell of interest that's growing by the year.
There's an intellectual debate to sort out how we're going to actually define this as we scale it up. There's a very real conundrum of how do we explain to the average person what this even is. I did my best at trying to explain it, and there's a bunch of people who will listen to this who know this better than I do will, who could have done it better. But what I think everyone agrees on is that we're at a stage right now where it is fairly complex to explain what regenerative is. The term itself is not super intuitive. And so I think the piece that I see us contributing to at some point is helping to figure out the right messaging and language to explain this incredibly important game-changing idea in clear enough terms that the average consumer can A, understand it, B, recognize and see themselves in it, and then most importantly, go to the grocery store, look for the regenerative product, and if it's not their, demand it be there.
Carrie Fox:
It's interesting, and I do not have an answer to that question, but as I was hearing you, I had this visual in my mind of fast fashion and how we have come to understand with just two simple words, the detriments of buying fast fashion. What those words now represent, what they mean and the negative effect that they have on our planet. And the best I could do is think, "Gosh, is fast fashion basically like fast agriculture?" Are we speeding up the process of how we bring food to market, how we grow food in a way that's actually contributing to this? And we need to go back to, not the slow food movement, because I know this is different, but going back to thinking about the intentionality of the growth.
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
Right. Yeah. I think that there's a lot of truth to that idea that we're hearkening back to a set of practices that frankly are ancient, that people who have been stewarding land hundreds of years ago actually had figured this out, including actually some scientists hundreds of years ago that had seen the basics of what I just described and tried to call everyone's attention to it and didn't get the attention that they deserved. So I think that there's a lot of truth to that. I will say that one caveat that I would add to that, or one parenthetical, let's call it, is as I've been on this journey and explored ways that Smoke Town can find its role, my level of empathy for farmers has grown exponentially because part of the extractive system that we've created within the world of food puts a tremendous burden on the farmer.
When the demand was we need you to feed 3 billion people as cheaply as possible, farmers bore the burden. When the demand was we need you to reduce your climate footprint, the burden was on the farmer. Every time there's a rallying cry of some sort, there's this way in which farmers, they get caught in the middle. That as part of how we approach this, one of the things that I find even more deeply inspiring just about the idea of regeneration is it's not just an approach to agriculture, it's an approach to life and relationships. It's the idea that every relationship in an ecosystem is sacred. All of the relationships are sacred. You remove one piece of it, if you degrade one piece of it, you've degraded the ecosystem, which farmers frankly have not. We have not done that with respect to farmers.
We've not honored the sacredness of their role in it. We have tended to put them in a vice where they're squeezed between cost pressure and price pressure. Or a squeezed between yield and revenue. They're just constantly squeezed. So part of this idea of regenerative at large in a bigger way is how do we rethink our relationship to one another? How do we honor the sacredness of relationships? How do we leave things better than when we found them? How do we add value rather than extract value? One of the cornerstones of regenerative practices is the idea of biodiversity. It turns out that biodiversity on the land, the more kinds of fauna, the more kinds of animals, the more dynamic the combinations, the richer the soil health becomes because each of them contributes something unique and different to the system that is what soil represents.
When you zoom out from that, if biodiversity is important to regenerative agriculture, then diversity is inherently important conceptually. So I say all this to suggest that part of what I believe regenerative can contribute is not simply giving each of us a way to vote with our dollars on food that actually helps the climate and also feeds us better. It does that. But if we embrace the bigger idea of what it is and what it means, it could actually transform society and how we relate to one another in ways that frankly, certainly in the world of business, few concepts I've ever run into are more comprehensive.
Carrie Fox:
So true. And I'm going to just repeat back the two that you shared. And I want the folks listening to think about their work right now in this moment, whether they're thinking about their DEI commitments or their thinking about their AI strategy, or they're thinking about their purpose commitments, whatever it happens to be. You just said add value versus extract value. You said diversity is inherently required to thrive. There are certain things that are non-negotiables, and this offers a perfect solution and framework for us to think about how we could apply regenerative agriculture practices in any part of our work.
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
That's right. I love how you distilled that down as non-negotiable. And what I would add is there's two ways to think of why they're non-negotiable. It's non-negotiable because society's demanding it, which can feel like it's like an imposition. But then there's a way of thinking about it as non-negotiable because it is built in to how the world was made. We are designed for this.
Carrie Fox:
Wow. Oh my gosh. So Ryan, I didn't prompt you with this one in advance, so take a minute and think on this, or maybe you know right off the top of your head. But as we are coming to the end of the show, what's one, two, or three things that we could take on to support you in this movement, or broadly just to support this movement, to keep this work moving forward?
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
Yeah, I do have a couple of thoughts. I think that right now we are at a place where the most important thing is education. That people who went from before they listened to this podcast, I've never heard of regenerative to, a seed has been planted, no pun intended. I think that the most critical next step is to invest some time and energy to go beyond this conversation between you and I and learn more. And there's a couple of things that I would point folks to that I personally have found particularly valuable. One of them is, there's a film called Kiss The Ground that is available on Netflix, I think. I believe that's where I saw it. There's an organization built around that also called Kiss The Ground, and their website has a ton of resources that can help you as a business leader, you as a gardener.
I'm actually literally going to plant a regenerative garden in our backyard and theoretically have chickens if I turned out to be good enough at it to not kill the chickens. So we'll find out. So Kiss The Ground has done a terrific job of collating a bunch of really great resources. That's one. A second one is there's a book called What Your Food Ate that is exceptional. It's a couple of scientists who read broadly across all published peer-reviewed papers and distilled all of it down to really unpack what is that symbiotic relationship between soil health and nutrient density and climate improvement, and it's the best thing that I've read. So I'd say that those are two places to start. And from there, both of those two websites and sets of people, if you follow their podcasts and threads and all that stuff, will take folks into a lot of directions and get introduced to some really smart people.
Carrie Fox:
Wow. Amazing. and I'm going to add one more. The note on really smart people, you among them, is if there are folks listening right now who are like, "I'm already in, I'm interested in learning more, and I'm interested in working with Ryan to explore this more," how do people get in touch with you?
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
Thank you for that. There's two ways. The first is you can always ping me on email, ryan@smoketownstrategy.com. The second way, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active. My level of activity there is going to ramp up here soon again. I guess there's three. The third way is I've got a newsletter on Substack called The Big Fight, and that will become a place where I'm publishing quite a bit about this topic as well.
Carrie Fox:
Great. And all of those links are going to be easy to find in the notes of this show. Ryan, as always, I am enormously grateful to you and to everything that you teach me and that you have taught this audience today. Thanks for your time and for these great insights and big thought provoking questions to keep us focused and continue to move this forward and we look forward to talking with you again soon and learning more about the growth of regenerative agriculture.
Ryan Pintado-Vertner:
Wow. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Carrie Fox:
And that brings us to the end of another episode of Mission Forward. If you like what you heard today, I hope you'll stop right now and give this show a five star rating wherever you are listening to this podcast, maybe even forward it to a friend who you think would enjoy today's conversation. And of course, check out the show notes for all of the links referenced in today's show. Mission Forward is produced with the support and wisdom of Pete Wright and the True Story production team, as well as the wonderful Sadie Lockhart of Mission Partners. You can learn more about our work over at missionforward.us, and of course, reach out to me anytime at carrie@mission.partners. Thanks for tuning in today, friend, and I'll see you next time.
