00:27 Hey, welcome back to the show. And today I am so excited to have with us Anastasia. Will you please tell us who you are and what do you do?

00:36 Of course, thank you so much for having me, Todd. I am the CEO and co-founder of Regrow Ag. To unpack what Regrow Ag does, I presume. 

00:47 Yeah, yeah, tell me.

00:48 We help to decarbonize agriculture as an industry that currently contributes up to one third to one quarter of the world's greenhouse gases. That doesn't seem right if you think about nature-based industry like agriculture. We're trying to make that equation right.

01:06 Right? It's tricky when those animals just can't really plow all those fields though, isn't it? 

01:12 Well, they really shouldn't. We know better ways of growing the food. But the actual challenge is companies that are large companies that have become the leaders in helping people eat. They now have the responsibility to figure out where is it that agriculture is falling short of that nature positive impact and try to address it because we as consumers, we're really hold brands accountable to a greater extent that we hold governments accountable for climate action.

01:42 Sure, sure. Well, I think it's smart and I definitely, I love what you're doing in terms of bringing science to technology into an industry that really is lacking in a lot of ways. And so I, you know, if the net result means less greenhouse, you know, more green sustainability and less energy consumption, I think it's an awesome thing. And so tell us about how you're doing that. I mean, what… What have you done to kind of provide a technical scientific solution to, let's face it, we've been agging the world since the beginning of mankind. What are we doing wrong now?

02:22 There are things that we've been doing well, but in the last, let's start with the problem statement. The last few decades, we've optimized agriculture to produce calories at pretty much all costs, and we figured a way to subsidize it. We figured a way to provide market incentives, but now we're really starting to say, well, we're all feeling the impacts of climate change on us. Therefore, we're all now willing to pay for those cost of externalities of how much does it cost the world for the food to be produced this way versus in a better way. In truth, we're going back to more indigenous, more holistic agricultural practices, often referred to as regenerative agriculture, less plowing, more diverse crops, less kind of synthetic inputs, more self-sustained systems through diversity of what's grown on down, integration of the animals. The systems are more complex. So definitely we took the right detour that we wanted to feed the world. Now we want to feed the world and not rock the planet. And we need to kind of keep both in the optimization equation from here onward. So what RegroW does about that is that if you think globally that you want to address this problem and you're a multinational brand, first of all, you can't manage what you can't measure. You need to measure where those Greenhouse gases need to be, where are they coming from? What should they be? What's possible? And you need scientific advice, but also you need the scale of technology to address it because we are farming 5 million hectares, 12 million acres of land globally. And any given company can source from a few million hectares of their tiny company to a few billion hectares in aggregate that they're touching through their supply chain, etc. So for us, being able to give them visibility into their on-farm emissions, for them to baseline them, and for us to give them the visibility into what can be done to reduce them, what's actionable, what's scientifically proven, what will farmers adopt, how can you invest in this now? That measurement of the gap and reduction of the gap is what the companies can find using our software.

04:42 So in addition to that though, from what I looked about on your website, which is very well designed and very informed, very educational, for those of you are wondering what we're talking about and want more details, I highly recommend you go to regrow.ag. It is a beautifully put together site, very clear and very informative actually. I really like it. For those of us that don't know, I mean, and for those of us who aren't in the know on agricultural, you know, effects on the environment. It seemed to me that your technology, while it is satisfying that mission, it does much more than that. It also increases efficiencies in farming. How are you solving these multiple problems all at once and where is your real focus?

05:30 Really the focus is on the North Star resilience for the entire value chain. So farm to plate or to a closet rack, whether it's food or fiber that you're growing and that resilience is the North Star we're aligning everyone to. Um, it just so happens really in an advantageous way that if you transition to some of the regenerative agriculture practices, you become more self-sustainable and that allows you to cut some of the budgets on synthetic inputs. So instead of getting the fertilizer synthetically, you are now getting more nutrients in the soil because you're farming it differently. The transition into that system is risky. 

06:11 Right, right, you're not killing everything all the time. Right?

06:15 Well, the transition into that system is risky. And so I don't think anyone wants to kill anything, but we want to operate within the system constraints of your crop insurance only promote certain set of practices, we need to evolve that crop insurance so it actually helps you focus on regenerative, become more resilient. That doesn't mean cutting the incentives, it means aligning the incentives with better for soil health practices.

06:37 Right, now I've actually been involved in it with another company that is very involved in solving a similar problem to you. And that is definitely stop, you know, after a crop is cut, stop killing everything and starting from scratch, you're eliminating all the minerals in the soils. And it sounds like what you're doing is, is you're promoting an action where the different types of crops are then leaving their excess for the next round. Is that kind of what we're talking about when we're saying regenerative?

07:05 Definitely. It's like the no-till practices. Yeah, 100%.

07:06 Farming, okay. That makes a lot of sense to most of us. Right, right. Now this makes a lot of sense. Now what is the big risk? Because if farmers, I mean, it makes sense to me that they wanna get the most crop they can out of their land and if they're cutting and killing instead of letting that regenerative process happen naturally, what do they have to lose from this? Is it fewer crops per season or what? What's kind of the what are we weighing here?

07:40 There's definitely, the risks are that if you have a highly optimized system and as a farmer you only have 40 harvests in your career that are under your belt. Normally, it's how you think about it. The risk of getting one of those wrong or adopting a bunch of new practices out of order or not necessarily having a good technical advice, it's operationally a logistical challenge. You have to have labor in the right place. You have to have the right machinery. You have to have the advice, you maybe want to see it done by your neighbor or so you know it works in the area, you can go to them for advice. So it's having this technological solution that in the science level makes everyone comfortable to make this transaction for the companies to invest in the future that the farm will make this impact and for the farmer to be able to get not just the science-based software and the clarity and the contribution to their positive impact but also get that technical assistance so that you are not risking the yield ultimately. You don't want the yield to dip.

08:44 Right, exactly. Right, right, that's torture for a farmer. So how do you maintain the yield? 

08:50 Very stressful.

08:51 Yeah, how do you maintain the yield while trying to adopt, and we shouldn't even say new practices, adopting practices that were here prior to World War II. I mean, is that really what we're trying to do here? Okay.

09:01 100%. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Yeah. And so I think in how you're trying to do it, we deploy a lot of agronomic decision support trying to work out where is the safe place. Is there enough like soil moisture to support this extra crop rotation or cover crop or is this in a good place for, from a weather perspective that if the cover crop is planted early enough, it's going to have enough benefit before they need to plant the main crop in spring. So we're trying to do this thinking for them. So by the time they're ready to even contemplate this decision, we have some directional guidance. 

09:37 I like it.

09:38 And cutting things like nitrogen, it is fairly straightforward, but it's something that can be feeling very risky, right? Because you always put it on as an insurance.

09:51 Yeah. Right. 

09:52 Like, oh, here's some extra fertilizer in case we get a bumper rain at the right time of the season. 

09:53 Give it a little boost, yeah. Right, right, right.

09:54 Yeah, but then when you're looking at it more closely. Oh, most of that really ends up in the environment and not in my crop. If I put it at this time, not this time, putting it at the right time, maybe logistically more challenging, but okay, how can I solve for that? You kind of move the needle by giving them the perspective that, oh, someone's going to pay you to share that risk. We all want that environmental outcome, not just productivity at all costs.

10:20 captainscouncil.com

11:57 Right, right, right. Hey, listen, I'm totally on board with this and I think that there are so many things we can learn. I mean, literally we've been farming the earth since the beginning of mankind and it's only been in the last 100 years, less than that, 80 years, that we've adopted some of these practices that have kind of hyper-manipulated the soils and we're actually seeing probably less yield now than we would have been 100 years ago, if we kept and maintained the same praxis. Am I kind of on the same page?

12:28 Hard to say Todd, hard to say because we've driven productivity through the roof. We've really optimized it and I don't think we would have had additional 2 billion people are being fed on this planet because of that process. So we've become very efficient and the farms are extremely efficient. But now we're just saying, hey, we do need to incorporate a little bit of more of that risk back into the system so that it's better for nature and more holistic. How can we do that? How do we redistribute the incentives to make that happen.

12:58 Okay, I love it. I love what you're doing and I am clearly not a farmer, but I will tell you that I appreciate what you're doing. I am a lover of nature and I'm a golfer and these little things, believe it or not, I get pretty nerdy about my golf grass and that kind of stuff and so I think about these things even though I'm not a farmer. And so Anastasia, as we talk about who you serve and why you're doing it, that seems very clear at this point. Talk to us about your business though, because you have had a really cool journey over the last seven or eight years in developing through acquisition some of your growth, but also just through your movement. I mean, this is a really powerful thing you're doing. How has that growth journey started and how did you jump off on your own and what made you think acquisition is the way we wanna do it?

13:49 Yeah, having started the company with the initial idea of this agrodomic decision support towards managing this access fertilizer application on a farm for the benefit financially of the farmer, it clearly evolved through two acquisitions, one of a farm management system and the team that was supporting it in Australia and New Zealand. It's still being widely used to compliance system in New Zealand where the environmental standards are much higher and tighter. So the farmers are a lot more clearly aware of the impact. So maintaining that system and giving them that decision support was really rewarding. And it was a foray into the use case of sustainability before the rest of the world has figured out they wanted to pay for it. So this was, you know, 2018, 19, back when, of course you can say environmental markets have been in the works for two decades, but really this is where governments were working with farmers. And that was Cottinghange where we saw it. So fast forward to 2021, we met with my current co-founder and merged our two companies, Degen and Floresat into Regrow. And the story there is that, as I mentioned, I started with an agronomic decision support use case on farm, and they started with like a large scale monitoring of sustainability practices that they could see in the landscape. And we said, Hey, these two are perfect marriage because you want to be optimizing for profitability and environmental outcome. We have the best in class science that we were able to license and partner with or create internally. Let's put these two things together and enable not just parts of the supply chain up upstream or downstream, but the entire supply chain, all the way from the farmer to the input provider, the aggregator, the food manufacturer, that brand that puts it on the grocery shelf.

15:39 There's a lot of steps there. Yeah.

15:40 A lot. We've become very efficient at this and that means it's very specialized.

15:44 I don't think a lot of people think about that. I think they just think, I'm gonna go to the farmer's market this weekend and grab some produce. But the reality is, is that there is a very, very complex organizational structure there between farm, even seed and fertilizers, if there are some healthy solutions out there. I'm not gonna jump into there. But from all the way from that point, all the way to the store shelves, you've got a lot of people in the mix there with a lot of influence and a lot of, you know. There's a lot of layers of money getting lost there as well. What are you doing to drive efficiencies there? Because I think that's what a lot of people think about is, well, how do we drive down costs? How do we bring more profitability to the farmers? Are you designing for that? Yeah.

16:33 We're doing two critical things. One, we're bringing them all on the same page. So the farmer is not using different science, different data to three other people that have actually end up paying for it. No, those three other people that are decision makers in these large companies, they can really collaborate and go to be on the same page and go with the straightforward incentive to the farmer. So like that has never happened before. So we provide unprecedented visibility to brands in aggregate what emissions look like, and then they're incentivized to provide the opportunity for farmers to contribute to reduce them. So having the same source of truth for what the science is saying is happening now and what could be beneficial is bringing them on the same page. A lot more efficient than running in circles and relying on different numbers. And the other thing we're doing is giving them more tailored tools. So each of them are more efficient. So they all sit on the same platform of data, but the brands, when they're planning, the projects when they're baselining and reporting their emissions, they're looking at a different software interface to a farmer. And in between, we have this very important amalgamation step where we don't just directly show farmer information to the corporate and vice versa. We amalgamated, de-identified, aggregated so that everyone's still looking at the same thing, but isn't stepping on each other's toes because that trust is really important. That we're all working on what matters in our way. And we're all protected by the fact that we're not directly exposed.

18:01 This is a really big deal. I'm really impressed with what you're doing. I mean, how are you getting buy-in on this? How has the growth been? I mean, you told me earlier, you've got a fairly large organization at this point. Monetization strategy, I mean, how does it work? Where are you making money on this deal?

18:19 Yeah, so we've grown fairly considerably. We've tripled, I think, since this time last year in terms of the number of people in the organization. 

18:29 Congrats.

18:32 And we're continuing to see the top line growth in terms of bookings and revenues. The way that we monetize is on their acre basis of annual subscription, so that companies buy acres worth of visibility into the system or worth of decision-making. And that's how we bring everyone on the same page.

18:50 That's smart. That's a fun, unique model. That's kinda cool.

18:54 It scales. It scales for everyone because that's what they tie their procurement volumes to. And for clarity, farmer gets paid. Farmer does not pay. They get paid to transition to the better practices, but the companies are financing it. Yeah.

19:12 Interesting interesting. Well that that's kind of a no-brainer

19:13 Well, it's all about sharing the risk with them so we can unblock the adoption of these better for the world practices and really show that agriculture not only can decarbonize itself but also help the world decarbonize and get on that 1.5 degree celsius trajectory.

19:28 Right, right. Well, I gotta say that there's a lot of people that are right along with you in terms of the carbon footprint and all that kind of stuff. I mean, obviously there's a lot of work to do outside of America. I think that America is definitely on a positive trend towards being more efficient that way. But I think that you're bringing real value in just bringing the science to the farmers and helping them understand that these efficiencies. The regenerative process that has been around forever has been forgotten. And how do we better utilize the earth and how do we better take care of this thing that keeps giving us our food, right?

20:10 And most of them want the same. They want to pass their land to future generations. And the most important thing is not only to come with better advice, because they largely know how to farm, but the intelligence that derisks those choices and the financing that derisks the implementation of those decisions. So it's a full package that matters. And it's really amazing to see just the visibility that the space is starting to gain. And we're so fortunate to either be, but the times 100 most influential companies on the leaders list, as well as getting, um, just so much interest from talent coming into the climate tech. And I think that's where we'll see biggest differences where we don't make it an isolated industry. We're really like everyone's job will be in sustainability by 2030. We will all figure out, uh, need to figure out how do we make the systems, uh, especially like supply chains more resilient, and that'll be the part of our job descriptions.

21:10 I like it, I like it. Now, obviously getting back to the growth and strategy within your growth of the company, let's talk about some of the challenges because I personally love an acquisition model where you're strategically aligning yourself first with software and then with another, whole other initiative that ties so well with what you're doing. It doesn't mean that it all works perfectly every time. What are some challenges that you've had to face in these acquisitions and in the growth of the regrow in and of itself?

21:45 Yeah, it's a great question. I would say we learned from the first acquisition what to do differently in the second acquisition, for sure. And the advice I would share is that I think that alignment culturally between the organizations, like it's either truly there, or it's truly not there. And you can't fake it. Like you really need to know what people are coming to work for. And that will determine whether they stay with then the renewed company, the new company that they will join. That was really, really clear to us, as well as if you are trying to put the puzzle pieces together, you really need to see those outlines clearly and really imagine that you would wake up tomorrow and all these people will be a part of your organization and all these products would be part of your platform. Does that fit or do you have really awkward places where you need to explain to this team why they're stopping to do X and starting to do Y or here is this forgotten cousin we're going to not leverage as much? Like it can be for a period of time. 

22:43 Totally. The redheaded stepchild. Right.

22:44 Exactly. That's the step child. Um, in, in some way you definitely want to, um, build it as a roadmap, but from the outset, you should be quite honest with yourself, how it fits and whether it will stick and be with you through the longterm and if that's what you want. Great. Like if you are all eyes wide open going into it saying, I'm acquiring IP here, the most important people that I want to retain the rest is really, um, not going to make a break the company after the transaction. Like whichever way it is, do you want to retain a high percentage or a different smaller percentage? You just need to be very clear about that and see it as if it's already happened and then process what conversations you would need to have with your stakeholders, 

23:28 Very smart. 

23:29 With your board, with your employees, with your customers. 

23:34 And theirs.

23:35 Exactly.

23:36 Yeah, so as you're doing that, as that process kind of unfolds, I really like what you talked about in being clear on mission, vision, values, and just kind of aligning, make sure that they do align with you, because you're right, it can't be faked. And everyone does stand for something, but not every company is very clear on what they stand for. How do you, you know, I mean, we're only talking about a couple of acquisitions here, but as you position yourself to potentially acquire a new partner or be acquired, by some other organization, how clearly and how well do you define what you stand for and what your mission is?

24:15 It's very clearly defined and it hasn't really changed even through the last set of merger acquisitions. It was strengthened, but we almost didn't touch our values to reinstate them. They were already there and they were the right values for us to continue on. I think having these conversations fairly regularly with folks reaching out and saying, hey, should we consider a JV or an M&A or where do you see this on this trajectory? Are we an additional piece to your puzzle or is it seen differently? We definitely want to be very clear as to what business models we want to be in and what business models and parts of the ecosystem we don't want to be in. And I think there's a number of ways to make this happen. Like you can have a partnership. You don't have to have a complete merger acquisition to just get something done. And maybe that's sufficient for that company to go and secure funding. They don't need to necessarily be acquired. But you have to be thoughtful about it. That like if we have a global business model with global partnerships. We can't have like a missed step where we make an acquisition that glans on the toes of one of our largest partnerships for elsewhere in the world. And then that needs to be discussed ideally upfront. It can be managed, but you really need to see how it all fits together. So we're very clear about that upfront and like whether and how we see that.

25:31 I love it. Hey, this has been such a fun conversation. I really do love what you've shared with us, not only about your business and what your mission is, but also how you've been able to transact and grow your business. I think it's fantastic. For those that want to know more, definitely go check out regrow.ag and dive into it. I mean, this is really a fun business model. And check it out. For those of you that are wanting to learn more, I mean, Anastasia, we all have somebody. As a CEO, we all got somebody that kind of is that pillar or that mentor or that person that's guided us through these transitions in our businesses. So someone you want to give a shout out to today.

26:11 I definitely want to give a shout out to my board, to Veery Maxwell from Galvanized Climate Solutions and Mike Zimmerman from Main Sequence Ventures. They've been with me on the journey and they both challenge me and inspire me, but also they help support this business and me personally and us navigating the turbulent waters of climate change.

26:33 It is very turbulent, but I think you're doing a great job. You're making a great impact on everything. And honestly, I hope more farmers do adopt. I hope that the earth is protected more. And I really appreciate what you guys are doing with your business. So thanks so much for being here today.

26:47 Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun.

26:51 It has been great. We'll catch the rest of you on the next episode. And Anastasia, we hope you the best in moving forward with your business. Thank you so much for being here.

26:59 Thank you all.