Between 40 to 50% of our population is alive on this planet today thanks to fertilizers. However, fertilizers are also one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters and when managed poorly, can also contribute to the nutrient pollution of lakes, rivers and streams.  This week, we sat down with Pablo Barrera Lopez, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Communications at Yara International, a leading Norwegian agribusiness and chemical company on the forefront of the sustainable and ethical production of several types of fertilizer. Lopez takes us through the history of the fertilizer industry (hint, modern fertilizers were invented at Yara), how the invention of fertilizer prevented mass hunger, and the complicated relationship of the life-saving product with climate change. Lopez also walks us through the top innovations taking place in the industry to mitigate its impact on climate including everything from renewable-energy fueled fertilizer plants and high-tech precision application tools to better farmer education. In addition, Lopez works with the World Economic Forum, where he promotes corporate sustainability and works with global youth to help them develop talents and skills to be responsible forces for good in their communities. For more information: https://www.yara.com/

Agriculture Adapts by ClimateAi

One of the greatest humanitarian creations of all time is also one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters. Here’s how we fix that.

Angela Santiago is the co-founder and CEO of the Little Potato Company, an innovative and fast growing company focused on colorful, tasty, mini-potatoes that taste delicious. We talk with Angela about the mechanics of the potato world, the obstacles climate change is creating for the industry, and what it takes to build an agriculture business from the ground up,  This week in Agriculture Adapts Breeding for diversity and flavor Your french fries, chips, and table potatoes all come from different types of potatoes, specifically bred for their end use Increasing weather uncertainty, more frequent extreme events, and a potato production moving north to escape the heat How small changes in weather can bear significant impact on the way the crop turns out *** website: The Little Potato Company facebook: The Little Potato Company *This episode is a repost

Angela Santiago – CEO of The Little Potato Company: Taking the Potato Back to it’s Roots (repost)

This week we sit down with Stuart Woolf, the President and CEO of Los Gatos Tomatoes, one of the largest tomato processors in the world. Stuart gives us an inside view into the science, technology, and logistical genius that enabled 3x higher yields in the processing tomato industry over the last 50 years, all while reducing labor requirements to a fraction of what they once were.  We cover everything from decades of tomato seed breeding efforts to the 120 day, 24/7 harvesting sprint-marathon that results in 325 million lbs of tomato paste every year. If ever there was a 1 hour crash course on processing tomatoes, this may very well be it. Stuart is also the President and CEO of Woolf farming and has served as Chairman of the California League of Food Processors, the Almond Board of California, and of the UC President’s Commission of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Stuart also currently serves on the board of the California Chamber of Commerce, the Western Growers Association, and Marone Bio Innovation. https://www.woolffarming.com/ http://www.losgatostomato.com/ 

325 Million lbs of Tomato Paste in 4 Months: How this CEO's Family Farming Operation Became One of the Top Tomato Processors in the World

Over the past 10 years, there has been a mass exodus of banks in the UK pulling out of short-term lending to farmers. This has made it harder and more expensive for farmers to get the capital they need to run their business and keep producing essential crops.  We sit down with Tim Coates, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of Oxbury Bank, the UK’s only 100% agriculture focused bank to discuss how Oxbury is revolutionizing agriculture banking and the impact this will have on farmers + agriculture sustainability throughout the country and beyond: The history behind the broken agriculture banking system How technology is enabling cost and time savings for farmers using Oxbury Turning savings into sequestered carbon Driving sustainability effortlessly and automatically at the farm-level Similar banking challenges are playing out in numerous countries around the world https://www.oxbury.com/

Agriculture Banking is Broken. This Co-founder is Fixing it... and He’s Helping You Sequester Carbon While He’s at It

Hey listeners, hope you all enjoyed year 1 of Agriculture Adapts as much as we did! The Ag Adapts team will be taking a short break before returning for year 2. We really appreciate everyone's support and we look forward to many exciting episodes to come! If you have any thoughts or feedback please feel free to reach out to media@climate.ai. See you all soon!  

Agriculture Adapts Intermission

 Since the 2008 financial crisis, agriculture has become a hotbed for investment: food consumption withstands recessions, demand is expected to double by 2050, and agriculture has largely proven to be a low volatility investment that can serve as an inflation hedge (as inflation goes up, so do ag land values)... But not everyone supports the institutionalization of ag land ownership. We sit down with Martin Davies, President and CEO of the Westchester group, the #1 largest farmland asset manager in the world to talk about: how institutional ag land investing really works what separates an extractive investment from a sustainable one the implications of increasing corporate/foreign ownership of domestic ag lands. how climate change plays into the investment thesis. Westchester has been a frontrunner on sustainability and continues to push the envelope on setting a positive standard for the industry. Westchester manages over 2 million acres and is a subsidiary of TIAA, a fund managing over $1 trillion in assets.

Martin Davies - CEO of the #1 Largest farmland Asset Manager in the World: Sustainable Farmland Investing and the Implications of Foreign/Corporate Ownership of Our Food Supply

*This is a repost of a past episode Katharine Hayhoe is one of the world's most renowned climate scientists-- she has a ted talk with over 2.5 million views, and in 2017 was named one of Fortune’s world’s greatest leaders. Katharine is a professor at Texas Tech University and has been published in over 125 peer reviewed papers, abstracts, and key reports including the National Climate Assessment. We speak with Katharine about the science, the impacts, and the psychology of climate change. This week in Agriculture Adapts: - Why the U.S. Military calls climate change a "threat multiplier" - The impact of climate change on agriculture: risk, resilience, and profitability - Faith based communication on climate change: the secret to a fruitful discussion is common ground *** Links to topics mentioned in the episode: Global Weirding Katharine's Ted Talk Iowa Interfaith power and light Katharine's Facebook Katharine's Twitter 

(Repost) Katharine Hayhoe - One of the World's Most Renowned Climate Scientists: the Science, Impacts, and Psychology of Climate Change

 ClimateAi - Accelerating Resilience in Agriculture The coronavirus has highlighted the importance of resilience, not just efficiency, in the long term success of agriculture supply chains. One of the most powerful tools we have to drive resilience is agricultural biodiversity... and yes, it can be done at scale. Biodiversity is a critical sign of ecosystem health--in the rainforest or on the farm-- and has proven to be crucial for agricultural productivity, profitability, and resilience. Biodiversity has been on the decline due to a simplification of our diets, growing demand for animal feed and biofuels, and a climate that is changing faster than nature can keep up with. We sit down with food system and agriculture biodiversity expert Ann Tutwiler to explore the tangible steps we must take to systematically increase biodiversity and the outsized impact this will have on the health of our planet and the profitability of farming.  Ann has spent the past 35 years tackling some of the most pressing issues in food and agriculture. She co-developed the U.S. govt’s global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future program. Ann is also the former Deputy Director General for Knowledge at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as well as the former Director General of Bioversity International. *** References Mentioned in the episode - UN Food Systems Summit   - World Benchmarking Alliance (how are companies holding up against their promises)

Ann Tutwiler - Biodiversity Determines Human and Environmental Health, Farmer Profitability, and Food System Resilience; Here's How We Deploy it at Scale

Agriculture is faced with the critical challenge of reducing pesticide use, improving water efficiency, and building a food system that is resilient to climate change all while delivering nutritious affordable food for the masses. In this episode we dig in with Dave Chen to talk about how Equilibrium Capital is putting their $1B+ fund behind a tried and true technology to deliver on all fronts-- high-tech greenhouses. High-tech greenhouses are extremely common across Europe. Meticulous optimization at the plant level has enabled 10 - 40x productivity increases with a laundry list of sustainability and resilience benefits. But these glass and steel mega-producers have yet to come to the U.S. en mass. Equilibrium Capital is fueling a movement that will enable a new era of precision agriculture with sights set on solving some of the industry's most pressing issues.  *** Equilibrium Capital

David Chen - The Technology that Reduces Water and Pesticides by +90% While Producing Affordable, Climate Change-Proof, High-Quality Fruits & Veggies

Between 1982-2015, the world’s population grew from 4.5 billion to about 7.5 billion while land under agriculture remained the same. More food was produced on the same amount of land but climate change and the resultant rise in the extreme weather events pose a serious challenge to the world’s food production. Is the time now ripe for a second green revolution? Ernst Van Den Ende, a leader in dutch agriculture innovation, explains that there is no 'silver bullet' to solve the world’s agriculture woes but a focus on a combination of technology and ecology can make agriculture more productive, efficient and sustainable. Based in the Netherlands, Ernst Van Den Ende is a renowned plant scientist and the managing director of the Plant Sciences group at Wageningen University, one of the world’s top agriculture educational, research and technology hubs. He leads a group of nearly 1,400 agricultural scientists, various corporate partners,  and hundreds of start-ups in the agro-food domain, to tackle the most pressing challenges facing the future of food.

Ernst Van Den Ende – Technology, Ecology, and Science Based Thinking can Solve the World’s Agriculture Conundrum

Nowadays, grocery store items are stocked full of labels: pasture raised, cage free, non-gmo, sustainable, the list goes on. But if the health and environmental problems these labels seek to address were legitimate, why wouldn't they be made mandatory? Are they just a marketing hoax or a path to a safer, healthier, more environmentally friendly food system?  We sit down with agri-business expert Mary Shelman to deconstruct these questions and more. Mary is an internationally recognized thought leader, author, and speaker on global agribusiness, AgTech, and food system trends. She is the former Director of Harvard Business School’s Agribusiness Program and has worked closely with startups, Fortune 500 companies, governments, and the FAO. She is the author of 70+ case studies on the world’s top agri-food businesses.

Mary Shelman - Value Added Food Labels: Marketing Hoax or a Path to a Better Food System?

After interviewing many guests, I was still left with the following questions: what are we doing to systematically mitigate our agriculture emissions, is it actually working, and how far do we have left to go? In this episode we dive in with the group that has been tackling these questions in California for the past 10 years. Renata Brillinger is the executive director at CalCAN, a California based nonprofit driving forward critical policies and programs at the intersection of climate change and sustainable agriculture. We discuss decarbonizing livestock, what regenerative agriculture looks like at industrial scale, and the financial breakdown of how we get to net negative emissions (I’ll give you a hint, its surprisingly low).  *** Resources mentioned in the episode: CalCAN website California Agriculture Climate Solutions Summary What’s happening in other states? National Healthy Soils Policy Network Renata’s email: renata@calclimateag.org 

Renata Brillinger - Getting California Agriculture to Net-Negative Green House Gas Emissions

Building a startup from scratch is an art. In this episode, we sit down with Swaroop Kittu Kolluri, one of the best early stage venture capital investors, to dive into what it takes to go from an idea to a billion dollar business, with a focus on the ag-tech and climate-tech.  Kittu is the founder & managing director at Neotribe Ventures. He is a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist and has both run and invested in several successful startups including well known names like Climate Corporation, box, robinhood, webMD, and Bloom Energy.  Kittu gives an inside view into the journey of The Climate Corporation, one of the most successful ag-tech and climate-tech startups of the 21st century. He also shares some of the key the tips, tricks, and strategies that he uses to coach his founders. *** Background Reading Walking Around in Your VC’s Shoes - Written by Kittu Neotribe Ventures

Kittu Kolluri - How to Turn an Idea into a Billion Dollar Agriculture Climate Technology Company

Ed brings one of the most diverse agriculture perspectives to the podcast to date. He is the former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 2 time governor of North Dakota, and he has led a multi-national consumer products business as well as many entrepreneurial start-ups. Ed played a pivotal role in many of the biggest agriculture events and movements of the 21st century. This week in Agriculture Adapts: Tackling the 2008 world food crisis; learnings for a safe & resilient global food system What it was like to build the USDA organic label and why it may be more "wishy washy" than you'd expect G.M.O.s are a spectrum, we can't bunch them all together and rule them out-- there is too much potential for good How silicon valley jumped the gun with ag-tech *** References mentioned in the episode 2007-08 world food price crisis Golden Rice - G.M.O.s and Vitamin A deficiency in developing countries 

Ed Schafer- Former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture: The 2008 World Food Crisis, Building the Organic Label, and GMOs' Potential Power for Good

Tatiana Schlossberg is the author of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have and a former New York Times Science and climate reporter whose award-winning work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg and other publications. We chat with Tatiana about a variety of topics relating to climate change, pollution control, social inequality, agriculture, and aquaculture. “Its not about feeling individually guilty, its about feeling collectively responsible”  This week in Agriculture Adapts: How Climate change relates to everyday life and why feeling bad is not the answer Oceans, aquaculture, and sustainable fishing Why climate change and pollution are inextricably linked to social inequality Coal ash ponds: pollution disasters destroying the surrounding farmlands and natural environments *** References mentioned in the episode - The Omnivore’s Dilemma - The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail - Tatiana’s book: Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have - Tatiana’s website - Global Fishing Watch

Tatiana Schlossberg: Climate Change in the Everyday, Sustainable Fishing, and Impacts of Coal Ash Ponds on our Farmlands

Every week we speak with industry leading executives, farmers, and academics to get a 360 view of how the agriculture sector is innovating to stay ahead of a changing climate. We belong to a small team of climate and ag entrepreneurs trying to make farming more resilient, profitable, and equitable as we transition to a new age of agriculture. This podcast is our journey as we explore the hurdles and opportunities that lie ahead for the industry that feeds the world. To learn more, visit us at www.Climate.Ai

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Agriculture Adapts by ClimateAi

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