Whole Foods Market’s Post

Transcript

O The farming systems that we've developed over the last 100 years in this sort of get big or get out mentality are remarkable in that they're from an engineering standpoint and from like a science and technology standpoint. But I think we missed on how do we build a farming system that is a more holistic way of interacting with the land. What we're doing at Hickory Nut Gap and and the broader regenerative agriculture movement is to try to rebalance some of those systems into a more holistic way of thinking. The Hickory Nut Gap Meets brand is working with around 90 partner producers. They're located in North Carolina. North Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia right now, a lot of our guys are living in extremely rural areas and they might have been doing incredible grass fed beef management, but they didn't have a market like Asheville. And so Hickory Neck got meets allows them to kind of use the power that we have in numbers when it comes to things like shipping, trucking, labeling, all this stuff to get their product to consumers that want it, which I think is really kind of the magic. With the brand, we can create something a little different here at Hickory Nut Gap as opposed to just the the Race to the Bottom commodity game that so many farmers end up playing. We try to bring in farmers, talk to them about new ideas, build community, build trust, get to know each other and, and, and have hard conversations because that's what that's what it's all about. With regenerative, it's more about like base saturation, organic matter, those type of things. So what you're really trying to do is prove where we're storing carbon. Instead of all that carbon being released back in the atmosphere, it's is staying in the ground because of the organic matter and that green cover that's bringing in carbon dioxide. I do a lot of ecological outcome verification on our partner farms, looking for signs that the four ecosystem processes are functioning to the best of their ability. And so I'm measuring the health of the water cycle community dynamics, which is generally plant community dynamics, the nutrient cycle, plant nutrients specifically, and then the mineral cycle. Regenerative is a special word to me and I think like if we're going to sum it up in one other word, it's like it's hopeful. And so it's agriculture through the lens of hope that we can do things better and that we can be improving our communities, both natural and human through agriculture rather than degrading them. It's not necessarily a set of new practices. These are things that a lot of these grass fed beef producers in particular have been doing for years and years and years. Things like adaptively managed paddock grazing, really just like reading the landscape. Putting an appropriate number of animals on it, giving the land adequate rest. We've sort of chosen regenerative as the term for those practices. It's a more hopeful term than sustainable. Like I don't just want to be sustaining where we're at, I want to be building. We've seen the term regenerative become a buzzword in recent years, and we want that word to still mean something at Whole Foods Market. 20 years ago, we were the first national certified organic grocer and now we're the first private label to launch a regenerative organic certified product. When we launched this policy in 2021, did not know how it would go over with suppliers. But most of our suppliers that are actually integrating regenerative agriculture into their supply chains have actually thanked us for having this policy because they know how hard they're working to advance regenerative agriculture and they too want to maintain the integrity of the term. The grass grow up big, thick and deep. You bring a herd of animals and you graze it and you move them and that's sort of pulsing other grass growth allows, I think, our economic system. Often leads to like a relationships that are transactional and ultimate goal is economic gain. And to me that's not a regenerative approach. What's a regenerative approach is building trust with with folks in your community. And we want people to come. We want people to be curious. We want people to ask questions and, and we don't have all the answers. We're still learning and and we see Whole Foods as a really good collaborator. Consumers to think about the whole story when they're trying to decide what products they want to buy. So not only the animal welfare side, but did this farms practices protect water quality and they're in that farms community. Did this farms practices increase the like economic welfare of these rural communities? My grandfather instilled in me at a young age he said the most important thing that you'll ever do in life is leaving things better than you found it. When we started, you know, doing the regenerative practice, you know, I started seeing those ecosystems come back to life, you know, with the birds were back, the butterflies were back. And if we could keep people on their land and we can keep family farms going strong, I think long term maybe we can make the world a better place and reverse some of this. But it's got to start at the farm.