Can I Sign California Banking PPT

Can i industry sign banking california ppt easy

we have greg pennyroyal who i'm also privileged to get to work with on a weekly basis greg's analytical mind is always working to come up with different hypotheses and experiments in the vineyard the answers found have helped aea continue to dial in our vineyard programs wilson creek winery and vineyards owns 60 acres of estate grapes and manages an additional hundred acres in different stages of conversion to regenerative practices welcome greg hi rochelle thank you very much uh it's a real pleasure to be here i i get the maybe good opportunity or the challenging opportunity to be the mop-up crew but it's five o'clock here it's actually almost six o'clock here in california and um where uh dennis and steve started out with coffee or red bull i'm a wine maker so i'm starting out with some wine so i'm already ahead of the program here a little bit let me switch over to my powerpoint presentation so what i'd like to cover how i've evolved into regenerative agriculture i want to talk a little bit about a shift in perspective to quote a uh you know a popular business book start with why regenerative ag what it is and how to start a little bit about my background i started i actually started on a family farm in upstate new york but my first venture in major commercial agriculture was a manager at trout lake farm largest organic herb farm in upstate uh in uh actually eastern and western washington two thousand four hundred acres of diversified medicinal botanicals that's a field of echinacea purpurea in front of mount adams um not a bad place to work i moved from there to the director of botanical research for liner health which was a division of pfizer pharmaceuticals mostly because my research budget at pfizer was a thousand times larger than it was at at uh trout lake and i just couldn't resist hiring all those phds i spent some time at the us pharmacopoeia expert committee doing standards for medicinal plants on research i've done that kind of research for the institutes of health the global institute of tibetan medicine the tibetans are just a ton of fun to hang out with currently i'm a vineyard manager at wilson creek winery and professor of viticulture at mount san jacinto college so to start with my why i started in agriculture i went to medicine because i observed rapidly deteriorating public health a lot of the experiences i got in college and some of the sort of more medically oriented training i got is i just saw this incredible decree increase in degenerative diseases and i was wondering why i wound up going actually into the health factor and realized that the greatest leverage we can get for public health is actually in agriculture and so not only did i get to go back to my roots if you'll pardon a bad pun but quite frankly agriculture is just so much more fun than medicine so i'm really glad to be doing that with the benefits of improving public health environmental health and community and economy you know it's i read an article recently in the uh new yorker about how years ago farmers weren't considered kind of local yokels farmers were on the boards of banks and they were on the um community councils and you know the the model of farmer as renaissance person is sort of manifested in thomas jefferson and that's the model of farmer that i see some of the smartest people i know and i've been in sciences i know a lot of eggheads but boy farmers are just amazing they not only know how to do a crop and do accounting but some of them can actually work a powerpoint slide i don't count myself as one of them so here's one of the great insights i got we're doing something called genomic profiling of plants and humans we're trying to figure out how we could have a reliable measure of how medicinal plants work in humans and what you can do is put a small amount of that into a white blood cell and then see how the genes in that white blood cell up and down regulate and that's how we're getting an idea of the efficacy but we had something really interesting happen i was doing sampling of herbs from lots of different farms but i knew a lot of the organic and biodynamic and the more biologically oriented farms and on those i saw a quantitative and qualitative increase not only in chemical characteristics but in the ratios of those and so it led me to believe that this is obviously a really unbiased perspective it's literally the genes telling us this is what we think is going on so once i saw that i decided i needed to go back into agriculture and this is my why the pathological approach to health and agriculture has led to declining personal environmental health and it's bankrupting the farmers and it's bankrupting the economy my goal is farming needs to be fun it needs to be profitable and it needs to be in harmony with humanity and the environment so once you change your perspective you can change your results the biological perspective is that all plants evolved in a highly complex mineral and organic biological matrix it's a theory of biological availability it's one of the reasons i still use soil tests but i don't put a whole lot of of decision making in those because you can have all sorts of stuff in the soil if it's not biologically available it's not available to the plant you also need to be maintaining soil health and i think our idea of how we achieve soil health has evolved this is an opposition to the what we call standard agriculture now which is an unfortunate term because it's i think it's relatively new and it's way wrong i mean even vincent von leibig the theorist back in the late 1800s who came up with sort of the npk approach later in life rescinded it and said i got this wrong this is really a biological system but that didn't support the sort of industrial agricultural complex so now we have an npk approach to fertility it says large-scale commercial interests support this and it's somewhat like anabolic steroids or you know a lot of drugs you can get results in the short term but then degradation sets in when i first saw the health pyramid that john put together from advancing eco agriculture is just one of those things that just clicked it's this whole idea about where a plant is on this health pyramid is actually paralleled very closely to how we look at human health it's how we look at microbiome health it's just a great way of looking at it in that any biological system is going to do whatever it needs to do to survive i think most of us as farmers are probably at level one and are pretty happy if we can get to level two but when you actually look at the economics and the um environmental implications of going up to level three and four it's really quite significant so this is one of my driving goals so in industrial agriculture soil is a medium for delivering soluble nutrients to plants it degrades the soil food web it releases co2 decreases soil carbon degrades organic matter it creates nutrient deficient foods which is creating health deficient people and the ecosystem services what i mean by that is clean air or clean water are degrading and it's also increasing our reliance on synthesized inputs i mean unfortunately the current system has basically pulled all the profits out of farming and put it into the hands of the fertilizer companies and the distributors and the manufacturers it's no longer in the hands of the farmers as opposed to this regenerative agriculture creates systems that are consistently improving soil health which means the net worth of your farm is constantly going up from a biological perspective and often that reflects in an economic perspective um it supports the soil food web it sequesters carbon hopefully we can get a rational carbon um trading program that farmers can can get paid for the sequestration of carbon if you look at the available resources we have for turning around climate change agriculture currently is one of the biggest problems but it is clearly the biggest potential solution if we can sequester carbon and quite frankly i think we should get paid for that you do that by building organic matter you can create nutrient dense food as medicine in the last 30 years we have gone as a percentage of gross domestic product from eight percent to 28 of our gross domestic product going into medicine and that's climbing every year after covet is probably going to break 32 33 so think about that over a third of everything we produce is dealing with sickness and that doesn't count vitamins that doesn't count health food that doesn't count chiropractic that's standard allopathic medicine which means that we're taking huge amounts of resource and putting them towards something that is a negative lifestyle attribute and you know quite frankly is pulling money out of our pockets as farmers also the value of ecosystem services if you are treating your land right the clean water that regenerates an aquifer is directly attributable to what you're doing right and if you are not doing that to the high nitrate levels that are entering the water system are directly attributable um and it decreases the eliminate rely the reliance on synthesized inputs um james talked about that really well in the last presentation about the stuff's expensive and it's dangerous and there's like i am really incentivized to stop using these the other thing about regenerative agriculture is it also must regenerate your bank account no margin no mission it's great to have these kinds of goals but if you can't make your payroll you're going to be out of business the other thing it has to do is perform in current economic models and generally it does so there's a concept called true cost accounting which says that you take into account things like water degradation clean air all those things of environmental services in that model regenerative agriculture is so obvious that it's just kind of blatant but even in our current economic model which has a lot of offset costs it still works out better just as james mentioned earlier we're just not paying these huge bills to the fertilizer salesman the value of ecosystem services i think or something that needs to be pointed towards farmers i think that will happen more often um as the paris um accord or the uh the paris um i'm sorry the uh climate you know paris meeting comes together is one of the things that the um the international community is suggesting and i think that's where it's going to go i hope it is because what you incentivize is what you get and what we are doing as regenerative agricultural operators are what we need to do to get us out of this current climate pickle the other aspect of this is john mentioned about the photosynthetic capacity of plants i think when we look at healthy soils we tend to look at healthy soils creating healthy plants but i think that's backwards healthy plants create healthy soils plants are the conductors of the symphony plants are what's driving the system from an economic perspective if we are currently running at 15 to 20 percent of the genetic photosynthetic potential of plants we're leaving 80 percent of our potential profit on the table now there's other you know there's high heat factors there's other things that would do that but if i could increase my photosynthetic capacity by a factor of two my economics would shift drastically by a factor of three i would be the low cost high quality producer across the board and that's what i'm shooting for so don't leave that 80 percent of the value behind so as one grower to other growers one of the things i wanted to discuss a little bit is what's your tolerance for innovation because we are on this innovative curve and you have to make sure that you're comfortable with where you are and where you're trying to go and what the potential threats are for that and how you're going to deal with that so a lot of us now are early adopters if you're in that phase you want to ask why part of the reason why is i'm just curious about the world i have these outside goals i'm pushing i'm willing to take a little more risks than most others the other thing is wine grapes are a relatively high margin commodity and we get paid for quality it's one of the reasons i went from herbs into wine making two reasons one is we get paid for quality so there's a direct payment there the other is i have to admit as a winemaker it so beats the heck out of having a real job there's like no words for it the next wave of innovators are going to come in the early majority and i think this is where a lot of people are especially if you don't have really high value crops i think caution is a really good attribute and you should be asking a lot of questions you should be asking how you should be connecting with the regen community that's been so well um represented in this at this seminar that's been gone on today but for me the real question is how do you bridge that chasm and the way you bridge it is with systems technologies and experiences i've been in the organic realm for 20 something close to 30 years now and one of the challenges i've had is everybody shows up with the latest greatest newest thing that's going to solve all your problems if you just spray this bug in a bottle and everything's going to work good working with advancing ecoag and i've also worked with taneo technologies i think two of the best companies um in the in this field is they're developing systems they are looking at the technologies that work they have recommended technologies to me that they don't sell we've also come to conclusions to do things that mean a lot less money for advancing eco agriculture but they know it's the right thing for my vineyard operation and the experience of having a team behind you um not only is the brain trust of meeting with david and rochelle on a weekly basis and going over our soil analysis been incredibly insightful but quite frankly it's given me the courage to take some risks take some chances you know if you feel like you have a team behind you it's a lot easier to move forward um for the late adopters well you know that's the coffee shop crowd um james talked about this a little bit it's the same thing happened here everyone was making fun of me when i stopped using glyphosate and you know they were calling me biomen which is actually a moniker i wear with pride until it came time to harvest and they saw that i had better yields better quality more consistency from year to year lower inputs and now they're kind of coming in going gee what is it that you're doing and can we do this a little bit so the coffee shop crowd eventually gets to the the laggards i don't know what to tell you about that if you got a you know possibly that's your dad or someone but those are the folks just be nice to them so how to start clear goals your goals may depend on some different things but one of the obvious is better yields i haven't had improved yields however for perennial clock crops i saw lag if you know the physiology of grapes the buds the primordial buds for the following season form in the late season of the spring of the spring before so this year in may my primordial buds will be setting for next year's crops so there is a lag one of the goals isn't so much better yield but i have a lot less variability and that has made a huge difference the cfo initially hated me for spending all this money on experimentation and now he loves me because we're creating this less variability but also to find quality um in wine grapes it's not just tons it has to do with the phenolic quality the how the fermentation process happens there's if you know what that definition of quality is you can focus on that as a goal and then you get the economic payback which then allows you to go back and keep the system going the other thing that i think we don't talk about enough is better lifestyle i'm spending more time in the art of farming i'm spending more time educating myself which is an essential part of doing the whole regenerative practices i'm having fun i have two interns i have a number of ag extension agents who now love this who show up to my uh once a month uh research meeting we have the usda knocking on our door everybody kind of wants to be in on it because a it's interesting two it's true and it's fun if you're not spending so m ch time putting out fires you get a better work life balance you also get better you become a better community member you're taking care of people and the planet and james quoted einstein i'm quoting mae west she goes i've been rich i've been poor but believe me rich is better so here's one of my biggest suggestions start small make mistakes on a small scale but keep good records know what your inputs are and then know what your returns are once you understand what the inter the return on investment is on time and expense you can figure out what your comfort zone is and how you can scale up once you have that figured out scale fast once you know how to make improvement do it on a large scale if you know if you know what's profitable do that on a large scale when you're experimenting and developing systems you're going to make mistakes and they're part of the fun of it but do it on a small scale and make sure you're developing the appropriate measures the sap analysis has been a huge issue for us i probably measure a little more often than i can but probably because i come from a research perspective but it's allowed me to be more proactive and this year i'm actually looking a little more at the 80 20 rule in other words 20 percent of my data gathering is going to give me 80 percent of my results so the the stuff that you're doing is not giving results get rid of it record keeping is important do your sap analysis review your sap asap sorry i couldn't resist that act proactively we are currently looking at something called critical points of influence it is those critical points in your plant's growth where you have the most ability to create change make sure your field and observations are tied to sap analysis yield and quality data and get out there and look we're taking a lot more photographs and just putting notes on photographs and keeping that as part of our record i still do soil tests i still give them some credence they are a good indication of kind of what's going on in your soil i don't see a great correlation between my soil tests and what's happening in the field so they're just part of the picture petiole samples in my opinion are worthless i've never seen a connection between a pedial sample and anything that happens in a reality they're great if you're a fertilizer sales person but otherwise they're pretty much worthless sap analysis has been a game changer for us because it gives me proactive indications of what's going on the one challenge i will say about the sap analysis sometimes interpreting it is a learning curve so once again that's why starting small and figuring out what works for your crop is going to make the sap analysis a lot more effective a couple of quick examples of the sap analysis we did over last year this is in one of my blocks early in the season you can see that my photosynthetic capacity was just terrible the sugar started out poor but we figured out how to correct that and got that into a decent zone it's not great but it was a big improvement but calcium we were scratching our head about calcium like what is going on with calcium it was just low it stayed low and then interestingly enough it bumped up later in later in the season which doesn't make a whole lot of sense until we stepped back and looked at it we also saw saw conversion of ammonium into um amino acids or actually amines poor in the beginning we did better we had that one little spike so in this case spike is bad and that was during the heat wave and then it dropped off but then we looked at that heat wave and said wait a minute let's look at iron so we did a foliar application it obviously bumped it up but it didn't stay very long but then right about at that same time that we had the solar event you know the heat event we saw that going up again so what was going on with that same with manganese and what the conclusion we came to is what we also did that was different is we shifted from irrigating twice a week to sometimes irrigating every other night and so now what we're looking at is the soil temperature and possibly the oxidative reductive capacity of that soil but that's a little more level detail what i want to get at is when you have this kind of information you have a good team behind you you can start to look at this and come to conclusions that you would never get if you didn't have this information so here's the benefits i have uh enjoyed an increase in yield of 22 to 30 percent average you want to know why the cfo loves me that's why it's also why the owners have gotten off my back about spending money on a good program is we went from being a huge money loser to a money maker this might be the most significant thing for me yield stabilization um 22 22 um 20 i'm sorry 2020 cabernet sauvignon it's a very heat-sensitive species the valley average for the last three year we do running through your averages was 65 percent of average because of the heat i did 110 average this is the one where the other growers come came and saw my vineyards and said okay we're done calling you a commie freako environmental guy what are you doing because you're kicking our butts economically the other thing is we're seeing better fermentation since we started this we've gotten 90 91 and 92 points in wine spectator and not only is that enjoyable from a glass perspective but that pays dividends i've seen a 50 reduction in the use of fungicides my goal is zero if i can move up the plant pyramid this was big a 38 reduction in the gallons to ton ratio now i suspect about half of that is from irrigation infrastructure improvement but it's clearly not all a big chunk of that is from better soil holding capacity i plan more react less i hang out with my crew more i have more crew time which equals more or more customer time which equals more profits i'm having more funds and here's a really big one for my partner melissa and i i don't work weekends anymore i used to work every weekend all the time it's rare that i work a weekend anymore so in conclusion regenerative ag may be the best way to improve the environmental and human health and this is just huge to me i mean this is my why you can benefit both financially and environmentally we don't have to choose the path towards both of those goes together technology can assist in a systems approach to agriculture i am having fun in agriculture again like i've never had it's challenging it's fun i love listening to john's blogs i love listening to all the other blogs i love listening to the regen news material and it's just it's fun and exciting and lastly what we do to the environments we're doing to ourselves at the talks of the microbiome is there is no separation between us and the environment so what we do to the environment we do to ourselves for better for worse and better is better so that's it thank you very much