For farmers, finding ways to adopt and fund climate-smart and regenerative methods can be a frustrating challenge. On this episode of the Spilled Salt podcast, Dylan Vaca explains to host Maureen Ballatori how the DeLong Company, through its Grown Climate Smart initiative, is stepping up to lead the way in climate-smart agriculture. By providing financial support and building partnerships with farmers, the company is helping the industry shift towards more sustainable practices.
What is Climate Smart Agriculture?
Climate smart agriculture refers to farming practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the sequestration of carbon in the soil. The goal is to help farmers grow crops in a way that is environmentally responsible, improves soil health, and maintains long-term sustainability. This approach includes practices like cover cropping, no-till farming, nutrient management, and using windbreaks to protect the land.
Through the Grown Climate Smart program, the DeLong Company is making it easier for farmers to adopt these practices by offering financial incentives and technical support. These practices benefit both the environment and the crops, making it a win-win for everyone involved.
Providing Financial Support to Help the Ag Industry Shift
The DeLong Company’s Grown Climate Smart program was created after the company received a USDA Climate Smart Commodities Grant. This grant, worth $40 million over five years, is designed to support farmers in adopting sustainable farming practices. The program helps farmers by offering funding for practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve soil health.
The program doesn’t just support farmers making the switch to climate-smart practices; it also incentivizes those who have already been using these methods. This is a crucial element, as many farmers who were already doing the right thing felt left out of previous initiatives. DeLong Company recognized the need to reward those farmers as well, giving them financial support for their continued commitment to sustainable agriculture.
One of the major barriers for farmers adopting sustainable practices is the upfront cost. Switching to new farming methods, such as using cover crops or implementing no-till farming, can be expensive. However, through the Grown Climate Smart program, DeLong Company offers financial incentives that make it more affordable for farmers to adopt these practices.
Supporting Regenerative Agriculture Practices by Building Relationships with Farmers
Regenerative agriculture goes beyond just sustainability. It focuses on restoring and enhancing the health of the ecosystem, including improving biodiversity, enriching soil, and supporting water cycles. Farmers who practice regenerative agriculture contribute to a healthier environment, and the DeLong Company’s Grown Climate Smart initiative supports these efforts.
By enrolling in the program, farmers can receive financial support for practices like planting cover crops, reducing or eliminating tillage, and improving nutrient management. These practices not only help the environment but can also lead to healthier, more productive crops.
Farmers receive funding on a per-acre basis, which allows them to make changes to as little or as much land as they feel comfortable. Whether they want to start small with a few acres of cover crops or scale up to a larger portion of their land, the program gives them the flexibility to try out these climate-smart practices without the financial burden.
Connecting Farmers and Brands Through Sustainable Sourcing
A major component of the DeLong Company’s Grown Climate Smart initiative is the connection between farmers and brands looking for sustainably grown products. The company works closely with businesses that want to source responsibly, helping them find farmers who are practicing climate-smart and regenerative agriculture. This creates a valuable marketplace for sustainably grown grains, providing farmers with more opportunities to sell their products at a premium.
Brands, in turn, can showcase their commitment to sustainability by sourcing products from climate-smart farms. This is an exciting opportunity for both farmers and brands, as it opens up new markets for sustainably grown commodities and allows companies to meet growing consumer demand for environmentally friendly products.
A Win-Win for Farmers and the Environment
The DeLong Company’s Grown Climate Smart program is making climate-smart and regenerative agriculture more accessible to farmers, while also helping brands meet their sustainability goals. By providing financial support and creating connections between growers and businesses, the program is driving positive change in the agricultural industry.
For farmers, the opportunity to adopt environmentally responsible practices while receiving financial incentives is a game changer. Not only does it help improve soil health and reduce emissions, but it also opens doors to new markets and higher value for their crops.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries. Today’s guest is Dylan Vaca. He’s the brand and marketing manager at the DeLong Company.
And so you may be wondering why I have a grain aggregator on the podcast, but Dylan and DeLong Company have an incredibly fascinating story.
DeLong Company has created the Grown Climate Smart Initiative, which was established to lead the way in climate smart agriculture by supporting environmentally responsible farming practices that offer consumers a way to champion sustainably grown products.
Essentially, the DeLong Company received some USDA funding over five years to help make regenerative agriculture and other forms of sustainable farming practices possible for farmers and make the sourcing possible for brands.
It’s so exciting for us to be able to find a company that’s doing this work because there are brands that want to source responsibly and there are farmers who want to grow responsibly but they’re not always able to find that matchmaking right that makes it possible for them to launch products and sell their supply to that right audience and the DeLong Company is doing that. So for anybody who’s ready to nerd out on this aspect of agriculture, you will love today’s conversation. Enjoy.
Maureen: Hey Dylan, how are you? Thanks for taking the time to join me on the pod today.
Dylan Vaca: I definitely appreciate the opportunity. I appreciate getting the chance to talk to you and talk about what we got going on.
Maureen: That’s awesome. And I’m especially excited because this is kind of a special two-part episode. We’ve got you here today and then we’ve got a brand that you sent our way Anytime Spritz is going to be joining us on next week’s episode.
Dylan: We’re really excited about that partnership. They have a really great following, a lot of storytelling that goes behind the products they’re producing. So we’re really excited about that partnership and some of the other partnerships we have. But that’s the one that we’re rolling with right now, and really excited to get them on the show as well.
Maureen: Love it. Fantastic. Well, let’s, I want to back up. I like to start in the beginning as it were. So tell me a little bit more about you and your personal background.
Dylan: My background is I grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago in a rural community. I didn’t grow up farming or necessarily grew up in a farming family, but was in an agricultural community and went to school locally in Aurora, Illinois at Aurora University.
I didn’t grow up in Aurora but it’s pretty close to my hometown so it definitely was something I was involved with there, through the university. I got a marketing degree through Aurora University.
I started my career out working in the marketing department of an industrial manufacturer. And from there, I got a lot of great experiences. I got to work on some really big accounts. It was a global company and it was really a great experience working for a manufacturer.
I put my time in there and found a new opportunity with the Delong Company to head up the marketing side of their Sustainability Initiative through the USDA. It’s called the Climate Smart Commodity Grant program. And we’re branding in-house and direct to consumers and farmers as “Grown Climate Smart”.
Now, I’m handling much of the marketing, the partnerships, and everything that goes in with marketing to growers and consumers and business-to-business (B2B) buyers.
Maureen: We’re going to talk more about that shortly about the partnerships. But I want to ask a couple of questions first. Before you joined the DeLong Company, did they have a sustainability initiative prior to that or did they hire you to lead it and you were the first one?
Dylan: The DeLong Company has been around for 110 plus years now and throughout time they’ve always been very focused on different initiatives and different sustainability things they can do. Whether it’s operationally, whether it’s product offerings, whether it’s internally or externally. So, simple things from implementing solar panels or Tesla energy packs right on facilities.
They’ve been doing that throughout time. But as far as doing a sustainability program or something like that with farmers, this is really one of the first things. So they actually wrote up a grant proposal probably a little over two years ago now to the USDA for this Climate Smart Commodities Grant, which is about $3 billion total. And they ended up winning $40 million through that.
And then from there, they’ve built out the team who would be working on that day-to-day.
Maureen: Got it. And so the USDA Climate Smart Commodities Grant that DeLong Company is a recipient of… Talk a little bit more about what DeLong Company is doing with that funding for the benefit of farmers and brands.
Dylan: Like I mentioned before, the DeLong Company won $40 million through five years to really implement this program. And what that means is it’s kind of two parts.
The first part is enrolling growers in this program that do cover crops, that reduce their no-till, that do nutrient management plans or windbreaks. Ultimately, what all these are, are what the USDA class advises as climate smart practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration rates.
So really the base of what we started doing and what we’ve been doing now for close to two years is enrolling growers. And these growers, they come to us and say, hey, I’m 200 acres of cover crops or 500 acres of no-till or 25 acres of a nutrient management plan, something like that. And we’re able to fund them on a per acre basis to do those practices.
It’s been really rewarding to talk to growers that have been doing these practices for a long time and get them funding for the practices and new growers as well that have always thought about doing the practices, but they’ve never actually got to them because they needed a little bit of financial backing behind it to make that change.
Maureen: I was so excited the first time we talked about this and I almost wish I could have just recorded that whole conversation and put that on the podcast episode today because it was just shock and awe from my perspective that DeLong Company is doing this important work.
One, because after going to the World Agri-Tech Summit in March in San Francisco, there was tons of discussion about what the government needs to be backing and providing these incentives to farmers but was a question of, how is that going to get done?
I don’t want to say that the whole room kind of shrugged their shoulders, but effectively that’s kind of what it was, that the folks in the room didn’t really have the answer for who is the in-between, and that’s what you’re doing.
Dylan: I think that’s a great point you make. I think that’s why it was so exciting. Our first conversation about this is that so many people out there realize that doing climate smart or sustainable or regenerative agriculture is the future, right?
We want to make it less of a niche and more of the norm for obvious reasons. It’s better for consumers. It’s better for companies to become more sustainable. It’s better for our growers to do it on the farm level and on the ground so they can benefit the food, the crops and the soil health.
But what was so exciting about that is hearing you talk about that and thinking about how it is to us, right? Where the government has come out with $3 billion worth of funding and said, hey, we want to put funding behind private companies to go out there and really build this market, reach growers, and build on those relationships you already have with this funding.
I think that’s why it’s such an exciting time to be a part of this, to be a part of Climate Smart agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and all the other sustainability programs out there because really from how we view it, it’s a win-win for everybody involved from the grower to the grain aggregator like the DeLong Company to businesses that are making products out there that stem from commodities and ingredients from these practices and the consumer.
Maureen: I think one of the most important things that you mentioned that I want to make sure that listeners hear is, and make sure that I’m right in what I heard, too, is that you’re not just incentivizing the farmers who are changing to climate smart practices. You’re incentivizing any farmer who is already doing climate smart practices, right? Because that’s been kind of like a little bit of a weird sort of space is that, folks who are doing climate smart practices or regenerative ag already, they’re not, in some cases, the incentives are not available to them because they don’t have a switch over that needs to happen.
Dylan: I think that’s one element of why we’ve been so successful with getting our program off the ground. And now we’re up to over 200 growers and over 400, 000 acres is that, like you said, one part of our program that we can enroll growers who have been doing a no-till or doing cover crops for 15, 20 years.
Maureen: I love that.
Dylan: And the nice thing about that is that these growers, I guess, I mean, it’s not necessarily nice, but unfortunately, after we’ve been talking to them a lot of times they feel victimized because they’ve never been able to get these funds before. They look at it as, I’ve been doing the right practices that you’re saying reduce carbon or are good for the land for X amount of years. Just because it’s not a new practice adoption for me, I can’t get funding.
Essentially, they have to go backwards to go forwards at that point. And the nice thing about our program is that we wrote it into our grant and talked to the USDA and said all of the controls and the guidelines we have and the auditing process and to go through and do all these things, we’re going to do it the right way.
But having those growers included in our program and being able to get funded has been really rewarding for us because we can talk to the grower and just to see, hey, I’m able to get funds for this now. I’ve gotten turned down three or four times before because they told me I need to go back to telling my land and that’s something I don’t want to do.
I think that’s definitely an element of why we’ve been successful is because we’ve been able to reach this, a good amount of growers that have never been able to take advantage of these programs and saying, hey, we recognize what you’re doing as well and to keep doing it.
And at the same time, we’ve been able to talk to the growers who have been, hey, I’m on the fence about doing it. I just need this little something, whether it’s financial incentives, whether it’s technical assistance, something like that, where we’re able to offer that and push them right over the edge to do that practice.
So that mixed with, hey, you don’t have to do your whole field, right? You don’t have to do your whole farm. If you have 100 acres, you can do 50 acres. Let’s just say you’re starting cover crops for the first time. They might be a little hesitant, right? And that’s understandable, but being able to have that flexibility, being able to do these practices in the past has really been I think a really strong focal point of our program.
Maureen: I totally agree. So you mentioned that DeLong Company already had these grower partnerships and that’s why you were really well suited to be a good shepherd of this grant program. Can you talk about that a little bit?
I just want to make sure that it’s clear to listeners what DeLong Company does as a grain aggregator.
Dylan: Like I mentioned before, the DeLong Company has been around for 100 plus years. It’s a six-generation family business, primarily based in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, but we have a handful of locations throughout the US, whether it’s New York, whether it’s Ohio or Nebraska or Kansas.
And really what we’re doing is we’re buying and purchasing row crop commodities throughout the Midwest and the East Coast directly from growers. So corn, wheat, soybeans primarily. And we’re finding markets for them, whether it’s overseas to the EU or to Southeast Asia, or domestically.
Where the DeLong Company found their really strong niche is that we are the largest exporter of agricultural commodities and animal feed, and putting those in bulk containers. So we’re the largest exporter in the US for that.
But we also have a lot of domestic business as well. So saying that, we already have a lot of great relationships with farmers that we’re talking to, right?
That’s another part of why our organization and why our grant has been successful in our program is because we have the resources to make it successful. We have the grain merchandisers. We have a crop insurance team. We have an agronomy team. We have people at the scale house. We have export locations where we can find these markets.
So that’s why we think we’ve been so successful with this, that we’re not coming to a grower with a program and not being able to offer them that technical assistance, or if they need to go talk to someone about a nutrient management plan, we can have that set up. So the DeLong Company is kind of a full service agribusiness, and it’s really helped us out with this grant and program and being able to implement it.
Maureen: You mentioned before coming to the DeLong company that you were at an industrial manufacturing company. What has it been like for you to learn this very niche, very nuanced, let’s say aspect of agriculture?
Because you clearly knew your stuff – very impressive on that. And, it’s there, there’s a lot to learn on it. And so for the DeLong company to bring you in and put you on this special project and have you be able to grasp it as well as you did, like I said, very impressive. So what was that like?
Dylan: I think that’s a really interesting question because I think about this a lot of how I fell into this or why I’m here now.
As I mentioned before, I grew up in an agricultural community. And then going throughout life there and my first career being in a manufacturer. The manufacturer actually was making electrical components and very focused on sustainability themselves.
So for instance, they manufactured and built all the charging plugs and cords that would go into an electric vehicle, right? So, you know throughout time I’m marketing these products and thinking about you know marketing the company and the sustainability behind that and I think that’s how I first got into that realm of the world and then finding something in the agriculture world that I kind of grew up with they all kind of mesh together at that point
But like you mentioned, it is a lot to learn. There’s a lot of things going on in the agricultural world, but also in the sustainability world at all different levels, too, whether it’s operationally, whether it’s at the farmer level, whether it’s product packaging and things like that. There’s a lot going on. So it’s always ever going as far as learning new things and being up to date on it.
Maureen: It’s funny, I was on a call recently with a bunch of other ag nerds. You should join us, you would love it. We get together every other Friday morning and just kind of banter about different things in the ag ecosystem.
And anytime we’re talking about regenerative agriculture, the whole room kind of rolls their eyes. It’s just one of those things of, well, how are we defining it today?
It is just still continuously evolving about what exactly is the definition that we’re talking about in this kind of conversation. So it’s always just funny to me.
We talked earlier, we briefly mentioned that the reason we got connected is because DeLong companies work with brands. We mentioned Anytime Spritz who we’re talking with next week.
You talked about the farmer angle and how that works. Talk about the other side of how DeLong works with brands.
Dylan: There’s two kinds of facets of our grant and our program and what we’re trying to do. And that second one really is about building and developing a market that ultimately will command a premium for these grains and commodities or for the other commodities that we handle just the corn, wheat and soybeans.
There’s other climate smart commodity grants and programs that are livestock-based, potato-based, and forestry-based. Really, it’s like what you said before, trying to build something that we can all recognize as being regenerative or sustainable agriculture.
So that’s why we are building out this brand, what we call in Grown Climate Smart to really signify the commitment to regenerative or sustainable agriculture, using ingredients, using grain, using things that end up in that product and that consumer product that stem from these climate smart agriculture.
Working with Anytime has been great. They’re implementing a lot of ingredients and grain into their products that stem from farmers doing this climate smart agriculture. And really, what we talk to someone like Anytime about is that, we want to help showcase that. We want to help offer a value-add or a product differentiator.
And how can we come together to partner and spread the word of what you’re doing and when you know the products you have out there for consumers are stemming from this really cool and forward-thinking initiative.
And that’s why we’re building out this Grown Climate Smart brand. So products now will have the Grown Climate Smart logo on them signifying that commitment to sourcing from growers who are localized and doing know, smart agriculture and sustainable or regenerative practices.
Maureen: I think it’s great how structured but flexible the Grown Climate Smart initiative is too, right? Because we work with some wineries and I’ve talked to them about, are you planning on incorporating any sort of regenerative organic practices in their life? We can’t.
Dylan: It’s different for everybody. I mean, it’s different whether you’re a corn grower or you’re making grapes from wine. I mean, it’s always different for everybody.
It’s always a learning curve whether we’re talking to a distillery, or a potato chip manufacturer, or tortillas. We’ve talked to a lot of different industries and it’s always different depending on where they are in that process.
The underlying thing and what I like to talk about is that 17% of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) market talks about or markets their products as being sustainable. You know, they have something on their packaging, on their website, they talk about their products having sustainable origins and it’s, you 17% and you think the whole CPG market isn’t huge. And it’s been trending up throughout.
Maureen: It’s still a big percentage. That’s a big percentage.
Dylan: All I am going to say is, someone might not look at it and be like, hey, it’s not huge, but it’s big and it’s been trending up throughout time in the past five, six years. I mean, it was nowhere near that, which is great.
But the really interesting thing about that is that 17% of the market, those products contribute to one third of all CPG growth. So when you’re talking about growth and trending ideas and how to market products, that’s really a focal point of trending products and growing. So I think that’s really interesting.
New York University actually came out with that. And they have a whole Center for Sustainable Business. And they come out with their sustainable market share index, which has a lot of great information like that that talks about how CPG companies are thinking about marketing their products with sustainable origins or backgrounds.
Maureen: What DeLong Company is doing just to like make it ultra clear to all of our listeners is helping farmers who want to get into sustainable growing practices to get there, whether they need resources or incentives, as well as incentivizing farmers that are already doing those practices, and then helping brands to be able to source sustainably grown products.
And so in some cases, you can even direct a certain vein, right? So like if I wanted to market regenerative organic, you could make sure that I’m sourcing regenerative organic compared to I just want them to be grown sustainably. It does not have to be regenerative and it does not have to be organic. You can help all of those scenarios.
Dylan: That’s really the big thing here is that there’s a bunch of differences, whether it’s regenerative organic, whether it’s just organic or there’s another one called the regenerate.
There’s a couple of different organizations or initiatives out there. And I think that’s what we’re lacking right now, what we’re trying to help. And what we’re always open to is to get that communication going between everybody, between the other initiatives and organizations, between the corporate buyers and CPG companies, how can we come together to kind of unify everybody here because we’re all essentially going for the same goal of trying to push sustainability and climate smart agriculture and the products that’s done from it together.
A lot of it is educating the market, but also working together to kind of build and strengthen that together internally before we all come out with a million different things and a million different definitions of what this means.
And that’s part of why we came out with our brand. That’s why we came out with Grown Climate Smart. We want to tell consumers, hey, when you see this logo in retail stores or in a restaurant or something, you should know that this means that it comes from sustainable or regenerative agriculture.
Maureen: I think it’s so smart. We talked about that last time, too, with the retailers being such an important part of this whole ecosystem too and how they define it. When I go back to my ag nerd friends and why it’s such a wild, wild West with a term of regenerative, it is because Sprouts, for example, has a page on their site that outlines how they define regenerative and whole foods has one.
And there’s similarities, but they’re not exactly the same, right? And so in order to have a product on shelves in a retailer that claims regenerative, it has to align with that retailer’s practices. And so I, again, go back to why it’s so smart for you to have this. Let’s talk about sustainability and climate and not just one method that is still working on its definition.
Dylan: The nice thing about it, but at the same time, makes it a little bit difficult is that to us, the USDA came out with a list of, think it’s 120 something practices that they classify as climate smart.
We’ve been primarily talking about cover crops or no tilling. But when you go industry to industry, they’re all a little bit different. A livestock producer wouldn’t really care about no tilling, right? Or maybe they don’t care about another practice that we care about.
But when we talk about rotational grazing that fits under those climate smart agriculture guidelines that the USDA came out with, that makes total sense to them and being grass -fed and grass -finished, things like that, that resonate with them.
So a lot of it is us coming together and at some point I feel like we’re going to have to make these guidelines or a common understanding of what all of this means. So at the same time, it’s great that a lot of companies, whether big or small, are interested in this and want to push it and see the value in it.
I just think at some point we’re all going to collectively come together, whether it’s through government, whether it’s through private coalitions or something, to kind of come with one definition, because I understand from a consumer standpoint, it can be confusing. It can be confusing to see what’s the difference between if something’s organic or non-GMO versus regenerative versus sustainable.
Maureen: Right, right, exactly. You talked about the fact that you work in a bunch of different industries. What are some of the industries that you work in and are there any that are more common than others?
Dylan: We’ve really found our niche with, and we didn’t set out at the very beginning, so it’s been kind fun to learn about it and get into it now, but we’ve really found our niche with distilleries and breweries and distilleries and malt houses and mills, because they’re so closely connected to agriculture. They already talked about grainy glass or seed to sip or seed to spirit or all the different terms that go along with it.
But there’s many different industries outside of that, whether it’s grazing when it comes to livestock or whether it comes to food ingredients.
You know, there’s big corporate buyers that are interested in buying a lot of grain that comes from this because they’re getting pressure from the Cokes or the PepsiCo’s of the world that they need to work with their downstream supply chain partners to become more sustainable.
So, there’s a lot of industries and it’s always interesting to see who’s at the forefront of it, who’s maybe lacking. Even thinking about ethanol fuel, there’s a lot of companies out there that are ethanol plants and thinking about sustainable aviation fuel. You know, maybe consumers don’t recognize that as much, but I think throughout time, it’s only going to be growing.
Maureen: I travel a lot, so I book a lot of flights. And you can see when you book a flight, right, what their CO2 emissions are for each airplane. So yes, I totally agree.
This is Spilled Salt, right? It’s about the idea of the things that spill, the things that get left behind throughout your career or a story. So tell me about a high point and a low point in your career.
Dylan: In my career, I think a high point is, like I said, kind of coming full circle to where I come from and how I grew up and finding I never thought I’d be working in the agriculture world.
So now that I get to work in it, it’s kind of been fresh, I guess you could say, and it’s been kind of exciting to kind of get readjusted to that world.
I think a low point, there’s a lot of learning curves working with the USDA and trying to administer a grant correctly and there’s a lot of paperwork that goes through it. There’s a lot of things that are trying to figure out how do we market to farmers first? How do we market to B2B buyers? It’s a lot of different things.
I wouldn’t say it’s a low point essentially or a bad thing, but an interesting point is that I am younger, right? I graduated college roughly five, six years ago maybe, but talking about marketing and how do you market to consumers and people, all the digital base, right? And we talked about how to, how to market that way.
But when you’re working with farmers, a lot of times that digital doesn’t connect with them for whatever reason, right? So it’s thinking about getting creative with things and how to be successful at your job is kind of what keeps it interesting to me and how to build on that. Ultimately, keep being successful and doing some really cool initiatives at the same time.
Maureen: I never thought I would end up in agriculture either. And I grew up on a dairy farm and it was just kind of I went off to school and I thought that was kind of the end of it. And then here we are, I talk to farmers all the time.
Dylan: I think a lot of times it gets, for whatever reason, it gets a bad rap, right? It gets left behind as being, it’s agriculture, it’s old and all this.
But there’s so many cool initiatives in companies out there with technology and different programs and product offerings that when it comes to robotics or it comes to drones. I mean, there’s so many things out there now that I think it’s really exciting to see where agriculture is now in all the interesting science that’s going to be coming out soon. It’s an exciting time. So I’m glad I’m in it, as I’m sure you are too.
Maureen: I’m especially excited about robotics, as well. The whole ag tech sector and industry is really exciting, but the thing that I keep hearing more and more about at any agricultural conference I’m going to these days is biologicals, which I think is also another whole interesting sector.
Dylan: I’m probably not the best person to talk about different strains of chemicals and all these things that go into building the top yielding crop. But there’s so many options out there. And it’s interesting where it’s going now. And again, it comes down to being more sustainable, using less chemicals, using less water, right, and being economical with it.
I think it’s an exciting time to be a part of agriculture. You know, if anybody’s listening and thinking about what industry to join or look into, I recommend agriculture.
Maureen: I think it’s a great industry. So last question for you. You mentioned that this is 40 million over five years and you’re two years in at this point. So you’ve got three more years of executing this initiative. What in a perfect world, what do those three years look like to you?
Dylan: In the next three years, what they look like to us is to continue scaling up this program and creating brand awareness with our program on the consumer side, getting more brands and companies to come in and say, hey, we recognize this is a great thing.
We want to show our commitment to sourcing or buying or implementing sustainable ingredients in our products. And at the same time, we want to continue getting more growers into our program.
You know, year one, we had 170 something growers. This year we have right around 210, we almost doubled our acres. have every bit of intention to continue growing and scaling our program to maximize its reach and to maximize these dollars.
So throughout time, hopefully by year five, we can look back and say, hey, year two was a great year, but we are able to keep expanding on that and build it. And we’re thinking about past year five too is that, hey, we want to ultimately build and develop this market so that it’s a self-sustaining brand and program for consumers to go out and purchase these grains and products and pay a premium for them given they stem from these and that premium gets passed down from the grain aggregator to the actual farmer to continue doing these programs or these practices.
Maureen: I love it. Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating. Thank you so much for joining me today and reaching out in the first place. I’m really glad to be able to spread the word about this. I think that this is just again, such a wonderful initiative for the long company to be working on for USDA to be promoting and then for you to be able to be boots on the ground, driving it forward is just such a great thing. So thanks for joining me.