As interest in regenerative agriculture gains ground across the country, one upstate New York farm is helping to define what that future looks like. Mike Kreher, a partner at the farm and Cornell graduate with a degree in business management and marketing, is leading that charge.
Improving Soil Health And Creating Long-Term Resiliency Through Regenerative Practices
Kreher Family Farms, now in its fourth generation, has grown from humble beginnings in 1924 to become the largest egg producer and the largest regenerative crop farm in New York State.
Mike’s focus is on improving soil health and creating long-term resiliency through regenerative practices. With 6,000 acres in production, about half of which are already certified regenerative, he’s successfully balancing tradition with innovation.
Creating a Universal Definition for Regenerative
One of the challenges in regenerative agriculture is that it doesn’t yet have a universal definition. Mike sees this both as a hurdle and a strength. While the lack of standardization causes confusion for consumers and retailers, the flexibility of regenerative systems allows each farm to focus on outcomes, not checklists.
Unlike organic certification, which follows strict production methods, regenerative farming is about the results: healthier soil, improved water retention, more biodiversity, and reduced chemical inputs. Certification bodies like the Rodale Institute, A Greener World, and Regenified are all working with slightly different standards, but Mike believes the common thread is simple: leave the soil better than you found it.
For Kreher Family Farms, that means investing in practices like strip-till and no-till systems, diverse crop rotations, and regular soil testing. Mike noted that although organic methods helped shape their thinking, some regenerative outcomes can be easier to achieve using conventional techniques, especially when it comes to limiting tillage and managing compaction.
The Role of Measurement in Agritech
Soil health, once a vague concept, is now measurable thanks to advances in agtech. Mike works with Cornell and other labs to conduct regular soil sampling, tissue analysis, and even sap testing. These tools help track everything from biological activity to root zone health and compaction depth.
While Mike notes improvements in the technology, he cautions that benefits like increased soil resilience or nutrient density aren’t immediate. They can take five to six seasons to become visible. But for his farm, the commitment is worth it. Regenerative systems have helped their crops weather unpredictable weather patterns, which is an increasingly critical issue in upstate New York.
Market Realities and Farmer Incentives for Adopting Regenerative Practices
Despite the environmental benefits, the economic side of regenerative farming is still catching up. Mike noted that confusion in the marketplace makes it hard for retailers to justify higher prices, even when farms are investing more in soil-building practices.
Most of Mike’s crops don’t go directly to consumers. Instead, they’re sold through wholesale channels, meaning there are several layers between the farm and the shopper. Educating retailers and building consumer awareness is key to shifting that model.
Mike believes the tide is turning. Consumers are asking questions. Retailers are taking notice. The early adopters, shoppers motivated by health, sustainability, and transparency, are starting to look for regenerative options in the produce aisle.
Educating Farmers in Regenerative Ag for the Future
For other farmers considering regenerative practices, Mike emphasizes the importance of education, trial and error, and realistic expectations. He recommends working with local extension services, attending soil health workshops, and collaborating with universities or private labs to gather data.
He also acknowledges the challenges of scaling these practices in the face of labor shortages and increasingly narrow weather windows. Despite the hurdles, Mike remains optimistic. He sees regenerative agriculture not as a trend but as a shared opportunity for farmers, retailers, and consumers to rethink how food is grown and why it matters.
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 Mike Kreher. He is a partner at Kreher Family Farms. Mike’s great grandparents started farming in 1924. Today, Kreher Family Farms is the largest egg farm and the largest regenerative crop farm in New York State.
Mike is the fourth generation at Kreher Family Farms and I can confidently say he was into regenerative agriculture before it was cool. He talks about that on the podcast today, not the before it was cool part, that is my personal opinion, but he talks about regenerative agriculture a lot on the podcast today. And we also talk about the critical push and pull from the consumer, the retailer and the farmer in regenerative agriculture. Enjoy the conversation.
Hey Mike, how are you?
Mike Kreher:I’m doing well, how are you doing?
Maureen: Good, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining me for this. I appreciate it. Yes, I’m excited. So I’d love to start where we always start, which is from the beginning. Tell me a little bit about Young Mike and what your interest was for your career as a youth.
Mike: My pleasure. Well, I grew up working on the farm. So nights and weekends and holidays were spent helping out on the farm. Just at that time, I was just doing whatever needs to get done. I did that for working with just various parts around the actual farm for most of my childhood. Then as I got older in high school and started to drive, I started to work. Helping out in the stores actually. So I’d go around and help merchandise the eggs in the store, put up signage, etc.
And that’s where my interest really started to fall was in marketing the product. And so whatever we were marketing at that time, I was really interested in planograms and how the stores were laid out and how that would influence sales. And so that’s what I went to college for. So I went to Cornell and I was in business management and marketing. And I was really interested in that piece.
Maureen: So before you continue from there, I have two questions. One is when you were helping out on the farm as a kid, I’m curious what that looked like. I grew up on a dairy farm. So for me, helping out on the farm was kind of just when the cows got out, you know, I would be a barrier to kind of help get them back in, but I was allergic to hay. So I couldn’t do much. So what did that look like for you as a kid?
Mike: Well, after school, I was sometimes just cleaning up around like garbage or anything like that. Just general cleaning. Sometimes it’s helping out in the packing room with packing eggs. A lot of working in the barns, cleaning up the barns with the chickens. So moving or vaccinating chickens when they were baby chicks, helping them, helping receive baby chicks.
But I have a similar story where I was just allergic to a lot of the environmental factors in the barn. And so I couldn’t keep doing that. And so that’s why I started helping out in other areas where I could.
Maureen: Gotcha. And then my next question is about merchandising and the planograms for retail and that sort of thing. I’m also wildly interested in that. And so what kind of control did you have? Cause that was a different time, right? A lot has changed in retail. What kind of control did you have back then in terms of how products could be merchandised?
Mike: Yes. So that was just at the beginning of where we were trying to create different levels within a commodity. So eggs are commoditized, obviously. And that’s when Eggland’s Best was starting to come out. And so that was really the focus was trying to create consumer awareness for an egg that wasn’t just like every other egg. Trying to get the message out there with rail strips, signage at eye level, trying to get the cartons at eye level to really get consumer interested in that. Then, I would say that was one of the biggest things we were trying to do at that time, was say there’s levels of eggs. It’s not just a commodity thing that every egg is the exact same.
Maureen: Right, yes. Very cool. Okay, continue, carry on. So you’re doing that kind of work and then what?
Mike: And then, like I said, I went to Cornell for that. Then after graduating, I went off and did something radically different. I was doing music for a while. And that played off of some of my creative interests in marketing, because I was essentially marketing music. So I really liked that.
Maureen: You play an instrument too, don’t you?
Mike: Yes. I was in the pep band and the marching band at Cornell. I played the trombone.
Maureen: Yes, love it.
Mike: So that was a lot of fun. Then, what happened on the farm while that was taking place though, as that’s the generation then the current generation wanted to start preparing for retirement. So they wanted to prepare for retirement and they didn’t know what that looked like. And there’s, I mean, that’s something that happens on a lot of family farms. One generation wants to retire and they don’t know what that means.
Maureen: And that was Gen 3 and you’re Gen 4? Yep, okay.
Mike: So we had a very large family meeting and I can’t remember how many people were there. There were probably 30-35 family members there, cousins, second cousins. It was a very large gathering. And the question was posed, what should we do? Some of us are getting older. We can’t keep doing this forever. What does that look like? And that’s when I made the decision to come back to help with that transition because we had a lot of questions and needed answering.
And I thought I could bring some creative solutions to that with my background. So I came back in 2012 to the farm to help with that transition and worked through a lot of things there, it was really good. We had a lot of good discussions as a family about what we needed to continue the path that we were on, that the only constant in agriculture is change.
Things keep evolving and keep changing. And so we needed to keep changing with the times and understand what that looked like. So I started to work on the crop side of the operation. We had a very large, or we have a very large organic crop operation. And I wanted to look at what that looks like in the future? So we started to look at different things that we could do with some of our customers, different crops that we could grow up to that time.
Our farm has done a lot of feed, and continues to do a lot of feed grain for the chickens, but we work into that rotation, some processing vegetables. That business is changing. Frozen and canned food is not as big as it was decades ago. So, I wanted to look at new markets that we could have for things that we could rotate through with the feed grain. At that same time, organic started to change.
And continues to be a large demand for organic, there’s more producers in it. And it’s become more of a global market. So what we could receive for a crop, that amount of money has continued to go down over time as just the supply increases of whatever that crop might be. So we wanted to look at, what’s next? Because we were early in the organic market with them, Upstate New York is a huge organic farming community.
And that with California, we’ve pretty much been leading the way in organics for a long time in upstate New York and California. So we’re looking at that community. They started to talk about, and this was probably somewhere between 2015, 2019, regenerative started to come more and more to the surface.
Maureen: So before you go there into the regenerative side, let’s just give a little bit of the basis of the farm and its scale, because it is the largest regenerative crop farm in New York, right? How many acres are we talking about?
Mike: So we have 6,000 total acres that we farm. We have roughly half of that certified regenerative, but we’re doing the practices on a lot more of those acres. And it just has to do with the certification. We haven’t received certification on all those acres.
Maureen: Gotcha. And I think that’s where you were just starting to go is the certification and kind of, you know, what that looks like and means. Yes. So go ahead.
Mike: You what that means. Yes. And there’s a lot of discussion. So that was one of the first things that organic farmers and conventional farmers started talking about is like, what does regenerative mean? And it was in some discussions that have always happened in organic, because there’s like a divide a little bit between organic and conventional when it doesn’t, there doesn’t need to be, but it exists.
Primarily from a marketing standpoint, people want to understand the difference. And so it’s easier to say, well, this is conventional, this is organic. But what does that mean? And what that, I can tell you what it means from a certification standpoint is it’s procedural, right? And if you follow these certain procedures when you’re producing a crop, it’s an organic crop. And if you’re not following those procedures, it’s conventional. And what was interesting is there’s a lot of conventional farmers that would validly have emotional reactions to that because they would say, we do a lot of things that are good too. Because it became a discussion of a judgment. was like, well, organic is good and conventional is bad. And that’s a problematic approach because that divides, you know, the group that’s producing the food that feeds everybody, it divides that group up into, from a judgment standpoint of good and bad. When there’s practice, go ahead.
Maureen: Yes, and there’s also some agricultural crops that really can’t go organic, like grapes. Could they? Sure. But is there a viable business in that? Not really, right? Because in order for grapes to be grown organically, you would lose so much of it due to disease and fungus and powdery mildew, that sort of thing. And so I think that that’s a great point about it creating a divide in a stigma, not only among consumers, but also among farmers. Are you in this club or are you not in this club? You know, even though some people weren’t, it wasn’t really in their control or an option for them to be in the club.
Mike: Right. And it also depends on what you are trying to accomplish. I mean, so in the organic community, I would say most of the farms are thinking this is a better way to farm. And it’s a little bit judgy, but also a little bit, they’re just looking at themselves and saying, I want to do better, and this is a better way to farm, which is an OK thought to have.
But I would say there’s an aspect of also there’s a lot, mean, conventional farmers also want to farm better. It’s not like they’re just sitting around saying, I don’t want to do this thing. They’re looking at their farm and saying, this is the best thing for me. If we’re looking at a total outcome of whether we want to have a better, say, environmental impact or a higher yield, it depends on what you want, right? We can create higher yields, but there can be an environmental trade-off with having higher yields. If you’re trying to balance some of that, then we have to have more of a discussion of what that looks like. And that ends up being farmed by farm, field by field, crop by crop. And that’s what started to become interesting to me about regenerative is its outcome-based.
So Organic with this procedure made it so that a farmer could, on this conventional farm, there’re many conventional farms that are spending more money producing a crop because they want to take care of their soil, they want to take care of the environment, they want to do, you know, they would view the right thing. It’s more expensive to produce that crop. They’re not getting a premium though. They’re doing the right thing, but they’re not getting paid to do the right thing because they’re selling it at that same commodity price that the person down the road who might be doing, creating a higher environmental impact to produce it. You know, they’re both getting that same price, even though the other ones, it’s costing them more to produce that.
So, what was interesting to me about regenerative is its outcome based. So it’s doing measurements. Saying, are we actually accomplishing the changes in the soil, the changes in the water, the changes in the air that we’re going for? But the discussion when it started was almost like organic plus. Well, you had to be organic first. And so there is a, I would say, still continues to be a really interesting discussion about how can you call yourself regenerative? What does the word regenerative actually mean? I would say where there’s common ground is we all agree it’s about the soil. At the end of the day, it’s about the soil after you’re farming it for that season is better than when you started that season. Whatever you’re doing is better for the soil.
Maureen: It’s so funny that you describe it that way because this is a point of contention, right? I attend a ton of agricultural conferences all over the United States and the definition of regenerative is the first thing that anybody’s talking about. And I was interviewed on somebody else’s podcast recently too about regenerative and I explained it in the exact same way. I said, it is essentially leaving the soil better than you found it.
Leaving the earth better than you found it. And that is how you sum it up. And the means to that end may be different, but I think that, as you mentioned, one of the big challenges between organic and regenerative is that because regenerative doesn’t have a solid definition, there isn’t clarity from the consumer standpoint of what does this mean? What am I buying? I don’t understand, you know, that sort of thing.
And so then there’s the certification component. And so talk about that a little bit, because you started to mention the Rodale Institute.
Mike: Right, so they have one that they do and that measures and looks at different things and they have different tiers to it. And then there’s a greener world which has a different approach to how they manage regenerative. There’s Regenify, there’s Soil Regen. There’s a lot of, probably five or six out there, different certifiers and have slightly different spins on what they’re looking at. They all work. at the soil. Meaning, so that’s the common ground that everybody can agree on is that we need to leave the soil better than we found it. And what’s interesting is you can sometimes, more often than not, in some scenarios, depending on the farm location, the type of soil you’re farming, you can do that easier with conventional farming methods. So with organic, weed control is primarily just tillage. So you’re going through and you’re driving a tractor over that acre over and over again to manage the weeds. And that creates compaction and you’re disturbing the soil, which is not good. And so if you can do like a strip till or a no till approach, which is a lot easier and conventional, then you have that puts you ahead of say the organic farmer.
When you’re trying to look at what’s building up and trying to eliminate compaction and leaving a root in that soil as much as possible. So that’s where I struggle with the idea that you have to be organic to be regenerative.
I would say, I don’t think that’s the case. I would say if we’re going, if we’re looking at the outcomes here, that we shouldn’t necessarily look at a prescription of this is the procedure of what you need to do to be regenerative. I would say, let’s leave it up to the farmer who knows their fields the best on the practices they need to do to build up that soil. And then let’s give them the tools to do that.
So to me, that’s what the overarching idea of regenerative is, is that whatever you need to do on your farm, you understand your farm the best, whatever you need to do there to build up the soil, to conserve water, to capture carbon, to promote biodiversity.
You understand your farm the best. You do that on your farm, whatever that is. And then let’s measure it. Did that work? And if it worked, then I would say you’re a good enough. And if it didn’t, well, then we gotta try something else.
Maureen: Yes, I want to go back to something that you said. You said that a reference to not getting paid to do the right thing. Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I assume that your goal in going this direction of regenerative was, cause you said that organic was getting more and more saturated. And so there were just more people out there that were doing it. And you said, we got to do something different. Let’s try regenerative. Is the farm able to demand a higher price point because you’re farming regeneratively?
Mike: Haven’t completely yet because just as you were talking about, there’s a lot of confusion about regenerative, what regenerative is. So we started doing this around 2019 and it’s been a journey to this point. First trying to figure out because we have a lot of organic acres. So how are, what are, we had to start looking at our practices on those organic acres.
To both accomplish what we need to from a weed management standpoint, but also try to start dialing back compaction, start dialing back how many times you’re driving the tractor over those acres. And then also look at our conventional farms and how do we start tweaking those systems so that we can start really increasing soil health year over year, season over season, measuring that. So there’s a lot of the tools that we have to measure soil health, just to exist.
I mean, they continue to get better and better at that and dialing in more and more because it’s not just a microbiological activity. It’s how water moves through the soil. It’s the respiration of the soil, things that we just really couldn’t go back in time. We didn’t measure before. We didn’t have the tools to measure. Now we can. And that gives us the information to know we can do a practice on a field, measure before and after and say, did that work? And if it works, we can expand that to more fields. So it took time to really dial in our practices.
At the same time, we’re trying to explain to people what we believe is generative to me. And we’re explaining to our customer, which is not usually the consumer. So there’s multiple steps between us and the consumer. And our customer said, well, I can’t get the consumer to pay me more, so I can’t afford to pay you more yet. And so it’s both been a journey of how to produce a crop in these systems, as well as an educational journey of getting our customer to understand what it is and starting to get consumer buy-in that this is in general a way to farm that will demonstrate positive results for the environment.
Maureen: Mm hmm. So, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a good thing to hear you say that, but it’s in line with, we’ve talked about regenerative ag a number of times on the podcast. And that is generally the assessment of. We need to figure out how to create this push and pull, right? So that the consumer wants it and the farmer has it and we’re figuring it out. And so it’s.
Again, that’s not a good thing to be in that limbo place, but it is, I guess, reassuring to hear you say, I am still doing this because I think it’s worth it for the future. I agree. I’m really excited about regenerative. I think that the practices make sense for a lot of the reasons that you already talked about here. And the fact that it is a little bit more… I don’t want to say loosey goosey, but it’s flexible, right?
In terms of what works for the farmer and their crop, exactly like you said. if we can, but I do think that we need to get to a place where we have a collective definition. And I hope that it does land somewhere with the idea of leaving the soil better than we found it. But you mentioned measurement and I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole because I do have larger big picture questions for you about ag and in general.
There’s one thing that you mentioned about that we have more ability to measure soil health now than we ever had before. When I was growing up on my farm, my dad didn’t measure anything. It was just, we’re growing to feed the cows. So what does measuring soil health look like for you right now?
Mike: Soil sampling. And so Cornell does soil sampling. There’s a company run by Dr. Liss Haney, the Haney test they do that does different soil tests. There’s different labs you can send it to now and get different measurements and different information that you just didn’t have access to before. And so that’s what I’m talking about. The microbiological activity. And you can measure at different depths to see.
Where the root zones are, what the impact is on the biological activity at that depth. And you can look at the compaction layers. I mean, you can always look at compaction. That’s something that farmers obviously have done for a long time. But you can see its impact on the soil health then too. Because you can measure it at different depths and see what that looks like. And then you can do tissue sampling from a crop standpoint. So you can say, OK, well, this is what I have in the soil.
How much of that is available to the plant and what it is doing with it. You can do a sap sampling too. It’s good. I can get, we can get a lot more granular now than we ever could before. And in the season, see what’s happening and then see the outcome after the season and really understand what our practices then have done both, you know, the impact it has both on the soil and on the plant.
What we’re seeing now over the many seasons we’ve been doing this is it does build a more resilient field. So the soil is more resilient regardless of weather events, regardless of what’s happening, it creates more resiliency. But that’s not in year one. This is five or six seasons out. So you have to be committed to it because there is going to be a learning curve. It’s going to be hard.
But after you start getting down that path, you start to see the results and we’ve seen it. It’s just we’re seeing more resiliency now than we had been before.
Maureen: I can’t tell you how many soil testing, tissue sampling, ag tech startups I meet at these ag conferences that I go to. So maybe I’m even kicking my potential client in the foot by asking this question, but a lot of the time they are proposing on-farm solutions for soil testing and tissue sampling that give you those results more frequently and closer to the field side are beneficial for you to have that information on an ongoing basis. You don’t have to send it out to be tested, that sort of thing. What are your thoughts on that?
Mike: I think I could go either way. I would say there’s some, in some aspects, you can make a change in the moment that could help the crop. So if you’re saying, I wouldn’t look at it so much from a soil standpoint. You know, if we’re looking at the crop from a growing standpoint, you can get more nutrients if it needs it. And you could see what nutrients might be more bioavailable.
And if you can get that to the crop faster, make an adjustment faster within the season, there would be value there. You know, it’s harder inorganic to have something that would be impactful like that, just because the organic options from a fertilizer standpoint are more limited, either from an availability or financially. You know, as I’m saying, you know, if the premium you’re getting for organic is going down, but the cost for an organic fertilizer that’s bioavailable at that moment is through the roof, then yes, it is nitrogen, but what am going to do? I can’t afford to go there.
And so, I would say that one of the challenges from an organic standpoint is that I can sample during the season. What am I going to do with that information? Conventionally, there’s more options. And if you have a higher value organic crop, or if it’s organic regenerative, you’re selling it for an increased premium, then it can be worth it. But that’s not every crop every time. You have to be much more selective.
Maureen: Mm-hmm. Yep. That makes sense. Tell me about some of the biggest challenges that you face as a farmer in upstate New York.
Mike: There’s a huge one. As we’re looking at thunderstorms rolling through. Yes. Just what we need. Yes, I would say with organic being the weather, that’s the perfect combination to a challenge, right? So as I was just talking about weed control, where you have to drive over that acre to manage the weeds.
Maureen: How much time do we have, right? Yes. I know I just got a flood warning alert on my phone.
Mike: And we had that blind wedding pass where we’re just disturbing that top of the soil just gently before the weeds can get established. You got to do that in the right conditions. And it’s very difficult to do that in the right conditions on many fields if you can’t get a good weather break. The breaks in the weather are getting increasingly condensed. We have to do more field activity in a smaller time frame, condensed time frame than we have in the past. And that’s a huge challenge. And on top of that, labor. People that want to do farming. Because when you have that brief period of time where you can get out there, it’s not nine to five. And trying to convince somebody that’s a younger generation that wants to have more of a work-life balance, you might have to have Wednesday and Thursday off, but that you’re going to be working through the weekend for a 10 or 12 hour day because that’s what we gotta do. That’s not a lifestyle everybody wants.
Maureen: Mm-hmm. Right. Yes, you can take three weeks off in January, but you know, when it’s time to plant, I have corn fields behind my house and we’ve had so much rain, you know, the last couple of months that it took forever for the fields to get planted back there. When it finally got dry enough that they could plant back there, they were still going. You could hear the tractors at 11 PM and they’ve got the lights on and everything.
And so I’ve seen that too, and that makes sense. And from the labor standpoint, I won’t even go down that direction because that’s a whole other thing too, in terms of the labor, the workers, where do you find the people, how those things are changing in today’s landscape and all of that. But the weather, certainly no surprise there.
What other challenges are you finding? I think you were talking, saw you somewhere recently, we had lunch. And you had mentioned that some of them, you had some things that you had to toss because they couldn’t go where they needed to go or something.
Mike: Yes, even from, and that’s weather-related. So we have a greenhouse and so on the floral side of our business, it’s been wet and cold. So nobody’s been gardening and the flowers just, you know, we can only hold them back for so long. And so they were getting overgrown and so we only wanted to sell a good product. So it went up to the compost pile, which you know, good use. It’ll go, it’ll provide nutrients to future, future crops.
But that’s a challenge when we’re expecting that income to be coming in and it’s not going to because people just aren’t gardening. And so those weather patterns are disruptive across the board when you come to agriculture. And then people are eating differently. I mean, that can be the flip side if we have a really warm October, now, so then we’re harvesting winter squash, we’re sending winter squash to the stores, but people aren’t thinking about squash if it’s really warm out.
And so then we see a decreased demand from that. If we have a really cold or rainy beginning of the summer or into the summer, people don’t want to buy sweet corn because they’re not grilling. That weather can really impact both the production and the sales side of business.
Maureen: Mm-hmm, yes. And especially for where you sit on the supply chain, right? Like you mentioned, you’re not selling directly to the end consumer. You have a customer that is a B2B sale that is then selling through to the consumer as well. And so it just adds a whole other layer to it. So I asked the challenge question. I always like to ask the flip side of that too.
Mike: I’m really excited about regenerative. I mean, that’s what I’m talking about right now. I think we’re at a tipping point that I believe that it’s now becoming a word that people are talking about more and not just in the food industry. I think consumers are starting to think about it. There’s only so many times.
Maureen: And why do you say that? Mike, what makes you say that you think consumers are starting to think about it?
Mike: Just because we’re getting asked about it from our customers, what’s the deal with this regenerative thing that they’re hearing about on their end. So the consumers come to the retailer and say, hey, I’m interested in this regenerative thing, which means the retailers are not coming out saying, hey, we’re hearing about this regenerative thing. What’s the deal with that regenerative thing? I think we’re starting to get there. Now it’s going to be the early adopters. It’s those folks that buy based more on their values and sort of like value based shoppers. Those individuals, the early adopters of this type of thing, we’re starting to see that person come into the store and say, this is what I would like to buy. I believe that gives us the opportunity, those who are farming regeneratively, to then open up more of a dialogue with our customer and with the consumer about what regenerative is. So they’re hearing about it, they’re interested in it.
Now that’s our opportunity to say, okay, this is what it is. And I believe that will get more interest in it because really if it’s better for the soil, better for the air, better for the water, at the end of the day, it’s better for you. Now, consumers shop for themselves. I mean, that’s why you buy something and you’re buying it for yourself. And so being able to buy something that you know is better for you, that’s what they want. And so this gives us the opportunity to explain how regenerative is better.
Maureen: Yes, I think also I’ve seen consumer trends, people are more interested in taking an active role in their overall wellness than they ever have before. And that is from the food that they eat to all the way down to the thing with Gen Z is skincare, right? Instead of heavy makeup and that sort of thing. And so it’s this alignment with authenticity and I think like the simplicity of something in its simplest form. And I think that regenerative aligns with that really well.
Mike: Yes, especially when we’re talking about regenerative produce. It’s not a process to anything. This is just a vegetable. You take it home, you use it. And that’s exactly what you’re saying with the values that the consumers are drifting towards that value set is you are what you eat. So if you eat better, you eat healthier, you’re not putting chemicals in your body.
It’s not processed food. I would also put a plug in here that it’s not just fresh produce. I would say you should be eating vegetables in any way, or form, be it canned or frozen. I support my farming neighbors out there doing that too. But that’s the thing is, this is eating a not processed vegetable, adding that into your diet in some way, shape, or form. There’s interest in that. And people are thinking about it.
For better or worse, it’s in the media. Processed foods are being discussed in the media. Having more of a natural diet is being discussed in the media. And when we talk about regenerative, it’s as natural as you get. We’re trying to avoid as much of the synthetic inputs as possible. So we’re not saying that you can’t use a spray or what have you. It’s about minimizing that use and using it in a very targeted way so that you can grow the best crop that you can but also at the same time you’re enhancing the soil as much as possible. And so all of that together is creating just a natural way of producing a natural product that they can buy and use.
Maureen: Mm-hmm. I want to clarify one thing that you said too, that process is great when we’re talking about it is just freeze-dried or it is just frozen or it is just, you know, it can be processed in a sense that it is leaning into convenience. But what you’re talking about is where the challenge lies and what consumers are staying away from is ultra processed in terms of you know, it was once an apple and now it’s applesauce that has a bunch of preservatives and sugar, like added sugar and that sort of thing that’s all added to it that makes it yucky. Yes.
Mike: Right. Just to be clear, when you’re doing a mechanical way of preserving the food in some way, or form, that makes a lot of sense. That makes it so that we can make nutrients more available for more people more of the time. And so nutrient preservation and calorie preservation is important. Now, yes, I’m talking about avoiding ultra-processed things where you can’t pronounce the ingredient list.
Maureen: Right, exactly. You said something too, just now about nutrients. And I think that is also where the future is going. That’s the new undertone of these agriculture conferences that I’m going to where it used to be, what is regenerative? And is it really going to take off? And the money’s gotta go back to the farmer and all of that stuff, which is still happening, but now it is.
And some farmers are claiming that their regenerative ag practices are increasing nutrient density in the output. And so there have been some early studies that are true, but I think it is also just as you said, that it is a farm-by-farm, plot-by-plot, crop-by-crop kind of thing, and really has to be tested with that ongoing information in order to be something that you can claim. It’s not, it is not just you know, automatically hooked that if it is regenerative, then it is more nutrient dense. And I think that that’s one thing that again gets into that sort of weird space where it’s regenerative is still a good thing, but it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily more nutritious for you in what you’re consuming. It could be true, but you know, kind of still working on it. Yep.
Mike: We don’t know. Right. And we should vilify other vegetables. Meaning, that’s the whole thing is people should be, we don’t want to say, well, you’re eating healthy, but you’re not eating the most healthy. You know, I think really if we can just get in general, better diet on the table, that’s what we should be shooting for and not vilify the way that it gets there. You know, be it frozen, be it canned, be it a conventional vegetable, you know, people should just eat more vegetables, period, end of story, right? You know, find a vegetable. Yes.
Maureen: Just eat a vegetable. Yes, well said. My final question for you, what do you think the agriculture industry needs as a whole?
Mike: That’s a big one. I don’t know how to answer that one specifically because I think there’s a lot of stuff that agriculture already has that it’s always had. And one of the things that makes agriculture great is that at the end of the day, we’re a huge community that works together. We sometimes have some disagreements internally about how to do a thing, but we’re trying to feed this planet where the population keeps getting bigger and there’s fewer farmers and less land to do it on.
And it’s really inspiring, I would say, just to be part of this community, trying to figure out how the heck to do it. To me, what’s awesome about agriculture is we’re all working together towards this common goal of feeding the world. And we don’t have all the answers, but we’re working together to figure it out.
Maureen: Love it. Well said. Mike, thanks for joining me on the show today. I really appreciate your insights. I am also all in on regenerative, although in a very different way. I’m not farming anything, but I am honored to be able to tell your story to advocate for farming in general and that niche aspect of the agriculture space with you. So thanks for taking the time.