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TL Tracey Lefroy On Agtech - So What?

“The rhetoric coming out a few years ago was that renewable companies are here to divide and conquer. People were being asked to sign NDAs, not talk to their neighbours. I might be getting $10 and you might be getting $15. So immediately you've got disparity between agreements, you've got a lack of transparency, and that undermines the trust between neighbours.”

Agtech - So What? · Alternative Proteins · November 2026

“The rhetoric coming out a few years ago was that renewable companies are here to divide and conquer. People were being asked to sign NDAs, not talk to their neighbours. I might be getting $10 and you might be getting $15. So immediately you've got disparity between agreements, you've got a lack of transparency, and that undermines the trust between neighbours.” — Tracey Lefroy, Agtech - So What?

Context

Asked whether developers resisted dealing with a landowner collective. She explains why negotiating as a group made sense: individual deals with different terms had been breeding distrust between neighbours.

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Transcript

Agtech - So What? Around 17:19 into the episode
Tracey Lefroy

…to have that legally and formally structured. And kudos to our proponents for embracing that concept. And I think that our proponents allowing us to work together actually created trust between not only within our landowner collective, but also between the landowner collective and the proponent.

Sarah Nolet

You would imagine like from a first principal's perspective that that's way more efficient for them too, that they're negotiating with one counterparty, but maybe there was resistance to it, or at least it wasn't the paradigm normally. Like, how did they take it? It

Tracey Lefroy

certainly wasn't the existing paradigm. And I think the other part, Sarah, is that the rhetoric coming out a few years ago was all about renewable companies are here to divide and conquer. So there was kind of this perception that people were being asked to sign NDAs, not seek to their neighbours, and that they perhaps sign up to things that were different from their neighbors. So I might be getting $10 and you might be getting $15. So immediately you've got disparity between agreements. You've got a lack of transparency. And that undermines the trust between neighbours. So to my mind, it makes complete sense, you know, in that surely working together smooths out those barriers. And as well, it means if I've got a question about something, I'm pretty darn sure most of my neighbors have got the same question because ultimately we are all farmers. Certainly these agreements are being done in a pre-competitive phase. It's not like me getting a turbine stops someone else from getting a turbine. Well, that's

Sarah Nolet

what I was wondering because the proponent was what was the driver for that kind of lock up the conversation, you know, NDA, single party. Like I could imagine a bunch of well-intentioned things. like oh these are people's private land and we want it to be respected and so it's a private…

Tracey Lefroy

so i think in a funny way there was almost and it's not been our experience at all but there was like this wild west approach where there was land speculation so slightly less ethical developers perhaps were trying to secure bundles of land that they would package up and then potentially sell off…

Sarah Nolet

interesting let's talk about that commerciality a little bit tell me about some of the risks you were managing for and the benefits that you see from an economic perspective and maybe otherwise

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Agtech - So What?

“What struck me first was the asymmetry in the approach. There were three people who came at first. This was a team who had done this dozens of times. They'd approached multiple families over multiple years, over multiple projects. We'd never done this. That gap in knowledge and experience and even in project literacy was real and huge, and you start feeling a little bit like you're on the back foot.” — Tracey Lefroy, Agtech - So What? “I'm not pro-development, I'm not anti-development, but if development is coming, how do we leverage it to the best of our ability to have that legacy impact? If you can find the pieces of the puzzle that are common to everyone, you're going to have more constructive conversations than trying to say to someone you have to host renewable energy transmission lines because it's good for the environment. That's quite a hard sell.” — Tracey Lefroy, Agtech - So What?