“So they're worried more about the yogurt they eat and whether they recycle than finance, which is absolutely brutalizing them most of the time.”
Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg (by Food Tank) · Food & Beverage · August 2026
Taylor co-founded a bank and now funds regenerative agriculture, and was asked how to break the silos between farming, philanthropy and finance. She describes banking as the most powerful industry in the world and invisible in everyone's supply chain, which is exactly what lets people overlook it. The line sets the small consumer choices people agonise over against the system she thinks is actually acting on them.
Transcript
…are multiplayer, multi-systems, and they're not uber competitive. They don't, there's no might makes right. They don't squash each other out. They're adaptive and evolutionary in nature. But that's kind of, we're trying to create an ecology in our economy and the subsystems like school food.
…that imagination that you talked about and getting those sectors to work together because the biggest part of this, the biggest sort of hurdle is finance, right? There's not the, you know, the financial mechanisms that are out there to help farmers and ranchers and others in the food system.
Yeah, yep, yep. So I'm definitely a woman with a hammer and it's finance. I don't come from a finance background. I'm obviously married to a guy who's a very good investor, but we both. Noticed very early on that there was something terribly wrong in banking and finance. It is the most powerful industry in the world. It's invisible in everyone's supply chain. So they're worried more about the yogurt they eat and whether they recycle than finance, which is absolutely brutalizing them most of the time. It spends 10 to 1 at least on political lobbying and campaign finance. Every other industry depends upon it. So coal is nothing without coal finance. Once it has coal finance, then you have Chase Bank financing oil and gas discovery and development in Russia, which fuels the Ukraine war, literally. So if we don't get finance right, we kind of feel like it's game over for these other systems…
Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for explaining all that. Where do you see the biggest opportunities then, especially around things like public-private partnerships? Where do you see the biggest opportunities for collaboration that's not happening right now?
So I think this it is a trick right now to not trigger trauma and fear in people, communities, or businesses in suggesting a change because the change has got to be good for everybody. The status quo is not, but it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game where for people who have been losing to now win…
Yeah, for sure. You know, I'm glad you brought up relationships. They are such an important part of regenerative agriculture practices. And I don't think we talk about them enough. And it's the relationships with organizations and people, obviously, but it's also a relationship with the land in a…
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