Well, so almost everything we do, we try to do in coalition. We are crowdsourcing design solutions at a time that is important to rethink and redesign. And we don't have all the answers. We're learning more than we're providing, probably, but we do have a platform because it's charitably funded to try to recruit all sorts of players in to provide data. It's data you would expect, like soil carbon, water cycling, biodiversity metrics, all sorts of things that are indicators of ecological health, but also that full cycling, full balance of natural systems. And that is actually an analogy of how our economy should run as well. So we learn a lot about many systems that are important to human survival, but also thriving. The other data that we're collecting is actually quite narrative in nature, like a values-based conversation about what do we actually want and how do we go together to get it. I'll give you an example in School Meals for All, that was passed here first, largely on a narrative and coalition basis. Nobody thought it could be done. It was going to take 15 years. There was a lot of oppositional forces, et cetera, et cetera. Then the pandemic comes along and the districts, for want of any other way to do it, fed everybody. They had no ability to discern between students. They didn't even stop at the students. They fed the families too. So when naysayers say it can't be done and then it happens even in that unique setting, it unlocks everyone's imagination. Then the coalition that came together around that, it was not just food and agriculture. It was labor, climate, healthcare, economy, environment. It was everybody who realized because of the storytelling and the collaborative effort that if we all went together, we'd get everything. If we went singly, we would get nothing. It's a form of a network effect. And it's very powerful, not just in passing school meals for all, but that coalition, which was 208 organizations originally, is now 245, I think, has to stay together for implementation. You know, SNAP is very important. Farm Bill is very important. How it actually lands on the ground is equally important. We always save half our energy, time, and resources for implementation. Otherwise, it gets watered down by opposition or it doesn't have the intended effect. So in California, which I think is an analog for the federal farm bill negotiations going on now, great. Universal school meals, the only thing worse than that is letting them be bad food. They can no longer be bad food. Some of it still is bad food. So we passed a prohibition of six food dyes that are unnecessary and very harmful to children's health and the environment. We pass a ban on ultra-processed food. Carefully we go to not let, you know, like wheat bread be winnowed out in that, but really important. So the guardrails to make sure it lands correctly, and then also the kitchen infrastructure training money, we have to resource these districts to cook. Again, they didn't cook for decades. So the aligned equipment, the workforce development that actually, by the way, upgrades the lowest classification in unions in schools to a high-skilled job with a lot of transferability. All of that has to happen in concert. It's like an ecosystem. Ecosystems 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.

Yeah, I really liked what you had to say about unlocking imagination because, you know, you've worked in agriculture, philanthropy, finance. These are very siloed spaces usually. And I'm wondering how you think about breaking those silos, unlocking 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.

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, the winners have to lose. So that's a trick to me of relationship. Like, how do we talk to one another? How do we reveal the problem without terrifying people? How do we make the problem bigger so the solution set is even bigger? And I think we're at almost a charmed moment. You would think. So we're very opportunistic. We work heavily in California because it is a microcosm for the rest of the country. It's the fourth largest economy. It's actually politically quite diverse. We're called a crunchy granola blue state. We're very purple. If you look at the voting record of the last when Trump was elected, a lot of that support came from California. It's just we were so late in the early presidential before people didn't notice it. But the state of Jefferson, Central Valley, Imperial Valley, Orange County, San Diego, those are not blue places. And that's where a lot of our food production is. So we are trying to listen deeply, empathize completely, and work with people where they are because we actually believe they want the same thing. 98% of the people want the same thing, including farmers and ranchers. They want to take care of their soils. They want a livelihood business, all that kind of stuff. So now we go to the political side of it all. Obviously, California has been a fruitful place for policy advancement, school meals for all being one example. It seems like the federal government is not, but before Trump came into office, Zach Ducheneau got congressional authority to consolidate and restructure farm credit. The USDA issues about 10% of the $500 billion of farm credit. If they simply restructure to 20-year debt, that is huge competitive pressure on the private markets who have been mispricing and misterming risk for decades because they can make adequate money doing it. They can make enough money doing it our way, too. So, like suasion, getting these markets to go their foot, that's a market intervention that is not dependent upon ideological. Leadership in Washington. And weirdly, because RFK Jr. is a fan and knowledgeable about regenerative agriculture and food as medicine and preventative health and things like that. I assume he was the one who triggered the executive order recently on regenerative agriculture. Then they'd taken away a lot of grant funding from the USDA that was in the conservation ag programs, which was a huge loss to everybody. If you restructure farm credit, you don't need that grant funding. Now you have your own production income to do the very same things and you don't wait two years to get reimbursed. They're establishing a pretty large fund researching the connection between food and health, housing it under the NIH. It's like, I never thought this would happen, but if it's, we're going to go there and say, yay, let's keep doing this. It does have political opposition because the Maha community is not fully aligned on regenerative practice. So being attuned to political opportunity, policy advancement, market mechanisms on supply and demand side at all times really increases the toolkit and really increases the coalition because there's a lot of people and interests who want those same things. And if we put the flag up, we're going to attract a lot of support, even if we're kind of out of favor in Washington at the moment.

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 very different way. And I know, you know, that you think very deeply about the impact of our agriculture systems on the climate crisis. And I want to give you a chance to talk about why livestock grazing systems, holistic ones, can be an important part of the future of regenerative agriculture and really make agriculture a solution to the climate crisis.