#116 - Chris Tolles @ Yard Stick - Making Soil Carbon Measurement Faster, Cheaper, & Easier

Episode Recap:

ReGen Brands Recap #116 - Making Soil Carbon Measurement Faster, Cheaper, & Easier - (RECAP LINK)

Episode Transcript:

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated with AI and is not 100% accurate.

00:13
Anthony Corsaro
Welcome to the ReGen Brands Podcast. The place for brands, retailers, investors and other food system stakeholders to learn about the consumer brands supporting regenerative agriculture and how they're changing the world. I'm your host, ac. Thanks for tuning in. Now, let's get into today's conversation. On this episode, we're digging deep, literally into why measuring soil carbon is so essential, but so difficult, and what it takes to make it faster, cheaper and easier. We're joined by Chris Tolles, co-founder and CEO of Yard Stick, a soil carbon measurement company that's helping unlock the data needed to scale regenerative agriculture by affordably and accurately delivering the ground truth data that proves the ROI of regenerative practices. 

01:00
Anthony Corsaro
Chris walks us through the graph that convinced him soil carbon was the climate solution to bet on and why most current measurement methods are too expensive, too slow or too inaccessible to meet the moment. You'll learn how Yard Stick's field based spectroscopy technology changes the game and why ground level measurement will always matter more than watching from space. We also explore how Yard Stick is working with carbon project developers, land funds and food brands, why these partners want the data, how they're using it, and what outcomes it's helping them achieve. Plus, Chris tells us what it actually looks like to measure soil carbon on a thousand acre farm. He gets real about the limitations of consumer demand to spur a regenerative revolution. He unpacks the drivers behind the underfunding of nature based climate solutions. 

01:48
Anthony Corsaro
And he shares his perspectives on what the voluntary carbon market might look like in 10 years. Whoa. Tons of stuff to unpack. Let's dive in. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the ReGen Brands Podcast. Very excited to have my friend Chris from Yard Stick joining us. So welcome Chris. 

02:10
Chris Tolles
Howdy. 

02:11
Anthony Corsaro
Good to have you here, man. For those that listen to the podcast regularly, we have a very exciting non brand episode. Even though I feel like a brand. Well, like I was going to say, you know, Yard Stick, I feel like we got to get into the CPG game. I don't know if it's like a functional bar that's like a yard long or like what we could do with the name, but you know, my brand architecture brain was tingling with possibilities. 

02:37
Chris Tolles
Not on the shelf at Whole Foods that we can say with clarity. 

02:41
Anthony Corsaro
Yes, but Chris, the. The company that you know, you're running and the service that you all are providing, I think many of us feel the is very important to this whole regenerative agriculture thing working out long term because soil Carbon is pretty central, I think, to a lot of theses around how this thing's going to be valuable and work and help from a climate mitigation and climate adaptation and carbon sequestration and all those standpoints. So excited to dive into all that with you today. For those that aren't familiar with Yard Stick, can you just give us a brief overview for who y' all are and what y' all do? 

03:21
Chris Tolles
You bet. We are a soil carbon measurement company, so I'm the business guy, but we are commercializing a bunch of science that's been going on for a long time. Before Yard Stick, my jam is science commercialization. This is that. Yeah, particularly we're replacing laboratory analysis with a fancy alternative called spectroscopy. And we're a service, so we get hired to measure solar carbon rather than selling a piece of hardware. For example. Our customers are, unsurprisingly, full carbon project developers in the voluntary carbon marketplace, but also food brands, also land funds, also some other stuff. Fundamentally though, the problem that we're solving is quantification of soil organic carbon stocks and stock changes over time on agricultural land, which has mostly been row crops and grazing land, but you know, forests have soil. Ain't no forest without soil. 

04:18
Chris Tolles
So certainly what we're excited about from an impact perspective, in a commercial perspective is all the soils of the world of which there are many. Mm. 

04:27
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. Very well said. Thank you. It's good, it's good overview. And you know, this is an interesting topic, I would say, for our platform because most of the brands that we talk to are really relying on some sort of identity preserved, segregated ingredient, product specific claim. Right. But there's this whole other world of regen ag where you could maybe say there's even more going on than in our typical kind of world where there's much more of a focus on kind of outcome metrics as it relates to farm level data. Right. Yep. And I'm really excited for you to kind of unpack that and be maybe our first true like, episode, really laying all that out. 

05:05
Anthony Corsaro
Because I think you do a really good job of articulating all of that before we dive into more of the details on the company and just lots of other topics, like give us a little bit of your background, how you got here, why, like soil carbon and the measurement of that was the next challenge that you wanted to pursue. Like what's your story and how did you get here? 

05:25
Chris Tolles
Yeah, so the why I think is like, I want to look my kids in the eye. I want to do stuff that like matters long term. I'm highly confident that at some point like my kids are going to ask me like, what the hell did you do? Right. Where were you? And as always, like truest things in the world I think are about holding paradox. Like they will be spot on with that implicit criticism. I doubt they will approach it that Socratically. Right. It'll probably instead be like, you know, why weren't you? And yeah, I want to be able to tell them like, I don't know. I did my best. Right. I put, I put some part of my life towards things with, with deeper value. There's a lot of different big problems in the world. 

06:06
Chris Tolles
You know, climate change is at least top three and they're all interrelated. So my gift I learned early in my career is science commercialization. I actually went to art school undergrad. I have a degree in furniture making early. Yeah. Yes. So backup plan in the apocalypse. 

06:26
Anthony Corsaro
Well, that's why Yalls piece of hardware looks so good. Because of that degree in furniture making. 

06:30
Chris Tolles
No, no, that's all by my co founder, Kevin. That's him and his team guy named Dalton. We've had brilliant people making the hardware look nice. But I will take credit for the aforementioned brand. I went to a school called risd, Rhode Island School of Design. And that's definitely like where I learned to be a design problem solver. But I went to art school not because I wanted to like make websites for a living or even I didn't study furniture because I wanted to make furniture for my job. What I actually loved at risd, ironically was that the furniture program was less commercial than industrial design. 

07:05
Chris Tolles
And I wanted these tools of like solving problems better, like using better problem solving toolkits for the problems that as far as I can tell, like aren't being solved very well with like a lot of, you know, conventional problem solving approaches. And was just really lucky as always to have an early career experience that made me realize there is a ton of amazing science in the world that does not have impact because some scientist publishes a paper and then they've done their job. And this is a much deeper conversation about sort of like the role of academia and the incentives of academic careers. Certainly most of our technology like did start in a lab somewhere. So clearly some makes the transition. 

07:46
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

07:47
Chris Tolles
But living in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I live right now, got involved in a company spun out of mit, I was like, holy shit. Like there's really cool stuff happening within science programs around the world if I want to be an impactful person in the world, that would be a cool place to sort of find dry powder as it were. Yeah. And because that first experience was a bunch of product people with not a lot of business acumen specifically I very quickly realized like oh I got to be. I want to be taken seriously as the business guy. And so I got an mba. That's how people take you seriously in business. Apparently it works. They take me seriously now. But it was really that early career experience, this solar startup in China that got me religion around science commercialization being the thing. 

08:38
Chris Tolles
I had a previous founding role at a company that was doing an ingestible sun protection product. So I have all kinds of weird. Yeah we again we can spend an hour and a half on that if you want but Yard Stick is really like the most recent I think in a career of a bunch of different like trying to solve problems that matter, doing so with the tools of business, you know. Warts acknowledged. And in this case it was summer 2020, not a great time for like buying a postdoc a beer out of mit. And so a Slack group was like you know the way we many of us were connecting. So met my co founder Kevin in the my climate Journey Slack group. Didn't even meet him in person until after we had closed our first round of funding. 

09:25
Chris Tolles
He had already built a relationship with one particularly kind of wizard level scientists that had done a lot of the original academic research and so that triumvirate of Christine the scientist outside the company like not an employee but you know, effectively co founding scientist Kevin my co founder hardware SpaceX Mickey wizard and then me. Biz of sky is where your stick came from. Unbelievably more than five years ago. 

09:54
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. Crazy. I can't even believe it's been five years since you and I've probably been connected that long or close to it as well. 

10:02
Chris Tolles
Probably the. 

10:04
Anthony Corsaro
There's kind of a three part question that I feel like is a little bit loaded but they're all, it's all interconnected. 

10:11
Chris Tolles
Right. I like learning questions. That's all Right. 

10:13
Anthony Corsaro
Which is like describe this the current state of soil carbon measurements like where was the need. 

10:20
Chris Tolles
Right. 

10:21
Anthony Corsaro
And why you personally were attracted to trying to solve that problem and thought like solving it was possible versus some of the other science you could have commercialized that had impact as well. 

10:32
Chris Tolles
Yep. So I'll do the last one first which means I'll probably forget the first question. So remind me like pretty literally it was one Graph that got me excited about soil carbon specifically. And we could put it in the show notes. Yeah, it's. So the X axis is gigaton removal potential. So many people at some point in the last five years got excited about carbon removal. That's good, it's important. And that was me for a portion of 2020 inarguable science that like, in some ways it's too late. We not need to just abate emissions, but we also gotta suck it back out of the atmosphere. 

11:10
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

11:10
Chris Tolles
So thankfully, scientists have been toiling largely in obscurity, at least obscurity relative to my awareness for a long time to stack rank each of these different technologies. And I have no interest ultimately in the like this carbon removal versus that carbon removal debate nonetheless, like, yeah, you gotta like evaluate options. And so this plot has. The X axis is gigaton removal potential, the Y axis is cost. And we want things. Yes. You know, class in the bottom right. We want a lot of tons and we want them cheap. That's the point. Right. These technologies all have pros and cons. Again, this is one plot. Never make like a major life decision one graph the way I have. But the box in the bottom right hand corner is called soil carbon. 

11:53
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

11:54
Chris Tolles
And so I vividly remember I was actually in this room on this monitor. I was like, I want that box. Can I get that box? And so I started asking people like, hey, how do we get that box? Like, am I reading this right? That's the good box. Right, that's the good box. And so you start just asking the five whys. And measurement is not the only barrier. Far from it. But like, measurement is one barrier. So, you know, as is the case, right place, right time, kismet, all the things. Kevin had already built a relationship with this scientist, Christine. I had seen this plot. What's one of the underlying barriers? Measurement. You know, maybe we should do it. That said, soil carbon measurement is not one thing. 

12:42
Chris Tolles
So I try and be precise in my language, as I did, to say we do soil organic carbon stock quantification. Soil carbon is a whole bunch of different things. People use this language in very sloppy ways. There are many other words being used in complicated, confusing ways, like your hat. So that's okay. Like we can work through that. But I think what I am most excited about here is that we are absolutely not solving all of the problems in soil carbon measurement. There are many that we don't even touch intentionally. So we gladly partner with others. You know, existing solutions are great, but particularly the question of Proximal quantification. That means your boots on the ground touching soil. Soil is underground. Satellites cannot see underground. That's an oversimplification. Biogeochemical modeling companies that are shouting at your podcast app right now. 

13:33
Chris Tolles
But like, nonetheless, like, I am most excited about the ground truth data dimension of this and seeing this particular technology with this particular person. People of Christina and Kevin, looking at that plot, it was real easy for me to get excited about forming the company at the time as well. Fall 2020, there was a lot of enthusiasm for some of the early entrants of soil carbon project developers in the voluntary carbon marketplace. And you know, like, we're an enabling technology, which means if, if the thing we enable isn't, you know, cresting, you know, good luck having real commercial opportunity. So it was also just great timing in that many of the companies that we would unlock, unblock, enable, were themselves growing. Indigo was growing, was huge, was visible. And you know, you put all those things together and you know, here we are. 

14:32
Chris Tolles
But it was really that first principles, and still is that first principles analysis of like, this is a thing that we have to do. I don't only care about carbon removal anymore the way I did then, but this is a thing that like we must do to not continue to experience catastrophic harm. And if I can unblock one of the 17 things that are getting in the way of that, like, that's again, you know, look at kids in the eye kind of thing. 

14:57
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. Can you just like super layman basic for someone that doesn't live it every. 

15:03
Chris Tolles
Day, like, how does it work now? Yes. Right. 

15:06
Anthony Corsaro
Well, even before that, like, you all are really focused on soil organic carbon stocks. What are like other things that people are measuring in soil that maybe are important, but like you, you are not focused on that just so people understand the full kind of menu? Maybe. 

15:19
Chris Tolles
Yes, totally. So the, the most important distinction is emissions versus soil carbon. So back to my example of the voluntary carbon market. Most people assume, and I'm going to call it BCM from here on out. Yeah, most people assume that the vcm, whatever your opinions of it, are crediting exclusively on the basis of sequester sequestration of atmospheric CO2 from soils. That's wrong. That might be a strategy, but like between reducing a gallon of diesel consumption and doing all this like, crazy shit to get soil supercharged to suck down atmospheric CO2, I would rather the former, like, just stop burning diesel. Right. Burn less. Like that's good. Right. Apply less fertilizer there's already overwhelming evidence that we over apply fertilizer. Start there, and rightly so. Leading methodologies Methodology means the big crazy PDF that defines who gets a credit or not a method. 

16:19
Chris Tolles
A leading methodology will give you credit for burning less diesel. We'll give you credit for reducing synthetic fertilizer application, and we'll give you credit for restoring or preserving soil organic carbon stocks compared to a baseline, a dynamic baseline, etc. So we do not quantify total agricultural emissions. The best language there is probably like an lca, a lifecycle analysis. Many of the brands that are on your podcast, they want to hold their bottle up and you know, like The Allbirds shoe 6.2kg for blah, blah. I don't do that. Right. What I do is an input to that if it's done with high rigor. What we quantify instead is that one piece of the total agricultural emissions puzzle, which is stocks and stock changes. That's the most important distinction to make. 

17:08
Chris Tolles
And therefore if our customer has a total emissions quantification and LCA claim that they want to make great, call Qantas, call these other folks and we will be a piece of that puzzle. But that's not what we focus on. 

17:22
Anthony Corsaro
And the people that are sending soil to a lab now to get like their NPK levels checked or their biological activity checked, the. That is also not something you do and not really a focus of what you're offering, correct? 

17:35
Chris Tolles
Yes, we do it in that if our customers want it, we will get it done. And yes, our technology can replace laboratory analysis for some of those soil properties, but that has not been our R and D focus to date, nor has that been the source of our real revenue. When our customers want those values as well, we just get it done the regular way. But some of those soil properties are very well served by existing laboratory or wet chemistry processes. If you want PH analyzed, that could be like 250 at a lab. 

18:05
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

18:05
Chris Tolles
Now you have to collect a physical soil. Right. And that's often actually like the more expensive piece of the puzzle. That's why I do not believe in like, you know, robotic efficiency gains within a laboratory environment as an acceptable solution for many of these things. But. Correct. We do not largely focus on provide. We do not have a innovative way of providing nutrient data. And not many land managers that are measuring soil nutrition are also measuring soil carbon for any other reason. So that's our kind of unlock is like we believe there's a reason to measure this. Yeah, our farmers, our customers are not Farmers and we can talk more about that. But that means that even folks that are measuring a ton of things about their soil, 100% likelihood that they are not measuring the thing that we're focused on. 

18:55
Anthony Corsaro
Well, yeah. I think the core distinction like that I have in my filing cabinet in my brain is like this is not something that's easy just to tick on the box to get back when you send off that regular soil sample. Like that's the important distinction here is like this. 

19:10
Chris Tolles
Yep, very correct and for two reasons. Number one, the way that you sample for it fits physically in the field is materially different. And number two, even if you do sample for the right way in field, the actual sticker price at the lab is very high compared to the other things. It's not like, oh, I'm spending 20 bucks, add another buck 50 and call it a day with organic carbon. Neither the piece of soil that you're sending to the lab for NPK is sufficient, nor is it that 150 add on in the end. 

19:44
Anthony Corsaro
So we basically have like a science and a cost which ultimately equals like an accessibility problem here to put it. To put it shortly. Right. 

19:52
Chris Tolles
Yep. 

19:52
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, we're gonna hit probably all the acronyms today. So you've already used vcm, which stands for Voluntary Carbon Market. 

19:59
Chris Tolles
Stop me when I don't define them up front. I went to business school. This is the main way I, I get people to think I know what I'm talking about. Just slinging acronyms. 

20:10
Anthony Corsaro
We, We've never had a glossary in the show notes, but this might be the first episode that we need a glossary. 

20:15
Chris Tolles
Get ready the. 

20:18
Anthony Corsaro
I think another thing that's important maybe once again for the people that don't live this every day when we think about this measurement process, another acronym that's used is mrv. I think it's what the. The longer one is MRRV or mmrv, which you can define for us. But I'd love for you to maybe like talk about the current state of that and kind of the two things that are sometimes presented as adversary and also sometimes presented as complimentary in terms of the satellite measurement and the actual like in soil measurement that you are focused on. 

20:52
Chris Tolles
Yep. Yeah, you bet. So I don't spend any of my time trying to understand the different MRV2M's 2R acronyms. And I'm the CEO of Yard Stick, so I don't know. I discourage your dear listeners from trying demonstrate. Anyway, if you ask Chat GPT. You will find like dissertation level definitions because somebody's gotta do that. But I don't really care in aggregate though, like measurement. M means measurement, which means measuring things. If there is a second M, it's usually monitoring. What's the difference? I don't know. Go read the paper. Reporting is the R and then V is verification. The things that really matter at the end of the day is usually that. 

21:34
Chris Tolles
Again, let's talk about VCM to start with, at least in the voluntary karma market, if brother Anthony is a project developer trying to sell credits, you hire me to provide measurement data to your project. You then turn around and you hand that data to Vera. Vera is the registry that publishes the methodology. Again, big PDF that says attention Anthony, if you do these things, I will grant you a credit. Yeah, if then Vera will turn around and hand that data to a verifier which is a separate organization that they basically licensed to check their work. And the point is that at the end of the day, by the time Vera comes back to you and says, congratulations Anthony, I grant you one ton that you may sell. 

22:18
Chris Tolles
You have this combination of primary measurement data collected by one or usually many service providers like Yard Stick. You have the project developer, you issuing the credits, you have the methodology and the registry, typically the same entity that are defining the rules of the credit issuance. And then you have the verifier, that's a fourth organization that is usually checked, you know, statistically significant portion of the overall work. And the idea is that chain of data is more likely to be of higher quality. So in MRV from a like doing the work perspective, the main thing to usually pay attention to is you, the project developer have the whole burden. I am a measurement service provider and the verifier is checking your work. To your point about satellites and whatnot. Correct. 

23:09
Chris Tolles
They are often positioned as adversarial and like one way we are, like we are trying to solve parts of the same measurement challenge. Yeah, I would say in reality 20% of our scope is overlapping and 80% is not overlapping. So many of the best soil carbon biogeochemical modeling companies of the world are my customers and my friends, my technology, my data enables their offerings. Yeah, that we can, you know, we compete for headspace and you know, in a scarcity market which one finds oneself in with some frequency, we compete for investment dollars and blah, blah. But in aggregate their technology is worthless without training data. Very few parts of the world like offer any training data. So like how the hell Are you going to teach a model to estimate soil carbon in Ghana and Cocoa? 

24:00
Chris Tolles
Unless like you go collect truth data, that's me. And if we can't model the impact of management practices on soil carbon, golly day. That means literally for all time you need one of these crazy Yard Stick probes going out there forever. That's not very inspiring. It may be necessary, right? Like right now, our ability. If you grow corn right now, you'll get paid on the actual amount of corn. That leaves the farm gate. Right? Like no one models your corn and then hands you money. No one models your beef. Right. So of course guy running the proximal measurement company believes that our technology is important, you know, as far in the future as I can possibly see. But you are correct that they are not alternatives. 

24:45
Chris Tolles
They have the advantage of looking at massive scale at low cost because it's quote unquote only a piece of software. Their cost basis is much lower. 

24:54
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

24:54
Chris Tolles
You know, some money to abs aws. Whereas if I do want to directly quantify stocks in cocoa in Ghana, I got to go to Ghana. And that's like a giant pain in the ass compared to running a piece of software. Fundamentally though, like, I think we spend way too much time talking about the 20% that we may disagree on. And in practice behind the scenes when we're actually signing contracts. What's encouraging to me is that 80% of it is enabling of each other. Grow the tent different pieces of the same total measurement obligation pie. And this also comes back to methodological guidance. Most methodologies in practice require both. Theoretically, a modeling company could choose to offer direct measurement services. Theoretically, Yard Stick could decide, I'm going to grab Regrow's lunch or I'm going to grab perennials lunch. Yeah, but these are completely different technologies. 

25:49
Chris Tolles
So I would discourage anyone from trying to do both of them because any one of them is hard enough. 

25:55
Anthony Corsaro
So then when you think about the stuff that you are focused on with the actual testing in soil, my basic brain that you can correct or build on right, is like, okay, you have the actual like travel cost to get to the plot. You have the piece of hardware that's actually doing the testing and then you have the cost associated with like actually running the lab testing. That's additional. And then like preparing the data. So you have like four kind of leverage points. And maybe I'm missing some. So feel free to add. Like how do you actually bring down the cost of those four things over a period of time that like make this More, you know, accessible. 

26:34
Chris Tolles
Yep. So two ways to oversimplify, as all things are. The first is that our equipment can move faster. Now, people who work at Yard Stick on our field team often disagree on this because they are the best damn conventional soil samplers in the world. Yeah. So the problem is, you know, in order to train our technology, we have had to get amazing at conventional sampling as well. We teach our probe to quantify organic carbon by teaching it on training data that we collect in the exact same spot conventional. And so many of the efficiency gains that our company has achieved in conventional sampling actually makes our cost competitiveness against ourselves, like, pretty limited. But that is pretty uniquely in my experience. The domain of Yard Stick is we are incredible at conventional sampling and incredible at spectroscopy. But that's cost advantage number one. 

27:24
Chris Tolles
If you took a typical soil sampler out to the field and compare the amount of time that they spend in field conventionally versus spectral, we would have the advantage. And this makes a lot more sense when you look at a video of our instrument in action, which I can send you and we can put in the show notes. 

27:39
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

27:40
Chris Tolles
The second, which is more important is the elimination of laboratory analysis. So while we concede that to directly quantify OC stocks, yes, you do need to be in the field, our technology trains a spectral instrument. And so again, you'll see in the video, when you collect data with our instrument, you're not taking anything out of the ground. You are effectively taking a movie in the soil profile for 45 seconds or so, and then you're moving on to the next sample site. This is also why I mentioned previously, while I of course always want labs to be more efficient as they can be, I think fundamentally, unless we're eliminating the physical soil sampling itself, we're unlikely to see the magnitude of cost reduction that we need to really scale these technologies. 

28:29
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

28:30
Chris Tolles
So they're sort of in reverse order of importance, but we go faster in field. Therefore, the cost of a person's labor is amortized around across a larger number of sample sites. Therefore, each one is cheaper and we eliminate the lab analysis portion of the puzzle after we've trained our instrument. 

28:48
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And we're getting into the. We're getting into the technology parts that feel a little bit over. Over my head, but. But I'm following. 

28:57
Chris Tolles
Hey, man, I went to art school. If I got here, you can get here. 

29:01
Anthony Corsaro
Can you, Chris, just walk us through maybe like process and outcomes at a high level for non VCM partners or. Or projects. Right. So like you did a really good job articulating that. But when you work with a, an asset owner or you work with a food brand, how are they taking the data or the service you're providing and integrating into some business outcome on their side? 

29:23
Chris Tolles
Yep. So let's talk about land funds. First one is to be clear, like, they want optionality on the VC app. Most of them, the fundamental economic case of their land fund is appreciation of the capital asset of the land. 

29:36
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

29:36
Chris Tolles
So, for example, Clear Frontier is a customer slm. As a customer, these are folks that, to oversimplify their house flippers for soil, they're buying farmland that they can make better by changing management. And the primary economic upside of that is either the asset itself is more valuable and someday they sell it, or the operations are more profitable and they enjoy the delta. But as the VCM grows, if they can be doing measurement data in such a way that they future proof their options to participate, that's good. There are, there are many data that you have to collect to be ready for enrollment in a VCM soil carbon program. 

30:19
Chris Tolles
And if you are not aware of those ahead of time and doing them, if five years from now you're like, wow, we've really crushed it, VCM is looking great, let's do the math and see what other economics are here. You're just not going to have that option. 

30:32
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

30:32
Chris Tolles
That said, the reason they hire us is primarily to understand the impact of their management practices on the land that they've acquired or are managing differently. 

30:42
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

30:43
Chris Tolles
So that either means they, like my metaphor is always, we're the photographer to the house. Right. They're like, look how bad this apartment was. I'm like, now it's good, right? 

30:51
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

30:51
Chris Tolles
And we're like, look how much stronger soil health is on this landscape. Therefore, you know, you paid X dollars an acre, you could presumably get Y dollars per acquire baker. Or they want to understand at a more granular level the relationship between management practices and on farm economics. And this actually gets into stuff that I'm a lot more excited about long term for Yard Stick, which is like, soil carbon is the single best indicator of soil health. Soil health is the foundation of like all good money in farming. If we destroy soils beyond their ability to recover, like, who cares about the vcm? You're not growing a lot of corn or a lot of soy or a lot of rutabagas or whatever. 

31:33
Chris Tolles
And so the reason why we're so proud to work so closely with the Soil Health Institute, which is the organization that Christine, the scientist I mentioned works for is because they're basically like blah, blah, VCM carbon's the co benefit. This is just like more profitable farming. 

31:49
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

31:49
Chris Tolles
And they do that with science rigor that is beyond any other quality of analysis I've seen anywhere in the world. So many people as you know better than I just talk constantly about look at this side by side and like their soil is bad. I make so much more money and like, whatever, like, I don't know, I probably do that too. 

32:08
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

32:09
Chris Tolles
What Shi does is like so we visited 100 farms across 17 states and we'll publish the data with peer review and again we can include some amazing links in the show notes. But like 80 to 90% of farms that have deployed what they call soil health practices have higher profits. 

32:29
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

32:30
Chris Tolles
I don't need to tell you or your audience like half of farms in America lose money every year. Like we have a really sick, messed up farming economics foundation. There's a bunch of reasons for that. This is not the only fix. But one really exciting opportunity I see that is really clearly expressed in the land fund segment of our customer base is what if we can make farming more economically compelling? 

32:55
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

32:55
Chris Tolles
Higher profits, greater gross margin per acre because we have an agricultural system that is so over rotated on yield. Like I'm not a farmer, I never given farmers advice. Nonetheless, like you don't feed your family on yield. Right. Like most of the corn you're growing probably isn't for humans anyway. Sorry. 

33:12
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

33:12
Chris Tolles
What you feed your family with is gross margin per acre. So how can we take the focus off this thing which serves agricultural input, mega ag, you know, input salespeople benefit, and instead focus it on the bottom line of yeah, revenues may go up, they may go down, but if costs go down and gross margin goes up, that's what you're feeding your family with. I would always rather value a business on a gross margin multiple or an EBITDA multiple than on a revenue multiple. And Shi's work is amazing for showing discounting VCM revenue opportunity entirely. You change your management practices, restore soil health, you make more money. Raise your hand if you want that. And there's a lot more barriers, but like a lot of people raise their hand for that. So that's land funds. 

34:01
Chris Tolles
And then on the food and also commodity supply chain side, it's mostly about supply chain resiliency, unsurprisingly, you know, I'm so proud that we have General Mills and Organic Valley as customers. Couldn't Be prouder. And for every dollar that General Mills puts into its net zero climate goals, it probably puts $1,000 into ensuring that it's going to have oats so that it can sell Cheerios. Right. So when I think about leverage, I want to show a supply chain risk analyst that healthier supply chains save them money. All these companies pay business interruption insurance, right? All of these companies. Suppliers, suppliers, suppliers bear crop insurance risk. Again, we can have a whole separate conversation about like crop insurance in America, but fundamentally these are supply chains that are risky and increasingly risky. 

35:03
Chris Tolles
There's a great plot of basically like supply chain price volatility over the last whatever it was, 30, 40 years. And it's like up and to the right, like bad volatility is up. It's not great science to ever attribute a single experience to any cause that's not a controlled study. And in aggregate, when you look at some of the most important supply chains of our food economy, you're like, oh, we are vulnerable. And the root of that is changing climate change and soil health, declining soil health. So while optionality is always welcome for food and ag brands. Right. Depending upon how SBTI goes. What about all these acronyms again? Right, like greenhouse gas protocol, ghdp. My favorite is a Folu, Agricultural, forest and other land use. I don't know. 

35:53
Chris Tolles
There is like potentially a real strong economic incentive to have reduced your agricultural emissions in the future. This is like a real possible thing. In the EU they have a law called cbam, Carbon Border Adjustment mechanism that basically says like, hey, organic valley, if you want to sell your yogurt in France, we're going to assess carbon intensity at the border and like you're going to get dinged based on carbon intensity. To be clear, that's not on food products yet. It's starting with I think cement and steel and electricity. But like, the implications are obvious. 

36:28
Chris Tolles
So while there are some companies who I think have the foresight and the disconnection from the quarterly churn of public markets to make a long term bet that the economics of emissions reductions will pay out in the long run, more of the food brands that are getting curious, excited signing contracts and solar carbon measurement are doing so because of this relationship between the measurement data we can provide and their overall goal of reducing supply chain risk, therefore reducing their risk, and their cost of capital, therefore improving their economics. 

37:07
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, okay, that was very well said and it was also a lot. So let's just summarize real quickly for the audience. 

37:14
Chris Tolles
Take a deep breath. 

37:15
Anthony Corsaro
So there's like Three main kind of project pathways, partnership pathways, like pathways of value here. Right. So you have the voluntary carbon removal marketplace and you are an enabling technology that allows those credits to be backed up, that allows them to exist, allows. 

37:32
Chris Tolles
Them to have rigor in the first place. Yep. So that's priced highly enough to matter in terms of marginal income to farmers. That's another important piece because if you issue credits and they're not sufficiently compelling to buyers to pencil out for revenue, that flows through to land managers, like, who cares? 

37:49
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. So it's like credit creation and credit quality right there. Like the accessibility and enabling of that. There's the land manager, land asset owner piece, which you're really enabling the optionality to participate in those same ecosystem services markets and. Or you are basically helping them prove the delta in the management changes and the appreciation and the value add of how they're managing the asset to the asset itself. And then on the brand side, on the food brand side, it's really about supply chain resilience and ensuring supply through this increasingly volatile and disrupted, you know, climate that we're in. 

38:27
Chris Tolles
Yep. 

38:28
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

38:28
Chris Tolles
Bingo. And I mean in any one of these examples, you know, multiple of these motivations can be varyingly important. Yeah. Organic Valley, for example, has been, as far as I can tell them of the, of large food brands the most clear that like, we will pay our suppliers for reduced carbon intensity. Like, to my knowledge, General Mills, like, hasn't said that and they're not to my knowledge, but correct. If you could represent, I think the middle of the adoption curve of each of these segments, what you just described is spot on. Cool. 

39:02
Anthony Corsaro
For another maybe dumber or layman question, Justin at Clear Frontier, Paul at SLM Sustainability person XYZ at General Mills picks up the phone and says, chris, we need you to go test XYZ plot of land that's a thousand acres. Like, can you just describe for the audience, like what does that actually entail? Like how many people are showing up with what. How long does it take? Maybe not exactly what it costs, but in general, what does it cost? How many plots of the thousand acres are you taking? How far apart are they? Like, just describe the. Like we're on the farm doing the sampling. What is happening? 

39:37
Chris Tolles
Yep. Okay, so one of the first questions is this a single thousand acre farm or is it 10 by 100? If it's the former, it's easy. It's one polygon at least. It's easy to determine this detail. If it's 10 by 100, the next question is, are you trying to quantify stocks across that portfolio of acres, or do you want independent quantification of all tenants? Because, for example, if you're General mills and those 10 farms represent 10 different producers, do you want to be able to report results back to 10 producers independently? That makes a lot of the measurement work harder. So that's question number one is like, how is this land organized? What are your goals? Yeah, question number two is methodological guidance. Again, are you a VCM project developer? What do you want to say? Right, start with the end in mind. 

40:26
Chris Tolles
Is this an on pack claim? Is this an roc? Is this a whatever? But let's define any external methodological guidance that will help us determine how accurate we need to be. All measurement has inaccuracy. All measurement has margin of error. You can imagine putting one sample site in the backyard of my office here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and using that one sample site to represent all of America. You wouldn't be wrong in one way, but your error bars would be infinite. So you would be correctly describing the mean of American soils. With your disclosure, N equals one sample site, which means your error bounds are too big to be usable. But that said, on that thousand acres, you could put 10 sample sites, you could put 100 sample sites, you could put a thousand sample sites. What that does is reduce the margin error. 

41:16
Anthony Corsaro
Got it? 

41:18
Chris Tolles
Then you would send me field boundaries, and those will be typical GIS file formats. Sometimes our customers don't have those. But usually if you don't have GIS file formats, you're not about to like, spend money on soil carbon measurement. You can always create those. You know, you can trace their solutions, but usually you send those over. We put all of those requirements in a blender and we tell you how many sample sites, where do they go? Here's how we're going to do sample plans. You tell us a bit about management so we can tell, aha, it's a ranch. You know, it'll be hot in July, but we can go there. Or, oh, it's corn. Don't go in late August because you'll be walking and that increases costs. 

41:56
Chris Tolles
If it's a ranch, is it a ranch like right next to Denver or like middle of nowhere? Right. Like we've had to abandon an ATV on a mountain once because, like, we got on a weird sketchy slope and like, there's like no way down. So, you know, people think of Yard Stick, I think a lot of time as like a fancy tech company. But like, a lot of our value creation is because We've been on like all the land use conditions of the world and we can tell therefore, like, how is this going to work for your particular situation? 

42:26
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

42:27
Chris Tolles
You hand us field boundaries, we do a bunch of math, we design a sample plan and then I'm making this up. But I mean, let's say there's 100 sample sites on your 1,000 acres of corn in Iowa. That's probably, you know, three people for two days. Depends on whether you're, you know, thousand acres has a river going through the middle of it, if it's a mountain, if it's in Ghana. But teams of three to five, typically at a given property for, you know, two to four days, we've done like multiple hundred thousand acre ranches in Mexico. So sometimes it is weeks in total. Yeah. But most things, you know, a small team of a few people for a week. 

43:12
Anthony Corsaro
So if I then have that first round of data and that's consider that the baseline or whatever term we want to apply to that. Just once again, basics like for me to measure any rate of change, do I need to wait 6 months, 12 months, 36 months for it to be legit? Do I need to do that three times over a three year span? Do I just need to do it once 12 months later? And I'm assuming there's variability to that, just like there was variability to the first answer. But like what's the, what's just the general table setting of that. 

43:41
Chris Tolles
Yep, yep. So to explain the variability in normal, not scientists, Chris, and sounds like Anthony, a thing that is changing quickly can have a detectable change faster. So my oldest kid is nine. I can measure my nine year old every six weeks and be like, yup, right. I'm, I'm 39. You know, like it's probably not worth measuring my height. So I'm 60. Yeah, right. And then, you know, every few years probably going the other direction. Yeah. So this comes back to like the expertise that is needed within our customers. You know, the question becomes great, what is the magnitude of expected stock change? And so the technical term here, another acronym would be Minimum Detectable Difference mdd. Basically, if you think like how fast is the kid growing? You can calculate like when should you go back and look again. 

44:35
Chris Tolles
That said, most methodologies require direct measurement. No less frequently than every five years, soil carbon changes slowly. Sometimes even five years is too fast. There are companies out there that are saying you sprinkle our fancy carbon dust and a year later, blah, blah, like kind of like categorical bullshit. Like, or if there's evidence to stand up those claims, like they've never shared it with anyone ever. It's not impossible. It's just never anything I've ever seen. And so, you know, three to five years is a good rule of thumb. Also there's a sort of like quality cost intersection here. You could imagine a solar carbon project developer in the VCM saying, I think Microsoft will spend more on my tons if I measure them every three years instead of every five years. Right. That's like more rigorous. Okay, great. 

45:28
Chris Tolles
You know, in a 30 year program now you have 10 measurement experiences rather than six. That's more expensive. So there's a juice for the squeeze angle here as well. But three to five years is what a normal guest would have just answered very briefly for you. 

45:44
Anthony Corsaro
Well, I think that's like super important to double click on and highlight on and I will illustrate it with like you and I's personal journey in this space, which is like you helped start this company in 2020. It's only been five years. I like committed myself to this work in January of 2021. It hasn't even been, you know, a full five years. And so, you know, speaking for me personally, I can get very frustrated I think with the amount of change and the rate of that change I'm seeing in lots of different areas of life, but especially in this work. Yeah, and it's just kind of the correct words escaping me. But it like puts it into perspective that like, hey, this like takes time. Like we just can't. There's only so much we can do to accelerate that timeline. 

46:31
Anthony Corsaro
Like the timeline kind of just is what it is. It's these natural biological systems that we're not going to change the rules that they abide by. 

46:38
Chris Tolles
Exactly, exactly. My, my line inside Yard Stick is another software developer does not make soil carbon change faster. Yeah, it doesn't. And I think this is a very deep and rich and underexplored cultural tension within my piece of the agricultural scene, which is largely the like tech VC piece of it, which is the whole business model of venture capital and like coastal tech brain is predicated on like ChatGPT4 came out six months ago and now it's like you know, trees don't care. Like they don't care. So if you want to change the world, make a lot of money fast. Bless you. I'm proud that I run this company. I believe in the money we've raised and yeah, like you're working on different timelines. 

47:33
Chris Tolles
So as a person, I grew up in New Jersey, which is like, I grew up in the like commute into Manhattan part of New Jersey, not the like you know, eggplant part in New Jersey. New Jersey is an agricultural economy, for the record. But you know, you have a lot of like grows like me that are like. And you hear this literally, like, you literally hear people use these words. Agricultural systems are really just another engineering problem. Right? And you're like, in one way you're right. There's inputs and outputs. And in the other way you are like so stupid ass wrong. Have you ever spent any time on that? And I'm looking in the mirror, right? Like that's me. I am that guy more so than the other guy. 

48:12
Chris Tolles
And that means I think you gotta select for a different experience of this tension between the fast, the quick, the science, the feedback, the software, the can't everything just be a piece of sass with like again, a tree that is like, who are you? You are irrelevant. I am ancient. You are dust. And it's the handshake between these systems of like speed and coastal and quote unquote, left brain and whiteness and maleness with all of these other ways that the world behaves that's simultaneously what I find really life giving about this work and really exciting and like really hard. 

48:55
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. Yeah. In my 32 years of life, I have never either seen or been aware of the level of transparency and tension we are living at in that paradox. And it feels very hard but also very necessary. And you know, to double click on kind of like the. There will be a great paper written at one point in history about the sassification of the world and how that, you know, those business models and that amount of success and that amount of wealth that was created was really great in all the ways that it was great. And it was also horrible in the fact that we tried to basically take that system, those models, those paradigms and like shove it down the throat of so many other things that just are never going to align with it. Which is really sad. 

49:49
Chris Tolles
Totally. And I am grateful because like without that shoving down the throat, you don't have the experimentation that's I think again truest things in the world about holding paradox. My world class coach Oliver taught me that. I am both like glad for that. That's why Yard Stick exists because tech is looking at agriculture and I'm like, oh man, like maybe this playbook isn't going to work. Exactly the same way when you're just trying to build yet another CRM or yet another project management tool. It's different. Yeah, fundamentally different. 

50:26
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. It is a good segue, I think, into the last thing that we need to cover from like a Yard Stick product service perspective, which is you do have a software component too. Is that software? 

50:36
Chris Tolles
Don't Worry, we got SaaS margins, we're good. 

50:40
Anthony Corsaro
Is that component simply just like a, a modeling and presentation tool for the data that you're capturing for your customers? Or is it deeper than that, like articulate the value of that piece? 

50:50
Chris Tolles
Is those things. My tech team would be in arms if I allowed the word simply yeah, to stand there. But yes, it is those things. I mean, you really think of our software in three buckets. The first is about probe enablement. So our instrument has a computer on it, right? I've talked about it being trained on data, I tend to, I try and unsuccessfully. I try and avoid the word modeling when I talk about probe enablement because it's so confusing with the soil biogeochemical modeling that's happening within perennial regrow, habitair, et cetera. Model just means like some machine learning has happened, right? Relationships. If X, then Y. There is a model on the instrument or in the cloud that says if you see this spectra, deliver this result. So let's call that probe enablement. That's the first piece of our software. 

51:42
Chris Tolles
The second is about planning. So sample plan design is one of the pieces of the puzzle I described. It sounds simple, at least it did to me. It ain't simple, it's unbelievably complex, incredibly sophisticated data science, spatial statistics, et cetera. And then the third is the R reporting. So I do need to make this data visible to you. We do have like a cute little ui. I can put a link in the show notes for what it actually looks like. More sophisticated customers increasingly are going to want that via API. I'll plug this into, you know, Op Center, I'll plug this into climate. But one way or another, someone needs to be handed things after the fact when it's. When the work is quote unquote done. So reporting of results is the third bucket of software that's most enabling of our technology. 

52:34
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, I want to go to the macro, but I have one last micro question which is at the very basic level, right. It's, it's really clear that hey, this lab process to do this soil sampling, it takes too long and it costs too much and we're trying to solve that with this hardware software solution that starts with this piece of hardware that we're taking in and actually measuring the soil with, on the farm. Like the basic scientific difference between what you're building in the spectrometer in the hardware versus like the science of what happens at the lab is what? Like when you talk about spectroscopy and you talk about taking a movie of the soil, like, yeah, what is that? And how is that different than the lab testing? 

53:15
Chris Tolles
Yes. So, and apologies to the soil scientists on the pod, because this will be a simplification, but I think it'd be a decent simplification. So in the lab, the shorthand for this is usually called combustion. So imagine a teeny piece of soil that gets burned up. All the organic stuff gets burned because it burns rocks until at the temperatures that this operate at, don't burn. Right. If you set your oven to a thousand degrees, like, a loaf of bread will be toast. The pan might get warped, but, like, it's not melted. So that's the basic premise there. Because we're looking for organic carbon, let's roast it and then measure the difference in mass before and after. We have only burned the loaf of bread. 

54:05
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

54:06
Chris Tolles
The rocks remain, the pan remains. Yeah, that's called combustion, or Dumas dry combustion. That's the best normie explanation of what happens in the laboratory analysis. And again, soil scientists on the line, there are alternatives, there's loss on ignition, blah, blah. But like, that's the, the, the 80, 20 of it in the lab. Our approach, spectroscopy is a movie. So if I went to the zoo and took a movie and texted it to you and said, hey, Anthony, you know, let me know when you see the antelope. You'd watch the movie and you'd be like, there it is. Because you know what the shape of antelope is. Same premise. It's just not shapes and it's not only the visible spectrum. So what our instrument does is it shines light out the tip of the probe. There's a sapphire lens. 

55:04
Chris Tolles
That light bounces off the soil that is pressed very closely up against the tip. And that's because it's underground, where there's a lot of pressure. It's pushing soil out of the way to get down there. So it's intrinsically very close to the lens. The light bounces off the soil, goes back in that same lens. We collect that light and we compare the amount of light that we shot out, which is known because we control the bulb at the tip of the probe to the amount of light that came back. So you can imagine as a percentage, 100% of light went out, 66% of light came back. That delta is extremely predictive of different amounts of organic carbon. So strictly speaking, what we are measuring is a difference between light out and light back. 

55:51
Chris Tolles
But because that is such a strong relationship to organic carbon, and we train it on data that has organic carbon, we can see 66% and say, aha, 3.2% organic carbon. We're doing that 0 to 100% analysis across a wide range of wavelengths. So the visible electromagnetic spectrum, famously Roy G Biv, has different colors. Right. So you could think about like, oh, I got a lot of red back and only a little bit of blue. It's that same thing, but it also goes into the infrared end of the spectrum, so wider than the spectra that our eyes can see. That means if you imagine that the x axis is wavelength, in our case it's about 350 to 2250 nanometers. And then the y axis is 0 to 100. You can imagine a squiggle. 

56:42
Chris Tolles
And so at a given color blue, maybe we got 31% of light back. At a different color Brown, we got 61% of light back. That squiggle, which is really just a whole bunch of 0 to 100 stacked side by side, that squiggle represents an organic carbon value. And then we're doing that continuously along the profile. 

57:03
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

57:03
Chris Tolles
So the video that I'll send you is our 45 centimeter probe. So we're doing that in real time along the profile. So you could take that plot, turn it vertical and imagine the squiggle changing as you go down the soil profile. 

57:19
Anthony Corsaro
Are you able today? And maybe it's just confidential if you're not to articulate like where are you at in that pursuit of like benchmarking with the regular sampling? Right. Like, is it 90% accuracy? Is that even the type of metric that you use to measure that? 

57:38
Chris Tolles
Like yes. So this is critically important to like the whole way that we're trying to do this, which is yes, I can give you that answer and you can read it in a peer reviewed public journal called Geoderma, which is like the best motherfucking soil journal in the world. Like we're trying to do this within the soil science establishment. Because that is understandably like the first question to soil scientists tasks. Yeah, we have that one published paper which was in Illinois. And then in conversations with customers, of course, we show lots of other data from other locations. Percent accuracy is a statistically worthless concept. If you ever see any company, no disrespect again, art school, I love you. But don't worry, like, you're in good company. There is no such thing as percent accurate. Like, that is not a thing. 

58:25
Chris Tolles
If you ever see a company saying percent accurate, you can very confidently assume that either they have no clue what they're doing, full stop, or the marketing department has way too much control and the science department should like, flex a little bit. There are way more complicated. Unfortunately, there are way more complicated ways of quantifying accuracy. In our paper we talk about R squared root, mean square error bias, rmse. There's all kinds of, I'm sorry, rms, whatever. They're in the paper. You can read the paper if you're a real scientist, which I am not. But the tldr, again for normies is like, it's the same. Like, we can, we can do this. Especially because right now one of our bugaboos that we are working to destroy is the illusion that laboratory analysis does not have error. 

59:17
Chris Tolles
Many methodologies treat this quote, unquote, gold standard data as gold standard. And that is like not an evidence based assumption. And so part of the storytelling challenge of the company has been that if the baseline itself has uncertainty that it's not quantified. We're being compared against a crummy baseline. But yeah, it's comparable, it's replaceable, it's the same, it's one for one. We have very sophisticated data science to defend that claim and the methodologies require it. Like, if you read VM42, there's a whole section on like, how to defend whether your spectroscopy is an acceptable alternative. It says spectroscopy is acceptable. If you're going to bring spectroscopy data to us, here's what you need to show us. And like, that's exactly what we do. 

01:00:07
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, well, that's really exciting to hear. One and two, I admire you and the team's ability to just like manage that complexity and like build with it in mind and either forward or against it, depending on how you kind of want to position it. I do, I do want to move into the macro. I think there's a few macro topics that you and I are both aware of, involved in. And, and the audience is aware of, slash involved in. And they, you know, will do a good job kind of expanding on what we've talked about to this point. I, I first just kind of want to get your take on the voluntary carbon market, like where the hell is this thing going? What's it going to be in 10 years? 

01:00:47
Anthony Corsaro
Like what do you think about just like the state of where that's at and where we're headed? 

01:00:53
Chris Tolles
Yeah. So I kind of, as a rule, don't try and like predict the future. Ten years out, I can barely handle like 12 months. Right. But what I will say is this, like, I don't know anybody that has a first principles argument that the VCM is not part of our toolkit. So will it be big enough to matter? Here's the thing. I'm really good at arguing either side of that. Like, this is the nature of hard things. This is why all of this work involves a judgment call. If it were obvious that the VCM is a bazillion dollars ten years from now, more people would be doing it. If it were obvious that it's going to zero, no one would be doing it. It's not obvious. It's actually fundamentally unknowable in many ways. Nonetheless, what's a world that doesn't contain that as a component? 

01:01:43
Chris Tolles
Just like, doesn't make sense to me. I am concerned that as the VCM gets big enough to have real climate impact, it's also painful enough to companies, CFOs to beef with it. So one thing that I would love VCM apologists to bring to me is an economic argument for when these are real costs to a public corporation, what makes them keep paying them? That's my, that's my most durable critical perspective on the vcf. 

01:02:18
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:02:19
Chris Tolles
My most promising one is it is born like a whole bunch of great innovation that then gets cycled into other things. So the most inspiring vision that I have personally for the VCM is that it will be massively successful in order to inspire other things that are not in fact voluntary. At the very least, if it only establishes that transitions are possible without cratering yield, Holy shit. Like, that's a gift to all of humanity. I don't have to do a back of the envelope of the VCM 10 years from now to raise money as a project developer. Right. And so like I haven't and I deeply respect people who both say, like, no, this is going to be the big one zillion dollar thing that McKinsey said it was going to be five years ago. 

01:03:05
Chris Tolles
And I really respect people who are like, it will always be marginal. That said, our biggest customers are VCM project developers. We do more revenue in the VCM than we do in the scope 3 or food or brand or land fund, you know, Biden didn't like support those efforts all that much. So there's not a lot for Trump to pull back. Republicans love voluntary behaviors. Right. Like it's all stick. So I don't see my VCM customers pulling back. Sun setting, it's challenging. But nonetheless, at least looking at the last 18 months, I continue to be confident that is going to be a growth lever for a Yard Stick. I'm not sure I can look you in the eye and say we're going to do $500 million in measurement revenue only on the basis of the VCM. But thankfully that's not my revenue goal this year. 

01:03:58
Chris Tolles
So we call that a tomorrow problem. 

01:03:59
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. And to give people perspective that aren't in an everyday, like specifically from a soil carbon perspective, these markets have only been around for what, five, 10, 15 years. And like they were built by a lot of other things that predate them that have had way more time to kind of like figure it out, so to speak. Correct. 

01:04:17
Chris Tolles
Exactly. You know, for the better or the worse. And the kind of abridged history is that most of the quote unquote nature based part of the voluntary carbon market was created with forestry and particularly this premise of avoided conversion. Hey, this forest is going to be cut down unless you pay me to not cut it down. 

01:04:38
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

01:04:38
Chris Tolles
That has had unbelievable rigor quality problems. Unbelievable. And the highest quality soil carbon methodologies today, the ones that I believe can actually move the needle for land managers in richer countries like America. Rich countries like America are like three years old, four years old, like very young, which means they are just starting to issue their first credits. And those methodologies have all learned from the problems of this crisis of the avoided conversion forestry market of the past. So yes, it's small, yes, it's easy to report large year over year percent growth rates because you know, the baseline is so small. If you are a project developer, you are not going to be looking at 100 million tons of demand each year, but steadily and slowly, which again Back to like 2 topics ago, is the way agricultural systems work. 

01:05:33
Chris Tolles
It is absolutely headed in the right direction. People love to shit on Indigo and they don't update their priors. Indigo is one of the strongest solar carbon programs in America right now. They had to go through a whole bunch of difficulties to get there. They've issued annual credit, they've done annual credit issuances four years in a row. Now they've issued nearly a megaton, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million tons. Like that's a lot of Tons at the prices that they're getting now that again can actually move the needle on rich country American farmer income. So it is both uncertain, challenging, hard and absolutely headed in the right direction. Especially when you start to fold in sister efforts like this program CRCF in Europe. 

01:06:17
Chris Tolles
I mentioned cbam, this cross border adjustment mechanism, which is like a quasi compliance, you know, effectively a unilateral global carbon border tax like is a pretty cool system to have. Those are the promising signals that I see that sort of VCM and VCM adjacent opportunities can really go the distance despite the challenges that we all see. 

01:06:39
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, man, I really appreciate your ability to give concise articulation to things that are very complex and not extremely well understood, at least by me. I want to double click on concise. 

01:06:52
Chris Tolles
Relative to the complexity. I've not been flattered for being concise in general, but thankfully you let me roll. So you're welcome and than. Thank you. 

01:07:01
Anthony Corsaro
Well, I think you're doing great and I appreciate it. I just want to double click on the paradox of like you didn't use this verbiage, but I will. Existence versus significance. You talked about that kind of very beginning of answering the last question and I think, you know, it just should be acknowledged and like known and I will like throw my hand up of like, I feel like one of the few people that leans a little more to the existence side. Like, hey, I know these specialty premium brands that are making these on product regenerative claims can only affect so much acreage, even if they just go totally gangbusters and we grow the hell out of them. Right. But you know, just because that might be insignificant compared to all the acreage of the multinational commodity supply chains, it's not completely insignificant. Right. 

01:07:47
Anthony Corsaro
And then I can put the other hat on and say, hey, like we really got to do most of the work on the other side. So. 

01:07:53
Chris Tolles
Yep. 

01:07:53
Anthony Corsaro
I just acknowledge like that shared pursuit of living in that paradox as well. And I think we need to be able to have discussions that can acknowledge like the good and the honest truth about each side and stop always trying to like maybe compare them or you know, pit them against each other, I guess is my. 

01:08:13
Chris Tolles
You bet. Love that. Yeah. I mean saying it back to you like here's another paradox. Small is beautiful and like big is beautiful, like they're both true. Right. And my theory, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but my theory is that you are more likely to value the quote unquote small end of that spectrum because you are Actually in relationship with them. 

01:08:35
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:08:35
Chris Tolles
You love them and they love you and you see that they're like real people really doing their best. And they're probably even people doing their best with what they literally have. I run a melon company. I run a premium melon company. The hell do you want me to do, Anthony? Right. Like quit and go work for some like, LCA SaaS startup like that? I know how to grow melons. 

01:08:56
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:08:56
Chris Tolles
And that's, I think, where we get back to this. Like, I haven't found the right metaphor, but like the coastal tech brain versus the other brain. It's not that one is good and one is bad. Like all things, like, they each offer something critical to this whole thing. But if we're not in community with people that are trying to solve problems, we treat this like a spreadsheet exercise. And when you start treating people like spreadsheet, everything goes poorly. 

01:09:26
Anthony Corsaro
We've talked about, I think, the answer to this question a little bit in various threads throughout the episode, but I just wanted to ask it directly. And it's very simply, like, why has nature based solutions and why have food and ag as a climate solution not attracted the level of capital that we feel like it deserves or the level of capital that other perceived solutions have? Like, what do you think are the biggest drivers of that? 

01:09:51
Chris Tolles
Yeah. So as with many complex problems, it's like really hard to tell what's a cause and what's a symptom. So there's a bit sort of like, you know, who's the mommy and who's the baby here. 

01:10:00
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:10:00
Chris Tolles
But a few things that are top of mind for me. One is a lot of times when that analysis is done, it's looking at venture capital. The business of venture capital is return the fund. So, like you're already selecting in a very specific way. 

01:10:15
Anthony Corsaro
Yep. 

01:10:16
Chris Tolles
Combine that with the ostensible track record of things that are ostensibly called agtech, and the reality that like most venture capitalists are unbelievably consensus driven, do not have unique perspectives on the world, are telling their LPs that they're going to do outsized returns, and then behaving exactly like the rest of their cohort, and you're like, oh, yeah, okay, I should not do agtech because it doesn't have good returns is like a pretty easy way to guarantee that it's going to continue to have middling returns. Right? Yeah. I don't have to spend somebody else's money. 

01:10:48
Chris Tolles
So although I literally do so, like all the mercy in the world for all the venture capitalists who are the exception to the rule, and I adore and are on my cap table very specifically, but I think there's a difficult sort of self fulfilling prophecy of like what's an acceptable scale of success, therefore what fits that pattern. And we've got some recent data that there might be a sort of like structural barrier to the home runs. Back to your point about take the SAS playbook and cram it down on the throat so it might just like not fit. It might fundamentally not fit. Yeah, so that's number one. Number two is I think a lot of the same. Where has a lot of venture money come from? 

01:11:41
Chris Tolles
Culturally it's come from, you know, you don't think of a farmer, you think of like an I banker or like a hedge fund manager or a pension investment manager. And so people pattern match, they like things that fit. Farming, you know, if you do your diligence, you very quickly realize like, oh, farming is not like a piece of software. Right. 

01:12:04
Anthony Corsaro
Like it's literally the most urban white male profile of capital of all time. 

01:12:09
Chris Tolles
Totally, totally. Except for of course all the like retiree, like rich white guy cost me play, you know, gentlemen ranchers. That's always the exception that proves the rule, but exactly right. Like it, you know, capital accumulates, it reinforces. Yeah. And when I look at a credible list of, I don't know, climate solutions and agriculture to pick one list, a lot of them look a lot harder than a SaaS product. And so I think there's an LP allocation challenge as well. And again, what's the mommy and what's the baby? 

01:12:45
Chris Tolles
But then the third is like, there is of course infinite entrepreneurial energy within agricultural communities and like as far as I can tell, they are at least directionally a little less likely to be Twitter famous and particularly Twitter famous in like intersecting with funding, there's always, you know, there's exceptions that prove all of these rules. Absolutely. But I think a lot of the times these analyses are choosing a lens that definitionally excludes a whole bunch of things. And so of course like when you look only one place, you don't see, you know, whatever you would call it, thriving agricultural entrepreneurism that has like a different set of like fit criteria or not. 

01:13:35
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, agree on all those points. And like you said, it's really hard to separate cause and symptom. I think a lot of the time, and you and I could probably spend a long amount of time continuing that conversation, but I Think that's a good coverage of it. For, for today, I want to talk. We, we've alluded to policy a little bit. Crop insurance, kind of like motivations, incentives, carrots stick a little bit. There's a very recent case study that you were like highly involved in as a business that I think we should just talk about and hear you maybe tell the story or share your perspective on it. And it's the Climate Smart Commodities program that was put in place by the Biden administration and it's now since been kind of like redacted almost fully I believe by the Trump USDA. 

01:14:22
Chris Tolles
You can call that. 

01:14:24
Anthony Corsaro
And you know, I remember when it was happening, it was this very celebrated thing. It wasn't without its warts. So to use your language. Right. But you know, personally, it wasn't perfect, but I was very excited about some of the organizations and people that I saw involved in projects and receiving money. But maybe for those that are also even completely unfamiliar, can you just give a little bit of background on what it was Yard Sticks, involvement and like maybe what was the promise and now like maybe potentially the negative fallout of not being able to participate anymore. I don't know exactly where all the project stand that you guys were involved in. 

01:14:58
Chris Tolles
Yep. So I might get the dates wrong, but I think it was announced spring 22 as a billion dollars. Hey, we're going to call it Climate Smart Commodities. This is usda. We've already got support of the Farm Bureau. Like they already had a whole bunch of big ag baked in bring us proposals. So there was an unbelievably fast proposal process significantly to make sure that there was progress ahead of the next election cycle is the best analysis that I can do. 

01:15:34
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

01:15:35
Chris Tolles
Which means I think in retrospect folks could probably argue that some of the selection and evaluation was rushed. Announcements were fall 22. They ended up awarding $3.1 billion. Where did the extra $2.1 billion come from? I don't know. I don't know how the government works. But like there they are, 140 projects, all 50 states, every major commodity, thousands of individual organizations. And what they, what all the projects had in common was a specific scope to establish the potential and value of Climate Smart commodities. Yeah, the process itself highlighted. Don't only talk about climate. Right. Talk about livelihoods, talk about all this other stuff. But like, nonetheless, the branding was there. Took forever to get a lot of these signed and kicked off. USDA was not ready to like administer this program. 

01:16:23
Chris Tolles
High quality Criticisms of some of the MRV rigor and MRV coordination Yard Stick was on, I think six different awards. I expected someone to say, here is the data dictionary. You must define soil organic carbon this way. No, don't heat your combustion machine to 1200 C, heat it to 2500, whatever. And very little of that happened that was trending positively over Q1. After the inauguration, most of the talk, including from USDA people, USDA staffers, not USDA political appointees, was, we're going to change the name, we're going to take out all the black people, but largely it's going to stay in place. And I don't like either of those things, but I'm definitely not in charge. So between that and the whole thing getting nuked, that's an enthusiastically positive outcome compared to the alternatives. So were cautiously, very optimistic all through Q1. We were wrong. 

01:17:15
Chris Tolles
I think it was second week of April, something like that. Put out a press release program, a Biden era climate slush fund. 

01:17:25
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:17:25
Chris Tolles
And canceled the whole thing. Now the asterisk is they said actually there's going to be this other thing called amp, like advanced market producer, whatever. Yeah. And you can reapply to that. Some, some of the projects were automatically moved into amp. There were some criteria that they explained, many criteria that they didn't about like what survived or what, different what didn't. But definitely get rid of all the black people and poor people. Yeah, definitely reduce budgets for mrv. Got to jack up the amount of money that's flowing through to producers and then, you know, we'll evaluate them as they come in. My theory is that they're going to slow walk the reevaluations of revolve so basically like not do any of it. 

01:18:08
Chris Tolles
And also because then therefore some of the programs aren't technically canceled, you don't have a class action basis on which to sue for a cancellation because you have an experience fund. So long story short, it got nuked. It was brutal. That's a big hole in our revenue pro forma. More importantly, like, all the folks that were supporting were doing great work. It was midstream that like, yeah, when you stop science midway, you don't get like 50% of the value. Like you usually get like rounding to 0 of the value. I don't want to say that categorically, but you know, on balance we spend an enormous amount of that money and aren't going to get anything for it for really like crummy but totally unsurprising, exclusively political reasons. It had challenges, but it was broadly popular. Again, the Farm Bureau supported it. 

01:18:55
Chris Tolles
You know, like many mega ag corporations were recipients of of money. And even in the initial scope there was a clear incentive to maximize the portion of budget that was flowing through to land managers. That's how you get people to participate and enroll. So it's really just I think a sad, perfect microcosm example of like so much of what's really sad about America right now. And yeah, on balance you can kind of just call the whole thing canceled and dead. 

01:19:24
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, yeah, it sucks. I know a couple of the projects that are still ongoing, whether they like will remain ongoing forever, I don't know. Yeah, I know plenty of people like yourself that basically it's all, you know, kind of gone zero. 

01:19:37
Chris Tolles
Especially because you know, we are a very like climate, climate story company. So in some ways we're liability for these programs. Right. Some of them have storytelling adjacencies that are feasible. You know, I could find change soil carbon for soil health on my website and like there would be no confusion about like who we are as a company. Especially because one of the clear like carrots that was dangled is jack up the percent of total project budget that's flowing through to producers. That's got to come from somewhere and so measurements, you know, especially with like the absolutely just horrifyingly unscientific behavior of the administration overall. I have, I've mercy on these people who are like, listen, I can still get money in these farmers pockets and yeah, I'm going to measure a fraction of the stuff I wanted to. 

01:20:23
Chris Tolles
But like it's that or nothing. To me I'm like go with God, you know, you're doing your best. I understand why we're cut. 

01:20:29
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. Are there any existing mechanisms either within the farm bill or in USDA that are like a good fit for y' all to plug into right now or is there not much that you can build around? 

01:20:41
Chris Tolles
Not really. And to be clear, we don't really have a farm bill right now. It expired a long time ago. Experiencing these like one year extensions. Yeah, there are programs that we could fit in eventually. But back to like our focus on soil organic carbon, there's a very famous program called Equip and CRP that has received a lot of high quality criticism from climate people for being decent conservation work and actually very low quality climate work. Those are different things. Conservation and you know, GHG, you know, CO2 are not the same thing. Yeah, I would love to see. I Would love to have seen in the Biden administration a reevaluation of some of how those programs are run so that outcomes based measurement to go back to one of the very first things you pointed to is increasingly important. 

01:21:31
Chris Tolles
But the short answer is, even though some of those programs require soil sampling for reporting organic carbon stocks and stock quantification is not really in scope. 

01:21:42
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, well, we'll hope for improvements there. I don't know if there's any real reason to hope in the short term on that specific topic, but you know. 

01:21:52
Chris Tolles
But there rarely is. And you know, that's the thing about hope is it's not a product of circumstances. 

01:21:58
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, I would love to get your take on this term regenerative. I've heard you offer a lot of interesting takes on it and I think they're all super valid and they've been super, you know, intriguing for me to hear in the various platforms you've offered them. But I'm most specific to hearing your take, which I believe is going to kind of be contrarian to mine of like, where do you see it long term as a consumer claim attached to an actual product. 

01:22:26
Chris Tolles
Yeah. Yep. So thankfully I don't remember any of my prior characterizations of it. I, as always, like reserve the right to change my mind. So I'll tell you what I think about it generally and then I'll tell you what I think about specifically vis a vis consumer products generally. I just want it to mean something specific. 

01:22:44
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

01:22:45
Chris Tolles
It could mean something important specific. It can mean something worthless specific. But like, if words don't have meanings, you know, it's. We're probably wasting our time. Yeah. There are many compelling definitions. Considering my company, I want it to be one that is primarily outcomes or impact oriented. The whole reason Yard Stick exists a little bit hyperbolic, but you get my point is because the relationship between cover cropping and all these other things that we want is tenuous. I personally do not actually want cover cropping for cover cropping. Sink. Yeah, I'm sure there are some people who actually intrinsically love cover cropping. Yeah, that's like actually it's. That's the thing. That's the goal. Most people want it for something else. And so at the end of the day, what gets measured gets managed. 

01:23:34
Chris Tolles
If you are measuring percent of acres cover cropped, you will optimize percent of acreage cover cropped. 

01:23:40
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:23:41
Chris Tolles
Is that the thing you want? You know, again, I have mercy on the people who have to measure this ship for a living. And they're like, sorry, Chris, you know, you haven't handed me an easy alternative. And that's usually a great rebuttal. Nonetheless, I will continue to posit that we do not actually want cover cropping. We want other things. So let's define those other things and capture data on them. That's why SHI is such an amazing organization, because they do the connection between cover cropping and productivity, cover cropping and arm farm economics. Yes, it is hard. No, it is not impossible. I always want to see things more outcomes based, more specific. Because otherwise you start optimizing for the thing that is not actually your goal. And over a long enough period of time, like that gets like that just definitionally like goes out. 

01:24:27
Chris Tolles
Rebuttal. Oh, it's not the. Be the good be enemy of the perfect. Hell yeah. Great point. I don't know. Everyone's doing. Everyone's doing their best, particularly vis a vis consumer products. I think something that I've said before, which it sounds like you may have heard, is I don't think that, like, consumer behavior is going to be a significant lever of change. I generally do believe that I honor the people who believe the opposite. Sounds like yourself included, almost all of your guests. 

01:24:55
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:24:55
Chris Tolles
That's the beauty of relationships. Right. Is like, I know people whose whole company is predicated. Actually, you know another measurement company recently, Eric at Edacious. Of course, I've told him many times, if that company were run by anybody else, I'd be like, this company is. But I know Eric, and I'm like, golly, Dave, this guy is so amazing. And like, he's doing it. And I'm so glad that he's doing it instead of either nobody doing it. 

01:25:19
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

01:25:20
Chris Tolles
Because I try and have an abundance mindset that, like, no, there is enough money in the world to do audacious. And yes, someone should figure that out. Do I want my food to be more nutritious? Yes. Therefore, do we need measurement of nutrition? Yes. 

01:25:35
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:25:35
Chris Tolles
End of conversation. Somebody do it. If I weren't in relationship with them, I think I would be like, golly day. That's a, that's a tough company to make work. 

01:25:42
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:25:43
Chris Tolles
I am in a relationship with him. To which he replies after a few beers, like, yeah, dude, it is. Right. Yeah, sorry. Like, we agree. We agree it's super important and it's really hard. That's absolutely what we agree on. I worked at Whole Foods many years ago in cheese and coffee. And classically, you know, I'm a knowledge worker. Like, everybody should work a service job. One or many times in their life. I had an amazing experience at Whole Foods. This was pre Amazon. I, like, was so encouraged to feel like this is, like, people really care here. This isn't just talking. Yeah. I'm glad Whole Foods exists. I'm glad for all of these experiments. And the thing that gets me most bearish on consumer power is one of the, quote unquote, most successful programs of the whole thing, which is organics. Right. 

01:26:35
Chris Tolles
It's still 10% of the whole thing. Decades, Decades of work. Best rebuttal. Hey, Chris, what's better than 10%? Like, or what's worse than 10%? Zero. 

01:26:45
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

01:26:46
Chris Tolles
And I think, as we've seen, the outcomes of organic are less categorically, obviously good. Yes. Scale it to a million, as one would hope. That's. I think my concern here is there's enough room in the world for everybody. I shop at Whole Foods. I love so many of the brands on your podcast. We've had. We've had Maui Nui in our, like, holiday thank you box. We've had the, like, soul simple folks in there, like, amazing. Yes, yes. And if I wanted to put a dollar on consumer behavior as the lever versus General Mills trying to make sure that supply chain doesn't collapse, I put the full dollar on the ladder. 

01:27:31
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. Yeah. I think it makes a lot of sense, and I can't really put together a beautiful counter argument to it. Like, back to kind of the. Both and. Right. Which is. 

01:27:45
Chris Tolles
And that's the beauty of it. It's not a rebuttal. It's like, you're right about the opportunity, and I think I'm right about the challenge. Yep, we're both right. Exactly. What a gift. 

01:27:54
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. And it's like, do I think for sure that this term or certifications aligned with this term will ever amount to some meaningful amount of consumer awareness and demand? No. I don't know. But, like, do I believe we have to find, Fund the trial and experimentation of it? Yes. Do I believe that all those people need to work together more? Right. Like, yes. 

01:28:16
Chris Tolles
Yeah. 

01:28:17
Anthony Corsaro
Because like, you use organic as an example. It's like, okay, well, that is proof that there is some sort of linkage, whether it's correlation or causation, between agricultural practices and some sort of consumer action? Right. 

01:28:30
Chris Tolles
Okay. 

01:28:31
Anthony Corsaro
But then once again, back to the existence versus significance. Where, Where. Where do you draw the line and what's worth pursuing funding, et cetera? 

01:28:39
Chris Tolles
Totally. And at the end of the day, like, most of that isn't economics, it's philosophy. Right. Like you just said meaningful. Right? Like what's meaningful? 

01:28:51
Anthony Corsaro
Right. 

01:28:51
Chris Tolles
What's meaningful in the world, in my life, like, right. I'm trying to look my kid in the eye. Like there is so much work in the world that is so meaningful, that is so invisible, possible. And I don't want to judge the worth of someone else's best effort by whether they show up in the top 10 highest growth venture black, blah. Like that's not how I wanted to find meaningful. And I want to see every acre of soil in the world in a different way. Yeah, that's the paradox to hold right there. 

01:29:32
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. I want to ask a follow up question to the initial part of your response previously, which was about the definition. Right. And it's basically, you're basically highlighting the fact that the still, this thing still doesn't have a universal, agreed upon and well defined definition. And I actually believe and can make a pretty compelling case that no matter what happens with the term regenerative Yard Stick is pretty insulated from that. Like in your work. 

01:29:57
Chris Tolles
Insulated. Do you mean it doesn't affect our likelihood of success or failure? 

01:30:03
Anthony Corsaro
Correct. 

01:30:03
Chris Tolles
Yeah, yeah. 

01:30:04
Anthony Corsaro
Like I think if the word regenerative goes to zero, like you can still go do everything that you want and need to do and you would have a lot of like, you know, reasons to do it and all that. 

01:30:18
Chris Tolles
Yep. 

01:30:19
Anthony Corsaro
I, I would like to ask the question, and I'm going to ask the question then add a little bit of like detail to it. So just bear with me for a second of like, how do we get to a definition? And the detail I want to add to that is like my take in what I observe and see is a very interesting bifurcation of agronomic versus product. Right. And so this thing started as kind of an agronomic movement where were talking about practices and then were talking about outcomes. And so you have the infighting on that side that's like it should be about practices, it should be an outcomes, it should be about both. But, but you ultimately kind of have like the party of defining via agronomics. 

01:30:57
Chris Tolles
Right. 

01:30:58
Anthony Corsaro
And then on the other side you have the party of defining via product, which is no, it has to be a consumer claim, it has to be tied to a product. And the mechanism is not product or outcomes, it's certification, definition and you know, whatever the rules are, this percentage of ingredients, this look and smell and tasting XYZ way. So I just think that that's super interesting to maybe, like, just share that observation, to tee up the question. But I'm curious, like, can we get to a definition? And like, how. How do we. Is it through the agronomic party? Is it through the product party? Is it through combination? Is it through neither? Is it impossible? What's, what's your take on that? 

01:31:39
Chris Tolles
Yeah, I think it's a really sound way of thinking about the options, especially because my experience is usually, maybe not usually, but often in your language, agronomic people and product people are talking past each other. Yeah. And really what that means is they actually value different things, and that's what they haven't reconciled. You're arguing about should it be blue or green, and you haven't actually revealed the underlying thing that you actually want. In my experience, in those conversations, agronomic people, of which I am less likely to be one just because of my knowledge and experience, can handle the complexity of agricultural systems. They often feel that a reduction to outcomes is fundamentally a compromise rather than fundamentally an achievement, which is largely the way I characterized it, you know, 10 minutes ago, or whatever. 

01:32:35
Chris Tolles
Product people usually, I think, are rightly pointing towards markets that need numbers and spreadsheets. 

01:32:43
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:32:44
Chris Tolles
And they want to reduce complexity. And both are. Right. Right. Like, here's the thing. So in terms of my preference, I don't think. I. I'm not sure that those are. I don't think those two categories map to practices versus outcomes. Exactly. But in general, you've already heard me say, like, my priority is outcomes. I want to define desirable outcomes very carefully. Very carefully. SHI Soil Health Institute. You know, their line to us has always been like, carbon's a co benefit man. Right. Like. Like there is a way, I think, of defining outcomes holistically. There's a way of defining outcomes that acknowledge the complexity of these natural systems. But nonetheless, on balance, I think I will. I will largely continue to be team outcomes, but I don't think that maps perfectly. 

01:33:39
Chris Tolles
So I don't think I have an intrinsic preference between the two buckets you've presented. I think what's most likely to actually happen, which is maybe a, like, I don't know, uninspiring way to think about it, is whoever figures out how to make money, that's the person that'll define it. 

01:33:58
Anthony Corsaro
Well said. 

01:33:59
Chris Tolles
Whoever figures out how to make money right now, you know, ROC can help you make a little more money, maybe probably not good data on that, but all of a sudden, when Mintel is like, Organic on pack versus buh buh. Then you're like, because somewhere in the world is a financial analyst at a mega hedge fund that owns 7% of a giant carrot company, right? And they're like, hey, should we go organic or not? 

01:34:25
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah. 

01:34:26
Chris Tolles
And there is a crazy ass spreadsheet that helps them make that decision. That is not how all decisions in the world get made. It is how a lot of decisions at the biggest companies in the world get made. You know, whether the conclusion comes first and then you create the Excel spreadsheet to justify the decision or vice versa, who knows. But my theory is whoever shows up with the most compelling economic case of a definition is the one that's ultimately going to have the most successful logo and therefore a definition of that logo somewhere on a website. 

01:35:01
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really strong case. And take. And you are probably right. And it was funny. As soon as I relayed the question, then it unpacked like my observations. I thought of maybe two other variables that I didn't lay out which is like scientific and political. Which does the thing get kind of defined by science and some sort of scientific standard and does this thing get taken by policy? Which that's basically what happened with USDA organic, right? Which kind of ended up being this merging of science, agronomics and product. But ultimately I think it's an even further illustration of the point you made which is like it determined market access and basically a pathway to a market premium that then could justify the investment of the roi. So yeah, super interesting. 

01:35:51
Chris Tolles
Which, which itself then defined the outcomes that were likely. So I'm not a scholar of the organic movement, so if I'm about to describe a piece of the history incorrectly, oh audience please, you know, send me angry email. But what I have read is, you know, somewhere I think it was like 88 or 89, there was a big throwdown in organics and someone said worker labor, worker welfare must be in scope. And a whole bunch of other people were like sorry, too complicated. And the latter one. And so to this day, again, sorry, I expect the angry emails like it is a partial definition of what many people assume it should mean, could mean, etc. That's how standards work. They include and they exclude which means o standard setter. 

01:36:37
Chris Tolles
You know, define with fear and trembling because what we define as regenerative or this claim or that claim is going to influence behavior that will have the benefit of influencing behavior towards the thing that are in scope and it will have the Cost of not influencing behavior vis a vis the thing. That's out of scope. When people talk about carbon tunnel vision, I'm like, hell yeah, I am worried about that. And actually there's a really interesting divide within the VCM part of my community, which is basically one group of people is worried that we will minimize the centrality of the carbon question and therefore the whole thing will be too bloated and complex and we will not accomplish anything. 

01:37:22
Chris Tolles
And the other camp is worried that carbon actually is an unacceptably narrow definition and we will be successful and we will over optimize only for carbon. And like organic, there will be things left out that bug us. And I'm like, yeah, that's the challenge. I think. Woe to the person that thinks there's a simple answer to that. 

01:37:46
Anthony Corsaro
How do we expand the ability to greet the complexity needed here in the macro? Is it like AI is going to take away all the simple stuff so it just gives us more time to live in these complexities and paradoxes? 

01:38:01
Chris Tolles
Oh no. I think AI is a simplifier in an unhealthy way rather than healthy. Like, I don't know, man. I love your neighbor. I wish I had a better answer than that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't. I literally believe that is the best answer I've got for that. Yeah, love your neighbor, brother. 

01:38:24
Anthony Corsaro
This has been a super fun conversation. Anything else you'd like to add you'd like to put people on the lookout for? Is there a specific pace place we should direct them beyond the website to get in touch with you or your team? What should we wrap with here? 

01:38:38
Chris Tolles
I am chris@useyardistic.com if you would like to be my customer, I would welcome the opportunity. You can hit me up. We focus most of our communications on LinkedIn so you can check us out there as well. We're often hosting webinars, happy hours at conferences and whatnot. And if we're coming through Cambridge, Massachusetts, hit me up. We're remote first, so I'm the only one here. If there's someone else at the company you want to meet, don't hit me up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but always happy to get a beer or a coffee with somebody who's vibing on what we are. 

01:39:10
Anthony Corsaro
Yeah, love it. The Yard Stick team, I think will be out in full force at Climate Week. So also if people are going to be on the ground there and interested in stuff, hit up the team. 

01:39:19
Chris Tolles
Chris Yep. We're running a Soil and Ag people run on Wednesday morning, so particularly I'll make sure you get a link to that. 

01:39:26
Anthony Corsaro
Nice. The web address is useyardstick.com we'll put that in the show notes along with a lot of other fun stuff that I have written down in Chicken Scratch to my right. Super fun. Really appreciate the work you're doing, man. Thank you for joining us. And yeah, super great, fascinating conversation. So thank you. 

01:39:44
Chris Tolles
You bet. It's an honor to be included. Not a brand and here I am. 

01:39:49
Anthony Corsaro
Thanks brother. 

01:39:51
Chris Tolles
See ya. 

01:39:54
Anthony Corsaro
For transcripts, show notes, and more information on this episode, check out our website regen-brands.com that is regen-brands.com you can also check out our YouTube channel, ReGen Brands for all of our episodes with both video and audio. The best way to support our work is to give us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform and subscribe to future episodes on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, the ReGen Brands Weekly, and follow our ReGen Brands LinkedIn page to stay in the know on all the latest news, insights and perspectives from the world of regenerative cpg. Thanks so much for tuning in to the ReGen Brands Podcast. 

01:40:33
Anthony Corsaro
We hope you learned something new in this episode and it empowers you to use your voice, your time, your talent and your dollars to help us build a better and more regenerative food system. Love you guys.