Realizing Regeneration: An Interview with Jesse Smith from Kiss the Ground

Over the past 150 years, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has increased by 30%, the effect of which, scientists believe, is rising global temperatures. Soils contain approximately 75% of the carbon pool on land and therefore play a major role in maintaining a balanced global carbon cycle. But industrial agriculture practices have dramatically increased the speed at which agricultural soils are eroding. Half of the topsoil on the planet has been lost in the last 150 years and less soil means less carbon sequestration. Luckily for us there is a solution. Regenerative agriculture and land use practices that rebuild soil organic matter and restore degraded soil biodiversity can significantly increase the sequestration of CO2 in the soil. Kiss the Ground, an NGO based in Venice, California, is dedicated to creating media and educational curriculum to raise awareness about the importance of soil. They also actively work to restore soils by working with brands to leverage resources for farmers to move towards more regenerative practices. Jesse Smith runs Kiss the Ground’s Farmland Program, which connects restaurants and their customers to farmers and landscapes by having chefs feature regenerative items on their menus.

ME (Michaela Elias): Can you start by introducing yourself and sharing some of the the work you do with Kiss the Ground?

JS (Jesse Smith): My name is Jessie Smith and my background is in small scale agriculture, diverse agroforestry, orchard systems, animal systems, and perennial tree crop prorogation as well as in local food marketplaces — direct to market food service providers as well as single family households. I also have a background in visual communication design and I found a great amount of inspiration in a permaculture design course that I took that really introduced all the knowledge and experience I had gained into a design system that was rooted in natural patterning, pattern recognition, and ecosystem design.

So that moved me into the agricultural world and at the beginning of this year I was approached by Kiss the Ground because of the new program they’re developing called the Farmland Program. The Farmland Program is essentially setting out to connect restaurants and their customers to farmers and the landscapes that they steward in a way that allows for the dining experience to create value that ultimately will go back to the farmer. So we’re having restaurants create specialized menu items that highlight an ingredient that showcases the potential of regenerative agriculture. It may be perennial grains that are used in bread or dough, it could be perennial tree crops that replace an annual crop, or it could be a diverse crop that has a diverse pollinator habitat, so ultimately we’re trying to speak to some of the practices that support the principles of regenerative agriculture.

What we’re doing is adding two dollars to our menu items which then goes into the funding pool to create a scholarship program for farmer education as well as access to technical resources that take the blind data and metrics and monitoring so we can start to see what the current state is of our agricultural landscapes. Ultimately any one of the farmers that participate in the farm land program can get scholarships to get further education and training and will also have access to funds to get the baseline data and monitoring on their property. So as they start to change their management practices and principles we can begin to see what the change of state is and whether we are actually increasing soil carbon or increasing water holding capacity in our soil. We can ask questions like are we increasing biodiversity and pollinator habitat? Are we increasing farmer livelihoods and resiliency? These are all things we want to do but if we don’t know where we currently stand we’ll never know how far we’ve come.

So that’s the general gist of the Farmland Program. We’re currently reaching out to restaurants in order to get them to sign on to the program and then we’re also working with educators to provide the resources that we’ll need in order to offer it to the farmers and ranchers that will ultimately benefit in a way that allows us to scale. We don’t want to all of a sudden have funds and not have the spots available for the farmers and we also don’t want to have the farmers who want to participate but not the diversity of educational offerings that truly speaks to their unique context. Once the funding pool has been created by the restaurants and customers we’ll then open it up to business sponsorship to provide a match.

ME: How has it been received by restaurants so far? Is it something they’re excited about incorporating?

JS: I think that’s been one of the biggest challenges, not that it’s hard to find the restaurants but that there’s so many people that want to participate we’re trying to make sure that we can apply a healthy amount of restraint as to which region we’re starting in first as well as the guidelines that we are setting forth for sourcing practices. We don’t want to degrade the integrity of the program by having something that doesn’t align with our goals. So we’re about the put this out there and get our first ones signed on. We did a test run at the end of last year with five different restaurants, and not only did it go over great for the restaurants as far as them being able to market that they are doing something unique, but also the customers really embrace the specialized menu items where they felt like they can actually have a positive change connected to a landscape just by choosing one meal over another. It’s ultimately a microcosm of what we’ve all been told and know inherently which is you can speak with your dollar by choosing one over the other, you’re making a choice that enacts change. We want to give people that opportunity to be able to speak in a way that enacts positive change.

ME: So through your program you’re connecting farmers with restaurants but are there specific strategies that you use to increase demand for products grown through regenerative agricultural practices? What kind of education or strategy goes into creating that demand?

JS: We found ourselves in a very unique position right now where demand outweighs supply by a large margin. There’s no shortage of people that are searching for products or ingredients that they can list as regenerative. This can actually be a very dangerous place to be in because people want to be the first to market with their regenerative items like regenerative cotton t-shirts or regenerative macaroni and cheese or regenerative whatever it may be. What we’re afraid of is that people will be grasping at straws in a way that doesn’t live up to the potential of regenerative agriculture and market regenerative products in a way that makes it seem like an end piece or that now we’ve achieved regenerative. So that’s the conversation we’re all within right now: What is regenerative agriculture, what is the potential of it and how do we get people on the business and agricultural front to engage with it in a developmental continuum where there is ultimately no end in sight? It is a constant evolution and we can’t try to put this finite upper limit on it. So I am all for businesses saying that we’re investing in regenerative agriculture. What I am ultimately very opposed to is a business saying “we are regenerative” or “that is regenerative.” Language is power and if we are aware of how our language can influence the mind and how we engage with certain processes then we have to constantly talk about how that farm as a living, breathing, growing entity is in the process of regenerating, and not that farm is regenerative.

It’s very difficult and we’re doing our best to educate businesses on what it means to engage with the farms because a lot of times they just want an ingredient to show up on a spreadsheet with a price next to it. They’re looking at the next column on a purchase order and we’re trying to explain to them that regenerative agriculture is about agriculture and agriculture includes people and places and animals and soil and policy. Agriculture as a whole is a large piece so if they don’t commit to engaging then it can’t be regenerative because if the engagement is just temporary and extractive there is no reciprocity in that relationship and there will be no regeneration of that relationship.

ME: So there’s also an educational component to working with the restaurants in terms of making it clear to them what you intend by regenerative?

JS: Yeah and ultimately I speak from the perspective of the Farmland Program but there’s also multiple programs that run concurrently with Kiss the Ground. They have a business program as well as a speakers training course. The business program is doing research on business case studies so that we can share these with the second line community of businesses that ultimately just want to learn more about what’s being done and what can be done and what has been done so that they can make better decisions on what they want to do. The speaker training course is focused on giving people the tools to be able to communicate within their communities about the benefits of regenerative agriculture and increasing soil health and biodiversity and ultimately giving people the power to know their own voice and be able to articulate what they believe and what they know in a way that can enact change. Imagine a family farm and the son or daughter is trying to move the farm in a new direction and the mother or father doesn’t want to do it. How do you articulate to them why it’s necessary for the future of their family land to transition their practices? That’s a very difficult thing to step into when there’s been generations of the idea that this is how we do things. Or the person who wants better food in their kid’s schools — how do you go into the PTA meetings or the board room and articulate why they should focus on nutrient dense foods? These are cases where people want the tools in order to feel confident enough so when someone rejects your comment and says well that’s not true, you have the facts. You have resources to point them towards and you can articulate your point and that’s ultimately what the speaker training course is trying to do, is give people the tools in order to have more conversations around regenerative agriculture and soil health.

ME: On the farmer side have they been very receptive to adopting new practices or are there any challenges that you have dealt with from that end?

JS: Farmers are very interested because a lot of farmers are dealing with pressures of continual land degradation, increased inputs and lowered prices and revenue so they’re interested in changing. They also rarely listen to outside experts and they’re much more likely to listen to a fellow farmer who has already gone through this process which is why we really focus on supporting the Soil Health Academy with Dan Brown, Ray Archuleta, Alan Williams, and David Brandt. They are all farmers who converted from conventional to a new way of low or no-input agriculture, no-till agriculture, and crop diversity and crop rotation, and ultimately have become well renowned for having very viable agricultural productions by going a different route. They are finding a lot of traction within that community because they have broken conventions while being surrounded by conventional agriculture. So that’s why they’re being touted as some of the most amazing case studies because they’ve done it in the corn belt.

ME: What is on the agenda for the Farmland Program going forward?

JS: I think that our big limiting factor is going to be discernment around which businesses we want to come in as our sponsors. So as we look to our business match sponsors we need to understand that they will ultimately have their name on this program and we want to make sure that we are conscious of the fact that they may not be in a place where they can say they’re in a regenerative paradigm while also allowing them to enter it at a first stage and then help them along this path. So we’re looking for business match opportunities and we would love to talk to anyone who might be interested in sponsoring this program and we’ll go from there.

ME: Is this any company or food companies or restaurants?

JS: It could be any company, we talked about having tractor companies which produce no-till seed drills and they can either come out as being proponents of being heavy till conventional agriculture or they can be aligned with the new wave of agriculture. Everyone has that option.

Projects like the Farm Land Program are critical for increasing soil health awareness and support for regenerative agriculture and land use. To learn more about the amazing power of soils and ways to promote regenerative practices visit https://kisstheground.com