Rebuilding American Agriculture Around Profit Instead of Yield

Tonya: American agriculture has never been more productive, but it is also increasingly fragile. For decades, we have measured success largely by yield per acre. Our new report, ​“Building The Missing Market: A National Strategy for American Agriculture,” argues that the better measure is risk adjusted profit per acre: how much a farmer actually keeps from each acre, and how reliably they keep it once costs and risks are accounted for.

The problem is not that farmers are unwilling to change. In many cases, the market that would allow them to change simply isn’t there: a committed buyer, a fair price, the right financing, and the infrastructure to make a transition work. At the same time, consumers and food companies are looking for healthier, more diverse, and more resilient options.

Part of the challenge is that the policy architecture supporting American agriculture was built for a different era — one focused on maximizing production of a handful of commodities at the lowest possible cost. The Farm Bill, crop insurance, commodity support programs were never designed to reward diversification, soil health, or the kinds of transitions that farmers, consumers, and the food system now need.

The report lays out a ten-year strategy to do two things at once: reform the incentives and institutions that keep the current system in place, and build the markets that would give farmers real alternatives.

In this episode, report co-authors Aaron Rudberg and Grant Leslie are joined by Al Tank, a farmer, advisor, and agriculture policy expert. They discuss why the Farm Bill alone will not solve these structural issues, why agriculture belongs in the national security and competitiveness conversation, and what it will take to build a more profitable and resilient American agricultural system.

Please stay tuned for important disclosures at the end of this episode.

Aaron Rudberg: Al and Grant, thank you for joining me today. Really appreciate your time and look forward to having a discussion today about this recent white paper and policy paper that we put forward. And thank you again for joining me.

Al Tank: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Grant Leslie: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Aaron Rudberg: Al, so I would love to start with you. Would love to hear a little bit about your experience and kind of what brings you to this conversation today?

Al Tank: Well, thank you first of all for having me, but secondly, it’s a really interesting road. So I grew up in Iowa on a family farm that I co-manage with my brother today. And we do a lot of very innovative sorts of things, which we can talk about if we want to with regard to being no till and cover crops and all kinds of other interesting things with pollinator plots and so forth. But beyond that, I had an opportunity to go to Washington DC shortly after graduating from Iowa State.

I worked on Capitol Hill for a member of Congress from Iowa named Jim Leach, and then got a series of other opportunities. was the lobbyist for the National Corn Growers. I traded commodities for Rafco, which was at the time the largest house in Chicago. So you start to learn about risk and understanding risk from that perspective. And then was recruited by the pork industry to become first their trade guy and then their public policy guy and then their CEO. But from there jumped off and said, listen, agriculture has a lot of really interesting attributes that are not being really applied or evaluated or leveraged. And one of those was in carbon and really dove into the carbon space thinking about agriculture’s one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions and it can be one of the single largest sources of the solution and really started to build a company and other technologies around that all the time trying to stay on the family farm and really understanding what it really means on that gravel road to to raise a crop, to produce a crop, to manage the risk associated with that crop, and then put all the policy pieces back around. And that’s how Grant and I know each other as well with regard to how you try to weave the policy around all the realities of Washington DC and the international markets.

Aaron Rudberg: Thank you for sharing that. Grant, you know, you’ve been you’ve seen the system from a number of different venues as well, a decade in the Senate in leadership with Tom Dashell and then Ken Salazar. You were a senior advisor to Secretary Vilsack at the USDA. and then you went on to build the food and ag practice at FGS. And we have the pleasure of working with you every day here now at S2G. What was the motivation for this report? Why are you putting out this report now?

Grant Leslie: Well, it’s funny, a lot of the ideas in this report have been simmering in my mind for a long time. And actually, after many conversations with you and Al and our other colleagues, I felt like now was actually the perfect moment to put out this paper for a few different reasons. One of which is I think back to doing my first farm bill in 2002, and I think about the issues that I was hearing about from farmers and from agribusinesses and other interest groups. You know, no one was talking to me about regenerative agriculture. They certainly weren’t mentioning the word climate at that time. You know, the organic program had just been created in the previous farm bill. So that was still new. So we weren’t really thinking about the nexus of health and food. The energy title was created in that bill. So it was sort of this newer idea of talking about those types of value-added opportunities for farmers. 

And so when I think about all of those things that were happening with that bill in 2002 when I was working on it to the reality of where we are today with the global picture of Brazil and China and the transition we’re about to face with 40% of American farmland being owned by people 65 and older and AI and more. Like these were not questions and thoughts and issues when the current structure for American agriculture that we’re operating under still today was developed. 

So the structure hasn’t changed. Everything else has. And to me, this means that we have to have this conversation right now.

Aaron Rudberg: It is interesting to think about the extension of the farm bill that’s happened.

Yet the world has changed dramatically since even that bill was written. But maybe starting with the report, I think the report’s central argument is that American agriculture is optimized for real yield and productivity as opposed to I would say economic resilience. And farms, as we know in the US, we produce more than we ever have. I mean, we’re some of the best farmers and entrepreneurs in the world. 

But at the same time the system is increasingly vulnerable. and there’s a lot of things that are happening globally that are putting pressure on American farmers and the entire system. I think a lot of people assume, you know, farming is hard and weather changes and yeah that’s just how it is. But I would love to understand from you, Grant,

How do you think about this? And how did that form the basis of the report and some of the recommendations?

Grant Leslie: Yeah. So you’re exactly right. Sort of the core of what we were talking about in the report is that we need to shift from a system of maximizing yield per acre to maximizing profit per acre. And so we need to align capital and policy and technology and the market around that. And the fact of the matter is there are a lot of good things happening right now. There are certainly companies that are committing to regenerative acres and off-take agreements, and there’s startups developing tools, but a lot of this is happening, it’s invisible to the larger system. And there’s no process for pulling together and sort of thinking about the good things that are happening and figuring out how to scale them.

And there is also fundamentally no system since we are built on that yield per acre versus profit per acre to allow farmers to make decisions to do some other things that they might want to do or might not. There’s no system under them that is developed to help them do that. And so, you know, when you start to think about one problem at a time, you realize you start to think that even these small little changes without

Fixing an underlying structure, you’re not gonna get there. So, you know, I was trying to look at, you know, what is a structure, what are ideas so that we can have a larger effort with the full system to think about what these changes look like. And then the fact of the matter is you can’t flip a switch, even if you had all the answers and put them into effect the next day. It has to happen over a period of time. There has to be phases.

So what is that plan to get us there?

Aaron Rudberg: Yeah, that’s helpful. I mean, I think what you’ve laid out, the tenure roadmap, is pretty ambitious. I guess Al, maybe that framing that Grant laid out, do you agree with it? What’s your assessment? You come with a very different set of experiences, your assessment of where we are with American agriculture.

Al Tank: Well, the one thing that American agriculture, I don’t believe, understands is the world has changed. The world has completely changed, and we haven’t responded to that change. And so as a result, we’re at this inflection point in American agriculture that we have to do something. And we have no choice because the rest of the world has already made these changes. And therefore we have to modify our behavior, our actions, our policies, our practices to allow this agriculture that we know to be competitive and to survive.

In a way that makes a lot of sense for rural America, for farmers and for the country as well.

Aaron Rudberg: We’ve talked, Grant and I have had some debates with folks in the industry around what is the policy for American agriculture. And I think the policy as described to us in some of that debate is, you know, cheap calories, roughly, and the family farm to support that. 

And I think not necessarily building that economic resilience that the rest of the world is going to, you know, stand behind. And so I do think, Al, you’re right, we need to to respond to that. You know, the report describes this chicken and egg problem that farmers don’t grow certain crops because they’re not directly tied to the demand side.

Buyers aren’t there. Again, sort of this fragmented supply chain that happens. Who realistically moves first here and what makes them do it? How do you build that demand side to the marketplace? 

Grant Leslie: Yeah, I mean I’ll start first, but Al would love your thoughts too. I think that it’s sort of all at once. I don’t think one can move first without the other and that’s sort of what we have today. There is demand for these things. There are actually like market signals for more diversified crops, the need for new ingredients, the need for solutions for food is health, for sustainability. But farmers can’t move first because there’s no structure to help them get there. They don’t have the exact long-term demand signals that they need. And so to me, again, this sort of goes back to the effort that we need to have in place, the structure that we need to put in place about bringing all of these sides together.

Because we’re gonna have to do a better job of communicating so that we can all move together.

Al Tank: I think Grant’s absolutely right. From my sense, it’s you gotta pull it through the system. You can’t try to push it through the system. It’s too big, it’s too cumbersome, too many barriers to success. So you have to pull it through. So it means that you have to have the entire chain on pulling the technology, the innovation, the capital, the risk, all those pieces through the system. And if it’s pulling, the likelihood of success and the speed to success are gonna be much, much greater.

And so I think that’s where we kind of all start. And once you start that pull, all of a sudden the innovation and the technology and the applications start to happen. But we also have to understand, I think that we’re talking far more than just food. We’re talking about all the things around there. And we have to have this big mindset of it’s food, it’s energy, it’s water. Those are the things in my mind that we have to start to think about and use those as the levers to pull this all through and understand that when we start to do that, I think the roads go from really bumpy to a little flatter, a little smoother, and and then turn into interstates for us over time.

Aaron Rudberg: Yeah, I think one of the things that really caught me in the report is that it isn’t just government playing a role, it’s all the different players. I mean, it’s the government putting incentive structures and policy in place that supports industry, driving entrepreneurs, the family, I mean, it is the entire system being kind of redesigned and everyone playing an important role in making the road flatter to build on that as well.

Al Tank: If people have been following what’s happening in the dairy business, beef on dairy, where they take, you know, a beef bull, beef semen, and they put it on a dairy cow and they produce a calf that is spectacular with regard to genome and quality, and all those signals from the marketplace are being driven down the supply chain. They produce an animal that has revolutionized the dairy business.

And it’s going to revolutionize the beef business over time. And they’ve linked it up with feed yards and packing plants and genetics companies, all the things we’re talking about in a very big microcosm, in a very big universe here. They’ve done it in a sector that quite frankly is really difficult to work with. And they have done it, and they’ve done it at scale. And I think for me, it’s a good example of what we could do really at any commodity, in any region of the country, with any products. You just have to innovate.

And all the things that Grant and you, Aaron, and the report talk about, they’ve started to dress. And I think that’s a check mark of saying, hey, pretty good roadmap to take a look at. How did they do it? What did they run into? How can we then apply that to other places as well that makes sense?

Aaron Rudberg:I mean, Al, we spoke about, you know, before we got on the podcast about how our agriculture is facing the same headwinds or our moment, similar to the critical minerals industry, semiconductors and chips. Maybe you can expand on that or your thoughts on that.

Al Tank: I think you’re absolutely right. I think chips and critical minerals are on top of people’s minds and we realize that we are way late to the game and the implications for us to national security and technology and innovation and our absolute futures are dependent on us being able to control our own destinies there. We should be thinking about agriculture exactly the same way. It is a national security issue.

We talk about cheap food and cheap calories. Absolutely, there’s no doubt about that. It is a massive national security issue.

It’s broken into so many pieces and it needs to be brought back into its critical mass and in its critical mass it represents the same thing as chips or critical minerals or any number of other energy issues that we’re seeing today.

Aaron Rudberg: Grant, you know, we’re on the third extension, I believe, of the farm bill that was passed in 2018, I think, if I have my dates correct. Maybe you could talk a little bit about you know, I think it’s passed the house, sort of deadlocked in the Senate. Where are we? How if you were giving advice and could, you know, sort of impact that room where these negotiations bring, you know, our listeners may be inside that room a little bit, but also where are we in terms of being able to take a policy paper like this and implement it? What has to go right?

Grant Leslie: Well, I feel like it’s a little more complicated than just passing the farm bill that’s pending because I don’t think the farm bill that’s pending is actually gonna do much of anything to solve these problems. I say that knowing that there’s a lot of wonderful people and very smart people that have been working on it, but we haven’t had a plan to address the real systemic problems that we’re all talking about here.

What we have in front of us that’s pending, in my view, is a piece of legislation that has basically been a series of band-aids to keep everything and everyone afloat versus addressing serious structural problems that we’re facing. And to think outside of the box. I mean, Al mentioned, like, you know, in some ways, maybe the new bill shouldn’t even be called a farm bill. It should be called something else because there are so many other pieces, health, energy, water that will need to be a part of this to really fix some of these issues. So I guess in some ways, what I would say is Congress should pass the bill. They should just pass it because it is another band-aid and it’s what we have in front of us.

And farmers right now need some sort of certainty. And it’s the only thing we have in the short term. But then yesterday we should come together with something like Al is talking about, whether it’s a commission or something else, and figure out what that next farm bill looks like and that is the bigger question. So I think that, you know, it is much bigger than just passing the bill in front of us today.

Al Tank: Aaron, if I may, I’m so old that my first farm bill was in 1985. You know our first piece of farm legislation was in 1933. It was the you know, Ag Adjustment Act, but the real one that happened in 1938. And we really didn’t do anything different until the 1985 farm bill.

And in 1985 Farm Bill, we did that because we had a farm crisis that was exploding. It was around agricultural credit, obviously, and we had this massive oversupply situation where we did things like idle acres, 20% of our acres, and we did the PIK program and a whole range of other dynamics. But it became the catalyst for driving significant policy change. And that was that 45-year gap between 38 and and and 85.

And I would argue that we haven’t done anything substantive since the 1985 farm bill with regard to agriculture policy. And we talked earlier, everything else in the world has changed. So we’re sitting here with this farm bill that’s being proposed that isn’t going to change anything. Okay, it does provide certainty and that’s really about the end of the game for us. But the reality is we should be thinking about this as an existential threat.

And then look at legislative and policy initiatives that reflect that existential threat. That’s how I look at it. How we get there, really hard to do, as we all know, in Washington DC in today’s environment. However, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Aaron Rudberg: Where is there agreement or disagreement, you know, specifically in the report, Grant or Al, if there’s things that you think are, you know, somewhat aggressive or maybe not aggressive enough or there’s agreement on this that you’re hearing and seeing in DC?

Grant Leslie: Well, I’ll give some thoughts on that and then I might want to ask Al a question too. I think there is definitely agreement among some circles who live and breathe this all the time, that there is an issue around, you know, farmers’ access to capital for innovation or farmers’ access to capital in general. There’s certainly agreement around innovation in general and wanting to get more innovative tools for production practices to farmers. And I think there’s agreement on that. 

I think there’s also probably deep down some agreement that these band-aids that we’ve been calling them aren’t good. But again, there hasn’t been a proposal or enough thought put through of what is the alternative to those band-aids. And, you know, Al, the question that I have in one way is as a farmer, you get these payments, and they’re probably helpful. I mean, what is it like you thinking about making a fundamental change where those payments wouldn’t come through anymore? Or what would the conversation with your neighbors be like about that?

Al Tank: Well, you’re not gonna turn down money. And we don’t. Okay. So that’s the first premise. And the worst part about it is everybody that I talk to in my rural community and in agriculture in general, is that we all expect them to come. And that is one of probably the worst pieces of the outcome here is you’re just expecting them to come, whether they come from market conditions or a natural disaster or whatever it may be.

We’ve become ingrained and conditioned that they’re going to come. And so as a result, you do not make changes. Because you want to be compliant, you make sure you know exactly how the policies and the programs are going to be done. You got this many acres of corn or this many acres of soybeans or this many acres of wheat or cotton. You’re going to get paid on that. And it’s going to be predicated on your yield, probably. And so the incentives are all in place and you know exactly how it’s gonna be done and those are the rules of the game that you’re playing today, and so you’re gonna play within the boundaries of those rules to make sure that you’re right. So you know they’re not helpful. They’re not constructive. They’re not being driven by the marketplace. They’re doing exactly the opposite of that in reality. And so, you know, this is something that if we really wanna get serious about it, you gotta say, listen, we’re not gonna do that anymore, and this is why. 

In an event like that you have to do X or Y or Z. I think there’s other things that you can do to redefine the rules. And people, listen, every farmer, every grower, every rancher I know, they understand what the game is and they will play the new rules if you just tell them what they are. But today it is pretty simple. 

Aaron Rudberg: Yeah, I’ve always said farmers are, you know, the first entrepreneurs in this

country and some of the greatest entrepreneurs in this country. They may not get the praise or the front page of the news like, you know, the tech entrepreneurs, but they are out there every day figuring out how to innovate and they understand the rules of the game and the market and the policy and the incentives.

We just need to shift those incentives and they’ll adapt and figure out ways to generate profits. Right now the incentives maybe aren’t structured the right way.

Al Tank: Yeah they’re not structured correctly and as a result, they’re not gonna change until they are structured differently and the incentive for them to change is there and they will go. I will guarantee you they will go.

Aaron Rudberg: Grant, one of the things in the report I think is important to point out is you’re not suggesting, you know, pulling the rug out day one. It’s really a roadmap that has three different phases. Maybe if you could just talk a little bit about that roadmap and give us an overview.

Grant Leslie: Yeah. So I felt like the roadmap I think was built around sort of a simple idea, which is we have two jobs to do at the same time and we can’t do one without the other. And we’ve sort of been talking about this, but the first is to start fixing the system that we have.

So reforming these incentives and policy frameworks that sort of have us locked into the path that we’re on. But then the second job is to build the market that doesn’t yet exist. And you can’t build a new market if the old system keeps pulling everyone back, like we were talking about, and you can’t reform the old system if there’s nowhere for the farmers to go. So that was sort of the thinking behind the roadmap.

And there were, as you said, Aaron, there were really three phases of it. And the first was about sort of proof and beginnings, where we just need to start trying new things. We need, you know, there are a lot of pilots going on, but there’s probably a lot more that we need that genuinely test different systems all at once, sort of not in isolation like we have it now. And then we need to start having these serious fights that are gonna take a while, like this question about making profitability rather than yield the measure of success. 

And then the second phase is where the market actually gets built. So that’s where we’re actually investing in that local infrastructure that we talk about in the report that connects farmers to buyers, you know, the financing ecosystem that’s super important, that really needs to mature.

The longer term institutional capital, stepping up, things like that, and you know, that will help these pilots and the things that we’re testing in phase one really scale. And then phase three was about making what we’ve built stick. I mean, what needs to happen is it needs to survive an administration change. These things need to survive a bad market.

And so, you know, the goal of this wasn’t just for farmers to remain productive, but to make sure that they’re keeping more of what they earned and that consumers are getting more of what they want and that the whole system is just less fragile. So that was sort of the thinking behind the roadmap. And the one other important piece that I think is really important to point out that we’ve been alluding to as well is that it’s not just about government or a new government program as it sort of has been in the past. Government has a role. It’s got to establish the frameworks. It probably has to absorb some of the risks that private markets won’t take. But the actual building needs to be from a lot more diverse groups, private capital, food companies.

Cooperatives, farmers, philanthropy, there’s a lot of other essential players that need to come together.

Aaron Rudberg: Al, from your perspective, what is the report missing or leaving out that you felt, you know, maybe needs to be addressed?

Al Tank: You talk about it, it’s a 10 year high, it’s a very aggressive horizon, but we probably don’t have 10 years.

And if I were to say anything, there would be a section in here saying, listen, we don’t have ten years. Our ten years are already up, and so now we have to act. So that would be the one piece that I would start with, and the second piece that I would start with is that everybody has to get serious about this and everybody has to play a role.

Aaron Rudberg: You know, I’m not sure you talk to anybody in ag and they don’t bring up regulatory issues and challenges.

Grant, maybe if you could talk about one of the phase one recommendations was opening up the regulatory pathway for agricultural innovation. And, you know, what I’ve heard used to be eight to ten years, now it’s ten to fifteen. You know, we’re maybe going in the wrong direction. You obviously wanna ensure safety, efficacy, but maybe talk a little bit about your thoughts on that as a recommendation.

Grant Leslie: Yeah. I mean, I think one important thing to note with that is and you just alluded to it, Aaron, when you’re talking about opening up the regulatory pathway, what you’re not trying to do is loosen the scientific rigor behind the regulatory pathway. And no one would want that. The thing that has been the biggest problem for us, well, one of the biggest problems for us in the agriculture industry is when there hasn’t been public support around some of the technologies that have been brought to market because of concern with the science or the efficacy. And so no one bringing a new product through the market wants there to be less of that. I think when I think about it, it’s much more about a couple of things. 

One, the agencies need to be staffed appropriately. There need to be enough people to look at the dossiers, to review the science, and honestly, the right type of staff. Innovation, you know, the technologies have changed a lot. Innovation has happened fast. And so there needs to be people with the right backgrounds reviewing the dossiers, which I think is an issue sometimes. But then when I think about it, I think about how there really needs to be some sort of other track. When you have an innovative product go through the regulatory path right now that has been built for some of these older conventional technologies, some of the questions that are asked of these new technologies, you can’t even answer because it’s like not what these technologies do. 

And so you lose all this time because the company has to explain to the agency like, I can’t even give you the data on that because our technology doesn’t even do it. I don’t think you can have one regulatory path for a new and innovative technology that the market has never seen before and something that’s been used but maybe has been tweaked for sixty years. Those are two fundamentally different products going through the system. Yeah.

Aaron Rudberg: Yeah, when you think about AI and all these technologies that are accelerating innovation in many ways, but you actually can’t get it out to market for ten, fifteen years. And you know, a further question I was gonna ask is that’s maybe two or three administrations, multiple Congresses.

You know, you’ve got multiple CEOs at these companies a lot of times. It’s a long time to survive and actually the market’s gonna change. You got Brazil and China and, you know, competitors that are gonna get to market much faster.

Al Tank: And, or worse, Aaron, it never brought to market because of that hurdle. And they simply go somewhere else.

Aaron Rudberg: I mean, we’ve heard many stories of innovators in the US going to other countries because they can get to market much faster.

I feel like we could spend another couple hours talking about all the crop insurance, lending, you know, all these tools and how they need to be reinvented. Someone this week mentioned to me, which I thought was an interesting frame, that the agriculture and food industry had a sense of obesity rates and the need for a GLP‑1 type solutions for twenty, thirty years. 

And yet was not necessarily acting to solve that issue. Pharma comes along and basically steals that profit pool in many ways. And that was right there for food and ag companies who are now in many ways, particularly on the food side, are on their back foot, dealing with, you know, decreases in essentially their market, their TAM is shrinking underneath them because pharma companies have essentially taken that. And in many ways, that should have been profit pools that food and agriculture

took advantage of. But it was missed because it was not connected enough again to the demand side and the supply side. We’re just not in concert working to solve some of these issues around nutrition, health. Again, the policy didn’t necessarily support the incentive structure. I don’t know if you agree with that sentiment, but

Al Tank: I agree 100%. And to quantify it a little bit, I actually think you’re underselling what that meant. Because you sold a great product that was transferred into a less great product, and now we have the innovative solution to address that less great product and the results that came from it. And it took away from agriculture and it puts us in the position we are. And to put it in context, it’s six to ten percent of annualized demand in the marketplace. Six to ten percent is a massive number in agriculture and in the food sector. And it really illuminates exactly what we have to address here.

Aaron Rudberg: Grant, what does success look like twenty, ten years from now, 2036?

Grant Leslie: My gosh. I guess I mean at a very simple level, you know, my answer would be if a farmer wants to grow something different than corn and wheat and soybeans, if it’s something regenerative or organic or whatnot, they should have a real buyer and a fair price and the financing tools to make the transition without it being a major economic bet for them. And if that exists in 10 years, I think we have made real progress. And I would hope that also on the consumer side that the consumers see that farmers are meeting their demand and are growing healthier, more diverse, sustainable food.

Aaron Rudberg: Al, your thoughts? Ten years from now, maybe I guess your point of it needs to even be sooner, but what does success look like for you?

Al Tank: Within the next ten years, I think success looks like that we’ve really taken every one of these pieces. You think about risk tools, capital tools, technology, regulatory tools, and we’ve really put them into a brand new paradigm that is adaptive, that basically allows American agriculture, the food industry, the energy related to it, the water related to it, that they literally can explore any opportunity responsibly and really meet that market demand, which then triples in rural America, down to every school, every medical institution, all that sort of things, and really change the dynamics that we’re collapsing onto right now. Because you all talk about it in the report, which is really underappreciated how much turnover there’s going to be in American agriculture and what that is going to result in with regard to rural America, you know, in eastern Iowa where I live. There’s a whole series of other things beyond food that have to be taken care of as part of this process. And they will, in my mind, if you create this economic opportunity. This economic opportunity drives all the other things in healthcare and population and on and on and on. And I think one of the things that we also have to think about is that we use tax policy differently in the future than we do today as it relates to that acre and what happens on that acre, wherever that acre is.

And how it’s going to be transferred and that young farmer that wants to take over and on and on and on. That can be the real catalyst to dramatic economic activities as well, and doing the right thing because that’s how you put that leverage on them. So Aaron, long-winded answer of saying that it looks very different depending on where you are, but it ends at the end of the day, when you have success at the acre, at the individual acre, at scale, that’s success.

Aaron Rudberg: Well, you know, thank you, Al, Grant, for joining us. I do think this conversation is really critical. It’s about building resilience, not only on our lands and water and our systems more broadly, but I think your last point, Al, around rural communities. This is an essential question for building resiliency in rural America. That I think you know, we need to stop putting band aids and we need to have the debate, the arguments, Grant, as you said.

We need to disagree, but at least have a common mindset that today is not working. I think there’s agreement on that and how do we compete globally over the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. And it’s important that we’re having this conversation. So thank you both for joining and Grant for your work on the paper as well.

Grant Leslie: Thank you very much.

Al Tank: Thank you. Great to be here.

Tonya: To learn more, download the full paper ​“Building The Missing Market: A National Strategy for American Agriculture” from the link in the show notes. Thank you for tuning into the S2G podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, or share it with a friend. For more information or to connect with us, check out s2gin​vest​ments​.com.

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