Resources

• Harvard Business School Business and Environment Initiative
• Acre Venture Partners
• Iron Ox

Guests

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative

Guest/Host: Eleanor Laurans, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School
Alex Bondar, Partner, Acre Venture Partners
Rebekah Moses, Vice President, Iron Ox

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:
This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School, and I’m your host, Mike Toffel, a professor here at HBS.

Today, I’m excited to share with you a special episode from a new one-week program we just ran for our MBA students here at HBS students, called Accelerating Climate Solutions. The session I’m sharing today is an interview conducted by my colleague Eleanor Laurans with two food and ag experts: Alex Bondar, a partner at the venture capital firm Acre Venture Partners, which invests in sustainable food and agriculture, and Rebekah Moses, Vice President of Impact Strategy at Iron Ox, an ag-tech company that uses AI and plant science to create resilient food systems. They’ll discuss several interesting opportunities to address the challenges climate change poses for our food systems.

The session has been edited for length and clarity.

Here’s a special episode of Climate Rising featuring Eleanor Laurans, Alex Bondar and Rebekah Moses.

Eleanor Laurans:
Welcome to our fourth and final day of Accelerating Climate Solutions. So, let's jump right into food and ag. food production, 26% of emissions. And there's some real challenges. We have both population growth, and we want the world to get richer. And as living standards rise, people tend to consume more meat. And so, we have very deep structural challenges that actually push emissions up in this category, not down. And it's not really that clear where the solutions are going to be coming from. There's definitely been activity in important areas, production efficiency, changes to diets, carbon sequestration, reducing food waste. But the alternative foods and low greenhouse gas emission proteins have been by far the largest area of investment to date. I thought it would be worth diving into the data that shows where those emissions come from in that 26%. Land use is a quarter, crop production 27%, livestock 31, and supply chain. But what's interesting is so much of it is for livestock. And this is why there's been so much interest in alternative proteins. Because when you add up across these categories, things that are happening for livestock versus crops and food that go directly to humans, it's half of emissions. We have a very deep-seated assumption I think in the climate tech US space, which is that to build a business you have to assume consumer behavior will not change. And frankly, every business plan I'm looking at right now, I'm going to bring that perspective to it. 10 or 20 years from now, are we going to be on more of a wartime footing? Will there be small but growing and meaningful segments of the population that are actually willing to change their behavior? I don't know. On that note, I want to turn it over to our two fabulous guests. I would love it if the two of you would introduce yourselves. Tell us about the organizations you've been a part of. Rebekah has had two big stops recently. Alex is in finance. Tell us about yourselves, your organizations, Alex, You want to start us off?

Alex Bondar:
Sure. Sounds good. Thank you for having me today. My name is Alex Bondar. I'm a partner at Acre Venture Partners. My background is I started in pure finance, so, over time, made my way to venture in food. I started in consumer-led companies with branding and trying to sell products. And, for me, I think this transition to something more on the climate impact side has been really exciting, but also I think has been much more impactful. I joined Acre in 2016 when we were starting the fund. The reason for the fund at the time was really investing in the future of food. That was something that was really novel. We wanted to do it around better outcomes for human environmental health. And so, a lot of the topics you're discussing today around how do we preserve this planet and also how do we provide better nutritious food for everyone. And so, for us, that really means investing across the whole food value chain. We invest in food tech, we invest in ag tech. We're also all the way down to the consumer. If you look a lot of at our sub-verticals, things like food waste being more efficient, I think are really part of that solution as well. We typically see through series B investor. So, early stage venture. We have investments in many of the areas. But for us, predominantly US focused but also do a lot of work globally because we do think the food system is a global one. And, for instance, I spend a lot of time in Latin America looking at investments I started doing a lot of work there in 2018, and a lot of the comments I was receiving on the alt protein space were almost curious. It's like, "Why would you ever do something like this?" And then I think by now, I think if you go down and talk to a lot of investors, a lot of operators, they're also very focused on sustainability. And so, it's incredible how quickly the space has changed just in the last four to five years.

Eleanor Laurans:
Thanks, Alex. Rebekah, take it away.

Rebekah Moses:
Yeah, thank you. My name is Rebekah Moses. I have a different track than Alex. I came out of food and agriculture, and specifically research and ecosystem services. So, I did for many years work around basically food, bugs, birds and farmers. Looking at how do we share space, how do we share land between food production, the things that people need, but then the other things that people need, things like pollination, soil stabilization, all the wonderful things that we get from nature for free that we don't necessarily attribute an economic value to. And so, I've worked in agricultural sustainability through graduate school, after graduate school for many years, like I said, largely in a research capacity, but there was a point where I started looking around literally the acreage that we were conducting research on and thinking to myself, "Even if we convince everybody to do what we're doing, and that's a pretty sustainable set of practices that we're doing across rangeland and across actual crop production and acreage, it still doesn't solve problems." And there's two big problems that I was thinking about, three, actually. One was climate change, one was biodiversity collapse, which is probably more threatening than climate change, although they're certainly linked. And then just water. Water scarcity, water use. I'm currently in California, we have a lot of water right now. That's not usually the case. So, figuring out how to manage our surpluses. But the thing that struck me was that private sector was probably going to be really important. There's no real way to scale these solutions without private sector, without things like impact investment. And so, I had read, this was early days, read about this interesting idea from a guy named Pat Brown, and he was founding this company called Impossible Foods. They'd actually been in R&D mode for about four years before I joined. But I came in right before we went to market, and I led their impact strategy team, which focused on everything from operational sustainability to how do we think about R&D roadmap? How do we think about product? And a lot, a lot, a lot around consumer activation. There's some interesting conversation happening around what consumers do or don't do, how they behave. We also did work with the UN Climate Change Group, and there's a lot of interesting politicization of meat consumption. Just anecdotally, we were doing a panel at one of the subsidiary body meetings in Bonn, Germany. I was asked formally within that panel, which was on the climate impact of agricultural systems, to not talk about cattle because there had been a letter from certain countries suggesting that that would be inappropriate to do. So that was certainly some diplomatic tightrope walking on that particular panel. So, there's lots of challenges in this. I would love to talk more about meat consumption, we will. The other issue that's really interesting to me is climate change adaptation. And that was what brought me to Iron Ox. We had been focusing on figuring out how you can expand the range of what has grown indoors by getting your unit economics in much better shape and getting out of just tomatoes, lettuce and leafy greens to get more crops that can be grown in advanced controlled environmental agriculture systems using AI, machine learning and robotics as well as genomics. We are branching into predictive breeding. There's a huge array of things that we need to work on, technologies that we need to advance, changes that we need to deploy within our food system to counter big wicked problems.

Eleanor Laurans:
Thank you both. What are your thoughts on these ups and downs we've had? Rebekah, you're coming right from Impossible, a few years ago you were there for the rocket ship that went up. Alex, you're investing in it. What's your take on this space right now?

Rebekah Moses:
There's a couple of things I wanted to comment on. It's a really good thing to think about consumer behavior. My question is how would you test this? There's two things I want to push back on, actually. Ground beef is not healthy. Ground beef is quite unhealthy in a lot of ways. Saturated fat, cholesterol, when you season it, you do end up taking in quite a lot of salt. Impossible burger is healthier than meat from a cow. Quantitatively, it is less fat, about the same amount of sodium. I don't even work for them anymore, but I'll represent on this. But consumers don't always behave rationally when it comes to their health. And so, I think that you can have a pretty successful business model even if you're selling something that's not necessarily healthy. And I think we have quite a lot of good examples of that. But the point around consumers not wanting to change behavior is a very good one, and I think really valid. There is precedent for it. There are things like smoking and littering and picking up after your dog. From the 1970s on, we've seen sea changes in this. But it came after concerted publicly funded efforts to change people's minds on things. Things from the ad council, for example. We haven't ever seen that perhaps because of the political climate. Agriculture is the only bipartisan committee in Congress. We haven't seen that for things like dietary change in the same way. And I don't know that we ever are going to see it. And so these kind of alternative proteins are really important. You said that, and this is correct, in terms of direct emissions, food and agriculture constitutes about 26% of the total share. if you look at total land use, you can bump that figure up to close to 50% of total climate impact comes from how we eat and that comes from livestock. Extensive grazing lands take up huge amounts of the earth and we have really limited carbon storage available to us in vegetation as a result of that. So, we've replaced natural landscapes with our burping cows. Actually, the enteric methane is a burping issue that seaweed can only do a little bit to mitigate across the lifecycle because most cattle are pastured regardless of whether they're dairy or beef. So, there's one other really good point that's unit economics and cellular agriculture. Big distinction between plant-based meat and cellular agriculture. Plant-based being plant materials squished together, oils, proteins, binding proteins, that kind of thing. It's relatively low tech. Once you get the formulation and the recipe right. Cellular ag is very, very different, wildly energy intensive. Until it seems like we have an energy system converging on free energy and unconstrained energy, that's something that would make me pretty skeptical of cellular agriculture.

Alex Bondar:
For us, there was a moment in time where, as a food investor, we actually didn't have a play in alt protein for a while. I think a lot of the issues you guys mentioned around we're not seeing some of these products as that healthy, we are seeing them as highly processed. And by the way, very industrial. So, if you think about soy protein, you think about pea protein, those are highly industrial supply chains. They don't really disrupt the way business is done today. So, I think, for us, we're always searching for our alt protein play. If you look at our portfolio that ended up being a company called Meati, with an I, they're using mycelium as a way to grow an alternative to protein that also has very similar texture to things like chicken and beef. And so, that experience of eating it reminds you of what you would see in a typical meat product. And at the same time, if we look at the nutritional panel, it has really high fiber, great protein content, a lot of the things that we look for in a healthy product and has fewer ingredients. So, for us, that was a really key element. I think if you look at a lot of consumer surveys, they all point to the texture, taste, as well as health, as the key attributes that consumers are looking for much more so than sustainability. I think if you interview anyone, they'll say, "Yeah, I don't want to kill the planet." But when they go to the grocery store or to a food service, they'll typically put their dollars towards things that are healthier, are better tasting. But by the way, I don't think there's anything particularly unique here. There have been multiple waves of coffee that people talk about. We started with Folger’s and then we went to Starbucks, and now a lot of people think Starbucks is too low market and they want to drink Blue Bottle, they want to drink some of these more fancy third wave coffees. To me, this is the same thing, we started with, let's say Beyond and Impossible, and maybe Meati is the second or third wave, and then there's going to be another wave which has cultivated meat that we get to at some point in time. The thing is it's a very urgent problem, and from a financial investment, it's also one where we would like to get our returns within the scope of our fund. And so, things like cultivated meats maybe don't make sense in that universe in terms of how quickly they'll be able to commercialize. But that doesn't mean that 10, 15, 20 years from now we won't have some other products that will also address a lot of these issues. So, for me, I think it's one of those things where I don't think there's a silver bullet. I think we're constantly evolving. And by the way, I don't want perfect to be the enemy of good. So, for us, I think we're always looking at solutions that contribute to reducing a lot of these impacts. But at the same time, as a fund, we're looking for financial returns within a reasonable scope of time.

Eleanor Laurans:
Alex, I'd love to pick up on that for a sec, a lot of climate tech is very asset intensive and has a long development cycle. And you referenced a few times in your comment the economics of your fund. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether venture returns that we've seen in the past in other industries are going to be a realistic expectation in the climate tech space.

Alex Bondar:
That's a great question. There's a reason why we're doing this. I've been at it for seven years, we just raised our third fund investing in this space. But I do think it's really important to differentiate between the types of investments you're making. And so, I'm extremely bullish on greenhouses, for instance, in the United States. That's been a huge growth driver for the ag industry, irrespective of sustainability, just from a financial standpoint. But I think if you're an investor in that space and you're just building purely greenhouses, I don't think that's a venture bet for instance. But we as a fund for instance, are investing in a layer of technology to keep these greenhouses more efficient, to be able to save on a lot of this land use that we talk about. So, to me, it's almost finding the right parts of the value chain, the right attributes that do look more like traditional venture. Biotech I think has been a really interesting play within food as we think about things like seed genetics that use pure resources. Maybe there could be other genetic uses within even animal agriculture. Cultivated meat, it's a biotech play, but I think it's really important to differentiate, I think, between steel the ground versus something that maybe is a bit more scalable, a bit more capital efficient.

Eleanor Laurans:
Rebekah, staying a little bit on this financial theme for a moment. You mentioned in your opening comment a bit about impact investing. Tell us a little bit about how you feel about impact investing, its place in the food and ag space, the pros and cons and challenges.

Rebekah Moses:
Impact investing to me is both something that is very important to continue to do and to refine it, to get better at it. While, at the same time, I am quite skeptical of the outcomes associated with it. This is a fairly sophisticated system that's been around for a little while and we're asking it to do something that it was not purpose-built to do. We are asking the generation of capital, the generation of wealth to align, if not perfectly then pretty well, with environmental or social good creation. This is not what capital was built for. If anything, the creation of wealth is agnostic at best to environmental and social good creation, extractive at worst. I think this is a business school, we're all capitalists here, but these are real limitations that we face trying to turn a boat that wasn't built to turn in a particular direction. So, if we keep on asking, "Why is that a problem? Why is that a problem?" I think the thing that we get down to at the very bottom of that list is, again, look, this just isn't what money was coded for. And as a result, this is a massive limitation that I think we're going to face across every space when we address an urgent, really existential crisis that's bearing down on us that we've suddenly decided to take seriously, at least in most parts of the world. And so, I am very skeptical of the limitations there. There's more tactical reasons for it as well. I'd like to see, and present company excluded because I think ACRE is one of the funds and firms that's doing this very, very well. I'd like to see more broadly across the impact investing space, certainly at a VC level, a little bit more focus on what the criteria are to achieve environmental outcomes as a result of those investments. And that would have to be something, unfortunately, that's a little bit pre competitive that goes beyond just a single fund because this is a whole pie of a little slices and solutions. And I'm going to give an example of that. And just because we're talking about alt protein, this is a good one to pick on, the rate of revenue growth in sales has been exponential from this space. There has been absolutely no downturn in the amount of meat consumed across the world, across the United States, across production of cattle. Why do we think that is? What are the criteria that need to be met to actually achieve the environmental outcomes that we say we can achieve by substituting much, much lower footprint environmentally plant-based foods and take that market share from livestock products that are much, much higher environmental impact? What's happening? Why is there a disconnect? What people are used to is really important. Food is culture. So, if your culture is kind of shifting in a plant-based direction, it makes everything a lot easier in terms of adoption. But I'm thinking way upstream. What has to happen for environmental savings to occur? We need fewer cattle, right? In theory, we need less production. How can a plant-based meat product or a plant-based meat manufacturer create those conditions? What makes money for a rancher? It's not ground beef. Ground beef might be 5% of the revenue associated with the cow, and a lot of it is coming out of the dairy herd. So, you need whole cuts. You need to look at a USDA price spread and go, "Here's what's making money in this sector." And then you need to create alternative products that address that. And we haven't done it yet. And so, Alex made the point, we might see multiple generations of these kind of alternative proteins. And for that reason, I think additional impact investment money is really important in this space. But we haven't satisfied those conditions. And I don't know that we have enough actors within impact investing who are ecologists. I don't know that we have enough people kind of going, "Here's the conditions that we need to meet to take revenue and align it perfectly to environmental outcomes, or at least a little bit." And that's not just limited to alternative protein. I think that's a number of different fields. You need a lot of things to happen and you also need supportive policy mechanisms, which is a whole nother problem. But that's a big concern that I have with impact investing, is we're not sophisticated enough. Again, present company excluded, I think that's an exception. And I'll say one more thing on this, which is later stage, past VC, growth investing. It's hard to find growth financing or growth stage capital for food and ag. And when you get later stage institutional, a lot of ESG funds are just investing in tech broadly, not necessarily investing in transformative solutions. So, if you have ESG funds bundled with Meta, Google, the big FAANG group, I'm not sure that's impact, certainly not environmental. So, some skepticism on my end.

Eleanor Laurans:
Let's open it up.

Student:
Drawing the parallel to oil and gas, can we just use price mechanism to change consumer behavior through something like carbon tax on the food based on carbon intensity, and over a longer time through capital discipline, people invest less in the cattle industry so that we drive up the price and people will just think it's too expensive to eat a lot of meat.

Rebekah Moses:
it's hard to put an additional price burden on a critical good. And I think protein is something people need. It's not easy to shift diets. So, historically, politically, it's been a nuclear football, the idea of regulating any industry beyond oil and gas in that way, what if we were to think about it from the inverse? What if we were to incentivize the land stewards? Farmers and ranchers are the land stewards, generational knowledge. What if we were to incentivize them to do other types of production? Carbon farming, ecosystem service payments. There is some precedent for that in the Farm Bill. What if they're alternative livelihoods? I'm not saying that we should shift all of farming or all of ranching into this, but what if we had ways to incentivize some of the landscape level conservation that we want to see without necessarily a punitive approach? That might be a little utopian, but I do hesitate to think about taxing meat, maybe not subsidizing it.

Alex Bondar:
Tend to agree with that. If you look at some of the bets that we made recently I think have been around this idea of conservation. But then how do you commoditize conservation around, I think carbon is one, but that there's other, I think, credits that can come to market. And so, over time, I think some of these really rich ecosystems that are being used for maybe some optimal production of things like cattle, you could harness that value. So, in terms of water credits, carbon credits, biodiversity credits, I think all of these natural assets, that's a new class, I think, of investment that's really been evolving in the last couple of years. And so, I think that's something we're hoping to see as well in terms of making better optimization decisions around what is truly valuable to our society, the planet, all those things by putting some type of value on them. And carbon farming I think is an interesting concept as well that we're investing behind.

Student:
I don't know if you guys have experience in fish farming, but I've heard a lot of classmates talk about how it solves the overfishing problem, but it also has pretty significant environmental impacts. I was wondering if you could talk about the future of that alternative to just wild caught fish, and if it's actually viable.

Alex Bondar:
We've been looking at aquaculture as an investment theme since day one. To be honest with you, we haven't seen as much innovation in that space. I think, by the way, just to be optimistic about a lot of things, is that the quality of entrepreneurs that we're seeing and the number of interesting investments that we're seeing in the space has increased exponentially over the last five, six years. And so, in many ways, I think the solutions are getting better, their talent is getting better. Agriculture I think is one where we're still not maybe seeing as much potential as in other parts of the food industry. And so, I'd love to see more entrepreneurs pursue that. But at the same time, I think there are some unique challenges given how consolidated that space is. And there's basically companies that control most of the farming. And there is maybe a branding issue too, because to your point, I think the consumer is probably pretty confused these days about is wild better maybe because it is more sustainable in other ways like, "What should I do?" The whole issue with oceans I think is a major, major problem that a lot of us are not even considering as part of these solutions. So, to me, I think that's maybe the next stage that needs to happen is how do we protect the oceans.

Rebekah Moses:
I think this particular issue where you do see from a socioeconomic perspective, wild caught fisheries culture is really, really important to certain regions. And I would almost think about fish farming or crustacean farming, just blue food in general in the same way that I think about indoor farming, which is, it's not necessarily always environmentally better, but oftentimes there's a socioeconomic component to it for certain regions that can be very critical, at least promising, in terms of economic development. And I think we're seeing a lot of that expansion happen in, again, different types of fish farming, but particularly crustacean farming space, and environmentally much of the concern associated with fish farming goes down to something called a feed to food ratio. Basically how much energy or protein or calories did you put into that fish in order to get a pound of fish meat out of it? And so often the feed source is the thing that can determine whether or not this is environmentally superior in terms of performance. And that's something that I know there is quite a bit of innovation going into that, is how do we create a better feed source for these fish that breeds healthy fish that's not environmentally destructive or as environmentally destructive? And there's a pretty good paper out actually recently from Stanford that looks at blue foods and the various types of waste that diets can be assembled around these.

Student:
Yeah, I had a thought on the idea of changing diets and if food is about culture and if it would take a generation to change people's diets. I was thinking of something more tactical, which is this increasing transparency around carbon, the carbon footprint, let's say on a menu, you could have, the same way you have calories today. That would be an easy way to maybe give power in the hands of consumers. And I'm thinking of this because in other industries, like in the EV space, for instance, in 2026 in Europe, there's something that's going to be called the battery passport. So, when you'll be buying an electric vehicle, you'll be able to know the exact footprint of your battery and you'll be able to compare across OEMs and pick your EV. So, I'm wondering do you think that's the direction of travel of the food industry and we're headed towards more carbon transparency?

Rebekah Moses:
I think we are seeing that. I think the direction of travel is there. I don't know how saturated that market is going to be and how often we are going to see it. I don't know that McDonald's is going to opt into this. We do already have this in some places that are voluntarily disclosing and investing in carbon footprinting, and LCAs in general are expensive, but there are ways to scale them. So, I don't know if you've ever been to Just Salad. I know that they're on the East Coast, they're super committed to this. Places like MAX Burger in Sweden, Northern Europe in general, they've been doing this for over 10 years. Panera even has a cool foods menu. So, we're seeing it start to mainstream a little bit. To what extent that's shifting consumer behavior at moment of purchase, I don't know. There are some studies that show dynamic types of messaging will help people shift what they put on their plate. When I was at Impossible Foods, we did this with our packaging, you can look at the full LCA statistics on the side of an Impossible burger or Impossible chicken nugget package. I think we might have been the first to do that, but you can see water, carbon emissions and land use comparison. Not everybody is going to do this, but if you look at a carbon footprint, you can play with that a little bit. You can create a carbon neutral pound of beef. Now, if you were to make carbon neutral beef production the norm, you would devastate the planet. That's an extremely extensive system. But you can do it. You can do it on a cow basis or a ranch basis. Does that make that an environmentally superior product? Definitely not, but it would look better in the moment compared to a plant-based product that wasn't carbon neutral. So, I think there are some ways that system can bite us a little bit, but it's better than not having it.

Eleanor Laurans:
Alex, I'm going to jump in with another question. I got us started focusing on alt protein and I want to make sure we leave space to hear about other parts of your portfolio and other spaces that you all are interested in so that we make sure we give the class a wide enough aperture of understanding of all the things you're looking at. Do you want to share a little bit about other things you've looked at, invested in, are exciting about in the future?

Alex Bondar:
Sure. Yeah, happy to. I think for us, as I mentioned, it is that whole value chain. And so, some of the things that we invest in maybe are less in the news and less exciting to people, but at the same time, maybe have even greater impact. And so, I think starting from the farm, one of the things that has been challenging is that I think a lot of times farmers are forced to be the stewards of a lot of these solutions in ways where they're essentially asked to do this as a charity work for the rest of us. Even though if you look at their margins and where their profits are, relative to everyone else, they're getting the least out of the system. So, it's like taking the most oppressed in this value chain and asking them to take one from the team. And so, in many ways, I think it is about enabling farmers to also have a more profitable business where they can take on some of these alternative solutions or at least be willing to take those risks where in today's system maybe they wouldn't be given just the pure financial elements of it. And so, even as you talk about things like nitrogen reduction, we have investments in that where you have fertilizer reduction that are uses of resources in general, shifting away from chemicals to biologicals within the ag system so that way you have better soil health. We can reduce it down to carbon. I think that's just a simplistic way because it's easy and it's commodified, but soil health as an idea is much bigger than that. I think our planet depends on a lot of that, not just for carbon storage. And so, I think as we look down the supply chain, efficiencies come to mind. We have a company in Boston called Spoiler Alert, which is working with a lot of leading CPGs to minimize their food waste. And so, if we can divert food from landfills and actually put it on people's plates or do something with it that's more productive, we feel like that has a huge impact because you're not forced to produce more food. You can just maybe save the 30, 40% of the food that we're wasting in today's supply chain. And so, there's many ways to go about this. And I think a lot of this for me is, once again, no silver bullet. It's really about a combination of things. But I'm very optimistic, I think relative to where this industry was even five, six years ago. I think Impossible, I think Beyond have done an excellent job of educating the consumer about problems with beef. 20 years ago, I'm not sure any of us would've said a cow is a problem for the environment. And I think we're getting there on these other solutions as well. So, to me, it's a pretty exciting place to be tackling things like these existential risks of climate change, tackling challenges we face with our health and nutrition. As a VC, that's as big as it gets.

Eleanor Laurans:
I think we could squeeze in one or two more student questions.

Student:
I'm curious about how you guys consider the ability to change consumer's behavior versus farmer's behavior, which ones may be easier? And then as for enabling farmers to farm more regeneratively or have fewer carbon emissions, what are the best mechanisms to do that? And who are the right stakeholders to be working with and convincing farmers to change?

Alex Bondar:
At least from my perspective, I think farmer might be a little bit easier just because it is a business decision, it's an ROI decision. I think fundamentally, farmers are very rational in terms of the types of products they've used and what they do. And so, if you can show the ROI, if you can show the economic impact, that tends to work really well. Whereas on the consumer side, a lot of times it is a more branding emotional decision. There's a cultural element, there's all these things that maybe are less easy to quantitatively control. To be honest with you, I do think maybe this is also financially, you'll probably get a more impact from the farming side because if you do change the way the farming system works, that impact flows down quite impressively through that supply chain and can also be very global because most farming globally is done in a very similar manner, especially for some of these large crops. And so, I tend to gravitate towards the B2B world a little bit within our investing, but I think that's maybe also a personal point of view.

Rebekah Moses:
Ditto, Alex. And I think this is an area where policy is really important. If you look at, farmers are squeezed horrifically in what we expect of them. And if you look at things like farm build programs like WHIP, EQIP, CSP, Conservation Stewardship Program, they're an acre-based incentives for farmers to adopt basically management practices and to help them pay for things that do create risk and create time and additional labor around their crops compared to a baseline. And so, I think expansion of those things, we recently saw an expansion of those things but continued, they're oversubscribed, is pretty helpful for those.

Eleanor Laurans:
I could keep going but we're out of time. I wanted to say a huge thank you to our two guests. There's certainly been moments of pessimism, but Rebekah, I was really struck by the comments you made about thinking about behaviors that we once took for granted, whether it was smoking or littering or whatever it was, and choosing to feel optimism that we can have change. And, Alex, I think you reflected it as well in some of the areas in your fund that you've been investing in. So, a big thank you to our guests.

Mike Toffel:
This was a special episode of Climate Rising featuring a conversation on food and agriculture with Eleanor Laurans, Alex Bondar, and Rebekah Moses from the HBS Accelerating Climate Solutions program. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we want to hear from you. Please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts, and share it with your friends. You can email us at climaterising@hbs.edu For show notes, head over to climate rising-dot-org or click on the link in the podcast episode. Kate Zerrenner is our producer, and Craig McDonald is our sound engineer. Climate Rising will be back in two weeks with another episode. See you then.