In this episode of the Spilled Salt podcast, Maureen Ballatori interviews Jacob Fox, a regenerative systems consultant based in Geneva, New York. Jacob is passionate about demystifying agriculture and promoting regenerative farming methods. He shares his journey from being an athlete who valued good food to becoming deeply interested in soil health and sustainable agriculture.
Highlighting the impact of regenerative farming on soil health and the environment.
Jacob emphasizes the importance of consuming regenerative food and highlights the impact of regenerative farming on soil health and the environment. He explains the differences between conventional and regenerative farming practices, focusing on the benefits of regenerative grazing for animals and the land.
As a consultant, Jacob works with various companies in the regenerative space, helping them find target markets and make their products more sustainable. He believes in the power of honesty and transparency in brands’ sustainability efforts to educate consumers and build trust.
Jacob believes in the importance of demystifying agriculture using tactics such as agritourism.
Jacob also shares his dream project with Maureen: a diverse and sustainable farm in the Finger Lakes region. His aim is to demystify agriculture by inviting people to experience farming firsthand and to showcase the potential for diverse revenue streams and sustainable practices.
Looking to the future, Jacob advocates for paying farmers for their ecosystem services through incentives and support for sustainable farming practices. He believes that valuing the environmental contributions of farmers will create a more resilient and sustainable agricultural system.
Overall, Jacob’s mission revolves around raising awareness about regenerative agriculture, supporting farmers in implementing sustainable practices, and fostering a stronger connection between consumers and the sources of their food. He hopes that by promoting regenerative methods, we can build a more resilient and sustainable agricultural future.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage, and agriculture industries.
Today’s guest is Jacob Fox. He is a regenerative systems consultant based in the Finger Lakes in Geneva, New York, and his mission is to demystify agriculture. So he’s really focused on regenerative farming methods. And our conversation today also strolls into some actions that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies and consumers can take to seek out some more sustainable options, as well as Jacob’s take on what’s next for agriculture. Enjoy the conversation.
Thanks for joining me today. We’re going to jump right into our questions. I want to start with a little bit of your background. So you’re one of the most passionate people I know when it comes to soil health. I’ve never met somebody who spoke more passionately about dirt, which I know is the unkind word for it. Talk a little bit about how you got into soil health and then specifically regenerative.
Jacob Fox: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for me, it really started with good food. I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I played college soccer and I’ve played a high level of various athletics. And so I’ve always eaten pretty well.
I kind of discovered that trick to staying fit is eating well. And, once you start eating well, there’s a lot of good food as well. It’s not just all eating kale or something, the way that a lot of people look at eating well.
There’s actually a lot of really the discussion between processed and unprocessed is kind of what I stumbled upon. And so as someone who is a normal city dweller, I was just at the mercy of what my supermarkets could offer me or where I could acquire this produce.
That kind of started a long journey of figuring out how to improve my food system and my personal resiliency. So that’s been a journey for a long time, but I kind of got involved with agriculture after college.
I got involved with the compost industry and I built a company and built a facility and really talked with a lot of farmers in that industry as I was selling them soil compost.
What I really realized was going around to all those farmers is that’s actually what I wanna do, is I really, really wanna farm. And that is an interesting conversation because when you tell most people you want to farm, they say, don’t do it. You’re going to lose money.
So for me, I kind of saw that as a challenge and I said, all right, let’s figure out how to grow good food and make money and make it a resilient system, both ecologically, but also financially.
I don’t come from a traditional agricultural background, but I’m trying to utilize my skills learned outside of agriculture and apply them to agriculture and really trying to bring more people like me who don’t have any family connection to agriculture, but who come from privilege and who wanna spread knowledge. This isn’t new knowledge, a lot of this is indigenous knowledge and it’s been here before, but it’s a matter of rediscovering it. And so that really is… makes me incredibly passionate about it.
It’s the combination of eating well and history and working outside and working with your body and working with others. And that’s really what my passion sources from.
Maureen: And where are you learning those farming skills? I didn’t realize you didn’t have a farming background. So where are you finding that education?
Jacob: I’m so lucky to be in the Finger Lakes region. There are tons of great farmers around here. I’d say 20, 30 of the best farmers in the world are up here. When I say best farmers, I’m talking about how their systems are really sustainable and regenerative. And so when I say they’re the best farmer, I’m saying they’ve created a system in which it doesn’t kill them, either financially or spiritually or environmentally as well.
And so, I’ve learned from a lot of folks in the region. Mike Biltonin is a guy down in the Truman’sburg area. Sean Dembrowski runs Edible Acres, which is a perennial plant nursery. John Bates really turned me on to perennials. And these are just folks that are within an hour’s drive.
And then, I mean, I’ve been super lucky, growing up in this age of technology, like there’s so much information on YouTube, and Facebook groups are actually some of the best ways to source agricultural information because you’re connected with people across the world. You can really target them specifically.
So let’s say, I’m growing perennial vegetables and the only other people that are growing perennial vegetables are in a lot of what we consider third-world countries or more like tropical environments. And so, you need to kind of learn about what they’re doing and try to apply it to our climate. And so you can talk to these folks through Facebook, which is incredible.
I’ve made so many great connections. And so I really just started learning about agriculture in about 2016. And now I’m a few years in and I mean, try to be humble about it just because I haven’t been in the industry for a while, but the industry, unfortunately, was very much in the dark.
There’s been so much in the past, like seven, 10 years, that have been rediscovered, and so I’ve been lucky enough to be part of that.
Maureen: So let’s go back to something that you said earlier about your focus on good food and processed versus unprocessed. What is it about regenerative farming methods that make the food better? And what does that mean? Talk a little bit about that. So, what is regenerative farming?
Jacob: Yeah, I mean, let’s just start with animals. I love the saying, you are what you eat and you are what you eat eats. And we’ve kind of internalized you are what you eat. If you eat junk food all day, you’re not gonna feel good. Well, guess what? If that animal you ate, ate junk food all day, you’re also not going to feel good.
The bygone effects of that, them eating junk food, they have to get more antibiotics. They have way more non-natural things inputted into the process in order to make it a saleable product versus regenerative.
You’re [not] doing things as close to the natural system as possible. Now, that’s not exactly as easy as just letting them go and they know what they’re doing.
I mean, we’ve bred animals in different ways. We used to have bison all over the place. Now we have cows. And so, we also used to have shared land. So you used to be able to graze. Now we have so many divides.
Really, it’s about creating a natural system on your farm.
And so just one differentiator [of non-regenerative methods] is the way that most cows are produced is they’re sitting in a barn for most of their lives. There’s either grain finished or grain throughout their whole lives. These cows aren’t moving around, so they don’t get the kind of health benefits from moving around. And so they have to be fed all these different things.
We also feed them to create quantity rather than quality versus regenerative grazing is where you’re doing what’s called mob grazing. You basically take the animals out into the grasslands and you intensively graze them for periods and then you let [the land] rest.
So you intensively graze [the land], you let it rest, which is very similar to the way that our grasslands actually evolved with bison moving around. And so I can’t quote exactly, but the health differences between feedlot meat and grass-fed beef are just unbelievable.
But the biggest thing is the impact of those farms. A feedlot farm usually requires a centralized, heavy infrastructure, headquarters, essentially. They have barns, they have tractors, they have silage bins, and a lot of infrastructure. And then they have to go farm 2,000 acres of crops and then bring stuff to [the livestock].
My favorite, I love this one farmer out of South Dakota, Gabe Brown, who was actually operating a heavily industrialized system that was incredibly costly, like capital intensive, which so a lot of these farmers are taking out loans, barely surviving on government subsidies, essentially. And so, Gabe Brown was on that edge of bankruptcy and he looks at his cows and he looks at his barn and his tractors and he goes, “Oh yeah, these cows have legs. I don’t need to bring the food to them. They can go get the food.”
And oh, by the way, when they go get the food, it actually improves the pasture if you’re managing them in a specific way.If they’re actually moving around and eating a diverse diet, they don’t get as many diseases and they’re able to pass parasites easily. There are all sorts of things.
You can then combine animals. So, you can have chickens going after cows. Chickens love eating the larvae that grow on cow poop. And that helps the poop actually integrate more into the soil. And that’s really this huge thing, that we really need manure. We need it to be responsibly managed, but as far as replenishing our land, chemical fertilizers is not the move.
So, that’s what the vegan movement is missing: that animals are really important. Now, the whole killing animals discussion is a longer one because a lot of the intensive veggie production requires heavy tillage.
So you’re killing earthworms, you’re killing all those microorganisms that are in the soil. Now, sure, they’re not as cheap as a little cow, but those little microorganisms are really, really helping us cycle atmospheric CO2 and capture water so it doesn’t pollute our water bodies.
There are tremendous environmental consequences of one versus the other and health consequences, as well.
Just last thing on this is the technology that I’m really excited about. The Bionutrient Food Association has been working on this for a while, basically making nutrient density spectrometry more available. So one day you’re going to be able to go into a supermarket with your phone and you’re going to be able to take a picture of an apple. and take a picture of another apple. And it’s gonna give you, “this apple has this many nutrients and it’s covered in glyphosate. This one has this many nutrients and it’s not covered in glyphosate.”
Maureen: That is wild.
Jacob: For me, that would be really fascinating. Not only for my health and welfare, but also in the future as the markets hopefully correct in this way. So that’s a fascinating thing that I always think about. You go to a supermarket now and it’s “all-natural” – what does that mean?
Maureen: Well, yeah. And so I could go down a rabbit hole about natural because that’s one of the unregulated terms that can actually go on CPG products and it doesn’t actually mean anything.
I love ag tech solutions like that, that you mentioned. And I think those are some of the things that we’re most excited to work on with our clients. And we’re working with some folks who are doing some really interesting things around methane, which is another conversation for another day.
But that technology that you’re talking about it, to be able to scan for nutrients would also be life-changing for the global environment, too.
Imagine in third-world countries to be able to measure nutrient density in produce like that would be pretty remarkable.
I think one of the things that’s great about the knowledge that you’ve been able to collect and now share with the world too is this fact that you’re new to farming and that you’re absorbing, right? You’re an open book. It’s not how my dad did it.
I grew up on a dairy farm. A lot of what you were just explaining is, my dad put our beef cows and the dairy cows out to pasture. And that was how it was done back then
But every farm is different.
You are calling yourself a regenerative systems consultant. And so tell me a little bit about the work that you’re doing these days. Are you specifically targeting regenerative systems and kind of helping to share the knowledge that you’ve learned with other folks to implement that for the benefit of soil health and good food?
Jacob: Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. I mean, that’s a really fascinating thing that I’ve worked for the past five, six years as an environmental consultant, a sustainability consultant, a climate-smart community coordinator. It’s been called many different things. And for me, it’s actually missing the point.
We can’t sustain the way that we’re currently going. So let’s throw that one out. Environmental consultant, I think that’s too broad. It also kind of connotates a certain type of activism or something.
For me, everything that we do is like a system. There are inputs and there are outputs and those inputs have to come from somewhere and those outputs have to go somewhere as well.
I’ve tried to frame my work as trying to help people improve their systems and ideally try to create a regenerative one. And so a lot of the clients that I’ve picked up originally with this are a compost company, a biochar company, a startup that’s working with microalgae. So there’s a lot of these folks that are creating solutions for the regenerative space, but they’re very much on the outside.
Often they get called snake oil salesmen, and because the modern agriculture world is so caught up in the chemical world that you start to throw these alternatives in there.
The pathway to actually sell fertilizer to farmers is really confusing. Most of them have a certified crop consultant and there’s also crop insurance and there are so many factors that go in there.
A lot of times these companies work really hard to discover something, they don’t really know what because they’ve spent time mastering their business, whether it’s making biochar or making microalgae. Suddenly they just think, or they’ve read an article, they’ve read some research or something that says this stuff is good, they make it, and now they’re like, okay, who’s gonna buy it? And that’s where I try to help them think about target markets. I try to help them if they are already coming from a regenerative space do more of that If you’re sourcing your products, try to source them more locally. And if have waste, make sure that that waste is handled in a regenerative fashion.
There’s so much with scope one, scope two, and scope three emissions that kind of refer to emissions that come from a company. And this is all as it relates to climate goals. And this has become a very popular thing. But most of what people are doing is just like, oh, I need to reach my climate goals. Let’s go buy some solar power or something. And that’s a whole other thing.
Honestly, I do support renewable energy. There are a lot of downsides. Really what I advocate more so is, if you wanna make an impact on the environment, eat regenerative food. There’s no downside to that. You also help to rescue a lot of these rural economies that people are really struggling versus the solar companies who are killing it. They’re doing great.
That’s where a company, they really want to improve their impact. When they have Burger Day, have grass-fed burgers rather than do some sort of technocratic solution. That’s what’s winning right now in the climate discussion is the technocratic solutions. And that’s where I’m trying to bring the regenerative nature-based solutions that actually have more benefits.
Maureen: The other argument I’ve been frequently hearing on solar, too, is that there are some farmers choosing it because it’s a set-and-forget thing. They’re using their viable high-quality farmland and putting solar panels there instead, right? Because they don’t have to do anything to it. I mean, it’s very low maintenance. And so now our high-quality farmland is being scooped up by solar, which to your point, it’s a good thing, right? Solar is a good thing, but let’s try and put it on top of buildings, right? Instead of on high-quality farmland.
You say that one of the best things that people can do is eat regenerative food, right? And I think that what kind of tips can you share for like the average everyday person or a big audience of this podcast is folks who are starting CPG brands or scaling CPG brands. How can they incorporate regenerative food into what they’re building or doing, or how can the consumer kind of keep an eye out for that kind of thing?
Jacob: I really think it’s just rationality. Just think about the impact of your product. I think of it when I buy someone’s product, and I’m often disappointed in the lack of information.
[Brands] guide you in all these different ways. They say these stories about their family and it’s like, listen, all I’m asking you is [to know about your sustainability before] buying your product
There’s this great Netflix show called ‘The Good Place’. that I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but the concept is that, I mean, I don’t wanna spoil the show for you, but at the end of the day, no one is in the good place because everything we do has some negative impact.
It’s like, I bought that banana. Oh, guess what? That banana is being grown in a country where they’re not using good labor practices, Sso for me, that seems incredibly rational.
For a CPG company, I’m hoping that in the future you’ll let me know where your stuff comes from, a little bit about how it’s produced, and then let me know if you do produce a significant amount of waste, or if you have to ship your product all over the place. Just mention how you’ve been able to get that around. And this is a fascinating conversation because it deals with carbon negativity, carbon neutrality, and carbon.
I actually try to take a super-rational approach to where it’s grown. Listen, if I’m growing a carbon-negative product in upstate New York that is able to be shipped to the furthest, the Middle East, somewhere that’s as far away from the Finger Lakes as possible. But in the way that it got there, it paid people fairly. It didn’t contribute to some crazy consequence…
Obviously, some of these things are more controllable than others but I just really hope for a sense of honesty. I know when I’ve been working with brands they start to be this crazy word salad. I mean, we both have spent a lot of time, you way more than me, in the branding world. There are so many fancy words that can drive you in certain directions, buzzwords, and some of those buzzwords can be helpful, but, for me, it’s just, to have a little bit of honesty about your process and if you don’t have honesty, I kind of assume that you’re not doing it well,
That’s why we assume about grass-fed. If I go to a restaurant and they don’t say that it’s grass-fed, I assume that it’s feedlot.
Consumers ask the tough questions. If you have a brand that’s producing something, and let’s say it is super regenerative, and they’re not talking about that, that’s a missed opportunity. If they are somewhere in between, it’s just about the honesty. Just draw it out for me.
Maureen: I think some of what is tough about regenerative in particular is that it’s still a term that people are learning. The average everyday consumer, I think, is still kind of getting on board with that language.
There are different ways that it’s talked about in terms of, what does the average consumer look for on the grocery store shelf, or how is that brand telling its story amidst the flavor profile story, the sustainability story.
We work with Gimme Coffee down in Ithaca, which is really a big advocate for fair wages and fair sourcing. And they sing that story loud and proud, which is great.
Lattini Sunflower Milk, another client that is an example of when you talk about how a consumer can make a choice between almond milk, which is very resource-rich to farm compared to sunflower milk, which is sourced from a regenerative product, sunflowers being regenerative, is an example of how that substitution can be made that starts to turn the needle, move the needle a little bit.
You were working on a very exciting project in the Finger Lakes. What can you share publicly about that?
Jacob: The compost facility or my farm?
Maureen: The farm.
Jacob: This farm is really what I’m hoping to spend the rest of my life doing. But the goal is to really demystify agriculture and exactly what you just said is spot on.
Kiss the Ground, who’s a pretty good advocacy organization for regenerative, just did a survey. I think 4% of Americans knew what regenerative is. Which is so small and we’re coming up on a farm bill soon.
The farm bill is super important every five to seven years. Basically, the next five to seven years of farming gets decided by the U.S. government. And oftentimes it’s been subsidizing commodity scale crops, corn, soy, wheat, rice, cotton, and then dairy also has subsidies as well.
I could go off about, why we should change that into actually paying farmers for their ecosystem value, rather than paying them for some production. We actually want to feed people and we actually want to survive for a while. We’d pay farmers for their ecosystem value.
For me, it’s a very confusing world of agriculture that I’ve learned over the past few years. There’s both on the production side. So how can I grow these products in a way that doesn’t harm me, my workers, the environment, or our local community How can I do that? But how can I also make it financially viable?
Everyone always asks me, what are you farming? And I hope to never be able to answer that question because I hope it’s going to be such a broad range of stuff.
And that’s where the mystery is, for the last 70, 80 years, you’re a potato farmer. you’re a corn farmer.
Unfortunately, first of all, that doesn’t take into mind crop rotation. So a lot of people have started doing crop rotation, but still, they live and die by these certain crops. And that would be insane to me. That’d be like having one client.
I come from a world that’s not farming, where you would never put all your eggs in one basket. There’s a reason for that saying.
So what I’m planning to do is create a farm that has so many diverse streams of revenue that, first of all, we can feel comfortable in living our lives and not have to be held hostage by the commodity markets, but also we can try things.
I’m planting a lot of perennials that aren’t gonna yield agricultural value for eight to 15 years or so. And so in the meantime, I’m trying to find different ways of revenue.
I get apples dumped at my farm from a local juice company and they pay me anywhere between $10 to $15,000 a year. I’m actually doing them a service.
This has been from my previous life as a composter. There’s a lot of money in handling food waste. And then you can also use that food waste to create really good compost, which is basically the food for your plants.
I’m trying to create diverse revenue streams. I got money coming in that way. I’m getting fresh compost that I’m going to be able to, first, it’s cost avoidance on the production side, but then I also get all this compost to play with.
I’m going to try things that other farmers don’t try because they have to buy compost and they have to use it really strategically.
I’m also going to be adding some agritourism elements to the farm.
My life goal is to try to demystify agriculture. That’s a big goal, but I would love for people to come out. And it’s what we said, the reason 4% people know this, the reason people are so confused about almond milk, cow milk, is because we are so disconnected from where our food comes from.
Growing up in the early 2000s, that was just a growing movement. But in the past, it was about the global economy – this is coming from Brazil, that’s coming from there. [The global network is] actually good, but there are actually a lot of downsides with nutrient density and shipping. Extracting value from one area because the government said it was the right place to grow stuff for the nation.
It’s just so confusing that the average person has no idea where their food comes from. They have no idea what a farmer does, or how they sell their products. I have tons of friends who I’m constantly explaining to them what I do and why I’m doing it. And so my goal honestly is to do that, is to bring people up and say, “See this, this is a farm, you see that over there, that is also a farm, but they make on average 350 an acre before expenses, so they’re losing money. I’m over here making money in all these diverse ways. I’m inviting you out to come check out my spot.”
And there are all of these hidden costs here. Folks who really have been disconnected from the land go to all these wilderness retreats. I’ve been lucky enough to travel and try to broaden my horizons. And what makes me feel the best at anything? Growing something. And that is such a huge thing that I would love to share.
My hope is to try to bring people up to the farm and show them that they can actually have a sense of accomplishment in their lives. They can feel good about what they’re eating. Once you start to demystify those things, light bulbs go off in their heads.
I don’t think I’m going to change the system, but I think if I can have an impact and people can come back and they can reference it, then that’s really my goal.
Maureen: I think where you can also have a big impact, too, Jacob is you’re talking, about two very distinct audiences, consumers, right? Those who don’t know and need to be educated so that when they’re doing their regular trip to the grocery store. Or maybe it’s walking into the grocery store instead of doing Instacart, little micro changes like that. You’re kind of educating the consumer to seek local, those sorts of things.
But you’re also talking about educating the farmer. How do you kind of explore more sustainable methods of operating your farm in the economic sense? How do you earn more money on your land? And that is also a really important job as well.
I love this demystifying agriculture umbrella and how it can serve both of those audiences. Especially when value-added production is something I constantly have farmers coming to me about. “Hey, USDA has money available for value-added production. Where do I start? What do I do? How do I incorporate that onto my farm? I’ve been a dairy farmer for five generations. What do you mean by value-added production?”
So I think that with what you’re doing and your angle on all of this, for the ripple effect of the impact of sustainability. I know you mentioned that that’s not really the word that encompasses all of it, but that’s what you’re talking about. Sustainable methods for farm economics, human health, the environment, the climate, everything is rolling up to a sustainable story.
Jacob: Absolutely. And my last piece on that is so funny. We often look over at these farmers and we wonder, why are you doing that? Why are you doing it that way? Why are you planting that crop? Why are you wasting all that stuff? They literally are on the verge of bankruptcy. And our government tells them, if you do this, we’ll give you this. And so they’re just off down that road.
Maureen: Or they’re multi-generations [farming the way they’ve always done].
Jacob: 70, 80 years of the same mentality. And that’s where I’m also lucky that I don’t have that. And that I’m seeing all these different opportunities and that is difficult.
Maureen: I admire your mission and the work that you’re doing. Thanks for all these resources that you shared. Kiss the Ground is a great one for everybody listening to follow and get engaged with as a great place to start.
What, in final words, do you think is next for agriculture and climate health in general?
Jacob: Well, it’s the thing I’m advocating for the most and it’s paying farmers for their ecosystem services. The last farm bill had some of this in there. A lot of it was studying how to measure soil health as well as practices. I believe we have to do that or we’re headed for another dust bowl. Not to be gloom and doom, but if we want our land in America to be productive, and if we don’t want to import all of our food at a high cost, we really need to pay farmers for their ecosystem value.
That will also help to solve a lot of our dietary problems. A lot of the farms are growing these industrial products because that’s the only money they can get. And so I see payment for ecosystem services as the future of agriculture. And the farm bill on Kiss the Ground.
Maureen: By that, you mean helping the farm earn more for creating their own compost and value-added production and kind of doing more with what they’re doing on their property, is that right?
Jacob: Yeah, a lot of farmers are already doing this for reasons that are very internal. But, for example, the town of Lodi a few years ago washed away because of a flood. It costs millions of dollars to clean a flood and it costs millions of dollars to clean dirty water.
We can actually pay farmers proactively less to make sure that our towns don’t flood and our water’s clean. And so it could be as simple as building a farm pond on your land. It could be as simple as not tilling it for some years or planting perennials.
Always keeping your soil covered is super important. Now they’re kind of starting to incentivize that, but we’re still in this commodity all the way world. And while I don’t think that that’s necessarily going to change overnight and USDA does pay farmers for their improving their land, we don’t have a price on it though.
And so what is the value of the water in the Finger Lakes to us? What is the value of future farming? What is the value of air quality? And as we start to put numbers to those things, the people who are in the best position to capture that revenue are farmers. And cause they’re the biggest land managers.
Suddenly if you put an incentive system in there that was focusing on encouraging farmers to look after the land better. It’s not about food, we have enough food, that’s a myth that we need this commodity program in order to produce food. No, it’s actually at this point become a welfare problem to keep farmers alive. And, that I absolutely support bringing up the bottom of our society.
For farmers, we have to stop just giving them these one-year solutions. We need to give them a way to make revenue, not just on their products, because their impact is more than just their product. And so if you can do that, let’s say you already have a pond, you already have perennial buffers, you already are doing all this stuff. Here are a few thousand dollars. Thank you for your contribution to the environment.
Now that farmer can see that, hey, Maureen, remember when we were talking about value-added products and I didn’t have any money for that? Well, here’s some money for it. Go make me a brand that can turn my potatoes into potato chips.
And that’s how our farmers can actually get out of this deep, deep hole that we’re in. We need to feed them money and resources in ways that will build them up, not just saying, oh, your crop failed this year, here’s a check. Oh, your crop failed again, here’s a check. We’re not going forward that way.
Maureen: Right. You want to get ahead of it.
Jacob: Totally.
Maureen: Jacob, thank you so much. It was a fascinating conversation. As always, you’re a man that moves a million miles an hour and it’s always great to watch you and keep up with the many things that you’re doing to contribute to soil health and wellness and regenerative in particular. So thanks for taking the time today.