406 Neal Collins – Agrihoods for free-range kids: a Trojan horse for regenerative agriculture

I want you to think about where and how you live now. Close your eyes and picture your ideal neighborhood. I'm betting it's pretty similar to this. A walkable neighborhood designed around a fully functional far. Different types of houses, very healthy, non-toxic, natural materials. The multi-family aging proof, small, but not too small, and with a lot of privacy, and of course, affordable. The neighborhood is designed so you meet your neighbors. Hence the word neighborhood. Cars are confined in a place and most importantly, lots and lots of free-ranging kits and chickens. But wait, isn't there an agriculture and food podcast? Why do we talk about real estate? Because so much of agriculture land is being swallowed up by development. Cities are getting bigger and usually building super ugly, incredibly toxic, sub-urban homes on it. Big gates, cars parked on the driveway or in a garage and kits that never ever get out. And real estate is really good at raising money and investing it, yes, without taking into consideration any negative externalities. But so what can we learn and how do we use this very well developed real estate capital market to build aggregates, thriving region farms, enabled because of a well-planned and developed, healthy neighborhoods. And yes, we can get market rate returns. Enjoy. This is the investing in regenerative agriculture and food podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Welcome to another episode. Today with the founder of Hamlet Capital, Hamlet Capital's mission is to create more aggregates and conservation communities, serving a largely untapped, yet growing, demand for these unique living environments. Welcome, Neil. Thanks, Koon. It is a pleasure, long time listener, first time caller. So it's a pleasure to be on the show. Makes me sound like a radio show, like, for a time caller, where are you calling from? Beautiful cabin, by the way. If you're seeing this in video, beautiful wooden, definitely, let's say, an alive and breathing living environment where you're calling from. Or it's a very good background that's fake, but I think it's real. It is very much a real background. The rooster is underneath the cabin as we speak. So anybody that doesn't want to hear farm noises, that's going to be maybe an interesting podcast. I was going to say, we're going to do our best to edit it out, but we don't, because it's just too relevant for the conversation. And as a long-term listener, the first question we always ask is how come you find yourself spending most of your waking hours on this sort of intersection? And we're going to unpack a lot of that on real estate, of course, living, but not living in just a building, or just on the side, or just a location, but actually on active commercial farms. What is that intersection of agri-hoots, which is a term of keep using, simply first-made? How come you spend most of your time around that theme and now actually with a lot of traction and a lot of work around it? There's a longer story, but the shorter story just right out of that. We have time. I am a firm believer that the world that we inherit and the world that we live in is the world that we invest for. And I've just really traced my kind of life circumstances up to this moment. I grew up in South Louisiana in the Mississippi River Delta. And unfortunately, I had to live through several mult-- several 10,000-year storms and cataclysmic events that really put life and perspective of-- wasn't really sure I wanted to follow in that geographic footsteps of my parents and five generations of Louisianaians that came before me. And I ended up working abroad for a number of years in Eastern Europe and South Asia in a lot of agrarian and fishing communities working with both producers as well as government agencies. And it got to a point where I was in the Maldives and we were working on climate adaptation projects. And the money that we were raising for these programs were coming from the resort luxury operators and five-star resorts and the developers of them. And that was really the aha moment for me. Of instead of working at the nonprofit NGO level in the community, I really started to have my tentacles go out towards where is capital flowing and congregating? And how do we start to bring that more into place-based human-scale projects? And to do that, I needed to get into real estate. And that was really in a broad shift in going into the belly of the beast. And having to learn, what is it like to actually create large mixed-use, urban, infill projects? And what is really important? Just as a term. I'm going to do a lot of interruptions with what does this term mean? Which we agreed on before. I'm not just being rude. I asked New York, that was fine. What is infill? So urban infill is think about the fabric of a city. We're not on the edges. We're not out in rural areas that is working within the grid, working on single-site selection to be able to take one use either where we're going ground up in a site that's never been constructed on before or we're doing adaptive reuse and taking an old building and making it into something new. And so I spent a number of years there. And it really was not purpose-driven. It was very much a conventional approach or a shotgun into an industry that is the epitome of transactional thinking and design. I mean, our job was to go out and design the buildings and the capital stacks to put together these really large projects where you've got a hotel and restaurants on the bottom, you've got condominiums and office and apartments on top. And that was the world in which I came to learn this is how capital meets design meets police making. And why that one? Why that? Because you jump from the mouthies, just the visual is interesting to working with large hotel operators, which is of course real estate, but also touching nature in that sense. You could have also gone to farmland developing or like another, you got there later in that sense. But why the real estate in inner cities? How did that happen? You know, there wasn't an entry point into farmland real estate for me. It wasn't even on my radar. It was so far outside of what I thought that I should be doing. It was really where is the energy and the money flowing? I entered up in Portland, Oregon, in just a really bustling city at the time, a lot of creativity. And I really like that spirit. There's a lot of sustainability that was going into to kind of the macro thinking and entrepreneurship in that city at the time. And so I had a lot of fun actually learning real estate from that perspective of the urban environment. It was only after a number of years, you know, of really holding my background in agriculture and infusing that with real estate. Realizing there's an opportunity for these two worlds, not just an opportunity. It is imperative for these two worlds to come together, especially as we start to see what is happening on the growth edge of our cities that's swallowing up farmland. And just the sheer amount of people that are demanding and saying, hey, I want to live more connected to my food sources, more connected with my community members, and more health and wellness-focused way. And that's something that a lot of urban infill operators are doing right now. You know, it might be a wellness club with a sauna and cold plunge and things like that. The vegetables is a package included somewhere. That's a stretch. That is certainly a stretch. We did about two to three billion dollars worth of commercial real estate development. And during that time, I realized that nobody is speaking the vernacular really around the deeper values of sustainability that I was holding, where it wasn't just about energy efficiency and the building envelope and HVAC systems. The industry is going to go there and it is going there already. But the conversation wasn't alive around community integration and deep well-being. And I came confronted face to face with a lot of cancer in our family. And it really sent us down this directory of realizing that it's really not just the quality of the medicine that we're getting either from the West or the East. And it's not just the quality of the food that we're putting into our body, although that is certainly paramount. But it's about the quality of relationships in the community that we are embedding our lives in. And for a lot of people, we're living in these systems that was designed for cars and isolation, rather for togetherness. And I think that's the real sparkle for me is we can actually create these kinds of places that people are really desiring that integrates agriculture and community and resilience. And it underpins this deep infrastructure that is needed where a lot of people on the permaculture side, they show these really beautiful pictures of domes and farms and natural settings. But there's not a lot of entry points for capital to actually come into the space. There's not a lot of mainstream. Hey, I want to live here. This isn't just a type of way of building myself with a group of friends. And I'm going to YouTube, like my way out of building a dome. That's it. That people are doing that and applaud. I think we have to realize that's a very small percentage of the population. They will end up doing something that radical, which they should and they should keep doing. And you're saying there's a much bigger group of people. wants to live, like properly live, not just for a holiday, not just for a week or a month or even six months, but live more in touch with nature. I think if you ask most people, they would say that, but also live in, not just on a golf course where you're semi in touch with nature, but actually on a living or next to a living farm being involved in that. And in a way that is not just another, oh, my house is surrounded by a farm grade, but I have a massive gate around it and a very big fence and actually have no clue who my neighbors are. And that group probably is a lot bigger than let's build my own, my own dome, which again, you should actually do that if you want to do that. When did you realize that? When did you realize you were not alone looking for that and they were actually, it is a real estate problem as well. And real estate problems have a lot of money behind it because we figured out how to finance real estate to an immense scale. Like when did that not just oh, let's do this for myself, maybe for some friends, like a lot of people want to go back to the land, maybe some people buy a farm somewhere, but when did you realize this is actually a much bigger piece of the puzzle and the potential business opportunity, a movement and all of that. You know, I think first of all, it was the realization that real estate is a conduit for finance. And I get really attracted to those areas of wow, this is how you can capital as something. And this is how we actually integrate in the design and the place making that we're really going for. And so a lot of real estate for me is the intersectionality between really fascinating areas that I love. And through building out a company that's really serving as a brokerage called latitude, we started to see a lot of consumer demand for that type of lifestyle. But we also started to get a lot of developers and landowners that were coming to us and saying, how do we put this project together? And that was the big libel moment for me is because people can go look at pretty pictures of what architects do and they can hire the best of the best. But at some point, they get confronted with, what's the business model here? How do we actually put these kind of disparate things together, especially that tension between agriculture and residential or commercial real estate? And I love that. That's where I am really drawn to just saying, okay, let's figure this out. How do we actually bring capital into this project? How do we talk the language of risk mitigation? How do we understand the differentiation of the types of capital that needs to come into projects at different times? And the things that people are wanting, they're wanting not just single family homes, but we want workforce housing, farm worker housing, affordable housing. We went local businesses and rural economic development. All of these things have different capital profiles and different risk profiles associated with them. And so for me, that was used to building these really complex capital stacks. It was just a great opportunity to say, you know, we can bring the sophistication of real estate and capital markets into a niche that is underserved. And we can really bring the expertise in the team and the system's development behind it to start to encourage the sector. And I want to be clear, like I, in some ways, I'm an evangelist. I really think that this is the way that we need to live. But in another sense, my job is to actually go to capital and say, look, this isn't, I'm not here as a height man. I'm here really trying to demonstrate that this is a grounded, prudent financial decision that we can bring money in. It enters here. It exits here. And this is the value creation that happens in the meantime with the impact as the outputs on the backend. Are you interested in learning more about our generation re-investment syndicate, where our aim is to make investments into a generative food and agriculture companies more accessible for everyday investors, with a minimum ticket being 1000. We have invested in companies across the region ecosystem like Ryze Core, Wild Farm, Matt Caputo, Rumi, NoFence, Hunters, AntlerBio, Regenerate and many, many more. Find out more on jenn-re.land that is jenn-re.land or in the links below. Yeah, and that's such a powerful way of looking at it, which I think is very different from many pioneers in the, let's say, the regenerative space as well. Like how, in this case, how do we look at current capital markets for real estate that are used to certain things? And yes, we can bend a few things. Yes, we can adjust a few things for not too many, because then most of the capital is just not going to do it. They're going to go to the next multi-multi, what is it, multi-facet development in a city, because this is just too already the fact that it's outside a city probably is like interesting. So you're saying, okay, how do we attract a flow of capital that's there? It's a choice if we want to or not. You're saying we have to or we should, because it's a tool in that way. But in order to do that, we have to speak that language. We have to speak those conditions to a certain extent, to show how it comes in and out what values created, to show that there's demand, etc., etc., all the documentation, has to be in that language. And that's a bridge between building a permaculture village and actually attracting money to do that at scale and keeping it affordable and a farm workers, etc., etc., which is an interesting puzzle. What's the biggest difference in your work of developing these multi-story hotel shops, etc., compared to doing that on the side of a city or maybe just outside and developing in agriculture? What are the big differences under the hood? I think the big thing, there's a couple big things. The first is the opportunity for ideas and generativity is massive. So we usually work with developers and operators that they went the farm and its multi-species and diverse and regenerative and agriculture, everything. And then it's trying to figure out, okay, how do we actually work with that amongst, we need to build homes, we need to build infrastructure, we can have this type of business and that type of business and do all these things. And I love that space. I think it's really fun to sit with people that can dream, tend to future. I hear a bot coming. It's how do we, what's the critical path to actually enable that? And I've come to realize much more so working really at the edges of our urban spheres that the sewer line ends and once you're off the sewer, you've really got to put on a different type of thinking hat. And so my world has really been turned upside down in a wonderful way by becoming more fluent in wastewater treatment and circularity of water and trying to figure out how to do it. Nobody thought, nobody's listening thought it was going to be sewer. That's, I mean, it was clear. I mean, it's such a prank, of course, yeah, like how it's one of the reasons we don't develop, apart from regulation, et cetera, but also just simple infrastructure like sewer, electricity, water, the whole shurang. The whole shurang. So you've been googling, you've been searching for the best compost toilets that still fit in a home that is not too much of a stretch for most people? Yeah, I mean, I think compost toilets is the, like, we're not even at that scale anymore. It's like, how do you actually create the infrastructure so that you can cluster 50 to 500 homes around a system that is going to be non-linear? So it's not just externalizing groundwater and has to be removed from the site as fast as possible. After we push it through our wastewater systems, like, we have a lot of opportunity. We just don't exactly know how to really work with that right now. And so that's been a really fun exploration of like, how do we actually design for the infrastructure of human settlement that also incorporates the agricultural component? And realizing, like, if it's just the developer's responsibility, like if we take it as, I want to go do a community that's integrated into conservation areas in nature and agriculture, then most people will take it as the developer is just going to pay for all of this infrastructure and it's going to pay for what the farm needs. And that's where things start breaking down is that if you need to go out and raise that type of capital, then you have a real obligation to return capital either fill in them. And so, if you start to sink capital into heavy infrastructure requirements, like alternative sewer systems or even farm infrastructure, it starts to put a lot of strain on a project and that's where most people just threw their hands up and said, this is too much. I don't know how to do it. And so what are pathways there? What are lighter ways, let's say, quote, unquote. For me, I really like to look at it in three different buckets of we have a pre-entitlement stage where we're looking at land typically that has been used at a lower use in terms of intensity of development. We're looking at agriculture or industrial land and and brownfield sites. And we're realizing this is a really risky time that capital needs to enter so that we can go out and plan it and design it an entitled property. Meaning this is where the lots are going to go, this is where the roads are going to go and the infrastructure and come up with a development agreement with a municipality. And that has a very particular risk profile. And once we move through that, that might be a completely different capital source than whatever it is. For layman's terms, the risk is so much higher that it doesn't happen because for whatever reason or that happens slightly different because that's like in any project development, I think anybody in renewable energy will be nodding along like that's the phase where you need a very specific type of capital, very risk-loving and also return. There's an interesting return component obviously there, but it's very different from what happens after when it has landed and it's probably assigned on it and it's like there's a plan and there's actually there's actually a project, this is pre-project, pre-seat if you can compare it with the VC area, this is still super risky but also extremely interesting for certain people that are used to taking these risks in real estate all the time. Yeah exactly. I mean it's not even on venture, it's like I've got this great idea in that port so many cases. Yeah but real estate. But in this case you actually have a government entity saying yes you can do this or no you can't and you've really got to balance out this is a visible project, you get their community as a state holder, you've got to be able to develop with sensitivity of the land in the community so you have political risk there. So it dictates a process in which you can't necessarily be a developer behind closed doors and you just plan it all and you don't tell anybody and all of a sudden there's a sign in the front that says you know development application and then the community goes up in arms. So it is which happens all the time people do the underestimate how most many developers in any developing thing are like it's and then of course a protest and of course and some push through and many just don't make it. Yeah not in my backyard is a very strong right fully so in rightfully so absolutely and so that is a very risky stage there's ways to mitigate that we've that we found but it then transitions into this middle phase of you've actually got to build out the infrastructure called horizontal development in the industry and that's still a little bit risky but it's defined it's like okay we need to put in the roads and the utilities and the wastewater treatment systems and then once we graduate after that we've actually we're going vertical we're starting to build homes in the built environment and no longer is it a risk from the sense of is the municipality going to let us do this it's now a construction risk of can we actually build this and get a return on our money and actually is there a market on the other end of of it and so typically with these large master plan communities there's three different developer groups that's trying that will one is great at pre-entitlement another is great at at horizontal and then you've got builders particularly these large national builders that are publicly traded that they don't want to take on entitlement risks they just want lots in their pipeline and use five to ten different designs that they've used across the country that are one not very aesthetically pleasing pretty hazardous and toxic for a living environment but they know they can stamp them out in places like Florida and Texas and they can get a good return so in these more kind of resilient place-based agricultural communities a developer may think that they need to go through every single phase and they might if it's a small project you might have to take on all that risk and so this is the opportunity to really get sophisticated with the capital sources and how we structure a project of how do we move through that and then how do we start to integrate the agricultural component of who's going to run the farm who's going to manage it is this and a single operator do they own a piece of the farm or do we need to bring it into a commons is it a multi-collective or stakeholder type of arrangement so there's just that there's a lot of planning and design that has to go into it and I love that because it comes out to be if you can go through a lengthy process methodically with clarity and experience and sophistication we're going to start to really move the needle of the agri-head predecessors that have come out in the last 20 years are going to look quite conventional compared to the opportunity to create kind of development two-point out. Let's talk about that actually the agri-hood because this is not a new idea but it has been done in a one-point-toe version let's say in a pioneering version quite a few times in many the US I think because you have a lot of planned communities in general I mean there's like say development has got slightly different there than in many other places but it doesn't agree with if you have some examples of course we can put them in the show notes as well typically looks like when people current one not saying how far we can push it version three-point though etc but a current version how does it typically look like and what can people of course is audio mostly let's make it as visual as possible if we if you walk us through it literally. The predecessors I don't want to throw shade at them you know that that's not my job I think what they've done is they started to move the development industry in a certain direction but the simplified version is that they've taken a golf course community where you plan homes around your central amenity and it's created these view sheds of you're going to look out and you're going to see green space it's just got little white balls flying through the air and that's where the defining feature really is and they'll they'll start to design and features like club houses and shops and things like that and so they've moved the needle to say look let's just swap out the golf course for a farm and I think that's great that's a good entry point for people that that don't really know anything about agriculture or that are kind of craving to live a more be call it lifestyle but oftentimes these farms they're kind of glorified scratch patch gardens that go into forgotten places tucked away on the edge of the property or in the marginal land that you don't really want to put agriculture and it's just that afterthought and after a couple of years the farm collapses and it gets turned into a park with some benches and things like that and so I think there's been some real struggle there as we've started to move in this direction of we want more walkable bikeable amenity rich communities more traditional neighborhood design we're starting to realize that you can this is the type of urban fabric that we can bring out to the prairie urban and rural areas that make them a lot less car dependent you can actually walk to a place to get provisions or grocery you can have smaller lot sizes so that you can have a more community oriented feel front facing porches instead of designing homes just for cars in the streets that's interesting what I love because you park your car which means you can't sit there which means you can't communicate with anybody that walks by because there's no sidewalk and like with that three four different things you're basically killed a community in its in its infancy and if you design no car or little car or cars parked in a distance sidewalk and front punches are ready and walkable distances in smaller lots already you have fixed quite a few things in terms of interaction and the longing for community I think this is the big thing that the US is is quick trying to learn from European settlement is that what we've done in so many of these master plan communities is that you drive into a neighborhood that is all homogeneous you can't even tell your house from your neighbor's house it is so disorienting and then you click a button and your garage door goes up and you park your car inside of what is actually a pretty toxic box with combustible engines and then that opens onto your kitchen and you actually never see your neighbors you do not have to see your neighbor and say hello versus neighborhoods in which cars are sequestered on in particular areas I love the word yeah we confining the car I think is a really big deal and and actually encouraging spaces for people to be neighbors and in what that looks like is creating places that there's actually going to be spontaneous interaction amongst people so that they can say hi and you can have kids that are able to be more free range you can walk to a store or to the grocery or into the farm and there's amenities that you don't have to get into your car to travel down the road and with the rise of remote work I think all of a sudden these the big question are about gosh these people just have to get downtown into an office building and you're just going to be be creating more traffic I think we're starting to freeze out of that and so now instead of just saying let's swap the golf course out with the farm and put the farm tucked way over there let's actually integrate this in a very meaningful way so that agriculture is the defining amenity not just from I want to be able to look at it and see green space out my window but what is the interaction amongst the farmers and the food and how do we start to really localize our food systems so that we can have nourishing food nourishing soils nourishing people and we build in market places that are place-based and so for me it starts to really activate a lot of these ideals that that we've been striving for in the agriculture world for so long but haven't quite figured out how to do that at any meaningful community scale yeah remember I think it was a quote from Charles Eisenstein I don't know if he ended up doing it but he was writing somewhere on a blog that he brought a place I think in Costa Rica in a community as well and it was much smaller and actually There's a question coming, people don't worry. It was much smaller. than the average MacMensha and the average house size, et cetera. And he said, because you realize, of course, because of climate as well, because you can do, there's so much more things you can do. You don't need your own yoga room, your own studio, your own this. Like, if you live outside or you live in community and you have these shared pieces, actually, you will probably realize you need a lot less space. Is this the case as well? We had a long conversation with Rasmus Norgart as well on real estate, which I will link below. Like, they actually designed smaller and sharing, but consciously making sure that people don't feel that it's smaller necessarily because they, but also that becomes more accessible. How important is size and how big, these are two questions. And how big does the farm need to be to have a meaningful impact on your, the quantity of food you need as a family? Like, what's the tension there and what's the game? Because people don't want to feel, I'm moving to a tiny house. That's where many people are also interesting, but not for everyone. What's the size discussion here? The size of the farm and the plot and the size of the plots and houses. This is like the innovative murky waters that we're all swimming in right now. The New York Times just came out with a fun article about how smaller houses actually contribute towards human happiness. And I thought that was really fun. But I look at it not just from how do we have shared spaces like a yoga space or you can have a tool library. But think about the shared infrastructure that communities end up having to build out. So if you're developing 70 to 80% of a site and you're going to put roads and houses on top of that means you've got 20% of natural areas. And maybe there's a green belt in the community garden. We really like to take this approach of saying, like, that's pretty expensive development. If you think about the concrete that needs to go into that. So we take a more conservation development approach where we'll conserve 70% of a site if not more and keep that as open space conservation areas and agriculture. And then with the 30%, that's where intensive development can go. So it's village, compacts scale size. The houses are going to be closer together with differentiated housing typologies. So it's not just a nice place. And I think that works really well so that you can recognize it as well as you can have a different home product for people that are just getting into the home market. You can have places for aging seniors. You can integrate those together. So what we're really going for is how do we create multi-generational and mixed income communities? Because that creates a whole community. That's what creates the social resilience that we really need. And then we have the ability to layer in the resilient infrastructure from energy, water, and food. And so we're working with properties that they can be pretty small. A couple acres, whenever you're working more in urban formats, up to several thousand acres. It really depends on what scale we're talking about in terms of food production and the type of agriculture. And that a lot is driven by place and by what works in that particular location. And I can see the address from people wanting to live there very clearly. How has been a response on the investor side, like the money side? Because we started with this, like how does it fit into current language and current lasers and all of that? This, I'm imagining where are the biggest tensions there and how has been the reception? You know, the interesting thing that I find is that we'll start talking about the theme of these agricultural-based communities. And the first reaction from investors isn't what's the IRR return on this and all those kind of more traditional financial questions. It's like, oh, you know, I'd really be interested in moving to a community like this. Or my kids would, I were talking about this and they'd really love this. Maybe I need to send this to my wife or my partner and we'll check it out. And so it's that instantaneous, like, oh, there's interest here that people can see themselves living in this type of an environment. And I think that's where I get excited because it's a humanized element. You can feel the momentum of people being like, this is really cool. I'd love to check this out. And then there's the education that needs to come after that. Like, how do you actually structure these types of projects? And are we looking at this from, and this is the tension point, right? Like, we're putting together a fund. The fund architect really wants us, or the architecture of the fund wants us to say, this is our repeatable process. You know, we invest here. It comes out, here's our, you know, 17% IRR. But if we're measuring this, just checking. You're 17, sorry. You're like, I'm doing this. You're just seeing low 20s, like whatever the IRR return is that capital is looking for in these quasi-private equity deals. There are different ways you mentioned, right? Just to be clear, coming back to our three-phase process, this is the earliest phase, just for people to see where we are. But it's not a repeatable. It's not a factory yet, at least. It's not a factory yet. And I think that's where you start to have to segment your risk out. But there's a different way of looking at this. And Master Plan community developers have actually got this nailed. And so I really have to credit a conventional approach to real estate industry for really showcasing what this is. If you start to look at it as the net asset value per acre, instead of a time-bounded return of an IRR, it's a completely different game board that you're playing. Okay, walk us through that because I can see people running their eyes. Okay. Imagine you're going out and buying land at $10,000 an acre. You know, an agricultural investor, the people that you have on your show or that you've had on your show, you know, a lot of people are like, well, how do we have less inputs and more outputs? And it still puts a lot of pressure on the supply chain there. But if you start to look at this as we need to develop, we need to add value to this land and to the community. So as you go through the entitlement process and you're adding infrastructure and you're adding value through creating buildings, what you're doing is you're adding value to the asset level per acre. So you might start with land that's $10,000 an acre, but you might end up with land that's worth $900,000 an acre. And so that's an interesting, interesting multiple. And so if you start to think in those terms of like, where do I want to play within that space? And do we want to take a really risky position at the very beginning? Or do we want to optimize more for cash flow and tax benefits by own long term ownership of assets like hotels and multi-family and commercial spaces? Then what is laid out is like, we need to take a platform approach that understands the whole system of this. And it's not just, we plug capital in here and it comes out there. And we're going to repeat that and that's how we get to a billion dollars AUM. But it's saying, where do we really want to hone in and become really good and be able to identify the gaps in the financial infrastructure that we really need. And oftentimes I think that is moving to take a more risk-prone position, but bring in the technical competence to be able to move projects with speed and clarity. And what are some projects that you're working on now just to give us a few acres to weigh more? Like what's something you can talk about obviously? Just to walk us through to and how you're currently designing or you're hiring the design thing. What would that look like? Why would that feel like if people, just for people that are longing for some more community feel inside US or outside US? Of course, we put all the links in the show notes. Just to get a feel of what you're currently developing or try hoping to develop. So we launched last year in 2025 and we've looked at a lot of different projects across the globe and we've settled on a couple in which we're participating now. I'll bring up a couple. The first that I want to mention is outside of Austin, Texas. We're pretty bullish on the area in terms of there's a lot of people that are moving there. The design constraints are going to be around water and how do we design for that type of circularity. And it's a smaller site. It's about 47 acres. It's got a main house on it already. It's right on the urban growth edge. So you look over the fence row and you see just house after house in this very prototypical suburban environment. And I love that because that really showcases what a conservation development plan looks like. Because now we can preserve 70% of that site as open space. And we can start to cluster these homes together. How do we create a commons and create the space in which there's going to be permanent residences where kids can run more freely. But people have the autonomy to have their own spaces for working and for privacy with great views of the springs and the lakes that are on the property. And we can preserve the best areas for growing. You don't want to put houses on them. This is where a lot of people get it wrong. This is such a beautiful area. I want to put my house here. It's like, no, you actually put your house in the ugly spot so you can look over these beautiful areas. And so you do a lot of cluster development. You understand how do whenever we build a little bit closer together, that's not the secret sauce. The secret sauce is how do they nest together. so that whenever you're looking out of your bedroom window, you're not looking into somebody's kitchen. So how do you really maximize your design? How do you find designers and architects that can do that? Because there cannot be so many in the US because you don't do that normally. And how do you work with, of course, now, with computer. I mean, you can do a lot of scenario ones. You can do a lot of interesting rendering, et cetera. Like how difficult was it to find people that can do that? [MUSIC PLAYING] We are very grateful for the support of the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast Field Builder Circle, which currently consists of planetary ventures, as-align partners, and fractal ag. For more information, visit InvestingIn Regenerative Agriculture dot com. [MUSIC PLAYING] You know, that's really been a multi-year endeavor. You know, whenever we're dealing with stage 4 cancer of my dad and my mother-in-law, I really started to hold this question of like, what is a Regenerative Real Estate approach? I created a podcast called the Regenerative Real Estate Podcast to forward this actual problem of who out there are the best architects, designers, engineers, urban, and- It didn't work. Did you find them through a podcast? I have. I mean, it's incredible. And I think it's just like this. You know, you kind of hold a question in your building and field, and people are attracted to that. And so through that, it's been learning. Like, oh, we can actually use something called a pattern language popularized by Christopher Alexander. To understand what are the design patterns that go to create hole-and-resilient communities where you're able to preserve significant amounts of nature and open space. And through that, we can assemble these really fantastic teams of artists and experts to help create a site plan that's going to work. And if you have that team, then you need the right capital markets and architectural and capital structuring team that can enable this. So that's what we do. And so on the smaller property, it will be literally a small neighborhood community of probably a couple dozen homes, mostly single family, but some shared spaces. Like, I love whenever we can design more co-living-type-style properties that maximize this privacy. So you're not just on top of everybody. It's no longer like a youth hostel for permanent living. Like that private activity is covered in that space. Some people cringe with hairy goal living because they think of that. People, it has moved. There's many other options, but yeah, very-- Exactly. So I think that's more of a design challenge than it is. It's just like, let's create as many small room boxes around the central kitchen in common areas possible. But we can do that in ways that are really high touch and meaningful. And so-- And much better materials and sound. And of course, different materials. Better flow places in which really encourage wellness. Places that we can create more affordable and attainable and workforce housing. This is all things that we really need. We can't just create the multi-million dollar homes integrated into a farm. There's a professional farmer over there. So I really love that approach. Of how do we actually design for free range kids and places in which you can go collect eggs. And there is different ways to integrate farming and trails and recreation. And that's very different than a larger property that we're working on outside of Pittsburgh. That is right now it's corn and soybeans. And so right off the bat we're thinking, how do you actually rebuild the soil capacity here and create meaningful village scale infrastructure so that you have the multi-generational range of home products. You've got more commerce that's going on. So you have a village center. It might be a bakery or a mill and maker space. Open to other people as well. I'm imagining. Not just-- Yeah, you want to be open to the outside. I do not really want to be creating gated high lifestyle, agricultural forward properties that you've got to have a key code in a security guard at the front gate to get into them. That's not where I think we're trying to take this. And so with that there's a lot of different agriculture operations that are we're working through from the market garden up to the agroforestry. Of how do you create these perennial systems that are going to get better with 150 years of time to mature that. And that's the gravity that I love to explore with our sponsors is to say, look, we're not just creating your agricultural Disney land today. What we're doing is we're creating homes and communities and agricultural systems that are going to be around for the next hundreds of years. And that's really being able to design three-dimensional in overtime. And people, once you can get them on that path, I think they become the artist and the developer. And they have a great time doing it. And going back to the Investors, after they send it to the deck or the brochure to their kids and to their partners. And oh, I might want to live here. How do you get from that thinking, which is a great start, but to them to put their serious quote unquote I'm doing, I'm not quite sure. Investor had on and seen this actually how well this is a business. This is an investment opportunity. This is just as I'm looking at the next high rise hotel mixed use, whatever thing. How do you make that switch? Or is it easy because you've got them already a bit on their emotional side and maybe done the second step actually this is very similar to what you used to investing. I'm going to really credit my partner, David Leon, for-- Shout out to friend of the show, David Leon. And David, he's been working in food systems for a long time through biome capital and farmer's footprint. He's been advising large family office platforms. And I think he has really helped to illuminate that there's a lot of families and private wealth that's been trying to support regenerative agriculture. And that could be through CPG. It could be through processing facilities. And some of it works, but a lot of it doesn't. There's just some kind of block there. And I can't speak as fluently to this side of the equation as he can. But one of the common things that we find is that real estate's an asset class that is in a lot of people's portfolios. And it's been in their portfolios for a very long time. There's kind of a standardization of how do you underwrite it and hold capital in there and how do you optimize your portfolio with different types of real estate. So in some regard, it's a Trojan horse into regenerative agriculture to say, look, we can create value and alpha in this type of real estate vehicle with the impact going towards these themes of regenerative agriculture, water, soil, rural economic development, affordable housing. That is all part of the special sauce that we're looking for, but we're not having to design an impact or concessionary fund vehicle to get there. We certainly love blended and innovative financial models. Maybe the farm or parts of the farm need more concessionary capital and impact capital, or we need to put some kind of a first-loss guarantee on something to enable more market rate risk-seeking funds to come in. But I think this is where we're meeting some real receptivity from the investment community of, wow, OK, my CEO knows how to underwrite this. And it's not-- To get him or her with all kinds of weird things, this is just relatively-- yeah, so many others. And so many ideas. This is development cost. Is it the face there in? It almost looks and it couldn't look different if we go back to the fence line, of course, of an agricultural land, but also there you talk more about how you improve the land and thus the value of the land. But also if we go back to the one in Austin, you could look at the developed-- almost the investors that back the planned community that's next door or the neighborhood that was built, very ugly, unhealthy, no free-range kids, no whole thing. But it could almost be a blueprint how yours gets financed as well. And it would not be such a stretch to have the same investors even participate because they recognize it even though it looks completely different. But the mechanics of financing in the capital stack is very similar. Absolutely. Because at some point what we need to do is we need to depressurize the agricultural activities from a financial perspective and let the real estate development do the heavy lifting there. So you're not trying to get extra juice out of a beat or a carrot to beat the return for the capital that's flowing into that vehicle. So for me-- It's such a good quote. I know extra juice out of the beat. I'm just going to write this down. This might be the title, people. Just if you clicked on it because of this, took 49 minutes to get there. But it's such a-- because I remember for Russ Muznorgad which was not the agriculture side with really on how to completely redevelop real estate. In that sense, is it real estate if you do it well and if you do it mediocre, you make money. In many markets, of course, depends where you are. But it's like the margins, the fluidity, the investors. It's just so much more developed in agriculture. And so you have space to experiment. You can do things. And people-- you're saying, let's use the agriculture part or let's use the real estate part 30% to finance the rest as well. You can and you can do that because the agriculture part gets developed, of course, and because people want to live there. But it's an engine for some people say, let's do agri-valtelics on 10% of the land and you can finance that. Use that because it's a developed market to do the rest of the transition. Like why squeeze extra juice out of the beet if you actually have another product if you are in a right location to do real estate. Makes-- yeah. It's such a powerful concept. Why are not more people looking into that? Like why are not more people like why are we having this conversation now and not five or 10 years ago? Oh gosh, you know, when I think we're coming out of a venture and tech cycle that if you're looking at venture returns on tech, you know, you're looking at huge multiples, that is a very different vehicle than than what we're talking about that is collateral and asset backed. For the agricultural investors, they're finding that this is a really unique and differentiated investment strategy for the venture investors. They like that it doesn't collapse to zero, but they're still trying to figure out like, OK, what can I invest into an operating company on top of this? So there's some funny things there. But I'd like to zoom out and take the long view on this. Of why are we talking about it right now? It's because agriculture and real estate has never internalized the externalities that it's created over the long run. And we're going to continue to see ecological degradation, social conflicts, economic loss because of the systems that we've created. And so as the pendulum swings in that direction, people are going to continue to clamor for spaces that are going to be community oriented, that they can have nourishing food and nourishing relationships. And that's not going to go away. So our sector, I think, is long term resilient proof in terms of more and more people are going to demand that type of lifestyle. And to get back to the question, we touched upon a lot to deeply on space. We touched upon size of houses. And you were very clear on how we can design, let's say, much better. And then size of agriculture land, how meaningful-- of course, there are two very different projects you just mentioned. How meaningful is the size of the land? And what it can produce for the people living there? Or what's the-- I'm not looking for the percentage. But with Hayden-Booten and Netherlands, I think they get up to 70 or 80% of what the owners or what the people, the partners actually eat or consume as a family. Of course, they don't live on the land. It's about 20 hectares for 200 families. But that's the goal. That's like we try to get to some kind of level. What are you interested in just to make it not like a glorified market garden or just a glorified garden that it's great. You have two tomatoes a year. And that's it. Whether you excited about or interested in it, or are you targeting with that? My answer is not going to be what you're typical answer. I tend to look at it in terms of the project isn't just the boundaries of the parcel. The project is the greater community itself. I love really saying, look, we're going to catalyze the community through intensive development and agricultural activities on this property. But if we're not understanding the field in which we're in, in realizing that we can take a bio-regional approach or a larger community-scale approach to figure out what are the gaps in the market. How do we work with different producers? How can we use things like residential housing or hospitality to be the tip of the spear that drives innovation or regenerative innovation within agriculture of an area? That's what I get really excited about. Because now we can start to have those agricultural investors that want to invest into processing facilities that are capital intensive. Because we're not having to generate all the agriculture on site of an angry hood. But we're looking at dozens to hundreds of producers within an area to really develop those food systems. And so what's the right scale of agriculture on-- It's a wrong place. It's eventually integrated into the housing. It could be greenhouses. It could be some chickens and pigs and something Joel Salatin style, but it's a little more approachable. You could embed this within a working ranch of several thousand acres. And you've got your move in cows every single day and holistic grazing. But if we don't look more food systems and bio-regionaly, then we're missing out on a huge opportunity. And that's where I'm compelled. And then is the idea or the opportunity partly that this sort of spreads in the same area, that there's one neighborhood being built, and then like hops to other places that come available? Because there's this one that makes sense and works. And somehow it starts spreading, or surrounding a city maybe, and has that sort of green spraw-- or the city's brought to urban spraw to stop that. Is there a conscious thinking, OK, what's the next plot nearby, or what's the plot that actually could make sense? Once you've already done one, of course, in an area, it gets a lot easier because you know where to buy your compost toilets, and I'm just joking. But how to do that is that from the developers you work with, of course, you work with low-core developers to let's actually do this multiple times if it works. I would love that. I mean, if you look forward into the future, I would love to be able to get on a satellite imagery and see that the urban growth edge isn't just so stark of we're going to eat up all of this greenfield land, and then you stop, and there's agricultural land. But how do we start to feather that in with an actual green belt so that rural economies are able to support that type of workforce? People can live in that interface. There's more optionality there. So to me, it just makes sense. That's the type of green belts that we can have around our metropolitan regions, and it's not so stark and brutalist in the architectural form. And I think it's going to support a better agricultural system overall. And hopefully we can actually start to put together the deep work, which is I think if we can get off of monocultured crops of corn and beans that are going to go into-- really, corn and beans. What that supports is processed food and really the derivatives market. But if we can start to showcase that where we do need efficiency within our agricultural system is to grow these types of commodities that can go into the value creation, like home building. How do we get marginal straw that isn't right for the-- We're one hour in. And we're going into building materials. Yes. I like it. I like it. OK. We can get into our building supply chain to build really healthy and resilient-- That's another big piece, right? We're building, as you mentioned, very unhealthy homes, and not the one I'm looking behind you. But materials need to come from somewhere. Toxicity needs to be reduced enormously if you want a free-ranging kid's grade. But if they're in the house and breathing all kinds of stuff, you don't want to. And you're saying, actually, there's a lot of agriculture land that we're going to need that shouldn't produce input for k-fos and ethanol. But actually, you should probably, in there, maybe you want to go there in the Phoenix one or whatever you mentioned, at the Pittsburgh one. Sorry. Like, how to regenerate a lot of this land? Probably it's through material and hemp and all kinds of things that can be used in the building environment. And I don't like to come out swinging with this, because I think it takes people that are fluent in that conversation. Most people are still at the level of conversation to realize, what do you mean we build with toxic materials in our homes? No, we're out of here. Our audience is there. I have a phone faith in the people listening people. They're not be dark. OK, let's go. Because once you can come to that realization that we couldn't have designed a more toxic built environment than what we have right now, you really had to sit down and think about that of how do we put as many chemicals and fire retardants into our homes as possible? That's what we've done. It's the same that we've done with our food. So anybody that's coming in from the agricultural side, you're going to find real simpatico with the built environment if you start to scratch that itch. Scratch the wall because you might get something. Don't scratch the sheet rock on the wall too hard. So we're starting to talk with more producers and operators that are thinking that way of how do we actually build healthier with materials that are going to be carbon sequestering. And this is very regional specific. I live in the Pacific Northwest where we talk a lot about cross-laminated timber and being able to have stewardship of forest so that not only can you have much more cleared out underbrushed, where these are just huge tender boxes and causing huge calamity within forest fires and smoke seasons every year. But they need a secondary manufacturing output, which is how do we build homes out of this? Or how do we build commercial spaces? I love that. In the Midwest, we're talking with straw producers that they want to do more panelized natural building that can go into building urban infill. One firms that are building the 1,000 multi-family homes home units a year. And they're just like, we've already got the demand for it. So let's figure out how we can innovate on our building materials. And so I think it's very place specific of the building solutions, the healthy building solutions that come out of it. But if we could start to build communities like that, then oh, man, we're really starting to move the needle on the impact that we can have in the space. And on municipalities, like how is this landing and are they not scared? This is just a very fancy presentation and way of still building on agriculture land that was officially protected by conservation eases, et cetera, to not be like the city stops here. And agriculture starts here or nature starts here. It's very stark difference that, of course, doesn't work. But how do they then engage with that? Because it also could be perceived as, oh, but this is just a good excuse so we can build 30% more. We leave the rest, but we get in there and we still build a number of houses. How does that land? normally with municipalities. Bless our municipality planners and workers there. The whole system that I found and I don't want to throw everybody into the bus is like I found municipalities to be very risk averse. You know if you do something innovative like there's liability that you invite and so they don't really want to deviate outside of the norm and where we see that isn't so much in the land planning of how much land is developed versus preserved it's really in the infrastructure. You know if you want to talk composting toilets even you know composting toilet very simple technology that like you would not even imagine the amount of problems that municipalities will have with that. Very big as I think the saying in French is you're not an environmentalist until you have two composting toilets correct me if I'm wrong but you could use it in meetings. I met they just the amount of potential lawsuits and stuff and liabilities and things are just in from a health perspective which we all know is not true but yeah it's you're pushing them on that. Yeah I can admit. Yeah so you've got the infrastructure side of things and then we've developed at least in the United States a very what's called Euclidean zoning so you've got your single family homes with a maximum number of units per acre and planets be great. If you want to build your family compound and you've got five different houses on it and a lot of places that's just not allowed like you you can have one house maybe mother and law house and that's it weren't you cannot build a community here but the municipal planners that are really starting to see where this is meeting their desire is they're looking for more housing and they're looking at ways to preserve the agricultural and rural legacy of these areas and so the ones that get it they recognize instantly oh this is the kind of smart development that we want and not necessarily we want to go forward with this and not necessarily with a different type of urban development that is going to be more brutal on the landscape so I really love to work in those types of environments I love to work on the edge where maybe we do want to expand the sewer system or we have capacity to build a more innovative solution so that's the type of municipal planners that we love yeah the ones that get it they see this as a way to preserve the agricultural and rural legacy of the place while developing and the type of housing and the infrastructure that they really need to move forward those are the places that that we love to work in that are going to be more favorable to our approach yeah absolutely and then to some questions that we always love to ask and we already covered quite a bit on the investor side obviously but let's say we do this in a in a theater at financial capital at a New York and we have a lot of financial the focused investors in the room either with their own wealth or with other people's wealth and we have a whole evening of course good food everybody is like sort of dreamy and wants to move immediately to any of these neighborhoods tomorrow but they also go home they go to their current house they they wake up the next day they go to the office or maybe work from home and what is the one thing you want them to remember what is the seat you want to plant in the minds of invest wars that are are listening and that might have listened to us on a theater stage yeah if we can capture the essence of that dinner amazing food amazing spirits quality connections and genuine connection with other human beings if we can just bottle that up and say this is what you're investing in and it's got market rate returns I to me I just don't know how that's a no and how do you get away from the night that sounds naive or too good to be true how do you counter that almost dead because a lot of people in the agriculture space region space and we're starting to talk more and more about returns which I think we should there are a lot of places where very interesting returns are possible and a lot of places not yet and we're still figuring out a lot of things and all of that how if somebody I don't know if that's the reaction you ever get but if somebody says that sounds good to be true what is your normal response to something like that this is where you have to show your numbers and the proof is in the pudding there's a lot of education that needs to go into that space it's not just imagine this like dreamy utopian world but it's really showcasing look this is how these projects get put together this is the return profile and the risk and how we're mitigating this risk and the previous projects that we've worked in and how different minds are coming together to inform this and a really multi-disciplinary way and and I think where the the place that we're having to sit is we can't just sit in the concessionary world there is not enough philanthropic capital to save the amount of farmland that's getting swallowed up by pretty bad suburban development right now not enough and we're not going to be competitive if we're just saying like we're going to put together this investment vehicle and we get concessionary returns we're continuously going to be losing out on the serious amounts of capital that's going into endeavors that are undermining all the efforts that we're trying to do collectively across the people that are listening to this podcast and the people that have been on the show so we actually need to be able to financially engineer investment opportunities that are going to be attractive towards investors and allocators that are going to have the type of deep impact that we're all looking for so that's been a very driving and poignant thing for me is I really don't want to just live in the philanthropic landscape for the rest of my life and why I love the fluency that comes with a blended financial approach but still knowing if we want to go toe-to-toe with market-based returns we can absolutely do that and what if you I mean you mentioned the one billion AUM as a number somewhere in the last hour but what would it be switch what if we switch the tables and you are in charge of a billion dollars to be put to work again we're not giving investment advice I'm not looking for exact numbers but I'm curious where where would you put the biggest buckets where would your focus be where would you be priorities be if you had a pretty large amount of resources I'm not saying anybody should have that and but these are the numbers in real estate and also in in in agriculture so let's deal with a lot of zeros what would you focus on I think real estate presents an opportunity to understand that there's a lot of different types of capital out there and you need to allocate capital in different ways it's very different if you're going to allocate a billion dollars in venture you might can just say we're going to invest series A average check size you know 10 million dollars or you march up through the series investing larger and larger amounts of capital to get to the one billion with real estate what is amazing is you can create platforms and you can understand we can bring in debt facilities this way we can bring in equity this way we can you know have really different portfolio dynamics and so to me it's that's how you get to a billion is you understand how do we construct these vehicles that go in these certain risk buckets to do these certain things and they're all accretive on each other you actually need everything within that and there is need to figure out how do we layer in tax credits and other public private financing vehicles that we can create the more community driven outputs that we need I don't think it's challenging to get to a billion dollars real estate is a pretty capital intensive sector from land acquisitions to the actual value add and the infrastructure so you just have to do it in a way that that is smart and grounded towards the realities of the project and the capital needs behind it and a question inspired by John camp definitely you ask it slightly different but what do you believe to be true about a regenerative agriculture and food systems that others don't believe to be true like very contrairions where contrairion when you go to in this more the ag side of things I might the answer might be we need to real estate ace up and it could be it could be another answer like where in the bubble of of region where where do you think differently with region what I find is I think the soil and the biodiversity and all that amazing right we're all in that camp but I also think it's the quality of food that we're feeding to to ourselves and our kids and our community it matters like how do we actually uplift the quality of thinking on a societal level it depends on the quality of food that's coming to our bodies for me if I want different outcomes then I want people to start thinking differently and that that really traces back to the food that we're growing and how we live now it's a very power like if we want a different outcome in society with the think differently what mental maps narratives etc and we probably don't know how negative or how let's say not abundance but scarcity we think because of what we eat and how we live and what we breathe in our toxic environment and the fume gases in our garage and all of the things we discussed in the last hour how different it would be if policy makers would live in nagrihood or something like that or if politicians or the hedge funds people or whatever we like to throw against or media people etc in how different they would be if they would live actually in a in a nice community and a nice neighborhood with nice food there would be an interesting interesting experiment would be a good TV show like very angry people it would be a really good experiment like a big big brother big brother about that different the agrihood big brother would be like give them a month i think it would be very completely changed three ranging kids they would like nobody like to look at their phone constantly anyway And give him a test at the end. Yeah, yeah. Who scores well? And who tests? A nice gut health test before and after would be good, probably. And as a final question, which obviously always leads to other questions, but if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing overnight, what would that be? Are we taking agriculture? We've heard everything from increased global consciousness to abolish all agriculture subsidies or animals outside. But he loves lentils, Henry Timberbee came up with that could literally be anything, but only one thing. Oh gosh. I would love for people to read more. For example, we haven't heard that one. That's a good one. Interesting. And fiction or nonfiction? Anything. Anything at all. I think we're on short form videos so much that we forgot just the amazingness that happens whenever you're reading a real book. I'm assuming, right? A real book. Yeah, a physical, which is not the sales are not going down interestingly enough. Like I saw it's on numbers. Like it's not, we're not, like it seems much more bleak than it is in terms of. You think last year was a good book years. Anyway, that we're getting on of a tangent. And I want to ask my theory is that we, it makes us feel good to buy books that then collect on our shelves. Oh, that's a good point. We don't know about reading. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Could be just the sales. And I'm going to kick myself in and ask these questions on the comments which you meant a few times, like steward ownership and longevity. You looked at you said 100 and 100 years, 150 years, seven generations. How do you make sure these agree would stay around and are not going to be brought up and developed. Quote unquote, into a golf course or something like what's there? And how do you get investors on board with that? Like how do you make sure this is a long, real long term movement, including the buildings and things because I think many of the plant hoods actually are. Currently built, let's say with slightly shorter term or toxic materials. Like how does longevity play into this? Yeah, I think first of all, what you need to do is you need to use something like a conservation easement, not necessarily to sell the development rights with a conservation easement. But to say, look, after we've figured out where the envelope of the development is going, and this is where the agriculture and the natural spaces are going, we're actually going to preserve this and perpetuity. It can never be developed. And that can either be held in ownership by the community or by the developer or in a commons structure. And so I think this is the way in which we start to say long term, this will never be converted into a data center. And in the same with homes, this is fee simple or this is held as kind of many a ownership or whatever it is. There's, you build for durability and for quality. And the buildings that we're building right now in the homes, they're going to be around for longer than 100 years. I think we're on a call a couple months ago and you're telling me that you're in a home that like 500 years old. So it's not that far fetched to think like we need to build with technology. This studio I'm sitting in is not that just to be clear about that. Yeah, no, but it's and does it imply anything with investors they need to think differently? Does that touch that financial piece at all when no speculation, longevity or is that relatively normal in the normal real estate? Again, I don't know. Like how does that touch the the investor, the capital stack and things like that and the exit? I think it's pretty big. In normal, I'm not asking somebody to own an asset for 150 years and then you're going to get your return on that. It's pretty well codified though. There's transfers of ownership. It doesn't even matter if we're just talking about a fee simple, so you own your house to the core of the earth and to the heavens. Or it's an affordable deed restricted home where you own the improvement structure and the community owns the land. There is really well codified structures of ownership and stewardship of homes and buildings that we don't have to recreate the wheel. And you don't have to have these ridiculously long timelines that of asset stewardship that's going to run the length of the physical. You're saying a lot of these things we're trying to figure out now in agriculture funny enough and what are, but that's already been figured out in real estate a long time ago. And everybody knows the different buckets, the different levers, the different conditions and it's not rocket science nor it's new. I think on the real estate side it's not new, but we're really open to new models where we really start to get into the water a little bit more. It is like how do we create more innovative structures in which multiple people can own land or steward land together. So think cooperatives, think commons, who's going to be the farmer. That's still where we need to roll up our sleeves and figure out what that right structure is because basically if you have a piece of land and the only viable way to farm that is for one farmer to have equity in that land and that's the multi generational wealth vehicle, then we get stuck. If that is the farmer for the community and she gets sick and is incapacitated and can't run a farm like you. Yeah, we have a problem. We need to we need to dig down there more. That's a great and then we're going to wrap up. It's a great Trojan horse as well to rethink models on the farmland piece because you free up capacity. You don't have to squeeze the juice out of the beetroot or the beet to think they are creatively like how do we think long not just also from a resilience perspective like we need farmers on there probably plural for a long time and it can have you rely on one person as you mentioned before and you can think that way because you have a profitable real state on this is for a wrap in that this is like a rabbit hole that we can spend a whole episode. No, it seems like investors in the regenerative agriculture space they like owning the physical asset itself because farmland appreciates over time at a very consistent rate and they're also trying to get the productivity off of the agricultural outputs. But at some point we can't continue to do that model especially not within community infrastructure like farm embedded with homes like we we might actually need to take away the speculative value appreciation of the land out of that model. It just requires us to think differently than what we've done for the past couple hundred years. And with that we're going to spend another time talking about that rabbit hole don't worry people are going to definitely check in if news up for it when homes are being built when maybe we do a walking the neighborhood instead of a walking the land and a walking the land episode at some point because I am really curious. And I'm just going to show you how this movement because if we do one or two it's great if there are going to be 200 different story and just to show how you can live differently not just eating but just living. And I keep coming back to the free ranging kids I'm going to put it in the title somehow if we manage but I want to thank you so much for the work you do for leading this is not leading this movement but being an important part of being the bridge between the real estate world where we always complain about inspeculation about a lot. But there's a lot of money there's a lot of creativity there's a lot of things that the real estate world has figured out and just as renewable energy and which is a bit later to the game of course but let's put that creativity and those frameworks and that money to work to do more objectively more interesting and probably more beautiful beautiful things. I'm going to thank you for a leading to being that bridge and for coming on here to talk about it. Thank you I've taken a lot of our inspiration and ideas from podcast guests on this show. We have to get thank the guys from both of everybody on this show yourself included and I've really used that as inspiration and working mental models to inform the work that we're doing. It's just a pleasure to be on here and and kicking the can with you to figure out like how do we make the world that we're all striving for. Absolutely. Thank you so much. So what do you think was this an episode that fitted on a food and agriculture podcast that makes you reconsider where you live? Did it trigger you to think in agree hoots instead of neighborhoods and reconsidering I mean for me this conversation always very inspiring like it's not that difficult to or not impossible to redesign neighborhoods and get away from a cleanness and toxicity. And you can do it relatively quickly a couple of years and that I think is something that really triggers me there's a whole financial space ready to invest in real estate with all its issues we absolutely know that but let's use that as a judo master let's use that energy let's use those resources let's use those skills that people have and put it into beautiful walkable neighborhoods full of food and free ranging and kids some super curious what you thought. If we should do more things around neighborhoods and food and ag and around investing and how to explore this part of the theme and how to explore that deeper and so please let us know as always we're reachable on most social media LinkedIn and also the contact for our website and for now looking forward to hear you at the next one. Thank you for listening all the way to the end for show notes and links discussed check out our website investing in Visit investinginregionteragriculture.com/posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend and get in touch with us on social media, our website, or via the Spotify app and tell us what you like most and give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your Podcast player that really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.