Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food 35 Eric Jackson, doing over 150M in sales of organic grain and soy, started 18mon ago
Covering over 1.5m acres in less than 18months, Eric is building an organic powerhouse.
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This time I had the great pleasure to interview Eric Jackson, the CEO and founder of Pipeline Foods. After a career in conventional chemical agriculture and software could retire but decided to build the missing piece in organic broad acre row crops (grain and soy).
He was triggered by a fascinating statistic: the US is a grain, corn and soy powerhouse but imports 75% of its organic demand. Why? There isn’t enough organic farmland in the US, so Eric started on a journey which led 18 months ago to the founding of Pipeline Foods, to build the infrastructure needed to get organic grain, corn and soy from the farmer to the food processor. Thus giving the farmers certainty and getting more farmers through the difficult transition process.
Why are they focussing on broad acre crops and not livestock, or produce? Because of the scale that they can bring. Broad acre crops cover many many millions of acres and when you can bring them under organic and hopefully soon organic plus/beyond organic management can really have a huge impact on local/regional climate systems, biodiversity and water quality (which we briefly touched upon in the interview).
Listen to the interview to hear why Regenerative Agriculture isn't a big topic yet for many broad row crop farmers as the market signals aren't strong enough (yet).
Hopefully this changes soon. We also discussed the role of Impact Investors in the transition and the role investment vehicles and funds might play to help more farmers through the organic transition.
An evergreen vehicle or a green bond, helping farmers who want to transition to organic, do so. If you are interested in developing this or now someone who is doing this, please reach out to Eric:)
Pipeline Foods currently works with 1.5M acres in North America 150k acres in Argentina And is projected to do 150m-175m in sales next year.
Show notes and links:
www.investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/2018/07/18/eri
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