Changing the "Messy Middle" of the Food System

In this episode….. We are featuring an interview with Derek Azevedo of Bowles Farming Company in Central California…….

Derek is one of those rare gems of a person who has had experiences in many different parts of the same industry – in this case, the food supply chain.  As a result, he understands deeply the challenges, trade-offs, and pressures that affect each part of the chain……  

So, if we are going to have a chance to change something as big as the food supply chain…… we really need the insights of people like Derek who understand both the pressures on the system to change……the pressures on the farmer to react to conform to the supply chain – and even – the barriers from the processing and distribution sectors that he has dubbed the “messy middle” — which connect the farmer to the consumer. 

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This conversation is almost too rich to summarize…..we talk about so many valuable things in this interview……including:

• How the processing system prevents some of the most flavorful foods from getting to the grocery store
• Why the food supply system is so slow to change even with strong consumer demand pushing it to do so
• Why the medical system needs to change as much as the agricultural system if we are to reap the benefits of healthier food….. 
• The importance of chefs in helping to connect people to the food trends they crave
• And of course, some discussion about the kinds of positive soil health practices they take on a very diverse farm that grows root vegetables – among other things –  which are almost impossible to do in a no-till system

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Go Further:

Support & Connect with Derek and Bowles Farming Company

Website:  https://bfarm.com/ 

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-azevedo-2a94a817/ 

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/BowlesFarming 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bowlesfarming/ 

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Transcript

Derek Azevedo: 0:11

It's easy to put a cheaper watermelon on a sort of shelf that comes from another country, but it doesn't come with all the things that people value. So if you value those things, support the places that are doing those things. And again, just try to educate yourself. I think that's the hardest part. A lot of consumers are just looking pretty easy to answer. Just try to educate yourself. And if something doesn't quite make sense, like take that step to ask. That really makes sense. Consumers are smartphones and they mean well, and they just want to be heard. So continue to voice opinions. Continue to demand the people that you source your stuff from for what you want. If you want regenerative grain that's milled by a farm who cares about a soil or her soil, focus on that and support those brands. It doesn't take a lot of these, a lot of the farmers that are sticking their neck out there to mill their own grain and stuff, those are big investments. And then those folks are literally betting the farm and they are risking their business and their livelihood to provide consumer something that they say they want. And it's up to consumers to put their money where their mouth is and actually support those.

Sara Harper: 1:40

Welcome back to our podcast Tasting Terroir, a journey that helps you understand what makes food healthier for you and the planet. We do this by giving conscious consumers like you a deeper understanding of healthy soil and the link that it has to both the flavor and health of your food. I'm your host, Sarah Harper. That clip was from an interview I did with my good friend Derek Azavito, vice President, COO and a farmer at the Bowls Farming Company in central California. More on the diverse set of topics that Derek will shed light on in just a minute. As you may recall from our episode last week, the big brands you have heard of are not really bringing regenerative ingredients into their products into your door, but it is starting to happen, thanks to the efforts of small, passionate food manufacturers like around the World Gourmet in Ohio. For more on that, check out episode seven of our podcast from last week. In last week's interview with Jennifer Cower, we explored just what it takes to bring better ingredients into products that you buy and how much power you really have to shape the course of the food industry by the decisions you make in terms of who to support. In this episode, we are featuring an interview with Derek Azavito from California. Derek is one of those rare gems of a person who has had experiences in many different parts of the same industry, in this case the food supply chain, and has great insights and humility about all of them. As a result. He understands deeply the challenges. Trade offs and pressures that affect each part in the supply chain or supply circle so if we are going to have a chance to change something as big as the food supply chain we really need the insights of people like Derek who understand both the pressures on the system to change. The pressures on the farmer to react and conform to the supply chain and even the barriers from the processing and distribution sectors that he has dubbed the. Quote. Messy middle of the food system. The part that connects the farmer to the consumer. This conversation is almost too rich to summarize. We talk about so many valuable things across a wide range of topics, but here are just a few highlights to give you a preview how the processing system prevents some of the most flavorful foods from getting to the grocery store. Why the food supply system is so slow to change even with strong consumer demand pushing it to do so. Why the medical system needs to change as much as the agricultural system if we are to reap the benefits of healthier food the important role that chefs play in connecting people to the food trends they crave and. Of course. Some discussion about the kinds of positive soil health practices that they take on their farm to grow a diverse set of crops from root vegetables to row crops. I hope you enjoy this wideranging discussion with my friend Derek and use his knowledge to help you find and support those who are literally betting the farm on creating better food for you. Here's my interview with Derek Ezevito. Hi, Derek. How are you?

Derek Azevedo: 4:52

I'm doing great, Sarah. How are you?

Sara Harper: 4:54

Good. Well, thanks for joining us and for sharing over the years. When I've talked to you, some of the most interesting, I think, insights come from you because you've had so many different types of agricultural experience and different positions within the supply chain. So I'm super excited for people to get to hear some of those insights today.

Derek Azevedo: 5:14

I'm excited too. It's always fun to catch up with you and you've assembled such an interesting group that is always fun to check in and catch up on the things you're working on also.

Sara Harper: 5:23

Oh, good. Well, first of all, let people know who you are and where you come from and where you're working at now. Great.

Derek Azevedo: 5:32

So my name is Derek Azavito. I'm the vice president and CEO of Bowls Farming Company. Bowls Farming Company is 163 year old diversified row crop farm in central California western Mercedes County more specifically. And so over the course of 160 years, every company has to reinvent themselves multiple times. And we started off as a butcher shop serving gold miners in South San Francisco vertically integrated to a cow calcaf operation with a lot of land holdings throughout California, Nevada and Oregon. And then through the early 1000, 1900 and family succession and things like that, a lot of the land was sold off and so it would be nice to still own all of silicon Valley and South San Francisco, all those cool places. And we joke around that. We're farming the ground that was the hardest to sell. But we did diversify into a small grain forage crop type of farm. And our latest reinvention that's been happening over the last about 15 to 20 years has been really, and especially over the last ten or twelve years, has been to focus on higher value, more fresh market retail type products. And so cotton is still a very big part of our program, but tomatoes are as well. And the newer crops that have been performing really well for our farm has been root vegetables like carrots, garlic, onions, a lot of melons watermelons, cantaloupes, honeydews, and mixed melons tea, specialty grains. We used to grow a lot of corn, and we still do, but the corn we grow now is either corn nuts for the snack brand or sweet corn for retail consumers. And so even though when you drive around the farm, it may seem like you see a lot of commodity type crops, our part of the world, even those are specialized. And so really, it's been really fun to work the crop rotations into a diverse row crop farm. Every crop you incorporate into the mix creates an extra layer of complexity to the Gantt chart of the year and all the different trade offs that happen with those crops. What rotations work well with others, which ones don't, which ones build on each other, which ones we plant to build on the soil. It's really fun to work all that in and work with a whole bunch of different customers and a bunch of different buyers and to be able to kind of combine that and listen to what the common threads of their needs are and then where the differences lie. And ultimately underneath all that, literally and figuratively, is our soil. And so trying to figure out what can we do to help serve the needs of the modern consumer and also do it in a way that's practical and allows us to continue operating a business for the next 160 plus years. So hopefully that's a big enough rundown of kind of who we are and what we do.

Sara Harper: 9:00

Yeah, well, and I know that you all do a lot of conservation work and work with organizations, educational work too, but you have a real focus on soil health, which can be, from my opinion, maybe even more of a challenge with the kinds of fresh crops that you're growing, things that you have to dig up that you can't just do no till. So maybe just share a little bit about how you're trying to focus on soil health and kind of working with conservation groups from your perspective.

Derek Azevedo: 9:31

A big part of it, I think that is perhaps the piece of soil health that you don't hear a lot of people, you hear a lot of people share a lot of opinions about soil health and even science share a lot of theory about soil health. And I think where we've taken that is there's no simple solution, there's no easy answers. And I think a lot of people are just seeking that. I think it was milken that said, to every complex problem in the world, there is a solution that is very clear, very simple and wrong. Just trying to focus on the science. Agriculture at its core is a science based industry. Agronomists, crop scientists, everything is science based. And so we've been really focused on the science of this practice, ends up with this result, these compost applications equate to these gas emissions or these carbon improvements or the soil organic matter improvement. And so really trying to get through to there's multiple ways to do everything in our part of the world. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of the drought that happens in California and all those types of things. We're in a Mediterranean climate, so we don't get rain in the summertime. And so when we plant the cover crop, which is a huge advantage to us, frankly, but when we plant a cover crop, we have to irrigate it as a water. Resources are expensive. We're also in a very progressive state that has done a lot of work to remove green waste from landfills and all those types of things. And so we actually have a large volume of compost we can use. And so when customers want to focus on things like building carbon, improving organic matter and things like that, you can do it through cover crops, but we can also do it through compost. And so just introducing customers to the multiple avenues, a lot of times customers will come to us and say, we want you to plant cover crops. And a lot of farmers stop there and just try to figure out how to work cover crops into the proper location. But when you ask a couple different questions and get down a couple more layers, it's like, what are you trying to achieve? And it's like, really what we want to achieve is we want to show that our supply chain has positive improvements to organic matter and carbon sequestration and things like that. And it's like, well, what if we apply compost at the rates that achieve those goals at a more costeffective combination of inputs to this crop and do the same way with fewer resources? Does that make sense?

Sara Harper: 12:22

But Derek, that's not on the list, that's not on the checklist. So where do I put that?

Derek Azevedo: 12:28

Yeah, and that's where the strength of agriculture is. Creativity, really. When you put the collective creative forces of farmers after a common goal, it's incredible what farmers can achieve.

Sara Harper: 12:43

Incredible.

Derek Azevedo: 12:45

We've done all sorts. We've got grapes that taste like cotton candy. You know what I mean? And so it's really about focusing on what are you trying to achieve and driving those conversations and you can't have those conversations with just anybody. You need to complete that chain of communication from the ultimate person consuming the goods and products that you're growing or the fiber that they're wearing. And you've got to have everybody in the room that connects the dots on that chain. A lot of times, the farmers communicating with the buyer, who's communicating with their sales team and another series of buyers and sales teams. And before you know it, you're six or eight layers removed from the consumer. And if a solution or if a product is going to have the kind of pull that changes farming services at the farm, there's got to be something in it all the way through that chain in order for it to get to the consumer. And so we've done a lot of work to try to identify where are the targets coming from, who's involved, and who needs to be in the room in order to explain. Here's the trade offs all the way down the line. If you want a tomato with four times the licorice content in it than the current tomatoes that we grow, those varieties exist. We can absolutely grow them. We can mechanically harvest them, we can process them, we can incorporate them into your products today. But that tomato plant horticulturally is not very sound. It doesn't stand up to disease very well. The yield is cut in half. And so in order for me to be on par, I need double the money for that. Now, if a customer really wants an incredible amount of Lycopene, we can do it. But what's in it for everybody in that chain in order for it to pull and deliver that all the way to the consumer? And there's a certain educational process that needs to take place in order for that to happen. So it's a really complex system.

Sara Harper: 14:55

Well, isn't that part of the problem that so many of the sustainability initiatives and goals and all these things that are responding to the consumer or concerns from activist groups, but, like, all the smart people get in the room and make up all the requirements without any of the people that are actually going to be doing it. And so, like, if they had some of that, it's like farmers are kind of like engineers, like, figuring out how to make it work and how you do it, how you do it. That's their whole expertise. And I know you've participated in some of these standard setting things in part to kind of help change that, right?

Derek Azevedo: 15:32

Absolutely. That's where we bump into that quite a bit with the no tale conversation, the minimum till conversation, because a lot of that research and a lot of those talking points are coming from the Midwest where they're growing a lot of small grains, wheat, things like that. Soy, corn, a lot of those crops that aren't touching the ground when they're harvested in order to facilitate the mechanical harvesting of a processing tomato. We're running a machine every 60 inches down our rows. That's accompanied by a 27 and a half ton set of trailers running down every set of bros, which creates a lot of compaction. But those tomatoes are also on the ground, and so you have to pick them up off the ground. We've done no till tomatoes. The tomatoes love it. They grow great. But if you have any wheat stubble standing up, the tomatoes work into that as they mature and get heavy. And then when the harvester comes through, the wheat mixed with the tomatoes kind of wants to smash, and it damages the crop. And you can't harvest it. You can hand pick those that would cost $80,$90 per ton, but the machine can do it for$15. And so there isn't enough margin in there to facilitate hand harvest, not to mention the labor in there to facilitate the hand harvest to overcome. So it's like, how do we craft a minimum till solution that facilitates the harvesting process in cotton? The minimum till solution that facilitates the germination process, like the tomato examples are really good. One, the strip till or minimum till tomato behind the cover crop process. It doesn't matter how good it works all the way through the growing process. If it doesn't work for harvest, it doesn't work. That's where a lot of these pieces on their own may make sense or in a small plot may make sense. But in order for this to genuinely serve the biomass needs of humans, things need to scale. And they need to scale for each piece of the process. And that works not just on the farm, but that works like we call the supply chain, that messy middle of the supply chain. When we offer one product and another product that's organic, regenerative, whatever you want to call it, kind of beneficial, kind of smart, whatever you want to call it. You're asking those folks to double their inventory space, and they're already working on these very complex, skew, rationalization projects and things like that that limits their efficiency. And so there's got to be something in it for them that overcomes that obstacle. In modern human society, everybody is more complex and everybody is more focused, more narrowly focused than we've ever been. And so everybody's world is a lot more complex than what everyone else thinks it is. And so the hardest part is really identifying the open minded partners who are supported by open minded CEOs and boards of directors who are willing to change the way they've done business. And they're out there, but they're hard to find. And when you do find them, sometimes it's hard to find a copacker that is aligned. Sometimes it's hard to find, like in cotton. We're working on some really fun projects, but a lot of the cotton textile industry doesn't even exist in the United States anymore. And so you might have the customer. You might have some other pieces of the chain, but you've got to have them all in order for it to work. And that's where identifying each valuable player in that chain is sometimes the hardest problem to solve.

Sara Harper: 19:53

And I'm glad you brought up the messy middle because we've talked before and you've shared that concept, and I really appreciated it because most consumers, of course, have no insight into all the steps in the chain that bring them the crop out of the ground and into an ingredient and into a product. And maybe with fresh and things like milk or beef, it's a little closer to them, or cantaloupes, but certainly like wheat becoming flour becoming bread, there's all these steps in each step, like you said, is more focused and more complex. And so why do you call it the messy middle? What is that? Help people that don't they don't really have an understanding of the supply chain, understand what that's describing.

Derek Azevedo: 20:39

I think if you just sat down and kind of pulled the I don't know. I haven't done any hardcore research on this, but the feeling I get is that the modern consumer kind of has this oversimplified version of their food shed, where their food comes from, and it's kind of like there's somebody that grows it. There's somebody that takes what you grew into what I'm going to eat. There's a truck or two in the middle, and then it's here. What's the big deal? Even in the case of something like a watermelon that's not even changing its shape, in most situations, the watermelon that leaves our farm could be owned by four different people within 48 hours before it gets to a store somewhere. Wow, we've done that.

We met up at 04: 21:36

00 in the morning or 330 in the morning at the South San Francisco produce market. And we followed our watermelons to the supply chain, and it was a surprise to me because a larger company owned them, and then they sold them to some smaller folks that went out to different distributors of this produce market where some other folks are going to buy them and working out their deals. And there was like 40 booths there, and I think our watermelons were at, I don't know, 27 of them or something like that. And it was really interesting to talk to some of these folks, and they were like, you're the first farmer I've ever met, or how many people that watermelon isn't food to them. It's a unit that comes in and it's a unit that goes out. And we've got these targets and these goals, and there's no incentive to them. There's an incentive to them to say, these are great watermelons. There's no incentive to them to say these are great watermelons. And here's the farm story, and here's the value that if they're able to negotiate a higher price for those, there's no incentive for them to give any of that to me. And so there's these pieces where that's where I bring in you. There's got to be something in it for everybody in order to maintain the continuity, that message and deliver that every single supply chain that we work with is far more complex than what a lot of folks realize. The logistics portion of our business alone is exponentially more complex than what the modern consumer has. There are some brilliant minds. There are some ultrasophisticated systems. There's some really tough and diligent truck drivers that pull all this together. There's different state regulations on which trucks can enter which state. California runs into that. You can't just take a truck and drive it from Texas to California. If it doesn't have the right engine, you can't even enter the state. There's all these things that go into delivering food anywhere that it goes in this country that a lot of folks have absolutely no idea what goes into that. The risk that goes into that, the curveballs that are getting thrown in that it's outrageous. The modern food and system is so designed for big scale that when you ask to size down, it gets really hard.

Sara Harper: 24:19

Well, that's why change, I guess, is so slow. I mean, anybody that's ever heard any of my little talks knows how impatient I am with particularly the flower processing industry. I've spent a couple of years trying to connect with some of our Regenerative weed farmers. It just seemed like such an obvious play to me. Because you've got flour mills, they already do some specialty or some separate runs. This is high value, and even with the nutrient density testing, you could show higher nutrient value potentially. So there's all this added value that to me made it worth separating out, at least for a trial. And there are plenty of flour mills interested in it, but of course they don't want to pay one penny more. Sure. That was just massive. So frustrating that a number of our farmers have started to add mills to their farming operation and they're milling it themselves and that's how it's going to get out.

Derek Azevedo: 25:16

Exactly.

Sara Harper: 25:18

It's good for me to talk to you occasionally because you help bring humility back to my world because that's a good thing, because it feels well, especially in the contrast of how much is marketed about regenerative. And yet they're not actually buying and not actually doing it, but part of what you're talking about and you've had a great position being you've been on the processor buying side. So you understand that role really thoroughly. Maybe just help me and help others understand. So we understand it's very complex. That's why things move so slow. So what is the consumer role in making that big system change? What are the things that finally do make it change?

Derek Azevedo: 25:59

Yeah, that's a great question. If you look at that messy Middle East, I don't really see it as a linear chain. It's almost like a circle, and the farmers and the consumers are down here, and the farmer starts here, and it goes around and winds up at the consumer, where you find, in many cases, a lot of similarities and aligned goals are actually with the farms and the consumers. There's a lot of farms and consumers are like, why don't we do this? And it's like, yeah, we can do that. How come it's not getting done? And again, it's that messy middle, that kind of there's a barrier there, and they rely on all these other folks to deliver that. But it has to come through. I would say, from a consumer standpoint, just being consistent with what do you want? And that's difficult because sometimes Steve Jobs didn't have a focus group. And the outcome of that focus group was a larger phone with a touch screen that could take pictures. In the days the iPhone was produced, we were going to smaller and smaller little flip phones, and it was like, the smaller the phone, the better. And it's almost like you have to be able to sometimes the consumers don't really know what to ask for. And so really presenting the products that simple and clear is sometimes what's best. One of the most confusing places in the grocery store, to me, is you walk down the cereal aisle and you're just, like, bombarded by all these health claims, and it's like, I'm not going to eat cereal. If I eat cereal in the morning for breakfast, it's not because I'm making a health conscious decision. You know what I mean? So I think there is, like, a genuine trend in the modern consumer to just simplify, look for things that are real simple things done well. It's just a really nice concept that people are looking for, and a lot of it is just kind of looking for those workarounds that a lot of companies have done that for a lot of years. When we're going through the it was fat free everything. That's when a lot more sugar started.

Sara Harper: 28:20

Yeah, I want to mistake that food.

Derek Azevedo: 28:23

And it's just, like, take a step back, consumer and say, like, does this make sense to me? I had a really good conversation that gets to the nutrient density and stuff a little bit. Human evolution has our senses have evolved to identify things that are good for us. And I had a fun conversation with a chemist, and he was like, the best tool I have is my nose. If something smells bad, chances are it's really bad for you. And he's like, when you're doing stuff and mixing stuff, he's like, some of the stuff that hits you, and you're like, I got to be aware of this because my nose is telling me this is Benny. I think that's why we're attracted to vibrant colors in our food, like tomato. Lycopene example. I gave you those tomatoes. The vine is much darker green. The tomatoes are so red, they're almost purple. It's got big green shoulders that kind of drip down the sides and you cut them open and they're like they're almost purple inside and that color red. And so a lot of your sights and sounds and senses that we've evolved with really help slice through some of the stuff and identify like this one is better for me than that one. It would be interesting to kind of relay more of that to consumers and give them the opportunity to kind of trust themselves a little bit more and not it's like of all of our senses, our ears are probably the least trustworthy. Kind of like empowering the modern consumer because what comes with a lot of this marketing stuff is a lot of confusion. And just giving consumers credit for the intelligent humans that they are and giving them something that is simple and clear is something that we can do to kind of help that process and help streamline their feedback and sometimes give them challenge folks to say. If you're going to ask a consumer to contribute more. How do you prove that the actual resources actually made it back to a farm? How do they know? And if you give consumers the opportunity to be maybe not everybody has the money to be an impact investor, but you can certainly be an impact shopper. And how do your purchasing decisions actually impact farms?

Sara Harper: 30:45

This episode brought to you by the global food and farm community. Global Foodandfarm.com, a private online space where farmers, chefs, emerging food entrepreneurs and conscious consumers learn about and apply the latest science behind building healthier soils for a healthier world. Members also gain access to help with their marketing and communication efforts through our Grounded Growth Paddock, featuring DIY instructional videos and joint marketing projects that are designed to help small businesses find an audience for the better products they are making. The Community provides new original content to members each week in the form of video interviews, scholarly articles, and the chance to ask Dr. Joe Clapperton any questions you may have each week. To get a free online tour of our digital streaming library and learn more about how this amazing resource community can help your business grow. Contact me, Sarahharper at sarah Sara at global foodandfarm all spelled out globalfoodandfarm.com. A couple of things I wanted to ask you to talk more about too. So this link between the vibrancy of the color and the taste and then also I know that you've had some interesting examples of growing. You grow things on the farm that you obviously taste too, and you've you're enjoying them too. And then, so you have the ability to see, wow, like cantaloupe. This is some of the best tasting cantaloupe, but yet the system isn't built to take it. And so the consumer missed out on the thing that in theory, they're looking the most for a flavor as well as health. Which are often aligned, like a really strong, good flavor is often coming from the health of the soil and the whole system. So tell them about that cantaloupe example, which I always found sad and fascinating.

Derek Azevedo: 32:43

Yeah, the cantaloupe industry has been struggling. I mean, the last couple of years it's been pretty good. But over the last 15 or so years, the camel volume has been going down and the industry has just been struggling. And they incorporated a lot of genetics that they're very efficient. They grow well. You can put them on the shelf. They can sit there for I don't know how long, but they can sit there for a long period of time. They're called extended shelf life varieties. That does a great job at reducing waste at the grocery store level. But the canal produces a lot of ethylene gases and natural ripening agent the plants. And when you smell that big strong candle, like if anybody has ever forgot a candle up in the back seat of their truck overnight and jump back in, it's like, whoa. And a lot of that real vibrant smell that you have is a lot of that ethylene gas coming off the varieties we used to plant. In fact, we planted a little bit of them this year and they were awesome. But they're only good for like five to seven days. And when you pick them, the stem slips off easily. They're packed with sugar. They smell really great, but it's really difficult to get those on the East Coast groceries. See their spoil rates go up and it causes them to miss their targets. And so a lot of folks will be like, we'll just sell fewer panels so we're not going to waste any. So we'll just keep with these newer varieties. And the newer varieties flavor profiles are getting much better and things like that and we'll end up getting back there eventually. But that's an example of the varieties that exist that smell and taste as delicious as the cantaloupe we all remember as children are still there. But if you get a buyer that buys them and then that grocery store doesn't do a good job of internal sales with their produce managers and let them know, like, hey, we've got some really good candles coming in. They're not going to, hey, we got.

Sara Harper: 34:58

To do a taste test here because people will see the difference if they.

Derek Azevedo: 35:02

Taste it or we're not going to beat you up over having a little bit more spoilage. We did a project a few years ago where we put a deal together with a small grocery chain. We grew a couple of fields of Western Chippers, which is an older school, Kennel Friday, and they showed up and the produce managers were like, all these things don't even have the stems fell off and all this other stuff. And I'm like, do we go in the world where our protest managers don't even know what a full Slip catalog looks like. And they weren't properly educated on what was coming. And so they were unhappy with the camels that showed up, despite the fact that they were great. And the consumers love them, but their spoil rates on their shelf, they didn't last as long on the shelf. And they're like, oh, good.

Sara Harper: 35:45

Isn't that part of what the consumer, in terms of helping the consumer understand to get to what they ultimately want, which is a turn back toward health by and large, yes, still convenient and simple. And those things too. But there's a growing awareness of gosh food is such a huge part of our health, and particularly things like fresh, like vegetables, fruits, the health of those the nutrients that they can contain versus not enough flavor that makes you want to eat more as opposed to processed stuff. So all of that knowing that about the consumer, isn't it super important to help the consumer understand that there's a trade off, at least in terms of the better for you stuff isn't going to last for two weeks. It's just not. If it is, it's because of these other things that are not as tasty, not as healthy. I feel like an honest conversation about that where I understand it's hard, people want to shop every other day for food and people have busy all of that. But I feel like some real honesty there could be very helpful to the whole system so that people understand that if they do want all these healthier things, taste your thing. That's absolutely possible, that it's not the farmers that aren't providing it. It's the convenience patterns of the consumer that often drive what the farmers are told to make.

Derek Azevedo: 37:09

I think that's a part of it for sure. But I also think and this is a much bigger topic but this is where our medical community has really failed the modern consumer. Because a lot of folks will say first thing is consult your doctor.

Sara Harper: 37:26

Yeah.

Derek Azevedo: 37:27

And I can say from my personal experiences with doctors, a lot of times as a farmer, I'll go in there and ask them some questions. And the medical community is really poorly trained in food as medicine. Their initial reaction to everything is chemical.

Sara Harper: 37:44

Isn't that ironic?

Derek Azevedo: 37:46

And so if you talk to doctors and say, like, how many in all of your medical training, how much did you study nutrition? How much did you study? I was prescribed an antibiotic one time. And so I asked the doctor, I was like, okay, this is pretty hard stuff. What would you recommend to repopulate my gut? My gut bacteria? And he's like, oh, just eat organic food and you'll be fine, because rattled off all this nonsense. And I'm like, you realize, like, no, that's true. I'm sitting there like, if this is the message that you're giving to all of your consumers, it's not moving the conversation forward. It's given people a confusing it's not given the right message, it's not given the truth. He could have taken that as an opportunity to promote food as medicine and instead it was just like, you'll be fine. And that's where we've got to make sure, like, we loop the medical community into this because we're definitely out of sync, I would say. And there's more food as medicine, there's more stuff coming out, but it's slow and it's not very sophisticated. And so having some opportunities, what we have that's really powerful is the modern consumer for the first time in our lifetimes, probably is more focused on health than they've ever been. If you look at society as a whole, back a long time ago, the wealthiest were the most overweight because they had the most access to resources. And now the wealthiest are among the healthiest and the most concerned. And so if you want to see the future, like, look at what the wealthiest people do. The wealthiest people, the first ones, they have lawns, the first ones to have toilets, the first ones to fly for recreation, all the things that wealthy people are doing are what winds up trickling through all society. And so you look and the wealthiest among us are the most health conscious in many cases. And so that's coming for a larger and larger and larger portion of society. And so how do we, as a food industry provide folks with a choice in two flowers? One is better for you and one's not. And not just assume that nobody's going to pay more. That's one of our biggest hurdles. Let's give folks a choice. Let's give folks a cotton shirt that was grown under these conditions and give them the chance to feel what an extra fine, extra long staple, pima cotton sheet can do as opposed to one that's just cheaper and filled with softening agents and all this other stuff. And so, like, giving folks the choice because people genuinely do want to feel better about their decisions. They want a healthier relationship with food. And a lot of times it's just given the choice to do it, it's the biggest hurdle.

Sara Harper: 40:57

Well, to me a pretty huge hurdle too is the marketing industry and the marketing of all of this because they know you're right, people are going in this direction, but we don't want to or we can't change the whole messy middle to actually deliver it. So we'll just find little ways that we can pretend and maybe not outright lie, not go as far as to get sued, perhaps. Although but even if they don't go all the way to that extent, because so many people don't know which practice makes a difference and because the activist community can often shine a very narrow spotlight on one thing, glyphosate being an example. Like, everybody knows Glyphosate, but they don't know the three other worst chemicals that probably you're going to push people to turn back to because now we can't use glyphosate. They don't know any of this context. And so it becomes like a shell game of just like, oh, we've got the popular word now. We're that free. BPA free.

Derek Azevedo: 41:58

We'll just put Bps instead.

Sara Harper: 42:00

Exactly. What you don't know can really hurt you, especially when you're paying more and you're thinking you're getting this more pure, more better for you, supporting all this stuff because they're telling you that you are. That's a large part of what I want to try to do with this podcast is by taking people inside from the ground up, starting to understand the things that at the very basic level, it's soil health. And so, of course, if you don't have a connection back to the farm in some way, then the claims about healthier for you and all of that, unless they have tests, nutrient density tests or things like that, that can objectively show you what you're doing, you should be very suspicious of, I think. But how do we deal with this marketing challenge that seems to help the whole kind of creaky system stay as it is instead of changing? Because it doesn't want to change. It's built for efficiency. It's built for, like you said, scale all sorts of food safety issues that it has dealt with well, but not for flavor, not for health, not for a lot of other things that people now want. Well, solve that challenge, Derek.

Derek Azevedo: 43:11

Easy deal. And I think a lot of it I learned from you, Sarah. I think it was really a brilliant move of you to include chefs in your group. It's been fun having conversations with folks like Bridget, because if you want to shape the other, like, I gave the rich people example of what they do, but if you want to shape how humans eat, chefs are the power players in that game. And I love working with chefs because I spend so much time working with food buyers who are, like, beat over the head in their companies, and they're programmed to say, no. You sit down with a chef, some of them don't know what's going to show up to their restaurant on one given day or the other, and they're expected to make delicious stuff out of everything all the time. And so they're programmed to say, yeah, I'll do that. We had a local chef that we work with. We had a patch of watermelons, and they were, like, a little bit bigger than softballs, and nobody wants to go in the store and buy a watermelon that's smaller than a cantaloupe. And I happened to be talking to a chef friend of mine, and he's like, yeah, send me, like, a few cases. I'll figure something out. And we went by his restaurant, like, a couple of days later, and he was serving watermelon, margaritas, and he was using the watermelon themselves as the cup.

Sara Harper: 44:26

With the straw and all this other stuff.

Derek Azevedo: 44:28

And I was like, how brilliant is this? This is the kind of products and solutions that the modern consumer is begging us to come up with. And so I think really creating the space for the chefs, because the chefs are the ones who really understand the stuff that tastes good.

Sara Harper: 44:47

Exactly. The flavor connection. And increasingly, they're understanding the connection to the soil. That's why their chefs are working with Jill Clapperton and scientists like her, because they understand that that's a way to have some predictability of good flavor.

Derek Azevedo: 45:02

Sure. And you'll find a lot more chefs that are much more well versed in flavor than soil. Giving chefs that knowledge, like, including the chef community in this process, is something that you did from the very start, which I thought was awesome, because they're the ones who can really translate that. At the end of the day, you and I aren't very good messengers.

Sara Harper: 45:25

Yes.

Derek Azevedo: 45:26

Because it's selfserving, but the chef isn't. They're just all about, I want to make the best stuff.

Sara Harper: 45:32

Right.

Derek Azevedo: 45:33

And the modern consumer isn't looking like they're looking for their food to provide them with more than just their nutritional needs. A lot of times, it's that story behind what's in that that is what's really inspiring to a lot of folks. And I know, like, I'm not a big fan of duck meat, but when I go duck hunting, and it's like, you get those and then you cook something that you got in the wild yourself and all that stuff, it just tastes better. And having the opportunity, like, giving the modern consumers the opportunity to say, I did this and this is why. Or when they're hosting dinner parties for their friends and say, like, I made this bread, and it came from this really cool farm that mills their own grain, and it's really healthy. And I've got a woman, she's a sustainability manager for a large company that we work with, and she's all into baking. And she was like, Check out my wheat collection. She had eight different varieties of wheat, and she's milling the grain at her house. And you see sales of home wheat meals going crazy. And so giving people the opportunity to work with ingredients that they feel better about is just going to continue to do nothing but grow. And so it's like, how do we position ourselves to serve that need? At the end of the day, farming is just a service, and we're just providing for others. How do we present it in a way that's not self serving, that we loop in the right messengers who can help get those messages through in a defensible but also neutral way, where it's just the truth, and it's not like, because otherwise we're just another marketer in there throwing more gas on a fire that's already out of control. Does that make sense?

Sara Harper: 47:29

Yeah, that's a good starting point. I'm curious in terms of different practices that you've used and then tasting the fruit, the produce of that. And have you found that different soil health things lead to different, better flavors? We're trying to get it that connection between flavor and health. And it's still kind of an emerging science for sure, but there's definitely a lot of art in there. But since you do sample a lot of new taste, a lot of your own produce and you know what's going on in terms of the practices, I'm just curious if you see an overlap like a year that you did a certain practice that you found the flavor better the next season.

Derek Azevedo: 48:11

I think one of the challenges with that is there are so many factors that contribute to a finished product that it's really difficult to tie something back to one, some of the examples, the easiest way to influence that is with variety selection, you can do a lot of different things. With variety selection, you can do some things with irrigation practices. Sometimes like a tomato, you stress them a little bit at the end.

Sara Harper: 48:44

You can find not giving them much water.

Derek Azevedo: 48:48

Exactly. You can see concentrated flavors and things like that a little bit. One of the practices that we've maintained for a long time, but I think contributes a lot to our soil health is we've had a long history of applying chicken manure fertilizer to a lot of our fields. And you see when various diseases in our area were popping up to steam, race three, some of the verticillium and cod, those types of things, they didn't seem to affect our farm as much as some of the other farms in the area. And that may not translate to a lot of flavor, but it certainly translates to a lot of health and disease resistance and prevention and those types of things. So it's ultimately contribute to just healthier, more productive plants. We don't have to treat them for as many things. It's difficult to say. Like an easy example is if you want to spice your onion, I'll just put a lot of sulfur on the ground before I plant that onion. And we can get your onions too hot. There's some of those that are kind of linear. Like, I applied this and this is the result that are a little bit easier to tie. But again, it's really hard to tie them all together because everything is tied to everything else, right? And so what I try to do is really maintain a really diverse rotation and depending on the irrigation systems that we have, depending on the crop rotation, mix the tomatoes and onions and carrots and depending on where the trip replacement stages and then it's constantly throwing different stuff at the fields. If we have the chance and the time. We'll go in with multi species cover crops in the fall and just try to keep I just looked at the microbes in the soil. The crop on there. That's the food source by throwing different food sources. That our microbes are giving our soil a lot of competing communities in their equal playing ground to be able to compete with each other effectively and prevent those diseases from even coming in in the first place. And so I would like to get to a point where we're doing things for flavor and we're doing things for nutrition, but the biggest gap in that is I get zero feedback. Which of our products tasted the best? Which of our products were the most nutrient dense? So I look at it like, who knows? Maybe what I think is a great honeydew isn't the most nutrient dense, but I'm being rewarded for a honeydew that is of this size and of this shape, of these other measurable quality attributes. To the extent that we develop a culture of providing feedback to farmers into which of their products are providing the most, that will give us the insight into optimizing those targets as opposed to the ones we're optimizing now in processing tomatoes. For instance, right now we have very good numbers on PH sugar, how much mold is in there, how many broken tomatoes in there, all those types of things. And there's hundreds of tomato varieties to choose from. And when I sit down and talk to the breeders, I ask him which one tastes the best, and they're just like, I don't know, who cares? And the market tomato folks, it's how.

Sara Harper: 52:28

It fits through the machine that turns it into sauce that's the important thing.

Derek Azevedo: 52:32

The market tomato guys are different. Like, they're a lot more focused on flavor profiles and things like that. And the breeders always have their little side project in the store, which is.

Sara Harper: 52:41

Funny, because tomatoes are one of the things that you hear consumers complaining about the most. Like the tomatoes that you buy in the store that look beautiful but have practically no flavor.

Derek Azevedo: 52:51

Exactly. And they're all harvested green to give the tomato credit. They taste pretty darn good for as green as they harvest them. They just have their own green with dark gel and maybe a blush of color on the inside when they harvest them. So they're pretty darn good for being harvested premature. Those same tomatoes, if you leave them in the field for another ten days or at the time of harvest, you go in there and just harvest the red ones. They're amazing. They're on par with heirlooms. And all those other tomatoes, they just aren't tough enough to stand up to the rigor of transportation and trading in their red form. And so that's why they're harvested green, because they're tough enough to be stuck.

Sara Harper: 53:37

In it, to be transported before they're.

Derek Azevedo: 53:40

Put into small boxes and then shipped to stores. So that's where it's that messy middle of food the tomato needs to facilitate the needs of those folks in order to get to the store to look pretty. If we manage the modern market tomatoes like we managed heirlooms, they would be every bit as good. And we get tons of compliments on our tomatoes that are left behind after harvest.

Sara Harper: 54:04

Well, I'm sure, yeah, you're in the amazing land of fresh food, and that's.

Derek Azevedo: 54:11

Where genetically, they're pretty darn strong from a flavor profile standpoint to be premature and still be acceptable.

Sara Harper: 54:22

You know what I mean?

Derek Azevedo: 54:23

That's one of the things, like just understanding the pieces that I need to fit. It's got to work for everybody.

Sara Harper: 54:30

But doesn't that argue then for more of a market, for a lot more local tomato growers that just serve a certain radius instead of trying to ship everybody everything from Wisconsin?

Derek Azevedo: 54:46

But again, you get into there's a ton of efficiency that comes with right.

Sara Harper: 54:52

So exactly how much more are you willing to pay for that amazing ripe tomato?

Derek Azevedo: 54:57

Exactly. And so there's an incredible amount of efficiency that comes with the harvest activities. We can come get two and a half truckloads of tomatoes per acre at one time. If you go back and come back and get what's left behind, there's not as many tomatoes available. So your harvest cost goes way up. They're not as tough, so your packaging material cost goes way up. And that's why when you go to the store and you see an heirloom tomato for $13 a pound or whatever the world they are, a lot of times it's because of how many efficiencies are lost by allowing them to write them, and there's a lot of risk. And then you shift more reliability on human labor to harvest them and pack them. And labor resources are tight and incredibly expensive. And so that's where there's a lot of pieces into the why, I don't know, we can go on forever about.

Sara Harper: 55:52

Like, yeah, this is super helpful for me, for sure. And I'm sure for a lot of folks that want to understand their food system better and that want to use the power that they have as consumers in ways that are really helpful. So I guess maybe let's end on that. You mentioned some things, but what are one or two things that you think is a consumer that they should stay focused on in terms of an action that they can take?

Derek Azevedo: 56:17

The actions consumers can take? Continue to try to eat healthy. Continue to try to eat the things that are on the outside of the grocery store and try cooking them yourself. Those are basic. And try the different things. If you haven't tried Belgian on Deep or those types of things, making a good the modern food system is and the other side of it is, look at where things come from. At the end of the day, every bite of every food that we eat comes from a farmer somewhere. There's never been a bigger disparity in growing practices, environmental practices, worker protections, all kinds of stuff. And there's ever been this now. And so looking for the places. Like, if you really whether it's organic or conventional, american and especially California grown stock is held to the highest regulations in the world for worker protections and environmental protections and training and all these different things to go into protecting the people, the environment, and the process of where the food comes from. Having all those protections is expensive. It's easy to put a cheaper watermelon on a store shelf that comes from another country, but it doesn't come with all the things that people value. So if you value those things, support the places that are doing those things, and again, and just try to educate yourself. I think that's the hardest part. A lot of consumers are just looking for an easy answer. Just try to educate yourself. And if something doesn't quite make sense, take that step to ask. That really makes sense. Consumers are smart folks, and they mean well, and they just want to be heard. So continue to voice opinions. Continue to demand the people that you source your stuff from for what you want. If you want regenerative grain that's milled by a farm, who cares about the soil or her soil, focus on that and support those brands. It doesn't take a lot of these, a lot of the farmers that are sticking their neck out there to mill their own grain and stuff, those are big investments. And then those folks are literally betting the farm, and they are risking their business and their livelihood to provide consumers something that they say they want. And it's up to consumers to put their money where their mouth is and actually support those folks.

Sara Harper: 58:45

That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Great place to end. Thank you so much, Derek. Really appreciate your time. And just let people know, is there a website that they can go to or where can they buy your produce if they're in California?

Derek Azevedo: 58:58

Oh, man. Yeah, there's a bunch. You can go to our website. It's under construction a little bit right now, but it's Bpharm.com. It's a bowls farming company website. And then we're in the process of updating some stuff, but we'll have a list of labels and things like that. We don't put a lot of our own stuff on our own label in stores. We really see our role as being a strong farming partner. The Co brands with folks are watermelons cantaloupes. Honeydews. Those are marketed under the Majesty label. Sweet corn is under Gloria. You can find all that stuff in Costco. A lot of our tomato products go out into other stuff, but we grow a lot for the ketchup companies and those types of folks give us a few weeks. But we'll have all of our brands and labels and stuff like that on the website. But there's a lot of cool stuff there. Like I said, we're not a very big farm. We're very open to feedback, and we're also very interested in just connecting to consumers and finding out what's important to them so we can position ourselves to provide for them in the future.

Sara Harper: 1:00:12

You've been listening to Tasting Terroir, a podcast made possible by a magical collaboration between the following companies and supporters, all working together to help farmers, chefs, food companies and consumers to build healthier soil for a healthier world. Risotherra owned by Dr. Joe Clapperton, Rhizotera is an international food security consulting company providing expert guidance for creating healthy soils that yield tasty, nutrientdense foods. Check us out@rizotera.com that's Rhizoterra.com in the Global Food and Farm online Community, an ad free global social network and soil health streaming service that provides information and connections that help you apply the science and practice of improving soil health. Join us at Global Foodandfarm.com and from listeners like you to support us through our Patreon account at patreon. Comtastingtawar. Patrons receive access to our full length interviews and selected additional materials. Patrons will also have the opportunity to submit questions that we will answer on the podcast. Tune in next week to hear more interviews and insights with myself, Sarah Harper and Dr. Joe Clapperton, as well as the regenerative farmers, chefs and emerging food companies in the Global Food and Farm online community and beyond. If you like our work, please give us a five star rating and share the podcast with your friends. Thanks so much for listening and for helping us get the word out about this new resource to taste the health of your food. Until next week, stay curious, keep improving, and don't stop believing that better is possible. When knowledge is available, you.