A recipe for less waste and greater health
Recorded at Climate Con 2021 on November 9, 2021
A recipe for less waste and greater health
We all eat. Let’s understand what’s behind each bite so we can make each one count. We’ll explore what food has to do with climate change, the role and power of local food systems, and meet people planting the seeds of greater health and wealth.
A conversation with:
Julia Collins (Planet FWD)
Jillian Hishaw (F.A.R.M.S)
Dr. Laney Siegner (Climate Farm School @Terra.do)
Reilly Brock (Food Storyteller))
Transcript
Kristen Winzent: We're going to shift gears a tiny bit and start exploring specific systems that are at play in the world around us. So first step, because we all have to eat is a group of folks who are going to take us into the food system and explain what food even has to do with climate change.
Reilly Brock: Hey everybody. Thank you so much for attending. Really appreciate it. Love seeing all these names and the attendees. This type of event, it's one of my favorite things of all time, I think specifically in the food space, there's a lot of kind of overwhelm and a lot of news and a lot of it's very negative.
So I think it's really wonderful to with events like today, bring in two things to the table. One is some optimism and some proofs of concept. See what folks are doing. That's working out there. And I think the other one really hoping to get out of today is cross-pollination right. There's so many folks working in this space in so many different avenues that it's really inspiring to get out of your lane for a little bit and learn about what are folks doing over there?
What are they learning? What can we share that maybe I'm not finding in my day to day. So I'm really excited about today. Hope you are as well. We got a truly astounding panel of folks here to share some life lessons and expertise working in and around food. The theme of today is really a recipe for less waste and greater health, right?
Thinking about how can we reinvent our food system a bit to work better for everybody. As we saw in that framing video, if any of you caught it how can we make food work better for all systems, right? The water system, the air system, the soil system. And of course the people system, right?
Because it's not sustainability for, just for the environment doesn't work. If it doesn't also work for the people, we need to have a way to grow from. Is people can participate in, they can make a viable living it's accessible and equitable for all. And so there's so many layers here that I'm pretty stoked to unpack with our panel today.
I think it goes without saying that how we're growing food right now globally is not working and almost any definition of working We're not going to dwell too much on how and why it's broken. I think, smarter folks than I, or us have covered that really extensively. What I'm hoping we can touch on is how is food in our food system really tied to climate and sustainability in a general sense.
And I do mean that both economically sustainable and also environmental. And also again, getting into these proofs of concept, what are folks doing to reinvent how food is grown and who can grow food and how we can make it more sustainable and hopefully break down some of these barriers that, maybe obstacles you've heard about, like, how are folks getting around them? How we've really scaling some of these approaches nationally and then globally as well. Yeah, so I guess quickly I'm Reilly Brock. Professionally most recently, I've worked at Imperfect Foods for about five years doing content for them. That really gives me a crash course in all things, food and sustainability and food waste.
I'm actually between roles right now, but as you all know, food waste and climate change do not take days off. So that's why I'm here today is to keep the fight going. And I'd love to just go around and quickly meet our panelists. I guess I'll go Brady bunch style who's on my screen. If we could start with Julia Colon.
Julia Collins: Hi, Reilly. It's so great to be here with you. And with the other panelists, I'm Julia Collins and the founder and CEO of planet forward. We're on a mission to help tackle climate change by making it easier to bring climate friendly products to market. So we help brands and suppliers to understand their carbon foot.
Reduce emissions across their value chain and then get on a path to being real zero carbon neutral by connecting them to high quality offsets. Ultimately we see a future where all food products are part of the solution to climate change and are made from ingredients that support regeneration as opposed to degradation.
Reilly Brock: Fantastic. Thank you for that intro. Going again around my screen here. Could we go to Jillian please?
Jillian Hishaw: Sorry, I'm having a golden girls moment. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Jillian. Hi Shaw. I am an attorney and founder of Family Agriculture Resource Management Services. It's been in operation for nearly about 10 years and we provide three services. Our focus is providing free legal services to aging, rural small farmers of color.
And that looks like putting the land in a trust, writing wills, also suing USDA regarding civil rights in fractions. And then of course why I am here, the focus is the food bank program. I developed the prototype based on my feeding America internship back in 2002. And so what we do and with David Harper is what we do. I write grants, raise money, then I pay the farmers for their produce that will usually be composted. And then all of the produce is donated to rural communities.
And we have donated nearly 2 million pounds over the past eight years in four different countries. And we have operations in Sierra Leone. We started working in Haiti in 2015. We just built a cold storage facility in a Rema Trinidad last year for farmers. And then we've also been working in South India off and on for the past two years. Thank you so much.
Reilly Brock: Thank you so much, Jillian. And finally, Laney.
Alana Siegner: Hi, great to be here on this panel with these other amazing panelists I'm Laney mirror. I am the chair of the Climate Farm School Program at Terra dot du. I'm a new online climate school that launched at the very start of the pandemic in 2020. I'm conveniently, always planning to be online, but I have been delighted to be able to establish our first in-person experiential class.
MIT education experience for adult professionals, and that is the climate farm school. It is an opportunity to bring adults farmers and non-farmers alike onto working farms to live and work and communicate together and collaborate around climate solutions in the food and ag space. So I just launched this program at two host farms this past fall in September.
And I'm looking forward to growing the program to better forge these connections between people actively stewarding the land with an eye towards food production, food security, and climate resilience, and as well as climate mitigation and those looking to support that work, get involved and understand physically what it means to do regenerative agriculture and restore degraded agro ecosystems. So it's great to be here.
Reilly Brock: Fantastic. Thank you so much for those introductions. I'd love to start with a little bit of a kind of personal framing context setting. Obviously, food touches on so many layers. Of our lives. It's a way of making a living. It's also a way of interacting with the natural space of interaction with other people.
And I'd love to explore a little bit at the start here. How did you each come to your work and maybe what was that aha moment of seeing I can use my skills here to help the food system work better for people and planet. And maybe we can just go around in that same order here. So starting with Julia.
Julia Collins: My connection to food begins with my grandparents who migrated from the deep south to the San Francisco bay area to start a dental practice serving the black community. And in that space, they created at home and at work, all people were equal. All people were welcome and worth serving. So I've always believed that the best moments in life happened when humans are sharing food together at the table.
My light bulb moment really was in 2017. When I learned that I was going to become a parent for the first time. And I think I felt simultaneously a huge amount of excitement and also a lot of weight and fear about what it meant to bring another human onto the planet during such uncertain times. And so for me, the answer was to reconnect to my love of food and my belief in its power to bring everyone to the table for solutions.
Reilly Brock: Super powerful framing. That's actually something I've heard. We had a podcast and imperfect, and that was something that a lot of folks would bring up that having a kid was actually this really interesting reframe moment. So it really powerful there. Thank you for sharing that. Jillian, could you share a bit about what you, what brought you into this work?
Jillian Hishaw: My grandparents as well working in the garden with my grandfather in the eighties. I'm originally from Kansas city, Missouri, and he was raised on a farm in Oklahoma. And as I grew older, I learned how we lost the farm and he didn't like to discuss those matters. And so my great grandmother hired a lawyer to pay the property tax on the farm, but the lawyer stole the money and the land was sold in a tax lien sale.
And now where my grandfather's house was to be, there's an oil pump going up and down. And so I reverted from biology and went to law school and I've been using law in science ever since for advocacy work.
Reilly Brock: Wow. Super powerful. A Jillian. Yeah, folks. Haven't just a brief plug. We did an interview, Jillian on the wasted podcasts with them. Perfect. And her full story. I would highly recommend listening to it offline when you have time really powerful and really happy she's here with us as well. Laney following up with you here, what brings you here? What how'd you get into this work?
Alana Siegner: Yeah. So my aha moment was really happened when I was teaching eighth grade in Boston as a citizen schools, AmeriCorps teaching fellow, and I was just out of college struggling to figure out how to connect with my urban team students and get them ready for high school and the most successful thing that I ever did with them.
Talk to them about starting a school garden project, and then get them to do that. With a kinda they're paired up with a kindergarten classroom and they were mentoring their kindergarten younger peers to learn how to plant things and grow food. And this was like a revelation for my students.
They had never grown anything. They had no. Deem that ceiling pop up out of the ground. And they were just like totally hooked and excited and their best selves working with kindergarteners to like, pretend that they knew something about soil and food. And it was just really awesome to see that light bulb moment for my students.
And at that moment I was like, okay, I have to go back and learn more about plants and plant science and agriculture myself. I grew up in an urban area. I feel really disconnected from my, I felt really disconnected from my food system. And I've always had an interest in environmental sustainability and climate change.
So went back to grad school and studied how urban gardens can be sites of environmental education, climate education, and food security in the community. So did a lot of work with urban farms in California, where I was going to grad school and did a lot of work with small rural farms in California, in Washington state that were focused primarily on school gardening and supplying food to schools.
And that kind of brought me to this okay, we're all really like a lot of people are disconnected from farms and food production. How do we rebuild these bridges and seeing my role primarily as an educator. Started talking to more farms about the education that they would like to be doing the communication around what they're doing and why, and how to value that. Not just having to try and high price point, but getting the community involved in the work on the farm. So that's what kind of led me into this farm based education career.
Reilly Brock: Fantastic. Thank you so much for shine that Laney already loving the kind of diversity of experiences. And yet also the commonality here of like of how food is a framework can really help inspire positive change and kinda bring out the best and people's skillsets in that vein.
I'd love to do a little bit of a deep dive. Panelists quickly about kind of some lessons they've learned from their work to bring them to light and help us learn from them a bit more starting with Julia. I'd love to start with some term definition, cause I know we're all drowning in environmental jargon these days. So can you shed some light on what regenerative farming is and why it matters in practice and any lessons you've learned about the promise and obstacles of farming, regeneratively and the modern.
Julia Collins: Sure. There's these are some really important questions. I hope you don't mind if I take a couple of minutes to answer this one, because I think it's great to get some good grounding on regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming. That's focused on creating ecosystems that not only sustain would actually reject. Or create all of the resources that are needed within that ecosystem. And often when people talk about regenerative agriculture, they're referring to a set of farming practices that improve the health of degraded soil and allowing that soil to sequester more.
Not only sequestered carbon, but also improve what we call water infiltration, the ability of soil to actually hold water. And that's important for climate resilience, as we all know climate change is causing more incidents of severe weather droughts and floods. And so we need to have soils that are healthy, that have the ability to suppress sequester carbon and also soil that have the ability to sustain these severe weather events. The practices that we're talking about are things like minimizing the deter disturbance of the soil, or a practice more commonly known as no till or reduced tillage. We're also talking about cover cropping. So actually keeping the soil.
We're talking about increasing and improving biodiversity, the number of living things, living in an ecosystem. And in many cases, we're also talking about integrating livestock. The same that we have in regenerative agriculture is it's not the cow. It's the how, and There are often many incidences where integrating livestock into a living system actually improves many of the elements that create resilience in healthy soil.
And the thing about regenerative agriculture is there's no. Single set of practices, actually the practices can vary dramatically depending on what you're farming, where you are your soil type. So there's a lot to think about in terms of the diversity of practices, but again, the practice, the outcomes that we see as a result of these practices are things like higher soil, organic matter more.
Diverse bio-diverse ecosystems and better nutrient density. So food that's grown in regenerative systems actually carries more nutrition to our bodies. And then as you said, Reilly at the beginning of the talk, we're also talking about humans, right? We're not just talking about carbon. So socially and economically regenerative agriculture, actually cultivates connection place and wellbeing among those who are involved in producing that, food I'm just going to talk for one more second about what I've learned and obstacles. And so regenerative, agriculture sounds like the most beautiful thing in the world. Why aren't we already seeing it being commonplace at scale? There are some obstacles that we've seen so far. The first obstacle that I'd set aside is infrastructure.
And in many cases there are actually negative incentive. For farmers who want to implement these regenerative practices, there are ways in which the existing farm bill or crop insurance actually de incentivizes the adoption of things like cover crops. So we need to remove some of those structural impediments, those infrastructure impediments to regenerative agriculture.
And then we also need to demonstrate that there's demand and motivate. More farmers to convert to these practices. So a large part of the work that we're doing at planet forward is to prove that there is demand for climate friendly practices for lower emissions suppliers and supply chains. So again, if we were successful in doing this, imagine.
The 1 billion acres of pasture range and crop land that exists in the United States. If we could reward the sustainable and regenerative stewards of that land, then we'd see, more climate resilience. We'd see a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas related emissions and our food ecosystem. And we'd also see better diversity, biodiversity and healthier farm economies.
Reilly Brock: Amazing explanation really appreciate you going into depth there, Julia Jillian going over to you, I'd love to explore a bit of what Julie touched on with the farmer's side of things, based on your work with farmers, what is needed to make sure that farming is not just sustainable environmentally, but economically, and really equitable for future generations.
And what sort of obstacles are you overcoming with your work?
Julia Collins: When it comes to regenerative agriculture, it's very difficult for the farmers to adopt. At least small rural farmer because it's expensive. And the average farmer, according to the 2012 USDA census between 2012 and 2017 may less than $10,000 annually each year.
And I know a farmers, particularly a dairy farmer in upstate New York that, they have fell on hard times and they're feeding their kids Cheerios and, dry cereal with the cows milk. And so a lot of my farmers are living from hand to mouth. That's why I created the farmer's emergency fund. The problem is that we're developing so much land, 175 acres are lost in this country, by the hour and the importance on urban structure is completely ridiculous. I was a city planner at home in Kansas city for two years, and just getting the city planning and zoning boards to really consider the conservation, ease and preservation of acres and not city lights is very frustrating because people often look at the bottom line and greed. And so what we need to do is we need to provide resources to the farmers. One-on-one we need to provide education tools and teaching. We need to make it affordable, and we need to pay the farmers.
We need to pay the farmers, a livable wage. Often people say pay farm workers, a livable wage. But 50% of, the farmers in this country are small farmers and average age of the farmer is 58.5. And so the average age of my farmer is 75. The oldest is 94 in Georgia. And so we really need to also incorporate a state planning mechanisms or from succession planning, but it also starts with paying the farmer where they're at no matter the age and.
If you pay them, they'll do it. It may be slow, but they'll do it. But if you don't pay them, it's easy just to throw, fertilizer, Roundup ready on it. And it's good to go. And so the whole thing needs to be upside down.
Reilly Brock: Really appreciate that nuance, Jillian. That was something I learned from my work at imperfect that really blew my mind was how little farmers were making even for their perfect produce that they could sell to supermarkets. And then when I would talk to farmers and say, okay, but why don't you just sell your ugly oranges or tomatoes to juice or processing?
They'd say, oh, we'd get 30% of what we get for. Great and stuff, which would often not even cover the labor of picking it much less like the box they have to ship it in. And so I had always tried to flip the question on people of if someone offered you your job at 30% of the salary, would you take it?
And then everyone always say, oh no. So I was like, okay, but why are we asking farmers to do that? Then if they have it even tougher in agriculture is one of the toughest ways to make a living. So now I really appreciate the candor there and the details you're able to share. And you really blew my mind in the pod.
When you talked about like estate planning, which is something I never thought was related to agriculture. Of course, it's all interconnected and really love that framework. Laney, wrapping it up here with you, from the farmers perspective, what are some reasons to farmer generatively and again, also what are some of the things, keeping it from being more common than it is, right.
Alana Siegner: Yeah, those are great questions. Then from my experience, I've worked primarily with smaller scale diversified farming operations, and mostly people that came into farming. Not being multi-generational family farms, but people that were really drawn to farming because of rediscovering that connection to food production in the land.
I'm getting turned on as a farm intern or apprentice or some earlier educational kind of spark experience. But I think, and also from the few farmers that I have spoken to who have were farming more traditionally or conventionally previously there has been this real impetus, I think, as we awaken to the climate crisis and farmers have experienced like severe crop failures and hardship and year after year of not being able to.
Make the yields that they need to make and not even having crop insurance be enough. So there's been on one hand, I think a climate impetus to change and farm regenerativity and people that love farming and food production have been willing out of necessity to try different things and experiment with regenerative and find ways to reintroduce life into the soil, reinvigorate a healthy soil, community and microbiome, and therefore grow diverse crops.
Legacy. Beans into a mix that used to be maybe just corn and soy and grains. So I think there's that on the one hand, and then there's others who have a woken to the climate crisis who see soil, carbon sequestration and planting, replanting trees and agroforestry as. The important and mutually beneficial on multiple fronts kind of solution to engage in.
So a lot of farmers that I've spoken to maybe used to have careers in like banking or something completely unrelated, or in some other cases, commercial salmon fishing and have found their way onto the land. And as to heal, we've seen as what's been degraded, the store productivity and health and nutrition into their local communities.
It's been, and I think in urban area, that's been a big response of people experiencing food insecurity to want to grow that food within the community and just seeing the response. There's been a lot of nonprofit farms that have cropped up all over. Berkeley and Oakland that have I think just risen to the occasion and the need to feed their communities and find funding to do that through not just, sale of produce.
So there's a lot of people coming to this work, which is really exciting, really energizing. But then also some really serious barriers, mostly. Financial and policy that I think Julia and Jillian have both touched on really well. And I think that's the model of crop insurance that exists today, where there are lots of dollars going to farmers, but just to grow certain crops that are not the most nutritious ones and not very environmentally healthy ways like that money in my mind all needs to be repurposed and read channeled.
A lot of political pressure and advocacy to allow farmers to farm regenerativity and have more of a whole farm approach to revenue support that includes ecosystem services and educating next generation of farmers and all these things that are really valuable about our food producers.
Reilly Brock: Fantastic really appreciate that Laney. And that would echo the crop insurance point. This is something I've heard from farmers as well. So it under-discussed that we're literally subsidizing certain crops and also literally covering the risks of certain crops, but not what many of us would consider food.
Like what we all eat at the grocery stores to what's referred to as specialty produce, which I always found a really ridiculous distinction. So it's a deep rabbit hole would encourage folks to, to dive down it deep but important stuff. I think have to wrap up in about 10 minutes. So I want to get us to closing here.
You today's all about inspiration and action. So I'd love to pop around one more time. And just, if folks have either a key takeaway, they'd love the attendees to leave with, or even an ask a thing you would hope folks could do to help build a bit more of a just and resilient food system.
I would love to hear it. So yeah, if we could just pop around again, starting with Julia, what is, what's the takeaway or an ask you have for folks attending.
Julia Collins: Sure, I think it's often surprising to people to learn that 34% of human-made greenhouse gas emissions come from land use and food systems more than a third. That's a huge number. It's everything from the way that we grow food to the emissions related in getting that food to your grocery store. So one of the best things that we can do, there's no silver bullet solution to addressing the climate crisis. It's going to take a lot of concerted effort across sectors, but one of the best things that we could do as people is to demand that our food systems become real zero.
I'm not talking about net zero by 2050, we're talking about drastically reducing emissions in this decade. And so the ask that I would have would be. To reach out to your favorite retailer, whether it's whole foods or target or Kroger, or reach out to your favorite brand and ask them what they're doing to drive their operations and drive their supply chains to being carbon neutral.
That would be a great ask, I think.
Reilly Brock: Awesome. Jillian, what would be your ask or take what you hope for.
Jillian Hishaw: Yeah. Definitely I would like to focus on plastic plastic use and just the problem as we all know with microplastics and, it's in our food, it's just everywhere. And so reducing your use of plastic also requesting the Biden administration to ratify.
The basil convention, which basically regulates the transportation and transport of plastic waste. And so a lot of the plastic ways, particularly in California accounts for one third of plastic waste is shipped out of the main port there in Oakland. And it's sent to, basically developing countries like Malaysia and we need to sit in our own waste. We need to sit in our own plastic because I think that would accelerates basically ways to reduce the use. And so why are we sending all of, our waste over. To a developing country. And to me, it's just, it's extremely unfair. And so I would ask the attendees to reduce their use of plastic and again, to ask the Biden administration to ratify the Bazell convention.
Thank you. And to donate to farms of course, 30,000 acres that she plugged
Alana Siegner: there, but yeah.
Reilly Brock: Love it. No, thank you for that. And yeah the reframe there you gave us of, there is no away essentially super and really appreciate that. Laney closing that with you. What's your ask or hope for folks attending here today?
Alana Siegner: Yeah, I would just ask that every folks here just participate in your local food system and building one, if that doesn't really feel like. I think everything from growing your own Bazell plant, or like some sort of participating in your own food production can start a lot of really amazing conversations, whether it's in the grocery store or the farmer's market, or some form of connection to a local urban community farm or surrounding rural farm.
I think that's having those conversations and connections is so important. And I think if you're able to notice, like what does it take to farm locally and organically and regenerative really what's missing in my local food system, is there a place I can bring my compost if there, my city doesn't collect it.
These are all ways that people can participate and I think. Starts to see those kinds of solutions and systems that that we can demand collectively. Yeah, I think there's really exciting things that everyone can do. I get really fired up when people show me they're like frozen worm. It's in their freezer, New York city.
And they're just like to deal with their own food waste. And I think there's this like that can feel good and resolve some cognitive dissonance that we all feel when like individual actions are small and potentially, feeling insignificant in the face of the climate challenge. But they do help us live a little bit more in, in harmony with where we want solutions to go.
So I think there are lots of things like that, and I just encourage folks to participate in that way. And talk about it. Create a ripple effect. That's even better.
Reilly Brock: Fantastic. No, I love that. Folks, companies, governments don't respond to things that are not being demanded. So for better for us, you got demand stuff sometimes.
Great invitation for all of us to speak up. I think a bit more as well. I have excellent news, which is that we have some time for questions. I always worry with these things about running out of time and like we have such great panelists and then we all have. So we have about six minutes. So if anybody has a question they'd like to ask, feel free to either unmute and ask it or just pop it in the chat, if that's easier and we'd love to get any insight we can from your questions.
I saw one, I guess I can read off that I saw earlier was have any of you looked into the intersection of how did they put it basically forestry and sustainable agriculture? Have you looked into the intersection of regenerative, agroforestry, and agriculture with a focus of protecting species on the verge of extent?
Jillian Hishaw: Yes, I have I did an internship back in 99 and we, and I worked with timber companies on habitat species for migratory birds. And so when I started farms, I incorporated that experience with my farmers that are primary timber farmers, timber farms, and. Basically just doing regulated, prescribed, burns, and Benning and things of this nature.
And then also telling them about, for example, I believe it was the white Oaks program that USDA had last year where they were paying farmers to plant Oaks and basically keeping also wet lands out of production, but I don't know. Monopolize all the time and, Laney or Julia can chime in.
Julia Collins: I think when we're talking about regenerative agriculture, we need to always be thinking about a whole systems approach. And so often there's. Tendency to be reductionist and just think about the carbon. What about that? And of course the carbon is critically important, but we really need to be thinking about all of this, all of the things that support our regenerative system, including the beings.
There's another problem that we sometimes have in our language, which is, we'd say people in the planet, we're trying to protect people in the planet, but aren't we really trying to protect all beings and the planet. The species that are on the verge of extinction. So that's just my philosophical addition to the really good tactical information that Jillian said.
Alana Siegner: Yes. And I think that agroforestry is an absolutely critical piece that people are coming to more and more like the farm that I'm on right now. Planting a bunch more fruit and nut trees in their pastor area where they have a small beef cattle herd, because it started to get really hot here and their cows are wanting some shade.
And so it's different than the pastor management that they've been doing. Introducing trees into that system, but there's a potential harmony along with this diversification of providing better shelter for the animals and also growing some more economic crops like fruit and nuts that can be harvested and sold and local food system. So that's one example. And I think another cool thing to maybe highlight is the bird school project in California is focused around protecting endangered species of birds and setting up farms with the right bird habitat in forested parts of farmland that can allow these birds to continue to exist and be part of our home planet. So I think those kinds of collaborations between conservation species preservation and farmland, stewardship are really important and exciting.
Jillian Hishaw: And then it's also important for the Biden administration to basically update their forest management. It's just very old. And so that's one of the reasons why we're having so many fires is because of the lack of forest management. And so having some type of dual collaboration between the department of interior and the forestry department with the USDA is very quick.
Reilly Brock: Super well said oh, we're going to make so many good questions. This always happens. I think we have time for maybe one more, one really quick. I guess I'll go chronologically. Somebody asked basically that, they live in a rural area. They're trying to grow their own food, but the yield is not great. Any advice for folks who feel really dependent on far away grocery stores?
Jillian Hishaw: I would suggest that they grow as a group. So I have a lot of farmers that grow as a group. And, as we all know, 95% of all farm co-ops fail within the first five years of operation due to the competitive nature. And so Ryan as a group is definitely essential. And so if you grow as a group, you increase your yield.
And if you sell as a group, you increase your revenue. And so that is, something to consider. As you build up your soil health, this will help with this.
Alana Siegner: And I think local food hubs can be really key here. I, the farm that I'm on is on an island and there's there's a small grocery store on the island, but the groceries real runs are like on the mainland.
Had there's a county food or a food hub now that aggregates a bunch of food from different farms and how. Distribution system for getting food around to the island so that it does start to feel easier and more resilient to get the healthy food that you need without traveling really long distances.
So I think that can be, yeah, like growing as a group it could start to be decentralized or it could get a little bit more formalized if you have access to a common refrigerated space or some sort of, even if it's a volunteer led distribution system.
Reilly Brock: Fantastic. I think we are officially out of time. This has been such a delightful conversation. I hope folks can follow up with each other offline somehow about some of these questions in the chat is really great stuff here. And, hope today is the start, not the end of this type of discussions, but I'll just want to thank all of our amazing panelists for joining us today.
I know I learned a lot. I hope our attendees learned a lot about. And I really appreciate all of you attendees taking the time out of your day as well. Really appreciate you. And thank you so much.
Jillian Hishaw: Thank you so much, Riley. Nice meeting everyone.
Julia Collins: Thank you everyone.
