How to finance the future of farming | Berry Marttin

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Modern farms and current agricultural practices are vital to life as we know it. They're also a major contributor to climate change. As a banker who works with farms and a farmer himself, Barry Martin is deeply aware of the problem. But he believes that farming is also a major part of the solution. Coming up, innovative efforts to make agriculture a leader in the fight against climate change.

0:41Well, at the farm, cash is king. It's a business. I'm a farmer myself. I raise cattle, grow corn, I build hay. But I'm also a banker. And I've financed farmers for more than 30 years. I actually have the honor to sit at the kitchen table of large and small farmers on all continents, except Antarctica. Not many farmers there. Well, one thing I can assure you, farming is a risky business. Profits are very small. You're dependent on the weather, and you don't know what that's going to be. You grow a crop, you don't know the price, you don't know the quantity, and you don't know the quality. So there's no much room for error there.

1:32And yet, farming needs to change. if we want to reach the goals of Paris and feed a growing population. More than 20 % of all greenhouse gases actually are emitted by agriculture or land use change. This includes deforestation, and let's be sure, let's stop that immediately, chemical fertilizers, emissions from animals, diesel of your tractor. But global farming is also using 70 % of all water withdrawals is also a major contributor to biodiversity and species loss. Add that all together, quite impactful. However, it's also a big part of the solution. Scientists estimate that farmers can take carbon out of the air by means of growing trees or put it in the soil.

2:27The impact is estimated as big as wind and solar. Quite something. So, if that's the case, why farmers are not rushing to change their ways and save our planet? The reality is quite different. First of all, biological processes take time, at least 5 to 10 years, to start changing the quality and the characteristics of your soil. It takes time to change your herd or to grow trees. Also, biological processes are very variable. They depend on weather, they depend on fire, rain, drought. Also, we actually have not fully tested all climate-smart agriculture techniques. Some of them have not even been adapted to regional needs.

3:17Then you have the cost. When you change, you need more labor, you need new machines, you need training, probably a failure of a crop. Then you have the consumer. The consumer today is not willing or able to pay for more sustainable foods. So, if you put all this together, it takes a lot of time, effort and money to transition. There is no viable business case at this moment. It costs the farmer more than it pays to transform. Meanwhile, at the other side of the fence, my neighbor, who didn't change his ways of farming, is enjoying a nice cash flow. I call this the valley of death. This transformation is long and is the best way, actually, of my neighbor to buy me out.

4:11As one farmer once said to me, the best way of guaranteeing my farm for the next generation is to pay my bills tomorrow. Why should I risk the farm? Let's help the farmer then to do the transition. Actually, I'm a true believer. I'm a true believer that we should pay for eco-services, that we should pay the farmer for their investments in nature and in carbon. We do have the instruments already that are the carbon and the biodiversity credits. But why are they not scaling? First, we actually don't have standard metrics or accounting rules to measure carbon at the farm level. Let's even go further.

4:56We actually don't know actually who really owns those carbon and those biodiversity credits. Is it the government? Is it the farmer? Or is it the one that's buying the products? We don't know about the price. We don't have a price transparency. It's actually a big Wild West out there. If you want to sell corn, you can get the price immediately from the Chicago Board of Trade. If you want to sell a ton of carbon from your farm, you actually don't know. You really don't know. And then we have the discussion about permanence. And what is that? It's that carbon and biodiversity are very variable and they're dependent on weather and fire.

5:39So the farmer needs to be protected against those variations. We need a good insurance scheme. And last, the government. Governments, please, set the basic legal framework for us to be able to use those credits. And, very important, a minimum price for the benchmark. Farmers are great stewards of the land, good entrepreneurs, smart operators. And once the right conditions are set, I'm absolutely sure they will quickly adapt and change. How do I know that? While I was at Rabobank, I have participated in many structures and schemes to support farmers to transition. Some of them failed, some of them were very successful.

6:27But all the good ones, all the successful ones, involved some form of income or risk mitigation. Let me share with you one successful project. One I'm pretty proud about, and that's project ACORN. ACORN was designed to pay for eco services to smallholder farmers in small and very difficult countries. What we have done there is that we used satellite imaging and very simple pictures taken by mobile phones of trees on your farm, cross the data and calculate how much carbon was actually stored. With this calculation, we issued certified carbon credits to the international market through an auction system.

7:14And we just sold them to the highest bidder. We have been able to obtain up to$35 per ton of carbon. It doesn't look much, but if you're living on$2 a day, it's quite substantial. Acorn today reaches more than 310 ,000 farmers and has issued 300 ,000 tons of carbon. And it's still growing. I think it's an amazing project. And if we could scale this up to the whole world, customize it to the needs of farmers in Brazil or Bangladesh, I think we could accelerate change. But let's be realistic. This is not easy. many carbon and biodiversity credit schemes have failed. However, it's not different than what happened with agriculture commodities, bonds of shares.

8:10It took time and effort to get them standardized and quoted on global stock exchanges. Let's see how all of this comes together and how I see it working out on the farm level. For that, I want to invite you back to my farm. On one morning, I'm sitting on my horse, kind of dreaming. I look at the horizon. It's a green horizon full of trees. I take my mobile phone out. I push my app, my trading app. And I see two prices. One of my carbon and the other one of my corn. In my pocket, I just have my last financial carbon statement. and it showed I did well. I have 40 ,000 tons of carbon in surplus. I have a big decision to make.

9:01Shall I sell this carbon or the corn to buy my neighbor? That's the farm of the future. But we will be paid for our eco-services and to produce nutritional food. On that farm, cash is king. It will cash flow for the generations to come. Thank you very much.

9:28That was Barry Martin at TED's Countdown Dilemma series on the future of food in 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.