Briefly describe your work with agtech and explain what motivates you to invest your time in this work.

My career has combined boots-on-the-ground work across national security and agricultural ecology with the high level strategy of disruptor brand building. Through education and early career work in national security I spent many years in the MidEast – in Iraq and Yemen, I encountered resource scarcity issues that spurred my interest in agriculture (a root cause of that scarcity) and my subsequent shift into agricultural ecology and development. After graduate school and several years in natural capital/ecosystem services and arthropod ecology research, I moved to the private sector by joining Impossible Foods as their first “impact” hire where I spent the next six years establishing a benchmark for impact strategy. My next role as VP of Impact Strategy at Iron Ox (a robotics and AI/ML driven indoor agriculture company) was oriented at building the tech and ops stack to support climate change adaptation – the ability to grow many crop types indoors, with minimal resource footprint. We also launched the first net-zero indoor ag roadmap on behalf of our lead investors.
But even in purpose-built companies, there is friction between revenue generation and the delivery of mission outcomes. The alt-meat sector has struggled to unlock tangible environmental outcomes, and controlled environment agriculture start-ups are falling into a very specific “valley of death” for want (in part) of forms of capital that are more patient, and better aligned to frontier tech. There is vast white space to build systems that help impact driven companies realize and govern their missions.

Briefly explain any commitments to sustainability that you or your organization bring to your work on agtech innovation. Be as specific as possible regarding what kinds of social and environmental impacts you aim to produce, and the relevant strategies you are pursuing.

Prior experience includes net-zero and 90% water efficiencies (CEA). Programmatic and business efforts included sparing water and sparing land for revegetation and rewilding through consumer awareness, switching behavior and product substitution and integration into potential voluntary carbon markets via rangeland transitions.

Briefly describe the way(s) in which you assess/measure social and environmental impact in your work on agtech innovation.

Product LCAs (comparative, ISO conforming), GHG inventories and operation-level water footprinting. We also create frameworks around “what conditions must be satisfied” in order to believe that an environmental outcome occurred on the basis of sales or consumer behavior (e.g. do we have the right products on the market? are consumers purchasing lower impact products at the expense of higher impact products in basket of goods? Is our technology being used to displace incumbent, or is it additive to industry).

Our research and this workshop aim to investigate tensions between the demands/imperatives of the tech-finance industry and the demands/imperatives of social-environmental problem solving. Please comment on this problem frame in general, and in relation to specific examples from your own experience.

Forgive the cursory take, here is a rough summary:
Purpose-built companies have an opportunity to realize environmental or social good creation as an outcome of business growth and sales. Thesis driven VCs are making investments based on the (stated) objective of aligning growth to transformative ecological outcomes.

Operationalizing this as a reality, however, has proven extremely difficult. I believe the root cause is the nature of capital — it is note “coded” for impact achievement and is at best, agnostic to it. As such, any sort of friction (and there is always friction) between maximizing short-term financial returns to shareholders and between optimizing environmental good creation will divert toward financial returns.

While it is the in the best interest of the agricultural industry to address catastrophic water scarcity/degradation, habitat loss (and ecosystem service collapse) and operator toxicity exposure in order to sustain production and yield gains, the underlying incentives structure is misaligned. Basic accounting structures do not necessarily daylight inefficiencies, let alone over-the-horizon resource risks. For example, one could argue that a large proportion of rangeland may be stranded assets in the not-too-distant future due to desertification and loss of water access, yet ranching continues to expand in tropical ecosystems.

Finally, the sector is a complex one, and there is probably a slightly higher level of ecological sophistication required across boards and executive teams so that they may, if they choose to, attempt to align to environmental outcomes. Today, it seems that very few corporate boards would have the ability to ask the right questions of their executives. (I worked with a finance leader who assumed that, because we grew plants indoors, we might be able to sell carbon credits. This is an understandable misunderstanding with the sheer volume of investment and dubious claims being thrown about in the sector).

To investigate the tensions suggested above, we rely on the concept of “mission drift”. We understand mission drift as a tendency for social and environmental impact commitments of individuals and organizations to leak out over time due to pressures and opportunities to expand revenue, valuation and capital gains. Our project aims to investigate mission drift applied to entrepreneurial ventures as well as to organizations dedicated to supporting innovation. Please comment on this thesis in general, and in relation to specific things you have experienced where possible. To the extent you find this thesis useful, what strategies can you identify to defend against mission drift?

The thesis of mission drift is valid, based on my experience in purpose-built companies within food tech and ag tech. Alt-meat has not aligned products to consumer tastes or to the value chain of livestock. Indoor ag in many instances burden-shifts or simply has too narrow a crop range to be of much use for adaptation or climate change mitigation.

Strategies:

• Board governance
• Public sector incentive creation (e.g. Inflation Reduction Act) which can defray some upfront innovation costs
• Widely available impact taxonomies specific to sectors so that conditions of achieving mission might be known and measured
• Frontier technologies for consumer behavior understanding (eg AI/ML)
• Education pipelines for ecologists/environmental scientists/industrial ecologists to move into private sector leadership.
• Novel financial mechanisms (e.g. patient capital/accelerated blended finance)

Please share something you would like to take away from the workshop.

I’d like to hear what other stakeholders are seeing and experiencing in the space, and to perhaps find some positive examples where some alignment of mission and revenue, even where imperfect, is occurring. I’d also like to test some theories as to what might be helpful in addressing current challenges and hear from individuals in other lines of work who may be approaching the issue in ways I have not considered.