Hello World!
Agrarian Design Inspiration (6/27)
Hopefully this is the start of something phenomenal, I really believe in the power of information driven communities.
Here are my expectations for this newsletter for the foreseeable future:
- It will be sent out once a week, likely on Friday or Saturday. I'm going to set a hard ship deadline of 10 am PST on Saturdays.
- The format will be fairly casual to start, I'm going to try different things. Please give me lots of feedback, as harsh as you want. The goal is rapid improvement, and that can only happen with your help.
- Eventually I want this to be the best source of inspiration you get all week, and that's what I'll center most of my efforts around.
- I'll respond personally to every email you send. I hope this becomes impossible at some point, and at that point I'll come up with a different format for collecting feedback and talking with you all.
I'm not sure if we should talk about our clients, or take money in order to advertise products on here. I'll commit to this: nothing that's purely extractive will be advertised on here. Our goal is to pull the market to a regenerative paradigm, so we'll require anyone getting something from us to be making that move.
Here's some content for the launch!
Regenerative Principle to Consider: Observe and Interact
We're going to start with 12 permaculture principles, and this is the first one. The idea is very simple, before intervening in a system you should go and see how it works.
Extractive Problem: Industrial Ranching
Methane emissions are one of the biggest climate change challenges. Livestock produce most of these emissions, and industrial ranching also creates a lot of negative externalities. Here is a non comprehensive list of those externalities: * Large consumption of cheap feed (which is grown extractively) * Inhumane treatment of animals * Potentially poor working conditions/compensation for humans * Vulnerable supply chain (only a couple large companies that do all the industrial ranching) * Lower product quality -> Long term worse for humans * High greenhouse gas emissions (distribution + actual animals)
Cool regenerative solution: Asparagopsis taxiformis
Regenerative ranching practices actually increase methane emissions from cows. However, this is one of the only negative externalities of feeding cows grass in rotating pastures. Enter asparagopsis taxiformis, a kind of seaweed that when added to cattle feed lowers their methane emissions to 1%.
Yup, that's a 100x decrease! Right now the team at Greener Grazing is working on growing AT at scale. This is a super promising solution, and you can read more about it on their website. Now the question becomes how to monetize and facilitate adoption of this potent additive. Designing a corporate feedback loop that produces something for farms that use AT is the key to widespread change.
Warmly,
Dev Rangarajan
Founder, Agrarian.Design