Janette Barnard; Ag tech in Silicon Valley, synthetic meat and an alternative to government bailouts

Janette Barnard [00:00:00] 2020 was a weird year, right? I get it. It was absolutely a weird year and there were a lot of things that we couldn't have anticipated. However, it was coming off the heels of a multi-year trade war with China, right? This is not a brand new phenomenon that commodity prices had been depressed. It wasn't an election year.

Vance Crowe [00:00:20] Hi, I'm Dan Crow, a small business owner living in central Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today I am talking with a very interesting woman. She moved with her agriculture background to Silicon Valley and now runs her own tech consulting firm that also does a bunch of heretical writing and very interesting stuff. Her name is Jeanette Barnard and she's a longtime friend of mine. And we sat down for a very interesting conversation where we cover everything from synthetic meat to the value of being the person that is actually writing the articles to some of the challenges around the government, support around agriculture and keeping farms afloat that maybe would've been sold otherwise, is an interesting conversation and maybe a touch controversial for those of you in the ag industry. In another turn of events, I actually have had a new product that I've developed, something that I wanted to share with you. I've shared it with my email list and if you've not signed up for that, I recommend, but I haven't talked about on the podcast 'cause we were kind of working out all the kinks. And that is that I am going to start offering private interviews so people can hire me. You can go to my store, store, Articulate Ventures, to do a one hour interview with a young person that you are caring for, maybe an adult or a grandparent, or maybe you have some ideas that you want to make sure are captured.

Vance Crowe [00:01:54] But the reason that you haven't written them down, the reason you haven't just set your phone down in front of you, is that talking to that black mirror is really hard to do. You freeze up, you don't know what to say, you get caught up. And so what I'd like to do is offer these sessions where I'll sit down and we'll talk about the questions that you want to be asked, and we'll also free range. I've had a chance to do it with a 6-year-old boy who was recording a gift for his mother for Christmas. I had a chance to talk with a woman who had been suffering from cancer and now has survived it, but wanted to make sure that no matter what happened to her, her children could hear about her values, her family stories, what she wants for them. If this is an idea that interests you, I hope you'll check it out. It's been a very interesting experience for me to do this. You can learn more at store Articulate Ventures. Alright, and now onto my interview with Jeanette Bernard. Jeanette. Bernard, welcome to the podcast.

Janette Barnard [00:02:58] Hi. Are you aware that you just, you said my name wrong.

Vance Crowe [00:03:01] Did I what?

Janette Barnard [00:03:02] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:03:03] Jeanette,

Janette Barnard [00:03:04] I thought you were joking for a second.

Vance Crowe [00:03:05] So I was

Janette Barnard [00:03:06] Barnard.

Vance Crowe [00:03:07] Barnard. Okay. I'll do that again.

Janette Barnard [00:03:09] Well, okay. But while we're here, so if I completely mess up an answer, do you have the ability to edit it?

Vance Crowe [00:03:15] It, I mean, I can, but I,

Janette Barnard [00:03:17] Is it just roll through once you get started? Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:03:19] I've done about 180 and I've, I've changed one interview. So it's, it's typically live to tape, you know, like if you, perfect. And the only time I really do it is if you say something and you're like, actually two, now that I think about it is if you're like, Hey, I really shouldn't have said that, or, I went too far. And so you should know that we have that ability so that that way we can go to the envelope. But I would say, yep, 99.9% of people are pretty happy with how it goes.

Janette Barnard [00:03:46] Perfect.

Vance Crowe [00:03:47] Jeanette. Okay. Barnard,

Janette Barnard [00:03:49] Barnard.

Vance Crowe [00:03:50] Barnard. God dammit. Okay. Okay. You

Janette Barnard [00:03:52] Just say however, we'll just, we'll roll, we'll roll.

Vance Crowe [00:03:54] Okay. Jeanette Barnard, welcome to the podcast. Damn it. I did it again. I That's fine. It's Barnard.

Janette Barnard [00:04:11] No, you, no, you said

Vance Crowe [00:04:12] Right. Oh, okay. 'cause you gimme this big pause. Yeah. Okay. So let me do something real quick so that way I can make it easy for editing. So hang on. Jeanette Barnard, welcome to the podcast.

Janette Barnard [00:04:31] Thanks. It's good to be her bands.

Vance Crowe [00:04:34] So you're an interesting character. You from ag, you moved to San Francisco and became a part of kind of the tech startup world that's engaged with agriculture, coronavirus hit, and you're now living in Arizona. So talk a little bit about what you do and what you were doing out in Silicon Valley before you moved to Arizona.

Janette Barnard [00:04:55] Yeah, absolutely. So sometimes I feel like I'm, I'm kind of straddling two different worlds, right? That of production ag. And this is actually a picture of the farm that I grew up on that's behind me on the background here in Southeast Arizona. But, so yeah, the last couple of years prior to COVID, I had been in San Francisco leading commercial, so sales and marketing team for a venture backed startup. And so scaling the team, we were selling a product that we were selling into meat processors, other segments of ag. And so as I was recruiting my team, it was actually really fun. I was recruiting some people that, you know, that I knew from, from business school, from, you know, kind of different phases of my career, but then also some people that I knew were also from Ag and would be able to have that perspective going into our customers. But yeah, so so was leading commercial for a venture-backed company, was doing that for a couple of years. And then I had left that company at the end of 2019 with the intent of, all right, I'm gonna go figure out what the next company is that I wanna start. And kind of fell into some consulting projects, just, you know, pay the rent kind of thing as I was going along. And then, then COVID hit and early March I was like, you know, I might need to get out of San Francisco. Had a 387 square foot apartment. And I was like, I don't, this lockdown thing probably will only last a little bit of time, but maybe I shouldn't be here while it happens. So thankfully I flew out on March 15th and San Francisco had shelter in place by March 16th, so kind of got outright in time.

Vance Crowe [00:06:31] When you think about San Francisco and you imagine what it's like to be there right now, if you are, you know, sheltering in place, what is it like versus what it was like just before the COVID hit?

Janette Barnard [00:06:43] Yeah, so I mean, I'll just, I'll reference my apartment size as an indicator. So it's no issue to have a tiny apartment in San Francisco because you're never there, right? You're out and about. There's, you know, there's, there's, the thing about San Francisco is a, a lot of people are transplants and there are a lot of people doing a lot of interesting things and, and not just tech, right? There are a lot of people across a lot of segments. So, you know, you're just, there's always something to do. You're there, you're always out and about. You know, I would every afternoon walk down to the bay, you know, kind of, that was my, my walk route. And so, so you don't, you don't really think about the fact that you have only have 3 87 square feet. And so I just would contrast that with now where offices aren't open, restaurants aren't really open, there's just not as much happening. All the reasons that you would live in the city, which is to connect with people. Those just aren't really rel as relevant right now. Right. So I'm obviously speaking from assumption since I'm not there, but I would assume it's a very, very, very different place.

Vance Crowe [00:07:51] Yeah. My sense is that the people that left in this kind of exodus, that, that thought like, Hey, I'm just gonna leave for a couple of months and then we'll come back when San Francisco gets back to normal, I wonder how many of those people will come back, or if it will be an actual generational shift that the only people that'll move into San Francisco in the future are people that were never there to begin with.

Janette Barnard [00:08:11] Yeah, I think it, I think that very well could be the case, because if you look at the number of companies that have said, you know what, we're just gonna go ahead and move our headquarters while we're at it right now during COVID, a large portion of our workforce is remote right now. It turns out the company can run fine, you know, it's better for the individuals and the company from a financial perspective if we're not based in San Francisco. So I think I say that I, I actually, I read a, I read a blog yesterday by a, a VC that I follow, and he said, you know, there will still be a concentration of startups and venture activity in San Francisco. He said, I don't, I don't really expect that to change. He said, what I expect to change is this idea kind of the, the rise of everywhere else, right? That now we've got founders everywhere else, we've got companies operating everywhere else, we've got VCs that used to only wanna get on a plane to Austin or Boston from San Francisco. They've now realized, well, you know what? I could invest in a company in Columbus, Ohio because I've figured out how to get comfortable getting to know a founder and getting to know the business via Zoom. So it's, it's not so much that, you know, San Francisco's gonna totally go away. It's just that everywhere else is gonna, you know, elevate in terms of, you know, the amount of venture activity as a, as a measure for startup activity, right?

Vance Crowe [00:09:38] Yeah. I saw the mayor of Miami saying, Hey, you know, if you're leaving California, you should come here. And underneath his tweet were people saying, well, the reason that we were in California was not necessarily 'cause we love California, but it gave us some protections that made it possible for tech to have that fast turnover, not least of which is in California, you're not allowed to impose a non-compete, right?

Janette Barnard [00:10:01] And

Vance Crowe [00:10:01] So you'd have these high talent tech people that wanted to work in one space for two years, and they didn't wanna have to wait six months a year, 18 months Yeah. Before they could go work somewhere else. So now you're seeing this impetus of local bureaucracies to say, Hey, we have a reason to change some of our local laws because there's this chance to grab some of the influx. And I, I wonder if California just gave away their biggest competitive advantage was that they were a gravity. Well, they just, they were the place where tech went and now they won't have that same drawing power. And if everybody has to live in 380 square foot apartments or like where I was in DC a four 80 square foot apartment, they're gonna opt for other other things at least as they're in the kind of older years.

Janette Barnard [00:10:48] Absolutely. Well, and the one caveat I would offer is potentially it's the case that because San Francisco, or because California had that had those legal protections in place, and because they were the only ones for so long, perhaps that gave them enough start time, right advance that the, it's the concentration, now it's the networking effect of a geography. That's where the real value is, right? And so I think the question is at what's the tipping point of how much of that, you know, network effect that mass of companies and people doing similar-ish type work that derive value from being near each other, right? What's the tipping point of how, how far down can you draw that before the whole thing falls apart? And I, my hypothesis would be we're not near a point where the whole thing falls apart, but it is, it certainly the, we've drawn down a lot on that critical mass for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:11:50] Yeah. There's an author that I've just found recently, his name is David Goodheart, and he has this fascinating concept about the difference between somewhere people and anywhere people. And so anywhere people are the type of people that they say, Hey, I want a cosmopolitan lifestyle. I want this kind of fast-paced. The very thing you're describing, there's things always to do. There's, if I don't like the company I'm with, I'll just move to another company. I can, if I wanna leave a city, I'll just move from San Francisco to New York to Atlanta, whatever kind of a cosmopolitan life. And so their view of the world is much more of transactional. And you, you put that against somewhere, people who are the people that say, I am living in this place, not because it's the most beautiful or because it's the best for me economically, but because this is where my people are, I want to build here. Right? The somewhere where I'm at is actually fundamental to, to who I am. And I think you kind of stand in that interesting juxtaposition. You were in a cosmopolitan city living in anywhere lifestyle and are now suddenly back in Arizona as a somewhere person.

Janette Barnard [00:12:58] Yeah. So, okay, I haven't heard of that author. I'm gonna have to check him out. But it reminds me of, let's see, what's the book called? It's written by the Senator from Nebraska Bin SaaS, and I think the book is called Us Versus Them, why We Hate Each Other. But that's kind of a core hypothesis of his, of it's, there's these buckets of people, exactly what you say, of those who are transitory. They have a transactional relationship with their city, whether it's DC or San Francisco or wherever, versus those that are the, the pillar of their communities as they have been for years and years and years. And the, the impact that that makes on how people view politics, even so, not that I wanna talk about politics, but it, that's kind of the connection of where, where Ben SaaS takes it. But yes, it's, so it, that is another example of kind of these two worlds that I'm sometimes seem to be straddling a little bit.

Vance Crowe [00:13:53] Yeah. And I, I'm struck by like in, so I lived in anywhere life for most of my life. And in fact, when we moved to DC I made a point of telling basically everybody that I encountered like, yeah, we're just here for a little while because we're gonna get outta here and go to somewhere else that is more important than this. And it was an interesting shift that happened in my brain, because I remember when I would tell people I'm, Hey, I'm moving from Washington DC to St. Louis, and we would have this whole conversation about feeling landlocked. And as a guy that was a deckhand on a ship, you know, I was like, oh, I love the ocean. I need the ocean. And, but when I moved to St. Louis, I suddenly realized, like I lived in DC in New Jersey, like 10 minutes from the ocean, and I never went to see it. Never

Janette Barnard [00:14:40] Went.

Vance Crowe [00:14:41] So my concept of being landlocked is just based on when I look at a map, it's not actually that, but I feel like that is a perfa pervasive thought that occurs with people living on the coast, is that everywhere in the middle is landlocked and that they're somehow suffocating because they're not anywhere.

Janette Barnard [00:14:57] Right. Well, and it's kind of funny because, so I grew up in Arizona and then I lived indi, well I lived in DC for a period of time, lived in Indiana, then lived in Athens, Georgia, then lived in college Station Texas, and then Dallas, Texas before moving to San Francisco. And so I've never lived near the water, right? So living like a half a mile from the water, that was a, a major novelty. But yeah, that, that idea of being landlocked, that's never, yeah, I mean, I grew up in Arizona, so I've never had any aspirations to live by water per se, but, okay. Let me ask you this though. So those time periods in your life where, or that time period where you were living in anywhere life, would you change that? Or would the person that's now kind of a similar person, would you go back and tell your 20-year-old anywhere self to do it differently? Or do you think that's just the benefit of that phase?

Vance Crowe [00:15:48] Yeah, I think that in the past people kind of had that kind of get out of this gravity well, and go out and see what other gravity wells are about. But if you come back home, that's not necessarily a failure. And I think the one part about my mentality as a young person was that the people that have decided to be somewhere, people, they're no less intelligent, they're no less driven, they're no less worldly. They're, they're just different. They just chose pressures for something. And I think that that is, if I could go back and talk with my 20-year-old self, it would be like, you are definitely putting the fact that you are transactional and that you're willing to just move to all these places as somehow a moral virtue that doesn't actually exist. These are just what people are choosing to do, and there's no more or less moral. But I definitely had a sense that I was superior in some way because I had gotten out and seen things.

Janette Barnard [00:16:49] Right. Man, that, I think that that's such an interesting point. But also going back to the idea of, okay, how does, how does 2020 and everybody getting comfortable working remotely, how does that impact rural America? I would think that there are a lot of people that are living in cities for a certain job that still have ties to rural America that are, that would be interested in even if not moving back to exactly where they're from, moving back to small towns like where they're from. Right. And to the extent that remote work enables that, and instead of being on a plane every week, now it's once a month or once every two months, and we can do everything else remotely. I, my hypothesis is that that has a lot of potential to kind of revive small town America. I have this debate with some friends of mine who say, no, no, no, we've been hearing that for years and it hasn't really come to fruition, but obviously 2020 was a great accelerator along a a lot of dimensions. So curious if that will be one of them.

Vance Crowe [00:17:53] Yeah, I mean, so when I read David Goodhart's work on this, one of the thoughts that strikes me is that in the past, if you were an anywhere person, you were just in the city. And the people that are somewhere, people are somewhere else. Like, you know, the, the, they've chosen a location, but that now the internet and the fact that we have phones allows us to spend most of our attention on anywhere subjects, right? It, it's no easier or it's no more difficult to find out what's going on down the street with the people on your Facebook than they are to find out what the people from college did or these other people that are around somewhere else. And so that we have this weird gravity, well, that even though you could be living in rural America, you could be in El Paso, Illinois, but as soon as you're looking down at that phone and you're staring at the problems that are far away, you are in some way in anywhere person. Like those relationships that you have with the people online, you can mute them, you can block them, you can unfriend them because all of those relationships become transactional. Whereas when you're in the community, you're going to church or you're going to the PTA, right?

Janette Barnard [00:18:59] You

Vance Crowe [00:18:59] Can't treat people in that transactional way because you have to see them tomorrow or next week. And so there's yeah, some other dimension going on there that even if people were to move back to the city I, or to the small towns, I don't know that that would by virtue create them into being somewhere people.

Janette Barnard [00:19:19] That is an interesting point. So this a conversation that I have with a friend of mine in Idaho who in the last few years had moved back to his family's ranch. And he, you know, his point was, look, I can, I can still read The Economist, I can still read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and have this connection to what's happening in the bigger world, but also be here in this place. And so it is, it's like there's a third category here for hybrid people, right? Who have elements of the somewhere and elements of the anywhere people, right?

Vance Crowe [00:19:50] Yeah. I, I totally agree. I, and you're in this weird spot, which is the, the Silicon Valley agriculture. So my experience with that was when I was working at Monsanto, they had just purchased the Climate Corporation.

Janette Barnard [00:20:03] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:20:03] So you now had a whole bunch of coders that were focused on working on problems revolving around agriculture, many of whom they had literally never met a farmer, or they were working on problems where they could not differentiate. And this is no lie between like corn and soybeans. Like they knew what corn was, but they couldn't differentiate between any other

Janette Barnard [00:20:25] Thing

Vance Crowe [00:20:26] That would be placed out in the field. And that's a weird thing to be thinking that you've got these people that are going to be taking such a central role in how agriculture is going to play out, but they are anywhere people that actually are not connected with the world of agriculture.

Janette Barnard [00:20:44] Yeah. So I guess one way that I see that play out is I see, well, first of all, I mean, there are just a lot of companies that are applying technology to the wrong problems, right? They're like, oh, we can, we can take this iot, this sensor and apply it over here. Well, over here isn't really a relevant problem. So nobody buys it. And then, then it gets blamed that, well, agriculture is just slow to adopt. No, that's, that's, that's not necessarily true, right? But I, I guess what I see is I see the companies that recognize, they a recognize that pitfall of what happens when you're not closely connected, both, you know, figuratively and literally to your customers, is that you build the wrong thing and you fail. Right? They recognize that now. But then they also recognize farmers, especially large farmers, especially more innovative farmers, have a healthy degree of skepticism about, you know, every random company that comes out of San Francisco. And so what I see is more startups saying, well, we're based outta South Dakota, we're based out of Minnesota. Even if they still have part of the team that's in San Francisco, there's still a big emphasis on we have a Heartland presence, and that's where we're headquartered.

Vance Crowe [00:21:59] That is hilarious. I hadn't even considered that. And, and one of the things about having all of these coders that are in DC that, or not DC in in any one of the major cities, but I think a lot of them are in Silicon Valley and not having the engagement with the farmers is that I think a lot of people living in the city don't understand how many times farmers are approached by salespeople. Like, I, in your normal everyday life, if you're a, an employee at a job, or even if you're a business owner, there are very few professions that have as many salespeople that are knocking on your door. And, and it's not just like, Hey, they called the office and they got accounting, or they got procurement. It is that the individuals that are making those purchases Yeah. Have to interact with so many salespeople that it makes total sense to me that you would make great pains to brand yourself as a, as a somewhere company as opposed to an anywhere company.

Janette Barnard [00:22:58] Right? Right. Well, so it's such a good point though of producers. They've got, they've got all the people calling on them from a sales perspective. But then when you think about, when you start talking about technology, whether it's software or hardware, right? I've got 15 different imaging companies calling on me. How, how am I gonna sort through who's legit and who's not, right? Or I've got 15 different farm management software platforms calling me. I don't know how to tell the difference. And so I, I think that's where it gets even, you know, even messier. And I think that's where we've seen some companies that have a, a lot of venture capital, some might say too much kind of pour the gas on some sales efforts that maybe weren't super effective, maybe weren't super empathetic to their customer, right? Like, think of the number of farmers that you've probably heard that have said, you know, X, y, Z companies are, they've got an inside sales rep that's calling me every day, right? And I, I don't have time for that. I've got 15 other bigger decisions that I've gotta make. So there, it's funny, I actually, I have written, what I've been writing this week for Friday's Prime Future Newsletter is about this idea of convergence and about how, especially in the a animal ad tech market, we see it right now, there's all these single point solutions, right? My, my product does this one thing, that's fine. But in order for the producer to A, get the bigger value and B, make a better buying decision, and c for the company to have lower customer cost of acquisition, at some point, those all those all have to roll up, right?

Janette Barnard [00:24:40] And you can't have 47 different salespeople calling on one producer, right? So it, it just leads to this in the evolution of maturing of a market, this idea of rolling some of these single point solutions into platform approaches, which I, I think you're starting to see that on the crop side, and I think we need to see that on the animal ag tech side.

Vance Crowe [00:25:01] So you brought up your newsletter, yours is one of the very few. So I unsubscribe from basically anything that I get subscribed to. It's like a ritual every morning. Did I get any subscriptions? Okay, I'm going to unsubscribe from all of them. And, but yours, I don't, yours I read almost every single week, and it's one of three that I read every week. And the reason I like yours so much is that you're a heretic in a lot of ways. Like you say, things in that newsletter that I don't expect. And I think that that is the mark of either a crazy person or a, or a person that's like pushing on the envelope. So are you a crazy person or pushing on the envelope?

Janette Barnard [00:25:42] Oh, I think that definitely would depend on who you ask. I think there might be a lot of people that would vote the crazy person camp.

Vance Crowe [00:25:49] So talk about your newsletter. Why do you put it? Yeah. Why'd you put it together? What is it all about?

Janette Barnard [00:25:55] Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I'll say this. I, well, I'm gonna take this from two angles. One from the, the industry content angle, and then the second, from what I'm learning about kind of this personal content marketing, which it turns out is kind of a really interesting thing, which obviously you're the expert at this, but I have, I have written a lot in the past, just a one off LinkedIn article here, a one off LinkedIn article there. Then the company that I was with the last two and a half years, I wrote a lot of content for them that obviously all went under the company name, right? I left the company and now all that content lives with them. I don't love that. Right? And thinking of a world of being anywhere, people, and the idea that, you know, I will presumably be with multiple companies over the course of my career just kind of came to this point of, you know, what, if I'm gonna be writing content, I want it, I wanna under my name. And maybe that sounds a little bit egotistical, but I think that there are, you know, it's really about building relationships and building relationships with people who want to talk about what you're talking about. So that was where it came down for me of starting the newsletter, was the topics I wanna talk about are animal ag and innovation, so specifically beef, pork, and dairy. What's happening, what needs to happen. And, and my interest was not just from a tech lens, my interest was more from the lens of like, what's, what's happening in the bigger picture that's gonna impact what technology we need or that's gonna impact technology adoption or things like this, right?

Janette Barnard [00:27:29] The tech is a, the tech is interesting, but the tech is a means to an end of the bigger outcomes. So that's kinda my whole shtick, I guess. So I, I just started writing end of March, I call it my COVID project. And I've been, I've been really pleased with the response in terms of subscribers, and maybe it's people who just think I'm crazy, but,

Vance Crowe [00:27:51] Well, I think that it's the, there's a ton of value in having that repeated interaction. So, you know, if I get a once off blog that I read and Oh, that's interesting, but it takes several times, you know, one of the things they said, I used to work in public radio and they used to say, A person has to hear a request for make your donation seven times before it even dawns on them that their, that they could, that they themselves could donate. They, they always say, oh, that's for somebody else. And when I think about it in terms of your writing, I mean, just take for example, you and I have known each other for a couple of years. It didn't even dawn on me until one day I was reading your thing for the, you know, 30th time or something like that. And I was like, oh, why, why have I never asked her on the podcast? And it's one of those things that, that experience alone makes me realize just because somebody doesn't respond to something you're working on or something you've written the first 5, 10, 15, 20, it doesn't mean that they don't want it, it doesn't mean that you should feel discouraged. It just means like, it maybe just didn't dawn on them.

Janette Barnard [00:28:55] Right. Well, and the other thing, the other thing about writing that I find is it forces me to flesh out my ideas. And sometimes, sometimes that forcing mechanism comes after I've published a blog when, you know, five people reply and they say, well, what about X, Y, Z? And I'm like, well, either I didn't include X, Y, Z for this reason, or I actually didn't think about X, Y, Z. So there's just this really nice forcing function for me of clarifying my thoughts of, of getting that, getting that out. I mean, I, I still, I don't know what it's like for you releasing the podcast, but you know, I still get butterflies in my stomach every time I hit send on a newsletter, even though I've been doing it for 35 weeks now, just because you are, you are putting your ideas out there, which inherently invites people to say that is a silly idea. But I think we need more people putting silly ideas out there just to spark conversations than playing it safe. And, you know, just texting, texting the idea to their two friends. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:29:58] Well, I can't even think of any article that was written under, under the corporate name where somebody didn't write, put some skin in the game by saying, this is an article by me that I've ever thought was all that valuable. I mean, occasionally there's an, you know, some anonymous article that maybe has a bit of data that I wanted to see, but normally it's in the graph that they shared as opposed to the content of their ideas. Because when you, when your ideas go from being, these are my individual ideas that I wanna propose for you to think about to these are the ideas of the corporation. Well, in the corporation, you're always going to have to water that down to the person with power that has the minimum threshold for risk. And so for me, like I, I, it totally makes sense to me, not only why a person would want to do that, but that if, if, if I'm reading something, I really only wanna read something that has a byline.

Janette Barnard [00:30:54] Yeah. That's, that's a Well, and I'm sure you appreciate that you've lived that point through your career of, of who you've worked for.

Vance Crowe [00:31:04] Oh, a hundred percent. And frankly, like, if I'm being candid, the people that are communications, people that are writers or professional writers that have been doing it for five or 10 years, I don't actually care what they have to say. And, and a large part of it is because they never put themselves in that firing line where somebody says, no, your specific ideas were wrong, or I disagree with you specifically. Because if you hide behind that veil of the corporate protection and the anonymous thing, if you are not taking those shots, then you're actually not learning. You know, and you could say, well, I, you know, I posted that article and it got some comments in the, in the, in the bottom. Yeah. But it's a different thing when somebody is saying, Jeanette, your ideas are stupid than it is like, oh, this company put out ideas that we don't agree with.

Janette Barnard [00:31:54] Right. Well, and one of the, I mean, I don't know how you measure success when a company puts out a thing other than, you know, like with a startup, I was with success was in the number of leads that were generated, right? So that lead magnets, for me, success is in, I mean, I have, I literally have a, a page in my Evernote notebook that says outcomes. And so for me, I keep track of who are the interesting people that I got introduced to, or I got to talk to or they engaged. Even if it was just via email, I actually, I mean, I don't, I did a podcast episode with Lamar Steiger, who was basically the producer mastermind that somehow worked the bureaucracy that is Walmart to drive their, their new supply chain. So Tim Ridge, let me do an interview of Lamar on the future Ag podcast. The way I got introduced to Lamar is that some person who I have never once met, but replies back to almost every prime future newsletter with an idea, he had sent me an email and he said, Hey, you need to meet Lamar. I think you guys would have a lot to talk about. And then that led to this, you know, opened up this whole great conversation. So I say that to say, for me it's about the outcomes of what's the interesting conversation or the interesting person that I get to talk to as a result of being willing to write. So I mean, how do you, how do you think about it in, I mean, in, in terms of podcasts, right? It's, it's gotta be more than just the numbers.

Vance Crowe [00:33:23] Yeah. I mean, if it is only the numbers, the problem is that it's just like a junkie, right? Like, so let's say you got yes, 10,000 downloads, right? Then the next week if you got, you know, 5,000 downloads, you, you feel like I have just been a failure and nothing in my life is complete and I should just quit. So you do have to have those other things that are going on. And as I think about the, the, the momentum that corporate communications departments have, oftentimes they're like, Hey, let's plan a calendar for what we're gonna talk about in May of 2021. Right? And that's okay. 'cause you're trying to organize a whole bunch of people and you know, if you wanna keep everybody busy, you've gotta make sure everybody knows what you're doing. However, there is no possible way to know what is going to be an important subject that your people are going to demand to want to know more about. And if you're just doing it that way, your writing department is really no different than a billboard department where all you're doing is going and like hanging up billboards and saying, download this information for the way you think, but we're not actually interested in that give and take.

Janette Barnard [00:34:32] Right. Well, and, and think about, think about all that's hap even just with an ag, right? Think about all that's happened in 2020 that if you had set out a year prior, or even a quarter prior to, to build your content calendar, you would have been speaking to topics that made you sound so incredibly tone deaf that not only would your effect have been neutral to non-existent, it would've been negative 'cause everybody would, you know, you just wouldn't have resonated. And I think that actually happens a lot, even still from corporate communications, not to back on corporate communications, but that's just a risk is you just, you sound so tone deaf because you can't be relevant because you're not, you know, operating on a timely enough manner, right? You're trying to get too far ahead of where the world moves.

Vance Crowe [00:35:22] And as you are thinking about the time when you hit that send button where you were the most nervous to hit it, certainly like the early ones, right? But like, what's an idea that you put out into the world that you're like, I don't, I don't know about this one. Do you have one that comes to mind yet?

Janette Barnard [00:35:40] Okay, I'm gonna bring, I, yeah, I definitely have one that comes to mind. What's one thing I've realized is I never know what's gonna resonate with people. So some of the things that I think are the most controversial people are like, yeah, okay, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. That's not controversial. Why are we gonna debate that? And then others that I think are the opposite, people wanna debate them, right? Anyway, one that did not get, it didn't get too much traction, but when we started to realize that 40% of farm income in 2020 was coming from the government, I wrote a blog called Bailouts are a bandaid, and you wanna talk about heretical, this is getting into some heretical space, right? I'm not saying that we don't need a safety net, right? And that it is, we, we, we, we don't need to have mechanisms in place to, to, to maintain some production here. That's not, that's not what I'm saying. My point is when we bailouts are short term, right? That was when there needed to be two, two rounds of, what was it? The CAP program. There was two rounds of it because once the first one was gone, it was gone. And those producers are now onto, okay, what's the, what's the next thing? My point is why can't we in the US take a little bit longer term view, similar to what Australia has done in terms of focusing on ag tech and innovation.

Janette Barnard [00:37:14] And I know we do that in a, you could argue that we do that through, through USDA research through the extension service. You could argue that we do take a long-term view. I don't, I don't know that we really do. And I don't know that if you, if you set, if you set expenditures of research and of long-term view initiatives out of the USDA budget next to subsidies out of the USDA budget, I don't know that those are gonna come out exactly how we, we want them to. And I, again, I'm gonna offer the caveat, 2020 was a weird year, right? I get it. It was absolutely a weird year and there were a lot of things that we couldn't have anticipated. However, it was coming off the heels of a multi-year trade war with China, right? This is not a brand new phenomenon that commodity prices had been depressed, it wasn't an election year. Would we have seen those same levels of subsidies if it wasn't in an election year? Probably some people that are like turning off the podcast right about now. So sorry about that Vance. But well,

Vance Crowe [00:38:16] I mean, I think it's, it's a good discussion to have. That is one of those things that I think ag likes to think of itself as, oh, we're open, we like have these free ranging discussions, but this is one that touches people pretty hard. The one of the questions that I have for people when we talk about subsidies is how do you expect new people to enter the ag space if the people that are there are always being floated? It it, or if the, if in large part, the, the people that were about to fail got help from the government, so their business stayed on. And I know that the, the counterbalance of this is, well, right now the only people that are buying 'em up are big companies, right? They're, they're the, the large ag that can farm thousands and thousands of acres. But one of the reasons that you get that is because, because there is so much land or money injected into the farm system, land prices go up that are, that are separated from what does the land actually produce. And they become an annuity where you say, we know the government is going to give us x amount of dollars for this. And I, you know, that that sets up a system where you don't have failure. So you can't have regenerative growth in, in, in the waste of, of somebody that didn't quite make it

Janette Barnard [00:39:30] Right. Well, and this, so again, I don't wanna talk politics, but I mean, I guess I brought this up, but it does get interesting then, because when you sit down to have that conversation, typically there's gonna be some version of someone saying, I believe in open free markets, right? Like, that's gonna be typically a cornerstone of that conversation. Okay, let's, let's talk about that. How open, how, how, how free are these markets that we're talking about? And then the other element of it is, and for the producer that's still listening and hasn't completely turned us off right now, I mean, I think the other element is I hear a lot of farmers that are at the same time applying for that CAP check, which is fine, right? It's there, it's there to support rock on, take it. I'm not criticizing that at all. But those people would also might be a little bit critical of a single mother applying for food stamps.

Vance Crowe [00:40:31] Oh, I mean, you look at the budget lines, I

Janette Barnard [00:40:32] Think that's just a place where we gotta be intellectually honest about this.

Vance Crowe [00:40:36] Yeah. And if you look at the comparison of the, like, the size of checks that people are getting, the welfare mom, it's gonna take her what, 30 years to collect that much from the government Yeah. Relative to what somebody might get for a single year. And I mean, like I think if you were doing this as a once off, that, that might be okay. But it's just like anything else, any group that gets handouts that now can add that into their budget line. I had a guy on named Tommy gfi, and he made the point that 90% of the American farmers accepted money from, I think it might even been higher than accepted money from the government. In what way are you not a government employee then?

Janette Barnard [00:41:13] Exactly, exactly. And I, the thing to me is, look, I'm not trying to say throw the baby out with the bath water. That's not what I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to criticize anyone. I'm just trying to say let's, I think there needs to be a pragmatic approach to this. And I think there needs to be a balancing of short-term objectives with long-term viability of the industry. And so from an innovation standpoint, what are we doing to foster more research, more innovation, you know, whether that's, you know, startup grants or what have you. I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying I'm,

Vance Crowe [00:41:51] You and I, you and I are startup game different poles here. You, you and I are in different poles here because I think the money that has gone to, from the government that goes to fund startups is like asking the DMV to find a race car driver. It's like, you know, they're, they're not actually designed for that. They're designed for some other purpose. And when they start making selections on how the market will behave or who we should fund, I, I think very, very few positive things have ever come out of that that wouldn't have been figured out in an open market.

Janette Barnard [00:42:22] So on the one hand, completely agree with you, right? And I think that that therein lies the trap of, if we say we want the government to be in the business of fostering future innovation, that's that we need to have a lot of conversations about the role of government and how that's gonna be administered and blah, blah, blah. Right? So I'm I'm with you on that. I'm just saying if you look at 2020, the point is the government is very involved in agriculture already. Full stop. We can talk about what we want the role of government to be, but the government is right squarely in the middle of the ag industry. So my point is just let's, let's spend some time thinking about short-term versus long-term wins and what that looks like. The other thing I would say, I think what I've kind of realized this year is that you talk about venture capital and the role of venture capital, right? So that's venture capital, it's the riskiest stages that you can invest in. It's the riskiest asset class. So you have expectations of outsized returns, right? Nothing new there. Vvcs invest, you know, pre-revenue, pre-market traction. Sometimes VCs are investing pre-product. Okay? I think you can make an argument though that perhaps sometimes the government does the, the riskiest investing in basic research, right? So think about like basic research and the number of innovations that have come from the Department of Defense, whether it's the internet or you know, satellite technology, GPS, all of these that came from basic research funded from the government.

Janette Barnard [00:43:58] I'm not making making any assessment of what we should do with that. How, where that should be allocated, whether we should scale that up or dial that back. I'm just making the observation that if you look at just tiers of risk, risk capital and where it fits, when you think about that basic research that is funded by the government, truly that is the riskiest capital. But

Vance Crowe [00:44:25] I think we could also

Janette Barnard [00:44:26] Say over the long horizon it's paid off. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:44:30] I see your point. But I would say that in the role of the defense, when they're doing development of new technologies, it is because they have a very clear purpose, right? A government is formed first and foremost to protect the people from outside threats. And so it that the defense spending is perfectly in line with what the government is designed to do. We need to be able to spy on other people, see during fog when, when nobody else can, when we're flying our jets, or we wanna be able to shoot missiles a certain distance. And so I think there's a clarifying effect, whereas when you're talking about agriculture, it's not as simple as we wanna sell the most grain is humanly possible because there's supply and demand, there's transportation, there's all these other things. Yep. And so because you don't have that clarifying effect, the government's direct role is make sure food gets produced, then, then you have perverted incentives and then it becomes the, the bureaucracy figuring out how to navigate the bureaucracy is the way that they determine how those things get allocated.

Janette Barnard [00:45:32] Yeah. So on the, I on the one hand completely agree with you. On the other hand, I think there's probably a lot more just discovery research that's done than what we give credit to that isn't necessarily, isn't necessarily allocated to go look up this and figure out if it can do x, that it's more just discovery in nature. But also right here, I'm just gonna admit, I'm hypothesizing. I would love to find some interesting books or, you know, case studies about it. So,

Vance Crowe [00:46:03] Well I am a, I'm, I'm a mees kind of Austrian economics person, so you would have to like hit me over the head with like really compelling case to get me to change my point of view. But I am probably as illiterate in this area as as you're describing, because I'm just like, in theory, this is the way things work In theory is actually a great way to transition to a question. I'm very interested in your thoughts on which is the future of synthetic meat. So you come from a cattle ranch, you're a part of the whole ag system, and every once in a while, every couple of of months, the idea that synthetic meat is gonna come in and disrupt the supply chain is thrown out there. And then there's other people that say there's no chance it'll never happen. What are your thoughts, first of all, what is synthetic meat and, and where do you think its future potential is?

Janette Barnard [00:46:53] Yeah, so I would just first of all draw the distinction. 'cause I think sometimes there's some confusion of, when we talk about the category of alternative meats, that includes the first category of plant-based, which is on the market, right? That's, that's beyond meat. That's impossible Foods, that's, you know, your Kroger private label at this point, right? That's just plant-based protein. It's on the market. It is what it is. There's a lot of, a lot of venture capital going behind that to brand and market that, but it is what it is. It's here, there's nothing technologically challenging about it. It's a consumer acceptance challenge that they have, right? Which they're marketing their way through. Then the second category, which is what you're talking about of synthetic meats, so cell cultured meat, meat that is grown in a lab. Advocates would say it's still meat because you are, you are starting from animal cells, right? That's what that is. What you are growing this from, you are culturing this product. So it's kind of funny, a couple of years ago I had, I kind of bought into a lot of the, a lot of the hype and especially being in San Francisco, I, I had bought into the hype in terms of like the inevitability of the category to, to be successful. And then I started talking with a couple of venture people at some of the processors, the meat processors who have invested in some of these startups. And they were saying, look, we're investing in these companies.

Janette Barnard [00:48:24] We're we're, we're keeping this door open. We don't, we don't see a path, there is not a projected timeline of when this is gonna be economically feasible. We can't tell you when that is. Maybe it's in five years, maybe it's in 20 years, maybe the venture capital bubble dries up before that technology has the chance to really work out its unit economics. So, and that's coming from people who are, who are betting on it, right? So there's that, I've done some due diligence recently looking at looking at some of the startups in the space. And you know, the, the challenge, the challenge is just the cost of production, right? Nobody buys a pound of synthetic ground beef. If it costs a hundred dollars a pound, there's, there's not a market for that, right? Beyond, you know, some five pounds a year kind of market, right? It's super tiny. So they, they're, they're big challenge is they have to get the cost down. That said, there are more and more companies that are working on innovating around the specific drivers of cost of synthetic meats. And so potentially, you know, that that cost does come down. The other piece of it is that my hypothesis is there's a little bit of a venture capital bubble around synthetic meat. There is so much capital that has gone in. It is the generally accepted view that synthetic meat will disrupt the animal protein market. And so I just wonder if, if, if we're now trying to solve problems with money, that money can't actually solve because these are, these are technology problems, right?

Vance Crowe [00:50:04] Yeah. Or even that demand will actually be there for one of the most interesting things, one of my clients is in the baking industry. And so I recently was reading some research on this. People's eating habits changed more in the last nine months, at least with regards to baking than they've probably changed in a hundred years, right? Like there was, so people went from being like, I don't like carbs, I want only keto, or I want, you know, something else to buying massive amounts of packaged, baked goods, doing huge amounts of baking at home. Like the, there was a, a shortage of flour and this actually extended even beyond when restaurants started to be able to allocate their flour out. Like this demand was huge. And you have to wonder, you're throwing all that venture capital money towards synthetic meat because there's this driver, there has been this drive away from animal agriculture when it really just took a pandemic for people to go out and buy all the meat on all the shelves that they could find anywhere.

Janette Barnard [00:51:07] Right? Right. I mean, it was effectively, it was effectively the comfort food category, right? And across all of animal protein, whether that's dairy, you know, butter, cheese or meat, that's where the shelves were empty. That's what people defaulted to. It's, it's just interesting. I also, so I I do like to play that game of what impact will it have and what is the time horizon for synthetic meets. The game that I'm more interested in playing though is how do we use that as a catalyst for the actual animal protein production industry to address the things that consumers are saying are, are concerning, right? Or that customers are saying are concerning. And how do we just say, you know what, there is this existential threat coming. It, it may never come to fruition. It may be a long time, but we probably need to not get complacent in the meantime. So that's kind of more of the message that I'm interested in, is how do we then align the right resources and capital and people around the big problems that need solving in animal agriculture.

Vance Crowe [00:52:14] Well, and then in animal ag, the, one of the big things that happened during coronavirus was this huge upswing of people actually being willing to pay for local. Do you, when you're looking at this, do you think, ah, this is just kind of a blip because it was insecure and people are doing that? Or would you say, no, this local thing now got the traction it needed to be able to drive forward in some meaningful way?

Janette Barnard [00:52:36] Yeah, so I haven't seen any aggregate numbers, right? But just anecdotally, talk to any producer trying to get a appointment at their local custom packing plant and they can't get an appointment for another 12 to 18 months, right? So if we, if if somebody had the calculation of what's the total custom packing plant capacity in the us we would know that that's, that's roughly the number of, of locally processed animals that have been bought in 2020 and plan to purchase for 2021. So let's say that number, you know, two to three x from what it was in 2019, even if it comes back down, some we're still significantly further ahead than where we were. Right? So I expect that trend to continue, even if it's not at the same pandemic levels. I think there are enough people that have, they went and bought a freezer and so now they have the freezer capacity, and so they want the, the, the beef in that freezer. It obviously raises the, the gigantic bottleneck for that local market is processing capacity. And so that's the, that's the piece that we've gotta figure out. It's, it's, there are reasons that the packing industry is structured the way it is. There are reasons that packers build bigger and bigger plants and, and so the economics and the value proposition of working through that processing capacity question at a local level, it's a tough one. And it's not, it, it's not gonna be figured out overnight, but that's the, that's the big bottleneck. That's what we've gotta figure out some way.

Vance Crowe [00:54:08] Do you imagine that the Cargills and ADMs and the companies that had made investments into synthetic meat because they wanted to keep an eye on it. Will they also try and do some sort of decentralization? Will they create custom packing plants or smaller avenues for people to get their, their meat out?

Janette Barnard [00:54:26] I, I don't see it happening just, just because of the, the margins and the economics of it. I think it's much more likely to be some sort of, you know, private equity type capital that does some aggregation that builds new capacity. I don't, I don't see it being the big packers. I mean, they're just, they're, they're playing the volume game and if the, if the local game were big enough that they, you know, it was meaningful to win in that then there would be incentive there. But I, I, I just think there, it's, it's too fragmented. They're, they're just two completely separate business models. So I think it's, I think private equity is the most likely capital source to solve the processing problem.

Vance Crowe [00:55:06] Well that goes along with my, my hypothesis that somebody ought to buy up the old packing plants in East St. Louis and, and start 'em back up and start supplying local meat to here locally. Well, I know you have a very busy day ahead of you, so I'm gonna let you go, but before I do, if people wanted to find you, they wanted to sign up for your newsletter, how would they do that?

Janette Barnard [00:55:26] Yeah, you can just go to prime future.substack.com to sign up or shoot me an email at jeanette barnard@gmail.com.

Vance Crowe [00:55:36] And are you on the, the Twitters, are you out there on social media?

Janette Barnard [00:55:41] I am on the Twitters, Jeanette Joy B is my handle. And then also on LinkedIn as well.

Vance Crowe [00:55:46] Well, thanks so much for, for joining me. We will definitely have you back on and talk more about Ag Tech and, and the weird world of anywhere people.

Janette Barnard [00:55:55] Sounds great. Thanks man.