November 11, 2019

By Michelle Pelletier Marshall, GAI Media

With more than 20 years of experience in corporate sustainability, environmental management and consumer engagement, Wood Turner, senior vice president of Agriculture Capital (AC), is committed to furthering the investment group’s mission to develop a regenerative food and agriculture system that produces better food at scale and delivers healthy returns to investors while making a difference in communities.

The fund management company, based in Portland, Oregon, invests in vertically integrated permanent crop operations, which includes a portfolio of more than 18,500 acres of table grapes, blueberries, hazelnuts, and citrus orchards in California, Oregon, and Australia. It also holds synergistic midstream assets to round out an enterprise that cultivates, packs, and markets high-value produce. With these assets under management, Agriculture Capital maintains an outlook that is committed to deploying regenerative ag practices across both organic and conventional farms.

Just last month Agriculture Capital released its third annual impact report – Regenerative Food – The Value of Scale, 2019 Impact Report – outlining the continued positive impact that its regenerative farming practices are having on the environment, economy, and labor force, while also generating favorable financial returns. “We are committed to being transparent about the opportunities created by focusing on positive impact and advancing a larger conversation about the real value of purposeful investing,” said Turner.

GAI News got the chance to chat with Turner to get more details on Agriculture Capital’s integration of regenerative practices, and the results quantified in their latest report.

1). The report states: “We believe when we bring a sense of responsibility – for the planet, for our communities, for our employees, and for our customers – it represents a mindset that fundamentally helps us reduce exposure to risk.” Can you please explain the relationship between the parts of this equation?

Our core investment thesis is guided by our own three R’s: risk, responsibility, and return as we find thoughtful ways to enhance return potential through a focus on regenerative activities. If we are reducing risk, and demonstrating responsible agricultural management practices, then we can generate enhanced returns. A good example of that for us, which you can see in the report, is our focus on wild bee conservation. Globally, our working lands have been degraded, which has had a huge impact on pollinator populations across the globe and is a huge risk to our food supply.

It’s important from a risk management perspective for us to be intentional about conserving wild bee habitats in and around our farms to reduce our dependence on imported honeybees for pollination. And right now, most farms that rely on pollination are relying on non-native honeybees for that service, which is an enormous expense and a huge risk. Our expectation is that bringing more wild bee activity to our farms will ultimately lead to higher yields and increased returns. Overall, we believe being a sustainability-minded land manager provides benefits to our communities, our employees, our customers, and the planet.

2.) Agriculture Capital creates checks and balances through a tiered regenerative management framework. How does this system work?

We call our management the AC Way. It is an effort to align all of our different business teams around the same set of core values and mission-driven practices. There are about 150 practices that fall into many different categories related to water management, employee health, soil health, habitat, energy management, and so on that we have prioritized into five tiers as part of the AC Way. We set goals each year around each of these tiers through specific activities on the farms and we track progress each quarter. Each year we expand the practices and ask our team members – which includes over 400 individuals across California, Oregon, Washington, and Australia – to grow within this framework.

The AC way is designed to be in line with our budgeting practices as well as our overarching organizational goals. It’s a great way to align teams that may be distant from each other, building connectivity across our business and growing our culture. We can build conversations through this framework across our business to have more impact than if those activities were only isolated to one project or one team.

3.) You have built your mission with respect to global yardsticks, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Please elaborate on the importance of collaboration in the proliferation of the regenerative ag effort.

There is a growing conversation about the value of regenerative agriculture in helping sequester carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere, and in protecting the soil and improving water quality – critical activities that have real value to all of us. It’s really an important demonstration that the work we do is aligned with high-integrity initiatives, like the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN Principles for Responsible Investing. We work to ensure that when we focus a lot of time and effort and resources on specific activities, they are both scientifically meaningful and relevant to larger impact collaborations. This is so critical because the more we are working on solutions that others are also working on globally, the more likely we are to move towards solutions that create a lasting, positive impact on our planet and global food systems.

Measuring against the UN’s SDGs has led to some very active and exciting partnerships. One of these is with The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, an organization that has helped us with conservation practices and habitat design in our pollinator program. We’ve also partnered with the healthy soils program supported by the California Department of Food and Ag, as well as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Department. We believe in having deep relationships with different kinds of organizations to grow the scale of these meaningful, high-impact initiatives. We don’t want to be operating in a vacuum, so we put into action one of the core goals of the UN’s SDGs which is to utilize partnerships to generate positive outcomes and solutions.

4.) You mentioned Agriculture Capital’s focus on native pollinator restoration, what results have been realized with these efforts and what is the long-term impact?

We’ve been focused on wild bee conservation since 2014 and have active wild bee conservation practices in action on two farms in Oregon, one in the California Delta, and soon to be on several other farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Since our start, we have built high-integrity partnerships with organizations that are focused on bee conservation in an effort to redesign some of our farms and facilitate more wild bee activity. This year, we are proud to report that from 2016 to 2018, through field studies, we saw a 232 percent increase in wild bee presence on our farms. This is a huge change that resulted from getting the habitat established and managed appropriately. We’ve also studied the activity of wild bees closer to hedgerows and meadows around our farms and seen more activity there, which shows us that there’s a real functional benefit to thinking about where these corridors, rows, and meadows are placed and how they support our crops and the pollinators that help produce our food.

Our management strategy is threefold. First, it’s focused on conserving existing native habitat around our farms; second, it’s about restoring native plant communities in new areas; and third, it’s about focusing on specific management activities, such as having appropriate buffers, pest scouting, and spraying at times when the bees are not active – all to ensure that there is no damage to the habitat as a result of other farm activities. One of the things we were able to do in 2019 because of these extensive efforts was to establish several of our farms in Oregon as Bee Better Certified^TM.

I am guardedly optimistic that the more bees we have, the better our overall farm performance will be.

5.) There’s a lot of talk in the sector about building more sustainable and transparent systems, particularly due to increased demand from consumers. In your experience, can this happen and still generate acceptable returns for investors? Does this more positive impact, purposeful goal prolong the already long-term rate of return in agricultural investing?

The alignment between risk management and returns is very clear. If you are managing environment, social, and governance (ESG) risks effectively, that is going to have an ultimate business benefit. Whether this is for business continuity or recruiting employees, or building connections with consumers, we believe this will have a measurable benefit. There continues to be growing interest from consumers around where their food comes from.

We believe that operating with a regenerative mindset, a commitment to the health of the planet, and a growing demonstration of transparency, helps keep us connected to evolving conversations consumers are having. Our determined pollinator campaign shows this connection between consumer desires and environmental impact. Many consumers are increasingly concerned about global pollinator risk. By driving a positive conversation around that concern, we can help build a better environment and hopefully attract shoppers when they are making purchasing decisions.

We think these actions translate into better, longer-term, more resilient investments that are attractive to investors wherever they are in the value chain.

6.) This is the third annual report. How has what started as a measuring tool for your company grown to further support the business and industry as well?

We set out very deliberately when we started our business to have excellence, accountability, transparency, stewardship, and a regenerative mindset at the core of our organization. Our Impact Reports are a crucial way that we report out in a transparent way about our practices and progress. This reporting process became something that has helped us articulate our point of view, interests, and goals, and helped make all of these a reality inside our business. As we’ve grown and expanded our operations and continued to refine our measurement process with our teams, it’s improved our shared vocabulary across the business, it’s improved our culture around our mission, and it’s helped bring forward opportunities for excellence in so many different ways.

When managing sustainability in a business, it cannot be a siloed function. For it to be effective it has to be something that every single function across an organization embraces as its responsibility — it is not separate from core job descriptions; it is absolutely essential to every job in the company. What we are driving towards and what this report shows is that ideas and opportunities emerge from every corner of our business. People really want to sink their teeth into this work. This is certainly not a box-checking exercise; this is about trying to invest real resources and real time into a lot of different kinds of work that are designed to drive impact and economic benefit. And the more we engage across the business and ask questions and build deeper relationships, the more impactful that work is going to be over time.

The beauty of this reporting process becomes much bigger than telling our investors what we are doing; it becomes a tool for storytelling and connectivity across all our employees and for communicating with all of our customers and consumers. Most importantly, it is also a public document that helps guide industry leadership. As our business has matured, it’s been really exciting to see how the discipline of this exercise every year has helped bring more depth and meaning to its purpose.

ABOUT WOOD TURNER

As senior vice president at Agriculture Capital, Wood Turner is focused on integrating and operationalizing the firm’s cross-platform sustainability strategies. Previously, he held positions at Stonyfield Farm as vice president of sustainability innovation, and was founding executive director of Climate Counts, respectively. Turner has consulted to brands, elected officials, and public agencies on mobilizing the public around ideas that improve the environment and build community, including food waste recovery programs and citizen engagement programs.

 Turner holds a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a graduate degree in urban and environmental planning from the University of Washington. He advises several sustainable food startups, including the food innovation accelerator Food System 6, and sits on the advisory boards of the Center for Good Food Purchasing the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Sustainable Food Initiative. 

~ Michelle Pelletier Marshall is managing editor for Global AgInvesting’s quarterly GAI Gazette magazine and an occasional contributor to GAI News. She can be reached at mmarshall@globalaginvesting.com.