S4 Ep31: Will the World Wake Up to Revolutionize Our Food System with John Roulac
“There are a lot of good opportunities to make the world better. The question is, will we do it?” — John Roulac
We are at a crossroads. There's a very large transition that we need to make as humans, in order to ensure the future of our planet. We must shift away from industrial agricultural methods as, without question, these methods currently fall short in many ways. They create soil degradation, water pollution, deforestation, and other global environmental issues that we are trying so hard to combat.
For thousands of years, farmers and gardeners have used plants as our most powerful tools for regenerating the landscape, expanding carbon sequestration, providing healthy food choices, and feeding the communities around us. We are living in a time where it is crucial that we make these lands functional again.
In this episode, Justine and Bridget interview John Roulac, the founder of the organic superfoods brand Nutiva and Executive Producer of Netflix Blockbuster's hit, Kiss the Ground. John has been passionate about the environment from youth on and has made it his life’s mission to revolutionize the way the world eats, and today he’s sharing how he was able to do that effectively over the years. John also shares the unspoken truths about industrial agriculture, how our everyday choices impact the environment on a larger scale, and how important regenerative agriculture is to securing the Earth’s future. Tune in to hear design ideas to make agriculture more efficient and sustainable.
Connect with John:
John is a hemp innovator, serial entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, writer, and champion of regenerative agriculture.
In 1999, John founded the organic superfoods brand Nutiva. He has sourced and formulated $1B in retail sales of organic superfoods in the past 20 years. Through his leadership, Nutiva became the fastest-growing superfoods company on the planet and was named one of Inc. magazine’s fastest-growing companies in America for seven years in a row.
He is also an executive producer of the Netflix blockbuster regenerative agriculture film Kiss the Ground, narrated by Woody Harrelson.
John was blessed to spend his childhood summers on the islands in the Pacific Northwest, where he played among the forests and tide pools. When nuclear waste was dumped nine miles from his California home, John’s ecological awareness was awakened. He began his central life journey: to study natural systems and discover practical solutions to pressing environmental challenges.
Over his career, John has founded six non-profit organizations, including Great Plains Regeneration, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities (creating regenerative food forests), and Forests Forever, which placed the California Forest Protection Act, Prop 130, on the California state ballot in 1990. His passionate hemp advocacy brought him to sue the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. This long legal battle culminated in a historic 2004 federal court victory to keep hemp foods legal. He is a pioneer of the modern home-composting movement and has authored four books on hemp and composting that have combined sales of more than one million copies. He has been interviewed on numerous radio and television programs and has been widely quoted in the print media—from WIRED magazine to the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal.
In his leisure time, John enjoys travel, hiking, playing basketball, and soaking in natural hot springs.
Connect with Nutiva:
Connect with Great Plains Regeneration:
Connect with AgroForestry Regeneration Communities:
Connect with Forest Forever:
Connect with Bridget (Dine & Design Co-Host):
A native from NZ, Bridget Cooper moved to NY when she was 18 to pursue a career in Interior Design. This journey started a life of the International jet set for Cooper, as travel became the source of inspiration and resource for herself and so many of her clients.
Her innate ability to seek out the extraordinary is the foundation for curating layered interiors and unforgettable experiences. This has built her a reputation in the design world as the “one in the know” and “to know”.
Bridget’s interior work ranges from chic high-rise apartments in Chicago and NY to modern farmhouses in Northern California. In recent years, Bridget Cooper has expanded her creative talents working on many commercial projects and events creating unforgettable experiences on both big and small scales. Bridget delights in over-thinking every detail and loves pushing the boundaries to keep things fresh and unexpected.
Currently, Bridget and her husband Rob have moved from SF to Ojai, Ca (a small town north of Los Angeles) where they are building Iverson house.
Episode Highlights:
01:41 What Am I Eating?
05:33 The Hemp (and Plants in General) Controversy
08:38 The Red Palm Wonder
13:59 Kiss the Ground
18:13 Regenerative Agriculture is Hope
24:09 Team Regeneration
30:14 The Most Destructive Thing in the World
34:20 Agri Design Ideas
Resources:
Documentary:
Tweets:
The time has come for a revolution in our global food system. Learn how regenerative agriculture brings hope and how to move to a more regenerative future with @_NextGenChef, Bridget Cooper, and @johnwroulac founder of @ nutiva and Exec Producer of Netflix’s Kiss the Ground. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #plants #diet #hemp #redpalm #certifiedorganic #soilhealth #agroforestry #regenerativeagriculture #climatechange #oceanacidification #teamregeneration #netflix #kisstheground
Inspirational Quotes:
01:55 “It was the best thing that happened though because it led me to ‘what am I eating?’ Because most 21-year-olds don't bother about what they eat. You just eat for whatever.” -John Roulac
02:36 “Our environment and our diet are linked together.” -John Roulac
04:20 “Diversity is a real strength. When I have diverse people in the company, we do a lot better.” -John Roulac
07:20 “Plants are not bad. How we develop it, how we grow it, genetically modify it and spray toxic chemicals is why we have all these cancers and immune issues.” -John Roulac
07:34 “People are fixated. Plants are good. Meat is bad. Well, it's not quite that simple.” -John Roulac
15:24 “Climate change is the issue. That's a big environmental issue and soil health is not even a discussion!” -John Roulac
16:53 “Sustain what we have!” -Justine Reichman
17:25 “Regenerate has a potential to essentially awaken a sleeping, brainwashed society.” -John Roulac
18:31 “Regenerative agriculture is a hope. We need to do it because Planet Earth and ecological systems are collapsing rapidly.” -John Roulac
23:48 “It starts with one person and it starts with effort. If we don't make any effort, nothing happens.” -Justine Reichman
25:13 “People have to make the change inside, and that's not always so easy.” -John Roulac
29:34 “We're trying to provide a platform so that people can be more educated and can make more informed choices.” -Justine Reichman
34:11 “Working hard is important. Building the right team culture is important.” -John Roulac
36:47 “There are lots of good opportunities to make the world better. The question is, will we do it?” -John Roulac
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Good afternoon, welcome to Dine & Design. I'm Justine Reichman, your co host. Today with me is Bridget Cooper, my other co host, and John Roulac, founder of Nutiva, and a variety of other things. I don't know where to begin. Maybe you can help us jump right in.
John Roulac: Well, I produced a film called Kiss the Ground, about a focus on regenerative agriculture narrated by Woody Harrelson that said like a Netflix blockbuster, has been doing really well. Yeah, I came out with that about a year ago.
Justine Reichman: I want you to tell us about all your things, but I'd love to also give a little synopsis on that afterwards. Because we do have some viewers, maybe just a few that don't know what that is. Probably most do.
John Roulac: About six nonprofit organizations including Forest Forever, GMO Inside and Great Plains Regeneration. And my latest one is Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, which is bringing food forests to people in the global south.
Justine Reichman: So what motivates you?
“It was the best thing that happened though because it led me to ‘what am I eating?’ Because most 21-year-olds don't bother about what they eat. You just eat for whatever.” -John Roulac
John Roulac: What motivates me? I've lived a very good life. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I started reading The Wall Street Journal everyday when I was like 14, because that's what my dad did. And I've been very interested in the environment, probably the two things that have really, the two like seminal events that really drove me as they dumped nuclear waste when I was 21 nine miles from my house by an unidentified truck driver when I was living in Los Angeles, Altadena Los Angeles area. That kind of pissed me off. I play basketball a lot. That was like my thing, basketball. My favorite sport and kind of hobby. I started cramping up because I was eating a really shitty standard American diet right around when I was in my early 20's. It was the best thing that happened though, because it led me to like, what am I eating? Because most 21 year olds don't bother what they eat. You just eat for whatever.
Bridget Cooper: How did you edit 21 year old? How did you get out the food? Did somebody sort of help you through?
“Our environment and our diet are linked together.” -John Roulac
John Roulac: Well, I was cramping really bad in my calves. I'd be run down the corner, oh, it's like, what's going on? And so then, I happened to run into this group of, they were all like 10 or 15 years older, and they're all into yoga, and meditation, and art, and Whole Foods, vegetarianism, etc. They kind of adopted me in that kind of one thing led to another, and then it all came back together. Our environment and our diet are all linked together. And then the other thing that really influenced me when I was a very young child, my mom and dad, we grew up in Southern California, very smoggy, very polluted. So most of the time, your eyes are burning you out and playing. When you come back, it's hard to breathe. Since the 1960s was very polluted, the air quality was horrible in Southern California. And then we spent two months a year on a remote island in Washington State in the San Juan Islands. And then also an island off of, one of the last islands between Canada and Japan, and off of Vancouver Island. So two months in beautiful nature. No phones, no electricity.
Justine Reichman: Amazing.
“Diversity is a real strength. When I have diverse people in the company, we do a lot better.” -John Roulac
John Roulac: 10 months in polluted eight miles from downtown LA, back and forth. So that kind of set me up to, why are we living this way? And so I've spent much of my life focused on what I'm interested in the environment, how can we improve the environment? I'm also a business person. I'm an investor and also support various flat philanthropic projects, which we'll talk more about. So I just do my thing, and I kind of like fighting the system. To me, the system is very corrupt. It's very dysfunctional. I think that general Americans are very naive people. I have to just say, just very naive. They know very little about what really goes on in the world. Not all Americans, but a very high percentage. And there's a reason why CNN, when you go to other countries, they have CNN International. Their programs help people all over the world. You can see what's going on in Iran, what's going on in all different countries. And in America, we have 450 cable channels so you don't have CNN International. So there's a reason why to keep Americans not know what's going around the world. Diversity is a real strength. And the companies that I've run, I found when I have diverse people in the company, not just old white men. When I have women and when I have people of color on the team, we do a lot better. It's true. But anyways, I could go on.
Justine Reichman: I couldn't agree more. I think many people have different experiences, people that can share their backgrounds, because we don't all have the same experience backgrounds together.
John Roulac: Yeah. I'd say that probably the most successful thing I did at Nutiva was having a very safe environment for women, especially Latino women or women of color. Because of the other companies they came from, they were mistreated. And we had leadership training, and we wouldn't put up with any bullshit from men like mistreating women of that company, and they flourish really well. And a lot of times made up for some of the mistakes that I made. The senior level like, oh, we should go do here and there. In the meantime, they just made sure everything was working well.
Justine Reichman: Well, that's great.
John Roulac: When I look back, I was like, that was a really good thing that I was able to do that.
Justine Reichman: That's a great thing. We should talk about the product. I mean, these are not uncommon products that you have, but they are different. So tell us, how are you different from all the other ones out there?
John Roulac: So I started Nutiva in 1999 with 500 hemp bars, selling them out of the trunk of my car. At the time, nobody thought hemp was marijuana.
Bridget Cooper: I remember that.
“Plants are not bad. How we develop it, how we grow it, genetically modify it and spray toxic chemicals is why we have all these cancers and immune issues.” -John Roulac
John Roulac: These pants right here, this is made from hemp. So hemp is a fiber, but it's also a seed crop. So we developed that, and then the government immediately started harassing myself and others in the industry, because they didn't want hemp to do well because they realized that people were lying. If they were lying about hemp, maybe they were lying also about other parts of cannabis. And they didn't want that to happen. And so we ended up suing the government because they said our hemp was the same category as heroin. So it was 10 to 15 years in jail in 2001. They did it 10 days after 9/11. So it was like, kind of scary times to be suing the Bush administration during the war on terror and everything. We were kind of in the same category, kind of scene, but we were able to win that case in 2004 with Dr. Bronner's and a bunch in the hemp industry. I was selling him and then I decided to also offer other products which offer coconut oil. So we offered virgin coconut oil, and most people thought coconut oil was really bad. It's solid fat, but much of the world uses coconut and then palm. So we sourced our coconut from the Philippines and planted over 100,000 coconut seedlings we gave to our farmers there, and then just added innovative new products. And one of them was the red palm oil that comes from Ecuador. It's smaller farmers certified organic, but a lot of people think that palm is really bad because they destroy a lot of forests in Southeast Asia. But palm is traditional in a West African tree crop. Plants are not bad.
“People are fixated. Plants are good. Meat is bad. Well, it's not quite that simple.” -John Roulac
Soy is not a bad plant. How we develop it, how we grow it, we genetically modify it to design to spray toxic chemicals. Wonder why we have all these cancers, why the hell are these immune issues, et cetera. But people are fixated. Plants are good, meat is bad. Well, it's not quite that simple. But people getting this narration in food is kind of like politics. I mean, imagine you have your friends, libertarians, conservatives, progressives, screw the system, I don't care, and the same thing in the food. It's unfortunate. So Nutiva, we grew, we're fortunate to grow really fast. We're seven years in a row. Ink Magazine fastest growing company. We pioneered organic foods that people had forgotten about, like coconut, chia. At one point, we (inaudible) the chia, organic chia market in the world. That was exciting until we had some crops, and failures, and stuff. And now, people aren't interested in chia. So chia was like really big for like three years. Like there's these trends in food and it goes really strong. Somebody jokes, they said Americans change or we change our food habits, like the French changed their hemlines.
Bridget Cooper: So true.
Justine Reichman: So now, where are you with all these products now? And what's sitting on the shelves?
John Roulac: Yeah. So this is a red palm. This product does not sell very well, I just brought along. No, no, because people believe the nature of the palm is bad. This is like 12 times the annual yield of corn or soy, so it's much better for carbon footprint, it's much lower. It's certified organic, and it has a vitamin, a type of vitamin E, not the vitamin E you find like in soy, or hemp, or sunflower, but a vitamin E that's called tocotrienols. It's 60 times more powerful antioxidant than regular vitamin E. Very nutritious, it boosts your immune system.
Justine Reichman: Wow. Nobody knows this.
John Roulac: And it's also orange.
Justine Reichman: I'm not sure that it looks appetizing.
John Roulac: That's true. It's true. We actually, it's funny. This is part of the COVID supply chain. We actually put it in a brown opaque container so you don't see it. But we lost that supply chain because of it, you can't get packaging because of the COVID disruption, which was caused partly because we don't do early treatment in the United States. People are deficient in vitamin D, they have a bad immune system that's why one of the reasons why our health has been so compromised is. So it's disrupted our whole supply chain, especially the United States.
Justine Reichman: Has sales gone down as a result?
John Roulac: I think it's always been, it's not really, to be truthful, I really don't know. I'm no longer the CEO. I stepped down four years ago. So my friends have been the CEO, and so it's like Nutiva is like my 22 year old or 23 year old, it's a life of, it does its own thing now.
Justine Reichman: That being said, one thing that I was really intrigued by was the fact that you guys do, you're such a mission driven company. So this company not only does it make great products, it also gives back to the environment. So many good things. I'd love you to talk a little bit about that.
John Roulac: Well, like, what's the why? There's like a well known business consultant, I think Simon, from his last name, talks about that, what's the why? Like Steven Jobs says, I'm going to sell you a computer with 64k ram, and it does this. No, he says, I'm gonna give you a tool that's going to allow you to do all sorts of amazing things in your life, and you're just going to live better. So like, what's the why? So the why for us is revolutionizing the way the world eats. So the way we do that is with organic, with fair trade, and the way we do the formulations. And then also, we give back like, for instance, we planted 100,000 coconut seedlings with our farmers in the Philippines. When we came to Richmond, California, we used to be in Southern California, we moved to the Bay Area to a 140,000 square foot building which was amazing when I looked at it. How are we going to build this out? It was definitely challenging for somebody who had been selling out the trunk of his car five years before that. But we planted a food forest at every school in the city of Richmond.
Justine Reichman: That's amazing.
John Roulac: And we did a bunch of different things. We funded GMO campaigns, we funded a big GMO Inside campaign which kind of had its thing and like, I found that in 2000 right after, like the end of 2012, 13, and 14. So it's about two and a half years. And we essentially put a spotlight on the largest food companies and what they're doing around GMOs. So we picked the biggest target was Cheerios, so we declared war on Cheerios. And so we took their Cheerios little graphic of their little icon of their grain, on their cereal, and we spelled out GMOs.
Bridget Cooper: Wow.
John Roulac: And the irony was they had just launched a major campaign that says, tell us what you love about Cheerios? So we took that graphic and the CEO says, the CEO was like, he had just contributed $2 million to the campaign to defeat GMO labeling. So that's why we decided to pick on him. So it's kind of like (inaudible) move. Pick one, and then use the momentum. So we just use all the momentum of people being pissed at General Mills for that, and then we put it like 100,000 comments on their social media wall, or 40,000? I can't remember, it was a lot. And then we created their market share, and then they removed the GMOs. And then the irony was they ended up buying Annie's, I knew the president of Annie's, and I took him to dinner about six years ago, and John Foraker, really great guy in the industry, and he looks kind of out of central casting like someone who would work at General Mills. But he's an organic guy. I said: "Look, the next thing is regenerative agriculture. This is going to be the next wave of how we're going to change how we grow food." And he became an advocate, and General Mills ended up being a leader. They need to do more, and there's a whole issue about what corporations say and do, and how much they are really doing, but they put a stake in the ground and said that soil is important. So if you got a big food company, saying that people start listening, they hired some great consultants, they spent a couple million dollars a year teaching farmers, they need to do a lot more, and they also supported our Kiss the Ground film.
Justine Reichman: I just say, what was this the lead into Kiss the Ground for you?
John Roulac: Basically in 2013, I had this aha moment that the previous years, the food movement has been against GMOs and against herbicides, and we need to get these chemicals out of our culture. But we were doing it by kind of being tough on people, shaming people, trying to do whatever, like trying to lobby all that stuff. And we were not winning. We tried to do the ballot box. Trying to go to Congress, lost, lose, lose. And maybe people changing their lifestyle a little to not buy GMOs. So I finally said: "Well, what if we could just get people to focus on soil health? How about if we could do this instead of like saying, don't do that? Do this. And if the world can shift our focus around soil health, then you don't need so many chemicals. Because the less chemicals you use, the soil can get healthier." And then when I decided, when I started learning more about the connection between soil health and climate change, and carbon, and ocean health.
“Climate change is the issue. That's a big environmental issue and soil health is not even a discussion!” -John Roulac
So I was like, why are all my mentors kind of heroes in the organic food industry not talking about soil health and climate? And literally for the first year, I walked around and I got inspired by the nonprofit Kiss the Ground, Ryland is the founder of that. He's a great guy. And there was a bunch of my people that I kind of knew that were early on on this. And nobody was really talking about the industry. I was saying like, am I crazy? Like climate change is the issue. That's the big environmental issue. And soil health is not even a discussion. And that was seven years ago, eight years ago, I said: "Well, let's do a film because we got to tell the story." Because it's way bigger than me. I could probably talk so much. So we did this film, and the filmmakers actually here in Ohio, Josh and Rebecca. So I met them, I kind of took over their lives. They kind of kid me because now they're doing two more films, a follow up for Kiss the Ground. The next one is going to be, the gloves are gonna come off, it's gonna be a little harder on people. And then we're going to do an international one, which I want to get into what I'm working on. I'm working now more internationally in regenerative agriculture in less than the United States.
Justine Reichman: What's the big goal?
John Roulac: The big goal is to regenerate the planet Earth. The idea is to think of business or agriculture in three ways. There's degenerative, and that's what we have. We degenerate the soil, spray a lot of chemicals, erode the soil, soils are getting less, there's less minerals. In 1939, the USDA Secretary said that we have a crisis in America. In 1939, we're losing minerals from the soil. That was 1939. What does he think happened then? So an apple, this isn't an apple, what it was 100 years ago. So we have this degenerate. Then about 30 years ago, people said, well, let's make it more sustainable. So let's be less bad. Let's take what we're doing. Instead of going 100 miles an hour in the wrong way, let's slow it down to only 40.
Justine Reichman: That doesn't sustain me and sustain what we have, and that's not a good idea.
“Regenerate has a potential to essentially awaken a sleeping, brainwashed society.” -John Roulac
John Roulac: Exactly. So sustaining what we have, but little better. A little better than what we had last week. Maybe like in terms of less worse, but the system has been so degraded. So regenerative is like a way to restore, to renew. It's kind of like, if you're in a relationship and somebody says, I want a sustainable relationship with you. I want a regenerative relationship. Like, okay, that sounds much more interesting. So regeneration is a means as a potential to essentially awaken like an asleep brainwashed society that's so stuck on our phones and on TV. I mean, literally, we are so brainwashed today, I feel like when I talk to people, I'm not saying this to you specifically, but a lot of people that I know, when I talk to them, it's not like I'm talking to them, I'm talking to their digital avatar. So they're speaking what Don Lemon says on CNN, Anthony Fauci, or it's like Tucker Carlson. Some feagan to someone, and you ever have a conversation, and they're just repeating what Tucker Carlson says. But I think there's a growing bunch of people who like going. I think maybe there's something a little good from what the progressive says, and maybe something good for the conserva, but I can be my own person. And hopefully, that can expand out, and maybe change things.
“Regenerative agriculture is a hope. We need to do it because Planet Earth and ecological systems are collapsing rapidly.” -John Roulac
But how to educate people, regenerative agriculture is a hope, and we need to do it because the planet Earth ecological systems are collapsing rapidly. Just some statistics, winged insects like bees, butterflies, very important. We've lost 75% of winged insects in the last 40 years because of insecticides and pesticides from industrial agriculture. And that's the number one cause. Destruction of land is also a leader in that, and we're losing one to 2% a year of winged insects. Then if you go to the oceans, if you notice, there's this word that never appears at COP 21, COP 25, COP 26, New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN, Sierra Club, NRDC, whatever. And that's called ocean acidification. Nobody seems to want to talk about this, and that's one of my pet peeves. I say, if you want to protect the oceans, we need to protect the soil. Because we live on an ocean planet, and the soils, what we do on the land impacts the ocean. What's the biggest contributor of oxygen on the planet? Oceans. What's the largest holder of all this biodiversity? The oceans. But we have this kind of like, will have this view of like, oh, we need to protect fish, or need to protect this or that, and that's important, but we don't talk about ocean acidification which essentially means all the excess carbon.
When we burn that up, and also from agriculture, plowing, the chemical fertilizer falls into the ocean and the ocean becomes acidic, and the little plankton are dying because they can't reproduce in an acidic situation. We've lost 50% or more of our plankton in the ocean. This is the basis for the life on planet Earth is the plankton in the ocean. Everything in the ocean either eats the plankton or eats what eats the plankton. We're losing one to 2% a year of the plankton. So those two things, the winged insects and the ocean acidification with the plankton, those two are linked to a system that is collapsing, and we have to regenerate those or we will be like the deer in the forest. Too many deer in the forest slowly dying out the grass destabilizing, and the odds that we will do this are low. As someone who's been at this for 40 years, like I don't go, I'm super hopeful that we're gonna do this. I just feel like we're really winning and like, we're just like, no, we're losing.
Justine Reichman: But still, you have the drive to do this.
John Roulac: I still have the drive to do it. I still think though, there is a potential that we can do this, and that's what keeps me going. I kind of came like, just--
Justine Reichman: I was gonna say, I have a question for you. So you still have the drive to do this. It's super aggressive. It's super ambitious. How do you still have that drive? And what would you recommend to another entrepreneur that's out there with an aggressive or ambitious idea?
John Roulac: So I'll tell you, in 1993, after a decade as an environmentalist and taking on the system and fighting the biggest corporations did timber, protecting Redwoods in California, we raised $6 million, we almost protected a bunch of forests, and we lost. They raised 50 million. I was devastated. And after a series of losses and some wins, but mostly losses, I basically, intellectually got to the point where I felt like, this is not looking good. Like intellectually, I couldn't grok in 1993 that we can change the system because the corporations and the media locked down the whole narrative. So I kind of let go of the quote, winning or like, this is going to turn around. So I let go of the attachment.
Justine Reichman: Okay.
“It starts with one person and it starts with effort. If we don't make any effort, nothing happens.” -Justine Reichman
John Roulac: And then out of that, and that means this is what works for me. I'm not saying it's gonna work for anybody else. But for me, it was like, I let go of the attachment of winning. And then like, I said: "Well, okay, so what are you going to do then?" I'm gonna keep doing what I'm gonna do. It's like a soldier in battle sometimes. You just keep going. And I feel like also, that maybe there's something that's going on on this planet that we can't intellectually or emotionally understand. There's maybe something else going on, and that maybe something will change. And maybe there can be something that just out of the blue could happen. So I'm not going to close that door off, I'm going to keep that door open realizing most likely that we're going to see the things that I've been concerned about for the last decade happen, which is starting to happen. We're gonna see extreme weather, and we're going to see food shortages, but we have the potential if we wanted to. We could regenerate the planet and grow lots of surplus food, create lots of jobs, we can create better economic opportunities. And I'm focusing now more, my some projects, agroforestry projects, maybe we can talk about that a little. Now, that kind of gave you a little the--
Justine Reichman: I also think, you guys, it starts with one person, and it starts with efforts here. If we make a little effort here, if we don't make any effort, nothing happens. So that's my philosophy.
Bridget Cooper: What's your plan for the education side? You're saying little by little, but how do people change behaviors? How do you see that?
“People have to make the change inside, and that's not always so easy.” -John Roulac
John Roulac: Yeah. My analogy of most humans is like crabs in a bucket. Crabs in a bucket. Like even the people who are on the same team, who are on Team Regeneration, there's like all sorts of fights and egos. We don't really even work well together. The people who already know the situation, we have the skills for it, and we don't work that well together, literally. So if we can't do that, as you can see, sometimes people get laid, they like, okay, John's gotten on his thing. Because like I just have this, I mean, I care, I'm passionate about, I mean, I love, I spent a lot of time in nature when I was a little kid. So I love nature, and I hate to see what's going on. It's really sad to see so many trees and so many animals, and like we used to drive a car and you'd see all these insects on the windshield. You have to walk them off. You go now driving, in agriculture biology, you don't see that. Those insects are going yeah. So educate them, and that's why, doing the film. So we got a couple more films, but people have to make the change inside. And that's not always so easy. I mean, the next generation, maybe Gen Z, the under 22 year olds, they're a powerhouse, and they're interested in change.
Bridget Cooper: Did you find that your film loved how you gave it to educators to show in classrooms and things like that? Has that been really successful?
John Roulac: I don't know 100% how, that's not my area of focus on the schools and stuff. So I know, it's been out for a lot. I'm busy working on other projects now.
Justine Reichman: Let's talk about those projects. We want to hear all about them.
John Roulac: Yeah. So a year and a half ago, I decided to focus on the middle of the country. And so I formed a group called Great Plains Regeneration. And there's a lot of regenerative advocates and allies in like Nebraska, in Kansas and Oklahoma. So we created a campaign around that to educate people and to network with farmers and ranchers. I was hopeful that we were going to get more support, and we had an idea to do a farm to flour, like baking flour. It's called Farmer Eve. We worked really hard on it, and it was going to create a more transparent and healthier baking flour. Not so easy to do, and I basically got door slammed in my face wherever I went. And we came close to almost making it happen, and we weren't able to. Someone gave me $5 million and said, you can just go spin or whatever.
Justine Reichman: What was the biggest obstacle you faced?
John Roulac: We couldn't get the processing. We quickly grew, and we had innovative processing technology. We needed a place that had the way scales, and they had the cleaning facilities, and elevators and all of that. And it's all very concentrated. And like in Kansas, you Kansas people can't buy wheat flour really grown in Kansas, mostly. They buy it from like some other place, some warehouse distribution, a thousand miles away. Kansas gets all this food, but they can't get local food. So we're still working on educating people, and we're doing workshops and doing things, but I decided, and there's so much control that the corporations control so much the government. And then the attitudes, the farmers are hard to change because this is what their dad did, the grandfather. Some of them like to be connected, and like some of them, I mean, I know a young farmer, his uncle's really into it, into this regenerate so they're trying to make the change, but it's not easy. And they're not getting paid enough.
The farmers are getting paid under the cost of the farm, the agriculture, their expenses, their debt, their machinery, and we're paying them, the farmer gets a smaller slice of the money. And the brands, the CPG, and the transportation, the packaging is getting more, and more, and more. So it's a challenge. So I decided, well, okay, if we can't do that, we'll keep going out with a team that's doing that. So I'm like the starter. So I went over to decide, like, what can we do with agroforestry? And so I have this, something called a donor advised fund. It's like a fancy term for tax breaks for the wealthy. So I'd set it up when I had a bunch of shares in Nutiva. And so I've been giving money away to projects all around the world, and some of them were involved in agroforestry. And the ones that I really liked, one was like Malawi and Kenya, and one was in Guatemala. So I decided, okay, where am I gonna put some of my focus and energy. You can see that I'm kind of a type A and passionate about this. And people get tired of me sometimes when I talk too much. I tried to be a little more entertaining. But back 30 years ago, I was yelling at people more. So you're destroying the earth, you're killing the Earth, you're gonna screw everything up, corporations are fucked up. Like what's with you people? But try to be a little more entertaining, so it works better. I don't know.
Justine Reichman: People like funny.
John Roulac: Try to be a little funny.
Bridget Cooper: How did you choose those areas?
John Roulac: Well, it just happened. Those are the people that I met that had really good programs. So Agroforestry Regeneration or ARC.
Justine Reichman: Like forestry, and soil, and roots, and things that have gone into the crown. That's the theme I'm seeing, because we get the roots. The roots, that feed, the food, the soil, so we're gonna have healthier food to eat. This is the theme I'm seeing. Am I right?
John Roulac: Yeah. I'm like a Celtic, Earth defender from 1800 years ago that's just shapeshifted into 2100.
“We're trying to provide a platform so that people can be more educated and can make more informed choices.” -Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: It's exactly what we're trying to. We're trying to provide a platform so that people can get more educated, so that people can make more informed choices. And you're trying to inform people and provide resources so that people can have greater access here. And you're doing it at the root, so to speak. Exactly.
John Roulac: At the root, yeah. So ARC, we just launched our website a couple of months ago. We're doing a webinar, we're getting experts around the world from people that I met. Actually, I went to a conference in Switzerland about three years ago, and it's kind of affiliated with the United Nations. And they did a lot of things like peacekeeping between German and French people after the war. And a couple of those, I met a bunch of a lot of interesting people there, including John Liu, from the Ecosystem Camp Restoration, you should definitely interview him sometime. He's really interesting. He's actually in LA working on a film with the United Nations. I need to go down and see him. But some of those people, so we're doing this workshop, and we already got like 180 people signed up, which was amazing for a webinar. I look at my phone every couple hours, and a couple more people sign up.
Bridget Cooper: The website codes?
John Roulac: It's agroforestryrc.org.
Justine Reichman: And what's the webinar about?
John Roulac: The webinar is expanding agroforestry in the global south for smallholders. So really my vision and idea, and it's not just my idea. This is what people in permaculture and regenerative, there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, there's lots of people who are into this. I'm just trying to use the experience of taking something from 500 hemp bars to selling a billion dollars worth of organic foods. That kind of journey experience which I learned a lot to help the small farmers. So we were doing this workshop, teaching people and like, I already had like eight people in the United States, USA ID sign up, which is great. Different people do this. So the idea is we help them, help these communities. So we have this project, like for instance in Malawi, and it's called Permaculture Paradise. And it's one of these projects I've been supporting for a while. So we find the people who are doing it right on the ground that have good community programs that know about plants. Some people are really interested in permaculture, other people are really interested in syntrophic agriculture, other people are doing agroforestry that is based on contour lines. Each one has their own flavor. And it's interesting to hear, they're dynamic. And sometimes they're like, they may or may not necessarily agree with each other. We're in a whole different context and a whole different continent, but they have similarities. So we bring them together and have discussions, and they give updates and stuff.
But the project in Malawi, we teach the farmers, most farmers there grow maize or corn. They're small farmers growing maize there, they do the same thing in Guatemala. And so whether you're in Malawi or Guatemala, they're growing the same thing. And they use chemical fertilizers, which is one of the most destructive things in the entire world, which no one knows about. Because there's too much money to be made in industrial AG. Nobody wants to know that chemical fertilizers are what drives Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, all these plant based companies. And Beyond Meat is better than Posh Burger. If you have to choose one, I definitely recommend Beyond Meat, and maybe we can get them to move towards regenerative. That's a whole nother thing. I kind of give them a little hard time. But I mean, they just kind of learned I'm not really behind the scenes talking to him. I mean, I know some of the people there.
“Working hard is important. Building the right team culture is important.” -John Roulac
Justine Reichman: Here's a question for you. If anybody wanted to sign up for this webinar that was listening to this podcast or watching this video, how could they do that?
John Roulac: First off, they can just Google my name, johnroulac.com. There's links to all these different projects and also articles, but they can go on tour. If you just Google Agroforestry Regeneration Committees, kind of a mouthful.
Justine Reichman: Well, johnroulac.com, we'll make sure that's linked to that. I wanted to just pick up on what you just mentioned, plus you had this whole history, this whole experience building Nutiva, and you had all these takeaways, what was your biggest takeaway from building this business?
John Roulac: You don't know what you don't know.
Justine Reichman: You might have something to share with other entrepreneurs listening and watching.
John Roulac: Working hard is really important, but building the right team culture.
Justine Reichman: Yeah, that goes back to what you were saying about how you treat people.
John Roulac: Yeah, that's important. And also I think, try to get people who are smarter than you and do things that you don't like. Try not to focus on the things you don't like doing. But when you're growing fast, you end up doing that sometimes. But I wanted to go back to the agroforestry just a little. That project Malawi is doing really well. So we're teaching farmers how to, instead of just having maize, that they can have fruit trees. We take the outdoor showers, we put bananas and papayas, and when they take a shower, it's just naturally watered. And now, all of a sudden, they had fruit.
Justine Reichman: That's a great design.
John Roulac: Exactly. And we're introducing our planting trees, then the leaves from the trees can feed the rabbits. So they're growing a lot of rabbits on some of the farms, and just teaching through permaculture, all the abundant foods. And then we also have a project in Kenya on a remote island, and we're doing workshops also in Uganda and Tanzania. And then in Guatemala as contour lines is one of the other projects, and they're doing very well. I was actually just on talk with one of the original employees at Google, and they have a program called Earthshot Labs. And they are essentially digitizing the information on how agroforestry and tree planting can connect up to the cloud, and to be able to show how people can be part of the solution through carbon, through biodiversity. And so we were kind of exploring a project. We have a thousand families that have food for us in Guatemala, and our goal is to do 100,000 in the next five years.
“There are lots of good opportunities to make the world better. The question is, will we do it?” -John Roulac
And so Earthshot Labs is growing very fast. They raised like $7 million recently. And the big challenge is, how do you organize from a small grass roots into a larger scale? The benefit is now these farmers, they don't need to come up here to the United States to flee their country. Now, we've been working in areas where it's more moist and better growing conditions. Now, can we go to these areas where there's more drought, where there's less rainfall, and that's where there is syntropic agriculture. One of the people speaking at our webinar on January 25, will be talking about syntropic agriculture, and it takes much less water. So it's a design principle, it's essentially, there's lots of good opportunities to make the world better. The question is, will we do it? Can you fund it? Can you get organized for it and out compete? But the reality is the shiny penny.
And today, everybody has electric cars, but as we have now seen, we don't have enough rare minerals for all these electric cars. And then you have to, and there's a lot of electricity and pollution to make these. Now they're better than burning like a low mileage car. I'm not saying electric cars aren't great. But that's where it's getting all the attention. Or let's fake sell your meat that uses Monsanto as the basis for the supply chain. So we have millions of people all over the world who are all passionate, and literally, there are so many people on LinkedIn. They're all like, yes, this is vegetarian, and we're going to do this, and we'll create a whole new industry. I said, what's your supply chain? They say, oh, it's better than, meats evil. Meat is evil. So the fact that we're partners with Monsanto, and we're killing bees, and butterflies and poisoning the oceans, but it's vegan, it's plant based, this is the future. It's like madness. But luckily, there's a lot of vegetarians, and vegans are going, wait a second. Hello? We need to partner with the regenerative agriculture people. And we can do both. We can have regenerative vegan, we can have regenerative--
Justine Reichman: I like your balanced way of thinking. Yes. And I think that that's what we're gonna, I mean, we could go on and talk about this forever, and I have so many things that I'd love to chat with you about, including how you balance running all these different companies, because I think we have a lot of other entrepreneurs that would love to know how you do that. We're not going to do that today.
John Roulac: I give a couple tips. One, what's really important is to do the plank. The yoga plank. Everybody can go yoga. Going to the yoga plank is very important. It builds your core muscles so you don't get sore so much because you're working a lot, and stress. So that's important. And then being more on your body, like nature. Spending time in nature is very important.
Justine Reichman: John, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.
Bridget Cooper: I can't wait to try this.
