Farmers & Makers: Dr. Chris & Erin Sojourner
Chapter #1: Dr. Chris & Erin Sojourner on the History and Future of Biodynamic & Regenerative Agriculture
“Biodynamic is the only certification that’s been codified and is the oldest and best ecological certification system in the world.”
New to the Journal, our Farmers & Makers series features extraordinary people who are furthering the Biodynamic and regenerative movement for a better planet. Through their inspirational work, they are helping to raise awareness for the dire need of improved agricultural practices which will not only help us all lead healthier lives through better food, drink, and skincare, but also help our existential battle against climate change. These are the people who are making a difference through commerce, art, design, and, of course, agriculture.
In our first installment, we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Christopher and Erin Sojourner, a power couple in the regenerative movement and veteran advocates of a better food system for people and the planet. Erin was one of the first people we met at Demeter USA when we first started Maison/Made, where she was the Director of Business Development, and was crucial to Maison/Made receiving its Biodynamic® certification. After a number of years at Demeter she since moved on to HB Specialty Foods where she is the VP of Brand Strategy & Innovation, as well as the co-founder of Entourage Medicinals, AND the co-founder (along with Dr. Chris) of Modus Operandi, which supports relationship growth between farmers and brands in the regenerative/Biodynamic space through brand management, awareness and distribution in the natural products marketplace.
In addition to Modus Operandi, Dr. Chris is a Naturopathic Doctor, focusing on Ortho-molecular Nutrition & Biological Medicine, serving a small clientele by creating customizable supplement regimes to help transform their lives. As if this wasn’t enough, he was the founder of Essential Living Foods, is a Strategic Development Specialist for the Bionutrient Food Association and is a consultant for Latbio, a coalition of Regenerative + Biodynamic entrepreneurs.
As we said, we could not be happier having Dr. Chris and Erin together with us to discuss their journey’s.
~ 🌼~
M/M: Welcome to Farmers & Makers you two! To kick us off, we would love it if you could give us a quick summary of what you guys are currently working on?
Erin: Thank you for having us! Diving in, well, I have my “daily bread” right now which is HB Specialty Foods where I'm the VP of Brand Strategy and Innovation, which allows me to continue working with a lot of CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands that are looking for that specialty sector in the regenerative and Biodynamic space. I’m also working on various supply chain projects, where my passion for helping with culture, and how to create culture, for the food production industry can really shine. This is an industry where you have food workers who are at a totally disparate communication level than the executives, so I love to work on how to bring those together. I'm on this really fun journey right now through a cultural MBA program and leading various workshops where I’m able to bring the whole company on board. Christopher, do you want to jump in and talk a little bit about some of the things that we're doing together?
Dr. Chris: Yes! So, we're currently in the development phase of a couple of different business endeavors, one of which is the One World Chocolate Program, which is ultimately going to be creating an above-and-beyond fair trade mechanism for transparency, with cacao farmers. With this program we’ll ultimately be creating a specialty cacao with the goal of elevating it to the level where cacao becomes like wine, coffee or tea, where the terroir of the cacao, the varietals, the region, the growing environment, etc. is expressed in the cacao. Essentially, trying to bring more value to cacao than just the commodity per se.
On that same vein, Erin and I, and through Modus Operandi, we have a chocolate company where we are bringing in Biodynamic cacao. And with that cacao, I´ve innovated a new device for which I’m in the midst of a provisional patent for. It will be unique, in that it’s never been done before, and while I can’t talk about the details of what it is or what it does, we are very excited about it because no one is doing it. Essentially it will allow us to be like Bulletproof coffee, but for cacao. It's a very unique market niche and there's already enough interest in the Bulletproof world that it's an easy target market as well the Keto and low-glycemic markets.
M/M: How wonderful, and we thought WE were busy! And tell us about the Biodynamic bananas that we’ve spoken about previously, this is also a fantastic project you are working on.
Dr. Chris: Well, like almost every business out there right now, COVID has introduced a number of snags that we’ve hit in the supply chain. That being said, we’ve found a work around finally, but like any sizable import business, we’re basically drowning in paperwork. You have to sign your life away to them (the government) in a sense. But I think we've just figured out a way to get the distributor out of the way and go directly to a couple of retailers. We'll see. And we're actually getting rid of the name Biodynamic on it. We're just calling it regenerative organic bananas for the moment because we have to pay all sorts of fees and registrations, as well as additional certifications for everybody involved, and we just need to get the program going, get in the door, get people, knowing what Latbio is. And then we can offer the Biodynamic to people that want it like at an Erewhon for example.
Erin: They're still Biodynamic bananas, but we just won't have that ability to call them Biodynamic until the economics warrant the certification. And then there's also the folks that went all the way down, got certified, did a bunch of different things and then still backed off because they were afraid of it being more expensive than organic. So, it's a unique situation, but we're not stopping. Christopher is a maverick when it comes to finding a way, he's like water, he's going to find the path of least resistance and how to figure out how to get there.
M/M: That's a great skill to have. It's part hustle, it's ambition, it's desire.
Erin: Absolutely! Also, just to give you a realization of why we're so connected to the bananas, yes, we have that, say, “beaming light” which is, how can we be an educational tool in the industry and also for consumers and the movement at large, learning how to work together? But also, with my time at Demeter, I became very close friends to the family that are fourth-generation farmers and over the years we've developed a really good relationship. You'll find that, a lot of times, within the Biodynamic movement the people seeking to further Biodynamics are going to have high-quality of virtues inside of them that I like to put myself around and what I like to see and what Christopher likes to see is the mission of giving back the legacy of being a human on the planet and what we can do. So it means a lot to us in a lot of different arenas.
So we have multiple projects, it sounds like a lot, we have a multiple array of projects, but they all kind of have that same tenant!
M/M: Fascinating and so inspiring! Switching gears slightly, how do you see this connection between Biodynamics and the word regenerative? As you know, these days, we're using the words fairly interchangeably in our conversations.
Erin: Well, it's really interesting because I was still on the Demeter payroll when the regenerative movement started to take hold. And all the reasons why it really started to take hold was because there was a large amount of money behind these brands that were looking at Biodynamic certification - Dr. Bronner's, Patagonia Provisions, etc. They were looking at Biodynamic, but they realized there were too many hurdles for their farmers to achieve it. And so at the time they asked whether we could resurrect an old Demeter certification called Aurora. Without getting into too many of the details (certification history is fairly convoluted and confusing), Aurora was essentially a certification where you would follow the Biodynamic standard, but not use the Biodynamic preparations. We began to work on it with them, but in the end it simply didn’t work out. And so essentially what happened was that they asked if they could take one of Demeter’s directors to write a NEW standard that could still help to regenerate soil, but be less rigid and stringent than Biodynamic. So Demeter received a donation from these brands to help them write this new standard with the Rodale Institute, and that's where it got its lift, but Biodynamic is the original. Biodynamic is the only certification that's been codified and is the oldest and best ecological certification system in the world.
At the same time, Demeter International saw what was happening with regenerative and said, okay, we do need to look at a social standard? It's really hard to do any social standard at a global level because it just won't work. You know, it's a case by case situation, which that's why I like Demeter and their standards, they are applicable to a hyper-local level. They focus on the individual farmer and their relationship to their own land, not grouping all farmers under the same restrictions. What may be good for the soil on one farm, may not be the best approach at another.
The regenerative movement is awesome because when you look at the term “sustainability” everybody thinks that to “sustain” means to bring life. The reality is quite different, we've had such degradation in our farming practices for so long, that to sustain what we have now is just leaving everybody in a loop of survival. To “sustain” means that things are not getting better and not getting worse.
Regeneration is about leaving the land better than the way we found it, leaving everything better, really. It's just starting to get into the mindset of businesses and people are looking at how to bring regeneration into their own lives. So it's positive, and I think just because there's so much money around the regenerative movement, it only makes sense to work with equivalencies and to work together.
But then the other part is that they're not protecting the regenerative movement by any kind of trademark. And we know in the world of greed and corruption that anybody who wants to create their own farmer scorecard, or just say it's regenerative just because they do one little thing like planting one cover crop in one field, well then it will lead to the degradation of the word regenerative, just like we’ve been degrading soil for decades. In the same vein, just because you plant a couple flowers according to a lunar calendar does not give you the right to call yourself Biodynamic. But with Biodynamic it’s easily justified with the certification.
M/M: Absolutely, that is one of our biggest concerns as well, that the word regenerative will be taken over by people claiming one thing and doing another since there is no oversight of what “qualifies” something as regenerative. It’s why, before we even heard of “regenerative agriculture”, we knew we had to be Biodynamic. It’s the gold standard, and verifiable. And so, where do you guys see the space that has the most potential to have the biggest impact? Is it food? Or do we need a Patagonia or Dr. Bronner's to do ROC in order to get regenerative where it needs to be, what do you guys think?
Erin: It’s a good question. I'm a board member of A Growing Culture where you can go to agrowingculture.org and see the stats on who actually grows our food. You’ll see that it's the smallholder farms that are actually feeding the world. We get all this propaganda thrown in our face that it HAS to be Industrial Ag in order to feed the world, that it has to be this large-scale farming in order to do the job. But I do think that it's only going to help to have the big bucks behind those brands to help further a regenerative mindset. That's my first instinct.
Dr. Chris: If you look at the beverage industry and you look at what PepsiCo has committed to, you look at what Anheuser-Busch, Miller Coors, General Mills, Cargill, etc, these are some of the main conglomerate players and they make up easily, 50+ percent of the beverage and food industry. They've all committed by 2030 to being carbon neutral.
But for these companies, they're saying they're going to do this by 2030, well, every year, there needs to be a group that is going to go out and stay on top of this because people really want to know, are you really doing this? I'm really wanting to get coalitions of people to come together and be watchdogs similar to the likes of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Why are they putting your farm or these subsidies to transition? Is it government money? How are they insuring them? What are they doing with the cover crops? I want to see everything that's happening because everybody can say this because it's this “great thing” but who is holding them accountable? At what point will we get sold this false bill of goods to go with this company? And then all of a sudden realize that they're just trying to gain market share by benefiting from the trends of the natural sectors. I think this is important because there are a lot of people greenwashing...
M/M: Absolutely, we need safeguards in place to ensure that what we, as consumers, are purchasing are actually in line with what we THINK we’re purchasing. One last question, where and how do you guys shop for your own food and personal care products?
Erin: We typically use Thrive Market, for our busy schedules. I was an early adopter of them. I'm also friends with the people who started it and work with them on a couple of different levels as well. I really like them and not just because we have some projects that we're doing together. I also have a local farmer that I've been utilizing for many, many years from whom I buy a lot of produce. We also have a little tiny grocery store called West Village Market in my neighborhood, and it gets a lot of really cool stuff, a lot of local food. I haven't been to one of the farmer's markets since I have this direct relationship to this farmer who’s in his seventies and is really awesome. His name is Robbie and he plays rock n roll for his animals and his plants, like, he will turn on his boombox and play Led Zeppelin if he feels that that is what his plants are asking for! And then of course there’s Earth Fair, Whole Foods, etc. Those will come into play if I need to quickly pop in and pick up certain things.
(Some of the questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity)