Resilience is an important attribute for anyone, whether they’re diving into the world of entrepreneurship, activism, or both. It is especially important when you tackle new ideas that have the potential to change the world. In this episode, Elliot Begoun chats with Robyn O’Brien of rePlant Capital, a financial services firm built to scale climate solutions by helping US farmers transition to regenerative agriculture. Robyn is a food systems advocate who speaks to the powerful connection between soil, climate, and human health. Her intersectional vision for the future of our food system inspires millions, but it has also attracted some detractors. In this episode, she shares how mutual dialogue is key in dealing with opposing perspectives. Tune in to learn more about what rePlant is working on and how they contribute to the movement to preserve the planet.

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Listen to the podcast here

Resiliency Amidst Fostering Change With Robyn O’Brien Of rePlant Capital

This is another episode of TIG Talks. I’m excited about this conversation. Robyn has taken on the moniker this food’s Erin Brockovich, but she’s an amazing human being. I would say maybe even a reluctant activist, but she’s doing some important things. This is a conversation that I think is important to have and important to open up to all of you reading.

It comes back to that message that commerce can be, when harnessed for good, one of the greatest powers and greatest influences of change. All of you are involved in the natural products industry, our best hope for being stewards. I think Robyn can offer some advice as to how best to do it. Before I turn it over to Robyn for an intro, as always, I like to do a little founder shout-out, but I’m going to do it slightly differently.

Rather than pick one founder and talk about their nimbleness or capital efficiency or resilience, I’m going to talk to all of you. It’s been hard because there was all this optimism. That veil was going to lift and things were going to start happening with speed and with excitement, and for many, that hasn’t happened. It’s an important time to continue to challenge yourself with being resilient.

Remember, resilience isn’t about the financial resilience of your brand, but it’s about you and your resilience, the ability that you have to withstand this emotionally and physically. I want to encourage everyone reading to take that time and make sure that you’re doing the work necessary to be resilient as an entrepreneur and nourish yourself both physically and spiritually. That’s my shout-out. With that, Robyn, love for you to share with those reading more about you and a little bit about how this whole journey started years ago.

I appreciate the conversation around resiliency because it’s a critical ingredient in anything that we’re building, including ourselves. The other piece on that is that none of us are going to get through this by ourselves. It is going to take a lot of supportive scaffolding around each of us to grow into what we need to become in order to move this forward. My story speaks to that.

I grew up in a conservative family in Texas. We were not at all environmentally aware. We ate well-rounded, but it wasn’t in the awareness of sugars and all these artificial ingredients. There was no conversation around that growing up. When I moved to Boulder many years ago and landed here from Houston, it felt like landing on a different planet. There were conversations, awareness, and things around preschool where the children weren’t allowed plastic forks in their lunch boxes and had to have cloth napkins.

I was, “What is this?” It was a real awakening on a personal level. I thought, initially, “This is great. These people have the time to have this awareness.” It felt like a real privilege. When our fourth child was diagnosed with food allergies in 2006, all of a sudden, I took a step back. Prior to moving to Boulder, my career had been in investments on a team that managed $20 billion in assets. I was the only woman on the team, so the guys had me cover the food industry.

At the time, I’d give up Diet Coke every year for Lent. I was not a food person. I didn’t know how to cook. As a rookie on the team, the food industry was what I got. All I can say now is thank goodness. Thank goodness that they handed me that because I learned in a very unemotional and mechanical way the models of the industry and why they were taking real ingredients out and subbing in these artificial ingredients to drive profitability and margin.

It was very mechanical unemotional work that I was doing initially. When my daughter was diagnosed with these food allergies, I turned back to the food system. I was reading labels and thinking like, “What the hell is this stuff? What are these ingredients that are going into the food? What is all of this doing in combination, not just to my kid but to any of us?” I began to ask questions that a lot of the big food companies didn’t like that I was asking.

In the early years of the work, there was a lot of pushback. Organizations that I would’ve thought who would’ve stood beside me and championed this took a couple of steps back and it was like, “Let’s see what happens here.” In that isolation, you learn what you’re made of. You’re either going to sink or swim. As a mother of four, there was no choice but to swim.

I had to figure a lot out early on. I had to figure out what was going on with the double standard in the US food system. I had to figure out a way to communicate it in a way that people could hear it. I had to figure out how to take care of myself in that isolation and in that incredibly punishing chapter of my work when a lot of derogatory and defamatory comments were made about who I was and to be anchored in the integrity of who I am, what I represented.

You learn what you’re made of in those moments. You also learn who your friends are and I can count on one hand who those friends were in the early years of this work. They are part of who I am now. They are part of my heart and will be forever part of the gratitude that I work with every day. Flash forward many years to be in a place where as rePlant, we are rolling out $2 billion to farmers in order to transition US farmland to regenerative in organic agriculture.

To have a team that we have wrapped around us is so humbling, exciting and joyful. Every day I practice the gratitude of that, of knowing that I came through this incredible isolation and this incredibly punishing period into this expansiveness and this abundance of opportunity in front of all of us to drive this forward.

The invitation for the readers is how lucky we are to be in a place with the transparency and solutions that we have in front of us to drive such a powerful change not only in the food system but in the health of consumers and the climate. We’re standing on the solution with the soil that’s under our feet and to be able to say as a generation, “This was what we were handed and this is what we did with it.” To me, that is one of the greatest opportunities I think we could ever hope to have.

Also, responsibilities. Incredibly inspiring but also so important. I’m going to take a host prerogative and ask a couple of my questions that came to mind while listening to what you were saying. They’re going to be a little bit left field. The first is I think about the fact, as a mom of four, the lessons that you’ve taught your four kids about advocacy and agency. Have you seen that manifest itself in them?

There were a couple of things. When the book came out in 2009, the online bullying was intense. That was right around the same time my oldest was starting middle school. If most of us remember, middle school is pretty rife with bullying. I would sit the kids down and I would show them the comments. I would say, “Here’s what this person is saying and do you think that’s their real name? They’re not using their picture as their image.” It was a great example of do you believe what some random stranger who has every incentive to discredit you is going to say or can you stand in your truth and can you look yourself in the mirror in that truth and say, “This is who I am. This is the research that I have done and I will stand by this.”

I think it was incredibly important. The other piece I was mindful of was the number of teenagers with eating disorders is huge. A second thought that I had was, how do I make sure that my children stay in love with food? It doesn’t become the enemy in this and I don’t inadvertently create something here. It was, how do you make this joyful and how do we make it a celebration? This is about one of the first things you have to take responsibility for and do to value yourself.

Once you choose to value yourself, then you are going to be mindful of the food that you’ve put in your mouth and how you’re feeding your body. That was part of the message to the kids, too, was, “The four of you are incredibly important and it is how you take care of yourself is going to show up.” It was interesting because one had this tendency towards ADHD and one of the chapters in the book is around these artificial colors and how in countries around the world pulled the artificial ingredients and colors out of food because of the link to hyperactivity in kids.

One of the boys came home from school and he said, “They were handing out blue popsicles, Mom. I passed because I didn’t want to have a bad afternoon.” I thought, “This is a ten-year-old kid that was able to understand what happens when he chooses these things and these consequences.” Fast forward to now, my oldest is a senior in college. She’s a Spanish and Psychology Major. Her focus is immigration Law. I think the justice piece is probably the nugget that all four of them will carry forward. I wouldn’t have thought about it as a justice piece in the beginning of the work, but very much that’s what we’re talking about is justice here.

First of all, I’ve got to imagine that your four kids think, “My mom’s a badass.” I think that’s such a cool thing. Also, as a parent of two Millennials, one Gen Z-er and now two grandkids, on the days when I feel this is so daunting and overwhelming, all I continue to do is look at them and realize they don’t see it that way. They recognize the role that they play and the change that they want. It bolsters my confidence.

Mine will swing back and forth. My third child who is in college came home from school on Earth Day, his sophomore year of high school. He said, “This is so depressing, mom.” I said, “Why? What is it?” He said, “We’re not doing enough.” We were in the early years of anchoring rePlant. I said, “I want you to google something for me.” I said, “Google soil carbon sink. That’s what I’m working on. This is what we’re working on.”

He ended up creating a whole video project that I shared with my friends at Patagonia because I was so proud of him. I think we do swing between despair and despondent, then this pathological optimism. That’s part of the reality of human emotion. It’s also why it’s so critically important that we surround each other with people who can be in that vulnerability and also in that strength. The reality is people do swing and have a hard day and then they can swing back into optimism, but it all is contingent, again, around the scaffolding that we have around us. Our ability to tap into this positive, as Gary Hirschberg calls it, this pathological optimism that’s required to drive it forward.

The other aspect of what you shared with us in your intro was what I would call a true metaphor for the entrepreneurial journey. That’s that transition, that path from isolation to team, to community. Many founders can relate to that. That sense that they’re truly isolated or on an island and they wonder will they ever get to that side where they have a team around them and support and community? The way you described it is how I’d want them to hear it. You can fight through that isolation. You can do that. You will come out the other side and you will come out the other side with people around you who are champions and able to help.

Also, a skill set that you’ll never lose, then an ability to mentor those on your team as they come in. I didn’t have a female mentor in my work and that is something that I feel is so important to give back. To be able to offer that to younger women on our team. Not just on our team. I do a lot of work with business schools and in the industry. It is one of the most joyful parts of my month when I have the opportunity to sit down with a younger woman and answer all of these questions.

How do you do this as a mother of four? How did you do this when you were doing? That candor and honesty, again, are critical because if we sugarcoat it, we’re not doing anybody any favors. To offer it up in this unvarnished serving is one of the best things that we can do so that people have, again, it gets back to full transparency. This issue and this concept of transparency, not in our food system but in entrepreneurship, is important.

That leads to another question and that is if you were to go back to that earlier self when you were first starting out on this journey, knowing what you know now and knowing what you’ve learned, what advice would you give yourself?

Don’t second-guess yourself. I spent a lot of time evaluating the naysayers and the doubters. I would say don’t second guess yourself. You know when you’ve done the work. You know when you put it in. Trust that.

How do you do that? I completely understand, but I would admittedly say there are times when I still struggle with that after all these years. How do you not second-guess yourself?

It’s important to question the source. A lot of the naysayers, now I look back and I’m like, “What incentive did this person have to keep me small?” There are different reasons, different people, personally and professionally, want you to stay small. Evaluating the source of where it’s coming from is important.

Something I could have done more of, but it was a function of having four children that were under the height of my knee to have taken some time that space to have. Part of your job is to create a space free from the noise where you can hear yourself think and tap your creativity and innovation. In the early years, it was run. What I would advise is part of your job is to create this space free from the noise where you can think.

I say that a lot. You talk about resiliency and one of the things is how do you take care of yourself in this process that is so demanding, especially when you’ve got personal stuff on top of that. I tell my team, “One of your jobs is that one of the meetings you have each day is to exercise. If it happens at 6:30 in the morning, it happens at 6:30 in the morning, but that is an important meeting for you each day.” It allows you to check in with yourself. It allows you to offload and process stress. It allows you to alchemize negative emotions. It could come out in a different way during your workday.

Initially, you think like, “This is selfish,” or “I can’t do that.” You have to do that in order to be in this for the long term. That was something I realized in my work is, “I was not going to be able to fix this overnight. I was not going to be able to fix it by myself.” I had to take care of myself in order to stay in the game. There were years in there early on where it was pretty scary and stripping. You could see that on me physically and to realize, “I can’t fix this. I can’t participate in changing this if I am not here whole operating.”

Part of my job is how I take care of myself so that I can continue to do this for the next 20, 30, 40 years. One of my role models is Jane Goodall. You look at how long she has been doing this work. I think about how ridiculed she would’ve been in the beginning talking about all of these communications with gorillas. People would’ve ridiculed her, yet she learned how to take care of herself to stay the course for 50, 60 years. I hope that I have that same opportunity.

Two things that come to mind saying that. One is that when we’re in those early years, when we’re in that almost fight or flight mode, what we often do is we confuse activity with results. We lull ourselves into the sense of belief that if we dig in deeper, work harder, do more, push through, that’s what’s needed. When in fact, often, what’s needed is to step away to spend a little time investing in yourself.

I’m somebody who doesn’t always practice what I preach or at least, I lose sight of it from time to time. Even in the last couple of years, I had to reengage with that because it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing because doing feels like progress even though it is. It’s insidious that way. That is the understanding that in order to be generous, in order to be effective, in order to be able to manifest the best version of yourself, you first have to be a little bit selfish. You have to do the things for you first. You have to take care of yourself first.

You can’t pour from an empty cup. It very much is that and it feels selfish. It feels contradictory but again, if you were listed on your earning statements as an asset, you got to take care of that thing to value yourself that way is critical. Especially for our industry, one of the easiest ways to do that is to think about how you’re fueling your system.

Are you fueling yourself in a way that your mind is clear that you can get sleep at night when you can’t sleep at night? It’s like, you look at these athletes. You look at a guy like Tom Brady that’s played forever and how he treats his body. That’s the invitation to an entrepreneur. You are that valuable. You have the potential to be enormously valuable, so take care of this vehicle that you’re in.

You are basically preaching to the choir. I say this all the time, “The most important asset on the balance sheet is you.” If you don’t treat yourself as such, if you don’t do it then you’re not doing what’s in the best interest of your business, your shareholders or the opportunity to move it forward. One of the things that you and I talked about briefly before we went on air was around that this industry invites trade-offs.

We have this industry and we are the change agents. This segment, these $ 50 million rough consumers that are natural, organic consumers, we lead them. We influence them. We are the change that we want it to be, but we are constantly confronted by the tough decisions around trade-offs in terms of, “I have to have my cogs work or that margins work so that I can manifest this vision. I can get on the shelf and make money or win investment or I have to go do this in order to do it. I can’t have the compostable material.” All of those things. The balance is when is that trade-off mission accretive and when is that trade-off crossing over, as you said, to violating your own integrity. Coaching there, suggestions there, anything that you can offer would be appreciated.

One of the best pieces I have advice I got in my career was early on when I was working on the investment desk. This guy named Charles said, “Whatever you do, make sure you want to read about it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.” To me, that’s it. Can you defend this on the front page of the Wall Street Journal? Do you want to? Does it reflect who you are? I think it’s pretty easy to get into these head games justifications and we’re smart. It’s a smart industry. We can justify just about anything.

You cannot buy your integrity back once it’s gone. You cannot buy it back. It’s critically important. One of the best things you can do is when you do hit a crossroads where you’re being asked to make that compromise. That is the best time to find a mentor and ask for help. We all have these internal dashboards like the dashboard on a car. When the lights start to blink at you and it’s like, “Warning, you need to get this checked.” We have that.

We have that internally and we’ve learned to override it at times in our lives. As I look back on decisions that I’ve made and that warning light going off, I was trying to justify or override it. The warning light’s always right. That’s the intuition that you have. Part of why you’ve come into your particular space as this particular entrepreneur is because of that intuition and insight. That’s what’s brought you to where you are, so why in the world would you want to override it? It’s what’s driven you to success and to the place that you’re in.

It’s recognizing when you are asking yourself to make a compromise that is not aligned with that intuition. Those are the dangerous places and those are the best times to ask for help. It’s usually finding somebody who is a few chapters ahead of you who has either navigated that mistake or navigated how to step around the mistake. Usually, the workarounds are going to be a workaround. It’s going to be a lot more work. Don’t be afraid of the work. Be afraid of what happens if you compromise who you are.

The reality of being an entrepreneur reality of this industry is that intuition, those warning lights. They’re institutionalized out of you. There’s a big push for that to be removed. It goes back to the earlier conversation, in my opinion, which is also why you need to go slow to go fast. You need that time to check in, to check your dashboard, your warning lights to make sure there’s some tug that feels. There are cognitive dissidents going on. There’s something real there and you need to slow down.

At the same time, this is where it gets difficult is that there are decisions that you can fall on the sword for that will prevent you from reaching or having this big an impact that you can have if you’re willing to make a small trade-off to move it forward with the hope of catching up to it, but then there’s the trade-off that will completely take you far field. How do you discern the two? How do you understand?

In my opinion, disagree with me, please, there are no absolutes and you’re never going to be able to chart a course forward in this business as an entrepreneur where you’re not going to be confronted with having to make some sacrifices around the things you dreamed or wanted to do to execute perfectly the product and the brand the way you wanted to. When do you know or how do you check yourself to make sure that you’re not trading away your integrity? You are trying to make some small trade-offs in order to keep the momentum or have as big an impact as you can.

It does get back to, do you want to read about this? What’s the story you want to read about your own life? Something I remind our team of and my audiences of is our life unfolds in chapters. Some chapters are long, short, great and terrible, but they’re chapters. I think what tends to happen is when we get into those tension points. It starts to swallow you. You think, “It’s always going to be like this.” It’s not always going to be like this. It’s a chapter.

Something I’ve learned is in those moments where you are tied in a knot in conflict. It’s usually at night when I’m in bed. The vision I have is to open my heart to okay, “This sucks. What is the lesson that I am supposed to be learning as I untie this knot?” I stay in it until I figure out what the lesson is. You touched on something that we tend to do is run from the tension. Run from the knot or busy ourselves, like you said, you start to get this hyper mode. What you need to do is sit with it.

We’re not taught that culturally to sit with the discomfort. We’re taught to numb it, to run from it, whatever, but that’s something I’ve taught the kids. The emotions aren’t going to kill you. It’s what you choose to do. Acting on those emotions that are either going to be productive or destructive. When you’re sitting in that discomfort, we tend to try to look for a quick fix to get out of it. Sometimes, it’s longer work in finding those mentors and finding those advisors and having the humility to reach out to somebody and say, “This is where I am stuck. Have you seen this? Do you know someone that’s seen this?”

I think of them as first-generation, organic industry leaders that are in our space. They have been through a ton of heartache and hardship. It’s easy to look at them now as these insane success stories that they all represent. They have been through heartache and hardship. They are usually pretty darn honest about those instances in their own lives and in their own careers and personally and professionally how they’ve been impacted by those things.

You aren’t going to know the answer until you ask. What I would hope we would see more of and especially for women in the industry, is that opportunity for that mentorship. I think there’s a real opportunity for real mentorship because we’re seeing now this second generation and even now the third generation of organic entrepreneurs. With that, we now have these elders in this wisdom that can be shared and bestowed. For us to continue to succeed and grow, that’s going to be critical.

As an industry and as an entrepreneur, I encourage anyone reading, it’s great that you’re reaching for that next rung in the ladder. Make a commitment that as you do that with one hand that the other hand is reaching down to grab the next person behind you. That’s how we’re going to compound this change. It isn’t by you being successful. It’s by all of us being successful. That comes with being willing to give back and teach.

We talk about this and we’ve been talking about it more. There’s an art form to working with advisors because there’s a bit in this industry where we collect advisors almost for vanity because they look great on a pitch deck. They help validate the fact that, “I’m for real and this brand’s for real.” That isn’t the benefit of an advisor.

The advisors are the ones that are going to tell you what you need to hear. Not what you want to hear. More importantly, you have to learn how to exact the information you need from them. You need to figure out how to ask the tough questions to get the important feedback. Everybody needs both like-minded and contrarians around them so that you’re not getting people who see the world the same way you do.

I think not surrounding yourself with yes-men is critical. It’s easy because things are so hard in the beginning to want to surround yourself with people that make you feel better. It’s like a salve that you need as you’re plowing through this the tough early days in the business. However, to have the people not only as advisors but also to create a culture on your team where those challenges can be brought forward. The environment and culture are safe to hold all of that conversation because ultimately, that will drive you forward in an exponential way.

All too often, we think again, easy doesn’t necessarily mean best. I agree on the advisor thing. Sometimes, it’s an ego thing where the deck gets stacked with all these amazing names and candidly, it’s usually the same names on every deck. What is that doing? That’s a very homogenous way of thinking. I think we have this broken food system because of the broken financial system and in both cases, they’re very homogenous.

Something that I am passionate about is how we bring that diversity and equity into governance because we’re so much stronger as a fabric weaving all of these different experiences and pieces together than any one thread would be by itself. That’s the opportunity. I was on a panel and it was the first time I had ever been on a panel where there wasn’t a White guy. I thought, “This is extraordinary to be 50 years old and on a panel for the first time.” That is representative of an incredible diversity of experience and backgrounds. What was fascinating was that after we were done, the organizer said in the webinar, which had close to a hundred attendees. Not a single person dropped off.

I had an opposite and very interesting and humbling experience. I was on a panel where we were talking about justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, post-George Floyd and all of that, where I was the only White guy. It was an interesting place to be because it’s usually the other way around. I found myself feeling a little bit vulnerable at the same time. It was powerful and important. It was a good learning for me too.

That point is such an important one. If you’re not feeling vulnerable, you’re probably not growing. Embrace vulnerability as part of the process instead of being timid and shying away from it. In the early years of my work, there was fear everywhere. I was calling out these agrichemical giants. The food industry was coming down on me, and fear wrapped around me in every direction. I realized that it was a seatbelt that was keeping me locked in my comfort zone. If I strapped in under the fear, I was locked in. Nothing was going to change.

It got to a point where and this helps where, when you feel that fear coming in, you see it come in and wrap around you or sit beside you. Call it what it is and that got to this point where I was like, “There you are. Of course, you’re here. This is a new experience and this is something I’m being asked to move into. Fear is going to be right beside me on this thing.” Acknowledging it, putting it in its place, recognizing it and moving past it because it does keep you locked in your comfort zone.

Fear and doubt, those two things. Vulnerability. They’re the greatest preventative medicine to complacency. I asked you the question about what you would tell your earlier self. That’s the advice I want to go back and tell myself is I spent years trying not to edge up against that space of vulnerability. Now here I am in my mid-50s leaning into it saying, “It isn’t until I have that sense of stark terror that I know I’m doing something right.”

It’s when I feel the ground isn’t underneath me anymore and I feel uncomfortable or exposed that I know, “This is where the magic happens. This is where I’m doing something that matters.” When I feel completely safe or comfortable, I know I’m taking the easy way out and not doing it. That’s one of my dashboard warning lights.

In the time that remains, I’d love to shift a little bit and talk and maybe give some actionable advice. A bit of inspiration to those entrepreneurs reading who want to be agents of change, to take on and do the right thing but maybe don’t know how to start, to stand up, to examine even their own businesses to be able to honestly answer. Am I doing the things I should be doing or I’m taking the easy way out?

The question to ask is, where can you be braver? We’re all being called as an industry to be brave with our lives and with our work. We’re the tip of the sphere. The rest of the world is slowly waking up to the value and importance of what we’re doing, but we’re the tip of the sphere. I think where we see is that the financial world hasn’t caught up to us yet. To transition farmland to regenerative and organic is a 3 to 5-year process.

If you’re a publicly traded food company on a quarterly earnings model, that timeline tension makes it pretty darn hard. Where is there an opportunity there for innovation? That was why we founded rePlant Capital. When we started it, it was that same energy that I got in the early years of my work when people were scratching their heads. They were saying, “This isn’t possible.” Impossible in a lot of cases. It’s something that hasn’t been done yet. Could I have done this by myself? No. It required my cofounders, Dave Haynes and Don Shaffer and now this extraordinary team.

Thinking about how you build out the strongest team, the most well-rounded team. It’s not bringing people on who are like you. It’s not bringing people on that are easy and going to surround you and make you feel good. It’s bringing people on that build you out. As I look around at our team, I am so proud of how well-rounded we are. There are different pieces of that team that are extraordinary in their own capacities and other pieces of the team that complement it. That’s critically important. Don’t shy away from the enormity and strength of other people’s success. Figure out where you can create synergies and collaborate together.

I ordered Ryan Holiday’s book, Courage Is Calling, because it’s very much salient to what you were saying. This all takes courage. It all takes a willingness to put yourself out there and it does. I do agree with you that often what we call impossible is something that somebody hasn’t done yet. There are a lot of things that, if we were to look back years ago, we would’ve said for sure, “We’re impossible.”

Breaking the four-minute mile, putting a man on the moon, all of those things that are now homeless pedestrians. Specifically, as a founder, you birth this brand and you’ve had this product in the market. How do you take a hard look to make sure you’re doing what’s right? What I’m trying to get to here is that I know there are entrepreneurs reading this. I think of Ryan Armistead, who made a comment earlier about how inspiring this is with Happy Moose with using upcycled ingredients and doing those things and trying to make a difference.

How do they amplify their voice? How do they challenge themselves to make sure that they don’t talk themselves into, “This is enough.” That’s what I worry about. I worry about that they start with this and they stop. They don’t consistently challenge themselves to do more. The reason I ask you this question is if I were to look at it chronologically or look at the impact, what you are doing has consistently built in momentum or impact. It wasn’t that you started after your daughter’s allergic reaction. It stayed at that same level of pursuit. You’ve not only increased your level of pursuit, but you’ve broadened and continued to, at least in my observation, challenge yourself to make a bigger impact.

The answer to that is I love being a student. I’m called to be a teacher a lot now, too, but I love to be a student. If I’m not learning, it’s not interesting. That’s been one of the greatest joys with rePlant as Don Shaffer as a cofounder, who coined the term integrated capital to learn from him, has been extraordinary. The reciprocity in that with the three cofounders, all of us feel that way about each other.

The ask is not more what I can be doing but how I can learn more. Learning requires listening. The art of listening has been an art form that has slipped. Especially as social media platforms took over and it was all about projecting and talking. One of the things that I value so much with social media is the comments section. I have always harnessed that for insight and information, especially the hard comments.

Those are some of the most valuable because if somebody truly is in there and challenging and trying to understand something. Those are incredibly valuable touchpoints and insights to get. Too often, especially for brands, you want to hide those comments because it’s like, “Here’s that blah. What do we do with this voice?” That can be one of the most powerful voices. When you have that respectful dialogue and their mutual understanding evolves, then that becomes a very powerful voice for a brand. The art of listening, the art of how you put yourself in the role of a student forever. To me, I will forever be a student.

It’s where I get so much joy and satisfaction out of the process because then you’re constantly learning. We are in this unprecedented time of tapping into this incredible indigenous wisdom that has been held in land and agriculture, especially with farmers of color. Marrying that now with 21st-century technology and these resources and tools that are now available to all of us. It’s taking those components and marrying them together to learn what we can do moving forward. I think that opportunity in front of us is incredibly expansive. It requires listening and all of us serving in this role, the duality of a teacher and a student.

That duality is so important. I know I love to teach. My wife has always said I’m a misplaced college professor, but what I love even more than teaching is waking up every day and learning and being this student. That’s what’s so invigorating to me. That’s why I’m so lucky to do what I do because I’m surrounded by these cool, innovative, courageous entrepreneurs who teach me every day. I love to consume information. I love to learn. I love to find out that I’m wrong.

That’s the other thing that I would encourage people reading. There are times when I am guilty of speaking in absolutes, but I’m inviting any time to find myself wrong because that’s where learning happens. Many of us are fearful of being wrong. That wrong looks like weakness or wrong look like foolishness. It’s not.

Wrong looks like growth. I would invite that in. As entrepreneurs, you should be okay with that. You should be okay with being wrong. You should be a student and a teacher. It flows both ways. I want to give it to you to share anything that you want to share about rePlant or what you are working on. Let folks know how best to reach out to you, etc.

RePlant was born out of the conversations and listening to multinational brands, smaller brands and recognizing that the math didn’t work. If 85% of consumers are buying organic and 75% of grocery store categories carry something organic. The fact that only 1% of our farmland is organic is insane. That’s the opportunity. How do we transition US farmland to regenerative and organic at scale so that we can change the economics here?

My personal mission forever and always will be, how do you make clean and safe food affordable and accessible to anybody who wants it? If you look over my career, that’s been core to every chapter. With rePlant, I was in conversations with some of these multinational food companies and helping them transition their portfolios to better-for-you, free-from-allergen, friendly, organic, and then realizing that they didn’t have the supply chain there.

I thought, “That’s awful.” You’re a multinational food company CEO who knows how to do the right thing but can’t do it because the math doesn’t work on the supply chain. For us, we’re deploying $2 billion in debt to transition farmland. US farmers carry $427 billion in debt and to convert US farmland in its entirety would take $700 billion. Clearly, we’re one piece of this, inviting, courage and collaboration by other players.

For us to model this as an example, to work with these different companies and say, “Give us your most forward-thinking farmers.” We can sit down with them and create these loans and create these terms. Tie them to biological metrics so soil health, water conservation, water infiltration and think about capital differently. The finance industry’s been pretty stale for a long time. There’s been an incredible revolution and incredible innovation in all other industries except for finance.

It’s like, “Let’s look at capital,” is the most important ingredient in our food system. Think about smarter ways to use it. Think about term sheets in a more innovative way that pulls all of these pieces together that we care about, not the return on capital but the return on soil and return on water and think about those things differently. That’s what we’re doing, which is exciting. It’s an incredible extension of everything that I had been doing up until this point.

I had been educating the consumer. I had been working with the corporations, then I got to a couple of presentations on Wall Street and I thought, “The capital’s stuck. How do we unlock the capital?” That’s what we’re doing. You can find us at rePlantCapital.com. You can find me at RobynOBrien.com. As I said, I’m super active on social media because the vibrancy of those conversations and the comments section especially. It’s incredible feedback. I value those conversations and that dialogue, so please reach out to me across any of those platforms.

I’m going to end this by reading a question that we didn’t have a chance to get to. One thing I continue to struggle with, how do you make justice for climate and food systems topic matter to the communities that are most heavily impacted by poisonous foods and industrialized food systems. The farm feels so far away from these under-resourced urban communities and low-income consumers seem not to even have access to fresh and organic food choices. It’s hard to believe what farming could be like could matter to them.

I would say, off the top of my head, you got to change the economics. If it’s not affordable and accessible, it’s not even part of the conversation. Having done a lot of work around the skyrocketing price of EpiPen, I realized these were families that were trying to decide between buying an EpiPen and paying their mortgage or buying an EpiPen and their car payment. You can’t get in there and start talking about organic when fundamental pieces of their lives are not secure and stable.

How do you make this economically viable? That’s the opportunity for our generation in front of us because it’s going to involve policy-makers. It’s things like us taxpayers, those tax dollars are being used to subsidize this agrichemical model. How can we think about capital differently? This is an economic conversation and I think this time has come.

Great answering that in such brevity. Thank you, everyone. Robyn, thanks so much for doing this. I’m so glad we were finally able to. I appreciate it. We’ll see you all next time.

Important Links

• Robyn O’Brien

• rePlant Capital

• Dave Haynes – LinkedIn

• Don Shaffer

• Courage Is Calling

• Happy Moose

About Robyn O’Brien

Robyn is a best-selling author, investment professional, mother of four, social entrepreneur and food systems advocate who speaks to the powerful connection between soil, climate, and human health. Her intersectional vision for the future of our food system inspires millions. She is a highly sought-after, globally recognized speaker.

Here are just a few of her career highlights:

• Regularly featured in media ranging from Forbes to CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox News

• Founding team member of AIM/Invesco’s first hedge fund of $100 million and their $20 billion Constellation Fund

• Advised CEOs and executives at multinational CPG companies, startups, and farm organizations for the past 15 years

• Has presented with presidential candidates, members of Congress and to governments around the world, invited to speak at Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg and

• other investor events Served as a board member and/or advisor to: Rabobank’s FoodBytes, the

• Environmental Working Group, Healthy Child Healthy World, Just Label It, and others.

• Founded the AllergyKids Foundation in 2000

• Published The Unhealthy Truth in 2009

• Delivered a TEDx talk based on her book; garnered millions of views and influenced food policy, legislation, and product formulation

• Her widespread social media presence reaches more than 1,000,000 people weekly and will bring awareness to your event.

• Co-Founder and Managing Director at rePlant Capital, a ground-breaking financial services firm determined to reverse climate change, deploying $2 billion to facilitate U.S. farmers’ transition to regenerative and organic agriculture

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