Resilience is an important attribute for any individual, both professionally and personally. It is especially important when you tackle and share new ideas that could potentially 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 with alacrity 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 has also attracted naysayers. Today, she shares that in dealing with opposing perspectives, mutually respectful dialogue is key. Tune in to learn more about what rePlant is working on and how they contribute to this important transition to preserve Earth.

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

I’m excited about this episode’s conversation. Robyn has taken on the moniker as food’s Erin Brockovich, but she’s an amazing human being. I would say maybe even a reluctant activist. She’s doing some important things and this is a conversation that I think is important to have and open up to all of you reading. It comes back to that message that when harnessed for good can be one of the greatest powers and greatest influences of change. All of you involved in the natural products industry are our best hope for being stewards.

I think Robyn can offer some advice as to how best to do it. Before turning it over to Robyn for an intro, I always like to do a little founder shout-out. I’m going to do it slightly differently rather than pick one founder and talk about their nimbleness, capital efficiency or resilience. I’m going to talk to all of you. It’s been hard because there was all this optimism that the veil was going to lift and things were going to start happening with speed and with excitement. 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 and 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 that is necessary to be resilient as an entrepreneur. You’re nourishing yourself and yourself both physically and spiritually. That’s my shout-out. With that, Robyn, I love for you to share with those reading more about you and a little bit about how this whole journey started.

I appreciate the conversation around resiliency because it’s a critical ingredient in anything 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 and 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 and awareness and things around pre-school where the children weren’t allowed to have plastic forks in their lunch boxes and they had to have cloth napkins. I was like, “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 and prior to moving to Boulder, my career had been an investment on a team that managed $20 billion in assets. I was the only woman on the team, so the people had me cover the food industry. At that time, I gave 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, it was what I got was the food industry.

All I can say now is, “Thank goodness that they handed me that.” I learned in a very unemotional and mechanical way the models of the industry and why they were taking real ingredients out in subbing in these artificial ingredients to drive profitability and margin. It was a very mechanical, unemotional work that I was doing initially. When my daughter was diagnosed with these food allergies, I turned back into 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 only 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 have thought would have stood beside me and championed this took a couple of steps back. It was like, “Let’s see what happens here.” In that isolation, you learn what you’re made of. Either you’re going to sink or you’re going to 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 and what I represented.

You learn what you’re made of in those moments and you also learn who your friends are. 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 everyday. To now, flash forward, to be in a place where as rePlant, we are rolling out $2 billion to farmers in order to transition US farmland to regenerative and organic agriculture.

To have a team that we have wrapped around us is so humbling, exciting and joyful, and every day, I practice the gratitude of that, of knowing that I came through this incredible isolation. 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 audience is how lucky are we to be in a place with the transparency that we have, with the 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 health of the climate. We’re standing on the solution with the soil that’s under our feet. 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 we could ever hope to have.

Responsibilities and yes, Robyn, I agree. 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 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 that itself in them?

There were a couple of things. When the book came out in 2009, online bullying was intense. That was right around the same time my oldest was starting middle school. Most of us remember middle school is per rifle for being. I would sit the kids down and I would show them the comments. I would say, “Here’s what this person is saying. Do you think that’s their real name? Look, they’re not using their pictures, 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’ve 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 and that it doesn’t become the enemy in this and I don’t inadvertently create something here? Again, it was, how do you make this joyful? How do we make it a celebration? One of the first things you have to take responsibility for and do is to value yourself. Once you choose to value yourself, then you are going to be mindful of the food that you put in your mouth and how you’re feeding your body. That was part of the message to the kids too. The four of you are incredibly important and how you take care of yourself is going to show up.

It was interesting because one had this tendency towards ADHD. One of the chapters in the book is around these artificial colors and how in countries around the world, they pull the artificial ingredients in colors out of food because of the linked-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 kid that was able to understand what happens when he chooses these things and these consequences.” Flash forward, my oldest is a Spanish and Psychology major and her focus is Immigration Law. 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 at the beginning of the work but very much, that’s what we’re talking about as justice here.

First of all, I’ve got to imagine that your four kids think, “My mom is a badass.” That’s such a cool thing, also, as a parent of two Millennials, one Gen Z and now two grandkids. On the days where 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 in the change that they want. It bolsters my confidence.

Mine will swing back and forth. My third child came home from school on Earth Day. 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. Google soil carbon sink. 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 despondency and 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 because the reality is, people, do swing and have a hard day. They can swing back into the optimism but it all is contingent again around the scaffolding that we have around us. Our ability to tap into this positive. As Gary Hirshberg calls it, this pathological optimism is required to drive it forward.

I can tell you that I certainly swing back and forth, especially around thinking about the future, for it to hit home when we had grandkids and you start thinking about that generation. 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 the team and community.

I think many founders can relate to that sense that they’re truly isolated or on an island. They wonder whether they will ever get to that side where they have a team around them and support and community. The way you described it is how I would want them to hear it. You can fight through that isolation. You can do that. You will come out the other side and with people around you who are champions and enable to help.

A skillset that you’ll never lose and an ability to mentor those on your team as they come in. I didn’t have a female mentor in my work. That is something that I feel is so important to give back. It’s to be able to offer that to younger women on our team. Not only 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? I think that candor and honesty, again, is critical because if we sugarcoat it, we’re not doing anybody any favors and so 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 only in our food system but in entrepreneurship, is important.

That leads to another question. 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, knowing what you’ve learned. What advice would you give yourself?

Don’t second guess yourself. I think I spent a lot of time evaluating the naysayers and the doubters. You know when you’ve done the work. You know when you put it in and so, trust that.

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

I think 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, both 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 that is free from the noise where you can hear yourself think and you can tap your creativity and innovation. In the early years, it was run.

I would advise is, part of your job is to create a space free from the noise where you can think. I say that a lot of me 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 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.” That is an important meeting for you each day because it allows you to check-in with yourself. It allows you to offload and process stress. It allows you to alchemize negative emotions that could come out in a different way during your workday.

Initially, you think like, “This is selfish. 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. 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 scary and stripping. You could see that on me physically and to realize like, “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 do I take care of myself, so I can continue to do this for the next 20, 30, 40 years. One of my role model is Jane Goodall. You look at how long she has been doing this work. I think about how ridiculed she would have been in the beginning talking about all of these communications with gorillas and having people would have ridiculed her. Yet, she learned how to take care of herself to stay the course for 50 to 60 years. I hope that I have that same opportunity.

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

The other thing is I’ve learned and again, 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 a couple of years, I had to re-engage with that because it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing because doing feels like progress, even though it isn’t. It’s insidious that way. That is the understanding that in order to be generous, effective, to manifest the best version of yourself, you first have to be a little bit selfish. You have to do the things for yourself 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 and contradictory but again, if you were listed on your earning statements as an asset, you got to take care of that thing and 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 feeling your system.

Are you feeling yourself in a way that your mind is clear that you can get sleep at night when you can sleep at night? Again, 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 preaching to the choir. I say all the time that 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 forward. One of the things that you and I talked about briefly was about the industry that invites trade-offs. We have this industry and we are the change agents.

This segment, these 50 million rough consumers that are the natural organic consumer, we lead that. 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 worked, so that margin worked 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 a creative? When is that trade-off crossing over, as you said, to violating your integrity? Coaching and suggestions there, anything that you can offer, I think would be appreciated.

One of the best pieces of advice I got in my career was early on when I was working on the investment desk and 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 and does it reflect who you are?

I think it’s easy to get into these head games and justifications. We’re smart. It’s a smart industry. We can justify about anything. You cannot buy your integrity back once it’s gone. 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 absolutely the best time to find a mentor and ask for help.

I talk about, we all have these like 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 checking and get this checked.” We have that internally. 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 overwrite it. The warning light is always right. Again, 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 that insight.

That’s what’s brought you to where you are. 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. Again, 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 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 workaround is going to be a workaround, so 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 and in 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 and to check your dashboard, your warning lights to make sure there’s some tug that feels there’s cognitive dissonance going on there.

There’s something real there and you need to slow down. At the same time, this is where it gets difficult. There are decisions that you can fall on the sword for that will prevent you from reaching or having as 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.

There’s a trade-off that will completely take you far afield. How do you discern the two? How do you understand? In my opinion, disagree with me, please, there are no absolutes. 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 want it to. When do you know or how do you check yourself to make sure that you’re not trading away your integrity? You are only trying to make some small trade-offs in order to keep the momentum or have as big an impact as you can.

I think 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 just a chapter. What tends to happen is when we get into those tension points, it starts to swallow you and 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 at night when I’m in bed. The vision I have is like to open my heart to, “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.

As you touched on, something that we tend to do is run from the tension and run from the knot or busy ourselves. As you said, start to get this hyper mode. It’s like 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. 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 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 has 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 they all represent. They have been through heartache and hardship. They are honest about those instances in their own lives and careers personally and professionally how they’ve been impacted by those things.

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

I couldn’t agree more. I think as an industry and as an entrepreneur, I encourage anyone reading, it’s great that you’re reaching for that next rung in the latter, 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 because 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 mentorship 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 all this, “I’m for real and this brand is 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 exactly the information you need from them. You need to figure out how to ask the tough questions to get the important feedback and I think everybody needs around them, both like-minded and contrarieties, so that you’re not getting people who see the world the same way you do.

Not surrounding yourself with yes-men is critical because it’s easy. Things are so hard, in the beginning, to want to surround yourself by people that make you feel better. It’s like a salve that you need as you’re like plowing through these tough early days in the business. To have the people, not only as advisors but also to create a culture on your team where those challenges can be brought forward and the environment and the culture are safe to hold all of that conversation. Ultimately, that’s going to be what drives you forward in an exponential way. I think 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 the same names on every deck. What is that doing? That’s a very homogenous way of thinking. We have this broken food system because of the broken financial system. In both cases, they’re very homogenous. Something I am passionate about is how we bring that diversity and equity into governance because we’re so much stronger as a fabric leading. All of these different experiences and pieces together than anyone thread would be by itself. That’s the opportunity.

One day, I was on a panel. It was the first time I had ever been on a panel where there wasn’t a White guy. I thought, “This is extraordinary. I’m on a panel for the first time that is representative of an incredible diversity of experiences and backgrounds.” What was fascinating is that after we were done, the organizer said in the webinar, which had close to 110 attendees, not a single person dropped off, which was amazing.

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 on the panel. 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 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 and the food industry was coming down on me. There was fear wrapped around me in every direction. I realized that it was like 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 I think this helps. 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. I got to this point. I was like, “There you are. 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 is the greatest preventative medicine to complacency. I asked you the question about what you would tell your earlier self. That’s exactly the advice I’d want to go back and tell myself. As I spent years trying not to edge up against that space of vulnerability and now here I am leaning into it. 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, then 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, what I’d love to do is shift a little bit and talk and maybe give some actionable advice and a bit of inspiration to those entrepreneurs reading who want to be agents of change, who want to take on and do the right thing but maybe don’t know how to start, stand up, examine even their businesses to be able to answer honestly. Am I doing the things I should be doing or am I 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 at the tip of the sphere. The rest of the world is slowly waking up to the value and importance of what we’re doing. Where we see that is 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 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, where people were scratching their heads and are saying, “This is impossible.” Impossible in a lot of cases. It’s something that hasn’t been done yet. Could I have done this by myself? Absolutely not. It required my cofounders, Dave Haynes and Don Shaffer. This extraordinary team thinking about, how do you build out the strongest and 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 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.

It’s interesting. I ordered Ryan Holiday’s book Courage Is Calling because I think it’s very much salient to what you were saying. This all takes courage. It all takes a willingness to put yourself out there. I 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 have said, for sure, “We’re impossible.” Breaking the four-minute mile, putting a man on the moon, all of those things that are now almost pedestrian. Specifically, as a founder too, you’ve built this brand. You’ve had this product in the market.

How do you take a hard look to make sure you’re doing what’s right? I know there are entrepreneurs. I think Ryan Armistead made a comment 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 that they start with this, they stop and don’t consistently challenge themselves to do more.

I look at your trajectory. 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 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. If I’m not learning, it’s not interesting. I think that’s been one of the greatest joys with rePlant, as Don Shaffer is 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 can I be doing but how can I be learning more? Learning requires listening. The art of listening has been an art form that has slipped, especially as social media platforms took over. It was all about projecting and talking. One of the things that I value so much with social media is the comment 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. I think too often, especially for brands, you want to hide those comments because it’s like, “Here’s that. 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 and 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. 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.

I think that duality is important. I love to teach. My wife has always said I’m a misplaced college professor. What I love even more than teaching is waking up every day and learning and being a student. That’s what’s 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 and find out that I’m wrong. That’s the other thing that I would encourage people reading this. There are times where I am guilty of speaking in absolutes but I’m inviting any time to find myself wrong because that’s where learning happens.

I think so many of us are fearful of being wrong. Wrong looks like weakness or 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 and you should be a student and a teacher. It does work and it flows both ways. We’ve got about a few minutes left. I want to give it to you to share anything that you want to share about rePlant or what you guys 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 is 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, it 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 realizing that they didn’t have the supply chain there. I thought, “That’s awful.”

You’re the CEO of a multinational food company 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. The US farmers carry $427 billion in debt. To convert US farmland and its entirety, it would take $700 billion. We’re one piece of this. Again, 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 has been stale for a long time and there’s been incredible revolution and innovation and all other industries except for finance.

It’s like, “Let’s look at the capital.” It’s the most important ingredient in our food system and think about smarter ways to use it. Think about term sheets more innovative way that pulls all of these pieces together that we care about. Not only the return on capital but the return on soil and return on water and thinking 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. 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 of the vibrancy of those conversations and the comment section, especially is incredible feedback. I value those conversations and that dialogue. 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 but I think it’s such a salient question. I’m bummed that we didn’t. Maybe what I’ll do is copy it and email it to Robyn. We can both take a shot at responding. One thing I continued to struggle with. How do you make the justice for climate and food systems topic matter to the communities who are most heavily impacted by poisonous foods and industrialized food systems? The farm field is so far away from these under-resourced urban communities and low-income consumers seem not even to have access to fresh and organic food choices. It’s hard to believe why 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 their very fundamental pieces of their life 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 policymakers. As taxpayers, those tax dollars are being used to subsidize this agrichemical model. How can we think about capital differently? This is an economic conversation. I think as time has come.

It’s great answering that in such brevity. Thank you, everyone, for reading. 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

• Patagonia

• Jane Goodall

• Courage Is Calling

• Happy Moose

• Integrated Capital

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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