Deep Dive Carbon

David Yocom: Good morning everyone. Welcome to Is Select’s deep dive webinar series.

My name’s David Yocum. I’m a principal here on is Select’s investment team, and I’m excited to welcome you to our discussion today. One theme that we’ve been researching Has climate smart agriculture and specifically carbon measurement reporting and verification MRV and agriculture. In recent years, agriculture’s role in the production of greenhouse gases, principally nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide, which today we will discuss largely as carbon dioxide equivalent has come under significant attention as a part of the global climate challenge.

However, in the same token, greater attention is being paid to the agricultural methods and solutions that not only can significantly reduce emissions, but in fact sequester them principally and biological sources. For agricultural practice changes to occur. We do need systems that create both incentives and trust for farmers purchasers of their products and purchasers of the carbon credits derived from their work and their efforts.

Measurement reporting and verification protocols are central to making this all come together. To kick things off today, we’re gonna start off with some introductions from our speakers. Then we’re gonna move into some sort of core trends that are helping define why we’re having the conversation that we’re having today, that we’re gonna speak about some key issues both in the implementation of, carbon projects, technologies that are being deployed.

The way that those look across rangeland versus cropland and then how farmers are playing a role in this and some of the opportunities they face, as well as some of the challenges. So with that, I’d love if we could start off with some introductions. If we could start off with Debbie then go with Lars, Kevin, and Mitchell.

That’d be fantastic.

Debbie Reed: Thanks David. I’m Debbie Reed, the executive director of the Ecosystem Service Market Consortium and the ecosystem service Market Research Consortium, our research arm. And we are a nonprofit working and operating the first national market program for supply chain accounting and reporting for companies with agriculture in their supply chain.

David Yocom: Awesome. Thank you Debbie. Lars.

Lars Dyrud: Hey, good morning everyone. My name’s Lars De, I’m the c e o of Earth Optics. Earth Optics is a soil mapping company with an emphasis on the on mapping. So we deploy technologies like proximal sensors and satellite data to dramatically increase the power of a traditional soil sample, allowing us to take far fewer soil samples for mapping just about anything you want, including carbon.

So we’ve been, thrilled to be participated in carbon measurement across grass and range land in, in row crop projects now for, nearly two years.

David Yocom: Awesome. Thanks Lars. Kevin.

Kevin Silverman: Morning, everybody. So I’m the Carbon and Sustainability product manager at Vents, helping set up our in setting and offsetting programs.

Vince is a virtual fencing technology company that uses Simuli to help do rotational grazing at scale without the need for physical fencing and really unlocking those possibilities.

David Yocom: Yeah. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks Kevin. And, last but not least, Mitch. Yeah. Hey

Mitchell Hora: everyone. Mitchell Hora. I’m a seventh generation farmer from southeast Iowa.

My family farm is mostly corn, soybeans but we’ve been deep into this space for a long time. Started no-tilling in 1978 and using cover crops in 2013. So really seeing these things in, a big believer. I started continuum ag and we’ve now expanded that company, really helping farmers with the how-to of regen ag.

We’ve built the top soil tool to help farmers manage and track their soil health data integrated in technologies like our represented here today and helping farmers to successfully implement regenerative ag systems. And then, as a bonus outcome of successfully implementing regen ag. Hopefully there’s a, bunch of carbon sequestration and, lower carbon intensity of our crops that we’re producing.

Excited to dig further into that

David Yocom: here today. Awesome. Thanks to all our speakers. We’re really excited to hear all your perspectives, and in putting this panel together, we wanted to make sure we got a diverse set of perspectives from anybody from, implementing carbon programs, to participating in them, to building the technologies and the solutions that help enable the, future that these programs ares are, promising.

And so really excited to hear everybody’s perspectives. Just to, jump in, I’m gonna spend a few minutes here just setting the stage for the remainder of the discussion. Bring us up to speed on some definitions, some recent trends, and how to think about how carbon Mr.

V’s been being implemented in agriculture and why that matters. For anybody who might be new to even agriculture as an industry I in the past five to 10 years in particular There though estimates Mary vary. Agriculture has represented a significant contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions.

These are on the left statistics around the US G H G emissions. And I, initially I, just wanna create a distinction here. We’re talking about carbon in terms of GHGs. They’ll be used interchangeably today, but functionally we’re talking about carbon dioxide equivalent because a lot of these emissions aren’t specifically carbon dioxide.

They’re in the form of nitrous oxide and methane in particular. But needless to say, the e p A estimates that the U US emissions approximately 11% came from agriculture and the leading sources being fer, enteric, fermentation, manure management, and from, cropland soils. And so this is, this has become a, significant area of focus and criticism for the industry, but also an opportunity to say, where are ways in which we can get better?

And also, agriculture as a biological system, how can it serve as part of the solution going forward as, opposed to being seen as part of the problem. And so that’s, where thinking about agriculture as a carbon sink comes in. In fact, global soils have. Have about 3.1 times the carbon storage capacity of the atmosphere, which is stored only by the storage capacity of the ocean.

And, biologically, we’re typically discussing the opportunity to create soil and crop systems that are functionally less disturbed in more capable of storing soil, organic carbon at higher rates for longer periods of time at a greater relate rate than their release back into the atmosphere. And so this serves largely as a function of the relationship that soil organic matter has with permanent root systems to store significant carbon quantities over the course of time.

I would be remiss not to mention that Obviously inorganic carbon plays a role in terms of storage and soil. And, there are companies that are working on technologies called such as enhanced weathering as a way of reintroducing mineral minerals to soil to sequester carbon in a much longer format.

Eventually it would end up in the ocean, but as a agronomic input. But just putting these two slides in context the, main takeaway is to say agriculture today has a significant con, is a sign significant contributor to G H G emissions. But in the same token, it is a part of a biological system that when treated correctly and when processed correctly, has an opportunity to also store carbon in a significant way, as well as reducing emissions from the current practices that we take on currently.

So you might be wondering what some of those practices look like and what those things are that we can do. So at the simplest level, there’s really two things the industry can do in, terms of building a climate friendly and resilient food system. One is, reduce emissions in food production, and the other is sequester emissions via food production.

How can agriculture help do both of these things? There’s a number of agricultural practices, which under the, recent branding, which the U S D A would call climate smart, other servers might call this regenerative. Others might call this sustainable. But tools like agri forestry cover cropping and no-till practices can help improve carbon stocks and soil and in plants while reducing soil disturbance that would release carbon back into the atmosphere.

Tools like biochar can be used as an extremely beneficial soil amendment that has a very long carbon permanence in the soil, meaning that it doesn’t break down and release into the atmosphere rapidly. Rotational grazing can help improve the productivity of grassland ecosystems and their ability to store soil organic carbon.

And the list goes on with a number of others who, are here. And fortunately for many developers and adopted these technologies, the U S D A, as you can see on the bottom right here recently announced 70 projects will be the recipient of 2.8 billion for the adoption implementation and incentivization of climate smart agricultural practices.

So we’re, at the beachhead of this really exciting opportunity to take a lot of these tools that I think Mitchell speak to this a little bit later, but tools that have been used for a long time but we’re at this time now where there’s, a momentum around, around this challenge particularly this, G H G emissions challenge.

In addition to some of the maturity in terms of the ways in which we can measure and manage some of these efforts in order to help deliver value, both to farmers, but also societal benefit in terms of the reduction of G H G emissions and also producing a more resilient food system overall.

I’ll pa I’m gonna pause here to see if there’s any comments from the speakers at this point before I jump into the next slide in case I missed anything.

All right. So before we move into talking more about carbon markets, carbon credits carbon programs that farmers might be participating, and there are some core concepts that are really important to understand in terms of how we functionally make all these things work together.

And so Debbie, before we move into some of the work more specifically around what you guys are doing with E S M C, I think it would be really awesome if you could help the, audience understand some of the nuances in terms of how carbon gets offsetted or inset in a supply chain and maybe creating a distinction between what an offset is an inset is and what you would describe as a scope three supply chain intervention.

Can you speak to some of tho to those three and why they matter? Yep.

Debbie Reed: Sure. Thanks for that. So I’ll start maybe with the middle right. We’ll scope one through three emissions. For any country or any company that has to do a greenhouse gas inventory, they have to look at their direct emissions and what they are.

That’s scope one. They’re indirect coming from energy, that’s scope two, and then they’re indirect from their supply chain, which is scope three, and that will help elucidate offsets, insets, and then supply chain emission reduction. So starting with the offsets, and I’ve been working in this industry since the offset market started in the nineties, offsets are a different beast and they are a way to create emission reductions more cheaply than a company can do within their own walls.

Carbon offsets are different from insets and different from supply chain emissions several ways. Jurisdictionally number one, they can come from anywhere. They an, offset that a company purchases in the United States can come from China, for instance, or anywhere in the United States, anywhere in the world.

Two sectorally. They can cross boundaries. So a oil and gas company or Microsoft can buy an offset from a different sector. For instance, the agricultural sector. Number three, offsets create an emission reduction, but they also allow emissions to increase elsewhere. So they do not ever get you to net zero at best.

They just keep you level. So that’s a definition of an offset. They can only be utilized to account for changes in the company’s scope one emissions. They can’t be utilized in scope two or scope three. Insects. The definition of an inset is an offset that occurs within a company’s supply chain. So it’s an offset, meaning it still allows an emission to increase elsewhere.

It can cross jurisdictional boundaries, but it has to be within the supply chain of an organization so it doesn’t cross sectoral boundaries. A supply chain emission reduction or a emission factor impact unit is different because it is not an offset. It is an absolute increase in soil carbon, or absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

It does not allow an emission re to occur elsewhere. So that is a huge difference between the first two, and it does not cross jurisdictional or sectoral boundaries. Supply chain emission reductions have to occur. Where a company actually sources a commodity. And they have to be within their supply chain.

So for a food and beverage sector, it has to occur within an agricultural supply chain, for instance, or somewhere else. They source products. But they are three different market mechanisms with three different market opportunities and ways of being quantified mi monitored and

David Yocom: verified. Thank you.

Debbie, that was a really obviously you’ve, spoken a lot about this over the last however many years. The in terms of, just going back to one point you made around the offsets versus the insets, the ins, it sounds and, from what I’ve read and what you’ve described here is that the insets and the supply chain interventions are really a much clearer path in terms of getting to an actual net zero goal as opposed to, the offset programs which you mentioned are cheaper, but perhaps not quite as effective as actually getting to the goal that we’re looking at here.

Debbie Reed: I think that’s exactly right. It insets, so we started an organization, our market program, with the intent of creating offsets and insets. And our companies, the buyer said, we don’t need offsets. We don’t need insets, we need supply chain emission reductions. Because if you’re following S B T I, science-Based Targets initiative, or you have a commitment that’s S B T I, you cannot use offsets or insets until you have achieved net neutrality in your carbon in, in your emissions profile.

And then you can use offset. So they cannot use them typically for the first 20 or 30 years.

David Yocom: Yep. Kevin, I saw you nodding. I didn’t know if you wanted to add anything. I just, I saw you. Yeah,

Kevin Silverman: no, that was probably the most cogent explanation of the different levels that I’ve ever heard. I was just in rapid agreement.

David Yocom: Awesome. Thanks, Debbie. I the, one last just definition that I would want to throw in the mix here, just particularly since we’re talking about agricultural systems that are functionally biological systems is this concept of, permanence. And thinking about how long emissions last for, in terms of how they’re sequestered, how long they’re sequestered for which als also comes into nuance of the types of emissions that are either prevented or offset in some way.

I think we’ll have a little bit more of an in depth discussion around that, but it’s, a core consideration in terms of thinking about what the long-term impacts of these types of offsets or insets could be.

So moving into sort of the, core definition around some of the conversation that we’re, already having, and that speaks to the title of this this Deep Dive. Is it really in order to accomplish all of this, which is to really say we wanna build a food system that is regenerative, that is that is climate positive there’s also climate resilient.

We need to know that the work that is being done is in fact being done and. That it’s working. And so that’s where an effective measurement reporting and verification program comes in. Just to give the definition for anybody who may be new to this concept, measurement reporting and verification refers to the multi-step process to measure the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are reduced by a specific mitigation activity.

Such as reducing emissions from deforestation or force degradation over a period of time, and to report these findings to an accredited third party. And we’ll, ex we’ll explore more what that actually looks like in a program, who the real stakeholders are there. But this third party then verifies the report so that the results can be certified in the covered credits, which then end up being used to pay people who have done the good work to improve either the sequestration of a project or reduce the emissions inherent to a project.

And with, that in mind the, sort of goals of an M R V program are really to understand where we are today. Create incentives for pro, for the production and purchase of high quality carbon credits, and then build trust in a system that all stakeholders believe the system is in fact working.

And that can be the power of a well put together Mr. V program and system. So with that in mind r v sort of comes to life through some of these carbon programs in marketplaces such as those implemented by, Debbie and her team at E S M C. So Debbie I’m, wondering if you can just give us a little bit more context for, what E S M C does and how your carbon programmers work and, really who I in doing some, background research, understanding all the key stakeholders that are involved in this decision making process to make this whole thing work.

How, do they all come together for somebody who may not have any exposure to this type of marketplace or this type of program?

Debbie Reed: Yeah, it’s a good question. And we are different. We are very unique in that we are nonprofit and we are a public-private partnership and a member-based organization.

So our members, we have 80 members across the ag supply chain and value chain that represent buyers. So corporations across the ag supply chain who have taken on commitments and need to account for their mission reductions. We have technology companies, measurement quantification companies we have agricultural groups and individual producers that participate and land grant universities, soil scientists, researchers, et cetera, right?

So we all collaborated in building our program and our platform to meet the needs of companies who have taken on commitments to reduce their, not just greenhouse gas emissions, but we also generate water quality, water quantity, and starting to generate biodiversity goals because companies are taking on commitments to do how we operate is. We take on. E S M C has built like an M R V platform that is all digitized so that our entire process we’re finalizing this now is digitized from start to end. And we take on the role of developing the protocols and getting them validated. We work with partners who actually do producer on outreach technical advice for practice changes, and then enroll partners.

We have partners we work with such as Earth Optics that do soil sampling for us to meet our program needs. And then we work on internally the quantification of the credits the credit through verified with sustained certain gold standard who are global certification and verification bodies. Then we sell to buyers and pay producers.

How we have set up that system is probably different and unique as well, but, The point is, that it’s really a collective enabling environment because what we observed is that individual companies who have to do accounting and reporting in Scope three, if they needed to do it themselves and invest in all the tools and technologies, would be a waste of resources, number one.

Number two would, take us all a lot longer to develop that. And we would not be able to scale the outcomes in the timeframes that we need to actually achieve what we need

David Yocom: to achieve. Gotcha. And that’s there there’s so much in there. I, think one of the things that.

On the surface when you read through how these different types of programs are structured, and if for anybody who’s curious to actually read a side by side comparison of a lot of the different programs that are available, that’s source two in this PDF that’ll be distributed following this conversation today, has a really helpful breakdown of a lot of those different types of programs.

So I think when you look at sort of the flow chart, it makes sense, right? The farmers taking on new practices, you’re helping coordinate, galvanize this effort around those who are, verifying partners like Earth objects who are helping, to measure the registries who are helping basically list out the, credits that are being exchanged.

Can you explain a, little bit about the, two that I always find the most hazy in terms of understanding from like a layman’s perspective are the verifiers and the registries. What how, would you explain what those two parties do in terms of this whole system? That’s a good

Debbie Reed: question.

The way carbon offset and insects markets work is a little bit different from how we work. So I’ll explain it from that perspective. Yeah. The way our program, and we were ju we just received validation and verification by sustainer and gold standard in August. What that means is they validated our program that is equivalent to having your protocol approved in an offset market.

But they looked at our entire program and how we carry it out to ensure that we’re quantifying appropriately, we’re collecting data and tracking it appropriately. We’re monitoring Yeah. Appropriately before we even get to the verification process. So sustainer is a certification body that certifies, that are accounting.

Our reporting, our data collection quantification, meets all of the rigor levels of certainty and uncertainty required. For companies to then say, yes, this is a valid. Report claim that I can make to show that interventions a company is taking within their supply chain are accurate and are credibly reported.

So it’s a little bit different than an offset registry. The other thing is that the reason we work with sustained Cert and Gold standard is that they work on not only Scope three supply chain reporting for different sectors, but they also track impacts and quantification for companies to help meet their commitments toward the UN’s sustainable development goals.

2030, right? So it accounts for land use, water use, impacts labor, lots of different things. So that is a benefit. To the, our program, right? So we’re doing the accounting and the reporting for companies in their supply chain reporting to meet their S B T I commitments, et cetera, but also helping them to quantify what they’re doing to meet U N d sustainable development goals for 2030.

In terms of a registry, it doesn’t work quite the same either, right? SUSTAIN Cert validated our program, and then they verify every project and we have created a digital platform to help them come in, look at all our data, how it is stored, how we do qa, qc, and then at the end of that they will verify that yes, our claims are material materially accurate and ver verified, and that they meet levels of uncertainty.

In the sustained cert program that we are in, it’s called, they have two different programs. Yeah. Our level of accuracy allows multiple companies to actually share the emission factors generated from our program. That means we’ve let met enough level of accuracy that they don’t think we’re propagating error across the system.

So if for instance, we’re working with General Mills and generating scope three emission factors for wheat, if they in fact work with Cargill, a d m on the wheat and they get it from them, they can all share that emission factor across their supply chain, whoever actually builds or buys and sell that product.

It could be Ad M, general Mills, and possibly even McDonald’s for instances. They can share the emission factors. It’s, some people think it’s double counting. It’s not, it is actually different in scope three. Sustainer has a program, a software platform that will actually track that across the supply chain.

And we have partnered with them to allow two things to allow different buyers to co-invest. So that reduces how much each buyer pays for that. And then we create ongoing dividends to producers. So each time a emission factor for commodity is resold. In that supply chain, the producer gets an additional dividend for it.

That is basically how it’s different. It’s not like secondary or tertiary markets that operate in the offset sector, but it is probably analogous.

David Yocom: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really, helpful comparison. I guess the one thing I would think might be helpful from a a clarity perspective that I still find is sometimes hard to understand unless you talk to experts in the space, is like in terms of the actual.

Can you give it a concrete example of a verification that would occur or some, a way in which you, a practice or a project would in fact be verified and how that works briefly?

Debbie Reed: Yeah. If we, if you look at the the. Screenshot on the left, if you will. So once we have done everything, the producers enrolled, they’ve undertaken a practice change they’ve, it included all of the data in our M R V platform, if you will.

It is all tracked yeah, and captured in our platform. We then send the data to be modeled, whether it’s to a carbon modeler and greenhouse gas modeler, or to the water modeler, or both. In many instances that comes back, we then submit that package of data to sustain insert for verification. What they will do is they literally have electronic lines of site into the M R V platform to look at.

Our QA r QC processes is the data we said this is based on in that platform. Yeah. If necessary, if there’s anything missing, they can flag it for us. If they want to call a producer and find out, did you do this practice right, they can do that. But it is intended to be digitized. Yeah. And much more less burdensome, if you will, than those verification processes in the past.

So they look at everything they need to, ensure that the process we said we were following is a process we followed. All of the data is there to show the accuracy of the claims that we can then sell. Super

David Yocom: helpful. Thank you, Debbie. So ho hopefully this gives everybody some, context for all the stakeholders that are involved in these programs.

Obviously some of the nuance of the S M C program itself. But in terms of how we get, from a farmer taking on a practice change to a functional credit of some kind in the form of a, of an offset and inset or a or a a scope three supply chain intervention. Obviously within the scope of M R V, one of the important components is, measurement.

And the measurement field has evolved a lot in the last five to six, six years since I, ever since I’ve been on the I select team. There’s, it’s been a, there’s been a, constant evolution in terms of the tools that are available for doing measurement and we’re having worked closely with, Earth optics.

When I’m discussing with investors how this breaks down in terms of how we measure carbon in agriculture, I break it down into sort of three buckets. Try and make it as simple as possible. There’s obviously nuance within this, so I don’t want to oversimplify this, but I find it as a helpful way to think about is there, basically there is direct sampling.

I we take a, soil sample and we verify components about that through dry combustion or other technologies to verify attributes of that soil. We have remote sensing from really far away, like a satellite image. It tells us where we can basically use machine learning to understand attributes about soil at the surface level based off of, satellite imagery or from hyperspectral imagery.

And then we have remote sensing that gives us a much closer look at what’s happening at the soil. And that’s either via technologies that. Are able to penetrate the earth and gap capture information below the surface. Or tools like for example, like a yardstick who uses spectroscopy in terms of capturing information below the surface in a sample point to reduce the number of soil samples that need be taken.

But, overall, there’s two goals we wanna measure with great accuracy and we wanna measure with low cost, high efficiency, and a high level of automation so that the amount of work that’s going into capturing this information is as minimized as much as possible and is democratized as much as possible.

So now is a great time to bring Lars into the conversation. Lars, can you give us a little bit of context for what you guys are doing at Earth Optics and the, problem you guys solve in terms of measuring carbon stocks in agriculture? And the only other thing I would add on to that is, Earth Objects does a certain level of data capture, but you guys combine with data from a lot of other sources, including all the data sources that are listed here on this chart today.

So maybe just tell us a little bit about, again, just what you guys are doing and how it ties into the other technologies that are currently being deployed to understand carbon and agriculture. David, thank you

Lars Dyrud: so much. That’s, a great setup. So at Earth Optics, we’re focused on the, how do we solve the very general problem of being able to quantify both baseline solar carbon, but also changes in solar carbon.

And just to put in perspective, what a challenging problem this is in general and why it’s been such a costing, sticking point for a lot of these programs is if you take an acre foot of soil, it weighs in general about 2000 tons. To and typical soil carbon concentrations in the soil for a Midwestern farm could vary from say, two to 5%, where five is probably historically high.

It might have been natural prairie level soil carbon concentration. Many farms these days are somewhere between one and three. With the practice changes we’ve been talking about referring to in terms of cover cropping or low till or no-till, or even rotational grazing or adding in prescribed burns and things like that.

For ranches, you’re typically, in general, rule of thumb, gonna be looking to get a, one ton, maybe in the most best case scenario, two ton CO2 equivalent per year increase in the soil carbon, mostly in that top one foot of soil. Remember I said CO2 equivalent, which is about a third of a, third of a ton.

So let’s get back to that 2000 2000 ton acre foot of soil. So even over a1 year period, if you’re looking to go after maybe 10, 20 tons of CO2 increase over a 10 year period, you’re still representing about a one part and a thousand change of carbon concentration inside that 2000 acre. 2010 acre foot of soil.

This is a very small amount, right? So in order to actually quantify that change, you need to take historically a lot of soil samples. And I’m in general the type of projects that that Debbie works with and that, we make measurements for. If you wanted to truly quantify that change accurately and confidently, you’d be taking many, samples per acre.

That would be so ridiculously expensive. In general, it costs about 15 to $20 just to collect a cell sample and have it tested in a laboratory for usually through Dry combustion to determine the amount of carbon in it. And so that would be about five times more value and or costs in the value of the carbon.

You’re accumulating the soil today anyway. So it’s just, it’s not economical. That’s not what’s happened. So folks have been looking for combining practice based models and other ways of combining measurement with models to still get a good estimate of and good verification, whether solar carbon’s increasing or not.

And what we really wanted to do is, hey, how can we set the bar for accuracy? Still incredibly high, trying to actually directly detect a change in solar carbon on five year type of basis, but get the cost down so it’s economical. And so we focus on technology development. David alluded to it.

We basically use everything that you’ve listed here in order to, achieve that goal. And we’re using NC two sensors like Crystal Labs to reduce the number of samples we need to send to a lab. We use grine and training radar and electromagnetic conduction. We’ve just added gamma ray detection.

We’re testing on a number of our rigs this this fall. And we also combine it with. High resolution, lighter base elevation data sets and hydrologic modeling and, satellite data as well. And so the whole goal in the fairly practical approach we’ve taken is how do we not eliminate the sample that is the gold standard for how you directly try to quantify changes in soil carbon, but how can we dramatically reduce the number of those samples you need, particularly on a per acre basis to achieve that, that truly important goal of being able to quantify carbon changes in the soil on annual or multi annual time scale.

So it’s a challenging problem. It’s one we think we’re really excited that we’ve made a lot of progress in. But it really is, I think a key piece in the success of all these programs because without the believability and that quantified nature of changing soil carbon we really think it’s gonna be an uphill battle to get some of these programs to really take hold within a larger portion of the public.

And, companies that wanna participate with them. There’s a lot of ways to sequester carbon. We think soil’s one of the most important, but it’ll always remain that that.

What is it? The ugly stepchild, until we can really demonstrate strongly that we measure these changes are real.

So yeah, I think that’s a kind of quick background on, what we do and how it relates to the,

David Yocom: this ecosystem. Thanks, Lars. I, Debbie, I don’t know if you have a perspective here, but I given, the amount of experience you have in the field and some of the, just the way in which all these really powerful data sets are starting to come together how, has that made these types of programs easier to implement, like lower cost, to implement, less cumbersome for people participating in what, role does just improving the overall measurement process and, doing the kind of work that Lars and their team are doing due to change the paradigm of how people might participate in a program like this, or how effective it might be?

Yeah,

Debbie Reed: so it, it’s incredibly important that there are organizations who understand the power of technology and. Ground truthing, those technologies everywhere that they are actually operating and utilizing the technology. And so we, when we started right, four years ago doing soil sampling, we were doing 60 centimeter three inch, getting soil carbon probe, right?

At a high density. And it’s incredibly expensive. It’s not sustainable, but that’s what we had, right? So we are really excited to see groups like Earth Optics doing the due diligence, understanding the variability, and how you account for that variability in a way that will actually meet the validation and verification requirements of a market-based program, right?

So to me it’s incredibly exciting. And that is one of the reasons we’re working with earth optics, right? We cannot sustain. The level of cost in soil sampling that we’ve seen in the past, and I’ll add one more thing. The highest risk to our entire program getting projects started and finished to date, remain soil sampling.

There are human errors, there are technology errors. There’s the need to get the data in a timely fashion on time, get it into the hands of the modelers, et cetera. So technologies that will make it more accurate and reduce that time in the human and other resource elements and risk to our program and others are the only way we are going to accommodate the needs of market-based programs and begin to make.

A difference in terms of climate change impacts.

David Yocom: Said. Debbie. Before we move on from the slide Mitch I, just would be curious to get your perspective, both from, as a farmer, but also as someone who runs continuum ag. Yeah. How you might interface with these new technologies that are coming online, ultimately to help farmers make decisions that allow them to have healthier soil health, which you guys have been doing for.

For the last 50 years. Yeah. And also that you’re helping farmers do going forward, how does that all, how those pieces fit together?

Mitchell Hora: Yeah for, me, I’m in a unique spot that with Continuum Mag now we’re helping, our role at Continuum Mag is to help farmers to navigate this space, bring in the data that they need to be able to optimize their scoring and make sure that the carbon is gonna be there no matter how we’re gonna measure it and test it and, whatnot.

I’ve done pilot projects with nearly all of the companies that are, that have their logos here. I work with a lot of ’em on an ongoing basis in, the, in a unique spot where I’ve got my own farm to be able to play with. And that’s how I bring in all these, systems. Before I take ’em to my customers I, test ’em on my own farm first.

That’s, that. I’m in a really unique spot to be able to do that. But the main thing that I’m taking away with this is that farmers, I think we need to. Enable farmers to aggressively implement these programs and stuff. And, that a focus on the real outcome, a focus on drawn down carbon being low carbon intensity.

That needs to be the main goal. As you highlighted before, there’s lots of different practices that can lead to great generating these outcomes. I really think we’ve gotta enable farmers to be paid and be compensated based on the outcome that they generate. Not just the practice that they can check a box and do the practice, which incentivizes doing the bare minimum because the payment isn’t enough to really incentivize doing it to the best of your ability.

It incentivizes do the bare minimum. So hopefully there’s a little bit of money in your pocket at the end of the day because the cost of doing these things is really expensive and the cost of cover crops has gone up by about 25% since last year. That’s just one of the things. No, that’s

David Yocom: a really good point.

I, and I feel like, High quality, low cost. High fidelity measurement underlies so much of that and underlies so much of the trust of a system like that for an outcomes based system as opposed to a practices based system. And the la

Mitchell Hora: The

last piece of it being that we’re, looking here at the soil organic carbon, that’s the last piece of the chain of the cycle, right?

What we try to help our farmers understand too, is the leading indicators, the, I call it liquid carbon, but it’s as root exudates that are putting that carbon down into the soil. The biological activity, the majority of, soil organic matter and soil organic carbon. It’s actually microbial micromass, microbial carcasses.

Yeah. And we can measure that. Those are leading indicators to these kind of things. So I try to bring in that because if, we’re gonna look at carbon once every five or 10 years or so, we need to make sure on an annual basis that we’re tracking in the right direction. We try to bring that to our growers too, and and do it in a manner where they can pay for it.

And and it could be directly cost effective. Awesome. Thanks

David Yocom: Mitch. Moving, forward from this measurement component I wanna talk, about this sort of in the context of a project and the way in which that might look. The, example we’re gonna talk about is gonna be livestock.

And so I’ll just jump to this next slide here. And just thinking about livestock having significant emissions contributions in the form of inter fermentation manure management. And then in some countries, particularly and well publicized in, in the Amazon issues with deforestation and land degradation due to increasing land, quantities for for livestock raising.

And so there’s kind of two ways to think about the ways in which livestock production can be decarbonized. One is, thinking about how do we functionally Allow livestock to improve landscapes through rotational grazing, improve the health of grassland ecosystems. In a second is thinking about, okay, this enteric fermentation thing is an annoying component of ruminant systems.

There’s something that we can do to reduce the amount of methane is being emitted. And that’s people are thinking, trying to solve that issue through, in some cases feed additives like Red Sea, red Seaweed as a, as an example. But I wanna bring, Kevin into the conversation here.

Given that livestock production has faced so much criticism for his contribution to G H G emissions in general ecosystem degradation, can you tell us a little bit about some of the work you guys are doing at vents and how a tool like vents can help shift that paradigm? And then beyond that, how a tool like Fences would participate in the context of some of the carbon programs we’ve talked about, like SMCs or others?

Kevin Silverman: Yeah, no, thank you for that. So the first thing I wanna say is that it is really, Early in understanding how regenerative and rotational grazing affects the link. We know that it has positive effects on things like water and soil, water infiltration, biodiversity, and carbon, but exactly how much and how much that varies in different regions is still something we have to work on.

There are some programs that are active and there are some really promising studies across the United States as well as a peer reviewed model that’s being used for a variety of different carbon offset programs. But we really need more to get to that point where folks are with dropping. And I think that’s important to understanding that investing in a livestock based carbon program is both a research project in some ways and a commercial one.

That being said, there’s still plenty of benefits for farmers and ranchers interested in enrolling, given the how the project, how the implementation of these regenerative ranching programs does help with production benefits. Additionally, a lot of what people talk about with regenerative ranching is beyond cattle rotations, and that’s the one that kind of gets the bulk of attention.

And there’s kind of these lurking variables where people are talking about cattle rotations, when in reality the ranchers doing things like seeding native perennial grasses

David Yocom: back in coral and doing

Kevin Silverman: Really, specific by

David Yocom: buffer management and

Kevin Silverman: doing things like SY pasture. So really being able to understand what practices arrangements doing when they talk about improved grazing management and better regenerative branching.

It’s crucial. That being said, with vents, what we really can do is tell you what exactly is going on in the land with the rancher. A rancher can monitor precisely where their cattle are any given moment. Pre-planned rotations, I think up to 16 collar rotations can be pre-programmed at once.

And, that’s important in two ways for a carbon program. One is just for general reporting and verification. This is a really good tool across reference ecological outcomes. Be them in biomass, in soil, organic carbon stocks, or again, biodiversity or water metrics. With specifically what did the rancher do?

How did they move their cattle? Where were those cattle? When a certain impact happened over time. And there’s also independent verification through the callers that the mo the movements that were claimed by the program actually occurred. Additionally in the future, this is gonna be really crucial with providing specific agronomic suggestions that can maximize carbon storage potential.

Once we know exactly how different movements have led to different ecological outcomes, we can optimize for that and we can help ranch agronomists and ran through thelike. Really. Plan for carbon storage potential. That’s where Vince is playing in, this space, both as an M R V partner for programs.

We’re listed as one in, Mexico right now. And also as a project developer because we really want to help folks get to market. And there’s really a, dearth of project developers in the carbon space for grazing. And we’re confident that with our technology folks will be able to maximize their carbon storage potential with what they wanna do now and achieve their branch management goals.

But again, there’s still a lot of steps to get there. And folks are taking a lot of different routes on goal. You could see this with the climate smart commodities programs. There’s a lot of really different grazing based programs doing really different kinds of management practices.

Like you said, feed additives. There’s a couple agro forestry ones. And lots of different improved grazing practices, one. So I’m really curious to see what practices and exactly how these different approaches lead to better ecological outcomes. As, Mitch said, it’s all about inuring carbon, the soil.

It’s not about prescriptive practice management. Yeah,

David Yocom: those are all really good points, Kevin. It makes me want to, so Lars, you guys are doing some work now in rangeland mapping for, carbon and also other, soil attributes. Kevin made some comments just around some of the, perhaps the evolving maturity of some of the modeling and understanding of practice change in rangeland.

How are you guys experiencing that as a measurement partner in some of these emerging efforts? Yeah,

Lars Dyrud: there’s for one, this is a really fascinating area for us and I think for a lot of other folks that there’s about as much grass and rangeland in the United States as there is crop acres, both of the order of about 200 million acres.

And Identifying methods that can improve soil carbon storage and grass and range land, have a pretty important potential impact just like they do for row crop. But as, as you suggested, it is much earlier days in terms of the type of measurements and long-term projects that have been conducted.

So we’re grateful to be involved in a lot of those different projects and are seeing early things, but it’s only been about a year, but at least firsthand we’ve been able to see certain things that some I was completely surprised at. In terms of, so at least on the measurements we made, it seems very clear that aggressive overgrazing dramatically reduces soil carbon.

And that makes sense because you’re reducing the vegetation pretty quickly over time. No vegetation, no carbon accumulation in the soil. One of the things I saw in terms of comparing nearby. Grazing plots of ones that have been had routine prescribed burns for many decades and ones that had not. There was a pretty significant difference in terms of there was a nearby Overgraze ranch owned by somebody else until it was bought, and it was right next to one that had prescribed burns on and not been overgrazed for about 30 years.

And there was about a 2% soil carbon difference between those two. One looked like the soil looked like coffee, the other one looked like it looked like sand that you buy at Home Depot to mix with concrete. It was white or yellow at best. So that, was really shocking to me that, alright, so these practices as evidenced by those kind of anecdotal pieces, can really accumulate over decades.

And so we’re, starting to see some of those Some of them were surprising to me. I didn’t realize how important prescribed burning could indeed be. But if you think about back to the traditional planes in the United States, we had probably more bison roaming these areas than we do cows today.

So they’re key part of the whole ecosystem. And we probably had pretty routine wildfires, which is why they’re planes as opposed to forests, right? That we’re burning these burning probably each area on average, maybe five or so years. And so there’s some natural things that we probably just need to relearn that will help us out along the way.

But we’re certainly have a lot of fun trying to make all these measurements and help help folks like Mitchell and Kevin understand with the data so they can help inform grazing practices and land management practices in the

David Yocom: future. Yep. And then thank, you Lars. And then just Debbie, briefly, is this, when you guys think about range land systems versus cropping systems, is that something that you’re focusing both on at E S M C, exploring these new opportunities and range land?

How are you guys managing to. Two systems that are pretty different in terms of the models that we have and also the, amount of historical precedent there is for participation in programs around cropping versus range land.

Debbie Reed: Yeah, we are we, our first pilot actually included Rangeland in Texas and Oklahoma.

And what we found is there is in fact a dearth of data to populate models, right? So it is important that technologies like orthotics are actually out there quantifying, cuz we don’t have good baseline data, we don’t have good research data to populate the models, so it’s very different as Kevin explained, it’s very different from the amount of data that we can draw from within cropland systems.

Yep. One additional point I’ll make though. So we, can’t populate the models now without the data. So we have to have different analytics and different tools to figure out what’s going on. And that over time will populate the models. But we’re starting at a much lower bar than what we did in cropland systems.

But I do worry that we’re focused so much on animals and the enteric methane emissions and manure management. We are forgetting that if we take those animals off the land, we will u lose all of the benefits of those grazing lands, which are incredibly important. Kevin pointed to some of it, but just the value of those lands, you can’t remove the animals and expect them to remain there and be productive and be sequestering carbon.

So we’ve gotta figure out the whole cow. Yeah. And the land based

David Yocom: opportunities. Said. The la we have one more slide here. Mitch, has put on his continuum ag hat for us today, and now he’s gonna put his farmer hat on for us. So just to backtrack a little bit we’ve, covered some of the, issues associated with emissions sourcing from agriculture.

Some of the, practices that can be done. A wide variety of practices either reduce emissions or sequester emissions. The programs that are benefiting farmers in terms of, or they, conventionally compensate farmers for these changes in practices and the outcomes in addition to some of the technologies that are helping us measure those outcomes that they’re actually happening.

But that being said there’s still. Mitch I think you, and I, when we talked on the phone, you had the actual specific statistic, but the, percentage of farmers who are enrolled in carbon programs in the US is very, small. And so obviously there’s a lot of momentum coming outta some of the U S D A grants, et cetera.

We need to keep building on that kind of momentum. So even with these opportunities around credits there you could get compensated soil health there’s in, there’s an inherent benefit to participating and then potentially selling your products in a premium because they’re grown a certain way.

Talk to us a little bit about what the main challenge that still remain the key. People keep farmers and producers saying, I don’t know is this really gonna benefit me? Is it really gonna, am I really gonna profit from in the long run? Am I gonna be supported? Is it gonna be a pain to work with?

Talk through some of those issues that you’ve seen Yeah. Through yourself and, the farmers in your network. Yeah. Perfect.

Mitchell Hora: The, main thing in working with these carbon initiatives is the main thing that carbon, that farmers need is transparency around. How do I get paid? What moves the needle? What do I need to do to really optimize the dollars that I’m going to get?

And then what’s the flexibility going to look like if the value of these things increases? The data you’re referring to was put together by Farm Journal. 93% of US’ farm, US farmers are aware of carbon markets. And less than 3% are pursuing it, enrolling in one. And, I’ve never been paid for carbon.

Now most of my farmers are early adopters in this. They don’t qualify because of the definition of additionality being a one-time practice change. And we need to obviously redefine that for agriculture. That’s our footprint’s gonna be different every year. New farmers come to the table are saying, Hey, help me to establish a baseline.

Help me to start making practice changes because I see that these regen practices are better and I fully believe that they are better. And farmers will come to the table because farming in a regenerative system is more profitable. It is more resilient. It is better for the family farm. So they will come eventually.

I hope that these programs can be there to enable them to really have success in doing that. But the main thing that I wanna leave the group with is that, Today we need to be able to quantify the carbon footprint of our farms, and that’s really what I’m after. And if anybody can help me do it I really wanna be able to get to that point.

And, we’re doing, projects with a bunch of the groups that we’ve talked about here. The, there’s a standard today for the carbon footprint of corn that’s going into scope three reporting. And I know one farmer who’s ran his actual numbers says actual carbon impact, or G H G impact per bushel or per acre.

That’s what I want to get to and show farmers. Here’s all these data that you’re tracking on your farm, which we can help them to do it and make it cost effective. Track everything that happens and put a carbon intensity number to it and show farmers. Here’s where you’re at today. Here’s the opportunity for you to improve.

And as you improve, maybe we can deploy mitigation and offset mitigation units as they’re reducing that supply chain carbon intensity and ultimately need to get farmers to a carbon neutral or even a carbon negative outcome where you know that scope three impact can already be carbon negative or carbon neutral and not necessarily need other avenues to be able to offset that.

I believe there we can incentivize those growers that are able to show that data and are able to show that they’re already carbon neutral, they can be earning premiums. Those premiums go away with basic supply and demand over time. And and we’re able to utilize today’s market drivers to get this to be paid for, to compensate farmers to document their carbon impact, to optimize their carbon intensity for their farm, using whatever practices are best for them.

And we can enable those farmers to understand the pros and cons of changing those practices, the financial impact of those practice changes versus the financial compensation for the carbon intensity outcome. I see a lot of farmers ready. They’re ready to come to the table. They know that they’re gonna have to go this route.

The main thing we need is, showing transparency within the calculations. We will help them to bring the data to the table to most accurately run those calculations.

David Yocom: That’s, that. It’s it sounds like. The, sort of knowledge gap and the agronomy support is a big deal. You’d mentioned that, you mentioned that previously.

And then that

Mitchell Hora: was my main takeaway from the commodity grants is I love paying farmers for practices, but there’s a lot of prac, there’s money out there, and only 4% of farmers in 2017 anyway, 4% of farmers using cover crops in about 30% years of no-till. This stuff is hard. Yeah. And the, knowledge does not exist at the universities.

It doesn’t exist within U S D A and, in the private sector too, or farm to farmer learning. It’s tough to be able to really teach it. I’m really trying to scale that. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but really seeing, hey, this stuff can work and, but it is nuanced to every single farm and the understanding of how do I do this?

That really is the ultimate gap. Yeah. And, to the point of all this, we’re doing these things and making it work and we’re as more profitable than we’ve ever been on our family farm with zero taxpayer federal subsidies without the need for federal crop insurance and with no environmental outcome payment.

Now, I’ve my solar organic carbon’s been built up by the rate of up to 4.9 tons of soil organic carbon per acre per year over the last couple years. And I’m not able to, accurately communicate that into the supply chain. That’s what I wanna be able to do, but Right. The practices on their own can pay for themselves.

We just need to in be able to come together and show growers, here’s the data that you can help us so we can all meet our goals and we’ll compensate you for the more that you do and enable that farmer innovation to drive this thing. That’s the most important thing in, agriculture. Yep. Is farmer innovation, and we need to really leverage

David Yocom: that.

Thanks, Mitch. Debbie, I’m curious to know if you have a perspective here on some of the, comments that Mish made around the knowledge gap in, helping with the transition, but also the additionality issue and how you guys are thinking about that for finding ways to compensate farmers who’ve already made transitions that are beneficial.

Debbie Reed: Yeah. I, so I think Mitch was dead on and his comments right, about not only opportunities, but challenges and barriers and knowledge is truly needed farmers and ranchers, right? They don’t have a lot of time to play, to get a crop into the ground and take on the new practices. So knowledge, information is important.

Additionality is important for market programs, right? Because you’re selling something, it has to be new. It’s like selling a corn crop if there’s no corn there, right? So additionality is important, however, it’s interpretation for biological, agricultural systems, I think is being misapplied, and we need to rethink that.

A cover crop is costly and new every year. There some, simple fixes that are pragmatic, really need to be applied to the lens of agriculture.

David Yocom: Awesome. Thanks Debbie. I know we’re, a little bit over time here. If anybody has to drop off I totally understand. We do have some questions from the audience.

And, now if you do, if you have further questions that haven’t already been asked of our speakers feel free to type them in the q and a box. I will filter through some of these at fall once I’m done talking. And answer them in the order that they’re received. It is very helpful if you can state who you would like to ask your question to and make sure your question is well articulated.

It is hard to read half sentences as questions, and I probably won’t read them if they’re written as such. But the. The first question is for Debbie, which is around the understanding of the value of a carbon offset versus a carbon inset. There’s a statement made offsets have value as they can be bought and sold.

They have market value. How, do you establish the value of an inset? The company that makes the change must understand their cost to create an inset versus the cost to buy in and offset. So I guess does that make sense, Debbie? Yes,

Debbie Reed: it does. And I’ll answer this way, carbon offset markets are global.

So you see global price signals and global valuation, it’s a little bit different. Higher prices in Europe, for instance, in the United States, but they tend to be global. And you see the pricing the insets or the supply chain reporting, it is different in individual. What we’ve done, and I think everyone’s handling it differently, is we’ve just put a price, $15 a ton for carbon, right?

And then now we’re really experimenting with how do we hit that sweet spot? I talked about how we allow members to co-invest to bring that down and then create dividends for producers. But there’s when we start to see a market program and supply chains for insets, et cetera, Come online, we will start to see some of that pricing being more transparent.

And I think you will begin to see price discovery happening differently and being reported and more transparent differently than it is now. Gotcha. Thanks

David Yocom: Debbie. Okay.

Mitchell Hora: Yeah, I got a, follow up question, Debbie. With, some of the, in setting do you see any, ability to utilize the increased dollar value in 45 q to be able to enable some of that 45 q with the inflation reduction act going from $50 a ton to $85 a ton, do you think that can enable some of the push towards in setting and, or can we even, I know today we can’t necessarily use Scope three reporting for that, but do you think that’s a, an opportunity to enable this to, go

Debbie Reed: further?

Biologicals currently don’t count under 45 Q and there was a long shit fight. Literally gone back 15 years to try to get that in. I don’t foresee it being included in the future. It doesn’t currently count, so that mechanism, however, could be deployed separately in a different policy, but there isn’t currently one like that.

I wish. I wish.

David Yocom: Debbie another, question from the audience. I think I think it’s directed toward you, but it open to others as well. Is how, do you attribute the scope three benefits across multiple parties? And I think you spoke to that a little bit earlier, but maybe just clarifying that.

Debbie Reed: Yeah, and I’ll give you one example to get, make it a little more concrete.

And I will say we don’t do this, right? Sustainer has set up a platform that does track this, but I will give you an example. If we are working with a partner, let’s say Cargill that is purchasing beef from a one of our livestock projects, and we show an improved emission factor intensity based emission factor for that beef Cargill buys that, they process it, they sell some of it to McDonald’s and some of it to target, right?

All of those three companies can share in that emission factor because it’s the same product that received that emission factor from improvements in soil carbon, and greenhouse gas emission reductions. They can share that. It’s long as it’s the same project. Or product, right? So sustain CERT’s platform will track that and allocate it as beef goes to one player and the hide goes to another in a way that we can’t do.

We just create the mission factor for that first product, that the point of sale, and then they track it. But we can help with the resale and I hope that makes sense, but it’s a complicated system to really unravel how commodities are actually bought and sold and broken down over the supply chain.

Yep.

David Yocom: Thanks Debbie. Question for anybody from a, anybody on the panel? Based on what happened with the Chicago Climate Exchange in the early two thousands, is a voluntary carbon market a viable model versus a regulatory regulated or mandatory model? I’ve got

Lars Dyrud: opinions on that, but I think the way that we’re unfolding the voluntary carbon markets are probably the appropriate way.

It is very similar to, I think, the way that the organic markets evolved around a similar timeframe in terms of, it was the wild west for a while. You had groups of growers and food, companies either individually or started groups creating their own standard for what organic meant to them.

And then that went on for almost over a decade. U S D A spent a long and careful time analyzing what was happening and then slowly and very meticulously rolled robust standards for what, you had to do to claim something as organic in every single food category. And I think that’s what’s happening in the voluntary carbon markets where the U S D is very carefully watching the, marketplace unfold.

And eventually they’ll start probably applying standards, maybe first around quantification requirements and standards to what is a ton, what do you have to do to say this is a ton in some of the various areas. But I think they’re years away from that. So I think they’re taking the right approach. And I think it’ll all work out

Debbie Reed: great in the end.

I think the other thing I would add is that the Chicago Climate Exchange was an awesome pilot effort to see how, in fact we include agriculture in a carbon offset market program. It had no additionality and that is really what created its downfall is it didn’t meet the actual market requirements.

It was not because it was voluntary, there was zero additionality. They were signing up farmers to do things they were already doing. And when buyers discovered that, they were like, oh, we paid for something that was going to happen anyway. So that is why additionality as a concept is important. I still disagree with how it’s being applied to agriculture.

Yeah, it’s a

David Yocom: double-edged sword. Yeah, it’s, that’s interesting in historical context. Yeah. Just one

Kevin Silverman: quick add-on right now is internationally there’s this group called the Integrity Console for voluntary carbon Markets that just release really specific guidance. I’ve heard folks talk about the ICD CM as being the new law of the land for offsets and it has really strict

David Yocom: Additionality

Kevin Silverman: policies.

That don’t necessarily align with what’s out there with the different standards. Debbie talked about the need to really have a clear understanding of what additionality means in agricultural settings. And that’s something to really keep an eye on. I really hope that we can develop some sort of probability of practice model.

What was the probability that an x, y, Z year a farmer

David Yocom: would be incentive without carbon

Kevin Silverman: to do cover cropping or to do rotational grazing and establish that infrastructure what is that i r And that’s more of an economics question than an agronomic one in some ways. But I think we really need that for

David Yocom: a agricultural carbon markets to scale globally.

Thanks Kevin. I think given where we are from a timing perspective, we’re gonna wrap things up. So I first and foremost wanna thank our panel today Kevin Mitchell Debbie and Lars, really appreciate all of your thoughts, input into planning this presentation, but also into all the insights that you shared with us today.

They got a lot of comments in the q and a, just saying thank you so much for such an informative discussion. So thank you guys for your for your input. Thank you to the audience for your thoughtful questions and for, your participation today. If you want to view this in recording, this will be available on YouTube in the next week.

I’m also happy to distribute the the p d f to anybody who’s curious and, wants to have either access to the slides or to the links that I got information from for those slides. Otherwise, thank you all so much for your time today and we look forward to seeing you on our next deep dive.

Thank you.