ASH CLOUD

Consumers will pay a premium for climate-friendly red meat, but not the way you’re thinking about it. This premium is not a mark-up on any single purchase. It’s customer loyalty to the retailer selling the product. A brand with integrity keeps customers coming back, and the retailer, the real customer, captures that lifetime value.
Today I am joined by Tom Sturgess, who has been involved in red meat production since 1985. Thirty years ago he moved to New Zealand and taught himself sheep and beef farming. Today his farms produce around 70,000 tope quality lambs a year that earns a 40 to 50% market premium. Tom has also spent over a decade investing in to reduce the carbon footprint of livestock production includeing funding a team developing a low cost feed additive with a target price of 1.5 to 3 cents per animal per day.
Tom acknowledges that ruminant maths is challenging. That said, he also agues that research system is too often its own worst enemy. The combiantion of the cost and need to conduct many large in vivo trials is crippling to many innovtaors. Rapid, small-scale animal trials that give a reliable, roughly 80% answer, are needed so researchers can learn and iterate before committing to expensive formal studies. 
Tom sees the California dairy industry as the standout success story. The combaination of  legislation and state funding behind them have enable California dairy farmers to cut emissions by close to 50% in around seven years. He also praises Australia as offering the most supportive research and regulatory pathway he has experiinced.
We discuss when innovations are ready for venture capital, and why funders need to monitor closely rather than impose rigid milestones. Tom also explains why genetics, feed, forage and husbandry solutions will stack together, and why, in the end, it all comes down to people and teams.
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Rice feeds more people than any other crop, and it is grown in a way that is quietly expensive. Globally, a third of all groundwater extraction goes to rice farming. And because those fields sit flooded for weeks at a time, the resulting anaerobic conditions produce methane. Rice accounts for around 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to the aviation industry, and about 12% of all methane. In India, rice covers some 40 million hectares, a quarter of the country's agricultural land, in a nation that is already deeply water stressed.
Today I am joined by Devdut Dalal of Mitti Labs (https://www.mittilabs.earth/), who is working on addressing water use efficiency and methane for smallholder farmers. The practice change is alternate wetting and drying. The challenge is implementing it across tens of thousands of farmers with an average farm size of one hectare. Exposing the soil to air a few times a season reduces water consumption, reduces methane, and does not reduce yield.
Their secret to scaling is to do one thing well, focus on that, and keep things simple.
"We're going to do one good thing across 100 farms. Get that one thing right. Prove the work was meaningful and impactful and reward worthy. And then you can stack good thing number two, good thing number three, good thing number four." — Devdut Dalal
Getting 70,000 farmers across more than 100,000 hectares to adopt a new practice took four things: trust, borrowed from local field agents and NGOs who already have relationships in those communities; demonstrated proof, by asking a farmer with four acres to try it on one; ongoing support; and an incentive. Trust, proof, support and reward. It is simply a matter of creating value for farmers.
That value comes from carbon credits. Companies with scope three commitments pay for the methane reductions, and the farmers are paid for the credits. Mitti has just signed an agreement with Google to supply one million credits by 2030, one of the largest super pollutant mitigation deals announced to date.
We also discuss the satellite technology that makes monitoring possible at this scale, the delayed and increasingly unpredictable monsoon, and the energy-water nexus that should make state governments the most motivated party of all.
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Managing and mitigating risk runs through my whole conversation with Robert Bonnie. Since the Dust Bowl, USDA policy, the Farm Bill and especially crop insurance have given US farmers a safety net that shares the risk of growing the nation's food. But farming keeps getting riskier. Climate change, volatile input costs and commodity prices, access to labour, access to markets and geopolitical instability are all shifting more than they used to. Too often farmers and ranchers are left to carry that extra risk alone. Governments have a unique role to play here.
"The question from a policy standpoint is how do you drive policy that is focused on the outcomes that folks want and that allow for the type of innovation you need in the private sector, and that de-risk the adoption of many of these practices, recognizing we actually don't have all the answers right now. We need to allow for innovation. How do we do that in a way that works for farmers while it also works for the public?" Robert Bonnie
At the same time, new technologies and innovation are opening up ways to manage that risk that weren't available a decade ago. We already know that no-till, cover crops, crop rotation and better grazing make yields more stable through drought and flood. During the Biden administration, Robert tried to design crop insurance that would reward growers for adopting those practices because they reduce yield risk. "It's very hard to do. It's possible, I think, with new technology." That's now his focus at Sage, a startup using AI on soil data to support better insurance products and farm lending.
He also draws a lesson from overseeing the US Forest Service in the Obama years. Every year firefighting took more of the budget, and less was left for the land management that stops catastrophic fires in the first place. Agriculture risks the same trap: paying for the disaster instead of the preparation.
Robert served 12 years as a political appointee in the Obama and Biden administrations, most recently as USDA Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation. He is now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship.
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Beef sustainability frequently gets framed as something imposed on the ranchers and the industry from outside—regulatory requirements, consumer pressure, climate obligations driven by environmental groups and activists, leaving the industry industry to respond or resist.
But this frame misses something fundamental.
My guest today, Tom McDonald, is chair of the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef and sustainability lead at Five Rivers Cattle. His reframing is powerful because it turns sustainability from an external demand into something the beef industry has been pursuing for generations. As he puts it: "Sustainability is a journey and not a destination." 
The three pillars are simple: environmentally sound, socially responsible, economically viable. But McDonald breaks this down further into language that resonates with producers: efficiency. The beef industry has been working on efficiency for decades. Feed efficiency. Land efficiency. Resource efficiency. When you talk to ranchers about doing more with less, you're speaking their language.
"Methane emissions is lost efficiency. Methane is energy that doesn't get converted to pounds of beef… As the beef industry, we didn't start focusing on that when it became a political issue. We've been focused on that for a long time, trying to make the animals more efficient." says McDonald
This reshaping of the methane conversation from primarily a climate problem to be solved for environmental virtue to lost productivity is powerful.
The insight is profound. When McDonald sat on a methane roundtable with the oil and gas industry, they described their leaking valves the same way: uncaptured gas is money walking out the door. The economics align across industries. Methane capture isn't virtue—it's profit optimization.
But there's an important caveat embedded in this philosophy. McDonald is clear about something critical: the beef industry doesn't need to reach zero methane to make significant impact. Complete elimination isn't the goal—substantial improvement is. This reframes the entire conversation away from perfectionism.
As he puts it: "Can we improve it? I think so. Can we make it zero? I doubt it."
This conversation explores how the efficiency lens reshapes sustainability from burden to opportunity, and why incremental improvements across the value chain, without demanding perfection, matter far more than seeking impossible silver bullets.
 
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The beef industry has spent decades optimizing feed efficiency in one place: the feedlot. Genetics have been selected for finishing performance, cattle are placed on feed at lighter weights and fed to heavier carcasses, and the result is measurable improvement in how much feed converts to pounds of beef. Al Rotz's 50-year life cycle assessment comparing 1972 to 2022 documents this clearly—the industry has made tremendous progress.
But this optimization has created a misalignment: the most profitable cattle for the finishing sector are not the most profitable cattle for cow-calf operations.
Today we are joined by Matt Beck from Texas A&M, whose research reveals a profound inefficiency hiding in plain sight. For every 100 pounds of additional cow body weight, weaned calf weight increases by only 14 pounds. That extra 100 pounds of cow, however, requires approximately 600 pounds of additional forage annually. Simple math: ranchers are feeding 600 pounds to produce 14 pounds of marketable product.
This isn't a visible problem. Ranchers can't see the extra 600 pounds of pasture consumption. But it's there, compounding year after year, driving profitability down precisely when the industry needs it up. Meanwhile, herd sizes have crashed to 1950s levels—not because ranchers want smaller herds, but because drought cycles are becoming more severe and smaller cows are more resilient to them.
Matt's most exciting work focuses on methane as a proxy for feed efficiency on pasture. Within the herds he's measured, there's 30% variation in methane emissions among animals producing identical output. And separate research shows that 10% reductions in feed intake are achievable without any loss in productivity. As Matt puts it: "Feed efficiency on pasture is the next great frontier, and with advances in technology, we're becoming more and more able to do that."
The challenge isn't scientific. It's economic alignment and infrastructure access for small producers who comprise the majority of the US cow-calf sector.
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