Start with the Soil. Behaviour Change for a Broken System, with Tamara Giltsoff

Speaker A: In all my work, I've never been convinced of this idea that we need big change. We actually need small seeds of change. And those seeds of change inspire, uh, and open the door for other seeds of change. Place is really about context and we couldn't get more contextual than nature.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the no Bull ideacast. I'm Becky Holland. If you've listened to previous episodes, you'll know I talk a lot about behaviour change, but today we're taking a step back, or rather a step deep down into something deeper and, ah, more elemental. We're talking about soil. My guest is Tamara Giltsoff, a regenerative finance strategist. Try saying that fast. Advisor to the Soil Association Exchange and co founder of Land Alive. She's someone who spent her career innovating in clean energy, finance and international development, but has come to believe that soil is where many of the answers to our climate and health crises really lie. And this is a bit personal for me too. I grew up with farming in my blood. My grandfather was a farmer in a little village called Buckland Dinham in the heart of Somerset. And my uncle Mark, who took over Hillhouse Farm, helped pioneer agricultural change with the Milk Mark before branching into silage. So Froome, where Tamara and I live is somewhere incredibly dear to my heart. It's where my family is from and where I remember so many happy times. In this episode we'll explore how soil, finance, farming and behaviour intersect. Why transformation requires a shift in worldview, not just new tech or policy. We talk about paradigm shifts, system change, Challenger Banks and how to listen, really listen to the land. It's about place, about stewardship and about hope. Let's dig in.

Speaker A: I love the word place. Place is really about context and you couldn't get more contextual than nature. I think nature holds it all together and in particular soil. And we'll get into that. But ultimately we lost connection with place, um, in our sort of highly mechanized economic system. We've forgotten um, where we come from and what we're connected to. Nature. We're a part of nature and we rely wholly really on nature, um, for our economy. And so I think place is the word that um, kind of hangs all of that work together and what I have rediscovered in the last three or four years with my work, many of the answers to our polycrisis, which, um, I believe lie in the soil, um, so soil at the center of place, I would say. Awesome.

Speaker B: So that's. So there's lots in there for me to uh, unpack the first thing I'm going to ask just so that everybody knows we talk about poly crisis. And so to me that says lots and lots of interconnected factors that um, you know you change one and it has a ripple effect and everything else. Is that what you mean or is there something else that I'm missing?

Speaker A: Yeah, I m mean polycrisis is multiple crisis is happening at the same time um on this planet. Um and um, one of those big crises as we know is climate change. But um, the next crisis that we'd sort of forgotten to acknowledge um, in our focus, in our sort of carbon tunnel vision focus on climate change is nature and nature depletion. And so we have a climate and nature crisis. We also have a crisis of global diet related health issues. So um, obesity um being one of the main issues. And we have a crisis of, of growing inequality. And so those, those multiple crises is often described as um, um the polycrisis.

Speaker B: One of the things you said was that in the last few years you've really kind of rediscovered that connection with place and I just wondered what, where that's come from, whether there was a particular stimulus for that in your life.

Speaker A: Actually it was two things for me. So one, um, we moved out of London four years ago um into a very rural area in Somerset which has had a profound impact on my um understanding of economies outside of urban areas and a profound impact on um my connection to nature. And um, then the other piece that um really kind of brought me back to nature and planetary boundaries and understanding nature as a system was a piece of work that I did with a venture capital firm called anthemis group through 2022 and 23. Um and I was asked to come in and um, build an impact strategy for this um fintech investor who were very successful and had done a lot in evolving the financial system largely through investing in innovative fintech businesses and championing diversity and equity in their work. Um and they asked me to look at um sort of the future. What should, what should the thesis of the organization be considering? So I took the organization on a journey of where we are as a planet and the state of our planetary boundaries and the state of nature and how our, our ah economic system and our uh financial system within that has led to the pressure on planetary boundaries and environmental impact, climate change, um, nature loss, um and it really um that process that I was taking these partners of this venture capital firm through, which was quite a difficult process because you're sort of staring in the face of the outcome of our Economic system, um, was also a process for myself. It's a process that really reconnected me to nature and ultimately to the soil. The soil bit really came from. Yeah, moving to Somerset, being closer to the soil, being closer to stewards of the soil, um, farmers and to understanding, um, how agriculture works and rural economies work. Um, and then I decided I needed another level of understanding. And so I have been part of a program called Roots to Regeneration, which is a program, um, designed for farmers actually, to uh, support farmers on their journey towards regenerative agriculture. And the program is a combination of sort of engaging with context and place and systems paradigms with technical understanding of sort of soil, plant and animal systems and ecosystems. So I went quite deep on that understanding.

Speaker B: Deep into the soil. Deep into the soil, yeah.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: It's an area that I just love. We've talked about Froome as a market town and that kind of. That. That um. That mixture of people that are coming from London and the people that have been there for a long time. So you've got culture and people, people and soil and all these things mixed together, haven't you? But it's the perfect melting pot, I suppose, to then be able to look at those. Those roots of regeneration and just think, what is it that. That we can do and how can we help farmers do things in their own. Because it's hard. They've got such economic pressures on them, haven't they? At the. Well, I was gonna say at the moment, they always. They always have. Farming has never been, uh, an easy job.

Speaker A: When you live within farming communities and you begin to understand the rhythm of farming and um, the pressures of farming, as you say, as well as the negative. Some of the negative outcomes of farming or the current system of farming. Because I think you have to be very careful not to point fingers at farmers per se. But what it really made so clear for me is where, um, farming and land stewards sit in our hierarchy of value in our economic system. And, um, farmers have literally been at the bottom of that. Um, and yet in the UK, 70% of our land is under agricultural use. 70% of our land. And we are a country with not much land and a large amount.

Speaker B: They are the stewards. Yeah. This is essentially 70% of what makes us who we are and allows us to be what we are is in the hands of a group of people that need to be supported to look after it.

Speaker A: Exactly. And these are often really at the bottom of the value chain. They are, in their own words, price takers. So they're subject to the vagaries of the markets, which is often, which is always out of their hands, as well as subject to changing policies, climate impacts, feeling, you know, really at the front line of climate impact. But when you trace our economic system back to the source of nature, and as Das Gupta said, our economic system is embedded in nature. There is no economic system without nature because there is no humanity without food. You could start there. Um, these land stewards are ah, fundamental to human existence. And m. That bit has been so profound for me. I mean it sounds so ridiculous now when you think about it, that we've just disconnected from that concept. Yeah, but it's not just food. You know, we have connect. We've disconnected from where our farm fibers come from, where our clothes come from, where uh, our building materials come from. We've disconnected from the ecosystem services that nature provides. And um, I think food is where that's most obvious. We're in a period of time where things are breaking. So there's a few people in the world breaking things quite, um, visibly and uh, vocally at the moment. But I actually think the breaking part is quite important at the moment. Um, and um, actually there's a concept, um, uh, in nature, um, um, well, sort of derived from nature called antifragile. So it's when actually the more you break things, the stronger you get, the better you get at things. An author called Nassau, Nicholas Tully was the thinker behind this concept. And I feel like within our uh, economic system we need to get much better at breaking things and behaving like nature behaves.

Speaker B: Actually, I think antifragile is a great word for what we need to be. We need to be tougher and we need to be able to change. Yeah.

Speaker A: And actually most of our systems are uh, fragile. So our food system is, is built on, and it's very cleverly built, but it's built on a series of sort of long supply chains, you know, just in time delivery, high consumer expectations, coupled with high levels of food waste. And um, I think food is a uh, really powerful metaphor for what's happened across our entire economy. But it's not, you know, it's not just food.

Speaker B: So I just want to bring us back to this idea of place that you brought up at the uh, at the start and where things are rooted and where things are happening. And it. For me it's open to a conversation about a piece of research that you've been doing talking to farmers. Um, and that has led to a report called Banking for Change. Can you just Tell me a little bit more about what prompted that. Um, um and essentially what, what were farmers saying?

Speaker A: I was very struck by a number of reports that I read, quite high level reports on the financing gap for nature and the financing gap for regenerative agriculture transition. And I was quite struck that quite a few of these reports, as brilliant as they are uh, are hadn't really got up ah close to farmers themselves um, in understanding what are the real challenges on the ground for farmers to make the change that now policy and society is asking them to make. Um and what are uh, the barriers to those changes? Um and I met Joseph Gridley, the CEO of the Soil Association Exchange. We um, met and we had a long discussion about this and he was very interested in the same question as me as what are the financial barriers to transition for farm businesses and Soil Association Exchange, let's just call them Exchange for now because it's a long name, um had and uh, continues to work with banks. So um, Lloyds bank being their main partner who has financed the provision of exchanges service to farmers. And so there was a kind of connection with banks and we were talking to a number of banks about um our ah research question and our research question was is there a financial barrier to transition for farm businesses and um, if so what is the barrier? And quite a few of the banks were interested in this question and they were saying to us we have these sustainable agricultural products, these lending products but they are not flying off the shelves. We're not seeing demand from farmers for financial products to support transition but we don't quite understand why sort of thing and it's quite hard for us to get close to farmers to understand that. And so that's where the seed of the idea of the research came from. The British Business bank got involved um and um, were very interested in the research question because m, uh the bank is there to support SME businesses um and yet hadn't really been doing very much in agriculture and so they supported the research. And um, um we did some pre research with a number of leading regenerative agriculture farmers and what became quite clear in the pre research is that many of these sort of, of pioneer regen farmers were either emerging in um, areas like Oxfordshire where there was strong connections to London, large areas of land and a kind of wealthy economy or there was quite a lot of wealth in the family or the farmer had multiple jobs, quite successful jobs or had gone away and built wealth capacity and was coming back to the farm or the farm was able to sell off a significant asset Like a property to finance transition. Um, so there's a sort of large group of regen farmers that's changing now. But you know that was very much the case. And within that pre research we found, or I found um, one farmer that really fitted the archetype of the research that we were doing. And he in his own words was highly leveraged so had a lot of debt. And um, um, the idea of transition was too much of a financial risk for his farm business. And so the concept of financial risk emerged as a sort of key assumption we were exploring with the research. And so I set about um, trying to find a number of farmers who had not yet transitioned who were willing to talk to me about this. And it's you know, it's a sensitive area talking about um, finances, um, and farm business and farm business plans. Um, but I got there in the end and I traveled around the country sitting in the kitchens of um, farmers homes often for three hours sometimes for more um, listening and understanding um, where those farm businesses are at, what is keeping them awake at night, um, what they see as the benefits of um, farming with nature and where the barriers were for them to transition their way of farming and thinking about their agricultural system.

Speaker B: There are people like you and I that are interested in this, that understand the power of this and want, want to share these stories. But the reality is that most people are going about their day to day lives and worrying about a whole load of other things. Is there a danger that this sort of becomes a uh, a place where we're essentially preaching to the, to the choir? How do we reach beyond that and bring other people along on the journey? Because systems change needs, needs people.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's a really important one to call that and there's no easy answer to bringing people along because we're talking about a seismic paradigm shift. Um M and um, and systems change doesn't happen by changing the entire system. It happens by small eddies in the system, small nodes, m in the system that are changing. And um, those nodes eventually tip that system. And so in all my work I've never been convinced of this idea that we need big change. We actually need small seeds of change. And those seeds of change inspire and open the door for other seeds of change. You really see this in the farming community and it makes my hairs on my neck stand up as I talk about it. But you really see the influence of one farmer to the next farmer and what it means if one farmer changes the way they farm. Um, and how that has an influence on another farmer it's almost like saying. It's almost like giving permission to do something in a different way because you're doing it in a different way. Yeah, I think it's an important question to be holding. I don't think there's a simple answer to it.

Speaker B: There's never a simple answer to an important question.

Speaker A: No, we're speaking. The uh, wonderful example of wildfound springs to mind.

Speaker B: So for anybody that's not heard of wildfromtootx, just explain what that is.

Speaker A: So Wild farmed um is um a business model that um set out to create a regenerative um wheat um but did so not by um buying up loads of farms to do that but by enabling farmers, supporting farmers to grow wild um farm crops um using a set of regenerative tools so a set of ways of growing um the crop on their land which are ah, obviously working with nature and not against nature. And to do that created right from the get go um, really strong support networks across wild farmed farmers um who are dotted um across the country um to support each other to do that. Um and then you know that uh, that uh wheat is aggregated um across the wild farm farmers and then sold initially into restaurant and sort of um the catering industry is what I'm trying to say. And then they launched a consumer product into Waitrose. So there's now a sort of consumer facing brand telling the story of regenerative produce which is you know which was very much the first of its kind. I think the other thing that's happening that wasn't necessarily planned but is the story of the founders and in particular one of the founders, Andy Cato who sold his, who's of Groove Armada who sold his rights to their music to finance the business. But his story if you read about him is that he spent a number of years, I think about 15 years in France um trying to create a business model like this and trying to crack regenerative farming um on his farm in France and failing on numerous accounts. Coming back to this anti fragile bit he tried and tried again. Um and actually he is a figurehead for the business and that's also important. His story, the stories that he's creating, the stand that he's taken, the passion that he brings to it, the role that he's playing in a policy environment as well as a sort of um, financial system environment as well as the agriculture and food system and more and more the health system. And so um, Andy Cato for me um represents a new type of Leader,

Speaker B: If we want a financial system that actually enables regeneration at scale and moves things forward rather than blocking it, where do we start? What needs to happen?

Speaker A: That's a very big question.

Speaker B: It's not a little light one to finish. It's a big one. Sorry.

Speaker A: I think we need to be, to be really good at shifting our financial system to serve life and to um, serve nature. We need to really understand, um, within these economic systems that need to transform, whether it's, you know, the food system writ large, the fiber system, our health system, um, we need to understand those systems and where the financial pain points are and what type of financing will support those transformations. But yeah, I feel quite strongly that the system needs to be open to shifting, you know, and supporting the transformation of other systems.

Speaker B: What is one thing that somebody that's listening to this, um, podcast could do to nudge, I say, the system, one of the systems that we've talked about today, uh, in a better direction?

Speaker A: Well, for me, one of the most important things to have done in the last few years is to reconnect to the soil, to plant systems, to animal systems and ecosystems, to get a real understanding of the ingenuity of nature and how nature behaves. Um, so I think learning to listen and to um, observe nature and to understand nature would be pretty high up there for me. There are endless brilliant podcasts to listen to, many of which are just fantastic storytelling. So one of my favourites at the moment is, um, a podcast called Carbon Calling. And they are two ladies, Nick Renison and Liz Geneva, who, who started a, um, a small conference, uh, for farmers in um, Cumbria. And um, it's brilliant event but off the back of that they also have launched, well, they do lots of different incredible things, but they've launched, launched a podcast. And what's brilliant about their podcast is that it's not all just farmers, but it is, um, the theme is sort of nature connection and um, what nature teaches us. But they will, you know, interview all sorts of different people, um, including farmers, and they bring a real humility to the podcast. There's humor in there, there's storytelling in there, there's self reflection in there, there's. There's stories of people's lives and journeys from where they've been to where they are to. And I think it gives you a really interesting insight to the changes happening. Um, and I can provide a list, I can provide my podcast list. I've got so many.

Speaker B: Please. Yeah, we'll take the list. Thank you. That'd be awesome.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah, I Think, be curious um, be curious about where your food comes from. Be curious about these different movements happening. Um, it's not that difficult to read and understand about regeneration, regenerative agriculture, regenerative economics and finance and you know place based thinking. Um, that would be.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: My advice.

Speaker B: Is there anything else you would love to say um, before we kind of close off the, close off the show?

Speaker A: Well just really briefly back to the financial system bit. Um, I think it's worth mentioning that I talked about the banks being engaged but I think it's worth just mentioning the response we had to the Banking for Change work. So Oxbury bank who is the one um Ag Challenger bank in the uk uh doing things differently and being anti fragile um launched a product almost instantly off the back of our research. They had been thinking about it for a while but we, our research tipped them into launching it. Uh and it's called the Oxbury Transition Facility and it's just a really good example of understanding those system needs. What we highlighted those specifically around the pharma transition. Listening and designing a product that's really flexible that's not really going to make the bank any money. Um, that's flexible, that's low interest that listen to the needs of that particular part of the system and did it just you know, didn't take years to do it, got on and did it and there's something there for me there's something in that move and um, the fact that it was a Challenger bank that's so profound. It's not transforming the entire financial system but it's one of those levers in the system. So I just wanted to mention that because it's been a really good and

Speaker B: it will have transformed some farms existence and coming back to your point you have to start somewhere.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And let's see what the other banks do. Because we behave as a herd humans

Speaker B: so we need the herd mentality everybody needs to follow.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: That's a brilliant point to finish on. So um, thank you so much Tamara for joining me on the show and have a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you. That's it for today's episode. Huge thanks to Tamara Giltsoff for such a rich and grounded conversation to really bring to life this idea of inside out impact. Now if you're thinking this is all incredibly connected but it's just a bit overwhelming then you're not alone. I recently finished reading a fantastic book called Environomics by Dashini David and it brilliantly captures this moment that we're living through. Dashini talks about how globalisation and industrialisation have shaped our modern lives, bringing choice, lower prices and lifting millions of people from poverty, but at a cost. Sprawling M megacities, mining in fragile ecosystems, SUV fueled lifestyles and record breaking emissions. According to the book, if we carry on as we are, we'll need the resources of three Earths, uh, by 2050 to sustain our current way of living. That's not just unsustainable, it's impossible. But she's not all doom and gloom. She highlights how environomics, the collision between economics and environmental reality is driving real change from new legislation to shifting investor priorities from fast fashion resale apps to Biden's now partially reversed inflation reduction act. But behaviours are shifting slowly, unevenly, but undeniably. What I love about this book, and I do really, really, really recommend it, is that it reminds us this isn't someone else's problem. Whether it's what we eat, how we power our homes, what we choose to buy, behaviour change plays such a central role, and systems only change when people do. That is what this season of the Know well Ideacast is all about. In next week's episode, we're going to shift from soil to technology and explore what why only 7% of leaders feel ready for AI. I'll be joined by James Easterbrook to, um, unpack a major piece of new research on data and AI readiness in complex organizations. We'll talk about hype, fear, inertia and how to use behavioral insight to drive real transformation, not just to spin up a new shiny tool. So subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or head over to BHP.com podcast to find all the episodes, transcripts and resources. Until next time, thank you for listening. Bye for now.