When you can get a $5 cooked and ready to eat chicken at Costco, how many consumers are going to pay $40 for the same amount of product, uncooked. Not many. In a world where we are still trying to get the public to accept the $20 chicken, the $40 chicken is insanity. Given that, let’s work with what we have. Let’s run with the $20 chicken and be OK with it. Let’s use what we have as a starting point to get to more regenerative future. And let’s taper our visions back to meet the customer who will ultimately be the one to cash flow that long term vision. Let me repeat that. We are the ones that need to back off. We are the ones that need to go meet the customer if we want to start in business long enough to have the customer start meeting us. As Darby will say in this episode, if the customer won’t support our moral compass then we need to back off a bit until they will. That can be a hard pill for some people to swallow. But it’s the reality of the world that we live in. It’s a long game. The food system didn’t get messed up overnight and we aren’t going to fix it overnight. And we have to survive now, today, in order to make it to tomorrow and the long term vision that we want to see. Surviving today means selling what the customer wants and will pay for, today. That means start by building solid foundations of a good business first - meaning build a customer base, start generating cash flow, and starting building trust and relationships with your customers. As that trust grows you can learn more about what those customers want, create that in a way that matches up with your ideology, and lead them a little ways down the field. And it is those steps that slowly move agriculture in the direction that you want it to go in. Darby has a great analogy for this. Farmers have a big rope. And they are slowly pulling the customers forward towards the manifestation of the prefect regenerative farm. It’s a constant pull and constant progress has been made. We are further along than we were 20 years ago, and 20 years from now we will be further along than today, but that’s only going to happen if we are still in business tomorrow, and the key to that is selling the customer what they want and will pay for today.
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