Broiler chickens. The Guardian. And LinkedIn.

That’s how the Grow Well Consulting team of Alison Grantham and Sarah Mock met and started working together. After reading Sarah’s article, Alison knew she had to meet “this person who didn’t have rose colored glasses [about agriculture] on. Maybe peach, but not rose.”

They’ve been working together ever since. In 2023 alone, they, along with Grow Well consultant Jo Ehrenreich traveled to eight states, DC and Puerto Rico, tackled 13 projects, gave four talks, appeared on three podcasts, and published one article to do their part in growing a better food system.

To reflect on 2023 and prepare for 2024, Alison and Sarah sat down to discuss the challenges and opportunities they’re facing in the agriculture and food system worlds.

In July, Alison and Sarah wrapped up a multi-year Local Food Promotion Program project in the southeast with long-time client, The Common Market, funded by the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service. They traveled to farms growing citrus, annual vegetables, pastured livestock, and more all across Georgia, Alabama, and even the Florida panhandle.

What project in 2023 stands out to you?

Alison Grantham: The climate/water risk assessment and farm bill project were pretty different in terms of what the client was interested in learning, but they were similar in that they both involved tracking down large volumes of data and processing that into actionable insights for the clients. I really love that process. And I also loved that both of them allowed some integration of both quantitative and qualitative data. For example, with the water risk assessments, Sara and I both were looking at extreme rainfall events, coastal flooding, river flooding using a tool which allowed us to use the different models that were sort of simulating current and future risks under different emission scenarios.

We also got to interview folks on the ground. In each of the regions, you really got the 10,000-foot view of what was happening. That translates into the experience of folks and their decision-making processes. They can't drill more wells. They need to think about switching crops. And how are they thinking about that? Are they thinking about pulling up stakes and telling somebody else to make those management changes or making them themselves?

The combination of the interviews and the recent news of extreme weather events that occurred in the regions, combined with the datasets, I think we learned the limits of simulations in terms of asking the question: Is it actually as dire as it looks? Yes, there are extreme events, but they haven’t yet bent the curve of production as much as other factors have, like trade and energy policy.

How have you grown with Grow Well Consulting this year?

AG: One of my biggest weaknesses is being a people pleaser, and it makes it really hard for me to make hard decisions sometimes, or to say no. This was the first year that I turned down some significantly sized projects and used a bit more of a filter to decide who I wanted to work with, when I had capacity to take things on, and when I wanted to focus more on thinking about where I wanted the business to go. Part of the reason I started this business was to have better control over my own work and life, and balance my parents, kids, and professional contributions to the world. And I had some hard decisions to make this year where I needed to allocate a little bit more energy to some of those other things, and I did that, which is something I feel proud of today.

We celebrated four years of Grow Well. Sarah and I rebuilt the website last year in 2022. And I also recognized that it had been three and a half years that the business had existed and I needed assistance keeping it updated on a regular basis. I found Becky [Grow Well’s communications consultant] and we have published content on our blog every single month of this year, which is a new milestone for Grow Well and a sign of personal growth that I don't have to do everything and sometimes need somebody who's going to keep things on track. We also started a quarterly newsletter, which I see as a hybrid between a personal email and a blog post. I love reading the emails that I've gotten back from current or former clients or collaborators. I have really just enjoyed using the newsletter as a way of sparking dialogue with people that I appreciate.

Grow Well Consulting turned four years old in 2023.

Sarah Mock: My first two years working as a freelancer. At the end of 2022, I realized that including all the vacation that I did not take and the weekends I worked, I netted zero days off. I was stressed about that. A big goal for me, perhaps a very counterintuitive one, was to not do that again and figure out how to actually take breaks to recharge. This kind of work tends to get more intense at the end of the year and you have a lull at the beginning but it doesn't feel like a break. It feels stressful. This year, we had a better handle on that.

Alison shares her book recommendations in the quarterly newsletter. She reads 40+ books per year.

What big lessons did 2023 bring?

SM: Some projects can also return results that are disheartening. One project, where the limit of trend analysis was very interesting, if not a little disheartening in terms of values. Despite the fact that I'm a “seasoned sustainability professional” and have done enough work in this space, we still completed a project where the organization wanted to know how much and what type of mitigation current or future expected water risks justified. Our research found there was a mismatch between the scale of the risk and the potential of more minor mitigation approaches like conservation practices to effectively mitigate those risks. This really complicates the financial case for value chain actors to support on-farm conservation. And there was a part of me that just really still believes that maybe there were financial incentives for companies to do better, but I don't know. Not yet.

AG: The scale of the challenge versus the scale of the impact of conservation practices versus shifting where your infrastructure is… that’s the type of change that’s needed. And that was a difficult thing to come to terms with. That needs to happen in an expansive way at a regional scale. For multinational companies, it may make more financial sense to just divest from the most challenged regions, than invest in practice changes that are unlikely to add up to the mitigation needed.

SM: Many multinational companies have the resources to be able to make investments and adapt. The thing is, they don't really need to. The people that really need to adapt are farmers and individuals and relatively smaller businesses who have less margin and less bandwidth to make investments. That organization is going to be fine because farmers are going to adapt or they aren't, but as long as a similar number of acres are under production around the world, they're going to sell the same amount of stuff.

What questions are you bringing into 2024?

AG: We are getting ready to embark on this other benchmarking project. This is across the whole ag and food value chain. These multinational companies from input suppliers to grocery retailers are actually doing really, really well financially this last year. The volatility in production and supply… they have effectively priced it into their products, passing costs on to consumers. And so their margins are up, profitability is up, their revenue is reaching record highs. We're sort of in this weird moment where the cost that they've effectively priced in the sustainability challenges into their products and currently, they're passing those on effectively to consumers or to governments who are helping consumers when consumer budgets fall short. That's been a fascinating learning and I think it's pushed Sarah and I to think a little differently about where the actual levers for change may be. How far does the measure-manage paradigm get you? How do you drive systemic change? What does systemic change mean? Is it something that you can do with multinational corporations? What are some other power structures that you can tap into?

SM: I think it was actually kind of a watershed moment for us. I am curious how other people in this space deal with having these kinds of realizations because I feel like there comes a point where you can only prove it so many times before you say, listen, unless you're talking about regulation or some other mechanism, you would have to be lying to your clients to convince them that their business is truly at risk.

What do you want people to know about Grow Well’s work?

AG: Sarah is a journalist. My background is science. And what brings us together is that we are truth seekers. I know my highest allegiance is to my best understanding of the truth. And we go about finding it in slightly different ways. Sarah is good at interviewing and finding out who people are, their real motivation, allegiances, and core values. My strengths are finding and digesting reams of data to pull insights out of it. We give our clients what is real and why they need to know how their business is working, how they're impacted by outside forces, and how they will be impacted; we don’t tell them what they want to hear. Sometimes, they might be surprised but by and large, they're grateful for our approach. Even when the result is surprising, our clients are grateful because we do a really good job of explaining our methods, how and why we got there, and the basis for the insights we’re delivering.

SM: We have no allegiance to the trends that I think a lot of other people do. Especially in the philanthropic and venture worlds, there's always something that's new and shiny, like, hemp or oats. For 18 months everyone’s talking about how oats are the future, if we just get a bunch of farmers to convert to oats, then we're all going to figure it out and save the world. There's never any evidence for that. And it's a fantasy all driven by like, one Washington Post article written eight years ago that someone dug up, but it becomes a talking point.

In my mind, it’s the kind of thing you latch onto when you’re coming into ag from another space. At first, you're think, I can do the research and figure it out. But then, all of a sudden everyone's talking about oats, you're like well, oats must be a real thing. But more often than not, our clients have been very open to hearing our perspective on the trends. They trust us and move on. We don't just want to be chasing after the latest “silver bullet,” like a weird hybrid wheat variety, or even slightly broader silver bullets like the industry’s current obsession with the narrowest possible conceptualization of “regenerative agriculture.” In a weird way, the conclusion is that we're not trendy.

What are you excited about in the coming months?

AG: I want to help people understand how the system works today so that we can provide pathways to systemic changes for it to function in better ways. I think there are some key ways that the system is not delivering the sort of basic outcomes that you want out of the food system. There is not equitable access to food in the world or in the United States. We have had the largest increase in food insecurity in the United States this year that we have had since the financial crisis. If people don't have enough food, or the right variety that they want to eat to be healthy, that's the biggest failing a food system can have.

On the production end of the food system, it drives a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. We haven't bent the curve on emissions. There's a lot of hopeful progress that is highlighted in the most recent National Climate Assessment, but that progress hasn't happened in the food system.Other sectors are improving, like the electric grid and transportation, but food and ag has not yet and we can’t leave equity out of it.

Just as much inequity exists at the growing end of the supply chain, if not more than at the eater end. With the US’s colonial roots, the Europeans who came here needed a lot of people to be engaged in land management for the new government to succeed and to forcibly take control of this landmass. Then the economy transitioned from more agrarian to industrial, and they needed people to show up in factories. And so policies pushed most of the population off the land during that transition.

“I want to help people understand how the system works today so that we can provide pathways to systemic changes for it to function in better ways.”

Alison Grantham

How can we kick start that conversation? Truthfully, farmers aren't feeding us all. There's a lot of people in the middle of the supply chain too, whose labor makes it possible for us to eat, who are not currently being compensated at living wages either here in the US or abroad. Do we need more of the population to be engaged in food growing, processing, and distribution to address the access and equity issues in the supply chain? The majority of the population doesn’t have the capital to access farmland when it's selling at record highs of $34,800 per acre, or more than $4 million for a seemingly unremarkable 115-acre parcel in Missouri. When the annual net return from a crop is on the order of tens to hundreds of dollars per acre for crops like oats, wheat, corn, alfalfa or soybeans crops, you can see that the math just isn't mathing.

A podcast to explore what’s truly possible

We’re excited to dig into this in 2024 through a podcast we’re planning where we’ll be exploring some radically different futures for the food system. What’s truly possible if we reimagined where, how, and who grew, processed, distributed and sold our food? We spend so much of our time trying to retrofit this current system, that is functioning as designed, but is not not designed with equity or environmental outcomes in mind. So, we’re both really looking forward to doing this first project together that is solely dictated by our own interests, questions, and imaginations.

Climate, food systems, and when the math isn’t mathing: Learnings from Grow Well’s Work in 2023