Ep. 1 White Buffalo Land Trust with Kyle Sullivan

Ever wondered how blockchain technology can support regenerative farming? Join us as we explore the fascinating intersection of regenerative agriculture and innovative tech with our guest, Kyle Sullivan, Director of Marketing and Communications at White Buffalo Land Trust. Kyle takes us on a captivating journey through their unique approach to land stewardship, illuminating innovative practices at the 1,000-acre ranch in Lompoc, California. From raising cattle to growing olives and pinot noir wine, Kyle shares how they are redefining farming while staying true to principles of land stewardship and regeneration.

We explore the power of NFTs in fostering community engagement and hear all about how White Buffalo is leveraging NFTs and blockchain technology to connect and engage with various communities, all while advancing their mission of land regeneration and community building. This isn’t your average loyalty program - it's a unique initiative offering exclusive rewards and experiences to members, from exclusive wines to custom butchered meat, olive oils, and more. 

We wrap up our chat with Kyle as he emphasizes the collective momentum that’s essential to drive forward the mission of the White Buffalo Land Trust. We discuss how they are using storytelling through blockchain technology and NFTs to build community loyalty, offering members access to exclusive content and rewards. The conversation underscores the power and potential of blockchain technology in supporting their mission of regeneration and community building. Don't miss this unique opportunity to explore how regenerative farming and innovative tech can unite to create a sustainable future!

Transcript

Cash Upton: 0:10

Welcome to Refi Generation, the podcast that talks to experts and leaders in the new frontier of regenerative finance to examine how blockchain technology is creating the next generation of environmental and humanitarian initiatives. I'm your host, cash Upton. It is with great pleasure that I kick off episode number one with the White Buffalo Land Trust, a regenerative farm just an hour up the road from Santa Barbara, california. We'll talk with White Buffalo's Director of Marketing and Communications, kyle Sullivan, about how White Buffalo Land Trust is launching an NFT collection. This NFT will be a membership token supporting the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at Halama Canyon Ranch, while allowing members to partake in the bounty of the land. I especially love this conversation because we discuss the importance of regenerative farming practices while examining how blockchain technology can be leveraged to support an active and functioning regenerative farm right in my backyard. Hi, kyle, thanks for coming on the Refi Generation podcast today.

Kyle Sullivan: 1:24

Absolutely Thanks for having me.

Cash Upton: 1:26

Today. Let's start with some background on the White Buffalo Land Trust, discuss some of the land management practices that the White Buffalo engaged in. Then we'll introduce our listeners to the JCR Club. I'll talk about why you chose NFTs, give a little background on how blockchain is allowing for some community engagement, and then get your take on the NFT space and the regenerative finance space. That sounds great. Let's dive in. I'm local to the Santa Barbara area, so I've always heard about the White Buffalo Land Trust and getting to talk today is great. What is it engaging? That's different than other farms in the area?

Kyle Sullivan: 2:04

For sure. The organization was founded. This is actually our five-year anniversary of this year. We've been at it for a little bit here. The roots of it were looking at the different agricultural systems around the world and seeing that there's definitely pretty heavy environmental and climatic shifts that have been happening and in part due to a lot of these conventional practices of agricultural management. At the same time, there's this tremendous opportunity to engage with the land in a different way and to build community around that that actually can have the inverse effect of starting to recuperate the environmental and ecological function of different areas. Looking at the land, looking at community, and it was just this opportunity to see it and build relationship in a different way, to store that land and to have a bigger impact.

Kyle Sullivan: 3:13

To do that, we founded the organization with four core principles or pillars of our own work, the first one being land stewardship. We felt that it was really important to be actually hands-on on the land and to be practicing agriculture to so much of agriculture is learned through that type of hands-on experience. It's so easy nowadays to get into the web, get into research, get deep into books, and we can be very heady about all the different things that we're trying to learn. Having that opportunity to practice on the ground and to learn as things come up was critical for us. Really, that unique context of every single place where agriculture is practiced creates different challenges and different opportunities. We really felt it was important to dive deep into the land here and to learn directly from the land. To do that, we actually, just over two years ago now, closed on a property called Holamacanian Ranch, which is a 1,000-acre ranch and it's our center for regenerative agriculture.

Kyle Sullivan: 4:32

That's near Lone Poke, california. That ranch is really our home base and our hub for all of our operations. The major types of agriculture that we are doing there is we are raising cattle out on the grasslands. We're also raising goats. We've had sheep come through and grazed. We have a five-acre vineyard of quinoa noir and chardonnay. We're creating wine. There's olives on the property, there's oak woodlands. Really, those are just kind of the foundations now and we're really building upon that.

Kyle Sullivan: 5:09

But that's kind of where it's starting and the you know, taking it from there into the other three pillars of our organization. We wanted to monitor the impacts of our work and learn from that as well, and so we have a whole team dedicated to monitoring and research and looking at what are the impacts, what are the outcomes of what we're up to and how can we learn from that. And, you know, how can we then use that information to go into our next pillar of education and training. And so that really is twofold. It's community education, just basic ecological literacy, and connecting people with the land again, and, you know, learning plant species that are native and local to this area and common agricultural crops. And you know, there's I don't know, I find there's such a cool relationship with all those. You know different plants and stuff, the more you can sink in and learn who they are. You kind of like, you know, walk through the environment and you're like, oh, you know, I know this guy one of your friends after a while, you know.

Cash Upton: 6:17

What's up? Porcus Agrifolia.

Kyle Sullivan: 6:19

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then from there to you know. So that's through the education and training. So we're inviting community out to field days, out on the ranch, where we're, you know, giving tours, walking people through it, getting people connected. And then we're also doing training and intensives that go from a one day workshop up to a 10 day intensive of learning about holistic management and how to kind of plan systems of agriculture for a certain land based that take an account the land itself and the unique context of that environment, but also take into account the social and community dynamics that are at play.

Kyle Sullivan: 7:03

And you know, what type of life do you want to live as a farmer and rancher?

Kyle Sullivan: 7:07

What type of, you know, community do you have around you to support you?

Kyle Sullivan: 7:12

So it's like looking at all those different aspects and then the final pillar is we wanted to be able to take everything that we're doing and bring it to market, like we.

Kyle Sullivan: 7:23

The answer, this is kind of enterprise development is what we call that. And so in that kind of wing of our operations we have our own food brand called Figurate Foods, and that brand is really, you know, our ethos is to look at ecological problems that can be solved through an agricultural, you know, production system and then creating a product around that, so that through creating a product and bringing it to market, we're actually actively improving the ecological system that we're working within and we are also then taking, you know, the profits. All the proceeds from that go directly to the organization to help support our work to build and kind of spread this impact regionally and globally to other Mediterranean climates around the world. And that's actually, you know, within that enterprise development sphere as well. We have the agricultural commodities that are coming up at the ranch at Halama, and that kind of ties in uniquely to this NFT project as well.

Cash Upton: 8:27

Really cool. Yeah, we'll dive into that phase of it a little bit. I want to pull on a thread. A little bit of what you said, though, because in the beginning the Halama Canyon Ranch was pretty degraded land from like decades of traditional cattle grazing, correct?

Kyle Sullivan: 8:44

So, you know, prior to our stewardship, there was cattle on the land for year round, and you know, within this ecological system it's interesting, it's, you know, historically like, if we look way back, these grasslands around this region of California were predominantly perennial based systems, and so these perennial grasses were green for throughout the growing season and beyond, even into the drier months and at their full health. There's stories, and there's, you know, logs and diaries from people that were early coming to California, where there was grass as high as people's chest height while they were on horseback. And so to just think of that as where this system could be in terms of ecological function and where it's at, you know, over time that's shifted with the constant pressure of animals. You know, on that landscape throughout the year, it's really the last thing that's green later in the season is the perennials, and so they get heavily targeted for food for the cattle that are on the land, and so then you're left with this kind of annual dominant system where we get the you know, these golden fields of California that we all know, and really that's that's not where the system was prior to us being here.

Kyle Sullivan: 10:17

And so there, you know, it's a much bigger story than the just the prior owners, and I think that every agricultural system, I you know I don't blame the people that are working on the land. I think that they're doing honest work and they're working within a much broader system of markets, and how your neighbor does it and how your community does it, and what you've learned, and so it's more, you know how do we, how do we demonstrate something that's slightly different and show the potential of where the system could be, and you know work in that direction. I think it's really important.

Cash Upton: 10:55

Absolutely. I'm excited to follow that journey. What are some of the regenerative methods, then, to you know? Tell our listeners how, how you guys are doing it differently, because I think that's really important because, like you said, so many land management practices are extractive or are just done like this because everyone's done it like their grandparents did it, and so what are some of the ways that white buffalo is using regenerative practices?

Kyle Sullivan: 11:19

Yeah for sure. And so in in thinking about this, it's really narrowing it down to the system that you're working with it. So there's many of them on the land at Palomacade Ranch and we kind of in our own minds, break it down into the different ecological sites that are present on the land, and that would be the Oak Woodlands, the Grasslands, the Riparian corridors, the Orchards and Vineyards. And then there's kind of the base camp, like this, you know home base, where our buildings are, infrastructure hosting people, all that kind of stuff. And so we kind of look at each of those ecological systems slightly differently. Let's hop into the Vineyard, for example, and so the Vineyard was planted years ago and is, you know, fully in production when we took over storage ship and was managed conventionally. And so you know how we started to make that shift. Is we, you know, immediately cut out any of the use of chemical fertilizers, of herbicides, pesticides, that kind of stuff to manage the land? And then you start to look at the different systems that those plants need. They need fertility, they need, you know, water and moisture. They also need protection from different pest diseases, things like that. And so, looking at fertility, we created a diverse cover crop mix that we incorporate between each of the rows. Then you know, as that grows, there was a point this last year where you know we brought in sheep early on in the season, prior to bud break, and they were able to come through and, you know, eat down all that cover crop and, you know, spread nutrients throughout the Vineyard and their impact of their hooves walking through there is also helping to push that organic matter down closer to the soil surface where it gets in contact with all the microbes that's in the soil. Further, you know, speeding up that process of decomposition and of bringing nutrients back to the ground. And then you know beyond that too, for you know we have some existing hedgerows that were around the Vineyard with different species and we are massively expanding upon that through the, through different USDA grants that are really accessible to all farmers and ranchers within California, which is great. And through that we have, you know, this huge diversity of different crops that flower and fruit at different times of the year and create, you know, food for pollinators as well as you know, habitat for different birds and even we've installed raptor perches. So you know we have different animal like birds of prey that are also hanging out and kind of different things to keep, like, go for pressure, for example, in check, and so you're kind of looking to these natural systems.

Kyle Sullivan: 14:26

We also do compost where we're, you know, spraying out on the landscape. So it's kind of interesting, you know, imagery of our tractor going through the Vineyard roads and it has a big commercial conventional sprayer on the back and it's just spraying everywhere and instantly that image kind of brings to mind like oh, what are they doing here? And but the driver of the tractor you know is not wearing a hazmat suit and respirator, it's, you know, something that is completely safe, completely, you know, biologically rich and full of microbes and really by spraying that onto the leaf surface we are effectively out competing a lot of the different things that can you know, for example, the you know, different funguses and stuff that can grow on the plant and can really inhibit yield and the quality of the crop. And then you know, later on in the year last year we had some some weather shifts where you would have that pressure of like some kind of mold or mildew and we use basically like pollution of baking soda and some cinnamon oil to take care of that. So there's just there's different ways of doing it. It's, you know, it's not easy, it doesn't always work, it's a constant learning, but it's looking at these, the broader systems, and how they all interact to create results. And then it creates resilience and like a robust and healthy system.

Kyle Sullivan: 15:55

And then, to give some some other examples from like the rangeland environment, so how the cattle are out, integrated onto landscape, we we found that it was really important, like I said before, like we had cattle here prior, that we're here year round and that had really, would seem, a big decrease in the amount of like perennial species that were present on the land, and it's really our goal to bring them back. And so we felt that for especially these first few years of bringing that land back to health, first of all, we did not want cattle to be here throughout the year. So once the kind of growing season is done and as the grasses start to brown, we wanted to allow the land to rest until the next season, and so to do that, we partnered with a wonderful operation called the Richards regenerative that's based out in Northern California and that's run by Carrie Richards and her family, and she, being in Northern California, had a different climate and a different grass season and there was a time a year that it was hard for her to get animals to processing to meet the demand that she has, as she has her own brand that goes directly into market. And so For her, you know, it was a win-win because we were, you know, able to raise cattle and harvest cattle at a time that she was not. But it also, you know, if you look at that bigger system, it mimics the migration of tule elk that used to live in this area, so they would come down during the winter months out of the high mountains and they'd be eating on the green grasses around where we are and then they would migrate, like, up to the mountains in summertime. And so, looking at those kind of bigger systems and kind of imitating that, and then the other thing that we do too is we, you know, practice holistic management, where we're breaking the ranch down into a number of smaller paddocks and then we're moving the cattle through there on a regular kind of rotation basis.

Kyle Sullivan: 18:02

What that does is it allows us to not overgraze the grass, and and overgrazing is, you know, not having too many animals on a space, like all come back like at one time, it's more once the grass has been eaten down to a small little you know fit left by an animal and it starts to regrow.

Kyle Sullivan: 18:25

If it gets eaten down again, that really stunts that grass and its ability to regrow and regenerate. But if it's only eaten down once, that stimulation it's very used to, it's grown into a symbiotic relationship with that pressure from herbivores to where it. It's slept off some of its roots, which basically means that they kind of die off and go into the soil as carbon that has been stored in the soil and then it starts a new spurt of growth and allowing it to then rest after it's been impacted and fertilized by the animals being there. You come back all the way around and now you have a fresh green field again that's ready to go for the animals, and in that process you sequestered carbon into the ground. You've built the robustness of that system and you just, you know, keep doing that, keep rotating that year after year on the same land base, and that's when we start to see those bigger changes that we're really aiming for.

Cash Upton: 19:25

Yeah, that's really cool. You're essentially mimicking predation by encouraging them to move around the landscape. Yeah, I love that. I think our listeners will really appreciate that there are those holistic management practices. So really excited that you guys are local to my area and doing this type of work Because, yeah, so much of my childhood was, you know, seeing those golden hillsides that are non-perneal grasses. So, yeah, restoring those perneals is awesome. I do have a passion to help restore the American bison to the Great Plains and our country. Does the White Buffalo Land Trust have any plans for future Buffalo?

Kyle Sullivan: 20:05

As of now. We don't. You know they weren't really. You know, as far as I understand, it was really the Tule elk that were native to this region. So there's, you know, within the plains, absolutely, and I've seen amazing, you know examples of that happening and you know the Dakotas in different regions and I think that's incredible and I totally agree with you. But, yeah, not currently something we're thinking about.

Cash Upton: 20:30

I hear you, but it would be cool to get the Tule elk back. I've seen some in the Carrizo Plain area of California here, oh wow, yeah, they're one of the last little herds out there, so, okay, cool. So I love that we gave the background on the regenerative farming aspects. I'd love to dive into the NFT aspect now because I'd love showcasing real world examples of NFTs having impact. So let's introduce our listeners to the Halama Canyon Ranch Club. I'll read off a tweet to kind of introduce an NFT collection representing membership in a like-minded community supporting the regeneration of our Center for Regenerative Agriculture at Halama Canyon Ranch and partaking in the bounty of the land. So why NFTs? And let's dive in. Like, what's this campaign aiming to do?

Kyle Sullivan: 21:19

It's a great question, I think that you know, a few years ago, as there was this, you know, tremendous boom and activity around NFTs, we were all curious and kind of tuning in and looking at it, as you know. What are the opportunities here? What's a way for us to utilize this technology creatively to support our work and to support our impact beyond the borders of our ranch as well? And it's funny, it actually started from a supporter of ours who had actually nominated us, without us knowing, for a community grant with a group called Artblocks, and so they nominated us and community members came out and voted and we actually were one of the recipients of that donation and that was really the spark of it all. We were like, oh, this is really cool, let's take that and let's roll that into, you know, starting to explore this opportunity and see what it is that we can create. And you know the evolution of it. Actually it started a little bit more on the art side. It started, you know, we were looking at the utility aspects, but we were looking at the land at Halama, and so each token is representative of one acre of the thousand acre ranch, and so we thought that was a really cool way to kind of bring people into connection and relationship with the land itself, and to do that we actually, you know, through our monitoring and research team. They have access to all of this satellite data and different data that we're collecting on the land as well, and so we wanted to utilize that as kind of a foundation for creating this art, create these little acre cubes that represent an actual acre out on the ranch. And so we partnered with an organization called NYIO and they are, you know, within the NFT space and are working with creating the art and also kind of bringing it all the way through to creation, you know, creating the contracts, executing them, all that kind of stuff. And so we were able to work with them to kind of build this model within Blender, which is kind of a design platform, to where we could feed in all this ecological data, that is, the different eco sites that are present on the ranch, the elevation, the evapotranspiration, the soil, carbon that's in the soil, like all of these different data points that we had from the ranch. And so we gathered all that data and collected it, we fed it into this model and refined the model, and the output of that is each of these unique tokens. Yeah, we, we love that idea kind of connecting in that way, and and that was kind of the start.

Kyle Sullivan: 24:22

And then we, you know, the other Big aspect that it was on our mind as well was the community building aspect of building a NFT project, and it's, you know, that's a huge component of our work in Everything that we do and and so, you know, locally and regionally it's, you know, hosting workshops, it's hosting the community out on the ranch and we kind of we're looking at how can we look beyond that to two different communities and Find a unique way to engage with them. And that's really where this, you know, came about. We saw that robust community building of web three and wanted to see if we could jump into that space to kind of bridge people Back to the land in a way. You know, we want to kind of be that bridge from, as things are shifting so fast in this modern day and age with AI and Web three and all this kind of stuff. It's like how do we Embrace those technologies for good but at the same time, bridge people back to the land itself? And, yeah, connection with our work.

Cash Upton: 25:31

Yeah, that's so necessary now when people don't get enough time outside. Okay, so I want to pull on that community thread a little bit more, but before I want, I want to go back to what you said about the Monitoring, and I love that you talked about a vapour, transpiration and and these sort of like data Samples that you collected. So one of my questions was going to be how is this going to be Leveraged in the future or is there gonna? You know, I imagine you're continually monitoring these data points. So then the reason why I'm asking is one of my past guests was doing MRV measure report, verify, and some of the blockchain applications out there are putting that data on chain and then receiving a reward or some sort of compensation for carbon sequestration, among among other things, and is that something that's on the road map?

Kyle Sullivan: 26:19

Yes, definitely on our minds. We've had an incredible partner in the regen network. We've worked closely with them and they, you know, are doing that with carbon and other ecological services and kind of bringing that on to the blockchain. It's it's, you know, a work in progress, that whole, that whole model, and we're a hundred percent on board to utilize those technologies to, like you said, kind of restore land and put it on chain and work in that way, and it's just a matter of getting there. It's, you know, there's still so much to be learned, I feel like, within those, the models of how we how do we Collect that data? What does that data mean? How much, how much do we value certain ecological services within one eco region versus a different climate? Yeah, lots of, lots of questions that we're still actively working on and pondering, but, yes, it's definitely Something that we're looking at.

Cash Upton: 27:20

Well, yeah, we got connected through region network, so I love the work they're doing. What I've heard is that the digital MRV Collection site is kind of the bottleneck right now, like how do you verify the data collected on the ground is legitimate? And that's one of the, you know, biggest challenges that I've heard people talk about. But it's great that you're also I heard you say just now it's it's not just carbon right. There's other ecological markers and things that need to be monitored that are Important in the whole scheme of the environmental crisis.

Kyle Sullivan: 27:53

Absolutely, absolutely, and I think you know really it's. It's that robust, it's back to community, it's that robustness of the ecological community and the services that that provide, that has a very outsized impact. And so we yeah I mean we've been obviously very focused on carbon and I think, for for good reason. But I think that's a stepping stone to a much bigger conversation.

Cash Upton: 28:17

Absolutely yeah. Species diversity and, you know, groundwater penetration yeah, so many markers that you guys could be Fairfine. Is there plans to Update the metadata on each NFT for, like how that acre of land Regenerates?

Kyle Sullivan: 28:34

um, that's a great question. I mean, it's something that we have talked about. We don't have anything, you know, solid or set in motion yet on that front, but you're absolutely right. I mean, like that's one thing that's unique about the ecosystem. One thing that's unique about these tokens is they are a representation of this snapshot in time of where that data was at On that day that we pulled it, and so, yeah, it's something that we've thought about because that would be awesome to be able to, you know, come back Five years from now and check out your acre and see what what's happening. But yeah, I think I, I like that concept. I think that was part of the challenge, too is how do you technically implement that within the NFT itself?

Cash Upton: 29:17

Okay, so the other side of the NFT, like you said, is the community, and that's what I thought was was really cool too. I mean, it is sort of like a almost like a co-op that you're building. If you know, you have a thousand members. I love the engagement side of it. I know what you mean about NFTs kind of being a dirty word. Now they're called digital collectibles now Kyle, no. But all kidding aside, I love that you guys are creating this like community loyalty program. So what do people get when they participate? I know that you. They have like Access to wines and different products. So come what? What's that vision look like?

Kyle Sullivan: 29:54

Yeah, absolutely so. It'd be kind of cornerstone of the Things that are the bounty that we're providing as being a member of the community, is the wine allocation itself, and so we, like I said earlier, we've got the five acre vineyard and we're with that. We we have a limited production and in what we can produce each year and it also varies each year depending upon in the season Last year, for example, was a much lower yield just because of different climate, shifts in the weather from that year, and that's that's kind of how it goes. So what we're doing is we're basically Anyone who is a member is going to have guaranteed access to the An allocation each year, and so that's access to purchase the wine each year. But that will be the only way to access the wines that are coming from the ranch, and beyond that too, there's many different things that we'll be creating that are coming off the land, and so we're, like I said, we're raising cattle out there, and so there's the potential of doing some custom butchered meat from the future for this community. We have olive oils on the land, or olives on the land, and we're harvesting that and creating oils. There is also we had an amazing harvest this year of chanterelle mushrooms, which we turned into like a pickled, almost like tapenade that's jarred and canned, and so we love the kind of culinary and creative side of kind of bringing these things from the land into a bigger story. That's on experience as well, and so this community is really a way to access those unique things as well as engage with us in different ways.

Kyle Sullivan: 31:48

I think we're gonna be, you know, hosting a number of events that are exclusive to the JCR club members. Also, we have a benefit event about every 18 months and at that event too, we're gonna reserve a table specifically for JCR club members, and so we'll kind of do an auction off of that seat or a giveaway. And yeah, so we're at the beginnings of expanding upon all that. What that looks like and I think that you know, looking at other NFTV communities as well, there's, depending upon what token you have or that kind of thing can also impact the kind of opportunities that we provide, and it's something that we've thought about.

Kyle Sullivan: 32:34

I think that the how we engage with the community, what opportunities we provide, is going to be this kind of constant evolution over time, based on what it is that we're working on and what's happening, and I think, beyond those events and beyond those unique offerings, we also wanna host exclusive kind of volunteer opportunities to come out and engage with us on the land and be a part of this work, and that you know can look like getting out on the land and collecting the data for those types of, you know, ecological services and looking at it and how does this work? How do you collect data? What data are you collecting? And engage with our team in that way and kind of get hands on with the process is really what we wanna invite people into do through this project.

Cash Upton: 33:23

Yeah, that's really cool. I love that and I think you hit it on the head with the functionality of NFTs can allow for like a broader reach of the ecosystem and different integrations with other projects and different product offerings can all be kind of leveraged through. You know having that token and then you know showing activity and stuff and support right. You know who is supporting the Halamicania Ranch and then you can say thank you and you can invite them to help. You know, educate and be part of that mission driven cause. Cause you know people do wanna, you know, feel good about the meat they're eating or the wine they're drinking. You know they don't wanna think that it's destroying this beautiful landscape because they had a you know bottle of wine. So knowing that it's regenerative is really cool. When does the Halamicania Ranch Club launch?

Kyle Sullivan: 34:11

So we are in our initial phases right now and kind of the process that we are doing to launch it is we've created a VIP list and that's kind of, you know, for those that are within the NFT world. It's kind of our white list or allow list for early minting, and so we are inviting people to join that now and get ready for minting through that process and then within the next month or so, we will be releasing the actual date of the mint itself and then we'll, you know, keep that open from there for an extended period of time and then we're just gonna kind of see how it lands and we'll kind of go from there moving forward. But yeah, within the next month, here we'll, the tokens will be available.

Cash Upton: 35:00

Cool, yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes for the VIP list and then, yeah, stay tuned, folks, for a July update. So, okay, cool. Well, I think you know let's take a little bit of a step back and just kind of want to get your opinion real quick on. You know what comes to mind when you hear the word REFI regenerative finance so I think we're kind of circling around that topic right now and that is, you know, what the bread and butter of this podcast is is how is blockchain regenerating and adding economic viability? So I think we talked about a lot. I think what you're doing is regenerative finance applications. So just love to kind of just get your take if it's something that you know you have any opinions on.

Kyle Sullivan: 35:39

It's a good question and you know, I mean I'm not an expert in all the nuts and bolts of how it's functioning and how it's working.

Kyle Sullivan: 35:47

I mean, the way that I kind of understand it is a lot of what we've discussed so far, which is that, you know, it's finding unique integrations with the on the ground work or finding ways to uniquely finance the different restoration projects that are happening around the world, bringing that on the chain.

Kyle Sullivan: 36:07

So there is that level of kind of transparency, openness and the ability to track that over time. I think that all of those principles are, you know, make sense, and I think that it's back to what I said earlier too, that I think it's really important to lean into technology and look at what it can offer us. And you know, things are gonna continue to progress in that world and it can be a huge lever for good if we are creative enough to find applications for it that truly have an impact and we can track over time. And so I think the potential of it is huge and I think that we're just we're in the work right now. We're doing the work, we're showing up, we're seeing that opportunity. We're, you know, looking for creative new ways to utilize it and to make it better, but I think that it's can be a great solution for helping us move forward.

Cash Upton: 37:14

Absolutely. I think you hit it on the head. It's not just crypto tokens, you know, pump and dumps from celebrities. There's a legitimate technology here on the backend that has transparency and a lot of potential to solve a lot of these climate emergencies. That's why I'm in this space. The central coast green building council is big on my list and you know, to find this blockchain space where there's finally some silver linings of hope, like you know, and seeing you guys locally doing this it really got me excited. So I'm excited to continue to follow your guys's journey and, you know, have you guys on in another six months or a year and see how the NFT campaign went and, you know, keep collaborating from there.

Kyle Sullivan: 37:54

I love it Awesome. Yeah, Thanks so much for having me. And yeah, I mean I think it's important work that you're doing too is like sharing these stories about people that are doing it in different ways. And you know, this is kind of my world, as you know. Being the marketing and communications director at Wipe Up Hello is I'm always, you know, within the realm of how do we communicate and tell stories about this work that's happening and engage people in that way, and it takes as many voices as we can kind of muster up to build that collective momentum in a way that it's, you know, truly going to have that long-term impact that we're all looking for. So, yeah, we're all working in the same direction. So appreciate you and appreciate you having me on.

Cash Upton: 38:40

Thanks to Matthew Patrick Donner for the ReFi generation production, including the music, mixing and editing. As a reminder, none of this is financial advice, and feedback is the breakfast of champions. Please subscribe to our show and send your thoughts, critiques and ideas for future content. Be well, take care of each other and do something good today.