Promoting Sustainable, Regenerative Farming Through Hospitality - David Rust, Sagra

Josiah: 0:00

Sagra is one of the most exciting new hospitality businesses, on a mission to build a more sustainable food system by creating hospitality experiences that connect their guests with the food, the land, and each other. In this episode, we hear the story behind how the brand got started from its founder, David Rust, as well as the opportunity that exists in this space for hospitality. To start us off, here's David explaining his personal story that prepared him for the work he's doing today.

David: 0:49

I grew up in Menlo Park, California, and I went to a pretty alternative school there I'm first through eighth grade. It's called Peninsula School and it's a small school with 20 kids per grade. You basically are with those kids for the entire time and it really prioritizes hands-on outdoor learning. So we do camping trips, we had a wood shop, we had a pottery studio and we also had a garden. I loved going to school and we actually had no homework. The first homework I got was in high school. That, I think, just had a major imprint on me around the power of experiential learning, the connection with the outdoors. My dad loves camping, and would always take us on camping trips. Then my dad grew up in Germany, was born and raised on a farm. When we would go visit family I would also oftentimes be out in nature in that way. My cousins of mine also ran a farm in Italy that you could stay at, so it was an agriturist map. I think all of that really impacted my experiences growing up and my thoughts on what I wanted to do career-wise. My favorite topics in school were biology. I ended up majoring in environmental science. I was always thinking about nature, the outdoors, and experiences around that. I think as a result of both growing up in the heart of Silicon Valley and then also going to Stanford. You're surrounded by a lot of people in the startup world. There was a moment I didn't exactly know what I wanted to major in. I was fishing around, I was doing environmental science. I didn't know really how that would tie into a career or job. Somebody who was a residential advisor for me in the dorm where I lived in school recommended this program called the Mayfield Fellows Program, where they basically take 12 or 14 students a year, usually with engineering or science backgrounds, and they do this nine-month program on top of your coursework, getting you into the startup world. So you meet all these different startup founders, you're doing case studies, you intern at a startup over the summer, you come back with a group and you debrief, and you meet venture investors. So you really get a deep dive into that and I think that, more than anything, started me moving into the startup world just because I was exposed to it and surrounded by it and eventually that led me to join Lyft in the early days because one of my close college best friends and basically dorm mates was working at the company that turned into Lyft. It was called Zimride, so I would always hang out there for lunch. I got to know the team, I got to know the founders and then I started using it. I think I was the 10th or 13th passenger on Lyft because they were just right in the beginning and I got to know the founders. And then I remember when they were about 20 employees and they had been just piloting in San Francisco and they wanted to try launching LA, I was talking with them and we all said, hey, what if we actually didn't just do lunch together all the time? But we actually worked together. So I joined and ended up being there first, basically living out of a suitcase for about a year and a half in launching Los. Angeles at first and then to Seattle and then Chicago and Boston and Indianapolis and Baltimore and elsewhere, and so through that, I first of all really loved travel and deeply getting to know places, because when we launched a city for Lyft, we'd go there and we'd live there for a month or two and you would get to know the city in a very unique way because you're meeting drivers, you're meeting passengers, you're meeting businesses, you're meeting influential marketing and press people. You're knowing the city in a way that is not like a tourist. You're truly trying in a month, to get as deep into the fabric of that community as you can, and so I loved that experience and the team of us there that launched cities. we've always kind of we stay in touch and we talk with each other and we say that those experiences being launchers sort of very much so formed who we are as people, because most of those people now continue to love travel, some love being settled in one place for very long, have a really entrepreneurial spirit, feel comfortable being dumped into places with complete chaos and a lack of direction and thrive in that and so what was useful for getting to know a place so quickly?

Josiah: 5:14

It seems like a tough challenge. Was there anything that you found across these cities?

David: 5:19

It's a good question. We, I mean a couple of things that we would do. I mean, we'd start by thinking about the major use cases where people need rides so nightlife is an obvious case study where people should not be driving drunk home and so we would start by actually just getting to know the nightlife in a city. We'd go to the bars, we'd go to the music venues and we would, you know, give out free rides, but we'd also be there just getting to know the cultural side of a city. And you can imagine I mean we started in LA after San Francisco, so I got to see that, which is a very vibrant nightlife, and then went to Seattle and it's completely different. I mean, what time do people go to bed? What time are the bars open until? How many musical acts are in town? What are people wearing? And then the other major thing is just who are the drivers? I mean, the drivers in LA were, for the most part, aspiring actors, as you would expect, and you know they'd show up in these like extravagant cars, right, like a brand new BMW, a brand new Mercedes, and like that's what they're driving on Lyft. Seattle was a totally different experience. Chicago was a totally different experience, and so I think more than anything, meeting the drivers was this amazing way of just getting to know a total cross-section of a city. And, again, you meet these people in day-to-day life but, like we, deeply got to know their families, we got to know the impact that it could have on their lives and within a month, if you do, you know, get out into these. You know bars, concert venues, sort of the area where culture is happening, and you meet a lot of drivers. Like you pretty quickly get to know a city.

Josiah: 6:50

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that, because I feel like that skill is so transferable into the world of hospitality, where doing that research and immersing yourself in the cultures is so key. I live briefly in Seattle and it is a very different scene, but you spent time there and it's almost like you were kind of in this accelerator and getting to know what is the culture of Seattle in a way that we can serve the people there.

David: 7:10

Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think when you're in hospitality, I mean, getting to know your market is obviously important, but there are many different types of markets these days, right? So hospitality isn't just an urban model anymore. So if you're working in a more urban-centric hospitality business, then getting to know Seattle, and getting to know Chicago, is all very relevant and comparable to what we were doing at Lyft. At least, the space we operate in, and a lot of hospitality businesses are operating in, is in much more rural environments. So we're not in New York City, we're in the Hudson Valley, we're not in San Francisco, we're out in Mendocino County, Sonoma County, and even in places like North Carolina where Chapel Hill is not a major city and then we are 30 minutes outside of Chapel Hill. And so I found it's also very different to get to know these small towns and it can be in many ways actually more difficult to get to know them because there aren't as many places to meet people, there isn't as quick an ability to get to know the people per se. I mean, we get to deeply know the farmers, but it is interesting, it's very different to get to know a small rural town than a big urban city.

Josiah: 8:28

That's super interesting to me and we'll come back to your time at Lyft if we can, but I wanna talk about you post-Lyft and post your career working in technology and VC backed startups. It's a wild world. It's a fun world in many respects, but I'm very interested in people's transitions and how they think about preparing themselves for the next chapter of their careers. Can you walk us through what it was like for you when you were going through this evolution of David, the startup tech growth guru, into what you do today? What did that involve for you?

David: 9:02

Yeah, well, it started when I left Lyft. I took some time off and I, first and foremost, went and stayed in Germany for a bit, because that's where my dad was born and raised. I went and visited the family farm and I was basically following what my absence is called, basically like following the breadcrumbs. It was not. There was not a clear path, there was not a clear goal. There was a sense of things that I was interested in, and oftentimes they were not very concrete, like, for example, I was watching Chef's Table religiously and there was some feeling that I got when I watched the show. That really spoke to me and I said, well, where else does that feeling show up? What causes that feeling to happen? I would listen to certain music and notice that feeling, and so it was a lot of just following feelings, which was very new because it is very different from how businesses and startups operate, where you're supposed to hit a certain goal or hit a certain metric, and so data-driven right, and this was like feelings and emotions driven. And so I lived in Germany for a bit. I went and I lived with a friend in Kenya who works with small-scale farmers, so I was really just following areas of interest. I remember talking to a company called Plenty that does large-scale indoor hydroponic agriculture outside of major cities and got to tour their facilities. So again, there wasn't really a clear goal and an aim and I did exploration for a while on that front and, probably because I didn't have a very clear goal, like it didn't turn into a very clear thing other than a much stronger understanding of what the feeling is that makes me feel alive and places where that showed up.

Josiah: 10:37

I think that is an important thing, though, for our listeners to understand, though, is to track those feelings. Being data-driven is very important, has its time and place, but I feel especially in an AI-driven world where you have more and more information at your fingertips right, and that's only going to accelerate. So just imagine this environment where we know everything at all times, feeling the feelings and tracking that could become a core skill to bring innovation right Right to the world. And so it's funny because I'm coming off a bit of a chef's table binge myself, and it's fascinating to watch that this whole area I did not even know I would be interested in has become fascinating to me. But that led you onto a journey, and you mentioned kind of following the breadcrumbs right, and I imagine, as you were doing that, you were refining your ability to tune into the feeling.

David: 11:22

Yeah, no, I think building that ability is one of the most important things we can do, and I don't think it oftentimes gets talked about, because when you think about people thinking of what kind of business do I want to start or where do I want to work, it's most often talked about through like what industry do you want to be in? Do you want to be in a startup? Do you want to be in a nonprofit? Do you want to? What role do you want to have? What size of company? All of that can be important, but at the end of the day, I think you're only choosing a business to work at or start because you're trying to both feel something yourself and help other people feel that thing, and you can do that in a myriad of ways. And so and I think especially in hospitality you're trying to create an experience for a guest, and I strongly believe that you can't create an experience for somebody that you aren't having yourself. So oftentimes in the more startup tech world, people will get burnt out. They'll be working behind a computer all to get some product out into the world that somebody can use, and the end user may not know or feel the stress, the anxiety, the burnout that's happening in a business that's creating a product that they're using. I think within hospitality, that doesn't really work. I mean, if your team members and your staff are burnt out and are not feeling the sense of inspiration and curiosity and joy and interest that you want a guest to have, guests are gonna feel it, and so I think that's part of what probably led me into hospitality is that I just love that refinement of what's the feeling that we're going for, what am I noticing and how do we just keep following that?

Josiah: 13:00

And that means that we may not always know where we're going on a personal level, was some of the environment that you experienced in venture-backed growth companies, something that led you to look for something else, even though they may have been good companies? I'm curious if there's something about corporate America that Might inspire someone who's listening to this. That maybe doesn't work in hospitality, but it's feeling a little burnt out or a little bit. You know they don't feel a sense of meaning in their work. Was that?

David: 13:28

was that your yeah, well, it's interesting too, because I have such fond memories of being at Lyft and for all intents and purposes. I mean, it's a wonderful culture, it's a wonderful brand. So it wasn't that I had some really distressing experiences there and felt like I needed to get out. That being said, there is something about when a business really starts to grow and you start to raise a lot of capital Ever you know, it just becomes so fixated on needing to hit goals and hit certain financial targets that a lot of that focus on the experience, the feeling, can get stripped away, and at Lyft, it held on to it for a very long time and has been, through its entire life, maniacal about that. Like what? What are the little things you're doing, from a pink mustache on the Front of the car to fist bumping your passenger to all the different you know Versions of lifts that we encourage people to do from like a baker who would bring freshly baked cookies in the car. I mean, it was all about experiences. At a certain point, though, I remember you know it was all about the competition with Uber, and Uber didn't care about any of that, and they were growing faster and they were becoming bigger, and so there was this inevitable pressure of Not focusing as much on that, and I think that's what sort of led me to say, okay, this seems like a path that almost every company eventually hits is like all right, now we have to turn this into a billion-dollar company. What do we do? And I think a lot of the humanity and the personality and all that can get lost in it, and so I think for me, a lot of moving into hospitality was that, oh, here's an industry we're like. You can't ignore that. Like it, the product is the experience. So you, you can think about scale and you can try opening a lot of locations and you can do that, but if you do it at the expense of the guest experience, it's not gonna work.

Josiah: 15:20

Well, I was going to ask you about that Uber-Lyft scenario you mentioned. Does that mean that experience doesn't matter? Or it matters kind of what, what sort of playground you're playing in, and maybe in hospitality. It sounds like experience does matter, but like, what was your takeaway from that?

David: 15:35

No, I think. I mean it's that experience matters, but you may not see the impact of it in a short-term period of time, you see, in a long-term period of time. So at Lyft we spent years Doing a bunch of things that were more expensive than what Uber did. We slowed down because we were caring about the experience. Now, at the time we cared about it, and we wanted to do it, but we knew that it was hindering our growth. Now there was a certain point in time where, when Uber started getting hit in the press and a lot of these articles started coming out about the culture and the experiences that people were having and then this whole delete Uber campaign came up was when, all of a sudden, it felt like, holy crap, all of this stuff that we've been doing is Is now paying off. And you started to see as the market share numbers swung I mean all but we got to 50% market share and we never even thought that was remotely possible and it felt like, all of a sudden it happened really quickly because this dialogue started happening around people not necessarily enjoying some of the practices and culture of uber, and they saw that lift had been genuinely authentically building this and caring about people and experiences and drivers for a while, and so then all of a sudden, like the market sort of corrected and identified that. But there was no guarantee that that would ever happen. We had no idea. That wasn't what we were necessarily even banking on. It was just who we were and the people and the type of experience we were looking to build.

Josiah: 16:59

So I think it depends on what period of time You're talking about it's a good insight because I think it's very important for people to understand how capital moves in the business that they work in because that really affects your day-to-day reality. Right, I spent a decade working in venture-backed startups and it's the reason I left, honestly, because I think what you're getting at is experience Does matter. It wins in the long term, but a lot of these environments are short-term thinking because that's the game right sprint for what two, five, ten years have a big exit, but you could cut corners in that environment. It feels like hospitality provides an environment that appreciates the importance of experience, and so this is for people who care about creating something special, creating experiences still doing well financially in the long term, but it feels hospitality is in a more interesting place to build something in that respect.

David: 17:48

Yeah, no. If you're somebody who deeply cares about offering a personal quality experience and not cutting corners, I think hospitality is like an amazing spot to be, because the first guest that arrives is as important, if not even more important, than the thousandth guest that arrives, and they're gonna have an expectation of an experience when they, not they're not gonna say, oh, this is a new startup hospitality business, I don't care, they're gonna have very high expectations, and that's very different than if you're building an app or something where people say, oh, okay, well, they're figuring it out and they're testing and they're rapid prototyping and you just can't really do that in the same extent. That being said, you know you can decide what level of hospitality you want to get into. So you know, if you do, you want to go create the next four seasons. That's different than if you're looking to create the next KOA campground, right? So there are different levels of quality, but you still need to deliver a great experience within that level of quality.

Josiah: 18:45

Let's go back to your story. You're following the breadcrumbs of an amazing time, it seems, not only experiencing your family's farm, but but others in other continents as well. So you're experiencing a lot. Can you, can you tell me where that led you to? What did you end up building?

David: 19:00

Yeah. So after a certain period of time, I did start to feel the pull of like, okay, what am I gonna do with this? And again I came back to All right, what am I interested in? I'm watching Chef's Table, okay, one of the episodes that I watched in the first season is about this beautiful farm called Blue Hill and called Stone Barns, this restaurant on site called Blue Hill in New York. And I said, okay, well, I guess one action I could take is to actually just reach out to one of these places and go visit. And so I sent a cold email. I was living in California at the time. I got a response from somebody at the farm and they said yes, come on by and we'll introduce you to one of the farmers. So I had a trip coming up to New York. I used that trip as an excuse to then go up north into the Hudson Valley and I met with this person who then became a co-founder and he's a close friend, Jason Grauer, who now runs the farm at Stone Barns, and I spent a day walking through the fields with him helping to put up fences, picking Lettuses, and then he said hey, do you want to see how this whole end-to-end experience works, and I said absolutely so. We took what we harvested from the fields and we walked through the back door of the kitchen into the Kitchen of the Blue Hill restaurant, which is a top-ten restaurant in the world, and all of a sudden I felt like I just stepped through the screen of chef's table and I'm standing there and, like Dan Barber's here on my left, all the chefs are there. They gather around, they're tasting everything that we just harvested out of the field, they're talking about how they might use that and dishes that night. And I just remember this like complete full-body feeling where I was like, oh, this is it to, like the full concerto version of just people who are passionate, connected to the land, working on interesting things they're not thinking about you know. Hey, we need to raise money at this valuation to reach this goal. It was like they care about the guests that are sitting at the table that night and blowing their minds, and there is something so beautiful and pure about that I'll never forget, and so that was sort of this like linchpin moment for me that then set me off on this journey that led to start this business, and there were many different steps along the way.

Josiah: 21:11

But that was when it felt like the feeling and the sense of following the breadcrumbs like hit reality so I want to come back to this moment and I Imagine for everyone who enjoys Chef's Table out there...can only imagine what it must have felt like to kind of go through and experience this yourself in real life. I also want to connect a thread that has been consistent throughout your career in thinking about environmental impact, thinking about sustainability. How did that play into this moment then, when you're kind of on this farm, what were you noticing and realizing at that moment?

David: 21:45

Yeah Stone Barns uses so many different techniques and practices focused on really caring deeply about the health of the environment and how food production can actually support and regenerate landscapes as opposed to degrade it. I had been reading everything from a lot of Wendell Berry's books to other movies, documents, and films all about agriculture and sustainable agriculture. What was so interesting to me is you get to this farm and you start looking at anything from the order in which you plant vegetables and harvest them to okay, there's bugs that are eating the plants, what do you do about that? To how you might want to rotate animals through the fields, each of these areas. I remember I just would have scores of notes after the end of a day because you realize that something as simple as a piece of celery that you buy in a store, at the end of the day, you start to realize how complex and difficult it is to get that to your plate. You see it from where did the seeds come from? How do you store the seeds? How do you create a plan throughout a year of what you're going to plant, when, and then how do you adapt that plan around what the weather actually does, and then how do you connect that into the restaurant, because the restaurant doesn't plan that far in advance for what they cook, because then it wouldn't work in concert with what's actually coming off the land. My mind was just blown at the complexity of how can you have a top 10 restaurant in the world that doesn't have a fixed menu and like a staff of 50 to 60 people cooking. I mean it's like an unfathomable amount of complexity. And so that whole focus on sustainability, environment, was like very much so tied into that. Because they are, first and foremost, deeply paying attention to the land. They're not just saying I want to plant squash, I'm going to till the land and I'm going to put squash in, and that's what it's going to be. They're noticing what happens to grow well, and sometimes in the northwest corner of the field squash grows well, but in the southwest corner it doesn't grow well. Why is that? We may not totally know, but they're paying attention to those signals. And then, because squash grows in the northwest corner of the field and they can only grow a certain amount, then that's what they're going to use in the restaurant and that's what shapes the dishes, and so everything is connected. And that's true for us too. I mean, in theory we should be eating in a way that is in alignment with those natural constraints that the environment's giving us. But we don't get to see it because we've been disconnected and we just go to the grocery store where everything's available.

Josiah: 24:18

For those who are unfamiliar with this concept of regenerative farming, how would you describe it? In kind of a high level, yeah.

David: 24:26

I think, at the highest level. The way I would describe it is that regenerative farming is really built on a belief that you can produce food in a way that actually enhances the environment in which you're in, rather than degrade it, and what you would call sort of industrial agriculture, meaning monocrops like it's a whole field of corn and it's genetically modified corn and it's sprayed with pesticides and that's all you know. You kill anything else that's there. That's sort of industrial agriculture and that's where you basically force the environment to do what you want it to do, and that has a lot of negative ramifications. That has you kill off the topsoil so that it can't really grow anything else. You're putting toxic chemicals into the soil. That's killing off other species, and so that's an example of farming in a way that actually degrades the soil. Then you have what people refer to as sort of sustainable agriculture, which is farming in a way that sustains wherever you're at. Regenerative agriculture is really focused on how can it improve, and there's some very tangible ways you can see this. So, for example, one big premise in regenerative agriculture is that you're enhancing the health of the soil, meaning that each season, based on the practices that you're used, you're actually increasing the soil's ability to grow even more. You're putting more nutrients in the soil. You're pulling carbon out of the atmosphere into the soil. That feeds the plants. It also mitigates climate change. So you're doing all these practices that then keep compounding in a positive way versus a lot of our industrial agriculture. You eventually end up at a place where you have land that can't grow anything, and then you have to try to restore it, and so this is basically the antithesis of that.

Josiah: 26:05

Interesting. So you talked about the complexity of what you were observing in the first moment you stepped into that environment. It wasn't just complexity for the sake of it. It wasn't that they were disorganized. There's the complexity of all these moving pieces. But if you look at the outcome of this top 10 restaurant, people love this experience. You're doing well by the earth, you're doing well by your customers, your guests, and you're building a business that's truly remarkable. So where did you go from there? What was next after that experience?

David: 26:36

Yeah, so I had since actually moved out to New York and I was still working in the kind of venture world I helped create a venture studio. So it's basically a business that helps start other businesses, and it was in the healthcare space and my mom's a speech and language pathologist. My dad wears hearing aids, so one of the business I helped start was around hearing aids. So I was still doing the sort of tech startup thing. But I was living in New York and every single weekend I was going up to the farm. So what I would say is I went from this world of being at Lyft, where my whole quote, quote, quote professional experience was in tech and startups, to then this world, where I was still in that world. But then on weekends I was dipping my toe into this other world and I was asking questions like do I actually just want to be a farmer and do a whole farming apprenticeship program? And my sister did that. She's a farmer outside of Berlin now and so I was just exploring that. But it was nice to honestly be able to explore these things without putting the full burden of having to make money on them. And I remember, you know, one of my favorite books written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, pray, love, but she wrote another book called Big Magic, which I think is even better. It's so good and she talks about how, like she very consciously avoided saddling writing with the need to make her money until like very, very far into her career, because she said that the second that you put a monetary requirement on something you love, it changes it, and so it was kind of nice to be able to do. That is like I would do my day job during the week and I'd go to the farm on the weekend and there was overtime and as those conversations happened that we discussed, you know, on the farm, eventually I got to a place where I said, okay, now I'm ready to full time jump into this, but it was after probably a year plus of that exploration.

Josiah: 28:26

That's such a great story. I feel like there's a bunch of directions we could go with this. But let's kind of stay with the story, with kind of you incubating this idea for a year and I love this notion of kind of tracking what we find ourselves doing on a day off or on the weekend, right Because if you kind of think about, okay, you know, this is maybe a new direction, I can go with my career. It's interesting to again pay attention to this. What has my curiosity? But you're sitting with this idea for some time, right, and then you decide to make the leap. What happens next? What does that leap look like?

David: 28:57

Yeah. So at the point where the leap happened, I we had gotten to this clear idea of okay, we're going to build a hospitality business that's going to allow people to visit farms, because we had been visiting a lot of different farms, not just stone barns. I've been meeting other farmers and so it was very clear that if we could just get people onto these farms, then maybe they could have experiences like we're having, that also shape their views and inspire them maybe to go start a business or pick food differently or support their local farmers or create policy I mean whatever they're doing in their life that may be changed as a result of that. So we had gone to this point where this idea had been refined. Jason, who was the farmer who I initially met at stone barns, and I were working on this together. We decided to actually incorporate a business, wrote up you know, some pitch deck slides and I had started to float it to a enough people where I sense there was an interest. And so it got to a point where I said I need to put enough time into this to make it something that I won't really be able to do my other job anymore. And that was sort of that decision point was like to really do justice to creating this thing, it's going to take more time than I can give, and so that's when I decided to leave. We hadn't raised money yet and I think it took four months three to four months and I just reached out to many different people in my network and, again, I knew investors, but I didn't know people who invested in this space. Right, they were investing in other types of tech plays, not a hospitality, food farming oriented business Totally different world. So a lot of the conversations were happening and ended up raising money and I'm happy to talk more in depth about that if there's interest. And then, once we had raised money, we said, okay, we now should put our first prototype out into the world. And that's what led me ultimately to meet this wonderful ranching family who runs a place called Stemple Creek Ranch, north of San Francisco. They have about a thousand acre ranch, they do regenerative rotational grazing of cattle and they also have sheep and pigs on site. And we realized that we could, in a relatively short period of time, stand up a first prototype where you could stay on a farm, you could eat food from the farm, you could have farm tours and experiences, and that was the first place that we piloted this whole thing.

Josiah: 31:06

I want to talk a little bit about prototype development from two different angles the problems that you're solving for your guest as well as for the farmer. But starting with the guest, you, on a personal level, enjoyed these getaways from city life, from tech life, and you found that very life-giving. I'm curious did you observe this being a bigger opportunity in the culture beyond your own experience and something that others would like? If so, what was that problem that you were looking to solve for them?

David: 31:38

I was seeing a lot of signals out there, from how many people love going to farmer's markets to the popularity of shows like Chef's Table or Kiss the Ground or Biggest Little Farm. I was looking at the major growth in nature-based hospitality so people going, glamping, the advent of companies like Getaway that put tiny homes out in nature there's all of these examples out there that were showing me that there's a massive and growing demand for people getting outside of cities into nature in drive-to destinations and people wanting to have deeper connections with their food. You even see that in terms of how popular and common it is now to put the name of a farm on a restaurant menu. All these little things were signaling to me that there's something to be done here. I think part of what can be fun about creating something is that you can sometimes feel like you have to live in the future because you're seeing these things Again. I had also had experiences coming out of Europe where I knew that agritourism in Europe and in Japan and South Africa is massive. This is not a brand new concept. You can go to these other countries and visiting and staying on farms is the common thing to do. It's not really rocket science, but for many people in the US who maybe had never seen that, there was a lot of education that had to happen. A lot of the pitches were sharing that it was like. Look at the growing interest in nature-based hospitality. Look at how many restaurants are putting farm names on the menu. Look at the popularity of these shows. The ultimate proof, though, is can you actually get people to come? When we did open the first location, we were pretty much sold out out of the gate. The reviews and the experiences that people were having spoke to it as well, where people said, wow, we had people coming who had stayed at ultra luxury Amangiri, all these other places. They said this is one of the most amazing experiences I've had, because when you're looking for truly authentic travel experiences, it doesn't get more authentic than being in the middle of the ranch eating food from that ranch, with the rancher sitting at the table next to you, looking out the window, with the animals. It's as central to that as you can get.

Josiah: 33:50

When he talks about creating experiences in hospitality. What is it about food that elicits such a strong emotional connection and reaction with people?

David: 33:59

I've always been drawn to food because to me, food and agriculture is a way that humans and the environment communicate. Oftentimes I'll be, sometimes I'll have a feeling like if I'm out in a gorgeous area overlooking the Grand Canyon or whatnot. I'm both in awe and inspired what I'm seeing, but sometimes I feel like I can't connect with it fully because I don't know how to speak to it. Maybe I don't know what plants are growing there and I don't know what's going on in the soil. There's an awe and appreciation, but there's also a sense of I don't know this place. One thing that I think is amazing when you get to know farmers is they're in a deep dialogue and relationship with the land. When I'm walking a piece of property with a farmer, I feel so connected to that land because you could stop and look at any square inch and they have so much to say about why that plant is growing there and why that makes them excited and what that looked like last year, and why they're planting these trees in the creek that give shade, that then create a habitat for the fish. You need a context setting and a guide to the to Nate. You don't need it in nature, but I find it very helpful to have a guide that is helping me better identify and connect with what I'm seeing.

Josiah: 35:23

You talked about some of these things you were observing that indicated people wanted more of a connection to nature. Do you think that's a short-term thing or opportunity, or do you feel, as more and more technology surrounds us, we're going to want a connection to nature more and more as time goes on?

David: 35:41

No, I don't see that going away anytime soon. I feel like it's a part of humanity that's always been there and always will. I don't say that in the way and I don't say that in the sense that augmented reality and virtual reality is not coming like it is. I think there will also be a desire to connect with nature, both virtually and in person. I think I mean for me a lot of my meditation practices in the morning. If I'm in a place where I'm not in touch with nature, I'll play nature sounds through a meditation app. I actually find that really connecting and that's technology connecting to nature. I think there will be deeply immersive experiences where, let's say, somebody can't afford to go on a lot of trips, or they're living in a dense urban area and don't feel like they've ever been able to know how to get into nature and no one's shared that with them. Maybe having a virtual reality experience that makes them feel deeply in the middle of a forest is like an incredible thing. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't also have real nature out there, but I don't think it's going away anytime soon.

Josiah: 36:44

Yeah, I think you know, but kind of back to this prototype development. So there's this big opportunity with people that you wanted to serve, and that's all well and good, but then you also need the supply side of, okay, who can host these people. As you thought about the farmers, your family was in farming. Your sister is a farmer now. You visited a lot of others. What were you picking up that farmers? What was the problem to be solved for them? How were you thinking about that?

David: 37:12

Yeah, there were some very clear problems to be solved. I mean, the biggest is that farmers, for the most part, do not make a lot of money and they are very cash strapped, and the most part, the only way they have to make an extra dollar is by producing another, you know, bushel of produce or another pound of beef or whatever that is, and that takes a lot of extra time and input. So you can't just produce more because you want to. It does take a lot of effort and extra cost to make more money. And so, first and foremost, anything that could be an extra revenue stream to farmers is deeply helpful, and many people had hosted guests at some point and had already recognized that even renting out like one room or one cottage on their farm, the revenue from that one place could oftentimes make them equal, if not more, money than they made from the entire farm. And so there was just a lot of insights into that for us where we said, holy crap like this could be a major game changer for farmers. And the other thing that farmers mentioned is that they're out in the fields during the day so they actually don't really have the time to communicate with guests who need you know who are checking in that day and have a question about what's going to be there when they arrive and are the towels clean? And you know what price is the room and does your listing look good and is there professional photography and what are the emails that hit you before you arrive. I mean, that's all very far outside of what a typical farmer does, and so we saw both that there's a need to have extra income. Many farmers have already identified that hospitality and letting guests visit the farm is a great, is probably one of the lowest hanging fruit ways to do it, and they were saying but we don't really have the time or expertise to do it.

Josiah: 39:01

So I want to get into how your business is structured. But I think just to that point, is it fair to also say that for a decent amount of farmers, especially people that are deep in their regenerative world, there's also benefits to them for communicating, kind of what they're doing. And why Did you? Yeah?

David: 39:19

I mean, the way I think about it is just different levels of needs, in the same way that you have like Maslow's hierarchy of needs right. So if you don't have enough money to keep your property, then there's like nothing to talk about in the end of the day. And so that's why I think finding ways to help farmers earn money and manage the tasks for them was like baseline requirement. Now, once you have that solved, yes, absolutely. Another major area of interest and need was for farmers especially, who are putting all this care and effort into regenerating the land, to be able to share that with people, because they're putting in all this care, they have all this knowledge and passion and they would like to be able to share that with folks who they oftentimes don't get to meet. Again, we kind of disaggregated the food world, where some truck comes and picks up products and the farmer never gets to see the guests or the end consumer. Now, all of a sudden, the person is coming to their property and they get to make these kind of connections that all of a sudden give them more meaning behind the work they're doing.

Josiah: 40:19

That's cool. So many of our listeners will be very familiar with this. But for those that are maybe new to hospitality, this is very high level but there's typically kind of three core stakeholders in the ecosystem. You have somebody owning the real estate, you have the brand, which is typically the flag in the hotel world. They're doing marketing, they have the standards. Then there's the operator, who's hiring the people. My understanding is your business is the brand and the operator. Is that right? And then I guess, just tell me a little bit more kind of how you thought about structuring it. So we talked about the prototype development and then maybe kind of fast forward today. How would you describe how the business is structured and works with these farmers?

David: 40:52

Yeah Well, and I would say you mentioned brand and operator. I would say absolutely operator. There's a little bit of nuance on the brand side, so maybe I'll just start there in that, in sort of traditional hospitality, like if you're Hilton and it's a Hilton location, like that's what it is, there's standards, there's a logo, there's colors, there's furnishings, furniture that let you know that's a Hilton location. We knew that in the end of the day, our whole passion and goal was connecting people to farms. So we don't want you to come to a farm and think this is just sagra, this is Stemple Creek Ranch, or this is reverence farms or this is, you know, whatever, whatever other places we're working with. And so we decided to do sort of a like almost a supporting secondary brand in that way. So, for example, if you go book our location in Vermont, it's called Hill Farm, which is the name of the farm and property by sagra, and that was very conscious. So we, what it does is two things One is it keeps and puts front and center the name of the farm, which creates the uniqueness and everything around that, and but it also then associates it with a hospitality brand that then sets certain expectations around a level of quality and service that you'll receive, so we chose to bring those two together.

Josiah: 42:12

Interesting. So it's almost a little bit like a soft brand in the hotel worlds, but you're, I guess, if you had to choose between the brand and the operations. You're heavily an operator, right Right, which means you're hiring people, welcoming all that stuff. You said that farmers don't have time, for that's where you come in.

David: 42:28

That's right. So on the operation side, there's really two different models that we operate under and this just really gets at like, okay, we want to connect people to farms. How do you actually do it? It at our locations, like Hill Farm in Vermont, that's what you would call a full, full service location. We call it a farm retreat, meaning you know it's 30 plus guest rooms. It has a full service on site restaurant that sources fruit from the farm on site and neighboring farms. You know there are spaces for events, weddings, there's farm tours and there's a whole team of chef, general manager, all of that. So we do what you would call traditional full service hospitality management like that. As you can imagine, not every farm has the scale to support that. Many farms have one guest cottage that you could stay in. So we've also introduced a line of business that we call farm stays. As opposed to the full service farmer treats and farm stays, farm stays are the rental of individual units and accommodations that we also manage, but think of them more akin to like a short term rental experience than a hotel experience, and so if you book one of these stays, for example, shortly we'll be opening up in Sonoma County, california Silver Penny Farm. It's owned by the founder of Calgirl Creamery. It's this wonderful place where you can you can connect with agriculture in so many different ways. It's got a wonderful five bedroom home on site. You'll be able to book that through sagas website. We also manage this on behalf of farmers across different channels, so we you could also find it through Airbnb, you could find it through VRBO. We manage that all for the farmer, so the farmer doesn't have to go figure out how to create listings across platforms, what price to set on a Tuesday in November versus a Saturday in October. We handle all of the digital guest communication. So if you have questions as a guest before you get a professional support team that's there for you. We structure all of the automated emails and messages that happen. We create a video about the farmer that gets sent to the guests before so they already start getting into the story. We create custom printed materials like a guidebook that sits in the room so that you have a whole story of the farm and regenerative agriculture Like these are all the things that connect people to the farm. But in this farm stay model, where it's one cottage and you can't have staff, we just basically take all of the best practices and learnings that we've figured out and we can apply them in a remote model.

Josiah: 44:46

It's awesome to see that. I can't wait for your Sonoma property to open up. I think what's really cool about this. It sounds like some of the locations you've described are sort of driving distance from major metro areas, and I think of all the everybody should experience something like this, but especially people who are just burnt out of city life, working corporate jobs. This is an amazing way to reconnect with the earth and see where food comes from. I'm curious, as you kind of think about running this business for some time now. What stands out to you is some of the most meaningful impact that you've been able to affect so far. It could be a story from the farmer side or from the guest side Anything that stands out.

David: 45:26

Yeah, I mean, when I start out just thinking on the guest side, I mean there's so many different stories and examples because I remember, like at Stemple Creek, when we were starting out and I would be on site and talking to different guests or talking to them over dinner, over breakfast, it was amazing to me how many people have felt, had felt, the same sense of connection and following the breadcrumbs around nature, food and hospitality that I had been feeling. So it was first of all pretty eye-opening to feel like, oh, this thing that I was exploring, I think is actually being felt by many, many different people at the same time, and so I heard countless stories of people who felt like they were working in some industry or career but like everything that they would read or watch was connected to food and nature and they were trying to figure out what to do with that. I heard many examples of, I saw many examples of families coming with their kids, where you could tell they had been rushing around between work and children activities and putting food on the table, and they would get there and the first thing they would do would just be sleep because it was quiet. I mean, it was quiet, it was relaxing. There were beautiful smells, and so for some people, yes, they got to connect with the farm, but even just letting them sleep and relax in nature was like a transformative experience in itself. I remember a mom and her daughter coming there and like they had been working through a lot of pieces in their relationship and they thanked us afterwards for just like the space to be able to connect with each other in a different way. I remember talking to people who felt like this was the most memorable meal they had ever had, because it wasn't just about the food, which Alan, who's the head chef Alan Sue is a phenomenal chef and did some incredible work but it was also that they were the environment in which they were eating felt so different. And now when they go home or go to a restaurant, they're thinking about food, not just as like this thing I need to cook, but where did it come from. They're thinking about those farmers. They're reflecting back on the experience they had sitting in a barn. So there's so many different types of impact and that's sort of the core philosophy for us is like we don't know what impact it might have on you as a guest, because there's all these different types of impact that are going to happen. All we're trying to do is to create the environment and an easy way for you to get there so that, once you're on the farm, whatever wants to happen for you is going to happen.

Josiah: 47:54

And I mean that's what hospitality fundamentally is right. It's creating that environment right and then your guests can kind of do with it what they will. But that's got to be personally rewarding for you Because my understanding, you know, if you kind of go full circle, think about your own childhood, not only your family's connection to farms, but my interesting is also you visit farmers markets and you get to know the farmers that showed up to those farmers markets and is it fair to say that that seeing that as a kid kind of launched you on the journey that you are now and it's got to be incredibly rewarding to see your guests and their kids start to continue that.

David: 48:28

No, it is. It is and like, by no means was it a linear journey and I honestly didn't even connect all the dots for myself of my childhood experiences and all that until I was quite far into this. And I think oftentimes we just don't have the perspective on ourselves to know what's driving what we're doing. I was just following a feeling. In hindsight it's very obvious why I had those feelings, based on the different experiences I've had, but I didn't really know that until pretty far down the path.

Josiah: 48:52

It's an amazing story. As you look to the future, what are you most excited about Could be in your business? Could be hospitality, could be regenerative farming. What's exciting you these days?

David: 49:03

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of things. I mean, first and foremost, opening a lot more locations around the country is exciting because there's just so many unique stories for farmers to tell. I mean, even just in this next batch of farms that are coming online from a dairy in North Carolina to a sheep farm in Vermont, to an avocado and a citrus farm and down in Southern California, the number and variety and types of farms coming up and the people who steward those farms. It's just going to grow and it also means that more and more people with the United States will be within a few hour drive of a farm that can serve as this point of connection and inspiration for them. So that's why we want to grow is to create those types of connections. So that's the most exciting thing to me.