Woody Tasch: What made you go into the soil business?

John-Paul Maxfield: I started with the desire to push toward a more sustainable food system. Soil is the place to start. We saw an opportunity to innovate around products and technology that reconnect people to soil. Long term, we want to be an agricultural innovation company.

Soil seems like a funny place to start with innovation . . . as basic as it can be.

Soil is incredibly complex. Just as with the human microbiome project, there is so much we have yet to discover. If we want to fix climate change, the answer is literally right beneath our feet. Da Vinci had it right when he said we understand the movements of the heavens better than we understand what is happening underfoot. We understand the soil at an intuitive level but not at a practical level.

What do you mean by the “intuitive level”?

It’s the place where all life comes from and to which it returns. We all pretty much know this. It’s not an accident that kids gravitate toward playing in the dirt.

What do you mean by the “practical level”?

We need greater understanding of how to work with soil to achieve broader goals of feeding people without destroying humanity’s ability to continue living on the planet.

So, what was the first thing you did as an entrepreneur?

I was working in private equity, but I was a square peg in a round hole. I’d always admired my grandfather. We’d drive along I-25 to go visit my grandparents in Wyoming, looking at corn fields as we went. My great-grandfather was the largest sheep producer in the country, pre-WWI. He lost everything in the Great Depression. My grandfather had feedlots and corn farms and had one of the largest livestock-sale barns in the country. It was not a mom-and-pop operation. It was vertically integrated. He was a tough old cowboy. My father and brothers sold the operation to their employees back in the ’90s. Torrington Livestock is based in Torrington, Wyoming. But I hope that, if he were here now, he’d recognize the need to redesign the food system.

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