Sweet Farm Climate Sanctuary w/ Nate Salpeter & Shira Jacobson

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. We hardly ever get to do an interview in person, and we really never get to do an interview in person at a brand new sanc... Well, not brand new, but brand new to us sanctuary. And pretty new to everybody.

I can't even tell you how excited I am about the work that you're doing here. I wanna hear all about it because there's so many different things.

I mentioned to a friend just the other day that I was doing an interview with someone who was tackling climate, the environment, animal welfare, technology, education, and sustainable agriculture. And they said, "What!?! Isn't that kind of a lot!?"

But they're kind of all the same thing for you, aren't they?

Nate Salpeter: They absolutely are. As you start to look at these giant global challenges and how they're all interconnected, you realize that this is just one single system. Many aspects of it are, are certainly broken, but isolating them and siloing the challenges and trying to tackle those in absence of any of the other connected pieces is kind of, I think, like missing it a little bit. it's important to have those, you know, focused efforts, but someone needs to kind of collect those pieces and take that systems point of view as well. It's really about complimenting the work of a lot of folks, and we do that under the banner of a climate sanctuary.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. What do you mean when you call it a climate sanctuary?

Nate Salpeter: So when you think about the biggest challenges in the world, right? It's food resiliency. It's carbon emissions, it's changing weather patterns, it's impacts on wildlife due to wildfires and floods, as well as other contributing factors to that, which obviously we talk a lot about animal agriculture. You cover that a lot on this podcast, and for good reason. When you look at all of these challenges in these connected pieces, they all collectively fall under this aspect of climate.

Now there's a lot of ways of looking at it. We are definitely, you know, it starts first and foremost with the animals, but we wanted something that really widened the net and created a bigger tent to bring people in to discuss and have these conversations.

Jasmin Singer: And a lot of the work you do...Oh, sorry, Shira, did you wanna add to that?

Shira Jacobson: Oh, no. I was just gonna say that part of our mission is to create a more sustainable and compassionate planet, and the animals are a huge part of that. However, everything is a part of that. The plants, the people, the planet, and the animals. And we really try to focus on every living thing.

Jasmin Singer: And to that end, a lot of the work you are doing seems very tech-centric and cutting edge and systemic, and yet you've chosen to found, I don't know, perhaps the most hands-on labor in intensive individual animal-focused type of venture- a sanctuary. So do these serve each other?

Nate Salpeter: They do, in a number of ways.

So I'll give you- I like answering with anecdotes, you know, past experiences if that's helpful here. So when we first started Sweet Farm, it really began as an animal sanctuary, and we were growing some fruits and vegetables for our friends and neighbors, but very quickly, that expanded into them bringing their friends, us doing some coordinated tours.

Then our agriculture program expanded into a CSA, a community-supported agriculture program, feeding families in the area. And what we realized very early on is you can't talk about the food system without taking that system's approach. As that continued to grow, what naturally occurred, it being in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay area, was some companies started reaching out saying, "Hey, you know, word on the street is y'all are thinking about things in a little bit of a different way. You have a bit of technical background and a business kind of mindset in terms of, like, how do you approach the problems. We'd love to do a project. We'd love to test a new technology out on the farm. Can we do that?"

And we started assessing these opportunities, and we said, "Hey, can we jump in and put a bit of focused effort very quickly and make a profound impact with that effort?"

So to your point, your question around, you know, this very labor-intensive undertaking- a sanctuary. That is 100% accurate. The thing that we always focus on is how can we maximize the way that every hour of our day is spent. How can we maximize the output of impact? So, the tech program really, really compliments the work of the other programs- the education program and inspiring people to take that education into action.

But the innovation piece is really how we scale impact globally by helping people make their own impact inherently through their daily choices. They might not even know they're making an impact, but the products that they know and love are shifting plant-based because they can now sub in some of these new products.

So Sweet Farm focuses a lot on helping those companies get their foot in the door, get their first technologies tested, go raise the capital they need to actually scale their products and solutions. And then, on the other side of the fence, we can help educate individuals as well on what's coming through the pipeline in this manner.

Jasmin Singer: And how do your programs differ from those at other farmed animal sanctuaries?

Nate Salpeter: I do not know of any other sanctuary that is running a technology program. It is kind of in our wheelhouse. So, we like to compliment the work of others. We think many different approaches to tackling these challenges is critical.

If there's a sanctuary that the founder is a musician, like, use music to bring people in. If you are a great storyteller or writer, use those skills to incorporate it.

In our case, we happen to be tech-centric. So, we incorporate that into our program. So I don't know of any others doing that or the fruits and veggies program.

But by the time we left California, we were feeding around 50-60 families a week through our CSA program and doing a lot of donations into the community. Of course, we're in our first year here, so maybe after this, we'll go take a walk down through the gardens and check those out. But, those different pieces, it just kind of falls into how we view the white space within the movement.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, there's still a lot of white space for us to cover here cuz I wanna talk both about your regenerative agriculture program and about the tech program. So let's start with the agriculture.

Regenerative agriculture, it's become kind of suspect amongst animal advocates because the industry has tried to co-opt that term, and it seems to frequently refer to greenwashing efforts And you know, putting cows on the land and then taking them off and whatever. So, let's define that term.

Talk about what you mean by regenerative agriculture and how it's going to serve the animals and the planet.

Nate Salpeter: Yeah, absolutely. So, regenerative, when folks use the term regenerative, and I will preface this with, there is active movement in California to define the term legally, which I think will help across the board. However, to date, regenerative has primarily meant you're using techniques and methods that regenerates the soil.

So, if you look at an individual tomato plant, for instance, you can define the boundary around that tomato plant on a per-plant basis. There's nutrients coming out of the soil, it's producing a tomato, and then a hand reaches in, picks that tomato, and that tomato disappears.

How's the soil continuing its fertility? So in some cases, it's synthetic fertilizers people are putting in there or herbicides to tackle pest control. That kind of thing. That's more traditional agriculture, right?

If you start expanding the window just a little bit, you now can start incorporating things like inner cropping and cover cropping. So inner cropping, being companion planting, you know, with plants that are co-beneficial to one another. So one drives away certain types of insects, and those insects are no longer sort of renegades. they can now work on behalf of the ecosystem. And you're basically fostering this ecosystem to continue to build fertility in the soil and continue to put carbon mass into the soil.

And it's all about just building it back up instead of just stripping everything away until you're left with nothing but dirt. It's about changing... I'm kind of like repeating myself because it is such a, it is an iterative process. So like, even my description, I recognize, is a little bit iterative.

Mariann Sullivan: Because that's exactly what the soil is doing. You wanna keep repeating and adding back and getting it to where it was. And taking out and putting back in. But how do we do that without animals?

You know, when you're trying to be vegan, and you're organic, it's a little depressing to think of how much manure you're actually contributing to the world in a sort of way.

Nate Salpeter: Yeah. Absolutely, so our compost program in California, we spent many years working on it. The animals are pooping here, right? They're not here to poop. I mean, that's just a natural outcome.

Jasmin Singer: I'm gonna make this the audiogram that advertises this episode!

Nate Salpeter: But the reality is they do it. And if composted properly, we can reduce the amount of emissions that are generated from their poop, right? We don't want to load it up in a trailer and haul it off to a landfill or something like that. That seems counterproductive to what the goal is.

And, when we look at the way Sweet Farm is growing produce, right? Using our compost. And of course, we're building up our compost program here again, we have to start over a little bit. It is important to recognize that veganism, we view it as it's a tool, it's not a dogma.

We look at, okay, what are the different elements at play in this very complex system? And what can we continually do to do better? And in this case, we have poop. We don't wanna expand our footprint, and we're gonna use it on the property.

That's a whole lot different than organic agriculture at scale, where bone meal, blood meal, feather meal, manure, is constantly used out in the field certainly different. So I do want to define, like, while we're making use of it here on the property, that is not the function.

Mariann Sullivan: Right. But do you think we'll get to the point, I mean, that we can have veganic agriculture where people just aren't using animal inputs at all? I mean, you're using it cuz it's there.

Nate Salpeter: Yes, certainly.

Mariann Sullivan: But can you envision a world where... I mean, I know the worlds I envision are very far from the way the world is now, but, you know, sometimes you gotta do that. You gotta build the vision in order to get there.

Nate Salpeter: Certainly, you have a lot of approaches that are not new. You have green manure cover crops, which are nitrogen-fixing. You can utilize other types of crops for your integrated pest management.

So you can start to mitigate pouring tons of insecticides on the property. There's even new technologies that are tackling things like exhaust gases from natural gas or coal-fired power plants that can actually capture CO2 and then use that to produce carbonates, which are very beneficial in agriculture as well.

So these things start to play with one another, and Sweet Farm has done field trials in the past with companies doing things even as wild as taking human biomass from the wastewater treatment system and upcycling that into biochars.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, no, this is like, I guess I'm a very weird person, but I'm so, I'm so excited. If there's one thing this world is more than full of, it's human poop.

Shira Jacobson: Yeah, exactly. And I will say, you know, when we were...like, yeah, exactly, it is. But it is!

While we were talking about how everything we do kind of ties together, that is exactly one area where our technology program really does come into play.

You know, is there a future with agriculture without using anything from animals? Right, exactly. Well, that's what people and startups and companies are out there trying to figure out, and we are trying to help them do that. So that is a huge part of our technology program, bringing in these entrepreneurs, these individuals, these startups, helping them discover what else we can do, what they can innovate to make that a reality.

Mariann Sullivan: I do have like one kind of more general question before we get to that because I do wanna get into specifics. But a lot of ag talk, people talk about it as if it's a choice between the way we have it now- huge, huge agriculture, both plant and, of course, the thing we're most concerned about- factory farms full of animals.

"That's a way to feed the world." That's what they talk about all the time. "We're feeding the world."

Or else going back to some bucolic past, which probably never existed the way people think of it and, you know, like the farm-to-table movement and all of that. Sorry if you're into the farm-to-table movement, but it kind of drives me crazy that that's obviously not gonna happen.

We're not gonna have a farm-to-table world for our billions and billions of people. So, what does the future of ag look like? In your best guess of the best way to do this using all this tech. Not the specifics, we can get into the specifics, but using all this tech to actually grow a really lot of food for a really lot of people.

Nate Salpeter: Yeah. I love the way you framed up that question because it really drives home our focus around how do we improve the way that the other 95% of the planet feeds themselves. Right? If we can get the 95% of the planet to even take a decent-sized step forward, by the numbers, that is a massive, massive win. We always applaud the individual going from zero to 100 and making that giant leap, but in a lot of cases, going to the kind of, I'll call it... you use much better terms than I did. I'll call it crunchy granola agriculture, which Sweet Farm does, right? We are growing, we're not spraying. Part of our program, yes, does grow food that way.

However, we've done field trials for companies that are creating plants that are biosensors. So you asked, "What does the future of food look like?" Future of agriculture to feed the billions and in a better way. We did the first two years of field trials for a company that is actually creating, essentially, canaries in the coal mine for pests and diseases and water stress and nutrient stress in a way that, within a matter of hours, you can actually detect that there's an issue as opposed to it taking two weeks or so for a farmer to see it with their own eyes.

So what does that mean? It means a farmer can now tackle a tiny patch of fungus in their field of thousands and thousands of acres quickly before it has a chance to spread.

Mariann Sullivan: So, the plants are kind of say out there saying, "Hey, we need some help over here."

Nate Salpeter: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: That's crazy.

Nate Salpeter: Exactly. So it's a little bit different, right?

Yes, that company, it is a GMO, and I recognize that, but they're also creating plants that are, they themselves are the indicators. It doesn't have to be everything, right? It could just be non-fruiting plants within the field.

Mariann Sullivan: I don't have some like GMOs are terrible. Like, there might need to be some more research done on whether some are or some aren't, but you know, if we're gonna save the world, we have to use technology. And GMOs seem to have been an important part of that.

Nate Salpeter: There's a lot of tools in the tool chest, and most technologies can be opted for, good or bad, and I think that's an important thing to remember. And GMOs, in particular, get a bad rep because, at a certain point in history, it was certainly the latter. They were co-opted in not the most farmer-friendly way. But I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

Jasmin Singer: And you mentioned the fieldwork that you did. Was that in California?

Nate Salpeter: Yeah, that was in California. The company is called Inner Plant, and John Deere actually just led their latest round of funding.

Jasmin Singer: Okay. So it's continuing?

Nate Salpeter: It is continuing.

Jasmin Singer: Wow. Okay, so let's talk about Sweet Farm in particular.

What are the programs at Sweet Farm that are focused on promoting sustainable, regenerative veganic agriculture?

Shira Jacobson: I'll let Nate chime in after this, but I will say all of our programs, really like we mentioned, are connected.

We rarely talk about one without talking about the other. So some of our main programs do include our farm animal welfare and rescue and rehabilitation. We have over a hundred rescued farm animals here on Sweet Farm living out their lives. But then that goes hand in hand with our education around our plant-based regenerative agriculture, where we do have our field down there where we're growing a lot of fruits, vegetables, flowers. And then, along with our education program, we bring people in. We host numerous events here, both on the farm and virtually. And then, kind of, our third is that innovative technology program.

Nate Salpeter: So, to the question around, how do we promote the regenerative ag piece? So in California, it was very straightforward. We had 60 families a week coming through picking produce. Here that ag program is continuing to grow, we are just in our first year of field trials here.

But, what Shira mentioned, that the programs go hand in hand, I think is very important. So with our tech program that, in large part, relies on a functional ag program in order to be able to leverage. So with, say, a company that is taking flue gas from carbon-emitting industry and turning that into humate, or carbonates, for soil amendments.

Having a functional ag program and having the wherewithal to connect the dots and go and co-write a grant application with a tech company, with a power plant, and be able to say, "Hey, we are farmers. We do have our hands in the soil." It may not be the biggest farm, but being able to connect those dots and leverage those outputs in our fields is extremely beneficial to the scaling of these practices because there's one thing that's for sure. It's farmers trust and respect other farmers, generally speaking.

It's not someone who's just sitting in an office space downtown saying, "You know, you really ought to do better, Mr. Farmer or Mrs. Farmer." It's really about like, "No, we're out there trying it; we’re seeing good progress. We think you might have success doing some of these things as well." There's a lot of value in that, and I have some really extreme examples of that.

From California, I'll just pick one. We had five companies we were working with. They happened to be raising funding rounds in their company's growth. And we had 40 different investors to the farm to meet these entrepreneurs, and those investors happened to be all from Brazil. We had the top investor from one of the largest meat-producing companies in the world there. We had some of the largest plant-based agriculture companies in the world.

And I remember the smallest farmer that happened to be there had a farm around 50,000 acres. The largest farm represented there was around 2 million acres. So what they told us, we only actively grew on about two or three acres. They themselves said, we know this is a small plot, but the fact that you're actually doing it, the fact that you're actually attempting to understand through practice as opposed to through a book or a blog, means an incredible amount to them.

So that's how I view what we're doing, how it actually scales and drives impact.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. Like taking it outta the laboratory and turning the farm itself into the laboratory.

Nate Salpeter: Exactly.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, Are you doing that here yet, or is this still a work In progress?

Nate Salpeter: Yeah, this past year, we grew our first crops last year.

This year, things are in the garden. They're coming out. Onions aren't yet ready. The garlic is almost ready. But yes, we're absolutely growing produce here at the farm.

Mariann Sullivan: But are you also doing these field trials with various companies and trying out new methods?

Nate Salpeter: Yes.

Mariann Sullivan: You've started that kind of work here?

Nate Salpeter: Yeah. So we do have a lot of different companies in the pipeline ranging from companies that are addressing frost protection, and there's even a lot of local biochar companies, interestingly. We did a lot of work with biochar.

Mariann Sullivan: I can't believe I've never heard of biochar before, and now I'm super excited about it.

Nate Salpeter: Yeah, we weren't sure how the tech program was gonna kind of shape up here. And what we've found is even more companies are interested in working with us now that we're here. In the Bay Area, it's kind of tough to do ag tech field trials when there's a hundred-year drought, or multi-century drought, in effect, or flooding when it's not in drought. So, it becomes a lot more approachable when we have consistent access to water.

Jasmin Singer: I feel like adding that we drove here in our EV, and Moore was talking about the regenerative breaking, and she was like, "Look, we have more miles now than when we left because we have the regenerative breaking."

I just feel like bringing that up, it's kind of outside of...but we're talking about regenerative agriculture, and just the idea of regenerative everything is kind of intriguing me a lot. And it's also intriguing me that we're here, in person, in the Finger Lakes, and we all put together that we're all recent arrivals in Western New York. We were chatting about that.

Actually, I lived in Santa Cruz when you were in Half Moon Bay. We bonded over the very fancy Taco Bell.

So tell us about that move from California to the Finger Lakes. Like how did you pull that off?

Mariann Sullivan: That must have been one of the points where it became particularly difficult to do what you do, considering you have all these animals.

Nate Salpeter: One thing that's extremely important to acknowledge here is Shira and I may be the ones talking into the microphone, but it is only backed up by an incredible team. An incredible team here in New York, also an incredible team in California, which they ended up staying there, right? A lot of them had family and partners tied to the Bay Area. But, a move like that does not happen with a single person. It doesn't even happen with 50 people. It was an incredible number of volunteers, incredible number of supporters.

Sweet Farm is a donor-supported organization. The cost of the move was quite expensive. it took about... let's see. It was four 18-wheelers to move everything. So two of them were with the animals. They were in big box stalls, very comfortable. Everyone arrived safely in good health, no injuries along the way. But then the equipment, right?

It took easily six months of planning just to get everything in order, all the health checks, you know, at the time, bird flu was a big thing, so we had to test every single bird.

So those kind of things, you know, happened with the support of a lot of people.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. you mentioned that one of your major reasons for moving here were some of the implications of climate change in California agriculture. And so you moved here, and now we're breathing in smoke from Canadian wildfires. So there's no safe place.

So what's your personal doom meter on climate? Like how long do we have?

Nate Salpeter: The doom meter? Wow.

I wanna hear Shira's opinion first.

Shira Jacobson: I can't give a number, but I will say, first of all, I appreciate your sort of realistic attitude. Not that I think we're doomed, but I appreciate the belief that we have to do things. We have to take action now. And it is bad.

However, we're very pragmatic here, I would say, at Sweet Farm. I think that's where we also differ a little bit as an organization. We do believe that there are changes that can be made in that there's real progress that can be made. However, you know, it might look a little different. What you said before about how we might have to do things a little bit differently than we thought we would or try new things. That's absolutely true. And I think in terms of my "doom meter,” I don't personally believe at this point that we can stop climate change. I don't think that's necessarily a thing.

And I think, generally, Sweet Farm takes that approach. We're not trying to stop anything. We're trying to figure out how to move forward from where we are now in a way that is sustainable and can actually start healing the earth and make real change. There's no stopping it, but there's changing what we're doing. There's coming up with solutions. There's learning how to live with it and how to heal the planet and all of the creatures within it.

Nate Salpeter: In a way, we stay extremely positive. Similar to your outlook on this podcast. I love that about all of your conversations... well, most of your conversations are.

Jasmin Singer: I think it's, maybe, slid a little bit...

Nate Salpeter: But really, I think in the process of healing the planet and working towards that, there are things that we can do that can slow climate change and then help adapt and over time.

You know, there's this going theory that over time, all technology effectively becomes climate technology. The automobile was developed to address a lot of issues. But the manure issue within the major cities, that was a major, major challenge that the automobile cleaned up effectively, an environmental disaster.

And then, 120 years later, created its own, right? So now we're cleaning that up with EVs, for instance. Well, I would say I'm hopeful. Working with entrepreneurs, working with educators, and also inspiring people- everyone from a few years old up through CEOs and politicians- inspiring them to take action with whatever platform they have.

If their platform is asking their family to have a more plant-forward diet even to start, right? That's a very important change all the way up to encouraging politicians to support programs, support alternative proteins, that whole range. I think it gives me hope to see that occurring more and more these days.

Jasmin Singer: And Moore is here with us. And I was like, if you have a question, just jump in, and I know she has one, so.

Moore Rhys: I have a question. Yeah. So you moved from near the center of Silicon Valley to here, and there's a large university with a state agriculture program at that university.

So I'm wondering, how have you integrated them and new thinkers and up-and-coming ag superstars?

Nate Salpeter: Yeah, absolutely. So, Sweet Farm is already partners with the Cornell Center of Excellence for Food and Agriculture. We do communicate very closely with their leaders across their agritech food ventures arm. We were just out there the other week, meeting with their leadership team. And we're sending entrepreneurs their way. They're sending entrepreneurs our way. It's really a collaborative approach. And Sweet Farm's sweet spot has always been pre-university field trials, in a way.

So, a lot of the companies that are coming to us don't yet have the funding or the resources needed to even navigate tech transfer offices at universities or to pay for the greenhouse space. Cuz universities, they're less expensive than some other approaches, but they still do have a lot of overhead.

So we're able to actually get them over that hump. They can then show their minimum viable product or their proof of concept, raise the money, then go to the university. So we really view it as a stepping stone for a lot of these companies. And it's complimentary. I always focus on that complementary work.

It takes all of us and all different approaches. We may have our own unique opinions about certain approaches, but I think it's important that we respect that those different approaches exist, as well. So, in this instance, complementing the work of Cornell. Absolutely.

Jasmin Singer: So, switching gears a bit, I know you're also active in the alternative protein world, I think, as an investor. And there was some big news in that world with the approval of Upside and Good Meat. Can you give us an idea of where we are and where you believe we should be headed?

Nate Salpeter: Yeah. Cultivated meat, whether an individual thinks it is vegan or not vegan, that's an entirely different conversation and one that I don't think actually is necessarily the most relevant question.

Jasmin Singer: Billion percent agree.

Nate Salpeter: Yeah. Right? These are products that are being developed for meat eaters, for people who don't opt for the black bean burger. Which if it's on the menu, that is definitely what I'm going for. But I think there's a lot of progress that's quickly being made towards producing it and producing an FBS-free growth media.

So that's fetal bovine serum, right? A lot of companies have already developed serum-free growth mediums. So I just wanna put that out there. That that development has already taken place, is already in practice for a lot of companies. With respect to the announcement from Upside and Good Meat, incredible progress made in a very short period of time. Back in 2012, the first cultivated burger cost about $300,000 to produce. And now, we're in just a couple of tens of dollars. There's companies in Israel producing chicken, getting very close to cost comparable. And then last year, I actually was fortunate enough to try Good Meat’s cultivated chicken product over in Singapore. Among a lot of different companies, I've tried their products, and the way I describe them is they're unremarkable in the best possible way.

Right? I don't eat meat, but I still remember what it tastes like and have memories myself, right? Food is like memories, in a way. And it was unremarkable in the sense of I ate it, and it just tasted like chicken. So I think that is, right now, one of the biggest compliments you can actually pay to these companies. But again, it's not gonna be for everyone. And I think we are getting close, a lot of these companies are paving the way for faster, more streamlined, and more effective processes.

When I see the announcement, what I actually see is, yes, they're today's leaders, but it's really about paving the way so we can have hundreds or more of these kinds of companies, really addressing a lot of different aspects of this system.

Jasmin Singer: Definitely. I love that answer. We have been going for a while now. I feel like Mariann, and I have enough questions for another few days of sitting here with you, so we're just gonna move in if that's okay. I saw the Airstream outside. We'll be your latest rescued animals.

But I do have just one more question before we get into bonus content if you don't mind sticking with us for a few more minutes. So for people who are listening and who wanna do more than just be vegan, maybe they wanna go electric themselves, but maybe they wanna do more than that. Maybe they are struggling with despair, which is something we hear a lot. Where do you suggest people put their efforts?

Nate Salpeter: Ooh, I think an important thing... okay, I'll start with my own experience, which is, I already work in the space. I am doing my part. There's a lot of brain space already consumed with sort of the concepts and topics that we're discussing. I don't add more to that than I need to. I already know the work that I'm doing is making an impact.

So I don't spend a ton of time at home watching videos from kill floors of factory farms or undercover things. I mean, really, I don't actually think that is necessarily doing a lot of additional good for me, right? In my realm.

So I would suggest to others...positivity is infectious. I'll kind of like break that comment with positivity is infectious, and if you're already on this path, one of the best things that you can do is focus on the positives.

Focus on these hopeful developments and progress because then also when you have conversations with your friends, family, loved ones, who you're encouraging to take their first step, if you approach it from a positive standpoint, most times you have a lot better chance of making that impact a successful one.

People want to join a winning team, a positive team. So, I would encourage someone to maybe put down the phone, take a walk, and really just focus on the things that we can be hopeful about and then translate that, right? It's not just about hoping and wishing, right? It's taking that positivity and then putting it back into the world in a way that is directionally productive.

Jasmin Singer: And, Shira, do you wanna add to that?

Shira Jacobson: I share a similar view that if you are already making a large impact yourself, and you know that, of course, there are so many other small and large changes you can make to your daily life to make one. But I think even more than that if you can inspire others at that point to make more positive choices, if you can, instead of being polarizing, if you can bring more people in, like Nate said, by doing so positively, that will make huge change by inspiring others to take your lead and follow that path towards making positive change.

Nate Salpeter: Yeah, and, and I will caveat all of that with, it is important to have the work of the activists and the undercover kind of work. But, when it comes to someone who is already in it themselves, like, put the phone down.

Shira Jacobson: And I will say that's part of how incredible this podcast you guys have is. You are doing that, you're inspiring others. You’re bringing people into the conversation. And that is huge

Jasmin Singer: Thank you so much.

Mariann Sullivan: You know, we have always said one of our things is, in spite of, I'm sorry about the doom meter question but that hope is a strategy.

By which I mean, exactly as you're saying, it doesn't mean that all you need is hope, and that's gonna fix things. But that hopefulness is a good strategy out in the world. That is a way you reach people and change people. It's nice to hear you saying that.

Jasmin Singer: And how can people find out about you and support your efforts?

Shira Jacobson: Well, as our development and communications manager, let me tell you! We are online, of course. We have a website at sweetfarm.org.

Pretty easy to remember. There's a lot of information on there. If you'd like to visit us in person, we would love to see you. We have in-person tours throughout the week. Check our website check our social media. We are all over. The Sweet Farm is generally our username on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.

You can see all of our incredible rescued animals on there, as well as a lot of information about events and programming.

Nate Salpeter: And we do have another program if you're not local, you can check out our program, Goat 2 Meeting, which is a program that Sweet Farm created at the height of Covid. It was Sweet Farm's pivot into a post-covid world.

Basically, we could not do any of these things when lockdown was happening. So, we started calling into corporate groups, private groups, public schools we were doing for free, and basically showing up with one of the goats, one of the cows, telling people a little bit about their story.

All smiles, leaving people with a positive thing that they can do, done in a very, very hopeful manner. Since the start of that program, that was March 25th, 2020, we've done almost 9,000 of those programs with people all around the world.

Almost 400,000 people. 700 schools for free. When teachers were having to teach from home. So if you're not local, you can go to our website, sweetfarm.org, and check out Goat 2 Meeting. Book one for yourself, your corporate group. And it does help support. The proceeds all do go back to the animals and those that support them.

Jasmin Singer: I love that.

Well, I hope to meet a couple of the animals before we get going, so thank you so much for letting us come here and for joining us today on Our Hen House, and for all the absolutely incredible work that you're doing to change the world for animals.

Nate Salpeter: Thank you so much for having us and you both as well.

Shira Jacobson: Thank you. It's been wonderful.