Alexander Eaton
CEO & Co-Founder
Being part of a team working on some of society’s biggest problems and creating an impact for people and the planet requires a vision of the future that ensures everyone is working in the same direction. To do this, we live a bit in the future, truly imagining the details of achieving our goals. This can be bittersweet because when we hit a goal, we must be ready with a new, more ambitious goal still further in the future. Given the scope of the challenges we address at Sistema.bio, this is not a process with an end. We won’t rest before every farmer in the world is integrated into a regenerative, just, and climate-smart food system. There are still massive goals to set when agriculture still emits nearly a third of all greenhouse gases, uses too much fossil fuel and chemicals. We are forced to stay a while in the future.
Sometimes, however, it is critical to stop, breathe, and take stock of the present moment. Today, a sunny, warm, Friday morning in April, 2023, I was reminded that any day now we will cross 60,000 farms using our technology. More than 350,000 people from around the world are more regenerative, productive, healthy, and climate smart because of our technology, team and hard work. When I think about where we started, it is truly incredible the amount of work that went into this accomplishment. Our work has created this deep impact on so many farms in over 30 countries. Today, 350 thousand farmers sustainably process 26.7 million m3 of organic waste, produce over 53 million m3of clean energy per year and produce organic fertilizer that can replace chemical fertilizer on 345K hectares every year. All this has reduced over 557K ton of CO2e.
The impact is not just measured in energy and fertilizer: each of these farms can be seen as a catalyst of greater change. Clear examples of our work are now available for over 100 million farmers to see. Our technology is working in so many different climates, farm types, cultures and treating so many types of waste that we can say with confidence that we can provide impacts for farmers everywhere on Earth.
But the only thing that can make our huge impact of today feel small is the challenge of tomorrow. The increasingly dire IPCC reports show that much more must be done. We continue to lose forests to inefficient agriculture and inefficient energy use of woodfuel and charcoal. We have lost ground to poverty in rural communities during the last couple years of global disruptions. Climate change makes feeding the world harder, even as the population grows. The only thing that make our achievements feel small, is how much more we still need to do.
But the entrepreneur’s superpower is projecting the future we want to see, and now I have a conceptual foothold. It took us over ten years to hit 20,000 farmers, and we reached 20,000 in 2022 alone. It took us 12 years to hit 50,000 farmers, and we will do the same in the 12 months of 2023. We are now at 60,000 which is 1% of 6 million, which is 1% of all the farmer families on earth. So I will take the time to celebrate the excitement of reaching 60,000 farmers, because tomorrow I will be in the not-so-distant future where we are celebrating 6 million farmers creating clean energy, organic fertilizer and leading a just, climate-smart food system.
