On Accountability

Shared vocabulary is important for facilitating a sense of belonging; to know the right lingo is to be a part of the club. Food and agriculture are no different. People use one or two words as shorthand for another more complicated concept, or they use acronyms to cut to the point.  

I came to Walden from tech and finance, and badly wanted to be a part of the club – and therefore was paying close attention to unfamiliar words and phrases that seemed pregnant with meaning. One phrase came up more often and seemed more loaded with associations than any other: “regenerative agriculture”.  

As far as I could tell initially that phrase was synonymous with: sustainable, healthy, organic, non-GMO, grass-fed, ethical, fair trade, produced at a small scale by an owner-operator, local…in short – good.

With research, its origin and meaning became clearer. The phrase “regenerative agriculture” was first introduced by Dr. George Washington Carver (champion of my favorite food – the sweet potato), and then came into wider circulation in the early 1980s, when Robert Rodale – farmer, publisher, Olympic skeet shooter, US Bicycling Hall of Fame inductee – and his Rodale Institute began using it in their publications and research.  

Rodale defined regenerative agriculture as “one that, at increasing levels of productivity, increases our land and soil biological production base. It has a high level of built-in economic and biological stability. It has minimal to no impact on the environment beyond the farm and field boundaries. It produces foodstuffs free from biocides. It provides for the productive contribution of increasingly large numbers of people during a transition to minimal reliance on non-renewable resources.”

In short, it’s a philosophy more than specific methods – and it has roots that go back centuries to Indigenous cultures’ orientation towards stewardship (over the modern emphasis of maximizing yield).  

But the growing ubiquity of the term has threatened the impact of its meaning. Look at how often it’s appeared in writing over the past ~10 years:

For “regenerative” to mean something, there has to be accountability – a backbone that connects its promise to the reality on the ground (literally). Without it, inevitable fraud erodes confidence that people and businesses are who they say they are.

An example: In 2017, the Rodale Institute – along with Patagonia and Dr. Bronner’s – launched the “Regenerative Organic Certification” (ROC) to bring standardization to regenerative production. Ingredients that receive the certification go above and beyond the USDA Certified Organic standard to satisfy criteria derived from their “pillars of regenerative organic certified” (namely: Soil Health, Animal Welfare, Social Fairness). Buyers of ROC ingredients can take confidence that there’s substance behind regenerative claims.

And this same type of substance is part of our thesis at Walden. As the members of Gen Z age into adulthood, businesses are compelled to take stands on ethical issues - but often times, their claim is out of alignment with the core of their business. Our differentiation from the rest of the crowd ultimately comes down to accountability – where the claims we make about impact are substantiated by the nature of our business model itself. As Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

We are designed from the ground-up to pursue our mission, different in three key ways:

Our brand is our mission
Our mission is to enable anyone to make positive and lasting change in our local food ecosystem – and that’s also the primary pitch we make to potential partners. It’s not a secondary consideration; it’s front and center. If we cut corners on our mission, we short-circuit our own ability to grow. ‍

Mission first, bank second
Our origins as a bank tie back to Charley’s entrepreneurial past in food. It was only through that experience that the need for a better bank partner for food and agriculture businesses emerged, and the concept of Walden Mutual was born. In other words, our form as a bank is incidental; it was the most effective means of achieving our desired ends. Other companies started with the goal of profit, and then appended purpose later. Our journey works in the opposite direction.

Our mutual structure
We’re the first new mutual bank nationwide in 50 years. Why go through the trouble? Because “mutual” means cooperative. Since we’re owned by our community, we’re incentivized to return value to our partners. Any money we make goes back to our community of partners – through dividends paid to the 250+ partners who helped raise our initial funding, better interest rates, lower fees, or other enhancements to the overall experience.  

It also holds us accountable to our long-term objectives. Our mutual structure is finetuned to disincentivize any future sale of the bank, aligning our sights not on outcomes in the next quarter – but the goal of building a 100-year institution.

Read our latest Annual Report for the full story, and whether it’s food at your local co-op or a new mutual bank you’re considering, we encourage a close reading of the ingredients.