Regenerative Agriculture - Why Nature Electrifies Us with Eric Whitley Part 1 (of 2)
“Nature always wins. There’s no doubt in my mind, nature plays the last hand.”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM Eric Whitley
Eric Whitley brings 33 years of industry experience leading, facilitating, and supporting critical operations and technologies in nearly all aspects of grid operations. Over the years Eric has held leadership roles at Southern California Edison, California ISO, Midwest ISO, and WECC, serving in positions of Project and Technical Management, Plant Manager, EMS Manager, Manager of Reliability Applications, and Director of EMS/IT Services. These roles have focused on grid operations and technologies, IT leadership, project management, NERC compliance, and developing high performing teams in support of critical systems. GridSME is the culmination of Eric’s career in forming a consulting company that bring together Subject Matter Experts and clients who need assistance.
Growing GridSME as a team
“So the way I approached running the company, with input from Lonnie, who was just the mentor for me, was to take concepts like I'd read in books. Specifically I read The Pumpkin Plan, and Profit First, and angled our company with those philosophies in mind. It was life-changing, it just created this sort of notion we had that we could do a lot with this company. And we put this framework together that allowed subject matter experts in the industry to come in and be a consultant, as well as grow consultants from just very competent people that we brought in. It was just me to start with 10 years ago. Today, we have over 60 people working in a company with about 40 or so employees. And then 20, independent consultants, many of them are full time. But again, teamwork, the focus on operating as a team.”
cultivating culture
“It's also very humbling, and to have an organization that people want to come to…to have that reputation and that branding out there that it's a great place to work. I think last year, we were able to share over 60% of our profits with the employees, which is the model. We're just looking to basically give more away. The number one thing of our company is our employees and our consulting staff that work independently. We focus on them and what they need, both monetarily wise, with opportunities, entrepreneurialism.. all these things that people would love to have at their corporate jobs, but can't. That is a huge differentiator.
Our clients are number two, we don't think of our clients as the number one thing we do. Our number one thing is to provide for our employees. And that way our clients are taken care of, because employees get it. They have high expectations of them. But they also know that they have a lot of autonomy in how they approach their work and their relationship with their teamwork, their teammates, as well as clients.”
nature always wins
“Soil is the building block of all that we are as societies and humankind in general. Without soil, civilizations shrivel up and die. And that happened with all these congregated cities like the Mayan culture and Egyptians and Babylon... So they depleted their soil by trying to raise food for all their people.
Allan Redin Savory’s view was to take livestock and mimic what nature has done, instead of trying to change nature to our industrial agriculture needs. So when you take cattle and you let them free range, they eat and forage down to a low level to where it's not regenerative. And then you'll get bare ground, bare patches, that type of stuff. And desertification, the encroachment of desert into farmland is going on worldwide, at a huge pace. That just started for me a deep dive into the understanding of where we were currently, not only with climate change, but with how we treat water, how we treat our food, the fact that our food today is a lot less nutrient dense as it was a prior to 1950s. All the inputs we use to do these, the chemicals, the physical tilling of land, which breaks up all the micro organisms. It's just a chilling way of looking at our ever growing population and looking at what nature is trying to do, because nature always wins. There's no doubt in my mind, nature plays the last hand and how that comes about because nature doesn't care if you're going to warm the earth, it's just fine doing that. It’s going to adapt, it's going to change whether humans can or can't.
So if we are truly stewards of the land, if we got kicked out a garden of Eden and technology was our effort to get back to some kind of utopia, it's just never gonna happen. So what I got into was regenerating farming or agricultural practices, where you use ruminant animals to graze grassland in a way that they did before, when they were bunched up by predators in Africa in the Great Plains.”
Be sure to SUBSCRIBE on your favorite platform for listening to podcasts.
Please rate the podcast and leave a review, and of course share it with any friends who are ready to discover the Nature Advantage!
.