Episode 176: Vertical Integration for Regenerative Farmers with David Stelzer
4/9/20261 hr 13 min
David Stelzer is the founder of Azure Standard, a company born from a 1970s family health crisis that inspired a switch to organic farming. When a major processor dropped their organic grain for conventional wheat in the 1980s, David began delivering his own crops directly to co-ops in a pickup truck. This grew into a massive independent distribution network that now manages roughly 12,000 SKUs, connecting growers directly to consumers.
In the field of regenerative agriculture, David focuses on vertical integration to bypass the expensive and often unethical mainstream middleman. By managing the farming, processing, and distribution in-house...
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First 90 secondsJohn Kempf· Host0:02
Hi, friends. This is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to regenerating our landscapes, our soils, the food that we eat, and our collective health, and the health of the ecosystems that we're responsible for stewarding. Today, it's quite an honor to have someone here who, uh, I consider a longtime friend, someone whose work I've greatly admired, and the, um, the impact that they've been able to produce. So, I have here David Stelzer with Azure Standard. David, thank you for being willing to join me and to share your story about the things that you've been working on. You've... You're, you're doing a couple of interesting things. You're farming in a challenging environment, but then I think the piece that is so desperately needed in today's world is you are developing a pathway to deliver growers' products, starting with your own products, to consumers, and you've essentially removed all the intermediaries in that pathway, and you are... You're, you're owning the pathway itself. And I think in, in the world today, we see all of... There's this constant refrain where growers are describing how, "Well, the middlemen are making all the money. We're not making any money." And yet, um, in many cases, many growers are not adding a great deal of value. They find themselves in a commoditized commodity production system. And you've chosen to take