Why we need to talk about money to save the planet with Yi Li and Brent Loken

[00:00:14] As a journalist, I've covered the intersection of tech and climate for years. I've reported on new companies and old companies, groundbreaking advancements, and boots-on-the-ground strategies. And across the board, I've noticed an interesting thread. In climate tech, we don't like talking about money. Somehow we've been taught that profit is a dirty word or a capitalist distraction from the real work of saving the planet.

[00:00:42] But what if we've had it backward? Early in my career, I saw plenty of game-changing startups launched with massive grants and noble missions, only to vanish the moment the initial funding dried up. They just couldn't figure out their economic plan, and they weren't financially sustainable in the long run. It's hard to watch this cycle play out over and over, especially when it comes to such an urgent issue.

[00:01:11] And it doesn't just hurt investors. It leaves communities, the people these technologies were meant to serve, stuck in the lurch. This is TED Tech, a podcast from TED. I'm your host, Sherelle Dorsey. Farmworks CEO Yi Li walked on the TED stage with a confession that might sound scandalous at first.

[00:01:37] She doesn't care about the traditional metrics of impact as much as she cares about her bottom line. Yi is a technologist and entrepreneur who started with a perfect climate-smart plan for Kenyan farmers. That's how Farmworks was born. But she quickly learned that a high-tech farm doesn't mean anything if tomatoes are rotting in the shed because no one is buying them.

[00:02:00] Yi Li's journey takes us from the quiet rows of an irrigation-fed field to the chaotic 5 a.m. energy of the Marakiti wholesale market in Nairobi. Her story shows us how to translate big climate ideals into a language that actually works for the people on the ground. The language of income. Is profit the enemy of the planet? Or is it an engine that can actually allow us to save it?

[00:02:28] 3,000 farmers supported. $6 million in direct income to farmers. 50 tons of food waste prevented every month. These numbers represent Farmworks' impact over the last five years. But what if I tell you they are no longer the most important metrics to me anymore?

[00:02:52] Today, the number one metric that I care about as CEO of Farmworks is our profitability. Now, before you judge me and think, how did we let this capitalist on the stage? Hear me out. Five years ago, I co-founded Farmworks with the grand mission to build 1,000 climate-smart, highly productive farms across Kenya. We invested in water dams, net houses, drip irrigation, organic fertilizers.

[00:03:22] We had every right climate solution by the book. But then, harvest time came, and I realized, when walking into our grading shed, there were crates of tomatoes rotting away because we didn't have enough waters. Our storage room was bursting with onions. It looks almost funny. But I was standing there thinking, great, now what? At the end of the day, every farmer has to answer one question.

[00:03:48] Who is going to buy my produce and pay for all my hard work and investment? Without the financial outcomes, climate initiatives cannot sustain themselves. This lesson hit me particularly hard a few years ago during one of our investor visits. The investor asked our group of farmers, so how do you like working with Farmworks so far? One farmer said, yeah, we like them a lot so far.

[00:04:15] But you see, every two years, there is a new organization coming to us with a new project. They disappear after two years, so we will see how long Farmworks can last. I felt my stomach drop in that moment. These farmers have gotten used to countless NGOs, donors, startups, rowing with grand climate visions, big promises, only to vanish when funding dries up. And without the financial sustainability, we too would be gone in just a few seasons.

[00:04:46] In that moment, finding financial sustainability for Farmworks meant we had to sell all of our produce. So that's when I threw myself into Kenya's vegetable wholesale market. This is 5 a.m. at Marakiti, one of the largest wholesale markets in downtown Nairobi. It was chaotic. So many sellers fighting for the best spot to sell. The customers are fighting for the highest quality creative tomatoes.

[00:05:12] And I'm Chinese, so I'm very much used to crowds and competition. But this was next level. I immediately knew I had to be part of this excitement. I started delivering tomatoes with our trucks to the markets. And on my first day, I got pushed down to the ground by a market vendor. Not exactly the welcome I was expecting. But over the years, I learned to be part of the market.

[00:05:39] I figured out how prices actually work, how weather can totally change supply and demand overnight. And I made friends with market ladies, many of them who are now our customers, proudly selling produce from Farmworks. What's the market figured out? We were able to sell almost everything. In fact, we realized that our own farms could never be enough to meet the full demand. In the end, people are eating every day of the year.

[00:06:07] But no farmer can be harvesting 365 days of the year. So we decided to partner with more farmers, starting by training them with climate-smart techniques. And this is what surprised me. When we gave farmers drip irrigation kits, sometimes they sit unused. When we showed them the more hygienic crop support structures, they were still using the same old method. It was hard to admit.

[00:06:34] But the reality is, we were imposing solutions, but not really solving problems. The drip irrigation kits saves water, but costs fuel to operate. The more hygienic crop support structure might prevent disease, but costs money to buy. We were providing knowledge, but not really capital or guaranteed returns. And without enough financial incentives, the farmers cannot really afford to implement those good ideas. So we changed our approach.

[00:07:04] Instead of focusing on training, we simply started buying and distributing the farmers' produce and give them a real income. What happened next shocked me even more because with the income from us, the farmers actually started to invest in better practices, better equipments, investing in their own farms. So it turns out the right economics was more powerful than the right knowledge. And you know what else?

[00:07:31] Supposedly, young people are not very interested in agriculture. That is not true. Young people in Kenya love agriculture, but what they love even more is to have a decent job and earn a decent income. At Farmworks, more than 80% of our employees are under the age of 30. We are an agriculture business made by young talent. Over the years, we have grown into one of the largest vegetable wholesalers in Kenya.

[00:07:59] In 2024, we sold 100 million tomatoes. That might sound like a lot. Until you do the math, it's barely two tomato per person in Kenya. So we still have a lot of room to grow and a long way to go. And remember my original dream of building 1,000 farms? That is still being realized, but in a different way.

[00:08:24] Today, the farms are being built not by us, but by the farmers who know their own land and communities the best. With steady market offtake and consistent income from us, they are now able to invest in their own farms and reach out to us when they need help. Finding financial sustainability was not easy. For years, after finding our market, we were still bleeding money. I had to make difficult decisions of shutting down priced demonstration farms,

[00:08:53] halting new partnerships, even closing regions that were too far away for us to serve. Turns out it was really difficult to save money compared to spending it. But I knew the only way for us to survive and grow our impact is through finding financial sustainability. Today, we are a business with healthy margins and growth. More than 300 employees work for us, and more than 10,000 market vendors rely on us for their daily supplies.

[00:09:22] The hard lesson I learned from the years of being a social entrepreneur is that real sustainability, climate or otherwise, must come from economics first. I'm not talking about choosing profit over planet, but I have recognized that without the viable economics, our climate projects and initiatives might remain as expensive experiments, but not really scalable solutions. Think about it.

[00:09:50] When farmers earn an income, they can invest in better practices. When companies achieve profitability, we can protect and scale our impact. When communities prosper economically, they're able and can afford to care about their environment in the long term. So here is my message. The best thing we can do for our climate is to build economically viable solutions. Let there be economics first.

[00:10:17] Then, and only then, can we unlock real, lasting climate impact. Thank you. That was Yi Li at TED Countdown 2025. Ever since hearing Yi's talk, I keep thinking about this. Yi went to Kenya with the science already figured out. The dams, the irrigation systems, the organic inputs. She had all the technical ingredients for a climate-smart farm.

[00:10:45] And it still wasn't enough. A farm can be perfectly designed for the planet and still fail the farmer. And if it fails the farmer, it fails the planet too. The missing piece wasn't technology. It was economic sustainability. It was making sure the people working the land could actually build a livelihood from it. That realization challenges a core assumption driving billions of dollars of climate investment.

[00:11:11] The common assumption is that if you build something that's good for the earth, adoption will follow. Yi's experience says, not without the market, not without the money making sense on the ground. So that raises the next question. If we accept that economic viability has to be baked in from the start, then what does the ideal farm actually look like?

[00:11:36] How do we build a farm that considers both climate and profit at scale across a planet that needs to feed billions more people in the decades ahead? That's exactly what food system scientist Brent Loken wants to know too. For our TED-Ed lesson of the day, Brent explores an idea that sounds almost too ambitious to take seriously. Can we create the perfect farm?

[00:12:05] About 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm. This agricultural revolution was a turning point in our history that enabled people to settle, build, and create. In short, agriculture enabled the existence of civilization. Today, approximately 40% of our planet is farmland.

[00:12:29] Spread all over the world, these agricultural lands are the pieces to a global puzzle we are all facing. In the future, how can we feed every member of a growing population a healthy diet? Meeting this goal will require nothing short of a second agricultural revolution. The first agricultural revolution was characterized by expansion and exploitation,

[00:12:56] feeding people at the expense of forests, wildlife, and water, and destabilizing the climate in the process. That's not an option the next time around. Agriculture depends on a stable climate, with predictable seasons and weather patterns. This means we can't keep expanding our agricultural lands, because doing so will undermine the environmental conditions that make agriculture possible in the first place.

[00:13:25] Instead, the next agricultural revolution will have to increase the output of our existing farmland for the long term, while protecting biodiversity, conserving water, and reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. So what will the future farms look like? This drone is part of a fleet that monitors the crops below. The farm may look haphazard, but it's a delicately engineered use of the land

[00:13:54] that intertwines crops and livestock with wild habitats. Conventional farming methods cleared large swathes of land and planted them with a single crop, eradicating wildlife and emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases in the process. This approach aims to correct that damage. Meanwhile, moving among the crops, teams of field robots apply fertilizer in targeted doses.

[00:14:22] Inside the soil, hundreds of sensors gather data on nutrients and water levels. This information reduces unnecessary water use and tells farmers where they should apply more and less fertilizer, instead of causing pollution by showering it across the whole farm. But the farms of the future won't be all sensors and robots.

[00:14:45] These technologies are designed to help us produce food in a way that works with the environment rather than against it, taking into account the nuances of local ecosystems. Lower-cost agricultural practices can also serve those same goals and are much more accessible to many farmers.

[00:15:07] In fact, many such practices are already in use today and stand to have an increasingly large impact as more farmers adopt them. In Costa Rica, farmers have intertwined farmland with tropical habitat so successfully that they've significantly contributed to doubling the country's forest cover. This provides food and habitat for wildlife, as well as natural pollination and pest control from the birds and insects these farms attract,

[00:15:37] producing food while restoring the planet. In the United States, ranchers are raising cattle on grasslands composed of native species, generating a valuable protein source using production methods that store carbon and protect biodiversity. In Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Nepal, new approaches to rice production may dramatically decrease greenhouse gas emissions in the future.

[00:16:02] Rice is a staple food for 3 billion people and the main source of livelihood for millions of households. More than 90% of rice is grown in flooded paddies, which use a lot of water and release 11% of annual methane emissions, which accounts for 1-2% of total annual greenhouse gas emissions globally.

[00:16:26] By experimenting with new strains of rice, irrigating less, and adopting less labor-intensive ways of planting seeds, farmers in these countries have already increased their incomes and crop yields while cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions. In Zambia, numerous organizations are investing in locally specific methods to improve crop production, reduce forest loss, and improve livelihoods for local farmers.

[00:16:56] These efforts are projected to increase crop yield by almost a quarter over the next few decades. If combined with methods to combat deforestation in the region, they could move the country toward a resilient, climate-focused agricultural sector. And in India, where up to 40% of post-harvest food is lost or wasted due to poor infrastructure, farmers have already started to implement solar-powered cold storage capsules.

[00:17:26] That help thousands of rural farmers preserve their produce and become a viable part of the supply chain. It will take all of these methods, from the most high-tech to the lowest cost, to revolutionize farming. High-tech interventions stand to amplify climate and conservation-oriented approaches to farming, and large producers will need to invest in implementing these technologies.

[00:17:53] Meanwhile, we'll have to expand access to the lower-cost methods for smaller-scale farmers. This vision of future farming will also require a global shift toward more plant-based diets and huge reductions in food loss and waste, both of which will reduce pressure on the land and allow farmers to do more with what they have available. If we optimize food production, both on land and sea,

[00:18:21] we can feed humanity within the environmental limits of the earth. But there's a very small margin of error, and it will take unprecedented global cooperation That was food system scientist Brent Loken. Can you imagine a perfect farm? We've been farming for 10,000 years, and we're still working out what that even means.

[00:18:52] What strikes me is that both of today's speakers are circling the same problem from different angles. Yi is on the ground in Kenya, learning that sustainability has to pay for itself. Brent Loken is zooming all the way out, looking at the entire planet as a single food system, asking where each acre can do the most good. And together, they leave us with something worth sitting with. We already have most of the science we need

[00:19:21] to feed the world without destroying it. The harder work is building the economic systems, the policy structures, the market incentives that make it easy and sustainable to do the right thing for the farmer in Nairobi and for the planet she's feeding. So maybe the real question isn't whether we can create the perfect farm. It's whether we're willing to redesign the systems around it. I'm Sherelle Dorsey.

[00:19:49] Thanks for thinking alongside us today on TED Tech. TED Tech is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. And the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Constanza, Gallardo, Daniela, Belarreso, Maria Ladias, Tanzika Sangmanivan, and Roxanne Hailash. If you're enjoying the show,

[00:20:19] make sure to subscribe and leave us a review. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.