This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with the CEOs of two startups that are trying in very different ways to help the planet. First, we hear from Ethan Steinberg of Propagate Ventures to learn more about how his company helps promote agroforestry efforts across the country. Then, we travel to Rotterdam and talk with Michaël Van der Jagt about his Dutch company, Parx Materials, which uses bio-mimicry to forge chemical-free, bacteria- and virus-resistant polymers, enabling the safe re-purposing of ocean waste plastic among other things.

Narrator  0:02  This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Michaël Van der Jagt  0:18  I'm calling it natural, because this is the way the body is preventing bacteria. This is the way the body is having its defense mechanism. So it's something that is not causing also bacterial resistance.

Narrator  0:36 This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with the CEOs of two startups that are trying in very different ways to help the planet. First, we hear from Ethan Steinberg of Propagate Ventures to learn more about how his company helps promote agroforestry efforts across the country. Then we traveled to Rotterdam and talk with Michaël Van der Jagt about his Dutch company Parx Materials, which uses biomimicry to forge chemical free bacteria and virus resistant polymers, enabling the safe repurposing of ocean waste plastic, among other things.

Alex Wise  1:22  I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by the CEO and co-founder of Propagate Ventures, Ethan Steinberg. Ethan, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Ethan Steinberg - Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it. It's great to be here.

Alex Wise - So why don't you tell us what propagate ventures is all about? What is your organization's mission?

Ethan Steinberg - Propagate is all about making agroforestry a cornerstone of agriculture. What we do is we work through our analytics and project development platform that makes it easy for investors to fund low risk agroforestry projects, while helping farmers get access to the economic insights and project development tools that they need to confidently manage agroforestry.

Alex Wise - So do you get your revenues from being kind of the middleman between investors and farmers, or who are your clients, or clients are farmers, landowners and investors, there's another category there around effectively, like the supply chain manager at a, at a food company, for example?

Ethan Steinberg - So what we do is we work with any of those groups to help them analyze their farmland for agroforestry to really highlight what cash flows can look like, has farms transitioned to agroforestry as well as making it easier to access the product development tools, and the financing to implement and to run successful operations and maintenance. So, we essentially sell an analytics service, we sell product development, and we become a financing partner.

Alex Wise - So you mentioned agroforestry, a few times, our listeners may not know what that is, why don't you define agroforestry, and then we'll dive into some examples of it in action.

Ethan Steinberg - Agroforestry is the integration of fruit, nut and timber trees with agriculture in row with an existing operation. Now we tell picture this, you can imagine trees planted on a farm, where in between the rows of trees, you might have a row crop like a wheat, corn, soy, or you would have livestock. And so this is really about bringing together more diverse landscapes and using trees as a really effective tool to drive economic value and ecological value on farmland. When we think of like the history of agriculture,