San Antonio Company is Fighting Climate Change 1 Acre of Cattle Grazing Land at a Time

By selling carbon credits to companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint, including H-E-B, Nestle and Microsoft, Grassroots helps ranchers make the investments needed to implement regenerative practices.

NOTE: this article was originally published to Express News' Apple News Channel on December 23, 2024. It was written by Richard Webner, Contributor 

A San Antonio startup is taking the fight against climate change to cowboy country.

The idea behind Grassroots Carbon, headquartered on Houston Street, can be mowed down to this: Cattle eat grass. When grass grows, it draws carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Therefore, the grazing practices used by ranchers in Texas and across the U.S. can have tremendous impact on global warming.

So, the company partners with ranchers to help them employ what Brad Tipper, its new CEO, calls “regenerative” practices, including using native grasses and rotating cattle across grazing sites to mimic the natural herd movements seen on the Great Plains hundreds of years ago. Beyond being good for the environment, the practices benefit ranchers by helping them raise healthier cattle and make their land more productive, he says.

A native of New York City, Tipper moved to San Antonio about a year ago with his wife, who grew up here. He became CEO of Grassroots in December, joining forces with former Shell executive Henk Mooiweer and well-known local entrepreneurs Ed Byrne and Lew Moorman. The company is part of the portfolio of Soilworks Natural Capital, the investment firm founded by Byrne and Moorman.

“This concept of red meat has been vilified, but it shouldn’t be,” Tipper said. “We have the opportunity to really improve the overall health and well-being of our food production and increase the productivity of the land. We can make this generational shift back to what I consider to be pre-World War II, pre-industrial revolution land management practices.”

By selling carbon credits to companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint, including H-E-B, Nestle and Microsoft, Grassroots helps ranchers make the investments needed to implement regenerative practices. With 20 employees in San Antonio and elsewhere in Texas, the company has grown quickly since its founding in 2021 — and is set to pick up speed in coming years, Tipper said.

“We’ve successfully partnered with 65 ranches, with a heavy emphasis on Texas, but we’ve since kind of expanded to both coastlines, managing about 300,000 acres today,” he said. “We’re quickly growing into about a million by the end next year.”

Tipper spent the first decade of his career working in private equity before the 2018 death of his mother from colon cancer helped motivative him to shift his focus to the health and wellness industry. He went on to serve as CEO of Prospect Farms, an organic farming and manufacturing complex based in the small town of Prospect, Maine.

He recently sat with the Express-News to discuss the Grassroots business model, the company’s growth plans and how carbon credits work. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: How is it living in San Antonio versus New York City?

A: We absolutely love San Antonio. I was a little bit transparently cautious as a born-and-raised New Yorker that loved the fast-paced energy of New York. My only requirement moving down here was I needed to have sidewalks. I needed to be within walking distance to a coffee shop. We were fortunate to get both of those things when we stumbled upon this old house in Monte Vista.

Q: Tell me about your decision to leave private equity.

A: In 2018, I unfortunately lost my mother to a long battle with colon cancer. Then I myself had some personal health issues; some early kind of cancer warnings. Being at a younger age in my career, I took it as an opportunity to (figure out) what I wanted to get out of life, both personally and professionally. 2018 kind of coincided with the Farm Bill, legalizing the production of industrial hemp at scale. I first scoured the country as an opportunity to invest as an angel, because they became just fanatic with this concept of plant-based therapeutics and their opportunity to manage things like inflammation. When you look at a lot of the disease states that you’d see — particularly colon cancer — it’s an inflammatory response in the colon. I was able to kind of connect purpose and passion with preventing my own kind of health challenges from expediting, but also honor the legacy of my mom.

Q: How did you get involved with Grassroots?

A: When we moved to San Antonio, I became a bit of a serial networker and introduced myself to anyone and everyone that was in and around the early stage investment landscape. I was fortunate through that to get introduced to Lew Moorman, who was known for all the great work at Rackspace, later Scaleworks. What was very under-publicized at the time was this Soilworks concept, which is another kind of fund that Lew and Ed (Byrne) had started, focused on the regenerative ranching industry. We really aligned on similar personal stories that led us to leave behind what I would consider to be more institutional careers to combine this idea of passion and purpose.

There was an early opportunity about 30 months ago to partner with the Grassroots founder, Henk Mooiweer, who was a 30-year Shell executive, to put some resources and rigor around building out this thesis.

Q: What’s the business model?

A: The broad-strokes business opportunity here is partnering exclusively with U.S. ranchers in support of their transition from conventional ranching to “regenerative.” You look at just the continental United States — 41% of the footprint is grasslands, or roughly 350 million acres. Less than 5% today is “regenerative.” It’s arguably the largest landmass that we have available to us that’s capable of sequestering carbon and it’s traditionally overlooked. The concept of ranching and cattle has been a bit vilified. We focus exclusively on providing those ranchers with both the educational as well as financial resources to not only make the transition from “conventional,” but to implement, maintain and sustain those “regenerative” practices to help draw down and sequester more carbon.

Q:  So, basically, you’re encouraging practices leading to greater grass coverage, and the carbon is stored in the grass rather than the atmosphere?

A: Even to take it one step further — not just to increase the grass coverage, but actually to graze it more frequently, so that you’re speeding up the ability to draw more. What’s happening is essentially those grasses are entering a bit of a state of shock, so they’re like, “We need to grow faster and faster,” and they’re drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. With those frequent rotations, you allow for rest periods so that it has an opportunity to continue to establish its root system and really grow above the soil. The cattle are helping speed up that process because they’re creating natural fertilizers.

Q: The company offers an app called PastureMap. What does it do?

A: Every ranch is separate and unique, right? A ranch in Corpus is going to be materially different than one in Colorado. PastureMap is our software tool that we provide ranchers as part of our partnership program to make informed decisions around their ability to rotationally graze their specific ranch and help establish the proper paddock size, proper rest areas; the amount of capacity in terms of the number of cattle that they can raise at any one period of time; to really improve not only the productivity of the land, but also improve the overall well-being of the animals.

Q: What’s the typical motivation for ranchers to do this? Is it profit motive or a desire to help the environment?

A: The primary motivation for the ranchers is the long-term commitment to making their land more productive. While we have a strong fundamental thesis around soil’s potential to be a meaningful driver of climate change, that isn’t part of the rancher-pitcher dialogue. We really focus on the four walls of their particular property, really thinking about how we lock arms to make their land more productive. As you make this transition from conventional to regenerative, you’re reducing a lot of the input costs and requirements.

We talk a lot with the ranchers about the frequent rotations: You can actually increase the number of cattle on your property. You’re reducing those input costs and labor costs but you’re also improving the health of the animals. By the way, we do have a very strong alignment of interest in terms of our profit share, where we’re currently paying 80% of all profits back to the ranchers so that they can continue to maintain these regenerative practices.

Q: Your website mentions buying and selling carbon credits. How does that work?

A: The voluntary credit markets have been around for coming up on two decades now. Probably the most robust marketplace exists in Europe. Some of the biggest participants in the voluntary credit markets are your multinational corporations like Microsoft and Shell that are looking for opportunities to meet their net-zero climate initiatives by 2050. Currently, the carbon credits are the currency by which we’re able to financially incentivize ranchers to make that long-term commitment. We’ve been fortunate to have the corporate support from H-E-B, locally.

Q: How is H-E-B involved, exactly?

A: They are sponsoring Grassroots Carbon to generate credits on their behalf. Nestle’s a great representation of this. Nestle has a very vast network of ranching partners across the United States and we work with those ranchers within typically an average of 100 miles of each one of their processing and distribution facilities to help reduce their carbon footprint within their supply chain.

Q: What is your company’s plan going forward?

A: I think we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of the participation in the soil carbon market. We have aspirations to grow materially over the years, but if we focus exclusively on the United States, there’s 350 million acres, right? That has the potential on an annual basis to remove 500 million tons of CO2 a year.

My vision would be to mobilize that entire 350 million-acre opportunity, be the largest driver in this carbon marketplace, but also inspire more corporate and consumer participation. And, see some of the knock-on effects that you’ve been able to see in like poultry with Vital Farms, that has given you that visibility into the whole supply chain, so you know exactly where your products are coming from. Put that same level of rigor and alignment around the ranching cattle industry. Yeah, we’ve got huge growth ambitions.