Two people in particular have taught me the most about this ripple effect. They are making an enormous impact through how they choose to show up each day in their companies and their lives. The first person is Paul Willis, the founder of the Niman Ranch Pork Company. Paul and I met on a volunteer consulting project many years ago, in Kazakstan. At the time, he had just shipped a couple of his pigs to Bill Niman in San Francisco. Niman raised pigs on pasture, the old fashioned way, with old fashioned genetics and husbandry practices. Fast forward 15 years, and the Niman Ranch Pork Company is now a company with over $30 million in sales that works with something like 700 family farmers in 10 states. These are farmers that would be unable to survive competing with the likes of Smithfield and other confinement pork companies. Companies that are rapidly eradicating the family farm as an economic institution and endangering our environment and human health. Paul added up all of their sales over the past 15 years and it came out to well over $100 million in direct economic impact, and something like 500 million in indirect impact. Paul has personally restored a 200 plus acre Iowa wet prairie that is now home to hundreds of species of plants and birds, some of which had not been seen in Iowa in years.
The second person is my daughter, Kendra. Kendra has been putting Gandhi’s words, “We must be the change we want to see in this world” as a salutation on her email since she was in middle school. She went on to get an undergraduate degree in environmental engineering at MIT, and start a non-profit that funds potable water projects in indigenous communities in the Amazon. Kendra chaired several environmental student groups, served as an EMT, invented a pedal powered laptop for health clubs, and a pedal powered corn mill for Central and South America. She attended pre-medical classes in Cuba, and volunteered at medical clinics in both rural India and rural Mexico. Kendra donates her hair to cancer victims, refuses to own a car, buys only used clothes, rides her bike, eats low on the food pyramid, and shows up each and every day ready to stand for a more responsible way of living our lives.
I created tera'swhey to be the pebble that, dropped in the water, causes a ripple that spreads across the entire lake. Everything we do is congruent with our values, from the kinds of products we make, our packaging, our manufacturing plant and processes, the kind of whey we source from small family cheese plants and small family farms, and our work to improve nutrition in children.
This means that every time you buy tera'swhey, it benefits these people and the environment we care about. It also means you join us in getting that ripple effect moving outward.
