I grew up on a lake in Huntsville, Ontario. Cottage country in Canada, filled with lakes and hills topped with maple and pine. The house I grew up in was originally my grandparents cottage, surrounded by ancient white pines and wild blueberry bushes. After only eating wild blueberries for my whole childhood, I remember the first time I tried a store bought blueberry - I said, “this isn’t a blueberry”. The flavour had disappeared.

I didn’t realize the impact my surroundings would have on me until much later in life. I didn’t grow up surrounded by nature, I grew up with nature. I spent most of my days in the forests surrounding my home, learning, observing and listening to nature's cycles. I realized that underneath all the visible activity on the forest floor are the invisible connections that allow nature to communicate, grow, and respond to the changing conditions of the world around us. That bond with nature led me to start Ryzome – a company focused on restoring those same cycles in our soils and food systems at scale.

Connecting to the natural world is not only deeply human: it is foundational to our experience on this planet, and right now, we are missing the mark. It is showing up in the changing climate and in our food systems. Chemicals gave us a century of bumper crops, but the returns are now diminishing. Our food is 50% less nutritious than it was 50 years ago, and the UN warns we could lose 10% of global yields by 2050. Farmers face rising costs, failing soils, and mounting debt – all symptoms of treating soil like a machine rather than a living system

Owen Goltz and his wife, Susan, run “Riverdale Farm” in Inglewood, Ontario. At the Goltz’s farm, they have 60 acres of farmland where they operate a market garden, growing seasonal fruits and vegetables. Owen is what is known as a ‘guru’ in soil science. Riverdale Farm’s goal is to source all the nutrients to grow their food from their own property. This has led to some incredibly creative, and sometimes witchcraft-like methods of obtaining the nutrients required for growing healthy plants. While most farmers turn to chemical nutrients for their plants' needs, Owen and an increasingly large cohort of farmers around the world are thinking that there has got to be a better way. Ryzome partners with farmers like Owen to accelerate this transition, providing inputs derived from waste streams that feed soil life rather than strip it.

Farmers like Owen, have realized that not only are their input costs rising faster than the rate of inflation, their soils are falling apart in front of them and they can no longer live off of what their farm produces. Speaking to one farmer who grows ‘cash’ crops in southern Ontario, he said -

“The thing about cash crops is [ ] - the cash is gone and all we have left are high input costs, variable yields and bridge loans to keep us going.”

There is a fundamental misalignment between our farming practices and our ability to both sustain those practices and compensate our growers. So what is the answer? You guessed it, nature. Behind the curtain of the chemical industry is a vast and largely unexplored landscape of soil microbiology and relational chemistry that supports plant growth, nutrient density, and even climate mitigation. Farmers that are taking to regenerative growing are seeing massive increases in land and plant productivity.

On the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, a Texas pecan farmer described how regenerative practices raised his yields sixfold – while cutting nitrogen use from 100kg per acre to just two and a half kilograms an acre.

So how do we move the needle? I asked Owen this, and his answer may surprise you. We need to make food taste better. Not only is Owen not using chemicals, but he is producing fruits and vegetables that taste unrecognizable. Have you ever tasted a tomato sweeter than an Ontario peach in August? Probably not - but that is what Owen is growing. The only way to get there is to focus on soil health.

“If you have good tasting food - you have higher nutrition, If you have higher nutrition - you have healthier soil, and when you have healthier soil - you have climate mitigation.” - Owen Goltz

Owen’s point is simple: flavour is proof. When food tastes alive, it’s because the soil is alive. And when the soil is alive, everything changes – from nutrition to resilience, even climate stability. Ryzome exists to help farmers like Owen transition away from chemical dependency and toward resilient, living soils. We restore the microbial life that underpins nutrition, taste, and climate resilience. In doing so, we’re not only helping farmers thrive, but repairing our own connection to the natural world.

Flavour Is the Future: How Better-Tasting Food Could Positively Impact the Planet.