100 Jeff Tkach: Making a Global Impact With Soil, Food, and People

Jeff Tkach serves as the Chief Impact Officer for the Rodale Institute. Jeff is responsible for expanding Rodale Institute’s global influence in healing people and the planet by unlocking the transformational power of regenerative organic agriculture.

As Chief Impact Officer, Jeff leads the development and execution of the Institute’s core strategies, overseeing opportunities for partnership and co-investment that drive positive outcomes for Rodale’s philanthropic and programmatic initiatives.

We Talked About

The origin story of his mission
The steps he took to come out of his health crisis (due to Lyme disease)
How he put together a championship team towards wellness (including his selection criteria)
The difference between a therapist and a spiritual coach
Reducing the cost of healthcare by how we grow our food
Agriculture as a spiritual practice (including the micro-steps we can take)
Regenerative organic agriculture as the solution to the UN sustainable goals
Does organic agriculture yield truly nutrient-dense food (more than conventional methods)? (hint: yes, 100x higher)

Full Episode

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iOQGgUSuDE[/embedyt]

Wisdom Quotes

"The best years of my life have always been the years where I slowed down, slowed down to give myself space, to think, to listen, to reflect and to be inspired. And the, and, the worst years of my life historically have always been years where I tried to take on too much, do too much achieve too much. And so much so that, ultimately drove me to a major collapse."

"The very best of us lies in those moments of contemplation, of rest of reflection. And the action should only come out of those moments. You should never force the action from another place of action."

"You're going to be okay. You're going to be okay. There is something for you in all of this and something beautiful is going to emerge. You have to trust that you have to trust. Looking back, I probably would have told myself one more time to trust, because I think in those worst moments. That's where the beauty comes from."

"This is your moment to slow your life down. Let this moment slow your life down. Let it slow you down. Be here with me. The beauty that was all around me."

"We all know how we've become separated. And now we need to think about our degrees of reconnection."

"We treat agriculture as a spiritual practice and carve out a discipline in our daily doing to reconnect us to source. Allow these new rituals to change you over time."

"At the Rodale Institute, we don't measure our success on profits. We measure our success on impact"

"I know we are all trying to biohack our way to better health, but you can't force the soil to do something it's not designed to do."

"If we truly want to be the healthiest, most act self-actualize humans, we do need to slow down. We do need to take time for our nourishment, for our food, and sure. there are convenient ways to have that delivered to our home and to maximize that, but healthy food is grown in healthy soil. Maybe that's worth slowing down a little bit."

"I found that regenerative organic agriculture could actually be the solution to 15 out of the 17 goals set forth by the United Nations."

"We could heal all of the world's greatest problems simply by changing the way we farm."