Joni Kindwall-Moore is the Founder and CEO of Snacktivist Inc. and The Ryzosphere. She is also an ethnobotanist and Registered Nurse. 

1) What is the Ryzosphere? 

The Ryzosphere is a business-to-business platform. It’s a place where we bring together the diverse stakeholders across the food system, from seeds to farming to manufacturing to the place where it enters the market at the buy site. 

We don’t go to the end consumer and our focus is on the whole system with our niche focusing around regenerative organic bioregional food systems.

Our focus is finding those farmers and ranchers doing something different and need visibility support to make it work from a business perspective.

2) How does regenerative agriculture work?

Regenerative agriculture is a system that actively demonstrates improvements in the vitality of living organisms while minimizing both external inputs and disruption to the ecosystem.

One of the issue’s that’s really tough with the definition is that it’s a process. It’s a system that actively demonstrates improvements in the vitality of living organisms.

There’s a lot of ways to get there and different management techniques that are reflective of the situation a farmer or rancher is in, but the whole goal is that you’re driving the health and vitality of whatever crops or critters come off of your farm. You’re also helping minimize external inputs to the ecosystem. 

When you’re out in the wide world of regenerative certification and they tell you that you can’t till and there’s all these rules. With the Ryzosphere, we’re building a system that allows people to communicate what their outcomes are. We're demonstrating improvements to the vitality of our system. Let’s have a data-driven model that helps them build systems around that.

3) What inspired you to pursue this field?

I was a nurse for almost 20 years in health care research, most recently at Kootenai Health.

I really got tired of such a large part of our patient population be affected from diet-related disease, but not really having a system that helps them get better quality food at an affordable price. 

I started my first company called Snacktivist 10 years ago and just building products and innovations by just using these supply chains.

If you want potatoes, but you want to find potatoes that have been grown in a regenerative way, we can distribute them to you.

If you want waffle mix to be gluten free and you want it to be made of ancient grains, you can get it at Bell's or Chomper's and that's our product.

I came at it from that way because I knew that we had this connectivity gap in the food system. We use matchmaking to create a free marketplace and we use AI because there’s no Craigslist for our industry.

We have AI and we have deep tech now. We’re using really incredible tech to build this system

4) What is something people would be surprised to know about you?

I have an oddball history, I’m in my 50s and I’ve had a couple of different careers in this trajectory.

I have a degree in ethnobotany and have traveled through the Amazon looking at medicinal herbs. 

Bringing all of that all together is fascinating.

5) What footprint does the Ryzosphere have and what do you want its legacy to be?

The current footprint is we’re in our beta. We’re in our testing phase for commercialization with real users from across the country.

We have a Northwest community hotspot in our own backyard, which is really exciting. 

The legacy of this project is our whole why. We’re creating a system and changing the way food can do business so that we can actually have the next generation of farming and ranching in family hands and ownership food sovereignty is really important to us. 

    Joni Kindwall-Moore takes a selfie at a farm.
  

    Joni Kindwall-Moore goes for a ride.
  

    Kindwall-Moore