Let me tell you what’s fantastic about offal.”

Jordan Kraft Lambert (MBA 2016), Colorado State University’s first director of agricultural innovation, is a full-body talker, and the topic of organ meat has her fired up. The parts of the cow typically seen as undesirable to US consumers are the most nutrient-dense part of the animal, Lambert explains, and a fantastic source of vitamin B12.

“There are nine neurotransmitters running around in your brain right now that are making it possible for you to even listen to me,” she tells a group of ranchers and farmers at an evening reception for Regenerate, a sustainable agriculture conference held in November at CSU’s Spur Campus in Denver. “Two of those neurotransmitters are dopamine and serotonin, which make you happy. Your body can’t make those without B12, which mostly comes from animals. So, please, have some dopamine and serotonin and be happy.”

With that, everyone lines up to sample beef-cheek birria, tongue, and heart with chili, prepared by Sandra Ruiz of Sabor Comunitario, a Denver-based organization that trains Latinos for careers in the food industry. CSU is the host, not the organizer, of Regenerate, but part of Lambert’s remit is to “throw parties for problems worth solving.” This event puts her in direct contact with some of the 30,000 Colorado farmers and ranchers who have plenty of problems to solve.

Taking it to the Top
Lambert and a colleague at CSU’s Spur Campus, in the Terra building’s rooftop greenhouse, where climate-friendly technologies for controlled environment crop production are demonstrated and tested.

Offal is a problem for ranchers who sell direct-to-consumer because it is frequently sent to rot in landfill, with the cow’s hide and hooves, emitting greenhouse gases and wasting 44 percent of the animal. (The rancher often pays for the disposal, eroding already tight margins.) On the other side of the equation is burgeoning demand driven by growing US Hispanic and Asian populations—that’s 80 million people, roughly—who value offal in their cuisine but are dissatisfied with typical supermarket offerings.

Put simply, it’s an arbitrage opportunity, Lambert says. She hopes gatherings like these and the connections they generate (she maintains an “offal people” email list) will spark innovation, building a stronger domestic supply chain for organ meats, as well as cow hides, keratin, and tallow, and creating a win for farmers, consumers, and the environment.

“We need to stop looking at food and ag as a supply chain, which implies a one-way street, and think of it in a more circular way,” Lambert says, citing HBS professor Rebecca Henderson’s Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire as an influence. “Both the Offal Party and Poop Shot [a party series to address cow manure and its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions] are about creating value out of what is typically seen as a waste product. We’re going to need agtech entrepreneurs and investors to help us re-circularize our food system.”

Lambert joined CSU’s Ag Innovation Center in January 2023, having worked at Indigo Ag and VAS, the company that makes the software platform DairyComp. She’d seen the system in action years earlier, as a child growing up in the 1990s on her parents’ dairy farm in Fort Morgan, an hour northeast of Denver. When it was introduced in 1983, DairyComp made it possible for workers to track and analyze the overall health and fertility of every cow, to ensure each animal was being cared for in a way that maximized milk production and animal well-being. Now Lambert is incubating the next generation of startups and serving as the connecting point between technology, business, and agriculture—all languages she happens to speak fluently.

Such fluency is unusual, and it makes Lambert an ideal fit for this newly created role at CSU. She has personal experience with the industry’s ups and downs, which means she can speak to them from a place of honesty, respect, and understanding. Fort Morgan, a town of about 12,000 people, is a major agricultural hub, its biggest local crops being corn, wheat, and sugar beets. A Cargill meatpacking plant is one of the largest employers in the area; Leprino Foods is another, converting 2.3 million pounds of milk into cheese every day. Just down the road, Lambert’s parents, Mary and Chris, and her brother, Stratton, run Badger Creek Farm and Quail Ridge Dairy, home to some 6,000 Holstein cows.

As much as Lambert loved her time in 4-H, nerding out on the economic inputs and outputs of owning her own dairy cow, she came to HBS to get away from that world. She’d been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma while completing her degree in plant biotechnology at UC Davis and had written her HBS application essay about wanting to work in health care. After graduation, she went to work for Professor Clay Christensen’s consultancy, Innosight. Flying to a client meeting, she looked out the window as the plane passed over the heartland: “I had a visceral reaction that I should not be on the plane. I should be down there.”

Not long after, recruited by Indigo Ag, she began the journey to where she is today: a modern university campus built on the site of a former rail yard where, in the 1880s, her great-great-great-grandmother Agnes Flockhart, a recent immigrant from Scotland, got off a train from Texas with eight children and a dairy cow.

Agnes fed her children with milk from that cow, Jordan says. The fundamental nature of agriculture is a big part of what drives her. “Without food, nothing else matters,” she observes. “I do what I do because every person deserves enough food to meet their daily nutritional requirements—and every person deserves a planet worth living on.”

Agtech, Lambert will tell you, is climate tech, with every effective innovation addressing a problem. In the 1950s, she says, the approximately 6 million dairy farmers in the United States all had the same problem: bulls. “In my grandpa’s case, that problem’s name was Louis.” Louis was expensive and extremely dangerous, and his genetic material led to inbreeding when used for more than one generation, Lambert explains.

Then a landmark innovation—artificial insemination, the first AI—made it possible for dairy farmers to preselect semen from bulls with a track record of producing healthy, productive offspring. “Now my grandpa and all the other farmers can get the best bulls, plural, for pennies on the dollar, create a breeding program, and track results to improve milk production,” she says.

As an innovation, artificial insemination had a dramatic impact. In the 1940s, there were about 20 million dairy animals—cows and bulls—in the United States. Today, 9 million animals produce five times the milk. “That means we can feed an additional 80 million children their total protein requirement every day with a reduced carbon footprint of 37 percent. Part of that comes from improved data management; another is nutrition science,” Lambert observes. “But the third is genetic progress, thanks to AI.”

Technology is a positive lever in what she calls the planetary balance sheet—it allows us to protect human health and well-being while using fewer environmental resources. But it needs to be grounded in respect for farmers and ranchers. “To be totally frank, many agtech companies are fundamentally extractive of farmers and ranchers. I want the innovation to come from real problems, which is why one of my core processes is to talk to at least one to three farmers each week and log their problems in a database,” she says. So far, water, labor, and lack of consumer understanding lead the pack.

A good agtech founder has three qualities, Lambert continues: “They understand the problem they’re solving. They have a new doohickey that the producer can’t get on their own. And they have ag-specific business acumen.” It’s rare to find those qualities in one person, which is where Lambert and the Ag Innovation Center come in, fostering connections between producers and innovators while validating and building out the innovation with the help, if needed, of CSU researchers. Lambert fills in the gaps in marketing and other business-related issues but also expects to draw on the expertise of CSU’s alumni network.

From a wider angle, she also hopes the center can help build trust, understanding, and connection, between ag producers and consumers—that’s a hoped-for side effect of those problem-solving parties—but also, between entrepreneurs and producers as well as entrepreneurs and funders.

“There has never been an IPO in the history of agtech,” Lambert says, getting the bad news out of the way first. Agtech has a much smaller addressable market than consumer tech or business software, for starters. There are about 2 million farmers in the United States, but once you get into a particular vertical—say, peach farming, which Colorado is also known for, or beef cattle—the market for a particular innovation can shrink considerably. The ability to pay for innovation and pass that cost along in a commoditized market is also a huge consideration, making it difficult to see the sort of 5X returns that make venture capitalists smile. Exit by acquisition doesn’t always work, either, if the acquirer is a big-ag behemoth with competing interests.

With all these factors in mind, Lambert wants to explore what it would take to build what she calls the yellow brick road of agtech capital. It will no doubt look different from the typical VC model, with more modest returns over a longer horizon. Maybe it’s debt capital. Maybe it’s a version of venture philanthropy, or at least very patient capital. It could also be grants, assisted by an AI-powered grant-finding and grant-writing tool developed at CSU.

“If we’re defining return as dollars alone, can you be okay with part of your portfolio having a 2X return over a 10-year horizon if the investment is good for the environment and combats hunger?” Lambert muses. “It’s not what any pension fund wants to hear, but I believe there are other ways of measuring ROI. We’re currently living beyond our planet’s boundaries by extracting a lot of cash out of our natural ecosystems.” Climate risk is financial risk, she adds, which is why BlackRock recently acquired Vanguard Renewables, an anaerobic-digester company that captures organic waste (like cow manure) to produce renewable natural gas. “It’s a way to hedge risk. They will no doubt make a return. And, I would argue, it’s the right thing to do.”

The Ag Center’s approach to incubating startups isn’t the usual model. “The easiest thing would have been to raise money from some corporate ag companies in Colorado and then hire someone to come in and run a typical accelerator,” Lambert says. She employs a different philosophy, ensuring that founders connect with the customers they hope to serve and that they have the resources and personal qualities required for success. “One of the things I help agtech entrepreneurs avoid is a mindset my dad affectionately calls ‘Dumb F— Farmer Syndrome.’ I’m looking for founders who are humble and excited to learn about what farmers need, instead of the type who assume farmers are stupid or overly risk-averse, which is a common misconception.”

Lambert is well into planning for an expanded offal party, featuring a business plan contest, line dancing, and offal delicacies. And she’ll be on the road and on the phone, talking to farmers and ranchers, listening to their problems, and working for the innovations that will bring efficiency to the vital work they do as well as lighten its environmental impact.

It’s hard to imagine a better fit for Lambert professionally. But it didn’t feel that way at first. “It’s such a cool job—my whole life is technology, science, business, and relationships, which I love,” she says. But there was an inexplicable sadness, too. On a student bus tour two years ago, she stared out the window as they drove to one of the university’s eight agricultural experiment stations. “It was a good time to do some thinking. I realized I was sad because of what I call rural phobia—this very strong, false narrative that I was living in the middle of nowhere, that smart people don’t live here.” After all, she’d attended HBS to get as far away from agriculture as possible. Initially, it felt like she’d missed the boat.

The community of farmers and ranchers and the fundamental necessity of agriculture ultimately helped reconcile those doubts. Today, Lambert feels fully herself in a way that wasn’t true in the past. Granted, she isn’t making a typical MBA salary. But she and her husband, Cei, have enough resources for what they’ve prioritized: art, community, good food, and the freedom to pivot as necessary.

“People come back to agriculture because there’s something about the land,” Lambert says on a drive from Fort Morgan to her home in Fort Collins, Colorado, golden-brown plains stretching in either direction under a deep blue sky. “There’s something about the body of the animal, and the grass, and the crickets, and the red-wing blackbirds—that’s what it is for me. It’s a physical grounding.”

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