In my twenties, I was optimizing my life around one thing: climbing.

Seasonal guiding meant gaps between work and, ultimately, income. Gaps between guiding seasons needed income. Everyone else became ski instructors, so I picked the warmest dry wall I could find and called it a plan.

Sarah, a fellow RPCV, was mapping food deserts for USDA SNAP. We were just catching up when she mentioned it offhand.

I’d been living on Mountain Project for years, so I don’t know what made me overlay the two maps, but they matched almost perfectly.

Turns out - farms are where the wild things are.

My first inspection: wild harvest mushrooms and Christmas trees in North Carolina, the same week.

IOIA was everything I wanted, flexible, autonomous, time in places most people don’t go. I had no idea it would turn into anything.

I learned fast that “organic” isn’t a thing, it’s a spectrum. People who genuinely live the ethos on one end, and what the USDA calls, without apparent irony, the Agricultural Marketing Service on the other.

I stayed close to the people who meant it and continued to add on agricultural scopes that kept me in the fields, because that meant I was always close to the walls and the wild I wanted on weekends.

I trained under the former deputy agricultural commissioner of California.

I asked exactly what the checklist asked for, looked at exactly what the scope required, and wrote reports that held up. Clean. Rigorous. Complete.

And entirely focused on land, inputs, and documentation, not once on the person sitting across the table.

Curiosity had gotten me here. It just hadn’t looked in that direction yet.

About six years in, I arrived at a processing and handling audit, and at the opening meeting, the quality manager I had prepared with for years had quit.

The person across the table had been in the role for three days, no training, no backup, no one from the company behind her.

The nonconformances stacked up, not because the systems weren’t there, but because no one had shown them how to evidence them.

At the exit interview, she cried.

When I said I was there to audit systems, not people, she told me her bonus was tied to the outcome.

I remember thinking, what do you mean.

But remember, everything is a spectrum.

That closing meeting is the origin of everything here.

Not a mission statement. Not a pivot. Just a question I couldn't stop asking once I'd asked it once — who is actually checking in on the workers?

I am a consumer. I am a worker. I have been on every side of these systems. In the wild, a wrong step is a fall. An uncorroborated claim about human integrity isn't much different — someone pays for it, and it's rarely the person who made the claim.

The wild doesn't negotiate with dishonesty. It just shows you what's true.

That's the standard I brought back with me. Root and Wander exists because integrity shouldn't be harder to find in a supply chain than it is on a trail. If that resonates.