I'm always interested in marketing techniques and I heard a great one today about a farmer near Munich.

 He went to the Munich politicians and offered to protect their water if they would buy his organic products.  I'm sure it wasn't as easy as this simple sentence portrays, but the bottom line is that he got a commitment from the Munich government to buy his stuff.

 His farm lay in the watershed, uphill from Munich, and he sold the leaders on the idea of protecting inflow water by eliminating chemicals from the runoff.  This seems like such a simple connect-the-dots idea between regenerative farmers and municipalities that you wonder why it isn't done more.

 With a municipal purchase commitment for the police cafeteria, hospitals, and schools, the farmer was able to expand his operations, expand his land base, and develop a thriving farm business that also ensured a clean water ingress for the city.

 We live in a time of connections.  Everything is about being connected.  And yet if you look at trend lines, these connections tend to be insular, driving us deeper into our tribes and less across tribes.  So rather than making us more eclectic, more often than not our connectedness is driving us more aggressively into our own trenches with people who think just like us.

 So I salute this farmer who had the audacity to dream a bigger what-if and start a conversation with those nasty city people, those urbanites.  Most urban folks can hardly imagine the disdain rural folks harbor towards them.  And too often the tension is mutual. 

 Talking across the divide is a new and wholesome connectedness we need to encourage and appreciate when we see it.  And as someone constantly looking for new ways to market, I'm enthralled by the idea.  In this instance, both parties came to the table to entertain a new connectedness to their own umbilical:  shared water.

 We're all in the nest together and it's high time we began looking out our shared interests.  That someone here in Munich actually pulled off such a difficult discussion and mutually beneficial arrangement is remarkable.  It offers hope for others to create these conversations in our own communities.  Wouldn't it be great if the rural and urban could be viewed as shared cousins in a space rather than cross-interests at loggerheads?

 If you're in the city, do you know what's upstream from the city limits?  Do you know where upstream is?