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is it warmer in iowa today it's beautiful in iowa today it's yeah 75 and sunny oh just like yesterday huh yeah just like yesterday and the day before [Music] welcome back everybody to season three of field work i'm zach johnson i'm mitchell aurora zach i cannot believe they invited us back for a third season it is a miracle i am just as surprised as you are mitchell but here we are you would think they would learn and of course a big thank you to the walton family foundation for their support this season as well yeah this is going to be a big season lots to talk about lots happening in the world of agriculture and those topics are what we got to cover here on our super serious podcast brought to you by farmers for farmers zach you do a wee bit of farming up north day yeah i don't know about you but we just kind of grew some crop and harvested it and it was almost planted it and then you came back later and picked it when it was all done and you're just on vacation the rest of the time or what yeah pretty simple not a lot of not a lot of thought going into it you planted it on video that's right because the fields are now actually a studio set oh it's all just green screen green screen is what you're telling me it's green screen to your entire farm that'd be a lot cheaper now we've we've continued to change things up on our farm we trying to continue to figure out this whole regenerative sustainable soil health carbon whatever the heck it's called now it keeps changing i think every time we every time we talk but progressing and i don't know it's been interesting and we're having some pretty good success with it for our farm so excited to continue to push things but you guys were trying some new stuff on your farm how'd some of that turn out yeah we actually did farm this last year we put quite a bit of work into that there was there was a lot of thought into it as well but we uh we have reduced a fair amount of tillage one of the things we've got out here a couple different tools i'll go over it one is the um vertical tillage tool that we've been using and it's it's really adjustable so we can add more angle to the disc blades or we can take that angle completely out but it's a it'd be a form of a high-speed disc or a vertical tillage disc i really like it we've got a a different style one coming this year with some con concavitization confavidation concave discs how about that some concave discs that's right some concave discs and we're going to try that out and see if we like that better maybe maybe not in certain situations we might um there's you know there's kind of a give and take there but the big thing that i i've been pretty excited about is i actually bought a strip till machine it's used well used but we went through it pretty good added some stuff to it and took our fertilizer cart that we were running on a deep bander before and put that behind the strip till machine and i just did a bunch more updates to it here over the winter so we've got uh blockage monitors in there we've switched it over to hydraulic drive so we're going to be stripping in 30 inch bands and fertilizing i'm going to be able to put down anhydrous with that at the same time so i'm hoping that goes really well this fall because i'm pretty excited about it i've got a lot of time and money into it yeah and you're going to wait on all of that until the fall of 2021 or anything going to go out here spring and 2021 before this year's crop or not no because most of our acres last fall got uh conventional till so so we won't be doing more more than likely we won't be doing any strip tilling this spring we've got our fertilizer down from last fall so that's all out there we we could run the tiller without you know the fertilizer cart behind it but i don't think we will yeah no that seems like a really good way to be able to do things and kind of a hybrid system to be able to utilize some of the equipment that you've already got and just kind of be able to piece in bit by bit some new equipment for the operation it's a good way to go about it yeah that's what worked out well for us was you know we already had that fertilizer cart and the local dealer had this strip till machine and as you know a lot of those machines can get they can get really expensive well this one happened to be a pretty good opportunity for me to jump in at the right time i kind of felt like if i was gonna try it this was uh the way to go for now and we'll see where it takes us yeah i know that's awesome and that's been a really key thing that i always think about too is as we're trying new things on a farm that it's got to be able to work within the equipment that we've already got so um yeah in 2020 we we actually end up with five different crops we had corn soybeans cereal rye malt barley and seed mustard but the rye barley mustard was all drilled in with our just our normal no-till drill we got a great planes no-till drill and uh didn't change any of the equipment there same thing for like the relay cropping didn't change any equipment um might have been better with a stripper head or a draper head to be able to harvest that cereal grain but our normal soybean platform worked just fine and things turned out really well and we're scaling it up for 2021 so continuously learning that's for darn sure though we've been busy recording some awesome new episodes for you guys and you're gonna love them first up we check in with john harris yeah he's the news director for farm journal and he's got his own broadcast set up at home just like us and we asked john to tell us what he's got his eye on now that the biden administration is off and running john thanks for coming on the show with us hey thanks for having me guys littlest point of the helicopter didn't come pick me up but glad to be here trust us we're disappointed too no no choppers today as we look forward into the future here what do you see looking towards the future when it comes to the biden administration and agriculture well obviously climate is their top priority uh after we get past covet issues uh um and you've seen that in some of the appointments in the bite administration um with gina mccarthy coming back former epa administrator as a domestic climate czar if you will uh and and so uh you know everything is going to be uh centered around climate every agency is going to have a role to play in climate it's kind of when that amazon box shows up and you brought it in the house and you've got it sitting in the in the table you know it's here but you don't know what's in it yet that's kind of where we are with the bite administration on on climate change we know we know it's here we know there is going to be something very soon but we don't have uh a clear picture yet of what is is inside that box we do have some clues coming um um here and there well and do you think part of that's gonna be with some of the bills that are already um on the table in dc at least at the time that we're recording this as far as the carbon bank and the growing climate solutions act or do you think it's going to be kind of intertwined into those or maybe something a little bit totally different well i think the growing climate solutions act is going to be a big part of it and kind of the first step in this um and you're going to see that kind of among other things open the door for the commodity credit corporation to be the funding mechanism to put uh dollars into farmers hands for carbon capture how exactly that works we don't have we don't know yet i mean i don't know that usda knows yet they are pushing now a farm bureau among others pushing to raise that lending cap for commodity credit corporation up to 68 billion dollars from the current 30. um it has been at 30 since it was created farm bureau among others argued that the index for inflation it should now be 68 billion dollars so that would obviously open up a lot more dollars for these kind of programs a key person to watch in all of this is robert bonney who has been named the the climate lead at usda he's been at usda before in the obama administration um and he drafted it was one of the lead authors on something called the climate 21 project that was a transition document uh used by the bible administration looking at climate issues and he's playing a very lead role in in what usda is doing over climate and at ag outlook forum uh he dropped a couple of clues one is that usda has 30 days to get input from stakeholders on what climate smart agriculture should look like in the byte administration and then they've got another some 75 days to actually put forth some proposals on enacting climates uh smart agriculture i think the other big clue that he dropped in that speech they see this as we put out an initial plan get feedback tweak it get some more feedback tweak it again and continue to adjust what usda does in this climate space even though it's it's early you're going to start seeing talk about the next farm bill and what shape that next farm bill should take we've seen a tremendous shift in in farm support in the trump administration with the uh the continuing ad hoc payments through uh cfap and mfp and everything else um there is not an appetite in congress to continue those um so what does the next farm bill look like i mean when when we passed this current farm bill it was supposed to be that it was uh a position to address most if not all disasters and there wouldn't be a need for ad hoc well we learned that wasn't the case as we do with every farm bill uh so you know does does congress look at um continuing to use commodity credit corporation as kind of a piggy bank for uh disaster payments for ad hoc payments for what usda needs uh for carbon credit purchases those kind of things um so it'll be interesting to see if um what the discussion is around the next farm bill and what people may want to see changed in that next farm bill as the talk gears up for um you'll hear you'll see hearings maybe even starting this year gearing up for a farm bill to be debated in 2021 to be implemented in 2023. well that leads me to a question that i had for you john what is the feeling you get from farmers when you're out in the field so to speak i mean how are farmers reacting to what we think may or may not be coming you've got some of that residual skepticism uh there but i i do think that there is some optimism there and again i talk more to farm group leadership than i do uh actually out on the pharma you know since i work mostly in policy but the leadership i talked to is really optimistic that this time that it will be more incentive-based the administration will be working with farmers to to get their feedback on what works on the farm and not just um putting in uh regulations um you know using the stick approach rather than the carrot approach um so we'll see if time you know time will tell whether or not that actually happens but that is the anticipation at this point i think there's so many different iterations here and we talk about it all the time on the podcast now between zach's location up in minnesota and in my location in southeast iowa but those are big differences and the stuff that we deal with on our farms is totally different but if you factor in trying to figure out policy for hawaii and florida and you know washington and maine and everything else like there's so many different variables so how do you think you know i guess what's our role in helping to make sure that some of these policies are going to be adaptable to everywhere in the country a couple of things one um and this was encouraging to me um john doggett who was the ceo of the national quarter horse association said that on the eve of michael reagan's nomination to be epa administrator reagan called john doggett out of the blue and talked to him at length about how do we work together how do we get input uh from you and i and as you read through all these documents there is a lot of discussion about getting input about forming new committees to get that input so uh there is going to be a lot of opportunity uh to influence this uh the other thing i'd say um in listening to some of robert bonnie's comments is he talks a lot about multiple tools to accomplish uh these climate change goals um that they realize that it's not a one size fits all as you mentioned you've got different agriculture in different states you're going to need different tools uh to address those kind of things um and i also think it's going to and this is where i think folks need to be really watchful of what happens and how it impacts them but um this is going to be not just taking ccc funding for uh carbon to pay by carbon credits but it's things like they're looking at crop insurance and how do we build incentives in a crop insurance that maybe lowers your rate if you're taking uh certain uh carbon capture actions on your farms or things like that so there's going to be a number of different things to watch what are you looking at in terms of other tools to meet those demands when you when we talk about things like seeds or equipment research or any other innovations what do you see that you think is going to make the difference in helping to move that needle you know i i don't know sky's the limit and that's um you know where usda is also looking uh for input on this um there there's really in this climate 21 uh document there there's nothing along those lines in there they do talk about biofuels a little bit um you know there's a lot about uh soil um there is a lot about um rural electric in there in that um you know usda puts out a lot of rural development money millions of dollars every year um focusing that money on projects that will uh reduce carbon emissions in in rural electric uh cooperatives things like that so john we're seeing a lot of um private industry getting into the carbon space and such as well what do you think is going to happen there as policy now kind of tries to catch up with some of the initiatives that are already happening in the soil and the carbon space well that's it exactly i mean you've got a number of players out there that are really pushing government and policy forward there is and i think that's what the big difference is this time around versus the last time uh that government really tried to take on the climate issue back in the obama administration is that you've got uh the industry and consumers pushing for this um and we we don't know exactly what that marketplace is yet um you know that there are programs out there but there's not one clear definition of how we measure carbon capture in agriculture uh and how that is valued um but the marketplace is pushing towards that i think that's probably a big role that usda could play in this is doing the research to set those ground rules to set um the you know what how we measure that carbon capture and then how you do how do you financially reward that um just a quick follow-up on that is you know i was reading through the um the united nations report on growing um carbon markets and growing independent carbon markets and a big piece of that was yeah we need to have some structure behind it we need to make sure that there's not double accounting we need to make sure that there's not embezzlement and such in some of these markets and i think that can be the role of the government in this but how quickly do you think some of these things can be scaled up because some of these markets are already here the policies being talked about and wanting to push it forward quickly but is it going to be fast enough to be able to keep up with what private industry is doing the other important thing along the lines of what you're talking about is that we need to make sure that we preserve the the value for the farmer in this and that somebody else doesn't try to capture that carbon value somebody further down the line and and i don't mean that ethanol plants would do this but i just used it as an example an ethanol plant could conceivably uh sell carbon credits to a company saying that hey we are capturing all of this carbon including the production of the crop you know so we need to make sure that the farmer is able to preserve the the value that they're creating on farm and that doesn't et gobbled up somewhere else in the value chain and uh i want to say you know a lot of people are still pretty skeptical about measuring sequestered carbon how do we do that what what's the what's the path to that and how do we make that work and then how big of a difference can ag actually make in the long term scheme of things here how big will that difference be how do we get farmers on board and how do we make this as simple as possible to make sure that farmers will take part in this and mitchell same question goes to you because you're way ahead of me on this stuff and mitchell may be able to answer this question better than i can but um first of all i think you just have to build trust in a system um and you know usda is going to have to take that up and do the research to get to your point uh zach about you know how do we measure this how do we have a level playing field um where everyone is working from the same yardstick and you know usda is going to have to do some research to figure out how we do that there are some private people out there now also doing that research to try to come up with that but you're going to have to have that one level playing field in order to do that to build the trust in the marketplace and then once you've got that trusted marketplace that is showing uh some folks making money off of it mitchell correct me if i'm wrong but i think that's where you start to see things really take off yeah i mean and that's kind of with that united nations report that was looking at on the paris agreement and some of the things that things that are going to be needed by 2030 by 2050 i think they're expecting a increase in carbon markets not just soil carbon markets but there's lots of different types of carbon markets and offsets as well it's not it's not only sequestration but it's mitigation as well so there's two different even halves of the carbon markets that are available today but these carbon markets have to grow 15 x by 2030 is what this report was saying and predicting um and it's going to drive the the dollar value of that ton of carbon quite a bit as well but i think what we're seeing from the agronomy and or the agricultural side of things and soil carbon is that we need to be able to understand how to actually model the carbon that is being sequestered zach to your point that it's impossible to actually measure the amount of carbon in an acre of soil an acre at one foot deep is 2 million pounds the ability to be able to get those models to be right is a major issue and john are you seeing anything there on you know how can we get the models to be better the usda already has the comet farm tool developed out of colorado state but any of these policies or push gonna get some more funding to be able to make that tool more robust are we gonna see other tools come to the forefront no matter what it is that that comes out of usda and out of congress you are going to see that as a centerpiece of it of how do we measure this what is the measuring stick um and to your point mitchell i i think a bigger or another challenge in this is not just measuring how much extra carbon is that soil capturing but uh you know how much have the efforts already taken by that farmer how much is that capturing because we want to make sure that they get the value for what they've already been doing not just what they had on top of it i mean that's going to be another challenge for this process and zach your question about how much impact agriculture can have again this climate 21 project report their estimate was that agriculture and forestry combined would add 10 to 20 percent of the needed change in uh carbon uh what what would need to be done in the u.s 10 to 20 percent of that would come from forestry and agriculture and i think part of that is like that right now we're emitting or like agriculture and forestry livestock the overall industry emits something like 12 of the annual us carbon emissions but then we would have the ability to sequester like five percent of the us is totally mission something like that that's that like 15 or 20 difference that you're referring to i think that's right john or am i reading that well yeah it's it's a combination of both reduction in emissions and also sequestration would equal 10 to 20 percent of the total need in change for the us i'm going to ask a question to both of you along these lines coming from a simple farmer here i'm on the outside looking in running my farm and all of a sudden this carbon market thing has become huge everybody's talking about it nobody has answers is this something where i'm gonna need to shift my farm towards taking advantage of these carbon markets and and really jump on it and make sure that i'm doing my part to jump in here and capture any value that i can or can i keep doing what i'm doing and the neighbor's going to jump on carbon markets and have a huge financial advantage over me how concerned about this do i need to be over the next five 10 20 years i'm gonna let mitchell take that one first because you you can address more directly what the cost is going to be which is a big part of this equation i mean you've got to make sure that the cost matches what you can get per ton of carbon yeah that's the major issue right now in full disclosure i have not um fully signed up for any of these carbon markets and we're very thoroughly into it but it it's also based on how the rules are written right now rewards farmers that are making massive changes to decrease their tillage add cover crop for the first time and degr decrease um synthetic inputs especially nitrogen so it's maybe another situation where somebody who's not doing a lot of tillage and has been planting cover crops and is at the forefront of it you can't jump on and take advantage of these programs as well as i could that's exactly and john that that brings me to kind of to my question so so zach your operation can get paid significantly because you have been utilizing some tillage you've been reducing um so that change you're not going to get paid for some of them you might be able to grandfather in some of the changes but but john you were bringing up you know how do we get farmers compensated for the carbon they've already sequestered or changes they've already made i don't i honestly don't foresee that happening at all however the number one thing that i think needs to be changed in this is to look at agriculture and our carbon on an annual sequestration basis all of these markets right now are really cost share and zach kind of to your question you know right now it's just an a different cost share you could go get equip you could get csp you could get state funding or watershed funding to be able to make some changes to you know get a strip till rig or plant cover crop or or do other water or carbon type of practices and that's really how these are set up right now is based on how far you change your operation but my argument and john want your thoughts on it is that farmers that are already doing these systems have the microbial communities built up to be able to foster cover crop and foster more diversity in their systems and my argument would be that after you make the transition now your system is really functioning and on an annual basis that cover crop and your cash crop and whatever else you're doing is sequestering carbon on an annual basis and the issue right now is that we're only all these markets are only looking at the change in practices but my argument being every year farms are pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and if we can get more photosynthesis going get more biomass out there get more diversity to stimulate more communities of microbes and continuously reduce tillage that that has a net better effect than only looking at the change in practices well and from a political and policy standpoint if you don't reward those early adopters they're not going to be excited about these programs they're not going to be trying to talk to others about how great they are because you know mitchell if you're not seeing dollars coming from it because you've already spent the dollars to get there you're not going to have the enthusiasm of the early adopters that this is going to need to get it to spread that's exactly you know a huge part of my point as well that the the early adopters are not just the ones that you know i don't think they're going to be necessarily after it to get paid all this money and everything they need to be able to make money they need to be able to participate in these markets and offset you know global carbon footprint but yeah their knowledge is super important to be able to bring others along with them that there's not that you know only what 4 of the farms in the country or four percent of acreage in the country are utilizing cover crops very small percentage of of acres but those acres are where all the other farmers need to learn from them and and zachman it goes to the point we always talk about it building that community around you know those local farmers but right now those farmers that are already doing the practices do not even qualify for these markets and and the key piece of that for clarification for everybody is it's based on the additionality clause that these markets are looking at additional things that you're doing in your operation my argument is that every year on an annual basis i am adding cover crop and i'm adding my cash crop adding more days of photosynthesis so that every year i am pulling more carbon out of the atmosphere but that's just different than how some of these other markets are set up um so there's just some rules that need to be better fine-tuned i think yeah those are some really good points and you talked a lot about the building the community there i mean we're gonna talk about that all through season three that's kind of a common theme when it comes to networking and figuring out how to make some of these things work on your farm and i think i think we're going to find that networking is kind of the biggest key when it comes to you know moving forward and and integrating the these other practices that we're all curious about um john there's been a lot of talk at least in minnesota about nitrogen regulations and how do we handle our nitrogen applications you know anhydrous ammonia is not great for the soil i hate what it does to the soil but i love the fact that i can put it down in the fall right before my soil freezes up and then in the spring my nitrogen application is done and i know a lot of people in my area love that and certainly north of me but how do we maybe move away from anhydrous application and maybe not necessarily move away from it totally but but manage it better and what do you see coming down the pipeline when it comes to nitrogen regulation specifically yeah and nothing coming out of the bright administration so far but you're certainly seeing it as you mentioned there in iowa um you're seeing a big push to to regulate nitrogen and in particular nitrogen flows it'll be interesting to see where this administration goes with that um i would hope that you'll see the the continued carrot rather than stick method carried through with nitrogen regulation as well and looking at using some of the conservation programs within usda to to fund and encourage uh practices that that fix nitrogen that uh control the flow of nitrogen off farm uh those types of things and and as you know there's a lot of new products coming out on the market uh microbials etc that that help fix nitrogen that um help reduce the the amount needed i mean you're just gonna you're gonna see that technology i think continue to grow again it's gonna take uh education and and you know folks like mitchell out there uh getting at the forefront of it and showing how they can be successful but i think uh you're going to see if you don't see gunfire changes um you know especially in states like iowa and illinois you are going to see tightened regulation on that because of some of the concerns about nitrogen in particular um and and particularly when you get to a gulf of mexico hypoxia issues part of you know all these different programs and and cost share type stuff is the money the concern is where's all the money come from there's been a lot of money come out of dc over the last year a lot of money you know through some of these programs for trade with mfp four coveted with this you know but with all these other programs and continued focus is that money really going to be there is it going to be long-term sustainable and i mean zack that's to your point on do you jump into one of these carbon markets well are they going to be their long-term their 10-year commitment um when is the right time to be able to do some of these things and how are they going to really work and ensure that these programs are going to be economically sustainable well and and i think that's part of why congress or why uh the administration is looking at monday credit corporation for spending on carbon credits you've got you know just this year you've got some 15 billion dollars that is going to go out in cfap payments um and so even though we've got a market that is more supportive of farm income there are still some structural weaknesses there as i mentioned there's not an appetite to continue a program like cfap but do we look at using ccc for carbon payments in some ways as a replacement for the money that's been going into agriculture through the cfap program i i think the administration is i think at least some of the administration are looking at it that way of this is a way that we can continue to have support for agriculture without continuing an ad hoc program good points there yeah i always just thought we could hit print and that's where the money comes from well yeah well john we appreciate the conversation today and uh mitchell as well for keeping me going on the carbon sequestration talk because that is so far above my head i depend on you for that but it's interesting definitely as a farmer sitting here you know all of this stuff you've got to be so aware of it you've got to keep up so thanks for joining us john uh we appreciate it hey thank you and appreciate the partnership we've had with fieldwork uh over these couple of years we uh we've had you guys post some of our uh write-ups and the audio on your site so we appreciate that yeah um as soon as they get posted check them out at agriweb.com and also on the akertalk app that's john harris news director at farm journal which has been an awesome partner to us here at field work and now it's time for a quick break and now we're back so before we get ahead of ourselves too much on the outlook of ag we want to bring out another guest here too has a really unique perspective from what he's seen from his time in washington dc we've got bill northey he's served as a under secretary at the usda in the trump administration we're going to cover a lot of ground here but bill just start us off with your takeaways from your time in dc well it was quite an interesting experience so i come from the farm and and was involved in state government was secretary of ag here in iowa and then got a call from the office of sonny perdue about uh sitting down to talk about what his vision was at usga um and as we sat down to talk i i really i had not met him before great experience to uh to to meet him have a conversation get a sense of kind of his vision my experience there was really kind of on the front lines of of the delivery of programs so it was farm programs conservation programs crop insurance programs those kinds of things secretary would talk a lot about customer service and about making government work um and so i was in one of those areas that that was really what farmers think about when does government work can i get signed up for a farm program and does my crop insurance program work the way it's supposed to and can the conservation program be understandable um and so all those pieces were were just a really great experience great staff there we also had a lot to do in three years we stood up some ad hoc programs which are additional programs to the standard programs the market facilitation program uh coronavirus food ass stance program um and and about 50 billion dollars over those five or six different ad hoc programs that we added as well so bill the usda it went through some reorganization or some restructuring and you ended up being the first person that led a team which was known as the farm production and conservation what were your priorities there and specifically what were the priorities when it came to conservation yeah so zach it really was a vision of the secretary so the previous farm bill in in 2014 farm bill had said they'd like to have the trade under secretary and the one that's responsible for for foreign ag service be its own stand-alone under secretary so at usda you have a secretary a deputy secretary and then eight under secretaries each have different program areas that the trade one was with farm programs and with crop insurance that needed to be pulled out on its own and so the secretary said what else should go on if something else should go on and and frankly most of us would think fsa and nrcs should be in the same place but they reported to somebody different dc and sometimes those folks got along and sometimes they didn't sometimes they talked and sometimes they didn't in this case they were all in the same shop and we met together all the time we helped rit coordinate better we helped our policies coordinate better and it really made a lot of sense uh to focus on the same people it's the same farmers out there that are working on conservation programs as farm programs and we could coordinate more of that by being able to have them in the same missionary so in a way were you kind of playing middle man to help facilitate the programs between the two sides we were um or i was but you're you're just meeting together all the time with both of them and and you hear something uh with one group if you're just meeting with that group and you say hey they're they're working on beginning farmer definition over at fsa too let's make sure that they're coordinated if they legally can be and in some cases congress actually wrote the legislation different so nrcs has to do something different than fsa um but in many cases they could be coordinated for example one of those things that we talked about it was really a nrcs risk management agency piece there was a concern about cover crops and whether crop insurance was encouraging or discouraging the use of governments and that's all the way back to agents as well as policies in adjusters and whether if you put in a cover crop you put yourself at risk that you might be doing a bad farming practice uh so we had folks meet together we said we got to rewrite some of that good farming practice discussion let's pull our inner cs folks in to be able to make sure and do that it was actually harder than it seemed like it should be but but it was very rewarding everybody's working together and at the end of the day that and some other things i think has us to the place today where we'd say crap insurance is not discouraging cover crops it's a good farming practice just like nutrient management is so bill as you're looking at changing some of those good management practices or best management practices i guess the right terminology what does the process of that look like as we continue to progress and and farmers innovate further mitchell i think that's a challenge i mean that that is government's slow to this process we see a few folks that abuse a process or look like they're doing that and it's very easy to overreact um and and not recognize that some folks are being creative and not everything that's creative it's successful and so it it is a challenge to do that so so typically around good farming practice we describe it in general you know what it takes to be a good farming practice and and and how folks analyze it and then we let a producer say okay this was somebody i worked with an extension agent on i had a consultant on this is something other people were doing and if a company says your crop failed because you didn't use a good farming practice then that producer has the opportunity to say hey it was relay cropping works here because i've got enough time and it works with these two crops back to back and i tried it with three acres before i've done it with with a hundred um and so they're able to do that not because somebody in dc says mitchell can do this or or you know zach can do that because the world is too big there's too many practices there's too much creativity and so you just define kind of structures of how that gets implemented and i think part of that is basically saying well you know here is a couple ccas certified crop advisors that are helping me or that kind of sign off that no this is something that can work here is that basically kind of what that process looks like if somebody is trying something really new that's exactly right what part of the air earlier was in cover crops is we required folks or it appeared like it was requiring folks to kind of pre-qualify their their cover crop planting time or their termination dates well first of all termination dates depend on whether they depend on lots of other things out there and you can't pre-qualify and and change that but but you can come in later and do it and we allowed that process for folks to be able to come in and say i couldn't get my i couldn't get in the field uh until may 20th uh and therefore uh me terminating at may 20th was just fine um all my neighbors said that and and my cca said it and and we got in as soon as we could and that was a timely planting not because i wanted to harvest it but because that's when we could get in and so um it really is about timing that's done afterwards not ahead of time because we have to have that flexibility for the actual growing season with some of the advances you made while you were there do you have any any concerns or ideas on where it might go now with the new administration in place i don't know that i do i think they have a whole new um realm of issues when you look at carbon um and the challenge is there and and and i'm sure we'll talk a lot about that but but the the challenge is there in standing that up i i think we did several different programs you know i talked about the the cpap and mfp and those were different kind of response programs that that it was amazing we could stand them up very quickly but they were based on economics we could say how much are people losing how much are cattlemen losing because of coronavirus and we could do an economic analysis and we may have may have been right or not and and two people may have a different response and so we may not hit it just right but at least we can analyze that it's a lot more of a challenge to say what's going on in that soil um and what's going on in that soil in a dry year in a wet year in your farm versus mitchell's farm versus my farm versus florida versus arizona versus hawaii these conservation programs have to work everywhere and by design nrcs allows flexibility between states with a state technical committee with local work groups to be able to say equip looks like this in arizona and it looks like this in montana now how do you do that around climate and then there's going to be a great temptation as well to say hey we want more cover crops which i love cover crops we want more cover crops therefore let's reduce the cost of insurance for cover crops well if it can be proven that there's less insurance cost then let's do that but let's not let's not destroy the actual functioning of of our crop insurance based on incentives that we want to apply someplace else and so be a temptation for that as well cost share to me payments to me need to be at fsa or nrcs and they should be there and then we should always make sure that crop insurance is ensuring based on the actual risk so there'll be those tensions so bill keep digging us a little bit further on that in that you're getting to you know there might be some other entities within usda or other groups that get involved here my understanding is that there's two main bills being worked through dc right now and obviously you're not not there in dc anymore but i'm sure you're super involved and very aware my understanding would be the growing climate solutions act and then the carbon bank is that correct and give us kind of the the lowdown on those two things especially on what a farmer should be paying attention to yeah so the carbon bank i'm aware of more and just kind of the general conversation of using you using a commodity credit corporation called ccc uh which funds conservation programs part plc other farm programs uh we went got some there for market facilitation program payments as well um and so it it's it's more of a funding mechanism now the bank could be just kind of a determining of value mechanism for the private industry to come in and say you know carbon ought to be worth 20 a ton or or that your system of no-till and cover crops is worth you know 0.78 pounds or 1.78 tons of carbon um mine is worth 0.65 or whatever so there could be a bank as far as determining value in either the carbon or in the practice in modeling the practice or determining the practice so i don't know how that's all going to play out and even when the legislation is done the real part that farmer cares about is how is it implemented you know what's it mean on my farm you know what's the payment for my cover crop and and is there a difference between rye and and three different cover crop uh mixes in that and and is there a difference if i terminate it in the end of april or terminated at the end of or the middle of may and and do you pay me different so so i don't think we're going to see any of that definition in the legislation congress doesn't know it they certainly can't know it in southeast iowa versus northwest arizona um and so they just need to provide kind of the general tools so i'd say watch but i think for farmers what we all need to do is figure out what can work in our area um and and nibble at it you know try some cover crops and and try some other you know a different combination of rotation and other pieces get more ready for whatever is going to happen so that that you're more ready you don't have to change anything also but get more ready it's going to come but i can't tell you the legislation is going to tell you what it looks like so behind the scenes at the usda with the amount of attention that carbon markets are getting as long as we're talking along those lines what's the talk like behind the scenes at the usda about how people feel about them and where we head from here is it kind of like you're saying where you know how do we really make the determination on what it's worth and how do we you know you can't put a you can't put an overall blanket on this and say that this is exactly what this should be right yeah it's it's a challenge um i think there's i don't know right now of course i'm not there anymore um but in the discussions at a different level now but we did have the secretary did announce a year ago secretary perdue the ag innovation initiative which was to say we're going to increase production and we're going to decrease inputs one of those things we were going to measure was carbon reduction and so we had some serious efforts in figuring out how do we do some measuring how do we understand that we're going to also look at water quality all other kinds of inputs um or for 40 or a 50 reduction in inputs out there as well uh so there was going to be an effort to do that and so there is kind of an infrastructure of sorts that's there but we're asking folks if there's a payment to do things in kind of a different way so nrcs typically looks at cost of implementation and then softens that so if it costs me you know a thousand dollars to put in a grass water way they'll pay me 500 and i pay i i need to put in the other 500 and and take the land out of production and that all makes sense or or maybe i'll put it into a crb contract and be able to get paid you know part of the rent of what that value is but in this case if we're trying to figure out value how many tons is either not emitted um and so there's really two different choices there too isn't there guys i mean we can say i'm normally admitting 100 tons and now i'm only going to mix 60 do i get 40. well i'm still admitting emitting 60 do or am i a no tiller who's already a negative admitter and do i get paid for continuing to bank that and sequester that carbon in my soil so is it i'm less bad or is it now i get to keep going because otherwise no tillers are going to say no tiller cover croppers um if you've already started that process you're going to say why would i keep going um because i can't make improvements and so there's that tension out there too around do we pay for conversions that are happening do we pay for ongoing sequestering and then how do we protect that once it's in the soil as well so i didn't give you answers zach i gave you questions and and i think folks are trying to figure those out but i think there's going to be a big effort to reach out to producers and say what's happening what do we know about the science and let's make sure the perfect's not the enemy of the good here we're not going to get this all right in the next six months we know directionally where we need to go we need to do less tillage we need to find ways of growing plants on that land more often um let's let's let's start that process yeah and you're getting right into you know a lot of the work that i've been trying to push on with these carbon markets is my viewpoint of the carbon markets today that are you know emerging are they're not necessarily a carbon market they're a new private cost share for practice change to be able to say okay well you're you know you're doing three passes of tillage today if you can go to no-till we'll pay you for the difference and if you can add cover crops will pay you for the delta in your carbon footprint not necessarily maybe the mitigation that you were saying that you were emitting 100 now you're 8 million 60 would pay for the difference there's some you know that can definitely be factored into those mitigation credits as well but um how i think we should be looking at is what is that growers bottom line net sequestration that way the more innovative you are the further you push things the more aggressive you get the more that you can be rewarded but how do we approach the science of that how do we change things because it's not even you know necessarily some of these markets that are coming out of the private sector they're playing within the rules so how do we look at you know the science component of this i think the markets have just developed so quickly that i don't know that all the science is really there to be able to back up some of these claims you know that we're arguing towards i i think that is a problem uh mitchell i i really i really do and one of the challenges is is i think it feels like we don't have time right because because the expectations are we're going to have a system set up in the next few months and yet we don't have all the knowledge well and the farmers are getting paid carbon credits today i mean this is real right there's farmers getting paid right now so yeah agreed now it's a handful uh it's a tiny handful of folks uh genetic circumstances are different and maybe at the end of the day it'll be like you know we'll have to decide if everybody's gonna grow biotech corn or non-gmo we don't have to decide we let markets do that i do think it'd be to most of us advantage to have at least the number two yellow out there what's kind of the standard of the market so we kind of know what the base is now if you want to throw something different at me throw it at me but but as opposed to 15 different ways that it all comes about so um in the government i would think will potentially be about establishing a standing and allowing other folks to do other things but it's but establishing a statement i've spent yeah an ungodly amount of time in this but and and i never anticipated it but it's just kind of the natural progression of things we've been working on and but yeah unfortunately zach i don't think we're going to buy our helicopter off of uh credit or off of carbon credits that's that's exactly where i really wanted to get to with this conversation yeah is that bill zach and i always joke that we need to get a helicopter and yeah carbon credits aren't going to fully do it but uh unfortunately maybe someday but a dollar raised in the corn price hey the corn price is pretty good i just uh i just sold the last of my corn though so i don't have any more corn in the bank but i do have a check that i need to go deposit today so good good for you you know that's what people don't realize the challenge is marketing the store and stuff i would have sold it all off the combine and watched i had to give up my farm to to go to usda because i could make a decision that would impact my own finances so so i've been saved from from feeling really bad about missing this whole price rise because i would have i would have flat out you would have jumped the gun and you would have gone early i would have thought in a quarter three and a half you know why in the world it's never gonna get to four bucks why in the world would i wait for for that i'm sure i'm sure glad you feel better about it bill um so bill we've been watching these um carbon markets and policy and stuff for the for a long time but here really recently my two republican senators from iowa senator chuck grassland center joni ernst have come out in support of the growing climate solutions act and some of these carbon initiatives any takeaway on how you've seen you know the bipartisanship or different political angles to this any any thoughts on how that's kind of changed and and how that's developing i guess on the policy side i mean i think there's still a wide sense of of uh responses out there there's a lot of folks who'd say don't tell me every every weather event is is caused by climate and caused by people um but but but there is a sense that that that there's something going on out there potentially around weather we don't know what it is and climate um but really certainly i think there's a sense that that there's a political movement here that says we've got issues around carbon dioxide and and certainly a political dynamics that are going to lead us down this road let's make sure that it's done the right way let's make sure that it's done in a science-based way in an incentive-based way as opposed to it to you know use the carrot not the stick um and and let's make sure that we're doing things thoughtfully and so there's folk there's some grudging participation there's probably some enthusiastic participation but i would say certainly more participation out there in this and i think it's a recognition that not only is this an issue here it's an issue other places um and while we may or may not have a sense of exactly what it means or whether everything we're going to do it contributes it frankly if you know there's a there's folks out there i know that are producing organic crops that say i don't think they're any better than the other stuff but but the market's asking for them and if there's a market here then let's be smart about how this market is created and and i'm willing to participated and so i think there's a participation level where some folks were just saying if i stay away from this it won't happen now they're saying it's going to happen i need to figure out where i'm going to be involved with bill i wanna i wanna turn this to you know your farm that you just brought up um and yeah you haven't been able to to be directly involved as a conflict of interest of course to your role at usda but are you able to get back on the farm now or what are some of the things you're up to you know let's let's talk farming here a little bit tell us about your farm so my farm is uh northwest iowa as zach said up at spirit lake um and so uh um farmed on it my grandpa started it back in the 1930s and we raised our kids in the same house grandpa and grandma lived in and and uh just i it it i didn't grow it very much during my time back farming because i started going off the farm to do other things getting involved in corn growers association and then as a secretary of ag in iowa so it became a weekend farm it was six or eight hundred acres of of crops up there and that's the part of the world where that can be three or four fields um you can get that so you can you can get that done on weekend and with lights on the tractor um had a guy that helped me still have all the equipment sitting in a shed uh my brother-in-law's farming it now and sister and they're probably doing a better job than i was uh because they're thinking about it every day and i was thinking about other things part of the time but one of those things i did get from being gone was um an interest more in no-till and strip till i started with striptow went to noto um was no-till for about 20 years um then as i got it i was at the secretary bag in iowa we we really looked at water quality and knew that cover crops was part of that as well as buffer strips and bioreactors and saturated buffers and lots of other things out there and technologies but cover crops was something that i could watch people do that that i thought were really innovative and creative and some of that was down in your area mitchell washington county number one county for cover crops in iowa um and and it was folks down there that that could help me understand and so i started trying cover crops and then my neighbor said you can't raise cover crops up here on the minnesota border and and we could um you know i'd often have them flown on um around uh labor day um and uh then you know make sure you got enough moisture i did it a few times without moisture and didn't have anything but but if you had moisture those cover crops had come up they'd be there at harvest time they get growing some probably six or seven years of of you know a hundred and probably 200 acres hundred acres of of corn 100 acres of soybean cover crops arrived just right um out of the 800 acres or 600 acres that i had so really enjoyed it really thought it did some great things for the soil i don't have any numbers to tell you what it was doing but i liked it hopefully um get back out haven't figured out exactly what's next for me would love to be able to fit in a little bit of hormone uh in with that as well uh but it'll probably be a little bit i won't make my living there i'll probably do something else but uh certainly want to be able to get out in the tractor and get out on a little bit billy you can get into professional podcasting like zach and i do that's right that's an option and you buy in in and then get your used helicopters when you're done with them right for all the money you're making from podcasts okay so i gotta ask here bill the burning question from all the listeners what is it like having donald trump as your boss and any good stories any good stories about that because there's gotta be there's gotta be something i wish i could make up one here real quick um he never swung by the office so i don't have any good story i think i'd have to make one up i think they'd have nightmares about him saying you're fired you know you just don't want to be one of his tweets you don't want to be in one of his tweets and i never was as far as i know and so i think i would have known if i was that's a good way to judge the job that you're doing you know as long as you're not on the president's twitter feed you should be okay that's right bill we're gonna have to let you go here this has been awesome and i've and great to catch up with you and again thanks for all your work over these last couple years and we'll be watching close on what's next appreciate it bill it's been great talking to you appreciate it all right everyone now it's time for a listener voicemail here's one that rolled in a few months after season two had ended and we wanted to be sure to include it hi zach and mitchell i'm colton turlington i'm out of kentucky me and my dad run cattle and bail some square bales for the local horse farmers right around us i just want to thank you guys for uh all the knowledge you guys have given me on other categories of agriculture i listen to you guys while i'm in the cloud baron hey thank you guys well hey man thanks for thanks for the love yeah absolutely see we like what we're doing on podcast too there doesn't always have to be a question i mean sometimes you can just call in and praise mitchell and i we love those kinds of calls we do go give us a rating or something i think those those would be good tell your friends too that's it for field work today our show is produced by annie baxter with lots of great help this season from laurie stern amy mayer mike langseph and corey suzuki kristen schmidt runs our social media la lions does our marketing and lauren humber is our project coordinator special thanks to veronica rodriguez eric romani and johnny vince evans for engineering and mixing our show this season johnny vince also composed and performed our theme music be sure to check us out on social media or at fieldworktalk on all the usual channels and we'd love it if you would write us a review and help other people find the podcast don't forget of course that we love hearing from you so give us a call with your comments or questions at 651-228-4810 that is 651-228-4810 thanks for listening tune in every week and we'll catch you next time you