America’s farms are disappearing at an unsustainable rate of 1.5 million acres per year. Yes, this has implications in terms of food production, but it also impacts our ability to deal with climate change. Through conservation practices and regenerative innovation, agricultural lands have the potential to sequester a great deal of carbon in the soil—and that can’t happen if development continues to erase our farms and ranches. So, how do we promote agriculture as a natural climate solution?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I am Ross Kenyon here with Paul Gamble and Christophe Jospe. We’re in Washington, D. C. and I realized this morning just how West Coast I am slash have become because I couldn’t tie my tie. I forgot how to tie a tie. I felt like a 12-year-old boy. And Paul did it for me. So thank you, Paul.
Paul Gambill: You’re welcome, son.
Christophe Jospe: You look very dapper, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: He also taught me how to shave.
Unknown speaker: No, I remember that one. How about tying your shoes?
Ross Kenyon: No, I got that one. That one’s okay.
Christophe Jospe: That’s great. Well, sitting across from us, we’ve got Jimmy Dacus. He is the Senior Program Officer at American Farmland Trust. We will learn more about what that means, what that does, how that fits in the broader farm economy and all the sorts of things that they’re advocating for that very much align with things that we care about too. Jimmy is, I think, someone who probably has more knowledge than all of us collectively in this space. So we’re just going to try to suck it all out of him and pass it on to you, the listeners.
But Jimmy, we like to start with people’s story to really understand how they got to where they are today, which is sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. So how did it all get started for you?
Jimmy Daukas: Wow. Well, thank you for inviting me and coming here to D. C. to our offices. I grew up in New England, in Connecticut, across from Hartford in a place called Glastonbury, Connecticut. It used to be farmland. During my lifetime, became more and more suburban households, and we lost a lot of the orchards and other things. As a high schooler, I worked in the tobacco fields during the summers, that shade tobacco in the Connecticut River. I got an opportunity, I went to school, got involved in environmental organizations. But I got an opportunity to work at American Farmland Trust 21 years ago and found that this was an opportunity to combine my interest in land, my interest in agriculture, my interest in food and in environmental issues.
And one of the things that I was interested in was the loss of farmland to houses and how my hometown had changed over my lifetime and turned into houses instead of farms and orchards. So I’ve been with AFT for 21 years. I like to say that I’ve had almost every job in the organization as I bounced around, but also filled some gaps. And it’s been very interesting the last decade I’ve been on the program side and the last two years. We really have been focused on creating our climate initiative. It’s not that we just started working on climate change.
We started back in the Waxman-Markey legislation days, but we have elevated it to a national initiative and are working in a number of places across the country.
Ross Kenyon: Where do farmers fit into climate change? Where might they have a lever to pull, you could say?
Jimmy Daukas: So climate change is going to impact farmers and ranchers and landowners probably as much or more than any other sort of group on the planet. Agriculture is a weather-based industry. Industry, the kinds of changes that climate change is creating in terms of increased heat and storms and fires and waters and droughts and too much rain and heavy storms, those are the things that make farming and ranching a lot more difficult. They’re on the front lines of some of the impacts. On the other hand, we believe that they can be one of the most important solutions to climate change.
That is, they being farmers, ranchers, and landowners, but ag lands and natural lands, including forests and wetlands, can be part of the solution by drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it down in the soil and into the roots. That is a unique and absolutely needed solution. Activity, given what we’re seeing now from all the research on climate change. Farmers and ranchers are both at the forefront of being impacted by it, and yet also able to be a really important solution to climate change.
Christophe Jospe: And I guess to kind of round that out with a trifecta, a lot of the way that agriculture is operated today is one of the driving causes because it’s a major emitter of carbon dioxide, especially when you plow, you’re depleting the soil of nutrients and carbohydrates. You know, one of the things that I love about American farmland transportation, And I totally hear you growing up in a place that has these kind of beautiful fields around and then you go back and like, oh man, there are houses. That was my backyard.
Grew up with a cornfield in the backyard. Now there are 250 houses. You know, it’s just a state of development. Development’s real, but it seems like American Farmland Trust is able to say we’re going to find those places that are under threat of development and make sure that they stay food producing lands.
Jimmy Daukas: Why is that important? Yeah. So let me just start off. I didn’t even say it, but American Farmland Trust, our mission is to save the land that sustains us, to protect our best farmland, to promote environmentally sound farming practices, and to keep farmers on the land. Okay. So that really puts us in a position to really care and work on, you know, The future sustainability and that isn’t always true for a lot of different groups. A lot of groups are engaged in agriculture because they want to do it for a different reason or some farm groups are really member organizations.
We’re trying to think of where’s it going to be in 50 years? How do we protect the land? So this is our mission is really important as it relates to climate change because how we use our land and how we develop and how we develop our urban and suburban areas has a really, really big impact on climate change. So one of the things that’s overlooked. Look, we feel in the whole discussion about carbon farming and carbon sequestration is if we don’t protect the land, if we grow in a sprawling manner, we undermine all the good work that we can do because sprawling development increases vehicle miles.
Increases energy use. We’ve done some studies in California, New York, trying to ballpark and do some alternative scenarios that find that if we can do farmland protection and compact growth, that we can, by reducing the We can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For AFT, that’s the core mission of AFT. Then that becomes a really important first step in climate change. Once you protect the land, then we can go on and have a conversation about management practices and the issues that you raised and how we might change some of those and improve those.
Ross Kenyon: What’s happening right now with the changing demographics of farmers? I’ve told this story before, but I knew some people who were young, graduated from college, and just went and decided to start farming, which I always thought that you were just born into it. Farming is almost like a caste system. Yeah.
Jimmy Daukas: Well, yeah. And so that’s sort of the third part of our mission, which we say keeping farmers on the land. And well, first, let me just answer the demographic question. Yes. I mean, farmers, when you look across all of the age groups, are getting older, right, as a group. But it is also... It’s also true that young farmers is a growing sector. It’s not just young, it’s new and beginning farmers because some of them are young and like your friends, but some of them are second job opportunities. People are retiring or looking at it or building out.
We look at it as new and beginning farmers. Here’s one of the issues. One of the things that pops when you talk to new and beginning farmers as a barrier to doing what you just said is access to affordable land. So that’s part of the work that we’re trying to do in terms of creating resources. Policies at the federal and state level and local level, because land use is a local issue, to try to make more land available in the future so that people who are interested in the kinds of things that you’re talking about have access to land.
In fact, Ben, on your podcast a couple of sessions ago, raised that as one of the issues, right? Money to buy land and that kind of accessibility. As the competition for farmland goes up because of housing and We can talk about other kinds of competitions because there’s other competitions from renewable energy and from reforestation and other kinds of things. But as that price goes up, it makes it even harder for people to get on. But I think that because of regional and local food systems, there are There are new opportunities for farmers and ranchers to be closer to the markets, to maybe earn a higher premium for some of the product.
That’s allowing them to bring new ideas to how we do farming. I think that’s very exciting.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, where is all this competition for land use coming from? Obviously, you have just development that can be quite sprawling at times, but you also mentioned something about renewable energy competing for some of this land.
Christophe Jospe: You hear models that are being put out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And how are we going to solve climate change? Oh, well, we’re going to need negative emissions. Well, how are we going to do that? Oh, with bioenergy, carbon capture and storage. Well, how are we going to do that? We need to plant a lot of trees. Where are those trees going to go? It very quickly starts thinking about models that are planting trees on land that we need to feed the planet. And so it ain’t going to work.
The math’s not going to add up. So there’s all these competing forces. So... Yeah, given that, American Farmland Trust is sort of uniquely positioned to become this protector of food producing lands. And I’m quite curious to see how you can talk sense into those who are advancing things in the name of sustainability, but don’t necessarily see the whole equation.
Jimmy Daukas: So we’re going to take that quote, though, and put it up on our website. Yeah. That uniquely situated. So we think so. And that’s why we dove into this and are expanding our operations and our work in this area. Because we think there’s a real... We issued a report in May called Farms Under Threat that looked back from 92 to 2012 and found that 1. 5 million acres of ag land are converted every single year. That to us is amazing. Unsustainable, right? Okay, this is urban sprawl or urban development, I should say.
But then it’s also sort of suburban and rural sprawl. And that’s what we refer to as fragmentation. So you take a big, large fragmentation. You divide it up into ranchettes or McMansions or things like that. That’s a big use of land. At 1. 5 million acres, if we’re losing that every single year, that’s a real problem. That’s here in the We will be projecting out to 2040 this next year with this project. So that will be even more interesting as we look at what’s the total potential loss of ag land or conversion of that ag land, but also where does it happen, right?
Where are the hotspots? The other thing that we’re trying to do is to look at the best land. And the best land is what’s most productive, what’s also versatile, that growing different kinds of things, right? It’s not just growing corn, right? Even prime soils often grow corn, but we also want sour cherries and we want cranberries and we want, you know, walnuts. And then lastly, resilient. That is, right, land that can continue to grow even as we’re going to see more and more impacts of climate change. So that’s one of the things that we want to do.
Once we’re identifying that land, AFT, that’s what we want to focus on, right? That’s the most important land to be protecting for intensive food production. The competition for land, for all ag lands in the future, is in addition to housing and that fragmentation. It also comes from renewable energy, but in particular sort of solar. And we see it flashing in different parts of the country, but certainly in the Northeast, but we’ve also seen it a lot in California, where you’d like to cite solar... And we as an organization want to support expanding solar.
We absolutely need to do that to address climate change. But we don’t believe that it should be sited on our best, most productive farmland. And without some policies, we’re sort of behind the curve, without some policies to try to create incentives to drive it away and to try to put it on sort of more marginal land. We see that some of the solar panels go up on better land, and that doesn’t make any sense. In addition, another increasing competition for land is what you mentioned, which is the need for increasing carbon sequestration and running models that say it’s easier to look at this and see growing trees will sequester carbon, so let’s put those on the land, and what’s the potential?
That’s how models run. Let’s look at the potential available land. Then you look at it and you start converting 10% or 20% or 25% of ag lands to forests, which I don’t think is a great idea. Putting some of those trees, reforesting marginal land makes a lot of sense. And so we’re hoping that some of our research to identify the best land also identifies some of the marginal land. And one of the things that we want to be looking at in the future is, what do you do with that marginal land?
I don’t know that it’s sort of best use, but some of it would be solar panels, some of it’s Some of it probably shouldn’t have been farmed in the first place. I think that becomes a really important part of the climate solution. The last piece of it is I think there has to be a lot more research and a lot more attention on the carbon sequestration potential of active ag lands. We believe that long term, we’re going to be much better off if we can solve this on ag lands and not just have it be all about reforestation.
If we can do that on ag lands, I think that’s actually what we say and it’s in the Project Drawdown book. If we can solve it on ag lands and it’s productive, that’s the most sustainable solution to address climate change, right? We’re going to produce food. We’re also going to sequester carbon. We’re going to make it more productive in order to be producing.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, there’s a lot there to unpack. And I really appreciate the way that you kind of framed the positioning of American Farmland Trust. Actually, the last guests we had were some folks who do agroforestry. And that seems like a very interesting hybrid where it’s not saying, no, trees are actually And when you plant the trees on the soil, what’s going to end up happening is the fungal network and the corridor actually gets a whole lot better and improves the biodiversity and improves the productivity of your land and all these great things.
And so we’re totally on board there. To sort of go back to my uniquely positioned, the reason I said that is because you operate this space that goes from farm table to Congress and everything in between. So could you talk a little bit about how that works and how, I guess, how does this work? How do you translate what you’re learning on the farm level into Congress that are actionable policies? And how does that go back to the farm and what needs to sort of fit?
Jimmy Daukas: So I think that one of the ways that we work or sort of a process is we’re working with a lot of partners on the ground, but we’re trying to do research and understand what’s sort of holding back kind of adoption of these conservation practices or what we call conservation cropping systems. And we can get into terms here. We’re trying to understand what’s holding back some of it because we believe that we know more than we’re doing. That is, we know more about some of the climate smart agriculture than is We’ll see you next time.
One of the things that we are able to do then is to come up with some ideas and solutions to tweak the policy, right? Once we understand what’s going on, what works. And then we are a policy organization working at the local, state, and federal agencies. To change policies, to improve policies, to build the case for more support for those kinds of policies, and then those policies get changed, like the introduction of a new conservation program within NRCS, and then worked in taking that and trying We’re trying to work on it to try to accelerate adoption back on the field with these projects of providing technical assistance and other kinds of things.
It’s really a circular between testing it out in the field, identifying barriers, making solutions, changing policy, and then coming back to implement those programs.
Ross Kenyon: Why do you think that prices might not be the best way to allocate land in this way? Like if this is very productive farmland, that would be priced into it. So why would you need a policy to say, hey, don’t sell this farmland and turn it into condos? But wouldn’t turning into condos be the highest valued use?
Jimmy Daukas: Well, so I don’t think that if we’re really looking at societal benefits, the highest and best use is just determined simply by how much we would pay for it. That’s an economist’s viewpoint, but I don’t think that’s actually true from an environmentalist or societal benefits.
Ross Kenyon: It’s possible there’s just not prices for those other things, and otherwise it might be taken into account and you’re compensating with the policies because those things aren’t priced.
Jimmy Daukas: Yeah, they aren’t priced. We don’t know what would happen if we didn’t have food. Many externalities aren’t priced, both positively and negatively. I think the reality is agricultural land right now cannot compete on a dollar-for-dollar basis with houses. We believe that there should be carrots and sticks, so there are carrots and incentives, there are sticks in terms of regulations, so there’s some base amount of regulation. We don’t say that you can’t sell your land for housing development, but we think from society’s viewpoint, You’ll be better off if we protect a bunch of that and we protect our best land.
Those are the kinds of policies. We want to see development like smart growth and have that compact. Then we find out that there’s lots of benefits to compact. Growth, right? At first, we were trying to convince people. And now everyone knows that walkable communities are maybe even more livable and they’re actually even more beneficial. And so that’s changing. But that’s the same kind of thing that we want to do on renewable energy. We call it smart solar siting on farmland. So that’s another one of those things. How do we put it on the land that makes more sense and then conserve the land?
And to do that, we do need some policies and some incentives.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, what’s the spread? So how much is this land? I don’t even know if you can give me an answer in the general here, but how much is land worth as farmland and then how much more proportionally would it be worth as housing? Is it a gap where a certain carbon price and if people were doing carbon farming, it might be more at parity, so the policy might be less necessary potentially? Or is the spread just so huge that these would almost always turn into houses? Yeah.
Jimmy Daukas: So I was about to say yes until you said that they will almost always turn into houses. I think there’s other policies that help it not to turn into houses, right? Of where you grow and how you grow and where zoning is and all those kinds of things. But to answer your first question, the differential is too large. You can’t make it up with some cost share or some carbon market, right? Just on the edge. It can be 10s and 20 times much more expensive. You can rent land for a couple hundred dollars, under $500.
In some places, it’s more than that. But then you can sell for 10 or 20, or if you’re out on Long Island, $250,000 an acre. So it’s just not comparable. But from a society point of view, that’s okay. We don’t want to develop on all the land. And I think that society supports those kinds of things. So we can do that with policies. What we then need to do, which maybe it’s good for the conversation to shift into how we manage the land. So we have a lot of ag land, right?
Sometimes people will say, well, don’t we even have too much ag land? I don’t think so in certain places, but you know.
Ross Kenyon: It’s all pretty concentrated, right?
Jimmy Daukas: Yes. And in and around urban areas, we don’t have enough for regional and local food systems. But when we talk about what we’re doing on the land and how we fund management practices, now that’s where... A carbon market or payments to farmers, incentives to farmers can actually really make a difference because those of the farmers who are active, they want to be doing that, right? Frankly, they don’t really want to be growing trees, so that’s not an option even if you could make money. The landowner might, but not the producer.
For the most part, agriculture is a low margin and fairly risky business. Having additional revenue streams has always been something that we’ve always been talking about. It’s been a challenge. You do cost share, but cost share is just a portion of what the cost is. But paying for ecosystem services, realizing those environmental benefits, paying and recognizing co-benefits, trying to do it through environmental markets, that’s always been something that if we could get it to work, it could really have a real impact on the activities that happen on the land.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that’s our hope. That’s why we’re in this business and hoping to do everything that we can to get it to work. But, you know, some of the nuances are challenges and these are terms that you just threw around. So I kind of want to unpack like, what does this mean? So we’ve got a farm operator. We’ve got a... They could be the same person. They could be different. We know that half of the land in the agricultural land is rented. And so you’re talking about different rental prices. So this introduces a whole other set of dynamics.
So I’d just kind of be interested in getting your perspective. Perfect. That’s great.
Jimmy Daukas: We actually have some specific work and projects going on in there. Back to how I said it works a little bit in terms of the process. We’re looking at these barriers. One of the things that got identified, not just by AFT, but by others as well, One of the structural barriers that if we could address it might unleash a lot more widespread adoption so we can get a scale impact was this whole question of the relationship between the renter and what we call the non-runner. So the landowner who is not the producer, not the person working the land.
And as you said, you said 50%. I think nationally it’s about 40%, but it pops all over the place. And in some of the counties in Illinois where we work, Over 70%. So that means there’s a disconnect between the owner and the operator, as you said. And what we find from some surveys is that owners who both own and rent land do more conservation practices on the land that they own. So now we’re talking about the people who get it. We don’t have to get them to adopt or understand a new practice.
These are the people who already get it and they’re doing it on their own land. So there’s something wrong with The relationship between the owner and the producer. And so trying to address that, we are working with the Nature Conservancy and some other groups on, we’re doing surveys in the top 10 states that have the highest rental rates to try to understand. And then we’re doing some sort of on-the-ground work to try to create. What we found is that most of the land is on year-to-year leases, but more than 40% of the land...
Has a tenure of 10 to 12 years. So you have long enough time relationships, but annual leases. So one of the things that everyone’s exploring is how do we extend leases? How do we share the risk to extend leases? Because then the producers would be... And so, if we can get some communication going between the producer and the landowner, then that relationship. Oh, I didn’t know that you wanted to do cover crops and I’d like you to do cover crops. So there’s sort of almost just a question of trying to create some more opportunities for the landowner and the operator.
So that would be a big deal. Instead of 50% being annual leases, you would have 50% of all of them be five-year leases. That would change the dynamics of conservation, I think, in terms of millions of acres across the country. That’s one example of trying to work on that, then trying to see how you would change policy, and then try to implement that across the country.
Christophe Jospe: That’s great. I feel like you are dropping so many nuggets of wisdom that someone could pay like hundreds of dollars to go to some conference or they could just listen to this podcast and get Jimmy giving all sorts of great ideas that could really create dramatic change.
Unknown speaker: Got anything else for us?
Jimmy Daukas: So here’s one thing that I think... It would be interesting to listeners and I’m just introducing the concept. But one of the things that I find in going to climate and ag conferences is we’ve got a wide spectrum. We’ve got a continuum of sort of practices and we have got conventional ag. And I think of it as a continuum, and it isn’t perfect, but a continuum that works there. And then you sort of add practices and you start working towards conservation, like I said, conservation cropping systems or conservation agriculture. You then work into organic maybe, and again, not perfect continuum.
And then there’s regenerative. I think given what the IPCC report said that said, you know, we got about 12 years to really make a difference and really take some action. I think we need to do, you know, on all of those fronts. So AFT being sort of size neutral, working with all We want to have progress across that entire continuum. I would love if we could get 100 million acres of conventional agriculture doing cover crops. That’s an impact at scale. At the same time, we need our regenerative ag innovations leading the way.
And I don’t know, and maybe you guys can come up with a better kind of analogy or metaphor, but there’s kind of this giant grain table. Tanker of grain out there. And that’s conventional ag. And it’s sort of slow to move and it’s out there, but it’s the biggest thing. But somehow there are these speedboats or maybe they’re tugboats redirecting it or something. And that’s what we need. We need both. And we need the... The innovations from regenerative ag. But if we just look at only the full spectrum in a certified regenerative ag, I just don’t know that we have in the timeframe needed adoption.
So I want to have as much of that As we can while we’re also sort of bringing on. But sometimes we’re at odds and we’re arguing amongst each other when I think we need to elevate ag as a climate solution into natural and climate solutions. And then we have to elevate. Elevate natural climate solutions up into federal and state climate policy. And, you know, that’s new. At the climate summit, natural climate solutions got a lot of press. That was great. But we need to now take advantage of that, work with states, implement stuff so that, you know, over the next 10 years, there’s changes on the ground.
Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure how you feel about that, Kristoff, but I do like as long as they’re going the right direction. When we speak with big ag companies, they tend to be quite favorable. They see their fertility dropping. They know they have high input costs, the same as small people. They might be able to better internalize those costs and spread them across their entire production. But I think it’s getting a warm reception. I’m happy that the train has started. But also, if we only relied on ag solutions, I’m not sure we’d be able to fully get there.
Unknown speaker: I think we could. Wait, what’s the potential for ag soils around the world? Do we know the storage capacity? The only actual study that we’ve seen about this is in the US, it’s 1 billion tonnes per year on croplands. That doesn’t include grasslands. And Alden is giving me hand signals behind Jimmy. That’s 11 billion tonnes globally from croplands. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So 11 billion tonnes a year from croplands, not including grasslands. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Wouldn’t get us all the way there.
Jimmy Daukas: No. So let me just, I don’t, I didn’t mean to say that’s the only solution. I just want to elevate it in terms of attention and resources, but I think- You got to do the other kinds of things. I think the other thing that came up at the climate summit was that natural climate solutions, which would be ag and forest, could be 37% of the global solution. That’s sort of the number that got sort of passed around. A lot of that is forestry and the only thing that I would say is as you guys are focused and to the extent that your listeners are focused on ag lands, I think that there’s a lot more research to understand the potential because when we do those models, we tend to not take The results that Gabe Brown and some of the regenerative people are getting because it’s just not yet ready to multiply times a billion acres, right?
And so this is where some of this kind of in this continuum and the different people sort of talking across, we want to encourage that to see if we could get to five or six or X percent, even while we’re just trying to add 1% to all the land. And I think there’s more research that needs to be done, but I think there’s a lot more potential.
Ross Kenyon: Sure. And I think the co-benefits that come along with ag are so stupendous that it’s interesting that it’s been ignored for so long or very little participation in the legacy carbon markets because we get really excited by ag’s potential. And we see it’s actually... Relatively easy to talk with people who work in agriculture, wouldn’t you say? As opposed to something like carbon capture mineralization, which doesn’t carry that same level of benefit.
Christophe Jospe: Also, it’s a question of like, we know how to improve tops. Soils, people have been doing it. It has not been happening at a major scale, but there is.
Ross Kenyon: And don’t we have like how many decades left of topsoil left? I heard something like 40 years or 60, somewhere in that range.
Jimmy Daukas: Yeah, it depends on how you assume the soil erosion goes. But yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So yeah, we need to start working on that. So there’s a lot of really great reasons why we’re starting with ag and are so excited to do so.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, and I really appreciate the way that you frame the continuum because I think absolutely we get a lot of our inspiration from people like Gabe Brown and the regenerative space. We’re still coming for you, Gabe. But if Nori is not working with Big Ag, we’re not going to work. So, Big Ag, if you’re listening, we are working with you and we’re coming for you as well. And it has to be that continuum. But I want to kind of go back to, you know, we’re here in DC, climate change. Climate change is often quite politically charged.
We don’t want this to be political and we maybe don’t want to even use the word climate change. And oftentimes farmers say, well, talk to me about soil health, talk to me about improving my topsoil. But as soon as we say the word climate change, it falls on dead ears. So can you unpack that a little bit? Should we be changing our brand when we go out to Iowa, Indiana, Illinois?
Jimmy Daukas: So, I think it depends on audience, right? You know, I mean, that sounds a little bit like a cop-out, but I think it does. And we speak to different audiences in different ways. Hopefully, if we’re ethical and true, you know, it’s the same message, but it is with some... Some, you know, different words or emphasizing things that matter to them. So I think that we have to talk about climate change. And if we had this conversation four or five years ago, I think that everyone had said, you know what, we’ll just sort of not say that.
And we’ll only. Talk about soil health. And I think that actually worked within the sort of ag community with the USDA. But I think that it’s important to be talking about climate change and to be trying to get over the hump, even if we don’t have to debate how much was human or not, or just that it exists and that we have to do something about it. Having said that, though, as our director from our Midwest office said, hey, Jimmy, you know, okay, we’re having this climate initiative discussion, but can I tell you, I never talk about climate.
Oh, and by the way, I don’t talk about water quality either. We work on that. That’s one of those wonderful co-benefits. She goes, I don’t actually talk about soil health that much. I talk about productivity and resiliency. And we haven’t talked a lot about that. But again, one of the things that makes me optimistic is It appears that the same practices, right, the conservation cropping systems and even beyond that to regenerative ag and integrating livestock into it, that those appear to be regenerating the soil, making it more productive and making it more resilient, right, which we need to do the adaptation.
And that then is an economic issue for the producer and the landowner. And that’s what makes me optimistic because it’s a little different than some of the other solutions, right? This is what we sort of want And before we got on the air, we talked a little bit about farmers that do a practice like this for five plus years. They don’t go back. It’s not because they continue to get cost share dollars or they keep on getting carbon market payments. It’s because it’s the right thing to do for the soil and for their own productivity.
That’s very exciting. Maybe frames a different question that says, all right, so how do I deal with this in terms of transition? How do we transition along that continuum from one to the next, from conventional to conservation, from conservation to regenerative? And maybe there’s an investment time needed during that transition of three to five to seven years or something. But that at least gives me hope for changing practices and having it have long-term impact.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s one thing that – you’re going to say something.
Unknown speaker: Nope.
Ross Kenyon: One thing that we are trying to do is definitely make that more affordable for people looking to make that transition. I’ve also seen proposals that as far as farm subsidies go, maybe make it easy for people to switch over to that where crop insurance and subsidies tend to favor conventional approaches to ag rather than on the regenerative spectrum. Is that – Yeah.
Jimmy Daukas: I mean a good example is if we truly – believed and had the data to show that these practices would increase productivity and reduce resiliency, then we ought to be seeing some sort of actuarial impact and therefore it ought to influence crop insurance and premiums, that is, right? For the person who’s been using conservation cropping systems for 15 years, They probably are a lower risk. They have less claims. Yeah, and we talked to a farmer in Indiana, 5,000 acres of corn and beans have been using conservation cropping systems for over 15 years.
And he said, you know what, the problem is, I can’t really use crop insurance effectively because it compares to the county averages and I am less risky than the county averages. And so he’s actually doing this because he thinks it’s the right way to do it and it is making his... And so I think there’s some exciting things to be testing in that area.
Ross Kenyon: I think I have more questions, but it’s time for us to go. There was a lot in there. Thanks for sharing all that.
Jimmy Daukas: No, thank you. It was fun.
Ross Kenyon: I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of the policy stuff, but we didn’t. There’s just too much to cover. It’s too good.
Christophe Jospe: No, let’s do lightning round. Policy, go.
Unknown speaker: Fix the world. Ready?
Jimmy Daukas: I’ll tell you one thing. You got to come back because we’re about to hire to become our new climate director, a woman by the name of Jennifer Moore Cacera. And she’s going to know all the technical stuff because she is the... She’s the co-director of the Northwest Climate Hub, and she’s the soil health lead in the Northwest or the Western part of NRCS. And so she’s going to be coming on board, and I’d love to do another one because she could then tell you really how some of the soil health stuff works and the soil health trainings and things like that.
It would be very exciting.
Unknown speaker: That sounds great.
Christophe Jospe: A million times yes. Yeah. We’ll come back for that. Yeah, this is the first time Nori is in town in DC. We are certainly impressed by the strategic importance of this city and we recognize that we will need to be here probably much more often than we have been. Which is thick, why don’t you?
Jimmy Daukas: Yeah, exactly. And by the way, Jennifer’s in Corvallis, Oregon, so she’s not actually here. So that’s even easier.
Christophe Jospe: Easier for us. So we’ll be there next. We’re coming for you, Jennifer. That’s our new line. Well, thank you. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you, Jimmy. We look forward to the next time we get to hang out.
Jimmy Daukas: Thank you.
