Hannah Birgé is the Director of Water and Agriculture and Nelson Winkel is the Platte River Prairies Assistant Preserve Manager and Soil Health Specialist with The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Hannah and Nelson join Ryan and Christophe to discuss the conservation practices farmers are adopting in the Great Plains and explain how The Nature Conservancy supports them with funding, technical support and labor.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Christophe Jospe: Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Christophe Jospe sitting here with a new co-host, Ryan Anderson.
Ryan Anderson: Hello.
Christophe Jospe: Ryan, should we fire Ross or Alexsandra?
Ryan Anderson: No, keep them. Just add to the mix.
Christophe Jospe: We should definitely keep them, but the roster of the Nori co-hosts is growing. We’re really happy with having Ryan here. We’re still here in Salina, Kansas at the Land Institute. It’s been a hell of a journey learning about things. The intellectual We have Hannah Berger and Nelson Winkle. They are both with the Nebraska Nature Conservancy. Hannah is the Director of Water and Agriculture.
Nelson Winkel: And Nelson is the Ag Specialist It’d be Assistant Land Manager for the Platte River Prairies and Soil Health Specialist for Nebraska.
Christophe Jospe: Great. And so welcome to the show, Hannah and Nelson.
Hannah Birgé: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Christophe Jospe: So we’ve been looking forward to doing this one because, you know, it’s easy to sit back on our platform and talk about ideas that we might not be directly connected to and specifically around, you know, improving the health of soils and putting carbon in the soils. And oftentimes when you’re not connected to that, you can think of certain realities that might not be the reality. So I’m really hopeful on this podcast that we’ll actually understand like what’s happening on the ground, on the soil. What are people thinking about saying, what are you What are some of the challenges you face?
All of these will be very fun things to unpack. But before getting in there, and we’ll start with you, Hannah, and then pass it over to you, Nelson. We like to start with people’s origin stories and understanding sort of what drives them, what sort of moments along the way in your journey clicked that brought you to where you are here today, which is sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Hannah Birgé: Great question. And I’m going to introduce myself and then also the Nature Conservancy because we both have interesting origin stories, I think.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, absolutely. And we should say that what Nelson and Hannah are saying on this podcast represent their own views and experience from doing their jobs, not those of the Nature Conservancy.
Hannah Birgé: Correct. Thank you for that reminder. So I’m from rural Vermont originally, and I grew up working on dairy farms. And so I had a real strong sense of what it meant to be a farmer, what it meant to tend to the land. And when I left home, I went to college in Minnesota, and then I did my master’s degree in Colorado. I did my PhD in Nebraska, and that’s where I landed for the rest of my career was in Nebraska. And throughout all of those experiences, you know, being immersed in academia, I sort of really leaned into the intellectual conceptual world of soil carbon, of ecosystem management, of what it meant to think about land in a really conceptual sense.
And then when I found myself at the Nature Conservancy, I sort of touched back down to the ground. A lot of our work is community-based conservation. We touch down with the local community. We work with working farmers, ranchers, other landowners. And it really reminded me that the academic space brings a lot of value and it helps us conceptualize things in really important ways to help us identify patterns, make decisions, and think about policy. But really, if the work doesn’t touch down on the ground meaningfully and it’s not practical, then we’re really not going to make very much progress in this space.
So I like to think of myself as sort of a blend between the innovative academic type and the practical on the ground. And that takes a lot of work. I’m not where I want to be yet, but it’s sort of this ongoing work in progress. And, you know, the Nature Conservancy is a really nice place to do this work. And again, I’m speaking, you know, on my own behalf, not on the behalf of the Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy for the last 50 or 60 years has been working in local communities doing place-based conservation.
We like to think that we work quietly behind the scenes protecting nature’s last great places, but in recent years we’ve realized that because we have this deep well of goodwill with local communities, we can start spending that in really subtle and really strategic ways to start tackling other planetary issues. So Right now, we sort of expanded our purview beyond just land and water protection to include tackling climate change, providing food and water sustainably, and building healthy cities. And this is really a both and for us, and it’s something that we’re doing very carefully and very strategically.
But it allows us, again, to sort of use that place-based expertise and goodwill and understanding of the local community. To start thinking about global important conservation issues that we can meaningfully address with sort of our strategy and our science-based approach.
Christophe Jospe: Thanks for that. And I want to just tack on a follow-up question for you to maybe weave in there, Nelson, which is why do you think that Nebraska might be ground zero for some of the work that you’re involved with?
Nelson Winkel: Good questions. So from my background, I grew up on a small scale organic dairy farm in Wisconsin. And so I’ve got dairy farming roots too. After college, I began to be more interested in conservation and really kind of taking care of the remaining ecosystems out there. In this case, a woodland and oak savanna restoration. And so that brought me out to Nebraska because I couldn’t find ways to incorporate conservation and agriculture at the time because I was so involved in agriculture. I didn’t have time to do the conservation work that I wanted to accomplish.
So I began working for the Nature Conservancy in 2010 out in Nebraska and really learning how to do larger scale restoration work and prairie management for biological reasons and biodiversity. And then Understanding, getting a good grasp of that, I began to look outside of that and started some of the larger issues and the private land ownership. And if I’m going to make a difference on the large scale, I really need to go back to the farm and find ways to incorporate these biological methods on that farming scale and help people work better together.
Yeah, so Nebraska’s got a lot of different things to offer. It’s got irrigated cropland, and it’s also got dryland cropland. And then it’s also kind of got a lot of agriculture in different scales. So that gives me opportunities to find things that work and really leverage them across different landscapes.
Christophe Jospe: So let’s talk about some of these things. What are these practices? What does it actually look like? And what are the changes that some of the farmers are making?
Hannah Birgé: So I’ll just start out by saying that, you know, we have our own set of best management practices that we read about in academic literature that we can hear about from different farmers. But really, a lot of this work, a lot of the innovation comes from the farmers. So they, you know, most farmers, if they’ve been farming for 30 years, they’ve spent 30 years building their technical expertise. And so they know what’s going to work on their farm or not. They know where the risk is and they know where the potential for innovation is.
So a lot of the way that we work with farmers is we’ll go to them and we’ll say, hey, We have some funding to sort of pay for some of these practices. We have some technical support for you. We have labor, which is a big one because a lot of the blockages for conservation is lack of labor because it’s usually pretty labor intensive work and a lot of farmers don’t have enough labor. So we offer sort of this full buffet of sort of support tools. Sometimes we bring in some of the best available science.
We say what’s worked in other projects. And then the farmer is really the leader and they pick and choose what’s going to work best for them. And so it’s really weaving together You know, from where our vantage point is to what’s going on in the working farm. And in Nebraska, no-till is fairly widespread in the state. We are seeing some acres come out of no-till to try to manage pests a little bit better without using too much herbicide. But for the most part, no-till is kind of part and parcel of Nebraska farms.
Where we don’t see a lot of adoption yet are things like... Precision nutrient management or cover crops. Although you’ll find them in pockets, it’s probably not as widespread in the consciousness as no-till is in Nebraska.
Ryan Anderson: So when you’re talking to farmers about putting them in the place of driving conservation innovation, What sort of language are you using that’s working and what are you hearing from them in terms of how to describe those changes in practices and their cropping systems over time? And are there specific things or maybe triggers that just don’t work and you’re learning from that to try to test other language with them?
Hannah Birgé: So the way I speak is much different from the way a Nebraska farmer speaks. When I talk to a farmer, I try to make it more about listening than talking. So a lot of the conversation is, tell me about your operation. Tell me about what’s worked in the past and tell me where you want to go. And so it’s more of an open-ended interview. And then once I start hearing about their objectives, I start learning about their operations, then I can start asking questions that I think might get us closer to sort of that convergence on a conservation practice.
So if they’re talking about things like, This part of my field, I have a lot of dirt blowing or I see a lot of gully erosion. It’s just a problem area for my field, but I don’t really know what I want to do because I need it to make money. I just start asking more questions to really learn what’s at the heart of the issue. And are there any barriers that the Nature Conservancy and our team can come in and sort of remove so that farmer can then implement the conservation practice?
So a lot of it is informal, open-ended interviews, again, to try to get to the heart of the issue.
Christophe Jospe: Can you give us some anecdotes?
Hannah Birgé: Sure. Are there any specifically you’d like to hear?
Christophe Jospe: I don’t know. I mean, it’s probably each farm is so unique and each set of decision variables change for a whole bunch of reasons. So I’m just curious, maybe like a middle of the road, top of the bell curve, and then something on one or the other extreme.
Hannah Birgé: Yeah, I have a couple of those, but I think Nelson might actually...
Nelson Winkel: Yeah, I can kind of fill in a little bit for some cover crop usage. Sometimes it just takes a little bit of a nudge to really help people. I think they’re interested in it. They want to try it. But sometimes all it really takes is providing the seed or the drill to get it in there or just... Just like the nudge that a farmer needs in order to take that extra step and dedicate and some more additional labor that’s limited in order to get these things in the playground. And then potentially they can, once they already have that at scale or on one field, well, they got a person hooked up to the tractor and got the grain drill there.
So they might as well go incorporate it on the other fields too while they’re at it.
Hannah Birgé: From our irrigation project, we have sort of a similar experience where we’ll have farmers who enrolled in that project, I think partially because they’re curious, partially because I think they were open to trying a free new technology, because at that point we were offering technology for managing irrigation water totally free. And farmers are usually open to getting free stuff, just like everybody else. But we saw the free stuff as a way to open the door to have a conversation with the farmers. And so instead of sort of just plunking down some equipment or some practices on a farm, we turned it into a whole like 365 degree program.
So we involve training sessions. We make sure that we’re on call if they need help. They have access to all the vendors. They have access to the Nature Conservancy. So they have sort of a full suite of folks who are there to provide technical support when they have questions. One thing we’ve noticed that a farmer, a lot of them are interested and they’re innovative and they’re curious about trying new So having that sort of ready-made, really good customer support along the way has been a really important factor in our success.
Christophe Jospe: I love the fact that like farmers don’t want to go it alone, which absolutely like no one should want to do something alone. And a lot of what we learn and hear about are the farmer cooperatives as a great way for not only people to share knowledge, but share equipment and share some of the risks of trying out new things. How have you seen that play out in your work? I mean, in general, sure. Just care to comment on cooperatives, Hannah?
Hannah Birgé: No, I don’t.
Christophe Jospe: All right. Next question.
Hannah Birgé: No, I mean, I think what you’re asking about is peer-to-peer learning and farmer-to-farmer learning. And absolutely. I mean, that’s something that’s core to what we do. So if we work really intensively with 30 farmers, the hope is that they’re going to be the ambassadors and they’ll be able to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. So instead of a farmer thinking, you know, cover crops are kind of a black box to me, they have someone they know and they trust who has a similar farm as they do, and they have a little bit more context when they go to make a decision.
And one thing that I’ve learned that was kind of a surprise to me and probably shouldn’t have been is that the big farms and the small farms don’t always consider each other peers. And so when we talk about peer to peer learning, the guys who are farming 300 acres Farmers are much more likely to consider the other 300-acre farms their peers. And the 15,000-acre farms might not feel like they have as much to learn from the 300-acre farmers. So it’s something that we think about a lot now when we enroll folks into our programs is how big is your farm and are you going to have a sort of built-in peer network because we don’t want to isolate them alone in a project.
Ryan Anderson: So I want to touch on kind of the aspect of time, because with cover crops, soil health management systems, it takes some time for those systems to stick. So what are you learning there in terms of you can start with information, you can start with giving some free technical assistance or maybe some seeds or access to equipment. But then how do you make it stick for those farmers who are trying it out, starting to get some support? But then really making it part of like the culture of what they do and ingrained in their operation.
Hannah Birgé: This one’s tricky, especially right now because profit margins are razor thin if they exist at all in farming. And this is sort of the nature of the industrial vertically integrated agricultural system is that it’s really sort of stuck on a year to year, season by season profit margin. And so making decisions that aren’t going to bear out for another five years is a really hard proposition for a lot of farmers. So it’s not something that we expect most farmers to be interested in right now. There are sort of like little gateway drugs, we like to call them, that can get folks a little bit more open to that.
But if I was sort of scraping by and I was about to lose my house and someone came in and they told me to change all of my light bulbs to LED because it’ll save me money over 20 years, I’m not that likely to invest in it, right? So I think a lot of it is right now we’re in a really tough situation. And I have personally, I have a hard time sort of asking farmers to take on that kind of risk. But we’re still starting the conversation. And they know that if they want to start experimenting with those practices, we’re here to help.
So it’s just walking a fine line.
Nelson Winkel: Yeah, and I think as farmers try some of these technologies out, they can be a little bit skeptical at first. And then in some cases, they have a really great return on their investment. And so at least the return on the Nature Conservancy and other organizations investment in that for the cost share. But then once they can see how that pans out and they already have the technology there, And it saved them, you know, thousands of dollars in pumping and water conservation. It seems really adaptable. And the next thing you know, your neighbor’s looking at your field too and wondering why you’re not irrigating or maybe why you’re irrigating and no one else is.
So it’s just another opportunity for peer-to-peer learning through the truck window.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, it’s interesting. Ryan and I were at a conference a couple months ago and there’s a presentation by Rick Clark, who’s a pretty well-known farmer in Indiana who’s been leading in a lot of regenerative agriculture practices and says, man, my neighbors look at me like I’m weird. And they’re all interested in what I’m doing and they’re all guessing, but I just wish they would ride in the cab with me. And like, I would wish that I could share this. So I’m wondering, like at some point there’s a knowledge transfer and there’s the like, I’m talking about this guy behind his back, but I want to actually talk to his face.
And how might one, whether it’s the Nature Conservancy or some other force, facilitate that like sharing, here’s what I tried, it was a little bit different and here’s how it worked out for me.
Hannah Birgé: I’m not actually sure that is our role for a few reasons. So the first is that we have nature in our title and I have a PhD. So I’m not going to be an effective messenger for that. The farmers we work with can be. And so we try to pick the middle of the road farmers, the ones that you’re talking about, right? The guys that are kind of side eyeing their neighbors. That’s what we actually target to work with. So we can talk to them and we can get them introduced to these ideas.
And then we hope that they’ll be the ambassadors to the rest of the community. Because working one-on-one with, you know, 30, 50, 60 farmers, which is typically the scale we work on, takes a lot of work. I like to say that these relationships move at the speed of trust. That’s actually a quote that I heard from Nori and I’ve co-opted and now I use it.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, I stole it from someone else. I forget who said it first then.
Hannah Birgé: All right, then you can cite me next time. I’ll claim it. So I think that for us, building that amount of trust is so labor intensive. It’s so worth it, but it wouldn’t be efficient for the Nature Conservancy to build trust with 20,000 farmers. So we build trust with a select group of strategically sort of positioned farmers in their communities and let them be the messenger.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And that’s just such an amazing theory of change. And it’s worth noting, we’re not only stoked to be sitting across the table from these great people and wanting to work with them independent of a relationship that Nori has with the Nature Conservancy, but we’re currently going through a program That allows us to put our relationship with the Nature Conservancy on overdrive and say, hey, there’s a new carbon market coming around. How might this create an incentive to drive certain behavior changes that align with Nature Conservancy’s goals, that align with some of the companies who the Nature Conservancy works with, that strategically finds individuals who are not Just preaching to the choir, sort of like we are here at the Land Institute, but really represent the bulk of American farmers.
And then also finding ways to say, well, if you do this thing, actually, there are markets or ways to measure and quantify the carbon going into your soils that’ll pay you for it, which sort of changes the whole paradigm, right? Sorry, this is a priming question. Validate what we’re doing. No, but I mean, all right, so here I was going to get to the point that I wanted to make, which is... Nuri’s market is in carbon market, geek speak, ex post, right? You can only get paid for a thing that you already did.
You draw down carbon, you can get paid for it. But farmers need money up front to even adopt these practices and Which we’d call ex-ante. And if you are someone who likes strategy and is trying to figure out a career, get into the regenerative agriculture space. Because there’s so many strategic plays of just like, how can we get everyone to work together to shift the system in a way that creates benefits for the soil, benefits for the people who are working for the soil, and benefits for society.
Hannah Birgé: And so I’m kind of just laying out So I have a lot of thoughts about this, unsurprisingly. I usually describe this system as lots of smoke and very little fire. So I spent my first few years at the Nature Conservancy and I sort of just dove deep into this sort of corporate responsibility, supply chain sustainability, Ecosystem Services Marketplace. And I really spent a lot of time trying to wrap my head around it because it was so new to me. And I will just tell anyone who’s interested in this to be patient with yourself because it’s a morass.
I mean, there’s just so much to learn in this space. And I kind of slowly came to the conclusion that while there’s a lot of interesting work being done, not much of it is touching down meaningfully on the ground. And really, to me, the bottleneck in the system isn’t the availability of really cool technologies, isn’t the availability of things like blockchain, isn’t the lack of availability of farmland. It’s the ability to connect the two. The real bottleneck in the system is on the ground practices. So that’s what we focus on really heavily.
My team invests almost all of our energy into how can we build projects on the ground that you can go out and look at, that you can touch, that you can interview a farmer about. And we get some criticism, you know, like, oh, you’re only working project by project. But I push back on that and I say, no, these are test beds for the prototypes of the kind of agriculture we need to feed the estimated 10 million people in 2050. So without these prototypes, without knowing the best available practices and how they look on working farms, we’re just simply not going to ever be able to connect it to this huge ecosystem of technologies that are available.
And what’s more, those projects give us tendrils into all sorts of other realms. And so a lot of our work has sort of given us a seat. At the policy table, it’s given us a seat with commodity groups. It’s given us a seat in academia. So they really sort of give the Nature Conservancy and the enrolled farmers and all of our partners on these projects a much larger platform. And we’ve also sort of been surprised at just how much attention some of them have gotten. And I wouldn’t, you know, I’d like to think it’s because they’re great projects, but I think it’s also that they’re fairly singular in this space.
So I would say if you want to get into regenerative agriculture, the real place where a lot of work can get done is touching those practices down on a working farm.
Ryan Anderson: So Nelson, what does that look like on the farms that you touch and you work with around Nebraska and Kansas?
Nelson Winkel: Yeah. You know, if a person can just reduce tillage a little bit, whether that be one pass, I mean, I think that helps, you know, or even if it’s reducing one spin of the pivot, or maybe it’s putting on some more nutrients via fertigation. And maybe it’s another soil sample that kind of tells you where you’re at on your nutrient levels. You’re not over fertilizing.
Christophe Jospe: So I got to catch you on the jargon. What’s fertigation?
Nelson Winkel: Yeah, it’s kind of a combination of fertilizing using irrigation. And so rather than putting up the nitrogen or other nutrients before your crop is growing, why not put it on at the same time your crop is growing with the water that it needs? And so it gives you an opportunity to kind of spoon feed the corn or whatever it is that you’re growing with the applicable amounts of nutrients. And so that way you’re not... Wasting nutrients on a field that got hailed out or maybe didn’t get established or maybe didn’t get in late, but it doesn’t give the fertilizer a chance to break down, whether it’s phosphorus being tied up or nitrogen being denitrified and leaching out into your soil profile.
Ryan Anderson: So the follow-up then, that’s what it looks like from the ground. And Hannah, what does it look like at the partnership level? What’s been successful there? You say you have projects at the scale of 30 to 40 farmers apiece, but how does that translate into watershed terms, into corporate partnerships that might plug into certain supplier value chains?
Hannah Birgé: Great question. I would say 90% of it is relationship management and communication. When you’re working with a startup and a corporation and a local state agency and 30 farmers, managing expectations, relationships, and understanding people’s objectives is really important because everyone’s sort of sitting in a different place looking across the canyon, right? And you’re trying to say like, are we all really looking at the same place? Do we all think that we need to get there the same way? And oftentimes having those conversations is incredibly revealing and it lets you sort of Thread the needle a little bit more to make sure that we’re as close as we can to a shared vision.
And it also helps you understand, you know, there are some places where we don’t have the same values. We don’t have the same vision. Can we still work together? And oftentimes the answer is yes, but it takes a lot of finessing. So for instance, you know, we’ll have a farmer who’s enrolled in the program and they’re like, I’m only here because this equipment is saving me a drive to my field. I really don’t care about water conservation. And then we have a big corporation that says like, we’re only paying for this because we want water conservation.
Are those antithetical? They could be if you don’t manage it correctly, but they’re not in our case because we tell the farmer, hey, that’s great. We’re glad this is working for you. We’re glad you’re going to continue to use it. Here’s how much water you saved. Maybe you don’t care. We do keep doing what you’re doing. Then we tell the corporation, hey, not every farmer is saving water of the goodness of their heart. Some truly do want to conserve this resource, but others are going to use this technology because it makes their life easier.
And as long as we have those conversations, we manage it and we’re transparent, we can sort of get a lot of momentum. But where you run into trouble is when you ignore those differences and you try to sweep them under the rug.
Christophe Jospe: So if you have your Nori bingo board out, fill in a square because we’re about to say Wendell Berry. And this quote came up and I wrote it down over the weekend. You can’t know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction. And that sort of goes to what you’re talking about, right? You need to bring the partners together who commit to the direction. But what is the direction? What direction do you think that people can agree that we’re all going in?
Hannah Birgé: I don’t think we can because I think there are multiple pathways in front of us. And I think we have a choice on which pathway we follow. And that’s not saying that we’re going to sit here and the four of us are all going to decide this is what will happen and we’ll make it be. What I’m saying is we can start practicing and we can start using the practices that we like to see. And if there’s a window of opportunity and we already have stuff in place that can go, then we’re going to get to a more desirable, more equitable outcome in agriculture.
And I’ll just use a quick example. Nori, for instance. I’m not sure that Nori by itself is going to transform the entire supply chain and start storing gobs of carbon in the ground. But you guys are out there testing a really important proof of concept. And if you can get sort of a critical mass going, there could be major windows of opportunity with policy, maybe with major polluters trying to buy carbon credits. I mean, there are multiple sort of different dynamic avenues for this to go. But if you don’t have the proof of concept on the ground, then you’re kind of stuck.
And so for me, the system I would love to see is one where farmers are rewarded for using conservation practices. Soil health practices on every single row crop acre in the country where everyone is using the technology and the management practices to keep irrigation just in line with crop needs, no more, no less, and really, really carefully managing their nutrient application. Same, just as much as the crop needs, no more, no less. And we’re not going to get there by sort of beating the drum at the Land Institute. Keep going, it’s important to do that, right?
But I think where we’re actually gonna get to where we wanna go is showing that we have these practices that can scale up. We’re just waiting for that window of opportunity.
Ryan Anderson: It’s something I’ve maintained as somebody who’s come as an ecological economist, thinking about things in systems terms and living well within limits. You need the profits of the Land Institute to set, here’s the horizon. Because it’s not just about the direction. Directionality is incredibly important when you’re trying to change systems. And the incremental improvement, also very important. You got to meet farmers where they’re at. But do you think there’s also a role for putting the vision out there that you can’t see how you’re going to get there with your specific farmers in Kansas and Nebraska, yet it might be something that you could point to say, it’s not here now, but there is a future where there might be a way where you can have an income that You can graze animals.
You can have agroforestry. And so speaking of the Land Institute and you have the direction that you’re going where you lay out some really important transitional steps. What about the profits that at the Land Institute where they’re laying out a vision? It may take 40, 50 years to get there. Where does that fit into the work that you’re doing here in the Great Plains?
Hannah Birgé: That’s a great question. So I think there’s this interesting sort of bifurcation in agriculture. And one side is saying... There are ecological limits. We are exceeding them. We do it at our own peril. We need to stop. We need something drastic and radical. And then there’s the other side that says, oh, we’ve learned to engineer ourselves beyond ecological limits. And because of that, we’ve dragged billions of people out of poverty, right? And folks no longer have to stay on the family farm and work. They’re replaced by a combine. They can go to college.
So there are these two sort of arguments. And those arguments, to me, Both have a lot of truth and a lot of value, but I think that alone they miss the point. And it’s almost like going into the Metropolitan and only going to the first two rooms, right? And thinking that art is paintings and art might be sculptures and missing an entire other sort of available set of options to us. And to me, that’s when I say like, we have lots of different pathways in front of us to choose from.
And I think if we just go sort of the profit, you know, we’re exceeding nature’s limits, the world is going to end, or we just go to the, oh, we can engineer ourselves out of anything. And neither of those, I think, get us to where we want to be, which is a combination of both and probably some other stuff too.
Christophe Jospe: I always like podcasts that get philosophical.
Hannah Birgé: I’m speaking only on behalf of myself and not the nature conservatives.
Christophe Jospe: It is funny, the Wizard and the Prophet has been coming up multiple times this weekend, so I feel like adding it to my reading list. So we’ve been talking a lot about communication on this podcast, and this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You have the Nature Conservancy in your title. As an organization, both of those can be trigger words for farmers, yet neither of us is backing away from standing behind those as important things to think about and also acknowledge that they play a key role in decision making. How have you seen things change over the last, I don’t know, decade or so?
And what types of considerations do we need to keep in mind when using these terms and talking to the farming community?
Hannah Birgé: That’s a great question. So language is something I think we grapple with quite a bit. And I’ve actually gone back and forth because part of me says, you know, we’re going to stick to the best available science. We’re going to have a shared platform of facts and we’ll move on from there. But really, you can’t confront values with facts. And if someone feels like maybe climate change is happening, but it’s not their responsibility, or maybe climate change is happening, but it’s not human caused, or maybe it’s not happening at all.
You know, I talk to a lot of farmers who say, I’ve been seeing a lot of wild weather throughout my life. This is no different. It just feels different because there’s increased awareness. And I’m not I do not think climate change is happening. And if I tell them you’re wrong, you know, science says you’re wrong. That’s not going to get me very far. Now, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t have the conversation. We shouldn’t push people. But that’s not my role. So I don’t hide climate change. I actually oversee the Nature Conservancy in Nebraska’s Tackling Climate Change program as well.
And one of the women on our team spends all of her time thinking about the intersections between policy, climate, and agriculture. And we don’t cover that up or hide it, but I do not lead with it. And if I have a farmer who’s willing to work with me and who will get paid to sequester carbon in their soil, that’s again one of those, do I need you to think climate change is real to work with me? No. But let’s talk about it. You know, we’re not going to bury these things.
We’re not going to pretend like we don’t have these differences. But is there a way to creatively navigate them? So again, it’s not a matter of saying that we shouldn’t talk about it or it’s not important to lead with farmers. But if it’s distracting from sort of near term benefits to both sides that eventually tackle climate change, then I’m not going to lead with it. And I’m not going to sort of make it a sticking point with the farmers we work with.
Christophe Jospe: It’s a great answer. And have you seen that change at all, either Nelson or Hannah?
Nelson Winkel: I mean, I think I see farmers might be a little bit skeptical coming to the table with the Nature Conservancy because I don’t know, we’re different, we’re new, we’re big, we’re scary, but I think we’re pretty awesome and so are they. And so I think a lot of it comes down to just trust and developing a relationship and looking at the needs that people have and everyone wants clean water, right? Everyone wants fresh air. Nature is corn in a field too. And so everything’s interconnected. And once we kind of come at it from that angle, I think we’re all trying to accomplish the same thing.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, totally. And these points have been themes coming up on our podcast before that actually most of rural America is much more attuned with nature than those in the cities. And whether we were talking with Benji Backer with the American Conservation Coalition or others where thoughts come up where environmentalism is something that people in the cities want for people in the country, but not really knowing what that is or realizing that farmers touch nature every day. And are very attuned to these things. So I totally hear what you’re saying. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that, yeah, we do all want the same thing.
Hannah Birgé: Yes, absolutely. It kind of reminds me that when I think about how farmers are engaging with the land... I like to say that they use poetry to make decisions. And when I say poetry, that’s not an insult. That’s not saying, oh, you’re disconnected from science. That’s saying you’re deriving meaning and it’s implicit and often it’s hidden and it’s something that’s meaningful and it’s quite subjective. And it’s very useful for making natural resources management decisions. I see this a lot when I hear indigenous communities or indigenous people speak about their natural resources management.
It’s a blend of science and it’s a blend of indigenous knowledge. And for farmers, I think a lot of their decision making comes from this deep connection to the land, from lessons passed down from generations before them. And so when you go to a farmer and you say, are you using science to make your decisions? Why not? It’s sort of this strange... Contortion that they would probably have to make to start really using science as the foundation for their decision making. And so the way that we view it is, you know, continue using this intuitive, subjective decision making process, but have science be there to help.
So that if you do experience extreme weather, this summer in Nebraska is a great example, we had historic flooding. So when you start seeing these sort of no analog events, you don’t have a past analog, you know, your intuitive poetic approach to management doesn’t work anymore. We have tools from science that can help. And so it’s not saying, going in and saying, you’re not using science to make management decisions, your farm’s going to fail in the face of climate change. It’s saying, how can we blend these meaningfully, the poetry and the science to get to better outcomes?
Christophe Jospe: Great answer. So what is the biggest misconception that you think the non-farmer community has about farmers?
Hannah Birgé: Oh, this is a good one. A lot of folks don’t realize that farmers are incredibly technically capable. They are also incredible economists. That’s something that I learned. So a lot of farmers know more about economics than the professors at the university. I mean, they closely, closely follow the economy and they’re applied economists. If you’re going to stay in business and you’re going to sell your grain at a profit, you better know how to hedge. The other one is, again, the technical ability. So it’s not just knowing how your planter is going to go over a certain grade of land at a certain time of year with a certain kind of soil moisture.
It’s also being able to go and fix all of your equipment. So the amount of skills that a farmer needs to be successful are varied deep. And one thing that I always say is we’re missing this opportunity because farmers are retiring. And they’re not being replaced by other farmers. Farms are just getting bigger. There are very few replacements. And when a farmer retires, we lose an entire university of knowledge and information. And we need to start to get them now to understand how conservation fits into an operation meaningfully before they leave and take all their knowledge with them.
Christophe Jospe: Same question to you, Nelson.
Nelson Winkel: Yeah, I think Hannah hit it right on the head. It’s incredible to see a farmer do an awesome job. And it’s just incredible how much managing people, managing equipment, thinking on the fly, planning ahead, doing all these things and still being able to pull off a crop year after year. And then add on that issues with wet springs, wet falls. Oh man, it’s just incredible. So much respect.
Christophe Jospe: Cool. So now to narrow the question even more, based on the fact that both of you guys come from a dairy farm background, what’s happening to dairy farms in America?
Hannah Birgé: It’s great. Kids, go into dairy. Don’t do that.
Nelson Winkel: It’s really tough. It has to do with a lot of consolidation too and there’s no margin for profit and you work yourself to the bone every day, day in, day out. It’s pretty rough. But the relationship that farmer has with his cows is pretty special and being out there every day. I don’t know, the quiet pulsation going on with the milking machines is pretty nice too. And just watching the cows eat their cud is pretty great.
Unknown speaker: That’s great.
Christophe Jospe: That’s a quasi positive note to leave us on. We’re getting to the top of the hour here. So if people wanted to connect with the work that you’re doing in Nebraska or learn more about the work that you’re involved with, where can they go? What can they do?
Hannah Birgé: Well, you can go to nature.org slash Nebraska and learn more about our programs. You can also just reach out to us if you want to have a chat.
Nelson Winkel: Yeah, that’s a good opportunity to check out those sites.
Hannah Birgé: I just have one more story because Nelson mentioned fertigation. A few years ago, I was talking to a farmer and he was like, hold on, hold on. He put his phone and I heard all this machinery in the background, which is normal. And then he picked it back up and I was like, what are you working on? He’s like, well... He was like, I found someone with a bunch of dead fish. And I thought, what a great opportunity. So he was blending the fish up in a giant blender on his farm, straining the fish guts and putting it through his center pivot to fertigate his fields.
I never asked him what came of it, but I was like, I cannot imagine that wasn’t just like a totally smelly disaster.
Christophe Jospe: Probably gummed up the works a bit too. You have to track that guy down and we’d love to pay him a visit. You can smell him from a mile away.
Hannah Birgé: Oh, yeah. His name is Clay Govier and he loves interviews. Go find him. He lives in Bokenboro, Nebraska.
Christophe Jospe: Road trip. Sorry, Clay.
Unknown speaker: No, that’s fine.
Christophe Jospe: Clay, we’re coming for you. But any more bonus nuggets that you want to leave us with before we shut this thing down?
Hannah Birgé: I think Nelson has to tell you what happened to his cover crop last year.
Nelson Winkel: Yeah, so part of my cover crop project was kind of increased nesting for some wildlife and you have some good structure out there coming off of a soybean harvest. And what happened is essentially the wildlife ate it and didn’t have much of a cover crop the following year because geese came in and just ate everything and what they didn’t eat, the deer did. And yeah, so it was pretty, not much there come springtime, but hey, they ate well and that’s pretty cool.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And you’re contributing to local biodiversity and probably some hunters were real happy, right?
Nelson Winkel: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: More deer. Great. Cool. Well, thanks so much. And yeah, like I said, we’re looking forward to continue to work with you as Nori progresses. I think there are great opportunities for startups like ours to plug into large institutions like yours and find the right way forward and agree on some sort of a direction. Not that we know where it’s going to take us, but at least we’ve agreed on some kind of a direction.
Hannah Birgé: Hear, hear. Thank you guys for having us.
Christophe Jospe: Thank you. Thank you.
