Episode 226 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. Paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
What inspires a farmer to monetize soil carbon?
For those already implementing regenerative practices and collecting the associated data, selling carbon credits provides an additional income stream, rewarding farmers for sequestering carbon in the soil, and potentially encourages new adopters to join.
And that's on top of the money they’re already saving through practices like no-till planting and cover cropping.
Cory Willis is a farmer at Nori supplier Willis Farms, a multigenerational, family owned and operated farm in Southern Middle Tennessee. In its 70-year history, Willis Farms has grown to nearly 4,000 acres of productive cropland and pasture, and Cory’s family uses regenerative methods on every acre under their care.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Cory joins Ross and Nori Supply Account Manger Sean Foster to discuss the history of farming in the Willis family, describing when they started using regenerative agriculture and how the practices benefit their operation.
Cory shares his experience working with Sean and the rest of the Nori team, explaining what inspired his interest in monetizing soil carbon, and why partnering with us was the right decision for Willis Farms. How does Nori’s cryptocurrency token affect how he views the risk of participation in Nori?
Listen in for Cory’s advice to farmers considering regenerative ag and find out what Willis Farms is doing with the extra income from selling carbon credits on the Nori marketplace.
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Full Transcript
Announcer: Listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace, is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon. I'm the creative editor at Nori. Another one of my colleagues is making their podcasting debut, Sean Foster, supply account manager here at Nori. Hey, Sean.
Sean Foster: Hey Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, so happy to have you here. Are you a little bit nervous?
Sean Foster: I'd be lying if I said I wasn't. This is a little nerve wracking, but I'm really looking forward to being famous, so.
Ross Kenyon: Literally all that it takes.
Sean Foster: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I'm happy that we made this all happen because we have one of our farmers we work with to supply Nori removal tonnes into our marketplace is here. And we brewed beer from some of his grain. Cory Willis, farmer with Willis Farms, one of Nori's suppliers and one of Sean and I's suppliers for beer. Thanks for being here.
Cory Willis: No problem. Glad to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. We wanted something kind of a personal connection to working together. So we decided to brew from the barley that you used to supply. It wasn't malted though, which, Sean, in my understanding means that it's like it bakes the grain into thinking that it's germinating. So it releases sugars into more simple forms that you can brew with them.
Yeah, I don't know if it was. Was it malted? The brewing guy that milled it up for me, he was unsure. Okay, so it was.
Cory Willis: Yes, it was. It was malted at a really, really light color. So that's one of the reasons the malt house likes our barley is 'cause it comes off the field really light colored so they don't have to, I guess by the time it's done being malted, it still looks almost like it's not malted. So that way it's a kind of a blank slate for brewers to do whatever they want with it from there. But it was malted. If it wasn't malted, probably wouldn't have been able to brew very well with it.
Sean Foster: I was trying to blame my bad brewing techniques on just it not being malted grain, but now there's no other excuse for not being good.
Cory Willis: Oh, sorry, ruined your excuse, [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: It ultimately worked out and it's quite tasty, but I think it just required quite a lot of malt extract to get to the requisite gravity of it, Sean. So I don't even know what happened.
Sean Foster: Yeah, we had to do some sciencey stuff. Ross had some malt extract, a few pounds of it, and I brought it up because we were trying to make an American pale ale, or I guess we succeeded in that. But we dumped in a little bit of malt extract, bringing up the gravity to what we were. And I actually, I don't know, Ross, you cheated. You already tasted it, but I don't know if I should literally debut mine and open it on the podcast right now.
Ross Kenyon: I didn't know this was the original tasting.
Sean Foster: No. Well, this is batch two. The first batch didn't really work out very well. And no fault of yours.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] with your first batch? I can't even remember at this point.
Sean Foster: Oh my gosh. Well, first off, I had to use way less barley than I wanted to because I forgot it home and I got to the brew store. And the guy basically, I had everything else for the beer. It was like around closing time. And the guy was just going to let me go. And he's like, "Oh, so you have a mill at home?" And I was like, "Oh no, that'd probably be a good idea." So anyway, I only had like, I think a pound of yours in my car and like a Ziploc. So I had to use a lot of the other stuff that he had to mill it up. Anyway, it was a mess.
And then [unclear] primary fermentation vessel and then the rubber seal broke so then it got contaminated. It was a nightmare and frankly the second batch for this, you know, in preparation for this podcast, it had a few twists and turns of its own too. So maybe I'm just the wrong brew master to be working on this kind of stuff for Nori but here we are.
Ross Kenyon: Do you feel like we went the extra mile to get this show and get this beer brewed from your barley, Cory, or are we just fools?
Cory Willis: I mean, the barley was grown here, shipped to South Carolina, North Carolina, came back to here and then shipped to you guys. And that was then, it's been about a year, so.
Ross Kenyon: The barley is well traveled, more well traveled than most people during that time frame. Yeah. So I'm trying to blame the barley, Sean. It's really disrespectful of you.
Sean Foster: Yeah, I also think it's funny that for a reversing climate change podcast, there's probably some irony behind it traveling a few thousand miles back and forth to get in our bottles here.
Ross Kenyon: Well, have you cracked yours yet? I've already had one and I'm sipping on another right now. I think it's tasty.
Sean Foster: All right, here we go. Let's see.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, good noise. Yeah, it's carbonated, cold. I thought it was nice, very, very malty. I like, I found it very refreshing.
Sean Foster: Branching into like ASMR. I don't know if you can hear it on my audio, but it's pouring up right now.
Cory Willis: I've got some pour noises coming through.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, so do I. ASMR is right. Here, why don't you give it a nice taste here, Sean? Give us some good tasting notes and then we can start talking about the business of farming and Nori.
Sean Foster: Pretty good. It's a little flat, but that's probably my fault. But it looks like beer. It tastes like beer. It smells like beer. I think we nailed it, especially for, we'll call this attempt 1.5.
Ross Kenyon: Have you ever had any home brewers use your grain before? Is this a first for you?
Cory Willis: Well, mostly me, so. I've used it quite a bit now. But otherwise, the only people that I know of. It's not a home brew, but they're a local brewery that just opened up a couple years ago with Common John in Manchester. And Sean actually, when he came down, we went there. But to my knowledge, they were the first ones to ever use the barley. And they've got a beer that they, they brew exclusively with this and every time it's on, the whole community shows up like, "Give me that one." They started off as home brewers, but other than that, me and you guys, about it.
Ross Kenyon: We could have gone right to the source this entire time and figured this out.
Sean Foster: I know, I also, yeah, I forgot about that. I guess time does kind of fly by. That was October, I think, that when it came out, right?
Cory Willis: Yeah, that was fun.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Cory, we should talk about how we started working together and maybe it's better to even start before that with how you got into farming itself. What's your story with agriculture?
Cory Willis: Well, mine personally is I grew up on this particular farm, moved away into [unclear] during the high school years. And let's say away, I mean like 30 minutes away, but I was still back in the summers and tossing hay bales around, that kind of crap. Went to college, did not think I was going to come back and farm, but one thing led to another, I guess, and then, didn't know what else I was going to do, so I came back, decided, let's give this a full year, a whole crop cycle and see what actually goes into this whole agriculture thing that my family has been doing for 60 years. And that was in 2012 and I'm still here. So I guess I decided I liked it.
My granddad originally started it back in the sixties and we've, since, we've gone through growing hogs and mostly growing crops to feed livestock, cows, whatever. And we got out of the hog business, got out of Holstein cattle raising. Now we're doing these cows. So there's been a lot of different transitions. Where we are now, we crop about 3,200 acres. We've got 400 mama cows. We grow barley, which we hadn't done before.
We're doing a lot of kind of different things than when we started. And even a lot of different things since I came back from college up until this point, all of our regenerative practices kind of started roughly in that time, not because of me, but just sort of there's a perfect storm. I was available, that he had something for me to do. There was a push from some local NRCS agents and local agronomists to try some of these things. So once again, one thing led to another and here we are.
Sean Foster: Awesome. Yeah. And Cory, I remember chatting with you last time too. Before, I forgot about that, I mean, it's in the name, right? Willis Farms and you're Cory Willis. So it's obviously a family farm. Do you want to drill into generational farming a little bit more and about the generation right before you and then your grandpa? And I think I remember in the call, something like you've been getting into the practices, these regenerative practices, which we can define a little bit more, but you've been going into them one by one. Can you go into that a little bit more?
Cory Willis: I can do that. Like I said, my grandfather started this particular farm, but his father and grandfather and presumably mother and grandmother as well, because everybody helped on it kind of thing. Within the Willis family, by and large has been in this general area for, you'll have to fact check me, but there was some will that was granted, you know, some land for military service, like the Revolutionary War or Civil War or something. I don't know exactly. We've been here in this general area for a long time.
My granddad though, was the youngest of I think nine. And by the time he got old enough to do his own thing, there kind of wasn't anything left of the family farm. So he ventured off, did his own thing. And he bought his first piece of property in like '62 or '3 or something like that. And we actually still farm that same farm. My mom actually lives in the house that he bought at that time. So he farmed it, managed it for I guess 30 years or so.
My dad and uncle came back from college roughly in the late 80s, early 90s. And they brought with them a lot of the no-till practices that was kind of like an up and coming thing. And by about the mid 90s, we were, I guess we were mostly no-till by that time. I mean, not every acre, we bought a new farm, we might have to till it, but for the most part, we were no-till.
Then now my generation's come back, I'm there. And then my uncle's son is there, Evan Willis. And Evan manages all the cattle stuff and he actually has a degree in agriculture, unlike myself. So when we were first starting to do a lot of the more in depth soil sampling and trying to figure out exactly how best to do cover crops and some of that, he was pretty involved in that kind of thing.
So yeah, at this point we are three generations that show up to work every day. Even my granddad, he's like 84 or something, shows up every day with his little beat up truck and his dog that [unclear] bite everybody and he just busts around and does whatever.
Sean Foster: Yeah, does he normally, I mean does he, I can't remember it. Does he do a lot of tractor work or basically lets it steer itself?
Cory Willis: He will do as much as he can. Like there's certain things he can do. Like he'll go bale most of the hay or he'll, he cleans up around round bale racks 'cause your cows eat the round bales and they make a mess and they, you know, they poop near it and stuff. So you got to clean that out every now and then. So we'll put that in a spreader and go out and we'll generally spread kind of that hay residue mixed with manure sort of like considering they're composting, but we'll use that to fill in like ditches to keep erosion down. There's also, you know, really high in organic matter and nutrients. He does some of that stuff just because he knows where the ditches are.
We send him to get a lot of parts, especially if there's something we want to pick up that's a few hours away. He'll just make a weekend of it or something, kind of go on like a mini vacation. He does as much as he can, but there's nothing that's like his main thing anymore.
Sean Foster: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, I guess how I hear it is, yeah, three generations and farther back than that, even a ton more, but there was kind of like the transition over to beef cattle and, and, and grazing and then adoption of no-till and then now cover cropping. And I think I remember even you saying you used variable rate machines and kind of subdivided your lots of land definitely based on soil type, which that was really cool.
Ross Kenyon: Generally, how did your family get into no-till? You alluded to that, but I imagine there's a story behind it.
Cory Willis: I don't know the whole story. And that's one of those things that growing up, we had been doing, again, since I guess late 80s, early 90s, I was born in 1990. So to me, no-till is such a normal thing that I don't even notice. To me, tilling is weird, but different parts of the country, you can do different things to help. Where we are, where we do have a lot of river and creek bottoms or hillsides, no-till makes a big difference because everything's pretty erodible. For our area, to me, it's kind of a no-brainer. You should just, you shouldn't till. That's just kind of a thing you do.
But from where I'm sitting right now, I can drive less than five minutes and everybody in that area tills. There's actually a guy across the road that tills and they hit the same yields that we do, but we feel like no tilling is the better way to do it. But again, everybody's operation is different. Farming's a big complicated beast, there's a million different ways to grow the same crops and hit the same yields and use pretty much the same amount of resources. You may lose some over time, but it's really hard to quantify some of those.
Sean Foster: Yeah, I think this is like a perfect time. Cory, since you told me the widget analogy, I don't even know if this is one that you use very often or if you just came up with it. But I've definitely used that a couple of times since you told me. But speaking to that, agriculture is massive and so different based on where you're farming, even in some cases across the road from where you're farming. You want to share the widget analogy with people if you remember that one.
Cory Willis: If I remember it correctly. But I think I said something along the lines, and this is my, I've also used it to say, I think I may have thought about it when you were down. The way I think about it though, is that an average farmer, let's say they start farming when they're somewhere in the 20 to 25 year old range, where I was, where my cousin was, presumably is where a lot of people who farm start off. And then let's say they retire when they're 75. So they've got 50 years there where they can actively farm and grow crops. Most of these crops take a full year to grow. So they've got 50 chances to grow a crop.
It's not like, you know, we're working in a factory where, you know, every day you're making 10,000 of the same thing and you have room to tweak all these little variables. And every day you've got 10,000 data points to play with. We have one year and we can test something come like May. And then we don't know what the results were of that test until we harvest. And then by the time we know that, then we have to choose what to do the following May. So it's very risky to just start changing things kind of willy-nilly just for experimentation.
There are different fields that obviously you could use, you could do something on one acre and something else on another acre. So there is some room there, but weather plays such a huge part. So you may do your experiment and that you happen to be a dry year. Well, there's one of your experiments gone immediately and now you only have 49. But all these, all these cropping years are very precious. Farmers naturally are pretty risk averse because they have to be. There's so much natural risk just inherent in the system.
Ross Kenyon: What's your Nori experience been like so far, Cory? It sounds tricky to enroll all of these [unclear] shapes of fields and to do all this work. How's it been?
Cory Willis: Well, it's been longer than I thought it would be, but overall, Pops started with Nori, I think in 2000, it was late 2019, maybe 2000, early 2020. And since then, I think Nori was going through some changes too, where some of the methodology changes, some of the sheet was changing. And then we originally came to Nori through another, like a business software system called Granular. And there were some, I guess, growing pains where Granular and Nori were talking to each other in odd ways. But again, it's all kind of back end stuff.
Luckily, we did have a couple people, Sean included, that kind of steered us and guided us through a lot of those challenges. But I still maintain that it was, we made the correct decision, one, to get into the carbon market at all, and two, pick Nori over the other teams at the time.
We had already done a lot of this, all these [unclear] practices, we already had records of when we cover cropped and what we applied, where, and our yields. But we've been collecting data for years. And then using Nori allowed us to actually use that data to do something. So we had to shuffle all that data into another spot. Admittedly took a lot longer than [unclear]. But once it's there, it's there forever. It runs through models.
I think Nori has all of its incentives in the right place. So, you know, Nori's not incentivized to take advantage of anybody, the farmer's incentivized to do what they need to do. The buyers are incentivized to buy from the farmers. It's a good system. So overall it's been very positive. We recently actually sold some of our first credit. I don't know if we're even still up, we listed or if we sold out now. I haven't looked in a couple days. But again, I've enjoyed working with Nori. It's been a long road, but I'm glad that we're here.
Sean Foster: That's a good shout out actually. Just a couple of days ago, I want to say on Friday, we sold out. It's the first time I think we've ever done that. I don't know. Ross has done a lot of podcasts, so maybe we can fact check ourselves here, but good problem to have. Yeah. Thanks for speaking to that, Cory. Kind of an [unclear] of that or just a follow up question is, so is the reason why you got into soil carbon and monetizing soil carbon is the reason out of necessity or, you know, like I already have this data, why not? Or is it a mentality that you and your family have adopted just being kind of the early adopter mentality or, or is it a bit of both?
Cory Willis: I guess a bit of both. Like I said, we already had all this data and we've already done all the practices. And I think actually this is kind of lame, but admittedly, the way that we found Nori and kind of got into the carbon market space was, I think, just a marketing email from Granular that was, "Hey, we have a partnership with Nori. Are you interested?" And I was just like, "Well, yeah, sure. Why not? We're doing things that presumably would sequester carbon, let's go for it."
And that snowballed and we started off with two or three fields with all the data, stick that in the system just to see, you know, we picked kind of a representative sample of all our different practices we do because it's not feasible for us to cover crop and graze like every single acre. So we cover crop the ones we can, we don't on the ones that say we can't harvest until late November. So if we were to plant cover crop, the cover crop wouldn't grow. So it's just waste. Not all of our crop fields are next to cow pasture so it's hard to graze, you know, things like that. So we picked a representative sample.
We fed them into the system, they generated positive results, and from there we were like, "What the heck? Let's go for it." Then we dumped all like 112 fields on you guys. And it was off to the races and I think that caused a little bit of issues along the way. But in retrospect, maybe we should have jumped from three fields to like [unclear] fields and then to 50 and then to 100. I got excited, so I just dumped them all on there.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that sounds, I don't always have a ton of interaction with what you do, Sean. That sounds pretty challenging though. We'll say that.
Sean Foster: I think it's a lot of fun overall. You get in the weeds and Cory definitely challenged me as an account manager at Nori with your fields in a good way. It's awesome and it's great farming. It's obvious that you like to stay busy, Cory. So the amount of fields you have and all the practices you've implemented with variable rate and cover cropping, no till and regenerative grazing and everything. I mean, it's really great. I'm really thankful I was able to actually go out there and meet you in person and see the farm and jump in a grain bin too. Apparently that's, for anybody listening that's not into farming, apparently that's the bad job to have is to jump in a grain bin, but I thought it was better than Disneyland. It was super fun.
Ross Kenyon: Isn't that kind of dangerous? Don't people like get hurt or drown in it?
Sean Foster: Well, he told me to stay on the ladder.
Cory Willis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very close to the ladder. There was the necessary safety precautions.
Ross Kenyon: Cory, if you kill one of my employees, we're going to have a problem.
Sean Foster: I mean, I did. I did sign it. I signed like a verbal. Yeah. His wife is an attorney and for her being an attorney, I will say I never signed anything. It was a verbal commitment or you know, of course like, hey, you're climbing this ladder, you're jumping this grain bin, I'm not liable. I'm like, all right, all right. I said, I'm not liable.
Cory Willis: I remember. He did.
Sean Foster: Yeah, that was good training. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Well, what do you think is coming next for working with us. Are there more fields to enroll? Is it a process of just automating more and making this easier for the future? I guess I could ask both of you that question. What's coming up next with our relationship?
Cory Willis: I guess I can go first on that. We intend to continue working with Nori. We are very excited for the token launch. I think that's going to change. To me, that's kind of like [unclear] Nori. And what we've been doing is still kind of the pilot program. But I'm very excited to see once the token launches how the market develops and what we can do, hoping we can sell some credits using the token in the future, hopefully the near future. And I would love to see more automation 'cause Sean and I have spent a lot of time going over records and typing this in and this many bushels here and this many pounds there. At this point, Sean probably knows second most about our operation to anyone.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. All right, we gotta talk about the token stuff then. Have you always been into crypto or is this a new thing for you?
Cory Willis: I know, again, admittedly, I don't know that much about it, but I'm very interested about it. When I was talking about the extended structures that Nori has out, the overall methodology that includes the token, to me that is, that was one of the big draw factors for Nori where that would open it up to more of a free market system where the value could fluctuate that gives the farmer options to sit on the tokens for a little bit, exchange them at a later date if we want to, not that we want to, but if we want to exchange them for non-US dollars, we could. I really like the idea that it takes care of one of the biggest problems of earlier carbon markets of the double counting thing.
The token provides a little bit of a buffer in my mind, again, where Nori is able to apply like a robust marketplace without directly getting involved, but they still have an incentive to make the marketplace as robust as possible. But I don't know a lot about cryptocurrency in general, but I know that it allows for a lot more possibilities moving forward.
Ross Kenyon: It's fascinating to hear that. And I imagine that many people listening might not anticipate that answer or I think something that we hear at Nori sometimes that farmers do tend to be conservative for the same reason that you mentioned earlier that there's already too many variables and adding something like crypto into the mix might make it more difficult for them. What might you say to a farmer or someone who's a bit skeptical and concerned about those things?
Cory Willis: My first thing would be that adding this level, not adding the additional [unclear], especially in our situation where we're doing variable rate fertility and we're no till planting or cover cropping. We're grazing that cover crop wherever we can, anywhere cows grazing cover crop. You don't have to feed hay. So that's a no brainer right there. You save a bunch of money doing that.
All these different things we're doing, we're doing because we think they're the correct things to do for our land so that we build organic matter. We apply less fertilizer just by doing variable rate. We apply 30% less fertilizer and hit the same yields. We've looked at scenarios that, we're doing these things not necessarily to sequester carbon. Being able to sell carbon credits for us is just gravy. So if we can sell carbon credits and the price is locked at $15, that's great. It doesn't really change our decisions very much, that it may cost us $45 to $50 an acre to plant the cover crop. So all we're really doing is recouping some of that money.
But when you throw the token in there where the price can go way up, way down, either way, I'm okay to play that market, wait for it to go up. If it does tank, fine, because we were already going to do this stuff anyway. If it does go up, we obviously get to recoup more money than just the $15 and that now looks much more appealing to other farmers who aren't doing these things that we're currently doing. Now changing their practices makes financial sense. But if the price of carbon doesn't go up, I'm not really sure, realistically, if a lot of farmers are gonna change what they're doing. They also get agronomic benefits, which again, I think they do, but in different parts of the country that's, I'm not experienced at farming in Minnesota or Nebraska, the way that they have to do things may be different.
Sean Foster: Yeah, I think you're kind of nailing on some pretty central conflicts or arguments in this whole space. And I think it's really interesting hearing firsthand when your take on tokens and cryptocurrency price discovery and all these things and another thing on just like, how do these dollars and cents make sense when you're talking about actually changing.
Cory Willis: The agronomic benefits that farmers get in my mind, if you were to actually calculate the value of those, probably outweigh the money they would get from selling the carbon credit on that particular acre. Like I said, us doing variable rates saves us immediately 30% fertilizer on years where fertilizer costs go up like they did this year where they're like, double what they were last year. That's a pretty big deal.
If you can tack on that you're now sequestering carbon because you're doing some of these practices, then it's once again, it's one of those like the carbon credit by itself at current prices may not be enough. But if you want to cause true change, you're going to have to pile on a bunch of little incentives. The carbon credit is one of those additional little incentives. The more money you can get for the carbon credit, the bigger incentive it becomes, but as of right now, it's still kind of a small one.
I think you can, if as it builds momentum and the value of them go up, that's, that's when you're, I think you're going to see real lasting change again, but in order for this to work, not just for the sequestering carbon, but for the way cover cropping works, you don't really see those benefits for a number of years. So if a farmer does choose cover cropping, they'll immediately see, you know, some increased organic matter, their soil temperatures will be lower, water infiltration will be better, but for like 10 years, then they really start to see some of like some pH and fertility issues go away, like their, like there are big drowned out spots where your water just sits in pools. If water infiltrates better, then those big spots will get smaller and smaller and smaller, and then you don't have that problem anymore. So now you have big areas out in the field that actually make yield instead of being barren because all the plants that you planted died.
But there's little factors. This is not a one size fits all. It's not a one fix for the big issue kind of thing. This is a piece of a really, really big complicated puzzle, going to take years because farming takes years and carbon takes years. And it took us a long time, to me, just to sequester this much carbon. So it's going to take a while.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have any advice for farmers looking to make this switch or things that you tell your neighbors when they say, "What are you doing over there, Cory? This looks pretty odd."
Cory Willis: Probably not, honestly. I guess be patient, still experiment with things. Again, I'm pretty young in the farming world. So I know that there was a time, I think, where we had a field. It was actually the one that you rode with me, Sean. It was on kind of a main highway and it was one of the first years we were doing cover crop. We let it grow to like six feet tall or something. And you know, it's like you can barely see over the cover crop from the tractor cab. It's not a small tractor. I'm just like planting straight through it, which is just super weird. You know, people are used to seeing tractors and go over bare dirt planting. I'm just kind of like smooshing this foot tall mat of cover crop down as I'm going. I remember my uncle saying, you know, there's a lot of people looking at what you're doing right now. And of course me being like one year out of college was like, "Oh, God, what am I doing?" But it's just, it's gonna work. I mean, plants like to grow.
There'll be some growing pains. Look to the people who have done it before. Don't copy someone, but look at a bunch of people and copy all of them in the little bits and pieces that you think you need to do for your particular operation. Everybody's different. Some people swear you've got to plant through the stuff green. We've decided that that doesn't work because it wraps all over our planter. Just then we have to get off with like a knife and cut it off every 10 acres. Terrible. So we kill the cover crop before we get there.
We may not, the greatest possible benefit, still in the business of growing corn and soybeans, but we still have to do the, grow good crops of those things. And that general ethos kind of overlays on top of whatever kind of regenerative practices we're doing. We're still getting benefits. But we're trying not to let that perfect ideal be the enemy of the good, still growing quality crops, being profitable operation while also sequestering carbon.
Sean Foster: Thanks for sharing, Cory. I only had, I only really had one more question. Is there anything that you're excited about this crop season? Is there anything that you're, you know, you're trying out new or anything experimental? And I know you had said in the past that, you know, you have the benefit of having quite a few fields, you can try out stuff that's new on maybe a couple of them, never on every single one of them, but [unclear] anything exciting coming up this year?
Cory Willis: Yeah, we've got one, you know how I guess, strength and restrictions kind of breed creativity. Since fertilizer prices are where they are, fuel's up, you can't find equipment. A lot of times we'll order a part for the bike. Let's say that something broke, we'll order a part and may not, they may not get there. Your supply chain issues are gonna be huge. So you'll just say your planter breaks down. You may not be able to get the part to fix it this year for a month or two, which is gonna be huge. So one thing that we're looking into is buying another planter, like an older model planter to have just as a spare, kind of a funky concept, but.
I remember when we first started selling carbon credits, you asked me, what are we going to do with the money? You know, are you going to go to Disney World? I was like, well, I do love Disney World, to me, this is something that popped up and I was like, oh yeah, this is kind of what we're going to do with that money. We have extra income coming in that we weren't counting on, but that may allow us to buy a planter just to have as the spare. It's kind of like insurance. It's also, it could be a payment on a million dollar loan to buy more land or to pre-buy more fertilizer or chemicals or something. So that way we can take advantage of low prices versus high prices.
So it's a, we're not doing anything in particular. We always do a test plot with some, you know, some local bean reps, you know, where we try out a bunch of different varieties of corn and beans or something like that. So we're doing that again. Not a lot of new, new stuff, I guess. But this year is shaping up to probably be a challenging year financially. The price of grain is up, so hopefully it'll kind of all even out. But this is kind of goes back to what I was saying. This year may not, maybe is not the year to experiment very much because the input costs are up by quite a bit.
Sean Foster: Yeah, for sure. And I think you alluded to it and you definitely spoke to it last time we were on a call together. One of the benefits of regenerative agriculture, just having those stacked practices is there's always going to be up years and down years and the neighbor that might be conventionally tilling or basically keeping the ground bare and focusing on yield over yield over yield. On the ups and downs, your ups and downs are going to be less so than the other guy just because of that.
Ross Kenyon: Cory, do you have some place you might like to send people who want to learn more about what you do?
Cory Willis: [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] We don't sell anything direct to consumer, really, but I guess I should have said also, we mainly grow corn and soybeans, two big main crops. We have some acres with wheat on it and we have acres with malt barley. Obviously we made beer. We're expanding our malt barley pretty rapidly. There's a lot of interest in Tennessee and there's a couple of local malt houses opening up. So if I guess if you're a local brewer and you'd like to get involved, then check out our website, contact me, that'd be great. Otherwise, that's kind of it. We just sort of occupy our little corner down here. We grow stuff, we sell stuff, and then we do it again next year. But we think we're doing a good job.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks so much for being here, Cory. Links to those things are in the show notes. Thanks for being here too, Sean.
Sean Foster: I hope to see you. Yeah, it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, for me too. And thanks so much for listening. If you like what we do, please tell your friends, send them a link to this show. And hey, thanks so much for listening and have a lovely day.
