A bonus episode 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.
Trey Hill of Harborview Farms has been participating in the Nori pilot for cropping soils via regenerative agriculture. The Carbon Removal Certificates now available for purchase in the Nori Lightning Sale have been generated by Trey. Catch up more with Trey on Reversing Climate Change episode #59.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to another Reversing Climate Change, Nori Lightning Sale bonus episode. I'm Ross Kenyon, the lead strategist with Nori. I have with me Trey Hill, CEO of Harborview Farms. You may remember him from a previous full-length Reversing Climate Change episode where he thoroughly busted the chops of Christophe and I deservedly. So I would say, Trey, we've been working with Trey in the Nori pilot for carbon removal through regenerative agricultural practices and is generating carbon removal certificates now available for purchase in the first Nori Lightning Sale. Thanks for being here, Trey.
Trey Hill: Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: So Trey, what is it about the way in which you farm that caught our attention? I assume it was a multifaceted...
Trey Hill: One is that I am 100% no-till, meaning that we never turn the soil over. And we also grow cover crops, which means that we grow crops year round on our soil. By doing so, we're essentially harvesting sunlight all year long. What that does is it uses the plant's natural processes to secure carbon into the soil. We didn't do it initially for climate purposes or carbon sequestration. We were doing it for soil health. As the tracks of environmentalism, science have kind of run in parallel with the two. It's made for a great opportunity to work with Nori.
Ross Kenyon: We've really enjoyed the process too. Although I know it's been a lot of hard work. A lot of it has been digging through data, making sure that this data is in a sort of unified form that we're able to work with. It's been very instructive. I know the product team has learned a lot from working with you and others in the pilot too. What exactly has it been like working through the pilot with us? What have you spent your time and the time of your staff doing?
Trey Hill: Well, I'm quite fortunate. One of the reasons we got hooked up was through a company that I use called Granular. It's like an enterprise software. It's almost like Oracle for farmers. And I use that for financial management. It gives me profitability per farm and field and monitors all my inputs and the costs and all these things. But what it did was it made it a really nice facilitation for the migration of data over to the models that Nori's run. So I really didn't have to do as much work as you might think, in part due to the technology that we've implemented on the farm. I think that's been a big part of it.
So a lot of what we've been doing here on the farm, Mike Legg is kind of my key guy on this. And we've been going through the data, making sure it's right. And then we've only used the software for five years. So trying to go back 10, 15 years on some fields to provide all the records that we can based on when we switched from conventional tillage to no-till and how long we've been doing cover crops and what those cover crop mixes look like and what the crop was and the yields were, to really just trying to get a complete history of the different fields that we're enrolling in this program.
Ross Kenyon: Great, and we love to work at Granular too. Farmers are entering data for their own agronomic purposes and planning. And when this data is in a form that's accessible to Nori, we're able to use that in a pretty turnkey fashion. So we've been very interested in working with partners like Granular and we think it makes farmers lives a lot easier as opposed to, yeah, doing all this manually doesn't seem like an attractive task, which you luckily were able to avoid by being such a digitally focused farmer, I guess you could say.
Trey Hill: Yeah, I don't think it would be a necessity to join the program. It just makes it easier. And I think being one of the first folks to go through it as a farmer, it probably made everyone's life a little bit easier. We started out just doing two fields, keep it organized. And those two took much longer than the fields that we enrolled here a few months ago. So I guess it was probably 18 months ago, we did those first two and it took several months. I mean, I think we had Michael Leggett, who's one of your main folks there. He was actually helping us manually enter data [unclear] hand. So it was a lot of time and a lot of effort, but the progress that's been made even prior to the first sale has been pretty amazing to see from our perspective because by the time we did the last couple of fields that we've enrolled, it went through pretty fluidly.
Ross Kenyon: Great to hear. Do payments for these sorts of activities influence your behavior at all? Like you think moving forward you would, well, you're sort of already bought into this practice. But would this help you expand or do you have some fields that are managed differently that you might change for their carbon potential? What might you do differently?
Trey Hill: Absolutely. I mean, farming is a fairly tight margin business. Now the crop prices are relatively depressed due to just global markets in Chicago, Board of Trade and all those complicated things. So it does make a big difference to us if we can make more money. For me, I believe in what we're doing, so it makes it a little easier decision. We do have some fields that we haven't been treating quite the same as others. And I think this will definitely help us bridge that gap to make sure that we're 100% doing what we're doing.
And I also think that this is going to help build transparency through my farm, one through the marketplace, but then hopefully also to end users as I start to, you know, as we market to the consumer what we're doing, I'm hoping that that may also provide some value as well as we try to figure out different ways to address climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Very good to know. Do you think that this might influence your neighbors, your peers? Maybe people who, I'm sure you know guys who are like, "Oh, I'd love to do things the way you are, planting green and cover cropping and no-till." They just haven't gotten there yet. Do you think this might nudge them along?
Trey Hill: I hope so. It costs money to try all this stuff. I live in the state of Maryland where I get a lot of help on the cover crops to help me pay for it through environmental programs. But folks that don't live in the state, there's different federal programs, but I think that just having that extra funds makes it much easier to invest for the different attachments that go on a planter or expenses. There's a lot of different things that you have to gear up.
And then I think you guys will also help kind of write a book or write a standard operating procedure on how to farm this way eventually as you pull all of us together that are doing it. That'll make it much easier than say when I adopted these practices and not many folks were doing it was steep learning curve. I think as more folks get into it and more folks can get on the trend of it, then we can start to have an operating procedure and it becomes more normalized and then a lot more farmers will start to get into it. So yes, I think it will. I was a little too long winded [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: It was exactly the right amount of wind. I hope you're right. I know there's a lot of decisions that go into changing practices.
Trey Hill: One of the big incentives I have for doing the whole program is I rent a lot of the land that we farm. It's difficult in a way because I'm asking the owners to sign a contract that says they're going to farm the farms this way, carbon that we're sequestering will stay in the ground. But it also lets them know that I care about the farms that I'm [unclear] that they own. So to me, I'm using it as part of my, I wouldn't say it's marketing because it's just, you know, me going and talking to landlords and building relationships.
But I'd say it's definitely something that I'm utilizing to help build a relationship with my owners, for the folks that own land to let them know that this is all stuff we're aware of and we can. And I think being recognized by Nori and by the marketplace definitely affirms what I'm saying and brings a lot of validity to what I'm saying.
Ross Kenyon: That's a great point and one that we don't speak about nearly enough. Forgive me listeners for this turn of phrase, but the expression, "Beat something like a rented mule." I think that's pretty common probably for land that you don't own. You don't have to live with it for decades. The reputation that at least I know of for farming rented land is that this land is sometimes more abused than land that you own yourself. You take better care of it when you actually own it. So it probably helps in working if there were a standard contract, or some way of dealing with landowners who are renting out to farmers for them to know that, "Hey, my land is actually going to be taken care of." Do you think that that's a big part of this?
Trey Hill: For me it is, yes. I've got one of my owners that's been signing up in the program and I told him about it when I first started working with Nori over a year ago. And he said, I want my farm in it. I said, I don't know any details. I don't have a contract. I don't know if these guys know what they're talking about. And he said, I want in. He said, if you're putting your land in, he said, then let's do it together. You know, we're a team. He's not costing us money. We're going to maintain yields. We're going to maintain profitability. But he's a firm believer in what we're doing, firm believer in the necessity to climate change and he wants these things implemented on his farm.
So for me that builds, we have a really strong relationship to begin with, which is why I called him. But it definitely lets him know that we're collaborating, that we're a team on this and that we're trying to do the best job we can at growing crops [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: Well, if people wanted to learn more about what you do or Harborview Farms, what's a way that they could learn more and support your efforts?
Trey Hill: Well, I have a website. I probably don't update it as often as I should. We have a Facebook page that probably also is not updated as often as it should. We get into harvest and I'm working long hours and the team's really definitely busy and we end up actually updating [unclear], which is counterintuitive to when people are actually interested in what we're doing. But I would say those would probably be the main things from that perspective in whatever information Nori's providing would probably be very good too.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. Yeah. I'll put in the show notes the link to your full length podcast, which is, you know, a very fun one. We had a lot of great chatter in there, learned a lot. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] And the CRCs that are available for purchase there are generated through Trey Hill's farm. Trey, thank you so much for being here. I hope people are excited about what you do and want to support you and farmers like you. And we're really grateful for the leadership you've shown in this space.
Trey Hill: Yeah, I'm excited, [unclear]. This is, it's been a lot of work in a long time and it's great to see it come to fruition. I'm super excited. My whole team's excited. So yeah, I think it's pretty neat too.
Ross Kenyon: Well, if you liked the show, if you like what we're doing here, if you want to get the word out about the lightning sale, we sure would appreciate it. Please share it out with your friends, rate and review the podcast on iTunes, Apple podcasts or Stitcher. Let people know we're doing something new here that has taken quite a lot of effort and we're ready for you. We're ready for you to interact with it and to be on the business end of not just endlessly releasing podcasts, but now there's stuff that you can buy and support carbon removal, regenerative agriculture, and working to amend some of the things that we haven't done so well as a species, but I think we're now developing the tools to be able to address them in a thoroughgoing way. And this is just the beginning. Thank you so much for listening and your support.
