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.
The earliest conversation in this batch, and the only long one in it that nobody has been able to hear for years. Christophe Jospe is co-hosting. Paul Gambill is back in Seattle, which we mention twice in the first two minutes with what I would now describe as insufficient sympathy.
Trey Hill farms at Harborview in Maryland and had been running no-till and cover crops on real acreage while the rest of the field was still arguing about the modelling. The part of this I would not have predicted is how much of it is two people from a carbon startup saying out loud that they had read the books and had not stood in the field. That is a good position to interview a farmer from, and a slightly humbling one to publish six years later.
No-till agriculture promotes soil health and sequesters carbon, so why isn’t everybody doing it? The practical reality is that farmers are limited by their infrastructure and financial obligations. Making a change is not always profitable and often means fighting against a father who’s mastered the conventional system. To facilitate large-scale change, we need a market that allows farmers to get paid for growing crops unconventionally.
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Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You're listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world's first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I'm Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe. Again, no Paul Gambill. Paul is sitting alone, sadly, in Seattle. He's probably fine. I don't think it's a big deal for him. He's got plenty to do. No, but we're still here at the National No-Tillage Conference. It has been a great time learning about no-till, speaking a lot with farmers, learning a lot. We've been listening more than we've been speaking. At least we try to. I think that's a good goal in general.
Christophe Jospe: I agree. I thought I knew something about no-till farming and it's really nice to say, yeah, I know nothing. You know, there's this idea around theory and practice and you can read as many books and you can understand the theory and how things might come. But until you get in the room and you have different people who have years and decades really under their belt of experience and can get into well this worked here and it didn't work that way and it's just there's some real energy in the room that people genuinely enjoy. We're experts in a way that is really, really refreshing. You know, we're entrepreneurs here at Nori and we innovate and come up with ideas on build, measure, learn, right?
And build systems. We're tech nerds though. We're tech nerds. But I actually think the true entrepreneurs of this generation and really of this time are no-till farmers because they're the ones who are out there innovating. We're super fortunate to be sitting across from a farmhouse. We've got Trey Hill. Trey actually was recognized by the White House a few years back as a champion of change for smart agriculture. His farm at Harborview. Do you have a view of the harbor?
Trey Hill: We do, yes. Rock Hall Harbor, yes.
Christophe Jospe: So, if you're interested to find out more, you can go to harborview.net and there's some great information about their farm and what they do. Or you could just listen to this podcast as we get into it. But Trey, first of all, welcome. It's so great to meet you in person. You've been working with us. We've been working with a lot of our colleagues and getting the data in and the pilot and now we're here to talk about that. And you listen to a few of our podcasts so you know the deal. We like to start with people's story, kind of how they got to where they are today, which is sitting in a hotel room on the 17th floor in Indianapolis talking about Reversing Climate Change.
Trey Hill: Yeah, it's a long journey. I did not anticipate sitting on the 17th floor doing a climate change environmental podcast. If you told me 15 years ago, I probably would have questioned your sanity. But I grew up on a very conventional farm, fairly conventional education, went to Purdue, graduated from there later than I should have.
Ross Kenyon: By conventional, you mean monoculture, corn and beans?
Trey Hill: A very stereotypical farm. Very successful. My father's very intelligent. Built a great business. Always did the best he could and used the most modern farming practices of the day, but that involved a lot of things. It involved a lot of conventional tillage. It involved a lot of fertilization without precision. It involved a lot of no cover cropping initially. That was very foreign to us. And then once the state programs came in, he was not an environmentalist. Yeah. So, we, about 20 years ago, or probably 25 years ago, there was a bad outbreak of pisteria in the Chesapeake Bay. It killed a bunch of fish. It's a bacteria.
At the time, they blamed the local farm community. I think it's been proved that whether or not it was or wasn't is irrelevant.
Ross Kenyon: Was it just a bacterial bloom of some variety that happened in the water?
Trey Hill: Yeah, it was a big red bloom and they thought it was fertilizer. I don't know about sewage. I know now there's rumors that it wasn't that. But anyway, it was a whole thing. And the farmers took the brunt of the blame and it could have been their responsibility. Responsibility or not a thing. In hindsight, I've heard other things, but it doesn't matter. So it became a very political issue on how and why we farm. So my father, who was very non-environmental at the time, said we need to talk to the environmental community. We need to explain to them what we do and how we do it because I don't think they know.
He said, I'm intelligent, educated in the products of farming. I'm a businessman that's efficient. And they're still viewing us as a stereotypical kind of wearing suspenders and holding a pitchfork and don't know what we're doing. It became very condescending. That's the way he felt. And I was probably just out of college. And I think it was kind of a feel amongst farmers that when folks come at you and act as though you don't know what you're doing, when you don't know what you're doing, it becomes condescending. It becomes offensive. So his solution was we need to get the folks from Chesapeake Bay Foundation out to our farm, come up with some solutions.
So I look back and at the time it didn't seem like a big deal, right? They came to the farm, they came out there and I gave them a talk on the combines that were running through the field and how much they cost and what we were doing with residue and different things. We were doing no till at the time, no cover crops because we hadn't heard of them. You know, how much money we had a day and different efficiencies that we were achieving. And they were all kind of like, wow, you know, this is pretty cool. And we had a cocktail party afterwards and it was very non-confrontational.
And I think I learned really a lot that day. It's one of those moments that you don't really realize you're learning when you're learning, but a bit of an epiphany, I guess you'd call it life changer. That we could really get a lot done by working with these folks. And that led to the whole cover crop movement. And then they wanted us to plant cover crops. You know, that was the big solution. And we all went what we can't afford to. Margins are tight. You know, it's a dog-eat-dog world out here. We have to compete with Indiana farmers and Brazilian farmers. We don't want to have to spend an extra $30 or $40.
Well, we can get the money. Wait a second, you can get money? What are you talking about? So I went with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to Annapolis with Kim Coble. I remember she was head of Maryland at the time and she and I testified on behalf of a bill that would fund cover crops. So this was the lady from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and a large scale commercial producer. For farms to plant cover crops. Yeah, it pays us to plant cover crops.
Ross Kenyon: What are cover crops and what does that entail?
Trey Hill: Well, let me finish my story. Oh, yeah. Because otherwise you'll get me into weeds. Is that all right? That's great. Is that cool? Literally, because there could be a lot of weeds with the cover crops. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We'll use a lot of analogies here. So, I think that led me down the path of environmentalism. So I'm on the board of a couple environmental groups. I deem myself an environmentalist because I'm a person that's an advocate for the environment. So I don't think that being a farmer that uses commercial fertilizers and pesticides necessarily relegates you to not be able to be an environmentalist. I think that the points of entry of a lot of these words often ostracize people that should be part of the conversation.
I always felt like I couldn't be an environmentalist because I was a farmer. But yet any other profession can be an environmentalist. You know, you can work for the biggest petroleum mining company in the country and still be an environmentalist in your off time, right? I mean, you can still advocate for the environment. You can still join. But as a farmer, I felt like I couldn't. But then once I joined and started... So it's a really nice symbiotic relationship.
Ross Kenyon: That's great. It's nice to hear when you can find groups that are conventionally opposed. I know there's a lot of animosity and I think part of it, whether it's real or perceived or some mix of the two, I think there is a perception that environmentalists can be a bit different. Yeah. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: So you asked, what are cover crops? And let me try, maybe we'll let the expert tell us what that means. But I think, you know, it's interesting to think about what are the motivations for cover crops as well. So in the Bay, Trey was talking about ready for a And when you plant cover crops of different varieties, these will actually activate and stimulate a lot of the nutrients in the soil where you get things like mycorrhizal fungi. I called Ross a mycorrhizal fungi at one time. I was like, you're a fungi. I think that's the pilot or the first episode. Yeah. So, I knew what that meant back then.
Now, I think I understand what that means a little bit more how you have root systems talking to each other and cover crops happen to be. Particularly good at that. And so instead of needing to use as much fertilizer, you're actually able to make living soils and make it all work. How did I do, Trey? Did I kind of figure it out? Yeah, I need things like truticale, hairy vetch, different cover crop varieties. I think
Trey Hill: you might have jumped. You might be too well educated now. I think you might have jumped some of the basics. I'm not sure. I'm not correcting you. I wouldn't dare correct. I mean, you're the expert. You're the podcast.
Christophe Jospe: No, no, no. You're the expert.
Trey Hill: I think the fundamental idea of the cover crop, you may have overlooked, I found that when I explain it to folks that don't know what farming or understand what we do as farmers, particularly corn and soybean farmers, they see this big monoculture, right? That's all we grow. It's really not probably good for the ecology, right? I mean, it's a monoculture. It doesn't build an ecosystem. It doesn't enhance diversity, right? Because that's what it is. And so, we look at it as farmers and one thing we think is, well, we can't change that, at least in the short term, right? Everyone wants to change. This dichotomy of growing corn and beans, but really that's how we get the most calories for the acre.
That's how we get really inexpensive food for the world. That's how we've learned to feed the world, which we've now achieved and achieved a decent balance, excluding if we have droughts from climate change. But what happens is when in any system that grows food, whether it's corn, beans, vegetables, organic, non-organic, you need nutrients to grow them. If it's grass, it needs nitrogen. If it's a legume, it needs phosphorus. They need different nutrients. But the system is not perfect. Mother Nature allows for escapes of these. And then on top of that, as we grow our crops, we don't grow within the natural cycle of life. So when our corn is harvested, it's not when the trees have already dropped their leaves.
The soil has not become steadfast at that point. The soil is still living, yet we have nothing growing. We have no living roots in the soil. So that's when most of our leaching and runoffing. So, what happened is we have this… So what the environmental community figured out is that if we grow another crop after that crop is harvested, this unnatural break that we've caused in the system of life is that we can now draw that nutrient up. If you have perennials, that doesn't occur. They don't cover crop in a perennial like grass situation. But for us, what we do is we plant this crop. So, we started out just planting other grasses just to pull the nutrients up out of the soil so that it couldn't leach through.
In the spring, they continue to grow. We plant our crop. Then that nutrient gets recycled. So, now as we've progressed and learned a lot more about soil health and mycorrhizal fungi and all the large words that I didn't know that you just used that you just learned in the last two days.
Christophe Jospe: Ruthless.
Trey Hill: Anyway, I'm sorry. Did that come off as obnoxious? I didn't mean for it to. I apologize.
Ross Kenyon: You clearly listen to the show and you know how to do it.
Trey Hill: But we've learned that if we start to do different mixes and different blends, we can really build. We build all of those big words into the soil. And once those fungi and everything get alive in the soil, the soil becomes much more dynamic. And we build a much more diverse ecological system within our monoculture. So we're still... We're still doing the monoculture, which I think we would agree is probably not ideal for the ecosystem. But what we've done is enhanced it exponentially. And in doing so, we're now sequestering carbon year round. So we're harvesting all of the sunlight every day of the year, essentially. Or there might be a couple little gaps between harvest and planting of the cover crops.
But rather than having a field that's harvested in September and lays fallow all winter long until we plant it in May, where we lose seven months of sunshine and seven months of growing potential, we're now creating biomass. We have living roots. We have living plants growing that entire time. So the soil is cycling the sun all year long. And at the same time, we're capturing nutrients. The legumes are capturing nitrogen out of the air. Instead of having to get the Haber-Bosch process to produce the UAN and the anhydrous ammonias, we're producing it naturally. So we can lower, not eliminate at this point. There's some folks that would argue either way.
I can't eliminate at this point, but we can definitely drastically... Lower the amount of fossil fuels we're burning and lower the items that we use in fertilizer, lower the amount of fossil fuel being used to produce those products.
Christophe Jospe: I love where you're going with this and you're bringing up some terms and it's kind of like you're not an absolutist. You're maybe a harm reductionist. You're saying that, you know… I can't completely get off the fertilizer. I still need to grow my crops. And you know what? I'm still going to grow monocultures, but I'm going to farm green. I'm going to do things which I know are creating living systems. It's good. It's, you know, you use the term, you know, it's a farm as a year round ecological system. And if you go to Harborview's website, you can see that's on the banner. It's right there.
It's It's really interesting. So we've thrown terms around and we have certainly learned in the various audiences that we talk to what to say to whom. And so, you know, we might use the word regenerative, but maybe you want to say low till or minimum till, multiple crop rotations. More cover crops. So, it's kind of like do a little bit more, but there's this like large range. And one of the things that I love about this conference is these are not the guys who are going to use the word. Ross and I kind of got in trouble. I use the word. And so for Nori, we want to consider the whole spectrum.
But at the end of the day... For us to really work, we have to work for the guys who think practically, who think large scale, and who know how to produce food that ultimately feeds the nation. So I'm kind of just laying a little bit of bait here.
Ross Kenyon: The people that are here, they don't seem... I've been to and spoken with farmers who are more ideologically committed to regenerative principles. They're there for some ethical reason, but there are people here like that too. But this seems like a very practical conference. People have had bad experiences with tillage before. They've lost money. Their inputs are quite expensive. It's riskier in some ways. Do you think that's a fair summation of the mentality of Yeah,
Christophe Jospe: I guess, you know, the question that I really want to get to is you have farmers here and some who were, I was sitting next to one listening to your talk. I was like, what do you think of that? He's like, I feel like I've been farming wrong. And you want to say, well, maybe you have, but also you haven't, you're not doing something wrong. And so, I want to go back to this farming green, like farm better. Like what does that actually mean in the context of just practical realities that farmers face? Yeah.
Trey Hill: That's the big question. And that all goes back to this cover crop system. I'd say 15 years ago, I'll speak for myself, not as the group, that I was simply managing inputs and outputs, right? I was a logistics coordinator and really You know, I mean, that's what I did, you know, whether it was working ground, keeping the crew efficient, keeping myself efficient, keeping the tractors moving, keeping the harvest going, all those things. And for me, it was more just kind of getting a little bored, you know, as a farmer, you can't, you can't. So for me, it was kind of a life changer in that way.
So there has to be a little bit of passion in it. But I think that you still have a lot of farmers. And I'm not saying that's wrong. I mean, it's actually probably a better business model than mine because mine's starting to get into stuff that isn't always profitable. We're taking some risks. We're doing some things that are a little unconventional. And the way we're farming with the cover crop sounds like a very, when stated or when articulated, which you guys are seeing here, it seems very simple. Why wouldn't guys do this? This has never been done, ever. Yeah. Then folks that in a lot of cases are not using herbicides.
Now we heard one speaker here that's doing organic no-till. I mean, what that guy is doing is amazing. He's a friend of mine. And just, I'm like, wow, but no one's ever done that. I mean, ever. So it's crazy. So it's, but it sounds very simple when you say it. It's like, oh, well, why don't you just do that? Well, no one's ever done it before. You know, we've been doing this, you know, my father did it, I did it, you know, so it becomes ingrained and it's almost a genetic thing. So all the farmers you're meeting here are doing things differently than their father. So they had to go through a whole More than likely.
I mean, there's a few people that started farming, but more than likely they had to fight their fathers on it. They had to go through a whole family drama of whether or not they were going to switch to no-till. I mean, it's every farmer here has the same story. Not the same story, but there's a similar story.
Christophe Jospe: And the people who married into a farm have a lot easier because they don't have to convince as much. Or we're talking to one guy this morning. He was a city guy. And he was like, you know what? It was easy for me because I didn't have to convince my father.
Trey Hill: Right. Exactly. So, a lot of that. So, I think that that's all part of this system that we're creating. Yeah. I don't know if that answered the question or not.
Ross Kenyon: I think so. I think it's on the right track. With big farms, I don't know, Harborview is something like 10,000 acres. Is that what I saw?
Trey Hill: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So, that's a lot of path dependencies built into there. A lot of infrastructure, a lot of risk too. It's a bigger risk than someone who has a hobbyist farm who practices organic no-till or they don't need to do any of the... They're able to like maybe supplement some of those capital inputs with labor. Maybe they're spending more time on less acres and maybe that's what they're making up for it. But switching a major farm operation over to something like that, like a regenerative or no-till organic seems like a big risk.
Trey Hill: I think it is. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: I would agree with that. So, in your keynote, you said farming as a canvas. Does that make you an artist? And what does that actually mean?
Trey Hill: One of my goals, I've never been an artist, but I think that what the cover crops have allowed me to do is bring a different way of thinking to the farm. So now I feel like I am kind of treating the farmland much differently. It was always a commodity. Farmers think in terms of commodities, or I always did. We rent land for so much an acre. We get this much return on investment. We put this much money into seed and everything's a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets, we've got to make a living, right? And then I'm going, wait a second, I'm growing these cover crops and we've got pollen swirling around the tractor as we're planting corn.
We've got songbirds singing. We've got bees buzzing, things that I never experienced while planting. And I'm going, wow. Wow. This is really an art. I'm like, how do I relate this to other folks? How do I relate this to you guys that what I'm doing is not just growing corn and beans in a monoculture, but if you actually come to the farm and I take you out in a field that's blooming in cover crops prior to planting and you can see what I'm seeing and then take you to a field that doesn't have all this. And you see the stark contrast of what's around us. It's drastic.
And so I really view that now as one of my goals is to make it more artistic, to take some of the linearness out of farming, make it more abstract. Which it is because if you're thinking of an ecological system, there's no linearness in Mother Nature. So, if you're trying to relate to nature, you can't think of it from – I'm drawing a lot of this from Call of the Reed Warbler where you have this – what do you call it? The mechanistic mind, right? And I mean, I was doing this several years ago, but I'll use his term that you need to get away from that.
And I agree with him totally, but it pertains to me completely different. I can't do what he's doing because he's in the Saharas of Australia. And as it relates to Africa, which is a far different climate, the climate that he's talking about that it can't be implemented on is where I live. But I'm like, well, wait a second, I'm relating to this guy. I truly am relating to him. I'm like, I agree with what he's saying on most things. And I'm trying to convey that to other folks. How do I speak to an artist about what I do? Because I have to start talking in their language.
Talking to a true artist and trying to explain what I do in terms of return on investment, going to ROI and capitalistic approach. Here's my spreadsheet. They zone out. They don't want to hear it. And the artist, a lot of times, is my consumer. Right. In the end, I'm selling everything in the aggregate, but I want to get to the consumer and say, wait a second. It's not necessarily bad to eat what I'm producing. But look at what I'm doing. Let's see how we're doing it and how can we relate to one another, you know? So, yeah, so we're viewing it a lot differently than we used to.
All the guys that work with me, my team is on board. They might not all agree with the canvas and the art stuff analogies, but they see it, right? They're tolerant of it. Yeah, they're tolerant of it. They're cool with my vision and it becomes their vision as well. So, it's very relatable, but it helps. I think it makes it much more relatable to other folks that are outside my industry that don't understand my industry.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you straddle a very unique line and I'm not sure that we've met too many people that are on the line in the exact same position as you. How do you speak with people that consider themselves environmentalists? How does one, is it mostly just bringing them onto the farm and showing them it's not as bad as they might think that you are being responsible? I joined the groups. This is like, if you're not at the table, you're being eaten kind of thing?
Trey Hill: No, it was more just, what do they think? Why don't people like me? Maybe it's just an insecurity. I don't know. It was just, why are they against what I'm doing? Is what I'm doing bad? You start to think all these things. If everyone was against Nori, at some point, you'd be like, why are you against me? So, I'm going, what's going on? And I found them, once I went to a few meetings, the folks were extremely engaging.
Ross Kenyon: Where they're like, wow, a farmer is here. We need to sort this out. A little bit,
Trey Hill: kind of. Yeah. But I found that as a farmer, a lot of farmers become very defensive. And the environmentalist doesn't know how to speak to a farmer because the one key point that I – when I talk to environmentalists is that if you tell the person what they're doing is wrong, you haven't told them what they're doing is wrong. You've told them what their father was doing is wrong. It becomes a family matter. And no one can relate to that because you have this weird – it's the only job where the CEO is always inherited. Right. So you don't know what the guy's qualifications are. You don't know if I'm qualified.
I mean, I'm running this big farm, but I could just be a bum. Right. You know, I mean, you know, oh, you know, his daddy's still doing it, whatever.
Ross Kenyon: It's like you're a prince and the princes are inbred.
Trey Hill: It could be. You don't know, you know, but you don't know who you're dealing with. But nine times out of ten, if you go to a guy and say, hey, what you're doing is wrong. That guy all of a sudden reflects back, myself included, that, wait a second, that's the way my father did it. You know, so it becomes a family thing. And I don't think people relate to that because your father probably wasn't a carbon sequestering guy. Right. Certainly not. But, you know, so it becomes a different dynamic. But the one thing I found that was common that I always key on is the passion.
Environmentalists are typically folks that work for less than what they deserve, right? Less than their qualifications. You know, you see some extraordinarily important Well-educated folks working for nonprofits and environmentalist groups that could probably make a lot more money doing other things. So farmers a lot of times are the same boat. We don't necessarily live that well based on how hard we work. And we're very... We're very passionate about what we do and we think what we're doing is right. We think it's for a just cause. You know, farmers feel like we feel like we're feeding the world, right? You know, we've got this calling that's got us into this and that's why we do it.
And environmentalists a lot of ways are the same. So if you can find those common elements, then you can start to work past things. And I avoid a lot of topics like genetic GMOs. You know, someone says, hey, are you against, you know, you grow GMOs, you're bad. I go, no, I grow GMOs, not because I'm bad. I grow it because I needed to make money. Create me a non-GMO market and I grow non-GMOs, but there's no non-GMO market. So you can't say that it's bad because consumers are not paying for non-GMO,
Christophe Jospe: which is a whole different idea. He said you didn't want to go there, so we won't go there. But I mean, I just, you know, for our listeners who maybe think all GMOs are bad, tomatoes are GMOs.
Trey Hill: But I'm just saying that I think that if I were to say GMOs are right, then all of a sudden the conversation becomes disengaged. That person is against me. I'm against them much the same as we have modern politics today where you lack compromise. Whereas I just go, hey, we can compromise on this. If you don't want GMOs, help me develop a market. And we'll eliminate them. That's cool. No problem. So I think that there's some different ways of discussing things when it comes to the environment where we are. The environmentalists have engaged us in a way that which I'm included in that group to engage farmers where it's, hey, do you mind doing this project?
Do you mind trying this? We'll help you eliminate some of the risk. Maybe we can get a grant to take some of the risk out of it if you try it. But if it works, will you implement it?
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like it's more carrot than it was stick. They weren't threatening you for, we're going to fine you if you don't have cover crops. It's like, hey, we'll pay you if you do.
Trey Hill: Right. And utilizing technology and getting technology together, Chester River Keepers, Before Shore Rivers got these variable rate nitrogen sensors. They're like, hey, Trey, you and eight other farmers, didn't matter size. They got a really dynamic group of farmers and said, hey, can we put these sensors on your sprayer at a variable rate nitrogen? We'll get it paid for. And after three years- You know, can we publish the results and hopefully we'll get other farmers to start buying it. Sure. Why not? You know, who wouldn't?
Ross Kenyon: So, data has been broached. So, it's time to probably bring up the pilot, I would say.
Christophe Jospe: We should probably talk about the pilot. You know, as a company trying to build a market for carbon, you know, we think about who are the early adopters. And the early adopters, you fit the profile in so many ways. One, you like to try new things. You're open to anything. You very kindly brought up Nori in your keynote and then spoken to at least 10...
Trey Hill: I apologize for that. Yeah, we...
Ross Kenyon: We loved it.
Christophe Jospe: We talked to people about it all. You turned us into the cool kids at this conference. You're like, all right, how do I get into this? And that was, you know, we can't say yes to everyone. There are people who work particularly well right now because they're willing to learn with us. We have a way to collect data that makes it quite easy. It just so happens that you're a granular customer and we are collaborating with granular to basically make our software platforms.
Ross Kenyon: We're coming for you granular for the podcast.
Christophe Jospe: Talk to each other. Oh, they know. They've been warned. And Emma is going to be coming on pretty soon, who I'm sure you've worked with a bit. But let me just back up a little bit. I'm getting ahead of ourselves. So we'll talk about what does the pilot even provide? Well... You're talking about Canvas and artistry and getting away from commodities. In a way, we're making a new digital commodity, which is a CRC or a Carbon Removal Certificate and working with you to basically take your data and understand when you started. I really like one of the shoutouts we were talking about, Nori. You're like, those guys are really optimistic, but that's their job to be really optimistic.
It's kind of funny. I was... You're very sober about it in a very responsible way.
Ross Kenyon: Like, don't be euphoric, but I think this is cool.
Christophe Jospe: Sometimes I feel like the universe or God or whomever is really speaking to me when I go to Chinese restaurants. I got a fortune cookie the other day that said perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. And I'm like, this fortune cookie is speaking to me right now because that is totally true. That's me. But we're not only optimistic that we're going to get it right with you, Trey, we're optimistic that we're going to learn how to do it right so that we can scale, we can do it with 10 other people. So, you're kind of like laying the groundwork and laying the foundation. But I don't at all know what it's been like on your side.
So, maybe I would first be interested in talking about the pilot kind of what was it that made you think, okay, you know, this is something that I want to try out. And then what was it, what's it been like so far as far as like what it is that you need to do to even be involved? Yeah.
Trey Hill: Well, I've been very interested in farming carbon for probably three to four years. I'm on the Hughes Center for Agroecology. It's a small university quasi-environmental group on the Eastern Shore. We had a new director come in and she said, what do we need to be working on moving forward for the future? I said, carbon. She said, oh, what do you mean? I said, carbon. She was like, why? I was like, because every meeting I go to, I get a pretty diverse group of meetings, whether it's granular technology, environmental groups, food groups, industry groups, even large chemical companies. Everybody's talking about carbon and carbon sequestration. And in doing so, I'm thinking, where are we going to sequester carbon when we finally hit the reality that we have to, right?
I mean, it's great to cut down on carbon emissions, but the oceans aren't going to sequester more carbon, I don't think.
Ross Kenyon: We wouldn't want them to, I don't think either.
Trey Hill: I'm not sure. I don't know any.
Christophe Jospe: Well, the science behind it is that as they take in more carbon, they acidify, so they lose their capacity to sequester carbon. They've been doing half of the heavy lift right now to take in the carbon from all our emissions.
Trey Hill: Forests aren't going to do it, right? I mean, you can manage forests, but are you ever going to get them to exponentially grow higher? But I'm like, farmland. We're plowing all this farmland and releasing carbon every year on millions and millions and millions of acres. So I'm like, well, what I'm doing is sequestering carbon, I think, but I don't know how to prove it. And I don't know if there's a value to it. I know there's a value to society and I know there's a value to me intrinsically. So I'm happy to do it. But when you guys called or Emma called me and was like, hey, do you want to start selling carbon credits?
I was like, wow, that's great. And she said, it's going to be through blockchain and paid for by cryptocurrency. And I was like, well, that's even better, right? Like, that's cool. I don't know what that means, but I'm going to look it up, you know? And I was like, well, we'll do it. You know, what the hell is blockchain? But that's cool. You know, like, it sounds good. You know, like, I've dropped that in like five different talks. Like, when I talk to people, like, yeah, I'm going to be blockchain next year. And they're like, what's that mean? I'm like, don't, you don't want to go there.
You wouldn't understand. I just get very condescending that they don't understand what blockchain is.
Christophe Jospe: I really don't know. But that's cool. Don't let our smug elitism rub off on you.
Trey Hill: But I think all of that is going to become a part of farming. And I think you guys are going to be the facilitators. And I think that as a farmer that's no-till and growing conventional crops unconventionally, it's very difficult to get other farmers to do it. We have the low-hanging fruit has been picked. The farmers that you see here are a lot of that low-hanging fruit. But most of the farmers that haven't adopted change probably will not. As far as I'm concerned, I don't think they will. They don't have the self-belief. It's much trickier. It requires a lot more management and it involves some risk in changing your farm over to no-till, planting green, all these things.
You guys are seeing it. We don't have it figured out, right? You're with the experts of the entire world here and everyone's saying, I don't know for sure. But I think, you know, whereas if you went to a conventional farming reading, everybody knows exactly. Right. You plow it this way. You set your plow this way. You set your cultivator this way. You set your planter this way. You set your fertilizer this way. And everything is very linear. So I don't think people are going to change. So when she called and said, we're going to develop a market. Well, first I was like, wow, hopefully I can make some money.
Right. I mean, that's always my goal. You know, I've got bills. I've got kids. I've got, you know, a farm to run, a business to run. And there's a lot of money involved. So I was like, well, that's great if I can get another market for not really having to change what I'm doing other than record keeping and getting on blockchain. Right. But if we develop this market, then a lot more farmers are going to change and that's going to reflect change in the world. So I'm like, this is, I'm the little person, but I'm like, if I can help facilitate the bigger people and facilitate the bigger markets by being my little person, that's my change in the world.
So that's why I'm really excited to do it. I'm very fortunate to be running granular, which for those not familiar is an enterprise software. So everything on my farm is tracked nonstop. That gets very into my linear portion of my business where like I go to technology conferences and I talk about how great it is and what the return on investment is and how efficient my machines are and how little fuel we burn and talk about the exact same things in a much different language, right? I'm talking about using less fuel because it costs less money, but it all then flows back into being environmental. So I think if we can get This off the ground, get the enterprise software in place, get the blockchain in place, get the carbon market going.
I think you'll see a lot more farmers change, which is what will change the world. Me doing it is not going to change things drastically, right? I mean, hopefully some company. I'll buy credits from me and we'll get this market going and it'll be cool. And, you know, I go, you know, I'll have the money to reinvest or do whatever with. But I think as it grows, that's what will precipitate the change. I've been saying that in order to get more farmers to convert to this style of farming, which is much better for the environment, maybe not the best. I mean, you can argue. I mean, there's plenty of room to get in the weeds.
But if you want to keep, you're not going to change the world immediately. But if you can at least get people to do what they're doing efficiently and well, better. That's where the drastic change comes in the environment and in the amount of carbon that we're sequestering. So that's what got me really excited. The experience has been great. Emma did all the work. She basically just sent all my data to Nori and she sent it to me too. And it was like a thousand pages of just numbers. And she's like, can you see if this is okay for me to send them?
Ross Kenyon: Worst email to get.
Trey Hill: I was like, yeah. What do you think? I have like an interpreter for this? You know, I'm like, I don't even know what it is. And I was like, yeah, just say, you know, it's cool. I'm transparent. I don't care. You know, at this point, I've got to, somebody's got to jump off the bridge and somebody's got to be transparent and somebody's got to be up front. And I also think that it's a building block for me. Once I get blockchain verification and I get my carbon footprint, hopefully I'm carbon neutral. Then I can be one of the first farmers in the world that's growing corn and beans carbon neutral.
And I'm hoping then I can find an end user that wants carbon neutral corn and beans to feed either to their chickens, their hogs, or their cattle. And they'll pay me more for my corn and beans than I can get out of a commoditized market or at least get a premium on the commodity markets. Because what I'm doing is hopefully better than what some of my competition is doing. And then they have to then compete with me, which raises the entire bar.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, or... Is that too big a picture? No, no, that's perfect. I mean...
Trey Hill: Sorry, that was a little more than dealing with Michael Leggett, right? Now, the cool thing is, I have a guy that's working for me, with me, I'm sorry, that is doing all the data collection and helping Michael Leggett at Nori, and his name is Mike Legg. Wow. Wow. It's crazy. It's such a weird coincidence. Sorry, I had to bring that up. That's just like the weirdest thing ever.
Christophe Jospe: I hadn't heard that yet.
Trey Hill: Did you know that?
Christophe Jospe: This is the first time hearing that.
Trey Hill: Yeah, Michael Leggett and Michael Legg are working together to get my data collected for Nori.
Christophe Jospe: That needs to go down in the history books of Reversing Climate Change as a little footnote.
Trey Hill: And Michael Leggett has a good friend named Adam Snyder who is also helping gather the data.
Christophe Jospe: Mind Sloan. There's a lot you said there that I want to comment on. I want to bring up, I actually tweeted a picture, we'll find the link and put it in the show notes of the underwear test here, which is a pretty funny one showing land the Land that has cover crops no till, land that's been conventionally tilled, land that has minimum till. And if you put white cotton undies in the soil for a period of time, the ones that will be completely destroyed are the ones that are in the land which has no till cover crops. And I think it's another revenue stream that you didn't mention.
But when they say, oh, man, I can get paid for farming carbon. First thing they're going to say is how am I going to do that? And here at this conference, Right. Tell me how. Hopefully, that's even one more revenue stream for the people who saw the forest for the trees and got involved. And one of the hopes that we have for Granular is that since we're talking about enterprise software, that in the future, people using software on a farming level would be able to see... If I change my practices like this, and I forecast how I might be able to do things that can sequester carbon, there's a dollar value attached to that.
And that will change my agronomic decision making process. And that's part of the change that we really hope to see on the blockchain side. And I think this is a really long-winded way to get to the next question. But farmers are extremely protective of their data. You're a little bit of an anomaly. You're like, I'm transparent because I know that's how everyone else is going to change. If I show how I do things, but if someone was telling me a joke, I'm going to get the numbers all wrong, so I won't even use them. But you have people sitting around a table talking about their yield data, and then they report that to the FSA, which...
What does that stand for? Farm
Trey Hill: Service Agency.
Christophe Jospe: Farm Service Agency. And it's 60% of what they said their yields were. So no one wants to say my data is transparent. And Nori is not going to make your data transparent. Your data is always yours. If you want it to be out on the internet and out there, that's on you. For us, we take the data, we always make it confidential. There's certain data that we need. There's more data that you have that we don't need. And we want to make it very clear that that's something that... Isn't necessarily going on the blockchain. What's going on the blockchain is the proof that your farm was sequestering carbon.
And absolutely, we want to make that so there's a price premium that people who are farming carbon would be able to take advantage of, which I think is a very straightforward way to say consumers want this. Consumers want to know that they're paying for this. But I'd like to go back to the neighborly kind of changing minds, changing behaviors. Like what does it mean to be a good farm neighbor when people probably look at you like you're a little bit crazy? And so this is a whole nother community to talk to. You look at environmentalists and you got to meet them where they're at and talk about empathy.
But here's the other side. The farmers are like, who are planning... To farming conventionally, look at you like you're crazy and maybe feel like if, oh man, this is working for trade, that you're suddenly telling them how they're farming wrong. So how does that work? Like my hope, and maybe this is completely naive, but that a lot of the conventional guys, let's just say half of the farmland in the US 20 years from now is doing no-till cover crop. Now that maybe that's a crazy ambitious goal, but it's going to take a whole lot of, it's going to need to take a hurricane of just change quickly, hopefully.
So how do you see maybe communicating to people who haven't even considered this as viable, something that they might want to consider?
Trey Hill: I don't really know. That's a good one. I think that the market-based approach is how it will be done. I mean, right now you can see where commodities are drastically lower than they were a year ago because of the tariffs. There doesn't seem to be a true end in sight. We're starting to overproduce population now. The concern has always been that we're never going to produce enough food to feed a growing world. But the wealthy world has stopped growing. Right. Or virtually stopped. You know, it's a very small growth curve relative to the amount of food that we're producing. So you have a commodity market that's probably not going to get much more lucrative in the near term.
Africa is still the only one that has large scale products. The problem is they can't afford the food no matter what the price, right? It's an economic thing as far as where the food's going as to why people are starving, not because we don't have the food, it's just we don't have the right disbursement of money. So I think now we're at an end. I think five went out and sold their cows this year alone, and we have very I think there was a quote that Wisconsin's losing a dairy a day. So as the farms now will have a consolidation, a reconsolidation. So I think once the market is built by you folks or one of your competitors, I don't know where it is.
And as commodities. Right now, when we had $7 corn, if you offered me a few dollars, I would have just been like, no way. It's not worth the hassle. But now, all of a sudden, as that market increases and the cost of the carbon goes up, as the effects of climate change increase and it becomes more valuable... Then all of a sudden farmers will be able to change. And as the farmer's consolidation, I'm not saying that consolidation is a good thing. I'm not saying that big farmers are better than little farmers. I'm just saying that it is a fact of life that this is probably going to occur.
At which point it is easier to change one big farmer than it is 10 small farmers, right? Especially if you have a market built. That's not meant to be a judgment in any way of anyone. But I think that is the... Potential for the 20-year plan. You have a huge organic market that's growing that's going to keep a different style of farmer around. But I think for the bulk commodities where we're competing with Brazil primarily, soon to be Africa and the Ukraine typically are the fertile crescents that we're competing with, they're always going to remain competitive. And as we keep growing more food and we have the potential to grow more food currently, the dynamics I think are going to shift somewhat.
Ross Kenyon: I can see this forking a bit where you have companies that are within the commodity market. When you're talking about commodities, they're interchangeable. One unit of corn is as good as any other and you sell it in bulk. Correct. Farmies of scale are very useful there. A large farm can often absorb those costs and shave off pennies here or there and that adds up at volume. But then I also see first generation farmers, small scale stuff that's heavily branded that is sort of the opposite of that approach.
Trey Hill: Correct.
Ross Kenyon: Would you say those are sort of the two dominant trends that are happening?
Trey Hill: I think that's the trend that's occurring if commodities continue to go down. You have your top 20% growers, then you have your 70% growers, and then your bottom 10. But every time the bottom 10 gets thinned out in terms of economics, the bar keeps raising. Well, what happens when the bar gets to the 20% and then you're taking 10% of what was the 20%? All of a sudden, at some point, size is going to become a factor as well. Right now, size is not necessarily relative to farm success. It's basically irrelevant. I mean, a 3,000 acre grower versus a 30,000 acre grower, the odds of them going out of business are probably very comparable.
I don't know. Universities would be able to tell you. But I think as that bottom keeps drawing up and you have to out-compete and out-compete, then economies of scale will definitely become a larger player.
Ross Kenyon: That's very interesting. One other trend I've seen too, and we've spoken about this a little bit, and I went to a little breakout session on data earlier, and agriculture doesn't always have a reputation as being very tech-centric, but I think this is a mistake. I've seen a couple of your presentations so far too. It seems like you're one of the more technologically involved people I know. Is agriculture more technology-focused than we think?
Trey Hill: I think so. I think that's what's allowing me to do what I'm doing. I don't think what I'm doing now could have been done 15 years ago. And trying to analyze, say, nitrogen usage in corn, we're getting pictures of our fields taken every day that it's sunny nine months out of the year.
Ross Kenyon: Satellites.
Trey Hill: We've opted out of the drone stuff just because it's a lot of work, requires a lot of personnel. The satellites now take pictures every day. I think we're getting four meter resolution. They then give us a soil or a crop health map so we can see different. We can see where we're lacking nitrogen or have too much nitrogen. Planet just launched some more satellites where we're going to soon be able to get even higher resolution. So pretty soon we'll be able to scout better than a person walking. So all of that really is helpful in trying to really fine tune our nitrogen management. For example, we can go in and do an in-season application of nitrogen because that's when the crop needs it.
So we put most of our nitrogen in corn. And nitrogen is the one that provides most of the pollution to the water, right? It's the one that leaches. It's the one that runs off it and phosphorus are the kind of the hot ones. So we can go in there in real time as the corn crop's growing and we know how much it rained. We know how much leached out through the soil because we know the characteristics of the soil. We can also look at the satellite image to see if there's any man-made differences. So right now we've got the natural stuff's pretty well ironed down. Weather, you know, we've got radar, we've got lidars.
So we know the topography. We've got soil data that we've already run. We've run EC meters through most of our soils. So we know what the characteristics of the soil are. We know what's going to leach. We know how much nitrogen we put on initially. So we know exactly what that plant needs. But now with the satellite technology, we can actually also go in there and determine if I've made any mistakes as a grower. And change the nitrogen rates based on that. If we had a compaction area where the soil was too compressed for the roots to grow, we know that the corn is not going to yield as well.
So we don't even have to fertilize that as much. So I think we're really starting to take this technology and really fine tune it. And we can then be... It's exceptionally precise in where we're putting the nutrients. Now, what happens afterwards is kind of the missing piece. You know, we can't predict weather. That's the biggest thing. If we could predict weather, it would be great. You know, that would be the holy grail, which we can't. But once you put it on, you know, you make your best guess estimate as to what the weather is going to do and what your yield potential is. But yeah, the technology is great.
You know, granular software. I have an app on my phone. And as guys are scouting fields, I'm getting a feed that looks like Facebook with all of their photos, all of their notes, and we can communicate to one another. So we're getting a collective intellect of scouts. So I can take a 20 year old guy that's learning to scout and learning agronomy and he's out there scouting and he doesn't know what stuff is. So he just takes a picture of it and he goes, let's all this worm. And then I've got a lady with a PhD in entomology that's helped me. She's retired and she loves crops and she likes what we're doing with the cover crops and everything.
And she looks at it and she goes, oh, that's no problem. That's a cabbage beetle eating your rapeseed. Leave it alone. Or she'll go, oh no, that's an army worm. Let's go scout it and see if we need to spray it or not. Let's see how many there are. So then Jack learns, the young man that's scouting, that's learning, he learns what that is. So the next time he knows, then he passes that knowledge on. So my whole farm is, the whole team is gaining intellect. Based on technology, which I could never teach all that, right? You know, we can't, you know, have so many classes and so many times where people are just going to zone out.
Whereas now, we're all learning from one another at an exceptionally rapid pace, which is just really cool.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, what I love about all that is you're collecting data that is important for you to do better farming and that same data... You might not even have been thinking it's relevant for a carbon market, but it just so happens that it is. And so it's like this add on. So we're super excited to work with guys like you to sort of figure all this out and pave the way for something of the future. Ross, he's... Got something to take us home.
Ross Kenyon: I'll let you see it. Yes, I do. Well, I'm wondering what you might be looking forward to changing in the next couple of years. It seems like this is all very iterative for you. You're learning and you're experimenting. Are there things that you want to try? You think there's places that technology will allow you to go the next couple of years that we should look out for?
Trey Hill: Well, the cover crops are still the big thing. The whole idea of, you know, we talked about cover crops. One thing we didn't discuss is typically farmers either till the field like a rotary tiller in a garden, right? You till it all up and you plant it or you no-till it. But in the past, whenever we've no-tilled, when we had the advent of chemicals, we decided as a group collectively that the field was much better off being devoid. We call it planting brown, or that's what I call it. So, in other words, the field's completely clean. You would say nothing but the residue from last year's crops because if you plant into weeds that have grown and you don't kill them, you have all these small microclimates.
You might have chickweed here, grasses here. So you have a lot of soil variability in terms of moisture and temperature. So now with the cover crops, we're able to make that field a lot more consistent. Like a forest floor is actually very consistent, even though there's a big diversity of plants. So we're putting this diversity of plants out, but it makes the understory much more consistent. So we can then no-till into it. But what that allows us to do is plant green, which is what I'm doing, but it's a very new concept. So I'm hoping to take that planting green to the next level.
Ross Kenyon: I saw a video of this too, where you're going through, is it cereal rye, right? And mixing with clover and other things. But do you have stocks that are five feet tall or something and you're running a planter through it, planting seed for corn or soybeans?
Trey Hill: And then at the same time, that's where all my carbon is, right? So I'm making money, hopefully, right? With you guys, because that's my carbon sequestration. And by having the satellite imagery, taking photos every day, You guys not only have a third party that'll probably come out, but you have a satellite image that you know how long the life was on my fields. And all we have to do is calibrate the satellite imagery on the ground with a third party or with myself or with my photos in granular that I'm taking anyway. Everyone that goes to my field takes a picture of everything. So you have a picture of this six foot stuff, plus you have a satellite image.
So all of a sudden the blockchain, the guy that you're selling to, he goes, well, how do we know this guy had cover crops? And you go, oh. Here's a picture from granular. Here's a picture from space. It's all dated. It's all timestamped. It was six feet tall. And here's the guy that was on the ground that did a biomass assay. And he had eight tonnes of cereal rye here. And we've got pictures. We've got everything to back it up. Well, all of a sudden the purchaser goes, man, this is great, right? Like there's no BS at all. It's all just, I mean, it is what it is.
So I think the more biomass I can accumulate, the healthier my soils become. It's really good for me and my future and whoever farms, whether it's my kids or whoever. But I think it all complements one another and then that really gets – the ball is rolling now, but I think we can really start to take it to the next level once we do that and start to build other people. And I think we'll learn a tremendous amount once we start working with folks like you. You know, we've never had, you know, techie people from Seattle out on large scale farms, right? I mean, you guys could come to my farm and probably teach me so much because you'd be like, why are you doing that?
And I'll be like, well, because I always did it that way. And then all of a sudden I'll go, wait a second. That's a great idea. You know, just because you didn't know anything, you can actually teach me more, right?
Ross Kenyon: You know how dumb we are, right?
Trey Hill: But I'm sure you're good at something. That's very kind of you.
Ross Kenyon: I softballed it. I dunked on myself. That was terrible. Sorry, sorry.
Trey Hill: I'm not very bright either. I just work with smart people, right? You know what I mean? That's the key. Don't worry about it.
Ross Kenyon: I'm cutting this whole last word.
Christophe Jospe: This has been a great podcast, but I want to end it because we're going a little longer, but I didn't get to talk about what is maybe your favorite or least favorite subject slash arch nemesis, which is slugs.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah, you really wanted to talk about slugs. I did.
Christophe Jospe: I worked at a summer camp years ago, and one of my campers was Russian, and he saw a slug, and he was like, and that's the only Russian word I
Alexsandra Guerra: know, and it's so good.
Christophe Jospe: And they started singing a song about Slyzniaks. It was great. Apparently, that's also an insult to call people. We don't really say that here in English. I mean, I guess you could, but it wouldn't make sense. But okay, why do slugs matter? Why is that a problem in farming? Why is it your arch nemesis?
Trey Hill: Well, most bugs are relatively easy to kill, right? You know, you have an exterminator at your house. If you have termites, he comes in and sprays, whatever. You know, we have an exterminator that comes every six months and we don't have any bugs in our house. And it's the same in a field. You know, no matter what it is, we can kill it pretty much. I mean, there's four or five different modes of action, whether it attacks, you know, nervous systems, respiratory systems, whatever it is, you can kill it. Bugs, anything. But you can't kill a slug. There's no chemical that I know of that can kill a slug other than a contact chemical.
And if it's contact, they have to be out, but they live underground.
Ross Kenyon: You know, like salting them?
Trey Hill: Yeah, whatever. So they're just next to impossible to kill. But in a conventionally tilled environment, like a rotary tiller in a garden, back to that analogy, the slugs don't have much habitat. But the more you no-till and the more you cover crop, you build this habitat. So we're trying to figure out how to control these things when we've created the perfect habitat for them.
Christophe Jospe: You made a luxury resort for slugs.
Trey Hill: Yeah, we made a luxury resort for slugs. Now, we've actually put a chemical on the seed that doesn't kill the slugs, but once the slugs ingest it, will kill the bugs that eat the slugs because they ate the slug that ate the chemical, which goes threefold, right? So, even if you had beneficial insects, we've got strict product placement of the insecticide, which is the greatest thing ever, right? It's on the seed. So, anything that eats a seed dies except for a slug. Well, the problem is that there's these beetles that run around. I haven't tried this yet, but there's a lot of farmers that are having some success with it.
The beetles run around and eat the slugs. Well, the problem is if the slug has fed on the seed that had the chemical, then the beetle dies. So it's this vicious cycle. But if we take the insecticide off the seed, then the worms eat the seed and then we don't have a seed. So, it's become quite a quandary for me.
Ross Kenyon: So, it's better to have a worm problem or a slug problem than to have a no seed problem.
Trey Hill: I don't know what the worst problem is. It sucks. It's just not fun. I don't know.
Ross Kenyon: These are the kind of questions you have to deal with if you go into farming. That's what you have to look forward to. It sounds like a series of hard trade-offs to figure out. Well, thanks for teaching us and being with us, Trey. That was super fun. Thanks for being the pilot too. It's a courageous thing when you have a first mover like that because there are lots of people who are waiting in the wings and I get it. It's scary to be the first one to jump off.
Trey Hill: No, I appreciate it. I'm enjoying it. So, I think it's fun to be the first. So, I'm excited.
