Generating interest in soil health - Rob Myers

Paul Yeager: Hello, everybody. I'm Paul Yeager Welcome to this MtoM podcast again, this week we are joined by a guest, like I say  that we do every week here. Rob Myers is the director of the Missouri Center for Regenerative Agriculture based at the University of Missouri in Columbia. You know, you're down south from where we're at. So, you know, I assume you're in shorts today?

Rob Myers: It's not quite that warm today, maybe a couple degrees warmer the year but not sure. 

Paul Yeager: It's weather now and it's it's that's the whole everybody kind of talks about this weather thing. I don't remember it being cold, or I don't remember it being hot. It's funny how weather and climate have all of a sudden become one in the common discussion among people. Do you find that to be true?

Rob Myers:  Well, anybody that's connected to agriculture, of course, is always paying attention to what's happening with the weather, but certainly the climate aspects of it are entering into our discussion more in terms of how does this compare compared to 30 years ago, or the long term trends. So that's very true.

Paul Yeager:  If you've been around a university enough, and I'm guessing, you know, Elwin Taylor, who he is at least at Iowa State. And he's always does the studies of weather and climate change. And now that he's in emeritus status, I don't see near as many updates from him. But he did teach me that things ebb and flow. And when you see people respond to some of the stuff you're doing that, oh, this is just an ebb and flow. What's that make you respond with?

Rob Myers:  Well, working in regenerative agriculture, definitely a lot of the interest in this topic comes from people interested in how extreme weather is affecting our ability to grow food and manage our agricultural systems. So I find a lot of farmers are not as focused on what's causing changes in the climate as the fact that they're seeing more challenging weather conditions. And I think that's something we can all agree, we need to be able to address, you know, we need our crop and livestock systems to be able to handle intense rainstorms, dry periods, unusual temperatures, and that's just part of what we're all trying to figure out is how we're going to manage that going forward.

Paul Yeager: Well, and I told you before we started recording here about it, the audience of this program really cares a lot about directions of grain markets. But the topic I know I get all the time is about necessarily the crop and how it sustains weather how it can be so dry, but yet we still grow, let's just say 200 bushel to the acre corn versus what we were maybe able to do in the early 90s. And how genetics have changed? Can science keep up with the climate changes?

Rob Myers: Well, that's what we're gonna find out, right? I do think genetics is helping but what we're really finding and this comes back to the regenerative agriculture is having our soil be resilient is critical, built to growing crops and livestock. And it really doesn't matter whether it's fruits, vegetables, corn, soybeans, wheat, whatever type of crop, we're talking about pastures, we need soils that are resilient. And the challenge we're facing is that many of our soils have lost half of the organic matter they had at the time we first started farming that just has happened over many decades, especially in the early years when there was really intense tillage. Now that farmers are doing more conservation tillage we've slowed down or in some cases stopped the loss of organic matter or carbon from our soils, but we're realizing if we can rebuild that organic matter, or that carbon in the soils that that contributes to more resiliency to intense rainstorms or prolonged dry periods. So we've seen both in recent years, 2018 was an extremely wet year when there were 19 million acres that were not planted at all. I mean, for your listeners, that's like taking the whole state of Iowa and not having a single acre of crops planted. That's what happened in 2018. It was just on a national level. And then this year, like so many years, recently, parts of the food growing areas of the Midwest were extremely dry. We were in a severe drought here, where I'm at in central Missouri. So you know, it's it's this challenge of weather that's outside the norm of what we saw in the past and figuring out how to continue to have productive crop and livestock systems with challenging weather.

Paul Yeager: I guess I should have before I got you into the heavy stuff I should have had you define what your role is right now?

Rob Myers: Well, I'm a crop and soils professor and I direct the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and that center is relatively new. I've worked in sustainable agriculture most of my career and actually split my time between the Sustainable Ag Research and Education Program and this new Center for Regenerative Agriculture. But the idea with regenerative agriculture is, is one that's still evolving. There's no exact definition. But in simple terms, when we talk about regenerative agriculture, we're talking about how do we make our soils more resilient to face challenging weather conditions. And that has to do with building soil health. We can do that with practices like cover crops and reduce tillage. We look at integration of livestock into the system, such as grazing cover crops on crop fields, we're interested in how we can have more diversity in our landscape. So if it's a crop field, we can maybe get that with cover crops or having a third cash crop and the rotation if it's a pasture, having more species of plants in the pasture, maybe including some native plants, depending on the pasture. So that biodiversity is something that seems to help build the health of the soils and add to our resiliency. So there's kind of a few principles or outcomes that people look at with regenerative ag and our center is aimed at doing research, education and extension around these practices.

Paul Yeager: We'll get back to a little bit more of your center. I want to go into about you for a minute, what year do you enter undergrad?

Rob Myers: Well, let's see I entered undergrad in 1979 grew up on a farm in central Illinois, and I worked through graduate school and conservation tillage and got interested in sustainable approaches pretty early. So I went up to Minnesota for my graduate degrees and have spent most of my career in the Midwest but have also worked in Washington DC, some both on Capitol Hill and USDA headquarters in Washington.

Paul Yeager: well, and the reason I asked about the year is because 1979 for you as a young farm kid, desiring the next level, I can't imagine there were a lot of options for studying sustainable agriculture, then or at least the options were different than they are today. What do you recall about some of those early studies? And either a how you've confirmed some of those initial thoughts, or Oh, no, what we were thinking isn't quite where we needed to be.

Rob Myers: But I can remember as an undergraduate taking crops and soils courses that I became pretty interested in soil conservation, then I grew up on a farm that was very flat. So we didn't have much runoff in terms of rainfall eroding the soil. But we did have wind erosion, people tend to think of wind erosion is something that happened just in the Dust Bowl, and I can remember, or ditches in the spring after they'd been moldboard plowed in the fall normally, and sometimes we'd be coming back from my grandparents a half hour away, they were farmers, and the soil was blowing so bad, you could hardly drive home on a Sunday afternoon, and my dad had helped me out helping dig paths in the ditches so the fields could drain because of all that soil blowing into the ditches or sometimes washing into the dishes from rain. So So I got exposed to some of those challenges early. But then we weren't talking about soil health, we were talking about soil erosion. And it continues to be a concern today. But we've learned so much about the biology of the soil since then, that's been a really big change.

Paul Yeager: And it has that you mentioned South Central Illinois versus Minnesota versus Missouri. There's not a lot of change in those locations. But there is in their approach. I mean, if I talk to a farmer, in the flat black areas, they look at you kind of funny sometimes when you say are you doing cover crop, but if you look at or some type of let's hold the soil in place, whereas some of the more hilly regions are not as healthy of soils. They're absolutely embracing it. Do you find that to be the case, in my overgeneralization of things?

Rob Myers: Well, it depends on the state. So we see a lot of cover crops on fields that don't have any slope to them. And it's true that if you went back 10 years ago, the cover crops are being adopted a decade ago, were more likely to happen on fields that had erosion issues. But because of this new interest and understanding of soil health, we're seeing farmers with all types of fields, getting interested in using cover crops. And then there's other things there's emergence of weeds that are resistant to some of our common herbicides, has led a number of farmers to look for alternative ways of controlling their weeds and that's a motivation for cover crops. We also have people with cattle and sheep that want cover crops for grazing reasons because that can make help make money for them. So there's not a single reason that all farmers are using cover crops but soil health is the most common reason that we find in surveys of farmers about cover crops.

Paul Yeager: And I know that cover crop is is not the only thing to use to help in soil health. And that's just a general entrance to the topic to ask you this, then how have you found that farmers have been willing to do improvements in soil health is it all just driven by dollars and cents that help them grow better crops?

Rob Myers: You know, farmers come in to soil health in different ways. Often it starts in a conversation with a neighbor, or maybe a farm magazine article they've read or a field tour they've gone to. And they often start with a single practice. So maybe they start by reducing their tillage or trying to cover crop or, but what I find is once as they get into the topic of soil health and learn more about it, then they start saying, I'm seeing some results from this, what else can I do on my field, so we find some farmers and this is true on my own family farm in Illinois, are the young man that's farming our land, he kind of just started with a single field to cover crops. And gradually he's gotten to the point where our whole home farm is now a cover crop. And he's been reducing his tillage and, you know, he's thinking about, is there another crop? I should try to so it just, you know, it takes time, like anything, but I see farmers using multiple practices as they learn more about soil health.

Paul Yeager: Is it going to take legislation to get that next step in getting more farms, farmers to adapt and adopt soil health initiatives? Are they going to continue to be able, can we wait for people to do find this on their own?

Rob Myers: I think the voluntary approach is by far the best way to go with soil health or other regenerative practices. I think almost everybody in agriculture would agree with that. The voluntary incentives that are out there, both from the federal government, sometimes state agencies and more recently, the private sector that's been really interesting in the last couple of years to see all the private sector incentives offered to farmers for practices like cover crops, and no till that those voluntary incentives are working pretty well. But they have to go hand in hand with education and kind of a newer interest is there opportunity in the marketplace for farmers to have incentives. So maybe their corn is easier to sell, or they get a higher price for it if they're using a cover crop or no tillage with it. And I think that's kind of the next step is probably seen some additional transformation in the marketplace for rewarding farmers to use these practices.

Paul Yeager: I've sat through a lot of carbon sequestration and carbon discussions in the last couple of years. And I know some other farmers are, how do you keep them engaged, or at least to attend that first seminar to kind of just hear what maybe some options are?

Rob Myers: Yeah, the soil carbon market has been interesting. I think there's been quite a few farmers interested in that. But the challenge has been we've got so many companies offering soil carbon incentives now that it's become a bit bewildering for most farmers very ihana. And I'm even very intelligent farmers are saying there's just too many options out there. So I think everybody is recognizing that it's a challenge to sort through when there's like 12 different programs available to you as a farmer, which one is right for you. And the other problem with some of the soil carbon programs is, it's not like it's the same every year, you may get paid more in the future than you do now, or what the program is this year is different from the way it was last year. So some of this is going to sort itself out, I believe, but right now it's it's it's kind of leading some farmers to stay on the sidelines in terms of soil carbon programs, because they're saying, I'm just going to wait and see if it gets better in a year or two. That's kind of an understandable response when there's so many different options out there right now.

Paul Yeager: Well, and it's confusing, even for those who follow a lot of this to not lump everything together. Like I just have about six questions, but those are the things that farmers are facing right now is they have a salesperson coming to say, well, here's an opportunity for you to make money. Okay, you have me, but you're gonna have to do this, but it's tied to here and here. It is a lot to understand. So where do you find good sources of information to not get taken advantage of by the good old American way of trying to make some money?

Rob Myers: A lot of the university extension systems and various states are starting to write up guidelines to how to evaluate soil carbon programs for your state. I think we're also seeing some of the state come on groups like the corn and soybean associations offer their members, educational programs on how to sort through these programs. So I would suggest that people talk to their extension staff, soil water districts, or maybe their state commodity office, if they have some staff devoted to kind of sorting through these programs to get get some guidance and see what kind of resources they've put together. And it's only gonna get more confusing, because now we have all these climate smart projects, and I'm participating in a couple of those that are going to be also offering payments to farmers to do certain practices. So the good news for the farmers is this is, this is a time period where we're entering when it's going to be easier than ever before to get some financial assistance to try some of these practices. So that's, I guess, a message I would have for producers is don't necessarily worry that you have to find the perfect program, just take advantage of a program that seems to work for you. And there's multiple programs that are out there. Now, there's going to be more available in the coming year. And these are things that these are programs that can help you try a practice like cover crops or no till, in a way, that's going to remove a lot of the risks for you because you're getting that financial support.

Paul Yeager: So it sounds like maybe that the private sector is taking care of some of these things that maybe the government was looking at doing is Is that accurate to say?

Rob Myers: I wouldn't phrase it that way. Because there's a lot more money still coming into this space from the government side of things in the private sector. And also, the incentives that are available to farmers are a lot smaller from the private sector. So just as an example, and these programs do vary a lot, but farmer to sign up to get a soil carbon payment, they might get a very modest $5 an acre, which is enough to motivate some farmers, but not necessarily the majority of them. Whereas if they're signing up for some of these other programs, whether it's these new climate smart programs. So for example, there's a new farmers for soil health initiative that I'm participating in, that will pay the farmers $50 over a period of three years. Or if they're signing up through the USDA Environmental Quality Incentives Program, they might get paid 30 to $50 an acre for three years. Those programs pay a little more, the nice thing is they can often add the private sector payment to the government payment they're getting. So that's something that farmers should be looking at is where there's opportunity to add payments together. But the private funding is not nearly as large as the government funding. And I think I think that's going to continue to be the pattern for the next couple of years. I guess the last thing I would say on that is the the the beauty of what we're seeing now is that a lot of farmers have a close relationship with like their seed dealers and so on. And maybe they're not as comfortable going into their NRCS office or just are not interested in doing that. But it's easy, maybe easy for them to sign up with a private sector program through their seed company or something just as a way of getting started then later that can potentially get involved with one of the government programs.

Paul Yeager: Are you seeing a size of farmer that one or another that's been more enrolled in soil health programs or trying to do things? Is it the is it convincing the big time operators to join the party? Because the small ones are the ones doing this? Or the small ones not doing it? And it is the big time operator?

Rob Myers: Yeah, well, one thing we do through my office is run a National Farmer Cover Crop survey. It's the SARE/CTIC Cover Crop Survey. And we've done six of those so far. And we always ask the acreage of the farmers and there's a really a very good distribution of farm sizes using practices like cover crops. Now, it's it's true that if somebody's got a two acre vegetable farm, they're not as likely to sign up for a government program, because it just, you know, they don't get a lot of a payment there. But in terms of actually using the practices, it's all sizes of forms. And we are seeing including some really big ones, we're seeing some 10,000 20,000 Acre Farms using these practices. The other thing I will add is it's not a lot of the farmers doing these practices are not doing them on 100% of their acres and nor should they when they're starting out if if a farmer had 1000 acres, I would tell them to start with one or two fields, do that for a year, start to get some comfort, and then gradually expand and maybe after three or four years, then your whole farm is in that new system or a large part of your farm but it's pretty typical that farmers are kind of gradually expanding the number of acres they're using with some of these practices.

Paul Yeager: Alright, all of this is leading up to this question. How do you know a what type of conversations are you having with those that are making the next farm bill? Because conservation, soil health, carbon, all of these are the buzzwords of that smaller pie of the big bill. That's opposite nutrition that we kind of argue about about where money should go, what's the conversation you're hearing? You've spent time in DC, you know, there's always conversations?

Rob Myers: Well, I'll start with what I think is very positive, I think, regardless of somebody is on the right, or the left or in the middle. There's strong interest in conservation all around. And I think it's stronger than it's ever been before. So I think regardless of who's chairing the House or Senate Ag committees that we're going to see strong support for the conservation part of the Farm Bill. Now, the parts that and there are certain practices like cover crops that are very non controversial. So I think that practice among others is going to be supported through the Farm Bill. There is debates and still people trying to figure out where they come in on broader ideas like regenerative agriculture and climate smart and so on. But I think I think we're will end up when we get done with the farm bill is it'll be a little bit more focused on practices rather than labels. And I think that's where there'll be some common ground is that people will recognize that, yeah, we are interested in protecting and improving the soil that we're interested in, in practices that hold the soil in place like reduced tillage cover crops, and whether the farm bill is got regenerative agriculture in there as a label or not. I personally am not as concerned about that as what are we ultimately encouraging the farmers to do in terms of practices?

Paul Yeager: So I have is the you mentioned label? I haven't heard you say the word organic? Does any of this mean organic?

Rob Myers: Well, people do ask is regenerative agriculture, organic, there are some folks working on regenerative ag that are particularly focused on the organic aspect. For example, the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania has really done a lot of work around how do you do regenerative approaches in an organic fashion. But as a whole, when you look at the various groups that are engaged in regenerative AG, are the farmers that are using that that term? The vast majority of them are not tying it to organic specifically, I mean, that is a way you can go but it's really kind of a separate concept. The challenge is, a lot of us recognize that it's challenging for consumers, if we have a whole bunch of labels when they go to the grocery store, you know, is this organic? Is it regenerative? Is it sustainable? Is it GMO free. So I personally feel we don't necessarily need another government label that says this food is regenerative agriculture, food, but what we're interested in is farmers finding ways to farm that helps them be prosperous in the long run and keeps the soil in place improves the soil. And if there is a way for for, for consumers to help support farmers that are doing that, then I think that'll be all for the good, but probably trying to avoid a bunch of new labels in the marketplace.

Paul Yeager: You mentioned GM corn or GMO corn, we have one of our biggest customers of US corn that has seen in a short amount of time, they don't want any GMO corn coming into Mexico. Is that going to accelerate some of the discussions you're involved with? If we ended up not being able to ship what we currently grow the majority of in this country?

Rob Myers: Yeah, I myself don't track too much what's going on with the GMO marketplace, other than I will say that some of the farmers using cover crops are trying to find seed of corn and soybeans and wheat that is not coated with a fungicide or an insecticide. And so sometimes that's things that are related to GMO, but those can be separate issues. But I guess I don't have an opinion about what's going to happen in the marketplace with the GMO seed. I just haven't tracked that as closely.

Paul Yeager: Well, and the only reason I even asked you was I just think it's going to accelerate a whole lot of discussion and maybe some confusion among one type of product over another. And that's just going to have to, again, there's gonna have to be some credible information that comes out to help the producer and the consumer. Make sense of it all. I guess that's the only reason I asked it that way.

Rob Myers: Yeah, I think part of what USDA is interested with these climate smart projects is helping food companies be able to track through the supply chain and how some of the food not necessarily all of it is being produce so that if we, let's say we wanted to have some beef cattle that are grown through their entire lifecycle on grass pasture, as opposed to go into a feedlot and having some corn fed to them, the farm, the consumer would be able to make that choice or maybe the packager is able to identify this as grass fed beef. So I'm not advocating that all beef has to be grass fed. I'm just saying that that's the sort of thing USDA is interested in, it seems to me is how do we know what the production system is on some of these so that the food companies or other buyers can better evaluate whether there's a reason to pay more for that particular product or pass that information along to the consumer?

Paul Yeager: What's been the biggest, I don't even know if you can label it most successful way you've seen somebody improve soil health and their operation. But what's been some of the most encouraging ways you've seen you mentioned your cover crop survey, again, cover crops, not the only way. But what have been some in ingenuitive ways that you have seen in with the private farmer that has adopted practices and had success stories.

Rob Myers: The farmers that have kind of put together a combination of approaches are the ones that have made the fastest progress with their soil health. So you can do a cover crop and still do tillage. But if you combine that cover crop, and with doing no tillage, so you're not disturbing the soil that's really important to help maintain key soil fungi like mycorrhizal fungi. And then if we can come in and graze that cover crop, there seems to be some benefit from having the manure, urine saliva from the grazing animals, much as we did in the past landscapes when the buffalo are grazing the prairies, the soils evolved for that animal component. And when we don't have it in a field, it seems like the soil health doesn't improve quite as fast. And then the biodiversity angle. So if they're using a diversity of cover crops and diverse crop rotation, those are the farmers that are making really significant strides over a period of five or 10 years and dramatically improving their soil health. But even just doing one practice, is like the old saying, take a step forward down the road, and even doing one practice can make a difference and had had the soil in the right direction.

Paul Yeager: Do you call it a gateway practice? Once you start once you do those first two acres of crop? Good luck, you're off?

Rob Myers: That's often what happens. People try one thing and they say, Yeah, this is interesting. I'm seeing more earthworms, what else can I do to make the soil better. So it often happens,

Paul Yeager: You're also advocating it sounds like for the fencing industry, because if we're going to start grazing some of these fields, again, we're gonna have to put fences back up.

Rob Myers: Well, and that's a comment that comes up from farmers that say, Well, I don't have any more fences around my field. Most of the farmers that are doing things like grazing cover crops don't put up permanent fences, they'll just use a single strand, or maybe two strands of electric fencing. And part of the reason they do that is like, first of all, it's the lowest cost compared to a permanent fence. But also they can move that electric fencing really easily, they use plastic posts that can just be stepped into the ground. And then after a couple of days, they can move their cattle or sheep to a different part of the field, mimicking the way buffalo moved across the prairie, there seems to be some benefits to doing intensive grazing in a spot and then moving, you know a little ways over in the pasture or the real crop field to to have what we call rotational grazing or management, intensive grazing. So we're seeing a lot more farmers taking that approach.

Paul Yeager: Well, I use the field behind me here, the homeplace in northeast Iowa, we took the fence out, there's no fence around. But that's one thing. There's not the animals, we don't there's not as many cattle producers in some places or animals that you want to put out there. And so that has changed also some of the equation for some people, not for everybody. So I mean, that's also something to consider, right?

Rob Myers: Yeah, where I'm at in Missouri, a lot of our farmers have both cattle and row crops, but it's true and other parts like where I grew up in Illinois, there's very few of the farmers that have cattle there are some same in parts of Iowa. So what we do see is sometimes farmers that don't have their own livestock will make an arrangement with a nearby neighbor that does to bring them in and do some grazing after their corn or soybeans are harvested and they've got some cover crop growing, that can provide some extra income to the person with the row crop ground even though they don't have their own livestock. It's not happening on 10s of 1000s of farms, but there are hundreds of farms doing that and I expect we'll see more in the future. And it's also a way for the next generation to come back to the farm. I've noticed some farms where let's say the family is farming 1000 acres, that's not enough necessarily to support a son or daughter to come back and start row crop farming. But if they can come in and start managing some livestock on that row crop acreage that can work. And so that's a nice way to create enough income from the given amount of land to have another generation and get started on the farm.

Paul Yeager: Well, I'm guessing you see it at your university when a student comes in, and you're like, what's your plan? Well, I'm gonna go back to the family farm. Well, there's no seat at for me at the table, unless I come up with some ingenuitive way to add value to what we currently do. So you are in a sense, helping the economies of these people who want to go back to the farm when there isn't land available, necessarily.

Rob Myers: Yeah, and that's a great, in fact, I know of our next door neighbor on our farm ground, Illinois, he had been farming primarily row crops, a little bit of cattle, but now he's set it up. So his two sons, one of them does focus on the beef cattle side, and the other one does the row crops. And I've seen that on quite a few farms. And so it's a way for them to both make a living from the same land base without necessarily having to double the size of the row crop operation.

Paul Yeager: Fascinating. I'll close with this. Dr. Myers, in the next five years. Are we going to see an increase in farmers participating in soil health?

Rob Myers: Absolutely, we're on a really strong trend in that direction. Right now. We've gone from probably about 10 million acres of cover crops in 2012, to having double that now I'm expecting it to double again, not necessarily in five years, but in the next 10 years. And it's not just cover crops, it's some of these other practices that we're talking about. So with the new climate smart programs, the private sector incentives and just farmers, innate curiosity and interest in trying new things, I think we're going to continue to see 1000s of new acres being used with some of these practices in the next five years. So we're in a, we're in a strong direction here, and I'm excited about what we're gonna see happening over the next several years.

Paul Yeager: Things have changed since 1979.

Rob Myers: Very definitely for the good for

Paul Yeager: the good. That's Rob Myers. He's at the University of Missouri, the director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture. Rob, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. 

Rob Myers: Thank you for having me. 

Paul Yeager: And that will do it for this installment of the MtoM podcast. New episodes come out each and every Tuesday. We'll see you next time.