Cameron Ogilvie:
\nOn Thursday, September 12th, 2019, the SOILS AT GUELPH initiative of the University of Guelph, the CREATE-Climate Smart Soils graduate program, and Grain Farmers of Ontario partnered to host a public lecture titled “Regenerative Agriculture at General Mills: The Way Forward.” The speaker Steve Rosenzweig is a soil scientist at General Mills where he leads research and outreach programs across North America to support farmers in improving soil health. Steve started at General Mills in 2017 after receiving his PhD in Soil Science from Colorado State University where he researched the effects of crop rotation on soil health and farmer profitability, the sociology of farmer decision making, and use satellite imagery to map agricultural practices on the landscape scale. He now leverages his expertise in soil health and sociology to find win-win solutions for farmers and the environment. He seeks to drive adoption of regenerative farming systems within General Mills’ supply chains and measure the impacts on soil health, biodiversity, and farmer economic resilience.<\/p>\n
Cameron Ogilvie:
\nThe talk was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Mike Buttenham of Grain Farmers of Ontario. The panelists included Steve Rosenzweig; Dan Petker, a farmer from Norfolk County; Anne Loeffler, a conservation specialist with Grand River Conservation Authority; Jim Barkley, an agronomist with Hensall District Co-op; and Paul Johnston, the farm products’ manager at Thompson’s Limited. We hope you enjoy the recording.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nThanks for having me. This is great to be here. So I’m Steve and I’m going to talk about what I do at General Mills, but also kind of what is driving the food industry farther and farther towards investing in soil health and sustainability. And if you have questions at any point, please just raise your hand. I’m going to go through a lot today. So really what I’m going to talk about is just a quick intro to myself. I think I have some time with the students a little bit after we can dive more into sort of career path type stuff.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nBut I’m going to talk about, why do food companies care about soil and sustainability. And then also how General Mills views regenerative agriculture as the key to a lot of the issues and things that we’re trying to do on the landscape. And so I’ll also talk about our specific programs, and how we trying to measure regeneration on the landscape.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo quick, just a bit about me. I’m from upstate New York, so not too far from here actually. I did my undergrad degree just right on the other side of Lake Ontario in western New York at SUNY Geneseo. I mostly studied ecology there, like lake ecology, stream ecology, but then I got to do a program at Kansas state where I studied soil science and looked at basically what happens when you abandon a wheat farm and let it restore back to the native tall grass prairie. And what I found pretty much blew my mind and decided that I needed to go study soils and try to figure out how we can make improvements in our agricultural systems.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo I study solar carbon, microbiology, a bit about nutrient cycling and rhizosphere priming, but I’m really also interested in sociology and how farmers make decisions and leveraging their understanding to really drive adoption of these conservation behaviors. And also do some work around satellite imagery. We can do a lot with satellite imagery, which I’ll talk a bit about just kind of mapping adoption and seeing how agricultural practices are changing on the landscape. So I’ve been at General Mills for about one and a half years. And I’m also interested in music and photography and some other stuff.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo first, why do food companies care about soil and sustainability? First, I’d say General Mills is probably leading in this space. So a lot of what I’m going to talk about is really sort of tip of the spear type stuff. But hopefully if we do this successfully, I think a lot of the other food industry will start to follow suit. So hopefully this is sort of a leading indicator of things to come. But you can already see lots of other companies are starting to invest in the space and starting to get interested. And really this is just my perspective on why it’s happening, but it’s really two major reasons.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nOne is that our key stake holders see that soil health and regenerative Ag really have the promise to deliver a huge social environmental benefits. And probably the more important reason is that our existence as a species and as a food company actually requires that we care for the way our food is being grown and the people who grow it.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo first I’ll just give a snapshot of some of who are the stake holders for the food industry. Who are the people that we really pay attention to? Who do we really care about their opinions? So it’s mostly these four groups. So activists. Activists are groups that are small in numbers, but very large in impact. And so activists, if you’re a food company, you don’t have a lot of data or information about who and how your food is being grown, activists will find out and you’ll hear about it on the news that way. So it’s really … activist pressure has caused food companies to really be proactive in how we start to understand what’s happening in our supply chains, and also how we interact to make change on the landscape.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSecond is customers. So customers are groups like … when I think about the customers for food companies, it’s retailers like Walmart, schools, like school lunches and stuff like that. We have all these different types of customers that we sell to. And I’ll give just a quick example of something that’s happened recently in the customer space that’s driving some of this change. So Walmart, so if you are selling to Walmart, which is pretty much everybody, they’ve asked that they want their suppliers to eliminate a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. And so this is something that was announced to all of the suppliers. So all of our competitors now are aware that Walmart wants this. We do reporting to Walmart of how we’re advancing towards this goal and things like this can help create some competition for shelf space based on some environmental performance.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo examples like this are ways that customers have a huge impact on the food industry. And General Mills was, I think, the first food company to come out with a scope three greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal. This is back in 2015. And so we basically had a third party group come in and do an audit of our entire greenhouse gas footprint. Everything from the fertilizers that go into the agricultural production all the way through the transformation of that product, packaging, supply chain, manufacturing, our buildings, shipping, selling, consuming, the energy it takes to refrigerate and cook food, all the way down to the landfill after the food is passed the consumer. All of those emissions we got audited on and we basically said, what does mother nature require of us at this time? And they said, we have to reduce our greenhouse gas footprint by 28% by 2025.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd so General Mills looked at this footprint back in 2015 and realized half of it is in agriculture. And so we could shutter all of our doors on every facility that we own. We could buy 100% renewable energy for all the energy we use and still we’d only be 10% of our footprint there. So we really had to look outside of our four walls to upstream and downstream and figure out how we can make big changes in this area. And this is a big reason why I was hired as a soil scientist, was basically to figure out how do we sequester carbon in soils? How do we reduce emissions in our agricultural supply chains to drive this down? So yeah, we have sustainability goals.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo investors, this is another stakeholder of a food company. And there’s a growing pool of green investor dollars. So like impact investors that want to make not only an economic return when they invest their money, but also a social return. And so there’s a lot of data that’s required to basically prove that you are a company that is a making a positive impact. And so being named to sustainability indices like this is really important for companies to try to capture that growing pool of green dollars. And it takes a lot of effort and data and analysis to do that.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd lastly, consumers, the people that actually eat the products at the end of the day. There’s trends in consumers, their preferences and beliefs as well. And so this is from the Hartman group. They do a study of consumers and how they react to sustainability. And I’m just highlighting here, a couple of the categories that have really jumped up in recent years, you can see natural agricultural methods and practices supports local economy, conserves natural habitats, and minimize inclusion of air, water, and soil. So these are some of the categories that are really jumping in interest among consumers. And so we’re responding to those sorts of trends as well. And please stop me if you have any questions.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd so this is actually what I think is the actual driving force of a lot of this, just being at General Mills and seeing what motivates our team to get up and do this work every day. It’s really that we realized that this is just a critical time for engaging in this space and making progress in agriculture. And here’s some of the trends that we see and that concern us. Declining top soil. So this is a photo my friend took. She’s a professor at University of Nebraska, but she was driving through Iowa and they have a rest stop showing that average depth of top soil in that county going back to 1850. And so this is happening all over the place and the trends in soil loss are unsustainable. And she’s out there saying, where are we going to be in 2050, right? So how are we … we really have to reverse this trend if we’re going to try to make … if we’re going to have a stable and secure agricultural supply chain in the future.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nThis is the global greenhouse gas footprint of agriculture. And so you can see it’s been going up pretty steadily every year. This dotted line going up is where we’re going to be if we don’t make any changes. But the dotted line going down is where we have to get agricultural greenhouse gas emissions to be to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change. And so you can tell we’re not even on the right trajectory at the moment. We really have a lot of work to do in this space.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nA biodiversity loss. So there’s a big report recently showing that a million species are at risk of extinction and they call out agriculture as one of the big drivers of that. And so when we compare our native systems and the agricultural systems that have replaced them, really Ag systems don’t support that level of biodiversity. And that’s having a huge impact on the things that live in these ecosystems.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd lastly, the farm economy. So this is a graph of the Canadian farm economy with agricultural subsidies subtracted. So keep that in mind, but this top blue line is gross farm revenue, so the total amount of money that farmers are bringing in every year. And you could see it’s been going up pretty steadily and that’s because farmers are producing more food than they ever have before. There’s more money coming into agriculture than ever before, just because of the overall amount of food that farmers are producing. But if you look at the green bar down below, that’s net farm income. The actual amount of money that farmers get to keep at the end of the day, and that is not going up. And so what’s happening is really that farming is becoming so expensive and farmers are under pressure economically. And so what I think is really going to have to happen is that we can maintain productivity while reducing how expensive it is to grow food. So I’m going to stop there and see if there’s any questions, I think, for the moment. Yeah, sure.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nSo when you’re talking greenhouse gases from the agriculture industry, what specifically are you looking at when you talk about that?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo it’s everything from, I believe what’s captured is upstream. So the energy it takes to make the products that farmers then buy and use on their farm all the way to diesel use in tractors, and shipping it to the elevator, and then the elevators operations. So you’ll see there’s transformation is called out there. So when we buy ingredients, a lot of times it’s already like milled flour. So it’s all the energy that goes into milling it. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s captured here as well, but it’s largely … the biggest piece of that impact is what’s happening on the farm, and we’re half a dairy company as well, so we own Yoplait, Haagen-Dazs globally, except for in America, which is owned by Nestle. We license it to Nestle in the US. So it’s all the methane. It’s all the energy it takes to run a dairy essentially as well. There’s a lot of stuff captured in there. Any other questions?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nOkay. So I’ll talk a little bit about why would we see regenerative Ag as the solution to a lot of those issues that we’re facing. And I do want to talk about agriculture broadly because it is a big, diverse kind of wonky movement that’s all happening on the landscape. But first I want to just talk a little bit about General Mills position. And our definition is that regenerative Ag protects and intentionally enhances natural resources and farming communities. And it’s really important to you to call out that we’re taking an outcome based definition of regenerative Ag.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo you are regenerative if you’re improving soil health, biodiversity and farming economic resilience. And that’s really different to how a lot of other folks talk about trends and sustainability. They want to be able to say like, this is a checklist of practices. If you do these things, then you are sustainable, for example. That’s how we talked about sustainability. But the shift in focus on outcomes really is like, we got to regenerate at by any means necessary. And so this has a lot of implications for science because we have to now measure all this stuff. And so a lot of what I do is try to figure out how we measure soil health, biodiversity and farmer economic resilience across huge swaths of land. And so I’ll talk about that a bit, but first I want to kind of back up a bit and talk a little bit about what regenerative Ag is.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd first of all, it’s a mindset. It’s just a different way of thinking about agriculture. You can really about it as a management philosophy. And the current paradigm in agriculture is really about, the farm is a machine that we need to make more efficient, right? We need to tweak our seeding rates, fertilizer rates. This is really around precision, making sure that we’re doing as little bad as we possibly can. And to a large extent we’ve become really efficient in agriculture, as efficient as we can be utilizing these things. But at the same time, there are a lot of these other issues that I just talked about that this paradigm cannot address. No matter how much resources we put into doing this, we can’t really address those other problems.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd what regenerative Ag really is looking to do is to change the paradigm. And so the new paradigm is really that the farm is not a machine, but it’s really an ecosystem that we can restore. And so it’s all about maximizing the connections between the components of this ecosystem to achieve real success in Ag. And I’ll talk about what that looks like. But really from a farmer’s lens, these are challenges they see every day. Pests, weeds, diseases, nutrient deficiencies, even droughts and floods to some extent, regenerative farmers see these things really as symptoms of an unhealthy ecosystem. So instead of trying to try to manage all of these symptoms, their goal is really to try to solve the root cause of these issues, which is that the ecosystem is unhealthy and that’s how regenerative farmers see this.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd there’s five ways to do this. I probably don’t need to go into too much detail about this. I mean, this is everywhere. These regenerative principles are pretty well accepted that this is the way you restore farm ecosystems is you minimize soil disturbance. There’s an interesting debate going on right now about whether that includes chemical disturbance. And so traditionally when we talk about minimizing disturbance, we talk about reducing or eliminating tillage. There’s a lot of folks that say this should also include fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, these other chemical disturbances to the ecosystem. So I actually tend to lean in that way, and I’ll talk a little bit about some recent research that suggests we have to think harder about the unintended consequences of some of those things.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nBut maximize crop diversity. This is really how you can defend yourself naturally against weeds, pest diseases, those sorts of things. Keep the soil covered, protecting it from wind and rain. This is really how you keep soil in the field and you have to keep it in the field if you want to have any chance of it making it better. Keep the living root in the ground. So this one is actually the most important because the soil is a living ecosystem and living things need to eat in order to survive and they eat carbon. And that carbon comes from roots. It’s basically roots and the stuff that roots spit out, these exudates. This is a picture of a root spitting out that carbon, those sugars below ground.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd so if you think about most of our agricultural crops, they only grow for a certain part of the year. And then we have all these windows in the spring and the fall, sometimes in the summer, depending on your region, that there’s no crop growing. And so that’s no food going into the soil. And so by trying to fill up every single window of time, by taking advantage of every ray of sunlight and turning it into a green living plant, that’s how we feed the ecosystem and keep that soil healthy.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd last one is to integrate livestock. And so if you think about where most of where we farm today, I’m in the great plains and that used to be a grassland. And so grasslands of all for thousands of years with huge herds of Bison migrating through and eating everything and depositing dung on you on the landscape. When we replicate that with the way we manage livestock in really intensive pack dense herds and move them frequently and let the vegetation rest for long periods of time, that’s really how we accelerate this regeneration process.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd so just a couple of pictures. So I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is what I see in maybe 95, 99 percent of fields driving around throughout North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba, South Dakota, throughout the Midwest. This is like everywhere. And so thinking about the principals, what do you see, or what do you see that’s missing here?<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nThere’s no green stuff.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. So there’s no green stuff. There’s no living plant. So no living roots.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nNo livestock.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nThere’s no livestock, right?<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nNo residue.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nNo residue. Right? So you see lots of bare soil. So there’s no soil cover.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nNo windbreaks.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. So there’s no windbreaks. There’s no kind of conservation practices happening out here either.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nThere’s a big diesel track that has done that.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. So you see big clumpy clods of soil that tells me that this soil has had been highly disturbed by some pretty intensive tillage. Yeah. So that’s pretty much all the principles and no diversity, is the last one. So, yeah, pretty much, none of the principals are represented there. And this is most of our agriculture today. Is this field organic or conventional?<\/p>\n
Audience:
\n[Murmurs]<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah, there’s no way to tell. Right. And so General Mills is the second largest organic food company in North America, at least. I’m not sure about the world, but we need to have a strategy that can improve both organic and conventional farm land, right. We can’t go to have a strategy for our organic supply chain, and our conventional supply chain. Those conversations really have to be the same. And these regenerative principles can be applied to any farm no matter who you are. So yeah, I mean this is our strategy for really lifting all boats at the same time. Is it regenerative? I think we’d all agree, probably not.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nThis is what the field could look like. This is in North Dakota in November. I took this picture. This is a diverse cover crop mix growing. He’s not going to harvest this. It’s just really there to feed the soil, to provide diversity, to keep the soil covered. And so even in November in North Dakota, you can have a green living plant pumping carbon out below grounds. And so actually you can see these kind of black lines running all the way up into the horizon there.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nThese black crops are fava beans. And so this farmer is going to plant his soybeans next year right into those fava bean rows. And because they’re black, they actually warm up a lot faster in the spring. And so a lot of farmers are concerned with cover crops and not tilling that the soil is not going to warm up as fast because that black soil collects a lot of sunlight, really warms it up. He’s doing that with a plant and so he’ll eliminate that yield drag with that kind of black decomposing plant. And so there’s a lot of ways we can use nature to our benefit. And so he doesn’t have to till at all in this field.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nSteve, do you know what the previous crop was, when it was harvested and when the cover crop was established?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. So he had cereal rye that he harvested actually, so he harvested this in August, and then he followed the combine with the planter in August. So this is about, I guess, almost three months of growth, two, three months of growth. So that’s really … the key is getting it in as fast as you can. Yup.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nWhat method do they to terminate that crop?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nWell, so we harvested … oh, this crop here. So a lot of these species will winter kill. He let the rye that he harvested volunteer and then he’ll probably spray glyphosate in the spring after he plants his soybeans directly into it. I’ll show actually a picture of that. So here’s a corn canopy, pretty typical. And other principles are there. This is that same farmer. In his corn canopy has got this diverse mix of rye growing. So if, to answer your question, if you didn’t want to spray this, and there’s really not a lot of rye here, so I’m not sure if you did have to terminate it in the spring or not, but there a lot of cover crops that will just winter kill, so you don’t have to really terminate it at all if you don’t want to.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nBut for example, this practice, so this rye, you can see he established it underneath the corn canopy. He’s a no till farmer, so you can see lots of the previous year’s crop residue covering the soil surface. And so this is a diverse mix. There’s winter camelina in there that as well that will over winter, but the following year he’ll plant soybeans right into this not of living rye. And this is what it looks like on the right. So it’ll survive the winter grow up again in the spring. I don’t think he uses a roller crimper, but you can use a roller crimper if you don’t want to spray anything and plant soybeans right into it.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd what’s interesting about rye is it’s got these illegal apathic effects, meaning no plants can grow where the rye has been because it’s exuded these chemicals that prevent plant growth. But soybeans love to germinate through that mat of residue. So he doesn’t have to do any weed control. That rye is doing it for him. He’s probably going to get a soybean yield increase, and he’s cut out all of his weed control expenses, and he sequestered all that carbon, and yeah, covered the soil, done great things. So lots of interesting practices that we’re looking at. And with this one practice, he’s hitting a lot of different principles.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo these are some of the other kind of interesting practices that we look a lot at. Inter-cropping, so growing multiple crops in the same field at the same time, harvesting them together, separating them out later, having livestock graze your fall cover crops. So he could have grazed that cover crop in the fall and gotten an economic return from it. Bio strip till which I talked about, that black strip that warms up the soil. Okay. Any questions about the principles?<\/p>\n
Speaker 4:
\nJust on the biostrip tillage, how comparable is that to tillage, just in terms of that, how much it warms up your environment?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nIf you did like a thermometer test, it’s probably only a couple of degrees difference, but relative to tillage, it’s only a couple degrees difference, but relative to this green where the green stuff is, it can be like five to eight degrees difference, which is pretty big.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nCelsius?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nOh, sorry. Fahrenheit. Yeah, not sure what that would be. Yeah. If anyone knows that conversion. Any other questions? Okay. So how does regenerative Ag work? What is like the theory behind this? Really it works by restoring these broken ecosystem processes. Really we’re trying to make this ecosystem better. So there’s lots of these processes in agriculture that are pretty broken today. The theory is that these cycles are really holding farmers back from real success. And so I did my PhD in Colorado where they only got 12 to 16 inches of rain a year. And even that’s almost a desert. And so even there, after rain, you drive around, you’ll see big ponds of water in the middle of farmers fields, none of it actually infiltrating into the soil. And so even if it’s just rained, farmers are seeing drought symptoms.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd so we really have to get water back into the soil. And with climate change we’re seeing even less frequent but more intensive rain events. So you’re getting more rain at one time. And we have to have resilient soils if we’re going to actually cope with those sorts of climate changes. So regenerative systems are able to infiltrate massive amounts of water. So some of the numbers that farmers are seeing on their own farms is incredible, the potential we have to change the water cycle.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nThe nutrient cycle, right? So this is the Gulf of Mexico. This is basically from nutrients running off farms into the Mississippi river down into the Gulf. This is evidence of a broken nutrient cycle. And a lot of the conversation that Ag today is about the four R’s, right rate, right source, right time, right place of fertilizer application. These things are super important and every farmer should be doing them. And they have the kind of the low hanging fruit in improving the nutrient efficiency, but it’s not really until you get into these systems level changes that you can actually start to fix that nutrient cycle and retain large quantities of nutrients in your system.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo like diversified crop rotation, cover crops, driving more of your nitrogen from an organic nitrogen source like a legume or deriving more of your nitrogen from organic matter, which requires having a microbial population that can cycle those nutrients. That’s really how you achieve huge efficiency gains and retention of your nutrients on farms. I talked a little bit before about this debate between chemicals … should minimizing disturbance include chemical disturbance?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nWe can restore our ecosystem and that can really start to solve some of our pest and disease issues for us. So this is a study just looking at corn pests in the upper northern great plains. And they found conventional farms that were using a lot of tillage, no diversity in the system. But we’re using insecticides. They actually had more pests, 10 times more pest than the regenerative systems did that weren’t using insecticides and had diversity. And so why did the regenerative systems not have pests? It’s because they had diversity and predators. And so really this is how they’re able to control pests without actually paying for insecticides. Yeah.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nWere those pest differences economically…?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nNo. So actually that’s interesting. Yeah. So none of these reached the economic threshold, but these folks didn’t pay for insecticide. So in this case, yeah, none of the pest levels were above economic threshold. Yeah. Another interesting study is over here, which is showing there’s a microbial system living on plants, on the vegetation, bacteria, fungi. And they actually help protect plants against diseases. And this was a greenhouse study with tomatoes, basically finding that when they applied fertilizer, it abolished that microbial mediated protection of the plant. So there’s potentially some impacts of fertilizer on disease, plants ability to protect themselves against the disease. So there’s all these sorts of cascading effects with everything we do in agriculture. And I think we have to really understand a lot more what some of those effects might be.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nCarbon and energy cycle, right? This is an example of a broken carbon cycle. There’s no carbon going into that system. We can restore that. That’s also the way we’re going to get the greenhouse gas emissions to where they need to be. I was going to talk a bit about just how our view on how carbon is sequestered in soil has changed recently. And I don’t have too much time to do this, but basically, I’ll skip to the punchline, which is that, basically greater diversity of crops contributes to carbon sequestration, and that’s really through microbes. So microbes are really what are leading to carbon sequestration. They’re there dead bodies and the products that they exude into the soil, those are the things that are preferentially sequestered for long periods of time. So you need microbes, and you need root exudates to actually sequester carbon.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo these things are derived from life. You need living stuff on your farm to actually sequester carbon. And that’s just come about recently. We can talk about that a bit later if there’s questions. And aggregation is also a carbon sequester. Yeah. So the punchline is basically we need greater diversity of plants growing more time throughout the year and a healthier soil, microbial population. That’s really the only way we’re going to sequester enough carbon to meet goals like these. So just to summarize quick, how does regenerative Ag work? It works by restoring these ecosystem processes. Any questions before we talk about what we’re doing at General Mills?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nCool. So, yeah, these are some of the things that folks at General Mills were thinking about when they decided to make a regenerative agriculture ambition. We just announced earlier this year that we’re going to advance regenerative agriculture on 1 million acres by 2030, and so this is largely what I work on. And there’s really no blueprint for how food companies can engage with their supply chain to drive this kind of change, and so this is what we’re really trying to figure out now in real time is how do we do this?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo this year we launched what we’re calling the regenerative oat pilot. This is mostly in our oat supply chain which is in North Dakota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. We spend a lot of time up in Canada here. And what we’re seeing with the farmers we’re working with in this region was really, they were like, okay, how do I actually grow a cover crop? Right? We have such a short window of time between when we harvest and when it snows. It’s a lot about the how, like how do I do this? How do I reduce tillage without hurting my yields? How do I do all these things? So farmers would go to conferences like soil health conferences, regenerative ag conferences, get all psyched up to go home and do something. They really believe in the power of soil health, regenerative ag, but they go home and then they don’t actually change anything on their farm.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo what we really wanted to do was to pair farmers up with somebody that’s going to go back home with them and say, okay, what are we going to do this year? You know, like a consultant, a coach that can help them implement change. So really what this program is is we’ve partnered with our grain suppliers, so bringing farmers to the table and we’re pairing farmers up one on one with a regenerative agriculture coach from Understanding Ag, which is a company started by Gabe Brown, who is a big regenerative ag influencer, farmer, and rancher in North Dakota. They have consultants throughout Canada and the United States. We’re pairing farmers up one on one with a coach for three years. They get this free coaching service, and they’re developing and implementing a three-plus-year regenerative management plan. We kicked it off this winter.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nWe had a Soil Health Academy, which is a multiple day workshop to really try to deprogram the conventional mindset and to reprogram with this regenerative mindset. We were hoping to get maybe 50 farmers show up, and we ended up with 150, and so we really only had enough money to support 45. Plus it’s a pilot. We’re just trying to learn about if this works.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo out of that 150, we selected 45 farms to receive this coaching, so this is where they’re at, both organic and conventional farmers. So if you eat like Cheerios or Nature Valley, this is where a lot of the oats comes from. Cascadian Farm Organic. This is where that from as well. So, yeah, so all these farmers are starting to implement changes this year on their farm. We’ve got a Facebook group for them. The idea is really that all these farmers are trying out different things. They’re seeing what works, what doesn’t work, because they’re all on different parts of this journey. But there’s a lot of knowledge sharing going on; pictures, people trying to figure out how to intercrop, how to do this sort of stuff. So really trying to build this community.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nI guess one thing that we really found this year is that we’ve over-engaged that 10% of innovators, like the 10% of farmers that are like totally bought in, they’re going to do this no matter what. We really over-sampled that group in the 45 farmers that we selected. In part, I think it’s because the project is really intensive. Like we’re trying to engage farmers in wholistic systems-level change, and there’s only a select group of farmers that’s going to be interested in that. One thing we realized is we really need to have an on-ramp for farmers. We need to make it easier for farmers to take that first step down this path. This is a pyramid of sort of what we have going on today with sort of a gap here in the middle. So we do have large numbers of farmers engaged in sustainability programs.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo like Field to Market, the Canadian Field Print Initiative. These programs are really just designed to collect farmer practice information, like how much tillage are you doing, what about this, what about that? We model their economic outcomes so we’re not actually… Other than the data that we provide back to them, they don’t really get anything. There’s not a lot of dialogue between. We’re not actually asking them to change anything. So we have a lot of farmers in these programs with this low level of engagement. And then we have this small number of farmers in this regenerative ag program that are highly engaged with this really high touch point coaching-type model. But we’re missing sort of an on-ramp to get these farmers kind of trying out new things. So we’re also trying out some different on-ramps for farmers.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nIn Saskatchewan, we’re working with this independent agronomist group, which is Shark Ag Consulting. They’re made up of oat farmers that decided to start a agronomy consulting business. Also in the States we’re working with Soil Health Partnership, and in Manitoba we’re working with the University of Manitoba. And all these projects are basically on-farm experimentation. So either we’re cost sharing with farmers to try this stuff, or we’re doing research for the farmer on this stuff. And so if a farmer in our supply chain wants to try intercropping or cover crops or no till or whatever, we’re going to try to help them do that or get some value out of that experiment. Any questions before I talk about measurements and like how we’re collecting data and tracking if any of this works? Yeah.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nI’m curious how you’re capturing the challenges that the farmers are coming across? And a follow up to that would be how much equipment modification is required?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah, so how we’re tracking the challenges that farmers face. I guess it’s more informal. Once a year we have farmer meetings and all the farmers that are engaged in that Field to Market or Canadian Field Print Initiative Programs, we’ll have a meeting and kind of just talk with the farmer and we’ll share some outputs of research we’ve funded. Or if there’s something going on in their area, we’ll make them aware of it. It’s really just informal discussion with farmers and asking them what have you been trying? The soil health conversation is so new that we’ve really only had these conversations with farmers for the last year or two. Before that, it was really just about efficiencies, like how are you going to improve nitrogen use efficiency, stuff like that.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo we’re still trying to learn a lot of what those pain points are. We do have a grant in right now to study this mental model of what we have going on. We’re launching a similar program in Kansas with all these pieces in our wheat supply chain. And we have a grant with a bunch of social scientists to interview the farmers, do a survey of the broader farming population, see who is signing up for these things relative to the broader farming group, like what their beliefs, perceptions, about soil health are, and then track them over time to see are these programs actually effective in meeting their needs? Like addressing the gaps that they have for moving farther down this path. So we have a lot more work to do in figuring out how to be effective in this. Yeah.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nAside from the oats [inaudible] that you just mentioned, do you have any ideas of where General Mills should be going with this after those programs are done, or any ideas? Where do you think that they should go with that research that you’re doing?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nWell, it’s iterative. So these pilots, like we’re learning so much. This is how we, just this year, I mean like a month ago, we really identified this on-ramp as a gap and so just going to be iterative. Like we’re just going to keep trying these things, seeing if they work. It’s really this kind of model that we’re sticking with at the moment, and I don’t really know where it’s going to go until we get learnings based on this. So it’s got to be constantly evolving and seeing if the farmers are changing. Yeah.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nAren’t there a number of farms out there that are already doing this?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYes, there are. I think that’s largely who we’re engaging currently in the programs, is the like the ones that are already totally bought in and figuring out how to do it. The important thing about that group of people is… The questions that everybody else has, the other 90% of farmers, is like how do I do it or why would I want to do that? And this 10% of farmers, we think, that are actually doing it now, we have to learn from them and learn with them so that we can transfer that knowledge to these other groups through shared field days and publications and ag magazine articles, stuff like that. We need to use them as case studies, as success studies or failure studies, so we can say this is how to do this. This is why you would want to do this. We’re using them as case studies, really, to get the message out broader. In the back. Yeah.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nAre you working with other organizations on this work? Because lots of other organizations are doing this kind of work. NRCS and conservation districts and so on. So you’re not duplicating the wheel when you’re doing this.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. We just had a meeting in Kansas, so we’re launching this program in Kansas. We had NRCS, Kansas State, Kansas Department of Health and Environment, kind of all of these other groups that are really interested in seeing these sorts of changes in the room together. We shared out what our plans are, how we might connect. So we’re really trying to do that. That’s a huge piece of this is… We have a tiny team at General Mills that’s working on this, and we have a limited budget. So we really have to combine forces if we’re going to have an impact. Yep.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nYou mentioned the economic side. I think it was an important point. How are you bringing that into the picture when you’re looking at the [inaudible]?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nI’ll talk about that a bit now, so about how we’re measuring stuff. Really, I’d say the number one question that I get from farmers and from non-farmers, too, is are you going to pay farmers more to do this stuff? And I’d say like at the same time that we’re trying to bring farmers along on a journey, we’re trying to bring consumers along on a journey. We have a whole team of people working with, like, what do consumers know about any of this stuff, and how do you talk about any of this with consumers? Because if we’re going to ask them to pay more for it, they have to know what they’re paying for. I think what we found to date is that regenerative ag is a solution to a problem that consumers don’t know exists.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo we have a ton of education to do until we can get the whole system to sort of pull this along. But my last slide is also about kind of an extra… If we don’t figure out the consumer piece, another way that we could put money in farmers’ pockets to do this. I’ll talk about that a bit later.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nOkay. So how do we measure regeneration? This is what I think a lot about, because ultimately what we’re trying to do with all of this is have an impact in these three areas: soil health, biodiversity, and farmer-economic resilience. So we’re using this regenerative oat pilot, now the regenerative wheat pilot in Kansas, I guess as a way of testing out and piloting these scalable strategies for measuring these outcomes. We’ve asked each of those farmers in the program to dedicate one study field that we’re going to look at all these different soil health tests on. We’re looking at meter deep soil carbon.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nWe’re trying to get a really good sense of how much carbon sequestration is happening, or a carbon loss. One thing we’re finding in the soil science world is soil scientists are only looking 30 centimeters deep. It turns out we’re losing tons of carbon below that. We need to capture the whole picture when we’re looking at carbon sequestration. Aggregate stability. So all of these different metrics of soil health we’re going to be tracking as these farmers change their practices. How do these different things change over time?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nA possible is scaling solutions for looking at soil change across huge swaths of land is satellite imagery. Through satellites, we can detect cover crops, no till, reduced till, conventional till. We can tell crop rotations, all this different stuff we can now see from space, basically, and we can track how many acres are doing these different things. And using what the satellite see as inputs for soil models to be able to say is this soil sequestering carbon or losing carbon? How much? Just to kind of get a sense of directionality. Like are we making these soils better or not? So that’s one thing we’re working on. Also, these rapidly deployable in-field soil health tests are becoming more common. There’s actually an app called Slakes where basically you take a couple aggregates, you put them in a little Petri dish. You can do this in the field. And it basically measures how much of that aggregate dissolves, and that’s a good measure of aggregate stability. It can actually be relatively comparable to lab tests. So these rapidly deployable means of measuring soil health in the field are also something that we’re looking at.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo, biodiversity. We know biodiversity is important, but what types of biodiversity? Are we talking about plants, animals, mammals, insects, birds? So, really what we settled on was insects and birds, because the theory is we know insects respond to reductions in chemical use, but also minimizing soil disturbance, tillage. They respond to diversity, they respond to vegetation in the field. So we were like, okay, we have a good chance of bringing back a lot of insect diversity through regenerative ag.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd what do birds eat? They eat insects. So if we bring the insects back, theoretically we can bring birds back as well. I’d say it’s a relatively untested hypothesis to date in the literature, so we’ll see if this is true or not. But what we’re doing is taking really intensive insect and bird surveys on these farms. We had a wildlife ecologist out there looking at all the different birds that are living in these fields and around the fields as well. They found 200 different types of bird species this year in and around these 45 farm fields. We’re also doing pretty intensive insect collections, and we’ll see how these things change over time as farmers start to implement these regenerative practices.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nScaling for biodiversity is really interesting. There’s a company that we just piloted some technology with this year where they have these cameras and theoretically, at some point, they’ll be mobile; we could put on a tractor or something. And coupling that with machine learning and artificial intelligence based on what the camera is seeing from the shininess, the color, and the movement and the wing beat frequency of different insects, they can group them into either a species or different morpho types so that we can get a sense of… You just drive a tractor through a field with this camera on it and we will be able to know what insects are out there, how much, so get a good sense of your insect biodiversity. We’re also interested in having farmers do this sort of work and learning from what the farmers are seeing on their own farms to scale some of this stuff. And bird radar, we don’t know a lot about that, but we’re looking into it.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nOn the economics piece, we have farmers entering for their study field basically everything that’s happening on that field. They’re entering their information and how much it costs and their yields. So we’re going to be tracking profitability and how these regenerative practices are changing input use and yields and profitability.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSupply chain resilience. I don’t really have a good plan for this yet. But, similarly, I think satellite imagery will be the key. But we’re a food company and we know that when there’s a drought in one of our key sourcing regions, we either have to go buy it from a more expensive region or we have to lose out on quality, and all of that stuff hits our bottom line at some point. I want to be able to make the case to the business and say regenerative ag can actually, especially in these bad years, this is sort of the theory about how regenerative ag works is it improves yield stability. So in the bad years, how much money is regenerative ag actually saving us? I think this would be a really important data point for the food industry as a whole. So they’re still trying to figure that out.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd, lastly, if you talk to any regenerative farmer, they swear that the nutrient density of their crop is going up, that the food that they produce on their farm is healthier than their neighbors. There’s no data about this yet, but every time oats pops up in the rotation, we’re going to be grabbing a sample and running it for different nutrient parameters and characteristics. At the same time, we’re also looking at in the range of oats that are out there across geographies, across varieties, are the differences in these actual nutrient parameters, are they medically relevant? If we can theoretically change it through regenerative ag, does that have an impact on human health? So we’re doing some of that research as well, and we have a strategy for scaling that, too.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nWe do a lot of university research in tandem, so about partnerships. We have a bunch of projects going on with the University of Manitoba. I’m trying to fill in some of the key research gaps that we can’t do all on farm, so we’ve got some long-term research studies going on. We’ve got some greenhouse gas monitoring going on. Some graduate student work to to come alongside these regenerative farmers and see in the spring, are cover crops and no till affecting your soil temperature and soil moisture? Some of those questions that farmers have.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nI mentioned before that in the event that we can’t get consumers to come on board and actually want to pay for some of this stuff. We are part of the Ecosystem Services Market Consortium, which is this group of food companies and scientists. We’ve all come together and we’re trying to stand up an ecosystem services market in the US to basically pay farmers for sequestering carbon, for improving water quality, and for reducing the quantity of water. Those are the three different assets that farmers can generate that they would get paid for. And so the failure of every ecosystem service market to date has been, because by the time you measure and verify that that service is actually being provided, there’s no money left over to pay anybody. It’s so expensive to measure that stuff, it just takes up all the money in the market.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo we’re doing this three-year research project to figure out how we bring down the cost of measuring and verifying that those services are being provided so that we can do it really cheaply and actually have a viable market. So that’s one thing we’re really working on, and that market will launch in 2022 if all goes well. So, yeah, this is really all about putting money in the farmers’ pockets for providing these sorts of services.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo one last thing, I’d like to give a plug for Twitter. Ag Twitter is awesome, and it’s really how I know a lot of what I know today about new things in agriculture. There’s a lot of innovative farmers on there. This is just a start of some people to follow in hashtags. Like #IntercropInnovators is such a great hashtag to look at every once in awhile because of all the crazy stuff that intercroppers are doing, especially in Saskatchewan. So, yeah. So I just gave a plug for that if you want to stay on top of what all the crazy innovative folks are doing. And that’s it.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\n[crosstalk]Oh, sure. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I’ll end on this one.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nThank you. Are there any questions? Yep. In the back.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nYeah, thanks for your perspectives on what your company’s doing. I’m just thinking, you mentioned several geographic areas in North America. You didn’t talk too much about what’s going on in Ontario. And I’m wondering if you could give us some perspective on the types of products that your company’s purchasing from farmers that grow in Ontario, and some of the targets you may have for this type of geography. It’s obviously very different than Kansas or western Canada.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nDo you mind repeating the question?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. So the question was what does General Mills buy, if anything, from Ontario? And what kinds of things would be we’d be looking for from farmers in this area? I’m actually not sure that we do buy anything from farmers in this area. I guess dairy would be the closest thing. I think a lot of that is happening in Quebec, if I’m not mistaken, for like Liberte business. So I know we’re really thinking hard about what does regenerative ag look like in dairies. So potentially that would be something that we bring up this way. But, yeah.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nUnfortunately, we are one of the world’s biggest food companies, but we really don’t have that large of a footprint when you actually look at it. Oats is one of our biggest purchases, and that’s one of the most minor crops there is out there. So, I think part of what we’re trying to do is engage the broader industry and trying to change how the food and ag industries work. A lot of what I do, too, is outreach and engagement and education to our suppliers and the folks that actually have a huge land footprint, trying to influence them. Because we can only really do so much with our own footprint. Yep.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nHow does this program you’re working on fit in with your other commitments at General Mills around sustainable sourcing? You’re involved in this Farm to Table…<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. So how does work fit in with some of our other sustainability commitments? So the regenerative ag one and greenhouse gas one I talked about. But there’s also a sustainable source and commitment. So that first one, the 2020 commitment, that was to sustainably source or top 10 priority ingredients by 2020. And what I say is I think regenerative ag is, as we look beyond 2020, that regenerative ag is really where we’re going to be going. Sustainable sourcing, this idea is throughout the food industry. This is a well-adopted thing with Field to Market, the Field Print Initiative. This is what a lot of food companies are doing, is basically collecting information from farmers, modeling their outputs, and if they see continuous improvement in greenhouse gas reduction, land use efficiency, nutrient use efficiency, some of these metrics, continuous improvement is the threshold for being defined as sustainably sourced. I think the evolution of that is really regenerative. We need to not just become more efficient, but we need to make things better. And that’s really post 2020. Yeah.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nBut why continuous improvement? If someone is already at the bar right where they are sustainable. Really, you’re starting at the bottom and looking for continuous improvement as opposed to starting at the top.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah, I guess even with regenerative there’s not really like a point at which you can say okay, you’re there. It’s a process and it’s a journey of changing your farm. And even if you talk to the most progressive farmer, I don’t think any of them would say we are at the point that we’ve wanted to be at. Like, There’s always sort of, like, what’s next, and keep moving forward. I don’t think that really applies to most of what’s out there today. Especially on the efficiency side. I mean when we were talking about efficiencies, there’s just looking at what practices farmers are using in our supply chains. There’s a ton of room for improvement. So<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nIn terms of using satellite imaging to figure out or use that as a way to measure or direct best practices, making sure the land was covered. What state is the technology at? What I’m thinking about is here in Ontario, I think the number is around $200 million a year, is a subsidy goes towards fossil fuels, [dye 00:55:53] , diesel and such for the agricultural industry. It might be some industrial subsidies also; I’m not sure how much is it just agricultural. But the concept would be instead of sending that money to the fossil fuel subsidy, but to have some of that subsidy go towards taking care of the soil, sequestering the eco services. So the question is around using satellite imagery to direct that subsidy?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. I know, at least in the US, we have lots of conservation programs in the US and a lot of them, their whole goal is to improve cover crop adoption, right? So we have EQIP, we have CSP, all these different things, and I think to measure how effective those programs are, it’s really just been surveys like the US census. But we lose a lot of granularity and what’s happening on the landscape with… And that’s all farmers self-reported data so you don’t really know how trustworthy it actually is.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nAnd so with satellites, I just think it improves how certain we are that these practices are actually being adopted, how effective a subsidy like that would be. Also, over time we get a lot better tempo or resolution where we can see year to year really what’s happening and in what targeted areas. Maybe there’s a hotspot of adoption here but not here, and that subsidy is being applied to both. I think really where we take it to the next level is, okay, why are these folks adopting and these folks aren’t? There’s a lot of questions we can probe at this satellite imagery to really understand what’s happening on the landscape, but we can be more certain in it, and I think it’s a lot cheaper than trying to do a lot of surveys.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nHow are you taking into account the different soil types and environments and how that impacts the best practices?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah, it’s going to be a covariate in all of our stats that we do. So when we take meter deep soil carbon cores, we’re going to divide those out by horizons so we can see like what soil type is. We’re going to do soil texture within each of those horizons so we can try to account for these inherent properties that farmers are stuck with. They can’t change. So we have to know how these practices are going to affect these outcomes on different soils, right. In different regions. And so that’s going to be part of it. For a lot of the larger satellite imagery type analysis, we have to rely on publicly available soil survey information. So like the Cerego database. You can get a map of what soil type is at this geographic point in space. It’s not always right and it’s very rarely right, which is why you have to do some soil sampling. But that’s a good start at least. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.<\/p>\n
Cameron Ogilvie:
\nWe should cut this short here because we’ve got a whole other section that’s about to come after this where we’re going to have a great panel discussion. So why don’t we give thanks to Steve for his talk. We’re going to take a little bit of time to set up the room a little bit differently. So feel free to take a stretch. There’s still conference snacks out there. Maybe grab something and then we’ll start again.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nSo today we have a panel discussion. We’re talking with Cameron and and colleagues at GFO. I’ve been speaking with Cameron for a few months here now, and this next session is going to be a panel discussion. So we’re lucky enough to have a great panel that’s agreed to come here and fill us in on their respective roles within the ag industry and really how sustainability, how the supply chain works, and really get a good round view of of everything.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nWe had a nice presentation to start off on regenerative agriculture. I think there is a lot of great concepts that were discussed. I think there’s a lot of similarities with what we do here already. I think Dan can probably attest to that with some of the practices he does. Regenerative agriculture, I’m not sure, when I think of that, I don’t really know what I’d define it as. But I think there’s some key principles that were included in that matrix of five key practices that I think, generally speaking, as an ag industry we’re all trying to focus on doing. Some of which… Livestock may be a bit harder in certain areas than others.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nI want it to kick off this panel discussion with a brief introduction by each panelist. I’m not going to introduce you because I don’t want to miss anything that may be important. So if you want to just briefly introduce yourself, what your role is in the ag industry, and a brief background about yourself.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nSure. My name is Dan Petker. I farm with my dad. We farm roughly 3000 acres in a little county called Norfolk. So that would be an hour and a half that way, right on the north shore of Lake Erie. So I go swimming every night. It’s a five minute walk from the beach.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nI did not go to ag school. I went to culinary school. So I cooked Vietnamese food for 10 years because I hated the farm. I came back because of issues. So, yeah. I’ve been there now for 12, 13, 14 years. I’m blessed to have a father who fully supports going forward and trying new things. So we adopted no till ages ago. Who cares? Like who really cares about no till anymore? It should just be standard anymore. Well, no, I shouldn’t say that. We’re passionate about it, but that’s standard practice, or it should be. We adopted strip till about four years ago for our corn. Tillage has it’s place. Do be careful because I’ll just start going off. So we raise corn, soybeans, wheat, hay, and a cat and a three-year-old son. I can go off, so you guys just ask me stuff.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nYou’re quite involved as well. Some of the different committees.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nOh, I guess. Yeah. So I’m on this directors board for Innovative Farmers of Ontario which is, to me, the premier kind of group for Ontario ag for forward thinking individuals.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nFor Ontario Ag for forward thinking individuals. I’m president of our local Soil and Crop. I’m part of this is very cool.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSo yeah, quite involved in a lot of different things in kind of this space of soil health and working on practices. So yeah. Well great to have Dan with us here. We’re going to move along. We have a good introduction.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYou know what I do, yeah.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nYeah. So Steve, so we’re going to move on to Anne Verhallen. If you can introduce…Anne Loeffler, my apologies.<\/p>\n
Anne Loeffler:
\nOkay. I’m a conservation specialist with Grand River Conservation Authority. Now for those of you outside the province, you’re not familiar with conservation authorities. Basically in Ontario we have a system where all of the municipalities in a certain watershed have representatives that on a board of directors that runs a given conservation authority for that watershed. So a cons … what a lot of people don’t realize is that conservation authorities are completely run by the municipalities. Really. I work with farmers on a voluntary program where we try to encourage them to adopt practices that will improve soil health and improve water quality. And one of my special challenges is that I work with a lot of the more conservative cultural groups in Ontario that had some resistance to trying some new practices.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nThanks.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nPaul Johnston. Been married happily for 30 years and I have two children, one of which works in agriculture as well. Spent … spanning over that in years in the ag business. It’s been a very interesting, fulfilling 30 years and I think we’ve seen more advancement in agriculture, both technology and social impact in the last five years that we’ve seen in the first 25. Graduate of a University of Guelph, Bachelor of Science in Agriculture and I now manage our crop input business for Thompson’s Limited, which is a business located in and Blenheim and southwestern Ontario. We were the first facility in Ontario to be 4R certified and the 4R principals really is made up the same components as we talk about when we talk about sustainability and regenerative agriculture. So<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nI’m Jim Barkley, crop retail manager at Hensall Co-Op. We’re a large independent co-op located about an hour north of Hensall. We’re member owned, so our members own us. We were into feed fuel. We have a logistics business and commercial grains seed, fertilizer chemical. We’re a large food grade exporter so we do about 14 different market classes of edible beans and a large amount of food grade soybeans. So quite involved in the field to fork working with end users on food grade. So my role at the co-op is been … I’ve been there twenties this is my 26th season. Most challenging one. Getting the crop planted, hopefully not harvested. So I’ve kind of worked up through being consulting with growers in their early years as a sales rep and more recently the last bunch of years doing purchasing crop inputs as well as work with the origination team, getting the acres contracted with growers to get delivered into our location to process, to ship to the various different countries that we ship to. So that’s my background.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nWell great. Thank you everyone. So we have a pretty good diverse group of speakers here today. We have people that are directly growing product. We have people that are procuring product, working with farmers as well as selling to customers. Then we have kind of the end user buyer perspective and then the conservationary group. So what I want to do is start off by asking the question of what does sustainability mean to you and your individual role and in your organization, I guess. We heard a great talk from General Mills about regenerative ag. There are many companies here in Ontario that are purchasing commodities from Ontario grain farmers as well as Ontario companies. Groups like Mondelez, Unilever, Kellogg’s, there’s large number of companies that are in the marketplace and each one has a different spin on maybe what sustainability means. So I think it’d be great if the group could just summarize what sustainability means to you in your respective roles.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nAre we just going to be going…<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nYeah if we can just go, move down the line.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nI have no idea. A lot of these talks or when I go to these things or these messages, it’s always sustainability to say it’s sustainability of the soil. It’s never about my bank book. I’m carrying about $3 million worth of debt right now and I’m going to buy another million and a half in two months. I got to be sustainable for the next, well until I’m dead. So it’s when I, when I’m chasing my soil sustainability, which I firmly believe because the original goal was to stop my soils from washing and blowing away. So I just started baby steps. You know when you put oats out there, you put stuff that costs me money.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nSo now I’m just adding to my overhead without what, we’re probably five years into our transition quest or whatever you want to call it. And I’ve lost money every year. So I’m going to have to recoup the loss and still make up some sort of ROI to keep the farm going so I can make my payments and have a life and go to Florida or wherever I want to go. Portugal. So I don’t know what it is. I really don’t know. Just farm health includes bank health.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nTrying to balance that, I guess.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nYeah.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nIs that accurate?<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nYeah that’s the key, but I lean towards economic health first and foremost because if I don’t have the money to do these things, the next guy who’s been taking my farm over probably won’t care.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah, that’s a perfect answer. I mean, I think sustainability for too long, is mostly focused on just driving efficiencies and not really explicitly focusing on farmer profitability and farmer economic resilience and just being able to be on the land for long periods of time. And I think that’s really why we are starting to phase out sustainability as a concept and really talk about regeneration or regenerative ag, which is more holistic and it is these pillars of soil health, biodiversity and farmer profitability. And that’s a huge focus now for us because we’ve realized we can’t be a food company without profitable resilient farmers.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nLike that is the basis of our supply chain, our entire business.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nIf I could just add a quick comment, like your slide where you had the stakeholders.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nNowhere on there did you have farmers?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nRight.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nThat should be the first one.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah, you’re right. I think you’re absolutely right. Unfortunately looking at the food industry as a whole, I guess, which is what that slide is trying to represent, farmers’ voices aren’t really elevated in the conversations for how food companies make decisions. And we do now a lot of talks with farmers. We invite farmers in and talk to us and one thing we’ve heard recently is like you are selling our food, right? It’s the farmer’s food and you are just putting your name on it right? We have a lot more responsibility to the farmer to make sure that their values and what they put into it is carried all the way through to the end. So I think we have a lot of work to do in that space. Hopefully I can put the farmers up there, and say this is now, a big part of what food industry, pay attention, pay attention.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nBut they’ve always been your stake holder.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nRight?<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nOne…<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nRight.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nAlways have been.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYep. Yep. Getting back to the question about sustainability. I think it’s got to focus on making things better and regeneration and improves farm economics in involves biodiversity in soil as well.<\/p>\n
Anne Loeffler:
\nOkay, so I’m going to talk about that same slide for a second too. You had the consumers as a stakeholder. When we as a conservation authority think of the consumer, we are more likely to call them the downstream water user and take a step back, and the Grand River is an amazing river here. It’s unique in this part of Ontario because it’s the only major river that actually provides drinking water for over half a million people directly from the river okay? All the other large or all the large cities in Ontario get their drinking water from the Great Lakes. There’s lots of water there, but the Grand River, it supports drinking water for Cambridge, Kitchener, Waterloo, all of Brantford, Six Nations. So we have a program where the municipalities have realized that, okay, it’s actually cheaper to help people to help farmers keep the soil and the nutrients on the land where they need it rather than to try to take it out of the water once it gets to the water intake pipe.<\/p>\n
Anne Loeffler:
\nAnd so this consumer that we’re talking about not only consumes the beans or the [inaudible 01:11:25] , the whatever’s getting grown but also drinks the, consumes the drinking water. So anyway, we have this system here now with the stewardship programs where the downstream municipalities actually provide us with funds that we can then share. Unfortunately not with Dan because Dan is not in our watershed, but with 80% of our watershed is in agriculture and we know that the only way we can keep the water clean enough in the Grand River to keep on providing drinking water is to work with the farming community and let them figure out how, what practices they would like to implement to keep the soil on the land and the nutrients on the land where they need it. And the concept that I tried to get across is that what’s good for the farmer is also what’s good for the downstream water user.<\/p>\n
Anne Loeffler:
\nSo to me, sustainability would be our farmers being able to continue to produce food and fiber in a way which is as … what’s the difference of leaky? We lose as little nutrients in soil as possible because it needs to stay on the land anyway and it’s what’s hope will hopefully pay for Dan’s trip to Portugal, but will also save money for the downstream water users when it comes to water treatment.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nSustain or regenerate is really to keep or to improve. And when I think of that, we’re trying to keep our, keep our land as productive as possible without affecting the environment or the environment affecting us. It has an economic impact as Dan mentioned, we all have to be profitable. Quite frankly, you all are here today, you all, you are here today because of funding, right? So we need money to keep this cycle going. As like Jim, our company does sell edible beam products to 37 different countries in the world and we have to do a lot of things, not for the sake of the consumer always, it’s for market access. And so we are have SQF certification, safe quality food and it doesn’t return us any more money at the end of the day, but it’s market access. And so that’s the part of the profitability. There’s also social impacts and that’s making sure that we are, we have land to farm over the next several generations and we, again, we don’t want to impact the environmental impact. So,<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nYeah. Some of the other comments I just want to add, like profitability is a big part of the sustainability. Everyone, all stakeholders have to be profitable long term to keep it, keep the process going. We’ve got to be able to be stable and be able to repeat year after year. I think risk management is a big part of sustainability. I know are different companies, you have to source in different, if you want to deal with the big food company, you have to source in different geographical areas to be able to spread your risk out to in case of something happening like a frost in Manitoba or flooding in Ontario. So that’s risk management. It’s got to be part of sustainability and as well a big part we feel as food traceability falls under that as well. So like most of the other comments were gone ahead.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nYeah. So I think, you know, we can all agree that generally everyone has a similar, idea of what sustainability means. From a GFO, Grain Farmers of Ontario perspective, we see sustainability as our farmers being economically viable while maintaining our commitments to both the environment and society as a whole. So, that’s kind of the general theme. And I think everyone kind of touched on that in their own kind of unique way. And I think that really sets in to me is that there isn’t one coined definition that each person uses as sustainability. And if I want to pick on people in the audience, I’m sure I could find a different example of what sustainability means. Laura, for example, what would it mean to you in your role? You know, what do you see as sustainable?<\/p>\n
Laura Van Eerd:
\nFor me, I think it’s the ability to maintain for many generations. So whether that’s in this context, it’s food production and environmental quality.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nSo generally everyone’s along the same lines. So I want to get into a little bit more about kind of the supply chain aspect of it all. Because obviously between Jim and Paul, you guys and your companies have a stronghold, obviously working with the farmer members but also working with end users, processors. And I’m wondering if you could maybe just briefly chat a bit about that and kind of how these relationship works and when we look at, the slide that was mentioned about the stakeholders and how the farmer wasn’t involved. When I look at this, it’s as much a top down approach as it is a bottom up approach and how do we really make it that bottom up approach as well, that it’s not just coming from the top and how do we make sure that it’s workable for someone like Dan who is obviously trying to make an income for that trip to Portugal or whatever it may be while also maintaining some of these things that are of concern to all of the supply chain stakeholders.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nSo I don’t know, I guess that was a kind of a question that could apply to everyone. So I don’t know who, who would like to start off by answering that kind of comment?<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nYeah I can make a couple comments.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nSure. Yeah, that’d be great.<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nComments on like from our side, kind of what I feel some of my role becomes sometimes is keeping an open mind to change because some of this is brand new. So sometimes we’re dealing with people that have done things for 40 years, some aren’t going to adopt change as fast as others. So sometimes it’s finding your conduit to change. It could be the next generation down. So sometimes it’s finding those conduits for things like that. Coaching is a big part so we feel sometimes we’re the liaison between the grower and the end user and we have to sometimes be like the parent or coach and work between, because we understand the farmer’s got to make money and we also understand the end users got to make money. So you have to work in between as well as what Paul was saying about the SQF, the different various audits that we have to go through that don’t, maybe it’s just market access versus profitability centers there.<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nTraceability, so we do the food traceability for every acre that we grow. We have to know where it is. We have to map that, we have to track what fertilizers, chemicals go on that so that we can track, truly track from field to fork. Each product that is under that for food production for us. Again, we have an online system that we invented like that we developed through that. We have an over a million dollars invested into a food traceability program that we don’t charge farmers for entering that data it’s or charge our end user for it using that data, and again, we’re certified crop advisors, so we have to go through education every two years.<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nThere’s a number of courses that we have to take and live by that to give advice to growers. We have … each crop will have a production guidelines that we work within the production guidelines with our, with our growers, all of that to continue to have sell year after year. So, and again for our practices are coming more into play with that too. That was just kind of a start.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nNo, it was great.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nYeah. I, we of end users, Kellogg’s for instance, we have a nine page survey that we have our growers fill out and it’s, sorry Steve, but sometimes the end users, it’s a check the box on their consumer report and the consumer is asking for it. So we’re going to put it on our label. But then there’s a downstream effect of, all that processing is required to be certified and then the growers required to be certified. And like I said, there’s often times, I’m glad to hear that the General Mills is supporting their growers by helping them through a program. However, there’s usually no incentive for the grower to do this. It’s more market access. So Jim’s company, my company, we would both have the same customer, both required to have that safe quality food certification.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nSo it’s not really a difference, differentiating factor. I think that’s, that’s pretty key is we don’t want this to be just a market entry. This is something most farmers really believe in and keeping their land productive and healthy. There are some large commercial producers that will race over the land with some large tillage and they are not concerned about cover crops. But I think for the most part, growers want to make sure that their soil is in good shape to be productive. And quite frankly for our nutrient stewardship is a program that we want to manage, especially the right rates of products. And none of our growers, none of my growers anyways, want to spend any more than they have to on that land. They know what their yield goal is and they’re going to spend the appropriate amount of money.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nSo no one’s just dumping fertilizer on the ground or applying pesticides without any requirement. There’s intensive pest management programs that we monitor pest thresholds and I think Dan even said, they up the economic threshold and fertility, we do extensive soil testing, we do precision application, so we’re applying the fertilizer where the crop is going to use it. And so that’s, that to me is sustainability and, regenerative agriculture. But I think the growers on most part are, are doing their share. We just need to get that story to the public because I heard in some of the preempt on this program you’re offering here is the consumer wants to know where their food is coming from and how it’s produced and we can certainly tell the story and having a farmer that’s a culinary expert he wants to cook what he produces. So I think that’s a good way to do it.<\/p>\n
Anne Loeffler:
\nI would like to talk a little bit more about the 4R. I forgot to mention earlier, I’m the conservation authority representative on the provincial for our committee and I, so I’ve had a ringside seat basically to watching this program being developed in Ontario and the impetus came from the farm groups and from Fertilizer Canada. And I can honestly say that I have been so impressed by the commitment from the industry to make this program work for a group like Thompson’s to be 4R certified requires an incredible investment in training and paperwork. And if there’s a lot of extra profit in it for you, I don’t know about that.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nHaven’t seen any yet.<\/p>\n
Anne Loeffler:
\nBasically the industry has taken on a lot of extra paperwork and training in order to make sure that the system is more transparent and has earned the trust I guess of the consumers downstream.<\/p>\n
Anne Loeffler:
\nAnd I have been so impressed by watching Fertilizer Canada and the industry develop this. It’s been really great. So I’m hoping that with time we will see those effects in our water courses and in the Lake Erie basin. Lake Erie, we’ve got some significant phosphorous problems but phosphorous hangs around in our water courses under our sediment for decades. If we implement 4R now we can’t expect to see an improvement next year or probably even next decade because these are such longterm problems. But I think the industry is really doing, is really taking a huge step in trying to address this through 4R.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nA couple of things. One as mentioned about like you know, certifications to how it’s sort of, it is like a big burden on the entire supply chain. You know we get asked all the time, is regenerative just going to be like another kind of check the box stamp certification and it’s no, absolutely not. We don’t want just to say like you are regenerative, you are not, this product is regenerative because we’ve got a stamp on it. It really is more about enabling this environment for farmers to figure out how to restore their land and become more profitable. We’re trying to create the enabling environment. You can see we’ve done that largely to date through education and technical assistance, which is free. There’s no, we’re not paying farmers to enter these programs, but like you said, the farmers want to be part of this. They want to learn how to become more profitable, improve their land. The demand is out there for programs like this. I guess I’m happy that we’re not taking like a ‘Thou shalt not…’ stamp for our supply chain and rather we’re just trying to kind of walk along with farmers as they’re going down this path and trying to figure out how to break down some barriers. Another piece on 4R, I think there’s so much work we still have to do and we still hire agronomists to go out and work on variable rate technology with some of our farmers, free soil testing for farmers in some of our supply regions to understand what nutrients are still there. But I still think we have to … if it’s not maybe five Rs and that fifth R is just the right system. We still have to focus on keeping soil in the field. We still have to focus on having something growing to hold those nutrients there in the soil at times when otherwise it’d be washing off or leaching. Those systems level pieces aren’t currently a part of the foreign conversation. So even if the farmer is doing everything absolutely right, maximizing efficiency down to the meter level on their fertilizer, on their banding for example, they’re still going to be lost. There’s a ceiling that we can only push pass through the systems-level changes that we also have to think about. So.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nWhat was the question again?<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nWhat was more or less about kind of a top down approach with, you have the end user, we’re running with the various supply chain partners. Obviously you being a farmer, you’re the last line in the chain or first however you look at it. So can I maybe can you elaborate a little bit on that perspective and what it means?<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nI’ve had good and bad. So we used to grow boatloads of handpicked cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, like hundred acres, tomatoes, Romas and year plum tomatoes, hot bananas, jalapenos, bells and then pickled cucumbers so if you go to Harvey’s or wherever. That’s all gone. What eventually happened would be there was this top down mandate to say, this is what we need you to do because this is what our user needs, but we’re not going to help you cover the cost. So eventually my margins went from here, which were very lucrative. They went to this, and if I’m going to farm like this, I’m going to go corn and beans because there’s a lot less effort and I don’t have 150 employees. So I got rid of those things. I’ve lost a pile of crop diversity. Now I’m just like everyone else in this big giant pile, growing grains – the entire world. So I’ve lost any sort niche that I have. Now when I call Hamilton Port, the big water port here for selling my soybeans, I get the same price as everyone else because my soybean is the same thing. So the guy who’s only shipping 15 kilometers away will be making a better margin than I am because I’m shipping 120. To go find … to make me special, I guess, we’re all looking for that.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nThese are all noble endeavors, but we’re just kind of … agriculture is dominated by various specific foods and there’ll be like that forever because it’s been that way forever. So grains, very specific vegetables, or oilseeds too. So I’m going to try to jump on a bandwagon and say we’re going to try growing winter canola, it should be getting planted today, but it got wet so, if I can’t do it by the weekend it’s done. But, does this world genuinely need more canola? No, not at all. But that’s a niche here, so that helps. I can kind of say to a processor the ADM and say like, you know, I’m one of the few people that grows it here in Ontario, you don’t have to buy it from the West, so I make a margin. All of a sudden the next guy sees that. He’s going to start doing it and all of a sudden there again, all my margins are gone because it becomes a commodity.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nThese are great ideas, but this kind of partnership thing. But eventually General Mills, we’ll put a sticker on there. Maybe you guys won’t look, but other people will and say, this is regen ag, supportive and they’re going to charge five bucks more box. It’s like, why you see that GMO free garbage? They want to charge you more. It’s not because they care about what you’re eating or, well, maybe some people do that’s a terrible question. But it’s all economics. That’s what drives it all. I don’t know. I get excited. I should, I, I sound down about it, but I’m not. It’s just, there’s a hard reality that we all have to constantly, constantly remember.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nMoney drives all of this. I take my regen approach, I take this extra cost as an acceptable cost of production increase. So let’s say when I grow corn, I interseed with things where I saw the ethanol plant doesn’t care that I’m doing this or they’re not going to offer me a premium. The dog food company doesn’t care. Purina doesn’t care that I have annual rye grass growing in my cornfield right now. They don’t care that I have Red Clover, beautiful Red Clover growing in my wheat. They don’t care that I have oats growing in my soybeans already. There are certain people … I’m in a position where I can take that on. So I add 10 bucks a cost production over across every acre per acre. So that’s 30 grand every year that I’m willing to give up as income or rather than reinvest into the business. The nice part is I can go walk around and I don’t see any more gully erosion where my neighbor is washing away. I’ll buy his farm eventually because he won’t be able to sustain that and maybe I won’t be able to who knows. That’s just hope.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nCan I ask a question? So I guess for both Steve and Dan, so Steven, you’re one of your slides you were talking about, you know in this regenerative agriculture. So you’re doing all the good things for the soil and feeding the soil so eventually you don’t have to put…Like your inputs should go down and maybe it will become more economically sustainable. But it doesn’t seem …for them I use … obviously.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nI don’t buy into that. I truly-<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nYou’re not seeing that. Or is that something that you just see over … because I mean in principle and the theory, right? You’re feeding the soil and you should, it should become less leaky. It should be more efficient, not have to apply as much fertilizer, all those things. But do you see that in practice?<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nDo you mind if I rant a little bit?<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nMore?<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nWell, yeah, right. This is worthy-<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nJust tell me to stop if you need it to be but it’s just… My grandparents came from Russia, when they came here it would be full tillage diverse crop takes hold, they grew all the coolest small grains, which I love, like barley, oats, wheat, rye, all the good stuff and lots of small plots and these things will always get rotated. Then now, a patch would always be there. Those wells were vibrant and beautiful.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nMy grandfather said there’s three things that were the greatest promotions or the furthering of agriculture. And it would be the tractor, so no more horses to feed, so a lot less labor on the farm. You could sell your grain rather than feed your grain. Hydraulics. Now you don’t have to pick up things, you just pull a lever in, compression happens, and things go up and down. And then the third thing was nitrogen. We’re two generations removed and we’ve completely forgot what it’s like to have soils that are starved for nitrogen. We don’t understand what growing 140, well 140 let’s say 80 bushel corn is year after year after year. We used to be amazing, we could raise a 20 bushel wheat crop. Now if I go spend 120 bucks, I’m raising 150 bushel of wheat. I tripled my return. Soils don’t care what we want to produce out of it. Nature doesn’t care. Well, I guess we can answer from our advise it, but it’s just doing its thing. It doesn’t care if I can raise 20 ton an acre of peppers or that I need to, or 250 bushel of corn. Anyways.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nThere was a question in the back.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nYeah, just, maybe just expanding on the last couple comments. Going back to your presentation, Steve you talked a bit about how conventional agriculture breaks nutrient cycles in water cycles and regenerative agriculture restores them, if I got it right correct me if I’m wrong. I’m just wondering, to me that’s a bit shocking in looking around and my experience farming as well. I don’t feel that my soils are broken, or my systems are broken and I’m just wondering if, Jim and Paul, you see a lot of farm and a lot of fields in here. What are you seeing out there in terms of Ontario ag and are things actually broken?<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nI’ll take a stab at it and just say there’s always cross sections, you have your, you get some situations where you have somebody that’s grown soybeans on soybeans on soybeans for 10, 12 years. That’s not necessarily what I would call sustainable and maybe the soil is a bit broken but you get into certain… We do a lot of crop rotation. Maybe in my general area where I’m from we have a lot of different crop mixes because we do a lot of winter wheat following edible beans or soybeans. We stick to our rotation so we have a pretty good balance. We are introducing a lot more cover crops. We have a lot more diversity than we had even 10 years ago. So things are changing. I don’t think things are totally broken, but there’s always continuous improvements that we can work on, I think that’s just my opinion.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nYeah, I would agree with that 100%. You’ve got your desert landscape right to your rain forest. The deserts, a lot of those environments were created from continuous tillage and removal of all the material from that land. I don’t think we’re at that point. However, we have some soils that are at risk and you see some of the erosion and some of those soils where there isn’t the soil stability you see ponding, where the aggregates are bound together. You don’t have a real good soil tilt. I think we’re at risk in a lot of soils and livestock is decreasing or we don’t have the cattle, sheep and that to have the pastures in our rotations.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nWhen you think about organics, you think of organics as being the answer to all of this. We have an organics division and we can stack hands on whether we agree to buy organics at the grocery store or not, but it’s a choice for growers as well as consumers. One thing about organics is they don’t have the pesticides to control weeds and so they’re relying on tillage. Some of that ground is tilled many, many times even in crop and we’re actually degrading that soil through an organic system, which we would think as a healthy system but it’s not. Now they’re looking at things like no tillage, no till in organics. I don’t think we’re at a crucial, but I think if we don’t act now then we could get into trouble on some of those lands where we rotate beans with soybeans with beans, and that’s a risk.<\/p>\n
Cameron Ogilvie:
\nYeah I guess again, following up on some of all of what’s being talked about here, Dan talking about I guess he saw his soils were at risk and so he made some decisions to change that and it’s cost him. There are some programs through conservation authorities and through Ontario Soil and Crop that he can tap into to get some cost sharing, but it doesn’t necessarily make up the margin. And Steve, I guess regenerative ag optimistically is hoping that not only can you regenerate the soil but regenerate a bit of that margin too. Yeah I’d love to see you two dialogue a bit on, is that just optimism or–<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nWell optimism is key. If if you have no hope, why even bother doing anything?<\/p>\n
Cameron Ogilvie:
\nIs it realistic?<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nOh who cares about that?<\/p>\n
Cameron Ogilvie:
\nIs that enough for General Mills? Does General Mills need to be doing more other than just hoping that just regenerative practices are enough to regenerate the market?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nRight. This is exactly the conversation I want to have and I’m really ha.. – well not happy obviously. I really like feedback like this. Is the theory of regenerative agriculture true in practice? I’ve seen it work in practice and I’ve also seen it definitely not work in practice. And I think we have to figure out what is the nature of that and why are some farmers seemingly wildly successful with it and why are some farmers really just not successful with it? I think is there more we can do? I think there’s only so much we can do. I think the ecosystem services market is a piece of that and figuring out how to pay farmers. I think that is essential, but General Mills or the food industry, we can’t just dial up how much we’d purchase commodities for, for example. The commodity market is not going to reflect necessarily the value that farmers are generating through these sorts of practices, right?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nI think we have to come up with some solution. I personally hope that it’s regenerative agriculture because it makes a lot of sense intuitively, but also just from the environmental challenges, in addition to the economic challenges that we have requires change. To your point about, is the system broken? I think we have tons of evidence that the system is broken. Not at the level of a farm scale, potentially your nutrient cycle, your carbon cycle. Maybe it’s working fine on your level, but when you zoom out to the landscape scale and we see mass extinctions, we see dead zones the size of entire states in the Gulf of Mexico, we see tons of issues.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nI think that’s evidence that what we’re doing now isn’t enough and that we have to do something more. I don’t think we can just sort of sit back and say everything’s fine necessarily, but I really am interested in the nature of agricultural economics and what is that lever that we can pull to make it work?<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nOkay. I’ll talk about what we’re doing on the farm. So in Ontario. Okay first of all, this is what I wanted to ask you guys a question or what is your background? Or where are you guys coming from? Are you coming from farm to go back to farm or are you staying in soil research like lab base or what’s the general? If you don’t mind just shouting out please. What do you guys see? What do you guys see yourselves doing in three years after you’re done? 10 years?<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nFarm consultant, environmental consulting, but whether it’s in soils or just broader issues of whatever sustainability. The amorphous term of that is something that I don’t personally come from a farming background. I grew up in suburbia.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nI would say also going to NGOs is probably the spot I might end up. Agricultural though.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nI’m just curious. What we’re doing for region, cause I want to believe in it, but I’m a firm believer of science and data. The easiest one here in Ontario is you grow red clover in your wheat, you get free nitrogen. You don’t get the nitrogen for your crop until the plant dies though so you got to kill it. I have clover right now that is that tall, just above my knee, there’s I don’t know, I’ll go do a biomass weigh off and stuff. But how do you deal with that? Like this on a mechanical in a physical way. I rely on, I don’t want to plow it. My neighbor asked me for a plow so I found him one, he’s going to go kill his that way. I will go spray with Dicamba and glyphosate in about six weeks.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nWhat do you do to help make this work though? Just for the physical act of planting a corn crop. We make a little strip in there now or we just did it about a month ago. That soil is now fragile and is subject to loss. Right away we come back and we plant buckwheat in there. Buckwheat’s cool because there was anecdotal evidence and there’s a couple of research papers that, who knows how good they are cause I don’t know. Buckwheat will kind of free up phosphorus in your soul profile and make it available. That’s good and bad because it’s all going to be available come November and I get a lot of rain and it all goes into the Lake. Now I have to have a living plant there.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nThe clover will take some where I haven’t stripped it but oops, I just killed my clover ’cause I have to be able to get on the farm in time in spring. Now what I’ve done is I plant winter barley or celia rye into this strip with the buckwheat. As the buckwheat dies these living grasses should hopefully in theory, take this stuff up, I go kill it in the spring time, and then as that rots, my corn plants can use it. Now will that be enough phosphorous for me to reduce how much map I use? So fertilizer. Could I reduce my fertilizer bill by 25 bucks an acre? That would be amazing. But where I do reduce my fertilizer bill in this system would be, I get end credit for my wheat or for the red clover.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nI have trials right now in my field. I do it every year. We grow 400 acres of this Clover and every year there’s 50 acres of randomized side-by-sides to I just reduce my end rate down to zero and then I go plus. So let’s say my average is I got to go put 180 actual pounds of nitrogen down. I’ll go all the way down to zero on about 40 pound increments. But then I go up, I go up to 320 pounds just to see where that system is really going to be. And then I take all my soil health tests everywhere I go with those. And the cool thing is I have higher CO2 and bacterial life the more that I trade, and I put into the system because I just gave them cocaine and they just went bonkers.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nSo there is a limit to too much because now they’re consuming my carbon like crazy that I’m trying to store. But carbon is a cyclical thing like you put it in so that you can use it later. And that’s where I really see it. I don’t really buy in, we’re moving pounds and pounds and pounds of actual nutrient and somebody have to put it back in there. Yes there is a lot of unavailable stuff but we don’t have the tools to make that available. If I buy manure I’m just taking it from somebody else’s place. So I’m mining their farm. If I go buy pot ash, well I’m taking it from Saskatchewan or from Florida.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nIt’s this balance and cycle. There is hope though because agriculture every decade has gotten better. And it’s going to get better. It’s going to be amazing. My dad, he’s 72, he loves promoting this stuff and this spring he’s planted his 60th corn crop and he’s like, “I want to do another 40 because it’s going to be amazing in 40 years.” It’s going to be absolutely astounding what it’s going to be like when we’re all that age.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nFarmers and the ag industry just faced so many issues with loss of land, increase of price of crop inputs and decrease in pricing of when you go to the market to sell it. There’s so many issues that farmers are dealing with and it just gets more complicated as the years go on. If everything stays the way it is and continues to go the way it is, in my personal opinion or in anybody’s opinion, one can argue that high yield is the way that’s going to fix all this. High yield you get bigger margin, it’s going to feed the growing population with less land available. And I just wonder how regenerative agriculture plays into that?<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nI think regenerative ag is trying to take the conversation from maximizing yield to maximizing profit. I think the ag industry ’til now has been like yield, yield, yield, yield, yield is going to solve all problems. Yield is going to feed the world. I think that’s totally not where the conversation needs to be. I think, we waste a third of the food that we produce. I wouldn’t try to dial up the amount of actual food that we’re producing, at least in this region. Small holder farmers, yes okay yield can be part of the solution. Here I think it’s like how do we maximize return? In your experiments you’re probably not saying, “Oh this wheat crop had the highest yield. This is the amount of [inaudible 01:48:26]–<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nOh no, I farm ROI. I definitely farm ROI.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nExactly. So it’s like, you’re trying to dial in where am I going to get the maximum profit? And that might be less yield and I think that’s right where we got to be.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nAnd it’s a hard concept for growers to get that in because we have been coached or trained that way. But if you also can say on a global scale, the Ukrainian grasslands, we need less wheat grown everywhere, we need less corn grown everywhere so farmers can have… Well basically you’re saying we’re going to restrict supply so people can’t eat as much so that farmers get paid more. That’s what that conversation is right now. It’s fix the supply chain. Why is it all getting thrown away? I just cleaned my fridge out yesterday and I was like, “Oh yeah there’s broccoli back there.” Gone ’cause it was slimy. There’s my mushrooms that went bad. Gone. You train the consumer how to be a better consumer, which is all of us, and then all of a sudden the waste chain, the waste has to get smaller. It behooves us just not on the production side, it’s on the other side of it too.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nWe already produce enough food to feed over 10 billion people. So it’s not food production side that has to ramp up. It’s other parts of the system.<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nWe all know like the balance, that ROI is so important but all farmers you also have to have in the back of mind that’s part of the sustainability is what’s your soil bank account? You can crank the nitrogen out but you still got to remember what it takes to grow the crop and then what the P and K and what are the other balances there. That’s part of that 4R’s and everything. But it’s a balance between farming for future years or future crop rotations. It is a cycle, right? It’s ROI but sometimes also balancing the future.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah, but also too, I think this is where the science has to evolve a bit. I mean there’s farmers, I think there’s farmers that are way out ahead of where the science is on this in some ways because there’s farmers that in theory should be mining. Just if you look at it on a balance perspective based on what we assume is happening with microbial community and free living nitrogen fixation. But if you actually track their soil over time, they’re not mining anything. They’re building up their organic matter pool and they’re doing that with less and less fertilizer.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nThere’s a science gap I think that exists there where we don’t really know exactly what’s going on. I mean there’s huge amounts of phosphorus and potassium and these things in the soil that are vast majority of it’s unavailable, but I think farmers do have tools to make it available and those tools are roots and plants and fungi and bacteria. But I also think we have to wrap our heads around free living nitrogen fixing bacteria and what is the potential for those to fix tons of nitrogen? And I think we have to learn from these farmers that are doing it and not mining and figure out what is going on because that’s a huge gap in the science right now.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnston:
\nI think we need to maintain those higher yields to feed that growing population. But they need nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. But those can come from organic matter. There are nitrosamona bacteria in the soil that release nitrogen. I think that healthy soils and healthy soils is really micro organisms, organic matter, lots of air. That’s a healthy soil. They will generate the nutrients that are there and I don’t think it’s all about commercial fertilizer, just pumping it up. But nitrogen is key as Dan said. But it can come, it’s our air we breathe there’s 80% nitrogen. If we can extract that from the air then that’ll help our crops out. That answer your question?<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nYep.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nIs there any further questions?<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nSure. We’re talking a lot about economics of farming and how that’s the bottom line to a lot of farming or your return on investment. I’m just curious to know what you guys think of, you can think as abstract as you want, what would incentivize you to actually do this regeneration agriculture? What would you really want if you could ask a conservation authority or General Mills? Just of you farmers.<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nI think a funding that’s more than a one year thing helps the people that are willing to put the effort in for cover crops or different things. I think over the years there’s been some really good efforts put in when there’s grass waterways were more popular 25 years ago than they are today. But there was a good effort put forth with funding that supported people for doing the right thing. I think same thing in some of the U.S. states, they have monies that goes back to farmers that will, they will add something like a Agra team to your 28% you get a rebate back from the government or whoever. There’s a ESN that you could mix in with urea, but there’s a cost to doing that on your own where some of that funding could go towards things like that. Funding isn’t the answer to everything but it helps pay. It’s a give and take. Right?<\/p>\n
Jim Barkley:
\nWe have precision tools. We can use 10% of every farm. Every field is unprofitable and because we’re applying more nutrients than what that grain is taking out. So 10% if we could take that acre and not plant it, which is a really hard concept for anyone to do is they’re paying rent and paying a mortgage on it and they’re not planting it. My God I’m sick, right? But if you can raise your overall profitability of that field of that farm by not planting that. But I think we need some longterm cover crop or longterm cover too. And that leads to this longterm funding to take that land out of production and that you know that can help our overall productivity of each farm.<\/p>\n
Anne Loeffler:
\nAnd that’s exactly where we would like to go. We’re not quite sure how to get there. We’re kicking around some ideas, but we’re hoping that we can support some field profitability mapping because where the conservation authorities would come in would hopefully to be to establish the those parts of the farm where you are losing money every year into either permanent covers such as grasslands or wetlands or trees. But our current programs provide per acre incentives for three years. Probably not enough, right? But that’s, that’s certainly the way we need to go instead of looking at maximum yield is ROI.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nI would second all of that. And in addition, I guess I would say we need a lot more science. There’s so much we don’t know about soil, about farmer economics. I think all of these things are research questions that need tons of effort to understand what’s happening.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nI hope for a time where I don’t need funding, I don’t want to have to apply for a grant. I desperately hope for that because right now I have to lie on the forms because I’m already doing some of these things and the way a lot of these government programs, especially in Ontario, are designed are for the people that have not adopted any practice. And those of us who have already made the expense and would like some recoup because now people are coming to me or to Woody Van Arkel – there’s some pillars in this province – and we’ve done all this legwork and now everybody else gets to capitalize on it. Like farmer way. So I just want that part to go away. The science will tell us, like there’s lots of claims. I went and Jason Mauck a friend of mine, so follow him on Twitter, he’s a lunatic. But he thinks, right? He’s thinking, he just thinks and he’s doing it on his own. He’s got resources that I don’t have. I have no pigs, I have no livestock, I have no desire to ever have livestock. I like raising plants. But if the science can say that some of these plants can do some of these things, then that’s what I need. ‘Cause then I’ll adapt it or adopt it, adapt it and maximize it. But funding assets, we got to get rid of that crutch somehow.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nThere’s a question in the back.<\/p>\n
Audience:
\nYeah. Try listening to all these and then with my personal experience, know recognize it for our economies with farmers. I know the resistance some of these issues and all that because anytime you talk about some of these things, the question you get is, how’s my profit going to be? Where’s my bottom line? That’s what it could come to. I’m asking here, that should some of these talks, no be full cost on it or maybe I’m on the consumer is making the consumers aware of what you’re eating and then effecting the change from there so that if they do, this is what we are buying and this is how much we are spending on aid that will then lead to a change in law in the farmer. Because at the end of the day like no, our farmer said no, if you don’t want his crop, he produces maybe 20 bushels and nowadays we’re losing 50. He goes to the market and the price is the same. At the end of the day he takes a hit. What is going to be on him the motivation for him to do that. I’m wondering if the change should rather start from the consumers, making them aware, so that we focus more the talk… It maybe, yeah.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nYeah. I mean we have a whole team of people that are… We did a focus group with consumers and we talked about soil health and we talked about farmers and economics. We talked about lots of stuff. I mean their minds were completely blown. Consumers just have no idea.<\/p>\n
Dan Petker:
\nNo conception, no idea.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nNo idea what happens on farms and that’s why, I mentioned in my talk like this is all a solution to a problem that consumers have no idea exists and we have to start somewhere with them. And that journey is starting now and we’re trying to figure out, General Mills has all these brands, right? You don’t buy a General Mills product, you buy Cheerios or Nature Valley? We have to figure out how we make their brand and their consumer because there’s no two consumers alike. There’s no such thing as the consumer. We have to figure out what the consumer for each of those products and different types of consumers, what gets them to resonate with what Dan’s doing? That is a long journey and it’s going to take tons of resources and time to figure out what that educational process should be and then also to get it out there.<\/p>\n
Steve Rosenzweig:
\nI think one thing that’s helping that’s interesting is that the presidential candidates actually in the U.S. had been talking about how we need cover crops, how we need regenerative agriculture, how these things are really important. I think that if it becomes part of mainstream conversation, especially as it relates to fighting climate change, some of these things, then it helps us on that journey. But right now if you said this is a regenerative product, it costs $2 more. There’s a tiny sliver of people that would ever even know what that means, let alone want to buy it. So yeah, we’re on a journey there as well.<\/p>\n
Mike Buttenham:
\nI think in the nature of time we’re going to have to cut things off here, but definitely appreciate all the questions and want to thank the panel for joining us here today. I think we had a great discussion. I think there was a lot of key points that were mentioned, a lot of things that were kind of repeating themes and things. So everyone will probably take back something different from their respective viewpoints to their roles, the research, that sort of thing. But please join me in a round of applause for the panelists.<\/p>\n
Cameron Ogilvie:
\nTo find out more about the soils at Guelph initiative, visit soilsatguelph.ca and follow us on Twitter @SoilsAtGuelph. For more on the create climate smart soils program visit smartsoils.ca and follow them on Twitter @SmartSoils. And for more on Grain Farmers of Ontario, visit gfo.ca and follow them on Twitter @GrainFarmers. My name is Cameron Ogilvie, Outreach and Communications Coordinator for the Soils At Guelph initiative. Thanks for listening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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