My first trip to Yellowstone National Park (YNP) was in 1965. Since then, I have returned on numerous occasions, each time deliberately entering by a different route. Yellowstone has five entrances (the South, East, Northeast, North, and West). Each entrance provides me with a unique perspective of the park. It is not the entrance, itself, that is so unique. Instead, it is the route I travel to reach each entrance that provides me the altered perspective. Each time, I see new things.
I feel like the same type of experience has happened to me since I sold Agren. The time I’ve spent researching and talking to people since July has given me the freedom to entertain new perspectives. Before selling Agren, I was certain the only route to sustainability was through the local ag retailer. I believed the local ag retailer was best situated to help the farmer. However, every local ag retailer I talked with told me they had no idea how to profit, or even break even, when offering conservation services; a fact I chose to ignore. In the last month, I have had time to reflect and entertain other routes to achieve conservation resource goals.
Consider a consumer who wants more sustainable products. They might talk to the
ir grocer. To satisfy their customer, the grocer talks to the Consumer Package Goods (CPG) companies that provide their groceries. Since the CPG companies have no influence over the sustainable production of commodities, they turn to the grain trading companies. By tradition, the grain trading companies have limited interaction with farmers, so the grain trading companies look to large agricultural manufacturing and wholesale supply companies for help. These large agricultural manufacturing and wholesale supply companies finally reach out to their agents who have direct interaction with the farmer. The agent – the local ag retailer.
No doubt, each of the six (6) layers of the supply chain requires its own special data. And, if each of the six players extracts a value to cover the transactional cost of securing sustainable food, then it is no wonder why profitability is not found in offering conservation services. It might be time to eliminate the slack in the middle.
I realize very few farmers are willing to accept conservation assistance from a grocery store or a CPG company. Therefore, I recommend the best place to intervene is at the grain merchandisers’ level. What if one or more of the A, B, C, D companies developed and offered technical support directly to farmers? And what if the technical support was both scientific and transparent? And what if the merchandiser supplied data assured the consumer their food was more sustainable? Is this possible? Absolutely, NO QUESTION about it. We have the information technology to do it.
I am not abandoning the idea of local ag retailers providing conservation services. But just like my experience entering different gates into Yellowstone National Park, I now can see the route to sustainability from another perspective.
We are Misappropriating Our Limited Resources
Tom – another good discussion of the challenge(s) that we face in this area. I attended the Sustainable Agronomy Conference this past June and came away seeing the frailties/limitations of the CPG and marketing industry in delivering long term solutions. The attention span is just too short for marketing long term solutions. Grain merchandisers are another possible service provider – but scaling this looks challenging and are still another middle man in the continuum you identify. An audience that has not been tapped for technologies you have developed are the various farmer groups. Practical Farmers of Iowa, some state commodity associations or Wisconsin’s Farmer Led Watershed groups. Many of these are made up of motivated farmers that are short of capital and personnel but very good at implementation. Perhaps a hybrid model would help. I would like to explore this avenue with you in the near future.
Bill, there does not seem to be any silver bullet for moving sustainability forward. It believe it is going to take all the partners pulling together. Unfortunately access to the marketplace and competition keeps this from happening. Again it seems the farmer in the one caught in the squeeze chute.
When a problem is fundamentally political, it can be very hard to solve it by using even the smartest non-political means. The Chesapeake Bay non-voluntary approach to water quality was put in place because decades of previous voluntary approaches to cleaning up the Bay had basically accomplished bupkis. Will that story be repeated in regard to the Gulf?
One possible Great Iowa Water Quality Compromise would be for taxpayers to agree to pony up a whole lot more money to pay for watershed work (ouch!) and for producers and landowners to agree to accept standards, transparent statewide testing and watershed planning, deadlines, and accountability (again, ouch!). Definitely painful all around. But if that kind of compromise had been part of the Strategy from the beginning, we’d be a lot further ahead now.
As it is, I heard a story not long ago about a family group of producers who were approached and asked to implement conservation measures because their operation was contributing disproportionately to the serious pollution of a public lake. The answer from the producers was that they might be willing to consider doing the conservation if they were given 110% (not a typo) of the cost.
I certainly wouldn’t claim that was typical. But radio silence has also been a common response to the general call for more farm conservation.
Not even nearly enough public funding on one side, not enough willingness to do the right thing or accept accountability on the other side. This is no way for Iowa to end up with clean water.
Cindy, as always I appreciate your comments. It would be easier if all people shared your passion for improving soil health and water quality. I do see the initial attractiveness of regulation. However there is a dark side to regulation that many don’t want to consider. I worked for NRCS during the days of Conservation Compliance. It was the easist regulatory conservation program ever imagined and it fell far short of his goals. I realize the Chesapeake Bay has made significant strides during the time of regulation. However I also feel it is a little unfair to draw too many comparisions between Chesapeake Bay to the Mississippi River Watershed. I would agree though, agriculture needs to access the magnitude of hte situation. They definitely are running out of chances to get it right.
There are a few success stories in Iowa where farmers have agreed to come together to address sediment and nutrient issues without receiving major federal and state funding. Case in point are HUC 12 watersheds — Hewitt Creek (Dubuque County) and Lime Creek (Buchanan County). With farmer-led leadership and minimum funding from the Corn Growers Association and Farm Bureau the farmers agreed to establishing very small incentive payments for implementing performance-based practices. The farmer-led performance and incentive payments for practices are described in publication: https://store.extension.iastate.edu/ProductList?Keyword=WQ++0032&S=0&A=0&F=0n The key to these pilot watershed projects were: 1) farmers concern about being regulated and 2) local, influential farmers willing to step-up and provide the leadership to bring together their neighbors to address watershed outcomes.
Jerry, I agree the Hewitt Cree and Lime Creek Watersheds are great examples of significant work for a reasonable cost. I truly admire those watersheds but as you alluded to those, they are not easily replicated just anywhere.
Thank you, Tom. And as I’m sure you know, there are many potential approaches to water quality improvement that don’t have to involve specific regulations on all farms.
I was dismayed to hear, on an Iowa talk show a few weeks ago, a couple of mainstream journalists indicating that they thought that what Iowa conservation groups really want is to regulate fertilizer use on farms(!!) I don’t know any Iowa conservationists who have any desire to attempt that, even if it were legally possible. Obviously some of us need to do a better job of educating journalists.
As an example of one approach, the State of Virginia has been using nutrient trading to help Chesapeake Bay water quality. Here’s an excerpt of a story about that.
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“USDA applauds the State of Virginia for showing leadership in purchasing water quality credits,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Efforts like these provide new and additional income streams for farmers and ranchers, while improving water quality and meeting Virginia’s regulatory needs.”
A VDOT-funded report released in August 2014 shows that the use of farm generated offset credits provided equal or greater water quality benefits for up to half the installation costs of traditional engineered practices.
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Closer to home, Wisconsin is using some nutrient trading and is also using “adaptive management” to meet phosphorus reduction goals. Minnesota is requiring buffer strips. Illinois has appointed an expert panel that is going to propose numeric water quality standards. Unless Iowa’s anything-goes approach starts working much better much faster, we’re going to be under increasing pressure to change it.