Hot Farm—episode 2 transcript
This is a transcript of episode 2, “Enlisting the Unconvinced.” Listen to Hot Farm wherever you get your podcasts. Narration by Eve Abrams and Dana Cronin.
DAVE: We are driving down a country road, surrounded on all sides by corn and beans, then beans and corn and corn, corn, and beans and beans, beans, and corn. (laughs)
EVE: You met Dave Bishop in our last episode. He grows organic grains and vegetables on a few hundred acres in central Illinois, but he’s surrounded, as far as the eye can see, by conventional farmers, who grow a few crops – usually corn and soybeans – on thousands of acres, with the help of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. This is the agriculture dominating the Midwest. For decades. Driving through it, it feels like it’s always been here and always will be.
DAVE: You know, once you have an entrenched system, the resistance to change is unbelievable. It doesn’t have to be rooted in fact, or anything else. It’s just that that’s not the way we do it. End of subject.
EVE: But the climate is changing. So how do you convince the majority of farmers to change with it? To fight climate change – which is expensive.
DAVE: Bottom line is if you want to change farming and you go bankrupt, you’re not a player anymore. You no longer have a role. You have to consider the economic impacts of what you do. There isn’t any choice in that. And by the way, there’s a field of beans and a field of corn. And a field of beans. We could put this on replay and you can just go a half hour. Oh, this is corn. This is beans.
EVE: From the Food and Environment Reporting Network, I’m Eve Abrams. Welcome to Hot Farm, a podcast about farmers and food – your food – and what the people who grow that food are doing – or could be doing – to take on the climate emergency.
In episode 1, I told you about some of the ways American farmers are innovating – how they’re trying to keep more carbon in the ground. But they’re a tiny minority. Most farmers are unconvinced that our climate emergency requires any significant changes from them.
This is episode two: Enlisting the Unconvinced. How do you get the majority of farmers to help fight climate change?
Tackling this gargantuan question is someone who spends a LOT of time with conventional farmers. Reporter Dana Cronin. Hey Dana.
Dana: Hi Eve!
Eve: Dana, you live near Dave, right?
Dana: Yeah, I’m about an hour away, in Champaign, Illinois. Champaign’s technically a city, but drive in any direction for two minutes and you bump up against a corn field. Grocery store parking lots are filled with pickup trucks. Sometimes it feels like everyone here isa farmer. Even at the NPR station in town — where I work — in addition to stock market numbers… It broadcasts what corn and soybeans are selling for that day.
Fade in sound of Closing Market Report (corn and bean prices) … fade out after about :15
The Closing Market Report airs every day – Monday through Friday – at 2pm. It’s one of our most listened to shows.
Many farmers have been here for a really long time – like, generations. There’s one farmer I’ve known for awhile now who – to me – epitomizes the conventional farmer. And who, by the way, also represents the average farmer demographic — older, white and male.
Lin: My name’s Lin Warfel. Lin is short for Linden, like the tree not like the old president. Uh, but at any rate, we’re sitting here on our Centennial Farm where I’ve lived most of my life.
Centennial farm means the farm has been in a family for at least 100 years. Lin’s is even older. In the mid-1800’s, the Federal Government appropriated the land from the indigenous people living on it; Lin’s great grandparents bought it shortly after and began farming it.
Every morning, Lin wakes up really early, and goes on a bike ride. He invited me along recently.
Bike ambi
Lin carefully swings one leg over his bike seat and straps on his helmet. He’s wearing suspenders, blue jeans and a long-sleeved button down shirt — not your average biking outfit, also this was mid-July… hot and humid. I’m sweating through my t-shirt even before we started riding.
We turn right out of Lin’s driveway and head down the narrow asphalt road.
Lin: Morning, Marilyn. Hi there.
Lin’s neighbor Marilyn shuffles out to her front yard to get her mail.
Lin: Marilyn’s lived there, gosh, 40 years, maybe.
We ride side by side down the country road. Each house is surrounded by acres and acres of land. Lin told me a bike ride is the best way to take in the immensity of his farm.
Lin: This is kind of what I wanted you to see from bike speed. And you can do a 360, and the vastness of it is really something. The quantity of food you’re seeing is staggering.
The food Lin’s pointing to isn’t food you put directly into your mouth. This food feeds livestock, or becomes food ingredients, like corn syrup. It may also end up in your car as ethanol fuel. And there is a TON of it.
Lin’s never told me exactly how many acres of corn and soybeans he farms – he says it’s too much like telling someone how much money you have in your bank account.
Bike ambi
After a mile or two, we turn into Mike Wishall’s long gravel driveway.
LIN: So this farmstead is the Wishall’s. They’ve been here a long time, too.
We ride up to a big open garage and lean our bikes up against a huge combine.
Lin: Let me introduce you to Mike, uh, who’s one of the most entrepreneurial guys I’ve ever known.
Like Lin, Mike is a corn and soybean farmer. He and Lin have known each other their whole lives — like seventy years.
Lin: Mike Wishall, Mike is the dad here. And grew up here on this farm. (fade under)
Mike started talking about how he’s in the process of retiring and passing the farm down to his two sons.
(fade up Mike) It’s been a little hard, this transition is not an easy thing to do… (fade under)
Lin knew I wanted to talk about climate change. So while Mike was talking about his sons, kind of abruptly, Lin took over the conversation.
(fade out of him talking about his farm) Mike: It’s been a little bit of a transition to try to get to where you’re comfortable stepping aside, but we’re getting there, so.
Lin: Mike, they’re interested somewhat in the change in climate, and you’ve been around here for a long time. Do you have any observations on climate change?
MIKE: I don’t know if the climate change is climate change or if it’s just, uh, trends or the way things evolve over hundreds of years. (fade under)
He’s saying the climate has always been changing! I hear this from farmers a lot. That, contrary to what the scientific community overwhelmingly says, we’re simply in the middle of a normal fluctuation in a long-term climate cycle. And this idea has a sidekick: people are NOT to blame for our increasingly hot Earth.
MIKE (fade up) Do I believe that I caused all of it? No. There’s things that happen that we don’t control.
Polls show most farmers believe the climate IS changing… But, most don’t believe humans — THEY — are contributing to it.[1] I hear this from other farmers – including Lin – all. the. time.
John Ackerman: I believe there is climate change. I don’t know what portion of that is human-caused or natural.
Randy Aberle: I mean, there’s nothing I can do to control it, so.
Phil Borgic: Yeah we don’t really talk about climate change, as much as, how do we do a better job raising pigs.
Farmers just want to farm. Climate change may be a priority for a lot of people. But most farmers are unconvinced. So enlisting them is tricky.
Part of the problem is that climate change doesn’t look as dire here as in other parts of the country and the world.
There are no massive wildfires here. No hurricane season or sea level rise. There are eye-popping floods. And drought. But so far, nothing particularly life-threatening.
Plus, many farmers can afford to lose the occasional crop thanks to government assistance. The USDA provides billions of American tax dollars every year to subsidize crop insurance.[2] They shell out even more money when farmers are impacted by severe weather – or even market fluctuations.
In fact, from Lin and Mike’s perspective – a cornfield in the middle of Illinois – a warmer climate doesn’t sound so bad. It doesn’t sound bad from the perspective of an atmospheric scientist either.
Eric Snodgrass: We’ve observed since the 1940s that we’re about three degrees Fahrenheit warmer in our overnight lows during the growing season.
That’s Eric Snodgrass; let’s stick with him for a minute. Snodgrass predicts weather for farmers so they can decide when to plant and when to harvest. He says, for farmers, rising Midwest temperatures are a good thing.
Snodgrass: That’s helped expand the frost free season. So actually, our farmers in Illinois have an advantage to planting a little earlier because of that long term change.
That long term change — a hotter earth — equals a longer growing season.
He says, another way the climate’s changed? Rain.
Snodgrass: We’ve also gotten quite a bit wetter. On average now, this isn’t every year, but on average we’re about five inches total rainfall wetter during our growing season than we were back in the 40s, 50s and 60s.
Crops love sun and water — up to a point. And so these climate changes…
Snodgrass: We would consider those changes that we’ve observed for the last 70 years to be a net positive.
Net positive for farming.
And lots of farmers are taking note.
Nicki: So like, silver lining of climate change if it just keeps getting warmer, okra is just going to be so happy.
Dave Boehlen: I just feel like if in 5-10 years I can grow mangoes and kiwis and bananas here in Missouri, I won’t be too torn up about it.
Ben: Che fruit, also known as Chinese watermelon, it’s borderline too cool of a climate for it. But the trend is that it’ll be a lot easier to grow probably ten years from now.
And hey, if I can buy tropical fruit at my local farmers market… you won’t hear me complaining.
More sun and water means you can grow more things – and more OF the things we’re already growing. Bigger yields means more money. And farmers need to worry about their bottom lines. So if they might benefit from climate change, why would farmers like Lin and Mike fight it?
(music to transition us back to Mike’s farm)
Which makes the next thing I learned about Lin’s neighbor Mike especially surprising. Despite not believing he and the rest of us humans are the cause of climate change, Mike IS fighting it… in a way. He’s voluntarily reduced the amount of fossil fuels he uses on his farm.
MIKE: I mean, we put the solar panels in to try to be green, not because I wanted to be green, but it made sense to do it.
Financial sense. Mike has erased hundreds of dollars from his monthly power bill by subbing in energy he gets for free, courtesy of the sun, and collected by solar panels on his garage.
Of course, the way solar works today, most people, in most places, have to foot at least part of the bill for those panels. Mike did.
MIKE: When I did my system at my house, uh, there wasn’t many incentives.
But still, he says, it was worth it. Mike started seeing savings nine years after he got his panels.
MIKE: And I was OK with nine years. I was fifty some years old and I thought, that’s still all right.
Plenty of time to offset his costs… and then some. In fact, Mike is so pleased with his green energy source that he works for a company that installs solar panels… on farms across Illinois.
MUSIC BEAT
Not only is Mike helping other farmers save money with solar panels. At the same time, unwittingly, he’s helping those same farmers offset their greenhouse gas emissions … which are a lot.
So how much do Mike, and millions of other US farmers along with him, emit?
In Illinois alone, the ag industry is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gasses.[3] Some of those emissions come in the form of nitrous oxide, which forms when fertilizer breaks down. Nitrous oxide is about 300-times more potent at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.[4] Fertilizer itself, by the way… derived from fossil fuels.[5]… and is responsible for 20 percent of US agriculture’s total emissions.[6]
So, Lin and Mike might not think they and their fellow farmers are adding fuel to the climate change fire, but they are. A lot of it.
Lin: See ya!
We hop back on our bikes and make a right turn back to Lin’s farmhouse. Within a few hundred feet, we pass by some of Lin’s fields. They’re full of corn stalks up to our shoulders, dense and green. Later, Lin tells me a few years after he started farming, he worried about those fields.
Lin: All of a sudden, a whole bunch of the soil would be gone. There would be a ravine there, kind of, you know, a small ravine, where I used to have soil.
Whenever it rained or got really windy, Lin says his soil would literally leave his farm, and wash down the river. He was losing soil fast.
Lin: That was a big problem.
You can’t grow crops without soil.
This problem – and how Lin tackled it – it’s gonna help me show you how some farmers can be convinced to change.
Midwestern farmers are losing their topsoil way faster than it’s being replaced – They’ve lost about a third of it since Europeans first settled here[7]. Topsoil is the upper layer of soil that contains all the nutrients crops need to grow. And with that disappearing soil goes fertilizer – up to fifty percent of the fertilizer[8] farmers put on their crops. It’s essentially money going down the river.
Now… soil erosion might seem like it has nothing to do with climate change. But, actually, it has everything to do with climate change. You’ll see how in a minute.
Lin is so concerned about soil erosion, that he’s changed the way he farms.
Lin: My great grandparents, all the way up to me 20 years ago, we did a lot more tillage.
Tillage, plowing deep into the soil and breaking it up.
Lin: To help control weeds and so forth.
But also… priming it for erosion. Which is why Lin doesn’t do that anymore. These days, to get seeds in the ground and control those weeds, what Lin does is more like
Lin: Just scratching the soil, and now we’re scratching less and less.
Reducing his tillage is helping Lin keep his soil on his farm. AND here’s how it helps with climate change. It’s also preventing a ton of carbon from entering the air. The Earth’s soil contains three times more carbon than the atmosphere.[9] Tillage starts a chain reaction in the soil, which causes carbon to be released. So by not tilling his soil as much, Lin’s helping keep that carbon in the ground.
Lin made this change – and others – because the right people told him to – good friendswho are also farmers. Joe Rothermel and Steve Stierwalt. I wanted to meet these farmers. I had to know: what does it take to convince farmers to change?
(music)
Joe pancake breakfast ordering “I’ll have the junior plate number one please…” (keep pancake ambi under)
That’s Joe, who, Like Lin, farms corn and soybeans here in central Illinois. We met up at the Original Pancake House in Champaign, where he’s a regular. Joe is a middle-aged dad with wire-frame glasses and a gray mustache-less goatee.
Steve pancake breakfast ordering “OK I’ll do number one also, with bacon, but I will upgrade to blueberry”
Steve is a bit older than Joe, nearing retirement. He has a friendly face and wrinkles from smiling.
Steve and Joe are pretty typical farmers. Just like Lin and Mike… older, white men from a long line of farmers. Like Lin, Joe’s farm is a centennial farm.
Joe: Sometimes, you know, when I’m out in the field, I’ll think, wow, grandpa farmed this, great grandpa farmed this.
Also like Lin, Joe and Steve have problems with soil erosion. which prompted them to start something totally new. To change how farmers farm.
Joe: Soil is a finite resource, you know, and we’ve already lost half our organic matter.
Unlike climate change, soil erosion is something farmers clearly think about a LOT.
BEN: Our largest export as a country – non GDP – is soil. It’s soil going down the Mississippi River…
SERENA: Down the Bourbeuse into the Missouri down to the Mississippi.
And into the Gulf of Mexico, where things get… lifeless.
PAUL: And there’s a dead zone down there, right? That all has to do with nutrients, over abundance of nutrients.
Midwest farmers are among the biggest contributors to that dead zone.
(sneak back in pancake ambi)
And so in 2008 the Environmental Protection Agency set out to get farmers to stop their soil from washing away. Of course, farmers like Steve know how the government usually works.
Steve: There’s kind of two courses you can follow. Either there’s voluntary and then there’s regulatory. And as farmers, we prefer voluntary.
Which is why Joe and Steve decided to head off government regulation. About six years ago — at this VERY pancake house, they created an initiative to convince farmers to change the way they farm. To keep the foundation of their farms — grade A soil — there for the next generation. They call it Saving Tomorrow’s Agriculture Resources. STAR for short.
The name pretty much describes how it works.
Steve: So many people understand rating things by stars. You know, you may have been to a restaurant, and check to see what the star rankings of it are before you go.
So let’s say you’re the farmer. If you want a good STAR rating, you farm with as many STAR practices – practices that are good for the soil – as you can. And there are loads of them. Like Lin’s reduced tilling. Like planting cover crops, which you heard about in episode one. And there are many more: saturated buffers, constructed wetlands and on and on. The more practices you use, the higher rating you get… up to a five star rating.
Remember that field Lin showed me where he reduced his tillage?
Dana: Lin, what does this field here… what’s its STAR rating?
Lin: Five.
Dana: Five Stars?!
Lin: It’s a five star.
Dana: Oh my gosh, wow. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a five star field.
The rating is from more than just reduced tillage. Lin also plants cover crops on this field – which I went back to see in the winter.
Lin: So what you see right there is cereal rye.
Which looks like… grass – whose roots help keep Lin’s soil in place and improve the soil quality. At the same time, these cover crops soak up carbon from the atmosphere.
Here’s where STAR, soil erosion and climate change all come together. Almost all of STAR’s practices either sequester carbon from the air or keep carbon in the ground. That means not only do these STAR practices fight soil erosion, they also fight climate change.
So STAR is like a climate program in disguise.
Not that Steve and Joe would ever call it that.
Dana: What about climate change? What about that word? Do you ever use that as an incentive to get people on board with this program?
Steve: We don’t use the word climate change. In the agricultural community that becomes a political term.
A political term and — as we heard earlier — something most conventional farmers don’t even think they’re contributing to.
No – STAR is on farmers’ terms.
Steve: Something that makes sense to farmers is what we’re trying to offer.
Carol: What do they care about, what’s important to them, what matters to them?
This is Carol Hays, who was not at breakfast – but who helped Steve and Joe get STAR off the ground when she led a non-profit in Illinois. She says what makes STAR so effective is that it’s designed from the farmer’s point of view.
Carol: There are reasons to think about doing something different that also fit into things that are important to them.
Dana: Meet them where they are.
Carol: Meet them where they are, definitely.
This is kind of revolutionary. This is a farmer-designed program that just so happens to mitigate climate change… tailored specifically to those who need to change — farmers.
(music)
But STAR isn’t a perfect program. Sure, it has enlisted farmers in the climate change fight — albeit unwittingly. But most of those farmers voluntarily enlisted. There’s no requirement to join STAR and there are very few incentives for them to do so.
Plus STAR practices are time-consuming and expensive.
TRACTOR AMBI
I wanted to see what that looked like for myself.
So, a few months after I met Joe and Steve for breakfast, I climbed into Joe’s tractor to plant some cover crops.
(Tractor ambi) Joe: This one has a buddy seat, so you’re in luck.
Joe’s farm is a bit south and east of Lin’s farm. It’s September, the thick of harvest season.
But Joe and I are planting.
Joe: Now it’s planting. Or it’s supposed to be, oh wait a second. (keep under)
Planting balansa clover. A type of legume, and another kind of cover crop. Joe points to a screen in his air-conditioned tractor cab.
Joe: There we go. That just shows… You see the little picture of the seed falling out?
The screen shows exactly what the tractor is doing. Right now, spraying balansa clover seeds onto the bare soil. We’re basically on a slow cruise control, where when we reach the edge of the field every ten minutes or so, Joe turns the tractor back around to plant the next row of seed. For two hours, Joe drives the tractor back and forth on this brown, 80 acre field. Just a few days earlier, it was completely green — covered in soybeans.
Dana: So you really get right back in there with the cover crops
Joe: Yeah, yeah, because we want to get them planted as soon as we can, so they have a better chance to grow and get as big as they can over the winter.
So, let me break this down. It’s harvest time, Joe’s busiest time of year. Just three days ago, he was sitting in his combine all day harvesting these soybeans here. And now, instead of kicking back with a cold one… or spending more time with his family… he’s out in the field again, putting in a whole new crop! One that he won’t even sell. One that will, however, improve his soil and sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
But that’s a payoff that can be hard to see. Cover crops aren’t cheap. In Joe’s case – about 14 thousand dollars for the seed alone. Not counting other costs – like tractor fuel.
Farmers are small business owners. They have to meet their bottom lines, or else they’re not players anymore. It’s a balancing act. Almost every farmer I spoke with said money is the biggest reason they don’t plant more cover crops.
Mike: The cover crops, I’m still not 100 percent sure it’s worth the cost.
Harold: The seed cost was tremendous. I mean, very expensive. So unless there’s some like incentives from the government to do it, there’s not a good return on investment.
Joe: Show me the money. You know, am I going to make more money growing these cover crops? And that’s hard to say right now.
Even Joe, in the midst of planting cover crops, isn’t 100% sold on the idea.
Dana: You think the investment is worth it, though?
Joe: Um… that’s a good question.
And not an easy one to answer. Because on one hand, there’s Joe’s cost of planting cover crops. But on the other hand, there’s the long term savings — his soil.
It’s not like Mike’s solar panels either. Those had a fixed, nine year pay off.
Cover crops aren’t on the same kind of payment plan. You don’t make money after planting them for x number of years. It’s a much bigger investment … in your farm and the planet. It’s one that’s harder to see.
Which is why less than four percent of US cropland has cover crops. 4 percent. And that’s something our President is trying to change.
Here’s Biden in his first address to Congress in 2021:
Biden: “Farmers planting cover crops, so they can reduce carbon dioxide in the air and get paid for doing it.”
It’s not often you hear a President talk about cover crops!
Agriculture is a key part of Biden’s plan to slash the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. He wants American agriculture to capture at least the same amount of carbon as it emits, which, remember, is a LOT of carbon!
Which is why the USDA is paying farmers to do things like plant cover crops. Well, some farmers.
Jackie: Our funding levels are always going to be our limitation.
Jackie Byam oversees USDA incentive programs. She says the USDA has way more farmers who want to plant cover crops than they can pay.
Jackie: We get two or three times as much requests as we are able to fund every year.
So all those farmers who would gladly plant cover crops if it didn’t personally cost them?… can’t. Because the USDA won’t pay for it. The federal government budgets far more money to things like crop insurance than to programs that would pay for cover crops.[10]
And instead of doing a budget overhaul to increase funding for cover crops, the USDA is taking a page out of STAR’s book. They’re trying another strategy: Peer Pressure.
Paige: Sometimes getting advice from the government or from getting it online, sometimes that’s not what a farmer needs. What they need to do is they need to hear from another farmer.
Paige Buck works with Jackie at the USDA. She says programs like STAR– farmer led and farmer trusted – are key to enlisting more farmers in the climate change fight.
Paige: We’ve been hoping for something like this for a long time, and now it’s spreading.
Spreading throughout Illinois and into three other states, too. Joe and Steve and the USDA are even talking about bringing STAR to the national stage.
MUSIC starts
We need farmers in the climate change fight… So we need to know what matters to them. Conventional farmers aren’t going to fight climate change directly. The key is to find common ground. to. That’s how you enlist the unconvinced.
(pause for music)
Next time on Hot Farm, we challenge all of this. But Because even if every conventional farmer did everything possible to cut carbon… covered every winter acre with cover crops… even that wouldn’t take enough carbon out of the air.
To stop our planet from warming… says STAR co-founder Carol Hays, change must happen on a more fundamental level.
Carol: The type of farming that we’re doing, we’ve sort of come to because we can use corn and soy for so many things. Well, what if we use other things for those things and the demand for those two agricultural products begins to change?
What if corn and soy were out?
What if scientists invented a different plant – a supercrop with the powers to feed the planet, preserve its soil, and pull carbon from its air? A plant so technologically advanced that it can create the parallel world we need… a total climate reset.
This episode was reported and produced by Dana Cronin and edited by me, Eve Abrams, with additional editing help from Alison MacAdam. Hot Farm was conceived by me and the Food and Environment Reporting Network. A huge thanks to FERN Editor-in-Chief Sam Fromartz, Executive Editor Brent Cunningham, Contributing Editor Elizabeth Royte, and Staff Writer Teresa (Cot-sa-ril-us) Cotsirilos. Thanks to all the farmers in this episode. In addition to those you met by name, you also heard John Ackerman (AH-kurr-men), Randy Aberle (AH-burr-lee), Phil Borgic (BORE-jick), Nicki Morgan, Dave Boehlen, Ben Brownlow, Serena Cochrane, Paul Krautman and Harold Smedley.
Greg Scahtz composed Hot Farm’s music and performed it, along with Paul Kemnitz and Tony Nozero. Recorded at the House of 1000Hz. Engineering by Andrew Gilchrest.
Funding for this podcast was provided in part by the Walton Family Foundation.
If you’re enjoyed listening to Hot Farm, give us a rating, write a review. It helps others find the show. And thanks so much for listening.