 I am going to dispense with the with the big bios and just give you the quick precy of who these folks are. On my left is Scott Faber, Environmental Working Group and many other places. Megan Staz is on his left with the Grocery Manufacturers Association. She's their Director of Sustainability and then Bill Hohenstein of USDA's Global Change Program Office. So let's start with how, bring me back to the US since we are here and I write for Scientific American, how is US agriculture moving to address climate change, if at all? Are we moving the right direction, wrong direction? What kind of steps are we taking? Whoever wants to jump in first? And they all look at Bill. Sure, I can start. Why not? I'm from the government, I'm here to help, right? Yeah, well first let me start by what USDA is doing. We have a significant program focusing on climate change. It's been around actually for over 20 years, starting with the Climate Change Prevention Act of 1990, which was one of the first acts of Congress on climate change and it created the Director of Global Change within USDA, which is now me and I've been in that position for 12 years. We focus on research. We're increasingly focusing on our programmatic responsibilities. How do we integrate climate change into planning and operations, our risk management operations, our conservation operations, our commodity operations, and what we do on forests as well. Now when it comes to farmers, a lot of the adaptation, a lot of the understanding of climate change and planning for climate change is happening inherently. And there's been some very interesting research in the state of Iowa looking at how the climate has changed in Iowa and the climate is changing. And we can see discernible effects of climate change within the U.S. Within Iowa, the changes are primarily changes in precipitation. A lot more water, a lot more water in the spring. What that has meant is a shorter planting window, but more moisture available for crops and a longer growing season. And farmers are responding by increasing tiling, increasing the drainage of their farms. There's a lot of tiling going in in Iowa. Changing their planting dates and managing the shorter planting window that they now have in the spring. What's amazing is that with larger equipment and with new technology, the state of Iowa can be planted to corn in something around a week. And so even though we're facing some challenges within the state of Iowa in terms of agriculture because of these wet springs, farmers are adapting with larger equipment, new technology, and squeezing the crop into a shorter planting window. So as someone born and raised in Missouri, we've got to stop talking about Iowa. But please, Scott. This is great research. Let me touch a little bit on what farmers have been doing to help sequester carbon and reduce emissions. Because there's actually a great 30-year record now of success that is, to some extent, in jeopardy because of some of the decisions Congress will make later this year. And Bill can probably provide a bit more detail on some of the success. But the big picture is really since the early 1980s, we've seen dramatic changes in the way farmers till the soil. We've seen widespread adoption of tillage practices that sequester more carbon in the soil. Just in the last decade or so, we've seen a net increase in grasslands, a shift from cropping to grasslands of about 10 million acres. And probably most impressively, we've met the, you know, I think some of us, probably not you, Megan, are old enough to remember when, that's more of a reflection on Bill, I don't know. Five minutes. You already did the age thing? You are the industry representative. Some of us are old enough to remember when the goal of no net loss of wetlands was a front page issue. And really, we've met that goal and now agriculture is reporting a net gain in wetlands. And a lot of those gains are the result of two big policy levers, one of which is a huge investment over the last really now 20 years in voluntary conservation programs where taxpayers share the cost of restoring grasslands and wetlands and forests and changing the way farmers plant their fields. The other is a policy initiated in 1985 called conservation compliance. Very few people know about this, but in exchange for subsidies, farmers agreed in 1985 to protect wetlands and grasslands and soil health. And as a result primarily of that quid pro quo or what we call it the conservation compact, there's been a real sea change in agriculture in the last, last 30 years. Both of those big advances, funding for conservation and conservation compliance are in real jeopardy as Congress takes up the new farm bill. And you know, many of you would be surprised to think there's legislation that will affect the climate that will be voted on this year, but the farm bill must be renewed, it expires in September, it must be renewed. And there are in critical decisions that could dramatically impact the extent to which farmers continue to have incentives to sequester carbon in the soil. The farm bill must pass that probably won't pass. But before we circle back to discuss a little bit more about what you mentioned there, let's hear the industry perspective. Well, sure, I mean, I think, you know, market signals and market drivers in the supply chain are always tremendous levers for change, right? And as we see farmers adopting new technologies that are better for the environment throughout the US and around the world, our industry is really looking at ways to increase those inputs into our supply chain. So ensuring farmers that working with farmers, helping them do the right things on their land and then buying the end product is really only helping to further that shift towards more environmentally friendly farming techniques. Do you have specific examples of how, you know, say the crafts of the world are reaching down the supply chain to help someone in Missouri farm better or, or, you know, wherever, but not Iowa? Not Iowa. That's all I know is Iowa. It's all Iowa. The limestone caves. Yes, well, craft, craft foods actually, one of their major facilities is happens to be situated next to a large section of naturally occurring limestone caves. And rather than building a whole new refrigeration facility on top of them, they actually somebody some clever person or craft actually said, Hey, let's use them. Right? So they now actually store most of the cheese that you get from craft has spent some of its life in one of these limestone caves in the, in the middle of the country. And it's dramatically reduced the amount of refrigeration dollars they have to spend. And obviously the, the carbon impacts on top of that in Missouri. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you very much. But it sounds French. Yeah. So to circle back to some of the gains you were citing, you know, we heard earlier about how no till good for carbon, maybe not so good for biodiversity because of the increased herbicide use, wetland refore and reforestation where the return is not the equivalent of what was lost, except in acreage, potentially, at least that's the that's the science as I understand it. So can we end and from what I understand, those returns are now going back into production because of increased demand for for corn for ethanol and feed and everything else that we want. There are some there's extraordinarily powerful drivers that are going to upend or reverse a lot of the change that we've made. I've mentioned to the two policy levers, but, but there are three other huge drivers that are going to affect the extent to which agriculture and ultimately the supply chains for food processors have an incentive to help us meet the challenges of climate change. One is is very, very high prices, which are driven in part by global demand. And there are about a billion of us who eat like you and me and soon there'll be about three billion of us who eat like you and me and 9 billion of us overall. That's putting extraordinary pressure on the price of commodities. In combination with that just natural global demand, you have the rising demand for biofuels. It sounds like you've heard something about our renewable fuel standards. And those those those mandates are not just us mandates, they're global mandates. And we're seeing around the globe countries turning to ethanol to essentially water the scotch to to reduce their fuel prices by blending in in some cases, depending on the day and our Bob versus the rack price cheaper fuel and then gasoline. And then the other big factor you have are some of the choices that Congress is about to make with regards to how we subsidize farmers and and some really troubling developments within Congress. In particular, Congress is proposing to extend extraordinarily expensive insurance subsidies that essentially underwrite the decision to farm in places where farmers probably wouldn't otherwise farm marginal lands, lands that have a lot of value for their ability to filter run off sequester carbon provide habitat for wildlife. And then to layer on top of those insurance subsidies, a new shallow lot what's called what you would call a shallow loss entitlement program. I knew it's hard to imagine anyone's proposing new entitlement programs in 2012. But of course, we're talking about agriculture, a new entitlement program that would essentially cover the deductible that farmers have would now pay on their insurance policies. So in combination, we would be paying about 60% of the premium that farmers pay on their insurance policies and pay a large share of the deductible associated with their shallow losses when they lose five or 10 or 15% of their average revenue. It's and of course, when you when you underwrite or essentially eliminate virtually all the risk of agriculture, any farmer is going to make the sort of the rational choice they're going to farm everywhere they possibly can, because the returns will be greater than the price of planting the field. So Bill, you've been the direct one. You've been the director for 12 years. How you know, that's a that's a long tenure. How seriously are we taking climate change in both the Department of Agriculture, but also the government writ large. I mean, you've seen some some pretty significant changes over the course of that 12 years. Yes. And in fact, before becoming the director, I worked at EPA on climate change for about a decade. So I go back to, you know, pre Rio. And back when we were going to do something, certainly the the work has evolved. And I don't think that's quite fair. Because I think we certainly I'm here to be a provocateur. I can I can say very clearly, we're, you know, we're well behind the research stage. I mean, I think there's a, you know, there's an understanding not just that climate change is going to happen and the phenomena is real, but that it's already happening, or seeing it on the ground, not just in Antarctica and the Arctic, but we're also seeing it within the United States as well. And I think the perceptions of farmers is changing, the perception is changing as well. I think it reflects the US population broadly. I spent a lot of time talking to farmers about climate change. And you know, you will get the same diversity of views within the farm community that you do within the US population. We are working with our existing authorities and our existing programs within USDA. And that means primarily working through the conservation programs, the programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, the Conservation Reserve Program, which was mentioned before, Conservation Stewardship Program. And these programs, you know, require funding. They're basically supported through the Farm Bill through Congress. And to get to Scott's point, we're going to need to be more and more efficient in terms of how we spend those conservation dollars. And so one of the things that we have underway within USDA is to try to quantify specifically these environmental benefits, the carbon sequestration benefits, the nitrogen reductions, the water quality improvements, the wetland benefits. So that when we're spending our conservation dollars, when we're working with farmers that we're doing it efficiently and they're getting the most bang for the buck. And that's going to be as important as anything I think moving forward over the next several years as budgets become increasingly more tight. So it sounds like you are doing what Hans wants you to do despite despite charges. It's sort of like a Nike model, right? Just do it. We're, you know, we're moving forward. And how long do you think it'll take for us to understand those carbon flows and how it lays out? Well, we produce an inventory of greenhouse gases and carbon sequestration each year for the United States. And so we can track the carbon flows within the soil. There are uncertainties certainly in those measurements. And we're we're actually doing something called the quick carbon and soil carbon assessment where we're going out and actually sampling a lot of sites around the country right now. That's needed globally as well. The, you know, despite the fact that we actually have pretty good numbers now within the United States, the uncertainties globally are much higher. And so measurement is certainly important. But then tying that back to the practices, you know, and making sure we're not just looking at current practices, but the practices that we think are going to be coming online five, 10, 20 years down the road. A lot of that is in the area of nitrogen and nutrient management. There's a lot of exciting work on on new fertilizers that can reduce nitrous oxide emissions that can spread fertilizer availability out to plants and increase efficiency. So we heard about waste in my in my last panel in something like 40% of food is wasted. We're growing all this great food and we're we're throwing it away. That doesn't seem like good business. It's certainly not good for the environment. And the government probably doesn't like it either. How do we go about addressing waste? And I'd like to hear from all of you on this. I gave you that question. So excited. So my I love weight. I love trash. I'm sort of the queen of trash. I my my office literally overlooks the dumpsters in the building behind us. And it's such a joyous thing because it makes me crazy. And we work in the food industry or work in the consumer products industry and it makes our industry crazy because it just represents you know everything you just said right. It represents missed opportunities for improved business efficiencies. It's not good for the environment sending organic material to a landfill. And of course there's a tremendous food and security problem in this country which we've heard a lot about today. So actually the GMA at the request of our board of directors has launched a three year project with the National Restaurant Association and the Food Marketing Institute which is the trade association that represents retail grocery to basically send less food to landfill and increase the amount of food that we are donating to the hungry in the United States. And we actually have Kai Robertson in the back from BSR is here with us today. BSR helped us do a top line assessment of how much food right now is being thrown away in the United States. We know that EPA has some numbers. We know that a lot of academic institutions had some numbers but there are a lot of different methodologies out there. And what what Kai and her team found for us is that we are essentially throwing away 215 meals per American per year in the United States. And to us and to our industry that's unacceptable. And so recognizing we couldn't do this alone. We reached out to our retail partners and to the restaurant industry and we are embarking on a two more years of solutions to find everything from policy to emerging solutions like new technologies on the horizon to communicating with stakeholders and educating consumers. To press on that a little bit a little bit more. I mean some of the food waste is about cultural norms. Some of those cultural norms are in fact exacerbated by some of your participants. How do we go about addressing that part of it. You know I think it's like anything else when you want to address waste. The first challenge is to produce less waste in the first place. Right. So how can we find ways for consumers to reduce the amount of food waste that they're producing at home. How can we do that within all of our own manufacturing processes in the back of a retail store etc. How can we do that through collaboration. And then it's finding solutions for the unavoidable waste. Plate waste. Institutional waste. Things like that. You know where can it where can it go. We're able to have much more beneficial impact than a landfill. Because as I'm sure all of you know food waste in a landfill is actually significantly more impactful than packaging waste in a landfill because it creates methane which is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. So for us you know there's just it's just a win-win left and right. We don't eat it the bacteria will and they'll make the methane. Government. Way in. Well I'd like to kind of talk a little bit about the international dimension. Please. This is global. It is. And when you think about the the footprint that agriculture has on climate change and the sources of emissions. You know there are the direct emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from animal and cropping operations. But there's also the pressure that agriculture places on land use and deforestation is one of the significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. About 18 percent of global emissions come from land conversion and deforestation. And so. It's the reason that Indonesia is number three on the list of biggest emitters. That's right. We're not burning a lot of fossil fuels. Right. But if we can improve utilization it's the same thing as increasing productivity. And so there are ways of meeting current and future food demand and other demands that we're going to have from the land. We can either be more extensive. We can put more land into production which means more land conversion and more deforestation. We're going to be more intensive. And the question is how do we do that and sustainably. Well one of the practical ways to improve intensification is actually to improve utilization. And work with work. You know focus on post harvest loss focus on loss in the production processes. You know so we're actually getting more usable product out of the food that we produce. So what specifically is USDA doing to. This is an important part of the Feed the Future initiative. You know there was I guess a fair amount of discussion about the the administration's Feed the Future initiative but a component of it has to deal with looking at post harvest loss and processing in developing countries where it's an extremely important. Issue. Well I'll just add that when you triage of landfill. You know the first thing you obviously would take out would be things that would have hazardous characteristics. The second thing you would try to take out would be these organic materials because of the methane emissions. So this is among the lowest of low hanging fruit opportunities to really begin to tackle a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. And so the partnership that GMA has developed is important because it will help solve. At least help reduce emissions from one significant source. It's also an exciting way to deliver more fresh fruits and vegetables to low income Americans. I know feeding America other food banks have partnered with retailers to get more and more fresh that consumers might not buy because it doesn't look just right but get more and more fresh to focus in through the food bank network. So there's a real opportunity there. But just to touch on something Bill said you know there's probably and you would know I'm sure there's probably more food being lost between the field and the bin than between the plate and the landfill. There's so much lost post harvest that that is really a huge opportunity in part because we are simply we're facing a huge crisis in the terms of the amount of land that continues to be lost converted to cropland factory which in our little world is sort of the kind of final word on a lot of these issues. Estimates that there'll be about 13 percent increase in global in cropland globally in the next decade with much of that coming in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Australia. So we're because of this extraordinary time of high prices and because of just shortages essentially in or low levels of basic commodities seeing lots and lots of land that's now in grass and forest being converted to cropland having tremendous impact on the environment. So if there's some way to increase utilization at the front end and reduce waste at the back end those would be two really significant ways to meet some of our big global climate challenges. Okay so I'm going to throw it to the audience, have at them. We've got a great panel here. First I have the gate. Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm thinking that current today about the budget. There are some suggestions that are claustrophobic to cut the budget and some will say they cut the subsidy for the oil and some will suggest maybe stop the nonsense grant maybe by the commerce department. I mean chamber of commerce all there are three eight in the local level to the federal maybe they divert the resources to many maybe a few. So in your opinion what can be cut and how much percentage all of the actual figure you can go come up to. Get out the scissors. Yeah, well I'll you know a few people could probably look across the entire budget and say cut here, cut there, cut here but I'll give you a few good examples of things that would provide enormous savings and would really significantly help the environment. One would be dramatically reshaping how we subsidize crop and revenue insurance. The subsidies that we provide to farmers I'll just take a second to explain this. It's just like your car insurance your homeowner's insurance. You pay a premium say a thousand bucks for your car insurance. Under current law the government is providing about 62% of that premium in a form of a subsidy to farmers. So and when you add that up across a million policies 262 million acres it adds up to this year about nine billion dollars. Of that nine billion of a significant share about 15% isn't even going to subsidize the premiums farmers pay on their insurance policies about 15% of it goes to insurance agents and insurance companies to sell farmers those policies. And overall over the next 10 years that's that program of insurance subsidies is expected to cost you the taxpayer about 90 billion dollars. We've done some analysis others have done some analysis that show that you could dramatically reduce the rate of subsidization and certainly reduce the amount we're giving to insurance companies and agents. And help pay for other things that help farmers help the environment help rural communities help promote truly sustainable sources of renewable energy and provide a lot of money for deficit reduction as well. And what's very troubling for us is that instead of cutting these subsidies the agriculture committees are proposing to make deep cuts to conservation programs and food stamps so that we can continue to provide truly unlimited no limits no means testing no payments truly unlimited subsidies to some of the most successful farm businesses in America. Anything to add to that? Really? I said it was a provocateur. Well, let me just back I mean there are reasons to provide insurance to farmers and provide access to insurance now we can debate you know what the right level of that is. But certainly farming is a risky business and there is a societal benefit to ensuring an adequate food supply and that's sort of the underpinning behind the commodity programs and the support for insurance. You know getting back to some of the tradeoffs and the programs that we work directly with in terms of mitigation through the conservation programs it we recognize that there's going to be really tight budget times and that you know if we're going to continue to support these kinds of programs that we're going to have to be able to document the benefits that they provide. In addition, you know we're looking at new innovative ways to provide conservation through emerging environmental markets where we can partner with the private sector recognizing that farms when they do conservation activities provide benefits to society. If we can internalize those benefits, if we can work with partners in the private sector, we can supplement the resources that are available for conservation. And so those are the kinds of things that we're looking at within the department. There is this broader discussion about you know what USDA should be doing in the next farm bill but we're sort of more focused on our current authorities and what we're doing right now. Of course now let's have the fight. I'm not going to put Bill on the spot. It's not a job to defend the status quo. But you know one of the things and let me start by saying I completely agree and am pleased that USDA is doing more to document the benefits of these programs. There's a program within NRCS called CF or whatever we call it these days that is helping to kind of calculate all the benefits that we get in terms of cleaner water, cleaner air, wildlife, habitat, carbon sequestration. Very important. The thing that drives me to distraction is that we are not requiring the same scrutiny, the same proof of ROI of these farm subsidies. I mean we're in the last 15 years between 1995 and 2010 we provided a quarter of a trillion dollars in subsidies to a handful of extraordinarily successful farm businesses. Keep in mind virtually only about a third of farmers are even eligible for these subsidies. And the largest 10% of those people who are eligible collect about three fourths of the money. So where's the ROI? Where's the evidence that those dollars are ultimately needed for those very successful businesses which by the way report average household income of more than 200,000 dollars a year. Where's the ROI on those investments? And then the second thing that I just think USDA has an obligation to challenge is this nonsense about farm subsidies contributing to ultimately to lower food costs. I mean the things that we largely subsidize in the U.S. don't go into the mouth of a gas tank or into the mouth of an animal, not into the mouth of anyone you're related to. And so largely, not exclusively but largely. And it just strikes me that if you significantly reduce the rate of subsidization, I'm not saying eliminate it entirely, but significantly reduced it that you would see no impact whatsoever in planted acres, net cash returns, or ultimately the cost of those ingredients to the companies that actually turn that stuff into things that you all eat. At this thank you for this, you just saved me $140 on a couch somewhere. We hear this all the time in the fantasy land that is called agriculture policy and it's wrong and it needs to be challenged and I hope that USDA will bring, because I know there are terrific economists at OCE, I hope they will bring some real world analysis to this question of what have taxpayers gotten for the quarter of a trillion dollars we have spent in terms of food prices, in terms of preserving farms? And what are we about to get for the $120 billion we're about to spend over the next 10 years? Those are the questions that I think USDA ought to be asking as well. Do you want a quick response or do you want me to go back to questions? No, I think we can keep going. Oh, yeah. Well, I do want to let other folks have questions, but if you want the opportunity to respond, I'm, you know, okay, I saw Hans hand up, but remember I'm going to hold you to the same standard as everybody else. You know, we know prevention is better than cure. I think we heard this morning that if we have a resilient system we'll be much less exposed to, again, the vagaries of weather, drought or floods, and they actually shown that organic farms here in the U.S. fair better than the conventional whenever there is an extreme weather situation. So we're not invest those subsidies in the dirty word organic farming. Because so what are you waiting for to actually change this? We know it. So that's the question. No, no, what are we waiting for? Because I have a neighbor farmer who used to be deputy of the secretary. Got you, Clinton? They started, where the Clinton, the Romiger family? All right. OK. So they started to grow organic tomatoes and rice anyway. They gave up because they can't compete with the import from China, for example, in terms of tomatoes. So obviously they need to be a help there to transition. So where is that money? Well, USDA is playing an important role in promoting organic markets in the country. We set the standards for what defines organic. In addition, there's a tremendous amount we can learn from organic technologies that we can apply to conventional technologies. And so it's not as simple as organic versus conventional. It's what are the best practices that can provide food, but at the same time do that sustainably and improve water and address greenhouse gases and reduce input use. And so there are things that conventional systems have adopted from organic agriculture over the last 20 years. The significant increase in conservation tillage is one example of that. The increased use of manure as a fertilizer is another example of that. And so organic agriculture and the demand for agriculture for organics is having an impact not just on the organic farms in the country, but on all farms. That's it, yes. Exactly. It's so easy to try to look for that silver bullet, that if we do this, then everything will be fine. And sustainability is not a silver bullet kind of issue. You have to take a look at everything in a really complete, holistic, global way. And I think. Don't say silver buck shot. Silver buck shot. Oh, I'm going to use that. Silver buck shot. But it's really a matter of. She did it anyway. I think, of course, because you told me to. Oh, you didn't tell me. I told you not to. Oh, sorry. Sorry, my listening skills. But I think it's what Bill was saying earlier. It's all about our bang for our buck. And if we want to encourage farmers to convert to organic, that is certainly wonderful. And the market for organic produce and all organic materials really are food that's just exploding throughout the US and around the world. But when we look at our global sourcing and what we can do to combat deforestation and the rainforest for materials like palm and soy, it's so easy to look for that one thing. But it's more complicated than that. And I think that we all have to take a step back and really look at what works and what gets us to where we want to be the fastest. And that's going to be multiple solutions at the same time. All we need to do is get the palm oil out of Girl Scout Cookies will all be saved. In the middle there, in the back, was the first hand I saw. And then we'll come over here. I just want to go on right there supporting Girl Scout Cookies. I know Bill Breeze. I love it. Thank you. I'm Jed Schilling. And it's very interesting that the USDA is collecting much more information about greener productive qualities and that the supermarkets are trying to market more of that stuff. But I think it's very important to get that information to the consumer because it would offset some of the cheaper is better view if people understood that different products they were buying had contributed much more to greenhouse gas emissions or to pollution or other things. And this would involve labeling products that have GMO production in them, which I think would be very important, particularly since I gather EPA recently approved the use of a derivative of Agent Orange in orange production that I would like to know about for sure. So how do we get that information out to the people effectively so that they can make rational decisions the way the free market tells us they will do it if they have the right information? So I want to know how we can get that information out, not just to groups like this, but to the consumers who are actually buying the products. To be slightly skeptical, it doesn't look like calorie counts work too well. But let's answer that. Do you want to start? I can start. So first of all, consumers are smart and consumers care. And consumers ask us to produce the kinds of things that they want to eat. And I think you're exactly right when you go into a grocery store and we've all been trained to look for that perfect orange, or that perfect apple. And yet it doesn't have to be unblemished in order for it to be perfectly nutritious and perfectly edible and all the rest. And I think consumers right now have an incredible amount of information at their fingertips. And I think honestly the biggest challenge for many consumers, many moms, is how to sort through all of the information that is available to them. And we're JMA and the industry are really working hard on that. We've actually taken some of the most important nutrition facts from the back of the panel and moved them up to the front to volunteer effort throughout the industry. So you can see some of those key most important nutrition information in bigger letters, bigger balance, right on the front of the package. So again, as a busy parent, busy consumer, you can go through the store quickly, find what you need, understand what's important to you and your family and make those decisions for yourself. Sure, and we have experience with labeling through the organics program. And it's not an endeavor to undertake lightly. You know, the organics system and the development of regulations for organics was, you know, a complicated endeavor. But it was initiated by a number of voluntary private sector activities where there were several attempts to actually look at, you know, what defined organics. And there were several different systems for how to define organics out there. You know, we're seeing some of the same things on greenhouse gases where there's an interest in labeling or documenting the greenhouse gas profile of the commodities or the consumer products that are being produced. A lot of interest in this in the private sector, the dairy industry, for example, has set an industry standard for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020. They're one of the only commodity groups to actually step out and make that kind of voluntary commitment. They're doing that in part because there's an interest from the retailers. In particular, some of the big retailers when looking at the greenhouse gas profile of the commodities and the products that they were selling, said we want to focus on milk and cheese and butter and try to see if we can actually improve the performance in the dairy industry stepped up and is working with the retailers on that. And they're not only looking at documenting this, but they have an extensive research agenda that they've come to talk to us about where they're interested in digesters, improving the performance of reducing and turf fermentation from their livestock operations, reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from the feed that's produced, their transportation systems, their cooling and storage systems. They have pretty much an entire lifecycle of where greenhouse gas emissions are emitted from the dairy industry and technologies and practices at each step that can reduce those emissions. The other Walmart effect. I really don't know anything about that. We need to move on to some other questions here. She's been waiting patiently. Thank you. I think all of you mentioned post-waste harvest and, or sorry, post-harvest waste. And I was just wondering though about whether the GMA initiative is addressing the waste of the food that's not being harvested in the first place because of aesthetic reasons and how big of the whole waste picture is that part of it? Aesthetics. On-farm food waste in the field is definitely a big component of the overall food waste picture in the US. Our project right now is focusing on from manufacturer down to in-restaurant consumption, which is a significant piece of the pie. It's about 44% of the total pie. But we also recognize that as manufacturers there's a lot we can do on-farm. But right now that's not the immediate focus of our project, but there are a lot of really great efforts out there through NGOs and through some think tanks that are working on gleaning and how do we get that food to hungry people in the US and also what other value-added food products can that be made into, right? So it's not a, it's a bruised tomato. Can we turn it into canned tomatoes, right? And how do we get that to market? Yes, so one more question and then we'll try to wrap it up there in the middle, yeah. Thank you, I'm Leon Wanchab, University of Wisconsin. Older in the day we've heard discussion about better use of science, of cultivation practices, different reimbursement for labor. One thing we haven't heard is the differences of land tenure and particularly in areas outside of the United States and we were talking a lot about that. You have a wide variety of either absentee landlords or land held by villages and not really held by any individual in freehold. I'm wondering how much of a problem is that and are we doing enough research into how we might be able to solve that problem? I would encourage you to read Ed Carr's book. There's actually some interesting stuff in there on that which shows that some of those communal ownership structures are actually good at promoting sustainability because no one particular farmer can kind of come in, mine the land and move on. But anyway, to some extent, we have a similar dynamic in the US, about half of the farm in the US is rented farmland. You have some big investors moving in to the land business, buying land, renting it to farmers. And as a result of that, you don't wind up getting sort of durable long term care of the land because so much of it is just kind of trading hands from year to year. One of the innovations that started in the last Farm Bill and that we're trying to expand in this Farm Bill is what's called the Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative. And I'll just take a second to explain this. Historically, we've always delivered these conservation payments to farmers a la carte. We give you a check and you a check and you a check and we wouldn't necessarily try to bring farmers together on a particular creek or a particular critter to try to get long lasting durable solutions. So instead what we're proposing to do, proposing to expand is instead of giving grants and cost share payments and loans to individual farmers, to have farmers essentially come to USDA in groups along with their own money, a local partner, a foundation, utility, what have you, the conservation district and say, look, here's our plan to try to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment in this creek. It's a five year plan. Here's what all of these different farmers are going to do. Here's our monitoring plan to show that we're gonna meet our goals and then deliver our conservation funding in that way. And it gets back to what Bill was saying about how do we make sure we're getting more ROI from these conservation programs? We know we're gonna, we presume, because we're optimistic that there won't be cuts to these programs, although some in Congress are trying their best to make them, how do we make sure that the $30 billion more or less that we'll spend over the next five years is being leveraged with other dollars and is actually producing long-term, sustainable, durable results? So we don't sort of lose those benefits when the land changes hands five years from now. So we're almost out of time. I wanna ask one last question of the panelists. We're up here at an event called Feeding the World While the Earth Cooks. We haven't focused that much on climate change. I'm gonna ask each of you to kind of give your one big fix or idea for both reducing the greenhouse gas emissions. I mean, agriculture is, let's face it, potentially the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. We do a lot with cars. We're trying to do a lot with power plants. We seem to be doing much less in agriculture. So what's the one big fix that you would suggest? Only one. Only one. Silver bullet. Silver buck dot. Silver buck dot. Well, I'm gonna take two. So the first one is that we, you know, there are enormous potential relatively inexpensive gains to be made in how we use nitrogen globally. And so in terms of how much is applied, new technological innovations, so we could dramatically reduce the amount of nitrogen that we use and simultaneously increase yields. So that would be a kind of a no-brainer. I can't remember the number, but it's still a huge number of farmers are not doing sort of basic nutrient management just in the U.S. So you can imagine what's happening globally. And we see that in the Gulf of Mexico. Absolutely. And the second would be, I think we really have to very quickly reevaluate and reverse course on our global commitment to ethanol. I mean, in part because it's just putting our food security, our environmental security and our energy security on an awful collision course. I mean, if we live in a world where the 10% of the globe's fuel supply is ethanol, it's lights out. I mean, start packing your bags and looking for a new planet. There's no way, despite the innovation of our farmers and the people who sell them inputs, there's no way we could possibly produce enough food in an E10 world. And so I think we very quickly have to figure out whether we've made really a tragic global policy mistake and instead look for how do we get the truly sustainable second generation fuels to the commercial marketplace quickly. Because the genie's out of the bottle. We've reached saturation point in the U.S. We're now, we've exported more than a billion gallons of ethanol this year of all places, the Middle East and Saudi and Brazil. And so it's just, it's a terrifying picture if we don't begin to really see these second generation fuels get to the market. So we already asked our lands to produce food, feed, and fiber. Now we're going to add the fourth F fuel and that's going to take the wheels off the bus. You've probably heard this. Already 40% of our corn supply in the U.S. is going into your gas tank. And now, not just your gas tank, but to some emir's gas tank in the United Arab Emirates. So it's, you know, it's just, and it's going to grow as these global markets grow and partly in response to higher and higher oil prices. Yeah. You know, I think it's about efficiency. You know, the essence of sustainability is doing more with less, right? And we're going to have to keep doing that. And certainly business is really good at finding efficiencies wherever we can and getting the most bang for our buck. And I think that's encouraging the conversion of supply chains into sustainable supply chains. And I think that is looking at how we can just produce less waste. And that's energy waste, that's water waste, that's food waste. But, you know, encouraging efficiencies and as much as possible I think is one of our silver buck shot solutions. 12 years, what have you learned? I will take a second of my time to say that I'm, I don't necessarily share the concerns about ethanol. I think ethanol can play an important role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, including conventional ethanol. And I think there are ways of producing ethanol that aren't going to contribute to land use chains that we can do so in the context of everything else that we need to produce from land. Good, our second disagreement. The thing that keeps me up at night is not so much on the mitigation side, although I think agriculture can play an important role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. It's the effects of climate change on agriculture. And again, not so much in the United States, but globally, where the capacity, there was a discussion about resilience. The resilience of farmers and the capacity to adapt to climate change is much more limited in developing countries. And there, the key technologies and practices are better access to information. You know, things like FuseNet, where we're providing drought early warning systems, where we're giving farmers access to climate information in advance of the events. Better access to seed and technology so they can improve production and reduce potentially the footprint that agriculture has. And then finally, better access to water management. Water management technologies are going to be critical in developing countries. Yeah, as a final point, you mentioned water. Do we have enough water to do what we want to do? Do we have enough land to do what we want to do? Final thoughts on that? Well, I think some of you probably are familiar with a report. I can't remember the author called Water 2030. It was sort of looking at this question of our global water budget. Maybe Bill, you remember who did that. I don't. Anyhow, clearly we are fair. If someone's Googling me as we speak. Clearly we are going to be stretching our freshwater supplies past the point where we will have enough to go around to put it simply, fairly in our lifetimes. And that's a real challenge. The variability caused by climate change is going to make those problems even worse. And then I think where Bill and I probably disagree is on this whole land question. Because I think certainly there are some kinds of biofuels that reduce greenhouse gas emissions relative to gasoline. But if you create enormous amounts of demand for those feedstocks, they have to be grown somewhere. We're going to get the music in a second. So let me let them respond as well. Just very quickly if you want to. Again, I think productivity improvements are in some ways a way out of this. I think with improvements in productivity, and there are tremendous potential for that, especially in developing countries, that we can increase food supply and reduce overall pressure on food and feed. I mean, it's an incredibly precious resource. And it's important to everything that we do. It's important to my industry. It's important to how we live. And we need to think about it that way. And I think Uniliver's turn off the TAP campaign, the work that PepsiCo has done in India, the work that Coca-Cola is doing, sharing their data with the World Resources Institute. I mean, it's a collaboration and efficiencies. It's one of our solutions. 45 minutes, not enough time to spend on this topic. But that's what we had. And I'd like you to join me in thanking my wonderful panelists. Thank you.