 Hello and welcome, everyone, to a bonus sixth briefing of our series, Farm Bill and Focus. Our look today continues with climate smart research for the farms of the future. I think that is just a great briefing title. Thanks to everybody for joining us today. I'm Dan Bresset. I'm the president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. ESI will actually celebrate 40 years of policymaker education work on Capitol Hill next year. And we have covered so much ground since then, and it all is culminating in the next couple months, for this year at least, with a continued emphasis on policymaker education to help congressional staff answer the tough questions from their bosses about climate topics, like the Farm Bill, like the COP28 negotiations, like the UNFCCC negotiations, like advanced weather forecasting, like the status of the Inflation Reduction Act in the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act. And that's what ESI does, policymaker education. And over the years, we've also developed some expertise providing technical assistance to utilities and rural areas that wish to provide inclusive on-bill financing programs for their customers. ESI is probably best known for briefings like today. Sometimes we're in person on Capitol Hill, sometimes we're online. But our briefings are always designed to be timely and relevant and accessible and practical. Our last outing was all the way back in July, on July 18th, when we presented the 2023 Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Policy Forum in Expo. That event featured six panels covering clean energy topics from energy efficiency to sustainable transportation to energy independence. We've also covered topics like the DOE programs to advance nuclear energy, energy efficiency, renewable energy programs at the Department of Energy, green hydrogen with our friends at the Environmental Defense Fund, organic agriculture with our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and so much more. One of the great things about ESI is that our educational resources are always free and available to everyone, including congressional staff. All you have to do is visit us online at www.esi.org. You can find all of our briefings, all of our articles, all of our fact sheets and even our podcast. The best way to keep up with all the stuff going on here at ESI is to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. I said four words earlier, timely, relevant, accessible and practical, and that's what really this briefing series is all about. We've put a lot of thought into these resources to ensure that they're science-based and ready when congressional staff need the information. Just with respect to the Farm Bill, in addition to briefings like the one today, we also have dozens of legislative side-by-side-by-side comparison charts that will, when we get text from the House and the Senate, they will help congressional staff compare what's being proposed. We also have articles. We also have a really impressive hearing tracker. If you'd like to go back and revisit any agriculture committee hearings that dealt with climate topics, we have you covered there as well. And we even have special editions of our newsletter. Our philosophy is much better to have this information before you need it and certainly before your boss asks a tough question about a climate change topic. I hope when you get those tough questions, the first thing you think of is www.esa.org because I bet we could help you answer that question. Today, our panelists will explore the latest advancements in agricultural research, technology and practices, as well as how to invest in, scale up and evaluate what is already working to achieve even more. As climate change continues to trigger extreme weather of increasing frequency and severity, farmers and ranchers are looking for innovative techniques to bolster crop resilience and ensure food security. Research in areas ranging from drought-resistant crops to carbon sequestration and precision agriculture can provide new ways of mitigating and adapting to climate change. Research programs and partnerships supported by the Department of Agriculture are generating creative climate smart solutions to enhance resilience and reduce greenhouse gas emissions on farms and ranches. We have a tremendous panel lined up for you today, but we are also very pleased to present a special guest. Representative Kim Schreyer has represented Washington's 8th Congressional District since 2019. Prior to being elected to Congress, Representative Schreyer was a pediatrician in Issaquah, working with children across the Puget Sound region and helping families navigate the health care system. As the first pediatrician in Congress, Representative Schreyer uses this expertise to inform her work on issues that improve the lives, health and well-being of children. Representative Schreyer is a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and she has degrees in astrophysics from the University of California Berkeley and medicine from the University of California Davis. Thank you so much to Representative Schreyer for joining us today on our online briefing. Thank you very much for the opportunity to virtually welcome you to the congressional briefing on agriculture research hosted by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The speakers assembled here and the experience and valuable perspectives they each bring are impressive and important to addressing the pressing agricultural research questions of today and how they inform practices on the ground now and into the future. I really wish that I could be there with you today to listen and learn from this robust discussion, but I am sorry that I can't and I will provide a few quick reflections. Agriculture, conservation and climate-smart practices are extremely important to this country, to our farmers, and have multiple benefits. Our agriculture industry is vital to our nation's long-term strength and security. Our agriculture industry employs thousands of hardworking Washingtonians and is vital to our nation's long-term strength and security. And finally, in the face of a changing climate and increased pressure on our food supply, we must support farmers in any way we can and make sure that we have resilient crops that can sustain a changing climate. And we did some of this last Congress with the Inflation Reduction Act, nearly $20 billion for conservation programs, a transformative moment for U.S. agriculture to address climate change and agriculture's role. And by directing funding to the voluntary conservation programs that farmers are already well acquainted with and are currently massively oversubscribed, agriculture can be part of the climate solution. There's work to be done and our ag research facilities need to get the funding they need to stay at the cutting edge. We need to address our deferred research maintenance backlog and increase investments in the next generation of agricultural research. This research is critical as farmers in my district face daunting challenges from hail in June to extreme heat. For example, the ability for researchers to conduct experiments on plants under various environmental stresses is critical to understand crop responses to new climate conditions. Modern facilities can also help researchers screen new crop varieties and understand the impacts of a changing climate on insects and diseases. Many farmers in Washington state and across the country rely on tremendous research being done at public land grant universities like Washington State University and our state, ensuring that they have modern facilities, world-class facilities will make it easier for them to attract and keep world-class researchers. This investment will reposition the United States for long-term success, competitiveness, and leadership in global agricultural and food research. This is why I was so happy to join with Representative Mann from Kansas to introduce the AG Research Act, a bipartisan bill that will increase federal investment in agriculture research institutions. This bill solves this issue by authoring authorizing $1 billion in mandatory spending and authorizing an additional billion dollars in discretionary appropriations over five years to provide the infrastructure grants to agricultural research facilities. These institutions discover the solutions to agriculture's most pressing challenges now and in the future. They're fundamental to successful food production and soil health during this time of extreme weather patterns, novel pests, and drought. For far too long these institutions have been underfunded, putting us at risk of falling behind the rest of the world if we don't make these investments. I was proud to introduce this bipartisan legislation that will invest in research institutions and provide much-needed assistance for our farmers, and I'm going to do everything in my capacity to make this happen for the 8th District. Lastly, this is a Farm Bill year and we need to put forward a bipartisan bill that brings us together, not one that divides us. Whether we represent rural farms or big cities, like I do in the 8th District, the Farm Bill makes a huge impact on the lives of all of our constituents. Trade, climate, nutrition, rural development, research, forestry, and so many other issues are covered in the scope of this bill. The challenge before Congress is to listen to our constituents and make sure we are shaping a final bill that can pass into law while providing support to agricultural producers, protecting nutrition programs, investing in our rural communities, and supporting sustainable agriculture and forestry. Thank you again for this invitation and I wish you well in today's session, and only wish that I could be there with you. Thank you. Thanks to you, Representative Shryer, for joining us today and sharing your thoughts, and congratulations on the introduction of your bipartisan bill. Thanks also to your great staff who helped make your participation today possible. Two things that Representative Shryer mentioned that I would just like to say a quick forward as follow-up one is the breadth of topics before us as the as Congress continues its debate around the Farm Bill. We've covered a lot of those topics, we've covered briefings, our Farm Bill Briefing Series has included process and sort of how the Farm Bill goes and how it opportunities for staff to help their their bosses engage productively in the process. We also covered economic environment win-wins, we covered conservation, we covered forestry, we covered rural development, so if you're learning about these issues for the first time or you need to learn about them very quickly or get sort of the best and best and most recent information about these topics you can check us check out this briefing series online at www.esi.org and my colleague Dan O'Brien just put that briefing list up it's pretty impressive. We also have all those other resources hearing trackers and article series and podcasts and things like that. Our four remaining panelists however will be with us for the next hour and 15 minutes or so and I'll introduce them in just a moment but before I do you our online audience will have an opportunity to ask them questions after the fourth presenter and if you have a question in your in our online audience you have two options to submit it the first is you can send us an email and the email address to use is ask that's ask and esi.org or you can hit us up on the platform formally known as Twitter by using the handle at EESI online and if we have too many questions we always give a little bit of priority to the ones who reach us reach out to us on social media but we'll do our best to get to all of our questions from our online audience during that Q&A. That brings us to our first panelist of the day Dan Rato is the director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute. Dan's work examines how public policy can support environmentally and socially beneficial agricultural innovations such as methane reducing cattle feeds and alternative proteins. Dan has led multi-stakeholder projects to identify technical options to decarbonize agriculture assess federal policy gaps and opportunities and build coalitions to advance climate smart agriculture. Dan you've outdressed me today but I'll allow that to happen of course because I can't wait for your presentation take it away. Thank you Daniel and thank you everyone so much for your interest. My name is Dan Rato I'm the director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute. We are a non-profit that identifies and advocates for technological solutions to environmental challenges including in agriculture and I'm going to provide an overview today on the importance of agricultural research climate mitigation in touch on the two or three key research programs that are instrumental in developing a more climate smart agricultural system. Next slide please. Publicly funded research and development or R&D for short has historically been a key driver of productivity growth providing really the scientific foundation that farmers and companies build upon to develop new crops, new animal breeds, new types of equipment, new farming practices and more. These innovations in turn enable farmers to produce more food with less less land, less labor even less fertilizers pesticides and other chemical inputs in many cases as well as fewer greenhouse gas emissions. That in turn reduces food prices and enables U.S. farmers to remain competitive internationally as other countries increasingly grow their food systems and become more productive. Because of these impacts every dollar that's spent on public R&D and agriculture has historically generated about $20 in value to U.S. consumers producers and the broader economy and on top of that federal agricultural research is a primary source of support for work and research on environmental natural resource management. The benefits of agricultural R&D for productivity and their contribution to developing more environmentally friendly practices enables each investment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a cost of about $12 per ton CO2 equivalent. Making agricultural research investments highly cost effective relative to many other types of federal climate investments. Next slide please. Despite this value despite the historical importance and the current importance of agricultural R&D investments we've seen public spending both at the federal and state level stagnate in fall about one-third in the past 20 years. Meanwhile funding in other countries has significantly continued to increase with China recently outpacing U.S. in terms of becoming the global leader and top funder of public agricultural research. Next please. This however is reversible. One of the main opportunities to reverse this trend is the Farm Bill which supports research and extension or farmer education through one of its 12 titles title 7. The Farm Bill primarily authorizes programs through this title which then have to receive appropriations or funds through the annual spending process. However there are a couple programs that are authorized in the Farm Bill that also receive their funds their appropriations directly through the Farm Bill through what's called mandatory funding. These ultimately account for a really tiny portion of the total Farm Bill budget less than 0.2 percent of all mandatory spending or drop in the bucket in the Farm Bill but nevertheless these importance are these programs are critical to agricultural researchers and to agricultural innovation climate mitigation in general. Next the Breakthrough Institute has estimated the amount of funding that goes from these agricultural research programs and other agricultural research programs at the federal level to projects to research projects related to climate mitigation. Due to differences in methodology you might see different estimates later today in our presentations or elsewhere but nevertheless these numbers in this chart in front of you are illustrative of what some of the main programs are that drive the most climate-focused research. Within this alphabet soup of programs you can see a couple highlighted in red that are dependent on the Farm Bill and also critical to agricultural climate mitigation. On the box on the right is AFRI the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative that's USDA's primary flagship grant making program providing grants to universities and colleges and other types of institutions throughout the country. In the box on the left is the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program or SARE which our next presenter Christy Borelli will present on in more detail after me. Both of these programs SARE and AFRI are authorized in the Farm Bill but then annual funding for them is provided through the annual spending process. However one program highlighted in the middle and red the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research FAR is dependent on the funding itself from the Farm Bill. It receives mandatory funding through the bill and it's not part of what's called the baseline of the Farm Bill. It doesn't receive permanent funding meaning that it requires its funding to be renewed. Every Farm Bill something to new operating. Given its importance for the climate and for climate smart research and its dependence on the Farm Bill on the topic today I want to dive into it in a little bit more detail. Next please. The Foundation for Food and Ag Research or FAR develops public-private partnerships with a wide range of institutions. You can see the breakdown in the pie chart on the right. Develops partnerships with industry, with universities, philanthropy, nonprofits and other organizations to support research throughout the food system. Topics range from soil health to animal health to breeding the next generation of crops and through its partnerships FAR is able to secure about one dollar and forty cents and non-federal funds for every one dollar in federal funds it's awarded meaning it's more than doubling the impact of its research and funding and compared to many other programs a larger share of FAR's budget supports climate mitigation. The breakthrough institute has estimated about 30 percent of the budget and FAR's grants go to projects focused on climate mitigation and FAR itself estimates that number is closer perhaps to 40 percent. Finally many of these projects are immediately relevant to farmers and industry because of the tight partnership between FAR and those organizations. Next please. Now what's the scale of funding that we're talking about here? FAR is relatively small compared to many other research organizations compared to NIFA the National Institute for Food and Agriculture for instance which has a over a billion dollar budget FAR has basically split its funding received about 200 million dollars in the first farm bill in 2014 when it was authorized in a similar amount in the 2018 farm bill puts that funding over basically five-year increments so on average it's funding about 40 million dollars a little bit more per year in awards and expects to grant about 60 million in federal funds this year in 2023 and it's on track to ramp that up as more organizations more partners in the industry work with it and as researchers continue to apply for funding but that's only possible of course if the farm bill maintains funding for the program in the future. Now I want to talk about one of their programs too on the next slide. Next please. The Agriculture Advanced R&D Authority quite the mouthful I call it Agarda for short. Agarda is a pilot research effort that was established in the last farm bill the 2018 farm bill to be modeled after advanced research organizations and other agencies like Department of Defense and their DARPA program or Department of Energy and their ARPA-E program. These programs and other agencies and instrumental the funding high risk high reward research that the private sector isn't willing to undertake and invest in itself because of its technological and market riskiness. However DARPA is famous for being instrumental in the development of the internet, GPS, none of the components and technologies underlie consumer goods like the iPhone. A similar program in agriculture would fund projects that also fall outside the scope of existing agricultural R&D programs and that also don't fall within the range of projects that the private sector is willing to undertake. Now I bring this up in today's webinar focused on climate because congress mandated that Agarda among other things help overcome barriers to development of technologies that can enhance environmental sustainability. And so if Agarda was to be reauthorized or stood up in some other way it could provide significant support to climate smart agriculture. But providing hotline funding for programs like Agarda or FAR is not the only thing that's important for climate smart agriculture. Next slide. It's also critical that agencies and programs use their existing funds to support key research areas within climate mitigation. There's already significant funding for climate smart research but it really pales in comparison to what's needed. A recent breakthrough institute report estimated that federal agencies spend about 240 million dollars per year on climate mitigation and agriculture and USDA itself has similar though lower estimates of how much it's spent in 2022. To put that into perspective that's 35 times less than the US spent on clean energy innovation. Besides that there are also many gaps within the existing allocation of funds to agricultural climate mitigation but this chart from the view highlights one of them at the very top in tariff methane otherwise more colloquially known as cow burps it received no more than two or three percent of all agricultural research funding focused on mitigation but in tariff methane accounts for something like one-third US agricultural emissions so it really has received this proportionate funding relative to its contributions to climate change. To wrap up or just say that public research and therefore the farm bill is ultimately critical not only to improving the competitiveness of US farmers and to keeping food prices low and further lowering them but also to equipping all producers large and small organic conventional likewise with the knowledge and the tools to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to cluster carbon and ultimately store their environment. Thank you for your time. Next slide. Thank you Dan for a great presentation lots of really great information in your slides. A reminder if you would like to download Dan's slides you're welcome to do so by visiting us online at www.eside.org all of the presentation materials are available there you can also go back and watch the archive of the webcast if you'd like to revisit any of our presenters today. Dan was also nice enough to recommend some additional resources and we've posted those on the web page as well so lots of great information if you'd like to go back and take a deeper dive into what Dan was just talking about. Our second panelist of the day is Christy Barelli. Christy is the Associate Director for the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program that Dan just mentioned at the program National Office. In this role Christy leads the National Reporting Communications and Coordination Office to develop educational resources for farmers and guide USDA grant programs aimed at supporting farmers and those who work with them. Prior to this role Christy was a Penn State University Extension educator specializing in agronomy and the SAIR Pennsylvania coordinator. Christy welcome to our briefing today I'll turn it over to you I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Great thank you Dan. Hi everybody good afternoon thanks for having me. Next slide. So Dan was really he gave a great overview of federal programs in general and so that's allowing me to focus specifically on SAIR which again stands for Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. So I'm going to go over very briefly our history give you a little bit about our SAIR grant programs including our topics for funding then I'm going to touch on the future of SAIR a little bit kind of what we're hoping but we'll probably get into that more in the question and answer than what I'll do in my presentation. Next slide. So the SAIR is part of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture NIFPA is our parent organization so we are in fact a USDA organization we're 100 funded through USDA funds and we are a farmer driven grassroots grant and education program and those words stick out on purpose because that's our mission and that is really the core of our programs is to remain based on what farmers needs and driving our research and education from that grassroots space. We started in 1988 and we operate in all states and territories across the United States. Next slide. And so in the 1985 Farm Bill is when the term sustainable agriculture which eventually became the term sustainable agriculture was addressed in USDA programs up until that time it really wasn't considered and it arose as a need to specifically reduce farm input costs and appropriate types of technology that were focusing more on conservation, energy, technologies and some resource management. Basically we wanted to look more at holistic farming systems and use integration and methods of managing farm systems and entities to reduce the dependency that we were having on chemical inputs outside on sorry outside farm inputs such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Next slide. So in 1988 the first USDA program that funded sustainable agriculture came into place and it was called LESA the Low Input Sustainable Agriculture Program and it was funded at 3.9 million as part of the the 1985 Farm Bill at that time. Next slide. And then in 1990 during that Farm Bill the program that is now SARE or very close to what SARE is today was born at that time and it was put into place and SARE operates under two chapters of the Farm Bill. Basically chapter one is our research and education program and chapter three is our professional development program professional development understanding that farmers and their cooperators the people working with them need education in sustainable agriculture whether it be as a concept or specific practices and so that's more of a train the trainer type program that got added to to our programs we do have grants focusing on it but we also have some that's our education portion. We also had chapter two which was never really instated I'm not sure why but we basically operate under the chapter one research and education and chapter three professional development. Next slide. So this is a snapshot of SARE in a nutshell on one slide. We operate again as I said earlier in all the states and territory and we're managed through four basic regions. We have five main offices the first is the National Outreach Office which I'm the director of and we're based out of the University of Maryland and we do reporting we do communications and we do coordination so overall sort of pulling everybody together but we do not have any grant programs out of this office. The grants are managed through the four regional host institutions represented one per each region that you can see from the colors the western north central the northeast and the southern. And it's really important and this is part of our legislative mandate too that we have administrative councils so each of the four regions manages their grant programs through administrative councils which is a very unique and important aspect that SARE has. The administrative councils are about 20 to 25 members per region and they are a committee of volunteers and some of those seats are legislated to be representatives of government agencies such as the EPA the NRCS but also a lot of those seats are also filled with five farmers and people who work with farmers extension folks or a lot of people wear multiple hats so they're serving in the capacity and that's where the grassroots part of our programming comes because the administrative councils are the ones who deem the programs that are important for funding. They set the funding levels they set the grant programs and they're able to focus on what type of agriculture is important for each region as you can imagine all the regions all the states are very different from one another and they need to be adaptable and flexible. So the administrative councils are the the the organizations that make the decisions for the grant programs. I also wanted to mention the staff behind each of those five stars is an amazing committed staff that works directly with SARE to manage our programs and provide support to our grantees. That's another unique factor that we have for our grant programs. We all work on some national committees and I also mentioned the professional development program earlier which began in 1994 so each state and territory has a state coordinator or somebody dedicated to working with SARE in each state. Okay next slide. And because the regions are so different it's very important for us to allow them to be flexible to adjust to different cultural practices within each region and state environments at different communities and different needs. However with that said so they all manage their own grant programs differently but with that said we have five that are fairly similar across all the programs or across all the regions excuse me they're the research and education program we all have farmer rancher programs we have on-farm research or partnership programs graduate student programs and professional development programs so when we look at the audiences of of those programs we do see research in there. The one thing I want to say about research is that we although we do it it's very applied very rarely are we doing research that's done for research sake it's very applied and it's very applicable to farmers at the time and oftentimes in the programs that farmers are required to be working with the researchers on that topic that's extremely important to them. So again building up that grassroots capacity that's farmer focused in all of our programs. We have educators and I use the term service providers here too so those are any partners who such as extension agents, educators or NGO representatives who work with farmers we also give grants to all of them and for the longest time I'm not sure that this is still true but again focusing our our recipients of our grants are not all researchers per say but they're representing that whole community of farming. Next slide. So this is a snapshot of our of our funding history over time I mentioned in 1988 we had gotten 3.9 million is where we started and we've moved up to 2023 and Dan mentioned also in his presentation that we we do receive annual appropriations we currently do not have mandatory funding up till this time we have received 662 million dollars in funding and when we look at our grant projects 412 million have gone into gone out through our grant programs and I just want to add there that's not all the 2023 funds we're still offering those awards right now so that number is a little bit low we're going to expect that 412 to go up and it is important that most of our money goes out into our grant programs where it's doing the most good and where it's needed the most but the any remaining would be going into our education and outreach programs as well as some of the staff support. Next slide. And so when we talk about topics for our grants it's very rare that we would or our administrative councils would ever allocate a specific topic for funding for example climate change again we want the grantees to be setting the priorities of what is appropriate to them to be studying and learning and that's the approach we've taken since 1988 and so this is just a snapshot of topics that we funded it's certainly not entirely comprehensive but you're going to see if you look through here a lot of the topics that when we talk about climate change for mitigation and adapting to climate change and resolving concerns about it are addressed here on farm renewable energy, rotational grazing, cover crops a lot of the social issues that are affecting agricultural producers and their communities are being addressed here so although we don't often fund climate change specifically we are addressing them through our practices and I believe we've been very successful with that. Next slide please and this is sort of a reiteration of what I just said there so when we look at our database just searching a term like climate and I search for climate and then I adjusted to focus more on the factors addressing the climate crisis as opposed to cold hardy crop climates for example and the results are a little underwhelming when you consider our history but 4.7 million has gone into climate specific projects and similarly regenerative as in regenerative agriculture we had 1.9 million dollars going into it and these are projects from 88 to 23 and when you look at the data too you'll notice that that these two topics are clustered to the top so the majority of these projects are kind of rising to the top since 2018 and not represented through our whole profile. Next slide please and then this is looking at their funding by topic and this is just addressing again just a snapshot where we have soil science-based projects so soil health cover crops organic matter and carbon and we're looking at the funding here and you're noticing that it's much more substantial for soil health and soil cover cover crops we had 23 to 22 million dollars in funding where organic matter and carbon had 19 to 17 million dollars in funding many more projects and these are all extending all the way through 1988 and you would imagine similarly looking at different topics that I had on that original list we might see clusters of our funding coming this way so we've really been focusing on sustainable and climate mitigation factors for a long time. Next slide please and so this is where we are now we we would like to be increasing our annual appropriations for SARE we are slated at 60 million dollars we have yet to reach that and we would like to that is a goal of our organization to get to that point with that money we would be issuing more grants covering more topics possibly higher amounts going out to grantees possibly more integration or interaction among grantees and offering them support we've also been addressing quality of life factors or the social sustainability factors more in our programs that includes improving our diversity equity inclusion efforts and realizing where we've been set back with those and how we can improve that we would also like to be providing more technical assistance for grant management acknowledging that not everybody writes grants or does that manages them on a day-to-day basis and it's very difficult so how can we offer that support without having a conflict of interest on our part and we're also getting better evaluating program impact we have a project going now that's addressing that next slide so these are our resources if you're interested go to our web page sarah.org if you want to look at our projects that sarah.org and i'd be happy to receive a message from any of you so thank you for your time that's great christie thank you very much and in addition to reaching out to christie using our contact information our online audience today will also have an opportunity to ask her in our other panelists questions as a reminder you can ask our panelists questions two ways the first is by sending us an email and the email address to use is ask that's ask at esi.org you can also follow us on the platform formerly known as twitter at EESI online and hit us up that way our third panelist today is Lawson Connor Lawson is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness at the University of Arkansas with research and extension appointments and crop production economics Lawson's research focuses on the intersection of farm risk management and farm finance including biotechnology, crop insurance, farm financial resilience and conservation practices in agriculture Lawson great to see you today welcome to our briefing i'll turn it over to you thank you dan and i'll share my screens that you can see um it's a good day everyone um thanks for dan and christie for introducing the funding side of this and i hope i'll i'll be able to branch into some of the research aspects of what we've been doing and so i'll be focusing on some of the research that we've been conducting and uh ending with some of the the grant uh the the grant sponsors that have been able to to fund this research with the aim of continuing to to see these types of funding come come our way and and towards other types of research which similar impact and so i want to start us off with sort of the the bigger context of where all of this research is sort of fits and sort of come from and so that would be kind of farming in the context of the the ecosystem and how it interacts with the ecosystem and so we're seeing this idea of the of farming having both external and and internal concerns some of those external concerns would include nitrate pollution um eutrophication uh hypoxia dead zones etc and waterways so those are some of the impacts that would kind of happen downstream of of the actual farm itself and then we have things that are occurring within the farm as well so soil erosion, nutrient leaching, increase yield sensitivity to extreme weather such as drought and those are becoming more and more concerns especially in the context of climate change and as those climate impacts become more and more severe we're seeing that these potentially can have greater effects over time and of course there's also interactions with the farm bill itself and some of the research we've done have tried to isolate some of the interaction farm bill crop insurance has come up a couple of times in terms of its interactions with with cover crop adoption or even with the drought sensitivity and so with that backdrop we look at what are some of the implications for farming in general and of course for administering farm programs and so when we're looking at these increased sensitivity to drought from from yield resilience or lack of resilience through climate change through other impacts we're seeing that potentially we would have increasing expenses for administering farm programs we're looking at the USDA report summarizing an agri-pulse report I should say summarizing USDA RMA data looking at indemnities over time and we're seeing that those indemnities fluctuate but have had an increasing trend of these in the last five or four or so years and part of that is due to increased acreage that is enrolled in in these farm programs and in crop insurance especially but we're also seeing other aspects that could be contributing as well there's been research that's been documenting greater sensitivity of our crops to to drought and several reasons that we pose for those and of course work that that I've done personally has looked at the interaction of crop insurance with yield risk and expansion to to lower quality lives and all of those interactions tend to have the effect of increasing the cost of administering these farm programs crop insurance in particular but other farm programs disaster programs especially that would also be potentially more expensive over time and so we enter the idea of diversified cropping systems many of us have heard about crop crops the research we've been conducting has been looking at this from sort of an ideal case where we what we would think these farming systems would ideally look like and we don't think that these ideals would necessarily ever be achieved but we're thinking of these components and in terms of how many of these components can be incorporated into our cropping systems and the reason that we're looking at it this way is because we have an understanding from the scientific research of this of all the effects that they have on soil health and the ability to create crop resilience and so when we're looking at this diagram we're seeing especially on the right on the left over here sorry different aspects that can be incorporated into farming systems that can promote some of these beneficial effects so we're talking about increased water retention which would be important for for drought as we were talking about those impacts have been increasing over time and you know we're we're seeing increased retention of nutrients and which again give us that increased resilience that we're looking for crop diversification livestock integration organic matter of amendments to minimum disturbance many farmers especially the large row crop farms are going to no-till so that seems to be much more incorporated into our farming system these days residue retention and continuous living root this is kind of where cover crops would tend to come in and so we're looking at this from sort of with how many of these components can be incorporated into a farming system and looking at it from a very holistic standpoint and so with that we've seen that conservation spending or spending towards specific practices has gone up cover crops has gotten the lion's share of retention and we've seen that the that the spending towards conservation programs has increased over time and as I said before cover crops have been one of the not necessarily detailed here but has been one of the the major received some of the major funding when we're talking about conservation conservation spending and so this is where sort of the research questions necessarily come in asking these broader questions of what are the internal or are the internal benefits sufficient to drive adoption because despite seeing increased spending towards or increased funding for conservation we're still seeing very low adoption for these practices cover crops included or cover crops especially as I said no-till has been increasing much faster than cover crops cover crops for many areas still remains relatively low and so the question becomes number one are the internal benefits so if we can reduce drought impacts if we can increase the amount of nutrients in the soil and the host of benefits that we think exist are those going to be sufficient to drive adoption of these practices can adoption mitigate the risks that we're thinking of so as as we as we do see increased or potentially increased drought risk or perhaps extreme weather risk in general do we see that those practices do they have the potential despite giving those those benefits do they have the potential to actually show results in terms of resilience of those crops and so that's sort of a second major question that we try to tackle and then the third one I think is is a very important one is these this idea of heterogeneous impacts do we expect to see that these practices may have benefits in some areas and and less so in others and does that help us to understand how to target funding in in any way whether that be private funds or public funds and so those are some of the drivers the the large questions that we see as our research program as part of our research program for how we would want to conduct research and so the research that we've been doing has been focusing mainly on the internal concerns of row crop agriculture we've been looking at crop diversification so increased rotation, continuous living routes through cover crops, minimum disturbance through no till and residue retention through a combination of these which will increase organic matter amendments and in addition to looking at the at the adoption of these practices we're looking at whether these actually have economic benefits at all whether they be on the farm or externally through the reduction in the amount of spending that the that the farm bill programs have to administer and of course a very important one as well is understanding and mitigating any kind of unintended impacts of of government funded programs towards farming of farming systems whether that being you know increased misuse of programs or or any kind of other effects so some of the selected outputs that we have have been looking at these specific issues one of the ones that was recently published was one looking at how cover crops have interacted with preventive planting so preventive planting is something that is related to crop insurance it is one of the one of the endorsements in the in the crop insurance program that is specifically related to early season issues and so in the early season prior to planting if you experience wet weather or perhaps too dry weather or any kind of weather impacts that repeat planting during that time then preventive planting would step in one of the issues with measuring the the effects of wet weather is that not only do we not see it is difficult for us to report or even estimate what the effects would be because it can be very heterogeneous but the the biggest issue is that we have missing data so we have lost crop acreage that is difficult to account for so preventive planting is one way that we can use to to figure this out but not only is it are we able to figure out whether we're having an impact or reduced impact from those cover crops we're also seeing those expenditures from the crop insurance portfolio and we were able to or some of my colleagues were able to show that preventive planting was reduced as a result of of those cover crops but the research doesn't really stop there because a bigger question to this is is this universal do these effects are they going to be similar effects if we move say our research outside of the Midwest and go towards other areas I'm currently located in Arkansas and there are questions about whether cover crops would have those effects in in in an Arkansas environment where we plant much earlier and we have to terminate much earlier as opposed to the the Midwest and so because of this heterogeneity these are essentially first steps in really understanding how these practices can be applied nationally and whether there are any kind of selective practices that we can use that are tailored from one from one region to another other types of research that we've conducted has included the interaction of the programs and incentives of individuals so this research here looking at the effects of crop insurance on on yield risk we also have ones looking at the interaction of crop insurance and and cover crop adoption and of course we've been looking at the the effectiveness of the conservation payments in terms of increasing adoption as well and so all of this research we think is important to continue to expand our understanding and of course improve the efficiency of dollars allocated towards farm bill spending recently we're able to attract two funding two two two grant awards one from AFRI and one from AFRIFAR as as was introduced earlier those were directly related to some of our sustainability aspirations we've been looking at the financial system really as a as a key driver for adoption and so we've been looking at tools that we think can be used by lenders to help understand the risks or risk benefits or risk mitigations that might be offered by these practices and incorporate those into this into the decision-making process for either lending or setting interest rates etc etc though this work is obviously in the in the early stages this this was awarded to us earlier in the year but i think that these types of awards help drive these types of research and innovation forward so that we can continue to the march towards understanding how these how these practices work how they fit into our systems regionally and nationally and how we can continue to improve the the efficiency of delivering these these practices towards farmers and so with that i will leave it there i want to make sure i mentioned my partners in all of this work a land core which is a 503c non-profit organization that we in partnership with them i was able to to get the both the FFAR and the AFRI grants for developing those tools and also want to mention my collaborators at NC State as well for the good work that they've been doing and that we've been doing jointly on a lot of these sustainability issues thank you Lawson that was a great presentation lots of great information as a reminder anyone would like to go back and revisit Lawson's presentation a review his presentation materials you're welcome to do that by visiting us online at www.esi.org thanks to everybody in our online audience for submitting questions we'll do our best to get to as many of those as we can when we get to our Q&A thank you my name is Tracey Morgan i am with the callous bill tribal extension office for washington state university under the callous bill tribe of indians program furtep program i'm going to talk a little bit today about something called the federally recognized tribal extension program which we call furtep for short furtep is a very unique program created to benefit tribes and agriculture natural resources and and other areas but it was it was began and initiated due to inconsistencies across the country of county extension county cooperative extension not serving tribes as readily as the rest of the county constituency so prior to furtep county extension offices were not serving reservation and tribal communities to their to the capacity or other other communities so in 1990 the farm bill included a program for furtep to address these inequities in agricultural extension so that native american farmers and ranchers would have access to the expertise support and programming under other usd and extension programs agriculture agricultural extension supports indian country in a sovereign to sovereign relationship tribes petition for and apply for grants to become a furtep tribe with an extension office of their own through the land grant university system the land grant universities develop memorandum of understandings between the tribes and the state to lay the groundwork for a furtep to occur there are only 35 furtep offices across the country where there are hundreds of reservations and tribal community and so 30 years later furtep has still not reached its full potential for for benefiting tribes the native american community furtep has been narrowed down to three main categories of assistance and support for native american communities the first is positive youth development programs including 4-H for tribal youth which often often has a very strong agricultural component the native farmer and ranch productivity and management program which supports tribal producers ranchers and farmers with usd and nifa programs that that really increase the success rate of farms in native american communities or on reservations and third native community development which is a very broad category which encompasses a few of the programs above but also includes everything from addressing childhood obesity to native plant propagation and so today this the three or four topics that may have been most interesting to you are food systems farming computing markets and food sovereignty how all this relates to adaptation to climate and environmental changes and how tribes contribute to knowledge held by ancient indigenous cultures to perhaps revolutionize or create innovation in existing agricultural systems so climate change or environmental changes mentioned in furtep are already having very dire impact on reservation and native communities extreme water shortages drought or flooding are impacting all of us across the country but often reservations are located in marginally irrigable lands that are often either already arid or remote or or in rocky or mountainous country making it difficult to to have hybrid activity and agricultural systems in the first place soil integrity and loss is also an issue uh statistics show that uh soil moisture across the scale is being impacted and this has consequences for all crops and even range and cattle forging we're faced with inconsistent logs which are the last and first uh frost dates and length of the growing season this has been observed and also impact crops and farms and food system uh the livestock disease and expense has increased drastically and puts a lot of pressure on reservation and other farmers and ranchers it can exacerbate disease primarily in that diseases that are in subtropical or other climate zones can migrate into areas that are not accustomed to dealing with those diseases or pests insects or even invasive plants in short climate change will disproportionately impact Native American lands reservations and community so regenerative agriculture is uh not a foreign concept to Native American communities uh they've long been privy to the innate knowledge of regenerative practices largely to their very close ties and intimate knowledge of the environment these have been around for centuries and in some cases even thousands of years a few examples are drainage and irrigation systems in the southwest storage systems in the northeast and just a myriad of other techniques at present most of these activities are done on small and localized scale but have potential to be expanded to benefit society at large and to be brought back and reinvigorated on reservation lands indigenous traditional ecological knowledge can help shift practices toward more sustainable production nationwide as well because these techniques often take into consideration perpetuation and propagation of plants and even animal animals even beyond cattle such as bison that are considered you know tens dozens even maybe hundreds of years into the future so i wanted to mention a few of these itek indigenous traditional ecological knowledge practices many of them have become mainstream in perhaps small-scale gardening but are uh also now starting to be integrated into the larger scale farming and ranching multiple cropping no-till farming uh companion planning which is putting plants together that actually have natural inhibitors for pests or disease innovation and treat soils for plants adjacent to them following fields resting them staggering the time of plantings so that nutrients are not exhausted maintaining separate plantings of different varieties so that varieties are maintained and not contaminated and polycultures where several plants may be planted exactly all together in the same location so i wanted to talk a little bit about what we're doing in the Califville Reservation our funding usually averages about 100,000 a year but with creativity and lots of partnering we can do a lot with that money and and this is the amount that most perteps get across the country but it's it's just an essential program for for helping keep tribal programs that are tribal government run and financed supported and and sustainable so one one such project is a cover crop on a plot of soil to both really learn the soil composition in the valley where the reservation is to get a good soil profile and the characteristics and growing potential there but also to pick cover crops that can help keep soil viable and the cover crop is being carefully chosen to be native plants so that helps sustain native plant communities adjacent to it but also these plants could be of interest culturally and traditionally as food crops as well and conserve pollinator local solitary bee pollinator communities so there's some symmetry to to the project that is not just one one topic uh the second is a hydroponic outdoor system where granules are being grown for food uh indian creek has a huge nursery for trees and other shrubs for remediation of landscapes after wildfires but we're now starting to see native plants as an as an incredibly important agricultural product and as also a cultural entity both serving to help feed feed the community the third is a study on forest gardens which would have edible plants intermingled with native plants in riparian zones to help restore cold water fisheries and also provide food and learning laboratories free for young people to go out with elders to learn the characteristics of plants trees and foods so in this sense we can see agriculture as healing healing relationships between the US government between land grant universities and tribal communities and within tribal communities as a source of sovereignty farmer and rancher programs can be culturally based such as having bison I don't have a picture of bison here but bison are very important livestock source for food but are also pathways to restoring culture and tradition that have gone almost to the brink of extinction and so supporting these programs does a multitude of benefit for the tribes community these forest gardens or solar plots community gardens these are places where community can gather and learn about native plants they can learn about other just food sources just classic gardening and get interested in healthy and whole foods and not last but not least adaptation to climate change because tribes will be disproportionately impacted the regions will be very interested and engaged in how the country approaches dealing with climate change and in one way we could go back to ways that have not been very healthy for the environment or the planet or we could look beyond and explore the techniques and ethics that native american communities have had in care for the land for thousands of years so in conclusion in conclusion to quote the nrcs rooted in indigenous wisdom regenerative farming is an alternative to this amazing decision making framework that offers a set of principles and practices to grow food in harmony with nature and heal the land from degradation and that from our own natural resource conservation service the 35 federally recognized tribal extension programs serving native american communities are assisting in providing food security for select tribes across the country already if expanded these programs have potential to serve all reservations where food insecurity is high it is imperative that agricultural systems change and adapt to climate change itech practices cannot already contributing and for tip it is primary in supporting this interchange of knowledge so if you have any questions or would like more references feel free to write me tracy dot morgan at wsu dot edu and almost all my resources and sources were cited from these uh these links here and um i could provide a lot more where these come from or if you'd like to talk about um some of the projects that are ongoing on this reservation please just write me a note thank you but before we get to our q&a we get to hear from david haze our fourth panelist of the day uh david is a lecturer of environmental law at stanford law school and senior fellow at the natural resources defense council he served in the white house as special assistant excuse me special assistant to the president for climate policy and prior to advising president biden david was executive director of the state energy and environmental impact center at the nyu school of law david is a former distinguished visiting lecturer at the stanford law school a former fellow at standard university's precourt institute for energy and woods institute for the environment and the senate confirmed deputy secretary and coo at the u.s department of the interior for presidents barack obama and bill clinton and he's chairman of the board of the environmental law institute david welcome to our briefing today thank you very much for joining us i'm really looking forward to your presentation thanks so much dan and thanks to your team and again and others for putting this important briefing together please out there in youtube land don't be put off by the fact i'm a lawyer i'm really a policy wonk as many folks know and my interest in these issues really peaked in the last couple years in the white house with the president working on climate smart agriculture issues in the broader climate context and i want to share some observations and thoughts that that i've been working on since i've left the white house a few months ago so next slide please uh so the climate smart uh moniker here for agriculture is extremely important as as all the speakers have really touched on because we all know that agricultural practices can have significant climate impacts both pro and con uh on the pro side of course there's excitement about sequestering more carbon dioxide and soil through good soil management practices and this is a real plus um i personally cringe a bit at at the at too much focus on the climate side of of the importance of carbon dioxide sequestration because the co-benefits are extremely important as well and i think need to get uh equal or even sometimes more billing than the the climate side in part because it's very hard to accumulate more carbon dioxide uh in soils that happens over a short a long period of time meanwhile methane and nitrous oxide emissions are are incredibly important and significant uh uh con sides of agriculture if you will which means there's opportunities for farmers to reduce both both types of emissions and potentially get payment for it frankly um and methane and nitrous oxide are in terms of their uh greenhouse gas impacts much more significant pollutants than carbon dioxide methane is about 30 times more powerful nitrous oxide is literally 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in terms of greenhouse gas impacts and methane in the near term is an extremely important uh emission to be reduced emissions source to be reducing uh because it it's because of that power uh it's in fact uh a third a quarter to a third of all of the greenhouse gases that are now accessed in the atmosphere are are from methane molecules um and uh and and the agriculture sector is the single largest emission source of methane in the united states it it uh from enteric fermentation and also from manure management uh together the emissions from those uh uh agricultural practices at the trump uh the emission sources of the oil and gas industry methane sources which we're hearing a lot about and and nitrous oxide is really a sleeper here but it's seven percent of the emission sources in the u.s and 80 percent of nitrous oxide emissions are coming from uh from fertilizer uh and from uh soil decomposition uh so it's it's also an opportunity uh for the industry um you know the good news the good news part of the story is that is the multiple benefit side of good practices that have good climate impacts but also important uh other uh advantages for for farmers higher yields for many of them reduced costs for precision agriculture as for example on the fertilizer side also cover cropping and other smart practices make farms more resilient in the face of climate impact and of course um they're they're folks interested uh from the usda and and the third parties about providing incentives to farmers to do these things um but all of it is dependent upon showing some results which is the primary purpose of my talking to you today with some some ideas in that regard uh next slide please so in terms of the statutory and legal framework for incentivizing clarence marthe practices i want to point to a few these are familiar to all of you i'm sure but just to put them on on a slide here um it's been mentioned earlier about the nearly 20 billion dollars in funding under the inflation reduction act uh which has been allocated to usda for existing conservation programs but based on a an assumption that is laid out in the statue that the secretary of agriculture will confirm their climate benefits associated with this funding and we know instinctually that that's true but that's the first signal that we actually need better data to confirm uh against baselines for example how much actually increased climate benefits we're seeing from the the allocation of these funds on landscapes and in that regard the ira explicitly earmarks 300 million dollars uh to for measurement monitoring verification and reporting of carbon sequestration in soils or methane and nitrous oxide emissions reduction those words very explicitly in the in the statue and for those of you who have been following this uh the usda on july 12 released an early assessment of the kinds of things that it's thinking about in terms of mrv approaches and data management approaches then the partnerships for climate smart commodities initiative many of you know actually has a huge focus on measurement and monitoring uh the the the whole thesis of secretary bill sacks initiative here is that um that that uh consumers will be willing to pay more for agricultural commodity products that have been produced in a climate smart way using practices that are known to confirm that known to sequester more carbon and soils reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions for example and the program was designed in cooperation with with our climate policy office in the white house uh to focus on measurement and monitoring because that is probably the most significant uh a negative impact in terms of and the lack of it uh in terms of properly monetizing and and rewarding farmers for these benefits the data simply aren't there so a lot of these programs were uh were the funding was granted in part on the creative and thoughtful new approaches for testing and for measurement and monitoring generally to prove out the benefits and to prove out the thesis that uh that to some extent government subsidies can be produced by what might be a more reliable income source for farmers namely higher prices for products that are produced in climate smart ways the president of course started out with a strong climate smart agricultural uh lean in in in his very first climate executive order for 2008 on january 27th and interestingly and importantly the omnibus budget uh law that was was enacted uh and signed into law in january this year uh is looking to usda to be more active in this area to identify why they accepted protocol sampling technologies uh with a recognition that that in today's world uh payments are not being made to farmers in a reliable way through voluntary carbon markets in in large part because of the lack of confidence in in concurrent protocols in current sampling methodology and and what are we going to see in the new farm bill i hope these issues will be addressed because there's a huge opportunity to do that next slide please so so my thesis is as you can tell there's really a need for better mmrv of climate smart practices in ag we uh the um currently this is difficult and expensive uh and it's not been invested in and new technologies have not been picked up uh this is hard to do obviously heterogeneity of ag soil uh is a problem uh and there's just been underinvestment in ground truthing of technologies and methodologies there hasn't been the the incentive structure available to do this uh and as a result um the the uh we're behind uh but now we are facing potential or have a prospective potential incentive payments that are putting into focus on climate sustainability practices across supply chains so you've got agricultural producers and farmer suppliers wind up confirm and validate climate benefit for these potential incentive payments and from a personal perspective and i suspect from any farmer's perspective there's a lot of aggnosticism about whether the the incentive payments come from conservation program payments by usda market based payments market price payments at the at the register if you will by consumers or potentially voluntary carbon markets all of them will be under realized unless there's vendor essentially uh confirmation of the climate benefits um and and uh and so next slide please so these are the factors that are holding back and improved mmrv for climate threat practices first usda has invested in broad-based models developed by a number of terrific land grant universities um uh but they're they're stale uh and they and they are models that were not designed with climate and mine with with carbon with with methane with nitrous oxide they they have a limited calibration they they carbon common farm for example will just give positive results and they simply are too gross in terms of their fidelity to confirm that practice a b c and d will provide results within an acceptable and understandable and confirmable range of of results also the usda has focused almost exclusively on carbon uptake and soil and very little effort in in the methane and nitrous oxide and when it comes to greenhouse gas benefits it's the latter that where the the big upside is in terms of uh reducing emissions and finally the the the lack of of strong usda sponsored uh models and confirmatory data practice protocols etc has left the field open for uh entrepreneurs and companies to do at their own uh versions of what should be done so and many of them are are putting proprietary uh sort of labels on this and and you get black boxes in terms of of companies that will will make payments based on kind of a trust me uh uh concept and and the voluntary carbon markets have been have had a rough go of it here in part because of the lack of transparency in terms of the data next slide please so we did a report at stanford with the help of really some really smart phd students uh business school students law students and and i i view this very optimistically there's a historic opportunity for usda to address these deficiencies and i mentioned why here in these these points um let's go to the next slide so how so so among the things that i think are important here is for usda to uh to continue to focus on specific agricultural practices uh to to identify what these climates for practices are and and get consensus protocols on them for soil carbon uh nitrogen dioxide and and methane without those consensus protocols and that congress has called for it as well we're going to have trouble and as to those consensus protocols we need some base lining and some regional uh testing to confirm uh expected benefits from them with periodic verification um so uh and and then the question is a huge question is how does usda uh if they can get these models of uh modernized and that are calibrated and and associated with specific practices what data are available not just to usda but to everybody particularly if we're talking about voluntary carbon markets and and and outside payers uh and supply chain uh issues to verify that data um that there needs to be a comprehensive plan around data collection analysis that usda knows this and they're struggling a little bit i have to say i think and how to uh how to manage it next slide please a final slide here um are some specific recommendations from our report and our ongoing discussion uh with a lot of stakeholders uh and and many of you on on this youtube we need some outside experts to help usda here uh this is a huge challenging situation and opportunity uh they're talking about a national soil monitoring network which is great but we've also got to give equal or even more attention to the methane to nitrogen dioxide um and the data management platform and mechanism issue is extremely important the white house has identified this as not just an issue for agriculture but for forestry and for all greenhouse gas emissions methane from oil and gas industry for example the us is about to put enormous investment uh into um reducing emissions across the entire scope of uh the emissions that are causing climate change and yet there's there's no way no no one place or no one way to get data that can be shared across all interested parties here in anonymized formats that will provide the kind of transparency and potential marketability if you will of uh reduced emissions uh that and that's going to hold back our our entire climate effort so um exciting exciting about what we can do here particularly with anonymized data as shown by organizations like the farmers business network etc recognizing the privacy interests but but taking into account what's happening uh in in region and and with various practices so i want to get to the questions i'm going to stop here obviously a couple other uh important recommendations there i hope you'll take a look at our report and and follow these issues and love to talk offline with folks who are deeply engaged in them as well thank you thank you david that was great and um if anyone would like to go back and revisit david's presentation the materials will be online as well as a link to the report um thanks so much for that that was really great um i'll invite dan and christy and Lawson to turn your videos back on and we will get into our q&a um thanks to everyone in our online audience uh for asking some questions and i'm going to pluck a few out of those that have been submitted and uh david actually kind of following up where you left off talking about measurement and verification and that topic um one of the questions came in um sort of dealt with how do we know we're getting sort of maximum benefits uh how do we know um that we're that we're actually getting the results um that are that are in line with the level of investment that's going into specific practices say for example cover crops um dano i'm going to excuse me dano i'm that's just habit dan are um i'm going to start with you because it's been a little while since we've heard you but i'd love to sort of hear your thoughts based on um what you've heard today and and what you otherwise know about this topic how can we ensure that we're sitting these programs up from a metrics perspective to ensure that we're getting maximum benefits uh and that these investments are in fact delivering what they're promising to so i think david touched on a couple key aspects here really ensuring that the tools both measurement tools as well as the modeling tools have uh the level of precision that policy makers require and that company is carbon markets and anyone else in the space requires um but it's not just when it comes to cover crops um or other practices about measuring carbon as david mentioned critical is also to measure nitrous oxide emissions and in some cases methane emissions with cover crops in particular some types of cover crops do fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and thereby um can either um help offsets the amount of fertilizer that crops need or in some cases increase nitrous oxide emissions from the soil so we need to look at all the green gas emissions involved and there are two other pieces at least that are important so one is really incorporating an assessment of the impact of practices on yields if yields are falling due to a farmer adopting a practice that means overall more land is needed to produce a sand level of food and if that's happening at scale it can result in what's called carbon leakage where farmers elsewhere in the country or world increase production to help offset that decline and the third element is really additionality thinking about whether a federal incentive or program or carbon offset if you're thinking about the private market is that actually leading to a farmer making a change on their farm but they wouldn't otherwise make and so um if there are places where cover crops are incentivized by states or required in those cases a new program might not be additional necessarily. Christy let's go down through the line and give you an opportunity to share any thoughts you have about how we ensure these programs deliver maximum benefits or at least the benefits that they're intended to provide. Yeah you know I think it's setting people up early I think this comes down from a technical assistance standpoint too is getting people set up to be able to ask the questions that they want to be measuring and find the results that they want to be able to get quantifying those and measuring those but I think also understanding that stories are important to like the impact that people you know brands have on people's personal lives or farms their businesses and particularly in the SARE program we do see that that maybe three or four years down the line that we might there might be a benefit that you really didn't set out to but has really emphasize enhanced your processes your practices your relationships and I think that really gets into more social science and being able to evaluate communities and grant users using social science methods as well and seeing what are our larger impacts so that's some of the things that we're doing and basically discounting things all along and trying to measure it more appropriately. Thanks. Thank you. Lawson in your work what steps are you taking to ensure that these um that these metrics are available and understandable on the part of policymakers? Yeah I think that's a good question I think perhaps maybe backing up a bit just going back to the original question I think it really depends on what we're trying to measure in first place I think what are the impacts that we're trying to mitigate if I think where carbon is concerned obviously measurement and additionality are going to be your biggest questions and how do you get at those adequately I think for other areas I think the Chesapeake Basin area has done a really good job at this when we have local concerns where runoff might be your biggest challenge cover crop adoption I know there is upwards of 40 percent due to local drives and initiatives and obviously those programs have been effective for the purposes that they were set out for which was to mitigate some of that impacts on the agriculture so I think it really depends on on what you're setting out to do and that perhaps might be setting up the evaluation of what are the what are the biggest needs in particular areas and giving the practices that make sense for those areas close. Yeah these are really great comments and I agree with with all of them I think Lawson's point is particularly significant and and on the soil side I completely agree that this should not just be a carbon climate sort of calculus here and on the other hand when you look at methane and nitrogen oxide there the opportunities are in front of us basically and so the additionality issues for example are much less significant the the potential for rewarding farmers with practices is is much higher and I just want to say obviously the whole system is burdened by the fact that particularly in soils area regular soil testing that's been required is very expensive and very labor intensive and you can't expect farmers to be doing this and and you shouldn't two things one is there's some really cool new technologies that are bringing down those costs secondly I mean this is this is the government should be doing this on a regional basis to provide sort of much much more baseline information and and with with some regular verification that sort of thing and and I think the opportunity on the methane and nitrogen oxide side is to we're starting from scratch let's get some good protocols let's take advantage of the research that's happening and it needs to be better funded as described earlier here today and and and and and and position this in a much better way from the outset I'm glad we've covered methane well I'm not glad because it would be better if we didn't have to cover it but the discussion today around methane and nitrous oxide is really interesting we had a briefing earlier this year it was part of our congressional climate camp series that looked at non-co2 emissions and pollutants and I have a pretty good hunch that we're going to revisit methane in particular next next year as well because it does deserve a lot of extra attention um christie this next question was I think inspired by your presentation so I'd like to start with you but then open it up for the rest of the panel to have a comment and the question had to do with how serr ensures that its grants are accessible um a lot of agriculture takes place in rural areas there are some capacity constraints whether it's financial capacities or human resources capacities or information technology capacity constraints in rural areas how do you go about making sure that people um in disadvantaged communities or people who might live in front-line communities or environmental justice communities are able to access the grants and other programs that serr makes available yeah absolutely thank you for that question and it's something that serr as a whole is focusing on very strongly right now and it really means getting honest with yourself and really looking at your program our mission is to represent the whole of American agriculture and have farmer-based programs and there's been a couple times we've looked up and realized that there's some people missing from those programs that we're not doing that the things we're doing we're doing really really well i don't want to be disparaging with that but we have a lot a lot of places to go and we've we've done some internal work and part of it is just asking those communities or members of those communities what you know it's hard to find who you're missing right if you're not there you know but but actively going out and seeking them and say what are some of the limitations with our grant programs especially in a program like serr these are available to everybody there are technical aspects sometimes we have some opposing viewpoints like we have a really amazing database that's really important for us as grant managers as grant users i just pulled some data off in a couple slides right that took me just a couple minutes so as a user that's really important for me however there are barriers to people entering that data if they have connectivity issues or lack of internet resources and so again that comes down to technical assistance i think a lot of that is well first of all on our end we can own that and we can say well our systems need to be more simple our questions don't have to be so involved you know and that's something we are looking at we're looking at making it a little bit easier to use but i think the support comes in also from people who are you know who can have access to those things again i mentioned a conflict of interest that serr has because we give grants we can't help people write grants even though we have all these amazing staff people out in our counties however we can work with other people who can you know work with people who are writing grants and we can offer the support we can some of the other things we've we've realized that we we had a definition of a farm which was very convenient but it had to be a thousand dollars of production we realized that that didn't serve a lot of cultural communities so we changed our definition of a farm because they might not be selling their products for example so they might be producing a thousand dollars of products but it might go back into their communities and to their families and so it's it's different than the backyard gardener you know they're actually they're they're producing farm products but that was a limiting factor invoice funding you know having some so many people have to put up the funding up front that's not available to everybody so that's something we're exploring a little more so those are some of the methods that thanks thanks for that um Lawson David Dan please feel free to chime in about um sort of any strategies you're coming across or best practices about how we can ensure that the next generation of agriculture research or even agriculture research that's going on right now you know is uh is done in a in an optimally actable way yeah sure and I I guess if I understand the question in terms of access to that information or funding in rural communities and I think being in a land-grant institution I think we do have a role in that through our extension delivery programs and so I think there is a burden on the on the the tertiary education institutions to make sure that that we as faculty as extension agents are getting the messages out there and are interacting with our stakeholders that also does include increased funding for even the 1890s and smaller institutions that might reach populations that we don't necessarily have direct access to our relationships with and I think all of those are essentially where we would see some of that start to take hold and just to jump in I think the OCA did a great job with their uh partnerships for commodity smart climate smart commodities program uh the awards were really uh the the program request took into I wanted to hear uh how that how those pro those proposals would would help frontline communities disadvantaged communities folks who are small farmers etc and and they work really hard and I think successfully to have partnerships that that are broad based and that take into account those those factors and I'm excited to see it's a lot of money going out in the next five years and some really interesting programs and of course the justice 40 initiative it's going to be guiding the a lot of the climate spending the administration is taking into account to make sure that 40 percent of the benefits of that spending come to disadvantaged communities so really good progress here I hope I'll just jump into you know perhaps one or two other things following up on Lawson's point there has historically been a significant disparity in research funding um at 1890 or historically black grand grand institutions um as well as 99 uh as well as the 94 tribal colleges compared to the 1862 um grand grant institutions there's I think uh the Center for American Progress at a great report recently on this same topic finding that the endowments of the older land grant institutions are four to eight times higher on average than for the 1890 and 94 institutions um which doesn't just impact the research that the institutions can carry out um directly it also has indirect impacts and that it makes it more difficult for universities and colleges to provide matching funds which are often required for federal grants um so thereby 8 to 90 institutions have foregone tens of millions of dollars in federal funds because they didn't have sufficient states matching funds or funds from their endowments um to secure that funding that that's a challenge that a couple of bills have recently um aimed to address in different ways um and then on a very different topic briefly there's also disparity um in terms of the amount of research funding available for crop versus livestock research typically um which has always surprised me there's a lot less funding available for livestock research both from the public sector as well as from the private sector even though the value of livestock production in the US is pretty similar to the value of crop production so that's another challenge that I think um faces efforts for climate mitigation in particular given the large portion of emissions that comes from beef and dairy production specifically that's very interesting if you would just ask me that I would have intuitively said the opposite but that's uh very interesting um we have unfortunately reached time today and so we need to um let everyone go back to their um other business of the day but um Dan and Christy and Lawson and David thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all of your expertise and perspectives with our online audience um everyone uh really enjoyed it I think there's a lot of evidence for that and the number of questions we got I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them but thank you for for tremendous presentations um if anyone would like to go back and revisit any of the presentations or presentation materials um you can do that by visiting us online at www.esi.org um you can also in a couple weeks we'll also have summary notes available so if you want to go back and say hmm I remember something at that briefing about this or that um it's a nice way to um sort of very quickly uh very excessively um catch up with the topics that we discussed today um also like to once again wish Tracy to uh our share my wishes for Tracy to get well soon sorry Tracy you weren't able to join us today but uh your presentation materials will also be available online and we'll do our best to catch up with you at another time um also big thanks to Representative Schreyer for joining us at the start of the briefing and thanks to her great staff for making that possible um there is a great team here at EESI make that do all of the work and make all of these briefings possible and like to share a special thanks to Dan O uh uh Dan O'Brien uh Omri, Allison, Aaron, Anna, Molly, and Nicole for all of your hard work uh this is also the first briefing of the fall which means it's the first briefing for our fall interns uh and Zoe, Laura, and Maggie are awesome and also doing lots and lots of work behind the scenes to make this possible so thank you very much as well um we have a bunch of briefings coming up if you've visited our website in the last two weeks you've noticed that there's a lot of briefings posted our next one is on September 28th this will be looking at the latest on the clean energy tax incentives in the inflation reduction act we are going to have a monster panel uh covering energy efficiency biofuels green hydrogen um electric vehicles um all of uh what panel is covering pretty much the entire range of the IRA tax incentives talking about what they are how much they are where they are in the stat of the implementation uh and that will be a briefing that no one will want to meet we'll be revisiting IIJA and IRA implementation on a regular basis and that's the next one uh we also have innovations in weather intelligence to tackle extreme weather that's going to be October 12th uh unfortunately a very relevant briefing topic we also will have our uh COP briefings or um our briefing coverage of COP 28 uh we'll kick off we have two posted uh one about international climate finance climate it's going to be called congress and international climate finance we'll also have another briefing about the global stock take and another briefing about the negotiations themselves so if any of that sounds good to you and I hope it does um follow us online um visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for climate change solutions it comes out every other Tuesday it's a really tremendous resource and a great way to keep up with what we're up to this last slide of the day I know just put it up is a survey link if anyone in our online audience would like to take that survey we take your series uh feedback very seriously we read every response if you had any issues with the audio with the video if you have ideas if you're uh just a little annoyed that your question didn't ask get in gas that's all fair game for the survey let us know what you thought of our programming today we're always looking for way to improve a ways to improve and like I said we really we really do take all those survey responses to heart we'll conclude there sorry for going six minutes over but thanks again to our great panelists and representative Shryer and thanks to everyone for joining us today we'll see you back on September 28th in person on Capitol Hill and from what I understand in SVC 208 in the Capitol Visitor Center we just got our room reservation uh for clean energy tax incentives in the IRA thanks everybody have a great afternoon