 Hi everyone, my name is Alex Reich and I am pleased to welcome you to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and to our monthly webinar series, Climate Conversations Pathways to Action. The National Academies provide independent objective advice to inform policy with evidence, spark progress and innovation, and confront challenging issues for the benefit of society. In keeping with this mission, we're excited to host these conversations about issues relevant to national policy action on climate change. I'd like to acknowledge that the National Academies Washington, DC headquarters is physically housed on the traditional land of the Nekoncha Tank and Biscataway peoples past and present. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have been at stewards throughout the generations. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land and acknowledge that the expertise held by different native communities is crucial to the work of understanding and addressing climate change. Our conversations today will be recorded and available to you on this webpage immediately after the events. If you'd like to ask questions, please submit them in the box below the video at any time and we'll incorporate them in a dedicated question and answer period in the final 20 minutes. We also invite you to participate in the polls that will appear in that same location and to give your feedback after the event in the survey link above the video. Above you'll also find the link to register for our June 23rd climate conversation about how to ensure all people in the US have access to clean and safe drinking water in a changing climate and a link to register for a June 6th National Academies webinar about the science and practice of soil carbon offsets, which may provide an opportunity to mitigate climate change through agriculture. If you want to be notified about other upcoming climate related activities at the academies, you can sign up for our newsletter, which is also linked above. But today, we're going to talk about how agriculture itself is impacted by climate change, how farmers are adapting and how policies can support or hinder this adaptation. I'm so pleased to be joined by Mitch Hunter, who leads the research and climate change programs at American Farmland Trust. Mitch will introduce our conversation lists and moderate the event. Thank you again for joining the National Academies for Climate Conversations. Mitch, it's all yours. Thank you, Alex, and hi everyone. Thanks for joining. I'm really grateful to the academies for hosting this conversation today because I think this is a very critical question for the future of humanity. Agriculture is often taken for granted in the US, but it is clearly essential and it faces real tangible risks from climate change. It is getting hotter. Rainfall is getting more erratic and less reliable. And extreme weather events are accelerating. Here in Minnesota, where I live, we had tornadoes in December and we had tornadoes again in April. So somehow on the northern tier of our country, we now have an eight month long tornado season, and this is a big change from decades past. All of these changes will make it harder and harder to maintain and increase agricultural production. And yet the global population is growing and food demand is growing with it. And the world also faces disruptions from an ongoing global pandemic, supply chain disruptions, including from the war in Ukraine, which is blocking critical food exports. All of this together is a recipe for food shortages and price swings that exacerbate hunger and poverty. And climate change will also make it harder for farmers and ranchers to take the steps they need to improve environmental outcomes, like water quality, like biodiversity conservation, and of course, carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas mitigation on farms and ranches. Not to mention that agriculture and the food system are a major employer, important economic engine, and that they're undertaken by real people. So climate disasters that happen on farms and ranches can spell hardship for those farmers and ranchers, for farm workers and for their families. So it's really critical that we get a handle on how climate change will affect agriculture and also how we can adapt to build a food system that is not only more robust to climate disruption, but also as we deal with that challenge, we need it to be more socially just, more environmentally friendly. We need better, healthier food outcomes for our eaters all at the same time. And this is truly a global challenge, like all aspects of climate change. But today in this conversation, we'll focus primarily on the United States and we'll focus primarily on what can be done on farms, rather than all of the many complex ways that this will affect the broader food system. And our third area of focus is that we'll focus on the crop inside of agriculture, plant production, rather than livestock production. We feel bad to leave out so many of these aspects, but there's only so much that we can cover in one hour. Our goal is really to give you some critical insights into how climate change is already impacting agriculture, how it will continue to do so in the future, how farmers can adapt. Importantly, we'll focus on the role of public policy in moving us forward into better outcomes. And we'll look into the future to see where we go from here. So with help from our two panelists, we'll keep it grounded in the realities of farms and in the latest science. So with that, I'd like to introduce Amelie Godin and Mitchell Horra. Amelie Godin is an associate professor and endowed chair in agroecology at the University of California, Davis. Her team's research focuses on developing sustainable and resilient agroecosystems by investigating regenerative practices that diversify and build up soil health and understanding how those practices affect resilience and productivity. And Mitchell Horra is a seventh generation Iowa farmer, the founder and CEO of Continuum Ag, and a co-host of the Fieldwork podcast, which discusses the benefits and challenges of sustainable agriculture. His farm has become a hub for innovation in the adoption of diverse cover crops, interceded cover crops, relay cropping, and other soil health practices. And his company has developed a unique data tool to quantify soil health and help farmers take practical steps to improve the soil health on their operations. So welcome, Amelie and Mitchell, and I'm excited to learn from both of you today. Well, just want to start by hearing more about your background and what brought you to this space. So, Amelie. Hi everyone. I'm glad to be here today. So I'm an agro-analyst and a scientist by training. I have a very practical background and understanding of farming system and management. In case you haven't detected, I grew up in the farming community in France and therefore I approach agriculture and farmer's knowledge with really deep and humble respects, especially deep in the challenges they face. So in my early training, I was a crop advisor. I was focused on learning conventional approaches to management, which often rely on a few number of crops, simplified system, large amount of synthetic inputs. But then I realized we were engaging with various pioneer and trailblazer farmers really, as well as farmers in developing countries where I worked for about seven years, that those solutions might fall short to build up the kind of system and long lasting climate change mitigation and adaptation pathways that we need. And that systems approach that boost provision of ecosystem services that are rooted in biodiversity may provide a water base of co-benefit for people and the environment. And so we're now 15 years down the road of this ha-ha moment. And my research programs at DC Davis is dedicated to quantifying the potential of some of those ecological strategies and in particular diversification to enhance resilience and adapt our perfect systems to the now rather inevitable social ecological stressors associated with climate change. I'm also approaching these conversations in the classroom as a professor, so engaged in training the next generation of scientists, policymaker, advisors, educators, but also farmers in thinking holistically about adaptation. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm Lee Mitchell. What about your background? Yeah, so really excited to be here. First off, thanks everyone for tuning in and thanks for having me. As I said in my intro, I'm seventh generation on my family's farm in Southeast Iowa. We're kind of average size or just slightly below average size farm, about 700 acres. Corn, soybeans, cereal, rye, doing some open pollinated direct-to-consumer corn we were talking about before we let everyone else in. We've also raised some wheat, malt barley, and mustard on our farm in the last couple years as well. So really trying to diversify, trying to figure out how we can make our systems work and be more creative on our farm and being able to showcase to other farmers that we can make systematic change to really do things better. We've been using no-till on our farm since 1978, and we've been using cover crops since 2013, really, really deep into those soil health systems. And really just striving to avoid any excuses on why these practices can't work in specific geographies. One of the really important principles of soil health is context, and all of these things that we're going to talk about in this webinar today, you have to take into context for your own operation, for your own farm, or for those operations that you're interacting with. Every farm, I believe, can continue to make strides to do better. And we have a long journey ahead, but we've seen some really amazing changes on our farm already. And that's where I started to continue MAG to be able to take that to a broader scale. Our current business footprint is 38 states and 15 countries. Right now, sitting on a team of about 24 people, and just helping farmers to really be able to have access to better data and tools that they can go and implement more soil health-minded systems on their own farm and be more resilient. And we've seen that on average, our farmers utilizing better data can improve their profitability via fertilizer management, just right off the bat, by an average of $106.24 per acre, because a lot of farms are over-applying, a lot of these inputs right now, and input costs are extremely high as we sit today. So with better data, I think is really the crucial component to enable farmers to be empowered to make better decisions, to be able to communicate on the farm and into the supply chain, and be able to really get this flywheel to spin. It's amazing to see the progress that is being made. But as everyone knows here, we have a long, long way to go. But definitely seeing the tide turning and farmers coming on board ready to go down this path, they just need to help in hand to really be able to enable them to have success. Great. Yeah, fantastic. Well, that sets us up so well for this conversation. I'm going to ask Amelie to do a very difficult thing now, which is to summarize for the audience in about two minutes what the overarching impacts of climate change on agriculture are going to be. So if you're up to the challenge, Amelie, take it away for just a couple of minutes here. Two minutes. Well, I'll start by saying that we only have until 2030 to bend the curve on global greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst of it. Second, the latest IPCC report, the report for the EPA and our all national climate assessments are clear and consistent in terms of impact. First, climate change is causing a combination of interrelated shifts in temperature, water availability, extreme weather events, new pests and diseases which impact production, but also the economic viability of certain crops and the well-being of our community involved in farming. Second, these shifts in resources and stressor are already having a very real impact on productivity and the livelihood of our farmers and ranching. It's not a distant future anymore. Climate disruptions have increased in the U.S. over the past 40 years, particularly due to extreme events that Mitch mentioned, flash floods in Nebraska, heavy wind on our East Coast, extreme droughts in the West. We already see increases in annual variation in crop and livestock production, uncertainties in production totals. A recent analysis shows that climate change has an outsized influence on year-to-year swings in corn prices in the U.S., so it's here and it's already here. Third, I think all commodities are vulnerable, while some region, providing the North and some type of production, can be more resilient, or there will increasingly suffer from those stresses. And finally, the industrial model that dominates our nation's agriculture and that's a model that neglects our reduced diversity rely too heavily sometime on fertilizer and pesticides make our farmers susceptible to climate impacts in several ways. So what should we expect in the future? This is not, you know, I'm synthesizing here, climate experts, opinions from climate experts, and they're saying that it will be significantly tougher challenges ahead for farmers and our rural community, unless we do more to mitigate climate change and improve adaptation, but also address some of those systemic issues underlying the vulnerability of the entire food system. We're expecting yield decrease within the next 10 years. There will be regional winners and regional losers, again, thinking about context, but yields of major U.S. crops and farm profits are expected to decline, and they will require deep adaptation. I think crop production area will shift to follow the temperature and moisture patterns for optimal growth. Through these changing in production region, increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and our soil radiation may benefit plant growth. Really, this does not really equate to increasing production as stress, erratic weather, even with disease and insect pests will increase and soil degradation might too. So we'll also need more agronomic management, new breeding programs to accompany those shifts, and so a lot of our sensitivity remains. So now farmers have already been adapting to climates and have sustained population growth from four thousands of years. I'm confident that we have the tools and the knowledge to adapt, but I think we should be making a mistake here. Mitigating this impact will require strong education and outreach, policy change, structural and consumer support, and really actively engage researcher across discipline to develop the multiple tools and solutions that are necessary. Fantastic. Thank you, Emily. And on that last note of how we can adapt, I want to throw it over to Mitchell and hear, first of all, what are you seeing in terms of changes? What's different for you than for your grandpa, your dad, your grandpa, your great grandpa? I know we can go back more generations than that in your case. What are you seeing that's different? And then what are you doing about it on your own farm with the farmers that you're working with? Yeah, being 27 years old, I don't have a great answer to exactly what we're seeing. And on the farm, weather is always our number one impediment to being able to produce. It's always our number one risk. And actually, we've been never till ahead of soybeans since 1986. And the reason that we went that way was in the fall of 1985, they had really bad weather. We weren't able to get the crop out. And they finished harvesting in April of 1986. And they started planting the next day. There wasn't time to do the tillage. Now, it's coming from there that we've had to learn and had to adapt. And for me, it's no matter what's going to be thrown at us, drought, too much moisture, not enough moisture, too hot, too cold, whatever it may be, all of those things can be mitigated against with improved soil health and by better controlling, just trying to take some of the risk out of it and build more resiliency into our systems. That's what we're focused on. We'll enable the scientists to help us to figure out what is going on with climate, what's going on with what's going to be happening in the future? How do we drive this further for us? How are we going to control what we can control? Because there's so many things that we cannot control. So that's what I'd like to really focus on and preach on our farm and preach to other farmers. What we've seen is that we've been tracking our yields by implementing really hardcore regenerative systems. We've seen no yield loss. We did have some yield loss in year number one. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have the right data. We didn't have the right help, but we lost 20 bushel the acre yield, lost about $100 an acre in our first year going to a cover crop system. But since then, we've been able to drastically improve our profitability and improve our resiliency. While at the same time, we've decreased our need for synthetic fertilizer by an average of 45%. We've cut our pesticides by up to 75%. The average water infiltration rate around the country is a half of an inch rainfall per hour, which is a huge contributor to all this as well. The water vapor that's in the atmosphere as well. We can't get that water down into our soils leading to flooding and causing the drought issues to really take hold. So the average is half an inch rainfall per hour. On our farm, we can infiltrate a four inch rainfall in less than five minutes. We can take an inch of rain at six seconds on our farm. We don't have flooding anymore. We don't have drown out. We don't have big crop insurance claims due to flooding or due to our crop drought. Now we don't have replant anymore. So many of those things are really crucial. We've been able to do that because we're keeping that soil covered, focused on keeping a living road at all time, minimizing chemical and physical disturbance, keeping those cover crops out there, diversifying our system. And we've seen actually that we've been able to build our organic matter by up to 1.4 percent since 2010. So our average organic matter, one of our farms we've been really doing some research on, it was 3.9 percent in 2010. Today it's 5.3 percent. That's a soil carbon accumulation rate of 4.9 tons per acre per year that we are accumulating into our soil if that were to be stratified down to a meter deep. So really interesting to see our ability to build this stuff up, directly put dollars into our pocket and make us more resilient no matter what mother nature is going to throw our way. That's fantastic. You hit on some really key points. I want to go back a couple to when you mentioned the nitrogen fertilizer, reducing inputs because people on the webinar may or may not know that nitrous oxide emissions are the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture. So today we're talking about adaptation, but we know that there are important linkages to mitigation as well. Really great to get that perspective from the Midwest. Human areas, what about the West where water is such a determining factor, Amelie? What are the specific things that growers are facing and how can they adapt? And I'll just note we've got passionate people here, so we are running a little over time. So if you can keep your answer, concise, that'd be great. Thanks, Amelie. Right. So California agriculture, I mean, is a different beast, right? We have 400 clav growing across our landscape. It's one of the most productive and diverse agricultural economy in the nation, and the leading supplier of the country's fruit, vegetable, nuts, and dairy products. So California farmers have really always been farming in some higher conditions, but really the increased rate and scale of climate changes is beyond the realm of experience for the agricultural community. And I think if we just look at the current drought across the Southwest, you know, California agricultural economy lost about $2 billion, 30,000 job, was the biggest impact on the on the Central Valley rural community. And that's even without considering the grueling and unself-working conditions in the summer heat and when wildfire occurs. So this year is especially dire in term of wildlife potential, water restrictions. We see surface irrigation water cats up to 100% forcing growers to fall, to fallow or rely on mining precious and increasingly scared groundwater, paleo water, ancient water without guarantee of replenishments. Really, the future outlook is not much better. And so our farmers are already being able to implement a lot of the practices and principles that were laid out by Mitchell as well, making real stride into farmers ability to be more resilient to those shifts in water supply. They're employing diverse strategy to decrease vulnerability and enhance their adaptive capacity. It's a little bit more complex because some of the strategy require water and wider water is at the center of every decision making right now. And so it's a main concern when we try to think about regional practices. But I hope we'll be able to circle back to talk a little bit deeper about some of those practices and the impacts in the California landscape. Yes, we should have time for that. I just want to bring in the policy aspect here because it's so critical and federal agricultural policy has a huge effect on the crops that farmers grow, what they grow, where, how historically speaking, the commodity programs and crop insurance have a really central role in setting the economic context for farmers' decision. And we know that most farmers are running small businesses, they need to make decisions that make economic sense. Many would argue that these commodity carpentry programs historically have not been helpful for diversification or for the adoption of conservation practices. And that's something that people have been working on more recently. So I'll be curious to hear your perspective on the current status. And yet there are also many other programs from the federal government, from conservation incentives to operating loans to climate data tools, research outcomes, and beyond that can help farmers anticipate what these changes are going to be and then adapt their operations. And as I said, the research agency's cooperative extension, these are critical public functions that will help us figure out how to adapt and also how to share those adaptations with farmers. And finally, we have federal disaster assistance programs that provide a safety net when climate disasters strike. Congress is actually set to write a new farm bill next year, their beginning work now. So the time is right to put forward new ideas. So I'm curious, Mitchell, in your work with farmers helping them adopt these diverse practices, diverse crops, soil health practices, which government programs have been most helpful to you and the farmers you work with? And have any programs gotten in the way? Yeah, no, great. And I think it teed it up really, really well. So wide array of my farmers are involved in federal programs like CSP, the crop stewardship protection program, and then EQUIP as well. And so EQUIP, you know, for more bigger infrastructure kind of projects, CSP is typically kind of in field management practice change and data type of system. So definitely farmers using both of those. The most successful one, though, that most of my farmers in Iowa are using is just through the state of Iowa. There's a Iowa Department of Ag cover crop cost share program. First time cover croppers can get $25 per acre on up to 160 acres to plant cover crops. And you can get $15 per acre in subsequent years, but again, capped in $160. That's been a program that we've used on our own farm. We actually have not participated in any federal programs, but we do participate in the state programs again, capped in 160 acres. Now one of the things that and definitely encourage farmers to do those. I think those are really, really great programs helping you get a jumpstart. Usually those are three to five year contracts on the federal side and on the state programs. Every state has different initiatives going on. I think the crop insurance kind of side is definitely impeding change in the overall farm programs. We've done a lot of things in our farm with zero safety net. We have done it all out of our own pocket and have had to rely on learning from other farmers, interacting with our colleagues in order to avoid the risk on our own because we are not fitting into best management practices in terms of what's by the book. But we know that what we're doing is better. One of those things is relay cropping that was just approved here now where we are actually planting our soybeans into a green growing winter cover crop. And then we're harvesting that cover crop in July, then coming back and harvesting our soybean crop. That's a really huge win on a policy side. That one is a super innovative practice really enable for diversification of our landscape and optimize the cover crop that we are spending money on and being able to now harvest our own cover crop seed. A huge win for policy and I really hope that federal policy is utilized to enable farmer innovation and help to support farmers who are out there trying new things, provide them those tools. That's why my county has been so successful. The county that I live in Washington County, Iowa has tripled the cover crop acreage of any other county in Iowa and it is 100% because our local folks say there is dollars available, farmers, here's the rules that you need to follow, here's the minimum, but we want to support you, be innovative, and we'll stand behind you. Wow, that's, that is inspiring. I didn't know that was going on in that part of Iowa. So those are good examples of state level innovation, even local level innovation to move this forward. If we handed you the pen to write the farm bill and you could put in your one top choice for something that Congress can do to help farmers innovate in this way, what would it be? Here's my number one thing that we've got to do and a lot of it ties into like the carbon conversation. We've kind of got the blinders on right now when it comes to carbon, it should be more broad, but in carbon context there's the definition of additionality. I really believe we copied and pasted that definition too much from other industries. Additionality for agriculture is an annual system and every year our carbon footprint is going to be different. The number one thing that the government could do is open up the transparency in terms of how to calculate our carbon footprint, how to calculate our water impact, our flood impact, whatever those environmental outcomes may be and enable systems, enable free market systems that reward those outcomes. If we can open up that transparency and define what I call annual additionality, helping give farmers the tools to better quantify their actual annual carbon footprint. I truly believe that farmers will be innovative to drive more of that outcome if they can be rewarded based on the true outcome, not just based on check the box and adapt the new practice like today's programs are. If we can open up that farmer innovation, I really think we can be successful here, but farmers must be directly incentivized to gain the outcome just like they are today with yield. Okay, great. Well, you're really making a strong plea for better data, better research, and I will note, I want to throw it to Omli to get a perspective, but I will note that there's been a bill passed in the Senate called the Growing Climate Solutions Act. It's under discussion in the House that would direct USDA to help in some ways to kind of set the rules of the road for some of these carbon markets. But as a researcher myself, I know that there's a lot of challenges, a lot of uncertainties to quantify all of that. So over to you, Omli, what do you think is the role of research in making change? And it could be picking up from Mitchell's idea there or taking it in a different direction based on your experience. How can research help farmers move in this direction of being more resilient? Right. So innovation, which stems from research and scientific knowledge across many disciplines will be will be really needed to provide the tool for farmers and policymaker to value our systems for more than yield and to keep pace with climate change over the next 25 years. And I think actually farmers and policymaker need science and data more than ever. So our goals as researchers, whether we use genetics, model, on-farm economic or ecological research, is to really provide relevant data to assess this transition, to assess this revaluation of system, quantify potential, inform farmers, inform the private industry insurance to provide relevant data to assess in this transition, but also the timeframe to harness benefits and to do system-scale assessment, which consider really multiple adaptation strategies, outcome, everything is interrelated, linked benefits, but also potential trade-offs. And so it's really essential to approach this at the system scale. It's also much more relevant since farmers seldom really manage for one objective on a single field and really consider other forms and market-level factors in decision-making. So our main role is to provide data. Second is really to increasingly engage in participatory research frameworks on commercial field so that the data and technology we develop, and we, I'm talking researchers in general, is relevant. It's relevant to contacts. It can inform models. It can inform farmers and help create and re-inform some of the knowledge networks that are really necessary for early adoption. From my own perspective is that we need to do more of those interdisciplinary research projects involving farmers in trying out practices and us quantifying impacts in collaboration. Now, scientists, in addition to system and integrated assessments, they're also interested in understanding the mechanics underpinnings. More fundamental research and measure the magnitudes and directions of ecological interactions under our current scenario, but also under future climate scenario. And that's important because it provides the basis for developing better varieties, better management practices that lower trade-off. For instance, knowing nutrient cycling dynamic and nitrogen release as a function of organic matter content is very critical to inform fertility management to offset inputs and support the transition toward more adaptive production models. And then finally, our role as scientists and researchers is also to outreach information and educate consumers who are large drivers of change, but also make science available to farmers who clear best management practice guidelines that they can adapt to the local context, social ecological context. So a lot of roles I think research can play actually in helping us move forward. Yeah, and that's fascinating. It strikes me that there's another link back to the Farm Bill because there is a research title. It provides a lot of the funding for all this sort of research. And looking at this next bill, I'm maybe inferring that there's a need to keep the research going, probably do more, but also maybe even more importantly, push new models that are not so narrow, not siloed, but are both nailing those fundamental mechanistic questions and then also thinking about how those systems fit together in a big way, which is a, I think you'd agree Emily, not always how we structure agricultural research in this country in such a holistic interdisciplinary way. So there's more that can be done, I would imagine, in the Farm Bill to push us in that direction. I'm glad that we're on this level of integrating systems and thinking big because we are already halfway through here and we want to save a lot of time for Q&A. So I'm going to transition us into thinking bigger, thinking about the future. And going back to Mitchell, so you are just making a strong plea for data that farmers can use to understand their systems, have the insight, quantify the outcomes. Some of that would be this year, next growing season, what have you. What about looking into the future? As somebody who looks at climate projections, is involved in climate projections, you can get buried in that data really quickly. What does the farmer need as far as data inputs and information to make decisions for 10 years down the road, for 20 years down the road for the next generation to be more resilient? Yeah, step number one is we need to better understand where we are today. I am one of the farm, I'm definitely within the top couple, deepest into the space of any farmer in the country. And I have no idea what my farm's carbon footprint is. That's a problem, no idea. We have the comment farm tool, the comment farm planner. I can plug in my practices into them. It spits out a number, but it's not even close to being representative of what's truly happening on my farm because of the limitations that are within that model. I think you're exactly right on the research side. We need to enable farms like mine and any other farm to really better understand what are the specific nuances of our mantra practices that we can plug in to not just the model, but into the real calculation behind the model. That's what we need. So we can quantify our fuel usage, we can quantify our nitrogen usage, we can quantify our electrical, our LP, our diesel fuel usage. We can quantify our days of carbon drawdown. We can calculate our liquid carbon entering into the soil. We can calculate our gaseous carbon coming off of the soil. We can calculate and quantify our soil carbon buildup over time. We have the tools to be able to do this, but and I have a lot of that data, but what I don't have is the right resources to really hone in on my specific management practices and tell me a more fine tune number. Like I mentioned before, with my soil data, I'm building carbon at a rate of up to 4.9 tons per acre per year. Now I don't know how that stratifies down to a meter, so I'm sure my actual carbon drawdown is not 4.9 tons. I believe it's probably somewhere in two and a half to three tons per acre per year, but I don't have enough, the data's not out there. So now we applied for one of the Climate Smart commodity grants, just like 450 of our other best buddies did, and what we are applying for and working with John Deere and a variety of other partners, including Iowa State, is that we need to quantify the true, really dialed in carbon impact of as many farms we can get to, of course, factoring in nitrous oxide, methane, and CO2. So we definitely are trying to do our part to open up more of that. I'm seeing most groups are just saying, hey, let's get farmers doing more no-till and cover crops, but what I believe is that farmers believe that what we're doing right now is the right thing. Most of them don't know that they could be doing any better. One of the best tools we can do is show them a shovel full of the soil from within their field versus a shovel full of soil from an area adjacent to their field that's undisturbed, have them smell it, have them see it, have them touch and feel it. It's amazing the light bulb moment that happens in, and we need to really just enable those farmers to better understand where you are today, what is possible, and help them to systematically go and improve and build policy around that to enable those farmers to optimize the outcomes that they can get. Last thing being that the message to those farmers has got to be then, here are the right tools like reduce tillage, cover crops, things like that. These are offensive management tools that are going to help you to address these environmental outcomes, but are directly going to help you to improve your annual profitability as well, and it absolutely can help a farmer be more profitable in year one. All right, great. Well, before we go to Q&A, I want to give the last word, last question to Amelie. We alluded to this earlier, thinking about California, and it struck me preparing for this that we have the state that is both the most diversified of all the states, and we've heard a lot today about the importance of diversification, and yet it's one of the states that's most challenged by climate change. So, Amelie, as you think forward 10 to 20 years, thinking about how all the systems fit together from the practices on the farm to beyond, how do you see the future coming together for California? Can that diversity be a resource? What can we take as lessons from California for the rest of the country and beyond? Yeah, I think that having 400 crab grown in California from small-scale diversified market garden to large corporate farms already creates a strong knowledge base, which if we combine it with ambitious policies in terms of incentive, technical assistance, but also regulation, rapid creation of markets that are enabling those uptake of some of the practices we've talked about. And the innovative nature of this state, we can really position California as somewhat of a living laboratory to test adaptations and have a path forward. We're also at the forefront of adaptive needs, and so it done effectively, I think California has the potential to provide some sort of roadmap for others where mitigation and adaptation really converge toward a common goal of a more sustainable and resilient food system. So it's about building and rebuilding better. California is the sixth economy in the world. It has tremendous diversity of crops and equal region, and so we have an opportunity to lead the way here. Now at the center, there are three main considerations, three or four main considerations, which are rather unique to California. The first one is that we have large investment in consolidation of land and markets, and our landscape is increasingly dominated by nut and grape systems. And that does not have much visibility to the system, and we'll very soon rely on year-round irrigation. And so this system are often more local share, but have large potential for diversification of understory, minimal value, or minimal yield gaps. So we can really provide a roadmap for perennial crop systems. Second, water needs and water footprints are the center of decision making right now. So we're really busy trying to clarify the impacts of irrigation strategies, water balances of more diversified systems, how much more is lost with upper transpiration, how much more is retained in the soil systems, how much is dedicated to our groundwater recharge. And so creating those mass balances I think will be relevant to support transition of irrigated systems in the US. I also wanted to share some findings that we had in our landscapes. 22 years of soil health building practices, cover crops, and radio stillage. Even in semi-arid landscape, lead to greater soil carbon and structure, increase in filtration rate by seven-fold, water storage and availability by 20%. And in a state where virtually more than 90% of the crop rely on irrigation, that becomes extremely important. Farmers that are workplace, Scott and Brian Park, for instance, are regenerative farmers and married in California. They've been harnessing this potential for production of processing tomatoes, for instance, especially during this season where they had 80% cut in their irrigation water. Imagine 80% cut in your irrigation water. And if you've been able to delay the onset of irrigation early in the season to cut water well before harvest for a longer period, they've cut their need by 30% without reducing yield and enhancing the processing tomato quality. So that gives them an ability to deal with those erratic deliveries of surface water. To go back to the Midwest, we measured 17% increase in maize yield under drought and system which has invested in healthy soils for diversified rotation, no-till and cover crops in the Midwest. And a moderate decrease in the probability of crop failure of both corn and soybean without yield trade-offs under favorable conditions. So the science is that we have data. Yes, it's data coming from trials, long-term trials here and there, but we're moving toward a model where we're gathering this data with farmers and we can try to inform some of the next step forward because the future of California agriculture will be challenging. Thank you. I truly mean this. I personally love hearing that story about the progress that was made on those farms that you're working with in California. You hear a lot of real doom and gloom because of the depth of the water challenges and it's heartening to hear that some of these practices are being proven out and actually having a really positive effect. And you know Scott and Brian Park, you know, one of our best research projects come from talking to them where they're just like, well, I don't understand. I don't need to spray herbicide and pesticides. And we actually discovered that healthy soil, build up healthy soil in the microbial community, that increased plant resistance compound and insects don't like those plants anymore. And so they don't even need to rely on input as much and all those are really based on building up your soil capacity to function and provide very critical ecosystem services. Fascinating. Okay, we need to move to some questions from the audience and we do have a lot of questions coming in. My head is spinning a little bit trying to choose where to go. I think I'd like to hear more about this question of data that farmers need. So you just gave the example on the way of, you know, in-depth research on a given farmer. We can't do that on every farm, at least in the models that we have now. Mitchell was talking about greater insight into what's going on. What about understanding of what's coming down the pike? Is it more helpful to have much more detailed and accurate short-term forecasts of climate and weather conditions that, you know, maybe would help farmers schedule their infield operations? Or is it, you know, much more valuable to have advance notice that some extreme weather is coming your way? Maybe next season is likely to be droughty or, you know, we've got major rainfall events happening not next Tuesday, but three weeks from now so that people can plan their field operations. How would you see the relative importance of those? And I'll leave it open whoever wants to jump in on this one. Yeah. I'll start. And then Mitchell, I think you'll have things to add here. I think planning short-terms has shown its limitation and that if you implement long-term vision to your management, those worries that will happen in three weeks will be less of a worry. And given the scale and timing of climate change, I think we really need to move toward those longer-term views, medium-term views. It takes time to restore health of a system and build up resilience and adaptation. And that's the time we don't have anymore. So, yeah. Mitchell, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's a blend as well in that, you know, when we are approaching a farm for the first time, we help them to first understand where they are today. That's number one. Let's quantify where we're at today, doing things like soil health testing and looking at their management practices. And then we look typically five years down the road wherever we want to be. We call that point B, kind of the future. Here's what we want the farm to look like. And we're doing it just based on here's the management practices, the principles of soil health. Here's the things that we need to strive to. That's going to make us more resilient against whatever the weather implications are going to be, you know, at whatever swing. Now, the number one thing that I think farmers can really improve on in year one is their fertilizer management. And like I mentioned before, our average customer using the Haney soil health test that we specialize in, they're able to cut their NPK fertilizer, their basic synthetic fertilizer, cut it by an average of $106.24 per acre, right off the bat. Really, really amazing to be able to put that kind of money back into a farmer's pocket. And they paid $10 an acre for that type of soil sample. And it's just disrupting that currently farmers get their advice and get their soil data and get their fertilizer reputation from the same person who's selling them that fertilizer input. And in a lot of times, especially in today's high fertilizer prices, we can probably do things better. And as you implement regenerative systems, your soil becomes much more biologically driven and more the nutrients are in the stable organic form. So as you push on that soil health, biological lever, you can really get aggressive. I pull them back on the synthetic inputs. On our farm, we don't use potassium at all. We have lime in 11 years, cut our nitrogen by, the nitrogen's been cut by about 30%. The phosphorus is cut by about 90% and potassium by 100% now. And seeing our soil nutrient levels actually go up and our nutrient density levels in the crop actually go up as well. So really seeing that work and farmers need that short-term plus long-term data because we've got to pay the bills today and we need to know where we're going as part of that holistic system. Yeah, fascinating. One element someone asked about is the role of new crop varieties and whether those are developed through traditional crop breeding, through bioengineering. How do they fit into this picture of making our agricultural systems more resilient? Are they critical? Is it more about the practices? And then if you have an opinion on the role of biotechnology, I'd be curious as well, what do you think that's necessary and important or not so critical? So Amalie, why don't you take that one? Yeah, I think creating the varieties that are going to resist insect pests and produce the best in the future climate scenarios is really important. I really want to get breeder on the bandwagon of what we're doing here. We haven't bred for a genetic system. Our crops are not equipped to team up with microbes to cycle nutrients in the rhizosphere and mine organic sources of nutrients. Our crops are not equipped to grow well in no-till systems that requires a different root system, different emergence rates. We've spent 50 years, whether through GM technology or general or regular breeding program, breeding crop that are equipped and respond to conventional management practices. If we want to switch the system, we need to give the tools. It's amazing, actually, that our systems, the regenerative system, are as productive when you see the amount of technology and research that has gone in those systems and you compare this to the other model. It's a proof of its value, really. I encourage breeder to stop working with us more intentionally, breed in the landscapes. Biotechnologies might have a role to play. The reality is that the GMs, as of now, have not helped much move toward those more diversified systems. We do not have more drought-tolerant varieties. We do not have more nitrogen-use-efficient varieties. We do have herbicide-tolerant varieties. We need to rethink the goals. We need to rethink the non-profit structures that we might want to build around those GM crops. Right now, they are not a pillar of regenerative agriculture. Just super quick from my side, we're mostly genetically modified crops, just like 99% of other farms in Iowa. We are using a lot more non-BT corn, so taking that trait out. It's herbicide trait only. We used no insecticide on our farm. Last year, we were down to about 95% reduction. We did one little trial where we tested insecticide versus using sugar, versus utilizing a fish-emotion product. This year, we'll have zero insecticide on the farm. We've cut our fungicide by a lot. Our seed treatment is almost entirely out as well. Using open pollinated heirloom variety corn, so going completely non-GMO in that instance. It has been a building system to get to that point. It's building up the soil, building up the fungal communities in the soil to be at that point where we can really now cut and fine-tune the types of seeds that we're planting. I think a huge opportunity there. Something I'm definitely interested in testing more in the future. Just a quick follow-up. When you're implementing really innovative systems like double cropping, cereal rise, soybeans, that sort of thing, are you selecting the variety specifically to fit into those systems? Is having those varieties available critical? Yeah. We're selecting varieties specifically for that system. The main thing that we've been using now is just a more full-season variety, especially on the soybeans. Typically, I don't want to get into crop maturities, but we use super full-season soybeans. They're all naked beans, meaning no seed treatments at all. They are herbicide tolerant, but absolutely choosing and changing the seeds that we're planting for those specific use cases on the farm. I think that gets back to Amelie's plea that we need breeders to be working in these kinds of systems, but go ahead, Amelie. I'm also looking forward to the day that we'll breed cover crops. We're using plants that have not been optimized for specific functions that we might want for cover crops, so a lot of them for improvement here. Absolutely. Well, we are about at time. I want to give you both an opportunity for concluding thoughts. Just in a minute or two, if there's one thing that you'd like our audience to take away from today's conversation, what would that be? I'll start with you, Amelie. My first thought comes to share an example of farming system that is well-positioned. I would love to talk more about the world of soil, health, and the multiple benefits, but I'll focus on that. I'm thinking about meat-scale, organic, diversified farms which implement the ecological principles we've detailed earlier here in California. What we've shown is that it can reach high yields, lower inputs. We've documented improvements in yield stability in tomato system mining long-term data. We found that mean yields are similar between conventional and organic approaches. We have higher yield resistance to unfavorable condition. We're talking 24 tons per hectare in the conventional system with versus 52 tons per hectare, lower risk of crop failure, 19% risk of crop failure in conventional, 3.8% in this specific organic system. We see this in almond system. We see this in other systems of California. There's many other examples that exist in the tropics. I want to invite the audience to consult and to learn more about this and consent the feasibility and adaptation assessment that we gave in the Chapter 5 of the IPCC report where we have many examples of such system across the globe and giving us some hope and that could really inform effective policies as we move forward. Very powerful. Thank you, Emily. Mitchell. Yeah, kind of final thought for me is just resonating on what we've been talking about. We need better access to data and tools to help us to really understand our impact in the variety of outcomes that all of us are really striving for. We can quantify yield today and we can now quantify soil health, but we can't necessarily quantify some of these other outcomes. We need some help to be able to really do that. We have to change the narrative here to ensure that farmers understand that these soil health systems, the practices that we're talking here, they are offensive management tools. I mentioned that before. That is a huge, huge thing that we need to talk more about, especially cover crops across the Midwest. They've been branded as defensive management tools. They've been sold to us as a tool to protect against erosion, protect against water quality issues, but really that cover crop in order for it to directly pay the bills on the farm and change the farmer's psychological approach to adding the cover crop, it's got to be an offensive tool just like nitrogen, just like the seed that we're choosing. Those are offensive decisions and that's how we approach cover crop. That cover crop is my nutrient stabilizer. It's part of my fertilizer program. It's part of my herbicide program. It's my moisture management program. It's my carbon drawdown program. So many other things, all directly driving return on investment for that purchase that I'm making on the farm. Huge thing and I would love to work with more folks that can help us to quantify our impact. Our farm is an open door and would love any of that. Final pitch, our field day is June 6th. So if anyone wants to, it sounds like there's one of these webinars that day as well, but join us in Iowa if you want to see more for yourself. Yeah, I might have to give in the car and drive down. Thank you both so much. This has been a really fascinating conversation. I feel like I've learned a lot from both of you and even with the magnitude of the challenges that we're facing. I'm feeling really inspired by all of the really practical, integrative, holistic approaches that you've talked about that can actually move us forward in a way that we can document and make our systems more resilient to climate change. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Alex. Thanks, Mitch. And thanks for your incredible moderation and your own contributions about the policy landscape. Amelie, Mitchell, thanks for sharing from your research and your own farm and advising experience. I'm really glad we were able to go to such depth about the practices and also talk about ways to encourage systems change on a bigger level. Thanks to all of you at home or work for joining us for this month's climate conversation and for your questions. The conversation was recorded and you can watch it on this same webpage immediately. I invite you to join the National Academies on June 6th for that related conversation, which will be about the science and practice of agricultural soil, carbon offsets, so more on the mitigation side. And also about our next climate conversation, which is on June 23rd. And we'll focus on how do we ensure that all people in the U.S. have access to clean and safe drinking water in a changing climate, you know, changing water impacts people as well as plants. The links to register are above the video. And we'll also have a July event about climate mitigations in the practice of the farm bill, which you can get updates about through the climate at the National Academies newsletter, which also has a link above. As a final reminder, to share your feedback on today's event or your ideas for future events, please see the survey link above or in the announcement below. It's just a few questions and we do appreciate hearing from you. Lastly, thank you to the climate communications team at the National Academies and to everyone behind the scenes who supported today's event. We're excited to continue the conversation through future events like this. Stay safe and have a good one.