 Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Food and Farmers series. My name is Stephanie Mock and I'll be your host for today. Today we have a guest named Brandon Todd from the Natural Resources Conservation Service of the Pacific Islands area. And he'll talk to us about connecting federal resources to farmers, a profile of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and how they can help Hawaii food and farmers here in the islands. So I've met Brandon a couple of times now in the field just doing NRCS work and working with farmers on how we can steward natural resources. But today I thought I'd invite him so he could tell us a little bit more about who he is, his background in agriculture, and how NRCS PIA is looking to help Hawaii food and farmers. So the Natural Resources Conservation Service is a tongue-tie, right? So they are also called NRCS. And NRCS has been around for about 80 years now helping people help the land. NRCS was originally created out of the phenomena of the dust bowl. So I'm from the mainland. We learned about the dust bowl every single year for 12 years about the phenomena of droughts and dust and wind storms that happened in the Midwest and the South. NRCS was created out of this because there was a need to combat this kind of erosion. And so NRCS, originally the Soil Conservation Service, was created to assist landowners, farmers and ranchers in helping their land and steward natural resources. So our show today is called Connecting Federal Resources to Farmers, and we're going to talk to Brandon about how NRCS is helping Hawaii farmers. I'd like to take a quick minute and just say hi, Brandon. Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm sure it is. Thanks for joining us. I believe you are our first NRCS staff. So thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. We know that NRCS is a really, really strong branch or service that is here in Hawaii, part of the United States Department of Agriculture. That's correct. Right. So your title is the Oahu District Conservationist. Yeah. So I'm in the field office. We cover the island of Oahu, the district conservationist. So I'm responsible for implementing programs and technical assistance to farmers along the island. Okay, great. And so I thought we could spend the first half of our show getting to know you as a person, just your background, where you're from, your education, and what is your experience with agriculture? So I guess first and foremost, where'd you grow up? So I grew up in a place called Roosevelt, Utah. Okay. Utah has the corner cut out of it. So on the northeast parts, it's sort of nestled underneath the UN of mountains. It's the second biggest mountain range that runs east to west. Okay. That's a good trivia fact. It's an interesting place. We're a desert. We get 10 to 12 inches of rain a year. Oh, wow. Yeah. Most of it comes in the form of snow. So I grew up there. My grandpa's farmed. My great-grandpa's farmed. My great-great-grandpa's farmed in that area. They settled an area called Monarch. Bluebell is another one. And so back home, there's a lot of dairy farms that's how they started out with pasture, some small grains, corn a little bit. So I grew up around agriculture. Like I said, my grandpa's farmed. My grandpa and my dad side the dairy farmer until he got older and sold the dairy. So I remember being young and going out and spraying down the dairy. So yeah, I grew up around agriculture, spent a lot of summers, thankfully not as much as other people, but bail in hay and so going that route. And then growing up, I lived in town, so I was able to play sports. It wasn't like living out a hundred miles away from everything, living on the farm. But yeah. After high school, I went on a service mission for the LDS Church to Korea. I came home, started school. I sort of bounced around. I didn't know what I was doing. So I decided to go build houses for a while, just taking school at night. And I ended up at Utah State, and I started taking classes, sort of like taking the shotgun approach, sort of taking anything. I gravitated back towards the natural resources side. I got my bachelor's degree in physical geography. I studied a lot of remote sensing, RGIS, using that to try to find relationships between physical aspects of farming. One thing was remote sensing and trying to figure out how we could use it to find out ground cover, which ties back into the dust bowl I'll talk about in a little bit. And then during going to school is when I thought, man, I need to get some summer work. I need to get some experience, yeah, formal experience. So I found, I was just cruising USA jobs, and I applied for this job in like January. And six months later, I got a call in the morning, and it was my good friend, Brett Prevodell. Okay. I knew who he was at the time, but we were like buddy, buddy, and he said, do you want a job? I was like, wait, yeah, like, who are you again? And so I showed up 30 minutes later, and I started just as summer help for the NRCS. So he was a district conservationist in Roosevelt. And so I started out that summer and continued just keep applying for these NRCS jobs, and they didn't run me off yet. So I worked in Roosevelt as just summer help, and then I got into what's now called the Pathways Program. So when you go to school, you work part time with NRCS, help out, just sort of understand the agency. And if it's a good fit with the agency, once you graduate, they'll hire you on full time. And so I spent time in Logan, Utah, it's the northern part of the state. And that's where Utah State is. And then I worked in the NRCS office up there, then I got hired full time back in my hometown for some reason. Wow. Yeah, I worked out great. I spent about six years back in Roosevelt as a soil conservationist. So what a soil conservationist does is they meet one-on-one farmers, they'll write what's called a conservation plan. And Utah is a really sort of unique area in terms of a geography. Millions of years ago, they had an inland sea. And over, yeah, you wouldn't think of that looking at Utah. After all that time, the sediment came in, deposited salts. It's just like a salt desert now. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So when we came in and started doing agriculture, there's a lot of salt on the ground. When we irrigate, yeah, it picks up the salts, go down the Colorado River, ends up in California. And in order to improve water quality, we help conserve the water, the natural resource that is water. And I did a lot of work in that area doing conservation work with the local agricultural producers. Yeah. So that's sort of how I got started into NRCS. I've been on island for three weeks now. I saw an announcement about, I don't know, four months ago. And it was for here in Hawaii, and I thought I'd apply for it and thought the worst thing that could happen is they'd hire me, and it did. The worst thing that could happen? Yeah. But it's been great. I've been, everyone on the island has been really kind, and there's a lot of great things we went on with the ag producers here. And I'm excited for the opportunity. It's been really good. Yeah. So I'm excited it happened. So it sounds like you've been with NRCS essentially since college. Yeah. About nine years. Wow. Yeah. And you already knew some of the team members here in Hawaii as well. I did. So you're kind of coming into this tight-knit group already, and you understand NRCS and seeing how NRCS can apply its resources to help farmers here in Hawaii. Yeah. So what NRCS does just from a bird's eye view is they'll work with private landowners. Everything we do is voluntary. We're not like a regulatory agency. We don't go out and tell people what they have to do. A government agency that's not regulatory? Yeah. Wow. We're all voluntary. Like you said, when we got started around the Dust Bowl era, it was actually called the Soil Conservation Service back then. Okay. And I think like in the middle of the 1990s, they changed it to the Natural Resources Conservation Service. And the reason they did that is because we take a broader approach things and not just focusing just on soil or looking at water, animals, plants, air, things like that. Everything that encompasses a farming operation or a ranching operation. So you're taking these natural resources into mind not only for economic benefit, but also the environmental benefit. Yeah. And the way we look at it, if you're going to, we want to take things in a long term perspective. Okay. And so things that you do from an environmental perspective will help you economically in the long run. Right. We want to make sure that people understand what we're trying to help them do will not only help the environment for that specific instance, but will help their operation be longer, more sustainable over time. Yeah. And then also we try to help people get in compliance with other state, county, federal laws that might come in to be or come about. One is, for example, like nutrient management, there's some things that people with large animal feeding operations need to be careful of. Like I'm not here to discuss policy or anything, but we can help people get back into compliance. Like you said, you're not regulatory, you're a resource for farmers so that not only so they can come into compliance, but they also can access federal resources to improve their operation long term and have that sustainability mindset. I mean, sustainability now is such a buzzword, right? Like everyone knows about sustainability. But when the soil conservation service came about in 1935, this idea of planning a farming or ranching operation for decades wasn't really there. And I think we have some photos of the Dust Bowl just to give people an idea of what kind of a natural disaster this, and this was going on for decades. Maybe we have some photos here courtesy of USDA NRCS, just kind of showing this insane dust storm that's taking over this farmhouse. And this would happen all the time. And why was this happening? So what would happen is you have the native prairie through the Midwest. Someone invented the moldboard plow, so you completely invert the sod over. A lot of the soil structure would be destroyed. And you think sort of like when you're making flour, you know, if you keep on pounding that grain, it's going to get dust. It just flies up just like this dust. And so in so many words, that's what happened. It wasn't the protection over the soil that would allow it to keep a structure, keep it where it's supposed to be. You get things like this where the wind would come up, it'd pick it up. There was actually an instance where it was, I don't know, I won't say like divine intervention or anything, but when Hugh Hammond Bennett was in Washington, D.C., trying to pass legislation, there came a huge dust storm all the way from Midwest, came 300 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, and it just darkened the room. And they're like, look, we need to do something about this. Clearly there's a need for this, right? And the federal government passing that soil conservation service or the Soil Conservation Act in 1935 created this resource for farmers, right? They weren't going after them in a regulatory sense. They were like, this is a problem that all farmers are experiencing. How can we help them and provide access to capital for them? Yes. So we started out more of the technical agency. We'd go meet with the farmer and show them information on how to reduce soil erosion, like we said before, we'd expand that to other natural resources, water, air, but we've also added a financial aspect to our programs. And so that's a way that we can explain that and how NRCS can help with that. Great. So we're going to take a quick break right now. We learned about Brandon Todd, the Oahu District Conservationist for NRCS or the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The second half of our show will feature more in-depth look at NRCS programs and how those resources farmers can access them here in the Hawaiian Islands. We'll be right back. Are you tired of sleep walking through life? Are you dreaming of a healthier, wealthier, happier you? You're not alone. And that's why thousands of people tune in each week to watch RB Kelly on Out of the Comfort Zone Tuesdays at 1 PM. Make a change. Get the help you need and stop sucking at life. The Army, we're going to go live. Hello, it's 1 PM on a Tuesday afternoon and I'm your host RB Kelly. Welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. Welcome back. Our show today is called Connecting Federal Resources to Farmers, the Natural Resources Conservation Service. I'm joined in the studio today with Brandon Todd, the Oahu District Conservationist for NRCS. He'll talk a little bit more about what a district conservationist is, who his team is, and what NRCS can do to help farmers, specifically their programs, technical assistance, and many other resources that they supply. So, Brandon, we left off talking about the dust bowl, this crazy environmental phenomenon that was happening in the 30s. That was a result of many different factors, but one of the main things that you were talking about was this idea of lack of soil conservation knowledge and implementation. And so, obviously, NRCS was created so we don't have another dust bowl. I know Hawaii did not have a dust bowl that I know of. And so I thought you could talk a little bit about your role as district conservationists simply because a lot of farmers and ranchers and the general public may not know what that means. So here in Hawaii, we haven't had a quote unquote dust bowl. I've only been on the island for three weeks. Okay, so maybe we'll check the research first. What I'm going to say is everyone talks about the ocean becoming milk chocolate. Sometimes after it rains. That's because the soil isn't staying where we want it to stay. It's eroding. One thing that a district conservationist does is he will direct the work with private landowners, so agricultural producers, team them up with a soil conservationist who they'll go out on their property, meet with them and do what's called a benchmark inventory. They'll go over all the natural resource concerns that exist on land, whether it be soil erosion, maybe water quality, poor irrigation habits. And then they'll create a conservation plan. This conservation plan will address those natural resource concerns. They'll give the producer the technical information that they need in order to address that resource concern. There's also programs that NRCS has that farmers, agricultural producers can sign up for. It's a competitive process. It changes sort of every year the processes. So people can go on our website and learn about that. But it's also a way that we can give people the ability to financially do these practices. Sometimes there can be pricey. Sometimes it's tough to initially jump into something that you're not so sure about. Right. Especially in Hawaii, where farming is just so expensive. I mean everywhere, even on the mainland, it can be very expensive. But just the high costs of land and water to have someone say, oh, let's also invest in these practices that you may not see the economic benefit initially, but over time you will, right? You're focused on making money. And there's nothing wrong with that. But you also have to think of that long term sustainability ethic. So you talked about the soil conservationists. I was wondering, who does your team encompass? What does your team look like? So we employ engineers. We employ the soil conservationists that we talk about. We have biologists on staff to make sure that we are being cognizant of the threatened and dangerous species on island. There's a lot of different players that have forestry, people that know more about private forests. We have a lot of specialists involved. And so soil conservationists is sort of like the Swiss army knife. Sort of know a little bit of everything. But they'll bring in an expert that knows what needs to be done. And they can give them the technical information that they need. So what happens is our team, we have a couple of planners right now on staff in RCS, but we're building relationships that we want to get more robust. One of them is the Wahoo RC&D. Another one's the soil and water conservation districts that are going to be getting a new planner on board. And we want to build up these partnerships so we can better utilize the tools that our hands help the farmers out. Right. And so you're talking about these soil conservationists, forestry technicians, biologists. I was wondering, I mean, I know you have been here like a month now, but I think you could speak a little bit more about who are the general, I guess like recipients or like who are good, who's a good fit for programs with energy? Anybody who is a farmer, anybody who has any agricultural interest, anyone who owns a piece of land that might produce agricultural products is a good fit for us. You could have an acre of land. You could have 1,000 acres of land. And policy changes a lot. So we know this. So don't shoot the messenger? Yeah. No, no, I'm just going to say, I won't. But we just want to help everybody. That's our goal. And we want to help people help land. That's one of the mantras of our agency. In order to do that, we need to get the word out to people. One thing that we really want to work on is making sure that people are aware of the services that we have. Being able to write our conservation plans not only beneficial just for the producer, but for maybe the producer's children down the road. Land's a premium here. We talked about this a little bit. So if we can help that acre of land or that 1,000 acres of land be profitable, be healthy, right now we're going through a soil health initiative where we're really focusing on trying to make soil as healthy as it can be, following certain principles. We want to make sure that the soil life itself, the microbes that are in the soil, are healthy. We want to make sure the structure of the soil is where it is healthy as well, where it can infiltrate soil, where air can get in, where the biological life can thrive. There's symbiotic relationships between that. And in turn, your plants will be healthier. You get better yields. I think you'll have less soil erosion. It's just a win-win for everybody. But sort of just taking that first step and to go in and putting these actual practices into play. So you're talking about improving soil health, increasing this knowledge, right? It sounds like you're getting back to basics, getting back to the roots of the initial soil conservation service. Because ultimately, if you can serve the soil, you're addressing these other issues of erosion and possibly degraded water quality, that kind of thing. So we've kind of been very vague about the programs that NRCS offers. You've talked a little bit about, I guess, the in-field technical assistance. Are there any specific programs that you'd like to highlight here? Yeah, there are. There's one called the Environmental Quality Center program. We just call it EQUIP. We like acronyms. So EQUIP's really good for first-time farmers, for farmers that have been there, say, 50 years. Somebody who's wanting to just get started on things, it's meant to address resource concerns across the whole spectrum. There's financial assistance available. EQUIP's a great program. It can, I advise everybody who has an interest in it, look it up, go to nrcs.usda.gov. You'll have all the information on EQUIP you could ever want and then some. That's E-Q-I-P. E-Q-I-P, yeah. And there's also AMA, it's Agricultural Management Assistance. It's a similar program. We don't get as much money here at EIA across the nation. Yeah, but that's Farm Bill, that's a whole other. We'll see what happens with that. And then we have what's called CSPA. It's not real big in Oahu right now. I think it's something that can really take off here. It's called the Conservation Stewardship Program. It's meant to help people take their conservation to the next level. Say they've worked with EQUIP before, they've met those beginning natural resource concerns they've treated them. Then they want to take their conservation to a higher level. And this Conservation Stewardship Program allows them to help them get to that next step. It's also financial assistance as well. And it goes through the program process as well. But I think it's something that can be beneficial on Island. We'd like to get that word out for people. We run on a continuous application process. So at any time anyone can come into our office, anyone can give us a call. We can get started on the application process. And meet with them quick. We want to be out on the ground. So where's your office? So right now our office is on in the Prince Federal Building. I can't say the whole word. Prince Cuyo? Yes. 300 Alamo on a boulevard. And we're there on level four. For now we're trying to get out. It's hard for producers to get in town. And we realize that. Hard for all of us. And so that's why we want to make sure that we're available, that we can get out to the field. We got our staff is really good about trying to meet with people on the ground. And so we're happy to take calls anytime and make sure that we're providing the customer service that we want to provide. And that should be top notch. Yeah, so we've talked about the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, EQIP, or EQIP, if they want to speak your language. We've also talked about the Conservation Stewardship Program, CSP. So all they would have to do is go to your website and click on those programs to learn more. Or they can come to your office and maybe talk to someone directly about this. And also maybe contact you as the district conservationist. I'm not going to put your phone number on blast here. But I think checking out the website and going to the office, too, is there any recommendation you have for people when they reach out to you? For example, they've started learning about conservation practices. Or they have a general map of their property. Or can they just come in blank and say, please help us at NRCS? You can come in with wide eyes and just say, I'm curious, what do you have to offer? And you can come in and you can know everything about EQIP and you can teach us about it. And that's fine. That's fine. We're not a, we just want to help anybody and everyone that comes in. And we're, our goal is just to work with every producer that wants help. We're not going to go in and tell somebody what to do. We're, like we said before, we're voluntary. Voluntary, yes. So yeah, we're pretty easy to work with, I would say. We want to be approachable. We want to be dependable. We want to be reliable. And so yeah, if someone just has no clue what we're doing, but they want to know a little bit more, I'm happy to talk to anybody. Yeah, really, really capitalizing on that customer service ethic, right? You have the technical resources, the financial resources, the programs, but engaging farmers and landowners one on one so that they feel comfortable participating in these voluntary programs. But also, farmers tend to be weary of the federal government. So as a non-regulatory agency, you're able to help them with those compliance issues. But also just the conservation issues as well. So I want to thank you so much for joining us today. We're out of time. Maybe in a year or so we'll have you back on so you can talk about the successes you've had working with farmers here in Hawaii. That'd be great. Thank you for coming on the show. If you'd like to learn more about NRCS, I encourage you to check out www.nrcs.usda.gov. You'll need to click on EQIP to learn more about the Environmental Quality Incentives Program that Brandon mentioned, as well as the Conservation Stewardship Program, CSP. We love having you watch our show. We hope you watch it every two weeks with Matt Johnson and Pomei Weigard, our other hosts. And we'll see you next time on Hawaii Food and Farmers.