 Hello and good afternoon. Welcome to our briefing today, Pathways to a Generative Agriculture Farm Policy for the 21st Century, which is presented in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council. I'm Dan Bresset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Studies Institute. The Environmental and Energy Studies Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, it also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs to help make energy efficiency, beneficial electrification, and renewable energy more accessible and affordable for their customers. ESI provides informative, objective, non-partisan coverage of climate change topics in briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts, are always available for free online at www.eesi.org. If you'd like to make sure you always receive our latest educational resources, just take a moment to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Today is a departure from our two companion briefing series, Living with Climate Change and Scaling up Innovation to Drive Down Admissions, which will continue on June 24th with extreme heat and June 29th with offshore wind energy. Be sure to sign up for these briefings and review the six previous installments by visiting us online at www.eesi.org. And there are two reasons for this departure. First, along with our briefings from a few months ago about financing inclusive clean energy investments in rural America and building a durable national framework for large landscape conservation, our coverage of agriculture and conservation topics is increasing to match activity on Capitol Hill and the lead-up to the 2023 Farm Bill. In addition to briefings, regular readers of our bi-weekly newsletter Climate Change Solutions already know that we have been publishing articles about climate and agriculture solutions like cover crops, no-till farming, and rotational grazing. And they also know about our comprehensive Farm Bill 2023 Congressional Hearing Tracker. It summarizes highlights and takeaways from House and Senate committee and subcommittee hearings. In the coming months, new resources for policymakers will be coming online. We know what it feels like to be a new LA or LC when that realization hits, oh, the Farm Bill is happening and wait, it's how many pages? I have how long to get up to speed? Well, don't worry, ESI will be there for you to help you figure it out and track your boss's priorities. And second, and most importantly, and this is the one that explains today's topic in particular, is that NRDC recently released a report for Generative Agriculture, Farm Policy for the 21st Century. A link to the report is available on the webpage for our briefing today at www.eesi.org. This incredible report is based on interviews with 113 farmers and ranchers across 47 states in the District of Columbia about what regenerative agriculture means to them, as well as why and how they put certain practices to use. This diversity of viewpoints is a major strength of the report, and those viewpoints helped inform the policy recommendations, findings, and case studies outlined in the report to illustrate the numerous benefits of regenerative agriculture, which is defined as a land management philosophy whereby farmers and ranchers grow food and fiber and harmony with nature in their communities. All four of our panelists today were involved in the report. But before we turn it over to our panelists, let me remind everyone that we will have some time for questions today, and we will do our best to incorporate questions from our audience. If you have a question, you can ask us two different ways. The first is you can send us an email, ask at EESI.org, at ASK at EESI.org, or even better, follow us on Twitter online, at EESI online, and send it to us by responding to the live tweeting thread. And bonus points if you use the hashtag hashtag EESI talk. We are joined today by a very special guest. Senator John Tester is a third-generation Montana farmer who was first elected to represent his state and U.S. Senate in 2006. He is also a former music teacher, school board member, state senator, and president of the Montana State Senate. He is an outspoken voice for rural America and an advocate for small business owners and entrepreneurs. And the Senate Senator Tester chairs the Veterans Affairs Committee and sits on the Commerce, Indian Affairs, Banking, and Appropriations Committees. Senator Tester, thank you so much for joining us today. Hi, this is Senator John Tester coming to you from Washington, D.C., and I want to thank Anna McGinn and Matthew Kaplan for inviting me to speak to you all and EESI and NRDC for co-hosting this event today. I may be a U.S. senator, but in my real life I'm a farmer and it is always great to get together with my fellow farmers and discuss the latest developments in agriculture. As a good friend of mine once said, there are about as many ways to farm as there are farmers. Regenerative Ag is a critical piece of the future of agriculture. It's good for the soil and it's good for the climate. And therefore it's good for the crops we raise, which means it works pretty well for producers. I'm glad to see you all gathering here today to discuss the future of farming and working to combat the climate crisis that affected rural communities across the treasure state. I see the effects of warming temperatures on my farm, especially with the lack of moisture in North Central Montana. My wife, Shar, and I have been running our farm in Big Sandy for 44 years. And last year was by far the worst harvest we've ever had because of extreme weather conditions. I know we're not alone. Farming farms across Montana are hurting and when producers suffer, our rural economies also suffer. We've done some good work for Montana producers by securing critical USDA disaster relief resources for farmers affected by the drought and excessive moisture and fires. But there is more to do to combat the underlying causes of these disasters. Regenerative agriculture is key to pushing us in the right direction. So thanks again for having me and know that you have my support. Thank you, Senator Tester, for joining us today to help us kick off this briefing and thanks to your staff for also helping to make your participation possible. Now let's turn to our panel. Our first panelist is Arohi Sharma. Arohi is the Deputy Director of Regenerative Agriculture at the Natural Resources Defense Council. She advocates for policies that promote regenerative agriculture to mitigate climate change, protect soil health, conserve and reduce water, and restore biodiversity. And she's one of the lead authors of this report, Regenerative Agriculture, a Firm Policy for the 21st Century. It is the subject for our briefing today. Welcome and congratulations on a fantastic report. I'm really looking forward to hearing you tell me all about it. Great, thank you so much. And yeah, it was a labor of love getting this report over the finish line, so I appreciate that shout out. And thank you for your remarks, Senator Tester. It's always an honor to partner with you on issues related to agriculture and climate change. And you are absolutely right. You are not alone in experiencing the disruptions of climate change on your farm. The growers we spoke with across the country for this report have been facing and are facing similar challenges. But more on that a little bit later. Hello, everyone. My name is Arohi Sharma and, like was mentioned earlier, I'm the Deputy Director of Regenerative Agriculture for the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC for short. NRDC is an international environmental nonprofit organization that works to preserve and protect natural resources, people, and communities. Thanks to all of you for taking the time to join our webinar this morning, if you're on Pacific time like me, or afternoon, to discuss NRDC's recent report on regenerative agriculture, titled Regenerative Agriculture, Firm Policy for the 21st Century. For those who haven't had a chance to read it through yet, here's a quick summary. So this side shows how my team and I interviewed 113 farmers and ranchers across the country to learn more about regenerative agriculture from the folks doing the work on the ground. With representation from 47 states and the District of Columbia, we got a pretty good lay of the land, pun intended, and learned what regenerative agriculture is, its benefits, and the barriers and opportunities to bringing more acres under regenerative management. A few notes about what we learned. Next slide, please. The first is that regenerative agriculture is not new. It has deep roots in indigenous wisdom. Tribal communities have been practicing and managing lands regeneratively for millennia, and now a growing number of farmers and ranchers are leading on this indigenous knowledge to grow healthy food, fight climate change, and build resiliency onto the land. Now, a bunch of you are probably saying, okay, great. Well, what is regenerative agriculture? Well, next slide, please. What we learned is that it is a land management philosophy where farmers and ranchers grow in harmony with nature. Now, there are five main principles that underpin this regenerative philosophy. Next slide. The first is nurturing relationships within and around a farm. Relationships between humans, land, plants, water, pollinators, predators, pests, even soil microbes are the crux of regenerative agriculture. So growers foster and protect those relationships wherever and however they can. The second principle is understanding your social and environmental context. Now, regenerative growers made it a point to learn about their unique farm's landscape, the naturally available resources on the land, and the ecosystem around the farm. They use what they learn to inform what on-farm practices they should use and are best used for their landscape. For example, if a farmer's farm is next to a river, the grower will plant trees or hedgerows at the edge of the farm to prevent soil erosion into the water body, while also providing shade and sequestering carbon. Another example, if a grower knows that water is becoming increasingly scarce in their area, like what we're experiencing out here in the west, regenerative growers will transition to planting crops that are not water-intensive to adapt to these new changes. The third principle is prioritizing soil health. Now, we all know that soil is at the heart of a healthy food system, and regenerative growers know that healthy soil grows healthy food. Generally, regenerative growers limit the mechanical soil disturbance on the land, and they do so to protect the biological structures that soil microbes, bacteria, and fungi build in the soil. Those same soil, those same structures, by the way, that help store carbon. The fourth principle is to reduce the reliance on synthetic inputs. Regenerative farmers and ranchers try to reduce their reliance on synthetic inputs, like herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. Now, most of our interviewees found that while prioritizing soil health, they ended up needing fewer chemicals anyway. And of course, fewer chemicals meant beneficial insects and wildlife coming back onto the land, which helped naturally reduce pest pressures. Now, this last principle, the fifth one, nurturing relationships outside off the farm. We learned that relationships in regenerative agriculture go beyond on-farm practices to include relationships with coworkers, with history, with consumers, and with themselves and their communities. They encouraged customers to visit the farm to see what they were doing firsthand. They had field days where families and other farmers came to visit to learn. They paid their laborers of the living wage. You know, this fifth principle actually captured some of the social and cultural components of regenerative agriculture that my team and I didn't expect to learn through our interviews. Now, you see all of these laid out in this wonderful honeycomb shape, and you'll notice that each of these principles builds on and relates to one another. For example, by prioritizing soil health, you reduce the use of synthetic inputs, which helps protect ecosystem relationships, while also contributing to the welfare of surrounding communities. So there's this great synergy, great symbiosis between these five principles. And because regenerative agriculture is a management philosophy, it looks different across the country. Next slide, please. As a result, when we asked interviewees what practices they used on the land, they shared a lot of different ones, including cover cropping, no till or low till, crop diversity, agroforestry, composting, dry farming, solar panels. Like there was a lovely hodgepodge of practices that growers could choose from. But one thing was clear. To continuously improve the land, growers used multiple practices. And as growers continued on their regenerative journey, they continued stacking practice on top of practice. And as a result, they were seeing faster land regeneration results. From improving water quality and water retention on the land, which is very important considering drought conditions and the swing from drought to extreme weather, to sequestering more carbon and improving biodiversity, to keeping more money in their pockets by not having to spend much on inputs, to feeling more connected with their consumers and their farming communities. The folks we interviewed shared a multitude of ways that regenerative agriculture benefited them and the land. Next slide. If I could step back a little bit and share personally, what I found really moving was the way that growers talked about the mental health benefits of regenerative agriculture. They enjoyed learning about the land that they worked on and the animals that they raised. They felt free and empowered to experiment and innovate on the land. And they shared how happy they were that they were able to make management decisions based on what they saw and what they felt on the land instead of being told what to do. Okay, so that's the first 17 pages summarized for you. If there's one thing you take away from all of that, it's that regenerative growers think of their land as ecosystems and use practices that strengthen those ecosystems, like using cover crops to build healthy soil that can hold on to more water during extreme weather events. So that's the first part of the report. The second part of the report digs into the ways that we think policy can change to support regenerative agriculture and scale it up. We analyzed all of our interview transcripts using a qualitative analysis software to see what common themes emerged across the interviews. When it came to the barriers and opportunities, there were four major pathways for changing agricultural policy to support more regenerative agriculture. Next slide, please. The four pathways are to level the federal investment playing field and invest in regenerative stewardship, invest in decentralized food systems infrastructure, support farmers and ranchers, and fund regenerative agriculture research and extension. Our interviewees were very clear that changes needed to happen throughout the food system, which is why our policy recommendations touch on so many different issues. Their experiences show the need to transform this industry holistically. Now there's a handy one pager on the website. Next slide. I'm going to give you a quick, brief look at what that one pager looks like. That summarizes all of our policy recommendations in each of these four buckets. And I think there's a link provided to this one pager on the EESI website. Now I'm going to dig into the research and extension bucket and the other panelists will each discuss the others. Next slide, please. So research and extension provide technical resources to growers across the country and can be administered in a variety of different, through a variety of different entities, including land grant colleges, extension services, conservation districts, and USDA programs. Now these technical resources are necessary for disseminating information, like for alerting growers about new grant programs or changes to existing grant program guidelines. These technical resources are also necessary for connecting scientists with growers, for trialing and experimenting new management techniques, and organizing field days for growers to connect and share with each other. We learned that the dearth of region specific and operation specific technical resources is a challenge for the regenerative movement. For example, finding information about practicing organic no-till in the Pacific Northwest was brought up a few times in our interviews. And this dearth of information is especially problematic given that one of the basic principles of regenerative agriculture is to employ farming practices that are specific to one's microclimate and environment. Remember that principle, understanding your environmental and social contexts. So we strongly encourage providing consistent, stable, and adequate funding for conservation technical assistance and conservation districts. These entities that are crucial in providing technical resources to growers and meeting growers where they are to provide those technical resources. Next slide. Now regenerative growers are innovative and they are curious. They experiment on their fields to find the best mix of practices, seed types, livestock rotations, and soil amendments for their unique landscape. I think I've mentioned that a few times if you can't tell already. On-farm research is a key ingredient of regenerative agriculture. So we want to see robust funding for programs that encourage experimentation like the USDA's SARE Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program and the Soil Health Demonstration Trial, which was a program established in the 2018 Farm Bill. Now I think that's all I got time to cover. Get it? Cover? Cover cropping? Looking forward to answering your questions. Stand back to you. Awesome. Thank you so much. I've looked through the report and now I can't wait to go back and look at it again after that presentation. Unfortunately, I'm hopeful that we don't have like a huge number of our audience drop off to go read the report, but everybody should go read the report. It's excellent. There aren't as many cover crop puns and regenerative agriculture puns as I would like, but Arohi just helped make up for that. So congratulations again on an excellent report. I'd like to remind everybody of two things. One is everyone can go to our website, www.esa.org. If you want to go back and revisit Arohi slides and actually download them for your work, please do so. Everything's available. The same will go for our other slides today as well. Everything's available online. Also, there's an opportunity to ask us questions and you can send us questions via email. The email address to use is ask at EESI.org. That's ASK at EESI.org. You can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Our next speaker is Dr. Michael Kutotwa-Johnson. Michael is an assistant specialist for the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona. He is also affiliated with the newly forming Indigenous Center, Resilience Center, which will work with tribal communities on issues related to water, energy and food. Michael is also an enrolled member of the Hopi Tribe, a traditional Hopi dry land farmer. Michael, welcome to the briefing today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Hello. Thank you very much. My name is Michael Kutotwa-Johnson. I thought I had a step away for a second, but you know, we've been all talking about, you know, a regenerative agriculture and as Harnie mentioned that, you know, this is nothing new to us and this is the concept we've been practicing, at least in my region for about 3,000 years. So and, you know, when Senator Tester says that he's a third generation farmer, he's talking to one that goes about 250 generations back. And so I kind of want to talk about this. Okay. Yeah. So like I said, indigenous, regenerative agriculture is nothing new to us. And so as a scientist and a PhD and everybody has their own little terminology, I came up with something to define what indigenous regenerative agriculture means in the context. So go ahead and start that. So I have regenerative agriculture defined as IRA is a process of incorporating placed-based ways of knowing supported by culture, belief systems, and environmentally friendly derived survival schemes over millennia. Now it's important to all understand all that because if you really look at the context of the sense, it incorporates everything that was already talked about by one of our panelists. So go ahead. Next slide. Okay. So it's also, we also have to understand why it's so important. So, you know, indigenous people protect 80% of global biodiversity on a mere 25% of the planet's land with only less than 5% of the world's population. Now that's important because when we're talking regenerative agriculture, we're also talking about biodiversity. It's the biodiversity of our crops that are basically place-based, regionally-based, and things like that that allow them to survive. And so we're looking at an example of what the biodiversity means. It doesn't mean that we don't, that all the crops don't come up at the same. It's not a monocrop culture. It's a perfectly designed culture that fits the environment. I'm always wanting to say, look at the Hokey Reservation, you know, we grow corn to fit the environment and we do not manipulate the environment to fit the corn. So it wouldn't change that. So when we talk about climate adopted crops here, that's the example of a corn plant. It's kind of bushy like that. And people give me a little bit of grief because they sound the bushmaster when it comes to farming and stuff like that. But the climate adaptive crops that we raise out here, that are place-based, are very important. This is a picture that I've taken in July. You can see how cracked the ground is. We don't get any rainfall all the way from April all the way up until July when we do have our first monsoon rains, if you do have them at all. And so you can see how cracked the ground is which you can see how beautiful that crop is thriving. You know, up at Hokey, we've learned to work the environment in ways that every single one of our conservation techniques is designed to conserve soil moisture when it comes to agricultural protection. So when it comes to human well-being, and I think we kind of touched on that, you know, I kind of really understand why we feel like we do when we do what we do because we're working with our hands, we're working with the environment. You know, it was unfortunate last time in the farm bill in 2018, we had to have some money set aside for suicide prevention on the farm that was occurring on farming units across the United States. And so I think one of the things that prevents us from doing that, at least at Hokey, is that we have experienced crop failure a number of times, you know. And for us, this is merely about subsistence, it's merely about who we are, it's tied directly into our faith, and that's what makes it so resilient. So we plant no matter what, you know. So it's very important that we incorporate human well-being in which it does, you know. Those kids right there, they're the next generation that's coming up to be farmers themselves. And so I like that picture. With that said, I kind of wanted to bring in some actually on the next slide, I wanted to bring in some of our own recommendations that follow along with it, with what the Natural Resource Defensive Council has put out. And so the first one is, you know, to enforce existing legislation, things like the American Indian Agricultural Resource Management Act of 1993, which by the way has never received congressional funding. It's just an act and it should receive congressional funding because in there there's a conservation program called ARMA, which is the agriculture and agriculture, American Indian Agriculture Management Act that would allow us to basically take over the conservation program and manage it the way we'd like to. Same thing with alternative funding arrangements. It was passed in 2018, but I have yet to see legislation on that that actually implement that here in Arizona. I think we only have two tribes out of the 23 that are actually using alternative funding arrangements. And that also opens the door too because we like to practice what we like to practice. And it's just recently that the White House passed an agenda called ITEK that actually incorporates some of our traditional knowledge and is going to set guidelines and be incorporated into federal agencies. The second one is very important. Creating funding mechanisms through legislation to support locally led small farmers and regenerative agricultural initiatives. Right now, there's really none of that. And so what happens is the regenerative person or the conventional person has a hard time getting off because there's a three to five-year window that doesn't cover the money that he's going to lose because when you switch over, you're not going to make money. You're going to lose money for a little bit until you're able to up feel the soils and everything else. The second one is fund initiatives geared towards agricultural-related infrastructure. The Native American Agricultural Fund has a beautiful plan called Reimagining Food Econ. And basically what that does is that that lets us have, you know, establishes infrastructure for things like meat processing centers. There's only, I think, four in the United States, so we need some more of those. So I'm just not trying to only help, you know, American Indian people, but also non-Indians as far as how we're going to upscale our supply chain and things like that. And so it also calls for food hubs because one of the main things that we had out here at Trouble on the reservation system is that there's no place to really store food. So like at the Hope Reservation, sometimes the St. Mary's food truck would come up and then we'd wind up have to go back because we did not have the place to store the food. The other thing is to also support adequate funding for the federally recognized tribal extension program. That's a big one because, you know, not all universities, not all land-grant universities have extension agents on Indian reservations. This specific piece of legislation does call for that. It's just not funded adequately enough. And so you can, there's a link there, you can turn on to read more about that. The next one is to aid in the development of permanently funded, regionally based, or nationally based, Native American policy and technical centers in the United States. For an example, the Utah Center, that's congressionally funded. Wouldn't it be nice to have one or two of those here in the United States? The University of Arizona, which I happen to work for, has just established the Indigenous Resilience Center. That'd be another place. So we're going to develop policies right out of that on a regionally based approach. And use the word tribes, you know, as far as the people that are here, I think a lot of times people forget to put that in there when it comes to legislation. So we need to use the word tribes in federal legislation so that we're able to be covered by that. Because if we don't do that, sometimes the states usher up all the funds and we don't get anything. And so, you know, I would also encourage people to look at the Native Farm Bill Coalition, some of their agenda, because a lot of their designs specifically help Indian country, but it's also specifically to help others, especially in the area of regenerative writing culture. And so with that, you know, that's pretty much my whole speech there, but I really want to thank you for the new talk. Thank you, Michael, for that excellent presentation. And as a reminder, people in our, folks in our audience can go on our website, www.esa.org, download Michael's slides to use them as a resource for later. And his slides also include those very helpful links that he mentioned at the end as well. Our next panelist is Chris Reynolds. Chris is Midwest Regional Director for the American Farmland Trust Midwest. He's a fifth-generation corn and soybean farmer in, oh, Nacomas, Illinois. I hope I said that right. I somehow managed to get all of this way into the briefing preparation without learning how to say your hometown Chris. I'm so sorry about that. Who grew up on a diversified grain and livestock farm. He began his soil health journey in 2013 by incorporating cover crops, no-till and nutrient management practices into his farming operation. And he continues to expand and improve their use on his farming gear. And Chris, you're a returning panelist. You did a briefing with us last year on natural climate solutions, if I'm not mistaken. So it's great to have you back looking forward to your presentation. And please correct how I pronounced it. Thank you, Dan. I really appreciate it. And you did pronounce it correctly. So hello and thank you everyone for joining us today. We can go ahead and move to the next slide. As Dan mentioned, my name is Chris Reynolds and I'm the Midwest Regional Director for American Farmland Trust. I'm also a fifth generation steward of the land on a corn and soybean farm in Central Illinois. And agriculture and conservation have been a huge part of my life, my entire life. And one of the reasons why I was drawn to come to work for American Farmland Trust over five years ago. AFT is a national nonprofit organization and our mission is protecting farm and ranch land, promoting sound farming practices, and keeping farmers on that land. The photo on the left there is a picture of my grandfather in the early 1970s cultivating soybeans with an open cab case 930 tractor. That tractor is still in the use on the farm today, but in a much different capacity. The photo in the middle is of my youngest son in a soybean field. This photo was taken several years ago and this field was one of the first fields that I know tilled into a green cereal rye crop. And so it's exciting to see as I've progressed in my soil health journey and also looking at my children and some of the experiences that they've had along the way as well. As I mentioned, I began my soil health journey in 2013 by incorporating cover crops into some existing no-till fields to reduce erosion, suppress weeds, and reduce chemical costs associated with weed control. Since that time I've seen a lot of different improvements in the soil that are really making it a lot more resilient during periods of drought. I also know that I can and will continue to try to do better by the soil and will continue to find more ways to make climate smart conservation practices work for me and my farming operation. And as a farmer, I'm experiencing, you know, increased management challenges that are resulting from your favorable planting days in the spring due to more intense and more frequent rainfall events. This has really made it more important than ever to adopt soil health practices, but at the same time it's made it more challenging. Cover crops, you know, require an additional level of management. They have to be planted in the fall when harvest activities are the main priority. And for example, because of a wetter than normal spring this year, I had a total of six planting days that were adequate for planting in April and May in order to get my corn and soybeans planted. So cover crops and no-till often go hand-in-hand when they're used together and can really provide multiple benefits. And I just really, really love this slide and how it shows all of these different benefits in one place. You know, we can reduce erosion and winter soil loss. We can keep those deep rooted cover crops to help improve nutrient cycling, improves on-farm water quality. We can produce more biomass into that soil. Just a lot of great things that are happening whenever we have these, when we're utilizing these practices on the farm. So as a conservationist, an agronomist, and a director for Midwest programming, I'm always looking for programs that can help drive additional conservation practice adoption across the landscape. This is what led us to explore program opportunities like the Fall Covers for Spring Savings Program in Illinois. This program allows for farmers to receive a crop insurance premium discount for planting cover crops with really minimal new capacity demands on service providers and agencies. This program can act as a bridge to provide some support while access is lined up for more substantial technical and financial assistance and really so that farmers can try on cover crops at a size that is right for them. So many people ask, why crop insurance? Why couple crop insurance and conservation? And it's fairly simple. Crop insurance is a trusted safety net program. It has an established acceptance in the ag community and because of its widespread use, crop insurance plays a significant role in shaping decision-making in American agriculture. The Federal Crop Insurance Program, or as I'll refer to in this presentation, Federal Crop or Federal Crop Program, is a critical risk management program. The program is managed by USDA's Risk Management Agency. It operates with the mission to provide market-based risk management tools to strengthen the economic stability of ag producers and rural communities. In 2019, Federal Crop covered 300 million acres of crop land, which included the vast majority of corn, wheat and soybean acres, and equaled approximately 90% of all of that crop land being covered. The Federal Crop Program is a valuable tool for stabilizing farm incomes. Farmers largely utilize any indemnities to pay off short-term operating loans. And this also speaks to the importance of crop insurance and maintaining the ag financial services industry by making it more certain that loans will be repaid. Studies have also shown that enrollment in Federal Crop has a positive relationship with farm survival. In one study, on average, farms enrolled in crop insurance survive seven years longer than farms that did not. And participation in the program reduced the probability of farm exit by 70%. However, Federal Crop does come with some of its own risks. The expected value of an insured crop is a major factor in determining the value of the premium subsidy and indemnity payment. As a result, farmers are incentivized to increase yield, increase revenue in order to maximize the value of these benefits. This may lead farmers to unintentionally deprioritize risk-mitigating actions like the use of cover crops and no-till, which can stabilize yields even under unfavorable circumstances. When farms do not utilize risk-mitigating practices such as these, they can become more vulnerable to extreme weather events, market fluctuations and more, therefore creating added costs and demands for the Federal Crop program to balance. In this manner, while Federal Crop mitigates short-term financial risk for farmers' institutions, it can promote activities that lead to long-term production risk that undermine the sustainability and long-term resilience of farming operations. Although the program has policies in place to mitigate moral hazards such as not offering 100% coverage options, insulating farmers from risk may also distort those same risk signals, which can, for instance, remove incentives for farmers' events to invest in climate adaptation. Active risk management requires understanding how human management decisions interact with natural systems to make disasters more or less likely to happen. This is a consideration that is not currently embedded within Federal Crop. Within agricultural systems, the risk that results from the interaction between human decision-making and natural systems is best reflected in crop production methods. For example, prolonged heavy tillage promotes erosion, resulting in a loss of soil organic matter, nutrients, and that can also limit the soil's water-holding capacity and result in more flooding and less available water for plants during drought years, ultimately hurting yields. These issues only become more challenging under the future climate scenario. Federal crop cannot be insulated from the impacts of climate change. Climate change will make Federal crop more expensive and challenging to manage without mitigating actions. Under a high-emission scenario, NASA predicts that corn yields will drop 24% in just the next 10 years. A 2017 EPA study predicted that even without factoring in the impacts of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and flooding, unmitigated climate change will result in lower yields by the end of the century for all major commodities, with the exception of wheat. The same study also predicts overall commodities to increase up to 8% by the end of the century due primarily to yield reductions. Because crop insurance benefits are tied to yield and revenue outcomes, these impacts on crop yield will pose new challenges for the administration on Federal crop, as the impacts of extreme weather deepen and become more frequent. One study suggested that increasing temperatures have been responsible for 19% of total crop insurance losses from 1991 to 2017, including 47% of losses in 2012, a year of historic drought. USDA's Economic Research Service estimated that these climate impacts could result in the cost of Federal crop increasing anywhere from 3.5% to 22% if adaptation practices are put in place, such as making changes to crop varieties or crop diversification and management practices. However, if adaptation practices are not put in place, the cost of the Federal crop program could increase anywhere from 10% to 37%. Federal crop can address these risks by establishing stronger pathways within the program to promote climate smart conservation practices that reduce production risk. Climate smart practices protect farm incomes while increasing on farm resilience to extreme weather. These pathways can be established by promoting greater interagency cooperation within USDA to connect farmers to conservation resources, expanding research and pilot projects, and utilizing tools like additional premium discounts to lower financial barriers for farmers to invest in these practices. The use of climate smart conservation practices needs to be expanded onto more acres to have a real impact when it comes to reducing risk in the ag sector. The current adoption of climate smart practices is still far too low to result in meaningful risk mitigation across the ag landscape. For example, fewer than one-third of all cropland acres utilize no-till or strip-till practices and less than 5% utilize cover crops. By increasing the use of just these two practices, American farmers have an unparalleled opportunity to combat climate change, improve water quality, and build on farm resilience and profitability. This lack of practice adoption can be attributed to a variety of factors, lack of financial and technical assistance from state and federal government agencies to assist producers in minimizing their own integrating new methods into their operations. Conservation practices can also yield direct financial benefits for farmers by stabilizing yields and lowering input costs for fuel, fertilizer, and pest management. A highly successful example of a premium discount program is the pandemic cover crop program which was offered by USDA during the 21 and 22 crop years. 12.2 million acres was enrolled in this program in 2021 and the program reached all lower 48 states at a cost of around $59.4 million. The program provided a $5 per acre discount that was similar to the discount that were available in select states in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. The Conservation Opportunity and Voluntary Environment Resilience Program or the COVER Act would establish the good steward cover crop program to provide premium subsidies to producers who plant qualifying cover crops. The COVER Act extends the $5 acre premium subsidy offered by the pandemic cover crop program and boosts technical and research assistance to help farmers to reduce production risk while continuing to access the federal crop program's financial safety net. The COVER Act is fully voluntary, it does not require farmers to plant cover crops in order to be eligible for crop insurance and it complements existing USDA programs while providing an easy access pathway to support farmers planting covers. The the act also provides additional funding for technical assistance to support outreach effort and it creates a soil health pilot program to evaluate how additional premium subsidies can be offered for other soil health practices that can reduce risk and comply with the goals of the federal crop program. Please feel free to reach out to me or my colleague Max Webster and a special thanks goes out to Max. He's our Midwest Policy Manager and thank you so much Max for helping us prepare this information and these slides and now I'll turn it back to you, Dan. Thank you. Thank you Chris for an excellent presentation. One final reminder if anyone in our audience would like to go back and revisit Chris's presentation. All of the presentation materials from today are available on our website at www.esi.org and there's still time to ask questions. We have a few of them coming in which is great. You can send us an email ask at esi.org and also follow us on Twitter at ESI online and join the live tweeting. Our fourth panelist today is Brittany Masters. Brittany is the CEO and co-founder of Rome Free Ranch. Brittany is a visionary leader and first-generation bison rancher. She has 12 years of experience in brand management and is a Western Sustainability Exchange Board member and officer and a center for a Humane Economy Advisory Council member. Brittany, welcome to our briefing today. Looking forward to hearing your presentation. Okay, thanks again Dan. Thanks for introducing me and good morning everyone. As Dan said, my name is Brittany and I'm the CEO of Go Rome Free. My husband and I run Rome Free Ranch in Hot Springs, Montana and we are first-generation bison ranchers running a regenerative meat company. So like I said, you know as first-generation bison ranchers we really believe that as an industry we can do better. We believe not only can we do better but we must do better than what the modern food system has to offer and so at Rome Free we promote an approach to animal agriculture that restores human health so that we do that through providing nutrient-dense products. We focus on repairing U.S. grasslands and we do that through regenerative management and then we prioritize animal welfare and we do that above our bottom line. But our origin story actually starts a long time ago. It starts actually back in the summer of 1989. This is John's dad here on the left and my husband John is a little guy there on the right and John's dad had just bought two pairs of very short shorts and a brand new camcorder and they were on their annual trip across the U.S. His dad was a military officer so they moved 18 times in 18 years and along the way they stopped in Montana to see the wild bison and it was here that John learned the history of the American bison. He learned all about their rise and their fall and how their migration patterns actually created that fertile top soil that we rely on today. He learned how there used to be over 100 million bison roaming across the plains and how they nearly went extinct to make way for settlers. But I think the most important story that John's dad told him was actually about a Montana rancher and it was a man who rounded up the last of the wild bison and saved the species from extinction. He was super inspired by this story and from that moment on at four years of age he knew he was going to be a bison rancher but he had to go to school so fast forward to 2014. John had graduated from the Air Force Academy. He spent five years of commitment service and then he was ready to you know follow his true first passion which was bison. During that time he spent in the military he actually lived on the flight line and he did that so he could bank his housing allowance. He ate strictly peanut butter and jelly to save up enough money to buy a very small piece of ground in western Montana and nine bison. But sadly just two years into his venture after he had built the ranch and got the bison built a house John had listed the ranch for sale and he just couldn't make make it work financially. He struggled to compete against the large corporations that really dominate our food system and that's when I met John. I will skip all of the sweet mushy parts about the story but ultimately he convinced me to marry him and I convinced him to give the ranch one last go. We doubled down on everything. I quit my corporate job. John and I sold our house and his parents mortgaged theirs to give us a loan to start a new business and the idea was we would create a value added product that we'd sell direct to market and cut out all of the middlemen. In 2017 we launched our very first product which is Bison Bites. It's a 100% grass fed and grass finished meat snack that also is sugar free and if you go to the next slide we just recently launched a line of ready to eat meals that are prepared sous vide. This is one example. This is a bison chili and our products are now sold in Costco in natural grocers and over 400 independent retailers across the US. Next slide. So while we've seen tremendous support from our community here locally and nationwide we've had really strong demand for our products. It hasn't come without a significant amount of challenges and sacrifice and I don't think our story is unique. You know I think that I know many first generation ranchers and even generational ranchers that have similar experiences so I think this our story helps to illustrate kind of the struggles that regenerative producers go through. John and I we always joke that if I had known the kind of barriers we'd run into I would have sold that ranch way back in 2014 but but I'll joke aside the truth is that while regenerative agriculture has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life it hasn't been the easiest path. Our food system and the infrastructure that supports it is really built to benefit these large multinational corporations that control the industry and you know as a small brand if you manage to keep your head above water long enough really the only long term success plan is to sell your business to one of those larger corporations to pay off your inevitable debt that you're sure to accumulate. So I think as most people know 80 percent of our industry is owned by just four large multinational corporations and they control the infrastructure to further process livestock and while animals livestock animals are born and raised on ranches all across the US most or the majority are chucked down to that fertile corn belt for finishing and processing and this just gives the power the leverage and the value that's created to those corporations rather than the rural communities where the animals are grown. So to make it roam free as a ranch has to operate completely outside of the system we compete for slaughter slots from small custom processors we typically have to commit to those slots 18 months in advance so we're making really big bets on our sales forecast and we only round up our animals once a year for processing we chuck them over 16 hours which is you know the part that we hate the most about our job and then we freeze our meat and use it throughout the year so we end up paying very high costs for cold storage for transportation especially in this environment and in addition our slaughter costs cost us four times more than what our larger competitors pay and it's not just the slaughter that's challenging it's also the further processing or the value added portion so we use a local smokehouse and we learned recently that they they had to pick up a contract from one of the largest turkey brands in order to have just a consistent business and so they had to push out smaller brands like us you know just to make room for them and there just really isn't any capacity for smoking and curing available right now as some of these larger brands continue to get bigger and bigger and take over more market share um the perfect example of this is just a few months ago we had to turn down what would be an estimated one million dollar purchase order from sprouts um because of the lack of capacity and so we're working through that trying to figure out how to you know grow regionally and and just work within the capacity that we have you want to go to the next slide uh so what can be done about the infrastructure we feel that um we need to invest significantly in regional infrastructure so you know decentralizing our food system and giving some of that value back to the producers on the land so that they can stay on the land um and this is really the only way we see regenerative producers succeeding um John and I have been trying to develop actually a mobile processing unit over the last couple years we believe it's the most efficient sustainable and certainly the safest way to process our animals but we just haven't been able to get there and I think first and foremost it's it's because ranchers like us need affordable financing uh you know leveraging our parents retirement just isn't going to work again so um so we need access to that to that cheap capital um and then secondly a lot of it is just help with the regulatory process and paperwork and getting some consultation around how to get through that we go to the next slide um and I just want to leave you with this thought so you know a lot of people ask well why invest in new infrastructure when we've got a system in place it's been working for 100 years why now and I think it's because honestly we're running out of time um the American grasslands in America used to be the most diverse ecosystem that we had but industrial agriculture has really depleted that finite resource and and changed the landscape so we produced mostly just five commodities in what was the most diverse ecosystem in the world um and we're depleting about 24 billion metric tons of top soil each year globally so we're we're tilling that up for monocrops um we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere at an alarming rate and we've lost that rich biodiversity that once created the fertile soil um that leads to a lack of resiliency and independence on foreign chemicals and other inputs and some estimates and people argue this all the time but we know that if we do nothing we will eventually run out of top soil to the next slide please but there is a solution so you know it's right under our feet and it has been around since the very beginning of time and that's regenerative agriculture and that's agriculture that builds top soil it increases biodiversity it adds resilience and strengthens rural America and it offers this abundant diverse rich food system that actually nourishes the people it's meant to support and we just need the infrastructure to support it so um that's it the next slide is just my contact information if anybody has any questions or who wants to discuss things further I'd love to talk to you and um just thank you so much for your time thank you Brittany for a great presentation I have a craving now for bison bites um so thank you for that um need to eat before I do these briefings because now that bison chili looks so good and it's said it was sous vide like you can't go wrong with that so I have to get some um we have lots of time for q and a and we have lots of questions coming in from the audience and we have a couple that we wanted to talk about uh as well ahead of time so why don't we go ahead and dig right into our questions and answers and um for people in our audience there's still time to ask questions so you can send us an email ask at esi.org you can also follow us on twitter or online uh at esi online on twitter um but the first question I wanted to get to and I wrote here I think we'll start with you and then we'll go through the presentations uh or the order of presentations how do we mainstream regenerative agriculture for someone like me who doesn't know a lot about being a farmer or a rancher I just listened to four presentations and I'm I'm totally convinced that this is the way to go but we're not there yet how do we mainstream these practices at scale good I'm glad our report worked then um well the fun thing is we have a whole report that delves into the different policy levers we can pull to help make regenerative agriculture the norm and help mainstream it through our political choices and decisions and through our policy um and those four buckets of reform I've talked about already the other panelists have talked about already leveling the federal investment playing fields like reforms to the federal crop insurance program that Chris mentioned finally getting more robust and more comprehensive support for farmers and ranchers and indigenous growers like what dr johnson mentioned really focusing on regionalizing and decentralizing our food systems infrastructure like britney so you know thoroughly discuss like these are the ways that we help make regenerative agriculture the norm that the backbone that infrastructure the policy decisions that can really help fuel um getting more acres under regenerative management so the other thing I would want to I would want to say here is um like regenerative agriculture isn't hypothetical it's not some like oh I wish this was happening or this sounds like a really good idea regenerative agriculture is happening there are growers who are practicing who are using this management philosophy already and I think what'll help mainstream this movement is to point out to the shine shine the light on these incredible leaders of of the regenerative movement the folks who are doing this work in every single state um learning from them getting their ideas for how to engage with consumers with policymakers at the local state or federal level bringing in indigenous communities and other historically underserved communities to the decision-making table I mean the fact that we're having this briefing the fact that we're having this conversation is a step in the right direction and I'm excited for more opportunities um to shine a light on the leaders like the three farmers represented on this panel today Michael love to hear your thoughts about how we can mainstream these practices well you know I think a lot of it has to do with the way our market system set up right now the usd market system the market formula because right now we're based based upon everything off of efficiency and quantity so because we have efficiency and quantity we're having to use these different types of inputs that aren't very environmentally friendly like pesticides herbicides and everything so uh in order to re redo that we need to go back to one of which would be based on quality like what kind of quality goods are coming out we all know that plant-based arrived in to jennifer culture have high quality in the stuff we have you know when you even look at you know cattle grass-fed cattle their nutrient value is a lot better than the lot that cattle just because of the things they're eating it's all plant-based buffalo especially buffalo are probably the number one food source that we that we eat out there but we don't subsidize enough because there's always some sort of you know arguments between the cattle and buffalo as far as what's better for the what's better for whatever as far as that you know we talked about regionally you know regionally based um processing centers like like the data make that a cultural fund supports you know i'm i'm also a fan of mobile things mobile processing centers that was mentioned but the problem with that is that we don't have the usda inspectors to go out and do that so it makes it very difficult to move that so if you look at the quaffaw operation oklahoma uh you can see that they're training those on the tribal lands are training those people at at their at their slaughtering house to be inspectors and so you know it's kind of a it's kind of putting it all together and so but i think the real big problem like i said is has to do with the efficiency efficiency and quantity argument that usda offers you know you wasn't too long ago that you know corn had a nutrient value into that now the one thing that has a nutrient value into that is this kind of like cattle and so when we start putting you know animals above human beings as far as what we're eating then we come up with all these different types of uh diseases that are out there heart disease and everything else so uh we need to heal our society we need to heal our hear the land that we're that we're that we're farming on or producing on so that's basically how i would streamline that is just change the formula around so that you're able to support more small farms because we all know that small farms have a lot better quality in their food than than the big and the big corporations do and so that's about it thanks chris love to hear from you and then also britney love to hear um your perspective as a rancher yeah thanks dan i think you know as senator turner mentioned in his opening you know there's as many ways to farm as there are farmers i think we we also have to recognize that um every farmer is in a different place um and and doing different practices as i mentioned in my opening um you know there are still a lot of improvements that i need to make in my farming operation and i recognize that there are there are um there are challenges that come along with that but also that i can do better by the soil so i think if we want to see regenerative agriculture become more mainstream we have to we have to be make it become more commonplace um we have to recognize that the farmers want to do better by the soil but don't often have the technical and financial resources available at that local level to to be able to adopt and these new practices so i think it's a journey i think you know farmers have to start adopting some practices um that lead them to the regenerative ag system and britney from your perspective as one of the newer regenerative agriculture or one of the new your adopters of regenerative agriculture on the panel how can we make this more common um you know i i think about it from our product's perspective so you know as a customer i'm going to go to go to casco and on the shelf you know probably the regenerative products or the grass-fed products are twice as expensive three times as expensive and at the end of the day as producers we're not we're not really paid more for doing regenerative agriculture and where the biggest um the biggest bucket of money is going is in that further processing and so when you know we have to be price competitive uh from a consumer's perspective and if it's going to go mainstream and if our if our processing is costing four times more than conventional agriculture it's going to be very hard to to shore up that gap um and then you know just like michael said it the you know the focus the the farm bill has a big nutrition component and the focus has always been you know how do we produce as many calories as possible it's always calorie focused rather than nutrient density focused and so if eventually our our food is completely devoid of nutrients because we don't have microorganisms because we don't have biodiversity um then we may be producing more and more calories and getting you know sicker and sicker because we don't have the nutrients in our food that we used to and so I think you know that's a big component of how we we um the nutrition part of the farm bill is where we can add into a focus on regenerative nutrient dense food great um I'm going to ask this next question this one comes to us from our audience and I think it's actually a good follow-up to this first question arughey one of your slides you had 16 boxes and you had different regenerative agriculture practices this question comes to us from our audience asking us sort of which of those practices are most commonly used and do we have any ideas of overall how many farmers or ranchers are using these practices is it is it millions of farmers is it thousands of farmers but which are the ones that are most common and I'm happy to start with you arughey but I'm eager to hear other thoughts as well we'll open this up to the group after you go yeah um like I mentioned in the presentation regenerative agriculture looks pretty looks very different depending on where you are a regenerative goer in the Pacific Northwest is going to have a different farming system or farming style than someone from Maine and somewhere from Texas then someone from Iowa um but the the five the five principles that I shared do there are some common practices that help um address all five principles kind of at once cover cropping was mentioned a lot um no till or low till was mentioned a lot focusing on diversification crop diversification planting perennial crops to help build um soil organic matter um agroforestry was mentioned um as a practice trying to think of what else crop rotations I mean there were some common practices but the the beauty of regenerative agriculture was like what Chris was saying there's always a chance to be better and so depending on where we caught people on their regenerative journey they were using a different suite of practices and michael chris britney please feel free to jump in if you have any additional commentary about sort of what are some of the more common practices and how widely um I can really just speak to animal agriculture um and the most common practices that I see in in my area um I mean you know people always usually start with the practices rather than the holistic view of what is regenerative agriculture and so most people when they when they hear that they think of rotational grazing and so that's really the idea is you're you know not return you're grazing down a particular pasture and then not returning to that pasture for at least 12 months afterwards to let it rest um and that looks very different whether it's a you're moving your animals every day or you're moving your animals every seven days or every month um and it depends again you know so many factors go into what practices you're going to use but I think that's probably the most common one and I think it's the one that you can't do a lot of the other things until you've um you've got that figured out because you need your pasture arrangements before you can start really moving around water or or planting or or anything else um and you know as far as how many people are doing that that's a great question I don't know the answer I can tell you in my community that I'm I'm actually on the Flathead Reservation here in western Montana and we you know I have neighbors that would say they're conventional conventional conventional you know growers um and they're all doing a little bit of regenerative agriculture here and there without calling it that um but true like high intensity where you're where you're moving your animals every day that's pretty rare around here um but they may be may be doing just one or two tenants of of what we would consider regenerative yeah Dan I think you know when we look at you know the soil really wants and needs to have plants growing on it in it you know year round and so when we can go from having a crop growing five or six months out of the year to 11 or 12 months out of the year a plant growing not and I've been necessarily a crop I think that's what's really most important um you know within regenerative agriculture and getting more diverse crop rotations on the land and then finally you know finishing that up with um with the livestock component you know it's really it's a systems approach but I think you have to start with making sure there's always a a living root in that soil Michael happy to give you uh opportunity to weigh in too on on which of these practices I'm just I'm just thinking because you know my panelists we're talking on such a big scale you know I mean our farms out there average one to two acres and there's a reason for that because you know it's place-based design who were to go any bigger than that we would have blowouts because of the wind erosion and stuff that we have out there but you know just when I look at my own cropping system from a from a technical standpoint of doing put a little science behind it you know our our roles out there it's not very would call economically valuable I can't take a Hopi cornfield and put it in Iowa and expect them to adopt that and and to make money off of that and so you know our regenerative systems based upon just our survival our cultural survival and who we are at Hopi and so you know our roles facing at Hopi for example is you have like six feet between rows you know you'll have clusters of plants you'll have planting depths anywhere from six to 18 inches you know and I like to see corn anywhere in the in the United States come up from that depth you know we only receive six to ten inches of annual rainfall a year can you imagine that growing cat corn when I was at Cornell they told me they ate three three inches of annual rainfall a year and I said uh we agronomy has something else to learn here a little bit and so you know it's that type of approach but you know for us it's just place-based you know and so it's it's our faith and our that makes our cropping system so resilient three thousand years of doing this so the replication is very important also if it works you know don't change it too much but uh we're able to do that and so but anyway that's kind of my approach on that probably didn't answer the question I don't know how many people are still doing that that'd be interesting study to know as far as how many people are actually doing regenerative agriculture and things like that but yeah so thanks I like I know that the USDA the USDA has its census every five years and they capture some data on cover crops on conservation no till but I think there's a lot of room for improvement on the types of questions and data that are collected through that census to better address this this question of how many folks are using these practices I was thinking that what Brittany said is probably the case where people are doing it even if they're not calling it so probably a little more widespread at least at some level um Chris I think perhaps we'll start with you on this next question and then we'll go uh we'll open it up to other panelists something you talked about in your presentation there are some things the federal government does policy wise that might make it easier or harder to be a regenerative farmer or rancher um what are the ways or what are some additional ways that federal farm policy could be more supportive or more encouraging of regenerative agriculture and are the things the federal government does right now that makes it harder to be a regenerative farmer or rancher yeah thanks thanks Dan so I I think one of the things that can be improved is to prioritize soil health planning and regenerative ag planning you know through the federal programs you know there's a lot of a lot of focus on the practices themselves but I think you know providing farmers with that technical assistance and ultimately financial assistance and some incentives to be on that soil health journey or that regenerative ag journey you know start out you know with cover crops and start you know with no till and start incorporating other regenerative ag practices into that farming operation and so I think there's a real need to prioritize you know planning from an entire farm system um at the field scale um you know I think there's a lot of a lot of you know great things happening within the system um I think there's also a lot of room for improvements you know I think that local lead approach is something that we we cannot lose sight of we have to remember that you know every place is different not just in in a particular state but every watershed is different every county is different every community is different so you know recognizing that um support is needed at that local level is is really crucial Michael Arroy Brittany love to hear you know well I'm kind of I'm kind of geared towards her source it was just heard but you know it's me you know we subsidize so much for for big farms you know we need to have some sort of former that subsidizes small ones because it really it really you know the some of the studies show that there's a three to five year gap funding gap when you're switching over from conventional to agricultural you know in the farm or American farmer you know I'm not going to be you know or against conventional agriculture but that person really has no choice because the system hasn't trapped you know that person has to you know has to do that because of because of the quality and and efficiency that art that I made earlier and so um but you know things like this that we always that we always tend to forget when we have these discussions that we need to also try to figure out your credence and as far as you to be involved you know our youth to be involved it'd be my my blessing if I already take Hopi corn and give everybody one kernel and all the kids in the United States and have give them a cup and have a roll of corn plant out of that you know that that kind of thing and showing why it's important because we can all talk about that's the other thing we can all talk about regenerative agriculture we can all do regenerative agriculture but we really need to understand the principles of why we need to do this you know it's like it hopefully you know we can all plan out there but unless our youth know why they're planting it just becomes another commodity another way of doing things and so we have to incentivize our young people to do this and that means also involving them in some of these big meetings that we have you know because I think the youth are our future right I mean I was lucky to have 42 of our of our 8 to 5 fifth graders come and visit my little farm out there recently and so there's nothing better than watching a little kid just get happy and you know you can tell little kids you know like my way of teaching is like you know you can go out there and you can explain we can be an hydrologist you can be a botanist you can be because we do everything when it comes to holistic management of agriculture that's what we do we incentivize that we incentivize it based upon our own culture and what they what they should learn in the future and what keeps them hopeful you know and so but that could be passed along everybody it's just like your grandfather talking to you and talking about how important farming is and things like that so just at a little different level there but that's how kind of how I kind of understand that and federal programs are geared right now towards corporations and everything else so we need to put it right back to where it belongs right locally live that's been talked about here a number of we can do that you know we also understand as consumers we need to think about the crop and stuff that we're buying because consumers what you buy makes makes the wheel run right and so we need to think about that a little bit more so yeah that's about it yeah I'd love to I'd like to take you back on on that because you said something about the youth and that like is just so close to um to my heart because obviously as first generation rangers and as somebody trying to get into this industry it's certainly been a challenge and I get asked that question a lot is like okay so how do we get the next generation involved and the average rancher I think is 65 years old and doesn't have any intention of passing the land off you'd rather sell it and retire in Fiji than you know continue to labor on and um you know the barrier that we always run into is the access to secure land to land that we know if we start putting in a bunch of infrastructure and a bunch of hard work sweat and tears that it's going to be around um you know seven 15 you know years um and so you know when I think about what kind of policies maybe um harm that you know the in the conservation bucket of the farm bill there's these retired lands um there's also just a bunch of land that that is used that's owned by the government to and is used for conventional farming and ranching and I think it'd be you know really interesting to look at what what if we use some of those retired lands or incentivized um wealthy land owners instead to give you know favorable leases or subsidized leases to beginning farmers and ranchers because getting into ranching is nearly impossible if you have to pay mortgage on bare land um you know you need 40 down on bare land and there's just no way in my lifetime that I could afford the with the cost of land to pay for that operation um using animals and so um we've had to be really creative about how we grow and that's always been through through land leases and with bison that's a whole new challenge which I don't have to dive into but essentially I can only you know go uh work with private land owners and the infrastructure needed to support bison is uh much different than it is for cattle so um just making you know access to this land and finding creative solutions to get the younger generation involved because many times they don't have land already yeah um I like the question because I think what you're learning from the other panelists is that this the ways the federal policy currently discourages regenerative agriculture if flipped can encourage regenerative agriculture um I'm thinking of you know Chris mentioned I'll read mention this um the federal crop insurance program right the way that our current subsidy regime favors um farms that degrade soil health or that are not practicing regenerative agriculture um the federal crop insurance program covers 90 percent of the US the United States' crop land which means it has enormous potential and influence over agricultural the agricultural landscape and agricultural policy so I'm thinking about you know if we can shift those farm subsidies um shift the federal crop insurance program so that the money that's currently being spent on it Chris what did you say like 77.9 billion or something like that over the next 10 years if we can change the way that the crop insurance program currently works to encouraging soil health and regenerative agriculture to rewarding growers for adopting a more regenerative mindset I mean that's that seems like a win-win-win great thanks for that that's really interesting um and I think you are the one who said it in your presentation all of the stuff works together works better when it works together so I appreciate that answer um Michael I'd like to ask you might steal that little quip I like that are you still whatever absolutely um what matters is more regenerative agriculture so whatever it takes um Michael I'd like to start with you for this next question um uh you mentioned sort of how long your family has been on the land it's kind of amazing and so I'm kind of hopeful that you have sort of a long-term perspective on this how do climate impacts like shifting seasons extreme heat drought how did those climate impacts affect regenerative agriculture differently and maybe industrial agriculture well the climate impacts to me would be less severe on regenerative agriculture if and only if the crops that they're raising are bio-diverse you know um that that's that's the big thing you know unfortunately uh we're not moving we have not been moving that way the last 50 or so years we've been always monocropping and so when you have one thing that hurts it you know like for example like drought or too much water you end up wiping up that whole crop so there's no there's persification whereas hopey you know there are all the whole things that are bio-diverse it's not even corn it's not a monocrofit it comes up at different times different years things like that it sometimes doesn't look palatable but you know it's at least we know what we're eating you know I think that's the important thing and so but with the climate fluctuations you can see you know that things are getting smaller and so I'm a person who talks about biodiversity is to try to raise something every year we're able to look at through our knowledge just look at just the different bio the biological indicators like the different types of plants to figure out if we're going to have a drought or not but regardless what we see we plan anyway because you know I like seed banks and stuff like that but I guarantee that if you take a seed that's been sitting in a seed bank for 100 years we try going into today's climate it's not going to do well and so we need to think about that so the biodiversity that we have things that you have you know when you look at cattle if you I mean a bison when you look at their range and how they raise their range and you look at all the ecological stuff that's under there it's it's very it's very good for the environment you know very good for that and so but I really think the biodiversity crops needs to be pushed forward further you know and and where those biodiversity is going to come from they're just going to come from indigenous people I know that and so we need to also have laws and rules and regulations in our in our books set up data centers that would help us preserve some of that because if you look at corn it's a billion dollar industry where did that come from you know it came from indigenous people originally and so we have the diverse crops we have been we have the seeds available it's just a matter of how we're able to use those not really protect that but also create deterrence that would allow us to keep moving because if you really look at that we're holding the 80 percent of biodiversity so listen to this people we need to support indigenous locally led efforts small grass root efforts who are still doing this because it's not we're going to lose that and once we lose that without true biodiversity we have no real sustainability and so just think about that one but that's how I'd answer that question but interesting Chris love to hear from you what are your thoughts on sort of how these how climate impacts might affect regenerative agriculture differently than industrial agriculture well I certainly think that regenerative agriculture is going to be more resilient it's going to be able to weather the storm no pun intended you know through through climate changes climate impacts but as I mentioned in my opening you know it doesn't come up without challenges as well you know it's still you know fewer favorable planting days and just changing in the seasons it makes it a lot more challenging to to plant multiple crops in a year to to get planting done in a timely manner to to get harvest done in a timely manner so I think we continue to have to adapt and and and learn from from what's working and what isn't and and I think you know as Michael mentioned the crop diversification is such a big piece to this so we have to figure out how we can develop new markets for crops that can be grown you know on a on a larger scale ridney are he interested in your thoughts as well yeah I mean so we've definitely been able to withstand you know we've had terrible droughts the last few years as senator tester mentioned and while we've been able on our ranch to get by with the forage that we that we have because we're building more forage every year there's downstream impacts so what happened was a lot of people couldn't afford to buy the hay to feed their animals so slaughter houses got backed up so everybody was sending their animals to processing otherwise they were just simply going to starve on on the ranch and so then you know the bottleneck became processing which we're finally getting through now but because people were basically slaughtering their replacement heifers and their replacement livestock now there's a shortage of animals on the market and so there's all these unintended consequences down you know downstream that just because we're regenerative ranch we're not you know we're not protected by that by any means and so the infrastructure really is such a big deal to have more capacity so that we don't get you know jammed up like we are right now I think the three panelists nailed it um we had there's one interviewee that that sticks out in my mind who said something really profound for me um she said that healthy soil is their insurance policy against risk and climate change and so I think about that quite a lot when asked this question about regenerative ag's potential to um be more resilient to climate change than others I mean the fact that healthy soil holds on to more water than unhealthy soil is a direct resilient a measure of resilience for those extreme weather events for those drought events um so yeah I and and what Dr. Johnson said about diversification came up really frequently in our interviews that they by adopting crop diversity by build stacking these enterprises like what Brittany mentioned um on their regenerative operation they were better able to withstand external market volatilities because they had these different income streams from a bunch of different products and value added products on top of that well that leads me to sort of a I think we have time for maybe one last one and Brittany probably makes sense to direct this one to you first I'm curious about the idea of developing markets for products that come out of regenerative agriculture and you talked a little bit about the consumers perspective and I would love to hear Brittany and then we can go through the rest of the panel maybe some final thoughts on you know how we create demand uh and markets for um things like bison bites yeah sound yeah I mean it's you know so we we created a product to save the ranch that's the true story um you know I I've always had a passion for nutrition and for food um if john had it his weight we would just be raising animals and we wouldn't have to deal with all the other parts of the business but it's it's um it it's sort of um it works together when you're out there talking to customers when you're promoting your product when you have a brand when you have a customer um facing product and you can reach them you just have more ability to to support the ranch and and the the um entities that are closest to the customer end up being the ones who receive the most value from the value stream so whereas traditionally um you know it's those branded programs or it's um the big multinational corporations that own the shelf space if you can get in and and actually have access to that customer which of course you know um you know the internet and and amazon and everything has given us more access to them you can you can start to extract more of the value um from every animal you produce or every crop you know you raise and so um but but it's not easy right I mean I've I've spent before this 10 years in brand marketing developing products and brands and and working on it and so I think it's it is a it's a tool that we have and I think you know the value added producer grant is is fabulous at helping producers come out with a product but I don't think it's the solution for everyone I don't think that it's realistic to ask producers that are already running a full-time you know 80 hour per week job to say and can you just maybe add a product to the to the list I think it's it's right for some ranches but but certainly it's um beyond the expectation for everyone and other panelists thoughts final thoughts on sort of how we create markets for products that come from regenerative agriculture well to me it's it's really about telling stories you know for Indian people you know we just need to tell stories about the good things we're doing out there but when it comes to things like I've seen I know a person in Italy's bill of software so when you has a code on it just like you know with our phones we look at the code and that takes you to a story of how that product is developed I wouldn't that be something if you had you know like a Buffalo product and you've seen how that that thing was raised what it looked like you know the buy-in would be overwhelming as far as I'm concerned not just to do that and then but I don't know if that's possible but anyways I thought that'd be a good thing to do just putting the story the value added in this I think is also important because the supply chain people have control over that you know it's a hundred dollar bush and lakers still a hundred dollar bush and lake were from 30 years ago from my understanding you know so the person has a minimal amount of room to do that as far as the producers concerned and so the value added needs to be important now when you but if you do have these codes on there that show where these which products are formed what do you think people are going to buy you know but we also remember to make those more accessible there is no whole foods or no you know underneath these these upscale grocery stores on Indian reservations at all and so we need to figure out a way to bring equity as we do this so as we're as we're as we're also you know put the market out there we also remember you know how to create equity at the same time so that's how I would kind of do that it just have a story of regenerative and what it's about there's just not enough publicity on that and so I think we should increase the publicity so yeah Chris and then we can give our he you can have the last word today but Chris final thoughts on market development yeah I think it's you know it's a huge challenge especially you know looking you know here in the Midwest where there's millions of acres of of you know commodity crops being grown and and just trying to trying to build that you know consumer demand but there's just there's so many acres that that are ripe for more crop diversification but but farmers have to have a place to to market that crop and you know we've seen you know a huge shift in all of the infrastructure that's that's here that's supporting those crops that we're growing today and so it's it's it's going to take a lot to change that okay now I'll end with this um so one of my favorite quotes from Wendell Berry is eating is an agricultural act and to me that is a call to action both from the grass tops level and the grass roots level everyone eats everyone can participate in changing the food system it's from the grass top side the way I see markets working is through policy thinking about procurement changes in procurement policies and procurement guidelines we have a whole section about that in our report but from the grass root side on the consumer side Dr. Johnson is totally correct I love this anecdote of telling stories of getting consumers to feel connected and bought in with the folks who are growing the food that they eat and raising their kids on consumers can vote very loudly with their dollars based on what they purchase and so I encourage folks you know ask questions about soil health about regenerative agriculture at farmers markets like who are you buying from at grocery stores at restaurants and even have these conversations with family members or for the Hill staff on the line with your bosses um so that's how that's how I see markets developing for regenerative agriculture awesome well thank you so much thank you to our four panelists today for a really really interesting conversation about pathways to regenerative agriculture Arahi Michael Chris and Brittany it was real pleasure to meet you I'm putting this briefing together I hope I'm sure everyone in our audience learned a lot about these practices also like to say special thanks to senator tester for joining us at the top of the session thanks to him and his staff for his participation today means a lot to have senator tester participate with us one final time congratulations to NRDC on the report it's fabulous everyone should take a moment look at it it's aesthetically pleasing it's an it's an interesting read it's organized smartly it's easy to use everyone should be checking this out you can find a link to it on the briefing web page at www.esi.org and also find briefing materials presentation materials excuse me archived webcast eventually we'll have some summary notes up there in the next week or two so everyone can go back and revisit this briefing I think it's going to be a big topic as we start thinking about the 2023 farm bill also like to say a special shout out to Matthew Kaplan at NRDC for his friendly collaboration along the process of putting this briefing together also like to say special thanks to our good friend Troy Hanford for all of his help putting today's briefing together as well I'd like to thank my ESI colleagues Dan O'Brien, Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna, and Savannah Anna even got a special shout out along with Matthew from senator tester so that's cool thanks to them for putting all of their hard work into a really interesting session today my colleague will put a oh finally we have four wonderful summer interns and they are very active in briefing uh briefings especially on the day of live tweeting the questions from the audience so thanks to Christina, Stephanie, Abby, and Nathan for all their hard work my colleague is going to put up a slide with a survey link if everyone in our audience today just has two minutes to take our survey we read every response did you have any issues with the video with the audio with the ideas for future sessions any feedback we really appreciate it and like I said we read every response so it means a lot when you take a moment to fill out that survey we're a few minutes over sorry for that but I think it was well worth it to spend a little bit of extra time talking with our panelists today hope to see everybody back on June 24th for um let's see what is June 24th June 24th is where is it uh extreme heat going to be a good one uh and June 29 offshore wind energy so those are the final two briefings in our living with climate change and scaling up innovation to drive down emissions thanks to our panelists thanks to NRDC and thanks to our audience for joining us today we'll sign off there