 Hello and welcome, everyone, to our first agriculture-themed briefing of 2022, Grow Organic, the Climate, Health, and Economic Case for Expanding Organic Agriculture. I'm Dan Brissette, President of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and I'd like to start by thanking our great partners at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who helped make this briefing possible. EESI was founded in 1984 by a group of bipartisan members of Congress to provide policymaker education about climate change topics to Congress. And since then, we have continued to do that and also expanded into technical assistance for utilities in rural areas that are interested in accessing federal resources, especially from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We do an awful lot of work. We do newsletters, podcasts, briefings like this, all sorts of great stuff. And the best way to keep up with everything is to sign up for our Climate Change Solutions newsletter. It comes out every two weeks. And you can do that by visiting us online at www.eesi.org. So far this year, we've already done. This is our fifth briefing of the year, actually. We did four in our Congressional Climate Camp series. And after this, we have many more coming up on Farm Bill topics. We also will be doing a briefing in a few weeks about the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy, as well as the portfolio of Nuclear Energy Programs underway at DOE. So there's all sorts of great stuff coming up. And we're really excited to start our coverage of agriculture with this briefing in partnership with NRDC. We have some really tremendous panelists. We also have a special guest who will be joining us via pre-recorded remarks to share some thoughts. And we will also have questions from our online audience. So if anyone in our online audience today would like to ask our panelists a question, you can do that very simply by sending us an email. The email address to use is ask at EESI.org. That's ASK at EESI.org. You can also follow us on social media, including Twitter at EESI Online. If you would like to keep up with the presentation materials that our panelists will be sharing, you can do that by visiting us online and visiting the briefing page. And that goes for pretty much every other briefing we've done in the last decade plus. If you'd like to go back and learn about any of the topics we've covered in last year, we actually did another great agriculture briefing with NRDC about regenerative agriculture. You can always go to EESI.org and review the livecast, the archived webcast. They should say as well as the presentation materials and even a written summary of what was discussed in the briefing. So without any further ado, I would like to introduce our special guest. Representative Ginny Panetta represents California's 13th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. First elected in 2016, Representative Panetta is serving his fourth term. During his time in Congress, he has fought for affordable housing, immigration reform, continued protection of our coastlines and environment, accessible healthcare, our agriculture industry and its farmers and farm workers, a reduction in gun violence, a fairer tax code, major infrastructure investments, sustainable conservation practices, our military installations and the benefits that our veterans were promised and deserve. He currently sits on the House Committee on Ways and Means, the House Committee on Armed Services and the House Committee on the Budget and he serves as Chief Deputy Web. Representative Panetta, thank you so much for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you. Hello, everybody. I'm Jimmy Panetta and I represent the 19th congressional district in California located right on its central coast. Let me first start off by thanking the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council for giving me this opportunity to say hello, to speak to you today, albeit briefly and virtually. As you know, the organic agricultural industry in the United States provides millions of jobs and creates millions in economic activity. As you also know, however, public investment in organic ag is really lacking, especially in comparison to other sectors of the ag industry. As everybody needs to know, though, organic agricultural offers broad economic and health benefits, safeguards or natural resources and positions farms and ranches to thrive even in droughts and other times of extreme weather. Now, I feel, and I think many of you do too, that our public policies should, must ensure that organic agriculture is accessible to producers and consumers all across, not just California, all across the United States of America. It's those organic producers that protect the long-term health of our food and farming system and the people and resources who make it work. Together, they're the ones that are building successful businesses that steward healthy soil, ecosystems and communities while reducing our reliance on costly synthetic inputs. Now, we got the 2023 Farm Bill coming up and this Congress has the opportunity to find ways to expand organic ag. I'm the co-chair of the Organic Caucus and the Ag Research Caucus in the United States Congress. That's why I plan to continue my work so that organic agriculture is expanded and we can ensure that the United States organic industry remains resilient, it remains innovative and is ready to address the challenges of our growing food system. Now, one of the ways I'm doing this is with my Plant Biostimulant Act. That's a bill that would create a uniform process for approving commercial plant biostimulant use and it would require more federal research on the technology's benefits for soil health. As many of you know, plant biostimulants are products that can be used both in ag and non-ag settings and that can improve plant nutrition processes which then can result in improved plant health, tolerance to abiotic and other environmental stresses and improve growth, quality and crop yield. Now, the use of plant biostimulants also has shown promise in eliminating the need for pesticides and fertilizers and growing sustainability management practices such as carbon sequestration and water quality improvement. Now, I'm also excited to be working with the NRDC on the Opportunities in Organics Act. That's a bill that would offer an array of flexible, easy to access tools that can reduce barriers to organic agriculture. It could also modernize reimbursements for organic certification to ensure cost does not deter those producers and it should increase technical expertise and support within public institutions and NGOs so that producers in any part of the country will have access to professional assistance with building healthy soils, natural pest management and protecting ecosystems and natural resources. And yes, it will help producers transition to organics through a program that expands NGO capacity and activities and provides flexible funding to small and mid-sized producers. It's these types of investments in organic agriculture that are proven to have a substantial return on our investment. That's why organic agriculture remains a growing industry that provides jobs throughout the food supply chain and is accompanied by immense environmental and climate-friendly agricultural benefits. With these types of further significant investments, organic farms both certified and non-certified throughout California and yes, throughout the United States of America will benefit from an increase in organic farming research, funding and programming. As a representative of the 19th Congressional District as the co-chair of the Organic Caucus and the Ag Research Caucus and as a United States Congress member who works with both Democrats and Republicans, especially on agricultural issues and solutions, I really am more hopeful than ever that this Farm Bill, the 2023 Farm Bill will help create an agricultural industry that opens more doors for organic agriculture and works to create a more sustainable agricultural future. I look forward to working with you, all of you to get this done. Thanks. Thanks to Representative Panetta for joining us today and sharing his remarks and thanks to his staff for helping make his participation possible today. Representative Panetta mentioned the 2023 Farm Bill and here at EESI we have congressional staff covered. We appreciate that every congressional staff person will probably become a Farm Bill staff person at some point in the next 12 or so months. And so what we've done is put a lot of time and thinking into our congressional education resources. So for example, we have a hearing tracker. We have side-by-sides of impactful provisions that will compare the text of the existing law and the House and Senate marks when those are available. If you'd like to find our Farm Bill resources, visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for climate change solutions. So you never miss a thing as these resources continue to roll out. So I am very pleased to introduce our first two panelists today. I'm gonna introduce them together and then they will co-present and I'm really looking forward to learning all about this issue today. Kathleen Merrigan is an expert in food and agriculture. Currently, Kathleen serves as the Kelly and Brian Sweat professor in the School of Sustainability. An executive director of the Sweat. I hope I'm saying that correct, Kathleen. I realize that I might not be. I didn't think so. Sweetie isn't Sweetie Pie. Sweetie. So Kelly and Brian Sweat professor in the School of Sustainability, an executive director of the Sweetie Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University. From 2009 to 2013, Kathleen was deputy secretary and chief operating officer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture where she led efforts to support local food systems. She's known for authoring the law establishing national standards for organic food and the federal definition of sustainable agriculture. And I will never forget how to say the word Sweetie ever again. And our second panelist is Allison Johnson. Allison focuses on sustainable food systems with a broad lens recognizing that we need a massive shift toward diversified and health-promoting agriculture and away from harmful pesticides, soil degradation, and antibiotic use. Prior to joining NRDC, Allison practiced environmental and land use law as an attorney and worked as an organic certification and policy specialist at California-certified organic farmers. Allison serves as a public interest and consumer representative on the National Organic Standards Board. Kathleen and Allison, thank you so much for joining us today with the briefing. I'll turn it over to you. Great, I think I'm gonna start. And I'll add to my bio that I'm a co-author of this great new report, Grow Organic, which I hope for those of you who are interested in organic, it is a great resource guide for you. And I'd like to thank Steve Giraud and Nadia El-Hagshalaba, also from the Sweetie Center at ASU as co-authors and I'll have Allison introduce the rest. Since I'm the old timer here in the crowd, I decided I would go back in history and draw some lessons. I actually have four to share today. So it was 35 years ago, that's how old I am, in 1988 when a young California farmer came to my office when I worked on the Senate Agriculture Committee, saying it was time for a national law that would have strict organic standards and a system of enforcement. Now, honestly, the organic community was reluctant to ask for regulations because USDA had historically been hostile to organic, but there had been a flood of new market entrance who wanted to make a quick buck following a big expose on a particular chemical and Meryl Streep was involved in the advocacy. And so all of a sudden there was a panic for organic. So reluctantly, those farmers who had been involved building the industry concluded that they really needed federal enforcement because these new entrants weren't necessarily wed to the philosophies and rules of organic. Two years later, the Organic Foods Production Act became law as part of the 1990 Farm Bill. So what's the lesson I draw from this? From its very inception, the National Organic Program was all about strict standards and strict enforcement. That was true then and it's true today. Some people think that organic has gotten watered down. I hear that sometimes. I can assure you that that is not true. It's only gotten stricter over time. When I was deputy secretary, one of the pleasures I had was finalizing the rule that requires access to pasture for ruminants, those dairy cows, for example. Last fall, USDA came out with a final rule on strengthening organic enforcement. That is pages and pages long, very detailed and is going to improve the program and it's the culmination of years of organic farmers advocating for a tougher program. So I know a lot of us have in our mind that farmers don't want regulations, they don't want rules. Well, this is the opposite side of the coin. So my second thought here, back when I wrote the law and collectively the organic consumer environmental lobbies pushed for its passage, we played it safe, maybe too safe. We stay clear of disparaging non-organic food. Politically, that seems smart. We didn't say organic was better. In fear of prompting opponents to rally against the bill, rather we discussed organic as a marketing claim. Even today, I worry that we sometimes whisper organic's incredible attributes. This report, Roe Organic, has more than 400 scientific references. It makes the case as to why organic matters to climate, to health, to our economy. It shouts the value of organic and why the federal government should increase its investment organic. So here's where I draw a lesson too. It's time to put it on speakerphone, that organic is all that. And in the decades that followed passage of the bill, we now have incredible science to back up claims that organic is in fact better. Now organic is a complex production system and we've got hundreds of pages of rules to prove it. The legislation itself is fairly prescriptive. And the rulemaking was intense. Because organic includes all kinds of production and processing requirements, it's difficult really to boil it down and explain it to people. Early on, the marketers decided to focus on what organic prohibits, what I call the nose of organic. No GMOs, no radiation, no sewage ludge, no antibiotics, no hormones, that sort of thing. This appealed to consumers and of course it's all true. But this market approach failed to describe all the organic guesses. The requirement for crop rotation. The report that accompanied the law when it passed described crop rotation as the cornerstone of organic agriculture. Requirements for humane housing for animals, pasture for ruminants as I mentioned earlier, practices that build soil organic matter, offers to protect streams and prevent intrusion of non-organic crops and so much more. So this is my third lesson. This report, Grower Grant Organic is important because we do take the time to describe the positives. Once you understand them, you might well ask yourself, what do the various so-called regenerative agriculture programs have that organic doesn't? I think you'll conclude that the answer is essentially nothing. I think the organic emphasis now in discussions about American agriculture is tremendous. I encourage it, but don't let it distract you from what I believe is the original climate smart label and that is organic. Final lesson. In 1999, I came into USDA as the administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Service and I was asked specifically to get this organic rulemaking done because it had languished over the years. We got the final rule out, the door in December of 2000. But getting across the finish line was not easy. USDA received 275,603 public comments across the rulemaking. That was, at the time, only second in the history of rulemaking for the number of comments received by the federal government. I think the first rule had to do with FDA and something about tobacco. Anyhow, the lesson I draw from this is that people really care about organic. Your constituents care about organic. And people come to this issue with deep passion. You'll encounter people with strong beliefs about what organic should be. And some may say that organic is not all that. Sometimes well-meaning folks let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don't get distracted. I like to describe organic as the imperfect gold ecosystem standard. It is the envy of the world. And I challenge anyone to point to a system of standards and enforcement that is better. We don't have consensus on every aspect of the National Organic Program, but it's provided the necessary rules to foster the fastest-growing subsector of American agriculture year in and year out. And the National Organic Program was brought forth by and continues to be nurtured by a strong coalition of environmental consumer and organic advocates. And finally, central to the National Organic Program and to those who practice innovative organic production is this idea of continuous improvement, always striving to do better. Organic has and will continue to improve and hopefully with your help. We will make great strides in the forthcoming farm bill. Over to you, Allison. Thank you, Kathleen. We're so deeply grateful for your leadership and the organic movement and everything you've done to get us to where we are today. It's a pleasure to be here with you all. I just love working on agricultural policy because food is so personal. Eating, growing, preparing, even just talking about food is how we connect with each other and connect with the world around us. And that's especially true for organic food. As Kathleen mentioned, Lena Broke and I at NRDC are thrilled to have published Grow Organic in partnership with the Swedish Center team and with Sarah Erd from Californians for Pesticide Reform. And what I hope you'll take away from today's briefing is an understanding that organic is in high demand and growing even with our public policy stacked against it. With stronger, more holistic support, the potential to grow organic and its economic, environmental, and health benefits would increase dramatically. Next slide, please. Organic is unique in that it's a comprehensive farming system with multiple benefits that allow us to solve multiple problems at the same time. Organic is a climate solution. Extreme weather is threatening the stability of food systems globally with particularly acute impacts on indigenous peoples, small scale food producers, and low income households that were acknowledged in the IPC's most recent climate projections. In the US, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimated that in 2021, 20 major weather climate and weather and climate disasters caused $12.5 billion in crop and rangeland losses. I live here in California where we're usually desperate for water. And this year, my heart drops every day when I hear about more farms literally underwater and farm workers who are struggling even more than usual to make ends meet because there are no crops to harvest and they're not getting paid. The IPCC report states that the solution is scaling up, adapting and widely applying tried and tested options that are available now. And organic is one of those tried and tested options. Organic producers reduce the climate footprint of agriculture by avoiding greenhouse gas intensive inputs like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and building healthy soil using practices that make farms more resilient like crop rotation, cover cropping and applying compost, things I'm sure you'll hear about from our farmers on the panel today. Organic animals spend more time on pasture and with careful manure management and that reduces emissions and protects our natural resources. Organic is a health solution. Many common synthetic pesticides are associated with human health threats, including developmental issues in children and various cancers, especially among our farm working families and in farming communities. These pesticides also threaten the health of ecosystems including pollinators that are essential for producing foods like nuts and fruits. And on the flip side, organic foods are often rich in compounds that make plants, animals and people healthier. Organic is an economic solution. Organic producers often earn more for their products and pay less for inputs. So going organic can help struggling farms succeed economically. It's also as Kathleen highlighted, one of the few areas of our food system that has grown consistently for several decades. Organic farms tend to have more crops, products and market diversity, which helps them stabilize their incomes and makes them more resilient even in the face of extreme weather and other disasters. Next slide, please. Organic has come a long way and today four out of five households buy organic on a regular basis. Organic has grown steadily since the national organic program was created a couple of decades ago and organic sales now exceed $50 billion a year in the US. Organic consumers are also diverse. A 2020 study found that 14% of dedicated organic consumers identify as black, 25% as Hispanic and 10% as Asian, which exceeds representation of each of these groups in the US population. Next slide, please. Organic is in every single state. People often think of the coasts when they hear organic, but every state in the US has at least two organic farmers and two organic processing operations and most states have a lot more than that. It's true that leaders in the West and the East have played and continue to play essential roles in the growth of organic, but we also have a critical mass in the middle of the country. As of 2021, Wisconsin had nearly 2000 organic operations. Iowa and Ohio had over 1,000 each and Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, Texas and Illinois each had over 700 organic businesses. Next slide, please. And even so, growth in organic demand is outpacing our domestic supply. The US imported $2.7 billion in organic products in 2021 and demand for commodities like organic grains is particularly high. Next slide, please. But despite that high demand for and the broad benefits of organic, still less than 1% of our agricultural land is managed organically. Why is that? Well, our report concludes that one of the reasons for that disconnect is that organic has not received its fair share of public investments and priority in our agricultural policy. And this underinvestment has made it harder to realize the full potential of organic. Next slide. So our report identifies 10 key policy solutions to shape a 21st century organic sector in the US. I won't go through all of them right now, but the top recommendation, one might be, oh yeah. Sorry, I'm trying to see the slides and look at notes at the same time. Our top recommendation is to expand organic agriculture by reducing barriers to organic transition. Next slide. As Congressman Panetta mentioned, we're working with him on a bill that will be introduced this spring called the Opportunities in Organic Act. We urgently need to grow organic agriculture to address the climate, health, and economic crises we face. And in order to help more producers transition to organic and succeed in the longterm, we need a comprehensive approach to reduce barriers, expand representation, and ensure that organic farmers and ranchers have access to relevant technical assistance and financial flexibility. This means we need to ensure that organic certification is affordable. And it also means we need to meet a lot of types of producers where they are. When we talk about transitioning to organic, we may be talking about farm workers who are carrying on traditional practices as they transition to farm ownership. We may be talking about a farm that's struggling financially and looking for a new business model. Or we may be talking about a seasoned farmer who's finding that they're sinking more and more of their hard-earned money into inputs that are no longer delivering the returns that they used to. All of these producers have unique talents and opportunities, and we need organic programs that are flexible enough to serve them. We also need to make sure that we're stacking our public institutions with adequate expertise and capacity to support all producers, including organic. We hear frequently that when organic farmers go to their local USDA office or university, it's hard to find someone there who speaks organic, even just one person who can advise on natural pest management or building healthy soil. That needs to change. We need to build new markets in tandem with supply and leverage federal spending in areas like procurement to offer stable market opportunities for organic producers. And finally, organic needs to do a better job of reaching people and regions that haven't received a fair share of our public investments in organic to date. The Opportunities in Organic Act would ensure that we have all of these essential pieces working together to entice more producers to go organic and to deliver healthy, affordable food to people across the country. USDA has already started to create this web of support through a new organic transition initiative, and we have an opportunity to build on that in this year's Farm Bill. I deeply share Congressman Panetta's excitement and hope for the Farm Bill year ahead, and I'm looking forward to today's discussion about how we can grow organic, so every farm has an opportunity to steward our environment, to care for people's health, and to make a fair living. Back over to you, Dan, thanks. Great. Thank you, Kathleen and Allison, for that great presentation. Wanted to flag a couple of things. One is Allison and Kathleen were both very generous with recommendations for additional resources for people wanting to learn more or read the Grow Organic Report. You can visit the briefing webpage, which is available at ESI.org. Lots and lots of great reports on all sorts of topics related to organic agriculture. I definitely recommend everyone check those out. And then also, we have a really great panel, and I'll be introducing our next panelists in just a moment. If you would like to ask questions to our panelists, you are welcome to use, you're welcome to do that. You can send us an email, email address to use is ask at ESI.org, and we'll do our best to get to those. You can also follow us on social media, which is at EESI online. So I'm going to introduce the next bundle of panelists, and then we will get into some moderated Q&A, and then we'll open it up a little bit more. I'm gonna introduce first Nate Palpalm. Nate first started in the organic industry when he received certification for his diversified crops and livestock operation. Since 2012, Nate has worked as an organic inspector in 41 states, including for livestock, crop, and processing inspections. Nate has served as a consultant to companies throughout the organic supply chain from multinational companies to startup manufacturers. In 2019, he provided testimony regarding the economic opportunities for farmers through sustainable agriculture before the US House of Representatives, and Nate serves in the farmer's seat on the National Organic Standards Board. Then we will hear from Wendy Johnson. Wendy is the owner and operator of Joya Food Farm, a diversified, certified organic food and fiber farm in Northern Iowa, growing organic grains, raising grass-fed sheep and cows, and humanely raising poultry and pigs. Wendy is co-founder and owner of Counting Sheep Sleep Company, a wool-bedding product company. That is a great name, Wendy. We deserve all the credit for that, I hope. She also co-manages her family's conventional corn and soybean farm and hopes to transition more to organic. Wendy often speaks in rights about the need for diverse enterprises and people on the land, intersections of climate change and agriculture, food system inequality, ag policy and observations on the lands she cares for. Wendy is chair of the Iowa Farm Service Agency State Committee, Midwest Rodale Organic Center Steering Committee member, Climate Land Leaders Co-Policy Lead and Spokesperson, and Wendy also provides leadership on several boards and committees, furthering the growth of a more agriculturally diverse and resilient Iowa in the Midwest. And finally, but not least for sure, Nyameen Martinez is the executive director of the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She has vast experience working with immigrant and indigenous communities across the San Joaquin Valley, managing public health programs in a variety of environmental fields, including pesticides and air pollution. Nyameen serves in various advisory groups, including the pests, pesticide and integrated pest management project, environmental justice advisory group of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, the community stakeholders advisory committee of the University of California, Davis, Environmental Health Science Core Center and the Children's Health and Air Pollution Study. So welcome, Nate and Wendy and Nyameen. Thank you for taking time out of your days as producers and as advocates to help our audience understand organic agriculture from your perspectives. And to kick us off, I'm gonna ask a question and I'm gonna direct this first question to Nate and Wendy. And I would love to hear about your farm. Could you please tell us about your farm and what organic practices look like on your farm? How long have you been practicing organic agriculture and how has your farm and your business as a producer benefited from organic agriculture? Nate, turn it to you first. Absolutely, it's now time to pull up those slides because that's basically all my slides are good for. All right, so hi everybody, my name's Nate Palpalm. I'm based out of Bozeman, Montana, Belgrade before being more accurate, which is just west of Bozeman. And I'm a first generation farmer. I did not, I got to grow up on a five acre plot where my parents allowed me to express an interest in raising one cow. And from there, I really decided that this was gonna be something I would love to shake a stick at. I wanna figure out how I could make a career in farming, not coming from farmers. There's this whole piece that typically you inherit things like farms or fields or livestock. So trying to figure out how would I get my foot in the door while not expecting inheritance coming down the way for me. And that's where I found organic agriculture. So my journey was as a 12 year old, I convinced the state of Montana to give me a loan to buy three more cows. And I'm shocked that they give loans to cows, but deeply grateful. And from there was able to discover this really interesting community of folks who are just doing things a little bit different. They were not being completely enslaved to inputs. They were not worrying about how to manage their family's health while competing with the needs of their crops. They were thinking about how do we innovate the crops that we grow in order to make it so that we have a robust soil building system. And all of that was handed off to me when I started my own farming. So the first slide, as we talked about in, or as Kathleen talked about crop rotation is the cornerstone of organic certification and the entire organic system. And crop rotation allows us to think about all of the different ways that we need to be actively feeding the soil and in turn getting robust yields without outside inputs. As we look to the farm income trajectory since about December of 2021, it has been a bleak picture. There's been a huge spike in inputs. Farmers who aren't organic have really no other options, but to buy those inputs and even with improved crop prices, they're still making very tight margins. On our organic farm, we're able to grow a series of crops that allow us to have basically a closed ecosystem. Our yellow peas feed our wheat, our flax scavenges for extra nitrogen. We have cattle integrated into the system. So whenever I mess up, the cows just eat the mistake and they make it delicious and hamburger. So as we think about the opportunities for our farm, one was we had to get to the point where we're able to not be so concerned with how are we gonna pay the bills? We are not beholding to a bank, where we've been able to farm debt-free from the beginning with a slow growth strategy, but also thinking about all the crops that we can market that might have a more aggressive buying pattern from the consumer package good industry. As I think Allison mentioned, organic is booming. It's got 63 billion in sales. So when we say north of 50, I just wanted to clarify, it's quite a bit north of 50 at this point. It's really exciting. And when Allison showed that map of there are organic farms all across the country, in my intro, we've talked about how I've inspected in about 41 different states. And every single organic farm that I've visited, I feel like we are all in on this secret of how life can be different in rural America and how we can solve so many of the issues that face rural America financially, health as well as environmentally. If we could go to the next slide, please. I happened to farm and I'm really lucky in some very pretty spots. So not to brag that there's mountains that we ski in and then we come down and farm in. But these are my yellow peas. This was a crop that was innovated into my crop rotation by a request of a customer saying, we want to be able to buy a legume that's going to feed the wheat that we normally buy and allow you to have a more closed system raising your own nitrogen. Next slide, please. But we need something to help suppress disease. We can't use synthetic inputs. We can't use herbicides, pesticides or fungicides. So this is where our flax comes in. We're looking at this flax to be able to suppress a number of fungi that attack our wheat seed but also can attack our pulse crops or yellow peas. Next slide, please. More broad scale of that flax. The cool thing that we've discovered with the flax is there is a critical shortage of organic flax in the marketplace that most of it is imported. It's a really fascinating agronomic crop that fits well with existing organic farms. And it's because we don't have the choice to use synthetic inputs. We have to figure out a system. And this is really what I think of the crux and the value proposition of organic is that it makes you basically quick cold turkey, all of these different inputs that keep you hooked on a system that is not entirely resilient. And so by forcing us to figure out a crop rotation that's going to make it so that we don't worry about pest weeds and diseases, but rather we deal with all of those through crop rotation, we're able to have a fairly easy life as far as our relationship to our bankers, as far as the diseases and the worries that we have in the field and also as far as the economic opportunities when we go to sell different crops that are expanding the marketplace. Next slide, please. And this is a broad scale of our flax. We can go another side, please. Montana is wheat country. So this is our Durham wheat. It's sort of the biggest, it's the foundational crop of our operation. I got into organic farming with wheat and it's the most, it's what Montana is known most for. As Allison was listing off the different states by acreages, I was sad not to hear Montana on there because we are the largest organic wheat producer and the best organic wheat producer, if I say so. But it's also something that is very well known to a lot of different farmers. When you say, I'm going to grow organic wheat or to go organic, I'm going to grow wheat, there's a lot more head nodding than if you say, oh, you have to grow some very obscure crop in order to be certified organic. We have figured out in many ways, made huge strides in yields, in agronomy, in plant protection. And we're realizing in many ways, parity with our yields from organic to conventional wheat, which I have just always found to be sort of a North Star. When I talk to my neighbors, mostly who are all conventional, it was always a concern of theirs. Could you feed the world? Is there enough grain coming off these farms to actually take care of the needs of our country and the world? And the answer increasingly is yes, but we need more research. If we think about the research that gets plowed into literally and figuratively, the conventional sector, that's a lot of money that could be doing incredible good if we were to direct more of it to the organic space. Next slide please. So, Kathleen had mentioned regenerative. And I want to just put out my shake on regenerative that it is a bunch of folks doing really incredible, diligent work to try to move towards organic. Regenerative is piece-mealing. All that organic is in a complete package. So when you talk about cover crops or you talk about crop rotation, but you also talk about using pesticide, I do consider you on the path to getting across that goalpost. The difference between organic and regenerative is I would say two specific things. Organic is defined and we have spent 30 years, 30 good years, I almost want to start crying when I think about all of the work that Kathleen has put into making this world possible for us. So thank you, Kathleen. But all of the work that put into that has earned consumer trust. Consumers are hunting for this organic seal for food because they might not know about it, but they know that it is of value to them, be it health for the family, be it the climate proposition, be it if farmers have a better economic outcome. And so the fact that we have earned that consumer recognition and that consumer trust just puts us in a field completely on our own. So when we're saying how do we make it so that you don't need, you do have a free market solution to this climate smart agriculture, organic is an oven ready option. So this product right here, I really like to use it. It's a little hard to see, but it's an Annie's mac and cheese product. I am featured on the back of it along with my buddy Casey Bailey, another farmer in Montana. And my yellow peas and my Durham go into this product. And so the fact that my practices are able to be described and elevated by not only a consumer packaged good, but the organic seal means that we have a direct pipeline to have consumers play a bigger part in sending those economic resources back to the farms. Farmers get more chunk of the food dollar. Farmers are able to have a better shake at more consistent markets, because as Allison said, demand is deeply outstripping supply. And it also gives us a chance to get off the sauce, as it were, with our conventional inputs. And when we think about young farmers being able to get on the land and stay on the land, next slide please. It's gonna take people. And I think we lose sight of that oftentimes when we talk about soil building, all of the practices, good nutrients, different innovations and fertilizer. None of that happens if it's not an economic proposition that actually works for rural farmers, rural communities to thrive with these practices. This is a picture of me and my partner Tanner out in our wheat field. And I just go back to this picture with thinking about what the system is working. And I think that evidence that sits most clearly with me is that for the last 12 years now, we've been able to start a farm, stay on a farm, haven't had to touch any inputs that harm our health or harm our soil, have built our soil, and have made money doing it. And if there's a one-stop-shop for this quest that we're on to address climate change with an agricultural system, got things at it best, it's just organic is ready and it's ready to be really amplified and catalyzed. So thank you, I'm happy. I hope I answered the questions you had in a scattered way. No, it sounds great. Wendy, let's turn it over to you. I'd love to hear about your experience as a producer and learn a little bit more about the products that you produce. Yeah, thanks. I think if you could put Nate's slides up and pretend that our crop rotation has very, it's very similar but slightly different. I think those pictures are great, Nate, and thanks for sharing those. My name is Wendy Johnson. I own and operate Joyo Food and Fiber Farm. It's a very diverse farm that we turned tillable corn and soybean conventional acres and transitioned to organic in 2014. And we started with oats in our rotation. That's usually what we start with oats with an under-seeding of forages, forages for grazing or for hay. And then we utilize those forages and their nitrogen components for corn, which is the following crop and then soybeans. And so we've been certified since 2017. This is an average crop rotation in Iowa. Iowa was on that map earlier. We have around 1,000 farms, I think is what was noted, 1,000 farms. And I think we're fifth or sixth in the nation in terms of organic production. And it's because our soils are so rich in Iowa. We have some of the richest soils in the world and we have the potential to grow an amazing diverse amount of food. But currently it's really corn is grown predominantly and we export a lot of our products such as corn, soybean meal, as well as chickens and hogs for organic food. Our farm is similar. We utilize this rich, rich soil that has very high corn suitable suitability ratings, which is what our property values are based off of, to grow an abundance of corn, which is used for pigs and chickens for feed. But we really could grow a lot more. And so that's what Joya Food and Fiber Farm is really trying to amplify, is that we can grow a really robust amount of food and a diverse amount of food for our local and regional economies. So Joya Food and Fiber Farm grows, we raise lamb, grass-fed lamb. It's certified grass-fed as well as beef and chickens, ducks and turkeys as an eggs. And we sell mostly to a diverse, try to grow the diverse regional markets through buying clubs and just trying to get the food to local and regional consumers. And so we use a plethora of different strategies to try to get our food to consumers, but we really want the food to be less traveled or use less miles, travel miles to get food to the consumer. We really focus on grazing. Grazing is a huge part of our organic rotation. But certified organic grazing doesn't always have a premium. And so one of the things I really like to later voice concerns about is the need for processing, organic processing, for example. But when it comes to organic agriculture, it is for us and how I benefited from organic agriculture. It's everything that's good about agriculture. It promotes just diversity and the healthy ecosystems all while growing this delicious and nutritious food. And it's all about the soil. Organic food is all about the soil. And we as like land stewards and farmers, we rely on only biological and mechanical strategies to grow this food. We don't have the options or an easy way out of using chemicals. So we're working alongside nature and not against it. So I've really benefited from organic agriculture, one because I'm an eater and I'm a consumer of organic food and fiber, but organic agriculture has provided me as a beginning farmer a really a way to be viable. And it's put me in touch with mentors and connected me to a community of other organic farmers and organic eaters and consumers, which that community is just so badly needed today, especially in agriculture. So I feel like I'm more resilient to climate change effects due to the diversity we have on our farm. And I love that the organic label is just huge, everyone knows what it means, the USDA organic label, people trust in that label. And so that really drives the market. So I just really wanna press that we're highly diverse. We also use agroforestry growing trees using civil pasture for our livestock. But it really is, we emphasize that livestock on the land is necessary in organic rotations to really have a robust and resilient organic system. That is great, so good to hear. It's the lunch hour between Nate and Wendy. I'm starting to get hungry for some mac and cheese and some other things. But let's, before we all rush to get our lunches, I mean, I'd love to hear from you about your perspective in California. And specifically, can you tell us a little bit more about what the central environmental, central California environmental justice network does and how have farmers in the communities that you are in touch with, have they been harmed in the past by pesticide use and climate change? And what about that has driven their interest in organic agriculture? Sure, well, thank you for the opportunity to share the story of the central California environmental justice network. But most importantly, the story of the farm workers and residents of rural communities that have been negatively impacted by the heavy use of pesticides that we have in our region. So I will call it CCJ, because it's a super long name, but CCJ has been promoting environmental justice and health equity for the last 23 years. So it's my privilege to take now the leadership of the organization so that we continue fighting for pesticides. Against pesticides, you. Why? Because we have seen that damage that it has done to our farm workers. When I moved to Fresno in 2000, I was impressed because I started right away working with farm workers and I started seeing how much they were drifted. They could be drifted either because they didn't feel where they were working or in that field next door. And a lot of the times, they didn't know how to report those drifted. They were afraid of the population. So the numbers that the Department of Prophecy and Regulation has in terms of aside affecting people, they leave on the reporting of what I just said. Farm workers continue to be afraid of reporting. Just last week in Madera, one of my workers was able to see and record with her phone a pesticide application that was happening while workers were in the field. She approached a contractor and said, please move the workers out or do something to Novel. He did not want to do it. So this is the reality for the thousands of farm workers are harvesting and working endlessly here in our central valley. Sadly, that is known to be the other world. Yes, we feed the world with all our crops. But by doing that, we are relying a heavy use of that. In California, more than 200 million of those chemicals are not only affecting the farm workers. Definitely, they are probably the most affected because they have to go into the field. And even when they are not being drifted, they have to be touching the residue that those chemicals leave in the soil, in the plants that they have to touch. But they are not the only ones being affected. Rural residents who leave fence lines to where these chemicals are applied are also affected. And some of these houses are as close as 50, 100 feet away from where these chemicals are applied. And we have been able to partner with researchers at Juicy Davis, at Colorado State, and have scientific proof of how much of these pesticides go into the homes of these people. How much of these pesticides are in their bodies. And even when we ban pesticides, as you may be aware, chlorpherphous was banned in California even before it was banned in the United States. Well, the study that we did last year encountered pesticides in the home of one of the participants. Encounter chlorpherphous, even after it was banned. So we are still seeing even illegal applications of ban pesticides. So for all of these reasons, I am against the use of pesticides. And also because my interaction with farm workers, many of whom come from Latin America, Mexico primarily, and that have been growing food in their home communities without the use of pesticides, that's the way that we know that there are other ways of growing food in their region. And that's why we're helping and doing the best that we can so that not only we're fighting pesticide by pesticide, but in general, promoting that California transition away from the use of these chemicals. I had the privilege of serving in the Sustainable Pest Management Work Group that was convened by the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the Department of Pesticity Regulation. And one of the strong recommendations of this roadmap that was just released in January is the support for the adoption or to increase the adoption of organic agriculture. And we need to make sure that that is possible for all farmers, especially for small farmers of color. Because what we see here in our region is that they don't get all the millions of dollars that some bigger farmers are receiving. They need technical assistance. They need support to make that transition. And we definitely would like to see less use of pesticides so that we can stop harming our farm workers at rural residents, but also because our whole region will benefit. We have the worst air quality in the entire United States. We have high levels of particulate matter, of ozone, but on top of that, we have all these toxic air contaminants that many of the pesticides are classified as. Contaminated in our air. And let me just don't even start with the water issue. Pesticides that have been done, that banned for decades, are still fine in the water that we drink. And who is affected? Rural residents again. Because their homes are close to where these pesticides are applied. So their water sources are still contaminated. And getting rid of these contaminants is costing our state and taxpayers millions of dollars. Where is the accountability of the companies that are produced pesticides? And I will just end by saying that we have also seen people getting sick, suffering from cancer, suffering from other conditions, health conditions are a result of their exposure to pesticides. So for us, it's a no-brainer. We need to transition away from the use of pesticides and adoption of organic and other sustainable practices. We are doing our part by starting a demonstration farm in Southwest Fresno, where farm workers are gonna be growing vegetables for themselves using organic practice. So thank you for the talk. Well, thank you for joining us. That was a tremendous presentation. And I love your point about how the, this is done differently in different parts of the world as evidence that we don't need to soak everything in pesticides all the time. I am gonna turn now to the full panel and I would love to hear perspectives from everyone with a couple of questions. And Kathleen, I think we'll start with you and then maybe we'll go through the presentation order. I made a little joke that's only half joke at the beginning, which is that every congressional staff person will become a farm bill staff person at some point in the next 12 months. That's mostly true actually. Most of those staff people are not, they don't come from a farming background. They, if they do, they probably don't come from an organic farming background, but the farm bill is going to have a lot to do with sort of the future of agriculture or organic agricultural practices in the US. And so for a congressional staff person who's watching us online today who doesn't know a whole lot about organic agriculture knows maybe just what they've heard over the last hour or so. What would you tell Congress? What should you, what would you ensure that Congress knows about organic agriculture as they start to put the 2023 farm bill together? And Kathleen, let's go to you and then we'll open it up to Allison and everyone else who would like to have an opportunity to weigh in. Sure, I would begin by saying about 6% of food that Americans eat is organic. And yet less than 1% of the resources that USC A puts out in the street is focused on organic. So I think just closing that gap alone would be wonderful. And I've probably visited over the course of my career nearly 2000 farms and processing facilities. The best way to learn about organic is go to an organic farm in your district. Farmers are there, they're happy to explain what's going on. We've had some great participants here on this panel because organic is as complex as I said, you know, hundreds of pages of rules and all that. The best way to understand what's going on is walking with a farmer on the fields. I always say to my students, I teach public policy, you never should write a policy without having conversations with people who are actually producing our food. So put on your boots and enjoy the great outdoors. That sounds like you're inviting us all over to Montana or Iowa to check out how things are going at these farms. So I could get behind that. Alison, I'd love to hear from you next. What would you want to make sure that Congress knows about organic agriculture as they get started on the farm bill? Sure, thank you. I think it's really important to understand that we need a food systems approach. We have so many programs that are pulled together and there's one huge piece of legislation. But what we hear really consistently from farmers and especially organic farmers is it's hard to figure out the programs, they don't know about them, they don't get guidance or they don't know where to go for guidance. So making sure that we have programs that work together are flexible and that meat farmers and ranchers where they are is really essential. And Wendy mentioned in her comments the need for processing capacity, particularly is something that sometimes is overlooked. I could sit here and listen to Nate and Wendy talk about their farms all day. And it gives me such a visual picture of being on the farm and what it's like to live in rural communities and grow our food. But often sometimes we gloss over then, well, you need a truck to take it to a silo and you need some machines to process it and turn it into what the consumers actually eat. So we need to attend to all of those pieces and then make sure that we're leveraging our federal investments in agriculture in smart ways to maximize the benefits of what we're spending. So that's particularly important for organic, but hopefully we'll also be an overarching umbrella for this whole Farm Bill season. Thank you for that. Nate and Wendy, I mean, please feel free to jump in with your perspectives about what our policy makers should know about organic agriculture. I would just throw in that any support we give to organic, we are chasing the opportunity to bring three to six billion dollars home to American organic farmers. And so we are leaving that much money on the table with the imports because like Allison said, 6% and I think Kathleen as well, 6% is the food market, but only 1% is grown in America. And so thinking about all of that opportunity just seems like a stunning move to be able to in a climate smart manner, expand the opportunities for all American farmers using organic. I'd like to. Yeah, I echo the comments and also would like to say that definitely will be a way of tackling climate change from another angle that is often times over under explored. We're focusing on carbon capture. We're focusing on fossil fuels, all of which is important. But in my experience, I think that at least here in California, a lot of the discussion about climate change has never touched best as I use. And I think it's important to start tackling that. And also I'd like to say that it was amazing to me to hear that the rotation of crops and all that is happening in organic farms, which is not the case in most of the big corporations that we have in the valley. They say that we feed the world, but I always say, I don't only eat almonds, I like almond milk, but I eat all the things. And what we have seen in the valley is the transition just because of profiting interests from the farmers of other crops to monocropes such as the nuts, pistachios, almonds that are more profitable for them. We export them, so we're not even eating them here in the valley. A lot of our farm workers are experienced with insecurity. The irony, they're growing fruits and vegetables for the other parts of the world, but we're not having access to that. Organic fruits and products are not available for many farm workers because of the cost. If organic was a more extensive practice, the cost would go down and all of us will be able to afford it, regardless if we are high income or low income. So definitely going and visiting all the benefits of organic farms and not only what a report, a written report can offer will be great. Thanks. This is such an exciting year because it's a farm bill year. And so there's many things that I can say about this and the work that you all can do, but really we really need more support for organic processing and organic grazing lands, for example, and some crop insurance inclusivity. And Nate pointed to something earlier and it's about people. There has just been with organic agriculture because we are focused on biological and mechanical methods, we need more people. And there is a serious lack of not only labor pools, but also the next generation of organic farmers that have access to land. And I love Nate's story of how he accessed land as a first generation farmer. It's quite inspiring, but the organic agriculture movement needs to also have, along with federal policy, put in some investment into infrastructure and making it available to a lot of different people who want to access land and farm organically. Also, we don't have a lot of tangible food in Iowa that we grow for a more robust and regional food and local food systems as we export a lot of things. So infrastructure is just a huge part of that, not only with processing, but also with creating more of a resilient regional local food system, which we saw during the pandemic, a lot of local producers were able and regional producers were able to really step up and step in, but that access to land peace and that technical assistance is probably a really big, is also a really big piece specifically for emerging farmers. I'm very privileged to have land access, but the major barrier is that there is not. And so how do we grow that next generation of farmers, organic farmers, to steward the land and grow the food for the nation for a really food secure nation? We also lose premiums on several of the first three years that we need to, when we need to access capital. And so just having some infrastructure support around grants and low interest loans that are flexible during those transition years so that farmers can remain viable in those years and not have a huge loss. That's great. Thank you so much, Wendy and everyone. And Wendy, you and Nate both touched on this and we actually got a question from our online audience that I think this would be a good way to toss in. And it's about sort of the workforce that supports organic agriculture. And this person's writing in from Idaho and she specifically sites a need for more organic inspectors. And I'm curious, what are the workforce shortages that you all have identified that might be a barrier to more organic farming? Is it inspectors? Is it on the processing side? Are there other places around sort of the organic sub-sector of the agriculture sector where there are acute workforce needs? And Wendy, I'm happy to start with you. And then I'd love to hear from everyone else too if you have any thoughts about this question. Yeah, so in Iowa, there's just so you know to lay out the land. There's 30 plus million acres of tillable acres in Iowa but only 130,000 acres are certified organic. So there's a huge, huge difference and understanding those barriers is key. I am also a conventional farmer. I have more acres that I could transition to organic but there's several barriers which I listed earlier infrastructure is a huge one. But in terms of labor, there is a lack of labor pools as well as a lack of agronomists who in the conventional world, you can go five miles down the road, visit your agronomist or your agronomist comes to you. They sell your chemicals, your everything. Where is that in the organic world? That's something that we need here out in Iowa and across the US in terms of agronomic help, agronomic technical assistance and accessing the markets that you know, I'm gonna give an example. Our ethanol plant in Iowa, majority of corn in Iowa, a lot of it goes to ethanol. So that ethanol plant is only two miles down the road. I can grow the corn and I can get it to that ethanol plant very quickly and very cheaply. But to get to sell organic products, it has to go really far away and so that infrastructure is a barrier as well. And so thanks for bringing up that labor pool or the labor portion of it because we also don't have a lot of people who are, how do they access the land? How do they get interested in organic agriculture? How can they even practice organic agriculture if they don't have access to land? And so we have this really big barrier that we need to be able to overcome to get more people on the land, big or small, we just need more. And so that would be, that in agronomist would be my biggest things to say. Thanks. Nate, please go ahead. And Nymeen and Allison and Kathleen too, please feel free to chime in after Nate if you'd like. As Kathleen said, we need to put organic on speakerphone. And I think that's something that we're really running into especially with something like organic inspectors that kids leaving their undergrad or their community college have no idea that there is a 70 to $90,000 a year job out there where you get to travel the country and talk with amazing farmers and be the eyes and ears of the organic consumer. And that's just something that is not at the job fair. So it's how do we really start bragging and blowing our own horn to make sure that everyone understands what opportunities outside of actually tilling the land exist in our sector. And there is a robust ecosystem of jobs out there. I just wanna upvote Wendy's point about infrastructure. I wrote a white paper about a year ago saying let's make organic boring again. And it was really just we shouldn't have to ship grain so far. We should have a lot of the same patterns that we had for generations where we're taking we have offtake opportunities. As Wendy said, you wanna be able to drive to the same elevator that your grandpa drove to and drop your corn that's three miles from your house. As opposed to me, right before this call I was shipping grain all the way to South Dakota it's gonna be a 13 hour trip that that grain is on. And so figuring out if we can make organic elevators if we can make organic offtake organic rail spurs if we can educate all of those workers in those respective facilities what organic is we're gonna have so much of a better infrastructure opportunity to have farmers have farmers realize that opportunity to have a consistent economic offtake opportunity. Sorry, a lot of opportunities in there. That's good. That's a good thing. Kathleen, Allison, please go ahead. Okay. Well, echo everything that's been said I will add the issue of adequate number of technical service providers. So when we go forward to the farm bill there's gonna be a lot of talk and focus on climate smart production practices. And at USDA it's NRCS that provides those services to farmers that kind of prop counseling that sort of thing. There is just not enough people who have organic expertise who have been certified by NRCS to be technical service providers. That's a real opportunity to do something positive for organic in the context of the next farm bill. And I'll add a personal story and a plug. When I finished my schooling at least the first time around I was looking for jobs and I interviewed for a certification job at CCOF. And I remember Jake Lew and the person who interviewed me saying you'll be one of the few people in the country who's an expert in this law and has this expertise. That shouldn't be the case but it really stuck with me because it was not a job I heard about in college. I had no idea that there was a career in organic that wasn't as a farmer. And so having that be an option that's provided to students as they're going through school or people who aren't going through a university system even straight out of high school or coming from a farming background there are a lot of ways to be involved in organic that are not strictly as producers. And the plug is that is one of the things that our Opportunities in Organic Act is trying to get at. This bill was developed through about three years of outreach to producers, to organizations that serve organic folks across the country at various scales. And one of the things consistently was the need for more capacity and technical assistance to help organic producers and handlers through their path. So the bill would have funding to help train organic inspectors to help farms explore inspection as an opportunity to bring in more farm income, trying to sort of build the critical mass of people who are serving the organic sector to bring down the cost of certification and make sure that all of the resources producers need are where they are because you shouldn't have to go as when you were saying so far to find a processor. You shouldn't have to go so far to find someone who can advise you. We need these skills and capacities to be much more prevalent. So that's one of the things that will happen if we adopt this bill through the Farm Bill. Thanks. And I mean, before we move on, if you have anything you'd like to add, I want to make sure we give you an opportunity to share your perspective. Yeah, well, just a quick comment that in terms of Opportunities, I think for our small farmers, especially farmers of color here in the Central Valley, I still see a need of technical assistance. A lot of them have the language barrier issue. They are Southeast Asians, they are Latinos. So if you don't have someone that speak your language, a lot of them older generations are not familiar with the internet. The applications to receive funding from USDA or even from CDFA are very labor-intensive. Small farmers might be operating their farms on their own with the help of a few people. And they don't have that technical expertise of navigating all these online websites and all that that are for them to apply for support. And even that I would say that that could be an important job opportunity that I don't think has been offered here for us careers in our valley. Most people that go into agricultural is because they own land, but people that do not own land but might have an interest could be those technical experts that can, because they might have the familiarity with the farmers or the small farmers and also the language skill. Thank you for that. So USDA has come up a couple of times, whether it's NRCS or technical assistance or other things. And this may have to be our last question we'll see. But Allison, I'll start with you for this one. And then I'd love to hear from the other panelists as well. Climate smart agriculture is an often discussed topic. We've talked a lot about it today. And USDA has rolled out significant opportunities to encourage climate smart agricultural practices. But where does organic fit into that in terms of what USDA is trying to accomplish to make the agriculture sector less of a contributor to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions? It's a great question. And it's really exciting to be in a position where we're hearing so much about climate smart agriculture a few years back, even getting people who think about climate to think about agriculture in the same sentence was a lot more challenging than it is today. So I'm really excited about the direction that we're heading. I think there's a lot of room to have more recognition of organic as a climate solution. We're, I hear a lot of conversations around climate friendly farming, climate smart agriculture focused on what's happening in the soil, which is one important part of the puzzle, but reducing our agricultural emissions is another huge part. And that has to do with reducing reliance on energy intensive inputs and practices that generate emissions. So I'll just pull out one example. Synthetic fertilizer is extremely energy intensive to produce and it also contributes to emissions when it's used. The production and use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer alone accounts for 2.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So organic producers are doing away with those emissions completely and using practices that help pull carbon out of the atmosphere, that help provide a really wide range of environmental benefits on top of that. So making sure we're accounting for that emissions piece and making sure that our USDA programs around climate smart agriculture acknowledge what's built into the organic rules so that we can kind of fast line organic producers to lead those programs and benefit from the resources that are becoming available. Thank you. Kathleen, other panelists, thoughts about USDA's role in all of this? Sure, I'll just follow on to what Allison said because I think the fertilizer issues, a big one, nitrous oxide, we talk about that when we talk about climate all the time. So you might wonder, well, how do farmers fertilize their fields? And you heard about crop rotation, you saw pictures of these fields, that's great. A lot of times I get the question about use of raw manure by organic farmers and I just wanted to spell that notion. For the most part, organic farmers are composting, there's very strict rules about this and if they are using raw manure, they have rules to follow unlike any other kind of farmer in this country. I could go through the details, but let me just say when FDA completed their rulemaking for the Food Safety Modernization Act just a couple of years ago in the fine print, I'm a nerd, I read all the details of these rules, it said, we haven't decided what the rule of law should be for the country around raw manure in a meat and we're gonna keep working on it, FDA says, for maybe the next 10 years, but in the meantime, it would be prudent for all farmers to follow the organic standards. So I just wanna point that out there because people don't realize, again, how strict the standards are for organic beyond any other kind of program of agricultural production out there. And other panelists, please feel free to jump in, Wendy. I'd like to add, I guess two words come to mind, ecosystem services and organic agriculture provides really some valuable ecosystem services. And when I speak to ecosystem services, I talk about we're protecting and cleaning our water, we're building the soil tilth so that we can hold more water in our soils. We're sequestering more carbon because we have diverse rotations, including forages and using rotational grazing to sequester more carbon. These systems have value and these climate smart commodities, these climate smart practices in the USDA could really help with that, have creative value or data points, value to those ecosystem services so that organic farmers can practice more of it. It's almost like a public service that we're offering people and humanity is our way of agriculture, the way of farming that promotes more perennials on the land and grows food while growing food for people. So I'd like to see incentivizing that for more transition. Thank you for speaking up. I was afraid we were gonna end on the note of raw manure. So I'm glad to hear from Wendy and now from Nate and hopefully from Niamhine as well. Niamhine, happy to give you the last word. Nate, go ahead. Thank you. Just again, building off of Wendy, what Wendy said. Organic is climate smart and we don't have time to read or how we build an ecosystem and a marketplace where consumers can pay farmers to do those services. We are ready for our agriculture built in marketplace. That's where $63 billion. So whatever we send to the organic marketplace is going to be a private market solution to all of the goals that the climate smart commodity program stated. Niamhine, please feel free. I'm happy to give you the last word today if you'd like. Well, since organic is climate smart and on the flip side, pesticides are exacerbating climate change. It's a no-brainer. Please expand, support, invest in organic farming. Great. Well, thank you. Tremendous panel. Kathleen, Alice and Nate, Wendy and Niamhine. Thank you so much for joining us today and Nate and Wendy, special thanks for taking time out of your busy day as producers. My wife grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont and I know that those people never get a break. Those cows need to be milked every day. So thanks so much for joining us. Also like to sort of express once again very, very special thanks to our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council for sharing their report with us and their expertise today on the panel and helping us and supporting us as we pulled this briefing together. So thank you so much. Also like to say special thanks to Representative Panetta for joining us today and sharing your thoughts about where all of this needs to go and thanks to his staff for making his participation possible. There are lots of people at EESI behind the scenes who make all of these briefings possible and I'd like to thank Dan Oh, Ameri, Emma, Alice, and Anna and Molly, as well as our three tremendous interns, Linley, Tyler, and Madeline. And even further behind the scenes is Troy, the person, our videographer, who helps pull all of the technology together and produce such a great looking session today. So thanks to you as well. My colleague Dan Oh is about to pop up a slide with a link to a survey. If folks in our online audience have two minutes to take the survey, we'd really appreciate hearing your feedback. Did you have any issues with the audio quality or video quality? Did you have any questions with how to ascend in questions, you know, questions, website, whatever? We read every response. And so we really do value everyone's willingness to help us improve our congressional education programming. And there, again, are the links. We have, I think I mentioned this at the beginning, we have a whole bunch of briefings coming up about the Farm Bill. They will start in mid-April and they'll run through mid to late June or so. We're going to have a briefing about Farm Bill 101, which no one will want to miss. We're going to have a briefing about Farm Bill Win-Win, so things that produce or things that generate mitigation and adaptation benefits. We're going to have a briefing about rural development. We're going to have a briefing about forestry. We're going to have a briefing about conservation. And that's just between now and June. So there may be more to come. We also have what I call our side-by-side-by-sides, which are our charts that will eventually help people orient themselves with the different proposals coming out of the House and Senate. And we have our hearing tracker. We also have our climate solutions map. So if you want to learn about climate solutions, say in Montana or Iowa or the Central Valley of California, you can click and you can learn about our resources as they apply to those places. We also will be recruiting for a position coming up in the next couple of weeks, too. So if you like what you saw today and you're thinking about perhaps joining us at ESI, if you visit our website, you can bookmark our careers page as well if you'd like to learn more about that. We are a couple of minutes over, but I think it was well worth it. Thanks once again to Kathleen and Allison and Nate and Wendy and Nymeen for their tremendous presentations. Thank you to NRDC for helping make all of this possible and thanks to Representative Panetta for showing great leadership on the issue and taking time out of your busy day to be with us as well. Hope everyone has a great rest of your Thursday afternoon and we'll see you coming up for the next briefings, no one will want to miss those. So thanks again, everybody.