 Welcome everyone. This is the second webinar in a series of five webinars for a workshop under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences Environmental Health Matters Initiative. Today, we're gonna be continuing our workshop series, Reducing the Health Impacts of the Nitrogen Problem. My name is Kathy Kling. I'm a Tish University professor at Cornell University and I'm delighted to have been the chair of the organizing committee for this important webinar and workshop. I am waiting for my slides, which repeats that title and here they come. In the meantime, please note that we are using a Slack channel to augment and encourage conversation and questions. So if you look below your Zoom screen, you should see directions on how to get into that Slack channel and we really encourage your participation, comments, questions, interaction. As I said, this is Reducing the Health Impacts of the Nitrogen Problem and this is, again, to repeat the second in a workshop series of five webinars. Next, please. I'm the chair of the committee that has organized and planned this workshop. The other members of the committee are shown on your screen here, Alina Austin, Jerry Hatfield, who will be moderating the session today, Jim Galloway, Jennifer McPartland, Robin Wilson, and Raj Khosla. In addition, it's very important for us to acknowledge the incredible heavy lift of the staff at the National Academies of Sciences, Caroline Janelle Walsh-Thomas and Sarah Harper have all been critical members in organizing, undertaking all of the logistics and making sure things run smoothly. Thank you to them. Next, please. Before I turn this second workshop webinar over to Jerry Hatfield, who will moderate the rest of the day, I wanted to quickly review the purpose of the web shop, the webinar and workshop, and give you a very brief summary of last week's foundational workshop. The title, Opportunities in US Agriculture to Reduce Public Health Risks of Nitrogen in Water, identifies the goals of the workshop. We in the National Academies under the Environmental Health Matters Initiative want to provide a place for information exchange and to provide a place for information exchange focused on the interdisciplinary science that is behind what we know about health risks, what we know about the role of nitrogen, important role of nitrogen in agriculture and the many ways in which nitrogen leaves agricultural fields and moves through water and potentially poses a health risk. The goal is an information exchange based on science, what we know, what we don't know. Second, we want that to then provide a platform for informed discussion. We want to be action-driven. We want to think about opportunities for change opportunities that cross the private sector, producers and consumers, NGOs, the government sector, state and federal government policies and everyone interested in this important issue. And importantly, we hope that this series of webinars and the overall workshop will move towards accelerating progress. We will be putting together a workshop synthesis at the end of the fifth webinar, but there will be no conclusions, there will be no recommendations drawn. This is an information gathering and communication activity. Next please. As I said, what I want to do before turning this over to Jerry to run the rest of the workshop is a very brief overview. Those of you who were able to join us last week saw a terrific set of presentations under the title, What is the Nitrogen Problem? I'll give us a brief summary of that, but first I want to tell you that today's topic is what farm level actions can be taken to address the nitrogen problem. We're now moving on farm and into decision making to learn about the economics, the incentives, the motivations for the way in which farming is done and the types of technologies that can be brought to bear on this problem. Next week we'll be talking about landscape level actions and innovative technologies, followed in week four by possible changes or continuation of policies and development of markets to see the degree to which they might be able to contribute solving these problems. And our final workshop will be focused on reflection and synthesis. Next please. Very briefly, last week we heard from six speakers. I kicked off the event with a very quick high level overview of the most important regulations and policies in the US addressing nutrients in water. I noted that the 1972 Clean Water Act at the federal level regulates water pollution from industry, but that most of agricultural sources from what we refer to as non-point sources, cropland for example, are not covered under that policy and that the approach there is voluntary as opposed to regulatory. The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 regulates drinking water from public water providers, but likewise has a gap in that it does not cover about 15% of the US population, 43 million people who draw their water primarily from private wells. Mary Ward provided an excellent overview about the state of knowledge. In summary, the strongest evidence for a relationship between drinking water nitrate ingestion and adverse health outcomes, including colloquially blue baby syndrome because I can't pronounce that word, is for colorectal cancer, thyroid disease and neural tube defects. Future studies of these and other health outcomes should include improved exposure assessment, especially for the highly exposed population using private wells. Craig Cox gave us an overview of what we know about the extent of contamination of drinking water sources, noting that those contamination has been observed at levels now understood to threaten human health, but a lack of concerted effort to collect data and monitor has left us unaware of the full extent of the issue. Next please. From there, Ken Kasman talked about the critically important role of nitrogen fertilizer as an input to the productivity of food, fiber and fuel production from agriculture, both here and around the world. And he suggested that a national agenda is needed to better understand how to balance production and environmental quality. Matt Helmers discussed nitrogen loss, the fact that it is prevalent throughout the United States agriculture and is exacerbated by the use of annual crops and tile-drained landscapes that have fundamentally altered the hydrology of millions of acres in this country. Finally, Eric Davidson brought us back to the role of nitrogen, the fact that it is a leaky nutrient, it leaks out to the environment in many places along the continuum of our food system. And knowledge of where those leaks and inefficiencies occur and exist can help us to design and better target effective approaches to mitigate the problem. Next please. With that, I'm gonna show again a picture I shared last week, which emphasizes I hope for you the scale of the agricultural footprint in the United States about, well, 900 million acres of farmland have been reported through the 2017 agricultural census. It is an extensive area about half 45%, 44% of US land is used in agriculture. We're talking about nutrients coming in small amounts from large area. And I hope that that helps provide some important foundation for the discussion we're gonna hear now. So next, I'm delighted to turn this to Jerry Hatfield, who will take away and take us on down into the farm and learn about lots of technologies and issues addressed facing farmers. Thank you, Jerry. Thanks, Kathy, and welcome everybody to the second of our workshop series and all of this. And as Kathy pointed out on our speakers last week, gave us a big overview of nitrogen and the environment, all of this. And today we're going to explore really about technologies and really perceptions about nitrogen. And we're gonna start off with probably one of the most important pieces of this and that's what causes farmers to make the decisions that they do. And it's probably no one person better to describe this than Linda Prokopi. And I should point out to the audience that all the bios are on the website for all the speakers. So I won't go through those, but it's my pleasure to welcome Linda Prokopi to give us her reflections on just what decisions farmers make and the actions that they do. So Linda, thank you. Thanks, Jerry. All right, well thank you everyone for the opportunity to speak with you today about what motivates farmer decision making around conservation. And on the left hand side of my image here is a very famous figure. It's the diffusion of innovations curve developed by Everett Rogers many decades ago, but it is frequently pulled out in agricultural meetings to discuss farmers. Well, you've got the innovators who adopt really, really early, then you've got the early adopters, early majority, and then this group here at the end, the laggards who are apparently the slow to never adopters. This is a helpful way to think about farmers or really anyone in terms of adoption of any kind of innovation. But there's a lot more to understanding decision making than just understanding this curve. So let's see, I am controlling the screen. There we go. There have been a number of studies over the last three plus decades looking at what explains farmer decision making around conservation practices in the United States. We've done a couple of reviews about literature published within the last couple of years. So most of what I'm gonna talk about today comes from all of the literature across the entire United States. But when I actually showed data that all of my personal data comes from the Midwestern US, specifically Indiana where I am, Illinois and Iowa, affectionately known as the three I States where we have a lot of tile-drain agriculture. So I particularly like this model here to explain farmer behavior. And I'm gonna, most of my talk really just walk us through this model and think about what it tells us about farmer decision making. So all the way over here on the left, we have background factors. And there are three key types of background factors. There are socio-demographics. So for example, we know that the older a farmer is, the less likely they are to adopt a practice. Conversely, we know that the higher the education level of a farmer, the more likely they are to adopt a practice. So demographics are interesting of course, but it's hard to change demographics. They're not necessarily that helpful to understanding decision making. The component of personal characteristics that is much more interesting, I think, are really people's underlying values and personalities. And there are a number of different values that have been identified to be associated with conservation decision making. So farmers who have more of a stewardship identity or an innovator identity are much more likely to adopt practices than farmers whose primary identity is more financially motivated. So in other words, farmers who think about the environment and their decision making, or who just love to try new things. Relatedly really to innovator thinking is this role of systems thinking. Some recent studies have really shown that farmers who think about their system holistically, their farm as a combination of all of the different practices, all of the fields, all of the ecosystems are much more likely to adopt conservation practices. And then farmers who are seekers and users of information are more likely to adopt practices. A number of farm characteristics are also associated with conservation adoption. So for example, farms with livestock are more likely to adopt certain different types of practices. Larger farms are more likely to adopt conservation practices. And farms that are more vulnerable. So in this picture here on the right where you see erosion, farms with more erosion, more vulnerable slopes are more likely to adopt practices. And then the final background factor is huge, right? It's really everything else that's going on in both the rural economy, but also globally. So commodity prices affect whether or not someone's going to adopt conservation practice. The climate and certainly climate change and people's opinions et cetera towards climate change affect conservation adoption. Policies affect conservation adoption and those can be state level, but primarily really federal level policies. And then all of us, right? So all of us are consumers of food and agricultural products. And what we demand and what we ask for also influences a farmer's decision making. So all of these different background factors are going on when a farmer is presented with a particular practice and is thinking about whether or not they would want to adopt it. When they're thinking about that, they're thinking about practices along these different characteristics. They're thinking, is it relatively advantageous? Is it better than whatever I'm doing already? How complex is it? Is it compatible with my existing practices? Can I observe it? Can I trial this on a small piece of land and then can I see if it's effective? And then of course risk. How risky is this practice? Is this something that I would actually want to do? I thought I would just pop up some pictures here. You're going to hear more about these types of practices later on this afternoon, but just that we're all thinking about similar types of things. On the upper left here, we have cover crops. Down the bottom left, a wetland. And on the right, we have some nitrogen applications. So these are very, very different practices and these are just a very small subset of the different types of practices that a farmer is challenged to think about whether or not to adopt to help to address the nitrogen problem. All of these practices have different characteristics and how a farmer perceives those different characteristics will be very much a function of their own personal background, where they are, what's going on in their community. The other thing to understand, of course, is one of those background factors that can really help influence someone's perception of a practice are policies that can help support the adoption. And at the federal level, we have a lot of what are called cost share programs where effectively the government shares the cost of practice implementation with an individual farmer. In most of our states, throughout most of the U.S., the adoption of these types of practices is a voluntary decision, but that cost share money is available to sort of help incentivize the farmer to adopt because all of these practices, as I'm sure you can well imagine, cost money. So just to bring some sort of, I see a human field to my talk, I pulled in some quotes here from some farmers just to illustrate some of the different practice characteristics and how those are mobilized and the kinds of things farmers say. So here's one from Iowa. I've never done cover crops. I can see some benefits of it, but when you get looking at the financial end of it and then the interim who's paying for that for the producer and reduction in yields or whatever. So definitely some concerns here about risk. Are my yields going to go down? Is this going to cost me money? That's really sort of a relative advantage. Is this going to cost me more money than whatever else I'm already doing? We've all identified that when you need to put cover crop on, it's after harvest. It's not everybody has that time. So this is an illustration really of compatibility. If adopting a practice is not compatible with the way that you run your farm, perhaps the folks who are managing that farm also have off-farm jobs. It can be very challenging to do some practices that need to happen at different times of year. I've never done cover crops. I can see some benefits of it. Oh, that's the same quote. Oops, we won't read that one again. There was another quote that was good, but it's gone. If you're talking about cover crops, it's a timing thing. You get such small windows of time where you can do something that's a positive thing rather than a negative thing. I don't know how you mix that cover crops into the mix when you're trying to just take care of business. And you can see here, we see some compatibility around timing. We see some relative advantage. Is this good? Is this bad? But we can also see in this quote how someone's personal characteristics interface with those practice characteristics, right? So this is a farmer who's very financially motivated and I'll speak caveat out there that all farmers have to be financially motivated or they'll go out of business. But some farmers certainly are much more motivated by this business mentality than a stewardship identity or an innovator identity. So we see this background factor of business motivation interfacing with some of the characteristics of cover crops to lead to a pretty negative attitude towards cover crops, which is the next box here in our diagram. So these background factors, practice characteristics affect three different real thinking around behaviors and specific practices. So they certainly inform an individual farmer's attitude towards a particular practice. They also inform norms and how a farmer thinks other people in their community think about this practice. Are other farmers doing this practice? Do people that they trust think this practice is a good idea? We've just concluded some work recently looking at counties across the three I States. So counties that are very biophysically similar but have very different levels of cover crop adoption. And what we found is that the counties with high levels of cover crop adoption and highest relative, as you'll hear later from Alejandro, the counties with the higher level of cover crop adoption have what we identified through our focus groups and interviews as a cover crop culture. So this real norm in those counties that cover crops are a good thing and that if you have bare soil in the winter that's a really bad thing and that's negatively perceived in that community. Norms are very, very powerful for behavioral decision making. So the other piece, of course, of norms is who do farmers talk to and who do they trust and who influences them? And this data here is from a survey that was done in 2012. So it's a little dated, but I haven't really seen any data that suggests this is no longer accurate. But this is a survey conducted across 12 States in the Midwest across the entire North Central region. And we asked farmers to indicate how influential the following groups and individuals are when you make decisions about ag practices and strategies. And they're grouped from left to right. So the groups on the left are the most influential and then least influential on the right. And I wanna point out who's here on the left. We have family, so not surprisingly, family is gonna be influential on someone's decision making. But then we have chemical dealer, seed dealer, consultant. This is the private sector, right? This is not, these are not the folks that we're paying to go out and talk to people that's their NRCS. Down here, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Farm Service Agency, University Extension. This private sector is very influential. These are the folks who farmers are talking to the most often. They're talking to them about some of the day-to-day practices of their farm. And so we hypothesized based on this data from our survey done in 2012 that working, trying to form partnerships with this private sector might be a really effective way to get conservation on the ground. And a number of different entities are now doing that throughout the Midwest. And are indeed finding that partnering with the private sector is very effective. One watershed we looked at was up in Michigan, the Saginaw Bay watershed. We partnered with the Nature Conservancy there to do an evaluation of a large program that was the Natural Resources Conservation Service partnering with the Michigan Agri-Business Association. And we found that new farmers were coming in the door of government agencies to sign up for practices and to sign up for cost share funding. And they were being brought there by their private crop advisor. So it is very effective to really think about who farmers are talking to and try to loop them into the conversation to, again, try to influence norms. Then the third of these categories is perceived behavioral control. Perceived behavioral control is super important. This is how much you, the person, the farmer or you, whatever decision it is, thinks what kind of control they think they have over this particular behavior. So it could be technical. Do I think I have the right kind of equipment for this behavior? Do I think I have enough money to adopt this behavior? Do I actually control this decision? One of the really important barriers to someone having control over their behavior that emerges in the Midwest is the role of rented farmland. So this map actually looks very similar to the one Kathy showed earlier, which I wrote it down, but I can't see what I wrote. The agricultural, where ag happens, basically. So the dark colors on this map, the dark maroon colors, is an overlay of counties that have high levels of nitrogen export and the percent of rented farmland. So in 60% of the land in the Midwest, and this is a problem across the country, the person farming the land does not own the land. If you don't own the land you're farming, you don't have a lot of control necessarily over the practices on that land. Conversely, if you're the landowner, I'm talking, my cool model here and talking about it from the perspective of the farmer, but you can also think about this from the perspective of the landowner. If you're the landowner, but you're not farming the land, you might not feel like you have control. And we've interviewed and talked to a lot of landowners who indeed say they don't feel like they have control. My tenant knows more about farming than I do. I don't want to interfere. I might lose them as a tenant. I don't have control over that decision. It's a huge issue. We've done some work partnering with the Nature Conservancy and Johns Hopkins University to try to reach these landowners and try to encourage them to talk to their tenants. So very briefly, we enrolled over 2000 landowners in the three I States into an experiment. And these are all people who had earlier responded to a postcard mailer and they had said, yes, I want to learn more about soil health. Our sample was 2,200 landowners, as I said. And these are folks who said they were not using cover crops in the last three years. We mailed over 800 of them a beautiful packet of information about cover crops and how they could get local support to learn more about cover crops. And we sent them, so we sent them information. Another group, we sent them information plus some template lease language or that they could use to get conservation written into their leases with their tenants. And then a smaller subset, 479, we mailed them the information, the lease template and a financial offer. And the financial offer was quite a generous financial offer. Given the cost of adopting cover crops, we offered them funding to get 30 acres of cover crops adopted on some of their farmland that they were not farming. And only 1.5% of those landowners took the financial offer. We did a subsequent trial where we mailed only 100 landowners, much higher financial offer to see if they would take it and only 5% of them took it. So this tells us, what tells us many things. One thing this tells us is that money is not always the biggest barrier to adoption. I often say that money is necessary to get practices adopted because of course they cost money and we have to help fund those. But it's often not sufficient. There are other things that are barriers and one of the big barriers again in the case of landowners tenants is really that relationship and getting the two sides to talk to each other. All right, so moving along our model, we have all of these different things. All of these come together to form somebody's intention to adopt a practice. Now farmers are just like the rest of us and make all kinds of good intentions and don't follow through, right? It can be due to inertia that I've made this decision but I'm not actually taking the steps. It can also be because after you've made the decision to adopt a practice, you realize you don't actually have the control you thought you had. In the case, for example, of nitrogen application, it could be that you've made this intention to I'm gonna apply my nitrogen throughout the growing season. That's better for runoff. It gets more of the nitrogen into the plants and then you go to implement that and you realize as you start looking into equipment and doing the rest of the pieces that you know what actually nitrogen is not available throughout the whole growing season in my area so I don't really control that practice if I can't buy what I need at the right time. But in an ideal world, intention leads to behavior and often our behavioral decision models stop at behavior and I'm gonna suggest that we think about one more step and that is the step of persistence. So it's not enough to just understand what motivates a farmer to adopt a practice. We really need to be looking at what motivates a farmer to continue using that practice into the foreseeable future. So cost share funding that I mentioned earlier does not last forever and at some point cost share funding goes away and we would like a farmer to continue using the practice at that point. And so there's very little work done on understanding what motivates someone to persist with a product, with a practice and we do need to do some more research in that space. Just very briefly here as I wrap up two things that I'm often asked about and that you'll notice are not in my model. One was the role of financial incentives. So I mentioned of course that cost share is there and I already said that that is often necessary but not sufficient. So just providing money without addressing the other barriers to adoption is not going to be enough to move the needle. And then knowledge, so in an ideal world we could tell somebody how great something was and give them all of the knowledge in the world about it and they would run off and do it. But we know that knowledge is not enough. Knowledge in the model that I've been showing is actually all the way over in the left in background factors. You have to have knowledge about a practice to understand the different practice characteristics and form your attitudes around those, to be aware of norms around that practice, et cetera. But knowledge is not sufficient to push adoption. Thank you for your time and if we have time for questions I am happy to entertain some. And yes, we have time for questions. So, Wendy, you bring up that behavior model and everything else that goes all the way from thinking about something to actually doing something and all of this, do we begin to, what are some of the, you talked about a little bit of the characteristics but are we seeing it as older producers or newer producers, who's most receptive to making a change along this continuum? So, it varies a little bit based on the practice, right, which is not necessarily surprising. In general, younger farmers are more likely to adopt practices. There is some evidence and it's limited evidence but there is some evidence for structural practices so some of these off-farm edge of field practices like wetlands, for example, and saturated buffers and other practices like that, that you'll hear about later that older farmers are more likely to invest in those practices. And it makes sense if you think it through, right? If you're younger, you're investing in the farm, so cover crops, nitrogen application, et cetera. As you're older, you start thinking more about the next generation and making some investments for the next generation. So, it's not necessarily always a consistent relationship with age and adoption. Okay, I have another question and that's a study paying to adopt cover crops. You know, farmers who adopted cover crops risk losing their crop insurance subsidies for Midwestern crop producers and that provided a major financial hit or increased risk for them. So, any comments about how we bring the crop insurance piece into this as a financial incentive or disincentive? Yeah, I don't think it's as big a barrier as we think it is based on some survey work that we've done and some of those issues with crop insurance have been addressed, but certainly it's, you know, it's both from I guess the insurer's perspective and the farmer's perspective, it's a little dicey to change your practices, right? And what's going to happen and the crop insurance is guaranteeing a certain yield and you're suddenly changing your practice, maybe that's going to alter it. I certainly think we could do something to guarantee the same revenue for a farmer, right? The same kind of yield. So if they trial a new practice for two or three years we could say, you know, we're going to guarantee if something fails, right, that we have your back and we're still going to make sure that you make the money and that would definitely remove a huge piece of the risk for farmers. Okay. Jerry, I don't have the hand raised thing that I can find. Can I ask a question? Yeah, let me get one from Slack and then I'll come back to you, Ken. Okay. How can information on the, what practices shape behavior be used to promote adoption of practices? There's a lot of information that we can pull out of this. It certainly helps us think about how we communicate with farmers. One thing, for example, I talked about systems thinking as a motivator for adopting practices. The adoption rate of cover crops in particular is quite low and the way that we message cover crops to early adopters was with the systems thinking kind of a message, right? And as we understand that not all farmers think the same way, we hopefully start to recognize that maybe our messages also need to change as we're talking to different cross sections of farmers. So it certainly helps with that. It helps us understand what kind of behavioral assistance we can provide and how do we try to change norms? There's lots of different ways that can help inform our outreach. Great. Ken, now you can ask your question. Thank you, Jerry. And thanks, Linda, for a great presentation. My question is, you made the comment that in your study, you used at first a low incentive payment and then a higher incentive payment that with the low incentive payment, you said 1% adoption or takers for trying cover crops. And then you said we tried a higher incentive payment and still only 5% of takers. And your conclusion was that non-monetary factors are at work. And my question is, how do you know your incentive payment simply wasn't high enough to cover the costs and the risks? Well, we certainly don't know if it's covering the risks, right, but it had more than covered the costs. So our second incentive payment was offering, for those of you in farming world, was offering $5,000 for 3D acres of cover crops, which is a lot of money. And it's way more than any government program is able to provide. So at some point, we can keep experimenting and increasing $10,000, $20,000, but it becomes a little impractical to keep experimenting that way, right? Because there's no way we can scale that up. So maybe at some point you reach a magic threshold where you have often enough money to really offset all of the other attitude, norms, all of those other barriers, but I think it becomes a really hypothetical and not very realistic exercise. One quick question, Rochelle. Yeah, Linda, I would just like to comment that as far as the crop insurance issue, USDA RMA fully supports cover crops. And actually in 2020 was the first year that they implemented the practice that you do not have to terminate cover crop the date of planting your insured crop. So I hope that that becomes a widespread communication moving forward because that should not be an issue. Yeah, so thank you. So that's what our data show as well. And thank you for being much more specific about how they include the crop insurance program. I appreciate that. Well, Linda, thank you. And we'll give you the Zoom, thank you. And all of this, we appreciate your comments and insights into the decision-making process and adoption. So now we're gonna transition into a series of what we call flash talks. These are gonna be for a length of seven minutes each. Speakers be aware that in the chat you'll be given a two minute warning to wrap up and everything. But these are different snippets of our technologies and what we have available to this. So I think you'll find these very fascinating and we'll reserve all the time for questions and dialogue until after all the speakers have talked this afternoon. So with that, I'm gonna start off by asking Bruno Basso from Michigan State University to talk about digital agriculture to reduce nitrogen losses across the U.S. corn belt. So Bruno, thank you for being here. Thank you so much, Jerry. And thank you the academies and the organizer for this beautiful workshop is truly a privilege to share with you some of the latest findings that my lab has been working on. As you mentioned, Jerry, this really deals with digital agriculture perhaps to the next level because the goal is to scale up what we've been finding on a farm level. The, move the screen, yes. So often digital agriculture is associated with obviously sensors on machinery and yield mapping is one of those. And this is an example of a yield map and obviously the difficulties of a farmer to be able to make a decision by seeing this spatial pattern that do not stay constantly over time. So there is a spatial temporal dimension. And so the possibility of analyzing these yield maps in into an historical perspective led us to combine these differences between pixels, between space and variation over time to identify what we call areas that they have a consistent pattern of the high productivity, a medium or constantly underperforming or even areas that they do well some years and not in others. And I have had the opportunity and the privilege to be able to use a substantial amount of yield maps. We have been working with 7,400 high-quality yield maps that were shared by farmers, high-quality information. And some of these maps are over 10 years of data on many fields across different crops. In addition to the yield maps, we have digital imagery. As you see there, one interesting finding more recently is the use of thermal imagery relate to the same principle of sea variation in temperature and canopy temperature into a thermal stability map. And if you see, I picked those fields as being the same to show the very close proportionality of areas high and stable and being cooler, basically availability of water and satisfying the evaporative demand versus areas that they're much more dependent on rainfall rather than a deep soil with a greater water holding capacity. And so that's coming together and it's helping us to separate water stress from nitrogen stress that is much more done with optical sensing. So not having done not be happy enough with the great data set, we needed to scale. And so a few years ago, my lab and I have been working on this scalability approach using imagery and using the same principle, basically using length set imagery. So the resolution is higher, but it's across a 30 meter, I mean, 80 million acres of the corn belt because 70 million was the first study, but we're adding new states. And so now you can basically learn about every single field because we use common land unit and basically understand the variation within the subfield using the thresholds of either two way outliers where one point flips from low to high or remains in the same category. And so we have a possibility of understanding that and the analysis led to this pretty tremendous finding of the low and stable areas as basically the areas losing most of the nitrogen because it's not necessarily nitrogen, not used efficiently, but rather the lack of water that is not coupling the uptake and the supply. So we have done an analysis in terms of economics, the energy emitted and the CO2 into the atmosphere. So we have again, for every tile, we will have a field that is a surplus, the cost. What we also worked on for again, the 70 million, it seems a little bit crazy, but it is for every single field that is available to be seen actually on a website. We partitioned the areas that they're more vulnerable to water deficit, the hill tops, the sloping land versus areas where water tends to accumulate. And this is a work that Rafael Martínez and I, my postdoc, have recently published in scientific reports and we showed that within the same year, the field is either some parts of the field that is, if the year is more on the dry side, you know, the water deficit vulnerable areas will have a reduction and the depression areas will be the only one doing a good yield. And vice versa has the rainfall, the anomalies of the rainfall as rainfall increases, you will have water accumulating, giving a reduction in the depression rather than an increase instead on the water deficit area. So we've been scaling and there is basically more than five million acres that they are vulnerable to the same situation within the same field every year with that level of reduction that you see nearly 33% of the yield. So the other thing is we've been analyzing all these zones and some of this work has been probably some is coming out really right at this moment. We learned also because of this valuable data set and the scalability approach that this low and stable areas tend to be on the edges of the field because we're shown with the yield mapping technology as you move away from the field that the yield tend to be better in the middle of the field. And so again, not being worrying about just the producers that shared the data, we scaled through the remote sense in knowing exactly where these areas are, but also going one step forward and being more pragmatic, which means we analyze the pixels that they are contiguous and to a size big enough that could really be implemented a sort of either a variable rate of some kind of reductions or even a precision conservationist as you will see. So either what are the fraction of low and stable areas that they are on the edge of the field or what are the areas that they are greater than one acre that they are in the middle of the field. And so the core of trying to answer some of the question on this workshop, this work really leads to what we could, I guess, called a sustainable intensification of these fields where variable rate comes in by understanding where nitrogen could be reduced in case farmers are not willing to use a precision conservation approach where you'll see probably hopefully the numbers. The blue map is the nitrogen that is applied with NASA and obviously the data that we had. If you were to implement based on the nitrogen use efficiency and the responses of water availability and more complicated analysis, you'll see that you could reduce the amount of fertilizer applied which converts into a climate benefit. The next map that I'm not showing here, it's basically carbon credits that could be verified from this sorts of approach from the machinery. So nitrogen precision conservation is not having any of this corn being grown on this low productivity areas, rather native vegetation. And I have a series of scenarios that I'll go really quickly across but here you'll have a significant saving as you see here. So if you bear with me just on the more on the right side of the column, you have this low and stable areas that they are partitioned in the total acreage in hectares. Middle means the greater areas of one acre that they are in the middle of the field at least not on the edge of the field versus one they are low-hanging fruit to be able to put things on the edges of the field. And so we could lead to the reduction that is actually the nitrogenity ends up in the Mississippi river of 1.1 teragrams or just by having precision conservation only on the edges of the field if farmers were not willing to change things even the big enough areas so they could but in that case would be 0.3 teragrams. So the other thing is we have shown that these areas are not just low productivity but unprofitable. And so if you see the map of the one on the left is a yield map of one year that's converted. This is not uncertain analysis. This is data coming from the expenses. We have just about anything from these farmers except their bank account because it's red and I don't want anything to deal with that. And so the yield map below the stability map for 11 years and seven years of corn shows more of a stunning picture of basically a lot of this land being unproductive. And so we've been using several scenarios including one of possibility of using cover crops. There is a limitation there is a need then cost of growing cover crops on fields. And so these areas could be allocated for seeds to be planted within the same farm. And so that's the low and stable areas that they are only on the edges of the field continues or what is the impact of changing the bio control which is a more extensive work. I just want to show the changes of composition in grassland from current to basically changing these areas to native strips. In the end, we have the critical thing I would agree with some of the statement that Ken Kassman gave last week, a brilliant presentation but one of the things is model are actually pretty close and they do understand the processes of what happens. The major limitation more often deals with the capacity of capturing spatial variability which is certainly not necessarily captured if you were to go and measure it everywhere because that's still not sustainable. So the approach of linking the remotely sense use plans as indicator, the figure up there shows if you were to run a soil, you know, yield map I mean a simulation using soils versus, you know stability map as you're seeing here, the performance of the model are completely different where the model will say the soil is good the yield should be higher when instead the plant, you know that area really actually flooded. So I'll conclude by showing that this is a scalable now with this analysis of corn profit and the pretty sad picture of how much money these farmers lose on these areas. And in conclusion, this is in a paper that John Antle and I published recently on nature sustainability where you got the sensors used critical to detect variability parameterized model remote sensing to get this stability analysis and then profitability lays at the center to show farmers in terms of adoption you can push the envelope in areas where there is a response you should change your mind about growing corn in low productivity areas all integrated into a system approach to increase the circularity of energy, water quality, profitability and eventually lead to a policy as the new administration is actually looking for. So with that, I thank again very much for the invitation and this work world wouldn't be possible without the funding agency and this great group of kids working in my lab. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Bruno. And next we're gonna move to Alejandro Prasina to talk about cover crops by region the good, the bad and the ugly in the Midwest. So Alejandro, it's over to you. Thank you very much, Jerry. And as soon as we have those slides ready to go, thank you. Okay, so I'm an economist by training. I will discuss the economic implications of cover crops. Next please. So before getting there, let's see what a cover crop is and Linda showed a picture of that. Now to the left we see that a cover crop is a plant that covers the soil between cash crops and it can be a winter cover crop or a summer cover crop. We'll focus on winter cover crops and the idea of using cover crops, particularly here in Iowa in the Midwest is to improve water quality, to improve soil health and particularly reduce soil erosion under high precipitation events and avoid the kind of disaster that we see on the picture to the right. And it's not really clear at this point whether cover crops are a good option to manage weeds, insects and other pests. But there's a science behind the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy and that report puts cover crops as a reasonable strategy to reduce nitrogen load by 29% and phosphorus load going into water streams by 28%. So that's the good about cover crops, right? That's mostly related to the environmental benefits related to cover crops. Now as Linda anticipated, the adoption rate is the bad because in Iowa in particular, we only have a 4% rate of adoption according to the 2017 Census of Ag. That was a huge increase from the 2012 Census of Ag when that was only 1% but that's not limited to Iowa. Next piece. This picture at the top shows a very low rate of adoption in most states. Michigan leads the pack with 9% but in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, the top corn soybean producing states, we have very low rates of adoption way lower than 10%. So the question is why is the adoption rate so low in these states? And I will summarize it from the economic standpoint and that's mainly because in crop only production systems, cover crops are not profitable for most farmers and that's the ugly part. So I will show the results from three studies that to support this claim. I understand that the economics are not the only reason but it's a major reason behind this low rate of adoption. We talked about cost share payments to incentive buys, the use of cover crops and how limited they are in time and in volume and it's true that cost share payments actually reduce the or offset to some extent the costs of implementing cover crops among program participants which are not all cover crop adopters but only few even among those who use cost share to offset the cost of implementing cover crops only a few of those experience positive net returns on an annual basis out of cover crops. Now, once we incorporate cows livestock, but cows in particular, let's say dairy or cow calf or even a feed log, if we have a mixed livestock crop system then cover crops can become profitable under the right conditions. So what are the right conditions if you think of the benefits that cover crops, winter cover crops can generate on the livestock system that will really depend on the volume on the amount of above the ground biomass that the cover crops generate in early spring. So it has to be enough at a good, at the proper timing to actually save on feeding costs for the livestock operation. But it's not just that cover crops have to be near the feed log or near the barn where the cows are and there are many other things that need to click in order for cover crops to be profitable on an annual basis even with livestock. But if anything, a farmer who is able to grow cover crops with livestock and receive some cost share payments, that's a farmer most likely to obtain positive net returns on an annual basis. So the three studies that I will discuss next please are based on partial budgets. So we compare the differences in cost and revenue from a system with corn following fallow, nothing planting in the winter versus the profit in a system with corn following cover crops in the winter. And this is for the same producer, next piece. The first analysis is coming from a regional online survey and the average extra costs here about $36 per acre and that's mostly planting cover crops, seeds and planting costs and then the extra termination costs about $36 on average. The average cost share payments received by farmers are about $26 and these respondents came up with a $2 on average yield drag for corn and a yield improvement for soybeans that resulted in a net return negative 21 for corn and positive 25 for soybeans. But that's driven mainly by the cost share payments. If we take out the cost share payments, now we're down to negative $46 per acre on a corn system and negative $3 per acre on a soybean system. Next please. We extended the analysis with a mailed survey statewide in Iowa and this is both financed by Card, Kathy supported this project back in 2017. And we had an average median, in this case, a median extra cost of $35, a median payment from cost share between 15 and 20 and the net returns, including the cost share payments were negative between 15 and $19 per acre. Only if we included feed cost savings on the livestock enterprise, then net returns would go into the positives side. Next please. And this is a study based on agronomic experimental fields with 324 data points and the average, as you can see, I won't go into the details, but the average net returns calculated on these experimental fields are negative for both years, fall of 18 and fall of 19. Next please. And I will conclude my presentation by saying that cover crops are still a crop and therefore they depend on weather, they depend on soil, they depend on several conditions and if there's a little biomass or that biomass is of low quality, then the net returns to the farmer tend to be very small to negative. Now, not only that, I want to point out that cover crops are listed, are ranked 11th and 12th in the nitrogen in the nutrient reduction strategy. So that means that there are 10 other practices more likely to reduce nitrogen phosphorus loads and that both at the state level and the federal level, there are plenty of cost share programs subsidizing cover crops and I'm not sure about the effectiveness or effectiveness is low, the efficiency and also the additionality. And we are missing here long-term effects of using cover crops but the monetization of soil health and carbon sequestration are really limited today by the disagreement on soil health metrics and without the metrics, it's really hard to put a dollar value to that long-term improvement. So with that, I will stop here and thank you very much for this opportunity. Alejandro, thank you. And now we'll transition to talking about using integrated Prairie to restore ecosystem health. It's a little follow-on from even a concept that Bruno bought of looking at the vulnerable parts of that field. So I'll turn it over to Lisa, she'll be more. Thank you, Jerry. And it's a real honor to be able to present today and follow on last week's talk as well as the talks earlier today. It's a fantastic workshop. So I'll be talking about strategically integrating Prairie and Prairie Strips, next slide. And first of all, for those of you that aren't familiar, what are Prairie Strips? They were defined now through USDA for the first time in 2019 as diverse perennial vegetation oriented linearly within crop fields. They may not exceed more than 25% of the cropline area of the field and they range in width between 30 and 125 feet and they can have some equipment traffic on them, next slide. And what we know about Prairie Strips has largely been generated through the Strips project, which I am a member of. Strips includes about 12 different institutions and dozens of investigators and students. And we've been looking at this concept of strategically integrating Prairie into crop fields for well over a decade now and have published about 39 papers now on the concept in addition to master's theses and dissertations from the students, next slide. And we've studied this both in experimental catchments at a pretty small scale, next slide, as well as in commercial scale operations and on commercial fields as you see in this picture, next. In this picture, next. In this picture, Dr. Kling wanted some pretty pictures so I've included them in here for you. Next slide. And what we found in terms of highlights over the decade of research have been many. I'm gonna focus what I present here though on those I think that are most relevant to the discussion of the workshop which includes some of the results that we've had that we've generated with regards to nitrogen moving with water runoff as well as through subsurface flow and conversion to and to gas through microbial processes. Next slide. And I'll focus on seven main points that I think are most relevant for this audience. And next slide. The first one being that prairie strips can substantially reduce nitrate loss when they are placed on untiled fields where the shallow groundwater can interact with the prairie root zone. And we've shown this in some of the papers from our initial experimental work and now some data here from Matt Helmer's lab, Matt presented in last week's workshop showing this importance of this interaction with the prairie root system. So what you're seeing here is two groundwater wells located just 20 to 30 feet apart. The first, the up slope is at the edge of this at the on the upper edge of the strip and the lower one is at the lower edge of the strip. And we can see while it's variable across time and certainly site that there tends to be a decrease in that nitrogen, that nitrate concentration in groundwater even over a very short spatial scale over a very short extent with the prairie strips. Next slide. Secondly, that the nitrate intercepted at the foot slope can be fully denitrified to end to and these are data from Havette Iqbal who's now at University of Nebraska and Mike Castellano at Iowa State showing again that nitrous oxide emissions are variable across time and space, but that prairie emits much less nitrous oxide than corn and soybean, the corn treatment here. And that when the prairie strips are located that foot slope position in the lower diagram, there's actually negative emissions. And so thus we know one that prairie strips we can completely denitrify that nitrogen with the prairie strips and so we're not trading an air, a water quality problem with an air for an air quality problem with prairie strips. Next slide. So what do we do about tile fields because we know that water entailed is just being shunted by the prairie strip. And in that case, we would suggest that farmers combine practices and implement a saturated buffer at the edge of the field along with the prairie strip. And here are some data from Dan Janes from USDA and Tom Eisenhart showing the ability of saturated buffers to remove nitrate from tile water. And if the strip is on the order of that 30 or 40 or 50 feet, we can remove most of that nitrate even from the tile water if it's compared with a saturated buffer. Next slide. And then the additionality piece that Alejandro just mentioned cover crops have a lot of great benefits. So do prairie strips. We know that prairie strips can help us reduce the flow of water off of farm fields. We can reduce sediment loss from farm fields. We can start to accrue carbon beneath those prairie strips. We provide bird habitat, pollinator habitat and prairie strips help improve honeybee health. Next slide. We also know that prairie strips are one of the most cost effective conservation practices that farmers can implement down their fields. And these are data from John Tyndall showing that if a prairie strip is paired with the conservation reserve program, the cost per treated acre is around $7 for that treated acre of farm field. Next slide. And similar to what Bruno has found, John's work hasn't yet accounted for crop acres that are actually losing money for farmers. And so if we are again able to put this native prairie vegetation on areas that are not pulling their weight financially, we have an opportunity for a win-win for farmers and society. Next slide. We also know from data from Jay Arbuckle, Extension Sociologist at Iowa State that farmers are increasingly more accepting of prairie strips. In a recent survey data, over half of farmers said they had heard of prairie strips, they wanna learn more, and they may consider putting prairie strips on their farms. We know that when paired with CRP acceptance of consideration for putting prairie strips on their fields increases by 47%. And prairie strips has just been a part of CRP for 13 months now. And those figures on the bottom, you can see the adoption rate over just this last 13 month period. Next slide. And lastly, we also know from a choice experiment conducted last year by Karina Schoengold and Badri Kahnel from University of Nebraska that Iowans are willing to pay for the benefits associated with prairie strips and especially nutrient removal. Based on this choice experiment, Iowans suggested that they were willing to pay $241, one-time payment for a 30 year span for the benefits that they would accrue through prairie strips. Next slide. And that's it. So I just wanted to also thank my collaborators, our funders and other partners. My contact information is there or else I'll meet you on Slack. Thank you. Thanks, Lisa. All right, we're going to move from prairie strips to water management. And it's my pleasure to welcome Jim Shepards to talk about infill water management in Nebraska. So Jim, you're on mute right now, so. Yeah, are we okay? Yep. Okay. Well, thank you, Jerry, and the organization crew that put this thing together. Next slide, please. If you look at this picture, this map, it looks like the state of Nebraska in the landscape looks like a pincushion with all the punctures by 100,000 or more irrigation wells. Now the interesting thing is that there's about 55,000 center pivot irrigation systems that are linked to these irrigation wells. And now if you go and string these out end to end, you've got a really long string of pipe. Next slide. In the case of many of these wells, they're also set up for chemigation so that farmers can inject pesticides or fertilizer into these wells. And the point being here is that once you've taken a lot of the risk of drought out of the system, you now have the ability to come in and start thinking about other things like the stability of production, cover crops, other things that we've already heard about, but you need to be ready to step it up in terms of the management level and also the time commitment. You need to be ready to react throughout the growing season. Next slide. Where does the water come from? Well, we have two major aquifers. The Oglala one is that it's deeper, it's quite clean and the one people mostly know about. But it's a Platt River aquifer that goes across the state. That's the one that attracts all the attention because this is a source of domestic well water for many, many people. And the point I would mention here is that in 1995, we sampled and put a date on the age of the water. The water table was at about 15 feet. The age of the water was about three months old at the top of the aquifer. At the bottom of the aquifer, about 60 feet, it was 19 years old. So in essence, what we're doing is loading the top of the aquifer with new water and also new nitrate compared to the bottom. One of the farmers says, it looks like we're storing nitrate in the groundwater for our children. Next slide. This is a typical situation then of monthly rainfall compared to the need for water for evapotranspiration. Until about the first week or two in June, precipitation is greater than the evaporative need for corn. And so we have a potential for nitrate leaching. Once you get to mid June, now we're to the point of needing water. And so we have a good chance of controlling and managing water. This also means that we can put nitrogen in the water if and when needed. So the strategy is cut down on the amount of early season nitrogen and be ready to fix it and to even play catch up if you need to by side dressing or furtigating. Next slide. Don't need many words for this slide, but the point being that if you're in the mode to spoon feed the crop, you really reduce the potential for losses. The only constriction here is that if you're spoon feeding the crop, you need to know when it's hungry and how much to feed it. Next slide. So this is sort of symbolic of a dipstick some way to monitor this crop to tell when it needs more nitrogen. Now we can get a long ways by using computer models or simulations and know about when and how much nitrogen is going to be required. But the crop is really a good biological indicator in itself and can be used and can be done with chlorophyll meters or crop canopy sensors, remote sensing, this sort of thing. Next slide. The thing I didn't talk about is that corn plants behave like a pig like me in a salad bar or a dessert bar that if there's extra nitrogen in the soil, it's gonna take it up and store it in the lower stock. This acts as a reserve, but we don't know how much is in that plant and there's no convenient way to monitor this crop short of destructively sampling it to figure out how much reserve we have. So we really have to stay on top of things and use sensors, spad meters, something like this to tell us when we're getting close to the point of needing to put some more fertilizer in the water. Next slide. So as we think about extracting and extending what we might have learned from irrigation studies in Nebraska, we look for the easy button or the free lunch. When I was asked to make this presentation, I started talking to some consultants that I know and they said, well, just build on the basics, keep it pretty simple. And they offered two ideas. Next slide. The first one goes back to the early 1990s. They said, you guys showed us a picture of a bare soil after planting corn and you also showed us a map of the organic matter that was generated by sampling several months earlier. The patterns are very similar. One was expensive, one was inexpensive. So the consultant said, what we do, we look at the color map of the soil, we do some smart sampling and from that, we put those values of organic matter content into the Nebraska algorithm that contains an organic matter correction and we make variable rate nitrogen applications either pre-plant or at side dress time and then late in the season, we follow up with chemigation or use a high clearance sprayer to take care of any problems. Next slide. In this case, it also involves color but in this case, I said, remember when you guys were spoon feeding the crops and what you had done was reduce the nitrogen rate on the field by about 25% but you put these high nitrogen strips in the field as an indicator so that you could see what was happening and when it might be time to put more fertilizer in the system. At this time, we were using chlorophyll meters to determine whether we needed more nitrogen in the system but the same sort of thing would also work if you had manure. So you could have a high manure strip and that would even perhaps tell you what particular nutrient was wrong if you saw a side-by-side comparison. Very briefly, just think what could be done if you were in a mode to put a low nitrogen strip in the field. That would provide a really early warning of the need to stay on top of things and make some corrections and be ready to take an action. And finally, the last slide. It goes back to Nebraska and we have what they call natural resources districts but these folks have a taxing authority. On our land out there, we pay about $3 an acre and farmers are able to use these funds for cost sharing activities if they're related to improving water management or new kinds of devices like drip irrigation or flow meters, these sort of things. The other thing that this particular natural resource district in blue is able to do, they've been doing this since 1988. And so depending on the nitrate level in the groundwater, they've said there will not be any more fall application of nitrogen fertilizer. And now if you see somebody out in the fall, a telephone call and the guy's done. But what the farmers are required to do is to test their soil and water, report how much nitrogen and water they apply and at the end of the year record yield, turn this information into the natural resources district. And so they have a record now going back to 1988 of production records for all these fields. It's been summarized a couple of times but it needs to be done again because in the recent years, many of these fields originally were under fur irrigation are now under center pivot irrigation. So maybe the ideas of using soil color and cost sharing dollars from natural resource districts and this sort of thing may give other locations and other people an idea how they might move forward to improve nitrogen management even though they don't have control of the water. Thanks now. Thank you. All right, we're gonna move a different aspect of water over to Jane Frankenberg to talk about management of nitrogen and tile drain system. So Jane. Okay, I'm very pleased to be here today to talk about ways that we can reduce nitrogen in tile drains lands are my slide showing. Should I go ahead? For those who might not be familiar with these systems, my slides, when they come up, we'll show a images across the bottom, there we are, that show different components of the system, the installation on the left and a newly installed field in the middle and an outlet at the right. Okay, I'll just keep talking. Nobody knows exactly the extent of tile drainage and the 2017 AgCensus reported 56 million acres, most in the Midwest and that little tool that you can barely see on the right there is a tool that we developed on the right so that users can try to explore likely drained land based on the soil and crop characteristics. Next slide. All right, there we go. Okay, so tile drain systems are key because they do tend to have quite high nitrate loads. The transforming drainage project has brought together data being collected by scientists across the Midwest and nitrate loads in the conventional drainage systems that we've monitored are shown in the graph at right. You can see that the blue dots which represent the average at each site range from 18 to 59 kilograms per hectare in these 11 systems. So that's pretty high for people in other parts of the country. Next slide. So what are the options for reducing the nitrogen losses? Well, researchers are working on this critical question all across the Midwest and beyond. As extension specialists, the colleagues listed below and I synthesized the various methods into 10 and developed an extension publication that clearly lays out the 10 main ways that are being researched and used at least a little and this publication can easily be found on the web but I'm gonna use it as the basis here. So we included a simplified nitrogen cycle shown in the center that shows the inputs, the outputs to the plants, which is what we want and outputs to the water which we wanna avoid. We also clarified four processes that these practices enable in various ways and we think this helps to understand what each of the practices can do. Next slide. So I'm going to quickly run through the 10 practices in my seven minutes and for each one, the slide shows what it is, how it works to reduce nitrogen loss and then some issues regarding its adoption. Obviously this will be very quick. So I'll start with managing nitrogen fertilizer. The four Rs are widely encouraged and I think we'll hear more about it. The rate is usually based on the economically optimum nitrogen rate and obviously if we get the right rate and right timing we can reduce the excess nitrogen source available for leaching and applying it at the right time can increase plant uptake. So that's two of the processes. But I do wanna emphasize as far as adoption that the economically optimum rates may not be the environmentally optimum rates and also that there's great difficulty in knowing in advance how much to apply. Next slide. The second way is to plant cover crops in the winter which work by increasing plant uptake of nitrogen and also reducing drain flow. They've got a lot of other benefits but there are adoption challenges as we've just heard because there are costs and effort that limit their adoption. Next slide. So the third practice is to add perennials to the cropping system and potential crops in our area include grass and legumes planted for pasture as well as bioenergy crops which at one point we thought would make a bigger impact but unfortunately all of these have been limited by lack of markets and infrastructure. So although we'd love to see more perennials adoption is limited. Next slide. So next we'll turn to practices that modify the drainage system. The first is control drainage also known as drainage water management. And in this practice an adjustable water control structure is placed in the drainage system to raise or lower the outlet. The top image shows that after harvest when drainage is not needed the outlet can be raised which reduces drain flow through the winter. It needs to be lowered before field work in the spring. So the adoption issues include the cost of installation and also that operating the gates takes time. They need to be adjusted in spring and fall to achieve the water quality benefits and there are yield benefits to adjusting them more often and automation is being developed but that of course raises the cost. Next slide. The next potential practice is to change the spacing or depth of the drains which changes the drainage intensity. More widely spaced drains would reduce drain flow and nitrate load. As for adoption however, typical drainage installations are moving in the opposite direction. The spacing is actually getting narrower and narrower increasing the nitrate load and the increases in precipitation in the Midwest due to climate change of course is making narrower spacing more likely in the future. Next slide. A very consequential practice would be what we call drainage water recycling which is storing drained water in a reservoir and using it as irrigation later in the season. It requires a quite large reservoir as the two reservoirs on the left show one in Michigan and one in Missouri but it could have a very strong impact on nutrient loads by reapplying the lost nitrogen onto the field where it's needed. Adoption of this practice is still very low as it's very expensive both because of the land taken out of production for the reservoir and for the construction costs but there's a new NRCS conservation practice standard that may support this more and more in Midwest states. Next slide. Denitrifying bioreactors made by filling trenches with wood chips where the biological process of denitrification can take place is the seventh practice. Although very quickly this has great potential but no yield benefit. So relies on farmers wanting to be good stewards or having good cost share of programs. Next slide. Rep to number eight. Constructed wetlands are quite well known. This is the first practice that works through three processes. So I think that shows the strength of practices like this that have multiple benefits but adoption challenges include especially the cost of taking land out of production. Next slide. We could also modify the ditch, the ditches that tiles drain into. In two stage ditches, a floodplain is added within the ditch and that creates a zone for plant uptake and denitrification. It also works through three processes as these small floodplains could be considered to be linear wetlands. And like other practices, the adoption is limited by the cost of the land needed for this practice. Next slide. And the final practice is saturated buffers. So as many people know riparian buffers can be a good thing but in tile drain systems, they're typically bypassed by the tile running under them and not benefiting from the plants in the buffer. And in a saturated buffer, researchers figured out that if the water leaves the drain and saturates the buffer, there's an opportunity for denitrification. And this is done through directing the drainage water into a perforated tile where if the topography is right, it will leave the tile and saturate the soil. So this has been shown to work very well in appropriate locations, but again, there are no yield benefits so other incentives would need to be provided. Next slide. So in this very brief run through, I hope you've seen that we have nitrogen reduction options and these all work to varying extent, but they all have costs. So engineers and others keep trying to think of different ways to manipulate the water in plants to reduce nutrient loads, but all our options are likely to continue to have costs. So I wanna conclude with a reflection about adoption that may seem obvious, but I think needs to be said, which is that today's incentives have resulted in today's nitrogen losses and that if we want to make a change, we need to change the incentives. I think research and extension can make a difference and although I'm a research and extension specialist working hard on that, I think we need to assume that we will actually need to shift the incentives and I hope that this study can result in some impacts in that way. Thank you again for allowing me the opportunity to present these thoughts. Thank you, Jane. And Jane has bought up the four Rs and we're gonna switch over to Kerry Volmer Sanders to talk about the four Rs of nutrient management. So Kerry. Thank you, Jerry. And I'm gonna talk about a little bit more than the four Rs. So I worked for the Nature Conservancy and the Nature Conservancy, if you're not familiar with us, it's a private nonprofit whose mission is to conserve the land in which all life depends. And when we think about the four Rs, I immediately think of the Fertilizer Institute, Fertilizer Canada and the International Plant Nutrition Institute who initiated the four Rs. So I thought I would talk about how we are implementing, how we're helping implement the four Rs and that is through a four Rs certification program. And if you go to the next slide, I'll talk a little bit more about what those four Rs are. They've been mentioned a few times. So the four Rs refer to the right source of fertilizer at the right rate, putting it in the right place and at the right time. But it's underpinned with this fact that it's not just the economic drivers but it's also the environmental and social drivers that matter. And you can find more information going to the nutrients stewardship.org website. But there's also been some research that's been conducted bringing together folks to determine what the beginning, intermediate and advanced four Rs of nutrients stewardship are because they're different for different regions and different systems. I'll also say that when you think about the four Rs holistically, it's not just those nutrient management practices that you think of maybe in field, like what I just mentioned, but also it's how those work in combination with other practices. Like if we incorporate the nutrients, does that change the rate? When you add blind inlets or wetlands, how might those four Rs that we mentioned just a minute ago change? So they need to work holistically. And when you think about implementing the four Rs, Robin Wilson did some research and as we might guess, the farmers need to believe that those practices are going to be effective if they're going to adopt those practices. Next slide, please. So I think Linda touched on this really well at the onset. Farmers trust their crop advisors in two different perspectives. They trust their crop advisors for even when you're thinking about conservation practices and when you think about nutrient stewardship or nutrient recommendations. So the science shows that farmers listen to those sources of information. So when you think about how many farmers a crop advisor might touch anywhere from 10 to 300 in the ripple effect, how many acres those farmers manage, then you get to think about, all right, how do we engage these crop advisors to really implement the four Rs of nutrient stewardship? If you go to the next slide, please. So that's why we, one of the reasons we created this certification program, it is to not only think about the education but also the implementation to make sure that we're actually implementing those four Rs practices. And we started this program in the Western Lake Erie Basin. It has grown beyond that, but I will say that the way we've structured the program, we can consistently agree on what the right four Rs are for that particular geography. Right now we've been moving in states or provinces and working really closely with the agribusiness association in that state or province to help administer the program. But each geography has to do a few things. One is create a governing body of council for that area and a technical or science committee. And that stewardship council needs to be a diverse set of partners, as you can see here. But that group reviews the science. They develop the geographic specific standards that are based on the global standards that have 15 different pieces to them. And each state or province to date has created about between 30 and 40 standards to meet those 15 global standards because they need to be state specific, geography specific. But once that geography creates the standards, then it needs to be approved by that global council. And then audits can occur. Typically those are annual audits to make sure that that nutrient service provider, that crop advisor is not only following those four hours for that geography, giving the right advice, but they're also applying the fertilizer in accordance with those four hours. And they're educating the growers that they're working with. And I'll also point out that the standards are reviewed annually should any new science come up or new practice be discussed then they can alter the standard accordingly. Next slide. The difficulty can sometimes be agreeing on what the right four hours might be. And I'll just point out a few things. We launched the first certification program after we were developing it for two years. And we did not have nitrogen in that list very often. It took a whole nother year of reviewing the science and discussing amongst the select, a smaller group to bring it back to the larger group to add in specific items for nitrogen. And we also had to define some words, which has been interesting. So thinking about frozen ground, what does frozen mean? Is it frozen in the morning? What if it's frozen just for a few hours and then it's not frozen? So we had a lot of discussions to make sure that we not only understood and agreed to the science but we defined those tricky terms. Frozen by the way means that you cannot till the soil for the next 48 hours. Next slide please. Robin Wilson and Collie, they did some surveys with farmers. It was the same farmers in 2016 as in 2018. And this slide here graphic shows that farmers that we're working with for our certified providers always or never they were working with a for certified provider in 2018 but not in 2016. What was their change or adoption for our practices? And you can see here that when comparing those, we can see that certification may be both increasing knowledge and behavior change among their farmer customers. Likely not doing entirely because of the increased prevalence of hearing about the principles but it also might be a result of consistent prompts, reminders and the availability of support that working with the for our certified providers provides. Another interesting outcome is that we can, we have a sense of pride by many certified providers with posting their signs on the front of their buildings, developing signage on their trucks or for their farmers so that they can showcase that they are for our certified. Next slide, please. I would encourage you all to go to the for our certified website and see more information. We have impacted four million acres to date with two states just starting their certifications this spring. So with that, I'll conclude my presentation. Thanks, Kerry. And we're going to transition now to the mentioned a number of times but we need some technology. So I'm going to turn it over to David Lee to talk about technology to measure nitrogen levels. So David. Great, thanks, Jerry. I hope I've muted myself on all the different variations I have and I want to thank you and all the organizers for inviting me to give an overview here. I'll be presenting on some of the programs that the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Project Agency has funded over the past few years. For those of you who are not familiar with RPE, it's a funding agency within the DOE focused on high risk applied research and I happen to be a technical contract for the agency. So I'm in the great position of being able to give an overview of some of the programs and individual projects that our great research teams have worked on in developing nitrogen-sensing on farms. Move to the next slide. So we often get asked, why is RPE funding research in ag? And so I have to highlight a number of energy-related impacts of agriculture both as a consumer of energy and natural resources and as a provider. Here are some of the estimated impacts and some of the various programs over the past five years that RPE has stood up, the Terra and Roots programs were focused on developing tools, phenotyping tools to enable the better development of the intense crops which could require less water and nitrogen. And our new smart farm program is focused on quantifying the baseline of GHG fluxes in agricultural environments. To move to the next slide, we looked at essentially quantifying the carbon intensity of crop production. And as been previously discussed, use of nitrogen fertilizer has a large energy cost. We work with Argonne National Lab to quantify the carbon intensity of the nitrogen component in seed crop production both in terms of the production and the volatilization. As you may know, nitrous oxide is estimated to be a greenhouse gas about 300 times more potent than CO2. So being able to reduce the amount of nitrogen being used and the amount being volatilized could have very large impacts. And we also felt that this could provide new incentives for sustainable practices by being able to tie in crop production with carbon intensity, which is utilized by some regulatory agencies, for example, to determine whether a low carbon fuel qualifies for incentives. To move to the next slide, we always like this picture and always have to thank Jerry Glover when he was at the Land Institute because it really illustrates the challenge of understanding what's going on below ground in the need for better sensing tools. This is also true of measuring volatiles such as N2O in the field. And if you go to the next slide, was some of the justification for our new smart farm program. This program is intended to develop some of the tools and models to better understand the levels of K-2 fluxes and soil carbon and agricultural fields. And it's split into two phases. First phase is deploying the current state of the art for gas measurements using eddy covariance towers to quantify CO2 and N2O emissions and high-resolution soil and plant sampling in the fields of active farmers with at least 80 acres. So that's a lot of soil cores. I want to highlight that these projects will be making all this data publicly available with the goal of establishing ground truth sites that researchers, regulatory agencies, anyone can get access to and better understand how these gases and nutrients are scaling up. The phase two projects are intended to really demonstrate novel sensors that have the same capabilities as what people are using for the phase ones but are scalable and don't require the same level of expertise. These are relatively new program with the phase one site of things kicking off almost a year ago and the phase two projects which were just selected last fall. The next slide illustrates where the four phase one field teams will be collecting data across the country though we have to acknowledge that due to COVID there were delays last year in establishing most of these field sites. The sites cover a wide variety of crops ranging from corn and soybean locations which University of Illinois and University of Nebraska are focused on. Sorghum which Oklahoma State is characterizing and then rice which is being characterized by Arva. I'll try to remember to post the link to the project descriptions in the Slack chat so that if you're interested you can read up a little more about them. And the next slide I'd like to briefly describe is an example of one of the phase one projects. This is from the Arva intelligence team which is being led by Michael Schupenhauer in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. As I mentioned they're focused on rice production systems and so they're combining eddy covariance, gas flux data, soil and plant compositional data and microbiome analysis to develop a model to predict potential improvements in greenhouse gas balances in rice production. And as you can see in the proposed targets that lists all the different sorts of data types that they're collecting with overall goal of helping develop a model that will predict more sustainable production systems that could justify low carbon fuel production of feedstocks. Moving to the next slide is just a snapshot of the phase two projects. These were just announced and really quickly projects at Princeton and Michigan Aerospace Corporation are gonna be developing a perimeter laser-based system for measuring nitrous oxide emissions and Michigan Aerospace Corporation is developing UAV-based platform. Dagan and the University of Illinois are developing data-driven models to predict the nitrogen fluxes and fields and build on existing models like DMVC. And the website below describes a little more detail. So lastly in the following slide, I want to highlight a technology that came out of a project at Iowa State University led by Lian Dong and it's now being commercialized by a startup called Ingenious Ag. It utilizes a silicon-based micro fabrication technique which is producing micro needles containing nitrate-specific electrodes and that's gonna enable very low-cost production scale because it's utilizing essentially semiconductor manufacturing. It's been demonstrated that it can measure both implant and nitrate levels so that image in the upper right is essentially a micro needle sensor being stuck into the stock of a corn plant. In addition to groundwater concentrations of nitrate which is the bottom image, essentially a pump is collecting from the groundwater and running it over the micro needle sensor. The table shows that its performance is comparable to existing commercial sensor but the main advantages that can operate continuous in the field for weeks at a time. The bottom left chart just shows traces of nitrate concentrations in individual plants over about a month and a half. And as you can see in some cases, the sensors were able to capture that diurnal nitrate uptake. We and the research team feels that the sensors applications for field management, crop breeding, and environmental monitoring. And hopefully it'll even help answer the question that Jim brought up earlier on when the plant is running low on its internal nitrogen storage. I'd also like to highlight that one of our other RPE technologies will be presented next week by Ana Arias on developing a novel soil nitrogen sensor. So the last slide moving forward, I just obviously want to thank all of you. I think I've stayed mostly within time with giving a very quick snapshot of how RPE operates and the sorts of technologies we're funding. I want to emphasize that my role and role of Project Program Director David Babson is really to help connect our technologies with users, both commercial and research. So if anything sounded interesting to you, please reach out to me or David and we'd be happy to connect you with the relevant TI's if appropriate. David, thank you. And we're going to transition out of the Midwest to Florida for our next talk to Wendy Graham to talk about the facets project. So Wendy. Thank you, Jerry. I appreciate the opportunity to bring you down to Florida where it is 65 and sunny. So I want to talk to you today about a project that is funded by the USDA. It's a coordinated agricultural project with four universities, 20 faculty members and 20 students, grad students and research scientists. So next slide, please. The overall project vision is to promote the agricultural and silvicultural sustainability in North Florida and South Georgia while protecting water quantity, quality and habitat in the upper-floor aquifer and the springs and rivers it feeds. Next slide, please. For those of you who aren't familiar, the upper-floor aquifer underlies all of Florida and parts of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama. And it's among one of the largest and most productive aquifers in the world. It's a vital shared resource, provides 10 million people with drinking water, about $9 billion in agriculturally related economic activity. But there is a lot of competition for use of this aquifer between urban, agricultural forestry and environmental water uses. And this competition is exacerbated by climate variability, agricultural migration from some of the drought-stricken Western states. And what I want to talk to you about mostly today is the stringent environmental standards that have been established to protect both human health, which I know this workshop is focused on, but also ecosystem health. Next slide, please. Like we've seen in several of the talks today, when we put wells into agricultural fields and measure nitrate concentrations in groundwater, we virtually always see concentrations above the MCL of 10 milligrams per liter. This is an example on the left of well underneath, directly underneath a row crop farm, where despite implementation of best management practices, we're seeing nitrate concentrations of 10 to, I mean, sorry, 20 to 30 milligrams per liter. We've been working on these problems for the 30 years that I've been involved here at University of Florida. But about 10 years ago, Florida established nutrient criteria for groundwater emerging from springs from the fluoronographer of 0.35 milligrams per liter. And the graph you see on the bottom left is a time series of nitrate emerging from springs going to something less than 0.1 milligram per liter up until about 1980, then increasing very rapidly to above two milligrams per liter. And this is causing disruption of fluoronfauna, algae blooms. And although we don't have health issues associated with the algae we're concerned about in the springs, nitrogen triggering harmful algae blooms which cause health problems, have been talked about before and are of concern other places in the state. So next slide, please. So what our project is aiming to do is bring together scientists and stakeholders to really understand and develop the new knowledge we need to look at the trade-offs between the regional agricultural economy and environmental quality. There's been a long time narrative that we can all win in this game. We have small tweaks in behavior, no economic impact and we'll get to the environmental quality we want and we'll all be happy. But when you're aiming toward a 0.35 milligram per liter nitrate standard, that's a little iffy. So we hope that together we can understand what changes are needed to both achieve environmental, agricultural water security and environmental protection and help put together the tools, incentive programs and educational programs for improved decision-making. Next slide, please. The project is a big project, lots of people, lots of moving pieces. And I could talk a long time about it but I'll just say we have four major components. There's a component that's doing on-farm research farm, BMP research in both Florida and Georgia. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. We're developing a modeling platform to really understand both the water quantity, water quality, yield impacts, economic impacts of different ways to manage individual pieces of land owned by farmers and then collectively how to manage water sheds to protect the aquifer and receiving water bodies. We're using these models both to look at scenarios with stakeholders but also we have economists using them in willingness to accept and willingness to pay survey to try to help develop some new incentives to spur changes in behavior. And we have an extension group it's also taking the research results from the BMP research into on-farm. We're developing apps for water and nutrient management that they're demonstrating on farms. In-service training programs for crop consultants and extension agents as well as water schools for decision makers. Next slide, please. So we mentioned BMP research. It's going on both in Florida and Georgia. In Florida we're looking at corn carrot peanut and corn cover crop peanut rotations. In Georgia corn cotton peanut rotations looking at fertilizer rates application methods and irrigation scheduling methods use of cover crops and different tillage methods. And just sort of a key findings are with better application methods, banding and DVI scheduling. We've found that application rates can be reduced by about a third without any changing yield in both Florida and Georgia. And that use of soil moisture sensors and phone apps that use real time weather with a simplified crop and water balance model reduce water required between 30 and 75%. Next slide, please. Again, just time I'll move on but this is a participatory modeling process. We have people from agriculture, forestry, conservation groups, government and academia working on this model development. Next slide, please. And we work with this group both to decide what the priority crops are that we want to model based on the field experiments done in part of this project as well as other existing data and what the range of management systems are that we would like to explore. So with the stakeholders we developed this list of production systems on the left and on the right is the range of management systems that we are modeling generally going from management system three which is sort of a traditional high input practice to management system one which would have the most efficient irrigation using soil moisture sensors, the lowest fertilization rate and the highest use of cover crops. Next slide, please. So as I mentioned, we have a platform that has both biophysical and economic modeling. We are using SWAT ModFlow as our biophysical model because the groundwater component is so important in this car stock buffer system and the springs are the ecosystem of concern. And then we have an economic model but what we're really trying to do is look at the trade-offs between the different management practices, net recharge, net returns to the producer and net nitrate leached. And that's at the farm scale where the decisions are made and then advanced please. We're also aggregating events again we're also aggregating it up to the watershed scale so we can see how collective action impacts aquifer flows, spring flows, nitrate concentrations. Next slide, please. So this is really the bottom line. What this is is our trade-off plot. We have net recharge to the aquifer on the left leaching to the aquifer on the x-axis on the various cropping systems. We've talked the management system going from management system three which is the conventional practice through management system one which is the most efficient. And you can see as you move from management system three to management system one in all cases you reduce the leaching, you increase the net recharge, however you do decrease the net return. So could you advance two times on here please? So if we're trying to protect the environment we're moving from the lower left up to the lower right to the upper left but if we want to improve the net returns we're moving in the opposite direction. So these are the trade-offs that we're trying to get the stakeholders to understand. And next slide, please. Just to make it a little more relevant to the nitrate standards we're talking about the current conventional practices are all leaching more than 10 milligrams per liter and this is borne out by wells that we have underneath these fields. As we move to improved management systems the most efficient management systems we do see leaching concentrations drop below 10 but nowhere near the environmental standard that we're also shooting for. So next slide please. When you aggregate this up into SWAT mod flow and we do some simple scenario analysis that we're developing with the stakeholders where everybody uses the most efficient management system management system one versus everybody uses the conventional system which is management system three. We do see significant reductions in the nitrate concentrations emerging from the springs but not enough to achieve the environmental standards. We have a scenario where all agricultural is converted to slash pine forestry that does get us below the 0.35 milligrams per liter but next slide please. We're now working with the economists on a regional economic model because converting the entire area to slash pine is not likely to be very positive for the rural economy and rural livelihoods. So this is the next phase in our project we're developing various scenarios with the stakeholders that include climate change, big land use changes and we'll be looking at that over the next couple of years. So next slide. So what it will success look like in our minds basically we would like the agriculture and the forestry and the conservation and the government stakeholders to really understand what the changes are that we need to achieve both water security and environmental protections. These aren't going to be small peaks that are going to need new incentives some transformative watershed scale modification widespread adoption of BMPs and substantial changes in cropping systems. We hope that we'll have a robust agricultural economy and most importantly trusted social networks to sustain positive change beyond the project. So next slide. This of course wouldn't be possible without all the great students we have working on this project. And next slide. If you want more information floordandwater.org has lots of other information about this project. Thank you. Wendy, thank you. And thanks to all the speakers and everything. I know we've gone a little over time but you've heard a wealth of information this afternoon and I'm going to turn over now and if you could bring up the slide because we developed an input tool and I'm going to use this these results as the catalyst for the discussion and question aspects today and here are the top four responses that we got. And if you want to continue to put input into this those are instructions that we'll be sending you and everything but they're on part of the webpage as well. And part of this is that the most challenging issue to reducing nitrogen loss and that my slide went away. There we go. Thanks Sarah. Is that we have the right technology but our engagement tool to change behavior are not on target. That was one piece that we know what to do. We just can't figure out how to get it done. The other one is that people say we don't have the right technological tools and you've heard a lot of different tools today. We have the right technologies but our systems are broken. We actually have poorly designed programs or off-market off-base market values or they're all equally challenging that we have a combination of not knowing what to do and everything else. So we're going to use this as the platform to ask each of the speaker's questions, in terms of talking about the technologies, talking about behaviors, how do we begin to put these all into practice? So we'll bring up all the different speakers as a screenshot then we'll be able to start sharing that and everything. And I'll start off the question as we go and go back to Debruno on this because you talked about the aspects of being able to utilize digital agriculture and actually David talked about some of the new things with Smart Farm. So are we developing the technology and it really is a matter of just getting that technology into the hands of producers and consultants in order to make this effective? Thank you, Jerry. Well, just my opinion on this is I think the technologies are suddenly coming together. One thing, including myself, I could never really possibly dream of be able to know how much variability is across every field. And so that shows how much progress we have made with very low level of uncertainties because of the level of calibration and stuff, validation that we have done. The farmers like to have turnkey solutions. And so one complexity is that everybody approaches the farmer with one piece of the puzzle but masking that kind of marketing approach as the solution to the problem when unfortunately it isn't. And so I guess that kind of addresses a little bit the engagement and the fact that everybody wants a piece of the farmer. The farmer operates on a very thin margin economically. Some do well depending on how big the farm is. And so that level of engagement varies as Linda showed the early adopters versus others the age. But at least what I feel optimistic about is the possibility of implementing this sort of technology at a much larger scale. The second point, I do think the system is broken in a way because we prioritize incentives for some valid reasons about having yield subsidized through the insurance program and the part price kind of guaranteed and that sort of approach. But at the same time, we're not rewarding farmers for ecosystem services. And I think one of the value of my analysis is shows that the areas that they lose most of the inefficient use of their cost of the inputs happens from some specific locations that could go to biodiversity, could go to alternative land use. But guess what, the insurance does not pay based on acreage. They say, if I go to this, I will not receive the level of incentives, the level of payment, now my field is smaller. And even I engaged in the conversation with even at the national level with insurance and insurance get paid by the acreage. And the APH, the actual production history does not get updated after one year, only if you do irrigations or major investments. So I think we need to make sure the stakeholders, the policy makers understand that if we focus on parts of the fields that will minimize the risk of the investment of a farmer's luck and insurance. If I'm, I like the car. If I'm a good driver, my insurance is normally less and same thing that way. But rewarding the farmer for adopting the right piece of technology. And in the end, there is, we never really talked about the nitrogen problem about the livestock where a major losses also come from them. The two systems are disconnected. And any practices that deals with regenerative agriculture is trying to push them, basically bringing them together. Is that a good thing? My economist friends say, they're much more efficient if they're separated. And that's why they went that way. And so there is complexity there about bringing these benefits because if you hear the regenerative ag groups, the solution is there. Obviously the soil is the answer, which I would fully agree with, the fact that soil being always covered, reduce erosion and bringing all those. But then the adoption and convincing the farmer as Linda showed at the beginning of saying, well, why do I have to do this extra work? So it's complex. I think the technologies there policy are missing. Okay. Sarah, are we gonna bring up all the speakers to have them all on the screen? Yes, let's go into that section right now. All right. I see Roger's hand up. I see Tom's hand up. Raj, you have a question and you need to unmute yourself. So I have a couple of questions. The first one is for Bruno. Bruno, I really want to commend you for the large scale work that you and your group has performed. I think it is very important for us to have a, you know, this global scale flavor of, you know, how our farm practices are translating into the nitrogen budget. And I think your study shows that. And you went one step forward, which is unique about your study in that you translated into dollars and cents. Now, your study is a clear example where you documented that based on the current practices that farmers are undertaking, not all of them, but a lot of them are bleeding money. That's loud and clear. Correct. So if we were to look into future, trying to address this challenge where there is not only we're trying to reduce the nitrogen footprint, when you couple that with what is at risk, you know, yields could go down. So how can we address this challenge? Because it's a two-edged sword. Given the magnitude of your work, have you given pot on that? Yes, I'll try to be brief. I really have to go back to Ken's talk last week. Nitrogen is critical and is needed. What this, my study showed is that the area, which is more than 50% of constantly most of, you know, the fields, plus even the area that fluctuates, the unstable area have a tendency to be more on the ideal inside, unless you have either a strong drought or too much a deluge where you lose one of the others. But so that has shown that you could sustainably intensify in a way where the uptake is happening. The point that I'm trying to make here and farmers will actually resonate with me is that you just cannot put close to 200 pounds on an area that yields 120 bushels. And they realized that until now they said, well, I didn't know where they were, how they think most of them are overestimated in many ways because they manage very large enterprise. And so they don't really know exactly where these areas are. And so having the tools that allows them to incentivize the adoption of conservation practices. And I'll tell you one more reason. Instead of charging them, what is probably going to happen is that if you move awfully with the new administration is that if you move from putting input, not putting input with the biodiversity, there is a possibility of sequestering more carbon and they could get verified benefits in terms of carbon sequestration. They could potentially lead towards a market with all the complexity of verifying it. But we very well know that if you have a biodiversity strip, you're returning those five tons even if you either burn or sequest. I mean, put it down, there will go with no input. And so then the positive emission of agriculture obviously is highly related to the input. Once we at least eliminate the areas that they are more vulnerable, then we could solve it because the high and stable areas have close to 80%, 85% efficiency of nitrogen. It's a leakage system. So you will always have some losses, but at least you will not just reduce. Now, there is a land use change. The thing is if even if it's 20%, 25% of this low and stable areas, there are actually half in terms of acre because the yield is about 100 bushels and it's not 200 bushels. So the footprint of producing that, for example, in Argentina is significantly lower. So we're working on trying to package this in a climate benefit altogether. But until we provide incentives or farmers to have this biodiversity, we'll sequester carbon, we'll increase the biodiversity and all the jazz of the biodiversity, big time stories, then we will get closer to a more sustainable, resilient and circular system. I'd like to ask Wendy and Kerry, maybe to comment because you've been working with stakeholders on this as well. So any, either one of you have some comments on this? Well, I would agree that the payment for ecosystem services is gonna be an essential component to keeping agriculture in our state, in particular in Florida. As I mentioned, I don't think this is small tweaks. I mean, certainly the technologies are there and not everybody's adopting them. So variable rate irrigation, variable rate fertilizer, drones and DVI fertilization. But eventually, I do believe we have to pay more. We have to pay more for our food. I think everybody wants their clean water, their cheap food and their low taxes and all those things do not line up unless we want to say, okay, I'll keep our state pristine and we'll get all our agriculture from South America and not worry about the consequences. So I think just a reckoning across society of what it takes and how to be sustainable is important. So all of those factors are challenges that we need to address. Kerry? I think that's a great, great set of points, Wendy. A couple of things that I would add. When we have some research that I say we pretty loosely, USDA and EPA have created a challenge the enhanced efficiency fertilizer focus challenge and they're looking at both nitrogen and phosphorus. And one of the challenges that farmers, sometimes ag retailers have is what data should they trust? Is it the company that has a particular product or is it a land-grade university that might only compare one or two products? So this effort is gonna compare multiple products. I don't think I can share the number yet, but I would, between 10 and 20, both in the greenhouse and then in the field to show the differences with these enhanced efficiency fertilizer products called the Next Gen Fertilizer Challenge. So that's one place that I feel like can help with adoption is there's a trusted source of information that can look across all of the resources. The other thing that I would say is when ag retailers, when they have a suite of practices that they can offer a farmer, it sometimes is a little bit easier to make changes happen. So it's not asking piecemeal, can you change this one thing? We've got this, we're gonna do, soil sampling for you to get the zone or grid sampling and then with that, we're gonna add in VRT. And so the ag retailer has made the package easier for the farmer to adopt. It's not quite the easy button that someone had mentioned earlier, but it does kind of help stair step the way to more in different new nitrogen practices. One last thing is we're hoping to work with an entity to offer guarantees to farmers for yield changes, the yield change should you implement some of these, advanced practices that the farmers might be, as Bruno mentioned, concerned about yield drag, especially if the prices are high, the risk is even worse. So we're hoping to test that out. I think it's been proven with some best management practices. We're gonna also try that for nitrogen and phosphorus. Tom, you have a question and there you go. Okay, sorry, trying to click the buttons to start my video. First of all, thanks for a great panel. And as a non-expert in agriculture and a public health person, I learned so much. And I think there's a lot to be optimistic about it, but the behavior issue and the lens of EHMI is to look at the big system. And obviously we heard last week a lot about emerging new evidence on health effects and the public health connection. So I would like to ask the group really, if the public health aspects of the downstream effects and exposure can enter into the incentives and the behavioral equation or what role does that health connection have in the mindset of decision-making about nitrogen use and or does it factor in at all? I think I can tackle that. Go ahead, Linda, I'll come back. There's some evidence that when issues are localized, so it's impacting drinking water in a local reservoir, that that can certainly impact behavior. But the more, the further away the impact, the less that changes behaviors. So that's a broad answer to that question. Yeah, I would add that the sensitivity to the health, I don't know if it is as drastic as the way we tackle the campaign against smoke, but there is certainly not a well-informed public about this level of impact on the health of the people which are extremely serious. And in addition, it's not just about the water, but I think that has created more of a divide because the nitrogen creates a big impact to the climate. And so by solving some of basically this critical element, you could link the way the earth should respond and through the people that lives on it through the decisions. And so I think it's a combination that needs to link sensitivity in relation to the environment. And I don't think farmers will, I often hear, this is my land, I do what I want rather than thinking, this is your grandchildren's neighbor's land because of the consequences further down. But the impact on health or not, I think heavily described in the common literature, I mean, in the media and so on. I wanted to add that source water protection was built into several programs in the last farm bill. And I think people thought that that would have this effect. I haven't seen a lot yet. I don't know if others have of active roles by the drinking water systems of getting involved in reduction of nutrients or other chemicals. That was the thinking. Hello, Henry. I would just point, oh, go ahead, Cary. I was just gonna point back to in 2014 when Lake Erie had its drinking water problems, there was a lot of action that happened immediately after that and the motivation to bring in multiple parties, that was huge. So I don't want a crisis to happen in order to initiate change, but I feel like in that case, it made people move more quickly with the Lake Erie and the water quality issue, those harmful algal blooms had been connected to health issues before, but it was, I would say there was probably 10 years running up to 2014 before that happened. And so it did give time for people to kind of do some research and think about how they could act together. So I think it's gonna take more than just education. And I would say, oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Wendy. I was gonna say that the contamination of domestic drinking water wells is sort of an unseen quiet problem. It's a rural quiet problem that whereas in Florida, the blue-green algae issue that we had in 2018 with Lake Okeechobee and Clusa Hatchee and the St. Lucie Estuary, that was a very visible, it caused respiratory problems, a combined with retired cause respiratory problems. So that's a much more visible thing to many, many more people versus the domestic water supply well, which is a very local, quiet hidden problem, I think. Alejandro, you have your hand up. Yeah, thank you, Adir. So I just want to point out the political problem that linking health issues to agricultural production will create since agriculture is a non-point source polluter. So in order to address, to link those two, you would have to first link the problem to the point source polluters. And that will be faced with tremendous political lobbying. Okay. You're talking about if the Clean Water Act is used, but that's not the only potential policy tool. Lisa, you have a comment or a question? I was going to respond to the question about source water protection or a comment that Dane made in that I don't know if it's driven by the Farm Bill, but at least here in Iowa, the cities of Dubuque and Cedar Rapids and Ames are investing upstream to help farmers implement practices such as saturated buffers and bioreactors and cover crops and curry strips with the goal of trying to address their own nutrient issues with regards to water quality. And so I'm really excited about that opportunity to link municipalities with upstream and that recognition that we're all in this together, right? We all need clean water and farmers need help in implementing these practices. So that's one thing, but the second thing I would say is that, and I'm not the first one to say this, but we need a second green revolution and whereas the first green revolution was really motivated in addressing hunger, now we need a second one to address all of the environmental impacts of agriculture and recognizing that people need our, we need a clean environment as well as food. We need both in order to sustain ourselves and our livelihoods in our communities. So that systems level of change that Tom had adjusted. I guess that begs the question and I'll put it to all the panelists, including Linda this afternoon. So what do we need to re-engineer in agriculture to affect this dynamic between the environment and ecology and health all simultaneously? You know, everything is on the table. We've heard a lot of different technologies. We've heard about the use of tools. We've seen, so where do we start in all of this? And I just have a quick stab at it. I think we have to make the system more sensitive of a circularity approach. So basically the resources that they're generated have to be completely accounted and the disconnect that we still have between the crop and the livestock. I mean, the livestock still produces a very large amount of waste. And even if it's with all the efforts of trying to get it back to some of the fields that don't go very far into the areas and there is a cost of, so I think circularity by increasing efficiency through some of the digital tools that I've shown, the ecosystem playing a role in terms of removing this unproductive land, but also things on the farm where, you know, more bio gas needs to be produced, you know, more energy generation, you know, one of the scenarios that I've worked on is the fact of using wind turbines. The Chicago land areas becoming, is actually giving away a lot of good land rather than putting these turbines, you know, on unproductive land to generate energy that could be used on the farm, as well as the bio gas. So circularity for me, it's not replacing sustainability or anything, but it's a concept that leads towards what we really trying to be. It's in a normal life, we try not to waste. And so that needs to become more of a stronger thought at the starting at the farm level and track it down to the supply chain because now the terminology is no longer agriculture, but they use agriculture and food systems. And so we need to start being circular at the farm level and deliver improved quality of food all the way, rich food and all the components of quality and impact on the health altogether. So it's really part of a bigger system. And I think circularity is a concept that we kind of undermined so far. I think we're partly having the wrong conversation, right? So, and I was, I'm part of the problem, right? So today we talked about a lot of practices that are trying to make an unsustainable system marginally more sustainable versus throwing out the unsustainable system and replacing it with something more sustainable, right? We subsidize, we incentivize, we support farmers to grow in my part of the world, corn and soybeans. Is that really the best thing we can do with our land? I would argue no, but that's a really radical major change. That's what I think we need. Thank you, Linda. That's a great statement. The changing the cropping system does seem fundamental and many researchers have shown how corn is fundamentally not sustainable. So that's great. The word that came to my mind was accountability to use something that's a lot used in the national conversation about other things, but that people need to be accountable or the farming system, the agricultural system needs to be accountable for the losses for the externalities. That also goes along with understanding the benefits of each of these practices. And that's a very active area of research, how much reduction can you get from various practices and we don't have clearly agreed on numbers for that. But if people were accountable for what's lost from either a farm or from a drainage area or a watershed, that would certainly change the incentives. So I guess it would also- Gary, do I? Oh, go ahead, Gary. I feel like I'm always just jumping in. So- I didn't see your hand. A couple of things. I think we don't agree as a society on the ecosystem services or what the value of those externalities is either. So it's hard to say to a farmer or a landowner, someone that's producing food, change it because we value it in this way or that way. So I think if we could agree on the value of the ecosystem services, on the value of those externalities, I think that would go a long way. And we could think about faster feedback loops to the farmer and the landowner. Oftentimes there is no way to understand the full extent of any externality until the next year or maybe never, depending on how the nitrogen is measured or how the erosion is measured. So I think some of the technologies that we're talking about today are perfect to help make those feedback loops faster and then change can happen more quickly. But they're also going to need some sort of advisor to help figure out what to do with all that information. Hey, I'm gonna put you on the spot because when we talk about third crops for the Midwest, producers will say, well, there's no market, there's no value. So if I produce weed or oats, who's gonna buy them? And they all say, well, these are good things to put in a rotation, but how do we incentivize markets for this? So that's a great point, Jerry. And I met with executives from Unilever, Switzerland and New York, and they actually are subsidizing or let's say cost sharing with farmers in Iowa that introduce oats into their three year rotation with corn and soybeans and not only oats, but cover crops in the system. And they pay some money to these farmers, but the problem that these executives have and that's why they called me was about how to report back to their stakeholders the impact that that money was creating locally. So they wanted to prove that not only the oats sourced by Unilever were of good quality and environmental produced environmentally friendly way, but that they could put a dollar value to that benefit, social benefit. And so I think that the problem that Cary was talking about is critical, metrics. We are lacking metrics to tell the story. I mean, I would say generally recognized or generally agreed metrics that can be used across practices to measure impact. Currently, at the point, I didn't have a good answer for those executives, but I think that's important. So let's just talk about the metrics a little bit. So what should, what would be the top five metrics that we would use to show improvement in efficiency, improvement in water quality? I mean, if we had to put those out, if you were asked to put those out by 430 this afternoon, what would we put down and carry your grinning? So I'll start with you. Well, so I don't know if all the technology exists to create it, right? I think that's part of the part of it, but I was intrigued by the infield and monitoring those micro needles. If those can give feedback immediately to farmers to say, this is what's happening with your nitrogen. I think that would be great. We have soil moisture probes in some places that, so at different levels, they're 36 inches long or something. And so at different levels, they can measure what nutrients are there and how much moisture is there. And so that could also be a metric. But again, the feedback loop would have to be pretty quick. I think there need to be some agreement on what we care about when it comes to soil carbon and how to measure that. I don't know that I haven't answered at all for that. I just think we need to agree on what those metrics are and then share that back with the farmer. But I also think, we have a lot of models. And so if a farmer is implementing cover crops, for example, could there be some sort of feedback loop to say it just rained two and a half inches because you have cover crops in place or wheat, for example, you prevented X amount of erosion from happening. It's not necessarily connected to nitrogen, but some of those feedback loops to say, you know what, this isn't paying right now, but you'll see some long-term impact. What it is helping with right now is some erosion. So connecting some of those things that pay off, maybe have a longer pay off period to some immediate impacts, I think would be really helpful. Dr. Shepers. You know, you've spent a long time in a whole career working on nitrogen and improvement. So I'm sure you've got a few thoughts for us on this. Well, Jerry, it seems to me that we come back to this business of if you can take water stress out of the management issue or greatly reduce it, it really changes the way people think or the farmers think and the attitude that they have toward managing other things. And part of what I also see is that you talked about specialty crops, the seed corn companies produce a lot of seed in Nebraska for a good reason because of irrigation. It's stability, but what they also do is they encourage the farmers when they go in and knock out the male rose to plant cover crops and get those cover crops started and then they bring cattle in to grade those things. And so even though you may say the seed corn production is not good or they apply extra nitrogen, in essence, there's an opportunity there to recover some of that. But I'm not sure that the seed corn companies emphasize this enough to their growers. They throw it out there as an option, but if it doesn't happen, don't worry about it. I think there's some opportunity there to set an example for the seed companies. David, you have your hand up. Yes, just in terms of the discussion of how challenging it is to set metrics, especially for ecosystem services, that's why RPE decided to focus on the carbon intensity metric. It's very well-defined, it can be quantifiable and it just so happens that nitrogen happens to make up a large component of that for the feedstock production. And while carbon intensity at the moment is somewhat limited and being utilized as metric driving behavior change, more and more regions are starting to talk about low carbon fuel standards. And when you think about approximately one-third of the corn crop going to biofuels at the moment, if you're able to quantify the carbon intensity of that corn going in the biofuels and you have market incentives established in some markets to incentivize reducing that carbon intensity, we like to think that that could be one relatively easy. Easy, I mean, easy is obviously in quotation marks, but we've seen evidence just on utilizing machine data off of farm equipment to quantify the nitrogen application and then plug into the LEGREET model to calculate the carbon intensity, being enough to show that certain growers and growing practices can reduce the carbon intensity 10, 20% over national averages. And that's our pathway that we as the Department of Energy happen to be focused on at the moment. All right, great. Lisa, did you have your hand up? Yes, I did, thanks, Jerry. So I have a few thoughts about this based on 17 years of data and conversations. Well, first of all, I think we've come back to the theme of profitability. I mean, that's got to be a metric. And if farmers are not profitable at growing annual row crops, why is society subsidizing that, undercutting that cost when it's having such a huge impact on so many other aspects of our lives? Secondly, with my work on prairie strips, the main reason farmers come and talk to me and my team about prairie strips is because they're worried about losing their soil. So soil loss through erosion is a significant, significant concern. They want to keep their soil. It's so important to their own bottom line and the resilience of their farm, that farm legacy to keep their soil. So soil erosion. And then they're also asking about other aspects of soil health. What that measure is, Carrie, you probably know better than I, but there's got to be other soil health measures in there as well. And then I think we can point to the willingness to pay survey data that I shared, which showed that society, at least Iowans, are willing to pay for nutrient retention. And then they're willing to pay for farmers and then they're willing to pay for soil and then they're willing to pay for other wildlife benefits. Taken together, we have a, what is that now? Seven metrics, we can do this, right? What we don't have represented in our data thus far is anything about GHGs or climate resilience. And so one great thing that could come from this panel, I think, is a nationwide willingness to pay study looking at all of these environmental benefits that farms could provide to society and asking people, what are we willing to pay? How can we support our farmers to provide us with a clean environment in addition to food and fuel? Jane, did you have a comment on metrics? No, it was back a little bit, but thank you, Lisa, that was very inspiring. This was more in response to Jim Shepard's and he got me thinking about once water, the threat of water stress is taken away what people are willing to do. The practice that we're probably most actively researching is very new here, the idea of water recycling. Somewhat circular, as Bruno said, at least it gets the idea that the water and nutrients would be circular. One of the difficulties is that there isn't much data showing the benefits of the irrigation, but this fact intrigued me that even in our very humid areas where drainage is a bigger issue than lack of water, there is still a lack of water. And so that's why there's so much nitrogen left at the end of the year in many years. So your comment that farmers are willing to try new things if the water stress is taken away has intrigued me as there might be more openness to other things if drainage water recycling kind of scenario where there is irrigation, even though it's not critical, it could open up to other practices. Peter and then Eric, Peter, you have a question? Yes, and thank you very much for these great presentations both this week and last week. I come at this from the perspective, partly as a farmer, but more as an advocate. And we've talked a lot about these great practices and how different policies could accelerate their adoption and policies are a function of politics. So my question is really, how do we get there? I mean, we don't have the, I would say I'm gonna oversimplify the, let's say the environmentally unfriendly policies that we have now by accident. Those are the policies that have developed over years because of the way politics works and the way lobbying works, et cetera. And so it seems we basically know what we wanna do. There's a lot of details in terms of practices where and monitoring and all, but overall research is on sustainable practices is a fraction of what it could be. And so it's not really our knowledge of what to do. And we also have some of the sense those were great slides that you put together on what do who do farmers listen to? Unfortunately, mostly the private sectors who are trying to sell them products, chemicals and seeds or whatever. How do we change the politics so that then we can change the policies? I think, again, we know that what we need to do, we know the policies that would make a big difference. How do we get the politics to get those policies changed? That seems to be the real struggle, the voices of the rural communities and only a small portion of people in rural communities are actually producers. More of them are working in other activities and suffer the consequences of the CAFOS nearby or the water pollution or whatever. And we're not listening to them. How can we change the politics? Anyone on the panel wanna address that one? That's a big question, sorry. That's why we have a big panel, Peter. And the answer is challenging, right? I mean, if we look at, so a lot of politics obviously are shaped by lobbyists. If we look at our big ag lobbyists, and I'll use climate change as an example, it has taken a lot of our big ag lobbyists a long time to admit that climate change is happening despite decades of science saying that is the case, right? And so I think we need to be working on those big farm groups and helping them to see the science that change needs to happen because they have the ear of the politicians. Very. Thank you. I'll figure out my hand raised soon enough. But one of the things that I think, so let's just go back to some of the science that Linda talked about, right? So education isn't enough. There also has to be that whole set of things in place for behavior change. It's true for all people, for politicians included as farmers. And so when you think about some of the roadblocks or opportunities, I think we need to go back to Linda's research. And one of the things that politicians also want is a guarantee that their constituencies are going to be as good or better off with a new sort of policy. And so some of this is like just making sure when you think about commodity producers, are they going to still be able to produce something later? Are they going to be out of business because of a new policy? So I feel like as Linda had just said, it's complicated, but there's still people. And I feel like that same model that Linda talked about earlier could be applied. I also think that we have made huge progress. I used to work at the Farm Bureau in Michigan and the conversations have just, it was, yes, we can talk about it 10, 15 years ago. And just because of just some things that they've experienced, things that they've learned, new research that's come out, I feel like the conversation has turned and it is, how can we help? So I think we're in a good place to make some policy shifts. Great, thanks for those comments. Eric, let's have you answer your question. Okay, I will. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to turn on my video. Oh, there I go. Yep, there you are. Okay, buddy, I really enjoyed this conversation. One of the things I haven't heard much about is the consumer. And when we talk about the food system, of course, we have to talk about the consumer. There was mention about how the consumers want affordable food. And we have a pretty good system to create fairly affordable food. But a lot of consumers also want to be responsible consumers. And the ones I know and my friends and family, when they think about trying to make choices at the supermarket that's good for the environment, what do they do? They buy organic. And I don't think any of us in this group would say that's really the answer. Not that I have anything against organically grown food, but I don't think any of us are going to advocate that that's the way to get more sustainable agriculture is to go completely to organic. If we look at other commodities such as fish, for example, my local grocer has little signs up saying whether or not the fish is sustainably harvested. Now, one could argue as to whether they really have good metrics for that. That's debatable. Cans of tuna fish have a little symbol on it that say it's dolphin friendly. And that's really where what consumers want. The USDA has come up with regulations as to what a farmer has to do to be able to put on that little symbol that says it's organically grown. What if we came up with a set of best management practices that are measurable, confirmable, that would be used for putting a little symbol on that product? It seems like General Mills is interested. It seems like Walmart is interested in those sorts of things. Field to Market and all the companies that are supporting that. What if we had metrics that the scientific community could stand behind and maybe convince whether it's USDA or environmental organizations or an industry collective to accept those and say, and a few examples might be how many, what fraction of the farm for how long a time has bare soil. It might be some metric of nitrogen use efficiency where farmers pretty much know how much they're harvesting and how much nitrogen is in it and how much they put on. So it's not a difficult calculation. It might be with new technologies coming out to make easier measurements of soil carbon or something like that. They'd have to be fairly simple. They'd have to be verifiable. They couldn't be that you can actually measure how much nitrate is leaching out of your farm. That's almost impossible to do. But if we came up with metrics about using best management practices and had the food chain industries connected to the consumers, could that not provide the kinds of incentives without increasing costs of food too far and with still providing incentives for farmers to participate, maybe in some cases getting a slight premium for the crop that they produce. Is that kind of more of a redesign of the food system that we might need to try to introduce to move towards the sustainable system? Good comments. Thumbs up across there, Eric. I mean, I think that we often in agriculture do have a disconnect with the consumer and looking at this system. And as Bruno points out, it is a circular system. And I don't know that we fully appreciate all the linkages that go on. But I think as we go forward, we're gonna have to look at much more of the connectivity among the different pieces and how it all fits. The Alejandro, did you have a comment back? Your hand is back up. I didn't know if that was from before or now. So... It's a comment about Eric's discussion. So thank you. I agree the systemic approach is better than the piecemeal approach. But in looking at the labeling itself, there are plenty of labels. And once you have more than a few labels out there like organic, natural, green, naturally environmentally friendly and so on, then it becomes really difficult for the consumer to identify exactly what the benefit of buying this product over these other products that have two different labels really is. So the market segmentation when there's a multiplicity of labels makes the market for each of those labels really thin. So unless there's the political will to eliminate all USDA sponsored labels and recreate the system, I don't think it will work. It's a great idea, but I don't think it will work. And even if the USDA proceeds that way, we still have all the private labels that cannot be disputed and USDA cannot go against those labels. So market segmentation will always be an issue. Maybe it's the big retailers like Walmart that have to somehow be in the driver's seat like for this. So maybe it isn't a label on each individual product. I don't know. I've never quite understood why Walmart is interested in regenerative agriculture, what they're getting out of it if they're not putting a label on it, but there must be something there that we're not understanding. Jane, you have a comment. I'm just wondering if anybody has thought about such a system for ethanol, which is of course the largest use of our cropland. Harder to imagine. I'm gonna make a comment that this time is flowing by very quickly. And I will express my appreciation to Linda and to the panelists and everything. I think that you've put a lot of information out on the tables and we've had a lot of great discussion. I'll leave you with this thought process. And I told producers that our biggest challenge over the next few years is really gonna be how we manage water. And the water is a conveyance mechanism for soil and for nutrients and everything else. But I think as we get producers to understand what the water dynamics of landscapes are and the water dynamics of different systems is gonna be, I think you saw that common thread throughout all the presentations this afternoon. And I think that that really becomes our challenge because as we understand how to handle one of those pieces then we can understand how we start looking at the utilization of that crop because it'll go back to reinforce a comment that Jim made is that when we take the water stress out of the system and a lot of these water stresses are relatively minor they don't show up as being drought stresses you would never characterize them as drought level but they do impact productivity. And as we impact productivity we really have magnified the impact of nitrogen inefficiency, phosphorus inefficiency and if we wanna improve that we've really gotta think about how do we enhance the capacity of being able to ensure that that plant doesn't have stress. And there's more and more data that point to that piece of it. And I think that it really gets back to this aspect that Lisa bought up and Jane bought up and Wendy bought up in looking at the overall system and the landscape of saying how do we really manage not a field at times but the overall landscape and looking at where that field is placed. And I do really think it's gonna take a different thought process for all of us to begin to move from that 40 acre field to that 2000 acre landscape that we often have a scale on. And I think we have the technology to do this. I think we have the tools but I think what we really lack and coming out of this is maybe the imagination of how do we bring those together? How do we really begin to put this into a different framework that we haven't utilized before? So with that we're actually out of time for this afternoon. I'm gonna turn it back over to, I guess it goes back to, oh, back to Kathy. She's waving her hand and everything. She's gonna give us a preview of coming attractions for the next and I really do want to express my thanks to the panelists this afternoon. Excellent job. I think we've had a lot of things to think about. I know I've got a lot of notes on the side of all the things that I've got that I'm gonna be getting back with each of you to ask you some very specific questions about how we put some of this into implementation. So with that, my appreciation and thanks on behalf of all of us and Kathy, it's yours. Thank you, Jerry and thank you all the panelists. This was incredibly rich conversation. I can't, as an economist, I can't stop from making a comment that this group with talking about technologies and all the different challenges have done just an amazing job of describing how hard it is to address externalities that are at the scale of half of the United States land base with just a voluntary approach. And so as we continue to struggle with that and think through that, keep in mind all the incredibly useful information that we learned both from the technology but what we know about behavior and incentives. Really, really incredible. So thank you. I just wanna end in addition to thanking all of our speakers today and Jerry for doing an amazing job of keeping us on track and engaged to draw your attention to what we have queued up for you next week. Today we heard a lot about individual farmer motivations, incentives and technologies that can at the farm field scale address nitrogen. Next week we're gonna talk a little bit more about some of those local issues but we're gonna get broader and talk about off farm large scale changes. So innovative technologies as well as decision-making, building coalitions, irrigated lands and regulatory programs. So the broader context. So with that I'll leave you, have a great evening and feel free to visit our website and share our slides and copies of this today's presentation. Be well everybody.