 All right everyone we're gonna go ahead and get started. We've got a couple more people. I hear that we hear the elevators chiming out there So we'll have a few more people rolling in and of course for our online audience as well I'd like to welcome everybody to our briefing. This is the second briefing in our five-part series Farm Bill in Focus, and I'm Dan Berset. I'm the president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and today our look at the Farm Bill continues with climate energy and economic win-wins in the Farm Bill and I'd like to say a special thanks to Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow for helping us with the room today and for being our host up here And in fact, it's really nice that we're in this room today because in a couple months we'll be back up here on the hill with the Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus which is co-chaired by Senator Jack Reed and Senator Mike Crapo for the 2023 Congressional Clean Energy Expo which we're really really excited about so if you like this room if you like what you see today Definitely keep an eye out for that. It'll be posted pretty soon EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide policymaker educational resources And today what that means is we do a lot of briefings briefings like today We also started the year with our Congressional Climate Camp series We looked at four big topics budget and appropriations Public polling added in public attitudes about climate change Non-CO2 emissions and other pollutants and the status of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and inflation and inflation reduction act Implementation since then we've also done briefings about the energy efficiency and renewable energy programs underway at DOE The nuclear energy programs underway at DOE. We've got one coming up on June 1st on hydrogen with environmental defense fund And a couple weeks ago our good friends at NRDC worked with us To do a really great briefing about organics agriculture and I'd like to definitely plug that as well All of our briefings all of our fact sheets all of our resources Everything is available always online at www.eesi.org and the best way to keep up with what we do is to subscribe to our biweekly newsletter climate change solutions So I went through briefings But what we really try to do is make all of our resources Timely relevant accessible and practical and the reason why we do that is because we know what it's like to be a congressional staff person And so we have a number of you in the room today We have a number of you in our online audience And we know what happens when your boss walks into your your cube or your office and says I need to know about something Well, if it wants to know or she wants to know about a climate change topic That's what EESI is for we want to be your go-to resource for non-partisan science based information about all manner of climate change topics We also Are paying special attention as evidence today to the firm bill and so while the firm bill Is not specifically a climate bill There are a lot of provisions and programs that will be up for debate in the context of the firm bill Including many of the win-wins we talk about today that will have climate impacts whether on the adaptation side or the mitigation side And we're putting a lot of thought into our resources of special Special call out to our legislative side by side by sides. What is that? Well, these are just Comparisons with existing of existing law with the house and senate text when we get it and again Everything is available online trying to make the congressional staff person's job as easy as possible You can definitely help us out with that or definitely count us count on us for that And everything's available online at www.esi.org forward slash 2023 firm bill and there's a number of my colleagues that are here today Most of us Allison looking at you I don't see one on you But most of us are wearing our esi lapel pins. And so if you have questions or you want to learn more about what we do Just track us down. We'll be we'll be hanging out After the briefing today, and we'd love to catch up and say hi and chit chat Oops, I see I said I wasn't going to use the clicker and I didn't but these are pictures of all of our great resources That's our hearing tracker If you are not keeping up with every agriculture committee hearing or if you weren't here in the 117th congress But you're interested in what the house and senate committees did We have a hearing tracker that tracks all of the climate change Topics that popped up in those hearings and they're really really good. That's our side by side We also have more briefings coming up. We did one two weeks ago on the process. It was a great briefing. We had Really tremendous experts helping us understand not just the firm bill process But also how you can engage in the firm bill process on behalf of your boss if you're new to the firm bill It was really really great two weeks from today. We'll be back with our host representative Jim Clyburn and we'll be talking about Unlocking rule economies firm bill investments in rule america two weeks after that for future of forestry in the firm bill And then two weeks after that conservation practices from farms to forests and wetlands So a lot of really great briefings coming up and I hope everyone Takes advantage of them and even if you can't make it in person That's okay if you rsvp that ensures that you get a link to the live cast it ensures You get the presentation materials and a couple weeks after the briefing it ensures that you get the written summary notes Which are really really handy But about our briefing today Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of us greenhouse gas emissions Farms ranches and forests are increasingly and more frequently negatively affected by climate related impacts like drought flooding and extreme heat And our panelists today will help explain how firm bill policies and programs help Agricultural producers and communities reduce greenhouse gas emissions build climate resilience and promote economic development and create jobs We are going to cover really interesting topics today diverse topics today. And if you have Questions there are a couple ways you can ask those questions for everyone in the room We'll have a roving mic. And so when it comes time for q&a We'll go around the room with the mic Raise your hand catch my eye and you can ask your question If you're in our online audience today, you can follow us on social media at EESI online Hashtag EESI talk you can also send us an email and the email address to use as ask That's ask at EESI dot org and you can ask your questions that way and we'll do our best to incorporate them Into the discussion But that brings us to our first panelist today. Micah McMillan Micah is a senior analyst in the natural resources and environment team of the government accountability office Where he's worked since 2004 Micah's work has primarily focused on climate change water infrastructure and the impacts of energy production on water quality In recent years. Micah has written reports on climate resilience and drinking water and wastewater infrastructure The migration of communities due to the impacts of climate change and climate resilience and agriculture Micah, thanks for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you and here's your clicker I hope it works better for you than it did for me Thank you. I thank you for the opportunity to participate today We really appreciate it. Um Just want to start this off by saying that our climate change work primarily focuses on In particularly our work on climate change and agriculture focuses on climate resilience and not greenhouse gas emissions reductions and In particular, we're emphasizing improving climate resilience to reduce the fiscal exposure of the federal government um So at the start No, sorry. Okay. There we go. Um at the start of each new session of congress We ask you what's called the high risk list and It basically identifies programs and operations that are high risk due to vulnerabilities uh to fraud Waste abuse and mismanagement or that need transformation um federal fiscal exposure and climate change was added to the list in 2013 And uh, we've categorized those risks into five different risks including including fiscal risk due To the federal government as an insurer of property and crops And we just issued our most recent uh high risk list report in april of this year Um, our past recommendations is primarily focused in two different areas It's main streaming which is sort of the idea of integrating climate resilience into existing programs and operations And uh, and then in cases where policy issues or projects with large and complex scopes That cut across agency missions and programs We make recommendations generally to create new institutions and in many cases these are kind of the Large projects are the biggest fiscal risks to the federal government um In 2020 we published the disaster resilience framework Uh, which identified key principles and a series of questions to help federal decision making on actions to improve resilience disasters and climate change And also to evaluate existing efforts to improve resilience Um, the framework identifies three key principles accessing information that can be used to identify risks and risk reduction strategies integrating analysis and planning across agencies and programs to take coordinated resilience actions And creating incentives to make long-term forward-looking risk reduction investments Um and to make them more viable and attractive among competing priorities Okay, so earlier this year we, uh, published we published a report um That basically summarizes actions usda has taken to help producers enhance their resilience and strengthen limitations Uh of policy options available to usd to help producers enhance their resilience um and just to sort of Illustrate the importance of this issue from a fiscal perspective in 2021 The crop insurance program ensured over 100 agricultural commodities with a total liability of around 136.6 billion And premium subsidies totaling about 8.6 billion And then also between 2018 2021 alone or at least disasters that occurred in 2018 to 2021 Uh, we appropriated more than 15 billion in agricultural disaster relief and assistance So I just want to before we get into the report. I just want to say that the report was Designed to provide a comprehensive and diverse set of perspectives on strengths and limitations Of the options that we identified. Um, just to inform congressional decision-making Um, and it's it's not policy perspective prescriptive beyond that Okay, so as far as actions that usda has taken they've probably been done through the climate hubs Starting around 2015. They did a series of regional vulnerability assessments kind of looking at region specific vulnerability vulnerabilities to agriculture and also some high level actions that producers could take to enhance their resilience um They've also developed developed some region specific tools and tools and guidance to help producers Take action on their own In response to a series of executive orders by the abiding administration usda has developed some department-wide climate resilience planning starting in about in 2021 and they follow that up with an update in 2022 They've also developed A series of sub agency Planning documents that sort of fit into the larger department-wide plan Technical and financial assistance provided through usda's conservation programs can provide some indirect incentives to producers to enhance their resilience um and also some of the climate change provisions and the inflation reduction act depending on how it's implemented could potentially Create some indirect incentives to help producers enhance their resilience Okay, so this is the list of options that we identified. I this is You know, we have almost 30 to 40 pages of discussion on these options and their strengths and limitations I can't really get into it in the in this context, but I like to refer you to the report if you're interested and and sort of going through these It's a pretty comprehensive set of limitations at least and strengths that we've summarized and that kind of Helps illustrate the trade-offs that you know, we're going to have to occur for us to take action on some of these All right So kind of summarizing the high level findings Experts told us that implementing multiple options have the most potential to improve producer resilience Because they can leverage the strengths and limitations They can address the strengths and leverage the I'm sorry address the limitations and leverage some of the strengths of of the various options And the timing in the sequence is important. Um, for example For something like regional climate resilience resilience planning that could be an opportunity to Generate buy-in among the producers and some of the key stakeholders and also it could be an opportunity to sort of set priorities For when the when the options should be implemented and if they and how it should be done sequentially The usd is kind of unsure just what the statutory Authority that they're going to need to implement some of these options and also They're not really they don't really know what resources they're going to need. So we sort of We found that a comprehensive analysis of the options would help identify the planning priorities And help informer congressional decision-making So we recommended that usda should analyze options to enhance the climate resilience Of agricultural producers and integrate them into usda's future climate resilience prioritization and planning efforts and the analysis should include usda's decisions to prioritize or not prioritize Which options and identify any authority and resources that usda might need for implementation And usda agreed with recommendation. So All right, thank you And micah the best place to get that report is to visit gao.gov Excellent and that was what I was the segue I was hoping for In addition to the presentation materials our panelists have also made some of our panelists have also made recommendations of other resources So if you go to our briefing page, it is a really convenient way to kind of download everything And and that includes the slides that micah and our other panelists will present Also, if you're thinking of questions that you would like to Oh, sorry. I thought you're waving at me. Troy. Sorry. I thought I was getting a big wave Just a big stretch If you have questions in the audience, we'll have a roving microphone My good friend Isabella will help us with that when it comes time for q&a If you are in our online audience, you can follow us on social media at esi online hashtag esi talk You can also send us an email and the email address to use is ask That's ask at esi.org That brings us to audrey Schmitt. Audrey is the north america agroforestry program manager at the nature conservancy Audrey manages a 60 million dollar usda partnerships for climate smart commodities grant designed to advance agroforestry As a regenerative agriculture solution in the united states Audrey has been working at the nexus of regenerative agriculture and environmental conservation for over 10 years And we're really happy to have you today to learn about Agroforestry, so thank you so much Great. Thank you so much. And can you guys hear me all right? Okay, wonderful Well, I first want to thank the organizers for the opportunity to be here today to talk with you all Let me just pass through here. So again, i'm audrey epp schmitt. I'm the north america agroforestry program manager at the nature conservancy Just first a little bit about the nature conservancy at tnc Our vision is a world where the diversity of life thrives and people act to conserve nature for its own sake And its ability to fulfill our needs and enrich our lives Tnc has been working for decades with farmers ranchers Forest landowners in order to understand what are the conservation opportunities that exist that can help for world development and creating safer communities And you know right now we're in a moment where the agriculture sector is contributing It's estimated about 24 percent of emissions here in the u.s What's the opportunity for us to help farmers bottom line while helping them be part of the climate solution? And one of those opportunities that is underutilized is agroforestry So agroforestry is the strategic integration of trees into cropping systems, whether they're grazing systems or Kind of your more traditional annual cropping systems And i want to note agroforestry has been around for millennium They this is these are practices that have been used by communities across the globe importantly indigenous communities as well And where we're at today is Re-envisioning what could agroforestry look like in our modern landscapes with our modern industrialized agriculture What's the role of integrating more trees into our farms so that there's profit and all the environmental benefits we know come from that And you know i'd like to note the usda has been involved in promoting agroforestry goes back to the 98 farm bill Which helped found the national agroforestry center a really important resource That's really helped us move the needle to date on integrating more agroforestry into Our farmlands and usda recognizes five specific agroforestry practices Just to run through them quickly. There's alley cropping and that's putting tree crops Maybe fruit nuts timber biodiversity species in row with existing annual crops Next is windbreaks. That's where you're more strategically placing the trees to reduce wind pressure that might be negatively impacting your crops Silvo pasture really critical and underutilized in our grazing systems These are trees that are there to benefit herd health So it can be really beneficial for individual animal health as well as weight gain In extreme cold temperatures and extreme heat temperatures, which we all know is modeled to be more and more the reality for us and Next riparian buffers riparian buffers are adding forested areas Right alongside whatever the waterway is and this this is known to have really strong water quality benefits Specifically, you know the concerns that exist around increased nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from our farmlands And last the final one is forest farming and forest farming is when you take an existing forested Landscape and you introduce botanicals like ginseng or blue cohosh To add a new layer a new revenue stream for that forest landowner To have an additional crop coming out of that And you know the truth is this is an underutilized resource that we have we know that this is a tool that can be added and What i'm here today to talk about is how this is an economic win-win This is there are a myriad of co-benefits here And specifically the stories that can come from agroforestry by being a climate solution Coupling that with farmers bottom lines Rural development job creation. It's just a real good win-win and It can really help farm Individual farmers resilience as well. We know there's increased market volatility that happens. There's extreme weather events by having farmers add a new Cropping system to their land. That's an additional revenue source that brings them more economic resiliency in times of difficulty and From an agro ecological perspective, of course, this is really important for introducing additional habitat for pollinators So that biodiversity question it really helps on the biodiversity side of things Not to mention again water quality and food resilience as well But there are a lot of barriers for why agroforestry isn't more widespread yet in the united states Right now it's estimated that only approximately two percent a little under two percent of u.s. Farmland Uses any kind of agroforestry practice under two percent that seems like a missing opportunity for us and so There's you know, there's technical challenges There's social challenges and there's financial challenges for why this isn't yet the reality one of those financial Challenges is that these are pretty expensive upfront cost to put in really high quality agroforestry systems And it can sometimes take five eight plus years before you see the returns from these systems If we know that this is a climate solution that can help our farmers How can we help them? How can we help get them the incentives to make this leap to do this longitudinal shift on their operation? And so we're extremely grateful that USDA awarded us a 60 million award from the partnerships for climate smart commodity grant We have Over five years we'll be working with a myriad of different partners Some of whom are listed on this map here across 29 different states The biggest chunk from that 60 million is 36 million so about 60 percent is specifically direct to Farmer incentive payments to get more agroforestry plantings in the ground over the next five years And to do that we're offering regionalized technical assistance and farmer outreach to help them think through What type of agroforestry might make sense in their particular context? And really specifically addressing the needs of underserved historically underserved producers is a really key part of our outreach efforts as well And ultimately all of this is to create a national network of demonstration sites We need more proof points in more geographies We all know farmers want to talk to other farmers and hear the good the bad and the ugly of what does or doesn't work They want to be on a farm kick the tires see the system themselves And so our theory is by getting these demonstration sites in more places across the country We will have network effects seeing that happen more and more and Finally we know we have to work with retailers and national food brands to make sure that there is market demand and grow new markets for some of these crops So just for a second envision with me This is an illinois cornfield But guess what there's trees in it and how beautiful is that? They're protected the the little you know white straws are the tree protectors to from the deer pressure But this probably doesn't look that normal today. This is unusual to see trees growing in our commodity row crop fields Again today, it's less than two percent of us farmland Envision with me. What if in five years time we more than double that to just five percent of us farmland? What if in 50 years this was the norm and it looked weird to have a field that didn't have trees in it There's a real opportunity to move the needle here and get more trees onto farmland And to grow them side by side with some of our commodity crops like corn, soy, wheat, etc And the farm bill really offers a strong opportunity to help with this and so having a robust farm bill Can particularly help with supporting historically underserved producers and Could be a significant investment to help with those upfront costs and other barriers that currently exist for why Farmers are not yet adopting agroforestry at the scale. We would like to see the farm bill offers an opportunity to D-risk some of those barriers that today exist So finally, I just want to thank you all Uh, I really appreciate the opportunity today to talk with you all about agroforestry My contact information is there. Obviously you can tell I love talking about agroforestry so would love to continue the conversation And you know better understand how can we all work together to accelerate this natural climate solution? That's a win-win for nature as well as farmers. Thank you That was great. Thank you so much. Audrey. Um, I wanted to um mention on this slide Do you had silva pasture and a few others? We talked when I was saying like what our resources look like we also do a lot of writing We do briefings, but we do a lot of writing and articles and things and we have Articles on a lot of those topics that audrey presented on so if you want to learn a little bit more Of course, you can visit the nature conservancy and talk to audrey after the briefing But you can also come to our website and access those articles as well I would also like to mention regenerative agriculture A little bit more than a year ago once again with our friends at nrdc We did a briefing on regenerative agriculture and it was really really excellent And all of our briefings including that one are available online You can go back and watch the livecast you can view the presentation materials And you can also Read the summary notes Our third presenter today is moe mendez Moe is a pastor and executive director of the hope center a nonprofit focused on community economic development He administers three community programs that enrich the blue island community in chicago with job readiness skills and technology Automechanics and agriculture moe is expanding community garden efforts throughout chicago via churches that desire to address food injustices And load of moderate income communities moe also serves on the advisory board for poor la crecyone A faith-based alliance that educates and empowers stewards of god's creation to leave a legacy for the future By conserving our natural environment Moe thanks for coming all the way out to washington For our briefing today really looking forward to your presentation. Thanks Yeah, thank you everyone. This is a great opportunity to share with you all what's happening in chicago land area I'd love I'd love to provide a little bit of context about the hope center why we started who we are And the hope center is a nonprofit focused on community economic development I had the privilege of growing up in blue island blue island is a low to moderate income community and Filled with a lot of the existential realities that most most low to moderate income communities are faced with moved out But the community never left my heart I've had the privilege to go back and to Be part of the change that I would like to see in the community and part of it was to envision a different future a different future that Sort of helps address the realities common Average income for for blue island is is anywhere from 18,000 to 28,000 dollars a year and that's for for both blue island and robbins Robbins is the adjacent neighboring city to blue island Food and justice is is a concern they're both food deserts and they both have Unemployment averages that that are More than double the national average So this is our team. I I thought of a vision to put together a team and the team consists of a lot of A lot of team members who have specialties in different areas I wanted to exist to add value in three of the following in four of the following areas Social value. I wanted to add economic value intellectual value and spiritual value And I wanted to do that through three of our vehicles auto mechanics Technology 3d printing computer a to drafting and gardening why gardening well, I just so happened to be a pastor and a scripture helps me understand that God meant man and woman in in the garden and that's where they learned a little bit more about life in general That's where I wanted to start. So this is the hope garage Anywhere from women workshops. You'll see that to Some of the students that start with basic auto mechanics and go-karts and work their way up to learning Were a lot of the master technicians that grew up in a community Um a do for living This is the hope technology department And this is our hope garden Now our hope garden This was an initially the plot of land that we had and what everybody saw is just a bear and piece of land This is what we saw A garden that focuses on not only organic gardening, but also mental wellness So as you see to the left hand side, there's a trail and that trail is meant to help the community It was birthed during the time of the pandemic where we understood that it was only food insecurities that we wanted to address But also mental wellness. So we added A path and that path there's qr codes so that community could come out check out Look up one of the qr codes have a guided tour and after that guided tour The community is invited to eat some of the fresh produce from the from our garden while they relax The monarch butterfly is very near and dear to me because my father immigrated from Michoacan, Mexico Where all the monarch butterfly? Come from so this is where we do the a majority of our educational purpose understand that the garden is just It is similar to our community in the fact that it's a it's a small economy It helps pollinate each other and those are some of the practices that we help Educate our community with this is our trail that's focused on mental wellness It's a beautiful trail. It's always 15 degrees cooler than what it is in the garden because it's covered with a lot of the greenery And this is where all the magic starts everything that we plant in both the indoor garden outdoor garden starts in our in in house in indoor greenhouse Where we do everything from seedling to canning to freeze drying to pickling This is our indoor garden our indoor garden each hydroponic machine grows 25 pounds of Vegetables in 28 days. They use 95 less water and 98 less land We currently have six and and we're hoping to have a total of 20 Now our garden isn't meant to feed our community Our garden is meant to educate our community on community economic development. So this machine We have all the data for this machine. We know how much we're paying per kilowatt based on paying somebody $15 an hour It's very profitable because you're cutting a lot of the energy costs and it's very efficient What we're doing is we're uh procuring a lot of uh partnerships with the community local stores A lot of the local a lot of the local stores and restaurants We're providing a lot of food for them and also a lot of different Community farms where we're sell selling a lot of our produce and not only are we selling some of the produce but we're also Growing different plants Different plants either house plants or outdoor plants. Some of these plants are very very profitable outside of these plants. We're also focusing on growing thym basal Educating our community on a lot of the different herbs that cross the blood brain barrier to extract a lot of the harsh metals for people that have been impacted through lead and other toxins that Have made their way through And the last and most important part is we gather our community to really help them understand the economic component to what we're doing And that's educating them on a business plan. What would it look like if you had a small business on the side? In the area of gardening and how could you work together just as a garden pollinate each other? How could we as a community pollinate each other and one of the ways that we've done that is bring some experts from Chicago Wood School of Business and also Kellogg School of Management where some of the students are involved in helping Our clients come up with different business plans and the product of that is our salsa We have a salsa that's made out of a lot of the different vegetables and somebody's growing corn Somebody else is growing tomatoes and we're helping the community work together so that ultimately they could create a product That's marketable Thank you very much Of course, this is when we noticed that there's no salsa here. So just throwing that out there that looks really delicious What would you say you grow the most of? lettuce Okay, that's very cool That's awesome. And what was growing in the hydroponic machines? Do you recall? The different plants? Yeah Okay, okay, they looked I mean they look nice and healthy. They look like happy plants That was great. Thank you so much That brings us to stacey peterson Stacey joined the national center for appropriate technology in 2008 She oversees and cats sustainable energy program which includes the agri solar clearinghouse energy efficiency program energy services low-income homeless low-income energy assistance program clearinghouse or liheap clearinghouse national energy assistance referral program and the residential energy program She develops interdisciplinary projects with diverse teams such as connecting the NCAT sustainable energy and agriculture programs and the agri solar clearinghouse And her energy conservation work. She's helped save enough energy to go to the moon and back 25 more than 2,500 times which could come in handy next year because apparently we're going back to the moon in 2024 Which is pretty cool. I'm looking forward to that. So stacey. I'll invite you to the lectern. I'm really looking forward to your presentation Thank you very much and thank you for organizing this and for having us here to speak today So first off, uh, what is agri solar? This might be a new term for some folks, but it's pretty simple It's just ag and solar co located together There are a lot of other different terms you might hear that are pretty close to the same thing You'll hear agrivoltaics, which is agriculture and photovoltaics agri solar is a little bit bigger tent It includes concentrated solar so concentrated solar can be used in dairies for preheating water for instance There's a lot of different ways that you can have Agri solar within your farmland landscape You can have it with solar co located with a crop solar with grazing solar with an apiary or beekeeping Solar and pollinator habitat solar and processing solar and dairies You can also have aquaculture, which is kind of neat They float the solar and then you can have maybe tilapia something like that underneath So lots of different terms for this lots of different ways That you can approach agri solar, but it's a pretty good win-win for farms and for rural communities With agri solar you can harvest the sun twice You can harvest it with the solar panel and then you can harvest it again with the crops and the forage The honey and the habitat and I'd like to invite anybody in the room here today We have some of the honey out at the main table at solar grown honey from bear honey Please sample it's delicious If you do this well if you use best practices you can diversify your farm revenue You can increase rural energy independence And we have some partners down in arizona down at biosphere that are doing research And they're showing the decrease in crop irrigation needs in heat stressed areas And in drought stressed areas they're going up to half sometimes three quarters in areas like arizona In a decrease in water needs and crops so this can be significant You're also getting an increase in solar panels solar panels operate optimally at a lower temperature And when they get really hot they're not operating as well the crops and the forage underneath lower the temperature And it helps the solar panels to operate at a better efficiency With grazing as a vegetation management you're saving money You're not needing to go out there with weed whackers mowers more labor you have grazing You're going to increase your soil organic matter when you do that you're going to increase your carbon and cruel You're going to increase the local ecosystem habitat and health You can do this in a way that supports native species And you can we're seeing results from some folks up in minnesota some of our partners from argon national lab We're seeing results of a triple in the amount of pollinators of bees bats and butterflies To the ecosystem services so this can have a really big impact to the entire ecosystem around the solar panels There's a lot of federal programs that are supporting this even though it's just a new practice There's a lot of good support out there the department of energy solar energy technology office the cedal office Is who funds us to do our work in the agro solar clearing house? I'll talk a little bit about that in a couple slides They also have a program that's long-standing called the inspire program and that is run by n rel the national renewable energy lab They're also partners of ours and they're doing some great work all around the country. They've got some wonderful demonstration sites On this They've funded the farms projects that happened last year And these are for megawatt scale to see how this scales up and to see how that works USDA has funded quite a few of these through the climate smart commodities One of them we're a partner on with university of texas rio grande valley They'll be installing 10 to 12 different agro solar sites around the rio grande valley We'll be providing technical assistance doing workshops on the ground help University of arizona our partners down there got one of the climate smart commodities They'll be doing further research around arizona into air into agro solar And then we have other partners helical solar is working on one with a low carbon beef And they've got this really interesting racking system that allows you to graze cattle So it's a little bit taller a little bit thicker to accommodate for the for the cattle rubbing against the racking system You can also use the reap program for for this to fund it And hopefully more soon There's a marker bill right now in the ara to define agrovoltaics and to provide mechanisms of support And I believe that there will also be one in the farm bill So as I mentioned, we manage the agro solar clearing house at NCAT We're a sustainable energy and a sustainable agriculture nonprofit We've been doing this since about the 70s. So when I learned about this concept of bringing together ag and energy I was really excited That's exactly what our company does. So we wanted to work on that. We also do a lot of technical assistance So we do programs like attra. We have that's technical assistance for farmers through usda We have programs like the light heap clearing house with department of health and human services And we do solar energy engineering and energy efficiency engineering So this was just this perfect mechanism. I thought for us to really be able to help So we applied for funding with department of energy and we got it And we started the agro solar clearing house with about 40 different partners Around the country. So it's a broad coalition of the national laboratories universities books like the smithsonian People all over the country are working with us on this This is a few features of the clearing house. If you'd ever like to learn more about this We have an information library that has over 600 different Abstracted peer reviewed pieces of information. So it's easy for you to search to look through it We also create original media. We have a short film series. We have a podcast serial I think one just came out today We have a financial assistance map. So if you want to do this in your state You can look and see what's available in your state to help pay for it We have case studies. We have an atlas of this. We also develop best practices So that's always needed, especially in a young industry like this We do individualized technical assistance We talk on the phone to folks zoom with folks in person's fine But we seem to do most of this virtually so we can do it all around the country We provide educational webinars We've been doing a webinar series the last six or seven months and we'll continue that We have a user forum and then we also do these events. We go out around the country We have a thing called the follow the Sun tour So because this is so new we want to bring people to these places let them see them let them talk to the farmers Let them talk to the policy makers the people that did this maybe the solar developer in that area We have a lot of fun at these we do farm to table events We bring the honey around have everybody taste it. So these are a good time You can it's open to anybody to come to so if it's in your area Please come and and see these great sites These are some of our recent publications that we've pulled together We have a few on policy There is one on policy approaches talks a little bit about how you would want to approach a policy in your area And we have one that provides a landscape of what's going on in policy around the country We talk about that at a state level and at a county level Some of the states like massachusetts has a feed-in tariff some states like Michigan have like a mandate for pollinator habitat at solar. So it's all over the map and it gives a nice Overview of what's out there. So folks are wanting to develop their own policy This is a place to go for you to start We just put out a practical guide on agri-solar ownership So if you're a farmer or a landowner or a community and you want to know what to do to get started What I should be considering we've got that out there now We have webinars on all of these recorded and available on our website It'll really step you through, you know, do I want to lease? Do I want to own? What do I got to think about? What are my paybacks things like that? And we're always there for assistance if you need it you can call us up. We'll walk you through that So in summary Agri-solar is a win-win on the ground It can be a win on farms and it can be a win for climate energy and the economy I believe it can be a win-win in the farm bill and we're here to help I'd like to thank esi for organizing this and I'd like to thank doe And the cito office in particular for funding us to do this work Like to thank the usda and and cat and then our agri-solar clearinghouse team and partners and our community That's an email if you ever need to get ahold of us And then we also have a newsletter it comes out by weekly You can go to our home page and sign up for that or you can always just email us and we'll sign you up Thanks Thank you much for that. Thank you so much. Um stacey you mentioned reap Reap is one of the programs that we have one of the side-by-side by sides for so as we get house and senate text For reap will be we'll be tracking the changes that are coming out of two different chambers with that So just wanted to mention that plug we're getting questions from our online audience And we're also we also have an in-person audience So after our final speaker today, we'll have a q&a If you're in our online audience and you have a question You can follow us on social media at esi online hashtag esi talk And you can also send us an email in the email address to use as ask at as that's ask at esi dot org Kathleen draper is our fourth our fifth panelist today and Kathleen has been a part of the biochar industry for over a decade She's been the board chair of the international bio biochar initiative since 2019 and she sits on the us biochar initiative Most recently Kathleen co-founded c interest a composites company in upstate new york developing and deploying biochar based composites For the building and packaging industries Kathleen is co-authored two books on biochar and has written white papers and articles about the subject for more than a decade Kathleen thank you for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you Thank you and good afternoon. It's always fun to be the last one Uh, so 10 minutes is not a lot of time to cover any topic But i'm going to do my best to cover what biochar is and in case any of you don't know what it is I brought some samples that are over there What biochar production is all about and how it can help farmers? To both reduce their impact and adapt to climate change and to foster more resilient rural economies I'll also talk about synergies between biochar production and use with other on farm organic management practices such as composting and anaerobic digestion And I will also highlight some of the current and proposed federal support The industry is receiving as well as other programs that could help farmers that move into biochar production Over the decade that i've been in biochar. I've learned that there's many ways to answer the question. What is biochar? To those in the climate world I say that it is the oldest carbon removal technology that most people have never heard of To my mom and her ilk i've taken to calling it burnt toast It is over baked organic material that results in something that is unappetizing to humans and soil microbes alike And since it's unappetizing It means that a good portion of the carbon dioxide that the plants absorbed during their lifetime And turned into carbon does not return to the atmosphere and get released as co2 As it normally would if it's left to decay If that charred material is put into soils or other long-lived products and not burned as charcoal would be Then the carbon cycle is effectively interrupted for hundreds or even thousands of years Any type of organic material from wood to crop residues to manure and even sewage sludge can be turned into biochar And in many cases renewable energy as well It uses high heat and low oxygen in a process known as pyrolysis One of the unique things about biochar is that it is eminently scalable You can make biochar when you're cooking the family meal You can make it by digging a ditch in your backyard You can utilize small scale equipment on farms that generate both heat and biochar You can utilize mobile systems and take it into forests to help reduce hazardous fuel loads Or you can make it with more industrial scale equipment that generates biochar and the number of other co-products While much of the attention Biochar is receiving these days has to do with its ability to sequester carbon There are many other co-benefits that can help farmers both economically and environmentally Converting crop residues or manure into biochar can be cost-effective Organics management Over the past few years. We've seen the demand for biochar based carbon removal credits rise dramatically The current price for these biochar specific credits is now between $100 and $200 per ton of co2 e And when you convert that back into biochar that can be more than $300 per ton Combining biochar with other on-farm nutrient sources can turn that biochar into a slow release fertilizer Which these days can generate significant savings for farmers And combining biochar with manure composting can reduce methane emissions by up to 80 So with the proper incentives This source of methane could be dramatically reduced today Biochar can also help farmers to adapt to a changing climate by optimizing soil's ability to manage water That includes both droughts and downpours Building soil carbon reduces crop losses in bad weather in addition to enhancing both yields and food security and it can also be used to alleviate toxins in soils leading to healthier food production Just to drill down a bit more on one of the ways biochar can help reduce climate change beyond carbon sequestration Let's have a quick look at biochar and nitrogen Nitrogen is the most limiting nutrient for crop productivity Ever since its debut after world war two, it's been one of the key reasons for increasing crop productivity sufficiently to feed our growing human population Unfortunately, there are a number of negative environmental impacts from the excessive use of nitrogen Not least of which is that nitrogen production and use contributes nearly two percent of global emissions And currently it's taking up three to five percent of natural gas supplies to produce nitrogen fertilizers Yet more than 50 percent of applied nitrogen is lost either to the air through vaporization Or leaching into soils below the root profile So it's no longer doing yet any good and it can in fact lead to groundwater contamination An excessive nitrogen fertilizer also creates acidic soils And favors nitrogen loving plants leading to biodiversity loss Nitrogen runoff after rain events negatively impacts water bodies Where it leads to huge algal blooms which causes even more emissions and it leads to eutrophication and large-scale fish kill Combining by biochar with smaller amounts of nitrogen creates a slow-release fertilizer Which increases nitrogen use efficiency resulting in savings to farmers and reduced emissions It can also reduce leaching and runoff and increase soil pH a real win-win-win for farmers You may be surprised to learn that one of the largest buyers of biochar in the us at the moment is the composting industry While some in the composting world worried that biochar would be a competitor In fact, it is very synergistic with composting operations On farm or beyond There's several reasons for that Biochar holds on to nutrients longer making the compost more valuable It reduces the time needed to finish composting making composting more efficient It heats up the piles hotter killing off more pathogens It reduces greenhouse gas emissions sometimes significantly as I mentioned with manure It provides longer lasting carbon, which makes it eligible for carbon removal credits And I can even immobilize toxic metals herbicides and organic pollutants making it safer for use on land That's used to grow food There are also a number of synergies between anaerobic digestion when it's co-located with pyrolysis Particularly if there's insufficient local local demand for the digestate or the fiber that results from anaerobic digestion This fiber can be dewatered and used as a feedstock for pyrolysis Resulting in rapid and significant volume reduction A portion of the resulting biochar can be fed back into the digester Where it provides a buffering Capacity and it also inhibits the production of hydrogen sulfide And this results in higher quality and quantity of methane produced, which is obviously an incentive for farmers to increase their revenue The biochar can also be used to absorb some of the liquid effluent And again, this will turn the biochar into a slow release fertilizer While these benefits have mostly been seen in the lab, we're now starting to see them demonstrated commercially And one of the first small demonstration plants is in my neck of the woods in upstate new york It's being funded at the state level through NYSERDA. It's being spearheaded by Cornell University And it's being hosted at spruce haven dairy farm We're starting to see some promising initiatives at the federal level which supports biochar use by farmers Most recently, the national resource conservation service passed what's called the soil carbon amendment protocol or code 336 used to be called code 808 Which provides financial support to farmers to increase their soil carbon levels either through Putting compost biochar or a combination of the two on their fields And we hope to see significant funding in this in the farm bill The us forest service also received a hundred million dollars from the infrastructure bill and has used some of that to fund support of the us biochar initiatives Efforts to demonstrate How to use mobile equipment to thin forests and to help create demand for the resulting biochar And this funding was matched by the us endowment of For forestry and communities other programs which could provide support are the usda bio preferred and Us made products as well as low embodied carbon preferences To wrap up if those of you for those of you that would like to learn more about biochar We're hosting the very first biochar academy in upstate new york in late june Within that there's a two-day opportunity for you to go visit the The pyrolysis on the dairy farm and I would also encourage you to look at the websites for the international biochar initiative Or the us biochar initiative. We just hosted the webinar on code 3 through 6 as well And to wrap up my my mantra has usually been um biochar it's safe scalable and shovel ready But pester more you might appreciate my new mantra is it's not a miracle But it's holy and not because it's divine because if you look at it under a microscope, it's very poor So thank you very much That was a great presentation and um I like charpedium. Um, I like to do things like that So game has to recognize game when it sees it. So that was that's really good. Um, all right. So we have Thanks to incredible time discipline on the part of our panelists We have a lot of time for q&a and i'm really looking forward to this And we also have uh, joe thompson who's the assistant director for natural resources and environment at gao He's going to come join us at the beginning a front of the room here in the front row as well And he can participate in the in the q&a as well But let's get started with the questions and answers and my friend isabella has a microphone So if anyone has a question in the audience, she will make your way over To you and to help get us started to give us a little bit more time I'm going to kick things off and mike i'm going to start with you with this one um, I would like to um sort of dig a little bit deeper on the employment opportunities that some of these agriculture climate solutions Offer and i'm curious Sort of how would you characterize sort of how workers are benefiting today? And are there a transferability of skills opportunities between You know existing energy sector and agriculture sector opportunities and Curious what you what you found in your research about that topic? Well, I think that um our perspective on it is probably a little bit different than than the other panelists, but I would say that every time a producer improves their resilience either by adopting a climate resilient practice or by diversifying their operations or moving to Either a production methodology or to a crop that it is going to be more resilient to climate change That's a job saved and every job that that producer supports. That's another job saved. So great And audrey curious what you think about uh sort of economic development opportunities and employment opportunities across some of these different solution sectors Yeah, sure. So with agroforestry, we obviously already have a whole industry of technical service providers working to help Our farmers here in the u.s adopt new conservation practices There's an opportunity to help retool them so that they have a better understanding and more fluency familiarity with agroforestry in particular And so we have some key partners that are part of our grant virginia tech as well as university of Missouri's center for agroforestry They're both doing really important work in terms of professional development for existing folks to become more comfortable with these new and emerging practices Great And moi, what are you seeing in your neighborhood in terms of economic development opportunities and job creation opportunities in your community? Yeah, what I love seeing about what I love seeing the most is uh seeing our community's self awareness and uh self of Self agency continued increase That has paid a lot of dividends in itself just because Doing it via agriculture has helped them to move and scale that into different areas of community economic development. That's great and stacey how are things looking in in the sort of nexus of agro solar and in the work that you're doing From a financial perspective employment opportunities. What are you looking? What are you seeing in terms of economic development and job creation opportunities? Yeah, you know this this can really help diversify farm income and and it can also bring solar installation jobs into rural communities Uh, you can this can help diversify income too for like community gardens. This can be community solar So there's a lot of different ways that this can be an economic win for a community or for an individual farmer And there are some um incentives in the inflation reduction act for solar around Production tax credit investment. Yes, there are. Do you have any? What effect could that have on the ability to bring community solar to more more communities and things like that? I think it's going to have a phenomenal effect I think that you're going to see solar growth throughout the country at a rapid rate because of this And I think that it's going to bring the payback down uh to to people, you know much much lower And you know, it can be more expensive to do agro solar If you want to raise your racking system if you want to incorporate crops you want to have more labor for crop yield That was going to help that pencil out a little bit better. So I think it's really going to help this practice And Kathleen will give you the last question on sort of economic development employment opportunities and Sort of what you're seeing for workers joining the biochar industry Well, I think I'll reframe it a little bit one of the obstacles to growth for say dairy farms or even sawmills Is organics management they need to have enough land or they need to increase their manure storage capacity and what we're finding is that if you have a pyrolysis Unit on site either on the farm or next to a sawmill Those those barriers go to go away and it diverses Diversifies his revenue streams as well So we're we're seeing a lot of excitement at the possibility of Co-locating pyrolysis on farmer and forestry businesses And we had an online question that I think I think Kathleen you're probably the right person to start with and so We'll I'd like to start with you and then like be interested and hear what the other panelists have to say And the question is will other stakeholders and players integrate biochar as well? For example, are there opportunities in agroforestry to incorporate biochar beyond what you included in your presentations? Oh, absolutely. I think because you're going to have to have some rigorous pruning throughout You know to to grow the things that you want to grow properly. So that's a great biomass for You know creating biochar and then you can use the biochar when you're planting these things and a lot of research has shown that it It gets them into production faster It helps with you know immunity in trees and things like that So there's there's absolutely a lot of work going on between agroforestry and biochar But sure. Yeah, I think that we were just talking about this for the presentation I I think that there's a tremendous opportunity for this for the integration of biochar and agro solar I think that it could be a way for a site that is already just a bare ground solar installation to become an agro solar Installation and I think that farms could incorporate this as well as they're installing their solar So I'd love to see this happen And moi and audrey and mica thoughts from you all about sort of opportunities to Work together with the biochar industry Yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of conversations and interests in the agroforestry industry around the opportunities with biochar It's You know, I think it's whenever you're working in these regenerative systems if there's complementary Opportunities to use inputs that are more regenerative as well. That's an interesting opportunity to explore And I don't want to over biochar the conversation but since you brought props As folks are leaving the room today could you tell us a little bit about what they're going to be seeing in your your So in the box I have samples of biochar made from everything from recycled cardboard to bones to Cherry pits, so if you pick them up You'll see what they were made from although it's kind of dirty at this stage Then I also brought some samples of different composites that you can make biochar Um Using biochar. So some of it is is drywall and insulation and I failed to bring the the most interesting one for this crowd Which is a sort of agricultural mulch that they're experimenting with where the binder can be degraded at the end of the growing season and the biochar can be tilled into the ground to Get some of the plastics out of agriculture Well, you didn't say where the bones came from so we'll let that go I don't know but there are there are like femur shape. No, I'm just teasing So the you all describe sort of the the opportunity sort of at present But let's make this briefing a little bit more forward-looking if If if there are steps forward taken in the in the upcoming farm bill Along the lines of what you would like to see What does that mean for audrey? Maybe we'll start with you. What does that mean for agroforestry? What is sort of success look like over the course of the next five years or so if The if the farm bill is supportive in a way that you would like it to be for for agroforestry And then really interested in hearing what the other panelists have to say too Yeah, I'd say for me the ultimate success that I'm excited to look for and I hope it's in five years It might be a few more than that But it's to be at the grocery store and see products that say This is a livestock product. You name it eggs You know chicken whatever and that it's grown in a silvopaster setting. How exciting would that be? That's not an opportunity that we have today as climate conscious consumers to choose silvopaster products or Say a box of cereal that proudly says this was grown in an alley cropping system someday That would be extremely exciting to see Another piece of success though. It's not exactly farm bill, but federal policy is working on Insurance products that are crop insurance products that are specific for some of these agroforestry crops that today Aren't properly captured. Um, and so that's something that we're also working on Moy I'll go to you next sure the success would be reflective on a community seeing a healthier community because of a lot of the Practices that were that will be put in place that that would um That would be great to see And stacey after kathleen Sure I think success would look like seeing this as a best practice as a standard practice in solar installation around the country And I would like to see, you know through the farm bill There be a way for this to be affordable for farmers to do and for them to have a good way to understand How to do it have practical information out there have technical assistance That helps them do it and see them do more research see what this does to the soil health. What does this do to soil um Water-carrying capacity things like that. So I'd like to see more research more implementation and more best practices Kathleen I think success looks like incentivizing resilient practices Um, and also getting more education out there from trusted sources And speaking of trusted sources, we have gao here. So we'll turn to you next mica and joe. Please feel free to chime in to if you'd like Yeah, I mean I what I would say is What we would like to see, you know, if congress decides that they want to pursue additional resilience actions is Make progress with the recommendation and on some of the options that we identified to make Producers more resilient, you know, if we move in that direction, there's some planning and there's some implementation And I think that would be what we're looking for right now So yeah, I would just add that, uh, I mean gao basically produced a roadmap For how to build climate resilience into everything that usda does many of those farm bill programs So progress over time is Uptake of those options in this farm bill and other farm bills to the extent that That congress chooses to address climate resilience in the farm bill itself. So there's a roadmap there We can measure the progress over time and gao set up to do that with our disaster resilience framework and so gao Micah in micah's presentation you talked about the report that you just produced but for the congressional staff in the audience today and our online audience And for people who watch the livecast later on are there any new reports or new Key sources of information any new developments that congressional staff should be on the lookout for In the next year or so whether it's out of gao or or or another agency that you might be Sort of tracking that we would want to folks to know about well I mean, obviously we just produced the high risk list update which just came out in april Joe was involved with that and then the report that that I wrote which came out in january We're going to also obviously have oversight activities associated with the r.r.a. And then I think that we have joke and speak to this a little bit more But we have some work that's going to be looking more closely at heart carbon offsets and greenhouse gas emissions so Yeah, we have work underway all across the federal government looking at climate resilience and and also various Sustainability efforts. So if you have any questions about any of that, we're here to help I think we have, you know 10 or 11 jobs underway right now looking at different programs In the agriculture area as micah said we have some ongoing work looking at pests and diseases And we will continue to do oversight as micah mentioned up the r.r.a. But I think you should also pay attention to What usda puts out in its continued climate change adaptation progress reports because they should be able to provide some specific information about how they Will or will not move forward on the options that we laid out in our report on climate resilient agriculture So that might be of interest to you Any other things coming out in the next year or so from other panelists that you would like to kind of put on people's radar screens Feel free to to speak up if there are any All right, uh, we'll we'll keep track of it to ed e si and keep putting articles and things like that out Moe, I think I'd like to start with you with this next question and Sort of the idea of education was a big part of your presentation and a big part of what you're you're doing out in Chicago And i'm curious if you have any thoughts about sort of how we can attract the next generation Farmers into the agriculture sector and sort of capture the imaginations of people who are thinking about Sort of what to do with their careers What are you seeing in terms of You know generating interest in in in the garden work that you do but then also maybe the tech in the automotive sector But how are you bringing in that next generation? What are you finding is working? Yeah, we're doing it through curiosity We're helping them be curious about imagining a different future of what it would look like for them to Be a potential farmer using a lot of the regenerative methods in agriculture or being a skilled mechanic What I love about the 3d printing components of what we're doing is that uh, we have engineer by trade who does the work of a patent attorney and Our whole tagline within the 3d printing department is we want to help stir up your creativity and imagination problem solving skills So anything that they could think of we could try to help them produce And what it does is it stirs up an imagine our imagination Which which I think in our day it's underutilized But being able to draw the next generation and via their imagination via their curiosity I think it's going to be our best window of opportunity Stacey and Kathleen and Audrey any additional thoughts about how we bring the next generation of people into into farming and and agriculture producing Companies and things sure I mean, I think there's a lot of really good programs out there like 4h and young farmers of america But I I think with things like agrisolar people get excited coming from the energy side and coming from sustainability And so I think there's a whole group of young people that are very interested in sustainability and green issues And they're going to be interested in coming into agriculture because of that and into approaching sustainable agriculture And agrisolar so I think if you can show them stacked benefits if you can you know, they might not want to call it that but If you can show them this additional benefit and and show them what they could be doing and help imagine as you say This greener world and in a better way. I think you're going to get people inspired and I think they're going to want to join Kathleen any additional thoughts Well, I grew up on a farm and I moved back there a while ago and interestingly It's it's not a challenge to find young people involved in Agriculture these days, especially the men and I community. I mean they're Prolific in my area, but I think one of the key barriers is affordability You know land's expensive the equipment's expensive. We need to figure out a way to make it You know not as risky Yeah, I mean we've we've had great examples where There was a you know speaking to the question of affordability of land access That's a really key one when we're thinking about new farmers that want to get into perennial agriculture Leasing options may be not going to be the right fit given the long-term nature of these perennial crops So there's some really great stories that have come out where for example, there's a grazing family They have a bunch of children and one of their children has decided to stay on the farm and develop their own fruit And nut operation literally stacking if you will a 3d operation a new operation onto the existing family's farm Which is a really exciting story for the continuity of how that family can keep their land for the long term We're also in a time of historic land transfer a lot of folks where you know You know say the grandfather passed away and the children have gone and moved to the city For urban jobs and they have this land and they maybe have an ethos that they want to do things differently Not just rented to the neighbor to hay it How could they do something more regenerative and then that's when they come to us asking what does agroforestry look like So that's another key place right now where that next generation is coming in That was a big subject of our organics briefing. We did back in march about bringing you know Providing opportunities for people who want to get into farming to actually be able to get into farming It's really interesting. Um, Micah or joe any thoughts about sort of next generation? Um, oh, we have a question in the audience. So isabella, please wait for the mic So that our live cast can pick it up, but go ahead. Thanks for the question. Hi. I'm amy McCrea-Kessler I'm actually a founder co-founder of the us biochar coalition, which is a new organization to advocate for biochar to do a lot of what Micah and his colleague you're talking about in terms of risk mitigation And I just wanted to to to ask, I mean All of the topics that everyone's talked about today are critical to our future going forward We all know that they need to happen and there are so many people working to make them happen in our current political setting One of the things that the Biochar coalition is doing is figuring out. How do we talk to politicians about that? So it crosses all political arenas and I think What the GAO office has really picked up on is fiscal responsibility I think that is Is the key and almost taking the climate part of it out And so that we talk about fiscal responsibility And I just wanted to think here from the folks on the panel Have you started to reframe those conversations that way and instead of maybe the climate? Resilience framework or disaster resilience framework. It's more about fiscal responsibility Anyone's welcome to chime in if you'd like Of course the biochar person has something to say about biochar, but go ahead Kathleen Well having grown up in a very conservative area mostly farming community I hardly ever talk about climate change when I talk about biochar I talk about soil health and resilience and You know yield improvement and toxicity Mobilization and stuff like that as soon as I start with climate change the conversation is over So reframing is really important knowing what your audience concerns are is really important I completely agree. That's we go with the resilience framework a lot We talk about you know, what kind of water savings do you have? What kind of energy savings can you have? What kind of assistance can you get? How can you get your costs down? How can you keep your farm? What kind of payback do you have? So we really stay with the fiscal Moira Audrey or Micah or Joe any additional comments on sort of the the reframing to get you know people interested from different perspectives Well, I mean it's it's not reframing for GAO. That's what we do, right? We're classically accountants so The whole reason that GAO is involved in the climate change issue is the you know the fact that The load of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will continue changing the climate regardless of what happens on emissions reductions And we as a federal government need to be prepared for that So every federal program will be affected. We need to manage that risk in the federal programs to save taxpayers money That is the natural fit for GAO and that's really why we're talking about climate change at all and we do say climate change So so Joe before you just so that the livecast picks up the follow-up question was about sort of how does How does that work? Appeal to people across the political spectrum people who might be Less inclined to go along with the conversation if it is oriented around climate change Yeah, I would say that it's important that we as GAO sort of stay in our lane So as Micah mentioned, um, you know emissions reductions discussions are separate from climate resilience discussions And we recognize that the emissions reductions questions are primarily policy choices But no matter what happens there you need to be prepared for the changes that we're already seeing in federal programs In flood insurance crop insurance disaster assistance We need to do a better job with strategic planning We need to do a better job providing people information so they can make risk management decisions for themselves These are all things that everybody can get on board with because No matter your political party you're actually seeing the impacts on the ground and your constituents are actually having to deal with these impacts on the ground and and we can help Build that risk management into federal programs of all types be a department of defense Agriculture Anything that the federal government does we're looking at it trying to figure out how to manage that risk for taxpayers Yes, thanks joe um, so I think our I like to Ask this this next question and Kathleen maybe we'll start with you again and we'll move down the row But we talked a lot about wind winds I think we probably should have called the briefing climate energy environment win win win win wins because I think it goes beyond That's the two wins, but are there other wind winds that we haven't talked about today That you would like to raise awareness of or are there Served synergies between biochar and other topics that we've talked about today that we haven't Haven't yet brought to brought to the front One of the things that's coming up a lot recently is the whole issue of PFAS in In soils and water and everything so what's been interesting I just hosted a webinar on this a few months ago is that These forever chemicals can actually be degraded in the pyrolysis process And it can be used to immobilize them in soils Which is really critical because there are certain farmers in Maine and elsewhere that Can't use their soils to grow crops anymore because it's it's toxic And so I think I think we're going to see a lot more research in that area proving that it can work in in various scenarios Stacy Sure, one thing I've been interested in lately is following solar as water conservation There's particularly in california and in the the desert southwest They're building canals and they're covering them with solar and they're using that as a way to to save water And you can do the floating solar like like the aquaculture But they're also doing it expressly for water conservation And I think you'll see more of that and I find it really fascinating So I'm excited to watch what develops especially in california. Yeah, I remember the first time I visited phoenix I was like wait, you just leave the water exposed like it is the desert the sun's right there like Apparently it worked for a while, but glad to see that people are thinking about that Um, more other comments. Do you want to make sure that we get talked about today? One of the books that's really influenced me is nature fix and it talks a little bit about how Uh, the wind for our community is reflected on how they become healthier Happier and more creative by just integrating a lot of these different practices Within agriculture and what they're doing so Creating healthier communities that are not only eating healthier But also out in nature is definitely a win especially if it becomes a win-win To the to the fourth exponent so And the way you the way you tell that story The way your presentation another like that that itself is a win, right? It's a success story of the of the community in addition, you know, sort of beyond of what your what your organization is able to do Audrey Yeah, I'd say with silva pasture in particular it lends itself really well to be complemented with Rotational grazing and other good managed grazing techniques. They go really well together So highly recommend those going side by side And then there's also of course other edge of field practices that should be used things like wetlands Two-stage ditches prairie strips. So those kind of practices can also be used when you're Implementing new agroforestry practices And mica I think we'll give you the last word today Yeah, I just want to say that I think that from our perspective if you look at the agricultural sector and every time that we Build resilience into that sector and we have experience and we do that planning Then there's going to be transferability to other sectors and and hopefully, you know If we get enough economic sectors bought into this and mainstreaming climate resilience It'll have a cascading effect and you know throughout the entire system. So Well, this was a really interesting discussion I would like to Say sincerest thanks to our panelists mica, audrey, moi, stacey and kathleen Thank you for joining us today to talk about these really really cool Multiple win agriculture sector climate solutions. Thank you so much. I'd also like to say thanks again to senator stabinow And her staff for helping us have the room today. We really really appreciate that In addition to my esi colleagues who I'll get to in just a moment, but we also got a lot of help From folks sort of in our in our orbit at esi I'd like to just shout out very quickly. Matthew, shana Ashana and and maureen for helping us think through sort of which Solutions we would feature in our briefings today. Thank you so much Um, we'll have a great set of colleagues at esi I'd like to say thanks to dan o or dan o bryan Omri, allison, anna and molly as well as our great interns Lindley, isabella and madeline for all the hard work that went into today's briefing as well Like to say a big thanks to troi our videographer for helping get our our live stream out to lots and lots and lots of people today We have a lot of briefings coming up. Um, some would say too many briefings dan o would say too many briefings, but Well, no, it's not too many briefings. It's just the right amount of briefings We'll be back two weeks to do role development and that is going to be a really great briefing I encourage everyone to check that one out and then after that we'll do Future of forestry in the farm bill. That's june 7th And then also on june 21st. We'll be back for the fifth of our series Conservation practices from farms to forests and wetlands on june 1st We're going to be doing a briefing about hydrogen with our friends at environmental defense fund I think that briefing has been posted So you can go on www.esi.org And sign up for that and then on Tuesday july 18th We'll be back in this room heart 902 For the 2023 congressional clean energy expo That's something that we work very closely with our friends at the senate renewable energy and energy efficiency caucus That's co-chaired by senator jack reed and senator mike crepo So that's going to be a really great event. We'll have a six panel policy forum We'll have an exhibition and then we'll also have a reception. So that'll be a really fun day And lots of great stuff Discussed there This last slide is a link. It has a link to our survey We really appreciate everyone who takes two minutes to fill out the survey. We read every response It really helps us think through things if you're in our online audience If you had an av problem or audio problem or visual problem If the live cast was slow to start if you have ideas for new topics for folks in the room today If any suggestions as well if you have two minutes and you would wouldn't mind filling out the survey It really does help us get a lot better. And we'll go ahead and end there Thanks again to our great panel and thanks to everyone at esi who pulled off the briefing today We'll be back two weeks for rural development. And until then I hope everyone has I hope everyone enjoys the amazing Wednesday weather here in washington. So thanks so much