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Michaela Paukner:

Welcome to the No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. I'm Michaela Paukner, managing editor at No-Till Farmer. Bill Northey, the former Iowa agriculture secretary and USDA leader, passed away in early February, leaving behind a legacy of farm policy leadership and influence on conservation agriculture. In this episode, we're sharing Northey's keynote presentation from the 2015 National Strip-Tillage Conference about applying science and technology to improve conservation tillage practices.

Bill Northey:

Well, thank you very much. Appreciate the invitation to be here tonight. I still farm up at Spirit Lake, which is northwest Iowa about, oh, probably five or six hours from here, four miles from the Minnesota border. I'm also one of those that was a ridge tiller, switched to essentially banded fertilizer into that ridge. Went to a strip-till and now don't do the ridging anymore, and so worked my way without necessarily intentionally going to strip-till to end up being there and really like it. It also shortens my spring and fall. Allows me to do this other job as well.

In Iowa, Secretary of Ag is an elected job, so I was first elected in 2006 and then re-elected in '10 and re-elected in '14. I think I'm very fortunate to be able to have a job that gets me around the state, gets me kind of in touch with the things that are going on. Occasionally, we get overseas when we're marketing, or we see a lot of international visitors come through here. Last couple of days, I've been kind of here in eastern Iowa, all the way up to the Minnesota border and down to the Missouri border, seeing an awful lot of good crops. Certainly a few poor crops. I know all that is represented here. You probably have had in some cases too much water in some places. We also got some good crops growing.

At the end of the day, we're in an amazing productive area. Certainly, Iowa is, and all the states around us, and wherever you're from, I'm sure you can tell the stories about how productive that is as well. We'll still produce probably this year more corn. We'll always compete with Illinois. More corn than any other state, and actually, both Iowa and Illinois produce more corn than all but three countries in the world. Only the US, China, and Brazil produce more corn than the state of Iowa does. Only four states produce more soybeans than the state of Iowa or, again, Illinois, and we've actually flipped back and forth a few times here on who's the biggest soybean producer, Iowa or Illinois. The four countries that produce more than either of us are US, Brazil, Argentina, and China.

And so, you would think that scale production... We were talking here a little bit earlier, those questions that I get from time to time. I had a group in West Des Moines asking me about, "It's too bad all the family farmers are gone, because there's no way those family farmers could have these $300,000 combines and these grain carts that haul a thousand bushel around and all the semi trucks," and you know that's not true. It's not true in your area. It's not true here.

These are families, and that's part of the reason I think it's hard when we talk the big numbers for folks to realize we produce that much stuff with a bunch of families. A bunch of families doing it one farm at a time, one county at a time, a lot of decisions that are different. You're doing something different than the neighbor across the street. In fact, heck, you're doing something different on one farm than another, and you're certainly doing something different than what you did last year.

And that's why it's so important that we have gatherings like this where we get together and talk, and I'm sure you're learning a lot from the speakers, but you're learning a lot from folks around the table that you're talking with, the folks in the hall that you're talking with. "What'd you do here? How'd you try this? Where'd you buy that?" And being able to understand the different pieces, and innovation is what agriculture does. We just do it in a way that it's sometimes even hard, I think, for non-aggies, and they do it in their own ways, but I don't think they understand.

They drive past the field of corn in Iowa, and it just looks like a field of corn in Iowa. I mean, it looks like it did when they grew up, they think, except it's yielding twice or three times as much when they grew up, depending on how old they are, and they don't know all that went into it. The biotechnology, the planter attachments, the way that we're able to harvest and not leave anything else out in the field, and keeping that plant healthier, and all the different pieces. There's no way they understand that. They certainly don't understand the kind of conversations that you're all having and how to be able to get that nutrient in the right place and be able to make sure that we don't starve it, but we also don't lose it.

We have a lot of conversations around that in Iowa as well, and probably a lot of you have heard we've got actually a lawsuit here in Iowa. We got Des Moines Water Works, which is our biggest water works facility, that is suing drainage districts in northwest Iowa. A lot of places have drainage districts the same, but others don't. In Iowa, those drainage districts are when a bunch of farmers go together. We don't have a creek running through there. We need to go together and put a county tile or build a drainage ditch for that area. We buy that collectively, and then we all can drain to it, and those are drainage districts. They're usually managed by our county's boards of supervisors, and they help us be able to get outlets so we can farm a lot of ground in Iowa that we couldn't farm without that.

They're suing 10 of those drainage districts in three different counties under the premise that those drainage ditches shouldn't have water that comes out of those drainage ditches at more than 10 parts per million nitrate, because that's what they've got to get their water down to in Des Moines for the federal standards on nitrates. Now, there are lots of times it doesn't have over 10 parts per million. Occasionally it does. Sometimes, that occasionally is several months a year. Sometimes, it's hardly at all per year. And there are some tricks that they do by blending some water from a couple different rivers that they're able to manage that a little bit, but sometimes it costs some money.

So, 2008 to 2012, they never had to run their nitrate reduction plant at all. That's not to say we probably didn't have some times it was pretty close to that 10 parts per million, but they were able to blend water and do some things. They never had to run that plant. Now, many of you know what happened in 2012. We had a short crop. We had a drought. We didn't use up all our nitrogen out there, and then come 2013, we had our wettest spring in Iowa in 140 years' worth of weather records, and anybody that understands anything about soils know what happened. We flushed some of that nitrogen out, and it went down the river, and they had to turn their plant on. Surprise, surprise, none of us would be surprised.

We'd all say that's why they have a plant. It costs them about $2 a customer to run that plant for about four or five months, and they use that as the basis to say, "Hey, we're going to maybe have to build a bigger plant some day. We're going to sue the farmers for allowing those nitrates to leave, and we're going to try and require them to have a permit that would not allow them, or at least would have some kind of engineering requirement to it, but technically not allow them to release over 10 parts per million nitrates."

Now, our permitting process here in the US with this NPDES permit is such that our cities have that. I was just with one of our small towns in northeast Iowa. They have a permit. They have a permit for their sewage treatment plant, and when it rains too much, water goes in the sewage treatment plant, and it overwhelms it, and they've got to bypass it. And yes, they release raw sewage, usually diluted with a lot of rain water, but they release raw sewage to a creek that goes to a stream that doesn't end up at Des Moines but ends up coming down the Iowa River eventually and certainly can impact some folks. So, there could be a permit that doesn't have a water quality requirement to it. There could be a permit that has a water quality requirement to it. If they were successful, I would argue it doesn't stop at nitrates. It certainly doesn't stop at these 10 drainage districts up in northwest Iowa.

If you're in the United States, and my fellow secretaries, directors, commissioners of ag know very, very well, have all called to check, "How is that lawsuit coming? What's happening?" They all know if it happens here, if a court eventually decides... This is going to end up probably at Supreme Court level at some point probably. If the court eventually decides those requirements are there, then that impacts everybody. Now what it says, we don't know. What's the permit say? What's that process? What do they write into those rules? We don't know. I would argue it's a pretty heavy legal lift for them to do this. No one's done this before. The rule has not been interpreted that way. They could well win some parts of it. I think there'll be appeals. Others will win. There could well be appeals back again by them. This is going to take decades.

Right now, it was filed earlier this year, this spring. It will be heard in front of the judge at the earliest next August, a year from now, and then whatever happens, however long it takes for a judge to decide, then it'll be appealed, and it'll be appealed, and it'll be appealed. And so, the lawyers are the ones that are going to win. They're the ones that are going to take home all the dollars. I don't know whether it'll be more clear or less clear when this is all done, but it certainly has folks a little nervous about what that all means.

Now, why does that matter here? It matters here because you are all living with some of the same kind of things happening in your states, and I'd argue what you are doing in looking at being able to make sure those nutrients stay where that plant is and looking at trying to control tillage and do the kinds of things that have less impact off our farm, using technologies to split our application rates to be able to make sure that we know late in the season if we need to be able to rescue a crop with a late-season nitrogen application, we know what that is. These technologies are going to help us do a better job.

That's if the government doesn't get in the way and tell you you can't do something. "You can't fall apply, you can't put more than 120 pounds on, or you got to use this form of nitrogen, not that form of nitrogen, or your soil type says X, and therefore this is what it needs to be." A few of those there's out there, and they make some sense. If you had a really sandy soil, certainly you're not going to be able to hold that nitrogen if you throw some nitrogen on that farm, but beyond that, we need to be able to let y'all innovate and figure out what works on their farm.

We got some things that five years ago, when we looked at Iowa and the productivity that's here, we said, "There's a lot of good stuff happening. We got a lot of people doing good things. What could be the problems?" Now, we didn't see a lawsuit coming, but we said, "It's water quality regs," because you could see it already happened. It's Chesapeake, it was Florida, it was other places. And so, what do we do to get ahead of that?

And we said, "We got to own this as agriculture. We got to own this in a non-regulatory way. We got to prove to the public that we can do these things better than government can do these things and that we know more about managing this stuff than some bureaucrat knows who's maybe never been to a farm." And so, what we said, "We're going to start a water quality initiative. We're going to have a nutrient reduction strategy. We got other states around us that are doing the same thing." We went to the Iowa legislature two years ago, got $2.4 million of new money plus $10 million worth of one-time money. Last year was $4.4 million. This year was $9.6 million.

Most all that money is used for cost share. We do a lot of cover crop work. We have 29 different watershed projects around the state. 16 of those are in local watersheds that have an issue with nitrates or phosphorus. Nitrates, obviously, we're looking at that water going through the soil and any kind of edge-of-field kind of things like capturing any tile lines or having a nutrient reduction wetland as well as timing of nitrogen applications and rates and cover crops. And on the phosphorus stuff, we're looking a lot at erosion, but certainly, one of those tools is cover crops.

And so, cover crops is something that catches both of those pieces that a lot of focus has been on here in Iowa. We got some folks who've been doing this long before we showed up with this program or this kind of emphasis. What has happened is we've tapped into some of those folks. Those folks have been at other places. We've got farm organizations that are organizing it, and we think we're seeing about double the number of cover crops here in Iowa about every year. And it fits so well with a no-till or strip-till type of situation. Conservation tillage is even a little tough to make this work, and I think it's both an incentive to figure out how we can make it work in these systems for some folks that aren't doing strip-till or no-till, and they can figure out that there are ways that you can build organic matter, you can hold that soil in place, and it's pliable. It's ready for that corn to go in the ground, those soybeans to go in the ground, next spring.

We are probably still... 2% or 3% of Iowa has cover crops on it. We're nowhere like some other states east of us, but we're growing, and we're growing in interest. I talked to a group today of ag retailers here in Iowa, and a bunch of those folks are investing in new custom equipment and trying to handle cover crop seed and doing some other things that'll get them more ready for that. And so, we see this growing in interest in Iowa right now. We have a cover crop cost share program, statewide program, open that in addition to these watershed projects that are out there, in addition to what some other counties can do through their soil conservation districts, and in addition to what the federal folks can do, we have $3 million set aside for folks that want to do strip-till, no-till, nitrification inhibitors, or cover crops.

The biggest uptake is cover crops. We've used up that money. We put a little more money with it. We're probably used up that money, but we still have some other places that folks can go to be able to access some dollars to try cover crops. All of it's cost share. Folks got to bring their own money to the table. This isn't free. We are not going to be able to cost share everything forever. I mean, just do the math. Right now, we pay for first-time users $25 an acre for cover crops. For repeat users, $15 an acre, so maybe a third of the cost of that cover crop for repeat folks.

But if we were to pay, let's say, $10 an acre, and we had half our acres, we have 23 million acres of corn and soybeans in Iowa. If we did that on 10 million acres times 10 bucks, you can all do the math. It's a hundred million bucks. We don't have that. We're never going to have that. It's got to work for the farmer. Well, what we're trying to do is introduce it, find a way, figure out what works for you, what kind of mix you want to use, and then you figure out how it needs to work on your farm. And many of your states are doing the same kinds of things or looking at adding it, those kinds of things.

Michaela Paukner:

I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment. Yetter is your answer for success in the face of ever-changing production agriculture challenges. Yetter offers a full lineup of planter attachments designed to perform in varying planting conditions. Yetter products maximize your inputs, save you time, and deliver return on your investment. Visit them at yetterco.com. That's Y-E-T-T-E-R-C-O.com.

Bill Northey:

I tell you, one of the things I'm most excited about is that we see a lot of businesses that are interested and believe there's a market for better precision around nutrients, and obviously, some that are here that are sponsoring right now and that are part of this and make this all happen. And other businesses as well, whether it's the equipment side, the other side. We got the seed company folks that are looking at computer programs to figure out how much nitrogen we have left on the farm, and we have equipment folks that are looking at mechanics for late-season application, and we got all kinds of folks playing with those things.

And to me, that's what's going to make this all work. We can spend our little $3 million over here, $8 million over there, but what's really going to work is when we all have the tools that works on our farm and we allow that innovation to happen. We can spark it, we can be a part of it, we can keep encouraging it, but the success, to me, comes from the folks, from you all being a part of this meeting, from you asking questions of your suppliers and anybody that you're buying stuff from and asking for something new. That's what's going to bring us to this next generation.

Now, we got to keep telling our story, because those same folks that thought we don't have family farmers anymore, you can't depend on them to know the difference between conservation tillage and strip-till and no-till, and they don't know the difference between a Y-drop and anhydrous ammonia, for that matter. So, they don't know all those pieces. At the end of the day, they don't have to. They just have to know that we're going to develop new things that work for us that we should be using, the farmers on the ground that know their farm better than anybody else to make the decision that works on their farm, and that we're taking this seriously.

We're not saying, "No regulation" because we want to sit and ignore it. We're saying, "No regulation" because we believe we can fix it better. We can adopt these pieces. Now maybe someday, there'd be a handful of folks that don't want to do anything, and there'll be regulation or something. I don't know. We're a long ways away from that. In the meantime, let's not try and fix the last 5% while we got the first 95% that will find these solutions. And I don't know how UAVs are going to fit into this and all kinds of other stuff.

I was with a group of FFA kids the other day, high school kids, and first of all, they asked about the lawsuit, and I said, "Most of you," these are in high school right now, I said, "Most of you will be graduated from college before we have a result to that lawsuit. It's going to take that long. I don't know what it's going to be, and I don't know what it's going to mean, so don't wrap yourself around a wheel on that. Certainly pay attention, understand it, let it motivate you to engage, but don't get lost in it in a way that you think the sky's going to fall because somebody's saying something bad about what we're doing out here or that there's a lawsuit."

But in the meantime, what an exciting world to be able to jump into now and see the technologies come and the way we can process information. I always tell somebody, I love to be able to have something on a tile line that would tell me how much nitrate is moving in my tile line, pop it up on the phone, how much water, how much nitrate is leaving that field? And if I see after a four-inch rain that I lost 15 pounds of nitrogen, I'm having a serious conversation about what I'm doing out there. And if the other half of the field only lost five pounds because they got a cover crop on it, you don't have to convince me anymore. You don't need a regulation to tell me that I'm going to use cover crops, because I am. And now, I just got a new metric about what I can do to make sure that it pays.

And we need those kinds of water quality yield results, too, just like we need... When we first started using weigh wagons out there, now we have yield monitors, we can figure out a lot of things that's happening out in the field. I'd still call that thing as imprecise as it would be... Still weigh wagons. I'm not knowing exactly what's happening on every acre and how much nitrate I'm losing, but I'd sure like to know something about what's happening out there, and I don't yet. And I think we will have those tools. Now, I don't want that tool sending information into some government agency some place that doesn't understand what happened and doesn't understand any context and wants to regulate off that. I want it for all of us to be able to figure out what we need to do different.

Talk often about, I've got a quarter section that's got a peat bottom in the middle of it, about 50 acres of peat. Heavy peat. Heavy peat for us, anyway. It's Okoboji soil. There are a lot of times when that's in corn, we go out and test it, and I don't need any nitrogen at all on it. I mean, I got enough nitrogen just in that 10%, 12% organic matter breaking down that it feeds the corn crop. I actually do more damage if I throw some more nitrogen on top of that. And on the edge of that, I got some Clarion-Nicollet-Webster soil that's 3% organic matter, and if I don't put anhydrous ammonia or I don't put some nitrogen on that crop, I've got trouble. That thing is not going to yield.

But I bet if I had that sensor, I'm probably losing more nitrogen out of that bottom that I have that's going and leaving that bottom in the tile lines than I am off that side hill, and someplace, somebody'd say, "Everybody can apply 120 pounds, but that's the maximum you can put any place." Well, that'd be stupid on two fronts. That might not be enough some years on my stuff on my hill, and that'd be silly down in the bottom. We'd all figure out a way to kind of starve the bottom and feed the hill, but not all of us have areas like that where we can do that.

And so, those are the kinds of things that farmers need to be able to manage and understand. I think we have time to do that. I think we have room. I think we got to move quickly. Certainly, we got to value innovation. We got to talk about it. We got to be able to talk about the new tools, because there is a group of folks out there, and some of them are very well-meaning. They want water quality fixed. They don't want to have problems with nitrates and phosphorus. They see algae blooms in places. They see the Gulf of Mexico have nitrate issues, hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and they say, "We fixed it in our urban areas. We fixed it at our point sources. Now you fix it in agriculture."

They can't tell us how to do it, and I would argue, and I have, with some of the folks that are part of Des Moines Water Works and others that say we need regulation. I say, "Okay, we got a plan. Now, tell me how your plan is better than this. What's your regulatory plan? Whether it's 120 pounds or whether it's buffer strips or whatever it is, what's your plan that's going to fix this better?" "Oh, I don't know. I just know not everybody will do it if we don't have regulation."

You don't fix something with nothing or beat something with nothing. In this case, we should make sure if somebody comes out and says, "We need regulation because that non-regulatory approach is not working fast enough," then you better prove to me before we get off this horse what horse we're getting on and why that's better, and what we're going to do when that doesn't work if that's not going to work. Now, those are arguments that down the road, and I don't really want to get there. I think if we all figure out ways to be able to show some improvements and show engagement that we won't have to do that.

Let me finish with just talking to... I don't think everybody appreciates... Certainly, they don't appreciate what's going on out here, but they don't always even appreciate our attitude in agriculture about why we address these things and why we care about them. So, in about two weeks, we have our state fair here now. Actually, it starts a week from tomorrow, but a week after that, in the middle of the state fair on the Thursday, we do Century Farm Awards and Heritage Farm Awards. And a lot of states do this. We'll give out about 350 or 360 Century Farm Awards here in Iowa. These are farms that have been in the same family for a hundred years. We'll give out about 70 or 80, I believe, Heritage Farm Awards. Those are farms that have been in the same family for 150 years.

Now mind you, in some parts of Iowa, like my parts up in northwest Iowa, we didn't have many people around 150 years ago, so in some cases, these are maybe the only family that's ever farmed these farms. And you can imagine if you've been a part of these, and I know there'd be a lot of folks in this room that have been a part of them in your own area, we haven't had farms that old in our family. We've had farms. My family's farmed a long time, but we haven't kept all those farms, and those have gone, and we're still 20 years away from our first century farm.

But I tell you, that is a very emotional time. If I could just get all the non-farmers in Iowa to spend 15 minutes watching that event and see these families come across the stage and the smiles and the hugs, and... We had a family last year that had 60 people that came back. This was their family reunion, from states all around the country to come back to celebrate this, and they'll cheer after when they're announced, and they get their picture taken, and they'll come across the stage and say, "Grandma was born on that farm, and she's still living on that farm. She's been on there 92 years."

We had a couple of young guys came across the stage, I assume they were brothers. This was a couple years ago. And I said, "So, congratulations." And they said... One of them was a landlord's family. These are guys in their probably mid-30s, I'm guessing, or early 30s. One of them was a landlord's family, and one of them was a tenant's family, and this was the 150-year award. And they said, "The rental family has rented that farm for over 70 years from that landlord family." And he said, "This is our farm together. We both treat this as our farm. This is something we care about." Not all rental arrangements are like that in Iowa, but there are some that are like that. I'm sure they still have a year-to-year lease too, but they never served notice on each other in 69 years.

But there is a connection that folks have. I remember one of the first years we had it. We had an older guy coming across the stage, and he was using a walker, and I'm guessing maybe in his 80s. And I always refer to him as a big, burly... I grew up on a cattle farm, so Dad fed cattle, and we'd sort cattle and all kinds of stuff, and this is the kind of guy that he's standing at that gate, and that heifer thinks she's coming through that gate, and he doesn't even have to wave his arms. He just locks eyes, and she turns. He just was large and in charge of that family. If Dad would've said, "We're walking off the front of that stage," they would've done it.

And he's coming across, and I say, "Congratulations." He looks up, and his eyes are all damp, and he said, "Got the fifth generation of my family with me, and they say they're going to farm, too." And he couldn't say anything more, and he didn't need to. And it's just a day full of that. And people are telling us those folks won't do what's right for their farm? Bull. I mean, these folks will do anything that's right. Give us the tools. Give us the chance. Don't tell us that you know better than we do what to do out there.

Now, we got to make sure the rest of the world knows this, because that's a secret to folks. In fact, last story on this, but we had a guy that came up, it would've been about three or four years ago. He came up after that Century Farm event, and he had a ponytail on and hadn't shaved in a week. I don't know if he changed his T-shirt since he last shaved. I mean, he was just really rough-looking, and I knew I hadn't seen him all day. Coming across the stage with families, and he said, "I want to talk to you about this Century Farm Award." And I thought, "This could be interesting. I have no idea where he's going." And he said, "I grew up in Philadelphia. I've lived in Houston. Now I live in LA and work in the tent for sound. I've never been to Iowa, never been to a farm, and what I just saw today was the coolest thing I ever saw. I saw all these families coming across the stage and hugging, multiple generations."

And he talked about going home, grabbing a video camera, coming back, and interviewing families about why the farm connected them and what they felt about the farm and how they were connected to generations that are gone, generations that aren't born yet. And there is no way I would've thought this guy, as separated as he was from agriculture, could have ever got it, and he got it. He talked for about 20 minutes. He said more in that 20 minutes than anybody else in being able to describe how important that connection to the farm was. And I think, that guy's going back to LA, and he's going to hear farmers are ruining the world again, whatever it is. "You're not using GMOs, are you?" Or, "You're not taking care of your livestock," or whatever it is. It's dust, it's water, it's whatever.

I think he's going to look back, and he's going to think of those families he saw across that stage, and he's not going to understand the difference between a deep-bedded building and a deep-pitted building or a strip till or no-till, but he's going to say, "Those folks wouldn't do that. They wouldn't do something that was wrong. They would only do the things that are right. Now, maybe they're doing something different than somebody else, because one is right one place and one is right another place, but they're doing the best they can." And I don't think he'd convict us like some of the folks that don't have a way to be in touch.

So, how do we capture that? We each have our own ways. We stick somebody in a combine seat beside you. I don't know if we want them in a planter seat beside... Well, if the planter's driving itself, you can have them in the planter seat beside you. Mine doesn't drive itself, so I'd be all crooked if I was sitting there talking to somebody all the time. But I think there are ways we can do pieces of this, and it's not just big city folks that don't understand. It is sometimes our small town folks that we're sitting in church with, that's in line at the grocery store with us. We need to make sure they have a chance to be able to see some of this stuff as well. And then, they find out how cool it is and how interesting it is, and I think there are going to be folks out there telling our story to others as well.

So again, thank you being here, for being a part of this. There's a lot of great stuff happening, and you're all figuring out things to be able to take home. You're making life better and telling your neighbors and farmers, "We got to keep innovating. We got to keep engaging." Certainly in Iowa, a big part of that's going to be a focus of water quality in addition to making sure that we're doing the best things that we can, as efficient as we can, raising the biggest crops that we can, but doing it in a way that causes less impact off the farm. We do all those things, I think the future is very, very bright.

Michaela Paukner:

Bill will certainly be missed by the agriculture community. A collection of memories about Bill is linked on the webpage for this article, which you can find at no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. Many thanks to Yetter Farm Equipment for helping to make this No-Till podcast series possible. From all of us here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.