Skilled Labor Series: Josh Svaty on Farming
*This episode is part of our new Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu. This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure.
Today’s guest is Josh Svaty, a farm owner and operator who also happens to be the former secretary of agriculture of the state of Kansas, among other hats he's worn.
Farming practices have dramatically shaped human development and the structure of our society. We may not see the every day implications, but farming will continue to impact land management and food systems around the world. Since climate change has altered the predictability of crops, innovative solutions addressing agriculture’s biggest issues are cause for optimism.
Josh provides a lot of insight in this topic as he oversees a diversified crop and livestock operation at Free State Farms. In this conversation, we learn about the evolution of farming, the role climate change has played in the day to day operations of Josh’s farm, his views on regenerative agriculture and promising trends in agricultural innovations. This episode is great for anybody interested in the food, agriculture and land use areas of the climate fight.
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*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded on August 31, 2022.
In this episode, we cover:
[1:46] Josh's upbringing and extensive background
[5:26] The role agriculture has played in human development
[7:24] Large-scale monoculture practices and Josh's feelings about them
[10:24] Climate change impacts felt on Free State Farms
[15:11] Solutions addressing the growing lack of predictability for farmers, including increasing crop diversity and livestock
[19:06] An overview of regenerative agriculture
[25:03] Role of water in farming operations
[27:11] Local and global trends as the result of drought
[29:00] What happens when we run out of water
[32:45] What keeps Josh optimistic about the future of agriculture
[35:50] Nitricity's unique solution to addressing the GHG impact of fertilizer
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Jason Jacobs (00:02):
Hello everyone, this is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Sims (00:04):
And I'm Cody Sims.
Jason Jacobs (00:06):
And welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Sims (00:16):
In this podcast we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:27):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode and if you feel like it leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change.
Yin Lu (00:41):
Today's guest is Josh Svaty, a Kansas based farm owner and operator who also happens to be the former secretary of agriculture of the state of Kansas among other hats he's worn. We talk through the evolution of farming. Here's some stories about the role climate change has played in the day to day operations of his farm, his views on a regenerative of agriculture and promising trends in ag innovations. Also, as you may notice I'm not Jason or Cody I'm Yin their partner here at MCJ. Like the rest of our team I'm curious to learn and break down knowledge silos across the new climate economy. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and with that, Josh welcome to the show.
Josh Svaty (01:16):
It's a pleasure to be here.
Yin Lu (01:18):
You are probably one of the most well prospective people in agriculture. You've had many lives and we were originally connected through Nico Pinkowski of Nitricity. He's running an awesome nitrogen fertilizer company and when I asked him do you know any farmers? Because we're doing this series. He said, yes of course you should meet Josh, you're a farm owner and operator. But you've also worn so many hats prior to owning and operating your farm. So I'd love to hear a bit more about yourself, your upbringing and all those hats that you've worn throughout your career.
Josh Svaty (01:46):
Sure. I grew up on a farm in central Kansas and when I say central Kansas I mean like right in the middle of the middle state in the United States. So I'm about as from the middle as you could possibly get. My family came there right as the civil war came to a close, they've been farming in Ellsworth County for over 150 years. My wife and I didn't break off but I have three siblings and farms are difficult to split up. My dad's farm was a farm partnership between he and two of his brothers. When they split up we had a smaller farm. As I grew older with my siblings we knew we would have to find a new way. So my wife and I formed our own farm. Our main operation is only about three and a half miles from where I grew up as well in the Smoky hill region in central Kansas and then we have some leased ground and everybody not accustomed to farming always asks, well how big is your farm? How many acres? Typically, most farmers don't like to talk about that.
Josh Svaty (02:44):
But as I tell people we're well above the state average size for a farm which is I think 745 acres to give an indication of the size of our operation. I was fortunate I'm 20 years into my professional career at this point and the first seven were in the Kansas Legislature representing the area where I was from in central Kansas. So I farmed and then I would come up from January through May and work in the legislature. I was the ranking minority member on the house agriculture committee and then was on the utilities committee and then I left that to become the secretary of agriculture in Kansas which was a great honor. We've had some long term ag secretaries in history, some that served over 30 years back when they used to not be tied to the governor. So I was only the 14th, but after that I left and was a senior advisor at the EPA and the Obama Administration. Which I loved and a lot of people laughed.
Josh Svaty (03:36):
They said that was going to be my instant death in terms of a political future to go work for the Environmental Protection Agency, but really interesting agency. They have the third most PhDs per capita behind NASA and NOAA in terms of federal agencies. Great learning opportunity for me, my trajectory then moved back to the nonprofit space. I went and became vice president at the Land Institute which is a tremendous global Institute working on perennialising the major grain crops. Very focused on sustainable agriculture. After that I made a run for statewide office, it did not go well which is fine. Focused now mostly on the farm and then working in and around the Topeka Statehouse and around the country on agriculture and energy issues. That's a long bit but it's been a great lifetime of learning in the ag space.
Yin Lu (04:27):
Amazing. I should note that you became a member of the house of rep at age 22, whilst you were going to school and whilst you were doing farming as well. Is that correct?
Josh Svaty (04:38):
Yeah. I look back now and I'm like why did people vote for me? I grew up working on the farm even. So I had never held a job that was a true functional job where you clocked in. I worked some harvest shifts at the Black Wolf Elevator which hardly constitutes an actual job. I had worked physically hard my entire life but I had zero work experience at all when I first got elected to office and I chuckle about it now.
Yin Lu (05:08):
I'd like to take a big step back and do some context setting both for myself as well as listeners that might not have a strong foundation and understanding of how we got to defining agriculture that we do today. If you can humor me, paint a picture of the role that agriculture has played in human development. Maybe if you can step back tens of thousands of years.
Josh Svaty (05:26):
Sure. I appreciate you asking because it also for me sets the context of why agriculture's so important for a discussion of climate change. We are in the position we're in now because of humanities race for fast carbon or stored pools of carbon and everybody thinks of fossil fuels because that's the best example. But that race started long before fossil fuels and arguably you could say that when we began felling forests to heat whatever shelters we were in. That was a search for a denser form of carbon to provide that heat. But it really started in earnest when homo sapiens started to figure out that you could plant some annual plants and get grain from that, that grain itself was a stored form of energy. But what we were really doing was harvesting that stored carbon in those soils to take advantage of what had been built up over millennia to produce the food that we needed.
Josh Svaty (06:26):
You can watch our March across six of the seven continents doing that as much as we possibly could and then you exhaust the soil of whatever remaining carbon and nutrients it had and you moved to the next place. Now we have 7 billion mouths to feed plus, plus, plus. So the race is on to squeeze as much of that stored carbon out of those soils to produce the food that we need.
Yin Lu (06:54):
I hear a lot of the narrative that talks about how we've got to this point and how monoculture is ruining everything and read a bit about the work that the Land Institute is doing around finding these perennial crops instead of anti crops that we use. If you can talk a bit about how we got from migrating and using the land in that way to we're going to plant the same crop in the same fields year after year, after year. What were the key catalysts that got us to the point where we're looking at fields of corn year after year?
Josh Svaty (07:24):
First of all, I certainly don't blame our ancestors 10,000 years ago they did the very best they could with virtually no computational power. They were doing what was called pheno typing, picking out the biggest of oh that plant looks nice we'll use its seeds next year and then they just did that over and over again. So we winnowed down the crops to a handful. There's more than people think, but generally a handful. I wouldn't even say there was some grand conspiracy, even in the last 100 years. People grow corn because corn as a plant happens to be remarkably versatile and open to human suggestion. So you can ask that plant to boost its productivity. You can ask it to be shorter and boost its productivity and it responds to those requests really well. So it's hard to say we've just got this corn monopoly by a bunch of evil people. It's mostly because you've got a plant that's knocking on the door of 300 bushels an acre, which is phenomenal.
Josh Svaty (08:29):
In fact most natural landscapes, forests, prairies from a total biomass growth every season they outperform human managed ecosystems. So our fields, those natural systems will grow more except for the context of one plant corn. Corn grows so vigorously and so well, the heart of the corn belt Iowa, Illinois, Indiana is almost behaving like a temperate Amazon. Just pumping out oxygen and taking CO2 in, in the heart of June and July from a science perspective it's pretty remarkable. I have my own feelings about large scale monoculture but it's pretty amazing.
Yin Lu (09:09):
Can we get into those feelings about large scale monoculture?
Josh Svaty (09:12):
Oh sure. Anytime you put all of your eggs in the basket you open yourself to trouble. Same way for fossil fuel dependence on energy over the last 150 years and farmers I've always thought should be the first to acknowledge that there's a problem. Because if you learn anything on the farm it's that if you do too much of anything it's going to have a consequence. If you pump too much water you're going to run out, there's no such thing as an endless supply. If you till too much you are going to destroy the organic activity that's going on in those soils. We should have been thinking years ago, gosh a giant pool of stored energy under the ground. Though it's awesome for fast gains, we just simply can't pull it all out and burn it right away. That's probably not the best use of that resource.
Yin Lu (10:03):
Thank you for a very helpful context painting. Let's double click into different repercussions that we're seeing from a lot of those practices. I'm curious, having grown up in the ag belt your entire life being from the middle of the middle of where a lot of farming is happening. How has climate change impacted you both at a personal level and then at a systemic level?
Josh Svaty (10:24):
On our farm every year is different anyway and so a lot of people are like well these are climate cycles and we've seen this before. Arguably I have seen in my own lifetime long stretches of drought, certainly nothing as bad as the drought of the 1950s, which I wasn't old enough to remember that. Or the drought of the 1930s the dust bowl, but I've seen bad stretches of weather. I do even sense in my brief time of paying closer attention to this changes that are concerning to me and I'll use one as an example, a very specific event. Last December on the 15th of December we had a windstorm come through Kansas and the great planes in general, we are not unaccustomed to wind, wind is what we do. So we get it and I put up with 40 mile an hour winds all the time that there's no storm associated with it, it's just blowing. But this was a day long wind event of between 70 and sometimes 90 mile an hour winds.
Josh Svaty (11:28):
Everybody I knew, all of my old timers and I don't want to tease my dad but my dad's 79, my dad's seen a lot of weather. All of them were saying we've never seen this, it was just a howling wind all day. It started some catastrophic fires because it was in the middle of winter and the grass was dry and you had arcing from power lines. It took people's winter wheat that was maybe three or four inches tall. It fried it from static electricity. From that amount of wind going across a flat landscape to say nothing of the fact that it was just hopelessly depressing. We are all very used to tornadoes, we all have basements. You all go down to the basement for the tornado and then you come up 15 minutes later and usually things are fine. No one is used to sitting in their house for nine hours while the whole thing heaves from 70, 80, 90 mile an hour winds. Those are the things that start to scare me because those are associated with a climate that is unbalanced.
Josh Svaty (12:31):
Canadian wind can come plowing out of the north and drop everybody's temperatures, 40 or 50 degrees, massive rainfall events far exceeding what we're used to, seven, eight or nine inches. Those are scary, it's outside of what we're used to.
Yin Lu (12:47):
It sounds like in farming there's the reliance on predictability in calendar for when you do your first harvest, when you do your first seed planting and all of that. So it sounds like these events become this unpredictable force that doesn't give you the ability to be able to have a predictable calendar year. Is that a fair assessment?
Josh Svaty (13:07):
That is a great assessment. In fact, you put it better than I did. We account for the vagaries in a normal weather system. Everybody on the High Plains assumes that you're going to have dry stretches. That's why we have crop diversification further outside of Iowa and Illinois because they're only growing corn and beans because they have up until this point had more predictable weather. We don't have this predictable weather, we're used to drought. So we grow some winter wheat, we grow soybeans, we grow milo which can handle the heat better. But even understanding what could potentially happen in a season, we have what we consider is a predictable calendar. We know that we are going to plant our spring crops, what we call our row crops at a point in the spring past which they will no longer be killed by the last freeze of the winter. Similarly, we anticipate harvesting them in the fall before an early freeze could shut them down. We know it's going to be dry.
Josh Svaty (14:07):
We know we may get a big rain event here or there and that's been this way for decades but we need to be able to have a predictable first and last frost. When you start to see Canadian air coming down deeper into May or maybe even June, there are I don't know 93 million acres of corn in this country. 40 of them are in between the Dakotas, Northern Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Imagine almost half of your corn crop getting wiped out by a fluke freeze happening early in June, which is something that we never would've considered before. In my opinion, that's one of the greatest threats in a climate changing universe. We could end up having really cold air at a time period where it would be catastrophic to our crops.
Yin Lu (14:57):
In thinking about that, the growing lack of predictability. I wonder if there are solutions or innovations that you're seeing that can help mitigate some of those impacts of the lack of predictability.
Josh Svaty (15:11):
First of all, and I have a Kansas perspective. Which is slightly different than the heart of the corn belt perspective. There are Iowa state economists that would call all the acres in Kansas fringe acres because we were already hotter and dryer than Iowa was. Let me step this back a little bit and say one strong aspect of farm practices in Kansas and Western Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle is that we were all subject to the dust bowl. That's now almost 100 years ago. Certainly nobody that was farming then is barely even around anymore. But those memories are long and you see farmers here that were early to adopt better soil management practices. But they also mitigated their risk of a changing environment by having greater diversity on the farm. So my own farm, we have winter wheat, we have alfalfa which is a perennial crop that's a forage crop.
Josh Svaty (16:09):
We have soybeans, we have milo, but then we also have livestock and we mix all of those in because you may lose your wheat crop but have a milo crop or vice versa or if all the crop prices are down cattle prices are up. The risk in agriculture in my opinion is if you look at the corn belt, it's success year after year producing 185, 190 bushel corn crops even higher consistently is that they like any industrial practice are refining that expertise and narrowing it down. So the best corn farmers only farm corn year after year, after year and the best soybean farmers the same way and none of them do livestock because they don't want to feed animals over the middle of the winter. They want to refine their cornfield so that they're perfect when they start in the spring. That has been the model, certainly in the last 40 years. They are going to have to move away from that and there's a lot of different things they can do.
Josh Svaty (17:13):
But the oldest way to do that is to have more diversity in your operation, have livestock be a part of that operation, have more crops than just two. Because corn and beans are both hard of the summer row crop plants and they depend on a lot of brain in those growing season months. Iowa, Illinois are normally awesome at providing rain during the growing season and we just don't know what that's going to be like 10 or 15 years from now.
Yin Lu (17:45):
We're going to take a quick break so you can hear me talk more about the MCJ membership option. Hey folks, Yin here a partner at MCJ Collective. Want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have since then grown to 2000 members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with differing backgrounds and perspectives and while those perspectives are different. What we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, non-profits have been established, a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more.
Yin Lu (18:39):
So whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show. All right, let's get back to the show. What you're describing these practices, does that all sit under the umbrella of regenerative agriculture? We hear that term more and more these days. Can you talk a bit more about that as a new area?
Josh Svaty (19:06):
Sure. Regenerative, there's a group that's trying to define that and so they have an idea of what they want that to mean. I have my own thoughts on regenerative or organic and that would simply be justice Potter Stewart when he defined pornography in the US Supreme court. Said, "You know it when you see it." I tend to think that way with a lot of farm practices. The consumer has in their mind what does an organic or regenerative operation look like? There are a lot of organic operations or ones that would classify as regenerative that are gigantic monocultures in the central valley of California and most consumers would be like, wait a minute that's not what I was thinking of. In the meantime, there are some great family owned farms through the Midwest that are not at all certified anything but there's good riparian areas there. They have a lot of diversity, they still have some livestock. They probably put some chemical down but not a whole lot.
Josh Svaty (20:06):
I struggle sometimes when we try to label those things. But yes, as a general rule crop diversity is step one toward mitigating the risk of climate change. But that's a baby step for what is rapidly becoming a much faster moving more difficult problem.
Yin Lu (20:24):
Crop diversity is step one. Are there a step two step three that are being defined right now? If so what are those?
Josh Svaty (20:32):
Steps two and three, what crops do we have out there that can handle heat a lot better? I mentioned that I grow milo or sorghum, most consumers probably have no idea what that is. It is the unknown stepchild of corn, it's a grass as well. It does not produce as much as corn, but it is substantially more drought tolerant. It takes a third the water to grow a milo crop that it would a corn crop. It's not as universally usable. It can be fed to livestock just like corn which is great. It's used actually a lot overseas, the Chinese brew and alcohol from it but it is drought tolerant. One of the problems of corn is that a key time when it's tasseling, it needs a lot of moisture and favorable weather conditions while it's tasseling and then pollinating those ears. Well, you may have the best growing season in history for your corn crop. But if you get a brutal 100 degree two week stretch from the end of June into July, it may catastrophically impact your pollinating stage. Whereas sorghum, as we like to say can sit, sit there and wait.
Josh Svaty (21:45):
So it may need a good rain to head out, produce the head that then produces the grain but it can just sit there waiting for that rain for at least a month or so. So what other crops are out there that have that sort of flexibility to be able to adjust? I'm trying to think of a good example of this but I actually don't like running bison. They're wild animals, they scare me. But one of the cool things about the people that I know that have bison instead of cattle. If my cows are set to give birth and a huge blizzard shows up they will give birth in the middle of that blizzard and then it's all hands on deck for us to try to keep those calves alive. Bison can sense the blizzards coming and hold off on giving birth until the blizzard passes, which is just awesome and we're looking for the same things in crops. What crops have that capacity? I'm certainly not a climate scientist.
Josh Svaty (22:40):
But if our great risks in climate are going to be at these fluke weather extremes, what crops do we have that can weather those extremes and how quickly can we scale them up to produce food?
Yin Lu (22:52):
So step one diversity and just keep on moving around so you're not using the same piece of land for the same thing over and over again. Step two drought resistant crops, resistant animals. Is there a step three to that?
Josh Svaty (23:04):
Sure, there is a place for technology. Farmers have historically you bat for the home run every year, you want to produce the home run corn crop every single year. It used to be that you would just dump as much fertilizer onto the ground everywhere as you possibly could afford to hope to hit that home run. Two modern farmings credit, including the big agri businesses that some people love to hate on technology has allowed us to have greater data about the productivity of every field. So if you have a side hill that consistently does not perform you now have the computational data that will say don't spend a fortune on fertilizer it's going to run off into the stream. Invest it down where it's flat or maybe on the top of the hill where it's flat. You're doing a bunch of things, you're using less fertilizer or at least you're probably putting it in different places. You're not losing as much down our waterways which has of course both a water quality impact but it also has an overall GHG impact.
Josh Svaty (24:09):
There's a lot of volatilization of fertilizer that's put down inappropriately or improperly, so that technology it's good. Now, there are people in the ag community that will say we've done this and we are ERGO sustainable. You can't keep doing 300 bushel corn and think you've just adjusted fertilizer and we've solved the climate change problem. I mean, it's got to be more than that but I would say it's a part of it. That technology plays a role.
Yin Lu (24:37):
One of the things I've heard you say a few times already is just the fact that water is so central to making any forming operations successful. Having been in California for the past couple of decades, we just hear our water's running out, everything's dry. We've been in a drought for a decade. Talk to me about water scarcity and the impact that's having in Kansas, in the corn belt in California on a global level too and what should we do about it?
Josh Svaty (25:03):
When I look at my own operation and I'm entirely dry land, people like to pat me on the back for that but I tell them I'm only dry land because I don't have any water underneath me. Where else I would be pumping it? A dry land farmer, you put the plant in the ground and then you pray for rain and that's all you get. Whatever you get is what you get versus irrigators who have the ability to mitigate that. But when I think about my total farm operation, the number one mitigating factor higher than everything else is whether or not I will get adequate moisture and this year in Kansas the catastrophic drought. So we will have almost no soybeans or sorghum at the end of this year entirely because of that drought and we couldn't mitigate it. That has always been something of a risk in Kansas, John Wesley Powell the one that went down the Grand Canyon came up with what he called the dry line. Which is where the semi arid zone begins and he put it about two thirds away across Kansas, north and south.
Josh Svaty (26:02):
That dry line is migrating east, as it migrates east and gets into the heart of the corn belt these places that laugh at my puny soybean crops because they every year consistently produce 80 or 90 bushel soybean crops. What happens to them when they're not getting the consistent rainfall through the growing season? Then more acutely as you mentioned in California. Those regions that have had 150 years of intense production agriculture, whose soils and sub soil water aquifers are now gone. What happens? California is so far in a way the largest ag economy in the country, it's not even close. Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, we are all between 16 to probably $25 billion in ag seats, maybe it's a little higher and California's usually almost double that. Because of the high value of the crops that are grown in the central valley and that water is rapidly disappearing.
Yin Lu (27:06):
Do you see this trend outside of the US as well? If so, in what areas of the world?
Josh Svaty (27:11):
Think about what areas of the world are heavily dependent on agriculture and are going to deal with different problems associated with climate change. One of the reasons the Midwest is like the awesome farm place ever is because we get most of our rain during the growing season for our principal crops. Iowa is the convergence of everything, great rain, great temperatures, unbelievable soils. You see a similar environment for Iowa in... I'll give a pregnant pause for effect here in the Ukraine. Ukraine and Southern Russia, an incredibly volatile place right now has a tremendous ag possibility because great soils, great temperatures, a lot of moisture. But if you look at the Indian subcontinent or Pakistan, places that already can be subject to enormously high temperatures and their moisture is largely dependent on monsoon seasons and snow melt similar to the central valley in California. I mean, they need a major winter event somewhere away from them to provide all that moisture. Well, when those begin to be less predictable then it leaves those areas that are already hot and dry but are critical to producing the food for those countries in a very bad place.
Josh Svaty (28:29):
Same with Sub-Saharan Africa. Those are seasonal rains that are critical for those growing areas and if they're not coming then they have a huge amount of trouble and then finally you have massive aquifer depletion. There are places that are depleting aquifers all around the globe, but honestly one of the most acute instances is right here in the Midwest. The High Plains aquifer running on the Eastern side of the Rockies and we're draining it as fast as we can drain it.
Yin Lu (28:58):
What happens when we run out of water?
Josh Svaty (29:00):
Very different style of agriculture, for sure and you can see that... Google some center pivot irrigation. On a year like this it's very apparent because center pivot is the type of irrigation that we use. It's probably used in the central valley too, but it's a central point and then this long spidery pipeline that runs on wheels around in a circle, very efficient way to apply water. That's usually done in a quarter section which is a square so you have this circle that gets water and then you have the corners that don't and a lot of times farmers will plant both. They plant the circle and then they plant the corners in the hopes that maybe they get some fluke rains and the corners produce something. This year you can see the circles are green, the corners are crispy fried, completely dead. So what happens when we run out of water, we can already see it short of water there it would be a full scale catastrophe.
Yin Lu (29:56):
Go down that morbid route for a second before we pull ourselves out and look at things through a more optimistic lens. I was thinking about what we've been seeing with COVID, geopolitical strife in different parts of the world and what that has done to the supply chain in semiconductors and chemicals and automotives and in certain cases we just saw supply chains break completely. Being morbid what would lead to a global agriculture system collapse? Do you see us being on this path and how do we prevent ourselves from going further down this path?
Josh Svaty (30:25):
Yeah. Global ag collapse is definitely something that can keep people awake at night. Back to our initial conversation about monocultures. When you are heavily dependent on five or six worldwide crops, the importance of rice and wheat globally cannot be overstated and if there was a problem in those it would be a major problem worldwide. That's critical and we saw this a little bit this last year and we're still seeing it. Everyone loves to talk about the value of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug's revolution in the 1960s and I don't want to take away from what Borlaug was able to accomplish. But that was largely teaching people to apply huge amounts of synthetic fertilizer, more fertilizer that you apply the more your crop is going to produce. What happens if there are supply chain problems in the fertilizer industry? We are in the middle of one of the most interesting times in our history in terms of supply chain infrastructure for fertilizer. Critical elements of fertilizers, potash, phosphorus, phosphates come from globally unstable places, Russia. Nitrogen production is still dependent on the Haber-Bosch process, which is very dependent on natural gas.
Josh Svaty (31:43):
So we're watching traditional Haber-Bosch factories that are making nitrogen fertilizer in Europe shutting down right now. Because it's not economic for them to get the natural gas or even if it was economic they may not even be able to get it. If you don't have that fertilizer and you're going into a growing season you know automatically even if I get dream rains. I'm going to put this crop out here spit balling, but it's going to be 50% of what it could have been if I wasn't able to get those fertilizers. That is very scary in terms of what the world needs to feed itself consistently on a year in year out basis.
Yin Lu (32:23):
On the flip side of that out of the morbid talk, as you're seeing innovations flourish. Companies that are measuring soil carbon, thinking about alternative ways to make fertilizer. What are two or three things that keep you up at night in a good way that gets you excited? That keeps you an optimist as we continue to farm, as we continue to grow our agriculture footprint?
Josh Svaty (32:45):
Perennial crops, in my opinion and we're still getting there in terms of their productivity but this is the holy grail. If you look at climate change and it's disruptive capacity, we've talked about when it doesn't rain or hot spells in the growing season. What if you get three weeks of rainfall during the time where you need to be planting your corn crop? And this is actually happening a lot now. Where farmers in Wisconsin can't even get into the fields because they're too soggy. How do you mitigate those risks? Nature mitigates those risks because its perennial ecosystems are self-managing. You don't have to replant them every year. You don't have to apply chemical to control weeds because those perennial systems keep weeds out of them. So Wes Jackson asked more than 40 years ago, would it be possible for us to have our major grain crops either perennialised? So you breed perenniality into wheat and for the listener's perenniality means it grows back like your front lawn or like a tree. Whereas right now we have to plant it every single year. Can you breed perenniality into a crop?
Josh Svaty (33:51):
Or is there a wild relative of wheat or corn or rice that's already perennial and our ancestors overlooked it 10,000 years ago because it was too complicated for them? But it's just sitting out there growing. Can we take it, breed it up faster so that it grows back every year but produces that grain as well? Wes wandered in the wilderness for years with the scientific community saying well that's just not possible and these guys are just kooky. They won't make it work and then all of a sudden guess what? It started working and through a lot of science and effort the Land Institute already has one cash crop out that they call Kernza, which I actually grow some Kernza. But they've also got some really exciting trials with perennial rice in down near Kunming and [inaudible 00:34:40] in Southwest China. Even if it's not fully perennial like 10 or 20 years, even if it were a three or four year cycle. The radical change that it could have on agriculture would be enormous.
Josh Svaty (34:54):
Reducing the amount of fuel needed for tractors going over that crop, the disruptions that are possible in a climate change universe. What a perennial crop is able to do in terms of being there year round, having a root system there year round. So if you suddenly in a climate change world get eight inches of moisture in February in a field that isn't planted anything a lot of that's just going to run away. In a field where there's a perennial root system sitting there it's going to capture and store a lot of that even in the middle of winter. It's really going to do a great job of protecting that nutrient runoff near your streams and your rivers. Especially in areas where they're having a lot of trouble with that, like Iowa and Illinois, that corn belt. I was privileged to work with them on that but I see that in terms of what it can do for this planet as enormous and that's still a long runway. We're talking decades, which for our generation is a lot of time like oh gosh that's a long way out.
Josh Svaty (35:50):
But in the realm of agriculture 50 years is nothing and we need to be thinking about that. How do we produce food on this planet in a universe where we may not have access to the fuel we need to run our tractors? Or have access to the fertilizer that we need for those plants to produce and a perennial form of agriculture solves a lot of those problems. One of the ways we got connected of course, was through Nico Pinkowski who was a co-founder of Nitricity and I got really excited about Nitricity. This is a process by which they make nitric acid from an electric arc basically and that's no different than where it comes from in nature. Nitric acid is produced when a lightning bolt strikes, small amounts of that fall to the earth in raindrops because of lightning. Large amounts of electricity can separate the nitrogen in the atmosphere which is actually a dinitrogen. It's two nitrogen atoms connected. You got to separate them, you think well this isn't very hard. Why can't plants use all that nitrogen?
Josh Svaty (36:55):
Because there's an enormous amount of it in the atmosphere but if it's in the dinitrogen form they can't use it. It has to be in a form that the plant can use it. Humans figured out how to split that atmospheric nitrogen through the process that we call Haber-Bosch in 1909. But we really haven't done anything different since then and that takes gigantic amounts of heat and huge amounts of pressure. When I look at say the Inflation Reduction Act and the amount of energy and money they're putting behind hydrogen production. I think, well this is kind of exciting because most of the hydrogen that is being talked about would be what they call green hydrogen produced from renewable energy. You could take that hydrogen and insert it into the Haber-Bosch process to help produce ammonia. Which is critical, one of the nitrogen fertilizers that are widely used in the corn belt. So that's a great possibility. What makes Nitricity so cool is that they don't even do a two step process that still goes through the heavy pressure system, they just have an electric arc.
Josh Svaty (37:57):
So you have renewable energy, you're funneling it into this lightning reactor. You are drawing atmosphere through that's not even under pressure and then you run it through water and you're creating nitric acid. Which is in nitrate form, which is very usable to the plant and the plant loves it in that form. We're starting to see these kind of technologies that don't simply make farms more efficient. Like the technology used in making sure the fertilizer is spread appropriately across the field. But will really begin removing those goose egg GHG points along the production line for our food. We will radically remove major CO2 points in our food production if we can reform the way fertilizer is produced, which is really exciting. But it's also cool because if you don't need such huge pressure, if all you need is a lot of electricity it can democratize it as well. So that you could end up with farmers each having their own little fertilizer plants on their own farm.
Yin Lu (38:59):
Instead of getting their fertilizer shipped from far away?
Josh Svaty (39:02):
Instead of depending on Russia to give it to you and suddenly Russia makes it quadruple the price or doesn't even give it to you. You can say, no I'm going to produce it myself right here every year. That's really exciting. The other thing that I would say that gives me hope back to the dust bowl. The dust bowl is arguably the worst ecological catastrophe visited on an ecosystem by humans in a brief amount of time in the history of humankind. We plowed up the Southern Plains, Southwest Kansas, Southeast Colorado, the Panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. We plowed up the Southern Plains, an area that already had the capacity to be brutally hot with high winds and we did in some cases irreparable damage to that landscape. But to the credit of farmers, even 200 miles away from that they made radical changes and we can debate whether or not chemicals associated with no till farming, which is when you don't till the soil you just use chemicals. We can debate other aspects of that, but farm practices for sure are substantially better in 2022 than they were in 1929.
Josh Svaty (40:18):
That was in part because of the rapid adoption of good farm practices by farmers that people would've said, oh these guys are never going to do anything different. Well, they did and they did it fast because they realized how bad they screw things up. I say that because I would imagine a lot of my climate journey listeners have their perceived assumptions of what Midwest farmers are and they are politically probably what you would think they are. But they have within themselves the capacity to rapidly adopt technology that makes things better. They may never do it because Nancy Pelosi told them to or because they feel like they're going to somehow make the climate better. But they'll do it if it helps mitigate their own risks and they'll do it if it obviously improves their bottom line, they're running businesses. If the risk is so great that their bottom line is threatened they will adopt all sorts of technologies that would be incredibly beneficial to the planet. That gives me a lot of hope.
Yin Lu (41:27):
Josh, this was awesome. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, sharing your perspective with us. I sure learned a lot and I hope our listeners do too. Really appreciate your time.
Josh Svaty (41:36):
Yeah, thank you. It was fun.
Jason Jacobs (41:39):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Sims (41:42):
At MCJ collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. To do this we focus on three main pillars, content like this podcast and our weekly newsletter. Capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change and our member community to bring people together as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (42:04):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective visit us at www.mcjcollective.com and if you have guest suggestions feel free to let us know on Twitter @mcjpod.
Cody Sims (42:19):
Thanks and see you next episode.
