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Despite his name, Steve Savage is actually a pretty mild-mannered and thoughtful guy. With a PhD in plant pathology and years of industry experience working for companies big and small, including DuPont and Mycogen, Steve has had a front-row seat to several technological advancements in agriculture. These days, he does a lot of writing about ag and his works can be seen on Forbes.com and the Genetic Literacy Project website. 

For this episode of the No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by SOURCE by Sound Agriculture, we caught up with Steve to chat with him to discuss the history of no-till farming, why the practice has been so important, and how it will play a role in the future of conservation. He’ll also share why he says using the term “synthetic nitrogen” is misleading, the inconvenient truth about the greenhouse gases associated with making compost, how small-scale, local Haber-Bosch nitrogen production could help reduce the reliance on foreign inputs and more.

Watch the video replay of this podcast.

No-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by SOURCE®️ by Sound Agriculture.

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Full Transcript

Julia Gerlach:
Welcome to the No-Till Farmer podcast brought to you today by SOURCE by Sound Agriculture. I'm Julia Gerlach. Despite his name, Steve Savage is actually a pretty mild mannered and thoughtful guy with a PhD in plant pathology and years of industry experience working for companies big and small, including DuPont and Mycogen. Steve has had a front row seat to several technological advancements in agriculture. These days, he does a lot of writing about ag, and his works can be seen on forbes.com and the Genetic Literacy Project website. For this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast, we caught up with Steve to chat with him about a couple of his recent articles. Stay tuned to hear him discuss the history of no-till farming, why the practice has been so important, and how it will play a role in the future of conservation. He'll also share why he says using the term synthetic nitrogen is misleading. The inconvenient truth about the greenhouse gases associated with making compost, how small scale, local Haber-Bosch nitrogen production could help reduce the reliance on foreign inputs, and more.

Julia Gerlach:
All right. Well, I'm joined here today by Steve Savage, and he's got a very interesting and extensive background in ag, having gotten a PhD in plant pathology and then going to work in academia as well as several companies, both large and small in the ag sector. So Steve, I'd like you to tell me a little bit more. You've been a regular contributor to Forbes and the Genetic Literacy Project, and you've even hosted your own podcast. So tell us how you got interested in ag and just give us some more, a little more of a glimpse into your background and your professional career.

Steve Savage:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I grew up in the suburbs of Denver, so absolutely no connection to farming. The only possible relationship there was that my grandfather was an avid victory gardener, World War I vet who did the gardening thing very seriously. And that was basically my exposure to growing of plants. Went to Stanford undergraduate in biology and got interested in the plant part of the classes. And then, it turned out there were quite a few classes I could take, specialization classes in later years of undergrad. And again, I liked those. And also, I was able to avoid the premeds by being in those classes.

Steve Savage:
And one of those was a course that was taught over in the Carnegie Institute of Plant Sciences, which is kind of on campus. And nobody knows about it, for the most part, but it was some real state of the art, but very, very basic research in plant sciences. And took a molecular biology course there with some of the, it was team taught by all sorts of people, including some of the very earliest pioneers of genetic engineering, not for plants but for in general, Cohen and Boyer, I mean, the people from the very beginning of genetic engineering. I probably should have gone into that field and into the medical side of that. But I had done a paper for one of my classes that involved, I looked into the history of the southern corn leaf blight epidemic of 1970. And it was just this fascinating thing to me that, oh, there's diseases of plants, and it has to do with the genetics and the weather.

Steve Savage:
And with about that much information, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school in plant pathology. And the Carnegie directors didn't know really much about ag schools and said, "Well, you could go to UC Davis." And since I was about to marry a California girl, I thought, "Yeah, I should stay in state." So I went to Davis, ended up in the lab that worked on diseases of grapes, so that was my exposure. But I was lucky in that my professor did a lot of outdoor field type of work, cooperative experiments in vineyards. And so, I was actually out there meeting farmers and being in agriculture, even if it is in kind of a verified atmosphere of agriculture. And so, that was super interesting.

Steve Savage:
But when I finished my degree, there were no jobs. It was 1982. It was the recession. Universities weren't hiring anybody. The only job I found on a bulletin board, because we used bulletin boards, was with Colorado State University in far western Colorado, an experiment station out there. And it was pretty much an extension job, although technically I was a horticulture faculty and working with the tree food industry. Again, really great experience in terms of interacting with growers and also got involved in a very young wine grape industry that was getting going there. And my experience with grapes helped. And there was an experiment that had been started before with 35 varieties of grapes being grown in a randomized complete block trial, there, on the station. And so I did wine quality assessments, fruit quality assessments. Published that and got involved in starting the Colorado Wine Grape Growers Association.

Steve Savage:
So that's really the only sort of accomplishment I can speak to from my time at Colorado State because after a couple of years, a job offer came up to go work for DuPont back in Delaware and get involved in a fungicide discovery group. And so, we were there screening new chemicals to try to find a fungicide. And once again... Well, while I was at Davis, a lot of the people I knew and labs I worked in or equipment that I needed for something, I was around all the people who were in the very, very early stages of plant genetic engineering, people who ended up going to Celgene and Plant Genetics, the first biotech crop companies. I call myself an accidental tourist of biotech because I was watching all that going on in it's very primitive days. Now, you can sequence the DNA of a whole organism in very little time. When I was back there, they were trying, at Davis, they were trying to sequence cauliflower mosaic virus, one virus. And it took a year, and they had to do it with radioactive label Q P35 and exposing a tax ray film. But that's where they identified the cauliflower mosaic virus promoter, which is probably the most widely used promoter in genetically engineered plants.

Steve Savage:
So anyway. At DuPont, I was associated, they had a biotech group. They were specifically trying to work on output traits. They didn't want to work on herbicide tolerance, diseases, and those kind of things. So yeah, a tourist of that.

Julia Gerlach:
So output traits means yield?

Steve Savage:
Yeah, yield. The people who are looking into things like high lysine corn. Again, this was all in the days before there was any commercial because that didn't kick in until '96. Right?

Julia Gerlach:
That's right.

Steve Savage:
So again, early days. Then, I think in 1989, I get this headhunter call. And there's a startup bio control company in San Diego. And so, that wasn't really a tough choice. It was like Delaware, San Diego? Yeah. I think I might want to go to San Diego. And my experience at DuPont was really great, but this just sounded really interesting. And so, I was there. We were working on biological control of weeds and also diseases. And of course, the main part of the company was working on BT based insecticides but trying to do that a different way. So that was very interesting.

Steve Savage:
Then, in 1996, Mycogen got sold to Dow. And so, I joined with some old friends, actually an old friend from Stanford who had gone into agriculture, and did consulting. And one of my very first consulting jobs was for an organization that put out a multi client report called biotech traits commercialized in '96 because this was a whole new thing. To most of the people in the industry, they wanted what's going on here. And I was hired to write a biotech primer trying to explain genetic engineering because most of the people, that hadn't been something that they ever learned about in school because it was too new. And then, got involved in a lot of projects where we looked at what would it be worth if you could make a disease resistant banana, or a banana that would have a long shelf life, or a hybrid popular tree that was resistant to insects. So very interesting projects there. And just all sorts of things over the years. From '96 up until around 2018, 2019, I was doing a lot of that. So yeah. So I mean that's the career side. I don't know how... I'm taking too long already, I'm sure.

Julia Gerlach:
No, it's quite fascinating. And I guess, we probably should move along. I guess, I specifically wanted to talk to you today because you have been doing a lot of writing the last few years. And like I said, you've been writing for Forbes and Genetic Literacy Project and probably other places as well, but you recently wrote an article that kind of covered a lot of the history of no-till. And I was just kind of curious, I'd love to hear you talk about what led you into doing that and your experience, what you learned in doing that.

Steve Savage:
Yeah. Well, over the years, I participated either voluntarily or sometimes on projects in some of these multi client, or not multi client, multi stakeholder sustainability organizations, like Field to Market or the Sustainability Consortium or Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops. And these were good things, trying to come up with sustainability metrics with a whole premise that you can only manage what you can measure. And so, if these things were done right, it would be a good thing for agriculture, and they tended to. But we were talking about the carbon footprint side... Oh wait, that's for a different story. But at these sustainability things, I kept hearing about no-till. And I had heard about it before, but in the context of the sustainability things, that basically really came up to the top of the list in terms of practices. And so, I always thought no-till is a really great idea.

Steve Savage:
But ended up subscribing to no-till magazine, just to keep pace with what was going on. And then, saw that their 60th anniversary articles. And I think there have been a lot, but there was one whole issue that was dedicated to that. And as I read that, I thought, "Wow, this is a great story because it represents this huge paradigm shift that happened in agriculture." And we probably need one of those again, when it comes to additional changes to make sort of more climate resilient kind of agriculture. And this, we need to look at the history of no-till to understand, well, how did that happen because that's the kind of thing that it's going to take to make additional change happen. And so, again, I wanted to write that history in a way for a sort of a broader audience. Because obviously, the farming community knows all about that, but I don't think, I don't get the impression that really has, for instance, that anniversary has gotten much coverage at all in the popular press or any other kind of press.

Julia Gerlach:
Right. I mean, I think, generally, people don't have any clue about no-till farming. None of my friends know anything about it.

Steve Savage:
Not even your friends.

Julia Gerlach:
I'll put it that way.

Steve Savage:
Well, and I think to me, and I think the part that should be the most relatable to everybody is the community aspect of it. That it was a very radical thing to do when people first started doing it. It was challenging. People, farmers frequently had to come up with their own equipment or modify their existing equipment, long before any manufacturer got involved. And that community is, to me, a great story that people should know about. And Dwayne Beck, who I also interviewed about that since he's somebody who certainly knows the history of this extremely well, I really like the way he broke down even that group into innovators, adapters, and adopters. Yeah. So that was really the key part of the story that I wanted to get out there someplace.

Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you bring that up because I have heard repeatedly that it helps farmers a great deal to have other people in the community that they can talk to about how to do this and what to do. And so, having that strong community presence, whether it's a soil and water conservation district, or it's a farmer-led group, or something like that, those kind of organizations and sort of that, a peer group can help really drive adoption in huge ways. And even today, there's so much peer pressure not to do it. So it's amazing. I'm always amazed to hear about the peer pressure in the farming industry, but it's there. It's not a joke.

Steve Savage:
Yeah. I mean, it's funny. We're down to this very small number of farmers. And yet, within that, still culturally divided.

Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. Right. Well, one thing I wanted to bring up. In this article, you used the term climate action farming in the story, and I would just like you to describe or define what you mean by that.

Steve Savage:
Yeah. There's a lot of names being thrown around for what really boils down to just some really good soil health practices, things like no-till and strip till, so that you're not destroying the organic matter that you would've saved; rotations and maybe even more diverse rotations, depending on where you are and what your options are in terms of water and soil; maybe even a perennial rotation for a while, something deep rooted; cover crops, again where you've got the water to make that feasible. There's kind of a long list. You could include things like controlled wheel traffic to prevent compaction, if you're not going to be doing any sort of tillage. So it's not like there's a list of things. It reminds me of the line from Princess Bride where he says... Was it Princess Bride? No. Pirates of the Caribbean, where he says, "Well, it's not so much rules as guidelines."

Steve Savage:
So you kind of have that mix of farming practices that could be customized for any given place to get to the point where you've built up your soil, organic matter substantially. You've got good aeration. And basically, you have land that can capture rain, even excessive amounts of rain, and hold onto it. Just be better able to withstand some of the kind of climate variation that is inevitably going to be happening down the road. And actually, I had a follow-up article published yesterday, talking about how, particularly in the future, land that has been improved that way is going to become particularly valuable. And all of a sudden, all those absentee landlords, non-farming landlords are going to have to pay attention because you've got to continue to farm it that way to maintain that value, and a fair amount of that is on rented land. And it would be better, it would be good if more of it happened on rented land.

Julia Gerlach:
Yes.

Steve Savage:
But that might require some changes in lease arrangements. Honestly, I think if a farmer takes a piece of somebody's land, turns it into that kind of resilient soil and that land value goes up, the farmer ought to be able to participate in that upside in some way.

Julia Gerlach:
We'll get back to the podcast in a moment, but I want to take time, once again, to thank our sponsor SOURCE by Sound Agriculture for supporting today's episode. Today, nutrients cost more and could be hard to get when you need them. Thankfully, there's a better source of plant nutrition. It's your soil. SOURCE from Sound Agriculture unlocks more of the nitrogen and phosphorus already in your fields, so you can add less while maintaining the yield you're counting on. It's such a solid backup plan you'll find yourself wondering why SOURCE wasn't the plan all along. Learn more about SOURCE at www.sound.ag. And now, back to the podcast.

Julia Gerlach:
So then, the article that we're talking about, right now, kind of ends by talking about regenerative ag and organic practices not really being up to snuff in terms of production. So I would like you to just talk about that a little bit.

Steve Savage:
Yeah. I mean, sort of by history, I came from a point where I was very sympathetic to organic. My grandfather talked about, took organic gardening magazine back in the 1960's, and he taught me the importance of soil quality and building soil quality. And in his case, that was composting his lawn clippings and everything and putting them into the soil. And when I first went to graduate school, one of my best friends there, in Davis, was one of the very early commercial organic growers that sold in the local farm or the grocery co-op sort of thing, in Davis. And again, the way he described organic was all about soil.

Steve Savage:
And once the long process that happened to figure out how to certify organic, because there were all these different definitions of it. And Congress finally said, "USDA, you have to come up with the guidelines." That took forever, took like 10 years to do that. And so, it was around 2001 that the final organic standards were issued. And by that time, organic had shifted in my mind and in the mind of my friend from something that was really focused on that farming aspect to really something that was very marketing focused. And unfortunately, marketing in ways that are very misleading. So big organic pays for the dirty dozen list to come out every year and things like that. And the message that consumers get, which they shouldn't get, is that there's a safety aspect involved, and there's none. USDA even says that this is not a safety certification. And the rules aren't driven by science. So that's where I sort of became anti organic, not anti organic farmer, but sort of anti brand.

Steve Savage:
Well, unfortunately, I see an alignment going on, and intentionally, between organic and the term regenerative. They've come up with their own certification. And so, I think we're on the same track because that's not within the USDA certification yet, but we're on that same track that they were on. And so that, to me, compromises that term regenerative because it's also ill defined. There's all these completely different definitions. But a lot of them, including theirs, are they have exclusions for technology. They'll say no GMO. They're anti pesticide. And to me, you don't want a system that takes away useful tools from farmers, particularly if there's no scientific rationale for doing that. And one of the things that is extremely difficult to do within the organic rules and within a limited definition of regenerative is true no-till or strip till. You don't have herbicides, which are a key part of it, although it's becoming necessary maybe to find some additional ways to control weeds. Weeds are tough. You wouldn't have access to valuable genetic engineering traits.

Steve Savage:
One of the things that's going to be happening with climate change, and everybody's predicting this, well everybody involved, there's going to be bigger issues with micro toxins, particularly Aflatoxin. And there are multiple strategies for that, but some of the most interesting ones involve genetic engineering, and you wouldn't want to not do that. And then, for the most part, if you're going to fertilize with manure, or derivatives of manure, you're going to have to till that in. And so, it's incompatible with a true no-till system. And yes, you can maintain fairly high organic matter and soil by bringing it in by the tons every year. But that isn't a solution, and that's not a scalable solution. There isn't enough manure to fertilize all the acres that we grow because cows don't make fertilizer. They just don't capture quite all of it that is in their feed. So anyway, I would hate to see the technology handicapped vision, which is what regenerative is starting to sound like. I would hate to see that sort of steal the PR, and in terms of what is it that needs to change in farming as we go into a period of intense climate change.

Julia Gerlach:
I see. Okay. Well, and I have a follow-up question, and you may have already answered it. But I'll ask anyways, and then we'll see where it goes. So a lot of farmers in what I think of as the regenerative ag movement are trying to reduce inputs like fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. And they're trying to rely more on the natural processes, like biological nitrogen fixation, nurturing predator insect populations, increasing diversity in rotations, and forgoing seed treatments and traits. So why don't you just talk a little bit more about what you foresee as the ramifications of farming that way?

Steve Savage:
Well, okay. Many of the things that they're doing in that list are great. I mean, you should absolutely try to foster beneficials. The more of our nitrogen that can come from nitrogen fixing organisms, that's great. And that's expanding. There are now some options, even for corn, Pivot Bio, Syngenta's got something. But in those cases, we're talking 10 to 20% of their nitrogen needs, and that's great. But the other really nice thing about synthetic nitrogen, which is a bad term for it but the name that people use, is that you can use that more efficiently. So yes, you can use less by putting it out there exactly when and where it's needed, to at least some extent, depending on what your delivery options are. But the idea that you can do variable rate fertilization, the idea that you can do precision application of that to get it right where the plant needs it, when it needs it, that's the goal. So reducing fertilizer input, particularly in an age where all of a sudden that's getting really expensive, there's plenty of incentive to do that. And then, the more of your nitrogen, particularly that the plant is able to take up, the less goes places you don't want it to go, like groundwater or into the air. So those things are fine.

Steve Savage:
But just saying, "Well, I want to not use chemicals, like seed treatments," my question would be why? Because if you're going to lose yield and become less efficient in your use of land and water and energy, why do that, particularly something like seed treatment, which is that extremely targeted delivery right to where it's needed. And frankly, it's important in a no-till system because when you leave stubble in a field, you have left a great place for diseases and insects to over winter. That's kind of one of the downsides of it. But you can deal with that problem with something like a seed treatment in a very selective way. You're only going to be affecting the pathogens and tests that actually go ahead and try to damage your crop. And something like prairie strips to foster beneficial. That's a great idea, in places where that also makes sense.

Julia Gerlach:
So you had just mentioned the term synthetic nitrogen, and I have a question for you specifically about that because, and this is a little bit of a pivot because I wanted to just mention or bring up again the podcast that you used to do. It was called Pop Agriculture, and it was cute how you kind combined popular culture into your ag topics. And you had sort an Andy Warhol treatment of your image and everything. It was very cool. And the podcast is still available, by the way, for anybody who wants to listen in. And I thought they were always really nice. They're short, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, something like that, but just really interesting topics, I think. But a couple of them went into some depth about nitrogen. And in one of them, you talked about the term synthetic nitrogen being misleading. So I'd love for you to talk about that.

Steve Savage:
Yeah. Language is often not as precise as you would like, but when you hear about something that's a synthetic chemical, probably the most accurate definition of that would be something that is made by some human process but to make something that wouldn't occur in nature. Especially when people call it artificial, artificial fertilizer or synthetic fertilizer, it implies that you're making something that doesn't occur in nature. And that's not true in this case. The Haber–Bosch process, which is essentially why a human population ever was able to get above a billion or two, there's only so much bird guano to mine. And that's what they were getting down to, by the early 20th century, and when they came up with the Haber–Bosch process that is able to take the 78% nitrogen in the air and turn some of it into ammonia as the original nitrogen form that has been derived from that Haber–Bosch process.

Steve Savage:
Well, ammonia is definitely something that occurs in nature. We're not talking anything unusual. It's a very simple thing. And then, that can get converted into ureae, which is obviously a very natural product, and ammonium nitrate, UAN, all these other things that we actually use. And so, those are naturally occurring forms of nitrogen. When you have organic nitrogen in the sense of proteins or nucleic acid that break down, well they get turned into things like ammonia and nitrate. And the plant doesn't care, whether it came out of a plant, a Haber–Bosch plant, or whether it came up from someplace else. Nitrogen is nitrogen to them, in the forms that they can take it up. And then, of this idea that, well, there's something more natural about the nitrogen that comes from something like an animal manure. Well, unless that happened to the nitrogen that got fixed by some soybean, but however it got into a cow or some other animal, it comes out the other end. If that had been a Haber–Bosch nitrogen atom, it still was a Haber–Bosch nitrogen fixed atom when it comes out of the cow, but now it's sort of blessed, and it's organic.

Julia Gerlach:
Well, and then, you had also talked about the carbon footprint of fertilizers, and you talked about composted manure as actually having a carbon footprint that is seven to 14 times higher than synthetic nitrogen per pound of nitrogen. And that was very eye opening for me. So I'd love to hear more about that.

Steve Savage:
Yeah, it was eyeopening to me. I was involved, I think that was for sustainability. No, that was for field to market. And we were working on the greenhouse gas metric, and people were going to... We knew about the greenhouse gas emissions for making nitrogen fertilizer with Haber–Bosch. And that's because the way Haber–Bosch is typically done is with natural gas. That's because that's the cheapest source of hydrogen. It always used to be the cheapest source of hydrogen. So people were saying, "Well, the composted manure is, we're not going to have any carbon footprint for that." I thought, "Well, I don't know. I should look into it." So I did a Google scholar search and just on greenhouse gas emissions and composting. And I found a few articles where people had actually measured what's submitted from a commercial scale composting operation. And there was a lot of methane. And in theory, composting, you're trying to keep air in there. That's why they turn it frequently. That's the idea. You want it to be aerobic.

Steve Savage:
But you're talking a great big pile of you know what, and there's going to be parts of that where there's no oxygen. And there are organisms, then, that will make methane under those circumstances. And so, I looked at those methane emissions that they had measured in these studies. They never calculated through, well, what would that mean on an acre that you put X number of tons of manure compost on? Did the math, and it was this frightening number, depending on what you were doing of it, but it was in the seven to 10 times as much as the energy that we knew that it took to make the Haber–Bosch nitrogen. And that's was what got me started on writing because I thought, "Well, nobody knows this. Everybody thinks composting is next to Godliness or something, and there's an issue with composting." So my first article was titled The Inconvenient Truth About Composting, so [inaudible 00:35:50] to Mr. Gore's book. And, oh my gosh, that set off this firestorm of people from NGOs trying to find, saying, "Well, that can't be true." And they're looking into the literature, and they couldn't find anything that's said otherwise.

Julia Gerlach:
That's so interesting. And I have never heard anybody talk about this before.

Steve Savage:
Nobody does. It's bizarre. And again, I've brought it up in many contexts, and nobody's ever been able to show me that's not true.

Julia Gerlach:
So one of the things that you've talked about is, in terms of the fertilizer question, is how farmers could do small scale production of their own fertilizer, like small scale Haber–Bosch process using renewable energy sources. So I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about that.

Steve Savage:
Yeah. So again, many years ago, I stumbled across somebody who was working on that, working on a small scale Haber–Bosch. And the reason that they were doing it was to store energy from stranded solar and wind installations. So out in the middle of farming country, you can easily put up a wind farm or a solar farm. But if you're not connected to the grid, what do you do with that electricity? And how could you store that electricity? And this was long before, and not wanting to be as expensive as the batteries or something like that. And so, this inventor had the idea of, well, what if I made a small scale Haber–Bosch and turned it into ammonia? I can store ammonia. And actually, they got some money from the military because when you have very long convoys providing the fuel, the diesel for the equipment is a real problem.

Julia Gerlach:
Absolutely.

Steve Savage:
And so, they were saying, "Well, what if we could even have solar panels on the trucks and whatever and generate our own ammonia," because you can burn ammonia in a modified diesel engine. Actually, that's what they originally thought vehicles were going to run on was ammonia. And so, the people had developed that technology. And I think I may have been the one who said, "Gee, have you ever thought about fertilizer from that?" And their goal was to have it in the size of a shipping container and be something that could be used on an individual farm. Well, that company didn't make it. It was too long. But there were several others along the way that looked into it and some universities.

Steve Savage:
And until recently, there was a recent article that sort of did an assessment. How is it going on this small scale Haber–Bosch thing? And it's not at that maybe individual farm scale, but it would be tiny compared to a commercial fertilizer plant. It would be the kind of thing that you could easily imagine being set up at the local co-op or something like that, and so make your neighborhood fertilizer. But it was always chasing the cost of large scale. And they were always like 2X behind on cost. Well, all of a sudden, 2X went away. And in the current climate, and we don't know how long that will last, we hope it doesn't last for a long time. But I think the shock from the Ukraine crisis was such that people are thinking, "You know what? It would be really good to not be dependent on that."

Julia Gerlach:
Right.

Steve Savage:
And in fact, it would be really great to connect these things up with our ethanol plants because the CO2 that comes off the ethanol plant would be great to react with the ammonia from this little thing and turn it into urea because that's even an easier to store and handle form than ammonia.

Julia Gerlach:
Oh, that's interesting.

Steve Savage:
And there are now several projects, and that is a thing. And that, I think it would be great just to insulate the farming community from the ups and downs of global markets, whether it's for natural gas. And also, just to be moving away from a fossil fuel source of our nitrogen fertilizer. I think that would be a great story.

Julia Gerlach:
Well, Steve, this has been really, really interesting. I really appreciate your time. And definitely, I hope people check out your podcast and your writings on Forbes and the Genetic Literacy Project. Are there other places that they can find your work?

Steve Savage:
Well, my long term work, and I need to update it with re-posting things, like I can repost after five days from Forbes. That way people who don't have a subscription to Forbes can read it. There's a blog called Applied Mythology. Because when I was applying to graduate school in plant pathology, I told some of my friends at Stanford. And one of them thought that I said I was going into applied mythology.

Julia Gerlach:
I like it.

Steve Savage:
And I just love that concept. What the heck would that be? So anyway.

Julia Gerlach:
That's awesome. Okay. So applied mythology. Dot com?

Steve Savage:
At blogspot.com or something like that.

Julia Gerlach:
Okay, good. I'm going to look that up. Very good. Well, thank you so much. This has been fantastic.

Steve Savage:
Thank you. I've enjoyed it.

Julia Gerlach:
Thanks to Steve Savage for sharing his thoughts on no-till and how it'll be critical in the future of conservation. To listen to more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies, please visit no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. Once again, we'd like to thank our sponsor, SOURCE by Sound Agriculture, for helping to make this no-till podcast series possible. If you have any feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me at jgerlach@lessitermedia.com or call me at (262) 777-2404. If you haven't done so already, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google podcasts to get an alert as soon as future episodes are released. You can also keep up on the latest no-till farming news by registering online for our no-till insider daily and weekly email updates and dryland no-tiller eNewsletter. And be sure to follow us on Twitter @no-tillfarmr, with farmer spelled F A R M R, and our no-till farmer Facebook page. For our entire staff here at no-till farmer I'm Julia Gerlach. Thanks for tuning in.