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No-Till Farmer Editor Frank Lessiter returned to the National No-Tillage Conference in January to moderate a thought-provoking discussion with No-Till Innovators Jim Moseley, Rodney Rulon and Lisa Holscher about the critical role farmer-to-farmer mentorship plays in the advancement of no-till, cover crops and other conservation practices.
In this No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Bio-Till Cover Crops, this esteemed panel will shine light on the true value of existing mentorship programs and share new ideas on where you can find real opportunities to connect, learn and grow with fellow no-tillers.
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No-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by Bio Till Cover Crops.
Bio Till cover Crops, a pioneer and leader in cover crop seeds, represents a complete lineup of seeds suitable for use in diverse soil types and growing conditions. Our focus on cover crop and regenerative forage seeds sets us apart from suppliers invested in other markets. Dealers in our distribution network are committed to your success by providing local resources, education and guidance to ensure you have the correct foundation for success. With over 50 years of experience in production, processing, packaging, and shipping, you won’t find a better fit for your farm.
Full Transcript
John Dobberstein:
Greetings everyone, and welcome to the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer Podcast brought to you by Bio Till Cover Crops. In January, No-Till Farmer editor Frank Lessiter returned to the National No-Tillage Conference to moderate a thought-provoking discussion with no-till innovators, Jim Moseley, Rodney Rulon and Lisa Holscher about the critical role farmer to farmer mentorship plays in the advancement of no-till cover crops and other conservation practices. In this episode, our esteemed panel will shine light on the true value of existing mentorship programs and share new ideas on where you can find real opportunities to connect, learn, and grow with fellow no-tillers.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Jim, if you don't know, has a great history. He's a third generation farmer in Clarks Hill in Indiana. Over 30 years, he's had a 2,800 acres of corn and soybean farm, no-tilled. At one time raised 50,000 hogs. He was sworn in as the US Deputy Secretary of Agriculture in 2001 and spent a lot of time in Washington. And one of the great things he did is he put Bill Richards from Ohio in as the NRCS, or may have been soil conservation service at that time. It is the chief. So we had a no-tiller there, and Bill has spoken at a number of these conferences. And he left USDA to return to full-time farming. Next one is Rodney Rulon. Rodney and the family run a large operation and are doing very well, been long-term no-tillers. They've been on this program several times in the past.
And then there's Lisa and she lives down by Ray McCormick, and she has a family that's really involved in no-till, and she runs the soil initiative for Indiana. So I'm going to sit down and we'll get going, and we're going to start with you, Jim. Okay? You've had many visions over the years, and tell us about your latest one on farm advisors and what you're doing.
Jim Moseley:
Well, I think Rodney and Lisa will go into some details, but for years, the first time I was in DC as an undersecretary for natural resource environment, I was just plagued with this question, how do we get farmers to shift and change? We were implementing conservation compliance with ... Bill Richards was very active in that. And then I went back home to the farm, thought I'd stay at home. And then I got the invitation to come back as deputy secretary. Interesting. Same question. How do we get farmers to make the transition? And so completed my deputy secretary responsibilities in 05. I had been working in Afghanistan. I was there until 07, came home. My accountant said to me, "You got to be something." And so I decided to carve out some of the land that we owned right close to home, 500 acres, and I put it into a model regenerative farm for our area, because it was new concept at that time.
And then from there, I got thinking, "Okay, I've made a transition. What did I use to make that happen?" And it occurred to me, duh. I used a friend of mine, Dan Desetter, some of you may know Dan in Indiana. Dan's not too far from me. And he was my mentor. All of a sudden, it just came to me. We are missing an opportunity here. We all go to conferences like this. We go to seminars, field days, et cetera, the kinds of things that Lisa puts on across Indiana, and we learn things. We go home, we try to implement, and then we run into a problem. Where do we get the answer to that problem? And those farmers who have been there are the ones that are best suited to answer that question. And so I looked at the data and evaluation of farmers, and where did they learn?
Number one answer, other farmers. That's their preference. And then we go down the list. And so that was the genesis of the thinking. Thankfully, we had a Lisa Holsher in Indiana who knew everybody in conservation. And I called Lisa and I said, "I'd like to do this mentoring program." She had done some thinking on it two years prior to that. And so we immediately connected up with a concept, farmer-owned, farmer-led activity, obviously private sector at the ground level, and let's build something from the ground up instead of my background, which had been trying to do something from the federal level and pushing it down. And I think I can get a lot of agreement that that's not been an extremely effective activity over the years. So that was the genesis of that, made the call to Lisa. She said, "I know the people. " And we called them together and Lisa then talk about that.
Frank Lessiter:
Decades ago, I had worked at one time with Daryl Smith, who was agronomy editor of Farm Journal. And he told me once when Noto was not so popular, he said to me, "I don't understand these no tours. They got such a good thing going. Why did they think they have to get everybody else on board to do it? Lisa, why don't you tell us what you're doing?"
Lisa Holscher:
So among other things, Jim said that he'd called me and said, "Hey, I want to do this. " I get to work with an amazing group of farmers because of the job I do with the Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative. I mean, they actually answer my phone calls, which is kind of cool. And I did say, "Okay, it's got to be farmer lit. It's got to be farmer driven." And these farmers did come together and said, "Yeah, we want to pay it forward." My world really resides primarily with the Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative doing outreach and education. So soil health trainings, a lot of event support, like 70 or so last year reaching, I think, close to 7,000 people, and that's one year. That is my world, and it's because of farmers like Jim and Rodney and Roger Winning and Dan to Sutter and others pushing forward and pushing forward with that education and outreach component.
That's what makes that organization work. And the organizations like Parallel with farm advisors, we do outreach and education, farm advisors. In this case, the Indiana mentoring group, we've been talking about mentoring all morning. They take it the next step so that people don't hit a panic button when they run into problems.
Frank Lessiter:
So Rodney, you and the family got a big operation, pretty much corn and soybeans and cover crops. Do you find time for the family to mentor some other people or how do you think this program can work from the bottom up?
Rodney Rulon:
Yeah, I think kind of what Jim and Lisa said here, it's just as we started, I want to give credit where credit's due, Frank, and the very first meeting that I ever came to when I came back to the farm and started to understand what they had started while I was in college, which was this no-till thing, I came here to my first National No-Till Conference 30 plus years ago now. And the mechanics, especially back then, we didn't understand them necessarily. And there was an opportunity that you can't get if you're at home trying to do it yourself. There's this whole cooperation, whether it's in the hallway or speaking with a presenter or at dinner or late night at the bar, whatever it is, but I really felt like what made us successful was the ability to come to these meetings and then continue throughout the year to talk with people from here that we had met and in other groups.
And if we want conservation to reach that critical mass where it has enough traction to actually get more than $700 million out of the new programs, right? To become the new program that supports us as farmers and everything else, we've got to commit ourselves to raising and helping that next generation. And that next generation of no-tillers is not necessarily age related, right? So I don't care if you're 21 starting a no-till or you're 79 starting to no-till, everybody has those problems and there's that whole social thing of it's easier to fall back to what you know. It's easy if you don't have any support there, that scrutiny that you feel or that you create in your own mind sometimes from other people, having somebody to talk to that has been through it and can reassure you, "Yeah, I've had problems, right? Nothing's perfect." I don't know, a tillage guy hadn't had a problem either, but that's a whole nother discussion.
So we kind of, in our operation, and I think the 50 farmers that we have right now that are involved and are volunteering to be mentors, all kind of feel that obligation that we had people that took the time to answer our calls and worked with us and helped us to continue and be successful and not give up. And that's something that you just can't get anywhere except from other farmers that have been through that. And so we've committed to this group of farmers is committed to putting in the time, whether we're busy or not, because it's important.
Jim Moseley:
Frank, let me just say one thing at Capstone. There's so much we can talk about, but the capstone on mentoring, the goal is everyone that goes down this path, if they go it alone, will make a mistake. And what we're trying to do is to eliminate the mistakes and truncate or shorten that timeframe from the moment you start until you get to the point where you're really comfortable and you will not go back.
Lisa Holscher:
To really flatten that learning curve and look towards long-term adoption.
Frank Lessiter:
One of the things about the rulin operation is Ken, correct me if I'm wrong here, my memory may be wrong, but he worked in corporate. Did he work for General Electric?
Rodney Rulon:
He did. Get his hour, right?
Frank Lessiter:
But anyway, he brought back the financial analysts, and I'm telling you, the Rulons probably have the best economic data of any no-tiller in the all United States.
Rodney Rulon:
I agree. I don't know about that, but we do a lot of record keeping and a lot of comparison.
John Dobberstein:
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Frank Lessiter:
So Jim, how do we get this program started with all these people out here? Is a formal organization or we do it on our own or what?
Jim Moseley:
Well, I think we quasi formalize it. The absolute last thing we want to do is bureaucratize it because that will kill it. As soon as we got Indiana going, in fact, even before, if Rodney and Lisa will recall, I said, "As soon as we get Indiana done, we've got a problem in this country with water quality." And I looked at the Upper Mississippi Basin and all that expansive land and I had traveled across it. I knew what it looked like. And I said, "Hey, there's other states besides Indiana that we can do this with. " So I called my friend, some of you will know Fred Yoder in Ohio and Fred accepted the responsibility to get Ohio Open running. I went to their first meeting back in June. We're working on Illinois right now. Minnesota and Wisconsin have good mentoring programs as do the Dakotas.
There are different models out there, but the concept here is to work in the Upper Mississippi Basin, those states that go into the Mississippi River, folks, we do have a problem. And for those of you in Iowa and Illinois, you will readily understand it. We've already had a lawsuit that was filed on water quality. I've been very surprised that we haven't had one up in Toledo from the Miami Valley. I worked in my first tenure of the spotted owl issue and the loggers out there said, "We're protected politically, we'll never..." When the environmental community came after them, they said, "We're okay." Well, the environmental community filed a lawsuit and a single person, a federal court judge, all of a sudden made the decision, "This is how you're going to do logging up here in these 19 spotted out forests." Looking ahead, it wasn't good because we went from 4.7 billion board feet, listen to the numbers, 4.7 billion board feet to 400 million board feet of timber cut in two years.
Quiet in here that devastated that logging community. And for all those years in between, from 92 till today, I still am worried about what can happen to farmers and the decrees that can come down from a federal court judge. So there's a number of better reasons to think about regenerative value, no-till, cover crops, the carbon loss, 50%. Okay? That's serious, folks, because microorganisms in your soil depends solely upon carbon, water quality, air quality. There's a number of reasons to do this. And so I've been looking for, how do you unlock this? And it finally came down to the point where we go to these activities and it's fantastic. The learning experience and YouTube is great. If you miss it here, you get it on YouTube, okay? So I use the analogy of it, that's kind of the glove. And then the other side of this that we're looking to develop is the hand that reaches out and says, "I will help you work through this.
" And then that hand goes into that glove and the two together, I think is the model that we try to work from. And I'm aware of the different models in states that are on a successful track and we've got a different model in Indiana. We don't know if it's correct yet or not, but we will do it differently. My goal would be though when these states get their state going and put together that we will form a coalition of states then that will help centralize this, but not your occupies.
Frank Lessiter:
Jim, I want to put you on the spot here. You got 500 acres of regenerative. How's it doing compared to the rest of your operation? You making money off this or where are you in this?
Jim Moseley:
Well, the only thing I'm responsible for anymore is that 500 acres and I just turned it over to my son and he of course is going to continue. He's renting some land in addition. He's going to continue. I have another son that's taking a different route. They're still in the traditional system. There is no doubt in my mind that what I'm doing in regenerative is making a significant difference. In terms of the soil itself, soil quality, then that goes into yield. I think we all know that if you get no-till cover crops working well, one of the big benefits is the resilience that you get in those bad weather years to the point where a number of individuals that are doing this have just decided to forego federal crop insurance completely and the expense of that because they're providing their own insurance policy. So I'm not recommending that.
I'm just saying that's real. That's observation. That's people telling me, "I don't need that any longer. I'm doing well."
Frank Lessiter:
Lisa, you got some more to talk about that I've missed with you. You've got a number of groups who are cash to these, right?
Lisa Holscher:
Yeah. So a couple years ago, I was invited to a meeting in Minnesota in November because nothing says fun like Minnesota in November. And it was comprised of a lot of food companies like the ones you think about, Campbell's, Denom, Unilever, all of those, as well as organizations representing like me for Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative, Precision Conservation Management out of Illinois. Dan DeSutter was there representing farm advisors and the conversation was about, "Okay, food companies, how can you help these organizations?" And at the end, these food companies said, "Yeah, we're interested." And now several of them who have already come forward is part of a program called Step Up Brag. So Unilever, Nestle, General Mill, PepsiCo, Starbucks, I'm missing somebody. I apologize, but they put money towards the program, including Practical Farmers of Iowa, farm advisors, and organizations like Farm Advisors and Wisconsin Watersheds, they've gotten some attention from these food companies.
They are seeing what groups like the one Jim leads and Rodney leads, the difference they're making.
Mike Lessiter:
Just to jump in, I was at that meeting with you as well and Carrie Volmer Sanders, who is running that meeting, she's going to be speaking tomorrow on the TED Talk program. So we'll be able to hear more about what Lisa has just mentioned here a minute ago. Just wanted to call attention to that.
Jim Moseley:
Frank, in terms of formalizing, I have built a small team and we are working to work in these states and put it together. Walt Lynn is helping me in Illinois, anybody from Illinois that wants to join, you need to find Walt Lynn, but I would make the point and that is if you're in a state, you're a farmer and you are willing to take a leadership role, get ahold of me or our team and we will help you. Rodney, Lisa, know what it's like to set this up. There's been bumps in the road when you've tried to form an organization, we're working through those bumps, just like there's bumps in the road when you're trying to implement a no-till cover crop program. So we are appealing to anyone sitting in this audience in a state, and I don't care what state it is, we can go to Kansas and Nebraska and so forth.
That's okay. Let's take as farmers, the bull by the horns and wrestle that bull to the ground insofar as we're capable and let's see what we can do from the ground level instead of the system that has tried to support us for all these years.
Frank Lessiter:
So the government just gave USDA 600 million, 700 million hours for regenerative ag. How are they going to make this work? Are we going to end up wasting this money or making something out of it?
Jim Moseley:
Now you did put me on the spot. Unfortunately, when our tax dollars go to DC and then they come back, it's a very inefficient process. So I anticipate that that money will not be as well spent as any of us would have liked, but it is funding. And what I would do is, as we have with the other programs we have, as working with a farmer that's new, particularly those who are stressed financially or a younger farmer, use those programs for crying out loud. It's okay, even though they have some inefficiency to them. So use them.
John Dobberstein:
Rodney?
Rodney Rulon:
Yeah. Frank, I think Jim just highlighted something that really is part of the inspiration for us as a farmer group and me as being part of the farmer board running this. The reason we've watched this our whole lives and our whole careers, money going to DC and coming back in that slightly inefficient manner and slightly too much paperwork. The goal is to keep this to be farmer led, farmer organized. We're going to have support staff. We've already started bringing on a ... Hanschmidt is out here in the group. He's going to be contracting to manage some of these things with us. And that's part of the stuff that is a little bit hard for us as farmers to find time for the administrative. And so we are getting help from Lisa and others on that. But the real key here is to keep this farmer led and keep the oversight, funding private as much as possible.
Everything really focused on farmers and understanding where farmers are coming from and helping farmers through what they face and not on the bureaucracy and not on the dollars and all of that. It's really about just farmers trying to help farmers get stuff done.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, this was a quick look at what's going on. And Lisa, Rodney, and Jim, I want to thank you very much for doing this.
John Dobberstein:
Well, that's a wrap for this episode of the No Till Farmer podcast. We want to thank Frank, Jim, Rodney, and Lisa for participating in this informative panel discussion about the value of mentorship. And we also want to thank our sponsor, Bio Till Cover Crops, for making this program possible. A transcript of this episode in our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at notillfarmer.com/podcasts. For Frank, Jim, Rodney, and Lisa, and our entire staff here at Notes Hill Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.
