There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about the opportunities within climate-smart agriculture. Jon Doggett, former CEO of the National Corn Growers Association, says we’ve unfortunately missed a few opportunities as well.
“When we started these conversations 30 years ago or more, you know, we didn’t even know what questions we wanted to ask, and the proponents of cap-and-trade and some of those other programs, they couldn’t provide us the answers. So, what we had was we had a lot of fights about, is there climate change? Is there no climate change? Why aren’t you understanding what it is that we are looking for? Why can’t you understand what our limitations are? And so, we just kept with that yelling back and forth at one another, and it took quite a while, but back in the 90s, farmers, by a very low percent, thought that there was climate change at a rate much lower than the general population. That’s flipped. Farmers and ranchers now believe there’s climate change at a much higher percentage than the rest of America.”
Farmers want to establish partnerships when it comes to climate-smart ag, and that’s been a little harder to find that Doggett would like.
What’s been made harder in recent weeks because of the questions about are these payments going to be made? Are these programs going to still be there? Are they going to operate at all? Or if they do operate, what’s going to look like? Climate is a dirty word for this administration, and they’ve pushed back pretty hard on it. We need some answers here pretty quickly because we are getting to the season where people are going to put seeds in the ground, and I think there are a lot of questions that need to be answered before that happens. I’m hopeful but not optimistic.
He talks about the best place to start in getting information on climate-smart agriculture.
“The best advice is to go down to the NRCS office, sit down with that person, and say, ‘Hey, I want to do something here. What’s available? How does it work?’ The other thing is to find out who else in your county is involved in these programs. Go talk to that person. What worked? What didn’t work? What would you have done differently had you known now what you knew then? Most technology in ag country is conveyed over the fence. If the Smith family does something and it works well, I tell you what, everybody in the county is going to want to follow suit. If it doesn’t work well, then they’re not going to try that. So, those are opportunities to learn some things from fellow farmers.“