The Water Table
The Water Table
#104 | Worldwide Conservation, Water Quality and Woody Harrelson
From batch and build to cover crops, a certain Woody Harrelson movie, and conservation farming around the world, this episode covers it all. Jamie sits down with one of our favorite guests– Ruth McCabe from Heartland Co-Op in Iowa. Learn what gets our guest up every morning and what boils her blood when it comes to conservation and water quality practices.
Chapters & Episode Topics:
00:00 Today on the Water Table Podcast
00:20 Welcome to Ruth McCabe
01:40 Dead cats and great guests
02:45 What is Heartland Co-op
04:25 Partnering with everyone
05:20 It’s a growing field (pun intended)
05:50 Batch and Build, cover crops and wetlands
07:20 Who pays the bills?
08:00 Jamie didn’t read the manuscript
08:15 Cover crops, yes or no?
12:12 Saturated buffers and bioreactors – of course!
13:30 What about Minnesota?
14:50 Winter camelina – what the heck is it?
16:40 Kiss the Ground – Have you seen it?
18:30 The problem with movies…
19:30 She was an urban girl
20:30 Talk to farmers
21:30 Be on both sides of the aisle
22:20 No till – should it be revisited?
24:24 60% tenant-farmed
26:00 Saturated buffers and bioreactors explained
27:45 Batch and build explained
31:24 You need the customer service
32:55 Angry bloggers & divisive rhetoric
34:30 Boil down the passion
35:00 Conservation farming around the world
36:00 The scaffolding is built, now let us paint the house
37:34 The naysayers are ramping up
39:30 A mix of countries and one really big surprise
42:20 A financial no-brainer
43:30 Ruth’s harvest– meat and veggies
44:15 Saturated buffers and pheasant hunting
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Jamie Duininck (00:01):
Join me on The Water Table as I speak with Ruth McCabe from the Heartland Co-op. Ruth is a conservation agronomist, and we're talking all things batch and build, saturated buffers, biosystem reactors, and much, much more. Welcome to The Water Table podcast. Today, I have Ruth McCabe with me. Ruth has been on The Water Table previously. She's a great guest and for those that maybe missed that episode, I'm going to read Ruth's bio here a minute. But Ruth leads a conservation team at Heartland Co-op in Iowa. She is a passionate advocate for sustainable farming practices in the Midwest and has devoted her career to working with farmers who want to adopt conservation into their management plans. Ruth is a certified professional agronomist, an Iowa CCA. You could probably explain that to me in a little bit. And has her MS in crop production from Iowa State University. Prior to our current role, Ruth worked as a technical agronomist, and organic agronomist, and a research agronomist around the Midwest for over a decade.
(01:18):
Her favorite topic is pheasant hunting. We're going to talk about that a little bit because I am interested. She specializes in cover crops, prairie management, and edge of field structures. So we're going to talk about that, of course, as part of The Water Table. That's been something we've talked about often on The Water Table. So welcome to the podcast. Welcome in studio here, thanks for driving all the way to Minnesota.
Ruth McCabe (01:43):
Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. I was really excited to see the studio because my inner geek was like, "Man, there's going to be those funny spongy panels on the walls. There's going to be a dead cat microphone." A little disappointed that there's not a dead cat microphone, but I won't hold it against you. So it's cool. This is a super neat space.
Jamie Duininck (02:01):
If it was a little warmer out, we'd just do this outside, and you could have the-
Ruth McCabe (02:05):
And then I could have the dead cat?
Jamie Duininck (02:06):
Yeah, that's right.
Ruth McCabe (02:06):
Well, invite me back in August.
Jamie Duininck (02:09):
We will because at The Water Table, we like great guests and you are one of them.
Ruth McCabe (02:14):
I know. Wait until the end of this.
Jamie Duininck (02:15):
Thank you. Well-
Ruth McCabe (02:16):
You don't know. Maybe you won't think I'm great at the end of this.
Jamie Duininck (02:19):
Well, you won't find out until-
Ruth McCabe (02:21):
It's true.
Jamie Duininck (02:21):
... months from now, whether...
Ruth McCabe (02:22):
Yeah, sorry. We lost your recording.
Jamie Duininck (02:22):
If we don't invite you back then you weren't-
Ruth McCabe (02:24):
We lost your-
Jamie Duininck (02:24):
You weren't good.
Ruth McCabe (02:25):
... recording. Sorry.
Jamie Duininck (02:26):
But thanks for being here and let's just start by, start talking a little bit about what you do in your role at Heartland Co-op and is, I guess, one... First explain that and then an add on question is, is there a lot of people that have your type of position at other co-ops around the country? Because it's probably not unique, but unique to the last few decades.
Ruth McCabe (02:52):
Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. My title is officially conservation manager, but I'm a conservation agronomist, and I lead a team of conservation agronomists at Heartland Cooperative. We are hiring right now, so please go to our website and see the application. But our goal22nd elevator speech is to help farmers adopt conservation farming practices that reduce the loss of sediment or nutrients from their farm fields. So that's in a nutshell what we do. And then our team builds public and private partnerships with municipalities, with treatment utilities, with IDALS, the Iowa Department of Ag and Land Stewardship with local NRCS offices, local SWCDs, Watershed Management Authorities, and then private industry. So like our industry partners, BASF, Helena, Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, you name it. We try to build these partnerships for supporting a conservation program, whatever that looks like. So we are partnered on a program called the Wetland Wave, where we bring high efficiency treatment wetlands, you might call them micro wetlands, to an area where they can treat a large upland drainage area by taking a minimum number of acres out of agricultural production.
(04:08):
We're partnered on a saturated buffer and bioreactor batch and build. My team actually leads several batch and builds now around Iowa. We're partnered on a cover crop cost-share program where we run a high clearance cover crop seeding machine. So these partnerships are us going out selling these conservation practices to farmers or landowners and then leveraging existing cost-share programming, taxpayer dollars that are already allocated towards those cost-share programs, leveraging those programs and using private industry support to support my team and putting those two together and then going out and selling these cost-share programs in a more efficient, effective manner than has traditionally been the case. So we're really good at it and really passionate about it.
Jamie Duininck (04:51):
Sure. Great. So you named a bunch of different programs and practices. What do you see as maybe a couple of different questions? What has gained the most momentum over the last couple of years from those and what is the most practical? Maybe they're the same thing, maybe they aren't.
Ruth McCabe (05:10):
That's a great question. You asked earlier, and I just want to touch on it before we go further. You said, "Hey, well, are there a lot of conservation agronomists?" I would just say, there's not a ton, but they are growing. It is a, oh man, best pun ever, growing field. It's a growing field. So if anybody who's an agronomist is listening to this and wondering, " Could I also get into conservation agriculture?" You can. Heartland Cooperative has the largest conservation team, but other co-ops in Iowa are also launching their own conservation teams. So it's not hard to find. Just Google conservation agronomist and there's more positions popping up. All right, to answer your question, what conservation program that my team is a part of has grown the most over the last few years? By far, the batch and build. Saturated buffers and bioreactors have been wildly popular among landowners and tenant farmers, and there are reasons for that, and we can discuss that.
(06:03):
Our high clearance cover crop interceder program was like the flagship public private partnership at Heartland. I wrote the grant proposal for that alongside Polk County and the Iowa Department of Ag and Land Stewardship. Oh, man. That thing took a year and a half to get off the ground, lots of behind the scenes blood, sweat, and tears. It has been very successful by far. And then the wetland program has been... It's really exciting, but that's really tough because you're going to landowners and you're saying, "Hey, I want to put this treatment wetland that's going to drain 1,000 upland acres into your property."
(06:35):
There's pumps and there's just dredging, just things that need to happen that is very intimidating to a landowner. Whereas the saturated buffer and bioreactor program, man, that's easy-peasy. You already have a buffer in place. Let's just put some perf pipe in there, and get a water control structure in there, and start treating some of the water coming out of your tile drainage. We don't even have to take land out of production. That's an easy sell. Bioreactors are like what? A 16th of an acre. They incy bincy, if you already have a large riparian area or buffer in place and you just put it in that spot, you're not taking any land out of production, those have been so easy to sell to landowners. I say sell, we're not getting paid by landowners or farmers. We're just leveraging the cost-share programming and then falling back on private industry sponsorship for our activities.
Jamie Duininck (07:23):
Sure. Sure.
Ruth McCabe (07:24):
So if that answers your question.
Jamie Duininck (07:25):
Well, yeah, it does. Like you say, the reasons for that when... I would've thought that the cover crops probably would be even more popular, even though they are. Is there reasons for why that isn't?
Ruth McCabe (07:43):
There's so many reasons? Yeah, I wrote a whole manuscript. Actually, I sent you the manuscript at nine o'clock last night. I'm sure you did not have time to read it, but I thought, "Oh, maybe this will help him understand."
Jamie Duininck (07:54):
Obviously, I didn't read it-
Ruth McCabe (07:55):
No, it's okay. No, no-
Jamie Duininck (07:55):
... because I'm asking the question, but I did see it.
Ruth McCabe (07:58):
No, it's fantastic. No, what you could have said, you could have said, "No, I did read it. That's why I'm asking you the question, Ruth." So you could have just played, "I'm Jamie, come on." All right.
Jamie Duininck (08:04):
Should we edit that?
Ruth McCabe (08:07):
Yeah. There's lots of reasons why cover crops are not as popular as you'd think that they would be. A lot of it comes down to expense and lost yield. A lot of farmers, anecdotally... I'm going to take a step back. I've been working with cover crops for over a decade, probably 15 years now. Used to working cover crop research at the University of Minnesota. I used to sell cover crop seed as a seed salesman, so I've got a lot of experience with cover crops. I will tell you that in Iowa with our heavy wet soils, anecdotally, a lot of farmers see yield hits from using cover crops, especially using something like cereal rye, which is by far the most popular cover crop and the cheapest. So-
Jamie Duininck (08:48):
Why is that? Explain that.
Ruth McCabe (08:50):
Yeah. So rye is a beast, and it's my favorite cover crop, even though it's the most boring. It can grow through a nuclear holocaust, which God willing we won't actually ever experience. It grows in harsh winter conditions. It'll still come back in the spring. You can throw it out, broadcast, it'll still grow. It's an amazing crop, but it's also very aggressive and can be a competitor for nutrients with something like corn. Soybeans play really well, actually, with rye. I don't have a problem with soybeans and rye, but I have several conservation customers, tenant farmers who are conservation users and they use cover crops. They will tell you, "Yeah, I do see yield hits even in my beans." There is anecdotally rye, it has something called allelopathy. There's a lot of research that shows that allelopathy doesn't impact something like soybeans or corn, but there's research coming out now.
(09:44):
There was a study that just came out a few months ago that talks about how using satellite imagery, they were able to prove that even in soybean fields, you were across the board seeing a slight decrease in yield when farmers were using cover crops ahead of their beans or cover crops ahead of their corn. Now, corn is much easier to understand. Rye's a grass. It's competitive. It's going to tie up nutrients as it decomposes. Super easy to understand why it would inhibit corn. I've traveled around the world and across the United States over the last few years, understanding how cover crops work in farm management operations. Unless you're using starter, like when you're planting your corn, you're probably going to see a yield hit to corn if you're using rye, just because it's so competitive and it's another grass. But ahead of beans really surprised me to read this recent research that says that farmers are still seeing yield decreases. They're slight. We're talking 3, 4 bushel.
Jamie Duininck (10:35):
That's what I was going to ask on corn.
Ruth McCabe (10:36):
Yeah, corn or beans. Yeah, corn or beans. Beans, I think, is lower. I think it was like two to three maybe. But that surprised me. But I guess when I talk with my farmers, I've had so many farmers say, "Yeah, but I still see a very slight decrease ahead of my beans."
(10:51):
I think anecdotally that supports their experiences, even though there are so many cover crop advocates who are like, "No, you're just not managing them correctly. You just didn't terminate it on time, or you did this wrong or you did that wrong."
(11:03):
And I'm like, "Iowa has really heavy wet soils. I actually think it's realistic that this could be a problem."
(11:10):
So to come back to your question, our cover crop program where we're using an interceder, we try to reduce costs across the board so that farmers are paying the lowest price possible. They do qualify for cost-share, but Cover Crop Cost-Share in Iowa is not robust. State cost-share is $15 an acre, and it's up to 160 acres. Most farmers are going to put in exactly 160 acres. They might be able to stack that with a locally known cover crop cost-share program from an organization called PFI or Practical Farmers of Iowa. That's another 10 bucks. That's 25 bucks. But seed, it'll cost you probably 18 to 20 bucks an acre. That's just if you're doing rye. If you're doing multi-species mixes, that goes up. Then you've got termination costs in the spring. On average, farmers are paying 35 to $45 to plant a cover crop. So if you're paying 35 to 40 bucks to plant a cover crop, you're probably going to take
Ruth McCabe (12:00):
Small yield hit and you're only getting a max of 25 bucks cost share, it's just not popular. But saturated buffers and bioreactors, they're paid for a hundred percent plus you get an outlet incentive right now with cost share. So a landowner doesn't have to take land out of production and they can put something in that treats, has a high efficiency for treating tile water and removing nitrates. They don't have to pay for it. It gets handled by a batch and build coordinator, which means that they're not even receiving tax. They don't have tax implications on the money that goes into the cost share component and they get a thousand dollars or $500 or whatever the incentive is per the program per outlet that they treat. So that's a no-brainer. So it's just been wildly more popular. And I think too, there's a lot of people who don't want to experience those yield hits, so they don't want to mess around with cover crops. For them, something like an edge of field structure is a way better option. So it's just surprised me that it was so popular, but we're running with it.
Jamie Duininck (12:58):
And I have a more specific question around cover crops and we'll get to the bio reactors and batch and build, but just specifically to Minnesota, just given that you're talking about some of the challenges in Iowa with wetter soils, but in Minnesota I think some of the challenges are more just the length of the seasons, right?
Ruth McCabe (13:23):
Absolutely.
Jamie Duininck (13:24):
You have experience here. What do you see in that as far as crops that work and how late can they actually get these cover crops in if it's a later fall of harvest?
Ruth McCabe (13:37):
Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, so Minnesota is absolutely more limited. Your soils are lighter than ours, and so they're sandier, lighter depending on where you are. And so driving up here, it's always kind of an eye-opener for me because the soil types up here are just so wildly different from Central Iowa. That shouldn't be surprising, but it always is, and it's the first thing I look at. But y'all are just so limited by growing season, I would say your growing season is anywhere from three to four weeks shorter than ours, and depending on the year could be even shorter. So rye is still a good bet. Rye is going to work. That stuff, you can plant it so late. Probably up here, you can get away with planting it in November, even December, depending on how mild the winter is. And it'll probably still grow. It won't necessarily qualify for your cost share limitations, right? I don't know what Minnesota's cost share seeding dates are, but in Iowa, the seeding dates are like mid-October or something. Sometimes they extend it into November for rye as an overwintering species. So rye is always a fantastic bet.
(14:39):
It wouldn't be something I would use ahead of corn, but an overwintering species I might use ahead of corn, and I'm really becoming a big fan of this species, I've been doing a lot of experiments the last few years with farmers in Iowa is winter camelina. I don't know if you've heard of it, it's a brassica.
Jamie Duininck (14:51):
No.
Ruth McCabe (14:52):
I am really excited about it. It overwinters, it is a brassica. From my experience, you can't plant it too early. You shouldn't plant it too early because it'll bolt. So you really do need to wait until October to get this stuff down. You don't need very many seed per acre. You need four pounds per acre because it's a brassica, so it's got really tiny seeds and it grows. Now, it's not as impressive as rye, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend rye ahead of corn unless you've got starter and you've got ways to get around that nutrient tie-up. But camelina is a good overwintering option that will grow and produce some foliage on top of the ground and it produces a really decent root mass underground. And it terminates really nicely too. It doesn't tie up nutrients. Its carbon to nitrogen ratio and its biomass above ground is very low, so it decomposes really quickly.
(15:41):
So that's something I'm getting more excited about ahead of corn. Oats are always a classic ahead of corn, but you got to drill them or you got to vertical till them in or you got to get them some good seed-to-soil contact because they don't like drying out the way rye can handle drying out a little bit. So an oat takes in water and then it can't stop taking in water. It's got to send down roots in germinate. If it dries out, it's just going to die.
(16:05):
So those are the three that I'm really excited about. People talk about multi-species mixes. I'm less of a fan of those. I think that you need to really know what you're doing with a multi-species mix. And also they are atrociously expensive, and I'm not sure that it's worth it, especially the further north you go. I'm not sure that a multi-species mix with 30 different species in it or whatever we're seeing nowadays is worth the $122 price tag. Just some people really get into it and I'm happy for them.
Jamie Duininck (16:33):
Good answer to the question that I was really going to ask.
Ruth McCabe (16:36):
Sorry, I keep going.
Jamie Duininck (16:37):
No, it's a good answer, this is where I was going to... And I hope the answer is yes because it'll get into, but have you ever seen the documentary Kiss the Ground?
Ruth McCabe (16:46):
Oh, God. Oh, man. I was trying not to swear and here you are throwing me a bone.
Jamie Duininck (16:53):
Well, this is perfect because I've had a lot of questions. So here now you can solve my questions.
Ruth McCabe (17:00):
Here's the thing, I'm torn because I like Woody Harrelson.
Jamie Duininck (17:04):
So actually I have tried, just in full disclosure, I've tried to get some of those people on the water table and they have not responded.
Ruth McCabe (17:12):
You don't say. You don't say they haven't responded. Huh, I wonder why.
Jamie Duininck (17:17):
So let's talk about that a little bit because part of that was the multi-species mix, and to me just not knowing anything, that made sense.
Ruth McCabe (17:30):
Yeah, it's a real sexy story. Just like on YouTube, you see farmers who plant green into rye with their corn or whatever, and it looks real hot. You watch it and it's like, "Damn, that's really cool." What you don't know is that that farmer is dumping tons of starter on, and they're going in side dressing, they don't talk about any of that. And it's the same thing with multi-species mixes. Like, yeah, the concept's great, but it costs a ton of money.
(17:58):
And I used to work as a seed salesperson for a small seed company. We love selling those mixes because they're really expensive and it's hard to get them seeded. You need to have equipment that can seed them properly, a drill with a small seed box and a large seed box. And if you're just broadcasting it, you're really flushing your money down the toilet. They don't tend to grow well, depending on if they bolt or create more of their own seed like brassicas, a camelina, can bolt if you let them go too far. And then you're going to have little brassica weeds all summer long that you're going to be dealing with. And a lot of those have hard seeds, so they'll stay in the soil for several years before they germinate. So I'm just not a fan of multi-species mixes.
(18:40):
And the issue with movies like Kiss the Ground or Food Inc or King Corn or any of these movies, which I have watched, I forced myself to watch these movies because they educate me on, "What's the thought think? Right? What am I up against?" The issue is that these movies boil incredibly complicated topics down into these, "Well, if farmers just planted multi-species mixes, by God, our water quality problems would be solved. The solution is simple. I can't believe none of these people have thought of this before."
(19:15):
Man, that just boils my blood. It's so much more complicated than that. And to be fair, I'm from California, all right, I'm from Long Beach. I think I have my granola cred. I also served in the military, so there's my conservative cred. Now I happily live in the Midwest in Iowa, but I used to live in all these urban environments, grew up in Minneapolis, right? Lived in San Francisco, Monterey, California, Los Angeles. I've lived in Iowa City, just lived in a lot of these urban places. I understand the topics of conversation that urban folks or people who are removed from farming have around subjects like water quality and soil health and erosion, and why they get so into movies like King Corn and Food Inc and Kiss the Ground.
(19:59):
First of all, Woody Harrelson is an attractive, talented actor. So right off the bat, you're going to want to get into that movie. But it also speaks to them. It helps them understand something that they wouldn't previously have any understanding of because they've grown up completely removed from agriculture. But it's like, look, just because it sounds great and super interesting and it helps you understand some aspects of farming better, broaden your horizons, maybe watch other shows, listen to podcasts like The Water Table. I don't know. Go to a local SWC meeting, maybe go to some field days that your local agricultural co-op is hosting. Talk to farmers. I guarantee you, during harvest, farmers are bored out of their flipping brains. Go stop a combine and ask if you can ride along with them for a few hours. Some of them might say no, but I guarantee you you'll find a farmer who will say, "Sure, get on in. Here's the buddy seat. Did you bring food?" And you can ask them all kinds of questions. So those movies drive me nuts because they simplify something that should not be simplified. Okay. That's honestly-
Jamie Duininck (20:58):
I think the funniest thing about what you said there when you talked about where you lived and to try to give yourself some liberal credibility, is all the Iowa farmers listening to this, they're like, "Okay, okay, okay." Until you said Iowa City, now they know you lived in and-
Ruth McCabe (21:13):
For real.
Jamie Duininck (21:13):
You're from Iowa. To me, that's hilarious.
Ruth McCabe (21:16):
Yeah. Well, I just speak to both sides. So when I go to presentations, I try to see things from both sides of the conservation, agriculture like wedding. I try to be on both sides of the aisle and get people to see agriculture and conservation from both angles. And it's so easy to get sucked on both sides into just one track minds, like one lane of thinking, very shuttered, blinkered ways of thinking about the situation. And it's actually really nuanced. And I'll call my people, my more agricultural minded people on their bowl of poop, and I'll call people that are more environmentalist on their bowl of crap as well, because both sides spew a lot of crap. But yeah. Oh, man. Kiss the Ground. Woody Harrelson. Damn you. If you're listening to this, sir.
Jamie Duininck (22:04):
I thought of that as we were talking. I wasn't planning on that question, but how about just a really old practice around no-till? Is there any way to revive that or any reason to and have more no-till in some of these practices?
Ruth McCabe (22:27):
Yeah, I love no-till. It's actually one of my favorite practices. I understand for a variety of reasons why people don't want to transition to it. Man, I love no-till. I wish more people would farm with no-till. But I also wish that our definition of what no-till is didn't need to be so rigid. There's no-till that I think could use a judicious every three to four year application of something like turbo or vertical till mixed in. Because depending on where you are and what soil types you have, you're going to get a banding of fertilizer. You're going to get these acidic zones because you're applying everything over the top, and then you're reliant on herbicides.
(23:02):
That's something a lot of lay people in the urban public don't understand is they're like, "Why isn't everybody no-till?" And I'm like, "Well, I thought you didn't like Roundup. I thought you didn't like chemicals." And guess what? If people completely transition to no-till they are reliant on chemicals for control now because they can't go in there and till up their fields.
(23:19):
And I wish that cost share wasn't tied to never putting steel in the field again. There's a judicious application of a vertical tiller or a turbo tiller every few years in order to prevent these long-term issues with no-till from cropping up, like pH bands or high phosphorus bands or what have you, especially the further west you move. In a state like Iowa where we get tons of rain, the real hit comes not from these pH bands or phosphorus bands or whatever building up, but from the cold temps of the soil and the moisture that ends up being retained. And there is tons of research to support this. When you switch to no-till in Iowa, you are easily going to be dealing with a three to five-year yield hit before you return back to normal yields. You
Ruth McCabe (24:00):
You don't go to higher yields and there's a lot of research that supports this, too. Transitioning to no-till, doesn't seven, 10 years from now, suddenly give you higher yields. You just return to normal. And that's because there's a lot of biology in the soil that kind of has to reset itself when you switch to no-till. And what kills me is, it's like if you're a tenant farmer ... And let's talk about this for a sec. Because 60% of Iowa's land is tenanted, meaning it's farmed by somebody who doesn't own it and that number's only increasing.
(24:27):
Of the tenanted acres, roughly 80%, that number differs depending on the study. Some say 88%, some say 80%, but I'm going to fall back on the more conservative number of 80%. Roughly 80% of tenanted acres are in a cash rent year- to-year lease. Okay. So for those listening, a cash rent year-to-year lease means that farmer has no clue if they're going to be farming that farm next year, all right?
(24:52):
As a tenant farmer, are you going to take a known yield hit for three to five years knowing that you might not farm that farm again the next year and your landlord certainly isn't going to share in the costs of the yield hit that you will take to adopt no-till. And there are no real benefits long term. You're not going to get more yield after that three to five years. So there's no benefits to the farmer to adopt that practice and the landlord isn't going to share in those costs. Why would you do that? There's zero incentive there to adopt that practice.
(25:22):
We don't build businesses that way. That's not smart business sense. So I love no-till. I think financially, if we want more of it, I think we need to pony up. The public needs to pony up and throw some more [inaudible 00:25:35] resources at it. This is an unpopular opinion, but I will argue that if we're going to only throw pennies at cover crop, then I'm like, can we just throw that money in making stronger incentives for no-till conversion instead.
Jamie Duininck (25:49):
Makes sense. I mean, it's kind of some of the same reasons. Batch and Build, let's go back to that as that's a pretty big process and something that water table prints go, our industry's pretty excited about from a water quality standpoint. And what do you see as, like you said, it's a practice that is number one and it's booming. But what do you see the future of that in your area, Iowa and then beyond Iowa, I guess?
Ruth McCabe (26:21):
Yeah. I'm incredibly excited about saturated buffers and bioreactors. There's tons of research to support their efficacy. Just for your listeners, saturated buffers and bioreactors are basically septic systems for a farm field, just taking advantage of advanced drainage to treat tile water before it gets to a stream or a ditch. It's nothing fancy, actually they're elegant, simple solutions to nitrates.
(26:49):
And there's gobs of research from Iowa State University and other universities that support a number of anywhere from 40 to 60% treatment throughout the course of the year. That number would be 100% or close to it, but there are times of high flow that both a bioreactor and a saturated buffer will allow water to go around because in snow melt or heavy rainstorms, you don't want to flood a farm field. So some of the water can move through those structures, but throughout the course of a year, they can treat an average of 50% of the water moving through them, which is amazing.
(27:18):
I am so excited about them and farmers and as I've already explained, farmers and landowners are a fan of them because it doesn't require infield management changes and they're inexpensive to put in and there's robust cost share to support them. Over the last five years, probably three or 400 of these structures have gone in and are going to be going in and more of them are going to be going in the next couple of years. To put that into context, prior to 2020, over a 10-year period from like 2010 to 2020 or something like that in Polk County, six were put in.
(27:55):
So the Batch and Build model takes the onus of doing the project away from the landowner, turns it into a large batch of landowners. A central coordinator manages it and utilizes state funding. That state funding moves through a public agency like a county or a nonprofit so that the tax burden is also not on the landowner and landowners are given a small incentive per outlet to participate in the program. Suddenly we're putting 50, 60, 70 of these structures in, in a single batch.
(28:25):
We follow a creek and we just run up a creek and we talk to all the people who own properties along that creek or that drainage ditch, and we're away to the races. They are incredibly hard. It's easy for the landowner. We try to create a giant easy button for the landowner. What you need to understand is that behind the scenes, it is not easy. It takes a village to manage a Batch and Build.
(28:45):
My company, my team, is the first retailer led team to manage a batch and build. We are the only retailer that is currently managing a Batch and Build in Iowa. I want that to expand to other Ag retailers, but I will say that there are many roadblocks and barriers in place from agencies that are not a fan of the Batch and Build model to prevent that from happening. And it's my goal to tear those barriers down and get it so that the Batch and Build model can be launched anywhere.
(29:16):
It is frustrating some of the barriers and the roadblocks that have been put into place. And it makes sense why those barriers and roadblocks are in place. IDALS, the Iowa Department of Ag and Land Stewardship, huge fan of Batch and Builds, is very supportive. But we have our Federal arm of conservation in Iowa, depending on where you are and what county you're in, they are less of a fan of that model. And I think that there's a few things that are happening there, but we need to get through to those agencies.
(29:42):
We need to get those folks to see that we're just trying to get conservation on the ground and it shouldn't matter who's leading the Batch and Build. Anybody should be able to launch a Batch and Build. And to be clear, I don't get a penny. So the cost share dollars that go into the Batch and Build, I don't get a penny of that. My team does not get a penny of that. That goes straight to the landowners or straight to the fiscal agent, the nonprofit agency or the state agency that's biding out the project as a public good project.
(30:10):
I don't see a penny of that. It's my private partners that are paying for me to do this work. And it's just frustrating because we'll go to a local office and we'll hear an NRCS office and we'll hear someone say, "This is wrong. Heartland co-op's an Ag retailer, y'all shouldn't be leading one of these." And I'm just trying to fight that and I'm going to keep fighting it. I went off a little bit there, but-
Jamie Duininck (30:30):
Well, yeah, we're going to do more podcasts and that's the next topic, I think.
Ruth McCabe (30:36):
Yeah. That's my axe to grind.
Jamie Duininck (30:38):
Well, I know and I may ... If I go down that road for me, too, that'll be a challenge. But, I mean, the whole purpose of the water table and what gets you out of bed in the morning is the idea that we can help people. So why wouldn't you want to all kind of be, "Hey, heartland's helping people." I'm supportive of that.
Ruth McCabe (30:59):
If you want to sell conservation, think about it. We're already really good flipping salespeople. I'm really good at selling something. My team, my conservation agronomists are really good at selling conservation practices. You hire in a local Federal office, people who do not have sales backgrounds, do not have customer service backgrounds. It's not a slight on those folks, but it's like, "Golly, don't you think it would make sense to partner with a company that this is what we do for a living?"
(31:29):
We sell stuff and we're real good at it. We solve problems and we see a problem and we go, "Hey, I got a conservation practice that could solve this for you." And it's in our vested interest to make sure that it's going to work for that farmer because, by golly, our livelihoods are built around that farmer being successful so that farmer's going to trust us. I don't understand why you wouldn't want to leverage that model.
(31:48):
Five to 10 years ago, you would hear public agencies say, "Conservation's not going to be successful till Ag retailers come to the table. We need these people. Until ag retailers really start to support conservation, it's never going to happen." Now we're coming to the table and they're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Now we didn't want you really coming into our space and showing us that you can do it better than we can."
Jamie Duininck (32:10):
Yeah, "Move their cheese." And the reality of it is, which all the agencies, public and private agree, these conservation practices are a good thing, they work. So why wouldn't we want to have more of them, right?
Ruth McCabe (32:28):
Yeah. In Iowa, we have some frustratingly influential left-wing environmentalist bloggers that write angry think pieces from their ivory towers. These folks don't actually go out and do any of the work in the trenches like my team or people for IDALS like the work that we're doing, but they write these angry think pieces that also speak to this urban public. And that's what really breaks my heart is, it's not really true.
(32:52):
And you read this angry blog or you watch your Woody Harrelson kiss the ground crap and you think that that's the reality and then you go and vote accordingly and it's not the reality and you wind up hindering the progress. The very progress that you want to see happen, you wind up slowing it down. So that's what we're fighting now. That's what my team fights against, that's what I fight against, is this misinformation that just gets spewed out by whack a doodle left wing environmentalists.
(33:19):
And I want to respect them, but it's like, "Man, you're not doing any of this work. Now, if you were down here in the trenches with me, this would be a different conversation because it's like you're fighting the same fight I'm fighting and we need to sit down and talk through this. But you don't do any of this work. You sit in your fancy office at your university and you type these angry blogs and you don't do any of the work."
(33:39):
And so that's what breaks my heart is that these people that just slow progress down. But when you've built a brand on divisive rhetoric, as a lot of environmentally focused groups have done, they just build a brand on divisive rhetoric to just slow progress down. You're actually slowing conservation down by grinding these Ag focused groups to a halt on the projects that they want.
Jamie Duininck (33:40):
Right, right.
Ruth McCabe (34:04):
So that's frustrating. Anyway, I'm getting into hyperbole, so I'll come back to the topic at the end.
Jamie Duininck (34:08):
So, one of the questions I was going to ask and I don't necessarily think I need to now, but it's what frustrates you.
Ruth McCabe (34:15):
Now you know.
Jamie Duininck (34:16):
But what are you really passionate about? I mean, you've said a lot of this already, but if you had to boil it down, there's a lot of things about your job. I know this from talking to you previously and that you really enjoy, but what's the one thing that you feel like you can make a big difference on and that gets you out of bed every morning to go to work?
Ruth McCabe (34:41):
Yeah. For the last two years, I've traveled around the world on a project for an organization called Nuffield International Farming Scholarships. And so I went to 16 different countries and then I traveled around the United States and I was studying conservation farming adoption in these countries. And across the US, I was looking at regulatory approaches to conservation farming in other countries. And then for that matter, in other states in the US.
(35:08):
And a lot of voluntary nutrient reduction approaches, for example, like in the Great Barrier Reef or in the Chesapeake Bay have been around for a few decades and they haven't been met with a lot of success. And there's a variety of reasons for that. Mainly there's just zero infrastructure to support the host nutrient reduction strategies. So, I mean, you can create a book about something, but if you don't then back it up with infrastructure to support it, it's going to be hard to get it to be successful. But here in Iowa, our nutrient reduction strategy drafted a little over 10 years ago ... Oh, we're not in Iowa. We're in Minnesota. Okay, whatever.
Jamie Duininck (35:43):
I was going to-
Ruth McCabe (35:44):
In Iowa. In Iowa, our nutrient reduction strategy is a little over a decade old. We've come very close to meeting our phosphorus goal and nitrogen has remained stable. But in the last 10 years, we have built cost share programming infrastructure, we
Ruth McCabe (36:00):
We have built personnel and teams across the state. It's like we built the scaffolding to paint the house. Now, just let us paint the house. What gets me out of bed every morning is this thought that, 15 years from now, I want some person in Washington DC to be like, "Damn, Iowa. They just came out of the rear like a black horse. They're meeting all their voluntary nutrient reduction goals. What the hell happened there?" And there's just all these incredibly talented people. My team, my conservation agronomists who work for me, Polk County. Just all these passionate people who are all working together to get the voluntary nutrient reduction strategy in Iowa to be successful. So what gets me out of bed is that, my goal is to prove that it can be done. And I think if there's any state that is primed to be able to make it successful, it is Iowa.
(36:43):
The tricky thing is proving out that it can work before those angry hate and discontent makers can tear it down. And so what do you do if your platform is built on proving that the voluntary model won't work? You throw roadblocks in place. When the voluntary model starts to look like it's going to work, you throw roadblocks in place to slow it down.
Jamie Duininck (37:05):
Right.
Ruth McCabe (37:07):
My goal is to stay one step ahead of the naysayers who say it can't be done and like water around a rock, right? Try to prove that the voluntary model can work.
Jamie Duininck (37:17):
Right. Do you feel like... This is not a question I was thinking of either, but it just came up. Do you see that those people, those naysayers are ramping it up more right now? And if you do, then that's probably because they see it's working, right?
Ruth McCabe (37:34):
You got it, absolutely. Right now, there's an investigative reporter for, I think, American Public Media who is just rattling the cages of all of my public partners. They haven't come to Heartland yet, but they've come to a lot of my public partners in Iowa making freedom of information requests and trying to dive into the nuts and bolts of the batch and build. I think in an effort to prove that the batch and build is inefficient and it's a bad use of taxpayer dollars and... Oh, man. It just boils my blood, because there's so much research that shows how effective it is to do the batch and build versus leaving the onus on the landowner or the grower to do it themselves, and it's way less expensive to do it that way.
(38:11):
And also just the efficacy of the structures themselves. That investigation is happening probably at the behest of some of these environmentalist groups and environmentalist bloggers who just don't want to see the batch and build model be successful, because by golly, if it's successful, that means voluntary adoption could be a reality. And when you've built a brand around regulation being the only option, that is not good. So yeah, absolutely it's ramping up. It's only getting worse, but I'm telling you, hopefully logic prevails. Hopefully logic prevails.
Jamie Duininck (38:47):
I'm about ready to switch gears, but I want to leave that part of the discussion with... Thank you for being such an advocate for water quality, for agriculture, for production, I think for the American spirit.
Ruth McCabe (39:02):
Absolutely.
Jamie Duininck (39:02):
Thank you for that. It's way better, and you feel a lot better when you go to bed at night knowing that you're providing solutions rather than prolonging a problem.
Ruth McCabe (39:12):
You got it, you got it.
Jamie Duininck (39:12):
Thank you for that from, I think... Well, for sure from the water table, but from I think the agricultural industry. Appreciate that. Before I move on, though, you did say the 16 countries you've been to, were all of them developed countries or were you in-
Ruth McCabe (39:13):
It was a mix.
Jamie Duininck (39:27):
Okay.
Ruth McCabe (39:28):
Yep, it was a mix. I was in Europe, I was in Southeast Asia, I was in South America, Central America, and Australia. The only continent that I didn't go to was the continent of Africa.
Jamie Duininck (39:39):
Did you see anything in there that surprised you from the standpoint of you did not think you would see conservation at the levels? Want to speak to that?
Ruth McCabe (39:51):
Absolutely. It's a chapter in my manuscript that I wrote. But it's soil degradation, especially soil erosion is way worse than I thought around the world. So I left Iowa naively thinking that these other countries I was going to go to who had higher rates of adoption of things like no-till, or they call it zero-till in some places, or higher rates of adoption of cover crops or other... In Brazil, they have the forest code. I just thought I would go to these places and they would just be so much better than Iowa. I admit I love Iowa, I'm an agronomist in Iowa trying to make things better there, but I just thought, "Yeah, we still have a ways to go," right? Then I go to these other countries and it was like, "Oh, my gosh. We are nowhere near as bad as we're told we are." Like, "Holy cow."
(40:33):
Iowa's average erosion rate is about five tons of topsoil per acre per year. That ain't sustainable, I'll argue with anybody about that, but Brazil is 20 to 50 tons of topsoil per acre per year, and they don't have as much as us to lose. So that was really concerning, to see that. When I was in Europe, the amount of regulatory... So the regulatory approach in Europe is very strong compared to... So I was in Denmark, the Netherlands, one other country that's escaping me right now, and the regulatory approach in those places is extreme and incredibly expensive. Incredibly expensive. I don't think taxpayers understand how expensive it is. And so that really blew me away. And also, it just so happens I went to a bunch of places that have crappier soil than Iowa.
Jamie Duininck (41:24):
Yeah, yeah.
Ruth McCabe (41:24):
Again, I naively assumed everybody's got soils like we do. I go to other countries where it's like, "Of course they adopted no-till." They got an immediate yield increase by adopting no-till, because they were conserving moisture. Suddenly, they could grow a crop, where before, they couldn't grow a crop. Canada, they would summer fallow their fields every other year just to collect moisture. Now, if they're no-till, by golly, they can get a yield every year. You go to Brazil, well, of course they're going to adopt no-till and cover crops. Now they can grow a second crop in the dry season, now they're getting two harvests a year instead of one. Why wouldn't you adopt those conservation practices? And I would talk. I interviewed over 100 farmers as I traveled around the world, and I asked these guys, "Why did you adopt these practices?" And their first response is, "Well, yeah, it was a no-brainer. I immediately got a yield increase." It's not that these people care more about the environment than Iowa farmers. Not that they don't care about the environment, but it's a financial no-brainer for them to do it.
Jamie Duininck (42:18):
Right, right.
Ruth McCabe (42:18):
Whereas in Iowa, it's not a financial no-brainer.
Jamie Duininck (42:21):
Right, right. Yeah, we'll talk about that later, but I've had an opportunity to be in the Netherlands in the last year twice.
Ruth McCabe (42:29):
That's wild, yeah.
Jamie Duininck (42:30):
And just fascinating on the agricultural standpoint.
Ruth McCabe (42:33):
And what's going on over there about closing down farms. It's just crazy.
Jamie Duininck (42:37):
Right.
Ruth McCabe (42:37):
Yeah, it's nuts.
Jamie Duininck (42:38):
So maybe we'll talk about that in the future, but just moving on, I want to know a little bit about you personally, and I think it does connect to your passion and your job and things like that. And so you were talking earlier before, off-air, about this commercial garden. Talk a little bit about that.
Ruth McCabe (43:00):
Yeah, I do a ton of vegetable gardening. My husband and I have a five-acre small farm. You could call it a property, if you will, outside central Iowa. Outside Marshalltown. And we're both avid hunters, so we try to harvest our own meat throughout the year. We have chickens, we have a very large vegetable garden, we do all of our own canning, freezing, dehydrating. We do a lot of that stuff that you see on those nice TikTok videos, and we love it. It's a labor of love, it's a lot of fun. I'm young, so I'm going to keep doing it until I can't do it anymore physically, but I used to run an actual farm to market garden, vegetable garden. Now I don't, but I used to do that work and it was backbreaking and financially very difficult. The statistic is, for most vegetable farms that try to make it as a farm to market farm, within five years, 80% something of them are going to fold, and I understand why now. No shame, I learned a lot.
Jamie Duininck (44:01):
Yeah, yeah. Do you consider it fair that a saturated buffer is a pretty good place to hunt pheasants? And you know where they all are.
Ruth McCabe (44:13):
Absolutely. Yeah, everyone's like, "Wow, Ruth, you're so passionate about this." I'm like, "Yeah, it's purely from the goodness of my heart." When, in reality, it's like, "Hey, you're going to be putting in two and a half miles of this native buffer strip. Do you mind if I come out here in November and just rustle up some pheasants?" They're technically a non-native species, so in reality, I'm just protecting America from a non-native bird.
Jamie Duininck (44:33):
Yeah, invasive species.
Ruth McCabe (44:35):
Well, they're not technically... We have to split hairs here. Invasive means that it's damaging. And non-native, non-native just means it's non-native, but it's not damaging. So something like purple loosestrife, that's an invasive species, because it damages wetland environments. No matter how pretty it is. Pheasants are... They're non-native, but they didn't displace any other species by themselves.
Jamie Duininck (44:58):
It's a great sport and a great pastime.
Ruth McCabe (45:00):
Oh, man. Heck yeah. Nothing feels better than having something fly up behind you scaring the crap out of you, you whip around, and you just drill it to the ground. And then you go home and you make pheasant tenders. There's probably some animal activists that's going to be listening to this and get real upset, but...
Jamie Duininck (45:17):
That's just fine with me.
Ruth McCabe (45:18):
Yeah, I'm okay with it.
Jamie Duininck (45:19):
But Ruth, thank you for joining The Water Table today and let's stay in touch and-
Ruth McCabe (45:24):
Absolutely.
Jamie Duininck (45:24):
... keep seeing what's going on in conservation in Iowa.
Ruth McCabe (45:27):
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a ton of fun.
