From Research to Resilience: Advancing Soil Health with Dr. Anna Cates
Good day and welcome to the University of Minnesota Extension podcast Minnesota CropCast. I'm your host Dave Nicolai. I'm with the University of Minnesota Extension Educator in Field Crops. I'm here today along with my cohost Doctor. Seth Nave, University Minnesota Extension soybean specialist.
Dave Nicolai:And Seth, we have a very special guest here in the studio today, Anna Cates and I'm going to turn to Anna and have her introduce herself a little bit with her proper title and give us a little bit of background in terms of some of the areas that she works with in terms of soil health, cover crops and the soils department. So welcome Anna.
Anna Cates:Thanks Dave, thanks for having me.
Dave Nicolai:Why don't we start out with a little bit of background of yourself in terms of your own education, where you came from, how you got here, etcetera, etcetera?
Anna Cates:Yeah. Yeah. I was born in a farm in Wisconsin. My parents were running the place for free rent, so my grandpa didn't have to sell the place yet. But they moved off when my uncle, who really wanted to be a farmer, came onto it in 1989.
Anna Cates:And my parents moved back to Montana where they met and where my mom's from, so I grew up in Missoula mostly. But I came back to Wisconsin for graduate school and worked in Wisconsin cropping systems, studying soil organic matter cycling, where carbon ends up in the soil, and came here right out of my PhD in 2019. So I've been here seven years.
Dave Nicolai:So what position attracted you to come here to Minnesota? What was developing here that was of interest and basically what did you apply for?
Anna Cates:Yeah, that's actually a good question because my position is unique and I wanted a unique position. When I was trying to decide whether to do a PhD, I kept saying to my advisor, do you really think it's fun just to be a professor? Like, all day long you have to be a professor? It didn't look that fun to me. But my position has all this interaction with other entities outside the university, so it doesn't feel like I'm stuck here on campus necessarily.
Anna Cates:And there's people, at these local government offices around the state that are really kinda listening. So that's because my position is what we call this Minnesota Office for Soil Health. It's funded mostly by the state, by our board of water and soil resources out of lottery money in the, through the Clean Water Council. So that money pays for my position because they wanted to have somebody at the university who could speak to essentially their staff around the state who were trying to do a bunch of soil health programming around contracts for reduced tillage and cover crops, and they wanted to make sure those people could do their jobs well. They wanted kind of a specialist in the extension, you know, with the university credentials to really support all these local offices who are trying to do soil health stuff.
Seth:So what tell me about the what is the office? So Yeah. The Bush.
Anna Cates:What is
Seth:the office? What is this office?
Anna Cates:The office consists of a recurring grant from the board of water and soil resources on top of support from the Minnesota Water Resources Center that gives us some of their base ag experiment station funding. It consists of myself and Marcel Levendusky who's a coordinator for the program. She's been in water resources in Minnesota for a long time. And then we get external grants, of course, on top of that. And we use some of our base funding from the Board of Water and Soil Resources to also pay for other outreach activities around soil health that Marcel and I aren't necessarily involved in.
Anna Cates:So other educators who wanna do soil health programming often work with us to use this funds to create programming that fits under our mission.
Dave Nicolai:So for our listeners, let's clarify this a little bit to start with. What is your title on paper per se?
Anna Cates:I'm the extension specialist for soil health and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Soil, Water and Climate.
Dave Nicolai:At the University of Minnesota. Okay, good. I wanted to make sure we got that out
Anna Cates:there. I do work for the University of Minnesota, yes.
Dave Nicolai:Alright. Alright. Okay.
Seth:And so but your position so with this, those monies come through the MDA. Correct?
Anna Cates:No. Through the Board of Water and Soil Research.
Seth:Separate separate from MDA Yep. Separate from any other any other office or department or whatever we call these things.
Anna Cates:Yeah. I don't know any other state that has an organization like Bowser or the Board of Water and Soil Resources. As far as I can tell, they are mostly a vehicle to move money into those local soil and water conservation districts, often through competitive grants, sometimes through sort of a standard funding stream.
Seth:Yeah. And that's my problem, is I hear about Bowser all the time. Yeah. And so I was a little bit, I was just a little bit mistaken about how all this is set up. So that's
Anna Cates:very good. That's Good
Seth:for me though.
Dave Nicolai:You know, most of the people in probably Minnesota are familiar. We've had them obviously for years and years and years, and that is their local soil and water conservation district or soil and water conservation staff. Yep. So how closely do those folks out in those county levels have an opportunity to work with you? Do they are you on a speed dial with them or do they email you back and forth or consultation?
Dave Nicolai:I mean, obviously, you have relationships with the general public, but just how does that work?
Anna Cates:Yeah. So every office is different. Right? They do their work is determined by their local elected board. Right?
Anna Cates:Their local officials in every county who are the board for that soil and water conservation district, and they determine whether they're gonna focus on windbreaks or cover crops or manure storage or whatever other things they're interested in from that board's perspective. Right? Whatever they think is the local priority. However, a lot of boards are interested in improving soil health on agricultural lands with reduced tillage and cover crops. So where a local priority for those things has been identified, that's where I really come in.
Anna Cates:I work on those practices on row crop lands for the most part. The way I help the districts comes in a few different ways. I run a quarterly networking call for people in those offices, or NRCS or sometimes the extension people just so they know each other so they can keep in touch. I'll present some resources. We'll talk about, oh, how would you do a tillage demonstration at a field day?
Anna Cates:Or we'll talk about, oh, if you wanted to set up an on farm research trial, how would that look? And so we'll try to offer something that people might have of interest or you know? And then they get to talk to each other a little bit more. The other thing is that I am kinda on speed dial for some of them. It just depends, you know, if they really are like, hey.
Anna Cates:You know, we're thinking about a cover crop program that has these species in it or that, you know, we wanna require this. You think that's gonna work? Or sometimes they wanna run an event like, hey. We really wanna show people the benefits of cover crops below ground. Do you have any ideas for good speakers for that?
Anna Cates:And sometimes it's me or sometimes it's someone else. Or do you have an idea for a way we can demonstrate the benefits we're seeing or, any new ways to talk about the the programs that we have out there?
Seth:So you have a very I would say it's a very, very unique position here. Was was this a this is inside baseball for university folks. But was this a challenge to communicate with your recent tenure documents? Did you have to work to try to educate folks that are not familiar with you, even your department or even extension or, let alone Bowser and all the intricacies of this kind of thing, the work that you do and how it affects the people of the state of Minnesota, how it might come under Yeah. Research or scholarly aspects versus service and things like that.
Seth:Was this a challenge for you?
Anna Cates:Well, you know, specifically in relation to the promotion process, you actually don't get to do very much of it. Right? You write it down, and then it goes off, and you have other advocates who follow it up the chain. So I don't know exactly what it looked like, how hard they had to advocate as it went up the chain. I didn't hear anything scary, but I wanna, like, acknowledge the people who set this up.
Anna Cates:They did the legwork in advance with the department heads. So the water resources center director and the head of the soil water and climate department got together and said, okay. We're gonna share this position. We're gonna share this money. How are we gonna do this?
Anna Cates:And there's there's lots of goodwill between those two offices that make my administrative life a lot easier.
Seth:So your position was set up appropriately to begin with, and you did not have to tinker and and be an ad self advocate for yourself
Anna Cates:Right.
Seth:In how you operated. So that was things things were well designed from the beginning.
Anna Cates:Yep. I didn't come in as the soybean specialist and say, hey. I wanna go and become a soil health specialist and I have to rejigger the whole thing. I came in as as what I was supposed to be, according to the designer. So Awesome.
Anna Cates:That's been really helpful. Having a good job description is super helpful, right?
Seth:Okay, right job, right person. This is good, good, good.
Dave Nicolai:Yep. So in terms of your extension appointment, what are a couple things that you'd like to talk about in the last year, two, three years and so forth that have really worked well in terms of providing an opportunity for education. Yeah. I know that there are some things that are coming up here, the Cover Crop Academy. Yeah.
Dave Nicolai:You know, that's probably one of the challenges in Extension is quote is how do you develop that audience, how do you keep them engaged you know and so forth and you know for some of us say well yeah I wrote a crop news an electronic article I sent it out there I hope somebody reads it.
Anna Cates:I know.
Dave Nicolai:Yeah because they're gonna you know they'll come back and then say okay what did you do to move the needle? Yep. So to speak show us show us some money show us Impacting. Changes in
Anna Cates:Yeah. Impact. Had a slide in a recent presentation that was something like, is anyone reading my blog post before they park the ripper? And I'm I'm pretty sure I know the answer to that question, but I think it I think it deserves to be asked by our administrators and ourselves. So because I work with these soil and water conservation districts all the time, I rarely host an event by myself.
Anna Cates:I rarely even lead hosting event. It's way more often that a district comes to me and says, this is what we wanna do. This is what our farmers are asking for, and I try to make it better. So that helps me a ton. Right?
Anna Cates:It helps me in terms of logistics and legwork and not spending my time, you know, thinking about lunch. But it also just helps me feel like I'm start I'm starting with an event that somebody asked for. You know, sometimes the districts didn't have a great idea, and we still have a poor turnout. But then we try again. And it feels like a team effort more so than I think a lot of extension people get to do if they're trying to run something from the state level.
Seth:You just have that many more built in contacts in your position. You know, this the way our Minnesota model is set up is faculty specialists tend to work with regional educators and local educators who drive this demand side and have requests. Yeah. You have that, plus you have this additional set of folks that are that are looking to you, which is is fantastic because then that helps the drive your your program. You just have that many more people advocating for for your material.
Dave Nicolai:So so you do the programs. I I I understand that. Yeah. What are the metrics? What are the numbers?
Dave Nicolai:You know, number crunching when they'll say, well, did we increase the amount of cover crop acres, the amount of seed we sold, or the diversification. What's you know how people are sometimes they they do numerical situations with that or you know run the economics, the return on investment and so forth. That's not easy.
Anna Cates:No, it's not easy. We made a big effort to collect a bunch of baseline data, what we know about how much these practices are being used across the state. We used the state funded practices list, which, PCA had developed a dashboard for to support their nutrient reduction strategy works. We used that list of practices funded on a number of acres of cover crops, etcetera.
Dave Nicolai:Give us an example of what one or two of those practices. What would it They
Anna Cates:know, you know, the number of thousands of acres of cover crops, which is not a number I have in my brain, but they they have that in that database. That data is also collected through the every five year ag statistics service. So that's part of our spreadsheet efforts. And then the other thing we have in that spreadsheet is satellite collected data. We've been working with David Mulla for several years to estimate both residue on the soil at planting, which is kind of a metric for how much tillage has been done prior to planting, and then also green cover in the fall.
Anna Cates:So did you get something growing before the winter freeze up? So we have some some satellite based metrics of that. And the tillage one is moving in the right direction. Again, I I'm not assuming it's because people are reading my blog posts. Obviously, they're reading Jody's blog posts, and that's why they parked the ripper this time.
Anna Cates:But So
Dave Nicolai:what's the right direction until
Anna Cates:I mean, things are moving in the right direction and that tillage is going down. I think it'll
Dave Nicolai:Amount of reduced acres. That's okay.
Anna Cates:Yep. Yep. But in you know, just to be perfectly frank about how I think about these metrics, you know, it's kinda like like the way I think about parenting. I can't, like, hang my hat on exactly what outcome my kid gets. Like, I'm putting in my effort, and they're gonna be themselves.
Anna Cates:And these farmers, you know, I'm putting in my effort, and I am not the sort of main decision element, I think, out there in terms of what they decide to do on their operations. So, again, like, I think about these collaborations, building local networks. If the SWCDs feel like they can get more people in the door, if they're happy with their program enrollment, that's a mark of success for me. But I am not bean counting on acres, you know, to the extent I can avoid it.
Seth:Well, this is something I I use in the marketing side of my work in terms of marketing US soybean products overseas. But it's it's offering you know, information about the alternatives so that those folks that do have an opportunity to change practices in some way can take advantage of that information. If they don't it's difficult to think about providing them the information that will entice them to make a change and just decide that, oh, I never thought about doing less tillage or I never but if you have the information in front of them and then some other factor, diesel price or the cost of a new, you know, 500 horsepower tractor, might affect that decision making process. And then they can look at your data and say, hey, this makes a lot of sense to do something, and in your case, something less in terms of tillage. So I think that's important.
Seth:And we don't it's hard because that's not as direct. It's like, as you mentioned with your children, that it's not directing them in any real way, but it's providing a little bit of background guidance and and more more in that same children analogy.
Anna Cates:Yeah. And that is exactly my theory of change, is making the stuff available when a person is ready to make a change. And I think about that in terms of who I reach to because I don't just work with these saltwater conservation districts. You know, you guys are kind enough to invite me to come to the CPM ShortCurse and talk to our certified crop advisers. And with those people, sometimes they're excited to use new practices, and sometimes they're not.
Anna Cates:But if I can get them to not see cover crops as scary, if I can see them to if I can help them see that no till beans are not scary, then that's just one person who's not gonna talk a farmer out of a decision like that if they decide to make that.
Seth:So what's what's I this is the question that I always pose to myself and everybody else in this extension realm. But it's, in your case, what success? Is it is it moving 10 people 10% or one person 100% of So the how how do you see that, especially when you're dealing with tillage and cover crops, you've got a real continuum here.
Anna Cates:Yes.
Seth:We also, you know, the environmental impact may not be completely linear. So how do you view this?
Anna Cates:I am mostly an incrementalist in this role. This role is about reaching row crop acres of corn and soybeans across Minnesota. I work a little bit with producers who are way out on adoption of integrating livestock into a really diverse rotation, who have an easy time achieving soil health and improving water quality in their direct vicinity, but there's so many acres that could do a little better. I'm okay with helping them do a little bit better. I think we get obvious benefits in terms of reducing erosion and a little bit of water quality benefit.
Anna Cates:If we want the you know, full package of benefit, the whole enchilada, we need to do more than just skipping fall tillage. But I'm I never let the perfect be the enemy of good.
Seth:Awesome. I mean, I I love it because, you know, especially the corn soybean world, we've got, you know, 15,000,000 acres or so of opportunity. Opportunity. There's almost every one of those 15,000,000 acres could probably do better. Yeah.
Seth:Very few of those people are at the at the ends that you that you mentioned. But I also appreciate that you have those people that are on the ends because those can then be, you know, those can be resources or inspiration or they could be models for others that helps drive people one direction. So I really appreciate that.
Dave Nicolai:You know, you mentioned before about education. And there is an opportunity in education oftentimes in extension or other situations in your position you'll go out and make a presentation. But I think we've found that sometimes we're limited in how much the human mind can absorb, how much we can talk about and so forth in a short amount of time. And so I think we are looking at other opportunities. And one of the things that you've been involved with and hit upon with other coworkers is to be able to spread this out a little bit
Anna Cates:Yeah.
Dave Nicolai:In terms of providing any information but take your time at it. And I think one of those things that I would point to that you developed and are developing is a Cover Crop Academy in working with some of my coworkers. You wanna explain a little bit about that? Yes. What's coming up and how people can take part in that to learn a little bit more about how cover crops may or may not fit in certain situations on their acres.
Anna Cates:Yeah, so this course was launched in 2425 and we have another registration opening for 2627 that's open now. And the idea of it is that you take a year, you do some infield stuff and some online stuff, you build confidence in your agronomy around cover crops, and you build a network of people locally who you can ask questions of. So it's structured with a beginning in person meeting. We use our research and outreach centers for the most part for our in person locations. They start to get to know each other.
Anna Cates:And then in their next online meeting, they design the cover crop treatments they wanna see. You know, have they wanted to see drone, application of cover crops? Have they really wanted to see a legume grass mixture? Have they really wanted to see a spring seeded buckwheat? What is it?
Anna Cates:I don't know. But they the research and outreach centers have capacity to do quite a few different things. And so they were able to apply a bunch of different treatments for us last time, and I think people got a lot out of actually seeing the treatments they wanted to research in action on our university land. You know, it's just small plot stuff. It's not everything, but we also ask them to go to a field day and to think about what did you learn at this field day from hearing a farmer explain their whole system versus from your replicated research, which is what you and I are always doing.
Anna Cates:Right? Thinking about the balance between what we learn from a narrative, from someone's experience versus what we're learning from the Agronomy Journal article. Right? So I'm asking them to think about the sort of those two different streams of information and then also just giving them a bunch of things like, you know, the herbicide interaction issues with cover crops. How do you do your fertility if you've got a cover crop on in the fall?
Anna Cates:How do you do manure? How do you think about, you know, how much fertilizer you need? So just some basic agronomy questions like that. In some ways, it's the course I wish I had been able to take in grad school before I had this job. You know, it's me kind of trying to advance people sort of where I've gotten to over my seven years in this job.
Dave Nicolai:So a combination. And is there a registration? How soon is this starting in 2026?
Anna Cates:Yep. We open in June 2026. Registration is open now. You can go to z.umn.edu/ccacademy or just Google the Cover Crop Academy Umn. And, yeah, our first in person meeting will be in June, then we'll meet online after that, and, we'll wrap up next year in May, actually taking our cover crop biomass samples.
Anna Cates:Had some actual a lot of help from our participants last time collecting the data on those plots. And we'll follow them through their cash crop year and send the participants information, but we don't continue to meet online.
Seth:So So this sounds really intensive. You already scared me away. So what what does this what does this require in terms of of a commitment from the participants?
Anna Cates:There's four or five web meetings. They're each two hours over the course of nine months. So it's every other month for two hours. It's not that intensive. And then there's a Canvas module that goes with it.
Anna Cates:I think those take about thirty minutes. So it's about two and a half hours of work every two months.
Seth:No. That that helps me that helps me in my own brain because you you talked about all the things you're doing, and it seems but because it's spread over a long period of time, you really, you know, spread this out.
Anna Cates:Yeah. And I wasn't sure if people would like that. Would you rather do it all in three months more intensively? That really eliminates our ability to do the fieldwork. But in the post course evaluations, people said they liked the amount of time that it took.
Anna Cates:And if anything, they might have wanted to come out of the research plots one more time in the fall. So we're gonna try to work that in this fall. Just a little iffy. You know? When do you get the cover crops planted?
Anna Cates:When is it gonna be freezing? Who knows?
Seth:So what what did you learn the first time? What what changes did you make, after the first year? I'm sure that that was a big learning the bigger learning curve for one year.
Anna Cates:You know, the course is gonna be a lot the same, except for that people wanted a little bit more in person interaction. One thing I'm doing differently is we had Waseca, Lamberton, and Crookston for our first locations. And Crookston was a great location, but because population is sparser, we wanted to get something more in Central Minnesota. So we're gonna work at the Rose Holt Farm in Westport, which is run actually by one of our soil and water conservation district partners. But a lot of U of M faculty do research out there.
Anna Cates:So we have an irrigated site. So we'll get to look at cover crops with and without irrigation, which I think will be fun.
Seth:Very, very, very centralized. I don't know how more centralized you could be in the state of Minnesota.
Anna Cates:Right about.
Seth:And it's very convenient for folks from campus. So those are all important factors.
Dave Nicolai:Well, I think it's great because it's not just a PowerPoint slide or something abstract because it's hands on opportunity. Small groups. So the the ability here to ask questions.
Seth:Yep. What's what's your target number for numbers of participants?
Anna Cates:Yeah. 25 at each location. That would be great.
Seth:Okay. And you mentioned that you work with them to to integrate themselves in kind of a a learning group locally. How how does that work? How do they how do they communicate with each other?
Anna Cates:Well, all 75 of them are in the same online web course. Right? But then when they look at their cover crop treatments, they make that decision as a local group. So they can self choose. Right?
Anna Cates:Some people ended up choosing a a location that was further from them because they liked the location or the dates were more convenient or what have you. But mostly, people who are near Lamberton work on Lamberton together. And so they have a few meetings together to get to know each other and kinda, yeah, figure out, oh, this is a good resource for a person, someone who knows a lot about herbicide. This is a good resource who has a lot of experience doing video outreach stuff, that kinda thing.
Seth:Is there any technology you're employing, social media to keep these people tied together, or this is just very old school get together? Yeah.
Anna Cates:I've let them kind of run that part themselves. A lot of them are gonna run into each other anyway if they stay in this world, the the soil and water conservation district world. So I have not tried a a social media cohort. That's a good idea. Which social media platform should I use?
Seth:This is the this is, a proposal that I provided to the United Soybean Board many years ago, and it wasn't funded. And I'm I'm still working my way around this. There's good models. Farmer learning groups is a really old school way. The Argentines are really, really good at this.
Seth:Yeah. And there's really good models out there. And I wanted to try to put this into an electronic format where people had their own groups kind of within a Twitter or within one of these other applications that they could utilize, that they could talk both internally within their own group and chat online, and then some of their findings then could get posted to a larger group or even externally. So it's still a dream of mine, but I think that your group lays a nice template for that. So anyway.
Anna Cates:Well, I I will just say one thing about that because it's a constant, conversation in the soil health world. Should we have state sponsored farmer led soil health groups? Would that help increase our adoption? There's a model in Wisconsin where they have money from their Department of Ag to sponsor these watershed level groups. But we already have some organic ones in Minnesota.
Anna Cates:They just aren't state sponsored kind of and organized centrally in the same way. But that is a function that some SDBCDs provide is they hold the meetings, they buy the coffee, they whatever they do to help these farmer led groups stay organized or stay motivated to keep getting together.
Seth:Awesome. Awesome. It's good. I'm very, very innovative work. I really appreciate it.
Dave Nicolai:You know, as we're kind of wrapping up here, I had one quick question. If someone is out there listening and perhaps said, I'm not ready for the academy yet but I'd like to do a little pre work on my own. What are some online resources, cover crops soil health, and or opportunity to look up a cover crop tool in terms of the pros and cons and so forth. Can you talk a little bit about some other things that are accessible here in Minnesota?
Anna Cates:Yeah. Well, I've been a part of a couple of regional groups that have coalesced a bunch of these resources, brought them together. The Soil Health Nexus has a nice toolbox of different information about soil health and how to do demonstrations and what do you learn from doing different demonstrations with soil. The Minnesota or the sorry. The Midwest Cover Crop Council has a really important resource, which is the cover crop decision tool.
Anna Cates:A lot of people use that. So the cover crop decision tool is great if you're trying to figure out what cover crop to plant.
Dave Nicolai:Is that online?
Anna Cates:That's online. All on the website. Yep. Just Google the Midwest Cover Crops Decision Tool and it'll definitely come up. And they also have an online course that is a little bit similar to our academy, but significantly shorter and all online.
Anna Cates:They've been running that every fall. So you can do that in kind of a a more condensed it's more condensed than the academy, and you won't get the local network element. But if you just wanna be online, then it works.
Dave Nicolai:Super.
Seth:So I've you know, I'm the I'm the one that always throws out these large philosophical things. And I we're in a we're in an environment that it's probably difficult to predict. But thinking about cover crops, I always have to think of incentives. And you're doing a great job providing the information, the resources for folks to be successful in this. But because there's been some history of some resources available for farmers doing conservation practices in various formats.
Seth:Yep. And now we've seen these kind of ecosystem markets. We've seen tax credits in 45Z and things like this. There's a whole bunch of stuff all in this. So what's what's the future?
Seth:What where are we going? What do you what's gonna be the biggest driver in the future? Is it all political? Is it is it all financial? Is it where where what's gonna make the biggest impact beyond what you're doing?
Anna Cates:Right. So I think the way people make decisions around this is really dynamic. Some of the more recent social science research has brought into my mind that we shouldn't think of people as either cover crop adopters or not adopters or no tillers or tillers, but everyone's making a different decision on every field every year in some ways. And so when I think about the increasing adoption of a practice like cover crops, it has to keep making sense on more places for more different reasons every year. It can't just be, I do it on this field because I got my equip money.
Anna Cates:Although equip money is a great reason to do it. It's a great way to start to keep the risk low and and just make sure you get cash in your pocket to experiment with. So equip is great for that stuff. But but it has to make sense in a bunch of different ways. And the people who have figured out how to do this practice effectively, agronomically, they've got a effective agronomic system that includes cover crops.
Anna Cates:They aren't doing it just for the money. It's because they're, you know, profitable farmers who can do cover crops as part of their agronomics. It's just part of a whole system. So I think it's, you know, not the silver bullet, but the silver buckshot. Right?
Anna Cates:It's gotta make sense in different places for different reasons, whether that's because the wind erosion is is so bad that the farmers are taking a lot of local negative flak, which you do here in different parts of the state, or it's because the nitrate in the water is so high that, having something growing on the landscape is of, like, high, high value to the county, and then they pay more for it. Or it's because they just like how their field looks in the spring when it's green and when there's some tilth there, and so they don't have drowned out spots that they gotta work around for two weeks while everyone else is planting. So whatever it is, some combination of those reasons has to motivate different people in different spaces.
Seth:It's fantastic. Perfect answer to my question. I really appreciate it. So I'm gonna ruin your answer Mhmm. By drilling down on one of my little pets.
Anna Cates:Go for it.
Seth:I'm going to make this about me again here. So the question that I have is really how we motivate farmers over single year versus long term investments in their land. Know, farmers are driven by current economics, especially we're in a climate like we are today. Farmers are just trying to stay sustainability to farmer today, they probably will say, I want to be able to farm next year
Anna Cates:Yep.
Seth:As their primary sustainability statement. So how do you have any methods for communicating this piece and this friction between managing for one year versus managing for ten or twenty or forty years?
Anna Cates:This is something I I say sometimes, but it it's not as effective coming from me as it is from one of our farmer champions when they say, I'm doing this for my kids and my grandkids. I'm doing this because it means my land will still be in my family in fifty years. I don't think it will be otherwise. They say with the tenuous markets and all the uncertainties around farming, this is the only way I think I'm getting that security for the long term. So that's an emotional statement that's coming from a place of of protecting this investment of a family over multiple generations.
Anna Cates:It's also a financial statement. Right? It's also us, saying that this is how I think I'm gonna lower my risk. But it yeah. I I try to get other people to deliver that message because it comes with more power from someone who's doing it for themselves.
Anna Cates:But that that's how I think about it is that most people actually say these practices are the long term sustainability answer. And we'll see in the current crisis. You know, in a crisis, you either tighten down and sit tight or you're like, I gotta move. And so some people will do one and some people will do the other.
Seth:For sure. That's is this is part of the opportunity is we've got all these challenges, but there is there are small opportunities within it. So awesome.
Dave Nicolai:Well Anna, we've reached the end of our time for this podcast and as you said before in terms of the Academy there's always more.
Anna Cates:There's always more.
Dave Nicolai:So there's an opportunity you can go online learn more you can look at some of these various decision tools certainly can sign up for the academy you know for this next year and so on and don't forget your local soil and water conservation. That's right. In the end.
Anna Cates:Start with them if you don't know them reach out and see what works for you at their office.
Dave Nicolai:Air technicians and so forth yes and they are always I know helpful people and certainly can and if they don't know the answer they can typically find it or call or call you and so
Anna Cates:to speak.
Dave Nicolai:So thanks again Adam we appreciate you stopping by Any last words otherwise we're gonna close it out here today.
Anna Cates:Thanks for having me.
Dave Nicolai:Alright thank you very much. Well this has been another edition of the University of Minnesota podcast Minnesota CropCast. I've been your host Dave Nicolai, University of Minnesota Extension Educator in field crops. I've been here with my cohost Doctor. Seth Nave, University of Minnesota Extension soybean specialist and thanks for listening and we'll look forward to talking to you next time.
