Regenerative agriculture is the opposite of Degenerative agriculture. Research and innovative farmers are showing that no-till with cover crops increases net profit, organic matter, water quality, air quality and builds soil while reducing runoff. Regenerating soil allows farmers to literally gain more land and grow more crops profitably without losing tons of soil per year from degenerative farming. Mike Lessiter is president of Conservation Ag and the No-Till Farmer Magazine.
About Table Talk
The Farm To Table Talk podcast is a virtual table for conversations about ideas, insights, and journeys of chefs, farmers, policymakers, researchers, NGOs and the food-focused public about our food and how it is grown, prepared and shared throughout society. The host, Rodger Wasson is a food and agriculture veteran. Raised on his family’s farm in Central Illinois, he has worked for and with every size, type, and age of farmers and aspiring farmers. Whether new, old, big or small, they are all part of today’s food movement. The Farm to Table Talk podcasts are for those interested in journeys within the modern food system and the stories behind our every bite.
Contact rodger@idea-farming with your thoughts, suggestions or questions.
Full Transcript
I think lately the question that I run into the most is what is regenerative agriculture? And I struggle along with that and try to give my explanation, but my guest today has a perspective of talking about something related to it that I want to share because I found one new answer to say, well, it's not degenerative and it's regenerative and is a term, again, we all are kicking around. Degenerative is one that's not used that often, and it's used to describe practices that we have in farming that can be improved on a great deal. And I'm happy to welcome Mike Lessiter, who's the president of Conservation Agriculture.
And Mike, I met you up in Chicago at a regenerative agriculture meeting, a Regenerative for North America. I'm sitting there in the front row and I'm sitting at a table with you and seeing the speakers. And going through my mind again is all the comments I've had over the last several years and particularly saying, what's regenerative agriculture? And you and your organization and your father and the magazine and so forth. You were into regenerative agriculture before it was even fashionable, Mike. So it's about time you're on Farm To Table Talk. Welcome.
Mike Lessiter:
Well, thanks for having us. I really appreciate the opportunity and it was pleasure meeting you in the front row at the summit last month.
Mike, when you're seeing all these people, companies that are not only supplying farmers but also supplying consumers, jumping up there and talking about a regenerative agriculture, is it ever tempting for you to say, "Where have you been all these years?" Because it seems to me, as I looked through your magazine, as I looked on your website, you really were into all of this before it was fashionable. You're right on the front edge. And I think the front edge was back in the '70s, probably, maybe in some respects more than that, but really old agriculture, the principle of old agriculture was plowing. And what was it? Was it Henry McCormick that got the moldboard plow? What-
Mike Lessiter:
That's what John Deere's roots were in, was that self scouring plow that broke the plains.
What was it, late 1800s?
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah, but on the regenerative and sustainability front, my dad has been the editor of No-Till Farmer since 1972, and he's still in here working at it today. But yeah, he often... Someone will ask a similar question like you did today on the definitions of sustainability or regeneration. And what he got started in 1972 was a way to protect the soils, and soils were eroding at a very rapid pace in some parts of the country. In fact, people in Western Kentucky and Tennessee said they would've been left with beaches. That's how quickly the soils were eroding. So it was a practice, it was very, very maverick at its time in the late '60s, but was really what regenerated soils across the entire country and still working on that today. There's a long way to go still, but that's our piece is that soil piece of regeneration and trying not to till the soil any more than is absolutely necessary and sequester the carbon and let the microbiology do its work underneath the soils
When you go back 100 years or more, a little more than 100, when we started having the plow, it strikes me, Mike, it was like talking about AI now. It's like the cool thing. Everybody's saying what they've been able to do on ChatGPT or something like that. And it's really in. And yet it was almost like that it would seem back in 1800s. So we had these plows and said, let's just plow up everything and not all soil is created equal.
And so I'm wondering, when you look across the country, is it any coincidence where that topsoil was thinner to start with? Say, out in Oklahoma and what led to the Dust Bowl years and so forth where you could probably abuse soil where I grew up in Central Illinois and get away with it because you had topsoil that was like six foot deep black and lots of organic material, and so it could take a lot of abuse, but there's much of the country couldn't take that abuse. And we ended up having dust bowls and we had all these other terrible things. You would think it wouldn't have taken us that long to learn that lesson.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, but that's very traditional farming. Granddad did it a certain way. People would say, it was good enough for dad or granddad, it's good enough for me. But the world has changed. And a lot of those soils that were on hilly land, a lot of soils were lost and ended up in the ditches or in the neighbor's field or the rivers. Like I said, the most stark examples in our country were in the hilly western Kentucky, Tennessee, where they had to do something different. They were losing so much soil that they had to try something new, and they found their solution through no-till. That had been studied at a handful of land-grant universities in the early '60s. The first commercial plot of no-till went in 1962.
So in a well-entrenched industry like agriculture, that 60-year period isn't all that much, but a lot of change came in there from the early '60s. The first piece of equipment was released in late '60s by Alice Chalmers. Up until then, the farmers had to figure it out themselves with their own torches and welders and trying to find equipment to fit. But yeah, 1972, when my dad started, No-Till Farmer, the entire acreage could've fit within the state of New Jersey, 3.3 million acres. Now it's 110 million acres today, but it's still a lot of room for growth.
When I got out of college, and it was close to that time almost, but I had a chance to become a farm director, and I had a radio program, and this was like a frontier yet at that time. And people would say, gee whiz, when they start explaining of what you could do, which is strange because in some respects it's like, don't do as much. I mean, you're not getting equipment out in the fall and trying to plow everything up as soon as you can, just get it bare naked, strip everything off. You can get off the top of it and then start plowing and then leave that ground out there uncovered naked to go through the next four or five months before it got warm enough that you could work it again and disk it, disk it, disk it. And people could go across the country and they think they were being complimentary because they say, "Look at that. Look at that nice black soil," but what they weren't seeing was how much of it was blown away or being washed away or the nutrients that weren't being able to be saved in the soil
Mike Lessiter:
Related to that story. There was the smell of earth after Tillageville. There's a lot of farmers who like that smell and they equate it to productivity and efficiency and doing a good job. But we had a grower who told us that he now equates that smell to the smell of death, the killing of the earthworms, the killing of the microbial activity that was at work underneath that top soil, the carbon that's forever lost to the atmosphere. And that was an interesting comment to hear from this farmer who's a longtime grain producer here in Iowa, in the state of Iowa.
That smell, I know what he's talking about. And some of the people listening to Farm To Table Talk aren't farmers themselves, but they're a fan of farming. Some of them are gardeners and they can experience a little bit of the same thing even in their own gardens when you go out and stick a spade in the ground. And that rich smell that you're talking about, that odor from it is really, really different. But this is the first time I've ever heard one somebody describe it as you just have as far as that's rather than something to be celebrated and that's something to say, oh, this odor that you're getting is the process of it dying. And the other thing people could relate to maybe in their own yards or their gardens or their farms, is whether or not you get any earthworms at all when you can go... Again, and years ago, I remember when you can decide you're going fishing and you could go stick a spade in the ground anywhere and get earthworms to put on a hook and catch some fish at the local pond. And that's gone too.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. The earthworms are very, very important to the no tiller. They're doing the work. They're moving things around and bringing nutrients. And we know of farmers who stop on a rainy day, get out of their truck and pick up the earthworms of the road to take them into their fields-
Really?
Mike Lessiter:
... and let them populate and just keep doing the work underneath that's so important in a no-till system.
Are you kidding? I didn't know that. So you can see a cloud of dirt that fell off a machinery or something on the road, get off and see a worm climb down, take it. Do you have to have breeding the worms? You got to have a couple of worms to have a litter or something like that?
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, I think a handful of worms will get you started. And the big thing, the reason why earthworms like no-till fields is because-
The big thing, the reason why earthworms like no-till fields is because feed for them all year long, the soil is covered with a cover crop or the standing soybean or corn residue and they can feed that. They can drag that down and feed off it all year long. That's a very big indicator of a strong soil system is the number of earthworms that are in there.
I think that's just fascinating. I think of, gee, my mind is racing ahead and deciding if I could be an earthworm breeder, it wouldn't take as big a farm. But when you look at this now I'm thinking your dad got started in this and you started a magazine in this. What was the inspiration back then? The recognition that there's something here and something worth sharing with other people. Here you are, the company's been going for all these years working on this, the job's not done yet, but tell me about that inspiration. Was there a light that went off that said, "Okay, this is where we really want to dig in and spend the next several decades,"?
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, it was an opportunity for our family. My dad is a lifelong ag journalist, but up until that time was mostly on the cattle producing side. There was a publisher here in Milwaukee who had also... Alice Chalmers was here in Milwaukee and they were coming out with their no-till coulter system. This publisher by the name of Roy Ryman here in town recognized that these farmers didn't know to how to use the no-till system. There was virtually nothing written about it. There was no books at the time. There was obviously no videos or podcasts like you're doing here, Roger. He asked my dad to relocate from Chicago to come and run this new No-Till Farmer publication. That was in I-team-seventy-two. I remember the day we moved to Milwaukee, I was a kid.
Dad produced the publication for this other publisher for the first nine years and then bought it himself. He and my mother or bought the publication, went out on their own, it's Lessiter Publications at the time. My dad was learning right alongside the farmers as they were learning. He kept going back to that original farmstead in Kentucky where the first commercial plot was going on. Spent a lot of time with the research farms, the land grant universities just to try to peel back nugget after nugget, successes as well as failures, calling out the landmines for others was just as important as talking about the successes. He was on a mission to help other farmers grow more profitably, take on more acres with less labor, save those soils from ending up in the gullies and ditches. It's been a really great ride for him and our company and all the farmers that we're working with.
It's really interesting to hear of a journey like that and to be committed to something that makes a difference. Comment, if you will, on that, on the progress. I'm sure from what you've said already and what I've read, you'd like it to go even faster than it has, but in that 50 some years since then, how's it going? Is it generally plodding along the country? Is some areas doing better than others? How would you characterize the progress?
Mike Lessiter:
We would characterize it as stagnant. It is still growing, but at a small rate. The attention to cover crops has brought more interest into no-till, because they work so hand-in-hand with one another. In fact, our no-till audience is among the greatest users of cover crops. The idea of keeping the soil covered all the time with a living organism there, that's a big trend and that's been helpful. But the soybeans are predominantly no-tilled corn. There's a lot of room to grow and part of that is that the challenges of handling the corn residue are more intense than they are with other crops. To do this, it requires a big management change. Got to do things differently when you're no-tilling than just the conventional, grab the plow and get out there with it.
Well, and when I think about leaving the previous crop, if you're going in on a field that was soybeans and had done very, very little to it and you chomp them down a little bit, if not a disc or something else, but you go right in and you can see how the equipment could be drilled or planted on top of what have been soybean stubble in a field unworked. But corn stalks are big and bulky and I would imagine it's a lot harder for machinery to chop through to place a seed if there's a lot of corn stalk left on a field.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. There was an inventor in Kentucky by the name of Howard Martin who came out with the row cleaner in the seventies just to move just a little bit of the residue aside to have the room to get that seed into the ground. There are ways to do it. There's less drilling on the corn side, of course, but there are ways to make it happen. A lot of that stock, when the earthworms are doing their job, they're helping to manage some of that residue as well.
Well, and then as you get this crop planted and it hasn't had a... Minimum till up to that stage and you're getting in and you're getting a crop planted, what happens next that's different at this stage? At what stage does the cover crop coming into play?
Mike Lessiter:
The cover crop is, and we're on a big upswing in interest in cover crops, but the idea there is that the soil's covered all the time. The fact that it's a living plant is going through all the necessary changes that keep the soil healthy and bringing nutrients into the roots that back when you plant your commercial crop, that those nutrients are there for the corner of the soybean to draw from. It's keeping the soils in place. The cover crops have good root structures, so it keeps the soil locked in and tethered when wind and flood come into the place.
But yeah, a lot of people who are... Economically, people are seeing the advantage of planting a cover crop in late summer after they've taken their crop off, or early fall as it may be wherever you are, and then coming back and killing that cover crop in the spring to allow the quarter of the soybean to grow. That can also be done nowadays through crimping with a mechanical device that sort of snaps the stem of the cover crop and so it kills it at the right time so the corn can then pop up and flourish.
Now, you're bringing up something that is a little bit controversial, because in some cases people that have been critical of saying regenerative agriculture and the use of cover crops in the Midwest say that, "Yeah, but they're using a product like glyphosate to be able to kill a product, kill a soil." Obviously, glyphosate has become controversial and we could have many podcasts about glyphosate per se and applying Roundup, but what's the status of how much of is that used as a stage versus other things that they can do to be able to make this transition? What else is there other than using products like glyphosate to be able to kill off that cover crop and be able to get the new crop started?
Mike Lessiter:
I think glyphosate is commonly used for this purpose, but the roller crimper is the more exciting thing. We heard it discussed at the summit, too. This is a pulled implement like a barrel drum that has metal welded in place that will kill that stem. They call it planting green where you would plant into a green living cover crop system and you can, these mechanical devices on these rollers will snap that stem and so then it will slowly die. That can be done without chemicals. That's a mechanical cover crop weed control.
The other thing in this transition, whatever dies off, is actually starting the next transition, too, because that material that's killed, that's in the cover crop, actually starts and making it rich. Let's talk about the feed that the soil is needing. How do you differentiate the impact of needing to feed the soil with traditional nutrients? What implications are there for how much MPK and maybe even nitrogen in particular is used or not used because of these practices?
Mike Lessiter:
We might be getting a little bit out of my depth, Roger, there, but we do know more people are moving to cover crops because it allows them to cut down on their other applied inputs, like you just mentioned. There are a lot of reasons to look to conservation ag practices, save the soil, save the environment.
To conservation ag practices, save the soil, save the environment, sequester carbon. But what really moves the needle is the economic side. And that's when we see farmers studying this and the fact that, as we heard at the conference, there were some who've moved and significantly cut their fertilizer costs back as a result of moving to practices like this. Maybe not entirely but significant cutbacks because of what cover crops can do for them.
Well, I'm used to being out of my depth, so I'm going to plunge in one more angle in as I think that in addition to wondering about that, the other things that farms have to worry about are insects, fungus, weeds, and without your having to have the PhD in that subject, all of these areas are touched on somewhat, aren't they? And that some of the practices, some of the mix of the procedures of the no-till and even the choice of cover crops and so forth, they do have implications in some cases, don't they, for these other issues? See, I'm just proving I can skirt along on the edge of beyond my depth.
Mike Lessiter:
Well, in the conventional no-till practice that we're in, and I'll use conventional because there's broad, broad spectrums of them, these farmers are not using tillage to kill the weeds that are existing. And that's a whole nother study on the expensive tillage equipment you need and the endless hours to do those jobs and to burn the diesel fuel that's all involved in that. But yes, for the conventional no-tiller the most important pieces of equipment are not the tractor, they don't have the heavy horsepower dragging things around, but it's the planter or drill and then most of them have a sprayer that they will use to control the weeds and to apply fertilizer with them. So yeah, it's entirely possible that a no-tiller is doing more application work than someone who's tearing up the soil to get rid of the weeds out there.
Yeah. Well, and I think that you point out something I've heard before and that is that even organic farming applies materials that are approved for certified organic well, and so if you start incorporating spraying into it too, that can be a part of the practices. It's quite an interesting mix.
Now to make these transitions to go this direction I've also seen some say it may take a couple years before it's quite paying off and just looking through the materials that I saw from your organization and from the magazine is that one of the complaints is some people say, boy, times are tough and for a couple years it might not be as good as the conventional was as far as it's a little less profitable. It takes a while to build the soil up before you're at a spot that you're much more profitable. Did I get that right? And that was the impression I got?
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, I might modify the... Yes, there would be a lot of people who would agree with what you just said. I think maybe an important distinction is you have farmers who measure themselves by yield. They want to talk to their neighbor at the coffee shop about their yields, and there can be a yield loss. However, the farmers nowadays who are on the ball care less about yield but care far more about profit. And so by a lot of calculations no-till can be very much more profitable even if the yield suffers because there's less capital equipment, you need smaller equipment, smaller tractors, you can farm more land with less labor because you're not dragging the tillage tools across the field numerous times a year. So yeah, I think that the farmers that we are most impressed with out there are studying profit not yield.
You mentioned something else, this dragging stuff across the fields because one thing that wasn't an issue when your father was getting started with this publication that's become an issue is climate issues and carbon. And I can't remember exactly when that started happening, but when people started making the point, look, if you're turning soil over, let alone burning gasoline or diesel to run the equipment back and forth over fields, you're creating more carbon in the atmosphere. And I don't remember exactly when it was, it might've been the '80s or '90s that people started paying attention to, wait a minute, this is not a good thing to keep throwing more carbon in the atmosphere that there will be eventually climate change. And then we've gone through stages of people that were against admitting to climate change and then saying, well, there's something going on. But still it's been kind of plotting in a certain direction of more and more concern with carbon.
So how have you dealt with that? I mean, there are incentives to reduce carbon right now, there have been government grants and so forth, but just even covering this issue as a magazine that's working in this area, how have you dealt with that? Because it's gone through stages of being somewhat controversial to even admit it's in an issue and then we've kind of evolved beyond that and we've got people in programs now that are trying to deal with carbon and incentives to it. So where does this all come together?
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, so that's a good question. I think we are mostly a publication of practical operation, like helping farmers learn how to farm better by talking to other farmers who've done it or who have made a mistake. And that's where we believe our place in the world is on practical farmer-to-farmer sharing. I think that it's become pretty universally accepted that sequestering the carbon is a good thing by all means. You'll have some farmers who might debate... I think obviously our weather patterns are changing out there, I think that's accepted. I think there's some debate on whether it can be controlled or not. But most people I talk to universally accept that keeping the carbon where it belongs there under the soil is a good thing.
And so that as a baseline has been good and has brought some more attention to no-till years ago you wouldn't see no-till as your cover crops being talked about on the Wall Street Journal and you do with some regularity today because it's a major trend and there has been funding made available to help farmers make that transition into no-till. One of the things I'll tell you that I'm excited about, and it's part of the audience that I understand you cover, Roger, is that the food companies are starting to care and have ESG statements that say that the practices of the farmers they're going to buy from is important to them.
And for us, we think that's a great opportunity, great excitement and I've tried to tell people that, food companies in particular, if you wanted to spend $1 and know that you'll get an [inaudible 00:30:20] out of it, put it into farmer education and to help support those farmers to make the transition because a transition is needed. It's not an easy process to go from farming like dad and granddad did it to using these regenerative and conservation ag practices that exist today and we need to help bridge those processes for wellbeing.
Now, I'm glad you mentioned that people are critical of big companies oftentimes for what they call greenwashing, that they're trying to get a good public opinion about doing the right thing. But I think, well, that's fine. I mean, if they in fact are for doing the right thing, and I think in these companies you're seeing are saying, look, we're going to purchase food and we should use purchasing power to encourage these practices that are good for the earth and good in the long run. And I applaud them. I think that, but what we are talking about today is pretty hard to fit on the label. So if you've got a product, and I don't remember all of the products I've looked at that had stories of the farmers and what the farmers are doing and what the company's doing to encourage the farmers, and I love it.
And I've talked to some of the farmers that are supplying them and they say, no, it's a good thing. Although every once in a while they complain, they think they're kind of bossy and they're dealing with a customer who can say, gee, I want you to do this, I want you to do that. You can see how you might say, hey, ease up a little bit. Because there's always, pricing is a part of these issues as well. But still, progress is taking place. Not everybody has an opportunity to talk about it for half an hour like we are, Mike, and someday they should. There should be a little button or a QR code on all of these labels and they can go to Farm To Table Talk and say, let's hear Mike and Roger talk about it. And we may help them sell more of the right kind of cereal or something at that stage of the game. So bring it on.
But I want to go back to something at the beginning and that is this term like degenerative agriculture, and I hadn't really thought of that and I've probably seen it before. But all of a sudden it kind of clicked, when I think about all the times I'm trying to explain why people are excited about regenerative, but I've mentioned it to someone this morning in fact and said, well, if you can just think of it as the opposite of degenerative-
... Act and said, "Well, if you can just think of it as the opposite of degenerative."
And they get a kind of quizzical look and say, "Huh, well, that's interesting." So why is that term degenerative useful and what is it that's describing, what would be degenerative agriculture?
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, I like this question and frankly I had not pondered this either until you brought it up today. And I guess I'd answer it this way. While regenerative and sustainable agriculture have numerous definitions and everyone seems to have a different definition, we learned at the conference there was 18 different definitions of sustainability, I believe it was. But the flipping the question like you just did to identify what would be degenerative, this is something I think pretty much all systems would be able to agree upon, is that tillage is a destructive, degenerative process. It is destroying soil. Now they come back, I'm not bad-mouthing everyone who uses a discer out there, but that is a destructive action. No one's ever been able to advance a scientific reason for ploughing, and that's the famous Edward Faulkner line from the book that he wrote that influenced so much of this. But I think that in no till, strip till cover crops, the other regenerative processes can kind of all point to heavy tillage as being a degenerative act. And I think that's where you can find agreements among all these definitions, as you said.
Yeah. Well, gee, I'm glad I was able to bring something up that helped you along, because you've helped me along a lot. And one more idea that I got from reading your latest magazine was this idea that any farmer would like to have more farm for the most part. I do know some that are intentionally trying to shrink down to reasonable sizes anymore. And if you're not using regenerative practices, you are in fact giving up land.
But we are used to looking at land like it's square feet instead of cubic feet, but the land is deep and wide maybe. And rather than only looking on the width, the depth, which the depth can include the quality and the life, and so forth in the soil, and maintaining the cover crop, that's something that we're going to have to have a few more podcasts over here on how to articulate that. And it seems like we need to be able to be working on a whiteboard or something to show this, but that idea is that both preservation, but you can also not only preserve it, but build it, when you're not letting that good soil your farm blow away or wash away, or put more sediment into streams and so forth. That seems like an intriguing frontier. Sign me up, Mike.
Mike Lessiter:
It's interesting, because we're working on a special project right now that we are... The farmers, while they own a portion of their land, almost all of them have to rent land locally to find the scale to make this business work. And we are on a project right now to help educate the landowner. And this was a non-farming landowner who owns 500 acres in the town next over. We are preparing a project to help them understand why renting to a farmer who practices conservation is in their good best long-term interest, not just the rent check they're getting, but how they are saving the soil in the microbiology and the organic matter for generations yet to come. And that's been a fun project, because instead of talking to farmers like we normally do, we're trying to talk to a landowner operator on why they should give a fair shake to the farmers who are practicing conservation.
That's a really important point too, because otherwise somebody that's leasing the land and so many of today's commercial size farmers have to lease land. They can't get the scale without getting some extra land. But if you're not sure you're going to have it forever. And in some cases converting may take a couple of years that you're not making as much progress, then there's not the incentive for that farmer necessarily thinking that, "Gee, this lease may be gone in another year." They're not committing to the long term. So trying to have that perspective with the landowner is, I think that's really important. And that reminds me of something else that I came across. And I think, again, I'm going to plug in your magazine as if I work for your magazine and I don't-
Mike Lessiter:
Thank you, Rodge.
... something else. I know, I know.
But there was one example that when Jim Mosley was the undersecretary of agriculture. I knew Jim and went in to see him in Washington, DC, and Jim has a farm kind of halfway between Indianapolis and West Lafayette, Indiana where Purdue is. And then I saw in your magazine, he was one of the early people to really embrace the whole system of no-till. And that doesn't surprise me, because he was very progressive. But I stopped to see Jim one time in Indiana, and he was telling me about how people would beat a path to a widow's door when the farmer passed away. And it was just so competitive to try to get the land and try to be the first person to get to the couple that had retired, had gone to town or something, and they're having to give up the farming. But there was a certain kind of ugliness to the whole thing as far as how competitive it was. But that aggressive competitiveness to get this extra land is also a disincentive to do what it takes when it takes a couple of years to build it up.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, that's a great point. And yes, it is highly, highly competitive. Just in February, I went to an event for landowners on no-till that was held out on a farm just outside of Indianapolis. And I was delighted to have made the acquaintance with an elderly woman there, who came to learn about no-till and cover crops, but she knew a few things about it. And as she told the group that she so wanted her soils taken care of, that she did the research and bought the cover crop seed, and helped get her local farmer off the ground with these practices that he'd wanted to do for many years. But as you just mentioned, the investment was high and she said, "I'll do it myself. I want it done on my land, I want to know it." And she got him going and she received applause from the others there for having cared enough to make it happen on our land. But if we could get more of that, everything would be in a much better place out there.
Hey, Mike, if you chase her down, I guarantee you I'll have her as a guest on Farm to Table Talk.
Mike Lessiter:
I have her name. I'll try to connect the two of you.
I think it'd be great to be able to have someone that's helping from, and there's people that are listening to this Mike that are intrigued. They've stayed with us on this. This is an unusual conversation. And some of them are farmers, probably an awful lot of them aren't farmers, but they care about how their food is produced and they're the ones that are also probably applauding the larger companies that are saying they're trying to create incentives too. They want more information. For some, it might be that they go on your website to get started or they might go get to your magazine. How would you suggest, how could they find you? How can they find information that can help them become half as enthusiastic as you are already? But they're saying, "Look, we want to be disciples of this technology, that it makes sense." Where do they find the information?
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, I think that two very easy URLs to remember would be notillfarmer.com, and we have a lot of great content, free content, including a getting started section. And then our other one, which could be very valuable for someone exploring cover crops, would be www.covercropstrategies.com.
Covercropstrategies.com. And I would also just make the point that this is not just a US issue. This is certainly Canada, really all over the world, isn't it?
Mike Lessiter:
Mm-hmm.
Yes. And we have listeners pretty much, as you might guess, mostly English-speaking countries around the world that are paying attention, and hopefully they're going to be jumping on the bandwagon and invite them to get in touch with me as well, because I love these stories of people doing the right thing and it's the right thing for them, the right thing for Earth. And it can go all the way from the farmers themselves and to the eaters,, and the chefs in between and the companies that are delivering the food. So Mike, Mike Lassiter, thanks a lot for being on Farm to Table Talk. I enjoyed our conversation. We need to do it again sometime.
Mike Lessiter:
Yes. I really enjoyed meeting you last month in Chicago, Rodger. I know you were a long way from home, but just making the acquaintance and if anything we can do to help, let us know. I appreciate the offer to join you here today.
Thanks.
