It’s no secret that our farmers, ranchers and producers have particularly demanding jobs, which can be physically and mentally exhausting. Lesley Kelly is the farmer behind the popular blog, “High Heels and Canola Fields,” and a passionate advocate for supporting mental health within the agriculture industry. She joins us to discuss the emotional toll of farming, particularly during this time of unprecedented uncertainty, and shares the small steps that anyone can take toward improving their mental well-being.

The following is an edited transcript of Michelle Michael’s interview with Lesley Kelly. Click below to hear the full audio.

Michelle:       Hello! I'm Michelle Michael. In this special series of AgFuture, we're talking with those working along the food supply chain about the impact of COVID-19. My guest today is Lesley Kelly. Lesley, you're the head and the heart behind the blog called High Heels and Canola Fields. You're a wife, you're a mother and a farmer from Saskatchewan, and we want to talk to you today about one of your many passions: mental health. Lesley, you believe the success of any farm operation hinges on the well-being of the farmer, and you personally make mental health a priority, and you don’t shy away from talking about mental health. Tell us about yourself and your family, and how did you begin down this path?

Lesley:           Yeah. Well, thank you, first and foremost, for having me. Mental health is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and what I've been trying to do over the last few years is reduce that stigma and break that silence that so many of us in agriculture are living in. Ten years ago, if you would've said I would become a mental health advocate, it wasn't even on my radar, but through struggles within my family, seeing my friends go through struggles, our fellow farmers, it really became a priority — especially a couple of years ago, after my husband and I did a live video sharing our mental health journey. I shared that I had postpartum depression after our second child was born, and my husband, a farmer, is living with anxiety mainly attributed to farm stress. So, we did this live video sharing what we had done together as a team and individually to really help overcome those challenges, and the reception we got afterwards was nothing that we've had or could have ever anticipated. That, really then, was the catalyst for myself and three other individuals in Saskatchewan for starting a not-for-profit called Do More Agriculture that is championing the mental well-being of our producers.

Michelle:       Before you started down this path of making mental health a priority, were you aware that there was so much of a need for this?

Lesley:           No. It wasn't until we did the video, because we kept thinking — my husband, Matt, and I kept thinking, "Are we alone in this?" After hearing from a few friends about their struggles, we thought, “There must be more of us out there.” We aired the video, and afterwards — after we pressed "stop" — the text messages, the phone calls, the direct messages, the social media, it blew up. It wasn't anything that we ever thought (would happen), and 99% of it was positive. People were looking for hope, and people were looking for that extra bit of encouragement to raise their hand and say, "You know what? I am going through something" or "I have gone through something and I didn’t know where to go or who to talk to or what to say." That really made us look at mental health as not just us but, really, an industry that needed more help and support and resources.

Michelle:       Absolutely. You have quite a following on your blog and on your social media sites, and you seem so passionate about mental health. You mentioned previously, you talked about the organization that you co-founded, Do More Agriculture Foundation. Can you talk about the specific goals of that foundation?

Lesley:           We are trying to do three things. The first one is to increase awareness about mental health. Our industry — agriculture — we haven't really talked about mental health in the past, so there is a lot of unknown. We're trying to bring awareness to agriculture as to what mental health is and what it takes for our farmers to be mentally well. The second is to create community. Our landscape in agriculture is changing. More people are moving to the cities. Our small towns are decreasing in size. It really takes a community to help our farmers around us, so we're trying to change that and build community, whether it's online or at events, and create a hub of resources, that community of health, so farmers know where to go if they are having a hard time. The third is research. We're trying to help those in research to understand what farmers need when it comes to support and knowing more about mental health in agriculture.

Michelle:       I wonder if mental health is more of an issue in agriculture — or is it around the world, globally, in all professions, and it's just now being talked about in agriculture?

Lesley:           Yeah. When it comes to mental health in agriculture, there are so many unknowns. It has been a recent discussion over the past couple of years that has come more to light. I have been part of campaigns where farming and agriculture was included, and it is a societal concern, but that societal concern — moving that needle, having a positive discussion — has then transcended into agriculture to help start those conversations. I do believe it is a worldwide concern, and I hope that, in agriculture, we can continue the positive momentum that we've had the last couple of years of starting a conversation and keeping it going.

Michelle:       It's no secret that farmers and ranchers have very demanding jobs. You know that firsthand. At times like these, amidst COVID-19 — it's unprecedented, but at times like these, there's economic uncertainty. There's vulnerability, still, to weather. There's isolation, which is obviously worse on someone who already suffers from something like anxiety or depression. What words of encouragement or advice do you have for fellow producers out there during this crisis?

Lesley:           Farming is an amazing lifestyle. It's an amazing industry to be in. Our roots are established in strength and perseverance, but sometimes, that could be a weakness, where you put your head down and work through it, and sometimes, that might not be the best. So, what we're trying to encourage in those around us — there are three main things, and that's to talk, ask and listen. By doing these three small things, you could really make a big impact on yourself and those around you. When we say “talk,” we want people to talk more about mental health. Talk to your family, your friends, your fellow farmers. Check in on them and talk about mental health. We don’t want these conversations to be hushed, because we know that if it just takes one person to raise their hand and say, "Hey, I need help," that could be a catalyst for encouraging others to get help that they need, too.

                        The second is to ask, and that really means to check in on people around you. Ask how they are doing. Also, check in and ask yourself how you are feeling. The third is to listen. I know that by listening, you don’t have to be an expert when it comes to mental health, but listening to someone — taking all of their struggles and pouring them out, taking the weight of the world off of their shoulders — can be a life-saving difference. It could make a life-saving impact. Also, listen to yourself and ask how you can help yourself through a really, really hard time.

Michelle:       Do you think farmers feel additional pressure at this time to keep the food supply chain moving, or is this business as usual for farmers?

Lesley:           Well, I'm not too sure about the pressure to keep it going as a farmer. I know, with us, seeding is right around the corner, and our goal is to keep putting that crop in every year. We're facing some worry and anxiety around will we have enough crop input supply, or what will that do to transportation if our plant or tractor break down? Will there be parts available? I can see or I've heard from other parts of the supply chain how they have more pressure. Transportation, frontline staff at grocery stores — that's where, probably, right now, is the most pressure.

Michelle:       I love what's happening in the background here, because it shows everyone is trying to maintain a sense of normalcy when nothing in the world feels normal right now. Is that your children at the background?

Lesley:           Yes. They are hungry, I believe.

Michelle:       Maybe you can explain to us how you're managing, because we talked about how, when you have something like anxiety or depression, you already feel isolated, and the social distancing might make it worse. How can somebody combat those feelings of isolation during this time? What advice do you have for them on how to maintain relationships and positivity when they feel so isolated and, quite frankly, are distanced from their loved ones in some ways?

Lesley:           Yeah. Right now, I can see for myself, being so extroverted, that I'm having a hard time being away from my family and friends. I think the one thing, once COVID is past us, on the top of my list is hugging my mom and my dad, who I haven't been able to see.

                        What I would encourage others who are having a hard time and need that connection with people is to keep continuing to reach out. What anxiety and depression do to us is they make us go into a box. They make us become distant, but continue to put that step forward. Every day, for me, it's making a goal that I'm going to check in on this person. I'm going to send a text, and not just a text saying, "Hey, how are you doing?" but even further, sharing what that person means to you because you haven't been able to see them in such a long time. Then, on the flipside is if you know in the past of someone who has had mental health challenges, who is going through a mental illness, for you to reach out to them, to have that text, send that text, to do that virtual call, because those can make a world of difference.

                        What my husband and I are doing right now inside of our home is we're journaling. We're doing art classes. We're trying to do as many family things to bring that connectedness home, and then the one thing that really helps my husband and I is to get outside, get that fresh air, feel that sun, do things, check off things on the to-do list that really make that anxiety lessen as we're coming into the seeding and planting season.

Michelle:       Figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that, at least here in America, those who work in agriculture have some of the highest suicide rates of any professional group. Is there a similar concern or a problem where you are?

Lesley:           Yeah. We actually, in Canada, we don’t have any stats on farmer suicides, but yeah, we've looked to our friends in the States who have that research, and it is very — that's a hard number to hear, so my goal, by me talking about mental health, being an advocate, co-founding Do More, is to ultimately change those numbers.

Michelle:       Farmers, of course, are often in rural areas with very limited access, in some cases, to mental healthcare. How does this compound an already escalating problem?

Lesley:           Yeah. There are so many things that, as farmers, we face that are outside of our control, whether (it’s the) economy, like what you've mentioned, but then, it's (also) our access to support. During harvest or calving, as a farmer, it's very, very hard just to pick up and leave and drive four to five hours into the city to get that support — and then, sometimes, that support might not understand farming. They might not understand the world of agriculture and that it's not a nine-to-five job, that there are so many layers and so many things that are happening on the farm. So, at Do More Ag, what we're trying to do is bring that support — to know what support is out there and then bring that support to agriculture, so those that are servicing us understand our world and we can help our farmers.

Michelle:       What are some of those resources that are out there for farmers? Where can they find help dealing with this additional stress and anxiety that everyone is feeling right now?

Lesley:           Well, for us up in Canada, first and foremost, they can go to our website at domore.ag, where we have a list of resources that are set out provincially, but those who are in the States, they can look to their extensions. There are so many resources right now that are online, especially during COVID, that you can access on your computer or you can text support or you can call someone, whether that could be a mental health service hotline or your local hospital.

Michelle:       Are there any certain signs, certain telltale symptoms, that farmers should be aware of and acknowledge for themselves so that they know they're headed down a dangerous path?

Lesley:           Yeah. When it comes to mental health, it might look different for everyone, but my biggest advice when I'm chatting with others about those signs and those symptoms is that we all know our normals and those normals of people around us. If their acting or if their behaviors or feelings or thoughts are outside of that typical normal, that's where that could be a red flag to start to have those discussions about mental health. For my husband, his farm stress — what we saw him go through is he stopped eating. He stopped sleeping. One of the biggest physical signs was he started to have panic attacks where he couldn't breathe, excessive sweating, just racing thoughts of worry and anxiety, so that made us really realize that it's something — it wasn't just a little bit of worry and then work through it.

                        For me, having postpartum, I became quite emotional. It was hard for me to call a friend. I really became socially distant, isolated. The other part with Matt, what I saw — and this could be (common) with those on the farm — is he had a really hard time making just day-to-day decisions. Just small decisions, they really stopped him in his track. That was when we saw each other outside of our normals and said, "Hey, I think that something is going on that's bigger than what we first anticipated."

Michelle:       Yeah. That goes right along with my next question. When farmers ignore mental health, just like chronic pain, poor mental health can make it difficult to manage everyday stressors in farmers' lives. How were you personally impacted, or what is the worry beyond just what you had to do on the farm?

Lesley:           Yeah. Mental health is not something that just affects the individual person. I had personal experience that, when someone is suffering from a mental health challenge or distress or an illness, it really impacts the whole family. It can impact the farming operation. You really need that support system, that rally of people, your cheerleaders around you, to help you get through it, because sometimes, for Matt, he didn’t think anything was wrong. It was something that was his normal for so long, so it really took us to champion and help him through that really hard time, but it can impact day-to-day operations. It can impact your sales. It can impact getting the crop in the ground. It can impact during calving season. It's not just an impact of your mental health. Mental health can impact everything in your life if it's not addressed or if you don’t have the proper mental health techniques to get you through those hard times.

Michelle:       Right now, especially, there seems to be a renewed sense of appreciation for farmers. People are showing appreciation more than ever before. Store shelves are stocked with milk and eggs and everything, for that matter. I've talked to farmers and producers firsthand who are hearing for the first time ever, "Thank you." Does that help with mental health from an agricultural perspective?

Lesley:           I don’t know, as farmers, if we do look for that recognition. I know, for my husband and I, it's the lifestyle and showing our kids a new experience or life lessons that come from the farm, but when it comes to consumers that are in a different world, if they're in the cities and something that's so far removed from agriculture or farming, when they see how we do as farmers — the 2% of us (who) impact so many things, whether it's the economy, getting food on the table — that "thank you" could really mean a world of difference to someone who is going through a really hard time.

Michelle:       From the consumer end of things, is there anything that we can do to bolster the feelings of love and appreciation toward our farmers and our food producers around the world, especially when they're working so hard to feed us during this pandemic?

Lesley:           Oh, that's a big question. For me, it would be to continue supporting your farmers. Continue buying that food. You know what? What makes me smile at the end of the day is just connecting with people now, through social distancing or physical distancing. It's getting to understand other people's world, and if I have the opportunity to connect with someone who lives in the city and hear those words of support and love and that kindness that the world needs right now, that, to me, really brings a smile to my face.

Michelle:       What do you think might change in regards to mental health after this crisis is over? How will it change us?

Lesley:           I'm being quite optimistic. I'm looking at it as, now, because of our world going through something that is so unforeseen, mental health is a priority. People will be looking at mental health as one of the top things that they need to make a priority — (and) make themselves a priority. I'm also looking forward to seeing the changes of the mental health support. We all love to go into or would like to have that face-to-face contact with someone, but as farmers, we might not have that luxury, so I'm seeing and hope to see even more support, whether it's texting, calling or those virtual conferences of bringing support to people who might not be able to get that face-to-face connection.

Michelle:       Lesley Kelly is our guest today. Her goal is quite simple: to make the agriculture industry stronger and, quite simply, to break down the culture of toughness encouraged among farmers so that they, too, can discuss mental health. Lesley, thank you so much for joining us today.

Lesley:           Thank you for having me.

Michelle:       For additional resources on COVID-19, visit Alltech.com.

Click here for additional COVID-19 resources.

This episode is part of a special AgFuture series on the impact of COVID-19 on the food supply chain. Join us to hear how those on the frontlines of the global pandemic are working to overcome adversity and feed the world.

Hosted by Michelle Michael

As lead video producer at Alltech, Michelle travels the globe for the company’s award-winning Planet of PlentyTM documentary series. Michelle spent a decade as a video producer/reporter in Germany, reporting from military hotspots at the height of the war on terrorism. The National Press Photographer's Association (NPPA) has twice recognized Michelle as their solo video journalist of the year.

Co-produced by Brandon Whitworth

As the senior media production specialist at Alltech, Brandon co-produces the company’s award-winning Planet of Plenty TM documentary series. Brandon is a two-time Emmy Award winning television news photojournalist and three-time nominee. He has received several regional awards from the National Press Photographers Association for excellence in visual storytelling.

As COVID-19 continues to impact communities around the world, the strength of the global food supply chain must be maintained. We spoke with Andrea Capitani, business manager for Alltech Italy, who shares how those working on the frontlines are overcoming adversity to provide food for families. What can we learn from one of the hardest-hit regions of the world?

This episode is part of a special AgFuture series on the impact of COVID-19 on the food supply chain. Join us to hear how those on the frontlines of the global pandemic are working to overcome adversity and feed the world.

The following is an edited transcript of Michelle Michael’s interview with Andrea Capitani. Click below to hear the full audio.

Michelle:       Hello! I'm Michelle Michael. In this special series of AgFuture, we're talking with those working along the food supply chain about the impact of COVID-19. My guest today is Andrea Capitani, business manager for Alltech Italy. Andrea, you're in a really tough spot right now. The world is in a tough spot, but especially you, your friends, your family, your team in Italy. You're the hardest hit right now during this pandemic. Can you give us an update on how you're doing day-to-day — not from a business viewpoint, not from a work viewpoint, but personally? How are you holding up? What are you seeing today?

Andrea:          Okay. Ciao, everybody. The story started a few weeks ago. It seems like years, but it's only a few weeks that we are completely shut down. We live our life in our house. Only a few people can travel, and for specific reasons. The rest of the people stay at home. Staying in the house with your family or with your loves or friends, whoever you live with, for days and days without leaving the house is quite challenging for everybody. We're so used to meeting with people, going to the restaurants, doing shopping, and now, those activities are completely gone. There's no social activity anymore. We can only speak with people through FaceTime or WhatsApp, videos in general. From an Italian perspective, we are more social than other cultures, and it is quite challenging, so this is how we live, and I don't know how long it will be.

Michelle:       What are you feeling as you're, like me, just looking out the window? What are you feeling? How are you managing emotionally day-to-day?

Andrea:          My suggestion, what I promised to myself and what I try to suggest to anybody: We need to stay busy. We need to keep our brain and the body — it depends on where you live — as busy as possible. If you start thinking or overthinking on what can happen, what could be, you become crazy. So, what we try to do — myself, my wife, my friends — we try to stay in contact and to keep our mental activity running as normal. We work through telephone or computer, of course, and we have social activities with those tools, so it keeps you busy as much as you can.

Michelle:       In terms of agriculture there in Italy, how are farmers and producers holding up? What are they facing during these unprecedented times? It's probably changing daily.

Andrea:          Yeah. There are two faces of the medal here: there is the reality and there is the reality that's shown from the industry. The reality is that farmers, they started to — the milk processors, the cheese producers — considering that restaurants are closed and we also cannot export anymore as we did in the past, the social life is not so social, so there are some goods, some foods, especially, that are completely forgotten — but for other foods, like fresh milk or meat, eggs, people still eat.

                        What farmers are facing is that they keep working as normal. The cheese and milk processors, for example, told them that they have to drop production as much as possible because they don't know what to do with the milk because the cheese is not sold. The mozzarella, Parmigiano-Regiano, whatever, is not sold as before, so they have to try to reduce the production without compromising the health of the cows or the animals in general because, sooner or later, it'll start back as normal, hopefully.

                        They are very stressed because they don't know what to do with the milk. The price of the milk dropped significantly, by 30% to 40%. In some cases, the mozzarella producers, the cheese factories, they didn't collect the milk, so the farmer has the milk in the farm and they don't know what to do with the milk, so they tried to freeze the milk, but you cannot freeze everything. For the other sectors, the eggs, they don't have any problem because people stay home and they normally cook, so they produce whatever they can in the house with the kids. The meat is the same. The sector of the agri-industry that is suffering much more at the moment here in Italy is the milk.

Michelle:       We talked a little bit about the shutdown of restaurants and the social scene and the lack of a need for some items, and that's certainly affecting ag right now, but is it offset by an increase in grocery sales, for example?

Andrea:          Yes, this is the fact. Statistics, you don't know if those are true or not, but I read recently that the groceries, the supermarkets, the big stores, they increased the sales of milk, eggs, flour, all the basic foods, significantly — by 50%, 60%, 80%. The consumption isn't that bad because people are still here and they have to eat. They don't go to the restaurants, but they eat at home.

                        What I think is making a difference is we have many tourists here during the year, especially now in the springtime, and I believe that a million tourists come here every year, so those guys aren’t here and those guys are not eating. This is why some foods are suffering more than others — for example, the wine. The wine is another sector that is suffering a lot because if you don't go to the restaurant, you normally don't drink a bottle of wine at home, or you don't buy many bottles. Also, the flours. The flours market is a niche market, but it's still an important business for us here in Italy. It's not for Alltech in general, but they cannot even sell the flours, so they stopped producing, and they don't know what to do with the flours. We're already in production. Some foods are okay. Some others are in big trouble.

Michelle:       Andrea, focusing on the livestock, are some livestock sectors affected more than others at this time?

Andrea:          Just the dairy cows and buffaloes. Those are the two sectors in livestock, in general, that are paying the bill. For the other species, there's no real difference between now and a few months ago. For eggs, for example, and poultry meat, broiler meat, it's even better now because the consumption grew a lot. Also, prices are linked to the growth. They are selling the eggs and the meat at a higher price, so they are quite happy, if we can say "happy" in this situation, but the milk is the one that is really a big problem.

Michelle:       What about crop farmers? What hardships are they facing there in Italy right now?

Andrea:          We are specialized; we don't produce row crops. We have, of course, but we are not a big country, so we don't produce tons and tons and tons of corn or wheat. We are more focused on importing those, and we produce more fruits and vegetables, especially in some regions of the south and even the north, but in the south, the temperature and the weather conditions are much better and they can grow crops all year long.

It seems that, also, this sector is going quite well, because people stay home and they try to eat as healthy as possible, so the consumption of any vegetable or any fruit has increased also. The challenge that all those guys have is that they cannot be in contact with other people. They need to pay attention. They have to use the masks. (Maintaining) a normal life isn't easy for them, but in terms of business, the crop guys, fruits and vegetables, at the moment, are doing quite well.

                        There are some crops that are probably going to have an impact on those. I'm thinking about the summer crops, like cherries or table grapes, but I don't think — because we export a lot of those, also, to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and, at the moment, we cannot export, or the export is not so relevant, so if things don't change, maybe those guys will be affected too, but to this date, in March, the crop guys are quite happy.

Michelle:       It seems all around the world, daily — sometimes hourly — we hear of new rules and restrictions on our lives. We have to do things differently than we did them one month ago or two months ago. What are farmers or businesses doing there in Italy to adapt, really, to this fast-changing world?

Andrea:          As I said, you can leave your house for three reasons: one, for buying food and medicines; two, to go to work; and three, for specific and serious reasons, whatever they are. There's the police industry that can stop you, and you have to have a paper with you. It's a form that you have to fill out and give to the police guy, and this guy can say, “Okay, you can go” or “You go home.” They can also give you a fine and bring you to jail, in some cases, of course. It's just a simple thing, but this form has changed four or five times in the last ten days, so we don't even know which one is the right one because they keep changing.

                        The farmers, consumers, anybody, myself — it's not that easy to operate, because you cannot leave the house, for one. Two, you cannot meet with people, and you have to stay at least a meter from them, and you have to put on your gloves, plastic gloves, the mask, and even more if you work in some areas. You'll never know who the person that you're across from is. Is he good? Is he infected? We don't know. So, the social activity, in general, and the operational activity of any business is really struggling with the new rules, and again, they keep changing. We had the red zone, which was a completely closed zone in the north. They enlarged and enlarged and, now, Italy is the red zone. Then it's not red, but it's super red. It's a very chaotic approach, and I hope that you in America or in the other countries are learning from us. It's better to stop everything for a while and wait, as Spain did, to wait and hope that things won't happen, because when things start to happen, it is too late.

                        I don't know if that's the answer to your question, but it's a very complicated environment where we live in, and there's a new set of rules that is announced, as you said, every day. It's easy, in some ways, to — if I need to stay home, I don't care. The only people who care about the new rules and all the other things are the ones that — like my wife, for example: she works (outside of the home), and she has to accomplish all the new rules that are set every day or week.

Michelle:       The world looks to Italy right now. I'm curious if there are lessons that you're learning right now about how agriculture and the food supply works. What does that future look like?

Andrea:          I was in a call before with a friend that produced feed. They also produced some feeds for us, and he told me he's really, really scared about the new future, the close future, because (as he said), “I don't know what and how and when we'll pass this phase and when we'll start again.” If there's a lesson that we need to learn, we waste hours and hours of our time every year doing things that are not so necessary, in general, in life, and also in our business. The efficiency is not that efficient. I think that we'll start, hopefully, to increase the local consumption more than importing too many things from everywhere. Consumers, in my opinion, will go back to — my relatives, my grandmother, they got only what the season allowed them to get in terms of fruits and vegetables and also the meat. You eat the meat, but you don't need to eat the meat from Argentina. We are in Italy and we eat Italian meat. You're in America and you — I know that export is a very important thing for any country, but I think that the consumers are realizing that probably it's better to — there's a lack of consumption of what you produce instead of importing exotic things.

                        The other thing is I think that people will travel less, at least for the next years, because, probably, we've traveled too much, and in some occasions, the travel wasn't so necessary. This is what I think. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a genius. That's just my opinion. Speaking with people here, we are enjoying the time differently, and we recognize that a lot of our time is spent on other things that are not so important. I think that for the food, it'll be the same. The agribusiness will be the same.

Michelle:       There are so many stories right now of struggles, sacrifices, and we hear things going on — the hardships, really — but in the middle of all that, there are also stories of great human compassion. What heartwarming stories are you hearing out of Italy even during these really, really difficult times?

Andrea:          The first thing is there are many people that are sacrificing their lives for other people. I'm speaking about the doctors and all the people who work in the hospitals — also, the industries in general, factories and the farmers, as in our case. They try to find ways, of course, to sell their product, because we need to sell something to survive, but also to sell it in a way that can have an impact on other people.

                        Consider, for example, the mozzarella di bufala farmers at the moment. They don't know what to do with the milk. Why should they dump the milk, especially when they have their own cheese factory? This sector is quite common, so you have the buffalo farm and then you have your own mozzarella di bufala cheese factory, and you sell it directly to consumers or to restaurants and so on. In our case, we have a group of farmers (who are) our friends. They have been in Kentucky several times, so they are farmers, but they are quite progressive farmers. They said, "We have to destroy the milk anyway. I'm not going to dump it. I'm going to produce some cheeses and I'm going to give those cheeses to the local hospitals so that at least they can have some food to eat" — the doctors, of course, not the people that are sick.

                        Also, when they sell the mozzarella, let's say the mozzarella price is €10 per kilo. They give €3 of the €10 to the local hospital to buy the medical equipments and all the other things that are necessary, whatever they are. So, you can just accept the disaster, or you can try to adopt the disaster to be positive. There are many, many stories like this, especially in the dairy sector, but we also have customers that are donating money, or they are trying to supply crops, zucchini or whatever, to the hospitals or to the places where they need it, because if you cannot sell it and you have to destroy it, it's better, in a moment like this, that you share what you have with other people. In some ways, we see a lot of kind approaches to the other person, and I hope that this is another lesson that we learn that won't disappear after the coronavirus.

Michelle:       That would lead right into my next question. You hear these stories of neighbors helping neighbors, strangers helping strangers. It's one of the positives, if there is such a thing, in a pandemic. What's one takeaway that you have after seeing COVID-19 firsthand change the very world around you? How will it change you? How will it change the way you behave on a daily basis?

Andrea:          I want to keep in mind that we only have 24 hours a day and those are the only hours that we have and to use those as best as possible, avoiding useless waste of time or focusing on things that are not so important. I'm spending a lot of time with my daughters, and I'm not used to it because I'm always traveling. I'm appreciating the time spent with them and, also, staying at home, which is another thing that is not normal for me. I think that my personal takeaway is I will use my time better.

Michelle:       Andrea Capitani, business manager for Alltech Italy, thank you for joining us today. It's really good to hear your voice.

Andrea:          Thank you so much.

Michelle:       For additional resources on COVID-19, visit Alltech.com.

Click here for additional COVID-19 resources.

There is nothing more important to us than the safety and well-being of our colleagues, customers and communities. As a family company, we understand that the interconnectedness of our lives means that the actions we take within our business have an impact on countless others.

We share your concerns about the spread of COVID-19 globally. We are committed to doing our part to reduce COVID-19’s impact as quickly as possible, while maintaining our supply and service to our world’s livestock and crop producers.

Our business spans more than 120 countries, so we first began monitoring COVID when it emerged in China. In spite of the many challenges, our team in China has continued serving our customers, and we have been able to maintain production and continuity of supply due to the strict biosecurity controls that we had already established prior to COVID-19.

As COVID-19 expanded its reach, we responded by establishing a dedicated COVID-19 task force representing all regions of the world. Together, with a team of senior management, we review the latest information, including the recommendations of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on a daily basis to adapt our approach to this dynamic and evolving situation.

A few of the specific actions we have taken to prioritize the safety of our team and the continuity of our service to our customers include:

1. COVID-19 company policy – Our policy addresses limitations on the travel of our team, including contractors and consultants, as well as other required practices to safeguard all of our sites. This is something we are reviewing daily and continually updating to ensure best practice.
2. Visitor screening form – A visitor screening form must be completed by any guest, including internal guests and truck drivers, before they are able to enter any of our facilities. This measure is a first line of defense to safeguard against any known risks.
3. Limitation of outside visitors – While we are maintaining some business-critical meetings, we are utilizing virtual meeting platforms as an alternative or are postponing visits to a future date. We are not allowing tours or visits to our facilities that are not deemed to be business-critical at this time. Truck drivers making deliveries or pickups are asked to stay within their cabs or as close to their trucks as possible, and any entry to our facilities must be approved following completion of the visitor screening form.
4. Enhanced cleaning protocols – In addition to our regular cleaning services, we have enhanced our procedures to occur at more frequent intervals and with greater attention to the disinfection of all surfaces.
5. Team member health – We are joining governments around the world in a shared effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 by asking our team members to work from home, if their function allows. Additionally, we have required that any team member who is feeling ill is not to return to the office until they have been free of a fever for more than 24 hours, without fever-reducing medications. Any high-risk exposure or confirmed case of COVID-19 necessitates a 14-day quarantine.
6. Operational continuity – Alltech operates nearly 100 manufacturing facilities around the world. Our global infrastructure enables us to shift production if necessary. We are working closely with all of our manufacturing teams to ensure operational continuity and service to our customers. We have implemented plans for all critical business units to work remotely, if required. As part of this, we continue to stress-test our systems and implement safeguards on the security of all data and technology.
7. Supply chain – We have been in contact with our key suppliers to review the status of all raw materials and have been reassured of continuity. While the majority of our materials and services are sourced in the Americas, we have built in contingencies globally, should the need to source from other geographies become necessary. Our global manufacturing and logistics capabilities position us favorably to continue to consistently serve our customers.

We have seen in other countries that food industries have been given essential industry status. As governments continue to shape their response to COVID-19, I hope you will support efforts to ensure a stable food supply.

To achieve this goal, the care and welfare of animals and crops must be of utmost importance. Feedstuffs, equipment for animal and crop production, and logistics are essential to ensure the certainty of our food supply. We ask that you implement any and all measures at your disposal to protect these vital functions until COVID-19 subsides.

We trust you value the importance of a safe, stable food supply. Thank you for your support as we seek, together, to provide security in this time of unprecedented uncertainty.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mark Lyons
President and CEO, Alltech

Spring is often accompanied by warmer temperatures, excess moisture and the reemergence of biting insects. While the more moderate weather can often feel like a welcome relief — especially after a long, cold winter — this aptly monikered “mud season” can wreak havoc on a horse’s skin and coat. Conditions like rain rot, scratches, sweet itch and hives are more than just unsightly and uncomfortable — they can also have a significant impact on your riding and training time.

Of course, we all know that horses are naturally sensitive beings and that skin problems are never 100% avoidable. Attention to proper grooming, nutrition, supplements and veterinary care can make a big difference, but we should all be prepared to recognize and treat these issues when they manifest. Let’s explore four of the most common ailments, as well as some recommended treatments and steps you can take to help keep them at bay.

Rain rot in horses

• What causes it? As the common nickname for this pesky dermatological disease implies, rain rot is brought on by a combination of moisture and the presence of a bacterium called Dermatophilus congolensis. Every horse is susceptible to this condition, which is generally associated with warm, wet weather. Broken skin, either from bug bites or cuts, allows the bacteria in. Excess moisture also plays a significant role because it strips the skin of natural oils that otherwise serve as protection from bacteria.
• How do I identify it? If your horse has rain rot, you’ll notice scab-like bumps, particularly along the top of the head, neck, back and/or croup. When pulled, the hair will easily come away from the body, leaving behind an infected, hairless spot of skin. These lesions are commonly itchy or painful.
• Is it contagious? Yes, rain rot can easily spread from one horse to another. As such, it’s important to not share brushes, blankets or tack, and to make sure these items are regularly cleaned.
• How do I treat it? While often mistaken for a fungal disease like ringworm — which is, thankfully, far less common — this bacterial condition will not be affected by antifungal medication. Bathing the horse with an antibacterial shampoo, removing the scabs once they have softened and following up with a topical antibacterial treatment can prove effective.
• How do I prevent it? Groom your animals daily and clean your brushes often. You should also take several environmental factors into consideration. Shelters are great in theory, but how many times have you witnessed a horse standing outside of a shelter during inclement weather? As horse owners know, equines are sadly not always concerned about self-preservation! If it’s raining, provide a protective waterproof sheet (which must also be regularly cleaned, especially if your horse is symptomatic) or leave your horse in a stall for the day instead.

Scratches in horses

• What causes it? Also known as mud fever or pastern dermatitis, this condition is often produced by a mixture of bacteria that commonly includes Dermatophilus congolensis, Staphylococcus spp and/or fungal organisms known as dermatophytes. It may also be caused by parasites. These organisms find their way into breaks or openings on the horse’s skin, and the prime conditions during which they are likely to appear include consistent exposure to an excessively moist or dirty environment. As with rain rot, every horse is susceptible to scratches; however, those with feathers or long fetlock hair that retains moisture seem to be particularly vulnerable. Horses with white legs may also be more at risk, since unpigmented skin is more susceptible to sun damage, chafing and abrasions.
• How do I identify it? Early symptoms often include swollen skin and small, scab-like bumps. If allowed to progress, you’ll notice scabby crusts forming on the back of the pastern, which often appear in a line that looks like — you guessed it — a scratch. Although scratches most often impact the hind legs, horses may get it on their front legs as well.
• Is it contagious? Yes, this is also an easily transmissible disorder. Do not share boots or grooming supplies, and practice good hand hygiene, especially after coming into contact with the infected area.
• How do I treat it? Carefully clip the hair away from the affected area and gently wash it with an antibacterial or antifungal shampoo. Begin by doing this once daily for the first 7–10 days and cut back to two or three times per week until the issue is remedied. Let the shampoo sit for approximately 10 minutes before rinsing. Scabs can be massaged off gently, but you should not pull or pick at them. Carefully pat the area dry with a clean towel before applying a topical antibiotic or antifungal treatment. Keep your horse housed in a clean, dry environment.
• How do I prevent it? Keep footing as dry as possible, and get into the habit of drying your horse’s legs before you put them into their stall. Don’t share boots or wraps, and, if possible, keep feathers closely trimmed.

Sweet itch in horses

• What causes it? Also known as summer itch, this seasonal recurrent dermatitis is typically caused by an allergic reaction to Culicoides, a genus of biting midges. You may commonly hear these pests referred to as “no-see-ums” or gnats. Horses may also experience insect hypersensitivity in response to biting flies. This hypersensitivity is considered the most common allergy in horses and is a typical reason for itchy skin.
• How do I identify it? Horses with sweet itch often become very itchy in the spring and may rub out their mane and tail hair. You may also notice skin irritation or lesions along the topline, jaw, axillary regions and ventral midline.
• Is it contagious? No, but other horses on the property may also be susceptible to the negative effects of these biting insects.
• How do I treat it? Antihistamines, topical creams and insect repellents may be effective options and should be tried first before resorting to more serious measures, such as corticosteroid injections, which can have serious long-term side effects with prolonged use.
• How do I prevent it? Remove manure regularly and keep standing water in check. Use stall fans and fly gear, such as masks and boots, and keep in mind that “no-see-ums” prefer to begin feeding at dusk and overnight, so keep at-risk horses inside during these times.

Hives in horses

• What causes them? Many things can cause hives, including insect bites, pollens, food allergies, medications or direct contact with a variety of materials.
• How do I identify them? Also known as urticaria, hives are fluid-filled, raised swellings on a horse’s skin. Generally round in shape, these bumps may range in size from 0.5 to 8 inches wide. They may or may not be itchy and can develop anywhere on a horse’s body, though they most commonly appear on the neck, back, flank or leg area.
• Are they contagious? No, hives are not transmissible.
• How do I treat them? Fortunately, hives rarely impact the general health of a horse and often resolve on their own within 24–48 hours. In these cases, treatment is unnecessary. However, in more severe cases, you may wish to consult with your veterinarian on treatment options, such as antihistamines, epinephrine or corticosteroids.
• How do I prevent them? It can be difficult to determine the root cause of hives, but avoidance or the elimination of triggering factors can play a key role in keeping them from reoccurring in the future. This may involve some trial and error, but suggested steps include changing paddocks and bedding and eliminating supplements one at a time to determine whether they may have been a culprit in causing this allergic reaction.

I want to learn more about equine health and nutrition.

[LEXINGTON, Ky.] – The agriculture industry has been presented with a great responsibility — to produce enough safe, nutritious food for all, while caring for our animals and sustaining our air, water and land for future generations. To explore innovative solutions to the challenges facing the global food supply chain today, ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference (ONE) returns May 17–19, 2020, in Lexington, Kentucky. Now in its 36^th year, ONE draws on Alltech’s global reach and business scope to assemble thought-leaders from the agriculture, business, health and wellness, and brewing and distilling sectors.

“Science, technology and human ingenuity converge at ONE,” said Dr. Mark Lyons, president and CEO of Alltech. “The topics up for discussion reflect the extraordinary opportunity our industry has to adopt new ideas for producing enough safe, nutritious food for all while preserving our planet.”

With universal themes of innovation, inclusion and inspiration, ONE invites everyday heroes from various industries to unleash the power of infinite ideas. More than 40 topics* will be discussed at ONE, including:    

Aquaculture

• Should Shrimp Culture Step Out of Its Comfort Zone?
• Optimizing Performance and Profit With Dynamic Nutritional Marketing
• Navigating Sustainability From the Feed Producer’s Perspective

Beef

• Analyzing the Impact: Examining the Environmental Hoofprint of Beef
• The Vital Role of Livestock in Reversing Climate Change and Desertification
• Sunny With a High Chance of Cattle: The Ag Market Outlook

Crop Science

• The World Beneath Our Feet: The Intricate Dance That Takes Place in Our Soils
• How Farmers Are Advancing Human Health Through Functional Foods
• On the Defense: Using Beneficial Compounds to Induce Resistance in Plants

Dairy

• Dairy Cattle Welfare: Essential for Animals, Producers and Consumers
• No Antibiotics, No Problem: Inside Rosy-Lane Holsteins’ Transformation
• How Herd Management Practices Can Minimize Lameness

Pig

• The Great Disruption: ASF and the Global Protein Market
• The Impact of Organic Minerals and Heat Stress on Health
• Which Tech Trends Are Transforming Swine Production?

Poultry

• Prioritizing Food Safety in Poultry Production
• Cracking the Competition: How to Grow Your Business
• Putting Poultry Welfare First in a World of Conscious Consumers

Business

• Mind Over Matter: The Power of Mental Toughness
• Four Habits of Digital Transformers
• Next-Level Leadership: Elevating the Multigenerational Workforce

Agri-Business

• Disrupted by Disease: How Outbreaks Have Reshaped Agri-Food
• A Seat at the Table: How Consumer Opinion Impacts the Value Chain
• Funding the Future: Why Are Outside Investors Banking on Ag-Tech

Brewing and Distilling

• Sustainable Brewing: Can Craft Beer Go Green?
• Market Saturation: Will Craft Beer Tap Out?
• The Canned Cocktail Craze

Future of Food

• Project Drawdown: Farming to Reverse Climate Change
• Meatless Protein: Sustainable Alternative or Over-Processed Panacea?
• What If Farmers Could Get Paid to Fight Climate Change?

Health and Wellness

• Food for Thought: Will Neurogastronomy Change the World?
• Gut Reaction: Probiotics vs. Prebiotics
• The Truth About How Agricultural Practices Affect Human Health

Pet

• A Balanced Microbiome: The Key to Your Pet’s Health and Longevity
• Top Dogs: Which Trends Are Dominating the Premium Pet Food Market?
• Enzymes: Innovative or Enigmatic?

Equine

• A Breeder’s Perspective on Horse Racing’s Future
• Happy Hindguts, Healthy Horses: Unlocking the Equine Microbiome With Nutrition
• Fast Track to Success: Training Horses to Win

*Topics are subject to change.

Alltech’s flagship conference is attended annually by more than 3,000 people representing 70 countries. Keynote speaker announcements are coming soon, and this year’s mainstage line-up promises to be as dynamic as ever. Previous ONE keynote speakers include Bear Grylls, General Colin Powell, Steve Wozniak and Beth Comstock.  

The ONE experience extends beyond superior presentation content, as attendees are invited to embark on area tours and network with peers from across the globe. International Night will offer a multicultural exploration of cuisine and entertainment from around the world, while Kentucky Night showcases the sights and sounds of the Bluegrass State from within the famed Kentucky Horse Park.   

Learn more and register at one.alltech.com by Feb. 29 to save $200. Follow ONE on Facebook for updates and join the conversation on Twitter with #ONEbigidea.

The 2020 Alltech Global Feed Survey estimates that international feed tonnage decreased by 1.07% to 1.126 billion metric tons of feed produced last year, due largely to African swine fever (ASF) and the decline of pig feed in the Asia-Pacific region. The top nine feed-producing countries are the U.S., China, Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico, Spain, Japan and Germany. Together, these countries produce 58% of the world’s feed production and contain 57% of the world’s feed mills, and they can be viewed as an indicator of overall trends in agriculture.

Dr. Mark Lyons, president and CEO of Alltech, shared the survey results via public livestream from Alltech’s global headquarters in Nicholasville, Kentucky.

“2019 presented extreme challenges to the feed industry, with one of the most significant being African swine fever. The regional and global implications are reflected by the Alltech Global Feed Survey and the decline in global feed production, said Lyons. “While pig feed production is down in affected countries, we are noting increased production both in other species as producers work to supplement the protein demand, and in non-affected countries as exports ramp up. The damage caused by ASF will have long-term implications, and we expect that the top protein sources will continue to shift as our industry adapts to the shortage.”

The global data, collected from 145 countries and nearly 30,000 feed mills, indicates feed production by species as: broilers 28%; pigs 24%; layers 14%; dairy 12%; beef 10%; other species 6%; aquaculture 4%; and pets 2%. Predominant growth came from the layer, broiler, aqua and pet feed sectors. 

Regional results from the 2020 Alltech Global Feed Survey

• North America: The U.S. is the largest feed-producing country globally with an estimated 214 million metric tons (MMT), with beef (61.09 MMT), broilers (48.525 MMT) and pigs (44.86 MMT) as the leading species. North America saw steady growth of 1.6% over last year. Canada produced 21.6 MMT with pigs (8.23 MMT), broilers (3.25 MMT) and dairy (4.2 MMT) leading species feed production.

• Latin America: As a region, Latin America saw 2.2% growth to 167.9 MMT. Brazil remained the leader in feed production for the region and third overall globally, with the primary species for feed production being broilers (32.1 MMT) and pigs (17.0 MMT). Brazil, Mexico and Argentina continue to produce the majority of feed in Latin America with 76% of regional feed production.

• Europe: Europe remained relatively stagnant with a slight increase of 0.2% over last year. The top three feed-producing countries in Europe are Russia (40.5 MMT), Spain (34.8 MMT) and Germany (25.0 MMT), with pig feed production leading the way in all three countries. The ruminant sector was hit the hardest as both dairy and beef numbers are estimated to be down by 4% and 3%, respectively. This was offset primarily by strong growth in the aqua (7%) and layer (3%) industries.

• Asia-Pacific: The Asia-Pacific region saw feed production decrease by 5.5% in 2019, primarily due to African swine fever and large declines in pig feed production. China’s feed production declined by almost 20 MMT of feed overall to 167.9 MMT and fell from the top feed-producing country globally to second, behind the U.S. India and Japan remained in the top nine feed-producing countries, with similar production compared to 2018 with 39.0 MMT and 25.3 MMT, respectively, while Vietnam declined by 7%.

• Africa: Africa continued strong growth with a 7.5% increase in overall feed production, with all the primary species seeing positive growth. The top five feed-producing countries in the region account for 75% of Africa’s feed production, and they are South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco and Algeria. The region’s primary species include broiler, layer and dairy, and combined, they account for nearly half of feed production estimates in the region.

Notable species results from the 2020 Alltech Global Feed Survey

• Pig feed production was greatly impacted by African swine fever, with an 11% decrease. The primary producing region for pig feed remains Asia-Pacific, but it also experienced the largest decline of 26%, with China (-35%), Cambodia (-22%), Vietnam (-21%) and Thailand (-16%) experiencing large decreases. Europe, North America and Latin America remained relatively stable compared to last year, within a percentage point’s worth of gain or loss. While Africa is a small region from a tonnage standpoint for pig feed, it showed a large increase of 29%.  

• In the poultry sector, Asia-Pacific is the leader in both broiler (115.2 MMT) and layer (73.1 MMT) feed. In Latin America, total broiler production amounted to 60.8 MMT, with Brazil leading the region with 32.1 MMT followed by Mexico with 10.5 MMT, while Mexico’s layer feed production increased by 11% to 7.05 MMT and surpassed Brazil. Russia leads Europe with 10.86 MMT of the total region’s 56.3 MMT of broiler feed and 5.3 MMT of the region’s total of 33.5 MMT of layer feed. In North America, the U.S. accounts for 94% of the broiler feed with 48.5 MMT, while layer feed in Canada increased by 460,000 metric tons. 

• Europe leads global dairy feed production with 34% followed by North America (21.8%), Asia-Pacific (17.6%) and Latin America (15.3%). The top dairy feed- producing countries are Turkey (6.5 MMT), Germany (5.2 MMT), Russia (4.2 MMT), the U.K. (3.8 MMT), France (3.4 MMT), the Netherlands (3.3. MMT) and Spain (3.2 MMT).

• North America continues to lead global beef feed production with 62.3 MMT, followed by Europe (21.9 MMT) and Latin America (13.9 MMT). For the 2020 Alltech Global Feed Survey, the beef feed production estimation was recalculated to improve its accuracy. The new estimate takes into account the average days on feed and intake as a percentage of body weight in the feedlot. Last year’s estimation was also recalculated to reflect this formula change for a proper year-on-year comparison.

• Overall, aquaculture feeds showed growth of 4% over last year. Per ton, Asia-Pacific grew the most with an additional 1.5 MMT. The primary contributors were China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Europe’s decrease is in large part due to decreased feed production in Russia, which is primarily due to an increase in imports.

• The pet food sector saw growth of 4% with the largest tonnage increases in Asia-Pacific (10%), Europe (3%) and Latin America (6%). By country, increases were seen in China, Indonesia, Portugal, Hungary, Ecuador and Argentina. 

During the live presentation, Dr. Lyons was joined by a panel of industry experts, including Jack Bobo, CEO, Futurity, USA; Matthew Smith, vice president, Alltech, U.K.; Bianca Martins, general manager, Alltech, Mexico; and Brian Lawless, North America species manager, Alltech, USA. The group discussed the trends behind the data and the implications for the global market. Topics ranged from consumer demands to the adoption of new technology.

To access insights from the 2020 Alltech Global Feed Survey, including a recording of the panel discussion, an interactive map and presentation slides, visit alltechfeedsurvey.com.

The Alltech Global Feed Survey assesses compound feed production and prices through information collected by Alltech’s global sales team and in partnership with local feed associations in the last quarter of 2019. It is an estimate serving as a resource for policymakers, decision-makers and industry stakeholders.

WHAT:            Join Dr. Mark Lyons, president and CEO of Alltech, as he shares the results of the ninth annual Alltech Global Feed Survey during a panel discussion with industry leaders. The presentation will be livestreamed from Alltech’s global headquarters in Nicholasville, Kentucky. 

                        Panelists include:

• Jack Bobo, CEO, Futurity, USA
• Bianca Martins, General Manager, Alltech, Mexico
• Matthew Smith, Vice President, Alltech, UK

Alltech’s annual evaluation of compound feed production is the most complete of its kind, including data from more than 140 countries and approximately 30,000 feed mills, covering all species of production animals. The presentation will highlight trends in feed production at a regional level, key insights for specific countries, what changes the industry may expect within the next year and looking beyond the data to explore the impact on farmers, the feed industry and the regions in which they operate.

WHEN:            Monday, Jan. 27, 2020

                        10:00 a.m. EST                      

WHERE:         Register for the livestream presentation here.

OTHER:           Information from the 2019 Alltech Global Feed Survey is currently available online at alltechfeedsurvey.com and will be updated with 2020 information following the livestream presentation, including a video recording of the presentation.

Modern farmers have countless resources at their disposal that those who came before could only have dreamt of. If we compare agriculture today with what was the norm 10 — or even five — years ago, the contrast is staggering. Over the last few years, farmers have reaped the benefits of numerous technological advances, and some of the most useful of them have come in the form of agricultural apps on smartphones.

The array of apps that could be useful for farmers is already vast and continues to grow. Armed with an Android, iPhone or even an iPad, they can scroll through the available apps to find a program that fits their every need, from buying new machinery to analyzing soil types.

But it is not only ag apps that are making farmers’ lives easier. Help can come from some unlikely places, and programs that were not designed specifically for agricultural use can be utilized in innovative ways.

With this in mind, we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at some of the useful apps currently on the market. Some are obvious choices for any farmer, while others may have previously been overlooked. Whether you are already ag-tech-savvy or are only just learning how the device in your pocket could change your farm management, this list will give you a sense of what is out there and how it can be used to your advantage.

Feed-management apps

Long neglected in terms of innovation and investment, feed management technology is finally making strides in the ag-tech industry. Until recently, it was still common for farmers to manage their feeding by using a pen and paper. Now, however, there are plenty of resources available on the App Store to make this process more efficient and cost-saving.

1. FeedSmart

Taking into account key variables, such as maintenance requirements, animal growth, lactation and more, this free calculator can provide farmers with instant information on their livestock's nutritional needs, feed values and feed allocation.

2. InTouch Forage Budgeting 

The management of forage stocks has also become a topical issue on farms in recent years, especially with changing weather patterns. Fortunately, smartphone technology can also play a role in long-term planning.

This app calculates the total forage available to the farmer in both fresh weight and dry matter from clamped forage and additional baled forage. The user inputs the forage required to feed livestock during the winter housed period, and the app then determines if the farmer has enough resources at his or her disposal.

Developed in association with the team at Alltech E-CO2 and available on all mobile devices, this app becomes particularly handy moving into the winter, when the demand for forage is at its greatest. Farmers need to be proactive in measuring conserved forage quantities in order to avoid any potential shortfalls.

Note-taking apps

Whether they want to admit it or not, some farmers are careless note-takers. For a profession in which constant checks and record-keeping are essential, many farmers leave too much to chance. This task can be made easier and quicker with modern technology. On a base level, it is standard practice for all smartphones to come with some form of notepad app included. You can even set reminders that will alert you about certain items and tasks at a pre-arranged time.

3. Evernote 

This multi-platform app allows you to access your notes and photographs from your smartphone, desktop and tablet, syncing everything to make sure you are always up to date. It also allows you to share content with other users, which comes in handy when disseminating information among your team.

4. Google Docs

The only drawback to Evernote is that many of its sharing and collaborative features are only available through a paid subscription. Google Docs, a free alternative with similar capabilities, could be a suitable replacement.

Field-measurement apps

5. GPS Fields Area Measure

Ask any farmer how much land they have, and they will be able to give you an answer straightaway. Being able to do so is an essential aspect of the profession and is an ability that many wear as a badge of honor. However, this off-the-top-of-the-head figure is only ever a ballpark number, probably rounded up to the nearest acre.

GPS Fields Area Measure is the perfect tool for determining distances and field perimeters and areas, fast! Using satellite imaging, this app provides you with an accurate measurement of your piece of land, saving you time and money. For added convenience, it can also be used offline, and saved measurements can be shared between users.

Weather apps

By its nature, farming is an outdoor enterprise. The success of a harvest, down to the budgeting of forage, depends heavily on the weather. While it can never be fully predicted, many tools and devices have been developed over the years to make dealing with the weather a bit easier. Modern technology now provides the most comprehensive methods of navigating the whims of Mother Nature. There is a plethora of weather apps on the market, all of which can provide highly accurate forecasts.

6. Strawberry Advisory System monitors the weather so as to help keep strawberry crops free from fruit rot.

7. Hurricane is the American Red Cross' hurricane-monitoring app.

8. Weather Underground

Along with providing accurate weather information throughout the world, this free app can also be accessed in a vast range of languages. Collecting up-to-the-minute data from more than 270,000 global weather stations, it also lets users contribute by reporting on weather conditions in their own regions.

Buying and selling apps

These days, it has never been easier to go on a shopping spree. A short time spent browsing online can quickly leave you with myriad new possessions and an alarmingly low bank balance. The agriculture industry is not immune to this — and now, farmers are able to get in on the fun, too!

9. TractorHouse

If you are in the market to buy or sell new or used machinery and farm equipment, this global app gives users access to thousands of sale listings. Its user-friendly interface allows you to easily search for equipment and parts, which can be bought directly or at auction.

10. Cattle Market Mobile

Your smartphone can even give you the edge when bidding on livestock. Traditionally, farmers would enter a market blind, not knowing anything about the animals being offered. Now, apps are emerging that allow farmers to do research and even make bids beforehand.

This handy tool collects data on current auction prices across the U.S. Using this information as a guide, farmers can see exactly how much they should be paying for steers, bulls, heifers and more.

11. MartBids

While only available in Ireland, this app is changing the way producers make decisions about livestock. This app works in conjunction with livestock marts throughout the country to provide users with vital information before they make their decisions. Whereas before, a farmer at an auction often had to rely on gut feeling when bidding, this mobile app negates any guesswork, helping you find the perfect animal for your needs.

12. FarmHedge

For an all-around app that connects farmers with multiple sectors of the agriculture industry, this real-time agribusiness app puts users directly in touch with suppliers of feed, fertilizers, parts and more. It allows producers to create personal and secure working relationships while also saving them time and money.

Farm smarter, not harder, with these helpful apps for farmers. We hope these useful tools will help you better manage what you have worked so hard for.

David Cleary, director of global agriculture at The Nature Conservancy, discusses the institution's three main sustainability goals: to reduce deforestation, increase soil health and promote water conservation. Learn what these three goals mean for climate change, habitat conservation, regenerative agriculture and the recent fires in the Amazon.

The following is an edited transcript of David Butler’s interview with David Cleary. Click below to hear the full audio.

Interviewer:  I'm here with David Cleary, director of global agriculture for the Nature Conservancy. Welcome, David.

David:             It's a pleasure to be here.

Interviewer:  Thank you very much. Tell us a little bit about what your role entails.

David:             Sure. Basically, three things. We have agriculture programs in about 40 countries around the world, so my first and most important job is to support those programs to help them grow their capacity, help fund-raise for them, and also to have them sort of, more or less, flying information around a shared definition of what sustainability and agriculture means. I represent the organization and voice our opinions on topics relevant to agriculture. That's the main reason why I'm here at this particular event. I also help to manage some of the global-level relationships relevant to our agriculture work in both the private and the public sector — so large agribusiness companies that operate on a global scale, but also organizations like the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the Gates Foundation, institutions that have an important role to play within the global ag space that we'd like to try and have conversations with and, occasionally, try to influence.

Interviewer:  You said that the Nature Conservancy has agriculture programs in how many countries?

David:             Around about 30.

Interviewer:  Okay, so what goes on at the country level? What do your programs do?

David:             Well, we have three areas of focus. One is trying to reduce and eliminate deforestation and habitat conversion from supply chains. We also have a soil program, trying to avoid soil erosion but also manage soils and increase soil health. The third area of focus is around water, water conservation and water quality, so dealing with agriculture so that it has the least possible impact and the most efficient possible use of water around the world.

Interviewer:  Great! That sounds like very important work, really.

David:             Very important and very challenging, sometimes.

Interviewer:  Yeah. You've spent a lot of your career — you've been at the Nature Conservancy a pretty long time, right?

David:             It wasn't deliberate, but that's how it's turned out, yeah.

Interviewer:  You've spent a lot of your career there focused on Brazil. Is that right?

David:             Mm-hmm, Brazil and Latin America, more broadly.

Interviewer:  Okay, so what are some of the biggest challenges there? I can guess one of them.

David:             Well, Brazil is a big country, so wherever you are, the challenges are slightly different. I think the biggest challenge that I dealt with the time I was living there was around deforestation and commodity supply chains, especially in the soy and the beef industry. We've actually been very successful over the last 10 to 15 years in reducing deforestation in the Amazon, way below where it used to be. I'd say you have an increasing problem now in various parts of Brazil with water use. We've already been able to see some changes in rainfall patterns probably linked to climate change. We've also, I think, in different parts of Brazil, got issues around soil loss and soil health. Brazil is an extremely efficient agricultural producer. It's a massive supply of agricultural commodities to the global market, but in some ways, that grain complex, an oil seed complex that drives that, have got some vulnerabilities on the soil and the water front.

Interviewer:  And is most of the erosion there related to large quantities of rainfall? Are a lot of the farmers there using no-till?

David:             No-till is really common in Brazil. It's been taken up by wildfire, actually, over the last 10 or 15 years. Brazil is a tropical climate, so you do have quite violent rain. That's just part of the natural cycle there, but I think what's happened is that quite a lot of habitat has been cleared in recent years to be able to expand the agricultural, the planted area there, and quite often, that's loosened root structures, and it's made soil erosion a problem in some places.

Interviewer:  Yeah. I'm sure there's a massive amount of erosion right after the forests are cleared, right?

David:             Yeah, that's absolutely right. You can see it very obviously on the landscape. It's important just to flag, though, that, actually, most of the cropland area in Brazil, it's expanded over grasslands rather than forests. The Amazon is by far the most famous part of Brazil outside Brazil, but the real engine of agricultural growth in Brazil has been, actually, more the Cerrado, which is a mix of savannah and woodland-type biome.

                        It's rather similar to the U.S., actually. The history of U.S. agriculture is it expanded much more over grasslands than it did in forested areas, and that's actually true of Brazil, too.

Interviewer:  Okay. Is that actually a bigger environmental problem than the rainforest deforestation?

David:             Well, it depends (on) what lens you want to view it through. If you're worried about biodiversity, then forests are more of a problem because they have much higher levels of biodiversity. If you're worried about climate change, probably, you're going to be more worried about forests as well because, when you burn a forest, it releases more carbon, if you're burning savannahs — but at the same time, we worry about all ecosystems, not just about forests. The Cerrado and grasslands, generally — the U.S. also — they're a really important ecosystem. They have historically been incredibly important to human life both in agricultural terms and for ranging and livestock, so it's really important, around the world, that rangelands and grasslands are kept in a good state. That's always going to be a focus of our work.

Interviewer:  This episode was recorded in May 2019 at our ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, and it was a great conversation with David Cleary. But shortly after that, things went awry in the Amazon rainforest, and there were thousands and thousands of fires this summer. David was nice enough to get on the phone with us today and give us a little update about where we are, how much damage was done, and what does the future look like for the Amazon.

David:             Thank you, David. Well, yes, you're right. Things have gone awry. The background to that is that the Brazilian government essentially signaled to the farming and ranching sectors in the Amazon that they weren't going to spend a huge amount of time or effort chasing down people who didn't have the requisite deforestation permits to clear land.

                        What we've been able to verify so far is an uptick, quite a strong uptick, in fire activity. It's important you understand what we know and what we don't know. What we do know is there's a lot more fire activity in the Amazon. What we don't know is the size of the land areas that those fires are clearing. We don't know that because the smoke and the clouds at this time of year make it very difficult for us to get reliable satellite data. But what happened is we're at the end of the year, and at the end of the year, we'll know what the deforestation figures are.

                        Now, I know the figures that you've seen in the media are quite dramatic. There definitely has been a significant increase in fire activity, but there's a lot of other factors in the mix as well. I mean, if the rains come early, that dampens it down. It's not necessarily true that a large increase in fire activity in the Amazon is going to result in that level of increase in deforestation. It could be more; it could be less. We won't know until the end of the year. What I think we can say is that, even with the quite strong uptick of deforestation in the Amazon, it will be bad in comparison with last year, but it's still going to be at a level that, historically, is not as bad as it was about ten years ago. It's bad news, but it's not devastating yet.

Interviewer:  What do you see for the remainder of President Bolsonaro's term? Do you expect that this is going to be an ongoing thing year after year? Will it accelerate? I know that conversations or messages from the G7 to him didn't work very well this summer. How can we engage with Brazil to slow this down?

David:             Well, I think it's pretty interesting, what happened, because I think the strong international reaction to the fires in the Amazon really put the Brazilian government on the back foot. It was very clear that they weren't expecting such a strong reaction. It wasn't just the environmental NGOs and the Greenpeaces of this world that were very critical. A lot of the companies that invest in Brazil and are active in the agricultural sector were also critical.

                        Brazil depends upon those companies, and the agribusiness sector in general is an incredibly important and thriving part of its economy. So, to the extent that Brazil makes life more difficult for its big agribusiness sector, and because it's an exporting economy, an agricultural commodity-exporting economy, it could do without the sort of damage to its image that the Amazon fires do. I think the government understands that better now. There are actually parts of the Brazilian government that always understood that very well. The Agriculture Ministry, for example, is run by an extremely competent woman who was very active in saying that, “No, no, this is not the way for us to be going.”

                        I think you did point to the sort of diversity of opinion even within the Brazilian government. In fact, there are different power centers within it. I'd be quite optimistic that, next year, perhaps, learning a little bit from this experience, we'll find the government and the private sector and the farmers making more of an effort to combat the damage that was done. There was clearly damage.

Interviewer:  Well, that sounds good. I hope that we can find a good way to go forward and not lose all the progress that we made over the last decade or more. At this point, we'll rejoin our previous interview in which you talk about how all that progress was made. Thanks for joining us again today, David. I really appreciate it.

David:             It was a pleasure.

Interviewer:  You mentioned that there's been a lot of progress in reducing deforestation in the Amazon. What were some of the things that were successful there?

David:             Both private and public initiatives played a role. On the public side, you have, actually, very good regulatory framework for agriculture. Farmers in the Amazon have to keep 80% of the land holding in native vegetation, so that's already a good thing, a high bar to be able to work from. The government also recognized deforestation is a problem, and it had targeted strategies to crack down on it where in the bits of the Amazon they could see that deforestation was increasing.

                        Technology really improved over the last 20 years to the point that you could really pinpoint where the problem was, and that made it much easier to target policing actions, but it wasn't just a sort of top-down regulatory approach. There was also, I think, a recognition on many market actors that there's plenty of land that's already cleared that you could expand soy over. There was also an understanding, I think, that there was consumer resistance to deforestation because the soy and beef that was being produced, significant amounts of that were exported to Europe. There was also, I think, a feeling among the big global traders that had their presence there that they had a reputation or risk here as well, so it was a kind of perfect storm of coming together of both the public and private initiatives that drove the deforestation levels down. It's worth saying by how much: Fifteen years ago, it was about 30,000 square kilometers a year. Right now, it bumps along between 5,000 and 8,000 kilometers, so very, very significant reduction.

Interviewer:  That is a big difference, yeah. How is that effort working on the savannah areas?

David:             Well, it's sort of like a catch-22 because, the way the geography of Brazil is, is you have the forest in the north. In the center of Brazil, you have the grasslands, the Cerrado. From our standpoint as a conservation organization, it's not a win if we're successful in reducing deforestation in the Amazon but all that does is displace that pressure for habitat conversion into the grasslands of the Cerrado. That has actually not happened. The dynamics are slightly different in the different regions.

                        Right now, we're in a situation where, for the last three years, habitat conversion levels in the Cerrado have been very low. Six or seven years before that, they were really booming. A lot of the Cerrado was converted and, right now, we're in a situation where we have about half of the Cerrado in native vegetation; the other half is under agricultural or pasture. There's a very large amount of pasture that's not particularly productive — probably about 20 million hectares in total that you could expand cropland over. So, at least in theory, you can see a future sweet spot where you have cropland expanding over pasture and pasture intensifying. That would make a lot of economic sense. Of course, there's many a slip between cup and lip, and you can see that in theory, but actually, having that land-use pattern develop is a complicated thing, but that's what we're working towards there.

Interviewer:  Some of the areas that have been in agriculture the longest, do they suffer from soil degradation, loss of fertility, possibly partly because of the heavy rainfall?

David:             Well, that's a hard question to answer because if you pull out globally and just do a quick look around the world, there are places that have had agriculture in place literally for millennia with reasonable soil quality being maintained throughout that period. There are parts of Southeast Asia, for example, that you've got these smallholder, peasant farming systems that use a very intensive — they use manure a lot, and they have maintained really excellent soil quality. That's because, on the whole, there are fairly stable systems, and they're in fairly stable market context.

                        What's destabilizing for soil is when you have a sudden expansion of demand and intensification of production that the natural ecosystem of the soil in that particular area can't support. There are many places around the world where you can point to that kind of dynamic having happened as well. There's no hard and fast rule, I think. You can certainly generate what the basic principles of good soil management are and apply them pretty much anywhere and it's going to improve your situation if you're in one of those stress systems.

Interviewer:  Yeah. Is there a movement to try to use regenerative agriculture techniques like no-till?

David:             Yeah. No-till, cover cropping, there's a whole range of systems. I think whatever agricultural system you're in — whether it's a system that's typical of, like, the U.S. or the Brazilian corn and soy belt, very high productivity, industrial agriculture, or a smallholder system like you could find in Africa or Southeast Asia — good soil management is a basic principle of success in all of those different agricultural systems. That's why it's really strategic for us to focus on it, because it doesn’t really matter what scale of agriculture you're in; basic soil management is going to be important, too, so it's an across-the-board strategy for us.

Interviewer:  Okay. Let's step back up to the global level that you're focused on. When you look at agriculture as a whole internationally, what do you see with regard to greenhouse gas emissions? That's a trickier thing to measure at the local level, right?

David:             Yeah. Well, we know a lot about what the patterns of greenhouse gas emissions around agriculture are, and I think we can make some pretty secure assumptions moving forward based around what we know about population growth rates and also consumption, patterns of consumption in developing countries as they transition from developing status to developed. I think China is a really good example of what you can expect; the country, a generation ago, was poor. I have colleagues in China who talk to me about their siblings who — they remember famine conditions when they were children. China today is a totally transformed country: much higher levels of income, much higher levels of protein consumption, protein demand, rather, so we can expect a world where hundreds of millions of people are transitioning into a middle-class lifestyle with all of these demand patterns that are involved.

                        For agriculture, I think the really big question on the climate change standpoint is you're going to have a big increase in demand for protein. As we know, enteric fermentation is the second-biggest source of greenhouse gasses after land conversion, so if you have the huge increase in protein demand that we expect, that's got implications. The agriculture could increase overall, in absolute terms, its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. That's a really important problem for the industry to be thinking about, the solutions to it. There's different range, a very large range of potential solutions to it, but it's really important that people understand, I think, within the industry, that the development pattern that we're on, which we have to manage, too — I don’t think it's possible to do more than bend the curve of development of the margins. It's very difficult to go to countries like China and Brazil and say, “No, you can't be achieving the same levels of consumption and development of the U.S. and Western Europe.” That's not going to happen, but I think, with the combination of wider understanding within the agriculture industry of how critical this is, and also science and ingenuity, which has always been really important in agricultural history as well, I'm reasonably optimistic that we can make progress.

Interviewer:  Can you drill down on a couple of the tools that we might put into place there?

David:             There are a lot of things around soil management that you can do that reduce carbon emissions. There's a lot of work that you can do around reducing the emissions intensity of livestock production. We're going to be diving into, I think, some of that work during this conference (ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference). There's also a lot that you can do around managing fertilizer, which is an important contributor here as well.

                        But most critically of all, I think we can think about ways that we can intensify agriculture without expanding its geographical footprint into a natural habitat because, if you look at the numbers, that's the single biggest contributor of agriculture to greenhouse gas emissions. It's the expansion of the geographical footprint of agriculture. If food demand increases by 70% or 100% or whatever it is — we know it's going to be a big number — there is no way that we can do that by expanding 70% or 100% the area that we farm or the area that we graze. We absolutely have to intensify our production systems but do that in a way that doesn’t increase the environmental impact of those systems. It's hard, but I think there are some places around the world that you can point to where this is happening to a significant extent already.

Interviewer:  What do you sense as the mood in the room, sort of, when you talk to large agribusiness companies and you talk to governments? Do you think they're excited about digging into this challenge, or are they helpful or optimistic or pessimistic?

David:             That's a hard question to answer because I think it depends on who you're talking to. If I could make some very dangerous generalizations, I'd say that I think the CEO level of ag companies in the agribusiness sector, they get how climate change is important. They're faced with two problems. One is their obligation is to their shareholders, and a lot of the short-term impact of what you need to do to address climate change is not necessarily going to be positive for your bottom line, so there's that tension between the short-term time horizon that many companies have to manage to and the medium- to long-term nature of the impacts of climate change.

                        The other problem, I think, that the private sector often faces is that you have — the world food system and the agribusiness companies within it are very large and complicated organizations, and it's like trying to change, the proverbial changing the direction of a supertanker. It's a difficult thing to do and it takes time and one has to be patient about it, but at the same time, there's a limit to the patience that we can have here given the urgency of some of the problems that we face.

                        In governments, I think there's much greater variety compared to market actors and how they look at climate change and the urgency that they feel. I think the European governments, to take one example, feel the urgency of climate change a great deal, and that's because they're reflecting, I think, the greater level of concern about that among European electorates. You don’t see that same level of concern in developing countries, for obvious reasons; they have very pressing social and economic issues that they have to address, and they regard those as more politically important in the short term than the longer-term issues that swirl around climate change. I completely get where they're coming from on that, but that's basically the picture of where we are.

Interviewer:  Well, let's talk about a couple of specific governments, maybe. The president in Brazil has just rolled back a lot of environmental regulations there. Are you afraid that that might undermine a lot of the progress that you've made?

David:             Well, I broadened it out because I think that Brazil and the United States are a really interesting compare-and-contrast right now. There's also, in the U.S., been a rollback of a lot of environmental regulations. There are some similarities, I think, with the view of the world that both President Trump and President Bolsonaro have. I think what you'll find in Brazil, and I think what we've seen in the U.S., is that the president can try and do things and set a certain tone, but Brazil and the U.S. both have quite strong institutions.

                        You will, I think, see a lot of the things that President Bolsonaro was attempting to do end up in court in the same way as things in the U.S. are ending up in court. Brazil has a very strong judicial system. It will take a while for things to work themselves out. I know there's a lot of coverage, all the media coverage about all of the things that could happen and might happen. I suspect that what actually will happen is actually a lot less than some people are thinking, because those institutions are going to come into play and, I think, to a significant extent, moderate what President Bolsonaro is thinking about doing. I think you're probably going to see the same or have seen the same dynamic in the U.S. as well.

Interviewer:  Tell me a little bit about this online tool that you've created for mapping out soybean production in Brazil.

David:             Sure. As I've referred to, a critical question for the long-term sustainability of agriculture in the Cerrado is encouraging soy and other grains and oil seeds to expand over land that's already been cleared instead of directly into native habitat. So, companies and other market actors, they might want to do that, but they'd face the challenge of, "Well, where would it be most economic for me to do that?" That's partly a question of what your environmental conditions are, what your topography is, what your precipitation ratio is, what your soil conditions are like, but it's also a question of economics — like, what are your transport costs going to be like, what's the yield history of this particular area, what yields can I expect, how much fertilizer am I going to need, all those kinds of questions.

                        What Agroideal does — and I should emphasize that Nature Conservancy put the system together, but the parameters of the system and what it's meant to do was completely designed by the soy traders and the financial institutions in Brazil that have a direct interest in this and can actually really drive what happens. All we did was execute what they said they needed. Agroideal is a geospatial planning tool. It's web-based. It's free for anyone who wants to use it. It allows you to zoom in on particular regions within the Cerrado. It covers the whole of the Cerrado. It's also, by the way, being expanded to Chaco in Argentina and Paraguay. It layers different categories of information — environmental, social, economic — and it allows the user to model different potential scenarios. So, I put a silo here or if I build a road spur over there or a railway in here, how can I do that in a way that minimizes soy expansion into native habitat and maximizes expansion over land that's already been cleared? It's a tool that allows market actors to be able to play with different scenarios and have that influence where they site their infrastructure in a way that channels cropland expansion over cleared land, over pasture, usually, rather than into native vegetation.

Interviewer:  That's fantastic. Well, let's talk a little bit about resiliency. You mentioned that as one of your global focuses.

David:             Well, the first thing to say about resilience is, it's kind of difficult to define. Scientists tie themselves up in knots trying to define it and map it, but you can recognize it when you see it. It's like good art: difficult to define but easy to see when you're walking around the landscape.

                        I'd say there are two really important points to make. One is that you can make all agricultural systems, whatever scale they are, more resilient. You often hear debates about, "Well, this particular system is more resilient than that particular system." Well, that might be true, but that doesn’t mean that you can't increase the resilience of all systems. The other thing, I think, that's really important to understand is that, in order to increase the resilience of your system, it's going to make sense for you to be sharing your agricultural landscape at least a little bit with natural habitat, because natural habitat plays a huge role in buffering the environmental impacts of agriculture. That's true even in a largely converted landscape like the U.S. Corn Belt, for example.

                        Provided you've got patches of native vegetation buffering your field edges, provided you're doing things like cover cropping and trying to do what you can to increase the variety of the agricultural system that you're using — intercropping, whatever it is — you're going to be more resilient than you would be if you weren't doing it.

                        Now, if you're in a smallholder system in Africa, say, or Southeast Asia or China, you're going to be probably more resilient in the sense that you've got lots of different crops instead of just one or two, often, in a really small area — but at the same time, you've got bigger population and growth. You've got urgent demands for production, and that can also undermine the resilience of your system, because you're over-intensifying, basically. The strategies that you would use in different settings vary depending on the nature of the system, but in general, don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Diversify as much as you can. Make sure you've got some native habitat around to be buffering the impacts of what you're doing.

                        I think it's easy to talk about it in the abstract. It's often good to be citing some concrete examples. My favorite example is actually what, on the surface, looks like one of the most vulnerable, politically unstable parts of the world for farmers, and that's Sahel. That's the area just south of the Sahara Desert as it transitions into West Africa. In the last 10 to 15 years, specifically in Mali and Niger, countries which had all sorts of political problems, you've had this extremely impressive agroforestry movement, where thousands and thousands of small farmers have implemented a system that's known in the trade as farmer-managed natural regeneration. It involves using a lot of different tree species to intersperse with their cropping. Some of the tree species have direct economic use, some of them don’t, but they all have an important role in helping to shield cropping from the effects of drought and increasing yield. You look at satellite photos of that part of the world, compare them, what they are, compare them today with what that part of the world looked like 20 years ago. It's much greener today, so there are examples of success stories. It's not just a story of “what a terrible problem, and it's really difficult to do anything about it.”

Interviewer:  Yeah. Well, that's really exciting that they're seeing increased yield from that practice. Do you know if there are upfront costs that they have before they can switch to a practice like that, and how can we overcome those upfront costs?

David:             There are upfront costs. The upfront costs are quite modest. It's a fairly low-tech solution compared to what you might be using in other parts of the world. Those costs have been funded by a combination of governments getting behind it, agriculture research institutes and extension agents getting behind it, so a lot of experimentation on what particular species would be good that was done within CGIAR network, which is a UN-funded network of agricultural research institutes. A lot of non-governmental organizations also played a really important role in bankrolling some of the costs, so lots of different people got involved.

                        The critical thing, I think, is that this was a low-tech solution. There were costs, but they weren't crippling. And even within the context of the fairly poor, hardscrabble farming that most of these villages were in, it was realistic. With appropriate external help, they were able to scale it up to the level that it's reached today.

Interviewer:  I imagine that Nature Conservancy works to try to spread practices like that.

David:             Yeah. Funnily enough, we can't claim any credit here because we actually don’t have a program in West Africa. Our programs are in East Africa in Africa. It's very much the type of thing that we try to encourage, building resiliency, but also when we're looking at it, not just trying to import expensive external solutions that just aren't a realistic proposition for the realities on the ground and the places that we're trying to influence.

Interviewer:  A similar kind of practice, I think, is silvopasture, where you mix forests and livestock pasture. Where do you see that taking off in parts of the world?

David:             Actually, that is one of the areas we work very directly with in Colombia and also in Argentina. You do see it taking off, yeah. It's really impressive to see some of the transformations it's been able to cause on the ground. I would introduce one note of caution, which I think is not just with agro-silvopastoral systems, but across the board, is that, sometimes, the impacts are really spectacular, especially in places that have been badly degraded. It's extraordinary how quickly areas can come back when they're well-managed, and these systems are really good at doing that.

                        Agriculture is always about context. It's the most contextual thing that there is, and what works in one valley might not work in the next valley along, so it's important not to get too evangelical and oversell any individual strategy. I think sometimes that happens with agro-silvopastoral systems. People try and say it's a silver bullet when, in fact, we're in a world where it's silver buckshot. I think it's really useful. We work with it directly. We find, especially in Colombia and Argentina, it's really made a huge contribution, but it's one of lots of solutions that we need to be thinking about and implementing.

Interviewer:  Well, it's exciting that there are some very low-tech solutions like this that are helping farmers put carbon back into the soil and into the forests.

David:             Yeah, although I would say also, I'm not knocking for the high-tech solutions either, because I think one of the really interesting things about American agriculture right now is that you look at the digital technologies that are coming out and the extraordinary way that they can transform how we manage water, for example, how we're able to target inputs in a really efficient way so that we can, for example, know exactly when we ought to be applying fertilizer, exactly where, and that kind of input efficiency is also really important in being able to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture while increasing yields.

                        I think one of the really fascinating questions that we'll be working out over the next 10 or 20 years is the U.S., in particular, it's always been this engine of technological innovation that's always led the way in thinking about the appliance of science. It's really had an extraordinary impact on the productivity of American agriculture. Now, if we could get those, even a fraction of those productivity gains in places like Africa or in Southeast Asia, we'd be well on the way to solving the problems that the world food system faces.

                        One of the great challenges, I think, is how can we translate those technologies and bring the promise that digital agriculture offers to very different settings, where you have farmers who are, on the whole, poor; on the whole, can't afford the level of investment that American farmers can to access these technologies; and, on the whole, don’t have much of a digital education. These technologies are complicated, and a farmer who doesn’t have much education is going to have trouble applying them. You don’t have, in Kenya or Tanzania, this ecosystem of service providers that you have in the U.S., but when you think about the need to increase the productivity of agriculture while minimizing its environmental impacts, these technologies can be incredibly transformative. How you can get them working at a scale in a smallholder farming context, where you have poor farmers and not so much capital to invest — that, I think, is one of the great unanswered questions of the next generation. If we answer it, I think we'll be a long way towards cracking the kind of questions that we've been discussing today.

Interviewer:  That's very exciting, and I like your concept of silver buckshot.

David:             It's not my phrase, by the way. I have to acknowledge Jon Foley, who's the president of the California Association of Science, who came up with that.

Interviewer:  Well, thank you very much, David. It was great talking to you.

David:             Yeah, it was a great pleasure. Thanks a lot.

Interviewer:  Thanks.

As climate change becomes a larger issue, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and finding ways to sequester carbon in farm and food production is more important than ever. Robynne Anderson discusses her experience providing businesses with sustainable solutions as president of Emerging Ag, the international consulting firm for agriculture.

The following is an edited transcript of David Butler’s interview with Robynne Anderson. Click below to hear the full audio.

David:                Hi, Robynne. How are you today?

Robynne:          Great to see you, David.

David:                Thanks! Tell us a little bit about Emerging Ag and what you do.

Robynne:          Well, it's a company that’s spread out around the globe. There are 22 of us on the team, and we work on agricultural policy, really, at a global level. So, whether that means working with agricultural trade associations or individual companies or farmer groups or agricultural scientists, we try and make sure the voice of agriculture gets heard in the context of the United Nations and other venues where people are talking about how you set agricultural policy.

David:                Okay. That sounds pretty exciting, and you must be doing a pretty good job, because I know that you are in the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame.

Robynne:          Oh, thank you. Yes, it was a great honor. Yes, my life is very exciting for a girl who grew up in a small town in Dugald, Manitoba, on a farm. I did not expect to get to see so much of the world, and I find that agriculture is just a great unifying part of a lens with which to see the world because, when you get out on to farms, whether it's in Africa or Asia or any other part of the world, there is something about farming that might be done differently. They might be growing different crops, but there's something about the reality of being from a farm that's kind of the same. It's practical. The weather is still a big factor. It's hard work, and those communities are very welcoming.

David:                Yeah. You mentioned that weather is a big factor, and of course, that's always been true for farming. There are all sorts of uncertainties around the weather and lots of different variables, which make it very challenging, and it seems like, more and more, that's an even bigger problem, with extreme weather events around the globe. What are you seeing that's a serious challenge for farmers?

Robynne:          Well, weather has undoubtedly, as you said, always been one of the toughest parts of farming, and it always seems that the rain never comes when you need it or comes too much. That's been the case in our farm a bit lately, but everybody feels this change from the norm. There used to be patterns; it was always variable, but now, even the sense of the way the seasons work, it really does seem to be changing quite a bit.

                             I was in Kenya for much of the month of March, and their rain season would normally have started about mid-March. I left at the end of the month, and it still had not started. The rains have started to come now, but weeks behind schedule. Really, you get that sense — and for us on our farm in Canada, you see more and more flooding pressure, year on year on year. It's no longer just once every 40 or 50 years that you're feeling that the Red River is going to swallow you up. It's a changing world, and I think this is what is giving extra credence to a discussion that scientists started many years ago, saying something is afoot. We are having too big an impact on our environment.

David:                Yeah, and that certainly seems to be true. Because extreme weather and climate change are becoming a bigger and bigger issue, it's very important to look at what we can do to mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions in every industry, not just agriculture, and you spent some time looking at that. So, what do you see that's promising? What are some opportunities we have to do that?

Robynne:          Well, here at Alltech, there was an awesome panel, and I was really lucky to be on it with a set of others who were working on all very different aspects of that. Part of what I was talking about specifically is that anything that we do in our businesses, we need to measure. We would never go into a sales program and not know what our target was and what our sales figure was and what our cost of delivering that product would be. We wouldn't be in business otherwise.

                             The same applies, really, if we want to take climate change seriously. That means looking at how we are measuring inside our individual businesses. One of the gentlemen on the panel was talking about actually pricing in carbon into their business planning and in terms of their internal budgeting, but what I was talking about also is the need for the sector as a whole to be engaged in measurement. I use a particular example of the Global Dairy Platform, which has helped to set up the Dairy Sustainability Framework. Now, about 30% of the milk sector, total volume of milk, is actually reporting in through this framework, so that's a really big jump forward, and it's not just about climate change.

                             Climate change is incredibly important, but if we're only looking at it from an agricultural perspective on greenhouse gas emissions, I think we're missing the range of things that we need to be involved in, and that includes looking at water and are we drawing down too much or are we polluting it on the way out. These are very concrete, measurable things, and by reporting in together, we can begin to understand what's happening and actually have a conversation about what needs to be done.

                             One thing that we saw that really surprised a lot of people is that the assumption is that greenhouse gas emissions are highest from dairy production in the developed world — an idea that large, intensive farms would be naturally more polluting — but, in fact, the efficiency of those productions shows that OECD countries have been consistently dropping their greenhouse gas emission rates, and they're really quite low. They're not down to zero, but they're really quite low, whereas in developing countries, where animals may go a dry season without being able to be fully productive, all of the emissions-related intensities are actually much higher, because they don’t have that production efficiency.

                             That's really important to understand, but I think it's also very true that, if you consider the emission discussion, it's great that dairy is down 11% in the past ten years in terms of how much carbon we're releasing for every liter of milk we produce, but if you consider that the world still continues to need a total reduction in carbon, you have to be looking, in agriculture, to make use of agriculture's great asset, because agriculture can also do carbon sinks. That is what we do, right? We grow stuff. We put carbon into the soil. We take carbon out of the air for those plants. The opportunity really does exist for all of us to be looking at a net-zero emission intensity, or below, because if we do the right things on our farms, we can get to that level so that we can grow the amount of milk we're producing that's needed in the world but do it in a way that isn't actually helping to destroy the world through releasing too much greenhouse gas.

David:                Yeah. That opportunity that agriculture has is very exciting. Can you talk a little bit about some of the practices that can help sequester carbon?

Robynne:          Absolutely. If you're thinking about a farm as having a land footprint, what kind of things are you growing on that land? Farmers can do concrete things, like plant more trees. A lot of farms actually already have trees around their houses to help protect them from weather, ironically, so what are you doing to put long-term crops? If you're looking at the livestock sector, pasture is a great carbon sink — you managing that pasture well and protecting it. Also, if you think about the dairy sector, for instance, anaerobic digestion, manure management and sequestering that into a facility where you are actually producing renewable energy is an incredibly powerful part of reducing the greenhouse gas footprint of your farm.

                             Farms actually have a lot of lands, so whether your dairy barns have solar energy panels on the top of them; you're using, perhaps, manure management; maybe you're taking local food waste products and putting them in with your manure manager to further that energy production; you can look at a wind turbine on your farm — but farms really can get energy, neutral or renewable energy, sourced. Even some farms are now moving to actually put onto the grid renewable energy, which gives it a double whammy, and that's how you can get to that negative footprint level. There's just such an incredible opportunity of managing well, of using conservation tillage, of really thinking about how you are engineering that system.

                             The great thing is, at the promised end of that is actually the potential to earn some money from that energy you're putting back into the grid, especially if you're working in collaboration with others. There's an opportunity for it not only to be the right thing to do, but to be a really good business decision.

David:                Yeah. When you're talking about earning money, you're talking about selling carbon credits to other businesses?

Robynne:          That is an opportunity, but I am thinking, actually, about putting electricity back onto a grid. You get paid for the electricity you generate, so that's a clearer path to a business.

David:                Okay. I suppose electricity and energy use in general is kind of a small percentage of the carbon footprint from the farm, but a farm has the potential to generate much more electricity than that and offset nearby homes or businesses and balance the equation, right?

Robynne:          Exactly. Whether you're making a compressed natural gas or a conventional electricity product, that is exactly the opportunity that farms have this resource available to them, because they have a land footprint. Now, you need to work collaboratively with your local electricity grid to be part of the renewable sources there. Some farms are working quite well together to achieve that. You see some of the cooperatives, for instance, in the dairy sector working together to get their members having a bulk-buy onto the grid, because getting access onto that grid is the challenge, but energy is actually quite a high input cost in a lot of farms. So, even if you got your electricity cost down in your own operation, that would be a big benefit, and then, to produce a surplus that you could actually use as a revenue stream is just one example of how you can really get to zero, because everybody says that's impossible, but farms really have this unique opportunity — and especially how they manage their carbon sinks on their farms, as well.

David:                It would be fantastic if many more farms were at zero greenhouse gas emissions, because there's so much negative publicity about the amount of greenhouse gasses that are produced on farms. You mentioned a little earlier that it's very important to look at data. You had an example yesterday that shows it's important to look at the data in multiple ways, when you were talking about the carbon output of New Zealand, Ireland, and the different ways you can look at that.

Robynne:          It is a strangely quirky thing that, when you look at a chart about greenhouse gas outputs, New Zealand and Ireland pop higher than countries like China and some other places that you would expect would have much higher greenhouse gas emission implications.

David:                And you're saying from the dairy sector specifically, right?

Robynne:          That is the calculation — is because both of them are very effective dairy producers — that this is counting very high in what the proportion of their greenhouse gas emissions are. Does that mean that two countries that have a very moderate climate, perfectly adapted to dairying, that have beautiful grasslands, that are easily maintained through natural rainfall, aren't the best place to produce milk? Really, what's counting against them is they are such a good producer that they are exporting milk and serving the rest of the world, but because that production happens in their country, they carry 100% of those emissions, but if you went off and set up a dairy — and I'm going to pick an arbitrary country here — in Amman or in the middle of a desert somewhere, it is not going to be, probably, a more greenhouse gas-efficient or more environmentally sustainable solution because it's happening in that other country, because you're going to have to irrigate that land. You're not going to have the same natural cycles. You might, potentially, have to provide cooling to those dairy cows to be productive, because they're not used to that kind of heat.

                             The result will be, actually, potentially, a bad outcome if we don’t find ways to recognize where we produce things efficiently. The current discussions about climate change actually really hone in on a country's responsibility for what they're producing, and that makes a certain amount of sense, but when you're talking about global trade — especially in food — it's really important that we also find a way to make the right decisions globally, that we're not turning over lands that are inappropriate for some things and making them into lands that are, therefore, being used. Because, as a Canadian farmer, I don’t think we're going to be growing mangoes in Canada. We will have gone a long way down the climate change path if, suddenly, banana trees and tropical plants or mangoes are growing in the middle of Canada. We grow some other things really, really effectively, and I think you can see that paradigm potentially going in the wrong direction.

                             If I might just add one more thing to that, it's really important to consider that, as we're having more extreme weather, that trade becomes even more important. You just don’t know what's going to hit where, who's going to have a drought and who's going to have a cyclone and who's going to have a flood.

                             One of the things that the FAO produced recently was to talk about just how important global trade is going to be in food. It's always been important, but it becomes our backup system to food security, and so, it is really important that we think about how to manage this in a way that the trade is actually encouraged and that the best, most ecologically sound producers are being encouraged to use it.

David:                Yeah. I'm sure it's incredibly difficult to write global agreements or treaties on things like greenhouse gas emissions, and there's certainly a potential for some inadvertent mistakes. When you're looking at greenhouse gas emissions on an industry per-capita for a small country that excels in that industry, the number looks horrible, but if you look at it per liter or gallon of milk, it's a completely different picture, right? So how do we tell that message and make sure that those decisions are being made in a sensible way that makes good policy for everybody?

Robynne:          Well, it is really challenging. I've had the opportunity to go to some of the UN climate change meetings or very large meetings. There's a lot on the agenda. It's a really complicated process. One thing they deserve a lot of credit for is that the climate change negotiations have really heard from NGOs and businesses and scientists alike, so it's a space where having a serious conversation is possible. As we've moved to getting serious about national emissions, the inequities of this position become more clear, and it is possible to then say, “Okay, now we understand that. In a way, we didn’t understand it before,” and the agricultural sector has to be doing those numbers, has to be doing those measurements, so you can explain that the efficiency level on this is very high.

                             There are some dairy farms in America that are getting to zero, so it's not impossible; it is actually really happening. You want to make sure that the discussions to advance our goals of cutting greenhouse gas emissions don’t create perverse subsidies for the wrong sorts of actions. For instance, strangely, if you were to till under all that pasture and grassland in New Zealand or Ireland, you might argue that once they went back to pastureland, they would get a carbon credit for creating a carbon sink, but they would've done something that actually caused more release of carbon so that they could get the credits for doing it. So, we really want to find ways to talk about agricultural production that have the practical voice of farmers there and don’t lead countries to make decisions to hit numbers that actually lead to the wrong outcomes.

                             It is a complex piece of work to navigate that, but we didn’t get to climate change without doing a lot of complex things, so it's going to take a fair amount of concerted effort to find a path forward.

David:                Yeah, good point. There's certainly a lot of accounting and measurement that we need to do to make sure that we're mitigating climate change, but it's very important to get that right. If we think we're doing everything we need to and we're not making the right decisions, we're in a lot of trouble.

Robynne:          We've just discussed the weather lately. I think we're in some trouble, and now, it is really about the path to get out, but you don’t want to make the path to get out worse. Like anyone finding their way out of a forest, we'll probably make a few wrong turns, but we want to at least be headed towards the edge of the forest, not going deeper in the other way.

David:                Are there things going on right now in the industry to try to help reduce emissions for low- and middle-income countries that have, traditionally, low productivity?

Robynne:          Some, but not remotely enough. It is a strange thing that agriculture receives very little of the global development budget. Only about 5% a year of all of the money that's going into development assistance goes into agriculture, even though 80% of the people living in multidimensional poverty — which means that they live below $1.25 a day — they don’t have access to schools. They don’t have access to hospitals. They live in rural areas, so they're farmers.

                             Eighty percent of the world's most needy are in a rural context, and yet, only 5% of development money going to agriculture is already wrongheaded, and then, on top of that, if you consider that, of that 5%, only 4% goes to livestock. We're talking about minute amounts of the development budgets going to important factors where they're needed, and many communities in these areas actually have a very strong livestock tradition.

                             So, it's really important that more gets done, but there are some things happening. There's the International Livestock Research Institute, which is based in Kenya but operates quite globally in the developing country context. I have the good fortune to work with them on a number of things, but there are some really innovative things that they've been part of the leadership on. One of them is Indexed Livestock Insurance. If you're in a situation where there's a drought, there's extreme weather, rather than doing what we've traditionally done — which is to say, "Here's livestock insurance. We're going to wait until that animal dies," so your herd is wiped out and an entire community that might be based on that herd has had their lifestyle devastated; they're perhaps nomadic, they're in a situation that they have completely destabilized the population — instead of taking a look at overall weather trends, seeing that clearly there is a drought. The Indexed Livestock Insurance actually is meant to buy feed for those animals so that they are in a position to make sure that those animals don’t die. So, rather than waiting until a terrible outcome and suggesting that you can just buy back your loved one — if you were to use a hospital analogy right, you don’t treat them at all while they're starving to death, but afterwards, you give a big payout for their death — you should do the opposite. You should get that assistance in.

                             It's a really simple, concrete thing that, if you're in agriculture, of course you should send in feed, but we've really struggled to get that kind of practical agricultural lens onto a lot of the interventions.

David:                That's a really good analogy. It needs to be more like health insurance and less like car insurance, right?

Robynne:          Yes.

David:                All right. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Robynne. It was great talking to you.

Robynne:          Pleasure.

Robynne Anderson spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference. Sign up to hear other presentations from ONE19.