Episode 1: Bridging The Agriculture Perception Divide

Mike Howell (00:08):

The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podKast where I present the down-and-dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by ekonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource, I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, news, and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.

(00:38):

Well, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. It’s been a long, cold winter for most of us, but I know everyone is getting excited to get back into the field and get this year’s crop started. And I’m excited to be back in the studio bringing you more episodes of The Dirt. Now, we’ve got a lot of new topics lined up for you this year, with some really great guests joining us as well. We also have plans to do some special events, and to kick all this off, we’re going to have a special contest where you can win some really nice prizes. So stick around for the second segment and find out how you can win.

(01:08):

Let’s dig in and get this season started. To help me do that, I’m honored to have with me today Mr. Jeff Tarsi, Executive Vice President of Nutrien and President of Nutrien Ag Solutions. Mr. Tarsi, welcome to The Dirt.

Jeff Tarsi (01:21):

Hey, Mike, it’s my honor to join you this afternoon.

Mike Howell (01:25):

Well, Mr. Tarsi, before we dig in, if you would tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

Jeff Tarsi (01:30):

I call myself a lifelong agriculturist. I grew up in the Mississippi Delta just outside of Cleveland, Mississippi in a family that farmed. Believe it or not, you won’t pick it up from the dialect, but second generation to Italian immigrants. There was an area of the Delta, really from Clarksdale down to Leland, that when I was a kid it was known as Little Italy. But anyway, loved agriculture, loved farming. Went to Mississippi State, got a degree in agricultural economics.

(01:58):

I’ll tell you, when I went to Mississippi State, I had every intent on coming back to the Delta and farming. For those people that are old enough to remember 1984/1985, those were really some of the darker times in agriculture over the last 45, 50 years. When I graduated from Mississippi State, the situation just really didn’t exist for me to return back to the farm, even though my father desperately wanted me to. He was in the farm equipment business as well. And so I started my career with BASF and got a wonderful education from Mississippi State. I wouldn’t be where I am today without that education. Got some great learning from BASF over about eleven-year career before entering the retail side of the agricultural industry.

(02:48):

I’ve been very blessed, Mike, I’ve worked just about in every aspect of retail agriculture that you could work in. I’ve traveled most of the globe as it relates to agriculture, with extensive travel across all the farming areas of North America, Australia, and most of Latin America, but in a lot of other countries as well prospecting to see if we wanted to do business there. Where we sit today is where we most desire to do business.

Mike Howell (03:15):

Well, Mr. Tarsi, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I didn’t grow up in the Delta, I was just a few miles outside of the Delta in the hill area of Mississippi, but when I started working probably about the age of 18 or so, I spent most of my time in the Delta, so I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Jeff Tarsi (03:31):

Mississippi State’s been a big part of my life, Mike, and outside of the college that I chose to go to get continuing education, it’s been a place I’ve been a part of since I was probably five years old. I was fortunate enough to have had a dad spend a lot of time with me, and a lot of the time we spent together was in the football stadium in Starkville and a lot of road trips as well. Baseball, basketball, football, it didn’t make any difference.

Mike Howell (03:57):

Yes. Well, I grew up on a research farm from Mississippi State. We didn’t get to travel to campus to go to all the ball games because we were just too busy doing other things, but never will forget Jack Cristil sitting there listening to him on the radio every Saturday afternoon.

(04:10):

Mr. Tarsi, we know we’ve had some pretty tough times on campus here the last few years as far as football goes, but we think things are fixing to change around. I know you still keep up with Mississippi State football pretty regular. What do you see for the coming season?

Jeff Tarsi (04:23):

Look, I’m a homer, so I’ll say that right now. I look at football in the State of Mississippi like I look at commodities. We’re in a commodity business, and we cycle in and we cycle out. Sometimes the cycle is really good, and sometimes you go down into some valleys. This last year was a very tough year for Mississippi State fans, but I feel really good. Listen, a lot of it with misfortune because nobody would’ve woke up two years ago and said that would be Mike Leach’s last year and that he would unfortunately succumbed to an illness very quickly. And so when things like that happen, there’s no perfect way to correct that.

(05:02):

I find that in business as well. We always try to be as prepared as we possibly can be for a lot of different scenarios, but there are certain scenarios that there’s just not 100% good answer for. Look, I think we’re on a great path now. We just made a great hire, in my opinion, and I’m greatly looking forward to the ’24 season. But I’m also being realistic in what my expectations are. If we didn’t have a change in coaching and two changes, really three changes in the last six years, just looking at the schedule we have for ’24 would make you say, “Man, I’m not going too far out there on the limb.” But I know this, for the home football games, I’ll be there, and I will be ringing my cowbell yes. I’ll ring my cowbell when allowed to ring my cowbell, maybe every now and then when it says please just cheer. I look forward to it, and this Friday is a start of baseball season. And if it’s not too cold Friday evening, I plan to out there watching them start off in the baseball season and catch basketball game on Saturday. I’ve got a daughter, my third child is a freshman at Mississippi State, so I have a good excuse for being over there.

Mike Howell (06:09):

Nothing like a weekend on campus, and nothing like 60,000 cowbells ringing at one time. That’ll just send chills down your spine, whether it’s a good chill for the home team or a bad chill for the visitors, but it’s going to affect you one way or the other.

(06:23):

Farming isn’t farming without questions, and now there’s a place to go for answers. At eKonomics, an entire team of agronomists is waiting and ready to help, for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit nutrient-ekonomics, with a K, .com and submit your question with the Ask an Agronomist feature.

(06:45):

Mr Tarsi, let’s dig in a little bit and start talking about what we really wanted to talk about today. Several months ago, Nutrien conducted a study and looking at the differences between the producers of these commodities, the row crops and the consumers. That study is on the internet. We’re going to put a link to it on our webpage as well. It’s called Bridging the Agriculture Perception Divide. There was a lot of comments about that, and I saw you had a few comments on that as well. I thought we would dig into that study a little bit today. If you would, tell us a little bit about this study and why it was so important to Nutrien.

Jeff Tarsi (07:18):

In Nutrien, we’re about as agriculture as you can get, I tell our customers this. We have 600,000 customers across the globe. I don’t know how you can be any more integrated in agriculture than we are, just as our customers are so integrated in agriculture and everything we do.

(07:35):

The study was interesting because we’ve known for some time that there is a perception gap between the consumer of goods and those that produce those goods. We sit right in the middle of Nutrien because we’re building out the prescription solutions for our growers to produce the crops they produce, and those crops that are produced are going to be consumed, as everyone knows, by consumers, and with some of it under direct consumption and some of it by the ingredients that go into making a finished good. What we wanted to get out of this study is we learn specifically what were those gaps, and as an industry, what can we do to facilitate enclosing that gap between the farmer and the consumer. We think that’s vital. Matter of fact, we know it’s vital. So this survey provided us a roadmap, and it supplied a lot of direction. A lot of it was stuff, again, that did not catch us by surprise.

Mike Howell (08:32):

What were some of the general findings of the study?

Jeff Tarsi (08:35):

Well, I think that some of the findings, if you hadn’t been around this, they’d be a bit alarming. Again, not a great surprise to me if somebody’s been around agriculture, but I’m going to talk about the positives of it as well. The findings are that consumers don’t understand in a large part where their food comes from. They don’t understand how their food is produced. They want more transparency in what goes into the production of those goods because, look, most of what we produce ends up on your table or on your body. It’s either food or fire. The positive of this is that consumers are interested in knowing more about the farm and knowing more about how this production takes place. They want to know more about the inputs we’re using. They want to know more about what we’re doing as environmental stewards of the land.

(09:33):

And man, that’s highly encouraging to me because as a input provider and someone that serves 600,000 customers, we are anxious to tell that story because we think it’s a very good story, and it’s a very positive story as well. Mike, I’m 61. I don’t mind telling somebody my age, I’m 61 years old, and I’m removed from the farm. But if you look at the consumers today and the Gen Zs and those types, we’re getting aware we’re three or four generations away from the farm now. The further society gets away from the farm, then it’s quite natural that that perception gap is going to get wider. For instance, I worked every day till I finished college on the farm, and so I had a lot of knowledge about agriculture and our food and things we did to environmentally steward the soil and those type things.

(10:32):

I’ll tell you, today, my kids, I have three kids and their father has been involved in agriculture every day of his life, but my kids would have a much less perception of how that exists today than I have myself. And then you go back another couple of generations because we really started to see people leave the farms in big numbers in the ’60s and ’70s. And so today, even when you look at the voting public, we’re in a very small minority of the voters that have some tie into agriculture today. That’s where our work has to be done, and I’m going to use this word, education. Education, educating consumers, educating our kids as to what’s happening on a farm and what’s taking place.

(11:21):

Again, Mike, as somebody that’s traveled the globe, I can tell anybody unbashfully, we have the safest food supply in the world. Our growers are the best in the world, in my opinion, of producing and preserving the land and doing the things necessary to ensure that 100 years from now, 200 years from now this soil is in good shape and we’re still able to be a global producer of food and fiber.

Mike Howell (11:52):

Now, Mr. Tarsi, you just hit a hot-button topic with me. I live on a small farm here. We call it a farm, we’ve got about 20 acres that we can do something with. It’s really not enough to do a whole lot, but we can have a garden out here. I’ve got seven kids, and we grow a garden just about every year. We’ve got a few cows that come around. We’ve got a few donkeys on the place. We’re not going to make any money off of this, that’s not the point of it. I can sure enough go to the grocery store and buy some food, I don’t have to get out there and sweat in that garden. But if I take those kids out there and teach them how to grow something in the garden, they’re learning a lot about agriculture. They’re learning how to produce their food. If they ever need to go back to the old times and produce that food, they’ve got a little knowledge about how to do that. I think that’s important. I wish there was more ways that more people could get out and get their hands dirty a little bit and actually see what it is to grow some food for their self. I think that would change a lot of the perception if they actually could do that themselves.

Jeff Tarsi (12:46):

Yeah, I agree. But here’s what we have to accept, is that’s going to happen some, but on a large scale it’s not. I love working with school systems and STEM programs, that type of stuff in school systems. Some of it is for selfish reasons when I do it, it’s because I want to attract more people to agriculture. I don’t mean just by knowing what they’re eating and where it came from, I want to attract more people working in the field of agriculture. I want them to know what I know. I know that what we do every day in our business serves one of the greatest purposes that you could ever think of. I’ve been on a three to four-week roadshow in front of our people, and I tell them with a straight face and a firm voice, “If you got a problem getting out of bed in the morning for the industry that we work in and the purpose that is associated with that industry, you are probably working in the wrong place. I don’t know that you can be motivated, to be honest with you.”

(13:43):

When I’m in these schools and I’m talking about agriculture, we’ve got to start earlier. A lot of people say, “Well, you got to start when they’re in the ninth grade, 10th grade, get them informed about agriculture, get them interested.” No, you got to start in the second grade. You got to start in the third grade, the fourth grade. You’ve got to really go back. But the first thing is you got to have them understand, because again, you and I might know what agriculture is, you got to remember, we’re dealing with people that have no clue, and I’ll give you an example. I’ll say, “How many of you are affixed to agriculture today? How many of you agriculture’s a part of your life today?” And if I got a class of 60, I might get two people raise their hands.

(14:24):

And then my next question always, “How many of you had breakfast this morning?” Most all of them going to raise their hands, and I’m going to say, “All right, tell me what you had for breakfast.” If somebody says a biscuit, I’m going to say, “Okay, what’s the ingredients in a biscuit?” “Flour and milk.” “Where did the flour come from?” And listen, you might say, “That’s too elementary.” No, it’s not. People don’t understand that as they get further and further removed away from the farm. I’ll ask them, “How many of you are clothed today?” And obviously everyone’s clothed. “All right, where did those blue jeans come from? Do you realize they’re made out of cotton? Okay, and how is cotton produced?”

(15:04):

These podcasts you’re doing, Mike, these are great. They serve as great communication tools for people to learn and hear more. When I’m in these classrooms today and I’m speaking about these types of things and I’m asking them, “What kind of jobs do you think are affiliated with agriculture?” most of them want to come back to working on a farm or something like that. I said, “Well, look, does sustainability mean anything to you?” Well, let me tell you something, if you’re in a classroom of students today, while most of them might not know where their biscuit came from, they all know what sustainability means, because it’s important to them. That’s what the agriculture field misses sometimes, is it is vital that we understand what the consumer is thinking, how they think about their food, and what they want. Because you can produce all of X that you want to in a manner that you’ve been doing it, and if that’s not appealing to a consumer, it doesn’t speak well for the longevity of profit-loss statement on a farm.

(16:10):

Sustainability is a buzzword right now with young people and middle-aged people and people all around the globe. And look, most of our practices in agriculture today are very sustainable practices. It goes back to farmers being great stewards of the land. Their largest single investment they have on their farm, barring nothing, is the soil that they farm. And so those are the positives there. You got to hook likes up, and as an industry, we haven’t done a great job, Mike, I’ll be honest with you. We haven’t done a great job of telling our story, because there’s so many positive things to tell.

Mike Howell (16:48):

I’ve heard you make that comment before that farmers are great stewards of the land, they’re great conservationists, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Growing up, I started working at the age of 17 or 18 checking cotton, and I spent a lot of time in the Mississippi Delta scouting those cotton fields. At that time we still had the boll weevil, and if you found an egg on that cotton square, you were spraying five times automatically. We didn’t have the boll guard technology that we do now, and we were spraying 7, 8, 12 times a year for bollworms or bud worms, and that’s not even mentioning the plant bug. So with the technology we have today, we don’t have to make all those applications. We’re able to help protect that environment a lot better by eliminating a lot of those costly pesticide applications. But if you would, talk a little bit about environmental stewardship and give a couple of examples of what farmers are doing now to be better stewards of the land.

Jeff Tarsi (17:38):

First of all, I think that you would not find anybody in agriculture today, and that’s all the way through the supply chain, that wouldn’t feel like that we have a responsibility to leave this planet in better shape than we found it. I know for me personally, and I just got finished doing my goals for 2024 with my boss, Ken Seitz, our CEO, and one of those goals is around environmental stewardship and making sure that we take the learnings that we have in Nutrien and share that with our customers.

(18:11):

As an industry, the adoption of technology has done miraculous things for environmental stewardship. You just mentioned it. When I started in retail, we sold pyrethroids 10 to 12 applications a year for bollworm control. I remember thinking when GMO came along and we came with BT first and then Roundup followed with it, think Deltapine 50 and 20 were the first two varieties, I thought it was the end of the world for retail. I’m being honest here, I’m going, “We’ll never recover from this.” What you find out is Mother Nature has a very unique way of creating other things.

(18:51):

The other neat thing is that growers take the money that they save when these events occur that allow us to advance ourselves and they invest back into their farm in other areas. They invest in better irrigation practices. They invest in better drainage practices. Today, we’re investing heavily in the health of our soil. Again, I cannot stress the emphasis of that enough in soil health. Mike, the last time I looked, there is no new soil being created anywhere in the world. And so what we have is what we’re going to have, except every single day it gets smaller because you got urbanization taking place across the whole globe. I’ve had, I won’t call it a pleasure, but I’ve had the ability to go into some other countries where they have not put this technology to good use and they have just rapidly depleted their soil over the last 500 years.

(19:52):

To be honest with you, I don’t know what it would take to get that stuff back up to a higher production basis again. You’re saying, “Give some examples around sustainability and that type stuff.” Look, a lot of the practices our growers are using today are what we think are sustainable practices, they’ve had incorporated for the last 30 or 40 years. When I go to Australia, and I go there quite often, we take for granted here in this country, outside of if you’re on the West Coast or in some more arid areas, moisture, water availability, those type things. We’re so blessed, Mike, through the Delta. And again, I think we take that for granted. We don’t understand just what we have here from the aquifers and those type things. But if you’re in Australia, either you’re conserving moisture or you’re not farming. What they do with their soil, what they do from a tillage standpoint, and just how minimum that tillage is today there, and what they do to trout any excess water that they have and reuse that water later.

(20:55):

This is one thing that’s amazing to me, is once they harvest a crop, they’re not going to let a weed exist for two weeks after it emerges. Why is that? Because that weed is consuming moisture out of the soil. These are things we don’t even think about over here. We get through harvesting, as warm as it is here, we’ll start in late August and September through this area, and you might go by a field three weeks later and you got vegetation that’s knee-high. That would never happen in a lot of parts of the world because they have to conserve that moisture, they need that moisture for the next year’s crop.

(21:31):

I will tell you that agriculture today, and people look at me sideways sometimes when I say this, agriculture today is one of the most technologically advanced areas of business that there is anywhere in the world. I will put agriculture up against any segment of industry today from a technological standpoint. We’re sitting here applauding Tesla today for having autonomous cars that can drive themselves. Mike, how long have we had tractors that have been on auto steer?

Mike Howell (22:02):

They’ve been there for a long time, and it’s not going to be long until we don’t have to have somebody in the cab of that tractor.

Jeff Tarsi (22:08):

We wont. And to be honest with you, the only reason we do today is from a liability standpoint for the most part and getting equipment and implements moved from one field to the next. We’re very large in custom application in Nutrien Ag Solutions. We would probably be the largest custom applicator in the world. We are eyes and ears wide open. Like you said, we got somebody sitting in the seat. They’re very rarely driving the implement in the field. Matter of fact, they aren’t driving it in the field. What we’re doing with mapping and 3D images and those type of things, but we adapt to technology very quickly.

(22:44):

One of the unfortunate things of this, and we are seeing a lot of consolidation at the farm gate. But the reason that consolidation is occurring is because of all the technology that’s coming along. Could never farm the acres that we farm today when I grew up on the farm, Mike. For instance, if we were spraying bollworms, at the acres I see farmed today, it would take you two weeks to get everything sprayed, and by that time the damage is done. It’s amazing this technology. If we think it’s coming fast today, it’s going to be twice as fast tomorrow. That’s one of my big fears outside of the safety of our people in our organization, is can we keep up or stay ahead of the grower when it comes to technology?

Mike Howell (23:27):

It’s moving really quickly. My oldest son is a freshman in college this year, and that’s what he’s wanting to get into, is the autonomous agriculture. I’m encouraging him, but I’m telling him, “You’ve got to be the best at it. Whatever you do, you’ve got to be the best at.” I’ve always believed that.

(23:43):

The Dirt is your home for agronomic topics that boost your crop knowledge and profitability, but it only scratches the surface on what eKonomics has to offer. See for yourself why eKonomics is known as farming’s go-to information resource. Check it out at nutrient-eKonomics, with a K, .com.

(24:05):

Mr. Tarsi, another thing that this study pointed out was a gap in industry advancement. What are some of the changes that you’ve seen growers make in the last 10 years to be more productive?

Jeff Tarsi (24:16):

When we see industry advancement today, anything around precision agriculture. You can say precision agriculture is two words, but it can mean 1,000 different things. I’ll give you a good example. Just 15 years ago, Mike, we put blanket rates of fertilizer on them. We took crop off in the fall and we were going to put fall fertilizer. We might put 150 pounds of potash and 75 pounds of phosphate. I’m just using that as an example across a 300 acre field. My gosh, we change that rate up five times within a given pass today. There is no blanket rate of anything. We variable-rate almost all applications today, and that’s been a heck of an investment. We’re putting the right product at the right place at the right time. Here’s the deal there, we don’t want to put one ounce more of a nutrient or a product than that plant or that soil calls for. At the same time we want to take those variations in soil and we want to make sure that if out of that 100 acres, 25 of those acres needs double what the standard rates have been and 25 of that needs a half of it based off the potential of that soil in that zone, we want to give the totality of that acre the chance to maximize yield. Where it can’t maximize it, we don’t want to be giving it rates that apply to maximization on it.

(25:39):

And so precision agriculture is huge. We’ve already seen the industry adapt to that. We’re seeing more and more technology come. We got sea and spray technology coming from John Deere now using camera systems to spray the actual weed, again versus a broadcast spray. That’s very interesting technology. And then what I think we don’t see today that’s going to have an amazing effect in agriculture is artificial intelligence. What I mean by artificial intelligence is that, man, we’re going to be able to look at millions and millions and millions of rows of data and make decisions within minutes based off of that. We’re just in the advent of that today. We’re seeing it in other industries. It will be in agriculture. Don’t try to run from it. Anything that we can use to make better, informed decisions on a more timely basis has got to be good.

(26:40):

When I first started in the business, which would’ve been 1985/1986, we used to say, “It’s 50% science and 50% art.” I tell our investors this today, the same comparison, “Today it’s 85% science and 15% art.” We got too much data, we got too much analytics that it’s going to be a science-based decision. It’s going to be an information-based decision based off of thousands of pretensions around it, and that’s what each and any situation. Obviously the part we can’t control is… I tell people this all the time, we’re not the Dallas Cowboys, we do not have a removable roof over our business. Our roof is open 24/7. The environment is what we don’t control, but I’m telling you, everything else, we’re taking a lot of the art out. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I used to call myself a muddy-boot scientist early in my career, but man, there’s just so many more efficient ways to make a decision today, and the accuracy is so much greater.

Mike Howell (27:44):

I couldn’t agree more. Well, we’re going to run out of time here quickly and I do have a couple of more questions. We could talk about this all day, but I know you’ve got other things to do as well. One last thing about the study that I found, it pointed out that the consumers lacked the knowledge about agriculture, and you already mentioned that, but they also indicated that they wanted to learn. What can we do as Nutrien to help educate these consumers more about agriculture and in turn help bridge this gap between these two groups?

Jeff Tarsi (28:12):

First of all, we can talk about what we do and talk about it a lot with pride like I mentioned earlier, stuff you’re doing with a podcast. Look, I’m happy for this podcast to end up in the hands of people that work in agriculture every day. My real wish was this podcast end up in the hands of people who don’t ever see agriculture so they can hear about what we see and what we think about it. All that work in this industry, we should dedicate time to working in the school systems, to get out and better educate. I’ll tell you this, I fly a lot and travel a lot, and I’m probably somebody’s worst nightmare when I sit next to them on a plane, because if I know they don’t know anything about agriculture, I’m going to make damn sure they do by the time we land.

(28:58):

But, really as an industry, we need to have one approach to our story in agriculture from the grower to the manufacturers and your seed producers and your retailers in that we need to be on one page on what we’re saying and how we’re wordsmithing what we do. But again, it’s about education, Mike. We’ve got to go tell our story. We’ve got to get in front of people. Sometimes it looks like we do it bashfully, and I don’t understand that. We have a office in Washington DC, we’ve got a tremendous lobbying team there led by Jeremy Stump. I commit about three trips a year to DC to travel with them just getting in our congressional and Senate offices. Gosh, you can’t believe how many of those people that come from states that produce a lot of agriculture don’t know our field. And so getting in front of them and expressing what we do on behalf of our growers, the things we need in the farm, we’ve got a farm bill that’s up right now, and getting the information shared of what we need there.

(30:05):

But we got to get agriculture back into schools. We got to get our story back into schools. We got to get our consumers better informed, and Mike, we got to open our ears and listen to what our consumers are telling us that they want from that standpoint. We want to produce a product that they need, not one we think they need.

Mike Howell (30:24):

That’s exactly right.

(30:27):

The Dirt is your place for the down-and-dirty agronomic science you need to grow, and now it’s an option for earning CEU credits. Visit eKonomics and click the Agronomics tab. There you’ll be able to review past episodes with credit opportunities. Credits are waiting at nutrien-ekonomics, with a K, .com.

(30:50):

Well, listeners, there’s a lot more information you can read about in this study. We’re going to have a link to that on our website, that’s nutrien-ekonomics, with a K, .com. Mr Tarsi, before we let you go, I do have one final question I wanted to ask you. We’re about to start planting this 2024 crop here in North America. We know that with each new growing season we’re going to have our own unique challenges for the growers, but I’ve also been taught all my life with every challenge we’re going to have an opportunity to go with that. So having said that, what do you see as some of the challenges that growers may face this year, and what opportunities could emerge from some of these challenges?

Jeff Tarsi (31:25):

I just kept finish telling our group that no two years in agriculture are alike. They’re like snowflakes; they might be similar, but they’re not exactly alike, none of them. Coming into this, I’m going to say from about a November time period to today, one of my big concerns in North America was the soil moisture situation. Now, I can tell you, that is getting better. We got water in the river now. We had situations late this fall we couldn’t even put fertilizer in place because of the level of the river. We want to listen to Mr. Snodgrass quite a bit, and we want to understand, if I’ve looked at his long-range weather forecast, he said we could have a tight window to get our crop in this spring. So when you hear something like that, you want to be prepared and you want to be ready, and when you get that opportunity, you want to hit with it and a lot of preparation goes into it.

(32:14):

We plan these crops much earlier today than we did when I started in this business. By the end of November, we got a crop plan done for every grower we got out there. The moisture situation got better in Argentina. Last year was an absolute disaster there. Brazil started off dry. They’re getting better moisture there. What I’m thinking is we’re going to see pressure in these commodity markets. We need to watch that because when we get opportunities and we get increases in pricing, we need to be observant of it. I don’t think our stocks-to-use ratios, those don’t scare me. They have come up some, but they’re still in an area where if something tragic happened in any growing region it can cause a quick response to prices and such. But we haven’t been in these lower price environments over the last five or six years, and so we need to remind ourselves that yield is absolute key.

(33:12):

When you got $6 corn, yield is good, but you can survive not having a great yield. But when we get the environments we’re in now with cost escalation like has occurred, then you’ve got to focus on the best germ plasm, the best trait packages, and the nutritional needs and really choke your stick up on your thresholds. Marketing, as always, is key. We deal with a lot of agencies and advisors on Russia-Ukraine. We don’t see a quick end to that, and so that’s going to keep some pressure in the market. Obviously what’s happening in the Middle East right now and some of the shipping lanes we’re having to use because some of the attacks on vessels has implications in this, so I don’t think we’re going to see a period again where we don’t have geopolitical factors that factor into agriculture and the prices we receive for our products and the supply chains and disruption or lack of disruption that we’re seeing there.

(34:11):

The Panama Canal is still very dry right now, and so it costs more if you can get a boat through there. And then if you can’t, it’s really a big cost in going around. This is going to be an eventful year in ’24. What we know today is probably going to be drastically different 90 days from now. You got to stay keen and observant to what’s happening in the market, and when you get an opportunity to capture some margin, you got to capture some margin if you’re grower, in my opinion.

Mike Howell (34:41):

Great advice, Mr. Tarsi. We sure appreciate you spending time with us today, I know you’re awful busy. Just want to give you a chance if there’s any closing comments or any take-home message you want to leave our listeners with today.

Jeff Tarsi (34:52):

Hey, look, we’re all very fortunate to work in the agriculture industry. We should never take a day of that for granted. Last year on the retail side, it was a tough year because we had a lot of resetting on prices and those types of things. People told me, “I bet you’ll be glad when ’23 is over with.” Well, now that my runway is not that long on my career, I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not glad when any year is over with, I relish every year. But I’ll tell you this, we learn a lot more on a tough year than we do on an easier year, so just be thankful for the industry that we work in if you’re in agriculture. And if you’re a consumer, be thankful that you have got wonderful producers out there that do a fantastic job in ensuring that you have one of the safest food supplies in the world. Hopefully, Mike, I get to join you again sometime in the future on one of these.

Mike Howell (35:44):

Anytime. Open invitation anytime you want to jump on with us.

(35:48):

Listeners, I hope you enjoyed the first segment of today’s show. If you did, please take a minute and give us a rating on your favorite podcast channel or app. Give us some feedback as well. We want to hear from you to help make the show even better. Don’t keep it to yourself. Please share these episodes with coworkers, family, friends, anyone you think may benefit from the information we’re sharing here. Don’t forget to visit our website, nutrien-ekonomics, with a K, .com, to help find the latest crop nutrition news and research information, as well as market updates, a growing degree day calculator, a nutrient use calculator, a rainfall tracker, and much, much more. It’s all at nutrien-ekonomics, with a K, .com.

(36:33):

Most episodes of The Dirt are now available for CCA credits. Visit our website and click on the Agronomics tab to find these CCA credit opportunities. And if you have a question, you can ask one of our agronomy team members. Simply ask your question and one of us will get back with you. Thanks for listening. Now, segment two of The Dirt.

(36:56):

Well, listeners, we appreciate you hanging around for segment two. As you guessed by now, we’re starting a brand new segment two this year. This year I thought we would spotlight agriculture research stations across the United States and Canada. I grew up on the Brown Loam Experiment Station, part of the Mississippi State University system. My dad was the herdsman there, and I lived on the station until I moved to Mississippi State to go to college. I’ve got a lot of fond memories there. To tell you the honest truth, that’s probably one of the biggest reasons I’m doing what I do today. I got my feet wet watching people like Mr. Gene Marson, who was a superintendent there at the station and the animal scientist and Dr. Ned Edwards, who was the agronomist. I learned a lot from those guys. Probably what I learned most is they were always there to help. It didn’t matter what the problem was or what kind of question you had, you could go ask either one of those guys what they thought about this or what they had found out and they would tell you exactly what they knew about it and do anything in the world they could to help you.

(37:50):

As I’ve gotten older and traveled around and visited more of these experiment stations, I found that that’s the case, not only where I grew up and knew these guys personally, but wherever I go, these people are here to help you. I want to encourage everybody to get to know the people on your local experiment stations. Those guys have a wealth of knowledge and they’re here to help you. So I thought the best way to kick this segment off is to start close to home. We’ve got an experiment station here in Mississippi that I’m awful proud of, and I’ll hold it up against any experiment station in the country or any that I’ve been to so far anyway. To help us do that, we’ve got Dr. Jeff Gore joining us from Stoneville today. Jeff, welcome to The Dirt.

Dr. Jeff Gore (38:26):

Appreciate it, Mike. One thing that surprised me already is I’ve known you a long time and I never knew you had a voice for radio.

Mike Howell (38:34):

They tell me I have a face for radio as well, but we’ll keep that between us. Jeff, if you will, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do there at Stoneville, and then tell us about Stoneville.

Dr. Jeff Gore (38:43):

As you said, Mike, I’m Jeff Gore. I’m the current Head of the Delta Research and Extension Center here in Stoneville. I’ve been here now coming up on 22 years. I came in April of 2002, so I’ve been here a while now. Initially, I came here working for the USDA ARS, which is adjacent to us right here on our research station. Our southeast headquarters is here. Worked for ARS for five years and moved over to Mississippi State in 2007. So I’ve been here a long time, as you can see on my jacket, doing entomology research for many years. And then the last two years I’ve been the Head of the Delta Research and Extension Center here for Mississippi State.

Mike Howell (39:23):

Jeff, I remember when you came over there, I was working right down the road at Monsanto at the time, and we were both doing a lot of work with Bollgard Cotton back in those days. I’ve known Jeff for a long time back to the graduate school days, I guess. Jeff, if you will, tell us a little bit about the experiment station and some of the contributions that it’s made and why it’s so important.

Dr. Jeff Gore (39:41):

So the Delta Research and Extension Center was established in 1904. We started off with 200 acres that some local growers actually donated to Mississippi State University with the sole purpose of starting a research and extension center here in Stoneville. Now we’re about 5,000 total acres. About 2,800 acres of that’s bottom land hardwood forest. Got about 1,500 acres of plot land where we do different agronomic research on all the crops that we grow. Then we also have about a 400 acre aquaculture facility here that really makes us unique.

(40:18):

I talk a lot to growers and different people, and out of a 5,000 acre research station, 1,500 acres of plots doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s actually one of the largest research and extension centers in the country in terms of row crop plot work. In that 1,500 acres we do research on cotton, corn, soybeans, rice, and then other things. We have somebody here working on pollinators, honey bees. We do agronomy research, weed science, soil fertility, entomology, plant pathology, you name it. If it’s something that affects our growers, we have faculty here working on it. Currently, we have 26 faculty here on our station. When we’re fully staffed, we’re up to about 30. One of the things that’s changed since I’ve been here is at any given time have between 20 and 30 graduate students here on the research station doing their research and completing their graduate studies. And all total about 110, 120 employees. Of course during the summer, hire a bunch of students intermittent that goes way up from that, but about 120 permanent employees here.

(41:29):

This station has always been extremely important for the Mississippi Delta. There’s been a lot of really good innovative technologies that have come out of the Delta Research and Extension Center. Mike, you and I were talking earlier, the first application of anhydrous ammonia was actually done here on the research station, and it was actually by a mule-pulled implement. Some other things, Dr. Gordon Tupper was ag engineer here for many years. He invented the Stoneville parabolic subsoiler. That’s something that really seemed like a fairly simple innovation, but it’s now known all over the world, the parabolic subsoiler, and is used all over the world.

(42:10):

The thing that made that unique is at the time, I think it was back in the ’60s or maybe early ’70s, is a lot of our equipment and our tractors were much smaller than they are now, had a lot less horsepower. And just by changing the shape of that subsoiler shank was able to reduce the horsepower requirement by up to 30%. So that was a real important innovative technology that came out of Stoneville.

(42:35):

Another one is Dr. Bob Bridge, who’s a pretty famous cotton breeder that came out of the Delta Research and Extension Center. What he was really known for was promoting earliness in cotton varieties. A lot of the work that he was doing was at the time when boll weevils were basically ravaging a lot of our cotton across the southern US. And so developing those early season cotton varieties was really instrumental in helping with managing not only boll weevil but tobacco budworm, which was a major pest at the time. We didn’t have a lot of good insecticides to manage it. A lot of the varieties that we plant now still have some of his genetics in them.

(43:17):

Another one, he wasn’t a Mississippi State employee, but as I mentioned earlier, we’re right here adjacent to the USDA ARS Southeastern Headquarters, so they have a lot of scientists as well, is Edgar Hartwig was a soybean breeder that was here years ago. He’s called the father of southern soybeans because prior to some of the breeding work that he started doing, soybeans were really thought of more as a forage crop in the southern US. He’s the one that really started breeding varieties adapted to the southern US to actually harvest the grain like they do in the Midwest. I don’t think we would be where we are today without some of the forethought that he had of breeding this soybean varieties. Soybean’s probably our most important crop now that we grow in Mississippi and especially in the Mississippi Delta, and it really all started with him.

(44:09):

The Delta Research and Extension Center has always been focused on addressing immediate grower needs and serving the growers in our area, and so we’ve continued that. I feel fortunate to have worked here for so long. I grew up in Northeast Alabama. Did my bachelor’s degree at Auburn, then went to LSU. But all through school I knew of Stoneville Mississippi, and when I graduated with my PhD, I had the opportunity to come here, go to Cornell New York or Asheville North Carolina, and I chose Stoneville Mississippi. This is where I always wanted to be. When I knew about it, I knew the innovations came out of here in, and it’s just a great place to work and develop and establish a career. The nice thing about working here is we’re so close to the industry. I think most researchers you want to see the impact of the things that you do, and there’s no better place in the world to see that happen than here.

(45:08):

The growers and the whole community around the Mississippi Delta really cares about agriculture, and they care about the research that we do here in making a difference to make our growers more profitable while also promoting those practices that not only save the growers money and increase their yields, but also protect this valuable resource that is the Mississippi Delta.

Mike Howell (45:31):

In our first segment, Mr. Jeff Tarsi told us that when he started his career, 50% of agriculture was science and 50% was an art. He said he’s seen that change over his career, and it’s more like 85% science, and the rest is art now. I agree with that, but the research station is where this art turns into science. Y’all can take an idea and do the scientific research and then convey that back to the growers. All the research in the world doesn’t do any good if somebody doesn’t realize that and learn how to use it. It takes both sides of that program there to make this system work, and we really appreciate what y’all are doing there at Stoneville.

Dr. Jeff Gore (46:06):

Yep, absolutely. The other thing that has made this a great place to work is I’ve had great people to work with my whole career, whether it be other Mississippi State scientists such as Angus Catchett and Don Cook and Darren Dodds and Trent Irby, a whole host of people that I’ve worked with through the years, but also a lot of industry partners. I think that’s something that we’re starting to lose a little sight of in agriculture right now is new developments or innovations come along, It’s important for us to work with industry. You mentioned Bollgard Cotton earlier. We work with Monsanto and then Bear for years on this new ThryvOn Cotton. We were some of the first ones to plant that new technology for thrips and plant bug management using Bt traits.

(46:50):

And then a lot of the fertilizers and ESN and different things like that, it’s important for us to work with industry and work with ARS and work with a lot of different partners because agriculture right now is in a difficult situation. Growers are facing a situation where profit margins are getting extremely slim on a per acre basis, and agriculture is constantly being challenged from NGOs and outside groups about sustainability and different things. All of those things cost growers money, so it’s important for us to all work together and solve those problems and address real-world issues to help our farmers remain profitable and in business these days. And that’s one of the things I value about R&E centers like DREC, I mean, any of the R&E centers around the country at any university are extremely important for fostering those relationships.

Mike Howell (47:44):

Well, Jeff, we sure appreciate you taking time to visit with us today and let us know about the importance of Stoneville. Any parting comments before we sign off today?

Dr. Jeff Gore (47:52):

I just appreciate the opportunity to do this today. I always appreciate my conversations with you, Mike. Like we talked about, we’ve been friends for a long time. Appreciate Nutrien and all of our industry partners for working with us and helping make farmers more profitable.

Mike Howell (48:09):

Well, listeners, we told you earlier that this was going to be our first segment two and we were going to do something special, we were going to have a contest today. In honor of our first show back and starting a new season, we’re going to try to have a little fun with this contest. Now, several years ago, Dr. Bobby Golden and I recorded a video for our eKonomics website there at the Delta Branch Research and Extension Center. During that conversation, Bobby told us the name of the mule that was used to make that anhydrous ammonia application. We mentioned that today, but we did not tell you the name of the mule. So here’s the trivia contest for today. What is the name of the mule that made that first anhydrous ammonia application? If you know, you can go to our eKonomics Facebook page, that’s eKonomics ag, or you can go to our Instagram page @eKonomics_ag. You’ll see a pinned post there where you can comment, put your answer in there. The first five people who comment on each post are going to receive some fantastic prizes and a lot of bragging rights.

(49:06):

Now, if you don’t remember that answer or haven’t had a chance to see that video, you can head over to our website, that’s nutrien-eKonomics, with a K, .com. You can watch that tissue sampling demonstration that I did with Bobby Golden a few years ago. Pay attention to that, and he will tell you the name of that mule. It’s also out there on the internet in a place or two, but it takes a little while to find that. So again, what was the name of the mule that made that first anhydrous ammonia application? We look forward to seeing your answers.

(49:34):

Thanks for tuning in this week. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.