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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, use, and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:39):
Well, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. We have a lot of farmers that listen to our program and a lot of people that are interested in conservation and we’ve talked about how farmers are great conservationists and we have an episode designed today, we want to talk a little bit more about conservation and some things that you can do on your farm to help improve some wildlife habitat. And to help us do that today we’ve got Jacob Taylor with Quail Forever with us. Jacob, if you will, take just a minute and introduce yourself to our listeners.
Jacob Taylor (01:06):
So I’m Jacob Taylor. I work for Quail Forever as a precision ag and conservation specialist based out of West Tennessee. I grew up in a small town in Trenton, Tennessee, went to a small college in Memphis, and now I’m here working with Quail Forever. This will be my third year as of this May. And my role specifically within this job and within Quail Forever is to assist farmers with precision technology to help them identify under-producing acres on their farm that can be converted to wildlife habitat and essentially move the needle for ROI with some of the practices and programs that are available, there’s a lot of those available, and help producers and farmers targeting row crop to navigate those programs and practices to increase profitability.
Mike Howell (01:47):
Okay, Jacob, well that sounds like something we really need to dive into a little deeper today. Before we get off into that, tell us a little bit about Quail Forever and what Quail Forever does.
Jacob Taylor (01:56):
Quail Forever is a nonprofit wildlife conservation organization. Most of our conservation delivery team is made up of Farmville biologists. A lot of those biologists are placed within different partnerships. The most common one, especially here in Tennessee where I’m at and also in states around in the Mid-South, are partnerships with the NRCS, my position is as well. And we have a whole lot of conservation delivery staff outside of our Farmville biologists, but that is the main structure of Quail Forever. And the idea is to work with private landowners, with farmers, with the NRCS offices, all these USDA offices, and different partners to help build habitat on private land. And in return, hopefully, we can affect upland bird species, pollinators, a bunch of different wildlife in a positive way by building them in those habitat. That’s essentially Quail Forever’s role nationwide.
Mike Howell (02:48):
Well, that sounds pretty interesting. I would love to go quail hunting when I get a chance. There’s just not nearly as many around as it used to be years ago. I remember as a kid just about everybody had a bird dog around and they would go out, Thanksgiving weekend seemed to be a big time, everybody would go out and try to go quail hunting, but we just don’t see that much around anymore. We basically have to go somewhere that’s actually raising the quail for a quail hunt now, but I’m glad somebody is working on that and I was mowing my fence row a few days ago and happened to flush a covey of quail and I did not have an idea that they were anywhere around, so I instantly stopped mowing that fence row and I’m going to let it keep growing up. If it’s good enough for them to be in when I come through, I’m going to let it stay like that for them.
Jacob Taylor (03:29):
Absolutely. That’s one of the things that we’re working to do is replace fence rows, build some of that grassy thick hedgerow cover because that’s what they used to have back in the heyday of quail. And of course, there’s a lot of other factors that are influencing quail, but back in that day, that’s what we had. We had smaller equipment, weren’t farming as much, and we had those areas for quail to get in, especially during the winter. There’s a lot of cover during the summer during the growing seasons, but during the winter, that’s when it gets sparse.
Mike Howell (03:54):
Well, Jacob, we’ve done several episodes on The Dirt talking about how farmers are great conservationists and how they do everything they can to conserve what we have and make the land more productive. And we all know that farmers are also hunters. A lot of them are hunters and like to see the wildlife on their property, but we still have to make a living farming. The farmers are doing this to make a profit to feed their families. How can we put these two together and make things where they can improve this habitat but still make a profit? You mentioned some of the programs you’re working with and taking these underproductive areas out of production. How can we go about doing this?
Jacob Taylor (04:28):
That’s where my role with Quail Forever is supposed to specialize. So I have an ag background, I don’t have a wildlife background, so I was hired by Quail Forever to be that bridge to the farming community. And of course, there’s already farmers that are doing this themselves and that’s one thing I’ve learned and that’s also a part of what we’re doing Quail Forever is to help tell that story better. But to get into more specifics, I, as a precision ag specialist, work with the farmer, specifically using yield monitors, NDVI data, soil maps, a bunch of different precision ag technologies that help us measure productivity. If we can take those and make them a little bit more useful for the farm and identifying these, what I call, small acres around in an area like West Tennessee and Mississippi. We’ve got a lot of marginal acres around tree lines, wet spots, and springs, highly erodible ground.
(05:19):
If we can identify those as unproductive for the farmer, taking that yield data, tying a price that the crop was sold for, how much it costs to put the crop in and harvest it, protect it, all of those things. And you can get an ROI map from the data that we have and looking at that data over years and years to get a big sample size and then take that data and look at a scenario in the field where we take this 50-foot around the edge of this entire field and we look at a program like the Conservation Reserve Program. That’s one that we work with, especially here in West Tennessee because there’s a bunch of different practices that are available like field boarders, buffer strips, filter strips, a lot of different partial field practices that you can use and roll those acres in, get a positive ROI as where your crop had a negative ROI.
(06:06):
So my role is helping use that data. And a lot of times, most farmers know where those areas are. You’re going over those acres a lot of times during the growing season and you’re in the combine, you’re seeing the yield monitor, what it’s reading, but actually looking at the yield loss on that and understanding, “I’m losing this much amount of money,” is really huge when it comes to decision making and actually taking a step to looking into some of these programs. And most of the time I work with the federal programs because my partner from my position is the USDA. I’m not specifically tied to those programs, but there’s a lot of funding, a lot of availability in those programs. A program like CRP. Most people think of CRP as, “I’m taking out a whole farm, we’re putting in a whole field.”
(06:48):
But there’s a lot of partial field practices we can take advantage of. On five acres on a 100-acre field where you’re yielding 25, 30, or more percent lower than the whole field average, that ends up being a lot across a big farm operation. Taking those underproduced acres and converting them to a wildlife cover like that and getting a financial incentive is where I’m specializing
Mike Howell (07:08):
Jacob, that’s getting back to the hard part of it. Growers want to be as productive as possible and a lot of these farms are rented farms and the landowners are going to want every bit of that land to be farmed for several reasons, but how can you go about getting the farmers to switch this? We understand that they’re probably not making money on every acre there, but it’s kind of hard to talk them into it. And you mentioned collecting data about the ROI. In my experience, I have a lot of farmers who don’t mind sharing yield maps with us and yield monitor information, but when you start talking about input cost and things like that, they clam up a little bit. They don’t want to share that with anybody. How can you work through that and work with these people to help them understand that they’re actually losing money on a certain percentage of their acres?
Jacob Taylor (07:50):
With every different farm operation I work with, we attack it differently however that farm operation is comfortable with. A lot of times, I’ll use the University of Tennessee’s crop budgets they put out. They have several of those archived over the years. I’ve used Mississippi State’s as well. For the most part, I’m not digging into the pockets and into the checkbooks of everything that’s being spent, right? But I’m getting an idea of I know that county, I know the general area, I’ve been in West Tennessee all my life and I understand a little bit of the economics and how that changes across county lines and in different areas. And if we can get an idea of ROI, not perfect to the dollar, exact dollar incentive, but just an idea of, “We’re losing money in this area,” this is the crop budget information that I used and allow that farmer to conceptualize that himself and he thinks, “All right, I’m probably losing money right there.”
(08:37):
And for the most part, the budgets and what I’m looking at, I’m underselling the cost of production. So if the areas we’re looking at are underproducing using this budget information, then it’s likely going to be even more underproducing actually in real-life. So I use a lot of that. There’s been a couple of scenarios where I sit down with a farmer’s advisor and we go through and get it very nailed down to the dollar and cent. And you mentioned the landowner. So yes, I work with a lot of people that have rented farms. And for the most part, these rented farms are some of the more marginal farms because you’ve got a landowner that’s got a really productive farm, 100 acres, but then that same landowner has another 30 acres that’s eaten by deer or it’s really highly erodable, but you’ve got to keep farming that 30 acres to keep the hunter good.
(09:19):
So I will sit down with that landowner and help that landowner see where a program like CRP or maybe some of the other programs we’re working with where there’s an ROI for them. And a lot of times when I’m working with a farmer, we try to target those landowners that are already wildlife friendly, but there’s money in it for the landowner too. When you take production data and you’ve got a farm that is a shared rent, and that’s common here in West Tennessee, be on a quarter share or a third share and a share of the inputs as well, you can take that yield information and present to that landowner where it’s unproductive for them.
(09:50):
So if I know that a CRP rate is $150 an acre on this farm in this area, I can show that landowner where the shared rent crop is not making enough to exceed what that CRP rate would be. So therefore, it would be more profitable for the landowner to have this area in CRP. And then we work with the farmer. The farmer might help manage what’s going in the wildlife habitat that’s going in the pollinator strips, the field borders, and we just work through that together as a team.
Mike Howell (10:17):
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(10:39):
Jacob, another thing that comes to mind is you’ve mentioned CRP several times and if I remember right, that’s the 15-year program when you sign up for that. What if things change, the economics change, is there any way to get out of that if it does become more profitable to put those acres back into production and how hard is it to get it back into production if that necessity came around?
Jacob Taylor (11:00):
CRP is, for the most part, up here, the practices that people do as a 10-year. You can do 10 to 15 in some practices, you can do anywhere in between. But yeah, a 10-year program is a long time and a lot of things change in 10 years. So, to get out of that, that’s a question I really can’t answer. I think there’s some sort of having to pay back the payments that you’ve got. Farm Service Agency, they handle CRP, so that’s a really specific question for them. But I’m saying CRP because it’s very popular up here. A lot of folks are starting to enroll their edges and are comfortable with that. If we know that the farm adjacent is not going to be bought and that trees are not going to be cleared, so we can farm straight across that.
(11:40):
If we’ve got situations where we know this field boarder is going to be here for a while, people are okay putting that in. But there’s a specific situation that I want to highlight that my role as a partner, I’m not a USDA or federal or any sort of government employee, so I have the flexibility to work outside of their programs. And one specific scenario I’d like to highlight is here with a farm operation in West Tennessee. Just to help visualize it, we’ve got about a 100-acre rectangular field for the most part that’s got a very steep hill in the middle of it that is terraced and farmed and it’s feasible to farm. And this farm is in a corn and then a wheat soybean rotation every year. So that hill is a loring soil type, is what we call a loring D slope with three erodibility soil type, which is a highly erodable spot.
(12:25):
It’s got a shallow natural hard pan, so the water holding capacity is not very good. During corn, that hill suffer. That corn burns up even during a really good corn year. The corn on that hill is very unproductive. It’s probably 100 bushel or less every year. During wheat and soybeans, especially during wheat because we have ample amount of rain during the winter and it’s a well-drained spot, it produces a very good wheat crop and a marginal soybean crop. So we can make a profit off of that hill. It’s about an eight-acre spot in the middle of this field and that producer can make a profit off of that hill during a wheat and soybean year. But during corn, roughly two to $3,000 loss just depending on the market and depending on input costs. So what we looked at doing was removing that hill during corn and establishing a summer cover crop that is beneficial for wildlife.
(13:14):
The farmer was really interested in managing for quail. There’s a small residual quail population in that area and on that farm. So we planted an annual mix this spring. Right now we’re letting it grow and it’s kind of an experiment. We’re working with it. But basically what we did is alter the crop rotation on that eight acres to save money. So we’re spending about $50 an acre on a seed mix as opposed to losing 2,000. 2000 divided by eight, I can’t think on top of my head, but that’s where we’re money ahead. And we’re not looking at a program. We’re not tying anything up for 10 years. That’s the type of solutions that I’m trying to work with farmers on. Sometimes that solution is CRP. Sometimes it’s a different program. There’s a bunch of different climate smart initiatives and so many different private and government agencies throwing money at all these different practices. It’s my role to help navigate those and sometimes a program doesn’t fit the farm.
Mike Howell (14:04):
The way I’m understanding it, there are a lot of different programs out there. We don’t have to put it into a 10 or 15-year program to lock it up for that time. So where can somebody find out more information about this? Do you have a website or how can they get in contact with you to help them work through some of these different programs?
Jacob Taylor (14:19):
Yeah, there’s a lot of different ways. We have a Tennessee Quail Forever Facebook and that’s specific to Tennessee. That’s a really easy way to get in contact with me. If you go to quailforever.org, go to the conservation tab, and you should be able to go to find a biologist. We have a function on our website where you type in a city or zip code near you and it pulls up the nearest biologist. My name will pull up if you’re near me, somebody else’s will pull up, whoever’s near you and you contact them. You can contact me at jtaylor@quailforever.org and I can direct you to the appropriate staff, whether that’s myself or that’s someone else. Those are the best ways.
Mike Howell (14:53):
So, Jacob, I’m sure by now a lot of these farmers are interested in what you’re talking about. They understand that they have some unproductive areas and anything they can do to help make more money is a great thing, but I keep going back to this rented land thing and a lot of these landowners want that rented land to be farmed. They want it to look good. They don’t really care about what the yield is coming off of it just because they don’t understand this. And if they see something growing up in weeds, no matter how good it is for the environment, they’re just not going to be happy with that. How can we help educate these landowners as to the benefits of something not being in a crop all the time?
Jacob Taylor (15:27):
Well, I would say these type of programs don’t work for every farm, don’t work for every landowner, but what we’re doing as an organization is we have a big outreach initiative. It’s across Quail Forever as a nation in our state and Tennessee. It’s our job to help educate the public and landowners about these programs and how they’re beneficial for the farm, for the wildlife, and for the public overall. So that’s where we’re working. Every year, we’re doing outreach events, workshops.
(15:55):
We’re trying to incorporate landowners that have not historically been involved with these programs and with wildlife management. That’s for us as a staff and a lot of other conservation organizations that have the same mission as us where we’re all working to do that. It’s our job. It’s our job to do that. It’s our job to help tell the story of the farmers that’s already doing this, which there’s a lot in my area. They’re already removing these unproductive acres on their own and putting them in programs. And it’s our job to help educate further.
Mike Howell (16:21):
Okay. Well, Jacob, we’ve sure covered a lot of information today. I know our listeners are excited to learn more about this. Is there anything that we may have missed that you want to touch on or any take-home message you want to leave our listeners with before we sign off?
Jacob Taylor (16:32):
Not that I can think of. I want to go back to telling the story, especially here in West Tennessee, we have a lot of really good progressive farmers that are doing a lot of good things, not just when it comes to quail habitat and wildlife conservation, just conservation as a whole. We have a lot of good farmers in this area. I can’t speak for other areas, I’m sure it’s the same, but that’s where we need to tell that story.
(16:53):
And I would encourage other people in my position to help tell that story better of the farmers in your area where you’re working. If you’re working in some sort of ag conservation space, we need to do better to help tell that story because they don’t have time to tell it for themselves. Quail Forever, we actually have a Farmer of the Year award that we do every year. So we’re trying to bring that to the Mid-South and to Tennessee to help better tell that story, but that’s what I would leave it with.
Mike Howell (17:18):
Okay. Jacob, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to help educate us a little bit more about conservation practices and how these farmers can help do better in terms of managing wildlife on their farms. Listeners, we hope you’ve enjoyed this segment. If you did, give us some feedback, let us know what you think about this. As always, if you need more information on anything we’ve talked about, you can go to our website that’s nutrien-eKonomics.com. And stick around for just a moment and we’ll come back with segment two.
(17:47):
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, and give us some feedback as well. We want to hear from you to help make the show even better. And 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.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.com. 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.
(18:55):
Well, listeners, welcome back to segment two. As you know, we’re still traveling around North America visiting different land-grant research farms. And today, we’re traveling to the great state of Iowa, Iowa State University. And to help us talk about a research farm there we’ve got Dr. Kendall Lamkey. Dr. Lamkey, welcome to The Dirt.
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (19:12):
Thank you, Michael. A pleasure to be here.
Mike Howell (19:14):
Dr. Lamkey, if you will, introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them what you do there at Iowa State.
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (19:19):
Well, as I said, my name’s Kendall Lamkey. I was trained as a corn breeder. I’ve been here at Iowa State in one capacity or another since 1982. And for the last year, I’ve been the associate dean for facilities and operations. And one part of that job is overseeing our research farms. Prior to that, for 17 years, I was chair of the Department of Agronomy, so I know a bit about our farms. I’ve used them my whole career, so they’re an integral part of who we are at Iowa State.
Mike Howell (19:44):
Dr. Lemke, tell us a little bit about the system in general. How many research farms you have scattered across the state?
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (19:50):
We have about 12, 10, how you want to count it. We have about 12 research farms scattered around the state, including two or three here in town depending on how we divide them up. We have our animal science farms, we got our EA farm, we have a hort farm. But what’s unique about some of our outlying research farms are that seven of them are owned by farmer associations, nonprofits.
(20:12):
They purchased the land in the area of the state that they’re in, usually in a major landform area, and they wanted research done there. They leased the land to us, we staff it, put buildings on it, and our faculty staff and students do research there. It’s really cool.
Mike Howell (20:24):
That’s a little different than a lot of the other universities we’ve been talking about. Dr. Lamkey, is there one that stands out that we want to focus on today?
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (20:32):
Yeah, I’d like to focus on our agriculture engineering and agronomy research farm here in Ames. It’s just west of Ames here about six miles in Boone County, and it’s our largest farm and it’s kind of representative of all of our other farms out in the state only in a larger scale, so we’ll focus on that one today.
Mike Howell (20:47):
Okay. Well, give us a little bit of history about that farm and what it’s been doing.
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (20:51):
The farm, in its current location, got established in 1963, so it’s been there for quite a while now. It has about 2,100 acres they’re farming this year or using in research. And it has about six staff at it, full-time staff, and it supports agronomy research, ag engineering research, plant pathology research, entomology research. Even though it’s named after two of our departments on campus, it supports all the departments that need access to the land base to do research. It’s been a wonderful place. And what’s the advantage to us of that farm is how close it is to town and to our campus. Ames is a small town, so we’re not urban by any stretch of the imagination, so I can be there in 15 minutes from my office, which makes it a real asset to us and our students.
Mike Howell (21:34):
That makes it really convenient. Back in my university days, sometimes I had that luxury. I could be 15 or 20 minutes away from the farm, but there were days I would have to travel four hours to get to the farm and then put in an eight-hour day. That makes for some long days.
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (21:48):
Oh, exactly. No, it really does. Yes.
Mike Howell (21:51):
So you said the farm has been there since the early 60s. I’m sure there’s been quite a number of significant contributions to the state of Iowa that have came off of that farm. Could you mention a couple of those for us today?
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (22:01):
I’ve been thinking about contributions. That’s something we think about quite a bit. The big one that stands out to me, particularly as a corn breeder, so that research farm was the place for the inbred line B73 was developed. And B73 got released in 1972 and a lot of the testing and development of that line came out. And B73 went on to be used at its peak in the mid-70s and as a female parent, 20% of the US maze hybrids in the US directly.
(22:28):
Then its progeny since then has formed the basis and some other inbred lines that related to it of the female side of the US maze pedigree basis in the United States and the rest of the world that grows dent corn. So that is a huge impact. And it came out of a population called Iowa Stiff Stalk Synthetic, which is still famous because that’s kind of the female heterotic group in maze hybrids in the US loosely, that evolves a little bit, but that was a major contribution for sure on that farm.
Mike Howell (22:56):
20% of the corn population in the US, that’s quite a significant feat for any hybrid, so that’s pretty remarkable.
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (23:02):
At the time, it was pretty amazing, I think, and that’s a hard thing to accomplish anymore, but that research farms had lots of contributions in plant breeding because plant breeders were one of the biggest users at that farm, especially back in the 60s and 70s, back then when we had soybean breeding programs, we still do have one. A lot of great soybean cultivars came out of that program, oat cultivars back in the day when there was oats being grown in the state. It’s been back then sorghum and the list goes on. So it’s been a major player in what we do. And also, that farm has been the basis, as well as our outlying farms, for a lot of our soil fertility recommendations that have come out, like you were mentioning Antonio Mallarino earlier. Him and John Sawyer and others before them did lots of their research at that farm to help develop the recommendations that we use in our state today. So these farms are quite important that way.
Mike Howell (23:51):
We’ve talked about the importance of these research farms many times on the program this year. If we don’t have somewhere to do this research or we can’t get that information back out to the growers, that’s what the land grant system is all about, getting this agriculture research and finding out what the best way to do these different things are and conveying that message back to the growers to help make them more profitable. We really appreciate what these research farms are doing. Dr. Lamkey, you mentioned the different types of research that’s going on out there. How many full-time scientists are on the farm or are they all housed on campus and just travel out to the farm?
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (24:23):
That’s what makes us unique. We have no faculty located on any of our research farms. Ames is geographically almost smack dab in the center of the state. And I don’t know the real reason we don’t have faculty, but the reason I attribute it to is our geographic location. So our farthest farm away is three hours and maybe change, so that’s not too bad. Frequently, unless you have a lot of work to do, you can usually drive there and back in a day with a crew and get your data collected, or most of them are near a place you could spend the night if you had to and get back. So it makes it really convenient.
(24:55):
It also makes our farms easier to manage. What we’ve learned here lately is that as I was hiring faculty in agronomy that I think a lot of our younger people don’t want to be located on these outlying research farms anymore because they’re isolated from campus. We have high-quality staff on them. Most of our superintendents have master’s degrees and the other thing about them is they want to be in that part of the state they’re located in, so that makes it a real asset to us, and then they care about what they do there. So that’s a big deal.
Mike Howell (25:24):
Yes, it sure is. And for our listeners that may not have heard everything, I grew up on a research farm with Mississippi State, so I lived on that farm for the first 20 years of my life, and I know what it’s like being on that farm. It’s hard to get away. You can have days off, but you don’t necessarily get to take them. Agriculture doesn’t take a day off. Dr. Lamkey, one question I’m asking all of our guests this year, we know that agriculture has changed a lot in the last 50 or 60 years. We’ve got a lot of changes that are right on the horizon looking at autonomous agriculture and artificial intelligence and all kinds of see and spray technology, just all kinds of things right there on the horizon. How is the university research farms going to have to change over the next few years to keep up with the times and where do you see the research farms in the next 50 years?
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (26:08):
I think about that a lot and the dean of our college asked me to think about that too. I see two big changes happening in agricultural research. One of them, I’ve been a big promoter. The other one’s just evolution. So for one thing, I had been associated with these farms for 40 years and I worked on the planters, I drove the tractors, I rode on the planters, I harvested the corn, I even hauled the planters and tractors, but a lot of our younger faculty don’t want to do that. They’ve come up in an era where they get data given to them. So we’re seeing a shift in how our faculty use farms and how they want them to be used, which is going to impact how we staff them, and then also how we equip them because in the past, a lot of our complex equipment has been hosted by the faculty members themselves, and that’s still the case in some cases like in plant breeding.
(26:57):
We’re having to rethink how we manage equipment. The farms help our faculty get plots at. The second thing I think that’s going on is that experiments are getting bigger and we’re seeing an increase in the size of the experiments or the experimental units for sure. Us plant breeders, we’re used to two row plots, 21 feet long. That’s still a standard in plant breeding, but now a lot of our agronomists are looking at 4, 6, 8 row plots, sometimes half-acre plots to try to get back up to scale. So I think that’s the second thing we’ve noticed is that the experimental size has gotten bigger. But I think the future lies in on-farm research. My group manages about 15,000 acres around the state, and my goal going into the future is twofold, is one that every acre of land that we have, we need to be getting data off of in some way because now it can be done, right, our farm.
(27:48):
Some of the land’s just rented out in our state because of the way it was given to us. A lot of this land was given to us as a farm by a farmer in Iowa. And what we need to be doing, and what I hope we to start doing this summer, start working with these producers, help getting data back into our system so we can improve our research. That really informs us when we learn what’s going on on an actual farm and how they’re actually running those farms and understanding their management, why they’re doing it, then we can bring that back in. I’ve been a big proponent of systems modeling when I was chair of agronomy, and we can use this kind of information in modeling and understanding nitrogen rates and other things at scale. I think doing ag research at scale is the future, and I think it’s going to take more land rather than less. And then more cooperation with farmers themselves as well.
Mike Howell (28:32):
That’s quite some lofty goals there, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Until recently, it’s been hard to do large-scale research plots, but some of the technology we’ve got today, it makes it a lot more feasible. Dr. Lamkey, we really appreciate you taking time to visit with us today and talk a little bit about the research farm system there at Iowa State and look forward to getting back up that way later on this summer.
Dr. Kendall Lamkey (28:52):
Okay, look forward to seeing you then, Mike.
Mike Howell (28:54):
Listeners, we appreciate you tuning in this week. And as always, if you have any questions about anything we’ve talked about today, you can visit our website. That’s nutrien-eKonomics.com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
