The relationship between farmers and researchers has not always been a collaborative one. Douglas Jackson-Smith, professor and Kellogg Endowed Chair of Agroecosystem Management in the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at The Ohio State University, wants to change that. For decades, researchers and farmers have largely worked in siloes only coming together when the scientists have research that points to something to preserve soil health like crop cover or crop rotation. In Jackson-Smith’s latest project, From the Ground Up, the “climate smart” research and practices are revolutionizing this relationship by being farmer-led.
In 2024, From the Ground Up was awarded $10 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to be distributed over the course of the next four years to farmers in Ohio and Missouri. At the time of this interview, Jackson-Smith said there wasn’t any news of disruption from the major budget cuts happening in the federal government.
For more, tune in on Wednesday, March 19 at 7 PM ET when Jackson-Smith participates in Great Lakes Now’s virtual town hall on climate and the future of agriculture in the Great Lakes region and beyond.
Here’s an in-depth interview with Jackson-Smith about From the Ground Up. The interview has been edited for clarity.
GLN: What was the initial pitch of this project?
DJS: The whole premise of the project is that there have been decades of research and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars spent to incentivize the use of practices that we might call ‘climate smart’ or regenerative or whatever — cover crops, diversifying crop rotations, integrating crop and livestock production — you know, all these things that are practices that we know have potentially valuable environmental impacts and benefits. We think they have important agronomic and economic benefits that farmers should see, but the adoption rates are frustratingly low and persistently low.
GLN: Why is that?
DJS: The reason why is partly because when you put practices out on working farms, the performance is highly variable and it’s complicated. So you’ve got to weave a single practice that worked well under experimental conditions into a complex system. And it’s that translation and application of these and the refining, say, of cover crops, which is often represented as a single thing, but it’s dozens of things. Different species, different mixes, different planting and termination practices and it’s precisely that applied work on-farm that I think we need to see a lot more of.
I think there’s also a perception that practices are being imposed from outside, and it is a whole lot more fun to have farmers pushing for it than to feel like we’re trying to pitch something that they’re behind.
GLN: You said the first phase was gathering farmers and holding meetings. How are you breaking up this project?
DJS: Our approach has three tiers. We’ll have 10 groups of farmers, we call them clusters. This first phase has been: who are those farmers? What do they want? What do they collectively decide they want to compare? What treatments or what practices do they want to evaluate and how do they want to evaluate them?
Then, we’re working with each of those clusters to map out a sampling approach to document, over four years, outcomes associated with comparisons between different practices or control, and some different treatments. We’re not prescribing what the controls and treatments are but we’re able to weigh in on how to design things to work under working farm conditions.
We’re also working at the community level with advisors, landlords, consultants and community leaders — we’re just starting to gear up for that phase of the project. We know that national policy, market signals, opportunities and constraints are terribly important. We’re not limiting it to just farmers, knowing that the people around farmers are often just as important.
Polarization around climate change
Shirley Wind Farm in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Energy)
GLN: Climate change is complicated in the way it’s been politicized. In the context of working with farmers, how are you navigating this?
DJS: It’s definitely something that comes up all the time, from the fact that when we approach farmers to be part of these farmer groups, they are reacting to the language that we might use in the recruitment flyer. What I have done throughout my career, and I believe deeply, is that there’s a lot of common ground. So farmers, they’re at the front lines of weather and climate. There is a shared interest in whether or not we can come up with management systems that provide benefits in the face of a drought, extreme rainfall or changing temperatures.
We don’t get caught up in, or I don’t worry about, a debate over whether it’s human-caused or not human-caused. Or, whether we should have a carbon tax or not a carbon tax. But the reality is, they know there’s been a lot of extreme weather, and these practices are adapted to, or I hope to, enable farmers to be more resilient and more successful. That’s not controversial, and so I think we try to avoid getting caught up in debates over climate change per se, especially now that it’s such a confusing, chaotic space.
GLN: So it’s less about debating the theory, and it’s more about just stating the fact that we all know that the weather is changing?
DJS: You’ll have a hard time finding farmers who haven’t seen a trend towards more extreme weather. I farmed most of my life. I didn’t farm the first few years I moved here, but we just moved out to a farm a couple of years ago, and I’ve got to say that I notice the weather a whole lot more now than I did when I lived in town. So, farmers notice when it’s unusually snowy or not snowy, or warming up unusually, or that plant maturity dates aren’t matching up, or that you can’t get in to plant because of a usually wet spring for three straight years. Those are the things that are their experience.
We got feedback on our recruitment flyer saying: ‘Now that I’ve sat with you, I understand what the project’s about, but when I read the flyer, I wasn’t going to come to the meeting.’ We wrote the recruitment flyer to focus on the things that we share that are important. I don’t think it changes the project at all. We weren’t leading, even before the last few months, with ‘climate change’ as the motivation for the project. When you get into that debate, farmers feel like everyone’s blaming them. Which is crazy to think that farmers are somehow at fault. No one’s going to want to jump on a project that makes you feel like you’re a bad actor.
Cover crop complications
NRCS Demonstration Farms Manager Barry Bubolz, left, discusses corn planted into winter rye harvested a few weeks earlier, with participants at a NRCS Lower Fox Demonstration Farms field day. (Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture)
GLN: What would you say are the most frequent concerns that you’ve heard from farmers now that you’re farther into this collaboration?
DJS: I think farmers are concerned that people don’t understand agriculture, they’re blaming the farmers, and they’re coming up with solutions that aren’t effective or well-adapted to the complexity of actual farming.
I think farmers are right. Whenever I see someone that says, ‘cover crops will do this, cover crops will give you a 5% yield boost.’ In almost every case, it’s not going to give farmers a 5% yield, but some might do better, and a lot are not going to do that well.
Cover crops, we know from research, can be quite different. Different species and the different functions they can play. There’s a lot of chatter about the benefits of legumes as cover crops, of root crops as cover crops, of diverse cover crop mixes. 95 pulse percent of the cover crops in the Great Lakes region are a single cereal rye cover crop. It has a lot of benefits, in some ways, but I’ve been on many fields that receive payments for growing cover crops that did not grow well enough to really convey much of a benefit.
Farmers know that, and to them, it seems like a waste of public money. But this project tries to shift that whole conversation to say, okay, what should we be promoting? What are the right practices? Let’s get their ideas. They have a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge, a lot of ideas. We’re really good at the university at measuring and testing and asking about the factors that explain different outcomes. And I think the partnership is where things sing.
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Featured image: A tractor in a field plows the ground at dawn, sowing grain. (Photo Credit: iStock)
