Conservation Agriculture: What Does The Data Say?

Conservation Technology Information Center: https://www.ctic.org/

Regrow Ag: https://www.regrow.ag/

The Nature Conservancy: https://www.nature.org/en-us/

FoA 248: Regrow Merges Agronomic Insights with Sustainability Metrics

Today’s episode is made possible thanks to the support of the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC). Formed in 1982 to support the widespread use of economically and environmentally beneficial agricultural systems, CTIC’s mission is to champion, promote and provide information on climate-smart technologies and sustainable agricultural systems that conserve and enhance soil, water, air and wildlife resources and are productive and profitable.

Members of this non-profit organization include farmers, policy makers, regulators, academic researchers, agribusiness leaders, conservation group personnel, farm media, and others. It is supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, and other public entities. 

Thank you very much to the Conservation Technology Information Center for supporting agricultural innovation and the Future of Agriculture podcast. 

All right, now let’s dive into today’s episode. I’m excited for this, because while the content of today’s show are right in our wheelhouse at the data-driven intersection of technology and sustainability, I don’t think I’ve ever had an episode quite like this. We’re not featuring an individual or company, but a collaboration. A group of people who saw a problem in the lack of important information, and came together to make that happen. 

To tell this story, I’m very pleased to have on the show three guests: Bill Salas who is the chief strategy officer at Regrow, Dave Gustafson, project director at the Conservation Technology Information Center, and Kris Johnson, director of agriculture at The Nature Conservancy. 

Some brief context here: 

CTIC, Regrow, and The Nature Conservancy are all partners is bringing together the Observational Tillage Information System, or OpTIS. This is an automated system to map tillage, residue cover, winter cover, and soil health practices using remote sensing data. 

And before anyone Tweets me concerned about using remote sensing to track on-farm practices, you should know: while OpTIS calculations are performed at the farm-field scale using publicly available data, the privacy of individual producers is fully protected by reporting only spatially-aggregated results at regional and watershed scales.

This collaboration has been happening for over 14 years, long before just about anyone was talking about carbon sequestration or climate smart agriculture, so in a lot of ways, this effort was ahead of its time. And it’s a good thing it was, because these data are needed now more than ever. So, I highly recommend you stick around through all of today’s episode, as we talk about the past, present and future of OpTIS, highlight some of the use cases it enables, and talk about the importance of efforts like this for the future of agriculture. 

And this isn’t just answering the simple question of are farmers doing x practice at not. This data can inform much more nuanced questions, like: 

• Why do farmers employ conservation practice in certain areas vs others?  
• Does this correlate with investments made in those areas? 
• What is the relationship between crop insurance and conservation practices? 
• What is the impact of cover crops and conservation tillage on nutrient runoff or prevent plant acres? 
• How does historic tillage influence current land values? 

The questions are endless and the more robust and reliable the data gets, the more accurately we can answer them. So I think this stuff is really cool, and extremely important.