Season 3/Episode 1: Lisa Schulte Moore on Reducing Nutrient Runoff from Agriculture
Lisa Schulte Moore
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Phosphorus and nitrogen are critical for growing food but can be dangerous when they enter our waterways as runoff. Lisa Schulte Moore, a landscape ecologist, Iowa state university professor, and a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, talks with John about how Iowa agriculture practices impact the Mississippi River and how her work integrating prairie vegetation into crop fields led to real results in reducing soil erosion and nitrogen and phosphorus runoff.
Show Notes
Lisa Schulte Moore
85% of Iowa is dedicated to agricultural use. Find more here, including the amount of bushels of soybeans and corn Iowa produces.
Lisa says Iowa is first in ethanol production. More on Iowa’s ethanol output.
Lisa discusses how corn & soybeans are “leachy” crops — especially nitrogen. They leak nitrogen into the soil profile, tiles and then out into streams. Here’s more on how soybeans add nitrogen to the soil and why the nitrate form impacts water quality adversely.
How algae use nitrogen and phosphorous and how algal blooms contribute to dead zones such as the Gulf dead zone.
Link to STRIPS Project (Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips)
Moore says “nitrous oxide is an extremely potent greenhouse gas with 300 times as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide.” Here’s more information on nitrous oxide in agriculture.
Transcript
START (LISA SCHULTE MOORE INTERVIEW)
[MUSIC]
JOHN: Welcome to Audacious Water, the podcast about how to create a world of water abundance for everyone. I'm John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University. On today's show, how can we experiment on a landscape scale to reduce nutrient runoff from agriculture? My guest is Lisa Schulte Moore, a landscape ecologist and Iowa State University professor who was named a MacArthur fellow in 2021 for her work integrating strips of native prairie vegetation with crops to reduce soil erosion and nitrogen and phosphorous runoff. Coming up I talk with Lisa about how Iowa agriculture and Mississippi River water quality are related, what it means to see a landscape experimentally, and the key factors in scaling her discoveries.
JOHN: Welcome to the show, Lisa.
LISA: Thanks, John, it's great to be here. Excited to connect again.
JOHN: Yeah, this is great. I'm looking forward to the conversation. So let's think about where we are. You're in Iowa and I'm in Louisiana. We're connected in spirit by the Mississippi River, which is a river that drains 32 U.S. states and 2 Canadian provinces. And we think a lot about water quality down here. It's two question--the first is how bad is water quality in the Mississippi, and why is Iowa relevant to Louisiana in that context?
LISA: Mm-hm, yeah. I know you could answer this first question better than I could, being an aquatic ecologist, right? So I'm going to start with the second one and then let you riff on the first one.
JOHN: Okay, fair enough.
LISA: Fair enough, yes - yes. Maybe I'll just start out by saying that, you know, I'm a landscape ecologist and I look at sort of the human-landscape interactions and how the human component interacts with the natural world and results in the patterns that we see as we fly across the landscape, and what that means in terms of both the environmental benefits provided by those landscapes, as well as how people enjoy those. So with that second question that you asked, Iowa, located here in the upper Mississippi River basin, most of the people know about Iowa as the "corn state," right? We grow a lot of corn in Iowa, as well as a lot of soy beans. That corn and soy beans is largely fed to animals. So, so much of the raw material in our food system, that corn and soy beans, while they're not directly consumed by people they make up other components of our food systems. So think about the eggs that you may have eaten for breakfast, the bacon that you're going to have on the side with your pancakes this weekend, or maybe your burger some evening. There's a good chance that there's a connection of that food back here to Iowa. We're really proud as a state that we're first in the nation in terms of corn production. Often we're competing with Illinois on soybean production, so we're usually second there. But we grow the most hogs, we produce the most eggs, we're fifth in cattle production, and then also first in ethanol and all sorts of bioproducts. Iowa is first. And I know some of those topics are really controversial, especially in some portions of the U.S., but I think it's important for your audience to realize that these are points of pride for Iowans, right, and especially any Iowan that is involved in agriculture. Now, there's unintended consequences that go along with those statistics that I just shared with you, right? So the fact that we've covered approximately 75% of our state with just two crops, corn and soybeans, means that there's not a lot of natural systems left here to sort of absorb the human impacts on a variety of environmental (outcomes), including water quality. And we know in particular that corn and soybeans are very leaky crops when it comes to the nutrients that farmers apply to the fields to make those crops go, especially nitrogen. You know, it tends to leach out through the soil profile and move into groundwater or what we call "(tile)" water, which makes its way out into surface water. So think about our streams and rivers, right? There's a pretty direct shunt of that fertilizer, that nitrogen fertilizer, down through the soil profile into what we call "tiles," drainage pipes, and then out to our streams. Phosphorous, on the other hand, usually moves above the surface, the majority of it, although some of the dissolved phosphorous is also moving, you know, like nitrogen does. That phosphorous is generally moving across land as rain falls on the land, and moves soil particles. As it concentrates, again, that phosphorous is going to make it into our streams and rivers where it becomes a potent pollutant. So these fertilizers, the nitrogen, the phosphorous, farmers need that in their fields. It's what, you know, propels crop growth. But, you know, as you know, as soon as it gets into our water that's where it becomes a problem because of excess nutrients.
JOHN: So tell me about nitrogen and phosphorous--why are they bad? Why are they potent pollutants? What do they do to a stream?
LISA: Mm-hm.
JOHN: I mean, we're both ecologists, but some of my listeners might now know that connection.
LISA: Right - right. Well, not only is - are there organisms on land that can consume that nitrogen and phosphorous, there's organisms in the water that can also consume that nitrogen and phosphorous. And in particular in the water, algae will use those fertilizers to propel their own growth. Algae is a natural component of any aquatic system. If you're walking along a riverside, you know, you can oftentimes see a little bit of green algae on rocks. You may see suspended algae in the water column with a greenish tinge. And a little bit of algae is a natural part of any aquatic system. What becomes a problem is when that algae becomes too abundant, right? Just think about walking along that stream and, like, all the rocks are covered with a ton of algal growth, right? Think about that water not having just a slight greenish tinge, but just, like, putrid green [LAUGHTER] with algal growth. Now, that’s a problem for all aquatic organisms, because, you know, just like us they need to breathe oxygen. And that algae, because it's so abundant, it tends to consume all of the oxygen, and then that oxygen isn't available for the life of other aquatic organisms. So it's a problem in several ways. It's a problem in terms of the - you know, obviously aesthetics, right, of our aquatic systems. It's a problem from the standpoint of trying to clean up drinking water for us as people to drink it. So, you know, removing that algae and then just removing the nutrients, too, especially nitrogen, to make it potable for people, healthy for people to drink. And then it's a problem in terms of our native biota, that stream ecosystem not having the diversity of biota that we would expect to see as a part of that ecosystem. But then also, you know, streams are just such an important source of life for terrestrial ecosystems as well. So you don't have that stream biota there to then support also the terrestrial wildlife.
JOHN: That's great. So from a perspective of an Iowan and a scientist how do you fix that in Iowa? Let's not think about the whole Mississippi, but what have been some of your strategies to address that?
LISA: Well, there's a whole lot of action going on in this space and in Iowa, and, you know, really diverse perspectives about how to best go about approaching cleaning up our streams. The first thing I want to really emphasize is that, you know, in my work with farmers I emphasize that the declines in water quality - farmers don't intend to pollute the water, you know, through what they're doing on their farm fields, right? They want clean water, too. So really emphasize that we are all in this together and, you know, it's not the goal of farmers to put too many nutrients on their field because they don't care about water quality. You know, that's - I think oftentimes we hear these simplified sort of tropes, right?
JOHN: Well, I mean, I've heard also that farmers are the best stewards of the land, right? So...
LISA: Yeah, another trope, right? There's a lot of complexity in terms of agricultural land-management, and, you know, and a lot of challenges in terms of trying to move forward solutions. The particular solution that I've been most involved with - and I've been approaching this challenge from multiple perspectives, you know, through the lens of, you know, just better understanding what the window of operation farmers have in terms of altering what they do--building computer models and online decision-making tools to, you know, try to figure out ways to be more strategic about land - or agricultural land use. And I've looked at this in multiple different ways. The way - one of the projects that has had the most success with farmers has been a project that we call the "strips project," or "prairie strips"--strip sands for science-based trial of row-crops integrated with prairie strips. And the interdisciplinary team that I've worked with on that project...
[0:10:00]
LISA: ...--you know, I've been working on this since 2005, a long time now, right--the interdisciplinary team that I work with, we first came to design the prairie strips practice and actually implement it in a pilot setting and collect data on how it was working. The data turned out to be pretty impressive, and so that resulted in our working with farmers to actually put prairie strips on their field. And then because we had that science, and because we had that farmer participation, prairie strips actually ended up in the 2018 farm bill as a conservation reserve program eligible practice, which now that program can be used to help farmers pay for the costs of putting prairie strips on their land.
JOHN: That's remarkable. That's so cool. There's so many things that I want to follow up on. The first one is, when you use the word "impressive," we had "impressive evidence," tell me what that looks like. Because you and I are both science geeks--not from a science-geek point of view, but from the point of view of the stakeholders that you had to engage, what really pushed it over the edge for them?
LISA: Yeah, that's a great question. Well, the first thing I would say is that, you know, the farmers that I work with, or when I'm working with a farmer audience, presenting to farmer audience, I find that, you know, farmers are very data-savvy, right? They use data all the time to influence how they manage their crops--what varieties they plant, which crop they're (inaudible) on, what field, you know, how much fertilizer to put on, when to apply pesticides, those kind of things. So I find that they're very data-savvy. So the lens that we've always approached farmers is through this data-based lens. So the strips experiment that we established back in 2007, what we did is we had this idea of, well, we know that a key thing that needs to happen if we want to address not only water quality but several challenges with agricultural production... Like, we know one of the key things that we need to do is just integrate in more perennial vegetation. When I first got to Iowa State in 2003 that's what I kept hearing from people on campus here is, like, "If we could just get more perennials in the system it would fix it," right? And so we designed the strips experiment with sort of that idea in mind. But instead of just, you know, doing any perennial anywhere, we were really thoughtful about what we were putting on the landscape and where we put it. What we chose in terms of the perennial was reconstructive native prairie vegetation. And so the idea is, you know, we're taking the Midwest's native landcover (type), the native vegetation that was here, prairie, right, which is adapted - the plants are well-adapted to our climate, it's well-adapted to our soils, and our native biota are well-adapted to it. So we didn't take, say for example, smooth brome, which is the conservation cover that farmers typically plant on their crop fields when they're looking to address some resource constraints. We chose native prairie because it's natural - you know, it's native to this place. We chose that because we thought if we're going to be able to detect any kind of effect in a short time in an experiment, in terms of a difference between a, you know, annual corn/soybeans versus a perennial type, we figured that prairie had the best chance of being able to show a big difference. So we chose native prairie. We sowed it into crop fields. Again, we were very strategic about where we put it. first of all, we put it at the bottom of the crop field because we wanted to provide a filter for water moving across the landscape, and then also a filter for water moving beneath the landscape, right? We wanted to have that living vegetation intercept that water as it was running off the landscape. And then also have that interaction between the roots and the groundwater, right, to be able to take up nutrients that were moving with that groundwater. So we put prairie strips at the bottom. In some of the treatments we also put prairie strips on the contour at multiple points up a hill slope. And the idea there being that, again, we wanted the land - that vegetation to interact with the water as it was moving, you know, down the hill slope, or through the hill slope, again, getting that opportunity for that water and the vegetation to interact. And then the other part of that is we wanted to slow down the water as it was moving across the field, so that that prairie vegetation is providing something of a speed bump within that field, slowing it down, and hopefully, you know, reducing the erosive power of that water. You know, just kind of a fun way to think about it maybe for your listeners, in some ways we've compared the prairie strips on the hill slope uphill in the catchment as "speed bumps." Think about that one in that lowest landscape position on the edge as a diaper, right? We want to catch things before they end up in our streams and rivers, right?
JOHN: That's amazing. I want to get back to the impact, but I want to stop for a second because there are two really important concepts that you brought up there that I think are relevant to other podcasts in this series and to other efforts I think that are similar but not in the agricultural space. So the first is experiments, and the second is engineering. You know, you and I are scientists, we're trained as scientists, but what we're talking about here is some mix of engineering and science, right? So let's talk about the science first, the experiments. Why are the experiments so important?
LISA: Yeah. Well, we can't value what we don't quantify. At least in the system I work in that's true, right, where the land values for farming here are so high that, you know, farmers need to be able to make quantitative sense for the decisions that they make on their land.
JOHN: Right, yep.
LISA: Yeah, and hopefully - well, in the long run - well, both short-term and long, it also has to - it's not just quantifying the benefits in terms of numerically, but, you know, what we're working toward in the overall research program that I'm involved with is making that dollars, right, those environmental services make dollars for farmers.
JOHN: Totally makes sense. I'll come back to that in a sec. I want to go back to experiments, because most people don't have training in experimental design. So when you say "quantify" I think what you mean is you have these treatments that have different locations of prairie strips, and then you have a control that you can compare it to, which is business as usual, right? So if you do this, this is the benefit is kind of the value proposition of the farmer, and you have the direct control. And then the dollars and sense peace is so important because tell me about the costs of doing this. And I know this circles back to the farm bill policy. How does it get done and how does it end up making them more money? Or does it?
LISA: Yeah. Let's put a pin in that for a moment and first I'm going to tell you about some of the things that we did quantify, okay?
JOHN: Okay, good, yeah. We'll put a pin in that.
LISA: Before we lose that, yeah. So in our particular experiment the control is corn/soybean agriculture. You know, one year it's going to be corn, one year it's going to be soybean. And in this particular experiment we used - was called "no-till soil management technique," where the farmer wasn't, you know, tilling the soil annually, but using a specific mechanism to plant the seeds and with weed control, you know, compare the seed-bed, plant the seed, provide weed-control, add the nutrients in which the soil - there's minimal soil disturbance. That's really important in this. So the control is the corn/soybean no-till. We had three different treatments. One was that diaper configuration, right, where we put 10% prairie but all at the base of a catchment, all before it would - you know, the water would leave that catchment. Another that was, again, 10% prairie but with multiple patches of prairie and running along the contour within the catchment, right? So linear strips running along the contour. And then the third treatment was just like that second one, but it was 20% - prairie made up 20% of the catchment. And what we found in a nutshell is that when you put a little bit of prairie in it makes a big difference in terms of the environmental outcomes, and we saw almost no difference in terms of whether it was 10% prairie treatment or a 20% prairie treatment. We also found a few differences in the 44 measures that we took in terms of whether the prairie was all at the base of the catchment or whether there were multiple prairie strips running along the contour. The big difference is just having that little bit of prairie within that crop field. Now, some of the specific measures we found were 95% less soil being lost from that catchment. So we're, you know, keeping the soil in the field where farmers want it, as opposed to letting it run off and out of that system.
JOHN: You said 95%?
LISA: Ninety-five percent.
JOHN: That's huge. That's, yeah, unarguable.
LISA: Yeah. And that measure right there is by far the most compelling to farmers. As, you know, the farmer cooperator on the practice who managed the crops around the prairie strips, the way Gary puts it is, "If you farm you do not want to lose your soil," right? That's a crucial resource for them. So that one right there is what has been really compelling. But they also don't want to lose their nutrients, right? They pay for those, too. And so what we've shown is that, you know, you put that prairie-strips solution in and you can keep 77% more of your phosphorous in the field, and 70% more of your nitrogen. And we've looked at nitrogen both moving with runoff water, and then also nitrogen moving with groundwater. Got to give a shout out to my colleague, Matt (Helmer), (inaudible) hydrologist on the project, and his team has collected those numbers.
JOHN: You use "we" in everything you say, and I'll come back to that at the end.
LISA: Yeah. You know, those are sort of the soil and water measures. We've since shown that we can build soil health underneath the prairie strips over time, and that data is very compelling to farmers as well. If they're looking for, you know, areas of their farm fields that have been degraded over time and are wanting to see - you know, to regenerate those soils, prairie strips can provide that service. We've also shown that there are benefits in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions. My colleague Mike (Castellano) here at Iowa State and a former post-doc, have shown that if you put the prairie strip in that lowest position, so that diaper position that I mentioned, that you can reduce the nitrous oxide emissions by 70%. Nitrous oxide is an extremely potent greenhouse gas with 300 times as much global-warming potential as carbon dioxide. So that's hugely important in terms of environmental impacts of agriculture as well. And then we also have looked at biodiversity measures, and we've shown that - again, that 10% prairie strip solution, we can double the (bird) biodiversity using that crop field, and we can triple the pollinator abundance. So we can address soil water, we can address greenhouse gas emissions, we can address biodiversity according to multiple taxa. Now the question is, like, how to pay for it, right?
[MUSIC]
JOHN: Coming up, I ask Lisa how she gets farmers to buy into implementing her findings, and how she thinks about the differences between science and engineering in her world.
[MUSIC]
JOHN: Well, I have, like, at least 10 other questions, but let's start with that. More from the farmer perspective--is there bang for the buck in doing it?
LISA: Yeah. So we've looked at this from multiple perspectives, and, you know, how to pay for it I would say is about how I spend 90% of my time these days. Because even though, you know, when you put up the graph and you say, 95% more soil, you know, 70% more nitrogen, you double the - you know, you put it all - the benefits, then the farmer looks at the end and you say - and looks at, "Well, but you're talking about taking 10% of my acres and taking out corn and soybeans," right? And corn and soybeans is what pays the bills. And 10% is a huge amount that is - very much could be the difference between profit and loss for a farmer. They work on very thin margins. And so that 10%, you know, they recognize all the benefits. Like, yes, they want that stuff, too, but you've got to keep the farm. You've go to send the kids to college. You've got to put food on the table, just like all of us, right? And so that has really been my focus, you know, how to pay for it we've looked at, as I mentioned in many different ways. One way that we've looked at it is--and every farmer knows this--is that not all acres are equal in terms of corn and soybean productivity. And corn and soybeans are really expensive crops to grow. Just think about the seed costs. Think about the fertilizer costs. Think about the diesel to run, you know, the tractor, right? They're very expensive crops to grow. So, you know, there are some areas of their fields that are really - they're in corn and soybeans for sort of traditional reasons. When you look at all the costs involved they might not actually provide income to the farmer, right? Because the costs are higher than - well, because the yield just isn't good enough to overcome the cost of production on those acres. So one of the things we've looked at is, okay, well, can we put prairie strips - to what extent can we address the environmental constraints of the land by putting prairie strips on the acres that aren't pulling their weight anyway in terms of the profitability on the farm? And so, you know, we've built models and produced maps, shared some of those data with farmers to be, like, okay, well, if you're looking at prairie strips on your land let's first consider what your yields are and where, you know, the profit from corn and soybeans might not be - where you might not have any profit, right, where the costs are not - exceed the income. So that's one way that we've looked at it. Another way we've looked at it is prairie strips, by being able to cover some of the costs that farmers incur through various programs--and that's where the farm bill, the CRP - the Conservation Reserve Program associated with the farm bill is so important. So what the Conservation Reserve Program will do is say, "Okay, well, you want to put prairie strips on your land in these areas. You know, if you can do it in a way that matches the program constraints we, the federal government, can compensate you for those acres." And they will pay farmers' rent - they will basically rent those acres from the farmer so that they don't have, you know, the costs of the corn and soybean production, plus they get the income from the federal government. And the idea is that we the taxpayers are paying for the environmental benefits that land generates, and that's how we can compensate the farmers basically for producing those environmental benefits on those acres. The next area that we're looking at is prairie--it can be very productive once it's established. You know, (worrying) - about not going to know the number in tons. [LAUGHTER] Here's where the science part comes in, right? Between about two to five tons per acre, per year, of biomass. And we know that prairie is a vegetation type--it needs disturbance. It was established - historically, you know, our prairies were managed or affected by a combination of (inaudible) grazers as well as, you know, Native American fire. So to maintain a good prairie stand we do need to remove that biomass periodically. So the next thing that we're working on is, like, can we harvest that prairie biomass that's grown on these prairie-strips acres, and then actually turn it into usable products that are demanded by society? So for example, energy or some kind of materials or chemicals that we're already using as a part of our society, but right now they're coming from petrochemicals, right? Wouldn't it be really cool if we could derive those from biomass? And then we could also pay farmers for that material that they grow through the prairie strip, the biomass.
JOHN: I mean, just to kind of play back what you said, it sounds like you're layering benefit for them, layering revenue streams if you will, some of them...
LISA: Exactly.
JOHN: That's super creative. And I think it's probably enough on experiments and outcomes, but there is one more thing that I want to talk about, and you mentioned it early in the interview, that you're a landscape ecologist. And you talked about seeing things from the plane. And I want you to describe - because I think for most people experiments are these things that happen in test tubes, right, where you can measure the gas coming off after you put a base - or an acid in a vile of Coke or something like that, you know? Something really simple. So - but you see the landscape from a perspective that most people don't, and you design experiments to address them. Tell me about inspiration for that maybe. Like, how did you get interested in that?
LISA: Yeah, that's a great question. How did I get interested in that? [LAUGHTER]
JOHN: Is it because you - from the plane you saw these things and they kind of sparked ideas about things that you could do, or do you actually close your eyes and see the landscape and imagine the experiments? You know what I mean? Like, some people are very visual about how they ideate.
LISA: Yeah. Two parts into this. First of all, I love science, I love the discovery process, right. The kinds of questions - it's cliché, but, you know, we know less about the world than we know, right? I love the discovery process. That said, it pains me when my science only stays in journals, right? That is, like, literally painful to me. Like, to just, you know, publish a paper in a journal; it's going to sit on some dusty library shelf, right? So the motivation I have as a scientist is not only to do the research but to make sure that it has a chance to get actually implemented in our world. So that is just the lens through which I'm approaching the science that I do is "use-inspired," to use the NSF terminology, right?
JOHN: "Solutions-oriented," "use-inspired," yes.
LISA: Yeah - yeah, exactly. Stopping at that step of, you know, just publishing it, but figuring out then how to connect it to the community that could actually make use of it.
JOHN: Yeah.
LISA: Right.
JOHN: Well, I would add one feather to your cap, which is--and we talked about this in Leopold training a lot--kind of the bright-spot philosophy instead of the crisis philosophy, right? You know, I think you have a we-can-do philosophy that is not that common in science, not that common in policy. And I think linking the we-can-do across that boundary is really super important.
LISA: Yeah. Just to kind of underscore that, one of my colleagues [LAUGHTER], you know, he said, "Lisa, for better or worse you just don't take no for an answer." [LAUGHTER]
JOHN: That's funny.
LISA: Yeah. It's always, "Okay, if not right now when?" [LAUGHTER]
JOHN: Excellent. Or, "If not this way another way," right? Like, I think - the question I was getting at with how do you envision these experiments, I just want to say this: when you describe the fields along contours I saw, like, a Georgia O'Keeffe painting in my mind, right?
LISA: Yes. And if you've seen any of the pictures that we - the team has taken of prairie strips, and, you know, part of news articles and such, they are gorgeous, right? We are not only introducing this function back into the agricultural landscapes, like, we are repainting these landscapes in really beautiful ways. It's just - yeah, like, you know, some of the imagery is just mind-blowing when you see the complexity of, you know, the prairie strips next to the highly-engineered, right, highly-arranged landscape of the corn and soybean right next to it. And it just makes such a gorgeous contrast, especially during high summer when everything is so green, and productive, and moving in the prairie. What I want to say, you know, for your listeners is that while the pictures are beautiful, it's nothing like actually being out there on the landscape. Like, the beauty times 10, or 100, right? And just one story to kind of share to bring that home, one day I was out helping one of my graduate students do work on birds--this isn't the water piece right now; it's the wildlife piece--birds. We were looking at nest-success of birds and comparing, you know, the crop fields, prairie strips to other more traditional conservation features like a brome, you know, the smooth broke that I mentioned. There was a nest that needed to be checked to see if it was the actual - eggs had hatched and the young had fledged. And that's where sparrows nest was in the middle of, like, a 160-acre cornfield. And it was early July and, you know, it was, like, 90 degrees, humid, and I knew that (inaudible) nests had failed, but you've got to collect the data, right? You can't assume; you have to go out and actually collect the data, right? So I walked, whatever it was, like, the half-mile, you know, through - you know, parting the corn [LAUGHTER] all the way, you know, to get to this (inaudible) nest.
JOHN: Like swimming through it, yes.
LISA: Yeah, swimming through it. And the humid air, right? And I get there and of course there's no eggs anymore. You know, I could see where they had been smashed, right, and there are no young. So we collected the data, but as I was sitting there, you know, I was just listening. And it was literally me and the corn. All I could hear was, like, a little bit of wind rustling in the corn and no other noise. And so then I had to leave that cornfield and go back to an area of the farm that had the prairie strips. And so I walked the, you know, now three-quarters of a mile back through the corn, you know, to where the prairie strips were. And as I was approaching the prairie strips I could - it was getting louder, and louder, and louder. And I get to the prairie strips and it is just brimming with life, right? There's crickets chirping, there's bees buzzing, there's birds, you know, flying around and squawking at me to be there, and many, many different species, right? I can hear the wind now in the prairie strip as well. I can, you know, see all the color of the flowers in the prairie strip. And it's just like - it was like two different worlds, right? And the fact that one was alive and one wasn't had everything to do with having that prairie there.
JOHN: That's so powerful, and it's so - I mean, clearly you have bar graphs that show this, and science will bless you for that, but it's hard to quantify what you just told - the story you just told with data, right? You almost have to be there. That's super interesting. And that kind of encapsulates what I was thinking when I was imagining. And I have seen pictures of your treatments, so I know what they look like. And a picture is worth 1000 words to a certain extent. But I appreciate the comment that being there and seeing the difference in all senses is much more powerful. That's super cool. Okay, well, we're going to switch to a nerdier topic. I love the art conversation. My mom was an artist, my dad was an engineer, so I balance that dichotomy every day of my life. So let's go back to engineering, because you mentioned drawing. The first word was - for me was, oh, she's designing functionally-sustainable landscapes. And that takes us to engineering as well. Because if you wanted to do that at scale it would be an engineering company doing that at scale, right? CH2M, for example, or something like that, building Iowa sustainable, or something to that magnitude. Can you talk about that first? And again, I'm going to ask you two different questions, and you can take either one, or take one or the other in order. But the difference between science and engineering and how you manage that. And the second is more about which one is more important for scaling?
LISA: Well, first thing is, you know, coming back to the can-do attitude, I love working with engineers for that very reason, right? They really do have can-do attitudes. And it's, okay, what's the problem? You know, how do we fix it? Solutions-orientation. So the second thing I would say is that this Iowa landscape is an incredibly engineered landscape. We sometimes joke about this here is that Iowa is the most altered state, right? I already talked about the land cover, right, about 75% corn and soybeans, about 85% agricultural, right? It has the highest amount of agricultural landcover of any state in the U.S. And so, you know, the human domination, the human signature on that is - you can see it. You know, there's very little natural element left as you would fly across the Iowa landscape. The other part I would say is it's not just engineered on the surface, right? The whole landscape has been re-engineered below ground, too, getting back to that tile drainage that I mentioned, right? Putting in pipes basically underneath the ground to remove water such that... Because it's too wet here during parts of the year, right, for corn and soybean production. So to raise the productivity of the landscape, especially for soybean. Our landscape has been altered on top as well as, you know, underneath. It's the most altered state in the U.S., right? So this gets back to some of my inspiration. In many ways as a landscape ecologist--and here I'll really emphasize, you know, the ecology part, right, where I grew up studying natural systems, right--the Iowa landscape in so many ways feels like a blank slate, right? It's a blank canvas for somebody like me. Let's put more diverse landscape elements back on here. Let's repaint the arrangement of patches within this landscape. And so there is this design element. You know, we're starting with this blank slate and we're adding back in these elements to hopefully, you know, address some of the productivity and profitability concerns for farmers, right, as I mentioned before--because it's corn and soybeans that pays the bills for them--or bringing in the policies that allow them to make different decisions on that landscape by helping to, you know, repaint what profitability can look like for them on that landscape. And certainly being really strategic about where we put these different landscape elements in to try to maximize the benefit to society. Because we want to get the most environmental bang for that taxpayer dollar.
JOHN: So much good stuff there. I mean, the idea of design and a blank canvas, that's super powerful. And in another realm, another aspect of water sustainability, I've always thought of empty aquafers as our biggest opportunity for resilience. And the blank slate has a similar "let's turn the crisis into bright spot" kind of feel to it. And I think it could be very powerful, especially in the policy realm, to speak of it like that. Because you could do anything with a canvas; it doesn't have to be full of native vegetation. And so you could imagine a lot of pleasing designs that are win-wins in a lot of ways, right? So I love that. Okay, one last question. I want to turn back to how do we finance this? And you have a lot of good ideas in this space. And I just want to preface it by saying that, you know, one of the answers that I always give when people ask me, "How are we going to fix water systems to make them more resilient?" is that, well, we had the New Deal but we're not going to have a Newer Deal where the government comes in and pays for everything. You know, and we have the (IIJA) right now, which is an amazing influx of capital for infrastructure investment. But at the end of the day it's going to take more creativity in the finance space. And you mentioned incentives--incentives are probably the only way that the federal government is going to pay for that. Who are the other actors that need to come to the table - that could come to the table and help not pay for it all, because that's not going to happen, but offset costs, de-risk projects, things like that? Tell me about your stakeholder universe I guess is what I'm asking you, and in particular the finance part of that.
LISA: Mm-hm, yeah. Well, we just did a stakeholder mapping exercise in my lab a couple weeks ago, and the stakeholder universe is massive (inaudible) [LAUGHTER] say it that way. It's massive, which, you know, is very fun. Especially since I'm an extrovert, right, I like talking with people. But it's also a bit of a challenge just to, you know, connect with that many people in groups in meaningful ways. But it has put me in contact with people that really see the world differently than, you know, ecologists, you know, scientists. And I've really learned through that process about what some of the opportunities are. For example, that - you know, that what I share with you about, you know, looking at the landscape instead of thinking about it, soil map is cool, you know, biophysical patterns, but thinking about that as, you know, (heterogeneity), maybe not in the texture of the soil, but thinking about that in terms of (heterogeneity) of profitability, and recognizing that, you know, not all acres carry their weight in a farming operation, and that there's this opportunity to reduce costs for farmers, right? And by reducing costs raising income. You know, that comes from working with farmers, and then also working with businesses and thinking about that - approaching farming from that business mindset. Another sort of way that we can think about profitability is farmers are constantly trying to navigate or balance short-term profitability with long-term financial resilience. They need to be profitable in every single year...
JOHN: I was thinking about that in particular with the soil. Like, if you have 95% soil retention then the farmer's going to make maybe less now, but much more over the long haul because the soil's been preserved, right?
LISA: Right, yep, keeping that soil in the field. Exactly - exactly. So it's in the farmer's best interest to keep that soil in the field and keep it healthy, right? But they may have to make decisions in the short-term to keep them so that they are financial viable to the next year. So the worst thing for a farmer is to have a bad year and then potentially several bad years, and then lose the farm. And this gets back to a whole (nother) conversation about being rooted to place and rooted to place for multiple generations, right? And you don't want to be the generation that loses the family farm. So while it's in their best interest to conserve that soil in the long-term they have to be able to be financially-viable in the short-term to get to that long-term, right? So they're constantly trying to balance those things and it's a challenge. And so that's another opportunity. You know, can - just about every farmer, and corn and soybean farmer, cotton farmer, you know, they depend on federal supports for crop insurance. Can there be a way that crop insurance policy is modified such that, you know, those that are really doing the sustainable practices get, you know, more of their crop insurance paid for, and those that, you know, are just doing the minimum on the environmental side maybe they don't get as much of their crop insurance paid for, right? [LAUGHTER]
JOHN: That totally makes sense. And it could be weighted - I mean, you said that the aerial coverage of prairie strips doesn't matter as much as location, so it may not be weighted by aerial coverage of it. But yeah, I get that. That sounds interesting. What about - in the non-governmental space there are a lot of big companies that engage in agriculture, and a lot of those big companies have sustainability goals, both on water and carbon. And it sounds like prairie strips solve both of them in a lot of ways. Have you engaged big companies on offsetting costs, doing these sort of corporate sustainability-oriented incentivization?
LISA: Yeah, definitely engaging companies in terms of getting the information out there, the science information out there. And by and large people love it, right? They love this idea of being able to have this, I would say, you know, like, a tweak intervention, right? We're not talking about converting the whole field to something else, right? We're - there's a lot of great things about corn and soybean production in terms of just people - farmers know how to manage them, right, and the infrastructure for them is developed, right? So we're not talking about totally upsetting our food and agricultural system, but being able to be really strategic about shoring up some of the environmental challenges associated with it. That message resonates. And, you know, you can - with some of the carbon programs that are being developed, you know, transitioning some of the land into a grass landcover, farmers could help to generate carbon credits associated with that transition. And one of the really cool things that the federal government has determined is that, you know, you can get your CRP payment for putting prairie strips in, that land rental, and then you can also sell - or you can help sign up for a carbon program and get a payment through a carbon program on that same acre, you know, so that you can - again, layering the economic benefits, as you said. So that is entirely possible already, so that's exciting. And these carbon programs are becoming more robust over time. Another project that we've engaged with here in Iowa, since we want to bring it back to the water space, is I've engaged the city of Ames because it's close, right? It's where I live. Another partner at the Sand County Foundation is also engaging other municipalities in Iowa to work with farmers upstream of those municipalities to put in prairie strips and other conservation practices, as well. And the Sand County Foundation worked with the State of Iowa to develop an MOU, a memorandum of understanding, that allows municipalities to use the nutrient reduction associated with changing those practices upstream on agricultural land, and the nutrient retention benefit associated with that. The municipality can then use that nutrient retention as a part of their discharge permit associated with their wastewater treatment plants under the Clean Water Act. The wastewater treatment plants have permitted levels to which they can release nitrogen or phosphorous into the stream. They need - according to federal law, right, they have to stay below their permitted discharge. And some of them, they've put on all the cost-effective mechanisms for, you know, staying within their permitted level. And the next most cost-effective way that they can stay within their permits is actually by improving the water quality coming into the plant. This is great because now we have people in urban areas, again, really connected to the farmers upstream of them, right, in financial ways, and then bridging that urban/rural divide that has developed in our society.
JOHN: It's similar in some ways to water-market...
LISA: Yeah, it's a payment for ecosystems services, you know, clean-water market.
JOHN: Yeah, that's cool. Well, hey, this has been a super fun conversation.
LISA: This was a lot of fun.
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JOHN: That's it for this episode of Audacious Water. If you like the show please rate or review us and tell your colleagues and friends. For more information about Audacious Water visit our website at AudaciousWater.org/podcast. Until next time I'm John Sabo.
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END (LISA SCHULTE MOORE INTERVIEW)