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Environmental Economics, Agriculture, and Clean Water: Chesapeake Watershed Initiative · Clean Water Conversations

0:10
SPEAKER_02: Hello everyone and welcome to Clean Water Conversations, the podcast where we have casual discussions about creating clean and clear waterways right here in Lancaster County.
0:19
SPEAKER_02: I'm Ken.
0:20
SPEAKER_04: Hey everybody, this is Allison.
0:22
SPEAKER_02: This is a big celebration.
0:24
SPEAKER_04: Always a celebration.
0:27
SPEAKER_02: Well, that is true.
0:29
SPEAKER_02: That is true.
0:29
SPEAKER_02: But this is the 30th episode.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: 30.
0:33
SPEAKER_02: And the studio audience loves it.
0:38
SPEAKER_02: Of course they do.
0:39
SPEAKER_02: We have had all kinds of guests, all kinds of moments, and we've had fun the whole time with this stuff.
0:45
SPEAKER_02: So is there a standout memory, a standout moment in any of those episodes?
0:51
SPEAKER_02: It just sticks in your head that so many, so many.
0:55
SPEAKER_04: But two that I will call out is that I love the fact when I meet somebody in Lancaster and they have recently learned about the podcast and they tell me, I just found out about this.
1:06
SPEAKER_04: I went back and downloaded the entire season and I binged everything while I cleaned the house.
1:11
SPEAKER_04: I love those people.
1:12
SPEAKER_04: Oh, I know.
1:13
SPEAKER_04: It just makes my heart warm because I'm like, oh, you loved us so much.
1:16
SPEAKER_04: It was the whole season.
1:18
SPEAKER_04: And then in the same day or in the same week, I meet somebody from a state or federal agency, and they're telling me about how they discovered some episodes and what a wonderful way to hear so many different kinds of voices.
1:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:30
SPEAKER_04: Like, oh, it's so true.
1:31
SPEAKER_04: Like we are shifting the narrative.
1:33
SPEAKER_04: This is one of the most fun ways to do that with real voices, real people, the stories that matter.
1:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:39
SPEAKER_04: How about you, Ken?
1:41
SPEAKER_02: For me, it all comes back to sitting in a stream doing a live broadcast.
1:46
SPEAKER_02: And I'm sitting there thinking, how did I get here?
1:54
SPEAKER_02: I know.
1:55
SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you what.
1:56
SPEAKER_02: It's so unusual, so fun.
1:58
SPEAKER_02: That was one of the most fun moments.
2:00
SPEAKER_02: We've had a lot of fun moments on this show, and it's just that's absolutely been a hoot.
2:06
SPEAKER_04: And there's so much more to come.
2:08
SPEAKER_04: It's only episode 30.
2:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there you go.
2:10
SPEAKER_02: Hey, you know what?
2:11
SPEAKER_02: Speaking of episode 30, we have a great guest today.
2:14
SPEAKER_04: Yes, yes.
2:15
SPEAKER_02: Dr.
2:16
SPEAKER_02: Patrick Fleming is the associate professor of economics and public policy.
2:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh, he's program chair of public policy at Franklin and Marshall College, and the co-director of the Chesapeake Watershed Initiative.
2:29
SPEAKER_04: And now, because Franklin and Marshall College was said in the introduction, the rest of today's episode will use FM.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: Check it out.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: Maybe best case scenario could encourage people to invest in more renewable energy forms or potentially nuclear.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: It'll be a renaissance of nuclear, which is also a little bit controversial, but it's at least uh thank you for pronouncing that word correctly.
2:58
SPEAKER_02: The number of people who do not is astonishing and saddening.
3:04
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
3:05
SPEAKER_02: So while we're on that, let's start things off with an icebreaker.
3:11
SPEAKER_02: You wear some unique hats.
3:13
SPEAKER_02: Your roles are really varied.
3:15
SPEAKER_02: If you could switch roles with a celebrity for one day, who would it be and why?
3:21
SPEAKER_00: That's a good question.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: I think uh I'd always wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: And so somebody like Dr.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Pohl or maybe James Harriet, who wrote the All Creatures Great and Small books would be really, really cool, I think.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: You know, I I work on a farm as well as being an academic, and so I get to work with animals a lot, which I like.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've always been an animal person.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: I love animals.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: And big animals too are interesting.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: To like drive around the English countryside with James Harriet and see beautiful old farms and help farmers to you know keep their animals healthy.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: That would be a nice nice day.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh, very cool.
3:59
SPEAKER_04: Dr.
3:59
SPEAKER_04: Patrick Disney Plus special.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: There we go.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know I'd get a TV show out of it.
4:06
SPEAKER_04: The celebrity part, yeah.
4:08
SPEAKER_04: There you go.
4:09
SPEAKER_04: I think there's plenty of people that would say you are a celebrity, so they may switch with you.
4:13
SPEAKER_04: Oh, I don't know about that.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: How about you guys?
4:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I honestly can't think of too many that I would that I would switch with.
4:23
SPEAKER_02: You know what?
4:24
SPEAKER_02: I think I'd maybe switch with Ryan Reynolds just because he looks like he has so much fun in like everything he does.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
4:33
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
4:34
SPEAKER_04: I've been watching Brene Brown pieces lately.
4:37
SPEAKER_04: And so I think I I'm confusing my answer though of like I'd like to hang out with her, not switch with her.
4:42
SPEAKER_04: Right.
4:42
SPEAKER_04: Right.
4:43
SPEAKER_02: That's a different thing.
4:44
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
4:45
SPEAKER_02: Well, does that change your answer?
4:46
SPEAKER_02: Would you hang out with somebody, a different person?
4:49
SPEAKER_00: Like if it was a dinner with somebody, it would probably change my answer.
4:53
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
4:53
SPEAKER_02: Um I'm curious, who would that be?
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Well, if there was music after dinner, maybe Chopin, listen to some piano music.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I could talk much with him in Polish or French.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: But I'd love to hear some of these classic musicians play, wouldn't that be?
5:13
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: But like, yeah, dinner with Ryan Reynolds would be would be fun.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, absolutely.
5:22
SPEAKER_04: You guys can chat.
5:24
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
5:27
SPEAKER_02: So you have a fascinating origin story.
5:31
SPEAKER_04: Air quotes and quotes.
5:34
SPEAKER_02: That's how it's written on my paper, so I figured, you know.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: That makes so much sense.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: And now I can't What is your background?
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Where did you grow up?
5:44
SPEAKER_00: I grew up in the Lehigh Valley.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: So not far from Lancaster, hour and a half away.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: And did not grow up on a farm.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: My dad was a chemistry professor, my mom uh was a nurse, and didn't have much background in agriculture, but ended up in farming over time.
6:02
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: So my wife is from Lancaster, and she grew up on a farm.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: We met when we were 17, and at the time had no intention of coming back to the farm and farming.
6:14
SPEAKER_04: Oh wow.
6:15
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: Sort of, you know, we figured like most people, we'd end up with a job in some city, go where the job is.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: And then it was only over time, and especially from reading different authors.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: So I did a a master's degree in theology and philosophy and read some agrarian authors like Wendell Berry, who's a major influence, G.K.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Chesterton, a couple other authors that talk about going back to the land as something attractive and healthy for people and for communities.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: And so that planted the seed in our minds, and so we started talking about that.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: Like, should we try to make a go of it on the farm?
6:56
SPEAKER_00: Because we didn't know if it was feasible.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: You know, we thought it was attractive, but is it feasible?
7:00
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: So we spent a year, came back to Lancaster for a year.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: You know, I call it my apprenticeship year on the farm.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: And for her, it was just kind of re-getting reacquainted with things she knew growing up.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: And during that year, we realized for it to be feasible, like many small farms, we'd need an off-farm income source.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: Most farms, there's about two million farms in the US today, and over 90% of them are what are considered part-time farmers, where they have substantial off-farm income sources.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: So most of our food is grown by that, 10% who are full-time farmers.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: But a lot of farms are making ends of meat by diversifying and having off-farm source income sources.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: So I went to grad school at University of Maryland, got a PhD in agricultural economics, and with the intention of coming back to the farm if we could make it work.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: And so after the coursework was finished with a PhD, we came back to Lancaster and wrote the dissertation from the farm.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: It was sort of one of those times in my life where it did feel like a healthy balance of I could spend four hours writing, then I can't write anymore.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: You're at a writer's block after a certain time.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: So I can go and do productive work with my body outside in the fresh air and have a nice sort of healthy balance of work.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: And then the the idea of getting a j uh an academic job in Lancaster was totally uncertain.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: And then in 2015, a job ad came up at FM, right in my field, which is environmental economics.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: And we thought this is too good to be true.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: But I'll try, I'll apply, we'll see what happens.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: And I I made my cover letter stand out enough that they called me to be in their top 10 like short interviews.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: In the cover letter, I wrote how I had some Franklin and Marshall FM students come to the farm and milk a cow.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: And I think that that piqued their interest like this guy that has already had FM students at his farm.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: So they interviewed me and that went well.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: And I came back and eventually it worked out.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: So it was sort of providential that I could land an academic job right here where the farm was.
9:06
SPEAKER_04: That's wonderful.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: That's our ear.
9:09
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
9:09
SPEAKER_04: So was academia always part of what you wanted to do?
9:13
SPEAKER_00: It was.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: Looking back, I mean, I had the veterinarian goal as a child.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: I loved animals.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: But at a pretty young age, I realized if you're going to be a veterinarian every day, not just for one day, you're with sick animals all the time.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: And that can be kind of hard.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: And I've always had an intellectual side.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: My dad was a chemistry professor.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: He he moved to Lehigh Valley to work for Bethlehem Steel.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: But then as manufacturing left the US, he had a mid-career shift into academia.
9:43
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: And that was a challenging shift for him.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: Like midlife career shifts are always challenging.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: And so he always advised me against academia.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: But I think as like many, maybe many children, you sort of sometimes resist your parents' advice, but then end up being like them in the end anyway.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: And that's sort of what happened in my case, where I have a very similar demeanor to my dad.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: And we so we both ended up in the same type of occupation.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but just in in different ways.
10:11
SPEAKER_02: My nephew did the exact opposite.
10:13
SPEAKER_02: His dad was a doctor.
10:14
SPEAKER_02: And so when we was young, we'd we say, Are you gonna go in into medicine be a doctor like your dad?
10:19
SPEAKER_02: And his response at like nine or ten years old was, no, the human body is disgusting.
10:28
SPEAKER_02: So just the uh exact opposite.
10:30
SPEAKER_02: That wasn't gonna happen in his case.
10:34
SPEAKER_04: So some of your academic pieces include a combination of agriculture, economics, and conservation.
10:41
SPEAKER_04: One of those projects was Big Spring Run.
10:43
SPEAKER_04: So curious what interested you in that initially.
10:47
SPEAKER_04: And that project has recently celebrated kind of an anniversary of sorts.
10:51
SPEAKER_04: And so what's kept you interested?
10:53
SPEAKER_00: So coming from a background in agricultural economics at University of Maryland, I worked on water quality issues there, Chesapeake Bay, the how effective cost share programs are at encouraging farmers to adopt conservation practices.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: And the kind of conventional wisdom in that field is that the most cost-effective practices, the ones that will really get you the most improved in water quality per dollar spent, are the agricultural practices.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: The things like cover crops, planting buffers along streams, better manure storage facilities, things like that.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: And so when I came to FM and heard about the research of some geologists that worked there, Bob Walter and Dorothy Meritz, it really piqued my interest in part because they were looking at like what was on the landscape before European settlement.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: And how can that inform the types of approaches we take to restoration today?
11:49
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things they discovered was that a lot of the valley bottoms in Lancaster County and throughout the Mid-Atlantic have sort of been buried by what they call legacy sediment.
11:59
SPEAKER_03: Right.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: And people, and this has now become a more somewhat common term, but in case listeners haven't heard of it, the idea is that there are many mill dams constructed over the colonial period that are now mostly gone, and we've kind of forgotten about some of their impacts.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: But if you put a wall in a low-lying area and then clear-cut the trees and farmland for the first time, there's tons of soil erosion that washes into the waterways, but it gets blocked behind that wall.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: And so all these low-lying areas have this legacy sediment that all carbon dates within the past 300 years or so.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: But then if you trench down underneath it, you find a clear difference in the color of the soil and the types of seeds in the soil and the carbon dating of the soil to be like a thousand to ten thousand years old, which indicates stable ecosystems long before the European settlers arrived.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: And those types of seeds and soils indicate wetland soils.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: So their approach is to unearth these wetlands that existed in valley bottoms.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: And so as I heard about this, it was very interesting to me.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: But as an economist, I thought, is this practical?
13:04
SPEAKER_00: How expensive is this?
13:06
SPEAKER_00: And so our first study was to look into that question is what is the cost to reduce a pound of nitrogen or reduce a ton of sediment in local waterways and in the bay, doing this approach in comparison to other approaches.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: And what we found was what really interested me to continue working in this is that for sediment and phosphorus reduction, it was very cost effective, kind of like an order of magnitude of 10 times more cost effective than the comparison practices, which are commonly considered the ones that are low-hanging fruit and really good to do.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: And they are good practices.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: But the logic behind it is that there's economies of scale.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: It's expensive up front, but you're getting a lot done with one big project.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then for nitrogen, it was similar order of magnitude to the low-cost practices.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: So that really motivated me to keep keep researching and then expand in other ways.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: So, how do we do better outreach to landowners about this practice?
14:01
SPEAKER_00: What are the potential economic benefits of restorations of this type?
14:05
SPEAKER_00: That's kept me interested over the years.
14:07
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
14:07
SPEAKER_04: Is it completely unique?
14:09
SPEAKER_04: Like I understand that those two were some of the first researchers, but the work at FM, is it completely unique to that area?
14:17
SPEAKER_00: To that institution or to the other.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: No, it's it's not.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: It's now spread.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: And there are other researchers that have have picked up the baton.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: There's some folks at University of Delaware, like Shri Ram and Namdar, uh at Virginia Tech, uh at USGS, the U.S.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: Geological Survey.
14:37
SPEAKER_02: Um almost got me there.
14:39
SPEAKER_02: You're you're quicker than my hand, that's for sure.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: But then it's important to also point out like the the Mill Dam issue was ubiquitous in the mid-Atlantic region and the East Coast.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: But then in other parts of the U.S., there's legacies of human impacts that have affected the landscapes just as much, but in different ways.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: So for example, we're working with researchers from Minnesota and Iowa who look at how drain tile has affected the water table and essentially lowered the water table if, you know, with all the fields having so much drain tile in it, the water table gets lowered.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: You end up with streams that have steep stream banks and have a lot of bank erosion similar to what you see here, but for a different reason.
15:20
unknown: Oh.
15:20
SPEAKER_02: Now that's not a phrase I'm familiar with.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: What is drain tile?
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Drain tile is sort of a plastic tube that's put under the ground to help water escape from a like a low-lying or wet area.
15:31
SPEAKER_02: Gotcha.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: And so many farms in wet regions have done this to make that land accessible or tillable to be able to plant crops.
15:40
SPEAKER_04: Do you think there's any lessons that Lancaster partners would need or should be aware of?
15:45
SPEAKER_04: Like there's so many things that you all have learned from places like Big Spring Run, but thinking of how we can take bite-sized pieces of that or how we can be better because of it.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell I think some of the lessons are things that I think Lancaster Clean Water Partners and partner organizations do very well already.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: Like one is not to have a one-size-fits-all approach, but sort of to look at an individual location and what's appropriate based on the history and the current land use of that location.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: That sort of notion I think is an important takeaway of our work.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Sort of to have a locally appropriate approach.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: And I think you I think Lancaster Clean Water Partners is very good at that.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: I think another lesson is that we're still learning.
16:26
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: I think some sometimes we can have the impression that we know what to do and let's just scale it up.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: The limitation is we need more funding, and then we can just scale up what we do.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: You know, wash, rinse, repeat, and and that's the best way.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: But we are really still learning about what works best in terms of implementation and when and where it works best.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: And also outreach strategies, like what works best to connect to landowners and to get people on board.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: And so I think paying attention to the research is an important takeaway.
16:58
SPEAKER_04: Oh, well, we'll use that just to jump right into your research paper.
17:01
SPEAKER_04: Excellent.
17:02
SPEAKER_04: How convenience.
17:06
SPEAKER_04: Your research was about new ways to do outreach and using the community to work together.
17:11
SPEAKER_04: So yeah, tell us more about that recent catchment council idea.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for asking about that.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: So the paper was recently in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: And I should shout out to my co-authors, Leah Palm Forster at University of Delaware, and then Hannah Connick and Alice Fodor, who were also at Franklin and Marshall College.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: And in this study, we tried to answer the question of how do you best encourage landowners to cooperate across multiple properties for one thing?
17:42
SPEAKER_00: And just how do you encourage engagement among landowners who might be hesitant to be engaged?
17:47
SPEAKER_00: And that's really important.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: If you want to do conservation work, water quality work at scale in Lancaster, there's so many landowners you have to get people to work together.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: You know, this is not Iowa where there's one 10,000 acre.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: You know, we have we have lots of landowners living in close proximity along streams.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, to try to how do we get people to think of this as a shared resource to work on together?
18:11
SPEAKER_00: So we formed these groups called catchment councils, where they're defined as sort of groups of landowners who are adjacent to a stream.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: They're given a common goal that's measurable, and the resources to try to achieve that goal, which includes a budget, financial resources, but also information to try to get to their goal.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: And the council was really formed based on some of the prior research on social science and how do you get people to to get interested and engaged.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: So just to give a little some of the things that inspired the council, one is just the importance of trust, that building trust really matters.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: And it sounds obvious, but it's hard to do.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: And it takes work.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: But there are a lot of examples of it, of it working well.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: And and one of the Nobel laureates of economics that I love and that I've I've followed over the years, she was the first female Nobel laureate in 2009, is Eleanor Ostrom.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: And she spent her career studying this question of how do people manage, like what marks the groups that are managing a shared resource well versus those that are not managing it well.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: And at the end of her Nobel laureate acceptance speech, she makes this simple point that I think is really profound.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: But she says the key difference she saw are groups that manage shared resources well are groups where there's trust.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: People trust each other within the group.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: And that trust she often found is based on an ability to monitor the condition of the resource so people can see if it's getting better or worse.
19:44
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: If somebody undertaking a certain action is causing a problem.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: This this ability to monitor is helpful not just for learning what works, but also for building trust to see what's effective and what's not.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: So that that really inspired me.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: So we tried to build trust in the group through bi-monthly meetings and we had we had a very intensive kind of outreach.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: Members would reach out to non-members who were their neighbors rather than having somebody you don't know reach out to you.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: All that stuff was very helpful.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: But what also matters are incentives.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: Economic incentives really do matter.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: So we had a budget for the council$20,000 that they could spend as they saw fit.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: And then we also had in information matters too.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: Giving people the information they need to solve a problem matters.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: And the way it's framed matters.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that we really paid attention to was in the one case, framing information so as not to blame any particular party for a problem, which again sounds obvious, but with environmental problems, sometimes it can come across as blaming.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: Oh, the finger pointing.
20:50
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, absolutely.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: And so we wanted to avoid that at all costs.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: And I think the research on the legacies of a landscape lend themselves well to that kind of a thing.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: This is a problem we've inherited.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: We're working on it together, and it's not primarily the result of any one group's practices today.
21:07
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: And in terms of information framing as well, another important factor that we saw was peer comparisons.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: We gave landowners maps of erosion on the streams in their property and how much erosion was uh contributed over the past 15 years, and then compared that to what's typical in Lancaster County or in that catchment.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: And so landowners who are below typical erosion are thought, that's great.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: I have very slowly eroding stream banks and that confirms what I've seen.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:39
SPEAKER_00: Or I'm lucky to be in this location.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: And landowners with high erosion properties kind of felt like, wow, I didn't realize that like I've seen a lot of erosion, and now I see that it's also much more than what's happening on my neighbors' parcels.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: And so maybe it's not inevitable.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: Maybe something can be done about it.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: So framing the information was important.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: And that's so In terms of takeaways, we worked together for a year with the landowners.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: This was on Indian Run in Little Conestoga watershed.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: We had 11 households participate out of 30 that we invited.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: So decent participation, about a third of the landowners.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: And what we found, some of the most important factors for people participating and then being open to doing restorations, probably the most important thing, was having high stream bank erosion rates on your property itself.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: Like seeing the problem that we're trying to solve as relevant to you.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: Was was key.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: So I think that information provision was was one of the key ways to get people engaged who were among the high eroding parcels.
22:42
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Another takeaway, which was interesting to me, and as an economist, somewhat surprising, was that the financial incentives were not as important as I thought they'd be.
22:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Universally, in in the interviews we had afterwards, everybody said the incentive was nice, you know, the participation bonus was nice, but it was not my main reason for participating.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: It was more the the environmental goal itself was more important.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: Some people described it as a nice additional push or a little nudge to help value, you know, value their time, but that was not the primary motivator.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's more intrinsic, at least in this case, more intrinsic motivation.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:19
SPEAKER_04: That's a fascinating piece because I know that you've said that with the results of this, but I've also heard it from Gordon Hoover and I appreciate what you said that your research was in cost share programs.
23:29
SPEAKER_04: Because so many times we all think if we if we show up with more money, if we show up with more financial options, that's what will make somebody more likely, but you're finding that not true.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: In our case, it was the information.
23:40
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
23:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
23:41
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
23:41
SPEAKER_02: You mentioning Gordon Hoover made me think of that.
23:44
SPEAKER_02: Has your experience in farming helped build trust as you talk to a landowner that might be a farmer?
23:52
SPEAKER_00: I think that does help.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: One farmer said to me in particular, the way that I framed it as not being an issue that's caused by farmers was really key.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: Right.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: To him being he felt welcome in the group and that he wouldn't be singled out.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: And I think that was that does help.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, to understand that context is important.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: And just if I could say one last takeaway from the study, the importance for the people who participated, they all said, in addition to the environmental goal, building community with our neighbors was a good benefit in itself.
24:23
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
24:24
SPEAKER_04: I love that part.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: Like we often think of a community on our neighborhood and our street and not along a stream.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: But this sort of developed the idea of the stream being a source of shared togetherness, community.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: And people liked that.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: They like getting to know their neighbors.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: Like on average, the average council member we had in this group knew four of their neighbors along the stream beforehand, but then nine by the end.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: So it really expanded who they knew up and down the creek.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: And the impact of that on conservation work in the long run, I think is there's a lot of potential there.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: If people begin to see it as something we can work on together, trust each other along the stream.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: You know, we didn't see any immediate impacts of that, but we had three restoration designs that were put together as a result of our group, which were done by seven households working together.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of a neat example of the power of this cat catchment council approach to get people to work together.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
25:21
SPEAKER_02: And now you are working with Chesapeake Watershed Initiative.
25:27
SPEAKER_02: Tell me about that project.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's a group of us at Franklin and Marshall.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: It's an interdisciplinary team with myself, with Bob Walter, Dorothy Meritz, and Chris Williams, who are in Earth and Environment and each have their own specialties in studying natural ecosystems.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: We've also looped in other faculty members at FM to do research on local businesses and psychology, psychological reasons that people care for stewardship or not, a bias towards what's natural or not.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: We're looking at a lot of different questions across different folks at FM.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: But in a in a nutshell, what Chesapeake Watershed Initiative does, CWI, is we're we take an understanding of the history of a landscape and how to restore landscapes guided by that history and try to disseminate that information.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: We, you know, one of our pillars is interdisciplinary research.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh, one of them is education through close collaboration with students, trying to launch careers of students into this type of work.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: And another is publicly engaged action.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: So something like the catchment councils would be an advan an example of that.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: But another big example of our work currently is with the blue-green connector along the Little Conestoga in downtown Lancaster that goes through part of FM's campus.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: And so we've worked closely with Emily Landis, who was a prior guest on this show on that project.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: And we've been tasked with designing a monitoring program for the effectiveness of that restoration and also helping to inform the trail, the scientific exhibits on the trail to make it a living learning laboratory.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, research, education, and publicly engaged action are the three pillars of our group.
27:12
SPEAKER_04: It's so fascinating because you said the social side of it is not often as it's not the go-to for nitrogen reductions or thinking about how we achieve conservation goals.
27:24
SPEAKER_04: So how are you changing that narrative?
27:26
SPEAKER_04: How are you making it about the social science?
27:28
SPEAKER_04: You do such a wonderful job of blending it often with the technical or chemistry side or something.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: But it's hard to work together across disciplines.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: There's different languages.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's Oh my gosh, the acronyms can.
27:43
SPEAKER_04: Different acronyms and departments.
27:46
SPEAKER_04: That's right.
27:46
SPEAKER_04: That's right.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: My head would explode.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: And in the in the clean water world, tons of acronyms.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: In the policy world, tons of acronyms.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: But then in academia, it gets blown up even further.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: So you really have to get practice speaking about what you know in a way that other intelligent people would understand, even if they haven't had the same training.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
28:08
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
28:08
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
28:09
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: And so I I've worked at that over the years.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: And I think working with this team at FM has been an aid to get practice doing that.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, the social science side is so is so important.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: And I think environmental economists have been saying that for a while.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: And maybe it is fine, it is getting some traction.
28:29
SPEAKER_00: But it's you can't say it enough that in, for example, in a county where a lot of the land along streams is owned by private individuals.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: And then even the land that's owned publicly, you know, it's still people that manage it and make decisions about it.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: There's there's no way that we can improve our waterways and get clean water without a careful and thoughtful approach about how to engage people.
28:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: And how economic incentives are important.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: And I think environmental economics was really born out of that kind of insight that you can't sustainably conserve something in the long run without paying attention to the people, the human communities that use it, the economic landscapes that it's in, that those things need to go together to really be sustainable.
29:12
SPEAKER_04: Have you seen a shift in that how it shows up, I'll say, with uh agency level conversations, like so much attention on nitrogen reductions, bay modeling things that tell us you have to get to this point.
29:24
SPEAKER_04: I feel like we have experienced somewhat of a shift within the CAP or the countywide action plan program where it was all about project numbers at first.
29:31
SPEAKER_04: And then we started to feel that, okay, we have to add the people.
29:34
SPEAKER_04: Uh I mean, the the other components there, it's like you're saying there's more awareness about it.
29:38
SPEAKER_04: But is that what you've experienced as well within the economic side?
29:43
SPEAKER_00: Certainly in the policy side.
29:44
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
29:45
SPEAKER_00: And with the 2025 Bay Goals coming up and and with some soul searching that goes with that, I think that has also led people to sort of ex some people anyway, to expand the set of indicators we're looking at.
29:58
SPEAKER_04: That's true.
29:59
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh in my opinion.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: I think that might be part of the impetus.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: I I agree with you that there is more, I think, focus more recently on some things aside from just the the chemical indicators of water quality that are also that we need to pay attention to.
30:14
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
30:14
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:15
SPEAKER_02: So your work in this space also connects with other leaders in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
30:20
SPEAKER_02: Specifically, you have participated in workshops and publications with the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee or STAC.
30:28
SPEAKER_03: Very good.
30:31
SPEAKER_02: What are some of the topics you've researched for that?
30:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: So the first Stack meeting I was a part of was on a steering committee for a workshop on targeting of best management practices.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: And the idea there is if we want to be more efficient and we want to maybe move the needle more noticeably on water quality, perhaps it's better to target certain high impact areas, target parts of the landscape or target certain practices that are most effective rather than what you might call a first come, first serve approach.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: Which given the kind of nature of a lot of the cost share programs and how I mean it's voluntary, which is a good thing.
31:14
SPEAKER_04: And limited dollars.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: And limited dollars.
31:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: It can sometimes be not targeted, but more based on willingness at a given moment in time.
31:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: So we there's a lot of ways to define a targeted program.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: And so we looked at at what are different ways you can design targeting in the context of improving water quality.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: You know, pay for performance is one way.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: Using mapping, aerial mapping imagery to target certain high impact areas is another.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: So that was the the overall goal of that of that meeting was to try to learn from this, you know, to try to be a little more efficient.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: How do you get the most bang for your bucket of public dollars?
31:53
SPEAKER_00: And since then, I've participated in workshops on monitoring and more recently on market-based approaches to improving Bay water quality.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: And uh I've enjoyed all of them.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: Stack does does good work.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: And I think the common thread of some of the meetings I've been a part of is trying to really make a measurable or noticeable impact on water quality.
32:11
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, because there's a lot of money spent and a lot of effort spent.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: And if the results aren't what you expect, how can we learn from that and improve?
32:20
SPEAKER_00: So targeting market-based approaches, sort of innovative ways to try to actually make a difference with water quality.
32:26
SPEAKER_04: I'll be a little selfish with my question of in those kind of conversations, have you seen a shift in the way that Lancaster is talked about?
32:36
SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: That's a really good question.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: And I can't say with with certainty, I haven't been in in a lot of the conversations, but over the years since I started thinking about these issues at University of Maryland, then through the stack workshops, my impression is that 10, 15 years ago, Lancaster was more seen as the black sheep in the bay, sort of the agricultural epicenter of of pollution sources.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: And more recently, within the past five years or or so, uh there's been, I think, a change in narrative about Lancaster being more of a partner.
33:11
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: More of a, you know, somebody who's integrated with the work and really important to the work.
33:17
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and and less of a black sheep.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: That's yeah, I have a limited set of you know of experiences to compare that with.
33:25
SPEAKER_04: Your interaction with people at different levels and different kinds of expertise is an especially important one because hearing about, I think from that Bay perspective, especially how Lancaster is viewed, experienced, and then interpreted, does it change the kind of finger pointing?
33:43
SPEAKER_04: Does it change the way that people set the table for those conversations and for the people that need to be there for I think some of what you were describing of the social science side of what are the kinds of resources we need, and then making sure that it gets to the right places.
33:57
SPEAKER_04: So I appreciate your distinction on targeting too, because we have those conversations a lot of like, do people feel that the finger pointing makes them the target?
34:06
SPEAKER_04: And then as your study found, like people don't want in on that kind of project.
34:11
SPEAKER_04: So that's right.
34:12
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think that is a big part of why 2025 resonates somewhat for Lancaster, but it's still we're focused on local waters.
34:20
SPEAKER_04: It will literally trickle downstream to improve at the bay over time.
34:24
SPEAKER_02: In Lancaster, we are looking at a collective goal of clean and clear water by 2040.
34:30
SPEAKER_02: Before that date arrives, we're looking at the end of 2025, the the end of the uh the bay agreement that you had mentioned, uh, as a milestone for local and bay-driven goals.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: What brings you excitement and eagerness as you as we all look beyond 2025?
34:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: And I think for my own work as somebody in academia, I have a long timeline.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: 2025 isn't isn't my own personal deadline or milestone.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: Right.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: But yet the Bay goals and the the total maximum daily load, TMDL goals, which had a 2025 deadline, were always in the policy discussion of why this matters.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: What's the policy relevance of the work we're doing?
35:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: So it really gave this work a hook to a lot of audiences.
35:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: And now that we're approaching it and people are coming to terms with the fact that those goals will not be met, I think has led to a certain reckoning, like I was mentioning.
35:27
SPEAKER_00: And there was this big report that came out last year, the comprehensive evaluation of system response or Caesar.
35:34
SPEAKER_04: Caesar is so much easier.
35:36
SPEAKER_04: It is.
35:39
SPEAKER_02: You are doing a really amazing job with that, by the way.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: It's it's uh being a professor just practice.
35:49
SPEAKER_00: But that report was was grate, in my opinion.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: And it it was very honest about you know, asking questions of, for example, what's feasible given our current state of development in the Bay watershed?
36:02
SPEAKER_00: If we're if we're far from achieving the goals, why haven't we?
36:06
SPEAKER_00: And then also if we're putting a lot of management practices in place that the Chesapeake Bay model says will do X, Y, and Z, but then in the monitoring data we don't see that, what are we missing in the model?
36:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: And I think this 2025 deadline that's now now passing has led people to ask these questions, which I think are really important and good questions.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: So that that does excite me to think of a broader set of indicators, you know, not just nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment, but also ecosystem health writ large and also how that connects with our current state of economic development and agricultural development in the region.
36:43
SPEAKER_00: And then if if the system is not responding in the way our model says it it should, what can we learn from that?
36:50
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: And I think the research that our team is doing at FM can speak directly to that kind of a question.
36:56
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
36:57
SPEAKER_04: Tying it back to that local piece for sure.
37:00
SPEAKER_04: Let's go local.
37:02
SPEAKER_04: Let's talk about your family.
37:03
SPEAKER_04: Oh.
37:04
SPEAKER_04: Local farm.
37:06
SPEAKER_02: So you're working with a lot of people all over the Chesapeake Bay region.
37:12
SPEAKER_02: And yet, and amongst all that academia, you're also doing chores.
37:18
SPEAKER_02: Feeding baby goats.
37:20
SPEAKER_02: Tell us about your your family's incredibly unique life at Burden View Farms.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: It is a unique life.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: A lot of juggling and balancing acts.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: And at its best, it can feel healthy, and at its worst, it can drive you crazy.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, for sure.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: But I I do love the work of farming along with the work of teaching and research.
37:45
SPEAKER_00: So holding them together is is worth it and and fun.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: And on the farm, so we farm 99 acres.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Some of those are rented.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: And we do beef cattle, grass-fed beef, and crops are the two primary agricultural things we sell.
38:02
SPEAKER_00: And then we have a bed and breakfast and also do farm tours.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: So the bed and breakfast is very busy.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we have seven rooms, and over the summer they're always booked.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: So we're serving breakfast to 25, 30 people a day.
38:16
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: With a lot of farm to table stuff.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: So sausage from our own cows or pig, um, potatoes from the garden, eggs from our chickens.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: It's it is a I think a nice experience for a lot of people to see the connection between the food they eat and where it comes from very directly.
38:36
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: And and that's our our wheelhouse in terms of who comes to the farm, are often families with kids that want their kids to see that connection firsthand, because it's so rare today to have that connection to agriculture.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: I think I mentioned earlier it's very common or often the case these days that farms have other income sources.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: So this is sort of a part of of that trend of diversifying income with agritourism and with inviting people to your farm.
39:02
SPEAKER_00: And it's in Lancaster County, I think we're lucky because we have a lot of visitors.
39:05
SPEAKER_00: Tourism is very vibrant here.
39:08
SPEAKER_00: And so we don't have to advertise to get people to the county.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: It's just more a matter of finding us at the farm once they're already here.
39:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
39:17
SPEAKER_02: Now you had mentioned agritourism.
39:20
SPEAKER_02: Uh Lancaster County is currently pushing for ecotourism in the form of uh like outdoor recreation, thinking of kayaking, biking, hiking, for example.
39:29
SPEAKER_02: Do you see agritourism and ecotourism working together?
39:34
SPEAKER_02: And if so, what could they accomplish here in Lancaster County?
39:37
SPEAKER_00: I think they do.
39:38
SPEAKER_00: I think they do combine.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, being outside on a farm, participating in farm chores, which is what we do.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's obviously very easy participation.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: We're not having people literally clean manure out of the barn.
39:50
SPEAKER_04: But oh, my kids will come do that.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:52
unknown: Yeah.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: Send them over.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: Happy to But you know, milking a cow, looking for chicken eggs, feeding animals.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
40:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's it's outdoor, it's active, and it's it's recreation.
40:07
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think I think they do fit together.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: For sure.
40:11
SPEAKER_02: Lancaster County making making tourists healthy one one at a time.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean, on one extreme, you see agritourism also being like a theme park.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: It can get very huge and and become agro-tourism becomes the main event as opposed to a side part of a farm.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Um so you know, is is a theme park outdoor recreation?
40:36
SPEAKER_00: I maybe you're out, you're outside.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: So there's, yeah, with an inclusive definition, there's a lot in Lancaster already.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: And uh it's it's good to hear that there's this renewed emphasis though on it, on kayaking and getting outside in the water.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's good.
40:52
SPEAKER_04: Well, sort of as you were saying, with the agritourism side and the importance of agriculture in our economy, I think that there's this opportunity that we're hearing from partners like EDC Lancaster County to talk about how there has to be clean water.
41:07
SPEAKER_04: Not an acronym, by the way.
41:08
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
41:09
SPEAKER_02: They are EDC is what they're just so so that we don't get, um, hey, you missed one.
41:15
SPEAKER_04: I was about to reach for the Ezra might correct me, but I don't know.
41:23
SPEAKER_04: But he's emphasized how the economy depends on clean water for things like that.
41:29
SPEAKER_04: Like the growth of outdoor rec.
41:31
SPEAKER_04: You have to have waterways that sustain kayaks that sustain fishing, and then you can start to build the river towns, and then you can start to build the breweries next to it.
41:39
SPEAKER_04: And then agriculture intersects with that so often.
41:42
SPEAKER_04: And so I see it as this mutually beneficial situation.
41:45
SPEAKER_04: You're exactly what you're saying, how Lancaster's this unique place for that.
41:49
SPEAKER_04: Have been able to embrace it.
41:50
SPEAKER_04: Many people have embraced it and have seen, I think, healthy ways for it to grow.
41:56
SPEAKER_04: I think that's where also the Lancaster like humble piece shows up of how you want to do this, do it well, honor that culture, honor the legacy.
42:04
SPEAKER_04: Um, and I I so appreciate how your family has done that with sunflower festivals and ways that you can come do the visits.
42:11
SPEAKER_04: And yeah, it's such a unique thing.
42:13
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, thank you.
42:14
SPEAKER_00: No, but that's so true.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: And that excites me about the little the the blue-green connector on the Conestoga is is bringing people from Lancaster into connection with their waterways.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: So true.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: I think in in some cases the waterways are sort of seen as, you know, a little bit dirty and and not not as places where people want to gather.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: But like you're saying, i i think the clean water comes first, the restoration is comes first.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: But that's just one part of a bigger picture of making it an attractive place for for people to want to be.
42:42
SPEAKER_04: Mm-hmm.
42:43
SPEAKER_04: I think being an attractive place may include baby goods.
42:46
SPEAKER_02: It may possibly.
42:47
SPEAKER_02: Which then, of course, brings me- I snagged that segue.
42:51
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's sauce.
42:53
SPEAKER_02: You're getting so good at that.
42:55
SPEAKER_02: That brings me to my favorite segment, trivia time.
43:01
SPEAKER_02: So, as we've discussed, you have Virgin View Farms.
43:05
SPEAKER_02: And one of the one of the types of animals that ironically you didn't mention was that you have goats on the farm.
43:11
SPEAKER_04: Video of your wife at the baby goats is so cute.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: And Marcus, our son, was on the front page of LNP at the goats this summer.
43:19
SPEAKER_00: This summer?
43:20
SPEAKER_00: Lancaster newspaper.
43:21
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
43:22
SPEAKER_02: Actually, not an acronym, acronym, though.
43:23
SPEAKER_04: They also find that one.
43:27
SPEAKER_00: He's adorable.
43:30
SPEAKER_02: So this might be an easy round for you.
43:33
SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna talk about goats.
43:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a goat expert.
43:36
SPEAKER_01: If it was cows, I'd be confident.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: I think you'll do just fine.
43:44
SPEAKER_02: What is a group of goats called?
43:48
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna guess a herd.
43:50
SPEAKER_02: It is a herd.
43:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
43:51
SPEAKER_02: Very good.
43:52
SPEAKER_02: We're starting off with a bang.
43:54
SPEAKER_02: Nice.
43:54
SPEAKER_02: What is a female goat called?
43:57
SPEAKER_00: A doe.
43:57
SPEAKER_02: It is a doe.
43:59
unknown: How about
44:00
SPEAKER_02: Uh the preferred name for a male goat.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: No, usually Billy.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: Oh, but uh a buck?
44:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a buck.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
44:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
44:08
SPEAKER_02: True or false, goats can be taught their name and come to it when called.
44:12
SPEAKER_02: Oof.
44:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna guess true.
44:15
SPEAKER_02: It is true.
44:16
SPEAKER_04: In your own experience.
44:18
SPEAKER_00: We haven't gotten that far with our goats.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: They run to food, that's for sure.
44:28
SPEAKER_02: How does a mother goat identify her individual kids?
44:32
SPEAKER_00: Ooh.
44:33
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna guess by smell, but maybe the bleat.
44:38
SPEAKER_02: You're exactly right.
44:39
SPEAKER_02: It is by their scent and their call.
44:41
SPEAKER_01: Oh, both, yeah.
44:41
SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
44:42
SPEAKER_04: I think that's really true for humans too.
44:44
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
44:44
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: That's very true.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh can goats climb trees?
44:49
SPEAKER_00: They're very good climbers, but they can't, unless there's a low-lying branch, they're not gonna go up a vertical surface.
44:57
SPEAKER_02: Actually, they can climb trees, yeah.
44:59
SPEAKER_02: I want to see that.
45:02
SPEAKER_02: It's the goat tree.
45:03
SPEAKER_02: I'll take you out there later.
45:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
45:07
SPEAKER_02: Well, you mountain goats will climb up a vertical surface that way too.
45:12
SPEAKER_00: So maybe I underestimate like the next installment of a rock wall.
45:22
SPEAKER_02: Goats are used in what athletic exercise?
45:27
SPEAKER_00: Goat yoga.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
45:29
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
45:31
SPEAKER_02: Uh how many uh compartments are in a goat's stomach?
45:34
SPEAKER_02: I think four, like a cow.
45:36
SPEAKER_02: It is four.
45:37
SPEAKER_02: Very nice.
45:38
SPEAKER_02: Very nice.
45:39
SPEAKER_02: Uh in spite of the rumors that the goats will eat anything, feeding a goat an imbalanced diet will cause the goat to experience what ailment where uh carbohydrate intake is significantly reduced and the body depletes its glucose stores.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: So there's a disease called ketosis in cows where that happened.
45:59
SPEAKER_02: That's exactly right.
46:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, very good.
46:04
SPEAKER_02: See, you know more about goats than you think because of the cows.
46:08
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
46:09
SPEAKER_02: Uh founder affects what part of a goat's body?
46:13
SPEAKER_02: Founder?
46:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
46:17
SPEAKER_02: Very good.
46:19
SPEAKER_02: Uh, what is the smallest breed of goat?
46:23
SPEAKER_00: The Nigerian dwarf or the pygmy?
46:25
SPEAKER_00: The pygmy.
46:25
SPEAKER_00: You got it.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
46:27
SPEAKER_02: Nice.
46:28
SPEAKER_02: What do you call a goat that naturally has no horns?
46:32
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: I had no idea until I looked it up.
46:35
SPEAKER_00: So again, in cows, they're called pulled.
46:38
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
46:39
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
46:39
SPEAKER_00: Bingo.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: Bingo, stick stick with your cow mallage.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: You're doing great.
46:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, because we actually fought we have 55 cows, but we have like six goats.
46:48
SPEAKER_00: The goats are more for cuteness.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
46:51
SPEAKER_00: They're great on social media.
46:52
SPEAKER_00: They're great, they are.
46:54
SPEAKER_02: Here's an it the next two questions are kind of interrelated.
46:58
SPEAKER_02: Are screaming goats a unique breed?
47:01
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
47:02
SPEAKER_02: Screaming goats?
47:03
SPEAKER_02: I don't think so.
47:04
SPEAKER_02: You are absolutely correct.
47:05
SPEAKER_02: They are not.
47:06
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
47:07
SPEAKER_02: How about fainting goats?
47:09
SPEAKER_00: But fainting goats are.
47:10
SPEAKER_00: Fainting goats are.
47:11
SPEAKER_00: They really do just faint.
47:14
SPEAKER_02: I love seeing you crack it up over here.
47:17
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen a fainting goat?
47:19
SPEAKER_04: Oh, I love those videos.
47:20
SPEAKER_04: They are hilarious.
47:21
SPEAKER_04: Ken, that's our goal is to find a goat for the podcast.
47:27
SPEAKER_02: We're going to do a little bit of lightning round here.
47:29
SPEAKER_02: As you know, the GOAT is also an acronym for greatest of all time.
47:33
SPEAKER_02: Uh.
47:34
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to uh uh name a sport.
47:36
SPEAKER_02: You tell me, according to Sports Illustrated, who is the GOAT, the greatest of all time in that sport.
47:42
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
47:42
SPEAKER_02: All right.
47:43
SPEAKER_02: Basketball.
47:44
SPEAKER_00: It's gotta be Michael Jordan.
47:45
SPEAKER_00: It is.
47:46
SPEAKER_00: Or some people might say LeBron James.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: Bonus points.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: Nice.
47:52
SPEAKER_00: I'd say Jordan.
47:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
47:54
SPEAKER_01: How about football?
47:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh let Tom Brady, I guess.
47:57
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
47:58
SPEAKER_01: That's correct.
48:00
SPEAKER_02: How about baseball?
48:01
SPEAKER_00: Baseball.
48:02
SPEAKER_02: Don't overthink it.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
48:05
SPEAKER_00: Hey, Bruce?
48:07
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
48:08
SPEAKER_02: This one's gonna be a little tougher.
48:10
SPEAKER_02: Uh, how about gymnastics?
48:11
SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness.
48:13
SPEAKER_02: Still around.
48:13
SPEAKER_02: Mary Lou Rettin?
48:15
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
48:16
SPEAKER_02: You know what?
48:16
SPEAKER_02: I would I would think along those lines too.
48:19
SPEAKER_02: But uh Sports Illustrated said Simone Boltzmann.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: Oh, Simone Baum.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: Of course.
48:23
SPEAKER_01: You were trying to give me a clue.
48:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
48:26
SPEAKER_01: Are you cheating over there?
48:27
SPEAKER_01: No.
48:30
SPEAKER_01: How about boxing?
48:31
SPEAKER_01: Boxing.
48:32
SPEAKER_01: Muhammad Ali.
48:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
48:34
SPEAKER_01: Ice hockey?
48:35
SPEAKER_01: Wayne Gretzky?
48:38
SPEAKER_00: Soccer.
48:41
SPEAKER_00: So some might say messy, but I would say Pele.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: And you would agree with Sports Illustrated.
48:46
SPEAKER_00: Nice, nice.
48:47
SPEAKER_02: How about swimming?
48:49
SPEAKER_00: Michael Phelps.
48:50
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
48:50
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
48:51
SPEAKER_02: My personal favorite.
48:52
SPEAKER_02: How about professional wrestling?
48:54
SPEAKER_01: Professional wrestling.
48:55
SPEAKER_04: Did you know that Ken is a professional wrestler?
48:58
SPEAKER_01: I was.
48:58
SPEAKER_01: Was I not anymore?
49:00
SPEAKER_01: No.
49:00
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I did not know, but I should have known.
49:03
SPEAKER_01: I totally built like a professional wrestler.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: So then I have to say Ken is the ghost.
49:09
SPEAKER_04: I should have set that up.
49:11
SPEAKER_04: Well done.
49:12
SPEAKER_00: How about Hulk Hogan?
49:14
SPEAKER_02: No.
49:14
SPEAKER_02: No.
49:15
SPEAKER_02: I'll give you one more chance.
49:17
SPEAKER_02: You have heard of this guy, and you have heard his signature phrase.
49:21
SPEAKER_00: Oh.
49:22
SPEAKER_02: Woo!
49:23
SPEAKER_01: Ric Flair.
49:24
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
49:25
SPEAKER_02: There you go.
49:25
SPEAKER_01: You got it.
49:28
SPEAKER_01: He would have been way down my head.
49:32
SPEAKER_02: Well, that is our trivia.
49:35
SPEAKER_02: That is the greatest trivia of all time.
49:37
SPEAKER_02: And that is our show.
49:38
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for joining us today.
49:41
SPEAKER_02: And uh we learned a lot today.
49:44
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
49:44
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
49:45
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for the education and uh ace at avoiding the acronyms.
49:50
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
49:51
SPEAKER_02: Made it for a very fun and entertaining show.
49:54
SPEAKER_02: We will be back in just a couple of weeks.
49:56
SPEAKER_02: Until then, take care.
50:13
SPEAKER_02: For more information, go to native nooknursery.com.
50:17
SPEAKER_02: If you have comments or suggestions for show topics, or are interested in becoming a sponsor, please contact us at info at Lyckstra Cleanwater Partners.com.
50:26
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for listening.