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Ecosystem Services and Farmer-Led Conservation with Brian Gilvesey · Conservation Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign. It's me again. Tillery Timmin Sims, your host at Conservation Stories. Conservation Stories is a podcast that is sponsored by the Sandhill Area Research association, or sarah, as we often call it. SARAH is a organization that is interested in all things human flourishing as they. That's an easy way to. To think of it. So anything that will impact our lives in a good and bad way, we want to make people aware of it. We are the founder, Lacey and I, as you might know, or from an ag background. And our guest today is also from an ag background. However, he is not quite in our neck of the woods. So run. Gil Vesey is here, and Brian is a friend that Lacy and I met in, of all places, Chicago at a regenerative farming conference that had three farmers, I think there. It was an interesting time. And of course, you know, Brian, you found out pretty quick how spicy Lacey can be. So she added some spice to several of those meetings or talks. And then we connected with you because you gave us a presentation on your organization, and I was very intrigued. And so you and I have connected since then and wanted to bring you on to talk about your organization. But let's start out with a little bit about your background. And you're not from Chicago. Tell us a little bit about where you're from and how you got started in the organization that you're working with now.
• 1:47
  Speaker B: Thank you, Tillery, for having me. And yes, I have met Lacy and enjoyed the spice. I am from. I live in southwestern Ontario, Canada. That is. That is the most southerly point of Canada. We're about 1500 miles from where you're sitting now, Tillery. But it kind of is interesting in one respect. We are at the same latitude as Northern California, so we aren't. We're a little bit of a temperate climate here because we're surrounded by the Great Lakes. But if we want to locate you for Americans, if you were to drive directly from Buffalo to Detroit, you'd find us right in the middle. So we actually live south of Detroit, west of Buffalo. I've been on this piece of land here for 40 some years. I bought this land in 1979, and our community grew nothing but tobacco. We had. We have very sandy soils here. We grew tobacco as a community for a long time. When that business went away, we all had to sort of reinvent ourselves. And what I decided to do was raise Texas longhorn cattle on the grass. We market them directly to the public here on our ranch. You can see some lovely examples in the background of our cattle. So we had that connection to Texas, that's for sure. These cattle thrive here. They make a unique beef product and they fit inside our environment here, which we like to say we have the perfect sort of stewarded ecology here. And the cattle harvest, what God. God gives us from the sun and the sky. We make a really premium product and push it out the front door. About 19 years ago, I got involved in the program that I'm going to talk to Tillery about today, this ALICE program, Alternative Land Use Services. I started as a third participant farmer because I felt like I was undervalued as a steward and an environmental contributor in the way the world works. And this program spoke to me.
• 3:42
  Speaker A: I totally agree. And I really just. It reminds me in some ways and some people see, I think, a little bit of the overlap between our Stormwater Conservation districts and big difference, private money, not federal money. And so I really appreciate you giving us your time today. And this may be a podcast that may or may not be applicable to all of our audience, but I'm particularly. I really want to provide a way for farmers to learn about what you're doing, because I think that it's very. I think the potential for being part of something, like being part of ALICE is. Is really a good opportunity for adding some value to. To farm to farmers.
• 4:30
  Speaker B: And part of this is a little bit. It's a. It's a simple human thing. You know, I feel all of us in agriculture across the globe, as a matter of fact, feel like there's fingers being pointed at us that we're being judged. And I really feel like we need to turn the table on that. We need to be seen as the creator, contributors to the wellness of the planet and the people for far more than just the food and fiber we provide, but also for what we call, in our parlance, the ecosystem services. Clean air, clean water, biodiversity that helps support life on the planet. So it's not just about food. It's about all the other things that we contribute.
• 5:04
  Speaker A: I like that. Ecosystem services. I mean, it, It's. That is a really great way of putting that, that term. And it doesn't have the baggage that some of the other terms like sustainability have.
• 5:16
  Speaker B: None whatsoever. And that's the beauty of it. It's. It's something that people, the people of the planet need ecosystem services like they need provisioning services for biodiversity. They need cleaner water that we can filter. So it's. It's part of provisioning. It's part of our productive experience as farmers and ranchers and, And I And I'm here to, I'm here to try and raise a profile of this in a programmatic sense where we seize this agenda and sort of declare ourselves as a new environmentalist. Or maybe the forgotten environmentalist might be a better term.
• 5:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And that's why I wanted you to come on and I've asked you if you would go ahead and run through your PowerPoint so that farmers, if this catches their attention, can really get some more specifics.
• 6:07
  Speaker B: As Lacy scolded me in Chicago, my pictures are far too green and lush for your experience. But make sure you understand that our program now operates in 41 different communities and landscapes across North America. So it's highly adaptable. But here's the thing in the nut. There's a cohort of people, farmers or ranchers, that can meet the challenges of the planet today and we can deliver nature based solutions to solve the planet's most pressing environmental problem. Adding a new dimension to our cv, what we do as farmers and ranchers, and what we can get paid for to do. So I'm here to talk about this conceptual framework. Alice, is the original frame that this is put in. Alternative land use services means we shall use our land in an alternate way and produce an ecosystem service. We are a principles based organization and one of the things that's near and dear to us is that we find value in people and the things that we do and ecosystems. System services means we're valuing nature that we can produce. You know, this isn't one of those games where we're, we're doing environmentalism or stewardship in, in lieu of food. What we're saying is agriculture and nature can meet. And if, if we decide to harness the land skills and knowledge of farmers and ranchers that can deliver nature based solutions, we can help tackle big issues, namely biodiversity loss. Water issues are coming to the forefront. And of course we're all experienced the climate as it's changing around us. We can help our communities adapt to a changing climate as these rainfall events seem to get bigger and stronger and that sort of thing. Our farmers in our system deliver ecosystem outcomes. And it's not solely targeted at governments, it's targeted on people that need the service. So think about governments on one hand that need to satisfy some priorities. But businesses want to address their landscape impacts. Organizations want to see more biodiversity. For instance, municipalities have a deep vested interest in the benefits that we can provide to them upstream of their towns and cities. But we produce both environmental and social benefits that accrue to People off our lands to the public and for the long term. Our program was built by farmers. There's a document online called A Farmer's Conservation Plan which is what this is rooted in. Again, I mentioned again that we are rooted in eight principles. Because we're built by farmers and managed by farmers, we are able to create grassroots program that truly represents our local knowledge and our skill. So we have our network of 41 community organizations that deliver the program. That means there's well over 330 farmers and ranchers sitting in governance of these communities and providing leadership and all their skills and talents. We do four simple things through our organization now. So we advance this basic notion that I've been talking about. The social and cultural shifts that position us as solution providers. We are also because we're community based, nurture a lot of cross sector partnerships and community level collaborations speak to that in a second. We also feel it's essential to prove to the world our work. So we do work to quantify the ecosystem services that we produce. That's what we get paid for, is the ecosystem services. And we're using technology and research partnerships in many dimensions. And lastly, we're driving investment from marketplaces that we didn't see before that could pay farmers on the land. Like I know ESG is not a population popular word now, but corporate, corporate spending on impacts of any kind can accrue to us to help solve their problems, for instance. And we work on opening up that extensive marketplace. You know, this program, when I started in 2006, I was just the third participant. We've grown this up now to be 40 communities in six Canadian provinces. We've opened in Defiance, Ohio, just at the western end of the Lake Erie Basin. We have a lot of communities wait listed. Our impacts in aggregate are around 150 square miles. Around 2,000 farmers are participating. Again, I mentioned to you the farm leaders that are in governance on this program. But this number around 492 active partnerships means roughly that every one of our communities that we open up in and give power to stimulates another 10 partnerships at the ground level. And this isn't partnerships that you're used to hearing about. This is partnerships more like with the Sarahs of the world. Small, local, highly knowledgeable, highly nimble organizations that want to be a part of this. You know, we do a lot of things, ecosystem outcomes that you know, that can include grasslands, something we called modified agriculture. Changing things slightly how we farm a lot of wetland programming, a lot of pollinator habitats, trees and shrubs of Course. And we also work on a pilot frame of, of a whole farm approach towards regenerative agriculture. We have two pilots right now. One is called growing roots for a row crops and one is called grazing forward for grassland and grazing settings. So what ALICE does though, it works because you know, we give power to the community. This is really, really important. This is the opposite of a top down program. This is a community people standing up on their hind legs and saying we know what needs to be done in our community and that will accrue to the rest of the planet. You know, behind the scenes we've developed a really good data collection system again that helps monetize our work to help be able to put it in the marketplace. But we're able to clearly protect farmers privacy and we don't sell the data. We have a lot of academic research and technological partnerships and then the quantification work and the investment work coming in from corporate and municipal marketplaces for instance, is helping us understand that there's a broad marketplace to be serviced here. That programming just doesn't have to be for the benefit of the federal government. For instance, I mentioned the data a little bit. Again, this runs in the background, but we have good high quality data that helps us helps monetize farmers work. Our technological partners include really cool things like measuring changes on the ground from satellites. And then this, this is how we turn to our corporate community with alice Nature based solutions for purpose driven businesses. So we have a 2000 farmers producing acre outcomes at scale. We're able to carry the value the ecosystem service produced on those lands and offer that to corporate partners and they can pay for that output and get credit for it as well. So again, if you think about it, if the corporation is the buyer that they're addressing their social impacts or their landscape impacts, we as farmers and ranchers are the producers. We're producing environmental outcomes, ecosystem services that are valuable to somebody. And there's a transaction in there and the transaction revolves around dollars and cents. There's value for what? When we go to the marketplace, we don't simply talk about a water filtration unit or a carbon ton of carbon or an acre of biodiversity. We talk about the bundle. When we do acre outcomes, when farmers and ranchers do acre outcomes on the landscape, that produces a bundle of benefits that we want the marketplace to recognize. Most importantly, because we're doing this at community level, the community leads here, the community makes all the decisions here. There's a social impact premium that corporations are paying us for. So we call this the new acre nature bundle. And we've been in the market for some years on this and we believe that this is the pathway forward for corporations that are looking to address their impacts. Now this becomes quite interesting when you think about this. How do you put all these investors together, people that are willing to pay for our work on the farm, pay for our production of ecosystem services, pay for our stewardship? How do you make that? Easy peasy. You do it this way. We have a funnel where not for profits, philanthropics, governments, municipalities, corporations can invest in the program. Those dollars get filtered down to the farmer. But the farmer only has to walk through one door. And that farmer faces members of their own community to make the decisions and payment rates and things like that of what's going to happen. Our database then allows the attribution to flow to the individual. So it's kind of a neat model in that we can aggregate together money from many different sources. Farmer in a community walks through one door, but the community itself benefits from a wide range of fund. Some of our community partners have funding from as many as 35 different sources that we provide and that kind of becomes cool. And the, and the community partnership itself, you know, Alice has a pretty active fundraising and business development arm. But I just saw the stats the other day that our community partners are able to use their governance unit, their local Alice community partnership model, and raise an equal amount of money from sources that are more local to them. Again, the farmer and ranchers only deals with their, with their own community. Paperwork is done by the community. There's very low burden on the farmer and the farmers in the program voluntarily, with nothing on title.
• 16:11
  Speaker A: So with nothing on title, that's something that's important for people to.
• 16:16
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 16:16
  Speaker A: Right, right. This is not a, it's not a government program.
• 16:21
  Speaker B: No, no. This is a simple contract with the farmer that outlines the, you know, the payment rates and what their obligations are to manage and maintain the projects. But the farmer is completely voluntary and if they don't like the way things are going, they can walk away. That said, over the nearly 20 years that I've been doing this, we've retained something like pretty close to 97% of all the farmers that have entered into this program. People like it because it's theirs. That's a community gathering together to wonder how to improve this prairie pothole, this wetland in Alberta. If you've not been to Alberta, this is what it looks like and prairie pothole country and make it better, and make it function better and make it work better for the for the, for the farmer on that land. So this is who we are. I think this is who farmers are. This is who I think all of us in rural North America are. We're focused on outcomes. We don't write reports. We're not in the newspaper. We just make outcomes. You know, we just deliver in a very, in a, in a community based way and we deliver highly credible outcomes. Listen, if you're ever wondering, if you think, Brian, you're, you're kind of full of hokum on this stuff. There's not really a marketplace for that in the world. Just, just bear in mind how much money these carbon capture and sequestration plants are gathering. This one on the left has seen $3 billion of investment and it's going to get another $3 billion of investment before it can effectively put carbon up from the sky and into the soil. We do that every day. We do that like falling out of a tree. As farmers and ranchers. This is, this is the only proven technology for taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in the ground. If this is your concern. It's a proven technology for filtering the water. It's a proven technology for making more biodiversity. There's marketplaces for this.
• 18:19
  Speaker A: Hey, friends, I'm excited to tell you about NASA. NASA Acres, which is part of the Earth Science division of NASA, is coming to our area. They're coming here because they want to learn about how we farm and they want to see if there's ways that they can help us. So NASA Acres is a project that we've been partnering with for several months now. And they will be here for ag tours October 6th, 7th and 8th. And we will be in Terry County. We will be heading then up to Cress and over to Morton. We're going to be in a lot of different places. We're going to put that agenda up on our website on the homepage so you can see where we are. And if you want to come by and just see what NASA, what do they have to do with agriculture? We would love for you to meet these folks. They want to meet you. They want to talk about maybe how you can participate and have remote sensing information available for your farm. This is, is a farmer led effort. So if you're an ag ag business or if you're a farmer, come out and just kick the tires on what it might be like to partner with NASA on an ag project. But it's not just, it's not just carbon. I mean it's, it's not like you like all of these programs that these 40 communities have put together are all based around carbon. It's, it's not that.
• 19:38
  Speaker B: You know what, I'll tell you, Taylor, you and I talked the other day that increasingly water is going to become the leading issue around the globe. The reason I pictured this carbon plant is just to make people understand the scale of investment going into finding solutions are at the $6 billion scale and they're not considering the proven technology that we possess. That's the point I'm trying to make. And water is going to become a massive issue in some parts of the country. It's, it's to filter it. It's. In some parts of the country, it's to hang on to it. In some parts of the country, like yours, it's about recharging your aquifers. There's all, all these things we can make work. But harnessing the power of the community and the people on the land is the only way this works. It's the only proven solution. And I think we framed up a pretty good model, pretty good method for how to do that. You know, Alice, I mentioned utility. This, this, this program, this concept that we work on. It's, it's not something we're selling. It's something that people in different communities adopt and take on and we provide a complete turnkey program that they can take on and do it in their own communities and then leverage the work that we've done in the past. But again, when your principles based, you can think this way. You know that you can highly adapt the programming to any landscape across North America and understand that at its core is valuing the people, valuing people on the land with hands in the dirt that can make something happen.
• 21:11
  Speaker A: Well, I, I think that, what I think is interesting about this and I think people that, that are familiar with this Soil Water Conservation districts will, will recognize that this is, I think this was the intent of those districts. There was not ever an intent as far as them to be funded, I think outside of the federal government. But they were always, they've always been voluntary.
• 21:40
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 21:40
  Speaker A: And they've always been locally. Priorities have been locally kind of identified. And, but a lot of what has happened through the decades is it has become more federalized and taken away at the local level, especially, you know, a lot of the vast majority of the money, you know, and so we may have a small pool of money on in each county to pull from force, you know, certain projects, but they might not even be enough to do one project, you know. And so the, the Idea, though here is that the world knows that we're. We are in ex. We're in extraction mode and we're the only people that can help someone who lives on concrete.
• 22:25
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 22:26
  Speaker A: Then like, the vast majority of the United States is living on concrete, and we are the ones. Concrete is never going to provide its own solution, you know, and what's there is never going to be replaced by something that's. All of it's going to be replaced by something. And at least not in our lifetime.
• 22:44
  Speaker B: Right.
• 22:44
  Speaker A: You know, and so you can say, people can say what they want about farmers and the mistreatment of the earth. I'm like, do you know how much pesticides are in the city? Like, the concentration of those things, you know, you know, what the, what the carbon footprint is of a city, like, compared to what we're doing? And you never hear that, you know, you never hear that. Or do you, as anybody ever thought about, like, the heat dome that these urban, you know, centers are causing, you know, and we are the only ones that can. Hey, we can cool you off over here.
• 23:24
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 23:24
  Speaker A: You know, and so I just really. I love the name. I love the idea. I mean, this is, I think, the idea that was originally intended, intended for these locally led conservation, you know, groups. But the idea that you have where Alice can come in and provide. You mean you don't have to reinvent the wheel?
• 23:44
  Speaker B: No, we have a really nice working structure. And every group has their own autonomy and their own freedom to make their decisions. I think that's a really, really important part of this. This is us, all of us out here standing up on our hind legs and say, you know, we matter and what we do is for real, and what we do is today and, and take the judgment out of it already. You know, you need, you need what we've got.
• 24:10
  Speaker A: Right?
• 24:11
  Speaker B: And it's not just food, fiber and energy. It's this other thing too, that we can provide.
• 24:15
  Speaker A: Exactly. And, and one thing that farmers are so bad at is. Is tooting their own horn. Like, they for sure don't. They do not talk about it. And, and that's what I like about if you, you have a structure like this. You know, the farmer doesn't have to do that. You know, they get to participate in doing the good, and the entity tells the story and the entity brings in the collaborators. And you guys got something big. I saw on your slideshow, I saw General Mills and Cargill and AW Canada.
• 24:51
  Speaker B: A W Canada. Denomer. You know, there's, there's a lot of Big companies that are, that are behind this concept. And I think if I, if, if I can speak for them a little bit, I think what they really like about it is, is the, is I think they value deeply the, the chance to speak directly or work directly with rural communities. Right. And that's, that's, that's meaningful to them too. You know, they understand that their, their whole business is built on people, it's built on the land and we give them a good vehicle, try and reach those sorts of things. So. Yeah, but you are, Hilary, I think you grasp this in a really, you know, cool and crisp way that takes sometime people a long time to understand. But I, I think we're just highlighting that, you know, rather than sitting back and feeling like we're put upon and pointed at and worrying about and moralizing about where we're sitting, this is a way to reclaim the agenda and say, hey, this is what we can do for the planet. Right. And that's a really cool place to position ourselves.
• 25:53
  Speaker A: You know, it actually, it absolutely is. And, and it's, you know, a way for, it's a vehicle for farmers to get something out of it that they've never monetized before. And it's, it's another revenue stream. And we're used in our, I mean, a lot of areas are nano, like, you know, cooperative type things. You know, we do, we're, we're, for the most part, we have, we're not opposed to cooperative type things. But even then, though, because you're principles based, like even each landowner can create their own type of. Okay, what is the system that I'm doing that's within the principles of what we're promoting. And, and there's not this, you know, lifetime easement, right? Hey, friends, here on the high plains, we have got a chance to work with NASA's develop project. The focus is cover crops using satellite tools to identify things like when they were planted and how they're managed and how can we build real research to see what value they bring or maybe they don't bring. So if you're a farmer, you're planting cover crops. We'd love your help. A short form will be sent to you with some basic information like your planning date, termination date, maybe the years that you had cover crops. Your information is going to stay protected, but it'll make a really big difference in showing what cover crops are really worth having in our region. If you want more information, want to be part of this, you can visit sara-conservation.com we'll have some information there. And you can also reach out to me at contact sarah-conservation.com and I would be happy to put your name on the list. Thank you very much.
• 27:57
  Speaker B: The people that come into our program are enormously creative and they come up some really cool, really cool solutions. Let me give you one really quick example. You know, the idea of water flowing off the land and into water courses. The concern there is we're getting phosphorus and nitrogen into the watercourse. Easy solution around that is to buffer that, right? But the normal buffer is you plant trees or you plant some tall grass prairie or something like that to intercept the nutrient. We've got farmers here that brought to our attention, well, why don't I grow my alfalfa there down by the river and, and then alfalfa will scoop up, you know, like during the growing season a tremendous amount of that nutrient before it hits the river or the water course and then the piers where the farmer solution comes in. And then we take that nutrient and put it back up on the field through the cattle because otherwise it stays there and it eventually will leach into the river. So we're productively using what we call a buffer strip to feed our cattle and, and produce the ecosystem service time.
• 28:59
  Speaker A: No waste, no waste, no waste.
• 29:01
  Speaker B: And it's. But getting that nutrient and not letting it hit the river because we paid for it and providing this water filtration benefit at the same time is really quite cool.
• 29:11
  Speaker A: So. And that, and the nice thing about that is, you know, a lot of the only thing that I can think of that's the equivalent to, to what you're doing is, I mean, we've got different conservation practices and stuff that you can get paid for. Or really you, besides crp, where you're putting your land out of production, there's nothing that you can really get fully paid for. You can get cost shared for some of it. So of the conservation, but as an easement. So where they're paying you 60 to 80% of the value of your land, but you, you manage it in the way they prescribe, either for, you know, so many years or forever, you know, and then it's of course, like you were saying, it's title impactful, you know, and so it's going to impact when you sell the land and all these things. This is so farmer driven, you know, that even we have what you recall in prairie potholes. We have something, I think that's very similar Playa lakes. I don't know that they work exactly the same, but they sound like it and you know, you can put those, there's an easement program for those. But if you can't run your cattle across there, I mean there's no reason. It is, I think it is because all of the programs that are being prescribed are coming. They're not, they're not grassroots, they're coming from somewhere off the farm into the farm, you know. And so in the Playa Lakes example, like we, we ran a program, we're wanting to show that we can have 58, 50, you know, owners, ply lake owners that would be interested in restoring their place. Get those people in the pipeline. You can get people in the pipeline if you let them manage their farm, let them continue to manage their land and benefit from the use of that land instead of taking it away and closing it up is what you know, and I understand, you know, the ideas of like this can't get, be sold to, you know, for some type of, you know, housing development or whatever. You know, that's a different story. But you know, when it's a very specific type of management, it's offensive. You know, like to come to a farmer and be like that.
• 31:30
  Speaker B: That's where, that's where we started this, this program started. The, the farmer who's generally credited with developing the idea is a man named Ian Wishard. But what Ian Wisher was pushing back against was a simple, simple thing. I, you know, I don't need an easement. I want to manage that land as part of my land and I want choice what land I put in. I want to have the choice to when I come in and come out. And that's sort of the core of where we're at. The, it's the anti easement model. But at the same time we've proven that you don't need easement to get long term commitment.
• 32:00
  Speaker A: Right. And yeah, it's interesting because I'm going to follow up like we're recording several podcasts today and then in a couple hours I'm going to actually be recording a podcast with an eisma expert. And you know, so we're going to talk about, you know, know what the and those are for. There are certain people that do well with those and there's situations where those are valuable to people. But I think if you're talking about you, if you're talking about a wide swath of land, if you're talking about really providing solutions to offset what's happening in the city, then you have to, it, it can't be an, a traditional easement. It has to stay in production. And it has to, it has to be farmer led because they know, they know. And when you tell them what you need and like, and here's the science of how these are the things that get us there, then you know, they're going to, they're going to take that into consideration into their production model. But when you say, and guess what, it might like offset me like to offset any expense or yield loss here is, are your farmers getting paid every year? Yeah.
• 33:14
  Speaker B: And, and that's the whole thing. They're, they're producing something of value every year. You pay for that value every year.
• 33:22
  Speaker A: And the money's coming through. It's from coming from all different sources going into a non profit that these folks have started. They're local, these, each one of these are their own independent organizations or one that's already there and then it's funneling down and so they're getting paid. And to your, I think it was last time we talked, you said so then really nobody knows exactly. Like did this piece come from this organization or this organization. It's all put together in a fund and everyone is cooperatively funding the work.
• 34:00
  Speaker B: Yeah, the, the bigger problem with putting the fund together is not every corporation, for instance, wants to fund say biodiversity. Some want to fund soil health or some want to fund maybe water issues. That's their priority. So sometimes the money has limitations on it and we at community level mix and match the money and we take the wetlands priority money and put it in the wetlands and we put the ply money and put it in the playas and that's how we did it all together. We've got these wonderful tools that the people on the ground delivering the program, they're called allocation tools that we've developed that help them suss all that out. But again, I think as a farmer, I mean I'm a participant too. I don't really care where the money comes from. I just care that I'm recognized for the work that I'm doing and the value I'm producing. And Alice does the rest as far as putting it out in the marketplace. And my local community partners partnership also has their own money sources that they've developed over time, which is really quite cool. These, Alice community partnerships become really highly effective fundraising organizations on their own. Anytime you put community and grassroots and autonomy, all those very American words in one spot, it's attractive. It's attractive funders that want a piece of this, you know.
• 35:22
  Speaker A: Right. And then. And people don't have to participate if.
• 35:24
  Speaker B: They don't want to 100%. And if they find the tide turns, they're not happy.
• 35:29
  Speaker A: Go, go on your way. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 35:32
  Speaker B: Going away. So, yeah, we got, like, it's. It all works out in the wash. I mean, we do things very scientifically as far as making sure that the people that are paying for the. For the programming get the programming they paid for. I mean, that's it. While at the same time allowing the farmer flexibility. We use. We use things like math, you know, to get that easy.
• 35:56
  Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Oh, that's. That's great. Well, I really appreciate it. This is. This has been very informative and just exactly what I wanted. And we're gonna put it up as a podcast, but also probably spread it around to some specific growers and see what kind of collaboration might come up here.
• 36:18
  Speaker B: Like I say, it's. It's an idea that people in the community, leaders, that community, they adopt, right? They don't buy. It's not for sale. They adopt. And we try and grow this idea together.
• 36:30
  Speaker A: So that's great. That's great. Well, Brian, thanks. Thank you for giving me your time twice now. I know about a week, so.
• 36:38
  Speaker B: Okay, thank you. And. And next time, Lacey come along too.
• 36:42
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Not. Not chance that woman will get up on stage and talk to thousands of people, but she cannot stand to be on podcast. And I think it's because she has to, like, you hear yourself later and go, oh, man, I sound like I was raised in Texas. So.
• 37:00
  Speaker B: Okay, friends, did I ever say A through this?
• 37:03
  Speaker A: Did I say, I don't think so? I don't. I don't think you did. I don't think you said a. Well, thanks for joining us, friends, for this informative, farmer informative episode of Conservation Stories. And we look forward to having you with us again next time. Thanks.