are you are you looking at the script here mitchell where it just says msack johnson

yeah yeah that's

i'm going to add an eye so that i don't do that.

I'm Zach Johnson.

I'm Mitchell Hora.

Before we get too far, thanks a ton to the Walton Family Foundation for supporting us throughout this entire season.

We've got a little mini-series going on here at the podcast now where we look at what it takes to build a conservation culture, and we just happen to know of a

great case study in Washington County, Iowa, which is where Mitchell is from. Yeah, this is an area

where a bunch of farmers have embraced no-till. They started doing that decades ago.

Now cover crops are the big one, and things have really just continued to grow from there.

Yeah, one of the big things you notice as soon as you get there is that, you know, everybody's trying something.

That's kind of the feeling that I got is that there's a lot of cover crop.

No-till is huge there, but everybody's always experimenting. Yeah, there's a lot of cover crop. No-till is huge there, but everybody's

always experimenting. Yeah, there's a lot of livestock in this area too. So they're starting to be

a little bit more diversity around that, but there's plenty of different market options and stuff.

And yeah, people that have been using no-till for 40, 50 years, some of them. And I suppose they're just getting bored with only

that. Now they're trying to make things more challenging for themselves. And, you know,

there's some guys in the area that have tried bioreactors, trying different cropping systems,

integrating livestock, lots of different things happening. Yeah, we wanted to figure out how this spirit of

conservation actually got started. You know, who were the key players? Last episode, you heard

about the amazing Iowa State Extension Director, Jim Freer. Everyone we talked to mentioned him

as really kind of a big key to what was going on down there. And Jim helped to facilitate a lot of

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