Zach, we almost forgot.

Our typical theme song writer, Johnny Vince Evans,

is also mixing our show today,

but Johnny Van Sevens today is sounding a lot more like Eddie Van Halen.

I like that.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Fieldwork podcast.

Thanks a ton to the Walton Family Foundation for their support this season.

I'm Mitchell Hora.

And I'm Zach Johnson.

We're going to take a quick break from our series in Washington County, Iowa today for a conversation with what I would consider to be a pretty dang important guest. It's actually our country's current Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack.

Yeah, as many of you probably know, he's back in the saddle as the ag secretary. This will be his second term because he also served in that role in the Obama administration.

Before that, he was the governor of Iowa.

So I think I can succeed in my goal of making Iowa part of every conversation that we've had one way or another.

Just great to include Iowa and more Iowa guests on here, Zach. We need more of

that. You're just living your dream here, aren't you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with Iowa.

So Secretary Bilsack is going to be leading some of these new policies on conservation and climate

that we've been talking about a lot on the podcast, especially this

idea of a carbon bank. And he agreed to come on the show and talk to us about this.

Thanks for coming to the show, Tom. Glad to be on, guys.

So Tom, we were just talking a little bit about, you know, where you come from just south

of Washington County, Henry County, the next

county over. We've been talking a lot about Washington County on the podcast here this season,

...