The Magical Dividing Line Between Counties

Field Work

Documentary, Society & Culture

5 • 652 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Nature Conservancy and Purdue University are among a lot of people in the sustainable ag keen to figure out what it takes to scale conservation practices. Does it come down to the availability of funding? Climate? Soils? What happens if all those factors are pretty equal between, say, two neighboring counties, but the level of adoption of conservation practices varies dramatically between them? Kris Johnson from the TNC and Linda Prokopy from Purdue talk about research in three different states where they compare counties with a robust conservation culture to neighboring counties that aren’t doing much. They talk with Zach and Mitchell about cover crop culture, the importance of collaboration among farmers, government agencies and entrepreneurs, and what they still don’t understand.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone. I'm Mitchell Hora, a farmer in southeast Iowa.
0:12.4	And I'm Zach Johnson. I farm in west central Minnesota. And you guys probably already know that you are listening to the fieldwork podcast, which is by farmers for farmers.
0:22.0	And we want to say a big thank you to the Walton Family Foundation for helping us out this season.
0:26.7	Zach, it's been a couple episodes already that we've been talking about this Washington County
0:31.7	miniseries and the conservation culture down here.
0:34.8	It's one thing to talk with a bunch of people, but we got to figure out what
0:38.3	do the actual researchers say? We got to have a little bit of science coming on in here, Zach. That's right,
0:43.2	because we are professional podcasters, and this is a very professional podcast, and it turns out
0:48.7	that Purdue University and the Nature Conservancy have actually been looking a lot at some of the
0:53.9	same things that we have.
0:55.4	They recently did a big study on the rates of adoption of cover crops and some other
0:59.2	conservation practices in counties in Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa.
1:03.5	And it turns out there are actually other spots just like Washington County.
1:07.1	Just none of them up in Minnesota, though, right.
1:09.5	Well, we can't all be perfect.
1:11.2	So in this episode, we're going to talk with Linda Prokopee at Purdue University. We are also going to
1:16.6	have on Chris Johnson, the interim director of agriculture for North America at the Nature Conservancy.
1:22.6	Who, here's Linda and Chris. Linda, let's start with you. The description of what it is you do is so long that I'm going to let you get into
1:32.8	what it is you do and where you work.
1:36.5	So I am in the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University,
1:40.9	and I research what motivates farmers to adopt conservation practices.
1:44.8	Pretty simple, Zach. I don't know how you're going to get that.
	...

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