Summary
Water plays an important role in all of our lives. But how much do we actually understand key water topics, like the share of Americans who get their water shut off or the biggest causes of pollution? Field Work co-host Zach Johnson talks to Andi Egbert from the American Public Media Research Lab as well as Kinsie Rayburn and Drew Slattery from Farm Journal’s Trust in Food initiative about research into average Americans’ and farmers’ understanding of key water issues.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks again to our sponsor, Manitou Fund, for helping out to make fieldwork possible. |
| 0:13.8 | Hey, everyone, we're back with another spin on the fieldwork podcast. I'm Zach Johnson, and as we like to say here, |
| 0:20.1 | fieldwork is a show that is |
| 0:21.5 | by farmers for farmers. We talk a lot on this show about the pressures on farmers to grow food |
| 0:26.7 | more sustainably in ways that benefit water quality. So a lot of the practices that we talk about, |
| 0:32.2 | like conservation tillage, cover crops, things like bioreactors, those can reduce water pollution and help build |
| 0:39.5 | goodwill with the public. Today we're going to take a look at the extent to which the public and |
| 0:43.8 | farmers actually think of ag as a polluter of water. We've got some fascinating new research |
| 0:49.1 | coming out from a collaboration we have going. American public media, which makes field work, has this really |
| 0:55.6 | cool unit called the research lab. And the folks there surveyed a thousand people across the country. |
| 1:01.4 | They wanted to capture what everyday Americans actually understand about water and the role |
| 1:05.4 | that it plays in their lives. And as farmers, it's really important that we understand what |
| 1:10.1 | the general public is thinking about water because whatever they think, whether it's accurate or not, could really trickle down to impact us in the form of things like regulations, market pressures, and stuff like that. |
| 1:21.5 | So it's important that we understand whether or not we agree just what do the consumers think about the effect that we have on water |
| 1:29.3 | quality as farmers. That work then led to a collaboration with folks from the Trust and Food |
| 1:35.0 | Initiative at Farm Journal, which a lot of you know as a good go-to source for Ag News. The guys and |
| 1:41.7 | gals at Trust and Food do all sorts of research and outreach to help farmers |
| 1:45.6 | adopt conservation practices. And those cats wanted to see how farmers' relationship with water |
| 1:51.7 | would compare to the general publics, and so they surveyed over 900 farmers from 43 different states. |
| 1:58.5 | Looking at the results of the two surveys is pretty fascinating because it |
| 2:01.6 | actually shows that farmers have a pretty strong understanding of some of the things about water |
| 2:06.4 | infrastructure and the like, but we as a group also definitely have some blind spots. We really |
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