Roundtable Webinar Series Connects Farmers and Ideas Across the Globe

The Global Farmer Network has kicked off a series of webinars designed to bring together farmers from across the globe to talk about the biggest issues facing agriculture today. It touched on aspects that affect farmers and ranchers on all levels, such as the environmental impact of agriculture and the idea of a standardized measurement of carbon footprints, to the influence of consumers on the industry.

The panelists included four farmers from across the world, whose businesses are in diverse segments of the industry:

• Paul Temple, who also served as moderator, is located in the north of England and whose business includes a beef operation and crops, including wheat for seed, barley, oilseed rape, vining peas and beans. His operation is moving from conventional tillage to conservation agricultural practices.
• Annechien ten Have-Mellema is located in the Netherlands. Her family has a 600-sow farrow-to-finish facility and capacity for about 5,000 wean-to-finish pigs, that are mostly sold under their own brand and qualify for two stars under the Netherland’s welfare label Beter Leven. The farm grows lupins for their own use, but also produces winter wheat, lucerne, sugar beets and corn. The farm also has its own biogas plant.
• Julio Speroni is a beef cattle rancher in the Entre Ríos province of Argentina. He runs Hereford and Angus cattle on open range, producing 800-850 steers from 1,000 cows, on 4,500 acres of land. He’s a big believer in good animal welfare practices and also plants corn, soybeans, sorghum and rye grass using no-till techniques.
• Joanna Lidback is a dairy farmer, chief financial officer, business consultant and mom and wife. She and her husband own and operate the Farm at Wheeler Mountain, a 70-cow herd of Holsteins and Jerseys in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Lidback is also the CFO at ADK farms, where they run 5,000 dairy cows and care for 8,000 acres of land.

Globally, much more worry, brainstorming and regulation has come about in the last few years to tackle climate change. As Temple put it, “We’re all increasingly aware of our environmental responsibility in a way that we probably weren’t 10 years ago.”

In Argentina, technology is supporting younger farmers in adapting to environmental best practices, Speroni says.

“What I'm impressed about is that my grandpa and my father, they were farmers, and they did cultural things. Us younger farmers are totally changing the way they used to produce. We are adapting quickly to technology. And we are really keen about using that technology in order to reduce yield losses, reduce water damping. I’m excited about it because young people under 40, are finally taking this into account, and all that technology available around us is helping.”

For ten Have-Mellema, the Netherlands faces a lot of environmental challenges because there’s a high concentration of both people and animals. However, she says consumer concerns drive some of the EU’s environmental legislation, so farmers must pay attention to what consumers are responding to, for example, the use of ractopamine. It is allowed in countries like the U.S. and Canada, but not in the Netherlands. The country also has limits in the quota for animals, and the government is even paying farmers to stop production, thereby lowering the total herd size, most recently resulting in a reduction of its dairy herd.

“It’s kind of a limitation to our production so I think we will not expand the production anymore,” she says. “Maybe in cropping, where you have better yields, but for animals we won't. We are not able to expand our production anymore. It will go down, because the government takes some production out and pays farmers to stop farming.”

A big focus in the climate change discussion is the carbon footprint and what can be done to lower it. But both ten Have-Mellema and Lidback agree, there’s not one way of looking at it, and perhaps there should be standardization across the industry, and from country to country.

“We’re not all doing it in the same way, and you can’t compare it,” ten Have-Mellema says.

Lidback says she keeps coming back to “Where are we at now?” in terms of the U.S.’s carbon emissions overall.

“On my small farm here in Vermont, we graze our cattle and we're a closed system. We return manure to our fields. And then, at the farm where I work in New York, we have a methane digester, and we use manure solids for bedding. It's fairly closed as well, but they’re two very different models,” Lidback says. “I think we’re both doing a great job with respect to carbon emissions but as far as the specifics and measuring what it is, I would love to be able to point with respect to being specific about the science and the measurements. But certainly, there's opportunity in quantifying those things. I think it also helps us to tell the story of what we have been doing, what we are doing and what we hope to do as well.”

Whether positive or negative, the influence of consumers on agriculture is something that will stick around, but one of the biggest things that farmers and ranchers can do is share their story and be proactive about getting the word out about the good that agriculture does.

Speroni says that he likes to go speak to children in schools to share the story of ranching and then the kids are excited, and he has a chance to inspire a new generation about agriculture. He also shares videos about how his ranch operates and the care that they give the cattle.

Ten Have-Mellema echoes the importance of connecting directly with consumers. Once you do, they can become some of your biggest supporters and share your story for you, she adds.

“Before COVID-19, we’d have people visit our farm, and in return, those people are the best ambassadors of our products. So, they tell the story and are involved. They are always there,” she says. “It's very nice to see how you can involve consumers in farming.”

To close, Temple asked a quick-fire question to each of the panelists: “If you were in charge of your government’s agriculture research and development (R&D) budget, what would be your top priority?”

For Speroni, he would prioritize drought resistant crops. “The technology is available, but it needs R&D to make it commercially available,” he says. “As the weather goes crazy worldwide, the rain comes later. There’s still a chance for production, but there’s a gap of 45 to 50 days that if the crop would resist drought, it would make a huge difference in production.”

In the Netherlands, ten Have-Mellema would emphasize taking science to the farmer. She’d like to see each researcher create a one-page summary for farmers, to make the research more widely known.

Lidback would focus highly on climate change and helping farmers get the tools and research they need to stay on top of climate change.

“We've got a tall task as farmers in delivering sustainable nutrition and climate change. It’s a challenge that's not going away,” she says. “It's making itself more and more present, whether it's wildfires or an early-killing frost, whatever the case may be. We've got to be able to react quickly, so that we can ensure we're here for the long haul.”

For Temple in the UK, he’d prioritize data collection and dissemination on a global scale.

“If we could do these things from a global perspective, we have a chance of learning more quickly and applying it more evenly than we have in the past. We live in a smartphone world now, connecting us all the time in ways we would never have imagined. So, there's a real opportunity from a farming level to pick an entrance point and to take it to the farmer,” he says.

The next webinar will be held in March. You can watch a replay of this webinar and learn more about the Global Farmer Network here.