♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: On today's episode of Ecosense... - We just turn over dirt and women just put their feet in the dirt.

And globally, that's one thing we all say in common is that that is our peace.

- We're having a competition to see who can collect the most poop, fecal samples.

- Solar over grasslands is the future of agrivoltaics and ecovoltaics.

JENNIE GARLINGTON: There are over 2 million farms in the U.S. today, and they are looking for ways to meet environmental and economic challenges.

♪ ♪ BILLY VAN PELT: American Farmland Trust is the only national organization that approaches agriculture holistically for the land, the practices, and the people.

Regenerative agriculture, women in agriculture, next generation farmers, federal policy.

We have helped to deliver 120 billion to farmers over the last four decades.

And we have directly supported over 600,000 farmers.

So our federal policy team is at the table at every Farm Bill and we are a nonpartisan nonprofit organization.

JENNIE: Can you give us just a little history of the Farm Bill?

BILLY: Generally it is the program that defines funding for a variety of programs across agriculture and as the needs of agriculture and farmers change, the Farm Bill is modified every five years and AFT is doing research so we can support these programs with data.

JENNIE: So what's the average age of the farmers these days?

BILLY: The average age of the farmer is 57 and a half.

I think that is perhaps a result of the fact that our population is aging generally across the nation.

JENNIE: So I hear that there are a lot of investors that are buying up farms.

What does this mean to the farmers and why are they doing this?

BILLY: Quite candidly, the land is the new gold, right?

As we lose 2,000 acres a day to non-agricultural conversion in this country, farm and ranch land will become more and more valuable.

And having critical masses of perpetually protected farm and ranch land will be very important for our future to feed ourselves.

♪ ♪ NICOLE GWISHIRI: It is sometimes incredibly difficult to be a farmer here in the United States.

And we need to really consider how to make our farms viable, how to make them profitable, and how to keep farmers on their land.

AFT is helping to bridge the gap between farmers and the local communities.

Now, a lot of people are living in cities and so they don't really have that connection to our local farmers any longer.

JENNIE: So what is the Women for the Land Program?

BILLY: Women own over a third of the land in this country and that number is growing.

Our Women for the Land Initiative brings women together.

NICOLE: Women are less likely to get farm loans through FSA.

They're less likely to participate in conservation projects and programs.

And so women may not be in those rooms of discussion that says, "Oh, these are the opportunities for you to sustain your farming operations."

So, I work here specifically in Kentucky and in North Carolina with smaller acreage farmers.

Women hold smaller acreage, but also they have more niche programs.

And so they may be doing like microgreens or some other type of different things that bigger acreage farmers aren't currently doing.

Women for the Land builds our reputation on connectivity and relationship building that is really important to us.

And if we build strong relationships when it comes to women farmers, then we can go in together and say, "Well, we need these issues handled and how can you help us with that?"

TIFFANY BELLFIELD/EL-AMIN: So we're in Madison County, rural Kentucky, the edge of Appalachia, Kentucky on our family land, Ballew Estates, 26 acres of conservation.

The back field has always been where we do our conservation.

Before my grandmother was here, there was a barn and they actually tilled this land.

It's not been tilled in over 40 years.

We have two community organizations that are going to own doing permaculture workshops and having kids learn about seed harvesting and creating their own plants.

So when we first got the farm, we knew that we wanted to continue and create a conservation space, So being able to take things to urban areas and bring urban folks onto the land was a big deal.

And then we went into services and events.

Host community groups, colleges, universities, African-American studies, permaculture, conservation, sustainability, and food accessibility.

So there's a lot of gathering here on the farm.

My mother's generation was baptized in this water, including my mother.

This is where I spent my summers playing in the mud and catching snapping turtles and tadpoles and me and my dad and my brothers camping out and stuff.

Like, it's definitely a big part and is just as old as the land.

I met Nicole from American Farmland Trust.

And she was like, "I did not know there was that many women of color here."

And I was like, "Yeah, this is the village."

That's my life's work right now because Kentucky does a great job at socially disadvantaged because white women can definitely get it and they get it, a lot, over and over again.

And so when you have a small pot for socially disadvantaged, then women and people of color are in the same box.

Women have been socially disadvantaged in Kentucky because it's been very much so a white man's world in Ag.

And so is it difficult?

It is only difficult in the representation.

So I think there's a lot of opportunity, but the data proves that there's not a lot of people of color being able to access outside loans, outside of what they've built.

There is a challenge, but is it impossible?

No, it's not impossible.

Black farmers used to make up a little bit less than half of the percentage of farm land owners and farm enterprises in the state, and now we're less than 1%.

So the advocacy that's happening around this work, I feel like we're just now seeing the funds and the coalitions who are building that.

We have an equity cooperative now on a federal level.

I want to get to the point where I'm living completely off the land.

I'd heal myself on the land before I go to the doctor.

[Laughing] I take my own elderberry syrup.

During the pandemic, we got hit with a lot of people, like, "Where can I get my food?"

And we're gleaning from each other, feeding our communities.

We are building agritourism like a cultural diaspora, agritourism cooperative.

So my farm would be one of three farms where you could come to the farm, be in a tiny home, go outside, pick your eggs for dinner, get your sweet potatoes, kale, and fix you some food and stay here and retreat.

We just turn over dirt and women just put their feet in the dirt.

And globally, that's one thing we all say in common is that that is our peace.

Us knowing that our energy is going into the food that we're feeding our family, our community, food system development.

Those women are like, "If I'm going to eat, she needs to eat.

They need to eat."

And we have to teach one another how to cultivate the food.

And that is something that is, it's religion.

JENNIE: Farmers and ranchers are on the frontlines of climate change.

At Colorado State University, The AgNext team works with ranchers to reduce their cattle's carbon footprint.

KIM STACKHOUSE-LAWSON: AgNext is a team that focuses on the development of sustainable solutions in animal agriculture.

And what's truly unique about AgNext is that we work in partnership with the supply chain and we were built to solve wicked problems that producers and NGOs, and let's say, pharmaceutical companies, et cetera, everybody who's within that value chain can't solve on their own.

Greenhouse gas emissions from beef cattle production is one of those wicked challenges that beef producers came to us and said, "Please help us understand better their baseline emission."

DR. SARA PLACE: Methane's a potent greenhouse gas.

Over a hundred a year timeframe, it's roughly 28 times more potent than CO2, but it's short lived, and so that short-lived nature is another reason why we're so focused on methane is because we know, if we can do things to reduce methane from all types of sources, including cattle or oil and natural gas, whatever that methane source may be, we can potentially have a climate benefit faster.

I actually come from upstate New York, so I grew up on a dairy farm up there.

So I've been in animal agriculture in some way, shape or form all my life.

So I started on a dairy and then went to grad school at UC Davis and got into measuring methane emissions over a decade ago.

I grew up in a beautiful place and that was a big part of it is just loving the natural world and nature.

KIM: These cattle emit methane through their normal biological processes.

So they are what we call a ruminant.

So they have one big stomach that has four compartments and the largest of that compartment is filled with all kinds of microorganisms.

And those microorganisms are actually what digests their feed.

And those microorganisms have methanogens which then the animal eructates, or burps, out of his mouth.

SARA: We just want to know and understand the differences of the breeds, in terms of their methane emissions, their performance in terms of how much they gain, and also how they respond to heat and cold stress.

It's also what we're interested in.

It's not just the impacts of cattle on the climate, but also the impacts of climate change on cattle.

♪ ♪ ANNA SHADBOLT: I am a sixth generation rancher on both sides of my family.

I'm from the Sandhills of Nebraska and we raise beef cattle, primarily Angus.

So I grew up in Ag.

I've never really known anything different.

I didn't realize that it was weird until I came to college and I was like, "Oh, everyone doesn't have cows."

This is, yeah, for my 16th birthday I got cows instead of a car.

I was very much raised in a way to look at the environment of our landscape and not just, you know, we're here to produce cattle, but we're here to have a good environment.

And that means your biodiversity, both plants and animals.

We really care about the entire system.

KIM: Cows are picky eaters.

And the palatability or how tasty they think the diet is, is really important to our work especially.

So not only do we want them to eat the diet that we've put in front of them, but many mitigation strategies are fed as an additive into the feed and it may not taste good to them, and so that they can and will sort feed.

So they will leave things in their bunk that they don't like.

And then the other really important thing to us about their pickiness is that we give them snacks as a bait through the green feed.

So how tasty their snack is is actually what's encouraging them to get their methane measured.

SARA: Yeah so this, this here is a smart feed machine and when the animal sticks its head into this device, this black thing here is an RFID reader.

And so that reads the radio frequency identification tag.

That's what that RFID stands for, in the animal's left ear, so it identifies the animal, identifies the time, and it weighs continuously the feed that's in the bunk.

So this is the smart feed device, the green feed device, which is confusing.

Smart feed is green.

The green feed is silver.

The green feed is what we measure methane emissions from.

KIM: In the United States, agriculture is responsible for 9% of our greenhouse gas emissions, our manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

And that's according to EPA.

Of that 9% animal agriculture is responsible for about half.

SARA: Yeah so we try to always take an approach of thinking about sustainability holistically, right.

So we're trying to reduce enteric methane emissions, but we're cognizant it's a part of a bigger picture, and we have to think about economic sustainability.

We try to engage with the cattle industry and people that are part of that industry right from the get-go when we do research, right.

So most of this equipment that we're looking at here has actually been donated by the cattle industry.

So they're very interested in understanding, "What is our carbon footprint, how the heck can we actually reduce these emissions?"

So we know how much feed they eat, we know how much every time they come and visit the feeder, how many times a day they visit, et cetera.

All those types of things are collected voluntarily.

They don't even know they're part of a research study.

While they're consuming their snack, again, they think it's just a snack machine, we're actually sampling their methane emissions every time they're there.

So their methane, the carbon dioxide, they're respiring out, how much oxygen they're consuming, and any hydrogen emissions that come from the animal get measured simultaneously while they're there at that machine.

KIM: So what we want to make sure is that we get a good measure of the animal over time.

ANA: So you can see there's two people out there behind me and we are collecting fecal samples.

There is a trace mineral distributed through the green feed and the pellets, titanium dioxide is what it is, and it passes through their system and we can find it in their fecal matter.

We're having a competition to see who can collect the most poop, fecal samples, and we have different categories.

So we have the person with the most hours, so they put in the most work, but maybe they're not great at picking up poop.

And then we have the per hour, which Ines, she's very good.

And then the most overall.

ASHLEY SCHILLING-HAZLETT: So we wait for the cattle to defecate and then we scoop it with a spoon into one of these cups.

And then we write which animal's tag number it is, and then what time of day that we were collecting.

INES MESA: Right now I'm the poop master.

I have, I was like 30 poops ahead of everyone else, but I dunno, because I took the weekend off, so who knows?

We will see on Friday.

♪ ♪ KIM: When our group thinks about climate adaptation, it's truly thinking about how do we make sure that these animals are healthy and resilient in the face of climate change?

And whether that is, more extreme weather events, increasing temperatures, decreasing temperatures, right, in some parts of the United States, and we just have to make sure that, that these guys are healthy and that their animal welfare is high, that they are living a life worth living.

And that's our number one priority, even when we're studying methane mitigation strategy is the health and wellbeing of these animals.

And so another thing our team is really focused on is developing solutions in partnership with the people who ultimately care for these animals.

And I know as a mom for myself, I want to make the best decision for my kids, and that's just not the health and nutrition of the food that I'm giving them.

Am I helping my kids, right?

Am I leaving the planet as somewhere they're going to thrive?

JENNIE: In Longmont, Colorado, just northeast of Boulder, we visited Jack's Solar Garden.

♪ ♪ MATT STURCHIO: If I had a dollar for every time I've asked someone, "Have you ever heard of agrivoltaics?"

[Laughing] I would have a lot of money.

BYRON KOMINEK: "Agrivoltaics" is agriculture with solar panels just smashed together, agrivoltaics.

Jack's Solar Garden was named after my grandfather, Jack Stingery, who was a farmer all of his life.

He bought this land in 1972 for his retirement.

I think there's common misconceptions about solar that it will leak chemicals or leak metals into the ground.

The top layer of the solar panels is basically tempered glass that helps to protect everything inside of it.

We've heard different comments about how solar panels could kill birds or that it has magnetic fields that make people go deranged or something.

And I live here maybe 400 feet away from our solar panels, and I don't think I'm deranged yet.

Jack's Solar Garden started as a means to make a living on our family's land.

We were losing money in the haying industry here and thought we would try working on something else and solar came up as an option to be able to make a little bit of money on our land and do better by our society.

Our solar array is elevated on the east side up to about eight feet when the panels are flat.

And then on the west side, the majority of the solar panels are elevated to about six and a half feet when flat... ...and that enables people, machinery, equipment, as well as plants to be able to grow taller and operate within that space.

The higher up you can put the panels, the less interactions you're going to have between humans, plants, and machinery with the solar panels, so that's beneficial.

Our research partners are the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Colorado State University, and the University of Arizona, and they're learning more about how the microclimates of the solar panels impact different types of vegetation from grasslands to wild flowers to growing vegetables underneath our panels.

The sun and the shade are cycling over the field, so you could actually plan your entire working day within the solar array, around where the shade is.

Maybe first thing in the morning when its cooler, you don't mind working out in the sunlight.

But in the afternoon, when it can be 100 degrees out, you want to work in the shade.

So any farm labor that's working out within our agrivoltaic system is always about three steps away from shade.

Shade for animals is just as important as it is for people.

If you ever drive by a pasture that has cattle out in the morning, they're all out grazing happily.

But when it gets to the afternoon when it's hot, they're all around that one cottonwood or willow tree just trying to pack underneath it to get as much shade as they possibly can.

Within a solar array that's built for cattle, they're able to have access to shade at all times of the day, and they don't have to fight over that one piece of shade.

Plus what we've learned from researchers from Colorado State University is that when animals are in the shade, they continue to eat.

Once they get too hot, they stop eating.

And what all ranchers want at the end of the season is a larger animal, and by providing shade to those animals during the hottest months of the year, you're more than likely going to have an animal with more meat on them to sell at market.

Colorado State University is very interested in seeing how we can incorporate solar arrays onto our native grasslands.

So, we've provided about a half-acre of land underneath our solar panels for two different research groups to learn more about how well these grasses grow.

MATT: Solar over grasslands is the future of agrivoltaics and ecovoltaics.

In the United States, about 98% of agrivoltaics are in grasslands or sites that are now managed and restored grasslands.

So understanding how these ecosystems respond to solar cover is really important.

So these eight foot tall solar panels, you can put cattle underneath around noon because they can't reach the solar panel.

That's what everyone's worried about.

And if you have enough healthy vegetation like this, they'll eat and they hang out.

They don't really notice the solar panels at all.

Another good thing about grazers in a solar array is that they have that natural ability to keep the vegetation lower, which keeps the shade away from the panels, which means that you still get high electricity production.

And it also maintains that natural balance of inputs from those grazers, which would be either fecal matter or urine.

So that's nutrients and carbon into the soils again, which you don't get when you have a lawnmower come through and cut all the grass.

One of the most fun parts of studying agrivoltaics, ecovoltaics, just dual use solar in general, is the collaboration with engineers, economists, landowners that usually don't get to talk to as an ecologist, but now we do a lot...

It's all very new, but it's very fun to be on the cutting edge of this.

♪ ♪ CATHERINE HUNZIKER: I am all about medicinal herb plants.

Herbs and plants have been our medicine for 99.9999% of our time on this planet as human beings.

And even though our culture here in the U.S. has forgotten, our bodies remember.

One of the beauties of working with the solar panels is it kind of mitigates the extremes of the weather.

Too much sun, not enough sun, a little more humidity, a little less cold, a little less heat.

And with the research that's going on here, we can take a really good look at which plants are most well adapted and what sorts of microclimates they prefer here regionally.

And this would apply to anywhere in the country.

Medicinals have been missing from our culture here in the U.S. for a number of years.

So people only think about Ag crops.

They only think about conservation and nature but there's this whole piece that medicinals have to offer.

The natural herbal supplement market is growing 10% every year.

It's now in the billions, [Laughing] and the vast majority of those plants for that are coming from overseas, and the beauty of medicinals under the panels is it gives a farmer, a grower, a way to make more money per square foot per plant than any other way that you could go.

What are the two probably biggest things we need to deal with for climate change and climate mitigation?

We need to move away from fossil fuels, electrification on so many levels to dead dirt.

Dead dirt.

We go with perennialization.

We go with regenerative soil management.

With crops that make more money, per pound, per acre, and bring sustainable health to our population.

Herbs, most of them are perennials.

And the beauty of perennials, you don't have to till the soil.

It's about the life in the soil.

There's dirt and there's soil.

Soil is living life, so when you have perennials, you're sequestering carbon for climate mitigation.

You're building your soil life, the plants can just be happy there for X number of years and you just continue to harvest them.

This is mother wort, there's a lot of medicinals, there's probably six of them here, six different mints.

So one of the beauties of being here at Jack's Solar, is the controls that are going.

So we learn about the plants.

One, two, three beds with irrigation, one, two, three beds over there without irrigation.

We have morning sun, midday sun, afternoon sun, which also gives us another perspective.

Do they like a little shade?

Do they have any microclimate tweaks?

You know, so we really can learn a lot about them here for a wide range of plants.

What is adaptable to this bio region?

I have felt for a long time that the path forward is putting together indigenous with postmodern into the future for a sustainable future.

Duh.

Here we go.

Solar panels, postmodern.

And here we have the indigenous, the ancient, we have the herbal health.

But when you combine it with a solar array then you've got two things coming in at once that do even more to help support that farmer and help the wider community transition to a more sustainable future.

♪ ♪