Droughts and Downpours: How Growers Can Weather Climate Chance, with Atmospheric Scientist Eric Snodgrass

Extreme weather events—like droughts, heavy rains and tornadoes—are becoming more frequent, as the effects of climate change take hold on our weather patterns. And that means that growers will need to adapt their practices to help them stay resilient in an era where the weather is expected to be increasingly unpredictable. So in this episode, Nutrien Ag Solutions Science Fellow and Principal Atmospheric Scientist Eric Snodgrass joins us to help get the politics out of the discussion on climate change. Eric will discuss real data about how weather patterns are changing, offer some predictions for the growing season ahead and discuss what growers in different parts of the country should prepare for in the long-term. Then, Tom and Sally will highlight some sustainable practices that growers can implement that can help counteract the effects of climate change. Plus, with many new growers enrolling in the Nutrien Ag Solutions Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes program, Tom and Sally will answer some of the frequent questions they're asked about the program.

Episode Transcript

Eric Snodgrass:

It doesn't matter what I believe. It's what the facts states, what the data shows. And whether I believe it or not, the data are there to show that the US farmer, the global farmer has a major role to play when it comes to ensuring that the environment continues to improve in the longer term. Because by the way, you all know this, the more we take care of it, the better it takes care of us.

Dusty Weis:

Welcome to The Future. Faster. A sustainable agriculture podcast by Nutrien Ag Solutions, with our very own Tom Daniel, Director North America Retail and Grower Sustainable Ag, and Dr. Sally Flis, Senior Manager North America Sustainable Ag and Carbon. This is your opportunity to learn about the next horizon in sustainable agriculture for growers, for partners, for the planet. To us, it's not about changing what's always worked, it's about continuing to do the little things that make a big impact.

Dusty Weis:

On this week's episode, Eric Snodgrass, Science Fellow and Principal Atmospheric Scientist at Nutrien Ag Solutions, joins us to discuss some weather predictions for the growing season ahead, why extreme weather events will play a larger role in the growing cycle in the years ahead, and how growers can prepare to weather the storm. But if you haven't yet, make sure you're subscribed to this podcast in your favorite app, also make sure you follow Nutrien Ag Solutions on Facebook and Instagram.

Dusty Weis:

I'm Dusty Weis, and it's time once again to introduce Tom Daniel and Sally Flis. Tom and Sally, as your team continues to enroll growers in the Sustainable Nitrogen Outcomes program, there have been a few questions that have come up, as with any new program, and luckily we have a platform to answer some of those. So Sally, what are some of the questions that you and Tom have been hearing from the field in regards to this program?

Sally Flis:

Yeah, Dusty, we're getting questions around why do different products count versus other products? How do growers sign up? What is the data that's needed to participate? Tom actually has been in some meetings with growers and crop consultants, and so I'm going to throw it to Tom for kind of what he's heard as he's been out in the field interacting directly in some of these initial meetings.

Tom Daniel:

Yeah. So Sally, in fact today I'm actually up in Northern Illinois today and had visits with one of our crop consultants with a couple of growers enrolled in our carbon programs up here, and they had specific questions about 2022. They said, "Where can we get information on our 2022 programs?" Their crop consultant shared with them about the Sustainable Nitrogen Outcome program, the SNO program, as we call it, around nitrogen management. One of the key questions they ask, we talk about efficiency fertilizers or using products that drive efficiencies around nitrogen. The question was, which products specifically fit, when we talk about a nitrogen management program, which products should we be looking at? Are there key active ingredients that have to be in those products for them to be considered? Sally, I'm going to throw that question to you. Which products or which components of products need to be part of a denitrification product?

Sally Flis:

Sure, Tom. So as we know, there's multiple different products on the market right now that can help us improve overall nitrogen use efficiency. You've got the urease inhibitors, the nitrification inhibitors, you've got products that are a combination of urease and nitrification inhibitors, and then you've got products that aren't inhibitor products at all that can help us improve nitrogen use efficiency. The way this program is designed and the way the Climate Action Reserve, as the carbon registry that we're using for this and their protocol around nitrogen management, is only those nitrification inhibitor products qualify for actually getting counted towards reducing the nitrous oxide emissions from improved nitrogen management in the field.

Sally Flis:

The three main ingredients that would occur in a nitrification inhibitor are the nitrapyrins, the pronitradine, and the DCD products. So those would be the active ingredient on there. They come under a couple of different brand names. Our brand name one is Nitrain Bullet is the product that would be the nitrification inhibitor.

Tom Daniel:

So we're really looking for products, as you say, that have what? The DCD component then?

Sally Flis:

Nitrapyrin or pronitradine or DCD are the three active ingredients that can count.

Tom Daniel:

We have products actually in our Loveland product line that fit that, but other products that are from some of our third party vendor groups like Corteva or others, we would also include them as part of the program. Am I correct?

Sally Flis:

Correct. So those products would count towards making that emission reduction. So you'd have N-Serve, Instinct, there's a couple of Coke products that have some of these active ingredients in them that would also fit as far as reducing the emissions piece. Now, the other part of this program, Tom, is that incentive around the use of an LPI product. So if it's not the Nitrain Bullet in this case, then it wouldn't fit for that additional incentive dollars that we've got available around LPI products, but it would count towards reducing emissions.

Tom Daniel:

So I'm going to change the subject slightly because this was a question that came up this morning, too. It's really around cover crops. We had a discussion on cover crops this morning and especially around how to get the cover crops incorporated or into the soil. Lots of situations, especially in Illinois, there's a lot of fall tillage. And obviously if we're in a carbon sequestering program, no till or minimum till is going to be the call of the day, the thing that we have to do. So the question was, if I'm broadcasting my cover crops over the top, how do I get them incorporated? So we went back to the NRCS standards, which basically says that to maintain your no till or minimum till status, light incorporation really can't go much deeper than a one or two inch, I call it a stirring of the soil, basically to get the seed covered.

Tom Daniel:

But that's not an easy thing to do, Sally. Some of these pieces of tillage equipment we have today aren't designed to do what I would describe as light tillage. So what do you consider the best ways to get cover crops on the soil? Is it drills? What do you think are going to be some of our best options in the future?

Sally Flis:

I think we tend to see that best germination when we are able to really seed it with a drill, though that adds a step, that adds more time to getting that cover crop planted out there. Versus I think you mentioned when we were talking about your visit this morning that they're considering maybe even flying on these cover crop seeds so that they're not pushing up against getting the seeds out too late after they harvest. One of the things that's always an advantage when you get a little further north is it's not the same as incorporating with a piece of tillage equipment, but if you get it out there early enough, sometimes the freeze thaw cycles, the fall rains, that kind of stuff can help get that seed down into the ground if you're really not sure how much disturbance you're going to have with tillage.

Sally Flis:

I think the other thing that could be recommended is maybe try part of the field with a light tillage pass and part of the field without one. I mean, a big part of this we talk about all the time, Tom, is figuring out what works for that grower, right? I mean, are they going to get the germination they want if they do no till and let nature incorporate that seed a little bit? Or are they going to need to do that light tillage pass so they get that good germination? So I think it's got to be a little bit of an experiment and I think that's why we've always talked about everything with these practice changes should start on a couple of fields and not a whole farm.

Tom Daniel:

We also have to recognize too that we've got to meet the grower for where he is, right? We've got to understand, what does he have available in the way of incorporation or light tillage tool, for instance? If he doesn't have that, then the process, we need to rethink how we approach it to a certain extent. And remember, we're trying to leave at least a 70% of ground cover left intact after we incorporate these cover crops. One of the other questions that you had that came through, and Dusty, I want to point out too that if we have podcast listeners that have questions, we want them to contact us, and I'm sure you'll give them the way for them to do that. But we get a lot of questions coming in from our retail crop consultants especially, and they're asking about Agrible accounts. Now, one of the qualifications to be in our nitrogen management program are any of our carbon programs today is that they have an Agrible account. What is the Agrible account? When we talk about it, what are we trying to capture with that tool, Sally?

Sally Flis:

So in the Agrible account, we're capturing every field pass that happens on that field. So seeding, fertilizer, crop protection, if there's manure amendments applied, if there's a cover crop applied, when things are harvested, what the yield is, how a cover crop's terminated. So it's every pass across that field so that we can calculate those sustainability metrics and really give a whole picture of how sustainability is functioning in that field. We're moving towards connecting it with some of our other digital tools. We just released recently that there's going to be some single sign on options. So as you get ready to enroll in these programs, we'll have some eligibility questionnaires or sort of preliminary interest forms available to fill out.

Sally Flis:

Then we've got our customer success team, which is just they're a group of rockstars, Tom, that have been helping us get through all this data entry and QAQC, so that we know the data that we're entering is good and that we're providing to verifiers is good. That team's going to help you walk through getting everything set up the way it needs to be set up so that we can limit the amount of times that growers, crop consultants or our customer success team need to move or enter data as they get into these programs.

Tom Daniel:

So Sally, I'm going to ask a question. You mentioned our customer success team, and I will have to say they are rockstars. I've met most of them and they are great people to work with and they will be the ones talking directly with growers to help get their data into the system. But let me ask this question, and you and I had this discussion this morning. How important is it that we be accurate in this data that we're entering into Agrible or to any other data storage platform for cropping history, how important is it that that cropping history information is correct? Not just an estimate or not just a, well, maybe it's close. We always talk about hand grenade close in a lot of things, but this requires specific information that's accurate. What are you seeing on some of the information you've seen come in from our 2021 pilots?

Sally Flis:

Yeah. It's super important, Tom, to have accurate information entered, and for us on our side to take a look at whether or not the numbers that we're using to calculate outcomes make sense, right? So we've got a couple growers, I was just going through the data this morning with one of our advisors and there's numbers that don't make sense for the crop type that's indicated there. So we're going to go back and double check, is that really the right crop type for that field? There were changes because of the weather, which we're going to talk about in the rest of the podcast, and what growers thought they'd plant in a field versus what actually ended up there.

Sally Flis:

So we had a whole bunch of fields that we were told originally would be wheat fields that ended up being soybean fields. So we had to take a bunch of data out of our project submittal so that we're providing accurate data to the verifier so that we can get verified outcomes. Because we won't make it through verification if they look back at the data and talk to a grower and find out we messed up and didn't even know the right crop type in a field.

Tom Daniel:

So Sally, you used the term verifier. A lot of times I think growers may not be aware, but there are third party verifying bodies that manage these registries, or at least they verify the data that goes into these registries. So if the data's not accurate or it can't be backed up with records from the farm level, these companies that are paying for these offsets, they're applying these offsets or these reductions to their investor reports and those type things. It creates a whole domino effect if the data is not correct. So there is so much importance and so much to be done to be sure the data is correct. And I go back to your customer success team again, those people are so engaged with making sure we're putting quality data in, so they're really kind of our guides in that process.

Tom Daniel:

We just need to encourage growers the data's got to be right. It can't be an estimate, it can't be a guess. It's got to be right. Is it important do you think that we enter the data as we go through the cropping season? Because it seems like it's always the end of the season before growers sit down and actually enter the information in. Are there technologies available today that will allow a flow of information in that happens as the cropping system's occurring?

Sally Flis:

So there are, but we're not necessarily connected to all of them. So we're working through that with our digital teams on, if you're using some of those infield data collection mechanisms, how do we ease these points of data need? And I think that's one of the biggest things we've learned from these 2021 pilots that we're finishing up.

Dusty Weis:

Well guys, some great actionable insights here for growers who are looking to use these tools to take control and improve their margins and their sustainable outcomes, and some great questions as well that I know you guys have heard out in the field. Tom, you had mentioned how anybody listening right now can get involved if they have a question and that's by emailing sustainableag@nutrien.com. So if you've got a burning question on your mind that you want to pitch to the experts Tom and Sally here, email sustainableag@nutrien.com.

Dusty Weis:

Of course, there's one thing that's out of growers hands. They can't control it, and that's the weather. And so next, we're going to talk to Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions' Science Fellow and Principle Atmospheric Scientist, about what the climate has in store for us during this growing season and beyond. That's coming up in a moment here on The Future. Faster. This is The Future. Faster. A sustainable agriculture podcast by Nutrien Ag Solutions. I'm Dusty Weis, along with Tom Daniel and Sally Flis, and we're joined now by Eric Snodgrass, Science Fellow and Principle Atmospheric Scientist at Nutrien Ag Solutions. Eric, thanks for joining us.

Eric Snodgrass:

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Dusty Weis:

So Eric, as our Southern region gets started with planting and the rest of North America gears up for it, can you share some predictions for the 2022 spring weather cycles? What can our retail team and grower customers expect to face in the months ahead this year?

Eric Snodgrass:

Yeah. One of the big things we're concerned about right now is that through the front half of winter in the Southern Plains over to the lower Mississippi River Valley, there have been times where we've been quite dry, and that dryness really extends pretty far to the north, even into Nebraska and South Dakota. Now, going into this part of the year, we know that all that can change in a heartbeat and we've got a few big systems rolling through in late February and early March that are going to hit the Mid-South pretty hard and stretch into the Eastern corn belt. So it's always a state of flux as you transition out of one season and go into the next.

Eric Snodgrass:

But I think the thing that'll be on the front of mind for a lot of growers is, what are the meteorologists talking about, myself included, about that drought that's still in places like in Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas and Colorado with respect to La Nina? We got a fading La Nina. It's the second time we've had a La Nina, and this time, this one's kind of moving its way out, probably going to be into what we call ENSO neutral conditions by spring. And you may hear me talk a lot about the development of an El Nino by the time we get into summer. So I guess what I would tell you is there's a lot of moving pieces and therefore, I don't think anything's set in any certain way here. So just expect some volatility and some flux as we go forward from now all the way through April and May.

Tom Daniel:

So it sounds like, you used the word flux, and it does seem like 2021 was one of those, especially the fall, when we saw unusually warm temperatures in my part of the country. I live in Kentucky. And then obviously if you watch the news, you saw all the tornadoes and tornadic activity we had that basically started out in Arkansas and came all the way through my state. So it seems like we're having lots of severe weather events, are real fluctuations in events. Eric, is this relatable to some changes that we're seeing in our climate? What are some of the factors that are leading to some of these really, really big swings in weather?

Eric Snodgrass:

Yeah. Ultimately, when we try to study the science of a shifting climate system, it boils down to seeing if we're going into higher variation or lower variation, right? And you're right, back in December, we parked a big ridge over the Southeast and that opens up the Gulf of Mexico, and we got hammered on December 10th. Had that quad state super cell, the one that hit Mayfield really hard. There was over 400 reports of severe weather with that one. And then five days later, up in the Western corn belt, they had almost 700 reports of severe storms. So we look at all of that and think about these big events and just wonder, what's changing? What are the bigger picture here? So December came in record warm, then we flip around to January, which has for most parts been very cold, and now we're here in February and that same spot in the Mid-South has been extremely wet.

Eric Snodgrass:

So the longer term study of these things, I'll just tell you two things about it, okay? The first is we've observed a pretty sizable shift in how far to the north and south the jet stream moves rather than west to east. And we call that a meridional shift, so it's falling the meridians north and south. That basically makes the jet stream a bit more loopy, tends to get blocked up, and when it gets blocked up, it delivers the same type of weather for a longer stretch of time period and then it breaks. The second part of this is some research was just finished... You talked about tornadoes. It was just finished here back at the end of 2020 that looked at the shifting position of Tornado Alley.

Eric Snodgrass:

Long story short, Mississippi River Valley, especially over the Mid-South is seeing an increase in what we call favorable tornadic days, which means the weather conditions come together to make those big, bad thunderstorms are happening more frequently along the Mississippi River Valley and into the Tennessee Valley and in the Ohio Valley. And it's moving out of traditional Tornado Alley, which runs from like Texas to North Dakota. So those kind of longer term shifts are observed, they've been in peer-reviewed publications, and that means that we got to look for more of this type of event moving forward. So yeah, our finger's on the pulse of those highly variable weather situations and yeah, the Mid-South has been targeted over the last about 40 years.

Sally Flis:

So Eric, you mentioned in your opening comments about drought in the West and the Southwest. And I had been listening to some other podcasts, because I do enjoy other podcasts besides ours, and they were discussing how the drought has been so long in parts of the West that we may never really come back from it. What's the difference between a short term drought that we might see within a growing season and some of these longer term droughts that we're really approaching in the Western third or half of the US?

Eric Snodgrass:

Yeah. The United States, if you kind of look at it in terms of a climate system, the Eastern side of the United States rarely has drought that lasts more than 6 to 12 months. But in the West, because it has more of a Mediterranean climate once you're over the mountains there in California, they have six months of dryness anyways every year that lasts about April to October. All right. So what ends up happening there is that if they don't get wintertime snow and wintertime precipitation, automatically their drought becomes a multi-year drought. And add to that the fact that California, 40 million people live in California, they place enormous demand on the water. And they have large reservoir systems, they have big mountains with a lot of snow, those Sierra Nevadas, that if they don't pack up that snow in winter, there are going to be problems.

Eric Snodgrass:

So this particular winter, huge snow in December, and now much of California has had the driest start to any year on record. We have records that go back 130 years. So there's a lot of concern that if we don't get what we call a miracle March or an amazing April, that we're going to have some problems in the West going into the 2022 growing season. So yeah, it all has to do with the difference in climate system, first of all, and the second thing is that the demands on water in the West are high because they go six months of the year without anything. And it gets really hot in summer, just naturally in the West, so there's a lot of evaporation. And if you don't have the moisture there that's in place throughout winter to keep you going through the summer, you'll get a multiyear drought out of that.

Tom Daniel:

I'm depressed. I'm in Tornado Alley now and the California's going to be a desert. So I'm pretty well depressed at the moment, so.

Eric Snodgrass:

I'm doing my best, Tom. See if I can just inject some Zoloft into the atmosphere and see if we can cure this thing. But you know what the Zoloft is by the way? Zoloft for the atmosphere is called El Nino. When we have El Nino events, the jet stream tends to flatten out, tends to deliver better moisture to the West, and we don't tend to see nearly the number of severe weather events in parts of the Mid-South. So you've just come off of two winters that were both La Nina winters. So we light up the Mid-South with severe weather, especially in winter and early spring, and then you miss California on the rainfall because the jet stream goes to British Columbia. So you want to know what the antidepressant is for the atmosphere? We call it El Nino and we need to get another one of those dialed up soon.

Sally Flis:

So, we've touched on it a little bit, but climate change is that kind of hot topic item that we hear about. I had a question yesterday in a session, well, what if the resource concern that growers need to hear about or that the resource concern a grower's dealing with is climate change? Are growers even thinking about it? And I said they think about it and they talk about it, but it's from the aspect of some of the stuff we've already touched on, the droughts, the severe weather, how does that change the crop that they're harvesting or their ability to produce a crop. They may not use the term climate change, but they're talking about the same dramatic events that we're seeing across the country. So when you look back through the historical weather records and trends, how is the climate evolving and shifting? You mentioned a little bit that shift already in Tornado Alley. What else are we seeing in these climate shifts across the country?

Eric Snodgrass:

I'm glad you're asking me this question, because I've spent 20 years researching it and I have no political affiliation, so I can actually just give you a straight up answer on what I've observed. And that's important, because you think about what our customer growers are doing, right? They farm within a weather system, but their entire long term perspective deals with the climate system. So we have to know year on year, what the weather's going to do, but if there's any systematic change in the weather, we would call that a climate shift. Let me just give you some numbers to think about here. Let's go right into the primary corn and soybean belt. So that's going to stretch from your neck of the woods, Tom, from Kentucky and the Eastern corn belt, all the way to Kansas and all the way back up north to North Dakota. In that area, you average the entire region since 1970, it's increased during the growing season, April to October, by about five and a half inches of rainfall.

Eric Snodgrass:

Now, I'm sitting here in an I state today in Indiana and these I states, we've actually measured a tripling in the frequency of what we call heavy rainfall events. That's where we're getting more than two inches of rainfall in a 24 hour time period. On the temperature side of it, because the precipitation side of it overall is that we're seeing more wetter years than drier years, but on the temperature side of it, maximum temperatures aren't necessarily increasing in this part of the world. What's increasing here in the primary corn and soybean belt is that we're seeing warmer overnight lows. Now that's added about 9 to 12 days on average, throughout the primary corn and soybean belt, that's added on average about 9 to 12 days of frost free season. So when you think about that, those numbers say, learn and figure out a way to manage the year on your water stresses.

Eric Snodgrass:

I'll tell you something, I've flown all over the Midwest and driven all over the Midwest this winter, and I see how folks are responding to it. They're responding to it with pattern tile. They're responding to it by changing their drainage strategies. They're responding to it with their tillage practices. We're finding better ways to take care of the soil so that when the adverse weather, like the heavy rainfall events come through, we're able to keep the soil healthier longer and it gives us bigger and better yields. So yeah, we deal with shifting climate all the time here, and not only in the Midwest, but around the world. And we're constantly in this adjustment mode to how we make better decisions to have year on year profitability to take better care of that soil. So these things are front of mind for the growers, and what we want to do here at Nutrien is provide the statistical evidence on how stuff is shifting around and keep all of the other nonsense out of the way.

Dusty Weis:

Tom and Sally, I think Eric brings up a great point here, is that as we're talking about these sustainable practices, certainly an end goal of that is to reduce the impact on the climate, but also a lot of the practices and products that you guys talk about can actually help growers weather some of these impacts of the climate, whether we're talking about dealing with a drought in the West, whether we're talking about more extreme rainfall events in the Midwest and the Central Plain states. I think a lot about what we're talking about here cannot just help mitigate the impacts, but can also help growers survive and even thrive amid some of this more extreme weather that we're going to see.

Sally Flis:

Yeah. Dusty, to follow on that, I mean, like Eric mentioned, these better soil health management practices really help us regulate that amount of water in the soil. If you're looking at the West, if we can build organic matter in the soil, we can help keep what little water we're getting in the soil. If you look at the Eastern half of the country, it's what are the practices that are either going to get the water infiltrated and down through that soil profile? With reduced tillage, with that tile drainage practices he's talking about.

Sally Flis:

I think it goes back to the discussion we often have on this podcast of it's a system level management decision, right? If you're going to put in tile drainage, that's going to change how and when you want to apply your fertilizer so you're not losing it to leaching events, because that's money that you're just putting in a pipe and flowing out of the field, right? So this is a great overview of all the different ways that we've got to think at a system level and talk with our growers and crop consultants about this. So following on that, question back to you, Eric, is we're really focused on enabling our customers and our field team to increase these sustainable crop productions. What do you see other companies doing or offering in order to help work with these changing weather patterns?

Eric Snodgrass:

Yeah. And that's a great question. I was just actually today given an event with a group at Bayer over in Indiana, and Nutrien of course, our partnership with them. So one of their chemists was there and we had a long discussion about fungicide applications, because you put this much more precipitation on a field, you've increased those pressures in a big way. So we have discussions about, well, when is the right time to do the right application at the right amount, right? So what I provide is the weather content for that information, or really to help provide information to make a decision based upon it. Because these issues affect so much. You talk about system level management, it affects every single decision.

Eric Snodgrass:

So what I see these other companies doing, just like we are at Nutrien, is we're trying to come down to a field level strategy with our customer growers so that it is the most efficient application. It's the most efficient practice that maximizes effort, maximizes yield, maximizes production, and minimizes total expense. That is what every company is on the lookout for to provide for their customers, because their customer is going to seek out that company that provides the solution that has a maximum benefit at the minimal cost.

Tom Daniel:

So Eric, our sustainable ag team and a lot of our crop consultants that we're working with today, we're focused on a lot of sustainable practices on the farm around the crop production, right? So we're looking at reduced emissions, nitrogen application reductions, the use of reduced tillage obviously for soil health benefits, and then of course cover crops to sequester carbon in the soil. We've got a lot of other companies that are starting to join us. You just mentioned Bayer as an example of a meeting you were at. Do you believe agriculture can be one of the key answers to helping in climate action where we can actually benefit our climate by adopting new practices that can not only benefit productivity on the farm, but actually protect the natural resources of soil, water, and air?

Eric Snodgrass:

Tom, it's a great question, but I'm going to rephrase it. It doesn't matter what I believe. It's what the facts states, what the data shows. Whether I believe it or not, the data are there to show that those changes in practices are fantastic for a couple things, reducing erosion, reducing total application. They're fantastic for keeping the soil more healthy, which makes it more resilient to big weather events that are going to come through regardless of how all of these practices go into place. You put on a cover crop, the effect of doing that plus changing tillage, we have measured and shown in the results how much carbon is stored. And you think about the reduction that that has of total atmospheric carbon and the footprint that's being drawn back and shrunk by that. The US farmer, the global farmer has a major role to play when it comes to ensuring that the environment in which we are stewards of continues to improve in the longer term.

Eric Snodgrass:

Because by the way, you all know this, the more we take care of it, the better it takes care of us. So these kind of things, I mean, they're right there in the peer-reviewed publications, they're in there in the trials, they're there in the data, and it's my job just to come out there and make a pretty song about it and sing it to let folks know, these are the things we've observed. These are the changes that are happening. Let's get those numbers in front of you to see how these things can make you a more efficient farmer in so many different areas. So Tom, yeah, you're a hundred percent on the money there that the data are showing that these practices will improve the bottom line.

Sally Flis:

All right, Eric, we get asked this all the time in the sustainability field. What's the one thing we can do to fix all these problems? So what's the one thing that growers and our crop consultants should be looking out for or paying attention to coming into this 2022 crop season?

Eric Snodgrass:

Coming into 2022, my biggest concern, and it's my concern in February, who knows if I'll still be concerned about it in May or June? But it's going to be over issues of expanding drought in the Southern Plains. That's what I'm going to have to watch most carefully. If that all gets erased by the time we get into June, hurray. I'll be happy with everybody else. But the bigger answer to your bigger picture question is really more about weather's going to give you ups and downs every year no matter what. What I would just tell folks is, whatever we can do to make more resilient soil, to hang onto the things that make us have smaller bumps in the road when the weather's going to come through and throw a curve ball at you, those are the kind of things I want to be thinking about and talking about.

Eric Snodgrass:

So it's the systematic shifts that we're doing to make our fields and our soil more resilient. And that's why talking to agronomists, soil scientists, talking to the chemists, and of course talking to the weather geeks like me help to put that whole picture together, because I would want to go into any growing season talking about how I have year on year smaller risk because I've taken care of the ground, which will end up taking care of me. So that's what I'm thinking about every single year.

Dusty Weis:

Well, and Eric, this has just been a great reminder that climate change isn't just about doom and gloom. This is one of those situations where forewarning is foresight. And we can see in the data that we've discussed here that more extreme weather events are on the horizon. So now it's about getting informed about what's coming, finding new and innovative ways to thrive in those conditions. So we really appreciate your insights today. Eric Snodgrass, Science Fellow and Principle Atmospheric Scientist at Nutrien Ag Solutions, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The Future. Faster.

Dusty Weis:

That is going to conclude this edition of The Future. Faster. The pursuit of sustainable success with Nutrien Ag Solutions. New episodes arrive every other week, so make sure you subscribe in your favorite app and join us again soon. Visit futurefaster.com to learn more. The Future. Faster podcast is brought to you by Nutrien Ag Solutions with executive producer Connor Erwin and editing by Larry Kilgore III. And it's produced by Podcamp Media. Branded podcast production for businesses, podcampmedia.com. For Nutrien Ag Solutions, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weiss.