FOA 205: Next Generation Farm Leadership

<p>We are going back to the farm today. Zach Johnson, the YouTuber <a href= "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp0rRUsMDlJ1meYAQ6_37Dw">Minnesota Millennial Farmer</a> and Mitchell Hora, farmer and founder of <a href="https://continuum.ag">Continuum Ag</a>, join us today. These two co-host the <a href= "https://www.fieldworktalk.org">Fieldwork Podcast</a>, “a podcast for farmers, from farmers.” Fieldwork Podcast focuses on sustainable farming practices, their environmental impact and how to make them profitable. For Mitchell, Continuum Ag specifically supplies health data analytics and does consulting for farmers. Mitchell and Zach farm 500 miles apart but find common ground in adopting soil health principles and are enjoying the opportunity to share that with other farmers.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong><em>“I think everybody has the opportunity to improve. I think it’s just more so looking outside of the box and looking holistically, but there’s a lot of ways to do this.” - Mitchell Hora</em></strong></p> <p> </p> <p>Mitchell draws attention to the fact that being more sustainable can involve different applications of soil health protocols on different operations. This isn’t a call for “one size fits all” in farming. He highlights impacting the carbon footprint in agriculture, water quality, water use, and nutrient density to name a few options to focus on.The Fieldwork Podcast’s goal is to “utilize some of these other agronomic sustainable type principles to be more profitable.” Mitchell is very clear that any changes need to “drive profitability” and be a sound “business decision.” Zach discusses that one barrier to fully adopting all of these soil health practices rapidly on his farm has been the amount of moisture and weather conditions in Minnesota. His dad attempted some no-till in the 1980’s but didn’t find success at that time.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong><em>“I think now we understand more about the soil. We have better technology, maybe better machinery to try to understand really what it is we’re doing and try