Transcriber: Uy Tran Reviewer: Keira White
Good morning, it’s great to be with you today,
and to talk about my favorite subject, and that’s agriculture,
and the constant change that’s evolved in agriculture in my lifetime
and really the lifetime of the world.
As I thought about that this morning, eating breakfast,
agriculture is something that touches every American every day.
And it’s something critically important to what we need to survive.
And as I think about that, and I think about the constant change
that’s evolved in agriculture,
clearly, it’s been one of the challenges, it’s been the opportunity for the world.
And that change was necessary
as we went from X number of people in the world
to line of sight on 10 billion people in this world by 2050.
So as I thought about today, and thought about how do we walk through that
and talk about the opportunity to continue doing,
in a more sustainable way, agriculture,
I thought about three things:
One: Where have we come from? Where are we today and where are we going?
And how do we look over the horizon at what can be rather than what is today?
And so I thought about my family and my family farm;
growing up on a 300 acre farm,
and when my father left for World War II, they were farming with horses.
When he came back, they didn’t farm with horses,
they had a John Deere B tractor with a four-row planter,
today, we farm that farm with a high-speed John Deere 90-foot planter.
The old planter that he farmed with for decades would plant 25 acres a day,
the new planter plants 75 acres an hour or 1000 acres a day.
And the tradition in agriculture that’s really been important for the world
is how do we produce more with less,
the very definition of sustainability,
and today we define that as: how do we lower the carbon score
and improve the environment by making every acre more productive?
And so as we think about that, it wasn’t just the planter
and the innovation and the science and technology
that went into that to improve productivity,
it was also what went into that planter and into the ground in the seed,
and in terms of the seed genetics,
and what’s happened to improve yields on every acre.
So if we think about in the 1950s and 60s, when he was using
that John Deere B four-row planter,
yields in the US were about 50 bushel an acre.
Today, they are 250 bushel an acre
because of the investment in seed technology.
Back to how do we produce more with less on that acre of arable ground
when over time, as population has increased,
we have fewer acres per capita of population,
so it’s really necessary that we increase production
so we have enough food for the world.
And what’s resulted in all that is today,
instead of 2000 calories per person in the world, we have 3000 calories,
and because of that improvement,
we’ve been able to do other things with crops like create renewable energy
and biofuels from that crop
in addition to feeding the world’s population.
But it wasn’t just corn production, grain production, soybean production
that increased, and the investment in agriculture, it was across the board,
and it included protein, it included beef, pork, and chicken.
And the genetic investment in breeding better animals,
in nutritionally how we feed them better, and having an environment we place them in
so that they could be more efficient has resulted on the slide you see today.
Instead of four pounds of grain to produce a pound of protein,
it takes two and a half.
Instead of 10 pounds on beef cattle, it takes six.
Instead of three on chicken, it takes one and a half
which has allowed the beef cattle herd, for instance, in the United States
to be the same size as it was in the 1950s,
but produce 70% more beef with that same number of animals
for the world demanding more protein.
So that opportunity continues to happen
and it’s back to, agriculture has always embraced
how do we produce more with less, the definition of sustainability.
And so as we talk about lowering carbon scores,
for us, in agriculture, it hasn’t been just a pitch, it’s been reality.
So as we produce more crops,
we are able to create biofuels out of that kernel of corn
rather than just feed animals and protein because of the surplus that we had.
And so when the ethanol industry started,
it had a carbon intensity score of about a 99.
So the improvements in agriculture, improvements in the technology
of the plant, lowered that in half.
Took about 20 years to do that, but cut it in half.
So as technology continues to come about and the question being:
How do we lower the carbon intensity score to improve the environment?
Well today, the plants emit CO2 into the atmosphere
as part of fermentation to create the alcohol that becomes ethanol.
And what we know we can do is we can take, and we can capture that CO2,
we can compress it, we can put it in a pipe,
We can ship it to geology,
and North Dakota has done a terrific job at studying the geology
to be able to safely store that permanently and improve the environment.
Cut in half the carbon intensity score of that ethanol plant in that biofuel
by the single stroke of doing that.
And then if we overlay the opportunity of what's happening
and continuing to happen in the rest of agriculture
and investment in science, technology, innovation to improve yields,
and also beyond that, we can take other emitters;
we can take nitrogen plants,
and capture their CO2 that lowers the carbon intensity level
of that nitrogen that goes on every acre in the upper Midwest,
that lowers the carbon score on the corn produced.
It goes to the ethanol plants
that have the opportunity to have a net zero carbon fuel within a decade.
And again, if you think about that: net zero-carbon liquid fuel.
And without the impact to society of changing the electric grid,
of the higher carbon scores of electricity and electric vehicles,
but we can do that through agriculture,
we can do that the same way we’ve always done it.
It’s embracing science, technology, producing more with less,
and today we call that lowering the carbon intensity score.
The other area that just struck me a few years ago,
you had Unilever in Europe announce that every one of their 75,000 products
was going to have a carbon intensity score on it going forward.
So if you think about, food products have a nutritional score,
I would suggest to you as consumers,
we will be seeing in the near future
every product we buy having a carbon intensity score.
And agriculture has a great opportunity with the software systems that exist today
to figure out how we capture carbon in the soil,
how we change farming practices to lower the carbon footprint across the board,
and farmers will be incentivized to do that by the suppliers they work with
to create a cleaner, better environment, lowering the carbon score,
lowering the amount of energy it takes to feed and fuel the world every day.
So as I think about that opportunity,
and I think about the past, the present and the future,
I can’t help but be inspired by that opportunity
and by the acceptance in the communities
of how do we accept change, how do we make our life a better life,
and how do we look over the horizon to see what can be rather than what exists today.
And that’s what’s going to happen if we embrace sustainability,
it’s good for the environment, and also, we can do that,
and create healthy food and energy for the world going forward.
So thank you for having me here today, I appreciate being here.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Music)