Transcriber: Thảo Nguyên Nguyễn Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Thank you all for having me today.
I’d like to introduce you two very special people to me,
who, through the challenges they were born with,
have helped me to see our food system through a different lens.
This is my son, Spencer.
He was born with a rare syndrome called 49,XXXXY,
which causes cognitive and physical challenges.
49,XXXXY is not considered heritable.
And Spencer has enriched our lives in many ways.
But understanding the challenges he faced,
we chose to have genetic testing before trying for a second child,
and those tests revealed no concerns.
That’s our daughter Tatum, kissing her older brother on the cheek.
She’s pretty spectacular.
When we found out we were pregnant with her, we were ecstatic.
Then our obstetrician gave us the diagnosis
of monoamniotic-monochorionic twins,
something that disrupted what we hoped would be a normal pregnancy,
instead resulting in the loss of one twin
and Tatum being born
with a life-threatening abdominal wall birth defect called an omphalocele.
Tatum was just a few hours old when I took this picture.
I’d just finished meeting with the medical team
that would soon perform the first of many surgeries to correct her birth defects.
And during that meeting, the nurse on the team looked at me
and asked a question I’ll never forget.
“Mr. Watkins, it just doesn’t make sense
that both your children have these challenges.
But we see you farm for a living.
Where does your family get their water?”
The team’s concern was that my children’s birth defects
can be caused by endocrine disruption from exposure to drinking water
polluted with the millions of pounds of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers
used to grow Iowa’s corn and soybeans.
Nitrogen fertilizer and the herbicide glyphosate are suspected disrupters.
Six and a half million pounds of the herbicide atrazine,
a proven endocrine disruptor,
are applied to Iowa’s crops every single year.
Now, I'm not an organic farmer.
I use some of these products,
and I think It’s important we learn to farm
without chemicals and synthetic fertilizer.
But it’s critical we farm in ways that keep them out of our water.
Fact is,
our water treatment plant operators are the unsung heroes of this state,
but there’s only so much they can do.
[Atrazine 6.5 million lbs]
I’ll probably never know for sure
if farm chemicals caused my children’s birth defects.
But I can’t prove they didn’t.
What I can prove is that Iowa’s farmers can be productive
and keep these poisons out of our water.
Tatum and Spencer's health challenges reveal the real problem we must address,
which is a failing food system that needlessly exploits people
and nature to secure the food we eat.
And sadly, it's human nature that drives this problem.
E.O. Wilson’s insight is that our power
to make the most of immediate opportunities can be institutionalized,
making it very difficult to change entrenched behavior
when we learn how to do things better.
Technology is important,
but just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
The technology of synthetic fertilizer
masks the degradation of our soil while polluting our water.
Technologies such as antibiotics have allowed us to confine livestock.
These are both short-term solutions with long-term consequences.
Often it’s our technology that holds us back
from the sustainable solutions we need to fix our failing food system,
creating more problems for others downstream, literally.
Institutions such as slavery
and our government’s genocide of Native Americans
on behalf of farming settlers
were reinforced by the primitive emotions
that make us accept the destruction of natural resources
and exploitation of others
as justified in securing our self-interest.
And we see the senseless influence of these emotions, institutions
and God-like technology in our food system today
with the treatment of essential workers in Iowa’s packing plants.
I feel this influence when my own industry lobbies to keep atrazine on the market,
telling me to care more about the corn I raise
than the health of my family.
We see the destruction of resources essential to the success of our state
with the fact that soil erosion is happening
at 16 times the rate of soil generation,
leading to sedimentation of our water, nutrient pollution and habitat loss,
resulting in over a third of all Iowa species being in decline.
And we justify this soil loss and nutrient pollution
because the chemicals and synthetic fertilizers that were used
are necessary to drive high yields.
Yet these yields cannot be environmentally or economically sustained.
In my lifetime, there have only been nine years
where the price of corn actually exceeded the cost of production,
with Farm Bill entitlements, supported by your tax dollars,
making up the difference.
Iowa’s farmers once raised 157 different crops
and received no subsidies.
Today, we raise predominantly two crops:
corn and soy,
and receive over a billion dollars a year in entitlements.
I’m a farmer, and I receive these subsidies.
But you deserve clean water and healthy soil for your investment in me.
Fixing our failing food system
has to start with prioritizing both stewardship and social equity.
These issues are intertwined
and we can’t successfully address one without the other.
Without stewardship we’ll continue to erode our state’s natural resources,
creating a future of scarcity and conflict.
These conditions will never allow for social equity.
Yet when we ignore the inequality
and exploitation inherent in our food system,
we create a vicious cycle that’s only made possible by rationalizing
that what we’re doing is acceptable.
I’m a fourth generation white, male landowner.
I've never been excluded from USDA loans or programs for the color of my skin.
I’ve never been forced to work in a covid-infected environment
to sustain a failing food system.
The injustice of our food system is on people who don’t own land.
It’s on people who are essential but invisible,
working in our packing plants, dairies
and picking our fruits and vegetables for poverty wages.
And it’s on families who can’t afford nutritious food,
because we subsidize the wrong things.
When it comes to social equity, my role is to listen,
learn and support a system where all people can thrive.
Farm stewardship is something I do understand.
The reason I’m standing here today
is 23 years ago in the middle of a blizzard,
I finally decided to trust my gut
and start focusing on stewardship instead of production.
Until that fateful blizzard,
my farming practices were inspired
by the embodiment of manifest destiny himself.
Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, who in 1971 when I was just two years old,
told farmers to get big or get out.
His directive was to use the modern technological package of chemicals,
equipment and synthetic fertilizer to maximize our production of commodities.
Yield above all else.
Until that blizzard, I did my best to follow Mr. Butz’s advice.
Farming with a total focus on production.
My attitude was modern technology and determination
could conquer anything Mother Nature threw my way.
Oh, I saw things that concerned me:
muddy streams,
fewer birds,
wildflowers on our landscape.
Practice that always concerned me
was having my cows calve in February and early March.
Industry wisdom was that by getting calving out of the way early,
I could dedicate my labor to planting corn in April
and have bigger calves to sell in the fall,
which, to an ag economist, probably looked good on paper.
But seeing a shivering, muddy baby calf
on a cold, wet, miserable, snowy March day
never looked good to me.
But when your industry experts are telling you to maximize your production
to feed a hungry world,
it’s hard to trust your gut,
even when you see things that concern you.
Then on March 11, 1998,
the blizzard struck in the middle of calving season.
Within hours, the temperature fell from 60 to below zero,
15 inches of snow, sustained 40 mile per hour winds.
I worked around the clock sheltering cows in chaos.
This miserable experience was the inspiration I needed to trust my gut
and ask the most important question of my career.
“Why am I working against Mother Nature?”
What I really wanted was clean water, healthy soil and happy cows.
And this meant switching my focus from production to stewardship.
If the experts right and I went broke with this new approach, so be it.
I’d had enough.
And I just wanted to do right by the cows and the land.
I started by moving my calving season to April.
The warmer April weather reduced my costs,
and this small change made wonderful things happen.
The warmer April weather reduced my costs for fuel, equipment and feed,
and allowing the cows to express their natural instincts
by calving on warm green pastures instead of cold, muddy lots,
reduced their stress and increased their productivity.
Instead of going broke, making a happy cow made my farm profitable,
kick-starting a beautiful relationship with Mother Nature.
And over time I’ve worked to build a system
that reduces my reliance on finite resources
by enhancing the biodiversity and natural resources
that truly sustain my farm.
Five pieces of this system with the greatest impact so far
include no-till.
This is placed in seed directly in the ground without tillage,
which reduces soil erosion as well as fuel and equipment costs.
Second,
by diversifying my corn-soy rotation to include oats, clover and alfalfa,
I’ve enriched my soil and enhanced biodiversity.
Iowa State University research shows multi-species crop rotations
greatly reduce my chemical needs, nitrogen fertilizer needs, soil erosion
and fossil fuel needs,
improving my bottom line by working with nature.
Yet our farm bill subsidizes the production of commodities,
not the regeneration of the resources we depend upon,
sending a very confusing message to farmers wanting to apply this research
and do the right thing.
The third piece of my system is cover crops.
Prior to harvest, I use a helicopter to fly rye into standing corn.
This will regenerate my soil’s organic matter in the winter
with a blanket of living plants,
actively pulling carbon from the atmosphere
while keeping nutrients on my farm and out of our water.
I mean, come on, farming with a helicopter,
regenerating our soil and protecting our water?
I’ve got the greatest job ever!
(Laughter)
The fourth piece of my system and my favorite
is farming with nature to enhance wild species.
Prairie strips are a perfect example.
By strategically restoring prairie to my fields,
I have been able to improve my return on investment.
And bring birds, wildflowers and pollinators back to our landscape,
while the deep prairie roots restore my soil and protect our water.
And finally, I integrate the cows back into my cropping system in the winter
to graze the cover crops, recycling the nutrients my next crop will require.
It's the golden rule of agronomy.
If you take something off the land, you must replace it.
A cow is perfect for this.
(Laughter)
High-quality forage in the front, high-quality nutrients out the back.
I think you get the picture.
Stewardship has made my farm sustainable for three reasons.
First, it’s profitable,
and there is no sustainability without profit.
Second, it makes my farm ecologically sound.
Farms are living systems.
Living systems are sustained by natural resources:
soil, sunlight, rainfall and the knowledge they all work together.
Our farms can’t be sustained by finite resources:
fossil fuel, chemicals, equipment.
Because over time the cost of these resources
will exceed the cost of the products I raise.
A better way of saying this is that my role as a farmer is not to produce.
My role is to care for the land.
And when I do this properly, the land can provide for us all.
And third, stewardship makes my farm socially responsible.
We all deserve clean, safe water.
Farming with nature
regenerates and protects the natural resources we all depend upon,
ensuring that the water that leaves my farm is safe.
Creating a bright future for Tatum and Spencer means everything to me.
I can’t undo the past.
But together we can address the failures in our food system
and give all of our children the bright future they deserve.
But the reality is, as it stands today,
our food system, which we’re all a part of,
continues to needlessly exploit people and nature
in ways that are harmful to our communities,
our families and our environment for the sake of yield.
That’s me sitting on my grandmother’s Shambaugh’s lap.
Her legacy in founding what would become 4-H
reassures me that we can fix our failing food system.
Her work proved that when we strive to make our best better,
agriculture can be a force for good.
Exploiting and excluding others, treating people as less than
does not make our best better.
Destroying our natural resources does not make our best better.
Embracing social equity and diversity makes our best better.
Regenerating and protecting our natural resources
makes our best better.
When we focus on stewardship and social equity,
we build better farms.
When we build better farms, we build better communities.
And when we build better communities, we build a better future.
This is a legacy we can all be proud of,
and this is the legacy our children deserve.
(Applause) (Cheers)