Clay Mitchell’s shed in northeastern Iowa, on the other hand, is more like a wizard’s lair—and a toasty one at that. There are tall racks of tools and parts, wrenches, tractor parts, and other gear you’d expect, but also network switches, cables, and sensors. There is a huge Irish wolfhound named Smoogie who is Clay’s field general for deer management during growing season but who lounged on a soft bed when I visited the shed in January 2013. There is a fertilizer applicator that has a number of custom elements Clay and his father have designed for farm equipment, such as section control to fine-tune the amount and location of the fertilizer application, and an independent steering mechanism so both the tractor and the applicator are controlled by GPS for maximum efficiency.
But there is also a spotless, automated bathroom, which is so nice that I don’t imagine even my four sisters would complain about using these facilities. There were still some Christmas decorations on the counter, and I watched family portraits and farm photos flash across a digital photo frame on a nearby wall. My sense is that the Mitchells want everyone to feel welcome here. During my visit, I spoke with a young woman from a neighboring farm who was working with Clay’s dad, Wade, on a roof cover for a small tractor. Clay explained that Wade is a mentor to many young farmers in the area. “I’m going to Iowa State University next year,” she told me, with plans to pursue a career in agriculture.
Up near the ceiling, a four-foot-high light indicator from an old John Deere foundry flickered. The industrial-strength heater kicked on, and had the place almost fifty degrees warmer than the icy twenty-six degrees outside. Clay and Wade have rigged up hundreds of sensors around the farm that they can program this “marquee” to monitor with blinking light patterns, such as when the heater is running or a fertilizer tank is running low and somebody needs to drive a tender out to fill it up. The light marquee may be vintage, but there is a good reason that Time magazine once called the Mitchell Farm “the farm of the future.”
IMPATIENT FOR CHANGE
Clay Mitchell, forty, is considered one of the most progressive, innovative crop farmers in the United States. Over a decade ago, he was the first farmer in the Midwest to use GPS-steered farm equipment. The equipment innovations are significant, but what is most important to my father and me is that the Mitchells are committed to preserving soil, making chemical use as efficient as possible, and also—and this point is critical—doing it in a way that delivers profits to farmers. Clay is a tireless advocate for no-till farming and long-term approaches, and, in the spirit of forty chances, he believes in mentoring and in evangelizing the lessons he’s learned so that other farmers benefit. Even though change comes far too slowly for his taste, he gives me reason to hope that US agriculture is moving in the right direction.
Five generations of Mitchells have farmed this region about an hour northwest of Cedar Rapids, near the small Iowa town of Buckingham. Clay’s great-great-grandfather moved his family here from Ireland. They launched a family farming operation to support themselves. Today Clay farms with his great-uncle, his dad, and his cousin. Clay himself is quiet but intense. He keeps a desk in the machine shed, and during my visit, he leaned against the corner of it with his laptop open to show me a PowerPoint presentation of some findings from incredible experiments he had conducted.
In 2009 he hand-tagged individual bar codes on 1,200 corn plants in four locations on his farm. Then, throughout the growing season, he took multiple, frequent measurements of many variables, including stalk thickness, number of leaves, water penetration in surrounding ground, fertilizer utilization, photosynthesis, and more.
One objective was to measure effects of what is called “controlled traffic” on a field, which refers to confining the paths that farm equipment travels over and over, and using wide wheels on the equipment to disperse the weight and create less soil compaction. Soil compaction is a major issue in farming, for several reasons. Compacted, dense soil creates a crust, and young plants have trouble breaking through it. In addition, it inhibits plant roots from growing and taking up nutrients, and prevents water from penetrating the soil. That can inhibit growth, create runoff, and reduce yield. Clay’s data showed that water infiltration in controlled-traffic fields can be upwards of twenty times the rate in fields where farmers are driving heavy equipment all over on narrower tires.
Those numbers grabbed my attention: efficient water use is something that is only going to get more important in farming in the future. For example, on our foundation’s farm in Arizona, there is already serious concern over water volume rationing, and water is only going to become more precious—and more expensive.
Clay and I discussed how his data on compaction do not necessarily provide a straightforward answer to water efficiency: infiltration rates vary by soil types, for example. It’s also influenced by factors such as whether rainfall has been fairly steady over time: steady rainfall tends to soften soils and improve infiltration, whereas long dry periods can make some soils harden like concrete. However, soil compaction is an important phenomenon to study in more depth and in more places—not only to make water use as efficient as possible but also to prevent runoff, which erodes soils and transports fertilizers and pesticides to river systems and other environments where they don’t belong.
The data fascinated me, especially the time and labor required to take the ongoing measurements. But our time together was starting to get tight, and Clay had a whole section of his presentation about the efficiency of pesticide spraying. One machine that he and his father invented works with different nozzles to vary the size of the droplets emitted to cover the plant leaves so that they don’t drift in the air and deliver “sublethal” doses that encourage pesticide resistance. As I checked the time, Clay seemed chagrined. “Okay, I’ll try to go through this quickly,” he said. Then he frowned and looked up, grimacing a little. “No, actually, I can’t. I can’t do this quickly.”
I smiled. Clay is so data driven and analytical that he can’t conceive of cutting corners.
We got to know Clay several years ago. He gave my dad a call to talk about conservation farming. Clay and his wife drove to Decatur, and my father took them to lunch. Then my dad invited him to visit our foundation’s farm in South Africa. Clay and I both attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2012. That event featured impressive speakers, heads of state, and titans of business, but the hour or so when I sat down and talked with Clay was my favorite part of the trip. He is on a mission to get farmers around the world to farm in a more sustainable way, and he is trying to inspire government leaders to craft policies to support that goal. But as a fifth-generation farmer steeped in Midwestern farming culture, he is acutely aware of the inhibitors of making that change happen.
As my father touched on earlier, farming in the United States has a rich history and a particular ethos. Traditionally, fathers have passed down their techniques and wisdom to the next generation. While there has been consolidation in recent decades, it’s still true on many farms that families have worked the same parcels of land for generations. Farmers are subject to the laws of supply and demand for their prices, but subsidy designs, inadequate or missing data, or other much less scientific factors can also influence their behavior and financial success.
There have been incredible spikes in farmland prices in parts of the Midwest in recent years. The day I visited Clay, a nearby parcel had sold for $17,000 per acre. In Iowa, land carries what’s called a CSR rating—that stands for “corn suitability rating.” It is an assessment, in many places done decades earlier, about the potential of that land to produce corn. The trouble is, it’s a static measurement. “It’s like selling a classic car based on the condition it was in when it rolled out of the Ford assembly plant on day one,” Clay said. The measurement does not assess how the land has been treated since the day it was given its rating. And yet it’s not uncommon for a farmer selling land not to give more information than that rating in terms of describing its quality. As Clay explain
ed, recent land values are not necessarily high because a given parcel is so valuable from a productivity standpoint. Rises in commodity prices have meant that farmers have more cash on hand than they’ve had in the past, and, as Clay pointed out, “If all you’ve ever wanted is that parcel of land that goes right up to yours so you could square off your field, and there is a guy on the other side who feels the same way, when it finally comes up for sale, you are going to pay a lot for it. It may be the only chance in your life you’ll ever have to get it.”
IT’S HARD TO HIDE ON A TRACTOR
Tradition and peer pressure also influence farmers. A unique element of farming in our part of the country is that, unlike the diversified “salad bowl” farming of fruits, nuts, and vegetables in California or the southern US, Midwestern corn, wheat, and soybean farmers all tend to do the same thing at the same time, whether it is disking, planting, fertilizing, or harvesting. When you’re out in your cornfield, you see what the farmer in the next cornfield is doing. You may be waiting for the right weather to spray, but if you see a neighbor start, you get anxious and may scramble to hurry up and do the same. If he upgrades his irrigation pivot, you start wondering if you should go shopping too. I’m told that farmers were not always this competitive, but with so many renting land and needing to demonstrate performance to their landlords through high yields, I know for a fact that they are today.
It’s hard, maybe impossible, to farm in secret. When a farmer tries something new, word spreads. He’s asked about it at the coffee shop, at the farm supply store, and in line at the bank. It’s a lot of pressure. Raised eyebrows from a neighbor make some farmers nervous. It can be a disincentive to try new things, and, when you do, according to Clay, there can be a tendency to stick too long with an approach that doesn’t work very well, just because you’re now known for doing it. Innovation isn’t easy. Pride may make a farmer throw good labor and money after bad.
But one of the biggest issues Clay sees as undermining smarter farming practices is that we don’t have accurate mechanisms or data to represent the true cost of treating land badly. Earlier in the day, as we drove around the area, he pointed to a farmer’s field with lots of rolling hills on it. “That guy is losing so much soil. He’s got ditches below the downhill slopes, and the county comes and hauls the soil away,” he said, referring to all the soil that runs off the hills, building up and clogging the ditches by the road. The farmer uses traditional chisel plowing at the end of his harvest season, ripping up the cornstalk residue from the old crop and turning over the top foot or so of soil and then just letting it sit fallow all winter. This practice is the standard for the majority of grain farmers in the United States, and one of the problems with it is that it “looks” neat. “I call that a Dorian Gray farm,” said Clay. “There is massive erosion, and he’s lost hundreds of years of soil, but you till it up, and it looks good.” A worked field gives the appearance of meticulous care. “No-till farming takes more deliberation and precision,” Clay admitted. “Tilling is an easy way for a farmer to cover up a lot of his mistakes. If he has weeds, he can cover them up. If his fields get compacted, he can till to loosen the upper portion of the soil. If he gets gullies after a rainstorm, he fills them in with dirt. He is degrading the land, but he doesn’t see the cost of that.”
Conservation farming, on the other hand, demands that a farmer leave the residue from the previous crop on the ground, where it adds to the organic matter of the soil as it decomposes. And it can involve the planting of cover crops. Cover crops can help fix nitrogen and hold the soil in place in rain and wind, but they tend to be low-lying plants that give a field a messy, weedy appearance. “The irony of plowing is that you use it to cover up your problems, and doing that makes the problems worse,” Clay noted. It’s almost like an alcoholic waking up with a hangover and taking a shot to feel better. It gives some immediate relief but only adds to the addiction. Clay has a photograph of a farm on a hill where the placement of a telephone pole years ago limited how closely the farmer could plow and plant. What’s shocking is that the chunk of land around the pole is now four or five feet higher than the hillside around it. Over the expanse of his whole field, that represents thousands of tons of topsoil that have washed down the hill, probably into gullies and some portion ultimately to a river system, never to return. Clay says that since it takes five hundred or more years for natural sources to produce an inch of topsoil, “It’s a disaster to lose even an eighth of an inch a year of topsoil,” he explained, “but when it’s happening, you don’t notice it.”
There is no easy way to measure the economic impact of soil erosion. You pay an invoice for seed and fuel, but the bill from Mother Nature will be paid by future generations. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Clay’s personal and family history has shaped his strong feelings and his experimental and creative approaches. Wade stressed the importance of education with his boys starting young. Clay says his dad taught his brother, Guy, enough physics and math by age four (not a typo) that he qualified for his ham radio license. Clay earned a degree in biomedical engineering from Harvard University. He found an outlet for his energy as a collegiate ski racer, but his heart never left the farm. Between his junior and senior years, he bought two hundred acres in Iowa.
Clay’s background is not typical, but his love of farming and his passion for helping farmers improve their technology and methods are infectious. He admits that he gets frustrated with how slowly farmers are changing their behavior, and he’s concerned about consolidation in agriculture, which tends to favor crop yields over soil stewardship. However, the Mitchells consistently outproduce their neighbors by 20 percent to 30 percent, numbers that should persuade even the most stubborn old-school farmers to consider changing their ways.
On the bright side, the Mitchells get a lot of visitors to this shed, lately more than Clay says he can even handle. That’s a good sign. Representatives from major companies such as John Deere and Trimble Navigation come here to look at new ideas Wade and Clay come up with or to drop off a piece of equipment that the Mitchells want to incorporate into a new design. They avoid formal arrangements, however. “We have an open door, and they have an open door to us,” Clay explained. “If we worried about intellectual property and all that, it would take months to do anything. We just explain what we want to do, and they trust us [not to go off and try to commercialize it on our own]. We can get a new part or piece of equipment here in a week”—compared to six months just to negotiate an intellectual property agreement.
We talked about ways to try to promote better farming. These days Clay splits his time between Iowa and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he and a college ski teammate have started an investment company called Fall Line Capital right in the heart of Silicon Valley. (A fall line is the most efficient path down a hill.) It seems curious: a farmland investment firm in California’s high-tech heart. But Clay is looking for new ways to force changes in farming practices that utilize market levers. The fund invests in farmland that Clay believes has potential to be more productive—not on the basis of emotional factors or outdated measurements but on the basis of its actual quality and potential to respond to good soil management and conservation farming techniques. I find this to be an interesting and creative approach. Being located in Silicon Valley also gives Clay and his partner an eye on emerging technologies they can apply to this effort, such as soil-sampling technologies to analyze soil quality right in the field in real time, which a Mountain View, California, company is developing.
FARM OWNERSHIP IS CHANGING
Sometimes small, simple, low-tech changes can make a big difference too. Clay said it is hard to find land-lease contracts with language requiring renters to use conservation techniques. The terms are not standard. This area of contract law has not developed yet. We discussed whether our foundation might help support the preparation of sample contracts that could be a resource for farmland owners interested in preserving the value of their soil. He mentioned an
interesting reality: a large percentage of farmland owners in Iowa today are women, often farmers’ widows who end up leasing the family land to contract farmers instead of farming it themselves. According to data from Successful Farming magazine, 70 percent of farmland will change hands in the next two decades, and 75 percent of that land will be transferred to women.1 In cases where new farm owners have not had much involvement in the operation of the farm, they may not be well versed in either farming contracts or the principles of conservation farming. One solution could be conducting an outreach program that provides resources such as standard contracts that focus on land management and preservation. That sounds simple enough, and could prove to be an incredibly useful tool.
Another aspect of incentivizing farmers to be good stewards of the soil involves the government conservation programs available today. The government pays Clay $40 for each acre of his farm planted with cover crops such as rye and radishes, which he figures costs him $30 an acre. We spent nearly an hour discussing government subsidies, as well as conservation efforts such as the Conservation Stewardship Program.
The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) encourages young farmers like me to farm without tillage, preserving our greatest asset: soil. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Like us, Clay wants to see improvements in the way the government incentivizes conservation-minded behavior, focused first and foremost on better soil management practices. “The truth is, it just doesn’t make sense to have price support subsidies anymore,” said Clay. “Our real problem as a nation is that we are no longer on the leading edge of farming practices anymore. It’s amazing that Brazil and Argentina are ahead of us in soil management techniques like no-till.” Clay notes that there are huge no-till operations in places like Kazakhstan, where literally millions of wheat acres are being farmed using no-till—versus only perhaps 30 percent of US farms, and perhaps only 5 percent of them are exclusively no-till.
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