Earlier this month, I enjoyed a visit to Boise for this year’s U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef General Assembly Meeting. It was great to see so many friends from our Trust In Beef world! Of course, like almost any sustainable ag event these days, the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities projects provided the backdrop and context for many of the discussions at USRSB, as the first 70 grant programs gear up to enroll farmers and ranchers to produce a diversity of climate-smart outcomes. It strikes me that the diversity of programs from the PCSC program is perhaps its greatest strength as well as a potential weakness: From the project presentations I’ve seen, it is clear that there will be a wide array of messaging on everything from program goals to how and why producers should consider climate-smart practices and PCSC participation. I’m starting to worry that without deeper collaboration among grantees on the front-end, we risk the real possibility of sowing confusion and cynicism. Consider this: USDA has estimated that over 60,000 producers are expected to enroll in PCSC projects. To get to that number of enrollees, we can conservatively estimate that at least 200,000 producers will have direct contact with the outreach of at least one program. As the projects are executed over time, those numbers will swell. Every outreach, technical support consultation, peer-network connection and over-the-fence conversations will help growers learn more about climate-smart agriculture. We estimate that in 5 years’ time, most producers will have had one or more touch points related to climate-smart agriculture. As a conservation ag community, I wonder if we have alignment on the opportunities and benefits of climate-smart agriculture – as well as a handle on the very real challenges – from a producer point of view? Trust In Food approaches producer outreach knowing that different farmers and ranchers have different values, motivations and goals for their operations. We’re applying our Human Dimensions of Change work to our own enrollment strategies so we can align our messaging and value proposition with the priorities of different producers. Collaboration is imperative for implementation, but we’ll never reach broad-based implementation goals without deeper alignment on producer centricity from the start. If this resonates with you, drop me a line to start a conversation about how we can set climate-smart agriculture implementation up for success. Yours in regenerative ag,
Amy Skoczlas Cole
President, Trust In Food™ | 