A book I started over the weekend has given me plenty of food for thought about the fundamentally human pursuit of working toward a climate-smart future. In “Take Charge Of You,” business executives David Novak and Jason Goldsmith describe the importance of self-coaching in life and in career. We can master new skills, become better leaders and achieve outrageous goals when we get serious about understanding what hampers us, what brings us joy and what outside experts can do to inform our journey. In a similar way, there is no one size fits all approach to climate-smart agriculture. Farmers take pride in their businesses and their land just as Main Street and Wall Street business leaders beam about their enterprises. Yet you wouldn’t (typically) invite a stockbroker to supervise a heart surgery any more than you would present yourself to a producer as an expert in the vagaries and specialized needs of the soils that underpin their operation (unless, that is, you are a soil scientist, an agronomist or an earthworm). Our responsibility as regenerative agriculture professionals is to deeply understand the unique perspectives, experiences and factors that drive individual farmers to make individual decisions—then be the conduit that gets them what they need to do the job. If we fail to appreciate the needs of fellow humans and instead make the climate-smart conversation all about putting practices on acres, we are inviting side-eyes and skepticism. Farmers take pride in their work, just like you and I do. Farmers have business needs, just like you and I do. Farmers don’t have a lot of extra time for a runaround, least of all at this time of year here in the Midwest where I live. Climate-smart agriculture will require practice adoption and innovation and a whole-of-industry transition that requires everyone to do their part, that’s true. (You’ll see what I mean when you read this week’s post about the Ginsu knife that is the spectrum of conservation ag activities available to U.S. producers.) But let’s not for a moment dampen the joy and nobility of agriculture as a profession in the process. Let’s empower farmers and let them do their jobs and put some humanity back in our business transactions. Because climate-smart agriculture requires people-smart leadership. Until next week,
Nate Birt
Vice President, Trust In Food™ | 
