Boots in the Dirt: Climate-Smart Agriculture in America’s Rice Capital

Chatting Up Arkansas Producers & The Alliance to Advance Climate-Smart Agriculture

We’ve had quite a busy summer here at RIPE and are grateful for every minute of it. Kicking off our summer adventures in Wisconsin, our travels took us to Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and most recently, Arkansas. We spent a few days in America’s Rice Capital to attend the Alliance to Advance Climate-Smart Agriculture Summit, meet with members of RIPE’s Steering Committee, and tour Isbell Farms, which promotes regenerative and climate-smart agriculture in its operations.

One of the best parts about our summer travels is seeing just what “rural America” looks like in several different places. Rural Pennsylvania and Rural North Dakota seem starkly different, yet RIPE’s mission is relevant to producers in both places, and everywhere in-between. Our work is meant to be impactful for producers across the country, with operations of all shapes and sizes. Our summer of farm tours and conservation conversations in many places across the country has been as exciting as it has been productive, ending with our trip to The Natural State earlier this month.

RIPE Past President, Eunie Biel, Executive Director Trey Cooke, and Communications Manager Melissa Willhouse traveled to Little Rock, AR to attend the Alliance to Advance Climate-Smart Agriculture first annual summit. While there, we met up with members of our Steering Committee, IDEA Committee and Board of Directors. This was an especially meaningful trip for us because RIPE wrote the proposal that laid the groundwork for this pilot project. Getting to see the proposal that we developed in action was rewarding and reinvigorating, giving us some fresh ideas and perspectives as to how we can best serve producers and rural communities across the United States.

This pilot project has three main goals:

• • Promoting agricultural productivity
    • Achieve global climate and food security goals through sustainable agricultural productivity growth

• • Creating strong markets
    • Invest in America’s farmers and build markets for climate-smart commodities to strengthen rural and agricultural communities

• • Improving climate resilience
    • Measure, quantify, and promote the carbon and greenhouse gas benefits resulting from climate-smart practices

Read more about the framework that supports these goals on their website.

While in Arkansas, we enjoyed a night out with several representatives from our Steering Committee who were also in attendance at the summit. This group included persons from the Arkansas Rice Federation, North Dakota Grain Growers Association, Minnesota Farmers Union, North Dakota Farmers Union, National Black Growers Council, and the Minnesota State Cattlemen’s Association. While gathered with this group, we presented RIPE Past President and current Board Member Eunie Biel with an award to honor her for all of her hard work in helping RIPE grow.

We managed to squeeze in a trip to Isbell Farms as well. Isbell Farms, located in England, AR, is a multi-generational family rice farm located in Central Arkansas with a focus on the sustainable production of quality rice. Five generations have now farmed rice on Isbell Farms, and rice has been in cultivation here for over 70 years. Per their website, “at Isbell Farms, sustainability is part of our heritage and part of our future. Our initial goal was simply to do the right thing and do it well.  It was only later that we learned that others had started using a word to refer to what we had long considered a core value: sustainability.  We think of it in terms of stewardship.” Isbell Farms proudly holds a gold ranking in the SAI Sustainability Platform and was the recipient of 2016 Commitment to Quality Award from the American Carbon Registry. Read more about their Sustainability Practices straight from the source.

Our tour of Isbell Farms happened to fall on the day they began harvesting their rice crop. This allowed us to ride in the tractor with Mark Isbell as he chatted about the regenerative agriculture practices they implement, as well as the history of farming in his family. We even stopped by the rice mill where Isbell’s crops are refined into market-ready products. Getting to see the production process from start to finish was certainly an exciting experience.

Another interesting feature of Isbell Farms is their array of solar panels located conveniently on-site. The power produced by these solar panels goes directly back to the farm, allowing Isbell Farms to harness solar power within their operation and use it to fuel their production system and their houses located on the property as well. There is so much opportunity for renewables to be used to benefit farms across the country, and it was great to see an example of this in action. The solar panels on Isbell Farms are located on a part of the property that is not ideal for crops, so rather than having an empty space, the Isbell family is making the most of it.

RIPE supports expanding clean energy opportunities for farmers and mitigating the tension sometimes created by installing it on productive agricultural lands. Specifically, we support:

• Ensuring renewable energy projects are designed in a way to benefit farmers, ranchers, and rural citizens
• Incentivizing and increasing R&D for dual-use agri voltaics plan that allow for solar alongside farming, if placed on productive or unique farmland.
• Expanding USDA REAP benefits to farmer-led cooperatives to allow for shared resource pooling and benefits.
• Requiring developers who lease solar arrays on farmland to decommission them in a manner that protects the land for active agriculture future use.

We believe that renewable energy has the potential to directly benefit farmers and ranchers, as well as citizens in rural America, where utility-scale projects are being built. Furthermore, citing commercial-scale renewable energy, on the farm for farm use, can be extremely beneficial as demonstrated at Isbell Farms.

Scaling regenerative agriculture the RIPE Way includes direct compensation for clean energy, in part because of the high cost of installation and other policies, and market mechanisms are more appropriate for rewarding it fairly. Future iterations of our work could include consideration of direct compensation for clean energy, which delivers in the range of $5,000 to $18,000 per acre in public environmental benefits, after careful analysis of how to protect productive agricultural lands and farmers’ economic opportunities, as well as best use of various programs and market mechanisms. Check out our Research and Policy page for more information about the practices which we believe producers should be fairly compensated for, including clean energy.

It can be easy to disregard all of the people and processes involved in providing food for the masses. Especially if you don’t live in a rural community. Unless you are growing your own food or shopping at a farmer’s market every week, food can just be a product on a shelf at the grocery store. We trust that these stores are providing us with safe, ready-to-eat food at the most affordable price possible from producers who are reliable and ethical (if we even consider that part of the supply chain). In reality, these producers are arguably the most important part of the supply chain as the supply begins with them. As consumers, we want affordable food produced through sustainable and ethical means – the livelihood of the producer should be top of mind too. This is where RIPE’s work and the work of the Alliance to Advance Climate-Smart Agriculture comes in, each with the goal of compensating producers for the public benefits of their conservation practices. This is the key in providing healthy, affordable food for our ever-growing population through sustainable and ethical means, WHILE promoting soil health and natural resource security.