Episode #217
Scott Myers: Organic Grain Against the Odds

After meeting at an event in DC, Ohio farmer Scott Myers gives Linley a candid look at the realities of organic grain farming. From the challenges of crop rotation and cover crops to the pressures of competing with fraudulent imports amid weak federal support, Scott lays out what it takes to grow with integrity in a system stacked against small producers. As a second-generation farmer who transitioned to organic for soil health and long-term resilience, he reminds us that farming isn’t just about yields – it’s about building something that lasts.

Our Scott Myers interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Linley Dixon interviews Scott Myers in Washington DC, Spring 2024

Linley Dixon 0:00
Welcome, Scott Myers, to the Real Organic Podcast. Thank you for sitting down with me. You’re one of those farmers who literally have endless entertaining stories to tell. I’m so appreciative that you agreed to do a podcast. I definitely want to amplify these stories because I think they’re really important. Let’s start – just tell us a little bit about Woodlyn Acres Farm in Ohio.

Scott Myers 0:23
Sure. I farm at Woodlyn Acres Farm with my father, so it’s a father-and-son operation. I have four boys that are coming up to farm in that. We raise about 2,500 acres of various certified organic crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, sunflowers, peas, oats, and hay. Our farm is very diverse in what we do.

Linley Dixon 0:51
You missed three. You said ten crops?

Linley Dixon 0:53
Ten crops, yeah. Multiple types of wheats: spring wheat, winter wheat, barley, and cereal rye… I think I got ten there. We do a lot of different crops. It’s a varied operation. Lots of different tillage practices – no till. Just all kinds of things. [inaudible 0:01:15] in our crops. A lot of different things that we use on our farm.

Linley Dixon 1:18
Long rotations was one of them. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your thought process in your rotations.

Scott Myers 1:26
Rotations depend on the soil types. We have lots and lots of different soil types in northeastern Ohio. We’re not big, flat fields. A lot of people think of Ohio as having big, flat fields – that’s Western Ohio. Our side of Ohio has small 10-acre fields, 15-acre fields, lots of tree lines around the edges, waterways, and odd-shaped fields. Some of them aren’t suited to hay production. We do make a lot of hay. Some of the lower, heavy ground doesn’t raise hay as good.

Scott Myers 1:57
So, those fields will be shorter rotations where we’ll use corn, soybeans, and wheat rotation and use cover crops in between. So, like corn, we will go to soybeans the next year and use a rye-companion crop, or a rye no-till crop that we roll and crimp rye down. Then after that, we go to wheat and use a red clover cover crop that we frost seed into that, and then after that, we will go back to corn. That’s our short rotation.

Scott Myers 2:28
Our longer rotation would be corn and soybeans – like we talked about there – and then into wheat. Then we seed it to hay at that point, and then it’ll stay in hay for usually three to four years. Then after that it will go back to corn. That usually is a 6 to 8 year rotation in that respect. It just depends. We try to be flexible. Sometimes it depends on markets as well.

Scott Myers 2:52
The corn and soybean market is pretty much a feed market. We can raise as much as we want there. Our wheat market is a specialty food-grade wheat market. We’re raising hard red winter wheat and hard red spring wheat. The mill we work with is very dependent on what they need in the next year. Some years they need more spring wheat; some years, they need more winter wheat. So, we try to work with our customers on that.

Scott Myers 3:20
I mentioned sunflowers earlier. That’s another one that’s variable based on the price. That’s a contracted crop, so it’s based on the price and how much we plant there as well. When we do our organic systems plan, my inspector always has fun because they always want to know, “Hey, what is your rotation? It’s set in stone, and ours is not.” It’s very flexible. We have a general rotation, but it depends on what crops we need and what our buyers want – it’s what we’re trying to grow.

Linley Dixon 3:52
You have a really fascinating transition story. I’d like you to talk about the transition, but you also said that sometimes your prices for organic are lower than the conventional prices, and you actually had to sell conventional at one point. Is that true? Did I remember that…?

Scott Myers 4:14
Not quite. One thing we do with hay – our hay production – we’re fortunate to live in Ohio. Where we live is the second-largest concentration of Organic Valley dairies. We have a lot of organic hay demand. But before we were certified organic 25 years ago, I started out with a hay business so I could come back and farm with my father. We didn’t have enough acres at the time to support two families.

Linley Dixon 4:44
It was just conventional corn soybean…?

Scott Myers 4:46
Right. It was conventional corn and soy beans. We had some small grains and, like, 30 acres of hay. When I was in high school, we used to make small, square bales of hay and put them in the mow. People always laughed when I told them that I never wanted to make hay again because we used to do 30,000 to 40,000 small squares. I hated it. I’m like, “I never want to raise hay again, ever in my life. Because this is the most awful thing.” Then I came back after college and decided I was going to be in the hay business. I had a thousand acres of hay, but doing that in big square bales. It wasn’t manual labor, but it’s still stressful.

Scott Myers 5:25
Before we were organic 10 years ago, the first 10 to 15 years of the hay business was dealing with conventional farmers and selling hay to them. Our goal was to raise high-quality dairy hay in our part of Ohio rather than have them ship it in from the western United States. It saved them money on their hay, but we were also able to capture some of the transportation costs, and so that helped. In our transition then, we still sell some of our organic hay conventionally, for organic prices, because there’s not a premium in organic hay, like there is for some of the other stuff.

Scott Myers 6:04
Oats is another one. The oats’ price that we get is not based…we sell it mostly locally to horse owners, specifically Amish horse owners. We figured out how to raise a very high-quality, high test weight oats in Ohio, which is great. They’ll pay for that, but they don’t care if it’s organic or not. They love that it’s organic, but they’re not paying a premium because it’s organic. They’re paying because they want that test weight. That’s what they’re looking for, and the higher protein that we raise with that. Price-wise, it really doesn’t make a difference if we sell it as organic or conventional.

Scott Myers 6:39
How did the transition work then? You came back, and you just did the organic hay. Did it take a while to get the corn, soy, and the other crops…

Scott Myers 6:47
Yeah. When we started the organic hay – and that came from our dairy customers – we had a lot of small, 50 to 75 cow dairies, a lot of work from the plain Amish community. Organic Valley dairies came in, and they were bringing these dairies on. This was about 10-12 years ago. 10-12 years ago, organic milk was really taking off, and they needed that supply. The conventional milk was really not good right then. A lot of the conventional dairy processing plants wanted to go to only semi-loads. They didn’t want to have to pick up milk from multiple small dairies. At that point, if you weren’t a 300- or 400-cow dairy, they didn’t want you anymore. They were just dropping them. At that point, Organic Valley came in and said, “Hey, we want you.”

Scott Myers 6:47
I remember it was like two weeks before Thanksgiving. I started getting these weird phone calls from normal hay customers that had already spoken for hay. They were like, “Sorry, we’re going to have to back out of the hay because we’re transitioning to organic.” At first I was really kind of bummed. I’m like, “Man, this isn’t good.” By about the fifth or sixth call, they were all asking me, “Where can I buy organic hay?”

Linley Dixon 8:13
I knew I could do something about that.

Scott Myers 8:14
Right, I could do something about that. The organic seed had been planted in the 80s, when I went to organic field days with my father. I’m like, “I think we could probably do this. Let’s start transitioning on a small scale.” We were fortunate – we have a lot of access to organic and conventional chicken manure in our area. That was great. We had some fields that were maybe a year out from being able to be certified organic – 50 to 60 acres. We decided, “Well, let’s try it on that small scale just with hay.” We made that switch and started selling organic hay.

Scott Myers 8:53
At that point, we decided to try some corn not long after that. We still knew how to cultivate, even conventionally. Back in the 80s and 90s, we still cultivated all our corn. We were a chemical no-till operation before, and we still cultivated no-till. It was a single sweep cultivator, but we wanted to… My grandfather always said that if you cultivated corn, you opened that soil up, and the corn greens up almost instantly by letting air into the soil and aerating it. So, we still like to do that no-till.

Scott Myers 9:31
I was one of those odd people when we started 10 years ago who, at my age, still knew how to cultivate, which was cool because most younger people getting into organic farming that are coming from chemical farming, they don’t understand how to cultivate. They’re like, “Oh, how am I going to cultivate? How do I stay between the rows?”

Linley Dixon 9:49
Because otherwise, they would just need to spray herbicides. To herbicide-resistant crops, you don’t ever have to cultivate.

Scott Myers 9:56
Correct, yeah. You never cultivate. When we were in chemical Ag, we were still doing that – cultivating. We did that in-row stuff. That was really interesting to be able to make that switch like that. But back with the Amish, they were fantastic. One of the cool things about the Plain community is that they’re a great, tight-knit community. When you start working with them, you build that relationship with them on the hay – good-quality hay, regular service – and you do what you say. They bring all their neighbors and say, “Hey, that’s the place you want to go buy hay.” It’s been neat to see that.

Scott Myers 10:41
We’ve developed a direct market relationship for usually 4,000 to 5,000 tons of hay. It’s all delivered by us. Most of it is within 50 miles of our homeplace – I would say 80% of it stays within 50 miles of our home. It’s a kind of just-in-time delivery, and they can just-in-time pay as well, which is great for these dairies, especially the grass-fed ones. They call it Grassmilk; Organic Valley has. They want to be able to put as many cows on their small farm as they can, and they have to graze them, which is organic requirement. So, they do that – intensively graze all summer.

Scott Myers 11:23
They might make a little hay, but if we happen to have any type of drought, like we did in our area this past year, they have no supplies then. As soon as the grass quits growing in the fall, they still have to maintain that production. By us raising hay, we’re able to help them supplement that. Usually they get paid a premium if they can produce Grassmilk in the winter. That’s been a neat addition to our hay sales.

Linley Dixon 11:50
Was it an easy transition then to bring on the organic corn, organic beans, organic wheat…?

Scott Myers 11:56
Yeah. We had a lot of those crops we were already growing in our conventional rotation, but we weren’t moldboard plowing. We had moldboard plows back in the 80s, we still had some old plows. That was the first thing – we had to relearn how to plow again. I knew how, but none of my employees knew how to plow. My father knows how to plow, and we kind of laugh sometimes when we have an employee that’s never plowed before and goes out and moldboard plows. Because unlike Europe, where they have rollover plows and you start on one side of the field, we don’t. We’re using American-type plows where you just kind of go round and round forever. It’s funny to watch a new employee try to plow and figure out a field because you have to really plan it out before you start.

Scott Myers 12:48
That was one of the challenges. Conventionally, we weren’t using as many herbicides as a lot of our neighbors because of our longer rotation. Most of the small grains I mentioned earlier, we were growing conventionally already. We only added sunflowers to the mix when we went organic. We had that. We weren’t using as many chemicals with what we were doing. We were using cover crops already for green manure and water-holding capacity. That part wasn’t as hard. Weed control and learning to cultivate at the right time, time weeding, and those kinds of things, that was a learning curve the first three or four years – trying to figure that out.

Scott Myers 13:30
Corn was a lot easier. Even before we were organic, we always said that if you moldboard plow a hay field and plant corn into it, that doesn’t take a lot of weed control. For some reason, that sod, that hay, the weed seeds don’t germinate as fast in that first year. Then you have all those nutrients that you’re putting in the ground, and the nitrogen and everything. I don’t want to say easy, but it is a lot easier to grow a corn crop after hay than it is in a corn and soybeans rotation. You have a lot more weed issues and stuff like that.

Linley Dixon 14:09
That’d be your first advice – to get hay in the rotation.

Scott Myers 14:12
Right. Get hay in the rotation. For people that can’t get hay – because in my travels and talking with different organic farmers, a lot of them are like, “Well, we don’t have a hay market.” I’ve realized in some parts of the country there isn’t a hay market. They’re producing hay, and they have to ship it the whole way across the country, and it’s just not feasible. If they don’t have that, then I tell them, “Get a green manure crop, like red clover in there, or something like that.” We frost-seed red clover into wheat. We’ll frost-seed that in February or March, as we’re freezing and thawing the seed into the wheat. We just use a John Deere Gator with a little seeder on the back – it’s cheap and easy in the whole scheme of things.

Scott Myers 14:51
That clover grows, we harvest the wheat, and we’ve learned to shred or brush hog the stubble. We want that red clover to grow back a couple of times. By stimulating that clover to grow and mowing it off once it starts blooming – like every 30 days, like you would with making hay – it stimulates it to put more nutrients back in the ground and keep growing. We do that with clover. A lot of times we don’t bail the clover off where we do that. We try to put those nutrients, letting them on the ground. We’ve had just as good luck the next year following that, then in corn, just as good a yield, pretty much just about as good a weed control, and not needing a whole lot of extra nutrients in that situation.

Scott Myers 15:36
That’s another option for people that don’t have the option to put hay in. The thing with hay is, if we have a problem weed field, we put hay in. The best way to get rid of problem weeds in organic is to put in hay and mow it every 28 to 30 days. There’s not a lot of weeds that can survive that. You might have weeds the first couple of cuttings, but after three or four years of that, those weeds will have died out and choked off. Some of our problem weeds are giant ragweed and lambsquarters. Those are annual-type weeds, and they don’t survive three or four years of hay. You’ll get rid of a lot of those weeds by doing that.

Linley Dixon 16:15
When you put the wheat in, you grow taller varieties of…I remember you saying, and that clover underneath helps hold that up in your wet climate…

Scott Myers 16:26
Yeah, a little bit. It doesn’t help as much as we wish it did. The clover is pretty spindly in that situation because the clover is trying to grow high too because they’re both trying to compete for the sunlight. Usually, the clover doesn’t really start to grow until the wheat starts to ripen and lets that sun in. There isn’t a lot with that. One thing we’ve had an issue with is, as we’ve switched to the food-grade varieties of wheat, the older type varieties, what they call a semi-dwarf variety – soft, red winter wheat, which is a lot grown in Ohio – has a dwarfing gene in it, which keeps the wheat short so it doesn’t lodge, and cause issues.

Scott Myers 17:10
The soft red winter wheat is a different type of wheat that we can use. One of the problems with the taller varieties of wheat is that because they’re so much taller, there’s more straw there, which also helps shade that clover, and it doesn’t come through quite as good. We’re still learning, trying to adjust our seeding rates, just a lot of things. Trying to figure out what works the best because we’re only in our third year of the food-grade wheat. There’s some things there we’re trying to adjust.

Scott Myers 17:45
Another interesting thing we learned with red clover is that…I talked about mowing it earlier. If we don’t mow it and we just leave it to grow into the winter, the next spring, a lot of times, it will either smother itself or winter-kill worse, and we won’t have anything green growing in the spring. I found that out accidentally a few years ago. Where we had driven in the field, we had literally had streaks of green growing. Where it grew fine – just driving on it, it grew. When we want that green, when we go to plow that under or till that in, because that green growth is a lot of its nitrogen for that corn crop that’s very readily available when you plow it under. It’s feeding the microbes.

Scott Myers 18:30
Gary Zimmer likes to talk about that process – you treat your soil like feeding a cow, and you want to feed them high-protein stuff. Protein is nitrogen. High-protein alfalfa, clover, and if you mow it at that height, like you were going to make it for hay, or if you plow it under at that same stage, you’re going to put that nitrogen that you just grew into the soil, besides all the nitrogen that you fixed through nitrogen fixation in the soil. You get kind of a double benefit there. We are able to grow most of our nitrogen weeds for our corn doing that.

Linley Dixon 18:44
Interesting. You said that they were sort of an organic guru in your community. We had three initials: JDS?

Scott Myers 19:15
JDS, yeah.

Linley Dixon 19:19
Let me know how that’s sponsored a lot of organic growers.

Scott Myers 19:22
In our area, we’re really fortunate. We have a very close-knit organic community that’s just grown organically from a few people and just grown outwards. It’s really neat. We have a lot of neighbors that are organic. You farm up against them; you don’t have to worry about buffers and stuff. There’s been some mentors, some people that have helped with that. One of them is John Daniel Slabaugh. He’s in the Plain community, but he’s helped push organic. He started working originally with the Plain community and Organic Valley and the dairy industry and bringing that in.

Scott Myers 20:03
Then there again, he saw the need for what those farmers needed. Like, “Hey, where do I buy my seed? What do I do? I have this pest problem. I need some help.” In conventional agriculture, you have your crop consultants, and he’s kind of that. He doesn’t charge for that service, but he’ll go out and help you solve that. It’s not always to buy that thing with organic, but it’s, “Hey, what practice do we need to change?” He’ll explore that and see what he can do there. He’s been a real help to our area. Probably 20 years ago – and I had dealt with him conventionally as well. He was trying to get me to go organic at that time. That time we were farming over 4,000 acres conventionally – I said, “Oh, I just don’t think I could do it on this large of a scale.”

Scott Myers 21:05
He’s like, “Well, just keep thinking about it.” Because he said, “I think you have the right farm, and you have the right mind to do that.” I’m like, “Oh, I just don’t want…” He kept talking about it, and he started having me go to different farms, and that’s one of the neat things now that we finally made that switch. Now every summer, he hosts, like, a driving field day around different organic farms in the area. He brings in people from out of the area to learn. That’s been a neat thing to just learn in that. He’ll even bring not just farmers, but he’ll bring people from seed companies that maybe don’t currently sell organic seed and other suppliers that, “Hey, you guys should look at getting into the organic market to help. These are needs we have. Can you fill these?” It’s been neat.

Linley Dixon 21:05
I can see it’s rubbed off on you a little bit. Do you kind of take on that responsibility to help bring in some more folks into organic? What’s your strategy there to convincing…?

Scott Myers 22:06
I believe that. I think that’s one of the neat things about the organic community over conventional agriculture. I think it’s more of a community. There aren’t secrets. When I was in conventional agriculture, it was always like, “Oh, I don’t want to tell my neighbor because he might rent the farm away from me or something, and he’s my competition.” Now we don’t really see each other as competition. We all see each other as people and help each other out.

Scott Myers 22:30
We share equipment with some different organic neighbors in our area; different times they need something. There’s smaller farmers – we might have a piece of equipment that they only need once every four or five years – they’ll be like, “Hey, can you weed zap our 10 acres of soybeans?” “Sure.” We don’t like to do custom work, but for somebody close by like that, it’s not a big deal to go help them out. Or with teaching and learning and things like that, I like to experiment, and I always joke that at least 10% of our farmers should probably always be in an experiment every year, because that’s the only way you get better – to try things out.

Linley Dixon 23:07
That’s such an organic farmer trait. It really is.

Scott Myers 23:09
Right. We’re always trying things; many of them fail. We tried no-till organic corn for a year. That was a complete failure. I probably tried it on too many acres that year. But you try different things, and then you adjust and see what works. I always hope that maybe one in five work, and then the other things. It is definitely one thing. You get your neighbors talking when you try different things, but conventional neighbors, especially. Both good and bad.

Scott Myers 23:41
But on the flip side of that, the organic neighbors, they ask questions. They’re like, “Hey, what are you doing over there? That’s interesting.” Then they can be like, “Okay, you tried that. It didn’t work. I’m not going to try it.” Or they tried something, and we go back and forth. We have an informal group in our area where we meet once or twice a year. Like I said, it’s informal. It’s headed up by the Tilmor group with the Steiner family there. Cultivators and stuff for organic farms, especially smaller organic farms, but they kind of bring us in as a focus group. “Hey, what are you doing with that?” But then it always turns into an organic farmer sharing information. It’s good for them, but it’s good for all of us.

Linley Dixon 24:26
I remember someone telling me, “Don’t get into farming if you’re not okay with failure.” It seems like that kind of experimental spirit. You can accept some failures if you know they’re coming, but then you get that surprise. It keeps it interesting. Keeps every year exciting. Can you describe some of those experiments of late and what’s kind of worked and what hasn’t? So people don’t have to torpedo?

Scott Myers 24:48
I was showing you pictures of our soybeans with the companion crop, rye. We tried a couple of different things with that. The buzzword, or the big thing in organic is no-till organic soybeans, rolling the rye. We did that for a while. We have a roller crimper on our planter. It works well, but we found some issues with what we were doing with food-grade wheat. We like to plant the wheat after the soybeans, and by doing that, we were getting volunteer rye in with the wheat. Then it can’t be for food-grade with the rye in there. We needed to find another way to do that. Plus, when you do that, you have to plant the beans a lot later in our area, and you’d lose some yield doing that. So we wanted to plant…

Linley Dixon 25:36
Explain that for someone not familiar with the crops. Why would you have to plant it later?

Scott Myers 25:40
The rye needs to get tall enough and get to a certain stage so that when you roll or crimp it, first, it has enough biomass to shade the soil. Second, it needs to be in the flowering stage, because once it’s in the flowering stage, then when you roll it down and crimp it, it’ll stay down. Otherwise it’ll pop back up again.

Linley Dixon 26:02
Yeah, that’s what we’ve heard a lot. It’s the perfect stage…

Scott Myers 26:05
In Ohio, that’s usually the first week of June, maybe late May. That’s really about a month late to plant soybeans. It’s still within all the guidelines; you can plant till mid-June in our area, but you usually lose some yield on soybeans if you plant them after the middle of May. We like to heat our soybeans in the first couple of weeks of May. A lot of times we have a dry August, and in September it’ll be dry, and you won’t have enough moisture to fill the pods. Sometimes it’ll be too dry. So, if we can move that whole process forward a little bit, we can still take advantage of some of the mid-summer moisture, rather than our… We’re typically very dry in our area in August, September, and October. We want to make sure that we’re past the stage where it really hurts with rain.

Scott Myers 27:01
Plus, by planning earlier, it has to do with the summer solstice. When the days are getting longer to a point and then they get shorter, soybeans are very photoreactive…it has to do with the day length. Once the days start getting shorter, soybeans will automatically switch to their reproductive stage. They won’t get as tall, won’t put as many flowers on, and won’t put as many pods on. The earlier you can plant them, the better.

Linley Dixon 27:29
You are planting them later now…?

Scott Myers 27:33
Now we’re planning earlier, but by planting earlier, we don’t have that option to roll the rye because the rye is only about three inches tall at that point. This was sort of an experiment, but I had heard of another farmer not that far away from us who had been basically planting a companion crop of rye or wheat in the spring. After it was safe, it wasn’t going to get cold anymore because when you plant a winter annual crop in the spring, if it goes below 25, 28, or 30 degrees for a few hours, then it will try and still put grain on and go to seed. You want to plant late enough so you don’t have that problem. But he plants that at the same time as he plants soybeans.

Scott Myers 28:23
Then at that point, he doesn’t do anything else. There’s no cultivation, and then you’re creating a mulch. They grow together, and for the first month, you’re going to have a nice green mat out there, and you’ll have soybeans and rye or wheat growing at the same time. Then the wheat and rye will get about six to eight inches, maybe up to a foot tall, depending on how much moisture you have. Then it’ll just slowly start to disappear and become a mulch. The soybeans will grow through that. By harvest, that mulch is just about gone, if not completely gone. A lot of times at harvest, you can’t even tell we planted the weed, or rye at that point. That eliminates most of our tillage.

Scott Myers 29:04
We’ll do just a little bit of tillage to level the field before we plant. But after that, we don’t cultivate, time weed, or rotary hoe. Usually, if anything, we have to run a weed zapper, possibly to get those escape weeds that get up above the canopy. There’s a few broadleaf weeds, like giant ragweed, that are not very well controlled by this situation. But in general, this works fairly well. A few years ago, we did a trial. We did three different things side by side. We did the no-till on one side of the field; we did the rye-companion crop in the spring in the middle of field; and then we did just straight soybeans, where you have to cultivate and do all that on another side.

Scott Myers 29:42
The stuff with this companion crop, rye, it outyielded the other two, not by a lot, but when we actually sat down and figured out our cost of production and our net profit at the end because we didn’t have all those extra passes, compared to the beans that didn’t have any rye with them, we actually made quite a bit more money because we eliminated at least three passes across the field having to deal with the weeds. You end up with cleaner-looking soybeans too, usually, because you don’t have as many weed seeds mixed in to clean out.

Linley Dixon 30:17
What’s your spacing? I remember you’re playing with that a little bit.

Scott Myers 30:20
We plant the rye on seven-and-a-half-inch spacing with a drill. I have a neighbor that just spreads it on with a fertilizer spreader and just spreads it on so it’s solid-seeded. Then soybeans, we’ve done tests with 15-inch rows and 30-inch rows. We’ve had no yield difference between the two. We thought because we got the quicker canopy, maybe we’d have better weed control, or… we just didn’t really know. In the end, there was really no difference between the two.

Scott Myers 30:49
We really normally stick with the 30-inch rows just because it allows us to get back through with the weed zapper and not knock soybeans down. But it also gives us that opportunity that we have, that one chance which we’ve had where we need to come in and take a high-residue cultivator and cultivate it one time for escape weeds or something. We can still do that on 30-inch rows and not have to have some type of specialized equipment or something.

Linley Dixon 31:14
You have the nerve to plant two things at once. What do the crop insurance people think? Assume the audience knows nothing, too, because this is a complicated issue. You really talk about the economics of how crop insurance is propping up conventional agriculture, too, and how the organic folks are different.

Scott Myers 31:38
One of the things with crop insurance is that crop insurance is geared and was designed to work in conventional agriculture for conventional grain crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat. It was not designed to work with multiple crops or cover crops, or anything like that. They want to make sure you follow a very standard set of approved practices. Those are able to be changed. It’s one of the reasons I’ve gotten into policy work with crop insurance, is because we need to get those changed and educate those people.

Linley Dixon 32:11
What were the approved practices to start with?

Scott Myers 32:13
The approved practice to start with was no green growing. You couldn’t have a cover crop growing, and if you did, it needed to be killed off before you planted. I think it was a week or two weeks before you planted your next crop. Otherwise, it was not insurable. Over the past 10, 15, and 20 years, we’ve gotten that adjusted to…you are allowed to plant green into a growing crop. What I’m currently doing may be a gray area, but it’s not approved, but it also isn’t specifically said it’s approved. Fortunately, my agent that I work with is really good at understanding these things. He comes out and sees what we’re doing. He knows how we farm, and it’s not really an issue.

Scott Myers 33:04
I don’t remember the exact language, but the way the exact language reads – were fine. It’s just one of those that we need to make sure we educate the people that make those decisions so that they understand what we are doing and that it’s actually helping. It’s good to have those side-by-side tests that show, “Hey, it’s the same yield, or it’s even better with what we’re doing.” Usually, when it gets dry, having that rye there holds the moisture in that mulch. Late in the summer, that’s why we get better yields because we don’t have bare dirt that is getting warmer and letting that moisture evaporate. We’re holding that moisture in the soil with that mulch on the ground.

Linley Dixon 33:47
[inaudible 0:33:50] I don’t know if you have as windy springs as we do, but just to hold down the soil that time of year…

Scott Myers 33:54
Yeah, in the spring. That was something that the last 8 to 10 years have changed. We had so many more heavy rain events in the spring. In the end of the year, we end up still with this same average amount of rainfall. Instead of getting a half inch at a time, now we get three inches at a time.

Linley Dixon 34:11
You got some [inaudible 0:34:11] ratios or whatever, too…

Scott Myers 34:14
This past summer at our house, we had three and a half inches of rain in two hours, and just half a mile north of our home, where our house is, but in some of our fields, we had eight and a half inches rain in two hours. It washed some roads out and washed a railroad out. In saying that we had no gullies. It washed the driveway out to one of our farms, but it did not wash any in our fields. I was really pleased. We actually benefited from some neighbors’ topsoil that we probably have now from…

Linley Dixon 34:45
Your soil grew.

Scott Myers 34:46
Right. Our soil grew. With the changing climate and stuff, we need to keep the ground covered. We’re rolling – we’re not flat – we need to have something growing there as fast as possible.

Linley Dixon 34:58
Well, let’s stay on crop insurance. I have some questions. I was shocked when I understood; just in conventional agriculture, the price point that you get, you need crop insurance, and you need additional checks from the government to even make it profitable. Sometimes you’re selling it for less than the cost of production. Is that true? Is that a real thing?

Scott Myers 34:58
Oh, yeah. That’s true.

Linley Dixon 35:25
Explain how that all works and how that system continues. I was chocking. I’m sure most people know this, but I did it.

Scott Myers 35:39
A lot of people don’t understand how that works. Conventional farmers have had fairly good prices for a few years here now on corn, soybeans, and wheat. When I started in it, in the late 90s, it was nothing to get $1.75 for our bushel of corn for conventional corn. We’ve had crop insurance on our farm since 1988. We’ve had some form of crop insurance there, and $1.75 was below our cost of production. Our costs were so much lower. It was like $2.20. It was still below. It’s a fairly good percentage. You saw that, and you’re like, “Well, how can I raise my price?”

Scott Myers 36:28
There were some programs through the government. One was called the Loan Deficiency Payment program, which still exists today, but because the prices set by the government are so much lower than where the price is at they never hit those. But what those say is that if you receive a price lower than that price, which back then was usually about $1.95 or $1.98 or something like that.

Linley Dixon 36:51
That’s what parity means, or it’s something different?

Scott Myers 36:54
I’m sorry. I can’t answer that. I’m not really sure. I think that’s where the parity comes in because if they don’t pass the Farm Bill, they always talk about going back to parity pricing. That’s an inflation-adjusted price. I think that’s where that comes in. That would change that price from being $1.98 to being, in some cases they talk about $10, $12, $14 corn. For conventional farmers, it would be the parity price. I think that’s where that comes in, but I’m not exactly sure about that whole program, because that was all set up in the 30s, and we’ve never gone back. That’s why Congress always makes sure that they at least renew the Farm Program to keep it going, because if they don’t, it would be a huge benefit for a short time for some farmers that were in the right position to benefit from that.

Scott Myers 36:56
You’re getting your price lower than your cost of production…

Scott Myers 37:39
You’re getting your price low. You get that difference. If we got $1.75, the government would pay us…we get maybe $0.20 to $0.25 per bushel, back from the Farm Service Agency part of the government. That was the subsidy there. Then the other subsidy that would come in…

Linley Dixon 38:00
What’s that subsidy called from FSA?

Linley Dixon 38:02
I think that was just the Loan Deficiency Payment program, LPDs. Like I said, those haven’t been used for years, because conventional prices have went way up comparatively, and those have not changed or very little. Back then, we had what we call direct payments. The program has changed over the years. Back then, they would pay us so much per acre, based on base acres of each crop, that nobody really quite knew where they came up with some of the acres and some of that. Usually you could figure out another $10 to $15 an acre, or something like that. That added a little bit more to your price.

Linley Dixon 38:38
Then crop insurance was another place that you could use to guarantee that you hopefully didn’t lose money in the situation back then. Back then, we didn’t have price swings. If corn over a 12- to 18-month period changed in price $0.50, that was a huge deal. That was a huge price change when you were a $2 corn. Now, it’s nothing for conventional corn prices to change $2 maybe even $3 or $4 sometimes in a 12-month time span. I dealt with that risk up until 10 years ago. It was crazy – the risk that you had to deal with. Crop insurance has changed to adjust that. But crop insurance, what it does then is…

Linley Dixon 39:26
By March 15 the year you work with your crop insurance agent, they set a price. They call it a spring price, which was just set in February. They use the average price on the Chicago Board of Trade for conventional farmers, set that price, and then you have what is called your yield, which is your Average Production History (APH). They take your APH times the price – I’m just going to throw easy numbers out there – if it’s $5 a bushel, and say you have 150-bushel corn, you multiply that by 5, you’re going to have $750 an acre. Of that $750, then you can choose what percent you want to guarantee you will get off of that acre. It starts at 85%. There’s different levels, I guess. So, if you guarantee 85%, you would be guaranteeing 85% of that $750.

Linley Dixon 39:27
It goes down to 50%, which is called the catastrophic level. The catastrophic level is the cheapest because you’re insuring the least amount of money. It’s just like any insurance works. The more you want to insure, the more expensive it is. Where the subsidy comes in is the government has said, “Okay, we’re going to subsidize that premium.” The 85% costs a lot more, probably by two, three, or four times what the 50% level costs. The 50% level, we’re going to subsidize maybe even almost 100%. It’s almost free to get that. The government will just help you kick that in; you’ll get a really big subsidy. The higher you get closer to 85%, the more the farmer pays because they’re paying for more insurance, but they’re going to pay less subsidy in that respect.

Linley Dixon 40:53
At the end of the year when you harvest, if they take what you actually harvest, you measure that – you keep track of that – by field, by farm. That’s another thing where you can do it, even by county, or you’re declared down to the field level. Then they figure out what you got off of there, and then they have their fall price. They don’t care what you actually sold it for; they are looking at the Chicago Board of Trade set in the fall, which I believe is the October month. They take the average price for October, and they multiply those two together, and if those are lower than what your guarantee was in the spring, you get a payment. In that whole scheme of things, in September, you also pay your premium. You may get some of your premium back, or you may not. That’s basically how crop insurance works for all crops.

Linley Dixon 42:11
Why isn’t this working for organic farmers, besides the fact that they’ve been wrong on some of the production practices that were essential. There are other reasons why this just makes sense: diversification, and what else?

Scott Myers 42:22
The main reason it doesn’t work is because that APH that I talked about, you need five years of your own yield history on that parcel of land growing that certain crop to be able to use those numbers. In our case, we have to raise five corn crops, and if we got 150 bushel per acre every year, then our APH should be 150 bushels on those acres. We can use that.

Linley Dixon 42:46
Do conventional farmers have to do that too? You were talking about it doesn’t encourage transition because now you don’t have a history.

Scott Myers 42:53
Right. As soon as you transition, you lose your APH. Even though we had started having crop insurance in 1988, we started with certified organic production in 2016. All those years of history – they’re still there. If I ever go back to conventional, which I’m not going to – they’re still there, but they don’t exist for organic. So, it’s based on practice. Since we transitioned, there’s actually three sets: there’s conventional, transition, and organic. We transitioned with hay, so we don’t worry about the transition part of the crops that are insured. But as soon as we switched to organic now, how you start… And this is no different than any beginning farmer. I’m basically a beginning farmer. It’s like starting from scratch, and I don’t have any yield history.

Scott Myers 43:48
What they do when you don’t have any yield history is take what’s called a county T yield. They call it a transition yield, which has nothing to do with organic transition, but it’s a Y yield. Those T yields are set by the Risk Management Association (RMA), which is a government entity that looks at all these yields by county, all over the country. If that crop is regularly grown in that county, then you will have a T yield. There are crops like when I went to grow sunflowers – I’m the only person that’s ever grown sunflowers at that point in our county; there was no T yield. Then that’s a whole other issue, which we’re not going to go into right this second, but hopefully you have a T yield.

Scott Myers 44:30
In the case of organic T yields, a lot of those are not based off of actual production in the county because they’re supposed to take surveys and find out what the actual production is. A lot of times it’s just a percentage of whatever the T yields are for conventional corn. This is their thought: “Organic doesn’t yield as good. So, we’re going to take whatever the conventional T yield is and deduct 20% off of it.” The thing about the T yields is they’re already extra low because of the way they calculate them. They don’t just take a county average. To be totally honest, I don’t quite understand how they calculate them, but they’re always artificially low because they want to make sure that the risk is in the crop insurance company’s favor for the risk of payout is not in the farmer’s favor.

Scott Myers 45:16
We farm in a couple of different counties, so it’s different by county, but I think the APH is 90 bushels per acre. That’s one place where we get hit. Now, all of a sudden, even though we have proven on our farm that our corn yields are the same organically as they were conventionally, if not better, we are paying as much, if not more, for our crop insurance and getting less coverage. It almost becomes where it’s not feasible to buy crop insurance. Yet, my bank, because we loan money, we have to get operating loans to buy the seed and the stuff for planting, and then we pay those back at the end of the year.

Scott Myers 46:10
Especially in organic, because a lot of banks don’t understand organic, they’re like, “Well, this is higher risk. We want you to have crop insurance because that helps us guarantee we’ll get our money back, and it’ll help you get a lower interest rate.” But in a lot of cases, we can’t buy very good crop insurance to guarantee those things, or the cost is so much higher, it’s really hard to justify for organic farmers. A lot of organic farmers just go without crop insurance. Then in response, some banks will charge higher interest rates because they’re higher risk. It costs them money on two fronts because they lose more risk and higher interest rates too. It’s a big thing. Organic crop insurance is getting better, but it’ll take a long time.

Scott Myers 46:54
The other thing we didn’t talk about was my long rotations when we talked about the five years. You have to have five years of production. We talked about how long rotations, in some cases, if I’m a three-year rotation, three times five is going to take me 15 years before I have…those data points. If it’s a seven-year rotation, that’s 35 years. In some cases, they always say, most farmers have 40 good crop years. It doesn’t work. They need to adjust how they figure that out.

Linley Dixon 47:30
I want to pinpoint that you said you have equal to or greater-than yields in corn of organic than conventional. First of all, that is one of the biggest criticisms of organic, “Well, you all have lower yields; therefore, we’re wanting to rewild this planet. We need more organic acreage if we’re going to transition to organic. We can’t give the world back to biodiversity.” Here you are proving that wrong. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Scott Myers 48:01
Crop rotation is huge, and that was one of the worst things that ever happened to conventional agriculture – going away from crop rotation because then they cost more inputs to get the same yield. I’m always up for a challenge, and I’m an economist. Ag Econ is my degree, so I love to look at numbers. Everybody always said, “Oh, you can’t raise the same yields.” I’m like, “No. That can’t be right.” As we’ve started getting into this, and we’ve proven that, and it hasn’t taken…the first few years of learning what to do, there was a yield hit because we had to relearn how to farm. So there’s an education factor there that we had to catch up with.

Scott Myers 48:47
But once we got a good transition and got our soils transitioned, and there’s that three-year organic transition, we transition in hay, which works great, and then we usually go to corn. But I believe it takes more like six or seven years to truly transition the soil to organic. I’m going to use the buzzword ‘regenerative,’ but the organic process and that soil – is it getting the soil microbes back – the earthworms back. Those earthworms are my workers out there. They’re the ones that are making the nutrients. When we were conventional, we didn’t have near the earthworms that we have now.

Scott Myers 49:25
While we did use cover crops, we killed them off with Roundup, 2,4-D, Dicamba, and things like that. Not only when we sprayed those did we killed the crop off, and we had nothing growing to support those, we also probably hurt the soil life with those chemicals out there.

Linley Dixon 49:25
They weren’t incorporated: they were just sitting right on the surface…

Scott Myers 49:32
They were just sitting on the surface, and they would [inaudible 0:49:53], and in many cases, they showed those. The nitrogen stuff will actually gas off and stuff like that. That was probably the hardest thing for me – because we were mostly no-till – to switch from no-till to doing some tillage. I mentioned the Gary Zimmer approach earlier about doing… and I said, we plow. We don’t plow deep; we plow very shallow – five or six inches max. We want to just incorporate that green manure in that top couple inches of soil so at that point, it will get decomposing really quick and get turned into nutrients that we can use really fast. Usually a couple of weeks time, things change.

Linley Dixon 50:30
Out of a five-year rotation, how many years are you plowing?

Scott Myers 50:34
One, usually after hay. That’s about the only time. Now we will do lighter tillage, like high-speed disk, which is a couple of inches deep, or even a disc chisel, but we only go three to four inches deep. Just enough to stir the ground and enough to get dirt moving. But actually, a moldboard plow, you turn the entire soil over once every…depending on the rotation. In the three-year rotation, we don’t moldboard plow because, in most cases, the clover can be torn up with the high-speed disk. It’s where we have long, four- or five-year hay seeding. Those are really hard to tear up, so you need to use a moldboard plow for those.

Scott Myers 51:12
Back to the idea on yields, what we found is that by getting that better soil work for us, our soil was more resilient than what it was when we were conventional. Resilient to droughts and too much rain. Like I said, this past year in our area, we had a drought. It wasn’t the worst drought directly in our area. Just a couple of counties south of us, they probably had one of the worst droughts they’ve ever had. But we went for, I think, some of July, most of August, and September, which would have been growing months; it went into October, where we basically…I think we maybe had a half-inch of rain for two and a half to three months. Yet, at the end of the year, we came back with the best corn crop we’ve ever had on our farm.

Scott Myers 51:55
It was conventional organic, anyway. We had the best corn crop. Now, our soybeans did suffer because when the beans were trying to fill the pods, it was too dry. Where we had the spotty rains, the soybean yield was double – we had 60-plus bushel beans. But where we didn’t get any rain, it was just too dry. It didn’t matter if there was rye underneath them or not; they were teeny, tiny beans in there, and they just didn’t yield.

Linley Dixon 52:25
Didn’t you say some yields were some of your neighbors actually didn’t…

Scott Myers 52:28
Right. Even though our beans were making 30 bushels per acre, there were places that were 10 bushels per acre. So, we were doing good. When I budget things, I figure 150 bushels per acre of corn. That’s what I figured at the beginning of the year. We’ve done that many years, no problem on average. This year we were over 200 bushels per acre, which is for us, unheard of. That includes all the edges where we have wildlife damage and stuff like that. The first round around the field doesn’t make a whole lot because we have a lot of deer, groundhogs, and raccoons. They love that corn, and they take that, and that’s not there to figure into the yield. So that means the interior of the field yielded a lot better to get that average up.

Scott Myers 53:19
People ask me all the time, like, “Well, it can’t yield this good.” I’m like, “Yeah, it does. It yields just as good.” Like I said, I’m always looking at budgets and the cost of production. Organic prices have been lower as of late, the last year or so. We’ve all been bombed – all us organic grain farmers. Corn is $7 to $8 a bushel, in most cases. Soybeans are anywhere from $18 to $21 a bushel. More what I would call ‘sustainable corn price’ for organic farmers is $9 to $11. Beans is more like mid to upper $20s. Along those lines, I decided, “I’m going to go back and look at my conventional budgets, because I know what my organic budgets are. I’m 10 years removed from looking at conventional budgets, but I have these budgets. I’m going to go update them with current chemical prices and all those things.”

Scott Myers 54:13
I have all these spreadsheets – Microsoft Excel is my favorite program. I went back through, and I looked at those, and I’m like, “Wait a second. My cost of production is identical.” For conventional corn and organic corn, I was within $5 an acre for the cost of production. Same with soybeans; I was within $5 an acre. I went, “Wait a second. My cost is the same as it would be conventional, but I’m selling my corn for almost double the price or very close. Same with soybeans; it would be about double the price.”

Scott Myers 54:49
Even though profitability isn’t as good as it was and was higher, I have to remind myself that it’s a very sustainable thing for our farm with where we’re at. I don’t know how the conventional guys do it year in and year out. I can’t imagine going to my loan officer at my bank, if I was conventional right now, and trying to convince him to give me a loan for another 12 months and not being able to show a profit. Because most of those people right now cannot show a profit or guarantee a profit in any way, even with crop insurance out there.

Linley Dixon 55:22
As we say, you’re doing all this in spite of the lack of all of those supports.

Scott Myers 55:27
Correct, yeah. Even when we buy the highest crop insurance, we can’t insure the amount of dollars per acre because of our yield histories being lower. Since we can’t insure that there’s an uninsured gap that we have to deal with.

Linley Dixon 55:40
What was that? FSA check? You don’t get that either?

Scott Myers 55:47
No. We don’t get that. Another issue is the FSA check. If the conventional farmers say they did get that, if it ever dropped low enough, or maybe they adjusted the prices up, one of the weirdest things that happens in USDA programs is they don’t use organic prices for everything, but they use them for some things. For crop insurance, they have an organic price, and they have a conventional price – great. But for certain government programs like these loan payments, they only have a conventional price. So, when they figure things up for us, they use the conventional price, so we get underpaid.

Scott Myers 56:23
There’s some government payments that are coming out, Emergency Relief payments, I think they call them, that they released at the end of 2024 with the budget process. They were pushed mostly by conventional farmers to help with that. We still benefit from that. I don’t know this, because nobody quite knows how this is going to be paid out, but if it goes away, all the other emergency payments have ever went, they will pay them out based on conventional prices. So, we will be paid at $4 corn rather than $7 or $8 corn.

Scott Myers 56:57
It helps, but it doesn’t help us offset things as much as it could in our case. If we truly had a disaster, it’s really not going to help us, because they’re going to pay us at conventional prices. They’re rewarding that because if they’re going to do that, they’re going to reward you to stay conventional. They also reward you to stay in crops that are easily insurable – conventional corn, soybeans, and wheat – because you can, in some cases, insure a profit. There were many here as you could buy 85% coverage – the highest coverage – pay the crop insurance premium, and insure a profit. Based on crop insurance, you make sure you made $50 an acre or $75 an acre.

Scott Myers 57:40
You can’t do that in organic. To be honest, crop insurance shouldn’t be for that. Crop insurance is so I can operate another year…when you buy insurance for your car, and if you get in a car accident, as much as you’d like to get a brand new car out of the deal, if you were driving a five-year-old car, they’re not going to give you a brand new car. They’re going to pay you what that car is worth at that point in time. It’s the same idea. You shouldn’t expect to make a profit with crop insurance. You’re expecting to be able to get something to drive – to be able to keep going another year.

Linley Dixon 58:14
Let’s talk about that price volatility. Why is that happening now more than ever?

Scott Myers 58:20
There’s a lot of things on price volatility in organic. One of the worst things that ever happened in the last five years to organic prices, especially soybeans, but it affect corn too because of crop rotation, is the $40 beans we had. There was that year where multiple things came together. India was importing in the United States, and they pulled all the import certificates for Indian soybeans. Over a week or two’s time, it went from getting all these soybean imports to none. At the same time, there was a bankruptcy of a large buyer in the United States, and those soybeans were held up in bins. It went quickly from $25 a bushel to $40 a bushel.

Scott Myers 59:02
Price shocks like that are terrible for demand because now all these people looked for alternative options, or people went out of business. Then when the price went back down, I had to overcorrect and go lower. That’s part of the reason – supply and demand. That goes back to just simple economics. Then the other thing that has happened, and I mentioned imports there a little bit ago, is that 75% of the organic soybeans in this country are imported into this country. We do not grow. We only grow 25% of our soybeans. We grow 75% of our corn and import 25%. That’s an average year to year. As US organic farmers, we have regulations we have to follow. From inspection to…the surveyors have to randomly pull samples on 5% of pesticide residue samples.

Scott Myers 1:00:07
They came out on a side of a corner of a field. They went and pulled a couple ears of corn, sent them in, just to see if there was any residue on them or anything. When we deliver corn, soybeans, and stuff, to the elevator where we deliver them to, they get tested for GMO content and, in some cases, pesticide residue. We get tested like that. Then you have these imports coming in; the US has reciprocal agreements with other countries to recognize their organic programs. They do that, but they’re not testing those coming in. They’re just taking their word for them, because organic certification isn’t a testing certification; it’s a paperwork trail – an audit trail.

Scott Myers 1:00:58
Those things are coming in, and they’re just not testing them, and yet, there are some buyers that are randomly testing or testing loads that are concerned about this, and they’re finding high pesticide levels in these things. One of the most common ones is soybean meal. When I say 75% of soybeans are imported into this country, most of it comes in as soybean meal, not as whole soybeans. It comes in as meal. There’s two ways to extract the oil from soybeans and make soybean meal. One, which is the organic approved way, is the expeller pressed way. It’s a mechanical process, no chemicals involved. It’s a very good process.

Scott Myers 1:01:44
But there’s still some oil left in soybean meal when they do it that way. They say around 7% of the oil is left in the meal. What they found is that by going in, they can use some chemicals like hexane and benzene. But they use those chemicals and get that last 7% out. A lot of these countries, they only care about the soybean oil. Then they ship us the meal because it’s a byproduct, in some sense. They don’t have the use for that. They want the soybean oil. They’ll ship us this meal, and in many cases, they can test for this. I know there’s an elevator in the center part of the country. [inaudible 1:02:25] He tests a lot of it. He won’t even buy imported anymore, because he said every load he got, he tested personally, on his own, and they all tested high for hexane.

Linley Dixon 1:02:34
These are carcinogens. We’re feeding our chickens these…

Scott Myers 1:02:43
Let alone the integrity we’re ruining of organic, we’re also feeding those things, which they’re doing that conventionally. But that’s one of the reasons I eat organic and I grow organic. I want to get away from that stuff. I don’t want that stuff. That stuff is coming in, and there’s such a fight for trying to test this stuff. I’ve told this story many times here recently. But when we deliver soybeans to our soybean processor, who processes the meal, we get tested. Most times they only test for GMO content, but they pull a sample on every truckload that comes in from our trucks.

Scott Myers 1:03:20
I’ve seen where they will be offloading barges, which are too far away, and bringing it in by the truck, and those trucks will not be tested. We’ve asked the question, “Why aren’t you testing that grain?” It’ll be weighed, and they dump it in the same place that they’re dumping ours – in the same pit. They’re like, “Well, we already bought that grain. We already own that grain. If we tested, we’d have to reject it. How can we reject stuff we already tested?” Then I asked, “Where’s this coming from?”

Scott Myers 1:03:46
After doing some [inaudible 1:0:47], I found it was coming from Argentina. Who knows if it would test positive for anything? We don’t know. But the fact that they’re not testing it, it’s like, “What’s the difference here? What’s the difference between mine and theirs? Why shouldn’t you be testing it the same way? If it tests positive, it should be thrown out and let ours…” Because if mine tested high for GMO content, they would reject it on the spot and not unload it.

Scott Myers 1:04:14
Wasn’t there a story about this is the NOP-compliant [inaudible 1:04:18] because that was the biggest difference? I just got back from BIOFACH in Germany, and they test all throughout the supply chain. It’s like the EU does it, these add-on certifications do it, the buyers do it, and the brokers do it. Nobody wants to be the one responsible for selling or exchaging of fraudulent grain because their own business is at stake. I felt so good about the supply chain there. Then, here’s the story that we…

Scott Myers 1:04:44
Through my work with Organic Farmers Association and being on the policy committee, I went to some different events where they bring in people from different countries to talk about different things. I was just fortunate to be at this event where they brought in some people that export organic grain from Argentina. The question was asked about organic crops and where they export to, and they just happened to make the comment that they have two grades of organic grain that they ship out of Argentina. I was sitting with other organic grain grower friends, and we’re all looking at each other like, “I’ve never heard this before.”

Scott Myers 1:05:26
Then they went on to say that they have organic grain that gets shipped to the EU and other places. Then they have what they call NOP organic grain. Of course, my hand goes right up and asks questions. I’m like, “First of all, which is higher quality?” I thought, “I’m not going to just ask the question right out.” I asked which is higher quality. That was like, “Well, the regular organic stuff, that’s higher quality.” The next question was, “Well, so what’s the difference?” He’s like, “Well, we know that the NOP grain won’t be tested for any type of residues, so we are not worried about sending stuff there, whereas the organic grain might be tested for residues, so we have to make sure that’s good, clean stuff that they won’t have a problem with.” That’s just shocking. It’s just sad.

Scott Myers 1:06:25
On some of the policy work I do, I make the comment a lot that, as a US organic farmer, I’m not afraid of imports. There’s nothing wrong with legit imports, as long as we’re all on the same playing field. But if the playing field is not level, and they are processing their soybeans differently. Or maybe they’re just raising non-GMO, or maybe they’re putting their buffer strips in the organic. When I have conventional neighbors, I leave at least a 30-foot buffer that I mow, leaving grass, and I mow. I can’t plant soybeans right up next to them and put them in with my organic grain, so I’m losing that production. There’s just so many things that could be happening there. It just boggles my mind that they can compete with us at these lower prices and still import grain here.

Linley Dixon 1:07:14
Do you ever get a certain price when you sign a contract? I’ve heard stories of, like, “Well, the ship came in, and all of a sudden the price is different now.” Is that volatile or something that is happening to you, or do you even buy the grain cheaper…?

Scott Myers 1:07:30
I had a situation a couple of years ago on wheat. It was part of the reason I started looking at the food-grade wheat because we were doing soft, red winter wheat, and it was for food, but it went to a large company that bought soft, red winter wheat. They have mills in Ohio and other states. I had asked about contracting, but I didn’t sign a contract. “Oh, yeah. We’ll buy your wheat, no problem.” I said, “I realized the price might change. I get it.” I just didn’t want to contract because I hadn’t raised wheat for a few years there, and I just wasn’t quite sure how many bushels I was going to have. I said, “Well, we’ll just wait.” They said, “Yeah, we’ll have plenty of room at harvest in July to take your wheat.”

Scott Myers 1:08:09
Harvest rolls around, and we harvested and put in our bin. I called them up and said, “Hey, I want to bring my wheat.” I think I had 10,000 bushels of wheat. “I want to bring my wheat.” At the time when I called them before, the price was like $10 or $11 bushel – that was back in the fall. Now it was $750 a bushel, I believe. They said, “Well, we don’t have any room for it right now.” I’m like, “Okay.” “We’ll have room in a couple months.” I wasn’t happy about it, but I was like, “Okay, I’ll deal with it. I’m going to store it.” That cost us money to store it.

Scott Myers 1:08:40
Then a few months went by; I called them up. I said, “You want my wheat?” “I don’t know; it’s going to be a few more months till we can take it.” I said, “At least I can, I sign a contract, at least bring it like the end of the year by December 1?” “No, no.” I came to find out that they were getting imported wheat in, and they had got it at a cheaper price. Because this wasn’t only happening to me, this was happening to other farmers too. They weren’t buying any of our wheat because our wheat was priced higher, but they could get this other stuff so cheap, and they didn’t have any room. They had taken a whole shipload, and they were going to use that before they wanted our wheat.

Scott Myers 1:09:19
Recently on corn, I know somebody with another large company that they had a written contract for a certain price and a certain delivery time frame. It was like in January, they were supposed to take, I think, 40,000 bushels of corn from them. The company said, “Well, we’ll honor our contract, but we don’t have any room for your corn right now.” I think it took them four months till they could deliver that corn. At that price, they’re talking $200,000 to $300,000. That farmer needed that money in that month, maybe to pay loans off or other things, and even just to delay it, hurts.

Linley Dixon 1:09:55
I’ve even done stories of contracts not being honored.

Scott Myers 1:09:59
Fortunately, I have not had that problem with the contract part, but I’ve heard that many times.

Linley Dixon 1:10:07
You’re an activist farmer. You’re here with OFA. What are some of the things that we can support to change the system? What have you felt good about over the years…?

Scott Myers 1:10:20
The biggest thing, and I tell everybody, is you vote with your dollar; buy organic food. Most of the people that listen to this probably already do, but still…and buy local. All organic food isn’t the same, which we’ve learned over the years. It’s sad. I’m an activist, even at the grocery store. I’m notorious for going into some of the larger stores. I’ve learned about dairy products specifically that you can look at the codes on them and find out where they’re processed and find out that some of these come from these huge CAFO dairies. I’ll stand in there and talk with people and be like, “Hey, that’s your only organic option, but over here is a local, conventional option, but it’s a family farmer. Maybe you should support them instead, rather than buying from this…the local might be better.”

Scott Myers 1:11:15
They’re like, “Well, but we want to buy organic.” I’m like, “Well, tell the grocery you want a local option or a small farm option.” I become an activist, even in the grocery store. I know one of your guests talks about the story about putting the hydro stickers on produce. I’ve thought that’s a really good idea. My wife, Nicole, says she won’t shop with me if I start doing that. She’s afraid we might get… I always say, “Eat organic first. Support the local organic farmers first.” Talk to your grocer, make sure that they know, and then talk to your legislators. They want to know whether that’s coming from a consumer eater. And farmers, too – talk to your local farmers.

Scott Myers 1:12:09
Even conventional farmers. Some conventional farmers are like, “Ah, I don’t want to do organic.” To be totally honest, there was a time in my life I was like that. I was like, “I don’t want to be organic.” I started doing my research and seeing what I was doing. Like I said at the beginning, my initial transition was because I had farmers asking me to grow organic. Initially it was driven by profit, but now I wouldn’t go back. It’s not a profit thing. It’s a philosophical thing. It’s a health thing. I couldn’t go back. I’ve told that to other people. My father and I talk about it a lot. We don’t know where we’re at in Ag policy right now.

Scott Myers 1:12:51
With Robert F. Kennedy Junior coming in, conventional farmers are all worried he might get rid of glyphosate or chemicals. I said, “Great. The price will be lower, profitability won’t be as great, but I can still compete on any level with those farmers.” Talk to your legislators on this imported stuff. That’s a tough one, but you need to talk to legislators. We’ve been working on some testing protocol stuff that we’re hoping maybe will get included in this next Farm Bill. The acronym, like they do in USDA program, is OIVA, Organic Imports Verification Act. I call and support that.

Scott Myers 1:13:40
In the Organic Farmers Association, we had a petition out, and I imagine we’ll have some sort of sign-on once this bill comes out, that we can sign-on – everybody can sign on to. The more support there is, the easier it get passed. But that’s a big one. It’s all about consumer demand – we want to raise what people want to eat. That’s something conventional farmers don’t think about enough. If it’s conventional grain farmers, they want people to buy what they raise. They don’t think about what people want. I want to grow what people want.

Linley Dixon 1:14:15
Well, the USDA is telling them what they should grow by their policies. You talked a little bit about how the USDA has created this lack of sharing of information with the conventional agriculture because they get out policies, like, “Am I going to buy my name around, or are they going to buy me out?” What are some of the things that the USDA has done to make that culture happen?

Scott Myers 1:14:43
In fact, just before we sat down to do this, I was reading an article. Our current Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, who just got confirmed, made a comment at the Commodity Classic here that she really supports getting rid of all the work that we have done to help support small farmers in USDA programs. She wanted a level playing field for all size farmers. What that means in USDA speak is a level playing field for large farmers, because small farmers have always been discriminated against – it’s harder for them to access some of these programs. It’s more difficult for that.

Scott Myers 1:15:25
A lot of large conventional grain farmers laugh at that notion. They’re like, “Oh, it’s not hard.” But they don’t realize that, especially with some of these job layoffs and stuff at some of the local offices, the less and less local offices there are, the harder it gets. Like I said, these large farmers, they don’t understand how easy they have it. I fall into that organically with the acres we farm. We talked to 44 landowners because we rent a lot of our land. We don’t own everything. As much as I’d love to own all the land, that would be crazy expensive. I couldn’t do that.

Scott Myers 1:15:59
So, we rent land from people, and so the paperwork that goes into that, when I go into the Farm Service Agency, I have to have statements from every single landowner that are signed by them every year saying that I am farming their land and that I can make changes and report the acres and all those things that they ask for in the crops that I’m allowed to do that. That means I have to get that signature every single year for those landowners, which is great. I talk to them, whatever, but there’s so many other things you have to do. But it’s easy, because I have 44, and I do it all once.

Scott Myers 1:16:35
A small farmer might have different things. When they go into a USDA office, a lot of times, those offices only understand corn, soybeans, and wheat. Ask them about a specialty crop; some of them get grumpy, and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t know anything about it, or we’re not going to look into it.” This makes it harder for them to access that stuff. When we first got into the hay business, we wanted to look for some sort of crop insurance for that. There was none available back in the late 90s and early 2000s except the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP). It’s crop insurance for any crop that is not insurable under the RMA programs.

Scott Myers 1:17:14
The girls in the office that helped me – fantastic ladies. I was fortunate – they were very knowledgeable, and they’re like, “Hey, we’ll work with you. We want to learn about it too.” We sat down, and we figured it out. I took some steps outside of their office, trying to help them figure it out. But nobody knew. We had to go to multiple state agencies and clear to the federal level to understand how to even use this insurance. That was just a specialty crop. I can’t imagine somebody with strawberries, leafy greens, and all those kinds of things, trying to go in and access some of this stuff. It’s a huge education gap.

Scott Myers 1:17:52
That’s one of the things I try to do – educate at any level. It’s great working with the OFA. Then I go into my local FSA office, and a lot of times they’re like, “You know more about what’s coming than we do.” Then I’m like, “Well, how can I help you? Is there something we can do?” So, it’s a great thing. It’s a communication thing. It really comes down to you got to not be afraid to speak out when there’s something wrong, and you got to not be afraid to seek out information when you have a question. Make sure you get real answers – don’t believe everything you see on the internet, like we say. Conventional agriculture is no different than some of these other things you see on the internet. They’re spinning things their way.

Scott Myers 1:18:39
Some of the things out there right now, and I still get some of these mostly conventional agriculture publications sent to me for free. The cover on the last one I got was, I don’t even remember what the group was called, but I happened to look, and all the sponsors were basically all the big chemical companies in the United States who were sponsoring this, and it was basically saving conventional agriculture, because “The whole world’s going to starve if we lose Roundup,” is what it was all about. I’m like, “Wait a second, guys. Do some research.” They always like to say that if we have to feed the world, we got to double our production. I used to believe that, but that’s not true when you look into it.

Linley Dixon 1:19:22
Even some of the additional climate-smart benefits and things were painful to see happen, like rolling out this kind of no-till story coming from the chemical industry. That was like, “They really did put the word chemical no-till in front of those two words.

Scott Myers 1:19:38
Exactly, yeah. It just drives me crazy when they talk about regenerative, because organic is regenerative. I don’t see how anything can be regenerative when you use a chemical because that just defeats the purpose. You’re killing off things that you shouldn’t be killing off. Regenerative is just a buzzword that they’re using. There’s all those certifications that are not even having to do with organic, but conventional agriculture wants to take over that word, and I really hope they don’t dilute the organic label because we are the only USDA label that’s out there.

Linley Dixon 1:20:18
We’ve been trying to dilute it from the beginning…

Scott Myers 1:20:22
That’s why we have the Real Organic Project. That’s why our farm is Real Organic Project certified. We don’t sell stuff directly to the consumer, so we don’t use the label that way. But it’s something we believe in, and a movement we believe in, so we need to support that. It’s the way we farm. We’re certified through the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OFA). This year, they’ve also started offering the Real Organic Project certification as part of their whole certification process.

Scott Myers 1:20:55
At their recent annual meeting, I was talking with some other farmers who didn’t know anything about the Real Organic Project. They’re like, “Oh, why would I want to do this?” I started asking questions as well. “What do you do? How do you farm? I’m like, “Well, you don’t have to change anything. You are already doing this. But by joining this movement, you’re showing that you believe in this cause and that this is how you feel.” I’m like, “Sometimes that’s what we have to do to show our support.”

Linley Dixon 1:21:22
By strengthening numbers, we can strengthen the organic seal together.

Scott Myers 1:21:26
Exactly. That’s like the Organic Farmers Association. It’s great what we do. We come to DC here, and as we’ve done this multiple years and gotten more numbers and gotten them to know our legislators, they really enjoy talking about organic. Even the ones we think wouldn’t.

Linley Dixon 1:21:43
Talk a little bit about the [inaudible 1:21:45] right now. It was different this year.

Scott Myers 1:21:46
It was really different. To be honest, yesterday we were on the Hill visiting our legislators. Initially I was a little depressed before we went yesterday, because I thought, “Boy, nobody’s going to want to talk to us. We’ve built all this stuff, but once we started talking to them, it was more positive than I expected. Fortunately, my representative, here in Ohio, built a relationship with his staff. He’s been out to our farm, and his Ag aid is Karen. She’s fantastic. She’s become a proponent for organic. She sees the import issues, and she sees how important organic agriculture is for our area. It’s really neat to go talk with somebody like that that’s friendly to it.

Scott Myers 1:21:52
Then her next comment was, “Well, how can we help?” We talked about, obviously, the organic imports act thing that we’re working on, but we also talked about some of these funding freezes. Personally, the grant funding freeze has not affected me directly. I have a fellow farmer that was putting solar panels up under the REAP program, but it was also funded through Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) money. He was putting solar panels on, and it was the end of January till they were finished. They basically told him, even though he had this signed contract, that his funding is frozen, and right now he’s having to pay for it all out of pocket. He’s already flooded with the money.

Scott Myers 1:23:21
She asked how they could help. I said, “First of all, we need to have trust in our government that when I do business with somebody, they’re going to hold up their end of the deal.” That was a written contract. They need to hold that side up. Like I told her, I said, “If you guys want to change legislation, then change it that goes through the proper channels. That’s why we have Congress. That’s why we have three branches of government.”

Scott Myers 1:23:46
I support the current legislation, and I don’t want them to change, at least if they go through the proper channels; we all have a chance to debate, discuss, and learn from that and figure something out. But when you just take the funding away and end the program in the middle, that’s not fair. Senator Boozman made that comment that he supported making sure that we honor our commitments. I think that’s so important. That’s just a business principle. That’s not even just a US government; that’s a life principle. You have a commitment; you honor it. That was that was positive to hear that in those things.

Scott Myers 1:24:25
In Ohio, we have two new senators, so that’s a learning process. The hardest part with organic is a lot of the staffers, and in the case of both of my Ohio senators, neither of them even have an organic or have an Ag staffer at this point. You go in cold, and you ask the staffer, like, “What do you know about organic agriculture?” One of the fellows yesterday just had a blank stare. Finally I asked him, “Do you eat organic?” He’s like, “Well, yeah. I eat everything organic.” I said, “Perfect. We got a starting point.” That was where we started, but it was like starting at square one.

Linley Dixon 1:24:25
I want a little bit of hope for the future, your vision. Do you sell to Janie’s Mill?

Scott Myers 1:25:15
No, not Janie’s Mill. It’s Farmer Ground Flour. Harold and I are good friends, but Farmer Ground Flour is up in New York. It’s near Ithaca, in Trumansburg, I think, is actually where they’re based. Tor Oechsner runs that one. Tor and Harold are friends. We sell all our hard red winter and hard red spring wheat to them. Most of the grain is grown in New York, but their business was growing – for their flour business and also to spread out their risk. Because if they have a bad weather event in New York, they wouldn’t have a backup supply. They reached out to us and said, “Hey, can you start supplying us?” That’s been a fantastic relationship for us. It’s so much fun.

Scott Myers 1:26:01
My wife and I went up like three weeks ago now to Cornell. I spoke at the Organic Grains Conference. Then we spent the weekend with Tor and his wife, Rachel, and seeing the mill. It was so cool because they now have their own bakery too, which is called The Wide Awake Bakery. It was the neatest thing to go into the bakery. First of all, it’s always busy – it sells out almost every day. I think they said they bake 700 loaves of sourdough a day, plus all the other stuff.

Scott Myers 1:26:02
But while we were in there – I was just standing back watching because I didn’t even know what we wanted to buy and just taking it all in – a lady came in and she’s like, “Oh, you’re ahead of me to get in line?” “Well, no, no. I’m just back here waiting.” She’s like, “Oh, you have questions.” I’m like, “No, no. I’m just enjoying watching.” She’s like, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, we grow a lot of the wheat for the flour here.” All of a sudden she’s like, “Oh, my gosh!” She started thanking me and telling everybody else about, “Hey, this is one of the farmers…” It was amazing. It was so cool to see that. That’s what we need more of…

Linley Dixon 1:27:11
…the demand all the way through the supply chain. Be it the mill, baker, the end customer, or distribution.

Scott Myers 1:27:20
In this case of this mill and bakery. Most of their flour doesn’t go to their bakery; it goes out to retail. All over, up and down the East Coast. They sell a lot of different places, and it just grows. But what’s really neat about the mill is…one of the mill’s philosophies before their farmers is not that the mill is going to become crazy profitable. I’m not exactly sure; I believe around 50% of the profits from the mill have to go back to the farmer that is growing the wheat.

Scott Myers 1:27:20
Their goal is to make sure the farmer is getting paid fairly. We get paid significantly higher than what I would if I went out on the open market, and we get to support this because they said the mill is just another way to create a market for those farmers grains. The rest of the profits go back into the mill and make it better if they need to grow, and that way they can grow without a lot of debt. It’s just a neat situation. We’re hoping that we can grow with even more grains with them in the future.

Linley Dixon 1:28:22
Even throughout that entire supply chain, there’s people that have said, “Well, if the USDA stickers is on, that’s good enough for me.” Then there’s other people that have said, “I actually want to support either my regional agriculture, or maybe I’m going to test this and make sure that it is organic.” Maybe I don’t want that hydroponic product or whatever. Even if it doesn’t come from the consumer – it’d be great if it came from the consumer that demand – but even the folks throughout the supply chain, that awareness of these issues, that willingness to support a more regionally based agriculture, American-grown even to start, I just appreciate those folks so much.

Linley Dixon 1:29:03
They really have integrity throughout the whole system that, “It’s fraudulent organic; it’s cheaper. I’m just going to buy it.” As opposed to someone, “Nope, not going to test it positive. I’m not going to take that.” Are you willing to share that story – what you did when you went to the NOP, or the response that you got when you went to the NOP? I think this was sunflower?

Scott Myers 1:29:33
I believe it was soybeans. I’ll leave the business names out of it. But in this whole process of learning about organic imports in the last two years, it has blown my mind how this whole process works. But in talking with people, I got to talking with one of the import buyers for one of these larger feed companies. I was shocked. They came to me and said, “We support what you’re doing.” And I’m thinking, “I’m surprised, because you guys import grain. I figured you’d want to get it as cheap as you can.” He’s like, “No. Our business tests everything because we believe in integrity and making sure we get the right stuff.” He’s like, “We had this shipload coming in, and I got this odd email from an address I didn’t know, just saying, “You might want to double-check the ship that’s coming in.”

Linley Dixon 1:30:38
Interesting, he got a tip.

Scott Myers 1:30:40
He got a tip. Luckily, he hadn’t paid for the ship-loaded grain. They don’t pay till it hits the port. He alerted their exporter, that was exporting it to him, and said, “Hey, we’re going to wait to pay, and we’re going to figure this out.” He calls the NOP, and he’s like, “What do I do? It sounds like this stuff’s not legit. Is there something you guys can do to help me out? You’re the NOP. I would think you would want to enforce this. I don’t want to do something wrong and cause problems. I want to make sure I’m getting legit grain.” They’re like, “Well, do you have proper paperwork?” He’s like, “Oh, yeah. We got proper paperwork.”

Scott Myers 1:30:40
They’re like, “Well, the choice is up to you then.” He’s like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “I think it’s fraudulent. I want to test it. Can you help me test it?” They’re like, “No. If you want to test it, go ahead, but if you have proper paperwork. You’re good. You can just go ahead and put it into the supply chain and do whatever you want. But if you want to test it on your own, go ahead, unload the ship, and test it. Cost is on you.” That’s what they did. They unloaded it into a warehouse. Luckily, they had that option because it was a large enough company that tested it, for pesticide residue. A few weeks later it came back positive for some sort of residue.

Scott Myers 1:31:14
Luckily, this company also had a non-GMO program. They moved it into the non-GMO program, and they told the exporter that they’re not paying the organic price. For them, luckily, they didn’t take a hit because they were smart enough they got that tip of an email. Had they not gotten the tip of the email and still tested it, then they would have had a problem. This happened a few years ago, and this is what started their process of testing. Because they were like, “Well, if that one tests positive, how do we know?” They become a lot more careful of what they bring in and testing. That’s just crazy that the NOP, who I thought w in charge of enforcing… That’s who would probably enforce something on us, domestic farmers, but they won’t enforce it on that situation, on an imported product. To me, that’s just boggles my mind, that that’s how that all works.

Linley Dixon 1:30:40
If the NOP is not doing it, there’s incentive to work with the fraudulent grain’s cheaper. We’ve got all of these organic CAFOs that probably shouldn’t be certified organic in the first place that are taking a ton of grain. If your heart’s not in organic, maybe you’re not really caring, it’s got the right paperwork, and it’s cheaper. This is the grain that you’re going to use.

Linley Dixon 1:32:57
We work with a lot of smaller, medium-sized dairy farmers, and they’re all like, “I don’t know if I support that or not because our feed costs might go up.” I’m like, “First of all, we’re talking about integrity.” I said, “We care about the integrity of the organic label.

Linley Dixon 1:32:58
If we’re not checking that, the Washington Post is going to figure it out…

Scott Myers 1:33:39
I’m like, “Second of all, if we can reduce the fraudulent imports, that will probably reduce some of the supply, and in the short term, their price might go up a little bit. In the long term, though, it’s going to stabilize their supply.” Because remember earlier, when I talked about those $40 soybeans, they pulled certificates for all Indian imports, and they jumped, “Well, if you’re not importing grain, you don’t have that chance of a huge fluctuation in supply; you have a more consistent supply.

Scott Myers 1:34:09
Plus, it gives more markets and incentives. If the price goes up a little bit more for all these conventional farmers that aren’t making any money, it’d give them that incentive to maybe at least look into organic production, because we have to remember conventional farms, they’re depending on exporting their grain. Which is the exact opposite of what we’re doing in organic. In their case, we have too much grain that we can’t even eat, so we’re using it for fuel, ethanol, or we’re exporting it.

Linley Dixon 1:34:40
Because of all those government programs that are incentivizing…

Scott Myers 1:34:44
When they talk about tariffs, which we’re right in the middle of right now, and those conventional farmers having a fit about the tariffs, personally, I’m neutral on them. I don’t really know how I feel because they don’t affect me nearly as much as a conventional farmer. Conventional farmers that just got 20% tariffs put on them from China, when that’s their biggest soybean customer. That’s huge. If we can stabilize this organic market more, there’s a huge hole in production. Grain production needs to be brought back to this country. That could be raised organically. That’s a great place for these conventional farmers to come over.

Scott Myers 1:35:21
I realize not all of them. In our area, the older generation, some of them don’t want to change. They’re doing the same thing. They’re probably close to retirement, but it gives the younger generation a chance to come back and farm. Organic is one of the few right spots for a young farmer. A young farmer can still come back to the farm with a few hundred acres on a grain farm and make a living. In a conventional farm, you don’t farm a couple of thousands acres, even then, that’s hard. If you’re only making $25 to $50 an acre, you have to farm a lot of acres. That’s terrible that the farmer, who is the person that is feeding us…

Scott Myers 1:36:00
Everything we hear on the news is about health and feeding everybody and making sure everybody’s healthy. But the farmers are the beginning of all that, and yet, in the end, we care the least about them. We basically kick them to the curb. They should be making good money in what they’re doing. I’m not saying nobody should be crazy rich, but they should at least be getting paid fairly and be able to make a good living and not have to worry about where they’re… In some cases, conventional farmers, some of them are not very well-off. We see that in our schools. They talk about their school lunch programs and stuff and who qualifies, and you see that. It’s crazy for a farmer’s kids to have low enough income to qualify for that. They should be…

Linley Dixon 1:36:07
You’re talking about a beginning farmer. You said $30,000 an acre is what they’re…?

Scott Myers 1:36:56
I wouldn’t say every area that they could start in. Our area in Ohio is right now $25,000 to $30,000 acre, but that’s because we have influence from a lot of development, from the city, and from the Plain community. There’s just so many different things in our part of Northeast Ohio that are weighing on that. It’s sad because our county has some of the best farmland in the state of Ohio. State University, their research facility, and part of their Ag campus sits in our county. They’ve done all these studies on the farmland viability and what quality… They’ve done it all over the country, but our county has all this really good farmland, and yet it’s getting gobbled up by houses. It’s comical.

Scott Myers 1:37:58
No matter how you feel about huge solar farms, our county has a moratorium on solar farms. They can’t come in and put a solar farm in; they can build all the storage units or all the houses they want on the land. In our county, a fellow farmer, they raise sheep, and graze them. It’s one of the first large-scale solar projects I’ve seen that I could actually get behind. They worked with the company. They were going to graze underneath, agrivoltaics. It worked together really good, and the county said, “No, you can’t do it.” It’s the perfect situation to utilize that. Yet, right across the street, they sold off another farm, and it’s all storage units, asphalt, and roof. Their priorities are so wrong.

Linley Dixon 1:38:29
A lot of what you were talking about today too – we’ve been static at 1% of the land that has been organic. It just seems like all these policies keep allowing fraudulent imports; all these things are just keeping it at 1%. That’s one of the things that sustainable food folks are like, “Well, maybe organic is not the answer,” because we’ve been static at 1% and we can’t convince farmers to convert. What you’re telling me is, like, this is a policy that’s causing this static growth. I know it’s a really complicated picture out there, but do you have anything we can say to those folks that are like, “Well, organics not the answer because people aren’t converting to it”? It’s too big of a change for folks to figure out how to do it.

Scott Myers 1:38:29
They always like to talk about the average age of a farmer – it’s late 50s, maybe 60 years. I don’t even know what it is anymore. I used to know when I was younger. Part of the reason for that is because young farmers aren’t coming back to farm. They think they can’t, because if they’re farming in conventional, they’re like, “Well, there’s no opportunity for me here.” A lot of those kids aren’t exposed to organic and all the other options because they’re told by even large universities that are funded by other outside interests that organic isn’t an option. They don’t see that. They don’t consider that. There’s so many ways that …you have to think outside the box a little bit, but it’s very possible…

Linley Dixon 1:40:01
The whole system seems to be designed against supporting the other…

Scott Myers 1:40:05
Government programs are designed by conventional agriculture for conventional agriculture. The Farm Bureaus of the world – the large companies – are lobbying on behalf of farmers, and yet, farmers don’t realize what they’re lobbying for sometimes. That just drives me crazy. There are some great organizations out there, and there’s great people in these organizations. I’ve been a Farm Bureau member for many years. There’s organic farmers in those organizations, but we need more. When you are told to talk to organic farmers, “Hey, what can you do?”

Scott Myers 1:40:45
We need to be in those organizations too. That’s how we get change, because if they’re truly listening to their farmers like they’re supposed to, then the more organic and specialty crop growers that are in there, the more they should listen to you. If they aren’t, then you need to call them out on it and be like, “Hey, I’m not paying for this. We need to do this.” Don’t be taking money from the chemical companies into these farm lobby groups, but they’re lobbying for the chemical company and not the farmer. That skews that, because people don’t see what we can do. They don’t realize it.

Linley Dixon 1:41:22
I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Scott, the man. You’ve got four kids?

Scott Myers 1:41:25
Yes, I do.

Linley Dixon 1:41:27
One of them’s even holding a big goat. Do you see him working on the farm someday…?

Scott Myers 1:41:33
I hope so. They love to help out. Our oldest is 16. Now, he’ll be able to drive trucks and tractors. Actually, all but my nine-year-old, who’s the youngest, but they drive skid steers and tractors, help pick up bales, and stuff like that. They all love the farm. Something that was done for me by my father was that I was never forced to come back and farm. He always said, “Hey, explore everything. If you want to come back and farm, that’s your choice. You need to make sure you want to come back and farm.”

Scott Myers 1:42:02
In fact, I started out as a music major. I love music to this day – I did music education. I was fortunate that I went to Ohio State University, who also had an Ag program, so I switched to Ag Econ shortly thereafter. Then I realized, “Hey, I want to come home and farm.” It’s crazy. In the late 90s, when I was at Ohio State in Ag Econ, nobody was going back to the farm. In fact, our professors and our advisors thought we were crazy. I think there was five of us in my graduating class. Just in Ag Econ, there was like 70 Ag Econ majors, and there was a five of us. All the professors were like, “You’re crazy.” I said, “If somebody is going back and farming, there’s not going to be an agriculture department at the school.” They said, “Oh, you can’t make any money farming.” I’m like, “No. If you farm the way we’ve always been farming. We have to think outside the box.”

Scott Myers 1:42:56
While it wasn’t organic initially – we had hay, and we tried all these other things – we’ve always thought outside the box. We’re not afraid to try something new. I have a neighbor, a conventional dairy farmer, smaller, and things haven’t been going good for small, conventional dairy farmers. He said, “Something has to change. The market’s got to change. Eventually, it’ll change and get better.” My take on that is that the definition of insanity – trying to do the same thing and thinking something else is going to change. Maybe he has to change. If you don’t change, you’re only falling behind. I’m not saying you have to always use the newest technology, but you need to be thinking of other ideas and things you can do.

Scott Myers 1:43:46
Like I said, I hope my kids come back to the farm. At least a few of them out of four. One of my goals is I want to make sure our farm can support all my kids if they all want to come back and farm. I want them to all have the opportunity, but if none of them want to come back, that’s their choice. They can all have a spot if they want. That would be great. I was fortunate. As soon as I got out of college, my father turned the farm over to me, and my grandfather did the same for him. He was in the hog business. My dad, out of college, got into the hog business. My grandfather said, “Hey, I’ll turn it over to you.” He just stepped back and was an advisor. That’s what my dad had done for me, but he wasn’t afraid to run without my ideas and help me. I would do the same for my kids.

Scott Myers 1:44:40
People are like, “How could you give up control?” I’m like, “No, it’s great.” My dad says every day, “This is the best job in the world.” I get to come out and do all the fun stuff. You’re working on making phone calls and working on numbers and all this. He said, “I get to go out and run the tractor. Just tell me what to do. I get to go have all the fun.” It’s a neat situation in family farms.

Scott Myers 1:45:03
I said we farm 2,500 acres, and that’s a fairly large farm. But I try to explain to people that we have multiple families in that. I have four full-time employees – we are supporting their families as well. There’s six full-time families that that 2,500 acres supports. If you divide that by six, that’s more like a 600-acre farm, if I didn’t do the math right. So, a 400-acre farm. It’s more manageable in that situation, because I get…I don’t want to apologize for my farm size. But I get that occasionally, because in the organic farming community, they’re like, “Oh, you’re a big farm.”

Linley Dixon 1:45:51
Well, not for the crops that you’re growing. You’re actually a pretty small farm. [inaudible 1:46:04] tiny farms that direct market that are surviving, or it’s like the mega farms. Somehow you’ve been in. That’s kind of the magic of the farm: the diversity, and the mid-size scale of it. It’s, I think, really rare…

Scott Myers 1:46:24
We look at it as preserving farmland too. For all those landowners that could sell their property to build on, we’re able to farm it organically. Pretty much almost every year, we seem to get new land to rent, and we might lose a little land development. This year, we just picked up another 90 acres from a farm. A family that’s like, “Hey, we want you to farm it. We want you to farm it organically, and we like what you’re doing.” It’s really fun to have landowners come to us and want us to farm their farm.

Linley Dixon 1:46:55
It’s astonishing to me. You must like spreadsheets because you’ve got all these tiny little parcels, and then this really complex rotation, and you’re trying to figure out what to do, and then sometimes you lose and gain these parcels. I’m blown away…

Scott Myers 1:47:11
We’re spread out over about 20 miles too, so a lot of road travel. Then each parcel has different fields because we don’t put every parcel in the same crop because we’re trying to rotate multiple crop strips. I think we have 150 fields amongst 25 to 100 acres or something.

Linley Dixon 1:47:30
How many days does it take for the organic crop inspector to…?

Scott Myers 1:47:35
They get a feel for it, yeah. Every inspector is different. Usually, we figure on a full day for an inspection. I tell them when they get there, “I’m an open book. You tell me what you want to see. You can go to any field. You can go to every field and go to any field. You just tell me where you want to go.” Because, like I said, I have nothing to hide with what we’re doing. Usually they just pick a few random fields and say, “I want to go to this field, this field, and this field,” and we take them there. The history and the records in history go with that.

Linley Dixon 1:48:10
Prior to that, when I said that vision, and you said local mills that are prioritizing more regional production, what does that look like? You’ve seen changes in your communities based on either good or bad agriculture policies. So, like, the gutting of communities, or hope for organic to bring some of that light…

Scott Myers 1:48:29
Yeah, I do. One of the neat things about selling to this mill in New York is that I can see that community. That community is way farther ahead of us in organic. It was so neat to just go get lunch at this little shop. The bread came from the bakery that we provide to, and it had local, grass-fed organic beef; it had some local cheese that was organic. Everything was on there. For, I think, $7.50 or $8, I got a really nice burger. I think there was organic sweet potato chips and a drink. I’m like, “That’s a really good value,” because you go to McDonald’s, you can’t buy a combo meal, which is totally unhealthy. If you buy a Big Mac meal, it’s probably more than $8. It’s neat to see that.

Scott Myers 1:49:22
As that community changes, it’s like the small stores come back – the locally owned stuff comes back. People support it. The whole cycle works. Our area has some of that where we live. Some of that is starting to come back, but we’ve lost so many farmers. The school that I grew up in, my graduating class, we had tons of farm kids. I would call my friends up and we talked about tractors and stuff like that in school and things. Now, there’s no farm kids, and there’s no agriculture programs.

Scott Myers 1:49:53
There used to be FFA programs in all the schools, and they’re gone. We’re fortunate, we still have 4H programs. I love 4H, our kids are in 4H – they show dairy goats. That’s how Nicole and I met. We were camp counselors together in 4H. We’re fortunate to still have that in our area, but a lot of areas don’t even have that. It’s too bad.

Linley Dixon 1:50:16
I think we were having a conversation with you about Argentina and the scale of farms. Was that with you? We were talking about, like how big…

Scott Myers 1:50:16
Oh, yeah. Argentina and Brazil, they both have huge, 20,000 to 30,000 acres or more even in some cases.

Linley Dixon 1:50:16
They just burned down rainforest or whatever university was there. At this time, we’re here in DC, and they’ve frozen funds, gutting programs, closing down USDA offices, and people are like, “Well, we’re going to make our government run like a business.” I want to respond and just say, “No, the government is here to create the world that we want to live in, and we have choices. We could turn into Brazil. We could turn our Midwest into just 40,000-acre farms, and in a way, we’ve made those political decisions to do that in conventional agriculture.” I feel like we’re at this really critical point in organic where we could say, “Okay, we could model what’s happening in conventional agriculture, and get bigger, get out.” Or we could use our government to say, “This is the world that we want to create for organic. If you want to think bigger, go for it.” But that’s what our government is for.

Linley Dixon 1:51:35
We’re pulling the plug right now, but I hope that we can at least use some of that. We are realizing what we’re losing some of this time and this chaos to just say, “Well, what do we want our world to look like, and how can I work with my government, or even go to my stores and start demanding things?” How can we participate and be part of creating the world that we want to live in? Because that’s the purpose of government, and the organic community did that. We came to the government and said, “This is the world we want. Regulate us so that we can protect it.”

Scott Myers 1:52:08
The lawmakers are always so shocked when we’re like, “Hey, we want to be regulated.” They’re like, “You’re the first people to ever come in and ask for more regulation sometimes.” But we’re like, “That’s what we want to create.” There’s a book I read probably 15 years ago. It was called “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations” by David Montgomery. He studied going way back thousands of years, and how the Middle East used to be one of the breadbaskets of the world. Because they basically didn’t put anything back – they didn’t raise things the right way – they lost that. We’re at risk of that in this country. Then what follows when the soil loses its productivity, the civilization goes down – it’s collapses. It all starts with the soil and how healthy the soil is.

Linley Dixon 1:53:04
I appreciate you, Scott. We got a double – here are two podcasts, I would say. Thank you for taking the time, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know you over the years [inaudible 1:53:12].

Scott Myers 1:53:15
Yeah. Thank you for your time. Thanks.