Carrie Vollmer-Sanders, Sustainability Director at USFRA

Filling in for Allan Gray, your host Jarrod Sutton, Managing Director of DIAL Ventures, welcomes in Carrie Vollmer-Sanders, Sustainability Director at the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance.

Jarrod Sutton:

Welcome to the DIALed IN Podcast. I'm Jarrod Sutton with DIAL Ventures. What is DIAL Ventures? We're the Digital Innovation in Agrifood Lab at Purdue University. Quite simply, we're fixing problems in the ag and food industry.

We bring an approach that is a bit unique. We recruit tech entrepreneurs from outside of the agrifood industry, and through a fellowship program, we teach them about ag and food. But the second piece of our secret sauce is the industry engagement. Meaning, we talk with stakeholders up and down the entire agrifood chain, and they help us build the digital solutions that are most relevant to the industry.

It's open innovation. That's all digital. We're excited to have the opportunity today to talk to Carrie Vollmer-Sanders who is the Director of Sustainability for U.S. Farmers and Ranchers in Action (USFRA). Carrie, it's great to see you again. Thanks for joining us. Would you mind providing a better introduction than I just did?

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Sure. Well, it's great to be here, Jarrod. I appreciate what DIAL Ventures is doing. I have been in sustainability and agriculture my whole life, essentially. I grew up on a farm in Northwest Ohio and went to school for agriculture, and then have worked in the sustainability space in ag ever since.

Most recently, before coming here, I was at the Nature Conservancy for 12 years, working on Lake Erie issues, nearly solved that. We kept moving on. But no, seriously appreciate being here today. I still farm with my husband and my parents in Northeast Indiana, Northwest Ohio. I'm the Sustainability Director, as you mentioned, for USFRA. I get to do a lot of cool stuff there: work with scientists, work with companies throughout the value chain, and work with farmers and ranchers. It's really exciting to support who I think need to be highlighted; and that's farmers and ranchers.

Jarrod Sutton:

It's amazing when you're born and raised on a farm, it just… I don't know if it's in our DNA before, or if we developed that, but similar, I'm a farm kid from North, Central Indiana, we're neighbors. My family farms, and the farming practice has evolved. But one thing that hasn't changed, I would say, is the core values as a business may think about them.

We're fortunate that my dad and his dad before him were innovators. Let's try new things and continue to grow and develop, but also conservationists and thinking about the importance of preserving the land and ensuring that we take care of it, it takes care of us, and let's make sure that we leave it in better place and condition than when we found it. That just was instilled in me at a very young age. Sounds very similar.

I've held different sustainability and social responsibility roles. When you're working with farmers that really rally around that, that's intuitive to farmers and to our industry, it's hard not to get excited about it. I think that's really our opportunity in our respective roles here, and certainly at DIAL is to continue to help, wherever we can, to amplify that message, fill in some of the gaps. Maybe it's data tools that need to be developed to help substantiate some of these claims.

But before we get into that, could you tell us a bit of an overview of who USFRA is?

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Sure. Maybe I'll start with why I thought USFRA was a great company to work for and believe in now. I started looking at what USFRA was doing. They had something called the Decade of Action. I was like, "Oh, this is interesting." The UN, they talk about the Decade of Action all the time. USFRA took that, embraced it.

They've taken the Decade of Action and turned it into something called the Decade of Agriculture. Because this is how we're going to make the Decade of Action in sustainability happen, is to focus on agriculture and how our food is produced, how fuel is produced, how we take care of our landscape. That was the first thing that drew me to USFRA.

The second is that it encompasses all of agriculture. It's not just beef, it's not just pork, it's not just corn; it's all commodities, all of agriculture, and taking that throughout the value chain. USFRA really is that connector organization. When you think about farmers and ranchers throughout the value chain and consumers.

We're that organization that's going to help make those conversations happen, convene the organizations to not just meet and have a presentation, but actually talk about and think through some of those hairy conversations, those wicked conversations wherever you are from. You might call it something different, but have those hard conversations and think about how we can solve it. I think that's one of the reasons why we appreciate DIAL Ventures so much.

Jarrod Sutton:

Man, how do you not get excited about that? This is big time, the global stage where you and I are from, where you farm, it's the best dirt in the world. You can grow tremendous crops with tremendous yields that literally feed the world, and you're thinking about it as part of an organization in that responsible way. Well, there's all kinds of good with that. I can't wait to dig into it. Thanks for the introduction and the overview.

I've got a handful of questions. We're going to riff, though. We'll go wherever the conversation takes us. I was reading about USFRA, and science-based innovation is one of the core values at USFRA. How do you all think about innovation? Specifically, how you think about it in the agrifood space?

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

A couple of years ago, USFRA changed its name. It's now U.S. Farmers and Ranchers in Action. I think that's the important piece of the science-based innovation. There's a lot of companies that are science-based. Some talk about innovation, but we want to be that company that's in the action.

When we talk about sustainability, as you probably heard 100 times before, it's really about that three-legged stool: the profit, the planet, the people. Our role at USFRA is to connect the farmers and ranchers with the food and ag stakeholders to drive solutions, whether it's by educating, just convening them, or helping host that conversation to co-create the value.

Innovation is part of that co-creation value piece that we want to talk about. We aren't necessarily the ones that are going to be the inventors and the innovators. That's where it's great to have organizations like DIAL Ventures as part of the conversation. But really, it's bringing farmers and ranchers together to collaborate and make advancements faster. Sometimes we do that with events that we host, sometimes it's just conversations and webinars. Other times, it's making sure farmers and ranchers are involved with the conversation, so bringing farmers and ranchers to the conversations that food companies are having.

But I think the purpose is for each of these advancements to help farmers make better decisions both in the short run and the long run. It might be something that helps the farmers be safer or have a less physically demanding job. All of these conversations are happening. It could just be about financing and how we need to just invest differently. But really, it gets back to the how can we help bring folks together to make the innovation faster?

The action is critically important. I remember when USFRA was born as an alliance, my CEO at that time at the National Pork Board and a few other CEOs of organizations got their heads together and the alliance piece was important. Let's make sure that we have that common ground shared values, which of course, in the barnyard, there's a tremendous amount of that. Let's make sure that we're consistent, how we're representing that proactively in the marketplace.

Jarrod Sutton:

When you talk about innovation and evolution, that's what USFRA did. Let's put that in action. There's so much great work happening on the farm and so many questions from downstream. How do you create that connection? I think USFRA is uniquely positioned to do that. Thinking about mutually beneficial outcomes, we're all marching toward that same critical success factor.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Right. The other thing that you have to think about is, how do we help efficiency? It's not any one person or one organization is going to have all the answers. When we can bring the different minds, the differing backgrounds together, then you can riff off one another.

Jarrod Sutton:

Yeah, that's right.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

I think the other thing that we do or focus on is making sure that when we do bring folks together, they're having these open and thoughtful conversations. One of the events that we have every year that I got to help lead last year is called Honor the Harvest. Are you familiar a little bit, maybe?

Jarrod Sutton:

A little bit. Tell me more.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

The focus is to bring roughly 150 people together, so small-ish, intimate group. But a variety of expertise from around the ag value chain. We want decision-makers, leaders, people of action involved in those conversations. Whether it's a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, maybe it's a sustainability lead, it could also be maybe a government official that's doing some work in agriculture and sustainability, and farmers and ranchers.

Oftentimes, we don't think of farmers and ranchers as CEOs, but we're bringing together CEOs of farms, whether they're small farms or large farms or they're fruit and veg farms or they're dairy farmers; we're bringing all those folks together for conversations. What I love about this setup is there might be a speaker or a set of speakers that come and get your thoughts flowing, get your juices going, excited about whatever that topic is. Then at each table, you're going to have a conversation.

There's eight people at a table. Those folks are curated in such a way that we don't have just farmers at one table because that would be easy. All the farmers just want to sit together and talk about like, "All right, what are you growing? How are you doing this?" No. It's everybody, is coming at it from a different perspective from throughout the value chain. You have a processor, you have someone from a CPG company, you have a farmer, a rancher, and they're going to talk about these hairy issues, like, talk about the tension. How do we work through that?

It's been great to see some new ideas come from those conversations. New partnerships, I was excited that there are brand new partnerships being announced. Now, I would love to take all the credit for these partnerships. But when I look back at who was at Honor the Harvest like, "Oh, they actually were at the same table this last year. Well, that's interesting." In part, I think we helped some of innovation and co-creation in a way that's maybe a little bit different than when people are thinking about innovators.

Jarrod Sutton:

That's amazing. You're a convener, you're a catalyst in many ways. But really, when you convene folks and there's a central theme, you have conversations. Sometimes you're sitting on the same side of the table working toward the same thing, and you didn't even know it. But those casual conversations can lead to those outcomes, which it sounds like was incredibly successful and exciting to see progress.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Yes. I think the other thing, when you bring people together to think about, work on, hear, learn, you have to take some time to just let the conversations happen. So often, we go to these conferences and there's amazing speakers and you learn so much, but you don't get to do a deep dive with those people around you to take it a step further.

You have the presentation, it's half an hour long because that's how long it's scheduled. Then you move to the next half hour long session, and, my goodness, by the time you're done, you've heard from 25 different people. Your brain is going 100 miles an hour, but you haven't been able to sit and think through what you just heard with other people who maybe have a different perspective or can help you take it to the next level. I think that's one of the things that's important about some of the work we do.

Jarrod Sutton:

I love everything you just said, especially the way we think about it here is when there's a discovery, you have a what? Here's a what? Here's a what, here's a thing. We just, "Okay, so what? What does this mean to our business, to our industry?" Then the now what? What are you going to do about it? The what, the so what, and the now what. That spells action to me.

I do root cost analysis all the time. I'm just curious, and so I'm always peeling layers down. Where do you see that root source of demand for innovation in our industry? Where do you see that coming from? Especially as it relates to the sustainable production practices. We hear about regen ag all the time, and that's the buzzword of the day. But I'm always wondering, is it Wall Street, asset managers looking at our industry and the food industry, or is it consumers, or anything? Where do you see it?

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

I'm going to go back to farmers in general. They're passionate people about whether it's animals or soil or crop. Usually, if they're animal guys, they're animal guys. If they're crop guys, they're crop guys. They have a passion for one of them. They always want to see this continual improvement. That continual improvement probably isn't enough to put us at this innovation pace that we're at now, but I think that drive for continual improvement, for efficiency, for just being better than where they were last year, that drive is the gear box, right? That's going to keep things moving forward.

We think about computers and technology, they've just advanced so much, so there's so much more we can do now. CRISPR technology took us to this whole new level, just on the genetic side of things. You want to talk about… You're talking about Wall Street? Well, maybe it's just international trade in general or international conversation. We're now able to learn from farmers in Australia that when you think about 20 years ago, it was so difficult to learn from farmers in other countries because how do you get them there? How are you going to learn from them?

One of the things COVID did is made Zoom okay, it made Teams calls okay. I just think there's a faster pace of learning also that's happening. I do think that consumers, they want a safe and affordable food supplies, but innovation is going to help it continue to be safe and more economical. I think it's a number of different sources, but I think it's the farmers' need and passion for their animals, for their crops to continue to get better. I think that's the root source. But all these other things make it happen.

Jarrod Sutton:

I love that. That's, again, back to our DNA, who we are, what we do. Thinking about, it's probably sound like, what does my son say, boomer? Because the Internet changed everything. But the reality is he doesn't know the world without the Internet. I do. But the reality is, I say this all the time, there are more people in more cities around the world that look like other people in other cities because we're all connected and Instagram is a thing, and it's influencing more so than the culture. Not that that's lost, but you get my point.

The same can be said for information exchange. Now we're talking about hardware, where John Deere is putting satellites in space, for example, to pull data from Brazil to be able to apply those learnings here and vice versa, of course. That fundamentally changes everything, which comes to my next question and where DIAL is focused.

Well, we're the Digital Innovation in Agrifood Lab. We're hardware-agnostic. We're not creating any robots to do anything anytime soon. Purdue has got some folks working on that, but for us, it's really some of that basic blocking and tackling to see where the gaps are for data collection, as it were, or to be able to fundamentally synthesize it to be in some usable form.

Those are the things under the auspices of ESG, of course, labor, overall data interoperability, consumer demands for more transparency and traceability, etc. It feels like there's, I say, critical eye, but really critical eyes just toward agrifood production. It seems to me that the proof in our claims, what you say, what I agree with, are intuitive to who we are as farmers and ranchers.

The proof is more important than ever. Carbon offsets or carbon insets, and I think there's a lot of confusion in between the two. That's one example. At USFRA, how do you help member organizations, farmers and ranchers? How do you help them navigate through this uncertainty? Where do you advise them to put their focus and efforts and resources as it relates to the proof points?

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Sure. Well, first I'll say that USFRA doesn't necessarily give advice to farmers. We're not out there in the business of being advisors. There's lots of advisors that farmers have to talk to. Some of the advice that we give is essentially understand your supply chain, what does your supply chain look like, and engage within that supply chain, whether it's with your local elevator and co-op, the processor that's buying your wheat, your corn goes someplace. Does it go to an ethanol plant? Does it go to livestock? Does it go to tortilla chips? What does it go to?

That's not always as easy to figure out, but it's really important because we've got, I've called them computer conservationists before, some folks call them pencil pushers, people that maybe don't understand farming, but they read something somewhere, and they know that the best way to raise a steer is to do it in this way, or if only the corn was made this way, it would be better for everybody. Well, yeah. We need to just take a step back and maybe take some time to also understand the supply chain. It's another reason why we have Honor the Harvest.

It was amazing. This past year, we had Honor the Harvest at a ranch, and more than half of the people had never been to a beef farm before or beef ranch. You can tell I'm from the East, from Indiana, Ohio, when I say farm, and I mean farm or ranch, it's definitely not the language that if I grew up in Oklahoma.

All that to say I have a term I sometimes use called green blocking. We have a way to make sure that only sustainability-focused products are sold or purchased, or processed, and it's going to block other people from being able to sell their products because we think it needs to be done in a particular way.

Well, maybe we just need to figure out. There's lots of ways to raise, let's say, corn that is good for the environment. Let's have that conversation. What is it that you're looking for? What data do you need to help you make that claim? Can we do it in a way that it's not blocking everybody, but it's also helping this continual improvement, it's helping farmers and ranchers, it's also helping you, as a company, sell your products?

Jarrod Sutton:

Green blocking, I've not heard that before. I like the term because it's… A lot of the science is lost, unfortunately. I think you can agree, certainly, I've spent a lot of time in my career trying to translate PhD into ADD. How do you distill it down and just do a couple of bullet points? Again, I would say sound science and the sound bites. It's not always easy.

Conversations like what you described at the Honor of the Harvest event are critically important because number one, it's a human being, and it's a human being with real examples and maybe a little dirt under their fingernails talking about the production practices. It fundamentally, at a minimum, gets the truth onto the table, and that's a great place to start a productive conversation to figure out how we might be able to partner and potentially create additional value. But maybe tell a little bit of a different story too.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Right. I will also say marketing directors are very good at their job, and sometimes marketing can drive conversations. When you can get the marketers out to talk with the farmers and understand, or vice versa, you can help the process move along so much faster and less complicated, perhaps.

Jarrod Sutton:

Exactly. You know farmers and you know ranchers; you are a farmer. At DIAL, we talk a lot about an adoption-first mindset… We're all thinking about that the jobs that need to be done, is our North Star to truly fall in love with the problem areas, the pain points, and dig deep into, "What is the job that's trying to be done here?" Because the reality is, if we don't think about it from that point of view, we'll create digital tools that don't have a pragmatic, practical approach.

There are plenty of really good ideas that actually became digital businesses that are in the roadside ditch because they were too technically complex, or they created more work for the farmer or the rancher, whoever the intended user. You know how this whole process works. That's not how DIAL works. We have to have that input from the customer, whoever it is, ideally the farmer and the rancher, first and foremost, to ensure that it's a very pragmatic approach here.

Let's not create more jobs for the farmer. In fact, let's develop solutions that can actually save some time and save some money and maybe actually help them make a little bit more money in the process. That's what we're thinking about. That's my perspective. With your experience, what do you see from farmers and ranchers in terms of their appetite and ability to adopt new digital tools?

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Well, I'm not sure, Jarrod, if it's just you or if it's all of DIAL, but I really do appreciate the adoption-first mindset. I think that's one of the reasons why we want to make sure that more people are engaged or understand what's happening at DIAL. Because when you start with the problems, the solutions are inevitably more useful, and efficient, effective, etc.

When it comes to adoption of new tools or practices, I think there's a lot of farmers that want to test it out, or they want to talk with someone else that's tested it out. Sometimes, depending on the situation, maybe you don't really want to hear what your neighbor did, but you do want to hear what your 50-mile-away neighbor did. It's not so close to home, and that person that's 50 miles away is now an expert, or your neighbor is the person you sit next to at church. You can get a little bit different perspective.

But farmers, they will try new things. They are always going to say—I shouldn't say always—often times what we hear first and foremost is, "It's too expensive. We're not going to try that. It's too expensive." Well, okay. Maybe keep asking the question about what's too expensive and you'll get to the root cause, and you'll get back to why the solution is maybe not a great fit for them at the moment, or you'll understand better how they're thinking about their operation.

Probably DIAL isn't going to experience this, but maybe other solutions that don't start with that adoption-first mindset, like, the farmers are thinking, "Oh, my gosh! It's going to cause me more labor. It is more expensive, but it's going to be more time. It's going to be more people." Labor is expensive, and farmers' time is expensive.

I do think that's why, in some ways, the whole carbon conversation is not working out as lovely as the food companies would like because it takes a lot of time to enter the data. It takes a lot of energy to capture all of that, repackage it, and send it up, and they're going to get what? $3 or $5 an acre? That's peanuts, really, when you think about the cost that goes into an hour of labor.

As you know, they want to see what's in it for them. How will it make their operation better? Sometimes it's how they'll be more efficient with their resources, their inputs, their time. Sometimes it is that they're looking at it for a three or five-year payback. It doesn't have to pay itself back right now. Jarrod, oftentimes I think of the… Back in the day, is in the '90s, there was an issue with soil erosion that the government got behind, and they were like, "Oh, we're going to solve this." They called it T by 2000. They had this great marketing campaign.

It wasn't until two other innovations happened that it really took off, this helping eliminate erosion. One was the John Deere no-till drill, and the other was Roundup Ready soybeans. When those two things came together, when those innovations made it the easy button for farmers, then that's when the innovation took off. Sometimes it might be that the innovation is good, we just need a second innovation to make it really take off.

I don't think that the seed companies and John Deere works together necessarily to do this, but they were each trying to solve problems for farmers. It was those two together that hit the easy button and made no-till and conservation farming really take off in the '90s. Sometimes it's a combination of innovations that's going to make things happen.

Jarrod Sutton:

I like the way you described that and having the personal reference. I never pulled a moldboard plow. I pulled a chisel plow several times, but even back then in the early '90s, we were starting to experiment with cover cropping. Some people were talking about no-till, to your point. The way that we're able to connect, as we mentioned earlier, through the Internet, which is always fun to say, that type of information is just shared so much faster, easily accessible, the knowledge is there.

I think, to your point, with our downstream food companies that have set goals, and it's all good in terms of trying to do good to remove carbon and reduce our overall footprint in their supply chain, that introduces the opportunity to have conversations. Ideally, it creates collaboration for mutually beneficial outcomes, like the two examples that you just provided.

It can check a number of boxes, and everybody in the supply chain wins as a result of it. Organizations like USFRA are uniquely positioned to represent that, and also to create those convening opportunities for all kinds of different parties to come together and think through that. If we zoom out and think about the entire broad spectrum of the agrifood value chain, where do you see the opportunities for digital innovation?

We've talked some about hardware and your example there with tech, both from John Deere and the Roundup Ready soy beans, fundamental game changers to your point. There's going to be a need for more digital evolution. There already is today, of course. Sometimes we think about it really to mitigate risks. Sometimes we think about it just to preserve a competitive advantage.

What I love to think about is the opportunity to start farming the data and realize new revenue streams through that. If there are downstream needs and our data, as farmers, can provide, then what is that worth, and how do we find a way to potentially market that? What do you think about that in terms of the opportunities? If you’ve got some specific examples, that would be super helpful as well.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

I was thinking about what's going to happen in the next 15 years. We know farmland transition is one of those things that's going to happen. Who's going to buy that land? Who's going to manage it? Who's going to farm it? In some ways, I wonder if there is a way to capture the data on the farms right now. Then when they are transitioned, whether they sell or someone else is farming them because you've got different owners, or it's managed differently because you're now in this new world of carbon, can the data move with the farm?

If your family inherits 80 acres, what do you do with that? Could you get a higher value for that farm if you had the last five years of data on what was happening with soil, carbon, with nutrients, with yield, etc.? Is that more valuable to the new buyer? Because then they can enter in different markets more quickly. That's one of the things I've been thinking about, is all this farmland transition, how do we help the new landowners take better advantage of the data and maybe manage the farm better also? They see the wet spots, they know how to manage that differently.

The other is thinking about just data management in general. There are lots of companies that can come and help you think through what's happening on your farm. Maybe they'll give you conservation recommendations or fertilizer recommendations, but I wonder if there is a solution that could combine those two things.

Maybe it's not one company, but it's a platform of sorts where a farmer could send their information, and you have somebody that can come and give you the conservation recommendations for carbon markets, they could give you recommendations for water markets, and at the same time, they're thinking about and considering next year's yield. Because often those two recommendations are by different people and there isn't an overlap, and so you get one or the other. I think that whole conversation needs to change. Maybe that'll change as agribusinesses see themselves more as a service oriented company rather than just an Amazon for inputs. I think that will change too.

Jarrod Sutton:

I think that's brilliant, Carrie. It's really about the relationship, not just the transaction, as you just described. How do you take data, which is just information—I love the word data, but it's information—to help inform the decision-making process? If we're thinking about this for the long term, as certainly we should without compromising the production and yields for the short term, then that's a super exciting area to really just explore and likely discover some low-hanging fruit to create more opportunities for better data-driven decision-making.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

The other thing is, think about what data farmers have to enter every single year. Sometimes there's government reports like, "Well, let's just make that automated." Whether it's for crop insurance or it's for census or some of the things that it's helpful for the market to know, helpful for you as a buyer of whatever insurance policies or risk management that you have, could some of that stuff just be automated? You have the data, just hit a button, upload it, ding.

Jarrod Sutton:

The cool thing about that is we know there are tools like that that exist in other areas and functions in our lives.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Right.

Jarrod Sutton:

That's the whole idea behind DIAL Ventures, is bringing tech entrepreneurs that have experience building those solutions in other industries. "Hey, do that for ag and food."

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Right. Well, and I was just having a conversation with some friends of ours there in the health care space and like, "So how exactly does the HIPAA policy work? If I go to the doctor in this town, but I have to be referred to a specialist over here, how does my data…" It's still mine; I have to give the okay that it's shared with the specialist doctor. "How do we make that happen for farmers on our fields?"

I get really excited about some things like that. It's the farmers in charge of their data, and they can then decide who helps them and where it moves. It isn't any input company that owns it. It's me as a farmer saying, "Yes, I want you to take a look at this, Jarrod. Thank you," and help me make better decisions. I think there's just so many opportunities. It's really an exciting time.

Jarrod Sutton:

Boy, you're not kidding. Listen, I'm not ready to stop, but we have to. I'm going to get the ax here and say we'll have to. If you would be open to it, I'd love to continue the conversation at another time, Carrie, because we haven't talked about generative AI. I hear from farmers all the time, "Give me a ChatGPT for running my farm operation." I'm like, "Yeah. Why not? Why not? That's brilliant." We'll talk about that another time. Super exciting.

Carrie, I can't thank you enough. It's been a pleasure having you today and hearing your perspective from USFRA. Thank you for all the good work that you're doing on behalf of farmers and ranchers and really the entire agrifood chain.

Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:

Well, thank you, Jarrod. I appreciate what Purdue DIAL Ventures is doing. Thanks for having me on.

Jarrod Sutton:

Awesome. Thank you, Carrie.

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