Op-Ed: The Next Farm Bill Can Help Farmers Kick Fertilizer

After college, I moved to Los Angeles and pursued a fashion career. But a decade in, I felt that something was missing. In 2009, my grandmother passed away, and I started to think about the farm. I didn’t want my dad to have to sell it, and I knew he needed help. So in 2010, I moved back to Iowa, to farm.

After four years of learning from my dad, I decided I was ready to manage my own section of the farm. I’d always used food, nutrition, and exercise to keep myself healthy, and I wanted to try preventive practices—in the form of organic agriculture—for the animals I raised and the plants I grew.  I rented a field from my family, transitioned it to organic, and put my sheep out on the healthiest pasture. I moved them daily from one paddock to the next, not allowing them to eat too much in one place. I stopped feeding them corn to fatten them up fast. And the soil started coming to life.

Legions of earthworms appeared, where I’d barely seen any before. The sheep and the plants became healthier, and I didn’t have to give them medicine or chemicals to help them grow. By building healthy soil and adding a greater variety of plants and animals to the farm, I realized I could create a self-supporting ecosystem that would generate its own fertility—no synthetic fertilizer required.

I started expanding my little plot and adding new farm enterprises. In addition to sheep, I started grazing cows and chickens and selling the meat to local families. I planted over 6,000 fruit and nut trees, started growing a perennial grain called Kernza, built out prairie pollinator habitats and riparian buffers, and restored wetlands. After a dozen years of working my way into this profession, I felt like I’d finally succeeded as a farmer.

But very early in my journey, after converting just a fraction of the family farm to these regenerative practices, I realized the reason no one else was doing it this way.

Not long after I’d moved back home, I sat in on my first meeting with our crop insurance agent. As the conversation progressed, it became increasingly clear that the value of our insurance hinged on one key number: our Average Production History, or APH.

Our APH, as the name suggested, was the average yield of a specific crop over a 10-year period. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) used this number to estimate what our yield should be, as a way of estimating how much loss we should be compensated for in the event of a disaster. Fair enough. But I quickly realized that the pressure to keep this number up was shaping what my dad did—and what every other farmer in our state was doing too.

For one thing, crop insurance was a huge factor determining what my dad was planting: corn and soybeans. These were the only crops we had a 10-year history of growing, and the yields had been pretty good. If you are growing something other than corn or soybeans, you have to start from scratch to build your APH, which takes ten years. So any part of the farm not planted into corn and soybeans is uninsurable.

To get a crop insured, there are other hurdles besides needing 10 years of yield history. First, it has to be recognized as insurable by the USDA, meaning it must be listed as a specialty or commodity crop.  Second, the crop has to have more than one farmer growing it in the county. Take Kernza, for example. This crop is uninsurable because it is considered a novel crop and not listed as a specialty or commodity crop according to the USDA.

Also, the pressure to maintain a high APH was shaping how we were growing these crops. No one wanted to risk a dip in their APH due to leaving any potential yield on the table. It was routine practice, I learned, to till to make the soil black so it warms up faster, plant as early as possible,  and overapply fertilizer—and apply it early—to ensure plants have as much as they could possibly use, because the earlier the corn is planted, the higher the yield. As I heard one farmer say, “I’ll throw everything in with the kitchen sink because there would be too much to lose if I didn’t.”

And it wasn’t just individual farmers making these decisions to prioritize their APH above all else. For most of us, farming at the scale of modern agricultural operations requires debt financing, and banks won’t lend to us without insurance. And what do they want to see? The high APH that we can only achieve with conventionally raised and tilled corn and soybeans—and oodles of fertilizer.

As farmers struggle with fertilizer bills made higher by the war in Iran, Congress has a rare opportunity to change the incentives that have kept families like mine stuck in a cycle of fertilizer dependence. Our legislators are currently working to reauthorize the $1.5 trillion federal farm bill, and there are four changes we could make to that bill that would support farmers in building up biological fertility and more resilient practices. This way, we wouldn’t need as much fertilizer and wouldn’t be as vulnerable to crop loss from extreme weather.

First, we could change the basis for crop insurance payouts, tying the size of these payments to the use of risk-reducing practices rather than APH. Under this system, farmers could qualify for higher payments by reducing their risk of crop loss with practices like longer crop rotations, cover crops, reduced tillage, and perennials.