Josh Payne closes the electric fence after 1,000 sheep pass through to a fresh paddock Sept. 3 at the Payne family farm in Concordia. Payne said that moving 1,000 sheep from paddock to paddock is easier than moving a small number (Cory W. MacNeil/Missourian).

Early on a cool September morning, farmer Josh Payne tends to his flock in Concordia, just east of Kansas City.  As Payne opens the gate, about a thousand sheep round the corner and bound into fresh grass.

The pasture the flock grazes was once corn and soybeans, along with the rest of the Payne family farm. Josh’s grandfather Charles Payne cultivated nearly a thousand acres of row crops for decades.

But as Josh Payne took over managing the property about 15 years ago, that wasn’t going to work anymore.

“I found out I’m allergic to herbicide,” he said. “My throat would swell shut three or four times a week during harvest.”

Payne wanted to transition the farm to regenerative agriculture — a movement that aims to revive farmland soil and by extension the ecosystem and the small farm economy.

He hoped that by changing what and how they farmed, it would reduce the need for chemical inputs and farm with nature. Josh told his grandfather they should use cover crops, graze sheep and plant an orchard. But Charles Payne wasn’t having it.

“I’m like, ‘Grandpa, we should do this.’ He’s like, ‘No, we’re not planting trees!’” Josh Payne said. “Literally. His phrase was, ‘I spent my whole life tearing out trees. We’re not gonna go plant them now.’”

Josh said he and his grandfather had similar disagreements, and even arguments, about many changes Josh hoped to make on the farm.

“We went through a really interesting process because I’m stubborn and he’s stubborn,” he said.

Mid-century farm revolution

Charles Payne, 96, came of age during an industrial and chemical revolution in agriculture. Like countless other Midwestern farmers, he heeded the advice from industry and government leaders to “plant fence row to fence row” to increase the production of commodities.

“And that’s what we did … tore out all the fences and hedgerows,” Charles Payne said. “Now I wish I had some of them back.”

U.S. agriculture production tripled in the latter half of the 20th century, due in part to chemical inputs. But that came with an environmental cost — soil degradation, water quality issues and a loss of biodiversity.

The resurgence of regenerative or environmentally sustainable agriculture is partially a response to the industry’s contribution to climate change and its susceptibility to it. There’s now a surge of funding, research and education to figure out how to scale regenerative agriculture and turn away from equipment and chemically intensive ways of cultivating crops.

But University of Missouri rural sociologist Mary Hendrickson said the way Charles Payne farmed was also a result of policy, research and methods encouraged by the industry at the time. Before the ecological consequences were understood, chemical inputs were “miracles” for a farm.

“Everybody who was going to be an advanced, innovative farmer, they were using chemicals for weed control, for pest control, for all of these things,” she said.

Hendrickson said for a certain generation of farmers, their skepticism or resistance to regenerative agriculture is a result of their lived experience. “There’s a reason why somebody who has lived through that transition says, ‘Wait, you want me to go back to what?” Hendrickson said.

The advice Charles Payne’s grandchildren, Josh and his sister Jordan Welch, are getting is sometimes the exact opposite of what he was told in his day.

Hendrickson said this isn’t unique to agriculture. There are many things in life that people do differently than their grandparents’ generation — such as cooking, cleaning or child rearing.

“The things that my mother did to raise me were not in vogue when I was born, and they were (again) 20 years later,” she said.

Generational legacy

Farming isn’t Josh Payne’s first vocation. After teaching English for years, he said he ended up back on the farm “completely accidentally” when his grandfather requested help managing the land about 15 years ago.

“When we got here it was a very, very conventional farm. Everything was commodity, corn and soy. Everything was Roundup ready. Everything was genetically modified,” Josh Payne said. “I call it growing nickels and dimes.”

Payne wasn’t exactly happy row cropping, and he was curious about trying other methods. But when he discovered his allergy to herbicides, it was a catalyst for change.

“Grandpa, I’m either going to have to go back to teaching or we’re going to have to completely change what we do,” he told Charles Payne.

The Paynes now rotationally graze their sheep among 800 chestnut trees — a method called “silvopasture,” which revives the soil by keeping living roots in the ground year round. They planted the trees eight years ago and are completing their third harvest.

Before the flock of sheep was added to the operation, the Paynes cultivated conventional crops in between the orchard rows that are spaced 30-feet apart — a regenerative method called alley cropping. The Paynes are still finding ways to grow and adapt, most recently by adding a produce garden.

Charles Payne has been farming the stretch of land in Concordia since 1956. He said corn, soy and wheat were the “going” crops at the time.

“We had some good years and we had some very poor years too,” he said.

Josh Payne said his grandfather has a deep knowledge of the land and the industry and now acts as a mentor and adviser to his grandkids.

Although he said he’s had to learn to bite his tongue at times during this transition, Charles Payne said he’s happy they are farming.

“That’s a good thing to have your grandkids farming where you left off,” Charles Payne said. “Of course, it’s a different way of farming, but they’re on the farm, and they seem to really enjoy it.”

For Charles and Josh Payne, the elder’s resistance to change and the younger’s desire for change were both motivated by the goal to keep the farm alive. Josh Payne said the markets for sheep and chestnuts are good and support jobs for him and his sister. He said they’re comparable to the markets his grandfather had for corn, soy and wheat decades ago.

“Grandpa, you made the right decisions for your time,” he said. “You were faithful to this land, to this place, to your family … but that just looks different now.”

Rural sociologist Hendrickson said in agriculture communities especially, there exists a generational pressure to farm and to succeed doing so.

“This identity as a farmer and the land and holding that for the next generation was significant for farmers,” she said.

For years farmers heard that to be successful in modern agriculture, they’d have to get big or get out. Payne thinks there’s another option.

“I think people either got to get big or get weird,” Josh Payne said. “We chose to get weird.”

‘The new old way’

Regenerative agriculture starts with the soil. The health of farm ground is connected to the financial viability and resiliency of the farm, said Chuck Rice, a professor at Kansas State University.

“We’ve lost 50% of our soil organic matter with 100 plus years of cultivation in the United States,” Rice said. “So we aren’t taking care of our soils.”

Methods like those Josh Payne has implemented on the Concordia farm revive — or regenerate — the soil and by extension the ecosystem. Regenerative agriculture methods aim to not only restore farmland to its prechemical and industrial state, but to help the land withstand the severe weather threats from climate change.

“Not only is the economy changing, but the climate’s changing,” Rice said. “I think if you’re staying with the same practices … ultimately you’re going to be losing out.”

Reducing or eliminating tillage of the soil, a practice called “no till,” is often the first step for farmers looking to operate more sustainably. Rice said market forces can sometimes jump start changes in the agriculture industry. In order to till fields, farmers need diesel fuel to power their equipment. That gas was highly priced during the 1970s fuel crisis, which made no till more popular, Rice said.

“There was a quick, rapid adoption of no till during that time period,” he said.

Two generations later, no till continues to steadily spread. Rice said Kansas farmers are leaders in no till operation, encompassing about 40% of the state’s farmed acres.

“We still haven’t reached its peak, but it’s one of the more common practices,” Rice said.

Cody Jolliff is a farm historian and the CEO of the Midwest Center for Regenerative Agriculture at Powell Gardens, a botanical garden in Kansas City.

The Powell Gardens’ Midwest Center for Regenerative Agriculture is creating a living laboratory for farmers to come to Kansas City and get hands-on experience in regenerative agriculture methods. Or as Jolliff said, to learn “the new old way” to farm.

He said in many ways, regenerative agriculture is a return to the farming of another era.

“It’s really interesting though, because as we are going to these super modern methods, they also have a lot of resemblance to old methods,” he said.

Before the Civil War, over half of the country’s residents were farmers, Jolliff said, and they worked with small parcels of land in diversified operations. The modern regenerative agriculture movement encourages that same type of farm diversification.

Jolliff said agriculture has changed before and can change again. He points to the success of the 1914 Smith-Lever Act that created the cooperative extension programs that work from land-grant universities to teach farmers across the nation.

“It takes a long, long time for agriculture methods to change,” he said. “This is not going to be an overnight thing. It’s a huge investment right now across the country into these practices.”

This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online. 

Emily Wright picks flowers growing safely in a garden tunnel Sept. 17 at Three Creeks Farm and Forest in Ashland. Wright saves the tunnels for high value crops such as these flowers, tomatoes and peppers, which are watered through drip irrigation and micro overhead sprinklers. (Cory W. MacNeil/Columbia Missourian)

On harvest days at Three Creeks Farm and Forest in the Missouri River valley, farm owner Emily Wright and her staff collect three varieties of leafy greens from the field.

Two staff members cut the lettuce close to the root, fan the leaves across their hands checking for bugs or wilts, and toss them in a bright orange basket. From there the greens are washed, packed and driven to town for delivery at local restaurants and grocery stores.

Wright co-owns and manages the farm with her partner Paul Weber, who moonlights as a touring musician. They have been growing fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers for nine seasons in a diversified market garden style farm in the Missouri River hills. Additionally, two thirds of their 15-acre farm is a forest.

“I think of it as sort of my long-term outdoor ecological experiment,” she said.

Wright and Weber plant perennials such as fiddlehead ferns and wild leeks throughout the forest. They also grow native trees including paw paws along the forest edge, allowing them to cross pollinate with and be protected by the more mature trees.

Wright calls the smorgasbord of vegetables, fruits, shrubs and trees on Three Creeks Farm and Forest “complex and chaotic” and said the crops benefit by growing among each other.

“I feel like I’ve witnessed an explosion of biodiversity in the past couple of years,” Wright said. “I mostly see it in insect populations, but I also feel like I’ve noticed new bird species and lots more amphibians and reptiles and just generally a lot of life in this valley.”

Operating a farm within its natural ecosystem is a tenet of regenerative agriculture — a movement that aims to revive farmland soils and by extension diverse farms and rural communities.

With climate change threatening farmland and the farm economy, people are looking to regenerative agriculture as a new way forward, specifically using perennial crops that don’t require the intensive annual tillage, planting, fertilizing and harvesting of conventional commodities.

Tim Crews is the chief scientist at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and said many of the commodity crops we eat — corn, rice, barley, oats — are annual.

“Annuals require the termination of all vegetation on the landscape for them to have a chance,” he said. “If you do that on massive landscapes year after year after year, you get soil degradation.”

The Land Institute scientists have been working on sustainable agriculture research and education across the Midwest and Great Plains for decades. They’re developing perennial grains that aren’t as hard on the environment as annuals. Crews said row crops take an environmental toll over time.

“They have no capacity to retain nutrients. Their microbial communities are much less functional than those that exist in mature grasslands or forests,” Crews said. “It’s such a compromised ecosystem.”

But if more perennial crops existed, he said, they could break the food system’s dependency on annual crops and transform farms into something more akin to a natural ecosystem, like a forest.

Regenerative agriculture aims to, in part through perennials, breathe life into depleted soils while also reducing the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which can have negative environmental consequences.

“The regenerative capacity of perennials is kind of unmatched … there’s economic advantages, there’s lifestyle advantages, there’s wildlife advantages,” Crews said.

Combining farm and forest

There is much to be harvested from trees and shrubs, like nuts or berries, and there are many soil health and ecosystem benefits of having them on the farm.

“Agroforestry is basically offering kind of a toolkit for being able to incorporate some of that ecological design onto a landscape,” said Zack Miller, preserve engagement manager with The Nature Conservancy in Missouri.

The organization is conducting ecosystem restorations across the state. Miller is coordinating a 164-acre agroforestry demonstration project at the Missouri River Center — the former site of riverfront bar and restaurant Katfish Katy’s.

The long-term goal of the project is to both connect people to the Missouri River and its ecosystems and to serve as a living agroforestry laboratory to “demonstrate what these systems could look like and be able to demonstrate their economic returns, how farmers might be able to implement different strategies,” Miller said.

Trees, shrubs and perennials can be integrated sporadically into conventional farms through alley cropping, prairie strips, wind breaks, hedge rows and more. But for agroforestry to be successful, Miller said we’ll have to get used to a messier kind of farm.

“Looking across landscapes and seeing how we have it divvied up and this chunk is for growing this one plant, this chunk is for growing something else,” he said. “But of course, ecosystems don’t function that way. There are no clear borders.”

Three Creeks Farm and Forest intentionally planted perennials with culinary or floral purposes that allow them to sell berries, nuts and fresh cut flowers to groceries and restaurants. Wright also planted a row of smokebush, a perennial shrub, with a dual purpose as a windbreak — blocking dust that gets kicked up from their gravel road.

Wright said she sees plenty of opportunity across the Midwest for conventional row crop farms to incorporate more diverse products in their operations.

“Just carving off those odd little corners that don’t fit the giant industrial tractors and … converting those to vegetable production would have a huge impact on the amount of food that’s being supplied locally,” she said.

Miller said that due to the amount of inputs required — fertilizer, fuel and equipment — the row crop commodity farming that made Midwestern agriculture so bountiful is no longer working.

Biodiversity has plummeted, and so has the ability to make a living in agriculture, Miller said.

“It’s like very simple to say, but the answer to many of our problems is diversity,” he said.

Wright understands how some farmers, due to the pressures of policy and markets, get stuck in a rigid structure.

“There’s not a lot of room for experimentation or adaptation,” she said.

But by operating a small, diverse operation like Three Creeks Farm and Forest, experimentation and adaptation never stops. Wright and Weber recently added fermentation business to the farm, which allows them to offer sauerkraut, pickles and okra to local restaurants.

“One of the reasons that farming is really attractive and engaging for me is just the learning curve never drops off,” Wright said. “It’s like, as soon as we get the hang of things and it gets even the tiniest bit boring, we add something.”

Diversification has not only helped Wright’s farm environmentally, but also economically.

“We don’t really qualify for crop insurance programs so diversification is kind of our insurance, because we do have crop failures every year,” she said.

“We kind of just accept that while one thing might go awry, another thing is going to be flourishing, and that both maintains our livelihood, but also maintains morale.”

This article has been republished from the Columbia Missourian. Read the original article here. 

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The welcome screen for the OpenAI “ChatGPT” app is displayed on a laptop screen in a photo illustration (Leon Neal/Getty Images).

As the use of artificial intelligence grows, so does the technology required to store its data — and the energy that infrastructure consumes.

At a recent forum about “securing Missouri’s energy future,” lawmakers, regulators, lobbyists and advocates discussed the challenge of powering new data centers.

A data center is a physical location that houses internet servers. Large tech companies are making plans to build them across the country. AI data centers use significantly more energy than current data facilities.

“We’re in (a) precarious position,” said Geoff Marke, chief economist with the Missouri Office of Public Counsel. “We don’t have enough generation to meet our load before we start talking about AI data centers coming online.”

Marke and the other energy experts gathered in Jefferson City expressed concern about resource adequacy — whether the state makes enough energy for its own use.

“Historically, at a real macro level … we get most of our energy out of state,” Marke said. “Then we use more energy than we produce in state.”

The energy industry is experiencing seismic change. Coal plants are retiring and renewable generation is coming online. However, its reliance on the sun and wind tend to make it less consistent.

Additionally, increasingly severe weather has negative effects on the grid, which is especially detrimental to a state like Missouri that depends on interstate transmission lines to deliver power. The growing popularity of electric vehicles and increased economic development are also contributing to more energy demand.

“As more solar and wind come online and as more coal goes offline, it’s getting cleaner and it’s getting healthier, but it’s coming at the risk of reliability and being able to maintain enough power to meet demand,” Marke said.

At the same time, tech giants are shopping around for places to build AI data centers. Marke says they’re likely looking for states with sufficient energy generation and tax incentives. Unlike households or businesses that use power at certain times, the energy consumption of data centers is relatively constant.

“Their biggest cost driver is going to be energy,” he said.

Boston Consulting Group analysis shows that data center electricity consumption is expected to triple by 2030 — to 7.5% of total U.S. energy consumption, comparable to the power needs of 40 million households.

In March, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson announced Google will build a new data center in the Kansas City area.

Energy experts anticipate more are coming, and they’re worried it will compound Missouri’s energy shortfall. At the Jefferson City conference, one energy representative said the supply and demand issue surpassed cyber security as the industry’s number one risk.

“All of a sudden this historic amount of potential generation (is) coming online and we don’t have, necessarily, the generation to meet it,” Marke said. “That’s really just a game changer.”

What if AI data centers didn’t have to use so much power? That’s the question University of Missouri engineering professor Chanwoo Park is trying to answer. Park received a $1.6 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to research how to reduce the energy load of data centers.

“Roughly half of the energy consumption in a data center (is) actually used by (the) cooling system,” Park said.

According to MU, the U.S. Department of Energy allocated more than $40 million to research ways to cool data centers. Park’s work is funded through the initiative known as COOLERCHIPS.

Park has been researching and developing cooling systems for digital technology since the early 2000s when he finished his Ph.D. and internet activity took off. He said we’re now in an AI boom, and the air conditioning that cools current data centers won’t be able to keep up.

“The air cooling basically can handle so much heat … but this heat will be easily exceeded by AI computer(s), probably by 10 times more,” he said. “So automatically, this air cooling is not an option at all.”

Park is developing a technology that cools computer chips using two phase heat transfer, using both vapor and liquid. He anticipates the method could be in use in the coming decade.

Meanwhile, others are keeping a close watch on how building new power plants to serve AI data centers will impact other electricity consuming Missourians. John Coffman with the Consumers Council of Missouri worries about the longevity of AI and the data centers it requires.

“It’s the risk that they go out of business and then we’re all definitely picking up the tab for the energy that was built or required for that customer,” Coffman said.

In the spring, the Missouri General Assembly considered — but did not pass — a number of policies concerning how the state should manage the forthcoming data centers. Coffman expects the topic to return to the Capitol next year.

“I think it’s important when you’re looking at adding these types of projects to the system that you provide consumer protections to protect the rest of us from having to bail out a project,” he said.

Marke with the Missouri Office of Public Counsel said it’s likely AI and its power hungry data centers are here to stay. But when it comes to internet technology, a lot is uncertain.

“I’m old enough to remember AOL and Yahoo,” he said. “Can I safely say that Facebook is going to be around in 20 years?”

This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online. 

Ty Murphy brushes his hog's hair at the Missouri State Fair (Jana Rose Scheise/KBIA).